<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->Letter in the Daily Times 07 July 2006
http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/default.asp?p..._7-7-2006_pg3_8
Defence II

Sir: This letter is in reference to “Defence expenditure and pragmatic policies” (daily Times, July 5) by Nikhat Shaheen. India’s Defence expenditure vis-à-vis Pakistan’s defence spending is based on the following realities: India’s maritime boundary is seven times bigger than that of Pakistan; India’s land area is four times that of Pakistan’s; India’s population is seven hundred percent greater than Pakistan’s; and India’s economy is seven times greater than Pakistan’s economy. Therefore, it stands to reason that India’s defence capability and expenditure should be between five to seven times greater than Pakistan’s. Hence, it is naïve for the Pakistani intelligentsia to expect India to spend as much on defence as Pakistan does considering such a situation will result in greatly reducing India’s ability to defend itself from any external threats, from Pakistan or elsewhere.

At this juncture China’s economy is twice that of India but its defence capability and expenditure is, in real terms, more than thrice that of India. Thus Pakistan should reduce its defence spending to at least one-fifth or one-seventh that of India. <b>As far as Pakistanis’ fear of India invading Pakistan is concerned, it would be unreasonable to continue with this belief given that India is already burdened with a population of over 1.1 billion people without trying to take charge of an additional 165 million Pakistanis. </b> <!--emo&--><img src='style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/biggrin.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='biggrin.gif' /><!--endemo-->
NK WADHERA
UK
<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->

Archive/Link to Part-1
http://indiaforumarchives.blogspot.com/200...n-theories.html
______________________________________________________

Husky,

Why should the Indologists go for the simple explanation when witzelian "complex scenarios" are always possible. You see, absolutely nothing can discourage the Indologist, heir to the precious enlightenment. See here:

<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->wiki on horse domestication
<i>The traditional scenario, in which the horse would have been domesticated in one isolated locale in the 5th millennium BC, is not without some serious anthropological puzzles.</i><b> For instance, how could the Ukraine's indigenous nomadic hunter-gatherers proceed to the sophistication of proto-Tocharian disk-wheeled ox-drawn wagons in such a short time span? </b>[1] Use of the wheel in this fashion commonly appears much later in the historical record (see Wheel), and wagon construction techniques require advances in carpentry that might seem beyond the reach of Neolithic peoples (see History of Ukraine). <i>Also questioned is why these advanced peoples suddenly appear and then disappear from the local archaeological record.</i> External influences are suggested but unknown; others may suggest transported evidence <!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->

The author should learn from the Indologists how to counteract "serious anthropological puzzles".

The civilizing gypsies from SSVC sindh-punjab, famous for their ox-drawn wagons, could certainly account for the sudden and extraordinary rise in two-bit ukraine's material culture.

<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin--><b>Sack Ramadoss </b>
The Pioneer News Desk
He is a risk to India's health sector ---- Ever since taking charge as Union Health Minister with the advent of the UPA Government, Mr Anbumani Ramadoss, whose <b>credentials as a medical practitioner do not merit comment, has been going about inflicting enormous damage to the country's health infrastructure with single-minded devotion.</b> From insisting on meddling in the affairs of the Indian Medical Council to poking his nose in the setting up and management of private medical colleges, <b>from authorising bulk purchase of drugs like the anti-bird flu vaccine that are destined to rot away in Government stores at the taxpayers' expense to promoting individuals of questionable repute, his objectionable actions have successfully sullied both his image as well as the office he holds but which he least deserves. </b>Mr Ramadoss's already bruised reputation has taken a fresh beating following his unseemly and uncalled for spat with Dr P Venugopal, Director of the prestigious All-India Institute of Medical Sciences, with the explicit purpose of grabbing control over this premier health facility with a <b>Rs 500-crore budget</b>. It is unthinkable that a Union Minister should get involved with minor administrative affairs of an autonomous institution, slyly ordering the transfer of officials while the Director is on leave. But this is precisely what Mr Ramadoss, true to his style of functioning, has done at AIIMS. That the Minister's gross interference would leave Dr Venugopal - or, for that matter, any self-respecting Director - incandescent with rage was only to be expected. Nor is it surprising that Dr Venugopal, known for his professional accomplishment and personal integrity, qualities that are alien to unprincipled politicians, should have threatened to resign from his post unless the Government reins in its Health Minister. The anger among doctors, who have threatened to put in their papers, and students at AIIMS over the Minister's outrageous conduct bears testimony to the righteous stand taken by Dr Venugopal.

