Haveil Havalim, the Carnival of the Jews, is at its creator’s place. Daddy!

Carnival of the Cats is over at Bloggin Out Loud. Number 100. Woo-hoo!

Almost forgot: This week’s Shire Network News podcast is up, with my latest On Second Thought, Lair Simon’s Full of Crap Report, and an interview with Egpytian Sandmonkey. Go. Listen. You can even hear Tig on my portion.

What do you call a Hamas “moderate”?

Someone who hasn’t killed anyone yet today.

The religion of peace went on a rampage through parts of Nigeria, burning, looting, and beating to death Christians — in the name of being “offended” by the Danish Mohammed cartoons.

Thousands of rioters burned 15 churches in Maiduguri in a three-hour rampage before troops and police reinforcements restored order, Nigerian police spokesman Haz Iwendi said. Iwendi said security forces arrested dozens of people in the city about 1,000 miles northeast of the capital, Lagos.

Chima Ezeoke, a Christian Maiduguri resident, said protesters attacked and looted shops owned by minority Christians, most of them with origins in the country’s south.

“Most of the dead were Christians beaten to death on the streets by the rioters,” Ezeoke said. Witnesses said three children and a priest were among those killed.

Meantime, the Muslim world is telling the rest of us that everything will be all right, as long as we adhere to the dictates of their religion and make insulting Islam illegal — globally.

In Cairo, Bishop Karsten Nissen, of Denmark’s Evangelical Lutheran Church, met with Grand Imam Mohammed Sayyed Tantawi of al-Azhar University, the world’s highest Sunni Muslim seat of learning.

Tantawi said the Danish prime minister must apologize for the drawings and further demanded that the world’s religious leaders meet to write a law that “condemns insulting any religion, including the Holy Scriptures and the prophets.” He said the United Nations should impose the law on all countries.

In response, Nissen did not address the issue of a global law but said it was impossible for Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen to apologize.

“I have brought to his excellency (Tantawi) the apology of the newspaper, but our prime minister did not draw these cartoons. Our prime minister is not the editor of this newspaper. He cannot apologize for something he did not do,” Nissen said.

And what does the U.S. spokeswoman have to say?

At the U.S.-Islamic World Forum in Doha, Qatar, U.S. Undersecretary of State Karen Hughes said U.S. newspapers generally did not reprint the caricatures “because they recognize they are deeply offensive, even blasphemous to the precious convictions of our Muslim friends and neighbors.”

Oh, stop lying. American newspapers are refusing to publish the cartoons because they are afraid of violent reprisals. The offensiveness thing is a cover.

You know what I’d like to see? An international day of solidarity for the freedom of the press, where every single newspaper in the free world publishes all twelve of the Danish cartoons. What do you suppose would happen then?

Yes, I know. The radical Islamists would stage-manage more riots. But the point would have been made. We are free. We will not bow to the dicates of a religion we do not follow.

The Muslim world is not free. The unrelenting totalitarianism of the Soviet Union has been replaced by the unrelenting bigotry and repression of radical Islam. I see no real difference between the two. The Soviet Union wanted the world to be entirely Communist. The Muslim world wants everyone to be Muslim. But for now, they’ll settle for making the rest of us bow to their religious laws and conventions.

I am a citizen of the United States. I refuse.

I choose freedom.

We have to stand with Denmark on this. I know about their boycott of Israeli goods, and their support of the palestinians. But there is a larger issue here, and frankly, our freedoms are at stake. Denmark is the 21st century Poland. If she falls, the Islamists will have won a major battle.

This isn’t a left-right thing. This is about the freedom to choose the way you want to live.

I choose the freedom to offend religions — theirs, mine, and yours — without suffering death threats.