Riding Shotgun With Jesus

The Article: Xtreme Religion by Ian Murphy in Buffalo Beast.

The Text: Since the dawn of man, deep, resonating questions have plagued his mind: What is the meaning of life? Is there a higher power? What is man’s place in the universe? Is there an afterlife? Who let the dogs out? Who? Who? Who?

Modern man, for all his Tony Robbins Personal PowerTM seminars, books, tapes and various twelve step programs, appears no closer to understanding these cosmic riddles than an Egyptian goatherd, circa 2000 BC, who believed the sky was a cow goddess, eating the sun every dusk, and giving birth to it every dawn. The point being: far too many people still believe in equally crazy shit.

Some will tell you religion (rough etymology – re linking) no longer links us back to anything; no unmoved mover, no creator, no creamy nougat center. It does however, link us to our own biological past, our primitive hardwiring, our kill-or-be-killed instincts, our clan versus clan animus. A good portion of the world population and this country are running on out-of-date mythological software. Linux, Windows 1400XP, Wahabbism, Santa Claus: ideas too are comprised of atoms. And so are bombs. Both are dangerous, especially when split.

It has always been about resources: fertile land, water, salt, gold, cotton, petroleum, stuffed crust pizza. “We deserve it and they don’t.” Aircraft carriers have replaced frigates, and entire civilizations localized clans, yet people shy away from saying “clash of civilizations.” Seems too dire, a position for zealots even, but true nonetheless. Mind you I’m not strictly speaking East v. West, but also rational v. irrational. Fanatical rationalists en garde!

The ideas of chosen people and jealous gods have justified atrocities and plundering from the ancient Aztecs straight through to the similarly antiquated mindset of the American religious right. The Crusades, the Spanish Inquisition, Slavery, the Holocaust—all the classics. Religion has been there every bloody step of the way, linking us back to the murderous savages we are. We only think we are more civilized because we partake in ritualized, rather than actual, cannibalism. Ask a devout Catholic about the tasteless wafer they consume weekly (made in a poorly lit Mexican factory) and they will tell you they are eating god. Same dance, different tune. Deep-seated, biologically rooted memes are a hard habit to break. Ape crack.

Folk on the moderate left like to remind us from time to time—like when fundamentalists wig out, commit arson and act like all around genocidal assholes—that these perpetrators are extremists, perverts of an otherwise moderate dogma. “These people are wackos, they don’t represent our faith,” apologists apologize. Bullshit.

The true believers are the ones willing to smash planes into buildings, hack people to pieces and bomb OBGYNs based on morality gleaned from sacred texts. God’s children, doin’ the best they know how.

These are real religious people, the ones who will get all the virgins and ride shotgun in Jesus’ sweet rapture mobile. What could be better than an eternity of tight pussy or snaggin’ a ride in the Son of Man’s tricked-out, flying Prius?

The truly faithful, the freaks, the believers are in it for the payout. All the others are Christian, Muslim and Jew in name only, they are the perversion; they are the ones who don’t understand their own faith. Probably people like your aunt, who calls herself a Christian, but gets squeamish over killing fags. You should either follow the bible to the letter or not. No more of this poetic license crap: burn down an embassy, or get off the pot. Take it or leave it. That’s why I liked the Taliban so. Religion is fucking crazy and those dudes were the craziest cats around.

The divinely guided, who will kill you, or at least wish you dead, because you belong to a different book club – this is what religion is.

People became hysterical over the James Frey deceit: Can you imagine what would happen if Oprah took on the Bible or the Koran? Surely the apocalypse (rough etymology – enlightenment) would be nigh. But don’t let your preacher or mullah know that little tidbit, because it smacks of book learnin’ – and not the good book either. Eating from the tree of knowledge has its consequence: Expulsion from ignorance.

What we need now are anti-preachers, anti-faith based initiatives, anti-Mohammeds and antichrists. We can no longer stand idly by, watching the retarded children pummel each other with stones and missiles. It is time for an apocalypse. Religion is a vile meme, its protracted end being dominion over the “other”: man over woman, tribe over tribe, “our god can beat up your god.” It will be hard to quash in the face of baseless afterlife promises and punishments, that some hold so dear. Maybe we could give the believers raisins, cookies and a universal healthcare system as substitute. Or maybe, just maybe – we should give them all a free one-way ticket to the heaven of their choice. Hey – it’s an idea!

It’s time to turn “Godless” from an epithet to a compliment. Every day, decent, reasonable secular folk withstand a barrage of damnation from less intelligent people. But for some reason, we are expected to humor them and their simpering expectations of deference. Fuck that. Religion is a mental disorder, obscuring reality and clouding thought, and we are the cure. Now is no time to back down.

This issue of The BEAST—especially this issue—is not for the religious, unless they’re ready to admit they’re taking part in an enormous charade, or at least ready to laugh about it.

