Target Centermass

Category: War on Terror

  • A Tale of Two Duh! Headlines

    Please be so kind as to file them both under the “well, I should freakin’ hope so” category.

    Poll: Americans fear Iran will develop, use nukes

    Americans are deeply worried about the possibility that Iran will develop nuclear weapons and use them against the USA, a USA TODAY/CNN/Gallup Poll finds, but they also fear that the Bush administration will be “too quick” to order military action against Iran.

    […]

    There is little doubt among Americans about Iran’s intentions. Eight of 10 predict Iran would provide a nuclear weapon to terrorists who would use it against the USA or Israel, and almost as many say the Iranian government itself would use nuclear weapons against Israel. Six of 10 say the Iranian government would deploy nuclear weapons against the USA.

    I’ll admit, I’m editing quite selectively, but the story really did try to hide the meat of the poll behind the numbers based upon a so-far successful undermining of the Bush administration and piss-poor reporting of our successes in Iraq.

    US and Israel ‘trying to destabilise Hamas’

    Hamas has accused the US and Israel of refusing to accept the result of a democratic election, after a report that the two countries are discussing means to destabilise and bring down a Hamas-led Palestinian administration.

    The New York Times, citing diplomatic sources in Jerusalem, said Washington and Israel intend to block funding for the Palestinian Authority in an attempt to ensure that Hamas cabinet ministers fail and new elections are called.

    After Hamas’s election victory, the US and EU warned the Islamist group that unless it renounced violence and recognised Israel’s right to exist they would cut funding for the Palestinian Authority.

    Let’s see … a terrorist organization is rightfully elected the run the Palestinian state-or-whatever. The two governments that have previously shouldered a lion’s share of the funding for the state-or-state-of-anarchy balk. Is this undermining or just a shade of common-sense diplomacy? I’m voting for the latter, and I would really like to see a little hardball played here — the Palestinians made a choice and Hamas must find a way to function as a true government or fail upon their promises. After all, they have a rather sizable role to play in the violent anarchy over which they now supposedly govern. That Hamas would decry a withholding of funding from those they’ve deemed enemies is a truly special brand of weak victimization for a state-or-state-of-bloodletting that has already banked for years upon its claims of victimhood.

  • Air Marshals Charged with Plotting to Smuggle Cocaine

    Here’s an absolutely despicable tale of betrayal of public trust.

    Two federal air marshals scheduled to appear this afternoon on drug conspiracy charges are accused of smuggling 15 kilograms, or 33 pounds, of cocaine for $4,500 per kilogram, the U.S. Attorney’s Office said today.

    Air marshals Shawn Ray Nguyen, 38, and Burlie L. Sholar III, 32, both of Houston, were arrested Thursday at Nguyen’s Houston home, where an informant had delivered the cocaine and $15,000 in “up front” money.

    Nguyen and Sholar are charged with conspiracy to possess with intent to distribute five kilograms or more of cocaine, which carries a sentence of 10 years to life in prison and a maximum fine of $4 million.

    The two air marshals had allegedly agreed with the confidential informant to bypass airport security at Bush Intercontinental Airport to smuggle the cocaine on board a flight bound for Las Vegas.

    Joanne R. Oxford, special agent in charge of the Federal Air Marshal Service in Houston, said, “The Federal Air Marshal Service takes these allegations seriously and is cooperating fully with the investigation.”

    Whatever beliefs one may hold about the U.S. drug policy, one should certainly feel that government agents should not be violating that policy. There comes a point where betrayal of public trust is almost treasonous, and there is arguably nowhere, other than the U.S. military, in the post-9/11 world where the American public has placed so much trust for their own security than the federal air marshall program. If these two marshalls are tried and found guilty, I vote that they be skinned.

  • At the Movies with the United Nations

    The good:

    Govts should pay for cartoon protest: UN

    Iran, Syria and other governments that failed to protect foreign embassies from mobs protesting over cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed should pay for the damage, UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan said.

    The cartoons’ publication in a Danish newspaper have triggered widespread protests across the Muslim world including violent attacks on Western diplomatic offices in a number of countries.

    “The government has a responsibility to prevent these things from happening. They should have stopped it, not just in Syria or Iran but all around,” Annan said.

