I responded: "To me, the question of which Muslim group(s) were responsible is not the basic issue. The basic issue is that radical Muslims feel free to murder any non-Muslim at will if they have the opportunity. This is certainly consistent with the thinking of Sayyid Qutb, the most influential radical Muslim thinker of the twentieth century   and other Islamist thinkers who saw the world dichotously as divided between the House of Islam (Dar al-Islam) and the House of War (Dar al-Harb).  These Islamists equated the House of War with the House of Satan. They further taught that the destruction of Dar al-Harb and all of its inhabitants is divinely sanctioned.  The militants who murdered parents and their children in cold blood in Mumbai believed they were serving God and convinced that their actions are divinely ordained. As you write, the Islamists seek to reestablish Muslim dominance on the Indian sub-continent, just as they wish to restore it in Al-Andalus (Spain), in Palestine, and anywhere else that Islam was once dominant. Of course, if the Pakistanis had a hand in this, it will have major strategic consequences. Moreover, if Al Qaeda wasn't in on this, they were certainly served as an example to be followed.

James Taranto has a short profile of Geert Wilders in the WSJ:

By his own description, Geert Wilders is not a typical Dutch politician. "We are a country of consensus," he tells me on a recent Saturday morning at his midtown Manhattan hotel. "I hate consensus. I like confrontation. I am not a consensus politician. . . . This is something that is really very un-Dutch."

Yet the 45-year-old Mr. Wilders says he is the most famous politician in the Netherlands: "Everybody knows me. . . . There is no other politician -- not even the prime minister -- who is as well-known. . . . People hate me, or they love me. There's nothing in between. There is no gray area."

(...)

Having his own party liberates Mr. Wilders to speak his mind. As he sees it, the West suffers from an excess of toleration for those who do not share its tradition of tolerance. "We believe that -- 'we' means the political elite -- that all cultures are equal," he says. "I believe this is the biggest disease today facing Europe. . . . We should wake up and tell ourselves: You're not a xenophobe, you're not a racist, you're not a crazy guy if you say, 'My culture is better than yours.' A culture based on Christianity, Judaism, humanism is better. Look at how we treat women, look at how we treat apostates, look at how we go with the separation of church and state. I can give you 500 examples why our culture is better."

He acknowledges that "the majority of Muslims in Europe and America are not terrorists or violent people." But he says "it really doesn't matter that much, because if you don't define your own culture as the best, dominant one, and you allow through immigration people from those countries to come in, at the end of the day you will lose your own identity and your own culture, and your society will change. And our freedom will change -- all the freedoms we have will change."

The murder of van Gogh lends credence to this warning, as does the Muhammad cartoon controversy of 2005 in Denmark. As for "Fitna," it has not occasioned a violent response, but its foes have made efforts to suppress it. A Dutch Muslim organization went to court seeking to enjoin its release on the ground that, in Mr. Wilders's words, "it's not in the interest of Dutch security." The plaintiffs also charged Mr. Wilders with blasphemy and inciting hatred. Mr. Wilders thought the argument frivolous, but decided to pre-empt it: "The day before the verdict, I broadcasted ['Fitna'] . . . not because I was not confident in the outcome, but I thought: I'm not taking any chance, I'm doing it. And it was legal, because there was not a verdict yet." The judge held that the national-security claim was moot and ruled in Mr. Wilders's favor on the issues of blasphemy and incitement.

Dutch television stations had balked at broadcasting the film, and satellite companies refused to carry it even for a fee. So Mr. Wilders released it online. The British video site LiveLeak.com soon pulled the film, citing "threats to our staff of a very serious nature," but put it back online a few days later. ("Fitna" is still available on LiveLeak, as well as on other sites such as YouTube and Google Video.)

An organization called The Netherlands Shows Its Colors filed a criminal complaint against Mr. Wilders for "inciting hatred." In June, Dutch prosecutors declined to pursue the charge, saying in a statement: "That comments are hurtful and offensive for a large number of Muslims does not mean that they are punishable." The group is appealing the prosecutors' decision.

In July, a Jordanian prosecutor, acting on a complaint from a pressure group there, charged Mr. Wilders with blasphemy and other crimes. The Netherlands has no extradition treaty with Jordan, but Mr. Wilders worries -- and the head of the group that filed the complaint has boasted -- that the indictment could restrict his ability to travel. Mr. Wilders says he does not visit a foreign country without receiving an assurance that he will not be arrested and extradited.

