What I find remarkable about all of the caliphate and 12th imam talk is that these people are just toeing the Bernard Lewis line (some might say cluelessly). They wouldn’t know occultation from dissimulation or shahada from jiziya if they didn’t have court academics to tell them what to say and how to say it. Arguably, you could say this about all politicians (and there are good arguments that academics themselves should never get into electoral politics personally), but there are levels of ignorance in public officials that I am not willing to tolerate. If people this hopeless didn’t want to run most of the world, I wouldn’t worry, but since they do it seems only fair to demand high standards of knowledge and understanding (not that these things alone guarantee good policy, but they usually can’t hurt).

What I found remarkable about all of the debate banter last week was just how much more uninformed many of them sounded by trying so hard to show their worldliness by dropping “caliphate” and “12th imam” into a sentence. It’s like someone at a party who wants to show how learned he is, so he starts using words like “interiority” and “appropriation” to refer to his desire to have a snack.

Good points.

I addressed the whole debate, including Romney’s comments, from an Arab-American Republican perspective under the title “Pachyderm Madrasa” – http://www.ajjan.com/2007/05/pachyderm-madrasa.html.

If the fact that Reid, Hatch and Osmond can all be mentioned in the same sentence doesn’t disprove the idea of the LDS conspiracy, I don’t know what would.

The Lubavitcher Rebbe, Bill Kristol, and Noam Chomsky–all part of the International Zionist-Fascist Conspiracy.

I could go on about Harry Reid, Orrin Hatch, and Donny Osmond as part of the International LDS Conspiracy, but I won’t.