Category: General

By ABDUL SATTAR, Associated Press Writer

*

The boy with the knife looks barely 12. In a high-pitched voice, he denounces the bound, blindfolded man before him as an American spy. Then he hacks off the captive’s head to cries of “God is great!” and hoists it in triumph by the hair.

A video circulating in Pakistan records the grisly death of Ghulam Nabi, a Pakistani militant accused of betraying a top Taliban official who was killed in a December airstrike in Afghanistan.

* While our MSM (even FOX) is to squeamish to play those video’s  (WTF are they ‘protecting?’) the so-called ‘Arab world’ distributes these videos widely.Obviously, they know who the enemy is. Why don’t we?
An Associated Press reporter confirmed Nabi’s identity by visiting his family in Kili Faqiran, their remote village in southwestern Pakistan.

The video, which was obtained by AP Television News in the border city of Peshawar on Tuesday, appears authentic and is unprecedented in jihadist propaganda because of the youth of the executioner.

Captions mention Mullah Dadullah, the Taliban’s current top commander in southern Afghanistan, although he does not appear in the video. The soundtrack features songs praising Taliban supreme leader Mullah Omar and “Sheikh Osama” — an apparent reference to Osama bin Laden, who is suspected of hiding along the Afghan-Pakistan border.

The footage shows Nabi making what is described as a confession, being blindfolded with a checkered scarf.

“He is an American spy. Those who do this kind of thing will get this kind of fate,” says his baby-faced executioner, who is not identified.

A continuous 2 1/2-minute shot then shows the victim lying on his side on a patch of rubble-strewn ground. A man holds Nabi by his beard while the boy, wearing a camouflage military jacket and oversized white sneakers, cuts into the throat. Other men and boys call out “Allahu akbar!” — “God is great!” — as blood spurts from the wound.

The film, overlain with jihadi songs, then shows the boy hacking and slashing at the man’s neck until the head is severed.

A Pashto-language voiceover in the video identifies Nabi and his home village of Kili Faqiran in Baluchistan province, which lies about two hours’ drive from the Afghan border.

* Ghulam Sakhi, father of a militant Ghulam Nabi shows the video grab picture of his son distributed by executioners in the area, during an interview with The Associated Press at his home in a remote village Kili Faqiran in southwestern Pakistan, Thursday April 19, 2007.

A reporter went to the village, and Nabi’s distraught and angry father, Ghulam Sakhi, confirmed his son’s identity from a still picture that AP made from the footage. He said neighbors had told him the video is available at the village bazaar, but he had no wish to see it.

Sakhi said his son had been a loyal Taliban member who fought in Afghanistan and sheltered the hard-line Afghan group’s leaders in the family’s mud-walled compound.

He blames the Taliban and wants to avenge his son’s death.

“The Taliban are not mujahedeen. They are not fighting for the cause of Islam,” the 70-year-old said. “If I got my hands on them I would kill them and even tear their flesh with my own teeth.

Read it all…

by Fabrice Randoux

*

LUXEMBOURG (AFP)

* The European Union is the ultimate passive aggressive nanny state, and now they’ve made something a crime that they deliberately do not define in precise terms; it’s Orwell’s 1984, except Big Brother is your dull-eyed pedantic cousin: EU agrees to penalties for racism and xenophobia.

The European Union on Thursday made inciting racism and xenophobia crimes throughout its 27 member states in a landmark decision tempered by caveats to appease free speech concerns.

The new deal specifies one- to three-year prison terms be available for incitement to violence or hatred “against a group of persons or a member of such a group defined by reference to race, colour, religion, descent or national or ethnic origin”.

That could include the sending of “tracts, pictures or other material.”

The deal, reached by EU justice ministers in Luxembourg, display’s “Europe’s “common moral values”, EU Justice Commissioner Franco Frattini told reporters.

* Franco Frattini has long been a sucker for Muhammedan causes and is highly suspect in selling out Europe’s interests to the Muslim invaders. Read this to understand what this man is doing to us

* Franco Frattini, the man with the Orwellian title ‘EU’s Commissioner for Justice, Freedom and Security,-‘ has already banned the use of the phrase ‘Islamic terrorism’ to describe Islamic terrorism. ‘You cannot use the term “Islamic terrorism”,’ he insisted. ‘People who commit suicide attacks or criminal activities on behalf of religion, Islamic religion or other religion, they abuse the name of this religion.’

