Will this be the defining moment for people to realize just what we are up against?  For the people of the Netherlands it probably was the Van Gogh murder.  But this might “do it” for a lot more people.  I’m glad to see what the Danes are standing their ground:

THE Danish editor who brought the fury of the Muslim world on his country by printing pictures of the Prophet Muhammad defiantly declared yesterday: “We do not apologise for printing the cartoons. It was our right to do so.”

As protests continued for a second day in Gaza with shouts of “Death to Denmark”, Flemming Rose, the culture editor of the centre-right daily newspaper Jyllands-Posten, sat in his book-lined office declaring his surprise at the reaction.

He said that he had to stand his ground because, as in the Salman Rushdie affair, freedom of speech was being threatened. “There is a lot at stake. It would be very naive to think this is only about Jyllands-Posten and 12 cartoons and apologising or not apologising.

“This is about standing for fundamental values that have been the (foundation) for the development of Western democracies over several hundred years, and we are now in a situation where those values are being challenged,” he said.

“I think some of the Muslims who have reacted very strongly to these cartoons are being driven by totalitarian and authoritarian impulses, and the nature of these impulses is that if you give in once they will just put forward new requirements.”

…

A poll over the weekend showed that 80 per cent of Danes thought that the Government should not apologise and 62 per cent thought that the newspaper should not apologise. Jyllands-Posten tried to calm tempers on Monday by apologising for any offence caused, but stood firm on its decision to print the pictures.

Here is a collection of Muhammad pictures including the one of him with a bomb as a turban which was so offensive to the extremist Muslims.  I’m particular fond of the “What would Muhammad drive?” cartoon.  The more in your face types will appreciate the camel one.

Thanks to Ry for the link to the collection and for the basis of this post.

Lyle sent me this link.  President Madison explains in great detail why a bill providing for the construction of roads and canals is unconstitutional and he had no choice but to veto it.  Such a bill that today would pass without the slightest hint of concern it overstepping the bounds of the U.S. Constitution.  Considering the role Madison had in writing the document one would think that he would know the bounds better than present day politicians.

If you want to understand Islam from the political viewpoint and how it relates to the non-Muslims of the world read Daniel Pipes. I started with a post from 1995 and at first I thought I was reading about present day from a recent article.  Everything he said then about the future we now have experience or are experiencing.  He knew what he was talking about then and I have no reason to believe his understanding has diminished.  Here is a sample from 1995:

Though anchored in religious creed, fundamentalist Islam is a radical utopian movement closer in spirit to other such movements (communism, fascism) than to traditional religion. By nature anti-democratic and aggressive, anti-Semitic and anti-Western, it has great plans. Indeed, spokesmen for fundamentalist Islam see their movement standing in direct competition to Western civilization and challenging it for global supremacy. Let’s look at each of these elements in more detail.

Radical utopian schema. Outside their own movement, fundamentalists see every existing political system in the Muslim world as deeply compromised, corrupt, and mendacious. As one of their spokesmen put it as long ago as 1951, “there is no [sic] one town in the whole world where Islam is observed as enjoined by Allah, whether in politics, economics or social matters.” Implied here is that Muslims true to God’s message must reject the status quo and build wholly new institutions.

To build a new Muslim society, fundamentalists proclaim their intent to do whatever they must; they openly flaunt an extremist sensibility. “There are no such terms as compromise and surrender in the Islamic cultural lexicon,” a spokesman for Hamas declares. If that means destruction and death for the enemies of true Islam, so be it. Hizbullah’s spiritual leader, Muhammad Husayn Fadlallah, concurs: “As Islamists,” he says, “we seek to revive the Islamic inclination by all means possible.”

Seeing Islam as the basis of a political system touching every aspect of life, fundamentalists are totalitarian. Whatever the problem, “Islam is the solution.” In their hands, Islam is transformed from a personal faith into a ruling system that knows no constraints. They scrutinize the Qur’an and other texts for hints about Islamic medicine, Islamic economics, and Islamic statecraft, all with an eye to creating a total system for adherents and corresponding total power for leaders. Fundamentalists are revolutionary in outlook, extremist in behavior, totalitarian in ambition.

