In a Wall Street Journal article a couple of days ago, Amir Taheri pointed out that claims by those organizers of Islamic mega-vandals over the Danish cartoon episode that depictions of Mohammed and jokes about Islam are banned by Koranic principles are a politically motivated fabrication.

The Muslim Brotherhood’s position, put by one of its younger militants, Tariq Ramadan–who is, strangely enough, also an adviser to the British home secretary–can be summed up as follows: It is against Islamic principles to represent by imagery not only Muhammad but all the prophets of Islam; and the Muslim world is not used to laughing at religion. Both claims, however, are false.
There is no Quranic injunction against images, whether of Muhammad or anyone else. When it spread into the Levant, Islam came into contact with a version of Christianity that was militantly iconoclastic. As a result some Muslim theologians, at a time when Islam still had an organic theology, issued “fatwas” against any depiction of the Godhead. That position was further buttressed by the fact that Islam acknowledges the Jewish Ten Commandments–which include a ban on depicting God–as part of its heritage. The issue has never been decided one way or another, and the claim that a ban on images is “an absolute principle of Islam” is purely political. Islam has only one absolute principle: the Oneness of God. Trying to invent other absolutes is, from the point of view of Islamic theology, nothing but sherk, i.e., the bestowal on the Many of the attributes of the One.

The claim that the ban on depicting Muhammad and other prophets is an absolute principle of Islam is also refuted by history. Many portraits of Muhammad have been drawn by Muslim artists, often commissioned by Muslim rulers.

The reasons for the recent violence by mindless animals was, therefore, just another excuse to do what they do best: Destroy property and injure innocent people, protected by the safety of numbers provided by fellow scum in their cowardly mobs.

This is an excellent piece, Read on.

The “diplomacy at any cost” policies and track record for useless censuring and impotent “sanctions” by the U.N. and its Euro-buddies is bearing its particular brand of bitter fruit among the Iranian leadership.

Iran told the International Atomic Energy Agency to remove surveillance cameras and agency seals from sites and nuclear equipment by the end of next week, the U.N. watchdog agency said Monday.

Iran’s demands came two days after the IAEA reported Tehran to the Security Council over its disputed atomic program. The council has the power to impose economic and political sanctions.

In a confidential report to the IAEA’s 35-member board, agency head Mohamed ElBaradei said Iran also announced a sharp reduction in the number and kind of inspections IAEA experts will be allowed, effective immediately.

As I posted here and here, I don’t for a minute see this situation being resolved peacefully.

Iran has to be prevented, one way or another, from developing a nuclear arsenal and they will not stop their nuke development program as a result of any political or other sanctions nor any other venues that are either threatened or imposed by the U.N. Security Council.

The only way to address this situation, hopefully before a large chunk of Israel becomes the proverbial glass parking lot, will prove to involve aggressive military applications of some sort.

Yesterday in Beirut, a bunch of Muslims demonstrated yet again how they are able to function, collectively and tolerantly, like reasonable human beings.

A mob burned and ransacked the Danish Consulate in Beirut yesterday in anger over newspaper cartoons depicting the prophet Muhammad, prompting the interior minister to resign over his inability to prevent the violence.
The rioters, many of them Syrians, also attacked a Maronite church and scuffled with security forces, burning police and army vehicles. The State Department held the Syrian government responsible for similar actions a day earlier in Damascus.
Muslims worldwide are enraged at a series of cartoons that a Danish newspaper ran in September, depicting Muhammad in the company of veiled women and as a terrorist with a bomblike turban. Islam forbids any portrayal of its prophet as idolatry.
Many of yesterday’s protesters arrived in Beirut in buses and carrying flags. They engaged Lebanese security forces in running street fights with rocks and sticks, burning or capturing police and emergency vehicles before storming the Danish Consulate in the majority-Christian neighborhood of Ashrafiyah.
“There is no God but God, and Muhammad is his messenger,” the rioters chanted, smashing their way into the 10-story commercial building and lighting fires that quickly engulfed the structure.

