She’s a broadcast and publishing legend. She’s battled political correctness for years. Tonight, the incomparable Dr. Laura announced that she’s ending her daily radio talk show — in order to allow her to speak her mind more freely.

More power to her.

Via E News:

The longtime AM radio fixture says that she will pull the plug on The Dr. Laura Program at the end of the year, a week after repeatedly using the N-word while taking a call on the air from a black woman who wanted to discuss her interracial marriage.

The made the announcement during an appearance on Larry King Live.

Here’s her rationale:

“My contract is up for my radio show at the end of the year and I’ve made the decision not to do radio anymore,” Schlessinger told King, who also happens to be on his way out this year (for less incendiary reasons).

“The reason is I want to regain my First Amendment rights. I want to be able to say what’s on my mind and in my heart and what I think is helpful and useful without somebody getting angry, some special interest group deciding this is the time to silence a voice of dissent and attack affiliates, attack sponsors. I’m sort of done with that.”

She’s not retiring or quitting, she added, but rather, hopes to be “stronger and freer to say the things that I believe need to be said for people in this country.”

WaPo’s story is here.

Look forward to seeing and hearing more of her.

Go to her site and show your support at DrLaura.com.

***

RadioEqualizer Brian Maloney wonders who’s next.

Enter lefty blogger and militant Trekkie “Spocko”, who’s on a crusade of recording and transcripting snippets from KSFO’s local shows. He then sent letters to KSFO’s sponsors, asking them to drop their support for KSFO’s programming. As Newsbusters’ Noel Sheppard ably documents, many of these letters were dishonest, took quotes way out of context, or were just totally dumb. Especially the “Chevy/ sh**y” thing–I’m listening to KSFO’s defense here, and you can hear it for yourself about 16:30 in the first hour of the streaming audio.

Furthermore, according to Sheppard, it also looks like Air America’s contributors are getting involved in promoting this controversy. Remember pushy, combative blowhard Mike Stark from the Allen campaign trail? He’s still around and playing ringmaster to this circus.

But.

KSFO’s not in the clear here. Newsbusters does some good work, but Noel Sheppard’s defense of KSFO doesn’t exactly fill me with goodwill toward them.

First, they sent a letter to Spocko’s ISP and got his audio clips of KSFO shows taken down. I don’t know the extent of the Fair-Use issues there, and they may have been within their rights to do so, but that’s a pretty ham-handed move for KSFO to make. One that will alienate a lot of bloggers who might be inclined to cut them some slack.

But more important is the thing that started it all. Spocko’s first letter to AT&T said this ( The [sic]s are Sheppard’s:):

Thanks to radio hosts from KSFO your brand is being associated with torturing and killing people. Would your marketing people be happy to hear your commercial ran after Lee Rogers [sic] said this about a black man in Lincoln, Nebraska?
“Now you start with the Sear’s [sic] Diehard [sic] the battery cables connected to his testi*les and you entertain him with that for awhile [sic] and then you blow his bleeping head off. ” [sic] (Audio link)
You should know the person calling for the execution and torture of the black man in that clip READS THE AT&T commercials on the air. Right now on KSFO Lee Rogers [sic] is THE VOICE of AT&T to the SF Bay area.

Sheppard notes–correctly–that KSFO’s broadcast made absolutely no reference to the race of the criminal, and Rogers (on the audio stream) says he still doesn’t know the guy’s race. But then Sheppard tries to offer a little more context for the incident in Spocko’s letter, and the context is not particularly mitigating. To read that, you’ll need to go into the extended entry:

Here’s some of Sheppard’s transcript of KSFO’s Lee Rodgers and Melanie Morgan, who note a Nebraska man has been arrested for the 236th time, this time for breaking into a car.

Rodgers: Better yet, put a bullet between his eyes and get it over because he’s never going to be worth a damn, never going to be anything but a criminal anyway.

Morgan: Well, that’s a bit of a harsh judgment, Lee.

Rodgers: No it isn’t, no it isn’t. No, it’s only common sense. What does the guy do? He’s demonstrated two hundred some odd times where he’s been caught. This doesn’t even count all the times he’s gotten away with crimes. So what the hell is the point of letting some creep like this live? What is the point? Now you start with the Sears DieHard, the battery cables connected to his testicles, and you entertain him with that for a while, and then you blow his bleeping head off. Thank you very much.

