As was inevitable, the cartoon deaths have begun. From Australia's ABC, with thanks to JE:
Two protesters killed in Afghanistan are believed to be the first deaths associated with the publication of cartoons depicting the Prophet Mohammed.Protests have flared across parts of Afghanistan in recent days, as they have in many Muslim countries.
Hundreds turned out in the eastern Afghan city of Mihtarlam and shouted "death to Denmark" and "death to France".
But when a police a station was targeted, police fired at the demonstrators and one person was killed at the scene.
Another died after being taken to a hospital in the nearby city of Jalalabad.
There have also been protests in Kabul.
Hundreds of people also protested in the southern capital, Kandahar, shouting "death to the enemies of Islam, long life to Islam", an AFP correspondent said.
l think these jihadists have way too much time on their hands.. you know the saying about idle hands getting you to hell.. or something.. well l am confident they are real hot where their at!
I suppose the Danes are at fault for these deaths; and the priest who was shot in the back in Turkey?
Yes, allah is great ... alright.
I know the day's events will likely bury these links, but I can hope some will see them:
Monsters of the Arab Streer:
http://www.townhall.com/opinion/columns/SteveMuscatello/2006/02/06/185285.html
Censorship by Firing Squad:
http://www.townhall.com/opinion/columns/johnleo/2006/02/06/185301.html
Reign of the Radicals (involving a Moderate muslim, no less):
http://www.townhall.com/opinion/columns/joelmowbray/2006/02/06/185302.html
The second front in Jihad:
http://www.frontpagemagazine.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=21178
A million Mogadishus:
http://www.frontpagemagazine.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=21153
Take care all! and Stay Safe!
As if Isreal is fooled by this!
Hamas today hinted that it may suspend its commitment to the destruction of Israel as the militant organisation's leaders convened in Cairo to begin constructing a new Palestinian government.
Senior leaders suggested that past agreements between Israel and the previous Palestinian government would be allowed to stand - at least in the short term.
Hamas' convention calls for Israel to wiped off the map. The party's apparent softening of its uncompromising stance came shortly after Israel agreed to release $54 million in monthly taxes owed to the Palestinian Authority.
Israel collects border duties on behalf of the Palestinians but last week threatened to withold them, deepening the PA's financial crisis and threatening social chaos in the West Bank and Gaza.
Ehud Olmert, Israel's acting Prime Minister, agreed to release the funds but said that future payments hinged on the make-up of the new Palestinian government. Israel, a nuclear power with the biggest army in the Middle East, has repeatedly stated that it will refuse to fund a government committed to its destruction.
As Hamas leaders assembled for talks in Cairo, an aide to Khaled Mashal, the organisation's supreme leader, suggested that it may be prepared to suspend its charter commitment.
Moussa Abu Marzouk, a close confidante of Mr Mashal who is in exile in Syria, said that the future government would abide by past agreements. Egyptian leaders have joined Western powers in pressing Hamas to drop the more extreme elements of its ideology before taking power.
Mr Marzouk told reporters: "There is no authority that inherits another authority without abiding by the agreements already made." But he warned that such a deal with would not necessarily be permanent, adding: "If the agreements contradict logic and rights, there are legal measures to be taken... there are no eternal agreements."
The atmosphere in the Palestinian territories is tense after Israel has launched an artillery assault on the Gaza Strip, the most deadly since the elections. Five Palestinian militants, including Islamic Jihad's master bomb-maker, have been killed in the past 24 hours. The radical faction vowed swift and bloody revenge.
"The Zionist enemy has opened the gates of hell," the armed wing of Jihad, the Al-Quds Brigades said in a statement.
Israel has said it is determined to block a Hamas-led government. During a speech to a business conference in Tel Aviv, Mr Olmert said that he would only be prepared to co-operate with Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian President whose Fatah Party was crushed in the ballot, on condition that Hamas does not lead the new government.
