Fundamentalism

I would like to say that it is open season on Islam. It is so trendy to dump on Islam. So convenient to oversimplify--good guys versus bad guys. Acts of violence committed by others against Muslims are portrayed to be only in reaction to some act of the followers of Islam. How foolish it appears to imply that these poor lambs go about their business peacefully until excited into action by a person of Islamic faith. Blaming Hindu fundamentalism on Islamic fundamentalism is mental trickery in order to skirt the real issue, i.e., minority rights.

NEW YORK — A federal court judge sentenced convicted Russian arms dealer Viktor Bout to 25 years in prison on Thursday, but in a swipe at prosecutors said there was no convincing evidence that he would have committed crimes they alleged if he had not been the target of a sting operation. Judge Shira Scheindlin gave the 45-year-old Bout, known as the "Merchant of Death," the minimum mandatory sentence for conspiring to acquire and use antiaircraft missiles. She also sentenced him to 15 years on three other counts of conspiracy to kill Americans and conspiracy to provide material support to a terrorist organization, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, known as FARC.

Tuncay Gunc, who sells carpets at the Grand Bazaar here, is a thoroughly modern Turk. He is a businessman who looks west, and he is a Muslim. "I pray," Gunc said the other day, "but only on Fridays--if I don't have a customer." Such religious pragmatism, more the rule than the exception in a Muslim nation that is also officially secular, is being challenged in Turkey today by small but growing numbers of Muslim fundamentalists, seemingly aided by Iran. The result is that in major cities throughout the rapidly modernizing country, new bouts are being fought in an old tug-of-war between a Middle Eastern heritage and official aspirations for a European future.

Newt Gingrich launched his day of Super Tuesday campaigning in the state where he plotted his political rise from history professor to House speaker, telling the Chamber of Commerce in fast-growing Gwinnett County he was the only GOP candidate who could bring fundamental change. Gingrich barely mentioned what had recently become a signature issue: his promise to boost energy production and bring down gas prices. Instead, he delivered an eight-minute discourse on the native genius of the Wright brothers, Henry Ford and Thomas Edison.

There's nothing more cutting edge than fundamentalism. The women swathed in veils in Picadilly Circus, the "facts on the ground" settlers in Jerusalem, the values voters who never give an inch. They wrap themselves in tradition and rage at the godlessness of modernity, but ultimately they are products of the very modernity they hate. Not that long ago it was the secularists who thought they were ahead of the curve, in the vanguard of progress. They wrapped themselves in the illusion that modernity would eradicate religion.

For decades now, liberals have been agonizing because conservatives seem to win even when polls show that the public generally disagrees with them. In their postmortems, liberals have placed blame on the way they frame their message, or on the right-wing media drumbeat that drowns out everything else, or on the right's co-opting of the flag, Mom and apple pie, which is designed to make liberals seem like effete, hostile foreign agents. It's understandable that liberals prefer to think of their subordination as a matter of their own inadequacies or of conservative wiles.

Any list of epochal dates in human history would be incomplete without Oct. 15, 1951, when chemist Carl Djerassi, working in Mexico City with his partner Luis Miramontes, created the oral synthetic hormone progesterone, which became the building block of oral contraceptives. For the first time, women could decide when sex would part company with procreation. For Djerassi the writer, that was another life ago. Although he keeps his hand in as a professor emeritus at Stanford University, his passions have moved on. He endowed the Djerassi Resident Artists Program in the Santa Cruz Mountains.

Re "21st Century Tribes," Opinion, Dec. 12: The roles of sociology and psychology in human behavior are invaluable. Whether to explain tribalism, nationalism or fundamentalism, we cannot know enough about what motivates us. But we cannot persist in the belief that only foreign cultures are vulnerable to the propaganda and manipulation of ill-intentioned colloquial influence. The rise in Christian fundamentalism as a tool for political exploitation signals that it is time to talk about American gullibility.

I, too, am a non-Orthodox Jew who identifies strongly with the Jewish people and resents any particular Jewish denomination or other subgroup dictating the criteria for who is a Jew. It is particularly offensive when the dictation comes from one of the smallest grouping of the Jewish people--the religious fundamentalists. We in the Jewish community are well aware of the efforts of this small sect to dictate their terms to all Jews but the larger Southern California community is quite unaware of it. Your objective depiction of the issue is, however, more than a journalist's effort to bring attention to hitherto relatively unknown facets of our civilization.

