Free Republic

In the days since President Obama’s highly touted “speech to the Muslim world,” a number of commentators have pointed out that Obama, a self-described “student of history,” managed to serve up a pastiche of half-truths, exaggerations, and utter nonsense about Islamic history, and that even in his supposedly gutsier moments — as when he criticized the treatment of women in Muslim societies — he was hardly as forceful as the circumstances warrant. It’s no coincidence that the commentators who have made these points have done so, almost without exception, not in major media organs but in places like Pajamas Media....

A Kos Kid gives it his best effort to be as blind and stupid as possible: Daily Kos: Is Islam Really Stuck in the 12th Century on Women’s Rights? After denying that there’s any problem for women in Islamic countries, Joshua Holland writes in the first comment: Who Knows? Hell, maybe women do fare a lot worse in Islamic culture than they do in other faiths. I’ve just never seen any hard evidence to support that claim. You haven’t seen any “hard evidence,” Joshua, because you haven’t looked. Ten worst countries for women. It’s a constant source of amazement to...

Bay Area complaints more than doubled from 2005 to 2006, reflecting national increase. Civil rights violations targeting Bay Area Muslims spiked last year, ranging from schoolyard taunts to deadly assaults, to routine citizenship applications strangled by government red tape. Reports more than doubled from 2005 to 2006, according to the Council on American-Islamic Relations. The nonprofit organization documented 246 incidents in 2006, up from 113 in 2005. The Bay Area numbers reflect national numbers, which show episodes of anti-Muslim bias jumping 25 percent. California accounted for nearly one-third of all the complaints. The report chronicles verbal and physical harassment and...

In the wake of the two bomb-rigged cars discovered in London and the flaming jeep that crashed into a Glasgow airport terminal, the terror threat level in Britain has been raised to critical. British authorities are continuing to search for suspects, and haven’t ruled out the possibility that more catastrophic attacks are being planned, and could be imminent. Authorities have noted similarities between these events and past jihad terror plots, are investigating a possible link between one of the would-be car bombers and Islamic jihad terrorist Dhiren Barot, who is serving a life sentence for an Al-Qaeda-backed plot to bomb...

May 07, 2007, 7:27 a.m. Islamic ApologeticsKaren Armstrong tells us to ignore history and doctrine, focus on platitudes about peace and love. By Raymond Ibrahim Islamic apologist extraordinaire Karen Armstrong is at it again. In an article entitled “Balancing the Prophet” published by the Financial Times, the self-proclaimed “freelance monotheist” engages in what can only be considered second-rate sophistry. The false statements begin in her opening paragraph: Ever since the Crusades, people in the west have seen the prophet Muhammad as a sinister figure.… The scholar monks of Europe stigmatised Muhammad as a cruel warlord who established the false...