Bloodthirsty Liberal

Three stories (vaguely related) in one, just to get rid of some open windows on my desktop.

Story number one:

An Egyptian court has sentenced 12 Christians to life in prison and acquitted eight Muslims in a case that is likely to stoke religious tensions in the country’s south.

The Christians were found guilty of sowing public strife and shooting dead two Muslims in April of last year in Minya province after a scuffle with Muslim protesters.

The eight Muslims on trial in the same case had been charged with possession of illegal weapons and burning down dozens of Christian-owned homes and stores after the shooting.

Egyptian rights researcher Ishak Ibrahim called the verdict “faulty and unfair.”

Yeah? So?

Story number two:

A Toronto native living in Jerusalem literally got away with his life when Arab school students smashed the windows of his car and tried to attack him Monday morning.

The near-deadly rock-throwing attack occurred as Ephraim Silverberg was making his annual pilgrimage to the Mount of Olives Cemetery for the anniversary of the death of his grandfather, who was brought to Israel for burial after he died in Toronto.

He was driving from Mount Scopus to the Mount of Olives via the A-Tur Arab neighborhood. Silverberg, armed with a hand gun, took the precautions of locking his doors and turning on his mobile phone.

“About midway through the trip, there was a traffic jam, and the traffic slowed to a halt near the entrance of a boy’s high school with the pupils just arriving for a day of studies,” he told Arutz Sheva.

“A few yards beyond the entrance to the school grounds, I heard a boom and immediately realized that a rock had struck my side of the car. At that point, I called emergency services on my cell phone and reported that I was under attack,” he related.

“The first rock was followed by many others as well as youths coming up and kicking the car. The traffic jam started to ease and I managed to move slowly forward. I informed emergency services that I was not attempting to exit the car but rather move forward as best as I could … I heard the sound of shattering glass and realized that the rear window and perhaps others were gone.”

What’s a country to do when surrounded by countries hostile to itself and any ideology different from its narrow interpretation of Islam?

Thank G-d for Israel:

The Knesset plenum on Monday passed in second and third reading a bill to amend the Income Tax Act, by which those who donate to settlements will enjoy tax benefits.

The initiator of the bill, Coalition Chairman MK Zeev Elkin (Likud), said that it aims to make amends for the lack of legislation that supports the settlement enterprise, although the government declared it as a top national priority.

“Organizations that wish to construct new mosques – like the Islamic Movement or other charity groups that funnel money to Hamas – receive tax breaks, while organizations that want to settle the Negev and Galilee fall between the chairs,” he said.

“The bill,” MK Elkin explained, “wishes to make amends for this injustice.”

There you go, Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, and Stephen King—you want to pay more taxes? Here’s your chance. I’ll join you. For once, I’ll agree with Joe Biden: paying taxes is patriotic.

You read that correctly

White House officials held talks with representatives of the Muslim Brotherhood in Washington this week, as the Islamist group threw itself into the fray in Egypt’s presidential election.

The meeting on Tuesday with low-level National Security Council staff was part of a series of US efforts to broaden engagement with new and emerging political parties following Egypt’s revolution last year, a US official said.

The White House pointed out that Republican Senators Lindsey Graham and John McCain, and other US lawmakers and officials had also met with Brotherhood representatives in Egypt and elsewhere in recent months.

“We believe that it is in the interest of the United States to engage with all parties that are committed to democratic principles, especially nonviolence,” said National Security Council spokesman Tommy Vietor.

“In all our conversations with these groups, we emphasize the importance of respect for minority rights, the full inclusion of women, and our regional security concerns.”

Put on your waders. This is deep.

By the way, this is the fault of the US government – our President and our State Department.

- Aggie

After mercilessly killing the poor terrorist who just needed some extra guidance, France is now rounding up Muslims. Sounds like an Apartheid State to me.

Nineteen people have been arrested in a series of police raids on suspected Islamists, French President Nicolas Sarkozy told French radio Friday morning.

The raids come a week after gunman Mohammed Merah, who killed seven people, was shot dead after a long siege in the southwestern city of Toulouse.

