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TO BE OR NOT TO BE – FREE: Thoughts on the Danish Cartoon Controversy by Larry Stout
When the Danish prince Hamlet wondered aloud whether it was better “to be or not to be,” he was struggling with the issue of vengeance and his own feelings of powerlessness.  I cannot help but think that dear Denmark is not besieged with the same conflicts today in the light of the published cartoons that Muslims have deemed blasphemous.  
American Christians have had to endure ridicule on almost a daily basis, with motion picture and television programs routinely depicting Christians as lying hypocrites, dangerous ideologues, foolish idiots, and worse, and subjected to ‘art’ such as crucifixes bathed in urine which would seem to make simple cartoons totally lame by comparison.  In response, Christians have written letters and boycotted products, but have never rioted, burned buildings, made death threats and the like.  But actions such as these are being excused and in some ways even justified by the Pope, the UN Secretary-General, and (to my shame) the US State Department because Muslim sensibilities have been offended by a free press practicing their freedom in their own country.    

Books are big news these days.  Even that enlightened book critic, Osama bin Laden, made a recommendation in his latest press release in the midst of his ‘truce’ proposal.  (The Rogue State by T. D. Allman, not surprisingly refers to the ‘outlaw’ state of the USA.)  Oprah Winfrey should feel slighted.  She probably thought she owned the book recommendation field.  When she coughs, the whole book industry catches cold.  She was greatly moved by James Frey’s recollection of his recovery from drugs and alcohol entitled A Million Little Pieces and instantly it becomes a number one bestseller.  Mr. Frey went rather overboard, however, in detailing the sordid details of his life.  For example, he stretched an overnight stay in a drunk tank in Ohio to three months in jail.  But the fact that Frey’s facts were more fiction does not matter to Opray, or the publisher Doubleday for that matter.  “The underlying message of redemption in James Frey’s memoir still resonates with me,” pronounced the television guru.   

WHY IS PARIS BURNING? Roots of the French Riots by Larry Stout

Paris is not exactly burning, but the riots in the Paris suburbs, which has now spread to other cities and has caused great consternation in France as well as throughout all of Europe.  French-born children of Arab and black African immigrants have savagely attacked in a mindless rage that is now in its sixteenth straight day.  Some are calling this one of the worst crises in the country's modern history. 
It would be easy to pass these off as simply the response of the accidental death by electrocution of two youths who may or may not have been fleeing the police.  That would be convenient, because it would mean that once the rage is spent, life will go back to normal.  However, I do not believe the solutions are going to be that easy for France.

IT IS NOW 2005 – DO YOU KNOW WHERE THE CHILDREN ARE? by Larry Stout

When I was attending college in the early 1970s, one of the greatest fears concerning the future was overpopulation.  Much of this belief was fueled by the popular book, The Population Bomb, by Paul Ehrlich, written in 1968.  Ehrlich predicted that, by the end of the 20th century, there would simply be more people than available resources to support them.  Mass starvation would sweep the globe, including the United States and (according to Ehrlich), “it is now too late to take action to save many of those people."  The fact that the man’s research was appalling poor and his conclusions astoundingly wrong did not prevent him from winning a MacArthur award, a prize from the Swedish Academy of Sciences (the same group that awards the Nobel prizes), the Distinguished Scientist Award of the American Institute of Biological Sciences, etc., etc.  In other words, all the smart people who mattered KNEW that overpopulation was the greatest threat to the future.

CINDY SHEEHAN – I believe a woman who has lost her son at war has every right to grieve.  But when that grief is being used as a political theater, the mother loses my sympathy.  Such is the case of one Cindy Sheehan, who has dramatically camped outside of the president's house in Crawford, Texas, demanding to see the President.  This has been heralded as some great gesture by the liberal media, of course.  Her vigil has been receiving non-stop media coverage, most of it with great sympathy.  The LA Times reports that Sheehan has given so many interviews that she needed lozenges to soothe an inflamed throat.  Her ears were sore from cradling a telephone.  Her media advisor, newly arrived from San Francisco, said Sheehan had developed a fever.

