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From the DEBKAfile, which I understand is not always reliable:

More than 35 missiles have been fired against all the Israeli towns and villages within range of Gaza since early Wednesday, Nov. 5. Two upgraded Qassam missiles hit Ashkelon’s main street and industrial zone. Three shock victims were hospitalized. Israel’s emergency services in Ashkelon, Sderot, Netivot and the villages around Gaza are on the ready for further attacks but not all the schools within range of Gaza have shelters or fortified classrooms.

The Palestinian barrage, which coincided with Barack Obama’s victory rally in Chicago, followed a battle that erupted Tuesday night when an Israeli armored force crossed 250 meters deep into the Gaza Strip to demolish a Hamas tunnel dug from Al Bureij the Israel military position at the Kissufim border.

Via SondraK.

My radio alarm woke me up with news about some plane having flown into some skyscraper somewhere. New York City, maybe? Whatever. That sort of disaster is just the cost of living in an advanced urban society. It happens. I shut off the radio, got up, got dressed, and drove into work; my home ritual on arising is very abbreviated. As was my habit at the time, when I arrived, I sat in my car in the parking lot reading the newspaper.

Suddenly there was a knock on my window. I looked up at a stranger who said, “Turn on your radio! Something terrible!” and strode away, a man on a mission.

I didn’t get much done that day, or the next, or the next.

I have never forgotten. I have never forgiven. I never will.

There are people out there who want to see me enslaved or destroyed, not because I’m rich or white or American or even free, but because I do not share their superstition about an invisible superhero from outer space who wants me to make war on all who don’t believe in him and who don’t allow the words of his prophet to rule every detail of their lives.

There is no god, not even allah; and mohammed, may piss be upon him, was a psychopathic child molesting mass  murderer. I call down death and destruction on all who would force me and mine to say otherwise.

There is a war on, and it did not start on 11 September 2001. It’s been raging for more than a thousand years, and it is driven by adamant blind ignorance, greed, and misogyny. It is time to put an end to it.

[update]

The Doomed hanging out of the World Trade Center windows on 9/11

Many more pictures like this came out after the first few days. Press coverage, however, quickly moved to pictures of the building itself. Pictures of people, particularly ones like this, or ones of those who chose to jump rather than burn, were avoided specficially because our Gatekeepers felt it would only fuel outrage.

No shit, Sherlocks, you lying partisan scum. I no longer question your patriotism; I assume you are on the other side.

Ghost of a Flea links to the Quote of the Day from Kathy Shaidle:

The difference between what the Nazis said about the Jews and what people today are saying about radical Muslims is…

What we’re saying about radical Muslims is true.

To pretend otherwise is to perform the intellectual equivalent of hiding Nazis in your attic during World War II.

By the way, not only is what’s being said by pro-War commentators  about radical Muslims true, the radical Muslims themselves are saying it, proudly, and are demonstrating and even rioting to get their points across.

Oh, by all means, you should definitely read the whole damning thing, which includes this QotD runner up:

But then again, Muslims don’t care much for books, do they?

Except for the Koran, which contains more hate speech than every issue of Maclean’s published in the last hundred years put together.

(Now THAT would be an interesting case for the Human Rights Commission. I’m a free speech absolutist, but I’d love to see how a case calling the Koran “hate speech” would play out, what with all its calls to violence against “apes and pigs” , i.e. Christians and Jews.)

Yeah, you should probably read the opinion piece that triggered her outburst, in which Haroon Siddiqui attempts justify the tyrannical “Human Rights” Commissions of Canada.

Q & O has a calmer, more detailed critique.

As always:

There is no God, not even Allah, and Mohammed was no one’s prophet, but a psychotic child-raping, hate-mongering, mass-murderer.

And again, it doesn’t matter whether or not that’s true. What matters is that I have the perfect right to say it, no matter how offensive it is.

[updated to include the runner-up QotD and Q&O.]

“Everybody in this room is wearing a uniform, don’t kid yourself.”
– Frank Zappa, Burnt Weenie Sandwich

Now read this, over at Overcoming The Bias:

Lonely dissent doesn’t feel like going to school dressed in black.  It feels like going to school wearing a clown suit.

Damn straight, Skippy.

I know people who simply refuse to like anything they hear on Top 40 radio, simply because it’s popular, and they can’t tolerate along with the crowd.

Shakespeare’s bad, because, you know, he’s a cultural icon.

Most of them are against the war in Iraq, because, you know, they’re questioning authority. They’re speaking truth to power. They’re out on the edge.

‘Scuse, please, but they’re credulous starry-eyed sheep. Avowed skeptics and inclusive multi-culturists, they’re bowing down before the most racist, sexist, close-minded, anti-progressive religious cult to come along in the past thousand years, a cult that openly promises to enslave or kill them. They’re trying to elect a presidential candidate from the Chicago Machine they’re treating like the Messiah. Meanwhile, if I can keep from vomiting on the voting machine, I’ll vote for this guy.

