I just can't face another chocolate.

Anyone who knows me will not believe this, but it's true. The fact is I have been stuffing myself with chocolates and all manner of rich food for the past seven days, and, incredible as it seems, I don't want another one. I have eaten my fill, and while Phil hasn't had enough, I have.

Overindulgence does strange things to the brain. As well as the "no more chocolate" blasphemy, I have been thinking some very un-Jacksonian thoughts, viz:

1. Teetotalism is a valid option.
2. Vegetarians are not cranks at all.
3. I respect vegans. They are not whey-faced cadaverous lunatics.
4. The EU is a wonderful institution, staffed by people who have our best interests at heart.
5. "May have" or "might have"? What does it matter?
6. Esperanto is an excellent idea. English, you see, is like London: old, sprawling, poorly designed and saddled by history with strange street names like "Pudding Lane". Esperanto is better. It is like Milton Keynes: the cows are concrete and don't smell; the streets are designed as an efficient grid system and the houses all look alike.
7. Hugh was quite right about "reference". I was utterly wrong about this and about so many other things, and it was very presumptuous of me to debate him.
8. Apostrophe's in the wrong place's? Who cares?
9. I don't mind America being Top Nation instead of us. It means we can adopt all those wonderful words like "transportation", "obligated", "favor", and "train station" and we can write y'all and debate y'all about them.
10. Don't you just love the French? I wish Napoleon had won.

And don't imagine that these un-Jacksonian notions are merely passing fancies. I will hold to them for the rest of the year.

Stephen Coughlin, a specialist on Islamic law on the Joint Staff, met recently with Hasham Islam, Deputy Defense Secretary Gordon R. England's close aide. The officials said Mr. Islam, a Muslim who is leading efforts for the Defense Department's outreach to Muslim groups, sought to convince Mr. Coughlin to take a softer line on Islam and Islamic law elements that promote extremism.

There is also evidence that a whispering campaign is under way to try and discredit Mr. Coughlin as a "Christian extremist with a pen" and force him out of the building, according to the officials.

Mr. Coughlin came under fire from pro-Muslim officials after a memorandum he wrote identified several groups that are being courted by Mr. Islam's community outreach program as front organizations for the pro-extremist Muslim Brotherhood. --from this news item

Stephen Coughlin is one of the keenest analysts of Islam working for the American government, possibly the very best inside the Pentagon. If he is pushed out, if he is subject to any campaign by Muslims and their non-Muslim collaborators and puppets, that will be, or should be, a matter for alarm as great as any raised about the infiltration by Soviet agents during the Cold War. Because such people are not working for an identifiable state does not mean that they are not working for a cause -- and the cause in this case is to neutralize all those who understand the meaning, and menace, of Jihad, and its varied instruments. And one of those instruments is the fog machine designed to confuse and distract Infidels, and to keep them from seeing clearly the nature of an ideology, its imperviousness to change, and the ways in which, even under the surface of the so-called "moderates" -- the claims on the loyalty of adherents of that Total Belief-System remain. Everyone, anyone, who is out to get Coughlin is working against the interests of the legal and political institutions of this country, and should be investigated by Congress (one is no longer sure about the C.I.A. and the F.B.I. and the levels of incomprehension there). This is more than a scandal. This terrifies.

Thanks to David Thompson for drawing my attention to this piece by Mona Charen on the nature of the enemy:

The next to last assassination attempt on Benazir Bhutto came... when a man in the crowd got the former prime minister’s attention. He was holding a one-year-old baby - Bhutto said later she thought it was a girl - and tried to hand the child across the sea of bodies. Bhutto said, “He kept trying to hand it to people to hand to me. I’m a mother. I love babies. But the [street lights] had already gone out and I was worried about the baby getting dropped or hurt.” So she turned away and ducked into her armoured vehicle. Just then, the baby’s body, rigged with explosives, detonated.

That is the nature of the enemy.

It was only a girl anyway. And it's nothing new. 

