Archived news and commentary: February 27 - March 5, 2006

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Sunday, March 5, 2006

News and commentary:

"Massive Muslim Protest in Bahrain Against Terrorism"
(Montadayat.org, 2006/03/01)
Via: "Massive Muslim Protest in Bahrain Against Terrorism" (Gateway Pundit, 2006/03/05): "Chan'ad Bahraini on the massive unity protest in Bahrain after the Golden Mosque bombings: 'It comes as no surprise that the recent sectarian violence in Iraq would have repercussions here in Bahrain. Both countries have a Shia majority but have been politically dominated by the minority Sunnis; and both countries are now trying to establish themselves as something that looks like a democracy.'"

"Arson, rape, massacres ... and the strange silence of the archbishop" (Nick Cohen, The Observer, 2006/03/05)
"Like Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, Mao Tse-tung, Pol Pot, Saddam Hussein and Slobodan Milosevic, the Islamists of Sudan claim monstrous liars are libelling them. 'You are terrorists,' Abdel Rahim Mohammed Hussein, the regime's defence minister, screamed at journalists in Khartoum on Thursday. 'Any foreign correspondent from any foreign agency, get out - we don't want you in here.' His goons duly expelled reporters from his press conference for inventing the incredible lie that Hussein and his friends were responsible for the murder of around 200,000 in Darfur, the ethnic cleansing of two million, the arson, the rapes ... well, you know the story.
Or maybe you don't. After all, it has not been in the news recently, and not only because Hussein is shutting out the journalists. Fashion matters and today the fashion is to ignore genocide. Quite rightly, the crimes of American, British, European and Israeli democracy are dissected and denounced. But an intellectual blockage - a Chinese wall in the mind - prevents the critics applying universal principles to far greater outrages. ...
The confusion isn't confined to the General Synod of the Church of England. The United Nations tried to suppress a report that named the alleged war criminals of Darfur, in a way that it would never have suppressed the names of alleged torturers at Guantanamo. On the blacklist was that friend of freedom, Mr Hussein. While he was ranting at the journalists, he said that if the UN sent troops to protect the people of Darfur, al-Qaeda would flood the country. 'Darfur will become the graveyard for the United Nations,' he promised with what sounded like inside knowledge.
Isn't that an extraordinary threat for a UN member to make? Why isn't every liberal newspaper and liberal party fulminating? Because genocide is out of fashion, dear."

"Iranian Bombshell?" (Elaine Shannon, TIME, 2006/03/05)
Iran II: "As the U.N. Security Council prepares to debate Iran's nuclear ambitions--perhaps as early as next week--Bush Administration officials are readying a new intelligence briefing for council members on Tehran's weapons programs. It will rely mainly on circumstantial evidence, much of it from documents found on a laptop purportedly purloined from an Iranian nuclear engineer and obtained by the CIA in 2004. U.S. officials insist the material is strong but concede they have no smoking gun.
They do, however, have diagrams that they believe show components of a nuclear bomb. According to a Western diplomat familiar with the U.S. intel brief, a Farsi-language PowerPoint presentation on the laptop has "catchy graphics," including diagrams of a hollow metallic sphere 2 ft. in diameter and weighing about 440 lbs. Other documents show a sphere-shaped array of tiny detonators. No file specifically refers to a nuclear bomb, but U.S. officials say the design of the sphere--an outer shell studded with small chemical-explosive charges meant to detonate inward, which would squeeze an inner core of material into a critical mass--is akin to that of classic devices like Fat Man, the atom bomb dropped on Nagasaki during World War II. "Because of the size and weight and the power source going into it and height-of-burst requirements," says the diplomat, Western experts have concluded that the design 'is only intended to contain a nuclear weapon. There's no other munition which would work.'"

"How we duped the West, by Iran's nuclear negotiator" (Philip Sherwell, The Sunday Telegraph, 2006/03/05)
Iran I: "The man who for two years led Iran's nuclear negotiations has laid out in unprecedented detail how the regime took advantage of talks with Britain, France and Germany to forge ahead with its secret atomic programme.
In a speech to a closed meeting of leading Islamic clerics and academics, Hassan Rowhani, who headed talks with the so-called EU3 until last year, revealed how Teheran played for time and tried to dupe the West after its secret nuclear programme was uncovered by the Iranian opposition in 2002.
He boasted that while talks were taking place in Teheran, Iran was able to complete the installation of equipment for conversion of yellowcake - a key stage in the nuclear fuel process - at its Isfahan plant but at the same time convince European diplomats that nothing was afoot.
"From the outset, the Americans kept telling the Europeans, 'The Iranians are lying and deceiving you and they have not told you everything.' The Europeans used to respond, 'We trust them'," he said. ...
He told his audience: 'When we were negotiating with the Europeans in Teheran we were still installing some of the equipment at the Isfahan site. There was plenty of work to be done to complete the site and finish the work there. In reality, by creating a tame situation, we could finish Isfahan.'"

"All British soldiers to be out of Iraq in 12 months" (Sean Rayment, The Sunday Telegraph, 2006/03/05)
"All British and United States troops serving in Iraq will be withdrawn within a year in an effort to bring peace and stability to the country.
The news came as defence chiefs admitted privately that the British troop commitment in Afghanistan may last for up to 10 years.
The planned pull-out from Iraq follows the acceptance by London and Washington that the presence of the coalition, mainly composed of British and US troops, is now seen as the main obstacle to peace.
According to a senior defence source directly involved in planning the withdrawal, Britain is the driving force behind the scheme. The early spring of next year has been identified as the optimum time for the start of the complex and dangerous operation.
The source explained that troop numbers were expected to decrease slightly over the next 12 months but that the bulk of British and American forces, who make up 138,000 of the coalition's 153,000 troops, would be withdrawn simultaneously."

Saturday, March 4, 2006

News and commentary:

"Torture and Death of Jew Deepen Fears in France" (Craig S. Smith, The New York Times, 2006/03/05)
The torture and murder of Ilan Halimi [emphasis added]: "BAGNEUX, France, March 3 — Two strips of red-and-white police tape bar the entrance to the low-ceilinged pump room where a young Jewish man, Ilan Halimi, spent the last weeks of his life, tormented and tortured by his captors and eventually splashed with acid in an attempt to erase any traces of their DNA. ...
"I knew they had someone down there," said a young French-Arab man, loitering in the doorway of a building adjacent to the one where Mr. Halimi was held. He claimed to live upstairs from the makeshift dungeon but would not give his name or say whether he knew then that the man was a Jew. "I didn't know they were torturing him," he said. "Otherwise, I would have called the police."
But it is clear that plenty of people did know, both that Mr. Halimi was being tortured and that he was Jewish. The police, according to lawyers with access to the investigation files, think at least 20 people participated in his abduction and the subsequent, amateurish negotiations for ransom. ...
Standing in the doorway in Bagneux near where Mr. Halimi was held, the young French-Arab man smiled when asked about Mr. Fofana [the gang's leader]. "He was nice, everybody liked him," he said. 'If the police bring him back here, the guys in the neighborhood will liberate him.'"