    “Not having stopped it, I hope they will pick up the bill for the destruction that has been caused to all the foreign countries,” he told CNN.

    “They should be prepared to pay for the damage done to Danish, Norwegian and the other embassies concerned.”

    The bad:

    UN report calls for closure of Guantánamo

    A UN inquiry into conditions at Guantánamo Bay has called on Washington to shut down the prison, and says treatment of detainees in some cases amounts to torture, UN officials said yesterday.

    The report also disputes the Bush administration’s legal arguments for the prison, which was sited at the navy base in Cuba with the purpose of remaining outside the purview of the US courts, and says there has been insufficient legal process to decide whether detainees continued to pose a threat to the US.

    The report, prepared by five envoys from the United Nations Commission on Human Rights and due for release tomorrow, is bound to deepen international criticism of the detention centre. Drafts of the report were leaked to the Los Angeles Times and the Telegraph newspapers, but UN envoys refused to comment yesterday.

    During an 18-month investigation, the envoys interviewed freed prisoners, lawyers and doctors to collect information on the detainees, who have been held for the last four years without access to US judicial oversight. The envoys did not have access to the 500 prisoners who are still being held at the detention centre.

    “We very, very carefully considered all of the arguments posed by the US government,” Manfred Nowak, the UN special rapporteur on torture and one of the envoys, told the LA Times. “There are no conclusions that are easily drawn. But we concluded that the situation in several areas violates international law and conventions on human rights and torture.”

    The report lists techniques in use at Guantánamo that are banned under the UN’s convention against torture, including prolonged periods of isolation, exposure to extremes of heat and cold, and humiliation, including forced shaving. [Note: humilition equals torture. Go figure.]

    The UN report also focuses on a relatively new area of concern in Guantánamo – the resort to violent force-feeding to end a hunger strike by inmates. [Note: certainly a case of damned if you do, damned if you don’t. Imagine the outcry had they been allowed to starve. I say fine — let ’em starve.]

    And the ugly:

    Bush agrees to work with U.N. on international force for Darfur

    In a move that ultimately could lead to the deployment of U.S. troops to Africa, President Bush on Monday agreed to work with the United Nations on the creation of a new international force to stop ethnic killings in Sudan’s Darfur region.

    Although Bush made no commitments on a possible role for U.S. troops, U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan said he favors American participation in the peacekeeping mission. Bush and Annan sidestepped that issue during a White House meeting that focused on the mechanics of creating a peacekeeping force.

    “When the planning is done and we come up with detailed requirements, then each government will have to indicate what they will offer and what they will do,” Annan told CNN after the meeting. “I hope that the U.S. and other governments with capacity will pull together and work with us in putting the forces on the ground.”

    Annan said that international troops offer the best hope for ending the violence that’s claimed as many as 200,000 lives and left nearly 2 million people homeless. Peacekeeping troops from neighboring African countries have been unable to stop marauding militias that operate with support from the Sudanese government.

    The campaign of terror and ethnic cleansing, orchestrated by Sudanese Arabs, targets Darfur’s African population. Humanitarian groups say the violence rivals the slaughter in Rwanda in the 1990s.

    Bush and other administration officials have shown little enthusiasm for putting U.S. troops in the middle of the ethnic strife, but they haven’t ruled it out. Bush, who has called the killings in Darfur genocide, didn’t even mention plans for an international force in brief remarks to reporters after his meeting with Annan.

    He said only that they had “a good discussion” about the problem.

    A State Department spokesman said that any discussion of sending U.S. troops to Africa is premature until the United Nations comes up with a more complete plan for an international force. The Pentagon is ready to send experts to U.N. headquarters in New York to help plan the peacekeeping mission and ensure that it has a large African component.

    “It’s really premature to speculate about what the needs would be in terms of logistics, in terms of airlift, in terms of actual troops. And it’s certainly in that regard premature to speculate on what the U.S. contribution might be,” State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said.

    One note about the ugly factor here: it is certainly an understatement to say the Sudanese situation is already quite ugly. Any U.S. military involvement only increases the potential for “Americanizing” the bloody mess.

  • America Won’t Attack Us, Says Iran

    Iran again grabs the opportunity to play the role of the little streetpunk in need of a good smackdown.

