29 September 2006 @ 9:26AM >> Is Europe finally beginning to stand up against Jihadist intimidation? The controversy over a cancelled Mozart opera in Germany may be a turning point.

German chancellor some effect:

A controversial Mozart opera adapted to include a scene showing Mohammed’s severed head on stage appears set for a new run in Berlin after the German government said the show must go on as a “signal of closer dialogue” with the country’s 3.4m Muslims.

[...]

Badr Mohammed, head of Berlin’s European Integration Centre and one of the Muslim delegates to the conference, said the forum was a “historic breakthrough - an opportunity that Muslims must now grasp”.

[...]

Yet greater co-operation was already proving difficult on Wednesday night, as some of the representatives of Germany’s main Muslim organisations complained that the interior ministry had also invited independent Muslim experts to the forum, including women writers and lawyers who are highly critical of conservative Muslim traditions.

So it sounds like, although the current run of the show has been cancelled, it may be put on at some yet-to-be-determined time in the future.

We shall see. I’ve got a feeling this story isn’t over yet.

28 September 2006 @ 3:29PM >> In response to the Berlin opera story, a reader e-mails:

Hey Evan,

Isn’t it amazing how there is a global organized entity that is actually successful in dictating conversation to the rest of the world? Has that ever happened before? Seriously, when was the last time a single movement censored the rest of the world? The Nazis were not successful censoring the world, neither was the Soviet Union.

I find it astonishing that the entire world is currently censored by one entity. It’s like The Mob took over the world.

Regards,
Name Withheld For Fear of Retribution

28 September 2006 @ 3:08PM >> There have been a lot of press reports lately claiming that by waging a vigorous campaign against terrorists, we’re simply creating more terrorists. Leaving aside the fact that the alternative would seem to be surrender, a recent poll of Iraqis indicates that the press speculation isn’t based on reality:

Overall 94 percent [of Iraqis polled] have an unfavorable view of al Qaeda, with 82 percent expressing a very unfavorable view. Of all organizations and individuals assessed in this poll, it received the most negative ratings. The Shias and Kurds show similarly intense levels of opposition, with 95 percent and 93 percent respectively saying they have very unfavorable views. The Sunnis are also quite negative, but with less intensity. Seventy-seven percent express an unfavorable view, but only 38 percent are very unfavorable. Twenty-three percent express a favorable view (5% very).

Views of Osama bin Laden are only slightly less negative. Overall 93 percent have an unfavorable view, with 77 percent very unfavorable. Very unfavorable views are expressed by 87 percent of Kurds and 94 percent of Shias. Here again, the Sunnis are negative, but less unequivocally—71 percent have an unfavorable view (23% very), and 29 percent a favorable view (3% very).

If our military actions in the Middle East are creating more terrorists, you’d think the place you’d see this most is in Iraq. But I guess not.

27 September 2006 @ 8:13PM >> In the wake of the controversy that erupted over the Pope’s citation of a centuries-old quote, one thing that seems absent from all the reporting is the historical context of the quote. This short video from the folks at The People’s Cube fills in some of the blanks.

26 September 2006 @ 8:53AM >> Europeans willingly give up more of their right to free expression out of a fear of violent mobs:

Berlin’s Deutsche Oper has removed the provocative staging of a Mozart opera from its schedule for fear of enraging Muslims, the opera house said in a statement.

One of three opera houses in the German capital, it cancelled director Hans Neuenfels’s production of “Idomeneo”, a 1781 drama set in ancient Crete, because authorities warned it could present an “incalculable security risk”.

In the staging, which sparked audience protests during its premiere in December 2003, King Idomeneo presents the lopped-off heads of Poseidon, Jesus, Buddha and the Prophet Mohammed and displays them on four chairs.

Notice that the heads of Jesus and Buddha are also cut off. But for some reason, there’s no “fear of enraging” Christians or Buddhists.

25 September 2006 @ 8:21AM >> The National Organization for Women claims to be “the largest organization of feminist activists in the United States.” The organization’s goal is “to take action to bring about equality for all women” and to “end all forms of violence against women.”

