Month: February 2006

Michelle Malkin has a round-up of various governments now censoring portrayal of Muhammad. Canada, Ukraine, Malaysia, Yemen, Sweden, and South Africa are among the beacons of appeasement. The EU is mulling a new media guideline to conform with the demands of Hezbollah. The editor who commissioned the cartoons has been sent on an indefinite leave. In America and Britain, the government does not need to censor the press. The press is only too willing to do what the Islamists want, without any prodding from the government. It’s amazing how quickly the Jihadists have succeeded in intimidating the West into giving up critical freedoms in a matter of days. Now, wait till they have a nuke.

At CPAC, the anti-drug crusaders fear they’ve lost the next generation on the cannabis issue. Why else would they duck a debate? And the younger ones don’t really believe preventing gay couples from settling down is the great conservative cause of our time either.

So now we see where this is leading. The head of Hezbollah, Sheik Hassan Nasrallah,

"said there would be no compromise before Denmark apologizes and the European Parliament and individual assemblies in Europe pass laws that prohibit insulting the Prophet."

And he essentially made a threat:

"Today, we are defending the dignity of our prophet with a word, a demonstration, but let George Bush and the arrogant world know that if we have to … we will defend our prophet with our blood, not our voices."

People keep talking about avoiding conflict. They are in denial. The conflict is already here. It is outrageous to be informed by a crowd of hundreds of thousands that the West must give up its freedoms in order to avoid violence. I’m relieved to see that this moment has forced some very hard thinking on the left. I got an email from a leftist British reader this week, passionately opposed to the foreign policies of Bush and Blair. Now he writes:

"What the Islamic world has succeeded in doing is forcing me to decide whether I’m going to side with a US policy which I think is often dirty but is nevertheless open to public scrutiny or an almost medieval, bloodthirsty and closed religious dogma whose intention – and partial achievement – is to undermine my way of life.

The British media and Government are, yet again, behaving in the same appeasing way towards Muslim fundamentalism in our own country as Chamberlain did towards Hitler in 1938 and as Stalin did towards Hitler in 1941. In both cases the results were disastrous; whilst the Allies eventually prevailed, it was at the cost of 50 million lives."

Another liberal reader comments:

"I’m honestly starting to suspect that, before this is over, European nations are going to have exactly four choices in dealing with their entire Moslem populations — for elementary safety’s sake:
(1)  Capitulate totally to them and become a Moslem continent.
(2)  Intern all of them.
(3)  Deport all of them
(4)  Throw all of them into the sea.

This sounds a bit shrill even to me — but what the hell else can you do with several tens of millions of potential Branch Davidians?

The whole worldwide situation would be SO much easier to deal with if Pakistan didn’t already have the Bomb. Think how much more interesting it will be when Iran has it, too."

Interesting is one word for it.

Here’s a challenge to the blogosphere: are there any graphologists out there who can add expertise on the question of who might have forged one of the cartoons? From the calligraphy, it seems someone who is not used to writing English may have penned the words on one of the images. Bottom line: an Islamist may have blasphemed in order to express outrage at others’ alleged blasphemy! Here’s the link. Do your worst.

National Journal has done us all a service with fresh reporting on who is actually detained in Guantanamo Bay, and what happens to them once they’re there. Key pieces here, here, and here. In June of last year, president Bush said "these are people picked up off the battlefield in Afghanistan." At the same time, Defense Secretary Don Rumsfeld was even more categorical: "These are people, all of whom were captured on a battlefield." No big surprise that these statements are untrue. Stuart Taylor summarizes the piece thus:

* A high percentage, perhaps the majority, of the 500-odd men now held at Guantanamo were not captured on any battlefield, let alone on "the battlefield in Afghanistan" (as Bush asserted) while "trying to kill American forces" (as McClellan claimed).

* Fewer than 20 percent of the Guantanamo detainees, the best available evidence suggests, have ever been Qaeda members.

* Many scores, and perhaps hundreds, of the detainees were not even Taliban foot soldiers, let alone Qaeda terrorists. They were innocent, wrongly seized noncombatants with no intention of joining the Qaeda campaign to murder Americans.

* The majority were not captured by U.S. forces but rather handed over by reward-seeking Pakistanis and Afghan warlords and by villagers of highly doubtful reliability.

And how have these innocent men been treated? Taylor again:

[D]etainees who had no information – because they had no involvement in or knowledge of terrorism – have been put through "humiliating acts, solitary confinement, temperature extremes, use of forced positions" in a systematic effort to break their wills that is "tantamount to torture," the International Committee of the Red Cross complained in a confidential report to the government, excerpts of which The New York Times obtained in November 2004. The Pentagon responded then that Guantanamo was an oasis of "humane" treatment.

