Michelle Malkin posted a two minute video back in February on YouTube, titled First, They Came, criticizing Islamic violence and intolerance. On September 28th, she received notice that her video was being removed on the basis of an “Inappropriate Content” Terms of Use violation.

YouTube has not been enforcing TOS restrictions against this video of a terrorist sniper shooting a US soldier. Or this Al Qaeda propaganda video.

Michelle Malkin has responded to YouTube’s enforcement of sharia with a video addressed to YouTube management. She’s right.

The Mail reports that the peculiar disease endemic these days to much of Europe, producing enervated victims suffering from a hazardous limpness of the spine, combined with severely diminished testosterone levels, has been found infecting local officials in rural Spain.

Spanish villages are toning down traditional fiestas, in which dummies representing the Prophet Mohammed are blown up, for fear of offending Muslims.

One eastern Spanish village, Bocairent, decided to abandon the custom of packing the head of a dummy representing Mohammed with fireworks after seeing the angry Muslim response to a Danish newspaper’s publication last year of cartoons of him.

Spanish newspaper El Pais also found that several other villages in the Valencia region had also held back on celebrations this year…

Bocairent’s mayor, Antonio Valdes, said blowing up the Mohammed dummy was offensive.

“It just wasn’t necessary, and as it could hurt some people’s feelings, we decided not to do it,” he said.

The village may not have blown up the wood-and-cardboard Mohammed dummy this year – but it still threw it off a castle wall at the fiesta’s climax in February.

Villages all over Spain hold annual festivals to commemorate the “Reconquista'”, the reconquest of Spain by Christians from the Moors, which was completed in 1492 after more than 700 years of Muslim rule in much of the country.

Spain is now once again home to a growing number of Muslims, mainly Moroccan immigrants, who villagers feel might be offended by some of their traditional celebrations.

I have got to find out the appropriate date, and get myself one of those for next year. Viva Ferdinand and Isabella!

In Whit Stillman’s 1994 film Barcelona, two American cousins, salesman Ted Boynton (Taylor Nichols) and Navy lieutenant Fred Boynton (Chris Eigeman) become involved with local girls Montserrat (Tushka Bergen) and Marta (Mira Sorvino), only to discover that both girls are also sleeping with Ramon, a glib anti-American journalist.

Discussing the situation with Montserrat, Fred makes a crucial discovery.

Montserrat: Ramon might not be as bad as you think. There’s a reason he has so many women. (pause) He has a problem.

Fred: What?

Monserrat: After he knows a woman well, he can’t have sex with her well.

Fred: He has a sexual impotence problem of some kind?

Montserrat: Of some kind.

Fred: That’s terrible. Poor guy. It explains a lot.

Montserrat: What?

Fred: It’s well-known that anti-Americanism has its roots in sexual impotence.

Recognition of the widespread nature of the problem is clearly growing, as this Levitra commercial features a new spokesman. (Warning: vulgarity)

David Aaronovitch, leftwing British commentator for the Guardian and the Times, has become fed up with the British left’s sympathy for Islamic extremism.

He has made a polemical documentary, titled No Excuses for Terror (placed on YouTube in four ten minute parts by Harry), which aired on Tuesday on Britain’s Channel 5.

Good stuff. Nobody can bash the lefties like a fellow leftie.

Hat tip to L’Ombre de l’Olivier.

People in Savannah commonly point out that Sherman burned Atlanta, which proves there’s good in everybody.

The recent frequency of angry Islamic mobs pouring into the streets, mullahs making death threats, and hirsute ruffians demanding apologies has made Islamic rage awfully tiresome, but at least in the case of Berlin’s Deutsche Oper production of Idomeneo by vandalizing Opernregisseur Hans Neuenfels, they may be on to something.

One can tolerate anachronistic settings and surrealistic stagings, but if some blithering nincompoop transmogrifies an opera’s plot into the precise opposite of the original’s, I feel a modicum of intolerance myself, my own hand itches for a sharp Khyberee.

When today’s liberal cultural elite want to praise one of their favorite pieces of artistic bogosity, they usually apply terms like “transgressive” and “courageous.” It is instructive to observe how rapidly artistic “courage” vanishes and “transgression” retreats, when the whiff of an actual threat is in the air.