So you’d think they might be concerned with the violent persecution of women that happens every day around the globe. Like the case of a woman in Iran who faces death by stoning after being convicted of adultery. Or the Pakistani woman in Italy who had her throat slit open for “refus[ing] to conform to an Islamic lifestyle.”

These days, the ladies at NOW can’t be bothered with all that. They’ve got far more pressing women’s issues to talk about, like the war in Iraq and the need to impeach President Bush.

It’s good to see that they’ve got their priorities straight.

24 September 2006 @ 5:45PM >> Pajamas Media has an interesting report on the number of embedded reporters in Iraq. There are none from The New York Times, the Washington Post or the Los Angeles Times. There aren’t any from CBS, NBC, ABC, CNN, PBS, MSNBC or Fox News.

In fact, there are only nine embedded reporters in Iraq, and four are from armed forces outlets, leaving a grand total of just five embedded reporters. Of those five, three are from relatively small outlets—The Charlotte Observer, Polish Radio, and the Italian media network RAI—leaving just two major media companies with embedded reporters: the BBC and the Associated Press.

It makes you wonder where much of the Iraq War reporting is coming from. In some cases, the answer is local stringers whose loyalties and biases are—to be charitable—unclear. It’s interesting that the media is willing to utilize reporters embedded with terrorists and insurgents, but seems less interested in having reporters accompany our own military.

23 September 2006 @ 7:33PM >> Charles Krauthammer on tolerance:

The pope makes a reference to a 14th-century Byzantine emperor’s remark about Islam imposing itself by the sword, and to protest this linking of Islam and violence:

• In the West Bank and Gaza, Muslims attack seven churches.
• In London, the ever-dependable radical Anjem Choudary tells demonstrators at Westminster Cathedral that the pope is now condemned to death.
• In Mogadishu, Somali religious leader Abubukar Hassan Malin calls on Muslims to “hunt down” the pope. The pope not being quite at hand, they do the next best thing: shoot dead, execution-style, an Italian nun who worked in a children’s hospital.

“How dare you say Islam is a violent religion? I’ll kill you for it” is not exactly the best way to go about refuting the charge. But of course, refuting is not the point here. The point is intimidation.

First Salman Rushdie. Then the false Newsweek report about Koran-flushing at Guantanamo Bay. Then the Danish cartoons. And now a line from a scholarly disquisition on rationalism and faith given in German at a German university by the pope.

And the intimidation succeeds: politicians bowing and scraping to the mob over the cartoons; Saturday’s craven New York Times editorial telling the pope to apologize; the plague of self-censorship about anything remotely controversial about Islam — this in a culture in which a half-naked pop star blithely stages a mock crucifixion as the highlight of her latest concert tour.

This double standard become obvious to the creators of South Park earlier this year:

“South Park” has been vilified as crude, disgusting and nihilistic, and the eagerness of Stone and Parker to impale every sacred cow they can reach is a major reason for its success. After all, in the fictional town of South Park, Colo. — home to third-graders Kenny, Kyle, Stan and the evil Cartman — everything is fair game. Even the Prophet Mohammed, who appeared as a superhero in a July 2001 episode called “The Super Best Friends.”

“People told us at the time, ‘You can’t really draw an image of Mohammed,’” Parker says. “And we were like, well, we can. We’re not Muslim, so it’s OK.”

In 2006, however, when Stone and Parker wanted to depict Mohammed in an episode, Comedy Central wouldn’t let them. After all, Muslims worldwide had rioted over insulting depictions of Mohammed in a newspaper in Denmark.

It seemed odd to the creators of “South Park,” who had been and were still allowed to depict Jesus in any number of profane ways. In fact, the episode in question, “Cartoon Wars,” shows a cartoon (supposedly created by al Qaeda) in which Jesus defecates on President Bush.

“That’s where we kind of agree with some of the people who’ve criticized our show,” Stone says. “Because it really is open season on Jesus. We can do whatever we want to Jesus, and we have. We’ve had him say bad words. We’ve had him shoot a gun. We’ve had him kill people. We can do whatever we want. But Mohammed, we couldn’t just show a simple image.”

