As far as I am concerned, they can pound sand.

Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten apologized to the Islamic world today for a series of twelve cartoon caricatures of the prophet Mohammed. All twelve can be seen here. (You will have to be patient today. Francis’ server is overloaded.)

Evidently bucking to replace Jimmy Carter as the most embarassing former president, William Jefferson Clinton has spoken out on this free speech issue (quoted in Junkyardblog).

Clinton described as “appalling” the 12 cartoons published in a Danish newspaper in September depicting Prophet Mohammed and causing uproar in the Muslim world.

“None of us are totally free of stereotypes about people of different races, different ethnic groups, and different religions … there was this appalling example in northern Europe, in Denmark … these totally outrageous cartoons against Islam,” he said.
The cartoons, including a portrayal of the prophet wearing a time-bomb-shaped turban, were reprinted in a Norwegian magazine in January, sparking uproar in the Muslim world where images of the prophet are considered blasphemous.

Hat tip to LGF and to Francis at L’Ombre de L/Olivier, whose comments are worth a look.

We do not apologize.

It’s in the Koran.

Hat tip to Charles Johnson.

Spengler argued against John Keegan’s optimism regarding the inevitability of Western victory in Asia Times shortly after 9/11:

The grand vulnerability of the Western mind is horror. The Nazis understood this and pursued a policy “des Schreckens” (to cause horror) and “Entsetzens” (terror, literally: dislodgement). Horror was not merely an instrument of war in the traditional sense, but a form of Wagnerian theater, or psychological warfare on the grand scale…

America, as Osama bin Laden taunted this week, lost in Vietnam. But it was not military setbacks, but the horrific images of Vietnamese civilians burned by napalm, that lost the war. America’s experience in the war is enshrined in popular culture in the film Apocalypse Now, modeled after Joseph Conrad’s story, The Heart of Darkness. The Belgian trading company official, Paul Kurtz, sinks into bestiality and dies with these words: “The horror! The horror!”…

From America’s moral collapse in the face of the horror of Vietnam, there arose a repudiation of classical Western culture unlike anything seen previously in the English-speaking world….

…how can Al-Qaeda overcome the West with horror? Let us suppose that some state or state agency over which Al-Qaeda wields influence possesses a weapon of mass destruction, with sufficient potency to cause a very large number of deaths in a Western country. If it deploys that weapon and causes a very large number of casualties, the West may have no choice but to bombard the offending country with nuclear weapons and destroy its capacity to make war. Given that Al-Qaeda has tendrils deep in numerous governments, even a nuclear bombardment of one rogue state might not diminish its capacities. The West would be left with the horrific fact of mass destruction of civilians combined with continued insecurity.

Time is on the side of Al-Qaeda…

…the West should think of itself as the underdog, fighting against the clock, and seize the tactical initiative. It should act unpredictably, with the objective of confusing and disrupting an enemy who until now has chosen his targets at leisure… the West should act unexpectedly and without mercy against states which allow Al-Qaeda. There is no need to go into details here. Doing so now offers at least the chance of gaining the respect of the Islamic world. Failing to do so makes probable a gradual accumulation of failures. It means that the war will be Al-Qaeda’s to lose.

We were lucky with Hitler. We may not be so lucky again.

George W. Bush should have pinned this article on the wall above his desk. He was right to invade Afghanistan and Iraq, but he allowed the War against Terrorism to lose momentum. Syria should have been invaded and its regime dismantled immediately after Iraq. We should have invaded Iran long ago.

Greg Richards on American Thinker quotes Winston Churchill, writing in The River War (1899), his account of Kitchener’s campaign against the jihadists of that day, on Islam:

How dreadful are the curses which Mohammedanism lays on its votaries! Besides the fanatical frenzy, which is as dangerous in a man as hydrophobia in a dog, there is this fearful fatalistic apathy. The effects are apparent in many countries. Improvident habits, slovenly systems of agriculture, sluggish methods of commerce, and insecurity of property exist wherever the followers of the Prophet rule or live. A degraded sensualism deprives this life of its grace and refinement; the next of its dignity and sanctity. The fact that in Mohammedan law every woman must belong to some man as his absolute property — either as a child, a wife, or a concubine — must delay the final extinction of slavery until the faith of Islam has ceased to be a great power among men.

Individual Moslems may show splendid qualities. Thousands become the brave and loyal soldiers of the Queen; all know how to die; but the influence of the religion paralyses the social development of those who follow it. No stronger retrograde force exists in the world. Far from being moribund, Mohammedanism is a militant and proselytizing faith. It has already spread throughout Central Africa, raising fearless warriors at every step; and were it not that Christianity is sheltered in the strong arms of science — the science against which it had vainly struggled — the civilisation of modern Europe might fall, as fell the civilisation of ancient Rome.

I fear that I may getting behind on my daily acts of Unbelief [Arabic: kufr], so I’m linking this site featuring a catchy tune titled “Islam’s Not For Me,” and “Mohammed’s Believe It Or Else” comic book.

The London Times is reporting that a Belgian woman, who had married a Morrocan and converted to “the religion of Peace,” travelled to Iraq and last month blew herself up in a suicidal act of terrorism.

MIREILLE, who was born in Belgium to a white, middle-class Christian family, blew herself to pieces last month in a suicide attack against American troops near Baghdad.

In one of the most extraordinary tales of Islamic radicalisation, she is thought to be the first white Western woman to carry out a suicide bombing.

Belgian investigators, who arrested 14 people associated with her, are keeping the 38-year-old woman’s true identity secret, but details have started to emerge. She was from the southern Belgian town of Charleroi, married to a Moroccan and converted to an extreme form of Islam.

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Expatica

Wretchard proposes a provocative way of looking at current events:

The fundamental issue… is whether nation-states are in some sense being replaced by distributed networks of people…

That Islam traditionally had no fixed hierarchy helped it adapt more readily to networked war. For the Jihadi the requirements of public policy and international law not only proved no hindrance, in a fundamental sense they did not apply: things like the Geneva Convention were the impedimenta of nation-states. Holy warriors were accountable only to Allah, which in practice meant they answered to no one but themselves. This circumstance exculpated the Jihadists from a multitude of sins in the eyes of a Western media capable of recognizing only state actors. Attacks against hospitals, schools, churches; and the use of children as combatants excited no opprobrium because these were understood to be acts of individuals; unfortunate to be sure, but ultimately insubstantial. Only states could commit war crimes, so that Jihadi atrocities, even on the scale of September 11, were only the subject of police action…

The key challenge is whether America, in the sense of a shared idea, can be expansive enough to permit subordinate threads which can truly “take on a life of their own”, and so become agile enough to engage the Jihadis at the lowest level.

Little Green Footballs and Bare Knuckle Politics (hat tip: Michelle Malkin) cover attacks on two liquor stores in West Oakland by “about a dozen African-American men wearing suits, white-collared shirts and bow ties — a trademark of the Nation of Islam.” Television news reports have studiously avoided mentioning the Islamic aspect of the attacks.

This cartoon, representing the Prophet Mohammed, was one of a number printed in the Daily Jyllands-Posten which led to Islamicist rioting in Denmark, and to Egypt contemplating of measures against Denmark.