Time reports:

Neuenfels’ production, first staged in 2003, is intended to be a symbolic gesture about the dangers of fanaticism. Although the production caused barely a ripple, except to impress the critics in its earlier showings, the climate has changed since then.

In July, Germany’s state police in Wiesbaden said they received an anonymous telephone call from a woman expressing concern that the opera, due to be staged this fall, could offend Muslim sensibilities. A subsequent study by Berlin police found that it could not “exclude the possibility” that something bad would happen, noting that decapitation could be associated with the videos distributed by militant terrorists. Berlin senator, Erhart Körting telephoned the Deutsche Oper’s artistic director Kirsten Harms to recommend that she cancel the show because he did not want harm to come to the opera house. Harms agreed, hastily convening a press conference this week in the cavernous lobby of the modernist Deutsche Oper to announce that future performances would pose “incalculable risks” to the public.

Today, Germany’s Chancellor and Interior Minister, and Berlin’s mayor are all decrying the surrender, and demanding the production’s restoration to the Berlin Opera’s schedule. It will be interesting to see just how long their courage lasts. And it’s a such a pity that the object eliciting the uncharacteristic display of European backbone is not something more worthy of defense.

Lee Harris, in the Weekly Standard, interprets the Pope’s recent speech (which so thoroughly upset the Saracens) as a message to the modern rationalist secular community of the West.

To the modern atheist, both (the Christian and the Islamic) Gods are equally figments of the imagination, in which case it would be ludicrous to discuss their relative merits. The proponent of modern reason, therefore, could not possibly think of participating in a dialogue on whether Christianity or Islam is the more reasonable religion, since, for him, the very notion of a “reasonable religion” is a contradiction in terms.

Ratzinger wishes to challenge this notion, not from the point of view of a committed Christian, but from the point of view of modern reason itself. He does this by calling his educated listeners’ attention to a “dialogue–carried on–perhaps in 1391 in the winter barracks near Ankara–by the erudite Byzantine emperor Manuel II Paleologus and an educated Persian on the subject of Christianity and Islam, and the truth of both.” In particular, Ratzinger focuses on a passage in the dialogue where the emperor “addresses his interlocutor with a startling brusqueness” on the “central question about the relationship between religion and violence in general, saying: ‘Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached.'”

Ratzinger’s daring use of this provocative quotation was not designed to inflame Muslims. He was using the emperor’s question in order to offer a profound challenge to modern reason from within. Can modern reason really stand on the sidelines of a clash between a religion that commands jihad and a religion that forbids violent conversion? Can a committed atheist avoid taking the side of Manuel II Paleologus when he says: “God is not pleased by blood–and not acting reasonably is contrary to God’s nature. . . . Whoever would lead someone to faith needs the ability to speak well and to reason properly, without violence and threats. . . . To convince a reasonable soul, one does not need a strong arm, or weapons of any kind, or any other means of threatening a person with death.”

Modern science cannot tell us that the emperor is right in his controversy with the learned Persian over what is or is not contrary to God’s nature. Modern reason proclaims such questions unanswerable by science–and it is right to do so. But can modern reason hope to survive as reason at all if it insists on reducing the domain of reasonable inquiry to the sphere of scientific inquiry? If modern reason cannot take the side of the emperor in this debate, if it cannot see that his religion is more reasonable than the religion of those who preach and practice jihad, if it cannot condemn as unreasonable a religion that forces atheists and unbelievers to make a choice between their intellectual integrity and death, then modern reason may be modern, but it has ceased to be reason.

Hat tip to Frank Dobbs.

Stephen Browne spent a year working in Saudi Araba, and he observes that most Americans, including George W. Bush, don’t understand how different from us they are.

Since the beginning of the Iraq phase of this conflict of civilizations, I’ve experienced the teeth-grinding frustration of watching both pro- and anti- Iraq sides make the exact same mistake – that of supposing that these people are bascially Americans in funny costumes. In this respect, George Bush and Michael Moore are equally clueless…

In the case of the Kingdom, I went there with a certain sympathy for Arab grievances, a belief that America had earned a lot of hostility from “blowback” from our ham-handed interventionist foreign policy and support for Israel etc.

I came back with the gloomy opinion that over the long run we are going to have to hammer these people hard to get them to quit messing with Western Civilization.

Interesting article.

Hat tip to offworld.

