The inaptly dubbed “War on Terror” continues to run up an ever-higher body count. In the nearly ten years since 9-11, the so-called “Religion of Peace” has racked up over 17,000 deadly attacks, killing tens of thousands all over the globe (all carefully documented by the indefatigable folks at aptly-named site The Religion of Peace). With the body count ratcheting ever higher on a daily basis, why do many if not the majority of Muslims seem so indifferent to the carnage, or worse, even enthusiastic about the never-ending bloodshed committed in the name of Islam? In fact, Muslims have proven themselves highly resistant to the idea of criticizing their coreligionists, no matter what outrage has been committed.

For a Malaysian example of this disturbing behaviour, let’s examine the Malaysian reactions to the passing of Dr. Azahari Husin in 2005. Doctor Azahari — a former Malaysian university professor — was a committed jihadist and chief bombmaker for the terrorist group Jemaah Islamiyah.  As you may recall, he was directly implicated in both Bali bombings (2002 and 2005), the JW Mariott hotel bombing in Jakarta in 2003, and the Australian embassy bombing in Jakarta in 2004.  Azahari was in fact an unrepentant mass murderer, responsible for the deaths of hundreds of innocent people.  But, as his family and the Malaysian media would have it, he was also supposedly a ‘genuinely warm and caring kind of guy’ who selflessly went to serve a ‘higher cause’.

Here is the kind of spin his family put on the ‘fondly remembered’ Doctor Azahari, as was published verbatim in a Malaysian newspaper at the time (link unavailable):

…in his family, he was a respected big brother whose skills in Maths and zest for sports were a source of inspiration to his nine siblings. Azahari Husin’s sister, Suraya, 45, recalled that her brother loved cowboy movies and thought girls were “soppy”. … He loved the outdoors and once hitchhiked on a lorry from the premier Malay College (in) Kuala Kangsar, where he studied, to his home in Jasin as a teenager.  When he studied in Australia, he took motorcycle excursions across the desert. He loved orchids and sports cars.

And while the family found plenty of wonderful memories to share with the sympathetic Malaysian media, there was nary a trace of condemnation of the late doctor’s multi-year murder spree. Azahari’s family did have this to say about the notorious terrorist in the family:

“… our family and friends never interfered with what my brother did. That’s the integrity of our family,” said (a younger sister of Dr Azahari Husin.) … “People can say what they want, but I know my brother,” she said when pressed for comments by newsmen at her house in Jalan Chin Chin here yesterday.

Azahari also received a hero’s send-off at his funeral in his hometown of Jasin, a small town several hours’ drive south of the Malaysian capital Kuala Lumpur.  The ceremony attracted some 600 well wishers, who repeatedly chanted ‘Allahu akbar’ during the funeral.  Many present at the ceremony also voiced skepticism of Azahari’s role as a top terrorist. “Azahari will always have friends here. We shouldn’t be asked to believe what is written about him in the newspapers,” said one man who refused to identify himself.

These are very curious reactions all around, at the very least.  Given multiple opportunities to condemn terrorism, and to pronounce how un-Islamic all this terrorism supposedly is, Azahari’s family, friends and neighbours all refused to so state.  Rather the opposite, actually — in particular, Azahari’s sister said for the record that family and friends “…never interfered with what my brother did”.  This is a disturbingly noncommittal thing to say about a man intimately involved in carrying out mass murder, and for conspiring to commit even more mass murder.  Indeed, it could even be construed as approval.

Leftist guru Noam Chomsky has been awarded the Sydney Peace Prize.

This is yet more proof that we live in an age in which “peace prizes” are worth less than the prizes kids find at the bottom of Cracker Jack boxes.

Look at the case of President Barack Obama. A few months after he was inaugurated, Obama, who is now presiding over three wars on two continents, received a Nobel Peace Prize. His most significant accomplishment when nominations for the prize closed on Feb. 1, 2009, just 12 days into his term of office, had been to throw a Super Bowl party.

The Godfather of Terror, Yasser Arafat, received a Nobel Peace Prize in 1994. Serial liar Rigoberta Menchu, a Communist agent who worked for the same terrorists who later killed members of her own family, somehow hornswoggled her way into one in 1992.

Now, the lesser-known Sydney Peace Prize has been awarded to the Chomsky, who routinely argues that the United States is worse than Hitler’s Germany and consorts with genocidal Jew-hating terrorists. It is unclear which peace Chomsky, a soft-spoken version of Ward Churchill, has actually secured.

“The choice of Noam Chomsky continues a pattern of Sydney Peace Prize recipients who have demonstrated questionable credentials as legitimate peace-makers,” said Vic Alhadeff, CEO of the New South Wales Jewish Board of Deputies. “It does nothing to enhance the standing of either the recipient or the prize itself.”

The Australian honor, awarded in 2003 to Palestinian terrorism apologist Hanan Ashrawi, was bestowed on Chomsky “for inspiring the convictions of millions about a common humanity and for unfailing moral courage.”

Perhaps in the leftist lexicon “moral courage” is the same as shrugging off the murder of innocent Americans. If so, then Professor Chomsky certainly deserves the prize.

Because Chomsky considers America to be “the world’s greatest terrorist state,” he finds it difficult to get around to condemning those who kill Americans for political purposes.

When Osama bin Laden was killed by U.S. troops in Pakistan last month, Chomsky was brokenhearted. It’s understandable: a few years ago, the al-Qaeda chieftain followed the lead of Hugo Chavez and praised Chomsky as “one of the most capable” citizens of the United States.

Chomsky repaid bin Laden by defending him with characteristic aplomb.

