Dubai’s leaders saved face, theirs and ours, by pulling out of the ownership situation that would have had a Dubai-owned company manage six U.S. ports.

The arrangement collpased because of widespread and often intense popular sentiment against the idea of letting an Arab company manage (or “own” or “control”, as were sometimes erroneously stated in the debate over the harbor deal) the ports.

Defenders of the deal accused opponents of Arab-bashing and Islamophobia, and to some extent they may have been correct, but since Americans have grown accustomed to see Arabs and Muslim burn U.S. flags, kill U.S. hostages or threaten U.S. citizens, rarely contradicted by other Arabs or Muslims, it’s hard to be particularly upset about that.

Another aspect, one that I think mainstream media has underrated, is that Americans have also come to understand that President George W. Bush isn’t particularly concerned about securing our nations borders. Yes, Dubya is undeniably admirably tough on terrorism, but that the impact of that reality surely must be weakened by his far less admirably disinterest in securing the borders. This especially since the porous state of our borders is defended with the same arguments as the port deal: It’s good for business.

Sadly, Hugh Hewitt fought harder for Harriet Miers than he does for the embattled Danes:

The cartoons were in bad taste, an unnecessary affront to many of the 1.3 billion Muslims in the world, just as Joel Stein affronted the military, the families and friends of the military, and as Toles did the same to the wounded, and their families, friends and admirers. Of course each of them had the absolute right to publish their screed, and the Dutch (and now Norwegian) governments must reply to demands that these papers be punished with a steely refusal to be dictated to as to their culture of free expression and the protection of the vulgar and the stupid.

But don’t cheer the vulgar and the stupid.

There are hundreds of thousands of American troops deployed in Iraq, Afghanistan and across the globe among Muslim peoples who they are trying to befriend. The jihadists like nothing more than evidence that these troops represent a West intent on a new crusade and a new domination of Muslims. Idiot cartoonists make our troops’ jobs more difficult, and the jihadists’ mission easier.

…

Cartoonists seeking to offend need to be defended against violence, but they don’t deserve praise and certainly not praise for their gift to the jihadists.

The Jihadists have their rallying points, and we have ours. Freedom of speech is a good one. Muslims across the world, including in the comments section on this blog, are openly rejecting that concept. We should embrace it. If doing so puts our troops in harms way, maybe they are in the wrong place?

When I first saw the cartoons last fall I found them cheap, shallow, and mostly pointless. But this struggle has nothing to do with the artistic or satirical qualities of the cartoons. It has to do with not only the legal right to publish them, but also the civic atmosphere that makes such publishing possible. Muslims of all stripes, and far from just “Jihadists,” are now doing their best to poison the civic atmosphere in the West so that nobody will ever again publish cartoons critical of Islam or even critical of some of Islams contemporary followers - the latter of which was obviously the purpose of the cartoons.

It is not a slippery-slope argument to point out that there are a lot more things than portraying the Prophet Muhammed that is super-duper haram in Islam. No matter how deep you bow, Mr. Hewitt, you’ll never bow deep enough to satisfy the Muslims.

So straighten your back and stand up for your right to gab.

Infinite Monkeys:

Hugh’s major error is in deliberately ignoring the intent of the cartoons. Their purpose was neither to offend Muslims nor to denigrate Islam, but to determine whether controversial views can still be aired in Denmark without fear of massive reprisal. It is clear from the reaction of some Muslims — most importantly the heads of various Middle Eastern states — that they can not.

They’re tolerant, too!

The New York Times reports that newspapers in The Netherlands, Italy, France, Germany, Spain, and Switzerland have published the cartoons that originally appeared in Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten last year. The cartoons have set off a firestorm of protest in Muslim countries around the world and it is possible that a series of bomb attacks in Iraq last Sunday were in response to the cartoons.

It is also possible that the agitation against the cartoons helped derail a proposal by British Prime Minister Tony Blair that would have outlawed speech that incite religious hatred, had it not been squashed by Parliament. The Danish cartoons became a clear example of what kind of expressions were threatened by the law, making MP’s balk.

A series of bombings of churches in Kurdish-dominated northern Iraq last Sunday may have been retaliatory attacks in response to the 12 anti-Islamist cartoons published in a newspaper in Denmark last year. Three people were killed and another nine wounded.

