CUANAS: 07/01/2005 - 08/01/2005

Sunday, July 31, 2005

A New Front In The War On Terror?

From the Financial Times, via Belgravia Dispatch:

The US is working with Britain and France to undermine the appeal of Muslim extremism by reaching out to moderate groups, in a sign that its counter-terrorism strategy is moving beyond the “war on terror”.

US and European officials say the Bush administration's review--expected to lead to a formal declaration of a new national strategy--represents not just a shift to a more multilateralist approach towards foreign policy but also an important development in thinking away from the emphasis on the military.

Already a shift in language has emerged that reflects the new approach. GWOT “the global war on terror” is being replaced in pronouncements by senior US officials by SAVE: the “struggle [or some say “strategy”] against violent extremism”.

Philip Zelikow, special adviser to Condoleezza Rice, secretary of state, is leading the effort at the head of a 10-member US committee. Talks began in London and Paris in June with the blessing of the White House.

Mr Zelikow's goal, according to a US official who asked not to be named, was to “develop and implement a comprehensive strategy to discredit and demystify extremists' ideology and promote moderate Islamic voices”.

We've known from the beginning that the War on Terror has poltical, ideological and diplomatic fronts, as well as military fronts. So, this is not a surprise. However, it seems some are surprised by the new moves being made by the Bush Administration.

The truth is, we've been using behind-the-scenes diplomacy with countries such as Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Egypt, France, Italy, England, etc. since the beginning of the war. We've shared intelligence, helped with extraditions, and consulted on security tactics. Are those military in nature? No.

The only thing that is new about this is that Europe is finally beginning to get serious about Islamofascism, so when we come to them with an initiative, it seems important all of the sudden.

The other thing is, had we moved to begin to forge ties with Islamic "moderates" any sooner, we would not have had nearly the success we will probably have at this stage. It is becoming clear, now, that Muslims are starting to worry that they will become ostracized, if they don't begin to help out.

Palestinian Summer Camp For Boys

A Palestinian boy learns important
lessons of "respect" at Hamas Summer Camp

From the San Francisco Chronicle, via Little Green Footballs:

Seventeen-year-old Osama Abu Asi knows what Hamas stands for: swimming lessons, horseback riding, potato sack races and other summertime fun -- including religious education and paramilitary training.

This is summer camp in the Gaza Strip, as organized by Harakat al-Moqawama al-Islamiyah, the Islamic Resistance Movement, better known as Hamas -- which is officially regarded by the United States and many other countries as a terrorist organization that has killed hundreds of Israelis.

"In this camp we learn the important things of life -- good behavior, respect," said Osama, who was spending the summer at a Hamas-run camp on the beach outside Gaza City.

They also learn how to sing "intifada songs," including one urging them to "kill Zionists wherever they are, in the name of God."

At one beach camp, attended by approximately 100 kids, an instructor wore a heavy flannel shirt under which a webbed belt could be seen strapped to his stomach. Asked by a reporter what it was, he answered, with a broad smile, “Boom!”

The instructor led a group of young teenagers through marching drills on the sand — facing movements, close quarter drill. With a smile at the reporter, he put a megaphone to his lips.

“What are you?” he called.

“Monsters!” the kids replied.

“What are you?!”

“MONSTERS!”

As the instructor, Sa’eb Dormush, stepped aside for an interview, a youth in the group shouted out “moqawama!” — resistance.

“That is the first word they learn when they are born,” Dormush said with a laugh. “This is the next generation.”

Across camp, a group of younger children — most between 10 and 12 — sat in a circle in the sand singing one of the “intifada songs” they learn at camp. One boy sang verses in a rolling soprano as the others joined in on the one-word chorus.

“We don’t want to sleep.

HA-A-MAS!

We want revenge.

HA-A-MAS!

Raise it up.

HA-A-MAS!

Rifle fire.

HA-A-MAS!

If it will take a thousand martyrs.

HA-A-MAS!

Kill Zionists.

HA-A-MAS!

Wherever they are.

HA-A-MAS!

In the name of God.

HA-A-MAS!”

Looks like people at the Islamic Society of Britain website are trying to do the same thing. From the London Independent, via Jihad Watch:

Children as young as 11 are being targeted by radical Muslims who appear to have infiltrated a mainstream Muslim website, The Independent on Sunday can reveal. Literature aimed at children between 11 and 18 on the youth section of the Islamic Society of Britain (ISB) website calls on them to "boycott those who openly wage war against Allah".

The article containing that quote, entitled "Imam Hassan al-Banna on jihad", goes on to say:
"Jihad is a powerful invigorating yearning for Islam's might and glory ... which makes you cry when looking at the weakness of Muslims today and the humiliating tragedies crushing him to death everywhere. "

Jihad is to be a soldier for Allah. When the bugle calls ... you should be the first to answer the call to join the ranks for jihad."

Other articles on atheism and secularism appear to be against integration. One article is entitled "Zionism, a black historical record", and another, "Israel simply has no right to exist". The ISB immediately disowned this content after being informed of it by the IoS, and promised to remove it.

Hitler Youth, anyone?

Nuclear Stalemate:
Iran and the EU Hit a Little Snag In Talks

The Astute Blogger quotes from a BBC article regarding Iran's ultimatum to the EU concerning it's nuclear program:

Iran says the three European states which are trying to resolve the dispute over Tehran's nuclear programme must submit their proposals by Monday. An Iranian government spokesman said a European request for the date to be put back had been rejected. But diplomats from the UK, France and Germany say they never promised to have the proposals ready by 1 August. Iran has repeatedly said that it will resume some of its nuclear activities regardless of EU proposals.

Earlier this week outgoing President Mohammad Khatami said he hoped EU diplomats would allow for a resumption of enrichment activities, but Iran would begin again in any case.

Europe has made it clear that a resumption of nuclear work will mean an end to the talks.

Sounds like the two sides are at a stalemate, huh? The Astute Blogger comments:

Iran is a growing menace. If they get the bomb they will be untouchable. The time is VERY near when SOMEONE with balls MUST take pre-emptive action and bomb ALL of Iran's nuclear facitlties - REGARDLESS of how many civilian casualties result because Iran DELIBERATELY put these facitlities in civilian locations - IN DIRECT VIOLATION OF THE GENEVA CONVENTIONS!

Sometimes You Just Gotta Love Your Enemy

In this article we meet Hassan Butt, a Jihadi who is not afraid to tell us exactly what he is thinking. From the London Telegraph, via Jihad Watch:

A Muslim who helped recruit young men to fight for the Taliban says that those willing to plant bombs in London were guilty of tactical errors but were not immoral.

Hassan Butt, 25, earned notoriety in January 2002 when he told the BBC's Today programme that Britons who went to fight the West in Afghanistan would return home to launch terror attacks.

Three years on, in an interview given to Prospect magazine some months before the bombings and published this week, he predicted that "a lot of killing" is unavoidable if the world is to come under the banner of Islam.

Formerly the self-styled spokesman for al-Muhajiroun, an Islamic fundamentalist group, he split from the faction over the issue of the "covenant of security", which forbade Muslims living in Britain from engaging in military action within the country.

While al-Muhajiroun supported the concept, Butt said he did not. His opposition to committing acts of violence was, he said, a matter of tactics rather than principle.

"Now, I am not in favour of military action in Britain but if somebody did do it who was British, I would not have any trouble with that either. . . It wouldn't necessarily be the wisest thing to do but it wouldn't be un-Islamic."

Anyone who was involved in such attacks would be a "completely and utterly loose cannon", said Butt, who now lives in the Leeds suburb of Beeston. Such "military action" would be unwise because "a bomb in London would be strategically damaging to Muslims here. Immigration is lax in Britain. . . London has more radical Muslims than anywhere in the Muslim world. A bomb would jeopardise everyone's position. There has to be a place we can come."

But he drew a distinction between Muslims who sought refuge in Britain - who would be bound by the covenant - and those who were born here, who would not.

"Most of our people, especially the youth, are British citizens," he said. "They owe nothing to the Government. They did not ask to be born here; neither did they ask to be protected by Britain."

You gotta love your enemies when they tell the truth. Thanks, Hassan.

So, what we see here is the labyrinthine workings of Islamofascist reasoning. A Muslim who sought refuge in Britain can't attack, but a Muslim British citizen can, because he owes his government nothing. Why is that? Well, because it isn't governed by the Koran.

And why can they use suicide bombers to kill innocent British people on the subway? Well, because they aren't innocent. They are citizens of a country who has attacked Muslims in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Even Giving The Palestinians
What They Want Is Hard

Israel is giving the Gaza Strip to the Palestinians, so that they can govern themselves. This is what the Palestinians have been asking for for years.

So, how do they respond? Well, the second leading Palestinian political party threatens to attack the Jews as they leave. What sense does that make?

From Associated Press:

JERUSALEM (AP) - Israel will launch a massive ground operation if Palestinian militants fire on Israeli soldiers and settlers during next month's Gaza pullout, the deputy defense minister said Sunday.

In such a scenario, the evacuation of settlers would be halted for 10-14 days while Israeli forces occupy Palestinian towns near the Jewish settlements, Zeev Boim said.

Israel is set to evacuate all 21 Gaza Strip settlements and four more in the West Bank in mid-August. The pullout is set to last four weeks.

Boim told Israel Radio the ground operation would be massive, on the scale of the Defensive Shield offensive of 2002, in which Israel reoccupied West Bank towns after a series of suicide bombings.

Israeli leaders have warned repeatedly in recent days that the military would respond harshly to Palestinian fire during the withdrawal. However, Boim's comments marked the first time the scope of a military offensive was outlined.

If the militants attack, "we would stop the withdrawal, we would deliver a harsh strike, a large-scale operation," Boim told the radio.

Such an operation would be "about the size of Defensive Shield, meaning about 10 days to two weeks of a heavy strike against terror, to uproot it," Boim said.

The focus of the strike, by a force of about 12,000-15,000 troops, probably would be the southern Gaza town of Khan Younis, which lies next to the main bloc of settlements, Boim said.

Israel is coordinating the security aspect of the pullout with the Palestinians, hoping Palestinian security will be able to prevent militants from firing on the thousands of soldiers and settlers who will be involved in the pullout.

But the Palestinians have warned that their forces are woefully ill-equipped in all major areas, including arms, ammunition, transportation and communications.

Israeli Vice Premier Shimon Peres said Sunday that Israel should consider giving the Palestinian police arms and ammunition to fight militant groups and ensure quiet during the withdrawal.

"If we tell the Palestinians to combat Hamas, we have to hear what their needs are," Peres told Israel Radio.

Israel fears the weapons will fall into the hands of the militant groups and be used to attack Israelis.

Yeah, that seems like a distinct possibility. Especially when you consider the fact that many members of the Palestinian security forces are also members of the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade.

Saturday, July 30, 2005

Postmodernism vs. Pre-Futurism
The Seismic Rift In Our Culture

Neo-neocon brings us a quote from Milan Kundera's book Immortality, which touches on our postmodern lack of perspective on reality. In this passage, Kundera uses the word Imagology to mean media-transferred images, or in some cases soundbites, or choice morsels of partial information, all of which are the stock-in-trade of the media:

For example, communists used to believe that in the course of capitalist development the proletariat would gradually grow poorer and poorer, but when it finally became clear that all over Europe workers were driving to work in their own cars, [the communists] felt like shouting that reality was deceiving them.

Reality was stronger than ideology. And it is in this sense that imagology surpassed it: imagology is stranger than reality, which has anyway long ceased to be what it was for my grandmother, who lived in a Moravian village and still knew everything through her own experience: how bread is baked, how a house is built, how a pig is slaughtered and the meat smoked, what quilts are made of, what the priest and the schoolteacher think about the world; she met the whole village every day and knew how many murders were committed in the country over the last ten years; she had, so to speak, personal control over reality, and nobody could fool her by maintaining that Moravian agriculture was thriving when people at home had nothing to eat.

My Paris neighbor spends his time an an office, where he sits for eight hours facing an office colleague, then he sits in his car and drives home, turns on the TV, and when the announcer informs him that in the latest public opinion poll the majority of Frenchmen voted their country the safest in Europe (I recently read such a report), he is overjoyed and opens a bottle of champagne without ever learning that three thefts and two murders were committed on his street that very day.

Public opinion polls are the critical instrument of imagology's power, because they enable imagology to live in absolute harmony with the people. The imagologue bombards people with questions: how is the French economy prospering? is there racism in France? is racism good or bad? who is the greatest writer of all time? is Hungary in Europe or in Polynesia? which world politician is the sexiest?

And since for contemporary man reality is a continent visited less and less often and, besides, justifiably disliked, the findings of polls have become a kind of higher reality, or to put it differently: they have become the truth.

Public opinion polls are a parliament in permanent session, whose function it is to create truth, the most democratic truth that has ever existed. Because it will never be at variance with the parliament of truth, the power of imagologues will always live in truth, and although I know that everything human is mortal, I cannot imagine anything that would break its power.

Go read Neo-neocon's thoughts here.

For my part, I will only say, as I have said here before, that we are no longer in the Postmodern age. Instead, we have moved into the age of the Pre-Future. Kundera's description of our cultural entrancement with images is accurate. However, that does not explain the seismic rift which has opened up in our culture.

What we are seeing is the beginning of the Pre-Future age, which is defined as an age wherein human beings, confronted with the works of their hands, will have to make three fundamental decisions which heretofore only God has had to make;

1) Decisions of Omnipotence. Because of our WMD's, we will have to decide whether to wipe out the human race.

2) Decisions about the creation of life, and the length of a lifespan. Because of biotechnology we will have to decide whether to indefinately prolong human life, and whether to create new life forms.

3) Decisions of Omniscience. The decision of whether to monitor all knowable things on the face of the Earth, at all possible times.

Go here to read of my thoughts on the kinds of anxieties these decisions will bring.

The seismic rift which has opened up in our society is the split between people who are still functioning by the rules of the Postmodern age vs. the people who have already begun dealing with the realities of the Pre-Future age. Just as Kundera's grandmother from the aforementioned passage, was living in some pre-modern age, so a large portion of our population has not begun to sense the seachange that has begun in human culture.

We are living in an age defined by the inevitability of our future capacities. The reality of these future technologies is so inevitable as to be present already, in the sense that we must begin to make decisions about how to handles it's effects right now, in our present time.

In this way, our future is palpable, and with us, almost like another being staring us in the face. And who is this being staring us in the face? The easy answer would be to say that it is ourselves, our capacity for good or evil. But, I think the answer can be expanded from there.

We could answer the question from a Jungian perspective and say that we are entering an age wherein we will become the gods of our myths. That we are entering an age when we will make exoteric all the violence and destruction of the collective unconcious.

Or, we could answer this question from a religious perspective, which I choose to do. We could say that the age of Pre-Futurism is the age when we will become fully aware of the enormous power that God gave us when He created us in His Image. That we, as a human race are finally growing into adulthood, that we will have to take ultimate repsonsibility for ourselves.

And we could go even further, as I do, and know that ultimately, these decisions will force us to confront God, in His Person, in a more direct way than we ever have before. No longer will we be the childlike farmers petitioning God for rain and a bountiful harvest. No longer will we be the nervous adolscents biting our nails, while doing our homework in front of a computer screen.

Instead, we as a human race, like adults coming to grips with parenthood and responsibility, will have to calm ourselves when things look bleak and hopeless, and we will have to say to ourselves, "We must do this. We must get it right for future generations."

And like adults faced with the stress of responsibility we will think to themselves, "Ahh, now I understand why my parents did that," and we will turn inside, to our Father, for guidance and wisdom.

The spectre of a humanity with 1) omnipotence, 2) omniscience, and 3) a life-creating and sustaining ability, on the level of the individual human being is frightening. But it is not necessarily apocalyptic.

We humans were made by our Creator with just such possibilities in mind. The Bible says that we were created in the image of God. More and more we are coming to find out exactly what that means.

Humans seem to have an infinite capacity, limited only by time, and the law that one can not get something for nothing. People from the 19th century would have said there was no way humans could create the things we created in the 20th century. History seems to demonstrate that, over time, humans can achieve whatever they can conceive.

Fear for man, but do not doubt him. Not even his ability to solve the problems presented by the works of his hands.

A Call For A Islamic Reformation
And A Tangential Discussion Of Some Key Ways
In Which Christianity Also Needs To Be Reformed

Last night on Little Green Footballs, reader NogenDavid (Comment #49) touched upon a subject I have been meaning to address for a long time here on CUANAS. That is, the fact that The Bible contains some very vicious law which can be compared to the frightening strictures of the Koran:

There is some ferocious stuff in part of the Jewish bible as well. (Death penalty for violating the Sabbath? Stoning rebellious sons?) Part of the glory of Jewish religious development is that this material was tamed through interpretation and supplementation (the Talmud).

Different versions of Christianity have taken different paths to adapting scriptures to evolving scientific knowledge and moral insight. One branch viewed some of the strictures of the Jewish tradition as having been supplanted by the arrival of Jesus.

The orthodox Jewish approach was in one sense more intellectually demanding, because it required that the older traditions be incorporated, without deletion, into the new. Not an easy challenge, but one that has been addressed with great imagination and rigour now for at least two millenia.

There is no reason, other than the perverse "you're better than we are" prejudice of some left-wing ideologues, to expect that Islamic scriptures are, taken literally, free of ideas that should now be considered ill informed or morally repugnant.

Literalism does not have to be the "real" Islam, any more than "real" Judaism is only the five books, read literally, or only the bible, real literally, and not the Talmud, midrash, bible commentaries or halachic rulings for the rabbis.

The challenge Islamic thinkers face is to find a way to reinterpret and adapt scriptures. This reform has to come from within that faith community.

It is not helpful for those outside, however, to pretend (or insist out of pure ignorance or bias) that Islam does not need to go through a reformation. It is even worse, of course, for those on the inside to harry, censor or even kill those within the Islamic tradition who are trying to creatively adapt it to the new world.

When my friend TVD, of Philosodude got booted off Someguy's very excellent blog, Mystery Achievement, this, as I recall, was the point he was trying to make.(The guys at Mystery Achievement didn't understand his point, and believed he was bashing the Jews.)

I have my own doubts and concerns about the religion of Islam as a basic structure. For instance, the way in which Islam seeks to negate the two main stories of the Jewish Bible (Abraham was going to sacrifice Ishmael, not Isaac) and the Christian "New Testament" (Christ didn't die on the cross. Instead Judas did.), while at the same time, almost psychotically, asserting the power of all things Islamic; that Allah is the greatest, Arabs are superior, Muslims are predominant over the infidel, who ought to be "humiliated" into submission.

From my Christian perspective this insistence upon power and submission, combined with the negation of the perfect sacrifice stories of the Bible, runs absolutely contrary to everything I believe in.

But, whatever. I can live with their twisting of the truth of the Bible. I can live with the negations, the belief in submission, the belief that Allah is the greatest. I can even live with Muslims thinking they are better than us in Allahs eyes. Really, who cares.

What we can't live with is Jihad, the abuse of a woman's right to be a free human being, the idea that infidels must be humiliated.

I agree with NogenDavid that Islam can reform itself, and I agree that we need to insist that Muslims do, indeed, reform their religion. As it is, wherever Islam reigns supreme it holds people in slavery, and promotes Jihad. This is a state of affairs the human race can not live with.

Just to be clear, I believe also that Christianity needs to reform itself in various ways. The truth is, the ways in which Christianity is currently working against human rights are minor compared to the outright obliteration of humanity that Sharia is committing in countries like Iran, Sudan, and Saudi Arabia.

But, just for the record, I think Christianity needs to get over it's issues with homosexuals. Homosexuality may be not be the preferred way to live, but it is clear that some men and women are just not born with the same inclinations as most of us. Who cares? Are they hurting anyone? Are they not capable of loving their neighbor as themselves, and loving the Lord God with all their heart, mind and soul?

Yes, clearly they are.

Another area in which I believe Christianity needs to reform itself is in the area of it's relationship with it's older brothers and sisters in the faith; the Jews. The book of Romans clearly lays out the Jews role in history, and warns us gentiles against "arrogance." In fact, not only does Paul warn us against arrogance, indeed, he lays out the penalty - which is to be cut off from the root of the tree entirely.

That's a frightening prospect, and one we ought to fear.

In the book of Romans, Paul says that the Jews experience a hardening of their hearts which causes them to be unable to recognize that Jesus (Yeshua) was their messiah. Does this mean that the Jews will not be saved? No, in fact, Paul says that "all Israel will be saved."

The reason for this hardening of the heart is spelled out very clearly as well. Judaism is not by it's very nature a evangelical religion. Instead the focus of Judaism has always been on maintaining the Jewish traditions, in order to be set apart. Paul explains that the Jews were set apart to carry the Word of God, the Law, through the ages. If they had not been set apart, if they had assimilated, the Law could not have been carried forward as perfectly as it has.

So, the book of Romans tells us that the Jews will continue to carry God's Law forward until the "fullness of the Gentiles" has entered in, and it is at that time that "all Israel will be saved."

In other words, the Jews have a specific part to play in the progression of God's plan. It is obviously both a blessing and a burden beyond all imagination. The Jews seem to be like Frodo in The Lord Of The Rings, except instead of a ring, they carry the Torah, and as a result the eye of evil is always upon them, and devising ways to destroy them.

Christians need to learn to understand this piece of God's puzzle. Christians need to learn to have profound respect for the burden and the suffering of the Jews.

But, I digress.

The main point of this post is that Islam needs to reform itself in the worst way. We infidels can not reform Islam. Those Muslims who look out on humanity and see that we are all children of Allah, need to speak up within their mosques and say no more will we look down upon the infidel. No more will we accept the preaching of violent Jihad, and martyrdom. No more will we accept anything less than full and free humanity for our women.

As Ledeen says, "Faster please."

UPDATE: This Imam from the Dar al-Hijrah Mosque, "one of the largest mosques on the East coast," doesn't agree with me. He says "The call to reform Islam is an alien call." And he supports Hamas.

He sounds like a maniac and a dangerous person to me, but I guess he's just another "moderate" Muslim.

Good Muslims have got to put these guys out of their community.

Oh, and yes, Imam, the call to reform Islam is an alien call, because people like you have everyone in your community too intimidated to tell you to shut up and get out.

So, it's left to us non-Muslims to remind your people that it isn't acceptable to call for violent Jihad.

Everything You Ever Wanted to Know
About Sharia States
But Were Afraid To Ask

From Associated Press:

CAIRO, Egypt - The framers of Iraq's constitution appear likely to enshrine Islam as the main basis of law in the country — a stronger role than the United States had hoped for and one some Iraqis fear will mean a more fundamentalist regime.

Arab constitutions vary widely over the role of Islamic law, ranging from Lebanon, where the word "Islam" never appears, to Saudi Arabia, which says the Quran itself is its constitution.

Culture weighs far more heavily than the constitution and law, particularly when it comes to women. In Gulf nations — where the constitutions spell out a slightly lesser role for Islamic law, or Sharia, than in Egypt — women are more segregated and wear more conservative veils covering the entire face.

Kuwait, for example, bans alcohol and only gave women the right to vote this year, in contrast to Egypt, where beer, wine and liquor are sold openly and women have been voting since the early 20th century.

Yet most Gulf nations' constitutions state that Sharia is "a main source" of legislation, while Egypt takes the more definitive phrasing of "the source" — a fine distinction taking on major importance in Iraq.

Former Egyptian President Anwar Sadat amended the constitution during the 1970s, changing the language from "a source" to "the source" to beef up his Islamic credentials rather than to start implementing Sharia.

But in Iraq, some fear the Shiite Muslim leaders who want similar wording in Iraq's constitution hope to lay the groundwork for a more fundamentalist rule, at least in Shiite-dominated areas.

Already, Shiite leaders in some southern cities have tried imposing Islamic-based rules, pressuring women to wear headscarves and forcing liquor stores and music shops to close.

A draft of the constitution published last week in the government Al-Sabah newspaper put Islam as "the main basis" of law. But the constitutional committee — made up of Shiites, Kurds and some Sunnis — is still haggling over the language.

Fouad Massoum, the Kurdish deputy head of the committee, said it will discuss the role of Islam in meetings Sunday.

"We, in the Kurdish coalition, want Islam to be one of the sources of legislation," he said.

Iraq's most prominent Shiite Muslim cleric, Ayatollah Ali Sistani, has said he wants to preserve a strong role for Islam in the document, but also shuns the direct rule by clerics seen in his country of birth, mainly Shiite Iran.

Mouafak al-Rubaie, a national security adviser and a Shiite, met al-Sistani on Saturday and said the main concern of the Shiite religious leadership is to "preserve the Islamic identity of Iraq and its people, which means preserving a united Iraq and people as a state."

When U.S. administrators ran Iraq, they insisted on language setting Islam as "a source" of legislation when an interim constitution was approved in March 2004. But the same Shiites who backed "the main source" last year now dominate, and American officials have less influence over a sovereign Iraqi government.

Six Arab nations do not mention Sharia at all in their constitutions: Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia, Libya, Lebanon and Jordan.

Lebanon, where the Christian population is large and the president is a Christian, is the sole Arab state not to set Islam as the national religion — in fact, the constitution does not use the words "Islam" or "Christianity" at all, a reflection of its 1975-1990 civil war between sectarian militias.

Tunisia has taken one of the most liberal tracks in the Arab world, abolishing polygamy in 1956 and banning the headscarf in schools and other public establishments. Authorities regularly urge women to avoid the hijab, though more women have been donning scarves in past years.

The one area where Islamic law is nearly universal is in personal status law — rules concerning marriage, divorce and inheritance. Sharia allows men to divorce their wives by proclamation and grants daughters half the inheritance that sons receive.

In Syria and Libya, the constitutions are more concerned with laying out their nationalist ideologies — Libya's socialism and Syria's pan-Arabism — than with Islam.

At the opposite extreme lie Iran and Saudi Arabia. Iran's constitution lays out its Islamic Republic headed by a supreme leader, supposed to be the country's most knowledgeable Muslim cleric.

Saudi Arabia, home of Islam's most sacred shrines, states in the first article of its Basic Law that the Quran and the Prophet Muhammad's traditions are the nation's constitution, later saying, "Saudi society will be based on the principle of adherence to God's command."

Sometimes You Just Gotta Cry Over Your Enemy

British police, in a valiant stab at multicultural bridge-building, invited a highly respected "moderate" Imam to join them in a press conference promoting cooperation between the police and the Muslim community.

So, what did the Imam do? He launched into a diatribe against his host country, denied the existence of Al Qaeda, and said the police are targeting the wrong people in their investigation of the 7/7 and 7/21 bombings. From the London Telegraph, via Little Green Footballs:

The most senior Islamic cleric in Birmingham claimed yesterday that Muslims were being unjustly blamed in the war on terrorism and that the eight suspects in the two bombing attacks on London “could have been innocent passengers”.

Mohammad Naseem, the chairman of the city’s central mosque, called Tony Blair a “liar” and “unreliable witness” and questioned whether CCTV footage issued of the suspected bombers was of the perpetrators. He said that Muslims “all over the world have never heard of an organisation called al-Qa’eda”.

Mr Naseem, who was speaking after police seized Yasin Hassan Omar in Birmingham, delivered his unprompted outburst when he was invited to a press conference with West Midlands police and Birmingham city council to help calm fears of racial or religious tension after the arrest. His comments shocked senior police officers. ...

To the obvious embarrassment of council officials and police standing next to him, Mr Naseem said the Government and security services “were not to be relied upon”.

He said: “Tony Blair has told lies on going to Iraq and in a court of law if a witness has proved to be a liar he ceases to be a reliable witness. So we cannot give our blind trust to the Government. To have that trust it is important that the process of law should be independent, open and transparent. I am also sad that unfortunately the impression has been given that Muslims are to be targeted in this war against terror. There seems to be a directive to target Muslims. Why do we not have an open mind about this?

“Muslim bashing seems to be more earnest than the need for national unity and harmony. Terrorists can be anybody - we will have to see [whether the bombers are Muslims]. The process is not open; the process is not transparent; the process is not independent. I do not have faith in the system as it stands.”

Mr Naseem is one of the most respected Muslims in the city and is considered a moderate. He has regular meetings with the chief constable to discuss religious harmony.

Mr Naseem said that while it was vital that terrorism was stamped out and that there was never any justification for it, the Government had not helped by going to war in Iraq.

Dismissing the Prime Minister’s insistence that the war had nothing to do with the terrorist attacks, he said: “Tony Blair … is not going to be perceived as a reliable witness. His comments could motivate someone to take the law into his own hands. Some people have been caught but I have not seen any evidence. The process of law is not open.”