I know, vaguely, what wearing the clown suit feels like, because I’ve come out to “liberal” friends and family as a gun owner. My advocacy of possessing a tool that would allow me to actually resist tyranny made me a pariah to folks who are very strident in their rebelliousness. (I probably also wore the clown suit a lot in school, but wasn’t aware of it. I don’t think that counts. Hm, I did almost start a fad for carrying Slinkies around, but the teachers put a stop to that, because they’re so damn noisy. Does that count?)

And mind, by the standards of the linked article, I’m still not a true rebel, because I didn’t figure out, on my own, how crucial the right to keep and bear arms really is; I picked it up from a chance conversation back in ‘76, and had it reinforced by Gharlane of Eddore, a nut job science fiction fan posting in the Babylon Five usenet forums.

I’m giving up on trying to be a rebel. I swear, from here on out, not to care how popular or unpopular my positions are, but only whether or not I feel they’re right. If I conform, too damn bad.

Now me, you know, I really am an iconoclast.  Everyone thinks they are, but with me it’s true, you see.  I would totally have worn a clown suit to school.  My serious conversations were with books, not with other children.

But if you think you would totally wear that clown suit, then don’t be too proud of that either!  It just means that you need to make an effort in the opposite direction to avoid dissenting too easily.  That’s what I have to do, to correct for my own nature.  Other people do have reasons for thinking what they do, and ignoring that completely is as bad as being afraid to contradict them.  You wouldn’t want to end up as a free thinker.  It’s not a virtue, you see - just a bias either way.

So I liked Madonna’s “Material Girl” video. So sue me.

[update]

Holy. Crap.

Overcoming Bias is a serious trip, particularly if you’ve let yourself get intellectually lazy. It’s a bigger, and far more productive, time sink than Wikipedia or even TV Tropes. Very, very strongly recommended.

Via Grouchy Old Cripple:

Followed by this:

Just think. If the ecotards and the Dimocrat Party had not kept us from drilling in ANWR, off our coasts, and on federal lands and if they hadn’t blocked the building of new refineries and nuclear power plants, we would be energy independent and this would be the peace we would be raining on Iran and Saudi Arabia. These are the two countries who are our worst enemies on this planet and the countries we will eventually be at war with. They sponsor most of the Islamic terrorism in the world. The sooner we realize this and take steps to destroy them, by first becoming energy independent, the better off we’ll be.

I’ve been watching this happen for several years now. It’s scary as hell, and perhaps the scariest thing about it is, it forbids you to talk about it.

It’s the Jihad on Free Speech.

If you read that, grimaced, and moved to click the Back button to get away from this racist screed, congratulations! You’ve taken the first step to Submission!

If you want to find out how your right to free speech is being eroded by religious fanatics who happen not to be Christians, read Bruce Bawer’s Anatomy of Surrender over at City Journal.

Islam divides the world into two parts. The part governed by sharia, or Islamic law, is called the Dar al-Islam, or House of Submission. Everything else is the Dar al-Harb, or House of War, so called because it will take war—holy war, jihad—to bring it into the House of Submission. Over the centuries, this jihad has taken a variety of forms. Two centuries ago, for instance, Muslim pirates from North Africa captured ships and enslaved their crews, leading the U.S. to fight the Barbary Wars of 1801–05 and 1815. In recent decades, the jihadists’ weapon of choice has usually been the terrorist’s bomb; the use of planes as missiles on 9/11 was a variant of this method.

What has not been widely recognized is that the Ayatollah Khomeini’s 1989 fatwa against Satanic Verses author Salman Rushdie introduced a new kind of jihad. Instead of assaulting Western ships or buildings, Kho­meini took aim at a fundamental Western freedom: freedom of speech. In recent years, other Islamists have joined this crusade, seeking to undermine Western societies’ basic liberties and extend sharia within those societies.

The cultural jihadists have enjoyed disturbing success. Two events in particular—the 2004 assassination in Amsterdam of Theo van Gogh in retaliation for his film about Islam’s oppression of women, and the global wave of riots, murders, and vandalism that followed a Danish newspaper’s 2005 publication of cartoons satirizing Mohammed—have had a massive ripple effect throughout the West. Motivated variously, and doubtless sometimes simultaneously, by fear, misguided sympathy, and multicultural ideology—which teaches us to belittle our freedoms and to genuflect to non-Western cultures, however repressive—people at every level of Western society, but especially elites, have allowed concerns about what fundamentalist Muslims will feel, think, or do to influence their actions and expressions. These Westerners have begun, in other words, to internalize the strictures of sharia, and thus implicitly to accept the deferential status of dhimmis—infidels living in Muslim societies.

Call it a cultural surrender. The House of War is slowly—or not so slowly, in Europe’s case—being absorbed into the House of Submission.

The Western media are in the driver’s seat on this road to sharia. Often their approach is to argue that we’re the bad guys.

Oh, yes. Read the whole, ugly, sordid, thing. You need to know.

