Osama bin Laden killed

As we are approaching the 10th anniversary of the Sept. 11 massacre, we heard unexpected good news: Osama bin Laden was killed "in his luxury hideout" in Pakistan by US commandos.
As we Bulgarians say in such cases, God finally collected his bad debts (Gospod nai-setne si sabra veresiite).
Below, I am copying the entire May 1 post Yes We Can by British-Libyan writer Soad El-Rgaig:

"Today the world rejoices the death of an evil man and his twisted ideology, Osama Ben Laden. This man and his evil ideology brought so much suffering and pain to everyone. Today the sun will shine on a world free from one evil man.
Tomorrow, I hope the world will celebrate the demise of another evil man called Muammer Gaddafi who is killing innocent people because they said no to his evilness, his hate-mongering ideology, his forces of destruction.
Any chance those Special US Operators who carried out the honorable job in Pakistan will pass by Libya on their way to home :-)"

Monster mosque to be built next to Ground Zero

(The expression in the title borrowed from Atlas Shrugs blog.)
First, I am copy-pasting below most of the article Plan for mosque near World Trade Center site moves ahead, by Joe Jackson & Bill Hutchinson, published earlier this month in NY Daily News, but for the moment just follow the link and read.

"A proposal to build a mosque steps from Ground Zero received the support of a downtown committee despite some loved ones of 9/11 victims finding it offensive.
The 13-story mosque and Islamic cultural center was unanimously endorsed by the 12-member Community Board 1's financial district committee.
The $100 million project, called the Cordoba House, is proposed for the old Burlington Coat Factory... just two blocks from the World Trade Center site.
"I think it will be a wonderful asset to the community," said committee Chairman Ro Sheffe.
Imam Feisel Abdul Rauf, who helped found the Cordoba Initiative following the 9/11 attacks, said the project is intended to foster better relations between the West and Muslims...
Daisy Khan, executive director of the American Society for Muslim Advancement and Cordoba Initiative board member, said the project has received little opposition.
"Whatever concerns anybody has, we have to make sure to educate them that we are an asset to the community," Khan said.
Khan said her group hopes construction on the project will begin by the 10th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks.
Once built, 1,000 to 2,000 Muslims are expected to pray at the mosque every Friday, she said.
No one at last night's meeting protested the project. But some 9/11 families said they found the proposal offensive because the terrorists who launched the attacks were Muslim.
"I realize it's not all of them, but I don't want to have to go down to a memorial where my son died on 9/11 and look at a mosque," said retired FDNY Deputy Chief Jim Riches - whose son Jim, a firefighter, was killed on 9/11.
"If you ask me, it's a religion of hate," said Riches, who did not attend last night's meeting.
Rosemary Cain of Massapequa, L.I., whose son, Firefighter George Cain, 35, was killed in the 2001 attacks, called the project a "slap in the face."
"I think it's despicable. That's sacred ground," said Cain, who also did not attend the meeting.
"How could anybody give them permission to build a mosque there? It tarnishes the area."

Frankly, I find it unbelievable. After some Muslims sacrificed their lives in order to destroy the Twin Towers together with the people inside, now other Muslims are keen to build a giant mosque almost on the cleared spot. As I wrote in my post about Samir Kuntar two years ago, "if we remove the fragile frame of civilization, what remains from the human? A Darwinian creature who will happily kill other people's children in order to make more space for his own progeny."
I am only slightly surprised that Muslims have come with such an idea. It is just the umpteenth piece of evidence about the nature of Islam. I am, however, surprised that the city is giving green light to this insanity.
The same NY Daily News page offers an opinion poll:

"Do you think it is appropriate to construct a mosque near Ground Zero?
- Yes, it will encourage tolerance.
- No, if the 9/11 victims' families are opposed.
- I'm not sure."

I cannot take part in such an opinion poll; I can just wonder at its authors' dhimmitude and stupidity. The first symptom of these is their priority of problems - regarding the intolerance to Islam as a more important problem than the deaths and suffering caused by Islam at Ground Zero and elsewhere. Following the same logic, we should build Nazi and Communist propaganda centers near the former extermination camps in order to encourage tolerance to these doctrines.
Second, I find it wrong beyond description that opposition to the plan is justified not with the need to regard Islam as the doctrine of supremacy, oppression and genocide it is, but with political correctness - not to hurt the feelings of 9/11 victims' families. So, if the Islamists had killed the whole families, there would be no problem at all, right?
I am outraged because the grieving relatives, instead of being allowed to devote themselves to the memory of their loved ones and the challenges of life, are now forced to fight against the trivialization of their loss and the planned building of an actual memorial to the murderers. We have observed the same in Bulgaria and other former Communist countries - the pressure put on the surviving victims of the regime, and on the relatives of dead ones, to put their hard feelings aside and embrace the Communists for the sake of "peace" and "reconciliation". It was wrong here, and it is wrong in New York now.
Another similarity is that Communists filled East-European cities with their landmarks and actively struggled for their preservation, because they knew the importance of architectural environment for shaping the collective mind. Russia successfully pressed Bulgaria to preserve the numerous memorials to Soviet occupiers. When a landmark of evil is standing, growing young people walk in its shadow and think, "How powerful they are - to kill so many of us, to do us so much evil and still to make us keep their monuments. We must always give them what they want, then they probably will leave us alive." The same is planned to happen in New York.
Disclaimer: I do not advocate any action against Muslims. I am against Islam, not against Muslims, as I am against AIDS, not against AIDS-infected people. And I do not like the fact that I feel obliged to include such a disclaimer. When I write against Nazism or Communism, I do not feel obliged to disclaim that I do not advocate any action against individual supporters of these doctrines.

Update from May 27: I voted with "no" in the above mentioned opinion poll, mainly to see the results. They are: 68% "yes", 31% "no", 2% "not sure".

Blaming America by junk science

I have just read the March 4 BBC report Fallujah doctors report rise in birth defects, after following a link from the WIP site. I am quoting a part of it below:

"Doctors in the Iraqi city of Fallujah are reporting a high level of birth defects, with some blaming weapons used by the US after the Iraq invasion.
The city witnessed fierce fighting in 2004 as US forces carried out a major offensive against insurgents...
Doctors and parents believe the problem is the highly sophisticated weapons the US troops used in Fallujah six years ago.
British-based Iraqi researcher Malik Hamdan told the BBC's World Today programme that doctors in Fallujah were witnessing a "massive unprecedented number" of heart defects, and an increase in the number of nervous system defects.
She said that one doctor in the city had compared data about birth defects from before 2003 - when she saw about one case every two months - with the situation now, when, she saw cases every day.
Ms Hamdan said that based on data from January this year, the rate of congenital heart defects was 95 per 1,000 births - 13 times the rate found in Europe..."

A commenter has left the following remark at the WIP site: "Bloody warmongering U.S. commits war crimes with impunity. I am disgusted and ashamed. Sincerely."
I wrote, "Comparing the congenital heart defects incidence in Fallujah to that in Europe, rather than to that in the same city in earlier years, in other Iraqi cities or in other Mideast countries, should immediately raise the red flag. Hoffman et al. (2002) in their article "The incidence of congenital heart disease" (J Am Coll Cardiol, 2002; 39:1890-1900) point out that this incidence varies greatly depending on which defects you count, and that including all of them gives a rate of 75/1,000 live births - only a little less than reported here for Fallujah. Of course there may be true increase in birth defects causally linked to the US weapons; but so far, the data presented remind me the infamous "vaccines cause autism" speculation."
In fact, the 95/1,000 heart defects statistics is the only number cited in the BBC report. All other data are anecdotal, such as how many defects a doctor "saw" before and now (which could be due simply to her now seeing a larger total number of babies, or to her hospital acquiring better diagnostic equipment).
According to Hoffman et al., "there is no evidence for differences in incidence in different countries or times". I would add that even if there are significantly more birth defects in Fallujah than in Europe, the cause could be selective abortion of malformed fetuses after ultrasound diagnosis in Europe, higher prevalence of consanguineous marriages in Iraq, other genetic factors or environmental factors unrelated to the US-led war. Identifying correlation, let alone causation, is serious business. So far, the presented "data" seem to show only that the war has had psychological impact on Fallujah doctors and their patients.
Of course, we cannot exclude true increase in birth defects in Fallujah caused by the 2004 US operation. Weapons are not presumed or expected to be healthy. However, such an increase can be revealed only by research worth this name, preferably followed by publication(s) in peer-reviewed journal(s). I find it unfortunate that the BBC is so happy to embrace any piece of junk science (if not plain propaganda) as long as it makes the USA look bloody and warmongering.

"Accused stabs witness to death in courtroom"

The late Marwa El-Sherbini with her husband and son. Photo copied from Europe-Turkmen Friendships, original source unknown.

This post is a tribute to an opponent - a Muslim woman killed in Germany. Different sources give slight variations in the details of the case. The large quote below is from Wikipedia:

"Marwa Ali El-Sherbini (October 7, 1977 – July 1, 2009) was an Egyptian pharmacist... She was killed during a hearing at a court of law in Dresden, Germany, by a man against whom she had testified after being insulted for wearing an Islamic headscarf.

El-Sherbini was... daughter of chemists... In 1995 she graduated from the El Nasr Girls' College, where she also acted as a student speaker. She was a member of the Egyptian national handball team from 1992 to 1999. From 2000 to 2005 she studied pharmacy at the Faculty of Pharmacy of Alexandria University, obtaining a bachelor's degree.

