About those other Muslim cultures, it should be noted how alien the psychology is for us.

In the West in modern times, it hasn’t been so unsual for some women to have visions. Among the Moghrebs (Berbers) and Arabs, it has not been so unusual for the men to have visions as well. The women have a reputation for using poison, as if in a classic illustration of Nietzsche’s discussions of the arts of the slave. The sense of time is very different from that of the West. Things that happened years ago might as well have happened yesterday. Paul Bowles opens a window on these things. One might read The Collected Stories (in a sideshow, you’ll come to see how Gore Vidal in his introduction flatly fails to understand some of Bowles’ stories), and also some of the novels & stories by Bowles’ friends such as Mohammed Mrabet & Driss ben Hamed Charhadi, which Bowles translated into English http://www.paulbowles.org/books.html

As an intellectual, Bowles was a pretty typical anti-Western Westerner. Meanwhile, his stories & novels tend to be about people traveling or touring (or the occasional local who’s tripping), and who get into trouble sometimes fatally in foreign or strange situations whose dangers they don’t understand. I wonder in how alien a world we all are now.

Islam was born, conceived, and raised in the desert. Islam is the desert. Islam is war and peace and submission and oppression if and when the desert is those things. The kif or the hashish is lit, and an Arabic script of golden scimitars dances against a hard blue sky. Islam is fatalistic. Cultures long Islamized invent little. For Islam, nothing is at liberty, nothing is really novel, and time merely reveals what was fated eons ago as if yesterday, like movements of orbs in ordered and undecaying dynamics. Allah is not sociably triune, much less swarmingly thousand-faced, but as stark over Islam, as desert sun or moon over a desert while the wind has died. Sometimes the wind blows, and the dunes are ever shifting and ever the same.

Er, concern for the well-being of the Israelis is well and good and all that, but please keep in mind that when the Iranians refer to “The Great Satan”, they’re not talking about the Israel.

IMO, this is much simpler than a lot of people think. When a government that refers to my country as “The Great Satan” and has citizens who go to rallies and chant “Death to America” is developing nuclear weapons, we are entirely justified in doing whatever we see fit to do in order to assure our own security. Doing nothing and hoping for ‘peace in our time’ because the other party is sane is not a plan, it is folly.

Either we take care of business before the Iranians have nukes, or we take care of business after the Iranians have nukes. The only difference between those two options is how many people are going to die in the process.

Which will it be?

“U.S. Push for Democracy Could Backfire Inside Iran”

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/13/AR2006031301761.html

1. Iran’s domestic supply of uranium is rather small — perhaps 7 years’ worth if the purpose is really for the production of peaceful energy. Contrast this with petroleum reserves that would last 250 years for domestic purposes. Clearly, the nuke project is about manufacturing arms.

2. Iran is a major earthquake zone. What chances that their facilities are going to be able to withstand a major quake?

3. Ha’aretz recently ran a story indicating that Iran has actually been processing uranium for a much longer period of time than commonly believed. The implication of this is that they are not moving along as swiftly as is commonly believed.

I too “I’m far from convinced Hitchens has the right approach here. But I wish I knew what was.”

The only active non-violent response to this situation that I can come up with is basically this:

Build a number of large transmitters in Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as satellites and use them to beam information like the Wafa Sultan (sp?) interview into the country in Arabic and Farsi and whatever other language is appropriate. Beam in any kind of anti-Mullah message we can…..AND…..beam in warnings about what will happen to Iran if the Iranians don’t take care of this themselves.

I’d also suggest B2 bomber loads of leaflets if practicable to A) increase the message penetration and B) to demonstrate our capabilities (the pamphlets could point out that they could have just as easily been MOABs or Smart Bombs.

They’ve said it, to destroy Israel and kill all the Jews as an absolute religious duty. They’ve said it many times, their President hosted a World Conference on the subject, this is near and dear to their hearts.

They’ve said they can “win” because they can lose half their population and still have 35 million people.

The other thing Iran wants is control of the Gulf and states around it. They’ve wanted this (and had it) for about 2700 years, going back to Cyrus. What stands in their way is the US Navy which kicked their butts in the 1980′s when they tried to take it by force.

Iran wants Israel destroyed, and the US nuked so the Navy leaves the Gulf. They’ve said it. Believe them.

Hitchens belongs to the horse and buggy whip, corset era of the Cold War. Quaint. Outdated, bygone era. What we have now is the Clash of Civilizations ala Huntington. With of course nuclear weapons.

Aside from that, if history has taught us anything it is this: when a genocidal Jew-hater tells you he wants to wipe all the Jews off the map (of Europe OR the Middle East) it behooves you to take him at his word.