The western world dithers

Fox News - Hours after winning a Nobel Peace Prize, President Barack Obama assembled his war council in the White House basement to talk about how many troops might be needed to right the 8-year-old Afghanistan conflict that military commanders are pressing him to escalate. The president and his top national security advisers huddled for three hours in the Situation Room to hear top military officials make their case for tens of thousands of additional troops to target Al Qaeda. The session marked the first time Obama has questioned his inner circle specifically about troop levels and military commitments needed for the war that has languished in progress and popularity.

A decision, though, was not in the offing. "I still think we're probably several weeks away," White House spokesman Robert Gibbs told reporters before the meeting began.

Fox News - A German book publisher has canceled a novel about Islamic "honor killings," fearing that the book would offend the Muslim community and put him in danger. Critics of the decision call it a cowardly move, but others say the publisher is simply being responsible. The publisher of the book, which was to have been titled "To Whom Honor is Due," has indicated that he withdrew the book after an expert on Islam warned that some of the passages could spark violent retaliation from Muslims.

"After the Muhammad cartoons, one knows that one can't publish sentences or drawings that defame Islam without expecting a security risk," Felix Droste, of Droste Verlag publishing, told the German newspaper Der Spiegel last week. He referred to a series of cartoons depicting the Prophet Muhammad that were published in Denmark in 2005 and sparked deadly violence across the Muslim world. Depictions of the Prophet Muhammad are forbidden in Islam. This new controversy comes on the heels of Yale University Press' refusal to print the cartoons that were published in Denmark in a new book that details the controversy surrounding them.

From the most powerful in the western world to those who supposedly believe that the pen is mightier than the sword, we dither, we huddle, we weasel, we voluntarily bow down to foreign laws and cultures that are far more inferior to our own. And with each huddling, dithering and weaseling we lose a bit of our hard-earned [by others] liberty and the enemy grows bolder. It'll be interesting to see where we will draw the line, if we ever do draw that line.

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