More on the torture and murder of Ilan Halimi:
"Needing to wake up, West just closes its eyes" (Mark Steyn, Chicago Sun-Times, 2006/02/26)
"Parisians Stare at the Evil Within" (Sebastian Rotella and Achrene Sicakyuz, Los Angeles Times, 2006/02/26)
"Barbarians Inside the Gate" (Matthew Kaminski, The Wall Street Journal, 2006/02/25)
"Ilan Halimi and Israel" (Caroline Glick, The Jerusalem Post, 2006/02/24)
"The Murder of Ilan Halimi" (Nidra Poller, The Wall Street Journal/Israpundit, 2006/02/23)
"Anti-Semitism Is Alleged in French Torture-Killing" (Sebastian Rotella, Los Angeles Times, 2006/02/21)
"Torturers' Iraq link" (Jason Burke, The Observer, 2006/02/19)
"Kidnappers lured their victim into a honey trap, were offered a ransom and killed him anyway. Was it all a grisly game?" (Charles Bremner, The Times, 2006/02/17)

"In Tape, Al-Zawahri Blasts Cartoons" (Omar Sinan, AP/Yahoo! News, 2006/03/04)
The Danish cartoon affair: "Al-Qaida's No. 2 leader Ayman al-Zawahri criticized the West for its insult to Islam's prophet, complaining in a video broadcast Sunday on Al-Jazeera that the Prophet Mohammed and Jesus "are not sacred anymore."
Referring to the cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad that have been printed in a number of European newspapers, al-Zawahri said: "They did it on purpose and they continue to do it without apologizing, even though no one dares to harm Jews or to challenge Jewish claims about the Holocaust nor even to insult homosexuals."
Al-Zawahri, wearing a black turban and seated in front of a curtained window, spoke insistently and waved his right hand to emphasize his words.
"The insults against Prophet Muhammad are not the result of freedom of opinion but because what is sacred has changed in this culture," he said. 'The Prophet Mohammed, prayers be upon him, and Jesus Christ, peace be upon him, are not sacred anymore, while Semites and the Holocaust and homosexuality have become sacred.'" (See also: "Al Qaeda's Zawahri calls for strikes against West" (Firouz Sedarat, Reuters/Yahoo! News, 2006/03/04): "'It is our duty to take part in a mass economic boycott of Denmark, Norway, France, Germany, and all countries that take part in this crusader attack against Islam,' he said, referring to the cartoons first published in a Danish newspaper last year.
He described the cartoons as part of a U.S.-led "crusader" campaign. "An example of the hatred of the crusaders led by America ... are the repeated offences against the personality of the Prophet Mohammad, may peace be upon him," Zawahri said.")

Note: I've removed the excerpt from "Cartoonist’s Daughter Hunted by 12 Jihadists" (Agora, 2006/03/02), as it turns out that the story was false. The original post has lots of updates: "According to the information Politiken has received, the actual case was about a group of 6-8 Moslem girls from another school who had gone to the school of the daughter of one of the cartoonists. They wanted "the daughter of the cartoonist who had insulted their prophet," but were turned away at the door.
The cartoonist’s daughter wasn’t at school that day, but both she and the family were very distressed."

Friday, March 3, 2006

News and commentary:

"What are we to do about Islam?" (Douglas Murray, The Social Affairs Unite, 2006/03/03)
"A speech to the Pim Fortuyn Memorial Conference on Europe and Islam":
"The flip-side of this is that defeat in the war on terror – the war on Islamic extremism - will not happen in a familiar manner either. Defeat will not look as defeat would have looked last time. It will rather, I suggest, consist of a gradual accretion of hurts on our society, a wearying accumulation of often minor humiliations: death by a thousand cuts. Rather than waking up one day and finding troops rolling into our cities, we will simply become aware, with a growing sense of numbness, that what we had has slipped away, that what we relied on for support and succour has eroded and washed beyond our reach. If we end in darkness this time, it will be because we shuffled, rather than fell, into it. ...
In their efforts to avoid war, Europeans are once again choosing dishonour. They refuse to cut back their welfare budgets or significantly increase their defence spending, and they still refuse to enforce the measures required to cease or reverse the disastrous effects of mass immigration. Indeed, there is no indication that Europeans are going to alter their path today any faster than they did in the 1930s. ...
If Churchill had sat down in 1940 and asked "Why do they hate us", or appointed a panel of Nazi-apologists to tell him why Britain deserved to be attacked by Nazis, then I can be pretty sure I wouldn't be here today." (Hat tip: Melanie Phillips. See also: "We should fear Holland’s silence" (Douglas Murray, The Sunday Times, 2006/02/26))

"Attempted Murder Charges in UNC Hit-and-Run" (abc11tv.com, 2006/03/03)
The Danish cartoon affair II [?]. Via Charles Johnson: "Now it appears that a Muslim psychology graduate from UNC-Chapel Hill may have committed the first act of terrorism inside the US connected to the cartoons":
"The driver of an SUV that plowed into a group of pedestrians at UNC-Chapel Hill on Friday told police it was retribution for the treatment of Muslims around the world, sources tell Eyewitness News and ABC News.
It happened around noon Friday in front of Lenoir Hall on the campus, in a common area known as the Pit. Paramedics took six people - - five students and a visiting scholar - - were treated for minor injuries and released from UNC Hospitals. Three refused treatment at the scene.
Police say they arrested the suspect, Mohammed Reza Taheri-azar, 22, of Chapel Hill, shortly after the incident. He reportedly called police shortly after the incident and surrendered a few miles from campus.
Police said they would charge Taheri-azar with nine counts of attempted murder.
Sources say Taheri-azar told police he was seeking retribution for the treatment of Muslims around the world, according to ABC News justice correspondent Pierre Thomas. ...
Last month, Muslim students at UNC protested the publication in The Daily Tar Heel of an original cartoon depicting the prophet Muhammad." (See also: "THEY MAY GET ME FROM MY BAD SIDE..." (The Daily Tar Heel, 2006/02/10))

"'Strong leadership for peace'" (Caroline Glick, The Jerusalem Post, 2006/03/03)
The Danish cartoon affair I. Glick on how "appeasement policies have served to weaken Western, liberal values and threaten the viability of Western societies":
"In Europe, the official reactions to the Muslim cartoon riots exposed this reality. Rather than telling the Muslims who took to the streets and called for the annihilation of Denmark and the waging of global jihad where they could shove it, Europe's leaders bowed before these violent, intolerant people while expressing contrition and sorrow over the Islamic sensitivities that had been offended.
In Britain the media refused to publish the pictures of Muhammad - out of sensitivity for Muslim feelings, of course. The newspaper editor who published the pictures in France was fired. In Norway, the editor who published the pictures was forced to publicly apologize to Norway's Muslim leaders in a humiliating public ceremony. Franco Frattini, the EU's Commissioner for Justice, Freedom and Security said it would be useful for the press to "self-regulate" in attempting to find answers to question of "How are we to reconcile freedom of expression and respect for each individual's deepest convictions?"
And so, the European reaction to the Muslim rampages has involved slouching towards the surrender of their freedom of speech. Not only has Europe's appeasement of radical Islam not protected its liberal values, it has undermined the democratic freedoms that form the foundations of European culture. From a security perspective, the consequence of the silencing of public debate on the challenge of radical Islam is that Europeans are now effectively barred from conducting a public discussion about the chief threat to their political traditions and physical survival."

