Religious Hate:

• Islamists committed religiously-inspired mass murder in the Kashmir (and there again), Kyrgyzstan, and in Iraq. Islamists also used violence to target political opponents in Denmark. In Switzerland, a plot to blow up an Israeli airliner was broken up.

• Efforts to impose Islamic law continued in Indonesia and Australia. We wonder: why go through all the hassle, when obsequent Westerners will go out of their way not to make you feel at home right now?

• Disgusting:

  A Somali teenager publicly hacked his father's killer to death in a punishment sanctioned under Islamic law today. Hundreds of people gathered in Mogadishu to watch the court-ordered execution.... Mohamed Moalim, 16, approached the condemned man... and stabbed him repeatedly in the chest, neck and head... The execution was the first to be held in the Somalian capital for a decade and was hailed by local Islamic spiritual leaders as a sign that order was being restored.

  For the reaction of the Western media to this kind of order being restored, we refer you to the first bullet-point under Idiotarian Seething.

• To be clear, though, Islamic law doesn't always allow you to kill people out of revenge. For instance, if you're a Muslim woman and you kill a man who tried to rape you... well then, you might have to die. Also, if you're a Muslim woman (even in the West) and you displease your husband... well then, you might have to die. If you're a little girl and you refuse to marry who your family tells you too... well, then, they might shoot you in cold blood. The choice for women in many Islamist societies is explicit: humiliate themselves through self-imposed inferiority or get raped. Still, Western Europe can rest assured: probably no reason to offend Muslims by, you know, trying to protect Muslim women.

• When the Zionist Organization of America needed a test case to get a judicial ruling that anti-Semitism on US campuses constituted a form of racism, they chose UC Irvine because of its institutionalized acquiescence to violent hate speech. Apparently, they could also have used nearby Cal State Long Beach as an example:

  Some students protested, holding the Israeli flag and signs that read, "Teach Love, Not Hate" and "Your student fees at work." Whatever the response, last Thursday's Muslim Student Association (MSA)-sponsored speaker Amir Abdel Malik Ali, provoked students, angering some and interesting others. Ali's speech, titled "Resisting Occupation by Any Means Necessary," hit the event's purpose "right on the nose," according to Naadiya Patel, events coordinator and MSA member.

  In fairness to Ali, if it wasn't for the Jewish-controlled media, you might have heard more about his speech.
  And not to worry, UC Irvine Muslims responded to CSU Long Beach's challenge (which school can have the most virulent events) with all the vicious energy that we've come to expect. They even went so far as to host Malik Ali too - just so they could have all the racism CSULB had, and more! You know, it's almost like there's something going on in and around Orange County's Islamic community.

• Do you remember a time when being offensive wasn't a reason to lynch someone?. And if you don't, do you at least remember a time when reporting that someone almost got lynched by Muslims for being offensive was actually surprising? Even in the Anglosphere, the phenomenon of ministers and MPs openly inciting murder seems to have dulled people's sensitivity to what ought to be outrageous.

• Insult to Muslim cleric, massive riots, subsequent apologies, blah blah blah

• Despite what many of our critics imply, we do believe in deference to religious sensibilities - up to a certain line. We're not sure where that line is exactly, of course. In fact, it's more of a guiding sensibility - an inchoate mixture of reactions - than a bright line. So for instance, we can't explain exactly why Canada shouldn't have to give Korans to terrorists who believe that the Koran ordered them to kill Canadians - but it just feels wrong. Something about being suicidally stupid.

• Pakistani Islamists want to ban culture.

• You know how Saudi Arabia keeps insisting that incitement against infidels has been removed from their textbooks? Yeah, no.

Idiotarian Seethings:

• Last month: Islamists ask what about all the good things Hitler did? This month: The LA Times asks what about all the good things Islamists do? Next month: Hitler asks, what about all the good things the LA Times does? Yeah, cause we're too proud to make that joke...

• Jimmy Carter is starting to get on our nerves. If we had let the dominos of Islamism start falling in the Middle East under our watch, we'd at least have the good graces to shut the hell up and stop giving advice on how to make nice with violent, fascist terrorists. It's not just that he's so wrong about Hamas, it's that he's so shameless about it.

• Self-hating Jew Noam Chomsky will support any genocidal cretin that happens to be sufficiently anti-American. But then, you already knew that.

