Articles Posted by Gritty
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Traditional Islam teaches that Muslims must call people to accept the faith or at least submit to the Islamic social order -- that is dawah. If they refuse, Muslims must fight them -- jihad. This is based on numerous passages of the Qur'an and Islamic tradition, including this one. Says the Prophet Muhammad: Fight in the name of Allah and in the way of Allah. Fight against those who disbelieve in Allah. Make a holy war . . . When you meet your enemies who are polytheists, invite them to three courses of action. If they respond to any one...
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A Tunisian man who was trained by Al-Qaeda in Afghanistan has been charged in Germany with trying to form a group there that would attack American and Jewish targets. Where did he go to find recruits for this endeavor? You guessed it — to a mosque:The prosecutors' office said the 33-year-old man, named only as Ihsan G., had tried to recruit fellow-militants at a Berlin mosque to set off a series of bombs around the time of the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq last March. This from Reuters, with thanks to LGF.And why did Ihsan want to attack Americans and Jews?...
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With the firestorm of debate over President Bush's immigration plan we've heard very little public airing of a factor that concerns many opponents of relaxed immigration policies: the changes to our culture they are certain to bring about.Most are afraid to express publicly their anxiety over such changes. Why? Because opposition to these policies for many other legitimate reasons is enough to invite unfounded accusations of nativism. But if you outright admit your affinity for the unique American culture and your fear that unduly relaxed immigration policies (coupled with inattention to assimilation) might dilute it, you are sure to brand...
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NEWARK, Jan. 6 — State researchers on Tuesday unveiled their work so far on developing a childproof "smart gun," while members of the state's Congressional delegation said they would seek federal research grants to help advance the technology, which is intended to revolutionize gun safety. (Snip) ... the current model of the handgun they have developed has 16 sensors built into the handle, which holds not a bullet clip, but electronics. The automatic handgun that they are developing uses electronically fired ammunition that is stored in the weapon's barrel rather than in the handle. (Snip) One key feature of the...
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Investigators in Mecklenburg County ended the year with a record 25 outstanding murder warrants, most for suspects with ties to others countries, authorities said. The record number of fugitives comes even as the number of homicides Charlotte-Mecklenburg last year remained statistically flat compared with 2002. Police investigated 66 homicides, roughly half of the record-high 129 slayings in 1993. Police say 22 of the fugitives have ties to other countries, including El Salvador, Mexico, Laos and Jamaica, raising the possibility that the suspects may have fled the United States. They are charged in 27 slayings, most of them since 2000. Charlotte-Mecklenburg...
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In my last column, I referenced a memo prepared by Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith, in which he listed 50 items of connection between Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein. The memo was prepared for the Senate Intelligence Committee and was leaked to The Weekly Standard. The column prompted the usual responses, including an agitated letter to the editor linking me to Goebbels. But, I also received a more rational e-mail demanding a retraction and apology. The demand was based on a quote from the Defense Department, issued just after publication of the Feith memo, stating "News reports that the...
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As soon as a group of fellow bikers pulled the handlebars out of his abdomen, Brian Shipwash wanted to make sure he did one more thing in case he died from the motorcycle accident. So he reached into his pocket and pulled out a small box, broken and blood-spattered, with a ring inside and asked his girlfriend, Shandra Miller, to marry him. She said yes. "I said, 'Shandra, the reason we were going to Pilot Mountain today was so I could propose,'" Shipwash said Monday while recovering in his room at Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center in Winston-Salem. "I...
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A 34-year-old man was shot in the leg Saturday morning after he broke into his ex-wife's house and hit her in the face, Henderson County Sheriff's Department officials said.. The man, who has not been identified, broke into the house at 181 Willow Bend at about 11 a.m. after making harassing phone calls to the residence, said Lt. Tim Gordon. The man entered the two-story Beechwood Lakes home, uninvited, through an unlocked front door, he said. As the man's ex-wife was dialing 911, the man hit her in the face and knocked the phone from her hand, Gordon said. Another...
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While many graduates of the U.S. Naval Academy have spent 2003 defending our nation in Iraq, in Afghanistan or on ships at sea, lawyers for the American Civil Liberties Union have been plotting an act of cultural terrorism against the Navy here at home.The ACLU is targeting the voluntary lunchtime prayer that has been a tradition at the Naval Academy since its founding.In the ACLU's view, consenting adults have a right to do just about anything they want except say grace in a government cafeteria. Consensual sodomy, it believes, is a sacred right, while consensual public prayer is a sorry...
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The American Civil Liberties Union filed a federal lawsuit Friday against a Colorado Springs high school for refusing to recognize a club that includes gays. The lawsuit said the school has repeatedly refused to recognize the Palmer High Gay-Straight Alliance. As a result, the group may not meet on school property on the same terms as other groups, cannot post club information at the school and is omitted from the school's yearbook. Mark Silverstein, legal director of the Colorado ACLU, said similar clubs are operating at 50 high schools in Colorado, and that federal law requires schools to grant equal...
