The Western Word

He is slight, impetuous, surly, speaks with the hint of an Irish accent and is a satyr who hops from bed to bed with the effortlessness of a rabbit and the conscience of a gigolo. Who is he? None other than King Henry VIII, the 16th Century monarch of England whom we meet in the BBC/Showtime drama The Tudors. But the real Henry was neither Irish accented, dark haired nor 5' 6''.

Nor was he, at least for the greater part of his life, the womanizing, carousing libertine we encounter in the first episodes of the series. These are the first among many facts that the The Tudors gets wrong - and it only gets worse from there. The political machinations of Henry and his counselors concerning European politics are hopelessly mangled; Cardinal Wolsey, Henry's primary adviser for the first 20 years of his monarchy, did not commit suicide in 1530 but died en route to the Tower of London; Henry did not send his sister, Princess Margaret, off to the King of Spain to be betrothed in a morganatic marriage but rather to Scotland where she became mother to the eventual Mary, Queen of Scots; It was Mary, not Margaret, Henry's second sister, who first married Louis, the King of France and later Charles Brandon, Duke of Suffolk. There were several years, not days, between those marriages and Mary certainly had no hand in the death of her husband, let alone any responsibility for his asphyxiation on their wedding night.

Okay, okay, the producers and actors tell us, this was never meant to be serious history, but rather an attempt to bring to life a vital period in the life of the British nation, which was dominated by an outsized king and whose story is juiced with lubricious detail.

But here, on the quincentenery of Henry's ascension (April 22, 1509) to the throne of England, one does have to wonder whether anything like truth and honesty should be the province of televised drama and what the corruption of that truth means for national identity.

The Tudors is, of course, not the first depiction of Henry to characterize him as either a skirt chasing rake or as a cruel, self -centered hedonist . For generations the Hans Holbein portrait of the aging monarch - obese, weak eyed and balding, has dominated our visual memories of the man, and, as a result of a string of 20th Century popular books and movies, the only thing we can now think of him wielding is neither scepter nor sword - but a drumstick.

Poor Henry. Who is now to know that the young King was once a dashing athlete, a brilliant scholar and deeply religious man who took his monarchical duties with the utmost seriousness? At 6' 2", extraordinarily handsome, and according to the measurements of his armor from 1522, possessed of a 32 inch waist - the new king was the ultimate renaissance man, passionate about the arts, devoted to developing institutions of higher learning and a careful strategist who understood exactly England's military and political position vis-a-vis the rest of Europe. More surprising, perhaps to most, will be the knowledge of the years-long deep affection and commitment Henry bore his queen, the Spanish princess, Catherine of Aragon who was, in fact, the widow of his older brother who had died several years before the succession.

Where the story of Henry begins to drift into the realm of soap opera is around 1527 when he first meets Anne Boelyn. Boelyn, according to contemporary accounts, beguiled the king not with her looks, which were quite ordinary, but with her vivacious personality. Catherine had failed, after several miscarriages and the death of three infants, to produce a surviving male heir to the throne of England. Like most medieval kings, Henry understood that the security of his own rule depended on the production of a male heir, for without it, as English history itself had clearly demonstrated, rivalries which anticipated the King's eventual death might develop to foment an early rebellion. With only a tenuous claim to the throne of England, the Tudors were acutely aware of the dangers of an heirless monarchy.

The younger woman offered an escape from this unhappy scenario and her six year long involvement with the King, before their eventual marriage in 1533, began a train of decisions which were to unalterably determine the course of English and world history. The Reformation, which began with Martin Luther in Germany in 1517, was triggered almost by accident in England when the Convocation of Canterbury agreed in March,1531 to accede to Henry's demands that the clergy recognize him as head of the English church and remove Papal authority of Rome. This sparked a revolutionary process of such profound economic and political change that even today there is dispute about the full extent of its consequences.

But there seems to be little doubt that without the English Reformation we would not have had the growth of an educated middle class, powerful enough to initiate an industrial revolution; without the removal of Papal authority, we would not have had the strengthening of the role of Parliament and hence the rise of constitutional government which resulted from the civil wars of the next century. Nor would we have had the dramatic expansion of English land and naval power that the sequestration of the Catholic monasteries' wealth facilitated. Therefore there would have been no British empire, no spread of the virtues of liberal democracy and no exportation of the concept of human rights and the notion of individual freedom.

