...born with the gift of laughter and a sense that the world was mad

Wishing and hoping and scheming and dreaming: Around two months ago my sister, who’s a kindergarten teacher, gave me a book she wanted me to read. It was called “Three Wishes: Palestinian and Israeli Children Speak”, and came from her school library. The book, by Deborah Ellis, was on school librarians’ annual list of “must-reads”—a finalist for a Silver Birch Award, a prestigious book prize.

“It’s supposed to be controversial,” she said. “Tell me what you think.”

Well, what I thought was that it was in keeping with the story as accepted and advanced by much of the mainstream media and others with a left-of-centre mindset. That is, what we have here is an even-steven situation, a real estate dispute involving two people contending over the same scrap of land.

Here’s how the book introduces the situation:

The children and young people in this book share a small piece of land on the Mediterranean Sea. This land, once called Palestine, is a land sacred to Jews, Muslims and Christians, but the area has been at war for more than fifty years.

The genocide that took place during World War II caused many Jews to believe that they could not count on governments in the world to protect them. So they would protect themselves in their own land of Israel, where they could live without fear of persecution or extermination. There was, however, a huge problem. Palestinians, as the Arabs of the land are called, were already living there. Their families had been there for generations, raising crops and livestock, and establishing businesses and cities.

Both Jews and Arabs have deep roots in the area—roots that go back thousands of years. And in the past they have often existed peacefully. But problems have arisen in the past hundred years, as Arabs felt they had a right to the same land that the Jews were claiming for their new state.

In 1947, the United Nations created a plan to separate Palestine into two states—one Jewish and one Arab. The Palestinians and the neighboring Arab countries rejected the plan, but in May 1948, Israel declared its independence, and the Israelis and Palestinians went to war. When the Israeli War of Independence ended, Israel controlled most of Palestine, and many Palestinians became refugees, fleeing to neighboring countries or living in refugee camps on their own land.

Many wars took place, culminating in 1967 in the Six Day War, in which Israel occupied the Sinai Peninsula, the Gaza Strip, East Jerusalem, part of Syria and much of Jordan. The end result was that Palestine is now divided between Israel and the two areas (the West Bank and the Gaza Strip) known as the Palestinian territories. Ever since, the UN has called for Israel to withdraw its forces, but the two sides have been unable to agree on how this might happen...

Need we wade into this morass of shading, evasion, half-truth and misrepresentation and refute it bit by bit? Need I remind the author that the Arabs started the war in ’48 in an effort to remove the blot and blight of Jewish sovereignty from their landscape (and as Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and other Muslims still long to do today)? Need we mention that at the same time the “Palestinian” refugees were fleeing their land (at the behest of their own leaders, who were convinced they’d be able to dispatch the Jews to Hell with little difficulty) almost the same number of Jews were being kicked out of their ancient homes in Muslim countries, but that these refugees were quickly absorbed by the Jewish state and not left to languish l’dor va dor in squalid refugee camps? Need we note the wars didn’t simply spring up, like mushrooms. With the possible exception of the 1956 Suez campaign, they were launched by Arabs against Jews with the express purpose of obliterating the Jewish state.

I’m sorry if these “facts” conflict with the tit-for-tat-cycle-of-violence-all-God’s-chillun-got-wings outlook of the book. But then, I didn’t write it. Deborah Ellis did. And she—and all the school librarians—think she’s got it right, and aren’t much concerned with the historical record. As long as Israeli children and Palestinian children have equal opportunity to speak, where’s the harm?

The Canadian Jewish Congress has leapt into action and is trying to have the book removed from the list of Silver Birch books. However, being the CJC, its objections are somewhat different than mine. While I object to the book for its mindset, for its inaccuracies and distortions, for suggesting that such outrageously pro-Palestinian organizations as the International Solidarity Movement and Christian Peacemakers Teams (among others) are “trying to make a difference in the situation in Israel and Palestine” (to which the only possible retort is, “Yeah, they’re making a difference by enabling the terrorists), the CJC has other dagim to fry. As we know, it still intends to “march arm-in-arm” with Muslim organizations in Ontario which, like the CJC, hope to convince the province to fund their religious schools. So, while it wants librarians to know that it’s none too pleased with the book, it wants to do so in the context of school marching, and thus must tread extra-carefully so as to not alienate its fellow marchers.

How carefully? The story about the book imbroglio in today’s Toronto Star quotes the CJC’s Feb. 8 letter to the library association, which outlines 17 passages from the book that the CJC finds inappropriate. While the article doesn’t mention all 17, the basis of the objection seems to be that the book lacks sufficient context and detail for its intended audience, students aged 9 to 11. Moreover, the book depicts Israelis as "brutal occupiers," and Palestinians as "murderers who are so intent on killing Israelis that they are prepared to blow themselves to shreds."

The CJC’s Len Rudner expands on these concerns to the Star reporter:

This is not a question of taking the book off the shelves, although some schools may draw that conclusion themselves. This is about considering the audience and acting in a responsible fashion. What you're left with is a book where, in a fair number of instances, you have kids saying: Maybe suicide bombing is a viable alternative, or maybe it's understandable or maybe it's a career choice for me. It either convinces children that maybe blowing up your enemy by strapping explosive devices to yourself is not such a far-fetched thing, or it advances the message these people are crazy and people like that can't be trusted. Just imagine how those kind of messages can play themselves out in a schoolyard.”

Let’s pause to digest this for a moment, shall we. According to Len, the even-steven mindset still pertains, and the CJC--which, lest we forget is a Jewish advocacy body--is as concerned about Israelis being reduced to brutal occupiers as it is about Palestinians being reduced to crazy, untrustworthy suicide bombers.

Perish the thought. Everyone knows that there are plenty of “moderate” Palestinans on the scene. Ones who don’t condone all that messy, crazy martyrdom. Ones who recently elected a party of genocidal jihadis because they wanted potholes filled in Ramallah and not because they wanted them to advance the cause of Jew-killing as set out in the Hamas Charter. Ones who, no matter what—car-b-cues, embassy torchings, mosque bombings—are prepared to march arm in arm with their Jewish brothers so that parents who want to give their children the benefit of a religious education will be spared the burden of having to cough up the ridiculously expensive tuition, not to mention that they also have to pay for public schools with their tax dollars. Ones who…

Oh, sorry. The spirit of Len took hold for a second, and I forgot where I was.

Posted by: scaramouche at 14:29 | link | comments

Woe is them: They're trying so hard, those Palestinians, to lift themselves up from their abject state (in their abject State). But it's like the Greek guy--what's his name again?; oh, yeah, Sissyphus. Every time they roll that rock to the top of the hill, it comes hurtling down on top of them.

Why, have a look at their current plight. They play by the rules and elect a new regime to clean up the joint, and now Great Satan and his henchmen--goddamn 'em all--want to go and revoke all their moolah. It's just not fair. From USA Today:

QALQILYA, West Bank — Mayor Hashim al-Masri slammed down the phone. "God curse America," he blurted, looking up from his desk.

On the other end of the line was the Palestinian minister of local authorities, Khaled Kawasme, who had just told him that the European Union would suspend its funding of sewage and paving projects in the West Bank and Gaza because Hamas won Jan. 25 parliamentary elections. Masri blames America for pressuring Europe to cut off funds.

For this town of 45,000, where donkey carts often outnumber cars on the street and jobs are few, the European money spells the difference between the gritty town it is and the modern one Masri envisions.

Qalqilya has been a Hamas political stronghold since last May, when the Islamic militant group won all 15 town council seats and the mayor's office. Most international donors yanked their funding at the time, wanting nothing to do with a city government that vowed Israel's destruction. But Masri nudged the bankrupt municipality into the black by selling off municipal vehicles, lowering project costs and putting pressure on residents to pay their taxes.

Now the West Bank town faces another funding crisis. Hamas swept January elections that placed the organization — on the U.S. State Department's and Europe's list of terrorist groups — in charge of the Palestinian Authority. Europe and the United States are using their purse strings to try and isolate the organization.

The money woes are severe...

Has Yasser's will been probated yet? I'm sure there are untold gazillions of stolen sheckels that his beneficiaries might be willing to share with their suffering countrymen.

Or have they already been spent on Suha's spa treatments and Birkin bags?

Posted by: scaramouche at 11:29 | link | comments

Inconvenient statistics: On the heels of a report that the American Coast Guard had concerns about turning over control of key seaports to a UAE company, comes this interesting statistic: 70 per cent of Americans polled say they're against the deal.

What's wrong with them? Don't they know that the UAE are the good guys who are in the vanguard of helping us turn back the tide of jihadism?

And if you want to keep thinking those good thoughts, then whatever you do, pay no attention to  these other statistics from a 2004 survey. From FrontPage Magazine:

-- 73% of UAE citizens had a negative view of the United States; only 14% had a favorable view.

-- Only 5% of UAE citizens felt that "democracy" was an "extremely important" reason for the U.S. invasion of Iraq. Preventing the spread of weapons of mass destruction was cited by 16%. "Oil" and "domination of the Muslim world" were the main reasons offered by UAE citizens for our invasion of Iraq.

-- 81% of UAE citizens felt Iraq was worse off after the war. Only 4% said it was better off without Saddam.

-- Asked to identify their "most admired" world leaders, 18% of UAE citizens chose Osama bin Laden. "No one" finished first with 22%.

-- When asked how they viewed themselves, only 19% said they identified first and foremost as citizens of the United Arab Emirates, while 66% said they saw themselves as "Muslims" first.

Posted by: scaramouche at 11:10 | link | comments

Meow: Astonishing news this morning. The nuclear watchkittens of the IAEA have done some concerted digging, and according to them there is absolutely no evidence that Iran plans to enrich uranium for anything other than peaceful purposes. Of course, the fact that Iran stymied the investigation all along by refusing to co-operate fully may cast some doubt on that conclusion:

A report by the U.N. nuclear watchdog agency shows there is no proof Iran's nuclear program is aimed at producing nuclear weapons, Iran's foreign minister said Tuesday in Japan.

"They could not find evidence which shows that Iran has diverted from its peaceful purposes of nuclear activities in Iran," said Manouchehr Mottaki, who was in Tokyo to meet with Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi.

A confidential International Atomic Energy Agency report made available to The Associated Press Monday said that a more than three-year probe has not revealed "any diversion of nuclear material to nuclear weapons or other nuclear explosive devices."

But it also said that because of lack of sufficient cooperation from the Iranian side, the agency remains unable "to conclude that there are no undeclared nuclear materials or activities in Iran." The report suggested that unless Iran drastically increases its cooperation, the IAEA would not be able to establish whether past clandestine activities were focused on making nuclear arms.

The report, prepared by IAEA head Mohamed ElBaradei for a March 6 meeting of the agency's 35-nation board of governors, could help determine what action the U.N. Security Council will take against Iran, which says its nuclear program is intended solely for peaceful purposes.

The IAEA decided at a Feb. 4 meeting to report Tehran to the council over concerns it might be seeking nuclear arms. But further action was deferred until the end of next week's meeting at the insistence of veto-wielding council members Russia and China, which have close economic and political ties with Iran.

Mottaki said Iran had a right to nuclear technology for peaceful purposes and is committed not to build nuclear weapons.

"Iran also, like Japan, enjoys its right to have nuclear technology for peaceful purposes," Mottaki told reporters after talks with Koizumi. "We are against nuclear weapons."

But, being a Shia jihadi, he has nothing against a little taqiyah now and then, just to keep the infidels off balance.

As for the prospect of referring the matter to the fearsome Security Council--no worries there for the Mully-Bullies. Any move to sanction Iran would most likely be vetoed by Russia and/or China. Which means as far as the international community is concerned, it's all systems go for Iranian nukes.

Posted by: scaramouche at 10:56 | link | comments

Killing Jews and other fascist pursuits: Caroline Glick on the Halimi murder, and how the Jews once again find themselves in the crosshairs of totalitarians. From JWR:

Ilan Halimi's barbarous murder in France should awaken all Jews to the most significant truth of our times: Today, every Jew in the world is on the front lines of war.

As was the case seventy years ago, every Jew today is a target for our enemies, who shout from every soapbox and prove at every opportunity, that their goal is the annihilation of the Jewish people. From 1933-1945, the enemy was Nazi Germany. Today, the enemy is political Islam. Its call for jihad aimed at annihilating the Jews and dominating the world is answered by millions of people throughout the world.

Among the lessons of the Holocaust, there is one that is almost never mentioned. That lesson is that it is possible, and indeed fairly easy to exterminate the Jews. The fact that the Holocaust happened proves that it is absolutely possible for the Jewish people to be wiped off the map - just as Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Hamas leader Khaled Mashal promise.

The story of Ilan Halimi's murder at the hands of a terrorist gang of French Muslims brings to the surface the various pathologies now converging to make the prospect of annihilating all Jews seem possible to our enemies. First, there are the murderers who took such apparent pleasure and felt such pride in the fact that for twenty days they tortured their Jewish hostage to death.

This makes sense. Anti-Semitism in the Muslim dominated suburbs of Paris and other French cities is all-encompassing. As Nidra Poller related in Thursday's Wall Street Journal, "One of the most troubling aspects of this affair is the probable involvement of relatives and neighbors, beyond the immediate circle of the gang [of kidnappers], who were told about the Jewish hostage and dropped in to participate in the torture."

It appears that Ilan Halimi's murderers had some connection to Hamas. Tuesday, French Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy said that police found propaganda published by the Palestinian Charity Committee or the CBSP at the home of one of the suspects. The European Jewish Press reported this week that Israel has alleged that the organization is a front group for Palestinian terrorists and that in August 2003 the US government froze the organization's US bank accounts due to its links with Hamas...

Posted by: scaramouche at 21:11 | link | comments

Jihad Jack's dilemma: "Jihad Jack" Thomas, the Australian jihadi, has been convicted by a Melbourne court of receiving a pay-off from al Qaeda.

J.J., who started out life as plain old Joseph but changed his name to Jihad upon converting to Islam, is about as unlikely a jihadi as you'll ever find. In fact, at first it was a tough call for our Jack. As he explained in a post-conviction interview, "I'd say, 'Oh look, you know, I really love your religion but I really love my beer.'"

I know what he means, but then I figure that any religion that ask you to choose between it and beer may be asking just a wee bit too much.

Nonetheless, Jihad took the plunge, and soon enough he was jetting to Afghanistan, where he met the Big Man himself, Mr. Osama bin Laden. And, crikey, did Osama have a job for him. He was looking for a "white boy" to commit terrorist acts in Oz--and Jihad fit the bill to a T (or should I say B--for the brew he was forced to give up?).

Jihad says he politely declined the invitation, although he does admit to accepting $3,5000 and a plane ticket home--crimes for which he will be serving a good stretch as a guest of the Australian penal system.

He also says that, despite his forbidding appearance, bin Laden is actually quite approachable. While he doesn't like being kissed, he is amenable to the occasional hug.

About as cuddly as a viper, I'd say.

Posted by: scaramouche at 19:08 | link | comments

Protesting (some) Jew-hatred: In Paris yesterday, at least 33,000 and up to 200,000 people (depending on where you get your numbers) gathered to protest the savage torture and murder of a young Jew, Ilan Halimi. Halimi was killed by a slew of true believers and some non-Muslim confreres, “youths” from the ‘burbs who like to torch cars and Jews. And aside from the possibility of extracting ransom from the Jew’s loved ones--which gave them incentive to keep their victim alive for a while--they make little distinction between the human and the vehicle. Actually, that’s not exactly correct. They treat the cars more humanely, destroying them at the once; the human they subject to week after week of the most excruciating torture.

The crime is said to have sickened the French, who marched alongside members of their increasingly embattled Jewish community to show that they refuse to countenance such obvious and egregious Jew-hatred in their midst.

How heartening. And yet, how hypocritical. For at the same time the French are tut-tutting the Muslim Jew-hatred they've done little to deter and that is now necrotizing their body politic, France, as a key member of the EU, is getting set to fund the Jew-haters perched like genocidal gargoyles on Israel’s doorstep. That the French see no contradiction between protesting Jew-hatred in Paris and funding it in Gaza; that, moreover, they are unable to draw a straight line between the existential threat to Jews in Israel and the one to Jews in France; that, most disturbingly of all, they have failed to draw any lesson at all from their experience of giving in to totalitarians who threaten first the Jews and then the rest of Western civilization, shows that yesterday’s protest is rather an empty gesture. It amounts to little more than the death rattle of a dying culture, one that ceded its power to the forces of darkness some time ago.

So, thanks for the march, mes amis. But considering that your country is funding the guys who want to complete Adolf Hitler’s Final Solution, the protest rings about as hollow as the burnt-out car carcasses that now litter your urban landscape.

Posted by: scaramouche at 17:28 | link | comments

Wake up and smell the totalitarianism: David Warren places the 'toon tumult (or as he calls it, the "organized apoplexy") in its larger historical context--the one all those timorous don't-rock-the-boat Westerners (including the Canadian Jewish Congress, which has some loopy notion of marching "arm-in-arm" with Muslims to lobby for religious school funding) are loath to face:

...The reason I have written so copiously on this subject -- not the cartoons themselves, but what I have called the “organized apoplexy” in response to them -- is because it is important. In my judgement, it is the most important thing that has happened since the Al Qaeda attack on the United States, in 2001. It is important in combination with other fast-developing events, including the victory of the openly terrorist Hamas in a Palestinian election; Iran’s public promise to “wipe Israel off the map”; collapsing public order in Pakistan, Nigeria, and elsewhere; the recent Muslim riots, and continuing low-level Intifada in France; and now the destruction of the Golden Mosque in Samarra, triggering vicious sectarian strife in Iraq. And quite literally, hundreds of lesser events of the same nature -- each revealing an Islamic world in combustion, and a West retreating into contrived apologies and other confused gestures of cowardice and panic.

One cannot keep up with all these events -- the wheels of history are turning too quickly. The world in which we will find ourselves, a few years hence, will not resemble the world we inhabited a few years ago. Yet this is among the few predictions that can be safely made. The events will fall out as unpredictably as those Danish cartoons. The names, dates, and places are not yet recorded; but the shape and scale of events is already blotting the sun on our horizon.

Even after the experience of the Great War, and the Depression, people on the eve of the Hitler war could not appreciate what was coming. It is only in retrospect that we understand what happened as the 1930s progressed -- when a spineless political class, eager at any price to preserve a peace that was no longer available, performed endless demeaning acts of appeasement to the Nazis; while the Nazis created additional grievances to extract more.

This is precisely what is happening now, as we are confronted by the Islamist fanatics, whose views and demands are already being parroted by fearful “mainstream” Muslim politicians. We will do anything to preserve a peace that ceased to exist on 9/11. Not one of our prominent politicians dares even to name the enemy.

And from a mixture of fear of, and sympathy for, large, recent, Muslim immigrant communities in the West, we confuse domestic and foreign issues. I do not doubt the great majority of Muslims, in Canada and around the world, are decent, “moderate” people, who want no part in a “clash of civilizations”. But it has become obvious they can do nothing to stop the triumph of “Islamism” internationally, or oppose the fanatics proselytizing in their own communities.

Germany was full of moderate Germans, as Hitler rose; Stalin drove his oars through a sea of moderate Russians. While we must not forget that the Muslims are the first victims of “Islamism”, and may suffer most from its triumph, we are beyond the point where we can do more for them than destroy the tyranny by which they are enthralled...

Posted by: scaramouche at 13:19 | link | comments

Incendiary singer: A singer known as the "Muslim Madonna" is haven't a bit of difficulty with her audience. Seems some of them are up in arms, as they say, over her latest video, in which she strips off her burka to reveal the bikini she's wearning underneath it.  On top of that, there's a cameo by Muslim refusenik, Irshad Manji, who, in a symbolic gesture, rips some tape off the singer's mouth.

Sounds like two uppity chicks are cruisin' for a bruisin', if you know what I mean. From the National Post:

A Muslim pop star has hired bodyguards for her upcoming tour in Britain after receiving death threats over her newest video, which features her stripping off a burka to reveal her bikini-clad body.

Deeyah, who has been dubbed the "Muslim Madonna," has been forced to hire security guards to protect her in London next month while she promotes a new single and video, according to the British newspaper The Independent.

The 27-year-old Norwegian-born star has become the target of threats from religious extremists who are angry about the video for her song What Will It Be, which she argues is about Muslim women's rights and empowerment. The video features Irshad Manji, the Toronto-based feminist Muslim writer, ripping off a strip of tape that covers her mouth.

On Ms. Manji's official Web site, she said she participated in the video because Deeyah represents "integrity and independence of thought." She added that since the release of the video, Deeyah has received a string of death threats and media outlets have "succumbed to the intimidation of angry Muslims, and are low-balling a great tune."

Deeyah, who divides her time between the United Kingdom and the United States, filmed the video in the U.S. and in India -- where, according to her Web site, she was chased around "the bumpy roads of Mumbai by a truck full of Muslim men who are angry at the [sight] of the sultry pop star being filmed." Filming sites in Los Angeles had to be kept secret due to "more threats to Deeyah's safety," her site says.

In her video, the faces of "women who have been killed in the name of 'honour' " are projected on to Deeyah's naked back. She also dances in the streets wearing a halter top.

"My core message in this video is the right of a woman to choose her own path and express herself without the fear of violence or cultural excommunication," she says on Ms. Manji's Web site.

"After years of being called a 'whore,' 'devil' and 'bringer of shame' by people who use Islam as their shield, I have decided to let this video speak for me ... I am tired of the people who clamour at the slightest hint of skin on a Muslim woman but who will not speak up when a woman is beaten and even murdered in the name of Islam."

Hoda Fahmy, who works with a group that provides education to Muslim women in Canada, says Deeyah's message is lost along with the singer's clothing.

"A lot of us are working for women's rights, particularly in the Muslim world. I think we have more self-respect than to dance around naked to make our point," she said. "It's unfortunate that she has to use those means, because it's true -- women are not able to speak up in a lot of these countries."

Posted by: scaramouche at 12:20 | link | comments (1)

EU funds terrorism: Or should that be, the EU continues to fund terrorism? From the Financial Times:

The European Union plans to provide the Palestinian people with over €120m in aid before the new Hamas government takes office, Benita Ferrero-Waldner, EU Commissioner for external relations said on Monday.

The announcement was made as EU foreign ministers met in Brussels ahead of a scheduled consultation on Wednesday by the EU and its fellow members of the international Quartet – the US, United Nations and Russia – on how to avert the imminent financial collapse of the Palestinian Authority even before the incoming Hamas-led government.

The European stance contrasts sharply with the US, which has called for the PA to hand back $50m in donations, and Israel, which has cut off transfers to the PA of $50m a month.

It prefigures an intense debate within the international community over contacts with and funding for a PA led by Hamas, which the EU, the US and Israel classify as a terrorist group.

Last month, the US, the EU, Russia and the UN agreed international support should be provided for the caretaker PA administration, but called on Hamas to recognise Israel and renounce violence...

Posted by: scaramouche at 11:25 | link | comments

Arab News sets us straight: Don't be fooled by that jihadi terrorist regime lurking on Israel's doorstep. Just because they remain committed to their charter which calls for the destruction of Israel--and have so far rebuffed all calls for them to renounce terrorism and accept Jewish sovereignty--doesn't mean they're actually required to take a different course. Why, according to Arab News, Hamas needn't do much of anything. In fact, its true intentions can be intuited from its failure to act:

The mere fact that Hamas participated in the election signified a de facto acceptance of the two-state formula. Taken a step further, the mere fact of its taking seats in the Palestinian Parliament — a body formed under PLO auspices in the context of the Oslo peace process — can be taken as a de facto acceptance of Israel.

You don't say. Then I guess there really is no impediment to peace.

'Cept for all that stuff about jihad, of course.

Posted by: scaramouche at 23:38 | link | comments

Invasion of the Dubya snatchers: I’m sure I’m not the only one who’s noticed that, in recent days, George W. Bush seems to be a shadow of his former self. Gone is the “you’re either with us or agin’ us” Dubya. He’s been replaced a wimpified version who, shades of Bill Clinton, feels Muslim pain over blasphemous Danish ‘toons and can’t understand why Americans would be stressing about handing over control of their seaports to Arabs.

One can only conclude that something dreadful has occurred. While our attention was diverted by the latest bomb blast in Baghdad, or the latest embassy torching in an Arab country, someone went and switched the real George Dubya with one of those pod people.

Oh, sure, it looks like George and talks like George, stumbling over the English language in an utterly convincing way (as evinced most recently by the Presidential reference to the “Great British”). But the real George W. Bush would never agree to continue funding the terrorist regime on Israel’s doorstep; nor would he have referred to the election of said terrorists as a sign of the Palestinians’ political “health”.

No, I’m certain that the real George W. is being held hostage in some warehouse on the outskirts of Omaha, while the pod George W. is making policy—really, really bad policy—in Washington.

Come back, George—wherever you are. We need you now more than ever.

Posted by: scaramouche at 22:00 | link | comments

The Star tows the (dhimmi) line: Some unintentional hilairity today in Haroon Siddiqui's mothership, the Toronto Star. In the IDEAS section of the Sunday paper, Lynda Hurst has a piece about how crucial it is for non-Muslims to appreciate the glories of Islamic art, some of which happens to include images of the Prophet. But then, these are really old pictures--like the beautiful, full-colour one adorning Hurst's article, which, as she explains, is an "exquisite 15th-century illumination" that depicts "the Prophet Mohammed in the course of his visionary night journey from Mecca to Jerusalem..." It's one of 61 paintings showing Mo that were created by unkown artists in Herat, Afghanistan in the early 1400s. The paintings were published without incident in a fancy art book published by fancy art book publisher, George Braziller, in 1977.

Ms. Hurst wants us all to get a sense of the gorgeosity of these images (my impression: very pretty, in a primitif Islamic Grandma Moses kind of way). But just to be on the safe side, there's a big black rectangle where the Prophet's punim should be.

Wouldn't want anyone to take to the streets and burn down embassies because of some brazen Afghani artists, now would we?

Here's how Hurst explains what amounts to the Star's self-censorship:

Perhaps Muslim scholar Tariq Ramadan, of London's Lokahi Foundation, which studies religious diversity, should have the last word.

"We are at a crossroads," he recently wrote in The Guardian.

"The time has come for (people) to reject this dangerous division of people into two worlds, to start building bridges based on common values. They must assert the inalienable right to freedom of expression and, at the same time, demand measured exercise of it."

Hence our offering of the painting, but with the face of Mohammed blocked out.

A measured exercise. A bridge, of sorts.

A bridge, huh? Looks more like a doormat, of sorts, to me.

Posted by: scaramouche at 17:22 | link | comments (2)

Grovel, grovel: Uber-dhimmi Kofi Annan has extended his sincerest apologies on behalf of everyone for the actions of a Danish newspaper in daring to contravene Muslim custom and foisting forbidden image of the greatest man who ever lived on its readers--and the world. And if you think he had any criticism for the manner in which the faithful reacted--make that over-reacted to the 'toons--you sure don't know our Kofi. From Islam Online:

The United Nations, Arab states and the world's largest Islamic body on Saturday, February 25, urged respect for all religions, regretting the publication of Danish cartoons that lampooned Prophet Muhammad (peace and blessings be upon him).

"We deeply regret the offence given by the caricatures," said a joint declaration issued in the Qatari capital city of Doha by UN Secretary of State Kofi Annan and the heads of the Arab League and the 57-member Organization of the Islamic Conference, who were also at the meeting.

The parties concerned pledged to adopt a common strategy to head off a repeat of the cartoons crisis, stressing the importance of responsible media and free speech as long as it is not used as a pretext to incite hatred, blasphemy or violence.

It called for enhancing dialogue, pinning high hopes on a Sunday meeting of the UN-backed Alliance of Civilizations in Doha.

"We urge everyone to resist provocation, overreaction and violence, and turn to dialogue. Without dialogue we cannot hope to appeal to reason, to heal resentment or overcome mistrust," said the statement, also issued by the foreign ministers of Qatar, Spain and Turkey who attended the meeting...

And if we were really considerate, we'd save them the bother of having to enhance their dialogue (which, in any case, may have already reached the limits of enhancement) and embrace the common strategy of sharia law right now.

Posted by: scaramouche at 16:02 | link | comments (1)

Ports in a storm: Kathleen Parker in the Orlando Sentinel (link via RealClear Politics) writes that there's nothing wrong with a little timely and rational fear, even if the President insists that fear itself--and not the idea of Arabs in charge of key American ports--is the issue:

...In the several days since the pending sale was announced amid much Sturm und Drang, new facts have surfaced that ultimately may convince Americans that the sale won't threaten national security. The ports will continue to be protected as they have been by the U.S. Coast Guard and the U.S. Customs Service, for instance. And American workers will continue to comprise the bulk of the ports' workforce.

Other justifications for the sale appear to be reasonable -- not least that Dubai Ports World is reputedly competent at managing ports -- and might be convincing if only someone bearing the title President of the United States would articulate those reasons in a spirit of respect rather than as a dismissive parent managing an impudent child.

We're at war, remember? We're fighting terror. We're staying the course and holding fast. You're either with us or against us. Americans got all that and the part about taking down Saddam Hussein in case he had weapons of mass destruction. They also got the part about planting seeds of democracy in hopes of changing hearts and minds that are stalled in the 12th century. Check.

At the same time, Americans have gamely tolerated interminable airport lines as old ladies got frisked and terrorist look-alikes strolled through magnetometers. They're mostly cool, in other words. But they're also watching the news and seeing a world gone mad over a few political cartoons and wondering whether it's such a good idea to increase even administrative traffic between "over there" and here.

These are not the xenophobic ravings of a fevered populace. Rather, they are a few reasonable questions, to which President George W. Bush replied: "I want those who are questioning it to step up and explain why all of a sudden a Middle Eastern company is held to a different standard than a Great British (sic) company."

Not to be a smart aleck or anything, but does "Duh" work for anyone?...

Works for me.

Update: Another way I know the Dubai deal is a bad idea: Thomas L. Friedman thinks it's a good one. From Newsbusters:

For the second time in two days, Mideast expert and New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman has taken a position in agreement with the Bush administration, and contrary to his bosses. You have to wonder how long Friedman can get away with this and continue to keep his job.

As reported by NewsBuster Mark Finkelstein, Friedman was on ABC’s “Good Morning America” on Friday suggesting that the increase in violence in Iraq of late might be an indication that al Qaeda knows it’s losing. In addition, he intimated that the absence of follow-up terrorist attacks on America since 9/11 is likely due to al Qaeda’s focus on winning the war in Iraq.

Now, one day later, Friedman wrote an op-ed wherein he, for the second day in a row, appeared to be supporting the Bush administration on the recent controversy surrounding DP World:

“But while I have zero sympathy for the political mess in which the president now finds himself, I will not join this feeding frenzy. On the pure merits of this case, the president is right. The port deal should go ahead.”

Friedman continued: “As a country, we must not go down this road of global ethnic profiling, looking for Arabs under our beds the way we once looked for commies. If we do, if America, the world's beacon of pluralism and tolerance, goes down that road, we will take the rest of the world with us.”

Sounds a little like the president, doesn’t it? So does this:

“If there were a real security issue here, I'd join the critics. But the security argument is bogus and, I would add, borderline racist. Many U.S. ports are run today by foreign companies, but the U.S. Coast Guard still controls all aspects of port security, entry and exits; the U.S. Customs Service is still in charge of inspecting the containers; and U.S. longshore- men still handle the cargos.

“The port operator simply oversees the coming and going of ships, making sure they are properly loaded and offloaded in the most cost-effective manner. As my colleague David E. Sanger reported: ‘Among the many problems at American ports, said Stephen E. Flynn, a retired Coast Guard commander who is an expert on port security at the Council on Foreign Relations, 'who owns the management contract ranks near the very bottom.' "

After warning the reader about the “terrible trend” he sees in the world today – from Sunnis and Shia attacking one another’s mosques, to deadly Muslim protests over cartoons – Friedman concluded:

“There is a poison loose today and America — America at its best — is the only antidote. That's why it is critical that we stand by our principles of free trade and welcoming the world to do business in our land, as long as there is no security threat. If we start exporting fear instead of hope, we are going to import everyone else's fears right back. That is not a world you want for your children.”...

