MEDPUNDIT has a post about antisemitism among European doctors and the threat to kick Israel out of the World Medical Association.

Are there any international organizations that aren’t full of antisemites, anti-americans, anti-capitalists, and the like?

NON-HATE MAIL: A reader writes:

…well this isn’t hate mail. I appreciate your reporting on gun-rights issues and lying historians. I’m one of those rare weird folk; a conservative gay “gun nut.” In fact I’m twice elected president of the local gun club, all by “red-neck” straight guys, mostly vets.

I find you much more up to date then the NRA website.

Thank God I live in Vermont where I can be both gay and a gun-nut.

I’ve always liked Vermont.

CHARLES JOHNSON is watching Saudi websurfers. And he’s caught one being naughty.

NICK DENTON has just discovered the wonder of CafePress. Basically, here’s how it works: You go to their website, set up an account, and then follow a menu and upload your graphics. Then you have a store, like this one where people can buy stuff. They order the stuff; it’s manufactured to order, usually that day, and CafePress handles credit cards, shipping, etc. You get the markup, which you choose, above their base price.

If you’re gonna sell a lot of stuff, it’s much less profitable than having it made in quantity. But if you’re not, it lets you get an online swag shop up and running with no initial investment, and very little effort. I love stuff like this.

BILL QUICK says that Arab Islam is an honor-shame culture that is unable to deal with its failure compared to the West; this has substantial policy consequences. Read the post.

BRINK LINDSEY has some interesting stuff on global attitudes toward free trade. Take that, Jose Bove.

I HOPE THAT THIS New York Times outline of our war plans for Iraq is disinformation. Because if it’s all true, well, there are a whole lot of problems. Starting (but not ending) with having our war plans in the New York Times.

GUNS: Funny, the posting that generated the most email was on SUVs, but I get the most hatemail on guns and Saudi Arabia. I guess this means that Saudi-supporters tend to be unarmed, which I take as a positive note; I rather doubt that this coincidence is logically related, but on the other hand the overlap between the sets of Saudi-supporters and gun-haters seems surprisingly high.

At any rate, varous people have asked me about mass shootings. I’m not deeply interested in the criminology of guns; my work is on the Second Amendment side, which is different. But you can read this paper by John Lott and William Landes on mass shootings and gun control if you’re interested.

UPDATE: Boy that was fast. A reader observes that there is a logical connection. Since, in the minds of America-haters, guns represent America, to hate America is to hate guns. (This connection of hating America with love for personal disarmament strikes me as a very clever meme for America to propagate. . . .) To support the Saudi regime in Arabia you don’t actually have to hate America, but it helps, so I suppose there’e explanation for the overlap.

MAX POWER has identified the dangers of the brutal Afghan springtime. Dang. And we just barely survived the dreaded “brutal Afghan winter.”

STEPHEN GREEN looks at the latest economic news and says I told you so.

ROBERT MUSIL demonstrates the perspicacity of the New York Times.

JONAH GOLDBERG comments on the French election in his own inimitable style:

The people attacking Jews for the last few months — or years — have for the most part been Arabs and North Africans who Le Pen hates and who hate Le Pen. The people making excuses for these attacks on Jews in France and, let’s face it, anywhere else in the world, inhabit the highest levels of the liberal-socialist French — and European — establishment. I would bet that if you compared the attitudes of first-time Le Pen voters — the folks who wanted to send a message about crime and immigration — to the folks who voted for the Marxist Mailman, you’d fine a lot more anti-Semitism among the followers of postal Communism than you would among the Le Penners.

I do not believe that being anti-Israel automatically means you’re an anti-Semite and I think many pro-Israel Jews make a mistake by using the concepts interchangeably. But it is becoming hard to dispute that Europe’s anti-Israel obsession has become so intense that it is making establishment Europe operationally anti-Semitic.

Indeed.

I’M BACK. We had a nice trip to Gatlinburg in the Smokies, visited the Ripley’s Aquarium (which to my surprise is astoundingly good — with its plexiglas tunnels through shark-and-ray-filled tanks, it’s as close to scuba diving as you’ll get on dry land). Then a drive home via Pigeon Forge, home of Dollywood, the Elvis Museum, and the NASCAR Speedpark. Now that’s America.

Naturally, there’s lots of email awaiting me, and if you’ve sent me anything important, well, it may be awhile until I get to it.

OFF TO THE MOUNTAINS FOR AN OVERNIGHT: Blogging will resume tomorrow.

“ECONOMIC REVIVAL POSES PROBLEM FOR BUSH” — That’s the New York Times headline, which I noticed via Mickey Kaus.

STILL MORE ON BROCK at the American Prospect’s website. You can listen to the audio if you’ve got RealPlayer, which I don’t have on this computer.

AN AMERICAN SERVICEMAN on Canadian soldiers:

My experience with Princess Pat’s Rifles showed them to be intelligent thoughtful sorts and at the time we were all quite impressed by their being paid significantly more than we were.

Anyone interested in the idea of an American Foreign Legion? Get paid squat, get sent to really bizarre places to perform objectionable acts, be subject to really draconian discipline and when all is said and done we’ll let you and your family become citizens.

jsa – who still thinks Heinlein had the right idea, even if the movie basically ignored the whole central theme of the work in favor of the special effects which didn’t meet up to the book either… (StarshipTrooper)

IT’S A BIG DAY FOR MEGAN MCARDLE: Not only is she called “shrewd” by Mark Steyn, but she’s quoted in Best of the Web today!