From the website of Mega Mosque No Thanks.
At a meeting of Newham Council on 3 December 2007 it was officially confirmed that Tablighi Jamaat (TJ) does not have any current planning permission for the 18 acre West Ham site of their proposed mega-mosque.
Statement from Newham Concern below.
At a meeting of Newham Council on 3 December 2007 it was officially confirmed that Tablighi Jamaat (TJ) does not have any current planning permission for the 18 acre West Ham site of their proposed mega-mosque.
Although TJ’s small temporary mosque on the site is in regular - almost daily - use, Newham’s Mayor Sir Robin Wales verified at the Council meeting that the previous planning permission for the site had run out. This happened over a year ago on 31 October 2006; TJ has been using the site illegally ever since.
The seriousness of the situation is compounded by a March 2007 report on the site by contamination experts Waterman Environmental. The site was formerly a chemical works and the report states (pages 8 and 9) that the ground is suffering considerable contamination from toxic metals (such as mercury, arsenic and lead), acidity, sulphur compounds, mineral oil, poly aromatic hydrocarbons, asbestos fibres and significant levels of organic contaminants.
Waterman (page 21) classifies the environmental risk from the contamination as “medium-high” and the risk to current site users as “potentially significant”.
Although some remedial action has been taken recently by TJ to mitigate the risk, the disturbing situation is that they have a seriously contaminated site that is in regular use by the public without the necessary statutory authorisation or planning permission. Newham Council has a duty of care towards the public and should take urgent enforcement action to rectify the situation, especially as TJ continue to use the site illegally and irresponsibly.

Aroosa rejected the fatwa. According to the Times of India, she said, 'I think Islam does not prohibit friendship and brotherhood. Religious interpretation of Islam is so wrong. Islam is a very liberal religion.'"
-- from this article, quoting the lady accused of un-Islamic conduct by seeing a man without a male guardian being present

What does it mean to say that the "[r]eligions interpretation of Islam is so wrong"? Is there another kind of interpretation of Islam, a "non-religious" or "extra-religious" one? And having asked this, the accused lady goes on to assert, without the slightest evidence, that "Islam is a very liberal religion" which appears to contradict the previous sentence. As with so many people born into Islam, and who secretly call into question much of Islam, she still cannot make the break, and she cannot even describe the situation accurately. Islam is not "a very liberal religion." It is, as Charles-Emmanuel Bousquet said, "doubly totalitarian" as a Complete Regulation of Life, and as a geopolitical system that insists Muslims must divide the world between Believer and Infidel, and furthermore must be in a state of constant hostility or war, directed at the Infidels, even if that war does not always take the form of open warfare.

Even she, a victim of Islam, says things about Islam that are false, and that either she knows to be false, or cannot allow herself to recognize as false.

It's a problem. Everywhere.

MSNBC: Geert Wilders, who compares the Koran to Mein Kampf, has been named the Netherlands' politician of the year in a poll run by public broadcaster NOS.

Mr Wilders' pithy and shocking soundbites - he warned of a "tsunami of Islamisation" - have dominated headlines, while his parliamentary outbursts have brought an adversarial style of politics to the muted consensus to which the Dutch are attuned.

His latest project, a short film about the Koran that will be released next month, has stirred anger even before much is known about it. Mr Wilders, who has had round-the-clock protection for three years due to the death threats against him, says the film will illustrate how the Koran inspires people "to do the worst things".

He has called for the Koran to be banned. "With this film I'm trying to show not only in words but also images exactly what I mean," he says.

Mindful of the backlash provoked by the publication in Danish newspapers in 2005 of cartoons depicting the Prophet Muhammad, government ministers have expressed concern but said there is not much they can do. Some public figures outside parliament have called for a movement against Mr Wilders.

The murders in 2002 of Pim Fortuyn, a pioneer of Dutch anti-immigration and anti-Islam politics, and in 2005 of Theo van Gogh, the director of a film critical of Islam, have pushed immigration and the failure to integrate large Muslim communities to the top of the Dutch political agenda.

Mr Wilders' proposed solutions are deeply radical: stop all Muslim immigration, ban the building of mosques and ask the 1m Muslims among the Dutch population of 16m to "go to their own countries" or give up their religion...

According to Stephen Pollard, last year eighty-four people spent Christmas Day filing their tax return online. Bah, humbug? Or were they following an earlier example?

1And it came to pass in those days, that there went out a decree from Caesar Augustus that all the world should be taxed.

2(And this taxing was first made when Cyrenius was governor of Syria.)

3And all went to be taxed, every one into his own city.

4And Joseph also went up from Galilee, out of the city of Nazareth, into Judaea, unto the city of David, which is called Bethlehem; (because he was of the house and lineage of David:)

5To be taxed with Mary his espoused wife, being great with child.

