571)Political Science Professor Salim Mansur Reminds Muslims They Face Future Of Nightmarish Totalitarianism Unless They Wake Up And Smell The Coffee

"Hence any Shariah compliance by the West undermines the struggle of Muslims for reform of their societies and defeat of the Islamists.
And placing any constraint on freedom of speech means in effect colluding with the Islamists."


Unveiling the truth behind Shariah

By SALIM MANSUR, QMI Agency

February 20, 2010

Let’s revise the famous opening sentence of Marx and Engel’s Communist Manifesto to state there is a real peril, instead of a spectre, haunting the West — the peril of acquiescing to the Shariah-based demands of the Islamists.

At the top of the Islamist demands is to make defamation of religion a punishable offence. Since Judaism and Christianity are open to criticism, even ridicule in free and secular societies of the West, such a demand is to make an exception for Islam.

The trial of Geert Wilders in Amsterdam for offending Muslims indicates the extent to which Holland, one of the most open European countries, has tilted in the direction of becoming a “Shariah-compliant” society.

Holland is not alone in this effort to appease the Islamists. Across the West, a chill has fallen over the fundamental right to think and speak freely about Islam like any other subject of public interest.

The not-so-curious fact that the mainstream media remains silent by not exposing the travesty in bringing Wilders to court for expressing his thoughts on Islam — it also remained silent by not publishing the Danish cartoons that incited a large number of Muslims around the world to rage and commit acts of violence — is proof of how great is the peril of western societies conceding de facto or de jure to Islamist demands for Shariah-based rulings.

There is terrible irony in this. Muslims remain the first victims of a Shariah-governed society, and the imposition of Shariah is the primary cause of the contemporary retardation of Muslim countries.

But the Islamists have succeeded in making the argument that the faith in, and the practice of, Islam is confined by the Shariah, and anything outside of it is non-Islam.

This argument deliberately obscures the fact that the Shariah is a legal system devised under Arab supremacy during the last three centuries of the first millennium and it was based on a reading of the Qur’an that reflected the prejudices of that age in history.


Redundant

The Shariah is not merely outdated, it is mostly redundant for any Muslim society straining to be relevant to the demands of the modern age of science and democracy.

Muslims struggling for democracy and freedom understand best that Islam cannot be reduced to the Shariah, and their progress demands the eventual abolition of the Shariah.

Mohamed Charfi, professor emeritus in the law faculty in Tunis and a former education minister in Tunisia writing as a modern Muslim, explains how the Shariah is contextually bound to the thinking of the ancient and medieval world and, consequently, resistant to any reform.

Charfi writes the Shariah or “Muslim law is based on three fundamental inequalities: The superiority of men over women, of Muslims over non-Muslims, and of free persons over slaves.
It recognizes the maximum advantages in the case of a free and rich Muslim male, and the fewest rights in the case of a non-Muslim female slave … Muslim law is therefore fundamentally discriminatory.”

Hence any Shariah compliance by the West undermines the struggle of Muslims for reform of their societies and defeat of the Islamists.

And placing any constraint on freedom of speech means in effect colluding with the Islamists.

http://www.lfpress.com/comment/columnists/salim_mansur/2010/02/19/12947426.html


Other Posts On My Blog By Salim Mansur:

Political Science Professor Salim Mansur, Coreligionist, Fellow Rightwinger; Not All University Professors Are Pinko Lefty Commie Islamist Apologists
http://gonashgo.blogspot.com/2010/02/570political-science-professor-salim.html

Recipe For Armageddon: Arab Muslims And Not So Arab Muslims, Snakes Slithering In The Sewers Of Antisemitism; Salim Mansur Soliloquizes
http://gonashgo.blogspot.com/2010/02/564recipe-for-armageddon-arab-muslims.html

Salim Mansur on free speech as being a crux of western secular democracies; Cannot stand the free speech heat?: Best return to totalitarian bliss
http://gonashgo.blogspot.com/2010/02/557salim-mansur-on-free-speech-as-being.html

Salim Mansur Speaks My Mind With A Clarity That Is Astonishing: "Target The Terrorists, Not The Public"; Quote Of Easy Nash
http://gonashgo.blogspot.com/2010/01/541salim-mansur-speaks-my-mind-with.html

Apologies don't quell anarchy
http://www.torontosun.com/comment/columnists/salim_mansur/2009/04/18/9153766-sun.html

Palestinians can learn from Jews
http://www.torontosun.com/comment/columnists/salim_mansur/2009/03/14/8744891-sun.html


Easy Nash

If there are 23,000 jihadist websites and blogsites out there in cyberspace, there is no reason why we should not create 100,000 non-jihadist websites and blogsites: Easy Nash(2007).
If my Blog was a four year undergraduate degree I guess my major would be Science and Religion and my minor would be Politics: Easy Nash(2010).
The mother of all insecurities: 1.6 billion Muslims on the planet and they lather themselves into a dingbatty islamofascist rage if one or two Muslims happen to be pro-zionist but will gleefully quote those Jews who happen to be anti-zionist: Easy Nash(2010).

570)Political Science Professor Salim Mansur,Coreligionist,Fellow Rightwinger;Not All University Professors Are Pinko Lefty Commie Islamist Apologists

Salim Mansur is an Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Western Ontario in Canada. He is a columnist for the London Free Press, the Toronto Sun and ProudToBeCanadian.ca, and has contributed to various publications including National Review, the Middle East Forum and Frontpagemag. He often presents analysis on the Muslim world, Islam, South Asia, Middle East.

He is a member of the Board of Directors for the Center for Islamic Pluralism based in Washington, D.C., a Senior Fellow with the Canadian Coalition for Democracies, and an academic-consultant with the Center for Security Policy in Washington, D.C. He has been a consultant with CIDA on development issues and has published widely in academic journals on foreign policy matters and area studies of the Middle East and South Asia.

Mansur is featured on the documentary Obsession: Radical Islam's War Against the West. He also unsuccessfully ran for the Canadian Alliance party in 2000.

He is an Ismaili Muslim.

At a press conference on October 2, 2008, Mansur stated that "Islam is my private life, my conscience...[but] my faith does not take precedence over my duties...to Canada and its constitution, which I embrace freely;" "I am first and most importantly a Canadian;" "only in a free society will you find Islam as a faith and not a political religion." Mansur also criticized New Democratic Party Leader Jack Layton, whom Mansur said "has gone to bed with Islamists", because he is running candidates in Ontario and Quebec who are closely identified with the push for Sharia law.[1]

Salim Mansur is an Associate Professor in the faculty of social sciences, University of Western Ontario, London (Ontario, Canada), and teaches in the department of political science. He is the co-editor of The Indira-Rajiv Years: the Indian Economy and Polity 1966-1991and has published widely in academic journals such as Jerusalem Quarterly, The Journal of South Asian and Middle Eastern Studies,American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences, Arab Studies Quarterly, and Middle East Quarterly.

Mansur writes a weekly column for Toronto Sun and his Sun columns are frequently published across Canada. in He also writes a monthly column for the biweekly magazine Western Standard (Calgary), and periodically for National Post (Canada), and has published in the Globe and Mail (Toronto).

Mansur was born in Calcutta, India and moved to Canada where he completed his studies, receiving a doctorate in political science from the University of Toronto. Before joining the University of Western Ontario he worked as a Research Fellow at the Canadian Institute for International Peace and Security in Ottawa. Mansur is Canadian director of the Centre for Islamic Pluralism and an academic consultant with the Center for Security Policy based in Washington, D.C. as well as a Senior Fellow with the Canadian Coalition for Democracies based in Toronto. Mansur remains active in public affairs, and is a frequent analyst and commentator on radio and television, invited as a panelist in PBS Jim Lehrer Hour and recently participated in the Doha Debates held in Doha, Qatar and broadcast on the BBC World Forum from London, England. Mansur was presented in September 2006 with the American Jewish Congress’s Stephen S. Wise ‘Profile in Courage’ award.

http://www.islamicpluralism.eu/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salim_Mansur


Other Posts On My Blog By Salim Mansur:

Recipe For Armageddon: Arab Muslims And Not So Arab Muslims, Snakes Slithering In The Sewers Of Antisemitism; Salim Mansur Soliloquizes
http://gonashgo.blogspot.com/2010/02/564recipe-for-armageddon-arab-muslims.html

Salim Mansur on free speech as being a crux of western secular democracies; Cannot stand the free speech heat?: Best return to totalitarian bliss
http://gonashgo.blogspot.com/2010/02/557salim-mansur-on-free-speech-as-being.html

Salim Mansur Speaks My Mind With A Clarity That Is Astonishing: "Target The Terrorists, Not The Public"; Quote Of Easy Nash
http://gonashgo.blogspot.com/2010/01/541salim-mansur-speaks-my-mind-with.html

Apologies don't quell anarchy
http://www.torontosun.com/comment/columnists/salim_mansur/2009/04/18/9153766-sun.html

Palestinians can learn from Jews
http://www.torontosun.com/comment/columnists/salim_mansur/2009/03/14/8744891-sun.html


Easy Nash

If there are 23,000 jihadist websites and blogsites out there in cyberspace, there is no reason why we should not create 100,000 non-jihadist websites and blogsites: Easy Nash(2007).
If my Blog was a four year undergraduate degree I guess my major would be Science and Religion and my minor would be Politics: Easy Nash(2010).
The mother of all insecurities: 1.6 billion Muslims on the planet and they lather themselves into a dingbatty islamofascist rage if one or two Muslims happen to be pro-zionist but will gleefully quote those Jews who happen to be anti-zionist: Easy Nash(2010).

569)The Full Story; Dr Shaf Keshavjee, Master Surgeon, Brilliant Scientist: The Man Who Gives The Gift Of Breath

"Nature is the great daily book of God whose secrets must be found and used for the well-being of humanity"(Aga Khan III, Radio Pakistan, Karachi, Pakistan, February 19th 1950)

"In fact this world is a book in which you see inscribed the writings of God the Almighty"(Nasir Khusraw, 11th century Fatimid Ismaili cosmologist-philosopher-poet)

"A thousand years ago, my forefathers, the Fatimid imam-caliphs of Egypt, founded al-Azhar University and the Academy of Knowledge in Cairo. In the Islamic tradition, they viewed the discovery of knowledge as a way to understand, so as to serve better God's creation, to apply knowledge and reason to build society and shape human aspirations"(Aga Khan IV, Speech, 25th June 2004, Matola, Mozambique.)

"Education has been important to my family for a long time. My forefathers founded al-Azhar University in Cairo some 1000 years ago, at the time of the Fatimid Caliphate in Egypt. Discovery of knowledge was seen by those founders as an embodiment of religious faith, and faith as reinforced by knowledge of workings of the Creator's physical world. The form of universities has changed over those 1000 years, but that reciprocity between faith and knowledge remains a source of strength"(Aga Khan IV, 27th May1994, Cambridge, Massachusets, U.S.A.)