    An Iranian vice president said he did not believe that the US would attack his country over its nuclear programme and compared defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld to a vampire showing its teeth.

    “Iran is not Iraq, Iran is not Afghanistan,” Isfandiar Rahim Mashaee said during a visit to the Indonesian capital Jakarta.

    “They still cannot leave (those two countries), it is impossible for them to invade Iran.”

    The United Nations nuclear watchdog voted last week to refer Iran to the UN Security Council over its nuclear programme – raising the stakes in the dispute over the Middle Eastern country’s nuclear ambitions.

    The US and Europe suspect Iran is secretly developing bombs, but Iran insists the programme is for energy.

    The US has denied it has any plans to invade the country, but Rumsfeld reportedly agreed with a German interviewer recently that all options, including a military response, were on the table.

    Asked about that report, Mashaee said Rumsfeld was like “Dracula showing his teeth”.

    Actually, yeah, I can kind of see the Dracula in Rummy. Then again, I kind of like that in a Secretary of Defense. It’s not the nature of the position to be the good cop in the greater scheme of things.

  • Sheehan Won’t Run Against Feinstein

    Damn it, Gold Star mom Cindy Sheehan, you’re such a tease.

    Anti-war activist Cindy Sheehan, who has criticized President Bush and other elected officials for their war support since her son was killed in Iraq, said today that she won’t run for office against U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein.

    “I felt that putting pressure on her from the outside would be more effective than working from the inside,” said Sheehan, 48, of Berkeley during a morning press conference.

    Sheehan, whose son Casey was killed in Iraq in 2004, had considered running in the Democratic primary to energize other anti-war candidates. The primary is in June, and candidates must submit their statements by Feb. 14.

    […]

    Sheehan, who has never held or run for elected office, considered a Senate run after accusing Feinstein of being out of touch with Californians on the situation in Iraq. Sheehan said the California lawmaker voted for authorizing the use of force in Iraq and will not support calls to immediately bring the troops home.

    My, but that would have been good for some chuckles, and the media would have been left with no way to avoid covering Gold Star mom Cindy Sheehan’s rather questionable ramblings.

    Damn.

  • Another Mohammed Cartoon Link Dump

    Shameful appeasement

    The past several days of mayhem throughout the Muslim world — all thanks to a handful of mild cartoons depicting the prophet Mohammed — have provided a clarifying moment for those still uncertain about what the West faces from radical disciples of the Islamic faith.

    What’s clear is that East and West are not just cultures apart, but centuries, and that certain elements of the Muslim world would like to drag us back into the Dark Ages.

    What is also clear is that the West’s own leaders, both in Europe and the USA, as well as many of our own journalists, have been weak-spined when it comes to defending the principles of free expression that the artists in Denmark were exploring.

    Instead of stepping up to passionately defend freedoms won through centuries of bloody sacrifice, most have bowed to ayatollahs of sensitivity, rebuking the higher calling of enlightenment and sending the cartoonists into hiding under threat of death.

    Many U.S. newspapers have declined to reproduce the cartoons out of respect for Muslims, setting up the absurd implication that an open airing of the debate’s content constitutes disrespect. Both the U.S. State Department and the Vatican have declared that Muslims were justified in being offended, while former president Bill Clinton, speaking in Qatar last month, called the cartoons “appalling.”

    Read the whole column. I particularly like the following portions:

    Thanks to this heritage of healthy irreverence, today self-deprecation and parody are favorite ingredients in the volatile, spicy stew we call freedom. That’s why we roast our most powerful in tribute — and why politicians collect, frame and display cartoons that lampoon them. The ability to laugh at oneself, or to shrug off insult, is a sign both of a mature ego and a mature society.

    Unfortunately, much of the Arab/Muslim world enjoys no such legacy, much to its cultural impoverishment and to our potential peril. It might help us to win this war of ideas if we properly understand our own.

    … and …

    Two common apologist arguments beg rebuttal. One of them compares printing inflammatory cartoons to crying “fire” in a crowded theater, implying that one shouldn’t express things certain to offend others. Never mind that all political commentary would cease by such a standard, but the reason crying “fire” is forbidden is practical. People panic and stampede when they hear it, and it is false. It is imperative to cry “fire” when there really is a fire. It is also imperative to cry foul when cartoonists face death threats for doodling.

