I really did think—naively, I guess—that this was over and done with, a triumph indicating at least an inkling of collective dignity, when Rupert Murdoch caved to outside pressure and pulled the thing from the presses. 

Oh but no. The American people will get their "If I Did It", courtesy of—wait for it—Ron Goldman's family, which seized the manuscript in a lawsuit. Some of the proceeds will go to the Ron Goldman Foundation for Justice, apparently. The rest, to the devil. 

I mean for God’s sake: they could have had a public ceremony and burned the thing. They could have kept it in a safe in a room in the basement. But no: the bullshit self-consuming therapeutic ethos that dominates so much contemporary fiction says: “the people must know”. For Ron’s sake. Because the truth—which, by the way, this isn’t—will set you (yes, You) free. Ah, closure. What dividends it pays to us poor among the living.

The idea that "exposing this confessional” to the rest of the world bravely—self-sacrificingly!— does justice to OJ's victims is so bogus it hurts. For starters, it is nothing the rest of America doesn’t already know, and know, and know. This is redundantly cruel, like a Shrek 3 with murder. 

 Anyhow, Timothy Noah has a multi-part review of the book’s actual merits:

 "Sit back, people," O.J. writes on the book's first page. "The things I know, and the things I believe, you can't even imagine."

"And I'm going to share them with you. Because the story you know, or think you know—that's not the story. Not even close. This is one story the whole world got wrong."

By even half-considering the book seriously, as, you know, literature, Noah manages to send several frissons equal parts anger, disgust, and fear down your spine.

The New Statesman reports that Saudi society is beginning to rebel against the country’s infamous religious police, or mutawwa'in, which have long served as enforcers for the seriously-named Committee for the Propagation of Virtue and Prevention of Vice:

 …public outcry has encouraged others to come forward and protest abuse by the committee. The most prominent case has been that of a 50-year-old Riyadh woman who was kidnapped, along with her daughter, by two committee members who then crashed her car. As a result, three lawsuits have been lodged against the committee, which has never been legally challenged before.

Established as part of the pact between the religious establishment and the House of Saud, the mutawwa'in have symbolised the quid pro quo arrangement of Saudi Arabia - religious sanction in exchange for religious influence. Their special status has protected committee members from criticism and given them virtually unlimited power. Even as recently as 2003, the editor of a prominent Saudi newspaper was fired for daring to challenge the committee.

Yet in the past few weeks, outrage against the committee has burst forth from almost all corners of Saudi society. Editorials critical of the religious police have abounded, even in the historically censored Saudi press. A controversial online poll on the mutawwa'in, conducted by the Saudi-owned news outlet al-Arabiya, attracted the highest number of votes since the website was founded. Almost 35 per cent of respondents supported dismantling the committee.

As one Saudi blogger who runs a satirical site called the Religious Policeman [muttawa.blogspot.com] puts it: "They are the no-hopers, the social misfits, the failed imams . . . ugly in nature, ugly in behaviour." Indignation is so high that there have been physical attacks on the religious police, with 21 incidents reported last year.

Official critiques of the police have also been forthcoming. The National Society for Human Rights, officially sanctioned by the rulers, has taken the committee to task. A recent report by the group condemns various mutawwa'in practices, including "humiliating people during interrogation" and "beating people and using force to arrest suspects". Dr Muhammad al-Zalfa, a member of the advisory Shura Council, recently lashed out at the committee, saying: "Those who make mistakes must be punished, and we must lift the religious, political and social immunity off them."

…the outcry has clearly had an effect: the interior ministry recently published a directive pointedly reminding committee members to transfer suspects to the police, rather than holding them in detention centres. The committee has also hired a public spokesman for the first time and established a legal department to be known as the "Department of Rules and Regulations" - moves that illustrate the extent to which the committee has lost its infallible status…

 Five years ago, the mutawwa’in  prevented a group of schoolgirls from exiting a burning school in Mecca because they weren’t wearing the proper religious dress, a move which was defended by the House of Saud even after 15 of the girls were killed and 50 others injured. Catholic priests—there are 100, 000 Catholics in SA—have been arrested for saying mass. And in May of this year, a man was beaten to death for being suspected of having alcohol in his home.

Time reported this month that a campaign is sending text messages to a million Saudis to declare that “2007 is the year of liberation”. Without being there, it’s impossible to sense what’s prompting this change in SA—it’s more than just the internet and technology—but it’s worth tracking whether a refomation of the religious police will actually be realized, if , according to al-Watan columnist Khalid al-Ghanami, everyone will realize “that such practices, which did not bother many people in the past, are by no means acceptable today."