Morgan: That’s what I like about you. You’re so temperate.

Sheppard thinks this proves something:

It’s a bit different when you find out that Rodgers and Morgan were discussing a felon that had been arrested 236 times, and were thereby using the Sears DieHard image to mock the justice and penal systems for his continued presence on the streets. Wouldn’t you agree?

Um, no. No, I most definitely wouldn’t. I don’t care if the guy had two thousand felonies, I don’t want the state shooting people for property crimes. Battery cables on the testicles and summary executions may be cool within the Mahdi army or Chi-Com dungeons, but not here in America. There’s nothing conservative about that sadistic, statist fantasy and as a conservative myself I don’t like being associated with it.

Talk radio is hard work and if you stand in front of a mike for a few hours each day talking politics, you’re eventually going to say something stupid. In this case, that’s exactly what the KSFO hosts did. I was discussing this with co-guest-blogger Mary Katharine Ham, who pointed out that gaffes like this “Just give[] liberals a foothold, which is then turned into a freakin’ ladder by the MSM, if you follow my metaphor.” That’s exactly what “Spocko” and the Left are trying to do with this issue. As I understand the controversy, it’s the single legitimate peg all the rest of this trumped-up stuff hangs on. While the sinistropheric poop-storm is typically overwrought and more than a little dishonest, KSFO ought to come up with an apology for that remark.

Although at 54 minutes into the audio stream linked above, they say anyone expecting an apology is “gonna have a loooong wait”. I doubt their sponsors and supporters will be willing to wait that long.

Last October, I blogged about a Danish newspaper, Jyllands-Posten, and its cartoonists being threatened by Muslim extremists for publishing cartoons about the prophet Muhammad deemed offensive by Islamist p.c. bulllies. See here and here.

For the past four months, The Brussels Journal has relentlessly covered the ensuing uproar from the Muslim world and the battle over the newspaper’s freedom to publish provocative speech.

Things came to a head over the past week. In Gaza City, Palestinian gunmen took over an EU office to protest the cartoons:

Masked gunmen today took over an office used by the European Union to protest the publication of cartoons deemed insulting to Islam. About five gunmen stormed the building, closing the office down, while 10 other armed men stood watch outside. One of the militants said they were protesting the drawings, one of which depicted Islam’s Prophet Muhammad wearing a turban shaped as a bomb.

Danish flags are being burned. Danish workers have reportedly been beaten. The country now faces an international boycott from Muslim nations.

While the intrepid newspaper has not apologized for printing the cartoons, it has issued a statement acknowledging that the cartoons “offended many Muslims, which we would like to apologize for.” Paul Belien at The Brussels Journal singles out the courage of Danish Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen, who has refused to capitulate to the bullies:

He is one of the very few European politicians with guts. If anyone deserves a prize for his valiant defence of freedom of speech and freedom of the press, it is certainly Mr Rasmussen. He did not give in to pressure from Muslim fanatics, nor from the appeasers at the UN, the European Commission and the Council of Europe. In the past weeks Denmark has shown that all is not yet lost in Europe. If something is rotten now it is not in Denmark.

Here, for posterity and in solidarity with the paper’s free speech rights, are the 12 forbidden cartoons:

In response to the notion that the West (or Islam) has ever followed the prohibition against depicting Mohammed, Zombie has created the “Mohammed Image Archive,” which contains dozens of Mohammed images from throughout history. A must-read.

Zombie e-mails:

I think it’s important that the West stands up on this issue: if we cave into Muslim demands for self-censorship, our freedom of speech will be taken away forever.

Exactly right. And for those who think this isn’t affecting us, open your eyes:

Local Radio Skit Sparks Muslim Controversy (KFI radio host Bill Handel is fighting back.)
Criticizing Islam on the airwaves
CAIR’s war on conservative talk radio
Brian Maloney: Islamists 1, Talk Radio, 0
LGF: CAIR goes ballistic over B.C., Dr. Laura

***

There is now a Buy Danish campaign in response to Saudi Muslims boycotting Denmark’s products.

Butter cookies, here we come!