In an article from February 13, 2006 he still denied that such laws were in the making.

It comes after almost six years of wrangling and falls short of Germany’s ambitions of specifically outlawing Holocaust denial.

The text also notes that “member states may choose to punish only conduct which is either carried out in a manner likely to disturb public order or which is threatening, abusive or insulting.”

German Justice Minister Brigitte Zypries nonetheless hailed the decision as “an important political signal” following failures in 2003 and 2005 to reach such a deal.

Germany had wanted to outlaw the denial of the murder of six million Jews by the Nazis and their collaborators during World War II before its six-month term at the helm of the EU runs out at the end of June.

Holocaust denial was made a crime in Germany in 1985 and the use of Nazi insignia is forbidden.

Building on the most recent attempt, spearheaded by Luxembourg in 2005, the measure has consistently run up against the problems that it might pose for free speech.

To make the text acceptable to Britain, Ireland and the Scandinavian states — particularly concerned about curbs to their freedoms of expression — Holocaust denial will only qualify under the EU-wide rules if it is deemed likely to incite hatred.

It is covered in a clause that states that the penalties will also apply to “publicly, condoning, denying or grossly trivialising crimes of genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes,” as defined by the International Criminal Court and the post-World War II Nuremberg trials.

The wording could also apply to crimes against humanity perpetrated in Srebrenica, Rwanda and elsewhere.

The EU sentencing framework can of course be higher under national rules and Holocaust denial is already specifically targeted by laws in Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, Poland and Romania.

“Attempts to harmonise EU laws on hate crimes are both illiberal and nonsensical,” European Liberal Democrat Leader Graham Watson said in a statement summing up the British opposition.

“The proposed list risks opening the floodgates on a plethora of historical controversies — like the crimes of the Stalinist regime or the alleged Armenian genocide — whose inclusion could pose a grave threat to freedom of speech. The EU has no business legislating on history,” he added.

“The text is in a sense more symbolic and political than judicial,” said a French diplomat while stressing “the importance of having the EU 27 on the same platform against racism”.

Debate on the measure lasted several hours, largely due to the Baltic states wish to include Stalinist crimes in the text. That idea was rejected by the other EU members who argued that such crimes were not principally racist.

In a compromise move, the EU member states also adopted a declaration deploring all crimes committed by totalitarian regimes.

After the new rules are adopted, member states will have two years to comply with the decision.

The Baltic states — Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia — indicated that their parliament would first have to agree to the text.

*

* Orwell sends his regards:

In a twisted way, this ludicrous deal stems from a good impulse that itself stems from a huge, deserved sense of guilt: to combat Holocaust denial. But you can be absolutely certain that the first groups to take advantage of these new legal powers will be the highly aggressive Islamists—who are often the same people who deny the Holocaust, and at the same time wish for a new, improved one.

Virginia Tech: “Muslims cannot pray for the non-Muslim dead”

* The psyche of the Musulman:
Liberal Arab Website Reports: Debate on Virginia Tech Muslim Students’ Association Mailing List Concerning Permissibility of Praying for Mercy for Non-Muslim Victims

The liberal Arabic-language website Aafaq reports that a Muslim student set off a debate when she sent an email to the mailing list of the Muslim Students’ Association at Virginia Tech asking the students to pray that Allah have mercy on those killed and wounded in the shooting attack at the university.

According to Aafaq, the dean of student affairs at American International University, Abu Hamza Hijji, responded, writing that Allah the Most Merciful forbids praying for mercy for the non-Muslim dead, or even for the non-Muslim living, and that it is only permitted to pray that they be rightly guided. He added that what happened was a sad occurrence, but that does not give Muslims the right to transgress the laws of Allah the Most Merciful.

Aafaq reported that a student named Chris, a recent convert, did not agree, and wrote that he usually does not intervene in this kind of discussion, but that this time he had to say “no.” He added that his German teacher, who was wounded in the shooting, is a good man, and that he was praying that he would not die. He said that he would pray for him and for his family, whether they are Muslims or not, and would pray for all those who suffered from this calamity. He expressed the view that religion must bring people together, and not drive them apart, and that the brotherhood of humanity takes precedence over brotherhood of religion or of state.