In Shia Islam, intellect is a key component of faith. Intellect allows us to understand the creation of God"(Aga Khan IV, July 23rd 2008, Lisbon, Portugal)

http://gonashgo.blogspot.com/2008/09/400blogpost-four-hundred-knowledge.html



The man who gives the gift of breath

February 21, 2010

Noor Javed

Staff Reporter

In a state-of-the-art presentation room in the new wing of Toronto General Hospital, wealthy donors mingle and snack on gourmet cheese, fancy pastries and fruit.

It's hoped they will donate big bucks to the hospital's foundation and research program. So the TGH has brought in its big hitter, thoracic surgeon Dr. Shaf Keshavjee.

Wearing a conservative suit and tie, the head of the lung transplant program looks like a businessman, but he speaks in a calming way that makes you wish he was your doctor. He begins by talking about TGH's illustrious lung transplant record: the first centre to do successful single and double lung transplants, the first to use an artificial lung to prolong life, and the first to repair donor lungs outside the body.

Murmurs of praise fill the room when Keshavjee shows before and after pictures of a teenage lung-transplant patient lying in her hospital bed and another of her surfing a few months later.
It's clear Keshavjee, who turns 49 this week, knows how to win over a crowd. And in this room, he has a head start.

Among the 200 or so guests are a few whose lives were saved by the surgeon. Like Merv Sheppard, 73, who says he is alive "years past his expiry date," breathing with a donated lung, because Keshavjee – or Shaf, as he likes to be called – thought he was worth the risk.

"I was one of the oldest people to undergo a lung transplant," says Sheppard, who was afflicted with idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis in one lung. "Most people told me I didn't have a chance because I was 65." The cut-off for lung transplants at the time was 55. In some hospitals, it still is.

Like most doctors, Keshavjee wants to improve his patients' quality of life. But he's also driven to probe beyond the obvious. Why are some donor lungs not suitable for donation? Why do others fail post-transplant? Can donor lungs, which start to deteriorate as soon as they're harvested, be repaired before transplantation?

Ultimately, Keshavjee hopes to eliminate donor organ shortages, and perhaps even get rid of the need for transplants altogether.

In pursuit of these goals, Keshavjee and his clinicians and researchers have revived one of the top lung transplant centres in the world – and the largest in North America. Last year, they did a record 102 transplants, surpassing the 1,000 mark for total number of surgeries. In January, they performed a record 14.

No small feat for an operation that takes six to 18 hours. "It is pretty intense, says Keshavjee. "You are working for that whole time. There are no coffee breaks, and you aren't going out to pee."

Despite having done so many, Keshavjee says it's difficult to not be moved.

"Every time I think this is a miracle. It's amazing that we can ... take the lungs out, and put them back in, and the person will be fine."

TRANSPLANTATION is risky work, but Keshavjee, who also performs other surgeries and devotes a lot of time to research, is clearly cut out for it – albeit with a little help from his mom, Gulshan.

She has been available night and day to look after 12-year-old Sara, Keshavjee's daughter with his wife, Dr. Donna McRitchie, medical director of critical care and division chief of general surgery at North York General Hospital.

"It was a great help," says Keshavjee. "It has helped us have some semblance of a balanced life. We try, but it's still not easy."

Keshavjee was 12 when he moved to Toronto from Kenya with his mother and his businessman father. The young Shaf was drawn to the sciences at North Toronto Collegiate. "I always knew I wanted to be a surgeon," he recalls. "Not just a doctor, but a surgeon."

He was a dedicated student and easily got into medical school at the University of Toronto.

Transplant surgery had never been a consideration until the afternoon of Nov. 7, 1983, when he was driving over a bridge on Mount Pleasant Ave. and heard a radio news bulletin announcing that surgeon Dr. Joel Cooper and his team had conducted the world's first successful single lung surgery at TGH.

"I thought, wow, that's cool."

The risky procedure had been tried 44 times before without success. Three of those failures had been in Toronto. Most patients didn't survive more than two weeks.

Three years later, Keshavjee was on hand when history was made the second time at TGH. He was a wide-eyed surgery resident when he scrubbed in to the operating room to witness the world's first successful double lung transplant surgery, on Nov. 26, 1986. That day, Keshavjee stayed mostly on the sidelines, watching the "giants" of thoracic surgery in action. On the operating table lay Canadian Ann Harrison, whose lungs had been virtually destroyed by emphysema.

Without the surgery, she had just a few months to live, doctors told her. With it, she might not make it beyond the operating table. She still said yes and lived another 14 years.

"By this time, all the other organs had been transplanted, but lungs hadn't," says Keshavjee. "The first kidney and heart transplants were done in the '50s."

For TGH, the 1980s were the golden age of lung transplants. Doctors flocked from all over the world to learn how to perform lung surgeries. The field boomed from a handful of transplants a year around the world to hundreds.

But as quickly as Toronto's lung program flourished, it ended. The city was dethroned by the brain drain of surgeons to the U.S. for greater opportunity and money.

That's when Keshavjee, by then a young thoracic surgeon, officially entered the scene. Despite offers to go to the U.S., he stayed, hoping to rebuild Toronto's reputation.

Pioneering lung surgeon Cooper had little doubt about his protegé's abilities. "There is no question there were some dark years there. But he ... was able to persevere."

THE LIFE OF a transplant surgeon is not for the weak-hearted. There are long hours, heart-wrenching cases and the burden of taking, or not taking, a chance on a patient who has nothing more to lose.

"The easier answer to give patients sometimes is no," says Keshavjee. "The tough one is to say we can try."

And even though the team has its share of high-profile successes, there are also stories of defeat, heartbreak and death. But even those, Keshavjee believes, are worth the risk.

"It's the ones where you stuck your neck out and they survived – they really make it worth it."

"Keshavjee is very open to new ideas and innovation," says Dr. Frank D'Ovidio, who trained at TGH and is an assistant professor of surgery and surgical director of the lung transplant centre at Columbia University. "He's really good at pushing the envelope and following his intuition."

Keshavjee started to push the bar in terms of increasingly complex cases in the mid-'90s. Among the first was Sheppard, who was beyond the age threshold.

A few years later, Keshavjee's team introduced Canada to the German-developed Novalung, an artificial lung to keep patients alive while they wait for donated lungs. It was first tried on Yen Tran, a 21-year-old mother of three whose health had quickly worsened from primary pulmonary hypertension. The tiny, box-like apparatus did the work of lungs for two days, giving her medical team enough time to find donor organs.

In 2008, Keshavjee and doctors at Sick Kids tried the Novalung on 16-year-old Katie Sutherland, who also suffered from pulmonary hypertension, which was constricting her veins and arteries and forcing her heart to work harder. In a matter of days, Sutherland's lungs began to give out. As she lay in the operating room, almost dead, the team had no option but to attach her to the artificial lung – giving her 30 days to wait for a donor lung.

"Boy, that case was high-risk," recalls Keshavjee. "But when you know that patient is alive because you took the decision to take the added risk, then you feel good."

The latest slew of high-profile cases has brought in more patients and garnered media attention (Keshavjee's mother still diligently keeps a scrapbook of newspaper clippings). And, as in the 1980s, it has brought researchers back to Toronto to learn from the best.

SITTING IN A glass dome on an operating table at the MARS Centre is a pair of pink, pert lungs from a pig breathing on their own.

This is Shaf Keshavjee's baby. Not the lungs per se, but the complicated mechanism that is keeping them breathing outside a living body.

Dubbed the Toronto XVIVO Lung Perfusion System, a fancy name for a Keshavjee-conceived set-up that allows lungs to remain outside the body for six hours – and holds the promise for the organs being able to repair themselves some day.

All morning, scientists at TGH have been teaching surgeons from Columbia University how to use the system. It enables lung transplant surgeons to figure out if a lung is suitable for transplantation. It also restores lungs after harvesting and keeps them alive longer, increasing the pool of donor lungs.

Last month, Keshavjee's team finished a clinical trial involving 22 patients who had received donated lungs treated with the Toronto XVIVO system. The technique could double the number of lung transplants at the hospital.

But in typical Keshavjee style, he had already moved on to another innovation before the XVIVO's success was proven. He and his team had begun looking at the possibility of treating lungs with the gene IL-10, which repairs the organs and strengthens their defences against injuries caused by swelling and the release of inflammatory enzymes.

"It's kind of like preventative medicine for our lungs," says Keshavjee, who notes that tests on rats have been very promising.

With one success story after another, Keshavjee concedes that there is a lot of pressure on him.

Especially as hospitals, patients and those ever-important donors keep asking: Now what? What else you can do?

Keshavjee has some ideas that seem far-fetched, but in his mind are completely realistic.

He foresees the creation of an organ repair centre where organs would be "optimized" before transplants. Further down the road, there's the possibility that injured lungs could be taken out, repaired and then put back into a patient's body.

With Keshavjee's batting average so far, we can expect more life-saving innovations from his team.

Yet the pioneering surgeon is humble about what he's accomplished. "I just think about the work that needs to gets done," he says. "And then I have been lucky, because it just happens to work out."

http://www.healthzone.ca/health/newsfeatures/article/768887--the-man-who-gives-the-gift-of-breath
http://ismailimail.wordpress.com/2010/02/26/dr-shaf-keshavjee-the-man-who-gives-the-gift-of-breath/


Related on this Blog:
Dr Shaf Keshavjee, Master Surgeon, Brilliant Scientist: A Newspaper Survey; Quotes of Aga Khan IV And Others.
http://gonashgo.blogspot.com/2009/11/503dr-shaf-keshavjee-master-surgeon.html


A Collection Of Posts On My Blog About All Things KESHAVJEE; Quotes from Blogpost Four Hundred.
http://gonashgo.blogspot.com/2009/11/505a-collection-of-posts-on-my-blog.html


Weaving Together The KESHAVJEE Family Story From The Accounts of Mamdoo Keshavjee, Lella Umedaly, Muthal Naidoo and Easy Nash; Quote Of Aristotle.
http://gonashgo.blogspot.com/2009/12/534weaving-together-keshavjee-family.html



Easy Nash
http://apps.facebook.com/blognetworks/blog/science_and_religion_in_islam_the_link/
http://gonashgo.blogspot.com/2009/08/500blogpost-five-hundred-is-blogpost.html
http://gonashgo.blogspot.com/2009/03/453a-blog-constructed-within.html

In Shia Islam, intellect is a key component of faith. Intellect allows us to understand the creation of God: Aga Khan IV(2008)
The Qur'an itself repeatedly recommends Muslims to become better educated in order better to understand God's creation: Aga Khan IV(2007)
The Quran tells us that signs of Allah's Sovereignty are found in the contemplation of His Creation: Aga Khan IV(2007)
This notion of the capacity of the human intellect to understand and to admire the creation of Allah will bring you happiness in your everyday lives: Aga Khan IV(2007)
Islam, eminently logical, placing the greatest emphasis on knowledge, purports to understand God's creation: Aga Khan IV(2006)
The Holy Qu'ran's encouragement to study nature and the physical world around us gave the original impetus to scientific enquiry among Muslims: Aga Khan IV(1985)
The first and only thing created by God was the Intellect(Aql): Prophet Muhammad(circa 632CE)

568)A Collection Of Posts Describing The Philosophical, Theological, Doctrinal, Historical, Scientific And Esoteric Underpinnings Of My Blog.

