No Justice for Zombie Mohammed

At first I thought this incident couldn't possibly be as bad as it sounded. But apparently, it is.

A Pennsylvania judge reportedly dismissed charges against a Muslim man accused of attacking an atheist dressed as "Zombie Muhammad" during a Halloween parade last year.

The Harrisburg Patriot-News reports that Cumberland County Magisterial District Judge Mark Martin said there wasn't enough evidence to convict Talaag Elbayomy of harrassment. Although there was grainy video of the incident, it was ruled inadmissible, leaving the case one man's word against another's, the judge said.

Elbayomy, 46, allegedly attacked Ernest Perce V, of the Parading Atheists of Central Pennsylvania, during the Oct. 11 parade in Mechanicsburg. Perce claimed Elbayomy tried to take his "Muhammad of Islam" sign and choked him, the newspaper reports. ...

It just gets worse:

... What transpired next was surreal. The Judge not only ruled in favor of the defendant, but called Mr. Perce a name and told him that if he were in a Muslim country, he’d be put to death. Judge Martin’s comments included,

“Having had the benefit of having spent over 2 and a half years in predominantly Muslim countries I think I know a little bit about the faith of Islam. In fact I have a copy of the Koran here and I challenge you sir to show me where it says in the Koran that Mohammad arose and walked among the dead. I think you misinterpreted things. Before you start mocking someone else’s religion you may want to find out a little bit more about it it makes you look like a dufus and Mr. (Defendant) is correct. In many Arabic speaking countries something like this is definitely against the law there. In their society in fact it can be punishable by death and it frequently is in their society.

Go to the link for the rest of the judge's appalling comments. Andrew McCarthy has a transcript, and adds:

But one’s “attitude toward Muslims” is irrelevant to one’s right in America to walk the streets and express opinions people may find offensive without being physically attacked and intimidated. And the fact that sharia governments kill people over such expressions of opinion means that they are barbaric, not that we should tolerate additional constraints on our (diminishing) liberties. ...

Harry's Place has more.

Volokh has an analysis.

More at Hot Air.

Think I'm making this up? I wish I were. Faith Freedom links to the news story at ABC 27.

UPDATE: Some sources incorrectly reported that Martin was a Muslim, based on a statement of Martin's which was misheard. It's not really relevant what his religion is; it's his distorted beliefs about religion and freedom of expression that are the problem.

What Martin Luther King Did

Via Jeff Fecke at Alas, here's Hamden Rice at Angry Black Lady:

And yeah, I said for African Americans, not for Americans, because his main impact was his effect on the lives of African Americans, not on Americans in general. His main impact was not to make white people nicer or fairer. That’s why some of us who are African Americans get a bit possessive about his legacy. Dr. Martin Luther King’s legacy, despite what our civil religion tells us, is not color blind.

And why should it be? The world he lived in was not color blind.

So anyway, I was having this argument with my father about Martin Luther King and how his message was too conservative compared to Malcolm X’s message. My father got really angry at me. It wasn’t that he disliked Malcolm X, but his point was that Malcolm X hadn’t accomplished anything as Dr. King had.

I was kind of sarcastic and asked something like, so what did Martin Luther King accomplish other than giving his “I have a dream speech.”

Before I tell you what my father told me ...

Go to the post to read what Hamden's father told him.

Defense Department Troubled by Leaks

The Number One problem for the Secretary of Defense, apparently, is the appearance of a video showing US Marines urinating on the bodies of dead Taliban fighters. Matters came to a head when the White House characterized the incident as "deplorable" and "reprehensible". The Taliban, for their part, are unimpressed.

Dear, dear. With all these pictures whizzing around the internet, will our battlefield superiority be rendered void? Robert Wright opines:

First, there's the new transparency of war. Infinitely more battlefield details get recorded, and everyone has the tools to broadcast these details. So it's just a matter of time before some outrageous image goes viral--pictures from Abu Ghraib, video from Afghanistan, whatever. These images will make you and your soldiers more hated by the enemy than ever--and hated by civilians who may identify with the enemy, whether because of national, ethnic, or religious kinship.

The second big change is that hatred is now a more dangerous thing. America faces no serious threat from any nation-state, but the more amorphous threat from radical Islam, if mishandled, could mushroom and, years from now, reach massively lethal proportions. And the lifeblood of radical Islam (like the lifeblood of many radical things) is hatred. The more Muslims there are who hate Americans, the easier life is for recruiters from al Qaeda or some other such terrorist group. ...

First, actually, there's the old transparency of open societies, and the opacity of dictatorships. This is what ensures that we know every piddling little detail of the doings of American fighting men in Afghanistan, but nothing of what goes on behind the lines on the other side.