    The other argument, also based on a logical fallacy, is that the Danish cartoons are comparable to racist caricatures of Jews in Nazi Germany and blacks in the segregationist South. The Boston Globe, which saw fit in the past to defend “Piss Christ” (a photograph of a crucifix submerged in a glass of urine) as well as a depiction of the Virgin Mary covered in feces as worthy of government subsidy, made such a case recently.

    There are at least two reasons why The Globe’s comparison is bogus: gas chambers and lynchings. Both the Nazis and the Ku Klux Klan were officially sanctioned enforcers of immoral social orders that used caricature to further degrade and dehumanize beleaguered minorities they ultimately murdered.

    There is no equivalence between organized murder on behalf of a malignant social system and a half-dozen nerdy artists, speaking only for themselves, lampooning a fanatical religious sect whose members, by the way, specifically advance the delightful goal of exterminating millions of “infidels.”

    The correct comparison, in fact, for Nazi and Klan terrorists are their brothers under the hoods — the jihadists who issued a death sentence on writer Salman Rushdie, who beheaded journalist Daniel Pearl and businessman Nick Berg, and who kidnapped an innocent American female journalist and showed videos of her sobbing and terrified among armed men holding guns to her head.

    A ‘dangerous moment’ for Europe and Islam

    As Islamic protests grew against the publication in Europe of cartoons lampooning the Prophet Muhammad, a small Arab movement active in Belgium, the Netherlands and Denmark responded with a drawing on its Web site of Hitler in bed with Anne Frank. “Write this one in your diary, Anne,” Hitler was shown as saying.

    The intent of the cartoon, the Arab European League said, was “to use our right to artistic expression” just as the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten did when it published a group of cartoons showing Muhammad last September. “Europe has its sacred cows, even if they’re not religious sacred cows,” said Dyab Abou Jahjah, the founder of the organization, which claims rights for immigrants aggressively but without violence.

    Such contrasts have produced a worrisome sense that the conflict over the cartoons has pushed both sides across an unexpected threshold, where they view each other with miscomprehension and suspicion.

    “This feels to me like a defining moment,” said Timothy Garton Ash, an Oxford professor of European history. “It is a crunch time for Europe and Islam,” he said, “it is an extremely dangerous moment,” one that could lead to “a downward spiral of mutual perceptions, and not just between extremists.”

    U.S. says Iran and Syria stoking cartoon protests

    America entered the row over the Muhammad cartoons yesterday accusing Syria and Iran of stoking up protests against the caricatures to suit their own ends. In France, the publication of all the offending cartoons by a magazine sparked further protests.

    Condoleezza Rice, the US secretary of state, said: “I have no doubt that Iran and Syria have gone out of their way to inflame sentiments and have used this for their own purposes. The world ought to call them on it.”

    Meanwhile, as all this plays out over a dozen, generally tame cartoons, some of which showed more the cartoonist’s fear of Moslems than an image of Mohammed, realize that today’s tremors are, at least in part, driven by lies and fakes (hat tip to Gateway Pundit).

    Also remember that, while the entire brouhaha is supposedly based upon the employment of images of the prophet Mohammed, such images are certainly nothing new. No, there are other motivations at play here, and they may be a case of radical Islamists showing their hand too early.

  • U.S. Officials Meet Iraq Insurgent Groups

    Perhaps we are looking at the beginning of the end game in Iraq.

    U.S. officials have met figures from some Sunni Arab insurgent groups but have so far not received any commitment for them to lay down their arms, Western diplomats in Baghdad and neighboring Jordan said Wednesday.

    […]

    The meetings, described as being in the initial stage, have not included members of al-Qaida in Iraq or like-minded religious extremists, the diplomats said on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the subject.

    Contacts have taken place in western Iraq, Lebanon and the United Arab Emirates, according to two diplomats based in the Jordanian capital, Amman. One of them said talks might shift to Egypt “at some point.”

    U.S. officials have said establishing a dialogue with the insurgents was difficult because of the lack of a unified command structure among the various groups and the absence of a leadership capable of speaking for most of them.