The arrests took place in Toulouse, Marseille, Nantes, Lyon and the Ile de France region, around Paris, the Interior Ministry said.

Authorities have not said that any of those arrested were directly linked to Merah.

Sarkozy told Europe 1 that the decision to act had been taken by the interior minister and foreign minister “to deny the entry of certain people to France” who did not share the country’s values.

“It’s not just linked to Toulouse. It’s all over the country. It’s in connection with a form of radical Islam, and it’s in agreement with the law,” he said.
French gunman buried in Toulouse
French politics and Toulouse suspect

“What you have to understand is that the traumatic events in Montauban and Toulouse were profound in our country. I don’t want to compare horrors but it’s a bit like the form of trauma visible in the United States and New York after 9/11. We have to be able to draw some conclusions.”

Interior Minister Claude Gueant said that several firearms, including five rifles, four automatic weapons and three Kalashnikovs, had been found in the searches, as well as a bulletproof vest.

Speaking to French media, he said the raids targeted people who have made the claim online that they are “mujahedeen,” or Islamist fighters, and support “an extremely radical ideology.”

The authorities’ decision to swoop was in part based on the suspects’ claims that they had received paramilitary training, Gueant said.

Sarkozy suggested that more raids will follow, saying, “There will be other operations that will continue and that will allow us to expel from our national territory a certain number of people who have no reason to be here.”

Can you say: ETHNIC CLEANSING?

Sarkozy said he was obliged to act to ensure the nation’s safety. “It’s our duty to guarantee the security of the French people. We have no choice. It’s absolutely indispensable.”

Why don’t they just sit down with some nice strong coffee and some croissants and have a heart-to-heart? Each side compromise a little bit and all will be well. Maybe they could give some of their country to the Islamists, just unilaterally withdraw? What is there to be afraid of? I’m sure that the French Muslims won’t use their new-found nation as a launching pad for rockets.

- Aggie

Did you hear the joke about the supreme leader of all Islam who called for the destruction of all churches in the Middle East?

It wasn’t a riot. In fact, it wasn’t even a joke:

In answer to a question from a Kuwaiti delegation regarding an announcement last month by a Member of Kuwaiti legislature, Osama Al-Munawer, that he plans to submit a draft law calling for the removal of all churches in Kuwait, the Saudi Grand Mufti “stressed that Kuwait was a part of the Arabian Peninsula, and therefore it is necessary to destroy all churches in it.”

…

ZOA National President Morton A. Klein said, “It is amazing and a commentary on our times that the senior Muslim cleric, in the land that gave birth to Islam and in the country that has custody of the two main Muslim holy sites of Mecca and Medina, can call for the demolition of churches without this vicious statement attracting any significant international condemnation or protest.

“Imagine what would occur if the Pope called for the demolition of all mosques in Italy, or if the Chief Rabbi in Israel made a similar call in respect of mosques in Israel. The protests would be huge, furious and immediate. Nor would the matter die away in a week or two. Yet, when the Grand Mufti of Saudi Arabia calls for churches to be demolished – deafening silence. And this, despite the routine frequency of attacks already upon churches and Christians across the Middle East (with the exception of Israel), something which the Grand Mufti’s call can only serve to increase.

“We call upon the Obama Administration to publicly condemn the words of the Saudi Grand Mufti.”

Good job ending with a joke, Morton. Always leave ‘em laughing.

He’s right, of course, but what can you do? The American-born Christian in the White House acts like anything but.

And snuff films are definitely a hot medium.

As a companion piece to the post below, Caroline Glick:

The exhibitionism common to all the men’s behavior makes it obvious that that their attacks were not the random actions of isolated crazy people or lone extremists. All of these killers were certain that they were part of a global movement that seeks the annihilation of the Jews, the subjugation of the Western world and the supremacy of jihadist Islam. And they were convinced that their actions served the interests of this movement and that they would be viewed as heroes by millions of their fellow Muslims for their killing of innocents.

