Would Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales have done this for Fox News or the Washington Times? And if he had/has, wouldn’t the New York Times editorial page blast him for colluding to suppress information from the public?

For seven months, The New York Times managed to keep out of the news the fact that one of its reporters, David Rohde, had been kidnapped by the Taliban.

But that was pretty straightforward compared with keeping it off Wikipedia.

…A dozen times, user-editors posted word of the kidnapping on Wikipedia’s page on Mr. Rohde, only to have it erased. Several times the page was frozen, preventing further editing — a convoluted game of cat-and-mouse that clearly angered the people who were trying to spread the information of the kidnapping.

Even so, details of his capture cropped up time and again, however briefly, showing how difficult it is to keep anything off the Internet — even a sentence or two about a person who is not especially famous.

The sanitizing was a team effort, led by Jimmy Wales, co-founder of Wikipedia, along with Wikipedia administrators and people at The Times.

Read the whole NYTimes’ piece. Note especially how a Times editor used Wikipedia (and the Times’ own website) to spread pro-Muslim propaganda about Rohde in order to secure his release — specifically, by expunging the word “Christian:”

Mr. Rohde was kidnapped in Afghanistan on Nov. 10, along with his interpreter and their driver. Two days after the kidnapping, a Wikipedia user altered the entry on Mr. Rohde to emphasize his work that could be seen as sympathetic to Muslims, like his reporting on Guantánamo, and his coverage of the Srebrenica massacre of Bosnian Muslims. Mr. Rohde won a Pulitzer Prize for his Bosnia coverage in 1996, when he worked for The Christian Science Monitor.

The Wikipedia editor in that case was Michael Moss, an investigative reporter at The Times and friend of Mr. Rohde who has written extensively about groups like Al Qaeda and the Taliban. Like many Wikipedia editors, he adopted a user name that hid his true identity.

“I knew from my jihad reporting that the captors would be very quick to get online and assess who he was and what he’d done, what his value to them might be,” he said. “I’d never edited a Wikipedia page before.”

With his editors’ blessing, Mr. Moss had already made similar changes to Mr. Rohde’s “topic page” on The Times’s Web site, and in both cases he omitted the name of Mr. Rohde’s former employer, because it contained the word Christian.

As I said before, I’m glad Rohde is safe.

But as I also said before, imagine if Wikipedia were, say, a bank cooperating in secrecy with intelligence/counterterrorism officials to help track jihadists. Why, it would be a front-page national scandal.

Have Wikipedia and the New York Times colluded on any other entries for any reason? Has Wikipedia conspired with any other media outlet/reporter to expunge accurate, relevant information that said media outlet/reporter doesn’t want published? Inquiring minds want to know.

Let the information consumer beware.

Yes, you can now identify and track Wiki vandals at, say, the NYTimes or Al Jazeera. Very useful tool.

An Army of Wiki Watchers has now been unleashed. LGF and Hot Air (flagging Wiki vandals at the DNC) have more.

WebProNews:

No one can claim innocence on either side of the political spectrum when it comes to playing with Wikipedia entries. The online encyclopedia that anyone can edit sometimes suffers from that openness.

The debut of an automated Wikipedia edit tracker – Wikipedia Scanner – from CalTech grad student Virgil Griffith made it easier for people to see the connections between anonymous edits and the netblocks of IP addresses from which they originate.

Big organizations tend to own blocks of IP addresses to suit their Internet communication needs. It’s unlikely a random person would be using an address that is part of a netblock. That makes it easier to find out who has been playing fast and loose with Wikipedia entries.

Both Fox News and the New York Times have been caught being naughty with certain entries.

Reader W.R. writes:

I saw the story on LGF about the new app/database that allows the public to track back anonymous users of Wikipedia to their originating IP Address and then pair those to companies. I was curious if any ACLU employees were editing Wikipedia and found this little tid-bit:

ACLU Wikipedia Edits

Originating IP: 12.42.243.10

Date: 19 APR 2005 (19:29)

Article: Pope Benedict XVI

Added the words, “…such as molesting young boys and degrading women.”

Total Sentence: “Benedict was considered to be Pope John Paul II’s “right hand man” and also one of his closest friends, and during the Pope’s final illness, he carried out many of the Pope’s functions as leader of the Catholic Church, such as molesting young boys and degrading women.”

Thanks ACLU for this!

As for the NYTimes’ employees vandalizing the Wiki pages of George Bush and Tom DeLay, perhaps the Old Gray Lady’s staffers should spend less time slumming around Wikipedia and more time spell-checking their own paper.