In 2005, El-Sherbini moved with her husband to Bremen in Germany. In 2008, the couple and their two year old son moved to Dresden, where her husband Elwi Ali-Okaz, a lecturer at Minufiya University, obtained a doctoral research position at the Max Planck Institute for Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics. At the same time, El-Sherbini worked at the University Hospital Dresden and at a local pharmacy, as a part of an accreditation scheme to practice pharmacy in Germany. Together with others, El-Sherbini founded an association (Eingetragener Verein) with the aim to establish an Islamic cultural and education centre in Dresden. At the time of her death El-Sherbini was three months pregnant with her second child.

In August 2008, Alex W. (a German citizen, born in Perm, Russia of German ethnic origin) shouted abuse at El-Sherbini in a public playground for children in Dresden, in a quarrel over the use of a swing by his niece and El-Sherbini's son. El-Sherbini, wearing an Islamic headscarf, was called an "Islamist", "terrorist" and "slut". Others present tried to intervene, but Alex W. continued the verbal abuse for several minutes until the police arrived at the scene...

Alex W. was charged with defamation, pressed by El-Sherbini, and found guilty by the district court of Dresden, issuing a fine of 780 Euro. During the trial Alex W. claimed mitigating circumstances for the act of insulting El-Sherbini, suggesting that "people like her" were not real humans and therefore cannot be insulted. The Public Prosecutor successfully appealed the verdict to achieve a higher conviction due to the openly xenophobic character of the incident.

At the appeal hearing at the regional court in Dresden, 1 July 2009, eight persons were present in the courtroom: a panel of one professional and two lay judges, the prosecutor, Alex W. as the defendant, his defence counsel, El-Sherbini as witness for the prosecution, and her husband and son as members of the public. No security personnel was present and no security searches of individuals and their possessions were carried out, common in cases without anticipated security concerns and with no persons under arrest present.

After El-Sherbini had testified, Alex W. strode across the courtroom and attacked her with a knife, by stabbing her 18 times while allegedly shouting "You don't deserve to live!". El-Sherbini's husband, Elwi Ali-Okaz, attempting to protect his wife was stabbed to the lung and hip area. A police officer, who was in the court building testifying in an unrelated case was called to the scene to intervene, but mistook Elwi Ali-Okaz for the attacker and shot him in the leg. Elwi Ali-Okaz... was in a coma for two days... El-Sherbini died on the scene... Alex W. is currently held... on suspicion of murder of Marwa El-Sherbini and attempted murder of Elwi Ali Okaz...

The killing was reported on 1 July 2009 in German radio and television and in print media on the following day. In line with common media practice regarding crime victims, due to stringent privacy laws in Germany, El-Sherbini was in the initial media reports only referred to as "a 32-year old witness". The Minister of Justice for Saxony... who had visited the crime scene on the same day, publicly expressed condolence to the "young woman and her family"... The Association of Judges in Saxony (Sächsischer Richterbund) demanded a review of security procedures in court buildings. According to the British media, the German media initially reported on the case at "the back page", and only in the light of the vociferous protests by thousands of Egyptians in Cairo against an apparent "Islamophobia", the German federal government, which had kept silent for nearly a week, issued words of sorrow...

On 6 July 2009, at El-Sherbini's funeral, in Alexandria, mourners referred to her as a "martyr of the head scarf"... Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad blamed the German goverment for El-Sherbini's murder and called for international condemnation of Germany.In a letter to UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad demanded firm action against Germany and stated that "there is a strong view that the crime was a pre-planned attempt engineered by the judicial system and security forces"."

Now, my thoughts about the case.

In line with the good tradition not to criticize the dead (especially if they have suffered a horrible and violent death), I won't comment on Ms. El-Sherbini - not in this post at least. However, while I may disapprove the victim's behaviour, I am utterly disgusted by the murderer. (May I omit the mandatory "alleged"? Thank you.) Not only because he is a murderer, and motivated by hate, but also because he is a narcissistic psychopath feeling entitled to decide who deserves to live and who doesn't. And what disgusts me even more (though I may show sexism here) is that he is a man and he chose a woman as his victim. I strongly hope and expect him to receive the maximum sentence existing in German law.

From the reactions to the murder, most impressive is the grotesque cynicism of the Iranian regime and its leader Ahmadinejad. Apart from the above mentioned official letter to the UN, Iranian authorities allowed and encouraged (if not ordered) public events to commemorate El-Sherbini and progest against Germany. You can see e.g. a photo of a symbolic funeral of Marwa El-Sherbini in Tehran on a post by German immigrant blogger Rose-Anne Clermont. In other words, anti-government protests are banned, but if you folk still feel like protesting, you are welcome to rally in front of the German embassy... I wonder, do Ahmadinejad's thugs really think that if they shed crocodile tears about Marwa, this will make their people forget Neda and all other innocent, freedom-loving Iranian women and men murdered by the regime? I fully agree with Azarmehr that this is hypocrisy beyond belief.

Most of the reactions in Egypt were also, to my opinion, far-fetched (to say the least). However, I prefer not to report them here. I hope that Egyptian people were just venting their shock, grief and anger in words without contemplating any actions. And as days are passing and we aren't hearing of any revenge against Germans, this explanations seems more and more probable. I hope also that I won't have to correct myself here.

Briefly, the weird accusations and conspiracy theories rotate around two facts - that nobody stopped Alex W. from stabbing Marwa 18 times and that the policeman shot Marwa's husband instead of the attacker. I would ask Muslims and their Western leftist friends (e.g. at the Guardian) to lighten up a little and call their common sense. Few are the heroes who, seeing an armed homicidal maniac in action, would rush to stop him and risk becoming his next victim. And it is so natural for police to make mistakes in disastrous, split-second situations. I have heard of quite a few hostage release operations where police have shot bystanders and hostages instead of the kidnappers.

However, there is a point where I fully agree with my Muslim opponents and wish to give them a shoulder. This is the way the crime was initially reported - at the back pages of newspapers, with headlines that didn't mention a word that it was a hate crime and the victim was a Muslim. I borrowed such a headline from Die Welt, Accused stabs witness to death in courtroom, as a title for this post. Doesn't it sound absurd? I found it in a post by a blogger trying to prove that German media did report the case timely and properly. If you are defending the wrong opinion, the usual result is that the more you put "arguments" for it, the more its wrongness is exposed.

Muslims and Leftists were quick to say that the murder of a Westerner by a Muslim would receive far more publicity, and cited the case of Theo van Gogh. To me, this example is irrelevant because van Gogh was already a celebrity when he was murdered. When the Western or "Western wannabe" victim has been an ordinary person, I have observed absolutely the same pattern of ignoring the case and its hate motivation, sweeping it under the carpet and reporting it in the back pages with the smallest font available. Just remember Kriss Donald, Ilan Halimi and Aqsa Parvez. In fact, the headline from Die Welt immediately brought to my memory the (in)famous Washington Post headline about Aqsa Parvez's murder: Canadian teen dies; father is charged.

Hate crimes are an important thing, especially during a global war. And they must be reported. At least I think so. One can say that straight reporting of hate crimes may perpetuate the hard feelings, trigger revenge actions or make some people emulate the culprit. All this may be true, but still I think that sweeping such cases under the carpet does more harm. And I would appeal to all my opponents to defend free speech and honest reporting. Because you never know when you will be the person needing it.

Harsh sentence for Nicky Reilly

Nicky Reilly (photo copied from the Guardian, original source PA.)

I first blogged about Nicky Reilly on June 26, 2008. These days, I googled his name to check for any news on him and saw that he was tried and convicted in January. Below, I am quoting most of a Jan. 31 report from the Times:

"Nicky Reilly, Muslim convert, jailed for 18 years for Exeter bomb attack
Adam Fresco, Crime Correspondent
A vulnerable Muslim convert who was persuaded by extremists to attempt a suicide bomb attack was jailed for a minimum of 18 years yesterday.
Nicky Reilly, 22, who has Asperger’s syndrome and a mental age of 10, was described by his lawyer as the “least cunning” person ever to have been charged with terrorism...
At his trial in October last year Reilly, from Plymouth, Devon, who appeared in court as Mohamad Abdulaziz Rashid Saeed, pleaded guilty to attempted murder and preparing an act of terrorism.
Sentencing him to life imprisonment at the Old Bailey yesterday, Mr Justice Calvert-Smith said that although the attack was “an unsophisticated attempt”, Reilly was a “significant risk” to the public.
After his conviction, counter-terrorism officials said that extremists had taken advantage of his low IQ to groom him.
Reilly, who has an IQ of 83, had first been taken to see a pyschiatrist when he was 9 and tried to take an overdose at 16. Kerim Faud, representing him, said: “He may comfortably be deemed to be the least cunning person ever to have come before this court for this type of offence.”
He is thought to have met British-based Muslim radicals in internet cafés near his council home, which he shared with his mother.
Security sources said that radicals encouraged him to visit internet chat rooms and other websites, where he encountered men based in Pakistan who helped to mould a violent hatred of the West. He discussed with the men what his targets should be and they directed him to bomb-making websites.
In a suicide note left in his home he paid tribute to “Sheikh Osama” (bin Laden) and called on the British and US governments to leave Muslim countries. He said that Western states must withdraw their support of Israel, and that violence would continue until “the wrongs have been righted”.
On May 22 Reilly put his plan into action... When he arrived at the Giraffe restaurant he ordered a drink and sat for ten minutes before heading to the lavatory to make the bombs.
Fortunately for the 24 customers and 11 staff in the restaurant and the 20 more people lunching outside, the bombs exploded in the cubicle.
Mr Justice Calvert-Smith said yesterday: “I am quite satisfied that these offences are so serious that only a life sentence is appropriate. This defendant currently represents a significant risk of serious harm to the public.
“The offence of attempted murder is aggravated by the fact that it was long planned, that it had multiple intended victims and was intended to terrorise the population of this country. It was sheer luck or chance that it did not succeed.”
He accepted that the attack was unsophisticated but added: “Those who attempt to commit suicide and in doing so murder other people are almost invariably unsophisticated in many aspects. That lack of sophistication saved many Londoners on July 21, 2005.” "