The Analysis:

New York police report warns of mounting homegrown terrorist threat

The Article.

The Text:

NEW YORK: People in the U.S. who quietly band together and adopt radical ways — not just established overseas terrorist groups like al-Qaida — pose a serious threat to the American’s security, a new police analysis has concluded.

The New York Police Department report released Wednesday describes a process in which young men — often legal immigrants from the Middle East who are frustrated with their lives in their adopted country — adopt a philosophy that puts them on the path to violence and attacking civilians that Muslim extremists say is acceptable under jihad, or holy war.

At a briefing, NYPD officials argued that local law enforcement is best suited to deal with the homegrown terror threat.

“Hopefully, the better we’re informed about this process, the more likely we’ll be to detect and disrupt it,” Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly said during the meeting with private security executives at police headquarters.

The study is based on an analysis of a series of domestic plots thwarted since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, including those in Lackawanna; Portland, Oregon; and Virginia. It was prepared by senior analysts with the NYPD Intelligence Division who traveled to Hamburg, Madrid and other overseas spots to confer with authorities about similar cases.

Instead of mosques, those places were more likely to be “cafes, cab driver hangouts, flop houses, prisons, student associations, non-governmental organizations, hookah bars, butcher shops and bookstores,” the report says.

The Internet also provides “the wandering mind of the conflicted young Muslim or potential convert with direct access to unfiltered radical and extremist ideology.”

Kareem Shora, legal adviser for the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, called the findings faulty and potentially inflammatory.

“It plays right into the extremists’ plans because it’s going to end up angering the community,” said Shora.

The report warns that potential terrorists are difficult for law enforcement to detect because they blend in well with society. It also argues that more intelligence gathering is needed to thwart potential terror plots at their earliest stages.

Potential homegrown terrorists “are not on the law enforcement radar,” the study says. “Most have never been arrested or involved in any kind of legal trouble.”

They “look, act, talk and walk like everyone around them,” the study adds. “In the early stages of their radicalization, these individuals rarely travel, are not participating in any kind of militant activity, yet they are slowly building the mind-set, intention and commitment to conduct jihad.”

The Lowdown: Back in my day this was called gang activity. Minority kids angry because they’re not fitting in and feel screwed? This isn’t terroism, it’s being 17. Praise Jesus we keep all them heathen religions out of our country. The last line is particularly disturbing…They look like us. They act like us, but secretly…deep down, they’re thinking about one day sometime…possibly, thinking radical thoughts to maybe consider Jihad.

…Call the Thought Police please, and I’d like another scoop of fear mongering while I wait…

The Essence of Occupation

The Article: In Divided Hebron, a Shared Despair by Scott Wilson in the July 26 edition of the Washington Post.

The Text: The barrier Israel is constructing in the largely rural West Bank is effectively separating Arab from Jew along much of its 456-mile length. But the broader project of disentangling the two peoples in the absence of a peace agreement is failing in urban areas such as Hebron, where the most radical elements of Islamic and Jewish nationalism are gaining strength.

Within Hebron, the separation is enforced not only by Israeli barriers but also by military checkpoints and curfews intended to protect the roughly 700 Jewish settlers living within the city’s most historic and religiously important areas. Securing the small Jewish minority has a potent impact on the lives of the city’s 150,000 Arabs, who voted last year to fill all nine of the district’s parliamentary seats with candidates from the armed Islamic movement Hamas.

This city, set among prolific vineyards, was among the first destinations for Jewish settlers following the 1967 Middle East war, when the Israeli military occupied the West Bank. Fired by a four-millennia-old religious claim to Hebron, the settler enterprise here is among the most ideologically determined in the territories. Its expansionist goals clash with Palestinian secular and Islamic armed movements, whose own nationalist passions helped turn Hebron into one of the most violent venues of the Palestinian uprisings.

In recent months, the Israeli army has helped the Hebron settlers expand eastward to a hilltop home near the settlement of Kiryat Arba, a large step in their plan to connect the two areas. An international observer mission here, established after 1996 accords that left part of the city under Israeli military control and placed the other under the Palestinian Authority, reports sharply rising violence between Israeli settlers and Palestinians.

“There is no future for Arabs and Jews together in Hebron,” said Noam Federman, 37, a settler from Beit Hadassah in the Israeli-controlled city center here. “And Hebron has always been a Jewish city.”

Jamal Maraga’s Palestinian fabrics shop sits along an alley in Hebron’s casbah, lit by shafts of sunlight that filter through bricks, bottles and trash suspended in fencing laced over the walkway. The Jewish settlement of Avraham Avinu is housed in a multistory building that towers overhead.

International observers here say the settlers regularly toss debris and dirty water into the Arab market below, now largely shuttered in a city where unemployment stands at 60 percent. Asked whether Arabs and Jews can share Hebron, Maraga, his hair and beard a gray fuzz, looked up at the chain-link canopy.

