I am Spartacus

The first effective counterstroke in the cultural confrontation between the West and Radical Islam has been fired by Europe. The Guardian reports:

Two leading German newspapers and one of France 's biggest dailies today reprinted the cartoons of the prophet Muhammad that have sparked furore across the Middle East. The 12 drawings were first printed in the Danish daily Jyllands-Posten in September, sparking protests by Muslims against Denmark in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and other countries in the region. The offices of the newspaper were evacuated last night following a bomb threat - a day after the editor in chief apologised to the Muslim world for publishing the cartoons. Islam forbids the human representation of the prophet. Many Muslims were also angry that some of the cartoons appeared to ridicule Muhammad. Die Welt printed on its front page today the drawing of the prophet wearing a turban with a bomb about to explode. "Democracy is the institutionalised form of freedom of expression. There is no right to protection from satire in the west; there is a right to blasphemy" the paper said in an accompanying comment piece.

Commentary
Michael Crichton characterized complex systems in the following way.

We live in a world of complex systems. The environment is a complex system. The government is a complex system. Financial markets are complex systems. The human mind is a complex system---most minds, at least. By a complex system I mean one in which the elements of the system interact among themselves, such that any modification we make to the system will produce results that we cannot predict in advance. Furthermore, a complex system demonstrates sensitivity to initial conditions. You can get one result on one day, but the identical interaction the next day may yield a different result. We cannot know with certainty how the system will respond. Third, when we interact with a complex system, we may provoke downstream consequences that emerge weeks or even years later. We must always be watchful for delayed and untoward consequences.

The first significant notice of the Danish cartoon controversy was carried by Samizdata in November, 2005. The subject was repeatedly touched on in the Brussels Journal, whose Paul Belien describes how an issue on the periphery rapidly gained center stage.

Four months ago to the day, on September 30th, Jyllands-Posten published its twelve Muhammad cartoons. Over the past four months The Brussels Journal, an internet publication, has posted 19 stories about the affair, but the mainstream media (MSM) have – until today – remained conspicuously silent. In the Belgian newspapers and magazines not a single letter has been published about this important story. And when the MSM finally decide to devote some attention to the case it is amazing to see how they manage to get basic facts wrong despite having had loads of time to do their research. The Australian networks SBS reported today that one of the twelve cartoons shows a pig-snouted Mohammed, while our readers know from our article of 14 January that Muslim hate mongerers had added this particular cartoon (and two others) to the original twelve because they did not deem the original cartoons offensive enough. Why do Western journalists repeat the lies of these anti-Western fanatics? Out of incompetence, or worse?

But something unexpected happened. An individual act by a little known Danish politician provided the twist which changed the course of the whole affair.

Meanwhile, one can but admire the courage of Danish Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen. He is one of the very few European politicians with guts. If anyone deserves a prize for his valiant defence of freedom of speech and freedom of the press, it is certainly Mr Rasmussen. He did not give in to pressure from Muslim fanatics, nor from the appeasers at the UN, the European Commission and the Council of Europe. In the past weeks Denmark has shown that all is not yet lost in Europe. If something is rotten now it is not in Denmark. Today conservative Americans have started a “Buy Danish” campaign in support of Copenhagen’s valiant stand. The Danes deserve this. The sale of Danish products in the Middle East has come to a standstill.

When little Denmark stood firm the global Jihad probably believed it was simply another punk European country that needed to be put in its place. Danish ambassadors were summoned to Arab capitals. Fatwas were issued. A boycott of Danish goods was organized. It should have led to predictable results, but as when nearly a hundred years ago "some damn fool thing in the Balkans" happened -- in the least consequential place in the world -- the results were unexpected. The two day old article in Brussels Journal continues:

Meanwhile, today’s raid on the EU offices in Gaza has dragged the EU into an affair it has so far generally tried to ignore. The European ministers of Foreign Affairs discussed the cartoons in Brussels today and condemned threats against Danish and Swedish citizens – since they are EU citizens. “We have expressed a spirit of solidarity with our northern colleagues, as well as our belief and attachment to the freedom of press and the freedom of expression as part of our fundamental values, and the freedom of religious beliefs,” Austrian foreign minister Ursula Plassnik said after the meeting. Her French colleague, Philippe Douste-Blazy added: “We have all declared our solidarity with the Danes.” The EU is also considering bringing the boycott of Danish products before the World Trade Organisation (WTO) because a boycott of Danish products is also a boycott of EU products. EU trade commissioner Peter Mandelson told the Saudi minister of Trade to “convey the seriousness of this issue to his government.” “Any boycott of Danish goods would be seen as a boycott of European goods,” Mr Mandelson said.

Europe discovered how to recognize shame all over again, but it was not the shame which the fatwa issuers had envisioned. Now the choices before the global Jihad are as follows: up the ante and humble Europe in its entirety or back down and eat crow. If they push forward the likeness of Mohammed will probably be plastered on thousands of newspaper and Internet websites before the week is up. It's a no-win situation for the Islamists which no one -- not the Danish cartoonists, nor Ramussen, nor Muslim clerics, nor even the startled Europeans themselves -- could have predicted.


posted by wretchard at 10:04 AM | 93 comments  

Funny how you don't see any other religion rioting upon viewing a caricature of their diety.....

The cartoon crisis continues

More developments on the Mohammed cartoon crisis.

Muhammad cartoon editor is sacked
'No one will draw the Prophet'
London Islamists target Israel, Denmark
Muslim Cartoon Fury Spreads
Anger as papers reprint cartoons of Muhammad
European papers ignore Muslim fury over Danish cartoons
Danish news editor: Dark dictatorships have won

And from the Financial Times, the first warning that this cartoon will lead to more terrorism.

President Hosni Mubarak said the reprinting of the cartoons – originally published by Danish daily Jyllands-Posten, they were reproduced this week in newspapers across Europe – would lead to serious repercussions, inflaming sentiment in the Muslim world and among European Muslim communities. Insensitive handling of the issue, he said, would give more pretexts to extremists and terrorists to carry out attacks. In Saudi Arabia, Prince Nayef, the interior minister and staunch conservative, said the cartoons were an insult to all Muslims, and suggested the Vatican should intervene to put an end to the spread of the cartoons. Tayyip Erdogan, prime minister of Turkey, a European Union candidate country, deemed the cartoons an “attack on our spiritual values”, and called for a limit on press freedom.

