Adjournment Speech:  Reprogramming the Debate on Stem Cells

21/12 Gordon Moyes Newsletters | Stem-cell research took a great leap forward last week, when two independent research groups, led by Dr. James Thomson of the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and Dr. Shinya Yamanaka of Kyoto University, Japan, reported success in the genetic reprogramming of human skin cells to create cells indistinguishable from embryonic stem cells. This new technique for deriving human stem cells may change the course of research in the field of regenerative medicine.  Please click on the link for the detailed speech:

Gene Technology (GM Crop Moratorium) Amendment Bill 2007

21/12 Gordon Moyes Newsletters | The Gene Technology (GM Crop Moratorium) Act 2003 provides for the management of genetically modified (GM) food plants in NSW in accordance with market requirements. The Commonwealth deals with human health and environmental issues under the Gene Technology Act 2000 (Cth). The Act is due to expire in March 2008. Without amendments, all GM crops would be allowed to be cultivated in NSW. In July 2007, a panel of experts recommended the NSW Government to remove the moratorium orders on the cultivation of GM canola and make amendments to the Act to provide a clear path to market for GM food products.  Please click on the link for the detailed speech:. 

David Hicks describes Osama bin Laden as 'lovely'

21/12 The Herald Sun | DAVID Hicks's enthusiasm for dying as a Muslim martyr has been revealed in a letter he wrote to his mother while training with al-Qaida in Afghanistan in 2001. "There are many privileges in heaven," Hicks said in the letter. "One reward I get in being martyred - I get to take 10 members of my family to heaven who were destined for hell. But first I also must be martyred. "Islam will rule again but for now we must have patience ... we are asked to sacrifice our lives for Allah's cause - why not?"

Hicks also described himself as a "fit, young Muslim, ready to defend Islam", and in another letter wrote of the "poison" of the West, which he said was trying to crush Islam. "Jihad is still valid to this day," he wrote. Barrister Andrew Berger, for the AFP, yesterday outlined the sophisticated terrorism training Hicks underwent at camps in Afghanistan and Pakistan, where he learned to use shoulder-mounted anti-aircraft missiles capable of bringing down airliners.

Mr Berger said the evidence repudiated any suggestion that Hicks was "all talk, no action" ... Letters in which David Hicks praised Osama bin Laden as "lovely" were also read in court yesterday. .

Open Slather on Family Values

19/12 Saltshakers Newsletter | On 6 December 07 we said, "WHAT NEXT? Homosexuality today – IVF and Surrogacy for single women and homosexuals tomorrow...."

It was not quite "tomorrow" but, sure enough, last Friday, yes, just ten days before Christmas, the Victorian government announced it would legislate to give single women and homosexuals access to IVF and Surrogacy in 2008.

We also now understand that they may well push the 'Relationship Register Bill' through in the first sitting of State Parliament in Feb. 2008.

The 'progressive' undermining of marriage and family took another three giant steps this week.

7/12 Saltshakers Media Release | Although the movie seems to pick up on fantasy themes similar to the Narnia series, this film is based on an anti-Christian book by British atheist Philip Pullman. The Golden Compass is based on the first book of a trilogy called His Dark Materials (the first book was originally called Northern Lights.) Pullman told the Sydney Morning Herald in a 2003 interview “My books are about killing God.”

Rev Nile Commends Government On Children Protection Measures But Urges Further Action

7/11 Christian Democratic Party | Rev Fred Nile, Leader of the Christian Democratic Party, has commended the NSW Government for introducing measures that will help protect children from sexual predators but has urge the Government to consider further measures that have been successfully adopted overseas.

The Golden Compass: A Movie to Avoid

7/11 Saltshakers Media Release | The ACT, Victoria and BOTH major parties (Federal ALP and Liberal) helped same-sex relationship legalisation and registration become a virtual certainty across Australia.

Until now, the ALP has been supporting State based ‘Relationship Registers ... Labor sees this as an easy and safe compromise.

