A hearing on Thursday will decide whether a set of controversial advertisements that refer to Muslims as “savages” will be posted in Washington, D.C.’s subway system. The injunction hearing comes following Pam Geller’s complaint that that the ads, funded by her American Freedom Defense Initiative, have been blocked by the Washington Metro Area Transit Authority (WMATA) system in violation of her freedom of speech.

The move to temporarily block the ads came in light of the current tensions around the world due to the infamous “Innocence of Muslims” video that sparked worldwide protests. WMATA Police Chief Michael Taborn in court documents asserted that he himself recommended the delay, after consultation with the Department of Homeland Security, due to the “unique target” the Metrorail system poses. Geller — who features prominent in CAP’s report last year on the Islamophobia network in the U.S. — said the delay “grows less timely and more absurd by the day.”

The American Freedom Law Center (AFLC) is representing Geller and claims on its website that “Sharia-adherent Islamists are waging a war against our Nation and its Judeo-Christian principles reflected in our Constitution.” Waging war on the non-existent Sharia threat seems to be the primary cause of the AFLC, as seen in this interview with the “Sharia Awareness Action Network”:

In their District Court filing to overturn WMATA’s delay, AFDI and the AFLC refer to “‘barbaric and uncivilized’ acts” by Muslims and accuses WMATA of being racist themselves:

[T]he WMATA apparently considers adherents to Islam to be violent and incapable of responding to critical, political speech in our country in a civilized manner. When the WMATA ran an advertisement critical of Israel, urging the United States to end its military aid to its long-time ally in the Middle East, there was no concern about violence and passenger safety. What message is the WMATA sending about Islam by restricting Plaintiffs’ core political speech? And what message will this court be sending if it affirms that position? Indeed, whether intentionally or not, the WMATA is essentially siding with the Muslim Brotherhood leader of Egypt, Mohamed Morsi, who condemns speech critical of Islam.

Geller’s attempts to turn the tables come in the face of concerted interfaith opposition to AFDI’s ad. The ads have already gone up in San Fransisco and New York City, where they’ve been the target of constant defacement, being labeled as “racist” and “hate speech.”

The University of Utah’s Hinckley Institute of Politics and the NGO Omid for Iran has concluded in a new report that bombing Iran’s nuclear facilities in an attempt to delay its nuclear progress would kill thousands of Iranians and severely injure tens or perhaps hundreds of thousands more.

The study assumed a “conservative” estimation that any attack would likely occur at four main Iranian nuclear sites — Isfahan, Natanz, Arak and Bushehr — and based on discussions with Iranian and Western experts, the report concludes:

[W]e have estimated the total number of people — scientists, workers, soldiers and support staff — at Iran’s four nuclear facilities to be between 7,000 and 11,000. It is highly likely that the casualty rate at the physical sites will be close to 100 percent. Assuming an average two-shift operation, between 3,500 and 5,500 people would be present at the time of the strikes, most of whom would be killed or injured as a result of the physical and thermal impact of the blasts. If one were to include casualties at other targets, one could extrapolate to other facilities, in which case the total number of people killed and injured could exceed 10,000.

The report, titled The Ayatollah’s Nuclear Gamble, added that “[t]ens, and quite possibly, hundreds of thousands of civilians could be exposed to highly toxic chemical plumes and, in the case of operational reactors, radioactive fallout.”

Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty’s Golnaz Esfandiari reports that while several experts said that the Bushehr site is not likely to be attacked (because it’s not of critical concern to the International Atomic Energy Agency) some say the report has filled a vacuum in the public discussion on whether war is necessary to delay Iran’s nuclear program.

“People talk very callously about the prospect of military strikes, and they frame it in the geopolitical fallout, the geo-economic fallout, what will happen to the oil price and all of these issues. But nobody has ever talked about the humanitarian consequences of a military strike on Iran,” said Afshin Molavi, an Iran expert at the New America Foundation.

The humanitarian fallout is just one of the many potential negative consequences of a military attack on Iran. At the same type, the Obama administration has said that it takes the threat of an Iran armed with a nuclear weapon seriously and has said it leaves no options off the table in preventing the Islamic Republican from acquiring one. These factors, coupled with U.N., U.S. and Israeli assessments that Iran has not yet decided on whether to build a nuclear weapon, leads the administration to pursue a diplomatic solution with Iran, a track the it deems the “best and most permanent way” to solve the nuclear crisis.

Former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld — famous for pushing the United States into a costly war in Iraq based on wildly false intelligence — criticized U.S. ambassador to the United Nations Susan Rice for being wrong about what caused the recent attack on the U.S. Consulate in Libya.

Rice had said that the anti-Islam video that sparked protests at the U.S. Embassy in Cairo was also the catalyst for the Libya attack, an assessment that the Obama administration soon after acknowledged was not correct.

Without any hint of irony, Rumsfeld said last night on Fox News that he was amazed that she could be so wrong, adding, that “has got to be embarrassing”:

RUMSFELD: I watched the presentation, and I thought it was amazing that someone in her position would go on with that degree of certainty, that fast and that authoritatively and be that wrong.

VAN SUSTEREN: Do you think she was perhaps hung out to dry? Because I thought it was unusual that the ambassador of the U.N. would be making that appearance right after that event. I would have expected some other member of the administration, not the ambassador to the U.N.

RUMSFELD: I agree. It would have been more likely that someone from the cabinet or the White House staff or the NSC staff might have said something. It may very well be that she was already scheduled and they just used her. But her — her presentation was demonstrated to be inaccurate within a matter of hours, which has got to be embarrassing.

Watch the clip:

The war in Iraq did come up later in the segment, however, Rumsfeld never expressed any embarrassment about how wrong he was about it. “I think that each country is considerably better off by not having the Taliban in Afghanistan and not having the “butcher of Baghdad,” Saddam Hussein, in Iraq,” he said. “The countries have been given an opportunity to have a freer political system and a freer economic system.”