***

What did Bill Clinton have to say about the cartoon controversy? You won’t be surprised.

More at LGF.

***

Feedback:

Reader David S…

By threatening to kill those who insult them, the terrorists are
demonstrating the vicious reality behind the caricature of Mohammad
wearing a bomb-shaped turban better than any cartoonist ever could.

Reader Mike W…

Buy Legos. Lots and lots of Legos. Especially the Mindstorm programmable robotics kits. Danish company and non-fattening.

Reader Fritz R…

The utter hypocrisy is that Muslim countries regularly lampoon Christians and Jews in their comics while demanding the west refrain from any criticism of Islam.

***

Feb. 8, 2006 update:

All posts to date:

Video: Breaking the taboo
The Muhammed Cartoons blogburst under attack
We are in this together
Origins of a fake Muhammed cartoon
Iran is burning
The Danish cartoonists respond
Cartoon jihad: the map
Mara-l equivalence
So, will our Supreme Court be next?
Pakistani doctors: No more European medicine
Chechnya joins the Cartoon Jihad
“With our blood we will redeem the prophet”
He shouted “Allah Akbar”
Stupid Islamist stunts
Video: Cartoon Jihad debate on Fox News
The lies of the Danish imams
Fanning the flames
Standing up in Australia
What does the American left have to say?
Another day, another embassy torched
It is not a “row”
Video: And then they came for the embassies
First, they came: the movie
Don’t forget: Buy Danish
In their own words
The Muhammad Cartoons blogburst
The State Dept takes sides in the cartoon wars
Followers of the Religion of Peace
bin Laden as Christ
The “International Day of Anger”
The cowardly American media (video added)
Support Denmark…and Piglet!
In search of a brave American newspaper (updated)
First, they came for the cartoonists
Fight the bullies of Islam
Support Denmark: Why the forbidden cartoons matter
The cartoons Islamists don’t want you to see
The forbidden cartoons

Alternative spellings to help those searching for this thread with a search engine: Mohammad, Mohammed, Muhammad, Muhammed

I take no pleasure in saying it. It pains me to think it. I could very well lose my job in talk radio over admitting it. But it is the plain truth:

Islam is a terror organization.

For years, I’ve been trying to give the world’s Muslim community the benefit of the doubt, along with the benefit of my typical-American’s complete disinterest in their faith. Before 9/11, I knew nothing about Islam except the greeting “asalaam alaikum,” taught to me by a Pakistani friend in Chicago.

Immediately after 9/11, I nodded in ignorant agreement as President Bush assured me that “Islam is a religion of peace.”

But nearly four years later, nobody can defend that statement. And I mean “nobody.”

Certainly not the group of “moderate” Muslim clerics and imams who gathered in London last week to issue a statement on terrorism and their faith. When asked the question “Are suicide bombings always a violation of Islam,” they could not answer “Yes. Always.” Instead, these “moderate British Muslims” had to answer “It depends.”

Precisely what it depends on, news reports did not say. Sadly, given our new knowledge of Islam from the past four years, it probably depends on whether or not you’re killing Jews.

That is part of the state of modern Islam.

Another fact about the state of Islam is that a majority of Muslims in countries like Jordan continue to believe that suicide bombings are legitimate. Still another is the poll reported by a left-leaning British paper than only 73 percent of British Muslims would tell police if they knew about a planned terrorist attack.

The other 27 percent? They are a part of modern Islam, too.

The Council on American-Islamic Relations is outraged that I would dare to connect the worldwide epidemic of terrorism with Islam. They put it down to bigotry, asserting that a lifetime of disinterest in Islam has suddenly become blind hatred. They couldn’t be more wrong.

Not to be mean to the folks at CAIR, but I don’t: Care, that is. I simply don’t care about Islam, its theology, its history — I have no interest in it at all. All I care about is not getting blown to smithereens when I board a bus or ride a plane. I care about living in a world where terrorism and murder/suicide bombings are rejected by all.

And the reason Islam has itself become a terrorist organization is that it cannot address its own role in this violence. It cannot cast out the murderers from its members. I know it can’t, because “moderate” Muslim imams keep telling me they can’t. “We have no control over these radical young men,” one London imam moaned to the local papers.

