This guy is a master at keeping his cool in the face of idiotic snark.

Here’s part 2.

Looks interesting - watch the whole thing:

Here’s the movie’s website.

The Western Standard is an Alberta based newspaper. It calls itself “Canada’s only conservative news source,” although libertarian is probably a more accurate description of its editorial perspective.

Last February the WS published the famous “Mohammed Cartoons.” Lots of Canadians flipped out over this, including some minions in the country’s thought police force.

The government decided early on not to prosecute anyone at the WS for violating Canada’s Orwellian hate crime statutes. But now the Human Rights Commission has started a fishing-expedition investigation - maybe the government is tying to get someone to say something incriminating, or maybe its just plain harassment.

The WS insisted on the right to video tape a recent interview of the publisher by some bureaucrat. Good stuff - watch all three:

Could this happen in the US? I hope not.

Via AoS

From today’s WSJ:

…During the fighting in 1947-1948, about three-fourths of a million Arabs fled or were driven (both are true in different places) from Israel and found refuge in the neighboring Arab countries. In the same period and after, a slightly greater number of Jews fled or were driven from Arab countries, first from the Arab-controlled part of mandatory Palestine (where not a single Jew was permitted to remain), then from the Arab countries where they and their ancestors had lived for centuries, or in some places for millennia. Most Jewish refugees found their way to Israel.

What happened was thus, in effect, an exchange of populations not unlike that which took place in the Indian subcontinent in the previous year, when British India was split into India and Pakistan. Millions of refugees fled or were driven both ways — Hindus and others from Pakistan to India, Muslims from India to Pakistan. Another example was Eastern Europe at the end of World War II, when the Soviets annexed a large piece of eastern Poland and compensated the Poles with a slice of eastern Germany. This too led to a massive refugee movement — Poles fled or were driven from the Soviet Union into Poland, Germans fled or were driven from Poland into Germany.

The Poles and the Germans, the Hindus and the Muslims, the Jewish refugees from Arab lands, all were resettled in their new homes and accorded the normal rights of citizenship. More remarkably, this was done without international aid. The one exception was the Palestinian Arabs in neighboring Arab countries.

The government of Jordan granted Palestinian Arabs a form of citizenship, but kept them in refugee camps. In the other Arab countries, they were and remained stateless aliens without rights or opportunities, maintained by U.N. funding. Paradoxically, if a Palestinian fled to Britain or America, he was eligible for naturalization after five years, and his locally-born children were citizens by birth. If he went to Syria, Lebanon or Iraq, he and his descendants remained stateless, now entering the fourth or fifth generation…

Alas, how different the world would be if more people accepted these simple facts.

An incredible piece by one refugee of Islamofascism about another. 

From today’s LAT:

As you read this, Ayaan Hirsi Ali sits in a safe house with armed men guarding her door. She is one of the most poised, intelligent and compassionate advocates of freedom of speech and conscience alive today, and for this she is despised in Muslim communities throughout the world. The details of her story bear repeating, as they illustrate how poorly equipped we are to deal with the threat of Muslim extremism in the West.

Hirsi Ali first fled to the Netherlands as a refugee from Somalia in 1992 after declining to submit to a forced marriage to a man she did not know. Once there, in hiding from her family, she began working as a cleaning lady. But this cleaning lady spoke Somali, Arabic, Amharic, Swahili, English and was quickly learning Dutch, so she soon found work as a translator for other Somali refugees, many of whom, like herself, were casualties of Islam…

…After attending the University of Leiden, Hirsi Ali began speaking publicly about the repression of women under Islam, and shortly thereafter she started receiving death threats from local Muslims. Her security situation eventually became so dire that she moved to the U.S. in 2002. However, she was soon contacted by Gerrit Zalm, then deputy prime minister of the Netherlands, who urged her to run for parliament. When Hirsi Ali voiced her security concerns, Zalm assured her that she would be given diplomatic protection wherever and whenever she needed it. She returned to the Netherlands with this assurance, won a seat in parliament and became a tireless advocate for women, for civil society and for reason.

The rest of her story is well known. In 2004, Hirsi Ali collaborated with Theo van Gogh on the film “Submission,” which examined the link between Islamic law and the suffering of millions of women under Islam. The reaction from the Muslim community was nothing short of psychopathic, and it confirmed the necessity of Hirsi Ali’s work and the reasonableness of her fears. Van Gogh, having declined bodyguards of his own, was gunned down and nearly decapitated on an Amsterdam street, and a letter threatening Hirsi Ali was staked to his chest with a butcher knife.

