Muslims attend Eid-al-Fitr prayers on a street in Mumbai, India. Muslims across the world are celebrating Eid al-Fitr, the festival marking the end of the Muslim fasting month of Ramadan.Punit Paranjpe, Reuters

Most people assume that bigotry and prejudice are born of ignorance. Of a lack of education. This is true. But I think it is also based upon an overabundance of “slanted” knowledge.

Like many FA readers, after 9/11, I steeped myself in literature of the Robert Spencer-variety, warning me of the dangers of (radical/political ) Islam. Anyone who wanted to define Islam as “a religion of peace” was ridiculed as being asleep and ignorant; of having drunk the political correctness kool-aid and multiculturalist nonsense. And they were right.

But now, I think we have become so “educated” on Islam, that as mostly outsiders looking in, we have only educated ourselves to the opposite extreme, in our views. And that is just as damaging to fighting and winning the war against Islamic terror as it is to deny that we are engaged in a real war with a radical movement. Yes, radical. Not normative, but extremist, radicalism.
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The latest broadcast purportedly from Bin Laden (it was voice only) appeared in the last few days on websites sympathetic to Al Qaeda.

There are several interesting aspects to this text.

Sources for Journalistic outtakes of “tape”.

CNN

FNC (since we do allow Fox to be used on this website despite calls from certain “open minded progressives” to censor them)

Notice that both sources say about the same thing.

So I found the actual text of the message without having to go to the islamofascist website.

Transcript of actual text:
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In the News From Around the World post, I highlighted terror networks in the EU. In previous posts, I stated events in other nations show patterns. Patterns point to outcomes. Outcomes which will directly affect America. I pointed out more terror cells in the EU being broken up, non-Muslims persecuted in Islamic lands, and attacks by Islamists in the EU against those who resist becoming dhimmis. I also went into detail about who we should believe on Islam months ago.

We are told that the “youth violence” in Europe and the increasing violence among Islamists in America stems from a failure of the Islamists to assimilate into Western Culture. We are told it is somehow our fault this does not happen by some and that we need to be even more accommodating to the Islamists coming to the West, even when these people overtly state they are here to colonize and conquer.

As a further exhibit on this, I give you remarks by the Turkish Prime Minister speaking in Cologne, Germany.
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Everyone is buzzing about the South Park episode last night, which I did catch. I haven’t watched too many new episodes this season but buy the DVD’s and love the show, along with Family Guy. When I saw that blacked out screen with the words:

Comedy Central has refused to broadcast an image of Mohammed on their network

I thought it was Parker and Stone making another one of their jokes, but after seeing the last scene where Jesus craps all over Bush I knew right away they were making the same kind of statement we have all been saying since the cartoon fiasco. The network finds it ok to show Jesus in this light, but not Muhammed….simple disgusting:

I’m not sure if it’s been reported yet, but for what it’s worth, I just got off the phone with a Comedy Central spokesman. I asked him about last night’s episode of South Park in which, at a moment right before the prophet Mohammed was supposed to make a cameo, the words, “Comedy Central has refused to broadcast an image of Mohammed on their network” appeared on the screen.

I asked him whether this truly was Comedy Central’s decision or whether this was just another gag (with South Park, you never know). He said:

They reflected it accurately. That was a Comedy Central decision.

Just in case there was any confusion, that settles it. Comedy Central censored the image.

The MSM has picked up on the story:

Banned by Comedy Central from showing an image of the Islamic prophet Muhammad, the creators of “South Park” skewered their own network for hypocrisy in the cartoon’s most recent episode.

The comedy _ in an episode aired during Holy Week for Christians _ instead featured an image of Jesus Christ defecating on President Bush and the American flag.

In an elaborately constructed two-part episode of their Peabody Award-winning cartoon, “South Park” creators Matt Stone and Trey Parker intended to comment on the controversy created by a Danish newspaper’s publishing of caricatures of Muhammad. Muslims consider any physical representation of their prophet to be blasphemous.