During the part of the show where Mohammed was to be depicted — benignly, Stone and Parker say — the show ran a black screen that read: “Comedy Central has refused to broadcast an image of Mohammed on their network.”

Other networks took a similar course, refusing to air images of Mohammed — even when reporting on the Denmark cartoon riots — claiming they were refraining because they’re religiously tolerant, the South Park creators say.

“No you’re not,” Stone retorts. “You’re afraid of getting blown up. That’s what you’re afraid of. Comedy Central copped to that, you know: ‘We’re afraid of getting blown up.’”

Every time we signal that we’re willing to let extremists half a world away dictate what we say and do, we prove that threats and violence work.

Some label it “tolerance,” but the message we’re really sending is that we’ll tolerate taking orders from violent mobs in the hopes that kneeling down before them will make them more peaceful.

That’s not tolerance, that’s a societal suicide pact.

20 September 2006 @ 12:18AM >> This quote isn’t from a rioter in Syria, Iran or Saudi Arabia; it’s from a speaker at a “peaceful” demonstration in London:

Muslims take their religion very seriously and non-Muslims must appreciate that and must also understand that there may be serious consequences if you insult Islam and the prophet.

Whoever insults the message of Mohammed is going to be subject to capital punishment.

I think that warning needs to be understood by all people who want to insult Islam and want to insult the prophet of Islam.

Unless this mindset magically disappears from the face of the earth, it seems we have three options:

1. Fight it,
2. Surrender our freedoms and say only what the Jihadists allow, or
3. Die.

Which would you prefer?

20 September 2006 @ 12:16AM >> In a parallel universe, political correctness infects the Muslim world instead of the West. Hilarity ensues.

19 September 2006 @ 8:05PM >> Time and time again, we’re told that there were no connections between Saddam Hussein’s Iraq and al Qaeda, and that any such claims are merely Bush Administration fabrications. However, two years before President Bush took office, CNN reported:

Osama bin Laden, the Saudi millionaire accused by the United States of plotting bomb attacks on two U.S. embassies in Africa, has left Afghanistan, Afghan sources said Saturday.

Bin Laden’s whereabouts were not known, said the sources who declined to be identified.

[...]

Iraqi President Saddam Hussein has offered asylum to bin Laden, who openly supports Iraq against the Western powers.

Saddam offered asylum to Osama? And Osama openly supports Iraq? That can’t be right, at least not according to the official mantra that the establishment media has been repeating for the last five years.

So what explains this find? The only logical explanation is that President Bush traveled back in time and brainwashed the reporter, or that Karl Rove has been hacking into CNN’s computer system. Either way, it’s all part of the conspiracy!

(Hat tip: Gateway Pundit.)

18 September 2006 @ 8:32AM >> Roger Waters, the estranged member of Pink Floyd, is now touring the United States. Normally, that’s a show I’d go see; I’ve been to a number of Roger Waters and Pink Floyd concerts in the past.

However, this tour is one I’ll be skipping. Why?

Well, according to the Drudge Report, the left-wing Waters is injecting even more politics into his shows than usual. The infamous flying pig has now been painted with the words “Don’t be led to slaughter! Vote Democrat November 2nd.” (I wonder if the flying pig would be considered illegal advertising under McCain-Feingold.)

I don’t know why musicians think that audiences attend their shows for political advertising. I don’t know why singers assume that if I like their music, I also like their politics. I’m paying to be entertained, so why inject messages that have nothing to do with that entertainment in the show? Frankly, I think it’s a bit rude, like if you’d gone into a restaurant and the chef came out to harangue you on his views on Iraq in the middle of the main course.

Roger Waters, the guy who penned the classic Pink Floyd album Animals, should know better than to treat his audience like sheep. And as a citizen of the United Kingdom, perhaps he should take his opinions home and not meddle in the internal affairs of another country.

Well, Waters will not get my money this time. I’m sure I won’t be missing much. These days, all the good concerts can be easily downloaded anyway.