Asked about the suspects’ DNA being found at the scene of the first attacks, he said: “DNA can match you, but that does not mean you are going to commit a crime. Thousands of youths are passing by and caught on CCTV, so how do you know it is them?”

I'll be honest, I am growing more and more depressed with each passing day, as I realize the depth of the truth that even the most "moderate" of our Muslim "friends" live under such willful delusions.

Yes, willful.

This Imam is a sophisticated man. He understands police procedure, and the uses of DNA. He knows Al Qaeda exists, because he was familiar with it's existence, and the ideology of Osama Bin Laden, before 9/11. He knows that Tony Blair didn't "lie" in the lead up to the Iraq War.

But, at the same time, as is true of our Western leftists (Dick Durbin, Michael Moore, Amnesty International), he is willing to grasp on to any scrap of truth to keep up the illusion by which he justifies his house of cards worldview.

And, on top of it all, he is willing to manipulate the less sophisticated of his constituents into believing his conspiracy theories.

If this is the face of "moderate Islam," then what hope do we have? How are we to build bridges with the Muslim community when ideological terrorists like this Imam blow them up as soon as they are built?

This Imam hates us. That's the truth. He does not desire to build bridges. He does not desire to cooperate with the police. He wants to win us over to his conspiracy theory worldview, or he does not want to befriend us at all.

You have to love it when your enemy tells you the truth, but sometimes you just have to cry over the bitterness of the truth he tells you.

Friday, July 29, 2005

Yeah, Those Moderate Muslims
Hate The Terrorists, Alright

A group of Muslims got together in Sharm el-Sheik, Egypt to protest against terrorism. This seemed to be a truly unequivocal protest. I was impressed with what I read about it, and I featured a photo in a post below.

Well, it turns out I spoke too soon. Guess who the terrorists are whom these Muslims are protesting against. From the New York Sun:

SHARM EL-SHEIK, Egypt - The poor people dressed in Islamic garb or in dirty blue trousers and T-shirts sitting in 118-degree heat in the hall of the Sharm el-Sheik Hospital were either the brothers, the cousins, or the friends of the people wounded in the terrorist attack of the day before. Just plenty of desperate young people.

No women were there, no mothers, or sisters, or wives. Egyptian women almost don't live in Sharm. The family and children of the workers are in the villages near Cairo, and their beloved men come to visit for one week once a month. Sharm is inhabited by a couple of thousand military people and public officials that President Mubarak, just like President Sadat, keeps as a defense vanguard near his own villa; or by poor workers, waiters, drivers, plumbers, and cooks - lots of day laborers that serve the enormous tourism business. Only a large group of very poor workers, the other face of the holiday town of Sharm el-Sheik, have been the killed and the wounded here.

You understand many things about terrorism when you speak to them; and you understand also, unfortunately, why we will never be able to count on what we call "the moderate Muslims" for the war against terrorism.

What you learn about terrorism from the poor of Sharm, if you still didn't know it, is that its cruelty has no limits, no excuses, and no historical explanation, but only a cold ideological background.

The terrorists know that the men they kill, wound, and destroy economically have nothing to do with imperialism, occupation, Palestine, Iraq, colonialism, and all the other explanations that the mayor of London, Ken Livingstone, finds to explain their crimes. They know who the hundreds they are going to kill are: people who sleep 10 (exactly!) to a room, with no bathroom, one toilet, and one little kitchen; people who define themselves as "good Muslims," go the mosques once a week, pray three times a day, and when they forget, says Khaled, it is because they work too much or it is too hot; people who after the terrorist attack tremble because they will have no work anymore, now that the tourist season is destroyed and this will make them lose their $100 a month wage in the best cases for a family of five, six, 10 children.

These guys are the typical "moderate Muslim" that the holy rage of the jihadists destroys with fury, the one infected by the contact with the West and also the one that in our Western dreams and in many European and American experts' analyses should suddenly rise against the extreme Islam, their enemy.

So, let's test this thesis and ask: "Do they hate terrorists?" The answer is "Yes, very much so," and they really do, - they close their fists and watch in rage and repeat to me that they deeply hope that Mr. Mubarak will catch them all, will put them in prison, will kill them. Are they ready to fight them? Yes, at every level, with their hands, if requested, and with demonstrations that actually, while I'm in Sharm, suddenly appear in the hot streets and just in front of the cameras of the international press: "Down with terrorism," "We are against terrorism"...

But then, if it's so, why can the great moderate Muslim world not really fight their own enemy? They themselves give me the answers: "Bin Laden? The Muslim Brotherhood? Certainly the terrorist attacks are not their work, no! This is a lie. A Muslim could never do this. And if they say they do it in the name of Islam, they are not Islamic; or, most likely, this shows, like the television says, that someone uses the name of Islam just to hide the real perpetrators."

Anyhow, Islam is out of the question, And then, we ask again, who is behind the attacks?

Well, you know the answer, they smile with a smart expression. Mahmoud, who comes from a periphery of Cairo, where he now cannot go back because he doesn't have the money for a bus ticket, knows the answer, and so do all his other friends, about 10, all from the same town ...

They know the answer, yes: the television said that only the Israelis and the Americans have a real interest in seeing Egypt on its knees;

General Fuad Allam said that the perpetrators of the Taba attack of October 2004 were apparently linked to the Israeli security forces, and so, supposedly, it is today. Also Al-Jazeera and even Al-Arabia interviewed "experts" to confirm this point of view. A big, beautiful guy with a red T-shirt just puts it down bluntly: "We know only what the television tells us."

So, we cannot count on "moderate" Arabs, not even on the group of youngsters that I meet later, the girls dressed just like ours: They repeat to me, still with a smart little face, "It cannot be a Muslim, it's certainly the Israelis and the Americans."

Oh, for God's sake. And I started to have some hope. Ughh.

France Expels Preachers of Hate

From the London Telegraph:

The gulf between British and French treatment of preachers of hatred and violence was thrown sharply into focus yesterday when France announced the summary expulsion of a dozen Islamists between now and the end of August.

A tough new anti-terrorism package was unveiled by Nicolas Sarkozy, the interior minister and a popular centre-Right politician.

His proposals reflect French determination to act swiftly against extremists in defiance of the human rights lobby, which is noticeably less vocal in France than in Britain.

Imams and their followers who fuel anti-western feeling among impressionable young French Muslims will be rounded up and returned to their countries of origin, most commonly in France's case to its former north African colonies.

Mr Sarkozy also revealed that as many as 12 French mosques associated with provocative anti-western preaching were under surveillance. Imams indulging in inflammatory rhetoric will be expelled even if their religious status is recognised by mainstream Muslim bodies.

Those who have assumed French citizenship will not be protected from deportation. Mr Sarkozy said he will reactivate measures, "already available in our penal code but simply not used", to strip undesirables of their adopted nationality.

"We have to act against radical preachers capable of influencing the youngest and most weak-minded," Mr Sarkozy told the French daily Le Parisien.

The first to be caught in the new round of expulsions is an Algerian, Rena Ameuroud, whose brother Abderraham was jailed in France earlier this year for his part in a jihadist training exercise in the Fontainebleau forest south of Paris. He faces immediate deportation for allegedly urging fellow-worshippers at a Parisian mosque to engage in "holy war".

At least seven French nationals are now known to have been killed while fighting with anti-coalition insurgents in Iraq, in some cases as suicide bombers, the minister said. A further 10 are believed still to be there.

France, which has Europe's largest Muslim population with estimates varying from five to nine million out of a population of 60 million, has long prided itself on its stern approach to terrorism.

Mr Sarkozy's crackdown on those "promoting radical Islamist polemic" was disclosed at the end of a week that began with French anger at Britain's failure to extradite the alleged financier of Islamist bombings in Paris in the mid-1990s. Rachid Ramda, 35, an Algerian, has been held for 10 years while fighting attempts to return him to stand trial.

Survivors and victims' relatives who gathered this week at the St Michel station in the heart of Paris to commemorate the 10th anniversary of the worst attack, which killed eight, called on Britain to "stop protecting" Ramda.

They are unimpressed by his supporters' claims that he is a "gentle and peaceful" man who devotes his time in the Belmarsh top-security jail in south-east London to learning the Koran by heart, studying English literature and comforting other Muslim prisoners.

Charles Clarke, the Home Secretary, has approved Ramda's extradition - as did his predecessor David Blunkett - but his removal depends on High Court proceedings.

French ministers and commentators have long expressed exasperation at British handling of individuals who support terrorism, arguing that greater emphasis is being placed on their human rights rather than on security interests.

Palestinian Government Uses Public Radio Station
To Direct Missile-Launch Crews

Palestinian political party Hamas has been using their official public radio station to broadcast instructions to terrorists on missile launches. From Jihad Watch:

GANEI TAL, Gaza – Hamas has been using its official radio station in Gaza to broadcast instructions to terrorists in the field firing mortars and rockets at Gaza's Jewish communities, security sources told WND.

Hamas regularly fires mortars and Qassam rockets at Gush Katif, the slate of Gaza's Jewish communities scheduled for evacuation Aug. 17. The terror group launched more than 120 rockets and mortars the past two weeks, killing one woman and injuring more than eight. Yesterday, a Qassam rocket hit Neve Dekalim, a large southern Katif town.

Analysts expect the rocket attacks to increase as the evacuation date gets closer so that Hamas, popular in the Gaza Strip, can claim to its Palestinian supporters it drove Israel from the area.

According to security sources, Hamas the past few months has been using its official radio station, Voice of Al Aqsa, to relay instructions to terrorists firing rockets and mortars at Gush Katif from Gaza City. The station, which broadcasts in Arabic, is available to the general Gaza public at 106.7 FM.

Sources say Hamas operations coordinators in Gaza use the station to provide terrorists with directions such as the exact coordinates in and near Gaza City from which to launch the rockets and mortars and the trajectory to be used in firing the Qassam missiles.

Qassams, about four feet in length, lack a guidance system and are launched by terrorists using the rocket's trajectory and known travel distance to aim at a particular Jewish community.
"The radio station is not only broadcasting incitement, but, incredibly, broadcasting military instructions to carry out attacks against Israel," said a security source.

Yes, Hamas got 33% of the votes in a recent Palestinian election. They are the second largest party in the Palestinian territories, behind the other major terrorist organization; Fatah.

It is becoming more and more clear everyday that the "terrorists" are, in reality, the official Palestinian Army

Arab Muslims Protesting Against Terrorism In Egypt

From Instapundit, via No Pasaran:

Glenn Reynolds points out that there ARE arabs who bravely and vocally oppose terrorism and the feudalistic preactitioners of that dark art, but that the western press doesn't really want to know, or doesn't know how to get past their own precambrian ideological filter:

«What's depressing is how little attention these demonstrations got from the media (you'll notice that most of the links above are to blog reports, not news stories). If any of these groups had blown something up -- or even just burned President Bush in effigy -- they probably would have made the evening news. But when Arabs and Muslims defy news-media typecasting, they seem to be ignored.»

Organized by Cairo blogger Karim Elsahy, attended also by the widely read Big Pharaoh were there. More photos were carried by GatewayPundit who noted that even tourists (the usual intended target in Masr) joined in. Of course like all closed and untrusting regime des bananes the cops (who are usually in tactical uniforms) busted it up like all good paranoiacs do.

«People started looking and reading what was written. A number slowed down just to read what we were displaying. Others sounded their car horns. I felt we were getting a very positive response from the people until Egypt's "do-not-disturb-the-peace-whatsoever" police destroyed our utopia and our ecstasy the same way Samson destroyed the temple.»

So the question is: where IS the damned media? Do they really want these particular Arabs to be on their own on this one? Historically, radicals with the passivity adn sheepishness of the rump of the population would treat these folks the way Arab Jews and Christians have been treated: driven off and marginalized while killing a few by example or to indulge baser emotions.

It seems like things are turning among the moderate Muslims. It seems like they are fed up with the Islamofascists destroying their religion. Good for them, and good for all of us.

But, don't believe it, everytime you hear a Muslim Imam, or organization, condemn terrorism:

The American Islamic Leaders' "Fatwa" is Bogus - from Steve Emerson, Author of American Jihad

This morning a group of American Islamic leaders held a press conference to announce a fatwa, or Islamic religious ruling, against “terrorism and extremism.” An organization called the Fiqh Council of North America (FCNA) issued the fatwa, and the Council on American - Islamic Relations (CAIR) organized the press conference, stating that several major U.S. Muslim groups endorsed the fatwa.

In fact, the fatwa is bogus. Nowhere does it condemn the Islamic extremism ideology that has spawned Islamic terrorism. It does not renounce nor even acknowledge the existence of an Islamic jihadist culture that has permeated mosques and young Muslims around the world. It does not renounce Jihad let alone admit that it has been used to justify Islamic terrorist acts. It does not condemn by name any Islamic group or leader. In short, it is a fake fatwa designed merely to deceive the American public into believing that these groups are moderate. In fact, officials of both organizations have been directly linked to and associated with Islamic terrorist groups and Islamic extremist organizations. One of them is an unindicted co-conspirator in a current terrorist case; another previous member was a financier to Al-Qaeda.

I spoke with Judea Pearl, father of murdered journalist Daniel Pearl who told me that the fatwa was “vacuous because it does not name the perpetrators of Islamic terrorist theologies and leaders of Islamic movements like Yousef Al Qaradawi, Osama Bin Laden, Ayman Al Zawahari, Hamas, Islamic Jihad, etc.” Pearl told me that these groups are “trying to perpetrate a deception on the American public.”

Officials of both groups have been linked to various terrorist organizations:

The Chairman of the Fiqh Council, Taha Jaber Al-Alwani, is an unindicted co-conspirator in the case against Sami al-Arian, the alleged North American leader of Palestinian Islamic Jihad, whose trial began in June 2005 in Tampa, Florida. Mr. Alwani has been named in court documents as an official of several entities in northern Virginia suspected of being connected to terrorist financing. Documents released in the Al Arian trial show that Alwani funded the Islamic Jihad front groups in Tampa.

Another past trustee of the Fiqh Council, Abdurrahman Alamoudi, is serving a 23-year prison sentence for illegal financial dealings with Libya and immigration fraud, has admitted to his part in a plot to assassinate the Saudi Crown Prince, and has vocally announced his support for the terrorist groups Hamas and Hezbollah. Additionally Alamoudi was just named by Treasury as having been a financier for Al Qaeda.

In 1998, Fiqh Council member Sheikh Muhammad al-Hanooti, gave a speech calling for jihad against the United States and the United Kingdom, saying that “Allah will curse the Americans and British” and “Allah, the curse of Allah will become true on the infidel Jews and on the tyrannical Americans.” Additionally, Hanooti is strongly linked to Hamas, having served on the board of the Islamic Association for Palestine (IAP). A 2002 INS memo extensively documented IAP’s support for HAMAS and noted that the “facts strongly suggest” that IAP is “part of HAMAS’ propaganda apparatus.”

On October 28, 2000, Muzammil Siddiqui, the President of FCNA, at a rally in Lafayette Park in Washington D.C., said, “America has to learn -- if you remain on the side of injustice, the wrath of God will come!"

In the past 4 years, several CAIR officials have been convicted of or charged with various terrorism-related offenses.

CAIR has championed and defended officials of Islamic terrorist groups including Hamas leader Musa Abu Marzook, Palestinian Islamic Jihad leader Sami al-Arian, Palestinian Islamic Jihad fundraiser Fawaz Damra, and the radical Egyptian cleric Wagdy Ghoneim.

CAIR has repeatedly attacked the prosecutions of Islamic terrorists arrested and/or convicted since 9-11 and has attacked the government’s freezing of Islamic terrorist fronts as part of a “war against Islam” by the United States.

CAIR has led protests against the deportation of radical Islamic clerics who have called for Jihad or who have been fundraisers for Hamas.

CAIR has asserted that the indictment of Palestinian Islamic Jihad leader Sami al-Arian on conspiracy to murder more than 100 people was “politically motivated” and instigated by “the attack dogs of the pro-Israeli lobby."

CAIR has been named as a defendant in a civil lawsuit filed by the family of former FBI official John O’Neill, who was killed on 9-11.

One of the signatories to today’s fatwa is Fawaz Damra who was convicted of immigration fraud related to his ties to Palestinian Islamic Jihad and denaturalized. He is currently awaiting a deportation hearing.

Another signatory, the Muslim American Society, is a front for the Muslim Brotherhood in the United States and whose publications have repeatedly supported suicide bombings.

For a comprehensive background paper on the links to Islamic terrorist and extremist groups, please click here.

Thursday, July 28, 2005

Germany During Hitler's Rise To Power

When I say that I am concerned about what Europe will do if we allow the Islamofascist threat to get too far out of control, it must seem strange. After all the Europeans are the pacifistic countries, the nations who do not field large armies, the places where people march in the street for peace, and abhor America's violence and "imperialism."

Here William Shirer, author of The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, writes of the mood of Germany circa 1925-29 (the years leading up to Hitler's rise to power):

My own acquaintence with Germany began in those days. I was stationed in Paris and occasionally in London at that time., and fascinating though those capitals were to a young American happy to have escaped from the incredible smugness and emptiness of the Calvin Coolidge era, they pales a little when one came to Berlin and Munich.

A wonderful ferment was working in Germany. Life seemed more free, more modern, more exciting than in any place I had ever seen. Nowhere else did the arts or the intellectual life seem so lively. In contemporary writing, painting, architecture, in music and drama, there were new currents and find talents. And everywhere there was an accent on youth.

One sat up with the young people all night in the sidewalk cafes, the plush bars, the summer camps, on a Rhineland steamer or in a smoke-filled artists studio and talked endlessly about life. They were a healthy, carefree, sun-worshipping lot, and they were filled with an enormous zeal for living to the full and in complete freedom.

The old oppressive Prussian spirit seemed to be dead and buried. Most Germans one met - politicians, writers, editors, artists, professors, students, businessmen, labor leaders - struck you as being democratic, liberal, even pacifist.

Among the most foolish things we can do is to believe that we have unshackled ourselves from the chains of history. Man has not morally improved himself. We have merely set up structures which help us to function more rationally on an everyday basis. However, when these structures are threatened, then all hell can break loose.

I do not believe that another Hitler will rise to round up people and put them in gas chambers. Instead, I believe that all the nationalism, racism, and violence could visit itself upon us in different form.

In the previous post, Youseff Ibrahim wrote of the terrifying force of the West when it is angered. I think William Shirer's description of the pacifistic nature of Germans just a few years before the rise of the Third Reich should act as a kind of tsunami warning to the Islamofascists. Do not look at the ocean, see no waves and conclude that you are safe. If you hit the West with a big enough jolt, expect a tsunami to swell up out of nowhere and destroy all in it's path.

The Muslim Mind Is On Fire

Here's an amazing article from the Middle East Times, written by Youssef M. Ibrahim, a former Middle East correspondent for The New York Times and energy editor of the Wall Street Journal (via Little Green Footballs):

DUBAI -- The world of Islam is on fire. Indeed, the Muslim mind is on fire. Above all, the West is now ready to take both of them on.

The latest reliable report confirms that on average 33 Iraqis die every day, executed by Iraqis and foreign jihadis and suicide bombers, not by US or British soldiers. In fact, fewer than ever US or British soldiers are dying since the invasion more than two years ago.

Instead, we now watch on television hundreds of innocent Iraqis lying without limbs, bleeding in the streets dead or wounded for life. If this is jihad someone got his religious education completely upside down.

Palestine is on fire, too, with Palestinian armed groups fighting one another - Hamas against Fatah and all against the Palestinian Authority. All have rendered Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas impotent and have diminished the world's respect and sympathy for Palestinian sufferings.

A couple of weeks ago London was on fire as Pakistani and other Muslims with British citizenship blew up tube stations in the name of Islam. Al Qaeda in Europe or one of its franchises proclaimed proudly the killing of 54 and wounding 700 innocent citizens was done to "avenge Islam" and Muslims.

Madrid was on fire, too, last year, when Muslim jihadis blew up train stations killing 160 people and wounding a few thousands.

The excuse in all the above cases was the war in Iraq, but let us not forget that in September 2001, long before Iraq, Osama Bin Laden proudly announced that he ordered the killing of some 3,000 in the United States, in the name of avenging Islam. Let us not forget that the killing began a long time before the invasion of Iraq.

Indeed, jihadis have been killing for a decade in the name of Islam. They killed innocent tourists and natives in Morocco and Egypt, in Africa, in Indonesia and in Yemen, all done in the name of Islam by Muslims who say that they are better than all other Muslims. They killed in India, in Thailand and are now talking of killing in Germany and Denmark and so on.

There were attacks with bombs that killed scores inside Shia and Sunni mosques, inside churches and inside synagogues in Turkey and Tunisia, with Muslim preachers saying that it is okay to kill Jews and Christians - the so called infidels.

Above all, it is the Muslim mind that is on fire.

The Muslim fundamentalist who attacked the Dutch film director Theo Van Gogh in the Netherlands, stabbed him more than 23 times then cut his throat. He recently proudly proclaimed at his trial: "I did it because my religion - Islam - dictated it and I would do it again if were free."

Which preacher told this guy this is Islam? That preacher should be in jail with him.

Do the cowardly jihadis who recruit suicide bombers really think that they will force the US Army and British troops out of Iraq by killing hundreds of innocent Iraqis? US troops now have bases and operate in Iraq but also from Kuwait, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Oman. The only accomplishment of jihadis is that now they have aroused the great "Western Tiger".

There was a time when the United States and Europe welcomed Arab and Muslim immigrants, visitors and students, with open arms. London even allowed all dissidents escaping their countries to preach against those countries under the guise of political refugees. Well, that is all over now.

Time has become for the big Western vengeance. Visas for Arab and Muslim young men will be impossible to get for the United States and Western Europe. Those working there will be expelled if they are illegal, and harassed even if their papers are in order. Airlines will have to right to refuse boarding to passengers if their names even resemble names on a prohibited list on all flights heading to Europe and the United States.

What is more important to remember is this: When the West did unite after World War II to beat communism, the long Cold War began without pity. They took no prisoners. They all stood together, from the United States to Norway, from Britain to Spain, from Belgium to Switzerland. And they did bring down the biggest empire. Communism collapsed.

I fear those naïve Muslims who think that they are beating the West have now achieved their worst crime of all. The West is now going to war against not only Muslims, but also, sadly, Islam as a religion.

In this new cold and hot war, car bombs and suicide bombers here and there will be no match for the arsenal that those Westerners are putting together - an arsenal of laws, intelligence pooling, surveillance by satellites, armies of special forces and indeed, allies inside the Arab world who are tired of having their lives disrupted by demented so-called jihadis or those bearded preachers who, under the guise of preaching, do little to teach and much to ignite the fire, those who know little about Islam and nothing about humanity.

I don't agree that we in the West are at war with Islam as a religion. We are at war with Islamofascism, which I define as that brand of Islam which wants to establish Sharia law as the governing code of nations, and which wants to divide the world into Dar al-Islam, and Dar al-Harb.

However, I do think it is a very good thing that Youssef Ibrahim is warning his fellow Muslims that there are negative consequences for their actions. The West is very dangerous when roused. One of the main things I have feared is what will happen if we wait too long to start solving these problems.

I believe World War II, for good and ill, is rather instructive of what can happen when the West is angry. Imagine the positive forces of the U.S. and England allied with the negative forces of Nazi Germany, and I think you will understand what I am worried about.

I do not want to see the West go full force against the Muslim world. Such a war would be a tragic mess, and possibly the end of civilization. This is why we need to put an end to Iran's pursuit of nuclear weapons. We must bomb their nuclear facilities and push to topple the Islamosfascist regime of Iran. To quote Ledeen, "Faster please."

Pope Benedict Just Kind of Throws It Out There

From AP:

VATICAN CITY - The Vatican on Thursday denounced some Israeli retaliations against past terrorism as a violation of international law in an ongoing spat over Pope Benedict XVI's failure to specifically condemn terror against Israel in recent remarks.

The Israeli Foreign Ministry summoned the Vatican envoy to Israel on Monday and complained that Benedict "deliberately" didn't mention a July 12 suicide bombing in Netanya while referring to recent terror strikes in Egypt, Britain, Turkey and Iraq.

"It's not always possible to immediately follow every attack against Israel with a public statement of condemnation," a statement from the Vatican press office said Thursday night, "and (that is) for various reasons, among them the fact that the attacks against Israel sometimes were followed by immediate Israeli reactions not always compatible with the rules of international law."

"It would thus be impossible to condemn the first (the terror strikes) and let the second (Israeli retaliation) pass in silence," said the statement, which had an unusually blistering tone for the Holy See.

It would be interesting to know precisely what Israel has done that Pope Benedict believes violates international law. It seems to me that, unless AP is not correctly reporting the contents of this Vatican statement (which is a distinct possibility), that Pope Benedict is being irresponsible in making such a non-specific allegation against Israel.

Let me be clear that I do not think that Israel has never done anything wrong. But, they certainly are wrongly accused of heinous crimes quite often. Just read about the Jenin situation, for instance. The fact that they are wrongly accused so often means that a responsible person ought to be doubly sure, and highly specific when criticizing Israel. Otherwise, one might light a fire one could never put out.

Israel's Friend France
An Interview With Jacques Chirac

Recent polls have shown that Jacques Chirac has very little support among his own people in France. The French economy is not doing well. The EU Constitution was voted down. His friend's Arafat, Hafez Assad, and Rafik al-Hariri have all died. To top it all off, the Middle Eastern leaders of today tend to look more to Washington, then to France for guidance and support in getting their initiatives through on the world stage.

All this bespeaks a leader whose influence is on a precipitous decline. But, Chirac is not a man to give up easily. Forty years in politics have taught him that there is always a way to reassert one's leadership. Thus, in one of the stranger confluences of circumstance in modern political history we find that Ariel Sharon and Jacques Chirac believe that, at this juncture, they need each other. The Israeli liberal daily, Haaretz, analyzes:

Chirac is in desperate need of some sort of achievement in the international arena. He wants to show a new peak in bilateral relations with Israel, which have been warming during the past two years. At the same time he wants to express firm support for the disengagement and the road map's comprehensive peace plan.

For his part, Sharon wants to show that he is not a prisoner in the hands of the Jewish settlers in the territories and that the disengagement is not interfering with his agenda. On the contrary. It burnishes his reputation in the world, and there is nothing like a seal of approval from a traditionally critical country like France to prove this. Sharon will also get points from the Jewish community, which is desperate for a warming of relations between the two countries.

Finally, the prime minister will also try to take advantage of the rare moment in order to formulate understandings on the burning Middle East issues - Syria, Lebanon, Hezbollah and the question of Iranian nuclear capacity.

Chirac is so keen to improve relations with Israel, that he sat for a lengthy interview with Haaretz, for which his handlers said he "worked very to prepare." Here is an excerpt:

Haaretz: Following the terror attacks in London, will Europe as a whole and France in particular have a better understanding of Israel's struggle with Palestinian terror? Will you, for example, evince more understanding of the policy of targeted assassinations in the territories?

Chirac: "The Europeans did not wait for the attacks in London in order to enlist firmly and uncompromisingly against terror. Everyday we expand, together and coherently, and in coordination with the other large countries of the world, our abilities to fight terror. We understand [your situation] well, and we have always condemned the acts of terror of which Israelis are the victims. Every act of terror is despicable and it must be deplored."

Haaretz: Is France's position on terror closer today to that of Israel, the United States or Britain?

"Nothing can justify terror. It uses the pretext of great causes as an excuse for the indiscriminate slaughter of innocent people. It is one of the faces of modern barbarism. No country is safe from it. France itself has been the victim of terror and has never underestimated the threat. On the contrary, it is spearheading the struggle against this plague. It identifies with Britain and with the other countries that have been hit, among them, alas, Israel.

"It is incumbent upon us to expand international coordination of the intelligence services, the police and the judicial systems. We are also insisting that the fight against terror be conducted while preserving the principles of the rule of law, democracy and human dignity. Therefore we have insisted that the international conventions define terror and determine a framework for international action against it.

That all sounds very resolute. But, Chirac wouldn't be Chirac if he didn't leave some room for equivocation:

"At the same time, we must deal with all the factors that nourish the hatred and the frustrations: the unresolved conflicts, religious intolerance, the rejection of the other and economic instability. We must prevent the terrorists from exploiting this fertile ground that serves them as a pretext and enables them to prosper."

The question is, how is Israel supposed to deal with the unresolved conflict that the two governing political parties of the Palestinian territories do not want Israel to exist at all?

Chirac notes that Abu Mazen has "promised to put an end to the violence," but he doesn't note that the "promise" has been followed up with no concrete effort.