Just as important as what gets recorded is what does not get recorded. That's why the Abu Ghraib prison that Wright and others are so fond of citing is known to the public as the place where Americans abused Iraqi prisoners and not for the torture and mass executions that occurred in Iraq's dark past under the Ba'athist regime of Saddam Hussein.

This is a good place to quote Rep. Allen West: "I do not recall any self-righteous indignation when our Delta snipers Shugart and Gordon had their bodies dragged through Mogadishu. Neither do I recall media outrage and condemnation of our Blackwater security contractors being killed, their bodies burned, and hung from a bridge in Fallujah."

The second big non-change is that hatred by itself is not dangerous to anybody. People acting from hatred are dangerous, and they are more dangerous if they have better weapons. Wright actually says as much. Wright's worry is that the enemy might get access to "massively lethal technologies". Better, then, to yield to blackmail before it starts.

Robert Wright's conclusion is typical of the accommodationist, pro-appeasement plan favored by so many mild-mannered liberals:

In the old days national security could be had by making sure all foreign governments either liked you or feared you; now national security requires (among other things) that as few people as possible hate you.

Notice that the element of "fearing you" is eliminated from the equation. Robert Wright can't picture anybody being afraid of him. (Judging by the picture, neither can I.)

This is the old liberal hand-wringing mantra of "let's not do anything rash, because then we might make them even more angry". (You remember the fretting about "the Arab street" after 9/11.) It's as if the enemy's hatred is an inexhaustible resource that can always be dialed up another notch. But somehow this same principle doesn't seem to apply to our side.

Robert Wright can't picture anybody being in mortal fear of him, but fortunately for all of us the United States Marines don't have that problem. Nor, I think, do they have any shortage of hate and contempt for the enemy. And I'll bet they're plenty angry.

Because the Marines understand one simple, timeless truth:

It's better to be pissed off than to be pissed on.

1948 Defenders' Memorial, Old City, Jerusalem

Jerusalem

View from the Old City, overlooking the Kotel.

Iran: Nuclear Scientist Killed

Mostafa Ahmadi-Roshan was killed in a bomb attack in Tehran the morning of January 11, Wednesday. The Iranian regime has urged the United Nations to condemn the attack. Tehran officials blamed the usual suspects - that'd be the US and the Israelis. Hillary Clinton denied any American involvement, but

Brig. Gen. Yoav Mordechai, a spokesman for the Israel Defense Forces, said on his Facebook page Wednesday: "I have no idea who targeted the Iranian scientist but I certainly don't shed a tear."

Stratfor points out that this is the fifth successful assassination of an Iranian nuclear scientist in as many years. Additionally, according to Stratfor,

Beyond continuing a trend in assassinations, Ahmadi-Roshan's death revealed that the Iranians could be pursuing a method of uranium enrichment other than centrifuges. There are two main methods of uranium enrichment: gas centrifuges and gas diffusion. Al Jazeera reported that Ahmadi-Roshan was in charge of a project working on polymer membranes, which are necessary for gas diffusion but not for centrifuges. ...

Go to the link for the full article.

Tom the Redhunter has a valuable roundup of related events.

The MO is the similar in the targeted assassinations; two men on a motorcycle drive up next to the car while in traffic, the man on the back of the bike attaches a magnetic bomb to the car, they speed off, and a few seconds later the bomb explodes and the man inside is killed.

Iran is warning of a "cross-border, cross-regional strategy for striking back" according to the Jerusalem Post article.

Dizengoff

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Israel Trip

I visited Israel - mostly Tel Aviv, with a couple of trips to Jerusalem - for the first two weeks of November 2011. Very soon, I will be posting my impressions from that visit.

Meanwhile, I'll post a couple of selections from the pictures I took.

Phyllis Chesler on Charles Small, Subramanian Swamy

Phyllis Chesler at A7:

I am talking about the Islamic persecution of infidels on every continent—a persecution which is still ongoing; about forced conversions to Islam; and about the genocidal extermination of 80 million Hindus over a period of six centuries (1000-1500 CE).

What I’ve just written is historically true as is Islam’s history of anti-Black racism, slavery, and gender and religious apartheid. Ibn Warraq has a new and very important book just coming out on this very subject. It is titled: Why the West is Best. A Muslim Apostate’s Defense of Liberal Democracy.

But, it is a crime to say any of this. And, it is a crime to suggest that a liberal or constitutional democracy must defend itself against jihadic terrorism.

This is not true only in the Middle East or in Islamic central Asia. It is true in the major and most prestigious universities in the United States. ...

Read it all at the link.

French Kiss

"L'Amour Plus Forte que l'Haine"

Following the announcement that Islamic prophet Mohammed would be 'guest-editing' an issue of the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, all hell broke loose.