---

Update: Chris Vozeh writes:

Is that a recent picture? November 7 is election day this year, not November 2. 2004’s elections were held on the second... therefore that may be an old picture.

If it is a current picture, I don’t care who or how many people vote for the Dems on Thursday, Nov 2.

Thanks for catching that, Chris. You are right on the dates of Election Day 2004 versus 2006. Perhaps Roger Waters got the date wrong, or Matt Drudge got an old photo. Either way, I know I’m not alone in attending concerts for their musical and not political content.

16 September 2006 @ 9:31PM >> Glenn Reynolds has some advice for vendors of electronic media:

Get this straight content providers: Our computers belong to us. If we’re in the mood, we might let you sell us some stuff to run on them. But they don’t belong to you, and we’re not likely to surrender control over our own bought-and-paid-for hardware, which we often rely on to do our jobs and run our lives, simply in exchange for letting you sell us something. (Honestly, most of what you’re selling isn’t all that good anyway, and you’re lucky that people buy it at all. So don’t get greedy. And while click-through license agreements may make it legal, they won’t make you any more popular.)

16 September 2006 @ 7:53PM >> According to Rocco DiPippo of a blog called The Autonomist, the story I covered in “The Taliban’s Free Pass” on Thursday may not be accurate. DiPippo contacted an official at the U.S. Military’s Central Command who said, “Normally cemeteries and other religious places and spaces would be areas where we would try to avoid given their religious and cultural sensitivity, but there is no blanket prohibition, circumstances always vary.”

The CENTCOM official, Major Matthew McLaughlin, said that the sensitivity to sites like cemeteries “was not the driving force behind the decision not to engage this target — inappropriate to say any more on the rationale.”

It is understandable that the military would like to avoid attacks in sites that would be perceived as culturally inflammatory, and it makes sense to treat such sites with greater caution. But it would border on military malpractice to let high-value targets elude us because of that alone. Although it sounds like that may not have happened in this case, Major McLaughlin implies that the military’s default position is to stand down whenever the enemy occupies certain hallowed ground. I’m sure members of the Taliban and al Qaeda are aware of this, and I’m sure they take advantage of it.

I would hope that the rules of engagement allow such decisions to be made quickly enough that they could be acted upon before the opportunity slips away. How many layers in the chain of command need to sign off on a strike in this type of situation? How much time could that process take? As a civilian, I’d be curious to know.

Because my current impression is that we’re still holding back against an enemy that sees our restraint as weakness. And I’m not sure they’re wrong. Sensitivity is not necessarily a helpful trait in war.

15 September 2006 @ 3:18AM >> An uncle e-mailed me this story with the comment, “Maybe Brad and Angelina should move to Sudan.”

A Sudanese man has been forced to take a goat as his “wife”, after he was caught having sex with the animal.

The goat’s owner, Mr Alifi, said he surprised the man with his goat and took him to a council of elders.

[...]

“When I asked him: ‘What are you doing there?’, he fell off the back of the goat, so I captured and tied him up”.

Mr Alifi then called elders to decide how to deal with the case.

“They said I should not take him to the police, but rather let him pay a dowry for my goat because he used it as his wife,” Mr Alifi told the newspaper.

And how are man-and-goat today?

“We have given him the goat, and as far as we know they are still together,” Mr Alifi said.

14 September 2006 @ 1:15AM >> If you watched The Path to 9/11, you may be surprised to hear that this sort of thing is still happening:

Taliban terror leaders who had gathered for a funeral - and were secretly being watched by an eye-in-the-sky American drone - dodged assassination because U.S. rules of engagement bar attacks in cemeteries, according to a shocking report.

U.S. intelligence officers in Afghanistan are still fuming about the recent lost opportunity for an easy kill of Taliban honchos packed in tight formation for the burial, NBC News reported.

The unmanned airplane, circling undetected high overhead, fed a continuous satellite feed of the juicy target to officers on the ground.

“We were so excited. I came rushing in with the picture,” one U.S. Army officer told NBC.

But that excitement quickly turned to gut-wrenching frustration because the rules of engagement on the ground in Afghanistan blocked the U.S. from mounting a missile or bomb strike in a cemetery, according to the report.

