Al Gore wants you to know that global warming is still the consensus scientific truth, even if there have been a couple of trivial mistakes made in the thousands of pages of the IPCC report of 2007. Hey, we're all human!

But Christopher Booker of the London Telegraph tears the whole defense to shreds. There are not just a couple of mistakes and they are not incidental to the global warming case. They are legion and they are integral to the climate warming case, and they bespeak intellectual if not financial corruption.

Read the pieces for yourself.

My colleague Jay Richards, writing on the The American blog, was picked up today on Real Clear Politics for this excellent dissection of the logic of Al Gore's Saturday New York Times article on global warming (see my previous post).

I wonder how people who read the New York Times and don't read blogs will get at the hidden assumptions and assertions of the Gore rhetoric. Where on the Times pages will that case be made?

Slowly, if in strange fashion, the truth about the fallacies of scientism are being made manifest. You fall for scientism and soon you get censorship, and then you get a halt--of all things--to scientific progress.

Unintentional assistance comes our way today from The New York Times.

On its front page the Times reports that Darwin skeptics have decided on a new strategy--linking doubts about Darwinian evolution to doubts about man-caused global warming. The article by Leslie Kaufman makes the ludicrous assertion that this is some sort of plot hatched by conservative Protestants.

Of course, this is a hoary old Times trope. In the real world, plenty of Catholics, Jews and other people, regardless of religion, question the alarmist view that human beings are largely responsible for global warming (to the extent there is global warming). The same goes for the responsible scientists of various faith backgrounds, and none, who contend that Darwinian science is collapsing in the face of evidence. And even a larger, more diverse crowd worries about the implications of Darwinism for our culture.

But the Times story does at least correctly and helpfully quote John West of Discovery Institute on a way global warming and Darwinism are connected. "'There is a lot of similar dogmatism on this issue,' he said, 'with scientists being persecuted for findings that are not in keeping with the orthodoxy. We think analyzing and evaluating scientific evidence is a good thing, whether that is about global warming or evolution.'"

Some German parliamentary members are advancing an idea for their country to to obtain a base on "Mittelmeer"-- at last, after all these centuries, a seaport on the sunny Mediterranean. It is a proposal to the Greeks to help them alleviate their notorious national debt by lightening their real estate.

Bismark would be astonished and delighted. However, since Germans today are mostly pacific (pardon the pun), do not expect them to build a naval base near Athens. Instead, Germany's new possessions probably will sport casinos and resorts where die Frauen can frolic as Nature intended, outside the gaze of formerly native Greeks. (Not that the Greeks have ever minded.)

Would you like a little spanakopita with your Kielbasa, Mein Herr?

The government expansionists have had their eyes on the Internet ever since Al Gore claims he invented it. Of course, the Feds' DARPA did help birth the Internet, but there is no reason why Washington now should imitate the Iranian mullahs or the Chinese and start restricting access and imposing financial or technical controls.

It is not just because the technology is new that it has made such a huge contribution to our economy; it's also because the new technology has been relatively unfettered by the government.

The whole subject of federal regulation re-emerges in a major way in coming weeks. Watch this space.

Meanwhile, Mark Landsbaum of the Orange County Register (in a column that I missed when it first came out) is among those trying to sound the alarm about losing freedom on the Internet.

Take note before they take it away.

Former Bush speechwriter Matthew Scully penned a tough review of Wesley J. Smith's book in National Review last week. This week, Wesley took his turn to respond. The latter article appears in the March 22 edition of National Review.

CNN interviewed Winnie Maneda, divorced spouse of Nelson Mendela, today and made the woman who once advocated "necklaces" of burning tires for inadequately motivated revolutionaries in South Africa seem proper and almost prim. But another interview, in the U.K., printed in the Daily Mail, gives a truer sense of the woman and her poisoned perspective.

Invictus, the film starring Morgan Freeman as Nelson Mandela, did not get much attention at the Oscars show last night, but it deserves to be listed in the pantheon of films of political redemption. Whereas Winnie's hatred pointed in one direction, the suffering and reflection of Nelson Mandela headed him--and South Africa--in another, and history was transformed. It is not perfect, but, still, it is one of the quiet, beautiful triumphs of our time.

From time to time almost everyone at Discovery Institute winds up taking a swipe at scientism, the philosophy that enthrones science as the ultimate arbiter of morals, as well as facts. Scientism--seen in many a news and opinion article--is an arrogant assumption of unearned authority. Wesley J. Smith blogs about it at First Things today.

