"Libraries put Bible on top shelf in a sop to Muslims"

Now there's an intriguing headline: how is it that putting the Bible on the top shelf is accommodating Muslims?

Read on:

Librarians are being told to move the Bible to the top shelf to avoid giving offence to followers of Islam.

Muslims have complained of finding the Koran on lower shelves, saying it should be put above commonplace things.

So officials have responded with guidance, backed by ministers, that all holy books should be treated equally and go on the top shelf together.

Of course, there is a potential problem remaining: which books go on the shelf furthest to the left--indicating precedence and priority?

Fortunately, the libraries can dodge the bullet on that one: they can just put the Bibles on the left and the Korans on the right--since Arabic, like Hebrew, is written right to left, being on the right will satisfy Muslims while non-Muslims can be happy too.

Whew!

Crossposted on Soccer Dad

Technorati Tag: Islam.

Anti-Semitism: The Vote Is In!

Mark Steyn writes about the Left pandering to Islamists in Europe, quoting from a piece by Lars Hedegaard to prove his point. Steyn writes:

Why then are the Euroleft prostrate before Islam? Simple arithmetic:

They are now increasingly dependent on the Muslim vote, which they hope will guarantee them a perpetual foothold at least in the major population centers.

With Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Antwerp, Brussels, and many other Continental cities from Malmo to Marseilles approaching majority Muslim status in the next decade, the demographic reality of a re-religionized Europe is too hard to buck. For the soft-left establishment, to be unsolicitous of Islam is to condemn yourself to a few fast shrinking redoubts. (It's strange, for example, to hear American Jews still professing bewilderment at the ever more naked hostility in Europe toward Israel. Look at the electoral math: For your average squishy Europol, there is nothing to gain and an awful lot to lose by being perceived as insufficiently hostile to "Zionism".)

So democratic parties maintain their electoral viability by pandering to the anti-democratic impulses of their fastest-growing bloc. [emphasis added]

Read the whole thing.

In his article, Hedegaard expands on the point:

This socialist-Muslim nexus turned out to be a marriage made in heaven. The swelling ranks of the Muslim immigrants could deliver the votes to fill the void left by the disappearing native working classes, and the socialist parties could reciprocate by delivering welfare benefits, cultural concessions and free immigration to their to non-working Muslim charges.

...To keep this bizarre road show running, it has become necessary for the leftist rulers to crush free speech. However much they may privately deplore it, there is nothing else to do if they want to retain the Muslim vote that keeps them in power.

Read the whole thing.

The question is whether this will become an issue in the US as well--considering the attempts by the Democratic Party to accommodate illegal aliens, this may already be starting.

Technorati Tag: Anti-Semitism and Islamists.

Delonas' Dead Chimp Cartoon: Who's Making A Monkee Out Of Whom?

This cartoon by Sean Delonas caused an uproar on Wednesday:



The Huffington Post seems representative of the general reaction:

A cartoon likening the author of the stimulus bill, perhaps President Barack Obama, with a rabid chimpanzee graced the pages of the New York Post on Wednesday.

The drawing, from famed cartoonist Sean Delonas, is rife with violent imagery and racial undertones. In it, two befuddled-looking police officers holding guns look over the dead and bleeding chimpanzee that attacked a woman in Stamford, Connecticut.

At least in the last paragraph, the more benign explanation is (begrudgingly) offered:

At its most benign, the cartoon suggests that the stimulus bill was so bad, monkeys may as well have written it.

Oh.

This outcry is reminiscent of the (over)reaction to a comment made by Howard Cosell when, during a Monday Night Football telecast in September 1983, he said "look at that little monkey go", in reference to a play by black wide receiver Alvin Garrett of the Washington Redskins.

The Washington Post notes that there was less to Cosell's remark than meets the eye:

He said at the time he used the expression as a term of endearment, that he called his own grandchildren little monkeys all the time and had said it before on the air. In fact, in a 1972 telecast, he had also described Mike Adamle, a Caucasian running back for the Kansas City Chiefs, as a "little monkey" during the broadcast.