"The principle is not me -- it's not about Geert Wilders," he says. "If you look at the press and the rest of the political elite in the Netherlands, nobody cares. Nobody gives a damn. This is the worst thing, maybe. . . . A nondemocratic country cannot use the international or domestic legal system to silence you. . . . If this starts, we can get rid of all parliaments, and we should close down every newspaper, and we should shut up and all pray to Mecca five times a day."

It is difficult to fault Mr. Wilders's impassioned defense of free speech. And although the efforts to silence him via legal harassment have proved far from successful, he rightly points out that they could have a chilling effect, deterring others from speaking out.

Mr. Wilders's views on Islam, though, are problematic. Since 9/11, American political leaders have struggled with the question of how to describe the ideology of the enemy without making enemies of the world's billion or so Muslims. The various terms they have tried -- "Islamic extremism," "Islamism," "Islamofascism" -- have fallen short of both clarity and melioration. Melioration is not Mr. Wilders's highest priority, and to him the truth couldn't be clearer: The problem is Islam itself. "I see Islam more as an ideology than as a religion," he explains.

His own view of Islam is a fundamentalist one: "According to the Quran, there are no moderate Muslims. It's not Geert Wilders who's saying that, it's the Quran . . . saying that. It's many imams in the world who decide that. It's the people themselves who speak about it and talk about the terrible things -- the genital mutilation, the honor killings. This is all not Geert Wilders, but those imams themselves who say this is the best way of Islam."

Yet he insists that his antagonism toward Islam reflects no antipathy toward Muslims: "I make a distinction between the ideology . . . and the people. . . . There are people who call themselves Muslims and don't subscribe to the full part of the Quran. And those people, of course, we should invest [in], we should talk to." He says he would end Muslim immigration to the Netherlands but work to assimilate those already there.

His idea of how to do so, however, seems unlikely to win many converts: "You have to give up this stupid, fascist book" -- the Quran. "This is what you have to do. You have to give up that book."

Mr. Wilders is right to call for a vigilant defense of liberal principles. A society has a right, indeed a duty, to require that religious minorities comply with secular rules of civilized behavior. But to demand that they renounce their religious identity and holy books is itself an affront to liberal principles.

Irwin Stelzer in The Spectator, which regular readers will have noticed that I always read on a Saturday:

French presidents/emperors are given to delusion. Napoleon thought he could conquer the Russian winter. Charles de Gaulle thought he heard voices anointing him the leader of the Free French, and later deluded himself into believing that he — not the British and the Americans, not Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt — liberated France from the Nazis, to whom the massive French army had quickly surrendered just a few years earlier.

And now we have Nicolas Sarkozy. Taller than Napoleon, shorter than de Gaulle, but equally susceptible to delusions.

Being short to middling will have contributed to this.

Taller than a pygmy, yet shorter than a watusi, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown is also susceptible to delusions. It must be the hair.

Spectator columnist Hugo Rifkind wonders why, if there really is a secret Zionist brotherhood, he hasn't been invited to join:

I know that the Iranian regime is famously confused about quite a lot of things, but if they are right about David Miliband being a member of a shadowy Zionist conspiracy, I’ll be absolutely livid. That bloody man has all the luck, doesn’t he? I’ve been waiting to be invited into the secret brotherhood of Jews who rule the world for years now. Nothing. Not a kosher sausage. Not a big-nosed sniff.

[...]

Some people [...] reckon the Jewish conspiracy goes a good deal further than Israel. I had a letter from one such person just the other week, after writing about Rothschild, Mandelson and Deripaska meeting on that yacht in Corfu. ‘Rothschild, Mandelson and Deripaska,’ wrote my correspondent, greenly. ‘What do they have in common, eh?’ To which I replied rather irritably that what they had in common was BEING ON A YACHT IN CORFU, please do pay attention before writing in.

But no. He meant the way they were all Jewish. I was a bit surprised by this, because Mandelson and Rothschild aren’t, and it had never occurred to me that Deripaska might be. Plus, it seemed a bit dismissive of poor old George Osborne. But no, explained my correspondent, never mind all that, the important thing is the surname. You can tell they are all basically Jewish, apparently, because they have Jewish-sounding names. God, they’re cunning, these Jews. A name. It’s like a secret sign, isn’t it?