THIS SITUATION is bad enough on its own. But what make it truly dangerous are the West’s responses to it. Those responses together with the crimes themselves expose the depraved and perilous nature of our times. And they show that Merah’s death can bring no closure to this story.

There are five interrelated aspects to the West’s response to these crimes and the jihadist reality they expose. The first aspect of the West’s response is denial.

Time after time, Merah and his ilk throughout the Western world show us who they are and what they want. And time after time, the Western elites, and even much of the Jewish leadership, turn a blind eye and a deaf ear to their cries of murder and calls for the destruction of Western civilization.

In the case of Halimi’s murder, for instance, Paris police refused to view his abduction as a hate crime. Despite the fact that Fofana and his followers called Halimi’s family and recited Koranic verses while Ilan screamed out in agony in the background, the Paris police treated his disappearance as a garden variety kidnap-for-ransom case.

Even after Ilan was found naked at a rail heading with burns on more than 80 percent of his body and died en route to the hospital, it took French authorities over a week to admit that he had been the victim of an anti-Semitic crime.

…

As David Horowitz wrote in a recent article at FrontPage magazine, Jewish student leaders at places such as the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill prefer to attack messengers like himself, than accept the inconvenient truth that Muslim student leaders on campus with them support the annihilation of Israel.

Ignoring and denying the openly expressed aims of jihadists like Merah is of course only part of the problem. The second aspect of the West’s effective collusion with these killers is Western elites’ justification of their crimes.

After initially pinning the blame for the Toulouse massacre on Nazis, when French authorities finally acknowledged Merah’s jihadist identity, they also provided his justification for murder. Speaking to reporters, French Interior Minister Claude Gueant gave us Merah’s name and his excuse at the same time.

Gueant told us that Merah was associated with al-Qaida and he was upset about what he referred to as Israel’s “murder” of Palestinian children.

It should be unnecessary to note the simple truth that Israel doesn’t murder Palestinian children. Palestinians murder Israeli children.

But then, if Merah got his news from the Western media there is a reasonable chance that he wouldn’t know that.

EU foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton was rightly condemned by Israeli political leaders this week for her equation of the actual massacre of Jewish children in Toulouse with the imaginary massacre of Palestinian children in Gaza. But she is not alone in this behavior. US President Barack Obama engaged in similarly outrageous libels when during his speech to the Muslim world in June 2009 he compared the Holocaust with Israeli treatment of the Palestinians.

And the line separating these libels from actual incitement is often hard to find.

French television, which Merah no doubt often watched, is notorious for crossing it. It was France 2 that gave us this century’s first anti-Semitic blood libel with its October 2000 tale of Muhammad al-Dura’s alleged death at the hands of IDF soldiers.

The France 2 story was exposed as a fraud by an appellate court in Paris in 2008. The appellate court overturned a lower court’s libel ruling against Internet activist Philippe Karsenty who wrote on his personal website that the al-Dura story was a hoax.

The appellate court viewed France 2′s unedited footage from the scene. That footage showed al-Dura moving after the France 2 cameraman had declared him dead. The footage led the court to overturn the decision of the lower court that had found Karsenty guilty of libel.

Apparently the same French establishment that now declares solidarity with France’s Jews is unwilling to part with the al-Dura hoax that incited the spilling of so much Jewish blood in the past decade. Last month, France’s Supreme Court overturned the appellate court’s ruling and ordered it to retry the case.

As far as the Supreme Court of France is concerned, the appellate court had no right to ask France 2 to provide evidence that its story was true. According to the court, the unedited footage which proved the story was a blood libel should never have been admitted as evidence. The truth should never have been permitted to come to light.

IN ADDITION to denying, justifying and inciting jihadist violence, Western elites and authorities also engage in facilitating it and, after the fact, excusing it. In the case of Merah, although details are still unclear, it has been reported that he underwent jihadist training by al-Qaida in Afghanistan and was apprehended by Afghan authorities.

Despite his ties to al-Qaida, either US or French military authorities decided he should be sent back to France even though he clearly constituted a danger to French society.

