GOOD NEWS AND BAD NEWS ABOUT IRAN: Tom Holsinger writes on StrategyPage that the mullahs are so desperate that they’re importing Palestinian and Iraqi mercenaries to keep their own people in line. “A tottering government’s resort to foreign mercenaries for domestic suppression, in lieu of existing regime-protection forces, indicates that its end is near.”

The bad news is, they’re also getting assistance from the U.S. State Department, which values stability over the collapse of a hostile regime. Holsinger says that this is typical:

The major issue here is the State Department, as it has been so captured by its foreign constituencies that it is effectively on the other side in the war on terror.

Sounds like major housecleaning is in order.

H.D. MILLER POINTS OUT that the odious Pakistani honor-rape decision is more about caste than about Islam.

CHRISTIAN BLOGGER MARTIN ROTH is disturbed by figures showing a correlation between non-catholic Christianity and HIV/AIDS incidence in Africa, and shows commendable honesty in worrying about what that means.

I’m not sure it means much. Over the years I’ve seen a lot of charts correlating AIDS incidence with everything from language to circumcision rates.

Roth also notes that Islamic areas tend to have lower rates. This may well be true (among other things, the widespread Muslim custom of washing before and after sex may help). On the other hand, they may just have lower reporting rates, for reasons of stigma. (This may be true of the Catholic Christian areas, too.)

Why AIDS has spread so extensively in Africa, and why rates are so different in different parts of Africa, remains a mystery. Religion might be the explanation, but there are a lot of other candidates.

THE MINUTE MAN says that armed pilots may not, ahem, “fly,” with European air security rules:

The bill applies to domestic and international flights. Left unanswered is whether the Euro-weenies will allow armed US pilots into their tranquil airports. Perhaps the bill covers this by deputizing the pilots into Federal service, but I wonder if it is that easy. There are also real issues here: if an armed pilot looks Germanic, there is a good chance that half of the natives on a flight to Paris will surrender.

This is an outrageous calumny. As the response to “shoebomber” Richard Reid demonstrates, French civilians are quite courageous when circumstances require. So unless the flight is full of French politicians, no surrender is likely to be forthcoming.

WHICH WWF IS FOR YOU? Tim Blair ponders the strange resemblance between wrestling and wildlife organizations.

EUROWEENIE ANTISEMITISM ALERT: German literary critic Martin Walser has a new novel coming out, said to be the first antisemitic novel published in Germany since the War. The book, Death of a Critic, features a thinly disguised version of a real person, well-known German (Jewish) critic Marcel Reich-Ranicki. Here’s what the Times says about it:

This being Germany, there is one other element in the book which has sent shock waves through the literary world. It is anti-Semitism. The principal character in Death of a Critic is a Jew — and not just any Jew. He is, in the words of Die Welt, “not a man, but a monster of corruption, of vulgarity, vanity and lubricity. He personifies the Jew as an object of hate.”

So this is more than just an attack on Reich-Ranicki, it constitutes an assault on his race as well. It is the first anti-Semitic novel to be published in Germany since the war. Realising this, the publisher of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung has hurriedly cancelled his plans to serialise it, describing the book as riddled with “anti-Semitic clichés”.

His nervousness is not surprising. Reich-Ranicki himself is not just any Jew. He survived the Warsaw Ghetto in the most dramatic of circumstances. As a young man in July 1942, he was deputed to take the minutes as Sturmbahnführer Hermann Höfle determined which Jews were to be “resettled in the east” and which would be kept back. Reich-Ranicki was allowed to stay. His parents were not. They did not survive.

So Walser’s attack is more than just an injured writer hitting back; it is, as the current literary editor of Die Welt, puts it, “an execution, a settling of scores, a document of hate”. The editor was particularly repelled by a sentence towards the end of the book where the critic’s wife observes that “getting himself killed would be out of character”. As a comment aimed at the sole survivor from a family destroyed by the Nazis it was, he noted, “nothing short of horrifying”.

And, sadly, not especially surprising these days.

CATS AND DOGS LIVING TOGETHER! Four airport screeners have actually been fired for incompetence!

ASK AND YE SHALL RECEIVE: The kids at Warbloggerwatch invited Howard Owens to Fisk them. He complied. It’s pretty much a waste of time, as their sloppy ad hominem attacks are unlikely to convince anyone anyway, but shooting fish in barrels can still be fun.

AL QAEDA IN THE UNITED STATES: This report is worrisome. 5,000 Al Qaeda operatives and supporters?

I’m a bit skeptical, unless the terms are defined rather broadly. And in a way it’s good news if it’s true: a group that big should be easy to infiltrate. But Al Qaeda will die based mostly on what we do abroad, not what we do playing defense at home.

