Free Republic

Muslim unrest as police carry out new raids By Nick Britten and Nigel Bunyan Last Updated: 8:08am GMT 03/02/2007 Police raided three more addresses in Birmingham yesterday as they continued to question nine men over their involvement in the alleged plot to kidnap and behead a serving British Muslim soldier. Men leave Birmingham Central mosque after Friday prayers No further arrests were made but West Midlands Police said that a "significant quantity of exhibits" taken from the 12 other properties were being examined following Wednesday's arrests. Officers were granted an extension to hold the men until Feb 5 and said...

DOUBLE standards? Of course. Whatever western countries may say about freedom of speech, such a thing as unlimited freedom of speech exists nowhere in the world. You won’t find much of it in the American media when it comes to Israel. Try pointing out Israeli atrocities in the occupied Palestinian territories and you’ll attract strange glances and be hounded or ostracized if you are in the media or the exalted world of academe. The American media didn’t distinguish itself for any conspicuous freedom of alternate opinion when the Bush administration was priming its guns for the invasion of Iraq. All...

After getting kudos from free-speech activists for its courage, the French magazine Soir reversed itself and sacked its managing editor for publishing Danish caricatures of the prophet Mohammed. The owner fired his editor in order to placate the rage of French Muslims: France Soir and Germany's Die Welt were among the leading papers to reprint the cartoons, which first appeared in Denmark last September. The caricatures include drawings of Muhammad wearing a headdress shaped like a bomb, while another shows him saying that paradise was running short of virgins for suicide bombers. France Soir originally said it had published the...