"Arab-American Psychologist Wafa Sultan: There Is No Clash of Civilizations but a Clash between the Mentality of the Middle Ages and That of the 21st Century" (MEMRI TV, 2006/02/21)
"Following are excerpts from an interview with Arab-American psychologist Wafa Sultan. The interview was aired on Al-Jazeera TV on February 21, 2006.":
"Wafa Sultan: The clash we are witnessing around the world is not a clash of religions, or a clash of civilizations. It is a clash between two opposites, between two eras. It is a clash between a mentality that belongs to the Middle Ages and another mentality that belongs to the 21st century. It is a clash between civilization and backwardness, between the civilized and the primitive, between barbarity and rationality. It is a clash between freedom and oppression, between democracy and dictatorship. It is a clash between human rights, on the one hand, and the violation of these rights, on other hand. It is a clash between those who treat women like beasts, and those who treat them like human beings. What we see today is not a clash of civilizations. Civilizations do not clash, but compete. ...
I am not a Christian, a Muslim, or a Jew. I am a secular human being. I do not believe in the supernatural, but I respect others' right to believe in it.
Dr. Ibrahim Al-Khouli: Are you a heretic?
Wafa Sultan: You can say whatever you like. I am a secular human being who does not believe in the supernatural...
Dr. Ibrahim Al-Khouli: If you are a heretic, there is no point in rebuking you, since you have blasphemed against Islam, the Prophet, and the Koran...
Wafa Sultan: These are personal matters that do not concern you." (UPDATE: See also a longer excerpt here. Also: "LA Psychologist Wafa Sultan Clashes with Algerian Islamist Ahmad bin Muhammad over Islamic Teachings and Terrorism" (MEMRI TV, 2005/07/26))

"Oscars for Osama" (Charles Krauthammer, The Washington Post, 2006/03/03)
"Nothing tells you more about Hollywood than what it chooses to honor. Nominated for best foreign-language film is "Paradise Now," a sympathetic portrayal of two suicide bombers. Nominated for best picture is "Munich," a sympathetic portrayal of yesterday's fashion in barbarism: homicide terrorism.
But until you see "Syriana," nominated for best screenplay (and George Clooney, for best supporting actor) you have no idea how self-flagellation and self-loathing pass for complexity and moral seriousness in Hollywood. ...
In my naivete, I used to think that Hollywood had achieved its nadir with Oliver Stone's "JFK," a film that taught a generation of Americans that President John F. Kennedy was assassinated by the CIA and the FBI in collaboration with Lyndon Johnson. But at least it was for domestic consumption, an internal affair of only marginal interest to other countries. "Syriana," however, is meant for export, carrying the most vicious and pernicious mendacities about America to a receptive world.
Most liberalism is angst- and guilt-ridden, seeing moral equivalence everywhere. "Syriana" is of a different species entirely -- a pathological variety that burns with the certainty of its malign anti-Americanism. Osama bin Laden could not have scripted this film with more conviction." (See also: "Oscar nominee: People hate Israelis for a reason" (Avner Hofstein, Ynetnews, 2006/03/02))

"Ex-Envoy: Execution Victims Spike at Baghdad Morgue" (Ellen Knickmeyer, The Washington Post, 2006/03/03)
"Nearly three years into a war epitomized by car bombs and suicide attacks, executions -- many of them following torture -- now account for up to three-fourths of the hundreds of corpses coming in to Baghdad's main morgue each week, the former U.N. human rights chief for Iraq said Thursday.
John Pace, who headed the U.N. human rights mission here until Feb. 13, said that between two-thirds and three-fourths of the victims brought to Baghdad's main morgue are recorded as casualties of gunshot wounds. Nearly all showed signs of having been executed, tortured or both, Pace said by telephone from his home in Sydney.
Pace said he held one of Iraq's factional militias principally responsible -- the Badr Organization, the armed faction of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, a Shiite Muslim religious party that is one of the most powerful members of Iraq's governing coalition.
"They have caused havoc," Pace said of the Badr group in a separate interview with the Associated Press. 'They do basically as they please. They arrest people, they torture people, they execute people, they detain people, they negotiate ransom, and they do that with impunity.'"

Thursday, March 2, 2006

News and commentary:

"The new threat: The radical politics of Islamic fundamentalism" (Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, The New Republic, 2006/03/02)
The Danish cartoon affair III: "In the street, the halls of power, and the battlefields, political Islam flexes its muscles. Its physical aggressiveness is exemplified in its disproportionate, violent reaction to the cartoons. ...
In Gaza, demonstrators demanded the hands of cartoonists be cut off, and an imam at the Omari Mosque declared, to 9,000 of the faithful, "We will not accept less than severing the heads of those responsible." Calls to slaughter Islam's putative enemies, such as "Death to Denmark" in Pakistan, are apparent commonplaces of the protests. More specific death threats against publishers and cartoonists alike, including a bounty of $1 million for the murder of the Danish cartoonists, seek to silence those political Islam has declared as enemies and intimidate others from speaking out.
This is not normal politics. This is not even the normal excess of normal politics. Imagine what European and American commentators would say if tens of thousands of Americans, Britons, Germans, or Israelis marched with calls for the murder of Palestinians, Lebanese, Iranians, or Muslims in response to a few anti-American, anti-European, or anti-Semitic cartoons appearing in one, or a few, Arab or Islamic newspapers. Yet Western politicians and commentators have mostly indulged this outpouring of violent hatred. Even when decrying it, they blame the cartoons' publishers and express pious regret that the cartoons insulted the Prophet Mohammed and Muslims, as if there is any normal political cause and effect (let alone a proportionate one) operating here. This Western indulgence is extremely wrongheaded and self-injurious. It cloaks the political Islamic proto-intifada in a measure of legitimacy. It emboldens its instigators and its shock troops in the street, revealing the West's unwillingness to respond resolutely to these verbal and physical assaults with moral, rhetorical, and political clarity, and to convey the unapologetic message that the West's people and polities refuse to be attacked, intimidated, and cowed." (Note: the article is subscriber only, but can also be found here.)

"Muslim students protest column in student newspaper" (OregonLive.com/Free Republic, 2006/03/02)
The Danish cartoon affair II [emphasis added]: "CORVALLIS, Ore. (AP) — A student's column in the Oregon State University campus newspaper has prompted protests by Muslim students, who say it is offensive to their faith.
The piece headlined "The Islamic Double Standard" was written by OSU microbiology student Nathanael Blake and published in the Daily Barometer on Feb. 8.
The column accused Muslims of expecting special treatment after a Danish newspaper published cartoons depicting the prophet Muhammad. Riots over the cartoons amounted to "savagery," Blake said. "Bluntly put, we expect Muslims to behave barbarously," his column said.
On Thursday, about a dozen students — including members of Muslim and Arab student groups — held a vigil on the campus to protest both Blake's piece and the Danish cartoons.
They handed out flyers that stated "While staying loyal to the main values of freedom of expression that founded this country, we also feel the need to reflect on the values of tolerance and acceptance on this campus."
Among the students offended by the column was Nada Mohamed, a 20-year-old junior and the vice president of OSU's Muslim Student Association.
"It was amazing to me that they (the campus newspaper) were allowed to publish this kind of stuff," she told the Corvallis Gazette-Times.
"Tears were flowing out of my eyes as I was reading," she said. "I felt like somebody was ripping my heart out."
At the Daily Barometer, editors said e-mail and phone calls poured in. Senior editors have met with the Muslim Student Association.
"The pain that it caused ... did not subside with time," said DD Bixby, the Barometer's editor-in-chief. 'It kind of just festered.'" (See also: "The Islamic double-standard" (Nathanael Blake, The Daily Barometer, 2006/02/08) and "Whose double standard — a response on Islam, Muslims" (Aly Mohamed, The Daily Barometer, 2006/02/14))

"Danish Cartoons International" (Hjörtur Gudmundsson, The Brussels Journal, 2006/03/02)
The Danish cartoon affair I: "According to the Danish online newspaper eJour, 143 newspapers in 56 countries around the globe, including Christian and Muslim ones, have so far republished one or more of the Muhammad cartoons, first published by the Danish daily Jyllands-Posten in September. ... A list of the countries can be found here. 13 newspapers in 9 countries, including Egypt, had published one or more of the cartoons before the Norwegian Christian newspaper Magazinet republished them on January 10.
Editors have either been sacked or jailed for publishing the cartoons. In Algeria two editors have been jailed and in Indonesia a number of them were fired. In Jordan one editor was jailed. In Malaysia the government has forbidden people to show the cartoons, distribute them or even possess them. In Saudi Arabia the weekly newspaper Shams was closed by the authorities. Its editor told the AP news agency that a mufti (a Muslim scholar) had asked him to publish the cartoons “to show their ugliness and to expand the volume of anger.” In Yemen three newspapers have been closed and the editors reported to the police.
In Europe the Swedish government closed down a website of a small newspaper for publishing the cartoons. In Russia two papers were closed. In France the editor of the newspaper France Soir was sacked for publishing all the 12 cartoons, while the editor of Charlie Hebdo has been under police protection ever since his weekly published them on February 8. In Finland an editor was sacked for publishing a cartoon about the cartoons and in Italy a government minister had to resign because he wore a T-shirt depicting one of the cartoons. In France five newspapers have republished the cartoons. This makes France the country with the largest number of republishers."

