Parenthood, Nightmares and Tragedy

A primal emotion kicks in for parents when they bring a child into this world. It grows more complex over time. It can't be stopped, and it's tough to contain.
It's called worry.
We worry something will go wrong in the womb. We worry about the baby suddenly passing away from sudden infant death syndrome or some other health problem. We worry about their health, physical and emotional. We worry about them accidently hanging themselves on a curtain cord. We worry about someone kidnapping them.
As the child grows older, other worries come into play.
A neighbor's back yard doesn't have a pool. It has a death trap. The street is a dangerous place. Accidents are a chased ball away. Bugs. Dogs. Rabid wild animals. Strangers. Disease. Chemicals beneath the kitchen sink.
Later in life, it's driving, drugs, alcohol, violence, unsafe sex, followed even later by career and spousal choices and the whole stress factors of life. And then having kids of their own.
My parents, when asked them why they worried so much, said, "Some day, you'll have children, and you'll understand."
Today, with two young boys, I certainly do understand. I wonder all the time about a parent's worst nightmare lurking around the corner. No doubt, these little guys are going to provide worry fuel, and they already do to some extend, despite their young ages of 2 and 4.
By the time they get to be teens, I'm afraid I'll be an emotional train wreck.
Yesterday, two Beaumont high schoolers died in just the kind of things parents brace themselves for but can't be totally prepared to face. A terrible accident on the rain-soaked highway. A telephone call at home. A visit to the grim, grisly scene.
And then the words: "Your child has died. I'm so sorry."
Last year, The Beaumont Enterprise wrote a gripping collection of stories on parents coping with the loss of a child. Almost every week, obituaries of children and young adults can be found in our newspaper. And then there was yesterday: two high school girls killed on their way to what was supposed to be a joyous occasion, a varsity playoff soccer game.
I see all this and wonder: How do people cope with this kind of devastating loss?
I think of the pregnancy and the miracle of childbirth, of changing diapers and then seeing them start to walk and talk, of going off to school and becoming their own individuals, of triumphs and failures. Of leaving home and finding their own way in life.
The parents of West Brook High School senior Alicia Bonura and sophomore Ashley Brown must have been proud that their girls were part of a varsity soccer team headed for the playoffs. They must have watched countless games over the years, giving up some nights and weekends for practice and tournaments. They organized carpools. They treated abrasions and bruises, some of them psychological due to a team loss or an individual failure.
But, obviously, that was just a small part of guiding their daughters through childhood into young adulthood. There were almost two decades of memories apiece regarding these young ladies.
And then the phone call came.
How are the parents going to cope with this devastating loss?
A twice-wounded Vietnam once told me the only way to survive an ambush is to fight your way through it, and I suppose this philosophy can be applied to just about any hardship, from beating an addiction to facing grief.
But then I look at the young faces on Page 1A of today's Beaumont Enterprise, and I wonder how I would handle it if it were one of my children's mugs out there.
All I know is that when I come home tonight, and my smiling, laughing boys come bouncing up to me and make me feel like I've hung the moon, I'm going to give them a big bear hug and tell them how much I love them.