6And so it was, that, while they were there, the days were accomplished that she should be delivered.

Luke 2

Times have changed. In those days women were delivered. Later it was babies. Now it's solutions.

(Mary and Joseph weren't married when she got pregnant. But it was a stable relationship.)

Brendan O'Neill (an avowed atheist) writes at Spiked (hat tip: Arts & Letters):

They say we get the leaders we deserve. We also get the bishops we deserve. And in an age of petty piety, where relativistic non-judgementalism coexists with new codes of personal morality, giving rise to a Mary Poppins State more than a Nanny State, it’s fitting that the Archbishop of Canterbury is a trendy schoolteacher type who dispenses hectoring ethical advice with a smarmy grin rather than with fire-and-brimstone relish.

In his Christmas sermon, delivered at Canterbury Cathedral, Dr Williams finally completed his journey from old-world Christianity to trendy New Ageism. His sermon was indistinguishable from those delivered (not just at Christmas but for life) by the heads of Greenpeace or Friends of the Earth. Williams did not speak about Christian morality; in fact, he didn’t utter the m-word at all. He said little about men’s responsibility to love one another and God, the two Commandments Jesus Christ said we should live by. Instead he talked about our role as janitors on planet Earth, who must stop plundering the ‘warehouse of natural resources’ and ensure that we clean up after ourselves.

Williams has clearly been reading the Good Books – not the Bible, but those Carbon Calculator tomes that are clogging up bookshop shelves around the country, and which instruct people on how to live so meekly that they leave no imprint whatsoever on the planet or human history. He said that Earth does not exist only for ‘humanity’s sake’; it also exists ‘in its own independence and beauty… not as a warehouse of resources to serve humanity’s selfishness’.

Williams warned that our greed – presumably our insatiable lust for warm homes, cars, cookers and other outrageous luxuries – is killing the planet. He welcomed the fact that mankind is ‘growing in awareness of how fragile [the planet] is, how fragile is the balance of species and environments in the world and how easily our greed distorts it’. In 2008, we must take more seriously our ‘guardianship’ of the Earth, he declared (1).

Williams isn’t the only leading Christian who has sold his soul to Gaia and traded in Christian morality for the pieties of environmentalism. The Reverend John Owen, leader of the Presbyterian Church of Wales, said in his Christmas sermon that everyone should remember his or her ‘duty to the planet’. He urged people to recycle leftover food, and ‘redouble [your] efforts to take action and campaign against climate change’ in the coming year (2). Meanwhile, the Vatican is taking steps to become the world’s first carbon-neutral sovereign state by planting trees in a Hungarian national park to offset the CO2 emissions of the Holy See. Cardinal Paul Poupard, head of the Pontifical Council for Culture, says that in 2008 there should be the ‘dawn of a new culture, of new attitudes and a new mode of living that makes man aware of his place as caretaker of the earth’ (3).

The reduction of man to an eco-janitor, a being who creates waste and thus must clear it up, is more than a cynical attempt by isolated Christian leaders to connect with the public. Yes, Williams, Owen, the Holy See and Co. no doubt hope and believe (mistakenly, I’m sure) that adopting trendy Greenspeak will entice people to return to the church. But the move from focusing on love for God and one’s neighbour to focusing on ‘respect for the planet’ represents more than a rebranding exercise: it signals a complete abandonment by the Christian churches of the Judaeo-Christian tradition. And in this sense, it is not only God that is being downgraded by the new nature-worshipping priests; so is humanity itself. And that’s enough to make even a committed atheist like me worry about the current direction of the Christian churches...

John F. Burns has a good obituary on Benazir Bhutto in New Duranty:

...When asked to explain the courage — or stubbornness, as some of her critics saw it — that she displayed at critical junctures in her political career, Ms. Bhutto often referred to the example she said had been set by her father, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto. He was a charismatic and often demagogic politician who was president and prime minister from 1971 to 1977, before being hanged in April 1979 on charges of having ordered the murder of a minor political opponent.

Mr. Bhutto was the founder in 1967 of the Pakistan Peoples Party, the political vehicle that he, and later his daughter, rode to power. Like his daughter, Mr. Bhutto battled for years with Pakistan’s powerful generals. He was ousted from office, and ultimately executed, on the orders of Gen. Mohammad Zia ul-Haq, one of the long succession of military rulers who have dominated Pakistan for nearly 40 of the 60 years since it emerged as an independent state from the partition of British India.

