JOSH CHAFETZ reports on the London pro-Israel rally. Here’s the the BBC report on the rally, too.

THE RICHMOND TIMES-DISPATCH has this followup piece on the little-reported armed law student who put a stop to the shootings at the Appalachian Law School. It’s a companion piece to this interesting report on defensive gun use in general.

UPDATE: And this piece by John Lott on European gun control and mass shootings is worth reading.

KEVIN JAMES writes that he called the French election, and the Franco-chattering classes’ reaction to it — way back in April. He’s also got a comment on Pim Fortuyn’s assassination, which he describes as the consequence of hate speech:

The controversial party leader is invariably described as “far-right”, “extreme right”, and suchlike in the world press, and made out to be the Dutch equivalent of Jean-Marie Le Pen. As Dave Kopel conclusively demonstrated in his Sunday article for the Rocky Mountain News, the portrayal of this gay Dutch sociology professor—take in carefully all four words: “gay Dutch sociology professor”—as some sort of neo-fascist extremist is a ridiculous slander.

And now it has proven a deadly slander.

If the Europeans truly value democracy, they ought to start demonstrating in the streets. Not in protest of the affrontery of people like Fortuyn for daring to question the Continent’s political orthodoxies, as they have been up to now, but rather against the European political and media elites for ensuring that Fortuyn and others who agree with him are demonized and denied a fair hearing.

This process of character assassination is profoundly anti-democratic, and appeared dangerous enough before, as I explained in “Understanding Le Pen’s triumph”. How much more dangerous it appears now, after today’s demonstration that character assassination can incite the more deadly kind…even in a place like the Netherlands.

Yeah. After the Oklahoma City bombing, everyone from Newt Gingrich to Rush Limbaugh was charged by Clinton spinmeisters (quite deliberately, as George Stephanopoulos recounts in his memoirs) of creating a “climate of hate” that led to a terrorist act, an accusation immediately picked up by bien pensant media figures.

I look forward to seeing the New York Times editorial page draw similar lessons for Europe.

UPDATE: Rod Dreher has some thoughts on The Corner.

SLANDERING PRIVATE SHLOMO: This UPI column talks about the treatment of Israeli soldiers in the media.

EUROPEAN HATEWATCH UPDATE: Anti-immigration Dutch politician Pim Fortuyn has been shot dead, presumably by someone who doesn’t like his politics. Details are sketchy at the moment.

Hmm. I thought that such shootings only took place in the uncivilized United States, with its bloody-minded Frontier approach to things. And it’s funny that these killers seem to be able to get guns. I thought they were against the law over there. . . .

MY FOXNEWS COLUMN is up! Frontiers, space, Islamo-fascists, and euro-weenieism all rolled into one delicious package, chock-full of pundit goodness.

RAND SIMBERG has a bunch of cool space-policy posts.

THIS says it all.

A FEMINIST, writes Anne Marlowe in Salon, is “somebody who believes she should pay for her own dinner.” In my experience, this excludes a lot of women eager to consider themselves feminists in other contexts.

UPDATE: Reader David Waghalter writes:

“I used to think a feminist was somebody who believes she should pay for her own dinner, too. Man, did that get me into a lot of trouble on dates.”

DEN BESTE explains the Oracle scandal, which still isn’t getting the national play you’d expect. He adds: “Oracle is the company which wants to build a national database to support a national ID card that all residents of the US would be required to carry. Be very afraid.”

Yep. They’re buying politicians, and want to build a system that will track Americans. The only good news is that — based on this transaction — the government will wind up letting Oracle sell it a piece-of-crap system that isn’t any good.

UPDATE: Jim Glassman supports a national ID card, but says that Larry Ellison shouldn’t be allowed near it, since he has a habit of spying on people. But Eric Peters isn’t having any of it.

THE IDLER has a content analysis of New York Times coverage of the Palestinian/Israeli conflict, showing consistent anti-Israeli bias. Here’s some additional evidence.