***

More from the Guardian:

Workers operating on CIA computers have been spotted editing entries including the biography of former presidents Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon, while unnamed individuals inside the Vatican have worked on entries about Catholic saints – and Sinn Féin leader Gerry Adams.

Meanwhile, an anonymous surfer from Labour’s Millbank headquarters excised a section about Labour Students which referred to “careerist MPs” and criticisms that the party’s student movement was no longer seen as radical.

And somebody from a computer traced to Democrat HQ edited a page on conservative American radio host Rush Limbaugh, calling him “idiotic”, “ridiculous” and labelling his 20 million listeners as “legally retarded”.

But the biggest culprit that the Scanner claims to have discovered is Diebold, a supplier of voting machines, which it says has made huge alterations to entries about its involvement in the controversial “hanging chad” election in the US in 2000. The company was criticised in the wake of the disputed results, but edits made by its employees on Wikipedia have included the removal of 15 paragraphs detailing the allegations.

He’s also a soldier.

Words written by the light of a red-tinted flashlight offer a poet’s-eye view of American soldiers’ life in Iraq: the fear, the loss, the heartache, the uncertainty and the rare moments of calm and beauty in an ancient land. Spare, finely crafted and with a punch that only war-torn reality can give, the poems in Brian Turner’s Here, Bullet (Alice James Books; $14.95) reflect his dual training, first as a poet and then as a soldier in the U.S. Army.

Here, Bullet won the 2005 Beatrice Hawley Award, a heady accomplishment in the poetry world. The book has garnered glowing reviews and feature stories in a range of publications, among them The New Yorker and The New York Times Book Review, and Turner has been interviewed by ABC News, The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, BBC London Radio, NPR’s Morning Edition and public radio stations from coast to coast. He was hosted by the Maine Veterans for Peace last November, will be at the Dodge Poetry Festival at the end of this month and is scheduled to speak at West Point in December and the U.S. Naval Academy next spring.

…….

Born in Visalia and raised in Fresno and Madera County, Turner attended Fresno City College then went on to earn a bachelor’s degree from California State University Fresno and a master of fine arts from the University of Oregon. He spent a year teaching English in South Korea and then, at the age of 30, he enlisted in the U.S. Army, where he served for seven years.

His standard response when asked why he enlisted is that it’s a long story which would require a bottle of vodka and all night to tell. Some things are private. But there’s a military tradition in his family, it was a pre-9-11 peacetime Army and he had college loans to repay. He was deployed to Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1999-2000, and spent a year as an infantry team leader in Iraq beginning November 2003. His poems about his Bosnia experiences are one of his seven unpublished manuscripts, which he now hopes will stay unpublished.

“When I went to Bosnia, I thought there was a lot of interesting material there. Writing that one taught me how to do the current one. How to do my job, be somewhere, do research, add cultural elements, historical details. I think that experience [writing poetry in Bosnia] helped mold me as a writer and prepare me for Iraq.”

His fellow soldiers in Iraq didn’t know Turner was writing poetry. He kept his poems secret, because they didn’t fit well with his image as a hard-bitten team leader. But his late-night writing gave him an outlet, a bit of sanity and a connection to his old life.

All but two of the poems in Here, Bullet were written while he was on duty in Iraq. They have the spare intensity and power of words dashed off in a flurry of emotion, but they are also carefully and beautifully constructed. Turner points out that one of the poems, “In the Leupold Scope,” has an underlying structure that is loosely based on that of a traditional ode.

I’ve read a few of Brian’s poems and they are simply brilliant. Amongst the ranks of the legendary British poet-soldiers of World War I. Highly recommend taking a look (or listen) at Brian’s work at NPR’s website.

IP addresses:

68.33.185.185 — Rockville MD (work?)
66.160.120.185 — Washington DC (home?)
68.62.72.192 — Auburn Hills MI (Mom’s basement?)

Names used:

Ben Jabituya
Ben Jaibtuyah
Baghwan Jabituyah
Darryl Revok
DR
Jalal
Peter “Top Gun” Michaels
John
BodeMillerJokes
BJM

The last two (from Blackfive’s blog) confirm my earlier suspicion that Punk is also the purveyor of the lame “Bode Miller Jokes” blog.

For much, much more on this troll, check out “Portrait of a Punk” on my home blog.

Sometimes, I like to go to the big city and play in the streets. My favorite game is to dress up in black, and run around town with my friends. We block traffic, yell at shoppers, and call the cops “pigs.” They don’t seem to like it very much, but they’re powerless to stop us, because we’re protected by the First Amendment!

Oh, did I mention that I’m a Black Bloc Anarchist?