Hirsi Ali was immediately forced into hiding and moved from safe house to safe house, sometimes more than once a day, for months. Eventually, her security concerns drove her from the Netherlands altogether. She returned to the U.S., and the Dutch government has been paying for her protection here — that is, until it suddenly announced last week that it would no longer protect her outside the Netherlands, thereby advertising her vulnerability to the world.

Hirsi Ali may be the first refugee from Western Europe since the Holocaust. As such, she is a unique and indispensable witness to both the strength and weakness of the West: to the splendor of open society and to the boundless energy of its antagonists. She knows the challenges we face in our struggle to contain the misogyny and religious fanaticism of the Muslim world, and she lives with the consequences of our failure each day. There is no one in a better position to remind us that tolerance of intolerance is cowardice….

…The Dutch Parliament will be debating Hirsi Ali’s case this week. As it stands, the government’s decision to protect her only within the borders of the Netherlands is genuinely perverse. While the Dutch have complained about the cost of protecting Hirsi Ali in the United States, it is actually far more expensive for them to protect her in the Netherlands, as the risk to her is greatest there.

There is also the matter of broken promises: Hirsi Ali was persuaded to run for parliament and to become the world’s most visible and imperiled spokeswoman for the rights of Muslim women, on the understanding that she would be provided security for as long as she needed it. Zalm, in his capacity as both the deputy prime minister and the minister of finance, promised her such security without qualification. Most shamefully, Jan Peter Balkenende, the Dutch prime minister, has recommended that Hirsi Ali simply quit the Netherlands and has refused to grant her even a week’s protection outside the country, during which she might raise funds to hire security of her own. Is this a craven attempt to placate local Muslim fanatics? A warning to other Dutch dissidents not to stir up trouble by speaking too frankly about Islam? Or just pure thoughtlessness?…

…There is not a person alive more deserving of the freedoms of speech and conscience we take for granted in the West, nor is there anyone making a more courageous effort to defend them.

We’ve written about Hirsi Ali before (here, here, and here). 

One of the great myths of our time is that the world stood together with the US after the 911 attacks. Bush’s arrogance and stupidity subsequently turned the world against us. A few reminders:

CNN’s coverage of Palestinians celebrating on 911

MSNBC’s coverage of Palestinians celebrating on 911

Fox’s coverage of Palestinians celebrating on 911

Iran’s response to 911

“What we watched on the TVs regarding slamming of two planes into the New York Twin Towers, was in fact a make-believe scene,” said Iran’s Deputy Culture and Islamic Guidance Minister and head of Iran’s Culture, Art and Communications Research Center Mohammad-Hadi Homayoun in an address to the Iran-Russia Dialogue among Civilizations Conference in Moscow.

Homayoun stipulated that the sky-scrappers were destroyed through bomb explosions, adding that after massive media propaganda of the US the crusades began.

Many cite the Le Monde headline Nous sommes tous Américains (We Are All Americans Now), the idea being that the largest circulation liberal newspaper on the continent was declaring solidarity with the US. Anyone who read the actual article knows their point was somewhat more nuanced:

…The reality is more certainly that of a world with no counterbalance, physically destabilized, and thus more dangerous since there is no multipolar balance. And America, in the solitude of its power, in its status as the sole superpower, now in the absence of a Soviet counter-model, has ceased to draw other nations to itself; or more precisely, in certain parts of the globe, it seems to draw nothing but hate. In the regulated world of the Cold War, where the various kinds of terrorism were more or less aided by Moscow, a certain degree of control was still possible, and the dialogue between Moscow and Washington never stopped. In today’s monopolistic world, it is a new barbarism, apparently with no control, which seems to want to set itself up as a counter-power. Perhaps, even in Europe, from the Gulf War to the use of F-16s by the Israeli army against the Palestinians, we have underestimated the intensity of the hate, which, from the outskirts of Jakarta to those of Durban, among the rejoicing crowds in Nablus and Cairo, is focused against the United States.

But the reality is perhaps also that of an America whose own cynicism has caught up with. If Bin Laden, as the American authorities seem to think, really is the one who ordered the Sept. 11 attacks, how can we fail to recall that he was in fact trained by the CIA and that he was an element of a policy, directed against the Soviets, that the Americans considered to be wise? Might it not then have been America itself that created this demon…

Not exactly an expression of unalloyed empathy and support.