Moreover, according to media reports, French authorities knew that he was dangerous and still failed to apprehend him. They had been informed that at least on one occasion, Merah sought to radicalize a 15-year-old Muslim boy. And yet, he was allowed to remain at large.

As the mother of the teenager said, “All these people had to die before they finally arrest Mohamed Merah. What an enormous waste. The police knew this individual was dangerous and radicalized. I complained to the police twice about Mohamed Merah and tried to follow up several times.”

In the US, Hasan’s colleagues and commanders knew of his sympathy for jihad and his connections to jihadist leader Anwar al-Awlaki in Yemen. And yet they promoted him to major and sent him to Fort Hood.

The West’s complicity with these jihadist crimes doesn’t end with their perpetration.

After failing to acknowledge that Halimi was abducted by jihadists who murdered him because he was a Jew, French authorities conducted his murderers’ trials behind closed doors. Hidden from public scrutiny, in their first trial, Halimi’s killers were given pitifully lights sentences. Fofana was rendered eligible for parole within 22 years. It was only the outcry of activists within the French Jewish community that caused French authorities to hold a retrial.

In Seattle, Haq’s first trial for his attack on Seattle’s Jewish Federation was declared a mistrial. Seattle’s mayor and media went out of their way to present Haq as mentally ill. The prosecution failed to seek the death penalty and didn’t bother to present the records of Haq’s phone conversations bragging about his crimes until his second trial.

Together, the behavior of proud jihadist warriors of the West like Merah, Hasan, Haq and Fofana, and the depraved silence, indifference and complicity of Western elites with their jihadist aims, form the physical and moral landscape of our time. And it is because of this evil mix of perpetrators and enablers that Merah’s death is not a victory of justice.

If I still have your attention, let me re-refer you to a piece I linked to the other day. The Obama State Department is conducting “stealth” outreach programs to European Moslems, often to the dismay and resentment of the host countries themselves. Those countries, France included, are trying to wind up the tangled tentacles of multiculturalism, while Obama and his rich donors (masquerading as diplomats) reach out and stroke the aggrieved parties. But as Glick amply demonstrates, it is we who are being played, not they.

He deconstructs the media coverage of the French terror attacks

The killer of French schoolchildren and soldiers turns out to be a man called Mohammed Merah. The story can now proceed according to time-honored tradition:

Stage One: The strange compulsion to assure us that the killer is a “right wing conservative extremist,” in the words of NRO commenter ExpatAsia, echoed by Chrisman and Galt’s Bain. Up north, this view was shared by Canada’s most prominent establishment Jew and the Liberal Party attack poodle Warren Kinsella (whom NR readers may recall from my free-speech cover story, which mentioned the groveling apology he was forced to make to “the Chinese community” after an unfortunately sinophobic cat joke). The insistence that the killer was emblematic of an epidemic of right-wing hate sweeping the planet is, regrettably, no longer operative. Instead, the killer isn’t representative of anything at all.

So on to Stage Two: Okay, he may be called Mohammed but he’s a “lone wolf.” Sure, he says he was trained by al-Qaeda, but what does he know? Don’t worry, folks, he’s just a lone wolf like Major Hasan and Faisal Shahzad and all the other card-carrying members of the Amalgamated Union of Lone Wolves. All jihad is local.

On to Stage Three: Okay, even if there are enough lone wolves around to form their own Radio City Rockette line, it’s still nothing to do with Islam. I’m sad to see the usually perceptive Ed West of the London Telegraph planting his flag on this wobbling blancmange.

And then, of course, Stage Four: The backlash that never happens. Because apparently the really bad thing about actual dead Jews is that it might lead to dead non-Jews: “French Muslims Fear Backlash After Shooting.” Likewise, after Major Hasan’s mountain of dead infidels, “Shooting Raises Fears For Muslims In US Army.” Likewise, after the London Tube slaughter, “British Muslims Fear Repercussions After Tomorrow’s Train Bombing.” Oh, no, wait, that’s a parody, though it’s hard to tell.

