Hot Air clues us in to this statement from Liveleak, the original Internet host of "Fitna," which pulled the film under threats of violence last week. Having retooled its security, Liveleak is back up and running with Fitna and for freedom of speech. Here's the company statement:

On the 28th of March LiveLeak.com was left with no other choice but to remove the film "fitna" from our servers following serious threats to our staff and their families. Since that time we have worked constantly on upgrading all security measures thus offering better protection for our staff and families. With these measures in place we have decided to once more make this video live on our site. We will not be pressured into censoring material which is legal and within our rules. We apologise for the removal and the delay in getting it b ...

In watching Western analysts argue over who "won" the recent round of fighting between forces seemingly directed by Moqtada al-Sadr, and forces sort of loyal to Iraqi prime minister Nouri al-Maliki, I notice the kind-of cease-fire negotiations were what you might call "facilitated" by Iran.  According to one Sunni lawmaker involved in mediation efforts (some substance of which appear to have taken place in Qom, Iran, just BTW), they were actually overseen by the commander of Iran's Revolutionary Guards' al-Quds brigade. That's the US-designated terror group that answers directly to the Iranian leadership and that the US  specifically

The excellent Rep. Duncan Hunter (would that he were the Republican prez nominee) details the dangerous and destructive practice by our government of buying America's miitary hardware from foreign countries, due to a fanatical attachment to bottom-line free trade, I suppose. But sometimes free trade is not "free."

Hunter writes:

As we become increasingly dependent on other countries for military resources and innovative technologies, we are becoming less capable of meeting our own critical defense needs.

In fact, when I was chairman of the House Armed Services Committee and American troops began taking casualties from roadside bombs on the streets of Iraq, I sent out my team to locate more steel to armor and better protect their tactical vehicles. They found only one company left in the United States ...

...did Pre-Emptive Rage, well, pre-empt post-release Fitna Rage?

Reuters reports :  The Netherlands breathed a sigh of relief on Friday after Dutch Muslims reacted with restraint to the release of a film by a Dutch lawmaker that accuses the Koran of inciting violence.

You mean they acted like normal people who just wrinkle their noses (maybe) when they don't like a movie? Let's give them the Order of William, the Netherlands highest military honor (I looked it up). 

But 21-gun salutes for "Muslims r ...

...in their rage at Geert Wilders.

That's the subject of today's column, written in anticipation of the film's release and in reflection on the run-up to the film's release. In the  long sequence  of Islamic "rages"--Satanic Verses Rage, Koran Rage, Cartoon Rage, Pope Rages, even Teddy Bear Rage--the rage over a film no one had seen until yesterday was something new: Pre-Emptive Rage.

Watch it here.

Two thumbs up, five stars, and an instant classic.

Shameful, shocking revelations from the Thomas More Law Center (via American Thinker) about what more and more appears to be a miscarriage of justice.

New Revelations in Haditha Case - Sec. of Def. Rumsfeld Set up Shadow Body to Oversee Investigations
March 26, 2008

ANN ARBOR, MI – Revelations by top Marine Generals, that former Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, set up a shadow “body” composed of high-ranking administration officials to oversee the Haditha investigations, could prove to be the most damning evidence of the political motivations and influence over the ongoing prosecutions of Lieutenant Colonel Jeffrey Chessani, USMC [photo above], and other combat Marin ...

“It is not the duty of government to bail out and reward those who act irresponsibly, whether they are big banks or small borrowers.”

--John McCain

In The Death of the Grown-Up, I make the argument that the infantilized condition of Western culture dangerously and tragically makes the West  particularly susceptible to the self-abnegating, supplicating trappings of dhimmitude (monumentally chronicled by Bat Ye'or), which may be viewed as the ultimate phase of infantilization.

Not that one has much reason to expect Switzerland to Stand Tall, but this recent display by the Swiss foreign minister (the grinning gal ogling   Ahmadinejad) offers an illustration of what dhimmitude looks like as free nations grovel for gas before genocidal jihadists at war with Western civilization.    

Certainly, there can be no possibility of peace for Israel until there is no more Palestinian curriculum of lies instructing Palestinian schoolchildren that Israel burns children in ovens, as reported this week by Palestinian Media Watch.

This esson is being taught this month in Hamas-controlled Gaza, but don't think the Fatah-controlled West Bank (led, after all, by Holocaust-denying Mahmoud Abbas) refrains from this Big Lie. As PMW pointed out:

Palestinian Authority (Fatah) TV already already taught children in the past that Israel burned children in the Holocaust. With ovens pictured in the background and actors playing dead children as part of a musical play, an actor in a video declared:
 

I have written before about the courageous anti-jihadist journalist Saleh Uddin Shoaib Choudhury (most recently here), along with his American champion Dr. Richard Benkin, whose untiring efforts to bring Shoaib's sufferings at the hands of the Bangladeshi government to the attention of US government authorities  has very likely saved Shoaib's life many times over. Today, at The American Thinker, Dr. Benkin takes us behind the scenes on Capitol Hill to ask and answer a very shocking question about which senator was most unhelpful regarding Shoaib's plight:

Who was the one lawmaker that took a pass on saving the life of an imprisoned US ally and opponent of Islamist extremism? That’s right, my own Illinois Senator Barack Obama.