Overall the episode was pretty funny, not as funny as it usually is, but good. The story isn’t the whole episode tho, it’s the fact that the Comedy Channel would puss out and bow to terrorists because that is exactly what they did by allowing those who use terror to dictate what can and cannot be shown on their network.

It’s ok to show Jesus in this light:

[gv data="PQHAyfTHObU"][/gv]

But not okay to show Muhammed handing over a football helmut:

And here is a example of what should of been shown while they quivered in fear: (Via PointFive)

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A reader who has left some mighty lengthy comments to my Muslim cartoon posts sent me some Mohammed pictures I had not seen. I really didn’t see anything new to post about to warrant putting those pictures up until I saw this: (via Atlas Shrugs)

PARIS — A gang of young Muslims wielding iron rods has forced a Paris cafe to censor an exhibition of cartoons ridiculing religion, the owners of the establishment said on Friday.

Some 50 drawings by well-known French cartoonists were installed in the Mer a Boire cafe in the working-class Belleville neighborhood of northeast Paris, as part of an avowedly atheist show entitled, “Neither god nor god”.

The collection targeted all religions - including Islam - but there were no representations of the Prophet Mohammed such as sparked the recent crisis between the West and the Islamic world, according to Marianne who is one of the cafe’s three owners.

“We used to give glasses of water to a group of local boys aged between 10 and 12 who played football across the street. On Tuesday a few came in, flung the water on the ground and accused us of being racists,” said Marianne, who did not wish to give her family name. “Later more of them came back with sticks and iron rods and tried to smash the pictures. They managed it with a few of them. With the customers we chased them away, but they kept coming back,” she said.

Later the cafe-owners were approached by a group of older youths. “They said they did not approve of what the youngsters had done. But what we were doing was unacceptable, too. They warned us that if we didn’t take down the cartoons they would call in the Muslim Brothers who would burn the cafe down,” said Marianne. “They kept saying: ‘This is our home. You cannot act like this here’,” she said.

Refusing to dismantle the exhibition, the owners have placed white sheets of paper inscribed with the word ‘censored’ over the cartoons that were targeted by the gang.

“To take down the cartoons would have been a surrender. But on the other hand we cannot expose ourselves to this kind of violence. This way you can still see the pictures if you lift the paper,” said Marianne.

To those Muslims who are such fanatics that you will force your will upon other free people….kiss my ass

This one isn’t new, but did force a young women to be imprisoned.

Via Mike’s America comes this cartoon about the idiocy coming from the Muslim world at the moment. If your easily offended then go elsewhere:

Only Mark Steyn can put it so well:

The third jolly event of the week was those other excitable fellows — the Big Media White House reporters — jumping up and down shouting “Death to Dick Cheney!” NBC’s David Gregory, the George Clooney of the press corps, was yelling truth to power about why the Elmer-Fudd-in-gun-rampage story was released to “a local Corpus Christi newspaper, not the White House press corps at large.” I know how he feels. I remember, like, four or five years ago — early September, maybe second week — there was this building collapse in New York and I had to learn about it from the TV because this notoriously secretive paranoid administration couldn’t even e-mail me a timely press release. For an NBC guy discovering that some hicksville nowhere-burg one-stop-light feed-price sheet got tipped off before he did is like a dowager duchess turning up at the royal banquet to discover the scullery maid’s been seated next to the queen.

So anyway David Gregory’s going bananas and yelling “I will yell!” and “Don’t be a jerk!” at the White House press secretary, and there’s more smoke coming out of his ears than from Ronald McDonald in Lahore, and I’m thinking, you know, maybe Karl’s latest range of Rovebots that he planted in American media corporations are just a wee bit too parodically self-absorbed to be plausible. And then this lady pipes up and asks, “Would this be much more serious if the man had died?”