Hey, let’s go charge up the Capitol steps! The pigs can’t stop us! It’s our Capitol, too!

Aw, shucks. Looks like we can’t go any further. Hey, does anyone have spray paint?

“All Cops are Pigs!” That’s brilliant! But don’t worry, it’ll wash right off… Let’s get out of here!

Hey, now what should we do? I know, we could go break some windows!

Yeah, that’ll show those stoopid Bushbot recruiters! Power to the people! (Oh, but I wasn’t there.) Time to get the Heck out of Dodge…

See you at Wal Mart, or the next big protest!

If you’d like to meet Ben and his friends in person, they’ll be wandering the streets of DC this Saturday, March 17.

But if they’re smart, they’ll steer well clear of these guys.

Internet site Wikipedia has been hit by controversy after the disclosure that a prominent editor had assumed a false identity complete with fake PhD.

The editor, known as Essjay, had described himself as a professor of religion at a private university.

But he was in fact Ryan Jordan, 24, a college student from Kentucky who used texts such as Catholicism for Dummies. He has now retired from the site. Under the name Essjay, Mr Jordan edited articles and also had the authority to arbitrate disputes between authors and remove site vandalism.

In his user profile, he said he taught both undergraduate and graduate theology, and in an interview with the New Yorker in July 2006, was described as a “tenured professor of religion”.

~^~

Patterico says he “just doesn’t get it,” referring to AP’s ever taller tale of Jamil Hussein Ghdaab Gulaim Ghdaab Redacted.

Specifically, he objects to the conclusion that AP knew “Jamil Hussein” was a pseudonym:

UPDATE: Let me make clear what I’m confused about. Everyone is running around screeching that the AP knowingly used a pseudonym.

What is the proof?

The problem is that Patterico — being a first-rate trial lawyer (prosecutor) — tends to think like a lawyer… which is extremely useful in his chosen profession (and is probably one reason why he chose that profession in the first place), but which can lead to unnecessary demands. Specifically, I believe Patterico is waiting for actual evidence — some AP reporter testifying that they knew it was a nom de guerre — that will never materialize, for obvious reasons. In this case, we can get farther by just being logical about the question.

What are the possible cases?

1. There really is a Police Captain Jamil Hussein — under that name — working at the Khadra police station in Iraq, and he was AP’s source, just as they claimed;
2. There is a human working at the Khadra station who was AP’s source, but his name is not Jamil Hussein, and he may or may not be a police captain;
3. Or else AP had no source at all at Khadra, and who cares whether someone named Jamil incidentally works at there?

I think that even if Eric Boehlert himself read this post, carefully sounding each word out, he would have to agree this covers all bases: either AP has a source at Khadra or not; and if they did, either he was named Jamil Hussein or not. So let’s go through them. Under which of these circumstances is AP acting honorably?

Let’s take the easiest cases first:

Case 1: Jamil Hussein (under that name) works at Khadra and was AP’s source

This would be the best-case scenario for AP (and for Eric Boehlert and others of his ilk). Alas for them, it seems very unlikely at this point: so far, the only news agency which has reported that Interior Ministry spokesman Brig. Abdul-Karim Khalaf said that “Police Captain Jamil Hussein” worked at Khadra police station — thus ever so slightly vindicating AP — was (drum roll) AP itself!

This is like shooting craps in the street: the dice roll down the gutter-drain; so you climb down to check, and you announce from the sewer than you made your point and won all the money.

Even if true, as Patterico himself has pointed out a number of times, this still would not be evidence either for AP’s “burning Sunnis” claim or its “burning mosques” claim. But so far, AP cannot even surmount the “existence” hurdle… other than by shouting up from the sewer that they made their point.

Case 3: The AP simply had no source at all at Khadra

We already covered this possibility (puckishly) over at Big Lizards, in our post Solvalogging: Jamil Hussein… Baghdad’s Own Lieutenant Kijé. Visit, read, return (wash, rinse, repeat).

For the elite media to make up sources out of whole cloth is not common, but it’s not unheard of either.

Now we get to the more interesting case…

Finally, case 2: AP has a source at Khadra, but his name is not Jamil Hussein

This is the case that Patterico implicitly assumes to be the only plausible alternative to case 1 (though I still haven’t entirely given up on the “Lieutenant Kijé” scenario!) There are two possible “subcases” here, which is the llama on whose horns Patterico sticks:

1. Steven Hurst and his editors at AP were aware that their source’s name was not Jamil Hussein

If this is the case, then AP was complicit in passing along a false name to the Ministry of the Interior, causing them to erroneously (in this scenario) report that the source did not work at the Khadra police station. At the very least, this is devious practice.