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Seven pit bulls escaped from their owner's home and mauled an 82-year-old neighbor to death Friday. Alice Broom died at Munroe Regional Medical Center in Ocala, officials told the Ocala Star-Banner for its Saturday editions. Broom was found by the dogs' owner, Robert Freeman, 67. He said the dogs were attacking the woman when he arrived, and speculated that the attack had gone on for at least 10 minutes. The dogs were seized by county animal control officials. Freeman, who was not immediately charged with a crime, said he told county officers to destroy the dogs. Broom's daughter Mary Alice...
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In the Democratic presidential candidates' debate in Des Moines, Iowa, on Nov. 24, Sen. John Edwards (D-N.C.), in his closing remarks, said, "We are the party that believes in lifting people up, not looking down on them. We're the party that believes in bringing people together, not tearing them apart. We are the party that believes that the family you're born into and the color of your skin should never control your destiny." This was less than a week after Sen. Kennedy (D-Mass.) referred to California Supreme Court Justice Janice Rogers Brown as a "Neanderthal." Now, whenever Kennedy calls people...
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PENROSE -- A more than four-year standoff between a metal stamping plant owner and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has apparently ended in favor of plant owner Steve McNabb. On Monday the EPA withdrew a complaint and compliance order against American Carolina Stamping, which McNabb and his wife, Janet, own. The order stemmed from a 1999 raid by the EPA Criminal Investigations Division agents. The order charged the plant with hazardous waste violations, including failing to make a hazardous waste determination, receipt and storage of hazardous waste without a permit and disposal of hazardous waste without a permit. Some counts...
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Suppose you had a headache, and I offered you a capsule from a jar. The jar has 99 capsules containing aspirin, and one capsule with powdered sugar. So, if you swallow a capsule, your chance of an undesirable result is only 1 in 100. Are you willing to take the risk? Now, keeping the same odds, would you take a pill from a jar with 99 aspirin capsules and 1 capsule containing a lethal dose of cyanide? Notice how the odds are the same, but the catastrophic nature of a bad selection causes a different response. This is the nature...
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Where's Charlton Heston when you need him? All across America, 12-year-old boys should be grasping their toy chests and vowing, in the words of the former National Rifle Association president, "From my cold, dead hands."The recent scare caused by a toy gun that closed down a congressional building has prompted Brooklyn Democratic Congressman Ed Towns to declare a new urgency to passing his proposed ban on "realistic looking" toy guns. His bill would "ban toys which in size, shape or overall appearance resemble real handguns." Next Towns will be after "realistic looking" daggers, bows and arrows, battle axes and lightsabers...
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It could have been Howard Dean's best week. It now looks like it was his worst.On Nov. 1 Dean for at least the third time said that he wants "to be the candidate for guys with Confederate flags in their pickup trucks." He'd said it at least twice before, according to The New York Times last winter.But this time it got noticed and the Democratic Party's antibodies attacked Dean like he was a virus.Three days later, during a debate sponsored by CNN and the cloyingly liberal youth group, Rock the Vote, Dean was asked to explain himself. How could blacks...
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In Texas, a U.S. District judge decreed that any student uttering the word "Jesus" at his school's graduation would be arrested and locked up. "And make no mistake," announced Judge Samuel B. Kent, "the court is going to have a United States marshal in attendance at the graduation. If any student offends this court, that student will be summarily arrested and will face up to six months incarceration in the Galveston County Jail for contempt of court." In Missouri, when fourth-grader Raymond Raines bowed his head in prayer before his lunch in the cafeteria of Waring Elementary School in...
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Zenon Kiszko's name or the role he played in the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe probably won't make it into any history books. Mr. Kiszko, the Communist Party's No. 2 man in Poland and "speaker" of the nominal parliament, certainly didn't know he was playing such a role in late 1962 and early 1963, but he was. Mr. Kiszko held veto power over key church appointments. He already had nixed at least six of Cardinal Stefan Wyszynski's nominees to fill the important See of Krakow in southern Poland. In what has to be one of history's most monumental miscalculations,...
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Neil Postman was a master at spotting ironies in life. But even he might have been startled to note that his death, at 72, came within hours of the election of Arnold Schwarzenegger as governor of California. Postman, of course, was the author in 1985 of the prescient book Amusing Ourselves to Death. In it, he alluded in detail to the American public's growing appetite for entertainment in place of serious discourse. To point right now to the media circus that helped propel Mr. Schwarzenegger to his rousing California victory a couple of weeks ago is to belabor the obvious....
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We are presently fighting World War IV. So say a number of scholars and military experts, particularly former CIA director James Woolsey. He says the Cold War between the Western democracies and global Communism was actually World War III. The Korean and Vietnam wars were combat theaters in this larger conflict, which included guerrilla wars in Latin America and Africa, espionage and counterespionage, diplomatic and ideological warfare, all conducted in the shadow of a nuclear standoff. The current war on terrorism is also global in scale, with a multitude of fronts: the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in the Middle East; the Pakistan-India...
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