And they’re out there, all over the Western world, running things. Goldman Sachs, Weinsteins, Spielbergs, Rothschilds, Mandelsons and now Milibands, too. It’s fiendish! Although actually, now I think about it, it isn’t. In fact, I’m slightly scornful of any secret conspiracy to take over the world in which you can quite publicly identify conspirators by their surnames. I’d suggest that it is a crap conspiracy. Or, failing that, no conspiracy at all. Still, maybe I’m just bitter because I haven’t been invited in.

Oh, come off it, Hugo. We're know you're in it really. This piece is just an elaborate double bluff. Is it not typical of those scheming Jews to admit that there is a worldwide conspiracy in order to pretend that there isn't? Double negatives are as much a Zionist weapon as double entendres.

From The Spectator:

I am utterly gobsmacked that Hugh didn't know the word "abseil". I have abseiled from the roof of our workplace for charity. You can, although I have not,"Abseil Africa".

Obviously Congress has never been invaded by abseiling lesbians, as happened in the House of Lords in 1988:

Perhaps the most spectacular demonstration occurred in the House of Lords in 1988 when a group of lesbians abseiled into the chamber from the public gallery.

Abseiled.

In the English accounts, but not the American ones -- we're apparently deemed too lazy or too stupid to look up and learn such a word -- of the assault on the Jewish center, the Indian troops are described as abseiling onto the roof of Nariman House from helicopters. I had to look it up. And usually I love to be forced to look up a word. In this case, today, I wish I hadn't had to.

The book just mentioned at this site -- ""The Return of Hyman Kaplan" and its predecessor, "Hyman Kaplan," are two of the funniest books in the history of American literature, and capture the night classes of English for new immigrants, in a much more innocent and sweeter age, among people who, from Bialystok and Palermo and some other places, were trying to learn English, in order to find work, and get ahead, and express their gratitude to their new country, in New York City, circa 1930. And these people harmed no one living, though they did manage to mangle a few nouns, a few adjectives, a few verbs.

 Another masterpiece, that in the early 1960s sold very well but now seems, unjustly, to have been forgotten,  is "Up the Down Staircase" by Bel Kaufman, the grand-daughter of Sholom Aleichem. She possesses  her grandfather's witty melancholy and his artistic gift, somehow managing to transplant to a big-city ("inner city" had not yet come in, and it doesn't quite apply, and besides, I'd never employ such a phrase seriously) high school, and the travails of a young female teacher of English, and she captures, and then expresses, the same kind of sentiments that her grandfather did in that immortally mordantly cheerful line: "So what about the cholera in Odessa?" 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6PxK44cpIz0

Here is part 3 -- Youtubishly speaking -- of the celebrated movie from 1951. Surely you too love, as much as I, the unforgettable voice of Joan Greenwood:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RDL6GkrAvfs&feature=related

The Times letters page continues the discussion of “meh”, an Americanism that has burrowed its way into the Queen’s English:

Sir, The word “meh” (letter, Nov 19) is an indication of indifference. The opposite can be said for the word “feh”.

In The Return of Hyman Kaplan by Leo Rosten, the word “feh”, an expression of disgust, entered the English language from Yiddish. It was deemed by the author important enough to appear in a dedicated chapter Mr Kaplan and the unforgivable feh.

Robert M. Bruce-Chwatt

Richmond, Surrey

Robert M. Bruce-Chwatt – a name t’watch.

A northerner chimes in, from Billinge, near Wigan. Billinge is an interesting place name, in that its soft –g- is unaccounted for. Was it umlaut? But I digress. Here is the letter:

Sir, In Wigan “feh” means ugly, probably taken from the dialect foul (letter, Nov 22).

Hence a person can have “fur ur un a feh face” (fair hair and an ugly face). A common disparaging comment about a woman is “er’s as feh as a clog back” or “er’s as feh as a dolly tub”.

C. E. Mather

Billinge, Wigan

I have heard “’er’s as feh as a clug back”, meaning “she’s as ugly as the sole of a clog”. “‘Er” is Lancashire for “she”. You can easily hear in Wigan – on Mesnes Street, no less – a sentence like “’Er’s 'ad ‘er ur done,” meaning “She has had a haircut.” To err is human, especially in Wigan.

Feh is foul and foul is fur. Find a fur on which to err. 

Among those killed at the Oberoi Hotel were Alan Scherr and his thirteen-year-old daughteer Naomi.

Here's part of a story about them: 

"Twelve years ago, Alan Scherr committed his life to meditation and spirituality, moving his family to the Synchronicity spiritual community in Faber, Va., about 30 miles southwest of Charlottesville in the Blue Ridge mountains.