THAT’S ECLECTIC! Stanley Fish’s postmodernism and Bush’s energy policy — deconstructed in adjoining posts on The Twelfth Parsec!

SCOTT ADAMS says there’s nothing to get excited about in today’s raft of CEO scandals:

But here’s the strangest backwardism of all: People seem surprised that captains of industry are stealing vast amounts of money at every opportunity. Back in our old dimension everyone assumed that C.E.O.’s and C.F.O.’s were weasels. Now it’s big news.

I think it’s useful to put these corporate scandals in perspective. Every employee I ever worked with in my old cubicle-dwelling days was pillaging the company on a regular basis, too. But the quantity of loot was rarely newsworthy. My weasel co-workers were pocketing office supplies, fudging expense reports, using sick days as vacation and engaging in a wide array of work-avoidance techniques.

Most people rationalize this kind of behavior by saying that corporations are evil and so the weasel employees deserve a little extra. The C.E.O.’s and C.F.O.’s aren’t less ethical than employees and stockholders; they’re just more effective.

MICKEY KAUS CONTINUES HIS FEUD with the MediaWhoresOnline crowd. Maybe we can get Jesse Ventura as guest referee.

TOOK ‘EM LONG ENOUGH: Amnesty International is finally condemning Palestinian attacks on civilians. Late as it is, this is another sign that the suicide-bombing campaign has failed.

BO COWGILL provides this link to a safe-sex-education videogame that you can play on the web.

Some people won’t like this. I think it’s kind of cute.

ANIMAL RIGHTS TERRORISM IN SEATTLE caused hundreds of people to be evacuated from a building. The “weapon” in question was a military smoke grenade. So is this really “terrorism?” Well, of the nuisance variety, anyway. It was calculated to inspire terror — and at a time when people are fearing terrorists’ use of chemical or biological weapons, it worked. It’s on a par with fake-anthrax mailings, which certainly count as terrorism.

Not one of those borderline, could-be-or-not cases, like, you know, shooting up an airport.

UPDATE: Reader Worth Colliton writes:

According to the SeattleInsider, the animal rights group calling itself “Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty” targeted Marsh, Inc., a company which insures Huntingdon Life Sciences.

Marsh, Inc. is a subsidiary of MMC, Marsh & McLennan Companies, Inc., the largest insurance brokerage firm in the world. MMC corporate headquarters were located on floors 93-100 of Tower One in the World Trade Center, the floors which took a direct hit from the first plane on 9-11. MMC lost over 300 employees that day.

Nice folks. Brimming with compassion.

CATERINA FAKE WRITES about the Compassion Project ,which is soliciting photographs that will inspire compassion. I thought about submitting these two — but then I thought, hell, the originals didn’t succeed in inspiring much compassion, so . . . .

A PALESTINIAN PEACE ACTIVIST explains his strategy for peace.

MARTIN DEVON SAYS I’m wrong about the FBI’s reasons for downplaying terrorism.

WORRIED ABOUT A POPULATION EXPLOSION? Stephen Green explains who’s to blame — and who’s not.

RED HEIFER ALERT: The End Time is surely upon us.

TOMPAINE.COM is still quoting Bellesiles on the Second Amendment. Well, strictly speaking they’ve published a book excerpt that quotes Bellesiles, but it still doesn’t do much for their credibility:

Moreover, as historian Michael Bellesiles has found, actual firearms ownership in America has been greatly exaggerated and mythologized. He reports that, from colonial times to 1850, gun ownership never exceeded 10 percent of the population, owing in large measure to the scarcity of guns, which were difficult and expensive to produce, and the considerable difficulty involved in maintaining in working condition those that existed.

Well, that’s not going to do a lot for their credibility on this issue, given that even the National Endowment for the Humanities and Garry Wills have written off Bellesiles’ work . Next up: Joe Ellis on his Vietnam combat experiences!

NONE DARE CALL IT TERRORISM: Okay, so when NBA star Allen Iverson storms into a home and threatens two men while looking for his wife, the police want to charge him with “making terroristic threats.” Meanwhile, the Hadayet shooting at LAX still isn’t officially being called terrorism.

Reader Mike Branom, who sent the link, says he’s unimpressed with these developments. He should be.

THE FAT GUY responds to Al Qaeda bluster with a quote from Samuel L. Jackson.

THIS MORNING CounterSpin Central was pooh-poohing my “Condi in 2004” point, saying that Cheney was going to be around for a while. But by this afternoon, he was saying Cheney is about to step down.

Condi in ’04!

THE RECORD INDUSTRY LYING? Surely not.