[...]

Agonizingly, Army officers could do nothing but watch the pictures being fed back from the drone as the Taliban splintered into tiny groups - too small to effectively target with the drone - and headed back to their mountainside hideouts.

It’s another small sign that we’re still not 100% serious about fighting the war on terror.

---

Update: Major Matthew McLaughlin of U.S. Central Command disputes the accuracy of this report, saying that the location “was not the driving force behind the decision not to engage this target.”

14 September 2006 @ 12:58AM >> Over at Free Speech Free-for-all, you can vote in a pair of not-at-all-scientific online straw polls, one for the Democratic presidential nominee, and one for the Republican.

(If you’re not happy with the options in the poll, feel free to create your own poll.)

13 September 2006 @ 1:38AM >> In the London Telegraph, Anne Applebaum looks at Europe’s perception of the United States, and how it has changed—and stayed the same—since the days after the September 11th attacks:

Within a couple of days [after the attacks,] a Guardian columnist wrote of the “unabashed national egotism and arrogance that drives anti-Americanism among swaths of the world’s population”. A Daily Mail columnist denounced the “self-sought imperial role” of the United States, which he said had “made it enemies of every sort across the globe”.

That week’s edition of Question Time featured a sustained attack on Phil Lader, the former US ambassador to Britain - and a man who had lost colleagues in the World Trade Centre - who seemed near to tears as he was asked questions about the “millions and millions of people around the world despising the American nation”. At least some Britons, like many other Europeans, were already secretly or openly pleased by the 9/11 attacks.

And all of this was before Afghanistan, before Tony Blair was tainted by his friendship with George Bush, and before anyone knew the word “neo-con”, let alone felt the need to claim not to be one.

The dislike of America, the hatred for what it was believed to stand for - capitalism, globalisation, militarism, Zionism, Hollywood or McDonald’s, depending on your point of view - was well entrenched. To put it differently, the scorn now widely felt in Britain and across Europe for America’s “war on terrorism” actually preceded the “war on terrorism” itself. It was already there on September 12 and 13, right out in the open for everyone to see.

After some future terrorist attack, we’ll hear lots of hand-wringing from people who say that our aggressive foreign policy invited the attack—in effect, we deserved it. But just as Europe’s disdain for America predates our response to 9/11, the hatred of the Jihadis was forged long before we invaded Afghanistan or Iraq.

During the quarter century that preceded the September 11th attacks, U.S. foreign policy towards the Jihadists was quite passive. From President Carter’s helplessness as dozens of Americans were held hostage for 444 days by Islamic revolutionaries in Iran, through the tail-between-the-legs pullouts in Beirut (President Reagan) and Somalia (President Clinton), the default bi-partisan American response to Jihadist provocation was to ignore it or to turn and run. And on the rare occasion that we strayed from that norm, whatever military response we did launch tended to be quite feeble. During this time, Jihadist attacks only grow more frequent and more deadly. Our passivity invited more attacks from people who were trying to get our attention.

And now that the Jihadists got our attention, many in Europe seem to wish they hadn’t. (Or, more accurately, that we’d continue to ignore them.)

I’m afraid that Europe will discover in the coming years that this is not an option. Since 9/11, the American homeland has remained free from attack, but there have been bombs in London and Madrid, riots all over France, a murder over a documentary film, and mass violence over cartoons. These events all have one thing in common, but Europe refuses to see it.

If we do suffer another attack on American soil, it will not be because our foreign policy invited it, but because our military campaign has not yet defeated the enemy. But if Europe is attacked again, it will likely be because they have not yet learned the lesson that we did five years ago.

I think Europe will come closer to America’s point of view...eventually. But unfortunately, it probably won’t be until after the Jihadists get the attention of Europe the way they got ours.

12 September 2006 @ 2:39PM >> “Danny” writes:

From: danny danny@studioanto.com
Subject: dumb ass
Date: September 12, 2006 2:27:17 PM EDT
To: Evan Coyne Maloney

Why not travel the world and discover a bit about other cultures? That might do good to your humanity

Thanks for the suggestion Danny. However, there are certain places in the world that I’d rather avoid, because I don’t have a strong desire to have my head sawed off. Having my head sawed off might not be too good for my humanity.