And how has the Minister responded? By justifying his brazen interference, and <b>callously asking Dr Venugopal to resign if he so desires and threatening to take disciplinary action against a doctor who has spent his entire life setting up what is perhaps the best cardio-thoracic-vascular surgery facility in the country. Both commitment and selfless dedication, it would seem, have ceased to matter for the UPA Government.</b> Instead, Ministers utterly lacking in scruples command a premium simply because they represent partners in the ruling alliance whose support overrides all other considerations, including those of probity and rectitude in public life. Here is a Minister whose presence in Government poses a serious risk to the nation's health infrastructure, a Minister who violates norms of propriety, a Minister who disregards the spirit, if not letter, of the Supreme Court's order on the anti-quota agitation, a Minister who throws his weight around and tries to bully people into submission by flaunting his political clout. India can do without such a Minister. Admittedly, stripping Mr Ramadoss of his portfolio is a tough call for the Prime Minister. But that call needs to be taken, and taken now, to save AIIMS.  <!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->

Ramdoss is diverting funds to TN, appointing his own people, transfering those who are doing good work and pocketing money on every deal.

The Ministry of External Affairs today named <b>Dr Shashi Tharoor</b> for the position of Secretary General of the United Nations. The term of Mr. Kofi Annan, the current incumbent, ends at the end of 2006.

Dr. Tharoor is currently the Under Secretary General of UN for Communications and Public Relations. He is also a critically acclaimed author of several fiction and non-fiction books.

<b>Something similar in EVR (referred as “Periyar” in parts of Tamil Nadu) and Bin Laden?
</b>Every action of EVR was aimed at wiping out Brahmins from the land he was born... The followers of him and the organization he founded, the Dravidar Kazhagam (DK) were all busy only in abusing a small, minority section of people in Tamil Nadu in the name of establishing equality. People in a small town near Salem were assaulted several times just because they were Brahmins, until almost all they decided to flee away. Most of the Brahmins live under the fear of being attacked by these DK activists. It is strange that EVR is being portrayed as “humanist”.

Perhaps he did not have access to the kind of arms that Bin Laden had, but these two men appear to be pretty similar in their thought process on eliminating whom they hate.

In almost every talk of EVR, he was attacking those who had faith on God and he and the thugs of DK had painted the whole of Chennai in 70s with slogan “all those who believe in god are fools and idiots”. (Read god as only Hindu gods, because these thugs had no guts to take on against Islam and Christianity, according to DK, those Gods were OK!) . Many of these graffiti ridiculed the concept of “temple “.

So, suddenly why should they (the DK and their political arm DMK) push the agenda of allowing anyone to perform “Poojai” in the temple? Yet another disparate attempt to eliminate that miniscule Brahmin community who live on temple jobs. EVR and DK miserably failed in stopping the masses from thronging the temples in their State. The statistics indicate that the crowd to Thiruvannamali alone for Girivalam is surging at over 300% year on year. Just an hour drive from Tamil Nadu’s border is the country’s holiest site, the Tirumala. So much so that the Pilots flying in or out of Chennai often tilt the aircraft to give “ darshan” of the holy “gopuram” of the Tirumala. Perhaps one of the best managed organizations in the world, the TTD has done much more than any “humanist” could do to address the needs of the poor and under privileged.

Temples and Hindu Gods are here to stay as it has been through the Mogul period. So the best that DK and the EVR‘s admirers can do is to attempt to eliminate the temples as they have tried for years to eliminate the Brahmin “archakas”.

Will DK and the EVR followers now step up the campaign to stop people from going to temples ? Why have they not prevented Christian from going to the Church or a Muslim from going to the mosque or a Sikh from going to Gurdwara?

