THEY’VE HIDDEN IT FROM THEIR MAIN PAGE, but the CAIR poll is back up to 77% against trying Sharon as a war criminal. Meanwhile, on Osama bin Laden’s blog an equally scientific poll has “non” ahead by an identical margin over “no.”

HERE’S A FULL-LENGTH TRANSLATION of the Oriana Fallaci article I mentioned earlier.

ISLAMIC EXTREMISTS IN DENMARK are calling for the murder of Danish Jews, reports Fredrik Norman. What’s more, after the Denmark/Israel soccer match, Palestinian sympathizers tried to storm the stadium, a riot ensued, and in a possibly related development shots were fired at the American Embassy.

DADAISTS FOR PALESTINE!

THERE’S NEW Clip Art Nonsense. You know, I just figured out who Jim Treacher is. He’s the guy who used to author “Sawdust” and “The Invisible Tribe.”

UPDATE: By the way, position your cursor over the text, or click on it.

JUST HEARD AN NPR MONOLOGUE from a reporter who said that it’s practically open war against Muslims in America. He was identified only as the White House correspondent of The Final Call. No mention that it’s Louis Farrakhan’s paper. That’s like having a commentary from a “correspondent” for The Spotlight without mentioning its racist and antisemitic connections.

Interestingly, most Muslims don’t consider the “Nation of Islam” to be Muslim at all. The Saudis even have a foundation whose purpose is to tell people this.

HERE’S A GREAT POST from Slate’s “The Fray,” the place where so many webloggers, including me, got their start:

The group that sends a message, “You can trust no one in our population not to kill you,” sends the message, “Unless you get rid of all of us, you will die.” This is very dangerous; it’s an invitation to genocide.

On the one hand, the people of Palestine seem to be saying that they have nothing to lose. This sends a message to the world to look at their situation. This is a definite benefit to them.

On the other hand, the people of Palestine also seem to be counting on Israel’s personal morality (or at least Israel’s need to appear moral before the world) not to commit genocide. They seem to be saying that the people of Israel will bow to world pressure and not wipe them out. At the very least, the message is that Israel is a good enough world citizen to follow certain rules of civilization.

There is another dangerous element to this for the people of Palestine. What if they are wrong? What if Israel says, “Damn world opinion. It’s us or them, so it’s going to be us”?

(Via Best of the Fray).

WARBLOG PROFITEERING: Yep, I’ve got an online store. I linked to this once before (I actually set this up to micro-manufacture gifts for people) but now that we’re all profiteers, I thought I’d open it to the public. Buy dozens of t-shirts for your friends, and don’t overlook the stylish coasters and totebags.

JASON KOTTKE is writing about weblogs and he’s not very happy. He’s not happy with the WarBlog Book project because he says its viewpoint is too narrow. And he’s not happy with James Wolcott’s Business 2.0 article on blogs because, well, its viewpoint is too narrow.

As to the first, I think that Max Power’s response is pretty fair. Books have viewpoints; if you don’t like them, you write your own. I mean, it’s not like Michael Moore gave me equal time in his book. Er, unless he copied some passages, but I would have heard of that. And it’s not likely anyway.

On the other hand, Kottke’s right about Wolcott, in the sense that Wolcott wrongly states that there aren’t many blogs devoted to “cultural pursuits.” There are, though you won’t find ’em on my links bar, except for Melissa Schwartz and sometimes Orchid and formerly (it disappeared during some template-mangling incident and I forgot to put it back) The Anna Franco Review. But my links (to the extent that there’s any organization at all there, which is a very limited extent indeed) are where I go, and I don’t go to cultural sites much. And the cultural sites I visit wouldn’t interest most InstaPundit readers: how many of you have ever stopped by DJ Mag, or want to? What’s funny about Wolcott’s statement, and Kottke’s criticism, is that the standard Big Media article on blogs until recently did the opposite — focused on obsessive hobbyists, book lovers, cat lovers, etc. and ignored the weblogs devoted to politics.

UPDATE: Jim Treacher had a similar reaction to Kottke’s on the Wolcott piece.

ANTISEMITIC VIOLENCE IN FRANCE: This story says there were 360 incidents last month. Something comparing it with, say, April 2001 would have been nice. What do they teach them in J-school nowadays?

UPDATE: A reader writes:

You write:

This story says there were 360 incidents last month. Something comparing it with, say, April 2001 would have been nice. What do they teach them in J-school nowadays?

It might be more instructive to compare with incidents in the US, as reported by CAIR, hardly a site that can be accused of pro-US bias.

CAIR has stats on reported incidents of all kinds “anti-Muslim” incidents since 9/11. They have a breakdown by category at [this link], and by state [here]. In NY and DC there have been, respectively, 116 and 113 reported anti-Muslim incidents of all sorts, including airport profiling and discrimination in the workplace. There are (I believe) more Muslims in Michigan than Jews in France, and CAIR has only 28 reported incidents of any sort since 9/11. I am not sure I care if it is worse to be a Jew in France today than it was a year ago. I want to know why it is worse to be a Jew in France now or a year ago than to be a Muslim in America post 9/11.

JASON KENNEY says Meryl Yourish is wrong and Andrew Sullivan is right about the Wolfowitz-booing incident. I think, however, that they’re talking past each other here.

HEY, the Lileks piece on journalism and the mideast that I link to below is now linked on Jim Romenesko. It deserves the attention.

VENEZUELA UPDATE, this from reader Jorge Schmidt, who has sent a number of interesting items:

The Chavez government is already escalating its confrontation with its opposition, despite its words of conciliation and rectification. The immediate targets are the media and PDVSA.

Remember that last week’s events originated in a strike by PDVSA’s upper management in support of executives fired for opposing Chavez’ appointees to the company’s board of directors. Said executives were later rehired. They were fired again hours ago [it’s not yet on the news, so no link]. This means that the managers will strike again. Chavez still has not retracted his attacks on the legitimacy of the elected leadership of the Federation of Venezuelan Workers (CTV). The media also continue to be intimidated and threatened.

Faced with fresh and clear evidence that all Chavez seeks is time to regroup and rearm his Bolivarian Circle thugs, a new protest is being planned for May 1st by the CTV and many sectors of civil society. This march will be larger than the one that took place April 11th.

The US Embassy, by the way, has sent all family and nonessential personnel out of the country, and the State Department issued a travel advisory warning Americans of the volatile and unpredictable situation there.

I don’t think it’s over yet.

READER SEAN COX thinks he understands what the White House is doing:

You point out Michael Kelly’s fine rope-a-dope article, but he misses the BIG point:

We still have a lot of bombs to build before we take out Iraq.

At the end of last year, people noticed that we had greatly diminished our stockpiles of smart bombs and non-nuclear cruise missles in Afghanistan. I recall (but do not have a citation) that the general guestimate was Sept/Oct of this year to build enough ordinance to drop on Saddam.

In the mean time, the US is playing the Israel/Palestinian game to make the rest of the Arab world go nuts. The US supports Israel, plays with Arafat, and hopes to rope a bunch of dopes into our sights when the bombs start dropping. Until we have the bombs we need to end this quickly, we’re going to do what it takes to keep the Middle East and the numerous maniacs that inhabit it looking like the evil idiots that they are.

Once we have enough bombs, we’ll know who to drop them on and this will come to an end.

In support of this characterization, I noticed an interesting line from David Remnick in The New Yorker (it doesn’t seem to be on their website). Remnick remarked that only “the parlor-statesmen of Europe” still take Yasser Arafat seriously as wanting peace. When you start reading anti-European throwaway lines in The New Yorker, you know there’s a change in attitude.