Those who know me will confirm that I am definitely not a fan of Islamic extremism - or, for that matter, of any thing Islamic.
However, the harshness of the sentence raises my outrage. 18 years! I know of many Palestinian failed suicide bombers who were non-disabled and nevertheless were treated much more leniently by Israeli courts. Justice must be driven by more serious considerations than the knee-jerk feelings of people concerned for their own safety. Reilly has mental disabilities, which in any civilized country should mean not to hold him responsible the way a typical person would be held after doing the same thing.
I also think that some disability advocacy and self-advocacy movements may be doing a disservice in such cases. In recent times, they often make efforts to portray people with mental disabilities as identical to non-disabled people in all respects except in the need of some extra services. As the Self-Advocates Becoming Empowered stated, "Our mission is to ensure that people with disabilities (a) are treated as equals, (b) are given the same decisions, choices, rights, responsibilities and chances to speak up to empower themselves, and (c) are given opportunities to learn from mistakes, as everyone else". However, in real life there are too many mistakes that can be made only once. I understand that nobody wishes to be stereotyped as a person with decreased ability to tell right from wrong, but I fear that the demand "Give us all the rights and responsibilities of the non-disabled" is leaving people like Nicky Reilly behind.

To end this post (in fact, as an instant update to it), I am quoting a comment to Fresco's report in the Times:
"Prison? Secure hospital accommodation surely, and all since the support he needed earlier in life was absent or inadequate. I fear the real terrorists were the first people to accept him and warmly (but falsely) welcome him in. Tempting, for a depressed outsider.
(adult with Asperger's) Chris , Launceston, UK"

NATO countries bullied by their "ally" Turkey

Image: a cartoon of Prophet Mohamed, by Kurt Westergaard, downloaded from the Mohammed Image Archive, originally published in the Danish paper Jyllands-Posten in 2005. It is inserted in this post as blog action against Islamism. I intended to abstain from publishing Mohamed cartoons out of respect to Anglo-Libyan, but an event of these days became the straw breaking the camel's back.

First, let me quote a report from Independent:

"Danish Prime Minister elected secretary-general
By Brian Brady, Sunday, 5 April 2009

One of the most troubling disagreements of the two-day summit was finally resolved towards the end of the gathering, when the Danish Prime Minister overcame Turkish opposition to become Nato's new secretary-general. Anders Fogh Rasmussen (pictured) was heavily backed by the biggest European powers, but his campaign to succeed Jaap de Hoop Scheffer was threatened when Turkey objected over his failure to ban Denmark-based Roj-TV, seen as the mouthpiece of the Kurdistan Workers' Party. The Turkish Prime Minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, also complained that Mr Rasmussen had failed to sanction those responsible for a Danish newspaper's publication of caricatures of the Prophet Mohamed in 2005 (emphasis mine - M.M.). However, Turkish officials said Ankara dropped its objection after the US President Barack Obama answered Mr Erdogan's "objections" during a private meeting. Mr Erdogan told Turkish television that he had received "guarantees" from Mr Obama that one of Mr Rasmussen's deputies would be a Turk – and that Turkish commanders would be present at the alliance's command."

Daniel Pipes is more open about the concessions: "The Dane won the job only after engaging in intensive negotiations with Turkish president Abdullah Gül hosted by Barack Obama. Fogh Rasmussen promised to appoint at least two Turks and publicly to address Muslim concerns about his response to the cartoons. More broadly, Erdogan announced. Obama "gave us guarantees" concerning Turkish reservations about Fogh Rasmussen. The hoops that Fogh Rasmussen had to jump through to win Ankara's support can be inferred from his cringe-inducing, dhimmi-like remarks on winning the appointment: "As secretary general of NATO, I will make a very clear outreach to the Muslim world to ensure cooperation and intensify dialogue with the Muslim world. I consider Turkey a very important ally and strategic partner and I will cooperate with them in our endeavors to ensure the best cooperation with Muslim world." "

So much about the "secular", "civilized", "model", "democratic", "Westernized" etc. Turkey - as soon as you get down to real business, you find yourself confronting the ugly face of Islamism.

Nizo once commented on my blog that what is important is not the type of the dominating religion but the separation of religious institutions from the state, which has been achieved in the West but not yet in most Muslim countries. This is a serious opinion, but I think recent events prove it wrong and show that as long as you have Islamic background, you can separate as much as you wish and still, when the moment of truth comes, it will be to no avail.

When I ask what the hell is the benefit of having Turkey in NATO, people keep telling me that "it has the 2nd largest army in the alliance (after USA)". In my humble opinion, this is nonsense. What is the use of an army, big or small, if you aren't sure whether it is with you or with the enemy?

Now, what to do with NATO? Change its decision-making process from consensus to majority? Good idea, but it is exactly Turkey that would oppose and prevent it from happening. Dismantle it altogether? Maybe we'll have to, who knows... My sympathy to the people of Denmark, and also to the decent people of Turkey.

Short overview of journalists criticizing presidents

Cartoon of a shoe with George Bush's face on it, apparently shown at a rally in support of al-Zaidi. Authors of the cartoon and the photo are unknown to me.

On Dec. 14, 2008, during his visit to South Ossetia, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev held a press conference. A local journalist, angered by the Russian occupation and de facto annex of his country, threw both of his shoes at him. President Medvedev ducked twice, avoiding being hit by the shoes. The journalist was arrested and is now awaiting trial. He may be charged with insulting a foreign leader of with assault, which carries a maximum sentence of 3 and 15 years, respectively. However, he found support from his employer, thousands of protesters in South Ossetia and some Ossetian politicians, as well as outside the country.

Of course the above described incident never happened. It hardly could, and even if it did, I don't think we would ever again hear of the shoe-thrower. The event actually took place in Baghdad, the journalist was Muntadhar al-Zaidi (29) and his target was then-US President George Bush. I copied some of the above phrases from al-Zaidi's Widipedia article, changing the names of people and locations.

Al-Zaidi became a hero not only in Iraq but also in the entire Arab and much of the Western world. I have shown above a cartoon held by his supporters, because it is really a good one and I can only regret that such excellent Arab cartoonists waste their talent on dubious causes, leaving all the important work to their Danish colleagues. In the city of Tikrit (where Saddam Hussein was born) a sculpture in the shape of a shoe was created, stayed for three days and then was removed following an order by local authorities.

Let me now frankly state that I have only contempt for al-Zaidi and his personality cult. According to Wikipedia, his journalism record prior to the incident shows him being strongly "anti-occupation", i.e. standing at the enemy side. While throwing the second shoe, he shouted, "This is for the widows and orphans...". Because civilian war victims are presumed to include at least as many women and children as men, and because only several thousands of regular Iraqi soldiers died during the 2003 invasion, al-Zaidi's mentioning of killed Iraqi men with surviving wives and children is (at least to me) a clear reference to the "insurgents", as the politically correct media prefer to call the terrorists. I think that German journalist blogger R.A. Clermont was quite right to note similarity between al-Zaidi and suicide bombers (her post is actually quite sympathetic to him, describing him as "thinking, civilized, with real understanding"). And while there is much talk about al-Zaidi's courage, this courage apparently never passed the threshold required for opposing Saddam Hussein's regime in any way. Many people independently asked the same question as commenter Jack on Sandmonkey's blog: "I wonder when Arabs will start throwing shoes at their own leaders? Or do they know, somehow, that the consequences might be substantially different?...I know exactly what would happen if people started to throw shoes at Arab leaders, aside from what seems to be the consensus so far: death after an indeterminate period of pain. The Arab leaders would make wearing shoes illegal."

After his arrest, al-Zaidi was beaten and this raised much indignation and protests (quite different from the silence observed when police are beating innocent citizens and killing detainees here in Europe). While I agree that no prisoner should be mistreated, I am amused by the double standards of al-Zaidi's supporters who claim that he is entitled to full corporal integrity and at the same time has the right to express his opinions by throwing heavy objects at other people's heads. Al-Baghdadia TV, which is al-Zaidi's employer, went as far to demand that "the Iraqi authorities immediately release their stringer Muntadhir al-Zaidi, in line with the democracy and freedom of expression that the American authorities promised the Iraqi people on the ousting of former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein. ... Any measures against Muntadhir will be considered the acts of a dictatorial regime" (source: Wikipedia).

What angers me most, and is the reason for me to write such a long post, is the worldwide attention given to al-Zaidi's act. It undoubtedly deserved to be included in the news, but I think this should have been in the People section, between reports of celebrity marriages, divorces, drunken drivings, clashes with paparazzi and attempts to guess paternity without using DNA tests. Inclusion of such news in the political section only diverts attention from real problems and leaves darkness where the spotlight of public attention is desperately needed. To illustrate, let me briefly mention what happened to two journalists criticizing other presidents.