Sounding like an ACLU lawyer, Chomsky protested the “planned assassination” of bin Laden which he said contravened international law. “There appears to have been no attempt to apprehend the unarmed victim,” he said.

The photographs of Osama bin Laden’s dead body should be released for public scrutiny. The President’s decision to withhold photographs of Bin Laden’s dead body is only the last in a series of terrible mistakes in the handling of the dead terrorist’s body.  Although there should be no doubt that Bin Laden is actually dead, there are grave doubts as to the circumstances surrounding his death.  Was he shot in cold blood?  Was he standing or lying down when he was shot?  Was he shot in the back or in the front?  Were his hands raised in surrender?  Was he actively resisting?

Many of these doubts could have been resolved if Bin Laden’s body had been subjected to the usual investigatory techniques routinely employed in homicide cases.  His body should have been subjected to an autopsy, to forensic testing by an experienced medical examiner, to extensive photographing of entrance and exit wounds, to paraffin testing for gun powder residue, and to other such forensic examination.

Burying his body at sea constituted the willful destruction of relevant evidence, which naturally gives rise to suspicions that there was something to hide.  I fully credit the administration’s explanation that the reason for the hasty burial at sea was the desire not to offend religious Muslims and not to create a shrine to a dead mass murderer.  I believe that the President acted properly in ordering the targeted assassination of the world’s most culpable and dangerous terrorist and that our armed forces complied with the law in killing Bin Laden.  But many reasonable people around the world will wonder whether the decision to destroy the best evidence may also have been based on a desire to suppress the whole truth.

In my nearly half century of representing defendants charged with homicide, I have come to know that the best evidence of how a person died comes from the body of the deceased.  Dead bodies often talk more loudly, clearly and unambiguously than live witnesses.  Bin Laden’s body should have been preserved as long as necessary to gather all relevant evidence, notwithstanding the requirements of Sharia Law.  When a Muslim or a Jew is the victim of a homicide in the United States, religious considerations do not trump civil requirements.  Their bodies are generally sent to the medical examiner for thorough examination.  Notwithstanding religious prohibitions, autopsies are performed and organs removed for testing.  No special exception should have been made for Bin Laden’s body.

Osama bin Laden, the terrorist scourge who created the organization that murdered 3,000 Americans on 9/11, has been killed by American special forces in Pakistan.

The head of al-Qaeda was shot to death by US troops in a mansion outside of Abbottabad, Pakistan. Initial reports are sketchy, but the attack was carried out by Joint Special Operations Command forces working with the CIA. Confirmed reports say that the United States has the body of bin Laden and that DNA tests have confirmed that the remains were of the terrorist.

Full credit is due to the hardworking, patriotic professionals in American intelligence. Their singularly focused determination to track the terrorist and bring him to justice — a story just beginning to be told — is a testament to their hard work and dedication in the face of what appeared to be impossible odds. Finding one man in a country the size of Pakistan is an immense achievement in the history of American intelligence.

In remarks addressed to the American people, President Obama offered few details of the operation except to say that it was a small US force that moved into Pakistan, actuated by solid intelligence going back to August. In the past week, a high degree of certainty that Osama had been located was achieved, and the operation was launched on Sunday, according to the president. Officers killed bin Laden and took custody of the body.

CNN is reporting that Navy SEALs took part in the operation that President Obama says was sanctioned by the government of Pakistan. The network also reports that the Pakistani intelligence agency ISI participated in the operation, and that Pakistan gave vital assistance in processing the intelligence that led to bin Laden’s death. But anonymous administration officials say that they did not share the fact that the attack was going forward with anyone outside of the US government. This makes more sense than any reports of Pakistani assistance, since the ISI has always had close ties to al-Qaeda. It is believed the ISI tipped off bin Laden in 2002, allowing him to escape from Tora Bora.

No doubt President Zardari of Pakistan is trying to put the best face on the embarrassing fact that Americans can move without his knowledge and with impunity inside Pakistan, engage in a firefight on Pakistani soil, and remove the body of the world’s number one terrorist. If he were to admit that, it is likely he wouldn’t last a week. As it is, even with the fig leaf of “cooperation” supplied by the White House, demonstrators will be out in force on Monday protesting against the US and Zardari’s complicity in the death of bin Laden.

The helicopter raid originated in Afghanistan and the SEAL team tapped to carry out the attack was able to practice the assault several times before the operation went live. The entire operation took about 40 minutes to execute, according to the Pentagon.

When I was a kid, like most Canadians I was an avid hockey fan. My consuming ambition in life was to become the goaltender for the Montreal Canadiens, whom I would lead to an endless series of Stanley Cups. At the age of five or so, I started listening religiously to the radio broadcasts of the Canadiens’ games, enthralled by the cadences of perhaps the greatest play-by-play hockey commentator of all time, Danny Gallivan, a true poet of the game.

Gallivan not only carried the play in the lilt and tempo of his voice, culminating in the soaring “He shoots! He scores!”—a clarion even more rousing than that of the Toronto Maple Leaf’s Foster Hewitt, the granddaddy of play-callers—but also coined various phrases that inserted themselves into the rhetoric of the game. “The puck caroms off the boards” is still caroming off the airwaves, and the word “carom” ricocheted into my fledgling vocabulary to stay. “He dishes out a crushing body check” remains in the lexicon. But the phrase I liked most, delivered at the top of Gallivan’s register and conjuring graphic and colorful visions in my pre-TV imagination, was the exhilarating “They bang away at it,” referring to a goal mouth scramble when players whacked at the puck until it either went into the net or the goalie “smothered” it in his pads.