“Impossible,” he said.
Proximity and Violence

Just before noon on a recent day, Azmi Shuyukhi, the graying leader of the Palestinian Popular Committees, a civil-resistance organization, approached an Israeli military checkpoint. Behind him trailed a small group of men and boys, who at Shuyukhi’s instruction were attempting to defy the enforced division of their city that has virtually emptied its most important historic, religious and commercial areas of Palestinians.

The post bars Palestinians from entering Shuhada Street, a once-thriving commercial strip closed by the Israeli military more than a decade ago to protect the two Jewish settlements and a yeshiva along its route. The U.S. Agency for International Development spent $2 million in 1997 to renovate the street as part of an Israeli-Palestinian agreement to reopen it for Palestinians. But Israel has since refused to do so.

The order to close the road was one of several that began the separation process here in 1994 after an Israeli from Kiryat Arba, Baruch Goldstein, killed 29 Palestinians praying in the Ibrahimi Mosque just past the end of Shuhada Street. The site is sacred to Muslims and Jews, who believe Abraham, Isaac and other biblical figures are buried in grottos beneath it.

According to the Temporary International Presence in Hebron, the unarmed observer mission, there are 100 Israeli-constructed fences, gates, concrete barriers and military checkpoints within the roughly one-square-mile historic center. The area included the Jewish Quarter until 1929, when Arabs killed more than 60 Jews living there. The survivors fled.

Hemmed in and harassed, the Palestinians are fleeing today. Nearly half the homes in and around the Israeli-controlled Old City of Hebron have been vacated, the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem recently reported. The group also said that more than three-quarters of the Palestinian shops and restaurants in the casbah and adjacent commercial districts have been shuttered, many by military order.

Shuyukhi’s band had failed to make it past the checkpoint for 15 consecutive weeks. But this day, the soldiers waved them into the Israeli-controlled area. After several moments of bewilderment, Shuyukhi started down the empty street — shops closed, no cars, men and boys with Palestinian flags following behind.

As they approached Beit Hadassah, a Jewish settlement of about 30 families, army jeeps roared up. Soldiers in helmets and body armor, joined by a few Israeli police officers, ordered Shuyukhi’s group to lower the Palestinian national flag they carried and turn back.

“We will not take it down,” Shuyukhi shouted. “The Ibrahimi Mosque is ours, not theirs.”

Suddenly, an older settler rushed from the entrance of Beit Hadassah, clutching a walkie-talkie in one hand.

“Grab the flag, grab the flag,” he shouted in American-accented Hebrew.

A policeman blocked him. But the man spun from his grip and, like a determined running back, plowed toward the Palestinians.

“Go take care of the Arabs, the criminals,” he shouted at the police, who led him struggling away.

Mats Lignell, a former Swedish soldier with the observer mission in Hebron, watched the scene before heading to a raised path across Shuhada Street, which his mission financed so Palestinian students could reach their Cordoba School without passing near Beit Hadassah.

The 50-yard walkway took months to complete because each night the bricks were uprooted. It opened this year.

During the three-month period ending Jan. 31, the observer group received 35 complaints of settler violence and harassment, ranging from beatings to throwing debris. Over the next three months, 71 cases were reported.

“The pattern you see is that you have settlement and then violence around it,” Lignell said. “And you see this project inching forward.”
A Chain of Settlements

On a recent morning, a dozen toddlers zipped around Avraham Avinu’s shady courtyard, where in 2001 a Palestinian sniper’s bullet killed 10-month-old Shalhevet Pas. A nearby market, once the main Palestinian clearinghouse for vegetables, has been named for her by the settlers who control it.

The Jewish settlement is separated — by a wall, razor wire and a worldview — from Hebron’s casbah and its Palestinian patrons, who have watched anxiously as the settlement project recently swelled beyond the city center under the protection of Israel’s military, whose strategic goals frequently coincide with the settlers’.

“The town is divided, it is deserted, and in many ways like a prison for us,” said Khaled Osaily, Hebron’s appointed mayor from the secular Fatah movement. Most of the more than 1,800 closed Palestinian businesses in the Old City area shut down since the second Palestinian uprising began in the fall of 2000.

David Wilder, originally from New Jersey, is the spokesman for the Hebron settlers. He largely dismissed public relations until Goldstein opened fire. The government of Yitzhak Rabin considered evacuating the settlers but instead imposed the military curfews and closures on the Palestinians.

Wilder, who like many settlers here wears a pistol on his hip, does not agree with what he calls the Israeli military’s “concept of using walls as a means of security, of building barriers and saying, ‘Now you are safe.’

“The problem here is not so much that people can’t make a living; it’s a political one,” Wilder said. “The Arabs want a presence here. If they have it, they own it, de facto. And if not, they don’t.”