Under house arrest at the time, Ms. Bhutto was allowed to visit her father before his execution at Rawalpindi’s central prison, only a short distance from the site of the rally where she was killed nearly three decades later. In a BBC interview in the 1990s, she said seeing her father preparing to die steeled her for her own political career, which some biographers have suggested was driven, in part, by a determination to avenge him by outmaneuvering the generals.

A History of Violence

Violence ran like a thread through her family life, to an extent that caused her admirers to compare the Bhuttos, in the contribution they made to Pakistan’s political life, and in the price they paid for it, to the Kennedys — and her enemies, pointing to the Bhuttos’ bitter family feuds, to compare them to the Borgias. The younger of Ms. Bhutto’s two brothers, Shahnawaz, died mysteriously of poisoning in 1995, in an apartment owned by the Bhuttos in Cannes, France. French investigators said they suspected that a family feud over a multimillion-dollar inheritance from Zulfikar Bhutto was involved, but no charges were filed.

Ms. Bhutto’s other brother, Murtaza, who along with Shahnawaz founded a terrorist group that sought to topple General Zia, spent years in exile in Syria beginning in the 1980s. When Murtaza finally returned to Pakistan, in 1994, he quickly fell into a bitter dispute with Ms. Bhutto over the family’s political legacy — and, he told a reporter at the time, over the money he said his father had placed in a Swiss bank when he was prime minister. In 1996, Murtaza was gunned down outside his home in Karachi, and his widow, Ghinva, blamed Asif Ali Zardari, Ms. Bhutto’s husband. Ms. Bhutto’s Iranian-born mother, Nusrat, sided in the dispute with Murtaza, and was dismissed by Ms. Bhutto as the Peoples Party chairman. “I had no idea I had nourished a viper in my breast,” she said of her daughter at the time.

Born on June 21, 1953, Ms. Bhutto, the first child in her family, reveled in telling friends that she was her father’s favorite. One of her most cherished anecdotes about her childhood involved her father’s encouraging her to set aside traditional Muslim views of a woman’s role and to have ambitions beyond the home, a message she said he conveyed with stories about Joan of Arc and Indira Gandhi.

After attending a private Christian-run school in Karachi, where the family maintained a luxurious mansion, Ms. Bhutto studied at Radcliffe College, earning a Harvard B.A. in 1973, and later at Oxford, where she gained a second B.A. in 1976. At Oxford, she was the first woman to become president of the Oxford Union, the prestigious debating society that nurtured several British prime ministers.

In her memoir, she described what life as a young woman at Harvard felt like. “I was amongst a sea of women who felt as unimpeded by their gender as I did,” she wrote. At Oxford, she adopted a Westernized way of life, spending winters at the Swiss ski resort of Gstaad. She said later that her passions at the time included reading royal biographies and “slushy” romances, and browsing at the London department store Harrods — a habit she maintained throughout the rest of her life.

From Oxford, Ms. Bhutto was thrust abruptly into the heart of Pakistani politics by General Zia’s arrest of her father in 1977, and by his execution 18 months later. Ms. Bhutto wrote in her memoir of her last meeting with her father, through a metal grille at the Rawalpindi Prison. “But I did not cry. Daddy told me not to,” she recalled.

From that moment on, Ms. Bhutto said in later years, she resolved to oust General Zia from power. But in August 1988, the general and the American ambassador, Arnold L. Raphel, were killed when their military plane exploded and crashed in southern Pakistan. Three months later, when she was 35, Ms. Bhutto won a general election and formed her first government, only to be ousted by Pakistan’s president in 1990, having served less than half her term. In 1993, she won a second election, but was again dismissed in 1996...

Well this is the Polish chicken. Actually its a French breed, but that's continentals for you. Obtuse and perverse.
I took its photo yesterday while visiting relatives and practising with my Christmas present.

