Krauthammer nails it on THE cartoons.

*****

Curse of the Moderates

By Charles Krauthammer
Friday, February 10, 2006; A19

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.

[...]

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The LA Times runs a background piece on Michael Yon in their "Column One" feature today. At least Yon is getting some well deserved recognition for his firsthand reporting from the streets of Iraq. He provides a much needed perspective that is sorely missing in the MSM accounts.

Lone Gun War Reporting
LA Times [Link good today without free registration may change by tomorrow]

At least the LA Times ran the piece but Winds of Change's Armed Liberal thinks it's a little lame. It's not a barn burner. I think this is a case of not that the dog talks well but that the dog talks at all!

*****

This Is Gonna Piss Off The Blogs...
by Armed Liberal at February 9, 2006 03:27 PM

The LA Times today has a Page 1, Column 1 article on journalist/blogger Michael Yon.

It's an interesting 'personality' article about him; not very deep or analytical - and not much news that those who haven't followed him in the blogs won't know.

Pretty unexceptional, I'd say.
Then again, there's the headline.

Lone Gun in War Reporting

Michael Yon's blog made him a hero among backers of the effort in Iraq. As his profile grew, so did debate on the quality of his work.

Boy, you'd think the story would go deeply into the wide-ranging debate on the specific quality of his work. Instead, we get the Carl Prine quote that was widely circulated around the blogs:

"As someone who has seen a great deal of combat in my life and who earns his daily bread as a reporter," Prine opined on the Internet, "I can assure you that a lot of what Michael Yon writes is misleading, inaccurate and vapid."

That's it; that's the sum of the debate we're shown in the article.

[...]

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Things just keep popping up re Saddam's WMDs went to Syria in the run up to the Iraq war. I've commented on this before. We now have General Sadda's new book and John Loftus is making the rounds re tapes that he will unveil later this month. Coupled with these is the immense backlog of documents that were seized Iraq needing translation.

The Saddam Regime was just like the Nazis and kept very detailed documentation of their attrocities. I've mentioned before it reminds me of the final scene in the first Indiana Jones movie showing the Arc of Covenent being stored away in some vast governmental warehouse.

*****

Congress's Secret Saddam Tapes

BY ELI LAKE - Staff Reporter of the Sun
February 7, 2006
URL: http://www.nysun.com/article/27110

The House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence is studying 12 hours of audio recordings between Saddam Hussein and his top advisers that may provide clues to the whereabouts of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction.

The committee has already confirmed through the intelligence community that the recordings of Saddam's voice are authentic, according to its chairman, Rep. Peter Hoekstra of Michigan, who would not go into detail about the nature of the conversations or their context. They were provided to his committee by a former federal prosecutor, John Loftus, who says he received them from a former American military intelligence analyst.

Mr. Loftus will make the recordings available to the public on February 17 at the annual meeting of the Intelligence Summit, of which he is president. On the organization's Web site, Mr. Loftus is quoted as promising that the recordings "will be able to provide a few definitive answers to some very important - and controversial - weapons of mass destruction questions." Contacted yesterday by The New York Sun, Mr. Loftus would only say that he delivered a CD of the recordings to a representative of the committee, and the following week the committee announced that it was reopening the investigation into weapons of mass destruction.

The audio recordings are part of new evidence the House intelligence committee is piecing together that has spurred Mr. Hoekstra to reopen the question of whether Iraq had the biological, chemical, and nuclear weapons American inspectors could not turn up. President Bush called off the hunt for those weapons last year and has conceded that America has yet to find evidence of the stockpiles.

Mr. Hoekstra has already met with a former Iraqi air force general, Georges Sada, who claims that Saddam used civilian airplanes to ferry chemical weapons to Syria in 2002. Mr. Hoekstra is now talking to Iraqis who Mr. Sada claims took part in the mission, and the congressman said the former air force general "should not just be discounted." Mr. Hoekstra also said he is in touch with other people who have come forward to the committee - Iraqis and Americans - who claim that the weapons inspectors may have overlooked other key sites and evidence. He has also asked the director of national intelligence, John Negroponte, to declassify some 35,000 boxes of Iraqi documents obtained in the war that have yet to be translated.

