Oscars for Osama

By Charles Krauthammer Washington Post, Friday, March 3, 2006; Page A17

Nothing tells you more about Hollywood than what it chooses to honor. Nominated for best foreign-language film is "Paradise Now," a sympathetic portrayal of two suicide bombers. Nominated for best picture is "Munich," a sympathetic portrayal of yesterday's fashion in barbarism: homicide terrorism.

But until you see "Syriana," nominated for best screenplay (and George Clooney, for best supporting actor) you have no idea how self-flagellation and self-loathing pass for complexity and moral seriousness in Hollywood. The "Syriana" script has, of course, the classic liberal tropes such as this stage direction: "The Deputy National Security Advisor, MARILYN RICHARDS, 40's, sculpted hair, with the soul of a seventy year-old white, Republican male, is in charge" (Page 21). Or this piece of over-the-top, Gordon Gekko Republican-speak, placed in the mouth of a Texas oilman: "Corruption is our protection. Corruption is what keeps us safe and warm. . . . Corruption . . . is how we win" (Page 93).

Click on the above link to read the full article.

Hollywood's historical carear in siding with the enemy seems to be gathering momentum.

Writers Issue Cartoon Row Warning

Salman Rushdie is among a dozen writers to have put their names to a statement in a French weekly paper warning against Islamic "totalitarianism".

The writers say the violence sparked by the publication of cartoons satirising the Prophet Muhammad shows the need to fight for secular values and freedom. The statement is published in Charlie Hebdo, one of several European papers to reprint the caricatures.

The images, first published in Denmark, have angered Muslims across the world. One showed the Prophet Muhammad, whose depiction is banned in Islam, as a terrorist bomber.

Many newspapers defended their decision to reprint the cartoons on the grounds of freedom of expression.

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Writers issue cartoon row warning: Salmon Rushdie et al

Religious Terrorism vs. Free Speech

Muslim death threats against Danish cartoonists echo Khomeini's 1989 fatwa on Salman Rushdie--a death threat renewed this month by Iran's mullahs. Combating such religious terrorism is a moral necessity.

The Ayn Rand Institute is releasing this 1989 editorial--originally published as an advertisement in the New York Times--because the same essential issues underlie the Rushdie debacle and the current uproar over cartoons of Mohammad. In both cases, the ultimate target is not “blasphemy” but man’s faculty of reason and the principle of free speech--values our leaders are too gutless to defend as absolutes. In both cases, Islamic leaders have incited violence and issued death threats against Westerners--but have met with a pathetically appeasing response (Khomeini’s fatwa against Rushdie still stands, and has just been reaffirmed). And today as in 1989, the West’s craven response is motivated by the same fundamental cause. Failure to combat such self-righteous barbarism invites further aggression--a lesson history continually teaches, but which Western leaders refuse to learn.

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Religious Terrorism vs. Free Speech: Leonard Peikoff. Friday, February 24, 2006

The Reason for the Bomb in the Turban

A cartoon of the prophet Mohammed with a bomb in his turban has offended people all over the world. But what was the cartoonist's message? The combination of Islam and terror has offended millions of Muslims, who see the satirical drawing as an expression of the West's contempt for Muslims and their religion. However, according to the cartoonist responsible for the controversial image, this is a misunderstanding. ________________________________________________ What was the message of your cartoon of the prophet Mohammed with a bomb in his turban?

"The cartoon is not directed against Islam as a whole, but against the part of it which obviously can inspire to violence, terrorism, death and destruction. And therefore the fundamentalist aspect of Islam. I wanted to show that terrorists get their spiritual ammunition from Islam."

Why was it important for you to get that message across?

"If a religion degenerates into religious Fascism, we are faced with totalitarian tendencies similar to Fascism and Nazism in the past. It is the same situation, where people have to bow their heads and act as the regime wants them to act. I believe we have to fight against that and of course a cartoonist's weapon is the pen or pencil and a certain amount of indignation."

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The Reason for the Bomb in the Turban

The Corruption of a Mixed Economy

Click on this link

to read the full article:

Another letter to the editor from ARI:

Dear Editor:
Washington's attempts to fight rampant corruption will amount to nothing unless they address its basic cause. The fundamental reason for today's rampant corruption is that our government has adopted a corrupt purpose. Once a protector of the life, liberty, and property of every American, the US government now uses its power to pursue an undefined "public good" by sacrificing some Americans to other Americans. If we want to get rid of the Jack Abramoffs and the "bridges to nowhere," we have to return our government to its sole legitimate purpose: the protection of individual rights.