Read it, as they say,

The AP reports:

Italy's most prominent Muslim, an iconoclastic writer who condemned Islamic extremism and defended Israel, converted to Catholicism Saturday in a baptism by the pope at a Vatican Easter service.

An Egyptian-born, non-practicing Muslim who is married to a Catholic, Magdi Allam infuriated some Muslims with his books and columns in the newspaper Corriere della Sera newspaper, where he is a deputy editor. He titled one book "Long Live Israel."

As a choir sang, Pope Benedict XVI poured holy water over Allam's head and said a brief prayer in Latin.

"We no longer stand alongside or in opposition t ...

From the Washington Post today:

Hillary Clinton has been regaling supporters on the campaign trail with hair-raising tales of a trip she made to Bosnia in March 1996. In her retelling, she was sent to places that her husband, President Bill Clinton, could not go because they were "too dangerous." When her account was challenged by one of her traveling companions, the comedian Sinbad, she upped the ante and injected even more drama into the story. In a speech earlier this week, she talked about "landing under sniper fire" and running for safety with "our heads down."

According to the Post's "Pinnochio Test," Hillary's story is a Real Whopper (Four Pinnochio noses). Highlights from the fisking:

Far from running to an airpor ...

The new head of the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC), Senegalese President Abdoulaye Wade, told the Washington Times that  the Danish Mo-toons are "the work of insignificant individuals who want to get famous overnight."

Rather dismissive, no? Does this comment--irritatingly provocative in several ways I pass on for now (but just ask Kurt Westergaard how he is enjoying his "get famous quick scheme" that resulted in a Muslim assassination plot that has made it impossible for him and his wife to live in their home)--perhaps reveal something new about OIC tactics? After all, the OIC has consistently  depicted the Danish Mo-toons as the worst calamity for Islam since Charles Martel. All of a sudden, they're no big deal.

Wade continued: &am ...

From today's column:

As a conservative in no way comforted by the Clinton-Obama-Pelosi-Reid rhetoric on the war in Iraq, I should have taken heart from the president's fifth-anniversary remarks revisiting the Battle of Baghdad, the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, the thrill of Iraqi elections, the perfidy of Al Qaeda terrorists, the Anbar Awakening, and the success of the surge.

 I didn't.

The rest of it explains why.

This AP headline from last week really does say it all:

Iraq oil revenue soars, creating huge surplus
But U.S. still investing billions in rebuilding, facing squeeze at home

Not that there isn't more to say:

Last week, Sens. Carl Levin, a Democrat, and John Warner, a Republican, asked GAO to investigate what Iraq is doing with its oil revenue. The senators estimated that Iraq will realize "at least $100 billion in oil revenues in 2007 and 2008."

A couple of questions:

1) Why isn't that oil money being used to assist with US efforts to rebuild Iraq? Back in 2003, the Bush administrati ...

From Worldnetdaily.com's Aaron Klein, the man who yesterday brought us Malik Zulu Shabazz's endorsement of Barack Obama:

Sen. Barack Obama's Chicago church reprinted a manifesto by Hamas that defended terrorism as legitimate resistance, refused to recognize the right of Israel to exist and compared the terror group's official charter – which calls for the murder of Jews – to America's Declaration of Independence.

The Hamas piece was published on the "Pastor's Page" of the Trinity United Church of Christ newsletter reserved for Rev. Jeremiah Wright Jr., ..."

The New York Times weighs in today on The Mo-toons Return Story: namely, picking up on what has happened since 17 Danish newspapers recently reprinted the Danish Mohammed cartoons in the wake of an Islamic  plot, thwarted by Danish police, to murder cartoonist Kurt Westergaard.

Two things.

One, the reporter's slant on Muslim hysteria:

Americans, for whom the presidential election seems to have become a delirious, unending sport, preoccupying their attention, turn out not to be the only ones ...

Gates of Vienna reports on the crashingly disappointing transformation of Danish Prime Minister Rasmussen from free-speech champion (he stood up to Muslim diplomatic and economic pressure during Cartoon Rage 2006 and beyond) to PC automaton, now mouthing the EU-correct platitudes  against Dutch parliamentarian Geert Wilders, whose career is devoted to staving off the Islamization of Europe. 

In the course of an interview with Danish TV (G of V has video link to the English-language interview) during which Wilders expressed his concerns about the Islamization of Europe, the need to stop Islamic immigration, and his opinion that the Koran is a "fascist book," Wilders also praised Rasmussen for upholding Denmark's principles of freedom of expression.  Reuters wrote:

Wilders said the cartoonist K ...