Several Muslim leaders in Iraq have denounced the attacks, including Shiite leaders Grand Ayatollah Sistani and Moqtad al-Sadr. Sunni leaders have also weighed in against the murders:

Later on Monday, the Muslim Ulema Council also condemned the bombings and warned that such acts jeopardised national security. “If anyone thinks these attacks can form a response to the recent Danish cartoons, they are very wrong. This is not the way to deal with the newspaper that has offended the prophet Mohammed,” the Council said in a statement.

As predicted here recently, the Senate has confirmed Judge Alito’s appointment to the Supreme Court of the United States.

This is a sweet, sweet moment. Decades of hard work has paid off with the appointment of Justice Roberts and now Justice Alito. The former is particularly satisfying as Alito is a more openly conservative fellow than Roberts, and also because his confirmation vindicates all of us who bitterly opposed that unfortunate nomination last year, the details of which we do not need to recount here.

President George W. Bush deserves a big helping of praise today. He could have drifted even further left after last year’s failed nomination, but instead he gave conservatives a chance to fight for one of their own.

It’s a good day. It’s a very, very good day.

Will update with links throughout the day.

Reactions:
Michelle Malkin

The Gang of 14 Gloating:
Red State
Professor Bainbridge

President Bill Clinton today upbraided the Danes for not punishing a Danish newspaper for publishing a dozen cartoons featuring the Prophet Mohammed:

Former US president Bill Clinton warned of rising anti-Islamic prejudice, comparing it to historic anti-Semitism as he condemned the publishing of cartoons depicting Prophet Mohammed in a Danish newspaper.

“So now what are we going to do? … Replace the anti-Semitic prejudice with anti-Islamic prejudice?” he said at an economic conference in the Qatari capital of Doha.

“In Europe, most of the struggles we’ve had in the past 50 years have been to fight prejudices against Jews, to fight against anti-Semitism,” he said.

Clinton described as “appalling” the 12 cartoons published in a Danish newspaper in September depicting Prophet Mohammed and causing uproar in the Muslim world.

“None of us are totally free of stereotypes about people of different races, different ethnic groups, and different religions … there was this appalling example in northern Europe, in Denmark … these totally outrageous cartoons against Islam,” he said.

It is disheartening, to say the least, that Clinton would side with Muslims against a European democracy for the latter allowing the same freedom of speech that is afforded Americans.

I don’t know what ad is running now with the article I linked to above, but here’s what it looked like when I read it earlier today. That little ad might remind Clinton why a lot of people tend to discuss Islam in the context of terrorism. It is quite interesting that Saudi Arabia has demanded an apology from Denmark, but it has never apologized for the 19 Arab-Muslim terrorsists - most of them Saudis - who murdered 3,000 American on September 11, 2001.

Great pictures from 2005 snapped U.S. Army photographers.

Roger Coleman was excuted in 1992, convicted of having raped and murdered a woman in Virginia in 1981. Until his death, Coleman insisted he was innocent and he attracted a group of supporters that tried to prove him right. Theirs efforts were dealt a blow this week when a DNA test indeed tied Coleman to the crime.

Coleman’s case had become a focal point in the debate over capital punishment, with opponents insisting that DNA tests would prove that an innocent man was put to death and proponents saying that justice was served. Coleman had maintained his innocence in a series of television and newspaper interviews that generated attention around the world, and his backers tried for years to get the courts or politicians to order the tests. Warner, in his last weeks in office, agreed to allow the analysis and became the nation’s first governor to allow post-execution testing.

Legal scholars said the test results denied death penalty opponents a long-sought opportunity to put a human face on one of their most compelling arguments: that the U.S. justice system makes mistakes that result in the executions of innocent men.

“The opportunity to bring new people into the abolitionist movement has been lost,” said Phyllis Goldfarb, a professor at Boston College’s law school.

Judge Alito is clearly qualified as Supreme Court Justice and the Democratic senators are seemingly endlessly running their mouths just to impress their left-wing supporters, in particular the abortion-on-demand lobby. Fortunately, we should have an Alito safe majority in the Senate, and if the Democrats try to filibuster Alito, it would be prudent for the Republican faction of the Gang of 14 to ditch their judicial true and support the nuclear/constitutional option. However, I don’t forsee any need for that. Alito will be confirmed by a comfortable margin.