Stanley Kurtz argues that the most dangerous aspect of Arab Islamic society is its preference for parallel-cousin marriage--that is to say, when cousins marry cousins strictly from the paternal family line. (A cousin on your father's side is a parallel cousin; a cousin on your mother's side is a cross cousin.) Tellingly, the region of the world in which parallel-cousin marriage predominates happens to coincide with the original Baghdad Caliphate. The danger: a society having such a preference loses its fellow-feeling with other societies and inevitably regards itself as at war with them.

I always knew that Islam was pan-Arab nationalism in religious dress. Kurtz now argues that it is actually Hatfield-McCoy-style clan-ism in religious dress.

He promises a further essay on the subject, in which I presume he will offer a solution. I can only speculate now, but perhaps one of his suggestions will be to strengthen all laws in this country that forbid cousin to marry cousin--or at least forbid the marriage of parallel cousins, as opposed to cross cousins.

Kevin McCollough lays it on the line.

Melanie Morgan tells us how.

The answer is yes.

This will seem bigoted to many readers, but unless the United States faces some key facts, it will go the way that Europe is now going--and some people are going to be in serious danger of having their heads chopped off.

Earlier this week, a Bosnian youth shot up a shopping mall in Salt Lake City, Utah, killing five before an off-duty police officer laid down enough covering fire to let the SWAT team move in. (The youth died in the fusillade.) No one even wanted to admit that this youth was Muslim. But tellingly, the authorities cannot rule out terrorism as a motive.

This young man is a first-generation immigrant. And today, Ilana Mercer tells us a hard truth: Muslims tend to drag in their old-country grievances when they immigrate to this country. Worse yet, they are as anti-Semitic over here as over there. (Surprisingly, they are not the worst anti-Semites. That dubious distinction belongs to Latinos.)

Ms. Mercer goes on to warn the Jews that they are supporting their own would-be murderers, by continuing to support an open-border immigration policy.

Now you know why I said that some people are in danger of having their heads chopped off--unless we re-examine our immigration policy and also re-examine our blanket tolerance of any "religious" tradition, no matter what sort of fighting words are in its very founding documents.

Brendan Miniter offers this perspective on Rudy Giuliani, as the buzz already begins to build about him. Add to it this perspective from National Review's editors.

Miniter talks about Christian conservatives being unhappy with Rudy. All right, here's a Christian conservative's perspective:

A President of the United States is not a cleric. We have no post called "Defender of the Faith" in this country. Rather, a President is a governing authority within the meaning of Romans 13:1-7. His job is to protect the people from criminals and foreign invaders, saboteurs, and murderers. Judge him, therefore, by how well he performed these functions, or functions close to them, while he was Mayor of New York.

When you do, you have to admit one thing that he does better than any other candidate out there: he commands. His command presence was obvious on September 11, and was the single most important thing that kept New York from flying into anarchy. More to the point, his decisions were the best possible under the circumstances. The NYPD and NYFD did better than anyone could possibly have expected, considering that no one had anticipated anything like what happened that day. Much of that was due to the high morale they had built up in the years that Rudy had been Mayor. But the biggest influence for law, order, and safety on that day was the spectacle of him running an operation the like of which no Mayor has ever had to run before.

That is what you want as Commander-in-Chief of the armed forces in wartime--and also as the chief law-enforcement and counterintelligence officer.

Don't expect him, then, to "throw down the high places" and "throw down the altars and cut down the groves (Asherah poles) that are by them." That's the job of good old-fashioned Baptist clergy.

Rather, expect Rudy to perform the Romans 13:1-7 function. He can handle that better than any other candidate now in the race.

And that's why he gets my vote.

This is bad news. Remember this? The story is that this girl, Melissa Busekros, had been committed for psychiatric care by the Jugendamt (Youth Office) with a diagnosis of "school phobia." We now learn that  someone, presumably also the Jugendamt, has moved her from that psychiatric ward and refuse to disclose her location.

Have the Nazis come back in Germany? Was is los?

Now we hear that three Border Patrolmen, all of whom had immunity from prosecution in the drug-smuggler "shooting," are no longer with the Border Patrol. Two of them got fired, and the third resigned when he knew what was coming.

How long does this farce have to go on before President Bush pardons the two convicted agents? He'll have to, if he wants this ugly scandal, which is getting ever uglier, to go away.

Details here, with a host of informative links. At issue is the practice of George Tiller, MD, who has allegedly done abortions later than 22 weeks and without proper diagnostic backup, in violation of Kansas law. The local DA deliberately took the case away from the Kansas AG's office and filed for summary dismissal of the case--and a sympathetic judge granted it. Turns out that Tiller's activist friends have contributed to that DA's campaign, and also that of the judge involved, and the new AG for Kansas, who is trying to quash the case that his predecessor began.

So now Senators Brownback and Roberts, and Congressman Todd Tiahart, have promised to investigate the matter at the federal level, this after pro-life activists in Kansas have now exhausted all remedies in that state.

This is the same state, BTW, in which Operation Rescue bought an abortion clinic building out from under a failing abortion practice, evicted them, and then inspected the building. What they found ought to have been part of a B-grade motion picture, but it was all too real.

Bear in mind, also, the larger picture. Fewer doctors are willing to perform abortions, or even to accept abortion training. Those that still are, aren't any too reputable. George Tiller's technical violations are one thing, but you also have abortion mills running with unlicensed staff. Those are signs of a desperate situation, and of people reacting to that situation in a desperate manner.