But ACT Chief Minister, Mr Stanhope, is inclined to be less accommodating. He wants a Civil Partnership and does not seem to want to settle for the lesser of 2 evils. Who will win?

Stanhope’s Civil Partnerships Agenda Defies Labor Commitments

7/12 Australian Christian Lobby | The ACT Government’s push for civil partnerships is in defiance of the new Federal Government’s election commitments and the Labor Party’s own National Conference resolution from April this year, the Australian Christian Lobby (ACL) said today.

ACL Managing Director Jim Wallace said Chief Minister Jon Stanhope and his Government seem prepared to break with the will of the people and the policy resolutions of their own party in order to fulfil a radical social engineering agenda. However, he is confident that Federal Labor has more integrity

'Satisfaction' - prostitution promoted on television...

5/12 Saltshakers Media Release | A couple of weeks ago the 12 week series of 'Californication' on Channel 10 ended.Thanks to your action, more than 64 companies told Channel 10 they did NOT want their ads to appear during the program!
See our full list

Now a NEW series about life in a brothel - called Satisfaction - is about to appear on TV.
The first episode will screen tomorrow - 5 December. It will be shown at 8.30 pm. Satisfaction is filmed in a brothel and features nudity, sex scenes between prostitutes and their 'clients' and more. The program promotes and glamourises prostitution and shows the activities in some detail.

Fortunately, the show will only appear on Pay TV (Foxtel) - not on free-to-air TV. Pay TV is governed by a Code of Practice - the classification codes are the same as those applied by the Office of Film and Literature Classification. A R 18+ rating is allowed for films but the HIGHEST rating for drama - like Satisfaction - is an MA15+ rating. We believe that the content shown in Satisfaction puts it OUTSIDE the M15+ category.

The Codes of Practice document is here

The Classification details are on page 6. However one can ONLY complain to the governing authority, the Australian Communications and Media Authority, if you watch the program and complain to the licensee first!

An additional concern is the fact that the series has received funding from Film Victoria, a Victorian state government agency.
Film Victoria has confirmed the grant to the media - but refused to say how much was given. Charities were furious, rightly saying that the government was funding the production of pornographic films but not genuine charity needs.

'Porn' gives charity no Satisfaction - Herald Sun, 25 November 2007.

Trick or Treat, SMH, 3/12/2007.

Background The series Satisfaction will be on a new Foxtel channel called 'Showcase'. Showcase is connected to 'Showtime', the company that produced 'Californication'. The Satisfaction series has been produced by Roger Simpson's company Lonehand Productions. It is distributed by Freemantle Media who also  distribute a wide variety of programs including Game shows such as Family Feud and Sale of the Century, variety shows like Australian Idol, drama including Neighbours, The Bill etc. Classics of Australian television. Satisfaction represents a descent into very questionable material for this company.

Put moderate clerics to work in jails: Islamic Council

2/12 ABC News | The Australian Federation of Islamic Councils says the New South Wales Government should consider appointing moderate Islamic clerics to fight religious extremism in jails. The Government says some prisoners have been isolated from other inmates after using tactics from an Al Qaeda training manual to set up a leadership group and threaten guards.

Federation president Ikebal Patel says the Government should do more to prevent extremist activity in jails.

Abortion pill approved for WA hospital

2/12 Australian Christian Lobby Newsletter | ... it was disappointing that the main women’s hospital in Western Australia has this week been given approval to offer the controversial abortion pill RU486.

According to news reports, the Therapeutic Goods Administration has given the King Edward Memorial Hospital permission to import and prescribe RU486 in cases of severe foetal abnormalities or where a pregnancy is a serious health risk to the woman.

This means the abortion pill is now available from three hospitals in NSW, Victoria and WA, as well as from a Queensland obstetrician. ACL is opposed to the abortion pill and believes that abortion rates are already far too high in Australia. A conscience vote in Federal Parliament last year has led to RU486 being more easily available. Please click here to see how Federal politicians voted on this issue.

