Religious Hate:

• Over time, many have provoked controversy by describing the terrorist acts of Islamist “militants” as “courageous”. I’d challenge anyone to apply that label to the Islamist “militia” which attacked a picnic held by dangerous and cunning college students in Basra. Or perhaps the mujahidin who took on the notorious mixed gender road racers in Pakistan deserve the accolades of bravery. I say true bravery belongs to the Basra college students, who have stood up to the Islamist thugs.

• That a covert to Christianity and local church leader can be arrested for the “crime” of apostasy in Iran should not be a surprise. That the same can happen in Jordan might. In fairness it must be said this happens relatively rarely (as an act of the state, anyway), though fairness also demands outrage that it happens at all. Qatari cleric and scholar Dr. Abd Al-Hamid Al-Ansari maintains that kill apostates is an error, though not all clerics agree with him.

• Surprise – not everyone feels the loss of pope John Paul II: the folks at islaam.com for instance:

  What to say about a human being who possibly misled more other humans than any of his contemporaries? A taghut who promoted the worst sin, declared what is lawful as unlawful and what is unlawful as lawful, while people followed him? Should one weep for him? Indeed. Muslims ought to recognize the enormity of the crime of disbelief and attributing a son to Allah the Most High.

  Meanwhile a few nanoseconds of sympathy for Al-Jazeera would be in order, whose coverage of the pope’s death is drawing condemnation from Islamists.

• Islamists in Pakistan have succeeded in pressuring the government to break the rules of the International Civil Aviation Organisation: Pakistan puts religion back in passports, religious minorities threatened. They're going to protest against education reform plans next by the way, because the reform is too "westernised and secular."

• Jihad Watch links this AP story on how Muslim clerics are instigating a boycott on vaccination in northern Nigeria. First it was polio:

  In 2003, Islamic clerics claimed the United States was using polio vaccine to sterilize Muslims or contaminate them with the AIDS virus. They ordered a boycott in messages disseminated from mosques, in radio broadcasts and by door-to-door campaigning.

  Now it’s measles:

  Nigeria, whose 130 million people make it Africa's most populous nation, has recorded 20,859 measles cases so far this year. At least 589 victims have died, most of them children younger than 5 and all in the north, the Nigerian Red Cross and the U.N. World Health Organization say. Southern Nigeria, which is mainly Christian, had only 253 measles cases, and no deaths.

  There are two possibilities here: that the Nigerian clerics believe what they’re preaching (making them paranoid) or that they don’t (making them craven). Not sure which is worse.

• Also via Jihad Watch, this Asia Times article noting the appearance of a new Jihad publication (“Dhurwat al-Sanam”), and providing a brief catalog of related publications. Jihad Watch’s Robert Spencer notes that these publications contain the detailed justification of the actions of the Jihadis, based on what they perceive to be authentic Islamic doctrines. But the Times article ends with an important point:

  The jihadi online publications discussed here are just the tip of the iceberg. What sets them apart from their more traditional cousins - ie the paper pamphlets, newspapers and books brought out by the jihadi outfits - is that the technology involved in producing them is more modern and their reach and readership far more widespread.

  The internet empowers everyone.

• Sometimes we have tough decisions here at Hatewatch: Consider this item:

  A thorough analysis of the Koran reveals that the US will cease to exist in the year 2007, according to research published by Palestinian scholar Ziad Silwadi.

  Idiotarian? Religious Hate? I had to flip for it.

Idiotarian Seethings:

• Arab scholars and intellectuals, in a U.N. sponsored report on Arab human development, are calling for democratic reforms and the end of repressive regimes in the Middle East. Of course they're blaming Israel and the U.S. for the repression and lack of freedom because Israel has "sapped the struggle for freedom and good governance in the Arab world." I guess it's those mean Jews that won't let women vote in Saudi Arabia.

