NATO front-runner might offend muslims say analysts

Ah for crying out loud! Is there anything we can do without first checking to see if it's ok with the muslim world?

But should we even be listening to "analysts" who hail from the land of the muslims. Screw 'em, put Rasmussen with Geert Wilders as co-chair of NATO, change the NATO logo to the motoon.

To hell with muslim sensibilities, what about the sensibilities of the West? Do you think the terrorists ask themselves if they might hurting Western sensibilities by calling us the most vile of creatures?Canada.com

PARIS — The U.S. and its top European allies will offend the Muslim world by choosing Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen of Denmark as the new political head of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, two analysts said Monday.

A Rasmussen appointment will be viewed negatively in Muslim countries like Pakistan and Afghanistan, where NATO is in a bloody struggle to win hearts and minds, due to his allegedly insensitive reaction to the 2005 cartoons in a Danish publication that mocked the Prophet Muhammad, they said.

Rasmussen criticized attacks on minority religious groups but strongly defended press freedom and refused to see 10 ambassadors from countries with large Muslim populations who asked to see him.

"Denmark has got a very poor relationship with the Muslim world, and that has been very detrimental," said Ahmed Rashid, the widely-quoted Pakistani author of a scathing book on U.S. policy called Descent into Chaos: The United States and the Failure of Nation Building in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Central Asia.