On a hilltop less than a mile’s trip along streets secured by Israeli soldiers sits a four-story house, which a group of settlers occupied the evening of March 19. Lignell and his observer team arrived less than an hour later. By then, dozens of soldiers had surrounded the home to protect its new residents.

Kiryat Arba, a settlement of about 7,000 people, sits just across a narrow valley. Wilder, 53, said the property represents a key link in the chain the settlers are trying to establish between the urban settlements of Hebron and Kiryat Arba. His daughter’s family is one of 15 moving into the house.

Wilder said the settlers bought the home for $700,000, some of it donated by American supporters. But Israel’s Civil Administration, the military government in the occupied territories, contends that the settlers did not arrange for the permits Israelis need to buy and move into property in the West Bank.

“These people think they can do what they want and then we will have to adopt their decision,” said Shlomo Dror, spokesman for Israel’s Coordinator of Activities in the Territories. “This is not the case.”

As a military court considers their appeal, the settlers are renovating the building. New plaster walls partition off a series of family apartments, their doors still sawed-out holes covered by hanging blankets. Soldiers wander the airy halls.

The house overlooks the main roads leading from Kiryat Arba to the downtown settlements and the Tomb of the Patriarchs, the caves beneath the Ibrahimi Mosque. The army used to set up a temporary post at the house on the Jewish Sabbath. Now, having set up a more permanent rooftop position, the army supports the settlers’ right to stay.

“This building will show us whether there is a right for a Jew to buy a house in Hebron,” said Baruch Marzel, a Hebron settler who has established a 70-student yeshiva in the home. “Or will Hebron be the only place in the world a Jew is not allowed to do so?”
‘After All That . . .’

Mohammed al-Jabari looks out from his home, across a courtyard of grapevines and olive trees, to the army post on the roof of the settlers’ new acquisition. On this day, he is waiting for a funeral, vivid evidence that separating Jews and Arabs here does not guarantee security for either.

“We don’t know the people who come and go from there,” said Jabari, 22, a bespectacled middle school chemistry teacher. “We try to stay inside now as much as possible.”

A few hours later, in the adjacent cemetery, dozens of men gathered beneath cypresses and pines to escape the sun. Yehiya al-Jabari, a 67-year-old shepherd from Hebron and a distant relative of the teacher’s, would soon be buried.

About 1 a.m. that day, Israeli soldiers had entered Yehiya al-Jabari’s home looking for his 18-year-old son, Saleh. Seeing the soldiers come in, the men and women of the family accosted them. One tried to snatch a soldier’s gun, Israeli military officials said, and the officer opened fire.

One shot struck Jabari’s wife, Fatmeh, in the neck. The next hit Yehiya, who also dropped to the floor. An Israeli medic administered CPR to Fatmeh, reviving her, but Yehiya died in his living room.

“After all that, they said, ‘Where’s Saleh?’ ” recalled Sami al-Jabari, Yehiya’s brother, who witnessed the scene.

Men and boys bore Yehiya’s wooden stretcher up the hill, pausing to allow mourners to kiss his face. Some held Hamas flags, and the angry chants celebrating martyrdom carried down to the soldiers at the settlers’ new home. Then, after tipping the body into the dry ground, the men wandered back down the hill into the divided city.

The Analysis: Hebron is the best example of the injustice of the Israeli occupation: 700 Israeli settlers have essentially held the lives of 125,000 Palestinians hostage. For more, I suggest The Hebron Tactic by Amira Haas in Israeli newspaper Haaretz.

Inster Lifestyle Hits NYC Restaurants

The Article: Fine Diner to Riffraff: Tipsy Tales of 4-Star Benders by Frank Bruni in today’s New York Times.

The Text: THE Bordeaux was flowing, the foie gras abundant and the well-heeled epicures at Daniel were having a refined old time when suddenly all eyes turned toward a table against one wall and all conversation ceased.

Jean-Luc Le Dû, a sommelier in the restaurant, looked in that direction, too. And he saw her: the woman making like a dancer on a pole at Scores.

She stood facing the rest of the dining room. First she took off a vest or a jacket, as best Mr. Le Dû remembers. Then she went to work on her blouse.

Just as she was getting to her bra, the maître d’hôtel got to her. Thus her drunken, wobbly stint as a stripper ended, and so did her dinner. She and her date, a smiling, sloshed man who had seemingly egged her on, were escorted to the door.

“She was not necessarily attractive or young, so it was disruptive,” complained Mr. Le Dû, who left Daniel several years ago and now owns a wine shop in Greenwich Village. “If she were beautiful, it might have been different. People might have been cheering her on.”

At Daniel? Hard to believe. But then Mr. Le Dû’s story provides a reminder that a 1985 Burgundy casts the same dark spell as a 2007 peppermint schnapps. That in a four-star temple as surely as a starless dive, some diners drink too much: way, way too much.

And that when they do, they act in all the expansive, untamed and humiliating ways you might expect, transplanted to settings in which you don’t expect them. The inebriation comes at a higher price, but it looks much the same. It looks randy. Sloppy. And — how best to put this? — sickly.