"A Self-Portrait of Suicide Terrorists" (Itamar Marcus and Barbara Crook, PMW, 2006/03/02)
Paradise Now II. A selection of videos prepared by six Hamas and Fatah suicide terrorists prior to their attacks:
"The romanticized view of suicide terrorists in the Oscar-nominated Palestinian film Paradise Now bears little resemblance to the real world of suicide bombers, whose actual farewell videos include the following vows:

"We are a nation that drinks blood, and we know that there is no blood better than the blood of Jews."

"My dear mother ... wipe your tears... Don't let me see you sad on my wedding day with the Maidens of Paradise."

"Escort our souls to Heaven after we fulfill this duty of crushing the descendents of monkeys and pigs."

'I hoped that the shredded limbs of my body would be shrapnel, tearing the Zionists to pieces, knocking on Heavens door with the skulls of Zionists... My blood shall be my path to march to Heaven.'"

"Oscar nominee: People hate Israelis for a reason" (Avner Hofstein, Ynetnews, 2006/03/02)
Paradise Now I. An interview with Hany Abu-Assad, the Israeli-born director of Oscar-nominated film "Paradise Now":
"At the beginning of our talk he demands that when quoting him I would refrain from using the term "terrorist" to describe people sent to explode themselves in buses and markets.
This is an act of terror, but this terror derives from another terror, Abu-Assad explains. Suicide bombings are a reaction to your terror, he says, and suggests the most accurate term to describe a suicide bombing would be "a counter-terrorist act."
The occupiers and the occupation are the real terrorists. ...
Even during the Holocaust, people did not strap on a bomb and set out to kill innocent people.
Abu-Assad stresses he is a pacifist who believes any killing is wrong, and that he advocates a non-violent struggle as the right method for obtaining one's goals. However, he states, while he currently has the privilege to make such a stand, in a different situation his moral position may have been different.
In other words, had you been living in the territories, you would have become a shahid (martyr)?
Abu-Assad hesitates for a second before replying, "yes." He recounts an episode in which he was humiliated by a soldier at the Kalandiya checkpoint near Jerusalem, and says this was what made him realize what runs through the heads of people who later become suicide bombers."

"Suspected Kidnapper Arrested in Baghdad" (Sinan Salaheddin, AP/Yahoo! News, 2006/03/02)
Iraq IV [Emphasis added]: "BAGHDAD, Iraq - Iraqi security forces have arrested a suspect in the 2004 kidnapping and beheading of a Japanese backpacker, officials said Thursday.
The Interior Ministry identified the suspect as Hussein Fahmi, a 28-year-old al-Qaida in Iraq operative arrested over two months ago in western Baghdad.
Fahmi confessed to carrying out 116 beheadings, including that of 24-year-old Japanese backpacker Shosei Koda, ministry official Maj. Raid al-Mafraji said.
Fahmi, who is of Egyptian and Palestinian descent, was captured by the Interior Ministry's counterinsurgency Wolf Brigade after a tip from local residents, al-Mafraji said. "We managed to arrest three other terrorists with him and seized a huge amount of weapons," he said." (Hat tip: LGF.)

"Civilians Bearing Brunt of Iraq Violence" (Robert H. Reid, AP/Yahoo! News, 2006/03/02)
Iraq III: "Insurgency-related violence last year killed more than twice as many Iraqi civilians — 4,024 people — as Iraqi soldiers and police, according to government figures obtained Thursday by The Associated Press.
And the civilian death count in the first two months of this year already stands at more than one-quarter of last year's total — due in part to sectarian violence triggered by the Feb. 22 bombing of a Shiite shrine and car bombings in Shiite neighborhoods around Baghdad.
The large number of civilian deaths — many in Baghdad, where 25 percent of the population lives — has created a climate of fear where parents are afraid to send their children to school, women spend their days huddled inside their homes, and husbands send wives and children abroad.
Figures compiled by the Health Ministry put the civilian death toll for 2005 at 4,024. The ministry's civilian death count for the first two months of this year is 1,093.
Death tolls for the police and army are compiled by the ministries of Interior and Defense. Their figures show that 1,695 police and soldiers were killed last year. Most of the victims — 1,222 — were from the ranks of the police."

"We must stand up to the creeping tyranny of the group veto" (Timothy Garton Ash, The Guardian, 2006/03/02)
"These days, the main threats to freedom of thought, freedom of speech and freedom of association no longer come from the totalitarian ideological superstate that inspired George Orwell to write his 1984. (First line, for the few readers who may not have caught the opening allusion: "It was a bright, cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.") That totalitarian horror still exists in places like Burma, but the distinctive feature of this new danger is the creeping tyranny of the group veto.
Here the animal rights campaign has something in common with the extremist reaction to the cartoons of the prophet Muhammad, as seen in the attacks on Danish embassies. In both cases, a particular group says: "We feel so strongly about this that we are going to do everything we can to stop it. We recognise no moral limits. The end justifies the means. Continue on this path and you must fear for your life." ...
Aggregate all their taboos and you have a vast herd of sacred cows. Let the frightened nanny state enshrine all those taboos in new laws or bureaucratic prohibitions, and you have a drastic loss of freedom. That, I think, is what is happening to us, issue by issue. These days, you can't even read a list of the British war dead in Iraq outside the gates of No 10 Downing Street without getting a criminal record. Inch by inch, paragraph by paragraph, we are becoming less free. ...
This is the line on which we must take our stand. Facing down intimidation, backed by the threat of violence, is the key to resisting the creeping tyranny of the group veto. Here there can be no compromise."

"We Can't Force Democracy" (Robert D. Kaplan, The Washington Post, 2006/03/02)
Iraq II: "The whiff of incipient anarchy in Iraq in recent days has provided a prospect so terrifying as to concentrate the minds of Republicans and Democrats, Iraq's sectarian political factions, and even the media. Staring over the abyss, only the irresponsible few appear distracted by partisan advantage. In that sense alone, the bombing of the golden dome in Samarra may serve a useful purpose. For the fundamental nightmare of the new century is the breakdown of order, something that the American experience offers precious little wisdom in dealing with. ...
In the case of Iraq, the state under Saddam Hussein was so cruel and oppressive it bore little relationship to all these other dictatorships. Because under Hussein anybody could and in fact did disappear in the middle of the night and was tortured in the most horrific manner, the Baathist state constituted a form of anarchy masquerading as tyranny. The decision to remove him was defensible, while not providential. The portrait of Iraq that has emerged since his fall reveals him as the Hobbesian nemesis who may have kept in check an even greater anarchy than the kind that obtained under his rule. ...
What we have to work toward -- for which peoples with historical experiences different from ours will be grateful -- is not democracy but normality. Stabilizing newly democratic regimes, and easing the development path of undemocratic ones, should be the goal for our military and diplomatic establishments. The more cautious we are in a world already in the throes of tumultuous upheaval, the more we'll achieve."