Dr. Yaron Brook _______________________________________

Dr. Yaron Brook Ayn Rand Institute Executive DirectorIrvine, CA2121 Alton Parkway #250949-222-6550 ext 226Copyright (c) 2006 Ayn Rand(R) Institute. All rights reserved.If you would like to help support ARI's efforts, please make an online contributionThis release is copyrighted by the Ayn Rand Institute, and cannot be reprinted without permission except for non-commercial, self-study or educational purposes. We encourage you to forward this release to friends, family, associates or interested parties who would want to receive it for these purposes only. Any reproduction of this release must contain the above copyright notice. Those interested in reprinting or redistributing this release for any other purposes should contact media@aynrand.org. This release may not be forwarded to media for publication.

Something Stinketh in Denmark !

....and it certainly isn't the Danes!

Click on the above cartoon to take you to Robert Tracinski's article:
The Cartoon Jihad

Rationality and Individual Rights vs Islam

Violent Muslim reaction to the cartoons is just one more excuse that radical Islam is using to spread its hatred of our western culture and values. To say that we have to consider the ‘delicate sensibilities of savages’ in order to purchase peace from them is the kind of appeasement that history has proved to be disastrous time and again.

I have in my mind a picture of Neville Chamberlin (the British Prime Minister in 1938) coming back from his meeting in Munich with Adolf Hitler. He stepped off the plane in England and held up a document, jointly signed by Hitler and himself and, smiling to the press, joyfully announced “Peace in our time”! And all the ‘peaceniks’ in England pointed their fingers at Winston Churchill and said—“see, we told you so!” But Hitler had already planned his invasion of Poland and soon enough, on schedule, did just that.

You will never be able to purchase peace by appeasing savages and capitulating to their irrational demands and death threats. This has been proved over and over.

The cartoons themselves are not the point. The point is that each person in the West has to face what we are really up against and decide where we stand. Do we side with ‘reason’ and the application of a rational view of the world to determine how individual men and women live their lives, or do we side with the interpretation of ‘holy scriptures’ by ‘men of god’ to enforce a particular way of life upon us

What inevitably separates the Western culture from Islam is the recognition, by the West, that reason is the means by which we pursue knowledge. That man’s rational faculty is the means by which we discover what is true and what is false—and the means by which we wish to establish proper relations between individual citizens. Islam, on the other hand, is based upon the premise and commitment to mystic dogma and the rule of a theocratic elite of powerful mullah’s.

At the root of our secular culture is the concept of individual rights. These rights are founded upon rational principles—and are the very thing despised by most Islamic clerics and their followers. The root principle of individual rights is the inalienable right to speak ones mind, according to the dictates of ones own conscience, free from the fear of being murdered by irrational savages who disagree and/or because their ‘feelings’ have been ‘hurt’!

We must cease our appeasement of Islamic tyrants and our growing capitulation to their increasing demands. If they do not like our open and free society, then they are quite at liberty to leave at any time and seek to build their dream of an Islamic State under Sharia elsewhere.

In addition, we in the West must cease supporting irrational Islam with financial handouts. We must cease allowing the transfer of Western technology and we must refuse to put food on the table of our enemies by purchasing their manufactured goods.

We are clearly at war with an irrational and brutally savage enemy. We must face this obvious fact and behave accordingly. We did not purchase items made in Germany or Japan during the Second World War—and for the same obvious reasons!

Banning Sharia

Rationality Vs. Blatant, Undeniable Evil

I thought that this was an important discussion http://tinyurl.com/be4py between Jamie Glasgov, McCarthy, Holtzer and May. But I do take issue with Jamie trying to continually appear ‘moderate’ by appealing to ‘moderate’ Muslims or ‘moderate Islam’. Islam is what it has always been since its very inception 1400 years ago. ‘Moderate’ Muslims are ‘moderate’ not because of anything found in Islam itself, but only insofar as they have been influenced by our Western civilizing culture, with its obvious freedoms which have inevitably produced a certain affluence. Surely, we must appeal not to ‘moderate Muslims’ (or any other ‘moderate’ group): rather, we must appeal to rational minds. And we must have the courage to come to know, name and face, head on, the nature of our true enemy—which are irrational and savage belief systems that if allowed to co-exist with us, will eventually destroy our way of life. We are at WAR with an irrational and brutally savage enemy who are very clear about what they stand for and what it is they hope to achieve—while at the same time most people in the West have become intellectually enfeebled by decades of ‘social-democratic-liberalism’ and are consequently utterly confused about what our culture and economic system represents.

Stop trying to appear ‘moderate’. Make a lifelong commitment to rationality; struggle to know what is right and therefore good and also what is evil. Then have the courage to JUDGE, choose and then make your stand. America no longer needs hordes of spineless intellectuals whose whole lives consist in making sure they are perceived by society as being ‘moderate’ or ‘tolerant’—that lot have had their day and have done their damage. Circumstances now require that people in America exercise their rational minds, come to know what is right and then stand up to the blatant evil that is confronting us all.