That’s one of the most striking lessons in a book about the restaurant Per Se to be published by William Morrow in the fall.

In “Service Included: Four-Star Secrets of an Eavesdropping Waiter,” Phoebe Damrosch recounts the years she spent hustling through the restaurant’s gilded corridors above Columbus Circle, and she writes that “more people throw up in the dining room of Per Se than your average college bar.”

She hadn’t exactly foreseen that, she said in a recent telephone interview. “You’d think that people would be on better behavior at a restaurant like Per Se,” she said.

“What you end up realizing,” she added, “is that people are the same everywhere.”

Others who have tended to the tipsy masters and mistresses of the universe agree.

“If anything, a large bank account enables one to forgo normal levels of decorum, because you don’t have consequences,” said Rocky Cirino, a manager at the restaurant Cru, who previously worked at Daniel. “I’m thinking of several people whose station in life has enabled them to bypass normal civility and caution.”

I should note that I am mentioned frequently in Ms. Damrosch’s memoir but that I keep my dinner down. I should also note that Per Se is by no means the only celebrated restaurant where, thanks to the torrent of spirits and the indulgence of the moment, very fine food tends not to stay put.

“Happens all the time,” said Joseph Bastianich, one of the principal owners of the Italian restaurants Del Posto, Babbo and Felidia, among others. His voice had the bored, blasé tone of someone stating the patently obvious.

It happens even outside the confines and privacy of the restrooms?

“Oh, yeah, in the dining room, all over the table, on their dinner companions,” Mr. Bastianich said. “You’ve never seen that?”

Um, no.

“Well, you go out to restaurants a lot,” he said. “Maybe you’ll run into it before you’re done. Hopefully, you won’t get splashed.”

Hopefully.

Other scenes would be more amusing to witness — like a rather famous one that transpired at the Four Seasons late one afternoon many years ago.

At the end of a long lunch three well-dressed, then undressed, women in their mid-20s decided that the marble pool in the center of the main dining room looked like a nifty spot for a dip, said Julian Niccolini, one of the restaurant’s owners.

So they took one, wearing nothing more than their panties, he said.

Asked about their motivation, Mr. Niccolini answered: “I’m not going to say the word drunk. They were very happy. They were very excited.” As well they should have been. A wealthy gentleman nearby had been buying them their drinks, which included bottles of Montrachet, Cristal and Cheval Blanc. The total bill came to more than $7,000, Mr. Niccolini said.

He said the incident, which ended when a maître d’hôtel rushed over with tablecloths to cover the women up, was one of about a dozen times over the years when happy, excited customers at the Four Seasons took happy, excited splashes in the pool. The spectacles seldom elicit protest, he said.

Neither do the annual bacchanals of one of Le Bernardin’s most loyal patrons.

Eric Ripert, Le Bernardin’s chef, said that this regular celebrated his birthday there every year, renting out a private room with an adjoining kitchen upstairs and donning chef’s whites to cook alongside Mr. Ripert. He has his first glass of his beloved Montrachet sometime between 4 and 5 p.m.

It’s never his last.

“During the course of the night he drinks maybe five or six bottles,” Mr. Ripert said, explaining that the man nonetheless manages to remain vertical because he is “probably 6-foot-5, and he’s probably 400 pounds. I mean, he’s a monster. He’s huge.”

And on his most recent birthday, after many of those bottles had been drained, he teetered downstairs in his chef’s whites, commenced a showy promenade through the main dining room and accepted compliments from the people there, who understandably took him for one of the kitchen staff.

This much he’d done before, but he broke new ground with his next trick, which was to instruct servers to bring caviar over to this table, Champagne over to that one. And Mr. Ripert said that Le Bernardin ate the cost of these haute freebies, because the tanked titan is such a good customer, and his heart is as big as the rest of him.

Besides, he wasn’t flashing or fondling anyone around him, as many an intoxicated omnivore apparently does. Chefs, sommeliers, managers and servers at New York’s finest restaurants all have their sex stories, all of which they attribute to the loss of inhibition with the advent of inebriation.

There were the man and woman at Bouley who kept the staff at the restaurant past 2 a.m. because they had locked themselves in a bathroom, where the sounds they made over the course of more than 30 minutes at least let the staff know that they hadn’t passed out.

At Cru one night several diners complained that the door to one of the two small restrooms must be broken, because it hadn’t budged in more than 15 minutes.

“We kept knocking and knocking and getting no answer,” recalled Robert Bohr, the wine director, in a telephone interview. “So we put the key in.”

And as the door opened, a young man and woman hastily gathered themselves together and just as hastily zipped back to their table. “The guy had a self-satisfied look on his face,” Mr. Bohr said. “The woman kept her eyes lowered.”