"The Divine Intellect, Aql-i Kull, both transcends and informs the human intellect. It is this Intellect which enables man to strive towards two aims dictated by the faith: that he should reflect upon the environment Allah has given him and that he should know himself. It is the Light of the Intellect which distinguishes the complete human being from the human animal, and developing that intellect requires free inquiry. The man of faith, who fails to pursue intellectual search is likely to have only a limited comprehension of Allah's creation. Indeed, it is man's intellect that enables him to expand his vision of that creation"(Aga Khan IV, Aga Khan University Inauguration Speech, Karachi, Pakistan, November 11, 1985)

"The Intellect is the substance of (God's) unity and it is the one (al-wahid), both cause and caused, the act of origination (al-ibda) and the first originated being (al-mubda al-awwal); it is perfection and perfect, eternity and eternal, existence and that which exists all in a single substance"( Hamid al-Din al-Kirmani, 11th centuryFatimid Ismaili cosmologist (Kitab al-Riyad, pp. 221-222))

"God – may He be Glorified and Exalted – created Intellect ('aql) first among the spiritual entities; He drew it forth from the right of His Throne, making it proceed from His own Light. Then he commanded it to retreat, and it retreated, to advance, and it advanced; then God proclaimed: 'I created you glorious, and I gave you pre-eminence over all my creatures.'"(Imam Jafar as-Sadiq, Circa 765CE)

"The beginning of all things, their origin, their force and their prosperity, is that intellect ('aql), without which one can profit from nothing. God created it to adorn His creatures, and as a light for them. It is through intellect ('aql) that the servants recognize God is their Creator and that they themselves are created beings …It is thanks to intellect ('aql) that they can distinguish what is beautiful from what is ugly, that they realize that darkness is in ignorance and that light is in Knowledge"( Imam Jafar as-Sadiq, (al-Kulayni, Usul al-Kafi, Vol. 1, pp. 34), circa 765CE)

"According to a famous hadith of the Prophet Muhammad: The first(and only) thing created by God was the Intellect ('aql)(circa 632CE)

http://gonashgo.blogspot.com/2008/09/400blogpost-four-hundred-knowledge.html



In chronological order from most recently posted to least recently posted:

Dr Paul Walker: Abu Ya‘qub al-Sijistani: Intellectual Missionary; Publication of the Institute of Ismaili Studies
http://gonashgo.blogspot.com/2009/12/528dr-paul-walker-abu-yaqub-al.html


'The Sciences' from the IIS's 'Muslim Philosophy And The Sciences' by Dr Alnoor Dhanani; Quotes of Aga Khan IV
http://gonashgo.blogspot.com/2009/11/507the-sciences-from-iiss-muslim.html


The 19 Grand Ideas Of Science: What Is The Universe Made Up Of And How Does It Operate? Quotes Of Aga Khan IV And Others.
http://gonashgo.blogspot.com/2009/11/501-19-grand-ideas-of-science-what-is.html


Blogpost Five Hundred IS Blogpost Four Hundred, The High-Octane Fuel That Powers My Blog On The Link Between Science And Religion In Islam
http://gonashgo.blogspot.com/2009/08/500blogpost-five-hundred-is-blogpost.html


Ismaili History by Dr. Farhad Daftary; An Encyclopaedia Article from the Institute of Ismaili Studies, London, United Kingdom.
http://gonashgo.blogspot.com/2009/06/488ismaili-history-by-dr-farhad-daftary.html


IIS Academic Paper:Creation in Time in Islamic Thought with Special Reference to Al-Ghazali by Prof Eric L Ormsby;Quotes of Aga Khan IV and Others
http://gonashgo.blogspot.com/2009/05/481iis-academic-paper-creation-in-time.html


What Do You Get If You Divide Science By God? A Cosmopolitan Sampling of Opinion;Quotes of Aga Khans IV+ III,Al Sijistani,Nasir Khusraw,Azim Nanji
http://gonashgo.blogspot.com/2009/05/477what-do-you-get-if-you-divide.html


A Blog Constructed Within a Scaffolding of the Al Sijistani-Khusraw Cosmological Doctrine and, Everywhere I Turn, There is Blogpost Four Hundred..
http://gonashgo.blogspot.com/2009/03/453a-blog-constructed-within.html


Elevating Science, Elevating Democracy: "If we are not practicing good science, we probably aren’t practicing good democracy. And vice versa"
http://gonashgo.blogspot.com/2009/01/444elevating-science-elevating.html


Cyclical Time and Sacred History in Medieval Ismaili Thought, By Farhad Daftary; From the Academic Papers Section of the IIS website.
http://gonashgo.blogspot.com/2008/10/420cyclical-time-and-sacred-history-in.html


Blogpost Four Hundred and all its earlier incarnations; the Cardinal Post of My Blog on the Link between Science and Religion in Islam
http://gonashgo.blogspot.com/2008/10/412blogpost-four-hundred-and-all-its.html


Blogpost Four Hundred, Knowledge, Intellect, Creation, Science and Religion: Comprehensive Quotes of Aga Khan IV and Others; a never-ending post.. http://gonashgo.blogspot.com/2008/09/400blogpost-four-hundred-knowledge.html


Transcendence and Distinction: Metaphoric Process in Isma‘ili Muslim Thought, by Dr Azim Nanji, Director of the Institute of Ismaili Studies. http://gonashgo.blogspot.com/2008/08/397transcendence-and-distinction.html


Nasir Khusraw, another Fatimid Cosmologist-Philosopher-Poet of enormous intellect from the mid-Fatimid era
http://gonashgo.blogspot.com/2008/08/390nasir-khusraw-another-fatimid.html


Abu Yakub al-Sijistani: Fatimid Ismaili Cosmologist, Philosopher, Theologian par excellence
http://gonashgo.blogspot.com/2008/08/388abu-yakub-al-sijistani-fatimid.html


Intellect and Faith in Shia Ismaili Islam as described on the Preamble to the AKDN website
http://gonashgo.blogspot.com/2008/05/361intellect-and-faith-in-shia-ismaili.html


The Science of Religion: reprint of an article from The Economist magazine; quotes of Aga Khan IV and others.
http://gonashgo.blogspot.com/2008/03/334the-science-of-religion-reprint-of.html


Allegories in Nature: "....a Cosmos full of signs and symbols that evoke the perfection of Allah's creation and mercy"; Quotes of Aga Khans.
http://gonashgo.blogspot.com/2008/03/332allegories-in-nature-cosmos-full-of.html


Muslim Philosophy and the Sciences(IIS Review Article); Quotes of Aga Khan IV. http://gonashgo.blogspot.com/2008/02/331muslim-philosophy-and-sciencesiis.html


"The learning of mathematics was therefore linked to the Muslim religion and developing an understanding of the world...."; Quotes of Aga Khan IV
http://gonashgo.blogspot.com/2008/01/319the-learning-of-mathematics-was.html


The uninterrupted thread of the search for knowledge of all types.
http://gonashgo.blogspot.com/2008/01/306the-uninterrupted-thread-of-search.html


The Death of Science in Islam/What have we forgotten in Islam?-COMBO DELIGHT
http://gonashgo.blogspot.com/2008/01/305the-death-of-science-in-islamwhat.html



Easy Nash
http://apps.facebook.com/blognetworks/blog/science_and_religion_in_islam_the_link/
http://gonashgo.blogspot.com/2009/08/500blogpost-five-hundred-is-blogpost.html
http://gonashgo.blogspot.com/2009/03/453a-blog-constructed-within.html

In Shia Islam, intellect is a key component of faith. Intellect allows us to understand the creation of God: Aga Khan IV(2008)
The Qur'an itself repeatedly recommends Muslims to become better educated in order better to understand God's creation: Aga Khan IV(2007)
The Quran tells us that signs of Allah's Sovereignty are found in the contemplation of His Creation: Aga Khan IV(2007)
This notion of the capacity of the human intellect to understand and to admire the creation of Allah will bring you happiness in your everyday lives: Aga Khan IV(2007)
Islam, eminently logical, placing the greatest emphasis on knowledge, purports to understand God's creation: Aga Khan IV(2006)
The Holy Qu'ran's encouragement to study nature and the physical world around us gave the original impetus to scientific enquiry among Muslims: Aga Khan IV(1985)
The first and only thing created by God was the Intellect(Aql): Prophet Muhammad(circa 632CE)

567)Scientists Decode Genomes Of Five Africans, Including Archbishop Desmond Tutu; Quote From Blogpost Four Hundred.

"All human beings, by their nature, desire to know."(Aristotle, The Metaphysics, circa 322BC)

http://gonashgo.blogspot.com/2008/09/400blogpost-four-hundred-knowledge.html



Quote from article below:
"Dr. Hayes said Archbishop Tutu was selected because of his keen interest in medicine and because his parents come from the two largest Bantu groups in South Africa, the Sotho-Tswana and the Nguni.
Bantu speakers originated in West Africa and began to migrate southward some 5,000 years ago, displacing the Bushmen, who were until recently hunter-gatherers.
Archbishop Tutu turns out to have Bushman mitochondrial DNA, a genetic element passed down through the female line. This Bantu-Bushman marriage was probably in the distant past since most of the rest of his genome is Bantu, the researchers said Wednesday in a telephone news conference. Their report is published in the journal Nature.
African genomes are of particular interest for understanding human genetic history because they have more variation in their DNA than other populations. Everyone outside Africa is descended from a small group that left some 50,000 years ago, carrying away only a small sample of the available genetic diversity.
Africans carry the bulk of the human genetic heritage but have been relatively little studied. Most genomic studies done in Africa so far have focused on the Yoruba of Nigeria. With the analysis of the Bushmen DNA, genomic analysis has now been extended to two of the 14 major African populations identified by Sarah Tishkoff, an expert on African genetics at the University of Pennsylvania."


February 18, 2010

Scientists Decode Genomes of Five Africans, Including Archbishop Tutu

By NICHOLAS WADE

The complete genomes of five southern Africans have been decoded, almost doubling the number of published human DNA sequences. The Africans include four Bushmen hunter-gatherers, known as !Gubi, G/aq’o, D#kgao and !Ai, the odd symbols representing different clicking sounds in Bushmen languages. The fifth person, a Bantu, is none other than Archbishop Desmond Tutu.

