Who needs Megan Fox when we have Rosie Huntington Whiteley?

From the pages of The King Abdullah Gazette:

The religion of "darwinism" makes the Crutch of Scatology look downright rational.

Liberals' View of Darwin Unable to Evolve
by Ann Coulter

Amid the hoots at Republican presidential candidate Rick Perry for saying there were "gaps" in the theory of evolution, the strongest evidence for Darwinism presented by these soi-disant rationalists was a 9-year-old boy quoted in The New York Times.

After his mother had pushed him in front of Perry on the campaign trail and made him ask if Perry believed in evolution, the trained seal beamed at his Wicked Witch of the West mother, saying, "Evolution, I think, is correct!"

That's the most extended discussion of Darwin's theory to appear in the mainstream media in a quarter-century. More people know the precepts of kabala than know the basic elements of Darwinism.

There's a reason the Darwin cult prefers catcalls to argument, even with a 9-year-old at the helm of their debate team.

Darwin's theory was that a process of random mutation, sex and death, allowing the "fittest" to survive and reproduce, and the less fit to die without reproducing, would, over the course of billions of years, produce millions of species out of inert, primordial goo.

The vast majority of mutations are deleterious to the organism, so if the mutations were really random, then for every mutation that was desirable, there ought to be a staggering number that are undesirable.

Otherwise, the mutations aren't random, they are deliberate -- and then you get into all the hocus-pocus about "intelligent design" and will probably start speaking in tongues and going to NASCAR races.

We also ought to find a colossal number of transitional organisms in the fossil record -- for example, a squirrel on its way to becoming a bat, or a bear becoming a whale. (Those are actual Darwinian claims.)

But that's not what the fossil record shows. We don't have fossils for any intermediate creatures in the process of evolving into something better. This is why the late Stephen Jay Gould of Harvard referred to the absence of transitional fossils as the "trade secret" of paleontology. (Lots of real scientific theories have "secrets.")

If you get your news from the American news media, it will come as a surprise to learn that when Darwin first published "On the Origin of Species" in 1859, his most virulent opponents were not fundamentalist Christians, but paleontologists.

Unlike high school biology teachers lying to your children about evolution, Darwin was at least aware of what the fossil record ought to show if his theory were correct. He said there should be "interminable varieties, connecting together all the extinct and existing forms of life by the finest graduated steps."

But far from showing gradual change with a species slowly developing novel characteristics and eventually becoming another species, as Darwin hypothesized, the fossil record showed vast numbers of new species suddenly appearing out of nowhere, remaining largely unchanged for millions of years, and then disappearing.

Darwin's response was to say: Start looking! He blamed a fossil record that contradicted his theory on the "extreme imperfection of the geological record."

One hundred and fifty years later, that record is a lot more complete. We now have fossils for about a quarter of a million species.

But things have only gotten worse for Darwin.

Thirty years ago (before it was illegal to question Darwinism), Dr. David Raup, a geologist at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago, said that despite the vast expansion of the fossil record: "The situation hasn't changed much."

To the contrary, fossil discoveries since Darwin's time have forced paleontologists to take back evidence of evolution. "Some of the classic cases of Darwinian change in the fossil record," Raup said, "such as the evolution of the horse in North America, have had to be discarded or modified as a result of more detailed information."

The scant fossil record in Darwin's time had simply been arranged to show a Darwinian progression, but as more fossils were discovered, the true sequence turned out not to be Darwinian at all.

And yet, more than a century later, Darwin's groupies haven't evolved a better argument for the lack of fossil evidence.

To explain away the explosion of plants and animals during the Cambrian Period more than 500 million years ago, Darwiniacs asserted -- without evidence -- that there must have been soft-bodied creatures evolving like mad before then, but left no fossil record because of their squishy little microscopic bodies.

Then in 1984, "the dog ate our fossils" excuse collapsed, too. In a discovery The New York Times called "among the most spectacular in this century," Chinese paleontologists discovered fossils just preceding the Cambrian era.

Despite being soft-bodied microscopic creatures -- precisely the sort of animal the evolution cult claimed wouldn't fossilize and therefore deprived them of crucial evidence -- it turned out fossilization was not merely possible in the pre-Cambrian era, but positively ideal.