Sometimes drunken diners don’t even bother to seek a private sanctuary for their libidos.

“People are often doing things underneath the table,” said a veteran server who has worked in many of Manhattan’s premier restaurants, including Gotham Bar & Grill and Fleur de Sel. The server asked not to be named for fear of angering past or future employers.

“The darker the restaurant, the more romantic the restaurant — there’s going to be some activity,” she said.

Ms. Damrosch said that at Lever House, where she worked before Per Se, she learned, “There’s always the Janet Jackson moment, when things pop out of dresses.”

Accidentally?

“You never know,” she said.

New York may be a better theater for this sort of thing than most other big cities in this country. Restaurateurs said that diners here often drink more heavily than diners elsewhere, because they’re more likely to be taking a taxi or the subway home.

And for the same reason, servers don’t have to be as vigilant about cutting a customer off.

“I just notice that people seem freer,” said Stephen Starr, who opened Manhattan offshoots of his hit Philadelphia restaurants Morimoto and Buddakan early last year. “In Philadelphia people are very careful not to go too far. It’s a car city. I mean, we drive five blocks.”

That’s not to say Philadelphia can’t compete. According to news reports, it was there, at Le Bec-Fin, that a well-lubricated, pot-bellied patron traded taunts with foie gras protesters on the sidewalk outside by leaping up and down, which presumably caused considerable jiggling, and bellowing, “This is what foie gras did to me!”

He then went inside the restaurant, pulled down his pants, exposed himself and pressed himself against a glass door, so the protesters could see.

Getting naked, or trying to get naked, or getting partly naked, or encouraging the companion on the far side of the Châteauneuf-du-Pape to get naked: these are some of the most common effects of a goblet or snifter too many.

The others?

Belting is big. At Blue Hill at Stone Barns in Pocantico Hills, N.Y., and Picholine, chefs or managers had stories about diners who stood up, reared back, and broke into song, loudly and long enough for all the dining room to hear and all the diners in it to be transfixed.

Sleeping is popular. Karen Waltuck, one of the owners of Chanterelle, remembers that she was closing up one night and minutes away from leaving when two lingering lawyers informed her that they hadn’t seen one of their friends for hours.

Ms. Waltuck found the errant friend, but only after jimmying the lock on a restroom door. There he was, sprawled across the floor in his suit and tie.

“He’d probably been that way for an hour and a half,” she marveled. She roused him, and off he went. “I don’t remember him being embarrassed,” she said.

Mr. Bohr and Terrance Brennan, the chef at Picholine, described an elderly woman famous at top-tier restaurants around the city for her habit of dozing off during long dinners with her husband, a fanatic for Montrachet and Bordeaux.

“They’re super-old blue bloods and they drink only expensive wine and eat only in expensive restaurants,” Mr. Bohr said. “She sleeps through the intermission between each course, and then her husband wakes her up. She gets woken up to take bites.”

Mr. Bohr cast alcohol as the quintessence of a gateway drug, saying it’s usually the smashed diners who smoke marijuana in the restrooms at Cru — this has happened a half-dozen times, he said — or come back from the restrooms with a case of the sniffles and a much diminished appetite.

But sometimes the doings of the four-star drunk are less brazen, more poignant.

Workers at Jean Georges still wince at the memory of the gentle, sweet woman who made the journey from the restroom, through a vestibule, across the breadth of the adjoining restaurant Nougatine and back to her table with the entire back of her dress tucked into her pantyhose.

“The walk of shame,” recalled Lois Freedman, director of operations for Jean-Georges Vongerichten’s restaurants.

It was nothing compared with the walk of a woozy diner elsewhere. A manager privy to the incident recounted it on condition the restaurant not be identified, because it’s a very nice restaurant.

And at this very nice restaurant, earlier this year, a regular sat at the bar — first with just one companion, then with several more — and ordered thousands of dollars worth of red wine. There was a $400 bottle of Rioja. There was a $3,500 magnum of Burgundy.

At a certain point he had to go. So he stumbled to a restroom, where he stumbled into a vase, knocking it over and shattering it. Surveying the wreckage, he apparently decided he should use a different commode. Sadly, he didn’t get to it in time.

He soon returned to his perch at the bar and to his companions, but in a more pungent condition. They had the good sense to persuade him to call it a night.

He had some good sense, too.

He didn’t set foot in the restaurant again.

The Analysis: Smushing one’s genitals against a window so a crowd of protesters can enjoy the view is the new it for insters.

Fancy Pants Pull Out Method

The Article: Leave the Muslim world alone by Gary Kamiya in Salon.

The Text: It is long past time for America to grasp that Bush’s decision to pound the Muslim world into submission — not just in Iraq, but in Lebanon and in Palestine — is not the solution, it is the problem. We have turned an entire region, and the adherents of one of the three largest religions in the world, against America and everything that it represents, including democracy. As if in a nightmare, our actions have multiplied the demons of apocalyptic religious terrorism they were intended to destroy.