The individuals were selected by Vanessa M. Hayes of the University of New South Wales in Australia and Stephan C. Schuster and Webb Miller of Pennsylvania State University; the genomes were decoded by Richard A. Gibbs and colleagues at the Baylor College of Medicine in Houston.

Dr. Hayes said Archbishop Tutu was selected because of his keen interest in medicine and because his parents come from the two largest Bantu groups in South Africa, the Sotho-Tswana and the Nguni.

Bantu speakers originated in West Africa and began to migrate southward some 5,000 years ago, displacing the Bushmen, who were until recently hunter-gatherers.

Archbishop Tutu turns out to have Bushman mitochondrial DNA, a genetic element passed down through the female line. This Bantu-Bushman marriage was probably in the distant past since most of the rest of his genome is Bantu, the researchers said Wednesday in a telephone news conference. Their report is published in the journal Nature.

African genomes are of particular interest for understanding human genetic history because they have more variation in their DNA than other populations. Everyone outside Africa is descended from a small group that left some 50,000 years ago, carrying away only a small sample of the available genetic diversity.

Africans carry the bulk of the human genetic heritage but have been relatively little studied. Most genomic studies done in Africa so far have focused on the Yoruba of Nigeria. With the analysis of the Bushmen DNA, genomic analysis has now been extended to two of the 14 major African populations identified by Sarah Tishkoff, an expert on African genetics at the University of Pennsylvania.

“This is just a beginning, and is paving the way for other genomic studies across a broad range of ethnic Africans,” Dr. Tishkoff said.

Geneticists are interested in variations in the human DNA sequence because these underlie human diversity, including susceptibility to disease. The Pennsylvania team found 1.3 million novel DNA variants in its five Africans, and some 13,000 new changes in those parts of the DNA that specify proteins, the working parts of living human cells.

The Bushmen genomes are of particular interest since the Bushmen’s ancestors branched off the main human lineage earlier than anyone else. Most of the many variations detected in their genomes were acquired after they branched off from the main lineage, the researchers said.

Genetic variations favored by natural selection often become common in a population. With the Bushmen, a large proportion of the protein-changing differences were found to occur in genes involved in visual acuity and the perception of smell and sound. This suggests these variations could have been favored because they are of great importance to hunter gatherers.

Dr. Tishkoff said the number of variations found in the Bushmen was quite high and could to some extent reflect errors in the decoding process.

Dr. Schuster and Dr. Hayes said they hoped their findings would make it easier for southern Africans to be included in surveys looking for the roots of genetic disease. At present, the gene chips used to scan the genome for variations are programmed to look for variations common in European and East Asian populations.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/18/science/18genome.html?ref=science


Related:
The Genographic Project of the National Geographic Society: How I discovered my ancestry from 10-15 thousand years ago.
http://gonashgo.blogspot.com/2007/11/249the-genographic-projectnational.html

Weaving Together The KESHAVJEE Family Story From The Accounts of Mamdoo Keshavjee, Lella Umedaly, Muthal Naidoo and Easy Nash; Quote Of Aristotle.
http://gonashgo.blogspot.com/2009/12/534weaving-together-keshavjee-family.html

Archbishop Desmond Tutu on ISMAILI MAIL
http://ismailimail.wordpress.com/?s=desmond+tutu&searchbutton=go%21



Easy Nash
http://apps.facebook.com/blognetworks/blog/science_and_religion_in_islam_the_link/
http://gonashgo.blogspot.com/2009/08/500blogpost-five-hundred-is-blogpost.html
http://gonashgo.blogspot.com/2009/03/453a-blog-constructed-within.html

In Shia Islam, intellect is a key component of faith. Intellect allows us to understand the creation of God: Aga Khan IV(2008)
The Qur'an itself repeatedly recommends Muslims to become better educated in order better to understand God's creation: Aga Khan IV(2007)
The Quran tells us that signs of Allah's Sovereignty are found in the contemplation of His Creation: Aga Khan IV(2007)
This notion of the capacity of the human intellect to understand and to admire the creation of Allah will bring you happiness in your everyday lives: Aga Khan IV(2007)
Islam, eminently logical, placing the greatest emphasis on knowledge, purports to understand God's creation: Aga Khan IV(2006)
The Holy Qu'ran's encouragement to study nature and the physical world around us gave the original impetus to scientific enquiry among Muslims: Aga Khan IV(1985)
The first and only thing created by God was the Intellect(Aql): Prophet Muhammad(circa 632CE)

566)Marvels Of Allah's Creation: Census Of Marine Life Discovers 5000 New Species In Ocean; Quotes From Blogpost Four Hundred.

"Behold! in the creation of the heavens and the earth; in the alternation of the night and the day; in the sailing of the ships through the ocean for the profit of mankind; in the rain which Allah sends down from the skies, and the life which He gives therewith to an earth that is dead; in the beasts of all kinds that He scatters through the earth; in the change of the winds, and the clouds which they Trail like their slaves between the sky and the earth; (Here) indeed are Signs for the people of intellect"(Noble Quran)

Chapter 30, Verse 27: He originates creation; then refashions it - for Him an easy task. His is the most Sublime Symbol in the heavens and the earth(Noble Quran, 7th Century CE)

"Seek knowledge from the cradle to the grave"(Prophet Muhammad, circa 632CE)"

"Seek knowledge, even in China"(Prophet Muhammad, circa 632CE)

"One hour of contemplation on the works of the Creator is better than a thousand hours of prayer"(Prophet Muhammad, circa 632CE)

"All human beings, by their nature, desire to know."(Aristotle, The Metaphysics, circa 322BC)

"The God of the Quran is the One whose Ayats(Signs) are the Universe in which we live, move and have our being"(Aga Khan III, April 4th 1952, Karachi, Pakistan)

“Muslims believe in an all-encompassing unit of man and nature. To them there is no fundamental division between the spiritual and the material while the whole world, whether it be the earth, sea or air, or the living creatures that inhabit them, is an expression of God’s creation.”(Aga Khan IV, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, Virginia, USA, 13 April 1984)

"...As we use our intellect to gain new knowledge about Creation, we come to see even more profoundly the depth and breadth of its mysteries. We explore unknown regions beneath the seas – and in outer space. We reach back over hundreds of millions of years in time. Extra-ordinary fossilised geological specimens seize our imagination – palm leaves, amethyst flowers, hedgehog quartz, sea lilies, chrysanthemum and a rich panoply of shells. Indeed, these wonders are found beneath the very soil on which we tread – in every corner of the world – and they connect us with far distant epochs and environments.
And the more we discover, the more we know, the more we penetrate just below the surface of our normal lives – the more our imagination staggers. Just think for example what might lie below the surfaces of celestial bodies all across the far flung reaches of our universe. What we feel, even as we learn, is an ever-renewed sense of wonder, indeed, a powerful sense of awe – and of Divine inspiration"(Aga Khan IV, Delegation of the Ismaili Imamat, Ottawa, Canada, December 6th 2008)For the full version of this quote see:
http://ismailimail.wordpress.com/2008/12/21/easy-nashs-blogpost-four-hundred-updated-with-quotes-from-the-opening-of-the-delegation-of-the-ismaili-imamat/

"The second great historical lesson to be learnt is that the Muslim world has always been wide open to every aspect of human existence. The sciences, society, art, the oceans, the environment and the cosmos have all contributed to the great moments in the history of Muslim civilisations. The Qur’an itself repeatedly recommends Muslims to become better educated in order better to understand God’s creation"(Closing Address by His Highness Aga Khan IV at the "Musée-Musées" Round Table Louvre Museum, Paris, France, October 17th 2007)

"......The Quran tells us that signs of Allah’s Sovereignty are found in the contemplation of His Creation - in the heavens and the earth, the night and the day, the clouds and the seas, the winds and the waters...."(Aga Khan IV, Kampala, Uganda, August 22 2007)

http://gonashgo.blogspot.com/2008/09/400blogpost-four-hundred-knowledge.html



My Blog has dealt with the discovery of the tiniest particles of matter in creation(Large Hadron Collider) as well as the most unimaginably large stars and galaxies in outer space(the latest generation of telescopes). But what about undiscovered parts of creation on our own planet Earth?:

Census discovers 5000 marine species

By Victoria Gill

Science reporter, BBC News, San Diego


The hirsuta crab was so unusual it warranted a whole new family designation

A preview of the Census of Marine Life has revealed that the project has discovered over 5,000 new species.

These include bizarre and colourful creatures, as well as many organisms that produce therapeutic chemicals.

A panel of scientists presented these early insights at the American Association for the Advancement of Science annual meeting in San Diego.

The final report from the decade-long census will be released in October 2010.

The project has involved more than 2,000 scientists from 80 countries, and the researchers involved believe the census will lay the scientific foundations for marine policies to protect vulnerable habitats.

The researchers presented images of some of the most striking species discovered in the last decade, including a crab so unusual it warranted a whole new family designation. This member of the new Kiwaidae family of crabs, discovered near Easter Island, was named Kiwa hirsuta because of its furry appearance.

One member of the panel, Shirley Pomponi, a scientist from Florida Atlantic University, highlighted a new species of sponge.

This was found in the Florida Keys in August of 1999. Further investigation revealed that it produced a chemical with anti-cancer properties, which is now being investigated as a potential therapeutic.

Dr Pomponi said: "Adaptation to life in the sea has resulted in the production of chemicals that not even the most advanced computer program could produce.

"Mother nature still makes the best chemicals."


Bulldozing reefs

A major aim of the census is to provide the scientific support for the establishment of a global network of marine protected areas to prevent damage from fishing and other human activity.

Dr Jason Hall-Spencer, a marine biologist from the UK's University of Plymouth, said that delicate coral reefs were under threat from deep-sea trawling.

"All but one of the reefs I've looked at has been very badly damaged by bottom trawling - where a fishing net is dragged along the sea floor," he said.

"Bottom trawling bulldozes through reef habitats that are thousands of years old.

"But the good news is that we now have the data to change policy and work with fishermen to say where marine protected areas should be."