More Fun In The Realty Rodeo

I've previously mentioned that my wife and I have recently contracted home-buying fever, an insidious, grass-is-greener-somewhere-else disease that has resulted in long drives and a series of disappointments, some of them with an element of hilarity.
There was the lunchtime jaunt to the hideous country house surrounded by swamp. There was the heartbreak over not being able to swing the trashed repo house that would have been a fantastic home and an even more fantastic investment. There was the overpriced house with the rubber tile floors, rickety upper deck, plethora of wasp nests and tragically conceived layout. The latest home-hunting debacle involved me taking a lunch hour last week, rounding up the family and making a 20-minute drive to what looked on the Internet to be a too-good-to-believe prospect. It appeared to have been on the market only a matter of hours.
We get there, and the proximity of a run-down trailer park immediately took this house off our table. Then, there was the large backyard pond, a fine place for breeding mosquitoes and family tragedies, and the frontyard dirt. An attempt to look in a front window was beaten back by menacing scouts from a hive of bees living somewhere inside a nearby wall.
And, after 30 minutes, we gave up hopes that the realtor would show up to give us a bee-free look at the inside. A subsequent phone call determined that the realtor had simply forgotten the appointment, made a day earlier.
Despite the home's shortcomings, it had a contract on it by the next day. It must have had a great personality.
So goes the Southeast Texas realty derby in these post-hurricane times, when people who lost their homes, whether rented or owned, seem to be on the prowl for fresh residential meat. I'm hearing stories of bidding wars, of properties being snatched off the market in stopwatch time.
It is, without question, a seller's market at this time.
The trouble for those playing the housing shell game is that no one really has to take a contingency, meaning they won't accept a contract based on prospective buyers' ability to sell their current digs. So those who own a house and are looking for something better, or maybe just different, are kind of stuck. Johnny McCheckbook is going to beat you to the offer table.
Folks like us can't buy a house without selling their current house, and yet selling the current house without a contract on a new home puts owners at risk of being homeless and having to either desperately settle on a less-than-desirable house or get into the even more vicious and competitive derby for rental property.
There's nothing like a crazy seller's market to take buyer's fever down a few degrees. I can feel the sweat already.

Rita Makes Top 10 On Hurricane Destruction List

The top story Sunday in The Enterprise noted that Hurricane Rita ranked No. 7 on the list of history's most destructive hurricanes.
Beth Gallaspy's report - using http://www.disasterinformation.org/disaster2/latest/10_Costliest/ as a source - confirmed what Southeast Texans have known all along: That Rita was a bad storm that did a lot of damage. More specifically, about $5 billion in insured losses alone.
Living in the shadow of Hurricane Katrina - clearly No. 1 with $38.1 billion in insured losses - has been almost as damaging, because the federal government, as well as the nation, still doesn't realize that Rita was terrible, worse than Floyd, Frances, Jeanne, Georges, Isabel, Fran, Opal and numerous other noteworthy storms.
While making the Top 10 list wasn't a shock, what was surprising was that Rita, while destructive, wasn't as strong here as we'd once thought. Winds at landfall were 115 mph, not into the 120s. Highest sustained winds in Beaumont were only 80 mph, far less than what we'd reported earlier, although there were gusts up over 100 mph.
Having sat in a lawn chair in the mouth of the Enterprise parking garage and watching Rita at her peak, I had the impression that she was blowing at around 120 mph. And she might have been - in downtown.
We've had the discussion around the newsroom many times regarding how the winds intensified as they criss-crossed and channeled through the buildings. We saw winds going east-west, north-south and, inexplicably, south-north.
At least we think we did. It was quite a maelstrom out there.
I often wonder what it was like for the handful of poor souls who unwisely chose to ride it out in their homes out there, in the symphony of howling winds and crashing trees. What we got here in downtown was pretty much all howling and no crashing, although the crumbling building facade across the street created some brief excitement.
I also often wonder what it was like for the hurricane veterans higher up on the destruction list, particularly with Hurricane Andrew, a Category 5 devastation machine that Katrina bumped to No. 2 on the list of costliness. Wilma, another storm in Katrina's shadow, was No. 3, with $8.4 billion in insured losses. I had no idea how bad Wilma was. Charley, Ivan and Hugo were the other storms ahead of Rita.
As far as intensity, Katrina was just a tad worse than Rita, but I shudder to think what would have happened had a Charley, a Category 4, or an Andrew, a Category 5, had hit here. I imagine emerging from the parking garage to a landscape of flattened trees and houses.
And lots of death.
As another hurricane season looms, and Rita six months behind us, it's still impossible to shake the images of what happened and what could happen if a bigger brute comes our way.

