Who owns a sports team? That is clear enough: the owner who bought it. He can do with it whatever he likes in accord with the policies of the league — i.e., the rules that all the owners establish together.

But to whom does a team belong? A team belongs to more than just its owner. It belongs in a sense to its supporters, most especially those who buy the tickets and, increasingly, the taxpayers who provide lavish subsidies for the team’s facilities. It belongs to the wider community, too. No one throws a parade when ABC Widget Company has a record year; but entire cities celebrate sports championships. Continue reading →

Mark Steyn, as National Post readers have long known, gets to the point rather more devilishly than most. Apropos of the violent attacks on various American embassies across the Muslim world, he asked, “O say, does that star spangled banner yet wave?”

Not in Tunis, Steyn observed, where the mob entered the embassy, lowered the American flag, burned it and ran the Islamic shahada flag up the pole instead. Francis Scott Key wrote his lines about the stars and stripes being glimpsed by the rocket’s red glare during the Battle of Baltimore, on Sept. 14, 1814; there was proof through the night that the flag was still there. Last Friday — 198 years to the day later — the shahada flag was flying o’er the ramparts of the Tunisian compound. Continue reading →

- in Washington, D.C. –
On Tuesday, the American ambassador to Libya was killed, along with three colleagues, by a mob aggrieved by the West’s treatment of Islam. The proximate cause this time was a film. Six years ago yesterday the cause was Pope Benedict’s courageous address at Regensburg. Eleven years ago, on the original 9/11, it was American troops in Saudi Arabia, or the loss of Andalusia in 1492. Continue reading →