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8523389.stm


Related:
'Outlandish ' Creatures Found Living Deep In The Ocean: Marvels Of Creation; Quotes Of Aga Khan IV And Others
http://gonashgo.blogspot.com/2009/11/507outlandish-creatures-found-living.html



Easy Nash
http://apps.facebook.com/blognetworks/blog/science_and_religion_in_islam_the_link/
http://gonashgo.blogspot.com/2009/08/500blogpost-five-hundred-is-blogpost.html
http://gonashgo.blogspot.com/2009/03/453a-blog-constructed-within.html

In Shia Islam, intellect is a key component of faith. Intellect allows us to understand the creation of God: Aga Khan IV(2008)
The Qur'an itself repeatedly recommends Muslims to become better educated in order better to understand God's creation: Aga Khan IV(2007)
The Quran tells us that signs of Allah's Sovereignty are found in the contemplation of His Creation: Aga Khan IV(2007)
This notion of the capacity of the human intellect to understand and to admire the creation of Allah will bring you happiness in your everyday lives: Aga Khan IV(2007)
Islam, eminently logical, placing the greatest emphasis on knowledge, purports to understand God's creation: Aga Khan IV(2006)
The Holy Qu'ran's encouragement to study nature and the physical world around us gave the original impetus to scientific enquiry among Muslims: Aga Khan IV(1985)
The first and only thing created by God was the Intellect(Aql): Prophet Muhammad(circa 632CE)

565)Dynamic, Perpetual, Continuous As Opposed To A Static Creation: A New Vista On The Birth Of Stars In The Orion Nebula; Quotes Of Aga Khans

"The creation according to Islam is not a unique act in a given time but a perpetual and constant event; and God supports and sustains all existence at every moment by His will and His thought. Outside His will, outside His thought, all is nothing, even the things which seem to us absolutely self-evident such as space and time. Allah alone wishes: the Universe exists; and all manifestations are as a witness of the Divine Will"(Memoirs of Aga Khan III, 1954)

"Indeed, one strength of Islam has always lain in its belief that creation is not static but continuous, that through scientific and other endeavours, God has opened and continues to open new windows for us to see the marvels of His creation"(Aga Khan IV, Aga Khan University, 16 March 1983, Karachi, Pakistan)

http://gonashgo.blogspot.com/2008/09/400blogpost-four-hundred-knowledge.html



A new VISTA on stellar birthplace

Telescope snaps revealing image of picturesque Orion star-forming region

By Ron Cowen
Wednesday, February 10th, 2010


Picture:
EnlargeStars bright in different light
This infrared portrait of the Orion starbirth region was taken by the European Southern Observatory’s new VISTA telescope, the world’s largest wide-field-of view telescope. The image, which measures about 35 light-years from top to bottom, records radiation with about twice the wavelength of light visible to the human eye. Many of the red features just above the center are young stars and the high-speed streams of gas they eject. These stars are completely hidden by dust in visible light but can be seen at dust-penetrating infrared wavelengths. ESO



Using its infrared eyes to peer into the dusty center of the Milky Way’s Orion star-forming region, the world’s largest panoramic telescope has produced a revealing new portrait of this familiar stellar nursery. The image was taken at the Paranal Observatory in northern Chile by the new 4.1-meter VISTA (for Visible and Infrared Survey Telescope for Astronomy) telescope, which records large sections of sky in a single exposure.

Orion lies about 1,350 light-years from Earth. Like previous images taken of the region in visible light, the center of the new picture shows the four hot, young stars known as the Trapezium, which blast ultraviolet light into surrounding space and set the Orion region aglow. But VISTA’s view also shows many other newborn stars, which in visible light are hidden by dust. Because infrared light penetrates dust, VISTA was able to record these youngsters and the high-speed streams of gas they eject.

The sweeping, high-resolution image bodes well for studies of less familiar and more distant reaches of the universe to be targeted by the telescope, says VISTA researcher Richard Hook of the European Southern Observatory in Garching, Germany. Sixteen infrared-sensitive detectors provide the telescope with 67 million pixels, giving VISTA an unprecedented width for its field of view. That capability enables VISTA to take panoramic infrared images in a much shorter time than other infrared telescopes, Hook says. The European Southern Observatory released the image, taken by VISTA last fall, on February 10.

http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/56195/title/A_new_VISTA_on_stellar_birthplace


Related:
A New Telescope Will Scan The Entire Sky And See (Infra)Red; Quotes Of Aga Khan IV And Aga Khan III
http://gonashgo.blogspot.com/2010/01/551a-new-telescope-will-scan-entire-sky.html

A Guide to the Cosmos, in Words and Images: Book Review; Quotes from Blogpost Four Hundred
http://gonashgo.blogspot.com/2010/01/543a-guide-to-cosmos-in-words-and.html

Arabic- And Persian-Named Stars, Clusters and Constellations As Seen On A Clear Night From A Cruise Ship In The Southern Hemisphere;& A Bond Movie
http://gonashgo.blogspot.com/2010/01/539arabic-and-persian-named-stars.html

New NASA Craft, With Infrared Power, Will Map The Unseen Sky; Quotes From Blogpost Four Hundred.
http://gonashgo.blogspot.com/2009/12/530new-nasa-craft-with-infrared-power.html

The 19 Grand Ideas Of Science: What Is The Universe Made Up Of And How Does It Operate? Quotes Of Aga Khan IV And Others.
http://gonashgo.blogspot.com/2009/11/501-19-grand-ideas-of-science-what-is.html

A Collection of Posts on Astronomy; Quotes of Noble Quran, Aga Khan IV, Aga Khan III, Nasir Khusraw, Abu Yakub Al Sijistani and Aristotle
http://gonashgo.blogspot.com/2009/03/456a-collection-of-posts-on-astronomy.html


Easy Nash
http://apps.facebook.com/blognetworks/blog/science_and_religion_in_islam_the_link/
http://gonashgo.blogspot.com/2009/08/500blogpost-five-hundred-is-blogpost.html
http://gonashgo.blogspot.com/2009/03/453a-blog-constructed-within.html

In Shia Islam, intellect is a key component of faith. Intellect allows us to understand the creation of God: Aga Khan IV(2008)
The Qur'an itself repeatedly recommends Muslims to become better educated in order better to understand God's creation: Aga Khan IV(2007)
The Quran tells us that signs of Allah's Sovereignty are found in the contemplation of His Creation: Aga Khan IV(2007)
This notion of the capacity of the human intellect to understand and to admire the creation of Allah will bring you happiness in your everyday lives: Aga Khan IV(2007)
Islam, eminently logical, placing the greatest emphasis on knowledge, purports to understand God's creation: Aga Khan IV(2006)
The Holy Qu'ran's encouragement to study nature and the physical world around us gave the original impetus to scientific enquiry among Muslims: Aga Khan IV(1985)
The first and only thing created by God was the Intellect(Aql): Prophet Muhammad(circa 632CE)

564)Recipe For Armageddon: Arab Muslims And Not So Arab Muslims, Snakes Slithering In The Sewers Of Antisemitism; Salim Mansur Soliloquizes

Anti-Semitism widespread in Muslim world

By SALIM MANSUR
12th February 2010, 3:21pm

A Jan. 21 item in the Jakarta Globe from Indonesia reported a speech by Mahathir Mohamad, the former prime minister of Malaysia, at a conference in support of Al-Quds (Jerusalem).
Mahathir was quoted stating that the lack of progress by the Obama administration in ending the war in Afghanistan, or in closing the terrorist detention centre at Guantanamo, was due to the “forces in the United States which prevent the president from doing some things. One of the forces is the Jewish lobby.”

He said Jews “had always been a problem in European countries. They had to be confined to ghettos and periodically massacred. But still they remained, they thrived and they held whole governments to ransom.”

Moreover, he continued, “Even after their massacre by the Nazis of Germany, they survived to continue to be a source of even greater problems for the world.”

These despicable words are not from the tongue of any common run-of-the-mill bigot. Mahathir was the elected head of government from 1981 to 2003 of one the more economically successful Muslim-majority countries.

The former prime minister’s remarks were not some carelessly expressed random thoughts. In October 2003, Mahathir was the chairman of the Tenth Islamic Summit Conference as Malaysia hosted the more than 50-member Organization of Islamic Countries. His opening address to the assembled Muslim leaders was punctuated with bigoted references to Jews and Israel.

Mahathir said, for instance, “The Europeans killed six million Jews out of 12 million. But today the Jews rule this world by proxy. They get others to fight and die for them.” He received, the press reported, a standing ovation from Muslim leaders and none disowned his anti-Semitic views.

Such hate-filled public statements against Jews and Israel by Mahathir, or Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran, or the leaders of Hamas, Hezbollah, Taliban, al-Qaida and member states of the Arab League, are indicative of how deep-seated and widespread is anti-Semitism across the Muslim world.

Since political-religious leaders promote this bigotry, the space for any Muslim opposition — and not merely against Jews — is restricted with the threat of mob violence ever present against those who dare denounce such bigotry.

Muslim anti-Semitism represents to a large extent the “Arabization” of Islam, particularly the majority Sunni Islam, in modern times. In other words, non-Arab Muslims — they constitute four-fifths of the world’s Muslim population — willingly defer in understanding and practising their faith tradition to the cultural and political prejudices of Arabs, especially to Wahhabi sectarianism of the Saudis. Mahathir’s recent anti-Semitic remarks were made about the same time Geert Wilders was taken to court in Holland for his anti-Islamic views.

While Muslims demand Wilders be punished for anti-Muslim bigotry, their silence — especially those Muslims enjoying the benefits of freedom and democracy in the West — over Mahathir’s anti-Semitism shows how greatly responsible they are in desecrating Islam by the filth of their own bigotry.

It is quite proper to note the rise in post-Holocaust anti-Semitism is directly related to the widespread bigotry against Jews and Israel among Muslims. It is also a measure of why the Muslim world’s political culture is so terribly retarded relative to that of the non-Muslim world.

http://www.edmontonsun.com/comment/columnists/salim_mansur/2010/02/12/12859836.html


Other Posts On My Blog By Salim Mansur:
Salim Mansur on free speech as being a crux of western secular democracies; Cannot stand the free speech heat?: Best return to totalitarian bliss.
http://gonashgo.blogspot.com/2010/02/557salim-mansur-on-free-speech-as-being.html

Salim Mansur Speaks My Mind With A Clarity That Is Astonishing: "Target The Terrorists, Not The Public"; Quote Of Easy Nash
http://gonashgo.blogspot.com/2010/01/541salim-mansur-speaks-my-mind-with.html

Apologies don't quell anarchy
http://www.torontosun.com/comment/columnists/salim_mansur/2009/04/18/9153766-sun.html

Palestinians can learn from Jews
http://www.torontosun.com/comment/columnists/salim_mansur/2009/03/14/8744891-sun.html


Easy Nash

If there are 23,000 jihadist websites and blogsites out there in cyberspace, there is no reason why we should not create 100,000 non-jihadist websites and blogsites: Easy Nash(2007).
If my Blog was a four year undergraduate degree I guess my major would be Science and Religion and my minor would be Politics: Easy Nash(2010).
The mother of all insecurities: 1.6 billion Muslims on the planet and they lather themselves into a dingbatty islamofascist rage if one or two Muslims happen to be pro-zionist but will gleefully quote those Jews who happen to be anti-zionist: Easy Nash(2010).
The above post reminds me of this video clip about a couple of conniving crooks calling for callous coercion, fiends fomenting fratricide, full of fetid foulness and fulminating fecality:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d51poygEXYU&mode=related&search=

563)Powerful Large Hadron Collider Set To Smash Protons To Uncover The Tiniest Particles Of Matter And Creation;Quotes Of Aga Khan IV And Aga Khan III

"Our religious leadership must be acutely aware of secular trends, including those generated by this age of science and technology. Equally, our academic or secular elite must be deeply aware of Muslim history, of the scale and depth of leadership exercised by the Islamic empire of the past in all fields"(Aga Khan IV, 6th February 1970, Hyderabad, Pakistan)

"God has given us the miracle of life with all its attributes: the extraordinary manifestations of sunrise and sunset, of sickness and recovery, of birth and death, but surely if He has given us the means with which to remove ourselves from this world so as to go to other parts of the Universe, we can but accept as further manifestations the creation and destructions of stars, the birth and death of atomic particles, the flighting new sound and light waves. I am afraid that the torch of intellectual discovery, the attraction of the unknown, the desire for intellectual self-perfection have left us"(Aga Khan IV,Speech, 1963, Mindanao, Phillipines)

"Islamic doctrine goes further than the other great religions, for it proclaims the presence of the soul, perhaps minute but nevertheless existing in an embryonic state, in all existence in matter, in animals, trees, and space itself. Every individual, every molecule, every atom has its own spiritual relationship with the All-Powerful Soul of God"(Memoirs of Aga Khan III, 1954)

http://gonashgo.blogspot.com/2008/09/400blogpost-four-hundred-knowledge.html



"In the meantime, even operating the LHC at 3.5 TeV per beam takes physicists “into new territory” where discovery of new physics, including a search for signs of a new theory of elementary particles known as supersymmetry, is still possible, he added."


