If anyone is interested, you can hear my interview with Radio Open Source on tonight show, [...]

But what a pity that Samar Jarrah came on last! She was, I thought, the single most illuminating guest, but her slot was the one when many if not most listeners are beginning to experience attention fatigue. (We’re Americans, after all.) So, I recommend to all you ROS listeners who’ve been silent on the blog to give it another listen—just for the show’s final guest. You won’t regret it, I promise. (Chris was quite good in that stint too.)

Unlike fiddlesticks I didn’t think Chris overly friendly to the ‘al-Jazeera concept’. (sorry f.s., but what else can you expect from a pinko commie radical like me!) My only critique is that As’ad AbuKhalil was entirely right to dispute the notion of an ‘Arab mind’. This is a shorthand stereotype like the threadbare ‘American People’, that means essentially nothing. There are as many Arab minds as there are Arabs, and as many American minds as Americans, and I tire of the politicians who claim to speak for the mythical ‘American People’. Enough already.

Aside from that, thanks again for the show. It’s just the sort of illumination we prize ROS for.

For a more substantial discussion on this issue listen to today’s program On Point on WBUR.

Sorry Chris, but you dounded like you were trying out for a job at al Jezeera.

If anyone is interested, you can hear my interview with Radio Open Source on tonight show, The al-Jazeera Effect. The show will be on air at midnight GMT, which is too late for me to be on live (3:00 am – local Bahrain time).
My host – Chris Lydon – …

http://www.europundits.blogspot.com/

“UPDATE: Immediately after being deposed, but before going into exile, Khruschev had a brief and secret meeting with Brezhnez in the Kremlin.

He gave his successor the key to a secret drawer in his desk and told him: “I’m leaving you three letters numbered one to three in that drawer; if there’s some huge crisis in the USSR, a crisis that you cannot solve in the usual ways and with which you cannot cope at all, open the first letter and follow the instructions; do the same with the next letters if there are further crises�.

Some years later Brezhnev sees himself in the midst of such a crisis and opens the first letter. It says: “Blame me. Yours truly, Khruschev�. That’s what he does and he overcomes the crisis. Time passes and there’s a second crisis. The second letter reads: “Blame the Jews�. It works. Eventually, there’s a third crisis, even worse than the earlier ones. Brezhnev sees no way out and opens the third letter. It says: “Write three letters�.

Since it doesn’t look as if the cartoon crisis could be blamed on the US, Bush, the Jews, Sharon, the usual suspects, what will Europe and the MSM do now: write three letters?