The Scriptorium

Mark Steyn’s article in the Sun Times is a must read. He contrasts the media’s response to Dick Cheney’s hunting accident with their censorship of a cartoon that has caused death and destruction around the world.

In an otherwise grim week — at least on unimportant peripheral matters like Iranian nukes — three things cheered me up. The first was the decision of Iran’s bakers to rename Danish pastries “Roses of the Prophet Muhammed pastries.” Has a ring to it, don’t you think? If they’re looking for a slogan, how about “Iranian pastry: There’s nothing flakier. Except our president.”

The second cheery sight was the destruction of a McDonald’s in Lahore by the usual excitable young lads from the religion of pieces. Apparently the lively Pakistanis had burned every single Danish target in the city — one early Victor Borge LP left behind by the last British governor — and had been obliged to diversify. So they dragged Ronald McDonald out of the joint, torched him in the street and danced around his flaming remains shouting “Death to America! Death to Britain! Death to Tony Blair!”

I’m not sure I even get that. Ronald and Tony seem kind of similar from a distance but even on the all-infidels-look-alike-to-me-especially-when-they’re-alight thesis you’d think they weren’t that easily confused.

The third jolly event of the week was those other excitable fellows — the Big Media White House reporters — jumping up and down shouting “Death to Dick Cheney!” NBC’s David Gregory, the George Clooney of the press corps, was yelling truth to power about why the Elmer-Fudd-in-gun-rampage story was released to “a local Corpus Christi newspaper, not the White House press corps at large.” I know how he feels. I remember, like, four or five years ago — early September, maybe second week — there was this building collapse in New York and I had to learn about it from the TV because this notoriously secretive paranoid administration couldn’t even e-mail me a timely press release. For an NBC guy discovering that some hicksville nowhere-burg one-stop-light feed-price sheet got tipped off before he did is like a dowager duchess turning up at the royal banquet to discover the scullery maid’s been seated next to the queen.

So anyway David Gregory’s going bananas and yelling “I will yell!” and “Don’t be a jerk!” at the White House press secretary, and there’s more smoke coming out of his ears than from Ronald McDonald in Lahore, and I’m thinking, you know, maybe Karl’s latest range of Rovebots that he planted in American media corporations are just a wee bit too parodically self-absorbed to be plausible. And then this lady pipes up and asks, “Would this be much more serious if the man had died?”

Well, maybe. And maybe it would be even ever so much more serious still if, after peppering him with birdshot, Cheney had dragged him into a safe house in the Sunni Triangle and decapitated him with a rusty scimitar while shouting “Allahu Ahkbar!” and then sold the video to al-Jazeera.

Read it all. It gets even funnier.

You give them freedom of speech, and they use it to threaten to join Al Qaeda and kill you. In Afghanistan, Muslims are threatening to become terrorists as a protest against “offensive” cartoons. At least they no longer have direct access to Al Qaeda in Afghanistan.

Hundreds of Afghan students shouted support on Monday for
Osama bin Laden and threatened to join al Qaeda during a protest against cartoons of the Prophet Mohammad.

In an attempt to cool the controversy after a weekend of rioting in countries including Nigeria, where 28 people were killed, and Libya, where 11 died,
Pope Benedict said the world’s religions and their symbols had to be respected.

Pakistan’s main Islamist alliance vowed to broaden its campaign with more protests targeted at the U.S. and Pakistani presidents.

The protest in the eastern Afghan city of Jalalabad passed off without violence. Students gathered at the university campus chanted “Death to Denmark,” “Death to America” and “Death to France,” a witness said.

They also shouted support for al Qaeda leaders Osama bin Laden and Ayman al Zawahri.

Shouting “Death to Karzai,” they demanded President Hamid Karzai close the embassies of Denmark, the United States and France and expel their forces from
Afghanistan.

“If they abuse the Prophet of Islam again we will all become al Qaeda,” the students shouted.

As the cartoon Jihad continued to claim lives and property today, the Pope chimed in with a bit of ecumenism and a giant diversion from reality.

In a speech to the new Moroccan ambassador to the
Vatican, the Pope said: “In order to promote peace and understanding between peoples and mankind it is both vital and urgent that religions and their symbols are respected and that believers are not the object of provocations that wound their religious feelings.”

“However, intolerance and violence can never be justified as a response to any offence, because it is a response that is incompatible with the sacred principles of religion,” he added.

Intolerance and violence IS compatible with some religions, and especially Islam. I’m so tired of hearing about wounded feelings as if it’s the most tragic thing to happen to human beings since the Holocaust. There is plenty of REAL persecution in this world. Christians are being murdered in Nigeria, China rounds up Christians regularly and sends them to reeducation camps where they’re tortured, and Christians in Africa are being driven off their land and killed. None of these things are addressed by world leaders, commented on with such urgency by the Pope, or reported by the MSM. Offend a Muslim with a stupid drawing, though, and everyone has a statement and a call for unity, harmony, and tolerance. Dead Men, women, and children in every Muslim country on the planet is a tragedy. Hurt feelings among fanatical killers is NOT.