Revealingly, they vaunt Islam as the best ideology, not the best religion-thereby exposing their focus on power. Whereas a traditional Muslim would say something like, “We are not Jewish, we are not Christian, we are Muslim,” the Malaysian Islamist leader Anwar Ibrahim made a very different comparison: “We are not socialist, we are not capitalist, we are Islamic.” While fundamentalist Islam differs in its details from other utopian ideologies, it closely resembles them in scope and ambition. Like communism and fascism, it offers a vanguard ideology; a complete program to improve man and create a new society; complete control over that society; and cadres ready, even eager, to spill blood.

In the January 26th issue of USA Today Mr. Pipes writes Don’t deal with terrorists:

An increasing number of voices are calling for Hamas to be recognized, arguing that the imperatives of governance would tame it, ending its arch-murderous vocation (it has killed around 600 Israelis) and turning it into a responsible citizen. Even President Bush made this argument in early 2005: “There’s a positive effect when you run for office. Maybe some will run for office and say, ‘Vote for me, I look forward to blowing up America.’ … I don’t think so. I think people who generally run for office say, ‘Vote for me, I’m looking forward to fixing your potholes, or making sure you got bread on the table.'”

The historical record, however, refutes this “pothole theory of democracy.” Mussolini made the trains run, Hitler built autobahns, Stalin cleared the snow and Castro reduced infant mortality — without any of these totalitarians giving up their ideological zeal nor their grandiose ambitions. Likewise, Islamists in Afghanistan, Iran, and Sudan have governed without becoming tamed. If proof is needed, note the Iranian efforts to build nuclear weapons amid an apocalyptic fervor.

…

It was a mistake to permit Hamas to compete in elections. Like al-Qaeda, Hamas should be destroyed, not legitimated, much less courted.

In September Danish and Norwegian newspapers published a cartoon with the Prophet Mohammad wearing a turban shaped as a bomb.  It raised the ire of the Muslim extremists to such an extent that some are now calling for a goods boycott and are threatening all Danes and Norwegians with physical violence:

The Danish Foreign Ministry warned against non-crucial travel to Saudi Arabia and urged Danes to be cautious in other Muslim countries such as Egypt, Iran, Lebanon, Algeria, Pakistan and the Palestinian territories.

“In the current situation where the drawings of the Prophet Mohammad have caused strong negative reactions among Muslims, Danes who choose to stay in Saudi Arabia should show extraordinarily high watchfulness,” it added on its Web site.

The Danish Red Cross said it had pulled two employees out of Gaza and one from Yemen.

Ten Palestinians armed with assault rifles and grenade launchers rallied outside the European Union headquarters in Gaza City and fired in the air, demanding an apology and saying Danes and Norwegians there would be at risk of attack.

…

Thousands of protesters in the West Bank town of Qalqilya marched through the streets, demanding an apology and burning Denmark’s flag, a white cross on a red background.

Militant groups linked to Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas’s Fatah faction issued a statement saying, “We call upon all Danish citizens in (Palestine) to leave immediately.”

Hamas, the militant Islamic group which won Palestinian elections last week, urged Islamic countries to take “deterrent steps against idiotic Danish behavior”.

“We call on Muslim nations to boycott all Danish products because the Danish people supported the hateful racism under the pretext of freedom of expression,” it said in a statement.

…

Egypt is also considering recalling its Copenhagen envoy, Danish media quoted Egypt’s ambassador for saying.

So what would be the result if all people reacted this way if some media outlets protrayed a political or religious leaders in an unfavorable light?  We would have had a major rift with Germany in the mid 90s:

This photo was taken at a German carnival in Cologne, Germany.

And that’s just the beginning.  This sort of thinking and behavior is destructive to civilized society.  Intolerance of this magnitude cannot be tolerated (forgive the irony).  We must destroy this extremist culture.

I’m constantly amazed there are people that are still opposed to our involvement in world war III.  You would think that with incidents like this at least the teacher union would be supporting it.

KANDAHAR, Afghanistan (Reuters) – Taliban insurgents have torched three schools in a restive southern province of Afghanistan, the latest attacks in the militants’ campaign against the U.S.-backed government and its efforts to promote education.

