"What these women want to say with the sign is unclear." Umm, not to me. Offhand, I would guess that they've been stoked up with plenty of worship of Haj Mohammed Amin Al-Husseini mixed in with being OBL whores. And -- no sorries from me -- I make absolutely no apology for my language when applied to vile cretins like this...

"And then it is done smugly."

Pssst. Don't tell Dana Milbank!

Pigs Leap Into Flight In France

"The accusation from French Foreign Minister Philippe Douste-Blazy — which Iran quickly denied — appeared to reflect mounting exasperation and a tougher stance by one of three key European negotiators.

"No civilian nuclear program can explain the Iranian nuclear program. It is a clandestine military nuclear program," Douste-Blazy said on France-2 television."

My guess is that this means things are so bad that the first Iranian nuclear test is just around the corner. Maybe even the corner in a neighborhood near you...

"Certainly the most pro-American place I’ve ever been."

Did I forget to mention those lyin' eyes?

As if I should have ever wondered why Grandpa Olaf left Norway. I'm praying this isn't true since I can't find any other articles to confirm it yet. In the course of looking I ran across an interesting article that points out that Jyllands-Posten was hypocritical in that they previously didn't print some possibly offensive "Jesus characatures". But while being much more tame on the subject than I am it still comes down properly on the freedom side of the issue...

UPDATE: Looks like it's not true. But I wonder for how long?

The Onion reports on Hamas' call for a "Giant Summit". Complete with 6 digit numbers and specially chartered freight trains. Did I mention that there was no holocaust? (HT LGF)

You won't read this in the NYeT in a million years... After all, everyone knows that all the Iraqis hate us too ... or do they?

Warren Again

"Twenty-seven years ago, as Ayatollah Khomeini took power in Iran, the first “Islamist” regime since the foundation of Saudi Arabia, you said it was a good thing. Islam had to find its way into a new balance between “piety” and “modernity”, and the Persians were just the civilized people to find this way. I agreed we needed both piety and modernity, in East as in West, but held little hope for “a new balance” from the ayatollahs of Iran. I reminded that many welcomed Lenin as a “reformer”, then Stalin, Hitler, Mao Tse-tung, Pol Pot. But these, you said, were all atheists; they did not have the conscience of an ancient and honourable religion to restrain them. In time we both came to see that Revolutionary Iran was a new and vicious engine of totalitarianism. And you called it, “heretical to Islam”."

And you're surely read about "Incompatibilities" also?

Steyn To The Dark Barricades

"The issue is not "freedom of speech" or "the responsibilities of the press" or "sensitivity to certain cultures." The issue, as it has been in all these loony tune controversies going back to the Salman Rushdie fatwa, is the point at which a free society musters the will to stand up to thugs. British Muslims march through the streets waving placards reading "BEHEAD THE ENEMIES OF ISLAM." If they mean that, bring it on. As my columnar confrere John O'Sullivan argued, we might as well fight in the first ditch as the last."

Early Showers In Denmark

"Excuse my choice of words, but all this pissing is pissing me off.

What's happening? I am not so much referring to the threats against Danish citizens and Danish commerce. Nor are the burnt down Embassies what occupies my mind. I am thinking of a word that keeps popping up whenever the Mohammed cartoons are mentioned.

That word is BUT. A sneaky word. It's used to deny or relativize what one has just said.

How many times lately have we not heard people of power, The Formers of Opinion and other people say that of course we have freedom of speech, BUT.

They have said it, all of them, from Kofi Annan, the UN Secretary General to our own Bendt Bendtsen [ed: Danish Politician]. Once we had to be sensitive of the easily hurt feeling of the Nazis, then came the communists, now it is the Islamists. The reason I say 'Islamists' is that I don't for a moment believe all the world's Moslems are pissing on us. I think we are dealing with thugs, fools and misled people. Those are the ones we have to deal with, and then the chickenshit politicians.

The cartoons are no longer something the Jyllands-Posten can control. They have already been manipulated and misrepresented to the point that few know what's going on and fewer know how to stop it. This affair is artifically kept buoyant in a sea of lies, suppressions of the truth, misconceptions, lunacy and hypocrisy, for which this newspaper bears no blame. The only thing the Jyllands-Posten did was that it with a pin-prick made a boil of nastiness explode. It would have happened sooner or later. That it happened more than four months following the publication of the cartoons, raises a question of its own.

Are we dealing with random events or with a staged clash of civilizations? One might hope for the former yet expect the latter.

That's why I say: Freedom of Speech is Freedom of Speech is Freedom of Speech. There is no but."