"Rhetoric of Unreality" (George F. Will, The Washington Post, 2006/03/02)
Iraq I: "Almost three years after the invasion, it is still not certain whether, or in what sense, Iraq is a nation. And after two elections and a referendum on its constitution, Iraq barely has a government. A defining attribute of a government is that it has a monopoly on the legitimate exercise of violence. That attribute is incompatible with the existence of private militias of the sort that maraud in Iraq.
Michael Rubin of the American Enterprise Institute, writing in the Wall Street Journal, reports that Shiite militias "have broken up coed picnics, executed barbers [for the sin of shaving beards] and liquor store owners, instituted their own courts, and posted religious guards in front of girls' schools to ensure Iranian-style dress." Iraq's other indispensable man, Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, says that unless the government can protect religious sites, "the believers will." ...
In the New Republic, Lawrence Kaplan, writing with a Baghdad dateline, says that only U.S. forces, which "have become an essential part of the landscape here -- their own tribe, in effect," can be "an honest broker" between warring factions, "more peacekeeper than belligerent." But he also reports:
'With U.S reconstruction aid running out, Iraq's infrastructure, never fully restored to begin with, decays by the hour. . . . The level of corruption that pervades Iraq's ministerial orbit . . . would have made South Vietnam's kleptocrats blush. . . . [C]orruption has helped drive every public service measure -- electricity, potable water, heating oil -- down below its prewar norm.'"

"Abbas: Al-Qaida Has Infiltrated Gaza Strip" (Mohammed Daraghmeh, AP/Yahoo! News, 2006/03/02)
"Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas said in an interview published Thursday that the al-Qaida terror network has infiltrated the
Gaza Strip and West Bank, which could have dire consequences for the Middle East.
Acting Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said in response Thursday that Israel was intensifying its "war" against al-Qaida.
Abbas said in an interview with the London-based Al Hayat newspaper that he had not expected al-Qaida would succeed in setting up operations in the Palestinian areas.
"We have signs of an al-Qaida presence in the West Bank and Gaza," Abbas said, without elaborating. "We haven't yet reached the stage of capturing them."
"The infiltration of al-Qaida can ruin the whole region," he added."

"4 Dead, Dozens Wounded in Karachi Blast" (Zarar Khan, AP/Yahoo! News, 2006/03/02)
"KARACHI, Pakistan - A suspected suicide bomb exploded Thursday outside the U.S. Consulate and a luxury hotel in Pakistan's biggest city, killing four people — including an American diplomat — just days ahead of President Bush's visit to Pakistan. ...
The car bombing ripped through the parking lot of the Marriott Hotel, about 20 yards from the consulate gate, shattering windows at the consulate and on all 10 floors of the hotel. ...
Shabbir Qaimkhani, the provincial health minister, said four people were killed and at least 49 were wounded.
The American diplomat and his driver were killed when their car was hit by the blast at a roadblock near the consulate entrance, a Pakistani police investigator said on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the media.
There was no immediate claim of responsibility for the blast.
The bombing left a crater 8 feet wide and more than two feet deep. The explosion propelled cars into the air and damaged nearby buildings, including a naval hospital, and left the street strewn with mangled car parts. One man's body was flung onto the second story of the hotel's exterior."

Added in archive:
"It's so cowardly to attack the church when we won't offend Islam" (Nick Cohen, The Observer, 2006/02/19)
"Why striking bus drivers in Tehran are the real defenders of Muslim rights" (Nick Cohen, The Observer, 2006/02/12)

Wednesday, March 1, 2006

News and commentary:

"Iranian Fury in the SWP Meeting" (Azarmehr, azarmehr.blogspot.com, 2006/03/01)
"Yesterday, the Stop the War Coalition, and the Socialist Workers Party organised a meeting about Iran." An eyewitness account of the meeting for which some Iranian democrats decided to turn up. Via the indispensible Harry's Place:

"Interesting thing quoted in the poster of this talk was the following sentence:
'Most people in the West, including many on the left, still have an image of Iran as a theocratic state dominated by medieval mullahs. What is the reality today?'"

"When [Elaheh] Rostami claimed that the Iranian women had more rights and family protection after the revolution than before, it was just too much for the Iranians in the room. There was an uproar of protest at her nonsense, especially from the Iranian women.
Another Iranian walked up to the panel and placed pictures of Islamic Republic crimes before each panel speaker. The chairperson with the headband, showed no sympathy and turned the pictures over, but another Iranian in the audience walked up to the panel, turned over the page and showed her the pictures again. The chairperson of the panel then tried to look away from the pictures of human rights abuse in Iran. I sort of sensed she felt if Americans were not responsible for human rights abuses, she was not interested.
I was innocently writing down my questions, thinking soon we will be given time to question the panel. I was perusing which questions I should ask. Some of which were:

- You have the privilege of protesting and marching against nuclear power in this country, do the Iranian people have this right too?

- You mentioned you are siding with the Muslims who felt offended by the cartoons, what about the Sufis in Iran who had their shrine completely raised to the ground recently and their members, including women and children who were beaten and maimed. Do you not think they were insulted too?

- You say you value your freedom of speech, are you not worried about Muslim extremists taking that freedom away?

But as I was pondering over these questions, Elaheh Rostami finished and the chair declared the meeting was over. What? No time to question all this nonsense that was spluttered out at this poor English public? The Iranians were furious. Even I, normally a placid person, couldn't stop myself from going to the panel and shouting
"You talk about freedom of speech. You have a meeting about Iran and yet you don't let the Iranians in this room speak?" I roared at the panel.
By this time SWP activists were calling for more reinforcement on their mobiles. Elaheh Rostami finally had to be escorted out of the room surrounded by a ring of SWP activists, while Iranians were shouting "Shame on You, Shame on You" at her."

"Threats against Scandinavians in the West Bank" (svt.se, 2006/03/01)
The Danish cartoon affair I. Translation of a dispatch in Swedish:
"New threats against Scandinavians have led UNWRA, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, to request that all Scandinavian UN-personnel leave the West Bank. Denmark has already evacuated its personnel, reports SVT:s Aktuellt.
According to the threats, a "Danish diplomat or similar" will be kidnapped and murdered. It's unclear who are behind the threats, but earlier threats have been conveyed based on anger over the Muhammed cartoons.
The threats have been supplied to all Swedish organizations on the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, says Sweden's consul-general in Jerusalem, Nils Eliasson, to Dagens Nyheter.
SVT:s Middle East correspondent Lars Adaktusson says to Aktuellt that the threats are taken very seriously.
'According to UN:s security personnel, the information comes from sources that are considered very trustworthy.'"

"Former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein..."
(Bob Strong, AFP, 2006/03/01)
"Former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, front, Mizher Abdullah Rawed, middle, and Taha Yassin Ramadan have a laugh at their trial in Baghdad."

"Saddam Says He Had Right to Order Trials" (Bassem Mroue, AP/Yahoo! News, 2006/03/01)
"Saddam Hussein said in a defiant courtroom confession Wednesday that he ordered the trial of 148 Shiites who were eventually executed in the 1980s, but he insisted he had the right to do so because they were suspected of trying to kill him.
The dramatic speech came a day after prosecutors presented the most direct evidence against him in the four-month trial: a 1984 presidential decree approving the death sentences for the 148, with a signature said to be Saddam's.
"Where is the crime? Where is the crime?" Saddam asked. "If trying a suspect accused of shooting at a head of state — no matter what his name is — is considered a crime, then you have the head of state in your hands. Try him." ...
The prosecution has argued the imprisonment and executions were illegal, saying the 148 were sentenced to death in an "imaginary trial" before Saddam's Revolutionary Court where the defendants did not even appear.
The crackdown, they argue, went far beyond the actual attackers. They have presented documents that show entire families — including women and children as young as 3 months old — were arrested, tortured and held for years. Those executed included at least 10 juveniles, one as young as 11, according to the documents." (See also: "The trial just got interesting" (Omar, Iraq the Model, 2006/02/28): "The documents revealed some unbelievably terrifying facts about the Dujail massacre; can you imagine that when orders were given to execute the 148 "convicts" the prison authorities executed only 96 of them. Why?
Because the remaining 48 "convicts" had already passed away during "interrogation"!!
What kind of interrogation was that killed one third of the suspects?!")

