Those wacky, irrepressible Muslims

Mark Steyn on the Jews they kill and the European media that doesn´t report it:

In five years' time, how many Jews will be living in France? Two years ago, a 23-year-old Paris disc jockey called Sebastien Selam was heading off to work from his parents' apartment when he was jumped in the parking garage by his Muslim neighbor Adel. Selam's throat was slit twice, to the point of near-decapitation; his face was ripped off with a fork; and his eyes were gouged out. Adel climbed the stairs of the apartment house dripping blood and yelling, "I have killed my Jew. I will go to heaven."

Is that an gripping story?

You'd think so. Particularly when, in the same city, on the same night, a Jewish woman was brutally murdered in the presence of her daughter by another Muslim.
You've got the making of a mini-trend there, and the media love trends.

Yet no major French newspaper carried the story.

This month, there was another murder. Ilan Halimi, also 23, also Jewish, was found by a railway track outside Paris with burns and knife wounds all over his body. He died en route to the hospital, having been held prisoner, hooded and naked, and brutally tortured for almost three weeks by a gang that had demanded half a million dollars from his family. Can you take a wild guess at the particular identity of the gang? During the ransom phone calls, his uncle reported that they were made to listen to Ilan's screams as he was being burned while his torturers read out verses from the Quran.

This time around, the French media did carry the story, yet every public official insisted there was no anti-Jewish element. Just one of those things. Coulda happened to anyone. And, if the gang did seem inordinately fixated on, ah, Jews, it was just because, as one police detective put it, ''Jews equal money.'' In London, the Observer couldn't even bring itself to pursue that particular angle. Its report of the murder managed to avoid any mention of the unfortunate Halimi's, um, Jewishness. Another British paper, the Independent, did dwell on the particular, er, identity groups involved in the incident but only in the context of a protest march by Parisian Jews marred by ''radical young Jewish men'' who'd attacked an ''Arab-run grocery.''

Thanks Ace.

Yale enrolls Taliban spokesman

Why am I not surprised? Yale has welcomed a member of and spokesman for one of the most evil and brutal regimes of the 20th century.

American Airlines

American Airlines is brutal in their cost-cutting. For a long time, they haven't served free alcohol in coach on international flights. Now they don't serve meals either. And no more movies.

That was bad enough, but I was amazed when a stewardess gave me a hard time about asking for a second soft drink.

Their new motto is "American Airlines: like riding Greyhound, but faster!"

En la playa

Little or no posting this week. On vacation in Mexico. I hope Keith and Old Zeke will take up the slack.

US Supreme Court, champion of the little guy

Remember when those blowhard Democratic Senators ran out of substantive issues (like membership in a Princeton alumni association) to use against Supreme Court nominee Samuel Alito? They turned to the vague accusation that he never supported the powerless, the underdog, the "little guy."

In the ruling in Gonzales v. O Centro Espirita Beneficiente Uniao Do Vegetal, the Roberts Court ruled that a small, powerless, religious group had the right to use hallucinagenic tea in their rituals. The all-powerful U.S. Justice Department lost.

Alito didn´t vote in this one because he wasn´t on the court when the case was heard, but as a First Amendment absolutist, he clearly would have ruled with the majority. We are on the verge of having a regular majority of Justices who actually understand the Constitution.

Alito will support "the little guy" wherever and whenever Constitutional rights are being violated. Oh, well. Democrats can always go back to the Princeton alumni scandal.

The Economist City Guides

The Economist is the finest weekly news magazine in the world. Read one issue and you'll be embarrassed to look at Time or Newsweek ever again.

It also has a great free monthly e-mail service of happenings in your city (if you live in a city worth noting). Sign up. It's good.

San Francisco and the GOP Convention

SF Examiner columnist Ken Garcia says that San Francisco should jump at the opportunity to host the GOP convention:

There are a number of good reasons San Francisco should be going great guns — sorry, Gerardo — to land the Republican convention, even though with 30 competing cities, our boiling liberal cauldron is clearly a long shot.

For starters, the last time I looked Republicans were still using the same currency as the rest of us, and those dollars could certainly help The City lift itself up by the bootstraps and carry it out of its deficit ways. New York City, another largely lefty bastion, managed to embrace the parade of flag-bearing Republicans in 2004 and cashed in to the tune of $163 million. I realize that many San Franciscans would rather flee town than share sidewalk space with the likes of Dick Armey and Orrin Hatch, but they could just use the week as a much-needed vacation from, well, the rest of the nation.

Garcia is obviously right that the convention would be a huge economic boost to the city, but he's missing the bigger point. The Republicans invited San Francisco to bid because they know what would happen: insane leftists would protest, or riot, in the streets.

The Republicans aren't very attractive this year, with pork, corruption, incompetence, and an unpopular war. But put them next to televised coverage of San Francisco's angriest anti-Bush wackos rioting in the streets, and the Republicans will win by a landslide.