Sophistication

The working masses of the industrialized world never quite rallied to the Marxist cause in the way that Marx-Lenin-Che and so many western intellectuals had expected. Will a billion or so Muslims rally to the Jihadist cause? The evidence is apparently mixed as of now.

What a wonderful time for the Christian/secular EU to admit Muslim/secular Turkey to the club.

The post-Iran revolution terrorist activities inflicted in the name of Islam around the world have been appalling and many years later, a strong Muslim reaction has not been seen.

James Carroll, in his magnificent Constatine's Sword, reminds us that it took the Holocaust to finally make anti-Semitism disrespectable (hence all of the effort by the Holocaust deniers to make it OK again). Short of Holocaust denial, European anti-Semites have found their legs by making common cause with radical Palestianians.

It was jarring to walk near the downtown campus of Oslo U and come upon a student residence with walls wholly decorated with stirring pro-Palestinian murals of rock throwers.

European news accounts of U.S. foreign policy are much more even-handed, with equal concern over the U.S. and the Jihadists. Shades of late-Cold War moral equivalence.

Europeans now want Turks to be more modern about adultery, as a condition of EU entry. Who will press Europeans to be more sophisticated about sorting out evil? The bombings of innocents in Russia now prompt sophisticated musings about the political causes of the bombers -- the people who carefully planned the mass murder of small children.