Dr. Tiller's time might come--or not--while he still walks this earth. But the bitterest irony in his mind, and that of his friends, must surely be that fewer people are willing to follow in his bloody footsteps.

If you're a student in Germany, that can happen--and has happened. And if we don't watch out, we shall see it happening in this country.

Happily, the German educational authorities might have overplayed their hand--or more likely gotten too far ahead of their time. The case of a 17-year-old girl hauled off and thrown into a psych ward merely because she was taught at home, has now attracted international attention, much of it highly unfavorable to the German position. That the law under which this involuntary commitment took place is a Nazi-era law might have more than a little to do with the international outrage this case has now drawn.

Remember this? Well, now we learn that the drug smuggler left his cell phone behind when he ran away. And to think that the DHS investigators said that they had "no evidence" against him.

This is worse than ridiculous. That smuggler could as easily have been a terrorist--and for all we know, probably was and is. Yet the agents who tried to take him down land in prison. What is wrong with this picture?

Read it and weep. In fact, Chertoff's own employees are none too happy about it themselves.

The name Islam does not mean peace at all, but submission. But Chertoff doesn't seem to realize that. But don't take my word for it; read Chertoff's memo for yourselves. In it, he identifies only as "extremists" those hashshasheen who tried to blow up 10 airliners last year. "Extremists" could be anyone.

The biggest failing in this current war has always been enemy identification. Of course, Mr. Chertoff, being Jewish, doesn't want to be accused of bigotry. What he fails to realize is that he ought not grant moral equivalency to people with an ideology that calls for killing everyone but them. And he especially ought not grant moral equivalency to those who would kill him first.

That, according to the London Guardian. Normally I don't lend much credence to a publication that acts like a liberal tabloid. And in fact, their spin on the story is that police might abuse the "power" of this invention in order to gain information that they might better not be able to gain during interrogation.

Actually, the Guardian goes further--for readers willing to scroll down to the end of the article. This kind of scanner could start an application on your computer as soon as it reads your thoughts and determines that you're going to need that application. It might even be able to take "dictation" from you--though in the latter case, I'd want a safeguard in place so that you don't wind up sending something that you'll live to regret. (Just imagine if Amanda Marcotte had a scanner like this on her own computer--nah. Her output would probably not be much worse than it is now.)

Then, too, the Guardian is afraid that courts will convict someone on the basis of his thoughts. Well, that's a fine thing for them to protest--after all, what are hate crimes, except crimes for which the punishment is made more severe by reason of specific political motives? That said--if I had this kind of scanner available to me, I wouldn't want to run the suspect in on a charge of wrong-thinking. But I might use the scan to obtain search, wiretap, and similar warrants.

And, of course, don't forget the military application. Clint Eastwood, call your talent agent...!

I'm talking about the case of United States v. Ramos and Compean, in which two Border Patrol agents were convicted of excessive use of force and sentenced to 11 and 12 years in Federal prison, respectively. Ramos has since been beaten up in prison, because someone put him into the "general population", something you're not supposed to do with Federal agents.

We now learn that a key investigator into the alleged (and yes, I say again, alleged) shooting of a drug smuggler had direct ties to that smuggler. These ties included their having grown up together.

Sportsfans, everything about this case stinks. For example, how did that smuggler make it back across the border if he was wounded in the exchange with the agents? How do we know that he didn't get someone to shoot him back on the Mexico side? This case now has the look of a deliberate frame, with DHS' own investigator perpetrating the frame and a US Attorney only too willing to run with it--as Mike Nifong did with those Duke boys.

We're not dealing with overzealous, bigoted agents. And how does that smuggler get a free pass on all his illegal activities, past, present and future?

By now you've probably  heard your fill of Representative (and Speaker of the House) Nancy Pelosi (D-San Francisco, CA) demanding the use of a particularly expensive military jet for her travels between Washington and San Francisco.

The aircraft in question is a C-32. To build one, you take a Boeing 757-200 airframe, take out most of the seats, and leave in place 42 business-class seats, a private stateroom complete with a bed and shower and its own entertainment center, and plenty of the latest and hottest communications gear. And to fly this plane and provide all the amenities, you need a crew of sixteen. To put this into perspective, the C-32 replaces the old C-137 (equivalent to a Boeing 707) and is the type of aircraft used by the Vice-President (under the call sign "Air Force Two") and any Cabinet-level civil officer or even a foreign head-of-state.

All right. This is not the VC-25 that serves as "Air Force One." But when Denny Hastert was Speaker, he was content with the much smaller C-20, equivalent to a Gulfstream III, and its crew of five. And the only reason why Nancy Pelosi was not content with the '20 was its range, which is less than the distance between Andrews AFB and San Fran Airport.

To its credit, the Pentagon has definitely refused Pelosi a C-32 and has instead offered her a C-20. No word yet on whether she will be content with that.

She should be ashamed of herself for demanding any more. The only reason why Denny Hastert got a special Air Force plane at all was for security reasons. Pelosi is claiming that "security" requires her to make a non-stop flight. But that won't wash. It's not as if she'd have to refuel at a civilian airport; she could stop at any of a number of Air Force facilities along the way.

update If range were Ms. Pelosi's only consideration, then she could have requested a C-37A. That aircraft, basically a Gulfstream V, would have given her all the range she needed.

This is the same Pelosi who said that she would "clean House." Her carryings-on over this plane make her guilty of the worst sort of special pleading. What a fine image that projects to the rest of the world. Thank you for your contribution, Nancy.