Tom's right about one thing: there is a poison loose today. It's called the jihad. And unless we're prepared to confront that export--'cause, yes, Tom, while there may not be any Commies lurking under your bed, there is a holy war, and it's pretty scary--this will indeed not be a world we want for our children.

Posted by: scaramouche at 13:54 | link | comments

Killing Jews in Europe (again): Mark Steyn on Europe's Jewish problem. The problem is that, shades of the Third Reich, Jews are once again being murdered for the "crime" of being Jewish. Only this time, the ones doing the killing are those restive "youths" affiliated with the one true faith--and no one wants to mess with them:

...This month, there was another murder. Ilan Halimi, also 23, also Jewish, was found by a railway track outside Paris with burns and knife wounds all over his body. He died en route to the hospital, having been held prisoner, hooded and naked, and brutally tortured for almost three weeks by a gang that had demanded half a million dollars from his family. Can you take a wild guess at the particular identity of the gang? During the ransom phone calls, his uncle reported that they were made to listen to Ilan's screams as he was being burned while his torturers read out verses from the Quran.

This time around, the French media did carry the story, yet every public official insisted there was no anti-Jewish element. Just one of those things. Coulda happened to anyone. And, if the gang did seem inordinately fixated on, ah, Jews, it was just because, as one police detective put it, ''Jews equal money.'' In London, the Observer couldn't even bring itself to pursue that particular angle. Its report of the murder managed to avoid any mention of the unfortunate Halimi's, um, Jewishness. Another British paper, the Independent, did dwell on the particular, er, identity groups involved in the incident but only in the context of a protest march by Parisian Jews marred by ''radical young Jewish men'' who'd attacked an ''Arab-run grocery.''

At one level, those spokesmonsieurs are right: It could happen to anyone. Even in the most civilized societies, there are depraved monsters who do terrible things. When they do, they rip apart entire families, like the Halimis and Selams. But what inflicts the real lasting damage on society as a whole is the silence and evasions of the state and the media and the broader culture...

Posted by: scaramouche at 12:44 | link | comments

Same old blame game: Haroon Siddiqui, a man who's squandered more column inches than practically any other in a fruitless attempt to justify politcal Isam, has been having a hard time of it lately. The faithful have gone squirrely, burning down embassies and blowing up the third --or is it the fifth or sixth? (I've lost track) holiest site in Shia Islam--and Haroon has been doing some furious backpeddling in an effort to explain such outrageous behaviour.

It can't be the fault of faulty doctrine, including the call to externalize the internal struggle in order to extend the sway of the one true faith: Let's stifle that notion before it has a chance to draw a breath. Nope, if the Muslim world is largely a backwater of seething hatreds and internecine squabbles, it's not because of them; or at least, it's not only because of them.  In large part, it's because of us and because we've had a hand in making them what they are today--angry, hostile, frustrated, abject. From The Toronto Star (where Haroon twitters twice weekly from his bully perch):

However much offence they might cause, cartoons don't kill. Yet Muslims have been on a rampage about the caricaturing of the Prophet Muhammad. Isn't their reaction wildly disproportionate?

And, why should the West take Muslims seriously when they routinely commit great crimes, such as blowing up the Shi'ite Golden Mosque in Iraq and killing Sunnis in retaliation?

The answer is that the Muslim world is in a deep crisis.

But Muslims alone cannot fix the mess, because it is not entirely of their making.

Most live in the Third World, much of it once colonized, and some of it still controlled by, Western powers. Not all Muslim shortcomings emanate from that but several do.

Millions of Muslims live in conflict zones, precisely in the areas of such meddling: Iraq (30,000 to 100,000 dead in the last three years), Afghanistan (an unknown number dead since the U.S. invasion), the Israeli Occupied Territories (one of the longest and most brutal occupations of modern times), and disputed Kashmir on the Indo-Pakistani border (65,000 dead since 1989).

Only the genocide in the former Yugoslavia (200,000 dead) and the Russian wars on Chechnya (200,000 dead) are not attributable to Western machinations though it must be noted that the latter has had the tacit support of the U.S.

Combined with the 1991-2003 U.S.-led economic sanctions on Iraq (at least 500,000 casualties), these conflicts have killed more than 1 million Muslims in the last decade and a half, and spawned the horrors of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay.

Why are we surprised that Muslims are up in arms?...

It's a relief that Haroon has arrived belatedly at the revelation that 'toons don't kill people; deranged seethers off their collective rockers kill people. Too bad he's still playing the same blame/shame game that keeps the faithful pining for past glories and mired in their misery--and causes them to act out in such a demented way.

Update: The conclusion of the Steyn piece posted above puts things in their proper light. It's not so much what we're doing to them; it's what they plan to do to us:

Something very remarkable is happening around the globe and, if you want the short version, a Muslim demonstrator in Toronto the other day put it very well:

''We won't stop the protests until the world obeys Islamic law.''

Stated that baldly it sounds ridiculous. But, simply as a matter of fact, every year more and more of the world lives under Islamic law: Pakistan adopted Islamic law in 1977, Iran in 1979, Sudan in 1984. Four decades ago, Nigeria lived under English common law; now, half of it's in the grip of sharia, and the other half's feeling the squeeze, as the death toll from the cartoon jihad indicates. But just as telling is how swiftly the developed world has internalized an essentially Islamic perspective. In their pitiful coverage of the low-level intifada that's been going on in France for five years, the European press has been barely any less loopy than the Middle Eastern media.

What, in the end, are all these supposedly unconnected matters from Danish cartoons to the murder of a Dutch filmmaker to gender-segregated swimming sessions in French municipal pools about? Answer: sovereignty. Islam claims universal jurisdiction and always has. The only difference is that they're now acting upon it. The signature act of the new age was the seizure of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran: Even hostile states generally respect the convention that diplomatic missions are the sovereign territory of their respective countries. Tehran then advanced to claiming jurisdiction over the citizens of sovereign states and killing them -- as it did to Salman Rushdie's translators and publishers. Now in the cartoon jihad and other episodes, the restraints of Islamic law are being extended piecemeal to the advanced world, by intimidation and violence but also by the usual cooing promotion of a spurious multicultural "respect" by Bill Clinton, the United Church of Canada, European foreign ministers, etc...

Posted by: scaramouche at 12:32 | link | comments

The ties that bind--and strangle: In the wake of the 'toon tumult, Europe could go one of two ways. It could either become more defiant, the last gasp of Western civilization holding out against the reality of demographics--which favours the younger, more fecund newcomers to the aging, non-procreating natives. Or it could roll on its back, raise a white flag and shout "Oncle".

This Islam Online article gives a hint of what may lie ahead:

European Union governments are considering a range of measures to build stronger ties with the Muslim world following the outrage caused by the publication of Danish caricatures that lampooned Prophet Muhammad (peace and blessings be upon him).

"The focus is on what we can do to promote inter-cultural dialogue and better understanding of each other," an EU diplomat told the German news agency dpa on Friday, February 25.

The new EU drive, expected to be unveiled by the bloc's foreign ministers on Monday, February 27, will focus on improving relations with Muslim governments but will also underline the need for better contacts between the two sides' media, youth groups and NGOS.

"We would like to close this chapter (of tension) and turn a new page in our relations with Muslim countries," said the EU diplomat, speaking on condition of anonymity.

The cartoons, one of them showing the Prophet with a bomb-shaped turban, were first published in Denmark last year, and have been reprinted by newspapers in many countries on the ground of freedom of expression.

Any image of the Prophet -- let alone biting caricatures -- is considered blasphemous under Islam...

Hands up anyone who thinks that "inter-cultural dialogue" is likely to be anything more than a one-sided monologue on the merits of the one true faith.

Posted by: scaramouche at 21:54 | link | comments

Fox tapped to be gatekeeper of henhouse: From the delightfully skewed mind of blogger iowahawk comes this comical analogy: Putting the UAE in charge of American ports is like...:

BUSH INKS IRISH FIRM TO GUARD NATIONAL WHISKEY RESERVE

Washington DC - The Bush Administration today angrily defended its controversial approval of the Irish company Donnybrook Lads Ltd. to oversee security at the National Strategic Whiskey Reserve in Lynchburg, TN, vowing to veto a new House bill that would force the two-man firm to undergo federal breathalizer testing.

"During the rigorous 7 minute review process, both Seamus and Kevin gave us an express oral promise that they never touch the stuff," said White House Spokesman Scott McClelland. "Well, maybe just a wee nip at wakes, and on All Saints Day."

"Congressional postering on this issue plays into the worst anti-Irish stereotypes," added McClelland, who said that the security contract included a failsafe Designated Driver clause to keep the Irish firm away from sensitive whiskey truck keys.

"We can reassure the American people that all Strategic Whiskey Reserve transportation and driving duties will be handled by highly-skilled elderly Koreans," said McClelland.

Posted by: scaramouche at 21:19 | link | comments

Lights out: In this crazy mixed-up world of ours, Islamic fascists are cossetted by Liberals, and those who stand firmly against Islamic fascists are condemned as...fascists.

Case in point: Oriana Fallaci, the Italian Cassandra--now, sadly, suffering from terminal cancer--who's been warning the West about the perils of political Islam for some time. As Cathy Siepp writes in the L.A. Times, Fallaci is persona non grata in a famous temple of free expression--San Francisco's City Lights bookstore.

A FRIEND OF MINE took his young daughter to visit the famous City Lights bookstore in San Francisco, explaining to her that the place is important because years ago it sold books no other store would — even, perhaps especially, books whose ideas many people found offensive.

So, although my friend is no fan of Ward Churchill, the faux Indian and discredited professor who notoriously called 9/11 victims "little Eichmanns," he didn't really mind seeing piles of Churchill's books prominently displayed on a table as he walked in.

However, it did occur to him that perhaps the long-delayed English translation of Oriana Fallaci's new book, "The Force of Reason," might finally be available, and that because Fallaci's militant stance against Islamic militants offends so many people, a store committed to selling banned books would be the perfect place to buy it. So he asked a clerk if the new Fallaci book was in yet.

"No," snapped the clerk. "We don't carry books by fascists."

Now let's just savor the absurd details of this for a minute. City Lights has a long and proud history of supporting banned authors — owner Lawrence Ferlinghetti was indicted (and acquitted) for obscenity in 1957 for selling Allen Ginsberg's "Howl," and a photo at the bookstore showed Ferlinghetti proudly posing next to a sign reading "banned books."

Yet his store won't carry, of all people, Fallaci, who is not only being sued in Italy for insulting religion because of her latest book but continues to fight the good fight against those who think that the appropriate response to offensive books and cartoons is violent riots. It's particularly repugnant that someone who fought against actual fascism in World War II should be deemed a fascist by a snotty San Francisco clerk.

Strangest of all is the scenario of such a person disliking an author for defending Western civilization against radical Islam — when one of the first things those poor, persecuted Islamists would do, if they ever (Allah forbid) came to power in the United States, is crush suspected homosexuals like him beneath walls.

Yet those most oppressed by political Islam continue to defend it, even (perhaps especially) in the wake of the Danish cartoon furor. I've heard that in Europe this phenomenon is now called the Copenhagen syndrome, and some of its arguments really are amazing...

Looks like at City Lights, freedom's just another word for nothing left to censor.

Posted by: scaramouche at 20:01 | link | comments (5)

Ken's defenders: Ken Livingstone has been suspended from his mayoral duties for telling a Jewish reporter that he reminded him of a Nazi concentration camp guard, and lovers of free speech have rallied in Ken's support.

Okay, maybe not lovers of free speech so much as lovers of Holocaust denial. From the Islamic Republic News Agency (with the unintentionally amusing bits highlighted in bold):

British Muslims Saturday joined widespread condemnations of the decision by an un-elected adjudication panel to suspend London Mayor Ken Livingstone over remarks he made to a Jewish reporters last year.

The Islamic Human Rights Commission (IHRC) said it was shocked by the unprecedented decision, saying it was 'reflective of the ever- increasing double standards in the implementation of laws and policies in Britain with regards to freedom of speech'.

"In recent times, many senior politicians and journalists have compared Muslims and Islam to Nazis and Nazism without even the mildest rebuke," IHRC Chair Massoud Shadjareh said.

"Today, Ken Livingstone has become the latest victim of the hypocritical implementation of freedom of speech," Shadjareh said.

The twice-elected mayor was suspended from office on full pay for four weeks, starting on March 1, for comparing a Jewish journalist for London's Evening Standard to a concentration camp guard.

Livingstone has said he was expressing his honestly-held political view about the Evening Standard's right-wing owners, Associated Newspapers, and that he had not meant to offend the Jewish community as was alleged.

The Muslim Council of Britain (MCB) also said that it strongly deplores the suspension as 'a clear over reaction and an affront to our democratic traditions'.

"He (Livingstone) is a committed anti-racist campaigner of longstanding. We are proud to stand by him and hope to see this ridiculous verdict overturned shortly," MCB Secretary General Iqbal Sacranie said.

Many Muslims also questioned the decision following an Austrian court sentencing British historian David Irving for three years last week for challenging details 17 years ago about the extent of the Jewish holocaust during World War Two.

Labor Muslim MP Sadiq Khan, who is also a human rights lawyer, said that the mayor's suspension was an affront to democracy, after being elected to office twice with overwhelming majorities.

"Ken Livingstone has been elected to serve the city of London by millions of voters, who are now deprived of a mayor for four weeks," Khan said.

"Un-elected officials should not be able to suspend a democratically elected Mayor unless he is guilty of a significant offense," he said.

The Muslim MP cited Livingstone's achievements as the first elected mayor to London as helping to portray a model for other cities to adopt.

"He not only helped to secure the Olympics for London, but also played an integral role in the aftermath of the bombings on 7th July," Khan said.

"Furthermore he has been a champion for equality for decades and has helped people of different races, cultures and religions to live harmoniously together," he added.

Update: To refresh your memory, here are some of Ken's inspiring words following the London bombings. Notice how the harmonious-minded mayor sees absolutely no justification for suicide bombings--except, of course, for the ones perpetrated by oppressed Palestinians against those brutal occupying Jews.

Posted by: scaramouche at 19:16 | link | comments

One way dialogue: A Danish newspaper prints a few mostly anodyne cartoons, and a portion of the world (granted, an exceptionally touchy portion) goes completely freakazoidal. As Rex Murphy notes in the Globe and Mail, such a disproportionate response is not exactly conducive to constructive dialogue between civilizations:

...If the mayhem and threats were meant to offer some counterstatement to the satirical intent of these contentious pictures, they worked dismally against that purpose. And if their point was that religious sensibilities should be shielded against editorial comment or representation, a neutral observer of the violence in a dozen countries saw in it little that breathed either sensibility or sanctity. The reaction was not proportionate on any scale to the perceived offence, and if it had any signiture characteristic it was one of intimidation.

I am not sure we can have a dialoge based on "respect" that is threated with the idea of violent retaliation if one side of the conversation does not have its way. The dynamic of any dialogue cannot be ceded to the extremists for that is the nullification of the idea of dialogue. "Agree with us--or else" is not a seminar topic...

Silly Rex. "Agree with us--or else" happens to be THE seminar topic--the seminal seminar topic--of the Dar al Islamists. And in their world, it's the only topic they're prepared to discuss.

Posted by: scaramouche at 11:47 | link | comments

First they came for the Jews...again: The story of Ilan Halimi, the 23-year French Jew who was held for three weeks and subjected to brutal torture because he was a Jew, will go down in the annals as one of the vilest chapters in the history of Jew-hatred in France--which has a long and inglorious history. In earlier centuries, this Jew-hatred was Christian in origin, a sign of a Catholic nation's inability to come to terms with the "deicidal" Others in their midst, even if they were loyal Frenchmen like Alfred Dreyfus. In the current century, Jew-hatred has a Mohammedan face, which makes the Jews' situation in France all the more precarious. French officials have already proven hapless in dealing with restive, car-b-cuing youths from the 'burbs, and remain determined to play down their religious origin. Initially, that's how they dealt with Ilan's story, trying to frame it as a simple kidnapping instead of a kidnapping undertaken specifically because the victim was a Jew.

In the days after Ilan's death, the French were shocked by the crime, with no less a personage than President Jacques Chirac attending Ilan's funeral. But given the sheer numbers of Muslim Jew-haters and the fecklessness of French authorities, there seems little France can do to protect its Jews.

YNet has a good summary of this horrific story and its aftermath. The piece notes that despite the fact that police found extremist Islamic literature and leaftlets for a Hamas charity blacklisted by the United States and Israel in Ilan's torture chamber, authorites and media are still trying to downplay the religious nature of the crime. And guess what? They've been doing their level best to hush up similar incidents as well:

...What happened to Ilan is not the first attempt of this kind. The gang tried to pull off similar crimes before with four of the six previous victims being Jewish. Similar stories are only now surfacing.

French daily newspaper Le Parisien reported that the gang's last victim was a fifty-year-old Jewish man, who had driven home a girl who attempted to seduce his twenty-year-old son. The man was miraculously saved from being further beaten and certainly kidnapped when passersby called the police. Meanwhile, young Halimi’s seductress has turned herself in.

Yet police officials and the media do not tell the whole story: Various attempts have taken place in the past, and other gangs are reported to operate in similar fashion, luring their Jewish victims with an attractive girl who brings the "target" to the gang.

There appears to be a tacit agreement between the media and police to downplay these attempts and the role of these young men from the suburbs, already “suffering” from bad publicity due to the riots of last November. In those riots, hundreds of cars were set aflame and violent clashes between police and young thugs took place.

Also, the Muhammad cartoons’ controversy is too fresh in many minds and further polemics involving the Muslim and Arab communities seem to be avoided by officials.

And so, despite recent reports about a sharp decrease in anti-Semitic incidents across France, the horrific murder of Ilan Halimi reminds us the monster is still there.

So much for "Never Again."

Update: Dennis Prager has revised "First they came for the Jews":

In 1945, the anti-Nazi German pastor Martin Niemoller wrote the following:

"First they came for the Communists, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Communist. Then they came for the Jews, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Jew. Then they came for the Catholics, and I didn't speak up, because I was a Protestant. Then they came for me, and by that time there was no one left to speak up for me."

This famous statement can be updated for Europeans:

First they came for Israel, and we didn't speak up because we weren't Jews. Then they came for Lebanon's Christians, and we didn't speak up because we weren't Maronites. Then they came for America, and we didn't speak up because we weren't Americans. Then they came for Sudan's blacks, and we didn't speak up because we weren't Sudanese blacks. Then they came for us, and by that time there was no one left to speak up for us.

As long as Muslim demonstrators only shouted "Death to America" and "Death to Israel," Europe (and the rest of the world's Left) found reasons either to ignore the Nazi-like evil inherent in those chants (and the homicidal actions that flowed from them) or to blame America and Israel for the hatred.

But like the earlier Nazis, our generation's fascists hate anything good, not merely Jews and Americans. And now the Damascus embassy of Norway, a leading anti-Israel "peace at any price" country, has been torched. And more and more Norwegians, and Brits, and French, and Dutch, and Swedes, and the rest of the European appeasers who blamed America for 9-11 and blamed Israel for Palestinian suicide bombings, are beginning to wonder whether there just might be something morally troubling within the Islamic world.

Some on the Left here and in Europe are beginning to reassess whether America and Israel or their Islamic enemies are at fault...

Posted by: scaramouche at 14:13 | link | comments (3)

Why generals aren't diplomats (and vice versa): The other day, an Israeli general got in trouble for speaking the truth. He told reporters that, given Hamas's appeal to the Palestinians, and given the fact that the population of Jordan is 80 per cent Palestinian, King Abdullah may well be the last Hashemite royal to rule the nation.

Not surprisingly, the King took royal umbrage at the comment--what else could a moderate King who presides over a far less moderate populace do?--and the Israeli general has been forced to apologize for his statement. From israelinsider:

A top Israeli general will apologize to Jordan's King Abdullah for saying he might be the last of the Hashemite dynasty to rule the Arab country, following the rise of Hamas, Israeli media reported Thursday.

"I don't want to be a prophet, but after King Abdullah I don't think there will be another monarch in Jordan," Maj. Gen. Yair Naveh told reporters Wednesday.

Experts estimate that some 80 percent of Jordan's population is Palestinian and Naveh said its citizens could turn to the Islamic fundamentalist Hamas in the wake of that group's victory in Palestinian elections.

Jordan has "expressed displeasure" after Maj. Gen. Yair Naveh made the comments to journalists, diplomats and academics in Jerusalem on Wednesday, said Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesman Mark Regev.

Israeli media reported Thursday that Jordan has warned that relations between the two countries will suffer if Naveh is not removed from his post as commander of West Bank forces. The Israeli daily Haaretz quoted Israeli security officials as saying there is no plan to dismiss Naveh.

Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni called her Jordanian counterpart Wednesday to emphasize that there is no change in the strong relations between the two countries. Israeli Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz said in a statement that Israel views Jordan as a strong and stable country, "with a glorious heritage and promising future."...

I know Israel counts on the King to be a moderating force in an immoderate region, but isn't that laying the spackle on a wee bit thick?

Posted by: scaramouche at 12:55 | link | comments

Role playing:  London's loathsome mayor, Ken Livingstone, has been slammed by a three-member pannel for comparing a Jewish newspaper reporter to a Nazi concentration camp guard. Ken, who faces suspension from his duties (but, sadly, only for a brief period), remains defiant, and has compared his situation to the one faced by embattled (and discredited) British cabinet minister, John Profumo in the 1960s.

Since Ken is gay and the Profumo case involved a married British politician dallying with a nubile prostitute--who was also entertaining a Soviet diplomat--it's hard to see the similarity. Unless, of course, Ken is referring to his dalliance with London's Muslim community. In that instance, though, Ken's role is definitely more Christine Keeler than John Profumo.

Update: Red Ken's "sweet charity":

The minute you breezed into town,
I could tell you were a force worth attending.
Some real big seethers.
Dynamic, unrefined.
The sight of all that dominance was simply divine.
So let me get right to the point.
I don’t bow and scrape for ev’ryone I see.
Hey, big seethers,
Seethe and whinge in my company.

Do you wanna get mad, mad, mad?
How’s about a good rage, rage, rage.
Go ahead, you de-
Serve it.
Mad, rage, serve it.
Mad, rage, serve it.
Mad, rage, serve it…
Hey, big seethers—
Seethe and whinge in my company.

The minute you breezed into town.
I could tell I’d fall in line and adore you,
Such real big seethers.
So forceful, gave me chills.
A man like me was putty in the face of such thrills.
So let me get right to the point:
I see how it shapes up demographic’ly.
Hey, big seethers,
Hey, big seethers,
Hey, big seethers,
Seethe and whinge in my company…

Posted by: scaramouche at 12:14 | link | comments

Dubya sings: George W. Bush is assuring Americans that, even if Arabs will be controling several key U.S. ports, Americans have nothing to worry about.

Oh yeah? Tell it to Bobby McFerrin:

Here’s a little song I wrote
'Bout keepin' a crappy deal afloat:
Don’t worry; they’re harmless.

Most ev’ry day jihad is trouble
It wants to turn us all to rubble.
Don’t worry; they’re harmless.

Don’t worry they’re harmless now…

Ain’t got the sense to admit my error.
They been so helpful with that war on terror.
Don’t worry, they’re harmless.

The UAE is full of haters,
But what’s that got to do with freighters?
Don’t worry (small laugh); they’re harmless.

Don’t worry; they’re harmless…

They got the cash, they got control.
But that don’t mean our heads will roll.
Don’t worry; they’re harmless.

‘Cause when you worry ‘bout that Gulf state,
It sounds like you discriminate.
So don’t worry; they’re harmless.

Don’t worry, they’re harmless now…

Here’s a little song I know.
It’s called “The Pres-i-dent’s Veto.”
Don’t worry; they’re harmless...

Posted by: scaramouche at 19:23 | link | comments (1)

Who's sorry now?: There are 'toons and there are 'toons. There are 'toons that "blaspheme" the Pro, and there are 'toons--like one that appeared on the Hamas website of the Star of David being obliterated in a mushroom cloud--that blashpeme humanity. But, as David Warren writes, while craven Westerners feel compelled to apologize for the former, no apologies are forthcoming for the latter.

Hmmm. I wonder why:

...Some dubious cartoons in a private Danish provincial newspaper -- versus psychopathic graphics on an official website, unambiguously projecting the extermination of the Jews. Or if you want better, listen again to President Ahmadinejad of Iran, member in good standing of the OIC, repeatedly promising to “wipe Israel off the map”, while his country races to produce nuclear missiles.

On the Danish cartoon front, here is what Prof. Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu, the Turk who is the OIC’s current secretary-general, is demanding: “The OIC member states expect from the European Union to identify Islamophobia as a dangerous phenomenon and to observe and combat it like in the cases of xenophobia and anti-Semitism, by creating suitable observance mechanisms and revising its legislation, in order to prevent the recurrence of the recent unfortunate incidents.” (He makes similar demands of the United Nations.)

In other words, Europe must monitor and censor its media, and introduce criminal punishments, to prevent any affront to Islam ever happening again.

What makes this poignant is that, Javier Solana, the EU’s bureaucrat-in-chief, who has already delivered several obsequious apologies, gratuitously on behalf of all Europe, has personally promised Prof. Ihsanoglu that action will be taken. According to one report, he is considering going to Jeddah to make an act of obeisance before the assembled Muslim foreign ministers. Similar, continuing, cringing apologies are coming from politicians in many Western countries -- and contrived gestures of “respect for Islam” from Western media.

This beggars the mind. The West is apologizing for what? And to whom?

Were we crazy to start, or has our bedwetting fear of Muslim fanatics deprived us of our judgement?

The more we apologize, the more we appease, the larger the demands will get. Yet we have not one prominent politician in the West, able to stand before the OIC and say, “How dare you!”

Posted by: scaramouche at 18:40 | link | comments

Haroony 'toons: Haroon Siddiqui, the Toronto Star's resident apologist for Islamism, outdoes himself today. In a deliciously unhinged roundelay--call it a Haroonapalooza--he blasts the West for its "double standards" (i.e. publishing blasphemous 'toons but shutting up David Irving for Holocaust denial). Read it and weep (with tears of laughter that someone could be this addlepated--and actually get paid for it):

Gary Younge, the New York-based black British columnist, has written this about the Danish cartoon controversy in The Nation magazine:

"Muslims have, in effect, been vilified twice: once through the original cartoons and then again for having the gall to protest them. Such logic recalls the words of the late South African black nationalist Steve Biko: `Not only are whites kicking us, they are telling us how to react to being kicked.'"

Confusion continues to mark the Western response to the issue. Some of this is because we are in uncharted waters. But something else is at work — double standards and insidious attempts at delegitimizing the Muslim protests.

Notorious British historian David Irving has just been sentenced in Vienna to three years for denying the Holocaust. Radical British Muslim cleric Abu Hamza al Masri has been jailed, among other things, for inciting hatred. About time.

Yet there's silence from freedom of speech advocates who were on their pulpits just days ago.

Denying the Holocaust is not the same as poking fun at a prophet, some might say. Muslims might respond that the cartoons contravened the historical fact that Muhammad was not a terrorist with a bomb in his turban.

Masri's case offers a better parallel. Besides terrorism-related charges, he was convicted of fomenting hate against Britons. Muslims said the Danish cartoons did exactly that to them. How does a democracy decide which hate is worse?

In France, the Catholic Church last year won a lawsuit against a fashion designer depicting The Last Supper with semi-nude women instead of the apostles. Where were the noisy advocates of freedom of speech then? Or, do they pop up only to claim the right to bash Muslims?...

Yes, some might say that Muhummad was not a terrorist with a bomb in his turban. And some infidels might respond that Haroon's completely missed the point--again. That particular cartoon wasn't intended as a historical depiction--duh!--but as a reminder that its the words of the Prophet and example of his life that continue to inspire the actions of his explosive followers.

And is Haroon seriously comparing the Danish newspaper which published a few innocuous cartoons in order to test a Western freedom with a hate-racked cleric who regularly beseeched his followers to murder infidels and who used his mosque as a weapons depot? The mind boggles at what is either appalling cluelessness or wilfull misrepresentation--or both.

Posted by: scaramouche at 18:11 | link | comments (1)

A whiff of buckshot: James Lileks on the "bravery" of the press and its commitment to free speech. From JWR:

...As it happens, the threat to free speech isn't coming from the government. While we don't doubt that the Patriot Act will be invoked any day now to criminalize dissent and seal up Cindy Sheehan in the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, it should be noted that the people who've suppressed the pictures are the ones who run the big old high-and-mighty mainstream media. Smaller outfits with spines have run them, with less than happy results — the editor of a college paper in Illinois was suspended for running the Horrid Scribbles of Doom, for example. This hardly means the death of the First Amendment. But add some riots, some flaming fatwas, some imams upping the bounty on the heads of cartoonists, and it has that "chilling effect" we hear so much about when government officials criticize a news story.


So we're all Rushdies now, like it or not? Perhaps. If one cannot draw Muhammad without editors fearing the mob in the lobby, then it's only a matter of time before the idea seeps into the heads of cartoonists everywhere. It's simply not worth it; who needs the aggravation? Who needs the meetings with the community groups, the mandatory sensitivity training, the sinking feeling of finding your picture on a placard in a London protest, next to the sign that says "BEHEAD THOSE WHO ACCUSE US OF BEHEADING."


It will all blow over. The press will get its nerve back, and start investigating whether Jack Abramoff bought Cheney a beer in 1997 and thus impaired his aim in 2006, or something. They'll return to their old brave role: Questioning Authority. Unless it's located in Mecca.

Posted by: scaramouche at 11:31 | link | comments

Belgians embracing Islam: The world's fastest growing religion is a big hit in the land of the waffle. From Islam Online:

For Belgian Jerome Francois, reverting to Islam was much deeper than just getting married to a Moroccan Muslim he fell in love with, for he found his destination after much-soul searching.

"It is a religion without an intermediary," Francois told IslamOnline.net on Monday, February 20.

"I was seeking spiritual fulfillment in my odyssey to find Islam," added the 27-year-old Belgian, who reverted to Islam seven years ago.

"I had a natural affinity for Islam and my faith has completed when I testified that there is no god but Allah and Muhammad (peace and blessings be upon him) is His messenger."

Francois Clarinval, 47, experienced a dramatic turnabout when he reverted to Islam.

"I grew up as a Catholic and became an activist in the Communist party after graduation and turned atheist shortly afterwards," he told IOL.

"Now I lead a happy life with my Muslim Somali wife and have a cute daughter. I felt like home when I reverted to Islam."

Belgian newspaper Le Soir said in its February 18 edition that 40,000 Belgians reverted to Islam, the largest reversion rate in Europe...

And if you revert to Islam, you too can find spiritual fulfillment and a cute Somali wife.

Posted by: scaramouche at 23:19 | link | comments (2)

No Straw man: Refreshing anti-dhimmitude from a British cabinet minister--Defense Secretary John Reid. From Islam Online:

British Defense Secretary John Reid said Wednesday, February 22, Britain was facing a war against what he called "evil Islamist extremists".

"There is a big struggle going on with Islam," Agence France-Presse (AFP) quoted Reid as telling Britain's Daily Express.

"This is a war against evil, make no mistake," he told the British tabloid daily, adding that "modern terrorists" would stop at nothing to destroy every non-Muslim.

"There is a twisted minority who simply want to take the world back to the seventh century, to build an absolute dictatorship where everyone is told exactly what to do and how to think."

"They even have little regard for the lives of Muslims," he said.

Reid's statements contradict those of another UK official though.

Mayor of London Ken Livingstone has blamed US President George W. Bush's policies for creating a "clash of civilizations" between Muslims and the West.

An opinion poll February 19, showed that a sweeping majority of 91 percent of British Muslims are "loyal" to Britain and 80 percent still want to live in and accept Western society.