Haaretz asks Chirac about the role of Hamas:

Haaretz: Could Hamas, in certain circumstances, become an interlocutor?

Chirac: "Hamas is a terrorist organization that cannot be an interlocutor of the international community as long as it does not renounce violence and does not recognize Israel's right to exist. This is the unambiguous position of the EU and it will not change."

Chirac then goes on to make a powerful argument for French/Israeli friendship; an argument the whole world needs to take heed of, whenever the concept of a "One-State Solution" to the Middle East Conflict is floated:

Haaretz: The assessment in Israel is that your invitation to Sharon symbolizes a substantial improvement in the relations between the two countries after years of tension. However, you are no doubt also aware of the despised image of France and the French in Israel. What, in your opinion, should be done to change this image, and what do you intend to do in order to improve France's image in the world, which has been evincing hostility toward it of late?

Chirac: "France is Israel's friend. It is so for historical reasons, its long and ancient friendship for the Jewish people, its admiration for this people's contribution to world civilization and also the very strong feeling that Israel's existence and legitimacy are indispensable in a world that has known the horror of the Holocaust.

I honestly don't know what to make of this new turn of events, nor of this interview. Political winds do sometimes seem to blow leaders, typically at odds with each other, into cooperative circumstances. Certainly, the Soviet Union and the United States cooperated in the destruction of Nazi Germany. However, in my opinion, while Chirac does seem to understand why Israel must continue to exist, he doesn't seem to understand the threat to it's existence.

For one thing, there is the purposeful ignoring of the fact that Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas is neglecting to live up to his side of the Road Map. And, later in the interview, Chirac is asked about Iran's pursuit of nuclear weapons:

Haaretz: If Iran decides to ignore the international demands, will you support the imposition of sanctions - and should these not prove effective - military action?

Chirac: "I cannot tell you what the results of our activity will be. I hope that it will succeed and eliminate the danger of proliferation. If this does not prove to be the case, it will of course be necessary to transfer the handling [of the Iranian problem] to the UN Security Council."

Haaretz: And then, is it possible that you would also support military action?

Chirac: "Please [he sighs] - we are not in any way at that stage. Military attacks are not a solution, whatever the problem. There are civilized means of solving problems and we hope that these will give rise to a positive solution. Otherwise, I stress, it will be necessary to turn to the Security Council."

You see, this is just more of the same thing we saw in the lead up to the Iraq War. Chirac's statement that "military attacks are not a solution, whatever the problem," flies in the face of reality, and of France's own foreign policy. When France is unhappy with the goings-on in the Ivory Coast, they do not hesitate to send in troops and shoot up the place. What Chirac is really saying here is that to attack Iran would be very dangerous. But, of course, to not attack Iran, and take out their nuclear capabilities, would be even more dangerous.

It is frightening that world leaders hold to such platitudes, and even seem convinced of their truth as they utter them. This world is not perfect. Sometimes military attacks are the answer. The Nazis could never have been vanquished without military attacks. And now, we are up against a similar fascist menace. Do we want Iran to have nuclear weapons, or not? If they show no signs of making real concessions in negotiation, then the answer is necessarily military attacks.

I think this interview is important because it shows that Chirac is wedged into a situation where he finds himself having to cooperate with Israel and the United States in the War on Terror. This could mean that he will be of help. But, at the same time, it is as clear as ever, that if Chirac is to be of help, he will have to be brought along kicking and screaming.

Wednesday, July 27, 2005

The Demons Turn on Each Other

As happens with the demons in the beginning of Paradise Lost, the various factions of our Islamofascist enemy are increasingly turning on each other. From Arab News:

Most of those killed yesterday were Egyptians. It is impossible to fathom the terrorists' warped thinking, but they clearly think that ordinary Egyptians, like ordinary Londoners, are disposable.

Theirs is not just a war against the Egyptian economy and government, it is a war against the entire Egyptian people, as it is against all the people of Britain, of Spain, of Lebanon, of Iraq, of Indonesia, of the US - of everywhere. The terrorist is at war with the entire world.

Take note; that is a Muslim criticizing the Islamofascist terrorists. And he's doing so in a newspaper which is known to defend terrorist tactics on many occasions. This is very good news.

This is what war does: It splits people into stark groups. The evil people will find other evil people to side with. Then, eventually the evil people will fall to fighting against each other. And then, it is easy to defeat them.

In World War II, Hitler and Stalin made a pact, but eventually they broke ranks and attacked each other. By the end of the war, Hitler ordered his troops to destroy Germany itself, because he believed the German people had proven themselves weak, and not deserving of an intact nation.

We are seeing the same thing in the Middle East. The Shiites, and Sunnis, and Wahabbists are fighting against each other. And they are fighting against the common people. In the Palestinian territories, Hamas and Fatah are fighting against each other.

I guess the wise thing would be for us to figure out how to give them even more reason to hate each other, so that we can sit back and let them finish the war for us.

Condemning Terrorism Is a "Defamation" Of Islam

What happens when the United Nations sits down to hammer out a definition of terrorism. Well naturally, the Islamists get angry and accuse the UN of an attack on Islam:

Commenting on this censorship, Roy Brown, President of IHEU (International Humanist and Ethical Union) said:"This is part and parcel of the refusal by the Islamic representatives at the UN to condemn the suicide bombers, or to accept any criticism of those who kill innocent people in the name of God.

These actions follow the refusal of the Islamic states at the meeting of the Commission in April to condemn those who kill in the name of religion, and to categorise their attempts to criticise Islamic terrorists as "defamation of religion".

"It is high time", Mr Brown insisted "that the Islamic States at the UN recognised that the suicide bombers are acting in the name of their religion, and to unequivocally condemn their actions."

Nigeria Embraces Fascist Sharia Code

Nigeria has decided that men and women are not allowed to travel together anymore. Why? Because that's what Sharia, the Islamic code of law derived from the Koran, dictates:

The authorities in the northern Nigerian state of Kano have imposed a ban on Muslim men and women travelling together on public transport. They say the ban is in accordance with Sharia law.

Men and women-only buses and motorcycle taxis were paraded in a mass rally at a stadium in the city of Kano. Kano is one of several Muslim majority states that adopted Sharia law in 2000, a move which led to inter-religious riots that left thousands dead.

The governor of Kano state said a new force of 9,000 uniformed police would enforce the law.

Kano is one of 12 northern states which have implemented Sharia law since 2000. The move initially heightened tensions between Muslims and Christians and led to clashes which left thousands dead.

Human rights groups have condemned abuses sanctioned under the law including amputations and flogging, and say it discriminates against women. Sharia law appears to have retained popular support in the north. But there is significant opposition to the law, especially among the Christian minority.

The goal of the Islamofascist terrorists, who keep setting off bombs around the world, is to establish a worldwide caliphate (Islamic government) with Sharia as the law. This is the enemy we are up against.

We need to understand that their grievance is against what they think of as our immorality. How do they determine that we are immoral? Well, because we aren't Muslims and we don't follow Sharia.

When understood from this vantage point, then it is plain to see that the War on Terrorism is a war between those who are free, and those who wish to spread a fascist ideology.

Tuesday, July 26, 2005

Thoughts On The Disengagement

There are two types of Zionists. Those like myself, for whom Zionism means the Jews should have a homeland (not a lot to ask), and those who believe that Israel belongs to the Jews because God gave it to them.

Those who believe that the Jews claim on Israel comes directly from God, often seem willing to go to any length to secure the territory they believe belongs to them. Many are willing to secure land through theft and murder.

I do not support such action.

Here in this post, Melanie Phillips discusses the new political fashion statement (wearing orange) of those who believe they have the right to land by divine decree:

Gershon Baskin says it all:

'Zionism is not about occupying the West Bank and Gaza. The continuation of the settlement enterprise is an act of suicide for the Zionist dream. It is not only about demographics. It is perhaps even more so about values, morality and lessons that we, as Jews, should understand better than anyone else.

'The disengagement from Gaza is a Zionist act. Ending our occupation and domination over Gaza and its people is an action aimed at saving Zionism from those who have tainted the noble aspects of its cause since 1967. The Zionist dream is still in danger and the Zionist enterprise is at risk as long as we continue our occupation and domination over the West Bank and its people. The march out of the occupied territories must continue. We must return to ourselves and build Israel from within.

'The future appears ominous. Over the past months I have watched the streets of Israel and, in particular Jerusalem, turn orange. As the streets, the trees and the fashion has adopted this new symbol I have found myself confronted with the very strong visual image of a people I do not recognize.

'How could these people – with their messianic vision and value system that justifies treating the "other" as less equal than Jews – and I be part of the same nation? We have the same roots, we share a common heritage, we come from the same places, yet there has been a split; for some time they and their kind have been very different from me and my kind.'

The disengagement appears to have brought the moral crisis that has engulfed Israel out into the open. The terrible danger, of course, is that this weakens Israel still further at a time when the Arab enemies who wish to annihilate it are seizing their moment and redoubling their attacks.

The orangistas are thus handing Hamas victory on a plate. This hysteria is suicidal. The country should pull itself together to back the disengagement, and put an end to the disgusting, Holocaust-denying equation being made between the resettlement of Jews from places where settlement was always a moral and strategic error -- a disengagement fraught with extreme danger which is being undertaken in order to safeguard the Jewish state -- and the pogroms and ethnic cleansing of Jews by those who wished them dead.

A country can survive a threat from without -- but not if it is simultaneously tearing itself apart.

Just to clarify: I think it is possible to believe that God gave the land of Israel to the Jews, and still not believe in seizing it by violence. The reality is, I do believe God gave Israel to the Jews. However, I also believe that God can, and will, work out His purposes in due time. I don't think men should take up the sword in God's name.

Violence, such as that we commit in war, is a necessary evil which is byproduct of the fallen state of our world. Violence committed in self-defense is justified. Therefore, if a people are threatened, they should fight back. And that's why I do support Israel in their ongoing battles against terrorism.

All that being said, the problems with the Palestinian terrorists will probably become worse with disengagement. I say this because the charters of the two main terrorist organizations, the PLO and Hamas, both call for the utter destruction of the state of Israel. As Hamas and the PLO are the two elected political parties which rule the Palestinian territories, it is reasonable to assume disengagement will not stop their violence.

The unacknowledged truth about the disengagement plan is that it is a way for Israel to give the Palestinians the state they were supposed to earn through negotiation. Once the Palestinians have a state, then any attack upon Israel is an act of War, in which case Israel will be justified in vanquishing their enemy.

The Palestinians can avoid such destruction by opting for peace, and concentrating instead on building Palestine into a viable and productive state.

Monday, July 25, 2005

Will we mock our own principles, and let the women of the Islamic world down?

Will Sharia Be the Law in Iraq?
Will We Mock Our Own Principles?

The Iraqi Constitution may not turn out to be something that is worth our investment:

Baghdad, 25 July (AKI) - Iraqi women are alarmed that the National Assembly committee mandated to draft the country's new constitution is curtailing the rights of women granted them in the earlier, interim version and using Islamic Sharia law as the main source for legislation, the United Nations Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM) has said.

Two weeks ago, a draft of the text, released to journalists by a member of a sub-committee of the main constitutional committee, contained a chapter on duties and rights, changing the status of Koranic Sharia law from being an important source of legislation in the interim constitution to being the main source, UNIFEM said.

In the draft, a clause putting 25 per cent of women on all decision-making bodies would only be followed for the next two election phases and could then be removed altogether, it said.

Factors in ensuring women's equality with men and issues addressed by international laws and treaties would all be subordinate to Sharia and the progressive personal status law governing marriage, divorce and inheritance would be replaced by the law as practised according to a family's own religion or sect, UNIFEM said.

The Iraqi women's movement recently prepared a memorandum making such demands as the recognition of women's human rights as mother, worker and citizen, the prevention of all kinds of violence and discrimination against women and the recognition of international conventions and documents that Iraq has signed and ratified as a source for Iraqi legislation and regulation, it said.

Some 200 men and women staged a protest against the draft in Baghdad's Firdaws Square last week, but the sit-in ended when news reached them that two Sunni members of the drafting committee had been assassinated, UNIFEM said.

If this is the Constitution the Iraqis end up with, we will have wasted our time, money, not to mention the precious lives of our soldiers. This is not acceptable. George Bush can not allow this.

The decision must be made. Is this war about freedom, or is it about realpolitik? Words don't matter. Only the final result of our sacrifices matters. If this is a war about realpolitik, then I am not a supporter.

If this war is not about Freedom, then we have made fools of ourselves. We have mocked our own Declaration of Independence, and our own Constitution.

I don't know about all of you, but I have not come all this way to be mocked.

And everyone else needs to make that decision as well. I said back in February of 2005 that I would never again vote for a Democrat. If George Bush allows this to happen to the people of Iraq, then I will never again vote for a Republican either.

I Hold This Truth To Be Self-Evident - All People Are Created Equal

If our government will not live up to this principle, then we need to throw out all those who are leading us. It will be time for another Constitutional Convention. And one of the Amendments will have to be that we never be led into a war which does not promote our own principles.

Is Oriana Fallaci A Racist?

The Economist says Oriana Fallaci is a kind of racist:

THERE is nothing al-Qaeda would like more than for Europeans to turn on Muslims in their midst, uniting fundamentalist militants with those who are neither fundamentalist nor militant. In that sense, Osama bin Laden won yet another victory this week with the publication of another hate-filled, anti-Islamic diatribe by an Italian writer who has become noted for such diatribes: Oriana Fallaci.

Over the past three years, the 76-year-old Ms Fallaci has carved out a role as the voice of what might be a new European racism—were race, not religion, her primary cause.…

I say she is not. However, I will admit that Ms. Fallaci, whom I admire, makes two crucial "errors" which Leftist appeasers use to corner her intellectually. The "errors" she makes are:

1) conflating Islamofascism with the Islam practiced by peaceful Muslims who believe in giving and receiving love from both Muslim and Infidel alike. I know there are Muslims like this, because I have met them personally.

2) conflating the historical threat that Islam has posed to the Western world with the Islam of every single Muslim. Once again, there are peaceful Muslims.

I believe Oriana Fallaci knows that there are peaceful Muslims. However, it is not her point.

Her point is that, historically, Islam has been on a 1,300 year long Jihad. When the Jihadists get beat back, they retreat and take time to regroup, but they always return to try, once again, to spread their religion by conversion or by the sword. Whichever need be.

All one has to do is read history, and read the Koran itself, to see this is true.

As it is true, it is fair to say that Islam itself, is a threat to the Western world.

Ms. Fallaci uses this conflation for the powerful effect it allows her to make with words. When one reads Ms. Fallaci's work, one is struck by the directness of the language. There is no equivocating. There are no disclaimers (as you find on this site) to impede the impact of her warnings.

In short, I think Ms. Fallaci is a necessary voice, because it doesn't much matter that the majority of Muslims are peaceful, if those peaceful Muslims won't stand up against the Jihadis in their midst. If they won't turn those in who would kill their neighbors.

I will continue on with the disclaimers here on CUANAS, even though they do break up the rhythm of my paragraphs. Even though they impede the directness of my language.

The reality is, I hold out hope that, one of these days, the Islamofascists will kill the wrong Muslim, or just too many Muslims, and that finally, the good, peaceful Muslims around us will be shocked into the reality we Westerners were already shocked into; which is that these Islamofascists don't care about life. They have no good in their hearts. They want us dead.

Canadian Imam Threatens Canada With Attacks

From Globe and Mail:

A controversial Toronto imam warned Public Safety Minister Anne McLellan at a closed-door meeting to stop "terrorizing" Canadian Muslims.

"If you try to cross the line I can't guarantee what is going to happen. Our young people, we can't control," Aly Hindy, the head of Scarborough's Salaheddin Islamic Centre, recalls telling the minister at the May meeting she held in Toronto with dozens of Muslim leaders.

The meeting was part of an effort by Ms. McLellan to reach out to Canadian Muslims amid complaints that the RCMP and Canadian Security Intelligence Service are engaging in racial profiling.

The minister and her officials have been meeting community leaders to explain they are not targeting Muslims generally, only individuals with possible terrorist links.

"The police came to me and said, 'This is a kind of threat,' and I said yes," he said. "But it's for the good of this country.

"And they said, 'Do you know some of the names of those people you expect to cause some problems?' And I said, 'You just open the telephone directory.' "

What the heck has Canada done to the Muslims, other than act like perfect little Steppin' Fetchits?

This seems like proof that giving in to the demands of Islamists does nothing but embolden them to make more demands.

Muslims Can Expect Increasing Distrust
Survey of British Muslims Reveals
24% "Feel Sympathy" For Motives of Terrorists

From Daniel Pipes:

Estimating how many potential terrorists reside in one’s country is a highly inexact business, but there’s a striking correlation between a British government report recently leaked to London’s Times a new opinion survey commissioned by the Daily Telegraph.
Drawing on unidentified “intelligence,” the government report (analyzed by me at “The Next London Bombing”) finds as many as 16,000 “British Muslims actively engaged in terrorist activity.”

Then, using standard survey research methods, the reputable YouGov polling firm interviewed 526 Muslim adults across Great Britain online during July 15-22, weighing the data to reflect the British Muslim population’s age, gender, and countries of origin. The survey found that 1 percent of them, or “about 16,000 individuals, declare themselves willing, possibly even eager, to embrace violence” in the effort to bring an end to “decadent and immoral” Western society.

Should their ranks really be so thick, such a huge number of potential terrorists could cause an unprecedented security crisis for Britain, with all the attendant economic, social, political, and cultural ramifications one can imagine.

The YouGov survey contains many other statistics that should interest, if not shock, Britons and other Westerners.

· Muslims who see the 7/7 bombing attacks in London as justified on balance: 6 percent.
· Who feel sympathy for the “feelings and motives” of those who carried out the 7/7 attacks: 24 percent.
· Understand “why some people behave in that way”: 56 percent.
· Disagree with Tony Blair’s description of the ideology of the London bombers as “perverted and poisonous”: 26 percent.
· Feel not loyal towards Britain: 16 percent.
· Agree that “Western society is decadent and immoral and that Muslims should seek to bring it to an end”: 32 percent willing to use non-violent means and (as noted above) 1 percent willing to use violence “if necessary.” Just 56 percent of Muslims agree with the statement that “Western society may not be perfect but Muslims should live with it and not seek to bring it to an end.”
· Doubt that anyone charged with and tried for the 7/7 attacks would receive a fair trial: 44 percent.
· Would not inform on a Muslim religious leader “trying to ‘radicalise’ young Muslims by preaching hatred against the West”: 10 percent.
· Do not think people have a duty to go to the police if they “see something in the community that makes them feel suspicious”: 14 percent.
· Believe other Muslims would be reluctant to go to the police “about anything they see that makes them suspicious”: 41 percent.
· Would inform the police if they believed that knew about the possible planning of a terrorist attack: 73 percent. (In this case, the Daily Telegraph did not make available the negative percentage.)

It's bad enough that there are 16,000 potential terrorists in the Islamic community. Add to that the fact that they can pretty much act out in the open without fear of being turned in. I believe we have the same problem here. Most Mosques in the United States contain anti-American, anti-Infidel hate literature, and nary a Muslim objects.

As I have been saying, until Muslims start taking action against the Islamists in their midst, they can expect to be treated with increasing distrust in our world.

Here's what they can do to start to make things better:

1) start by contacting Christian churches, Jewish Synagogues, and Mormon Temples down to their mosques for a day of gathering up the hate material, and carting it to the recycling plant.

2) call the FBI every time they hear of Islamist terrorists recruiting people on campus or in a Mosque.

3) eject Imams and other speakers from Mosques when you hear them say things like this and this.

When mainstream Muslims start taking strong action against such hatred, then they can expect the level of respect for their community to rise dramatically. Until then, they can expect suspicion.

Former Prime Minister of Britain Says,
Deport Those Who "Spit Hate"

Maybe I just didn't get him, but John Major always seemed like one of the most boring politicians on the planet. But, look at this. He's got a great idea:

People who "spit hate" at the British way of life should be deported, Tory former Prime Minister John Major said.

Mr Major spoke of the "uncomfortable reality" that many terrorists were born or lived in the UK but had been taught to hate its culture.

"There seem to be many people who, for reasons that are irrational, dislike the Anglo-Saxon way of life," he said.

He called for heavier penalties for those who incited violence at this "particularly sensitive time".
"Always difficult to balance this against freedom of speech but I think, at the moment, it is justifiable to protect the public," he argued.

Mr Major added: "As far as those who literally spit hate at our country and there are some of them - they spit hate at our country and they incite - I personally would be prepared to deport those where it is clear that what they are doing is causing civil unrest and may cost other people, as a result of that, their lives."

He also called for more CCTV cameras to deter the threat and the use of intercept evidence in courts. Interviewed on the BBC Radio 4 Today programme, Mr Major urged the Government to consult widely over new anti-terror legislation.

"They are going to have to carry people with them at this moment," he warned.

He also defended the controversial shoot-to kill policy that led to the death of Jean Charles de Menezes.

"I rather prefer the expression shoot to protect rather than shoot to kill - I think that is a more accurate description of what happened."

These are the kinds of tactics we will have to adopt, if we are to win the War on Islamofascist Terror.

Sunday, July 24, 2005

Female Arab Columnist Says,
"God Belongs To Me Too."

Mona Eltahawy is a columnist for the New York-based pan-Arab newspaper Asharq al-Awsat. In this article, published by the Washington Post she declares that she is fed up with the Islamofascists murdering people, and murdering her own religion:

The July 7 London bombings did it for me. Perhaps it was because my parents moved us from Cairo to the British capital when I was 7 years old, and so London was my childhood "home." Or maybe it was because our route to work and school every morning crisscrossed those same Underground stations that were targeted.

I'm sure it was also those dog-eared statements that our clerics and religious leaders read out telling us that Islam means peace -- it actually means submission -- and asking us to please forget everything they had ever said before July 6, because as of July 7 they truly believe violence is bad. Their backpedaling is so furious you can smell the skid marks.

Some are not even bothering to put their feet on the pedals, such as the 22 imams and scholars who met at London's largest mosque to condemn the bombings but who would not criticize all suicide attacks.

Sayed Mohammed Musawi, the head of the World Islamic League in London, insisted "there should be a clear distinction between the suicide bombing of those who are trying to defend themselves from occupiers, which is something different from those who kill civilians, which is a big crime."

In a classic example of laying blame everywhere but at our own door, Musawi actually criticized the Western media (for supposedly confusing frustrated young Muslims) rather than those scholars who had blessed suicide bombings as long as they targeted Israelis.

Suicide bombings are the Muslim weapon of choice not only in London and Israel but in Iraq, Saudi Arabia and Turkey. They are killing Muslims and non-Muslims alike, and yet our imams and scholars cannot condemn them.

As I said, the London bombings did it for me. Or maybe it's the knowledge that the more these faceless cowards strike, the more Muslim men in the West like my brother are pushed onto the stage of suspicion. After the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, Ehab -- who spends virtually all of his time caring for his cardiology patients or fulfilling his role as husband and father -- was one of the 5,000 Muslim men questioned by the FBI; two years later he was among the thousands more who had to submit to being fingerprinted and photographed as part of a special registration.

But most of all, the London bombings rid me of all patience with the excuse that "George Bush [or Tony Blair or take your pick of Western leaders] made me do it." We don't know who was behind Thursday's explosions, but an Arab analyst told a satellite channel that if Blair hadn't learned the mistake of the Iraq war, these new attacks were a firm reminder.

I never bought the explanation that U.S. foreign policy had "brought on" the Sept. 11 attacks, and I certainly don't buy the idea that the Iraq war is behind the attacks in London. Many people across the world have opposed U.S. and British foreign policy, but that doesn't mean they are rushing to fly planes into buildings or to blow up buses and Underground trains in London.

I was against the invasion of Iraq and would not have voted for George Bush if I were a U.S. citizen, but I'm done with the "George Bush made me do it" excuse. We must accept responsibility for this mess if we are ever to find a way out.

And for those non-Muslims who accept the George Bush excuse, I have a question: Do you think Muslims are incapable of accepting responsibility? It is at least in some way bigoted to think that Muslims can only react violently.

We all must ask a host of difficult questions. How about beginning by acknowledging once and for all that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is not a Muslim issue? It is a dispute over land that too many clerics and religious leaders, radical or otherwise, use to flesh out the victimized-Muslim scenario.

Yes, Palestinians deserve a state, and, yes, Israel must end its occupation of the West Bank and Gaza.

But rather than dwelling endlessly on these issues, we would do well to spend time encouraging our young people to become more active members of their communities and to not live caught between two worlds: a Muslim one at home and in the mosque, an "infidel" one outside.

And what about assimilation? It is not bigoted to ask Muslims if they are integrating into the societies they are living in. Just as the British government has responsibilities toward its citizens, immigrants included, so too do those immigrants. Muslims ask for time off work for prayer, for example, and they often get it. But are they truly living in Britain or are they perpetuating an existence that even their relatives "back home" long ago left behind? Domestic policy is too often ignored by many Muslims who are more concerned with Palestine, Iraq or any other place where Muslims are believed to have suffered injustice.

I raise these questions because London might have done it for me, but I'm not done with Islam. The clerics and the terrorists will not take it away from me. God belongs to me, too.

Women are the Thomas Jefferson's and Thomas Paine's of the Revolutionary War against Islamofascism. Women like Hirsi Ali, Mona Eltahawy, Irshad Manji, Oriana Fallaci, and our blogosphere's very own Pamela from Atlas Shrugs, and Dymphna from Gates of Vienna, are necessarily the most powerful voices raised against the Islamofascist tyranny.

Why do I say necessarily? Because, you will notice, whenever I recite the litany of offenses that constitute the Islamofascist assault on civilization, the very first I cite is the fact that Islamofascists keep HALF THEIR POPULATION IN SLAVERY; that is the female half.

Under the Islamofascist tyranny of strict Sharia law, women are not allowed to make choices about whom they will marry, whether to be educated, whether to work, what to wear, or where to go. People who are not allowed to make such basic decisions for themselves have had their freedom of choice absolutely obliterated. They are slaves.

It is, apparently, hard for us here in Western countries to process this idea. We think of slaves as being people who are chained, and forced to live in little huts on the back of a plantation. We think of slaves as people who pick the cotton and dig the ditches. But, the basic definition of a slave is:

One bound in servitude as the property of a person or household.

It is true that women do have the right to demand a divorce under Sharia law, but as they don't have the right to make these other decisions for themselves (especially the right to education and work), divorce is a choice for poverty, and a life of being ostracized.

I want to be clear that I am speaking here against not only the idea of the enslavement of women under Sharia, but against it's practice in countries such as Saudi Arabia, Iran, and the Sudan. The life of a woman in these countries is at the will of the men in their lives, and is as degrading and inhuman as those men choose to make it.

We must be clear about who our enemy is in this war. Just as surely as during the Revolutionary War, or the Civil War, or any other war, for that matter, the reasons for our fighting are legion, and include economic, as well as territorial concerns, but the enemy we fight is the same; that is, the forces who would take freedom from individuals, and hand it to a tyranny.

Islamofascism must end, and as women are the individuals most abused by it's existence, so women are also the most eloquent voices against it.

Palestinians Stab 12-Year Old Palestinian Boy
Blame Jewish Settlers

From Little Green Footballs:

NABLUS, West Bank (Reuters) - Palestinian security forces said on Thursday they were investigating the possibility that Palestinians stabbed a 12-year-old boy to death in the West Bank, after earlier saying witnesses had blamed Jewish settlers.

The boy was playing in a river bed on Wednesday night near Qaryot village when he was attacked and killed.

Immediately after the incident, a Palestinian security official said witnesses had reported the boy had been stabbed by Jewish settlers who had marched into the village, south of the West Bank city of Nablus.

But senior Palestinian security officials investigating the incident said on Thursday there was no evidence that settlers had been behind the stabbing.

Rase Rajbeh, a Preventive Security official from Nablus, said police were investigating the possibility the boy was stabbed as part of a feud with another Palestinian family or that he was killed by Palestinian criminals.

Israeli police said they questioned the only witness to the incident, a friend of the boy who was playing with him at the time, and that he told them the assailants were Palestinians and spoke Arabic.

“The other boy saw everything. He was questioned last night and he said it wasn’t done by Jews,” Israeli police spokesman Shlomi Sagi said.

You know there is no evidence against the settlers when Palestinian "security officials" won't pin it on the Jews.