It Shouldn't Be Called The World Series Anymore

A team of some of the finest Major League Baseball players got bounced from the World Baseball Classic, raising questions about whether baseball still belongs beside hot dogs and apple pie in that old saying about what's American.
What's particularly astounding is that when Cuba and Japan take the field in San Diego to play for the World Baseball Classic title, they'll have a total of only two MLB players between them.
The U.S. team, with big-name hotshots such as Roger Clemens and Derek Jeter, fell to the likes of Canada, Mexico and South Korea. That had to hurt.
Like with the NBA following the 2004 Olympics, in which the men's team returned with only a bronze medal, U.S. professional baseball now finds itself in a position in which it might not be the world's best.
In summer 2004, Argentina took home the basketball gold, with Italy grabbing the silver. The United States - with Tim Duncan, Stephon Marbury and Allen Iverson on the court - lost to Puerto Rico (92-73), Lithuania (94-90) and Argentina (89-81).
Sure, the United States didn't have the best of its all stars on the team, but when a bunch of pasty-faced goobers from Krapzakistan can come along and beat a team of top-notch NBA players, maybe it's time to take a hard look at what we're doing over here in regard to fundamentals, teamwork and execution.
And we should not say the winner of the NBA is a world champion.
Likewise, we shouldn't call the Detroit White Sox world champions for their victory last year over the Houston Astros, not when the Sox haven't faced Japan, Cuba or even South Korea. They shouldn't even call the matchup The World Series. It's the U.S. Series, plain and simple, and the winner gets to go on to play in a world tournament, just like they've been doing with World Cup soccer, where the United States gets its fanny paddled.
As Americans, we'd like to think we're the best at just about everything, particularly two sports that were not only born here but have become an integral part of our culture.
But don't be surprised if the folks in Japan start saying that something is as Japanese as baseball, tsukemono and sweet potato mochi.

Preschooler Bracketology

We made big decisions this morning in the Pearson home. The intense discussion did not center on income taxes, the household budget or the children's education. It had nothing to do with emptying the dishwasher, taking out the trash or doing the laundry.
No, this morning my 4-year-old son, Curt, had some tough decisions to make for his bracket for the men's NCAA basketball tournament, which was just hours away from kicking off.
"West Virginia or Iowa?" I asked.
"WEFF VIRNINIA!!!!" Curt replied.
And on and on it went, one game at a time, with 64 teams from which to select.
I "helped" a bit with some of the first-round games, guiding him away from picking a No. 16 team over a No. 1 team, or even a No. 15 over a No. 2.
But the rest was pretty much up to him.
"Montana or Nevada?"
"MONTABANANA!!!!"
With the Doodlebops singing in the background, Curt stood in nothing but his underwear in the middle of the living room and called out his picks as I filled in his bracket.
"Seton Hall or Wichita State?"
"STHEETON RALL!!!!"
Each pick was followed by some kind of energetic decision dance, with Curt bouncing all around the room in celebration. I almost shed a tear when he picked Texas A&M over Syracuse in the first round, but he had my beloved Aggies losing to LSU in the second.
"Villanova or Wisconsin?"
"VILLASCONSIN!!!!!"
Boing. Boing. Boing. Boing.
"No, it's either Villanova OR Wisconsin."
"VANILLANOVA!!!!"
Curt then suddenly dashed into his bedroom and dragged out his little plastic basketball game, the one with little catapults that send little plastic balls through little plastic nets.
"Boston College or Ohio State?"
"OHIO STEAK!!!!!"
Boing. Boing. Boing. Boing.
We got down to his final four: LSU, Kansas, Tennessee and Ohio Steak.
"Tennessee or Ohio State?"
"TENNETHEEE!!!"
Boing. Boing. Boing. Boing.
"LSU or Kansas?"
"KANTHAS!!!!"
Boing. Boing. Boing. Boing.
"OK, this is the last one. Who is going to win the whole thing? Kansas or Tennessee?"
"TENNETHEEE!!!! HOORAY!!!!! I DID IT!!!! HAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!"
Boing. Boing. Boing. Boing.
Curt had a bracket last year and did pretty well, but a risky pick early on took him out of contention in the pool of a dozen or so other brackets. He did, however, pick some upsets that no one else saw coming. I don't recall what they were.
For some reaon, Curt has always loved basketball, or "baskeetball" as he calls it.
The kid who can't sit still for more than 0.0001 seconds sometimes will watch a whole basketball game without moving.
I'm not too confident in his Tennessee pick this year, but as crazy as the NCAA tournament is, just about anything can happen.
And if Tennessee does happen to win, my wife and I might need to start thinking about moving to Las Vegas.