WORLD CONGRESS FOR FAMILIES RESTORES FAITH IN THE FAMILY

2/12 Assist News Service | With marriages collapsing around the world at an alarming rate and abortions rocketing, some 3,000 delegates from more than 60 countries recently gathered in Warsaw, Poland, at the World Congress for Families to affirm their faith in the need for traditional families.

Allan Carlson, co-founder of the World Congress for Families said "We met in the spirit of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights which affirms that the family is the natural fundamental unit of society entitled to protection by society and the state. And the architects of that declaration had a very clear idea of what they meant by family, they meant a man and a woman coming together in a life-long bond of marriage for the purposes of the procreation and rearing of children, binding the generations together."

Mr Carlson said that "one of the principle themes of the Congress was finding ways to counteract the sharp decline in fertility in most developed western countries - particularly so in Europe - due to a retreat from traditional marriage that's been going on for several decades now. This trend in turn is related to secularization and the declining influence of religion in public life, and in people's lives."

Source: Assist News Service

ASSISTED REPRODUCTIVE TECHNOLOGY BILL 2007

1/12 Christian Democratic Party Media Release | Reverend the Hon. FRED NILE: I speak on the Assisted Reproductive Technology Bill 2007. The Christian Democratic Party supports the aims and objectives of this very important bill because it will correct some of the original policies in earlier legislation. The bill requires those who take part in assisted reproductive technology to be registered by the Director General of the Department of Health. The bill makes certain requirements in relation to the provision of those services, including a requirement that assisted reproductive technology services be undertaken by and under the supervision of a registered medical practitioner, which we support because it will give medical certainty and professionalism to the treatment. Counselling services are to be made available.

The UN and the right to life

2/12 Australian Christian Lobby Newsletter |... the Catholic Family and Human Rights Institute reports, a surprising debate about the protection of human life was held in the Third Committee of the UN General Assembly late last week. The initial resolution, sponsored by members of the European Union, sought to condemn the death penality. Muslim states responded that since the resolution aimed to respect life, it was appropriate to widen its scope to include the protection of unborn children from abortion. Sadly, but perhaps not surprisingly, these amendments were voted down, though the non-binding resolution calling for a moratorium on the death penalty was passed.

Several states called for a separate right to life resolution to be brought up at next year's General Assembly. Please pray that the UN would reaffirm its original recognition of the fact that the unborn child deserves special protection before, as well as after birth (contained in the Declaration on the Rights of the Child 1959 and re-iterated in the Convention on the Rights of the Child, 1989). In recent years, the UN has moved away from this towards an increasing acceptance of abortion as part of a woman's reproductive rights.  

Scientific breakthrough may put an end to embryonic cloning

2/12 Australian Christian Lobby Newsletter | In a breakthrough in the battle for protecting human life, one of the world’s most prominent advocates of cloning human embryos for stem cell research has abandoned the controversial practice in favour of ethical adult stem cell research.
Professor Ian Wilmut of Edinburgh University is famous for cloning ‘Dolly the sheep’ and is regarded as the ‘father of cloning’. This week he announced he would pursue ethical adult stem cell research following the latest breakthroughs in this field.

Two papers published this week, one by Yamanaka in the journal Cell and one by Thomson in the journal Science, show that the ordinary skin cell of a human can be transformed into the equivalent of an embryonic stem cell without ever creating or destroying an embryo.

Professor Wilmut’s announcement that he would pursue this new method, despite having a licence from the British Government to clone human embryos for the past two years, has sent shock-waves through scientific circles.

ACL this week put out media releases on this development:

We are calling for Australia’s controversial cloning laws to be reviewed in the light of the new scientific developments. We are also urging the State parliaments in Western Australia and South Australia to reject the cloning bills they are currently considering as these bills are clearly premature, given the rapid progress being made in the field of ethical stem cell research. In Western Australia debate on its cloning bill recommenced in the Upper House on Wednesday night (the bill has already passed through the Lower House). In South Australia, a cloning bill has been introduced but has not yet been debated.

If you would like to find out more about theses scientific developments please click here.