The trouble is, one may dismiss scientism as folly, and yet be seduced by it in particular circumstances. My chief disappointment these days is not with those snake oil salesmen in the scientific community who try to peddle their views as unimpeachable truth, but the gullible laypeople who, lacking a doctorate in science, think they have to defer to the "experts". This is particularly true of journalists and editorial writers. They wouldn't defer so readily to generals on the subject of the advisability of war, would they? Nor to Wall Street gurus on the wisdom of a given tax policy. But some "study" in which "scientists say" something in a "journal" is treated as Gospel.

Gospel, of course, is not treated as Gospel.

In the course of this one day Rep. Bart Stupak, D-MI, who leads a Democratic pro-life group of about 12 House members, was quoted in support of a possible "sidebar" bill to prevent abortion funding, and then, later, minimizing the prospect. This underscores the problem that opponents of Obamacare face. It is only the abortion issue that stands in the way of a narrw majority House vote for the expensive, cumbersome Senate health care bill that President Obama favors.

But all it really will take to reach a successful compromise is a decision by the President and the Senate Democrats to concede this point in language acceptable to Rep. Stupak, either in a "sidebar" bill or in the health care bill itself. That would be painful, and a few House and Senate votes might shift against the bill, but only a very few. In return, Obamacare proponents would get the 12 pro-life Democratic votes for their bill, and with it the prospect of a much bigger government role in health care from now on.

They could and probably would betray Rep. Stupak later on.

Pro-life groups are urging Rep. Stupak to hang tough. The reality is that only when the present legislation is buried can a genuine bi-partisan effort develop that ends some of the bureaucratic sclerosis in the present system, and yet prevents the even worse bureaucratic sclerosis that Obamacare would entail.

by Anika Smith

Jonah Goldberg has a thought-provoking article up at NRO where he reminds us that "Feminists Get It Right" when it comes to the plight of women subject to abuse simply because of their sex. After giving a few examples of grisly practices where women are punished for men's inability to restrain themselves (particularly the opening scene, where he explains how young girls in Cameroon are disfigured by their mothers in order to discourage the randy local boys), Goldberg explains that this a familiar story on a global scale. "Around the world, women -- girls -- have to pay the price for the barbarity of boys."

It's a fact too often ignored in what Harvey Mansfield calls the gender neutral society, that purposefully obfuscates the differences between men and women, but it's still true: where men are most brutal, women, being the weaker and more vulnerable sex, suffer most.

The Obama Campaign in 2008 opposed George W. Bush's efforts on behalf of free trade, including the permission of qualified Mexico truck drivers to bring their goods into the United States. The reason was simple: big labor was opposed; in the Mexican case it was the Teamsters.

Now we are experiencing a near collapse of free trade progress and, in the case of the Mexican trucks, strong retaliatory measures by Mexico that, according to the Wall Street Journal, already have cost us $2.6 billion in export trade and some 25,000 jobs.

Wesley J. Smith's book, A Rat is a Pig is a Dog is a Boy, is gaining traction. Here is an excellent interview of our senior fellow in bioethics at Frontpagemag.com. As with so many issues, the opposition to Smith's views create a straw man about it, holding that Smith is insensitive to animal welfare--the humane treatment of animals from pets to ranch cattle. The opposite is true, as Smith makes clear.

Radical animal rights is part of the utopian leftism that depreciates human exceptionalism--those qualities that make us distinctly human.

Sometimes, educational experiences are unpleasant. Vice President Biden was in Israel this week to cheer his "old friends," declare his joy at being "home" and, oh, by the way, encourage Israel not to build any more settlements in Jerusalem and the West Bank. But during his visit the Israelis announced (by cooincidence or the unilateral decision of a faction in the Netanyahu government) that they were going to allow another 1600 new settlement housing units in (East) Jerusalem.

This provoked Joe Biden to rebuke the decision, and his mission more or less ground to a halt right there.

In The Israel Test, George Gilder argues that Jewish settlements have not hurt the Palestinian economy of the West Bank, Gaza or Jerusalem, but have greatly improved it. Before the intifadas of the 90s, Palestinians moved into the areas where Israelis settled and gained greatly from the collateral prosperity. Palestinian per capita income tripled in the period.

