What are our friends, the Saudis up to these days?

RIYADH, Saudi Arabia (Reuters) — A court sentenced a teacher to 40 months in prison and 750 lashes for “mocking religion” after he discussed the Bible and praised Jews, a Saudi newspaper reported yesterday.
Al-Madina newspaper said secondary-school teacher Mohammad al-Harbi, who will be flogged in public, was taken to court by his colleagues and students.
He was charged with promoting a “dubious ideology, mocking religion, saying the Jews were right, discussing the Gospel and preventing students from leaving class to wash for prayer,” the newspaper said.
Saudi Arabia, the birthplace of Islam, strictly upholds the austere Wahhabi school of Islam and bases its constitution on the Koran and the sayings of the prophet Muhammad. Public practice of any other religion is banned.
A U.S. State Department report criticized Saudi Arabia last week, saying religious freedoms “are denied to all but those who adhere to the state-sanctioned version of Sunni Islam.”
The newspaper said Mr. al-Harbi will appeal the verdict.
A similar case was cited in the State Department’s International Religious Freedom Report for 2004.
“During the period covered by this report, a schoolteacher was tried for apostasy, and eventually convicted in March of blasphemy; the person was given a prison sentence of 3 years and 300 lashes. The trial received substantial press coverage,” the report said.
A 2003 report by the U.S. Commission on Religious Freedom, the world’s only government-sanctioned entity to investigate and report religious-freedom violations, named Saudi Arabia as the world’s biggest violator of religious liberties.

Oh, okay, SSDD.

And this is a nation that exports its “religious” beliefs via mosques and schools to countries all over the world, where despite their claim that they are friends of ours, they preach hatred and scorn for all but Islam to their young, naming the United States and its citizens as one of their two worst enemies, the other being Israel.

Islam, the Religion of Peace.

Tell it to the French.

In scattered attacks overnight into Monday, vandals rammed a car into a primary school in the southern city of Toulouse before setting the building on fire. In northern France, arsonists set fire to a sports center in the suburb of Faches-Thumesnil and a school in the town of Halluin.

A gas canister exploded inside a burning garbage can in the Alpine city of Grenoble, injuring two police officers, the national police said. Three officers were injured elsewhere.

The rioting, sparked by the accidental electrocution deaths of two teens who thought police were chasing them, began in Paris’ poor suburbs, where immigrants from North and West Africa live with their French-born children in housing projects.

Sunday was the 18th straight night of unrest, but the storm of arson attacks and other violence has lost steam since the government declared a state of emergency on Wednesday.

The number of cars burned nightly has steadily decreased — from 502 overnight into Saturday, to 374 overnight into Sunday, to 271 as Monday began. A week earlier, 1,400 cars were incinerated in a single night.

What really irritates me about the way the liberal media has been handling the above events, collectively, is that they all but justify the property destruction, school and car burnings and other violence, including cop killing by focusing on the failure of the French to assimilate these Muslims into their society, citing the high rate of unemployment and poor living conditions in Islamic neighborhoods in France.

The Mainstream Media has actually excused these rioters and reduced, in tacit manner, what they’ve been doing to the status of peaceful protesters demonstrating against a government that has made them feel oppressed.

Right, so there’s no harm in burning a few thousand cars belonging to individuals who more than likely have had no influence in anything having anything at all to do with the Muslims’ situation, burning some schools, go figure — throwing gasoline all over a woman on crutches that burned the skin over a large part of her body — beating up senior citizens and attacking police.

We need to try and understand the poor dears, examine the reasons, the very motivations that created this atmosphere of violence, etc, etc…

Let’s hear it! “Kumbaya my lord, Kumbaya…”

So as is always the case, the portside media manages to turn the victims into elements of an evil society{well, it is France} that is unfair to its Muslim citizens, who are merely responding to the unfairness, and voila! the rioters are now the victims.

Leave it to the left to define a situation thusly. If the ACLU had a Paris branch, they would probably be suing the French government for setting curfews and arresting rioters, thereby obstructing their rights to express their hate and anger.

Still, it must be a tough call for the left, since their appointed villains belong largely to the socialist government liberals so look up to.

What the truth boils down to is that gangs of young Muslims have been running amok, commiting violent, destructive felonies and there is nothing they can use as an excuse that will justify their acts. They are, indeed, scum.

If the French courts don’t deal harshly with those arrested in the course of their terrorism — yes, that’s exactly what this is — it will only make them appear weak and vulnerable to these animals, who view leniency as spinelessness and therefore contemptible. This lesson has been learned the hard way by many, not least of whom are the Israelis, but the left still hasn’t picked up on that. They won’t, in fact, until they are living under Sharia law and no longer have the right to criticize the powers that be, and their women are eighth class citizens, chattel who can be beaten bloody by hubby for the slightest infraction.

Dealing leniently with these “people” will only let them know that the threat of future rioting will be accepted as a bargaining chip by the French government. And there will be future rioting as a result.

What western supporters of and apologists for the actions of militant Islamics refuse to accept is that we are dealing with a mindset that is 100% intolerant of any religious beliefs that differ from theirs, believing that they are false and that it is the God given right of Muslims to go to any country they please and attack its customs, religious symbols and heritage in order to force it to comply with their own culture. It is acceptable to lie to infidels(non-believers), even to the point of signing treaties with full intentions of violating them when it is strategically advantageous to do so.