• And speaking of Saudi Arabia: in a country that grew rich practically overnight, Saudis consider a tradesman's work shameful. Between Pride and a Hard Place

• Meet Jane Christensen, a professor at Wesleyan College in North Carolina:

  "America is fighting wars in Afghanistan and Iraq under Zionist control...Jews rule America (and most of the world) by proxy. They trick us into fighting and dying for THEM. Politicians of the 'free world' are too cowardly to oppose Zionism."

  Jihad Jane and the Jews

• This Frontpage piece documents some pedestrian and predictable “we had it coming” sentiments expressed by professors at the University of Pennsylvania. Points for originality go to Associate Director of the Solomon Asch Center Ian Lustick, a professor of political science. Commenting on the expulsion of the Taliban:

  “What I wanted was a war, a Goldilocks war, not too fast and not too slow, but we didn't get it. We got one that was too fast and it gave the whip end to the cabal.”

  Charming.

• LGF links this WaPo piece on Andrew Mickel, who murdered a cop in a cold blooded ambush in 2002, hoping to spark a revolt against corporate Amerikkka. His friends and family think he’s nuts.

  Then there's the other disturbing possibility: What if, as Andrew Mickel maintains, he is sane, is exercising his free will, is fighting for a cause he believes in, until the bitter end? Like another infamous defendant, Timothy McVeigh. Only in Mickel's case, it is a jihad from the far left.

  Sick or twisted, thankfully he’s failed.

Race and Culture:

• I’m not completely bought in to the “Eurabia” thesis, but Glenn links to a Weekly Standard piece on what was apparently a pretty horrific race riot in Paris last month:

  On March 8, tens of thousands of high school students marched through central Paris to protest education reforms announced by the government. Repeatedly, peaceful demonstrators were attacked by bands of black and Arab youths--about 1,000 in all, according to police estimates. The eyewitness accounts of victims, teachers, and most interestingly the attackers themselves gathered by the left-wing daily Le Monde confirm the motivation: racism.

  The article mentions people and institutions speaking out against “Francophobia”, but not everyone is on board:

  And he [journalist Jacques Julliard] sharply rejected the view endorsed by most left-wing organizations and individuals that the violence was an expression of class struggle, a clash between rich and poor. "Anyone should be ashamed," Julliard wrote, "after all we went through in the 20th century, to offer such a coarse explanation. . . . There is no good and bad racism."

  They can’t say they weren’t warned.

  One of the major anti-racist organizations, LICRA (Ligue Internationale Contre le Racisme et l'Antisémitisme), pointed out that the same people and organizations who failed to recognize the wave of anti-Semitism in France beginning in 2000-2001 are today unwilling to face up to an outbreak of racial violence.

  Plus ça change? Plus betta change… Read the whole thing.

• In the U.S., attitudes toward Jews improve, but anti-Semitic incidents on the rise

  Released Monday, the poll showed that 14 percent of Americans were deemed “anti-Semitic,” a three percent decrease from a 2002 poll. The poll also found that one in three Americans believe American Jews are more loyal to Israel than to the United States, and 30 percent believe Jews were responsible for the death of Jesus.
  
  The ADL’s annual round-up of anti-Semitic incidents found a 17 percent increase in the number of cases in the United States in 2004. The audit found 1,821 incidents last year, compared to 1,557 incidents in 2003.

• PA TV: ´Israeli Perpetrates Evils in the Name of God´

  Inculcation of virulent hatred on Palestinian Authority (PA) Television continues under the authority of PA chairman Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen), despite commitments to remove hate content against Israel from official local Arab television.
  
  Palestinian Media Watch (PMW) reveals that a dance segment broadcast on March 30th, 2005, features a song laced with hatred of Israel, accusing the Jewish State of torturing, burning and exterminating Arabs in the name of God.

• Why was Hitler popular? How Germans Fell for the 'Feel-Good' Fuehrer

  A well-respected German historian has a radical new theory to explain a nagging question: Why did average Germans so heartily support the Nazis and Third Reich? Hitler, says Goetz Aly, was a "feel good dictator," a leader who not only made Germans feel important, but also made sure they were well cared-for by the state.