POWERFUL COLLIDER SET TO SMASH PROTONS

LHC to begin collisions soon, but will be limited to half power

By Ron Cowen
Saturday, February 13th, 2010

After more than a year of delays, the most powerful atom smasher on Earth will finally begin regular collisions of its two proton beams around February 20. But to help safeguard CERN’s Large Hadron Collider from further electrical problems, the accelerator will run at only half its maximum energy for the next 18 months to two years, said Steve Myers, CERN’S director for accelerators and technology.

That decision all but guarantees a new and major delay in discovering new elementary particles — including the long-sought Higgs boson, whose existence would account for why subatomic particles have mass.

Starting in mid-March, each of the twin beams of protons accelerated by CERN’s Large Hadron Collider are expected to carry an unprecedented energy of 3.5 trillion electron-volts. But that’s just half the 7 TeV per beam that the particle accelerator is designed to have, Myers noted. The collider won’t run at full power until 2013, he said on February 13 during a talk at a meeting of the American Physical Society in Washington, D.C.

The lower-than-designed operating energy will ensure that the collider won’t suffer any additional electrical problems. In September 2008, an electrical short in the system powering some of the collider’s superconducting magnetsforced a shutdown of the accelerator for more than a year. The short caused a thermal runaway in a section of the superconducting magnetic system, not only damaging magnets but also flooding part of the 27-kilometer accelerator with helium gas.

After a yearlong set of repairs during which about 250 magnets were either refurbished or replaced and 6,500 new detectors were added to the system’s magnetic protection system along with 250 kilometers of new cable, that particular problem “can never happen again,” said Myers. But during tests in April 2009, scientists discovered another set of problems. Electrical flaws were found in copper bus bars housing superconducting cables.

The copper problem is not a complete showstopper but means that the LHC can operate safely only at 3.5 TeV per beam. At higher energies, the faulty connection could vaporize the copper and cause further damage to the collider. After 2011, the Collider will shut down for a year of upgrades and then is expected to finally achieve its maximum energy in 2013, Myers said.
Late last year, the LHC achieved what was then the highest energy of any accelerator — 1.18 TeV per beam, beating out the Fermilab’s Tevatron in Illinois. Because of all the delays with the LHC, the Tevatron’s operating life has already been extended two years, to 2011, and Fermilab scientists are closely watching the LHC’s progress to determine whether it might keep the Tevatron working until 2012, said Joseph Incandela of the University of California, Santa Barbara.

In the meantime, even operating the LHC at 3.5 TeV per beam takes physicists “into new territory” where discovery of new physics, including a search for signs of a new theory of elementary particles known as supersymmetry, is still possible, he added.

http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/56321/title/Powerful_collider_set_to_smash_protons


Related:
Large Hadron Collider Roars To Life, Opening Up A Window To The Marvels Of The Ultra-Miniscule Creation; Quotes Of Aga Khan IV And Others.
http://gonashgo.blogspot.com/2009/12/527large-hadron-collider-roars-to-life.html

The Large Hadron Collider and the God Particle: Can Islam be in the middle of this exciting melding of Science and Religion?; Quotes of Aga Khans
http://gonashgo.blogspot.com/2008/09/403the-large-hadron-collider-and-god.html

The Particle Zoo: The Building Blocks of All Matter; Quotes of Aga Khans IV and III and others.
http://gonashgo.blogspot.com/2008/08/393the-particle-zoo-building-blocks-of.html


Easy Nash
http://apps.facebook.com/blognetworks/blog/science_and_religion_in_islam_the_link/
http://gonashgo.blogspot.com/2009/08/500blogpost-five-hundred-is-blogpost.html
http://gonashgo.blogspot.com/2009/03/453a-blog-constructed-within.html

In Shia Islam, intellect is a key component of faith. Intellect allows us to understand the creation of God: Aga Khan IV(2008)
The Qur'an itself repeatedly recommends Muslims to become better educated in order better to understand God's creation: Aga Khan IV(2007)
The Quran tells us that signs of Allah's Sovereignty are found in the contemplation of His Creation: Aga Khan IV(2007)
This notion of the capacity of the human intellect to understand and to admire the creation of Allah will bring you happiness in your everyday lives: Aga Khan IV(2007)
Islam, eminently logical, placing the greatest emphasis on knowledge, purports to understand God's creation: Aga Khan IV(2006)
The Holy Qu'ran's encouragement to study nature and the physical world around us gave the original impetus to scientific enquiry among Muslims: Aga Khan IV(1985)
The first and only thing created by God was the Intellect(Aql): Prophet Muhammad(circa 632CE)

562)PM Harper Describes With Aplomb The Ethos That Last WW1 Veteran John Babcock Represented; Canada's New Citizenship Guide Embodies That Very Ethos.

Various Quotes Of The Right Honourable Stephen Harper, 22nd Prime Minister Of Canada(2010):
1)Prime Minister Stephen Harper said of Mr. Babcock and his compatriots: “They paid dearly for the freedom that we and our children enjoy every day. Now they are all gone. However, their voices and stories live on. They live on in our commitment to never forget, to cherish their values they fought for and to remember their sacrifices.”

2)Prime Minister Stephen Harper saluted Babcock Thursday, paying tribute to “Canada’s last living link to the Great War, which in so many ways marked our coming of age as a nation". He said 650,000 men and women served in the Canadian forces during WWI

3)"The passing of Mr. Babcock marks the end of an era," Prime Minister Stephen Harper said in a statement. "His family mourns the passing of a great man. Canada mourns the passing of the generation that asserted our independence on the world stage and established our international reputation as an unwavering champion of freedom, democracy, human rights and the rule of law."


Quote Of Governor-General Michaëlle Jean, head of the Canadian Forces(2010):
“You know how dear the members of the Canadian Forces and our veterans are to my heart,” she said. “And while I am deeply moved and saddened, I am also very honoured to be the Commander-in-Chief and Governor General to pay final tribute to Mr. Babcock.


Quote Of Canadian Minister Of Citizenship, Immigration And Multiculturalism Hon. Jason Kenney(2009):
"I think it's scandalous that someone could become a Canadian not knowing what the poppy represents, or never having heard of Vimy Ridge, Passchendaele, Dieppe or Juno Beach."


Quote Of Easy Nash(2009):
"Canada is a stable secular democratic state with a solid, longstanding and admirable history. It is not a disparate bunch of autonomous multicultural fiefdoms as some political parties would have you beleive. Canada is the Magna Carta(1215), War of 1812, British North America Act(1867), Boer War(1899-1902), Vimy Ridge, Ypres and Paschendale(1914-1918), Dieppe, Monte Cassino, D-Day, Juno Beach, Belgium and Holland(1939-1945), Korean War(1950-1953), Cold War(1917-1989), Vietnam War(1960's) and Afghanistan(post 2001)".



Related:
A Collection Of Posts Describing The Stephen Harper Conservative Government's Magnificent New Citizenship Guide; Quotes Of Minister Jason Kenney.
http://gonashgo.blogspot.com/2009/12/526a-collection-of-posts-describing.html

Another one of those off-topic posts: My visit to the City of Lights, Paris, and to the beachhead of my cherished freedoms, Normandy, France. http://easynash.blogspot.com/2007/03/138another-one-of-those-off-topic-posts.html




Veteran was the last link to an era that defined Canada

John Babcock, last Canadian from the First World War, dies at 109


Michael Valpy

Globe and Mail
Friday, Feb. 19, 2010

A last trumpet for John Henry Foster Babcock. A last muffled beat of the drum.

The last known Canadian veteran of the First World War has died at 109 – the last of the 650,000 men and women to serve in the uniforms of their country's armed forces in the conflict of 1914-1918.

A teenager spared the mud, disease and horrors of the Western Front in France only because authorities declared him too young for battle at 15 1/2, just before he was to be shipped overseas, Mr. Babcock was the final link to an era that in many ways marked Canada's emergence as a nation.

Mr. Babcock, born on an Ontario farm near Kingston at the end of Queen Victoria's reign, died in Spokane, Wash., his home for many years.

He became the last veteran of what was called the Great War and the war to end all wars in May, 2007. “That means I'm it,” he told the Canadian Press in a telephone interview when he heard the news.

At the time he was no longer a Canadian, having been compelled under U.S. law to renounce his citizenship in order to work in the country. The Canadian government moved quickly to restore it and a Canadian is what Mr. Babcock was when he died.

The last French veteran, who also lied about his age to join the foreign legion and fight in the trenches, died in 2008 at 110. The last British soldier who fought in the trenches died in July, 2009, at the age of 111. Frank Buckles, the last living U.S. veteran, who also lied about his age to get into the army, turned 109 earlier this month.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper said of Mr. Babcock and his compatriots: “They paid dearly for the freedom that we and our children enjoy every day. Now they are all gone. However, their voices and stories live on. They live on in our commitment to never forget, to cherish their values they fought for and to remember their sacrifices.”

From a country with less than eight million population, 67,000 Canadians died and 173,000 were wounded during the war, a horrific loss of life and blood an ocean away from home – and a horror expressed by the Canadian national war memorial at Vimy that broke with the tradition of triumphal arches and made a powerful brooding on top of a French ridge.

