Note from Robert Spencer:
The mere threat to Salman Rushdie was a cause celebre. Roger Simon asks: why are his Hollywood colleagues silent on the death of Theo Van Gogh?

But these are different times. Just a bit more is now required of such advisers. One suspects that the degree in social relations or psephology, that stint working for McGovern, fundraising with the Democratic National Committee, and a friendship with someone who writes for Tikkun, just won't cut the mustard any more. And if you are not used to reading real books, without pictures, how likely is it, as you supply "opinions" and "you know, stuff to back up those opinions, like facts" that you will have the time to wade through all those daunting texts about Islam -- I mean, just trying to pronounce the names "Bat Ye'or" and "Ibn Warraq" is hard enough. But "isnad"? And "Al-Hudaibiyya"? Hey, I'm outta here. And am I expected to follow demographic trends in Europe, or to understand what Islam has to do with southern Thailand, or the current situation in the Ivory Coast, or what the phrase "les deux rives" now means in France?

Yes, those "foreign policy advisers" must be getting just a bit anxious. Time to leave, time to find other employment -- perhaps at some university where an old pal from fundraising days can ease you into a sinecure (the students will never know that you know nothing -- and you've got the power of the grade over them, anyway, and besides, they will be thrilled to be taught by someone who actually worked with Hollywood stars. Call the course "The Uses of Fame: Compassion and Commitment Among the Stars." Enrollment will be huge; everyone wants to find out what these people are "really" like -- you know, behind all that irksome falsity, and the makeup?

Besides, the islamization of Europe just may have an effect on what really counts -- foreign and residual rights. You know how those matter these days. More than 30 years ago, during filming of Harry Craig's script about the life of Muhammad, a single phone call made by some Saudi to the King of Morocco forced the film crew to decamp overnight from that country, though luckily that wild-card Qaddafi offered them his cinematic desert ("mazza che spiaggia"-- "wow, what a beach" as the old joke has it) instead. Don't count on the world of Islam to support the current standard of living in Malibu, or Bel Air, or those away-from-it-all 3,000 acre spreads that offer you the simple life in Wyoming and Montana.

So what Hollywood celebrity, out there, would like to trade in his or her "Nation" reading adviser for someone who will actually promise to have read, predigested, made sense of, Qur'an and hadith and sira, as well as many of the books and articles, even by long-overlooked scholars of Islam -- texts that would take you, busy celebrity, ten years to plow through, and you haven't time. It isn't your highest and best use. But you need someone to make matters plain -- and please don't think hiring one of those "experts" -- Arab and Muslim -- that are all over the airwaves are the way to go; you might just as well hire Karen Armstrong, or John Esposito between coffee-table books (mosques, Iznik tulips, magic carpets qibla-aimed), and what good would that do you? And don't think there is anywhere in the press you can turn to -- Tom Friedman et al are looking sillier and more irrelevant every day.

The principals at Jihadwatch proudly announce that the services of its "private opinion" advisers can now be engaged -- to provide, everything from at-table or post-prandial disquisitions on Islam and the World, Saving the Environment and Fighting the Jihad, Women in a Muslim World, and other topics, some not quite so fashionably titled. Having such an improvisatore on hand, ready to make sense of riots in the Ivory Coast, future warfare in East Africa over Nile waters, massacres in East Timor and the Moluccas, Turkey's application to the EU, the rate of demographic conquest in Western Europe, the relation of Islam to science and art -- these, and many more topics, to enlighten your guests, instead of having those tired old political hacks tell them yet again about their candidates' vision for a "new America." Whether star or starletta of the big or little screen, agent or director or producer, you can become the cynosure of all eyes at dinner-parties, the astonishingly well-informed guest on Leno or Letterman or Charlie Rose. All for less than you pay that personal trainer for your pets.

You will be able to beat the salon bolsheviks, in the usual salons, at their own game. And what's more, you will actually be able to make sense of the world. Your adviser will be able to beat their adviser -- this we can guarantee. Money back if not fully satisfied with opinions (and evidence, and logic) provided.