Evil

The British official said modern terrorists were seeking to wield dangerous weaponry to kill non-Muslims everywhere.

"Evil is the same, whether it is dressed in Nazi uniforms, the supposed socialists of the Red Brigades and so on or the IRA (Irish Republican Army) in Northern Ireland.

"The terrorists want to commit mass extermination. And if they can get their hands on the material to do it, they will.

"They want to destroy every Jew they can, and every non-Muslim they can," Reid added.

"These evil terrorists are intent on gaining the technology of mass destruction.

"They are an absolute threat to our wellbeing, to our civilization and our society. The only people who stand between them and us are our soldiers."

A leaked secret memo written by Foreign Office Permanent Secretary Michael Jay warned Blair a year ago that the Iraq invasion was fuelling extremism at home and making Britain seen as a crusader state.

But Reid was a staunch supporter to continuing British military presence in the US-occupied Arab country.

"There is no army in the world that has saved more Muslim lives than the British Army in Kosovo, in Afghanistan and in Iraq."

A report by the respected British think-tank Royal Institute of International Affairs said the London terrorist attacks were linked to Prime Minister's Tony Blair's support for the US-led invasion of Iraq.

Notice how I.O. does its level best to discredit Reid's statements with its typical spin. Not surprisingly, it fails to mention another recent poll--that one that has forty per cent of British Muslims saying they'd like to see sharia as the law of the land in the U.K..

Posted by: scaramouche at 23:10 | link | comments

Dubai boosters: While the howls of outrage continue to build over handing over control of some key American ports to a company from Dubai, there are a few people--few are far between though they may be--who think the deal should be allowed to go through. They include all the the Bush-is-infallible gang over at the National Review, of course, as well as several influential Republicans and a noteworthy Arab. From MSNBC:

Mr Bush has friends on his side - but only a few. One is his brother, Jeb Bush, the Florida governor, who acknowledged that, ''on the surface, it does give one cause for concern" but added: "I have full confidence that the president of the United States will make the right decision as it relates to our national security interests.''

Another is John McCain, the Republican senator and possible presidential candidate, who has been a frequent thorn in the administration's side, most recently pushing for a ban on the use of torture. "The president's leadership has earned our trust in the war on terror, and surely his administration deserves the presumption that they would not sell our security short," he said. "Dubai has co-operated with us in the war and deserves to be treated respectfully."

Mr Bush has also emphasised Dubai's role as an ally, arguing that his critics were treating the country unfairly. "I really don't understand why it's okay for a British company to operate our ports, but not a company from the Middle East, when our experts are convinced that port security is not an issue."

James Zogby, president of the Arab American Institute, on Wednesday called the swarm of criticism of the deal "nothing more than a self-serving use of anti-Arab sentiment callously playing off post-9/11 fear and insecurity".

I find it alarming that the President can't see the difference between a company from Britain and a company from the UAE operating key American ports: last time I checked, the U.K. was not an Arab nation (not yet, anyway). Nor am I comforted by "experts" who don't see port security as an issue. I think what we're witnessing here is the same kind of failure of the imagination that preceded--and had a role to play in--the attacks of 9/11. Before Arab jihadis managed to comandeer large airliners and hurl them into American landmarks, no one could imagine that such a scenario was possible. But really, considering the Arab anger at Great Satan--in the UAE and other places--you don't have to be Tom Clancy to imagine a plot line wherein  the brother-in-law of a cousin of some mucky-muck in the Dubai company uses his shlep to secrete a dirty bomb or two in the hold of a tanker.

That's not "anti-Arab sentiment." That's merely taking into account the anti-American sentiment of many, many Arabs.

Posted by: scaramouche at 20:59 | link | comments

One genocidal Islamist dystopia offers to fund another genocidal Islamist dystopia: Gee, thanks, Moo.

Posted by: scaramouche at 20:40 | link | comments

In other news, dog bites man and Simon Cowell is mean to tone-deaf contestant on American Idol: Here's a shocker (not)--Hamas is getting backing from its neighbours (a.k.a. the enemies of Zion).

Posted by: scaramouche at 17:44 | link | comments

What every lilly-livered, don't-make-waves Canadian should consider: These words by Christopher Hitchens:

The incredible thing about the ongoing Kristallnacht against Denmark (and in some places, against the embassies and citizens of any Scandinavian or even European Union nation) is that it has resulted in, not opprobrium for the religion that perpetrates and excuses it, but increased respectability! A small democratic country with an open society, a system of confessional pluralism, and a free press has been subjected to a fantastic, incredible, organized campaign of lies and hatred and violence, extending to one of the gravest imaginable breaches of international law and civility: the violation of diplomatic immunity. And nobody in authority can be found to state the obvious and the necessary—that we stand with the Danes against this defamation and blackmail and sabotage. Instead, all compassion and concern is apparently to be expended upon those who lit the powder trail, and who yell and scream for joy as the embassies of democracies are put to the torch in the capital cities of miserable, fly-blown dictatorships. Let's be sure we haven't hurt the vandals' feelings.

Would that Hitchens displayed the same concern for the small democratic country of Israel. Unfortunately, his animus toward all religion prevents it.

Posted by: scaramouche at 17:36 | link | comments

Instictive alarm: James Lileks on the Bush Administration's colossal misstep:

...The average American’s reaction to handing port control over to the UAE is instinctively negative, and for good reason. There are two basic reactions: We can’t do this ourselves? and We should trust them, why?

As for the first, the assertion that American firms were the lower bidder is unpersuasive, rather like saying that we should have outsourced the flight crew for the Enola Gay to Japanese nationals because they knew the terrain better. As for the trust issue, well, wanting port control to remain in American hands is not a matter of Arabiaphobia, any more than selling Boeing to China means you harbor deep hatred of Asians. Some things ought to be left in local hands. It seems absurd to have to make that argument in the first place. The UAE is not exactly stuffed stem to stern with pro-American individuals; the idea that the emirs will stand foursquare against infiltration by those who have ulterior motives is the sort of wishful thinking that makes buildings fall and cities empty. I’m not worried that some evil emir is putting a pinky to his monocled eye, and saying Mwah! at last I have them where I want them! I’m worried about the guy who’s three steps down the management branch handing off a job to a brother who trusts some guys who have some sympathies with some guys who hang around some rather energetic fellows who attend that one mosque where the guy talks about jihad 24/7, and somehow someone gets a job somewhere that makes it easier for something to happen.

That’s a lot of ifs and maybes. But I don’t want any ifs and maybes. You can't eliminate them all, of course, but I would rather we had a system devoted to worrying about ifs and maybes instead of adopting an official policy of Whatever.

We’re told we’re at war, and we reach back for the wartime memories we all saw in the movies and read in the novels: Yanks walking along fences with a dog, rifle on the shoulder, searchlight playing on the ground, stealthy foes ever at the perimeter. It was never that tight, of course; it was never that dramatic. But there were the constant imprecations to be vigilant, because peril lurked. That would have been undercut, perhaps, if the Roosevelt Administration had given port control to Franco.

Well, not the best analogy, perhaps. But the specifics don’t matter; arguments about the specific nature of the Dubai Ports World organization’s global reach and responsible track records don’t matter. Because it feels immediately, instinctively wrong to nearly every American, and that isn’t something that can be argued away with charts or glossy brochures. It just doesn’t sit well. Period...

Posted by: scaramouche at 17:16 | link | comments

It can happen here: Canadians—and I include Jewish Canadians—have tried to weather the ‘toon tumult by flying under the radar. We reasoned (if that’s the appropriate word), that if we were “sensitive” to the concerns of Muslims, “understanding” of their need to vent over the Danes’ unabashed defamation of Mo the Pro, we could manage to avoid their violent fury—at least this time. Then that nasty old Ezra Levant went and spoiled the plan by publishing the ‘toons on our shores, thereby adding fuel to their ire.

But don’t worry, folks. This is peaceful, multicultural Canada, where all the pebbles of the beautiful mosaic comingle in beautiful, harmonious amity. Fortunately, Muslims here aren’t marginalized—like they are in Europe—or under “occupation”—like they are in Israel, Iraq and Afghanistan. (As Tariq Fatah, the most moderate of Canadian Muslim spokemen, explained to the Ontario government committee holding hearings about its arbitration bill. While condemning the use of violence in the Muslim world, Mr. Fatah—who has been on the receiving end of many death threats from true believers who think he’s too moderate—told the committee that violence had erupted because Muslims are “frustrated” that three of their countries are occupied. Thus does even the most moderate Muslim dignify the Muslim preoccupation with occupation.) So there’s little fear that “our” Muslims will take it into their heads to act like those other Muslims who like to run riot and burn things down, right?

That’s an issue that Barbara Kay examines in the National Post today, and she’s more than a little uneasy about what she sees:

Mainstream Canadian Muslim organizations have publicly and explicitly repudiated the legitimacy of violence as a form of protest, a helpful and encouraging response to the tension. But other voices are being raised with more worrying views. On Sunday, 3,000 Muslims gathered in Toronto to protest the Danish cartoons, to call for bans against further similar material and to predict economic implosion in Denmark. One protester’s sign spoke of a “countdown to justice” for the cartoonist.

He said “justice” meant only a jail sentence, not death. Call me a cynic, but I am sceptical.

Then there’s Khalid Qasim, a protest organizer, who said of the cartoons, “This is a continuing process of humiliating Muslims and we cannot take this humiliation any more.” “Cannot take”? “Any more”? Call me paranoid, but I hear a threat.

Most disquieting of all, Sheik Ahmad Shebab, a Toronto imam, said to a cheering crowd: “We will watch the oppressors burn their economy down. We will watch them drown in their own blood…The oppressors will see what type of turn their affairs will take. It will take a terrible turn.”

Call me a pessimist, but when I hear the words “burn,” “drown in their own blood” and “terrible turn” bandied about by the spokesman of a protest, and cheering ensues, I don’t assume it’s just rhetoric…

Me neither. And I can understand why Canadians would prefer to placate these intemperate folks in an effort to calm them down: no one wants to see Muslims rampaging down University Avenue. What I object to is the pretence that “sensitivity” and not pure, unadulterated fear is what’s motivating our craven response. Canadians—and here again I include Jewish Canadians and their leaders—should at the very least have the courage to own up to their own cowardice.

Posted by: scaramouche at 13:42 | link | comments

Peace be upon them: Adherents of that peaceful, benevolent faith have been getting testy again. No, it's not because arrogant infidels defamed their Prophet by drawing some 'toons. And no, it's not because of "the impotence" engendered by the Israeli occuptation. It's just that some of the believers think other believers have got it all wrong. And to underscore that conviction, they've destroyed the golden dome of a Baghdad mosque--one of one of the Shia faction's holiest sites.

It's a good thing their religion instructs them to be so peace-loving. Think of the damage they could do if their doctrines were war-like.

Posted by: scaramouche at 12:20 | link | comments

Terror regime good for business: A Palestinian businessman says that because Hamas is so uncorrupt, so dedicated to purity in all aspects of life--including the political--it will run a tight ship:

AMMAN, Feb 22 (Reuters) - A Palestinian government led by the militant Islamist group Hamas can win business confidence by combatting graft and running an able administration, chairman of the top Palestinian firm PADICO said on Wednesday.

Munib al-Masri, chairman of Palestine Development and Investment Ltd (PADICO) <PADICO.PL>, told Reuters in an interview Hamas was pragmatic enough to pursue sound policies that generate growth despite years of Israeli-Palestinian violence.

Hamas is forming a Palestinian government after its landslide election win last month.

"They will scare some people but at the end of the day Hamas will show they are pragmatists and with the private sector," said Masri, a leading Palestinian investor whose holding firm has subsidiaries in telecommunications, real estate, industrial parks, electricity generation and tourism.

Hamas inherits an economy with deep problems. Unemployment in the Palestinian territories runs at 22 percent, and half the population lives in poverty, with many in Gaza surviving on around $2 a day.

However, a gradual recovery began in 2003, and the World Bank estimates economic growth reached 8-9 percent last year...

And if everyone is compelled to conform to strict Islamic practice a la the Taliban, that's a small price to pay for economic growth, right?

Posted by: scaramouche at 11:55 | link | comments

Dubai, Dubai, doo: Americans sing about some strangers in the night:

Arabs in our ports,
Unloading tankers,
Supervising ships,
Consulting bankers.
They’ll get stinking rich
And send cash to Dubai.
Something ‘bout it reeks
Up to high heaven.
How many ports are theirs?
Now six or seven.
“Our safety can’t be breeched”—
Is such a whopping lie.
Arabs in our ports.
Whose dumb idea to put
Arabs in our ports?
We’re only safe until
We go and make them mad.
Then, watch out—jihad.
Shahids inside of freighters,
Dirty bombs from other haters, and…
Ever since that day
We give them power
Danger to us grows
By ev’ry hour.
Feeling out of sorts
With Arabs in our ports.

Posted by: scaramouche at 20:07 | link | comments (1)

Olympic kitsch: If there were an Olympic medal for bad taste, it would undoubtedly go to a pair of ice dancers. Sure, skaters in the other subjectively-judged events can usually be counted on to be spangled, glittered and sequined to within an inch of their lives, but ice dancers, being dancers in the competitive ballroom dancing vein (have you seen those get-ups on Dancing With the Stars?), always go that extra distance.

Last night I was so absorbed by the outrageous costumes—and the assorted bits of chiffon and ribbon dripping off them—that I wasn’t really paying attention to the country the skaters came from; with one or two exceptions, they all appeared to be refugees from some second-rate Vegas extravaganza. My favourite outfit: the one worn by the underwhelmingly-endowed skater who glided around the ice wearing little more than giant white feathered pasties on her ta-tas. Very chic.

I realize there’s a great deal of artistry and athleticism involved in ice dancing, but it’s hard to take a “sport” seriously when its practitioners are garbed in such hideous stuff.

Posted by: scaramouche at 13:18 | link | comments (1)

Dissecting the Cricket: The Toronto Star reprints the Jimminy piece that appeared in yesterday's Washington Post . And FrontPage Magazine, noting the Nobel laureate's, ahem, selective flexibility, rips it to shreds:

Jimmy Carter had no problem cutting off funding to America’s historic ally and the Middle East’s only democracy ten years ago, but today he demands American taxpayers and Israeli government officials pony up for jihadists. This reflects Carter’s pro-Islamic history. As head of the heavily Saudi-financed Carter Center, the former president has ghostwritten speeches for Yasser Arafat. He even called a secret summit with Hamas leaders in Cairo in the mid-90s to ask if they would strengthen Arafat’s PA government. (Hamas cancelled on him at the last minute.)

More to the point, though, it is another example of his knee-jerk reaction to punish our allies and reward our enemies. During the Cold War, President Carter withdrew support from Nicaragua’s Anastasio Somoza, leading to his exile in July 1979 and his assassination months later. Carter sent $90 billion in aid to the new, pro-Soviet Sandinista government. When it promptly fomented a Communist revolution in neighboring El Salvador, Carter withdrew recognition from El Salvador’s anti-Communist government, as well. And he undercut the Shah of Iran as herds of angry Muslim fundamentalists called for his ouster, because he refused to impose a fascist theocracy.

Come to think of it, Carter gave that government $8 billion in U.S. funds. Today, we see what that investment has yielded, in Iran and Palestine. Iran is one of Hamas’ top financiers, giving it $3 million a year. The PA warns if America does not force its taxpayers to subsidize their Naziesque state, it will turn to Iran for even more funding. Let it. And when any oppressive, dictatorial regime in the world need a useful propaganda tool in the West, it need look no further than the president who declared, “Human rights is the soul of our foreign policy.”

Posted by: scaramouche at 12:30 | link | comments

Disastrous deal: The left and right in America have finally found a cause they can both rally 'round: the White House's bonehead decision to hand over control of six major American ports, including New York, Baltimore and Miami, to a company from the United Arab Emirates. Here's how the Real Clear Politics blog (hardly a creature of the left) sees it:

...I'm not well versed on the potential merits of the deal, but irrespective of whether it might be good policy it is darn sure terrible politics. It's surprising the White House couldn't see this from the beginning, and even more surprising they can't see it now. It feels a bit like a rerun of the Harriet Miers nomination where the administration dug its heels despite knowing within hours it had made a grave mistake.

The port sale is potentially even more damaging politically to the president because it strikes at one of his few remaining core political assets: the public's perception of Bush as an aggressive fighter of terrorism and staunch defender of America. Earlier today Baltimore Mayor (and Maryland Gubernatorial hopeful) Martin O'Malley said:

"I believe that President's Bush's decision to turn over the operations of any American port is reckless. It is outrageous and it is irresponsible. We are not going to turn over the port of Baltimore to a foreign government. It's not going to happen."

When the American public starts agreeing with a liberal like O'Malley, the president is in big trouble. The port sale is an idea that seems wrong at a gut level, and no amount of talk or persuasion on the part of the White House is likely to change that feeling.

Bad optics; bad politics; bad plan. Unless the White House has some notion of marching "arm in arm" with these folks to seek funding for faith-based schools, it's hard to see the point of willingly handing over power to Arabs at this particular time, even if you consider them friendly and benign.

Posted by: scaramouche at 11:35 | link | comments

Israel at sea: Sure, it's not going to turn over tax revenues, but according to Caroline Glick, the Israeli government has failed to come up with a effective plan--or, indeed, any plan--for dealing with Hamas. From the Jerusalem Post:

...In declaring that the government had decided to stop all direct transfers of funds to the PA, Sunday's headlines indicated that Acting Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and his associates have launched a concerted campaign against the Hamas-led PA. But the small print told a different story completely.

Over the objections of the IDF, the government is continuing to allow Palestinians to work in Israel. The government also rejected the IDF's recommendation to cut off all links to Gaza and transform the passages from Gaza to Israel into international border crossings.

Far from working to cut off international funding of the Palestinians, the Olmert government continues to support international funding of non-governmental and UN organizations that operate in the PA; and apparently does so unconditionally.

Finally while Olmert admitted Sunday that the PA has become a "terrorist authority," he and his ministers failed to take any actions - either diplomatically or militarily - that legally arise from this designation..

Doesn't exactly inspire a feeling of confidence, does it?

Posted by: scaramouche at 21:04 | link | comments (1)

Mixed message: Israel is refusing to fund the genocidal jihadis on its doorstep, and the Quartet that sponsored the roadmap to nowheresville must now decide on its next step. To fund or not to fund: that is the question. Kind of:

...White House spokesman Scott McClellan, traveling with President George W Bush on a trip to the American Midwest, said Washington's position regarding Hamas was firm.

"I think that our view has been spelled out very clearly, not only from our government but in the statement of the quartet. This is really about Hamas and the choice that Hamas has before it," he told reporters.

A United Nations spokesman separately said U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan took part in the discussion with Rice, together with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, EU foreign policy czar Javier Solana and Austrian Foreign Minister Benita Ferrero-Waldner.

"They all agreed that the quartet continued to support the interim Palestinian government," U.N. spokesman Stephane Dujarric told reporters in New York.

(Hand waving frantically in air so as to attract attention of White House press secretary): Mr. McClellan--If Washington's position re: Hamas is so firm (i.e. renounce violence and recognize Jewish sovereignty) why is the U.S. continuing to support an interim regime dedicated to Israel's destruction?

Posted by: scaramouche at 20:48 | link | comments

Dhim Jim: Jimminy "Cricket" Carter, the self-styled conscience of the Western world, is telling us all how to behave once again. This time the unlovable old gasbag thinks the West should keep forking over the shekels to Hamas because--get this--the Palestinians shouldn't be "punished" for their electoral choices. And here's his brilliant reasoning: if you don't fund the terrorists the Palestinians might do something drastic--like, um, turn to terrorism.

Good thinkin', there, Jim:

Former US president Jimmy Carter on Monday cautioned the United States and Israel against punishing the Palestinian people for electing a government led by Hamas.

"During this time of fluidity in the formation of the new government, it is important that Israel and the United States play positive roles," Carter wrote in a Washington Post opinion piece.

"Any tacit or formal collusion between the two powers to disrupt the process by punishing the Palestinian people could be counterproductive and have devastating consequences," warned Carter.

"Unfortunately, these steps are already under way and are well known throughout the Palestinian territories and the world," added Carter, who observed last month's election.

"Israel moved yesterday to withhold funds (about $50m per month) that the Palestinians earn from customs and tax revenue. Perhaps a greater aggravation by the Israelis is their decision to hinder movement of elected Hamas Palestinian legislative council members through any of more than a hundred Israeli checkpoints around and throughout the Palestinian territories," wrote Carter.

"This common commitment to eviscerate the government of elected Hamas officials by punishing private citizens may accomplish this narrow purpose, but the likely results will be to alienate the already oppressed and innocent Palestinians, to incite violence, and to increase the domestic influence and international esteem of Hamas. It will certainly not be an inducement to Hamas or other militants to moderate their policies," said Carter.

"If Israel is willing to include the Palestinians in the process, Abbas can still play this unique negotiating role as the unchallenged leader of the PLO (not the government that includes Hamas)," Carter added.

For Carter, "it would not violate any political principles to at least give the Palestinians their own money; let humanitarian assistance continue through UN and private agencies; encourage Russia, Egypt and other nations to exert maximum influence on Hamas to moderate its negative policies; and support President Abbas in his efforts to ease tension, avoid violence and explore steps toward a lasting peace."

That Jimminy. Such a humanitarian. Such a philospher.

Such a dumbkopf.

If I were Palestinian, I'd be deeply offended by Carter's statement. He's implying that Palestinians are like irresponsible children who shouldn't be held liable for their own actions. And if that's the case, then how can Jimminy possibly expect them to govern themselves?

Posted by: scaramouche at 14:44 | link | comments (3)

Blasting the Church: An editorial in the Globe and Mail castigates the United Dhimmi Church of Canada for issuing a statement last week describing the publication of Danish 'toons as being motivated by "racial hatred". The Church, long a bastion of the guilt-ridden and self-loathing (and by its own admission, no great friend of the Jews), sent its opinion along to Canada's Islamic Council of Imams. Not surprisingly, the Council concurred with the Church's assessment.

Shame on the Church, says the Globe. (The editorial is unavailable online for free, so I quote from my hard copy):

...That is a breathtaking slur against the papers concerned. The Danish Jyllands-Posten says it commissioned the cartoons after hearing that artists were afraid to illustrate a children's book on the Prophet Mohammed. It thought that free speech was being damaged and asked cartoonists to draw the Prophet in order to assert the right to do so. The paper did not expect the reaction that followed and says it regrets the uproar it has caused. You could argue that the paper was insensitive or needlessly provocative, but racist?

As for the other papers that published the cartoons....all of them argued that they were doing so to either underline the right to free expression or simply to show their readers what the fuss was about.

To suggest that they were inciting race hatred is to echo the ravings of the extremists who have been burning flags and attacking embassies around the world, claiming that the cartoons are part of a racist assault on all of Islam. That is dangerous nonsense. Shame on the the United Church for repeating it.

As they are apt to say in church (and in synagogue, too), amen to that.

Posted by: scaramouche at 11:56 | link | comments

Dumb move: So let's see if I have this straight: Five and a half years after some Arabs hurled an airliner into the World Trade Center and the U.S. felt compelled to embark on a mission to fight world-wide Islamic terror, the U.S. government is handing over control of six key ports to...Arabs.

I guess they must be really, really nice Arabs who would never let any of the nasty Arabs take advantage of them and maybe slip a dirty bomb or two into a shipment of bananas, right? From ABC News:

Lawmakers from both political parties, including the chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, on Sunday questioned an Arab company's takeover of operations at six major American ports as a possible risk to national security.

"I'm aware of the conditions [attached to the change] . . . but it doesn't go to who they hire, or how they hire people," said Rep. Peter King (R-N.Y.).

"They are better than nothing, but to me they don't address . . . how are they going to guard against things like infiltration by Al Qaeda or someone else?" King said.

Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff on Sunday defended the security review of Dubai Ports World of the United Arab Emirates, the company given permission to take over the port operations.

"We make sure there are assurances in place, in general, sufficient to satisfy us that the deal is appropriate from a national security standpoint," Chertoff said on ABC's "This Week."

He wouldn't discuss specifics...

Of course he wouldn't, because the whose thing is simply too absurd to defend.

Posted by: scaramouche at 11:19 | link | comments

Oh, brother: And for those who still think the 'toon to-do is about our being unneccesarily blasphemous and not about the desire of one religion to impose its beliefs on the rest of us, I offer this story. Call it Exhibit T (for Toronto) in the ongoing battle to preserve our cherished (but quickly eroding) freedoms. From the Globe and Mail:

Toronto — A student newspaper at Canada's largest university is not backing down after publishing a cartoon depicting the Prophet Muhammad and Jesus kissing.

Nick Ragaz, managing editor for the Strand, says the newspaper is not pulling the controversial issues off campus and the cartoon will also remain on its website.

In a message online he says the cartoon was intended to provoke debate, dialogue, and thought, and should not be understood to promote violence or hate.

He says the newspaper's staff thought long and hard about publishing the cartoon and since printing it hasn't broken any laws or university policies, they're not backing down.

He says he regrets that some people feel upset or marginalized by the cartoon but that wasn't the intention.

The University of Toronto student union says it has received several complaints about cartoon, which was published Wednesday alongside an editorial addressing the debate on whether to publish controversial Danish cartoons that have sparked protest around the world.

“We took the decision to publish very seriously, we discussed it over the course of almost a week we feel it's a valuable contribution,” Mr. Ragaz said.

“We reject completely the idea that what we published was an act of hate or an attack on the Muslim faith, or on Muslims or the Christian community.”

Jesus and Mohammed in a lip-lock. How shocking. What the article fails to mention (but what I heard yesterday on local Ceeb radio) is that Mohammed's back was turned, so they can't possibly be complaining about the depiction of his visage.

But maybe they were objecting to something else--like, say, an infidel kissing their Pro.

Posted by: scaramouche at 21:09 | link | comments

No experience necessary: ABC News has an AP photo showing Iranian maidens filling out employment applications. The good news is, it's for that rare career in the Islamist dystopia which affords women the same opportunities as men (at least in this world, if not the one to come). The bad news is, it's for a one shot gig with no long term disabiliy.

Yup, they're applying to become suicide killers in the event that the infidels take aim at their beloved nukes.

What, you thought you could just show up and explode?

Posted by: scaramouche at 20:49 | link | comments

Wail music: If you clear really close--and I mean really close--you might be able to hear my microscopic cello. It's the instrument I've been playing to accompany this story about how upset Mahmoud Abbas is that the Jews are refusing to fund the Islamokazenazis who want to toss them into the sea. From Reuters:

Israel halted its monthly transfer of millions of dollars to the Palestinian Authority ahead of the formation of a Hamas-led cabinet, a move President Mahmoud Abbas said had plunged the Palestinians into a "financial crisis".

Israel's government made the decision days after Washington, the Jewish state's biggest ally, asked the Palestinian Authority to return $50 million of its own aid to ensure it does not reach Hamas. The Islamic group is sworn to Israel's destruction.

Israel and the United States have called on other nations to boycott Hamas, which crushed Abbas's long-dominant Fatah faction in a January 25 election, winning 74 parliamentary seats, until it disarms and recognizes the Jewish state and interim peace deals.

"Unfortunately, the pressures have begun and the support and the aid started to decrease ... therefore we are currently in a real financial crisis," Abbas told reporters in Gaza, ahead of a meeting this week with Hamas leaders to discuss a unity cabinet...

I'm no Yo-Yo Ma, but I try, I try.

Update: Abbas may be sounding the alarm, fearing that this time the Palestinians may have finally sauteed their own goose, but the leader of Hamas isn't worried. "Zionists," he says, "we don't fear no steenking Zionists."

Posted by: scaramouche at 20:33 | link | comments

Making the world safe for Iranian nukes: The man empowered with keeping the world safe from the nuclear designs of genocidal mullahs--and who won a Nobel Peace Prize for his feckless efforts--has now decided there's only one way to deal with the prospect of a nuclear Iran: accept it. Head nuclear watchkitten, Mo El Bee, sounding very Strangelovian, says all we can do is relax and learn to love their nuclear enrichment. From the Washington Post:

...IAEA chief Mohamed ElBaradei will make no recommendations in a broad report on three years of probes in Iran he is to give to board members on February 27, a week before they convene to weigh whether to urge a course of action by the Security Council.

But he has already suggested in diplomatic circles that a compromise may lie in accepting small-scale enrichment in Iran in exchange for guarantees of no full nuclear fuel production that could enable diversions into bomb-making, diplomats say.

IAEA spokeswoman Melissa Fleming said ElBaradei was still advocating publicly and privately that Iran take steps to earn international confidence by shelving enrichment-related work and cooperating fully with agency investigations.

"He has also told diplomats that Natanz (pilot enrichment plant) is Iran's bottom line, a sovereignty issue, a reality we may have to deal with," a diplomat close to the IAEA, who asked for anonymity due to the subject's sensitivity, said...

Israel's right not to be the target of an Iranian nuke is a sovereignty issue too, but apparently Mo's not going to get too worked up over that one.

Posted by: scaramouche at 13:44 | link | comments

Dutch dhimmis abase themselves: Some members of the Dutch chattering classes are vying for the " Best Performance by Grovelling Dhimmis Award"--and it looks like they just might win. From Zaman Online:

Dutch journalists, cartoonists and academicians evaluated the crisis over the blasphemous cartoons of Prophet Mohammed to Zaman, which has deeply offended the Muslim world.

Dutch intellectuals, concerned about the violent reactions in the Muslim world, think that the incidents were triggered by the “West’s ignorance and insensitivity towards Islam”. Terming the crisis as being, “ a psychological crisis among the civilizations”, the academicians underline that the cartoon scandal will not end the dialogue among civilizations.

Anton C. Zijderveld, a sociology-philosophy professor at the Rotterdam Erasmus University and a member of the Rotterdam Islamic University Advisory Board, emphasized that it cannot be accepted from the Muslims to “completely” comply with the unlimited freedom of expression understanding of the West.

“The fact that the West is giving a lesson of values to the Islamic countries, results from its ignorance about the issue,” Zijderveld told. Professor Zijderveld does not approve of the protests including violence. “I hope that this crisis will open new doors of dialogue among civilizations and cultures at all costs,” he expressed.

Dr. Anja Lkoundi-Hamaekers, a counselor at Open University of the Netherlands, defines the recent events as a double faced psychological civilization crisis. Hamaeklers said “The Western World, especially Denmark and the Netherlands, lost their respect for Islam and other civilizations and have been arrogantly trying to impose something to the world” and added the anger for Western colonialism, American imperialism and double standardization in the Muslim countries transformed into violence with the cartoon crisis. “Western countries close the doors of dialogue and direct the Muslims to violence” said Hamaekers and added the crisis emerged after the Western World’s ignorance grew and the Muslims’ sensitivity for their beliefs clashed.

Hamaekers also condemned violent events, noting that “Islam means peace. Muslims should pity for the people publishing these cartoons rather than burning and destroying buildings.” ...

Funny, I thought it meant "I submit".

No matter. Bravo to the Dutch. With that kind of bowing and scraping, they're a shoe-in for the prize..

Posted by: scaramouche at 12:52 | link | comments

Letting go of makebelieve: Saul Singer in the Jerusalem Post sees a bright spot, sort of, in Hamas's refusal to recognize Israel's right to exist: it precludes the necessity of having to pretend that your enemy has any intention of making peace. Unlike the PLO--or, for that matter, Egypt and Jordan--Hamas isn't even willing to pretend to accept Israel. A good thing, says Singer, because it exposes a harsh reality:  Islam's inability to come to terms with the sovereignty of others--the real reason long term peace between Israel and its neighbours is so unlikely:

...Why, indeed, should we pursue such a utopian goal? Egyptians and Jordanians still believe that Israel has no real right to exist, yet they seem to have resigned themselves to accepting Israel. Shouldn't such a pragmatic result be our objective with the Palestinians?

Yes, but only on an interim basis, and only if we do not delude ourselves into calling the result "peace." We should recognize that the refusal to accept Israel is a particularly virulent subset of the general Islamist refusal to regard any non-Islamic sovereignty anywhere, including in the Arab world, as legitimate.