And yet the only thing paleontologists found there were a few worms. For 3 billion years, nothing but bacteria and worms, and then suddenly nearly all the phyla of animal life appeared within a narrow band of five million to 10 million years.

Even the eye simply materializes, fully formed, in the pre-Cambrian fossil record.

Jan Bergstrom, a paleontologist who examined the Chinese fossils, said the Cambrian Period was not "evolution," it was "a revolution."

So the Darwiniacs pretended they missed the newspaper that day.

Intelligent design scientists look at the evidence and develop their theories; Darwinists start with a theory and then rearrange the evidence.

These aren't scientists. They are religious fanatics for whom evolution must be true so that they can explain to themselves why they are here, without God. (It's an accident!)

Any evidence contradicting the primitive religion of Darwinism -- including, for example, the entire fossil record -- they explain away with non-scientific excuses like "the dog ate our fossils."

Here is more brilliance from Ann:

The Flash Mob Mentality of Scientific Inquiry

Amanda Knox: The New Mumia!

Dumbass Heretics of the Day.

I'm guessing you morons were never taught how Stalin slaughtered all the Mennonites with whom he was entrusted.

Don't worry. Us militaristic types will continue to protect your right to be dumbasses until we're all killed. Then you can fight the bad guys with protestantism.

From NBCWashington.com:

Goshen College Bans "Too Violent" National Anthem

Tiny Goshen College in Indiana has banned the "The Star Spangled Banner: at all sporting events because the Mennonite school's president considers the National Anthem's words to be too violent.

The 1,000-student school had already banned the words last year, but the band could still play the music for patriots in attendance. Now, the school has banned the song entirely, according to NBC Sports.

The school’s board of directors told college President Jim Brenneman to “find an alternative to playing the National Anthem that fits with sports tradition, that honors country and that resonates with Goshen College’s core values and respects the views of diverse constituencies.”

Brenneman was okay with that.

“I am committed to retaining the best of what it means to be a Mennonite college, while opening the doors wider to all who share our core values,” Brenneman said. “And I invite others to join us at Goshen College as we make peace in all of its forms, even with the national anthem.”

Art professor John Blosser told The Goshen News that there is much national pride at the school, but that most people aren't going to blindly accept what the country does.

NBC Sports' Rick Chandler weighed in, saying: "I suppose we could have followed the example of the Mennonites and simply fled, giving the nation back to the British. But then we’d all be playing cricket."

Tragedy strikes the Kontinental League.

Please pray for all their souls.

From AP via Yahoo! News:

Russian jet crash kills 43, many top hockey stars

TUNOSHNA, Russia (AP) — A private Russian jet carrying a top ice hockey team slammed into a riverbank moments after takeoff Wednesday, killing at least 43 people in one of the worst plane crashes ever involving a sports team.

Both Russia and the world of hockey were left stunned by the deaths of so many international stars in one catastrophic event. Two other people on board were critically injured.

The Russian Emergency Situations Ministry said the Yak-42 plane crashed into the shores of the Volga River immediately after leaving the airport near the western city of Yaroslavl, 150 miles (240 kilometers) northeast of Moscow. The weather was sunny and clear at the time. Russian media said the plane struggled to gain altitude and then crashed into a signal tower, shattering into pieces.

Russian television showed a flaming fragment of the plane in the river as divers worked feverishly to recover bodies.

The plane was carrying the Lokomotiv ice hockey team from Yaroslavl to Minsk, the capital of Belarus, where the team was to play Thursday against Dinamo Minsk in the opening game of the season for the Kontinental Hockey League. The ministry said it had 45 people on board, including 37 passengers and eight crew.

The Emergency Ministry said Czech players Josef Vasicek, Karel Rachunek and Jan Marek, Swedish goalie Stefan Liv, Canadian coach Brad McCrimmon, Latvian defenseman Karlis Skrastins and defenseman Ruslan Salehi of Belarus were among those killed. Slovakian national team captain Pavol Demitra, who played in the NHL for the St. Louis Blues and the Vancouver Canucks, was also among the dead, officials said.