You will learn none of this from the The Tudors. The monarchy of Henry VIII in the Showtime drama is bathed in very little historical context and the soap opera which engulfs the King, ironically parallels the plot line of another recent Showtime offering - Californication. It came as no surprise then that a bonus trailer for that very production accompanied my DVD copy of The Tudors.

Why should any of this matter? After-all, the producers and director have laid no claim to historical authenticity (a fact underlined by the costuming which is Elizabethan, not Tudor) and have repeatedly insisted that the show is entertainment, not educational material.

This is answered by a simple truth. A civilization's continuity is predicated on a unified understanding of its past. Reduce that past to a mere pandemonia of sexual politics and bedroom acrobatics, in an attempt to mirror the mores and license of the contemporary world, the glue that binds that civilization together begins to come unstuck. Britain's national identity is largely dependent on the remembrance of the greatness of its achievements. But neither the British educational system, its media nor its bureaucracy seems to value them much any more and the pernicious results can be seen in the collapse of respect for authority; the impugning of Britain's prior imperial ambitions, the replacement of patriotism with a reverence for multiculturalism and the consignment of such world changing works by Shakespeare and other " dead white males" to irrelevance.

The United States suffers from a similar malediction, with movie makers and television writers and directors seeking to rip apart the reputations of some of America's greatest and most inspiring figures - from Thomas Jefferson to Harry Truman. This kind of revisionism and the supposed honest drive to reveal these men as human beings - warts and all -might be an expression of artistic license, but it is extraordinarily harmful to the embrace of a proud and unified national memory.

Henry VIII may be haven dead for five hundred years, but for whatever his flaws, his legacy to England and the world, accidental or not, should never be forgotten. Unfortunately, The Tudors does much to subvert that legacy and in the process contributes to the gradual collapse of national cohesion - a fact all of us, British or not, should mourn.

Want to comment on this article? See Avi Davis’ blog
Avi Davis is the Executive Director and Senior Fellow of the American Freedom Alliance in Los Angeles. He can be contacted at isdev@ix.netcom.com

McVeigh = Osama?
by Robert Spencer (more by this author)

“To continue to use McVeigh as an example of the stereotypical ‘disgruntled military veteran’ is as unfair as using Osama bin Laden as the sole example of Islam.” So said the commander of the American Legion, David Rehbein, in his recent letter to Janet Napolitano protesting the characterization of veterans in the DHS report about “right-wing extremists.” (By the way, we’re all still waiting for the DHS report on the global jihad threat.) Rehbein, of course, is expressing a commonplace assumption: that Osama is some kind of deviant, a psychopath, who is no more representative of Islam than Timothy McVeigh is of veterans because he has transgressed against the core principles of Islam just as McVeigh trampled upon the principles of the U.S. military. The comparison dissolves, however, upon close examination. (Frontpagemagazine)

The Real Interrogation Scandal-Andrew C. McCarthy
It’s the disclosure of the memos that should ‘shock the conscience.’
‘Does it shock the conscience?” Chris Wallace, the Fox News Sunday anchor, pressed former CIA director Michael Hayden about waterboarding. General Hayden gave the only responsible answer that honesty would allow: “It depends on the circumstances.” Wallace’s question came after the Obama administration’s shockingly irresponsible decision to release government memoranda that spell out, in exquisite detail, the enhanced interrogation methods that were approved for top-tier al-Qaeda detainees in 2002–2003. Certainly President Obama is entitled to his rose-tinted opinion that more is to be gained by shelving the tactics than by further exploiting them. As chief executive, moreover, it is his prerogative to supplant a policy of proven effectiveness with one based on vague, counter-historical hopes of depressing terrorist recruitment. He could easily have altered the policy course, however, without giving a tactics seminar to our enemies. (Nationalreview)