The real objection to Israel is Islamic, not nationalist. True nationalists can abide two states, Islamists can't. The ultimate goal cannot be just for Hamas, or Palestinians generally, to mouth recognition that Israel exists, but to abandon the idea that non-Muslim sovereignty is illegitimate.

This may be a long-term objective, but we cannot get there if we don't begin. Western leaders should say that the root cause of the Arab-Israeli conflict, like the root cause of the Islamist war against the West, is the rejection of any right of non-Muslims to hold power. The war is not against terrorism, but against the ideology that produces terrorism.

Compelling Hamas to pretend that it accepts Israel may be a necessary first step. More necessary is to realize that while those who reject "Christian" sovereignty over America and Europe are considered wild-eyed extremists, the analogous view of Israel remains mainstream throughout the Arab world among "nationalists" and Islamists alike.

Posted by: scaramouche at 12:41 | link | comments

To tell the truth: A shockingly (and bracingly) honest assessment of Islamic "truth"--along with a lot of fudging--by a practicing Muslim. From the L.A. Times:

...The first truth is that most Muslim ideologues are hypocrites. What has Osama bin Laden done for the victims of the 2004 tsunami or the shattered families who lost everything in the Pakistani earthquake last year? He did not build one school, offer one loaf of bread or pay for one vaccination. And yet he, not the devout Muslim doctors from California and Iowa who repair broken limbs and lives in the snowy peaks of Kashmir, speaks the loudest for what Muslims allegedly stand for. He has succeeded in presenting himself as the defender of Islam's poor, and the Western media has taken his jihadist message all the way to the bank.

The hypocrisy only starts there. Muslims and Arabs have done pitifully little to help improve the capacity of the Palestinian people to be good neighbors to their Israeli brethren. Take the money spent by any Middle Eastern royal family at a London hotel or Geneva resort during one month and you could build enough schools and medical clinics to take care of 1,000 Palestinian children for a year. Yet rather than educate and feed Palestinian and Muslim children so they may learn to settle differences through dialogue and debate, instead of by throwing rocks and wearing bombs, the Muslim "haves" put on a few telethons to raise paltry sums for the "have nots" to alleviate the guilt over their palatial gilded cages.

The second truth — one that the West needs to come to grips with — is that there is no such human persona as a "moderate Muslim." You either believe in the oneness of God or you don't. You either believe in the teachings of his prophet or you don't. You either learn those teachings and apply them to the circumstances of life in the country you have chosen to live in, or you shouldn't live there.

Haters of Islam use the simplicity and elegance of its black-and-white rigor for devious political advantage by classifying the Koran's religious edicts as the cult-like behavior of fanatics. The West would win a lot of hearts and minds if it only showed Islam as it really is — telling the story, for example, that the prophet Muhammad was one of the great commodity traders of all time because he based his dealings on uniquely Muslim values, or that the reason he had multiple wives was not for the sake of sex but to give proper homes to the children of women made widows during a time of war. The cartoon imbroglio offered Western media an opportunity to portray the prophet in his many dignified dimensions, not just the distorted ones; sadly, there were few takers.

But to look at angry Islam's reaction on television each night forces the question of what might be possible if all the lost energy of thousands of rioting Muslims went into the villages of Aceh to rebuild lost homes or into Kashmir to construct schools.

In fact, the most glaring truth is that Islam's mobsters fear the West has it right: that we have perfected the very system Islam's holy scriptures urged them to learn and practice. And having failed in their mission to lead their masses, they seek any excuse to demonize those of us in the West and to try to bring us down. They know they are losing the ideological struggle for hearts and minds, for life in all its different dimensions, and so they prepare themselves, and us, for Armageddon by starting fires everywhere in a display of Islamic unity intended to galvanize the masses they cannot feed, clothe, educate or house....

The writer concludes that the angry 'toon rampagers are not "the real Islam."  Maybe not. But it's the reality of Islam as it confronts us in 2006. And isn't it interesting that he neglected to mention that one little word that sets it all in motion: jihad.

Update: Dhimmiwatch has a much more negative take on the article.

Posted by: scaramouche at 12:00 | link | comments

Poland to mullahs--take a hike: As part of its ongoing bid to erase the historical record of the Holocast--a prelude, perhaps, to its perpetrating a second one--the Islamonazis of Iran had wanted to sent a team of "researchers" to Poland. No dice, say the Poles, who have told the mullahs in no uncertain terms to keep their researchers at home. From aljazeera.net:

Stefan Meller, Poland's Foreign Minister, has ruled out allowing any Iranian researchers to examine the scale of the Holocaust committed by the German Nazis on Polish soil during World War II.

Meller's remarks came after repeated denials of the Jewish Holocaust by Iranian officials and their suggestions that more research is needed to establish the truth about what happened to European Jews.

"Under no circumstances we should allow something like that to take place in Poland," Meller told Polish news agency PAP on Friday. "It goes beyond all imaginable norms to question, even discuss or negotiate the issue."

Polish daily Rzeczpospolita reported on Friday that Iran wants to send researchers to Poland to examine the scale of the Nazi crimes during the war.

Some 6 million Jews perished in the Holocaust, with an estimated 1.1 million killed in gas chambers at Auschwitz- Birkenau, a death camp set up in German-occupied Poland.

Last week Iran's ambassador to Lisbon, who in the past served as a diplomat in Poland, said in an interview on Portuguese radio that according to his calculations based on a visit to the camp, now a museum, it would have taken the Nazis 15 years to burn the corpses of 6 million people.

Good on the Poles.

The most startling part of this piece: al Jazeera.net acknowledging the six million deaths (even though it tries to mitigate the admission somewhat with the line about the Portuguese ambassador).

Posted by: scaramouche at 13:29 | link | comments

Condi's dreams: Foggy Bottom diva, Condi Rice, says the Palestinians deserve their own state and there's no reason why they shouldn't get one. From Xinhua:

U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said on Friday that the United States will work hard to implement the "road map" leading to a Palestinian state if Hamas cooperated.

"There is no reason that the Palestinian people ought to be denied statehood, a more peaceful life, an end to the kind of daily humiliations to which they are currently subjected," Rice told reporters before she travels to the Middle East next week.

"There's no reason that that can't all come to an end and we can't have a two-state solution if there is a Palestinian government that is prepared to pursue it," the top U.S. diplomat said.

She said if Hamas, considered by the United States a terrorist organization, renounce (sic) violence, recognize the existence of Israel,"I believe you could move the peace process along very rapidly."...

And if pigs could fly they'd be birds--which about as likely as the notion of Hamas renouncing violence and recognizing the people they're determined to expunge.

But hey, who says that  folks who choose to be represented by terrorists don't deserve their own state? Certainly not Condi. But then, what do you expect from a woman who's on record for praising Islam's "benevolence"?

Update: Can a tiger change its stripes? Can a leopard alter its spots? More to the point, can an Islamofasist terror outfit devoted to obliterating the sovereign Jewish presence in Israel do a sudden about face and wage peace?  

Just about anything's possible if, like Condi Rice and the Foggy Bottom Breakdown Boys, you are able to dream. 

If you listen up, you can hear Condi leading the boys in a bluegrass version of that old Everly Brothers tune:

When I say peace
Could be in sight
It's not that I can't see the light.
Whenever I want to
All I have to do
Is dree-ee-ee-ee-eem
Dream, dream, dree-eem.

When I call Islam
Benevolent
It's not because
It's heaven sent.
Whenever I want to
All I have to do
Is dree-ee-ee-ee-ee-eem.

I can take as mine
Foggy Bottom's line
Though Jews may want to roar.
But what makes Hamas mad--
Jihad--
Is something I'd sooner ignore.

I need my dreams
To keep me warm
And if Hamas
Is true to form.
I'll never abandon
Foggy Bottom's need
To dre-ee-ee-ee-eam
Dream, dream dree-eem
Dree-ee-ee-ee-ee-ee-eam.

Posted by: scaramouche at 13:09 | link | comments

No revenge: According to the Spielberg/Kushner version of events as depicted in the Hollywood blockheadbuster Munich, Israelis knocked off Palestinian terrorists involved in the Munich massacre purely out of a desire for "vengeance" (which also happens to be the title of the George Jonas book upon which the movie is supposedly based).

Not so, says the former head of Mossad, who also refutes other aspects of the film. From Ha'aretz:

In a quiet, somewhat monotonous voice, rather as if he were delivering a prepared speech, the former head of the Mossad espionage agency, Zvi Zamir, debunks myths and beliefs that have taken root as facts in the Israeli public consciousness for some three decades. No, he says. The assassinations of Palestinian terrorists after the 1972 Munich Olympics were not an act of revenge. "There was no order given by Golda [Meir, the prime minister at the time] to exact revenge," he emphasizes. It was less a case of looking for those who had been involved in the attack, he explains, and more a desire to strike at the infrastructure of the terrorist organizations in Europe - "their offices, liaison people, means of transportation, their representatives."

The term "liquidation" is not in Zamir's dictionary. Throughout the interview he keeps using "the prevention of future threats." In other words, he claims that terrorists who were killed by Mossad agents were "not involved or connected with the planning or the execution of the murder of the Israeli athletes at the Olympic Games. We reached the conclusion that we had no choice but to start with preventive measures. This decision was made," Zamir continues, because "Israeli civilians in their travels abroad, and Israeli installations, were not protected and even when the European authorities arrested the terrorists, they immediately surrendered to their entreaties and demands, and released them. As far as the terrorist organizations and groups were concerned, there was no risk for them in attacking Israeli targets."

Spielberg should have at least a passing acquaintance with the concept of Europeans standing by while Jews are being murdered, given his great interest in the Holocaust and all.

Posted by: scaramouche at 12:23 | link | comments

Good dhimmis:  The Ceeb website has a story about how pleased some Canadian Muslims groups are at the agreeably Canadian way Canadians have responded to those blasphemous 'toons. The groups have lauded Canadians for striking "a balance between freedom of expression and protecting people from hate and racism."

This "balanced" approach is exemplified by the United Dhimmi Church of Canada which, according to the article, "has expressed its regret over decisions by media outlets in Canada and other countries to republish the caricatures." Bowing and scraping, senior church officials send a letter to Imams which included this deathless line: "We believe that the intention of publishing the cartoons has little to do with freedom of expression and much to do with incitement to racial and religious hatred."

Riiiight.

Although the story doesn't mention it, this "balanced" (i.e. the "doormat") approach was also adopted by the Canadian Jewish Congress. It  framed the issue as one of Jews doing unto to Muslims as we would have them do unto us--as if that makes any sense at all in this context.

No surprise that dhimmis should be praised by Muslims for conforming to their designated role, but what are we to make of the story's opening line?

A coalition of Muslim groups praised Canadians on Friday for their non-violent reaction to caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad that have sparked violent protests around the world.

Um, shouldn't that be "praised Muslim Canadians for their non-violent reactions"? Unless those are frenzied Wiccans, Buddhists and Seventh Day Adventists burning down embassies and busting heads over Mo 'toons.

Posted by: scaramouche at 11:18 | link | comments

West's wisdom: Diana West is almost unparalleled in her ability to cut through the crapola. She does it once again in her latest piece in The Washington Times:

...Christianity and Islam are not interchangeable belief systems inspired by a generic divinity. One relevant distinction is the way they operate in relation to their societies. Christianity abides by the separation of church and state; Islam knows no separation whatsoever. As a result, the theological teachings of Islam as revealed by Muhammad, which form the basis of the Islamic law (sharia) that drives Islamic societies, necessarily belong to the political sphere in a way that Christianity does not.

This is not to say that Christianity should be, or has been off the table. Indeed, all the ink (not blood) spilled over assorted Excrement Icons only enhanced their value, not to mention the reputations of their artists (using the word loosely). But the all-encompassing nature of Islam underscores a special need for open, critical examination of the Koran and Muhammad as political, and politically violent, forces that roil our times.

Let's take what are considered the most inflammatory of the Danish Dozen: Bomb-head Muhammad; and Muhammad in the clouds, telling arriving suicide bombers that Islamic paradise is plumb out of virgins. What Denmark's cartoonists did in these caricatures is something few writers have dared to do in words: They made visual reference to the copious, historical and contemporary theological underpinnings of holy war (jihad) and suicide bombings. What is offensive here, then, is not the extremely mild caricature, but rather those theological underpinnings of holy war and suicide bombings. When the widely influential Sheik Yusef al-Qaradawi can praise Muhammad as "an epitome for religious warriors [mujahideen]," Muhammad, a jihad model, shouldn't be a taboo subject in the West, either in caricature or commentary, and certainly shouldn't be super-sacralized, in effect, by a fearfully polite censorship. The subject should be laid out for all to see.

The valiant Dutch parliamentarian and ex-Muslim Ayaan Hirsi Ali put it this way: "You cannot liberalize Islam without criticizing the Prophet and the Koran... You cannot redecorate a house without entering inside." And especially when you're not allowed to see what it looks like.

And especially when the politically-correct neighbours refuse to acknowledge the blood-curdling screams coming from inside.

Posted by: scaramouche at 17:33 | link | comments

Lama rama ding dong: The Dalai Lama is visiting Israel, but don’t you be expecting a hallowed peacenik to take sides in messy disputes between infidels and true believers. From israelinsider:

....Asked about Mideast strife, he appealed to Hamas to renounce violence, in the wake of its victory in last month's Palestinian parliament election. Hamas is under growing pressure from the West to end attacks, recognize Israel and honor Israeli-Palestinian interim agreements.

The Dalai Lama noted that Hamas won a democratic election.

"I want to take this opportunity, and also my appeal to Hamas, now through violent way it won't solve, it won't achieve what it wants," he said in halting English. He called for "mutual respect" and urged the group to approach the situation "more realistically."

The Dalai Lama is touring Israel for most of his visit, but on Sunday will meet with Palestinians in the West Bank city of Bethlehem. "So if some Hamas people may join, then I am happy to see them," he said.

The spiritual leader, who advocates religious tolerance, would not take sides in the dispute over Danish newspaper cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad which have sparked protests, some deadly, across the Muslim world. He said it would be unfair to hold all Muslims responsible for the violent acts of a few.

Asked to take a side, he said: "I think tricky question ... so difficult. If you give me permission, I remain silent. No comment."...

In honour of his Lama-ness, I’ve revised an old Broadway showstopper:

Hello, Dalai.
Well, hello, Dalai.
It’s so nice to see your face in Is-ra-el.
You’re looking swell, Dalai,
Hate to tell, Dalai,
That your namby-pamby words
Don’t really sit too well.
It’s come to pass, Dalai,
That Hamas, Dalai,
Is now set to push the Jews into the sea.
We
Appreciate your presence here, Dalai,
Nicer if you’d make it clear, Dalai,
Terrorists won’t go away, you see.
Mutual respect’s a fantasy.
“No comment” is a comment
That has no morality.

Posted by: scaramouche at 17:16 | link | comments

Laughing matters: From yesterday's Jerusalem Post:

Amitai Sandy, 29, a Tel Aviv graphic artist, has launched the Israeli Anti-Semitic Cartoon Contest, a challenge, led by Jews, to find the best cartoons, caricatures and short comic strips that demonize the Jewish people.

"We'll show the world we can do the best, sharpest, most offensive Jew-hating cartoons ever published!" wrote Sandy on his Web site. "No Iranian will beat us on our home turf!"

Sandy told The Jerusalem Post that his intention was to challenge bigotry by using humor - an approach that officials at Yad Vashem are not convinced is the best idea.

"We're not sure this is the best way to respond," said spokeswoman Esti Ya'ari.

Ephraim Zuroff, head of the Simon Wiesenthal Center's Israel office, was more emphatic. He pointed out that the initial response of many Jews to Hitler was one of ridicule. "It might have been funny at the time, but it wasn't an effective response," Zuroff said.

With all due respect to Ms. Ya'ari and Mr. Zuroff, I beg to differ--big time. When those about you are losing their heads (sometimes literally) and blaming it on you, it's not only good to laugh; it's essential to laugh. And to those who would foist their solemnity on us, who would curtail and control our laughter, seeing it as an unacceptable affront to their doctrine, I say this: in the war between solemnity and laughter, I CHOOSE LAUGHTER.

I choose laughter because laughter is freedom.

I choose laughter because our enemies decry it.

I choose laughter because to deny laughter is to deny our own humanity.

I choose laughter not because it is "an effective response", but because it enables those who are derided, defamed, cursed and spat upon for the "crime" of being Jewish to stand up to their enemies, look them square in the eye, and blow a big, wet raspberry right in their hateful, hideous punims. "When der fuhrer says vee ist der master race, we heil (raspberry), heil (raspberry), right in der fuhrer's face": That song may not have won the war--but why should anyone expect irreverence alone to carry the day? Laughter--the laughter of those who exult in the freedom to express themselves, even as their enemies strive to slaughter them--is merely one element in any battle with totalitarianism: the secular totalitarianism of Nazism or Communism, and, today, the religious totalitarianism of the Dar al Islamists.

Laughter is liberating, even--no, especially--if one is in chains.

Laughter means hope, because the alternative is to sink into a pit of despair.

I can see why Ms. Ya'ari and Mr. Zurof might be somewhat alarmed. After all, both work for organizations devoted to perpetuating the memory of the Holocaust, in the hope that such vigilance to memory will inoculate the world against a second go-round. (Whether that's a reasonable or realistic expectation is another story.) Everyone knows the Holocaust is about as serious an event as has ever occurred in human history. That's a given. But that doesn't mean that we should banish laughter from our repertoire of responses to current Jew-hatred. Laughing at your enemies--at their idiocy, ignorance and rank stupidity--in no way detracts from understanding and appreciating the Holocaust. If anything, it reminds us of what was lost; of the fact that every single one of those six million was an individual who was endowed with a trait that separates us from the beasts: the capacity to laugh.

So I say, laugh as if the whole world depends on in--because, in a very real way, it does. Laugh, and keep laughing at all the horrible, comical rogues, thugs and tyrants who populate our ridiculous world. Laugh at the Ahmadinejads and the al Zarqarwis. At the bin Ladens and the Galloways. At the Baathists and the Hamassholes and all the rest of the wretched scallywags.

Laugh to puncture their pomposities and pretensions.

Laugh to knock them off the pedestals upon which they've raised themselves.

Laugh to take them down a notch, or two, or three, or twelve.

Laugh because laughter is life, laughter is joy.

Laugh because nothing so offends them as our laughter.

But most of all, laugh because those who laugh need never submit.

Posted by: scaramouche at 14:52 | link | comments (3)

Truncated headlines: From CNN--Russia: Peace process needs Hamas.

They forgot the rest of the sentence:...like a hole in the head.

From the San Francisco Chronicle--Putin rolls the dice in talks with Hamas.

...and comes up with snake eyes.

Posted by: scaramouche at 11:54 | link | comments

I'll have a tall half caf half decaf skim milk lattes and, oh yeah, one of those cherry cheese turbans: To review: you're not allowed to depict the Prophet Mohammed in any way, but you are allowed to turn him into a delicious flakey pastry. From the Toronto Star:

Iranians love Danish pastries, but now when they look for the flaky dessert at the bakery they have to ask for ``Roses of the Prophet Muhammad."

Bakeries across the capital were covering up their ads for Danish pastries today after the confectioners union ordered the name change in retaliation for cartoons of Islam's revered Prophet first published in a Danish newspaper.

The move was reminiscent of a decision by the US House of Representatives in 2004 to rename French fries "freedom fries" after France refused to back the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003.

"Given the insults by Danish newspapers against the prophet, as of now the name of Danish pastries will give way to Rose of Mohammad' pastries," the confectioners union said in its order.

"This is a punishment for those who started misusing freedom of expression to insult the sanctities of Islam," said Ahmad Mahmoudi, a cake-shop owner in northern Tehran.

One of Tehran's most popular bakeries, named Danish Patries, covered up the word Danish on its sign with a black banner emblazoned Oh Hussein, a reference to a martyred saint of Shiite Islam. The banner is a traditional sign of mourning.

The shop owner refused to speak, reluctant to be drawn into discussion over the issue.

In Zartosht street in central Tehran, cake shop owner Mahdi Pedari didn't cover up the words "Danish pastries" on his menu, but put the new name next to it.

"I did so just to inform my customers that Rose of Mohammad is the new name for Danish pastries," he said...

Posted by: scaramouche at 17:37 | link | comments

Funding Hamas: Such a conundrum for the West: A terrorist regime is getting set to take over the P.A.--the populace, apparently, having internalized the culture of death to such an extent that it's prepared let purveyors of jihadi martyrdom take the reigns of their already failed not-quite-yet-a-state. And Western powers, Israel included, are racked with indecision: "Do we keep funding the Palestinian Taliban, even though they've never wavered from their oft-stated aim of obliterating Israel?"  Or "do we turn off the money spiggot, knowing that a humanitarian crisis may ensue, one, we are told, which may push folks even further into the arms of terrorism?"

Yeah, that's a real toughie.

Since I'm not sure why anyone would think people are obliged to fund their enemies, and thus collude in their own destruction, I am bemused by the "to fund or not to fund' debate. Here, for example, is how The Economist sees it:

...The truth is that the outside world knows what it wants, but cannot agree on how to get what it wants. The Middle East “quartet”—America, Russia, the European Union and the United Nations—says Hamas must end violence, sign up to a two-state solution and accept prior agreements made by the PA. What the members of the quartet cannot agree on is whether—or how—to use the lever of money to enforce those demands.

The result is general confusion. While harder-line elements in the American and Israeli administrations may want to turn off the funding taps, others, especially in Europe, just want to reroute the cash to circumvent rules restricting aid to terrorist groups. This week, for instance, the EU proposed paying the PA's utility bills directly to its Israeli suppliers. There is talk of channelling all cash through the office of Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian president—though that, say most, looks like a particularly flimsy fig leaf. Some infrastructure projects, says an American contractor, could be reclassified as “essential humanitarian assistance” and be provided by the UN. Donors, especially American ones, may use the UN and World Bank, not bound by restrictions, as conduits to sidestep domestic political pressure. Or maybe they will start applying the same pressure to those agencies. Nobody yet knows.

But the largest shortfall is going to be the $55m or so in revenues that Israel collects on the PA's behalf. Israel this week announced that transfers will stop after the new Hamas-dominated parliament convenes on February 18th, even before it forms a government.

The fear is that Hamas may turn to sources the West cannot control. Two weeks ago Hamas was sounding conciliatory, but this week Mahmoud Zahar, one of its hard men, told America to keep its “satanic money”. Hamas leaders are now on a regional fund-raising tour: there is no shortage of donors worldwide who have helped it, and even tided the PA over in previous crises, though for how long they could plug the gap is unclear. America could press Arab leaders and banks not to provide or transfer money, and some might agree, but that would further inflame an already angry Arab street. In any case there are many informal networks—through Islamic charities in various countries, business people, or smugglers—that could let cash trickle through. Russia, which has invited Hamas leaders for talks (to Israel's fury), has a large Muslim population which may offer conduits of its own...

Okay, I think I get it now. They want to keep giving them the money, no matter what.

I just had a brainstorm: Maybe the "quartet" can volunteer to fund al Qaeda. You know, so it can keep tabs on and control its sources of funding. And maybe the EU can channel all the cash through the office of Osama bin Laden. I hear that along with running a terror network, he's a crackerjack bureaucrat. Certainly a lot more efficient than that bungler Abbas.

Posted by: scaramouche at 17:08 | link | comments

In 'toono veritas: From The Age:

Posted by: scaramouche at 16:02 | link | comments

'Toons times two: A writer on The American Thinker site notes the stark contrast between the genuine Danish 'toons--which, like the Danes themselves are really quite sweet and gentle--and the 'toons that were fabricated by Danish imams in order to spark outrage--which were really quite vile. And because that second batch of 'toons was created by Muslims for Muslims, they knew exactly which buttons to push for maximum impact:

...(The genuine Danish 'toons) seem more gentle and truthful by the day. As the Islamist cartoon scam unfolds and hatred is all over the news, these cartoons have no anger. They aren’t laugh-out-loud funny, just whimsical. They say: your Prophet Mohammed was a violent, desert warrior. And so are you. The cartoons just tell the truth in a quiet way.

My favorite ‘toon is a take-off on EC (sic) Escher’s famous self-portrait using a round, shiny mirrored vase, showing a fish-eye view of Escher himself quizzically drawing his own face. It is a wonderful visual metaphor for looking at oneself without preening, and without anger: just a bearded guy in a funhouse mirror. Except this Danish parody of Escher has the bearded Mohammed looking back at the cartoonist with a fierce expression on his face. It’s very funny in a quiet way, a sort of Kierkegaardian “I and Thou” expression: Here I am in sedate Denmark, looking at you, the prophet of religious violence. It is a face-to-face meeting across a thousand years of civilizaton.

No wonder the Imams who went to Egypt in December to stoke the fires needed to spice up these gentle drawings. So they added three fakes: One using an AP photo of a bearded man wearing a pig mask for the piggie competition at a French festival; one of a dog buggering a Muslim at prayer; and an amateurish drawing of an Arab figure with the Danish word “pedofil.”

No one can confuse these blasphemous frauds with the gentle drawings of the Danes. They are gross, deliberately setting out to violate Islam’s greatest taboos. The fakes are just classic hate speech, because that’s their purpose. And oddly enough, they were forged and peddled by devout Islamist Imams from tolerant Denmark.

Which makes me wonder even more about the twisted minds of these actors. Interestingly, some Arab bloggers are completely aware of the fraud, and are laughing at it. So are others.

Well, the forged hate cartoons are working like a charm. While the rent-a-mobs in Syria and Iran have been small and obviously organized, people are still dying in Pakistan, and there is no end in sight to the hatred being whipped up for political purposes. The fascist wing of Islam is determined to squeeze every bit of blood out of this farce, and they will certainly continue to intimidate politicians like London’s mayor Ken Livington, who plays the anti-Jew card to get out his Pakistani voters...

Posted by: scaramouche at 12:34 | link | comments

Jew flu: That's right, folks. You know that fine feathered flu now starting to strike sporadically--the calm before the pandemic? It's a Jewish invention. It was created with a specific end in mind: to damage the genetic material of Arabs.

Don't believe me? Here, read the translation of an authoritative article that appeared in a Syrian newspaper last month. From MEMRI:

"Avian Flu May Have Been Developed by Israel, to Damage Arabs' Genes
"On November 16, 1998, the British newspaper Sunday Times published details about what was later dubbed 'the Israeli race bomb.' It reported that Zionist experts were trying to identify genes unique to Arabs, in order to create, through genetic engineering, dangerous viruses and bacteria that would exclusively attack these genes. The paper stated that the race bomb program was being carried out in the secret Nes Ziona Institute, near Tel Aviv, which specializes in production of chemical and biological weapons. In October 1999, the newspaper again emphasized that the Zionist entity was increasing its scientific efforts [to develop] the race bomb.

"At the time, no explanation was given regarding the nature of this virus that was being genetically engineered to realize the Zionist goal of harming the Arabs. It was also not specified what agent would be used to transmit the virus [to the Arab population]. The word 'bomb,' in this context, is merely a label... since the [attack] might involve mice, rats, birds or any other agent that can be used to spread the disease. The weapon, when ready, would therefore be used without declaring war or moving troops. It would look as though the [disease] broke out naturally, and not through [human intervention] - as though it were being spread by natural elements and not through a despicable and cunning plot." ...

And the reason I know for sure the above is bogus? Because Jews would never to anything to alter Arabs' DNA. It would have a dire effect on the taste of their blood, which, as everyone in Syria knows, Jews use to add piquancy to their holiday baked goods.

Posted by: scaramouche at 12:09 | link | comments

They've got to be kidding: Trust The Christian Science Monitor to put the most positive spin possible on jihadi terrorists assuming office. The article is headlined "Palestinian factions vie for spoils"--which made me think of ravenous vultures circling carrion:

KHAN YOUNIS, GAZA STRIP – When the new Palestinian legislature is sworn in Saturday, Hamas's installation as the new majority will be hailed as an electoral milestone for the fledgling Palestinian democracy.

But a brewing dispute between the Islamic militants and the deposed Fatah Party is already calling into question the stability of a new government: How will authority be divvied up between the Hamas prime minister's cabinet and the higher-ranking post held by President Mahmoud Abbas?

"Palestinian legislation is slippery and elastic. There's unclear constitutional lines," says Bassem Ezbidi, a political science professor at Bir Zeit University in Ramallah. "We will have a power struggle from now on from these two heads of government. And that will impact everything: the mandate, the authority, the politics that will emerge."

Setting the stage for the standoff will be a speech expected by Mr. Abbas to lawmakers Saturday in which he'll ask Hamas, which calls for destruction of the Jewish state, to embrace his vision for peace with Israel.

Hamas is expected to remain steadfast in its opposition to Abbas's approach, deepening the divide between Fatah and Hamas lawmakers as negotiations begin to form the new government...

So Fatah and Hamas have "lawmakers" who must contend with legislation that's "slippery and elastic"?

Oh, you mean like Silly Putty?

An equally wacky headline appears in the Seattle (thick as a) Post-(un)Intelligencer: Hamas win threatens Palestinian prosperity.

What prosperity? Unless I missed something, any shot the Palestinians had at achieving proseperity disappeared a while ago into the bank accounts of its venal leaders.

Posted by: scaramouche at 23:45 | link | comments

Wailin’ and Willie: In a sign of the times (and in keeping with the popularity of gay cowboy movie, Brokeback Mountain, country warbler Willie Nelson—he of the long braids, dessicated punim and high-pitched, vibrato-laced tenor—has released a song he’d originally written back in the 70s. It’s all about how cowboys have a hankerin’ for ladies’ dresses—and each other.

The news made me nostalgic for another old Willie tune—and no, it’s not "Crazy", although I think it’s probably the best song he ever wrote—which I’ve decided to revise:

Martyrs are easy to love in a culture of death.
Their exploits are lauded and hailed as they take their last breath.
Black masks and jihad, their hatred’s a sacred pursuit.
While we don’t understand him, and he’s apt to die young
His passion is hard to refute.

Mamas, don’t let your babies grow up to be martyrs.
Don’t let ‘em don semtex and blow off their heads.
Let ‘em try law or accounting instead.
Mamas, don’t let your babies grow up to be martyrs.
Cause they’re itchin’ to die, and with virgins to lie
And that means no grandkids for you.

Martyrs hate all kinds of folks, but especially Jews.
‘ Cause they’re uppity dhimmis who for some reason can’t seem to lose.
But with Mahmoud in Tehran and Hamas now in charge
They might have the Jews on the run.
So try to have patience, and just wait and see
If that great cosmic battle’s begun.

Mamas, don’t let your babies grow up to be martyrs.
Don’t let ‘em don semtex and blow off their heads.
Let ‘em try law or accounting instead.
Mamas, don’t let your babies grow up to be martyrs.
Cause they’re itchin’ to die, and with virgins to lie
And that means no grandkids for you.

Posted by: scaramouche at 22:18 | link | comments

Rashamon in the West Bank.: Two versions of the same story. In the Ceeb's version, Israeli soldiers shot and killed a "mentally disabled" 15-year-old Palestinian boy who was holding a toy gun. In the Beeb's, during a raid on "militants" in Jenin, Israeli soldiers shot and killed a 20-year-old Palestinian man with learning disabilities who seemed to be threatening them with a weapon, which turned out to be a toy.

I have a feeling that the second version is the more accurate one, because while the Beeb has no reason for wanting to make the story sound more awful than it really is, the Ceeb never wastes an opportunity to put Israel in the worst possible light. Sure, Israeli soldiers might have handled the situation more deftly, and realized they were dealing with a mentally challenged boy? man? with a toy gun. Then again, to determine that the gun was fake, they'd have to have been close enough to get a good look at it--and if it had been a real gun, it's the soldiers and not the Palestinian who would probably be dead.

Posted by: scaramouche at 20:47 | link | comments

Unlikely pairing: Who would you say is the leader who's least likely to want to meet with an avowed jihadi terror organization Hamas? Tony Blair? George W. Bush? Ehud Olmert?

