End The "Diabolization" Of Imam Rauf

The peerless Leon Wieseltier on the lower Manhattan community center and mosque:

In matters of principle...polling is beside the point, or an alibi for the tyranny of the majority, or an invitation to demagogues to make divisiveness into a strategy, so that their targets come to seem like they are the ones standing in the way of social peace, and the “decent” thing is for them to fold. Why doesn’t Rauf just move the mosque? That would bring the ugliness to an end. But why don’t Palin and Gingrich just shut up? That, too, would bring the ugliness to an end. Certainly the diabolization of Rauf, an imam who has publicly recited the Shema as an act of solidarity and argued that the Declaration of Independence “embodies and restates the core values of the Abrahamic, and thus also the Islamic, ethic,” must cease. In a time when an alarming number of Muslims wish to imitate Osama bin Laden, here is a Muslim who wishes to imitate Mordecai Kaplan.

Read the whole column.

Atheist In The Hole

Michael M. Phillips totally nails the beginning of this evocative story:

SANGIN, Afghanistan—They say there are no atheists in foxholes. There's one on the front lines here, though, and the chaplain isn't thrilled about it.

Navy Chaplain Terry Moran is steeped in the Bible and believes all of it. His assistant, Religious Programs Specialist 2nd Class Philip Chute, is steeped in the Bible and having none of it.

Together they roam this town in Taliban country, comforting the grunts while crossing swords with each other over everything from the power of angels to the wisdom of standing in clear view of enemy snipers. Lt. Moran, 48 years old, preaches about divine protection while 25-year-old RP2 Chute covers the chaplain's back and wishes he were more attentive to the dangers of the here and now.

It's a match made in, well, the Pentagon.

"He trusts God to keep him safe," says RP2 Chute. "And I'm here just in case that doesn't work out."

She Did Buy The Shoes, BTW

This afternoon I posted on Facebook about a friend's Mustang and, not long after, noticed a Mustang ad in the right-hand column. This Wall Street Journal investigation explains how they do that. I heard the reporter, Julia Angwin, talking about it on NRP's Fresh Air not long ago.

The sites we visit most often, and advertising firms that specialize in this stuff, have ways of gathering information about the things we look at on line and generating ads that match our interests. Angwin found that the average site puts over 60 tracking devices on your computer when you visit. Often third parties are running the tracking programs without the host sites' even knowing.

Angwin said that when she checked out some shoes on line, "they kept following me around the web" as ads popped up at other places she visited. While she says that our profiles can get pretty detailed and sophisticated, our names aren't attached to them. The data is mined and traded instantaneously, since the whole idea is to get to us while we're in the market and before the data are corrupted by our fickleness, or the other people who are using our computers and start searching for guitar strings instead of pumps.

I tried to summon some outrage about an invasion of privacy inherent in this example of the market in hyperactivity, but I couldn't. This is Big Broker, not Big Brother. I only got worried when the NPR interviewer, Dave Davies, asked Angwin, "Is anyone in the government interested in this?"

Hawking, Dickens, And Spontaneous Combustion

Stephen Hawking now says that the laws of gravity were enough to bring the universe into being -- which would have been the first instance of spontaneous combustion. For us old-earth Bible-interpreters, this is big news. Since the publication of his A Brief History of Time, Christian adult education teachers who found no essential conflict between the big bang and Genesis have been able to say that the great British astrophysicist himself was willing to concede the possibility of Someone throwing the great switch.

That Hawking has changed his mind, as disconcerting as it may be at first to the Bible study teachers, just means that he has chosen to insist that "science is on his side in order to make his case for the imagination." Oops. Sorry, that's what Brooke D. Taylor says about Charles Dickens in the September 2010 issue of Dickens Quarterly.

See, the 19th century's greatest English writer believed in spontaneous combustion, too, and used it in his novel Bleak House to dispose of a character named Krook. Krook had been hoarding papers which held the key to a legal case that has been grinding along for decades. Two characters who come looking for him find -- well, you could say that they find evidence of a sacramental reenactment of the scientist's vision of the beginning of the universe, a mass for rationalists:

Here is a small burnt patch of flooring; here is the tinder from a little bundle of burnt paper, but not so light as usual, seeming to be steeped in something; and here is--is it the cinder of a small charred and broken log of wood sprinkled with white ashes, or is it coal? O Horror, he IS here!

That's Krook's burnt remains that are "here," not God. As Hawking now insists about the universe, no one had to light the fuse in Krook's grubby little room. It just happened. Really, it happens all the time. As he assured his readers in the preface of Bleak House, Dickens had studied the literature.

All these years everyone has thought him a bit daft on this narrow point. Seeking to rescue him, Brooke Taylor concludes:

In the end, most of us agree that, for literary purposes, the scientific accuracy of Spontaneous Combustion doesn't matter. But Dickens argues for the scientific authenticity of this manner of death because a world in which fact and feeling are irreparably divided is a tragic and frightening place.