• London, Ontario is home to at least two white supremacist groups and their leaders. Why are they here?

  The word hate comes easily to Londoner Tomasz Winnicki. "We do hate . . . the negroes and other mud races who flood into our clean, white civilizations and then wreck them," he e-mails in response to a request for an interview.
  
  "We hate the Jew: the media Jew, the banking Jew, the political Jew, the lawyer Jew, who's committing genocide against the white European race by flooding us with subhuman species in order to mongrelize white Europeans. This hate will help us in the upcoming RAHOWA (Racial Holy War). And as one of our slogans goes, 'ITZ COMING.' "

• A survey conducted by the Pew Research Center found that among predominantly Christian countries, Russia is the most antisemitic.

• And in another anti-semitic campaign in Russia, over 5,000 activists and members of the clergy have sent a petition to the state prosecutor's office in which they demand to outlaw Jewish groups. They claim that Judaism is "a fanatic and racist religion that hates gentiles."

• Rory Miller writes at TCS on the history of the “Zionist = Nazi” slander. Far from being a formula of the modern era when the Holocaust is slipping from living memory, it dates from a time when the slaughter of the Nazi’s victims was still in progress. A comparison of the actual historical conditions of modern Palestinians and the victims of the Holocaust is necessary to dispel the first order ridiculousness of the charge:

  Would these same school children fresh from their brainwashing classes have been free to enroll, in the glare of the world’s media, in summer camps dedicated to training a new generation of anti-German guerillas? Would their religious and secular leaders have been able to go on their own TV channels and call their occupiers the “sons of monkeys” with impunity?

  But subtler minds were at work in Britain.

  While Sir Edward Spears, who had been British ambassador in Syria and Lebanon during the war expanded on Grigg's view:

  "political Zionism as it is manifested in Palestine today preaches very much the same doctrines as Hitler", and he continued "Zionist policy in Palestine has many features similar to Nazi philosophy…the politics of Herrenvolk…the Nazi idea of Lebensraum, is also very in evidence in the Zionist philosophy...the training of youth is very similar under both organisations that have designed this one and the Nazi one".

  Left unstated were the sinister parallels between Eisenhower’s interstate highways and the Fuhrer’s autobahn. Read the whole thing.

• Human rights groups say that Greece has one of the worst records in the EU for racism against ethnic minorities: Hating Albanians

• Parents in Dubai are offended by a picture in book used at a private school – a picture of two Jewish children playing. What’s striking is the pedestrian, mater-of-fact tone of this piece – the insult implicit in such a photograph needs no further explanation.

A Hopeful Note:

• Counter-jihad: Islam's moderates start taking it back

  "The long and painful silence of moderate theologians and experts in Islam jurisprudence _ who had been bought off or intimidated into silence _ is finally starting to break apart," said Khaled Abou El Fadl, an authority on Islamic law at the University of California, Los Angeles. "We are seeing signs of a counter-jihad."

• Hatewatch covered the conviction of evangelical Christians under an Australian law banning the “vilification” of religion back in January, and now some of the other Christian groups which supported the law are reconsidering, and raising the same issue I raised back then:

  "Secondly, and more specifically, are we to assume that Christians quoting and commenting on Islamic texts in ways the Muslims object to, will be penalized? This ability to critique another person's position is integral to a free and democratic society."

  Prohibiting offence ultimately results in the prohibition on any spiritual expression.

  "No matter how hard I may try not to offend, an atheist will take offence at my claims that he is wrong and that God exists," he said. "A Muslim will take offence when I claim that Christ died on the cross and rose again."

  Democracy and free expression does not confer a right not to be offended.

• More examples of true courage: These reformers in Saudi Arabia audaciously demand an open trial for their “crimes” (which include “holding a public gathering”. Laudable in itself as an act of protest, they demonstrate that transparent justice is a universal aspiration and not just one cultural modality among many. Naysayers and cynics (and worse) may note that these Arabs appear to understand the rule of law, transparency, and peaceful civil disobedience – just fine, thank you.