County Misses Golden Election Opportunity

The disastrous election night March 7 for Jefferson County resonated into this week with the discovery of a gigantic error in how the electronically-cast votes were counted. Some votes were counted twice last week, so a recount was held Monday.
The outcome was the same, and ES&S, the company that sold the county the machines, will foot the recount bill.
However, the debacle exposed a lack of preparedness for the transition from paper ballots - and those potential hanging chads - to touch-screen voting. It also underscored the old adage about how practice makes perfect.
What Jefferson County should have done was have a small-scale practice election. It should have set up a few touch-screen machines in the courthouse and let anyone and everyone, whether it be an unregistered voter with a felony record or a drooling baby, come by for a test vote.
The ballot items could have helped unofficially decide all kinds of lingering issues, such as who would win in a fight between Batman and Spiderman, whether Crawdad Disney should be built next to Ford Park, paper versus plastic, frying pan versus fire, the 1985-86 Chicago Bears versus the 1972-73 Miami Dolphins, Ford versus Chevy, Ali versus Tyson, toilet paper roll installed with the loose end coming over the top or hanging down the back, etc. We could have put all the perennial local candidates, the ones who are lucky to get 0.000001 percent of the vote, in one big race to decide which one was the most popular.
We could have elected Donald Duck as U.S. president.
Yes, the county missed a ripe opportunity here to test its system and do so in a humorous way that could have solved age-old questions.
After all, if anyone could decide whether the chicken or the egg came first, it would be the wise and resilient folks of Jefferson County.