According to Aafaq, Hijji answered Chris, saying that there is no problem with praying that non-Muslims be kept safe and not be killed, if there is hope that they might be guided [to the right path]; but one cannot pray for the non-Muslim dead, since there is no chance of their being guided.

More…

===================
Arab Reaction to Virginia Tech Massacre

From the Al Jazeera website.

It gave a pretty good account of what happened, but ommitted any mention of Liviu Librescu, the Israeli Holocaust survivor who gave his life saving his students. I thought that was terrible. They made sure everyone knew the killer was Korean. They even covered Bush’s remarks, but ignored his words about Librescu.”

Blogger Basharee Murtadd went looking for reactions on Arab web sites to the mass murders committed at Virginia Tech, and while it’s pretty clear that Seung Hui Cho was simply insane (and not on a personal jihad ), the jihadis are eager to claim him as one of their own: The Difference between Jews and Muslims.

And now, turning to our peace-loving Muslims at an Arabic Islamic forum, I translate some of their ‘condolences’:

Al-Jazeera reported 20 dead and 29 injured. Praise be to Allah.

* Actually 32 are dead

Praise be to Allah for these calamities hitting America. By the will of Allah, more of this [will happen], following their defeat in Iraq and Afghanistan.

O Allah, keep America busy with itself, and enamor its people against it.

And on this site, the massacre is being referred to as “The Great Ghazwa of Virginia”:

(Ghazwa means ‘raid’ in Arabic, referring to the battles Muhammad and his followers fought against the non-Muslims)

Translation: “The first picture of the South Korean Shaikh, Abu Mus’Ab Al-Virgini [the Virginian]” (an attempt to make him seem like Abu Mus’Ab Al-Zarqawi)

Read the whole blog post here.

Read also: Europe, Please Stop Moralizing 

It was of course, the “violent gun toting Americans” that helped save Europe from itself. Remind us never to do that again.

Via SPIEGEL:

After SPIEGEL published a summary of European press reactions to the tragic shootings at Virginia Tech, our in-boxes were flooded with hundreds of letters from Americans who were angered by editorials critical of America’s lax gun policies. Conservative blogs also stormed the barricades. Here’s a compilation of some of the mails.

A day after the massacre at Virginia Tech University, SPIEGEL ONLINE posted summaries of the first editorials from across Europe about the deadliest school shooting in history — the tragedy was still unfolding, the printer’s ink still wet. Of course, many of these op/ed pieces expressed sympathy and sadness for the families of the victims. But like the New York Times and other major American newspapers, many in the European media issued biting critiques of the lack of exhaustive federal gun controls in the United States. An editorial in one of Germany’s most conservative newspapers, Bild, argued that this has created a situation where it can be easier in some states to purchase a submachine gun than to get a driver’s license.

In many parts of Europe, where gun control laws are strict, no man better illustrates this American paradox than Charlton Heston, the actor and former head of the National Rifle Association, America’s pro-gun lobby. His outspoken views on guns have made him the posterboy of school shootings.

German cable news network n-tv was quick to flash the iconic image of Heston and his musket in its coverage of the tragedy. An editorial in the Stuttgarter Zeitung opines that the killer lived in “a society in which weapons are idolized as emblems of freedom and manliness … a country where the masses cheer when aging actor Charlton Heston raises a musket in his shaky hand and bellows that nobody will ever be able to take his weapon from him unless they ‘pry it from my dead, cold hands.’”

The French left-wing daily Liberation is even shriller in tone. “It is said that in France, everything ends with a song,” the paper’s editorialist writes, “but in the land of John Wayne, Charlton Heston and George Bush, every anger, every heartache, every fight between neighbors or dealers and every depression ends with a shootout. That’s why the students on the campuses die — because no one, starting with Hillary Clinton, thinks about doing anything about it.”