The three newly built schools, where 1,000 boys and girls studied, were gutted on Friday night in different parts of Nawa district in Helmand province, said provincial education chief Mohammad Qasim.

“I can say that the Taliban were behind this,” Qasim told Reuters on Saturday, adding that no one was hurt in the attacks.

Or maybe you could expect strong support from womens rights groups:

The Taliban banned girls from school during their rule, which ended when they were ousted by U.S.-led forces in late 2001 after the Islamists refused to hand over Osama bin Laden, architect of the September 11 attacks on the United States.

But it’s teachers in particular that should be able to see the issue most clearly:

Suspected Taliban gunmen dragged a teacher from his classroom and shot him at the gates of his school in December after he had ignored warnings to stop teaching boys and girls, officials said.

In a separate attack, also in December, gunmen shot and killed an 18-year-old male student and a guard at another school in Helmand. The gunmen opened fire on teachers and said they would be killed unless the schools were shut down, police said.

In Zabul province, also in the south, a teacher was dragged from his home and beheaded last month.

But what do I know?  I’m just the weird guy that insists on thinking logically.

That’s the headline for this article referring to a resolution being considered in the Washington State legislature:

A resolution sponsored by Rep. Toby Nixon, R-Kirkland, heard by the House Transportation Committee this week, calls on Congress and President Bush to repeal the REAL ID Act, saying it infringes on civil liberties, creates a huge burden for the Department of Licensing and could make identity theft easier.

I’m all for doing away with the concept of a national ID card.  It fails my Jews in the Attic Test and probably will make us less secure rather that more secure.

I’ve been saying for a long time that airport screening for weapons on airplanes may be an insolvable problem and that we need to consider alternatives.  Now research from the University at Buffalo and Georgia State University suggest we may now know why it is such a difficult problem:

Screeners at airport security checkpoints perform an important task in which they search for objects that belong to threat categories in complex X-ray images. New research by cognitive psychologists at UB and Georgia State University explores the cognitive processes that underlie screening, suggests limits on those processes and has implications for the training and evaluation of screeners in the field.

The findings were published in the article “Specific-Token Effects in Screening Tasks: Possible Implications for Aviation Security” in the November-December issue of the American Psychological Association’s Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory and Cognition (Vol. 31, No. 6) and in the article “Visual Search and the Collapse of Categorization,” in the November-December issue of the APA’s Journal of Experimental Psychology: General (Vol. 134, No. 4).

…

The problem addressed by the research, Smith says, “is that screeners must be able to bring ‘category-level’ knowledge to their search for targets. That is, they must search for guns and knives generally, not for specific Beretta guns or Bowie knives they have been trained to recognize. Yet it has been unknown how the processes of categorization stand up to visual complexity or why they fail facing it. We filled this research gap by creating a visual-search and categorization paradigm in which participants searched for members of target categories in complex displays.”

…

The reliance on familiarity might also have implications for the training and evaluation of screeners in the field for the following reason: The “Threat Image Projection” (TIP) system provides an important potential means of assessing performance at security checkpoints. It includes a library of test images that can be digitally injected into the X-ray image of a bag as it is presented to the screener. This lets screeners’ ongoing target-detection performance be evaluated, provides ongoing training and maintains screener vigilance. Yet, a strategy of using a fixed library of test images risks the specific-token effects that Smith and his colleagues observed. Estimates of screener performance might be inflated by these familiarity effects, compared to the detection levels that would be observed for real threats that will be from outside the library and unfamiliar. A more conservative and truer estimate of screener performance would result if one arranged testing so that targets essentially never repeated, so that familiarity could never develop and so that screeners were forced to rely on category general knowledge and strategies.

Smith notes that it is to the Transportation Security Administration’s credit that it has actively responded to this specific-token effect by increasing the size of TIP libraries and by planning periodically to infuse new targets. These changes have the potential to keep TIP as a viable and accurate indicator of detection levels in the security system. These steps also show the promise of cognitive scientists and sponsoring agencies cooperating toward solving important problems. 

Unfortunately, knowing why it is a difficult problem also means everyone knows how to make it difficult for the screeners.  We need to consider the alternatives.