"The terrifying ordeal of Jestina Mukoko, a television news anchor turned human rights activist, began at 5am on December 3 when seven men and one woman forced their way into her house at gunpoint... Certainly Mukoko has been a thorn in Mugabe’s flesh. She resigned from state television to become director of the Zimbabwe Peace Project, a human rights monitoring network, and has been one of the regime’s most intelligent, influential and informed critics. She has collected evidence of tens of thousands of abuses in the past decade. Her monthly reports have detailed the routine tyranny of violence, the shortage of food and the denial of free speech that characterise Zimbabwean life today..." The quote is from the Sunday Times Dec. 14, 2008 article Silenced - the sharpest voice against Mugabe, by Sophie Shaw. I came across this report via the WIP site, which means that I would never hear about this case if Mukoko were male. According to a later report by Independent, Mukoko was tortured and is now being tried.

Let's now come home to Bulgaria, which is expected to have a better human rights record and more freedom of speech. On Sept. 23, 2008 journalist Ognyan Stefanov (54), editor in-chief of Frog News, was severely beaten in the street as he was leaving a restaurant. The attackers were several men who first asked for Stefanov's name to be sure about his identity and then started beating him with hammers and metal rods. Stefanov suffered fractures of all four extremities, backbone and head injuries, lost over two liters of blood and spent days on artificial respiration. Doctors were not sure for a long time whether he would survive; fortunately, he did. I have no information about his present condition.

I wanted very much to blog about Stefanov immediately after the attack, but I had no opportunity back then. However, today isn't late at all because the key questions remain unanswered. Stefanov's attackers haven't been caught and their motivation remains uncertain. However, most commentators reminded that Stefanov had been "highly critical of the President Parvanov" and that shortly before the assault he had been subpoenated and interrogated by the State Agency for National Security. A month before the beating, on Aug. 28, Stefanov himself wrote a text titled Free speech between fear from those with power and power over fear; in it, he claimed that unidentified powerful people demanded him to stop criticizing the President and threatened him that if he doesn't, "they knew how to cause harm". So Bulgarian journalists strongly suspect that either security agents or "businessmen" sponsors of the President, not content with the legal options to shut up criticism, arranged a beating. But even if DANS people didn't participate in the attack per se, by calling Stefanov they clearly gave a sign to the mafia (against which he also wrote) that he was considered by the authorities as an enemy and wouldn't be protected. This aspect was best expressed by TV journalist Velizar Enchev, who knows well the secret services. If the reader thinks that I am too biased against our security forces and unwilling to let them off the hook, I would ask, why are then the attackers still unidentified and walking free? Or are our police good only in intimidating journalists and other citizens?

As far as I know, the attack against Stefanov was largely neglected by international public opinion. An exception is the Netherlands, where Daniela Gorcheva, a journalist from Bulgaria, alerted her colleagues about the case. Five leading Dutch cartoonists created works in solidarity with Stefanov (you can see the cartoons at Gorcheva's blog).

Let's now return to the shoe-throwing subject. While this post was in the pipeline, another incident took place in Britain. On Feb. 2, as Chinese Prime Minister Wen Jiabao was delivering a lecture at the Cambridge University, an unidentified 27-year-old man called him a "dictator" and threw at him a shoe, which landed a meter away. While agreeing with a university official that "Cambridge is a place where ideas are put into play, not shoes," I have much more sympathy for this protester than I have for Mr. al-Zaidi.

Chinese media initially kept silence over the incident, but when information leaked in via satellite channels and the Web, they just had to report it. According to one commenter, "the uncompromising Iraqi people threw a shoe at Bush which is a brave act by a suppressed nation, but the ugly Englishman threw a shoe at Wen, which was only a barbaric trick". Isn't this brilliant? I love China!

Disappointed enemies

As the end of the year is approaching, time comes for various analyses and generalizations. An unescapable subject, esp. in a US election year, is the development of current global war (usually referred to by the misnomer "war on terror" while I prefer to call it "war against the West"). Does either side seem to win so far?
The US election results seem to indicate a loss, or at least a perception of loss. Of course Barack Obama may turn out to be a good President after all. This is unlikely but by no means impossible - history knows much stranger things. However, nothing can ever erase the fact that he was elected with the promise of "change", which, to my opinion, inevitably implied that USA had been going in the wrong direction. This, in turn, matched 100% the claims of America's enemies. To sum up, on Nov. 4 US voters agreed with US enemies that America was bad as it was and needed a change. Of course I may be wrong and I'll be thankful to each opponent who points to me some more benign logic behind the "change" slogan; however, my overall impression is that logic had only a marginal (if any) role on Nov. 4.
On the other side, our enemies are also facing problems. There haven't been major successful terror acts on Western soil since 2005. And the increasing recruitment of people with mental retardation and other mental disabilities as suicide bombers, apart from demonstrating the unlimited evil of the recruiters to anyone who had doubted it, also shows that they may be running short of neurologically typical volunteers to blow themselves up.
More than two months ago, Highlander wrote a post titled US 2008 elections: a cloning apparatus. It was followed by an interesting discussion not only about the (then upcoming) event but also about Israel, Palestine, Arabs, nationalism, citizenship etc. One of the participants was LouLou, a young lady living in the UAE but officially a Moroccan because of her father's Moroccan origin. She said many interesting things and here I want to cite one of them:
"It reminds me of a speech by Al Zawahri soon after Sept. 11 in which he was saying something to the effect that Al Qaeda carried out Sept. 11 to energize and mobilize 'the ummah' to join their jihad and how disappointed he was that 'the ummah' failed to respond and support the Mujahideen. He was clearly expecting some kind of mass universal Islamic suicide-bombing spree. It didn't happen because reality is 'the ummah' is not and has never been an ideological/cultural/political monolith capable of a single, unified response in the manner he dreams about... When this tide of Islamism has receded in the same manner that Arabism receded in the 70's, we will be left with a few Islamist intellectuals and writers here and there lamenting the failure of their grand scheme and attributing it to external conspiracies and 'perceived betrayal' by millions of people whose loyalty was never actually pledged to said scheme."
(For those who are as blissfully ignorant about the term "ummah" as I was in 2001 - it designates the global Muslim community.)
After Sept. 11, I hoped and almost expected that ordinary Muslims would start a powerful movement to reform Islam and many would leave it altogether. (I mentioned this once, again on Highlander's blog, but don't remember on which post.) When this didn't happen, I was disappointed. I realize now that my expectations and demands on Muslims have been, and maybe still are, too high. Human beings cannot en masse acquire superhuman qualities. If we discuss people like Ali Sina, Ayan Hirsi Ali and Nonie Darwish, we can say about them whatever we like (depending on the viewpoint) except that they are typical individuals and everybody can do what they have done. Most people just cannot and therefore the process of defanging Islam, if happens at all, will take generations.
LouLou and I have many differences in our views (and little affinity to each other's personalities), but despite this I find what she says noteworthy. I hope she is right in her rather optimistic prediction. And I owe her thanks for picking and translating those words of Al-Zawahiri. It is good that whenever Islamists say something in a non-English language for limited circulation, there is always a kind soul to translate and post. Now I know that after Sept. 11 al-Zawahiri was disappointed like me, possibly even more. I can only wish him more disappointments with each coming year.

Two words about the US elections

A week ago, Sen. Barack Obama was elected US President. I wanted to write about him before the elections, particularly why I thought it wasn't advisable to vote for him, but I was too busy and missed the opportunity. Now, I'll abstain from bashing him until he has been President for 100 days, as tradition requires. I don't want to be like those Arab dictators who began lecturing the poor man what to do 2 months before he was even sworn in.
So let me just share my thoughts about the phenomena accompanying Obama's victory. I mean all those crowds of people totally out of control, shouting, crying, fainting etc. I have never seen or heard of adults behaving this way without being under the influence of a psychotropic substance. In backward countries like Bulgaria people are quite susceptible to messiah politicians promising the Earth but, frankly, I never thought the same to be possible in an advanced post-industrial country with established democracy such as the USA. I briefly visited a couple of my favourite US-based blogs and other sites. In a number of them, I found accounts of the authors crying when they heard about Obama's victory. How sad. (No, don't expect any links from me here. If an online friend decides it's a great idea to post nude photos of herself, I won't link to them, either.)
To be sure, Obama's opponents were far from perfect; and those always seeking the bright side should be glad that USA, the leading nation in science, was spared the disgrace to have an antivaxer President and a creationist Vice-President. But the pros seem to end here.
As far as I can grasp something rational in the "hope" and "change" abracadabra (most of which, however, clearly works well below the brain cortex), Americans want to renounce their role in the world. They are tired of being good, intrepid, strong and devoted. They are tired of bringing light to the world and receiving mostly hate in return. They want brilliant isolation, keeping all their money at home to pay their own mortgages and letting dictators and terrorist do whatever they wish. I don't know whether this would be good for the USA. It surely wouldn't be good for the world. But if this is what the Americans want, who am I to judge them?

Sad day for civilized world

July 16, 2008 was a sad day for the civilized world.