"I still believe there are key individuals who have not been debriefed and there are key sites that have never been investigated. I know there are 35,000 boxes of documents that have never been translated. I am frustrated," Mr. Hoekstra said.

[...]

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HT Omar - Iraq the Model

Omar has some interesting insight re THE cartoons.

*****

I have refrained from writing about the Danish cartoons issue, not because it doesn't concern me but rather because too mush has been written about it and I didn't feel like I would be adding something new to the discussion.

However I couldn't resist commenting on some of the most unacceptable reactions by some Muslims…more precisely by some Iraqis.

We have all seen common people protesting in the streets of different countries and we heard many condemnations from governments but as far as I know, not a single Muslim government took any action, except for one…Iraq's!

We have a piece of wisdom here that says "The bird got mad at the grain field!" which as you can see means that sometimes people make stupid decisions that can harm only their own interests yet they think that by doing what they did they would harm those they're boycotting.
This saying applies to all Muslim countries in general and to our interim government in particular.

Our brilliant transportation minister Salam al-Maliki who is a Sadrist by the way announced that his ministry will suspend all projects and contracts with Denmark and Norway and said that Iraq will stop accepting any donations or offers concerning Iraq's reconstruction! Who are they harming by doing this? Denmark? No…they are harming no one but Iraq and Iraqis.

I give up! I have to comment on the general situation…
I swear that 90%+ of the protestors in Muslim countries have not seen the cartoons and do not know the name of the paper and when I say that I'm sure of it because I have access to the web 24/7 and I spent a really long time searching for the cartoons and couldn’t find them until a friend emailed me a link and.

You know that those cartoons were published for the 1st time months ago and we here in the Middle East have tonnes of jokes about Allah, the prophets and the angels that are way more offensive, funny and obscene than those poorly-made cartoons, yet no one ever got shot for telling one of those jokes or at least we had never seen rallies and protests against those infidel joke-tellers.

What I want to say is that I think the reactions were planned to be exaggerated this time by some Middle Eastern regimes and are not mere public reaction. And I think Syria and Iran have the motives to trigger such reactions in order to get away from the pressures applied by the international community on those regimes.

However, I cannot claim that Muslim community is innocent for there have been outrageous reactions outside the range of Syria's or Iran's influence but again, these protests and threats are more political than religious in nature.

One last thing, even if the entire EU apologizes it won't change a thing; fanatics in our countries here had always considered the west their infidel arrogant crusader enemy and no apology no matter how big or sincere can change that.

Link to ITM

HT The American Thinker
February 7th, 2006

The emphasis on regime change to deal with a soon-to-be nuclear armed Iran looks like a repeat of our short-sighted strategy in dealing with Saddam Hussein. Astute analysts in the pages of the American Thinker have suggested strategies that essentially focus on Ahmadinejad and the mullahs: encouraging rebellion by the Iranian people concurrent with a Coalition bombing campaign to step up the pressure on the Iranian leadership to effect a regime change.

[...]

The missing element in all of this strategy is of course, a conventional combined arms and services assault into selected areas of Iran. One experienced intelligence officer has reminded us of the absolute requirement to commit ground forces to ensure success against the mullahs. Paul Levian, a former member of German intelligence (Bundesnachrichtendienst), writes in the Asia Times that the most likely scenario is a massive land, naval, and air campaign to deal the mullahs a death blow by destroying their forces in the field and seizing their economic center of gravity. He reveals how the Russians and Chinese see the battle developing:

An initial Israeli air attack against some Iranian nuclear targets, command and control targets and Shahab missile sites. Iran retaliates with its remaining missiles, tries to close the Gulf, attacks US naval assets and American and British forces in Iraq. If Iranian missiles have chemical warheads (in fact or presumed [as previously I noted were present on the island of Abu Musa – DH]), the US will immediately use nuclear weapons to destroy the Iranian military and industrial infrastructure. If not, an air campaign of up to two weeks will prepare the ground campaign for the occupation of the Iranian oil and gas fields. [emphasis added

[...]