Did AP just forget that “Jamil Hussein” was actually “Mohammed Achmed al-Fruitbat?” Was the purpose to make the MOI look foolish, forcing them to make a statement then correct it later? Or did they not give the real name because there is a problem with the source, and they didn’t want anyone looking too carefully?

If the reason for the pseudonym was entirely honorable — Hurst worried about death threats against the man — then why not simply say “said a souce who would only speak on condition that we not name him, due to fear of reprisals”? That would have been honest. Thus, I think we can rule out this honorable reason; and all remaining reasons are disreputable and dishonorable.

2. Steven Hurst and his editors at AP were completely unaware that their source had given them a nom de guerre

If anything, this is even worse for AP than sub-scenario (a) above. If Hurst and his editors were blissfully unaware that their source was giving them a false name — then that can only mean they did not even make a minimalist check on his veracity… not even so much as verifying his identity!

What does this mean? Basically, that anyone can call up an AP reporter in Iraq, claim to be a police captain with a story to tell… and that story — propaganda — will wind up in an AP war dispatch without the slightest checking. Rumor central — and a lovely example of the big-box media’s “multiple layers of editing” in action.

And of course, if they couldn’t even bother to verify “Jamil Hussein’s” name, why trouble to verify any other piece of the 62 stories he told them? The source could have said that Dick Cheney personally few to Baghdad and shot some kids, just for fun… and AP would have run with it that evening.

Bottom line

Thus, of all the possibilities, the only one that means AP acted honorably, responsibly, and professionally is case 1, where there really, really is a police captain, stationed at Khadra and actually named Jamil Hussein, and that this fellow was actually a source for the Associated Press.

Under any other scenario — a source for AP at Khadra but who isn’t named Jamil Hussein, or even no source whatsoever — AP has acted despicably, dishonorably, and has forfeited whatever shreds of trust remained in news consumers after 87,339 Iraq horror stories that turned out to be complete fabrications… and it doesn’t make a lick of difference whether they knew he wasn’t named Jamil Hussein but taunted us with the name anyway, or whether they were so incompetent (or venal) that they deliberately did not even inquire into the matter.

So far, AP has been completely unable to demonstrate that case 1 is true; the closest they have come is to assert, themselves, that the MOI verified it — only to see that assertion itself disputed.

What’s not to understand?

Comments on this post here.

The blast smashed glass in the front of the building near the U.S. emblem of the embassy. Police did not report any injuries and embassy officials could not immediately be reached for comment.

“This is an act of terrorism. We don’t know where from,” Attica Police Chief Asimakis Golfis said. “There was a shell that exploded in the toilets of the building … It was fired from street level.”
Authorities were searching apartment buildings and a hospital nearby.

A Reuters source says, “This was a rocket attack launched from a building across the street. It landed inside a toilet on the third floor of the embassy.”

The investigation is on:

The explosion, at 5.58 a.m. this morning, was caused by a rocket fired from outside the Embassy compound, according to a statement from the Greek Public Order Ministry, posted on its Web site…

“This is a very serious attack,’” U.S. Ambassador Charles Ries said in comments to reporters outside the building, which is located in central Athens on Vasillissis Sophias Avenue.

The embassy was targeted once before in 1996.

Investigators are “examining what they believed was the device used to fire the rocket shell from a construction site near the embassy.”

AP’s calling the ordinance an “anti-tank shell.” Anyone know anything about those? Here’s a wikipedia entry on the term, for what it’s worth.

Jawa notes that Undersecretary of State Nicholas Burns spoke in Athens Wednesday.

Allah was on it early, and has the goods.

Now, consider this “promotional” film for the radical Muslim group Hizb-ut-Tahrir (more about them here and here). Although they take themselves every bit as seriously as the Nazis, they just don’t quite manage the Riefenstahl panache:

It is a small consolation that our fascist enemies in the current war are somewhat less telegenic than the Nazis, if ultimately every bit as dangerous and savage. One wonders whether the event advertised in that video will someday be remembered as the Aussie equivalent of a Munich beer-hall putsch. Fortunately Australia is recruiting more spies to deal with the problem.

In case you were wondering about the date mentioned in the video, March 3rd, 1924 is when Mustafa Kemal Ataturk abolished the Ottoman Empire and the Caliphate. (“Khilafa”, the name of this conference, means “Caliphate”).

More on this at Ace, LGF, and Tim Blair.

PS: Australians are shocked, shocked to find Saudi extremism going on.