"Tolerating the Intolerable" (Anne Applebaum, The Washington Post, 2006/03/01)
Applebaum on the suspension of Ken Livingstone and the imprisonment of David Irving:
"We also have evidence of something that, in the wake of the cartoon fracas across the Muslim world, should interest us all: the Western world's growing inability to deal with its own offensive, insulting and racially or ethnically controversial debates. We don't, for the most part, burn flags, storm embassies or hang foreign prime ministers in effigy when someone offends the general public's sensibilities, which is an extremely good thing. But neither does it seem right that an unelected committee should prevent the elected mayor of London from doing his job, just because that mayor is unpleasant and offensive (and I can personally testify that he is both). Surely it's the voters' job to weigh Livingstone's behavior against the fact, conceded by all, that he has improved the flow of London traffic. ...
Maybe it's no coincidence that both of these stories somehow involve World War II, a tragedy from which Europe, and indeed all of the West, has never recovered. Maybe it's no coincidence that they both involve political mavericks, far left and far right, who aren't influenced by normal political constraints. Or maybe they're just a sign of the times. In a world in which a Jewish man can be found tortured and murdered outside Paris, as one was last week, in which imams issue fatwas against cartoonists, in which the golden domes of mosques explode and in which religious intolerance seems to be exploding too -- it's becoming far harder for everyone else to see the value of uninhibited, unrestrained and deeply offensive free speech."

Added today:
"Don't be silenced by extremists" (Toronto Star, 2006/02/28)

Tuesday, February 28, 2006

News and commentary:

"Manifesto: Together facing the new totalitarianism" (Jyllands-Posten, 2006/02/28)
The Danish cartoon affair III: "After having overcome fascism, Nazism, and Stalinism, the world now faces a new totalitarian global threat: Islamism.
We, writers, journalists, intellectuals, call for resistance to religious totalitarianism and for the promotion of freedom, equal opportunity and secular values for all.
The recent events, which occurred after the publication of drawings of Muhammed in European newspapers, have revealed the necessity of the struggle for these universal values. This struggle will not be won by arms, but in the ideological field. It is not a clash of civilisations nor an antagonism of West and East that we are witnessing, but a global struggle that confronts democrats and theocrats.
Like all totalitarianisms, Islamism is nurtured by fears and frustrations. The hate preachers bet on these feelings in order to form battalions destined to impose a liberticidal and unegalitarian world. But we clearly and firmly state: nothing, not even despair, justifies the choice of obscurantism, totalitarianism and hatred. Islamism is a reactionary ideology which kills equality, freedom and secularism wherever it is present. Its success can only lead to a world of domination: man's domination of woman, the Islamists' domination of all the others. To counter this, we must assure universal rights to oppressed or discriminated people.
We reject «cultural relativism», which consists in accepting that men and women of Muslim culture should be deprived of the right to equality, freedom and secular values in the name of respect for cultures and traditions. We refuse to renounce our critical spirit out of fear of being accused of "Islamophobia", an unfortunate concept which confuses criticism of Islam as a religion with stigmatisation of its believers.
We plead for the universality of freedom of expression, so that a critical spirit may be exercised on all continents, against all abuses and all dogmas.
We appeal to democrats and free spirits of all countries that our century should be one of Enlightenment, not of obscurantism.

12 signatures

Ayaan Hirsi Ali
Chahla Chafiq
Caroline Fourest
Bernard-Henri Lévy
Irshad Manji
Mehdi Mozaffari
Maryam Namazie
Taslima Nasreen
Salman Rushdie
Antoine Sfeir
Philippe Val
Ibn Warraq"

(Note: Agora has more, including a round-up of reactions from the blogosphere.)

"Don't be silenced by extremists" (Toronto Star, 2006/02/28)
The Danish cartoon affair II. "A plea from 11 Canadian Muslim academics and activists":
"A curtain of fear has descended on the intelligentsia of the West, including Canada. The fear of being misunderstood as Islamophobic has sealed their lips, dried their pens and locked their keyboards.
With hundreds dead around the world in the aftermath of the now infamous Danish cartoons, Canada's writers, politicians and media have imposed a frightening censorship on themselves, refusing to speak their minds, thus ensuring that the only voices being heard are that of the Muslim extremists and the racist right. ...
It is time for Canadians to stand up for the hard-won democratic values that the Muslim extremists oppose.
By rejecting the agenda of the extremists, Canada's intelligentsia would be standing shoulder to shoulder with the Muslims and secular individuals from the region who reject both Islamophobia and Islamism. Islamism is not the new revolutionary movement against global forces of oppression, as a section of the left in this country erroneously perceives.
Today, the religious right and autocracies in the so-called Islamic world are united in their call for passing legislation to make any discussion on religion a criminal offence.
This, at a time when many writers in Jordan, Iran, Yemen, Pakistan and Afghanistan are rotting in jails, facing charges of apostasy and blasphemy.
We call on Canadian politicians and intellectuals to stand up for freedom of expression.
Our democratic values, including free speech, should not be compromised under the garb of fighting hate.
To fight Islamophobia and racism, we do not need to sacrifice free speech and debate.

Jehad Aliweiwi, former executive director of the Canadian Arab Federation.
Taj Hashmi, sessional professor, Simon Fraser University.
Amir Hassanpour, associate professor, University of Toronto.
Tarek Fatah, host, The Muslim Chronicle, CTS-TV.
Tareq Y. Ismael, professor, University of Calgary.
Jacqueline S. Ismael, professor, University of Calgary.
El-Farouk Khaki, secretary general, Muslim Canadian Congress.
Shahrzad Mojab, associate professor, University of Toronto.
Haideh Moghissi, professor, York University.
Munir Pervaiz, secretary, Pakistan-Canadian Writers Forum.
Saeed Rahnema, professor, York University." (Hat tip: Agora.)

"A Pakistani boy brandishes a dagger..."
(Shakil Adil, AP, 2006/02/28)
"A Pakistani boy brandishes a dagger during a rally against the publication of cartoons depicting Islamic Prophet Muhammad printed by some Western newspapers, Tuesday, Feb. 28, 2006 in Karachi, Pakistan."

"Pakistani Kids Rally Over Prophet Cartoons" (Zarar Khan, AP/Yahoo! News, 2006/02/28)
The Danish cartoon affair I: "KARACHI, Pakistan - About 5,000 children chanting "Hang those who insulted the prophet" rallied in Pakistan's largest city on Tuesday in the latest protest in the Islamic nation against the publication of cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad.
The children, ages 8 to 12, burned a coffin draped in U.S., Israeli and Danish flags at a traffic intersection in the port city of Karachi as police in riot gear looked on.
The rally was organized by Jamaat-e-Islami, Pakistan's largest Islamic group. The children, some wearing school uniforms and headbands emblazoned with "God is great," were released from schools to take part."

"Civil War Looms With 68 Killed in Baghdad" (Steven R. Hirst, AP/Yahoo! News, 2006/02/28)
Iraq II: "Sunnis and Shiites traded bombings and mortar fire against mainly religious targets in Baghdad well into the night Tuesday, killing at least 68 people a day after authorities lifted a curfew that had briefly calmed a series of sectarian reprisal attacks.
At least six of Tuesday's attacks hit clearly religious targets, concluding with a car bombing after sundown at the Shiite Abdel Hadi Chalabi mosque in the Hurriyah neighborhood that killed 23 and wounded 55. A separate suicide bombing killed 23 people at an east Baghdad gas station, where people had lined up to buy kerosine.
In addition to those known to have been killed Tuesday, police found nine more bullet-riddled bodies, including a Sunni Muslim tribal sheik, off a road southeast of Baghdad. It was unclear when they died. ...
One of the day's bloodiest attacks came when a suicide bomber detonated an explosives vest packed with ball bearings among people lined up to buy kerosine at a crowded filling station in east Baghdad. The blast killed 23 people and wounded 51, leaving behind the charred and twisted remains of wheeled carts that customers had used to transport fuel canisters to the station."