Victor Davis Hanson comes up with the perfect phrase to describe Obama's speech: an exercise in "self-serving relativism."

He explains here.

Every newspaper in the Free World should respond to Bin Laden's latest ravings by reprinting the Danish Mohammed cartoons.

Historian John David Lewis (about whom I've written here) thought he was giving a lecture at George Tech, but turns out, in the eyes of an Islamic segment of his audience, he was actually committing a thoughtcrime. He explains:

I spoke at Georgia Tech last week on "No Substitute for Victory: The Defeat of Islamic Totalitarianism." A pro-Islamic group in the audience (some at least were students) tried to filibuster the Q&A. Their attacks openly called for Islamic law (a "good thing"), praised jihad as a "wonderful" concept, and proclaimed that subjugated peoples forced to pay the Islamic tax should be "grateful" for the "protection" they receive. They whitewashed history as well as the present situation, demanded that we stop & ...

...maybe I'm over-reacting. Aaron Klein reports that Malik Zulu Shabazz, national chairman of the New Black Panther Party, a virulently anti-white, anti-Jew, anti-American organization, just loved the Obama speech.

Go Team Obama.

Mine had to leave her lifelong home of Brooklyn, New York, in the mid- 1970s because of heretofore unseen urban crime in her neighborhood--crime disproportionately committed by black men. Does this condemn her as a racist in Sen. Obama's eyes?

In comparing his own grandmother's "confessed" fear of black men, to Rev. Wright's vicious racism, Sen. Obama hit a new low. Such feelings on the part of elderly women, often widows in fragile health who live alone on a fixed income in a foggy state of beleaguered bewilderment at their great age and diminished capacity, is in no way a sign of racism but of fear. Fear that a walk  to the corner market or mail box will end in a mugging, or worse. Obama should be ashamed of himself for making this disgraceful moral equivalence. But he isn't. And that is more cause to question the judgment of this man who sees nothing wrong with having been mentored by an anti-American racist for two decades.

Commentary's blog has now weighed in on the recent BBC poll (mentioned below), seizing on rising Iraqi "optimism" and Democratic defeatism as the big story--and  ignoring the shattering finding that even now, five years after the United States deposed Saddam Hussein, 42 Iraqis in 100 think it's "acceptable" to attack Americans.   

The Drudge Report is headlining the evening with this:

Calls Mount for Olympic Ceremony Boycott.

A "Ceremony" boycott? The AP reports:

Moves to punish China over its handling of violence in Tibet gained momentum Tuesday, with a novel suggestion for a mini-boycott of the Beijing Olympics by VIPs at the opening ceremony.

A mini-boycott? How adorable. And how suitable for standing on--tiptoeing on--a mini-principle.

The story goes on to describe French,  Dutch and IOC receptivity to the mini-notion.

IOC executive board member and marketing chief Gerhard Heiberg said Olympics officials can't lecture China but does raise human rights a ...

At one point in his speech today, Sen. Obama said:

But race is an issue that I believe this nation cannot afford to ignore right now.

Imagine if he had said, "But race is an issue that I believe this nation has been far too focused on, obssesed with even to the point of blinding us all to our common humanity"--or some such truly post-racial notion. Instead, his take on the nation's revulsion over Rev. Wright's racist sermonizing, along with the five-minute flap over Geraldine Ferraro's comments about Obama's race and her sex aiding their respective careers in the Democratic Party, drove Obama to call for still more focus on race. He said:

The fact is that the comments that have been made and the issues that have surfaced over the last few weeks reflect the complexities of race in this country that we’ve never really worked through – ...

Still going over Sen. Obama's speech, the prepared text of which is here, but I didn't hear anything that erases the seemingly indelible impression that, yes, Barack Obama spent 20 years being spiritually mentored and advised by a minister whose racism and anti-Americanism places him beyond the pale. How does Obama thus earn the trust of the people of this country? Depends, ultimately, on how many share or have learned to  "understand" the minister's vile creed. Obama rationalized the minister's rage, and also tried to persuade voters that there was more to the minister than rage--hardly the "post-racial" thing to do.

And then there was this:

Some will see this as an attempt to justify or excuse comments that are simply inexcusable. I can assure you it is not. I suppose the politically safe thing would be to move on from this episod ...

...believe attacks on "Coalition forces"--i.e., US troops--are "acceptable." (Hat tip Andrew Bostom.)

But look on the "bright side": That figure is down 15 percent from six months ago. That is, I mean to say: That figure is down 15 percent from six months ago!!!!!!

Little wonder General Petraeus has sounded frustrated lately. 

Serving the glass-full interpretation, the survey also tells us 57 percent of Iraqis think such attacks are unacceptable--up 14 percent ...