It didn’t take long before bloggers began attacking. Here’s a round-up in the political blogs:

Denis Boyles, who blogs for the influential conservative National Review, which helps set the agenda on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC, calls Monday’s shootings “an ideological windfall for the European left.” SPIEGEL, he adds, “has a round-up of kneejerk Euro-drivel, not including its own — most of it created by journalists who don’t know (or didn’t care) that the Virginia Tech campus had already been disarmed by gun control. … All in all, another day of deep embarrassment for the European media.”

Over at the arch-conservative John Birch Society, Alan Scholl blogs: “In the minds of leftists and formerly civilized Europe, the Virginia Tech shootings were perpetrated by Charlton Heston.” Whether in Germany or the United States, “gun control laws put law abiding citizens at the mercy of criminals. America’s Founding Fathers understood that each person has a fundamental, inalienable right to his or her life and that, as a consequence, each person has a right to defend his or her life against criminal depredations from any quarter. If these fundamental rights would have been respected by Virginia law, then perhaps yesterday’s violent rampage could have been prevented, or much lessened.”

“It’s very sad when countries decide to seize upon the events of a maniac to push their leftist agenda,” writes Doug Miller of the US. “The United States citizens are suffering from a horrific display of evil by someone we welcomed into this country with open arms. I saw none of my fellow country men gloating during the Russian schoolhouse massacre of 2004. We were saddened. We were respectful. To those who wish to dump on my country during this time of mourning, shame on you. You are heartless and thoughtless.”

“He was a madman and you, as Europeans, should well understand that there is no protection from a madman,” writes H. Pitts of the US. “To reduce this to an arrogant and patronizing diatribe against the well-considered provisions of the US Constitution serves only to demonstrate your lack of empathy for the victims. To exploit this misery as a platform for political posturing is nothing short of disgusting.”

“I’m amazed at the simplistic and smug attitude of European pundits who go so far as to lay the blame for Monday’s massacre at the feet of Charlton Heston,” writes Theresa Colbert of the US. “The assumption that Americans are gun lovers is far off the mark, as is the notion that this latest tragedy is somehow the result of Americans who are descendents of the pioneers who had to fight off the Indians or the British. Guns do not kill people, people kill people. Need I remind you of those who have been slaughtered by Islamic terrorists in bloody and brutal ways without using a gun? Face it, you do not understand American people or American life.”

“You can’t even wait one day to begin your political blather condemning, once again, America,” lambasts Marilyn Hannahs of Corralles, New Mexico. “When London and Madrid suffered, we Americans grieved along with those nations. When all of the world struggled to survive against dictators, who saved everyone? Oh, it was the Americans. How do we get repaid? By this constant drumbeat of hate.”

“Castrated by pathetic political-correctness and rotting from the inside from insidious immigration issues, you lay blame on one notable person while ignoring the magnifying effect your news-whoring creates,” writes Scott Smith of Boulder, Colorado. “Blaming Mr. Heston, who is fighting against dementia and unable to defend himself is what one would expect from a feckless and spineless creature: the Euro-press.”

“The real problem is that none of these students or teachers had a personal weapon,” writes Rick Geiger of Rochester, New York. “They could have killed this guy before 30 people were dead. Here in the US we value each and every individual human life and that is why having a right to self defense is part of our constitution and assumed to be a natural right.”

“More guns in the hands of law-abiding citizens would have helped prevent this slaughter,” writes Charles Edwards. “This is exactly what happens when there is gun control. Don’t think that we the people aren’t on to this gun grabbing, Second Amendment-opposing propaganda. We are, and we will not let you spin this tragedy to the benefit of your wicked agenda.”

“Accusing Charlton Heston of being responsible for this atrocity is like blaming Pope Benedict of being responsible for the Holocaust,” writes Dave Noll of the US. “Get your act together — and stay out of American affairs. We are never going to give up our rights under the Second Amendment and we don’t need any influence from the liberal left-wing and new world order activists from Europe.”

“The Constitution of the United States,” writes Mark Neidig II, “does protect and allow for the formation of militias and the private ownership of arms. This is not only to protect against foreign invasion, but also gross infringement of personal and civil liberties by our own government. Europe is all too familiar with what a government’s intent is when it confiscates private arms from its citizenry. Hitler and Stalin all confiscated arms prior to confiscating all personal and civil liberties.”