If you would like to join ACL’s campaign against State cloning laws please click here.

Inmates studying al-Qaeda manual

3/12 Sydney Morning Herald | ISLAMIC extremists are using an al-Qaeda training manual to give them instructions for taking over the state's toughest jails, prison authorities have alleged. Up to 40 inmates had established an internal organisational structure to maintain morale, resist interrogation and recruit members to Islam.

The prisoners had set up leadership groups in several maximum-security jails, with their activities governed by the code outlined in the al-Qaeda manual for incarcerated followers. A number of Corrective Services staff have been targeted, some with violent threats by inmate groups. Other staff have been singled out for conversion to Islam.

NSW Attorney-General John Hatzistergos said an undisclosed number of inmates had been transferred to other jails in an attempt to disrupt the leadership groups. Mr Hatzistergos said he was extremely concerned about the broader attempts to infiltrate the jail system, which were uncovered after sweeping changes to prison regulations allowed 24-hour monitoring of Muslim inmates.
The latest crackdown followed the disclosure this year that a third of the state's most dangerous criminals held in the highest-security jail in Australia, the Super Max facility inside Goulburn jail, were Muslim fundamentalists or converts to Islam.....

REV FRED NILE CALLS FOR A BAN ON TOBACCO DISPLAYS

7/11 Christian Democratic Party | In light of recent scientific research on the effects that cigarette displays have on smokers trying to quit, the Rev Fred Nile, Leader of the Christian Democratic Party, has again raised the issue in State Parliament and called on the Labor Government to heed the advise of experts and support a ban on all public display of cigarette packaging..

SUDAN: Not Child's Play

7/12 Saltshakers Media Release | There is rioting in Sudanese streets calling for the death of a woman over a teddy bear named Mohammed. What can we in the West possibly do with this — nationally, individually? How do we help? What must we learn from it?

National Review Online asked a group of experts and commentators.

Bat Yeor - The rioting in the Sudanese streets calling for the death of an innocent woman, Gillian Gibbon, over a teddy bear’s name, would not surprise any person familiar with traditional Islamic society. The rioting occurred under government instigation and that, without it, probably nothing similar would have happened. The Sudanese government’s motivation might have been to arouse in the Muslim mob anti-British and anti-Western feelings, while humiliating the former colonial British power and the West.

What can we do in the West? First, each of us should understand how the theological and legal rules and framework in sharia society function. We should know that the whole Muslim world, even the countries we mistakenly call “moderate,” moves toward unification under sharia rule and traditional Koranic values. We should understand that because we share this planet with over a billion Muslims, represented by 57 countries, this situation concerns each one of us in our homeland and abroad.

What can we do to save this innocent woman? We should create a world movement of solidarity with her, hang her portrait everywhere, organize manifestations for her liberation putting her poster in every newspaper, and oblige our governments to move out of their usual cowardly silence. We should do that also for the innocent victims of Darfur, of Chad, masses of men, women, children enslaved, expelled, dehumanized, whose martyrdom one finds endlessly repeated over a millennium and more of dhimmitude throughout the land of Islam.

Bat Yeor, born in Egypt, is a British citizen who has been living in Switzerland since 1960. She is the author of Islam and Dhimmitude: Where Civilizations Collide, among other books.

Jonathan Foreman - Much of the response to the teddy-bear incident has been naïve. In Khartoum, the crowds baying for Gillian Gibbons’s blood carried pre-printed posters, just as the anti-Danish cartoon protesters on the West Bank and elsewhere, just happened to have lots of Danish flags at hand. The Islamist Khartoum regime is exploiting the teacher’s arrest — apparently the result of a rivalry between her and a politically connected colleague — to foment anti-western feeling and to combat pressure about Darfur.