Islamabad, Pakistan (AHN) - Following the assassination of former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, opposition groups have warned of a civil war in Pakistan. Riaz Malik, of the opposition Pakistan Movement for Justice party (Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf), warned, "The impact will be that Pakistan is in more turmoil - it will be the start of civil war in Pakistan." --from this news article

Those nuclear weapons -- what about those nuclear weapons? It was the incredible negligence of Western intelligence agencies and Western governments made possible: A. Q. Khan stole plans from laboratories in the West; the necessary technology came from that West; the money for that nuclear weapons program came from the West -- chiefly the United States, giving aid to its "staunch ally" Pakistan to use to support the "brave Afghani mujahideen" etc. It is the responsibility of Western governments to get those weapons back, or make sure they are handed over "for safekeeping" during this "temporary" (i.e., permanent) "time of troubles" in Pakistan. Musharraf must be threatened with a total collapse of Pakistan, of its economy: no aid, no favorable treatment for its textiles, no travel to and from the West, no children of the zamindars who own, and the generals who run, Pakistan to be allowed to study, work, or remain in the West. A declaration of war, with a non-negotiable demand: give up those weapons.

As for the rest of Pakistan, it can hold together, it can disintegrate, it can do this or do that. Baluchistan may declare itself independent, and the Punjabis may crush them. Or not. The Sunnis may kill Shi'a, or not.  Who cares, as long as Pakistan  ceases to have control over, and has no chance to re-acquire or transmit to others, such weapons as it was foolishly allowed to acquire. That's all that Infidels should worry about  -- what actual damage they can inflict on us, by what means. 

Because, you see, that's the country. That's Pakistan.

Flemming Rose writes at Northern Light (thanks to Alan):

A study commissioned by Germany’s Interior Ministry warns that 180.000 of the country’s 3 million Muslims are willing to commit violence in the name of Islam, which amounts to 6 percent of the Muslim population of Germany. The number is alarmingly high because a similar study a year ago showed that just 32.000, slightly more than 1 percent, were radical islamists representing a potential security threat.

Interior Minister Wolfgang Schäuble says in a foreword that the study leads to the ”worrying conclusion that a serious potential for Islamist radicalization has developed in Germany”.

Christine Haderthauer, secretary general of the conservative the Christian Social Union, told Der Spiegel that her party ”has always warned against the dangers of parallel societies. Our fears have been confirmed in a shocking manner.”

The study was conducted by two researchers from the Institute of Criminology at the University of Hamburg. The authors interviewed 1,750 Muslims of whom around 40 percent were German citizens. Almost 40 percent of the respondents think that ”physical violence is justified as a reaction against the threat of the West’s threat to Islam”. The study doesn’t clarify what is meant by ”threat” and for what exactly the West should be hold accountable.

The survey found that more than half of the respondents felt themselves excluded from German society, and felt they were being treated as foreigners. the study has caused a big debate in Germany about the need for better integration...

[T]he publication of the Mohammed cartoons in Denmark was an act of inclusion and integration of Muslims into the Danish tradition of religious satire, though a majority of Muslims saw it differently. The cartoons send an important message to Muslims saying: We don’t expect more or less of you, we expect exactly the same of you as of everybody else, and that’s a full recogniction of your presence in society as equal citizens.

Stuart Jeffries writes about the unintentionally hilarious spat between Ted Honderich and Colin McGinn (hat tip: Arts & Letters):

It is probably the most negative book review ever written. Or if there is a worse one, do let me know. "This book runs the full gamut from the mediocre to the ludicrous to the merely bad," begins Colin McGinn's review of On Consciousness by Ted Honderich. "It is painful to read, poorly thought out, and uninformed. It is also radically inconsistent."

The ending isn't much better: "Is there anything of merit in On Consciousness? Honderich does occasionally show glimmers of understanding that the problem of consciousness is difficult and that most of our ideas about it fall short of the mark. His instincts, at least, are not always wrong. It is a pity that his own efforts here are so shoddy, inept, and disastrous (to use a term he is fond of applying to the views of others)."...

Don't you regret writing the review that way, I ask McGinn? "I know Ted and know I don't think much of him as a philosopher. But if you ask did that affect the way I wrote the review, absolutely not. If you allow personal hostilities to distort what you write, you're going to get caught out.

"It would have been different if it had been a junior person. I wouldn't do it to a junior. But Ted deserved it. It had to be done."

Honderich replies: "For McGinn to say that is for him to be a philosopher on the moon. Nobody on Earth believes that his review is not motivated by animus. To suggest the tone wasn't dictated by any history of hostility between us is crazy."

Intellectually, they hold very different views on one of the hottest, and most intractable of philosophical problems, consciousness. Honderich calls himself a radical externalist on consciousness, meaning, he writes in his book, that "my perceptual consciousness now consists in the existence of a world".

