An "intellectual" in Rideau Hall. (News in Brief: Canada).

Ottawa--As merely the husband of Governor-General Adrienne Clarkson, John Ralston Saul is free to express his opinions in public. Some of these are very odd, however. Saul has often been called a "leading Canadian intellectual" true only if the term refers to someone who frequently lapses from common sense.

In a new book On Equilibrium reviewed in the newspapers, Saul partly blames the West for the terrorist attacks of September 11 and says that President Bush appeared frail and weak as he addressed the nation on television after the attacks--an impression few other people had.

In a chapter on ethics he writes that "Christian militancy has wreaked far greater destruction than anything managed by Islam"--a statement which would be hard to prove. Is he finding excuses for the Taliban?

He also writes, "I sometimes feel that European and North American aggressiveness towards Arabs over the last half-century has had less to do with Middle Eastern politics and more to do with an almost psychotic attempt to forget that it was the Christian civilization and no other which massacred six million Jews." Someone, in a letter to the editor, wondered whose armies then defeated Hitler and his Nazi regime?

It is obviously a very curious psychotic twist which enables a man to think of Hitler as the epitome of Christian civilization, especially when Hitler, like Saul, hated Christianity.

"Therefore I will again deal with this people in surprising and wondrous fashion. The wisdom of its wise men shall perish and the understanding of its prudent men be hid" (Isaiah 29:14).