THE REAL MIDDLE EAST: The Arab-Israeli war is not strictly and literally a war with Arabs on one side and Jews on the other. Aside from Israel’s quiet and fickle fair-weather supporters in Lebanon, many Israeli Arabs are now saying Finish Off Nasrallah. “I hope Nasrallah gets a rocket between the legs for what he is doing to me here, for harming grandma and grandpa.”

WEARY GAY RIGHTS ACTIVISTS, as seen by U.S. News:

“[N]obody’s swept up anymore,” says [Seattle gay-rights advocate Lisa] Stone….

A group of nearly 250 gay-rights supporters recently urged less focus on marriage, saying it “has left us isolated and vulnerable to a virulent backlash.” Legislative victories could avoid that backlash. “The politics is driven by the lawsuits,” says Matt Daniels of Alliance for Marriage, which opposes gay marriage. “No more lawsuits, no more state amendments.” Matt Foreman of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force acknowledges, “Our legal strategies got ahead of our political strategies.”

GAWKER ASKS “ORGASM OR EXCELLENT MARINARA?” Can you tell the difference between your favorite Food Network foodies and porn stars?

REUTERS ADMITS using photoshopped images of war damage from Beirut.

THE KISS ARMY invades Cleveland, demanding Kiss’s induction into the Rock-n-Roll Hall of Fame. Sources say that they were armed with Love Guns and sought to “meetcha, meetcha in the Ladies’ Room.” With their money, you know, you can’t be too soon. What’s next? An “Army of David Lee Roths”?

MORE LAW SCHOOL ADVICE. Hat tip Ron Coleman.

IF, LIKE ME, YOU LOVE “PROJECT RUNWAY,” I’m pretty sure you’re going to love Project Rungay.

“A PATHETIC STICK-IN-THE-MUD WHO WOULD FALL ILL BEFORE BATTLE.” That would be Osama Bin Laden, as described by Dexter Filkins, based on his reading of Lawrence Wright’s new book “The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11,” which receives a rave review. There is a lot of surprising detail about Bin Laden in the book. (He’s only 6 feet tall, and he was a permissive father.) Filkins highlights some sharp material about Sayyid Qutb:

[L]ike so many others who followed him, Qutb seemed simultaneously drawn to and repelled by American women, so free and unselfconscious in their sexuality. The result is a kind of delirium:

“A girl looks at you, appearing as if she were an enchanting nymph or an escaped mermaid,” Qutb wrote, “but as she approaches, you sense only the screaming instinct inside her, and you can smell her burning body, not the scent of perfume, but flesh, only flesh. Tasty flesh, truly, but flesh nonetheless.”

It wasn’t much later that Qutb began writing elaborate rationalizations for killing non-Muslims and waging war against the West. Years later, Atta expressed a similar mix of obsession and disgust for women. Indeed, anyone who has spent time in the Middle East will recognize such tortured emotions.

ENGLISH IS FLOWING EVERYWHERE. It’s unstoppable, though some countries try to ban it. (Iran just outlawed “helicopter” — the word.) But with maybe a billion people speaking it now, English is the future.

But the danger is that proper English will be overwhelmed by the English of nonnative speakers, he acknowledged. “This is not English as we have known it, and have taught it in the past as a foreign language,” he wrote. “It is a new phenomenon, and if it represents any kind of triumph it is probably not a cause of celebration by native speakers.”

Leave it to a native of France — a country that itself in the 1990’s briefly required that 3,000 English words be replaced by French ones — to suggest that this simpler English be codified.

Jean-Paul Nerrière, a retired vice president of I.B.M., calls his proposal Globish. It uses a limited vocabulary of 1,500 words, taken from the Voice of America, among other sources, which can be put together clumsily to express more complicated thoughts. Little concern is given to the complexities of grammar, and he proposes that speakers of Globish say the same thing in different ways to make up for difficulties in pronunciation…

“Globish is not a language, it will never have a literature, it does not aim at conveying a culture, values,” Mr. Nerrière wrote in an e-mail message. “Globish is just a tool, practical, efficient, limited on purpose.”

The linked article says the native English speaker might be at a disadvantage, because you’d know so many words that aren’t on the limited list. But would English in the Globish form really take over and remain constrained?

The typical conversation in Globish could be grating to a native speaker, but get the job done between, say, a Kenyan and a Korean trying to navigate a business deal or asking for help at the airport check-in. For nephew, there is “son of my brother/sister”; kitchen is “room in which you cook your food”; chat is “speak casually to each other.”

Hmmm… well, I’m seeing in this article that “chat” is another one of the words that Iran saw the need to ban. I think the kind of crisp short words used in web-writing are going to spread and people won’t confine themselves to a tedious word list that requires them to construct clunky phrases containing boring filler like “in which.” There will be some sort of global English, but I think it’s likely to be, not Nerrière’s 1,500 building blocks, but the kind of clear, straightforward English that makes for good blog writing. And you can write real literature in this language. Man, Nerrière annoys me. His vision of the future is no fun at all. It’s infuriatingly desiccated! Or should I say it is so dry it makes me mad.

“SOME PEOPLE ARE REALLY ANGRY AT CONTEMPORARY ART,” Says Alison Stephen, a “gallery guide” at the Guggenheim Museum. What’s a gallery guide?

The job of the Guggenheim’s eight gallery guides is in some ways unique: although all of New York’s major museums have educational programs, only the Guggenheim hires people to mingle full time in the galleries, interacting with museum patrons in all their quirky diversity. And though she had been on the job only three weeks, Ms. Stephen had already noticed a recurring phenomenon. “Some people are really angry at contemporary art,” she said reflectively.

If the Guggenheim had simply needed better security, more guards could have been hired. The guides program exists because the public’s confusion about modern and contemporary art is alive and well, which is brought home to the guides every day.