"Toll in Iraq's Deadly Surge: 1,300" (Ellen Knickmeyer and Bassam Sebti, The Washington Post, 2006/02/28)
Iraq I: "Grisly attacks and other sectarian violence unleashed by last week's bombing of a Shiite Muslim shrine have killed more than 1,300 Iraqis, making the past few days the deadliest of the war outside of major U.S. offensives, according to Baghdad's main morgue. The toll was more than three times higher than the figure previously reported by the U.S. military and the news media.
Hundreds of unclaimed dead lay at the morgue at midday Monday -- blood-caked men who had been shot, knifed, garroted or apparently suffocated by the plastic bags still over their heads. Many of the bodies were sprawled with their hands still bound -- and many of them had wound up at the morgue after what their families said was their abduction by the Mahdi Army, the Shiite militia of cleric Moqtada al-Sadr.
"After he came back from the evening prayer, the Mahdi Army broke into his house and asked him, 'Are you Khalid the Sunni infidel?'" one man at the morgue said, relating what were the last hours of his cousin, according to other relatives. 'He replied yes and then they took him away.'"

Added in archive:
"Barbarians Inside the Gate" (Matthew Kaminski, The Wall Street Journal, 2006/02/25)
"Controversy over cartoons deals 'Nordism' a powerful blow" (Ivar Ekman, International Herald Tribune, 2006/02/24)
"How does the modern world look when you have done nothing to help create it, and innovation is a threat to cherished beliefs?" (Dinocrat, 2006/02/18)

Monday, February 27, 2006

News and commentary:

"The World According to Fogh" (Jesper Larsen, Berlingske/Agora, 2006/02/27)
The Danish cartoon affair V. An interview with the Danish Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmusen:
"'Everybody in the debate says with great gravity that we must guard Freedom of Speech and that everybody has the right to print whatever they like. "But…" they then say - and that means that they don’t really mean that. That is where they lose their grip, in my opinion.' ...
"Writers and other people living off free speech have been a disappointment. And I think I know why - it’s because they are seeing it as something it is not, in a way that has completely blurred their vision. They don’t like the Danish People’s Party, they don’t like Jyllands-Posten and they don’t like this government. Possibly in that order. Due to a relation bordering on the hateful to those three factors, they can’t bring themselves to defend Freedom of Speech today. So there’s a double standard."
When you say ‘others’, are you referring to Politiken and Berlingske Tidende?
"I don’t think it serves any purpose to speak of that," says the Prime Minister, even if the editorials of Politiken on this issue brings to Anders Fogh Rasmussen’s mind "vestiges of April 1940", where "one ought to just lie down."
"I must say that I think that what we have seen has been a total lack of principle painted with a broad brush across the board - none mentioned, none forgotten. But it is something we saw from parts of the private sector to a large part of the cultural and media world."
Jyllands-Posten has felt that other media outlets have left them high and dry, especially Politiken and Berlingske Tidende. Do you think that other media outlets ought to have been more assertive of free speech?
'Being the Prime Minister does not entail that I get to edit the newspapers of this country. But I think it is safe to say that we have seen a situation that have seperated the sheep from the goats.'"

"The End of Tolerance" (Stefan Theil, Newsweek, 2006/03/06)
The Danish cartoon affair IV: "Welcome to the end of tolerance, or at least to the nonnegotiable limits to what Europeans will tolerate.":
"Dutch borders have been virtually shut. New immigration is down to a trickle. The great cosmopolitan port city of Rotterdam just published a code of conduct requiring Dutch be spoken in public. Parliament recently legislated a countrywide ban on wearing the burqa in public. And listen to a prominent Dutch establishment figure describe the new Dutch Way with immigrants. "We demand a new social contract," says Jan Wolter Wabeke, High Court Judge in The Hague. "We no longer accept that people don't learn our language, we require that they send their daughters to school, and we demand they stop bringing in young brides from the desert and locking them up in third-floor apartments."
What's going on here? Weren't the Dutch supposed to be the nicest people on earth, the most tolerant nation in Europe, a melting pot for minorities and immigrants since the Renaissance? No longer, and in this the Dutch are once again at the forefront of changes in Europe. This time, the Dutch model for Europe is one of multiculturalism besieged, if not plain defunct.
This helps explain Europe's unusually robust reaction to the cartoon crisis, which continued last week with riots in Nigeria and Pakistan that have left over 100 dead. There were apologies, to be sure, for causing offense after a small Danish paper published a dozen cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad. But on one point European leaders were united and bluntly clear: they would not tolerate any limits on European newspapers' rights to publish. "Freedom of speech is not up for negotiation," declared Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso, summing up a consensus that has only grown stronger as the cries of outrage from the Muslim world grow louder." (Hat tip: rgr.)

"Foreign ministers wrangle over cartoon row text" (Mark Beunderman, EU Observer, 2006/02/27)
The Danish cartoon affair III. The notion that I should exercise a "spirit of respect" for others "beliefs and convictions" is manifestly absurd.
A functioning open society means that I must respect the right of others to hold and express convictions I don't hold or even detest, but it certainly doesn't mean that I must respect those convictions.
This essential distinction between tolerance and respect should really be obvious, but it's apparent that it's not, even among EU foreign ministers. Perhaps they should be forced to learn Voltaire's excellent summary by heart?
But I expected even worse from EU and will will gladly say Na zdrave over a pint of Staropramen for the position of the Czech delegation:
"EU foreign ministers on Monday (27 February) changed the wording of a statement on the Danish cartoon row at the insistence of Dutch foreign minister Bernard Bot, who wanted to avoid the suggestion of an EU apology towards the Muslim world.
Meeting in Brussels, the ministers issued a fresh statement on the violence that recently erupted in some muslim countries following the publication by Danish paper Jyllands-Posten of cartoons depicting the prophet Muhamed.
The statement in its first paragraph says that "The [EU] council acknowledges and regrets that these cartoons were considered offensive and distressing by Muslims across the world."
An earlier version of the paragraph, contested by the Dutch, said that the EU regretted "that these cartoons caused offence."
"I put the first paragraph under discussion and this has been adapted so that freedom of speech has remained upright," Mr Bot told reporters.
"It is now clear that we do not make an apology for the cartoons," said a senior Dutch diplomat. ...
The Netherlands' stance was echoed by the Czech delegation, which was unhappy about any use of the word 'regret.'" (See also: "EU regrets 'offensive' cartoons" (BBC News, 2006/02/27): "While they upheld freedom of expression as a fundamental right, the ministers said freedoms "come with responsibilities".
"Freedom of expression should be exercised in a spirit of respect for religious and other beliefs and convictions. Mutual tolerance and respect are universal values we should all uphold," they said.")

"Galloway: MoToons 'worse than the 11 September attacks in the US and the 7/7 incidents'" (David T., Harry's Place, 2006/02/27)
The Danish cartoon affair II. And the first prize for the looniest comment on the cartoons from a Western politician goes to...: "George Galloway has given a nice interview to El Khabar newspaper in Algeria. There is an English language extract from it here, but BBC Monitoring has produced a full translation of the article, which I've reproduced below.
If you can't be bothered to read all of it, here are the choice passages.
The MoToons:

Halimi: Mr Galloway! Let us deal with the core of the issue immediately. What is your personal position and that of your party towards the events and the demonstrations which have been taking place in the Muslim world against the publication of cartoons depicting the prophet?
...
Galloway: Personally, I condemn these barbaric and evil acts. Today, the objective of the Western states is to control the oil of the Muslims whatever the price. In fact, the cartoons published in Denmark did not surprise me because the Western states have been waging fierce attacks against Islam for years. These began by humiliation, insults and then occupation. Today they reached the point of ridiculing the prophet. This incident is worse than the 11 September attacks in the US and the 7/7 incidents in London. Therefore, today it is the right of Muslims to express their anger and to defend their right and faith."