"MUMBAI, India - Commandos who stormed the Mumbai headquarters of an ultra-orthodox Jewish group found the bodies of five hostages inside, among them a New York rabbi and his wife, as a fresh battle raged at the luxury Taj Mahal hotel and other Indian forces ended a siege at another five-star hotel.

We all knew, didn't we, that it would end like this. In India, where for a thousand years, at least, there have been Jews, and as far as I know there has not been a single attack on any of them, at least by the majority Hindus, no attakcs on Jews for being Jews in the long history of Bharat, of India.

And now, at long last, there has been. A young rabbi and his young wife have been murdered in cold blood. Their two-year-old son is alive only because she was spirited out of the building by Sarah Samuel, apparently not a nanny but a cook. Three other Jewish people were also murdered in cold blood by the Muslims who took them hostage, at Nariman House,. Their bodies were found by the Indian troops. Why were they killed?  For being Jews, of course. What did you expect? Being Jews, you see, they had it coming to them.  

It's an old story. It has already been told in many chapters written over the centuries. Some chapters have not yet been written, and need not be written, if only enough people come to their senses in time. But how often, in this idiotized age, do enough people come to their senses in time about anything? 

A reason why I give creedence to the suggestion that some of the terrorists at work in Mumbai may hold British citizenship. From The Telegraph
A university student from London has admitted trying to get to Afghanistan to join mujahideen terrorists fighting coalition forces.
Mohammed Abushamma, 20, from Islington, north London, pleaded guilty at the Old Bailey to preparing acts of terrorism between March 17 and April 18, this year.
He was remanded on conditional bail and will be sentenced on a date to be fixed.
Abushamma and co-accused Qasim Abukar, 20, from Tufnell Park, north London, were arrested at Heathrow airport in April as they arrived back in England.
They are believed to have applied for visas to go to Afghanistan.
Alison Morgan, prosecuting, told the court the plea had been entered following "lengthy negotiations".
In a separate hearing today, Abukar pleaded not guilty to the same charge of engaging in conduct with the intention of carrying out acts of terrorism.
He was remanded on conditional bail to face trial in the Spring.

This is an interesting analysis of the Mumbai attacks by Amir Taheri in The Telegraph.
The Army of Muhammad is back. This was the message buzzing in radical Islamist circles yesterday as the world tried to absorb the shock of the terrorist attacks in Bombay, India's economic capital.
While it is not yet clear which group was behind the attacks, it looks as if the perpetrators were trying to imitate the tactic of ghazwa, used by the Prophet against Meccan caravans in his decade-long campaign to seize control of the city.
The tactic consists of surprise no-holds-barred attacks simultaneously launched against a caravan or settlement with the aim of demoralising the enemy and hastening his capitulation.
This time, however, the approach was "symphonic", in the sense that it involved different types of operations blended together.
Involved in the operations were men who had placed explosives at selected points. But there were also gunmen operating in classic military style by seizing control of territory at symbolically significant locations along with hostages. Then there were militants prepared to kill, and be killed, in grenade attacks against security forces.
Whoever designed the operations had another important Islamic tactic in mind: tabarra or exoneration.
This consists of separating the "outsider", in this case the British and American "infidel", from the community with the intent of blaming them for the ills of the world before sacrificing them. It was no accident that one of the places attacked was a Jewish centre, where gunmen seized a rabbi and several members of the congregation as hostages.
The loud message was that a small group of individuals could turn a megalopolis of almost 15 million inhabitants into a battlefield for at least a day.
One of the reporters for the BBC I was watching earlier today  did liken the attacks to a military invasion rather than the stytle of terrorism we have seen before.
So far the only claim of responsibility has came from a hitherto unknown group using the name the "Deccan Mujahedin".
This may be a cover for other groups, perhaps the Lashkar Tayyiba (the Army of the Pure) and the Jaish Muhammad (the Army of Muhammad), two terrorist organisations created by the Pakistani military intelligence services.
Earlier this year, in one of his last acts as president, Pervez Musharraf announced the dissolution of both, but it is possible that the two groups and their backers in the Pakistani military and intelligence elite have returned to the market under a new brand, with new tactics.
The new label used may also be significant. Deccan, a region in south-central India, was the intellectual and cultural capital of Indian Islam for centuries.
By using the term "Deccan Mujahedin", the terrorists may be trying to pass two messages. First, that the Islamist movement is no longer interested only in Kashmir but intends to strive for the reconquest of the whole of India for Islam.
This runs in line with the new pan-Islamist thinking that propagates the will to recover all lands once ruled by Muslims – from India to Spain and southern France, passing by Siberia, parts of Russia and the Balkans. "Deccan" designates a movement that has universal aspirations precisely because it claims local roots.
The designation is also intended to show that India now has a home-grown Islamist terror movement.
The Islamist terror movement has adopted what is known as the Matryoshka method, after the Russian dolls nested one into another. The outer and bigger doll in this case is the Students' Islamic Movement of India (Simi), which claims millions of members.
Indian authorities call Simi an antechamber of terrorism. Within it are nested other dolls in the form of cultural associations, charities and political lobby groups. The smallest and deadliest doll represents the kind of groups that may have been behind these attacks.
The need for a home-grown terror movement in India may have been further emphasised by the success of the US-led coalition in destroying virtually all Islamist training bases and safe havens in Afghanistan.
With Pakistan also becoming inhospitable, partly thanks to Zardari's apparent determination to move his country close to both India and the United States, Indian Islamists are forced to look for training centres and safe havens at home.
In jihadist circles, the new Indian economic boom is often described as the "House of the Spider", a reference to a sura of the same name in the Koran, Islam's holy book. On Wednesday, the attackers may have wished to show the flimsy nature of the "House of the Spider" by attacking Bombay, the engine of India's economic transformation.