Maybe that kind of fear helps us understand why the mystery of God can be such a challenge or an affront to the rational mind. For Hawking and those who are most pleased by his latest assertion, it actually seems less preposterous, or perhaps less frightening, to say that they know what occurred 14 billion years ago at a point in-- well, somewhere, than to accept the possibility that a living but persistently invisible source of ultimate meaning and benevolence is present right now, right here. The very idea of a power they can't fully explain must make them want to explode.

Nixon's On The Ballot Yet Again

George Demos, vying with Christopher Nixon Cox for the GOP nomination in New York's first congressional district, isn't confining his campaign to Long Island issues. He's also running against the most famous mosque in Manhattan and the most famous Quaker from Whittier.

Obama At His Best

Tim Rutten on the stakes in the Middle East for President Obama:

[He's] a president even more willing to put himself directly on the line for an agreement than Clinton was in Northern Ireland — a chief executive seemingly willing to risk his record for audacious hope.

On the other hand, while nothing but jobs and the economy may matter in 2012, healthcare and Middle East peace might be something on which to run.

Then again, probably not. In 1980, voters didn't care about President Carter's historic Camp David breakthrough, when Israel and Egypt made peace. They cared about inflation and jobs, and so they voted him out of office after one term. Obama knows that, which is why it's pretty close to astonishing that he chose to make dialogue between Israel and Palestinians a top priority within 48 hours of his inauguration and then renewed his commitment by driving the progress toward the new round of talks.

It's Obama at his best, and shrewdest. Middle East peace would further isolate Iran and be a boon for regional stability and democratization. Pray for the peace of Jerusalem!

Mustang Saturday

When Tom Meena bought this 1966 Mustang seven years ago, it was painted yellow and had a vinyl roof. His first plan: Restore it and send it off to college with one of his and Denise's daughters, but after all the time and treasure, he decided to keep it. Wouldn't you have? When the couple met, he had a 1964.5 Mustang, the earliest ever. That's one at right. I spotted the Mustanging Meenas Saturday as Tom was helping Denise, director of the St. John's Episcopal School preschool, with start-of-the-year preparations.

Hamassed On The High Ground

If there's ample reason to be pessimistic about Middle East peace, Yossi Klein Halevi reports in the LA Times, there's also the unifying effect of having common enemies:

The most acute danger facing both Israel and the Palestinian Authority is radical Islam. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu rightly regards a nuclear Iran as an existential threat to the Jewish state. And if Israel launches a preemptive strike against Iran's nuclear facilities — a real possibility should international sanctions against Tehran fail — it will need the support of its friends. Progress on the Palestinian front could ease Israeli diplomatic and military isolation.

As for [PNA President] Abbas, he is engaged in a life-and-death power struggle with Iran's ally, Hamas. That is why he approved an unprecedented level of cooperation between Israeli and Palestinian security forces in the West Bank.

George The Big Swedish Meatball

From the first moments of the hollow-hearted thriller "The American," the Swedes are out to get George Clooney, and Ingmar Bergman is at the head of the posse. The movie has gorgeous scenery and minimal dialogue and music and reeks of existential angst. Most Bergmanesque of all is a scene where Clooney, playing a weary assassin named Jack, has a conversation with an inquisitive priest, Fr. Benedetto (Paolo Bonacelli) during which his face is in focus while staring at Benedetto's, which is perpendicular to his and slightly out of focus. You've seen the same move in Bergman movies, Woody Allen movies making fun of Bergman movies, and the SNL Compulsion ad starring Jan Hooks and Phil Hartman.

Jack and Father bond over brandy and beef stew and soon recognize each other as sinners with dark secrets, though Jack's are a lot darker and more recent. We never learn why Swedish assassins want to kill him, but when they track him to his snowbound love nest at the beginning of the story, he murders his innocent girlfriend to make sure he gets away clean.

This completely unjustifiable act makes him the most unsympathetic well-trained killing machine I've ever seen on film, which is ironic, since the whole idea is that in middle age Jack's becoming a big Swedish meatball. "Don't make any friends," his ridiculously sinister handler, Pavel (Johan Leysen), says scoldingly after bringing him in from the cold. "You used to understand that." Pavel sends Jack to a remote Italian village to await instructions and not make friends, whereupon he promptly sidles up to Benedetto and falls in love with a prostitute named Clara (Violante Placido).

Wandering through the village's dark, empty, maze-like streets trying to evade Swedes, Jack is your basic Sergio Leone antihero trapped by his destiny. Later, he's MacGyver, out to fulfill his last assignment by building a rifle for a mysterious Belgian assassin (Thekla Reuten) out of auto parts. You never know whom he, she, and Pavel are working for. You may care, but I didn't.

Oh Henry!

In the New York 1st, 56 throws his weight behind 37's grandson, agent of what some in the Nixon family have referred to as "the restoration."