Commentary

The statements of Hosni Mubarak and Tayyip Erdogan indicate how deep this cultural division is. At the same time many Europeans -- not most, but many -- are suddenly aware they stand on the edge. If they let Islamic clerics determine what Europeans can and cannot print in their own press through a process of intimidation and force, the Old Continent will have surrendered a large part of its independence and sovereignty. The holy grail of every agitator is to find an issue on which both sides are unalterably opposed. Radical Islam has found it the blasphemy of Mohammed and ironically gave those who would rouse the West a mirror issue of their own: the blasphemy of censorship and the extinction of freedom of speech.

Both sides now are in too deep to climb down without damage. For the European press the path to this confrontation has been imperceptible, absentminded and catastrophic. Yet all so terribly familiar. The old warnings come naturally to mind.

... descending incontinently, fecklessly the stairway that leads to a dark gulf. It is a fine broad stairway at the beginning, but after a bit the carpet ends. A little farther on there are only flagstones, and a little farther on still these break beneath your feet.

The fine, broad highway to Hell that is political correctness which has achieved the opposite of its intent: not the universal chorus of harmony but religious conflict at its most primitive level.

And do not suppose this is the end. This is the beginning of the reckoning. This is only the first sip, the first foretaste of the bitter cup, which will be proffered to us year by year, unless by a supreme recovery of moral health and martial vigour, we rise again and take our stand for freedom as in the olden time.

But the words are only memories. The men who said them are gone and their heirs are not yet found.


posted by wretchard at 11:56 AM | 64 comments  

The other battle of the comics

Anyone looking for tea-leaves to read in battle for hearts and minds in Europe may note that a law which might have prohibited publication of the Danish cartoons was narrowly defeated in the UK. The Brussels Journal reports:

On 31 January 2006 the British House of Commons narrowly defeated – with just 283 votes against 282 – New Labour’s Racial and Religious Hatred Bill, intended to prohibit speech or artistic expressions deemed insulting by religious communities. This was a narrow yet historic victory for freedom of expression, as well as a victory for Parliament against a despotic-minded Government. Liberal-Democratic spokesman Evan Harris commented: “The Government just failed to understand that they can’t take liberties with freedom of expression.” On the occasion of the House of Commons vote, familiar maxims on liberty were aptly invoked in various debates, e.g. against the British Government’s plea that the bill was “necessary” to make multicultural coexistence possible (an argument invoked by governments across Europe to impose similar censorship laws). William Pitt the Younger was quoted: “Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom; it is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves.” Regarding the argument that this curtailment of freedom of speech is only a small concession to an acute societal need, Edmund Burke’s words were repeated: “The true danger is when liberty is nibbled away for expedience and by parts.” Against the argument that many things people say about other religions are ill-informed or prejudiced, Mahatma Gandhi was quoted: “Freedom isn’t worth having if it does not connote the freedom to err.”

One of the heroes of the hour was apparently Mr. Bean. The Times of London reports:

Rowan Atkinson's supporters in Parliament mounted a sophisticated ambush to defeat the Government over its laws against religious hatred. To borrow a phrase from the comedian’s television series Blackadder, they had “a cunning plan”. They realised that only 25 to 30 Labour MPs might rebel and that in a trial of strength with government whips they would lose. So, instead of seeking publicity to gain momentum for a rebellion, they opted for stealth and targeted lobbying. ...

The campaign prised wavering individuals from disparate groups to eke out the narrow victory.  On the defeated side the search for scapegoats has already begun. Fingers are already being pointed at Labour Whip Hilary Armstrong for having failed to carry the measure despite the party's superiority in the House of Commons. The Independent reports:

Downing Street tried to shrug off the defeat as a "one-off" and a "cock-up". Mr Blair's official spokesman said: "It happened. I'm sure every effort will be made to make sure it doesn't happen again." ... Earlier, the Prime Minister's spokesman denied Ms Armstrong was about to be sacked, saying Mr Blair still had "enormous respect" for her. But among Labour MPs there was a general expectation yesterday that Ms Armstrong would be out in the next cabinet reshuffle.

Commentary

As the repeated and unceasing submissions of the European Constitution to the electorate illustrate, it's unlikely that Parliament has seen the last of this issue.

The only quote I could find from Mr. Bean appropriate to the occasion is this: “We are in the stickiest situation since sticky the stick insect got stuck on a sticky bun.”


posted by wretchard at 2:40 PM | 16 comments  

So the Euroweenies won't back down?

Now the fucking US State Department (bunch of pinkie liberals, whole lot should be fired) have come out ON THE MUSLIMS SIDE!  

today.reuters.com/news/newsarticle.aspx?type=topNews&storyid=2006-02-03T171307Z_01_N03197247_RTRUKOC_0_US-RELIGION-CARTOONS-USA.xml

Unfuckingbelieveable.

I guess that "piss christ" would have been more easily managed by catholic groups if they promised to riot and perform acts of terrorism instead of trying to deal with funcing for the NEA.

Quoted: Now the fucking US State Department (bunch of pinkie liberals, whole lot should be fired) have come out ON THE MUSLIMS SIDE!   today.reuters.com/news/newsarticle.aspx?type=topNews&storyid=2006-02-03T171307Z_01_N03197247_RTRUKOC_0_US-RELIGION-CARTOONS-USA.xml Unfuckingbelieveable. I guess that "piss christ" would have been more easily managed by catholic groups if they promised to riot and perform acts of terrorism instead of trying to deal with funcing for the NEA.

Don't make fun of the Muslim's.....you'll get your head chopped off

a buck says this thread is locked before 5:00pm

Thursday, February 02, 2006
Last word on the cartoon crisis

Last word on the cartoon crisis from Sisu quoting Laurence Simon.

I think the Danish ambassador should issue an apology. In the largest Christian church in Saudi Arabia.