In both cases, the damage has already been done. Sharpton has jumped on board with a condemnation. Apparently, no one cares that it was Pelosi and not Obama who was behind the writing of the bill. More than that--Sharpton claims:

The cartoon in today's New York Post is troubling at best given the historic racist attacks of African-Americans as being synonymous with monkeys.

If you want to go by history, both the Koran and the Nazis use the image of the monkey to diaparage others.

Apparently, people also don't care about all presidents who are compared to monkeys either.
I don't recall the outrage at the many cartoons, graphics and even teeshirts comparing President Bush to monkeys. 

Do you?

Technorati Tag: Sean Delonas.

UN Leaves Hamas Guarding The Henhouse--With Predictable Results

Earlier this month, we learned that Hamas acquired hundreds of tonnes of food by "mistake":

UN awaits return of Gaza aid, Hamas says 'crisis over'

The United Nations was on Saturday awaiting the promised return of hundreds of tonnes of food aid for Gaza "mistakenly" seized by Hamas, as the Islamists insisted the crisis is over.

But UNRWA, the main agency for Palestinian refugees, said the incident will not be considered "over" until all 200 tonnes of rice and flour have been returned and Hamas has guaranteed the situation will not be repeated.
In the wake of the incident, the UN agency suspended all imports of aid into the Gaza Strip.

Now it appears that Hamas has "mistakenly" gotten hold of some unexploded weapons left over from Operation Cast Lead:

The United Nations is frantically searching for a large stockpile of unexploded weapons that have disappeared in the Gaza Strip, the BBC reported.

The explosives, fired by Israel during the recent Gaza offensive, including aircraft bombs and white phosphorus shells, were being guarded by Hamas and were scheduled to be safely disposed of by the U.N.

Israel has accused Hamas of taking the weapons and the U.N. has called for their immediate return.

"We are anxious to get the return of this ordnance. It's clearly extremely dangerous and needs to be disposed of in a safe manner," Richard Miron, the senior U.N. spokesman in Jerusalem, told the BBC. "This is our primary concern."

A U.N. Mines Action Team found the explosives in a storage site in Gaza City on Feb. 2. They included three 2,000-pound bombs and eight 500-pound bombs that had been dropped by Israel but failed to explode, the BBC reported.

When U.N. officials returned to the warehouse Sunday to retrieve the weapons, which was under a Hamas police guard, the explosives were gone.

Left unexplained, of course, is: why the UN would trust terrorists to guard weapons--especially when the UN saw for themselves that Hamas has a tendency to appropriate things for themselves. 

Apparently, the UN actually believes all of their rhetoric about freedom fighters--not that they'll learn their lesson this time around.

Technorati Tag: UN and Gaza and Hamas.

How Outspoken Can Israel Be About Obama's Decision On Durban2? (Updated)

Shmuel Rosner cautions that Israel cannot afford to be too outspoken about Obama's decision for the US to get involved in Durban2:

My worry is this: Israel should be very careful not to be perceived as an obstacle on America’s road to world acceptability. Unless public opinion is mobilized against this distorted version of a human rights forum by other (namely, non-Jewish) leaders concerned about human rights, dramatic Israeli objection will have unfortunate consequences — either because Obama will choose to take part and give credence to the conference or because the enemies of Israel will be able to argue that by lobbying against Durban it has damaged American interests.

Read Anne Bayefsky for not being outspoken about this is so difficult.

UPDATE: Jennifer Rubin responds to Rosner:

But Israel cannot, of course, remain indifferent or mute in the face of a conference premised on the notion that it is a racist country. This is not an incidental matter. It goes to the core of Israel’s right of existence as a Jewish state.

...Israel simply can’t pull its punches on this one. Perhaps Powell, who thought so highly of Obama that he crossed party lines in the election, might set him straight on this. If not, the chips will fall as they must.

Has there ever been a time that Israel has 'pulled its punches' and has been successful?

Technorati Tag: Durban.

