curses and threats to their old enemies, right before falling face first back into the pudding. Consequently, the European public really is left with no alternative except the xenophobic right. Noone else has articulated a position that even bothers to address their concerns seriously. Their too busy using political correctness as a whacking stick to bother noticing that their audience is walking away. As before, I generally have more points of agreement than disagreement with Ghannoushi's columns. However, yet again, I am amazed by her lack of irony [ She is not good at intentional irony either ] in reducing complex geopolitical and geocultural problems into a 'Western/ Islam' dichotomy. Yet again, Ghannoushi writes as though the entire Far East doesn't exist. This is rather odd considering that Japan and South Korea form a substantial chunk of the world's GNP and an even bigger chunk of its scientific and technical largesse. With China modernising rapidly, what we find is that Ghannoushi's columns are actually not about 'Western' countries, but what Osama would term the Crusader nations. Ghannoushi then sets up a specious binary opposition querying white people's distaste for Islamic veiling, and the building of large mosques, questioning whether this is hypocrisy on the part of whites preaching tolerance. I know quite a few Chinese and Japanese. Their attitudes towards female veiling in Muslim cultures, and to many other features, seem almost identical to the white stereotypical features which she lambasts. Even religious East Asians generally eschew ostentatiously large houses