I’ve long lost interest in the Montreal Canadiens, a perennially weak, mismanaged and shamefully uninspired team, little better than the current crop of lame and fatuous broadcasters burbling away on the catwalk. And of course I no longer play the game. But I bring the same sort of enthusiasm to the political arena that I felt as a child for the game of hockey.

Once I cheered on the heroes of my youth: Maurice “the Rocket” Richard, his diminutive brother Henri, the “Pocket Rocket,” defensive whiz Doug Harvey, slapshot artist Bernie “Boom Boom” Geoffrion, “Le Gros Bill” Jean Beliveau, corner-digger Bert Olmstead, goaltender Jacques “Jake the Snake” Plante who introduced the goaler’s mask, and later in the day, Guy Lafleur aka “the Flower,” Larry “Pile-Driver” Robinson, and goaltender Ken “the Kid” Dryden (now a Liberal politician, alas).

Today I follow the textual exploits of the compelling political writers of our time, as impressive in the pursuit of their métier as the towering figures I once admired were in theirs. There’s Efraim “Killer” Karsh, “Big Bruce” Bawer, David “the Howitzer” Horowitz and his linemate Jamie “Sock-it-to-‘em” Glazov, Victor Davis Hanson aka “the Scholar,” Ibn “the Warrior” Warraq, “Fearless” Phyllis Chesler, Mark “the Rapier” Steyn, “Marvelous” Melanie Phillips, Tom “the Terrible” Sowell, “Battling” Barb Kay and many others too numerous to mention here. They are all members of a magnificent team, capable of scoring, dishing out crushing body checks, caroming their missives off stupefied minds, digging in the corners and, no less importantly, banging away at it. As Blake Geoffrion, Boom Boom’s grandson who plays for the Nashville Predators says, in his impeccable Frenglish, “If you want da score da goal, you have to shoot da puck.”

The problem is that the game is often rigged, the referees corrupt (like their Swedish and Russian counterparts in the hockey world), and the mainstream commentators refusing to call the play as it actually develops but describing an alternate reality in shrill and distracting tones. It’s hard to win when the rules do not apply or are regularly bent and even persistently violated. It’s hard to win when the whistle stops the play once it begins to look dangerous for the opposition or you are sent to the penalty box for an infraction you have not committed. And it’s just as hard to win when the reports of the game are re-written and the standings manipulated to establish a fraudulent outcome, giving priority to debased and incompetent teams of political duffers and flashy nonentities, like those who play for the New York Times Rangers.

The great players, however, are undaunted. They continue “swarming the crease.” They know the score. They play in the hope that, however unlikely, another Danny Gallivan will arise to call the game properly, report honestly on the achievements of our marquee agonists, influence a new generation of commentators and bring back the fans. Sometimes it seems like a vain and desperate prospect. But they know that, in the big leagues of this rough and tumble political world, you can’t put the puck in the net if you don’t keep banging away at it.

Image courtesy of RedState

Your college dollars at work, parents! At Ohio University, the cuckoo pants is in full swing. Ohio University has a student-run magazine called Backdrop Magazine. They decided to have a little fashion spread in their Spring issue. No big whoop, right? Wrong:

Enter OU hyperfeminist Bethany Francis.  Francis is a theater production major, and apparently, a giant whackadoodle.  When Francis picked up the Spring issue of Backdrop Magazine , she saw the coming of the Fourth Reich in the student-run pop-culture magazine.  Why?

Because the magazine’s spring fashion shoot didn’t include, in her estimation, the proper quota of non-blonde girls.

That’s right. Because there were too many of those icky, pretty blonde girls, Miss Francis, in her childish and perpetual victim mentality head, said to herself  “Brunette h8rs!!!11 You are just like those Nazis that I kind of, sort of read about but clearly don’t remember it or I wouldn’t compare a fashion spread to mass genocide.” She was so upset, that she made it her super cool cause and enlisted fellow insane college “feminists” via Facebook.

Then I saw the summer fashion “article”: eight identically bodied, white, blonde – excuse me: one brunette – very athletic/thin, women who looked so similar, they could be interchangeable. I can assure you, the first thought I had when viewing this shoot – in which the girls go nameless, mind you, a step down from the magazine’s previous “article” about “Women Who Work It” with no written component, aside from a minimal blurb about Ms. Lisa Summerscales – was not, “Wow, what an attractive swimsuit!” Rather, my reaction was a combination of, “So, here at OU we produce publications that celebrate the Beauty Ideal hurting both women and men?” and, “Apparently the Aryan Race is in and people of color and different sizes are OUT.”

But the most shameful, immediate response I had to the shoot was, “This makes me feel bad about my body.” I was in no way looking at the suits that these women were wearing; I was immediately comparing my body to theirs and angrily hating mine/theirs at the same time. This confession is not to say that these women are not beautiful or healthy – they are both! – but I have a serious problem with an Ohio University publication broadcasting that this body type that everyone should have.

Aha. And there, we have it. Once again, a leftist jumps to Godwin’s Law and odiously compares something to Nazism just because they don’t like it. And it made her feel bad. About herself.  Bethany, try scrawling madly in your diary or maybe even start an angry manifesto as an outlet for your self-involved faux-angst. No one will take you seriously then, either, but at least you won’t be offensively and outrageously daring to compare your low self-esteem issues with people who were murdered by mass genocidal, anti-Semitic maniacs.

Maybe try giving a hoot about women who actually are subjugated and are made to feel shameful about their bodies. Ever hear of Iran?

TEHRAN — Iranian authorities have begun police patrols in the capital to arrest women wearing clothes deemed improper. The campaign against loose-fitting veils and other signs of modernism comes as government opponents are calling for rallies to mark the anniversary of the disputed presidential election, and critics of the crackdown say it is stoking feelings of discontent.