Stockholm: Honor-related violence more widespread than previously thought
The problem of honor-related violence and oppression is much greater and more widespread than was known until now, according to SVT Rapport. The first major survey of the problem which is now presented shows that in Stockholm alone there are estimated to be over 4,000 teenagers at risk. Almost a quarter of girls in the Stockholm area, 23%, answered that they were expected to be virgin when they married, and that they can't have any boyfriend. Almost a sixth of girls, 16%, stated that they weren't allowed to have a boyfriend, and that they couldn't choose for themselves who to marry. 7% of the boys answered the same way. 10% of the girls and 4% of the boys answered that their lives were restricted and that they weren't allowed to have the same everyday life as their peers. 7% of the girls and 3% of the boys answered also that they were exposed to insults, threat and violence. Most of these children have parents who were born abroad. Stockholm city estimates that over 4,000 teenagers in Stockholm live in an honor culture which violates Swedish law. The survey was presented by the city of Stockholm. (Islamineurope)

New calls to shut down Jihad group that Blair promised to ban-Matthew Hickley
Ministers are facing renewed calls to ban an extremist Islamic group after its leaders asked Muslims to fight Israel and overthrow moderate Arab regimes. Tony Blair promised to ban Hizb ut-Tahrir after the July 7 bombings four years ago, but the Government has never carried through the threat. The group, which is banned in Germany and several Middle Eastern countries, opposes democracy and seeks to unite all Muslims in a single global Islamic state. Officially Hizb ut-Tahrir denounces violence, but a video of a rally in London earlier this year has emerged showing its chief UK media adviser Dr Imran Waheed claiming that ‘fighting in the way of Allah’ is the only solution to the Arab-Israeli conflict. He told the crowd: ‘There will be no peace and no negotiations with the illegitimate entity of Israel which has usurped the Muslim lands. ‘There is only one solution to the occupation of Muslim lands, one solution to the cries of the widows and the orphans, one solution to avenge the deaths of the elderly and the children. Fight in the way of Allah those who fight you! Al-Jihad!' (Dailymail.co.uk)

Muslim converts accused of holy war bomb plots-Roger Boyes
Two Muslim converts and two Turks go on trial in a bomb-proof courtroom in Düsseldorf today accused of plotting to blow up German civilians and US soldiers. “The world will burn!” boasted an intercepted e-mail sent between the accused, who are alleged to have wanted to wage an Islamic holy war in the heart of Europe. Three of the men — Fritz Gelowicz, 29, Daniel Schneider, 23 and the Turkish national Adem Yilmaz, 30 — are accused of attending a training camp on the Afghan-Pakistani frontier run by an Uzbek-based terror organisation known as the Islamic Jihad Union. Intelligence services say that it has links with al-Qaeda. Using detonators — supplied, the state prosecutor claims, by Attila Selek, 24, a German citizen of Turkish origin — the gang prepared bombs with the explosive force of 410kg (904lb) of TNT, to be set off in and around the US Ramstein air base and other targets. The bombers in London on July 7, 2005, had 4kg of explosive. It is alleged that the gang wanted the attacks to influence a parliamentary debate extending the mandate of the German Army in Afghanistan in the autumn of 2007. (Timesonline.co.uk)

Schools to close on Muslim holidays in order to cut absence rates-Martin Beckford
Schools will be allowed to close for Islamic holidays in order to improve attendance rates, under new plans.
Many Muslim children are currently taken out of lessons to celebrate religious festivals such as Eid. In an attempt to lower levels of classroom absences, Manchester City Council is considering allowing schools attended by large numbers of non-Christians to close on these holy days. Education departments in some parts of east London, where the majority of pupils are Muslim, already tell schools to close on two days for Eid. But critics point out that Christianity remains the state religion in England, and claim that communities risk becoming more segregated if different groups are allowed to change the school calendar. Douglas Murray, director of the Centre for Social Cohesion think tank, said: “Either people are British and go to British schools and have a particular holiday system, or we decide to carve the country up into areas that are Muslim and non-Muslim, and I think that’s what this does. “To have a quota above which schools are designated as Muslims seems to be, putting it at its mildest, an unhelpful way to bring cohesion to Britain. (Telegraph.co.uk)

New diplomatic crisis for US over Iran's jailing of Roxana Saberi
The fate of an American journalist sentenced to eight years in prison for spying against Iran has put fresh strain on Washington’s relationship with Tehran, damaging hopes for Barack Obama’s reconciliation bid with the Islamic regime. Roxana Saberi, 31, a dual American-Iranian national who had lived in Tehran for the past six years, was found guilty of espionage in a secret court hearing and told she would serve the lengthy sentence in the notorious Evin prison in the Iranian capital. Her father, Reza Saberi, described the court proceedings as a mock trial and said that the entire hearing lasted only a few minutes. Western diplomats in Tehran and Iranian reformers were sceptical about the case, suggesting that it was politically motivated. There are suspicions that hardliners in the regime want to use the prosecution to end the peace initiative announced by President Obama last month in a broadcast to Iranians who were celebrating their new year. (Timesonline.co.uk)