"Lebanon's Hezbollah guerrillas turned over to Israel two coffins containing the bodies of Israeli soldiers captured two years ago... The U.N.-mediated swap closes a painful chapter for Israel, which launched a war in 2006 against Hezbollah in response to the soldiers' capture in a cross-border raid. It is likely to be a significant boost for Hezbollah at a time when it is trying to rebuild a reputation tarnished after its guerrillas turned their guns on fellow Lebanese in May. After the bodies handed over by Hezbollah were confirmed to be those of Ehud Goldwasser and Eldad Regev, Israel was to turn over five Lebanese prisoners — including a militant convicted in what is perceived here as a monstrous attack (the author refers to Samir Kuntar (Kantar), featured in my previous post - M.M.)... Lebanon's Al-Manar TV quoted senior Hezbollah official Wafik Safa at the border as saying the bodies were in a "mutilated" shape from injuries they suffered during the raid... "We are handing over the two Israeli soldiers that were captured by the resistance ... and whose fate has been unknown until this moment," Safa said. "Now you know their fate"... In the Gaza Strip... people celebrated in the streets and handed out sweets in support of Hezbollah. Ismail Haniyeh, Gaza's Hamas prime minister, called Kantar an "Arab nationalist hero" and said his release was "a great day for the Arab nation." He warned Israel that it will also have to "pay the price" for a soldier Hamas has been holding since June 2006" (source: Aron Heller from AP, via Yahoo! News.)

In my July 29, 2006 post about the soldiers' kidnapping, I failed to upload their photos for some technical reason. I am doing this now. The images are taken from Wikipedia.

***

Commenting the prisoner swap, Shlemazl wrote that "the Israeli public, which supports the decision, has more heart than brain".

I fully agree with Shlemazl on this and on the Israeli decision being a grave mistake. And not the first one in the story. Back in 2006, Israel yielded to external pressure and aborted the war without a serious military justification. When will the Israelis realize that 95% of the world population will either rejoice or at least sigh with relief if Israel ceases to exist? To try and appease a force with a lethal attitude toward you is a recipe for suicide.

The swap included also handing over the remains of some 200 Hezbollah combatants. I don't mind this; in fact, I wouldn't mind if those remains had been handed over to their families unconditionally. But releasing captured enemies in exchange for hostages will only encourage future attacks and kidnappings. And releasing live enemies in exchange for dead hostages will only encourage Israel's enemies not to bother to keep captured Israelis alive. (In this case, if Wikipedia is accurate, the two reservists were killed during the initial attack rather than in captivity.)

It is a natural and legitimate wish not to leave your people behind. To get them back, or at least their remains. The principle to bury your dead people properly, as far as I know, is reinforced in Judaism (though, frankly, I wonder how some Jews still think that God exists and is worth believing in).

If Israel had stood tall and firmly refused any deal with the hostage-takers, it would have been a very painful decision. But the strategy formulated by F. Kagan as "“Just end the pain now and deal with the future when it gets here” is a road to Hell.

Let's repeat: Rewarding any behaviour, in any way, will encourage and reinforce that behaviour. Rewarding kidnapping and murder means subscribing to more future kidnappings and murders. In fact, while the deal to get back the remains of Ehud and Eldad will surely provoke more attacks in the future, their fate was likely a product of other similar deals in the past. As Kuntar's Wikipedia article reports, several years after his sentencing, "the Palestinian Liberation Front seized the Achille Lauro, an Italian cruise ship, demanding that Israel release Kuntar, along with 50 other Palestinian prisoners, though Kuntar was the only prisoner specifically named. The hijackers killed a wheelchair-bound American Jewish passenger, Leon Klinghoffer during this raid and had his body and wheelchair thrown overboard. In 2003, Israel agreed to release around 400 prisoners in exchange for businessman Elchanan Tenenbaum and the bodies of three soldiers held by Hezbollah since 2000. Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah refused to accept the deal unless it included Samir Kuntar... Israel then agreed to release Samir Kuntar on condition that Hezbollah provided "solid evidence" as to the fate of Ron Arad, an air force navigator missing in Lebanon since 1986... Inspired by the prisoner swap, Hamas vowed, a few days later, that they would also abduct Israeli soldiers to secure the release of Palestinian prisoners. Hassan Nasrallah simultaneously told his supporters that Hezbollah would continue to kidnap Israelis until "not a single prisoner" remained inside Israeli jails."

So the future is now and if Israelis want more from it, they must stop rewarding their enemies. Especially if bodies are all that the enemies will give in return.

Lebanese greet child murderer as hero

Left: Danny Haran and his daughters, Einat and Yael, one week before their death. Right: the murderer Samir Kuntar. Source: CAMERA.

The genocidal and evil nature of Islamism is most evident when non-Muslim children are deliberately murdered by Islamists. The best known act of this kind is of course the 2004 Beslan school massacre, but there are many others, targeting mostly Israeli Jewish children. Let's remember the 2001 Tel Aviv Dolphinarium disco bombing, the 2002 Petah Tikva ice cream parlour bombing, the 2002 kubbutz Metzer shooting of two brothers (aged 4 and 5) and their mother and the numerous attacks against Israeli school buses, one dating as early as 1970.

In 1979, a group of four Palestinian militants led by Samir Kuntar (Kantar, then 16) "entered Israel from Lebanon by boat... They arrived at the coastal town of Nahariya. The four killed a policeman who came across them... (Two of them) broke into the apartment of the Haran family... They took 31 year-old Danny Haran hostage along with his four year-old daughter, Einat. The mother, Smadar Haran, was able to hide... with her two year-old daughter Yael... Israeli witnesses claim Kuntar's group took Danny and Einat down to the beach, where a shootout with Israeli policemen and soldiers erupted. Kuntar shot Danny at close range in the back, in front of his daughter, and drowned him in the sea to ensure he was dead. Next, he smashed the head of 4 year-old Einat on beach rocks and crushed her skull with the butt of his rifle... Kuntar denied killing the 4-year-old and said she was killed in the shootout... Kuntar asserted in court testimony, only published in 2008, that Israeli gunfire had killed Mr. Haran... and that he did not see what happened to Mr. Haran’s daughter... Smadar Haran... accidentally suffocated Yael to death while attempting to quiet her whimpering, which would have revealed their hideout" (source: Wikipedia).

Despite Kuntar's denial, his rifle butt was shown to have traces of Einat's brain tissue (source: CAMERA). He received five life sentences.

When in 2006 Hezbollah kidnapped two Israeli soldiers , Mideast people believed from day 1 that the idea was to exchange them for Kuntar (source: e.g. Sandmonkey).

On July 16, the deal was done. The Israelis received from Hezbollah the two kidnap victims - in coffins, and delivered Kuntar - in good shape, together with four Hezbollah combatants captured during the 2006 war. The five militants "got a hero's welcome from tens of thousands of cheering Hezbollah supporters and kisses from the U.S.-backed prime minister... "Your return is a new victory," President Michel Suleiman told the freed men as he stood in combat fatigues supplied by Hezbollah" (source: Sam Ghattas from AP, via Yahoo! News).

***

Though common sense tells us that there must be something wrong in a culture that continuously produces genocidal murderers, you cannot automatically blame any community for the deeds of its members. You first have to show that the actions of these individuals find strong popular support. And here we have a problem with Arab societies: because free speech and other attributes of democracy are in short supply, it is difficult to find how people not belonging to the ruling gang feel and think. However, Lebanon is believed to be as close to democracy as it goes in the Arab world; and I find it unlikely that participants in the welcome rally were forced to attend it, except perhaps some women and children brought there by the heads of their families. So we have a rare opportunity to observe first-hand the Lebanese "street", i.e. public opinion. And what does our poll show? A child murderer is greeted by tens of thousands and condemned by an occasional anonymous blogger.

What is civilization? Thinking of the above described events, I am coming to the following ad hoc definition: Civilization is a frame of thinking that doesn't allow its members, under any circumstances, to regard the terms "child murderer" and "hero" as synonyms. Plus the economical, technological and military power needed to preserve this frame. Arabs are of course unhappy when other people regard them as uncivilized, but I wonder, how many of them are ready to pay the price for being civilized?

One of the oldest and most popular tools of peace propaganda is to assert that we needn't be hostile to our enemies because they are human like us. They love their children, too, sing lullabies to them as we do. One needs some courage and cynicism to ask, "Well, they may love their children, but does this guarantee that they will love, or even tolerate, our children? As if in reply, a Palestinian failed suicide bomber said, "I don't have anything against Israeli children, but I know there is a possibility that this Israeli child will grow up and come to kill my son or my neighbor's son. Therefore, I think he should be dead now."
Our enemies are human indeed, but if we remove the fragile frame of civilization, what does remain from the human? A Darwinian creature who will happily kill other people's children to make more space for his own progeny.