This post is by Big Lizards (mostly Sachi), not by our dearest Michelle; the host is on holiday somewhere — I couldn’t quite make out where she was, but she shouted something that sounded remarkably like “earache.” Faugh; earache, my eye.

You put your left foot in…

If the mainstream media has no agenda, and their misreporting can solely be blamed upon the fog of war, we should see the mistakes benefiting both sides equally; half the time, they should wrongly report a great American victory that turns out not to be so great after all. I now pause for readers to wrack their memories to recall the last time AP, Reuters, CNN, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, the Boston Herald, the Wall Street Journal, or Media Matters did so.

Go ahead; I’ll wait.

Curiously enough, every time a major media source blows a story, they do so by publishing something that advances the message of the “emerging defeat” in Iraq, and that only thing we can do is to manage that inevitable defeat. (Similarly, mistakes on restaurant bills always seem to be in the restaurant’s favor.)

We have never read a headline such as “American troops kills 100 terrorists,” only to find out later that we bombed a simple wedding party. It is always the other way around; the wedding-party meme always comes first, followed by a quiet correction in a little box at the bottom of an inside page.

But let us not call it an MSM conspiracy or say that Boehlert is a part of it; for they are all honorable men, and honorable men would not sling such libelous accusations without rock-solid proof.

Let us instead examine some of the stringers upon whose reports the media (especially AP) rely:

Snuff films on Haifa Street: In December 2004, masked gunmen pulled two Iraqi election workers out of their car in broad daylight and assassinated them. An AP photographer-stringer just happened to be standing a few yards away, snapping pictures of the multiple homicide. The terrorists just happened to let him live. They even let him keep his camera and film. This was fortuitous, since the report earned an AP reporter a Pulitzer Prize.

After initial denials, AP first admitted that the photographer had been tipped off; then at last, they revealed the rest of the dirt on the endless supply of stringers ready and willing to accomodate “[i]nsurgents [who] want their stories told as much as other people.” As Power Line’s John Hinderaker concluded:

That makes the admission pretty well complete, I think. The AP is using photographers who have relationships with the terrorists; this is for the purpose of helping to tell the terrorists’ “stories.” The photographers don’t have to swear allegiance to the terrorists–gosh, that’s reassuring–but they have “family and tribal relations” with them. And they aren’t embedded–I’m not sure I believe that–but they don’t need to be either, since the terrorists tip them off when they are about to commit an act that they want filmed.

Stringing AP along: In April 2006, Bilal Hussein was taken into US custody as a member of a terrorist group. Hussein had been working as an AP photographer-stringer; he had sent AP a series of pictures taken inside the terrorists’ training camp.

He also snapped a picture of terrorists boldly posing by the body of a murdered Italian journalist. But perhaps Hussein was only tipped-off by, not embedded with, the killers.

PhotoShop phantasies: In August 2006, Reuters had to fire their Lebanese photographer-stringer Adnan Hajj, after his photo-shopped pictures were exposed by some sharp-eyed bloggers.

These are not isolated cases; the major news media have published hundreds of such photographs by Iraqi photographer-stringers, and thousands of stories by Iraqi writer-stringers. The standard media narrative of tens of thousands of dead Iraqis, as well as the entire case for “the emerging defeat” in Iraq (as Eric Boehlert gleefully puts it), is based upon the concatenation of these questionable stories… many of which have all the earmarks of enemy propaganda disseminated via the reliably compliant (and incurious) American and international media.

How can we ever know how much of what we read and see about Iraq is real, how much exaggerated, and how much simply defeatist fabrication? Is Eric Boehlert even curious to know the answer himself? Or does he, like Charles Foster Kane in Orson Welles’ magnum opus, believe the people will think what the media tells us to think?

If that is what he believes, and if he is right, then thank heavens they are all honorable men: just imagine what mischief they could concoct were they not!

Believing is seeing

Meet Salam Daher, AKA Abu Shadi Jradi, AKA Abdel Qader, AKA Green Helmet Guy (how many names do Moslem extremists get to use?)

In July 2006, in Qana Lebanon, in the aftermath of an Israeli attack on a rocket-launching site, the photograph of a Lebanese “civil defense worker,” his face anguished as he held a dead child in his arms, was plastered across the front pages of newspapers around the globe. Yet there was something odd about the guy, a discordant note. Many bloggers pointed out that he had been photographed throughout the day for hours, ghoulishly holding up the same dead child in various poses.