The Multiculturalists Get Mugged

Mark Steyn tells the story of an interesting pre-9/11 encounter with Mohammed Atta, and how it is emblematic of our Multicultural fantasies. From Mark Steyn:

WITH hindsight, the defining encounter of the age was not between Mohammed Atta's jet and the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, but that between Mohammed Atta and Johnelle Bryant a year earlier. Bryant is an official with the US Department of Agriculture in Florida, and the late Atta had gone to see her about getting a $US650,000 government loan to convert a plane into the world's largest crop-duster. A novel idea.

The meeting got off to a rocky start when Atta refused to deal with Bryant because she was but a woman. But, after this unpleasantness had been smoothed out, things went swimmingly. When it was explained to him that, alas, he wouldn't get the 650 grand in cash that day, Atta threatened to cut Bryant's throat. He then pointed to a picture behind her desk showing an aerial view of downtown Washington - the White House, the Pentagon et al - and asked: "How would America like it if another country destroyed that city and some of the monuments in it?"

Fortunately, Bryant's been on the training course and knows an opportunity for multicultural outreach when she sees one. "I felt that he was trying to make the cultural leap from the country that he came from," she recalled. "I was attempting, in every manner I could, to help him make his relocation into our country as easy for him as I could."

So a few weeks later, when fellow 9/11 terrorist Marwan al-Shehhi arrived to request another half-million dollar farm subsidy and Atta showed up cunningly disguised with a pair of glasses and claiming to be another person entirely - to whit, al-Shehhi's accountant - Bryant sportingly pretended not to recognise him and went along with the wheeze. The fake specs, like the threat to slit her throat and blow up the Pentagon, were just another example of the multicultural diversity that so enriches our society.

For four years, much of the western world behaved like Bryant. Bomb us, and we agonise over the "root causes" (that is, what we did wrong). Decapitate us, and our politicians rush to the nearest mosque to declare that "Islam is a religion of peace". Issue bloodcurdling calls at Friday prayers to kill all the Jews and infidels, and we fret that it may cause a backlash against Muslims. Behead sodomites and mutilate female genitalia, and gay groups and feminist groups can't wait to march alongside you denouncing Bush, Blair and Howard. Murder a schoolful of children, and our scholars explain that to the "vast majority" of Muslims "jihad" is a harmless concept meaning "decaf latte with skimmed milk and cinnamon sprinkles".

Until the London bombings. Something about this particular set of circumstances - British subjects, born and bred, weaned on chips, fond of cricket, but willing to slaughter dozens of their fellow citizens - seems to have momentarily shaken the multiculturalists out of their reveries. Hitherto, they've taken a relaxed view of the more, ah, robust forms of cultural diversity - Sydney gang rapes, German honour killings - but Her Britannic Majesty's suicide bombers have apparently stiffened even the most jelly-spined lefties.

At The Age, Terry Lane, last heard blaming John Howard for the "end of democracy as we know it" and calling for "the army of my country ... to be defeated" in Iraq, now says multiculturalism is a "repulsive word" whereas "assimilation is a beaut" and should be commended. In the sense that he seems to have personally assimilated with Pauline Hanson, he's at least leading by example.

Where Lane leads, Melbourne's finest have been rushing to follow, lining up to sign on to the New Butchness. "There is something wrong with multiculturalism," warns Pamela Bone. "Perhaps it is time to say, you are welcome, but this is the way it is here." Tony Parkinson - The Age's resident voice of sanity - quotes approvingly France's Jean-Francois Revel: "Clearly, a civilisation that feels guilty for everything it is and does will lack the energy and conviction to defend itself."

... multiculturalism is a kind of societal Stockholm Syndrome. Atta's meetings with Bryant are emblematic: He wasn't a genius, a master of disguise in deep cover; indeed, he was barely covered at all, he was the Leslie Nielsen of terrorist masterminds - but the more he stuck out, the more Bryant was trained not to notice, or to put it all down to his vibrant cultural tradition.

"Let America and Israel Know,
Each of Our Suicide Volunteers
Equals a Nuclear Bomb”

Iran has all but officially declared war on the United States. From IranFocus.com:

Tehran, Iran, Jul. 22 – A military garrison has been opened in Iran to recruit and train volunteers for “martyrdom-seeking operations”, according to the garrison’s commander, Mohammad-Reza Jaafari.

Jaafari, a senior officer in the elite Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), told a hard-line weekly close to Iran’s ultra-conservative President-elect Mahmoud Ahmadinejad that the new “Lovers of Martyrdom Garrison” (Gharargahe Asheghane Shahadat, in Persian) would recruit individuals willing to carry out suicide operations against Western targets.

The full text of the original interview in Persian can be seen on the weekly’s website at www.partosokhan.ir/283/page08.pdf .

“The Lovers of Martyrdom Garrison has been activated and we will form a Martyrdom-seeking Division for each province in the country, organised in brigades, battalions and companies to defend Islam”, Jaafari told the weekly Parto-Sokhan.

Jaafari was quoted by the weekly as saying that the organisation of "martyrdom-seeking popular forces" was being implemented on the basis of instructions from the Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces. In the earlier interview, the garrison commander spoke in glowing terms of the newly-elected president.

The commander said that “in Tehran alone, there will be four martyrdom-seeking divisions”, adding that “we are currently in the process of recruitment and organisation and soon volunteers will receive training in accordance to their assigned missions”.

The weekly’s interview with Jaafari appeared under the title, “Commander of Lovers of Martyrdom Garrison:

Let America and Israel know, each of our suicide volunteers equals a nuclear bomb”.

“The Imam [Khomeini] said years ago that Israel must be wiped off the face of the Earth, but so far practical steps have not been taken to achieve this”, the garrison commander said. “Our garrison must spot, recruit, organise and train martyrdom-seeking persons to be able to materialise this objective. Any delay in fulfilling the strategy of the Imam and the Supreme Leader in this regard will not be to the advantage of Islam or the revolution”.

“The United States should know that we have nuclear weapons, but they are in the hearts of our suicide bombers”, Jaafari added.

Jaafari is a senior commander who has met with Khamenei on several occasions, according to the interview. He was chairman of the First Conference in Honour of Unknown Martyrs in Tehran earlier this month. The event was widely reported by Iran’s state-run media, which cited Jaafari’s remarks.

If we are to win the War on Terror, we must attack Iran and bomb them until we are sure their nuclear capability is destroyed. I have been a supporter of the Bush Administration up until now, but I am beginning to doubt their focus. I think we can prevail in Iraq, but victory in Iraq will not ensure us peace.

Iraq was definitely a threat, but the biggest threats to our country specifically, and stability in general are Syria, Saudi Arabia and Iran. Are we going to do anything about them?

I have been working under the impression that the strategy behind the War on Terror was to first overthrow the Taliban in Afghanistan, and then the Hussein regime in Iraq, as a way of setting up bases in the Middle East surrounding Iran, and threatening Syria. I have been under the impression that we hoped that these bases would pressure Syria and Iran into giving in to the Democratizing forces within their own countries.

In the case of Syria, the Assad regime did feel threatened enough to remove their forces from Lebanon. However, presumably, they still hold much of their power through the connections within Hizbollah. And when it comes to what happens within the borders of Syria, all our work has pretty much come to naught, as far as I can tell. Syria is still known to be a launching ground for terrorist attacks within Iraq.

Now, to Iran. A month ago we learned what we should have known from the start; that the reform candidate in the Iranian elections stood no chance of winning. Although he was carrying the polls just days prior to the ballots being case, he was roundly defeated when the Mullah form of "Democracy" was applied.

Now, we have the new Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, a hardliner, Sharia-promoting, America-hating fascist, right from the Khomeini school.

So, what have we accomplished? Not a lot. I'm sure many Lebanese Christians, and Afghani, or Iraqi women would say we have accomplished a lot. But, let's be honest, this war is not all about spreading Freedom. It is also about protecting the United States, and the interests of Western Civilization in general. So, as things are, what will we have accomplished if we eliminated Iraq, only to have Iranian nukes trained on us?

And what, if anything, does the Bush Administration plan to do anything about the problem?

UPDATE: After opening my big mouth, and speaking my doubts about Bush Administration policy on Iran, I figure I'd better add this, from Publius Pundit:

Earlier in the week I wrote about martial law being declared in Mahabad, a city in the north-western Kurdish area of Iran. According to Kurdish Media, protestors are defying the crackdown. And now, the protests are spreading throughout Kurdish cities in Iran.

Since the killing of Shuana Kardi, a Kurdish activist, on Saturday July the 13th by the Pastaram in the city of Mahabad, Iranian Kurdistan, the people of this city have come every day to the streets in order to protest against the Iranian state’s oppressive policy towards the Kurds.

They expressed their demands for democracy, their national and cultural rights but the suppressive forces of the regime have attacked these demonstrations and about 100 people have been killed, arrested or crippled.

The city is surrounded by the military forces of the Islamic regime and people currently have no possibility to continue their normal life, but it should be mentioned that at the same time the people have reacted to this suppression in different ways and chanted slogans in which they demanded democracy, human rights and other democratic rights.

Iranian officials have answered to these demands and demonstrations with nothing but yet more oppression, killings and arrests.

Continuation of the above mentioned demonstrations in Mahabad has resulted in the spread of the demonstrations to other cities in Iranian Kurdistan. During the last few days, people in the cities of Piranshar, Sardajd, Mariwan, Rabat, Bokan, Narada, Ushnauia, Urumia, Salmaz, as well as Sanandaj and Kirmanshah through different means have demonstrated and shown their support to the people of Mahabad and their just demands.

According to different Kurdish sources these demonstrations are becoming ever bigger. The Islamic forces use gas, guns and other illegal methods to suppress those demonstrations and the Kurdish people. The regime has now enforced a kind of military order all over Iranian Kurdistan.

According to different sources hundreds of people in other cities have also been arrested and wounded, and those who have been wounded cannot be transported to hospitals because they are afraid and are in a difficult situation.

So, maybe the people of Iran are being emboldened by our presence. However, their protests, and sacrifice could come to nothing if we don't help out with more than rhetoric.

As Ledeen say, "Faster please."

Indian Muslim Convicted of 9/11 Plot
To Fly Jet Into British House of Commons

British blogger, and newspaper columnist, Melanie Phillips brings us the news that a man was convicted in a Bombay court the other day for conspiring, with a group of seven other men, to hijack airplanes and fly them into the British House of Commons on Sept. 11, 2001. Yes, that' right, concurrent with the attack on our own World Trade Center and Pentagon

Had anyone ever heard about this before? Doesn't this seem like big news?

Not to the London Times, who buried it on Page 12:

The Times reports:

‘An Indian man was jailed in Bombay yesterday for plotting to fly passenger jets into the House of Commons and Tower Bridge in London on September 11, 2001.

‘Mohammed Afroze was sentenced to seven years after he admitted that he had a role in an al-Qaeda plot to attack London, the Rialto Towers building in Melbourne and the Indian Parliament. His lawyer has claimed, however, that the confession was “forcefully taken” and that Afroze was tortured by Indian police.

‘Afroze admitted that he and seven al-Qaeda operatives planned to hijack aircraft at Heathrow and fly them into the two London landmarks. The suicide squad included men from Bangladesh, Afghanistan and Pakistan, Afroze said.

They booked seats on two Manchester-bound flights, but fled just before they were due to board.’

I did a double-take when I read this. One of the central claims by the appeasenik crowd is that Britain would never have been an al Qaeda target had it not joined the US in its war on terror, Afghanistan, Iraq etc. It was always obvious to anyone with eyes to see that Britain was always a target along with the rest of the free world.

But the only reference to an actual plot against Britain on 9/11, as far as I am aware, was made in Rohan Gunaratna’s book Inside al Qaeda. Now, in a small story on page 12 of the Times, we are told that a man has been convicted of an al Qaeda conspiracy to hit Britain on 9/11. Shouldn’t this be a major story?

So much for the arguments of the appeasers.

Muslim Anti-Terror Rallies Fail To Get Coverage

From the Anchoress:

AN ANTI-TERROR RALLY BY MUSLIMS in Antelope Valley, California.

You know, if these people had blown something up, they’d be getting more press. Which suggests that if the press wants to help eliminate terrorism, it should adjust its priorities.
UPDATE: Here’s a report of an antiterror protest in Iraq, too. The same point applies.

ANOTHER UPDATE: There’s more anti-terror protest action in Denmark.

Hey, you people in the press. What kind of world do you want to leave your children? Do you enjoy the idea that your kid can get on a subway train or go to a carnival and perhaps be blown to bits? When are you going to get with the program? You cover the terrorists, you give them credibility and glamour. How about YOU COVER THE ANTI-TERRORISTS for a change?

Once again, we get our news from the blogs and alternative media because the MSM WILL NOT DO THEIR JOBS.

.

The Jews Did It, Part 1,378,491

Yesterday there was a bombing in Egypt which killed 88 people and injured hundreds. Today, we find that Egyptian "security experts" and "political analysts" say the Jews did it:

Several Egyptian "security experts" and "political analysts" interviewed by Arab TV stations in the aftermath of the Sharm e-Sheikh bombings on Saturday claimed that Israel and Jews were behind the carnage.

The accusations that Israel was responsible for the deadly attacks were made despite a claim of responsibility by a group citing ties to Al-Qaida, according to a statement posted on an Islamic Web site.

Similar charges have been made against Israel in the past, particularly after last year's suicide attack at the Taba Hilton Hotel in October 2004 and after the 9/11 attacks in New York and Washington.

However, most Egyptian government officials refrained from pointing an accusing finger toward Israel, pointing out that extremist Muslim groups were most likely responsible for the Sharm e-Sheikh attacks.

Shortly after the attacks, Egypt's state-run television interviewed retired army general Fuad Allam. He said that he was almost certain that Israel was behind the attacks at Sharm e-Sheikh and Taba.

According to Fuad, investigations have shown that the mastermind of the Taba attack was a Palestinian "apparently linked to Israel's security forces."

He added: "I'm almost certain that Israel was also behind this attack because they want to undermine our government and deal a severe blow to our economy. The only ones who benefit from these attacks are the Israelis and the Americans."...

Racists say the darndest things.

"For Four Years

I've Been Talking About Islamic Nazism"

Someguy, from Mystery Achievement, has translated Parts One, and Two, of the most recent Oriana Fallaci column. Here are some brief excerpts:

Now, I ask myself: “What do you say, what do you have to say, about what happened in London?” They ask me face-to-face, via fax and email; often scolding me because up until now I have remained silent. I’ve been saying it for four years ...

For four years I’ve been talking about Islamic Nazism; about the war against the West; about the death cult; about European suicide. About a Europe that is no longer Europe, but Eurabia, and that with its feebleness, its inertia, its blindness, its servitude to the enemy is digging its own grave.

... for which in France they tried me in 2002, accusing me of religious racism and xenophobia. For which Switzerland asked our Minister of Justice to extradite me in handcuffs. For which in Italy I will be tried for vilifying Islam; that is, for an offense of opinion.

During these last four years, I have done nothing but ask myself why a warrior like Wojtyla, a leader so singular who contributed more than anyone else to the downfall of the Soviet empire and, therefore, of Communism, showed himself to be so weak towards a disease worse than the Soviet empire or Communism. A disease that, above all, targets Christianity (and Judaism) for destruction. ... why he did not inveigh openly against what was happening (and is happening), for example, in Sudan where the fundamentalist regime was practicing (and is practicing) slavery. Where Christians were eliminated (are eliminated) by the millions.

Why he was silent about Saudi Arabia where anyone with a Bible in hand or a cross around his neck was (and is) treated like a scum to be put to death. Still today, there is that silence I don’t understand, and….

Click on the links above, and go read the whole thing.

It's true. Oriana has been trying to tell us for four years now, and she is being brought up on charges for her efforts. She's an old woman, dying of cancer, and the Euros are bringing her on charges for telling the truth.

Why? Because Europe is an old woman dying of Alzheimers.

Negotiation: European Style

No one wants the Mad Mullahs of Iran to have access to nuclear weapons. So, we've all been waiting with bated breath, while the EU negotiates with Iran over the future of the Iranian nuclear program. Looks like the Euros have finally hammered out a deal:

Senior Iranian Official: Europe Will Recognize Iran's Right to a Limited Nuclear Fuel Cycle

The European Union, which is negotiating a long-term nuclear agreement with Iran through the EU-3 ( United Kingdom,Germany, and France), was scheduled to submit a detailed program for Iranian and European guarantees by the end of July 2005.

If the talks had not taken place, there would have been a crisis with Iran 's nuclear portfolio in the IAEA Board of Governors, and the major oil and gas contracts that Iran signed with the world would not have been possible.

The negotiations with the E.U. have generated an atmosphere enabling Iran to sign long-term gas export contracts with India, China, Pakistan, and the UAE. These contracts are considered to be among the world's greatest economic contracts. Mousavian:

"If Europe Offers to Support the Iranian Nuclear Power Plants and to Guarantee their [Nuclear] Fuel Supply,Iran Should Welcome Such a Proposal"

You see, Europe gets to have oil, and the Iranians get to do whatever they want. Good negotiating, Europe.

Saturday, July 23, 2005

Poll: Americans Say World War III Likely
Japanese Say They Aren't Interest In Things Like War

It looks like Americans have a bit more grasp on reality than the Japanese. From AP:

WASHINGTON - Americans are far more likely than the Japanese to expect another world war in their lifetime, according to AP-Kyodo polling 60 years after World War II ended. Most people in both countries believe the first use of a nuclear weapon is never justified.

Those findings come six decades after the United States dropped atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The war claimed about 400,000 U.S. troops around the world, more than three times that many Japanese troops and at least 300,000 Japanese civilians.

Out of the ashes, Japan and the United States forged a close political alliance. Americans and Japanese now generally have good feelings about each other.

But people in the two countries have very different views on everything from the U.S. use of the atomic bomb in 1945, fears of North Korea and the American military presence in Japan.

Some of the widest differences came on expectations of a new world war.

Six in 10 Americans said they think such a war is likely, while only one-third of the Japanese said so, according to polling done in both countries for The Associated Press and Kyodo, the Japanese news service.

"Man's going to destroy man eventually. When that will be, I don't know," said Gaye Lestaeghe of Freeport, La.

Some question whether that war has arrived, with fighting dragging on in
Afghanistan and Iraq as part of the U.S. campaign against terrorism.

Now, check this out. Susan Aser has the right idea.

"I feel like we're in a world war right now," said Susan Aser, a real estate agent from Rochester, N.Y.

The Japanese were less likely than Americans to expect a world war, less worried about the threat from North Korea and less inclined to say a first strike with nuclear weapons could be justified.

"The Japanese people take peace for granted," said Hiroya Sato, 20, of Tokyo. "The Japanese people are not interested in things like war."

Wait, I gotta write that down. "The Japanese people are not interested in things like war." Check. Thanks Hiroya. I got it.

That wouldn't have anything to do with the fact that, as is also the case with Europe, we are your freakin' military.

The lesson here is, when you pay for another person, or country, to have a free ride, they forget reality. The idea that a Japanese person, just sixty years after the Rape of Nanking, could tell us that the Japanese people aren't interested in war, is both laughable and illuminating.

It is dangerous to have people live in this kind of derangement. When people are not connected to the world by practical concerns, they are liable to follow their own delusions down all sorts of rabbit holes. Such thinking is what leads otherwise intelligent people to be able to say with a straight face that America is the biggest threat to world peace.

I think one of the lessons to come out of the War on Terror is that we have to force our allies to become responsible once again for their own defense. Otherwise, we have no true partners, only resentful teenagers, pissed off that we won't lend them the car.

Thursday, July 21, 2005

More Explosions In London

From Jihad Watch:

Fox is reporting no trace of chemical agents found. Police confirm explosions on three subways and a bus. There are reports that only the detonators exploded, not the bombs. A man was lead away from 10 Downing Street by police. University Hospital near Warren St. subway was in lockdown after a suspicious man wearing a sweatshirt with wires sticking from it was spotted. From IrelandOnline:

Terrified Tube passengers were evacuated from trains today as police dealt with “incidents” at three different London Underground stations.

Emergency services were also called to a bus in east London amid reports there was a device on board.

Passengers evacuated from Warren Street Tube station reported seeing smoke in the carriages before the evacuation.

There were also unconfirmed reports of an explosion.

A British Transport Police spokesman said: "One person has received an injury at Warren Street. We cannot confirm what the injury is, how it was received or who serious it is. We are still waiting for more information.”

Sosiane Mohellavi, 35, was travelling from Oxford Circus to Walthamstow when she was evacuated from a train at Warren Street.

“I was sitting in the carriage reading a book and I smelt something burning, like wiring or tyres, and it just got more intense. Suddenly people panicked and started screaming and were walking on each other’s backs trying to get the hell out of there.

“I couldn’t move, I didn’t know what to do, whether to run or not. People ran and left their shoes and belongings when they smelt the burning,” Mr Mohellavi said.

A British Transport Police spokeswoman said Warren Street, Shepherds Bush and Oval stations had all been evacuated.

She said the incidents were “ongoing”.

Underground services were suspended as the alert spread.

London fire brigade said there were reports of smoke coming from Oval station, which crews were investigating.

A Scotland Yard spokeswoman said: “Emergency services personnel are responding to reports of incidents at three locations on the Underground – the Oval, Warren Street and Shepherd’s Bush.”

Victoria Line passenger Ivan McCracken claimed a traveller’s rucksack had exploded on the Tube outside Warren Street station.

He told Sky News: “I was in a middle carriage and the train was not far short of Warren Street station when suddenly the door between my carriage and the next one burst open and dozens of people started rushing through. Some were falling, there was mass panic.

“It was difficult to get the story from any of them what had happened but when I got to ground level there was an Italian young man comforting an Italian girl who told me he had seen what had happened.

“He said that a man was carrying a rucksack and the rucksack suddenly exploded. It was a minor explosion but enough to blow open the rucksack.

“The man then made an exclamation as if something had gone wrong. At that point everyone rushed from the carriage.”...

Interesting, because just yesterday, an extremist cleric in London warned that there would be more to come:

THE radical cleric Omar Bakri Mohammed defied the Government’s clampdown on extremism yesterday by warning on a new website that the July 7 bombings “are not the first and will not be the last”.

As Charles Clarke, the Home Secretary, declared that hardline preachers such as Bakri Mohammed, Abu Qatada and Yusuf al-Qaradawi could be deported or excluded from Britain, the site blamed the Government, the British people and moderate Muslims for the atrocities.

The site carried a picture of the wreckage of the No 30 bus in Tavistock Square and condemned the fatwa against suicide bombs signed by 500 imams as “clear blasphemy against Islam”. It attributed the bombings to al-Qaeda and said that the British people should accept Osama bin Laden’s truce offer “otherwise you will have nobody to blame but yourself for what has and will most probably happen again”.

Websites run by Bakri Mohammed’s followers are monitored and regularly taken down by the authorities but al-Ghurabaa (the strangers) was still online last night.

It was also promoted in an internet chatroom where extremists glorified the London bombs and praised Bakri Mohammed and bin Laden.

Why are they not attacking the United States? I'm sorry, as much as I respect the work of our security forces, I don't think they are all-powerful. Somebody would have to get through if they were trying.

I hope this is not the calm before the storm for us.

Watch Out For The Blood

The other day, Ken Livingstone the Mayor of London lectured Western nations on why we deserve Islamofascist terror attacks. Here's the Livingstone quote:

Decades of British and American intervention in the oil-rich Middle East motivated the London bombers, Ken Livingstone has suggested. ... he argued that the attacks would not have happened had Western powers left Arab nations free to decide their own affairs after World War I. Instead, they had often supported unsavoury governments in the region. ... Mr Livingstone was asked on BBC Radio 4's Today programme what he thought had motivated the bombers. He replied: "I think you've just had 80 years of western intervention into predominantly Arab lands because of the western need for oil. "We've propped up unsavoury governments, we've overthrown ones we didn't consider sympathetic."

Watch now, as The Astute Blogger shows Red Ken that the law of the jungle applies to logic; that is, he who has the bigger logical apparatus, will surely tear the more poorly endowed to shreds

Well RED KEN - as he is known - is just flat out WRONG. Let's look at the FACTS:

During the Cold War the USA had to align itself with some unsavory leaders; this was practical, and not unlike how FDR and Churchill used Stalin to defeat Hitler. Some unsavory Arab nations fell in that category. Let's examine them closely, though: Iraq, Syria, Egypt (until 1970), and Libya, were all "clients" of the USSR; (2) Iran was a "client" of the USA and the UK - AND IT WAS BETTER FOR IRANIANS UNDER THE SHAH; Algeria and Morocco and Tunisia and Ethiopia were more influenced by the French and the Italians and the Germans than either the USA or UK; Jordan was "NEUTRAL" - remember, it was the late King Hussein (a Hashemite descendent of Mohammed) who defeated Arafat and kicked him into Lebanon (without aid from either the USA or the UK!). AND FINALLY: In fact, the EU has largely been anti-Israel and pro-Arab since Munich in 1972 - which is 33 - YES THIRTY-THREE YEARS AGO! So nearly VERY ARAB ALIVE TODAY HAS EXPERIENCED A EUROPE AND A UK WHICH IS MUCH MORE PRO-ARAB THAN IT HAS EVER BEEN PRO-ISRAEL.

ALSO: much of the world's oil comes from outside the Arab world: Africa, Canada, Venezuela, Mexico, the North Sea nations and Russia produce as much as the Arabs do. The USA and the UK do NOT get most of their oil from Saudi Arabia. While Middle Eastern oil is vital to the West, it is equally vital to the ENTIRE WORLD. Leftists who contend that the West got rich by stealing resources or labor from the Third Word are NUTS. If that was truen, then Africa and Soiuth America would be rich NOW - soince colonialism died fifty years ago. BUT THE FACT ITS... that "Arabia" and Africa and South America have gotten POORER - just as Asia got richer. WHY IS THIS SO: Because Asia largely embraced freer trade and free markets (China did in 1979, and stopped being a poor basketcase as a result!). Socialism is what makes the Arab world poor. YUP: Baathism is nothiong more thasn Islamic Scoailism. Youi can look it up; just Google BAATHISM.

BUT THE MOST GLAROING ERROR RED KEN MAKES IS THIS: the Arabs - especially the jihadofascists - do not see the world in terms of oil-producers and oil-users, or divided into Western versus "oriental", but Islamic versus infidel. And to them there are two types of infidels: the dhimmi who pays tribute to Islam (and therefore may live, albeit as a second-class human) and the infidel who must be murdered. Arab jihadoterrorists actually go even further: they divide the world into the ummah and the others; the Ummah is the Arab/Islamic people - which transcends nation-states.

STILL NEED MORE PROOF? Well, the Buddhas of Bamiyan had NOTHING to do with Europe or Arabia. And the Hindhus slaughtered at the Ayodhya Temple in India had NOTHING to do with Europe or the West or oil or Israel. YOU SEE, the jihadists have goals that transcend the Middle East and London and NY and Israel. They want to re-establish the caliphate under Wahhabist sharia, and they will kill or convert anyone that gets in their way. THEN, they will exact a trubute/tax from the rest of the non-Muslim world.

SO: Red Ken Livingstone is just plain wrong on the facts - (the BOTTOM-LINE FACT is that the last 80 years and Europe actually have VERY LITTLE to do with what's bugging the jihadoterrorists; their gripes go back much MUCH further and much MUCH farther afield).
Red Ken fits VERY neatly into the DHIMMI category of the jihadofascists: he is willing to retreat, to pay ranson and even blackmail for a moment of pseudo-peace. Red Ken is an anti-Semitic, anti-American cowardly piece of crap.

NEED MORE PROOF?! Well, just a few days ago, Red Ken EQUATED HAMAS and the Likud Party ! This is another example of his anti-Semitism and idiotic moral equivalency; it is TYPICAL of the Left. In fact, HAMAS is a genocidal racist Jihado-terrorist organization which wants to eradicate the ENTIRE state of Israel. Whereas Likud is a pluralistic and democratic PUBLIC political party that (a) made peace with Egypt and returned the ENTIRE Sinai to Egypt - (dismantling every settlement which was there); and (b) is unilaterally withdrawing from Gaza; and (c) signed the ROADMAP FOR PEACE - which Abbas is violating EVERYDAY (by NOT disarming the terrorists)!

Leftist jerks like Red Ken - who equate, or CONFLATE, conservative politicians with genocidal jihadofascists - are dangerous fools who should drummed out of public life and into rat-holes or snake-pits where they would feel right at home.

It's sad to see a man so thoroughly humiliated like that. But, you know, it's all part of the circle of life.

If men like The Astute Blogger didn't come along and remove the memes of weaklings like Red Ken from the meme pool, then they would breed, and our whole world would become filled with the disgusting site of their logical decrepitude.