Their offices were firebombed, its website taken offline, and huge protests broke out at the weekend.

So how does Charlie Hebdo respond? With the headline "Love is stronger than hate": ...

Go to the BI link for the whole works. Great cover.

Related: Make love, not jihad.

French Magazine Firebombed

Fox:

PARIS – French politicians and Muslim leaders denounced an arson attack early Wednesday that destroyed the offices of a satirical French newspaper after it "invited" the Prophet Muhammad as its guest editor this week.

No one was injured in the fire that started around 1 a.m. in the offices of Charlie Hebdo weekly in eastern Paris, hours before the current issue hit the newsstands.

"Everything will be done to find those behind this attack," said Interior Minister Claude Gueant ...

Time's Bruce Crumley says that the magazine is no free speech martyr. (What, exactly, does it take to be a "free speech martyr" then?)

Jill at Feministe responds:

Again: I agree that Islamophobic antics are “futile and childish;” I agree that they serve absolutely no common good. But they “bait” Muslim people into violence? They just make it too tempting to blow up a building? Nope! You don’t get to use violence in response to rhetoric, no matter how abhorrent the rhetoric.

And you know, the vast majority of Muslim people respond to bigotry by pushing back, or being disgusted, or voicing their disapproval, or being quietly angry, or organizing. It seems more than a little condescending and insulting to suggest that Muslims as a group just can’t help getting all bomb-y when someone pisses them off.

Anwar al-Awlaki Gets His Virgins

Anwar al-Awlaki (also spelled Aulaqi; Arabic: أنور العولقي‎ Anwar al-‘Awlaqī; April 22, 1971 – September 30, 2011) was a Yemeni-American imam who was an engineer and educator by training. According to U.S. federal government officials, he was a senior talent recruiter and motivator who was involved with planning operations for the Islamist militant group al-Qaeda. His sermons are alleged to have helped motivate at least three attacks inside the United States, and was the first U.S. citizen to be added to a list of persons approved for targeted killing by the Central Intelligence Agency. With a blog, a Facebook page, and many YouTube videos, he had been described as the "bin Laden of the Internet". U.S. President Barack Obama alleged that Awlaki was "the leader of external operations for Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula".

IISS:

Nigel Inkster, a former deputy head of MI6, said Awlaki "was the ideologue of al-Qaeda".


"He was very influential because he able to groom and animate so many," he said. "While everyone else in al-Qaeda was dumbstruck by the Arab Spring, he was the one person able to embrace the tsunami that hit the region."

Armies of Liberation:

AQAP issues message confirming death of Anwar al-Awlaki: Site Intel

Safe copy at Jihadology has link to original post: al-Malāḥim Media presents new statement from al-Qā’idah in the Arabian Peninsula: “Blood of the Martyr, Light and Fire: Statement on the Martyrdom of Shaykh Anwar al-’Awlaqī and his Colleagues”

No mention of al Assiri per @Inteltweet but Sami confirmed dead as well.

“The blood of the sheik (al-Awlaki) and his brothers will not go in vain; there are heroes behind him who do not sleep under oppression, and they will retaliate soon,” the group said. “We and the Americans are at war: we get them and they get us, and the end is for those who are patient – they are the ones who will be victorious.” FOX

Awlaki lived at Yemen house of General People's Congress official Zindani five months before death.

This article says Anwar was living in Sanaa in the house of a GPC member when the National Security transfered him to al Jawf for his own security, but put a transmitter in his car… Anyway this article contradicts the Ahram article, unless the National Security transferred him to Afrag’s house and then he went to visit Okaimi. Update : al Zindani does have a huge farm in Al-Jawf .. it’s about 10 kilometers x 10 kilometers.

Zindani's farm. Also, Awlaki trained Farouk on failed 2009 and 2010 bomb plots.

Long War Journal: AQAP confirms Anwar al Awlaki killed in US drone strike.

Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) has confirmed that Anwar al Awlaki was killed in a US drone strike last month, according to the SITE Intelligence Group. In a statement released to online jihadist forums, AQAP also confirmed the killing of Samir Khan, who edited AQAP's online English publication, Inspire.

AQAP's martyrdom statement references the public debate in the US over the legality of killing Awlaki and Khan, both of whom were American citizens. AQAP says the US government "did not prove the accusation against them, and did not present evidence against them in their unjust laws of their freedom."

The statement, according to a translation provided by SITE, continues: "Where are what they keep talking about regarding freedom, justice, human rights and respect of freedoms?! Was America fed up with it to the point that it contradicted it - and every day it contradicts - these principles that it claims its state is based upon?!"