Harvard was founded in 1636 as a Christian seminary. For generations it trained ministers and leaders for Massachusetts and the young American nation. The Puritan divines were well educated, their writing precise and often eloquent. Over two centuries, the axis of university religion turned from Puritanism to transcendentalism (Unitarianism, essentially) and from there to a pluralism that honored religion in general but nodded toward conventional Protestantism. This latter era is expressed well in the beautiful neo-Georgian Memorial Church, built at the head of The Yard in 1932 to honor Harvard men who died in World War I. But even in the first two thirds of the Twentieth Century, Harvard was also characterized by sophisticated skepticism. Then came the '60s and things got worse.

Illustration by Peter Oumanski for Newsweek

Today Harvard students go to church, some say in record numbers; but the culture of the university is hostile to religion, presented in that supercilious manner often associated with Harvard.

For faculty star Stephen Pinker--evangelist for evolution, atheism and animal rights--religion has no place at such a fine educational institution. ("Pinker to John Harvard," a New York Post headline might read, "Drop Dead.")

Lisa Miller's recent article in Newsweek about this subject continues to draw attention, including from Harvard undergraduates. The article itself unconsciously draws a line between those who, like Pinker, want to banish teaching about religion (unless the course is about the evils of religion) and those who think that an educated person in our day, or any day, must know something of the rich patrimony of religious faith.

Two friends (of each other and of mine) have written well-publicized articles about the true condition of Turkish democracy today. They both seem reasonable and they overlap a bit, but they also clash.

First, look at Claire Berlinski's article from the Wall Street Journal.

Then read Mustafa Akyol's article from Newsweek.

I want Mustafa to be right. I am not sure that he is. I do know that the United States has not handled Turkish relations well for some years. For those of you who think it doesn't matter, Claire and Mustafa both could set you straight.

Do you still contend that scientists are a breed apart, a superior species that should hold others, mere mortals, in awe? Then please digest the latest scandal about money, greed and "science", and this time keep in your mind's eye the thousands, maybe millions, of infants that are affected by autism. It is their welfare that must now come into focus.

Danish scientist Paul Thorsen has disappeared, apparently, along with a couple million dollars of U.S. public money and some of the data that formed the basis for studies in which he participated. Now those enormously influential studies--supposedly disproving any connection between mercury and autism--are coming into question, and deservedly so.

Maybe the studies were valid. By all means, let's find out. In fact, a thorough and independent public investigation is imperative. Since the Center for Disease Control's money was involved, surely the CDC should not be the only body looking into this matter.

A U.S. Court decided just now that the autism link to mercury is invalid. Maybe so, but given the timing it doesn't seem that the court was at all aware of the Thorsen scandal. The Court ruling and the Thorsen revelations seem to have overlapped.

Senior Fellow George Gilder has shot a little arrow into the Obama Administration plans for "net neutrality". The Tuesday Wall Street Journal carries George's attack.

The author of Life After Television, Microcosm and Telecosm, among others, has been trying hard to make the point that the very cutting edge of our economy is high technology and its abundant success is the product of freedom from government over-regulation. Obama and Co., he says, hope to change that.

Net neutrality is Orwellian. It is further evidence of America's careening drive into a planned economy--and stagnation.

Some folks are bothered a bit by a couple of trends in the taking of the Census; yes, the one being taken right now.

First is the letter householders are getting in the mail to alert them that they are about to get an official Census form to fill out. It's a bit expensive, but there is nothing wrong with sending out this little teaser. Response rates go up when people are advised that the real thing is on its way. That means fewer, more expensive personal Census worker visits later.

The more troubling problem, rather, is the admonition written in the letter (and in many of the radio ads for the Census) that "Results from the 2010 Census will be used to help each community get its fair share of government funds for highways, schools, health facilities, and many other programs you and your neighbors need. Without a complete and accurate census, your community may not receive its fair share."

I pointed out on March 9 that if the White House and Congressional leaders cannot get the health care bill passed, all it will take to sway the final needed votes is a Leadership concession to the handful of Democratic anti-abortion forces. The pro-choice Democrats will make ritual complaints, but they still will vote for the resultant, supposedly "anti-abortion" product.

That is what is now in the works, perhaps, according to The Hill. Watch for developments in the coming hours.

Meanwhile, I repeat my prediction that any such supposed legal agreement will be betrayed. Indeed, it is so obvious to insiders that it will be betrayed (perhaps almost immediately, perhaps after a decent interval of a few months) that some of the anti-abortion Democrats may not go along. However, some will go along because the parliamentary fig-leaf they are being offered gives them a way to pretend that they have not caved in on the abortion issue. Actually, all the Leadership needs is about half the anti-abortion Democratic members. Once the bill's future is secured, Speaker Pelosi can give the other members a pass to vote "no".

