There are just a few things you can count on in this world: The sun will rise in the east; nobody will ever sing better than Ray Charles and somebody will try to make a martyr out of that piece of camel dung that killed 13 innocent men and women at Fort Hood, Texas.

Nidal Malik Hasan, a Muslim and a major in the U.S. Army for reasons I will never understand, decided he didn’t want his pious posterior shipped to the Middle East where it might get shot off, so he decided to demur and a shoot a bunch of defenseless people instead. What a guy.

By the way, I have it on good authority that God doesn’t like anybody who shoots innocent people or blows up cars, buildings and little kids and will definitely not reward them with 42 virgins for their labors. Instead, they will get 42 crones who look like Barbra Streisand, plus a bag of pork rinds.

Muslims want it both ways. They want us to accept them and their customs but they don’t want to play by the same rules we do. It doesn’t help that our government, our media and our society cut them breaks the rest of us don’t get.

Remember the furor over the cartoons of Mohammed that appeared in Denmark and caused riots? To my knowledge, not one newspaper in the United States had the backbone to reprint the cartoons and let us see for ourselves what had the Muslims so upset. The media don’t mind showing flag-draped coffins of soldiers being returned from the battlefields. Why not a cartoon?

Certainly, there was no shortage of coverage of the photograph of the crucified Christ in a bottle of urine. In fact, the picture was a winner in the "Awards in the Visual Arts" competition, sponsored in part by the National Endowment for the Arts, a U.S. government agency. You remember the U.S. government, don’t you? That’s the wonderful folks who keep trying to appease Muslims.

Last year, publisher Random House pulled a novel "The Jewel of Medina," about the Prophet Mohammed’s child bride, fearing it could "incite acts of violence." There is no truth to the rumors that the chicken-livered publishers are seeking manuscripts for a book on freedom of expression.

And then there is the woman who showed up in a Douglas County courthouse this past December with a shawl on her head and was told to remove it by the bailiff for security reasons.

According to news reports, the woman with the scarf, or hijab for you naifs out there, had recently moved to Georgia from New Haven, Conn., and said the incident reminded her of all the bad things she’d heard about the South. "I just felt stripped of my civil, my human rights," she groused.

My crack research staff has been unable to determine if she was kidnapped and brought here against her free will or if she came voluntarily when she learned that the whole state of Connecticut has rusted and will soon fall down.

Oh, did I mention that the same news reports say she uttered an expletive as she left the courtroom? I’m not a legal analyst but I think uttering expletives in a courtroom is a no-no, whether you are sporting a hijab or a beanie with a propeller on top.

If I have to go to court I plan on wearing my Cochran Mill Nature Center cap with the grinning frog on the front and if a bailiff objects, I plan to go "pfft!" and tell him that a grinning frog is a redneck’s hijab. Let them try and figure that one out.

I assume most American Muslims decry the massacre at Fort Hood, but their condemnation of violence (a one-paragraph statement) rings a little hollow when compared to their vigorous condemnation of books they don’t like and mounting their high horses over hijabs.

My Muslim friends are caught between a rock and a hard place. But it is of their own doing. They want it both ways.