    Lt. Col. Barry Johnson, a U.S. military spokesman in Baghdad, said the United States is involved in talks on promoting Iraq’s political process with “all sorts of groups,” but declined to say if any insurgents were among them.

    However, a Western diplomat in Baghdad who is familiar with the dialogue said the U.S. was reaching out to “Sunni Arab nationalists” and “some Islamists from the Shiite and Sunni sides,” many of whom have grievances about jobs and reconstruction money.

    “We hear all the time that they are interested in coming in but we haven’t seen signs,” the diplomat said. “We want to see attacks stopped. The question is, can they help end the violence if they want to join.”

    Please note that I am not saying that success in Iraq is close or even a certainty. That would be quite a statement in the face of political scene where the likes of Gold Star mom Cindy Sheehan have their words and deeds selectively reported and the doom-laden calls for retreat by Congressman Murtha (D-Penn.) are trumpeted while the pronouncements of progress by Senator Joseph Lieberman (D-Conn.) barely register a blip on the radar.

    That said, this may be the first step in seperating the men from the boys … errr … the actual Iraqi insurgents from the radical Islamist terrorist bastards. Realize that the domestic Iraqi holdouts have witnessed large parts of their homeland enthusiastically embracing democracy and have become disgusted with their supposed Islamist terrorist allies’ tactics of murderously targeting innocent Iraqi civilians. Oh yeah, they have also seen a lot of their insurgent brethren getting shredded by Coalition troops they cannot truly engage, as well as improving and growing Iraqi security forces. With a wedge already developing between the insurgent and terrorist facets of our enemies in Iraq, it is only sensible that the U.S. would work to further drive home that wedge in the hopes of reducing our opponents by means other than bullets. While it is at yet uncertain any benefit for the Iraqi people and the Coalition will come from these efforts, certainly there is no foreseeable harm in the maneuver.

    If Iraq can actually come to grips with its domestic insurgents, embracing them and isolating the truly blood-craved Islamist terrorists, then this may indeed by the opening moves of a lengthy end game. After all, as much as the anti-war opponents and large portions of the media have tried to paint the picture of another Viet Nam, one key difference has never been overcome: the war in Nam was, post-Tet, fought primarily against a regular military of an outside force backed, supplied and heavily maintained by a global superpower. That is certainly not the case in Iraq. That has never been close to being the case in Iraq.

  • U.S., Russia, Germany Cancel Afghanistan Debt

    Smart move all around.

    Afghanistan on Wednesday hailed decisions to cancel the impoverished country’s debts to the United States, Russia and Germany, but the country likely will remain dependent on foreign aid as it recovers from decades of war.

    Afghanistan owed $108 million to the United States and $44 million to Germany from loans before the 1979 Soviet invasion. Russia claimed it was owed about $10 billion from loans to a puppet communist government in the early 1990s.

    “After 30 years of devastation, we are starting from nothing and any move such as this helps the reconstruction of Afghanistan,” said Khaleeq Ahmed, a spokesman for President Hamid Karzai.

    The Bush administration said Tuesday it will forgive the entire debt, following a similar pledge from Russia on Monday and from Germany at a donors’ conference last week.

    Even with the loans forgiven, Afghanistan looks set to remain reliant on years of foreign aid. More than 90 percent of the government’s $4.75 billion budget in 2005 was financed by international donors, and Karzai has said his government will need propping up for about a decade.

    The International Monetary Fund’s representative in Afghanistan, Joshua Charap, said that even by 2010, Afghan government revenues are expected to cover less than two-thirds of total expenditures.

    Charap said the removal of the foreign debt would allow Kabul to “normalize its credit rating,” paving the way for new loans.

    Nearly a third of government spending this fiscal year has been on its new army and police amid rising crime and the Taliban-led insurgency. The hard-line Islamic militia was ousted from power in 2001 by a U.S.-led invasion.

    This poor nation, ravaged and rent by strife since the days of disco, needs all the assistance possible in succeeding, and the three countries forgiving debt are all safer with a peaceful Afghanistan.

  • Of Mohammed Cartoons and Moslem Carnage

    Apparently, while I was incommunicado this past weekend in an obscure and isolated Oklahoma state park, the story of the reaction by the Islamic global community to a dozen generally-inoffensive cartoon representations of the supposed prophet Mohammed exploded. As I’m still trying to play catch up, here’s a link dump on the brouhaha.