Angry Blog:

Christopher Hitchens: “Of the suicide bombing population, 100% are faith-based.” (at 52 min)

"Wrong. Prior to 2003, the leading suicide bombing organization was the Tamil Tigers of Sri Lankda, a secular, Marxist-influenced separatist group."

 Robert Pape, the leading American scholar on suicide bombings, shows in an absurdly illuminating article that the origins of terrorism are not in Islamic fundamentalism but rather in firsthand experience of foreign—particularly US—occupation. He writes:

 “The evidence shows that the presence of American troops is clearly the pivotal factor driving suicide terrorism. If Islamic fundamentalism were the pivotal factor, then we should see some of the largest Islamic fundamentalist countries in the world, like Iran, which has 70 million people—three times the population of Iraq and three times the population of Saudi Arabia—with some of the most active groups in suicide terrorism against the United States. However, there has never been an al-Qaeda suicide terrorist from Iran, and we have no evidence that there are any suicide terrorists in Iraq from Iran. Sudan is a country of 21 million people. Its government is extremely Islamic fundamentalist. The ideology of Sudan was so congenial to Osama bin Laden that he spent three years in Sudan in the 1990s. Yet there has never been an al-Qaeda suicide terrorist from Sudan. I have the first complete set of data on every al-Qaeda suicide terrorist from 1995 to early 2004, and they are not from some of the largest Islamic fundamentalist countries in the world. Two thirds are from the countries where the United States has stationed heavy combat troops since 1990. Another point in this regard is Iraq itself. Before our invasion, Iraq never had a suicide-terrorist attack in its history. Never. Since our invasion, suicide terrorism has been escalating rapidly with 20 attacks in 2003, 48 in 2004, and over 50 in just the first five months of 2005. Every year that the United States has stationed 150,000 combat troops in Iraq, suicide terrorism has doubled.”

Tim Lee at The American Scene adds:

"It’s fascinating how close the correlation is between the 9/11 hijackers and US deployments. 15 of the 19 hijackers were from Saudi Arabia, which hosted thousands of American troops at the time of the 9/11 attack. Two more were from the United Arab Emirates, which is currently host to about 1100 American troops. Another is from Egypt, which has 384 American troops as part of a peacekeeping force on the Sinai Peninsula, and also carried a Saudi passport. And the final hijacker was from Lebanon, a country that doesn’t currently have any American troops, but he was seven when Israel invaded Lebanon and eight at the time of the barracks bombing, two events that could easily have made a big impression on him.Among the hijackers there were no Iranians, Syrians, Sudanese, or residents of other countries where radical Islam flourish but the United States did not have a troop presence. No Iraqis either."

I hope that this will be the beginning of the end for all those that find comfort—and an excuse not to seriously confront the issue—in the generalization that Islam, the religion, is the source of today’s evils. It might be of use to novelists, too, who'll have to go beyond the Wikipedia page on Islam in order to create the believable psychology of a suicide bomber.  

In May, Mickey Mouse’s Islamofascist cousin—the one that’s never invited to the weddings—was beaten to death by an Israeli terrorist. But never fear, never fear, for the Disney franchise is stocked with willing martyrs…and so it was that last week Simba, the Lion King himself, was shown on Hamas’ al-Aqsa television network fighting an evil army of rats, wielding Israeli guns and adorned by US dollars—Fatah, of course. Do listen for the actual dubbed-in voice of Mohammed Dahlan, former Fatah leader, here incarnated as the chief rat.

Among the 500 entries for the Blake Prize for Religious Art in Australia are a painting depicting Osama bin Laden as Jesus Christ and a statue of the Virgin Mary covered in a blue burqa familiar to Afghani women that lived under the Taliban. The outrage and the debate—if you can call it that—is predictably stale, because the anti- side if reflexively offended but also because the art itself isn’t good. I don’t know how some artists get away with claiming provocativeness to be the supreme goal of art, especially since—by these standards, at least—anyone out of ideas and marginally shameless can be provocative. If you’re going to get people talking, you should be able to answer them. Otherwise, stun their sleeping asses into woken silence. Also: how is this “religious art”?

Damien Hirst, the obscenely rich and famous British artist, is more complicated. His diamond-encrusted platinum skull was sold today for US $ 10 million. If you’ve ever seen Hirst speak, or even read what he’s said, it’s clear that he’s a performance artist, that the man’s responses to the (eagerly awaited) criticisms of his art are as much a part of the art, more so, even, than the inanimate spectacles themselves. The art never stops, and Hirst is clearly calculating, if not always consciously. The fact that richer he gets the better an artist he becomes is, as far as I can tell, a new one for history. Worse, weirder, is that if you try to protest, you add to it.