But hard-liners say that improper veiling is a “security issue” and that “loose morality” threatens the core of the Islamic republic.

Most of them are brunette, Bethany, and are of “diverse” skin colors and such (by the way, they are also punished for being suntanned). You should care about them, then, right? Nah, of course you don’t. Because it’s not about them. It’s not about women. It’s all about you, as it always is with femisogynists like yourself. Your outrageous outrage is always based on your own victim mentalities. As Jesse Hathaway said at RedState:

Also, just as “advocates” such as Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, or OU’s own Aisha Upton aren’t truly trying to help anyone except themselves and their endless RAAAAAAAAAGE, feminists such as Andrea Dworken, Marylin French, or OU’s own Bethany Francis aren’t really upset about the plight of the women in 2010, they’re just in it for the attention and the glory.

Bingo. The only systematic sexism or racism that exist in this country are the kinds created in the minds of these perpetual victims, erroneously calling themselves “advocates,” and in the institutions that they’ve created to perpetuate the same.

Thankfully, these race baiters and gender baiters are now failing with most of the population, even if Backdrop Magazine caved in and apologized.

Now irrelevant, but soon extinct. Good riddance.

—–

Follow Lori  on Twitter and read more of her work at Snark and Boobs, iOwntheWorld , Right Wing News and Red State.

Iskenderun (AsiaNews) - Today at 4pm local time the funeral will take place of Msgr. Padovese, killed by his driver, Murat Altun, strangely "crazed" last June 3. Meanwhile, new details have emerged on the dynamics and motives of the killing that has prostrated the Turkish Church.

The funeral ceremony will be held in the Church of the Annunciation, with the participation of the apostolic nuncio, Mgr. Antonio Lucibello, the Latin bishops of Istanbul and Izmir, the Armenian Catholic Bishop of Istanbul, as well as the priests in Turkey and representatives of international embassies.

There will also be a delegate of the Conference of Bishops of Europe present. The presence of bishops from other countries, particularly Italy, are not expected: After the funeral, in Iskenderun, the body of Mgr. Padovese will be brought to Milan, Italy, where he will receive other funeral. The funeral in Italy is likely to take place on Monday, June 14. The delay is due to the fact that the Italian courts have asked to do an autopsy on the body of the martyred bishop.

As the days pass, new details emerge on the story of murder and the alleged "insanity" of the assassin.

The doctors who performed the autopsy reveal that Mgr. Padovese had knife wounds all over his body, but especially in the heart (at least 8). His head was almost completely detached from his neck, attached to his body by only the skin of the back of the neck.

Even the dynamics of the killing is clearer: the Bishop was stabbed in his house. He had the strength to go out the door of the house, bleeding and crying for help and there he was killed. Perhaps only when he fell to the ground, was his head cut off.

Witnesses said they heard the bishop cry out for help. But more importantly, is that they heard screams of Murat immediately after the murder. According to these sources, he climbed on the roof of the house shouted: "I killed the great Satan! Allah Akbar! ".

This call coincides perfectly with the idea of beheading, making sense that it is like a ritual sacrifice against evil. This correlates with the murders of ultranationalist groups and Islamic fundamentalists who apparently want to eliminate Christians from Turkey.

Moreover, according to a Turkish newspaper, Milliyet on June 4, the murderer had told police that he his actions were the result of a " divine revelation."...

Muhammad had one of those, too, interestingly: "Therefore, when ye meet the Unbelievers (in fight), smite at their necks..." (Qur'an 47:4). Does Muhammad get an insanity defense?

KABUL, Afghanistan - A Taliban suicide car bomber struck a NATO convoy in the Afghan capital Tuesday, killing six troops -- five Americans and one Canadian, officials said. Twelve Afghan civilians also died -- many of them on a public bus in rush-hour traffic.

The powerful blast occurred on a major Kabul thoroughfare that runs by the ruins of a one-time royal palace and government ministries. It wrecked nearly 20 vehicles, including five SUVs in the NATO convoy, and scattered debris and body parts across the wide boulevard. The body of woman in a burqa was smashed against the window of the bus.

The attack -- the deadliest for NATO troops in the capital since September -- comes despite a ramped up effort by Afghan authorities to intercept would-be attackers and better secure a capital city that saw a spate of brazen attacks this winter.

In the last such attack in February, suicide bombers stormed two small downtown hotels and killed 16 people....

Not Government Approved

Is it prima facie Orwellian to have a bill proposed by the government called the “Healthy Choices Act”? Think about it. 

Let’s just assume that it isn’t for now. Let’s instead commit to judge the creepy statism of any particular legislation by the creepy statist measure it proposes to enact.

In this case, it looks like the “Heathy Choices Act,” the only thing the White House seems willing to let Michelle Obama undertake publicly, is again the big winner. Among the seemingly innocuous “for the good of the children” measures it will include, is a mandate on states receiving federal funding from the bill to annually track the Body Mass Index of children ages 2-18.

CNS News reports,

Section 101 of the bill amends the Public Health Services Act by stating that health care providers must record the Body Mass Index of all children ages 2 through 18.  “The provision relates to all children in states that accept grants under the bill,” a spokesperson for Rep. Kind told CNSNews.com. “However, it is important to note that no one is forced to come in for a doctor’s visit to get their BMI tested.  BMI will be taken at times when the child makes an otherwise scheduled doctor’s visit.”

