Religious Hate:

• Because of the ""shame and dishonour" brought on the family of his 16 year old girlfriend, 19 year old Arash Ghorbani-Zarin apparently had to be stabbed 46 times and killed by her two brothers. The young woman had refused to bow to her father's pressure for an arranged marriage.

• Some people believe that the suicide bomber movie Paradise Now is a celebration of genocidal violence worthy of Nazi Germany. We believe that it is a powerful, complex, but flawed film which is nonetheless well worth seeing. Some Palestinians believe it's an excuse to dress up their children in suicide bomber costumes. Go figure.

• Turns out, Muslim rioting in Paris really was kind of anti-Semitic:

  Moslem riots in France have fanned anti-Semitism, and four synagogues and Jewish schools have been firebombed, despite Jewish media reports that Jews are not being targeted more than others.

  Such actions have caused French Jews to flee France in ever greater numbers.
  In addition to hatred directed at other religions, one of the more general acts of seething hatred during the riots bears particular repeating (even a month later): the apparent need of the "disaffected youth" to douse a disabled woman with petrol and light her on fire to demonstrate their "disaffected-ness". All the national landmarks must have been too well guarded.

• Islamists linked to Al Qaeda in Iraq murdered dozens by exploding three suicide bombs at a Jordanian wedding.

• Somehow, an atmosphere in which the Jewish State is demonized and Stars of David are equated with swastikas has led to an increase in anti-Semitism on college campuses. One of the campuses picked out by the Zionist Organization of America as being of particular concern is the University of California Irvine. You can see pictures and other evidence of the rank anti-Semitism and anti-Americanism on that campus here and here and here.
  A push to make public colleges accountable for the intimidation brought to bear on students by professors and for the anti-Semitic speakers that their organizations sponsor failed in Congress this week.

• UK Indymedia is passing on information from Al Jazeera that purports to prove that Jews were behind the Amman terrorist bombings. So we're adding this to the list of things that Muslim and Arab sources have accused Jews of doing in the last five years: the 9/11 WTC bombings, the 3/11 London subway bombings, the 7/7 Madrid bombings, the Beslan school massacre, and the death of Jesus Christ. The NYT's write-up of how Jordanians believe that Israel was involved is here, and if you want to see the sick conspiracy theory in all its glory, it can be found here. In fact, when you type Amman bombings into Google, two of the first ten hits are sites which claim to prove that Israel was behind the bombings.

• An Egyptian Christian eye specialist has accepted an undisclosed sum of money after being fired from the hospital he worked at in Britain because he wasn't Muslim enough.

• Anti-Semitic violence and vandalism is now so common in Germany that it's barely worth commenting on:

  Spiegel quoted provisional German Interior Ministry figures showing some 4,600 racist or anti-Semitic offences in the first half of this year. Between 2000 and 2004, nearly 60,000 such offences, including 4,000 involving violence, appeared in police statistics. He said attacks on Jewish cemeteries, nasty graffiti on walls and hate-filled letters to the Council of Jews or to Jewish communities were "so common that the news media hardly reports them".

• The Gujarat state in India has published textbooks for school-children which focus on all the good things Hitler did but fail to mention any of the bad things - like the Holocaust.

• Palestinian anti-gay atrocities receive virtually no attention from the typical anti-American / anti-Israel / anti-capitalist / anti-etc coalitions that have formed on the Left since 9/11. But they should:

