The Dish

An observation.

The Ayatollah Sistani has been perhaps the most stabilizing force in Iraq these past few years. I’ve praised him often; some have suggested he be offered the Nobel Peace Prize. He is often presented as the very model of a modern mullah, open to separation of mosque and state. Still it’s very useful to see what he actually believes on his own website. He believes, for example, that he must not touch a non-Muslim. We are unclean. There is a short list of things regarded as unclean, and, if you are not a Muslim, you are on that list: urine, feces, semen, a dead body, blood, a dog, a pig, alcohol and the sweat of an animal that doesn’t eat the right things. Oh, and you:

The entire body of a Kafir, including his hair and nails, and all liquid substances of his body, are najis.

Faithful Jews and Christians fare a little better:

As regards the people of the Book (i.e. the Jews and the Christians) who do not accept the Prophethood of Prophet Muhammad bin Abdullah (Peace be upon him and his progeny), they are commonly considered najis, but it is not improbable that they are Pak. However, it is better to avoid them.

This website is useful for us to understand better why Islam – not just radical Islam – finds modern pluralistic societies so difficult to tolerate. The West’s view is that all humans are equal in their political and civil rights. Islam’s view is that non-Muslims are on a separate plane: beneath them. Hence their insistence that the West now comport to Islam’s rules with respect to what we can and cannot say and publish in public. We keep saying we must avoid a "clash of civilizations" and no sane person would want one. But that clash has already occurred – within our own civilization. And we’re slowly surrendering.

The Catholic Church is dedicated to celibacy for the priesthood, except when it isn’t. The parish church I attended as a child now has a married priest. Another one got ordained in San Bernadino yesterday. There are hundreds out there. If you’re a former Anglican, you can stay married as a priest if you convert to Catholicism. If you’re a Catholic from the get-go, no dice. This is very similar to the fixed rule that you cannot get divorced as a Catholic. You can just get an annulment. Whenever I’m told that the Church can change no rule, and violate no doctrine, when it comes to issues like celibacy, women priests, marriage, and homosexuality … I always remind myself of what the actual Catholic church does all the time. If the people involved are powerful enough; and its own self-interest strong enough.

My most devoted reader, Mickey Kaus, calls my defense of freedom of speech, including the right to offend others’ religions, "close to unhinged." Then there’s the perspective of someone just returning from Europe. By the way, I do not believe that a single one of the cartoons is objectively offensive, given the criteria applied to other cartoons in the West. Muhammad with a bomb as a turban is the only close call. But when mass-murderers specifically cite Muhammad as the inspiration for their terror, are cartoonists the actual blasphemers for depicting that connection – or the murderers they are criticizing? If Islamists blaspheme their own faith on a daily basis, then the West has every right to illustrate that fact. With no apology needed. What we’re seeing here is the emergence of a special dispensation for Islam in the West – to be free from the kind of rough treatment accorded every other faith. The only rational justification for such a double standard is that Islam is somehow more sacred than Christianity, Judaism, Buddhism, and the like. But, of course, the actual justification for the double-standard is merely fear. The intimidation is working and has worked.

Adding them up. In recent days, leading Republicans have called for the Bush administration wire-tapping surveillance program to have some kind of legal framework, outside what David Addington thinks is appropriate on any given day; a key CIA intelligence expert confirms the notion that vice president Dick Cheney was not seriously interested in finding the whole truth about Iraq’s WMD program, and railroaded the intelligence to produce the result he wanted; we have learned from the head of FEMA that the president knew fully about the dangers poised by Hurricane Katrina in plenty of time to coordinate a much better response; and we know that assurances by the administration about who’s in Guantanamo Bay and why have been lies. We have also learned that the vice-president routinely authorized the release of classified information to advance his political goals, told Scooter Libby of Valerie Plame’s identity, discussed how to handle the press, and shortly after one of the Libby-Cheney discussions, Plame’s identity was leaked. The one thread between all these instances of incompetence, malice and poor judgment is that the sources are either impeccable or Republicans. And the person responsible all of them … is Dick Cheney.

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.