Of course, with vaccination requirements and routine doctor’s visit, the BMI tracking will not be terribly burdensome to parents. This, however, is really not the issue. The troublesome nature of government BMI tracking is the prospect of even more government intrusion into our lives, especially with regard to the relationship between parents and their children. What it does is encourage the substitution of parental responsibility with government responsibility to children — a trend which only seems to become more widespread the more nanny-statist we become. What we want as a society, and what the bill claims to “facilitate,” is a nation in which all parents properly track their own children’s BMI and are concerned with their children’s diet. Yet, the BIM provisions of the bill clearly have the opposite effect. 

And suppose that little Jimmy gets a bad report from Internal Body Mass Index Services. What happens next? Will the government be coming into your homes to monitor what you are feeding your children everyday? Will Social Services come knocking at your door? Indeed, this is a society in which rate of Dorito consumption could easily come to define new terms of child neglect. Sketchy territory.

On a dark Thursday in March the telephone rang and I picked up the receiver to hear my youngest child say “Something terrible has happened,” and I knew that a family member was gone.

When death takes someone you love, there is no looking back. And there is only looking back. You can’t complain there’s been a mistake or argue there was no time for goodbyes. You can’t protest the life was too short, and you can’t negotiate a deal for a final conversation. When death takes someone you love, she has slipped off the edge of the world and there is no bringing her back.

So it was with my daughter Sarah who was taken from us without warning in her forty-fourth year, leaving a wake of vacancy and heartache behind.

More than a day intervened between her collapse and the time police discovered her body on the floor of her apartment where it lay crumpled by her bed. Though we can never know for sure, it appears she drew her last breath on Wednesday, March 6, 2008. They had gone to look for her after she failed to show up at the school where she taught autistic youngsters, and did not call in sick. It was out of character for her to be unconcerned about her children, so the school called her mother, Elissa, who called my daughter Anne, who said, “We must notify the police.”

By the time I answered Anne’s call in Los Angeles, they had already located Sarah in the spot where her heart had stopped. For those of us who loved her, there was nothing left but to get on with our grieving and counting up our loss, and then to proceed with the arrangements for putting her lifeless body to its rest.

In the three days that passed before the funeral, I noticed how our conversations kept returning to the final words each of us had exchanged with her when she was alive. What was the purpose of these futile gestures that could not bring her back? Perhaps they could be understood as a desperate hope for the past to flow into the present as before. As though, after the pause, we might pick up the phone to hear her voice, or knock unexpectedly at her door and find her at home to open it when we did.

There were other dimensions to our helplessness during these watery hours — unnerving thoughts that had to do only with ourselves. I should have spent more time with you when there was time to spend. I should have told you how much I love you, or told you more often. I should have been less contentious when we had our disputes. I should have come up with more ways to protect you. How desperately now, when it is too late, I wish I could put my arms around you and hug you again, and hold you and hold you.

– A Cracking of the Heart 

If you have a favorite Horowitz quote you want to highlight for others then please submit it here. Please include:

1. “Horowitz Quote of the Day” in subject line.
2. A link to where the quote is from. (No need to include this if it’s from a book.)
3. Any remarks you’d like published explaining what value you take from it.
4. Your preferred name and a link to your blog or homepage (if you have one.)

....Quoting Islamic scholars, Revolution Muslim explained, "Whoever curses the Messenger of Allah (peace and blessing of Allah be upon him) - a Muslim or a non-Muslim - he must be killed and this is the opinion of the general body of Islamic scholars." [...]

What we learned from the South Park event, however, is just as troubling. In the face of threats, the bosses at Comedy Central folded like cheap TV trays. Comedy Central heavily censored the cartoon, granting such blackmailers exactly what they want.

Forget land of the free, etc. The channel gave up without even considering a fight. [...]

Theo Van Gogh, whose antics occasionally resembled South Park's in their tastelessness, discovered that his pen was no match for a killer's sword. And yet, the pen - the keyboard, the comedian, and the editorial cartoon; Bart, Cartman, Kyle, and Kenny - actually holds enormous power. To win, however, it needs its backers to show backbone. Too bad South Park's have none.

Indeed.

Jillian Michaels "I'm going to adopt. I can't handle doing that to my body."

Alright, so I admit it, I enjoy watching the “Biggest Loser” now and then. At first I was put off by the title, but after watching it, it really seemed to change lives—who can argue with that right?

After reading a short piece in The Huffington Post about an interview with one of their star trainers, Jillian Michaels, I couldn’t help but drop my jaw when she revealed more than skin.

Although, I rarely take anything from the Hollywood Left to heart, Michaels really hit a nerve this time.

HuffPo:

Biggest Loser’ trainer Jillian Michaels has a hard little body and she plans to keep it that way. Michaels, 36, tells Women’s Health she is unwilling to become pregnant because of the way it would change her body.

Fair enough.

Personally, I found the trade-off in my favor, giving birth to my children can’t compare to any other accomplishment I could hope to achieve. Granted, I was never a trainer. (Although one could argue, if you’re a great trainer, you should be able to get back into shape.)

Nevertheless, that is her personal decision, and her loss. It was the statement that followed that I take issue with.

“I’m going to adopt. I can’t handle doing that to my body,” she told the [Women's Health] magazine. “Also, when you rescue something, it’s like rescuing a part of yourself.”

“When you rescue something?”

We are not talking about baby seals here. These two statements combined say more than “I’m self-centered” it says she really has no idea what being a mother actually is. If “rescuing a part of yourself,” is anywhere in the equation of becoming a parent, there is a rude awaking around the corner.

I can tell you from an adopted child’s point of view that a mother is a mother, whether you came to her by birth or adoption. It doesn’t feel any different for the child.

Parents who adopt with the attitude they are doing a child a favor, have no business adopting. It simply will not end well. The child will never live up to their expectations of gratitude for being “rescued.”

