No Vacation From the Crazies

Oreos are still legal. That's the good news. The bad news is that those fat kids in Brooklyn are still suing McDonald's.

Well, actually, the real bad news is that I'm writing this at the beach in Jersey and the top story on our car radio when we pulled in last night was that al-Qaeda was planning to hit American beaches somewhere between New York and D.C. within the next 48 hours.

And so here we sit without a single surface-to-air missile in the house, not even a good gun, like sitting Memorial Day ducks – and to top things off, a friend from Pittsburgh called about an hour ago to tell me he'd heard about the Islamic beach chatter and that I should be careful because I might be a target because of the things I'd written recently.

Well, no, they're nuts but not that nuts. Salman Rushdie is still kicking. Anyway, his call reminded me of something I meant to say about Muslims in France until I got sidetracked by Rick Santorum and the idea that vegetarians are okay as long as they don't eat any vegetables.

Guy Milliere, a French journalist, describes how anti-Western Islamic totalitarians are destroying Paris:

"The only things that are growing in France right now are crime and Islamism. Some readers have been amazed by the fact that teenaged girls and young women in many city districts have to wear the Islamic veil if they do not want to be harassed, but it gets worse. A few weeks ago, a young Arab burnt a teenaged girl alive in the suburbs of Paris. He was convicted of murder, but he became a hero and an example for other young Arabs living in the same kind of areas. Two month ago, 10 Arab men who raped another teenaged girl in another district were convicted and condemned to spend five years in jail. Yes, just five years. The Arab families left the court of justice shouting to the journalists it was unfair and they would look out for revenge. Eight days later, the court was burnt down during the night. The teenaged girl and her family have had to leave Paris, and hide in another part of the country."

For that kind of reporting, Milliere has had his life threatened.

"I have written columns in the French press concerning what's happening," he explains. "The response has been death threats, with color pictures of slit throats, anti-Semitic insults. There were Muslims in France 30 years ago, but they were not like the Muslims of today. They were moderate, they did not feel they could wield decisive political power in France, they did not think they were at war against Western civilization. Now it's clear that they think they are at war. Very few people are in jail in France (France does not have enough jails), but more than 60 per cent of the convicts are Muslims, and Islamist imams visit them on a weekly basis."

Michael Radu, co-chair of the Center on Terrorism and Counterterrorism at the Foreign Policy Research Institute in Philadelphia, points to how radical Muslims in Europe are using Western tolerance to inflict Islamic intolerance:

"Europe is being used as the perfect petri dish for Islamic radicalism. Simply put, the worst of the political culture of Islam is moving to Paris, London, and Berlin. In the name of Western tolerance for their faith, they want to impose non-Western, especially Islamic, intolerance upon their Western hosts. Call it the revenge of multiculturalism."

In short,

In an interview with the literary magazine Lire, Houellebecq described a "revelation" he had in the desert: "I said to myself that the idea of believing in only one God was cretinous," and added that "the stupidest religion of all is Islam."

He said also that Islam was "a dangerous religion from the start," and that the Koran, as a literary work, wasn't so hot. "When you read the Koran, you give up," he said. "The Bible at least is beautifully written because the Jews have a heck of a literary talent."

Claiming "humiliation," four Muslim organizations sued Houellebecq – the largest mosques in Paris and Lyon, the National Federation of French Muslims and the World Islamic League. The Paris-based Human Rights League joined the lawsuit, claiming that Houellebecg's comments amounted to "Islamophobia."

In court, Houellebecq said he "never displayed the least contempt for Muslims," but added, "I have as much contempt as ever for Islam." The rector at the Mosque of Paris argued that Muslim feelings trump any rights to free speech: "Freedom of expression stops at the point at which the Muslim community feels insulted."

In the end, the court decided that offending Muslims wasn't a crime, not yet, and Houellebecq was acquitted. If found guilty, he'd have faced a 52,000-euro fine and up to 18 months in prison.

And tomorrow? Tomorrow we should go fishing (the blues are biting), and we'll keep an eye out for the wackos.