MEMO TO THE FRENCH: NYAH, NYAH!

On Sunday, Jean-Marie Le Pen, the alleged extreme right-wing madman, managed to place second in the first round of the French Presidential election. Since then, many Europhile commentators in the English-speaking world have been attempting to reassure us that the significance of this event has been much overplayed — Le Pen only got a little more than he usually gets, pure fluke he came second, nothing to see here, move along. The best response to this line of thinking was by the shrewd Internet commentatrix Megan McArdle: “They’re completely missing the point, which is that it’s hilarious.”

Absolutely. You’d have to have a heart of stone not to be weeping with laughter at the scenes of France’s snot-nosed political elite huffily denouncing Sunday’s result as an insult to the honour of the Republic. I was in Paris a couple of weeks ago and I well remember the retired French diplomat who assured me that “a man like George W. Bush is simply not possible in our politics. For a creature of such crude, simplistic and extreme views to be one of the two principal candidates in a presidential election would be inconceivable here. Inconceivable!”

This Mark Steyn column, as usual, is far better than any excerpt can be. Read it.

THREE OXFORD STUDENTS now have a blog devoted to international relations.

MICHAEL BELLESILES UPDATE: Now he’s suggesting that his critics forged his emails. This has gone from disgraceful, to pathetic. Here’s what Boston University law professor Randy Barnett says:

Barnett said Lindgren was innocently trying to reconcile differences in his research with Bellesiles’ work when Lindgren first e-mailed Bellesiles. Lindgren had not yet read Arming America, but he was familiar with some of Bellesiles’ work from an online discussion site for academics. He also said Bellesiles had a demonstrated record of lying to cover-up a “scandal.”

“The fact Bellesiles now accuses a reputable scholar of fabricating an e-mail (at a time when the other scholar was merely requesting data he had no idea had been falsified) … is an admission of how significant his previous lies have been,” Barnett wrote in an e-mail to the Wheel. “Were these trivial matters, Bellesiles would not have to invent such desperate accusations. This latest incident should reveal much about Professor Bellesiles’ character to anyone who previously harbored any illusions.”

“This is not typical academic behavior and this not a matter of different people interpreting data in different ways,” Barnett added.

Yes, and I’d add that it’s disgraceful that Bellesiles’ publisher, Alfred A. Knopf, is still trying to maintain that this is all a question of interpretation, when it’s a question of fabrication.

MORE ON THE DAVID BROCK CONTROVERSY from Henry Hanks, if you’re interested.

MORE ON THE GERMAN SCHOOL SHOOTING: First, there’s some dispute as to whether it exceeds the toll at Dunblane; apparently some people are counting killers in their casualty totals, and others aren’t. Oh, well. It’s more than Columbine, for sure. Some other reader comments: From Craig Schamp:

I saw your appropriate comment about the shooting in Germany, questioning the value of gun control. Another thing just struck me: Germany has very strict laws against showing violence in video games. I think there are some video games that I’ve played which have a switch to disable “virtual blood” in the game. I’m pretty sure that in Germany, you can’t enable depictions of
blood in a game.

After the Columbine shooting, and at other times, plenty of people in the U.S. have tried to show a causality between shoot-em-up games and violent youth. Seems like an even more specious claim now.

And from another reader:

My fiance is a German national who is still living in Dresden (about an hour and a half from Erfurt). They have very, very strict gun control there. Basically no private ownership of anything but shotguns for hunting. Even the military and police can only carry on duty, and have to leave their firearms locked up at the station when they are not working. However, a delivery driver friend, who is a relatively trustworthy guy, said that even there, where the police are efficient, strict, and mean… he could get a Walther for a few hundred bucks by the next day, if he had to. So there you go… if you outlaw guns, then only criminals will have them.

Yeah, but unlike in many American mass-shootings (including, most recently, the Appalachian School of Law) there won’t be any citizens with guns to bring the event to an end. No doubt John Lott will have a column on this shortly.

TONY ADRAGNA says Krauthammer is right about European antisemitism.

A FORMER CANADIAN SOLDIER sends this email:

I knew the government would put the screws to the Canadian Forces in regard to service in combat. The army has put the process of awarding the soldiers a bronze medal on hold because it “may want to award something as well”

BULLSHIT! You could save 16 burning babies, a nun and the Prince of Wales from floodwaters in the Forces and get nothing more than a court martial a few months later- I had friends who got charged for making a three layer jello tree and leaving it on an officer’s desk because he got tired of hearing the schmuck saying “hey you kids, keep out of the jell-o tree”. They can always get you on “conduct unbecoming” as a charge, if they cannot arrange some other charges just in case

When I was searching for a job a few years ago I was told to remove my experience with the forces from my resume by a career counsellor because it “looked bad having army experience”

I have a suggestion for the US Army: Want a few REALLY good soldiers? Buy out the Canadian Armed Forces!

Offer a signing bonus, American citizenship and the opportunity not to be right royally buggered by the incompetent idiots who supposedly are your bosses.

Well, in our armed forces, at the very worst you’ll at least be right democratically, as opposed to royally, buggered.

Boy I sure get a lot of email from Canadians whenever I mention Canada. Apparently, I have a lot of Canadian readers.