"Though it occurred thousands of miles away from our home arenas, this tragedy represents a catastrophic loss to the hockey world — including the NHL family, which lost so many fathers, sons, teammates and friends who at one time excelled in our League," NHL Commissioner Gary Bettman said in a statement.

Russian NHL star Alex Ovechkin tweeted: "I'm in shock!!!!!R.I.P ..."

Officials said Russian player Alexander Galimov survived the crash along with a crewmember.

"Their state of health is very grave. But there is still some hope," said Alexander Degyatryov, chief doctor at Yaroslavl's Solovyov Hospital.

The crash comes on top of an already mournful year for the NHL in which three of the league's enforcers were found dead: Derek Boogaard, Rick Rypien and recently retired Wade Belak.

The cause of the crash was not immediately apparent, but Russian news agencies cited unnamed local officials as saying it may have been caused by technical problems.

More than 2,000 mourning fans wearing jerseys and scarves and waving team flags gathered in the evening outside Yaroslavl Lokomotiv's stadium to pay their respects. Riot police were also present as fans chanted sport songs in memory of the athletes.

Yaroslavl governor Sergei Vakhrukov promised the crowd that the Lokomotiv team would be rebuilt from scratch, prompting anger from some fans at a perceived lack of respect for the dead.

Russia was hoping to showcase Yaroslavl as a modern and vibrant city this week at an international forum attended by heads of state, including Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, so the crash came as a particularly bitter blow.

In recent years, Russia and the other former Soviet republics have had some of the world's worst air traffic safety records. Experts blame the poor safety record on the age of the aircraft, weak government controls, poor pilot training and a cost-cutting mentality.

The plane that crashed Wednesday was built in 1993 and belonged to a small Moscow-based Yak Service company.

Swarms of police and rescue crews rushed to Tunoshna, a ramshackle village with a blue-domed church on the banks of the Volga River 10 miles (15 kilometers) east of Yaroslavl. One of the plane's engines could be seen poking out of the river and a flotilla of boats combed the water for bodies. Divers struggled to heft the bodies of large, strong athletes in stretchers up the muddy, steep riverbank.

Resident Irina Prakhova saw the plane going down, then heard a loud bang and saw a plume of smoke.

"It was wobbling in flight, it was clear that something was wrong," said Prakhova, who said she was on her way to a local pump to collect buckets of water. "I saw them pulling bodies to the shore, some still in their seats with seatbelts on."

Lokomotiv Yaroslavl is a leading force in Russian hockey and came third in the KHL last year. It was also a three-time Russian League champion in 1997, 2002 and 2003.

McCrimmon, who took over as coach in May, was most recently an assistant coach with the Detroit Red Wings, and played for years in the NHL for Boston, Philadelphia, Detroit, Hartford and Phoenix.

The KHL is an international club league that pits together teams from Russia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Latvia and Slovakia.

A cup match between hockey teams Salavat Yulaev and Atlant in the central Russian city of Ufa was called off midway after news of the crash was announced by Kontinental Hockey League chief Alexander Medvedev. Russian television showed an empty arena in Ufa as grief-stricken fans abandoned the stadium.

"We will do our best to ensure that hockey in Yaroslavl does not die, and that it continues to live for the people that were on that plane," said Russian Ice Hockey Federation President Vladislav Tretyak.

Tomas Kral, the president of the Czech ice hockey association, was shocked to hear the news.

"Jan Marek, Karel Rachunek, and Josef Vasicek contributed greatly to the best successes of our ice hockey in the recent years, first of all to the golden medals at the world championships in 2005 and 2010," Kral said. "The were excellent players, but also great friends and personalities. That's how we will remember them."

Medvedev has announced plans to take aging Soviet-built planes out of service starting next year. The short- and medium-range Yak-42 has been in service since 1980 and about 100 are still being used by Russian carriers.

In June, another Russian passenger jet crashed in the northwestern city of Petrozavodsk, killing 47 people. The crash of that Tu-134 plane has been blamed on pilot error.

In past plane crashes involving sports teams, 75 Marshall University football players, coaches, fans and airplane crew died in Huntington, West Virginia, on Nov. 14, 1970, on the way home from a game. Thirty-six of the dead were players.

Thirty members of the Uruguayan rugby club Old Christians were killed in a crash in the Andes in 1972.