Lovely.

This stuff keeps on happening{in this case, the violence erupted over items published in a Danish newspaper about five months ago} in various countries, then terror supporting organizations such as CAIR react with indignance and wrath when anyone even dares suggest that there might be some violent people in the global Islamic community.

Go figure.

Mark Steyn provides some great related commentary here.

The Washington Times’ Tony Blankley’s latest column presents a good analysis of the Democratic Party as it now stands, citing the relationships between some of George Bush’s statements in Tuesday evening’s SOTU address and the folks on the left side of the aisle.

During an election campaign, political operatives are fond of seeking to induce in their opponent a negative “defining moment.” That is to say a highly publicized moment when their opponent portrays everything that is wrong with him. In 2004 John Kerry provided that moment when he said he voted for the $87 billion before he voted against it.
Surely, at the State of the Union address the Democratic Party provided such a moment when, as has already been well commented on by others, they wildly applauded President Bush’s statement that Congress failed to pass Social Security reform last year.
As the party of reactionary inertia — as the party that not only doesn’t have any solutions to today’s dangers and problems, but denies that such problems exist — the Democrats on the floor of the House Tuesday night demonstrated a flawless, intuitive sense of its new, disfunctional self.
The Democrats’ wild applause on behalf of doing nothing was more than a merely tactical political blunder. It displayed a deeper truth about them.

It sure did. It seems like ever since Bush beat Gore in 2000, the Democrats have put all other issues, in fact their very minds on the back burner in order to prosecute their War On Bush.

If one recalls, last year the official position of the Democratic Party was not only that they opposed President Bush’s Social Security reform. They also argued there was no crisis — no major problem that required rectification.
(In fact Social Security has four trillion dollars of unfunded liability, and if major changes are not made quickly, will only be able to pay the retired baby boomers about 70 cents for each dollar of promised benefits.)
Social Security is the single most iconic Democratic Party issue of the past hundred years — the Democrats created Social Security in 1935 and have won countless elections since then by beating up Republicans for allegedly not supporting it. It was the Democratic Party’s sacred virgin. They would lie for it, die for it, steal for it, demagogue for it — but never cheer its demise or harm, even sarcastically.
Their collective decision to cheer the failure of the body politic to provide for sufficient revenues to pay the benefits was an act of historic shame for the Democratic Party.
Worse than that for the Democrats, it shows how severely degraded their political instincts have become. Tip O’Neill’s Democratic Party of 20 years ago would never have cheered the failure of Social Security — even to try to make a small political point. To be sure, they would demagogue the issue ruthlessly, but never be seen to be walking away from the sacred program.
Until George Bush became president the Democrats, for better and for worse, were a liberal party. Deformed by hatred of the current president, the Democrats have become a nihilist party.

Yeah, well, thanks to alternative media and the Democrats’ own obvious lack of either unity or direction, their uselessness as a political entity is costing them more and more public support, despite the misleading reports to the contrary by the liberal mainstream media.

The Republicans have majorities in both houses of Congress and we have a strong conservative in the Oval Office, and the numbers can only increase on the right as the nation realizes long before this November that the left hasn’t a clue about anything, they’re standing at a $25.00 minimum table with four $5.00 chips.

For those who, for whatever reason, didn’t catch the President’s SOTU address yesterday, the full transcript can be found here.

The Wall Street Journal has published a number of key excerpts from the speech, which are here.

Now me, I’m not a big TV or movie fanatic, I’m completely disgusted with what the Big 3 are broadcasting these days and have little use for Hollywood’s incumbent output. I must admit that I’m not the type to sit through something like Wuthering Heights, if I’m going to suspend my personal productivity, I’d rather watch action flicks or films whose plots possess the hint of danger or violence as they go, or are really funny comedies, the mindless sort of stuff that requires no deep thought, are just pure entertainment.