• Maybe if enough global unions will agree to boycott Israel - Canada and Britain can't do it all on their own - then the Palestinians will stop trying to kill Jews. Stop rolling your eyes - it makes perfect sense.

• We live in a world where leading political scientists declare that the US government is being controlled by Jews and in which genocidal Iranian mullahs converge with left wing moonbats on 9/11 conspiracy theories. Certain flavors of crazy are drawn to conspiracy theories because such theories make complete sense out of a chaotic world. So, paradoxically, the wilder the theory is the more compelling it gets. A theory that ties together banking and Jews is good. A theory that ties together banking, Jews, Templars, the Catholic Church, and the Bush family is even better. The Which explains how more that can be explained away as the machinations of a mere man behind the curtain, the greater the psychic payoff:

  The government was making plans for large-scale detention centers in case of an "emergency influx" of immigrants. KBR, the Halliburton subsidiary recently reprimanded for gross overcharging in its military contracts in Iraq, won a $385 million contract to build the centers... Certainly the detention centers raise the specter of WW II Japanese internment camps. The new facilities could be used for round-ups of Muslim Americans or other American citizens tagged as "enemy combatants."

  Bush imposing martial law is good... Bush imposing martial law with Halliburton is better! It's more attractive because it seems to explain more about the world. Seriously - totally batshit crazy.

• Also, the Jews looted the Baghdad Museum. This isn't really a new story, but we'd be failing in our conspiracy-theory chronicling duties if we didn't bring your attention to it.

• Leftist theories otherwise notwithstanding, the arrests in Miami were not manufactured by the FBI to strengthen the Bush Administration. Nor were they meant to disenfranchise black voters. We know that this is a family blog, but seriously - these people are just totally batshit crazy.

• The elegant and gorgeous Alexandra of the eponymous All Things Beautiful was accused of being a Nazis last month. Turns out, angry leftwing moonbats are ill-bred louts. Who knew?

• Oh god, please not this again.

• With due respect, this is objectively stupid:

  A Keller school district parent said political correctness has run amok at her daughter's elementary school, where the principal chose to omit the words "In God We Trust" from an oversize coin depicted on the yearbook cover. Janet Travis, principal of Liberty Elementary School in Colleyville, wanted to avoid offending students of different religions, a district spokesman said. Students were given stickers with the words that could be affixed to the book if they so chose.

  Are there any religious students (from whatever different religion Travis imagines them to be) who don't trust God and so would be offended by the implication that they should? And if there are, isn't that kind of not being part of a religion?

• Every once in a while, an anti-war moonbat thinks he can get away with lying about having been a decorated soldier. So the rightwing blogosphere has to roll up a newspaper, hit him on the nose, and firmly say "no!"

• Pro-illegal immigrant rallies culminated in a massive May Day rally. Consequence: we could actually get around Los Angeles. Oh, and increasingly obvious electoral backlashes and cascading political failures. But in fairness, who could have seen that coming?. Michelle Malkin has your pics.

• LGF has the pics from the moonbat anti-Israel rally at Brandeis. How could a former haven for disenfranchised Jews be slipping down the slope of irrational anti-Zionism? We have no idea.

• The Democratic Party: where being accused of wanting to murder the President is a compliment.

• In a startlingly clear display of the romatic love of thugishness that so often characterizes the Che-loving Left, the Guardian finds itself unable to condemn Palestinians who torture confessions out of ostensible collaborators. Because whether it's torturing a 17 year old until he condemns his mother to be lynched or forcing an innocent man to proclaim his guilt and then killing him, if it's anti-Israel it must be OK. You know, we have a theory: maybe the Guardian doesn't really mind collaborator lynchings since those lynchings are later then used to calculate Palestinian victims in the Intifada. In other words, those deaths are blamed on Israel. On the other hand, you know what - that's a horrible thing to say. We take it back.
  Although the thing about Palestinians lynched by other Palestinians being tabulated as "Palestinian deaths" that are blamed on Israel - that part's true.
  Take away the machismo of Leftist journalists insisting that street life is hard, and this is what you're left with:

  Muhammad Abu al-Hawa was a 42-year-old father of eight when he died last Wednesday night... Abu al-Hawa's body and car were torched. Abu al-Hawa was tortured and murdered because he stood accused of committing what the Palestinians consider a capital crime. Eight young children were orphaned last Wednesday night because their father allegedly sold an apartment building in Israel's capital city to Jews.

  While "progressives" fete the thugs in far off places, innocent people actually die.

