In the West, Muslims practice their religion freely and with complete legal protection. This is fully in keeping witht he ideas that spring from the Enlightenment, that religious tolerance is necessary to a free society. But what of non-Muslims in Muslim countries? I think this example from Saudi Arabia says it all.

Forty foreigners, including children, were arrested for proselytizing when police raided a clandestine church in suburban Riyadh, the head of a wide-ranging security campaign in the capital said Saturday.

Lt. Col. Saad al-Rashud said the 40 were arrested Friday in the neighborhood Badeea. Their church, he said, contained crosses and was run by a Pakistani man who claimed to heal the sick. He allegedly was holding prayers, hearing confessions and distributing communion.

It is illegal to promote religions other than Islam in Saudi Arabia, the birthplace of Islam. There are no legal churches in the conservative kingdom, where members of other religions generally can practice their faith in their own homes, but not try to convert people or hold religious gatherings.

Authorities said those arrested with him were foreigners, but did not specify nationalities.

A conviction on proselytizing can result in a harsh prison sentence followed by deportation.

Multiple thoughts spring to mind -- few of them suitable for publication. But I will say one thing, however unpopular.

If Saudi Arabia cannot see its way clear to allowing fundamental freedoms to its people, maybe it should be the next country liberated by the US military.

I didn't think I could get any angrier than I was when I originally posted on this last night. I was wrong. The San Francisco Chronicle has run a "news story" (actually a thinly disguised advocacy piece) about Lynne Stewart, the convicted terrorist supporter who admits that she passed operational information on behalf of the blind sheik Omar Abdel-Rahman. Not only did this violate federal law, it violated special administrative measures (SAM) imposed by the Justice Department to prevent the terrorist leader from continuing to direct his folowers from a federal prison.

"I argued that lawyering can't be interfered with by government regulations,'' Stewart said. "SAMs now seem to override a lawyer's sense of what is right and proper to do for a client. The government will decide that now.''

Damn straight the government will decide those things, when it comes to protecting national security. You ignore two things in your flawed analysis. First, the man committed an act of war against the United States and had been duly convicted at the time you acted. Second, when an attorney becomes a party to a conspiracy to commit a criminal act, attorney-client privilege no longer applies. Your complaint is, in effect, that you got caught and were not held to be above the law because you are a lawyer.

If you live out in the San Francisco area and want to show your contempt for this traitor, here's where you can view her schedule.

And since the Left has organized a letter writing campaign in an attempt to get her a lenient sentence for her betrayal of the United States, I would like to urge loyal Americans to write the judge urging that Stewart face the maximum possible sentence. Send them to the court at the following address.

Honorable John G. Koeltl
United States District Judge
Southern District of New York
United States Courthouse
500 Pearl Street
New York, New York 10007

My best advice is that they be typed, respectful, and note the seriousness of Lynne Stewart's actions and her utter lack of remorse for them. If you or someone close to you suffered any harm due to the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center or other terrorist attacks on the United States, be sure to share that with the judge. Focus on the fact that America is currently in a battle for its survival against Islamist jihadis of the nature assisted by Stewart, and that her sentence should be severe enough to deter others from following her anti-American example. Urge the judge to sentence her to the maximum penalty of 30 years in prison.

When he became head of the Democrat National Committee, Howard Dean said he was going to change the tone of politics in America, talking about what is right with the Democrats rather than defining the Democrats as the anti-Bush party. Well, let's take a look at how he has done.

• In a speech in Kansas in February, not long after his election as DNC chairman, Mr. Dean said the contest between Democrats and Republicans was "a struggle of good and evil. And we're the good."

• In Florida earlier this week, he accused Republicans of being "corrupt," saying, "You can't trust them with your money, and you can't trust them with your votes. ... Evangelicals don't like corruption either."

• In a closed-door Democratic fundraiser in Lawrence, Kan., he said conservative Republicans were "intolerant" on the issue of abortion. "They don't think tolerance is a virtue. I'm not going to have these right-wingers throw away our right to be tolerant."

• Speaking to Democrats Abroad, Mr. Dean called Republicans "brain-dead," saying the reason his party lost the 2004 race to the "brain-dead" Republicans was because of the Democrats' "tendency to explain every issue in half an hour of detail."

So, "Mr. Positive" (or should that be "Dr. Positive") has been anything but positive. Rather than defining what the Democrats are, he has maligned the Republicans as evil, corrupt, intolerant and brain-dead. Not only that, but after the Democrats complained about Republicans "politicizing" the Terri Schiavo case, Dean has promised to "use Terry Schiavo" to score political points against the GOP. Along the way, Dean has defined the Democrats as against Bush judges, against the Bush Social Security Plan, against Bush nominee John Bolton, and against virtually every policy initiative proposed or implemented by the Bush Administration.

So, Howard, where are your solutions? Where are your programs? Your platform can be summed up in two words -- "Oppose Bush". How can you claim to be positive when you spend your time engaging in nothing short of anti-Republican hate speech.

When I was about 14 or so, the chaplain at Naval Training Center -- Great Lakes, Fr. R. Conway O'Connor (may he rest in peace) got approval to offer a Saturday evening Mass in Latin. No, not the Tridentine Mass, but the current liturgy promulgated by Pope Paul VI following the Second Vatican Council. I got to serve mass, along with my brother and a couple of buddies. I was entranced by a language that I didn't understand, didn't recognize, but knew carried with it a weightiness and sense of the sacred that was missing in the regular vernacular mass that I was used to. Years later, while a seminarian, I was one of the guys who struggled to learn Latin from Sister Dorothy in the afternoons, though I soon dropped out of the class because it conflicted with choir practice. Looking back, i would have done better to drop choir.

The advent of the papacy of Benedict XVI may send a lot of folks scrambling for Latin dictionaries and classes in the classical tongue (or its ecclesiastical offspring). Just as a knowledge of Polish was helpful in the Vatican during the pontificate of John Paul the Great, it appears that Latin may become an important means of communication in a Church that has practically abandoned the tongue outside of "official" texts of documents.

Latin may be considered a dead language today, but for many centuries it was the language of the Catholic Church.

Forty years ago the Vatican decided to drop Latin as the official language of the mass and switch to the vernacular.

In the 1990s, even bishops stopped talking to each other in Latin when they went to official meetings at the Vatican.

When he was Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, Pope Benedict XVI originally supported the idea of dropping the Latin mass.

Now he is Pope, he has apparently had a rethink and Italians are struggling to keep up.

Now I am certain that the Tridentine Mass will not be making a major comeback, though this pope will probably allow its more liberal use where tehre is a desire for it. Nor do I think we will see an end to vernacular liturgies. What I believe we will see, though, is a move back towards the teaching of Latin in seminaries and the revival of the use of the language for liturgical purposes. I would expect that Catholics will be able to find a Latin liturgy in a local parish, if not their own, as one more option. And I suspect that we will see more use of the Latin language in liturgical celebrations for international gatherings, to communicate the message that the Church is universal and timeless institution.

And besides -- if we are to see the continued internationalization of the Catholic Church leadership, there needs to be one language that is shared among those who work in the Vatican and those back in the local dioceses and parishes of the world. It needs to be a langage that doesn't change from pontificate to pontificate, and which is clear and fixed in its meaning. So unless the Church is going to adopt Esperanto, there is one obvious candidate -- Latin, which was the language of choice for most of the history of the Church.