  Much criticism has been leveled at gay organizations for their reluctance to make much ado about the Iranian government's public hanging of two gay youths this past summer. The incident was not a rarity in the Islamic world... While the outrage over gay organizations' indifference to the plight of Iranian gays was necessary, it ought to be directed toward a political situation
  where gay Americans can have more influence: the Arab-Israeli conflict... In the disputed territories run by the Palestinian Authority, gays are routinely harassed, tortured and murdered.
  A 2002 article in The New Republic magazine documented the dire predicament of several gay Palestinians. A 21-year-old recalled that he "was forced to stand in sewage water up to his neck, his head covered by a sack filled with feces, and then he was thrown into a dark cell infested with insects and other creatures he could feel but not see." One man fled to Tel Aviv, only to be captured by the Palestinian police upon his return to Nablus, a city in the West Bank. "They put him in a pit," a friend of the man recalled. "It was the fast of Ramadan, and they decided to make him fast the whole month but without any break at night. They denied him food and water until he died in that hole." Tel Aviv, Israel's flourishing gay hub, has become for Palestinian gays what Miami is for Cubans: a refuge of freedom from tyranny...
  Not surprisingly, gay rights groups have ignored gay Palestinians, as has the pre-eminent human rights organization Amnesty International. The Palestinian "struggle" has long been a cause celebre for the left.

• A few weeks ago, The Tehran Times gave prominent attention to Holocaust denier Robert Faurisson. Presumably, this was the result of simple anti-Semitism, and not any complicated plot to assuage their consciences as they prepare to launch nuclear weapons at five million Jews.

• Michael Jackson will fit right into his new home in Bahrain.

• Two judges have been murdered in Bangladesh for not refusing to allow the Koran to trump the laws that were passed by, you know, elected officials.

• There's nothing like a massive earthquake to boost jihadist recruitment:

  Children orphaned by the Kashmir earthquake are being “adopted” by terrorist groups that hope to train them to fight in the jihad, or holy war, writes Dean Nelson. Pakistan’s leading human rights organisation, the Ansar Burney Welfare Trust, said jihadi groups fighting the Indian government were taking orphans off the streets and putting them in training camps. The organisation said it also had evidence that sympathetic government officials were passing children on to the jihadis to be looked after.

  We haven't worked through all the logic yet, but in the aftermath of a devestating act of God, aren't the people who claim to be God's representatives the default bad guys?

• Mechelen striker Patrick Goots believes that his team would have done better in a soccer match between Mechelen and Antwerp if the Germans had done more "with the Jews in the gas chambers during World War One". This begs the question: if you're going to be an anti-Semite, is it better or worse if you're especially stupid?

• In New York, Jimmy McMillan is promising that, if he's elected mayor, he will lower rent by taking power back from the Jews.

• The Vatican has published its much anticipated - albeit unenthusiastically - paper on the role of homosexuals in the church. Andrew Sullivan says that the "no social value" portion of the paper effectively mandates outright hatred of gays and lesbians. Kathryn Lopez says that the document requires no such thing. Sullivan's response is devestating on this point.

Idiotarian Seethings:

• Former United States President Jimmy Carter - having taken the memo that said that former Presidents do not attack sitting Presidents, burned it, encased the ashes in lead, and then dropped them into a volcano - is accusing President Bush of planning to invade Iraq before 9/11 and degrading the standards of American foreign policy. This is Jimmy Carter giving people advice on how to run a successful foreign policy. The punch line is left as an exercise for the reader.

• Well this is just stupid:

  The riots in France that started in the Parisian suburbs are ringing alarm bells throughout Europe. These incidents of civil disobedience should serve as lessons to neighboring countries on how not to treat a minority population.

• There is a theory that holds that one of the hallmarks of the intellectualized New Anti-Semitism is the move to marginalize atrocities committed against Jews (and thus remove the taboo against committing future ones) either by linking Jews to Nazis or by linking Muslims to Jews. The former tactic can be seen in the crude and hateful "Sharon = Hitler" and "Star of David = swastika" posters so often brandished by Leftist college activists. The latter is on display in this article from a Maine newspaper.

• Ted Rall believes American troops are murderers and rapists and torturers - and he's willing to draw crude cartoons to prove it.

• Chris Matthews is not an idiot. But sometimes his over-enthusiasm makes him sound like one:

  "The period between 9-11 and (invading) Iraq was not a good time for America. There wasn't a robust discussion of what we were doing," Matthews said.” If we stop trying to figure out the other side, we've given up. The person on the other side is not evil. They just have a different perspective.