Green Helmet Guy told reporters conflicting stories about the number of children found dead. And then, Germany’s NDR found footage of this guy directing scenes, using the dead body of a child as a prop, toted to the site from storage somewhere. Not only that… Green Helmet Guy had done the exact, same thing 10 years ago:

This is nothing new. In Gaza, Palestinians have been staging battles and coaching witnesses for years. We even have a name for it: Pallywood. Here is an 18 minute video from YouTube, taken during the second intifada from 2000 to 2002:

For the first ten minutes, you will see Palestinians staging various events:

• A man shoots into a building as if he were defending himself; but the building is actually deserted;
• Civilians direct soldiers and crowds of “innocent bystanders” (extras) how to act prior to filming a scene;
• Footage of a funeral march in Jenin, after the “Jenin massacre,” where the pallbearers accidentally drop the corpse from a stretcher — and the dead fellow obligingly hops back aboard.

But the most telling footage starts about the 11th minute: an interview conducted by a Palestinian “reporter” with a new mother and father and with the doctor who had just delivered their baby at the local hospital. (I wonder if the reporter is a stringer for AP?)

On the way to the hospital, the reporter discusses with his staff what kind of story he is looking for: the terrible conditions that Palestinians must endure because of the wicked Israelis. At the hospital, the reporter tells the doctor that the young couple must say that the road was so dangerous, they couldn’t get to hospital in time… and the young husband had to deliver the baby all by himself. In fact the doctor had delivered a healthy baby in the hospital few hours earlier.

Chillingly, all three subjects — father, mother, and doctor — agree; they give the interview, describing the terrible ordeal that never occurred.

How many times have we heard that eyewitnesses, bystanders, and doctors had all “verified” some calamitous event caused by the Israelis, the Americans, or our Coalition partners in Iraq? Oh, wait, here’s one:

For the record, along with Hussein, the AP based its Burned Alive reporting on an account from Imad al-Hashimi, a Sunni elder who told Al-Arabiya television about the killings. (He later recanted his story after being visited by a representative of the defense minister.) The AP also spoke to three independent eyewitnesses (two shopkeepers and a physician) and confirmed the story with hospital and morgue workers.

This is from the very piece by Eric Boehlert that is the subject of this discussion.

Please also notice that the “Sunni elder” recanted… but that this was “after being visited by a representative of the defense minister.” Not that Boehlert is implying any threats, intimidation, or torture… he would never do such a thing without a shred of evidence, for Boehlert is an honorable man.

So are they all. All honorable men.

Continued yet again next lizard post…

Comment on this post here.

For unto Us a Child is born
Unto Us a Son is given
And the government shall be upon His shoulder
And His name shall be called Wonderful, Counsellor,
The mighty God, The everlasting Father, The Prince of Peace.

- Isaiah 9:6

Merry Christmas, dear readers. Hope your day is filled with joy and love. A few holiday links:

*Rich Galen has a lovely Christmas tribute to the troops: Six Words.

*We feature a special message from a military chaplain in Baghdad over at Hot Air and send our thanks to American troops around the world. “Peace on Earth” isn’t possible without all of the men and the women who volunteer to put their lives on the line to defend it.

*DVIDS features a terrific service–hosting more than 10,000 video greetings from the troops to their families.

*Michael Graham reflects: Hear bells and a warning

*Pope Benedict XVI’s midnight mass homily:

Dear Brothers and Sisters,

We have just heard in the Gospel the message given by the angels to the shepherds during that Holy Night, a message which the Church now proclaims to us: “To you is born this day in the city of David a Saviour, who is Christ the Lord. And this will be a sign for you: you will find a babe wrapped in swaddling clothes and lying in a manger” (Lk 2:11-12). Nothing miraculous, nothing extraordinary, nothing magnificent is given to the shepherds as a sign. All they will see is a child wrapped in swaddling clothes, one who, like all children, needs a mother’s care; a child born in a stable, who therefore lies not in a cradle but in a manger. God ’s sign is the baby in need of help and in poverty. Only in their hearts will the shepherds be able to see that this baby fulfils the promise of the prophet Isaiah, which we heard in the first reading: “For to us a child is born, to us a son is given; and the government will be upon his shoulder” (Is 9:5). Exactly the same sign has been given to us. We too are invited by the angel of God, through the message of the Gospel, to set out in our hearts to see the child lying in the manger.

