And when we compare "political Hamas" to political anything, we insult ourselves. This isn't political, it's diabolical -- and in reality, alas, no mere aberration of the summer season. No doubt there's more double-talk in store from the Gourdault-Montagnes of the world, who disguise such anti-Western venom as parlor-ready political discourse, masking their own motives, it seems, in the process. Which is one reason the next entry in the summer memory book -- the obituary of a notable British explorer -- is at least a little different.
Sir Wilfred Thesiger, dead at age 93, was by all accounts the last of his kind when it comes to pre-modern desert exploration. He rode camels here and roughed it there, covering vast stretches of the Arabian Peninsula back when it was still uncharted, even by Standard Oil. His August death prompted suitably lengthy and predictably respectful obits in the British papers, but only Saudi Arabia's Arab News got to the more curious heart of the matter.
According to a fellow explorer, Thesiger was not just an eccentric reactionary opposed to "progress, education and cars" -- odd enough -- he was also "able to travel to fulfill his antipathy to Western values." How's that? Here is an example: After Eton and Oxford, naturally, dear Thesiger trekked around Abyssinia with tribesmen "whose social standing," the Arab News reports, "was measured by the number of men they had killed." From his autobiography, Thesiger is quoted as having written about the experience: "I knew that this moonlight meeting in unknown Africa with a savage potentate who hated Europeans was the realization of my boyhood dreams."
At least the man was forthright about his antipathies, not to mention his dreams. Of course, there are those who dream of a home where the buffalo roam; others who dream of April, or even August, in Paris -- a dream deferred this summer as many Americans, in the travel story of the season, steered clear of France. Which certainly wouldn't have pleased Thesiger much. After all, all those Americans bypassing France look like they're fulfilling their affinity for Western values.