Free Republic

Actually, he pretended that they have already done that. He spent his time hectoring the only side that really wants peace as if it were the only obstacle to that peace, and called upon it to take steps that would seriously imperil its survival. "Obama tells Israel: 'Peace is the only path to true security,'" by Stephanie Condon for CBS News, March 21: Speaking before a lively and receptive crowd of 600 Israeli students, President Obama today urged the youth of Israel to accept "the realization of an independent and viable Palestine." A two-state solution, the president suggested, is the...

The Byzantine icon representing this article is the work of the 16th-century iconographer Theophanes the Cretan. Many Muslims around the world today would consider it offensive and insulting to Islam. Muslims in the Balkans just a few years ago have entered churches and destroyed icons like this one for precisely that reason. How does this icon insult Islam? In many ways, including these: 1. It depicts human beings, which violates the traditional Islamic prohibition of images and would be considered idolatrous and blasphemous on its face. 2. It depicts Jesus not as a Muslim prophet, as this does: Instead, it...

The Byzantine icon representing this article is the work of the 16th-century iconographer Theophanes the Cretan. Many Muslims around the world today would consider it offensive and insulting to Islam. Muslims in the Balkans just a few years ago have entered churches and destroyed icons like this one for precisely that reason. How does this icon insult Islam? In many ways, including these: 1. It depicts human beings, which violates the traditional Islamic prohibition of images and would be considered idolatrous and blasphemous on its face. 2. It depicts Jesus not as a Muslim prophet. Instead, it depicts Jesus in...

National Review Online has been running a symposium on the cartoon controversy for the last two days, featuring notable contributions by Bat Ye'or yesterday and Nidra Poller today. Here is my bit: This controversy indicates the gulf between the Islamic world and the West on matters of freedom of expression. The idea of blasphemy as a capital offense is not an invention of “Islamists” or “Wahhabis,” but is deeply rooted within traditional Islam — which is why the forces of radicalism are finding it so easy to stoke cartoon rage worldwide. Freedom of speech encompasses freedom to offend. The instant...

They suggested Islam was violent! They must die! From AP, with thanks to the Constantinopolitan Irredentist: GAZA CITY, Gaza Strip - Outrage over caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad erupted in a swell of protests across the Muslim world Friday, with demonstrators demanding revenge against Denmark and death for those they accuse of defaming Islam's holiest figure. In Iraq, the leading Shiite cleric denounced the drawings first published in a Danish newspaper in September, one of which depicted the prophet wearing a turban shaped as a bomb. But the cleric also suggested militant Muslims were partly to blame for distorting the...