A College Board Does Its Job-Steve Balch
Inside Higher Ed reports that the board of the College of DuPage, a community college in the Chicago area, has adopted a policy statement based upon the Academic Bill of Rights (ABOR). Some professors, together with the local faculty union, are vehemently protesting passages in this statement such as “Exposing students to the spectrum of significant scholarly viewpoints on the subjects examined in their courses is a major responsibility of faculty. Courses will not be used for the purpose of political, ideological, religious, or anti-religious indoctrination.” Notwithstanding the very deliberate qualification “significant scholarly opinion,” the policy’s critics have asserted – as have detractors of ABOR more generally – that this kind of language will require that biology teachers give equal time to various forms of creationism. Quoted in the Insider Higher Ed article, AAUP national president Cary Nelson carries this rather lame argument a surprising step further. According to him, “It cannot be considered ideological indoctrination to expect that students master the theory of evolution or the idea that gender’s meanings are socially constructed.” (NAS)

Mark Perry at Harvard - Multiple Identity Syndrome [incl. Sara Roy]-Hillel Stavis
The latest apologist-for-Islam guest to be honored by Harvard's Center for Middle Eastern Studies is one Mark Perry, author, self-described "security consultant" and above all, raconteur (read "name dropper"): "When I was waiting outside Yasir Arafat's office..." His topic at Cambridge's Baghdad-on-the-Charles was ostensibly the skinny on Hamas and Hezbollah. These days, the operative buzz-phrase among the academic cognoscenti is "multiple elective identities" (popularized by the Nobel Laureate economist Amartya Sen). You see, we're supposed to look at Hamas, Hezbollah, Ahmedinejad and the Taliban as complex, nuanced actors with whom we can dialogue, and, ultimately, strike a deal with. There are no more monoliths, according to the university pooh-bahs. Except for one, of course. It's the tiny country in the Middle East that begins with I and ends with l. There's no point in talking with Netanyahu or the settlers -- they have only one identity -- Zionists -- and we don't have to be told how evil that movement is. Hamas, on the other hand, according to Perry, is pro-democracy and anti-Shariah Law, hence it is possessed of multiple identities. Our academic betters are telling us to pay no attention to the mountains of corpses, flogged women or disappearing minorities in the Islamic world -- these folks are at heart just like us -- Progressives! (Campuswatch)

Chaplain’s E-mail Sparks Controversy-Melody Y. Hu
Crimson Staff Writer
CLARIFICATION APPENDED
Harvard Islamic chaplain Taha Abdul-Basser ’96 has recently come under fire for controversial statements in which he allegedly endorsed death as a punishment for Islamic apostates. In a private e-mail to a student last week, Abdul-Basser wrote that there was “great wisdom (hikma) associated with the established and preserved position (capital punishment [for apostates]) and so, even if it makes some uncomfortable in the face of the hegemonic modern human rights discourse, one should not dismiss it out of hand.” The e-mail was forwarded over Muslim student e-mail lists and later picked up by the blogosphere, sparking debate and, in many cases, criticism of Abdul-Basser from those who have interpreted his statement as supporting the execution of those who leave the Islamic religion. “I believe he doesn’t belong as the official chaplain,” said one Islamic student, who asked that he not be named to avoid conflicts with Muslim religious authorities. “If the Christian ministers said that people who converted from Christianity should be killed, don’t you think the University should do something?” [SEE CLARIFICATION BELOW]According to the student, many of Abdul-Basser’s other views are “not in line with liberal values, such as notions of human rights. He privileges the medieval discourse of the Islamic jurists, and is not willing to exercise independent thought and judgment beyond a certain limit,” the student said. (TheCrimson)