By green-lighting Israel’s war against Lebanon and trying to suffocate Hamas, Bush has succeeded in deepening Muslim hatred of the U.S., without achieving any results on the ground. By invading and occupying a country in the heart of the Arab/Muslim world, the U.S. gave Osama bin Laden and his fellow jihadists a greater gift than they could ever have dreamed of. Invading Iraq to defeat jihadist terrorism was like pouring a can of gasoline on a fire. Now that the fire is raging out of control, continuing to fight it is simply pouring more gasoline on it.

Jihadists need their American boogeyman as much as Bush needs his Islamist boogeyman. By fighting them in the wrong way and on the wrong terrain, we have inadvertently allowed them to claim the heroic mantle of nationalism and anti-Americanism. When the U.S. occupiers leave, Osama bin Laden and his ilk will groan in despair.

At this point, the smartest thing we could do would be to leave the jihadists alone and let their neighbors deal with them. Better still, send them birthday cards.

According to military sources cited by the New York Times, every month 60 to 80 foreign fighters enter Iraq to fight for al-Qaida in Mesopotamia. These men, who represent a fraction of the insurgents in Iraq, are the ultimate bad guys, the true believers who would gladly blow up anything American if they could. Yet even these ardent jihadis are not, contrary to neocon claims, an eternal fact of life in the “pathological” Arab world. They are drawn by the presence of U.S. occupiers on Arab soil. Remove the occupiers and their numbers will drop. If Iraq breaks apart after the U.S. departs and descends into a hell of sectarian violence, the brutal logic of numbers will prevail. The jihadists are all Sunnis, and Iraq is going to be a Shiite-dominated country. The Shiites can deal with al-Qaida in Mesopotamia far more efficiently than we can.

A good general recognizes when the conditions are not favorable for a battle — and this is one war that we simply can’t win. But in the long run, a U.S. defeat in the Middle East will be a victory.

For Bush and the neocons, such an acknowledgment of obvious reality is tantamount to treason. Their mantra is “we must take the fight to the jihadists over there so we don’t have to fight them over here.” In a July 12 press conference in which he discussed interim Iraq benchmarks, Bush repeated this theme: “As president, my most solemn responsibility is to keep the American people safe. So on my orders, good men and women are now fighting the terrorists on the front lines in Iraq.”

Yet it is precisely because we are fighting Arabs and Muslims “over there” that the American people are less safe. That is a conclusion reached not by leftist appeasers but by Bush’s own intelligence agencies. Almost six years into his war on terror, al-Qaida is as strong now as it was just before the 9/11 attacks, according to a U.S. intelligence threat assessment.

This finding should come as no surprise. It echoes what American intelligence has been saying for the last year. The last National Intelligence Estimate, which came out in 2006, concluded that the Iraq war had greatly strengthened jihadists around the world. The latest NIE, of which the “threat assessment” forms a part, is not out yet, but it will no doubt reach the same conclusion.

After 9/11, it was understandable that Americans wanted to lash out at the enemy that had wounded us so grievously. But foreign policy should not be driven by raw emotion. The painful truth is that using American troops, or Israeli proxies, to fight Muslim radicalism is a self-defeating proposition. In effect, Bush challenged the entire Arab-Muslim world to fight a guerrilla war against us. As any student of military history knows, this was a really bad idea. If you have a choice, you don’t want to fight a guerrilla war on the enemy’s turf, and you definitely don’t want to fight a guerrilla war against people who are willing to kill themselves.

To borrow a concept from the realist school of great-power politics, the Muslim world is outside of our sphere of influence, at least military influence. We are simply too despised there, our goals too dubious, our allies too problematic and our methods too destructive. It is not possible to surgically separate the jihadists, who are our real enemy, from the nationalists and anti-Americans, who make up the bulk of the region’s population. Most Arabs and Muslims despise the jihadists. But by attacking the Muslim world, we have turned them into anti-American heroes.

What holds true for jihadists is doubly true for complex militant organizations like Hezbollah and Hamas. Most of the world’s Muslims see these groups, which Bush and his neocon brain trust lumps in with al-Qaida, as legitimate national liberation or resistance movements, and are enraged that the U.S. has tried to starve or bomb them into submission. American support for Israel’s war on Lebanon last summer greatly weakened our already abysmal standing in the region, and strengthened al-Qaida and its ilk.

By conflating jihadists with militant, religiously oriented national liberation movements like Hamas, Bush has not only undercut the support we might otherwise have received from Arab populations for police operations against genuine jihadists, he has helped to create toxic new forms of anti-Western extremism. Indeed, the most damaging result of Bush’s crudely undifferentiated “war on terror” may be that he has succeeded in creating the dangerous, mixed-up jihadist-nationalist boogeyman that he set out to destroy. If al-Qaida-like groups manage to get a foothold in Lebanon or Gaza — and there are ominous signs that they are — the Israeli-Palestinian crisis, the world’s most dangerous and intractable problem, may become completely unsolvable.