• Myopic multiculturalism makes people write really stupid things.

• Fashionable liberalism at its most exhibitionist. The nauseating thing is to imagine the sanctimonious self-satisfaction that accompanied this stunt:

  The upscale "Marc by Marc Jacobs" fashion outlet at 2142 Fillmore Street in San Francisco's exclusive Pacific Heights shopping district recently unveiled a new window display: seven-foot-high blue letters spelling out the phrase "WORST PRESIDENT EVER!"... The windows were ordered up by the visual department of Jacobs' New York office, which tells me they were specified only for San Francisco.

  Tsk tsk - one almost begins to suspect something along the lines of a clever corporate entity playing on its audience's shallow political sensibilities. Hey, it works for American Apparel.

• On June 20, we explained on our home blog why anyone who says that Abbas's referendum endorses a two-state solution is either ignorant or lying. So of course, The Guardian, June 22:

  Hamas has made a major political climbdown by agreeing to sections of a document that recognise Israel's right to exist and a negotiated two-state solution, according to Palestinian leaders.

  The trick, of course, is that the document demands that 5-8 million radicalized Palestinians currently living in UN camps be allowed to overrun Israel - the so-called Right of Return, which effectively means the end of Israel. You want to get a sense of just how pathological the Palestinian hatred of Israel is? There's still a significant percent of the Palestinian public (25%-ish at last count) that won't endorse the document - demographic suffocation of Israel isn't good enough for them, they want to achieve the destruction by military means.

• You're Ward Churchill. You're a star of the idiotarian Left. You've translated this stardom into celebrity status in the American academy. And yet members of this same academy - an environment famous for its literally fetishistic deference to political correctness - still decide to unequivocally declare you a liar. The universe is trying to give you a hint: it's time to get your life together.

• YearlyKos happened. In other DailyKos news, lots of people think that politicians are to some extent or another buying influence from these moral political crusaders. Comedy gold.

Race and Culture:

• It is the official position of HateWatch that Ann Coulter has a point. No, not about the evolution stuff - that's just silly. But there are indeed 9/11 widows who used the tragedy that befell them to launch borderline slanderous attacks against the President of the United States. And there were indeed liberal shills who defended them in the same terms tone that they would later use to declare that absolute moral authority attached to losing a dear child in the Iraq War. We applaud Townhall, which responded to the controversy by writing an article filled with more Coulter quotes. Coulter's lack of sensitivity doesn't make her wrong - it just makes her insensitive. If it's sensitivity that you long for, give up politics and devote the rest of your life to watching Anderson Cooper 360.
  Speaking of which, it is the official position of HateWatch that Anderson Cooper is a overwrought, hand-wringing pretty-boy more suitable to MTV's The Real World than to a serious news channel (countdown to Joe Katzman email, subject: "Winds of Change and Omri's authority to declare official positions for anyone about anything" begins... now).

• The MSM needs stop leaking classified information. Seriously.

• This statement from a Milan official, commenting on the desecration of Jewish graves in his city, is ironic in ways we can't even begin to describe:

  Deputy Mayor Riccardo De Corato called the incident "an event of... extreme seriousness" and expressed his solidarity with the chief rabbi and the Jewish community "for this intolerable offense to dignity." "It is absurd that in a multicultural town like ours we should allow these serious acts of anti-Semitism and I hope that will we soon be able to...deliver to justice the people responsible for the desecrations.

  Except to say this: it seems that it is precisely these European multicultural towns where anti-Semitism is being prevalent. We can't help but wonder if maybe there's any specific culture - among all the multi-cultures that coexist - that's driving this dynamic. Which is not to say that this was Islamist anti-Semitism - we're just shocked that people can still assert with straight faces that anti-Semitism could ever emerge in the context of European multiculturalism.

• TIME's 100 people who shape our (their) world. Arianna Huffington yes, Glenn Reynolds no. Hugo Chavez yes, Tony Blair no. Dixie Chicks yes... actually, that punchline kind of writes itself (we were actually more perturbed about the lack of any String Theory skeptics in the Scientists and Thinkers category - apparently cutting edge books and a growing, wave of media coverage aren't signs of "the big ideas of our time"). But we digress.

• Someone from Reuters threatens to kill LGF blogger Charles Johnson. Hilarity ensues.