“Modern art baffles,’ said Jim Fultz, the longest-serving guide, who was hired in 2004. “It alienates. It frustrates. But part of what we do is make them feel comfortable with it. A lot of people are afraid to ask questions. They don’t want to seem dumb about something they already feel is elitist.”

So the modern art keeps pissing people off, and they’ve hired people to pass as ordinary museum-goers and try to manage the mood. I’m slightly offended by this ruse, but also charmed that there is a job like this, which I think would be a really nice day job for a struggling artist or actor. I would have loved to do this when I was young and fancied myself an artist. I’d even like to do it now. I could see myself, retired from professorhood, roaming around the museum looking for the surly folk and saying something to guide them back onto the track of art-love. I’d be happy with a collection of jobs like this. I would, for a price, go sit in a movie theater crowd and cue the flow of laughter on the subtler jokes. I would, for a price, eat in a restaurant and make slightly audible favorable comments about the menu and, with a co-worker, contribute a pleasant sound of conversation and even make up gossip about fictional characters to give the other diners something to eavesdrop on. Or maybe I should just start a business, designing jobs like this and selling businesses on the notion that they need fake patrons to improve the attitude of the real patrons. And all you artists and actors in need of an amusing day job can come to me. I’ll just take 10%.

ADDED: I should say that — based on the photo accompanying the linked article — the Guggenheim guides are wearing tags, and are not as stealthy as the artists and actors in my job fantasy scenario.

HEZBOLLAHLAND PHOTO GALLERY: Last year I took dozens of pictures of Hezbollah-occupied Lebanon, along the border with Israel and in the suburbs south of Beirut. Many have never been published before. You can view them here. Much of what you’ll see has since been destroyed.

RED ON RED: Radical Saudi cleric Sheik Safar al-Hawali, who inspired Osama bin Laden, says Hezbollah is not the Party of God but the Party of the Devil.

“THE GOOFUS AND GALLANT GUIDE TO LAW SCHOOL“: Priceless. (Warning: contains some bad language.)

LAWYERS BEHAVING BADLY, PART N+1: From my colleague Marcia McCormick comes this “Plaintiff’s Motion to Compel Acceptance of Lunch Invitation.”

“CONTROL YOUR INTEREST IN PUBLICITY FOR YOUR IDEAS,” UW-Madison Provost Patrick Farrell told Kevin Barrett, the part-time instructor who believes the U.S. government is behind the 9/11 attacks. Barrett is planning to teach students about the factual truth of this theory in a course called “Islam: Religion and Culture.” Citing our university’s tradition of academic freedom, Farrell rejected demands that Barrett be fired. But the political uproar has continued, and Barrett — unsurprisingly — has gotten numerous invitations to appear in the media. And now, we see that 10 days after Farrell made his decision to retain Barrett, he warned him about all that media activity:

“[I]f you continue to identify yourself with UW-Madison in your personal political messages or illustrate an inability to control your interest in publicity for your ideas, I would lose confidence … ,”…

Announcing his decision on July 10, Farrell declared, “We cannot allow political pressure from critics of unpopular ideas to inhibit the free exchange of ideas.”

Farrell said he wanted Barrett to know that he could reconsider his decision if he did not meet expectations. He said Barrett has “modestly made some efforts” to cut down on publicity.

“I was trying to be fairly careful to not inhibit his privilege of speaking freely,” he said. “My point was that he should be aware as he exercises those rights there may be a time when I have to rethink the assurances he has given me about his ability to separate his opinions from what happens in the classroom.”…

Farrell scolded Barrett for identifying himself as a UW-Madison instructor in e-mails in which he challenged others to debate his theories. The provost said the challenges suggest “that you speak for the university — precisely what I told you was inappropriate in that context.”

Barrett, for his part, says that he isn’t seeking this publicity. It’s seeking him. And what, exactly, is wrong with his speaking publicly? His reprehensible conspiracy theory is fine to inflict on students, but please stop showing your face to the general public because it’s making trouble for the university? That Barrett is teaching at the university is — unlike his crazy theory — a plain fact. It’s an embarrassing fact, and we can easily understand Farrell’s interest in suppressing it. But the public is entitled to know this fact and to react to it. This too is part of free speech. Why are we so keen on airing all sorts of ideas within the university but averse to letting the general public have access to those facts?

When I go on radio or TV, I am introduced as a professor at the University of Wisconsin, whether I’m talking about law or politics or culture or some other topic I presume to blab about. It’s never even occurred to me that stating this true fact — where I work — means that I “speak for the university” or that listeners might be confused into thinking that I do. You’d have to think ordinary people are idiots to believe that they think Kevin Barrett is speaking for the university when he spews his offensive theory. The problem is not confusion about whom he speaks for, but the embarrassment to the university that he thinks what he thinks and he teaches here. How can you justify suppressing this factual information of great public interest?

And why should Barrett have to refrain from publicizing his ideas in order to keep his job? It’s acceptable for him to teach here, but please, be very quiet about it? And this is held out as an attempt “to be fairly careful to not inhibit his privilege of speaking freely”? The letter makes a connection between speaking out publicly and being able to “separate his opinions from what happens in the classroom.” But what is that connection? And would we use that reasoning on other teachers? Promoting a strong political position in the public arena raises a suspicion that you can’t fairly present material in the classroom anymore? All politically active academics would feel threatened if we thought the university would apply that reasoning across the board. And if Farrell is not going to apply that reasoning across the board, why is he inflicting it on Barrett?

KOS COY? Why?

BIG SURPRISE: Lebanese officials at odds with Iran.

BACK FROM THE FRONT: Israeli soldiers describe what it’s like to fight Hezbollah in Lebanon.