Leave alone assaulting Muslims or Christians, can the DK thugs stop a single “ Kowari” this year going to the holy city of Haridwar. The National Highway, NH4 , all the way from Ghaziabad to Haridwar is shut down during the Kawarias movement. Perhaps millions of people will be walking that 250Kms stretch . Can DK do anything about stopping those Hindus who have a lifetime wish to see the Lord at Bardinath ? Thousands, many at 70 + of age brave one of the toughest terrain of the mighty Himalayas to enter the holy shrine at Badrinath. And, for sure the vehicular traffic to Badrinath is doubling every year, despite of severe restrictions on the timing of the vehicle movements. The growth of faith on the Sri Mataji at Vaishnodevi, the Lord at Kedarnath, Amarnath and Mount Kailash is only increasing every year !

According to EVR , each of those millions of Indians who live on faith are “ fools”.

Bin Laden had his way to shatter the WTO, but EVR ‘s way of attacking the people with faith on Hindu gods are not very different.

How could EVR be called a “ humanist” ?

Tamil Nadu has a 69% reservation and is prospering
On the face of it, it looks like reservations are good for society

Let us start digging deeper

In Tamil Nadu, several upper castes that normally would be considered dwija in
north India are classified as Shudras or OBC

Banias - Chettiars are OBC
kayasthas - kanakku pillai ( counting pillai ) are OBC
Vellalas - Rich super landlords ( thakur type ) are OBC
Naickers - Descendants of Vijayanagar soldiers are OBC
Reddiars - Reddy migrants in tamil nadu ( landlords ) are OBC

In short the entire Dwija segment , minus brahmins is OBC

Much of this is due to historical stupidity of tamil brahmins
They were very reluctant to hand out dwija certification
For example, in Andhra, the Komati Chetty ( bania ) is a dwija,
whereas in Tamil Nadu, the Chettiar was not granted dwija and is an OBC

P.Chidambaram for example is an OBC

I am going to call this segment - OBC-Dwija or Dwijas masquerading as OBC

The net result is that in Tamil Nadu, the only Dwijas are brahmins,
Meaning in Tamil Nadu, the Dwijas are less than 3% of the population vs 25% in north India

In tamil nadu, the OBC-Dwijas have a 30% reservation
in addition they can compete in the open seats and possibly get 15% out of the 31% open seats

So 31% open seats are gotten by brahmins and OBC-Dwijas
30% OBC seats are gotten by OBC-Dwijas

Real OBC are called MBC ( most backward castes ) yadavas etc
They get 20%
Dalits get 18%, ST gets 1%

So

Dwijas -
Tamil Nadu - 61%, All India 50%

OBC -
Tamil Nadu - 20%, All India 27%

Dalits
Tamil Nadu - 18%, All India 16%

ST
Tamil Nadu - 1%, All India 7%

As you can see , Tamil Nadu is over-represented in Dwijas and is run by a higher average IQ group than the rest of India and no surprise it is doing well

Of course by not driving out the tamil brahmin they could do even better

<b>Myth of Aryan Invasion Update</b>
Written by Dr. David Frawley

2005 Edition Preface

The Myth of the Aryan Invasion was first written in 1994 in order to summarize important new information on the ancient history of India that refutes commonly held views on the subject inherited from the nineteenth century. It was a condensation of longer material from books of mine like Gods, Sages and Kings, Vedic Aryans and the Origins of Civilization (with N.S. Rajaram) and In Search of the Cradle of Civilization (with Georg Feuerstein and Subhash Kak). The 2001 update reflected my recent book Rigveda and the History of India that pushed the Vedic horizon further into the South India.

Its time to start recording every event related to War against Maoist in India.

We should list GOI failures and inability to help state Govt.
At the end we will know GOI objectives. As we always suspected UPA is encouraging Maoist by doing nothing or turning its face otherside or sabotaging state govt efforts. Prime reason, UPA had used maoist during election and finishing opposition.

<b>With all good wishes to Gill and his team. </b>

<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin--><b>Gill crafts ultimate battle plan in Chhattisgarh: Hit Maoists hard, hit them sure  </b>
Pramod Kr Singh | New Delhi 
Supercop KPS Gill, now the security adviser to Chhattisgarh Government, has outlined his plan of action to stamp out Maoists from the State. Gill, credited with winning the war on terrorism in Punjab, has already submitted his blueprint to the Home Ministry bosses.