“The knee-jerk response of the left-wing European press to the shootings was perfectly predictable,” writes William Heubaum. “Don’t blame the madman who committed the crime, instead blame American citizens’ constitutional freedom to own firearms that is unavailable to the ’subjects’ of foreign governments. Yes, America has more individual freedoms than perhaps any other country, with more opportunities for the abuse of those freedoms. That’s the price we pay for our liberties.”

“I am a pro-gun American who works for a university,” writes Carl Black. “I am of the opinion that if a gun toting, law abiding citizen had been around, this individual would not have killed all these people because he would have been shot earlier in his rampage.”

“Those Europeans are so evolved,” writes John Wolfington of Philadelphia. “Why should we listen to people who joyously embraced totalitarianism and waged two world wars? After all that, there are still people in Europe who, to this day, cannot summon up the testicular fortitude necessary to effectively intervene and stop genocide in Bosnia in their own backyard. History has shown us quite clearly — and so do the current events in Darfur — that a disarmed populace results in numbers of death orders of magnitude greater than a nut with a couple of handguns. Europeans need to get a grip on reality.”

“It is unfortunate that the reporting from Europe always seeks to blame the US and its policies for the acts of individuals and always ends the blame before Europe can be implicated,” writes Jeff Patterson. “The primary gun used in this situation was a Glock from Austria. If I were to apply the European rule set, then Europe is to blame for this shooting. Of course this is not correct. This individual would simply have used another manufacturer’s product. We, as a nation, have to live and deal with what happened in Virginia and we will. But it is unfortunate that Europe uses a tragedy like this one to once again make the point that you think our president is incompetent and that we are a bunch of gun-toting thugs.”

“As an NRA member for approximately 30 years, I believe extremely violent movies and video games are a much more likely cause of gun violence than is Charlton Heston,” writes Janet Fuls of Cottonwood, California. “Guns have been easily available for 200 years in this country, yet the gun violence on the streets and in schools is a relatively new phenomenon. I’ve always wondered why the gun is blamed and not the perpetrator.”

“I wish to let your readers know that the authors of these articles have little understanding of the facts about guns, gun control and the NRA in the US,” writes Bob Hampton of Little Rock, Arkansas. “The 2nd Amendment is not an anachronism of history, nor an inconvenience … it is second in importance only to the right of free speech (the 1st Amendment). Unlike Europeans, we Americans subscribe to the belief that personal rights and responsibilities are held by the individual, not by a group. And the NRA is not a nefarious group of misfits who seek to put guns in the hands of criminals — they are an organization of individual members who want to keep the Democratic Party from transforming our country into the European model of gun ownership. From our point of view, the European gun laws represent a threat to individualism and liberty.”

The Religion of Throat Cutters

More from this story: Three Christians murdered in attack on Turkish Bible publisher

From CNN:

MALATYA, Turkey (AP) — Police detained five more people Thursday in connection with an attack on a Christian publishing house that killed three employees, doubling the number of suspects in custody, a Turkish official said.

One group of suspects detained in the slayings Wednesday told investigators they carried out the killings to protect Islam, a Turkish newspaper reported.

The attack added to concerns in Europe about whether this predominantly Muslim country — which is bidding for EU membership — can protect its religious minorities. It also underlined concerns about rising Turkish nationalism and hostility toward non-Muslims.

“We didn’t do this for ourselves, but for our religion,” Hurriyet newspaper quoted a suspect as saying. “Our religion is being destroyed. Let this be a lesson to enemies of our religion.”

* Actually far from it. The Religion of Peace destroys everything in its wake, but accuses others of doing that. Its called ‘projection’

The paper did not name the suspect. Local media said the suspects were students, and that the residence where they were staying belongs to an Islamic foundation.

On Wednesday, police detained four youths, aged 19-20, as well as a fifth who underwent surgery for head injuries after he apparently tried to escape by jumping from a window at the Zirve publishing house in the central city of Malatya.

Malatya Governor Halil Ibrahim Dasoz said another five suspects, detained Thursday, were of the same age as those taken into custody on the day of the attack. He did not say whether the group detained on Thursday had been at the scene of the attack, saying only that they had been picked up at “various locations.”