Media Bias

CNN vs. the Tea Parties-Mona Charen
Principled opposition to big government does not compute.
When thousands of people in all 50 states assemble to protest government policy, you might suppose that this is news. Not according to the coverage on the front pages of theWashington Post, the New York Times, or the Wall Street Journal. The “tea party” rallies went unmentioned. In Washington, D.C., despite temperatures in the 40s and a driving rain, about a thousand demonstrators assembled across from the White House on April 15. The front page of the Times the next day found space for a big story with accompanying pictures of public demonstrations in Kabul, Afghanistan, but not a word about the American protestors. Perhaps this snub was intentional. Fox News (becoming a participant itself and not merely a recorder of events) had been beating the drums for these rallies for days, and some pressies clearly regarded them as therefore necessarily illegitimate. (NationalReview)

CNS News: CIA Confirms That Enhanced Interrogations Foiled L.A. Terror Plot-NB
CNSNews.com, a division of the Media Research Center, is spotlighted on the Drudge Report as editor-in-chief Terry Jeffrey [1] confirmed what President Obama and his Bush-loathing supporters in the media want to downplay: The Central Intelligence Agency told CNSNews.com today that it stands by the assertion made in a May 30, 2005 Justice Department memo that the use of "enhanced techniques" of interrogation on al Qaeda leader Khalid Sheik Mohammed (KSM) -- including the use of waterboarding -- caused KSM to reveal information that allowed the U.S. government to thwart a planned attack on Los Angeles. Before he was waterboarded, when KSM was asked about planned attacks on the United States, he ominously told his CIA interrogators, "Soon, you will know." According to the previously classified May 30, 2005 Justice Department memo that was released by President Barack Obama last week, the thwarted attack -- which KSM called the "Second Wave"-- planned " ‘to use East Asian operatives to crash a hijacked airliner into’ a building in Los Angeles." (Newsbusters)

Netherlands: US Islam-critic cancel trip due to death threats
Mark A. Gabriel, ex-Muslim and Islam-critic has gotten death threats and must cancel speaking appointments in the Netherlands. The American terrorism fighting unit, the FBI, advised Gabriel to drop all public appearances in the Europe due to these death threats. He was escorted to the Schiphol airport by his contact person in the Netherlands, Jewish-Christian pastor Ben Kok. Gabriel had planned to be in the Netherlands till April 25. Gabriel (51), his pseudonym for years, grew up as a Muslim in Egypt. He was a teacher at Al-Azhar University and an imam as well, but was disappointed with Islam, in particular due to its violent character. When he crossed over to Christianity, he had to flee. He now has asylum in the US. (Islamineuropeblog)

Are You an ‘Extremist’? -Thomas Sowell
While the rest of us may be worried about violent Mexican drug gangs on our border, or about terrorists who are going to be released from Guantanamo, the director of homeland security is worried about “right-wing extremists.” Just who are these right-wing extremists? According to an official document of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, right-wing extremists include “groups and individuals that are dedicated to a single issue, such as opposition to abortion or immigration.” They also include those “rejecting federal authority in favor of state or local authority.” If you fit in to any of these categories, you may not have realized that you are considered a threat to national security. But apparently the Obama administration has its eye on you. According to the same official document, the Department of Homeland Security “has no specific information that domestic rightwing terrorists are currently planning acts of violence.” But somehow they just know that you right-wingers are itching to unleash terror somewhere, somehow. So-called honor killings by Muslims in the United States, including the recent beheading of his wife by a leader of one of the American Muslim organizations, does not seem to arouse any concern from the Department of Homeland Security. (NationalReview)

ANTISEMITISM

Yom Hashoah 2009 Speech by SWC Dean & Founder, Rabbi Marvin Hier
As Jews around the world gather to commemorate Yom Hashoah, Iran’s President used the platform of the United Nations Durban II in Geneva to question Israel’s right to exist - when he called it a country created by 'military aggressions to make an entire nation homeless under the pretext of Jewish suffering' from the Second World War. Or as he said in an interview the day before to Der Spiegel magazine, “The Zionist regime is the result of WWII - what does any of this have to do with the Palestinian people or with the Middle East? I believe we must get to the root of the problem - if one doesn’t consider the causes their can be no solution.” In short, what he’s saying is that Israel shouldn’t have been created after WWII and there will be no solution until Israel stops existing. Oh how quickly time flies – we were just there, in Evian, some 71 years ago when the nations of the world met with an opportunity to save Europe’s Jews but, instead, they closed their doors on them and left them all to Hitler. Today, another world conference in Geneva, and, once again, the Jews are the principal targets. Yes, its true – many nations led by the United States, Canada, and others walked out of the hall right in front of Ahmadinijad, but it’s also true that the United Nations, founded as a result of the Holocaust gave a platform to a Holocaust denier who, once again, railed against the Jews. (SWC)