Surviving global war with mental retardation

My blog generally isn't intended for mentally retarded people. In fact, if I have such readers, they are likely to find some my posts very offensive. But today I'll make an exception.
We are living in a global war and people who should be 100% civilians get involved. Lynndie England had been oxygen-deprived at birth and apparently had borderline mental retardation. Nevertheless, she was allowed to join the US army, sent to Iraq and after taking part in Abu Ghraib prison abuse, was sentenced to jail. But at least she wasn't taken advantage of and sent to a suicide mission, as the enemy did with Nicky Reilly.
I learned Reilly's story not from the news but from a disability forum. In fact, it was reported by some major media, but not on their front pages. They really care not to make Islam look bad, so they stress on Islamist terror only when it is lethally successful. Thank Heaven, in this case it wasn't.
On May 22, Nicky Reilly (22) tried to set off a suicide bomb in a crowded restaurant in Exeter, England. The bomb misfired and Mr. Reilly was the only one injured. He was autistic, had the mental capacity of a typical 10-year-old and was coming from a troubled family. The consensus opinion of his neighbours was that he had been brainwashed by Islamists. After converting to Islam several years ago, Nicky Reilly changed his name to Mohammed Rasheed, started to hate his family and to call them infidels. Significantly, he "had a screensaver of the Twin Towers in flames from the 9/11 attacks on his home computer and would often watch a video of the atrocity" (source: Inside bizarre world of the Big Friendly Giant, by Jamie Doward on The Observer). Before detonating his device, Reilly "had been sent a text message of encouragement".
Reilly's story would be troubling enough if it was isolated, but it isn't. Doward quotes Haras Rafiq, executive director of the (British) Sufi Muslim Council: ''Many converts to Islam have a sound spiritual reason, but there are also some who get brainwashed by extremists because they don't have the mental foundations to counter their arguments." Rafiq also "said the grooming of vulnerable people for suicide missions was well documented in the Middle East and claimed that there had been cases of terrorist organisations hacking patient health records to identify the vulnerable." In the Newsweek article Al Qaeda's New Recruits, authors Isikoff and Hosenball write: "U.S. officials acknowledged that the Reilly case points up a general concern they have about efforts by extremists to prey on the mentally handicapped... Earlier this year, two markets in Baghdad were attacked by women suicide bombers who allegedly had been targeted for recruitment by Al Qaeda because they were mentally handicapped... A British counterterrorism expert, who asked for anonymity when discussing sensitive matters, said that the Palestinian militant group Hamas also had a history of recruiting mentally handicapped or emotionally vulnerable people to carry out suicide missions."

So let me offer some tips that could help people like Reilly survive the current war.
1. If you have mental retardation, don't become a combatant of either side. Don't repeat the mistakes of Lynndie England and Nicky Reilly. If there must be war, let other people fight it.
2. Do not change your religion. This will only isolate you from your family and community. Even if some religions are truly better than others, God is unlikely to be so touchy about the exact way people worship Him. Specifically, do not convert to Islam. This may make some unscrupulous people try to use you as a tool for their goals.
3. If you are born in Islam or have already converted to it, practise your religion modestly and piecefully. Remember Tip No. 1 and do not ever consider to join jihad. Disabled Muslims are exempted from jihad (see the Koran, Sura 4, Verse 95) and you are disabled.
4. Do not listen to people who persuade you to convert to Islam or, if you are already a Muslim, to join jihad. Do not participate in arguments with them. They will use their faster, sharper minds to take advantage of you. If such people try to argue with you, just repeat, "These things are too complex for me, I cannot understand, I have mental retardation." Pretend that you do not understand anything at all. This isn't the moment to prove that you also can reason. Leave the other person as soon as you can. Inform about the incident your parents or other trusted people.
5. Do not let anybody convince you that your life is insignificant and you must make some self-sacrifice to add value to it. Your life is valuable as it is. Enjoy it.
6. Do not let anybody convince you that someone else deserves death. How would you feel if the same is said about you? The Nazis did say that mentally retarded people do not deserve to live, and killed thousands. Now, some people say that "infidels" do not deserve to live. I wonder how they can be so pompous to judge who is to live and who is to die. Do not listen to them. Live your life and let other people live theirs.

My Westerner's demands to Muslims

On May 15, another Bulgarian blogger wrote that religious denominations are unimportant for her, so the attempts of us her commenters to "convert her to anti-Islam" were to no avail. On the same day, I replied with a post on my Bulgarian blog where I asked what more had Muslims to do in the name of Islam in order to "convert her to anti-Islam", and wrote what Muslims, on the other hand, had to do in order to make me renounce my Islamophobia.
Now, I am translating those demands to English and publishing them here. This is blog action against Islamism as a reaction to the June 2 suicide attack against the Danish embassy in Pakistan which killed 8 people.

To renounce my Islamophobia, I demand from Muslims to recognize the right of existence of:
- Israel;
- former Muslims;
- critics of Islam;
- Buddhists, Hindus, atheists and all other people not belonging to any Abrahamian faith;
- homosexuals;
- clitores.

They must also recognize the equal rights of:
- non-Muslims;
- women.

I'd wish to add something about separation of religion from state, de-criminalizing food, alcohol and sex... but let's not be maximalistic.
The above listed demands are absolute, non-negotiable, and I think that no Westerner should ever consider any compromise regarding them. I reserve the right to make additions to the list if something appropriate comes to mind.

Blog action against Islamism

There is a site that periodically announces "blog action day", i.e. appeals to bloggers to write posts devoted to a particular subject on a particular day. However, I think we don't really need special days and a special site or another authority to call us to blog action. Any ordinary blogger can do the job as well. So I use the opportunity to appeal for blog action against Islamism. My idea is to react to every major action of Islamists by numerous anti-Islamist texts, images, videos, music and whatever else comes to mind.
While some of the anti-Islamist and anti-Islamic propaganda could, in isolated cases, change the views of our opponents, this is not what I am pursuing and certainly not what I am hoping for. The core of my idea is to try behaviour modification on Islamists. Behaviour modification means influencing another person's actions by rewarding him for wanted behaviour and/or punishing him for unwanted behaviour. It is widely used in animal training, upbringing and education of children, and virtually all aspects of adult life. Islamists use it on us all the time, while we most of the time unduly abstain from using it on them. Let's change things. They don't want anti-Islamist and anti-Islamic stuff in public space? Let's guarantee that when they resort to coercion or terror, they'll get more of what they don't want. As said Christopher Hitchens in his must-read essay God-fearing people: Why are we so scared of offending Muslims?, "It is often said that resistance to jihadism only increases the recruitment to it. For all I know, this commonplace observation could be true. But, if so, it must cut both ways... And the advocates and apologists of bigotry and censorship and suicide-assassination cannot be permitted to take shelter any longer under the umbrella of a pluralism that they openly seek to destroy."

Proposed rules for Blog Action against Islamism:
1) Write explicitly that your post is participation in blog action and specify to which event you are reacting. That is, make it clear that without the particular undue Islamist action your anti-Islamist or anti-Islamic post would never appear on your blog. This is especially important for blogs that are Islamophobic all the time.
2) Try not to write things you may regret later when you calm down. We claim to stand not only for our interests but also for universal principles. So we regard all people as humans with rights, no matter how malicious their views may be. Besides, it's good to remember that were we born in a Muslim community, we would most likely be quite like the people whose behaviour we condemn now.
3) It isn't necessary for the published material to be new and created by you. However, if you are using another person's work, cite properly the original author, unless he prefers to stay anonymous. While it isn't practical to ask specific permission from the author, you should consider whether he would mind his work republished on your blog and proceed only if you think he wouldn't. This rule has an exception - Islamists wouldn't want their words to be cited in such context, but still I think it is OK to do so.

Of course traditional media can also participate in such action, which they actually are already doing. In 2006, after Denmark became target of Islamists because of the famous cartoons, a number of European newspapers republished them. Earlier this year, a group of Danish newspaper republished the cartoons again as a reaction to an Islamist plot to assassinate one of the cartoonists. However, most people cannot publish in media other than blogs, therefore I am writing specifically about blog action.

Model European state Belarus respects UN resolutions

Belarus, which has the "honour" to remain in history as the last European dictatorship, strictly keeps UN resolutions. In accord with a recent one against "defamation of religions", particularly Islam, a court in Minsk ten days ago sentenced Alyaksandr Zdvizhkou, former deputy editor of the weekly Zhoda, to three years in prison for reprinting cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed that first appeared in a Danish newspaper (source: Spanish Pundit, hattip Hyscience). The same source continues, "He was found guilty of “inciting racial hatred”... It is highly likely that this was just a pretext for punishing an opposition journalist."
I also think that this must have been just a pretext, but the million-dollar-question is, why were Belarussian authorities given such a convenient pretext? If somebody has doubted that Muslim states are using UN as a tool to spread Sharia to non-Muslim states, I don't know what more evidence is needed.
And if you think that such things happen just in dictatorships, to obscure Slav people who don't matter much anyway, here is more food for thought: in Canada, journalist Esra Levant, who had also reprinted the (in)famous cartoons, has been summoned to Canadian HR Commission because "a Saudi-trained imam, who had called for sharia law to be introduced in Canada, complained to a human rights officer". Also in Canada, as Robert Spencer reports, "The Canadian Human Rights Commission and the British Columbia Human Rights Tribunal have begun proceedings against Mark Steyn, author of America Alone. They are responding to complaints from the Canadian Islamic Congress about an excerpt from the book." The text in question contained quotes from Muslim leaders revealing their expansionist agendas.
I wish to end with a citation from Spencer's article: "In a free society, people with differing opinions live together in harmony, agreeing not to force their neighbor to be silent if his opinions offend them... Wherever offensive speech is prohibited, the tyrant’s power is solidified."