Thanks Astute Blogger. Good work.

Wednesday, July 20, 2005

Canadian National Public Radio
Calls For Government Regulation of Religion

From The Anchoress:

OTTAWA, July 19, 2005 - Just as Senate approaches the final vote on the gay ‘marriage’ bill, C-38, Canada’s national public radio CBC Radio has aired a commentary by a retired professor from the Royal Military College calling for state control over religion, specifically Catholicism.

While parliamentarians dismissed warnings by numerous religious leaders and experts that such laws would lead to religious persecution, former professor Bob Ferguson has called for “legislation to regulate the practice of religion.”

“Given the inertia of the Catholic Church, perhaps we could encourage reform by changing the environment in which all religions operate,” Ferguson began his commentary in measured tones yesterday. “Couldn’t we insist that human rights, employment and consumer legislation apply to them as it does other organizations? Then it would be illegal to require a particular marital status as a condition of employment or to exclude women from the priesthood. ”

Ferguson continued, “Of course the Vatican wouldn’t like the changes, but they would come to accept them in time as a fact of life in Canada. Indeed I suspect many clergy would welcome the external pressure.”

Continuing his comparison Ferguson stated, “I envisage a congress meeting to hammer out a code that would form the basis of legislation to regulate the practice of religion."

It looks like them Canadians are really thinking through the issues of the day.

I've got an idea, let's regulate what comes out of people's mouths when they open them. Oh yeah, and how about if we form a government oversight commitee responsible for regulating the press, and another one in charge of searching and seizing everybodies property, and ...

Yes, yes, I can see it now, if we just make enough laws, we can have a perfect world, where you know, everybody who is tolerant is cool, and everyone else is, you know, in jail.

Struggle - Jihad - Kampf

Melanie Phillips points out what should have been so obvious, but has eluded me the past four years:

It is surely no accident that the word 'struggle', which is

used in Marxist thinking to sanctify the attempts by the workers or the self-designated 'oppressed' to destroy western civilisation, was
also found in the defining creed of Nazism --'Mein Kampf'-- and is
the meaning of the word 'jihad'. Nazism and Communism required the submission of free peoples to their ideology -- and 'submission' is of course the meaning of the word 'Islam'.

The word struggle is not by itself evil. The word Israel also has the connotation of struggle with God. But, the idea the way it is taught is that Jews struggle with God and, in doing so, come to know him better. One struggles with the Torah, or with the words of Jesus the Messiah, in order to understand their application in our life.

Similarly the word Jihad can simply mean to struggle inwardly.

However, when it is used in the sense of struggling against the infidels and the Jews, then it is similar in connotation to the way the word is used by the other two totalitarian fascisms of the 20th century; Nazism and Marxism.

Jihad Group Threatens "Bloody War" on Europe

From Associated Press, via Jihad Watch:

CAIRO, Egypt (AP) - A statement in the name of a group that claimed responsibility for the London bombings threatened Tuesday to launch "a bloody war" on the capitals of European countries that do not remove their troops from Iraq within a month.

"This is the last message we send to the European countries. We are giving you one month for your soldiers to leave the Land of the Two Rivers. Then there will be no other messages, but actions, and the words will be engraved in the heart of Europe," Abu Hafs al Masri Brigades said in a statement.

The "two rivers" in the statement refer to Iraq's Euphrates and Tigris rivers....

It vowed to launch "a bloody war, God willing," against Denmark, Holland, Britain, Italy and other countries "whose soldiers are roving and having fun in Iraq."

It was one of at least two groups to have claimed responsibility for the July 7 bombings that killed 56 people on London's Underground and a double-decker bus.

"We promise you that these will be the last words," the statement said. "After that, our Mujahedeen will say something else in your capitals."

The group has no proven track record of attacks, and experts are skeptical of its statements. The organization has claimed responsibility for events in which it clearly did not play any role, such as the 2003 blackouts in the United States and London that resulted from technical problems.

We Are Not Afraid.

The Palestinian Military

London Mayor Ken Livingstone makes a point I've been making for over a year here on CUANAS. From Jihad Watch:

Less than two weeks since the London terror attacks, the city's Mayor Ken Livingstone has sparked controversy by defending the use of suicide bombers in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and charging that Israel had indiscriminately slaughtered Palestinians in acts that "border on crimes against humanity."

"Given that the Palestinians don't have jet planes, don't have tanks, they only have their bodies to use as weapons," Livingstone told Sky News in an interview.

Yep, exactly, Mr. Livingstone. The Palestinian suicide bombers are the Palestinian Army. They are the military hand of the elected parties (Fatah and Hamas) that run the Palestinian Authority. They express the military will of the people of the Palestinian territories.

Therefore, Israel is within their rights to respond to Palestinian suicide bombings by attacking the Palestinian territories with the Israeli Defense Force.

In fact, they would be smart to do what any other nation would do when the army of another nation invaded their borders and set off bombs. That is, Israel should beat the Palestinian military into absolute submission. They should beat them until they no longer have the will to fight back

Wow, what do you know? Red Ken and I can agree on something.

How Could This Happen?

Many people in Britain are shocked that the suicide bombers who attacked them on 7/7 were British citizens; shocked that these young men grew up in their midst, going to British schools, playing cricket, and running fish and chips restaurants.

The Anchoress links to this piece by Michael Ledeen:

That the London killers were native Brits surprised a lot of people, which is testimony to our capacity to forget our own history. Why were so many well-educated and well-informed people surprised, even shocked? Why were the facts ignored?

George Orwell got it just right when, in the winter of 1940, he bitterly observed "highly civilized human beings are flying overhead, trying to kill me."

He knew what his countrymen, and most of the intellectual elite of the West, have relegated to a quiet intellectual closet: that Hitler and Mussolini had created monstrous mass movements in two of the most civilized, and most cultured countries in Europe.

The Duce and the Fuhrer were wildly popular in the countries of Dante and Vivaldi, Beethoven and Goethe; they were not the products of some alien culture. They sprang from the most profound beliefs and passions of the highest cultures in the world (and those passions and beliefs spread to France and England, as well as to central and eastern Europe), which is why there was hardly any effective popular resistance in fascist Europe.

The great evil was only abandoned by the Europeans when it was defeated on the battlefield.

The horrors of Communism have been similarly removed from active memory, albeit through a slightly different mind game. The ideals of Communism are still unaccountably admired in our popular culture — just a few days ago the Brits themselves voted Karl Marx the greatest intellectual in recent times — even though it is grudgingly admitted that it worked out badly in practice.

This sort of deception sank to dramatic depths in Italy during the dark years of the Red Brigades terrorists, when the leaders of Europe’s most sophisticated Communist party proclaimed the brigadiers "misguided comrades."

Both fascism and Communism inspired mass murder and individual martyrdom for "the cause," just as radical Islam does today. Like Osama bin Laden and his ilk, Hitler and his cohorts raged against the democracies.

Both blamed the free peoples for Germany’s and the Muslims’ misery and bragged of the superiority of Aryans and Muslims over decadent, corrupt, and self-indulgent free men and women. Stalin went one step further, blaming democratic capitalism for the misery of the entire world, while proclaiming the superiority of the new Soviet man.

Freedom and democracy do not protect us against such people; Indeed, in the past century, free nations elevated them to power, and kept them there until we dominated them. The evil can't be explained by economic misery, or social alienation, or even by the doctrines adopted by the terrorists. The problem lies within us.

Nasra Hassan, who interviewed terrorists and their families, noted in Saturday’s London Times that:

None of the suicide bombers — they ranged in age from 18 to 38 — conformed to the typical profile of the suicidal personality. None of them was uneducated, desperately poor, simple-minded, or depressed. Many were middle-class and held paying jobs. Two were the sons of millionaires. They all seemed entirely normal members of their families. They were polite and serious, and in their communities were considered to be model youths. Most were bearded. All were deeply religious...

To be sure, those terrorists came from Palestinian camps — not from London or San Francisco or Amsterdam, but we can recognize the London bombers, and the Amsterdam killer, and the San Francisco jihadi. They are not misfits or sociopaths. They are people who find it fulfilling to kill us and destroy our society.

As time passes, we will meet more and more of them. And, in the fullness of time, we will remember that Machiavelli warned us half a millennium ago that "man is more inclined to do evil than to do good," and that the primary role of statesmen and other leaders is to contain the dark forces of human nature.

Evil cannot be "fixed" by some social program or suitably energetic public-affairs strategy, or by "reaching out" to our misguided comrades. It must be dominated.

Otherwise it will dominate us.

Muslims Can Expect Increasing Distrust

Most of us who live in the United States meet Muslims quite often. Many Americans, such as myself, have had the pleasure of being friends with good people who happened to be Muslims. Because this has been our experience we know that moderate Muslims exist in abundance.

However, the problem is, while condemnations of terrorism, and expressions of horror at terrorist acts come from the Muslim community, we don't see calls for the hate literature to be cleared from Mosques. we don't hear loud public condemnations of Imams who preach Jihad. And, when there is a Muslim March Against Terror, barely anyone shows up.

In recent days, I have begun to change my rhetoric on this issue. I have always been very careful to make a distinction between those Islamofascists, or Islamists, whom I call the enemy, and the majority of moderate Muslims.

I will continue to make that distinction, because I believe in it. However, I will now add to my distinction the idea that moderate Muslim can expect to be increasingly distrusted in Western society until they start making serious changes in the way they deal with the radicals in their midst.

Here's an article by Andrew Bolt, from the Australian Herald Sun expressing frustration with the lack of forthright action by the moderate Muslims Mr. Bolt believes in:

It's time we accepted the difficult truth: many of the Muslims we invite to live in Australia want to destroy us.

FOR four years, since the September 11 attacks, I've begged our Islamic leaders to drive extremists from their mosques.

For four years I've also reassured you that most Muslims here are moderate.

I've even insisted they have some moderate Muslim leaders, and last week again endorsed Sheik Fehmi Naji El-Imam of Preston mosque as a man of peace.

How eager I was to praise. Heavens, I described as "moderate" the Melbourne-based Islamic Information Services Network of Australia (IISNA), which purged from its website articles I'd noted claiming democracy was a sin, Jews were behind September 11 and Western society was a pollution.

But was I just kidding myself? Isn't it becoming terribly clear that Islam -- at least the Islam of Australia's Arab sheiks and imams -- is hostile to our society?

Isn't it now obvious we should never have let into our country those imams who now preach hate?

Isn't the evidence that some cultures -- Muslim Arab ones -- pose more problems than their importation at this rate is worth? Isn't multiculturalism making these problems worse?

I know these are dangerous, hurtful questions. I also know many Muslims will feel deeply offended, loving this country and obeying its laws, and I wish only I heard from them far more often.

But the London bombings, perpetrated by home-grown Muslims, makes our silence on such issues not a sign of civility, but suicide.

So let me admit that the past few days have been terrible for those of us who thought we could count on Muslim leaders for real help against the Muslim extremists who threaten us.
Such setbacks we've had.

Only last week I'd praised Sheik Fehmi as a good man, who'd condemned the London bombings. But a day later he was asked about fellow Melbourne sheik Mohammed Omran, a friend of a suspected al-Qaida boss, who'd claimed September 11 was really the work of a US-based conspiracy.

"He is entitled to his own thinking," Fehmi replied meekly. Then, asked if Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaida terrorists had committed those attacks, he added: "We cannot say. We do not know these things."

How can Muslim leaders fight terrorism, when the most moderate of them won't condemn even bin Laden, or admit that monster's self-confessed guilt?

Fehmi was not my only disappointment. I checked the IISNA site this week, and among the announcements of classes and prayers found this advice to a reader who'd asked if it was a sin to kill non-Muslims:

"In regard to non-Muslims who are at war with the Muslims and do not have a peace treaty with the Muslims or are not living under Muslim rule, then Muslims are commanded to kill them, because Allah says . . . 'Fight those of the disbelievers who are close to you, and let them find harshness in you.' "

In a Melbourne bookshop run by Omran a Herald Sun reporter this month found books being sold that command Muslims to ready for war and to hate Jews.

In Sydney last week, the Islamic Bookshop, Australia's largest of the kind, was found (again) selling similar poison near the Lakemba mosque, including a book with tips on how to blow yourself up and kill plenty.

"The form this usually takes nowadays is to wire up one's body, or a vehicle or a suitcase with explosives and then to enter among a conglomeration of the enemy and to detonate," it says.
"There is no other technique which strikes as much terror into their hearts."

Again and again we're told such things aren't typical. Apologists, too often Muslim converts with little clout among ethnic groups, claim Islam means peace. But again and again we are left feeling like dupes.

Faced with such evidence whichever way I turn, what else can I think about Islam -- or Arab Islam, at least -- but that it is an enemy of our culture, our society?

As I said, Muslims can expect to be increasingly distrusted if they don't start making serious changes. Here are my suggestions:

1) start by contacting Christian churches, Jewish Synagogues, and Mormon Temples down to their mosques for a day of gathering up the hate material, and carting it to the recycling plant.

2) call the FBI everytime they hear of Islamist terrorists recruiting people on campus or in a Mosque.

3) eject Imams and other speakers from Mosques when you hear them say things like this and this.

When mainstream Muslims start taking strong action against such hatred, then they can expect the level of respect for their community to rise dramatically. Until then, they can expect suspicion.

Note: This is the second time I have posted this list of things Muslims can do to win respect. You can probably expect to see this repeated by me ad nauseum in coming weeks.

Tuesday, July 19, 2005

Civilly, And Not Civilly, Debating The End Of Civilization

Baron Bodissey has a good post, over at Gates of Vienna, on Congressman Tancredo's remarks about nuking Mecca. There is also quite a lively and sometimes enlightening (in oh so many ways) discussion going on in the comments section. Read it. Read it.

My contribution:

Baron, having read more of the comments now, I see that you and I are in agreement. I do not think that now is the time to be discussing nuking Mecca. I don't think it is the time to nuke Mecca.

However, I think that if Saudi Arabia were to fund a nuclear attack on multiple American cities that we should retaliate in kind. And, I believe that somehow the United States should make that clear to them in advance. In fact, I think the Bush Administration probably already has. And, I think that if we can believe Bush's stated policy already, he has probably gone so far as to warn them that they had better be aware of what terrorists are doing inside their country, because they will also be held accountable for what they should have known about.

When it comes to the possibility of terrorists using nuclear weapons, we can't afford to not be very explicit in our communications with those countries who pose as friends, but seem to act as enemies.

I have to express my frustration, and my disappointment with Ed Morrisey and Hugh Hewitt on this issue. Yes, I agree with them that Tancredo should have kept his mouth shut, but I believe they are almost going to the opposite extreme in their criticism of him.

For God's sake, Morrisey proposed that if we were to be hit with nuclear weapons in multiple U.S. cities, our repsonse should be tactical hits against the Iranian and Syrian airforce, the Iranian nuclear power plants, and Saudi holdings within the U.S.

Boy, that would really show them, huh? All that Bin Laden said about the West being so weak that we lack the will to fight would be proven true.

Understanding Disengagement

The Supernatural Blog has a great piece posted on the politics of the Disengagement in Israel. Here's a little excerpt:

Good arguments have been made by both sides and the debate has generally been rational and reasonable.

It's worth noting that the very existence of this newfound disagreement between the pro-Israel blogs is evidence that Israel is making painful, difficult and potentially compromising (in terms of their security) decisions in order to move towards a possible end of conflict. When everyone agrees, nothing is happening. Disagreement is a sign that things are moving ahead (or behind as others may argue) - all the while nothing seems to change in the Palestinian camp.

It's a pity that Israel isn't receiving the credit due for even considering these moves.

Arguments for and against the disengagement are often provided, but here is a quick look at what the disengagement plan actually is - as described by the Israeli government.

1. General

Israel has concluded that there is currently no reliable Palestinian partner with which it can make progress in a bilateral peace process. Accordingly, it has developed a plan of unilateral disengagement, based on the following considerations:

i. The stalemate dictated by the current situation is harmful. In order to break out of this stalemate, Israel is required to initiate moves not dependent on Palestinian cooperation.

ii. The assumption is that, in any future permanent status arrangement, there will be no Israeli towns and villages in the Gaza Strip. On the other hand, it is clear that in the West Bank, there are areas which will be part of the State of Israel, including cities, towns and villages, security areas and installations, and other places of special interest to Israel.

iii. The relocation from the Gaza Strip and from Northern Samaria (as delineated on Map) will reduce friction with the Palestinian population, and carries with it the potential for improvement in the Palestinian economy and living conditions.

iv. The hope is that the Palestinians will take advantage of the opportunity created by the disengagement to break out of the cycle of violence and reengage in a process of dialogue.
v. The process of disengagement will serve to dispel claims regarding Israel's responsibility for the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.

When there is evidence from the Palestinian side of its willingness, capability and implementation in practice of the fight against terrorism and the institution of reform as required by the Road Map, it will be possible to return to the track of negotiation and dialogue.

Go read the rest.

By the way, there is no issue regarding Israel which is more divisive within the camp of those who are pro-Israel. I have pretty much stayed out of this fight, because I don't understand the various proposed borders and their political/strategic import. I have not been to Israel. So, I couldn't understand. I imagine that I could read and read and read, and still probably only understand a bit of what one could easily see if one were there. But, I will say, the writer of the Supernatural Blog seems like a reasonable guy to me.

I wonder how many new enemies I will have created for myself, just by writitng the previous sentence.

"Are You Ready? Tomorrow You Will Be In Paradise"
Inside The Mind Of A Suicide Bomber

An interview with a terrorist, from the Times of London:

What motivates a suicide bomber? Our correspondent talks to a young Muslim who survived his intended 'martyrdom' and describes the terrorists' rigorous training

AT DAWN, when the three men heard the morning call to prayer from a mosque in the village below their hideout in the hills, they knelt and uttered the traditional invocation to Allah that Muslim warriors make before setting off for combat. They put on clean clothes, tucked the Koran into their pockets, and began the long hike over the hills and along dry riverbeds to the outskirts of Jerusalem.

In the Palestinian neighbourhoods of East Jerusalem, they walked in silence so that their accents, the guttural vernacular of Gaza, would not arouse suspicion. It was June 1993, and they were members of the Palestinian fundamentalist group Hamas. Along the way, they stopped to pray at every mosque. At dusk, they boarded a bus that was heading toward West Jerusalem, filled with Israeli passengers. When the driver thwarted their attempt to hijack the vehicle, they tried to detonate the homemade bombs they were carrying.

The bombs failed to go off, so they pulled out guns and began firing wildly. The shots injured five passengers, including a woman who later died. The young men fled the bus, hijacked a car at a red light, and forced the driver to take them toward Bethlehem. Israeli security forces stopped them at a military checkpoint, and in a gun battle two of the young men and their hostage were killed. The third hijacker, whom I will call S, was struck by a bullet in the head; he lay comatose for two months in Israeli hospitals. Finally, he was pronounced brain-dead, and the Israelis sent him back to his family in the Gaza Strip to die.

But S recovered, and when we met, five years later, he told me his version of the events. By then, he was married and the father of three sons. Each of them had been named for shaheed batal — “martyr heroes”.

In Gaza, S is celebrated as a young man who “gave his life to Allah” and whom Allah “brought back to life”.

He was polite as he welcomed me into his home. The house was surrounded by a high cement wall that had been fortified with steel. We sat down in a large, simply furnished room whose walls were inscribed with verses from the Koran. On one wall was a poster showing green birds flying in a purple sky, a symbol of the Palestinian suicide bombers.

S had just turned 27. He is slight, and he walked with a limp, the only trace of his near-death. He invited his wife to join us, and he answered my questions without hesitation.

I asked him when, and why, he had decided to volunteer for martyrdom. “In the spring of 1993, I began to pester our military leaders to let me do an operation,” he said. “It was around the time of the Oslo accords, and it was quiet, too quiet. I wanted to do an operation that would incite others to do the same. Finally, I was given the green light to leave Gaza for an operation inside Israel.”

“How did you feel when you heard that you’d been selected for martyrdom?” I asked.

“It’s as if a very high, impenetrable wall separated you from Paradise or Hell,” he said. “Allah has promised one or the other to his creatures. So, by pressing the detonator, you can immediately open the door to Paradise — it is the shortest path to Heaven.”

S was one of 11 children in a middle-class family that, in 1948, had been forced to flee from Majdal to a refugee camp in Gaza, during the Arab-Israeli war that started with the creation of the State of Israel. He joined Hamas in his early teens and became a street activist.

In 1989, he served two terms in Israeli prisons for intifada activity, including attacks on Israeli soldiers. One of his brothers is serving a life sentence in Israel.

I asked S to describe his preparations for the suicide mission. “We were in a constant state of worship,” he said. “We told each other that if the Israelis only knew how joyful we were they would whip us to death! Those were the happiest days of my life.”

“What is the attraction of martyrdom?” I asked.

“The power of the spirit pulls us upward, while the power of material things pulls us downward,” he said. “Someone bent on martyrdom becomes immune to the material pull. Our planner asked, ‘What if the operation fails?’ We told him, ‘In any case, we get to meet the Prophet and his companions, inshallah.’

“We were floating, swimming, in the feeling that we were about to enter eternity. We had no doubts. We made an oath on the Koran, in the presence of Allah — a pledge not to waver. This jihad pledge is called bayt al-ridwan, after the garden in Paradise that is reserved for the prophets and the martyrs. I know that there are other ways to do jihad. But this one is sweet — the sweetest. All martyrdom operations, if done for Allah ’s sake, hurt less than a gnat’s bite!”

S showed me a video that documented the final planning for the operation. In the grainy footage, I saw him and two other young men engaging in a ritualistic dialogue of questions and answers about the glory of martyrdom. S, who was holding a gun, identified himself as a member of al-Qassam, the military wing of Hamas, which is one of two Palestinian Islamist organisations that sponsor suicide bombings. (Islamic Jihad is the other group.) “Tomorrow, we will be martyrs,” he declared, looking straight at the camera. “Only the believers know what this means. I love martyrdom.”

The young men and the planner then knelt and placed their right hands on the Koran. The planner said: “Are you ready? Tomorrow, you will be in Paradise.”

Note that S wanted to carry out his suicide operation during the time of the Oslo Accords, which had led to the Palstinians having control of their territory for the first time. In other words, when things were getting better, and people were living in peace, that was the time he wanted to blow up a bunch of Israelis, because "It was quiet. Too quiet."

Sometimes You Just Gotta Love Your Enemies

The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation has banned the word terrorist. And they are giving there reasons in a very forthright and specific manner. From Little Green Footballs:

‘Terrorist’ and ‘terrorism’: Exercise extreme caution before using either word.

Avoid labelling any specific bombing or other assault as a “terrorist act” unless it’s attributed (in a TV or Radio clip, or in a direct quote on the Web). For instance, we should refer to the deadly blast at that nightclub in Bali in October 2002 as an “attack,” not as a “terrorist attack.”

The same applies to the Madrid train attacks in March 2004, the London bombings in July 2005 and the attacks against the United States in 2001 ...

Well, if that's not offensive enough already. Now, they explain exactly why they are adopting this policy:

Terrorism generally implies attacks against unarmed civilians for political, religious or some other ideological reason. But it’s a highly controversial term that can leave journalists taking sides in a conflict.

By restricting ourselves to neutral language, we aren’t faced with the problem of calling one incident a “terrorist act” (e.g., the destruction of the World Trade Center) while classifying another as, say, a mere “bombing” (e.g., the destruction of a crowded shopping mall in the Middle East).

See how that works? They so don't want to call what happens in Israel a terrorist attack, that they will even refrain from calling 9/11 an act of terrorism.

Man, oh man, you just gotta love you enemies when they tell the truth.

Monday, July 18, 2005

The Ents Are Awakening

Wretchard links to a web site called United Against Terror, where men of the British Left state their reasons for choosing to stand against the Islamofascists.

Wretchard comments, "If liberal readers have ever wondered what it was like to have lived in the "Great Days" when men fought against Nazism, shake yourself awake. Those days are come.":

Marko Attila Hoare (Faculty of History, University of Cambridge)
I sign this statement as a supporter of the legitimate struggle for freedom and independence of the Palestinians, Chechens and other enslaved Muslim peoples caught between the Scylla of colonial oppression and the Charybdis of Islamofascism.

To every genuine national-liberation movement, sectarian hatred and pogroms of civilians are as alien as the foreign occupier. In German-occupied Yugoslavia during World War II, the anti-Nazi Partisans preached brotherhood and unity between Muslims, Christians and Jews; they were known to execute their own officers and soldiers if they so much as stole chickens from local peasants, let alone massacred civilians.

Al-Qaeda's Islamofascist network - targeting Jews, Kurds, Shiites, women, homosexuals, moderate Sunnis and ordinary civilians everywhere - represents, by contrast, the very antithesis of a genuine liberation movement.

Everywhere, Islamic extremists have aided and abetted the oppressors of Muslims. In World War II, the Islamofascist Grand Mufti of Jerusalem Haj Amin al-Husseini helped incite an anti-British revolt in Iraq; he subsequently visited Nazi-occupied Yugoslavia to mobilise Bosnian Muslims to fight in the SS.

Islamist terrorism in Daghestan in1999 provided Russia with the pretext for its genocidal reconquest of Chechnya. Elements in the Turkish and Israeli security services encouraged Islamic extremism as a means of dividing and weakening secular Kurdish and Palestinian nationalism respectively, helping to create a Frankenstein?s monster that is claiming the lives of Turks and Kurds, Jews and Arabs alike.

There can be no freedom for Muslim peoples without the defeat of the Islamofascists and everything they stand for; and there can be no defeat of the Islamofascists without liberty for all Muslim peoples.

Christopher Hitchens (Writer)
Association with this statement and with many of its fellow-signatories involves two commitments. The first is the elementary duty of solidarity with true and authentic resistance movements within the Muslim world, such as the Kurdish guerrillas in Iraq and the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan, who were fighting against Ba'athism and Talibanism (and the latent alliance between the two) long before any American or British government had woken up to the threat.

It should go without saying that, though the suffering of their peoples was intense, neither Jalal Talabani nor Ahmed Shah Masoud ever considered letting off explosive devices at random in foreign capitals. I have my political and ideological differences with both groups, but these differences are between me and them, and are not mediated through acts of nihilistic murder.

My second commitment is equally elementary. The foreign policy of a democracy should be determined only at election times or by votes in Congress or Parliament. It is one hundred per cent unacceptable even to imply, let alone to assert, that a suicide-murderer or his apologists can by these means acquire the right to any say in how matters are decided.

Both of these observations, and indeed this very statement, would be redundant if it were not for the widespread cultural presence of a pseudo-Left, and an isolationist Right, both of whom have degenerated to the point where they regard jihadism as some form of "liberation theology". The old slogans are often the best, and "Death to Fascism" is life-affirming in these conditions.

Stephen Pollard (Writer)
Beyond the murder and the carnage inflicted by terrorists, there is a further insidious danger to our liberty, that posed by those whose words and deeds give support to the terrorists, and whose warped values lead them to side with those who murder above those who promote freedom.

The Guardianista fellow-travellers of terror, who stress its supposed causes, are the useful idiots of the Islamofascists. The terrorists are the operatives of an ideology which has no concern with Palestinians or Iraqis, whom they murder without compunction. They have no concern with anything but the destruction of the West.

At a time when Islamofascism seeks to destroy liberal, democratic civilisation and to replace it with theocracy, it is imperative that those of us who believe in democracy and liberty stand up and fight. Not just against the obvious enemy, but also against the enemy within - those who claim to be on the Left, but whose views have nothing in common with the decency for which the Left ought proudly to stand.

Oliver Kamm (Columnist, The Times)
Many years ago, Conor Cruise O'Brien identified an attitude he termed "unilateral liberalism". This is a stance acutely sensitive to threats to liberty arising from actions by democratic states, but curiously phlegmatic about threats to liberty from the enemies of those states.

O'Brien was alluding to attitudes to terrorism in Northern Ireland in the 1970s. But many of us on the Left can recognise a similar tendency, and worse, in the response of progressives to the atrocities of 9/11 and other acts of suicide-terrorism against established and emerging democracies.

The terrorists give allegiance to a totalitarianism both with recognisable twentieth-century forebears and with a still more atavistic - literally mediaeval - character. They oppose the US and its allies not for our sins of commission and omission, but for what we exemplify: liberal political rights, pluralism, religious liberty, scientific inquiry and women's emancipation.

Their contempt for human life and disregard for the principle of non-combatant immunity stem not from despair and anger, but from nihilism. "Unite Against Terror" expresses a tougher-minded liberalism on this central political issue of the early-21st century. More than that, it is a call for simple human decency and an insistence that human rights are indivisible.