Living In A Fantasy World

Long before reality television became so popular, people started playing "fantasy" sports. The idea, in general, is to draft a team of real players and then pit your players against some other guy or gal's players.
I'm not sure how it all started. Maybe the headwaters started in the minds of young children and baseball cards, putting together all-star teams from their cards and pitting them against their friends' cards in a make-believe match for the ages.
According to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fantasy_football_(American) , the first fantasy football league started in 1962, years before there was a Super Bowl. The GOPPPL (Greater Oakland Professional Pigskin Prognosticators League), was born in the fall 1962, with the first draft in August 1963 in the Oakland basement of Wilfred Winkenbach, a limited partner of the Oakland Raiders. Another early pioneer of GOPPPL was Philip G. Carmona, a best friend of Winkenbach.
I started playing fantasy football in fall 1989, drafting a horrible team that lost every week but stimulated my interest to the point where I continue to play to this day, in several leagues ... and several sports. Some years I'm a big winner, and other years my players let me down.
I wouldn't call it as much an addiction as a hobby. Plus, when you have a personal interest in a game, it makes watching the games and reading the statistics all that much more interesting.
Fantasy football essentially works like this: There are typically between eight and 16 team owners. I personally prefer 12.
The owners hold a draft, either via the Internet or in person, at a home or a bar or wherever. After picking a draft order, you pick NFL players, focusing on quarterbacks, running backs and wide receivers. You also pick a kicker and a defense. More complicated leagues get into picking individual defense players.
So now you've got a team of between 16 and 20 players. Every week, before the games start, you pick a starting lineup, which in most leagues is 1 quarterback, two running backs, three wide receivers, a kicker and a defense. Your team goes head-to-head with another team in your league, and the winner is the one who scores the most points on the statistical grid iron. Generally, quarterbacks get 1 point for 25 passing yards and 4 points for a passing touchdown. Running backs and wide receivers get 1 point per 10 yards rushing/receiving and 6 points for a touchdown.
There are all kinds of other details, but I won't go into that.
Having a fantasy team makes Sunday afternoons in the fall so much more exciting. Sure, you love the Dallas Cowboys and all, but you love watching even more when Drew Bledsoe, your fantasy quarterback, chunks a 50-yard touchdown pass. That's 6 points for you!
But, alas, the fantasy football season only lasts for four months, so where can you get your fantasy sports fix?
Well, there's fantasy NBA basketball, fantasy baseball, fantasy NASCAR, fantasy soccer, fantasy hockey and fantasy tennis, to name a few. If there is a sport, there is likely a fantasy league for it out there somewhere. Some play for money. Some play for free.
My wife and I play fantasy "Survivor" and fantasy "The Bachelor." We draft characters on the shows, and whoever has the final "Survivor" or the person who gets the final rose wins a free dinner. Yeah, it's silly, but it adds a new dimension, particularly when your dimensions in life are limited by having a couple of young critters running around the house and refusing to go to bed.
The Internet has not only fueled the popularity of fantasy sports but become a multi-billion-dollar business. Just plug "fantasy football" into a search engine and see how huge it is. I just plugged it into Google and found 59.5 million references.
Yahoo offers all kinds of free fantasy leagues in several sports. You can play in a public league or join/start a private one. Right now, I'm playing fantasy golf and drafting a fantasy baseball team. Playing doesn't take much time. Just a few minutes to set up a starting lineup, in fact. Soon, after the baseball season starts, part of my morning will be spent pouring over the previous day's statistics as I shovel cereal into my mouth.
After all, isn't baseball all about the statistics anyway?
But all this fantasy stuff can go a lot further.
How about some fantasy stock market: http://www.simustock.com
You get a fantasy $100,000 to play with and can put it into real stocks. If you lose all your money, you can just start anew with a fresh $100,000. You can play alone or, of course, join a league and indulge in some friendly greed competition with others. Right now, I'm down about $5,000.
Meanwhile, I've developed lasting friendships with people whom I've met on a fantasy football forum. In fact, when my wife and kids fled as Hurricane Rita approached, they took shelter in a fantasy-football friend's home in DeRidder, La. Then there is the woman and man who hooked up at the fantasy football forum and are now living together. I've never met them, but if I were in their neck of the woods up there on the East Coast, I'd go out of my way to visit.
The old saying goes that nothing is certain but death and taxes.
I've never heard of a fantasy income tax league, but, you guessed it, there are fantasy death leagues, or "ghoul pools," as some people call them. Here's an example: http://www.racetothegrave.net/dlist.html
How it works is that sometime in January, competitors pick a list of 10 or so people for their ghoul pool. As the year wears on, competitors get points if someone on their list dies. Points usually are based on how many years the listed person is away from 100 years old.
Sure, it's sick, but like a young boy fantasizing about being his favorite football or baseball hero, gallows humor and laughing in the face of death is just another wacky aspect of human nature.

