Free Republic

The pope blinked. He picked a fight with Islam. Then he gave Islam a victory. All of this was unnecessary. Pope Benedict XVI, an erudite theologian, decided he needed to play an academic game with Islam. In furtherance of open dialogue between world religions, he decided it would be helpful to quote a 14th-century Byzantine emperor’s disparagement of Mohammad. The Islamic world, apparently lacking the pope’s sophistication, responded violently. The Islamic world still operates on a 14th-century paradigm. In the Palestinian areas, Muslims started burning churches. Priests disappeared in Baghdad. There were Catholic priests still operating freely in Baghdad?A nun,...

I was planning to maintain a tasteful silence about the forced conversion of Fox newsmen Steve Centanni and Olaf Wiig. I expressed my gratitude at their release, and was going to let the humiliating subject lie.Others haven’t, however, so let’s go: Centanni and Wiig -- abducted, bound and blindfolded by armed Islamic terrorists in Gaza -- were told they had to convert to Islam.They did so.They later said nice things about the Palestinian cause while still in the custody of Palestinian terrorist leaders. There was some premature debate among armchair heroes on the Internet about whether they should have done...

US Customs officials confiscated a large painting that a Boston Herald reporter, Jules Crittenden, brought back as a souvenir from the war in Iraq, but the artwork is not valuable enough to merit prosecution, a law enforcement official said yesterday.