I have witnessed more than a couple families that believed they were being noble and Christian by adopting a child with a tragic background. They didn’t do the children any favors. When these children needed more love than they gave, they were sent back—or just sent away. These parents managed to only add another chapter of heartache and loss to the children’s lives.

Michaels can yell and drive contestants to change their lives, and get paid doing it—wonderful. But before trying to change the life of a child, Michaels needs to weigh the cost of self-sacrifice.

PARIS - French President Nicolas Sarkozy has ordered legislation that would ban women from wearing Islamic veils that fully cover the face and body in public places, the government said Wednesday.

It is Sarkozy's first political action toward an outright ban, though he has repeatedly said such outfits oppress women and are not welcome in France, home to a firmly secular government.

Government spokesman Luc Chatel said after a Cabinet meeting Wednesday that the president decided the government should submit a bill to parliament in May on an overall ban on such veils "in all public places."

That ups the stakes in Sarkozy's push against veils such as the burqa and niqab and chador. Some in his own party have bristled at a full-out ban, and France's highest administrative body has questioned whether it would be constitutional.

Sarkozy insisted that "everything should be done so that no one feels stigmatized," according to Chatel. Sarkozy said the veils "do not pose a problem in a religious sense, but threaten the dignity of women."

Chatel did not say how the new bill would affect a resolution already slated for discussion in parliament May 11 on ways of limiting the full veils....

First, the TSA posted its entire Screening Management Standard Operating Procedure document online. The posting of that amateurishly redacted document was followed by the posting of a second document with the same redaction flaw – revealing more TSA baggage screening policies.

Terrorists, who no doubt have dissected the unredacted documents, have also been discussing ways to evade and beat airport scanners on jihadi forums:

“We have that system in place in Algiers…does anyone know if it’s capable of detecting [the flammable gas] butane?”

On another Jihadist site, a visitor questions security involving 3D scanners at British airports asking: “Can I refuse [to pass through] for religious reasons?”

Before long comes this answer: “...advise those who wish to avoid the Heathrow scanners to take the train to Paris… and then board a plane from there.”

The TSA website features a map and lists of locations to help terrorists determine which airports to avoid when planning to smuggle explosives aboard commercial airplanes. There’s also a video on CNN showing just how easy it is to beat TSA’s screenings. ...

Astounding, but true. And there is much more. Read it all.

Roman Polanski’s new film The Ghost Writer permeates with America-as-a-danger-to-the-world cliché. This could be merely his knee-jerk reaction (or perhaps vendetta) towards a country that still has an arrest warrant hanging over his head. Perhaps Polanski wants us to follow Coleridge’s “a willing suspension of disbelief” when it comes to the villainous America of The Ghost Writer. But it’s preferable (and perfectly possible) to ignore the movie’s incriminations and take the story as some fictional international intrigue.

The Ghost Writer’s British Prime Minister Adam Lang (with a stellar performance by Pierce Brosnan, who will nonetheless go down in history as a second-rate Bond) defends the “bad guys” and justifies racial profiling so ardently, one wonders if that is what Polanski himself believes. Therefore, it is not even certain if Polanski is bound to this anti-Americanism. And he coats The Ghost Writer with such crafty, dark humor, that he brings levity to the political plot. Still, this new film is a small gem of visual mastery, made by a director with a bad reputation, but with a very good eye.

Prime Minister Lang oversees an American backed kidnapping of al Qaeda terrorists, whom he then orders to be waterboarded for information. The International Criminal Court deems this illegal, and he is to be brought to trial for war crimes. And only the Americans can save him. His connections with America lie deep and long, and especially with the CIA, which started his political career when a flamboyant Cambridge University student, making him, as the Prime Minister of Britain, one of the most powerful men in the world, supported by the most powerful country in the world.

Polanski exposes subtle personal dynamics within this grandiose political act. Lang is in the process of writing his memoirs. He has had to hire a new ghostwriter because his former one was found dead on the shores by Martha’s Vineyard, where Lang is staying during a lecture tour in America. Lang had a close, friendly relationship with this original ghostwriter. Yet, this friend’s death points towards Lang and his entourage as the suspects. And he later learns that this friend betrayed him by leaking political secrets. Lang is on Martha’s Vineyard in a secluded fort-like mansion with two women who, in their own ways, support and fortify him. There is his quick-witted but acerbic wife Ruth (played by English actress Olivia Williams), on whose advice he relies to make his political decisions. And his indispensible secretary Amelia Bly (Sex and the City’s Kim Cattrall convincingly transformed in business attire) is also his mistress. After Lang realizes that it is a political rival who exposed his illegal – as deemed by the ICC – activities, he views it more as the politician’s personal revenge for having been fired from Lang’s cabinet, rather than any principled political beliefs that he might hold.

Lang’s new ghostwriter (played by Ewan McGregor) meets Lang and his duo of wife/adviser and secretary/mistress for the first time on this island mansion. He introduces himself to Lang as, “I’m your ghost,” and is nameless for the rest of the film. This new ghostwriter remains an insipid character throughout, but his naïveté inadvertently helps him to unravel the mystery he’s been forced into. We, the audience, in the tradition of Polanski’s other mystery movie Chinatown, follow him along as he wanders through false signs and positive leads until he finally solves the puzzle.

The capricious ocean, whose shoreline Ruth often traverses in long solitary walks, and along which McGregor is caught during a potential storm, is reminiscent of Winslow Homer’s paintings of rough seas. It is appropriate that the original ghostwriter’s dead body turns up on these volatile shores, setting the stage for the mystery and turmoil that is to be part of McGregor’s stay on the island.