Antibiotic Misuse Will Be The Death Of Us All

It started with a tingle in the nasal passages and throat and then moved on into the lungs before evolving into uncontrollable coughing fits and then a fever that spiked at 102.3 degrees.
The process took a couple of weeks, following my son's bought with bronchitis, but by mid-morning yesterday, I realized that this ailment in my system was just going to get worse.
I soldier through the early part of the day and then raced over to the clinic after taking my temperature, scoring an impressive 102.
An hour or so later, I emerged from the doctor visit with some heavy-duty antibiotics, a sore butt and a diagnosis of some nasty bronchitis.
However, within hours after the poked my behind with the alarmingly sized Cajun spice injector-sized syringe, delivering what the doctor called one of the most powerful antibiotics ever invented, I felt incrementally better as the evening progressed and even entertained the idea of a glass of wine. I ultimately opted for another big cup of water mixed with a little lemon juice, apple juice and Pediatlyte. (Try it sometime. It's pretty good!)
Today, I'm back at my desk, feeling about 98 percent and ready to take my wife out to dinner for some Mexican food.
Nevertheless, the antibiotic administration got me to thinking, and worrying, about our increasing inability to fight off bacterial infections. Stories abound about the ever-increasing bacterial strains out there.
Scientists work like crazy to stay ahead of the wave, but some day, something is going along and pose a threat to all of humanity, some superbacteria for which there is no cure.
The first antibiotic, penicillin, was discovered in 1929. Here is the story, according to http://helios.bto.ed.ac.uk/bto/microbes/penicill.htm :

"The antibacterial effect of penicillin was discovered by Alexander Fleming in 1929. He noted that a fungal colony had grown as a contaminant on an agar plate streaked with the bacterium Staphylococcus aureus, and that the bacterial colonies around the fungus were transparent, because their cells were lysing. Fleming had devoted much of his career to finding methods for treating wound infections, and immediately recognised the importance of a fungal metabolite that might be used to control bacteria. The substance was named penicillin, because the fungal contaminant was identified as Penicillium notatum. Fleming found that it was effective against many Gram positive bacteria in laboratory conditions, and he even used locally applied, crude preparations of this substance, from culture filtrates, to control eye infections. However, he could not purify this compound because of its instability, and it was not until the period of the Second World War (1939-1945) that two other British scientists, Florey and Chain, working in the USA, managed to produce the antibiotic on an industrial scale for widespread use. All three scientists shared the Nobel Prize for this work, and rightly so - penicillin rapidly became the "wonder drug" which saved literally millions of lives."

We've come along way since penicillin's discovery, and while antibiotics have been a blessing for millions, perhaps just about everyone on this whole planet, they've also become a possible means to our demise as a species on Earth.
Why?
Well, a few simple reasons, according to various medical accounts I've read over the years.
For starters, bacteria naturally mutates to survive, proliferate and become more effective. Like all things in nature, microscopic things evolve.
Second of all, doctors overprescribe antibiotics, plain and simple. They look in a patient's throat, see some red or something back there and prescribe a pill. Often, thanks to the litigious nature of society, the pills are prescribed for the sole purpose of reducing a medical professional's liability.
Also, and this could be the worst one, people don't take their medicine.
Imagine a bacterial illness to be something like this:

x x x x x X x x x x x x X x x x x x x x x x

OK, so you go to the doctor, and you get a diagnosis of some kind of bacterial infection, such as bronchitis, strep throat, sinus infection, etc.
You get some antibiotics, which you're supposed to take for 10 days, but after a couple of days, you're feeling 100 percent, so you blow off taking the medication.
Up until this point, the antibiotic has killed out the little x's, allowing you to feel a lot better, but it hasn't quite stomped out the big X's, or the more powerful, hard to kill platoons of the infection army. They don't exist in a number large enough to make you feel bad.
However, those big X's start multiplying, and a few even bigger, mutant X's emerge, and then you start feeling worse than ever. In effect, you've become an incubator for an even worse strain of infection, and it's going to take an even more powerful antibiotic to kill it off. Maybe you've passed it on to someone else, and if they don't take their medicine ...
Albeit an oversimplified explanation of what goes on, it paints a scary portrait of why antibiotics someday will become ineffective, thereby threatening civilization as we know it.
So, for the sake of humanity, the next time the doctor prescribes you an antibiotic, by all means save help save the planet by following the instructions!

