Osama has a new video in which he accuses coalition forces of deliberately killing women and children (He’d never do that!), but notes that the Danish cartoons were much worse.

Rusty Shackleford has the 5:05 video at the bottom of his article.

Ezra Levant, publisher of Calgary’s Western Standard, two years ago reprinted the Danish Mohammed cartoons.

Yesterday, as the National Post reports, he was hailed before the Alberta Human Rights and Citizenship Commission to answer a complaint filed by the head of the Islamic Supreme Council of Canada.

Levant has produced several video statements defending Candanian free speech, which are linked by LGF.

At least 25 of the 200 newspapers carrying Berkeley Breathed’s comic strip Opus, including the Washington Post, the comic strip’s own syndicator (!), refused to carry the last two weekly episodes.

Editor&Publisher reports that the Post’s Sales Manager explained that “some client papers hesitated to run a sex joke and others won’t publish any Muslim-related humor.”

But, as the Chicago Tribune makes clear, it doesn’t seem likely that mere mild sexual innuendo caused panicky editors at 25 newspapers to shun the last two episodes.

Some newspaper editors think cartoonist Berkeley Breathed might have crossed a line when he incorporated sexual innuendo into an “Opus” comic strip about a character’s conversion to radical Islam. But it’s not the first strip by the artist to poke fun at religion.

The cartoon ran in the Tribune, but not in The Washington Post, the strip’s home newspaper, or in a couple dozen other papers that pick up “Opus.”

Editors at the Washington Post reportedly showed the strips to Muslim employees, who disapproved of the depiction of the Lola Granola character dressed in traditional Muslim garb, declaring conservative Islamic views and making a sexual innuendo.

But the same care apparently was not taken with any of the previous irreverent cartoons that referenced Lola’s spiritual quest, which included introducing the Amish to nude yoga. The punch line of an Aug. 19 “Opus” poked fun at the late Rev. Jerry Falwell.

The Weekly Standard wonders:

Why would editors have felt constrained to solicit the views of Muslim staffers?

Were all the Baptists in the Post newsroom consulted about the Jerry Falwell joke? Is “Doonesbury” shown in advance to all the Republicans in the Post newsroom?

6:32 MSNBC video

Islamic-themed comic strips:

26 Aug 07

2 Sep 07

Jerry Falwell-themed comic strip:

19 Aug 07

The same Washington Post which was not afraid to publish leaks disclosing secret National Security operations in time of war behaves like this over… cartoons!

Mohammed Overcome by the Fundamentalists
(Balloon:) “It’s a Drag Being Loved By Idiots”

Reporters Without Borders announced

a Paris criminal court’s decision today to clear Philippe Val, the editor of the French satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo, of “publicly abusing a group of people because of their religion” by publishing cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed a year ago. The case was brought by the Paris Grand Mosque, the Union of Islamic Organisations of France (UOIF) and the World Islamic League…

France22 March 2007

Charlie Hebdo editor’s acquittal in Mohammed cartoon case hailed as positive for French society

Reporters Without Borders hailed a Paris criminal court’s decision today to clear Philippe Val, the editor of the French satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo, of “publicly abusing a group of people because of their religion” by publishing cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed a year ago. The case was brought by the Paris Grand Mosque, the Union of Islamic Organisations of France (UOIF) and the World Islamic League.

“The court’s verdict accords with the French republic’s values and is good for French society as a whole,” the press freedom organisation said. “We hail the judges’ finding that the limits of free expression were not exceeded in this case. This ruling is a victory for press freedom and in no way is a defeat for a community. We hope it will set a judicial precedent.”

The UOIF announced that it would appeal, but the Paris Grand Mosque said it would not.

The outcome of this key trial for the defence of press freedom follows a similar decision by Danish judges acquitting the editors of the Danish daily Jyllands-Posten, the first newspaper to publish controversial cartoons of Mohammed.

In the French case, the three plaintiffs had demanded 30,000 euros in damages from Charlie Hebdo, while the French public prosecutor’s office had recommended acquittal. Val had additionally faced a possible sentence of six months in prison and a fine of 22,500 euros. As he left the court today, he expressed his satisfaction and confidence in the French judicial system, commenting: “We have been vindicated by the court.”