The Baltimore Sun almost begs President Bush, "A small first step — but only a first step — would be to sit down with Mrs. Sheehan and listen to her, really listen...Take time to talk with her. Have the courtesy."  CBS Evening News anchor man Bob Schieffer asks, “I wonder why the President doesn’t meet with her?”   Maureen Dowd of the New York Times rises to even greater heights in praise for Mrs. Sheehan stating that the moral authority of parents who bury children killed in Iraq is absolute. 

HIROSHIMA – Thankfully, the 60^th anniversary of this event produced less second-guessing than the 50^th did.  In 1995, there was whining from many quarters that Japan was ready to surrender, that the USA simply dropped the bomb out of vengeance, or to prove they could, or other such nonsense.  There are fewer of those comments today for two reasons.  First, 9-11 has shown us the face of terrorism afresh. The Japanese had developed their special Thunder Gods (kamikaze) which make al Qaeda look like amateurs. Today, we can better appreciate why the impact of those suicide bombers was so devastating upon the troops.  Morale was becoming so shattered and the men discouraged by the ruthlessness of the kamikaze that as the attacks continued, the Allies were actually shooting down less of them rather than more.  Hundreds of thousands of Japanese were prepared to give up their lives before surrendering the homeland.  According to historian Edward Blanchard, (reference here) the Japanese Emperor only barely succeeded in demobilizing his own officers.

Now we have 7-7 to go with 9-11. I am wondering if we need 363 more anniversary dates to wake up to the reality that we have a savage enemy that shares none of our civilized sensibilities. Yet while the bodies were still being dug out from the rubble of an exploded bus and subway tunnels in central London, totaling over 50 people, the apologists were already at work. George Galloway, member of Britain’s Parliament, compared the carnage on Thursday to the Allied forces assault on Fallujah, Iraq. Not quite so blatant, but just as insidious, was the editorial on Friday’s New York Times which states, “That fear has already led to questions about why the British security agencies did not anticipate the attacks, why the wealthy nations have not done enough about the root causes of terrorism and why Al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden continue to function after almost four years of the so-called war on terrorism.” “So-called war on terrorism?”

[Warning: this is long but important reading]

As Abraham Lincoln famously quoted, if you call a horse’s tail a leg, the horse still has four legs, because no matter what you call it, a tail is still a tail. Though it might be fun to play with language, it can also cause misunderstanding, confusion, and as we shall later see – deadly consequences.

I first realized this in high school when I was searching for a place to study after graduation. Near my home was Susquehanna University (SU), a small, liberal arts school located in Selinsgrove, Pennsylvania. It was founded in 1858 as the Missionary Institute of the Evangelical Lutheran Church. In 1873, the school merged with the Susquehanna Female College, and by 1895 it realized it needed a name change. The name they chose was Susquehanna University.

The hostility turned to rage when Newsweek magazine reported in May that American guards at the US prison for terrorists at the Cuban base of Guantanamo had flushed a Koran down the toilet. The fact that this report was later proved completely untrue did not stem the rage. The US military commissioned Brigadier General Jay Hood to look into allegations of Koran mishandling at the Guantanamo facility. General Hood delivered his report on June 3 and the American Bashers were delighted.

Now they had documented proof of American autocracies. The world media jumped on the report and such reputable sources as the London Times summarized it by stating “An American guard at Guantanamo Bay urinated on a copy of the Koran while others kicked, stepped on and soaked copies with water balloons, the Pentagon admitted last night.” The news service Reuters similarly reported, “The U.S. military for the first time on Friday detailed how jailers at Guantanamo mishandled the Koran, including the case in which a guard’s urine splashed onto the Islamic holy book and others in which was kicked, stepped on and soaked by water.”

It is already becoming known as the Riga Speech. When President George W. Bush came to tiny Latvia’s capital in route to his visit to Moscow to join in their 60th anniversary celebration of the end of World War II last week, no one expected that he would give one of the major foreign policy addresses of his administration.

In retrospect, I should have suspected something was afoot. After all, what possible purpose could cause the most powerful figure in the world to spend a full day and night in a country that does not even make a blip on the international screen? I know everyone who is anybody in Latvia, and there is not one who could be considered a player on the world stage. So what was he going to do during his 23-hour visit? It seemed to many, even in Latvia, like a lot of wasted time.