Regimes like that of Sudan’s Omar Bashir know all too well that the Western media has an endless appetite for apparent manifestations of “Muslim anger,” and invariably takes them at face value. Earnest anchormen and BBC “experts” take one look at screaming (always all-male) demonstrators — whether Sadrist rent-a-mobs in Basra, semi-professional demonstrators in London, or government-sponsored crowds in Damascus — and assume they express genuine Muslim “fury.” In response, Western politicians call for more attention to be paid to ultra-delicate yet violent Muslim sensibilities. At the same time many ordinary Muslims wonder if they should be as angry as their coreligionists waving banners and threatening murder.

We should be wary of manufactured “rage” in the Arab or North African street — and our journalists should be more skeptical when confronted by telegenic demonstrations — otherwise we play into the hands of cynical murderous regimes and encourage the worst tendencies in modern Islam.

As for the absurd blasphemy charge in the teddy-bear case, it should be clear by now that the standard cowardly response of Western societies to “Muslim anger” helps no-one; indeed it empowers extremists and encourages an Islamic sensibility that is both hypersensitive and bullying. Perhaps we need to show that, though we are no longer have an “honor culture,” we too can be dangerously offended, especially by the uncivilized religious intolerance of certain Muslim states.

— Jonathan Foreman has reported from the Muslim world.

Tawfik Hamid - We have much to learn from the teddy-bear riots in Sudan. We see, in stark relief, the hypocrisy of many Islamic organizations in the West; in democratic societies they demand freedom of religion and civil rights — whether it is the right to wear the hijab, or have prayer rooms in football stadiums, or be provided with Islamic foot baths in college restrooms. In contrast, Westerners in Islamic nations lack basic civil rights. Today, because a student named a stuffed animal “Mohammed,” Gilliam Gibbons rots in jail, and large mobs clamor for her decapitation.

The silence of the world’s Muslims should send warning signals to heads of national security. Powerful Islamic bodies have not condemned the violent reaction of the rioters, and Muslims — who not long ago took to the streets to protest cartoons — cannot muster a word in her defense. Why? Because Islamism is far more pervasive among Muslims than politicians and the media can comprehend. A community that is silent in the face of barbarism is one that tacitly endorses it. Who really is a “moderate Muslim?” Free nations must not allow our cherished tolerance to be exploited by an Islamist community which seeks to use our civil protections to end civil protections.

— Tawfik Hamid is a former member of Jemaah Islamiya, an Islamist terrorist group. He is currently a medical doctor and Muslim reformer living in the West.

Victor Davis Hanson - Same old, same old-whether a teddy bear, a cartoon, or a papal sermon, whether in Khartoum or Islamabad. They take offense, we understand, or rationalize, or equivocate — either out of condescension or fear of terrorism or worries over oil or multicultural guilt or all that and more. Then the moderate Muslim spokesman is trotted out to condemn the nuttiness, but also to anguish over the media that “sensationalizes” and “inordinately” reports the latest Islamic lunacy.

We usually then get the silly Timothy McVeigh or IRA comparison, and forget the entire absurdity — until the next opera, film, or novel brings out the fist-shaking, swords, and death threats. The only dramas seem to be our infighting over whether this reflects Islam itself, or the reaction of radical Islamists angry at the modern world — or whether at this point that really matters any longer anyway.

— Victor Davis Hanson is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. He is the author, most recently, of A War Like No Other. How the Athenians and Spartans Fought the Peloponnesian War .

Paul Marshall - British teacher Gillian Gibbons’s sentence for blasphemy, and the subsequent demonstrations calling for her death, is one of a series of such incidents that, by their very absurdity, have shone media attention on the perils of accusations of blasphemy, apostasy, and insulting Islam. We need this attention to lead the West to become aware of and address the far wider and more serious political repercussions of such accusations in the Muslim world and beyond.

Examples could be taken from Iran, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and elsewhere, but Sudan provides enough of its own. In 2005, Mohammed Taha, who edited the al-Wifaq newspaper in Sudan’s capital, reprinted an article that debated the background of Mohammed. He was charged with blasphemy, though the charges were later dropped. However, in 2006 his body was found in a Khartoum street. He had been beheaded.

