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Mere hours after officially declining to buy into the Borat franchise, Abu Dhabi's new billion-dollar film enterprise may soon rebuff yet another burgeoning cultural nemesis: Mickey Mouse. The magazine Israel Today reports this week that a Muslim cleric has issued a fatwa urging the murder of the Disney mascot, "whom he characterized as an agent of Satan sent to corrupt young minds." It's not just that his kids keep asking to watch Fantasia during Ramadan, either, but something far more fundamentally unsound:

Sheikh Mohammed Al-Munajid told Saudi Arabia's Al-Majd Television that his beef with Mickey is that he is a mouse, a creature that Islam sees as "repulsive and corrupting."

Al-Munajid explained that Islamic law refers to the mouse as "little corrupter" and a creature that is "steered by Satan," and grants permission to all Muslims to "kill [mice] in all cases." Therefore, according to Islamic law, insisted the sheikh, "Mickey Mouse should be killed."

The fatwa has since proven deeply divisive to Palestineans, who only last year were treated by Hamas to a powerful "Martyred Mickey" episode of the popular children's show Pioneers of Tomorrow — a crisis of allegorical politics that now stands to shatter the rodent relations so painstakingly advanced over the years. We pray for a swift, peaceful accord; it would be a shame to see Sarah Palin's foreign-policy skills wasted on such a trifle somewhere down the line.