The recent brouhaha surrounding Pope Benedict XVI comments on Islam delivered in Germany should give Moslems a pause.  What the Pope said allows me, as a Moslem, to ponder self-examination and not rush into a reaction of condemnation.

Islam, throughout its history, delivered its share of great minds to humanity during times of peace and prosperity. Scientists like Mohammad al-Khawarizmi who invented algebra and Avicenna who contributed greatly to medicine lived in an era of "political prestige, financial power, and intellectual pursuit with Baghdad as the epicenter" as Saadia Iqbal described it in a recent National Geographic article.

We Moslems, in another era, built our own great and peaceful civilization that ushered the prosperity wished upon any people of any race in any religion.  But Islam of today differs from the Islam of yesterday. Instead of a thriving era of the Abbasids, we are experiencing a terrorist era of Wahhabism.

The radicalism of Wahhabi Islam demands a concerted effort by moderate Moslems and Moslem nations alike if ever Islam is to survive to usher another era of peace and prosperity.

There is a historically fairly predictable pattern to the unfolding strategies and views of great wars. They often start with a morally ambiguous view of the enemy, a more limited conception of the war's magnitude and a restrained application of violent tactics.

Eventually, moral clarity is obtained, war objectives expand - often to grandiosity, and tactics become ferocious.

Today, the West's struggle to resist radical Islamic aggression (both cultural and terroristic) is still in that early phase of moral confusion and limited tactics.

Thus we continue to debate the ethical merits of minor intrusions into American civil liberties (such as NSA surveillance of some phone calls from foreign suspects), and even men such as Sen. John McCain and Gen. Colin Powell challenge the need to permit psychologically rough - but nonviolent - interrogation of captured terrorists.

But there are some signs that the early stage of moral confusion is beginning to give way to greater clarity.

Syrians Foil US Embassy Bombing blared the BBC headline regarding the terrorist attack on the American Embassy in Damascus, Syria on September 12.  US Lauds Syrian Forces in US Embassy Attack was the CNN headline the next day.  Then came the clincher when the Associated Press ran a story headlined Isolated Syria Hopes Attack on US Embassy Will Warm Relations with US.

Syria playing Uncle Sam for a sucker yet again.  For the "attack," you see, was staged.  It was planned by Assef Shawkat, head of Syrian Military Intelligence, whose agents provocateurs provoked a few hothead fools, provided them with weapons, and organized the attack for them - so Shawkat's "Syrian Forces" could be there as heroes to kill the bad guys and save the American diplomats.

It's an old Damascus game...

At my university I was sitting at one interminably long meeting where sadly much time is wasted and little gets done. But during one of the discussions the person who was the leader made the point that there are faculty members of two different political persuasions, conservative and progressive. He was trying to be simply descriptive.

Ah, yes, "progressive," that into which liberals have been transformed.

Yet the designation fails to fit folks on the Left altogether.  Because instead of moving forward, getting away from past practices, of making progress, those on the Left are actually regressive, even reactionary, in their politics. I give you one major example.

"Roger Ramadi" is the pseudonym of a high-ranking Marine intelligence officer currently serving in Iraq.  To The Point just received his "sitrep" of the best and the worst in Anbar Province, Iraq's "Wild West."

Worst City in al-Anbar Province -- Ramadi, hands down.  The provincial capital of 400,000 people.  Killed over 1,000 insurgents in there since we arrived in February.  Every day is a nasty gun battle.  They blast us with giant bombs in the road, snipers, mortars and small arms.  We blast them with tanks, attack helicopters, artillery, our snipers (much better than theirs), and every weapon that an infantryman can carry. 

Every day.  Incredibly, I rarely see Ramadi in the news.  We have as many attacks out here in the west as Baghdad.  Yet, Baghdad has 7 million people, we have just 1.2 million.  Per capita, al-Anbar province is the most violent place in Iraq by several orders of magnitude.  I suppose it was no accident that the Marines were assigned this area in 2003.

Best Chuck Norris Moment -- 13 May.  Bad Guys arrived at the government center in the small town of Kubaysah to kidnap the town mayor, since they have a problem with any form of government that does not include regular beheadings and women wearing burqahs.  There were seven of them.  As they brought the mayor out to put him in a pick-up truck to take him off to be beheaded (on video, as usual), one of the bad Guys put down his machinegun so that he could tie the mayor's hands. 

The mayor took the opportunity to pick up the machinegun and drill five of the Bad Guys.  The other two ran away.  One of the dead Bad Guys was on our top twenty wanted list.  Like they say, you can't fight City Hall.

Most Surreal Moment -- Watching Marines arrive at my detention facility and unload a truck load of flex-cuffed midgets.  26 to be exact.  I had put the word out earlier in the day to the Marines in Fallujah that we were looking for Bad Guy X, who was described as a midget. 

Little did I know that Fallujah was home to a small community of midgets, who banded together for support since they were considered as social outcasts.  The Marines were anxious to get back to the midget colony to bring in the rest of the midget suspects, but I called off the search, figuring Bad Guy X was long gone on his short legs after seeing his companions rounded up by the giant infidels.

[Tibor Machan and I have been friends for almost 40 years.  I remember when he taught at Cal-State - and reminded him, when I read his column, that back then I had a bumper sticker on my car that simply said:  CommUNism.]

In 1972, I was not rehired at the Department of Philosophy of the California State University, Bakersfield, even though I fulfilled the requirement of finishing my dissertation and obtaining my PhD to be reappointed.

I was mystified - I had a good publication record, my teaching went quite well as a beginner. So what was up?

I had a friend in the office. She checked out the secret records they could still keep on people back then and learned that those records contained something totally irrelevant to my qualifications.

I had written a letter to the editor of the local paper, The Bakersfield Californian, in which I argued that the United Nations is mostly a coercive international organization that lacks any moral or even political legitimacy.

The Israeli navy rarely gets the spotlight, but it briefly drew attention in July when a Hezbollah anti-ship missile surprised a command vessel, killing four sailors. Then the coverage turned back to the war in the air and on the ground.

Hearing only about what went wrong at sea, we missed a terrific, positive story. We've been missing it for years.

The Israeli navy is the state's smallest military arm, with only 1,500 personnel on active duty and reservists rounding out crews. But the service has an enormous mission - which it's been executing quietly and superbly for decades.

Which brings me to terrorists on jet skis...