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By Kathy G.Ah, New Republic! You never really do let me down, do you?I admit to having had a second thought or two about writing this post. Was it, oh, perhaps a teensy weensy bit over the top? A tad intemperate? Might it be said to be lacking the attribute of scrupulous, Olympian fairness and evenhandedness? After all, in that paragraph about what's good about the New Republic, I left out a few names. Noam Scheiber, for example -- now he's a smartie! And Jonathan Cohn -- how could I forget Jonathan Cohn? As someone else put it, Cohn is "the best health care writer not named Ezra Klein."But then I saw this, and every one of my self-doubts melted away in an instant. In the post, titled "Another Psychotic Creep Writing at The New Republic," Brad DeLong notes the latest charming addition to the New Republic stable, an academic named Philip Jenkins who's now writing for TNR's Open University.On that blog, Jenkins has been gracing us with his pensees regarding Muslim history. There's this, for example:
[T]he Arabs actually borrowed their much-cited "Muslim science" (the astrolabe and so on) from the Nestorians and other Eastern Christians...And this:
[I]t is rather rich to complain that after the Reconquista, "In an act of utter domination, the Christian king orders the great [Córdoba] mosque consecrated as a Catholic church." Actually, that mosque (like most major Spanish mosques) was itself built on the site of an earlier church.... [T]he purveyors of public broadcasting history have learned something; but they are still offering apologetics, not reality.But wait, wait -- it gets better! Philip Jenkins, I thought: now where have I heard that name before?