I was watching the BBC News before setting out for the library this afternoon (prognosis on my PC not good, sob!) and decided this aspect of the terrorist attacks was worth my first attention. The dear old BBC is still insisting that "the identity of the 'gunmen' and their motive is unknown".
LONDON (AP) — The British government is investigating whether some of the attackers in the deadly India shootings could be British citizens with links to Pakistan or Kashmir, officials said Friday.
Indian Chief Minister Vilasrao Deshmukh said two British-born Pakistanis were among eight gunmen arrested by Indian authorities.
"There is so much information still to be discovered and made available," British Prime Minister Gordon Brown told reporters in response to the report. "I would not want to be drawn into early conclusions about this."
British security officials said none of the attackers' nationalities had been confirmed but authorities in India were checking the men's identity documents.
The group that claimed responsibility for the attacks, Deccan Mujahideen, was unknown to global security officials. The name suggested the group was Indian though some security officials have said it may be an offshoot of the Indian Mujahideen.
One of the suspects reportedly called an Indian television station, speaking the main Pakistani language of Urdu, to demand the return of Muslim lands. That was a reference to Kashmir, territory claimed by both India and Pakistan.
Britain, home to nearly 2 million Muslims, has a large Kashmiri population.
"The issue of Kashmir clearly resonates in Britain," the British security official told The Associated Press on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of his work. "But we have yet to confirm yet whether any of the attackers were British or not."
Brown said he will discuss the situation with Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh later Friday. Singh blamed "external forces" for the attacks.
"Obviously when you have terrorists operating in one country they may be getting support from another country or coming from another country and it is very important that we strengthen the co-operation between India and Britain in dealing with these instances of terrorist attacks," Brown said.
To find them born in Savilletown or Walthamstow would not surprise me in the least.

Haaretz:

Pope Benedict XVI is set to visit Israel and the Palestinian territories in May 2009 after accepting an invitation by President Shimon Peres. The Vatican and Israel are said, thus, to hopefully end the high tension of recent months between the Catholic Church and the Jewish people over the initiative of canonizing Pope Pius XII.

(...)

The tension began after calls came by ultra-conservatives at the Vatican to expedite canonization on the 50th anniversary of Pius' death. The process began during the time of the previous pope, John Paul II, but both he and the present pope were aware of the harsh criticism such a move could engender in the Jewish world, which accuses Pius XII of remaining silent and not protesting the extermination of European Jewry during the Holocaust.

The debate was fanned by the Jesuit Father Peter Gumpel, who said a month ago that the pope would not visit Israel until a change was made in the caption to two pictures of Pius XII in the Yad Vashem Holocaust museum, which state that Pius' response to the murder of Jews during the Holocaust is controversial. The captions also state that when Jews were deported from Rome to Auschwitz, Pius did not intervene.

The caption caused a diplomatic storm in the past when the papal nuncio threatened to boycott the Holocaust Remembrance Day ceremony at Yad Vashem in protest over the caption, although he did attend the ceremony.