Well, maybe. And maybe it would be even ever so much more serious still if, after peppering him with birdshot, Cheney had dragged him into a safe house in the Sunni Triangle and decapitated him with a rusty scimitar while shouting “Allahu Ahkbar!” and then sold the video to al-Jazeera.

Fortunately, the Washington Post had that wise old bird David Ignatius to put it in the proper historical context: “This incident,” he mused, “reminds me a bit of Sen. Edward Kennedy’s delay in informing Massachusetts authorities about his role in the fatal automobile accident at Chappaquiddick in 1969.”

Hmm. Let’s see. On the one hand, the guy leaves the gal at the bottom of the river struggling for breath pressed up against the window in some small air pocket while he pulls himself out of the briny, staggers home, sleeps it off and saunters in to inform the cops the following day that, oh yeah, there was some broad down there. And, on the other hand, the guy calls 911, has the other fellow taken to the hospital, lets the sheriff know promptly but neglects to fax David Gregory’s make-up girl!

One can only hope others agree with Ignatius’ insightful analogy, and that the reprehensible Cheney will be hounded from public life the way Kennedy was all those years ago. One would hate to think folks would just let it slide and three decades from now this Cheney guy will be sitting on some committee picking Supreme Court justices and whatnot.

[...]It’s easy to be tough about nothing. The press corps that noisily champions “the public’s right to know” about a minor hunting accident simultaneously assures the public that they’ve no need to see these Danish cartoons that have caused riots, arson and death around the world. On CNN, out of “sensitivity” to Islam, they show the cartoons but with the Prophet’s face pixilated so that he looks as if Cheney’s ventilated him with birdshot and it turned puffy and gangrenous. C’mon, guys, these are interesting times. Anyone can unload the umpteenth round of blanks into the bulletproof Chimpy Hallibushitler, but why not take a shot at something that matters?

Or perhaps it would just be easier to change the term ”free press” to the ”Roses of the Prophet Muhammed press.”

One of his best pieces yet…and he continually outdoes himself week in and week out.

Ok, now I’ve seen everything. The LA Times has an editorial that actually, wait for it, displays some common sense:

ANOTHER WEEK, another Muslim country burns in rage over months-old Danish cartoons depicting the prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) in an unflattering light. On Friday it was Libya, and earlier in the week it was my father’s homeland, Pakistan, where violent protests were scattered across the nation. Some Muslims have decided that burning cities in defense of a prophet’s teachings, which none of them seem willing to practice, is preferable to participating in rational debate about the myths and realities of a religion whose worst enemies are increasingly its own adherents.

This week’s events should compel those of us who claim Islam as our system of philosophical guidance to ask hard questions of ourselves in order to revive the religion’s essential foundation: justice, peaceful and tolerant coexistence, compassion, the search for knowledge and unwavering faith in the unity of God.

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

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

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

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

This is not Islam. And the faster its truest believers stand up and demonstrate its values and principles by actions, not words, the sooner a great religion will return to its rightful role as guide for nearly a quarter of humanity.

The writer, Manzoor Ijaz, has been speaking out against fanatical Islam for quite some time so his opinion is not that huge of a surprise. That my local Socialist paper would run it IS a surprise. But still, no sign of the cartoons on their pages.

While it appears most of Europe, and some of the MSM in the US, is appeasing the Muslim world a bevy of Al-Qaeda documents show’s the true intent of radical Islam:

Recently captured al-Qaeda documents portray terrorist leaders struggling over strategy, facing challenges by subordinates and issuing guidelines listing minimum qualifications for terrorism training camp supervisors.

Drawn from a classified database called “Harmony” compiled by the U.S. Special Operations Command, the documents were disclosed in a report released this week by West Point’s Combating Terrorism Center.

The documents were obtained during recent anti-terrorism operations, the report says. They came from a variety of sources and were selected because they show al-Qaeda discussions of ideology, tactics, potential operations or training, the study says.