As I say, the pro-choice Members of the House, meanwhile, will know full well that any abortion "compromise" is synthetic, a fig leaf. They will pretend otherwise while voting for the bill.

There are so many open deals like this that are tied to certain members and certain districts on the issue of health care "reform" that one can only imagine the behind the scenes deals--the ones based on promises of jobs after a likely election defeat, for example, and the ones based on threats of various kinds. A "no" vote Member can be threatened with everything from loss of a treasured committee assignment--where the real work the House supposedly takes place--to loss of good office space after the next election, not to mention election campaign cash meanwhile. A truly vengeful Leadership could even threaten a potential "no" vote Member with discreet disclosure of unsavory personal information to inquiring media. (Sorry if that sounds cynical.)

It is risky for the Leadership to act in a really vengeful way; there is always next month's votes, and the votes after that. But the stakes are really high now. If the bill passes, watch for more and more deals to come to light. It may be too late, but they will come to light.

As I wrote Friday (and earlier on March 9), all it took at the end was for the President and the Speaker to induce Congressman Stupak to accept a fig leaf pledge that funds under Obamacare will not fund abortion. He gratefully accepted such a fig leaf--an "Executive Order"--today.

How likely is it that the Executive Order will make any lasting difference? Yuval Levin, who served on the policy staff of President George W. Bush, tells his readers, not much.

Only a legislative fix would have mattered.

The supposedly anti-abortion Democrats, in the end, couldn't take the heat.

Pro-life groups are denouncing the supposed pro-life Democrats, led by Rep. Bart Stupak, who voted for Obamacare based on the transparent excuse of an unenforceable Executive Order.

Were the pro-life Democrats fooled?

No, they are all politically savvy. More likely, they were successfully undercut by their political base, especially the increasingly powerful public employee unions. In the case of Stupak, for example, the unions may include many people who support the Congressman's pro-life views, or are indifferent, but they undoubtedly made it clear to him that they regarded the bill as a priority and his pro-life principles as expendable.

Had the pro-life Democrats held out, they might have forced the original House anti-abortion funding language to be adopted by the Administration and (once again) Speaker Pelosi in the bill itself. Instead, it was Stupak & Co. whose bluff was called. As between their base and their principles, they chose their base.

"Make my day!" is the reaction of White House political advisor David Axelrod to the prospect of critics making an issue of Obamacare this fall. His view (and hope) is that once enough people think they are getting free or reduced price health care--paid for by "the government"--they will never let it be taken away. He may be wrong, at least in the 2010 election, but he may be right long term.

Therefore, if conservatives want to deal with the looming takeover of medical care, they are going to have to come up with something more than a call for "Repeal." Sadly, the insurance industry, Big Pharma and the American Medical Association, as well as platoons of big foundations, have bought into the idea that the government should, indeed, run medical care. It is the public that the Administration and Democratic majority in Congress has defeated, and the public, as such, doesn't fund much research.

Therefore, it will take a lot of careful thought and planning in coming months to develop the ideas and methods to disentangle Obamacare--even if Republicans regain one or both houses of Congress--and to propose something else.

The question, therefore, is what is the "something else"? There is no need for an answer today, but there will be soon.

I don't care if Bill Gates believes in man-caused global warming, he is right about at least one creative and practical response to the energy problem: The former Microsoft head has teamed up with Toshiba and--putting his money behind his ideas--is figuring out how to make the small nuclear reactor, via "Traveling Wave Reactor" technology, a business reality.

Toshiba's model nuclear reactor

Meanwhile, the Wall Street Journal has noticed the opportunity, too, publishing an op-ed today by Steven Chu, U.S. Secretary of Energy. "Small modular reactors would be less than one-third the size of current plants. They (would) have compact designs and could be made in factories and transported to sites by truck or rail."

My own dream is something even smaller: a nice, safe nuke for a neighborhood or city district. Even your private basement. ("The Bloom Box.")

News stories after passage of the health care bill are focusing on proponents' outrage over the negative reactions to the bill. It is as if the left wants to hide the new law's contents and implications by anathematizing the act's opponents.