As readers are aware, I am no fan of Islamism and support aggressive execution of the war on terror. But I do not believe we should be detaining people without due process, abusing and torturing detainees, and prompting dozens of prisoners to go on hunger-strike because of the complete hopelessness of their situation. As Jon Henke reminds us, we have principles in war-time: no self-censorship to appease religious thugs; no torture or abuse of detainees. You cannot defend freedom while extinguishing it at the same time. I fail to see why this is so hard for so many to appreciate.

A year later, the huge news story hyped for days in the New York Times is still a non-story. That man with "super-HIV" is doing fine; there was never a second case; and you can bet your life the NYT won’t run a story revisiting their hysteria one year on. (Hat tip: Petrelis.)

An interesting exchange. Here’s the right-wing blogosphere’s case:

"What we said was that Newsweek should have corroborated their single source before publishing that rumor, and that reprinting allegations by terrorist detainees of abuse without any corroborating evidence of their truth was highly irresponsible. It’s a far cry from publishing these baseless allegations as fact — and the basis of what turned out to be a non-existent pending report of proven misconduct — and publishing editorial cartoons that express an opinion."

Point taken. But Anne is on the side of the angels in this dispute. And what the right-wing blogosphere avoided in its piling on against the Newsweek Koran story is that, although the actual incident was false and Newsweek deserved a shellacking in that respect, the broader phenomenon was true. The Koran was abused at Gitmo – deliberately, at the beginning. The government’s own investigation found this to be true; and others cite evidence showing that it was much more widespread at one point. Exposing abuse and torture legally sanctioned by the president is not, pace Powerline, "a media assault on the American armed forces." It’s a media defense of the American armed forces, from the policy decisions of their civilian superior; and their fawning followers in the more partisan parts of the blogosphere.

I was going to respond to the email I posted in the wee hours, but decided to wait till the morning. Now I don’t have to. Charles Krauthammer has. Money quote:

"A true Muslim moderate is one who protests desecrations of all faiths. Those who don’t are not moderates but hypocrites, opportunists and agents for the rioters, merely using different means to advance the same goal: to impose upon the West, with its traditions of freedom of speech, a set of taboos that is exclusive to the Islamic faith. These are not defenders of religion but Muslim supremacists trying to force their dictates upon the liberal West.

And these "moderates" are aided and abetted by Western "moderates" who publish pictures of the Virgin Mary covered with elephant dung and celebrate the "Piss Christ" (a crucifix sitting in a jar of urine) as art deserving public subsidy, but who are seized with a sudden religious sensitivity when the subject is Muhammad. "

I have to say that the performance of the British and American media this past week has made me sad to be a journalist. The main objective of those editors has been sensitivity; the last imperative has been giving readers the information we need to understand the world around us. If you want to know why newspapers are struggling, you just found out.

A reader writes:

I have no way to know for sure but I have to believe that the New York Times’ decision to refrain from publishing the cartoons in some way reflects the heroic way the city has put forward its tolerance as the best answer to the mass murder in our midst. You may see it as a sellout, a craven surrender to the intimidation of the extremists, but I prefer to see it as a concession (and a small one at that), one that will empower moderate Muslims, especially in the West, to grasp that we do respect their religion and its teachings of peace and love, even as we confront a dangerous minority’s attempts to use it to spark a civilizational war. 

This afternoon I saw a report on MSNBC, detailing the response from American Muslims, how they’ve been proud of our media’s "restraint and dignity" as opposed to what has happened in Europe. We desperately need to enlist these moderate Muslims in our cause — and I don’t think we’re compromising our commitment to freedom of expression by exercising a little respect.

Again, I’m with you on the merits of all your arguments. But my experiences as a New Yorker tell me there may be another way to reach the people who don’t hate us yet but trust us less and less each day."

A reader scoffs at my plantar wart agony:

The injections aren’t the ‘nuclear option’. Penis surgery is. When I was younger – my pre-condom days – I contracted warts on my penis from a girlfriend. I was advised to try the various ointments. Nothing worked. Then I started the practice of periodically going in and having a doctor freeze them off with liquid nitrogen. That would work for a while but I had to keep going back.

One day my regular doctors weren’t there. So this new chap took a look and before I could do anything, he was trying to swirl my ‘johnson’ around in the liquid nitrogen. I said: "what the—!?!?" and he said: "But I had to! You have warts all around the edge of your helmet." Idiot. Those little knobby things weren’t warts. They were part of my anatomy, and are presumably part of the anatomy of all uncircumcised males.

There’s more. I was living in Canada but I moved to England to do postgraduate work in philosophy. One day I went in to see a doctor there – what looked like a small wart had reappeared – and he said he’d found some more … in the urethral canal. I couldn’t tell so I took his word for it, and his word was that I needed surgery. I had the canal scraped out, meaning not only no sex but no erections until everything healed. Try willing yourself to not have an erection in the middle of the night, or whenever. You can imagine how that worked out (about as well as willing oneself to have an erection): ruined sheets, ruined mattress.

So, be glad your warts are where they are, and, er, not somewhere else."

T.M.I.? Not on this blog. And, yes, my foot pain seems much more bearable now.