In 1979, a plane heading from Soviet republic of Uzbekistan to Minsk carrying the Pakhtakor Tashkent soccer team collided mid-air with another passenger plane, killing 178 people. Seventeen members of the Pakhtakor team were killed.

The entire 18-member U.S. figure skating team died in a crash on their way to the 1961 world championships in Brussels.

In 1949, the Torino soccer team lost 18 players near Turin, Italy,

A plane crash in 1950 near the Russian city of Sverdlov, now called Yekaterinburg, claimed the lives of 13 players and officials in the air force's ice hockey squad, while the Munich air crash of 1958 cost eight Manchester United players their lives.

Fyodor previews our slavemaster's much anticipated speech on "jobs".

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

Blast From The Past! The Great Cartoon War continues apace.

Botophucket's recent attempt to censor your humble narrator brings to mind the last time it happened...

From January 29, 2007:

Take that, Photobucket Nazis!

Sure, they have the right to lay down, spread their legs and take it from the goat rapists and their left-fascist Western allies like $2 whores...BUT THAT'S NOT MY PROBLEM!

Behold the cartoons that terrify non-moderate mohammedans and Western pansies alike:

I do not know how long it will take the moral cowards from Photobucket to find these and take them down as they did the last time, but I can change the file names and put them up again just as quickly.


As you can see from the stories below, the Great Cartoon War continues into the Year of Our Lord 2011:

Cartoon Of Prophet Muhammad Dogs Swedish Artist

Swedish artist Lars Vilks has been a virtual prisoner in his own home for weeks now, ever since a suicide bomber attacked Sweden's capital Stockholm. - NPR

Hee-hee! "Dog"? Is there a subversive right-wing sleeper agent at National Pansy Radio?

Everyone Draw Mohammed

Everyone Draw Mohammed Day 2011! Keep sending me cartoons, links and videos, and i will keep publishing them. Stand up for Freedom of Speech and offend some Islamofascists ...

- everyonedrawmohammed.blogspot.com

From the New York Review of Books blog:

Why Are the Muhammad Cartoons Still Inciting Violence?

More than five years after Danish artist Kurt Westergaard published controversial cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad, lives continue to be lost and—if we are to believe the police and intelligence agencies of dozens of countries—assassinations are still being attempted and plotted because Muslims have been angered by the display of such images. In December, a suicide bomber inspired by other insulting drawings of Muhammad attacked a busy shopping street in Stockholm; on Friday, a court in Copenhagen sentenced a Somali man to nine years in prison for attempting to kill Westergaard.
Traditional Islamic doctrine offers little explanation for this violent response. There is no explicit ban on figurative art in the Quran, and representations of Muhammad, though absent from public spaces, appear in illuminated manuscripts up until the seventeenth century; they still feature in the popular iconography of Shiism, where antipathy to pictures of the Prophet is much less prevalent. There are numerous such depictions—faceless or veiled as an indication of his holiness, or even depicted with facial features—in manuscript collections. It is only quite recently that Muslims living in the west have begun lodging objections to the reproduction of these images in books. The objections are by no means confined to a militant fringe. Populist sentiment—fuelled by the Salafist or “fundamentalist” trends emanating from the Gulf and Saudi Arabia, has produced a near consensus among a majority of Muslims that representations of the Prophet and other holy figures are forbidden by Islam.
All the more puzzling, the recent iconophobia in popular Islam has largely ignored the spread of such images on the Web. Indeed, all the images that have been cited in the cartoons controversy are readily accessible online, including Westergaard’s notorious cartoon published by the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten depicting Muhammad with a bomb in his turban, and a more recent one by Swedish artist Lars Vilks showing him as a dog, modeled on the canine sculptures that since 2006 have been installed on Swedish traffic circles.
What has been missed in the recent upheaval is that Muslim piety and Muslim militancy have been at odds. Salafists yearning for a return to the “pure Islam” of the Prophet’s era are not necessarily the same as those seeking holy war against western influences, though there may be some overlap between the two. The pious Salafist response is exemplified by Abdul Haqq Baker, imam of the Brixton Mosque in London, who says that believers should avert their gaze from blasphemous images and desist from showing them around. The militants or jihadists have taken the opposite view, using the web to publicize the images while making threats against artists and publishers who dare to display them in a public gallery or on a printed page.