The Vatican has since distanced itself from Gumpel's statements. Pope Benedict's spokesman said the caption is not a factor in his decision on whether to visit Israel or not. Social Affairs Minister Isaac Herzog also contributed to the dispute when he told Haaretz a month ago that Pius' canonization was "unacceptable." The Vatican demanded that Herzog apologize for the statement.

However, Benedict praised Pius' actions during the Holocaust and criticized historians who said he did not help to save Jews. In a meeting a few weeks ago with Jewish leaders, Benedict was asked to delay the canonization process until all the documents in the Vatican archives involving the period of the Holocaust were released, a process that is expected to take about another seven years. The pope told the delegation he was "seriously considering" the matter.

In other meetings at the Vatican, understandings were obtained that the canonization process would not be rushed.

I sincerely hope Pope Pius XII will not be canonized.

My father used to warn me that if I didn't work hard at school, tidy up or generally shape myself, I would "end up working in Woolworths". This, it seems, was the worst kind of "no good end" - as in the song:

A sewing machine, a sewing machine
A girl's best friend
If I didn't have my sewing machine
I'd come to no good end

I didn't need a sewing machine to save me from working in Woolworths, which I have visited many times only as a customer. Woolworths' staff were thought of as dozy and shiftless, a reputation quite undeserved. There are worse ways to end up - conversion to Islam being one.

Woolworths was never the kind of place to find a Fabergé egg or Chapman’s Homer – must look into that - but you could easily find an Easter egg or Homer Simpson. If you needed a telephone extension lead, some white spirit, a breadbin, superglue, paper plates, a mobile phone and some garden furniture, you could get it all at Woolworths – and it would be cheap. Last, but not least, there was the pick ‘n’ mix – or nick ‘n’ mix for hardened juvenile delinquents. (No, I never did. Well, maybe once, but it was only the 'n' and they had a lot left over.)

I use the past tense, for Woolworths has gone into administration. After Christmas, it will no longer be there, and its bright Christmas display looks rather desperate. From The Times:

Woolworths has been part of British life for one year short of a century. There cannot be a home in the land that does not have something from Woolies in one of its cupboards.

It is a fair bet that many of the Christmas decorations shortly to be hauled out of attics and cellars will have been snapped up at Woolies in the dim and distant past – some even bearing the old “Winfield” brand name from the 1970s.

It was where generations of Britons first bought a vinyl single, and where their first school uniform was bought. And, of course, it is home to the Pick’n’Mix counter.

Woolworths was founded in Pennsylvania in 1879 by Frank Winfield Woolworth, who had hit on the idea of selling goods for a fixed price of either five or ten cents – the original “nickel and dime” concept.

Having swept the United States, Woolworth decided to head across the Atlantic, opening his first store in Liverpool in 1909. The concept was the same – with all goods priced at threepence or sixpence.

Woolworth wrote in his diary: “I believe that a good penny and sixpence store, run by a live Yankee, would be a sensation here.”

He was right. On its first day, there were queues round the block to get into the “3d and 6d” store, with every item on the shelves being bought.

Britons had never before been able to browse in a store and actually handle the goods – they were used to queueing at a counter to be served. Equally popular were the refreshment rooms that provided free cups of tea to shoppers, helping them to get used to the idea of wandering into a shop simply to browse.

More stores quickly followed across the North of England, in Manchester, Leeds and Hull, with the pace of expansion stepped up during the Great War – when few other retailers were active in the property market.

Between the wars, more than 350 stores opened across Britain, and in 1931 Woolies was floated on the London Stock Exchange as a company in its own right. The 6d price limit was lifted in 1942 and Woolworths carried on expanding into the 1970s – when the number of shops in Britain peaked at 1,144. At that point, every high street in every major town or city had a branch of Woolies, its nickname sealed for posterity in the store’s famous “That’s the Wonder of Woolies” advertising jingle. 

 […] 

But then high street competitors raised their game. Shops such as W H Smith and Boots stocked many of the lines sold in Woolies, while retaining their own unique selling points, as did hardware and household goods shops – and even supermarkets.

[…]

In 1997 […] the very last Woolworth store in the US closed – but Woolies staggered on here.

[…]

The failure of Woolies, with more than 800 stores, is the very last thing anyone in retail wanted before Christmas. Boarded-up stores are unlikely to entice shoppers to the high street.

From the article linked in this post.

Or a fish.