How about the Dalai Lama?

If you said hello, Dalai, looks like you might be wrong.

What does it say about Israel's future prospects if the even the Dalai Lama,  that icon of equability, the Gandhi of our age, is prepared to meet with Hamas?

Posted by: scaramouche at 17:56 | link | comments (2)

Fake entrant; real Jew-hatred: There was a report the other day that the Iranian newspaper sponsoring a contest for the cartoon that most effectively defames, denies or makes fun of the Holocaust had its first submission: a 'toon by Australia's most popular cartoonist, who works for Aussie rag, The Age. Turns out the 'toon wasn't drawn specifically for the contest, and it wasn't entered by the man who drew it. That man--Michael Leunig--is outraged that his 'toon ended up in Iran, and is insisting the newspaper remove it from its website and consideration in its contest.

To paraphrase the Bard, methinks the 'toonist doth protest too much. Such images are all in a day's work for Mr. Leunig, and if he's cranky about the Iranians seeing it worthy of including in a Jew-bashing project, then he might consider how much he has in common with the Iranians; so much that they could believe such a submission was genuine. It is this, writes Sharon Lapkin In Front Page Magazine, that's most shocking:

...What is shocking and ought to disturb much of the Australian public is that their favourite cartoonist’s work was accepted by the Holocaust cartoon competition without question. The Iranian newspaper considered the cartoon to be an appropriate representation of its own Jew-hating mindset. The submitted cartoon had been the product of a regular day’s work for Leunig. He didn’t need a Holocaust competition to mock or ridicule Jews.

Leunig’s most recent cartoon assault on Jews came when Ariel Sharon was struck down by a stroke. On 11 January 2006, The Age published a cartoon where Leunig drew a moral equivalence between Ariel Sharon and the creator of Hamas, Sheik Ahmed Yassin. He referred to Yassin as “an old Palestinian man in a wheelchair,” ignoring the more potent characteristics of his life where he orchestrated the murder of hundreds of Israeli civilians in terrorist attacks and suicide bombings. This odious cartoon was published by the Age as the Israeli Prime Minister fought for his life in a Jerusalem hospital and the Jewish people were grieving and struggling to come to terms with the consequences.

On 13 January, Leunig wrote a defensive opinion piece for The Age in reaction to a robust readership protest, where he attempted to justify the vicious wanderings of his malignant pen. Many commentators, he argued, were depicting Sharon as “a war criminal and a leader who quite possibly was corrupt enough to take the odd hefty bribe.” And, he said “I can almost imagine that if Sharon could have sat up from his coma and seen the cartoon, he might have approved.”

In one shrewd breath, Leunig maligned Sharon and then claimed impunity due to a mendacious assertion of familiarity with the Israeli Prime Minister. And when he was asked, “Why do you criticise Israel and not the Palestinians?” He argued, “Well, my work is usually humanistic, so in a universal sense it can be safely assumed that I’m deeply reluctant about anybody’s violent policies or deeds."...

We may never know who entered Leunig's cartoon in the contest, but whoever it was must have had an excellent sense of humour. The cartoon ended up exactly where it belonged.

Posted by: scaramouche at 17:24 | link | comments

Unpacking the CJC: It’s been several days since my semi-heated exchange with Bernie Farber, CEO of the Canadian Jewish Congress, and I’ve had a chance to take a deep breath and assess what occurred.

Initially, I was—what’s the word? gobsmacked? incredulous?—that the CJC would issue a news release condemning a Western newspaper for doing something that Western newspapers are in the business of doing and do every day—freely express opinions as members of and advocates for a free society.

That the organization in the forefront of representing Jewish interests in Canada could side with those who seek to revoke a basic Western right was utterly baffling to me. What could possibly be behind it?

In his first email, Bernie Farber tried to frame it as a matter of “the golden rule”: Jews should not treat others in a way they themselves would not like to be treated. However, in the context of the ‘toon controversy, that seemed to make no sense at all. First, because the ‘toons themselves were so innocuous; the kind of political cartoons that appear all the time—granted, on different topics—in Western newspaper and never elicit a second glance. Some of these cartoons—like the one in The Guardian of Ariel Sharon cannibalizing babies, echoes of Medieval blood libel—have been far more defamatory to Jews. And newspapers in the Muslim world regularly publish images so vile they would curl the nose hairs of Joseph Goebbels.

Then there was the way the controversy had panned out. It wasn’t, as the CJC news release implied, a matter of a spontaneous reaction to the ‘toons publication. It took the concerted and focused effort of Danish Islamists who, angered that the Danish government refused to apologize to them for the act of one newspaper (as if Denmark were Saudi Arabia, and the government were responsible for the press), took their grievances months later to an arena where it was far likelier they'd get a rise out of people. And to ensure that they got the reaction they were looking for, they hedged their bet by including images that had never and would never appear in a Western newspaper; images that were so obviously hateful that they would only appear—with Jews and Americans in place of Mo the Pro, of course—in the Muslim press. (One of them, purported to be a photo of Mohammed sporting the ears and snout of a pig, turned out to be an AP photo from last summer of a contestant in a pig-calling contest at a French agricultural fair.)

My first clue as to what was really up with the CJC should have been Farber’s second email, in which he including a slew of accolades from representatives of Muslim Canadian organizations. Should have been, but wasn’t, since the idea that the head of the CJC would be basking in the praise of Muslims for agreeing with the primacy of Muslim doctrine seemed like a bizarre joke. Put it this way: it seems fairly obvious if these groups are telling you you’re doing something right, it’s much more likely that you’re completely off track.

Farber finally tipped his hand in his penultimate email. In it he painted the rosy picture of Canadian Jews and Muslims marching “arm in arm” (Farber’s "stirring" phrase), to lobby the government to fund their schools. (In Ontario, Catholics are the only ones whose religious schools are funded by the government.)

That’s it! Now it all made sense. The reason the CJC issued a news release on the ‘toons when it could have just as easily remained silent (which, as far as I’m concerned, is what it should have done if it wasn't prepared to support the Danes) was to solidify ties with the Muslim community so as to maintain a united front when approaching the government for school funding.

As that noted Jewish philosopher, Cher Horowitz, once said: As if.

As if they had any hope of persuading the Ontario government to fork over shekels to fund Muslim schools, especially in light of outrage over the prospect of the government funding arbitration based on sharia law. (The government was forced to amend its bill, doing away with all faith-based arbitration, including the Jewish Bet Din's, which had been adjudicating marital and some other civil disputes in Ontario since the late 1890s). Clearly, this is neither the time nor the place to convince the government to foot the bill for faith-based services.

As if the “alliance” is anything more than an artificial construct that's as flimsy as the pretext upon which it is based. How much arm-in-arm marching is there likely to be if, say, Israel is compelled to take out nuclear sites in Iran. Or if Iran nukes Tel Aviv? Should that occur, all the goodwill engendered by the CJC news release will disappear in—dare I say in a nuclear flash?

Moreover, if the genocidalists in the Muslim world succeed in obliterating Israel, there won’t be much point in getting the government to pony up for Jewish schools because without Israel, the long-term prospects for the Jewish people will become largely moot.

In my final email to Farber, I opined that the CJC seemed to be focused on “the little picture”—the one where Jews and Muslims in our country were allies in the common cause of school funding—at the expense of “the big picture”—the one where Western values are being eroded in the name of “sensitivity” toward those who are angling to destroy us; the one where anger and fear (their anger; our fear) are the order of the day; the one where Israel and the Jewish people face their gravest existential threat.

Farber insisted that the CJC pays attention to both pictures, but I would suggest otherwise. I’d say that not only is the CJC a “little picture” organization, it is one given to “miniaturism”. Its world view has contracted to the point where all it can see is the school funding scene immediately in front of it. Tragically—and dangerously—the CJC may have sold out Western values and the Jewish people on the off-chance that it can save Jewish parents a few thousand bucks in school tuition.

Thanks, but no thanks. As a parent whose child attends a Jewish school, I would much sooner shoulder the burden myself and have a CJC that stood up for the West, than have a CJC that repudiates fundamental Western values in a Quixotic quest for Muslim goodwill and government funding.

Update: A valjean for Bernie:

Bernie Farber said, “Sound the alarm.
Those ‘toons will do a lot of harm.”
Then off he toddled, arm in arm.

Posted by: scaramouche at 14:29 | link | comments (2)

Caught in a catch: In Joseph Heller’s novel,Catch 22, which is set during WW2, the protagonist, Yossarian, wants out of the army. Like Corporal Max Klinger in a later anti-war black comedy, Yossarian is bucking for a section 8. That is, he hopes to get out by claiming insanity. The “catch” of the title is this: if he wants out of the army, he is ipso facto sane, thus making it impossible to get out by claiming to be nuts.

An online dictionary defines a catch-22 as:

1. a. A situation in which a desired outcome or solution is impossible to attain because of a set of inherently illogical rules or conditions: "In the Catch-22 of a closed repertoire, only music that is already familiar is thought to deserve familiarity" Joseph McLennan.
b. The rules or conditions that create such a situation.
2. A situation or predicament characterized by absurdity or senselessness.
3. A contradictory or self-defeating course of action: "The Catch-22 of his administration was that every grandiose improvement scheme began with community dismemberment" Village Voice.
4. A tricky or disadvantageous condition; a catch.

I’d like to add a number 5 to the above:

5. A situation in which the world obliges you to fund your enemy, one committed to your destruction, by insisting that your failure to give him money might cause him to lash out--which would be blamed on you and would supposedly make the situation even worse. From CBS News:

Israeli officials confirm an American newspaper report that they are looking for ways to topple Hamas from power, CBS News correspondent Robert Berger reports, while the Bush administration denies any U.S. complicity in such a plot.  in

Berger reports the officials say Israel intends to cut off $50 million monthly tax payments to the Palestinian Authority if Hamas forms what they call a terrorist government. The officials say they expect the U.S. and Europe to follow suit.

However, some officials warn that a cutoff of aid could lead to chaos, sparking more Palestinian violence and terror.

The New York Times reported Tuesday that this approach was being discussed at the highest levels of the U.S. State Department and the Israeli government. The ultimatum to Hamas will be either to recognize Israel's right to exist, abandon violence and accept previous Palestinian-Israeli agreements, or risk isolation and eventual collapse, the newspaper said....

And if they refuse...?

Posted by: scaramouche at 20:20 | link | comments (2)

Bad will hunting: When you heard the news that Dick Cheney had mistaken a hunting buddy for a quail, you could just see the wags jumping up and down with glee. And so they have; this kind of story is like a gift from the comedy gods, and as smirking faux news anchor Jon Stewart says, the Cheney jokes almost write themselves. (Letterman's number one of his Top Ten List of Cheney's excuses for shooting his hunting buddy: "Made a bet with Gretzky's wife.")

There's a serious aspect to the story, of course. A facefull of buckshot is no laughing matter, even if you were the Veep's sitting duck (so to speak). And the White House is getting hammered with questions from angry reporters as to why the incident, which occurred Saturday, was no reported until the next day, and then only released the local paper.

All I could think when I heard White House Press Secretary Scott McClelland getting grilled yesterday was: "Chill, folks. This ain't Chappaquiddick."

In that vein, here's my contribution to the Cheney mirthfulness:

Dick Cheney phones up Ted Kennedy and says,  "Ted, I've been thinking. I know we've had our issues over the years, but what say we let bygones be bygones and 'bury the hatchet', if you know what I mean. Look, I'm going on a hunting trip next month--gonna shoot me some quail. Say, how'd you like to come with?  I'll bring the guns and ammo. All you have to do is show up."

Ted thinks about it for a moment and says: "You know what, Dick? That sounds like a really nice offer. I might just take you up on it. On one condition."

"What's that," says Dick.

"I'll drive."

Update: It may be time to stop joking. According to a report I just heard on the radio, Harry Whittington, the prominent Republican attorney at the recieving end of Cheney's buckshot has taken a turn for the worse. Seems some of the ammo has now lodged near his heart.

Update: Now he's had a heart attack.

Posted by: scaramouche at 13:09 | link | comments

Freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose: The timorous dhimmis are taking cover today in an effort to evade fallout from publication of Mo the Pro 'toons in Alberta-based magazine, The Western Standard. The National Post reports that Indigo, Canada's largest book chain is refusing to stock the 'toon issue, as is Air Canada, which will not provide the magazine in lounges or in flight.

This story makes a good companion for a piece on the front page of the Post about the EU backing the UN's bid to pass a covenant against "defamation of religion." Some day soon--maybe even tomorrow--Westerners will have assimilated Muslim proscriptions to such an extent that they will they won't even notice that their freedoms have ebbed away and been replaced by sharia.

But, hey Bobby McGee, what use is freedom if your practice of it makes so many devout people so angry?

Posted by: scaramouche at 12:18 | link | comments

Citrius, Altius, Fortius: That's the Olymptic motto, urging international athletes to go faster, higher, stronger. Most athletes, anyway. But some people want to mothball the motto for the Canadian women's hockey team. So dominating was it during its first two games--with Italy and Russia--that it trounced its opponents by a lopsided score of 28 to zip. For that it is being roundly criticized by some in Canada who say that kind of play is "unsportsmanlike". From the CBC:

"What a terrible display of poor sportsmanship," fan Buke Lacktavose wrote in CBC's Hometown Heroes message board. "The way the women's hockey team ran up the score against Italy – what an embarrassment to Canada and a blemish on the sport."

(Canadian Hockey pundit and former NHL coach Don) Cherry hasn't commented on the women's Olympic team but Hockey Night in Canada viewers know how he feels about such lopsided scores.

During an October broadcast of Coach's Corner, conversation turned to the Toronto Maple Leafs' 9-1 victory over the Atlanta Thrashers.

Cherry was indignant and, to make his point, he harkened back to his stint as coach of the Boston Bruins in the 1970s.

He said that when his team, which was one of the NHL's best at the time, forged a sizeable lead, he instructed his players to ease up on their opponents.

To both Buke and Don I say this: horse hockey. To "ease up" is not only a good way to lose momentum--and thus, to potentially lose the championship when the team meets toughter challengers later on, but it is a gross insult. It insults the team's opponents--who deserve to play against an opponent that isn't "holding back" (how else can they get a true measure of where they stand against it?).  And it insults the team itself, which has worked so hard to get where it is.

Moreover, you never hear pundits in other sports--like baseball or basketball--complaining about lopsided scores. The idea, quite simply, is ludicrous. (Here's something you'll never read in the sports section: After the game, Shaq commented on his spectacular perfomance. "I could have done even better, but Coach told me to lay off the hoops, else it wouldn't be sporting.") Only in hockey--and only in Canada--would a team find itself taking heat for winning so convincingly.

So I say keep slinging the puck in the net, girls. It'll help make up for all the other times during the Olympics when Canadians are bested by competitors who are faster, higher and stronger than them.

Posted by: scaramouche at 13:35 | link | comments (2)

It's not about the 'toons: An impassioned piece in yesterday's Telegraph by Nonie Darwish  in which she explains that it's not about a Danish newspaper defaming the Prophet. It's about a culture so suffused with hatred and so frustrated by its own shortcomings that it cannot help but lash out. (hat tip: my sister)

...Is it any surprise that after decades of indoctrination in a culture of hate, that people actually do hate? Arab society has created a system of relying on fear of a common enemy. It's a system that has brought them much-needed unity, cohesion and compliance in a region ravaged by tribal feuds, instability, violence, and selfish corruption. So Arab leaders blame Jews and Christians rather than provide good schools, roads, hospitals, housing, jobs, or hope to their people.

For 30 years I lived inside this war zone of oppressive dictatorships and police states. Citizens competed to appease and glorify their dictators, but they looked the other way when Muslims tortured and terrorised other Muslims. I witnessed honour killings of girls, oppression of women, female genital mutilation, polygamy and its devastating effect on family relations. All of this is destroying the Muslim faith from within.

It's time for Arabs and Muslims to stand up for their families. We must stop allowing our leaders to use the West and Israel as an excuse to distract from their own failed leadership and their citizens' lack of freedoms. It's time to stop allowing Arab leaders to complain about cartoons while turning a blind eye to people who defame Islam by holding Korans in one hand while murdering innocent people with the other.

Muslims need jobs - not jihad. Apologies about cartoons will not solve the problems. What is needed is hope and not hate. Unless we recognise that the culture of hate is the true root of the riots surrounding this cartoon controversy, this violent overreaction will only be the start of a clash of civilisations that the world cannot bear.

Posted by: scaramouche at 11:08 | link | comments

No BUTS allowed: Melanie Philips has a translation of a brave response from a journalist with Jyllands-Posten. Would that the CJC had the same kind of stones (or, alternatively, at least had the wisdom to know when to keep quiet):

How many times lately have we not heard people of power, the opinion makers and others say that of course we have freedom of speech, BUT.

They have said it, all of them, from Kofi Annan, the UN Secretary General, to our own Bendt Bendtsen [a Danish Politician]. Once we had to be sensitive to the easily hurt feelings of the Nazis, then came the Communists, now it is the Islamists. The reason I say ‘Islamists’ is that I do not for a moment believe all the world’s Muslims are pissing on us. I think we are dealing with thugs, fools and misled people. Those are the ones we have to deal with, and then the chickenshit politicians.

The cartoons are no longer something Jyllands-Posten can control. They have already been manipulated and misrepresented to the point that few know what is going on and fewer know how to stop it. This affair is artificially being kept buoyant in a sea of lies, suppressions of the truth, misconceptions, lunacy and hypocrisy, for which this newspaper bears no blame. The only thing Jyllands-Posten did was provide a pin-prick which has made a boil of nastiness erupt. This would have happened sooner or later. That it happened more than four months after the publication of the cartoons, raises a question of its own. Are we dealing with random events or with a staged clash of civilizations? One might hope for the former yet be prepared to expect the latter.

That is why I say: freedom of speech is freedom of speech is freedom of speech. There is no but.

Initially I was doubtful of the timeliness of publishing the cartoons. Later events have convinced me that it was both just and useful to do so. That they are consistent with Danish law and Danish custom seem to me less important than this: that we now know that remote, primitive countries deem themselves justified in telling us what to do. Unfortunately we must also note that governments close to us are agreeing with them in the name of expedience...

Update: Since there seems to be a whiff (actually, more like a blast) of the Third Reich in the air, thought I'd revive an irreverent old favourite:

Kofi, he only had one BUT.
Bendtsen had two, but then shut up.
Farber toiled that much harder.
And good old Dubya’s will trubya a lot.
(Duh duh duh duh duh duh)

Posted by: scaramouche at 23:34 | link | comments

Bernie and me: I post in its entirety the series of emails that went back and forth between me and Bernie Farber, CEO of the Canadian Jewish Congress.

Dear Bernie,

I was dismayed to read the CJC’s policy re: the Danish cartoon controversy as articulated by CJC President, Ed Morgan, in Friday’s Globe and Mail. Frankly, I don’t think the CJC has any business standing up for Muslim ideology--and thus standing against the right of non-Muslims to criticize, discuss and, yes, draw cartoons, even if such efforts contravene Islamic doctrine. Muslims have every right to eschew visual depictions of their Prophet, but they do not have the right to foist this proscription on the rest of us. We are not bound by their law. Not yet, anyway.

Moreover, the Muslim world is extremely hypocritical. It seems to have no difficulty with “irreverence” when it’s aimed at Jews, as cartoons that appear with sickening regularity in the Muslim media attest. And those cartoons—the contemporary version of the kind that appeared in Der Sturmer—make the Danish ones seem comically innocuous in comparison.

So I think it is a mistake to believe that condemning the publication of the Danish cartoons in any way serves the long-term interest of Canadian Jews—or for that matter, of the West in general. Nor is it likely to score any “brownie points” with the Muslim community, as the Danes and other Europeans are now discovering to their horror. They had thought that their years of supporting the Palestinians and condemning Israel might have earned them the gratitude and goodwill of Muslims. Obviously (and ironically), they couldn’t have been more wrong.

FYI, I am sending you the following link to an article by Diana West which helps I urge you to read: http://www.washingtontimes.com/op-ed/20060209-100253-3900r.htm

Regards,

Email from Bernie:

Thank you for your email. We understand fully the troubling issues that you raise but we had to limit ourselves to what, as we saw it, was most necessary under the specific circumstances.

As a religious minority we know full well the effects of free expression when it goes beyond the acceptable even if it is not illegal. By speaking out we retain our credibility with other minorities and the larger society as well as strengthen our capacity to respond when we are vilified, and when that vilification comes from sectors of the Arab and/or Muslim communities we are in a position to call on our developed Muslim contacts for a counter-response. If we are hoping that moderate Muslims will have the strength and the courage to take on the radicals we must bolster their sense that they are not alone.

We note as well that we unequivocally condemned the violence and the fanning of the flames by the radicals and expressed our strong solidarity with the Danish people.

We believe that the CJC statement is carefully balanced. We add that we are beginning to receive positive reactions to our press release from those sectors of the Muslim community to whom we have been reaching out, as follows:

Co-ordinator of the Islamic Council of Imams-Canada: “Thank you very much for a well worded Press Release. I have circulated to member Imams. Please convey our appreciation to CJC officials.

Immediate Past President, Muslims Against Terrorism, Canadian Chapter [yes, there is such an organization]: Thank you Manuel. I have sent a press Release to the Toronto Star denouncing the Iranian cartoons of the holocaust. I hope they'll print it otherwise I'll send it to you directly.

Past Chair, Federation of Muslim Women: Thank you for the press release. I am just as appalled by the violence and the antisemitic rhetoric that some of the Govts, eg Iran are spouting. These are hurtful and sad times for all. I must admit that given the human right history of Denmark I was very surprised that this kind of racism should have originated there. I pray for peace and calm.

Salaam and shalom

President, Islamic Supreme Council of Canada: Thanks for your email. I am thankful for the statement that the Canadian Jewish Congress sent out. I agree with you that violence is not the path to resolve issues. Hatemongering cartoons are very provocative but Muslims should not resort to violence in protesting against these insulting and racist cartoons. I am not sure you saw our press release regarding Iranian newspaper. Here it is for your information. Thanks again. God willing, we will meet one day.

Provocation from Muslims will not be Tolerated

Iranian Newspaper Must not Publish Any Cartoons Against Holocaust

This is not an easy matter but in our tradition we are told; What is hateful to you, do not to your fellow man. This is the law: all the rest is commentary." Talmud, Shabbat 31a. and this is followed with "And what you hate, do not do to any one." Tobit 4:15. As Jews we are both the canary in the mine and a community that understands the pain of offense and derision. Our Rabbonim knew of what they spoke and we must try to work towards that highest ideal..

Thanks for your email. I hope this response gives you a different view of our goals as an organization on behalf of our community.

Cheers:

Email from me:

Bernie—The fact that you received positive feedback from the Muslim community shows that your statement sits very well with them. And no wonder. You are siding with them in the controversy. Nonetheless, that doesn’t mean the CJC took the right position, merely the one that was most likely to placate Muslim leaders. The fact is that the Danish cartoons were printed without incident back in September. The matter would have ended there had Danish imams not taken it upon themselves to go to Lebanon, where they systematically distributed these cartoons to Islamic leaders, including Yousef al-Qawadari—along with many more that were far more inflammatory and would never have appeared in a Western newspaper (although cartoons such as these with a Jewish theme appear regularly in the Muslim press). That is what lit the spark. It is also interesting to note that the same cartoons had previously appeared in an Egyptian newspaper—where they elicited no reaction at all.

Thus, the entire cartoon controversy is obviously much larger than a Danish newspaper daring to contravene Muslim doctrine. (And there again, there is some dispute as to whether it actually is Muslim doctrine, there being no specific restriction in the Koran about depicting the Prophet.) It is about Islamic extremists wanting to stir up trouble and widen the chasm between cultures for their own religious and political purposes. And it seems to me that your empathetic response to “the pain of offense and derision” is woefully misguided because it unintentionally plays right into their hands.

As for the kind words from Canadian Muslim leaders—that’s all very nice. I doubt, however, that these folks have anything positive to say about the existence of a sovereign Jewish state on their “occupied” land. Nor have I heard a single Canadian Muslim leader come out against Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s statements denying the Holocaust and his desire to remove the “blot” of Israel from the map of the Middle East—an ambition he may be able to fulfill soon enough if the world continues to sit on its hands while Iran goes nuclear. And the existential threat to the Jewish state has just increased exponentially because the Palestinians have elected Hamas, a terrorist organization bent on Israel’s destruction. Let’s ask Canadian Muslim leaders, shall we, where they stand on that issue.

Obviously, I don’t have to tell you that these are incredibly perilous times for the Jews—and not just for the Jews. But, as the lesson of the Holocaust shows—tragically—acceding to the demands of fascists—whether secular or religious--can only pave the road to doom.

From Bernie:

Well we will have to agree to disagree on this one. We have had many emails form our community on this release and it is running about 3:1 in favour. Many understand that there are times for us to speak out even times when we walk arm in arm with Muslim Canadians as we continue to do in our battle for funding for Jewish and faith-based schools.

I am saddened to see those who wish to continue to polarize rather than within a Canadian context find some common ground that will eventually lead to civil discourse. We can vehemently disagree with many groups but in Canada we still must find a way to do so with dignity and emphasis.

Interestingly there were Muslim groups that spoke out against the Iranian President’s dictates including “Muslims Against Terrorism” and the “Muslim Canadian Congress”. It wasn’t necessarily what we would have written but it was a start.

Either way I appreciate your comments. If at any time you wish to discuss this with me please do not hesitate to call.

From me:

Bernie—I can certainly see where you’re coming from. The “little picture”—the one where Muslims and Jews march off arm in arm to lobby for government funding for their schools—is a lot more comforting and appealing than “the big picture.”

From Bernie:

Both pctures need to be assesed when we strategize on behalf of our commiunity (sic)

If that's the case, then why is the CJC concentrating on only one of the pictures? And why do I feel like it's 1933?

Posted by: scaramouche at 18:48 | link | comments

Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow: How Israel saved the Turin Olympics.

Posted by: scaramouche at 17:09 | link | comments

Last minute replacement: Some "funning" from Jewsweek--Stewart's out, bin Laden's in:

Jon Stewart, the original choice, had to pull out as host of the March 5 Oscars because of a groin injury. Instead, Osama bin Laden will serve as MC for the ceremony that is broadcast, as always, around the world to the millions and billions in their homes and in their caves.

The late replacement was announced by the Academy moments after the nominees were made public from a secret location in Hollywood. The selection of Mr. bin Laden to host the Oscars seemed logical after the Academy voted in two movies that offer the bright side of terrorism and romantically portray the longings to find love and murder Jews.

"We needed someone famous, a man with a particular sense of justice and jest, and we found him," said Academy spokesman Reginald Hubert. "He is a very funny guy, bin Laden." added Mr. Hubert, chuckling. (Distinguished UK MP George Galloway was considered for the job, but he also suffered a groin injury while lapping up milk like a cat during a British Reality TV show.)

Though famous, Mr. bin Laden has been a recluse for several years. Attempts (by the FBI and CIA) to locate him proved futile, until the IRS was called in. Agents discovered that Mr. bin Laden was behind on his taxes (his W-2 Form was improperly filled out) and, once set to the task, found him within a matter of hours.

Contrary to reports that he'd been secluded in caves in Pakistan or Afghanistan (along with J.D. Salinger and Bobby Fischer), Mr. bin Laden and his family have been penthouse guests at the Four Seasons in Beverly Hills. For the days leading up to the Oscars, however, Mr. bin Laden will be staying at the home of Barbra Streisand and James Brolin.

"This gives me such naches," said Ms. Streisand, while shopping for a burka on Rodeo Drive. "Pinch me, I'm kvelling."

Mr. bin Laden, however, will not be handing out the hoped-for Oscars for "Munich," nominated for Best Picture, or for "Paradise Now," nominated for Best Foreign Film. "Paradise Now" tells the touching story of two young suicide bombers on a mission to murder Israelis and their qualms of either that or the Prom. (It was Prom Night in Ramallah.) Munich tells the same touching story of aggrieved terrorists, but with a cast of thousands and a budget of some $70 million.

The presenter for those nominees will be the president of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, pronounced Ahmadinejad. Mr. Ahmadinejad will be staying with Geena Davis for part of his visit, but has also accepted an invitation to join Steven Spielberg and the Spielberg family, along with Tony Kushner, who co-wrote the screenplay for Munich, largely an account of 11 Israelis who were murdered at the Munich Olympics by sensitive and misunderstood Arab terrorists.

"Nobody's perfect," said Mr. Spielberg, the director of "Munich."...

I hear they're going against tradition this year and handing out a posthumous Cecil B. De Mille Award for lifetime achievement to Hitler pal, the Grand Mufti.

Posted by: scaramouche at 16:59 | link | comments (1)

Sidelining the moderates: Moderate Muslims, we're told, are the only ones who can turn back the tide of extremism. But how can that happen when moderates won't take a stand? A cautionary tale from the Times Online about what happens when extremists elbow out the moderates--and the moderates can't be bothered--or are too afraid--to speak out:

WHEN Rachid Salama, a young Algerian, found himself homeless in London, salvation lay in a large mosque dominating a street corner in north London.

“The mosque was huge, clean and warm. Apart from the heavies on the door glaring and flashing their Afghanistan scars, everybody was extremely friendly and welcoming,” he said last week.

“Then I discovered how my brothers passed the day. Many were on benefits or living off charity so they could hang about discussing jihad all day. Whenever we were not praying, we were taken to watch TV. There were endless videos of mujaheddin activity around the globe.

“Jihadist nasheeds (songs) were played in the background, with medieval-style voice harmonies and deeply stirring lyrics about how brave mujhads are suffering for Allah and dying in order to defend Muslim lands. They sometimes climaxed with a question — are you going to stand by and watch Muslim civilians killed? “The atmosphere was intense. Any slight dissent was stamped on so quickly and aggressively that I realised that the best thing to do was nod and say ‘Inshallah’ with the rest of my brothers.”

Salama had found sanctuary in the Finsbury Park mosque under the regime imposed by Abu Hamza, the one-eyed, hook-handed Egyptian who had seized control of the building from moderates and turned it into a centre for incitement to murder.

The Algerian was never gulled by the talk of jihad and left the mosque to find work. But he, like other moderates, had failed to counter the extremism.

When Hamza was convicted of inciting his followers to murder non-Muslims last week, it became clear that the British authorities had also failed to counter the extremism — although they were only too well aware of what was going on.

Is this how moderate Islam has ended up being overshadowed by fanatics in Britain? Has the politically correct Establishment made the fatal mistake of ignoring extremists?

THE poisonous progress of Hamza, and the authorities’ slow reaction to it, reflects the wider rise of Islamic extremism in Britain and the sidelining of moderates...

Posted by: scaramouche at 16:47 | link | comments

Making political hay out of 'toons: Pakistan's opposition nutters are calling for a nation-wide strike to protest the 'toons. From the CBC:

Pakistan's opposition Islamist parties have called for a nationwide strike next month to protest against the publication of cartoons deemed offensive to Muslims.

The Muttahida Majlis-e Amal (MMA) alliance, a six-party coalition of religious groups, is organizing the walkout for March 3 "to condemn the blasphemous act" of publishing cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad.

MMA leader Qazi Hussain Ahmed announced the plan after a national convention of political and religious parties.

Pakistan's ruling Muslim League party (PML) said it would support the strike "if it is disciplined, peaceful and focused."

Check out the AP photo of the seether in Lahore with the "fiery" beard. I don't think Clairol makes that colour.

Posted by: scaramouche at 16:01 | link | comments

A spanner in the works: A French journalist says that Western efforts to thwart Hitler--a democratically elected leader--did a great disservice to the much-vaunted concept of democracy.

Um, make that a French journalist says any Western refusal to recognize Hamas as the duly-elected choice of the Palestinians would be a great disservice to the concept of democracy.