Policing the web is nearly impossible. In Pakistan and Bangladesh governments blocked access to the Internet after a Facebook group launched an “Everyone Draw Mohammed Day” last May. But the results were only local and temporary. Elsewhere, Islamic militants have launched cyber-attacks by hacking into computers, including Jyllands-Posten and Vilks’s personal website, but also others many with no connections to either. Danish victims of cyber-attacks in early 2006 included websites belonging to Girl Guide troops, school districts, private companies, and nursery schools, as well as the websites of government departments—part of a campaign of punitive actions against Danish institutions generally. Despite—or rather, because of—the furor, the images remain highly accessible.
This contradiction suggests a somewhat archaic and formalistic approach to the tools of communication and what constitutes private and public space. In a departure from the medieval conventions, the paper and ink of Marshall McLuhan’s Gutenberg Galaxy are now seen as vehicles of public expression: the shock provoked by a visual insult printed on the page of a journal or exhibited in public can easily be exploited by militants. Yet when the same images (or worse) appear on the Internet, any action aimed at protecting religious sensibilities will be thwarted because websites are often hosted anonymously and thus extremely difficult to shut down.
The self-appointed defenders of Islamic honor may seek redress or revenge by threatening artists and publishers, but thanks to the combined effects of television and the Internet, the main outcome of their efforts has been a quantum leap in the dissemination of the images pious Muslims find most offensive. By drawing attention to them the militants become accessories to the blasphemies they ostensibly seek to repress.
This comes as no surprise in an era of religious militancy in which the charge of blasphemy is used as a means of political arousal rather than a legal resource for defending the sacred. In Pakistan Salman Taseer, governor of the Punjab region, was assassinated in January, for daring to suggest that the country’s blasphemy laws, which human rights activists claim are routinely abused to persecute minorities or settle personal or family scores, should be abolished. Even in America, conservative and evangelical groups have objected to art works that challenge traditional notions of the sacred by using religious iconography in novel ways, thereby alerting the attention of philistine zealots. Examples include Andres Serrano’s Piss Christ (an image of a crucifix submerged in what appears to be urine) and Chris Ofili’s Holy Virgin Mary, with its image of an African Madonna crafted from the author’s trade-mark use of paint and elephant dung, with cherub-like images of female genitalia. Serrano received death threats, and in the Brooklyn Museum of Art, Ofili’s painting needed an armed guard and Perspex screen to protect it, after high-profile critics including Mayor Giuliani attacked the museum for showing it. Questioning received notions of the sacred is always dangerous.
The original controversy over the Muhammad cartoons arose in September 2005, when Jyllands-Posten published a number of images intended to satirize Islamic extremism, including Westergaard’s notorious caricature of Muhammad. A script on the turban displays in Arabic the shahada—the Islamic declaration of faith (“there is no god but Allah, Muhammad is the Messenger of Allah”). While Westergaard explained that he intended merely to call attention to the exploitation of Islam by terrorists and militants, the image could be taken to imply that Islam is in itself a religion of violence or a “terrorist faith.” Protests by Danish imams, spearheaded by one with an ultra-conservative Salafist background in Saudi Arabia, produced no results in Denmark, where freedom of speech is regarded as a fundamental right. The affair escalated after Muslim governments and inter-governmental organizations, whose legitimacy depends on being seen to protect the rights of Muslims, became involved.
The Danish imams took the offending images to Cairo and other Middle East capitals. The dossier included an image of Muhammad as a pedophile downloaded from a Christian evangelical website and a picture of a man wearing a pig-faced mask taken at a French food festival with no Islamic connections, neither of which had been published by Jyllands-Posten. The dossier was circulated by the Arab League, and at a special meeting in Mecca of the Organization of the Islamic Conference—an umbrella body comprising fifty-seven Islamic states and Muslim countries. The OIC passed a resolution condemning the insult to the Prophet and the use of freedom of expression as “a pretext to defame religions.”
At least 200 people—most of them Muslims —died in anti-Danish and more generally anti-Western and anti-Christian protests in various Muslim countries where the cartoons were republished (in a minority of cases), or as a result of television and press reports. Some were killed by police trying to control the demonstrations, others—as in the case of Nigeria—in clashes between Muslim and Christian mobs that broke out after demonstrations against the cartoons. In the Middle East a commercial boycott led to the removal of Danish goods from supermarket shelves: Arla Foods, one of the larger companies, estimated its losses in 2006 at $223 million. Danish embassies and consulates were attacked and burned in Syria, Lebanon, Afghanistan, Iran, Pakistan, Nigeria, and Indonesia.
After Yousuf al-Qaradawi, the Muslim Brotherhood preacher and host of a popular show on al-Jazeera television, called in February 2006 for a public “day of rage” against the cartoons, the riots escalated into generalized attacks on Western targets. To add fat to the fire, there were reports that Danish Neo-Nazis, in implicit collaboration with Muslim activists, were planning a public burning of the Quran (although in the event they were intercepted by Danish police). In Damascus, protestors torched the Norwegian as well as the Danish missions. And in Libya, where demonstrators stormed an Italian consulate, at least nine people died.