The word fida’i (pl. fida’iyin) from the Arabic is “one who sacrifices himself.“ The “mujihadin” are those who carry out “holy war” (jihad) from the common root  J-H-D for the extension of Islam throughout the world. The two terms are in common use throughout the world by Islamic terrorist groups. One does not have to be an expert in the Arabic or Farsi languages to know what the intent of all such groups are - blatant terror and a commitment to commit wholesale massacre and mayhem against all those who are “infidels” and must be eliminated because they stand in the way of Islam’s struggle to convert the entire world into submission (ISLAM). 

Siren:

Come, worthy Greek, Ulysses, come,

Possess these shores with me;

The winds and seas are troublesome,

And here we may be free.

Here may we sit and view their toil

That travail in the deep,

And joy the day in mirth the while,

And spend the night in sleep.

 

Ulysses:

Fair nymph, if fame or honor were

To be attained with ease

Then would I come and rest me there,

And leave such toils as these.

But here it dwells, and here must I

With danger seek it forth;

To spend the time luxuriously

Becomes not men or worth.

 

Siren:

Ulysses, Oh be not deceived

With that unreal name;

This honor is a thing conceived,

And rests on others' fame.

Begotten only to molest

Our peace, and to beguile

The best thing of our life, our rest,

And give us up to toil.

 

Ulysses:

Delicious nymph, suppose there were

No honor nor report,

Yet manliness would scorn to wear

The time in idle sport.

For toil doth give a better touch,

To make us feel our joy;

And ease finds tediousness, as much

as labor yields annoy.

 

Siren:

Then pleasure likewise seems the shore

Whereto tends all your toil,

Which you forgo to make it more,

And perish oft the while.

Who may disport them diversly,

Find never tedious day,

And ease may have variety

As well as action may.

 

Ulysses:

But natures of the noblest frame

These toils and dangers please,

And they take comfort in the same

As much as you in ease,

And with the thoughts of actions past

Are recreated still;

When pleasure leaves a touch at last

To show that it was ill.

 

Siren:

That doth opinion only cause

That's out of custom bred,

Which makes us many other laws

Than ever nature did.

No widows wail for our delights,

Our sports are without blood;

The world, we see, by warlike wights

Receives more hurt than good.

 

Ulysses:

But yet the state of things require

These motions of unrest,

And these great spirits of high desire

Seem born to turn them best,

To purge the mischiefs that increase

And all good order mar;

For oft we see a wicked peace

To be well changed for war.

 

Siren:

Well, well, Ulysses, then I see

I shall not have thee here,

And thereforer I will come to thee,

And take my fortunes there.

I must be won that cannot win,

Yet lost were I not won;

For beauty hath created been

T' undo, or be undone.

                                       --- Samuel Daniel

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rPZwbMcIDUg&feature=related

Just in time for the holidays.

Weapon of Musical Defense's first album, Imagine Jihad (part 1) is now available! You can listen to Imagine Jihad (part 1) on our site and buy either a digital download or a beautifully packaged CD direct from our store.

WMD is a group of concerned rockers and rock stars. After 9-11 we were horrified at the hate & exhortations to violence we read in the Koran so we began learning more about what Winston Churchill called "the religion of blood and war".

We wrote songs and studied to be certain of the facts, all the time becoming more alarmed. Now we want to share our findings with a wider audience. This album is the first to result from our work.

What if it had been China, and not India?

What if Muslims -- Chinese-looking Muslims -- had plotted and planned in Beijing, and then managed to attack several major hotels, perhaps where a meeting of international business leaders was taking place, and to seize them?

Yes, it's not verisimilar. For the Chinese do not have, outside  of Xinjiang, very many Muslims, and even the few mosques in Xinjiang are monitored, and those Muslims who travel from that region to the cities of eastern China are carefully monitored as well, as they travel. In the 19th century, in western China, Jihads were declared there roughly -- according to Mildred Cable  in her excellent "The Gobi" -- every thirty years. The last declared Jihad was in 1930. So what if Muslims, enraged at their treatment in Xinjiang, somehow did manage to attack in Shanghai? 

What would be the reaction? The Chinese would not just round up, and then subject to swift trial and immediate execution -- all those involved, but would shut down all over the country mosques, and even greater repression would be felt by Muslims in Xinjiang, and Muslims all over the country would be fearful of declaring themselves. And that would be only a start, as the full power of the state, backed by the fury of the populace, reacted.