Same difference. From Islam Online:

The West’s rejection of Hamas after its democratic landslide election victory makes its democracy and political reform calls in the region rather insignificant and useless, according to Alain Gresh, the editor-in-chief of France’s Le Monde Diplomatique magazine.

“Rejecting Hamas by the West will cast a spanner in the efforts of bringing democracy and political reforms to the Middle East,” Gresh told IslamOnline.net Wednesday, February 7, on the sidelines of his visit to the Qatari capital Doha.

“This stance gives an excuse for Arab regimes to drag their feet on the much-hoped reforms since the West does not respect the results of the democratic process in the Palestinian territories,” he said.

"What do they mean by democracy and elections if they reject dealing with the democratically-elected Hamas?"

Hamas swept the Palestinian legislative elections last month, winning a surprising 74 of the 132-seat legislature, against 45 for the ruling Fatah party of President Mahmoud Abbas.

The United States and the European Union have reiterated their opposition to talk to Hamas unless it recognizes Israel, “renounces violence” and commits itself to past agreements with Israel.

The Middle East peacemaking Quartet, which groups the US, EU, Russia and the UN, warned late January that financial aid to the Palestinians would be under threat if Hamas did not recognize Israel.

Reacting to the Quartet demands, the resistance group accused the West of blackmail.

 It takes a very smart, very intellectual Frenchman to make such stupid statements.

Posted by: scaramouche at 15:49 | link | comments

Say godnight, Moocie: According to a report in The Telegraph, the U.S. is getting ready to take out Iran's nukes.

Posted by: scaramouche at 15:25 | link | comments

Fairy tales can come true: Ever since the 'toon controversy erupted, believers have resorted to an odd--at least to Western ears--comparison: "Why can you say bad things about our Mo, but we can't say bad things about the Holocaust?" As if denying the truth of an historical event is in any way akin to showing images of the founder of a religion.

But Holocaust denial, which has for a long time lurked in the shadows of Muslim politics has now, disgustingly, taken centre stage. And at the moment, the empresario of denial is Moo Jihad, the man with a plan to enact another Holocaust. From the Bangkok Times:

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said on Saturday that the Palestinians and "other nations" will eventually remove Israel from the region.

Addressing a mass demonstration in Tehran - one of many organized throughout Iran to commemorate the 27th anniversary of the Islamic revolution - he once again questioned the Holocaust "fairy tale".

"We ask the West to remove what they created sixty years ago and if they do not listen to our recommendations, then the Palestinian nation and other nations will eventually do this for them," Ahmadinejad said in a ceremony marking the 27th anniversary of the Islamic revolution.

"Do the removal of Israel before it is too late and save yourself from the fury of regional nations," the ultra-conservative president said. He once again called the Holocaust a "fairy tale" and said Europeans have become hostages of "Zionists" in Israel.

He also accused Europeans for not allowing "neutral scholars" to investigate in Europe and make a scientific report on "the truth about the fairy tale of Holocaust."

"How comes that insulting the prophet of Muslims worldwide is justified within the framework of press freedom, but investigating about the fairy tale Holocaust is not?" Ahmadinejad said.

"The real Holocaust is what is happening in Palestine where the Zionists avail themselves of the fairy tale of Holocaust as blackmail and justification for killing children and women and making innocent people homeless," Ahmadinejad said.

The president said that the results of the parliamentary elections in Palestine and the victory of the Hamas group "clearly showed what the people really want."...

All in all, the request to vacate the premises is not such an onerous one. It's not like the West is being asked to give up the Ruhr valley or the Sudetenland or anything.

Update: Old "green light" is back:

Fairy tales can come true
It will happen to you.
When I get my nukes.
For it’s hard to deny
That the Shoah’s a lie
When I get my nukes.

I will go to extremes
With my genocide dreams.
I will laugh when your schemes
Fall apart at the seams.
And Jews get close to dying with each passing day.
And I won’t listen to a single word you say.

Don’t you know what it’s worth—
I will conquer the Earth
When I get my nukes.
There will be no more ‘toons,
No more Prophet lampoons,
When I get my nukes.

You will never survive
Long as I am alive.
Think of all I’ll contrive,
Strategize and connive.
And here is the best part—
I have a head start.
The UN cannot spur me to a change of heart.

Posted by: scaramouche at 13:35 | link | comments

Shaggers vs. nutters: Mark Steyn says that he "clash of civilizations" is panning out in an unexpectedly comical way. From the Chicago Sun-Times:

From Europe's biggest-selling newspaper, the Sun: ''Furious Muslims have blasted adult shop [i.e., sex shop] Ann Summers for selling a blowup male doll called Mustafa Shag."

Not literally "blasted" in the Danish Embassy sense, or at least not yet. Quite how Britain's Muslim Association found out about Mustafa Shag in order to be offended by him is not clear. It may be that there was some confusion: given that "blowup males" are one of Islam's leading exports, perhaps some believers went along expecting to find Ahmed and Walid modeling the new line of Semtex belts. Instead, they were confronted by just another filthy infidel sex gag. The Muslim Association's complaint, needless to say, is that the sex toy "insults the Prophet Muhammad -- who also has the title al-Mustapha.''

In a world in which Danish cartoons insult the prophet and Disney Piglet mugs insult the prophet and Burger King chocolate ice-cream swirl designs insult the prophet, maybe it would just be easier to make a list of things that don't insult him. Nonetheless, the Muslim Association wrote to the Ann Summers sex-shop chain, "We are asking you to have our Most Revered Prophet's name 'Mustafa' and the afflicted word 'shag' removed."

If I were a Muslim, I'd be "hurt" and "humiliated" that the revered prophet's name is given not to latex blowup males but to so many real blowup males: The leader of the 9/11 plotters? Mohammed Atta. The British Muslim who self-detonated in a Tel Aviv bar? Asif Mohammed Hanif. The gunman who shot up the El Al counter at LAX? Heshamed Mohamed Hedayet. The former U.S. Army sergeant who masterminded the slaughter at the embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania? Ali Mohamed. The murderer of Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh? Mohammed Bouyeri. The notorious Sydney gang rapist? Mohammed Skaf. The Washington sniper? John Allen Muhammed. If I were a Muslim, I would be deeply offended that the prophet's name is the preferred appellation of so many killers and suicide bombers on every corner of the earth.

But apparently that's not as big a deal as Mustafa Shag. When Samuel Huntington formulated his famous "clash of civilizations" thesis, I'm sure he hoped it would play out as something nobler than shaggers vs. nutters. But in a sense that's the core British value these days. If it's inherent in Muslim culture to take umbrage at everything, it's inherent in English culture to turn everything into a lame sex gag. The "Mustafa" template is one of the most revered in the English music-hall tradition: "I've been reading the latest scholarly monograph -- 'Sexual Practices of the Middle East by Mustapha Camel.'" If they wanted to appease the surging Muslim demographic, the British could conceivably withdraw from Iraq and Afghanistan but it's hard to imagine they could withdraw from vulgar sex jokes and still be recognizably British. They are, in the Muslim Association's choice of words, "afflicted" with shag fever...

Posted by: scaramouche at 13:10 | link | comments

Freedom in America: Unlike some of their brothers, American Muslims haven't taken to the streets and torched embassasies. Sure, they're just as offended by the images, but, being more firmly assimilated into their society than Muslims in other infidel lands, they do have a certain fondness for that First Amendment stuff which allows for freedom of speech, but also provides the freedom to march against such free expression. But that doesn't mean they have any clearer grasp of the reason the 'toons were published. From the Jackson Sun:

Cartoons depicting the Prophet Muhammad as a terrorist and misogynist have offended Muslims in the United States as they have Muslims worldwide. But the debate raging among Muslim-Americans on college campuses, the Internet and in Islamic media has its own unique flavor because of this country's constitutional commitment to free speech.

American Muslims are adamant in their support of exercising their First Amendment right to protest the drawings through boycotts and other peaceful means, but many are embarrassed by the torching of European embassies in the Middle East and other forms of violence that have accompanied some demonstrations.

Because the cartoons constitute what he considers hate speech, the issue is not "black and white," said Junaid Ahmad, a student at the College of William and Mary Marshall-Wythe Law School in Williamsburg, Va., who is active in national Muslim organizations.

"This is not just a matter of being for freedom of speech and against freedom of speech," Ahmad said. "The first thing we should realize is that Muslims don't accept the basic framework. The principal issue here is not freedom of speech but the Islamophobic context in which such a caricaturing of the prophet is taking place. I think that's the issue here."

Nevertheless, Ahmad said he was against laws restricting such speech.

"You can't give the state too much power. It's better to fight hate not through laws but education and community organizing and activism."...

"Hate speech" in the Muslim world being perfectly acceptable within the Judeophobic context--and any criticism of the perfect faith being automatically construed as Islamophobia.

Posted by: scaramouche at 13:01 | link | comments

Boo, 'toons; yeah, bombs: Don't you dare show a 'toon of Mo with an explosive turban because the Prophet was a gentle, peace-loving chap who is in no way implicated in the fury of his believers.

Right?

From the Times Online:

A LEADING imam in the mosque where the July 7 bombers worshipped has hailed their terrorist attack on London as a “good” act in a secretly taped conversation with an undercover reporter.

Hamid Ali, spiritual leader of the mosque in West Yorkshire, said it had forced people to take notice when peaceful meetings and conferences had no impact.

He also praised the bombers as the “children” of Abdullah al-Faisal, a firebrand Muslim cleric, who was convicted of inciting murder and racial hatred in 2003.

Ali revealed that the leader of the London suicide bombers had attended sermons in Yorkshire by al-Faisal and tapes of al-Faisal’s teachings were still circulating within his mosque.

Al-Faisal, who has branded non-Muslims as “cockroaches” ripe for extermination, is serving a seven-year prison sentence but is eligible for early release next week.

Evidence of continuing extremism and terrorist sympathisers in the bombers’ community has been exposed by a six-week investigation by The Sunday Times. It contrasts with the public statements of condemnation by community leaders — including Ali — in the immediate aftermath of the July 7 attacks...

I'm sure Mo would be stunned by this extraordinary perversion of his peaceful message.

Posted by: scaramouche at 12:44 | link | comments

Who's the boss?: I'm confused. There's Great Satan. And then there's L'il Satan. And then there's Europe, which I suppose is one of the lesser demons, say Beelzebub. One would have thought that Great Satan is in charge of the whole demonic enterprise, with his buddies having significant input. But according to Iranian genocidialist, Mahmoud Ahmageddon, a.k.a. Moo Jihad, L'il Satan seems to be running the whole shebang. What gives? From the Guardian:

Iran's hard-line president on Saturday accused the United States and Europe of being ``hostages of Zionism'' and said they should pay a heavy price for the publication of caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad that have triggered worldwide protests.

There's something bleakly ironic about a member of religion that is currently using kidnapping as a terror tactic accusing another religion of taking hostages. 

Posted by: scaramouche at 20:52 | link | comments

Off with their heads!: The Saudis are now demanding that Muslims ignore any apologies and insist that those involved in creating and publishing the 'toons be tried and punished.

Posted by: scaramouche at 16:37 | link | comments

Selective rage: A piece in Saudi-based Arab News lauds the unified front Muslims have shown over the 'toon insult, but chides his brothers for acting like--well, the word that springs to mind is "pussies"--for not fighting back on other occasions. The other word that springs to mind here: jihad:

It makes one glad to see the Muslims taking a unified stance in defense of our blessed Prophet (pbuh). It was about time to react after month of gross insults directed at the person of the Prophet from the Danish newspaper, and I hope that our boycott will continue in spite of the feeble and belated apologies from both the Danish government and the newspaper. What will give us the assurance that such insults against the Prophet or Islam will never reoccur in other Western countries where in fact they already have? Islam has been the butt of many a bad joke and the target of more insults in recent history, and it has become acceptable to insult Islam or Muslims — and I don’t include criticism since they can criticize us to their hearts content as long as they respect civilized codes of conduct.

However, one wonders why in recent times Islam and the Muslims have become easy fodder for such an aggression. Do recent events like the blatant aggression on Afghanistan and Iraq have anything to do with it? Or does the illegal abduction and imprisonment of Muslims around the world have any impact on the weakened situation of Muslims everywhere? Have we forgotten the many recurring incidents of the desecration of our Holy Qur’an in American prisons?

Also, I wonder why the insult of the Danish newspaper per se incurs such a strong reaction when crimes and insults just as great have descended upon Islam and the Muslims in recent history and passed by without any strong, unified and sustained reaction from the Muslims. Is the blood of innocent Muslims in Iraq, Afghanistan and Palestine not also sacred? Does the humiliation and torture of Muslims in Western prisons and illegal imprisonment count less in Muslim eyes than an attack on Islam and its Prophet? Do Muslims think that the Prophet will not be pained as much by the humiliation of Muslims as he would by the insults directed toward him? When will we hold our blood and dignity as sacred, or are we just reacting to this latest insult by the Danes because we can?

It seems we now not only choose our opponents but we choose also our insults; the weaker the perpetrator of the insult the swifter and harsher is our reaction. Why have we not boycotted the products of the nations that have been insulting and humiliating us far more than this measly little newspaper and the country it belongs to, or do our sacrifices stop at the kind of cheese we can eat? To sacrifice for Islam, the Prophet and his people should be on all levels and against every aggressor, not just against those whom we know will not demand from us great feats of bravery and sacrifice. I do not belittle the insult directed at our beloved Prophet, blessed be his name and being, by the Danish newspaper, but, I ask you, are the blood and dignity of Muslims not sacred? Why haven’t we seen such a united action against those who have inflicted greater pain and misery on our brethren for so long? When will we respect ourselves and demand of the world such respect?...

Whoa. Talk about your chasms. The guy doesn't only belong to another civilization, he resides in an alternate universe. Somewhere near Alpha Centauri, I'd say.

Posted by: scaramouche at 16:30 | link | comments

Survival of the fittest (religion): Ralph Peters has a must-read piece on religion as a crucial factor in human evolution, and how difficult it is for those who subscribe to the antithetical but equally compelling doctrine of rationalism to comprehend the minds of believers (and vice versa, for that matter). Peters says this prevents analysts in Washington from seeing the obvious: that religion is a motivating factor in the behaviour of indiviiduals, like suicide bombers, who are so immersed in their beliefs that they are willing to sacrifice themselves for the promise of a reward in the afterlife. Secular, rational people often have a hard time making that mental leap connecting religious beliefs with an individual's actions, and thus many analysts--like the one Peters describes at the outset of his piece--continue to believe that Muslim suicide bombers blow themselves up for personal reasons--because they lost their job, or their marriage broke up, of their family has been shamed. Their religious beliefs--and their religion--are let off the hook, and the analyst's understanding of the situation--which is crucial to making effective policy--is faulty and severely limited. And that's no way to perpetuate the survival of Western civilization:

...Religion is, to say the least, a volatile topic. Even those national leaders willing to come to grips with the need for a tough response to Islamist terror take great pains to assure the world that ours is not a religious war and that the Muslim faith is as peaceful as a newborn sheep in a meadow full of wildflowers. Islam is, of course, an umbrella faith, covering forward-looking movements as well as reactionary, violence-prone sects. But we nonetheless must come to grips with the extent to which Middle Eastern Islam itself has become the problem — not only the cause of structural failure, but an impetus for confessional violence (defensive violence, in the Darwinian context, since it seeks to preserve the threatened community — although it’s savagely aggressive from our perspective).

We shy away from a fundamental question of our time: What if Islam is the problem?

Some months ago, an Army general made headlines through his politically incorrect remarks about Islam and Christianity. A devout religious believer, he spoke in a church, in uniform. My personal response to the media’s self-righteous, self-important horror was twofold: Yeah, the guy displayed poor judgment by letting loose at a religious event with his fruit salad on his chest. But I also recognized that, as a believer himself, that general was vastly better equipped to grasp the nature of our enemies than our legions of think-tank experts and timid analysts. Put bluntly, it takes one to know one.

If we are serious about understanding our present — and future — enemies, we will have to rid ourselves of both the plague of political correctness (a bipartisan disease so insidious its victims may not recognize the infection debilitating them) and the failed cult of rationalism as the only permissible analytical tool for understanding human affairs. We will need to shift our focus from the individual to the collective and ask forbidden questions, from inquiring about the deeper nature of humankind (which appears to have little to do with our obsession with the individual) to the biological purpose of religion.

The latter issue demands that we set aside our personal beliefs — a very tall order — and attempt to grasp three things: why human beings appear to be hard-wired for faith; the circumstances under which faiths inevitably turn violent; and the functions of religion in a Darwinian system of human ecology.

The answers we are likely to get will satisfy neither secular commissars nor their religious counterparts, neither scientists schooled to the last century’s reductionist thinking nor those who insist on teaching our children that the bogeyman made the dinosaurs. We are at the dawn of a new and deadly age in which entire civilizations are threatened by the dominance of others. They are going to default to collective survival strategies that will transform their individual members into nonautonomous parts of a whole. We are going to find that, after all, we may not be masters of our individual wills, that far greater forces are at work than those the modern age insisted determined the contours of our lives. Those greater forces may be god or biology — or a combination of the two — but they are going to have a strategic impact that dwarfs the rational factors on which our faltering thinking still relies.

Applied to human affairs, rationalist thought too easily becomes just another superstition. Even the unbelievers among us are engaged in religious war...

I have long thought that, if you were going to design a religion likely to withstand the vicissitudes of time and prevail over all others, Islam has as good a shot as any, and better than most. Consider this: a religion that demands complete submission of its adherents--thus making building a powerful group identity, subsuming the individual within the mass, and making it easier to get the mass to act in a certain way--like freaking out about cartoons and setting fire to Danish flags and embassies. A religion of conquest--violent conquest, yes, but also conquest by stealth--by overwhelming your opponents through sheer numbers. A religion that keeps growing because of the role it assigns to women--to be under the control of men who can have up to four wives, all of whom can be kept in the family way during childbearing years. A religion that makes claims of perfection and universality, that sees itself as the only religion that gets religion right. Down through the centuries, and continuing today, that's immensely compelling.

Then again, a lot of these strengths are also weaknesses--and have resulted in the fundamentalist Islam we see today. Stultified. Unable to evolve. Deprived of the minds of half its population. Aggrieved at its loss of status, at having to take second place to lowly, decadent, infidels who (you think) disrespect you and your beliefs, and who are all going straight to Hell. Hence the anger and frustration, the determination to reclaim what's been lost.

So will this religious Darwinism enable Islam to prevail? Or will its inherent weaknesses--along with a focus on the world to come which manifests itself in a nihilistic love of destruction for its own sake--spell its doom--and perhaps our own as well? For the sake of preserving my sanity, that's a question I prefer not to tackle just now.

Posted by: scaramouche at 14:31 | link | comments

Peace, how?: Anyone watching the opening ceremonies of the Turin Olympics couldn’t help but be impressed. The spectacle! The colours! The costumes! The antics of Cirque de Soleil-like acrobats who slid up and down a silken grid like human spiders; in a spectacular finale, they assembled themselves into a giant white dove, the symbol of peace.

Ah, yes, peace. Don’t we all pine for that state of quiescence? Can’t we, as Yoko Ono (oh, no), barking out words from that most citing famous of paeans to peace, “imagine” what the world would be like if we put our minds to it and thought peaceful thoughts?

Actually, Yoko, imagining peace is about all we can do at the moment. Because despite all the platitudes mouthed last night—as they are at the opening of every Olympics—the fact is that humans beings like to dominate one another. If we could limit the propensity to the field of athletics, we might have a shot at peace. Alas, the Olympics are an artificial—and ultimately, a largely meaningless—construct. Sure, it’s fun to watch someone on a tiny sled hurling head-first down a twisting and treacherous track of ice. But really, is that likely to have any impact on defusing international hatreds or persuading irrational people to behave rationally? I think not.

That point was hammered home yesterday because I watched the ceremonies on CBC’s news channel, Newsworld. As the spectacle unfolded—did you see Sophia Loren?—so did the “crawl” at the bottom of the screen: Muslims protesting Danish cartoons. Danish flags burned in Nairobi. Vladimir Putin to invite Hamas leader to Moscow. And the rest of the wretched headlines which underscored—literally—the woeful lack of peace in this world. Meanwhile, the athletes marched in (Iran, thankfully, separated from Israel by Ireland), the acrobats cavorted, the fireworks blazed, the torch was lit. And the disconnect between what was happening in the centre of the TV screen and the headlines below became almost too much to take in.

Posted by: scaramouche at 13:46 | link | comments

Business Week gets it wrong: With the Holy 'Toon War spiralling out of control, and seethers taking to the streets in such disparate sites as Kenya and Bangla Desh, glossy money mag Business Week contends that, despite all signs to the contrary, this is not a volley in the Clash of Civilizations. Heck, no:

The attacks on the Danish and Norwegian embassies in the Arab world and other rioting, some of it lethal, have taken place against a backdrop of unease in the West over the militant Islamic organization Hamas winning a majority of the Palestinian parliament and Tehran's defiance of the West over Iran's nuclear program. Are these the first battles of the much-feared "Clash of Civilizations" that Harvard professor Samuel Huntington warned about in 1993?

INTERNAL STRAINS. The answer is no. But that such a conflagration could be set off by such a seemingly minor spark shows how strong emotions are running both in the Islamic countries and in the Muslim communities of Europe. Muslims in the Mideast are angry over a host of perceived insults, including the occupation of Iraq, while some Muslims in Europe consider themselves an oppressed minority subject to abuse and injustices. The recent strong showing by Islamic groups in elections in the Middle East is leading both governments and mobs on the street to flex their muscles.

But at their roots, these violent reactions may have more to do with profound pressures and shifts being felt in the Middle East and beyond than about hostility to the West. One clue: The main forces pushing the Danish government for an apology for the cartoons were not Islamic radicals such as al Qaeda. Instead, they were established Arab governments including Egypt, Syria, and Libya, as well as the conservative Saudis. The governments were moved to action when Danish Muslim groups came to them with complaints about the cartoons.

Governments like those of Egypt and Syria have long been secular forces in the region. But they're feeling increasing heat for failing to deliver on a wide front from economic growth to meeting the growing political aspirations of their people...

It's said that the mark of true intelligence is the ability to hold two seemingly opposing ideas in one's head at the same time. Thus: these reactions are the result of profound pressures and shifts AND these reactions are about Muslim hostility to the West.

See, that didn't hurt.

Also, the article neglects to mention the role played by influential seether-chieftan (and close personal pal of London mayor, Red Ken Livingstone) Sheikh Yousel al-Qawadari. When the Danish Islamists, ahem, Muslim groups, brought their doctored batch of 'toons to him, he lost no time in stirring up the seethers, who quickly took to the streets.

But I can see why the magazine would want to run with its theory: Civilizational conflicts are notoriously bad for business.

Posted by: scaramouche at 18:11 | link | comments (1)

The seethers are still revolting: Those Danish Muslims who brought the Danish newspaper 'toons (along with a few of their own additions) to the attention of some influential seether-chiefs in the Muslim world must be extremely gratified. Their efforts have paid off--in spades--as the Holy 'Toon War continues to rage in various locations around the world, and shows no sign of letting up. From Reuters:

Kenyan police opened fire at hundreds demonstrating against cartoons of the Prophet Mohammad on Friday, wounding at least one person, as protests across the Muslim world showed no sign of abating.

Police in Bangladesh beat back about 10,000 angry protesters marching on the Danish embassy in the capital Dhaka and demonstrators also took to the streets in Afghanistan, India, Jordan, Malaysia, Sri Lanka and Turkey.

The Palestinian militant group Islamic Jihad, which has carried out several suicide bombings in Israel, threatened more violence and a leading Saudi Muslim cleric called for no mercy in punishing anyone mocking the Prophet.

"So far we have demanded an apology from the governments. But if they continue their assault on our dear Prophet Mohammad, we will burn the ground underneath their feet," Islamic Jihad leader Khader Habib told supporters after Friday prayers...

Essay question: When Islamic fascists demand "apologies" from Western governments for a pereived insult to their Prophet, it is tantamount to a demand for the West's total submission. Discuss.

Posted by: scaramouche at 17:14 | link | comments

Russian roulette: Israel is furious that Vladimir Putin is mulling over the idea of inviting Hamas leaders to visit Russia. Outrageous, disgusting, unacceptable, say Israeli leaders, rightly seeing it as further evidence that the world is easing itself down the slippery slope of legitimizing a terror regime bent on Israel's destruction. Others suggest that Russia is merely reverting to Soviet form--setting itself against the U.S.--because it aims to return to those halcyon days of influence and power. The truth is probably a mix of both. Russia is blowing a raspberry at the American superpower, but Putin is canny enough to see which way the wind seems to be blowing, and to set sail in that direction. From Reuters:

"Hamas is in power, this is a fact, and secondly, it came to power as a result of free democratic elections,"  (Russian Defense Minister Sergei) Ivanov told reporters at a NATO-Russia meeting in Italy.

He said Moscow was not happy with all of Hamas's policies, but predicted the West had no choice but to deal with it.

"I hazard the prediction that sooner or later certain countries, including those of the Quartet, will be favorable to contacts with Hamas," he said.

France appeared to side with Russia in the diplomatic row.

When asked about Russia's invitation to Hamas, French Foreign Ministry spokesman Denis Simonneau said: "As long as we stay within the framework of the objectives and principles that we have fixed, we think that this initiative can contribute toward advancing our position."

"We share with Russia the goal of leading Hamas toward positions that permit reaching the objective of two states living in peace and security," Simonneau said.

At a meeting in London on January 30, Quartet representatives said the Palestinians risked losing international aid if Hamas did not renounce violence and recognize Israel. Hamas has rejected the demand.

In a bid to shore up international resolve, Israeli Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz will travel to Cairo on Tuesday for talks with President Hosni Mubarak and other officials.

"The rise of Hamas is not just a local problem for Israel, but a strategic threat for all states that seek peace in the middle east," a Mofaz spokeswoman said.

Hamas, which is considered a terrorist organization by Washington, has suggested it could be extended further if Israel gave up land it captured in the 1967 Middle East War...

Update: No surprise as to who's lining up to give Hamas a chance--and who isn't. On the give-'em-time-maybe-they'll-change" side: Russia, France and clueless Kofi Annan. On the "nyet-to-Hamas's-potential-for-reform side": the U.S. Plus ca change, as they say. From YNet:

Like Israel, the U.S. government was amazed and furious with Russian President Vladamir Putin's invitation to Hamas. A U.S. official asked how Russia would respond to a U.S. invitation for Chechen rebels to visit Washington.

U.S. anger is further fuelled by the signature of Russia to a Quartet agreement to freeze contacts with a Hamas controlled PA until Hamas ended terrorism, recognized Israel, and abided by agreements signed between Israel and the Palestinians.

Meanwhile, U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan urged the international community to give Hamas time to change it ways before ruling it out as a partner.

"We are at a very early stage of the game," Annan told reporters in New York.

"Hamas won the election but they have never been in government. They need time to organize themselves," he said.

Annan also told Hamas to listen to the warnings of the international community, to take upon itself the commitments of the Palestinian Authority, to abandon the path of terrorism, and to recognize Israel

Yeah, that's gonna happen.

Posted by: scaramouche at 14:01 | link | comments

Move over, Great Satan: You support them, send them your money, invariably side with them against the Jews and Americans, and this is the thanks you get? From the San Francisco Chronicle:

Paris -- For years, Western Europe has played the good cop to America's bad cop in much of the Islamic world. Its governments have offered a sympathetic ear and billions of dollars to the Palestinian cause, and millions of its citizens have poured into the streets to protest the U.S. invasion of Iraq.

But these days, the Great Satan has competition. Now, it is European embassies that are being torched and attacked by rampaging protesters in Beirut and Damascus. European products are being boycotted in Dubai and Pakistan, and European nationals are facing death threats and warnings not to travel to volatile areas.

European analysts warn that the furor over the cartoons depicting the prophet Muhammad could have longer-term political consequences for the continent.

"Europeans are already being perceived in more negative terms than they have in the past," said Richard Whitman, an analyst at the Royal Institute of International Affairs in London. If not soon resolved, the situation could lead to a "downward spiral" in relations between Europe and much of the Muslim world, he said.

Anti-European anger continued Thursday, with demonstrations occurring in Lebanon, Bangladesh and South Africa, but the intensity of the protests appeared to subside, and there were increasing calls from Arab and Muslim government officials and commentators for an end to the violence. And in a further attempt to tamp down the storm, the Danish paper Jyllands Posten, which first published the drawings in September, posted a letter in Arabic on its Web site apologizing to Muslims for the "misunderstanding" the cartoons provoked.

But analysts in France say that even after the furor dies down, its impact may linger.

"Diplomatically, I think that the Arab countries are going to be re-looking at their relationship with the European Union, particularly by requiring a certain amount of respect (on issues like religion)," said Luis Martinez, a North African and Middle East expert at the International Study and Research Center in Paris. "Even if this doesn't necessarily correspond to European values." ...

A student of Bat Ye'or might say you reap what you sow, and Europe is now paying the price for years of somnolence, cynicism and greed.

Posted by: scaramouche at 13:22 | link | comments

Why can't the Muslims be more like the Jews?: Jonah Goldberg imagines how the 'Jewish Street' might 'erupt' in response to offensive 'toons published in an Iranian newspaper--a reaction that's less than volcanic. From the National Post (link available to subscribers):

..At Brandeis University, a course on Lesbian motifs in Yiddish literature was briefly interupted as students asked their professor what he thought about the controversy. In Washington, D.C., a flurry of letters to the editor and press releases poured out of Jewish organizations. In New York, Commentary magazine--a leading organ of the "neoconservative" Jewish RIght--announced it would run three articles on Iran in its next issue as well as an extensive letters section.

"This is outrageous but expected," thundered a furious Abe Foxman of the Anti-Defamation League on a longer-than-normal appearance on MSNBC's Hardball with Chris Matthews.

Elsewhere, Jewish tempers weren't so hot. At Artie's Delicatessen on the Upper West Side of New York, Josh Greenberg ate a pastrami sandwich with a friend, Abe Kolman, hoping to avoid all the furor in the Jewish street. "Zabar's is a mad house today," Greenberg observed. When asked about the Iranian newspaper controversy, Greenberg said, "What are you going to do?"...

Posted by: scaramouche at 12:59 | link | comments

Who benefits from the 'toon tummult? David Warren reviews the 'toon crisis, noting that it wasn't the 'toons published in the Danish paper that sparked the outrage so much as a much more inflammatory images that appeared in a "media kit" systematically distributed in the Muslim world. One of these images, you'll recall, was of a rural French swine-summoner comporting like one of his summonees, an image the faithful proffered as an infidel dressed up as--and thus defaming--the Prophet. Warren says that these images were used by extremists for their own malign purposes, and gullible Westerners have fallen for the song and dance about how the Danish newspaper is to blame. From Real Clear Politics:

...From several sources, we now know that word of the cartoons was then carried systematically through the Muslim world -- to principal mosques, madrasahs, and government offices starting in Egypt. This was done by delegations sent by Ahmed Abu-Laban, the Saudi-supported Imam of Copenhagen. And in addition to the dozen cartoons that had actually appeared in that obscure provincial newspaper -- most fairly innocent, and one actually satirizing opposition to Islam -- the delegations' "media kits" included as many as 30 graphics that had never appeared, and by their nature would never appear, in a Western mainstream newspaper. For instance, a photo of a man dressed as a pig, over the caption, “This is the real Mohammad.”

The fake pictures not only outnumbered the real ones, they were much nastier. Many were in the style of anti-Semitic cartoons that appear frequently in Arab papers, but turned around to target Muslims instead of Jews. And the covering letter, which I have read in translation, was full of outrageous lies about events in Denmark, and misrepresentations of what had been said by Danish journalists and politicians.

It is this document, and not any copy of Jyllands-Posten from Sept. 30th, 2005, that is at the root of the Muslim riots, the Saudi-sponsored pan-Arab boycott of Danish goods, and various fatwas and other acts that put Danes and other Europeans, who had never previously heard of Jyllands-Posten, in peril for their lives.