• Chris Hitchens took time out of his busy schedule to slap around Juan Cole for more or less claiming that Ahmadinejad's Mein Kampf-esque statements aren't really all that bad. Then Hitchens took a fortifying sip or two of bourbon (because he can) and did it again. These things he did because Juan Cole is a lying, near-illiterate mediocrity. So that's fair. Plus, Iran is probably just kidding. Really - that uranium hexaflouride gas is just a party favor.

• At the risk of overloading you with Christopher Hitchens, his first and second articles from last month about Holland's shameful treatment of Ayaan Hirsi Ali are mandatory. There will be a quiz on the material later (or you could read apologists for Islamism disgustingly piling on against this brave woman).

• Howard Dean lied about the Democratic Party's pro-gay platform:

  Democratic chairman Howard Dean mischaracterized his party's platform on gay rights in an interview courting evangelicals, then set the record straight Thursday when an advocacy group called him on it. Dean told Christian Broadcasting Network News that the 2004 Democratic platform declares "marriage is between a man and a woman" just one of the points he made in reaching out to religious conservatives who are largely hostile to the party. But the platform does not define marriage that way, and his remarks prompted the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force to return a $5,000 donation from the Democratic National Committee.

  We're glad that the Chairman of the Democratic Party is unwilling to take a principled stance in favor of gay marriage - less guilt the next time we pull the lever Republican on national security issues.

• Moussaoui declared victory after getting life in prison. Cause the poor baby had a rough childhood or something. Listen, we don't know how we feel about the verdict - but we do know that, rightwing bloggers' fantasies of prison justice aside, arrested dissident blogger Alaa Abdel-Fatah. Not only did this act have something less than the publicity-dampening effects they had hoped, but by the time they released him all they had managed to do was dramatically demonstrate their impotence. Governments need to understand that arresting bloggers doesn't work. Bloggers have blogger friends, who tend to be energetic, politically active, and computer literate. Very few things unite and energize bloggers across the political spectrum, but that's one of them.

• It seems like a reasonable premise: if a culture is unwilling to defend itself, it will lose when attacked. So England better hope that it's never attacked. Wait - it's already been violently attacked by Muslim terrorists? Yeah, then they're kind of screwed.

• European support for the Palestinian cause is a fickle thing. If the Palestinians don't make much trouble for a while, their support in Europe plummets. Let the Palestinians start up a new round of rocket fire, though, and soon the Europeans remember what they've loved all along.

• Walt and Mearsheimer are still on the radio, and they're still insisting that they actually like Jewish people. In fairness and without sarcasm, we believe them. We agree with people deep in the IR community that the two of them are probably not anti-Semitic. They just do the leg work ... and for the white supremicists and the vulgar Islamists and the people who want to wipe out the State of Israel. But at least they're not anti-Semitic! Still wrong though.

• Guess that overhyping Zarqawi's importance before taking him down an infinite number of notches doesn't seem like such a bad idea now? The MSM: strategists par excellance.

• This is why, in the immortal words of Eminem, nobody listens to techno (no, just ask your kids...).

• Pathetic and sad do not a funny skit make:

  Here he is in a transmission from “parallel Earth,” making lockbox jokes five and a half years after they went stale. Which tells me Franken probably wrote the sketch. Greeted by wild applause, too, of course; George Bush isn't my president! This won’t get as much attention as Colbert’s WHCD gig because Bush didn’t have to sit through it, but it should be good... nonetheless. They play into the same fantasy, after all: if Colby’s the leader of the Resistance, Gore’s the head of the government-in-exile.

  But at least his movie is populat in LA, New York, and Europe.

A Hopeful Note:

• Cardinal George Pell, the Archbishop of Sydney, has noticed that there's something about some forms of Islam that seem less than peaceful. Should he pen a memo to this effect and distribute it, it would not be a bad thing.

• Algerian moderate Malek Chebel has issued 27 Propositions for Reforming Islam. JihadWatch is skeptical, largely as a reaction against the energy with which some in the West will trumpet even the most tenuous signs of Islamic reform. Yet a sign of hope this is, and a sign of hope it should be taken as.

• Kuwait held its first ever election in which women could vote. In the past, we've been cynical about the fact that this counts as progress, but really - it does, and we're grateful.

• Turkey - traditionally the only secular Muslim-majority democracy in the world - has spent the last half decade or so slipping into anti-Americanism and Islamism. At the end of last May, secularists started to push back.

• Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was killed by coalition forces in Iraq.

• Protests broke out across Iranian universities toward the end of last month.