God’s sign is simplicity. God’s sign is the baby. God’s sign is that he makes himself small for us. This is how he reigns. He does not come with power and outward splendour. He comes as a baby – defenceless and in need of our help. He does not want to overwhelm us with his strength. He takes away our fear of his greatness. He asks for our love: so he makes himself a child. He wants nothing other from us than our love, through which we spontaneously learn to enter into his feelings, his thoughts and his will – we learn to live with him and to practise with him that humility of renunciation that belongs to the very essence of love. God made himself small so that we could understand him, welcome him, and love him. The Fathers of the Church, in their Greek translation of the Old Testament, found a passage from the prophet Isaiah that Paul also quotes in order to show how God’s new ways had already been foretold in the Old Testament. There we read: “God made his Word short, he abbreviated it” (Is 10:23; Rom 9:28). The Fathers interpreted this in two ways. The Son himself is the Word, the Logos; the eternal Word became small – small enough to fit into a manger. He became a child, so that the Word could be grasped by us. In this way God teaches us to love the little ones. In this way he teaches us to love the weak. In this way he teaches us respect for children. The child of Bethlehem directs our gaze towards all children who suffer and are abused in the world, the born and the unborn. Towards children who are placed as soldiers in a violent world; towards children who have to beg; towards children who suffer deprivation and hunger; towards children who are unloved. In all of these it is the Child of Bethlehem who is crying out to us; it is the God who has become small who appeals to us. Let us pray this night that the brightness of God’s love may enfold all these children. Let us ask God to help us do our part so that the dignity of children may be respected. May they all experience the light of l ove, which mankind needs so much more than the material necessities of life.

And so we come to the second meaning that the Fathers saw in the phrase: “God made his Word short”. The Word which God speaks to us in Sacred Scripture had become long in the course of the centuries. It became long and complex, not just for the simple and unlettered, but even more so for those versed in Sacred Scripture, for the experts who evidently became entangled in details and in particular problems, almost to the extent of losing an overall perspective. Jesus “abbreviated” the Word – he showed us once more its deeper simplicity and unity. Everything taught by the Law and the Prophets is summed up – he says – in the command: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind… You shall love your neighbour as yourself” (Mt 22:37-40). This is everything – the whole faith is contained in this one act of love which embraces God and humanity. Yet now further questions arise: how are we to love God with all our mind, when our intellect can barely reach him? How are we to love him with all our heart and soul, when our heart can only catch a glimpse of him from afar, when there are so many contradictions in the world that would hide his face from us? This is where the two ways in which God has “abbreviated” his Word come together. He is no longer distant. He is no longer unknown. He is no longer beyond the reach of our heart. He has become a child for us, and in so doing he has dispelled all doubt. He has become our neighbour, restoring in this way the image of man, whom we often find so hard to love. For us, God has become a gift. He has given himself. He has entered time for us. He who is the Eternal One, above time, he has assumed our time and raised it to himself on high. Christmas has become the Feast of gifts in imitation of God who has given himself to us. Let us allow our heart, our soul and our mind to be touched by this fact! Among the many gifts that we buy and receive, let us not forget the true gift: to give each other something of ourselves, to give each other something of our time, to open our time to God. In this way anxiety disappears, joy is born, and the feast is created. During the festive meals of these days let us remember the Lord’s words: “When you give a dinner or a banquet, do not invite those who will invite you in return, but invite those whom no one invites and who are not able to invite you” (cf. Lk 14:12-14). This also means: when you give gifts for Christmas, do not give only to those who will give to you in return, but give to those who receive from no one and who cannot give you anything back. This is what God has done: he invites us to his wedding feast, something which we cannot reciprocate, but can only receive with joy. Let us imitate him! Let us love God and, starting from him, let us also love man, so that, starting from man, we can then rediscover God in a new way!

And so, finally, we find yet a third meaning in the saying that the Word became “brief” and “small”. The shepherds were told that they would find the child in a manger for animals, who were the rightful occupants of the stable. Reading Isaiah (1:3), the Fathers concluded that beside the manger of Bethlehem there stood an ox and an ass. At the same time they interpreted the text as symbolizing the Jews and the pagans – and thus all humanity – who each in their own way have need of a Saviour: the God who became a child. Man, in order to live, needs bread, the fruit of the earth and of his labour. But he does not live by bread alone. He needs nourishment for his soul: he needs meaning that can fill his life. Thus, for the Fathers, the manger of the animals became the symbol of the altar, on which lies the Bread which is Christ himself: the true food for our hearts. Once again we see how he became small: in the humble appearance of the host, in a small piece of bread, he gives us himself.

All this is conveyed by the sign that was given to the shepherds and is given also to us: the child born for us, the child in whom God became small for us. Let us ask the Lord to grant us the grace of looking upon the crib this night with the simplicity of the shepherds, so as to receive the joy with which they returned home (cf. Lk 2:20). Let us ask him to give us the humility and the faith with which Saint Joseph looked upon the child that Mary had conceived by the Holy Spirit. Let us ask the Lord to let us look upon him with that same love with which Mary saw him. And let us pray that in this way the light that the shepherds saw will shine upon us too, and that what the angels sang that night will be accomplished throughout the world: “Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace among men with whom he is pleased.” Amen!