The three victims — a German and two Turkish citizens — were found with their hands and legs bound and their throats slit at the publishing house. Police went to the scene after receiving calls about a fight, Milliyet newspaper reported. The five suspects detained Wednesday had been carrying copies of a letter that read: “We five are brothers. We are going to our deaths. We may not return,” according to the state-run Anatolia news agency.

Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul said the attack had hurt his country’s image abroad, and was aimed at “Turkey’s peace, Turkey’s tradition of tolerance and Turkey’s stability.”

Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan described the attack as “savagery.”

The German and one of the Turkish victims were found dead, and the third victim died in a hospital, Dasoz said.

The German man had been living in Malatya since 2003. Anatolia identified him as 46-year-old Tilman Ekkehart Geske. It was the latest in a string of attacks on Turkey’s Christian community — which comprises less than 1 percent of the 70-million population.

In February 2006, a Turkish teenager shot a Catholic priest dead as he prayed in his church, and two other Catholic priests were attacked later that year. A November visit by Pope Benedict XVI was greeted by several peaceful protests.

Earlier this year, a suspected nationalist killed Armenian Christian editor Hrant Dink. Authorities had vowed to deal with extremist attacks after Dink’s murder, but Wednesday’s assault showed the violence was not slowing down.

German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier condemned the attack “in the strongest terms,” and said he expected Turkish authorities would “do everything to clear up this crime completely and bring those responsible to justice.”

German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrat Party — which opposes Turkey’s bid to join the EU — said the attacks showed the country’s shortcomings in protecting religious freedoms.

“The Turkish state is still far from the freedom of religion that marks Europe,” the party’s general secretary, Ronald Pofalla, said in a statement.

Turkey began EU membership negotiations in October 2005 but talks have stalled over Turkey’s refusal to formally recognize EU-member Cyprus. The country is under intense pressure to improve human rights and to expand religious freedoms and free speech as part of its membership bid. A group of 150 lit candles and unfolded a banner that read “We are all Christians” in downtown Istanbul to protest the attack and show solidarity with the Christian community.

But there was far less public outcry than with Dink’s murder, which was followed by widespread protests and condemnations. More than 100,000 people marched at Dink’s funeral. Malatya is known as a hotbed of nationalists, and is also the hometown of Mehmet Ali Agca, who shot Pope John Paul II in 1981.

The Zirve publishing house has been the site of previous protests by nationalists accusing it of proselytizing, Dogan news agency reported. Zirve’s general manager said his employees had recently been threatened.

*

Update:

* Turkish Christians Tortured Before Murder
The three victims murdered at a Christian publishing house in Turkey were apparently tortured for hours before being slaughtered: Slain evangelists were tortured, says Turkish doctor.

Real torture. Not Andrew Sullivan-style torture.

MALATYA, Turkey — Three Protestants murdered at a Christian publishing house in Malatya, Turkey, were tortured for three hours before their assailants slit their throats, a press report said Friday, quoting one of the doctors involved in the grisly case.

Dr. Murat Ugras, a spokesman for the Turgut Ozal Medical center, told the daily Hurriyet of hospital surgeons’ fruitless efforts to save Ugur Yuksel, one of the three victims of the massacre at the Zirve (summit) publishing house, which distributed Christian literature.

“He had scores of knife cuts on his thighs, his testicles, his rectum, and his back,” Ugras said. “His fingers were sliced to the bone.

”It is obvious that these wounds had been inflicted to torture him,” he said.

* And rightly so. I heard him on FOX and he really made his point. Passionately making sense, but will it penetrate the thick skulls of the politically correct wankers?

A Culture of Passivity
“Protecting” our “children” at Virginia Tech.

By Mark Steyn

I haven’t weighed in yet on Virginia Tech — mainly because, in a saner world, it would not be the kind of incident one needed to have a partisan opinion on. But I was giving a couple of speeches in Minnesota yesterday and I was asked about it and found myself more and more disturbed by the tone of the coverage. I’m not sure I’m ready to go the full Derb but I think he’s closer to the reality of the situation than most. On Monday night, Geraldo was all over Fox News saying we have to accept that, in this horrible world we live in, our “children” need to be “protected.”