In the early 1990s, Gaspar Biro, the courageous United Nations Special Rapporteur on Sudan, produced a series of reports documenting the National Islamic Front government’s massacres, slavery, draconian penal code, and other depredations. In 1994, the NIF (an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood) called his work “a vicious attack on the religion of Islam.” In 1995, Sudanese officials said “we don’t want to speculate about his fate if he is to continue offending the feelings of Muslims worldwide.” These accusations of blasphemy were deemed dire enough that the U.N. General Assembly described it as “an unacceptable threat against his person.”

Perhaps the most striking instance was Mahmoud Mohamed Taha. He was one of the country’s leading Islamic scholars, and a co-founder of the Republican Brotherhood, which pushed, on Islamic grounds, for an open and democratic society. A major opponent of the regime, in January 1985 he was tried and executed on charges that amounted to apostasy because of his views on Islamic teaching.

As these examples show, a major function of blasphemy laws is silencing those who want to debate and discuss the meaning of Islam, particularly those who favor open and democratic societies.

How do we respond? Well, first, with diplomatic pressure to have Ms. Gibbons released, which appears to be progressing. But it is vital not to treat blasphemy accusations and convictions as merely idiosyncratic vagaries of Muslim regimes that simply require a humanitarian response on behalf of the unfortunates involved. Blasphemy charges are the front line of the war of ideas within Islam. If there is to be debate within Islam, we need to work to remove such laws.

A good place to start is for the U.S. to seriously campaign against the ongoing, partly successful, multi-year effort by the Organization of the Islamic Conference to have the United Nations condemn “blasphemy” in the international sphere (an effort couched in the language of combating ‘Islamophobia’). A good occasion for this campaign is the preparatory meetings for the 2009 U.N. conference on “Racism,” which, under the leadership of Iran, Libya, and Pakistan, is set to condemn all “insults to Islam,” whether those purportedly by Ms. Gibbons, or those of political targets such as Gaspar Biro or the Tahas.

— Paul Marshall is senior fellow at Hudson Institute’s Center for Religious Freedom and is writing a book on blasphemy. The new edition of his World survey of Religious Freedom will be published by Rowman and Littlefield in January.

Clifford D. May - This affair will not come out well — not even if Gillian Gibbons is eventually freed. Why not? Because we’re still going to be treated to an outpouring of nonsense about how she didn’t mean to cause offense, and how we all have to learn to be more sensitive toward “the Muslim world.”

As for the value of tolerance, demonstrators in Khartoum this week made their point clearly: “No tolerance - execution.” Others yelled: “No one lives who insults the prophet.” The spokesman for the Sudanese embassy in London, Khalid Al Mubarak, spun the same idea more diplomatically: “If a lesson can be learned, it’s that anybody going abroad should learn about the culture and orientation before taking any job.”

Would some reporter mind asking him if that applies equally to Muslims in Europe who ought to learn about freedom and what it implies when it comes to satirical cartoons? And if that doesn’t apply, why not? (I’ll offer a theory in a moment.) Pay a visit to the website of the Organization of the Islamic Conference. Note that the OIC has not a word to say about Gibbons’s predicament (as of Sunday night). The Arab League has been silent, too.

If the United Nations were not an Orwellian junkyard, its secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, would be reading the riot act to Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir, and the U.N. Human Rights Council would be meeting in emergency session.

Instead, the British government has sent Muslim Labor peer Lord Ahmed and Tory Baroness Sayeeda Warsi to visit with al-Bashir. You think they are telling him: “Curse your moustache! You don’t realize what this makes the world think of our religion?” Or do you think they are saying: “You know the English are stupid, so show mercy this time around. You’ll be rewarded in due course.”

Here’s what ought to be happening: The few civilized and not spineless nations of the world should be recalling their ambassadors for “consultations,” making it clear to al-Bashir that he is risking all foreign aid and economic cooperation. British Prime Minister Gordon Brown should be quietly sending al-Bashir the message that he will hold him personally responsible for Ms. Gibbons’s welfare. And two rumors should be spread: 1) that Brown is re-reading Churchill’s The River War, and 2) that British Special Forces are on alert. Brown can deny both publicly.