In India, however, that will not happen. In India, the leaders are so fearful of the Muslims that they do everything they can to hold back those in the Hindu population whose popular fury might, in fact, be the only thing that would cause Muslim terrorists to think twice, and force Muslims within India, instead of continuing to dare to act as if they are aggrieved, and putting constant pressure on India's rulers not to take even the mildest of measures but to continue to pretend, for example, that such "terrorism" is the work of "[unidentified] gunmen" and not to treat all those who adhere to the Total Belief-System of Islam as, necessarily -- shouldn't we take their texts, their tenets seriously? -- a permanent danger to the non--Muslim population, so that any expansion of the power, real or perceived, of Muslims is a threat to the non-Muslims of India? 

What, after all, will be the consequences of this attack? Those participating immediately will be taken into custody, and the law's delay will ensue, and appeals, and more appeals, and then finally -- finally, one supposes, they will be given life sentences. But will Islam, will organized Islam, the ideology or mass-cult of Islam, suffer in India or anywhere else? Will there be consequences that might, just might, make it less rather than more likely that such an attack will not be repeated, or not easily repeated, because Muslims themselves, everywhere, will have reason to so fear the consequences that they will not support, but will distance themselves, and even, some of them, collaborate with the Indian or other non-Muslim security forces, because they realize they must, to save their own positions, to save themselves.

The attack that began in Mumbai yesterday is larger, more deadly, more spectacular, but not different in kind, from a long series of such Muslim attacks within India, including one on the Indian Parliament building itself. And can one imagine similar attacks on the capitals or centers of commerce of the countries of Western Europe, or even on the E.U. headquarters in Brussels? Of course one can.  And one can imagine, with slightly more difficulty, such an attack happening in North America. But can one imagine it in China? What is it about the certain Chinese response that we can all predict, and that offers real deterrence from Muslim attack? 

Some in the threatened Western world have decided that there is "nothing we can do" about the Muslims in our midst except to change our ways, to accommodate Islam, and that means, because of the nature of Islam, to change forever our own ways, our own freedoms, our own understanding of what what legal equality means, of what individual rights means -- and the latest, and most horrifying example of this comes from one of the most "distinguished" members of the Bar in Great Britain -- Stephen Hockman QC,  who surely knows -- doesn't he? -- what an attempt to accommodate as he suggests the collectivist cult of Islam would mean for English law, and English custom, and English everything? 

In the United States, too, an example of such intellectual paralysis, such emotional hopelessness, such a failure to grasp what is at stake,, can be seen in the argument  of a certain Professor Peterson, of the University of Brigham Young, in Mormon Utah, whose argument for not looking too closely into the nature of Islam is that there are now so many Muslims -- he says, wrongly, that "one-quarter of the world is Muslim" (the real figure is 15%), that we must not examine Islam and come to conclusions about it that might somehow get in the way --in the way of what? -- because, so his argument from numbers go, there are simply too many Muslims so we cannot possibly conclude that Islam inculcates a world-view that is permanently dangerous to the civilizational and physical health of non-Muslims. That would just be too bleak and disturbing a conclusion. Peterson asserts this, by the way, in the United States, a country where barely 1% of the population is Muslim (that is, 3 million out of 300 million), and 2 million of those three million are in fact members of the Nation of Islam, a group which is not orthodox in either its doctrine or its practice, and many of whose members clearly are more interested in the Nation of Islam as a vehicle for black power or "empowerment," and they are enraged at their treatment -- being kept of mosques for example -- at the hands of the Arabs and Pakistanis who hardly disguise their contempt, and eagerness to stay distinct from, not only the members of the black Nation of Islam, but away from orthodox, but black African, Muslims.

Who among us, now changing our travel plans, now wondering if this café, that hotel, that  railroad terminus, that airport, is quite the place we want our travelling children to visit, or our relatives, or we, ourselves, do not, all over the Western world, now look not with self-righteous horror, not with a spirit of condemnation or distaste, but rather with a kind of secret envy,  a secret wish that, in this case, our political elites (now, uselessly, stupidly, "condemning the attacks") and media elites (now reporting on "gunmen" in India and what "gunmen" have done) could begin to instruct themselves, and us, about Islam, and help to protect us by making clear to the world's Muslims that there will be consequences, beyond the rounding up of the immediate participants, and that the sea in which they swim will be, if not entirely dried up, at least dammed and channeled. There can be no policy of deterrence unless it is made clear what, or what kinds of things, will necessarily follow if. If.