Peres Admits He Was Wrong About The Disengagment...Sort of

Interesting timing:

President Shimon Peres said Wednesday that he had erred in supporting Israel's unilateral withdrawal from Gaza.

The revealing remarks come three years after Israel's evacuation of the volatile coastal strip which has since been seized by Hamas.

"Whatever will happen in the future, we shall not repeat the mistakes we made in leaving Gaza," Peres said in a question and answer session with a group of American Jewish leaders. "It should have been done otherwise. I was for leaving Gaza. I consider myself as one of the persons mistaken."

At the same time though, Peres has not completely retreated from the idea:

The dovish leader, who has long been a champion of Israeli territorial withdrawals, said that although "lessons must be drawn" from the 2005 unilateral Gaza pullout, demographic and democratic considerations still necessitate the creation of a Palestinian state.

"It doesn't change the fact that there is a [demographic] reality," he told the annual Israel meeting of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations. "I want to make sure that the state we have remains Jewish."[emphasis added]

In light of this seeming contradiction, David Hazony's post on the Peres comment is instructive:

Of course, this can be read in more than one way. Aside from the objection from the Right, that disengagement would embolden Israel’s enemies and lead to a much worse conflict, there was also an objection from the Left: that Israel should be reaching negotiated settlements rather than taking unilateral actions. Peres’s ambiguous words let him hint in both directions at once. Peres is a master at this sort of thing.

Also, Peres' demographic reality comment is debatable, based on the miscalculation of the Israeli Arab population and the statistics on Palestinian Arab emigration.

More interesting is the timing for his comment. Hazony notes:

We are just days before Peres has to choose between giving the reins of coalition-forming, and probably government itself, either to Kadima or to Likud. It will be recalled that the whole reason that Kadima exists was that Ariel Sharon failed to get support for disengagement from within his own party, so he broke away to form Kadima, got Peres to come on board, and on this basis went ahead with disengagement anyway. In other words: Peres has chosen this particular moment to distance himself forcefully from the party with the most seats in the Knesset, the party that he himself helped create.

In still other words: It looks like he’s preparing his old friends in Kadima for the disappointment that his next move will bring. [emphasis added]

Talk about disengagement!

Crossposted at Soccer Dad

Technorati Tag: Peres and Israeli Elections.

Guardian Of Anne Frank Celebrates 100th Birthday

From The Telegraph:

...Miep Gies was in her early thirties and working as a secretary for the well-to-do Otto Frank at his import export office along Amsterdam's Princengracht when he asked her for help. She was the first to be told about his decision to move his family from their comfortable apartment in the well-to-do south of the city into a small hiding place known as the Achterhuis (home behind) adjacent to his office.

Many old Amsterdam canal houses have a small Achterhuis and Anne's father was counting on the Germans, who had occupied the city and were relentlessly rounding up Jews, not being aware of the secret buildings.

Mrs Gies immediately agreed to be the family's go-between with a group of others. She is now the only surviving member of the team which kept the Franks alive for two years from 1942 until their capture in 1944.

She gathered food and clothing coupons, delivering supplies to the family in their hiding place and risking her own life.

"Anne was a lovely, lively, normal young girl. She was so full of the joy of just being alive. She looked forward to resuming her own life, going back to school, travelling abroad and becoming a writer after the war. She never doubted she and her family would survive."

Miep Gies risked her life looking after the Franks but said: "I stand at the end of a long line of brave Dutch people who did much more than I did to save lives during the dark terrible years of the occupation of the Netherlands by the Germans. For them, the events of those terrible years remain alive like something that happened yesterday. For me, I think of what happened to the Franks every day."

Scholastic Magazine has a section that covers Anne Frank and Miep Gies, as well as other features, including a transcript of an interview she did on line with students, explaining--among other things--how she avoided getting into trouble for helping the Frank family.

Technorati Tag: Holocaust and Anne Frank and Miep Gies.