Look, pace Ed West, isn’t it just a teensy-weensy little bit to do with Islam? Or at any rate the internal contradictions of one-way multiculturalism? No, it’s not a competition. Most times in today’s Europe, the guys beating, burning and killing Jews will be Muslims. Once in a while, it will be somebody else killing the schoolkids. But is it so hard to acknowledge that rapid, transformative, mass Muslim immigration might not be the most obvious aid to social tranquility? That it might possibly pose challenges that would otherwise not have existed — for uncovered women in Oslo, for gays in Amsterdam, for Jews everywhere? Is it so difficult to wonder if, for these and other groups living in a long-shot social experiment devised by their rulers, the price of putting an Islamic crescent in the diversity quilt might be too high? What’s left of Jewish life in Europe is being extinguished remorselessly, one vandalized cemetery, one subway attack at a time. How many Jewish children will be at that school in Toulouse a decade hence? A society that becomes more Muslim eventually becomes less everything else. What is happening on the Continent is tragic, in part because it was entirely unnecessary.

OK, my bad. I posted the whole thing.

- Aggie

This is the new game. We’re taking bets on how long the Muslim French murderer of a 30 year old man, his two little boys, ages 3 and 6, and the 8 year old daughter of the principal, will serve in jail. One week? One year? Five years?

I guess we should define the terms. Part 1: How long a sentence will he receive (or will he get off)? Part 2: When will he actually be released?

We need to come up with a prize for the winner of each phase.

I’ll begin. I think he will be convicted and sentenced to ten years. Extenuating circumstances will be his youth (age 24) and the fact that he hates Israel and feels oppressed. I think he’ll be out in 5 years.

I am now beginning to understand things better. He knew to murder the Rabbi and his kids, plus the daughter of the principal, because he lived close to the school. He and his friends must have seen them every day and hated them every day. The French police did a great job catching him so quickly. I am not skeptical about them; I am skeptical about their entire society, about anything European in fact.

Here’s the update that BTL referenced below. (PS: I’m a sap for believing that it was a neo-Nazi attack. I just couldn’t get past the fact that North Africans had also been murdered by the same guy).

TOULOUSE, France – A gunman, suspected of killing three children and a rabbi at a Jewish school in the name of al-Qaida, said on Wednesday he would hand himself over to police after an hours-long siege in which he wounded three officers. The suspect was named as Muhammad Merah, aged 24, AFP reported.

About 300 police, some in bullet-proof body armor, cordoned off an area surrounding an apartment in a Toulouse neighborhood in southwestern France, where the 24-year-old Muslim man was holed up. Shots were heard in the early hours of the morning, and police said three officers had been slightly wounded.
Related:

Funerals for Toulouse victims set to begin in J’lem
ADL: 24% of French harbor anti-Semitic attitudes

Interior Minister Claude Gueant said the gunman was a French citizen of Algerian origin who had been to Pakistan and Afghanistan and had shot dead the four in revenge for French military involvement abroad. He is also suspected by authorities of killing three soldiers of North African origin last week.

“He said … he will turn himself in this afternoon,” Gueant told BFM television, adding the man had thrown a Colt 45 pistol from the house in exchange for a “communication device”.

He still has an Uzi machine gun, a Kalashnikov assault rifle and other weapons, the minister said.

French President Nicolas Sarkozy, campaigning for re-election in a presidential poll in five weeks time, has blamed racism for Monday’s school attack. His handling of the crisis could be a decisive factor in determining how the French people vote.

Far-right candidate Marine Le Pen decried the attacks as the result of France’s mistaken policy in Afghanistan and said France should wage war against “these fundamentalist political and religious groups that are killing our children”.

French Interior Minister Gueant said earlier the gunman wanted revenge “for the Palestinian children and he also wanted to attack the French army because of its foreign intervention”.

“He claims to be a mujahideen and to belong to al-Qaida,” he told journalists in Toulouse.

Gueant did not say how they had tracked the man down, but that police were talking to his brother at a separate location in connection with the killings.