Please have your bosses read this Dean Barnett Sunni-Shia Cheat Sheet over the holidays in order to avoid another Jeff Stein gotcha moment.

While you’re at it, The Truth About Muhammad would make an informative gift for the clueless.

Bryan Preston offers his recommended reading list here.

One additon to Bryan’s list: I’m reading The Shia Revival by Vali Masr. Also must-buy for Congress.

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Debbie Schlussel e-mails a note about Barnett’s FAQ: “I only browsed it, but Lebanon is majority Shia. He incorrectly says only Iraq and Iran are majority Shia. He also says the Alawis are 10% of Syria. That’s a very high number. The real number is far, far smaller.”

Reader Seamus: “Regarding Debbie Schlussel’s email saying Lebanon is majority Shia Muslims: according to Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lebanon#Lebanese_People), Christians make
up the largest ethnic group in Lebanon at 39%. Followed by Shia Muslims
35%, and Sunni at 21%. So, perhaps a technicality but I believe Dean Barnett was correct.”

We left-handed people have a special bond. At book signings, left-handers always make a point of noticing that I’m one of them. Fellow left-handers will ask which hand I shoot or bowl with (right-handed–but I crochet and sew left-handed). We all have stories of elementary school persecution. We have the same sayings:

“It’s the only thing left about me.”

“Only left-handed people are in their right minds.”

“Everyone is born right-handed. Only the greatest overcome it.”

Har-har.

Anyway, a left-handed fan passed along the latest news on our brains. Looks like we can play games and think faster than all you right-handers:

Left-handed people can think quicker when carrying out tasks such as playing computer games or playing sport, say Australian researchers.

Connections between the left and right hand sides or hemispheres of the brain are faster in left-handed people, a study in Neuropsychology shows.

The fast transfer of information in the brain makes left-handers more efficient when dealing with multiple stimuli.

Experts said left-handers tended to use both sides of the brain more easily.

Study leader Dr Nick Cherbuin from the Australian National University measured transfer time between the two sides of the brain by measuring reaction times to white dots flashed to the left and right of a fixed cross.

He then compared this with how good participants were at carrying out a task to spot matching letters in the left and right visual fields, which would require them to use both sides of the brain at the same time.

Tests in 80 right-handed volunteers showed there was a strong correlation between how quickly information was transferred across the left and right hemispheres and how quickly people spotted matching letters.

But when the tests were repeated in 20 left-handed volunteers, the researchers found that the more left-handed people were, the better they were at processing information across the two sides of the brain.

The term is “bicerebral:”

Chartered psychologist, Dr Steve Williams said left-handed people tended to be better at using both sides of the brain.

“It’s certainly very interesting. It’s always been said that left-handers are different from right-handers in that they are less consistent with their left-handedness.

“This seems to go with evidence that left-handers use both sides of the brain for language – that they are more bicerebral. They get faster at it because they’re having to use both sides of the brain more.”

Small but sweet revenge for all of who were forced to use your blasted scissors and can openers.

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Wikipedia actually keeps a list of famous left-handers. The musicians’ section is interesting in light of the latest study’s findings on bicerebral-ness.

Iran yesterday shut down access to some of the world’s most popular websites. Users were unable to open popular sites including Amazon.com and YouTube following instructions to service providers to filter them.

Similar edicts have been issued against Wikipedia, the internet encyclopaedia, IMDB.com, an online film database, and the New York Times site. Attempts to open the sites are met with a page reading: “The requested page is forbidden.”

The clampdown was ordered by senior judiciary officials in the latest phase of a campaign that has seen high-speed broadband facilities banned in an attempt to impede “corrupting” foreign films and music. It is in line with a campaign by Iran’s Islamist president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, to purge the country of western cultural influences.

Greg writes: “There’s a good quip to be made about Iran banning The Times I’m sure, but it’s evading me at the moment.”

Indeed, there’s something richly bemusing about Iran banning the website of every terrorist’s favorite newspaper.

It’s equally bemusing to see the Iranian jihadists banning YouTube–every terrorist’s favorite video sharing site.

Guess banning all of us anti-jihadists wasn’t enough to keep you off the mullahs’ target list, eh, YouTube?

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Reader Andrea e-mails: “Perhaps Ahmadinejad just wants to avoid reading all those American responses to his letter!”