Can’t kick ‘em out of your faith? Can’t excommunicate them? Apparently Islam does not allow it…

For the record, I do not consider all Muslims terrorists and would not call Islam a “terror organization.” But in his own clumsy way, Graham (like Tom Tancredo before him) raises fundamental issues that need to be tackled head on, and he is certainly not alone in raising them.

Steve Emerson over at The Counterterrorism Blog has a relevant, related post on the sham fatwa against terrorism issued by American Islamic leaders:

This morning a group of American Islamic leaders held a press conference to announce a fatwa, or Islamic religious ruling, against “terrorism and extremism.” An organization called the Fiqh Council of North America (FCNA) issued the fatwa, and the Council on American – Islamic Relations (CAIR) organized the press conference, stating that several major U.S. Muslim groups endorsed the fatwa.

In fact, the fatwa is bogus. Nowhere does it condemn the Islamic extremism ideology that has spawned Islamic terrorism. It does not renounce nor even acknowledge the existence of an Islamic jihadist culture that has permeated mosques and young Muslims around the world. It does not renounce Jihad let alone admit that it has been used to justify Islamic terrorist acts. It does not condemn by name any Islamic group or leader. In short, it is a fake fatwa designed merely to deceive the American public into believing that these groups are moderate. In fact, officials of both organizations have been directly linked to and associated with Islamic terrorist groups and Islamic extremist organizations. One of them is an unindicted co-conspirator in a current terrorist case; another previous member was a financier to Al-Qaeda.

See this related post at Robert Spencer’s Jihad Watch on a new column published in the London Spectator by Patrick Sookhdeo on the myth of moderate Islam. Sookhdeo points to the funeral for 7/7 London suicide bomber Shehzad Tanweer, who was hailed by Muslims as a “hero of Islam” while mourners shouted “Jihad Jihad Jihad!”

Little Green Footballs points to piece echoing Sookhdeo in the New York Sun today by Fiamma Nirenstein on “Muslim ‘moderates’ and terrorism.”

Also at The Counterterrorism Blog, Walid Phares takes on the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) for its continued failure to condemn al Qaeda and Jihadism.

Instead, CAIR’s relentless efforts and strongest condemnations are aimed at its critics–from Paul Harvey to Dr. Laura to Daniel Pipes and to several other conservative talk radio personalities. It was CAIR’s pressure campaign that led to Graham’s supension and ABC Radio’s cave-in (see Front Page Magazine for details). I just received an e-mail bulletin from CAIR crowing about the move. It begins:

In the Name of God, the Compassionate, the Merciful

DC RADIO HOST SUSPENDED OVER ANTI-ISLAM REMARKS
CAIR applauds WMAL’s move, says Graham should be fired

WMAL’s decision to change its mind (it backed Graham last week, but wilted under CAIR’s heat) will no doubt have a chilling effect on other ABC talk radio hosts and beyond–precisely CAIR’s agenda. JWR editor Binyamin Jolkovsky reports on the controversy here. Excerpt:

[A]s late as this week, a WMAL executive, Randall Bloomquist, told the Washington Post that despite CAIR’s protests about some of Graham’s on-air utterances, the station had no intention of reprimanding him. Describing Graham’s rhetoric as “amped up”, he said, according to the paper, it is justified within the context of the program.

“Remember that this is talk radio,” Bloomquist added. “We don’t do the dainty minuet of the newspaper editorial page. It’s not ‘Washington Week in Review.’ It depends on pungent statements to drive it. Michael is rattling the cage. It’s designed to start and further a conversation, and it has certainly done that.”

Okay, so why is he off the air?

***
Update: Readers are asking for WMAL contact info. Try feedback@630wmal.com.

Update II: E-mailers are getting messages bounced back when they use the above address. Try here.

Update III: Read Dr. Sanity.

The Institute is giving away its 2005 Great American Conservative Women Calendar to donors who contribute $25 or more. Online contributions can be made here. I am honored to be one of the conservative women featured in the calendar. It is quite a compliment to be included along with Condi Rice, Dr. Laura, Jeanne Kirkpatrick, Ann Coulter, Schlafly and, of course, Luce–who, as a male friend notes, “was quite the right-wing babe in her day.”