France’s Europe 1 radio said he had been picked up by Pakistani intelligence services in Afghanistan’s Kandahar and his details had been sent to the French security services. It gave no date.

People posting on various websites flat-out refused to believe that the killer was a neo-Nazi. I believed it based on the Norway attack, plus the killing of other Muslims. This is a little reminder that you can never be too cynical about human nature. There is no bottom.

PS: I wonder if Abbas will have anything to say now?

- Aggie

I wonder if Iran is planning a preemptive attack on Israel, by proxy?

Hezbollah Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah said on Monday that Israeli-Palestinian negotiations were doomed to fail, and called on Muslims and Christians to take Jerusalem from Israel.

“Every Palestinian, Arab, Muslim, and Christian has a national, popular, and ethical responsibility towards Al-Quds (Jerusalem). It demands seriousness and action from all of us,” Nasrallah said at a forum entitled “Declaration of Al-Quds as the capital of Palestine, the Arabs and Muslims,” according to Hezbollah-affiliated media outlet Al Manar.

Warning that Israeli settlers were “Judaizing” and “desecrating” Jerusalem, Nasrallah said, “We are not responsible for the occupation of Al-Quds, but we bear the responsibility for the continued occupation of Al-Quds, and every faction and people should be prepared for questioning on Judgment Day over what actions he took towards Al-Quds’s liberation.”

He probably just needs to bare his soul.

- Aggie

Jimmy Carter calls it an historic achievement.

To live in Massachusetts is to face deep ambivalence. I spent my free time socializing with people who think this is just ducky.

The political wing of Egypt’s most historic Islamist party won by far the largest number of seats in the first post-revolutionary parliament, final results confirmed Saturday, and is now poised to play a dominant role in the drafting of a new constitution.

The Muslim Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice Party took 47 percent of seats in the lower house of parliament, and the ultraconservative Salafist Nour Party won 25 percent of the elected seats.

The Brotherhood was banned under former President Hosni Mubarak but has emerged as a major force on the political scene since the uprising last year. The group’s Freedom and Justice Party has vowed that all political factions will play a major role in parliament, which is tasked with appointing a body to write the new constitution.

I can’t bring myself to post the Carter video, but if you can go to the link, you can see who evil really is banal, just as Hannah Arendt said.

- Aggie

Oops! Wrong state! Oh well, as long as you’re here:

Egyptians plan to block Israelis from making their annual pilgrimage to the tomb of Rabbi Yaakov Abuhatzeira. The country’s Islamist parties and other activists vowed last week to put an end to Jews visiting the grave site of the 19th centry rabbi, son of a chief rabbi of Morocco and known among Jews to be a Kabbalist.

Rabbi Abuhatzeira was elderly when he became ill and died near Alexandria while traveling in 1879 from Morocco to the Holy Land. According to tradition, his followers attempted three times to move his body from Egypt — but each time, heavy storms blocked the effort. The tomb is located in the village of Daymouta in the Nile Delta, about 180 kilometers (112 miles) north of Cairo.

The peace treaty signed between the two countries in 1979 should have allowed Israeli Jews to travel freely to pray at the grave site and to mark the day of the rabbi’s passing, but the privilege has been allowed sporadically at best.

Egyptians have consistently opposed allowing Jews to travel on pilgrimage to the site, and there have been repeated demonstrations and court orders banning the ceremony to mark the day of the rabbi’s passing.

“Normalization with Israel is forced on the people [of Egypt] and the visits also come against the will of the people and despite popular rejection,” explained newly-elected Muslim Brotherhood parliamentarian Gamal Heshmat.

According to a report published Tuesday in the Egyptian daily Al Ahram newspaper, 31 different political and other groups have banded together to block the pilgrimage.

Couldn’t Israel then close off the Al Aqsa mosque? They won’t and they shouldn’t, but wasn’t it “forced” on the Jewish people, built as it was on the foundations of the Temple?