The character of this war will be completely different from the Iraq war. No show-casing of democracy, no “nation-building”, no journalists, no Red Cross – but the kind of war the United States would have fought in North Vietnam if it had not had to reckon with the Soviet Union and China.

On this point he is absolutely spot on. Regardless of how the battle develops, our divisions and regiments must be cut loose to win the fight. And this time, leave the aid agencies and the beltway governance types at home.

Douglas Hanson is the national security correspondent of The American Thinker. He is currently overseas supporting GWOT operations.

Read it All

HT Instapundit

SPIEGEL INTERVIEW WITH AYAAN HIRSI ALI

'Everyone Is Afraid to Criticize Islam'

Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the Dutch politician forced to go into hiding after the murder of filmmaker Theo van Gogh, responds to the Danish cartoon scandal, arguing that if Europe doesn't stand up to extremists, a culture of self-censorship of criticism of Islam that pervades in Holland will spread in Europe. Auf Wiedersehen, free speech.

SPIEGEL: Hirsi Ali, you have called the Prophet Muhammad a tyrant and a pervert. Theo van Gogh, the director of your film "Submission," which is critical of Islam, was murdered by Islamists. You yourself are under police protection. Can you understand how the Danish cartoonists feel at this point?

Hirsi Ali: They probably feel numb. On the one hand, a voice in their heads is encouraging them not to sell out their freedom of speech. At the same time, they're experiencing the shocking sensation of what it's like to lose your own personal freedom. One mustn't forget that they're part of the postwar generation, and that all they've experienced is peace and prosperity. And now they suddenly have to fight for their own human rights once again.

[...]

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HT Dr. Zin - Regime Change Iran

Nah! Who'd have thought the Mullahs would pull the wool over the eyes of the IAEA.

*****

Dow Jones Newswires:

Iran used negotiations with the European Union to play for time and has now achieved the "capability to develop nuclear weapons and the means to deliver them," a senior Bush administration official said Monday. At a news conference at the Foreign Press Center, Robert G. Joseph, the undersecretary of state for arms control, cited "tremendous resources" as well as a "very sophisticated, a very advanced scientific and technical community" as helpful to Iran.

[...]


Joseph took it a step further. "I would say that Iran does have the capability to develop nuclear weapons and the means to deliver them," he said in a response to a question.

With the Europeans having declared two years of negotiations with Iran at a dead-end, Joseph said "there is no end of diplomacy" and that taking Iran to the Security Council was "moving diplomacy to the next level."

"We are giving every chance to diplomacy to work," Joseph said.

At the same time, the official said, "No options are off the table. We cannot tolerate a nuclear-armed Iran."

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I did not see this this episode of Las Vegas that aired yesterday. See this excerpt from a fan site:

[Urban Legend]
Originally aired: Monday February 6, 2006 on NBC
Writer: Gary Scott Thompson
Director: David Solomon
Show Stars: James Caan (Edward "Big Ed" Melvin Deline), Vanessa Marcil (Samantha "Sam" Jane Marquez), Nikki Cox (Mary Connell), Josh Duhamel (Danny McCoy), Molly Sims (Delinda Deline), James Lesure (Mike Cannon)
All Guest Stars: Jimmie Johnson (Himself)
Production Code: 315

It seems like a Las Vegas urban legend has come true when a hotel guest wakes up missing a kidney. Sam and Ed have to deal with a high roller who has a problem with sweaty hands. The Montecito hosts a car convention.

Don't know if this is a parody on the urban legend of kidney harvasting. Common thread is that victim ends up in hotel room in an ice-filled bathtub. On the mirror is a scrawled message to call "911." Victim has fresh surgical incission and is missing a kidney.

I was alerted to this episode by "The Admiral" who had just watched it with a friend. Friend of course believed this to be true and cited sources where such incidents have occurred.

Well folks this is and continues to be an URBAN LEGEND no matter what the screenwriters write:

For further on how this myth has evolved since the early 90s see this link:

Snopes

Drugged travelers awaken in ice-filled bathtubs only to discover one of their kidneys has been harvested by organ thieves.

HT Counterterrorism Blog

A Must Read!

*****

THE CARTOON OFFENSIVE...

