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7. februar 2006
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Thomas Kleine-Brockhoff, Washington bureau chief of the German newspaper Die Zeit, which printed the Mohammad cartoons after the madness broke out, is blasting the American government (current and previous) for outright cowardice in this conflict.
Much of the U.S. reporting about the fracas made it appear as if Europeans just don't get it -- again. They struggle with immigration. They struggle with religion. They struggle with respect for minorities. And in the end they find their cities burning, as evidenced in Paris. Bill Clinton even detected an "anti-Islamic prejudice" and equated it with a previous "anti-Semitic prejudice."
The former president has turned the argument upside down. In this jihad over humor, tolerance is disdained by people who demand it of others. The authoritarian governments that claim to speak on behalf of Europe's supposedly oppressed Muslim minorities practice systematic repression against their own religious minorities. They have radicalized what was at first a difficult question. Now they are asking not for respect but for submission. They want non-Muslims in Europe to live by Muslim rules. Does Bill Clinton want to counsel tolerance toward intolerance?
On Friday the State Department found it appropriate to intervene. It blasted the publication of the cartoons as unacceptable incitement to religious hatred. It is a peculiar moment when the government of the United States, which likes to see itself as the home of free speech, suggests to European journalists what not to print.
True.
There is of course a totally logical explanation why the United States have reacted by criticising the cartoonists and newspapers, instead of standing up for freedom of speech. I can spell it out in four letters: I-R-A-Q. The US and the British governments are scared that the outrage over these cartoons will make the situation even more intolerable in Iraq, by turning the population totally against the coalition forces.
Tactically understandable, maybe, but the irony is thick when we at the same time hear from President Bush that the American soldiers in Iraq are fighting for freedom.
11:26:19 PM 
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More 'revenge cartoons', this time from a Tehran newspaper wanting to print Holocaust cartoons.
Iran's biggest-selling newspaper has chosen to tackle the West's ideals of "freedom of expression" by launching a competition to find the 12 "best" cartoons about the Holocaust, the Associated French Press reported on Monday.
Farid Mortazavi, graphics editor for Tehran's Hamshahri newspaper, said that the deliberately inflammatory contest would test out how committed Europeans were to the concept freedom of expression.
Yes, the murder of six million people is really such a great topic for humour. Ha ha.
As I wrote below, such grisly spectacles just inform us what a sick culture the Islamic extremists live in. Many of us already knew that, but thanks to this 'retaliation' it is now becoming apparent for more and more westerners who earlier made all sorts of excuses for Islamo-fascists.
Which just shows us all how valuable freedom of speech really is, and how utterly obsolete central Europe's laws against Holocaust denial is today. Let's know what those people really think!
We Norwegians have long known from our local folklore that trolls burst when exposed to sunlight.
9:46:46 PM
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 All right. How the heck did street thugs in Gaza even know what a Norwegian or a Danish flag looked like, even less find one to burn? Well, the business spirit of the locals has not been entirely crushed under decades of corruption.
When entrepreneur Ahmed Abu Dayya first heard that Danish caricatures of the Prophet Mohammad were being reprinted across Europe, he knew exactly what his customers in Gaza would want: flags to burn.
Abu Dayya ordered 100 hard-to-find Danish and Norwegian flags for his Gaza City shop and has been doing a swift trade.
"I do not take political stands. It is all business," he said in an interview. "But this time I was offended by the assault on the Prophet Mohammad."
Imagine if all that local enterprise and imagination had been turned to something useful. Then we'd be deluged in cellphones from Palestine, not Finland, and Arab, not Japanese, cars.
9:28:35 PM
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When Danish imams went on a tour to the Middle East to raise a firestorm against the country they live in, they brought with them the twelve cartoons we know so well. They also brought with them three other cartoons, never printed in any known newspaper, and presented them as if they had been published in Denmark. No doubt the fake cartoons, one showing Mohammad as a pedophile devil, one showing a Muslim being shagged by a dog during prayer, and a third showing Mohammad, allegedly, with a pig's snout.
Blogger NeanderNews has discovered the true story behind the alleged 'pig Mohammad' drawing!
You just have to read this; it is absolutely astonishing!
Via Michelle Malkin.
9:16:48 PM
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Demonstrators, better armed than most demonstrators I have heard about, today attacked Norwegian soldiers in an ISAF/ NATO base in Maymana, western Afghanistan. There were 34 Norwegian soldiers, and also Finnish personnel, in the camp, which was attacked by an estimated 300 'demonstrators,' who threw grenades and opened small arms fire against the soldiers.
Six Norwegian soldiers were injured, two of them are hospitalized after grenade fragment injuries. Fifteen others were injured, including random passers-bys, and four 'demonstrators' were killed.
The camp asked for backup from British forces nearby, as well as F-16s which tried to frighten the protesters with low overflights.
As far as I have seen from the reports, Norwegian soldiers did not return lethal fire against the protesters, unlike Afghan police.
Showing a rare display of some backbone, Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg was most emphatic that Norwegian soldiers in Afghanistan will not be withdrawn.
At the same time, Norway's embassy in Tehran, Iran has been subject to mob attacks. Stones and at least one firebomb was thrown against the building, but the only visible damage is some broken windows. The embassy was already evacuated.
It is interesting to note that Norwegian journalists in Tehran, like Dagbladet's, report that people in the streets are saying that this attack embarrasses them and their country. The thugs, numbered at around fifty, are just a few people who don't know what they are doing and 'just follow orders' from up high.
Iran's authorities, who have the most to gain by everyone in the world from this cartoon war, are so obviously desperate to keep the fires burning to gain support for its nuclear confrontation. The timing of this entire incident coincides remarkably well with the showdown between the west and Iran.
9:07:22 PM
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The infamous Mohammad cartoons have come to America:
The Philadelphia Inquirer became the first major American newspaper to publish any of the caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad on Saturday, prompting a small protest outside the newspaper's offices yesterday morning.
Kudos to them, and the New York Sun who published the drawings earlier.
If the crazy protests had rescinded by now, I would say there any editor choosing to publish these cartoons would risk suspicion of just doing it for the sake of offense. But this story is made huge, and important, by the extremists themselves. If angry Muslims had really wanted these cartoons to go away, they would have ignored them.
Well, at least most flag-burners in the Middle East already know what an American flag looks like! They must feel like really coming home to the familiar after burning those exotic flags from two obscure countries in northern Europe.
8:49:01 PM
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A muslim cartoonist in Islamabad 'strikes back' against the Danish Mohammad cartoons with a bit of anti-Semittism: Of course it was the jooos who were really behind those cartoons.
What a remarkably original idea. Did you think that up all by yourself?
It is one of a number of 'revenge' cartoons made by cartoonists in Pakistan and published in VG.
Now I am sure everybody in the west will go completely bonkers and run out in the streets to burn Pakistani flags. In case you have no idea what it looks like, you can see it on the picture below (from Birmingham, England).
Well, somehow, I don't expect the outrage to be extensive. I don't think Pakistan's green flag is very much in danger of being burned. I think their embassies are safe from us (no guarantees about the Islamists, of course).
The hate propaganda of those Muslim cartoonists, who exercised their right to 'free speech' as long as it agrees with local religious dogma, simply says nothing about the rest of the world and a heck of a lot of unflattering things about their own culture.
8:39:58 PM
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© Copyright 2006 Jan Haugland.
Last update: 01.03.2006; 16:49:25.
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