Israel-Palestinian Conflict: It's Not About Land

"Palestine is a legitimate theatre of operations for jihad (holy war)"
Mohsen al-Awajy, Saudi religious scholar

Who says Hamas lost the war?

In a hall crowded with conservative Sunni Muslim sheikhs and scholars, in a hotel close to Istanbul's Ataturk Airport speaker after speaker called for jihad against Israel in support of Hamas.

...The conference, dubbed the Global Anti-Aggression Campaign, also gave impetus to Sunni clerics concerned about the growing power of Hezbollah, the Shia movement backed by Iran, which rose to international prominence in its own war with Israel in 2006.

"Gaza is a gift," the Saudi religious scholar Mohsen al-Awajy told me. He and other delegates repeatedly referred to the Gaza war as "a victory".

"Gaza," he continued, "gives us power, it solves our differences. We are all now in a unified front against Zionism."

In closed meetings after sessions delegates focussed on the creation of a "third Jihadist front" - the first two being Afghanistan and Iraq. The intensity of the Israeli attack had "awakened all Muslims," Mr Awajy claimed.

Where else can you have a meeting to wage Jihad and entitle it "the Global Anti-Aggression Campaign"? Then again, to claim that you are openning a third front and compare it to Iraq does not give the impression that this meeting was heavily based on reality.

And there was the obligatory call for martyrdom by a leader of Hamas who lives in Syria:

Mohammed Nazzal, a senior Hamas leader based in Damascus, challenged Arab governments to "open their borders and allow the fighters to come."

Delegates from all over the Middle East, and from Somalia, Sudan, Pakistan and Indonesia applauded as he stabbed the air with a raised finger and declared: "There will be no agreement with Israel... only weapons will bring respect."

Mr Nazzal told his audience: "Don't worry about casualties." [emphasis added]

That may be the motto of Hamas, but Gazans are not as taken with it as they once were--no wonder the leaders of Hamas is looking for new volunteers.

More at Memeorandum

Technorati Tag: Israel and Gaza and Hamas and Operation Cast Lead.

France Acknowledges Vichy Government Deported Jews To Their Deaths

The acknowledgement comes as a response to the request by the daughter of a deportee who died at Auschwitz. She is asking for reparations from the French state while also asking for damages for her own personal suffering during and after the occupation.

France's top judicial body on Monday recognized the French government's responsibility for the deportation of Jews during World War II, the clearest such recognition of the state's role in the Holocaust.

The Council of State found that the government of Nazi-occupied France at the time held the "responsibility" for deportations that led to anti-Semitic persecution.

The decision released Monday also found that the deportation had been "compensated for" since 1945, apparently ruling out any reparations for deportees or their families.

Thousands of Jews were deported from France to Nazi death camps during the occupation. After the war, subsequent French governments took decades to acknowledge any role by the collaborationist Vichy regime in the Holocaust.[emphasis added]

This is happening while anti-Semitism is on the rise in Europe. As Roger L. Simon points out in Holocaust Oxymoron, quoting from The Writing on the Synagogue Wall:

“The Pope embraces a Holocaust-denying Winchester and Cambridge-educated bishop; slogans such as ‘Hamas, Hamas, Jews to the gas’ are chanted in Amsterdam;”

These few words embody the irrationality of anti-Semitism. How can there be no Holocaust and Jews being gassed at the same time? Perhaps Richard Willamson, the “Holocaust-denying Winchester and Cambridge-educated bishop” above, who says “there were no gas chambers” can explain that to us?

In this environment, France's acknowledgement will create barely a ripple.

Technorati Tag: Holocaust and Anti-Semitism and Vichy France.

Star Trek Meets...Obama--Star Trek: The Stimulus Doomsday Machine

From Doug Ross:

Space. The final frontier. These are the voyages of the Starship Enterprise.
Its five-year mission to understand liberalism. Or progressivism. Or whatever it's called these days.
To seek out intelligence among the left.

'Watch' the whole thing.

[Hat tip: Soccer Dad]

Technorati Tag: Star Trek and Obama and Stimulus Package .