Despite public statements by the US government scolding the Danes for failing to respect religious sentiments, even American franchises such as Holiday Inn, Kentucky Fried Chicken, Pizza Hut, and McDonald’s were sacked or torched in Pakistan. What one Jyllands-Posten journalist had jauntily described as an exercise in “democratic electro-shock therapy” for Islamists had snowballed into a major international crisis.
The turmoil appeared to subside after the paper’s editor-in-chief issued an apology. (According to a cable released by WikiLeaks, under pressure from the United States and the Danish government, the paper also decided against republishing the cartoons on the first anniversary of the controversy, averting, as the US ambassador put it, “another potential crisis.”) But a new report from Stratfor, a private intelligence agency based in Austin, Texas, states that “the dust kicked up over the cartoon issue” is far from settled and is unlikely to be so soon. While working on its forecasts for 2011 the organization was struck by the number of recent plots involving the cartoon controversy, with groups such as al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula going to great lengths to keep the “topic burning in the consciousness of radical Islamists, whether they are lone wolves or part of an organized jihadist group.” There have been several attempts on the life of Kurt Westergaard and his wife, including by the Somali, said to be associated with the al-Shabbab group, who has just been convicted in Copenhagen. (In January, 2010, he broke into Westergaard’s home, and was shot and wounded by Danish police while pursuing the artist with an axe.)
The most recent of several terrorist plots described by Stratfor came to light on December 29, when police in Denmark and Sweden arrested five men with a variety of ties to Iraq, Lebanon, and Tunisia. The men were allegedly planning an armed assault on the offices of Jylland-Posten in Copenhagen and were said to have obtained a pistol and submachine gun equipped with a sound suppressor, and to possess flexible handcuffs—indicating that they intended to take hostages in a theatrical operation.
Other recent plots involving depictions of Muhammad include the March 2010 arrest in Ireland of seven people with Middle Eastern and North African backgrounds, in connection with an alleged plot to kill Lars Vilks, the Swedish artist who depicted Muhammad as a traffic-circle, or “roundabout,” dog. An American woman, Colleen LaRose—known by her on-line alias “Jihad Jane” was arrested by the FBI on returning to the US from Ireland in November. In early February, she pleaded guilty to a series of federal charges that included a plot to kill Vilks. It appears that her meetings in Ireland with the would-be assassins, whom she met through Internet chat-rooms, were monitored and watched by the FBI and Irish police.
One of the most alarming attacks so far connected with the cartoon controversy was the suicide-bombing in Stockholm on December 11 by Taimour Abdulwahab, an Iraqi-born Swedish citizen. (Fortunately the attack, which could have been devastating, was frustrated when his explosives went off prematurely, killing only himself.) In an e-mail sent to the Swedish News Agency shortly before his attempted atrocity, Abdulwahab referred explicitly to Vilks’s pictures, as well as to the presence of Swedish troops in Afghanistan.
The Stratfor report reveals the risks to which named artists who have dared to lampoon Muhammad have exposed themselves, raising difficult questions for editors torn between the fear of Muslim reprisals, and accusations of pandering to extremist prejudices. In November 2009, Yale University Press published The Cartoons that Shook the World, the definitive account of the controversy by Jytte Klausen, a Danish-born scholar of contemporary Islam who teaches at Brandeis University. Shortly before the book’s appearance the Press decided to remove all the images of Muhammad, including not only the cartoons, but such well-known historical images as an engraving from Gustav Doré’s version of Dante’s Divine Comedy depicting the punishment of Muhammad in the Eighth Circle of Hell.
The publisher defended its decision stating that “all” the authorities it had consulted had voiced “serious fears” that republication of the images would provoke more violence. But this was challenged by at least one consultant, the distinguished Islamic art historian Sheila Blair, who told the London Guardian that she had “strongly urged” the press to print the images. Suppressing them, she said, would “distort the historical record and bow to the biased view of some modern zealots who would deny that others at other times and places perceived and illustrated Muhammad in different ways.” In response to the Yale decision, Gary Hull, a professor at Duke University, has printed all the discarded images in Muhammad: The Banned Images, an illustrated book published by the Voltaire Press, which he founded for this purpose. The book, which is available on Amazon, can be downloaded on Kindle. Amazon has not been intimidated, and nor has Wikipedia, which has numerous entries on the controversy that include—as Yale could have pointed out—all the cartoons as well as numerous depictions of Muhammad from the historical repertory.
In 2008, Muslims protesting against the illustrations in a Wikipedia entry on Muhammad claimed to have collected nearly half a million signatures for an online petition objecting to the reproduction of an image of Muhammad taken from a seventeenth-century copy of a fourteenth-century Persian manuscript. Wikipedia rejected a compromise that would allow visitors to choose whether to view the pages, stating that it does not censor itself for the benefit of any one group.
While it may be true that traditional notions of free speech or expression, as displayed in material media such as paint, ink, canvas, and paper are under threat from militants insistent on denying the variegated richness of the Islamic artistic heritage, the dangers should not be exaggerated. The electronic word and image are not easily suppressed—especially if authors and artists choose to remain anonymous. The liveliest depictions of Muhammad currently available are on the “Jesus and Mo” website, an online comic strip about religion that has until now attracted little criticism or vitriol: no artist signature, no terrorist target.