The centerpiece/ mastermind of today’s global Islamic terrorist front is, of course, al Qaeda, and those extremists have become so excessive as to alienate a few Muslim countries and communities through the none-too-bright practice of murdering their own. Witness the beach resort bombings in Egypt not long ago and, the other day, their hotel bombings in Jordan, the latter leading to a declaration of war on them by the king of Jordan himself.

JORDAN’S King Abdullah II vowed to “take the fight” to Iraq-based Al-Qaeda leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, whose group Jordanian officials say carried out suicide attacks in Amman this week that killed 57 people.

“We are going to crack down and take the fight to Zarqawi,” the king said in an interview with CNN television.

“We have been very successful in taking down his operations in the past … (when) he used Jordanians. Now he has changed tactics, he is using foreigners. That means that our security services have to change tactics too.”

Authorities have arrested 12 people suspected of having had a hand in Wednesday’s bombings and have questioned scores more.

Jordanian-born Zarqawi was released from jail in 1999 as part of general amnesty granted by King Abdullah but was last year sentenced to death by a Jordanian court for the 2002 murder of a US diplomat.

Good, let the SOBs get their own people after them, at least those fellow Muslims of theirs are folks who understand what they’re up against, unlike western governments like our own who simply refuse to realize that we are addressing an enemy whose thought patterns are totally alien to our own, especially in regard to such items as the sanctity of human life or the value of their word when given to any person or political body that exists outside their own faith.

And our political leaders really don’t seem to have a clue. One piece of supporting evidence for that statement comes from the pressure we are putting on Israel to expedite their capitulation to the Palestinians.

A sharp dispute arose on Monday between Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice over the issue of Hamas participation in Palestinian elections slated for January.

In a Monday morning meeting in Jerusalem, Sharon said that allowing Hamas to take part in the elections for the Palestinian Legislative Council would be a grave error, and would only weaken Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas, rather than strengthening him, as Palestinians have argued.

“We will not interfere with the elections,” Sharon declared, “but neither will we coordinate the elections with [the Palestinians], and will not allow Hamas people to operate and move around differently from what is happening now.”

We are pushing Israel to interact with the Palestinians in the same manner the United States would exercise diplomacy with, say, Norway, Germany or Greece, but the reality they face is alien to that of diplomacy with the average civilized country.

Very real security concerns prevent the Israelis from going with a program that could get innocent civilians killed. As many of us expected when Ariel Sharon ceded the Gaza Strip to the Palestinians and evacuated all the Jewish residents, Gaza has been morphing itself into an armed camp from which terrorists of such esteemed murder organizations as Hamas and Islamic Jihad can launch attacks against Israel without even having to travel. They can telecommute by mortar.

Condi, I love you and will vote for you for President in 2008 if you’re our candidate, but please, don’t treat the relationship between Israel and the Palestinians like the relationship between the U.S. and Canada, for Chrissake!

While we argue with the political panjandrums in Ottawa over things like steel manufacture or Mad Cow, the Israelis exist in a completely different reality.

Late Sunday night, tanks lined up outside the northern Gaza border targeted the sources of the attacks.

According to IDF officials, the reprisals would continue into the early hours Monday morning, “because the Palestinians must understand that we will not ignore mortar fire.”

The army began firing at the terror cells after a mortar shell landed near the security fence north of the Karni crossing Sunday night. No one was wounded and no damage was caused in the attack.

“Our response will be exaggerated and disproportional to the [mortar] fire,” a senior IDF official said, according to Army Radio. If the Palestinian cells continue firing mortars, he added, Israel’s response will even intensify.

Israel has gradually escalated its response to the attacks from Gaza since its withdrawal from the strip. During the first half of September, during Operation First Rain, Israel stationed a row of tanks bordering the Gaza Strip to discourage attacks. When Palestinian attacks continued, however, the army was given the go-ahead to respond to fire with fire.

IDF officials explained that the object of the current operation was to drive the terror cells away from the security fence, and thus render the mortar fire ineffective due to the limited range of the shells.

The major worry here is that Hamas, a terrorist organization by any definition, has become an important political party among the Palestinians and if they win any major posts in upcoming elections they will be a terrorist organization with political authority that will undoubtedly be acknowledged by the U.N. and member nations that encompass, among others, western countries, including the United States.

To add to all else, we have ongoing problems with Syria and Iran.

We are at war with radical Islam. We initiated our two main fronts in Afghanistan and Iraq, and despite the mewlings from the left as to how “Bush lied and people died,” and the down-playing and downright ignoring of our highly positive results in Iraq by the Mainstream Media does more to hurt our country than to help it — they would rather spin, omit and lie than tell the truth, all for a political agenda that’s more important to them than the security of our form of government and the well-being of Americans in America.

Sad.

Since the beginning of Islam, the “faithful” have attempted unsuccessfully to force their beliefs and lifestyles, para-militarily and militarily, on the Judeo-Christian world. They have failed miserably. Today, however, they are taking advantage of advances in technology and travel to pursue their ages-old agenda via terrorism.

We are fighting a global war whose stakes comprise our freedom and the continuity of our very way of life, and it would greatly benefit us all if those Americans on the left side of the aisle went beyond the limitations of partisan politics and stood up for their country and for the freedom these fanatics are fighting tooth-and-nail to take away from us.