"We have no interest in hurting the head of the Palestinian Authority, Abu Masen," Mr Olmert said , referring to Mr Abbas. "As long as he does not co-operate with Hamas, and the Palestinian government is not a Hamas government, we will cooperate with the Palestinian Authority cautiously and responsibly."
With Hamas holding 75 of the PA's 135 seats, it is unclear how this could be achieved. European and US leaders are attempting to woo Hamas into the diplomatic fold by threatening to withdraw the annual $900-million aid packages unless it renounces violence.
Mr Mashal was expected to leave Syria for Cairo this week to guide the process of assembling a Palestinian coalition. Hamas has repeatedly stated that it wants to work with the secular Fatah organisation that it trounced in the elections, but Fatah has so far refused to engage.
The new Palestinian parliament will meet for the first time on February 16. Mr Abbas then has two weeks to appoint a party, presumably Hamas, to form a government. The party has five weeks to complete the task, meaning it is likely that a Hamas government may not be formed until after Israel’s March 28 election.
Hamas has a financial interest in delaying the formation of its government for as long as possible, to ensure Israeli and Western aid is not cut off before it has agreed other sources of funding. Senior Hamas leaders have embarked on a tour of Arab and Muslim nations to try to enlist their financial support.
The death toll is now up to four:
Why are they attacking the police?
This is going to sound hard-hearted, but I would care much more if the deaths were of non-Muslims, or of Muslims who had stood up for free speech, like the brave Jordanian editors who have been arrested.
For Toronto area JWers who haven't heard about this -- two Jewish U of T campus organizations are hosting an event this week -- Know Radical Islam Week -- in advance of the usual "Israel Apartheid Week" sponsored by the Muslim student/pro-Palestinian orgs. Speakers include Nonie Darwish, born in the Gaza to Muslims and now an outspoken convert to Christianity, Khalid Abu Toameh, former PLO journalist who now writes for the Jerusalem Post and Barbara Crook of Palestinian Media Watch.
http://www.knowradicalislam.com/
Gary:
You missed listing Ibn Warraq's piece on Democracy in a Cartoon on frontpagemag.com.
As for the riots in Syria and Lebanon, from Across the Bay blogger "Anton Efendi", writes about what was going on behind the scenes -- lots of foreign agent provacateurs in Lebanon. (And somewhere in Maritime Canada, CBC Radio I reports that there were about 200 sexually-segregated protesters demonstrating outside a Danish consulate yesterday. Geez, no orchestration by the usual suspects going on here)
Burning Embassies
After the Syrian regime helped burn down the Danish and Norwegian embassies in Damascus yesterday (with utter transparency I might add), the trend moved to Lebanon today.
Of course, unlike with Syria, in Lebanon's case the government had nothing to do with it, although it failed miserably, yet again, in handling the situation. A knowledgeable friend writes the following on the two episodes, and those who may have been involved in the Beirut riots:
Clearly this sort of thing [referring to what happened yesterday in Damascus] happens in Syria only when the regime decides it should happen. (There was a similar episode with the US embassy in Damascus in 2000.) Worth noting that Denmark has been on the Security Council for the past year and voted for all the resolutions dealing with Syria and Lebanon. The regime may trying to have it both ways: on the one hand, it says to the Danes, among others, that the Syrian regime can "reach out and touch you" with impunity. On the other hand, they may yet hope to use this, as they've used other incidents over the past year in Syria and Lebanon, to make themselves look like a indispensable bulwark against fundamentalism and chaos, to survive the Hariri investigation. But their role in this is just too transparent for any serious observer to buy the second line.
Today's riots in Beirut were surely connected to yesterday's in Damascus, and appear to have had multiple objectives. The mass of demonstrators seems to have been infiltrated by groups like the Ahbash and Tawheed, and those were probably the ones behind the violence. The Syrians probably still have enough agents, sympathizers, and tools here to cause problems on this scale.