    How cartoons sparked violence

    The violent and now deadly protests rippling through Asia and the Middle East over the publication of caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad reflects a larger schism and lack of understanding between traditional Western cultures and Islam, experts said Monday.

    In the secular world, the debate is about freedom of the press, but to Muslims worldwide, the images are offensive not only because they depict Muhammad as a promoter of terrorism but also because their very existence violates the Islamic tradition forbidding visual depictions of the Prophet.

    As European diplomats urged calm and restraint, the violence that already led to the burning of Danish and Norwegian embassies over the weekend turned fatal Monday. Afghan troops killed four protesters, including two outside the U.S. military base near Bagram, and a teenage boy was trampled in Somalia.

    […]

    The anger, according to experts, stems from long-held and deep beliefs. The Koran, Islam’s sacred book, does not contain an explicit ban on images of Allah or Muhammad. But visual depictions of Muhammad or other prophets such as Moses or Abraham are traditionally eschewed in order to discourage idolatry, or worship of an object as a god.

    “It’s very offensive on many levels and for many reasons, but mainly because it’s an attack on the sense of what is most sacred and which cannot be ridiculed,” said Inamul Haq, adjunct professor of Islam at Benedictine University in Lisle.

    That the cartoons also portray the prophet as a terrorist only increases that anger, the experts said.

    Unfortunately, such portrayals would seem to be an accurate reflection, according to the objective history I’ve read of the man.

    Cleric calls on Mohammed cartoonist to be executed

    Omar Bakri Mohammed, the radical Muslim cleric, has said the cartoonist behind caricatures of the Prophet Mohammed that have sparked outrage across the Arab world should be tried and executed under Islamic law.

    The cleric said the cartoonist had insulted Islam and must pay the price, as three people were killed during protests against the cartoons in Afghanistan.

    “The insult has been established now by everybody, Muslim and non-Muslim, and everybody condemns the cartoonist and condemns the cartoon,” he told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme.

    “However, in Islam, God said, and the messenger Mohammed said, whoever insults a prophet, he must be punished and executed.

    “This man should be put on trial and if it is proven to be executed.”

    The cleric said Muslims in Britain were not allowed to kill people who insulted Islam because it was against the law of the country.

    “We are not saying ourselves to go there and start to look to him and kill him, we are not talking about that. We are talking about Islamic rules. If anybody insults the prophet, he will have to take a punishment.”

    He said if countries refused to put people on trial for insulting Mohammed they must “face the consequences”.

    Sounds rather blackmailish and unpeaceful to me. Yeah, the guy seems like a worthy student of Mohammed (hat tip LGF).

    No let-up in sight for cartoon fury

    After a weekend that saw Denmark’s embassies torched in Lebanon and Syria, fury over the images continued to spread with protests held across Afghanistan as well as in Indian-held Kashmir, Indonesia, Lebanon, Iran and Thailand.

    French Foreign Minister Philippe Douste-Blazy called for calm as the Arab world seethes over the cartoons which first appeared in a Danish daily and have been reprinted by several publications in Europe, Australia and Malaysia.

    “Let us calm things down. We have had enough hate and intolerance,” he said on French radio. “There is not a religion in the world that condones killing, or the burning of flags.” [Editor’s note: well, there does appear to be one on the killing thing, though I’m not certain of any mention of flag-burning in the Koran]

    […]

    In Kabul about 300 people marched on Denmark’s embassy, where they torched a Danish flag and threw stones at the embassy, shouting “Death to Denmark, death to Norway, death to America, death to Bush.” [Editor’s note: Death to Bush? Did some of his doodles get published?]

    Around 1,000 protestors also gathered in the northern city of Mazar-i-Sharif and burnt the flags of France, Denmark and Norway. Hundreds protested in Kandahar, while more than 5,000 marched in Parwan province near Kabul.

    In Lebanon, one person died and almost 50 people were wounded during rioting in the capital Beirut which saw the Danish consulate set ablaze, police said yesterday.