After Ms. Gibbons is freed, there should be no effort to quickly “put the incident behind us.” An apology and a commitment to tolerance in the future should be expected. Instead, I fear, when this is over, the West will be one step closer to accepting the deal the Islamists are demanding: They get to say — and do — anything at all in regard to Christians and Jews. But Christians and Jews — “infidels” who are the descendants of monkeys and swine — are to learn their place and avoid acting uppity, either at home or abroad.

— Clifford D. May is the president of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies.

Andrew C. McCarthy - We need to start breaking stuff, and people, in Sudan. At a minimum, we should cut off all aid (it is simply intercepted and used to help sustain the barbarous regime), and end all immigration from Sudan (in addition to expelling any Sudanese Muslims who cannot make an asylum case for staying here).

Sudan is one of the worst places on the planet and — what a coincidence! — a prime well-spring of jihadism. A short history lesson. Hassan al-Turabi’s National Islamic Front came to power in Sudan in 1989, and he promptly put out the welcome mat for every Islamic terror organization in the world. Sudan provided a soft place to land when Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman (the “Blind Sheikh”) left Egypt and when Osama bin Laden left Afghanistan. Sudan brokered the cooperative relationship between al Qaeda and Iraq, and between al Qaeda and Iran (and Hezbollah, Iran’s creation).

In 1993, in addition to the Blind Sheikh, I prosecuted several Sudanese members of his organization. They had been apprehended in New York City while plotting a campaign to follow up the bombing of the World Trade Center with simultaneous strikes against several New York City landmarks. One of targets was the United Nations — and the plan was to drive what appeared be a diplomatic vehicle, laden with explosives, into the complex. The diplomatic plates for the plot were to be provided by two Sudanese diplomats assigned to the regime’s U.N. Mission — the Clinton administration quietly expelled the diplomats in 1995; no further action was taken against Sudan for this act of war. (Nearly a decade ago, I wrote a lengthy piece on this for the Weekly Standard, “The Sudan Connection: The Missing Link in U.S. Terrorism Policy.” It’s still missing.) In 1998, after our embassies in east Africa were bombed, the Clinton administration carried out a cruise missile attack against a pharmaceutical plant in Sudan based on intelligence that it was a joint chem/bio weapons venture colluded in by Sudan, Iraq, and al Qaeda. The operation was much maligned, but top Clinton officials (including President Clinton) told the 9/11 Commission they still stand behind the intelligence, and my complaint is not that we did it, but that it was too weak a response given the provocations from these venturers.

Meanwhile, the Islamic government has perpetrated — not one — but two genocides, and the even dirtier little secret, ignored by the American media, is that the jihadists take many of their victims as slaves; young women are kept as concubines (rape being one of the prime weapons of the jihad) ,and boys are often maimed to prevent them from fleeing. At the U.N., China protects this despicable regime because of its extensive energy and trade interests, and the Organization of the Islamic Conference rallies around it as needed, so it’s a pipe-dream to think sanctions of any kind will work discernible improvement in Sudanese behavior.

The only thing surprising about the teddy-bear incident is that anyone is surprised by it.

— Andrew C. McCarthy, a former federal prosecutor, is a senior fellow at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies.

Daniel Pipes - The mob demanding the execution of Gillian Gibbons — for allowing her seven-year-old pupils to name a teddy bear Mohammed — may have been government-prompted. In any case, it represents the latest example of one type of Islamist aggression. Most Muslim-majority countries have rules against insulting the Islamic prophet — most notoriously, clauses 295 and 298 of the Pakistani penal code. Islamists capriciously use such laws as a weapon to hound free-thinking Muslims and non-Muslims.

In 2002, for example, 105 persons were killed in riots in Kaduna, Nigeria, following the publication of an article suggesting Mohammed would have approved of a beauty contest. At this very moment, mobs are howling in India for the death of Taslima Nasreen, the Bangladeshi author critical of Islam. Statements coming out of the West, from the Salman Rushdie affair in 1989, to the Danish cartoons, to Pope Benedict’s speech in 2006, have inspired multiple violent eruptions.