12 September 2006 @ 12:12AM >> Not only did Saddam Hussein have CNN’s chief news executive covering for him, it now appears that Saddam had a spy inside the Associated Press who was supplying the Iraqi dictator with information on U.N. weapons inspection plans.

AP bills itself as “the backbone of the world’s information system serving thousands of daily newspaper, radio, television and online customers” and “is the largest and oldest news organization in the world, serving as a source of news, photos, graphics, audio and video for more than one billion people a day.”

An organization that large is vulnerable to infiltration, and a lone Iraqi spy inside AP is not necessarily a sign of a systemic problem. Still, it makes you wonder who else has infiltrated the world’s big media outlets, and whether they’re having any effect on coverage. (In the case of AP rival Reuters, we already know the answer.)

11 September 2006 @ 12:00AM >> Remember.

5 September 2006 >> On a remarkably clear morning five years ago, New York City came under attack. This video memorial, taken from footage shot by eyewitness David Vogler, shows New Yorkers waking up to that grim reality. Crystal Morning tells the story of September 11th, 2001 through fire and ambulance radio calls, the 911 call of a trapped World Trade Center worker, and the lens of local resident who saw an explosion while walking to work. More >>

1 September 2006 @ 1:53AM >> The Inverted Logic Award goes to Hammasa Kohistani, “[t]he first Muslim to be crowned Miss England”:

“Even moderate Muslims are turning to terrorism to prove themselves. They think they might as well support it because they are stereotyped anyway.”

Makes sense. No better way to disprove the stereotype than by blowing some people up.

Ms. Kohistani added that “there is this hostility” which comes “mainly from the Government.”

Someone should remind the beauty queen that last summer’s London bombings suggest that “this hostility” might be coming from somewhere besides “the Government.”

Thankfully, there are a number of Muslims far more sensible than Ms. Kohistani:

“This sentiment of denial, that sort of came as a fever to the Muslim community after 9-11, is fading away,” said Muqtedar Khan, a political scientist at the University of Delaware and author of “American Muslims.” “They realize that there are Muslims who use terrorism, and the community is beginning to stand up to this.”

Muslim leaders point to two stark examples of the new mind-set:

A Canadian-born Muslim man worked with police for months investigating a group of Islamic men and youths accused in June of plotting terrorist attacks in Ontario. Mubin Shaikh said he feared any violence would ultimately hurt Islam and Canadian Muslims.

In England, it’s been widely reported that a tip from a British Muslim helped lead investigators to uncover what they said was a plan by homegrown extremists to use liquid explosives to destroy U.S.-bound planes.

[...]

Salam al-Marayati, executive director of Muslim Public Affairs Council, an advocacy group based in Los Angeles, says working closely with authorities underscores that Muslims are not outsiders to be feared. It also gives Muslims a way to directly air their concerns about how they’re treated by the government.

“We’re not on opposite teams,” al-Marayati said. “We’re all trying to protect our country from another terrorist attack.”

In 2004, his group started the “National Anti-Terrorism Campaign,” urging Muslims to monitor their own communities, speak out more boldly against violence and work with law enforcement. Hundreds of U.S. mosques have signed on, al-Marayati said.

[...]

Imam Muhammad Musri, head of the Islamic Society of Central Florida, said he has tried to address this problem in the eight mosques he oversees in the Orlando area.

He regularly invites law enforcement officials to speak with local Muslims and encourages mosque members to come to him with any suspicions, even if they overhear something said in jest. Musri says he also speaks regularly with local FBI and police to establish a relationship in case a real threat emerges.

“Here in Central Florida, talking to most people, they are literally upset by the actions of Muslims—or so-called Muslims—overseas in Europe and the Middle East, because they say, ‘We wish they would come and see how we’re doing here,’” Musri said. “We know who the real enemy is—someone who might come from the outside and try to infiltrate us. Everybody is on the lookout.”