    […]

    In Indonesia’s second-largest city of Surabaya, police fired warning shots outside the US consulate to disperse 200 protesters from the hardline Front of the Defenders of Islam, who earlier smashed windows at the Danish consulate.

    […]

    In the Indonesian capital Jakarta, hundreds of people demonstrated outside the Danish embassy, which was closed, calling for an apology from the Danish government over the offending images.

    Widespread. Radical. Islam. Oh yeah, it’s a threat, folks.

    Danish lawyer shot as fury of Muslims sweeps world

    A Danish lawyer was shot and several Muslim demonstrators died as protests against the publication of cartoons showing the Prophet Muhammad continued around the world yesterday.

    The lawyer was wounded in an incident in a Moscow cafe by a man from the Muslim Caucasus region of southern Russia.

    Meanwhile, the prime minister of Chechnya announced that Danish humanitarian organisations would be expelled. [Editor’s note: way to shoot yourself in your foot, idiot]

    Danish troops also came under fire in southern Iraq. Shots were fired at a patrol as it helped children who had been hit by a car near Qurnah. None of the soldiers was injured. [Editor’s note: way to shoot your children in their feet, idiots]

    The worst trouble yesterday came in Afghanistan, where hundreds of demonstrators clashed with police and soldiers. Four people were killed and at least 19 wounded, officials said.

    The worst violence was outside Bagram, the main US base in Afghanistan, although the US has not been involved in the controversy over the publication of the cartoons. Afghan police fired on some 2,000 protesters as they tried to break into the heavily guarded facility.

    Kabir Ahmed, the local government chief, said two of the demonstrators were killed and five wounded, while eight police were hurt. The protesters threw stones at the base and smashed a guard post.

    Some of those in the crowd then shot at the base with assault rifles, prompting the police to return fire, he said. [Editor’s note: way to shoot at people who can shoot you in your foot and elsewhere, idiots]

    […]

    Iran said it was cutting all trade ties with Denmark.

    Danish flags, however, remain in demand. An enterprising shopkeeper in Gaza, Ahmed Abu Dayya, said he had ordered 100 Danish and Norwegian flags when he heard that the cartoons were being reprinted.

    “I knew there would be a demand for the flags because of the angry reaction of people over the offence to the Prophet Muhammad,” he said.

    Angry Muslims have been setting the flags ablaze or tearing them to pieces

    I left the last in as an investment tip — flags are a good investment in Islamic lands, as they seem to be lit as often as cigarettes. Inventory management would be difficult, though; obviously a huge chunk would have to be devoted to the U.S. and Israel, but trying to predict the enemy o’ the day for the always-victimized ain’t easy. Trust me, there was some planning behind coming up with all of these Danish flags to torch.

    Iranian paper launches Holocaust cartoon competition

    Iran’s biggest-selling newspaper has waded into the Muhammad controversy by launching a competition to find the 12 “best” cartoons about the Holocaust.

    Farid Mortazavi, graphics editor for Tehran’s Hamshahri newspaper, said that the deliberately inflammatory contest would test out how committed Europeans were to the concept freedom of expression.

    “The Western papers printed these sacrilegious cartoons on the pretext of freedom of expression, so let’s see if they mean what they say and also print these Holocaust cartoons,” he said.

    Karen Pollock, chief executive of the Holocaust Educational Trust, said that victims of the Holocaust and their families were growing used to insults from Iran. “It’s just very sad,” she told Times Online.

    Iran’s regime is supportive of Holocaust revisionist historians, who maintain that the slaughter of Europe’s Jews during the Second World War was invented or exaggerated to justify the creation of Israel on Palestinian territory.

    As usual for the Moslems, it’s got to be the Jews. Hat tip to John Little at Blogs of War, who points out that, while trying to shift blame and anguish down the Jewish route, the Islamists miss the mark.

    And finally, there’s the usually remarkably-astute Victor Davis Hanson:

    A European Awakening Against Islamic Fascism?

    Over the last four years Americans have played a sort of parlor game wondering when—or if—the Europeans might awake to the danger of Islamic fascism and choose a more muscular role in the war on terrorism.

    But after the acrimony over the invasion of Iraq, Abu Ghraib, and Guantanamo, pessimists scoffed that the Atlantic alliance was essentially over. Only the postmortem was in dispute: did the bad chemistry between the Texan George Bush and the Green European leadership who came of age in the street theater of 1968 explain the falling out?