An Unconscionable Farce-Melanie Phillips
Word reaches me that my criticisms below of the approach taken by UK Jewish leaders in the Jewish Human Rights Coalition towards the ‘Durban II’ farce in Geneva have produced a state of near-apoplexy among certain JHRC members and their hangers-on, who believe I have failed to recognise the heroic role these leaders have been playing behind the scenes at this meeting and the terrific results they have achieved. They thus underline how grievously they fail to get the point. On one particular matter, however, I may have inadvertently giving the wrong impression. I wrote that it was only last Friday, when the JHRC fruitlessly implored Foreign Secretary David Miliband three times to withdraw from the conference, that they appeared to have realised that the event was indeed a travesty and that there were ‘serious concerns’ that could not be overcome. This has been taken to mean in some quarters that I was saying it was the first time the JHRC had asked the government to withdraw. Actually, I didn’t mean that. I meant precisely what I said -- that only on Friday did the JHRC realise the game was now up. But now I realise that this is not so. They still haven’t realised it.

On Hamas TV, Friday Sermon Cites 'Protocols of Elders of Zion,' Calls to Annihilate the Jews, Compares Jews To Dogs-MEMRI
The following are excerpts from a Hamas Friday sermon, which aired on Al-Aqsa TV on April 3, 2009.
To view this clip on MEMRI TV, visit http://www.memritv.org/clip/en/2080.htm.
To view the MEMRI TV page for Al-Aqsa TV, visit,http://www.memritv.org/content/en/tv_channel_indiv.htm?id=175.
"It Is the Jews Who Are Leading the Vehement Campaign Against the Muslims Today"
Preacher: "Who is leading the world today against Islam and its people? Who is leading the fierce and vehement campaign in the world today against Islam and its people? The answer is as clear as day: It is the nation of the Jews. It is the Jews who are leading the vehement campaign against the Muslims today.[...] "We Muslims know best the nature of the Jews, because the Koran has informed us about this, and because the pure Sunna of the Prophet Muhammad has devoted much space to informing the Muslims of the truth about the Jews and their hostility to Islam and its Prophet." [...]
"[In] 'The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,' The Jews Included Their Plan... Jews Today Are Weaving Their Spider Webs in Order to Encircle Our Nation"
"Their famous book, the existence of which is denied by the reasonable people among them, the so-called Protocols of the Elders of Zion - but we call it the Protocols of the Idiots of Zion... In this book, the Jews included their plan to besiege the whole world by land, by air, by sea, by ideology, by economy, and by the media, as is happening today, my brothers in the nation of the Prophet Muhammad. The Jews today are weaving their spider webs in order to encircle our nation like a bracelet encircles the wrist, and in order to spread corruption throughout the world." [...] (MEMRI)

TERRORISM, INTERNET, JIHAD

Torture memo has put US in danger, CIA tells Barack Obama-Tim Reid in Washington
President Obama visited the CIA headquarters yesterday to placate officials dismayed by his decision to release top secret “torture” memos, a move that has provoked accusations that he is willing to compromise America’s safety out of political correctness. Mr Obama’s first visit to the CIA, to boost morale there and shore up his own reputation, came as his decision to release the memos detailing brutal interrogation sessions of terror suspects continued to attract criticism. There were claims from inside the agency’s ranks that the move had undermined its ability to extract vital intelligence from America’s enemies, and could even blow the cover of some secret operatives. Michael Hayden, who ran the CIA under President Bush, said before Mr Obama’s visit that the release of the memos had compromised the CIA’s intelligence gathering work and, in effect, aided America’s enemies. (Timesonline.co.uk)