That the first violent acts were performed in Gaza and Damascus, under the oversight of Hamas and the Syrian Baath party, respectively, speaks volumes. That the Danish embassy in Beirut was torched just after the one in Damascus, says more. Lebanese police arrested nearly 200 provocateurs, most of them Palestinians and Syrian nationals. These people also tried to start a rampage through the whole upscale Maronite (Levantine Catholic) neighbourhood that is also Beirut's embassy quarter, by pitching rocks into random windows, and leading anti-Christian chants.

The barometer is still falling. Local Islamists have now seized upon the issue to launch more riots in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Indonesia. Across Europe, attempts are being made to rekindle the sort of thing we saw in France. And apologies are being demanded, that would be very foolish to give.

For the whole point of this exercise is to enhance the power and prestige of radical Islam, over the great number of Muslims who have not been looking for trouble. Simply by recognizing the least reasonable Muslim voices as the legitimate representatives of Islam, terrible damage is done to moderate interests.

It is utterly wrong to appease an Abu-Laban. Here is a man who gave an interview on Danish television, pretending great distress, and condemning the excesses of the international campaign against Danish persons, property, and products. But he also gave an interview to Al-Jazeera, in Arabic, cheerfully congratulating the world's Muslims on putting a scare into the Danes, and gloating over the success of the boycott. Alas for him, the Danish television network, DR, has now shown excerpts from the Al-Jazeera interview, translated into Danish.

This has to be spelled out very plainly to people in the West who don’t get it, including ignorant scribes in the U.S. State Department, the British Foreign Office, and the Vatican, who have added their official voices in condemnation of those irrelevant Danish cartoons.

Every time we refuse a radical Muslim demand, by sticking to our sound Western principles, we strengthen reasonable Muslims against the fanatics. Every time we relent, we strengthen the fanatics.

As the used to say at the end of that old TV show, "To Tell The Truth": Will the real moderate Muslims please stand up?

Posted by: scaramouche at 12:10 | link | comments

A "moderate" view: The prime minister of Malaysia, a man touted as a "moderate" (as was his famously immoderate predecessor) says the 'toon tummult is a sign of the "chasm" that has opened up between Islam and the West. And what's behind it all? Why, Muslim "frustration", of course. ("Frustration" being only one of many interchangeable words used to justify Muslim behaviour. Others include: alienation, marginalization, non-assmilation and, my own personal favourite, "the impotence".) And what fuels the frustration? Bet you were going to say "the Jews", but being a moderate and all the prime minister refrained from mentioning them specifically, collapsing them into the larger category, "Western foreign policy." From BBC News:

...Abdullah Badawi, seen as promoting a moderate form of Islam in largely Muslim Malaysia, said many Westerners saw Muslims as congenital terrorists.

As he spoke at a conference in Kuala Lumpur, thousands protested outside at Western cartoons of Prophet Muhammad.

Their publication in Europe has led to demonstrations across the Muslim world.

Friday's demonstration, numbering well over a thousand, is the biggest in Malaysia's capital for years.

"Long live Islam. Destroy Denmark. Destroy Israel. Destroy George Bush. Destroy America," protesters shouted as they marched to the Danish embassy in the rain from a nearby mosque.

(Badawi said) "The West should treat Islam the way it wants Islam to treat the West and vice versa - they should accept one another as equals."

The satirical cartoons - which have been denounced throughout the Islamic world - include an image portraying Muhammad with a bomb in his turban. Islamic tradition explicitly prohibits any depiction of Allah and the Prophet.

They were first published by a Danish newspaper in September, but reprinted in several other European publications.

On Thursday, Mr Abdullah shut down indefinitely a Borneo-based paper, the Sarawak Tribune, for reprinting the cartoons.

He described their publication as "insensitive and irresponsible". The paper had apologised for what it called an editorial oversight.

AP news agency reported that the prime minister had also declared possession of the cartoons illegal...

Malaysians are fortunate to have such a "moderate" leader. Just imagine how an "immoderate" one might have acted.

Update: Melanie Phillips has more on the "moderates", these ones in Britain, who are getting set to hold large but moderate 'toon protests in London:

...In Britain, the street shows are set to continue. Two more massive Muslim demonstrations are planned. Today’s newspapers dumbly fell for the spin and dutifully reported that these would be organised by ‘moderate’ Muslims. as opposed to the mob that demanded murder and bombings last weekend. These ‘moderates’ are the ‘moderate’ Muslim Council of Britain, who moderately boycott Holocaust Day, moderately back the Jew-hating, gay-hating, human-bombs-in-Israel-and-Iraq-supporting Qaradawi and moderately want to criminalise anyone who even talks about Islamic terrorism; and the Muslim Association of Britain, the British arm of the ‘moderate’ Muslim Brotherhood whose offshoots are busy terrorising Iraq and Israel and are a principal ideological core of the jihad against the west.

This show of force on Britain’s streets will put muscle behind the ‘moderate’ demand by 300 ‘moderate’ Islamic religious leaders who want the law to be changed and the Press Complaints Commission code of conduct to be tightened to stop the publication of any images of the prophet Mohammed. Not only is this a demand for special treatment, not only is it an attempt to bludgeon Britain into censoring speech about Islam, it is also – according to Amir Taheri again, this time in the Wall Street Journal -- based not on religion but on political extremism...

Moderation seems to pan out along a sliding continuum, with yesterday's extremists being seen as today's moderates, and today's moderates becoming tomorrow's extremists.

Update: Daniel Pipes begs to differ with both Badawi and Phillips. There is no "chasm" or clash between civilizations, says Pipes, because there are tons of moderates who aren't actively involved in any clashing. Pipes, of course, has staked his reputation on the theory that moderate Islam is the cure for radical Islam. Now, if we could only locate that timourous silent majority, we'd be all set. From The Middle East Forum:

It certainly feels like a clash of civilizations. But it is not.

By way of demonstration, allow me to recall the similar Muslim-Western confrontation that took place in 1989 over the publication of Salman Rushdie's novel The Satanic Verses and the resulting death edict from Iran's Ayatollah Khomeini. It first appeared, as now, that the West aligned solidly against the edict and the Muslim world stood equally with it. As the dust settled, however, a far more nuanced situation became apparent.

Significant voices in the West expressed sympathy for Khomeini. Former president Jimmy Carter responded with a call for Americans to be "sensitive to the concern and anger" of Muslims. The director of the Near East Studies Center at UCLA, Georges Sabbagh, declared Khomeini "completely within his rights" to sentence Rushdie to death. Immanuel Jakobovits, chief rabbi of the United Kingdom, wrote that "the book should not have been published" and called for legislation to proscribe such "excesses in the freedom of expression."

In contrast, important Muslims opposed the edict. Erdal Inönü, leader of Turkey's opposition Social Democratic party, announced that "killing somebody for what he has written is simply murder." Naguib Mahfouz, Egypt's winner of the 1988 Nobel Prize in literature, called Khomeini a "terrorist." A Palestinian journalist in Israel, Abdullatif Younis, dubbed The Satanic Verses "a great service."

This same division already exists in the current crisis. Middle East-studies professors are denouncing the cartoons even as two Jordanian editors went to jail for reprinting them.

It is a tragic mistake to lump all Muslims with the forces of darkness. Moderate, enlightened, free-thinking Muslims do exist. Hounded in their own circles, they look to the West for succor and support. And, however weak they may presently be, they eventually will have a crucial role in modernizing the Muslim world.

Provided the extremists haven't first slit their throats.

Update: The final word on "moderates" goes to Charles Krauthammer, who always manages to cut through the crapola and expose the essential truth. From the Washington Post:

As much of the Islamic world erupts in a studied frenzy over the Danish Muhammad cartoons, there are voices of reason being heard on both sides. Some Islamic leaders and organizations, while endorsing the demonstrators' sense of grievance and sharing their outrage, speak out against using violence as a vehicle of expression. Their Western counterparts -- intellectuals, including most of the major newspapers in the United States -- are similarly balanced: While, of course, endorsing the principle of free expression, they criticize the Danish newspaper for abusing that right by publishing offensive cartoons, and they declare themselves opposed, in the name of religious sensitivity, to doing the same.

God save us from the voices of reason.

What passes for moderation in the Islamic community -- "I share your rage but don't torch that embassy" -- is nothing of the sort. It is simply a cynical way to endorse the goals of the mob without endorsing its means. It is fraudulent because, while pretending to uphold the principle of religious sensitivity, it is interested only in this instance of religious insensitivity.

Have any of these "moderates" ever protested the grotesque caricatures of Christians and, most especially, Jews that are broadcast throughout the Middle East on a daily basis? The sermons on Palestinian TV that refer to Jews as the sons of pigs and monkeys? The Syrian prime-time TV series that shows rabbis slaughtering a gentile boy to ritually consume his blood? The 41-part (!) series on Egyptian TV based on that anti-Semitic czarist forgery (and inspiration of the Nazis), "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion," showing the Jews to be engaged in a century-old conspiracy to control the world?

A true Muslim moderate is one who protests desecrations of all faiths. Those who don't are not moderates but hypocrites, opportunists and agents for the rioters, merely using different means to advance the same goal: to impose upon the West, with its traditions of freedom of speech, a set of taboos that is exclusive to the Islamic faith. These are not defenders of religion but Muslim supremacists trying to force their dictates upon the liberal West...

Looks like if he have to depend on these "moderates" to reform their faith from within, we're going to have a good long wait--like, say, forever.

Posted by: scaramouche at 11:16 | link | comments

The freedom to criticize perfection: Die Welt has a transcript of the speech Ayaan Hirsi Ali gave in Berlin yesterday. Hirsi, who has a good claim to be called the bravest woman in the world, asserted the right of free people to speak freely, and explained where she thinks the Prophet--whom believers see as the most perfect human being who ever lived--went wrong. How blasphemous!:

I used to be faithful to the guidelines laid down by the prophet Muhammad. Like the thousands demonstrating against the Danish drawings, I used to hold the view that Muhammad was perfect -- the only source of, and indeed, the criterion between good and bad. In 1989 when Khomeini called for Salman Rushdie to be killed for insulting Muhammad, I thought he was right. Now I don’t.

I think that the prophet was wrong to have placed himself and his ideas above critical thought.

I think that the prophet Muhammad was wrong to have subordinated women to men.

I think that the prophet Muhammad was wrong to have decreed that gays be murdered.

I think that the prophet Muhammad was wrong to have said that apostates must be killed.

He was wrong in saying that adulterers should be flogged and stoned, and the hands of thieves should be cut off.

He was wrong in saying that those who die in the cause of Allah will be rewarded with paradise.

He was wrong in claiming that a proper society could be built only on his ideas.

The prophet did and said good things. He encouraged charity to others. But I wish to defend the position that he was also disrespectful and insensitive to those who disagreed with him.

I think it is right to make critical drawings and films of Muhammad. It is necessary to write books on him in order to educate ordinary citizens on Muhammad.

I do not seek to offend religious sentiment, but I will not submit to tyranny. Demanding that people who do not accept Muhammad’s teachings should refrain from drawing him is not a request for respect but a demand for submission.

Precisely.

Posted by: scaramouche at 10:47 | link | comments

Walking a tightrope--or being hanged from a noose?:The rehabilitation of Islamo-kaze-Nazi terror outfit Hamas continues apace. In USA Today, Ralph Peters, who's certain that the election of Hamas had absolututely, positively, stamped-it-no-rubs-outs, NOTHING to do with a Palestinian penchant for terrorism, says the U.S. has to "walk a tightrope" in its dealings with the new government. And by that he means that Americans should largely ignore Hamas's stated mission of wanting to rub out the Jews and concentrate on turning Hamastan into a best Islamo-fascist terror state ever.

Okay, he doesn't come out and say it in so many worlds, but that's the inference to be drawn from the following list of questions, which Peters says are essential to consider:

• Is it more important to see the rise of a healthy, responsible Palestinian state, or to combat Hamas?

• What if Hamas continues to take a hard line on Israel — but delivers good government to Palestinians? What if Hamas proves popular in power?

• Or what if Hamas finds that it must compromise to maintain international support — leading to a violent split between hard-liners and pragmatists within a movement that has multiple centers of power and rival chains of command?

• Could we see a civil war between Fatah backers and Hamas?

• Might Hamas do our work for us by failing to govern well? Will Hamas prove as corrupt as every other Middle Eastern political party? Or might it build a successful Islamist government?

• What becomes of the many Palestinian Christians under an Islamist regime? What about women's rights? Will social repression alienate voters from Hamas?

• The greatest danger to Hamas is the democratic system that brought it to power. Governments must satisfy voters — or fall. What do we do if Hamas subverts future elections to hold onto power?

• What if outrageous acts of now-state-sponsored violence discredit the Palestinian cause and turn back the clock? How could hopes for peace be rescued?

• What if Israel overreacts, playing into the hands of our mutual enemies and critics? With its own elections looming, can Israel act with restraint?

• Where will developments leave the United States as we seek to enable democracy in the Middle East? Will we find ourselves disheartened by democracy's Middle Eastern deformities? Or does democracy take time, trial and error before it yields worthy results?

The advent of a Hamas government shifts the regional equation — but the truth is that we don't yet know exactly how it will change things. We face a dauntingly complex challenge to which there is no easy response. The Hamas victory at the polls might, indeed, prove nothing short of a disaster. Yet, history is full of unexpected consequences. The trick is to end up on the right side of history.

Call me crazy, but I'm pretty sure that giving in to Hamas--an organization that is as likely to reform as any other jihadi terror group, i.e. never-- is bound to land you on "the wrong side of history".

Posted by: scaramouche at 22:31 | link | comments (3)

Sooey!: In a bizarre but hilarious addendum to the story of Ahmed Akkiri, the Danish Islamist whose package of 'toons helped ignite the outrage, comes this story from AP (link via Tim Blair). I was going to describe it, but I kept cracking up, so I'll let AP tell the tale:

 COPENHAGEN--The Associated Press protested Wednesday the misleading inclusion of an AP photograph in a pamphlet purporting to show images offensive to Islam.

The picture shows a bearded man wearing fake pig ears, a pig nose, and a pink embroidered cap on his head. He was wearing the costume while participating in a pig-squealing contest at an annual festival in a farm village in southern France last summer.

The AP sent out the photo describing the pig-squealing contest on Aug. 14, 2005. The photo had no connection with Islam or the caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad published in a Danish newspaper in September.

A blurry, black-and-white copy of the picture was included in a brochure that a delegation of Danish Muslim leaders carried on a Mideast tour to Syria, Lebanon, Egypt and Turkey, in December and January.

"The photograph was taken at an agriculture fair last summer and is totally unrelated to the current controversy," said AP's Director of Photography Santiago Lyon.

Jack Stokes, an AP spokesman, said the picture was used "completely out of context and without permission.

"AP is attempting to contact the distributors of this unrelated photo to protest its misrepresentation and demand that they stop immediately," he said.

The brochure purported to show examples of anti-Muslim images from Europe, said Ahmed Akkari, a spokesman for the Danish Muslim delegation. Included were 12 controversial drawings of the Prophet Muhammad that were published in Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten, he said.

The group received copies of the AP picture in threatening anonymous letters last year, Akkari said.

"We did not find it ourselves," he told the AP, saying he had been unaware of the origin of the photograph and said he believed it was sent to the group as an example of a provocation.

When told about the background of the original AP photo, Akkari said: "I have no comments."...

In other words, the 'toon of Mo with a pig snout wasn't actually a 'toon and didn't show Mo. It did show a Frenchman at an agricultural show pretending to be a pig, but I'm pretty sure that doesn't violate any Muslim teachings.

Update: Here's an enlargement of the offending photo.

Funny, he doesn't look Swinish.

Update: Famous pigs, none of them Mo.

Posted by: scaramouche at 19:02 | link | comments

UN blame game: The Palestinian economy is in a shambles, and the UN thinks it knows why. No, it's not because of kleptocratic leaders who helped themselves to money that was supposed to be earmarked for the people. And it's not because, in seeking to destroy Israel while remaining wholly dependant on it for jobs (a contradiction if there ever was one) Palestinians never got around to building their own economy. As far as the UN is concerned, there is only one reason for what it calls the "de-development"--and I think you can guess what it is. From Islam Online:

Israel's separation wall and its network of checkpoints and roadblocks across the occupied West Bank have led to a "de-development" of the Palestinian economy, a report by the Office of the United Nations Special Coordinator (UNSCO) said on Thursday, February 9.

Francine Pickup, author of the report, said poverty and unemployment in the West Bank were expected to increase because of denying Palestinian workers access into Israeli markets, reported Agence France-Presse (AFP).

"Our research highlights the high level of dependence in the West Bank on the Israeli market both for goods and work," she told a press conference.

"It's difficult to see how the northern West Bank economy can be viable (and) separate from the Israeli economy. It is likely that unemployment and poverty will increase as there is no alternative to the markets in Israel."

Thousands of Palestinian workers lost their jobs in the northern West Bank, where the bulk of the rural population is based, after they were denied entry into Israeli markets on security grounds.

The UN report said that a third of the rural population in the West Bank had lost jobs in Israel because of closures and the separation barrier...

Posted by: scaramouche at 18:03 | link | comments (1)

Ingrates: There have been no more stalwart supporters of the Palestinians and their cause than Norway, Sweden and Denmark. And what has all the goodwill and megabucks lavished on Arabs bought the Nordics? From the looks of it, absolutely nothing. From the Washington Post (link via The American Thinker): 

For years, Scandinavian countries have been among the most generous with aid to the Muslim world, but that generosity has stood for little in the scandal over cartoons of the Prophet Mohammad.

In the past week, Scandinavian embassies have been set ablaze in Syria and Lebanon and bans have been put on Danish exports, creating a row that threatens to unravel the substantial goodwill Scandinavia had in the Middle East.

Despite the vast contributions Nordic countries have made, analysts suspect Denmark's heavy-handed approach to immigrants may be one reason behind the Muslim backlash. And they worry that it could take a long time for reputations to recover.

That's bad for Scandinavia, but it may also be bad for aid recipients such as the Palestinians, just as they face a crunch over funding following militant group Hamas's election victory.

"The general perception in the Arab world of the Nordic countries as tolerant and generous has suffered a huge blow," said Ole Woehlers Olsen, a senior advisor at the Danish Institute for International Studies.

The region's reputation for generosity was not undeserved.

Norway brokered the Oslo accord between Israel and the Palestinians in the early 1990s; Norway and Sweden are the top single donors of aid to the Palestinians after the United States; and Denmark launched an "Arab initiative" in 2003 to promote understanding. Its presidency of the European Union helped set up the "roadmap" for Middle East peace.

"That is why is has hurt so much to see the pictures of flags being burned and all the threats against the people who are there to help the Palestinian people," said Fathie El-Abed of the Danish-Palestinian Friendship Association...

Talk about your sour grapes. But then, the jizya only goes so far. It certainly doesn't defray the cost of defaming Mo the Pro.

I wonder what Terje Roed-Larson has to say about all of this.

Posted by: scaramouche at 16:36 | link | comments

Sticks and stones...and hatred and bombs: I always tell my son never to use the expression "shut up." It's rude and disrespectful. Apparently, the leader of Hezbollah failed to receive similar guidance from his Mommy. From the Jerusalem Post:

The leader of Hizbullah, heading a march by hundreds of thousands of Shi'ite Muslims on Thursday, said US President George W. Bush and his secretary of state should "shut up" after they accused Syria and Iran of fueling protests over cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad.

Sheik Hassan Nasrallah urged Muslims worldwide to continue demonstrations until there is an apology over the drawings and Europe passes laws forbidding insults to the prophet.

The head of the guerrilla group, which is backed by Iran and Syria, spoke before a mass procession of Shi'ites marking Ashura, an annual remembrance of the 680 A.D. battle in which Hussein, their saint and grandson of Muhammad, was killed by rivals, cementing the split in Islam between Shi'ites and Sunnis.

Whipping up the crowds on the most solemn day for Shi'ites worldwide, Nasrallah declared: "Defending the prophet should continue all over the world. Let Condoleezza Rice and Bush and all the tyrants shut up. We are an Islamic nation that cannot tolerate, be silent or be lax when they insult our prophet and sanctities."

"We will uphold the messenger of God not only by our voices but also by our blood," he told the crowds, estimated by organizers at about 700,000. Police officers had no final estimates but put the figure at even higher...

Posted by: scaramouche at 14:34 | link | comments

Siddiqui's contortions and distortions: It's Thursday, and you know what that means: another column elucidating the Islamist P.O.V. by the Toronto Star's resident seether-explainer, Haroon Siddiqui. Haroon's column today is one of his little masterpieces of disinformation, and must be read in its entirety in order to savour every last drop of his pretzel-like reasoning. For the sake of brevity, I will cite selected "gems":

The controversy surrounding the cartoons featuring the Prophet Muhammad has given rise to several propositions that deserve to be debated.
It is said that Muslims are trying to force non-Muslims to live by Islamic taboos. Not so.

Muslims in the West are only asking that democracies live up to their rules — exercise freedom of speech with the concomitant responsibility of self-restraint, and also respect people of all faiths or no faith at all.

This is not a new proposition. It has always been a balancing act between competing rights.

That's why Jyllands-Posten's publication of the offensive drawings was "juvenile," in the apt phrase of a New York Times editorial. That's why most dailies in Canada and the U.S. have refused to reprint the cartoons (not because they are "afraid," as some polemicists say).

It is said that only the fundamentalists and conservatives are offended. Not so.

The offence is broadly felt. Some take to the streets, millions don't. Critics include such "moderates" as Hosni Mubarak and Hamid Karzai.

And:

It is said that there would have been no uproar had some Danish Muslim leaders not gone to the Middle East to drum up support.

They had every right to seek allies, anywhere. They were not out stoking violence and are not responsible for it. The real culprits are those who created the controversy.

Moreover, the small Muslim delegation went abroad only after both the newspaper and the government had refused to listen to their concerns.

And:

It is said that the consumer boycott of Danish products is misplaced, in that it hurts innocent Danish businesses and workers. It does. That's always so with boycotts. And economic sanctions.

The 1991-2003 sanctions on Iraq killed nearly 1 million innocent Iraqis, half of them children.

One does not justify the other but the context is not irrelevant.

It is said that no grievance justifies violence. Absolutely.

But the biggest victims have been Muslims — 11 dead so far, killed by their own anti-riot police in Afghanistan, Somalia and elsewhere. That speaks to the pathology of Muslims.

But that's not what's driving the narrative here. Rather, it is the damage caused to Danish embassies and the fear of terrorism that conflates all Muslims with terrorists.

My favourite part of the column, though, is the following:

Correction: In the Sunday column, I inexplicably called the Star of David the Cross of David. I was thinking at the time of the battle between the cross and the crescent. Still, that's no excuse. I apologize.

Your Freudian slip is showing, Haroon. Stars, crosses--what's the difference? They're all infidels.

As a corrective to Haroon's mishegas, here's a blast of fresh air from Amir Taheri, who recounts the chronology of the crisis. From the National Post:

'A blessing from God." This is how Iran's leaders, starting with President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, have described the controversy over Danish cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad.

A closer look at the row, however, would show that the whole rigmarole was launched by Islamist groups in Europe and Asia, with Mr. Ahmadinejad and his Syrian vassal, President Bashar al-Assad, playing catch-up. God had nothing to do with it.

HERE IS THE CHRONOLOGY:

- The cartoons originally were published last September and, for more than three months, caused no ripples outside small groups of Islamist in Denmark.

- In December, a group of Danish Muslim militants, led by 60-year-old Palestinian imam Abu-Laban, filled suitcases with photocopies of the cartoons and embarked on a tour of Muslim capitals.

The group did something dishonest: It added a number of far more derogatory cartoons of the Prophet to the 12 published by the Jyalland Posten, and misled interlocutors in Muslim capitals into believing that all had appeared in the Danish press.

- In Cairo, the group was told by the Muslim Brotherhood that this was not the time to kick up a fuss over the cartoons. The Brotherhood was busy plotting its election strategy and pretending to be a "moderate" political party. The last thing it wanted was to be branded as a rabid anti-West force. Brotherhood leaders suggested the matter be put on ice until January.

The Danish militants received a similar reply from Hamas, which was then trying to win the Palestinian general election, and needed to assuage at least part of the Palestinian middle classes.

- The Danish Muslim emissaries found a more sympathetic audience in Qatar, base of the satellite television channel Al-Jazeera. The channel's chief Islamist televangelist, Yussuf al-Qaradawi, was all too keen to issue a fatwa. He then mobilized his network of militants in Europe to attack the cartoons, claiming the Danish paper had violated "an absolute principle of The Only True Faith."

- As the first rent-a-mob crowds appeared on global TV screens, Ahmadinejad realized this was a cow worth milking...

Posted by: scaramouche at 12:50 | link | comments (2)

Mixed up Mo: The Christian Science Monitor, which, as everyone knows is neither Christian nor scientific nor especially watchful, has a report on how American Muslims are reacting to the 'toon contretemps. Not surprisingly, some see the violent reactions as justified while others believe a more restrained protest is in order.

Whatever their take, most are agreed that Mo was a peacenik whose message deserves to be heard and respected not only by the faithful, but by everyone:

...The two sides illustrate the diversity of American Muslim opinion about the simmering global controversy. But they also dramatize a larger divide within the community about Islam's attitude about free expression. Many of America's estimated 2 to 3 million Muslims are angry, but instead of throwing stones, they are calling for American-style protests, such as boycotts of Danish products like cheese and yogurt.

Still, some fear that the violent demonstrations against the cartoons in Arab and European countries could spread here.

In Brooklyn, Mustapha Amir's desk is piled high with Arab newspapers. One headline urged Muslims to unite against the cartoons. After reading aloud part of the article, Mr. Amir puts down the paper. Muslims' strong devotion, he says, may impel them to take action, including martyrdom, to protect Muhammad's reputation.

What would Muhammad do?

Such views concern Rabiah Ahmed, spokeswoman for the Council on American-Islamic Relations in Washington.

"We are concerned that people are not responding the way the prophet Muhammed would want," says Ms. Ahmed. "He was the kind of person who would turn the other cheek if someone slapped him. He preached love and tolerance."

According to Islamic tradition, pictures of Muhammad are generally considered sacrilegious. But Jonathan Bloom, a historian of Islamic art at Boston College, says it wasn't always so. "There were times when images of Muhammad were not forbidden," he says. "In Iran in the 14th century and during the time of the Ottoman Empire, manuscripts often contained illustrations of him." The modern prohibition, he says, probably derive from the strict teachings of Wahabi Islam.

Ingrid Mattson, a professor of Islamic studies at Hartford Seminary, says Muslims aren't upset because the cartoons mock their beliefs. "These are racist depictions," she says. "They are deliberately offensive and are aimed at a minority that is already feeling marginalized."...

Turn the other cheek, huh? And I suppose he also liked to walk on water and raise folks from the dead.

Or do I have him confused with somebody else?

Posted by: scaramouche at 20:58 | link | comments

The talented Mr. Akkari: He didn’t mean to do it; really he didn’t. When Ahmed Akkari, a Danish Islamist flew to Beirut to share Danish ‘toons dissing Mo the Pro with some compadres in the Arab world, he had no idea of the conflagration he’s set off. No siree. According to the whitewash of Mr. Akkari on the front page of the Globe and Mail (such a nice, inoffensive-looking young man) all he was looking to do was…well, actually, if he wasn’t looking to light a fuse, it’s hard to say what he did think he was doing. Especially because, along with the newspaper ‘toons—which, though insulting, weren’t quite insulting enough—Akkri including several that the Danish paper hadn’t printed; that, in fact, no Danish paper would ever think of printing. These 'toons showed the revered Prophet in a number of, shall we say, less than savory poses. In one, he sported a pig’s snout; in another, he was depicted romping with a canine—and they weren’t playing “fetch”, if you know what I mean.

Mr. Akkari was shocked—shocked, says he—that when he gave said ‘toons to some of the Arab world’s leading seethers, including the Grand Mufti of Egypt and members of the Arab League, things could get so out of hand.

Now Akkari is surveying the scenes of violent “protest”, which show no signs of abating, and considering whether it wise to do what he did.

To which the only sane retort, pace the Globe’s gullible scribe, Doug Saunders, who traveled to Copenhagen to detail the poor, unsuspecting Islamist’s plight (at least, in his telling) is BOLLOCKS! And the reason I can say that with conviction is that you have to be, well, a gullible scribe like Doug Saunders to swallow the idea that a true believer, who was angry because the Danish government refused to take steps to keep its newspapers in line with Islamic proscriptions, and who, several months later, traveled to the heart of darkness with a slew of ‘toons that were far more outrageous, didn’t expect to get the rabble roused. Doug Saunders may think that he really only expected the Mufti to make a few phone calls, maybe write some heated letters to the editor, but anyone who knows how the Arab/Muslim world operates, and knows, for example, how  freakaziodal it went over bogus reports of Koran-flushing (and unless you've been living incommunicado in an ice station near the North Pole, you've heard about it) , knows that it was bound to lose its collective nit-picking mind over reports that the infidels were printing ‘toons of Mo frolicking with man’s best friend. Nine-year-old girls are one thing, but dog-shtupping—that’s beyond the pale.

Globe columnist Marcus Gee seems to have a firmer grip on the subject than tender-hearted Doug (who buries information about the second batch of ‘toons, the doggy-piggy ones, so deep in his story that one might never excavate it—more a matter of flow than intentional interment, I’m sure; he also refers to our Ahmed not as an Islamist or even as a militant but as a "Muslim scholar"--which sounds so much nicer, don't you think?). Gee writes:

Among those who saw the drawings (when Akkari brought them to Lebanon) was Yusuf-al-Qaradawi, a powerful Muslim scholar whose edicts can move millions.

This is when the real trouble began. Militants around the Islamic world seized on the opportunity to send their followers in to the streets, attacking embassies, throwing rocks and burning the Danish (and Israeli) flag. While claiming to defend the honour of the Islamic faith, they are using the cartoon flap to spread a perverted version of a great religion. While demanding respect for the tenets of Islam, they are showering contempt on the values of others.

Saudi Arabia joined the protests against Denmark but bans any display of the Star of David within its borders. Sheik al-Qaradawi is offended by newspaper cartoons, but finds nothing wrong with sending children to blow themselves up as suicide bombers.

That part about "perverting" a great religion is open to debate, but the rest of what Gee has to say is bang on, including this bit, which puts Mr. Akkari in a far less positive light than the Saunders puff piece:

This is no spontaneous upswelling of Muslim outrage. Militants from Denmark worked months to stir up their Muslim cousins about the cartoons.

Months, they worked. I’d say that, far from coming as a surprise, the results were exactly what they were looking for.

Posted by: scaramouche at 19:14 | link | comments

(Un)just desertions: In a Toronto courtroom today, a judge is considering the cases of two American army deserters who fled to Canada and are claiming refugee status. Sure, they'd joined the army voluntarily, apparently under the misimpression  that they'd never actually have to fight a war (you know, sort of like Goldie Hawn in the movie Private Benjamin when she thinks she's joining up for the travel and condos). But then nasty old Bush lied to his people and waged war on an unsuspecting despot who was simply minding his own beeswax, and they discovered that, shudder, they were expected to go to Iraq and shoot genuine guns. With real bullets!

Their lawyer is trying to convince the judge that they were justified in deserting because, under international law, the war is illegal. From the Globe and Mail:

Anti-war demonstrators gathered outside a Toronto court Wednesday where it was decision day for a U.S. military deserter who fled his post rather than serve in Iraq is asking to be allowed to remain in this country.

On Wednesday morning, the Federal Court began reviewing the case of former soldier Jeremy Hinzman, 27, who fled the 82nd Airborne Division in Fort Bragg, N.C., in January, 2004, to avoid service in Iraq and sought refuge in Toronto with his wife and son.

Outside the courthouse, protesters held up signs and banners declaring: 'Let war resisters stay.'

The court — which is also examining the case of a second deserter, Brandon Hughey — is to determine whether a decision by Canada's Immigration and Refugee Board last mark to deny Mr. Hinzman political asylum should stand.

