ATLmalcontent

The Politics of Fear and Loathing

While the Republican presidential candidates invoke Ronald Reagan's name almost as much as they date drop 9/11, they seem to have learned nothing from the Great Communicator. Optimism is out -- fear mongering is in. Witness Tom Tancredo's bellicose campaign ad (ridiculously restricted to viewers 18-and-older by YouTube).

His campaign slogan is just as ominous: "Tancredo ... before it's too late." A bit subtle, don't you think? "Vote for Me or Die!" works much better.

Never offend a Muslim

Is there anything more sickening than puny intellectuals who bow to extremist demands instead of defending free speech?

Cambridge University Press has just agreed to pull all unsold copies of the 2006 book, "Alms for Jihad: Charity and Terrorism in the Islamic World" after being threatened with legal repercussions. According to the Chronicle of Higher Education, this is the fourth such book on terrorism funding to be pursued by a libel action.

And the Cambridge publishers have just set a frightening precedent, says Rachel Ehrenfeld, author of one of the books being targeted.

Ms. Ehrenfeld characterized as "despicable" Cambridge's decision to settle this week, a move the press has defended as necessary and just. Ms. Ehrenfeld, who is a friend of Mr. Burr's [one of the authors of Alms for Jihad], said that, as she understands it, press officials "caved immediately."

"They didn't even consider the evidence that the authors had given them," she said. "They received a threatening letter, and they immediately caved in and said, Do whatever it takes. Pay them whatever they want. Ban the book, destroy the book, we don't want this lawsuit."

Fighting al Qaeda

Riveting footage of a street battle between Lebanese forces and suspected terrorists in Tripoli.

Suffocating moderates, enabling extremists

M. Zuhdi Jasser blames the media in this must-read column:

It is time for the MSM to stop protecting Muslims from one another and to stop stifling the debate many anti-Islamist Muslims would like to wage against leading Islamists. If Muslims are going to form a public expression of Islam which is reconciled with western democracies which separate religion and government, this debate against Islamism needs yet to begin, let alone blossom into cultural change for Muslims.

Islamists fear nothing more than credible and genuine debate against the core political ideology of Islamism from pious anti-Islamist Muslims. With an ideological counter from anti-Islamist Muslims the Islamist emperor “has no clothes”. At every level, they are using America’s naïveté about Islam in order to continue their theft of Islam for the political agenda of Islamism. The Islamists know that anti-Islamist Muslims rob them of their minority trump card of Islamophobia and force them to come to terms with the anti-freedom, and anti-liberty and anti-pluralistic ideology of Islamism. Anti-Islamist, pro-Islamic Muslims expose the real motives of Islamists—which is the exploitation of the spiritual path of Islam for political and governmental power and coercion.

Caption du jour

(Via Andrew Sullivan)

Palestinians attend a demonstration against violence in Gaza April 23, 2007. REUTERS/Ibraheem Abu Mustafa (GAZA)