Over 500 planned terrorist attacks in EU in 2008-ANDREW WILLIS
The European Union's law enforcement agency, Europol, counted a total of 515 terrorist attacks carried out or planned in the union in 2008. "The threat to EU member states of Islamist as well as ethno-nationalist and separatist terrorism remains high," Mariano Simancas, deputy director of Europol, said on Thursday (16 April). "Law enforcement agencies must stay alert in order to prevent and to keep trying to dismantle terrorist groups and structures," he added. Of the 515 attacks carried out or only planned, 397 were by separatist movements, of which 97 percent were in Spain and France. In 2008, four people, including a law enforcement officer, died in the EU as a result of terrorist attacks that were carried out by the Basque separatist group ETA in Spain said the Hague-based Europol. (Euobserver)

Somali pirates becoming 'more sophisticated' warns British naval commander-Colin Freeman
The British naval officer commanding the fleet of European warships fighting Somali pirates has warned that they are becoming 'better-armed and more professional' in their hijackings.
Rear Admiral Philip Jones, who is in charge of the six warships attached to the European Union Naval Force for Counter Piracy, spoke out as his force struggles against a new spike in piracy attacks. He said that while they had had some success deterring more "amateur" attacks in the Gulf of Aden, the more recent onslaught of hijackings in the Indian Ocean appeared to be the work of new, better-organised gangs, who could range far out to sea in so-called mother ships. "In the Gulf of Aden we saw a lot of opportunist attacks from people who are part-time fishermen," Adml Jones told The Sunday Telegraph. "The more recent attackers seem to be more sophisticated, with access to better arms and equipment." He added that the foreign anti-piracy patrols were merely "scratching the surface", and that the only real solution was for proper security on the lawless Somali mainland.The spate of attacks in the past fortnight, which included the abduction of Captain Richard Phillips, of the US-flagged Maersk Alabama, comes after a lull lasting nearly three months in which piracy dropped off notably. Adml Jones conceded that that was at least partly due to the recent monsoon weather, which hard for the pirates' small launches to operate in. (Telegraph.co.uk)

Somali Muslims call FBI outreach 'coercion'-Phillip O’Connor
ST. LOUIS — Concerns about racial profiling and other questionable tactics used
to investigate the possible terrorist recruitment of Somalis living in the United States are prompting some Muslim leaders in St. Louis and elsewhere to limit their cooperation with the FBI. Across the country, federal agents are intensifying efforts to make connections within the Somali community amid growing concern that some are being radicalized by al-Qaida-affiliated terrorists. Over the past two years, about two dozen teenagers and young men have disappeared, most from the Minneapolis area, and returned to the Horn of Africa to possibly train with terrorist groups, according to the FBI. In October, one of the men became what is believed to be the first U.S. citizen to carry out a terrorist suicide attack when he blew himself up near Mogadishu killing 30 people. "We've talked to a lot of people, we've asked them to come forward and we're going to continue to do that," said E.K. Wilson, spokesman for the FBI office in Minneapolis, home to the largest concentration of Somalis in the U.S. (St.Louistoday)

Computer Spies Breach Fighter-Jet Project-SIOBHAN GORMAN, AUGUST COLE and YOCHI DREAZEN
WASHINGTON -- Computer spies have broken into the Pentagon's $300 billion Joint Strike Fighter project -- the Defense Department's costliest weapons program ever -- according to current and former government officials familiar with the attacks. Similar incidents have also breached the Air Force's air-traffic-control system in recent months, these people say. In the case of the fighter-jet program, the intruders were able to copy and siphon off several terabytes of data related to design and electronics systems, officials say, potentially making it easier to defend against the craft. The latest intrusions provide new evidence that a battle is heating up between the U.S. and potential adversaries over the data networks that tie the world together. The revelations follow a recent Wall Street Journal report that computers used to control the U.S. electrical-distribution system, as well as other infrastructure, have also been infiltrated by spies abroad. (WSJ)