Val had received strong backing not only from French journalists but also many politicians, including UDF presidential candidate François Bayrou and French Socialist Party leader François Hollande, who voiced their support for the weekly during the two-day trial on 7 and 8 February. Interior minister Nicolas Sarkozy, the UMP presidential candidate, had also indicated his support, commenting that he preferred “an excess of cartoons to a lack of cartoons.”

The lawsuit concerned three of the six Mohammed cartoons which the weekly published on 8 February 2006. Two of the three had appeared in Jyllands-Posten in 2005. One of them showed Mohammed wearing a turban in the form of a bomb about to explode. The other showed him saying: “Stop, stop, we have run out of virgins.” The third, which was on the cover, was by French cartoonist Jean “Cabu” Cabut. It showed Mohammed with his head in his hands saying: “It is hard to be loved by idiots.”

Previous posting

“Charlie Hebdo Must Be Veiled!”

Charlie Hebdo, the French satirical weekly which was the only publication in France to reprint the Danish Mohammed cartoons, is appearing today before the Correctional Tribunal of Paris facing accusations by Islamic Organisations of France and the Grand Mosque of Paris that reprinting the cartoons was a violation of French laws prohibiting politically incorrect expression.

AP:

Charlie-Hebdo and the publication’s director, Philippe Val, are charged with “publicly slandering a group of people because of their religion.” The charge carries a possible six-month prison sentence and a fine of up to $28,530.

Guardian

New Straits Times

Al Jazeera reports:

In an act of solidarity with Charlie Hebdo, French newspaper Libération printed the contested cartoons once more on Wednesday.

“It is not words which wound, or pictures that kill. It is bombs,” the daily said, calling the trial “idiotic”.

Never Yet Melted 8 Feb 2006

Henryk M. Broder has some choice comments on the contemporary European response to militant Islam, particularly in the case of the Danish cartoon crisis in which Europrean embassies were burned by Islamic mobs.

In 1972, more than three decades ago, Danish lawyer and part-time politician Mogens Glistrup had an idea that brought him instant fame. To save taxes, he proposed that the Danish army be disbanded and an answering machine be set up in the defense ministry that would play the following message: “We capitulate!” Not only would it save money, Glistrup argued, but it would also save lives in an emergency. On the strength of this “program,” Glistrup’s Progress Party managed to become the second-most powerful political party in the Danish parliament in the 1973 elections.

Glistrup had the right idea, but he was a number of years premature. Now would be the right time to set up his answering machine.

Read the whole thing.

An anti-Islamic outrage video.

Hat tip to Pim’s Ghost.

The G2 Bulletin, a subscription Intelligence newsletter, is quoted in World Net Daily as reporting that:

A dozen young terrorists have departed Afghanistan, bound first for Iran and then Europe, where their mission will be to hunt down the Danish cartoonists responsible for drawing anti-Muhammad sketches…

The report was passed on by Hamid Mir, the Pakistani journalist who has interviewed al-Qaida leaders Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri and who just visited the no-man’s land along the border of Afghanistan and Pakistan.

While there, he was told by Taliban sources in south Waziristan that 12 young men — nine Afghans and three Pakistanis — are on their way to Europe to kill the Danish cartoonists. While some carry Afghan passports and others carry Iranian passports, all will travel through Iran on their way to Europe, he reports.

All 12 have recorded the video messages that will be aired publicly if they hit their targets.

What will Europe do? I suppose they could refuse entry to, or simply intern, all persons bearing Afghani or Iranian passports. It looks like the the twelve Danish artists who drew the generally rather bland Mohammed cartoons will wind up living anonymously, under police security, like Salman Rushdie for years.

Hackers operating from Saudi Arabia aiming at shutting down Aaron’s CC blog today successfully knocked out one of the servers at Hostings Matters shutting down temporarily a number of prominent blogs, including:

Instapundit
Power Line
Captain’s Quarters
SondraK
Pundit Guy
Chuck Simmins
Small Dead Animals
Radioblogger
Hugh Hewitt
IMAO
Mountaineer Musings
Say Uncle
Counterterrorism Blog
Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler
Castle Arggh!
She Who Will Be Obeyed
Michael Totten
Ticklish Ears
Samizdata
Theodore’s World
Something……And Half of Something
Big Lizards

What provoked all this was a posting on Aaron’s CC cached on Google) responding to some earlier Islamic hacking attacks, derogating the civilization of the Islamic Golden Age, and asserting:

the Muslim world’s contributions to civilization, were entirely derivative, bereft of originality, applying principles derived by Westerners. While script kiddies might have taken down my site earlier this month, they’re no match in the long run against motivation, resources and creativity. Hell, let’s face it, by any quantitative measure, Israel invents more in a month to benefit mankind than Arabs do in a century. OK, that was too generous… in half a milennium.

