A hat tip to Ulrich Speck of Kosmoblog for pointing me to this Spectator article about Germany (free reg required) by Wolfgang Munchau. A snipped is below, but also visit Kosmoblog’s entry for the footnotes. Snippet:
Via Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung: A German court has lifted the ban on the deportation of the “Caliph of Cologne” — Kalif von Köln. Granted asylum in Germany in 1992, Metin Kaplan later proclaimed the caliphate of Cologne and was then convicted of “calling for murder” (Mordaufruf) in 2000. Since then the government has been trying to get him out of Germany.
I have no idea who Princess Louise is/was, but the cool good guys from last week in Iraq were her “Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders,” who, if you didn’t catch the story already, initiated and very successfully completed the first British bayonette charge in over 20 years. Read about it. And let’s not forget those who preceded them:
I know it is terribly unfashionable in this post-historical age to think there is anything special or sacred about military tradition and values. Things like discipline, for example. Yet in this Washington Post exclusive story about the possibility that General Sanchez was present at Abu Ghraib when torture was inflicted during interrogations, we have a Brigadier General (Karpinski) giving interviews and posing suggestive questions:
UK lefties and appeasers are ramping up for big protests while the President of the United States is in town, as they continue to spread the word that removing vicious, threatening regimes from power — even after September 11th and its lessons — is somehow incompatible with their utopian visions. (Oh I forgot, the “lessons” were about how badly the U.S. has acted in the Middle East, particularly in its support of the only liberal democracy in the region.)
I’ve had a nice response to the entry (2 entries ago) regarding Sophie Scholl and the German resistance group The White Rose. Thank you to the people who have written.
Paul Craddick, blogging at Fragmenta Philosophica, packs a lot into these 800 words responding to the complaint “There never was a consistent rationale for war; the ‘case’ kept changing.”
It’s part three of an ongoing “Rethinking Iraq” series.
Because of something I wrote about here yesterday, I spent much of the day thereafter re-reading for the hundredth time many of the excerpts from the letters and diary entries of Sophie Scholl. And because of something I coincidentally read today, I now want to write a bit about Sophie Scholl. I type her name knowing full well that many readers will not know who she is. Good, because then I get to introduce her in the way I see fit.
In a 16. August Die Presse review, Anneliese Rohrer pretty much pans Hillary Rodham-Clinton’s book, Living History. Rohrer echoes a complaint that many American critics have made: that Rodham-Clinton views all criticisms of the Clinton White House as somehow evidence of danger to America’s democratic system, and that she portrays the members of the administration as victims. (We would call it Hillary’s obsession with the “Vast Rightwing Conspiracy.”)
The ultra-left Red Army Faction (RAF) terrorized West Germany during the late 1970s, particularly in 1977. Of course in post-communist Europe they are now seen as murderers and as pathetic adherents to a discredited political system, correct? Incorrect. The group, which disbanded only eight years ago, is instead achieving cult-status, as is the entirety of East Germany itself.