Who's to blame for the caricature of Mohammed? According to a cartoon from Bahrain, the Zionists of course. (Volokh Conspiracy)



(From Michelle Malkin) Read this CNN report very carefully:

The international storm over cartoon drawings of the Prophet Mohammad published in European media gathered pace across the Islamic world Thursday with angry demonstrations and the shutting down of the EU office in Gaza City. In Paris, the daily newspaper France Soir fired its managing editor after it republished the caricatures Wednesday, and in Pakistan protesters marched chanting "Death to Denmark" and "Death to France." Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan was quoted as saying the cartoons -- one depicting the founder of Islam wearing a turban resembling a bomb --showed press freedom should have its limits. Muslims consider it sacrilegious to produce a likeness of the Prophet Mohammad. CNN has chosen to not show the cartoons in respect for Islam.

The offending cartoons from the Danish newspaper. All of them. The rest are spurious.




Commentary
Heh.


posted by wretchard at 6:59 PM | 104 comments  

Friday, February 03, 2006
Interesting times

It's possible to regard the cartoon crisis as either a strategic disaster or boon for the War on Terror. The argument for being a disaster is assertion that in the war against extremists it is necessary to win over the moderates. And even if winning them over is impossible one may still be capable of keeping them neutral or indifferent; but at all events to avoid raising the Muslim masses in an emotional war against the West. The Danish cartoon crisis has managed to ignite what the Bush administration hoped to avoid from the beginning: turning the War on Terror into a War with Islam. Now an incident arising from a relatively obscure newspaper in Denmark has forced a choice between the most deeply held of all Western values, freedom of speech, with the cherished strategic goal of keeping the Muslim "street" aboard in the War on Terror.

The argument for regarding the Danish cartoons as a boon is premised on the belief that President Bush's attempt to separate the War on Terror from Islam was doomed to fail anyway; that it was better to face that question now than later. According to this point of view, a view reinforced by the election of Hamas in the Palestinian territories, cultural and religious issues were at the root of international conflict. That mere voting -- in Palestine for example -- would never be sufficient to establish a liberal democracy for as long as the underlying culture remained hostile and aggressive to democracy's roots.

Ralph Peters argued that America's shiny weapons were striking at the wrong targets. The West was, like it or not, engaged in a contest of cultures, one it did not know how to fight.

The suicide bomber's willingness to discard civilization's cherished rules for warfare gives him enormous strength. In the Cain-and-Abel conflicts of the 21st century, ruthlessness trumps technology. We refuse to comprehend the suicide bomber's soul--even though today's wars are contests of souls, and belief is our enemy's ultimate order of battle. We write off the suicide bomber as a criminal, a wanton butcher, a terrorist. Yet, within his spiritual universe, he's more heroic than the American soldier who throws himself atop a grenade to spare his comrades: He isn't merely protecting other men, but defending his god. The suicide bomber can justify any level of carnage because he's doing his god's will. We agonize over a prisoner's slapped face, while our enemies are lauded as heroes for killing innocent masses (even of fellow believers). We continue to narrow our view of warfare's acceptable parameters even as our enemies amplify the concept of total war. ... The hallmark of our age is the failure of belief systems and a subsequent flight back to primitive fundamentalism--and the phenomenon isn't limited to the Middle East. Faith revived is running roughshod over science and civilization. Secular societies appear increasingly fragmented, if not fragile. The angry gods are back. And they will not be defeated with cruise missiles or computer codes. A paradox of our time is that the overwhelmingly secular global media--a collection of natural-born religion-haters--have become the crucial accomplices of the suicide bomber fueled by rabid faith. Mass murderers are lionized as freedom fighters, while our own troops are attacked by the press they protect for the least waywardness or error. One begins to wonder if the bomber's suicidal impulse isn't matched by a deep death wish affecting the West's cultural froth. (What if Darwin was right conceptually, but failed to grasp that homo sapiens' most powerful evolutionary strategy is faith?) Both the suicide bomber and the "world intellectual" with his reflexive hatred of America exist in emotional realms that our rational models of analysis cannot explain. The modern age's methods for interpreting humanity are played out. We live in a new age of superstition and bloodthirsty gods, of collective madness. Its icons are the suicide bomber, the veil, and the video camera. ... We are not (yet) at war with Islam, but the extreme believers within Islam are convinced that they are soldiers in a religious war against us. Despite their rhetoric, they are the crusaders. Even our conceptions of the struggle are asymmetrical. Despite the horrors we have witnessed, we have yet to take religious terrorists seriously on their own self-evident terms. We invaded a succession of their tormented countries, but haven't come close to penetrating their souls. The hermetic universe of the Islamist terrorist is immune to our reality (if not to our bullets), but our intellectuals appear equally incapable of accepting the religious extremist's reality.

Samuel Huntington wrote in a 1993 Foreign Affairs article that the primary driver of international conflicts in the 21st century would be a clash of civilizations.

"It is my hypothesis that the fundamental source of conflict in this new world will not be primarily ideological or primarily economic. The great divisions among humankind and the dominating source of conflict will be cultural. Nation states will remain the most powerful actors in world affairs, but the principal conflicts of global politics will occur between nations and groups of different civilizations. The clash of civilizations will dominate global politics. The fault lines between civilizations will be the battle lines of the future."

This does not mean that all-out hostilities between Islam and the West are unavoidable. But it does imply that cultural conflict and competition is inevitable and that these clashes must be played out on some sort of battlefield, though not necessarily a physical one. The attitude of many Western intellectuals paralyzed by the cult of multiculturalism is ironically that "they don't do culture". Mark Steyn understood that multiculturalism was fundamentally about evading cultural conflicts rather than resolving them. In the New Criterion he wrote: "the great thing about multiculturalism is that it doesn’t involve knowing anything about other cultures—the capital of Bhutan, the principal exports of Malawi, who cares? All it requires is feeling good about other cultures. It’s fundamentally a fraud, and I would argue was subliminally accepted on that basis".

The challenge raised by Peters, Huntington and Steyn is to accept the challenge of a clash of civilizations and find modalities -- preferably peaceful ones -- in which to resolve them.