ENRON SCANDAL UPDATE: Reader Stan Brown sends this story:

A California state senator plowing through boxes of subpoenaed Enron Corp. documents has finally unearthed a smoking gun, the first tangible proof that energy traders tried to manipulate the price of electricity amid short supplies last summer.

One problem: The evidence doesn’t implicate Enron so much as the managers of California’s electricity grid, whose Folsom-based trader was caught red-handed trying to game the market. In a bizarre twist, it turns out that the state-created Independent System Operator, or ISO, was the one rigging the price of power, not the evil private generators who everyone suspected.

Robert Musil, call your office!

UPDATE: Gena Lewis has another interesting Enron angle.

MODERN WEATHER COVERAGE: Yep, it’s pretty much like this all right.

BELLESILES UPDATE: A reader sends a link to this speech of Sen. Zell Miller’s (D-GA), reproduced on the Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s website. Zell Miller does what many (though not all) historians have been too polite to do, and accuses Bellesiles of outright fraud. Excerpt:

A couple of years ago, an Emory University professor, named Michael E. Bellesiles wrote the most distorted view ever published about the role of firearms in early America. It was called “Arming America.”

It delighted anti-gun reviewers by claiming that colonial militias were ineffective, that settlers seldom engaged in hunting and that colonists had little interest in owning firearms. The New York Times gave it a glowing, almost giddy review of several pages, as did the other liberal media.

It would seem that, in Bellesiles’ America-in-Wonderland, colonists were a bunch of naive, wishy-washy peace nicks.

Well, tell that to the British Redcoats who tried to cross Concord Bridge!

Tell that to Thomas Jefferson who said, “No free man shall ever be debarred the use of arms.”

Or Samuel Adams who said, ‘The Constitution shall never be construed to authorize Congress…to prevent the people of the United States, who are peaceable citizens, from keeping their own arms.”

Tell that to James Madison, the Father of the Constitution, who explained that the Constitution preserves “the advantage of being armed which Americans possess over the people of almost every other nation where the governments are afraid to trust the people.”

And, Thomas Paine, the writer of Common Sense, that pamphlet that inspired the Revolution, who wrote “Arms discourage and keep the invader and plunderer in awe, and preserve order in the world.”

Or finally, Patrick Henry, who warmed us to “Guard with jealous attention the public liberty. Suspect everyone, he said, who approaches that jewel.”

In those words of Patrick Henry, I suspect Professor Bellesiles with the willful intent to kill the Second Amendment. But all his distortion, backed by all the anti-gun media in the world, cannot murder the founding fathers’ wisdom that no man be disarmed.

By the way, when other historians later began to really examine the Bellesiles book, which one early reviewer labeled as “the NRA’s worst nightmare,” these historians found he had actually made up much of his so-called research. Just made it up out of the thin air of anti-gun bias.

One of the most respected historians at Emory called the research “scholarly incompetence.”

And an inquiry is presently underway, as the dean of that university said this week, to address allegations of misconduct in research. An NRA nightmare? I don’t think so. But, my friends, that’s the kind of thing we’re up against, and it has come down to us – the Guardians of the Second Amendment – to ensure the preservation of our heritage.

A lot of readers have emailed me to say that they think Emory will just wait until the attention dies down and then issue a report that whitewashes the whole Bellesiles affair. I’ve doubted that all along, but things like this make it less likely.

UPDATE: Reader Nick Ludlum writes:

I’ve been following the Bellesiles matter on your site for some time now, in no small part because I actually attended Emory and took one of Michael Bellesiles classes (freshman lecture course on American history to the antebellum period). My thoughts on the man aside, the fact that Zell Miller is speaking out so vociferously bodes well for the future of academic integrity. Senator Miller taught at Emory for about a year or so after he left the Governor’s Mansion and a lot of old influential Georgians passed through Emory at one time. With Zell Miller coming out against him, its hard to believe this practitioner of fraud will have much time left. The only stumbling block may be the President of the University, William Chase, who’s integrity has been questioned in the past (on seperate matters).