McGinn thinks Honderich's brand of radical externalism is bogus. "Ted's saying that one's perceptual content just is that thing, a table for example. But if you close your eyes, does the table stop existing? On Ted's account it seems to, which is just wild."

McGinn, by contrast, is the world's leading proponent of the so-called new mysterian position (named after the rock band Quark and the Mysterians) whereby some philosophical problems, consciousness among them, are insoluble. In this, he claims other leading thinkers - Noam Chomsky and Thomas Nagel among them - are new mysterians, too. Chomsky, for instance, maintains that just as a mouse will never be able to speak like a human (because of its biology), so certain problems may be beyond human understanding.

Honderich heaps derision on this new mysterian position, describing it as a "form of intellectual wimpishness". "And in any case, how dare McGinn rubbish my position. Twelve leading philosophers contributed to a book about my theory [in a special issue of the Journal of Consciousness Studies last August] and not one of them was as abusive as he was."

Honderich believes there is more than intellectual difference behind his and McGinn's row. "At UCL we had a jokey locker-room relationship," recalls Honderich. "But then I made a misstep. I suggested to him that his new girlfriend was not as plain as the old one, and I could see the blood drain out of his face. That was possibly the start of our frostiness." Forget, perhaps, abstruse philosophical disputes in understanding the men's mutual bile. Rather, cherchez la femme...

"If the IFA [Israeli Football Association] feels that 'Mohammed is dead' is a racist chant than we think that they should also take action against the Sakhnin fans shouting 'Allah Akbar'. We hope the IFA's Supreme Court will overturn this decision." --from this news article

Any phrase about Muhammad, or any other significant figure important to anyone, is not a "racist" phrase. It may be true or false, clever or silly, in good or in doubtful taste. But whatever it is, it is not "racist." Distinctions matter. Carelessness with words should not be tolerated.

Aspirants to the American presidency should hope to score so highly in the United States. In Pakistan, though, the al-Qaeda emir easily beat out that country’s current president, Pervez Musharraf, who polled at 38 percent.

President George Bush, the face of a campaign to bring democracy — or, at least, some form of sharia-lite that might pass for democracy — to the Islamic world, registered nine percent. Nine!

If you want to know what to make of former prime minister Benazir Bhutto’s murder today in Pakistan, ponder that.

There is the Pakistan of our fantasy. The burgeoning democracy in whose vanguard are judges and lawyers and human rights activists using the “rule of law” as a cudgel to bring down a military junta. In the fantasy, Bhutto, an attractive, American-educated socialist whose prominent family made common cause with Soviets and whose tenures were rife with corruption, was somehow the second coming of James Madison.

Then there is the real Pakistan: an enemy of the United States and the West.

The real Pakistan is a breeding ground of Islamic holy war where, for about half the population, the only thing more intolerable than Western democracy is the prospect of a faux democracy led by a woman — indeed, a product of feudal Pakistani privilege and secular Western breeding whose father, President Zulfiquar Ali Bhutto, had been branded as an enemy of Islam by influential Muslim clerics in the early 1970s.

The real Pakistan is a place where the intelligence services are salted with Islamic fundamentalists: jihadist sympathizers who, during the 1980s, steered hundreds of millions in U.S. aid for the anti-Soviet mujahideen to the most anti-Western Afghan fighters — warlords like Gilbuddin Hekmatyar whose Arab allies included bin Laden and Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman, the stalwarts of today’s global jihad against America.

The real Pakistan is a place where the military, ineffective and half-hearted though it is in combating Islamic terror, is the thin line between today’s boiling pot and what tomorrow is more likely to be a jihadist nuclear power than a Western-style democracy.

In that real Pakistan, Benazir Bhutto’s murder is not shocking. There, it was a matter of when, not if.

It is the new way of warfare to proclaim that our quarrel is never with the heroic, struggling people of fill-in-the-blank country. No, we, of course, fight only the regime that oppresses them and frustrates their unquestionable desire for freedom and equality.

Pakistan just won’t cooperate with this noble narrative.