• At some point, these stories will become so tiring that the boredom will outweigh our need to know that there are still lunatics like this out there. But for now, we refer you to this BYU professor who believes that bombs planted inside the buildings - and not planes - brought down the World Trade Center towers. He also believes that "Muslims are (probably) not to blame for bringing down the WTC buildings after all" (he doesn't offer a theory as to who he thinks was responsible, but you don't have to try very hard to guess). This one is particularly dangerous because he adds the veneer of scientific language to what - no matter how much physics is attached to it - is just total moonbat craziness. Popular Mechanics dismantles his theory here.

• Seriously, this guy just doesn't seem very smart:

  Conservative Christian televangelist Pat Robertson told citizens of a Pennsylvania town that they had rejected God by voting their school board out of office for supporting “intelligent design” and warned them Thursday not to be surprised if disaster struck.

Race and Culture:

• In Saudi Arabia, saying nice things about Jews is an insult to Islam:

  A court in Saudi Arabia sentenced a teacher to 40 months in jail and 750 lashes for "mocking religion" after he discussed the Bible and praised Jews, a Saudi newspaper said on Sunday. Al-Madina newspaper said secondary school teacher Mohammad al-Harbi will be flogged in public after he was taken to court by his colleagues and students.

  750 lashes for "praising Jews."

• What with Jews priding themselves on a 4,000 year history of scholarship and erudition, banning the Internet makes perfect sense.

• When you live in a world of moral exhibitionism and facile elitism, where jokes about President Bush's intelligence have replaced small talk about the weather as the grease the oils chit-chat, pathetic and gratuitous slams at the Commander in Chief are just something you do:

  The school superintendent whose district includes Mount Anthony Union High School has labeled "inappropriate" and "irresponsible" an English teacher's use of liberal statements in a vocabulary quiz. "I wish Bush would be (coherent, eschewed) for once during a speech, but there are theories that his everyday diction charms the below-average mind, hence insuring him Republican votes," said one question on a quiz written by English and social studies teacher Bret Chenkin.

  Indeed, all Republicans are stupid and the reason this guy will be living the rest of his life as a failed high school teacher somewhere in rural Vermont is because of the vast rightwing conspiracy that successfully "shut him up" when he tried to expose the truth about the Bush administration's manipulation of simplistic Americans. But at least he'll feel better knowing that a fill-in-the-blank quiz that he wrote proves to him that he's smarter than the man occupying the highest office in the land.

• Professional racist David Duke wants everybody to know that he's on Syria's side:

  Former US Louisiana Representative David Duke on Monday expresses solidarity with Syria in face of the pressures and threats against the country. Duke told a news conference at the 'Nation's Tent' at Rawda Square in Damascus that "I have come to Syria to express my support to the Syrian people and their just stances...it's the duty of every free man to reject the conspiracies and threats Syria is exposed to." He added that the pro-Israel neoconservatives in the US have influence on their country's foreign policy and have been working behind the scenes through their mass media in the US to hide "the reality of Israeli terrorism against the Arabs."…
  Duke expressed appreciation of Syria under the leadership of President Bashar al-Assad, saying he would do his bets to convey "the real peace-loving Syrian" stances to peoples across the world.

  Do you want to know a secret? By "neoconservatives", he means "Jews".

A Hopeful Note:

• As Indonesian Muslims marched to condemn terrorism, new polling data showed that sentiments were turning against terrorism across the Muslim world. Instapundit has the goods.

• In the aftermath of the Amman bombings, many Jordanians have at least temporarily turned against Al Qaeda.

• A landmark victory for women has taken place in Saudi Arabia, where Lama al-Sulaiman and Nashwa Taher have been elected to the chamber of commerce.

• Despite the almost unbearable sexual temptation that their totally covered presence posed to men, women participated in the recent Egyptian elections – which took place. Which is itself probably a good thing.