Point one: They’re not “children.” The students at Virginia Tech were grown women and — if you’ll forgive the expression — men. They would be regarded as adults by any other society in the history of our planet. Granted, we live in a selectively infantilized culture where twentysomethings are “children” if they’re serving in the Third Infantry Division in Ramadi but grown-ups making rational choices if they drop to the broadloom in President Clinton’s Oval Office. Nonetheless, it’s deeply damaging to portray fit fully formed adults as children who need to be protected. We should be raising them to understand that there will be moments in life when you need to protect yourself — and, in a “horrible” world, there may come moments when you have to choose between protecting yourself or others. It is a poor reflection on us that, in those first critical seconds where one has to make a decision, only an elderly Holocaust survivor, Professor Librescu, understood instinctively the obligation to act.

Point two: The cost of a “protected” society of eternal “children” is too high. Every December 6th, my own unmanned Dominion lowers its flags to half-mast and tries to saddle Canadian manhood in general with the blame for the “Montreal massacre,” the 14 female students of the Ecole Polytechnique murdered by Marc Lepine (born Gamil Gharbi, the son of an Algerian Muslim wife-beater, though you’d never know that from the press coverage). As I wrote up north a few years ago:

Yet the defining image of contemporary Canadian maleness is not M Lepine/Gharbi but the professors and the men in that classroom, who, ordered to leave by the lone gunman, meekly did so, and abandoned their female classmates to their fate — an act of abdication that would have been unthinkable in almost any other culture throughout human history. The “men” stood outside in the corridor and, even as they heard the first shots, they did nothing. And, when it was over and Gharbi walked out of the room and past them, they still did nothing. Whatever its other defects, Canadian manhood does not suffer from an excess of testosterone.

I have always believed America is different. Certainly on September 11th we understood. The only good news of the day came from the passengers who didn’t meekly follow the obsolescent 1970s hijack procedures but who used their wits and acted as free-born individuals. And a few months later as Richard Reid bent down and tried to light his shoe in that critical split-second even the French guys leapt up and pounded the bejasus out of him.

We do our children a disservice to raise them to entrust all to officialdom’s security blanket. Geraldo-like “protection” is a delusion: when something goes awry — whether on a September morning flight out of Logan or on a peaceful college campus — the state won’t be there to protect you. You’ll be the fellow on the scene who has to make the decision. As my distinguished compatriot Kathy Shaidle says:

When we say “we don’t know what we’d do under the same circumstances”, we make cowardice the default position.

I’d prefer to say that the default position is a terrible enervating passivity. Murderous misfit loners are mercifully rare. But this awful corrosive passivity is far more pervasive, and, unlike the psycho killer, is an existential threat to a functioning society.

— Mark Steyn, a National Review columnist, is author of America Alone.

* No, his name is not Gavin King 

In a horrible incident in Mississauga, Ontario, a journalist for a Canadian-Pakistani paper was savagely beaten by two Muslim men who demanded that he “stop writing against Islam.”

CHICAGO — A journalist for the Mississauga, Ont.-based newspaper The Pakistan Post was assaulted by two men, one armed with a cricket bat, who warned him to stop “writing against Islam” and a Pakistan-based religious organization, the Canadian Journalists for Free Expression (CJFE) reported Thursday.

Journalist Jawaad Faizi was attacked on the evening of April 17 while sitting in his car outside the home of the newspaper’s editor, Amir Arain. The two men smashed the car windows, and repeatedly hit Faizi. They fled when they saw him call 911 on his cell phone.

During the attack, Faizi said, the men told him to stop writing critically of the religious organization Idara Minhaj-ul-Quran and its leader, Cleric Allama Tahir-Ul-Qadri. Allama Tahir-Ul-Qadri is a frequent visitor to Canada, CJFE said.

By cravenly surrendering to Islamist demands over the Danish Mohammed cartoons, mainstream media set the stage for incidents like this. Islamists know that threats and violence will achieve their goals, and that the media won’t stand up for their own principles.

There will be more.

UPDATE at 4/19/07

By the way, this article shows us what it takes for trade journal Editor & Publisher to use the words “Islamic Fanatics” — one of their own has to be the victim.

