Category: Internet

There will be no peace in the Middle East, with Palestianian statehood or without, until someone can guarantee Israel’s safety, says DailyPundit.com W. T. Quick:

But there is only one nation in the world willing and able to offer that guarantee – the U.S. That given, it is either stupid, futile, or both for the Eurostatists to keep waging this – well, what clever phrase would the French come up with? Guerre chaud d’air* has a nice ring, don’t you think? – against the United States.

*war of hot air. Quick’s a master of creative phrasings, of course – he coined the term “blogosphere.”

The Corner on National Review Online

JONAH, AVERT YOUR EYES: [Dreher] You will not normally hear me say this, without a glass of wine in my hand, but here it is: “VIVE LA FRANCE!” I’m watching the French athletes parade in, and they’re waving double-sided flags. On one side is the Tricolor, on the other are the Stars and Stripes. Yes, Jonah, they’re cheese-eating surrender monkeys, but this claret-swilling tinpot gourmand will forgive the French everything on the slightest pretense.

One of the nice things about having a TiVo is that you can watch things like this after reading about it. The French have now officially redeemed themselves.

One of the reasons I’m so interested in cooking is explained on this web page Ethnic Cuisine: Indonesia

Chart a country’s cuisine and you can chart its history.
Nowhere is this more true than in Indonesia, the fifth largest country in the world, an archipelago consisting of 18,000 islands, spanning one-eighth of the globe and occupied by 250 ethnic groups. Here tremendous ethnic diversity coupled with wave upon wave of cultural influence adds up to a world of pleasure for the culinary adventurer.

Looking for a good Indonesian/Malaysian/Sinaporean cookbook, I find my favorites are out-of-print, but still available as half-price books from Amazon’s network. Try The Cooking of Singapore : Great Dishes…
and Makan-Lah! : The True Taste of Malaysia
The latter has the Raffles Hotel’s recipe for the Singapore Sling, and is worth the price just for that.

the Kolkata Libertarian Suman Palit is doing an in-depth examination of the Hawala system for transferring money:

If one removes the anti-terror-fighting blinkers, the basic rules of hawala, mixed with the transperancy and legal backing of current western banking systems, is what free-market based international finance should be. It liberates the little guys, the classic Mom & Pop operations, the innumerable SBOs, from the stifling hand of over-regulation.

In other words, hawala is off-the-books and outside government control, which is normally good, but in the case of financing terrorism, probably not so good. What’s not clear about the hawala system, to mine own self, is to what extent it actually serves to finance terrorism in the first place, since there seems to be evidence that the conventional banking system is the tool of choice for moving large sums of money around, and to what extent hawala is a reaction to banking regulation vs. a predecessor of the modern banking system. Islam has a weird attitude toward banks because it prohibits usury, or the charging of interest for loans. Since this rule, taken literally, effectively prevents the formation of a modern, capitalist economy, a bypass had to be built to allow Islamic countries to do business. Hawala is probably part of that bypass.

So I would assume that it’s not possible to stamp-out hawala, but it’s easy to overstate its importance since its ability to transfer funds is limited by the liquidity of hawaladars, which is probably not all that great.

It’s wonderful, of course, to witness the foaming-at-the-mouth reaction of politicians to a system of commerce they’re utterly incapable of controlling.

From WarLog: World War III by Jeff Jarvis

An Olympic event
: So the Olympics relented and will let us bring our tattered flag from the World Trade Center into the opening ceremonies. How frigging big of them.
Here’s how I want it to play out:
As soon as the flag enters the stadium, the entire audience should rise and sing God Bless America — spontaneously, unanimously, reverently, defiantly.
I’ll be damned if I’m going to hide like some PC mouse just because other countries don’t like us. This is our country. We have been attacked. We are prevailing through it all. We will be united and proud and strong together. We will show it.
We will bring our flag into our stadium.
We should rise as one voice to sing in praise and hope.
Can we spread this meme in two days? Bill O’Reilley could do it.

Join Little Green Footballs and the Kolkata Libertarian in spreading this meme.

“Christianity Is Life” – Middle East Quarterly

The Islamist campaign of violence in Algeria has turned some Muslims, especially Berbers, away from Islam and toward Christianity, reports the Algiers daily Al-Yawm in late December 2000, as reprinted in Courrier International, January 4-10, 2001, p. 29. The following extracts are translated from the French.

In Kabylie, people of all ages are converting to Christianity.

But of course. If the bin Laden’s are going to claim the mantle of Islam, and the clerics aren’t going to denounce him, then Official Islam becomes a dead-end. It’s destiny. (from Rantburg.)

One of India’s prominent English-language dailies has launched a sharp verbal offensive against the US and Israel: The Hindu : Bush’s new stridency:

Iran’s Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has described the U.S. itself as “the greatest evil”. Given Mr. Bush’s objections to the suspected Iranian plans of acquiring WMDs, Ayatollah Khamenei is critical of America’s archetypal “sales of lethal weapons” to Israel and others. However, it has been left to Iran’s President, Mohammad Khatami, to reaffirm Teheran’s sustainable advocacy of a “dialogue among civilisations” as the cultured answer to the “insults” that Mr. Bush has now heaped upon the Iranian people.

Was it something we said? Personally, I prefer the Free Press’ ragging on us for being too soft on Pakistan to these scurrilous insults. The Hindu’s frame of reference was apparently formed back in the heyday of the Congress, when the US was too closely tied to Pakistan. Wake up, folks – times have changed.