It’s long and detailed, but here’s the nut:

Britain’s Foreign Office has since deemed even [the phrase "War on Terror"] offensive and banned its use by cabinet members (along with “Islamic extremism”). In January, the Home Office decided that Islamic terrorism would henceforth be described as “anti-Islamic activity.”

Oh, that’s lovely. Brilliant. Note how that makes it impossible to fix responsibility for jihadist terrorism where it belongs. Anyone committing such an act is automatically considered separate from Islam–which therefor cannot be blamed for incitement.

In Britain, “Asian” is the accepted codeword for “Muslim”. In Europe, Muslim rioters are “disaffected youths”. Thus is the language debased, and made to hide the truth rather than reveal it.

Can’t be said often enough:

There is no God, especially not Allah; and Mohammed, may piss be upon him, was no prophet, but a child-molesting mass murderer. Islam is no “Religion of Peace”, but a violent warrior cult specially designed to enforce ignorance and hatred of everything other than itself.

Today is St. George’s Day.

This flag has long been a symbol of England. It’s also associated with the Crusades, and is therefore reviled by jihadists. Today, the dhimmi forces of appeasement are working to ban its public display. In the latest outrage, a St. George’s Day parade has been canceled, because the planned participation of 1,500 children made it too attractive a target for the Religion of Peace.

Can’t be said enough:
There is no God, certainly not Allah; and Mohamed, may piss be upon him, was no prophet, but a child-raper and mass-murderer who invented a sociopathic warrior cult that advocates more of the same.

I’ve said some pretty harsh things about Islam here, believing as I do that among religions, particularly the Abrahamic religions, that it is especially toxic, the creed of a violent warrior’s cult. (Unlike the others, such as Christianity, which can be twisted into advocating violent proselytization, Islam must be twisted into a “religion of peace”.)

But are such ideological attacks wise? Brian Micklethwaite over at Samizdata argues that it is a wise, perhaps even necessary, strategy in the Long War, and that it is beginning to result in massive apostasy.

In this spirit, I at first thought that whereas Soviet communism was ideologically breakable, Islam is not breakable. More than a billion souls believe in it, and however true it might be that it is evil and repulsive nonsense, saying this would accomplish very little. It would merely poke the hornet’s nest with a stick. But slowly, I have been coming round to thinking almost the complete opposite. Not only does denouncing Islam as evil nonsense establish the mere right, of us civilisationers, to denounce Islam - along with our right to say anything else we might want to say - true or false, nice or nasty, sensible or daft. Such talk also, I am starting to believe, strikes a dagger into the heart of the enemy camp, by spreading doubt in it about basic beliefs and hence sewing discord and confusion. I used to think that Islamists were indifferent to such ideological attacks. Now, I am starting to believe that they fear them very much. Hence all the murder threats. They sense that this is one of their weakest and potentially biggest fronts in the struggle. The biggest front of all, in fact.

Yes, yes, read the whole thing.

And follow his pointer to this widely-linked article arguing that apostasy is widespread and on the rise.

Also via the Anchoress, an excellent article explaining why the majority of American soldiers believe that what they are doing is right and necessary.

“The foundation of all mental illness is the unwillingness to experience legitimate suffering.”
- Carl Jung

Last weekend, I was profoundly privileged to be in the VFW Post in Nashville, Tennessee with a roomful of the some of the most intelligent, reasonable and sane human beings I have ever encountered. These men seemed to shun the term “hero.”

Yet, what other word could possibly suffice?

From Hollywood’s anti-war movies to the New York Times’ pitiful anti-vet screeds, to the major networks’ portrayals of whacked-out homeless vets to the Winter Soldiers , the American public is bombarded on a daily basis with the notion that suffering for a just cause is not only a needless expenditure of treasure, but a disgraceful evil that should never be borne by good people.

But anyone with a decent upbringing and a grain of common sense, who listens to representatives from Vets for Freedom and Vets for Victory, as I did last weekend, clearly knows that Carl Jung had it right. These hero vets of VFF and V4V know intimately and soundly, the difference between legitimate and illegitimate suffering.

These men, these genuine heroes, are the personification of sanity walking tall.

And having listened to these heroes explain with poise, eloquence and clarity the cause of our war against the forces of terror, I have never been more proud to call myself an American.

Nor have I ever felt such shame for the mainstream media’s insane and childish portrayal of America to the rest of the world. Unfortunately, the mainstream media has the big megaphone and theirs is the voice the world hears.

The author, Kyle-Ann Shiver, then presents summaries of two of the speakers. Read the whole thing.

Yes, here’s an irrefutable mathematical proof that Invisible Superherovillain From Outerspace Allah means for me to submit to him.

Irrefutable, of course, for anyone who believes in numerology, or who believes that when you see a horsey in the clouds, it’s because Allah sculpted it as proof of his existence.

I like it that early on, they use “God” instead of “Allah”, and “submission” instead of “Islam”. At first glance, it could be a Christian site.

Via P.Z. Myers at Pharyngula.

Oh, and allow me to re-iterate:

There is no god, not even Allah, and Mohammad, may piss be upon him, was a child-molesting mass murderer.