Whether we get round to admitting it or not, in Pakistan, our quarrel is with the people. Their struggle, literally, is jihad. For them, freedom would mean institutionalizing the tyranny of Islamic fundamentalism. They are the same people who, only a few weeks ago, tried to kill Benazir Bhutto on what was to be her triumphant return to prominence — the symbol, however dubious, of democracy’s promise. They are the same people who managed to kill her today. Today, no surfeit of Western media depicting angry lawyers railing about Musharraf — as if he were the problem — can camouflage that fact.

The rest is here.

Brian of London writes:

This week's show features an extended piece by Tom Paine on his thoughts of London and a three way chat between Meryl, Damian and Brian of London.

We've not really got Blog News this week so not much to link to. I do mention a new Egyption Coptic site, www.sonsofapesandpigs. org and we have a song at the end of a show that has a rather good video. Go and look at it: The Nose on your Face.

Tom used some spoof tube announcements from Emma Clarke. Go to her site to hear more and check out her hilarious spoof sat nav voice overs.

We will try our very best to be more regular next year. Honest.

You can find Meryl's blog here and Damian Penny posts here.

In the meantime thank you all for listening and for commenting and supporting us all year. We do it all for you and believe me, this is not a simple undertaking. I'm not complaining though, one comment saying we've opened someone's eyes is enough to cheer us all up for a week.

In the Netherlands Hizb ut Tahrir is circulating the following pamphlet in opposition to Geert Wilders and his upcoming movie on the Koran.

I CALL FOR A HALT! AGAINST THE SLANDERING OF ISLAM

During the past years, Holland has been dominated by a climate of slander and common insult towards Islam and Muslims. It is also evident that certain politicians and influential people are behind the current hostility. In answer to this we, the shabab of Hizb ut Tahrir in Holland, have initiated the campaign "Stop the slandering of Islam".

With the help of this campaign, which entails a substantial signature petition, we want to give the Muslims a voice. This will enable them to react in a respectful and proper manner to the constant slandering of high values within Islam and the feelings of insult and anxiety that are the result of this.

At the same time, the campaign "Stop the slandering of Islam" also makes clear that the common insult of Islam and Muslims creates an altercation in the Dutch society and hereby seriously disturbs the harmony of the Dutch society.

We can report that the first weekend of this campaign has lead to positive reactions from the community. The initiative has been welcomed and we have received messages of support from both Muslims as non-Muslims.

ABC: Pakistani opposition leader Benazir Bhutto was killed in a gun and bomb attack after a rally in the city of Rawalpindi on Thursday, her party said.

"She has been martyred," said party offical Rehman Malik.

Police at the scene said about 15 people had been killed.

A Reuters witness said he saw about eight bodies on a road as well as a mutilated human head.

An Interior Ministry spokesman said initial reports suggested it was a suicide bombing and more than 10 people had been killed...

Earlier, gunmen opened fire on supporters of another former prime minister, Nawaz Sharif, from an office of the party that supports President Pervez Musharraf, killing four Sharif supporters, police said.

Sharif was several kilometres away from the shooting and was on his way to Rawalpindi after attending a rally.

Sharif, who was overthrown by Musharraf in a 1999 coup and allowed back into the country just last month after seven years in exile, blamed supporters of the pro-Musharraf party for the violence.  

WND: JERUSALEM – Members of the most active West Bank terror organization are set to participate in security forces being deployed to protect President Bush during his visit to the Palestinian territories next month, WND has learned.

Bush is due in the region Jan. 9 as part of a follow-up to last month's U.S.-led Israeli-Palestinian Annapolis summit.

During his trip, the American president is scheduled to hold talks with Israeli leaders in Jerusalem, and meet quickly with Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas in the West Bank city of Ramallah.

According to Israeli security officials coordinating deployments of forces with the PA for Bush's Ramallah visit, members of the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, Fatah's declared military wing, have been called upon by the PA to participate in the protection of Bush's convoy and in securing the parameter during the meeting with Abbas.

The Brigades is listed as a terror organization by the U.S. State Department. The group took credit along with the Islamic Jihad terror organization for every suicide bombing in Israel between 2005 and 2006, and is responsible for thousands of shootings and rocket firings. Statistically, the Al Aqsa Brigades perpetuated more terrorism from the West Bank than Hamas, according to the Israeli Defense Forces...

The Israeli Defense Forces will protect the main West Bank highway Bush's convoy will use to approach Ramallah. Security for Bush will be largely turned over to the Palestinians once he enters Ramallah, although security plans are being heavily coordinated with the U.S.