The documents show al-Qaeda is committed to waging a holy war against “dictators of the Earth and secular groups” that will end only when “everyone believes in Allah.“

Even with this proof they continue to cower under the demands of Muslims worldwide. They just don’t get it do they? Appeasing them by not showing a few cartoons, or by pulling out of Iraq (cough Spain cough), doesn’t change the fact that they want ALL non-believers dead.

Will the world now come to grips with the fact that this is a new clash of civilizations? Jim Hanson hits the nail on the head with this piece:

The desire of many European countries to atone for their imperialist pasts has led them to an untenable position regarding their own Muslim immigrant populations and Islamists around the world. They practice multiculturalism, but there has been no assimilation by their immigrants or acceptance of a free Western society. They have maintained an insular culture and enforced many abhorrent customs, including forced marriage and honor killings. Now Islamists worldwide are expanding the scope of their assumed authority and demand submission or violence in ostensibly free countries.

[...]The Palestinians replaced one corrupt terrorist group with another and a nuclear Iran is a real possibility.

[...]Osama bin Laden calls to restore the Caliphate across the Middle East, but states directly that is only a base for expansion into infidel territory. Islamism is united in hatred of the West and the need to deflect attention from the huge disparity in quality of life between their states and free ones.

Demonizing the West as evil in mosques and schools inoculates the young against their natural desire for the freedom and plenty they can’t get at home. Islamists realize they must consolidate now or lose any chance as their youth continue to be exposed to the tempting blasphemy of Western culture. Islamists are making their play, and the West needs a coordinated response.

But is the West up for it? Will the West appease this movement as they did the Hitler movement in the 30’s? Most people shake their head in shame when they learn how most of the world appeased Hitler, given what we know today. But they didn’t know what was coming, there were signs of course but no one acted upon those signs and said enough is enough.

The West needs to say enough is enough NOW!

Victor Davis Hanson writes a wonderful column as usual comparing the world of the late 30’s with the world of today:

British intellectuals, like European Union idealists today, wrote books and treatises on the obsolescence of war. Conflicts were supposedly caused only by rapacious arms merchants and profiteers at home, not by anti-democratic dictators who interpreted forbearance as weakness. Winston Churchill was a voice in the wilderness ? and demonized as a warmonger and worse.

Today, the 50-year Cold War is over, and Europe is at last free of burdensome military expenditure and the threat of global annihilation. Like Osama Bin Laden, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad senses a certain weariness in much of the West as it counts on perpetual peace.

He assumes that most sober Westerners will do almost anything to avoid military confrontation to stop a potential threat ? even though, unlike Hitler, Ahmadinejad not only promises to liquidate the Jews but reveals his method in advance by seeking nuclear weapons.

Some naive conservatives in prewar Europe thought the German and Italian fascists would prove a valuable bulwark against communism, and so could be politically finessed. So, too, it has been at times with Islamic fascism. Arming the mujahadeen in Afghanistan, Pakistan or Saudi Arabia was once seen as an inspired way of thwarting Soviet communist imperialism.

At the time of the Ayatollah Khomeini’s homicidal fatwa against Salman Rushdie, religious conservative commentators from Patrick Buchanan to New York’s Cardinal O’Connor attacked Rushdie, rather than defended the Western right of free expression. Apparently, they felt such Islamic threats to supposed blasphemers might have positive repercussions in discouraging left-wing anti-Christian attacks as well.

In the 1930s, the doctrine of appeasement fobbed off responsibility of confronting fascism onto the League of Nations. Both France and England were quiet about the 1936 Italian invasion of Ethiopia and the German militarization of the Rhineland. They counted on multilateral action of the League, which issued plenty of edicts but marshaled few troops.

[...]As fascism spread, France worked on fortifying its German border with the Maginot Line, Oxford undergraduates voted to refuse “in any circumstances to fight for King and Country,” and British newspapers decried the Treaty of Versailles for unduly punishing Germany. This was all long before the “no blood for oil” slogan and Al Gore in Saudi Arabia apologizing to his Wahhabi hosts for the supposed American maltreatment of Arabs.