Adrian Cohen (London)
London is still reeling from the suicide bombings which hit it on 7/7, killing 54 civilians. We have yet to understanding the impact that these attacks will have on our society. Since September 2000 there have been 160 suicide bombings in Israel and many more attempted suicide bombings, in a country with a population comparable to that of the greater London area. 514 people, including many infants, children and elderly citizens, including Holocaust survivors, were killed in those attacks; thousands have been maimed.

Those killed and injured include Muslims, Jews and guest workers of neither religion. Israel is a society which perceives itself to be under an existential threat.

The ideology of those pursuing this campaign, the funders, the mentors, the bomb engineers and the direct perpetrators are predominantly members of Hamas and Islamic Jihad, or under their influence; organisations which openly embrace the destruction of the state of Israel and espouse overt anti-Semitism; organisations now intent on subverting the Palestine Authority and undermining the peace process.

For those who truly believe in democracy and civil society, regardless of their views on the politics of the Middle East, there can be only one legitimate position which is an unqualified condemnation of all suicide bombing whether in Western Europe, Iraq,Turkey or Israel.

Peter Tatchell (Human Rights campaigner, London)
We are witnessing one of the greatest betrayals by the left since so-called left-wingers backed the Hitler-Stalin pact and opposed the war against Nazi fascism.

Today, the pseudo-left reveals its shameless hypocrisy and its wholesale abandonment of humanitarian values. While it deplores the 7/7 terrorist attack on London, only last year it welcomed to the UK the Muslim cleric, Yusuf al-Qaradawi, who endorses the suicide bombing of innocent civilians.

These same right-wing leftists back the so-called 'resistance' in Iraq. This 'resistance' uses terrorism against civilians as its modus operandi - stooping to the massacre of dozens of Iraqi children in order kill a few US soldiers.

Terrorism is not socialism; it is the tactic of fascism. But much of the left doesn't care. Never mind what the Iraqi people want, it wants the US and UK out of Iraq at any price, including the abandonment of Iraqi socialists, trade unionists, democrats and feminists.

If the fake left gets its way, the ex-Baathists and Islamic fundamentalists could easily seize power, leading to Iranian-style clerical fascism and a bloodbath. I used to be proud to call myself a leftist. Now I feel shame. Much of the left no longer stands for the values of universal human rights and international socialism.

This is what I was saying in the days after the elections in Iraq, when the people of the "Left" here in the United States mocked the courage of the Iraqis with their cynical hatred of what America had helped to accomplish.

Deep Thoughts by Paul Johnson...

I have admired the lucidity of thought of Paul Johnson for a few of years now (I know I am a late comer to discovering him) and for all of his thoughtfulness I have never known him to be religious (based on his self admissions during interviews on Dennis Prager's radio show). In this context the following is a doubly interesting and thought provoking piece by Johnson in Forbes... (Hat tip to The Anchoress)

"Thoughts on the Existence of God"
Paul Johnson, 06.20.05, 12:00 AM ET

"Of all the fundamentalist groups at large in the world today, the Darwinians seem to me the most objectionable. They are just as strident and closed to argument as Christian or Muslim fundamentalists, but unlike those two groups the Darwinians enjoy intellectual respectability. Darwinians and their allies dominate the scientific establishments of the West. They rule the campus. Their militant brand of atheism makes them natural allies of the philosophical atheists who control most college philosophy faculties. They dominate the leading scientific magazines and prevent their critics and opponents from getting a hearing, and they secure the best slots on TV. Yet the Darwinian brand of evolution is becoming increasingly vulnerable as the progress of science reveals its weaknesses. One day, perhaps soon, it will collapse in ruins.

Weak Underpinnings:
Few people today doubt the concept of evolution as such. What seems mistaken is Charles Darwin's theory of natural selection, whereby species evolve by infinitesimally small stages. Neither Darwin nor any of his followers--nor his noisy champions today--was a historian. None of them thought of time historically or made their calculations chronologically. Had they done so, they'd have seen that natural selection works much too slowly to fit into the time line allowed by the ages of the universe and our own planet. The process must somehow have been accelerated in jumps or by catastrophes or outside intervention. There are five other weaknesses the Darwinians cannot explain away either. The best summary of these can be found in Richard J. Bird's Chaos and Life (Columbia University Press, 2003), page 53. Warning: This book is tough going but will reward the persistent. If the theory of natural selection is incorrect, then the Darwinians' view that there is no need or place for God in the universe is itself weakened, though not necessarily overthrown. Physics, however, increasingly tends to suggest that there is a God role, particularly with regard to the origin of the universe. We now know this occurred about 13.7 billion years ago, and our knowledge of what happened immediately afterward is becoming increasingly detailed, down to the last microsecond. Few now doubt there was a Big Bang. We know when it occurred and what followed. But we are just as far as ever from understanding why it happened or what--or who--caused it. Indeed, all calculations about the Big Bang are based on the assumption that nothing preceded it. It took place in an infinite vacuum. There was no process of ignition, or traces of it would have been left. Hence, this fundamental happening in history seems to conflict with all the laws of physics and our notions of how the universe operates. It was an event without a cause. It also produced something out of nothing. More: It produced everything out of nothing. The expansion of the universe has proceeded ever since, and all the creative processes involved in it--including Earth and homo sapiens--were written into the laws laid down in that first tremendous explosion. We do not have to believe in an entirely deterministic universe to see that the first microsecond of history foreshadowed everything that has followed over the last 13-plus billion years. If the laws of physics cannot explain how and why this event occurred, we must invoke metaphysics. And that means some kind of divine force. I've been rereading what Sir Isaac Newton wrote about God in the second edition of his Principia (1713). Newton saw God not as a perfect being--or any kind of being at all--but as a power, what he termed a "dominion." "We reverence and adore Him on account of His dominion," he wrote. This power was exercised "in a manner not at all human … in a manner utterly unknown to us." Newton knew God only through His works. "He is utterly void of all body and bodily figure, and can therefore neither be seen, nor heard, nor touched." Our knowledge of Him is limited "by His most wise and excellent contrivances of things."

"...and the Word Was God":
This notion of God as an impersonal power or force, wholly outside the laws of physics, fits with the role assigned him as author of the Big Bang. And since that primal event there has been no need of further intervention by God in the affairs of the universe. Or has there? I've also been reading Guy Deutscher's The Unfolding of Language (Metropolitan Books, 2005) and reflecting on the nature of words. Speech is the greatest of man's inventions and the mother of all others. Yet, in truth, nobody invented it. Its emergence and evolution proceeded in ways that are still almost a total mystery. It is as close to a miracle as anything associated with human beings. Both the Hebrews and the Greeks, in different ways, believed there was something divine about "the word," or logos. The Greeks thought the word was the abstract principle of reason exhibited by an orderly universe. The Jews thought it the image of God, the beginning and origin of all things. It is possible, then, that the giving of the word to humanity was the second intervention of the metaphysical force or dominion in the process of history. That, I think, is the conclusion I have come to in these difficult matters. What will be the third, I wonder?"

The Wind Blows Very Hard

Ed Morrisey at Captain's Quarters is in quite a lather today:

We have enough problems fighting the war on terror in the measured, strategic method used by the Bush and Blair administrations without Republican Congressmen recommending the bombing of sites held sacred by Muslims across the political spectrum. Yet today, Tom Tancredo (R-CO) suggested that a nuclear attack on an American city could result in a bombing run on Mecca.

Tancredo was asked how the United States should react if several cities were hit with nuclear weapons by extremist Islamists. Tancredo answered:

"Well, what if you said something like — if this happens in the United States, and we determine that it is the result of extremist, fundamentalist Muslims, you know, you could take out their holy sites," Tancredo answered.

"You're talking about bombing Mecca," Campbell said.

"Yeah," Tancredo responded.

Ed Morrisey says:

I think the "ultimate response" to Tancredo's apolcalyptic fantasy is that we don't bomb civilians in response to terrorist attacks, no matter how seductive such a response might seem. The idea that the US would retaliate in such a manner should be repulsive to any rational person, no matter where they fall on the political spectrum. The war on terror targets the terrorists and the governments which fund and/or shelter them, not the civilians who happen to live there.

What Ed Morrisey is saying here sounds very noble and measured. But, let's face it, what he is saying is that if the United States is hit with nuclear weapons in several cities, and millions of innocent people die, and millions more are effected for the rest of their lives by the winds of radioactive fallout, and our economy takes a hit 100-1000 times greater than the hit we took from 9/11, that we should retaliate with restraint that seems beyond turning the other cheek.

I mean, for God's sake, look at how Morrisey thinks we should react to being hit with multiple nuclear weapons:

Here's what we should make clear will happen if we suffer another major attack in the US, especially one that uses WMD or causes significant losses:

1. Take out the air forces of the two nations we know to support terrorists -- Syria and Iran.

2. Destroy all nuclear facilities in Iran, to the best of our intelligence.

3. Bomb all known militarily-related manufacturing facilities.

Jeez, maybe we could take out the Mecca Cola factories too, while we're at it.

Remember all that talk after 9/11 about how Bin Laden believes that America is too weak and decadent to respond to an attack? Well, if nothing else has served to convince the Islamofascists that we are not serious, a response like Morrisey suggests surely would.

Morrisey makes one good point. He comments:

... who is Tom Tancredo to make these threats anyway? He doesn't have anything to do with the military chain of command or the national security systems that would make those kinds of recommendations. He certainly doesn't speak for the President ...

Yes, that's true. And that's why Tancredo probably should have recused himself. But, in my opinion, Morrisey is off base as well, although perhaps not in as offensive a manner.

Does Morrisey discount the strategy that helped us win the Cold War, Deterrence through Mutually Assured Destruction? A policy that held the Soviet Union, and the United States for that matter, at bay for forty years is not a policy to be scoffed at with a simple phrase like "should be repulsive to any rational person."

I will ask in turn, who is Morrisey to make these judgements anyway?

The truth is, our government has probably issued threats of this nature behind the scenes. For myself, I will only say, I have no idea what to do in such a situation, and I'm glad I am not the one who would have to make such a decision. But, how will we deter a country like Iran from giving nuclear weapons to terrorist organizations, if we do not issue such threats? How would we deter Saudi Arabia from funding such an operation?

Come on, Mr. Morrisey, you need to think this through a little further. Or maybe you should just recuse yourself.

The Bodyguards of Liberty

A reminder, from Ben Stein, that we're all in this together, some of us just get paid better:

I read about men and women who are taking fire from insurgents in Iraq and being blown up by homemade bombs that the Pentagon refers to as improvised explosive devices. The people being blown up are maybe corporals, and they get $1,900 a month, including combat pay.

Or I read a letter from a buddy of a member of the Navy Seals who was killed recently in Afghanistan when his helicopter went down, and he was getting maybe $1,950 a month, fighting the Taliban and fighting Al Qaeda (which killed 3,000 innocent men, women and children on American soil on Sept. 11, 2001). That means the guy at the hedge fund is getting as much as, say, 10,000 of these corporals per annum.

What keeps going through my mind is that there is a big, yet always unstated, connection between these two groups of men and women - on one hand, the megastars of Wall Street and corporate boardrooms, with their vast paychecks, yachts and horse farms in the Hamptons, and, on the other, the grunts in body armor chasing down terrorists half a world away in 130-degree heat.

The link is that the men and women of Wall Street and of corporate America do their very important work - and it is vital work, indeed - inside a box of security and safety created by the courage of the men and women who wear battle dress uniforms and ride down the highway of death in Iraq in armored personnel carriers handling machine guns.

The men and women in the Armani suits, who get the huge paychecks - and who, again, do work I sincerely appreciate and admire - could not exist for long if they were not being shielded by the men and women in uniforms and boots.

And I do not mean only the military. I am also talking about the police officers, the firefighters and other first responders; the Department of Homeland Security folks; the airport security people; and the people in the C.I.A., the F.B.I. and the National Security Agency. All of them offer their time and their lives and their families' sanity to protect the country.

Remember that it all depends on the fighting men and women, not on the people in finance. It depends on the guys whose names you will never know, guys who come home and work - not at jobs in which helicopters ferry them to secret-deal meetings in New York or London, but at jobs in places like a car wash in Burleson, Tex., where one of the men who captured Saddam Hussein is working without complaint and with barely mentioning that he was in Iraq.

That is, if they come home with all their limbs - or if they come home at all.

I work with a women whose husband is about 45, and works an engineer, presumably making around $100K a year. But, you know what? He won't be making that for long, because he's in the National Guard, and he's being called up for a tour of duty, for the second time since 9/11.

And, he's happy to serve.

In other words, there are people who make a great living, and then choose to sacrifice it, in order to go overseas and protect our great country.

Is England Getting A Grip?

Bat Ye'or, via Jihad Watch says that Britain is completely trapped in dhimmitude:

Dhimmitude is characterised by the victim's siding with his oppressors, by the moral justification the victim provides for his oppressors' hateful behavior, and by the destruction of the victim's own self by a mental enslavement of love and admiration toward his oppressors. Willfully serving his oppressors, the dhimmi loses the sense of his own rights and humanity. He loses the possibility of revolt because revolt arises from a sense of injustice, and the dhimmi justifies the injustices done against him because he is utterly destroyed as a human being.

Perfect examples of this are Edward Saïd, Christian janissaries, and dhimmi Churches throughout history till today. I studied this mentality in all my books.

Mental dhimmitude has been implemented in Europe over the course of 30 years by politicians, intellectuals, the Churches, and the media, all of whom sided with the jihadist Palestinian terrorists against Israel's wars of liberation from dhimmitude. Europe's uncritical alliances with and support for the Arabs' jihad involved a self-inflicted dhimmitude, since Christians are treated the same as Jews under Islamic law.

The Europeans' justification of jihad and of Jewish dhimmitude explains their current lack of reaction. A dead body does not react. European governments, especially the British, have bought their security from the terrorists--starting with the Palestinians in 1973--by promoting an anti-Israeli and anti-American policy and an anti-Semitic hate campaign.

Tony Blair's posturing in the wake of the London bombings is the cover-up of this cowardly policy that seeks protection from the terrorists by offering them Britain as a safe haven, from where they have sent killers in Israel, America, Bali, and other places. Having for so long and continuously justified injustice against others, the British people go along with the same injustice when it turns against them.

For thirty years, Europeans were taught that they have to love Muslims and Islam, and now they are receiving back the exchange for this love which is nothing less than the other face of their hate of Jews and Israel.

Meanwhile, Melanie Phillips says Tony Blair's latest speech is proof of the opposite; that he and the British people are coming around to a real understanding of the evil of their enemy:

Tony Blair’s speech last Saturday on the threat that we face was excellent and seminal, a step-change in his rhetoric on Islamic terror, and should be read in full. He spelled out more clearly than he had ever done before why the argument that the London bombings were carried out in response to Iraq or indeed to any other conflict is exceptionally stupid and ignorant:

‘This ideology and the violence that is inherent in it did not start a few years ago in response to a particular policy. Over the past 12 years, Al-Qaeda and its associates have attacked 26 countries, killed thousands of people, many of them Muslims…

They demand the elimination of Israel; the withdrawal of all Westerners from Muslim countries, irrespective of the wishes of people and government; the establishment of effectively Taleban states and Sharia law in the Arab world en route to one caliphate of all Muslim nations...

‘From the mid 1990s onwards, statements from Al-Qaeda, gave very clear expression to this ideology:

"Every Muslim, the minute he can start differentiating, carries hatred towards the Americans, Jews and Christians. This is part of our ideology. The creation of Israel is a crime and it has to be erased. You should know that targeting Americans and Jews and killing them anywhere you find them on the earth is one of the greatest duties and one of the best acts of piety you can offer to God Almighty."

Just as great is their hatred for so-called apostate governments in Muslim countries. This is why mainstream Muslims are also regarded as legitimate targets.

‘Their cause is not founded on an injustice. It is founded on a belief, one whose fanaticism is such it can't be moderated. It can't be remedied. It has to be stood up to.’
Quite. But will he do so?

It does sound like Britain realizes they have a problem, but like an alcoholic who needs to disentangle himself from the cycle of their abuse, the British need to understand all the ways in which they are currently lying to themselves.

They need, for instance, to understand that sometimes when Muslims condemn terrorists killing "civilians" or "innocents," that they aren't condemning what we would call terrorism in general, but instead, they are condemning terrorists who would kill Muslims along with all the other infidels.

A Book of Common Palestinian Prayer

On July 8, 2005, less than 24 hours after the bombing in London, the following prayer was heard on Palestinian state-owned TV:

"Annihilate the Infidels and the Polytheists! Your [i.e. Allah's] enemies are the enemies of the religion! Allah, disperse their gathering and break up their unity, and turn on them, the evil adversities. Allah, count them and kill them to the last one, and don't leave even one." [Suleiman Al-Satari, PA TV, July 8, 2005. View an excerpt of this sermon online here]

This call for the genocide of all Infidels is particularly striking coming as Britain was still reeling from the London terror attacks - especially since PA religious usage routinely includes Britain in the "Infidel" category.

Such a call does not represent a new policy - or even a shift in policy. While the PA is careful to exclude this hate ideology from the image it presents to the foreign media, to its own people in Arabic the PA has always presented itself as part of a greater Arab-Islamic conflict against the West.

This enmity is focused primarily on the US and Britain, who are seen as the dominant forces of Western civilization. This enmity is neither time nor event dependent, but is presented as part of Allah's plan. The ultimate victory is predetermined, Palestinians are taught, and Islam will eventually rule over Britain and America.

The following is a review of some of this religious hate expression towards Britain as reported in the PA media.

Britain is among the Infidels

"America, Britain and Spain ... are uniting to strike at the people of truth [i.e. Muslims] in their homeland. This is the Infidels' way, Oh Muslims... The United Nations, to our regret, has become Dar al-Nadwa [literally 'House of Assembly,' the term for the pre-Islamic meeting place in Mecca], because that is where the Infidels meet." Ibrahim Mudayris, PA TV, February 28, 2003. View an excerpt of this sermon online here]

"The Infidel countries under the leadership of the US made up an excuse and justification to wage their dirty war [post 9-11 war in Afghanistan] against Islam and the Muslims... Concerning evil Britain, which directly brought about this corrupt entity [Israel] on Palestinian land. Britain forgot that it is the height of terror and the height of hatred against Islam and Moslems." [Yusuf Abu Sneina, Iman of Al-Aqsa Mosque, PA Radio, December 28, 2001. Hear an excerpt of this sermon online here]

Prayers to Allah to destroy Britain

Dr. Ikrime Sabri, Mufti of Jerusalem, highest-ranking Islamic figure in the Palestinian Authority, just 18 days before the September 11 attacks against America in 2001:

"Oh, Allah, destroy America and its supporters and collaborators. Oh Allah, destroy Britain and its supporters and collaborators." [Ikrime Sabri, PA Radio, August 24, 2001.Hear an excerpt of this sermon online here]

"It is our obligation to prepare for the soldiers of Allah who are advancing in the will of Allah, glorified and praised. We will prepare a foothold for them. Allah willing, this oppressive state will disappear, the oppressive state Israel. The oppressive country America will disappear. The oppressive country Britain will disappear - those who caused our people's Catastrophe [PA term for the establishment of Israel]. [Muhammad Ibrahim Maadi, PA TV, June 8, 2001. View an excerpt of this sermon online here]

Last Friday, Charles Krauthammer had a piece in the Jewish World Review which contained a line I believe will go into the history books:

"Decadence is defined not by a civilization's art or music but ultimately by its willingness to simply defend itself."

We look into the face of an enemy who is calling for our destruction and we talk about forging ties with them, about our common shared interest, about working together in the interest of peace.

We're dead if we don't stop this nonesense.

The question then is, how can we put a stop to it. The answer, in part, is to demand that Muslims cease and desist from such incitement. Yesterday, fellow CUANAS contributor Publius 2000 posted an excerpt of and interview with Victor Davis Hanson which contained a passage which I think is relevant:

... we have to tell Muslims of good faith, the end is over for tolerating this type of behavior. If you go to a mosque, and somebody stands up and says Jews are apes and pigs, or the West should be destroyed, then you have a duty as a resident or a citizen in a Western country to oppose that. And if you don't do it, you're abetting it, and you're complicit in it."

Sunday, July 17, 2005

Two Top Turkish Bestsellers
Mein Kampf, and A Novel About
Islamic Nuclear Terror Against U.S.

Mr. Fjordman has become my favorite European blogger of late. Fjordman:

Burak Turna's previous book, about a Turkish hero who destroys Washington DC with a nuclear device, was the only book to beat Adolf Hitler's "Mein Kampf" on the bestseller list in Turkey.

Of course, Turkey is a beacon of Islamic modernism, and all its close to 80 million inhabitants should be allowed to join the 15 to 20 million Muslims already in the EU. The problems we have with 20 million Muslims will disappear as soon as we get 100 million Muslims. Our leaders tell us so, so it must be true:

Turkey Shrugs Off Success of Hitler's 'Mein Kampf'

The current No. 1 bestseller in Turkey, ahead of "Mein Kampf," is "Metal Storm," which depicts a U.S. invasion of the country. The Turkish hero avenges his homeland by destroying Washington with a nuclear device.

Clash of civilizations comes to a store near you

Burak Turna, who has developed a large following in Turkey, hit the bookstands this month with his second political fiction, "Third World War," which is about a clash of civilizations. His first book, "Metal Storm," co-authored by Orkun Uçar, describing a Turkish-U.S. war sparked after an assault on Turkish troops in northern Iraq by U.S. forces, is a bestseller in Turkey with over 450,000 copies sold to date.

Westerners Call It Terrorism
Muslims Call It "Sacrifice"

From Fjordman:

The uncle of Shahzad Tanweer, one of the four London bomb suspects, has defended his nephew's actions as a desperate "sacrifice" in an interview with the British tabloid newspaper. "These suicide bombers are desperate people," Bashir Ahmed told the Sunday paper.

"They are not getting their rights. They can see that their brothers are not getting their rights, so they take extreme action."

"This lad has made a name for himself in the world. Muslims call it a sacrifice, the Europeans call him a terrorist," he was quoted as saying.

Tanweer's uncle laid the blame for the rush-hour attacks on London's transport network at the feet of British Prime Minister Tony Blair and US President George W. Bush, warning, "There will be more".

Citing US policy in Iraq and the Middle East, as well as its treatment of detainees at the Guantanamo Bay base in Cuba, Ahmed told the paper that Western disregard for the rights of Muslims was driving young men to violence.

"Britain and America are saying that they will defeat terrorism. I am saying that terrorism can be finished in one second," he said. "Why can't Blair and Bush apologise for the way they have abused the human rights of Muslims. They should apologise. They should stop these injustices."

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Mindless Multiculturalism?

The Death of Mindless Multiculturalism in Europe

Jeff Jarvis at Buzz Machine, points to two articles, one each from a British and Dutch writer, which discusses the possibility that mindless multiculturalism might be coming to an end in Britain. First, here is Dutch novelist Leon de Winter, from the New York Times. Hat tip, the Anchoress:

For centuries the Netherlands has been considered the most tolerant and liberal nation in the world. This attitude is a byproduct of a disciplined civic society, confident enough to provide space for those with different ideas. It produced the country in which Descartes found refuge, a center of freedom of thought and of a free press in Europe.

That Netherlands no longer exists.

The murder last year of the filmmaker Theo van Gogh, whose killer was convicted this week, and the assassination of the politician Pim Fortuyn in 2002 marked the end of the Holland of Erasmus and Spinoza.

No, the Dutch suddenly did not become intolerant and insular. But these killings showed the cumulative effect of two forces that have shaken the foundations of Dutch civic society over the last 40 years: the cultural and sexual revolution of the 1960's and 70's and the influx of Muslim workers during those years of prosperity....

When they came to the country, often under long-term government work visas, they were faced with a highly educated but apparently decadent society in the grip of a cultural revolution. Many were astonished: was this country some sort of freak show?

No, it certainly wasn't. Under the effusive "anything goes" exterior, the majority of Dutch people held on to their disciplined Calvinist values. To the immigrants, however, this core was all but invisible....

And thus the delicate mechanism of Holland's traditional tolerant society gradually lost its balance. The news media, politicians and artists gnawed away at the traditional values of Calvinistic civic society, while in the bleak Muslim suburbs resentment grew among the Moroccans' Dutch-born children, who found the promise of an affluent life unfulfillable.

Meanwhile, the news media and politicians maintained an unofficial ban on any discussion of the problems of immigration: after all, in progressive Holland only socioeconomic problems were admissible. It was simply not acceptable to discuss problems relating to religion and culture.

Then, there's this, from Michael Portillo, writing in the Sunday Times of London:

Tolerance was clearly never meant to mean that Britain should allow those with roots outside the country to flout human rights and the laws of the land on the pretext that things were done differently where they came from. The Ayn Rand Institute is right to say that it is dangerous nonsense to pretend that all cultures are morally equivalent. Such sloppy thinking corrodes our ability to distinguish good from evil.

It is tempting in a tolerant society to want to see other people’s point of view. If Islam has thrown up its extremists, we can recall the excesses committed over centuries in the name of Christianity. We can understand that a devout Muslim might find western society licentious and irreligious. But the time for sophistry has passed. Our citizens and our society are under threat from those who believe that difference is a justification for terror and murder. Our country has the right to assert its values and require from everyone living here compliance with our laws and respect for our standards.

Britain’s woolly thinking about multiculturalism has helped to make us vulnerable.

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The West is its own Worst Enemy

Here is an excerpt from a radio interview with Victor Davis Hanson conducted by Hugh Hewitt...It is well worth reading the whole thing.

"HH: It's a magnificent piece today, and I think you put your finger on what has been coursing through...I read a piece in the Times of London by Gerard Baker today, other pieces that folks have finally realized that our civil war over this war may be more dangerous to our victory than our enemies in the mountains of Afghanistan. Do you agree with that?

VDH: I do, because they are not able, militarily, to defeat us. They're not even able to wage a successful unconventional war. But as you know, from the twenty five years that followed from the Embassy takeover in Iran, they have an uncanny ability to decipher the mind of the West: to hit, back off, allege victimization or grievances, and then to hit again, and hoping all the while to have an incremental agenda that finally achieves their goals."

Here's More...

"HH: Now, Professor Hanson, in the Washington Times today, Diana West wrote an op-ed, in which she talked about the danger to our way of life, posed by Islam. And I quote now, quote notice I didn't say Islamists, or Islamo-fascists, or fundamentalist extremists. I have tried out such terms in the past, but I've come to find them artificial and confusing, maybe purposefully so, because in their imprecision, I think they allow us to give a wide berth to a great problem. The gross incompatability of Islam, the religious force that shrinks freedom, even as it moderately enables, or extremistly advances jihad with the West. Am I right? Who's to say? Professor Hanson, I don't think she's right, but I'm interested in your response.

VDH: I don't think she's right, either. At least not yet, because I think that the Muslim community in the West is going to have to make a decision, and that decision is on the horizon. In other words, the people of London are going to have to realize that there may be two or three or four percent of the population, in which they go to the Medrasa, they go to a Moscque with a C, and this could be sizeable number of people. Several hundred, even several thousand. Same in the United States, same in France, same in other countries. And that's going to be the key. We should remember in 1939, there were fascist societies in places like Mexico and Argentina, that professed allegiance to what Mussolini and Germany were trying to do. But by 1946, they were moribund, because that ideology had been discredited. So while we try to attack it militarily, and prevent the terrorists from killing people as well as promoting democracy, we have to change the climate or the landscape under what we will tolerate. And we have to tell Muslims of good faith, the end is over for tolerating this type of behavior. If you go to a mosque, and somebody stands up and says Jews are apes and pigs, or the West should be destroyed, then you have a duty as a resident or a citizen in a Western country to oppose that. And if you don't do it, you're abetting it, and you're complicit in it."

Read the rest...

Sharon Vows "No Restraints" In Stopping Violence

When reading the following article, from Associated Press, keep in mind, the Israelis are trying to leave the Gaza Strip. Why would the terrorists (Palestinian military) continue to attack Israelis when they are in the midst of attempting to effect the change the Palestinians say they want?:

JERUSALEM - Prime Minister Ariel Sharon issued his sternest warning yet to Palestinian militants on Sunday, promising no restraint in stopping an upsurge in violence that has left a Mideast truce in tatters ahead of Israel's Gaza Strip pullout.

Thousands of Israeli troops massed along the Gaza border and Israel Radio reported that Lt. Gen. Dan Halutz told Sharon's ministers that preparations for a possible ground strike were complete.