No one can foresee where the Danish cartoon controversy will lead. At best both sides will return to their lines of departure after having made their points, each with a renewed respect for the other. The West should understand, if it didn't realize it before, that Muslims are willing to fight for their religion. And Muslims should understand, from the cartoon controversy, that whatever they had heard to the contrary it goes double ditto for the West. And in the long run that grudging respect may make the the process of winning over the Muslim moderates easier than feigning the cheap and superficial attitude of multiculturalism. For who in Islam would believe in us if we did not believe in ourselves? Who in Islam could trust that we would fight at their side if we could not defend all that we were, all that we believed?


posted by wretchard at 10:17 AM | 8 comments

We live in a world of complex systems.

We live in a world of man made complexity...........and 90% of it is useless!

CNN has chosen to not show the cartoons in respect for Islam.

My hats off to those EU countries for, after seeing the shitstorm the good and proud Danish recieved from the muslim twits, posting the pics. Wonder if any American paper will have the nuts to post them.

hear is an email I just sent to kurt at the state dept. . I'm probably on some list anyway .

You people are UnFu**ingbelievable . Your going down with headchoppers cause of a simple line drawing of an asshole ?

Quit kissing their ass they hate us I know it , you Know it .

While I was singing "Jesus Loves the little childern yellow black or white they are precious in HIS sight" 40 years ago these idiots TEACH their "people" to hate and you support them . The recent hammas vitory speaks volumes of muslim intent .

"Pissed Christ" Oh yea that Maplethorpe trash is fine for Christians , but a picture of a raghead and you freak ?

If it sounds like I have no respect for muzzies it's because I dont , respect is earned . They havnt done anything to deseve respect ....ever , unless discovering bricks and dirt fills the bill.

Grow some balls Kurt

East of Gaza

"Clinton warns of rising anti-Islamic feeling" -- that's the lead in a Yahoo! News article quoting Agence Press France. The incident former President Clinton refers to is the caricature of Mohammed by cartoonists in a Danish Newspaper.

"So now what are we going to do? ... Replace the anti-Semitic prejudice with anti-Islamic prejudice?" he said at an economic conference in the Qatari capital of Doha. "In Europe, most of the struggles we've had in the past 50 years have been to fight prejudices against Jews, to fight against anti-Semitism," he said. Clinton described as "appalling" the 12 cartoons published in a Danish newspaper in September depicting Prophet Mohammed and causing uproar in the Muslim world. "None of us are totally free of stereotypes about people of different races, different ethnic groups, and different religions ... there was this appalling example in northern Europe, in Denmark ... these totally outrageous cartoons against Islam," he said.

Here's what the fuss is about.

Palestinian gunmen take over EU office to protest Danish cartoons
Danish paper apologizes over Prophet cartoons
‘Deal with Danish offenders strongly’

And so on. I think the Big Pharaoh's view on the issue is somewhat better than former President Clinton's.. He hates the cartoons but doesn't think anyone has the right to forcibly suppress them.

Muslims have the right to protest against the newspaper by writing emails and boycotting it. However, they should not demand that it issues an apology or expect the Danish government to implement some sort of censorship on the paper. In addition, they have the right to boycott Danish products, yet I find this so naive because it only shows how ignorant they are of the mechanics of a developed country where you can disagree with what someone says yet defend his/her right to say it even if what is being said is so outrageous and inflammatory. Besides, what if a single newspaper in all European countries published those 12 cartoons. Will we boycott Europe?! The Jyllands-Posten case is one of those cases that you hate yet you cannot do anything about it. I really wish it hadn't published such terrible cartoons. Even if the case highlighted something in Denmark (the editor said “the cartoons were a test of whether the threat of Islamic terrorism had limited the freedom of expression in Denmark), it only widened the huge current gulf between Islam and the West. Muslims around the world believe that the Westerners have nothing to do except plotting against Islam. The Jyllands-Posten case gave us another reason to believe this myth. I can't end the post without saying: when will we grow up?? The Da Vinci Code did not harm Christianity, 12 cartoons won't harm Islam either!!

Commentary

Zombietime's coverage of the Save Tookie Williams demonstrations features a couple of leftist girls doing a sacramental song and dance they somehow felt appropriate to the occasion of the execution. The words went like this: "We use these hands to touch our clits; we like to come, that's no shit!" No shit, Sherlock. Those of us who are used to leftist ritual, whether they be invitations to listen the Vagina Monologues, offers to sniff at the sacred Chocolate Factory or worship at the altar of infant sacrifice; we the people who have become inured to Robert Mapplethorpe and Piss Christ have come to accept the existence of evil as the necessary consequence of freedom.

And the Lord God planted a garden eastward in Eden; and there he put the man whom he had formed. And out of the ground made the Lord God to grow every tree that is pleasant to the sight, and good for food; the tree of life also in the midst of the garden, and the tree of knowledge of good and evil.

But with that acceptance comes the unceasing struggle to stand on the side of angels when one might cross to the devils. Eternal vigilance is the price of freedom in more ways than one, and its principal battlefield is the human heart. We can tolerate the presence of evil in our midst only if we are prepared to cleave to the good. There was a time this foolish and ugly religion of the Left could have been laughed to scorn; but no longer. We have our Garden still, though we can hardly see it for the weeds.


posted by wretchard at 10:46 PM | 71 comments  

tag

Quoted: CNN has chosen to not show the cartoons in respect for Islam.

Well, I bet it has no trouble with the Washington Post cartoon depicting a quadraplegic soldier begin judged "battle hardened" by Dr. Rumsfeld.  It didn't seem to make a point with me as I always viewed Rummy as a straight shooter that eschews euphemisms.

I'm unsure what value CNN has for me personally anymore.  I don't hate it, I just find it like a "warm" water faucet and quite unappetizing.

This thread is useless without pics.

Saturday, January 28, 2006
Progressive thinking

Two Christian pastors were convicted in Australia for vilifying Islam. The Sydney Morning Herald reports:

In Victoria, two hellfire Christian preachers, Danny Nalliah and Daniel Scot, are facing jail after preaching against Islam in the aftermath of September 11, 2001. Ever since, they've been fighting an action brought by the Islamic Council of Victoria under the state's new Racial and Religious Tolerance Act.