Cascade of Cartoon Comments Continues

The Beaumont Enterprise story Tuesday on Page 1A about the resident John Caffery and his free-speech yard sign regarding the Muslim-themed cartoons continues to draw an avalanche of reader comments.
Reporter F.A. Krift has received a steady stream of e-mails about Caffery and his West End sign. (See yesterday's blog entry for more information.) What's interesting is where they're coming from: Wisconsin, Colorado and elsewhere. Krift theorized that the story has been posted on ultraconservative web sites throughout the land.
Here are the reader comments (spelling errors and all):

From Denver:

"From the article you give this sentence:

'He said newspapers were not giving the public all of the information they needed to understand."

As this story is about a sign, and your newspaper has not provided an image of the sign, the very heart of the story, would you agree with Mr Caffery that your newpaper has failed to provide the information necessary for the public to make their own decision about the sign?"

From Tennessee:

"I say more power to John Caffery and his postings of the cartoons. I cannot understand why people, especially the media, want to bow down and quiver everytime a muslim says something. They are taking over the world one whine at a time because of gutless wonders in DC and around the world. People losing their jobs for having the audacity to tell the truth about them, insane. The whole Islam situation is because a bunch of uneducated, or cowards, have bought into the myths being spread by muslims. I have lived among them and Islam is not a religion of peace, the Koran instructs them to kill everyone not a muslim, they want world domination regardless of the number of people they have to kill to get there. They declare this crap in their papers, motos and charters, so, to buy into the peace idiocy, one must be on the verge of total insanity.

I wonder how many times Iman Muhammad Humayun has complained about the things muslims print derogatory to the Christians on a daily basis. Has he spoken to CAIR, a supporter of terrorism, about their blackmail and coercion practices? You see, if he, and muslims around the world, were a peaceful people and against what the terrorist are doing, they would stand up and the terrorist could not survive because they would have no place to hide. They are cowards, everyone. If they are so proud of Muhammad and willing to die for their cause why do they hide their faces? Only cowards hide behind something and only supporters sit quietly by as they wreak their havoc. Yep, the media has refused to do their jobs when it comes to Islam."

From North Carolina:

As a retired Marine who spent twenty years supporting and defending the rights recognized in our Constitution, I have to emphatically support the man who put up the cartoon on a sign. I too, am more than a little miffed about the public reaction to these cartoons. Somehow the "offended" seem to have missed the last thirty years of Islamic terrorists doing violence to people with a different opinion than they have, and they have systematically defended their actions, which include rape, murder, burning the victims and detonating bombs in the midst of mothers and children along with every other person who might be at their bombing destination, defended these actions as being fully in keeping with the principles of Islam and the teachings of Mohammad. If what the terrorist do is right according to the Koran and the hadiths, then any reasonable person would have to conclude that were Mohammad here in the world today, he would also be advocating terrorism, and whether he personally donned a bomb and blew people up, or was the hypocrite that the imams who call upon the people to commit such acts, yet abstain from their own suicide, he would in fact act as the cartoons suggest.
The biggest problem for Muslims with regard to these cartoons is the fact that they accurately portray Islam in its current form in this world we live in today. Islamic fascism will cease immediately as soon as the "peace-loving Muslims" make it plain they will not tolerate their religion being used to excuse murder. Until that day comes, the cartoons are far less inflammatory than the daily murders that are done in the name of Islam all over the world.
If Imam Muhammad Humayun wants the cartoons to go away, all he has to do is lead the "peaceful revolution" of the Muslims who don't believe that violence is the way to subject the whole world to Islam. I don't think that's going to happen, and in the mean time it is of vital importance that the real image of today's Islam be kept in the public eye every hour of every day, they are the enemy and they have made their proclamations of controlling the world under an Islamic Caliphate. It's much easier to take over the world if you don't let them know your purpose, these cartoons only cause anger because they expose the truth about Islam, it is a murderous, unabashed religion of war and conquest which has declared its self superior to every other form of religion in the world, and has declared every person not Muslim to be "infidels" which makes all of us legitimate targets for death in keeping with the traditions of the "prophet Mohammad".

Tomorrow, reporter Krift is going to attend a meeting between Caffery and representatives of the local Muslim community.
This ought to be interesting!