<b>The Gill doctrine is:</b> Gather intelligence about the strength and capabilities of the Maoist groups active in Chhattisgarh, identify their hideouts, train and modernise the State Police, then hit them hard in a sudden and well-coordinated attack.

Gill also wants helicopters for aerial reconnaissance and forces paradropped in Maoist strongholds.

The thrust of the Gill doctrine is to launch a swift offensive giving little time to Maoist guerrillas to regroup and retaliate.
 
The supercop has also requested the Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) to provide 32 battalions of Central Para-Military Forces to launch an all-out attack on Maoist outfits.

<b>However, MHA mandarins are believed to have conveyed it to him and the State Government that providing so many battalions was not possible. Gill scaled down the demand to 18 battalions.  <!--emo&:thumbdown--><img src='style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/thumbsdownsmileyanim.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='thumbsdownsmileyanim.gif' /><!--endemo-->

Again, the MHA officials expressed their inability. They said they could spare only six more battalions at this juncture as there are already seven battalions of Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) deployed in the State.</b>  <!--emo&:thumbdown--><img src='style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/thumbsdownsmileyanim.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='thumbsdownsmileyanim.gif' /><!--endemo-->

<b>According to sources in the Government, the Prime Minister's Office has put a spanner into Gill's plan as it first wants the State Government to raise its own special force.  <!--emo&:thumbdown--><img src='style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/thumbsdownsmileyanim.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='thumbsdownsmileyanim.gif' /><!--endemo-->
 
Further, the PMO does not agree with Gill's suggestion of commando-type operations to flush out the Maoists.</b> <!--emo&:thumbdown--><img src='style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/thumbsdownsmileyanim.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='thumbsdownsmileyanim.gif' /><!--endemo-->

The PMO spanner apart, the State Government has outlined its own policy to deal with the Maoists. The State Government has identified places in forests in the Bastar region where Maoists are known to have strong bases. Because, the Gill action-plan stresses the need to identify places where the Maoists can be engaged in a calculated way.

Initially, the supercop wanted the anti-Maoist campaign to begin before the Monsoon. However, the State Government officials were of the opinion that it would be better to conduct the operation during the rains as the militants come out of their dens during the season, making them easy targets.

However, the MHA disagreed. Its officials said that thick foliage during the Monsoon made boobytraps and landmines laid by the militants near impossible to detect, which would mean heavy casualty for the security forces.

As of now, according to State and MHA officials, the anti-Maoist operation will begin after the Monsoon.
 
<b>The MHA is believed to have promised to rush Central forces to Chhattisgarh as tackling Maoists in the State is on top of its agenda.</b>

Chhattisgarh is one of the worst Maoist-affected States in the country. Maoists are active in eight out of the State's 16 districts, Bastar, Dantewada, Kanker, Surguja, Jashpur, Koriya, Rajnandgaon, and Kawardha.
 
An anti-Maoist movement, euphemistically called Salva Zudoom (peace initiative) is currently going on in the state to rope in villagers against Maoist violence.

As many as 250 villages of the Bastar region have been mobilised under this movement, which commenced in mid-June 2005. Apart from holding relatively large meetings, releasing anti-Maoist posters and pamphlets and maintaining vigils at the local level, the villagers have killed three Maoists.

The MHA was willing to provide as much force as Chhattisgarh Government demands but it should also raise a Special Task Force (STF) on its own to counter the Maoist charge, a senior MHA official said.

The Chhattisgarh Government has also adopted an Intelligence-gathering model, which was presented by the BSF during the recently held meeting to tackle the Maoist problem. State Chief Secretary told the Home Secretary the State was doing everything to further augment its Intelligence setup.
<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->

Let me list recent achievement of UPA and appointed PM of India in J&K

0) Ready to let go Siachien.
1) Hindus are still butchered by terrorist
2) Called Army to become civil, when he will make his own cabinet civil?
3) Terrorist refused to join Spineless Man mohan for chai-panni /roundtable
4) Coward Mudmohan suddenly rushed back to Delhi.
5) Setup committee to let go J&K from India.
6) Raising reservation statement from J&K with his soiled pants.

India's bad karma, we get such a useless as PM and politicans.