So here I am, watching a movie called Murder At 1600

I’m a Wesley Snipes fan, which sucks where this film’s concerned because it’s another lefty propaganda effort.

Ronny Cox is the President.

U.S. airmen are prisoners of North Korea, and are being beaten and otherwise abused by the commies therein on international television. While all his advisers believe we should rescue our military personnel from the bad guys, the President is a peace-at-any-cost kind of guy with a Carteresque attitude towards the situation.

Definitely a Democrat with strong liberal leanings.

A twenty five year old woman is found murdered in the White House, and all the evidence points to the First Son. DC homicide detectives Wesley Snipes, Dennis Miller and Secret Service Agent Diane Lane investigate, despite aggressive pursuit by Lane’s own agency, and in the end discover that there is a plot by SecDef and associates to destroy the President via blackmail based on the concept of POTUS’ son, a spoiled, lecherous brat, being responsible for the murder in question(a frame-up).

So of course, SecDef and his ilk(read that as the GOP and its minions) are the evil murderers, blackmailers and general scoundrels who mastermind the plot.

Coincidentally, however, the cast includes an assassin named John Kerry and, though the film was made in the 1990s, the First Lady is more reminiscent of Theresa Heinz-Kerry than anyone else.

Heh heh.

Bottom line: The bad guys are war-mongering Republicans whose plan is to blackmail the President into sending troops into North Korea snd rescuing the U.S. military people from the clutches of the commies, then resign.

And this movie came out in the late 1990s, prime Clinton years during which the Presidential attitude was “let our citizens and military personnel be butchered, wherever on the earth they happen to be, we’ll take no positive action. We are Democrats, we could care less.” Remember Mogadishu?

Clinton’s policies as President were not unlike those of Jimmuh Cahtuh, the other recent-decades-Democrat President who allowed U.S. citizens to be held as hostages for months without addressing the situation.

Murder At 1600 was, in short, while being an action film, also another pitiful political jab at conservatives by the amoral, anti-patriotic Hollywood crowd.

The saboteurs of freedom attempting to demean those who protect the United States.

Hmmmmmm.

Sounds like today’s liberals…

Judge Sam Alito was sworn in today as the justice replacing retiring Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor.

I bet a whole lot of liberals are whining about this development.

Whine, liberals, whine!

Leonard Pitts, Jr. has a column running at Jewish World Review this weekend that’s kind of an amusing look at the stupidity of the average racist, such as the kind belonging to the Ku Klux Klan, that hate organization created by southern Democrats.

Check it out.

I had meant to link to this great Op-Ed column by author and City Journal Senior Editor Brian C. Anderson a few days ago when it was first published in WSJ’s Opinion Journal, but for the last several days I’ve been swamped with issues involving my new house and a few other things I seem to be getting out of the way –finally!

Mr. Anderson discusses campaign finance reform and how it targets free speech, particularly that of conservatives.

The rise of alternative media–political talk radio in the 1980s, cable news in the ’90s, and the blogosphere in the new millennium–has broken the liberal monopoly over news and opinion outlets. The left understands acutely the implications of this revolution, blaming much of the Democratic Party’s current electoral trouble on the influence of the new media’s vigorous conservative voices. Instead of fighting back with ideas, however, today’s liberals quietly, relentlessly and illiberally are working to smother this flourishing universe of political discourse under a tangle of campaign-finance and media regulations. Their campaign represents the most sustained attack on free political speech in the United States since the 1798 Alien and Sedition Acts. Though Republicans have the most to lose in the short run, all Americans who care about our most fundamental rights and the civic health of our democracy need to understand what’s going on–and resist it.

