Last night, before I went to bed I checked out the Pravda of bloggers, Instapundit.com. Glenn Reynolds had noted that the Council on American-Islamic Relations had one of those little Web polls up. The question: Should Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon be tried for war crimes?

Glenn suggested that his readers may want to make sure that their voices were heard on the issue. At the time Reynolds posted the item, at 10:48 p.m. EDT., there were 531 total votes, 94 percent of them for trying Sharon for war crimes. About three hours later I visited the CAIR site and registered my vote. At that time there were over 10,000 total votes and the tide had turned, with 94 percent against trying Sharon.

Earlier this morning, with the poll going the way that CAIR obviously didn't expect, they pulled it from their Web site.

CAIR is investigating several nefarious attempts by users trying to manipulate the votes. Thank you for your patience while we isolate and correct the problem.

Please be advised that such systems that help in weighing public opinion should not be misused.

Reynolds has posted before that he gets more than 30,000 page views on an average day, and lots of them are other bloggers like myself. I'm sure that news of this spread like wildfire and it wouldn't surprise me if all of the votes were valid votes. CAIR suggests some nefarious plot, but really they just wanted to attack Sharon and Israel, and were frustrated when public opinion went against them.

Jonathan Last over at The Weekly Standard is quick to analyze the CAIR poll fiasco.

No matter which one is true--my guess is neither--their response is preposterous. No one who wants to "weigh public opinion" uses a website poll. At best, these polls are like parlor games--a way for the regular devotees of a site to get to know one another better, at worst they are tools for demagoguing--something CAIR is expert at. In fact CAIR has an entire section of their website devoted to "Action Alerts" where they inform their viewers to mass e-mail people who say things they find objectionable. They give out e-mail addresses and telephone numbers and encourage people to swamp elected officials and members of the media.

In its mission statement CAIR says that they are "dedicated to presenting an Islamic perspective on issues of importance to the American public." And with their little poll fiasco, they've certainly given us all a lesson in the "Islamic perspective."

Like Yasser Arafat, the folks at CAIR are happy to bully others with loud protests against discrimination and humiliations. Like the Saudis, they're intolerant of dissenting viewpoints. Like the Taliban, they're willing to create an "official" version of the truth to bury opinions and beliefs they don't like. And just like the Arab Muslims who believe the Mossad was behind September 11, they're nestled deep in conspiracy theories.

The Islamic perspective indeed.

Well, I think everyone knew that CAIR was a joke before. They're just more of a joke now.