Finally, don’t forget what happened to a former US ambassador when he appeared just days after 911 on a talk show on the state owned network of probably our most important ally. Of the incident Frontpage wrote:

We all know about poor Philip Lader, former US Ambassador to the Court of St James who was reduced to tears on BBC ‘Question Time’ on 15 September 2001 as the moderator, Davis Dimbleby, sat and dispassionately watched a crazed studio audience stomping its feet and shouting anti-American epithets two days after the Trade Center and Pentagon attacks.

Allies wavered, the European press sneered, and people across the Middle East danced in the streets - that was the world’s response to 911. Issues like Iraq, Halliburton, Gitmo were appropriated post hoc to vindicate a pre-existing chauvinism.

ABC claims to have a copy of the CIA’s translation of Osama’s latest video diary. Some highlights:

…In the Vietnam War, the leaders of the White House claimed at the time that it was a necessary war…and during it Rumsfeld and his aides murdered two million villagers. And when Kennedy took over the presidency and deviated from the general line of policy drawn up for the White House and wanted to stop the unjust war, that angered the owners of the major corporations who where benefiting from its continuation. And so Kennedy was killed…

…Among the most capable…who speak to you on the topic of manufacturing public opinion is Noam Chomski…

…So in answer to the question about the causes of the Democrats’ failure to stop the war, I say: they are the same reasons which led to the failure of former president Kennedy to stop the Vietnam War. Those real power and influence are those with the most capital. And since the democratic system permits major corporations to back candidates…there shouldn’t be any cause for astonishment in the Democrats’ failure to stop the war…

…All of mankind is in danger because of global warming resulting to a large degree from the emissions of the factories of major corporations, yet despite that, the representatives of these corporations in the White House insist on not observing the Kyoto Accord…

…The capitalist system seeks to turn the entire world into a fiefdom of the major corporations under the label of “globalization” in order to protect democracy…

Chomsky, Vietnam, Global Warming - he even criticizes Bush for not giving the UN more authority in Iraq. With the exception of repeated invitations to accept Islam (which don’t in themselves sound all that crazy) everything could have been written by the typical American Leftist.

Question for the next youtube Democratic presidential debate - “Osama obviously wants to destroy America. What party do you think he wants to win in 08?”

Update 9/9/07:

David Brooks makes the same point on The News Hour.

LGF Headline:

Drunken Anti-Israel Climate Change Hooligans Who Love Hamas

From AP:

Police were confident of being able to contain the expected climax of the climate camp at Heathrow Airport.

Protesters, buoyed by an influx of new arrivals, promised 24 hours of direct action, starting from midday on Sunday.

The move came after 20 anarchists from the camp broke into a warehouse in Hayes, owned by Carmel Agrexco, an Israeli fruit and vegetable importer. Up to six were arrested on suspicion of burglary, police said.

Amos Orr, general manager of Agrexco UK, said: “They broke in. A lot of them were drunk, they broke doors, spread papers everywhere and they were very aggressive. They were singing about Hamas.”

We wrote previously about a children’s show on a government-operated TV channel in Gaza (government = Hamas). The show starred a Mickey Mouse look alike, subsequently killed on air (by a Jew, of course).

The mouse has been replaced by a big bee. Here the Nahoul the Bee teaches a lesson on cruelty to animals.

Via LGF

Pretty funny:

The musical, a parody of Islamic terrorists, is attracting protests already. Offended petitioners (calling for the British Government to condemn the production) claim all sorts of reasons: insensitive to victims of terrorism, incites religious strife, &c. In reality I think most just want the government to stop anyone from making fun of people who are fighting shooting war against Western Civilization.

I wonder if the release of The Great Dictator (Chaplin’s 1940 Hitler parody - his most successful film) was met with any organized protests. I doubt it. I don’t think it was as fashionable during that war to openly sympathize with our opponents.

And Nazis weren’t even that funny. I don’t recall any reports of Nazi wehrmacht soldiers dressing as women before going into battle to avoid detection, or Nazis using kids (or even retarded kids) as guidance systems for their ordinance. Living in caves, something about 72 virgins, getting their butts kicked in every engagement not involving women and children. These people are crying out for parody.