UN doesn't want us to criticize Islam

In December 2007, UN General Assembly passed a resolution against "defamation of religions". Predictably, the only religion mentioned in the document was Islam (hattip: Joseph Klein in FrontPage Magazine).
Media Watch Watch lists how different countries have voted. I am pasting from there:

In favour: Afghanistan, Algeria, Angola, Antigua and Barbuda, Azerbaijan, Bahamas, Bahrain, Bangladesh, Barbados, Belarus, Belize, Benin, Bhutan, Bolivia, Brunei Darussalam, Burkina Faso, Cambodia, Cameroon, Cape Verde, Central African Republic, Chad, China, Comoros, Congo, Costa Rica, Côte d’Ivoire, Cuba, Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Djibouti, Dominica, Dominican Republic, Egypt, El Salvador, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Fiji, Gabon, Gambia, Grenada, Guinea, Guyana, Haiti, Honduras, Indonesia, Iran, Iraq, Jamaica, Jordan, Kazakhstan, Kuwait, Kyrgyzstan, Lao People’s Democratic Republic, Lebanon, Lesotho, Liberia, Libya, Malaysia, Maldives, Mali, Mauritania, Mauritius, Morocco, Mozambique, Myanmar, Namibia, Nicaragua, Niger, Oman, Pakistan, Philippines, Qatar, Russian Federation, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Saint Lucia, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Sao Tome and Principe, Saudi Arabia, Senegal, Sierra Leone, Singapore, Somalia, South Africa, Sri Lanka, Sudan, Suriname, Swaziland, Syria, Tajikistan, Thailand, Timor-Leste, Togo, Trinidad and Tobago, Tunisia, Turkey, Turkmenistan, Tuvalu, Uganda, United Arab Emirates, Uruguay, Uzbekistan, Vanuatu, Venezuela, Viet Nam, Yemen, Zambia, Zimbabwe.
Against: Andorra, Australia, Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Canada, Croatia, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Georgia, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Latvia, Liechtenstein, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, Marshall Islands, Micronesia (Federated States of), Moldova, Monaco, Montenegro, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Palau, Poland, Portugal, Republic of Korea, Romania, Samoa, San Marino, Serbia, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, The former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, Ukraine, United Kingdom, United States.

Bulgaria is in the Against list. I am proud of my country! And because I have so few occasions to be proud of it, this makes me really happy.
This resolution, and the comparison of the two lists, shows well why UN is of no use. It gives equal weight to countries like Canada and Switzerland and to what I'll refer to as "In Favour List Countries". And because there are, unfortunately, more In Favour List Countries in the world than countries like Canada and Switzerland, UN resolutions reflect what governments (not necessarily people) of In Favour List Countries want.
Here in Europe, blasphemy was a crime back in the Middle Ages. In many of the In Favour List Countries, life is like it was in the Middle Ages, or worse. So their rulers may be unaware that the Middle Ages are actually over. Isn't there anybody to kindly inform them about that? (From a safe distance, of course.)
In the meantime, I invite the UN General Assembly to come and shut down this blog.

For whom is the truth inconvenient?

The above video mocking Al Gore and his Nobel Prize-winning documentary An Inconvenient Truth was found by my son, who is right now interested in videos about penguins. The video lists "Things you can do to stop global warming: Stop exhaling. Become vegetarian. Walk everywhere (no matter the distance). Take cold showers."

My opinion about Gore is not all negative. I liked what I found in Wikipedia about his participation in the Vietnam war: "Gore opposed the Vietnam War and could have avoided serving overseas by accepting a spot in the National Guard that a friend of his family had reserved for him, or by other means of avoiding the draft. Gore has stated that his sense of civic duty compelled him to serve in some capacity... With seven months remaining in his enlistment, Gore was shipped to Vietnam, arriving on January 2, 1971... Gore said in 1988 that his experience in Vietnam: "didn't change my conclusions about the war being a terrible mistake, but it struck me that opponents to the war, including myself, really did not take into account the fact that there were an awful lot of South Vietnamese who desperately wanted to hang on to what they called freedom. Coming face to face with those sentiments expressed by people who did the laundry and ran the restaurants and worked in the fields was something I was naively unprepared for.""

These days, we have real winter. I have difficulties dragging the baby pram through the snow to the nearest shop to buy bread. The vegetables left carelessly at the glazed balcony became as solid as stones because the water inside them turned into ice. The TV broadcasts horror stories about people who froze to death in snow-drifts, about patients who died because of impossibility to reach the hospital in time. The entire continent is held captive in the snow. At the other side of the Atlantic, Winston also writes that it is difficult right now to believe in global warming.

Of course all this doesn't mean that global warming isn't real or isn't due to human activity. However, I dislike the way Gore and his award-givers address the problem . First, they politicize an important problem and utilize it to serve a narrow partisan agenda. Second, they distract the attention from the current conflict threatening our civilization. Third, his message is addressed predominantly to the West. Restrict, restrict, restrict consumption, you bad Westerners. It is true that those who buy and drive pickup trucks and sport utility vehicles without really needing them are guilty toward Mother Nature. However, it is much more important how many of us are there. If there were only a billion of humans, the planet would easily endure even if every single adult had a sport utility vehicle. And here the West has done its part of the job. USA has a replacement birth rate and some population growth due to immigration alone. Other Western nations are imploding. Gore briefly mentioned the population burden but he travels and lectures exclusively in the West. Of course it is much more politically correct to tell Westerners that they should consume less, rather than to turn round and tell non-Westerners that for the sake of our dear poor planet, they shouldn't have so many babies.

Last but not least, the documentary seemed fitted to an audience of 10-year-olds. One of the most serious dangers to a culture is erosion of intellect, and it is only encouraged by catering to people with modest intellectual abilities. Because intelligence, similar to commodities, is produced and supplied when there is demand. Perhaps Gore foresaw that schools would request copies of his film; but what worries me was that I haven't heard any commentator of An Inconvenient Truth, even those highly critical of it, to mention the low level of the message.

A carnivorous Mickey Mouse

My 4-year-old son enjoys watching short videos at the computer. Last night, he asked me for one.

"What video do you want?" I asked.

"A Mickey Mouse video."

I duly started a Google search for video mickey mouse. However, as you guess, the Disney products are very heavily copyrighted, so my search produced different Mickey Mouse-related stuff rather than the real thing. No. 5 of the items found was the video shown above, Hamas Mickey Mouse Teaches Terror to Kids, by Palestinian Media Watch.

It hardly needs my comment, but I'd like to cite what Freedom for Egyptians wrote about another headscarved and indoctrinated little girl: "The girl is wearing a scarf?? Is this the definition of a childhood for what they call themselves "true Muslims". This is childhood abuse and there is no difference between it and childhood pornography. She is wearing it because her parents are teaching her that males are thirsty dogs who will try to rape her at any time."

UPDATE: For readers who for technical reasons cannot see the video, and also in case the video stops being available, I've written down the subtitles:

Al Aqsa TV (Hamas), Apr. 16, 2007
Mickey Mouse: We are setting with you the cornerstone for world leadership under Islamic leadership.
Girl –TV show host: We remind you that we, the great ones, started this program to lead this world. The nucleus, with the will of Allah, will be from here, from Palestine.
Mickey Mouse: From Palestine, oh Saraa, what do you mean? From Gaza, Jerusalem, Ramallah, or from all of Palestine?
Girl – TV show host: Yes, from all of Palestine. Many say that we had glory, and we had culture, and the Muslims had greatness and respect.
Mickey Mouse: We, tomorrow’s pioneers, will restore to this nation its glory. We will liberate Al-Aqsa, with Allah’s will, and we will liberate Iraq, with Allah’s will, and we will liberate the Muslim countries, invaded by murderers.
Girl – TV show host: Yes, they are children [in Palestine] occupied by the Jews, but with the will of Allah, we will resist and protect against the Zionist occupation.
Mickey Mouse: Until we win, with the will of Allah, we will resist until we win.
Al Aqsa TV (Hamas), Apr. 23, 2007
Esraa (12) on the phone (sings): We will surrender ourselves.
Mickey Mouse: No!
Girl – TV show host: Esraa, it’s not a good song. Why? Because it has surrender. We don’t want to surrender, we want to resist against the enemy.
Mickey Mouse: Allah willing, Allah willing, this country, its children, its men, its women, and its elderly – will win! We will win, Bush! We will win, Sharon! Ah, Sharon is dead. We will win, Mofaz! Mofaz left. We will win, Olmert! We will win! We will win, Condoleeza!
Girl – TV show host: I remind you that Al-Aqsa and the prisoners are a trust on our shoulders, and Allah will ask us on Resurrection Day what have we offered for their sake.
Al Aqsa TV (Hamas), Apr. 30, 2007
Harwa (11) on the phone (sings, Mickey Mouse is dancing): The people firmly stand, singing this to you. Rafah sings “Oh oh”. Its answer is AK-47. We who do not know fear, we are the predators of the forest.
Muhammad (12) on the phone (sings, Mickey Mouse is dancing): Oh Jerusalem, we are coming. Oh Jerusalem, it is the time of death. Oh Jerusalem, we will never surrender to the enemy, and we will never be humiliated. It is beloved Palestine that taught us what to be and taught us to be the soldiers of the Lord. We will destroy the chair of the despots. It is the time of death, we will fight a war.

Don't forget Ilan Halimi

Ilan Halimi (photo copied from Wikipedia, original source AFP)

I intended to write here my next Bulgaria-centric post but a discussion at Highlander's blog changed my intention. Her Nov. 3 post The Patriot and the Racist: a tale of two citizens begins like that, "Israel is an ally of the US and is rewarded handsomely for it. They are there holding the front in the Middle East against the barbarians (that would be the Arabs - for those who don't know their 101 of the Middle East)." (Those my readers who don't know Highlander - don't rush to judge her based on this single quote, it was quite unlike her.)