[...]Just as Hitler concocted incidents such as the burning of the Reichstag to create outrage, Islamist leaders incite frenzy in their followers over a supposed flushed Koran at Guantanamo and several inflammatory cartoons, some of them never published by Danish newspapers at all.

[...]The point of the comparison is not to suggest that history simply repeats itself, but to learn why intelligent people delude themselves into embracing naive policies. After the removal of the Taliban and Saddam Hussein, the furious reply of the radical Islamist world was to censor Western newspapers, along with Iran’s accelerated efforts to get the bomb.

In response, either the West will continue to stand up now to these reoccurring post-Sept. 11 threats, or it will see the bullies’ demands only increase as its own resistance weakens. Like the appeasement of the 1930s, opting for the easier choice will only guarantee a more costly one later on. .

While the world appeases these fanatics the news of the day appears grim as usual:

CNN and the rest of the MSM have gone out of it’s way to publish the Abu Ghraib photo’s but still refuse to publish the cartoons of Mohammed. And of course with their bias so instilled into their brains they see nothing wrong with this. The cartoons inflammed the Muslims. The pictures of an OLD case where the suspects have been tried and convicted for their crimes will inflame the Muslims. Nope, nothing wrong there.

Filipino Muslims are angry also:

Thousands of angry Filipino Muslims ?beheaded? two effigies of cartoonists and set a Danish flag on fire in a protest over the controversial caricatures of the Prophet Mohammed.

The protesters marched through the streets of this southern Philippine city and demanded death for the artists who drew the cartoons that first appeared in a Danish newspaper in September.

The Muslims then demand that laws be passed making any insult upon Mohammed a crime:

Head of the International Union of Muslim Scholars (IUMS) and TV preacher Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, well-known for his appearances on the al-Jazeera satellite channel, has told the network he accepts Tuesday’s apology from an inter-faith Norwegian delegation for offence caused by the publication of Danish cartoons satirising the Prophet Mohammed. However, the apology for the cartoons’ re-publication by a Norwegian Christian newspaper last month is “not enough,” said al-Qaradawi, who is close to the Muslim Brotherhood movement.

Al-Qaradawi, who is imam of the Omara mosque in the Qatari capital, Doha, and also the head of the European Council for Fatwa and Research, said: “I accept in principle the apology from Norway, but this is conditional. We want the Norwegian government to pass a law that punishes all those who cause offence to religious symbols.”

“These kinds of acts must be considered a crime and be punished. Only then will we wholeheartedly accept their apologies,” he continued. The apologies from Norway do not justify the end of the consumer and retail boycotts of Scandinavian goods in many Arab countries - this can only happen when Norway passes a blasphemy law, he said.

Muslims worldwide will no longer eat danish’s, but they will eat Mohammed instead:

Iranians love Danish pastries, but when they look for the flaky dessert at the bakery they now have to ask for “Roses of the Prophet Muhammad.”
Bakeries across the capital were covering up their ads for Danish pastries Thursday after the confectioners’ union ordered the name change in retaliation for caricatures of the Muslim prophet published in a Danish newspaper.

“Given the insults by Danish newspapers against the prophet, as of now the name of Danish pastries will give way to ‘Rose of Muhammad’ pastries,” the union said in its order.

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

And more proof showing how backward these people are:

Aliye Cetinkaya, a journalist from the Turkish daily Sabah newspaper, who was reporting on the recent protests over the offensive caricatures of the Prophet Mohammed, was stoned in Konya for reasons demonstrators said were provocative ? as she did not cover her head. Cetinkaya was taken away by male colleagues after stones hit her head and shoulders. The female journalist was attacked for being ?sexually provocative? for not wearing a head scarf at the demonstration organised by the Peoples Education Research and Support Group in Konya (He-Da-Der) and entitled ?Loyalty to the Prophet?.