Walid Phares

- Brussels, the European Parliament

- PART ONE -

"In my religion" said Imam abu Laban, leading Muslim cleric of Denmark , “drawing images of Prophet Muhammad is forbidden.” In my country, said the editor in chief of Jyllands Posten “there is a freedom of press.” The BBC TV forum was attempting to educate its vast public worldwide about the Cartoon drama. Unfortunately, the debate left viewers in greater disarray. The anchor seemed to ignore why theological Cartoons are offensive to Muslims to start with, but also missed why secular democracies are clashing with their antithesis. World media, and behind them their respective Governments have been reacting to television images rather than to direct knowledge. The crisis of the “offensive cartoons” has in fact become a “cartoons offensive.” Here is why:

[...]

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HT Instapundit

Islamic Depictions of Mohammed Throughout History

This is an interesting site that archives historical Islamic paintings and drawings of Mohammed throughout history. Most are Persian, Turkish, Indian, Afghan and Mongolian. The webpage also covers European medieval depictions of Mohammed, and a few contemporary images in print, literature, art and media. Some I have seen before, many are new to me.

And here is Wikipedia's article on the subject, where you can view the original images, published on Jyllands-Posten, that caused the uproar with plenty of related links.

I only saw these images of Muslim protestors in London today. For the life of me, I cannot understand how the British police let those demonstrators get away with it. The protestors are blasting free speech in Europe, yet they are using that same free speech to call for murder and bloodshed. I would strongly support deporting those people back to the miserable societies they originally came from.

I will try to comment further on the subject very soon.

Link

HT In the Bullpen

U.S. Newspaper Prints Mohammad Cartoons

After wishy-washy comments from Condi Rice concerning the 12 Mohammad cartoons, finally a strong reply from a U.S. newspaper. “The Philadelphia Inquirer, one of the few U.S. newspapers to publish a caricature of the Prophet Mohammad from a series that sparked a wave of protests by Muslims, defended the action on Sunday by saying it was just doing its job.”

[...]

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HT Austin Bay

We are all Danes now

By Jeff Jacoby, Globe Columnist | February 5, 2006

HINDUS CONSIDER it sacrilegious to eat meat from cows, so when a Danish supermarket ran a sale on beef and veal last fall, Hindus everywhere reacted with outrage. India recalled its ambassador to Copenhagen, and Danish flags were burned in Calcutta, Bombay, and Delhi. A Hindu mob in Sri Lanka severely beat two employees of a Danish-owned firm, and demonstrators in Nepal chanted: ''War on Denmark! Death to Denmark!"In many places, shops selling Dansk china or Lego toys were attacked by rioters, and two Danish embassies were firebombed.

It didn't happen, of course. Hindus may consider it odious to use cows as food, but they do not resort to boycotts, threats, and violence when non-Hindus eat hamburger or steak. They do not demand that everyone abide by the strictures of Hinduism and avoid words and deeds that Hindus might find upsetting. The same is true of Christians, Jews, Buddhists, Mormons: They don't lash out in violence when their religious sensibilities are offended. They certainly don't expect their beliefs to be immune from criticism, mockery, or dissent.

But radical Muslims do.

[...]

Most of the pictures are tame to the point of dullness, especially compared to the biting editorial cartoons that routinely appear in US and European newspapers. A few of them link Mohammed to Islamist terrorism -- one depicts him with a bomb in his turban, while a second shows him in Heaven, pleading with newly arrived suicide terrorists: ''Stop, stop! We have run out of virgins!" Others focus on the threat to free speech: In one, a sweating artist sits at his drawing board, nervously sketching Mohammed, while glancing over his shoulder to make sure he's not being watched.

That anything so mild could trigger a reaction so crazed -- riots, death threats, kidnappings, flag-burnings -- speaks volumes about the chasm that separates the values of the civilized world from those in too much of the Islamic world. Freedom of the press, the marketplace of ideas, the right to skewer sacred cows: Militant Islam knows none of this. And if the jihadis get their way, it will be swept aside everywhere by the censorship and intolerance of sharia.

[...]

Make no mistake: This story is not going away, and neither is the Islamofascist threat. The freedom of speech we take for granted is under attack, and it will vanish if it is not bravely defended. Today the censors may be coming for some unfunny Mohammed cartoons, but tomorrow it is your words and ideas they will silence. Like it or not, we are all Danes now.