Abraham Cooper of the Los Angeles-based Simon Wiesenthal Center warned in a statement Tuesday the once-outlawed Islamist Muslim Brotherhood was trying to “curb religious freedom of Jews,” adding, “In their world view, there is no respect for the traditions of Jews, dead or alive.”

Yeah, so?

Egyptian Islamists claim to have won nearly 2/3rds of seats

Is he merely stupid or is he malevolent? And how soon before we can be arrested for asking the question?

The Muslim Brotherhood said on Saturday it had won at least 41 percent of the seats in Egypt’s lower house of parliament, with Islamists of various stripes occupying almost two thirds of the assembly so far.

Banned under deposed president Hosni Mubarak, the Brotherhood has emerged as a major winner from the uprising that toppled him, exploiting a well-organized support base in the first free legislative vote in decades.

It may be some weeks before the exact shape of the lower house is known because of various runoff votes. However, it is unlikely that their outcome will alter the dominance of the Islamists who now look set to wield major influence over the shape a new constitution to be drafted by a 100-strong body that the new assembly will pick.

The Brotherhood has promised that Egyptians of all persuasions will have their say and, while the strong Islamist performance has alarmed some Egyptians and Western governments that backed Mubarak, it is far from clear whether rival Islamists will cooperate in the new legislature.

The Brotherhood’s Democratic Alliance list has won 41 percent of the seats so far, while another list led by the hardline Islamist Nour Party came second with 20 percent of the seats.

The Nour Party seeks strict application of Islamic law and the more moderate Brotherhood may seek an alliance with liberal groups to allay concerns about the prospect of an Islamist-led Egypt.

Sixty-two percent of potential voters cast their ballots in the third round of the election, which took place on Tuesday and Wednesday, Egypt’s election commission said.

BTL quoted Caroline Glick below, and what she says is right. But it isn’t new, is it? The administration proved that paper is worthless when it refused to acknowledge the note that George W. Bush sent to Ariel Sharon, promising that the US will back Israel regarding Jerusalem and the Palestinian so-called “right of return”. Obama used it as toilet paper. Flushed long ago.

- Aggie

When we read this phrase, we think of semi-automatic pistols and suicide vests.

But it has another, earlier, more noble connotation (if I may be so judgmental):

Following are excerpts from an interview with Egyptian priest Yohanna Qulta, deputy patriarch of the Coptic Catholic church, which aired on Al-Hayat TV on December 10, 2011.

The Copts did not fight you [Muslims] or drive you out of your homes, so why do you want to expel them? Do the Copts constitute a foreign community? They tell you that Switzerland persecutes the Muslims, France persecutes the Muslims… The persecution of any group is unacceptable – but we are not even a community of immigrants. We have deep roots in this country.

[...]

Interviewer: Do you Copts fear these Salafi statements? If they do come to power and instate the jizya poll tax – I’m not saying that this will happen, but let’s assume this for the sake of argument – how will you respond?

Yohanna Qulta: We will oppose this fiercely, to the point of martyrdom. Returning to the Middle Ages is out of the question. We will not turn to the UN or to the Western countries, but to Al-Azhar, to Islamic moral values, and to the vast majority of Muslims, who are moderate. Gone are the days of paying the jizya, the days of slavery. What the Salafis and the others need to understand is that the religious state has failed, from East to West, in every era, both in Christian and Muslims countries.

The Church was liberated the day religious was separated from state. Has the Catholic Church collapsed in Europe, or in France? No, it still exists, despite the separate of Church and state.

It has been proven that a religious state is not compatible with human nature. The role of religion is to educate the human conscience. It shapes the conscience of Man, so that merchants have a conscience, engineers have a conscience, laborers have a conscience… Religion is not supposed to regulate traffic or taxes, or to determine whether one should wear the hijab or niqab. Religion is supposed to advise and guide, but to leave one with freedom of choice. Religion is freedom.

…

I’d rather turn to my Muslim neighbors.

I never thought I’d quote an Egyptian cleric favorably.

But I fear his adversaries like giving martyrdom as well as receiving. All I can say is, God be with him.