Nonetheless, Emory is a proud institiution in Georgia and it’s hard to believe the alumni (if not the administration), will let Bellesisles dirty its name much longer.

CATHY YOUNG looks at an analysis of Women’s Studies programs and finds bogus facts and weak or nonexistent scholarship.

MORE BAD NEWS FOR SWEDEN: They’re poorer than the United States — heck, they’re poorer than Mississippi according to a Swedish study — but they also have more crime! That’s according to the U.N.-sponsored International Crime Victims Survey, which is hardly likely to have a pro-American, anti-Swedish tilt. Excerpt:

The ICVS allows an overall measure of victimisation which is the percentage of people victimised once or more in the previous year by any of the eleven crimes covered by the survey. This prevalence measure is a simple but robust indicator of overall proneness to crime. The countries fall into three bands.

Above 24%: (victim of any crime in 1999): Australia, England and Wales, the Netherlands and Sweden
20%-24%: Canada, Scotland, Denmark, Poland, Belgium, France, and USA
Under 20%: Finland, Catalonia (Spain), Switzerland, Portugal, Japan and Northern Ireland.

(emphasis added)

What’s more, European crime is generally rising; North American crime is generally falling. Here’s a story from the Telegraph on the survey with some interesting bar graphs listing the top-ten nations in four crime categories. The United States appears in only one — for burglary — where it’s number eight. Excerpt:

After Australia and England and Wales, the highest prevalence of crime was in Holland (25 per cent), Sweden (25 per cent) and Canada (24 per cent). The United States, despite its high murder rate, was among the middle ranking countries with a 21 per cent victimisation rate.

Can you establish a linkage between welfare-statism and crime? Take it away, Mickey Kaus!

U.S. TROOPS must be getting close to something important along the Pakistani border. The Islamofascists are calling out the mullahs.

DON’T WORRY ABOUT THE U.N. REFUGEE SEX-ABUSE SCANDALS: The U.N. is investigating the matter.

OKAY, CHIRAC WON, LE PEN LOST: My prediction: the French Establishment will congratulate itself on having singlehandedly defeated fascism, and go back to business as usual, ignoring all the problems that Le Pen was trying to capitalize on and paving the way for either (1) someone worse; or (2) general social collapse.

Emmanuelle Richard weighs in with somewhat similar concerns. Also read this post by Matt Welch on French problems, and their resistance to American-style solutions. Additional problem: there are no “French-style” solutions to French problems.

JOSH MARSHALL reports that the State Department told Arab leaders to give Cheney an earful when he visited. Sadly, it’s all too credible. The State Department all too often forgets which side it’s on. That’s a cliche, I know, but like many cliches it’s a cliche because it’s so often true.

MICROBIOLOGISTS ARE DROPPING LIKE FLIES according to this report from the Globe and Mail. I can’t quite come up with a plausible conspiracy theory to explain this, but I’m sure that someone else will be able to.

CHOMSKY: GETTING THE ATTENTION HE DESERVES IN THE BLOGOSPHERE — well, no. It’s much nicer than the attention he deserves, even though it’s not all that nice. But Pejman Yousefzadeh is certainly paying attention.

THIS WASHINGTON POST ARTICLE wonders why Noam Chomsky is ignored these days. Well, he’s not ignored in the Blogosphere! But one reason for not taking him seriously might be found in statements like this: “The positive side of [the Khmer Rouge] picture has been virtually edited out of the picture.”

Chomsky’s even out of favor with hard-core leftists, one of whom says: “He’s become a phase that people on the left should go through when they are young.” Yes, right after teething, and right before toilet training.

It’s not a bad article, particularly its references to the “elastic math” Chomsky uses to claim that 9/11 wasn’t as bad as Clinton’s bombing of the Sudanese pharmaceutical factory.

A FIRSTHAND ACCOUNT of media bias in Jenin, via Charles Johnson.