Having enrolled in a somwhat unusual five-year undergraduate program, I was dragged kicking and screaming through four semesters of college German.  But gee, it's come in handy, and I don't mean only during graduate school.  I usually skim through the German-language weekly "Amerika Woche," for it sometimes includes interesting items that don't get coverage in our standard media.  The 01-08 March edition contains an article that describes the ongoing mohammedan persecution of Christians in Mosul, Iraq.  During the previous week, four were murdered.  Roughly a dozen families are leaving the city each day, and only a fraction of the estimated 2003 population of 5,000 remain.  The Obama administration has had much to say about Shiite-Sunni reconciliation in an imagined democratic Iraq, and nary a word about the human rights of Christians.  (Fourteen centuries of uninterrupted warfare, and counting, since the inventing of the religion of peace.)