The Israeli air force fired missiles Sunday at a car in a region of northern Gaza used by Palestinian militants to launch rockets and mortars, witnesses said. The two men in the car escaped, but a bystander was seriously wounded, the witnesses said.

The Israeli military refused to comment.

The attack took place in Beit Lahiya, near the line between Gaza and Israel, a launching area for Palestinian militants firing rockets and mortars at Gaza settlements and Israeli towns and villages just outside the territory.

In recent days, Israel has renewed its practice of killing suspected militant with airstrikes.
Earlier, militants vowed to retaliate against any Israeli military assault.

The violence has cast a heavy pall over Israel's planned withdrawal from Gaza and northern West Bank settlements next month and has sent international mediators scrambling to try to restore calm ahead of the pullout.

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice changed her schedule to include a last-minute trip to the region later this week.

"I spoke to the heads of the defense establishment ... and informed them that there are to be no restraints on our operations," Sharon told Cabinet ministers at the start of a weekly Cabinet meeting.

Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz also said Israel would launch a "massive, prolonged and intricate" military strike if the Palestinian Authority doesn't curb militants who have been bombarding Israeli targets with rockets and mortar rounds in recent days, a meeting participant said.

Palestinian police, meanwhile, began removing Hamas, Islamic Jihad and Fatah flags from the streets of Gaza, leaving only the Palestinian national flag. On Saturday, Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas said he would brook no challenges to his government's authority, and called on militants to stop their attacks.

A Palestinian suicide bombing and a rocket attack last week killed a total of six Israelis. Militants have fired more than 100 projectiles at Israeli targets since Thursday, in one of the heaviest onslaughts since the two sides declared a now-moribund truce in February.

Rockets and mortar rounds continued to hit Israeli targets on Sunday. Two Israelis were wounded seriously by a mortar that landed on a house in the Gaza settlement of Neve Dekalim, rescue officials said. Hamas militants claimed responsibility for the attack.

Earlier Sunday, an Israeli sniper shot and killed a senior Hamas field commander in a targeted strike after another mortar round hit the same community, the army and Hamas officials said.

Israeli Deputy Defense Minister Zeev Boim told Israel Radio earlier in the day that the military would decide soon whether to launch a ground offensive before or after Rice pays a snap visit to the region to try to halt the Palestinian attacks.

"It depends what will develop in the coming hours," Boim said. "It's a matter of hours. We will not suffer such a heavy rain of Qassam (rockets.)"

The army plans to invade northern Gaza — the area militants use to fire rockets at Sderot — a military official said, speaking on condition of anonymity because he was discussing sensitive military plans. But he said the massing of thousands of soldiers along the border is meant more as a threat for the time being.

Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat said an Israeli incursion into Gaza "will have a disastrous impact on the disengagement plan, and all efforts to make it a successful and smooth and peaceful disengagement."

Mushir Masri, a Hamas spokesman in Gaza, said an Israeli incursion would touch off more violence.

"They should understand that by this serious escalation they have opened the gates of Hell, and if they enter Gaza we are not going to stand by silently," Masri said. Hamas, he said, was re-evaluating the truce,

An Egyptian delegation arrived in Gaza Sunday to try to salvage the tattered cease-fire. Masri said Hamas, which is to meet with the Egyptians later in the day, welcomed efforts to end the tension.

Mofaz postponed a trip to Washington because of the escalating violence, ministry officials said. Mofaz was to have left for the U.S. on Saturday, but now plans to go later in the week.

Israeli officials also were occupied with preventing Jewish extremists from disrupting next month's pullout.

Sharon told his Cabinet that "the severest possible measures" must be taken to prevent pullout opponents from entering Gaza in an effort to sabotage the evacuation, the Cabinet meeting participant said.

Settlers and their supporters plan a massive march and rally this week in defiance of last week's order to seal Gaza to nonresidents. Police official Uri Bar Lev said police would not authorize the protest because demonstrators plan to cross into Gaza.

Gaza was sealed last week to prevent withdrawal opponents from flooding the strip and tying up evacuation forces.

The evacuation also touched off dissidence within army ranks. Halutz ordered a 120-member company disbanded Sunday after nine of its soldiers refused to carry out orders to stop demonstrators from entering the Gaza settlement bloc, the military said in a statement.

Hundreds of settlers opposed to the dismantling of Gaza settlements clashed with police and soldiers overnight, leaving several injured on both sides by dawn Sunday.

.

Saturday, July 16, 2005

Leading Iranian Religious Leader Says
Britain Is Behind London Bombings

From Jihad Watch, via Agence French Presse:

TEHRAN — A leading Iranian religious leader and politician charged in a nationally broadcast sermon yesterday that there was a British hand in last week’s deadly London bombings. Ahmad Jannati, who chairs the powerful Guardians Council, which vets all legislation and candidates for public office, said the British government benefited from the bombings and was the key suspect, whether directly or through its “child” Al-Qaeda.

“One hypothesis is that Al-Qaeda is behind these events, but Al-Qaeda is (US President George W.) Bush and (British Prime Minister Tony) Blair,” Jannati charged. “Who created Al-Qaeda? It’s you who ought to be put on trial. Al-Qaeda is your illegitimate child,” he said, addressing the two leaders.

“The other possibility is that the British government itself created this situation, just like on Sept. 11, 2001, when we discussed the responsibility of the Americans.

“To understand who is behind these events, you need to look at who profits from them. It’s the Americans who profited from Sept. 11 and today it’s the British who are profiting from these attacks. They say that it’s to fight terrorism that they have to go to Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere, and that’s how they justify their presence in those countries."...

Yes, that's right. And since we are profiting so much from ending the Hussein regime, I guess we'll have to end your Islamofascist Mullocracy next.

Cheney Passes Colonoscopy With Flying Colors

Vice President Dick Cheney has exactly the sheepish look you'd expect any guy to have, when coming out of the Doctors office after a colonscopy:

WASHINGTON - Vice President Dick Cheney has a mild case of esophagitis and some small dilation of the arteries behind both knees, his office said Saturday after he completed a two-part annual physical.

Cheney, 64, was at George Washington University Hospital for a colonoscopy, an upper endoscopy and vascular screening. The procedures completed his yearly medical checkup.

We, at CUANAS, wish the Veep a speedy recovery of his sense of personal dignity.

We've been through it before as well, VP Cheney. We understand.

The History of Islam and Nazism

Periodically, I post a photo here of this or that group of Islamofascists giving the Nazi "Heil Hitler" salute. I'm sure many people who see this wonder to themselves, "Why? What's the connection between them and the Nazis?"

Today, Someguy, at Mystery Achievement, quotes from this Caroline Glick article on the history of the relationship between Nazism and Islam:

Reacting to Neville Chamberlain's Munich Pact with Adolf Hitler in the British Parliament in October 1938, Winston Churchill warned, "You have to consider the character of the Nazi movement and the rule which it implies There can never be friendship between the British democracy and the Nazi power, that power which spurns Christian ethics, which cheers its onward course by a barbarous paganism, which vaunts the spirit of aggression and conquest, which derives strength and perverted pleasure from persecution, and uses, as we have seen, with pitiless brutality the threat of murderous force. That power can never be a trusted friend of British democracy."

With the outbreak of World War II one year later, Churchill's warning that Munich was "the beginning of the reckoning" with an implacable foe was of course proved correct.

In the week since last Thursday's attacks in London we have repeatedly heard the analogy between those bombings and the Nazi bombing war against Britain. Indeed, in most cases, the analogies drawn between the two circumstances have to do with the British response to the attacks and not to the parallel nature of the perpetrators.

In truth though, just as the British stoicism recalls the same from 65 years ago, so too, there is a deep and instructive similarity between the Nazis and the Islamic-fascist forces that attacked then and attack today. The fact of the matter is that to fight this current war to victory requires understanding and accepting the similarities between the Nazis and the Arab-Islamic terrorist armies.

On Tuesday The Wall Street Journal published an investigative report into the establishment and growth of the Islamic Center in Munich. As Stefan Meining, a German historian who studies the mosque, told the paper, "If you want to understand the structure of political Islam, you have to look at what happened in Munich."

According to the report, the Munich mosque was founded by Muslim Nazis who had settled in West Germany after the war. These men, who were among more than one million citizens of the Soviet republics who joined the Nazis while they were under German occupation, were transferred by their Nazi commander to the Western front in the closing stages of the war to protect them from the advancing Red Army.

The Journal report explains that the first leader of the mosque was a native of Uzbekistan named Nurredin Nakibhidscha Namangani. Namangani served as an imam in the SS and participated in the liquidation of the Warsaw ghetto and the putting down of the Jewish uprising in 1943.

According to the article, the exiled head of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, Said Ramadan, participated in a 1958 conference organized by Namangani and his fellow Muslim Nazis to raise money to build the mosque.

The article then outlines the subsequent takeover of the mosque by the Muslim Brotherhood in the 1960s and its transformation, with Saudi and Syrian funding, into a nexus for the spread of Islamic-fascist ideology and its call for jihad and world domination.

Ignored by the report is that there was no particular reason, other than perhaps turf warfare, for the Nazis to have had a problem with the Muslim Brotherhood. As German political scientist Matthias Kuntzel chronicled in his work "Islamic anti-Semitism and its Nazi Roots," the Muslim Brotherhood, which spawned the PLO's Fatah as well as al-Qaida, Hamas and the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, owes much of its ideological success and pseudo-philosophical roots to Nazism.

In the 1930s, the mufti of Jerusalem, Amin el-Husseini, rigorously courted the Nazis. When, in 1936, he launched his terror war against the Jewish Yishuv in the British controlled Palestine Mandate, he repeatedly asked the Nazis for financial backing, which began arriving in 1937.

From 1936-39 Husseini's terror army murdered 415 Jews. In later years, Husseini noted that were it not for Nazi money, his onslaught would have been defeated in 1937. His movement was imbued with Nazism. His men saluted one another with Nazi salutes and members of his youth movement sported Hitler Youth uniforms.

Husseini was allied with the new Muslim Brotherhood movement that was founded by Ramadan's father-in-law, Hassan al-Banna, in the 1920s. The impact of his terror war on the movement was profound. From a 1936 membership roster of 800, by 1938 the ranks of the Brotherhood had risen to 200,000 official members backed by perhaps an equal number of active sympathizers.

As Kuntzel argues, the notion of a violent holy war or jihad against non-Muslims was not a part of any active Islamic doctrine until the 1930s and, as he notes, "its concurrence with the arrival of a newly virulent anti-Semitism is verified in no uncertain terms." Husseini's gangs in the Palestine Mandate were joyously praised by the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, which held mass demonstrations with slogans like "Jews get out of Egypt and Palestine," and "Down with the Jews!"

For the Nazis, the Jews were seen as the principal force preventing them from achieving their goal of world domination. As Hitler put it, "You will see how little time we shall need in order to upset the ideas and the criteria for the whole world, simply and purely by attacking Judaism."

In his view, once he destroyed the Jews, the rest of the world would lay before him for the taking. "The struggle for world domination will be fought entirely between Germans and Jews. All else is facade and illusion," he said.

Husseini, who became an active Nazi agent – fomenting a pro-Nazi coup in Baghdad in 1942 and then fleeing to Germany where he spent the rest of the war training a jihad army of Bosnian Muslims; exhorting the Arab world to rise up against the Allies; participating in the Holocaust and planning an Auschwitz-like death camp to be built in Nablus after the German victory – escaped with French assistance to Cairo after the war. There he was embraced as a war hero.
Hitler's obsession with the Jews as the source of all the evils in the world became so ingrained in both the Arab nationalist and Islamic psyche that it has become second nature.

At the 2002 trial in Germany of Mounir el-Moutassadeq, who was accused of collaborating with the September 11 hijackers, witnesses described the world view of Muhammad Atta who led the attackers. One witness claimed, "Atta's [world view] was based on a National Socialist way of thinking. He was convinced that 'the Jews' are determined to achieve world domination. He considered New York City to be the center of world Jewry, which was, in his opinion, Enemy Number One."

In light of the wealth of historical documentation of the Nazi roots of Islamic fascism, it is absolutely apparent that the collaboration between Nazis and the Muslim Brotherhood in the building and developing of the Islamic Center in Munich was anything but coincidental or unique.

It is also hardly surprising that PA chieftain Mahmoud Abbas, whose predecessor, Yasser Arafat, was Husseini's follower, devoted his doctoral dissertation to a denial of the Holocaust and a justification of Nazism.

The thing of it is, just as with the Nazis, it is impossible to separate the Islamist ideological and military quest for world domination from its genocidal anti-Semitism. As with the Nazis, they are two sides of the same coin. And, just as was the case from the Nazi ascent to power in 1933 through the end of World War II, the British and, to a lesser though increasing degree, the Americans refuse to acknowledge that the war against the Jews and Israel is the same as the war against them.

.

The White Boys Come Out In Support of The Jihad

The Aryan Nations have announced which side they are taking in the War on Terror. From Jihad Watch:

There has been a little misunderstanding as to what our perspective is as far as an alliance with Islamic Jihadeen, and our own Phinehas Priests. There are some out there who would like to imply that we are now an Islamic Fundamentalist Organization, and this is erroneous, our Organization is not for the support of any religion,

however based on the history of the Aryan Nations, the rules and conduct are based on Biblical Law, and the general views of the bulk of this organization is the acceptance of Aryan Messianic Identity, or other forms of what is called “Christian Identity” in most circles....

Further, seeing the errors of the past, we have taken this approach with alliances to Islamic adherents, because we find their standards of morality to be nearly analogous to our own, and their resolve to uproot and destroy the fallen tree of the Garden, the satanic “jew”, to also be analogous to our own desires and devotion.

In this sense, Islam is our ally, and the 1500 cults all claiming to be “Christian” are our opposition, as they have chosen to worship the image [jews] of the beast [satan] as prophesied within the Holy Scriptures for the non-elect, the condemned of Yahweh, the rejects of Israel.

Islam has not been dishonored as much by “jew”ish incursion, therefore Islamic Jihadeen have safeguarded the purity of the very instinct for self preservation for which we hold the most vociferous esteem.

Reobert Spencer comments: Note the disassociation from the name "Christian" and denial that they are a "Christian" group. Yet in a week, or a month, someone will mention this group to me again as an example of "Christian extremism," as if the existence of such a thing somehow justifies the Islamic jihad. This shows how increasingly divorced from reality is such moral equivalence.

The Logic of Suicide Terrorism

Belgravia Dispatch has a very interesting post this morning which quotes Robert Pape, author of Dying To Win: The Logic of Suicide Terrorism. Mr. Pape has assembled a complete database of all 462 suicide attacks around the world, from 1980 through 2004.

His conclusion is suicide terrorism emanates from one source; the desire "to compel modern democracies to withdraw military forces from the territory that the terrorists view as their homeland."

Pape notes that the suicide belt was invented by a terror group called the Tamil Tigers, based in Sri Lanka, a Marxist-Hindu group which is completely secular. From this he implies that suicide terrorism is not a fundamentalist phenomenon.

Here are some excerpts:

Since suicide terrorism is mainly a response to foreign occupation and not Islamic fundamentalism, the use of heavy military force to transform Muslim societies over there, if you would, is only likely to increase the number of suicide terrorists coming at us.

Since 1990, the United States has stationed tens of thousands of ground troops on the Arabian Peninsula, and that is the main mobilization appeal of Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda. People who make the argument that it is a good thing to have them attacking us over there are missing that suicide terrorism is not a supply-limited phenomenon where there are just a few hundred around the world willing to do it because they are religious fanatics. It is a demand-driven phenomenon. That is, it is driven by the presence of foreign forces on the territory that the terrorists view as their homeland. The operation in Iraq has stimulated suicide terrorism and has given suicide terrorism a new lease on life.

If Islamic fundamentalism were the pivotal factor, then we should see some of the largest Islamic fundamentalist countries in the world, like Iran, which has 70 million people—three times the population of Iraq and three times the population of Saudi Arabia—with some of the most active groups in suicide terrorism against the United States. However, there has never been an al-Qaeda suicide terrorist from Iran, and we have no evidence that there are any suicide terrorists in Iraq from Iran.

Sudan is a country of 21 million people. Its government is extremely Islamic fundamentalist. The ideology of Sudan was so congenial to Osama bin Laden that he spent three years in Sudan in the 1990s. Yet there has never been an al-Qaeda suicide terrorist from Sudan.
I have the first complete set of data on every al-Qaeda suicide terrorist from 1995 to early 2004, and they are not from some of the largest Islamic fundamentalist countries in the world. Two thirds are from the countries where the United States has stationed heavy combat troops since 1990.

Another point in this regard is Iraq itself. Before our invasion, Iraq never had a suicide-terrorist attack in its history. Never. Since our invasion, suicide terrorism has been escalating rapidly with 20 attacks in 2003, 48 in 2004, and over 50 in just the first five months of 2005. Every year that the United States has stationed 150,000 combat troops in Iraq, suicide terrorism has doubled.

I have collected demographic data from around the world on the 462 suicide terrorists since 1980 who completed the mission, actually killed themselves. This information tells us that most are walk-in volunteers. Very few are criminals. Few are actually longtime members of a terrorist group. For most suicide terrorists, their first experience with violence is their very own suicide-terrorist attack.

There is no evidence there were any suicide-terrorist organizations lying in wait in Iraq before our invasion. What is happening is that the suicide terrorists have been produced by the invasion.

Well, ok. There were 140 suicide attacks against Israel during the last four years alone. This would mean that almost 1/3 of all suicide attacks are aimed at Israel. When one takes into account Israel's staggering ability to halt such suicide attackers (they halted 367 such attacks in 2004 alone), then one can see that the percentage of total attacks which are directed at Israel is much, much higher than 33%.

In other words, the preponderance of sucide terrorism is done in the name of Islamic fundamentalism, which inseminates potential suicide terrorists with two necessary ideas,

1) that it is their land by the will of Allah, and that no human being of another religion should be on their land, ever, for any reason, unless they are living in submission to Islam,

and

2) that they will attain paradise for their actions.

While it may be true that the secular Tamil Tigers invented the bomb vest, the numbers would seem to prove that the ideology of communism has been less successful in motivating humans to commit suicide in the name of their cause.

In other words, the Tamil Tigers may have invented the suicide vest, but the Islamists have provided an almost perfect germinating ideology.

I must say, I agree with Pape that there are an almost unlimited supply of suicide terrorists available in the Islamic world. I agree that in the short-term, terrorism will increase as a result of our "occupation" of foreign land.

However, one of the notable things about making war upon a people is that it usually angers them, and causes them to fight back.

So, no surprise there.

The notion that such anger and determination on the part of our enemy is a reason to quit is a wholly new idea in the annals of military strategy; and it's probably not an idea with legs.

It seems to me wars are won by breaking the will of the people fighting them. Unfortunately, this is done by cornering the enemy and pouring the force on, until he believes he has no other choice than to admit defeat.

It's The Caliphate, Stupid

I love the way Charles at Little Green Footballs put this, so I'm just going to give you his whole post:

After several inevitable paragraphs about “Muslim anger” over Iraq, the New York Times comes clean about Islam’s goal for the United Kingdom: Anger Burns on the Fringe of Britain’s Muslims.

A recent poll commissioned by The Guardian found that 84 percent of Muslims surveyed were against the use of violence for political means, but only 33 percent of Muslims said they wanted more integration into mainstream British culture. Almost half of those surveyed said their Muslim leadership did not represent their views.

The grievances of the boys of Cross Flats Parks have not propelled them toward political action. But Dr. Waheed, a practicing psychiatrist, and Mr. Khan, a documentary filmmaker, are acting on their alienation.

Both men, eloquent, better educated and better off than most in their community, are also among the more politically motivated. They have embraced one of the more conservative, if not militant, Islamic movements in Britain today - Hizb ut-Tahrir, or Party of Liberation.

The party’s stated goal is to rebuild the Caliphate - the Muslim state dissolved with the fall of the Ottoman Empire - to displace corrupt dictators in the Muslim world, and to instill Islamic mores and Islamicize almost every aspect of daily life.

The group has drawn about 10,000 members to its recent annual meetings, its members say, and includes chapters abroad in places like Uzbekistan. It is a controversial movement, even among British Muslims, and its members have become emblematic of the shift of Muslims born in Britain to more conservative and outspoken expressions of their faith.

In interviews earlier this week in Birmingham, where they were born and bred, Dr. Waheed and Mr. Khan described the group’s struggle as one for the very identity of Muslims in Britain.

This shouldn't surprise anyone, this is the stated goal of Bin Laden and his followers. And, as I mentioned a couple days ago, Bin Laden enjoys enormous support in the Islamic world.

While his support may not be as strong among Muslims in the Western world, I believe we can assume it is still significant. Especially considering the statistic that only 34% of British Muslims said they desire to integrate more into their host society.

The Sacraments of Postmodern Thinking
And The Global War on Terror

In his latest piece,Victor Davis Hanson explains what he calls the "false narrative of the left," which weakens our resolve to fight and win the Global War on Terror:

Why does this false narrative, then, persist — other than that it had a certain political utility in the 2002 and 2004 elections?

In a word, this version of events brings spiritual calm for millions of troubled though affluent and blessed Westerners. There are three sacraments to their postmodern thinking, besides the primordial fear that so often leads to appeasement.

Our first hindrance is moral equivalence. For the hard Left there is no absolute right and wrong since amorality is defined arbitrarily and only by those in power. Taking back Fallujah from beheaders and terrorists is no different from bombing the London subway since civilians may die in either case. The deliberate rather than accidental targeting of noncombatants makes little difference, especially since the underdog in Fallujah is not to be judged by the same standard as the overdogs in London and New York. A half-dozen roughed up prisoners in Guantanamo are the same as the Nazi death camps or the Gulag.

Our second shackle is utopian pacifism — ‘war never solved anything’ and ‘violence only begets violence.’ Thus it makes no sense to resort to violence, since reason and conflict resolution can convince even a bin Laden to come to the table. That most evil has ended tragically and most good has resumed through armed struggle — whether in Germany, Japan, and Italy or Panama, Belgrade, and Kabul — is irrelevant. Apparently on some past day, sophisticated Westerners, in their infinite wisdom and morality, transcended age-old human nature, and as a reward were given a pass from the smelly, dirty old world of the past six millennia.

The third restraint is multiculturalism, or the idea that all social practices are of equal merit. Who are we to generalize that the regimes and fundamentalist sects of the Middle East result in economic backwardness, intolerance of religious and ethnic minorities, gender apartheid, racism, homophobia, and patriarchy? Being different from the West is never being worse.

These tenets in various forms are not merely found in the womb of the universities, but filter down into our popular culture, grade schools, and national political discourse — and make it hard to fight a war against stealthy enemies who proclaim constant and shifting grievances.

If at times these doctrines are proven bankrupt by the evidence it matters little, because such beliefs are near religious in nature — a secular creed that will brook no empirical challenge. These articles of faith apparently fill a deep psychological need for millions of Westerners, guilty over their privilege, free to do anything without constraints or repercussions, and convinced that their own culture has made them spectacularly rich and leisured only at the expense of others.

According to Mr. Hanson, a fissure has been created in Western Civilization, between the postmodernists on the one hand, and those of us who still believe in absolute truth:

So it is not true to say that Western civilization is at war against Dark Age Islamism. Properly speaking, only about half of the West is involved, the shrinking segment that still sees human nature as unchanging and history as therefore replete with a rich heritage of tragic lessons.

This is nothing new. The spectacular inroads of the Ottomans in the16th century to the gates of Vienna and the shores of the Adriatic were not explainable according to Istanbul’s vibrant economy, impressive universities, or widespread scientific dynamism and literacy, or even a technologically superior and richly equipped military.

Instead, a beleaguered Europe was trisected by squabbling Protestants, Catholics, and Orthodox Christians — as a wealthy northwest, with Atlantic seaports, ignored the besieged Mediterranean and Balkans and turned its attention to getting rich in the New World.

So too we are divided over two antithetical views of the evolving West — Europe at odds with America, red and blue states in intellectual and spiritual divergence, the tragic view resisting the creeping therapeutic mindset. These interior splits largely explain why creepy killers from the Dark Ages, parasitic on the West from their weapons to communications, are still plaguing us four years after their initial surprise attack.

"The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars/But in ourselves, that we are underlings."

So, in other words, we are fighting a two-front war. One, in the Islamic world, and one here in America. The one in the Islamic world I have no doubt we can win. However, we will not win if we do not believe in the cause for which we fight. And that is where the second front comes in. We also need to put an end to the moral relativism of our postmodern rot.

There is no doubt that Islamism, the ideology that seeks to establish a worldwide caliphate governed by Sharia law, is evil. There is no doubt that Western-style Democracy is a better form of society than that envisioned by the Islamists. There should be no doubt that it is morally preferable that people should be free. However, we seem to believe we are wrong to spread freedom. We seem to believe that we would be "imposing."

This is an oxymoron. One can not "impose" freedom. And, I do not mean that in the way those on the left mean it, when they try to imply that we are attempting to force freedom on people who would not want it; as if we were the fascists. We can only offer the opportunity for freedom, by removing existing constraints upon liberty, such as the evil of Islamist tyrranies.

All human beings long to be free. If we don't believe that, then we must conclude that only Westerners long to be free, and really at that, only white Europeans want to be free, because white Europeans are the ones who invented Western Democracy. In other words, we must also believe that Arabs do not want to be free.

This is racist. And, it is nonesense.

Those who do not want freedom are those who stand to gain something by forcing their will on others; in other words, the leaders of Islamist states. That they are able to terrorize their people into agreement, or to manufacture agreement by inculcating hatred of the West, does not mean the people of Arab countries do not crave freedom. It means they are the victims of a hateful ideology.

The difference between the hateful ideology of Islamism, and the ideology of Western Democracy should be clear to us at every corner. But, maybe it will be clearest on this point. Freedom allows many worlds. One may be Christian, Jew, Buddhist, Muslim, or other. Our leaders do not attempt to create hate in us for Muslims in general. Our hatred is saved for the ideology of terror.

For the Islamists, on the other hand, there are only two worlds; the world of Islam, and the world of the Infidel; also called Dar al-Harb; the House of War. Islamists say Muslims are to hate the Infidels, and make war upon them, until they convert.

But, while our world of freedom allows room for many worlds, we can not allow fascism, which is the opposite of freedom. We are diametrically opposed to this Islamist ideology. It is either them or us. There is not room for both. It's either our freedom, or their fascism. Sooner or later, we will have to choose which we believe in more.

Friday, July 15, 2005

One-Stop Shop

Apparently, the EU is starting to lose hope that they can dissuade the Islamofascist government of Iran from building nuclear weapons. In fact, this Reuters article describes EU leaders as being downright gloomy:

BERLIN (Reuters) - European Union foreign ministers will agree on Monday to press on with a diplomatic initiative to try to persuade Iran to abandon its nuclear ambitions despite gloom since the election of an Islamic hard-liner as president.

Considering the fact that high government officials of Iran have threatened to use nukes, preemptively, on both the United States and Israel, I can understand the gloom.

Well, what to do? What to do, when you're so gloomy? Hey, I've got an idea. Let's do some cocaine:

Cocaine traces have been found at the European Parliament in an inquiry by one of Germany’s main broadcasters. The Sat-1 channel sent reporters to take 46 swabs from toilets and other public areas of the Brussels buildings. Nearly all tested positive for cocaine.

A European Parliament spokeswoman said cocaine abuse was not a problem among staff working at the buildings.

A professor who analysed the samples said the amounts found were too great to have been carried in on clothing. “It simply reflects the fact that cocaine was brought in there,” Professor Fritz Sorgel of the Institute for Biomedical and Pharmaceutical Research in Nuremberg (IBMP) told the BBC News website.

“The amount was too high and found in too many spots. It shows it was brought in deliberately.”

I hope the Euros use the word "toilet" to mean bathroom. I'd hate to think they're snorting the coke right off the toilet seat. But, it would make sense that their faces would be near the toilet seat, given how much time they spend kissing the Iranians butts.

Boasting of Botswana

Jack, at Jack of Clubs, had an interesting post the other day about Botswana. Apparently, Botswana, unlike most African countries, is doing pretty well:

I have long been an admirer of the nation of Botswana. Almost alone among African countries it stands as an example of liberty, prosperity and stability. I thought I had said something about this several months ago on this blog, but I could not find it in the archives. It had also occured to mention Botswana in connection with the hoopla over the Live-8 concert, but I didn't get around to it. Fortunately, Will Franklin has picked up the slack in his entry for the Carnival of the Revolutions:

Botswana is the model for reforming Africa. It has a generally free and open market economy; it is freer, politically (.pdf -- Freedom House), than Brazil, India, and even Jamaica. Corruption is low, the free enterprise system is allowed to work, and, what do you know, the country is one of the more successful countries in Africa.