Transparent Secrecy

The Ghost Writer is a film about secrecy poised as transparency, about superficial facades and hidden truths. One of the earliest scenes of the film is a close-up of gray waves rolling over a dead body. The following scene is a long shot of sky, water and sandy beach for as far as the eye can see, with the dead body an amorphous mass. Did we really see what we just saw? Was the object a dead body? As we later connect the dots, we realize that this was the body of Lang’s ghostwriter. No one is willing to clarify whether the cause of death was suicide, drowning, or the unspeakable possibility, murder.

Glass looms everywhere in The Ghost Writer. At the Rhinehart publishing house in London where McGregor has his contract finalized, walls have been demolished and replaced by floor-to-ceiling windows. Everything is visible from the outside. Even internally, sections are divided by unyielding transparency. There is no hiding from anything. But is there? Despite this open concept interior design, there are a few secured, sacred rooms. Naturally, one such is the CEO’s office. And that is where the contract negotiations take place, where McGregor expects frankness – after all, this is about a memoir – but secrecy and deceit seem to be the rule.

The modernist fort-like mansion on the island is the epitome of the architecture of glass. Whole walls have been transformed into windows, which are kept free from confining shutters or curtains. It’s as though the outside has been brought inside. But the freedom and transparency are illusionary, since the mansion is like a prison, with the ocean as its barricade. And throughout the building, elaborate measures of security guards, checkpoints, and hidden alarm systems are in place. Ruth describes it “like being exiled with Napoleon in St. Helena.”

False Frames

Polanski uses every possible opportunity for a frame: windows and doorways; television screens; computer monitors; paint canvasses; and the ultimate frame on which the movie is projected to us, the audience. These frames all enclose something supposedly concrete and truthful. Yet, all image-makers know how deceptive and unreliable the frame (and framing) can be.

The mansion’s giant windows are like huge movie screens projecting the expansive and exhilarating ocean. But this very ocean is what constrains the protagonists on the island. News stories and images on TV are carefully selected and edited for their meaning, such as the torture scenes that were “reenacted” to affect high drama. An old man framed behind a screen door, like a classic Paul Strand photograph of a rustic native, looks menacingly at McGregor sheltering on his porch from the rain. Yet, the old man is simply concerned about the dead body that was found on the shore. The many paintings that are scattered around the mansion are abstract expressionist, with elusive meanings and no decipherable images. Is Polanski also telling us to question what we see on the giant screen that projects his film to us?

Color Codes

The film is infused with gray. Like the color-field artists who used color on whole canvases as an atmospheric device, Polanski covers his film canvas with an omnipresent gray. Gray is the ocean where death occurred. The giant gray concrete walls of the ghostwriter’s headquarters display gray abstract paintings. The cars that dangerously maneuver the island’s country roads under the gray sky are shiny gray. Bland gray clothes cover Ruth’s body. Gray swathes everything in a shroud.

This pervasive gray hides dangers and truths. It covers the expository sun; Ruth’s tempestuous personality; the dead body on the beach. A gray fog of rain and mist constantly envelops the island. The wailing foghorn of an ever-present lighthouse regularly warns of the dangers the impenetrable gray moisture may conceal.

Yet, Polanski taunts us with splashes (or slashes) of red throughout the film. Red flashes in and out of view on the steady, permanent gray.  In gray London, only the double-decker buses are bright and red. The somber gray fort is decorated with red canvases of abstract paintings. Amelia, who is always dressed in shades of gray (and black and white which blend into gray), holds a notebook with a daring red gash at the binder. All the news logos, including CNN’s and the BBC’s, are in red. Red curtains cover hotel windows, and a red glow from exterior neon lights frames McGregor’s face in the hotel room he escapes to from his pursuers. Ruth changes to red when her husband is away and she gets a chance to seduce her young guest, the ghostwriter. Even the lighthouse has red stripes. Red is danger; red is blood. We have been forewarned.

Coded Language

Language is manipulated and unreliable everywhere in the film. When McGregor is first exposed to this project, his agent tells him, “Rumor has it that the manuscript is a crock of s***.” Throughout the mansion, Polanski hangs paintings and prints with either undecipherable words, or words with their meanings truncated from their context. What we do get to read in the art poster in Amelia’s office is negative, menacing words like “Scornful, Disdainful,” or “Love worth killing for.” Shady double entendres make up a good part of the jokes. A memoir intended to tell a straightforward written account of a life becomes rife with code. “All the words are there, but they’re in the wrong order,” says McGregor. When McGregor exposes the lies that Lang has told about his past, through documents that his dead ghostwriter left behind, Ruth retorts with, “Trust McAra (the original ghostwriter) to ruin a good story with too much research.” Truth is a liability, and should be evaded. Like McGregor, we have to selectively string together the words and language we are given to arrive at the truth. Lang, Ruth, Amelia, and ultimately Polanski are unwilling to help us.

Authentic Sound

A score composed specifically for the film by Alexandre Desplat, a young but seasoned composer with more than a dozen film scores to his name, including Julie and Julia and The Girl with a Pearl Earring, holds this Rubik’s Cube of a movie together. Desplat’s composition for The Ghost Writer skillfully integrates sound with images by introducing themes, accentuating suspense, and exposing emotions as varied as romance and fear. He even uses humoristic sequences to support Polanski’s entry into black comedy. Desplat, who worked closely with the film footage, incorporates many ambient sounds like car horns and clanking iron into his score. One of the most important is the island lighthouse’s foghorn. Desplat uses this as his resounding motif, producing a melodic sequence that uses the rise and fall of the foghorn’s moans to accentuate the sense of danger.