Stories:

LGF

Michelle Malkin

UPDATE

Also temporarily disabled were:

Big Lizards
Lone Star Times
The Strata-Sphere
Blogs For Bush

I had no idea that so many blogs, some with large readerships, some with small, all used the same hosting service. There is a real vulnerability here.

The sex industry, which is legal in Germany, is anticipating a bonanza of lonely customers from abroad, travelling to attend the World Cup soccer tournament taking place June 9 to July 9. So the Pascha Brothel in Cologne, which boasts of being the largest bordello in Europe and the only business of its kind to offer a money-back guarantee to dissatisfied customers, wanting to welcome customers from all 32 participating countries, placed a 9-story tall advertising poster on its high-rise building, featuring a smiling blonde removing her bikini, above the flags of all 32 countries, captioned with a paraphrased version of the official motto: “The World as a Guest Among Girlfriends.”

Well, the sons of the Prophet were not amused. The BBC reports that Brothel-owner Armid Lobscheid told the Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger newspaper that Muslim groups accused the brothel of insulting Islam:

He said they had accused the brothel of insulting Islam by using the flags.

First there were telephone threats of violence, then about 30 hooded protesters armed with knives and sticks turned up outside Pascha on Friday, the Koelner Stadt-Anzeiger newspaper reported.

“The situation was explosive,” Mr Lobscheid told the paper.

“Some of the people compared our ad to the Danish Mohammed cartoons,” he said, referring to cartoons which sparked violent protests in several Muslim countries in February.

German brothel-keepers are no more courageous on the average than the management of Borders, of course, so the flags of first Saudi Arabia and later Iran were obligingly blacked out.

Dr. Prof. Matthias Storme Y (M.A.) ’82,offers very nice example of earlier European treatment of Mohammed. The Church of Our Dear Lady in Dendermonde, Flanders (Belgium) features a late 17th century pulpit, sculpted in wood by Mattheus van Beveren, upheld by angels who are treading underfoot the false prophet Mohammed, who is leaning on the Al-Koran.

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Hat tip to Michelle Malkin.

John Spraggins of the Nashville Scene, his journalistic dagger removed from Bill Hobbs’ back, cleaned, and carefully replaced in the drawer, strokes his chin, marvels at the fuss bloggers made over the whole thing, subtly reminds his readers that Hobbs deserved career assassination for publishing that cartoon (karma, don’t you know?), and does a quick patch job on his own karma (referring to Bill Hobbs’s stiff-upper-lip “I’m going to be fine” post-resignation posting) and assuring himself that Hobbs “landed on his feet.”

Certainly, the whole affair raises issues worth debating. Is an ersatz journalist with mainstream media credentials a fair target? What if he’s prominent in some political circles and, by day, a paid representative of a local university? Can he be fired for his private statements? If an anti-Muslim cartoon is drawn in the blogospheric forest and few people read it, does it still offend? Can an alt-media journalist on his way to work for a centrist politician point out conservative Muslim-bashing when he sees it? And, most importantly, isn’t karma a bitch? In blog comment threads, these questions were dealt with in approximately inverse proportion to their importance. So nothing’s been settled, and lots of names were called along the way.

But over the past week, the Scene has learned a few lessons, and like Hobbs, we’ll paint with a broad, provocative brush here. First, bloggers want media attention until they get it. Second, many of them are far more reactive than the angry Muslims we feared would storm our offices after we took Bill’s challenge and published a hateful Mohammed caricature in our newspaper. Third, pissing off bloggers is great for the Scene’s web traffic. And fourth, you can cobble together enough of their rants, under names real and assumed, to form a decently entertaining political notes column. Read to the end, and you’ll even learn that Bill’s landed on his feet.

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Hat tip to Michael Silence and Glenn Reynolds.

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Original story.