That's not too surprising. Everyone knows Oriana Fallaci is facing charges before an Italian magistrate for her criticisms of Islam. What about this: a French member of parliament has been convicted in court of making derogatory remarks about homosexuality. The The Brussels Journal notes:

Stating that “homosexual behaviour endangers the survival of humanity” and that “heterosexuality is morally superior to homosexuality” can cost you dearly in France. Exactly these opinions, expressed by the French politician Christian Vanneste last year, led to him being sentenced on Tuesday to payment of a heavy fine. A court in Lille [Rijsel in Dutch], in the French northern province of Flanders (adjacent to the Belgian Dutch-speaking region of Flanders), ruled that Mr Vanneste has to pay a fine of 3,000 euro plus 3,000 euro in damages to each of the three gay organisations that had taken him to court. The politician, a member of the French National Assembly for the governing UMP, also has to pay for the verdict to be published in the leftist Parisian newspaper Le Monde, the regional Lille daily La Voix du Nord, and the weekly magazine L’Express.

Again you might say, no surprises here either. But what about this: An Austrian cartoonist is facing charges in Greece for writing a satire on the life of Jesus in his home country. The Guardian reports:

Haderer did not even know that his book, The Life of Jesus, had been published in Greece until he received a summons to appear in court in Athens in January charged with blasphemy. ... "It is unbelievable that a person can write a book in his home country and be condemned and threatened with imprisonment by another," said Nikki Conrad, a human rights expert who organised yesterday's press conference. "But he is not going to just sit back and accept this injustice. He is prepared to take this to the European court of human rights. When Gerhard first got the summons he thought it was a joke. But now he is starting to get a bit nervous."

Whole categories of discourse are now being outlawed in the West. At least two celebrities are fighting this trend, probably because they lead active lives of the mind. One of them is Mr. Bean.

Blackadder star Rowan Atkinson has launched a comedians' campaign against a government bill to outlaw inciting religious hatred. ... Mr Atkinson told a meeting at the House of Commons on Monday night there are "quite a few sketches" he has performed which would come into conflict with the proposed law. He added: "To criticise a person for their race is manifestly irrational and ridiculous but to criticise their religion, that is a right. That is a freedom. The freedom to criticise ideas, any ideas - even if they are sincerely held beliefs - is one of the fundamental freedoms of society."

The other is Michael Crichton. At a speech entitled  "Fear, Complexity, Environmental Management in the 21st Century" that he gave before Washington Center for Complexity and Public Policy, Crichton described one the major unrecognized dangers stalking the world: bad information. Crichton meticulously showed how grossly hysterical coverage of Chernobyl reactor incident, for example, caused deaths far more numerous than the incident itself. He went on to trace the history of public policy fads, Global Cooling, the predicted Y2K meltdown, the Population Bomb, Electromagnetic Fields and so on, and shows how we have nearly forgotten them in our rush to replace them with new ones. We live once again, in Carl Sagan's phrase, in a demon-haunted world.

Commentary
It has been observed that Marxism was itself a religion. It had its martyrs, processions, ritual flagellations, paradises; and other things besides, though they went by other names: but chiefly it had its Inquisitions -- the Great Purges, the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution -- which consumed millions. It is ironic that the single greatest imperative of its ideological heirs is the urge to persecution. At heart political correctness is the rejection of the scientific method. Truth is measured by conformity to the unholy writ. What is the essential difference between these two reactions to blasphemy?



Harvard Chief's Comments on Women Assailed
Washington Post

During nearly four years as president of Harvard University, Lawrence H. Summers has earned a reputation for blunt, sometimes brutal comments. After upsetting African Americans early in his tenure, he has provoked a new storm of controversy by suggesting that the shortage of elite female scientists may stem in part from "innate" differences between men and women. "I felt I was going to be sick," said Nancy Hopkins, a biology professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who listened to part of Summers's speech Friday at a session on the progress of women in academia organized by the National Bureau of Economic Research in Cambridge, Mass. She walked out in what she described as a physical sense of disgust. "My heart was pounding and my breath was shallow," she said. "I was extremely upset."

Mark 14:61-64
King James Bible

14:61 But he held his peace, and answered nothing. Again the high priest asked him, and said unto him, Art thou the Christ, the Son of the Blessed? 14:62 And Jesus said, I am: and ye shall see the Son of man sitting on the right hand of power, and coming in the clouds of heaven. 14:63 Then the high priest rent his clothes, and saith, What need we any further witnesses? 14:64 Ye have heard the blasphemy: what think ye? And they all condemned him to be guilty of death.

Except two thousand years. Blasphemy is the end of argument. The high priest rent his clothes as though it settled something. The West is menaced not only by its declining fertility but by an assault on its intellectual core. We have become as the Ancients whose ideas of freedom went on to illuminate distant generations, but not their own descendants, who hastened to embrace the following dark.


posted by wretchard at 5:33 AM | 159 comments  

If I disappear I didnt mean to !

State dept. auto reply:
Thank you for your question to the U.S. Department of State web site.
Your question has been received and we are working on an answer for
you.


Question Reference #060203-000292
---------------------------------------------------------------
         Summary: Kurtis Cooper
Category Level 1: Foreign Policy
Category Level 2: Expressing Foreign Policy Opinions
    Date Created: 02/03/2006 03:03 PM
    Last Updated: 02/03/2006 03:03 PM
          Status: Unresolved

Re-reading William Manchester's "Alone"

In popular memory there was no interval between the end of the British policy of Appeasement towards Hitler and the new resolution ushered in by Winston Churchill. But in fact there was a phase known as the Phoney War during which Britain was technically at war with Nazi Germany without engaging in major operations against it. The Phoney War spanned the period from September 1939 to May 1940 -- the Fall of France -- and marked a time when though Appeasement had died its ghost had not yet been laid to rest. In addition to the natural fear of incurring mass casualties by confronting the Wehrmacht, some in Britain like Lord Halifax and perhaps Chamberlain himself, still Prime Minister, hoped that Hitler would not attempt the Maginot Line and turn his energies East.