The Mohammed Cartoon Dust Has Not Settled - STRATFOR

When one considers all of the people and places in the West targeted by transnational jihadists over the past few years, iconic targets such as New York’s Times Square, the London Metro and the Eiffel Tower come to mind. There are also certain target sets such as airlines and subways that jihadists focus on more than others. Upon careful reflection, however, it is hard to find any target set that has been more of a magnet for transnational jihadist ire over the past year than the small group of cartoonists and newspapers involved in the Mohammed cartoon controversy.

- STRATFOR.com


From Jihad Watch:

"Jihad Jamie" to plead guilty to aiding jihad terror plot to murder Motoonist
Throwing her life away to register her disapproval of a cartoon. An update on this story. "‘Jihad Jane’ conspirator to plead guilty: lawyer," by John Shiffman for the Philadephia Inquirer, March 4:

A Colorado woman will plead guilty in federal court in Philadelphia on Tuesday to a count of providing material aid to terrorists, her lawyer said Thursday.
Jamie Paulin-Ramirez of Leadville was charged in the same indictment as Colleen LaRose, the Pennsburg woman known as Jihad Jane.
LaRose pleaded guilty last month to participating in a plot to kill a Swedish artist who offended some Muslims by drawing a picture of Muhammad with the body of a dog. E-mails LaRose apparently sent show that she offered to use her identity - blond hair, Western face, and U.S. passport - to help extremists in Europe.
U.S. counterterrorism officials have called LaRose's 2009 arrest evidence of a new and alarming threat - an American-born woman's joining an Islamic terrorist conspiracy.
LaRose and Paulin-Ramirez began e-mailing each other in August 2009. According to the indictment, LaRose wrote that she was moving to Europe "to join the brothers and sisters," and Paulin-Ramirez responded, "I would love to go over there."
The women first met a month later, when, the government alleges, they arrived in Ireland to meet up with terrorists. As part of the plot, prosecutors said, Paulin-Ramirez married a co-conspirator the day she arrived in Ireland, a man she had never met....