A little anti-Islamic humor from Grouchy Old Cripple in Atlanta.

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Hat tip to Scott Drum.

From the Nottingham Evening Post:

In today’s secular society you could be forgiven for not knowing which direction Christian graves face.

Ancient tradition shows they should look east in anticipation of the second coming of Jesus Christ.

But all headstones at the new £2.5m High Wood Cemetery in Bulwell will be plotted to face north-east, in line with Islamic faith.

Muslims believe the dead look over their shoulder towards Mecca, towards the south-east.

Despite there being separate sections at the cemetery in Low Wood Road for different faiths, the council wanted to give a tidy, linear appearance.

Only on special request can families have graves with headstones facing in a different direction.

Hat tip to Dhimmi Watch.

video

Hat tip to Red Square.

Islamic editorialist in London threatens war.

Somali cleric calls for Pope’s murder.

Palestinian gunmen fire bomb Christian churches on the West Bank and in Gaza.

They have a interesting way of trying to prove Byzantine Emperor Manuel II Paleologos wrong, don’t they?

Show me just what Muhammad brought that was new and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached.

Journalist and author Oriana Fallaci died yesterday at age 77 of cancer in Florence.

Washington Post

In the aftermath of 9/11, Fallaci wrote two best-selling books, The Rage and the Pride (2001) and The Force of Reason (2004), criticizing Islam in scathing terms.

Attempts were made in 2002 in Switzerland, and more recently in Italy (her pending trial had been postponed to December 18th), to prosecute her on the basis of her writings for such supposed crimes as “inciting racial hatred or discrimination” (Switzerland) and “making defamatory statements about a religion” (Italy).

I think the least we can do is to commemorate her passing by sharing some of her observations and opinions.

Tunku Varadarajan, in today’s Wall Street Journal, recalling just how eloquent she could be on the subject of Islam, quotes from a letter she wrote to him in March.

In the speech I gave at the Italian consulate in New York to accept one of the four golden medals I have received in the last two months, I told that I had drawn a cartoon on the Prophet and his nine wives including the 9 year old one and his sixteen concubines including the she-camel. But I had not published it because I had not been able to draw well the she-camel. (True). The author of the booklet which asks the Moslems to eliminate me in accord with four Suras of the Koran even sued me . . . Meaning now in Italy they even appeal to the Italian law to incriminate an Italian citizen for a ‘vilifying’ cartoon that nobody has seen.

Tunku finds Fallaci a little too high-proof, and remarks:

This is acid, bitter, marvelously funny. Oriana Fallaci was very brave. Perhaps a little too brave. But now is not the time to judge her by proportions.

Mark Steyn, on the other hand, is much more keen.

Racked by cancer, Oriana Fallaci spends most of her time in one of the few jurisdictions in the western world where she is not in legal jeopardy – New York City, whence she pens magnificent screeds in the hope of rousing Europe to save itself. Good luck with that. She writes in Italian, of course, but she translates them herself into what she calls “the oddities of Fallaci’s English”, and the result is a bravura improvised aria, impassioned and somewhat unpredictable. It’s full of facts, starting with the fall of Constantinople in 1453, when Mehmet II celebrated with beheading and sodomizing, and some lucky lads found themselves on the receiving end of both. This section is a lively read in an age when most westerners, consciously or otherwise, adopt the blithe incuriosity of Jimmy Kennedy’s marvelous couplet in his 1950s pop hit “Istanbul (Not Constantinople)”:

Why did Constantinople get the works?
That’s nobody’s business but the Turks.

Signora Fallaci then moves on to the livelier examples of contemporary Islam — for example, Ayatollah Khomeini’s “Blue Book” and its helpful advice on romantic matters: “If a man marries a minor who has reached the age of nine and if during the defloration he immediately breaks the hymen, he cannot enjoy her any longer.” I’ll say. I know it always ruins my evening. Also: “A man who has had sexual relations with an animal, such as a sheep, may not eat its meat. He would commit sin.” Indeed. A quiet cigarette afterwards as you listen to your favourite Johnny Mathis LP and then a promise to call her next week and swing by the pasture is by far the best way. It may also be a sin to roast your nine-year old wife, but the Ayatollah’s not clear on that.

Moliter ossa cubent. (“May the earth lay lightly on her bones.”)