This time the crocodile won't wait
Londonistan by Melanie Phillips Buy this book

Reviewed by Spengler

In retrospect, it seems oafish of Neville Chamberlain, Britain's prime minister in 1938, to have betrayed Czechoslovakia to Nazi rule in return for the empty promise of peace. Yet an overwhelming English majority looked with horror on the prospect of confrontation with Germany and a new world war, until Adolf Hitler forced England's hand by invading Poland. "The appeaser hopes the crocodile will eat him last," said Winston Churchill. Today's crocodiles may not be so patient.

Opposing voices in 1938 rang lonely and shrill, and just as shrill today sounds Daily Mail columnist Melanie Phillips in her portrayal of an emasculated Britain ashamed of its own national identity and anxious to appease the "clerical fascism" of the jihadis. That will change, perhaps even before the print is quite dry on her new book. She warns that the West faces a religious war with Islam. I concur, and recommend Londonistan as indispensable background.

Britain, Phillips warns, is reaping what it has sown. A large minority of British Muslims are disaffected at best and seditious at worst. Phillips cites a 2004 Home Office survey finding that 26% of British Muslims felt no loyalty to Britain, 13% supported terrorism, and about 1% (up to 20,000 individuals) were "actively engaged" in terrorism or support for terrorism.

Another poll found that 32% of British Muslims agreed that "Western society is decadent and immoral and that Muslims should seek to bring it to an end". In the event of a violent collision between the West and Iran, for example, civil conflict might arise in Britain on a scale resembling that in Northern Ireland in the 1970s.

Phillips accuses British security services with complicity in the gestation of a terrorist apparatus in London. Her documentation of overt terrorist activity centered in London is exhaustive, and raises the question of why the open scandal was tolerated. Saudi, Algerian and Egyptian requests for extradition of suspected terrorists were refused, and Arab diplomats vented their frustration over British recalcitrance in public.

A cynically narrow concept of national interest guided this policy, she argues, charging that MI6 (Military Intelligence Section 6, now officially known as the Secret Intelligence Service) believed "that if the Islamists were being left undisturbed to conduct their activities on the assumption that they would not then attack Britain".

But that can explain only part of the story, and Phillips searches for deeper causes of Britain's cowardice. "Denial" is a recurrent theme. She cites an unnamed "foreign intelligence source" as follows:

During the 1990s, many attempts were made to enlighten the British about what was happening. But they refused to see this problem as having a religious character. If this was a religious problem, it became a religious confrontation - and the specter of a religious war was too horrendous. A religious war is different from any other war because you are dealing with absolute beliefs and the room for compromise is very limited. Religious wars are very protracted and bloody, and often end up with a very high toll of lives.

That is not denial, though, but revulsion. The British establishment may have recoiled in horror from the prospect of religious war precisely because it has sufficient institutional memory to know just what such wars entail. Religious war, however, is precisely what it will have, on the worst possible terms, and with an extensive fifth column in place.

Successful manipulation of religious conflict is a lost art. Cardinal Richelieu and his successor Jules Mazarin kept the Thirty Years' War aflame in Germany by subsidizing new entrants into the fray, notably Sweden's Gustavus Adolphus (King Gustavus II), deploying French forces when proxies were not available.

The carnage claimed the lives of more than half of the German speakers and left France the dominant power in continental Europe until 1870. On a smaller scale, Britain played such divide-and-conquer games throughout its imperial history, most obviously by transplanting Scottish Protestants to Northern Ireland. Some in India read malice aforethought into the 1947 partition of the sub-continent. Britain no longer has malefactors with the iron stomach and broad culture of a T E Lawrence or a Sir Richard Burton to undertake such projects.

Phillips soft-pedals the imperial sins for which today's problems are part payment. As Phillips observes, the legacy of Britain's imperial past in the form of Northern Ireland distracted the security services' attention from the Islamist threat:

Instead of studying the Middle East as a cause for concern, they were staring across the Irish Sea at Northern Ireland, where a terrorist insurrection against the UK had been in progress since the 1970s. The mindset, on both sides of the Atlantic, was that terrorism was tied to discrete grievances against individual states. And with the end of the Cold War, the notion of a global threat rooted in ideology was assumed to be dead and buried.