The image to be conveyed was that Lebanese Sunnis are all fanatics, and that the community as a whole is out of control -- a useful optic for the regime in Damascus. The provocations made in predominantly-Christian neighborhoods will help keep things on the boil here, which is also in the regime's interest.
The Interior Ministry was virtually absent the whole morning. The images of ISF Land Cruisers being overturned and trashed, and of fire engines being commandeered by the protesters while the Danish consulate burned are a major humiliation of the government. Michel Aoun's argument criticizing the Siniora government's handling of security will only strengthen after this.
The Ahbash are the group infiltrated by and beholden to the Syrian regime. They were used by the regime to bully the traditional Sunni establishment, and they were used in the Hariri assassination. The Syrians have been increasingly using the Islamist (and al-Qaeda affiliates) element in Lebanon. The relationship of the regime with militant Salafis is not at all how it presents it. The West is not duped by this all-too-transparent show, no matter how much Landis wishes it to be the case in his latest stupid post. The reality is actually the opposite. The "bulwark against Islamists" charade no longer holds water.
Update: Michael Young's take over at Reason's Hit and Run. See also this older piece of his in TCS, which dealt with Syria and Islamists.
Update 2: Breaking news: I just heard on Future TV that the Interior Minister, Hasan Sabe' submitted his resignation to the cabinet. He did not wait for a response, and left the session. He told journalists that among those arrested today from the rioters were 76 Syrians and 38 Palestinians as well as 25 without passports (bedouins). There were also something like 130 30 Lebanese arrested (I can't remember the exact number). Addendum: This Reuters reports claims there were 38 Lebanese arrested.
There has got to be accountability for this travesty.
Update 3: Some of the things Aoun said in reaction to the riots lend credence to Michael Young's theory about the Future Movement (the Hariri party) sharing part of the blame.
Should the cartoons not have been published? I say YES they should have been published. When a bully gets away with being a bully they do not stop, they get stronger.
But we as a people, and our Government and the world needs to stand together as one huge force and say NO to the terrorists, fight back and let them know we will not take their crap anymore. That we will not take their threats, their beheadings, and their terrorism any longer. They are NOT going to rule the world as they keep repeating.
They only know kill.
Have any US newspapers ran the images? I searched the internet and could find any. It woudl be a shame if the center of Free Speech in the world cannot find it's own gonads on this issue.
Snikle,
The San Francisco Chronicle has stated that it would not publish the cartoons in its print edition, since the cartoons are so readily available from other sources, and indeed its on-line edition provides links to these sources. Its reason is that publishing now is only gratutitous, and does not further the debate of free speech over cultish taboo.
All of the articles published by the Chronicle, including its on-line World Views forum, have clearly come down in favor of the supremacy of free thought over religious taboo. Note its lead with reprinting from the Telegraph of the cartoon of submission before fear, and the other cartoon of an artist holding a drawing that contains only text "Mohammed with a big nose." In this bastion of liberalism, it is heartening to see in the reader comments of the World Views blogs, the strong condemnation of Islam. Perhaps is has finally set into the nonreligious and/or liberal mindset, and to the tolerance of everyone whether right, left, pious or atheist, that Islam is after all the greatest enemy.
From yesterdays Chronicle Editorial Is nothing sacred:
The ABC (American Broadcasting Corporation) television news on the local affiliate has shown full screen images of the cartoons on television, and has inferred that the riots and destruction confirm the content of the cartoons. They added the obligatory interview of a local hijab clad muslim from a Santa Clara County muslim organization, and limited her on-air soundbite to "but, but, Islam is a religion of peace..." to highlight the discongruity.
snikle-
The Philadelphia Inquirer ran some, from what I've read.
Home of the Liberty Bell, Independence Hall and that witty old fellow Ben Franklin, who said:
"Little strokes fell great oaks."
Freedom bends like a willow; despotisms crack and fall under the inflexible trunks of their dogma.