Special discounts available for bulk purchases of opinions (political, literary, historical-pastoral-tragical).

Oh, and if you are not a Hollywood celebrity, but want someone's akin to Pushkin's improvisatore (see "Egyptian Nights") at your next professional meeting, feel free. You need not be written up in those check-out counter newspapers to be eligible for our services.

Contact: Adviser, at the Jihadwatch address.

One feels like adding: Operators are standing by. Calls may be monitored for quality control.

But that would be silly. >

Here is what I posted about it on October 22 [if you google “jihadwatch” and “Posted by Hugh” and “deux rives” and “Abd-el Kader” that posting comes up]:

One sign of the times can be seen on a little postcard, with a picture of the Algerian leader of the 19th century Jihad, Abd el-Kader (some of whose men ended up settling in what is now the West Bank and Gaza, and became the ancestors of some of that "ancient Palestinian people" we have heard so much about since they were invented after the Six-Day War). The postcard announces that "le Centre historique des Archives nationales presente l'exposition ‘Un héros des deux rives: Abd el-Kader, L'homme et sa légende."

The exposition took place "du 26 fevrier au 26 mai 2003." It must have been something. A Muslim warrior, fighting against French Infidels, is now celebrated, in France, at the Musée de l"Histoire de France, Hôtel de Soubise, 60, rue des Francs-Bourgeois, as a "hero of the two banks" (of the Mediterranean). This "deux-rives" stuff is now all over the place; it is practically the theme song of that (unintentionally) amusing performer, Dominique de Villepin. He seems not to have noticed, nor have those echoing him, that it is not simply a question of which bank of the Mediterranean -- cette mer blanche du milieu as the Arabs call it -- one happens to be living on, as if the differences between Europe and the Islamic world were merely a matter of rooms similiary riparian but with different views [R./w/vu, like the one E. M. Forster took]. There is the vast and inescapable matter of history, of Islam versus Christendom, of what people carry around in their heads, of what has formed their mental makeup, and everything about them, and their ancestors, for generations back. That is why the phrase "un héros des deux rives" is so insidious, so silly, and so telling.

Imagine putting on an exhibit at the National Gallery or the Smithsonian, celebrating either Tojo, or or Admiral Yamamoto, or Erwin Rommel, or any of the others in the “military wing” of a vicious ideology (as opposed to the “spiritual wing” just as in Hamas or Hezbollah or Al-Qaeda or….you can fill it up yourself) that would still, if it could, make war on the United States and the Western, advanced, civilized or quasi-civilized, world) – as “heros of two banks [of the A., or of the P.].

This “deux-rives” business exploits all those historians – Fernand Braudel comes to mind – who have made the “civilization of the Mediterranean” and the idea of a “Mediterranean culture” their interest. And of course, before the Muslim conquest, when North Africa was part of Europe culturally, and the home of such Fathers of the Church as Tertullian and then St. Augustine, he of Hippo, one really could use a phrase such as “les deux rives” unabashedly – had anyone felt it necessary. And what is both amusing, and confusing, is how things quite distant from politics – such as cookbooks stressing the Mediterranean diet – somehow make all the people interested in food and longevity, who far outnumber those who want to read about history, or the history of clashing ideas, or the effect of ideologies on people – may think that this “Mediterranean uniculture” idea may have something to it. But it will take a lot more than the polyunsaturated fat of olive oil, even if it is extra virgin olive oil (that “extra virgin” stuff should not impress – just look at what happened to Britney Spears), to convince the intelligent that the way people think, react, ponder, understand the world, what they love, what they encourage, is the same in Constantine, or Tripoli, or Marrakesh, as it is in Leiden or Versailles or Urbino. This will not stop the promoters of the Euro-Arab Dialogue, such people as Hubert Vedrine, and D. de V., and Jacques Chirac, for they, predominately French, having made a terrible mess by permitting mass Muslim migration, and not having a clue as to how to solve what is an insoluble problem, are prepared to “dilute” France’s problem by implicating the rest of Europe in it as well – including such poor innocents as Bulgaria, Hungary, Poland, and other countries that have done nothing to deserve having to pay, for the mistakes, passed on a failure to understand the importance of ideology (well, Jaroslav Geremek and Pavel Kohout and Czeslaw Milosz and Vaclav Havel could have helped out those spoiled-rotten Frenchmen, if only they had been asked). Think of those complacent asses at the Elysee, and the Quai d’Orsay, and all those members of the Assemblee Nationale (D. de V.’s father has been a “senateur” representing Français d’outre-mer, and helping his son’s early career, until quite recently) eating their expensive expense-account lunches at that expensive restaurant near Rodin's house/museum, have not been serving their country, the legacy of that country, well. Many of those “morts pour la France” – Denise Bloch, Boris Vilde – must be turning over in their graves.

