In mentioning the sword, he was also obviously alluding to the two (now ex) Christian journalists, Steve Centanni and Olaf Wiig.  They were kidnapped last month in Gaza and then forced at gunpoint to convert to Islam, to the delight of many Muslims who viewed the video.  The journalists have not yet dared to publicly renounce their sham conversion, as such apostasy warrants death. 

Naturally, I could understand why Muslims would be upset that the Pope in his speech should have drawn attention to these events, for they are deeply embarrassing for the the majority of a more moderate persuasion who are doing their best to get on with their lives whilst honouring Allah. 

Thus, to pour into the streets in wild demonstrations, setting fire to Papal effigies, vandalising churches, shooting elderly nuns, in effect to show the world once again the truth of Benedict's words, was bizarre indeed.  These events only underlined how the Pope had hit the nail on the head. 

And yet he hadn't, because I was only picking up “fag-ends”; I hadn't been tuned in for the full story. 

For it seems these weren't his original words at all.  He was just quoting some old Byzantine despot called Manuel II Palaeologus who said this back in 1391 to provoke a Persian Muslim with whom he was in dialogue.  This was at the tail-end of the dozen or so Crusades, in which Christendom was trying (pretty unsuccessfully) to wrest back lands that Muslims had seized from Christians, culminating just sixty years later in the loss to the Ottomans of the Byzantine capital itself, Constantinople.  So Islam was certainly a hot topic among Christians. 

In this context, what Manuel would have been referring to is, no doubt, the jihad that Mohammed and his followers had engaged in, almost continuously, since Islam's founding in the 7th century.  Slaughter, looting, rape, enslavement and, yes, forced conversions, all as mandated in the Koran, were the means by which Islam had spread from a small corner of today's Saudi Arabia, southward and westward across northern Africa and into Spain, and in due course north and westward into today's Iran, Iraq, Turkey and Europe (as well as eastward into the Indian subcontinent).  The victims of all this unwelcome attention - brilliant in strictly military terms - were largely Christians who had adopted their faith mainly through persuasion rather than weaponry.  (Jews and pagans were, of course, also major casualties).   

So, naturally, Manuel, a Byzantine (Christian) emperor was bound to deride Islam as something evil and spread by the sword. 

Indeed, those early centuries of jihad were the reason that Pope Urban II had eventually decided that enough was enough, raised an army and in 1095 launched the first of the Crusades, which were aimed at regaining Jerusalem for Christendom and protecting the remaining Christians in North Africa as well as modern-day Turkey.  Whatever the excesses committed by the Crusaders (a moot point in the contemporaneous milieu where massacring the men, women and children of your enemy was par for the course), without the unprovoked Islamic jihad against Christians over hundreds of years, there would have been no Crusades at all. 

So, getting back to Benedict, it seems (to this infidel) that his words about evil, inhumanity and spreading the faith by sword were doubly, even trebly truthful ...

But is it not extraordinary that no Muslim leaders seem prepared or able to debate and refute the central allegations? 

If the doctrine and practice of Islam are not evil and inhuman, these authorities should be explaining how the evil and inhuman acts that some Muslims have perpetrated are in utter conflict with the peaceful teachings of Islam and the writings in the Koran.  They should be clarifying that forced conversions - and by extension death-sentences on apostates -  are abuses of Islam not embraces of it. 

Silence, mere denial, or riots on our TV screens, only serve to authenticate the accusations of Manuel and Benedict. 

Would someone please demonstrate that these two men are wrong!

Some verbal ripostes to the Pope's remark here

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	Firstly, anarchy and killing are effectively what the Sudanese people have already got, and in abundance.  That's what the genocide in Darfur is all about.  You couldn't make it worse.
	Secondly, the current rulers - those who are in fact egging on the genocide - are wholly illegitimate; they are criminals who have absolutely no mandate from the Sudanese people.  I have as much right (ie zero) to be president of Sudan as Omar al-Bashir.

Yet if he behaves himself reasonably, the West will leave him in place and in peace, and could even invite him to the White House.  There are plenty of illegitimate thugocrats whom the West leaves alone, if not embraces.  Pakistan's Musharraf, Kazakhstan's Nazarbayev, Egypt's Mubarak, even Libya's Qaddaffi, and no doubt Thailand's new boss General Boonyaratkalin are just some of them.

But if the new man misbehaves, and perhaps continues where al-Bashir left off, the West should mount another high-speed, low-cost, in-and-out regime-change, with court-appearances or death for the incumbent and his team.    More of the same chaos will of course ensue, and then another big man will wrestle himself onto the throne.  But this one will be more careful - and if not, then his successor will.

This reminded me of the three MIT students I wrote about last year who, with a concern about standards at academic conferences but also for fun, devised a computer programme that automatically generates learned research papers full of clichés, buzz-words, jargon, graphs, references and gibberish.  They then submitted some of these papers and to their delight got one of them accepted for presentation at a serious conference. (You can generate your own scholarly paper right now just by typing in a few author names.  Try it.)

When he's about to slice you open, what do you care about?.  How many papers he's had published, or whether he knows what he's doing and his hand is steady?

	poor science,
	conflicts of interest,
	the influence of pharmaceutical companies,
	research fraud,
	editor probity.

Two Wars: Propaganda and Military

In July and August, the Israelis fought two wars against Hezbollah, with two decisive outcomes: a propaganda war which they lost and a military war they won. 

