The public prosecution department on Friday afternoon stated that Geert Wilders is not guilty of discriminating against Muslims. Earlier on Friday it announced he should also be found not guilty of inciting hatred.

Prosecutors Birgit van Roessel and Paul Velleman reached their conclusions after a careful reading of interviews with and articles by the anti-Islam politician and a viewing of his anti-Koran film Fitna.

They said comments about banning the Koran can be discriminatory, but because Wilders wants to pursue a ban on democratic lines, there is no question of incitement to discrimination ‘as laid down in law’.

On the comparison of the Koran with Mein Kampf, the prosecutors said the comparison was ‘crude but that did not make it punishable’.

Dealing earlier on Friday with incitement to hatred, Van Roessel and Velleman said some comments could incite hatred against Muslims if taken out of context, but if the complete text is considered, it can be seen that Wilders is against the growing influence of Islam and not against Muslims per sé. [Source.]

Mr Wilders, may your tribe increase. Perhaps there’s some hope for The Netherlands. But I fear not much hope for India.

That towering intellect, that defender of secularism, that holy man of the jhollawalas — Shahi Imam of the Delhi Jama Masjid, Maulana Syed Ahmed Bukhari — defended his faith, the Religion of Peace ^TM, by getting his supporters to peacefully give a public thrashing to a reporter who had the temerity to ask uncomfortable questions. The public stood and watched.

[The imam] lost his cool when a journalist questioned him regarding the Ayodhya verdict during a press conference, following which he was thrashed by supporters of the cleric.

Mohammed Abdul Waheed Chisti, a reporter with a local Urdu daily, raised a question relating to the ownership of the disputed site before the construction of the Babri mosque in Ayodhya.

Chisti asked the Shahi Imam to spell out his stand on the mention of King Dashrath’s name in land records of 1528 before the Babri mosque was constructed.

Initially, Bukhari skirted the question but when the journalist insisted, he was threatened.

“Get him out of this conference, Bukhari shouted while accusing the journalist of working against the interests of the Muslims,” he said.

Bukhari’s supporters then thrashed the journalist in full public glare.

People like him will ‘not be tolerated by Muslims at any cost,’ the Shahi Imam said before leaving the press conference. [Source. HT Yoganand.]

Nice work, dear imam. A small sample of how it will all be when sharia is imposed all across India. Like they do in Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia is where they have true Freedom of Religion — unlike India where the Religion of Peace has to struggle against the intolerance of the kuffar Hindus.

RIYADH, Saudi Arabia – Saudi police raided a secret Catholic mass in Riyadh last week and arrested a dozen Filipinos and a Catholic priest, charging them with prosyletising, a local daily reported on Wednesday.

The raid took place as some 150 Filipinos were attending the mass in a Riyadh rest house on Friday, the second day of the weekend in Saudi Arabia, Arab News said.
. . .
Saudi Arabia bans the practice of any religion aside from Islam. However, small, low-key prayer services inside expatriate compounds and in Filipino gatherings are tolerated by officials. [Source. HT Ziggy.]

One of the most enduring mysteries to me is the fascination that leftists have for repressive ideologies. Is it because they are control freaks and want to control people? Command and control. That could explain the JNU jhollawala’s love for oppressive ideologies such as Islam and Marxism. The US too has its own JNU jhollawala types. But the US is fortunate to have defenders of freedom who are not shy to tell it like it is.

Here’s Bill Benett, American conservative pundit, politician, and political theorist.

It’s a 11-minute long video, and worth every second of it. You have to watch it if you want to know what is going on and what lies ahead.

The shortlist for YouTube Play. A Biennial of Creative Video has been announced! Selected from more than 23,000 submissions from 91 countries, the 125 shortlisted videos can now be seen on the YouTube Play channel.

The jury will now select their top choices to be revealed and presented at a special YouTube Play celebration event at the Guggenheim Museum on October 21 and on youtube.com/play. The final videos selected by the jury will be on view to the public at the Guggenheim Museum from October 22 through 24, and available to a worldwide audience on the You Tube Play channel.

Here’s one that I especially like — Lucky by All India Radio:

Details:

All India Radio/ Dee Pee Studios

From: DarcyPrendergast | August 02, 2009 | 375,527 views

Lucky by All India Radio, is the viewable blood, sweat and tears of Australian based animation company ‘Dee Pee Studios’.

It involves a painstaking animation technique, whereby the team paints in the air with glow sticks, frame after frame to create entire sequences of animation, usually taking a whole night to shoot.

For more info, please check out:www.deepeestudios.com and www.allindiaradio.com.au

“Blasphemous bras, heretical heels, yoga and me,” a funny opinion piece by Julia Suryakusuma for The Jakarta Post (Dec. 3, 2008) on a not-funny subject:

Yesterday morning I woke up early as usual and got ready for my early morning meditational yoga. It’s something I’ve been doing since 1981, clearing my mind and reinvigorating myself for the day ahead. It’s like getting your cell phone recharged, as simple as that.

But then I remembered reading that the Indonesian Ulema Council (MUI) is thinking of issuing a fatwa declaring yoga haram (forbidden), inspired by the Malaysian National Fatwa Council which has declared yoga haram because it “goes against the teachings of Islam”. Well, Malaysia is our sister country and they’ve done us the honor of imitating so many Indonesian things — batik, songs, language, even food! It’s understandable we should reciprocate.

To distract us from all the doom and gloom, check out Twinkle, twinkle little star (Desi style). This is funny only if you are a desi.; furriners will not get the joke. (Thanks to Prakash Advani for the link.)

But now back to the terror attack on Mumbai. WSJ published a very well written piece on Dec 1st which concisely reports the sequence of events as they were known then.

Pieced together from interviews with dozens of witnesses and officials, this account of the three days of the battle for Mumbai shows just how a small but ruthless group of skilled militants, attacking multiple targets in quick succession, managed to bring one of the world’s largest cities to its knees. The human toll — currently at 174 fatalities, including nine terrorists — was exacerbated by the Indian authorities’ lack of preparedness for such a major attack. But the chain of events also points to just how vulnerable any major city can be to this type of urban warfare.

It is worth reading, and reading soon before it disappears behind a subscription wall.

Here are pictures from The Big Picture on “Mumbai after the smoke has cleared.”

An Interview With E.O. Wilson, the Father of the Encyclopedia of Life. From the NYTimes. (Link thanks to Suhit.)

DR. E.O. WILSON: I’ve been in systematics and the mapping of biological diversity all my life. And a little more than ten years ago, I thought the time had come to undertake a complete mapping of the world’s fauna and flora.

Because remarkably–and this is little known even in the scientific community–we’ve only begun to explore this planet. It was 250 years ago this year that Karl Linneus, the great naturalist in Sweden, began what became the official form of biological classification: two names, like “homo sapiens” for us, and ranging the species in hierarchies according to how much they resemble one another. 250 years ago.

Power Laws, Weblogs, and Inequality. From Clay Shirkey’s writing on the internet. (Link thanks to Idling Inc.)

Inequality occurs in large and unconstrained social systems for the same reasons stop-and-go traffic occurs on busy roads, not because it is anyone’s goal, but because it is a reliable property that emerges from the normal functioning of the system. The relatively egalitarian distribution of readers in the early years had nothing to do with the nature of weblogs or webloggers. There just weren’t enough blogs to have really unequal distributions. Now there are.