Pumping iron, with Condoleezza Rice

Why The Left Doesn't Blame Muslims For Muslim Violence (Dennis Prager On PC Victim Alert)

Is Abortion a Moral Issue? A Fascinating Debate on the Left

(IMDB) If Republicans Ran Hollywood, Recent Movies would look like this....

Play About Demonstrator's Death Is Delayed [Rachel Corrie]

Scalia jeers fans of 'living' charter

Italian Minister to Wear Muhammad Cartoon T-shirt:

"'It is time to put an end to this tale that we need dialogue with these people,'"

Iran paper plans Holocaust cartoons
Oh, brother... and this will be different from their regular cartoons how? (And I thought they didn't believe in the Holocaust?)

Funny way to kickstart the Crusades II, isn't it?

[UK] School deems hot cross buns 'offensive'
First Piglet, then piggy banks, now this... the mind boggles.

Brit Hume: Muslim Cartoon Protests 'A Disgrace':

Prior to Hume's comments, 'Fox News Sunday' aired a shot of the cartoon deemed most offensive by the protesters - a drawing of Mohammed wearing a turban shaped like a bomb.

CNN, on the other hand, has only broadcast images of the cartoons with Mohammed's face digitally distorted beyond recognition.

It's official, even the French are ballsier than CNN.

FT.com / World / Europe - Muslim anger over cartoons hits Danish companies:

Kofi Annan, the United Nations secretary-general, said he believed "freedom of the press should always be exercised in a way that fully respects the religious beliefs and tenets of all religions".

How did we arrive at this?

The dispute began on September 30, when Jyllands-Posten, Denmark?s biggest newspaper, published 12 cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed, a move considered blasphemous in Islam. One of the cartoons showed the Prophet with a bomb under his turban. The Danish newspaper later apologised but the row escalated this week after several European newspapers reprinted the cartoons to assert the right to free speech.

Most daily UK newspapers decided not to reproduce the cartoons. One cartoon appeared on The Spectator's website but was quickly taken down.

Jack Straw, UK foreign secretary, said on Friday that "freedom of speech" did not carry "any obligation to insult or to be gratuitously inflammatory".

"I believe that the republication of these cartoons has been unnecessary, it has been insensitive, it has been disrespectful and it has been wrong," he said, adding that he thought the British media had shown "considerable responsibility and sensitivity" in its approach to the issue.

FRANCE'S LE MONDE PUBLISHES FRONT-PAGE CARTOON OF MOHAMMED
Good thread.

Austria says it cannot afford to buy back Klimt masterpieces ($300 million dollars)

First they came for the funny ones:
Ahhh... finally, the back-story.

"The cartoonists in question are a dozen Danish artists who drew Muhammad-themed cartoons last September for the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten during an exercise to test the limits of free speech. The cartoon-a-thon was conceived in response to complaints from a Danish author who couldn't find anyone to illustrate her Muhammad children's book.

Although the book itself was not controversial, the Muslim faith considers it blasphemy to depict the Prophet in any way. Thus, in December, the youth branch of Pakistan's largest religious party, Jamaat-e-Islami, offered a bounty for murdered cartoonists. "

More papers (French and German) join cartoon furore
Al Jazeera chimes in.

Well, it seems like this is a line in the sand to the Islamic nations... time to join us in the 21st century.

But I don't see it happening.

Germans print Muhammad caricatures
The French did, too. Is someone spiking their wine with Viagra or something?

The drawings were among several published in a Danish paper in September that sparked outrage and boycotts in Islamic countries. The pictures were also shown in a Norwegian magazine last week.

Palestinians in Gaza burned Danish and Norwegian flags this week in protest of the caricatures.

The caricatures offended many Muslims both because of their critical content and because Islam forbids representations of Muhammad out of concern they could lead to idolatry. In some of the pictures, Muhammad was shown to be wearing women's attire.

But the German Welt daily put one of the drawings showing the prophet's turban transformed into a bomb on its front page on Wednesday. It said the picture was "harmless" and expressed regret that the Danish Jyllands-Posten daily had apologized for causing offense.

"Democracy is the institutionalized form of freedom of expression," the paper said in a front-page commentary. "There is no right to protection from satire in the West; there is a right to blasphemy."