The irony is that without our help, the jihadists would be struggling to survive. As Gilles Kepel, a French expert on radical Islam, argues in “The War for Muslim Minds,” very few Muslims, no matter how radical, support al-Qaida. “Beyond the circle of Bin Laden and Zawahiri and their supporters and admirers … the majority of Islamists and salafists, let alone most of the world’s Muslims, no longer see the commando action carried out by ‘the umma’s blessed vanguard’ against the twin towers and the Pentagon as fulfilling the promise of jihad,” Kepel writes. “On the contrary, after the first few seconds of enthusiasm for this blow to America’s ‘arrogance,’ most Muslims saw the massacre of innocents on Sept. 11 as opening the door to disorder and devastation within the house of Islam.”

The suggestion that we now leave a bunch of fanatical mass murderers alone may strike most Americans as cowardly and morally contemptible. But what we want are results, not self-righteous campaigns that make matters worse. Bush’s righteous war has failed. To leave jihadists alone is not to appease them. It is to plan their isolation and eventual extinction more precisely.

In response, hawks argue that the jihadists will hate us and try to destroy us no matter what we do. “We weren’t bothering them before 9/11, and they killed 3,000 Americans!” they shout angrily. “The war is on, and we have to win!” Leaving aside the historical myopia involved in the claim that America’s foreign policies had nothing to do with 9/11, and the inconvenient fact that Bush’s crusade has greatly strengthened the jihadists, this argument still runs up against the painful reality that it has now become clear that this is one war we can’t win.

To be sure, there are rare cases when military action against radical Islamists may be necessary and effective. The U.S.-led invasion of Afghanistan, for example, was both justifiable according to just war doctrine (on the grounds that the Taliban regime, which was harboring al-Qaida, constituted an imminent threat) and could turn out to be successful, although there are increasingly ominous signs. But Afghanistan is a unique case. Every other country in the region is far more problematic.

Similarly, I’m not saying that if a group of high-ranking al-Qaida operatives suddenly decided to tell the CIA that they were going to pose for a group photo in a field in the Northwest Territories of Pakistan, we shouldn’t blast them all to heaven with a Hellfire missile. But in the real world, these kind of golden opportunities almost never present themselves.

After we leave Iraq, as we inevitably will, we need to do three things to fight the “war on terror” effectively. First, we need to ratchet down our apocalyptic and moralistic rhetoric and recognize the jihadist enemy’s true, relatively modest dimensions. This ain’t no Soviet Union we’re fighting here — it’s a bunch of guys in caves. Second, we need to use military force as a last resort. As Iraq has shown, occupation and war create more jihadis than they capture or kill. Instead, we need to use intelligence and police forces to break up jihadist terror networks. Finally, we need to address both the Arab/Muslim world’s self-created pathologies and its legitimate grievances, both of which contribute to jihadism. War supporters make much of the pathologies, but have almost nothing to say about the grievances — chief among them the festering Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the greatest source of Arab/Muslim rage against America.

There’s nothing radical about any of these ideas. They are essentially the ones proposed by the Iraq Study Group, whose long-range policy recommendations would set America’s Mideast policies on a rational course.

Ironically, the Bush administration has begun to embrace some of these ideas — alas, too late. By partnering with Sunni insurgents who are sick of the violent nihilism of al-Qaida radicals, U.S. forces in Iraq have had some success in isolating hardcore jihadists from Iraqi nationalists. This kind of hardheaded realism, with its tacit acknowledgment that moralistic labels are counterproductive (today’s Sunni allies were yesterday’s terrorists), points toward the more rational and pragmatic policy we need to embrace in the region as a whole.

It is very hard for Americans to admit that there are some enemies that are best left alone. Our tendency to moralistic self-righteousness, our refusal to admit defeat and our belief in our invincible military all conspire against such an admission. But until we realize this, we are likely to be tempted to engage in future adventures — like a war against Iran — that are likely to prove even more disastrous than Iraq.

Even a superpower has areas where it cannot impose its will. The limits of American power have been shown in the Middle East. It’s time to get out, protect our own borders, do some diplomacy and police work, and let things cool down. And they will cool down. The jihadist moment is too insane and self-destructive to last. Like a wildfire, the best thing to do is starve it of oxygen.

In short, it’s time for a tactical retreat. Tactical retreats don’t look good on a president’s legacy sheet, and they don’t inspire stirring patriotic songs. But they can save armies — and nations.

The Analysis: The analysis… is other people’s analysis: Two Deadlocked Parliaments by Juan Cole, How Bush supports the troops, Petraeus, Coopted By GOP Propaganda, New Intelligence Report Undercuts Bush On War And Terror Defense, and What Strikes You First When You See Me? My Handsomeness?.