Although today it is fashionable to think of Appeasement as the political embodiment of cowardice it was coldly calculated to bring the Dictators into conflict and -- so Chamberlain hoped -- into annihilating each other. By selling out Austria in the Anchluss, the Czechs in the Sudetendland and nearly betraying Poland over the Danzig corridor Chamberlain was tempting Hitler ever further east into what he hoped would be an eventual clash with the other monster, Joseph Stalin. He did not reckon that evil, while coarse, is surpassingly cunning. The announcement of the Molotov-Ribbentrop nonagression pact on August 23, 1939, just a week before Poland was finally invaded by both Hitler and Stalin, made plain to Chamberlain that he had been outwitted. If Britain intended to drive Hitler East, Stalin had instead turned Hitler West. Nothing remained to Chamberlain and Britain's enervated armed forces but to gather up the tatters of their strategy and huddle behind the army of France. Having staked everything on diplomatically containing Hitler while neglecting Britain's defense -- not provoking Hitler was a deemed essential for diplomacy to succeed -- Chamberlain had no Plan B. He had wagered all and lost. Churchill assumed the Prime Ministership the day Hitler raced his armies across France. Every catastrophe he had warned against had come to pass. And he was finally handed the reins in haste by the very men who had taken Britain to the edge of precipice, its armies trapped on the continent, its allies smashed, its air force outnumbered; desperate and alone.

It is an old and familiar story which bears repeating because it illustrates how far leaders can be trapped by webs of their own making. Like the politicians of the 1930s the leaders of the West after September 11 each made their own calculation. In America's case it took the shape of thinking that it could make common cause with the most enlightened elements of Islamic civilization against fundamentalist extremists who were vying for Islam's soul. The strategy for achieving this goal, though reviled as simplistic, was anything but: America would not pick a fight with Islam itself. Rather it would make itself Islam's friend, ally with its most moderate elements, overthrow its worst oppressors and enlist the aid of the Muslim everyman against the Osama Bin Ladens of the world. In practice it would build a web of relationships with intelligence services, soldiers, intellectuals and politicians in Islamic countries who would provide the information and in cases the manpower to hunt down fundamentalist villains. The War on Terror would be to wars what Smart Bombs were to bombs. It would destroy the miscreants while leaving the surrounding structure untouched. It may be that Europe's calculation was more cynical. But it was equally sophisticated. It would pursue a policy of Appeasement which  like Chamberlain's was calculated to drive one nuisance against another, pitting America against Islamic fundamentalism in the hopes that one would wear the other out. And the key to Europe's establishing its bona fides with Islamic countries was to make nice at every opportunity; avoid giving offense; be lavish with aid; open to immigration and obstructive to America at every turn. Like the appeasers of the 1930s it paid for its diplomatic strategy by systematically weakening itself.

The crisis over the Danish cartoons depicting the prophet Mohammed has ironically struck the weakest point of both strategies. At present the crisis is not a danger to the grand strategies of either. But as the days pass the danger grows that it may get out of hand; that some Islamic cell may detonate a bomb in Europe or some skinhead burn a mosque. And then the consequences may incalculable. For America an open antipathy between the West and Islam would destroy its carefully crafted attempt to ally itself with the Muslim street. It would place Washington in the intolerable position of having to choose between its old European allies and its newfound friends in the Middle East and Central Asia. For Europe the consequences would be no less disastrous because in following the policy of Appeasement its leaders have risked falling so far behind their publics that they now find themselves unable to steer the course of popular events. Europe is angry and Chirac, like Chamberlain after the Sudeten crisis, is too far behind the curve of popular opinion to seize its leadership. Chamberlain understood it and brought Churchill into his cabinet to bolster his credentials when he himself had none.

The Dutch blog Zacht Ei shows how far things have come in the space of a few days.

In a move which is both courageous and stupid, Dutch blogger 'Reet' (a Dutch colloquialism for 'ass') of the blog 'Retecool' (a Dutch colloquialism for, er, "really" cool) has started a Photoshop contest in which participants create parodies of Mohammed. The contest can be viewed here (a mirror can be found here).

A contest to humiliate Mohammed has been launched not in Texas, not in Israel but in the Netherlands. The Netherlands. Almost inconceivable. A smoldering match in a continent riddled with unassimilated Muslim enclaves. Now the European leaders who staked their careers on political correctness and oleagenous kowtowing to radical Islam find themselves unable to assert themselves. It's a moment when Nicolas Sarkozy or Hirsi Ali may count for more in dampening the anti-Mohammed wave than Chirac or Dominique de Villepin. The key challenge for the leaders of Europe is how to get out in front of their publics; hard because they are so far behind.

Yet the cartoon crisis has been cruelest to radical Islam because it has upset the timetable for the slow demographic conquest of Europe. It forced the crisis before the time was ripe to win an outright trial of strength. And it has deranged the carefully crafted plan to hold Europe politically neutral while the Islamists concentrated their force on their most dangerous enemy, the United States. Unless the Islamists can reverse or at least pause the process of confrontation it will find itself engaged on two fronts, against Europe and the United States simultaneously.

Like all historical comparisons this one is inexact. The world of the late 1930s can never be compared to the opening decade of the 21st century. Nazism is not Islam nor is Hitler Osama Bin Laden. But I think some valid correspondences still remain between the Phoney War and the period between September 11 to the present. Both are marked by an attempt to maintain a disintegrating status quo long after it became imperative to exchange it for a new model of relationships. Both are marked by miscalculation as political leaders find themselves struggling to overtake the tide of events. Both mark the end of the last boundaries between the familiar and the dark, unknown future. What did Churchill feel, one wonders, in those desperate days when he did not know the end yet went on?

‘I wonder what sort of a tale we’ve fallen into?’  said Sam. ‘I wonder,’ said Frodo. ‘But I don’t know. And that’s the way of a real tale… The people in it don’t know…’ ‘The old stories! Why, to think of it, we’re in the same tale still! It’s going on. Don’t the great tales never end?’ ‘No, they never end as tales,’ said Frodo. ‘But the people in them come, and go when their part’s ended.’ ‘You and I, Sam, are still stuck in the worst places of the story, and it is all too likely that some will say at this point: “Shut the book now, dad; we don’t want to read any more.”’

posted by wretchard at 2:17 AM| 110 comments  

I'm too lazy to look around, anyone got a link to the cartoons?