All in all, another day of appeasement. I think I will end this with the words of Ann Coulter:

What is stunning about this spectacle is that their violence is working. With a few exceptions, the media won’t show the cartoons that incited mass violence around the globe (cartoons available at www.anncoulter.com). And yet, week after week, American patriots endure “The Boondocks” without complaint. Where’s the justice here?

Perhaps we could put aside our national, ongoing, post-9/11 Muslim butt-kissing contest and get on with the business at hand: Bombing Syria back to the stone age and then permanently disarming Iran.

I would add to the business at hand by including: Every newspaper in the United States publish those cartoons.

UPDATE

And the appeasement continues:

A leaked Foreign Office memo published yesterday reveals that the government is to establish ties with the Muslim Brotherhood, an Islamist group banned by the Egyptian government.
Like other western countries, Britain is struggling with the dilemma posed by the electoral successes of Islamist groups either directly linked to terrorism or alleged to be fronts for violent organisations.

The memo, written on January 17 and leaked to the New Statesman, recommends increased engagement with the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, the oldest Islamist group in the world. The recommendation has been accepted by Jack Straw, the foreign secretary.

The memo says: “The presentation of any change in the way we deal with the Muslim Brotherhood will have to be carefully handled, in order to safeguard our bilateral relations with Egypt.”

The whole memo can be read here.

How about this one:

BBC bosses are ready to AXE a ?1million episode of hit drama Spooks in which an al-Qaeda terrorist is shot dead ? in case it upsets Muslims.

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Latest from Cox & Forkum.

Winston Churchill wrote this 107 years ago. Still fits:

?How dreadful are the curses which Mohammedanism lays on its votaries! Besides the fanatical frenzy, which is as dangerous in a man as hydrophobia in a dog, there is this fearful fatalistic apathy. The effects are apparent in many countries. Improvident habits, slovenly systems of agriculture, sluggish methods of commerce, and insecurity of property exist wherever the followers of the Prophet rule or live. A degraded sensualism deprives this life of its grace and refinement; the next of its dignity and sanctity.

The fact that in Mohammedan law every woman must belong to some man as his absolute property, either as a child, a wife, or a concubine, must delay the final extinction of slavery until the faith of Islam has ceasedto be a great power among men. Individual Moslems may show splendid qualities ? but the influence of the religion paralyses the social development of those who follow it. No stronger retrograde force exists in the world. Far from being moribund, Mohammedanism is a militant and proselytizing faith. It has already spread throughout Central Africa, raising fearless warriors at every step; and were it not that Christianity is sheltered in the strong arms of science, the science against which it had vainly struggled, the civilization of modern Europe might fall, as fell the civilization of ancient Rome.?

Amir Taheri writes in The Opinion Journal today with some very wise words.? And some not so wise:

But how representative of Islam are all those demonstrators? The “rage machine” was set in motion when the Muslim Brotherhood–a political, not a religious, organization–called on sympathizers in the Middle East and Europe to take the field.

Ok, stop right there.? The Muslim Brotherhood is a political organization, not a religious one?? How can you tell the difference?? I don’t think there is any such thing.? They are all religious organizations, with political aspirations maybe but it all comes down to religion.? Take for example the next sentence:

A fatwa was issued by Yussuf al-Qaradawi, a Brotherhood sheikh with his own program on al-Jazeera.

So this “political” organization issued a fatwa?? Yeah sure.

Not to be left behind, the Brotherhood’s rivals, Hizb al-Tahrir al-Islami (Islamic Liberation Party) and the Movement of the Exiles (Ghuraba), joined the fray. Believing that there might be something in it for themselves, the Syrian Baathist leaders abandoned their party’s 60-year-old secular pretensions and organized attacks on the Danish and Norwegian embassies in Damascus and Beirut.