The headline: “Islamic Fanatics Beat Journo in Canada.” with thanks to LGF

* Well, if it is the  “LAW”  it must be alright then, no?

“Do we really believe in a culture of death? Absolutely not. We believe in the culture of martyrdom. Martyrdom is valuable, sacred, respectable, and great, not something that can be used as an accusation. It is an honor for us to be accused of believing in the culture of martyrdom.

Deputy Secretary-General of Hizbullah, Sheik Naim Qassem: We Received Jurisprudent Permission to Carry Out “Martyrdom” Operations and to Fire Misilles at Israeli Civilians from Iran MEMRI Transcript here

Naim Qassem: As for the issue of the culture of death, the culture of martyrdom, the culture of life – with all its different names… It is no secret that the materialistic West, and the atheists in general, and all those who see that the power of Islam is on the rise, and that it is gaining influence – and especially with regard to the philosophy of martyrdom-seeking… They all take a negative position and exert pressure, in order to make the believers abandon the culture of martyrdom. What is the reason? They seek (the pleasures of) this world and compete in this world. They know that if we competed with them according to the rules of this world, they would overcome us, because they are more materialistic than us. Therefore, by materialistic criteria, they would be victorious. But if they compete with us on the issue of faith, we will overcome them, because the competitive power of faith is greater, stronger, and more influential.

So they challenger us, or provoke us, by saying that we have a culture of death. They call martyrdom “death,” in order to make us renounce martyrdom. If we renounce martyrdom, we will only have the strength of our weapons and our numbers, and then they will be able to overcome us. The enemies will be able to overcome us.

[…]

“Hizbullah, when it comes to matters of jurisprudence pertaining to its general direction, as well as to its jihad direction, based itself on the decisions of the Jurisprudent. It is the Jurisprudent who permits, and it is the Jurisprudent who forbids. When the resistance of Hizbullah was launched in 1982, it was based on the jurisprudent position and decision of Imam Khomeini, who deemed fighting Israel to be an obligation, and therefore we adhered to this opinion. How Israel should be fought, what equipment you should prepare, when you should or shouldn’t attack – these questions are guided by principles in Islamic religious law, and you can act in this direction, according to your abilities. Therefore, we covered our jihad position with regard to fighting Israel with the decision of the Jurisprudent. “With regard to all the other details – whenever we need jurisprudent clarifications regarding what is permitted and what is forbidden on the jihad front, we ask, receive general answers, and implement then. Even with regard to martyrdom operations – a person cannot kill himself unless he has jurisprudent permission.

…and we are all guilty of accusing innocent Muslims of being mass-murderers, right? Right?

No further comment. 

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IRANIAN COURT AGREES WITH CHO SEUNG HUI

Killers are everything but original. If the pictures sent by were not reminiscent enough of Islamist vigilantes, his argumentation cannot be more identical – his college classmates and teachers were not moral enough to live and therefore he had a right to kill them:

You had everything you wanted. Your Mercedes wasn’t enough, you brats. Your golden necklaces weren’t enough, you snobs. Your trust fund wasn’t enough. Your vodka and Cognac weren’t enough. All your debaucheries weren’t enough. Those weren’t enough to fulfill your hedonistic needs. You had everything

The Iranian supreme court could not agree more. It has just reaffirmed that according to their interpretation of Muslim law, individuals have the right to decide that their fellow citizens are not moral enough to live and proceed to execute them:

The Iranian Supreme Court has overturned the murder convictions of six members of a prestigious state militia who killed five people they considered “morally corrupt.” . . .

The ruling stems from a case in 2002 in Kerman that began after the accused watched a tape by a senior cleric who ruled that Muslims could kill a morally corrupt person if the law failed to confront that person.

Some 17 people were killed in gruesome ways after that viewing, but only five deaths were linked to this group. The six accused, all in their early 20s, explained to the court that they had taken their victims outside the city after they had identified them. Then they stoned them to death or drowned them in a pond by sitting on their chests.

In other words, Iran would be acting virtuously if it used its nukes to destroy any country (not only Israel) it considers too immoral to survive. Oh, yes, the IAEA just informed us that Iran produces nuclear fuel in underground facility.

Pamela from Atlas Shrugs has more…