'Save the planet' rhetoric soars to crazy new heights
The terrifying threat of global warming is beginning to turn people's minds, observes Christopher Booker.
How would you cope if faced with a GCSE physics paper? Have no fear. You don’t need to know anything about physics. As can be seen from the adjacent question from last year’s paper on physics and electricity, so long as you’ve listened to enough environmentalist propaganda to know what answers are expected (eg that most of the sources of the electricity we use are creating global warming), you could get 100 per cent. But if, of course, you don’t agree with the Government on these matters, you will fail. Doubtless one of the teaching aids which might have guided you to the right answers would have been Al Gore’s famous Oscar-winning movie An Inconvenient Truth, which in 2007 our then environment secretary, David Miliband, ordered to be sent to every secondary school in the country. It was obviously inconvenient that in October that year a High Court judge should have ruled that nine of the claims made in that film were so scientifically absurd that the Government would be in breach of the law against teaching propaganda in schools unless the film was accompanied by material correcting its errors. But when last week I asked the Department for Children, Skills and Lifelong Learning (or whatever they now call the old ministry of education) for sight of that corrective material they never came back with an answer. (Telegraph.co.uk)

To Fight Stigmas, Start With Treatment-SALLY SATEL, M.D.
Last fall, British television broadcast a reality program called “How Mad Are You?” The plot was simple: 10 volunteers lived together for a week in a castle in the Kent countryside and took part in a series of challenges. The twist was the lack of a prize. Five of the volunteers had a history of a serious mental illness, like obsessive compulsive disorder and bipolar disorder, and five did not. The challenges, meant to elicit latent symptoms, included mucking out a cowshed, performing stand-up comedy and taking psychological tests. But the real test came at the end of the week. Could a panel of experts — a psychiatrist, psychologist and a psychiatric nurse — tell them apart? They could not. After watching hours of videotape, the experts correctly identified only two of the five people with a history of mental illness. And they misidentified two of the healthy people as having a mental illness. The point was made: even trained professionals cannot reliably determine mental illness by appearances alone. (NYT)

Inventing a New World-John Steele Gordon
The men who engineered the astonishing emergence of the modern age
The Industrial Revolutionaries By Gavin Weightman Grove, 422 pages, $27.50
There are technologies and then there are technologies. Some are trivial, such as Ziploc plastic bags. They're handy, to be sure, but they don't change the world. Some are extraordinarily simple but profound, such as the stirrup, which came along only after men had been riding horses for well over a thousand years. Nothing more than a ring of metal hung from a leather strap, the stirrup made cavalry the dominant force on the European battlefield and therefore made the mounted knight the dominant force in European society for several hundred years. As Gavin Weightman's "The Industrial Revolutionaries" reminds us, inventions on the level of the stirrup's importance seemed to come every other month during the late 18th and 19th centuries -- what Mr. Weightman calls "the most remarkable period of practical inventiveness in world history." When Thomas Hobbes famously wrote in the 17th century that the great majority of the population led lives that were "nasty, brutish and short," he was describing an agrarian society that was, in its essence, unchanged since the advent of agriculture about 10,000 years earlier. Ownership of land was the basis of wealth. Hobbes had no reason to think that the situation would change any time soon. But it did: A rapidly accelerating development of world-transforming technologies, subsumed under the rubric of "the Industrial Revolution," began in Britain and within 100 years had molded the modern world. (WSJ)

Our language is England's greatest gift to the world... and this is the week to celebrate it-Boris Johnson
A couple of weeks ago City Hall in London put out a modest Press announcement about our plans for St George’s Day – and we couldn’t believe the reaction. The phones went wild. The emails and the letters started to swamp our response teams. People started crossing the road to shake my hand, pumping it up and down and thanking me with embarrassing fervour. I felt like some Texan prospector who has idly whacked his pickaxe on some piece of unpromising ground and then stood back in amazement before a great gusher of erupting oil. As I studied some of the emails I got a sense of pent-up longing, of people who were yearning to reclaim the English flag from the extremists. They didn’t want anything to do with the far Right. They deeply disliked the BNP. They didn’t want to cock a snook at the Scots, and they didn’t have any particular resentment of the Welsh or the Irish. They certainly didn’t have any hostility towards St Patrick’s Day, or Diwali or any of the other high days and holy days we mark in the great multi-ethnic metropolis. They just felt that London was not only the capital of Britain, and of the United Kingdom, but also the capital of England. After decades of watching ceremonies and festivals in honour of just about everyone, they wanted to celebrate the genius of England on the day of England’s patron saint. In a simple, joyful and unthreatening way – in a way that included all the communities that live here – they wanted a day to announce their pride in this country and all the things it has given the world. Now at this point we must be careful, because when politicians try to analyse the particular genius of England, they notoriously come unstuck. (Dailymail.co.uk)