Quoted: I'm too lazy to look around, anyone got a link to the cartoons?

Scroll up to post #10...

tag,

if nobody else has posted it, here is a link to the story of the Danish embasssy in Syria being burned to the ground.

news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/4681294.stm


Thanks for the links to excellent commentary, ArmdLbrl.  I hope nobody gets this thread locked, since it is full of great information.

This should be enought to justify the total distruction of the Muslim culture.

Those scamps. They are photoshopping that cartoon now!

Quoted: Those scamps. They are photoshopping that cartoon now! img.photobucket.com/albums/v732/pcsutton/Muahammadfat-woman.jpg

Sunday, February 05, 2006
Unintended consequences

The cartoon crisis shifted course ever so slightly as the White House held Syria responsible for the burning of the Danish and Norwegian embassies in Damascus. The Washington Post quoted presidential press secretary Scott McClellan as he read a statement from Crawford:

"We will hold Syria responsible for such violent demonstrations since they do not take place in that country without government knowledge and support ... The government of Syria's failure to provide protection to diplomatic premises, in the face of warnings that violence was planned, is inexcusable."

The embassy attacks were ostensibly the outcome of Muslim outrage at the depiction of Mohammed by a Danish newspaper, a representation considered blasphemous. But the direction of the crisis has been nudged from the outset by groups hoping to turn its emotionally explosive content to their purposes. The Guardian describes how radical Imams took four month-old embers and fanned them into flames.

What should have remained a parochial row was to blow up into an international incident, largely because of the perceived obdurate response of Denmark's centre-right prime minister, Anders Fogh Rasmussen. On October 19 ambassadors from Islamic countries, including Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Iran, demanded a meeting. They wanted the paper prosecuted. The PM gave them the brush-off, arguing that his government could not interfere with the right to free speech. At this point a group of ultra-conservative Danish imams decided to take matters into their own hands, setting off on an ambitious tour of Saudi Arabia and Egypt with a dossier containing the inflammatory cartoons. According to Jyllands-Posten, the imams from the organisation Islamisk Trossamfund took three other mysteriously unsourced drawings as well, showing Muhammad with the face of a pig; a dog sodomising a praying Muslim; and Muhammad as a paedophile. "This was pure disinformation. We never published them," Lund complained. But the campaign worked. Outwardly the row appeared to be calming down. But in Muslim cyber-chatrooms, on blogs, and across the internet, outrage was building fast.

But fire once kindled can take on a life of its own. The demands for apologies and the deluge of threats against Denmark created the opportunity for a pushback which some were quick to seize. Guardian account continues.

Outraged by what they regarded as Denmark's "caving in", several rightwing European newspapers decided it was time to demonstrate solidarity. On Wednesday, France Soir republished the caricatures under the defiant headline: "Yes, We Have the Right to Caricature God" - a gesture that led to the sacking of the paper's editor the next day. Separately, Germany's Die Welt slapped the turban-bomb Muhammad cartoon on its front page.

On February 1 the flames had spread to the Internet. The cartoon issue, which did not register on the Technorati blog search index on January 31, became within 24 hours topics 1, 2, 3. As of this writing it threatening to solidly block out the top five.


But embassy burnings in Syria provided the opportunity for the White House to re-secularize what was rapidly becoming a religious and cultural conflict. The White House seized the chance to point out these arsons were not religious outpourings but deliberate acts of a State -- the Assad regime to be exact -- a State with bitter enemies throughout the Islamic world, thereby harnessing the charged climate of public opinion to advance its strategic agenda. It's reasonable to surmise that the first victim of the frisson that ran through Europe has already been Iran. Opposition within the IAEA to referring Teheran to the Security Council over its uranium enrichment program suddenly collapsed -- almost unnoticed -- as the furor over the cartoons rose to a screeching pitch.

February 5, 2006 ... The United Nations' atomic energy watchdog voted in Vienna yesterday to report Iran to the UN Security Council, setting the stage for a possible international showdown with Tehran over its nuclear program. ... The landmark 27-to-3 decision by the International Atomic Energy Agency capped months of wrangling by the body's 35-member board and paved the way for possible economic or political sanctions against Iran by the powerful 15-member Security Council.

One of the things which may contributed to this lopsided vote was the sudden European realization, on account of the cartoon crisis, that things were serious, that the hour was late. And for that we may ultimately have to thank Islamisk Trossamfund.


posted by wretchard at 5:13 AM | 24 comments  

Here is an intersting comparison between the British police response to the pro-fox hunt protests and the radical Muslim protests

Vito, your cops are weird.

Quoted: Those scamps. They are photoshopping that cartoon now! img.photobucket.com/albums/v732/pcsutton/Muahammadfat-woman.jpg

Should send that to a tabloid in Europe.

February 04, 2006
More lies from Danish Imams (Updated 2/5)
Last Friday the CT Blog revealed how a delegation of Danish Muslims, led by Copenhagen imam Abu Laban, toured the Middle East in December and showed fabricated cartoons depicting the Prophet Mohammed in a very offensive fashion, even though the pictures had never appeared on Jyllands Posten.

The controversy has now exploded in Denmark. Friday night Danish public television, DR, ran two interesting stories about Abu Laban, the man who organized the delegation's trip to the Middle East. While the first profiled him, showing his extensive links to the Egyptian group Gamaa Islamiya, the second showed his double-talk. Abu Laban, in fact, was first shown speaking on Danish television condemning the boycott of Danish goods (in English), then shown interviewed on al Jazeera, cheerfully commenting on the effectiveness of the boycott (in Arabic). To see the stories go to DR's website, click on "Se TV AVISEN" on the right and select the news broadcast from Friday, Feb. 3, at 9 PM (the stories start on the 23rd minute).

Moreover, Andy Cochran has just made available to me the English translation of the Arabic letter that the Danish Muslim delegation presented during their tour of the Middle East. To see the document, irrefutable proof of the delegation's intent to create animosity, click here: Download danish_letter.pdf

UPDATE 2/5: The original files in Arabic and Danish, first published in the Danish daily Ekstra Bladet, can be found here.