I commented, "The mention of "barbarians" is interesting. By the way this was how Ilan Halimi's murderers (who were Muslims but not Arabs) called themselves..."

French commenter Nomad replied, "I am surprised you call yourself a scientist, because of this very sentence I can just see how your an adept of the "vagueness". There were no avered "arabs" in the gang who killed Ilian Halimi, the murderer is Ivoirian, his complices are white young surburbans from different EU origins... The only allegated "muslin" is the ivoirian, who is not practicing his religion though. In his mind it's more racism anti-whites than anti-semit."

So this post was called into existence.

"Ilan Halimi (1982 - 2006) was a young French Jew kidnapped by a gang of Muslim immigrants called the "Barbarians" and subsequently tortured to death over a period of three weeks." This is the beginning of his article in English Wikipedia. It specifies below, "Implicated in the crime are the members of a youth gang calling themselves "les barbares" (the Barbarians), many of whom were Muslim. The people so far arrested are mostly unemployed children of immigrants from African countries."

The same source describes Ilan's fate as follows: "On 21 January, Halimi, aged 23, was lured by an attractive 17-year-old French-Iranian girl to an apartment block in the Parisian banlieues (suburbs). There Halimi was overwhelmed by a youth gang and kept prisoner for twenty-four days. During that time, his kidnappers tortured him by stabbing him with knives, burning his face and body with cigarattes and beating him in order to try to extract a ransom of initially EUR 450,000 from his family. He was also kept naked and tied up and at one time, his kidnappers poured flammable liquid on him and set him on fire. Reportedly, neighbors came by to watch and to even participate in the torture but no one called the authorities. On 13 February, Halimi was found naked, tied and handcuffed to a tree near a railroad track in the Parisian suburbs, with burns from acid covering 80% of his body..., with multiple stab wounds, as well as with one severed ear and toe. On the way to the hospital, he died from his wounds."

Let me comment the bit about the neighbours. I have spent all my life in apartment buildings. This sort of housing offers no privacy, let alone secrecy. If you play violin in your apartment, or if your child jumps around the way children do, neighbours come to complain. It is unthinkable that a person can be tortured to death in such a building without all inhabitants being aware. Each one of them could call the police from some pay phone and tell them what was happening without any risk to himself. Nobody did it. Some neighbours may have participated in the torture and some did not, but all of them wanted him tortured.

Let's look at the alleged kidnappers' list as given by Wikipedia. Youssouf Fofana, aged 25, the self-proclaimed "brain of the Barbarians", is regarded as Muslim even by Nomad. Indeed, she said he was non-practicing. I asked in reply, were Mohamed Atta & Co. practicing Islam while in the USA? In this context, "practicing" and "non-practicing" are terms of absolutely no importance.

The next gang member listed is "Christophe M-V aka "Moko", a 22-year-old French man". However, the corresponding French Wikipedia article gives an additional detail: "Christophe Martin-Vallet dit "Moko", martiniquais converti à l'islam". So those who make the effort to check French sources are rewarded with the information that the Barbarians' No. 2 was a convert to Islam. It is a strange coincidence that, disputing the term "racist", I had commented on the same Highlander's post, "I would also feel uncomfortable if flying with Arabs... It has nothing to do with racism. I would feel equally uncomfortable if I know that some of my white fellow passengers are converts to Islam. Because there have been many terrorist converts, regardless of their racial affiliation..."

The next person on the list is "Yalda, a seventeen-year-old French-Iranian girl who acted as a honeypot to lure Halimi into the gang's lair". It is well known which religion is dominant in Iran.

No. 4 in the list is "Samir" (Samir Aït Abdelmalek) - no details are given about his origin, the name sound like a Muslim one.

No. 5 is "Zigo" (Jean-Christophe G) - no details are given about his origin, the name doesn't sound like a Muslim one. Some Barbarians may have been non-Muslims. Would this change much? Non-Muslim useful idiots often assist Islamists in their crimes. A good example is the International Solidarity Movement.

No. 6 is "Giri", from the Comoros. Wikipedia says that this country "prior to 2002 was known officially as the Islamic Federal Republic of the Comoros", with as much as 98% of the population consisting of Sunni Muslims.

No. 7 is "Nabil", with Egyptian-French origins (remember Nomad's claim that not one of "the Barbarians" was Arab).

No. 8 is "Jérôme", a Portuguese. Perhaps he gave Nomad the excuse to call the gang members "white young surburbans from different EU origins", hardly an accurate description.

The Guardian, a source not known to have pro-Jewish and anti-Muslim bias, has published on Feb. 22, 2006 an article titled Brutal murder was anti-Semitic crime, says Sarkozy. It says, "The police, who found literature linking some of the suspects to Palestinian and Muslim groups, have insisted the murder was motivated by greed - the gang had demanded a ransom - and not religious motives. Mr Sarkozy told MPs: "The truth is that these crooks acted primarily for sordid and vile motives, to get money, but they were convinced that 'the Jews have money', and if those they kidnapped didn't have money, their family and their community would come up with it. That's called anti-Semitism by amalgam." He added that four of the six other people the gang had approached and tried to kidnap "were of the Jewish faith"... Police had earlier insisted the murder was not anti-Semitic, but the victim's mother Ruth Halimi accused them of ignoring this motive for fear of upsetting Muslim opinion."

Other, less politically correct sources paint even a bleaker picture. Media-Ratings reports in March 2006, "The media have been doing a lot of beating around the bush to avoid addressing the anti-Semitic nature of this crime. As soon as we found out that the victim of this crime was Jewish, that the gang’s other kidnapping attempts mainly targeted Jews, plus some additional facts Ilan Halimi’s family had revealed, there could be no doubt about its anti-Semitic motive. Yet the press held out until, first, the Israeli daily Haaretz published an interview of Mrs Halimi on February 20 2006, to the dismay of the French Foreign Office".

A Feb. 23, 2006 post by Tom Gross says, "Rafi Halimi, Ilan’s uncle, told the media that “when we said we didn’t have 500,000 euros to give them they told us to go to the synagogue and get it.” “The gang phoned the family on several occasions and made them listen to the recitation of verses from the Koran, while Ilan’s tortured screams could be heard in the background.” The police found literature linking the suspects to extremist Muslim causes and also discovered that the gang had already tried to kidnap four other Jews in recent weeks. Yet, last week the Paris public prosecutor, Jean-Claude Marin, told French journalists that “no element of the current investigation could link this murder to an anti-Semitic declaration or action”. Following an outcry late last week by French Jews, the police have now admitted that there was an anti-Semitic component to this torture and murder... For days last week, when reports of the kidnapping and murder of Ilan Hariri were published in Le Figaro, Libération and Le Monde, there was no mention of the racist aspect of this crime. Only French Jewish media mentioned it.Following protests, French newspapers have now said that this was an anti-Semitic crime... In London, The Observer, the Sunday affiliate newspaper of The Guardian, in its report on the kidnapping and murder also failed to mention that the victim was Jewish. It is very unlikely that The Guardian of The Observer would report on an almost certain racial attack on a black or Asian Muslim without mentioning that it was a racial attack, or who the perpetrators and victim were."

Gross also cites a Wall Street Journal article reminding an earlier murder: "The murder of Ilan Halimi invites comparison with the November 2003 killing of a Jewish disc jockey, Sébastien Selam. His Muslim neighbor, Adel, slit his throat, nearly decapitating him, and gouged out his eyes with a carving fork in his building’s underground parking garage. Adel came upstairs with bloodied hands and told his mother, ‘I killed my Jew, I will go to paradise." In the two years before his murder, the Selam family was repeatedly harassed for being Jewish. The murderer, who admits his guilt, was placed in a psychiatric hospital, and may be released soon. The initial response to the kidnapping of Ilan Halimi suggested a comparably selective ignorance."

Some months ago, a Libyan-American Islamist wrote in his blog (now deleted) a post about a young Muslim mother who was attacked by four or more young men in Glasgow and had to run away with her baby, leaving the pram behind (the case is described e.g. here).

If that blogger wanted to be more balanced in his reports about racially/religiously motivated crimes in Glasgow, he could also mention 15-year-old Kriss Donald, who in 2004 was abducted by men of Pakistani origin, stabbed 13 times, doused in petrol, set on fire and left to die. But this is another matter.

In his post, the Libyan-American said that the media reports didn't mention the religion of the attackers and that if Muslims were doing a crime, their religion would be mentioned. Highlander agreed with this in a comment. I disagreed and cited the 2005 Washington Times article about the Paris arsonists Rioters are Muslims, but don't say it.

Indeed, mainstreem media and politicians do all they can to cover up the hate crimes committed by Islamists. They prevented the murders of Kriss Donald and Sebastien Selam from receiving wide publicity, they tried to do the same with the murder of Ilan Halimi, they still manage to do it with the systematic gang-rapes of native European and other non-Muslim women by Muslims.

The question is, why do ordinary native Europeans like Nomad embrace this pernicious policy even in circumstances when they have no reason to fear for their own safety? One reason is the multi-culti charlatanism postulating that non-Westerners cannot do bad things. Another reason is the psychological phenomenon known as wishful thinking. With so many Muslim immigrants already in Europe and not intending to go anywhere, and becoming more numerous every year, it is so tempting to regard them as no worse than any other group of people. So Westerners prefer not to see the unpleasant truth, not to hear it and, above all, not to speak about it.

But the memory of the victims and the future of our children requires us to open our eyes and mouths. Because if we do not speak, who will?