More than 100,000 Canadians signed a statement asking Parliament to give Mr. Babcock a state funeral and Parliament voted in favour of it, but Mr. Babcock himself said he didn't want it.
Rudyard Griffiths, co-founder of the Dominion Institute to popularize Canadian history, said he hoped the government would find a way to hold a national day of commemoration that would be marked by Canadians to honour the Great War's sacrifice and the epic moment in the country's story.

“It would be well deserved if we could find a way to honour Mr. Babcock and his generation at the Olympics,” Mr. Griffiths said. “It would be a fitting tribute if the next gold medal that was won by our athletes was given to his family.”

The Prime Minister's statement said only that the government of Canada “has plans to respectfully mark this moment in our history. Canadians will have the opportunity to pay their respect and honour all those who served our country in the First World War. Details will be announced in the coming days.”

Mr. Babcock was born on July 23, 1900, the eighth of 10 children of a farm family in Ontario's Frontenac County just north of Kingston.

He remembered being with an older brother when approached by a lieutenant and sergeant recruiting for the army in 1916.

“They were hard up for men,” he said in an interview in December, 2005. “They asked me if I would like to enlist and I said, ‘Sure.' So they signed me up.”

He recalled in another interview that one of the recruiters recited to him Alfred Lord Tennyson's poem The Charge of the Light Brigade .

Despite an accurate recording of his birth date, his enlistment papers dated Feb. 4, 1916, described his “apparent age” as 18. The fair-haired boy stood all of 5 feet, 4 1/2 inches. He was assigned to the 146th Overseas Battalion of the Canadian Expeditionary Force and got on the train for Halifax.

“Of course, the company commander, who knew my age, had me step aside when I was ready to get on the boat,” Mr. Babcock said.

He wound up toting freight on the docks, a job he loathed. When there was a call for 50 men to go overseas to join the Royal Canadian Regiment, he volunteered, said he was 18, and set sail across the Atlantic aboard a troopship escorted through submarine-infested waters by a navy cruiser and three destroyers.

He was stationed in Sussex, England, and drilled for eight hours a day for eventual service in France – which he never saw.

The only conflict he witnessed was on the day the Armistice was signed – Nov. 11, 1918 – when a fight broke out between Canadian and British soldiers.

“They armed themselves with rifles and bayonets. One fellow got a little obstreperous and they stuck a bayonet through his thigh.”

A fortnight later, Mr. Babcock was back in Canada.

With a report from Tom Hawthorn

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/veteran-was-the-last-link-to-an-era-that-defined-canada/article1473667/



Quotes Of Canadian Minister Of Citizenship, Immigration And Multiculturalism Hon. Jason Kenney(2009):

1)When you become a citizen, you're not just getting a travel document into Hotel Canada.
2)I think it's scandalous that someone could become a Canadian not knowing what the poppy represents, or never having heard of Vimy Ridge, Passchendaele, Dieppe or Juno Beach.
3)We mention freedom of conscience and freedom of religion as important rights but we also make it very clear that our laws prohibit barbaric cultural practices, they will not be tolerated, whether or not someone claims that such practices are protected by reference to religion.
4)I think we need to reclaim a deeper sense of citizenship, a sense of shared obligations to one another, to our past, as well as to the future, a kind of civic nationalism where people understand the institutions, values and symbols that are rooted in our history.

561)Molecule With Legs Walks Into Cell On Walking Track,Seizes'nDrags Perp Virus Out For Immune System to Neutralize; Conservative Law'nOrder Ideology

"Nature is the great daily book of God whose secrets must be found and used for the well-being of humanity"(Aga Khan III, Radio Pakistan, Karachi, Pakistan, February 19th 1950)

http://gonashgo.blogspot.com/2008/09/400blogpost-four-hundred-knowledge.html


Orestes Brownson's noble hope: "that we have reached the term of our downward tendency; that radicalism has had its day; that a reaction has commenced, and that the mass of our people will recover from their folly, and henceforth not fear to be conservative."

http://www.newenglishreview.org/custpage.cfm?frm=4846&sec_id=4846




"Man-made walkers might be used someday in micromachines to walk up and down walls carrying fans to channel fluid in a desired direction. Or, tiny walkers could bind to viruses and carry them off."(Excerpt from article below)


Tiny molecules walk the track

Artificial walkers may one day haul microcargo

By Laura Sanders

Web edition : Friday, February 12th, 2010

See Picture:
EnlargeWalk this way A newly designed molecular “walker” has one thiol foot (blue) and one hydrazide foot (red). As acidity in it is environment changes, the walker's feet can move from one foothold to the next. S. Otto/Nature Chemistry 2010

In one very small step for mankind, researchers have designed a tiny molecule that can walk on a track. Such artificial walkers may one day carry cargo purposefully, much like natural proteins in the body.

The new walking system, reported in the February Nature Chemistry, is “a pretty big leap forward,” comments chemist Charles Sykes of Tufts University in Medford, Mass.

In the body, motor proteins walk in one direction along molecular tracks inside cells, hauling their load as they go. These biomotors transport big loads, such as organelles, lipids and vesicles, to the desired destinations in the cell.

“Nature is full of tiny molecular motors,” Sykes says. “Mankind hasn’t been able to build anything comparable,” in part, because it’s very hard to scale down to the microscopic level, where ordinary forces such as gravity are negligible, he says.

In the new study, researchers led by David Leigh of the University of Edinburgh designed a two-legged walker made up of 21 atoms and a track made up of “stepping stone” molecules designed to react chemically with the walker’s two “feet.” There are two types of stepping stones for each of the walking molecule’s two feet. Those feet are chemically different — one consists of a chemical latch called a hydrazide and the other is a latch called a thiol. This design allows each foot to grab on to every other stepping stone.

A wash of an acidic solution loosens one foot from its hold on the track and allows it to bind to the next open step. A wash of a basic solution loosens the other foot. As the chemical environment changes, the walker’s legs scissor as they move, a motion the researchers called the “passing leg gait.” This design, in which the walker always has one foot firmly bound to the track, helps to keep the walker on the track.

On average, the walkers took 37 steps back and forth on the four-step track before falling off, which corresponds to a traveled distance of 26 nanometers, the researchers found. In contrast, an important motor protein in the body, kinesin, takes between 75 and 175 steps along its track without falling off, the researchers note.

In the new system, some walkers reached the end of the track, but not all did. In the original design, each loose foot could bind to a step ahead or to the step it just left, yielding no net directional movement. To counter that problem, the researchers then replaced the basic step with an irreversible reaction. This reaction, called a redox reaction, made the walker much more likely to take a step forward than backward.

Using these chemicals to build an artificial walker is “a very clever approach,” comments chemist James Tour of Rice University in Houston. “It’s just the beginning, though.” This system is still a long way from being able to carry cargo in artificial systems.

Man-made walkers might be used someday in micromachines to walk up and down walls carrying fans to channel fluid in a desired direction. Or, tiny walkers could bind to viruses and carry them off. Such ideas are many years off, but the new study suggests that they may one day work, Tour says.

http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/56296/title/Tiny_molecules_walk_the_track



Easy Nash
http://apps.facebook.com/blognetworks/blog/science_and_religion_in_islam_the_link/
http://gonashgo.blogspot.com/2009/08/500blogpost-five-hundred-is-blogpost.html
http://gonashgo.blogspot.com/2009/03/453a-blog-constructed-within.html

In Shia Islam, intellect is a key component of faith. Intellect allows us to understand the creation of God: Aga Khan IV(2008)
The Qur'an itself repeatedly recommends Muslims to become better educated in order better to understand God's creation: Aga Khan IV(2007)
The Quran tells us that signs of Allah's Sovereignty are found in the contemplation of His Creation: Aga Khan IV(2007)
This notion of the capacity of the human intellect to understand and to admire the creation of Allah will bring you happiness in your everyday lives: Aga Khan IV(2007)
Islam, eminently logical, placing the greatest emphasis on knowledge, purports to understand God's creation: Aga Khan IV(2006)
The Holy Qu'ran's encouragement to study nature and the physical world around us gave the original impetus to scientific enquiry among Muslims: Aga Khan IV(1985)
The first and only thing created by God was the Intellect(Aql): Prophet Muhammad(circa 632CE)

560)Valentine's Day Special: Ken Kabab Opines On the Cruelty Of Eros; Quotes Of Ken Kabab

The Cruelty of Eros

Sex tips from the Marquise de Pompadour

by Ken Kabab(a pseudonym): January 2007

Some study history for knowledge, others to honor their ancestors, but few, I suspect, do so to improve their sex lives. This is most unfortunate, since buried within the lives of great men are history's compelling stories of romance, and in them useful, practical lessons on how to seduce that special, or even not-so-special, someone. For my own part, I feel a pressing urge to write a few kind words about a certain marquise de Pompadour, best known as Louis XV’s official mistress, and someone who, I think, has much to teach us about seduction and human nature.

That history has ignored the woman who seduced Louis XV is disappointing but not altogether surprising, for to have as your life's principal achievement the seduction of an utter mediocrity, to be, as it were, the Edwina Currie of the ancien régime, inspires more contempt than admiration. Baudelaire wrote no poetry in Pompadour's honor, Camille Paglia passed her over in Sexual Personae, and the nicest thing I could find that anyone interesting has written about Pompadour was, “Elle pensait comme il faut”, which, since it came from the author of Candide, is probably a mark against her. Though not, perhaps, the most significant event in pre-revolutionary French history, Pompadour's seduction of Louis was a remarkable accomplishment in its own right, since only a very special woman is able to seduce the King of France.

Born outside the French nobility—née Jeanne-Antoinette Poisson—the future marquise de Pompadour learned early on that status was earned, not inherited, and that those who carry themselves with dignity and respect, even if born in the middle class, could still achieve a measure of respectability. Eighteenth-century England had absorbed a similar lesson, where the honorific “gentleman” was conferred on those who held no baronetcy, but nevertheless set a good example for the common man. Understanding the subtle distinction between class and status, that the former is intractable, while the latter is not (JAMES II: “I could make him a nobleman, but God Almighty could not make him a gentleman.”), allowed Pompadour to climb the ranks of French society, seducing her way to the very top.

Pompadour was probably a bastard-child, since her mother was a courtesan, and, on her father’s death, which occurred when she was still quite young, a curiously large number of older men offered to pay for her schooling, and generally to assume the responsibilities of fatherhood. Fortunately, and to her credit, Pompadour made the most of these opportunities, immersing herself in French literature and perfecting her riding skills, two traits that, as Dr Johnson would remark to Boswell, were the defining virtues of a well-bred woman.

In 1741, Poisson, as she then was, married up, becoming the wife of Charles-Guillaume le Normant d’Etiolles, a mostly unremarkable man whose saving grace was birth in a good family. The marriage, it seems, was cursed from the beginning: the product of its consummation was stillborn, and another child born several years later died young. The historical record does not relate any details of love or devotion between husband and wife, so perhaps it is somewhat fortunate that the Etiolles produced no other offspring, and that Charles-Guillaume eventually went mad, possibly from syphilis.