    Or was the return of the old anti-Americanism natural after the end of the Cold War—once American forces were no longer needed for the security of Europe?

    Or again, was Europe’s third way a realistic consideration of its own unassimilated and growing Muslim population, at a time of creeping pacifism, and radically scaled down defense budgets after the fall of the Berlin Wall?

    Yet suddenly in 2006, the Europeans seem to have collectively resuscitated. The Madrid bombings, the murder of Theo van Gogh, the London subway attacks, and the French rioting in October and November seem to have prompted at least some Europeans at last to question their once hallowed sense of multiculturalism in which Muslim minorities were not asked to assimilate at home and Islamic terrorists abroad were seen as mere militants or extremists rather than enemies bent on destroying the West.

    Please go read it in its entirety, as it is rare I find myself so often in disagreement with the man. His whole piece strikes me as too optimistic, supported by bits and pieces scattered over several years in a hope of showing a European strengthening only anecdotally supported. Hanson does, towards the end, seem to recognize the difficulties I have with his point.

    So is Europe now finally at the front or will they retreat Madrid-like in the face of the inevitable second round of terrorist bombings and threats to come?

    Americans are not confident, but we should remember at least one simple fact: Europe is the embryo of the entire Western military tradition. The new European Union encompasses a population greater than the United States and spans a continent larger than our own territory. It has a greater gross domestic product than that of America and could, in theory, field military forces as disciplined and as well equipped as our own.

    It is not the capability but the will power of the Europeans that has been missing in this war so far.

    Yes, overwhelmingly, I still question whether that will power is present, and even if it can be resurrected before it is too late for the continent.

  • Al Qaeda Jail Escape Seen as Blow to Yemen

    Once again, Islamist terrorists have made use of the shelter of a mosque, this time to rescue a captive with American blood on his hands.

    The escape of 13 al Qaeda inmates, including two convicted for deadly attacks on a U.S. warship and a French supertanker, was a serious blow to Yemen’s fight against the Osama bin Laden network, diplomats said on Monday.

    Yemeni security forces scoured mountainous provinces for the fugitives, who included the mastermind of the 2000 bombing of the U.S. warship Cole and the leader of a group that bombed the French oil tanker Limburg two years later.

    The United States said it was disappointed at the jailbreak and vowed to pursue the militants with its allies.

    “It’s a disappointing development that al Qaeda operatives escaped, particularly one who targeted and killed Americans. We will be working with Yemeni officials and our international partners to actively go after these dangerous terrorists,” said White House spokesman Scott McClellan.

    U.S. ally Yemen, bin Laden’s ancestral homeland, has shed its image as a haven for militants by cracking down on al Qaeda. Analysts and opposition politicians said the jailbreak was a serious embarrassment for the government as well as a blow to its security efforts.

    “This unravels all the work that the Yemeni government has done over the past couple of years (against al Qaeda),” said a senior Western diplomat. “It is a very serious error.”

    […]

    Mohamed al-Sabri of the opposition Nasserite Party told Reuters the escape was “a serious setback for Yemen’s security that puts the country in a very embarrassing position”.

    “This has implications not only for Yemen but for all countries in the region,” he added.

    Security sources said the militants were among a group of 23 inmates who escaped through a 140-metre (460-feet) long tunnel that appeared to have been dug from a nearby mosque.

    The entrance of the tunnel was in the less frequented women’s section of the mosque and the inmates probably fled on Thursday night, the sources added.

    […]

    The escapees include prominent al Qaeda members Jamal Badawi and Fawaz al-Rabe’ie.

    Badawi masterminded the October 2000 attack on the Cole that killed 17 U.S. sailors. His death sentence was commuted last February to 15 years in prison. Rabe’ie was sentenced to death for the Limburg bombing.

    Badawi should have already been dead. Here’s hoping he reaches that destination soon without taking any innocents with him. The memory of seventeen American sailors demands it.

    Yemen should be embarrassed. That these dangerous, murderous swine were able to be let loose is a disgrace to the nation and its security system and an added threat in our efforts against Islamist terror. The question remains: where will that threat surface?