Mr. Dunetz:
I am an Italian American. You want to complain about how YOUR people are portrayed in films, all I can say is "GET IN LINE"

Ms. Chesler: Your story states that the asst principal said the late Ms. Mokdad was "proud to be Muslim". If she was, what was the falling out with her mother and stepfather? What could trigger this if she was adhering to the Muslim faith and living with mother and stepdad and proud of the faith/ideology that she was raised in?

I am NOT being sarcastic, I just find this "honor killing" much more puzzling than the wife in Buffalo who set off her husband by seeking a divorce. There just seems to be no cause here. The stepdad uses the word "Americanized" what does that mean? Was she not supposed to seek college education post high school? Was she reading and writing English too well? DId she want to go out with non-Muslim friends and "hang around" with them?

As an actress, I wish my home state was more competitive in providing film companies and tv producers tax incentives. Far too many shows are shot in Canada or Romania because of the lower costs of labor and better bottomline all around.

In Illannoyed, our guv, Quinn, is driving our few remaining industries out of state. Tax cuts and tax incentives help the worker not just the corporation.

This idiot THINKS he is talking about the Catholic Church during the Middle Ages. You know, when all those "unenlightened" Roman Catholics such as Thomas Aquinas and Dante Alighieri managed somehow to write some of the greatest works known to the Western world and Fra Angelico was doing his best without such brilliant minds as Jackson Pollack to show him how to paint. This is a popular image confusing the 1200 and 1300's with the "dark ages" that followed the fall of my ancestors' Roman Empire. Actually, during THOSE Dark Ages, the light was kept burning by the VERY holy, Catholic Church whose monks kept alive ancient texts, classical learning and great works of antiquity which would later be drawn on by St. Thomas and Dante in their writings and later still our Founding Fathers. Not so DARK after all Mr. Simmons.

Mr. Leigh: For real prescience, you may want to check out another of Britain's Roman Catholics, Hillaire Belloc who wrote in the mid 1930's that Islam would by the end of the 20th century be resurgent and posing yet another threat to the West (ala Constantinople, Malta, Lepanto and September 11-12, 1683 at the gates of Vienna). In fact I think Belloc would not be surprised by the date the 19 of Air Jihad chose.

Belloc saw Islam as yet another heresy of Christianity. I choose to call it a socio-political ideology masquerading as an Abrahamic religion.

There was plenty of snobbery by the Republican country club set such as Kathleen Parker and Peg(een) Noonan. They sniffed their patrician noses at her lack of a degree from one of the Seven Sisters colleges.

"In Africa, the homeland of all black people, Islam came from the Middle East and Christianity came from Europe and they all exerted inordinate damage."

NOPE. The first Black African convert was Queen Candace's eunuch who was baptised by Phillip, the Apostle on his way back to Ethiopia having been in Jerusalem for the Passover. Ethiopia's connection to Judaism dates back to the Ark of the Covenant Days and it is fiting that it can claim the first Black Christian whose baptism is recorded in the Acts of the Apostles.

My point is that I try not to confuse the Pope with the Vatican as the two are sometimes working at opposites. The Cardinals within the Vat bureaucracy can often time resemble more the EU bureaucrat PC elites rather than shepherds of Christ. He told us that we'd recognize the hirelings, the bad shepherds, by the fact that they would run away when the wolves approached to attack the flock. These hirelings are concerned only about themselves, their appearances, their PC credentials. You and I know what their ultimate reward will be. DO NOT DESPAIR. Christ will use the Pope, simple priests, good Bishops such as Bishop Gassis, and laywomen such as Brigitte Gabriel, brother and sister non-Catholic Christians such as Walid Shoebat . His arsenal is not limited to Vatican PC mouthpieces.

Aquinas (one of my favorite saints and ITALIAN to boot) :-)

I share your pain as a fellow ROMAN Catholic. However, as a 53 year old, I watched in my early years the appeasement toward Communism of the left wing elites at the Vatican. JP II was raised to the papacy to deal with that and upon Benedict's meeting with Oriana Fallaci and his first year or two of pronouncements, I thought God had sent us someone to speak truth to the falsehood of Islam. However, the Vatican apparatchik is like the US State Dept -- an organism existing within its host and NOT for its host's benefit. Tauran and other "career" Vatican bureaucrats are the real "ELITES". Note how he uses the term "the masses". Typical of the Left in its disdain for the common man and common sense.

When back in 2001, some Chicago theater pals of mine found out my newly adopted dog was named "Dutch" in honor of President Reagan's nickname, they could not hide their contempt for "that senile ol' man" and me for actually admiring him. When one of the lawyers from my day job found out, he was standing a few feet away from Dutch, my darling dachshund. He actually raised his scrawny, pale little liberal leg as if to kick her, when I informed him that it would be the last time he would ever feel anything in that leg or the other one if he even tried.
This is their vitriol. And then they try to pin hate crimes on "the vast right wing". Puhleez!