It came as no surprise when Senator John McCain was behind one of the most offensive “campaign finance” acts in modern history. That aisle straddling, self seeking, in-name-only Republican distinguished gentleman is… No, this time I will avoid my usual flair for digression…

The most imminent danger comes from campaign-finance rules, especially those spawned by the 2002 McCain-Feingold Campaign Reform Act. Republican maverick John McCain’s co-sponsorship aside, the bill passed only because of overwhelming Democratic support. It’s easy to see why liberals have spearheaded the nation’s three-decade experiment with campaign-finance regulation. Seeking to rid politics of “big-money corruption,” election-law reforms obstruct the kinds of political speech–political ads and perhaps now the feisty editorializing of the new media–that escape the filter of the mainstream press and the academy, left-wing fiefdoms still regulation-free. Campaign-finance reform, notes columnist George Will, by steadily expanding “government’s control of the political campaigns that decide who controls government,” advances “liberalism’s program of extending government supervision of life.”

Ah, yes, there is that, indeed. George Will hit the nail right on the head with the last, “liberalism’s program of extending government supervision of life.” It beats me how a bunch of folks whose political handle stems from the word “liberty” can be so set on taking away our liberty, that concept-cum-reality earned for us by patriots who fought, died, sacrificed nearly two hundred thirty years ago so that theirs and future generations might live free.

Liberty to go about our lives without the very government control the liberals are attempting to force feed us through Congress and the courts, and are largely succeeding.

McCain-Feingold, the latest and scariest step down that slope, makes it a felony for corporations, nonprofit advocacy groups and labor unions to run ads that criticize–or even name or show–members of Congress within 60 days of a federal election, when such quintessentially political speech might actually persuade voters. It forbids political parties from soliciting or spending “soft money” contributions to publicize the principles and ideas they stand for. Amending the already baffling campaign-finance rules from the 1970s, McCain-Feingold’s dizzying do’s and don’ts, its detailed and onerous reporting requirements of funding sources–which require a dense 300-page book to lay out–have made running for office, contributing to a candidate or cause, or advocating without an attorney at hand unwise and potentially ruinous.

Not for nothing has Justice Clarence Thomas denounced McCain-Feingold’s “unprecedented restrictions” as an “assault on the free exchange of ideas.”

Because political blogs are mostly conservative, reporting and commenting on important news issues that the liberal mainstream media either downplays, spins or ignores and have become a formidable “new media” power all their own, these “reformers” have now cast their jaundiced eye on the blogosphere.

Campaign-finance reform now has the blogosphere in its crosshairs. When the Federal Election Commission wrote specific rules in 2002 to implement McCain-Feingold, it voted 4-2 to exempt the Web. After all, observed the majority of three Republicans and one Democrat (the agency divides its seats evenly between the two parties), Congress didn’t list the Internet among the “public communications”–everything from television to roadside billboards–that the FEC should regulate. Further, “the Internet is virtually a limitless resource, where the speech of one person does not interfere with the speech of anyone else,” reasoned Republican commissioner Michael Toner. “Whereas campaign finance regulation is meant to ensure that money in politics does not corrupt candidates or officeholders, or create the appearance thereof, such rationales cannot plausibly be applied to the Internet, where on-line activists can communicate about politics with millions of people at little or no cost.”

You can’t blame the left for seeing the right thinking bloggers on the Internet as a threat to their previously enjoyed media monopoly…

The FEC thus has plunged into what Smith calls a “bizarre” rule-making process that could shackle the political blogosphere. This would be a particular disaster for the right, which has maintained its early advantage over the left in the blogosphere, despite the emergence of big liberal sites like Daily Kos. Some 157 of the top 250 political blogs express right-leaning views, a recent liberal survey found. Reaching a growing and influential audience–hundreds of thousands of readers weekly (including most journalists) for the top conservative sites–the blogosphere has enabled the right to counter the biases of the liberal media mainstream. Without the blogosphere, Howell Raines would still be the New York Times’ editor, Dan Rather would only now be retiring, garlanded with praise–and John Kerry might be president of the U.S., assuming that CBS News had gotten away with its falsehood about President Bush’s military service that the diligent bloggers at PowerLine, LittleGreenFootballs and other sites swiftly debunked.