The most ridiculous example is histrionic partisan distress over a lawsuit that is being brought by 14 Republican state attorneys general, including Rob McKenna of Washington and Bill McCollum of Florida. The state officers contend that the new act's requirement that every adult purchase health insurance is unconstitutional. The federal government, they argue, has no authority to make such a requirement. Attempting one infringes upon both individual rights and powers the Constitution reserves to the states. The state attorneys general either will succeed or fail with their case and it is the federal court system that will decide the matter. (By the way, the McKenna, McCollum et al warned in advance that they would file this legal challenge if the offending provision was adopted by Congress. They didn't spring their suit on anyone.)

Meanwhile, contrary to fulminations from various Democratic sources, the attorneys general are entirely within their rights as state legal officers to take such a matter to federal court. All the arguments against them so far are political posturing and hand waving. Some simply misrepresent the legal case of the attorneys general, apparently hoping to confuse the public about what is at issue. Even sillier is the attempt in the Washington State Legislature to pretend that state funds are being misused by the state attorney general. That too is just projection.

Liberals who have been dissatisfied by the actions of conservative Congressional majorities and presidents in the past have never hesitated to take their complaints to court. What makes them think it is somehow wrong for conservatives to do likewise now when the shoe is on the other foot?

Dr. Scott Gottlieb of the American Enterprise Institute is one of the shrewdest health care analysts around. He is predicting now what many have feared, the slow motion consolidation of the insurance industry as the big boys become government sanctioned monopolies and small providers disappear. Insurance policies for individuals and small organizations will become untenable.

The new order will start as soon as next January when new rates are announced--two months after the 2010 elections.

Your choices will be narrowed and narrowed again.

Says Gottlieb, the "rich" that the President has targeted will turn out to be any couples with incomes of $100,000 or more. To afford the level of care they enjoy now such families will be looking at expenditures reaching 20 to 25 percent of their income. In the end, nearly everyone will be in the public system, lucky if they can buy special private policies for extra benefits, as under Medicare now.

It will be very complicated, a bureaucrats' delight, a citizen's nightmare. This is crony socialism: the form of a "free market" will be preserved (along with the opportunity to extract massive campaign contributions from it), but it will be a government industry in all but name.

Wesley Smith of Discovery Institute is one of the few "bioethicists" who actually argues for a traditional, invariably high, valuation of human life. Many of the others, unfortunately, are now parts of the machinery of hospital panels convened to deliberate on end of life treatments. The reason this is unfortunate is that the people that pay the bioethicists' salaries are usually plagued by budgetary pressures that subtly, or blatantly, compel rationing of care.

A disturbing recent family situation persuades me that this pressure already operates under Medicare--a government program. It may well be the future for everyone under ObamaCare, when each of us, effectively, will be in competition with others for scarce, government-controlled treatment dollars.

Think not? Look at NICE in Britain, as Wesley Smith describes it in connection with ObamaCare.

Dr. Francisco Ayala is now the winner of the Templeton Prize for science and religion, his distinction seeming to be that he, a scientist, asserts that science and religion are "compatible." Accept Darwin's theory that life arose by an unguided natural process that has nothing to do with design and your creed can be stamped "Approved" by Inspector Ayala, always described in the press as a "former priest."

The only problem is that Dr. Ayala himself doesn't believe in your religion. He left the priesthood years ago. With all the evil in the world, he no longer could believe in God. He left the Catholic Church, too. He won't discuss his current views on religion --he doesn't want to be "tagged"-- but he certainly will not affirm anything of substance in the Christian faith, or any other.

How does such a person fit the Templeton template of recent years? Responding to the Ayala award, an article by Michael Brooks in the New Scientist (definitely a Darwinian journalistic redoubt) makes it plain: "When I attended a journalism fellowship funded by the Templeton Foundation in 2005, I learned from Templeton-endorsed scientists and theologians that the way to establish a peaceful co-existence of science and religion was to make no religious claims at all.

"...There can be no afterlife. Nor does anyone have an eternal soul. There was no virgin birth - that was most probably a story made up after Mary was raped by a Roman soldier. There was no physical resurrection of Jesus. None of the miracles actually happened. And prayers are not answered."

Maybe Jack Templeton agrees, though that is contrary to his reputation.

Ayala, accepting the Templeton prize, has a way of explaining the odd situation: "If they (science and religion) are properly understood, they cannot be in contradiction because science and religion concern different matters." That is, believe what you want about religion, so long as it does not intrude on reality, for reality is established by (Darwinian) science and that explains it all. You see, it's the old fact/value split. We'll take the facts, you can have the values.