These incidents point to two of the deepest problems in modernizing Islam. One is permitting freedom of speech concerning Mohammed, the Koran, and other aspects of the religion. The other concerns the right of Muslims to leave Islam. These twin transitions must be accomplished for Islam to leave its current backward and oppressive condition.

— Daniel Pipes is director of the Middle East Forum.

Father James V. Schall - When Cassius Clay became a Muslim, he called himself “Mohammed.” I have a young student in class whose last name is “Mohammed.” Normally, young girls endow their dolls with names of affection. Evidently, in Muslim theology, to say Jesus Christ is also a man is blasphemy, as is the truth that a Trinity of persons is found within the Godhead’s oneness. To threaten a girl with death for calling a teddy bear “Mohammed” not only insults Mohammed himself but also insults creatures like bears together with all human relationships to God and to the things that He created to be good. No incident could be more helpful in understanding the way such murderous minds work. The disorders in the streets, and threats of death, arise from confusions in minds about the order of rank in God’s creation, and the way we name things that exist. The real blasphemy does not consist in affectionately calling a doll-like teddy bear “Mohammed.” The real blasphemy consists of demanding that the rest of the world, in the noble name of Mohammed, live by such untenable confusions evidently prevalent in the Sudan.

— James V. Schall, S. J. is a professor of government at Georgetown University and author of The Regensburg Lecture, among other books.

Robert Spencer - This incident is another attempt to strong-arm the West into shying away from, and even prohibiting, any critical examination of Islam, precisely at a moment when jihad terrorists use Islamic texts and teachings to justify violence. If you can’t name a teddy bear Mohammad without calls for blood, you certainly can’t call for a critical reevaluation of the Islamic texts and doctrines that jihadists use to justify violence and make recruits among peaceful Muslims.

The OIC and other Islamic entities began calling for blasphemy laws after the cartoon riots of 2006. But the prohibition of blasphemy, whether it takes the form of teddy bears, cartoons, or books about Islam and Mohammad, has no place in a free society. Freedom of speech must encompass the freedom to annoy, to ridicule, and to offend, or it is hollow. The instant any person or ideology is placed off-limits for critical examination and even ridicule, freedom of speech has been replaced by an ideological straitjacket.

Will the West acquiesce in the Islamic world’s efforts to place Islam beyond criticism, when it needs to be reexamined and reformed more than ever? Or will we stand up and defend ourselves and our societal principles of free speech and free inquiry? The teddy-bear incident, as ridiculous as it is, only underscores the urgency of these questions.

— Robert Spencer is the director of Jihad Watch and the author of The Truth About Muhammad.
At http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=NmYzM2ZlMTBlOTNmOTNkYzc2MzA4NDg0OWE5YjFjN2Y=&w=MA==

Summit Australia 13-19 January 2008

The International Conference in Victoria, Australia, will challenge you to examine your thinking, and renew your mind - to learn what the Bible says about important areas of ministry like Politics, Economics, Law, Psychology, Sociology, etc.

It will help you establish a solid foundation of biblical truth, equip you to champion the Christian faith, and empower you with ability to take positive and effective action in our world today

This is the fourth year SUMMIT have been in Australia to run these schools with Australian co-speakers.
SUMMIT has been running Biblical Worldview Schools in the US since 1962.

David Noebel, author of  ‘Understanding the Times’ and ‘The Battle for Truth", one of 4 international keynote speakers.
If you have a Koorong Bookshop near you, you can pick up a few brochures from them. (Vic, NSW, SA, Tasmania)
If you want more than  5, then contact us and we will post them out to you. Please let us know how many you require.

Website: http://www.summit.org/conference/international/australia/

Email address: summitaustralia@optusnet.com.au

SUMMIT is being hosted in Melbourne by Salt Shakers and CultureWatch.