Your editorial presents with great clarity, brevity and conviction the main evidence for placing the age of the Earth at more than 4 billion years. You must be aware that it will sway none whose mind-set is that of the creationists. Let us hope, though, that some who read it are teetering between absolute religious fundamentalism and common sense. Perhaps they can be brought back to reality. H.W. ANDERSON La Jolla

With his competition focused on the chilly Midwest, Newt Gingrich wooed California's Republican faithful Saturday, banking on a Republican contest so chaotic that the most populous state in the country could actually matter when voters go to the polls in June. "You cannot follow the recent Republican practice of writing off our largest state and imagine that you are going to run an American campaign," the former House speaker told delegates to the state party convention, meeting outside of San Francisco.

Indiana Pacers point guard Darren Collison used a food analogy to describe his graceful jump from playing under UCLA Coach Ben Howland to his quick success in the pros. "You need the vegetables from Coach Howland," Collison said. "[Then] dessert in the NBA is kind of your reward. " It has been a disappointing basketball season so far for the Bruins, who are in a three-way tie for fifth place in the Pac-12 after being picked to win the conference. And there is some restlessness among the UCLA fan base.

Occupy Wall Street and its coast-to-coast spinoffs captured the headlines in 2011, but the economic debate it helped trigger should reverberate deep into 2012. That's the debate over the future of the American middle class. Rarely has its economic plight been an explicit issue in a presidential election, but candidates on both sides of the partisan divide are poised to make it the centerpiece of their campaigns in the coming year. President Obama, delivering a theme-setting speech December 6 in Osawatomie, Kan., called the coming campaign "a make-or-break moment for the middle class.

Love him or hate him — or love him and hate him — it is hard to deny the colossus that is Jerry Lewis, International Clown. Even if you only know him from his echoes — Professor Frink on "The Simpsons," Adam Sandler movies, the Beastie Boys — you are living in a world that he has partly made. Among American film comedians, he's one of a small number who rate the term "auteur"; at the same time, he's kids' stuff, a thing we know from childhood and treasure like other childhood things.

Any list of epochal dates in human history would be incomplete without Oct. 15, 1951, when chemist Carl Djerassi, working in Mexico City with his partner Luis Miramontes, created the oral synthetic hormone progesterone, which became the building block of oral contraceptives. For the first time, women could decide when sex would part company with procreation. For Djerassi the writer, that was another life ago. Although he keeps his hand in as a professor emeritus at Stanford University, his passions have moved on. He endowed the Djerassi Resident Artists Program in the Santa Cruz Mountains.

Vice President Joe Biden is reaffirming the United States' status as a world economic power at the start of a five-day visit to China. Biden arrived in Beijing on Wednesday evening, shaking off jet lag to make an unscheduled visit to an exhibition game featuring the Georgetown University men's basketball team. Photos: Vice President Biden in China On Thursday he begins the substantive portion of what is a more than weeklong tour of Asia, with the first in a series of meetings with Chinese Vice President Xi Jingping, widely expected to be the nation's future leader.

It's the first rule of thumb for any aspiring UFO investigator: Keep an open mind. "We all want to believe, we all want to believe bad," said David MacDonald, a certified investigator with the Mutual UFO Network. "But you've got to look at the evidence. You've got to come at this like a scientific researcher. " On Friday, MacDonald and dozens of like-minded individuals filled an Irvine hotel conference room to discuss the finer points of investigating the inexplicable — or at least that which cannot be explained in terrestrial terms.

Reporting from Las Vegas — His jersey soaked, his shoulders glistening with sweat, Ishmael Wainwright managed a weary smile as he posed for celebratory pictures with teammates. The Kansas City 76ers had just won the 17-under invitational division of the prestigious Las Vegas Fab 48 tournament, capping a stretch of three games in 11 hours Monday and eight games in four days. "I just want to go home and go to sleep," said Wainwright, a junior forward from Raytown, Mo., who is coveted by UCLA and other top college programs.