…but they can be blamed for trying to replace our American right to freedom of speech with intrusive government regulation.

Read Brian Anderson’e entire commentary here.

Here is a very well laid out analysis of the significance of the Hamas victory over Fatah in Wednesday’s elections, and where this result of terrorist organization over long established, corrupt governance might lead.

The sweeping victory of the Islamist Hamas party in Wednesday’s Palestinian legislative elections can hardly be considered good news. But neither is it surprising, and it may even have the long-run benefit of educating Palestinians about the terrible cost of their political choices.

Absolutely, but that long-run benefit will come the hard way. The Hamas charter’s still all about murdering as many Jews(not considering the collateral deaths of fellow Palestinians to be of consequence)as it takes to make instant history of Israel. Having been voted into power makes them no less terrorists than they were prior to the elections.

The ruling Fatah faction of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas governed corruptly, ineffectually and, until the death in 2004 of founder Yasser Arafat, dictatorially. So it is understandable that Palestinians wanted an alternative. That they went for the only other major choice on offer is not necessarily an indication that they share Hamas’s goal of destroying Israel and all its citizens. The vote might even turn out to be clarifying–in the sense of showing the world that no Israeli-Palestinian peace is possible until the Palestinians have leaders who really want to live in peace with Israel.

Right, sometime soon. No doubt.

Rabin was right that Arafat would have scant regard for the rights of Palestinians. But he was wrong that Arafat would crack down on Hamas. Like every other strongman, Arafat didn’t crack down on extremists but used them to his advantage where he could. Palestinians could see that the U.S. was coddling a man who oppressed them, breeding cynicism about U.S. motives and making it hard for democratic movements to flourish. The Bush Administration is working hard to change those perceptions and build a Palestinian civil society, but this will take years.

Just one of many cases of the Bush Administration’s having to sidetrack assets from ongoing proactive projects to clean up a mess generated by the Clinton Administration years before, but I’ll digress no further.

The White House will have to resist the temptation, no doubt encouraged by Europe, to pressure Israel to deal with Hamas as it once was pressed to deal with Arafat. But given Hamas’s history and declared goals, the onus is on its leaders to show that they have an agenda beyond terror. If Hamas begins to use Gaza as a base to import weapons and attack Israel, the Jewish state will have every right to strike back in self-defense. And the U.S. should support it in doing so.

Future terrorism by Hamas, which is a certainty, will bring misery to the Palestinians via Israel’s completely justified retaliatory and self defense measures, and the Palestinian leadership will blame Israel for any collateral damage, somehow managing to make the part about the original terrorist attack go away and accusing Israel of violating territorial agreements it had made with the Palestinians.

True story: When I lived in San Francisco, I found that there are a lot of small, family run retail stores owned by Palestinians, and got to know the owners of a few in my neighborhood.

“Arafat no good.” Was a consensus among these people. “He steal. He make violence. Arafat gone, violence stop, I go home.”

About two and a half years ago, there was a Palestinian terrorist attack of particular severity that drew a smash for smite response from the Israelis more than twelve hours later.

Two of the Palestinian merchants told me that according to Al Jazeera and a couple of other Arabic news agencies, the Arab terrorist attack had been retaliation for the Israelis’ action. According to the time-line involved, this would have meant that the terrorists had been retaliating in advance.

That being the nature of Hamas and the rest of the terrorist groups purporting to speak for the Palestinians, in my own unhumble opinion I see nothing changing for the better for a long time to come, unless my own long-standing prediction comes true:

Israel exercises an extreme military option in which a lot of Palestinians die, good(collaterally, or simply too moderate for Hamas’ use and therefore executed) and evil alike, the terrorists are hammered into oblivion, destroyed root and branch, and any support among the Palestinians for any kind of militancy suffers a broken back.