George Clooney Hearts Terrorists

Without further comment, the story first linked to by Andy McCarthy:

George Clooney, already one of Hollywood's leading liberal voices, has embarked on what may be one of his most controversial projects: the story of Osama bin Laden's driver.

Clooney's production company, Smokehouse, has bought the rights to a book about Salim Hamdan, an inmate at Guantánamo Bay who last week was sentenced to jail for his role in helping the al-Qaeda leader. The book, The Challenge, is by journalist Jonathan Mahler and tells the story of Hamdan's capture and trial, defended by a US navy lawyer, Lieutenant Commander Charles Swift. It has had a big critical success.

Last week Yemen-born Hamdan, who has already spent seven years in US custody, received a surprisingly light sentence of just five and a half years for being bin Laden's driver in Afghanistan. Prosecutors had billed the case as a key plank in the 'War on Terror', designed to show that terrorists could be dealt with by Guantánamo. They had described Hamdan as a member of bin Laden's inner circle who had knowledge of his terrorist plans...

Clooney is believed to be interested in playing the role of lawyer Swift and the case certainly has all the drama and tension of any fictional legal thriller. Aside from the terrorism and exotic locations, The Challenge describes Swift's battle as a classic case of a crusading 'little guy' winning against the odds.

Today in terrorists

Michelle Malkin has the round-up. I recommend reading it. One part funny, another part pathetic.

Britain is falling apart

This is what happens when leftism and political correctness runs amok in a country, as Jaime Sneider writes. Britain released a terrorist from prison and not only lets him walk the streets (he's technically under house arrest, but he's pictured walking around his neighborhood), but pays him $100,000 a year in welfare for his supposed bad back:

Al Qaeda foot-soldiers behead our soldiers while we pay their leaders disability. Qatada is living in a home worth $1.6 million. He's receiving government benefits totaling $100,000. This goes well beyond not deporting him. There really are no words.

Islam and the West

I don't feel like creating a huge post about this today, but here is a great primer from the always-fantastic City Journal on the hidden war of Islam against the West within our own countries.

Downplay it if you want, but look to Europe as the scary example of what can happen when you mix wimpy mulitculturalism with a totally foreign and backward group of immigrants. Here is a small sample:

Canadian Muslim reformist Irshad Manji has noted that in 2006, when 17 terrorists were arrested in Toronto on the verge of giving Canada “its own 9/11,” “the police did not mention that it had anything to do with Islam or Muslims, not a word.” When, after van Gogh’s murder, a Rotterdam artist drew a street mural featuring an angel and the words thou shalt not kill, police, fearing Muslim displeasure, destroyed the mural (and a videotape of its destruction). In July 2007, a planned TV appeal by British cops to help capture a Muslim rapist was canceled to avoid “racist backlash.” And in August, the Times of London reported that “Asian” men (British code for “Muslims”) in the U.K. were having sex with perhaps hundreds of “white girls as young as twelve”—but that authorities wouldn’t take action for fear of “upsetting race relations.” Typically, neither the Times nor government officials acknowledged that the “Asian” men’s contempt for the “white” girls was a matter not of race but of religion.

The finale:

The key question for Westerners is: Do we love our freedoms as much as they hate them? Many free people, alas, have become so accustomed to freedom, and to the comfortable position of not having to stand up for it, that they’re incapable of defending it when it’s imperiled—or even, in many cases, of recognizing that it is imperiled. As for Muslims living in the West, surveys suggest that many of them, though not actively involved in jihad, are prepared to look on passively—and some, approvingly—while their coreligionists drag the Western world into the House of Submission.

But we certainly can’t expect them to take a stand for liberty if we don’t stand up for it ourselves.

The media and Muslims

This was too good of a point to not post, I thought. Here's the whole thing from Jamie Sneider over at The Blog at The Weekly Standard:

One thought about the Jerusalem massacre: the lack of moral outrage about the fact that the gunman disguised himself as a rabbinical student.

Although the media frequently covers protests by outraged Muslims throwing temper tantrums at any perceived disrespect to their religion, Reuters and other news outlets fail to focus on the transparent hypocrisy when writing about terrorist attacks against Jews and Catholics. Not only do the terrorist sympathizers celebrate attacks against other religions with street-parties, prayers, and sweets, they fail to condemn al Qaeda’s bombing of mosques, which presumably contain an abundant supply of oh so sacred Korans.

Newsflash: Airport security is annoying

This girl has a prosthetic leg, which causes her much embarrassment when going through airport security screening.

Well, yeah, I'm sure it's unpleasant for her to have the extra attention from having a leg like Robocop. I don't blame her for getting cranky about it. The problem is she is turning her fire towards the wrong targets.

The first is the terrorists who hijack planes. Before they started doing it in the late 1960's, there basically was no airport security. Guys going on hunting trips would store their rifles in the overhead compartments (no joke). Heck, I remember back in 1996 taking a wooden baseball bat on a plane with me. So first and foremost, blame the Muslim a-holes who want to take down planes.

The second is our ridiculous policy of treating everyone the same in screening. It's obvious that young Muslim men are by far most likely to hijack or destroy a plane, yet they get the same attention as an old black lady. Sure, it would then really be bad for Muslims who fly who mean no harm, but it would be a lot better for everyone else.

Our friends the Saudis

I don't know if everyone has kept up with the news about this (I don't really care too much because nothing is going to come out of it, but that's a rant for another day), but apparently there is an upcoming summit in Annapolis for a bunch of Middle East countries, including Israel.

So, can we count on our friends the Saudis to behave like adults? If you ansered yes, you don't follow Middle Eastern politics closely enough:

Saudi Arabia's participation in the U.S.-sponsored talks on Middle East peace was seen as a diplomatic coup for the Bush administration but the kingdom has made clear there will be no handshakes with Israeli officials.

Let's not forget that 15 of the 19 9/11 hijackers were from Saudi Arabia.

Here are some additional thoughts on the conference from a guy who is much smarter than I am.

"If people had known how close we came to world war three that day there’d have been mass panic."

Not much was made at the time of Israel bombing something in Syria, and even less has been discussed since then. Here is a recap of the whole thing. An excerpt:

According to American sources, Israeli intelligence tracked a North Korean vessel carrying a cargo of nuclear material labelled ‘cement’ as it travelled halfway across the world. On 3 September the ship docked at the Syrian port of Tartous and the Israelis continued following the cargo as it was transported to the small town of Dayr as Zawr, near the Turkish border in north-eastern Syria.

As the author goes on to detail, it had to have been a huge deal if no one since said a word about it, as has occurred.