Propaganda War

That Hezbollah should have lied and dissembled in trying to portray themselves in as positive a light as possible should surprise no-one; indeed it made abundant sense.  The same goes for Hamas.  But what was a surprise for many of us was not only the way such a cutthroat Islamonazi organization, sworn to annihiliate Israel, funded and armed by Iran and Syria, was cheered on by much of the West's mainstream media, but also that the media were similarly eager to lie and dissemble. 

In a particularly bitter piece, Melanie Phillips, a British Jewess, despairs about the institutionalised anti-Semitism in today's mainstream Western media when it comes to Middle East conflicts, a bias that leads them to publish any fake or staged rubbish provided it denigrates Israelis.  But she has noticed that it is

“only the blogosphere which is now performing the most elementary disciplines of journalism: to aspire to objectivity, to separate facts from prejudices, to apply basic checks to claims being made by partisans to a conflict, and to be particularly wary of those with a proven track record of lying.”

This has been evidenced in just the past few weeks of conflict in the

1. concocted stories of an Israeli strike against an ambulance in Lebanon and

2. another against a TV crew in Gaza;

3. staged photographs of Israeli “atrocities” in Qana;

4. doctored photographs of damage in Beirut. 

In all cases the fakery was unmasked by bloggers using basic analysis of published material, work that the publishers themselves should have routinely undertaken.  And you have to wonder therefore how much other faked stuff remains unexposed. 

To take just item 2 as an example. 

Reuter's correspondent Fadel Shana was said to have been “wounded” in Gaza when an Israeli missile struck the clearly marked press vehicle in which he was travelling.  In the Reuters photo on the left, he is seen apparently being taken away to hospital.  But look at the spotless undershirt which you can see above his waist where his bloodied outer shirt has ridden up. 

Not convinced?  Then how about this shot from Yahoo. 

How amateurish is this faked scene?  Yet the media, starting with Reuters, swallowed it whole and spread it round the world. 

So since you clearly can't believe the photographs, why should you believe that a bona fides press vehicle was even struck by Israeli fire? 

Or you could choose to believe the IDF's version that

“there was an aerial attack on a suspicious vehicle that drove in a suspicious manner right by the forces and in between the Palestinian militant posts ... in an area of combat and [it] had not been identified as belonging to the media”. 

Unlike Hamas and Hezbollah, Israel is not noted for putting out lies, and it gains no military advantage and no kudos from targeting genuine press vehicles. 

I came across a further example of successful Hezbollah propaganda, or if you prefer, anti-Semitic bias in the West, and not only in the media. 

This time the culprit is the Centre for Research on Globalisation (CRG), whose website tells us it is

“an  independent ... non-profit ... research and media group of writers, scholars and activists ... in Montreal.  [It] publishes news articles, commentary, background research and analysis on a broad range of issues, focussing on social, economic, strategic, geopolitical and environmental processes.” 

Independent, eh?

Towards the end of the Israel/Hezbollah war, CRG published an array of particularly gruesome photographs of victims of Israeli attacks in Lebanon, from mainstream sources such as Reuters, AP and Agence France Press.  Depicting people who have been burnt, dismembered and disembowelled, the images are almost pornographic in their immediacy. 

In so doing the “independent” CRG revealed, perhaps inadvertently, its pro-Hezbollah agenda. 

Actually, since the photographs appear on a webpage headed “Israeli crimes against humanity: Gruesome images of charred and mutilated bodies following Israeli air strikes”, it's not inadvertent at all.   The page amounts to blatant propaganda in support of Hezbollah. 

We are asked to believe that charrings and mutilations are of themselves evidence of “Israeli sponsored atrocities”.  This is nonsense.  For if it were true, then the corollary would be that a humane killing method, such as a bullet to the head, would remove the criminal nature of the act; it would not longer be an “atrocity”.   

Some (though not I) may make a sincere argument that Israel over-reacted, that its retaliatory attacks should have been less ferocious, and thus the suffering of people in Lebanon reduced.  Some may even think that no-one in Lebanon should have died, that in effect Israel should have turned the other cheek to Katyushas raining down on their northern cities. 

But if you are going to engage in warfare at all, horrible methods of dying are inevitable, whether it is by today's bomb from the sky or yesterday's slash with a sabre. 

For it is not the method that makes war terrible, it is the killing itself. 

By displaying dozens of images of bloodied bodies of Lebanese, whilst of course not showing any in Israel, the  “independent” CRG is merely doing what it can to help Hezbollah to annihilate Jews. 

Yet considering it has all those  “writers, scholars and activists” at its disposal, it is surprisingly sloppy. 

Here is my breakdown of the victims of Israeli strikes as depicted in its 42 photos. 

A number of bodies are shown more than once, thirteen actually, which gives the - undoubtedly intended - impression that more people (ie 42) have been killed by the Israelis than actually have (29). 

Moreover, at least one set of images has clearly been manipulated for effect. 

The later shot below left, which carries the same caption as the one above, shows the same body now accompanied at his feet by a second corpse, possibly removed from the green cover.  

The shot below right confirms that it is indeed a second body with its caption, “Lebanese firefighters try to extinguish the fire while the dismembered and burnt corpses of two Lebanese civilians killed in an Israeli air raid lie on the ground at the port in Beirut”