In 1745, while attending a masked ball, madame d’Etiolles, as she then was, began her seduction of Louis XV, about whom I should probably write a few words.

Louis XV acceded to the throne on the death of Louis XIV, le roi soleil. At first, he was a popular king, and his people held high hopes for his reign; indeed, the French began referring to him as "Louis Quinze" instead of Louis, in the expectation that his accomplishments would outlast him. Unfortunately, early failures in the conduct of foreign policy in Europe ended Louis's honeymoon with the people, and poisoned the remainder of his reign.

The king soon stopped concerning himself with matters of state, which he found profoundly boring, and began instead to satisfy his baser instincts and indulge in the vice of gambling and cheap thrill of hunting. Louis XV's advisers, seeking to curry favor with the king, would pander to his frivolous desires, which only encouraged Louis to further abdicate his responsibilities, as well as sabotage his chance at greatness.

Here is where the story of Pompadour's trickery and seduction begins. Only after everyone in the kingdom, including Louis himself, knew that his reign would be utterly unremarkable, did Pompadour, still married to Charles-Guillaume, enter the picture. What few details are known about the seduction of Louis XV suggest that it began at a ball to celebrate the marriage of his son, Louis, dauphin de France, who went on to father three future kings of France: Louis XVI, Louis XVIII, and Charles X.

The seduction continued for several months afterwards, most fruitfully when the king was engaging in a favorite past-time, hunting, on an estate adjacent to the Etiolles's, during which Pompadour would ride nearby in an open carriage. In short order, Louis XV fell madly in love with her, granted her a divorce from her husband, and in 1745 purchased the marquisate of Pompadour for her.

But how exactly did Pompadour seduce Louis XV? And what can this teach us about human nature and romance?

Pompadour did not, it is fair to say, have a romantic conception of love. Indeed, the Italian sociologist Francesco Alberoni probably summed up her approach to romance quite nicely when he wrote that "the experience of falling in love originates in extreme depression, an inability to find value in everyday life." From the very beginning, Pompadour acted as though the key to Louis's heart was through exploiting his insecurities as well as his fear of the future. Pompadour's insight into human nature, as I hope shall become clear shortly, is a particularly shrewd one when seduction, and seduction alone, is the overriding goal.

Before she could prey on Louis's insecurities, Pompadour had to reckon with the irksome fact that Louis XV, having long since abandoned any hope of being a great king, was becoming more and more carefree. How do you make someone feel insecure about that which they no longer care about, or to which they remain oblivious?

Pompadour's strategy, which was sheer genius in conception and execution, was to open the wounds of failure, rub salt in them, and then offer Louis the hope of closing them. Basically, since the king had few insecurities, Pompadour had to create them. Pompadour strongly hinted to Louis that the reason for his unpopularity was that the French felt he would not live up to the legacy of his auspicious predecessor, Louis XIV.

This much, I rather suspect, Louis XV already knew deep down; but since most of his advisers, through politeness or sycophancy, avoided making this point directly to the king, Louis XV thought Pompadour's observation particularly novel, and profound, and was impressed that someone could see so deeply inside him. As if meeting a stranger who knew all his stories, Louis began falling for Pompadour's spell.

Preying on his easily ascertainable yet unremarked shortcomings, and passing these off as unique insights into the real Louis XV, Pompadour began her masterful seduction. Having drawn Louis's attention to his own failures, and then nurtured his insecurities so that they could grow malignant and spread, Pompadour became the only person with whom the king felt comfortable discussing his foibles, of which he was, understandably, quite ashamed.

Pompadour shared a special bond with Louis XV: sometimes, Pompadour correctly recognized, there are things one is more comfortable confiding in a stranger than a friend; and so Pompadour used what Louis XV told to her to enhance her status from stranger to close confidant to, eventually, official mistress. But how precisely did she accomplish this successful entrapment?
Pompadour sought to bridge the gap between who Louis was, and what he felt he ought to be. Of course, and she knew this, what Louis ought to be was vastly different than what he was, or even what he could be (Pompadour did not actually believe Louis XV could amount to anything); but the key to her seduction was to convince Louis that this chasm was not as wide as everyone thought, and to make him believe that only she could bridge it. Thus Pompadour became a teacher, a confidant, and someone who made Louis feel good about himself. To Louis, the power she possessed over him was all for the good, and she gradually became indispensable to his sense of self-worth, rather like an addictive drug.

Unlike other members of Louis XV’s inner-circle, who either flattered Louis with pretty words that lacked substance or otherwise approved of his baser instincts and disreputable habits, Pompadour, after destroying Louis by pointing out his weaknesses, then inspired him, offering him a path to follow if he wanted to achieve, how shall I put it, salvation.

Perhaps Pompadour's insight into seduction—discover someone's weaknesses, then exploit them—sounds trite, but its effectiveness when executed correctly, by which I mean subtly, is so rarely remarked on nowadays: Everyone must endure the weight of insecurity, of not believing in themselves, and a person who aspires to something greater than mere ordinariness is especially burdened by this, as well as by, and this is true of the young in particular, uncertainty about what the future will bring, and a sense of powerlessness in shaping it.

Pompadour recognized this, and used it to make Louis XV emotionally dependent on her, and used that dependence, in turn, to enhance her status in the kingdom. By the time of Pompadour's death in 1764, Louis XV is said to have remarked, in tacit acknowledgment of what she had done to him, "La marquise n'aura pas beau temps pour son voyage."

Pompadour taught that effective seduction, because it requires creating something similar to an emotional dependence, cannot be a one-off affair. The seduction must be continuous. In fact, the sheer strength of Pompadour's hold on Louis became known when she, having lost the ability to excite the king in the bedroom, and in any event finding intimacy unbearable because of a painful and chronic leucorrhea, still retained her position as Louis XV's official mistress.

Gradually, Pompadour's responsibilities shifted to the exercise of a political function, where, being aware that Louis was unhappy with his accomplishments as king, she persuaded him to try to leave his mark on French foreign policy by abandoning France's traditional friendship with Prussia in favor of one with Austria. It is I think worth pausing here to note the ease with which Pompadour transitioned from the world of romance to that of politics, for ultimately, Pompadour knew, they both rewarded the same manipulative and mendacious behavior.

Two points should I think be made about Pompadour's seduction of Louis XV. First, and most importantly, Pompadour was able to maintain her dignity throughout. Historians tend to ignore Pompadour and instead celebrate Don Juan, Casanova, and Cleopatra as the apotheosis of the sexual personae. What they fail to consider, however, is that these latter three, when seducing others, demeaned themselves and their gender considerably.

Don Juan and Casanova, in addition to being scofflaws, debased themselves into androgynous figures. The two basically ceased being obtrusively masculine and instead trumpeted their femininity, prefiguring, in many ways, none to their credit, Oscar Wilde's famous prepubescent object of lust, Dorian Gray. This sort of willful and unmanly metrosexualism is unbecoming; doubtless, Don Juan and Casanova were quite happy being the little spoon, too.

Cleopatra, likewise, is hardly a figure we want women to emulate. What in particular is praiseworthy about Cleopatra hiding in a carpet and having her man-servants unfurl it in front of Julius Caesar, making a complete spectacle of herself? The Romans of the period called Cleopatra an “Egyptian whore”, which, on an honest inspection of the list of men who had their way with her, is not an entirely inaccurate charge. Additionally, Cleopatra brought ruin to Caesar and, later, Mark Anthony, probably making wittols of them both.

By contrast, Pompadour's quiet, graceful, and dignified seduction of Louis XV leaves her with nothing to be ashamed of. Surely it is Pompadour's story we should celebrate, and emulate. Yet it is ignored, partly because Pompadour's seduction of Louis XV was deeply, and palpably, unromantic; instead, it was workmanlike, shrewd, manipulative, and entrapping. And effective.

Precisely because the seduction worked, however, it repays close study. By deromanticizing seduction, Pompadour provides us with a handy map to help us obtain what we desire.
Pompadour is, in many respects, the matriarch of the relationship guru, except, unlike today's men and women's magazines, Pompadour's stock-in-trade is not dull platitudes. Pompadour instead offers a subtle lesson into human weakness and insecurity, and how knowledge of these can be used to seduce others. It is dangerous knowledge, but it is knowledge nevertheless.

For Pompadour, a successful seduction can overshadow the means used to obtain it. Now, this is obviously untrue when one is hoping that a seduction will lead to a stable marriage, because manipulation of the kind Pompadour counseled will poison any long-term relationship; Pompadour's advice, however, is quite useful for short-term relationships.

During high school, college, and the early years of one's working life, few men and women are actually seeking out a partner for life. Where Pompadour's advice is helpful is in the pursuit of one-night stands or good-for-now relationships. In these trysts, does it really matter that a certain level of emotional manipulation is involved? I should hope not, for to expect every romantically-inclined young adult to pursue their lust within Kantian constraints is certain to result in an unspeakably sub-optimal number of such relationships. After all, as Pompadour reminds us, it is the cruelty of eros that elevates it above mere pleasure, and makes it sublime.

Ken Kabab is a pseudonym.

http://www.newenglishreview.org/custpage.cfm?frm=5187&sec_id=5187


The above article was also featured in the prestigious Arts And Letters Daily:
http://www.parislogue.com/travel-tips/seduction-tips-from-madame-de-pompadour.html


Quotes of Ken Kabab, a pseudonym of the actual author, whose real identity can be ascertained by clicking on the original link to the article:

"Some study history for knowledge, others to honor their ancestors, but few, I suspect, do so to improve their sex lives": Ken Kabab(2007)
"Pompadour's seduction of Louis was a remarkable accomplishment in its own right, since only a very special woman is able to seduce the King of France": Ken Kabab(2007)
"Pompadour was probably a bastard-child, since her mother was a courtesan, and, on her father’s death, which occurred when she was still quite young, a curiously large number of older men offered to pay for her schooling, and generally to assume the responsibilities of fatherhood": Ken Kabab(2007)
"Thus Pompadour became a teacher, a confidant, and someone who made Louis feel good about himself. To Louis, the power she possessed over him was all for the good, and she gradually became indispensable to his sense of self-worth, rather like an addictive drug": Ken Kabab(2007)
"In fact, the sheer strength of Pompadour's hold on Louis became known when she, having lost the ability to excite the king in the bedroom, and in any event finding intimacy unbearable because of a painful and chronic leucorrhea, still retained her position as Louis XV's official mistress": Ken Kabab(2007)
"Surely it is Pompadour's story we should celebrate, and emulate. Yet it is ignored, partly because Pompadour's seduction of Louis XV was deeply, and palpably, unromantic; instead, it was workmanlike, shrewd, manipulative, and entrapping. And effective": Ken Kabab(2007)
“It is the cruelty of eros that elevates it above mere pleasure and makes it sublime.”: Ken Kabab(2007)