It is hard not to compare Desplat with Alfred Hitchcock’s prized composer Bernard Herrmann. In Vertigo, Herrmann incorporates a foghorn’s call for danger in his score. Madeleine’s theme song in Vertigo is reciprocated in Desplat’s musical sketch of Lang’s unhappy wife in “The Truth about Ruth.” This composition, at times romantic, at times melancholic, shows us more of Ruth than she herself is willing. Lang also has his own theme song, “Lang’s Memoirs,” which is played at discrete moments when McGregor watches Lang expose his true nature. The soundtrack ironically seem more truthful and authentic than the images, as Hitchcock also frequently showed in his films.

Film time is often expanded with Desplat’s score. One strategy he uses is to overlay a full musical composition over the images, which are then edited to stretch time. Such is the case when McGregor goes to the island for the first time. Desplat’s piece “Travel to the Island” is played twice through, while intercutting shots of McGregor in various positions – looking at the sea, reading signs, sleeping, walking around on the ferry, riding in the taxi – are filmed in one long sequence. These lengthy musical and visual sequences force us to slow down to look for clues that might help us solve the puzzle. Music becomes our aide in deciphering the images.

Final Exit

Notwithstanding Hitchcock’s notorious murder scene in Psycho, most of his murders occurred off-screen. This is another undoubted Hitchcockian influence on Polanski’s The Ghost Writer. Polanski does show us the politically induced assassination of his main character, followed by the suicide of the assassin. But I’ve already argued that Polanski doesn’t take the anti-American politics that preceded this assassination seriously, thus he makes it a straightforward incident of gunshot then death. In addition, the blood that we see from the wounds is part of the symbolic red that Polanski has been weaving throughout his film. The deaths of the two ghostwriters are presented in a more mysterious and intriguing manner.

At the end, during his book launch at Rhinehart’s, McGregor foolishly informs Ruth that he’s figured out everything. McGregor then walks out of the party and into the street carrying the manuscript with him. He wanders into the middle of the street looking for a taxi, and eventually walks off-screen. A car travels at high speed towards McGregor as the music, in ¾ waltz tempo (dancing with death?), progresses in a crescendo. When the car is barely out of the frame, the music stops abruptly. The next scene is silent, with scattering papers blowing back into the frame. Polanski leaves this crucial last frame empty of its context and lets our imagination finish the story,

We follow Polanski’s imaginative processes with the clues he places throughout the film, from the canvases on walls, to the surrounding color schemes. One such clue is the coffee table art book he places in Lang’s office. The book is on visual artist Olafur Eliasson. “If [my] artworks make you think about what you see and how you see it, I think I’ve achieved something,” says Eliasson. This is surely Polanski’s wish for The Ghost Writer.

NAIROBI, Kenya, March 24 (CDN) -- Islamic militants in Somalia tracked down an underground church leader who had previously escaped a kidnapping attempt and killed him last week, Christian sources said.

Islamic extremist al Shabaab rebels shot Madobe Abdi to death on March 15 at 9:30 a.m. in Mahaday village, 50 kilometers (31 miles) north of Johwar. He had escaped an al Shabaab attempt to kidnap him on March 2.

Abdi's death adds to a growing number of Christians murdered by Islamic militants, but his was distinctive in that he was not a convert from Islam. An orphan, Abdi was raised as a Christian.

Sources said the militants prohibited his body from being buried, ordering that it be left to dogs as an example to other Christians. Al shabaab, which is fighting the Transitional Federal Government (TFG) of President Sheikh Sharif Sheik Ahmed, has embarked on a campaign to rid the country of all non-Muslims.

"The al Shabaab say, 'Leaving Abdi's body outside is a warning to all that a murtid [infidel] is a disgrace to Muslims,' hence creating fear to whoever would like to choose Christianity," said a source....

Will the West ever stand up for the freedom of speech? Or will it just roll over and play dead? "Seven held over 'cartoonist plot,'" from the UKPA, March 9 (thanks to Twostellas):

Seven Muslims have been arrested over an alleged plot to assassinate a Swedish cartoonist who depicted the Prophet Mohammed with the body of a dog, police said.

Al Qaida put a $100,000 bounty on the head of cartoonist Lars Vilks after a newspaper published his cartoon....

Islamabad, March 7 (DPA) A delegation of Pakistani lawmakers refused to subject themselves to a controversial full-body X-ray scan at a Washington airport, a media report said Sunday.

The six-member group of the parliament members from Pakistan's restive tribal region cut short their official US visit immediately to return home, the Pakistani Express News channel said.

It was the first official delegation that refused to go through the body scanners since they were installed at 19 US airports last month.

Abbas Afridi, the head of Pakistani delegation, said the US State Department had invited them to Washington to discuss security and development projects in the tribal region, with a promise that they would not be subjected to body scanning.

'We were not scanned when we arrived on March 28 in Washington from Pakistan, but on Saturday when we wanted to travel to another city the authorities told us that we would be scanned,' Afridi told Express News.

'We refused the scanning and now we are returning home,' he said....

Should the Islamic Republic of Iran be renamed the Misunderstanders of Islam Republic of Iran? Or is this a Sunni/Shi'ite thing, with the Sunnis of the Fiqh Council being all uptight while those insoucient, mystically-minded Shia have no problem with appearing buck naked in front of the prying, hungry eyes of kuffar TSA personnel?

Unlikely. More likely is the fact that there is nothing really Islamically objectionable about body scanners, but if the Fiqh Council can intimidate the clueless, hopelessly compromised dhimmis of the TSA to allow an exemption for Muslims, they will have enabled the jihad against the West to advance that much more smoothly and unimpeded.