Peace be upon him.

I’m sorry but I completely disagree with Ms Nomani. Muhammad, peace and blessings be upon him, and his beloved wife A’isha, our Mother, should not feature in (as Ms Spellberg put it) soft core pornography fiction.

It bloody well IS offensive, and I’m a pretty open-minded type of a gal.

You don’t need to be an Uncle Tom to advocate for freedoms for Muslims. What *is* it with these Professional Muslims (TM)?

Excellent post by Irfan Yusuf on the hypocritical double-standards of politicians and shock-jocks (and frankly, ordinary journos). Yusuf convincingly argues that pollies only prance around condemning misogynistic attitudes about violence towards victims of sexual assault/abuse when those attitudes come from the ‘wrong’ religion. His proof:

* when Hilali (a Muslim religious leader) compared women to uncovered cat-meat alluding to their eligibility for rape, said pollies and media pundits loudly condemned him (rightly so) and called for Australian Muslims to be held accountable for those comments.

* when Fisher (a Catholic religious leader) described the parents of two girls raped by a Catholic priest as crankily dwelling on old wounds…. silence and tumbleweeds from those same pollies and media pundits.

I’m no fan of Christopher Hitchens, but I’ll give the man - he put his money where his mouth is. He underwent a torture technique called “waterboarding”
(controlled and reversible drowning) in an effort to add information to
the ‘debate’ over the use of torture by the US military.

As a Muslim, I cannot and will not countenance the use of torture on
any individual, no matter their crimes (real or imagined). It is a sign
of the degredation of morality in the American political system that
there is anyone who would defend the use of torture. Life is sacred,
and we will all have to stand before our Creator to defend our actions
in the end.

Seriously funny. For those outside of Australia, George Negus runs a (usually) serious world current affairs program called Dateline. Uncle Sam is a character from Salam Cafe, who has been running a campaign to build TEN Islamic schools in Camden (the town that in real life, recently voted to reject an Islamic school after an anti-Islam campaign backed by Fred Nile’s “No More Muslims” Christian Democrats.)

Howard lies… again *groan*.