"Oncoming" (David Warren, Ottawa Citizen/RealClearPolitics, 2006/02/27)
The Danish cartoon affair I: "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."

"Europe vs. Radical Islam" (Francis Fukuyama, Slate, 2006/02/27)
"For the United States, with a Muslim population of less than 1 percent of the total, radical Islam is an issue to be dealt with "over there," in dysfunctional areas of the Middle East like Pakistan and Saudi Arabia. For Europe, however, it is a much more immediate and threatening crisis because it is domestic.":
"Those like Pym Fortuyn, the gay Dutch politician who was the first to say clearly that Muslims were a threat to the central Dutch values of openness and pluralism (and who was assassinated by an animal-rights activist), are denounced by the media and academic elites as fascists and racists. ...
There is no question that what has come to be called "Eurabia" constitutes a major problem for democracy there, a problem that European elites have been inexcusably slow to recognize and address. They operated for too long under a false understanding that liberal pluralism meant respecting the rights of communities rather than individuals, and they were not willing to step in when, for example, a Moroccan family forced their daughter into a marriage or shipped her back to Morocco against her will. Trendy multiculturalism dovetailed with traditional European corporatism and left Muslim communities in isolated ghettos, which then became fertile grounds for the growth of a highly intolerant version of Islam. ...
Time is getting short to address these questions. Europeans should have started a discussion about how to integrate their Muslim minorities a generation ago, before the winds of radical Islamism had started to blow. The cartoon controversy, while beginning with a commendable European desire to assert basic liberal values, may constitute a Rubicon that will be very hard to re-cross. We should be alarmed at the scope of the problem, but prudent in responding to it, since escalating cultural conflict throughout the Continent will bring us closer to a showdown between Islamists and secularists that will increasingly look like a clash of civilizations."

"Jihadi Turns Bulldog" (John Fund, OpinionJournal, 2006/02/27)
"The Taliban's former spokesman is now a Yale student. Anyone see a problem with that?":
"Never has an article made me blink with astonishment as much as when I read in yesterday's New York Times magazine that Sayed Rahmatullah Hashemi, former ambassador-at-large for the Taliban, is now studying at Yale on a U.S. student visa. This is taking the obsession that U.S. universities have with promoting diversity a bit too far. ...
"In some ways," Mr. Rahmatullah told the New York Times. "I'm the luckiest person in the world. I could have ended up in Guantanamo Bay. Instead I ended up at Yale." One of the courses he has taken is called Terrorism-Past, Present and Future.
Many foreign readers of the Times will no doubt snicker at the revelation that naive Yale administrators scrambled to admit Mr. Rahmatullah. The Times reported that Yale "had another foreigner of Rahmatullah's caliber apply for special-student status." Richard Shaw, Yale's dean of undergraduate admissions, told the Times that "we lost him to Harvard," and "I didn't want that to happen again." ...
In the spring of 2001, I was one of several writers at The Wall Street Journal who interviewed Mr. Rahmatullah at our offices across the street from the World Trade Center. His official title was second foreign secretary; his mission was to explain the regime's decision to rid the country of two 1,000-year-old towering statues of Buddha carved out of rock 90 miles from the Afghan capital, Kabul. ...
I don't believe Mr. Rahmatullah had direct knowledge of the 9/11 plot, and I don't think he has ever killed anyone. I can appreciate that he is trying to rebuild his life. But he willingly and cheerfully served an evil regime in a manner that would have made Goebbels proud. That he was 22 at the time is little of an excuse. There are many poor, bright students -- American and foreign alike -- who would jump at the opportunity to attend Yale. Why should Mr. Rahmatullah go to the line ahead of all of them? That's a question Yale alumni should ask when their alma mater comes looking for contributions." (See also: "The Freshman" (Chip Brown, The New York Times Magazine, 2006/02/26))

"Hamas lawmakers say will not recognize Israel, hold talks" (Haaretz, 2006/02/27)
"Two Hamas lawmakers on Sunday dismissed any future peace talks with Israel, calling past negotiations "a failed experiment" and said Arab nations had rejected U.S. pressure to force the militant Palestinian movement to moderate.
Hamas leaders Mahmoud Zahar and Saeed Syiam made the comments during a gathering of Arab parliamentarians on the Jordanian shore of the Dead Sea.
Speaking to The Associated Press on the sidelines of the conference, Zahar asserted that Hamas' recent upset victory in last month's legislative elections strengthened its hardline stand.
"We don't consider the Israeli enemy a partner. By winning the elections, we defeated Israel," he said. 'Why should we recognize Israel? Pressure is coming from the United States on us, not from Arab countries.'" (See also: "'We Do Not Wish to Throw Them Into the Sea'" (Lally Weymouth, The Washington Post, 2006/02/26))

"Saudis: 2 Foiled Bombers on Terror List" (Donna Abu-Nasr, AP/Yahoo! News, 2006/02/27)
"Saudi Arabia said Sunday that two suicide bombers killed in a foiled attack on the world's biggest oil processing complex were on its list of most-wanted extremists.
The Saudi Interior Ministry in a statement reported by the official Saudi Press Agency identified the two as Abdullah Abdul-Aziz al-Tweijri and Mohammed Saleh al-Gheith and said both were on a list of the 15 most-wanted terrorists the kingdom issued in June.
The deaths of the two meant that only four remain at large of the list of 15. Ten have now died or been killed, and one was previously arrested."

Added in archive:
"We should fear Holland’s silence" (Douglas Murray, The Sunday Times, 2006/02/26)
"Nigeria Counts 100 Deaths Over Danish Caricatures" (Lydia Polgreen, The New York Times, 2006/02/24)

See the archive for earlier news and commentary.

 

 

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Copyrights of quoted materials belong to their respective owners.

"When people accept futility and the absurd as normal, the culture is decadent. The term is not a slur; it is a technical label."

Jacques Barzun

Articles of the week

"Losing the Enlightenment" (Victor Davis Hanson, OpinionJournal, 2006/11/29)

"Allah’s England?" (Daniel Johnson, Commentary. November 2006)

"'Sex in the Park': The latest doings of the Danish imams" (Henrik Bering, The Weekly Standard, 2006/11/18)

"Narcissism on Stilts" (Harold Evans, New York Sun, 2006/11/16)

"Terrorists are recruiting in our schools, says MI5 boss" (Philip Johnston, The Daily Telegraph, 2006/11/10)

› AOTW Archive



From the archives

Oriana Fallaci, R.I.P.

"The Rage, the Pride and the Doubt" (Oriana Fallaci, The Wall Street Journal, 2003/03/13)

"How the West Was Won and How It Will Be Lost" (Oriana Fallaci, The American Enterprise, from the January/February 2003 issue)

"On Jew-hatred in Europe" (Oriana Fallaci, dennisprager.com, 2002/04/13)

"Anger and Pride" (Oriana Fallaci, dennisprager.com, 2001/12/19)

Weekly archive

2006/12/04 - 2006/12/10
2006/11/27 - 2006/12/03
2006/11/20 - 2006/11/26
2006/11/13 - 2006/11/19
2006/11/06 - 2006/11/12
2006/10/30 - 2006/11/05

› From 2001/09/11 -



Monthly index

December 2006
November 2006
October 2006
September 2006
August 2006
July 2006

› From September 2001 -



Author index

› Ajami, Fouad - Johnson, Paul
› Kagan, Robert - Ye'or, Bat



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