Mr. Hinzman is the first U.S. service member to seek asylum formally in Canada because of his opposition to the war in Iraq.

He requested asylum because of the fear of persecution in the United States for his refusal to take part in the controversial war, saying he would be committing a crime if he killed anyone during the course of the conflict because the war is illegal.

The refugee board, in turning down his request, refused to hear evidence as to the illegality of the war.

The case has drawn international attention and is being closely watched by people on both sides of the argument for the implications a ruling would hold for others in a similar situation.

Some estimates have suggested that as many as 200 U.S. military personnel are secretly in Canada to avoid the war. About 20 are now trying to gain refugee status...

Unless the judge is someone like, say, Noam Chomsky or Ramsay Clark, I'm pretty sure Hinzman and Hughey can expect to be seeing the inside of a U.S. pokey fairly soon.

Posted by: scaramouche at 18:07 | link | comments

Clueless Cricket: A revolting performance for former President JImminy "Cricket" Carter yesterday, who took the occasion of the funeral of one of America's most beloved women to take swipes at the current Presidnet.

A piece on Yahoo! lays into the sanctimonious old windbag for his egregious and untimely remarks:  

Jimmy Carter may or may not have been the worst president of the 20th century - history will have the final word on that - but his disgraceful performance yesterday at Coretta Scott King's funeral marks him as the most shameless.

Maybe of all time.

There is, after all, a time and place for everything - but not for Carter.

In a reprehensible (albeit typical) display of tone-deafness, the former president used the funeral of Dr. Martin Luther King's widow to score cheap points against President Bush. (He wasn't alone in that regard, more of which in a bit.)

Carter warmed up by conjuring the outlandish conspiracy theories that still linger from Hurricane Katrina: "We only have to recall the color of the faces of those in Louisiana, Alabama and Mississippi who are most devastated by Katrina to know that there are not yet equal opportunities for all Americans."

Then he segued on to the Bush administration.

In what could only be taken as a direct attack on Bush's electronic surveillance of suspected terrorists - a program Carter has repeatedly denounced as "illegal" - the ex-prez said of Mrs. King and her slain husband, Martin Luther King, "they became the targets of secret government wiretapping and other surveillance."

True enough - though Carter couldn't quite bring himself to note that the wire-tapping was conducted under Presidents John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, and was originally ordered by Attorney General Robert Kennedy, all Democrats.

And, frankly, had Carter made better use of electronic surveillance back in day, 52 Americans might have been spared 444 days of Iranian captivity. (Indeed, the world might well have been spared the Iranian revolution - and the current nuclear crisis - had Carter been up to the job.)

There was a time when former presidents did not publicly attack their successors, but that respect long ago went by the wayside as far as Carter, America's national scold, is concerned.

But to level such attacks at Mrs. King's funeral demeaned the occasion as well as the woman who was being honored by four presidents...

Hey, what do you think about the 'toon tummult, Jimminy? Betcha blame that one on Dubya, too.

Posted by: scaramouche at 11:53 | link | comments (6)

Finsbury Park arsenal: Back in 2003, London police had a decision to make: should we take a chance at offending some tender feelings, or should we raid Hooky’s mosque in search of evidence that there was more going on at the Finsbury Park Mosque than preachin’ and prayin?

The latter won out, and police uncovered a wealth of terror gear which was used to convict Hooky. Today for the first time, it was revealed what they found. From the Independent:

…Operation Mermant, which began in the early hours of January 20 2003, involved scores of officers in body armour using battering rams to enter the building…

The stash of equipment included chemical warfare protection suits, or NBC (nuclear, biological and chemical) suits, as they are technically known.

They were found together with three blank-firing pistols, a stun gun and CS spray.

Officers also found a gas mask, handcuffs, hunting knives and a walkie talkie.

Detectives believe the equipment was being used in terror training camps located somewhere within the UK.

It is not clear exactly where these were, but speculation in the past has centred around remote parts of Wales, in particular the Brecon Beacons, and national parks such as those in the Highlands, Yorkshire Dales or Lake District.

"Our assessment was that this was material that had been used in training camps, probably here in the UK," a senior police source said.

Some of the material was found close to Hamza's office, although police sources admit they could not put his fingerprints on it, "literally or metaphorically".

Police also found more than 100 stolen or forged passports and identity documents, laminating equipment, credit cards and chequebooks hidden under rugs and concealed above ceilings. One officer recalled pulling down part of a ceiling to find passports raining down on him.

HAZMAT suits, guns, knives, handcuffs, pilfered and phony passports—you know, just your everyday kind of sacramental paraphernalia.

Posted by: scaramouche at 22:42 | link | comments

Alien nation: Remember when excitable lads from the 'burbs were torching cars in France last fall?  Word was that the reason they were so upset was because they felt "marginalized" and "alienated" from their society. Well, guess what?  According to The Sydney Morning Herald, that sense of "alienation" is also behind the anger over the Mo 'toons:

THEIR anger was raw. Several New York Muslims protesting against the caricatures of the prophet Muhammad became irate when asked if the global furore was an overreaction.

"Do you know the atrocities that are happening to Muslims every day?" one demanded. "In Iraq? In Pakistan? In Palestine? Muslims feel as if we are under siege."

The deep offence many Muslims have taken to the cartoons is about present-day politics as much as theology.

Islamic tradition strongly discourages depictions of the prophet as a form of idolatry. But the reaction to the cartoons cannot be understood outside a broader, post-September 11 political context: Many Muslims see the drawings' publication as a deliberate attempt to insult them as they perceive themselves to be a stigmatised minority in Europe and a humiliated civilisation in the Middle East.

"You can't understand the response in isolation," said Dr Faroque Khan, of the Islamic Centre of Long Island. "At such a sensitive time, when many Muslims view the war in Iraq as an occupation of an Islamic country by Western powers and fear growing sentiment against immigrants in Europe, this is a kind of spark. People see it as an attack on the core of their faith."

Set against a backdrop in which both anti-immigrant political parties in Europe and Islamist groups are framing the conflict in terms of a clash of civilisations, all the ingredients of a conflagration are there...

Why did these particular drawings provoke such a storm?

"I would argue that the genesis of this whole controversy has a lot more to do with the position in which Muslims find themselves in Europe than with Islamic theology," Dr Safi said.

"I think that some of the same kinds of questions that Europeans asked about Jews a hundred years ago are now being asked of Muslims. Namely, can these people ever be proper citizens of Europe if their loyalties and allegiances lie elsewhere?"

To Westerners who wonder why Muslim sensitivities should trump free speech, Muslims respond with accusations of hypocrisy.

"The West likes to frame this as a free speech issue, but there are many categories of restricted speech: for instance, eight countries in Europe ban speech denying the Holocaust. You can call our prophet a terrorist, but you cannot question the Holocaust?" said Muqtedar Khan, of the University of Delaware.

See, we're the ones who are unreasonable, insisting on our right to acknowledge the veracity of the Holocaust. Such insensitivity to "core beliefs" is to be expected and will not go unpunished.

Posted by: scaramouche at 20:36 | link | comments (4)

The iceman stayeth: He's cool. Collected. Unflappable. When an ambitious, genocidal leader threatens to wipe the map clean of Jews, he admits to being "dismayed". When seethers give in to their hair-trigger tempers and burn down Nordic embassies, he calls upon folks to "remain calm." He's Kofi Annan, the man with icewater in his veins and not a clue in his head. And the only way to get a rise out of him is to be so shameless as to mention the words "Kojo" and "Mercedes" in the same sentence. But don't worry. Kofi always knows where to assign the real blame.  From the San Francisco Chronicle:

As protests over cartoons of the prophet Muhammad grew more violent and four people were killed by police in Afghanistan, U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan called Monday for an end to religious-inspired attacks on diplomatic compounds and other unrest sweeping the Islamic world.

The Bush administration urged Saudi Arabia to help stem protests. "Certainly the leaders of the Saudi government might be individuals who might fulfill that role," State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said. "There are others in the region who also might fulfill that role as well."

German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier said his country is mounting a major diplomatic push to cool tempers. "We cannot allow this argument to become a battle between cultures," he told reporters.

Annan's statement, issued on the U.N.'s Web site, came as hundreds of Iranian protesters hurled stones and fire bombs at the Danish Embassy and tried to torch the Austrian Embassy in Tehran before being turned back by police.

Protests have spiraled over the Danish political cartoons, which in recent days have been reprinted in dozens of Western newspapers, mainly in Europe. The Islamic Army in Iraq, a major insurgent group, posted an Internet statement urging attacks on citizens of any country where the cartoons appeared.

Annan implored Muslims to halt the violence, saying that offense given by the drawings doesn't justify attacks on embassies or calls by militants to spill European blood in retaliation for the pen-and-ink caricatures of Islam's founder.

"Such resentment cannot justify violence, least of all when it is directed at people who have no responsibility for, or control over, the publications in question," Annan said, adding his voice to those of European politicians and Muslim leaders urging calm.

Afghan police opened fire on demonstrators in several cities, with two protesters killed in Bagram, near the site of the largest United States military base in the country, and two more in Mihtarlam, capital of Laghman province. Palestinian police used cudgels to beat back unruly crowds gathering outside European Union offices in Gaza. Thousands of Iraqis rallied to demand that the country sever diplomatic ties with European countries where the cartoons have appeared, burning German flags and an effigy of the Danish prime minister, Anders Fogh Rasmussen.

Both Lebanon and Syria pledged investigations into how firebomb-hurling protesters were able to destroy Danish diplomatic missions in those countries over the weekend.

But Iran, which is embroiled in an unrelated dispute with Western countries over its alleged efforts to develop nuclear weapons, took a hard line on the cartoons. In a Tehran news conference, chief government spokesman Gholamhossein Elham said that "the Islamic Republic of Iran is prepared to sacrifice its life for its belief in Islam and the honor of the prophet."

He called the cartoons symptomatic of the West's "anti-Islamic and Islamophobic current -- which will be answered." ...

Thanks for nada, Kofi. Now, what about Kojo's free ride?

Update: Ladies and gents, I give you Kofi Annan, the man who isn't there (or actually, who is there, but shouldn't be):

Well, no one told us about him—
The way he calms.
Well no one told us about hi-im,
As folks throw bombs.
Well it’s too late to be effective.
He’s a milquetoast who’s full of hot air.
His assessment is defective.
Why’s he there?
Well let me tell you ‘bout the way he talks,
The way he acts makes you wanna pull your hair.
His voice is soft and cool.
His words are daft and dumb.
So why’s he there?

Well, no one told us about him—
What could we do?
Well, no one told us about hi-im,
Though they all knew.
Well it’s too late to pay attention
To anythi-ing he has to share.
He deserves a long detention.
Why’s he there?
Well let me tell you ‘bout his cold, cold words,
Misplaced concerns and his sympathy to spare
For those poor victims of Islamophobia.
Gad, why’s he there?

Posted by: scaramouche at 13:18 | link | comments

Hamza goes down: A British court has just found the one-eyed, one-hooked, jihad-preaching people-hater (affectionally known as Hooky) guilty of soliciting murder.

I hope they throw the book at him. But please, not the Koran. That would just set off the seethers on a whole 'nother rampage.

Hooky in happier times with his favourite appendange

Posted by: scaramouche at 12:31 | link | comments

Another nutty country heard from: Like I said in the post below, I knew it wouldn't be long before the seethers got back to their favourite--and by that I mean their least favourite--dhimmis. From Ireland Online:

The West’s publication of the Prophet Mohammed cartoons was an Israeli conspiracy motivated by anger over Hamas’ win in the Palestinian elections, Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, said today.

Speaking to Iranian air force personnel, Khamenei said the cartoons were a scandal, particularly as they came “from those who champion civilisation and free expression.”

The cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed have led to demonstrations, boycotts and attacks on European embassies across the Islamic world. They were first published in Denmark in September and then reprinted recently by numerous European newspapers in the name of free expression.

“The West condemns any denial of the Jewish holocaust, but it permits the insult of Islamic sanctities,” Khamenei said.

The cartoons have offended many Muslims because most Islamic teachers forbid any illustration of the prophet and because several drawings depict Mohammed as a man of violence.

The caricatures amounted to a “conspiracy by Zionists who were angry because of the victory of Hamas,” he said, referring to the Palestinian militant group that won a surprise landslide victory in last month’s elections.

A prominent Iranian newspaper says it is going to hold a competition for cartoons on the Holocaust to test whether the West will apply the principle of freedom of expression to the Nazi genocide against Jews as it did to the caricatures of the Prophet Mohammed.

Hamshahri, which is among the top five of Iran’s mass circulation papers, made clear the contest was a reaction to European newspapers’ publication of Danish cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed, which have led to attacks on European embassies across the Islamic world.

The newspaper said the contest would be launched on Monday and would be co-convened by itself and the House of Caricatures, a Tehran exhibition centre for cartoons.

Both the paper and the cartoon centre are owned by the Tehran Municipality, which is dominated by allies of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who is known for his opposition to Israel...

Ah, yes--the House of Caricatures. Puts me in mind of the Nazi's exhibition of "degenerate" Western art. It, too, was a big hit with the masses.

Update: The House of Caricatures is also known as The House of Cartoons.

A must-see on any tour of the dyspeptic metropolis, I'm sure.

Posted by: scaramouche at 11:37 | link | comments

First they came for the Danes: As a Jew, I can't help but feel for the Danes. It's extremely unpleasant to be singled out for opprobrium by a large portion of the world, to be the target of boycotts, to have your property destroyed, to be on the receiving end of a relentless wave of irrational hatred. To be treated, in fact, like the Jews.

Still, I have a sense that, after the anger has subsided--as it eventually will, at least until the next real or imagined slight against the Paragon of Impeccable Perfection--the lesson the Danes and the rest of the EU will take won't be about standing up to the irrational bullies who would impose their beliefs on others. More likely, it will be that if we tread very, very carefully, paying attention at all times to any words and deeds that could rouse the beast, maybe we can prevent them from lashing out in such a savage way. Calm them. Soothe them. Reassure them of our good intentions. Defer to them because they believe in their faith with an intensity that we, as non-believers, cannot comprehend--an intensity that scares the bejeesus out of us.

And soon enough, they will forget the Danes and refocus on the uppity dhimmis who preside over their gold and silver mosques, and everything will return to "normal".

And not too long after that, Europe will find it has paid the price for its weakness as the continent slips further and further into de facto sharia.

That's the scenario unless the EU and rest of the civilized world finally wake up. We can only hope and pray that if and when it does, it's not too late.

Update: Daniel Pipes states the case as bluntly and succinctly as possible. From FrontPage Magazine:

The key issue at stake in the battle over the twelve Danish cartoons of the Muslim prophet Muhammad is this: will the West stand up for its customs and mores, including freedom of speech, or will Muslims impose their way of life on the West? Ultimately, there is no compromise; Westerners will either retain their civilization, including the right to insult and blaspheme, or not...

Any questions?

Posted by: scaramouche at 11:15 | link | comments

Vengeful flick: My neighbourhood rag, which was just deposited on my doorstep, has a quarter page ad for something called "Voices Forward: A Festival of Israeli & Palestinian FILM & CULTURE."

Alarm bells immediately went off, as I assumed that anything puts the two cultures together in one package is likely to favour one of them over the other, if you catch my drift. Sure enough when I went to the Web site, I found this info about the film set to launch the "festival". It's called AVENGE BUT ONE OF MY TWO EYES (their caps, not mine), and is directed by “controversial” (ding, ding, ding) Israeli filmmaker, Avi Mograbi. Here’s how the film is described:

Inspired by the legendary myths of Samson and Massada, Avi Mograbi's AVENGE BUT ONE OF MY TWO EYES is a wry, provocative and mournful documentary on present-day Israel that ponders the relationship between the Jewish struggle for freedom and the Palestinian resistance - a struggle played out most dramatically in the two intifadas, the second of which is still ongoing.

The film's title comes from the Biblical story of a blinded Samson who asks God to bring revenge against his Philistine enemies; the film draws contentious parallels between Jewish historical tales of persecution and the plight of Palestinians under Israeli occupation. Mograbi's camera is unflinching, offering a powerful lament of the continuing cycles of violence rooted in the past and threatening to completely engulf the future of everyone in the region, if not globally.

One of the most vital filmmakers at work today, the prolific Mograbi has been called the Michael Moore or Nick Broomfield of Israel. Born and educated in Israel, Mograbi studied philosophy and art before pursuing his illustrious film career. A long-time peace activist, Mograbi was sent to jail by the army in 1982, when he refused to serve in Lebanon for political reasons. Among his other feature documentaries are festival favourites How I Learned to Overcome My Fear and Love Arik Sharon (1997), Happy Birthday, Mr. Mograbi (1999), and August, which won the Peace Award at the 2002 Berlin Film Festival.

"Toronto audiences will be stirred by Mograbi's cinematic achievement, his critical look at the current painful reality and his belief in the exchange of ideas," say programmers Amit Breuer and Stacey Donen.

Thanks, guys, but I think I’ll give it a pass. Sounds like it would make a terrific triple bill with Paradise Now and Munich, though.

Posted by: scaramouche at 21:51 | link | comments

Drug withdrawal: I think this one falls under the heading "cutting off your nose to spite your face." Physicians in Pakistan have decided to show their disapproval of nations that dared to publish those blasphemous 'toons by refusing to prescribe medications made in those countries. From Expatica:

Joining in a countrywide condemnation, Pakistani medical practitioners have decided to boycott medicines from firms based in European countries where derogatory cartoons featuring the Prophet Mohammed were published and reprinted.

"We have asked doctors not to prescribe medicines of the multinational companies with headquarters in Denmark, Germany, Switzerland, France and Norway till their governments apologize," Dr. Shahid Rao, an official of the Pakistan Medical Association (PMA), told Deutsche Presse-Agentur on Monday.

Rao, General Secretary of the body for the central Punjab province, said the decision has been made at the regional level while a nationwide boycott will be decided at a meeting scheduled for February 7.

"The body has also asked the chemists and druggists to remove medicines of these countries from their medical stores," he added.

Earlier, Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz met the visiting Italian deputy foreign minister in Islamabad and condemned the publication and reprinting of blasphemous caricatures depicting the Prophet Mohammed in the European media, an official statement said.

"Publication of these sketches has profoundly hurt the sentiments of Muslims all over the world," Aziz told Margherita Boniver, days after Pakistan formally lodged protest with at least nine European countries through their envoys in Islamabad.

Envoys from France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Switzerland, Holland, Hungary, Norway and the Czech Republic were summoned to the foreign office over the weekend and a formal note was handed to them.

"In any event, freedom of expression is not a license to hurt other peoples sentiments or disparage their values," it said...

Uh, yes it is.

Furthermore, doesn't such a boycott contravene the Hippocratic Oath? Or do they not "submit" to that kind of authority?

Posted by: scaramouche at 16:52 | link | comments (2)

The Ceeb's unbalanced balance:  It's official. According to an official Hamas official, Hamas is sticking to its official policy and will officially refuse to recognize Israel. As a Hamas suppporter explained yesterday on CBC radio to Michael Enright, host of The Sunday Edition, the Jews can keep living there if they'd like (although, clearly, he'd prefer if they'd up and leave), but they can't have their own state. They just can't.

Simple as that.

A listener whose tax-dollars go to fund the CBC and pay Mr. Enright's salary might have hoped that they might have considered it inappropriate to give an organization dedicated to expunging the Jewish state a forum to air its, ahem, views. But the Ceeb is nothing if not "fair", affording "both sides" in the issue an opportunity to state their case. So on one side of the discussion, the Ceeb offered Amos Oz, the Israeli writer who's been chin-deep in Peace Now doo doo for decades; on the other side, it gave us the Hamas guy. That's what passes for "fairness" these days at the MotherCorpse.

And not only these days. I'm reminded of the story recounted by Irving Abella on the occasion of the 20th anniversary of his book, None Is Too Many. The book detailed the Canadian government's woeful record in refusing to allow in Jewish refugees during WW2. (The title refers to Canadian immigration head's response to the question of how many Jews he thought should be allowed into the country.) Abella recalled that when he wrote the book, he was invited to be a guest on the CBC's mid-day television show (which was cancelled some years ago, a casualty of belt-tightening). He was told that, if he agreed to appear, they would also be inviting someone to speak for "the other side."

"The other side?" said Abella, racking his brain as to who that might be. "You mean...the Nazis?"

Needless to say, he refused the request.

It seems Amos Oz doesn't share Irving Abella's qualms.

Posted by: scaramouche at 14:52 | link | comments

One way street: A Times Online article notes that the Danes are "rueful " about the uncharitable feelings they've been experiencing as a result of the 'toon tummult. As they see it, it's hardly fair for them to be singled out in this way when they've always been so helpful and obliging to Muslims at home and abroad:

THE mood was tense yesterday in Noerrebro, the multi-cultural district of Copenhagen where the Cartoon War began. As TV pictures showed Danes fleeing the Middle East, Jan Smolarczyk complained about how his once-gentle adopted country had been turned upside down.

“Suddenly everyone is asking themselves: are we bad people?”, the 60-year-old Polish-born academic said.

For years, Danes thought tolerance and free thinking would also make them popular; now they see their red and white flag being trampled into the dust. Opinion polls reflected the popular confusion. There has been a surge of support for the right-wing People’s Party, which has been hostile to immigration. The Left Party, which still has some stake in preserving a multicultural society, has also seen a boost in the polls.

Mr Smolarczyk lives only a few blocks away from Kare Bluitgen, the writer whose book The Koran and the life of the Prophet lit the fuse. Mr Bluitgen was no Islamophobe, Mr Smolarczyk said.

He was a typical Danish resident of Noerrebro, which is 80 per cent Muslim. He helped to train the local football team, full of Moroccans and Turks.

“That world — socialist, internationalist Danes helping out foreigners — has been disappearing and it was only last week that we caught up with reality and realised it had disappeared almost completely,” Mr Smolarczyk said. “When I came here, the Danes were open but cold. Now they are closed and very edgy indeed.”

There are 200,000 Muslims in Denmark and the State has been subsidising many of their schools. Islam, in the view of right-wing Danes, secured a privileged position in Denmark and is trying to use it to engineer further change...

What did they expect? Gratitude or something?

Sounds like some Danes (the "unrueful ones?) are having an epiphany-- much like the Dutch had after a seether ritually slaughtered Theo van Gogh-- that the "good will" doesn't seem to flow both ways.

Posted by: scaramouche at 14:14 | link | comments

A web of thieves: Ever wonder where those gazillions of shekels lavished on the P.A. have gone ('cause, as we all know, they certainly haven't paid for hospitals and schools--no, the terrorists fund those infrastructure projects). So does soon-to-be-ex-President Mahmoud Abbas. Now that the Palestinians are living paycheck to paycheck, and can't be assured that the next one's going to be coming in, he cracking down on some (but by no means all) of the thieving miscreants. From The Age:

PALESTINIAN Authority investigators have arrested 25 officials suspected of stealing at least $US700 million ($A935 million) in public funds since the authority was set up in 1994.

The Palestinian attorney-general's office said that another 10 suspects had fled abroad, and with the investigation continuing, the total amount missing could run into billions of dollars.

News of the probe comes less than two weeks after the surprise election victory of the Islamic militant group Hamas, which campaigned against the alleged gross corruption of the former ruling party, Fatah.

Foreign donors who provide the bulk of the authority's funding have long complained that much of the money was being siphoned off by Fatah officials and de facto warlords, who distributed it to their followers or deposited the money abroad.

In December, several big donors cut funds in protest at the authority's decision to give all public servants a 40 per cent pay rise and to hire thousands more "security officers" from the Fatah militias. This was seen as a ploy to buy re-election.

Hamas, which is expected to form a new government later this month, welcomed news of the investigation....

Of course it did. No point in being able to drive the gravy train if all the gravy is gone when you finally get on board.

Posted by: scaramouche at 13:06 | link | comments

No laughing matter: Irshad Manji writes about the Muslim world's inability to locate its collective funny bone, citing its teaching against--no joke--"excessive laughter". She also points out the hypocrisy of 'toon rage. From the National Post (link unavailable):

...Arab elites love such controversies, for they provide convenient opportunites to channel anger away from local injustices. No wonder President Laboud of Lebanon insisted that his country "cannot accept any insult to any religion." That's rich. Since the late 1970s, the Lebanese government has licensed Hezbollah-run satellite television station al-Manar, the most viciously anti-Semitic broadcasters on Earth.

Similarly, the Justice Minister of the United Arab Emirates has said the Danish cartoons represent "cultural terrorism, not freeedom of expression." This from a country that promotes its capital as the "Las Vegas of the Gulf," yet blocks my Web site--muslimrefusenik.com--for being "inconsistent witht he moral values of the UAE." Presumably, my site should be an online casino...

No wonder Irshad feels so out of place in the modern Muslim word. She has a discernable sense of humour and a willingness to be irreverent.

That and being a mouthy anti-anti-Semitic lesbian, of course.

Update: The front page of the Globe and Mail has a photo of a female seether in London holding up the following amusing placard: "Islam says--don't insult other peoples' religions."

Translation: "While we reserve the right to insult your religion, don't you dare insult ours."

Posted by: scaramouche at 12:47 | link | comments

A call for understanding: A Canadian of Danish descent calls upon people to act with tolerance, sensitivity and mutual respect as the 'toon agita continues..

A timely and welcome message indeed.

My attention was immediately drawn, however, to the paragraph in which the writer voices his bewilderment at Denmark being hit so hard. What gives, says the writer, at slamming a nation that's been so supportive of a certain Arab entity much admired in the EU (not to mention one that continues to be propped up by oodles of euros). From the Toronto Star:

...Sadly, but also not surprisingly, extremist Muslims jumped on the matter to inflame the situation. Instead of keeping their eyes on the ball and a legitimate grievance, they have taken the cartoons way out of context and used them as propaganda tools for their intolerant interpretation of Islam. First of all, how can the writing of one newspaper suddenly be assumed to be the responsibility of all Danes, let alone all Europeans? Is it, precisely, one of the definitions of racism, to extend a specific negative to the many?

What is the purpose of the economic boycott? To threaten the livelihood of people with no direct connection to the cartoons? Isn't that a form of economic blackmail? And what do the extremists expect as a satisfactory response? The Danish government has apologized to the Muslim world; is it expected to go on and shut down the newspaper? As Canadians, in a country with similar press laws, we know that this is impossible as a matter of constitution. The reality is that the leaders of the extremists also know this and therefore their demands are intended to create an impasse that will add fuel to the ongoing deterioration of relations between the Muslim world and the West.

As a Canadian, I have been proud of how well the different races and religions get along in our country. Similarly, I have also been proud of Denmark's tradition of defending human rights. Almost ironic in the current situation is that Denmark, together with its fellow Nordic nations, has historically been supportive of the rights of the Palestinians...

"Ironic" isn't the world I would attach to it. "Fitting", more like. Obviously, the writer doesn't understand that the EU's jizya only goes so far. It doesn't, for example, exempt you from feeling the full force of the seether's wrath when you (you lowly infidel) do something they consider blasphemous. (And, as the case of the unflushed-Koran shows, you don't need to do anything at all; there need only be an unsubstantiated rumour that you may have done it. In other words, heads they win, tails you lose.)

Posted by: scaramouche at 12:20 | link | comments

Mob job: The seethers are really upset that the infidels published 'toons of their beloved Prophet, especially that one that showed a bomb in his headgear. They are appalled by the implication that the Prophet is somehow implicated in stirring up violence in the world. And to show their comtempt for such an assertion, they've been threating to chop off infidel heads and have been enganging in "spontaneous" violent protests during which they've torched offending embassasies.

But don't blame Mo for any of this. Why, that would be blasphemous and might cause them get them riled up all over again.

An article in The Guardian describes the "spontaneous" demonstration in Lebanon yesterday, the one which resulted in a toasted Danish embassy. Bear in mind that the people who behave in such a manner have been extremely aggrieved and can't help themselves. Notice, however, that once the "out of control" mob completes its mission, it complies with an order to turn off the anger and get back on the buses that brought them.

It was one of those unpredictable Lebanese Sunday mornings. The ski slopes in the mountains overlooking Beirut would have been crowded with skiers enjoying the brilliant winter sunshine. Walkers were out along the Corniche, strolling in designer tracksuits. Downtown, the chic restaurants were preparing for lunchtime. And there were a few men on scooters riding around town broadcasting an imminent protest.
It wasn't long before the heavily-laden coaches and minivans began to arrive from Beirut and the rest of Lebanon. They were all full of young, often bearded men who wore headbands and carried identical flags with calligraphic inscriptions in Arabic such as: "There is no god but God and Mohammad is his Prophet" and "O Nation of Muhammad, Wake Up."

There were soon as many as 20,000 of them filling the streets. They walked up past the Christian quarter of Gemmayze and into the even more genteel Christian area of Achrafieh, gathering not far from the Danish embassy, the target of their protest. One man waved a placard in English that said: "Damn your beliefs and your liberty." Another carried a sign saying: "Whoever insults Prophet Muhammad is to be killed."

The police seemed to know the demonstrators were coming and had turned out in force with barriers, barbed wire fences and several large fire trucks. Just a day earlier, the Danish and Norwegian embassies in Damascus had been torched by a furious mob, repeating the violent protests that have spread across the world from Gaza to Afghanistan to London. On Saturday night, anticipating trouble, the Danish diplomatic staff in Beirut flew home.

The mob stood in the street, chanting their fierce condemnation of the Danish cartoons that spawned this rapidly-spreading crisis. By 11am, the Lebanese police and army were firing tear gas at the crowd. The protesters threw volleys of stones. Some stuffed cotton wool into their nostrils to stifle the effect of the gas.

One group overturned a car and set it alight. Sunni clerics in robes tried to calm the young men down. They were ignored. One cleric, Ibrahim Ibrahim, said his pleas were met with stones and insults. "They are hooligans," he said.

The mob grew fiercer, and finally the police withdrew. As they moved back, the crowd smashed their way into the building housing the Danish embassy and set it ablaze. From the burning building they hung a banner that read: "We are ready to sacrifice our children for you, O Prophet Muhammad." By now dozens of people had been wounded or arrested and at least one person was killed, a protester apparently caught up in the fire at the embassy building.

The many politicians representing Lebanon's fractured sectarian society sensed this was suddenly a situation a long way out of control. "It is the work of infiltrators," said Saiad Hariri, a prominent Sunni politician. "These acts have nothing to do with the Prophet. They are harming Muslims."

On the street, the riot began to take a more sectarian turn. Throwing the metal barriers and barbed wire aside they chased the police up into the narrow alleys of Achrafieh, well beyond the embassy and deep into the Christian quarter. They smashed dozens of parked cars and tossed bricks through the windows of the furniture boutiques and hair salons. Others overturned two police cars and threw rocks through the windows of the St Maron church.

"What is the guilt of the citizens of Achrafieh for caricatures published in Denmark?" said Charles Rizk, the justice minister and a Christian. "This sabotage should stop."

Asad Harmoush, a leader of Jamaía Islamiya, the conservative Sunni Muslim group that had helped organise the protest, tried to deflect the blame. "We can't control tens of thousands of people. We tried to limit the harm and we extend our excuses to our brothers in Achrafieh and to the security forces. There has to be an investigation. Obviously there were infiltrators."...

And then in the early afternoon, as suddenly as it had all begun, it ended. The leaders of the mob turned to the angry young men beside them and told them it was time to leave. Obediently the crowd thinned out and began walking back to the buses, even as the Danish embassy continued to burn...

Apparently, "infiltrators" is the current Lebanese term for "jihadis".

Update: And what up-to-the-minute technology do  you use to harness the destructive force of primitive minds? According to a story on the front page of the Globe and Mail (unavailable online), you text message them about how some right-wing Danish infidels are getting set to ignite some Korans. At least, that's how they got all the seethers to seethe on cue in Syria and Lebanon. It doesn't matter if such info is fabricated. Lies, truth--it's all the same to them. Witness the ongoing popularity in Arab lands of that Czarist fabrication about the Jews' blueprint for world dominance.