Jeff Jacoby's e-mail address is jacoby@globe.com.

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HT LGF

CHICAGO SUN-TIMES

'Sensitivity' can have brutal consequences

February 5, 2006

BY MARK STEYN SUN-TIMES COLUMNIST

I long ago lost count of the number of times I've switched on the TV and seen crazy guys jumping up and down in the street, torching the Stars and Stripes and yelling ''Death to the Great Satan!'' Or torching the Union Jack and yelling ''Death to the Original If Now Somewhat Arthritic And Semi-Retired Satan!'' But I never thought I'd switch on the TV and see the excitable young lads jumping up and down in Jakarta, Lahore, Aden, Hebron, etc., etc., torching the flag of Denmark.

Denmark! Even if you were overcome with a sudden urge to burn the Danish flag, where do you get one in a hurry in Gaza? Well, OK, that's easy: the nearest European Union Humanitarian Aid and Intifada-Funding Branch Office. But where do you get one in an obscure town on the Punjabi plain on a Thursday afternoon? If I had a sudden yen to burn the Yemeni or Sudanese flag on my village green, I haven't a clue how I'd get hold of one in this part of New Hampshire. Say what you like about the Islamic world, but they show tremendous initiative and energy and inventiveness, at least when it comes to threatening death to the infidels every 48 hours for one perceived offense or another. If only it could be channeled into, say, a small software company, what an economy they'd have.

[...]

Jyllands-Posten wasn't being offensive for the sake of it. They had a serious point -- or, at any rate, a more serious one than Britney Spears or Terence McNally. The cartoons accompanied a piece about the dangers of "self-censorship" -- i.e., a climate in which there's no explicit law forbidding you from addressing the more, er, lively aspects of Islam but nonetheless everyone feels it's better not to.

That's the question the Danish newspaper was testing: the weakness of free societies in the face of intimidation by militant Islam.

[...]

Very few societies are genuinely multicultural. Most are bicultural: On the one hand, there are folks who are black, white, gay, straight, pre-op transsexual, Catholic, Protestant, Buddhist, worshippers of global-warming doom-mongers, and they rub along as best they can. And on the other hand are folks who do not accept the give-and-take, the rough-and-tumble of a "diverse" "tolerant" society, and, when one gently raises the matter of their intolerance, they threaten to kill you, which makes the question somewhat moot.

One day the British foreign secretary will wake up and discover that, in practice, there's very little difference between living under Exquisitely Refined Multicultural Sensitivity and Sharia. As a famously sensitive Dane once put it, "To be or not to be, that is the question."

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HT Austin Bay

Rocketsbrain has said all along the GWOT is a class of ideologies, cultures, and civilizations. The ultimate question and which will prevail, is that ideology which meets the needs and wants of its people without becoming repressive and totalarian.

See this related comment in the thread below.

The Cartoon War: A Collision of Values

Nope, it’s not a “row.” It’s a war.

At first take the name The Cartoon War may suggest something comic, exaggerated, or surreal. Those elements are in play– definitely in play. Cartoon and War are a collision, words that should not appear in the same serious sentence. They are a collision of values. But that’s the core of this, isn’t it? Likewise, the very real violence and anger add a heavy, instructive irony. The war between open and closed societies is not superficial, exaggerated, or surreal. The imagination is a battlefield. On a “technologically-compressed planet” the small and mundane –the cartoon– can quickly inflame; in a world of unfiltered, borderless information “the imagined” can have extraordinary conzequences.

Perhaps it should not be, but it is. Perhaps 9/11 should not have occurred, but it did.

Islamists are using the cartoons as a propaganda vehicle, but then they used Newsweek’s “Koran flushing” article. An implacable, unappeaseable enemy can use anything and everything as propaganda.

The Cartoon War is complex. It pits free speech against violent mobs. It also pits provocation against faith.

The conflict once again reveals the peculiar arrogance of some European Muslim immigrants: they cannot be criticized or satirized, though they freely critique and satirize Christians, Jews, and secularists.

Link