Posted by Lorenzo Vidino at 09:11 PM | Permalink | TrackBack (2)

I do not know if anyone here reads from FARK.com or not but its a page of news from around the world.  They have photshop contest on pics and what not along with headline news.  WEll I just got done with one and waiting for them to upload the pic.  I think this whole thing is quite funny.  Sometimes you just need to see the humor in life.  

Fark.com

IF this is against COC just remove my post dont lock the thread.  

Fark.com photoshop contest

And my 5 minute job being uploaded to Fark.com contest!

Today, the Danish consulate in Beirut, Lebanon was torched.

news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/4682560.stm




... and Iran threatened to stop selling oil to Denmark.  That last one made me laugh.  Yeah - whatever.  Force us to buy our oil for Norway, and develop our windpower farms even more (Denmark is the world leader in windpower technology)  - then we'll see who laughs in the long run.  

Quoted: I do not know if anyone here reads from FARK.com or not but its a page of news from around the world.  They have photshop contest on pics and what not along with headline news.  WEll I just got done with one and waiting for them to upload the pic.  I think this whole thing is quite funny.  Sometimes you just need to see the humor in life.   Fark.com IF this is against COC just remove my post dont lock the thread.

Not to pick on you or anything, but since almost ALL of the other thread have been locked, I'd rather we didn't take the chance with this one, since it is such a great thread with so much info.  let's not ruin it with pictures or statements that may get it locked.

Quoted: ... and Iran threatened to stop selling oil to Denmark.  That last one made me laugh.  Yeah - whatever.  Force us to buy our oil for Norway, and develop our windpower farms even more (Denmark is the world leader in windpower technology)  - then we'll see who laughs in the long run.

I had the assumption that you were able to supply yourself with oil? How much do you have to import? And BTW, windpower sucks - go nuclear.

Here's an email a guy in Turkey sent to Instapundit

Evidently there were "hundreds of demonstrators" at the Danish consulate here today. (I missed it; I was happily oblivious until I read the news.) Now, "hundreds of protestors" never congregate in Istanbul without government sanction. There is no such thing as freedom of assembly here; if you're out protesting, it's because the government authorized it, period. So Denmark and Turkey are going to be part of one big happy EU family? Sure thing. Tell that to the Danish diplomats cowering in their consulate in Istanbul and nervously reviewing the fire escape plans. Oh, and someone shot a Catholic priest in Ankara today, too. Not clear yet whether it was related. That said, "hundreds of protestors" isn't that much in a city of 10 million, and when I went out today everyone seemed to be their normal friendly selves, including the Islamist grocers down the street, who have never been anything but pleasant to me. So don't be put off if you're thinking of visiting, Istanbul is still great, and very safe. (Almost certainly safer than London: I have no doubt that if the protestors get too frisky here, the government will mow them down like dogs.)

I dunno if that priest mentioned there is the same one that was shot dead in this article near the Black Sea. One is happenstance, twice is enemy action. Hey, if they want to declare war on the Catholic Church directly, fine by me. We've done this whole holy war thing before guys.

Also, read this: michellemalkin.com/archives/004465.htm

The Imam here is the guy that added three cartoons to the 12 when distributing letters to Muslim governments. He felt the 12 weren't offensive enough.

Jonathon Hunt: So, you want a new set of rules for the way Western Europe lives? Imam Ahmad Abu Laban: Yes.

And there you have it folks.

Quoted: Quoted: ... and Iran threatened to stop selling oil to Denmark.  That last one made me laugh.  Yeah - whatever.  Force us to buy our oil for Norway, and develop our windpower farms even more (Denmark is the world leader in windpower technology)  - then we'll see who laughs in the long run.   I had the assumption that you were able to supply yourself with oil? How much do you have to import? And BTW, windpower sucks - go nuclear.

I'm not sure - but I do know that there are a lot of StatOil filling stations in Denmark   But Denmark definitely does have it own oil and natural gas, just not anywhere near as much as Norway.

(Don't get me started however- a lot of people are still bitter about the oil fields that are in a part of territory that Danmark agreed to give to Norway many years ago - people still HATE the minister that signed that treaty, and many suspect he was drunk when he did).


... and for some reason Denmark has a dislike for nuclear.  ALthough we actually had nuclear reactors for a long time (mostly for scientific and exprimental purposes).  I actually got to see the reactor of one of them, since I visited - back in my high school dats when I thought I was going to be a physicist - and they had the top off for maintenance, so I got to look into it.  Very cool stuff, when you are a kid.

I guess a campaign could be started in which the comics are printed out, fax numbers in Islamic countries randomly pulled up in a google search and then just fax the bajeezus out of these overly sensitive Islamic types and let them know that we'll draw all the damn cartoons of the prophet that we please.

All the interesting press commentaries repeated above are by the European press while the American press has nothing to say about the matter.  

IS THE LIBTARD US PRESS IS SILENTLY EATING CROW?

The Philly paper printed sample(s) of the offending cartoons.

Quoted: An Indian newspaper columnist  'Gets' it' so why can't the West?

Given the problems that India faces from its ROP population, it is not suprising that the Hindus 'get it'.

I can't believe where this cartoon is showing up. It doesn't even make sense most of the time. Case and point,  the site Publicliterature.org .

Quoted: i1.tinypic.com/nb2974.gif

+INFINITY

Quoted: i1.tinypic.com/nb2974.gif

Nice summation.


In other news, a hot-dog vendor in Denmark was attacked and beaten with a bat by two muslim youths today, for selling "unclean meat"






I don't think those guys realize that if you mess with our hot-dogs, then the gloves will come off!!  

Quoted: Quoted: i1.tinypic.com/nb2974.gif</a> Nice summation. In other news, a hot-dog vendor in Denmark was attacked and beaten with a bat by two muslim youths today, for selling "unclean meat" I don't think those guys realize that if you mess with our hot-dogs, then the gloves will come off!!

Buddy, I am sorry you and your people are going through that shit.

I wonder about this world at times, I really do.

tag
good thread