The idea, you see, behind “les deux rives” is to act as if culture, sensu lato, the entire slow development of Western civilization in Europe, does not mean very much, is not diametrically opposed to, in its essence, everything for which Islam stands, and which it inculcates in its hostile, and sometimes murderously hostile, adherents. This includes the emphasis in Islam on the collective, as opposed to individual autonomy in the West (the umma, everything for the umma). It includes the Total Regulation of Life, down to various minute details of personal hygiene which need not be elaborated upon here, or for that matter, whether a woman can wear a certain hairstyle (note for Marcel de Paris or Gianni d'Italia in Abu Dhabi town: be careful not to pile the customer’s hair up in the shape of a "camel's hump" -- it's haram). Islam offers at no additional cost a Total Explanation of the Universe (possibly the funniest part of those Da’wa books you can pick up at a mosque near you, are the little pamphlets full of solemn attempts by “scholars of Islamic sciences” to discover, mirabile dictum, all of the subsequent developments of modern science, since those desert days in the early 7th century, in the Qur’an. Oh, apparently it has everything in it – the nature of recombinant DNA, the Big Bang theory, volcanology, subatomic particles – it’s all there, was always there, and there was really no need for Watson or Crick or Rosalind Franklin, no need for Gell-Mann or Yuval Ne’eman, no need for Benoit Mandelbrot’s chaos, nope – everything you know, and everything you need to know (well, Keats was born a Muslim wasn’t he?) is in that Book. All we mortals need do is read it rightly.

The "deux rives" formula used to overlap, but now one supposes it has even replaced, the “North” and “South” theme, by which the world was divided into two—the advanced, European or European-derived countries, full of ruthless exploiters of natural resources, and the “South” of the victimized, darker peoples – this was, by the way, a neat trick for the Arab Muslims, because though they were in the process of engineering the largest transfer of wealth, of unmerited wealth, in human history, the billionaires and millionaires of the U.A.E., Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Libya et al. felt right at home at these conferences, pretending to be part of the delegation of peoples from the oppressed and impoverished “South” making aggrieved demands on the North. Actually, that Iraq is now getting debt relief, and that the American government, not content at having spent nearly $200 billion on relieving Iraq of a monstrous dictatorship, actually plants to lavish tens of billions of dollars of taxpayers’ money on that country (instead, say, of letting it borrow against future oil revenues) shows how that “North”-“South” polarity (but who is cru and who is cuit in this Levi-Straussian, if not Straussian, classification?). Remember how every so often another one of those conferences is held so that the "rich white spoiled-rotten and exploitative West" can be raked over the coals by the "wonderful victimized Third World”? Think of all those news items that began "The debtor nations of the South called in their statement on the creditors of the North to forgive their $800 billion dollars in debt in their collective statement presented on the last day of a U.N.-sponsored conference held in the magnificent new Palace of Conferences and Culture, built last year at a cost of $380 million dollars, and situated in the dusty capital city of Ubangi-Shari....").

That’s what “deux rives” is all about.