The Muslim Brotherhood’s position, put by one of its younger militants, Tariq Ramadan–who is, strangely enough, also an adviser to the British home secretary–can be summed up as follows: It is against Islamic principles to represent by imagery not only Muhammad but all the prophets of Islam; and the Muslim world is not used to laughing at religion. Both claims, however, are false.
There is no Quranic injunction against images, whether of Muhammad or anyone else. When it spread into the Levant, Islam came into contact with a version of Christianity that was militantly iconoclastic. As a result some Muslim theologians, at a time when Islam still had an organic theology, issued “fatwas” against any depiction of the Godhead. That position was further buttressed by the fact that Islam acknowledges the Jewish Ten Commandments–which include a ban on depicting God–as part of its heritage. The issue has never been decided one way or another, and the claim that a ban on images is “an absolute principle of Islam” is purely political. Islam has only one absolute principle: the Oneness of God. Trying to invent other absolutes is, from the point of view of Islamic theology, nothing but sherk, i.e., the bestowal on the Many of the attributes of the One.

The claim that the ban on depicting Muhammad and other prophets is an absolute principle of Islam is also refuted by history. Many portraits of Muhammad have been drawn by Muslim artists, often commissioned by Muslim rulers.

[...]Islamic ethics is based on “limits and proportions,” which means that the answer to an offensive cartoon is a cartoon, not the burning of embassies or the kidnapping of people designated as the enemy. Islam rejects guilt by association. Just as Muslims should not blame all Westerners for the poor taste of a cartoonist who wanted to be offensive, those horrified by the spectacle of rent-a-mob sackings of embassies in the name of Islam should not blame all Muslims for what is an outburst of fascist energy.

Interesting tidbit about the Brotherhood: (via A Blog For All)

BEIRUT (Reuters) - Former Syrian Vice President Abdel-Halim Khaddam and the exiled leader of the outlawed Muslim Brotherhood agreed on Wednesday to join forces to topple President Bashar al-Assad.

A source at Khaddam’s office said the former official held talks with Ali Bayanouni, head of the Sunni Islamist group, in Brussels on Tuesday and Wednesday.

“There was agreement on a joint vision to save Syria from the crisis that the regime has placed it in,” the source told Reuters in Beirut by telephone. “It was also agreed to contact other opposition leaders inside and outside Syria to come up with a joint plan of action.”

The source said the two leaders also rejected any foreign intervention in Syria: “The responsibility of changing the corrupt regime in Syria lies only on the Syrian people.”

So the group that was responsible for the assassination of Sadat now wants to take out the Syrian regime because they are kinda bad guys.? Only in the Middle East.

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The ones who are so murderously offended as to scream for heads to roll need to relax. Quit making it so easy for others to push your buttons. Sign up for anger management classes. This Egyptian blogger gets it.

I found this at Michael Medved’s fanblog, and thought it was pretty good:

Ink

It’s just ink.

Imagine. A man stands before you in a boardroom, holding an inkwell.

“With this little jar of black liquid, I can make images that can get me fired, write words that will get me arrested. I can incite hate, and I can make pictures that would cause me to be executed in some countries. I can create international incidents.

“I can also leave a lasting legacy. I can inspire my children and others to attempt new things and change the world. I can make testimonies and promises to the world I will no doubt leave behind one day.

“With ink like this, Bibles, Torahs, Baghavad Gitas and Korans are printed. Millions file past old parchment in the national archives just to glimpse the ink put down two centuries ago outlining our freedoms.

“Don’t let it go to waste. But never let it become more important than another liquid: never let it become more important than blood.”

Right now, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Jordan, Egypt, Libya, and other Muslim nations are demanding that the Danish government punish a private newspaper for printing 12 drawings of Mohammed (the prophet of Islam). Furthermore they are demanding Danish laws and UN resolutions that would forbid such “offenses” from occuring again. Ambassadors have been recalled. Flags are being burned. Threats of death are being made. This is an international incident.

It’s ink.

It’s just ink.