But the Northern Ireland disaster was more than a distraction. Britain has a glorious past, and its role in defining individual rights and representative democracy is central to the success of the West. But real crimes can be laid at Britain's doorstep, including the mistreatment of the Irish over centuries. That does not excuse the thuggishness of the Irish Republicans, but it does help explain the moral palsy that afflicts today's British establishment.

Former US president Jimmy Carter's ability to see the better side of his country's worst enemies comes to mind. In this month's issue of The Atlantic Monthly, Mark Bowden reports that Carter forbade the Delta Force commandos to use deadly forces against the kidnappers of American hostages in Tehran in the ill-fated 1980 rescue attempt.

In his ignorance and provincialism, Carter could not see any conflict in terms other than the black-white confrontation during the US South in the 1960s. Palestinians, Iranians, or other self-defined victims of Western imperialism are the blacks of Selma in the diminutive mind of the former president. But the civil-rights movement in the United States brooks no comparison to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It was a Christian-led movement appealing to the conscience of other Christians under the law of the land, and succeeded with minimal loss of life.

Black and white Baptists made their peace in the US South a generation ago. Protestants and Catholics yet might make peace in Northern Ireland. But that is an entirely different matter, says Phillips: "True, the IRA [Irish Republican Army] were Catholics and their adversaries were Protestants. But their cause was not Catholicism. It was a united Ireland. They did not want to impose the authority of the pope upon Britain ... There is simply no comparison to the agenda of the Islamists who want to defeat the West in the name of Islam."

The institution that should understand this best, namely the Church of England, seems most eager to liquidate itself. Notes Phillips: "In America, the churches have been in the forefront of the defense of Western values. Some of the strongest support for Israel comes from evangelical Christians. In Britain, by contrast, the Church of England has been in the forefront of the retreat from the Judeo-Christian heritage."

The Archbishop of York, the black Ugandan Dr John Sentamu, praises the British Empire and the culture it spread around the world, whereas the present Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, apologizes for taking "cultural captives" through the export of English hymns and liturgy. Sadly, the "cultural captives", mainly black African converts, are all that is left of the C of E. Its evangelical wing, represented by former archbishop of Canterbury Lord Carey - a vocal critic of Islam in the past two years - cannot compete with dissenting churches, and the High Anglican side barely breathes.

It is a bit late in time for a national church. The Roman Catholic Church can make a case that Benedict XVI has the right to head a universal church by virtue of his apostolic succession from St Peter, and thus can forgive sins in Jesus' own stead. But why should Queen Elizabeth II, much less the overtly Islamophile Prince Charles, enjoy this privilege? Perhaps the moment is ripe for the remnants of English Catholicism to join the Roman Church, and for British Protestants to find their way to more robust dissenting denominations.

In any case, Western liberalism, including the sexual habits of English curates, does not appeal to Muslims. On the contrary, Phillips says:

British Muslims are overwhelmingly horrified and disgusted by the louche and dissolute behavior of a Britain that has torn up the notion of respectability. They observe the alcoholism, drug abuse and pornography, the breakdown of family life and the encouragement of promiscuity, and find themselves there in opposition to their host society's guiding values. What they are recoiling from, of course, is the breakdown of Western values. After a visit to the United States in 1948, Sayed Qutb wrote: "Humanity today is living in a large brothel!"

Revulsion and contempt color Muslim attitudes toward the British leftists who most desire to appease them. That is not a recipe for co-existence but for escalation, as last year's subway bombings should have made clear. But the issue now is not terrorism but rather outright war.

The British authorities may have turned a blind eye to terrorism directed against others, and may even have dragged their feet at confronting the terrorist threat at home that erupted in the July 7, 2005, subway bombings. Terrorism is dreadful but, like many nasty things, one can develop a tolerance for it. Now it is not merely terrorism that the West confronts but a strategic debacle of intolerable proportions in the form of Iranian acquisition of nuclear weapons.

In that sense Melanie Phillips' book comes too late, for it reports a set of circumstances shortly to be overthrown by events. She is writing about 1938, and we are entering 1939, when the West will have to respond to an external challenge in a way that it never could to an internal threat. Britain will have the religious war it sought to dodge.

Londonistan by Melanie Phillips. Encounter Books: New York 2006. ISBN: 1594031444. Price: US$25.95, 213 pages.

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Front_Page/HE23Aa01.html