I understand why an Orwellian stylist like Ayala is attractive to Darwinists like the National Center for Science Education, all right. He is part of their show at conferences of atheists. such as the famous "Beyond Belief" meeting covered by the New York Times in 2006. He joins the advisory boards of groups like Campaign to Defend the Constitution, whose agenda included the standard fare of abortion, embryonic stem cell research, euthanasia, etc. He cleverly terms intelligent design a "heresy". He himself may not be a Christian any longer, but he surely doesn't mind parodying the lingo. In a 1999 New York Times interview titled "Ex-Priest Takes the Blasphemy Out of Evolution," Ayala argued that "evolution, in my view, is not only NOT anti-Christian, but the idea of special design ... might be ... blasphemous."

How is it that someone who is not a Christian pronounces on blasphemy?

When asked by Biologos Institute to critique Steven Meyer's book, Signature in the Cell recently, Ayala's resulting online attack showed plainly that he had not read the book and had little idea of the scientific issues it raises. Francisco Ayala is above arguing science, he is available only to declaim on religion, and that in the most vague possible fashion. He is willing to absolve Christian believers, mind you, and grant them respectability, but only if they humbly disavow any consequential religious beliefs.

True believer Darwinists--who at least are honest about their convictions--snicker about Ayala. No wonder.

The national election in Iraq was almost a tie among the two leading parties, with plenty of minor parties gaining seats. The losers are complaining, the "victors" celebrating, but the reality is that no government can emerge quickly from the results. A coalition will develop, and that slowly.

Let us pause, meanwhile, to admire the reality that Iraq has held another relatively solid and fair election. For its part of the world, that is a major accomplishment. Real contests took place, real politicking went on. What other country in the region has such freedom?

Well, sure, Israel. But, who else?

There is hand-wringing about possible violence, even "civil war", in the days ahead. But Iraq has horrible bombings all the time. They come from terrorists who didn't want this election to happen, not from the democrats of various allegiances and persuasions.

One other thing. For several years after the Coalition invasion, we were told that sectarianism would dominate Iraq. The refreshing thing about the elections just completed is how diminished a role sectarianism has played. I admire the Iraqis. They may be the pivotal power (again, other than Israel) in the region in years to come. It is partly because whatever government comes about now, it has ballots behind it.

People in the Pacific Northwest don't worry much about earthquakes. But it is certain that a big one will hit in time, and an examination of results from the recent quake in Chile provides the disturbing observation that the U.S. West Coast, and especially the Seattle region, are not adequately prepared. Building codes are not nearly strong enough. A Chile sized quake could lead to skyscraper collapses.

This is the kind of story that probably will be forgotten quickly, but resurrected after a big quake hits. Then it will seem amazing that leaders were so uninterested. If I were in politics, I would raise this issue to policy consideration now.

Thanks to Peter Yanev and the New York Times for bringing this information to public attention.

This dark Lent for the Vatican is a time of satisfaction for those who wish the Catholic Church ill--and, with it, Christianity. The pedophile cases that rocked the United States eight years ago are now erupting in Europe. The latest charges are from Italy.

Lacking in almost all news stories is the historical context for the sexual depredations that have brought disgrace upon Catholicism in this--ironic--"Year of the Priest." Essentially it is this: In the 60s and 70s many in the Church bowed to the culture of therapy that was prevalent at the time and decided that sexual predators in the clergy should be treated as persons with treatable illnesses--rehabilitated, rather than punished. That seemed to be the enlightened path.

Rachel's Tomb in Jerusalem

Americans tend to assume that all Muslims are anti-Israeli. Americans--or at least the media--also often fail to see through the stratagems of Iran's meddling in the Palestinian territories, Lebanon, and, for that matter, Iraq.

Two examples of outspoken Iranian expatriates who defeat the stereotype are Nirs T. Bom and Ido Mizrahi. They published "On Tombs and Rage" originally in the Israeli daily, Haaretz, and then in The Caspian Weekly, a journal that covers various events in the Middle East/East Asia.

In this article, the authors examine the ploy of taking umbrage over Israeli efforts to preserve two historic sites that actually are worth protection for the heritage of Muslims, as well as Jews and Christians. The Palestinian Authority could have used these projects to illustrate a willingness to cooperate on matters of common interest; eventually, after all, the restored sites could attract pilgrimages and tourist support. But at the least the Palestinian officials could have ignored the prservation developments. Instead, they chose to make propaganda out of distorting the issue, as the writers explain.