Botswana's per capita GDP ($9,200) is above that of China, Ukraine, Bulgaria, Turkey, Brazil, and Thailand;

Botswana's per capita GDP even bests the world average.Contrast Botswana with Zambia (or any number of sub-Saharan nations), and you can really see how much institutions matter.

In short, Africa could learn a lot, from one of its own.

One thing Will does not point out is that Botswana is largely a Christian nation. According to the CIA World Factbook, 71.6% of Batswana are Christians. (I have seen other estimates that place the number closer to 50%, but these numbers are only good for comaparison anyway.)

Additionally about 80% of the country is literate, which is low by Western standards but remarkably high for African nations. Curiously, the female literacy rate is higher at 82.4% than the male rate at 76.9%. I would suggest that the prosperity Will cites is largely due to these two facts, both of which can be traced to the legacy of the British Empire.

Well, what do you know? The African country which shares a religious and political heritage with the United States is doing better than the most of the rest of the African countries. Makes you wonder if maybe we should be working to help Africans install Democratic Republics in Africa, instead of just giving them money. From the New York Times, via Atlas Shrugs:

Don't insult Africa, this continent so rich yet so badly led. Instead, insult its leaders, who have ruined everything. Our anger is all the greater because despite all the presidents for life, despite all the evidence of genocide, we didn't hear anyone at Live 8 raise a cry for democracy in Africa.

Don't the organizers of the concerts realize that Africa lives under the oppression of rulers like Yoweri Museveni (who just eliminated term limits in Uganda so he can be president indefinitely) and Omar Bongo (who has become immensely rich in his three decades of running Gabon)? Don't they know what is happening in Cameroon, Chad, Togo and the Central African Republic? Don't they understand that fighting poverty is fruitless if dictatorships remain in place?

Even more puzzling is why Youssou N'Dour and other Africans participated in this charade. Like us, they can't help but know that Africa's real problem is the lack of freedom of expression, the usurpation of power, the brutal oppression.

Neither debt relief nor huge amounts of food aid nor an invasion of experts will change anything. Those will merely prop up the continent's dictators. It's up to each nation to liberate itself and to help itself. When there is a problem in the United States, in Britain, in France, the citizens vote to change their leaders. And those times when it wasn't possible to freely vote to change those leaders, the people revolted.

Associated Press - The Propaganda Wing
Of the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade ("Loosely" Affiliated)

Supernatural Blog points to a recent Associated Press article which claims the links between Fatah, the party of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, maintains only "loose" links to it's sister organization, the terrorist group Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade:

Also yesterday, a Palestinian suicide bomber blew herself up near a crowded bus stop in Jerusalem, killing two people and wounding at least 14 others, Israeli authorities said.
The Al Aqsa Martyrs' Brigades, a violent group loosely linked to Arafat's Fatah movement, claimed responsibility for the attack. - Sapa-AFP and Sapa-AP

The link is hardly "loose," however. From Honest Reporting:

The evidence, however, clearly indicates that the Al Aqsa Martyrs' Brigade is not some "loose offshoot," but rather has a direct and ongoing bond to the Fatah party, which holds a majority of seats in the Palestinian Parliament. The Palestinian government, therefore, bears direct responsibility for the group's heinous terrorist acts:

The Jerusalem Post reports that a disagreement between the two groups has led Fatah to publically recognize its obligations to the AAMB. For their part, the AAMB is feeling abandoned by their sponsor:

"Thanks to us, Fatah restored its dignity and power during the intifada," [an AAMB leader] added. "But now the members of the Fatah Central Council are putting pressure on us to disband. We don't trust them any more and we tell them that they are the ones who must go."

The leader of the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades in Tulkarm told USA Today on March 14, 2002: "The truth is, we are Fatah, but we didn't operate under the name of Fatah...We are the armed wing of the organization. We receive our instructions from Fatah. Our commander is Yasser Arafat himself."

In November, 2003 a BBC investigation found that up to $50,000 a month was funneled by Fatah directly to the Al Aqsa Martyrs' Brigades.

Why does AP lie about this? Why is it that AP has a horse in this race?

For some reason, AP wants to maintain the illusion that these terrorist attacks are not official acts of the Palestinian state. For some reason, AP wants the people of the world to believe that the terrorists, or "militants" as AP calls them, are just a bunch of justifiably angry people running around blowing things up with almost no plan or method to their madness.

Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, and now Hamas (who won 33% of the Palestinian vote in the most recent Palestinian election) are both official arms of the Palestinian Authority. They are the Palestinian military. Israel should do what any other country would do when attacked by the military of another nation; fight back with their full force.

But, Israel is held back by world opinion which is stoked by organizations like AP, who lie about the situation.

How long, oh Lord? How long?

Thursday, July 14, 2005

CUANAS - Believe It Or Not

Last night, believe it or not, PBS Frontline ran a segment on the rise of Islamofascism in Europe. And they almost got it right. Here's the intro from their website:

Since 9/11, European law enforcement and intelligence agencies have foiled dozens of Islamist terrorist plots. In "Al Qaeda's New Front," FRONTLINE, The New York Times and the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation's documentary program the fifth estate join forces to investigate the realities of "Eurabia," and the peculiar problems faced by Western governments in confronting this gathering threat.

The key reality faced on the other side of the Atlantic is the 18 million Muslims whose ranks are expected to swell to 20 percent of Europe's population in the next 15 years. This community of immigrants who share religious and ethnic bonds has largely failed to integrate into European societies. Many are poor and subject to bigotry; they have lived in Europe for years and many were born there, yet often feel that they are not full members of society.

This sense of alienation is deepened by the ubiquity of television with its non-stop images of their suffering brethren in Palestine, Iraq, and Chechnya. Inspired by local radical imams and jihadist Web sites, disenfranchised European Muslims are taking up the cause of jihad.

With full-scale war between the U.S. military and Islamic insurgents in Iraq -- which is just a two-and-a-half day drive from Berlin -- the reality of a war between Islam and the West is a domestic problem for Europe. The dream of the European Union, the end of all borders, has had unintended consequences. It means that a terrorist can travel freely once he has gained entry, leaving law enforcement with the nearly impossible task of tracking clandestine warriors as they slip in and out of countries with literally no restrictions.

That ease of movement presents America with an ongoing threat: a visa waiver program that makes travel by any citizen or permanent resident of Europe into the United States virtually unrestricted.

Since 9/11, intelligence sharing between the United States and most of Europe's governments has reached unimagined levels. But within the European Union itself difficulties persist as each country continues to have its unique laws and civil rights protections.

While Europe girds itself for more attacks, all of the top counter-terrorism officials interviewed for this report warn that the threat is only growing -- in part, they lament, because America's strategy of going to war in Iraq has created a new intense threat from combat-hardened veterans of that insurgency and a large immigrant population with growing sympathy for their cause.

From Bali in the Pacific to Beslan in remote Russia, the images deliver a stark message: nobody is safe in a war without borders -- a war now threatening to boil over in the heart of Europe.

Well, like I said, they almost got it right. They blamed America, but you know, that's like breathing to a Euro, isn't it?

:)

Anyway, there's video. Click here to see it.

100% of Lebanese Say They Have
A Very Unfavorable View of Jews

Here's a poll from Pew Research which shows that support for Bin Laden is dropping. That's great, in a way, but the really extraordinary information to come from this poll is how people from various Muslim countries feel about Jews. From Reuters:

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Support for Osama bin Laden and suicide bombings have fallen sharply in much of the Muslim world, according to a multicountry poll released on Thursday.

The survey by the Pew Research Center examined public opinion in six predominantly Muslim nations: Morocco, Pakistan, Turkey, Indonesia, Jordan and Lebanon. It also examined views in nine North American and European countries as well as in India and China. In all, more than 17,000 people were questioned either by telephone of face-to-face.

"There's declining support for terrorism in the Muslim countries and support for Osama bin Laden is declining. There's also less support for suicide bombings," said Pew Center director Andrew Kohut.

"This is good news, but still there are substantial numbers who support bin Laden in some of these countries," he told a news conference.

In Turkey, bin Laden's support has fallen to 7 percent from 15 percent in the past two years. In Indonesia, it has dropped to 35 percent from 58 percent.

However, in Jordan, confidence in bin Laden, who took responsibility for the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the United States and many other attacks, rose to 60 percent from 55 percent. In Pakistan, it went to 51 percent from 45 percent.

A similar picture emerged when respondents were asked whether suicide bombings were justifiable. In Morocco, 13 percent said they often or sometimes could be justified, down from 40 percent in 2004.

In Indonesia, 15 percent expressed that view, down from 27 percent in the summer of 2002. Support for suicide bombings also fell in Pakistan and dropped dramatically in Lebanon. However, support rose in Jordan, to 57 percent from 43 percent in 2002.

Kohut noted there had been devastating attacks on civilians in Indonesia, Morocco and Turkey in recent years and a rash of assassinations and bombings recently in Lebanon.

Both in western countries and the Muslim world, respondents expressed fears about Islamic extremism.

Seventy-three percent in Morocco and 52 percent in Pakistan saw Islamic extremism as a threat to their country.

The figure was 84 percent in Russia, 78 percent in Germany, and an identical 70 percent in Britain and the United States. The poll was taken well before last week's bombings in London.

When asked what caused Islamic extremism, 40 percent in Lebanon and 38 percent in Jordan blamed U.S. policies and influence; in Morocco, Pakistan and Turkey, respondents were more likely to blame poverty, unemployment or poor education.

Despite terrorism fears, majorities in Britain, the United States, France, Canada and Russia and pluralities in Spain and Poland expressed favorable views about Muslims.

But in Germany and the Netherlands, opinion swung to an unfavorable view. Fifty-one percent of those surveyed in the Netherlands expressed an unfavorable view of Muslims. In Germany, 47 percent were unfavorable, compared with 40 percent who expressed favorable views.

I suspect that the only reason support for Bin Laden and terrorism is dropping is because Bin Laden and his minions have begun to kill their fellow Muslims. In other words, while such triangulation serves us well in the War on Terror, this drop in support is not necessarily a sign that these Muslim societies are becoming any less sick.

In fact, here's evidence that they are just as sick as ever; an extraordinary statistic, which Reuters saved for the end of the article.

Anti-Jewish sentiment was overwhelming in the Muslim countries. In Lebanon, 100 percent of Muslims and 99 percent of Christians said they had a very unfavorable view of Jews, while 99 percent of Jordanians also viewed Jews very unfavorably.

Who has ever heard of a population being unanimous on anything. Jeez, if you asked people if they like it when people give them free money, some people would say, "No." But, hatred of Jews is universal.

Don't you wonder what motivates such hatred? Do you think it could have anything with the authority of the Koran in that part of the world, and the fact that it calls for death to the Jews?

U.N. Official Compares Israelis to Nazis

From the ADL, via Atlas Shrugs:

New York, NY, July 11, 2005 … The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) has urged the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights to condemn the "outrageous comments" and to request the resignation of Jean Ziegler, the U.N. Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food who recently called the Gaza Strip "an immense concentration camp" and compared Israelis to Nazi guards.

"Once again, Jean Ziegler has brought the name of the United Nations and the Commission for Human Rights into disrepute with his scandalous remarks comparing the situation of the Palestinians with the fate of the Jews under the Nazi regime," said Abraham H. Foxman, ADL National Director.

"Sadly, Mr. Ziegler's remarks follow a consistent pattern of abusing his mandate to advance an agenda dedicated to the delegitimization of the State of Israel. His calls in the past for trade sanctions against Israel, as well as the vastly disproportionate attention he devotes to the Palestinian issue, have dismayed those of us who wish to improve relations between the U.N. and the Jewish community."

In a letter to U.N. Human Rights Commissioner Louise Arbour, ADL called on her to immediately condemn Ziegler's remarks, noting U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan's "significant decision" to personally condemn him. The League added that such action should be "urgently followed by a concerted attempt to secure Mr. Ziegler's resignation."

A Nazi Concentration camp. We can presume Mr. Ziegler knows history well enough to know that there were gas chambers in the Nazi death camps. That the Nazis devised an elaborate industrial system dedicated to killing and disposing of as many human beings as possible, as quickly as possible.

Since we can presume that Mr. Ziegler knows these facts, yet chooses to wildly exaggerate the nature of the Israeli occupation, then we can infer that Mr. Ziegler is prejudiced against Israel in proportion to the factor by which he has exaggerated reality.

British Reject French Proposal for
Surveillance of Mosques

French Interior Minister Nicholas Sarkozy suprised the EU yesterday by calling for across-the-board surveillance of all European mosques:

British Home Secretary Charles Clarke has poured cold water over a French proposal to control all mosques in EU in the aftermath of last week's terror attacks in London.

Clarke told a press conference after the extraordinary session of the EU Justice and Home Affairs ministerial Council in Brussels Wednesday evening that French interior minister Nicholas Sarkozy had made the proposal in the meeting.

"He (Sarkozy) has to think what is best for the security in France.

From my part, in the UK, we are considering the position of some of the preachers in certain circumstances because it is necessary to do so," said Clarke.

"But I think that to move to an overall position that says surveillance is the right way is a big step that we will need to consider very carefully."

"It is important that in everything we do we work with the legitimate mainstream Muslim community," stressed the British Home Secretary.

Clarke said the Muslim community in Britain are committed to working very strongly to protect the democratic system.

Can you imagine the caterwaul if an American of high political office made a similar proposal?

Islamonazis

American Hiroshima

Make of this what you will:

WASHINGTON – Rep. Tom Tancredo, R-Colo., a staunch critic of the federal government's lax immigration and border enforcement policies, said yesterday he would request a briefing from the Justice Department on information it has on plans revealed by WND this week for a nuclear attack on the U.S. by al-Qaida terrorists.

Tancredo said he was greatly alarmed by the report and would seek whatever information he could get from the nation's law enforcement authorities – either in classified or unclassified reports.

Tancredo also plans to meet with the author of a book that provides new evidence al-Qaida has used the insecure Mexican border to bring nuclear devices into the country along with thousands of sleeper agents.

Al-Qaida's plans, known as "America's Hiroshima" according to captured terrorists and terrorist documents, calls for the multiple detonation of nuclear weapons, already in the possession of Osama bin Laden's operatives currently inside the U.S. The agents and arms having been smuggled across the U.S.-Mexico border with the help of the MS-13 street gang and other organized crime groups, according to the report originating in Joseph Farah's G2 Bulletin, a premium, online intelligence newsletter published by the founder of WND.

The attack is designed to kill at least 4 million Americans.

Al-Qaida has obtained at least 40 nuclear weapons from the former Soviet Union – including suitcase nukes, nuclear mines, artillery shells and even some missile warheads, according to the report. In addition, documents captured in Afghanistan show al-Qaida had plans to assemble its own nuclear weapons with fissile material it purchased on the black market.

In addition to detonating its own nuclear weapons already planted in the U.S., military sources also say there is evidence to suggest al-Qaida is paying former Russian Spetznaz, or special forces operatives, to assist the terrorist group in locating nuclear weapons formerly concealed inside the U.S. by the Soviet Union during the Cold War. Bin Laden's group is also paying nuclear scientists from Russia and Pakistan to maintain its existing nuclear arsenal and assemble additional weapons with the materials it has invested hundreds of millions in procuring over a period of 10 years.

The plans for the devastating nuclear attack on the U.S. have been under development for more than a decade. It is designed as a final deadly blow of defeat to the U.S., which is seen by al-Qaida and its allies as "the Great Satan."

At least half the nuclear weapons in the al-Qaida arsenal were obtained for cash from Chechen terrorist allies.

But the most disturbing news is that high-level U.S. officials now believe at least some of those weapons have been smuggled into the U.S. for use in the near future in major cities as part of this "American Hiroshima" plan, according to an upcoming book, "The Al Qaeda Connection: International Terrorism, Organized Crime and the Coming Apocalypse," by Paul L. Williams, a former FBI consultant.

Tancredo has contacted Williams and WND about the revelations.

According to Williams, former CIA Director George Tenet informed President Bush one month after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks that at least two suitcase nukes had reached al-Qaida operatives in the U.S. President Bush reportedly went "through the roof" upon hearing the news, prompting him to order his national security team to give nuclear terrorism priority over every other threat to America.

"Each suitcase weighed between 50 and 80 kilograms (approximately 110 to 176 pounds) and contained enough fissionable plutonium and uranium to produce an explosive yield in excess of two kilotons," wrote Williams. "One suitcase bore the serial number 9999 and the Russian manufacturing date of 1988. The design of the weapons, Tenet told the president, is simple. The plutonium and uranium are kept in separate compartments that are linked to a triggering mechanism that can be activated by a clock or a call from the cell phone."

It is worth noting Bush failed to translate this policy into securing the U.S.-Mexico border through which the nuclear weapons and al-Qaida operatives are believed to have passed with the help of the MS-13 smugglers. He did, however, order the building of underground bunkers away from major metropolitan areas for use by federal government managers following an attack.

Bin Laden, according to Williams, has nearly unlimited funds to spend on his nuclear terrorism plan because he has remained in control of the Afghanistan-produced heroin industry. Poppy production has greatly increased even while U.S. troops are occupying the country, he writes. Al-Qaida has developed close relations with the Albanian Mafia, which assists in the smuggling and sale of heroin throughout Europe and the U.S.

Some of that money is used to pay off the notorious MS-13 street gang between $30,000 and $50,000 for each sleeper agent smuggled into the U.S. from Mexico. The sleepers are also provided with phony identification, most often bogus matricula consular ID cards indistinguishable from Mexico's official ID, now accepted in the U.S. to open bank accounts and obtain driver's licenses.

According to Williams' sources, thousands of al-Qaida sleeper agents have now been forward deployed into the U.S. to carry out their individual roles in the coming "American Hiroshima" plan.

Bin Laden's goal, according to the book, is to kill at least 4 million Americans, 2 million of whom must be children. Only then, bin Laden has said, would the crimes committed by America on the Arab and Muslim world be avenged.

There is virtually no doubt among intelligence analysts al-Qaida has obtained fully assembled nuclear weapons, according to Williams. The only question is how many. Estimates range between a dozen and 70.

The future plan, according to captured al-Qaida agents and documents, suggests the attacks will take place simultaneously in major cities throughout the country – including New York, Boston, Washington, Las Vegas, Miami, Chicago and Los Angeles.

In response to the G2 Bulletin revelations, Chris Simcox, founder of the Minuteman Civil Defense Corps, a citizen action group demanding the U.S. government take control of its borders, said an immediate military presence on the borders is now imperative "to stop the overwhelming influx of unidentified, potentially hostile and seditious persons coming across at an alarming rate."

"Terrorists have carte blanche to carry practically anything they want across our national line at this time," he said. "As ordinary citizens have warned this government for years, the only surprising part about the new information reported here is that nothing apocalyptic from Mexican-border weapons trafficking has yet happened. Terrorism has reared its ugly head in London again these past few days, and as we know all too well we are not immune in this country.

"At this point, the next attempt to attack America at home is just a matter of 'when,' not 'if.' And our unsecured borders have surely contributed to this threat – yet our government officials continue to fiddle while our nation's margin of security and safety burns away. The president and Congress had better wake up before they have to answer for another devastating terrorist incursion on our own soil."

It might seem strange that it is specified that the goal would be four million deaths. But, I've been hearing that number for several years now. There is, apparently, a mad method to their madness:

... radical Islamic scholars rely in their rulings on the principle of retaliation while justifying indiscriminate mass murder of Christians. Suliman Abu Ghaith, a prominent al-Qaeda leader, in his famous series of public letters entitled Under the Shade of the Lances and directed at Muslim youth, listed the crimes of the U.S. against the Arab and Muslim world.

He argued that the U.S. is responsible directly and indirectly, in its long-lasting war on Islam, for the death of four million Muslims, including 1.2 million Iraqis, 260,000 Palestinians (as a result of its support for Israel), 12,000 Afghans and Arab fighters, 13,000 Somalis, and millions more throughout the world.

From his perspective, al-Qaeda's attacks in Washington and New York in September 2001 are not enough to balance the equation of killing. Basing his claims on the Islamic principle of retaliation, Abu Ghaith argues that Muslims have the right to kill four million Americans, including one million children, to displace eight million Americans, and to cripple hundreds of thousands more.

It seems to me there is some illogic to this speculation. For instance, if this plan has been in the works for over a decade and, if nukes had already reached the United States back in 2001, why did Al Qaeda bother going through with the low-tech World Trade Center attack?

It doesn't make sense.

But, as I have shown repeatedly on this blog, it is not a wise course of action to ignore the words of the Islamofascists. They always tell us what they are going to do, before they do it. And really, they've pretty much done everything they've said they were going to do so far, with the exception of killing four million Americans.

What is Sharia Law?

The goal of the Islamofascists is to re-establish the Caliphate and institute the Sharia Law Code worldwide. Currently, Sharia is the law of the land in nations such as Iran, Saudi Arabia, Malaysia, Nigeria, and the Sudan.

But, what exactly is Sharia? From Indymedia:

Islam is often in the news these days. News articles that relate to Islam sometimes refer to the Shariah. What is the Shariah? The Shariah is the Islamic Sacred Law which was developed hundreds of years ago by Islamic jurists using the Koran and hadith (remembrances about what the Prophet Muhammad said and did during the time he was alive) as guideposts.

The Shariah outlines a complete way of life in a legal framework which tells you how to do everything from how to pray to how to go to the bathroom. What does the Shariah law actually state?

Here are some examples of Shariah law:

1. Offensive, military jihad against non-Muslims is a communal, religious obligation;

2. A person who is ignorant about Islamic legal opinion must follow the legal opinion of a scholar;

3. The penalty for a Muslim apostate (someone who no longer believes in or no longer follows the tenets of Islam) is death;

4. When slaughtering animals for food, a knife must be used to cut the windpipe and gullet;

5. A woman is only eligible to receive half the inheritance of a man;

6. Marriage may be forced on virgins by their father or father’s father;

7. A non-Arab man may not marry an Arab woman;

8. A woman must seek permission from her husband to leave the house;

9. A Muslim man cannot marry a woman who is a Zoroastrian, an idol worshipper, an apostate from Islam or a woman with one parent who is Jewish or Christian, with the other being Zoroastrian; a Muslim woman cannot marry anyone but a Muslim;

10. A free Muslim man may marry up to four women;

11. Retaliation is obligatory in most cases when someone is deliberately murdered except when a Muslim kills a non-Muslim, a Jew or a Christian kills a Muslim apostate or a father or mother kill their offspring;

12. Non-Muslim subjects (Ahl al-Dhimma) of a Muslim state are subject to a series of discriminatory laws – “dhimmitude”;

13. The penalty for fornication or sodomy is being stoned to death;

14. The penalty for an initial theft is amputation of the right hand. Subsequent thefts are penalized by further amputations of feet and hand;

15. A non-Muslim cannot testify against a Muslim in court; a person who is “without respectability” cannot give legal testimony; a woman’s legal testimony is only given half the legal weight of a man’s (and is only acceptable in cases involving property); to legally prove fornication or sodomy requires 4 male witnesses who actually saw the act;

16. The establishment and continuation of the Islamic Caliphate (by force, if necessary) is a communal obligation;

17. Sodomites and Lesbians must be killed;

18. Laughing too much is forbidden;

19. Musical instruments are unlawful;

20. Creating pictures of animate life is forbidden;

21. Female circumcision, which includes the excision of the clitoris, is obligatory;

22. Slavery is permitted;

23. People may be bribed to convert to Islam;

24. Beating a rebellious wife is permissible; and,

25. Lying is permissible in a time of war (or jihad).

In order to demonstrate to you that the above examples of Shariah law are real and valid, I will excerpt below the relevant legal clauses relating to each of the above numbered headings.

First, I will repeat the heading. Then, I will excerpt the relevant legal clauses. However, to start with, I must explain from which authority I will be excerpting these legal clauses. I will be excerpting them from a book entitled in English as the “Reliance of the Traveller: A Classic Manual of Islamic Sacred Law”. In Arabic it is referred to as the Umdat al-Salik and was authored by Ahmad ibn Naqib al-Misri (d. 1368 A.D.). The English translation was edited and translated by Nuh Ha Mim Keller. The book is published by Amana Publications, Beltsville, Maryland, U.S.A.. I will be excerpting from the revised 1994 edition. The book is available for sale at http://www.amana-publications.com. It is also available at http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0915957728/qid=1083543579/.

Women are slaves under this system of law. Non Muslims are second-class citizens. Gays and Lesbians are to be killed. Slavery is permitted.

This is a wholly unacceptable form of law. This is not a matter of a culture of people who simply want to live differently from us. Sharia law violates basic human rights at almost every turn.

Click here to read the rest.

Look, Mom and Dad
I Grew A Penis

A Myanmar woman miraculously grew a penis:

Hlaing Thar Yar, Myanmar - Chicken-seller Thin Sandarin had always dreamt of being a man.

When she inexplicably grew a penis last month, the 21-year-old treated it as an awe-inspiring omen - as have the thousands of stunned villagers who have travelled to a pagoda to see him."

On the morning of the full moon day of June 21, I noticed my thing (sex organ) was not the same as before," Thin Sandar, who now goes by the male name Than Sein, said on Wednesday.

So, what do you think a woman does when she suddenly sprouts a penis? Well, Thin/Than tells us:

"So I called out and showed it all to my mom and dad. It was very strange."

Yeah, that is strange.

Wednesday, July 13, 2005

Europe Humming an Nostalgic Tune To Herself
As She Frolicks in the Fountain

Europe, Disrobing
And Humming A Nostalgic Melody To Herself

A few examples today of how desparately ill Europe really is. First, from the Guardian, via Little Green Footballs/The Daily Ablution, comes an opinion piece about the "Sassy" suicide bombers who attacked London the other day:

Today's Guardian gives space to Dilpazier Aslam, a "Guardian trainee journalist" who suggests that one shouldn't be shocked by Thursday's suicide bombings - such a reaction would be inappropriate because, among other reasons:

"Shocked would be to suggest that the bombings happened through no responsibility of our own."

Yes, ladies and gentlemen - we bear responsibility for the murderous actions of maniacal members of a religious cult. An apology is certainly called for - the queue forms to the right.

Needless to say, there are other reasons why shock is inappropriate. Mr. Aslam explains:

"Shocked would be to say that we don't understand how, in the green hills of Yorkshire, a group of men given all the liberties they could have wished for could do this."

Fortunately for those who still don't quite follow, Mr. Aslam provides an explanation immediately, in the very next paragraph - which reads, in its entirety:

"The Muslim community is no monolithic whole. Yet there are some common features. Second- and third-generation Muslims are without the don't-rock-the boat attitude that restricted our forefathers. We're much sassier with our opinions, not caring if the boat rocks or not."

Suicide bombing .... sassy!

Mr. Aslam makes much of pointing out that he, like the terrorists, is "a Yorkshire lad, born and bred," and is careful to preempt accusations of support for terror by saying that indiscriminate killing is "sad," and "not the way to express your political anger."

Although the Guardian article unaccountably omits the fact (presumably for reasons of space), Mr. Aslam is on record as supporting a world-dominant Islamic state, notably in his writings for London based site khilafah.com ("Khilafa" translates as "Caliphate". The site's tagline expresses its aim: "then there will be khilafah rashida [a righteous Caliphate] on the method of Prophethood [i.e., sharia]"). As he puts it, in an article he co-authored there:

"... we will have to run an Islamic state which must lead the world, economically, militarily and politically"

As the establishment of the state that he hopes to help run seems unlikely without the implementation of violent measures such as those we've seen, and also considering the fact that the Caliphate that Mr. Aslam so keenly anticipates is the stated goal of many such terrorists, readers can't help but question the sincerity of his thinly-voiced disapproval of inappropriate "sass."

In fact, his stated fear of "being labelled a terrorist-lover" seems particularly justified, in light of another of his khilafah.com articles - in which he specifically calls for violence:

"The establishment of Khilafah is our only solution, to fight fire with fire, the state of Israel versus the Khilafah State"

Incidentally, it should be pointed out that there's no question whatever about this "Yorkshire lad's" loyalty to Britain. He has made it quite clear that:

"Muslims grant their loyalty and allegiance to their deen and the Ummah, not to a football team or nation state."

Neither should there be any questions concerning the Guardian's use of columnists who advocate "fighting fire with fire" to bring about the establishment of a sharia-based Caliphate.
After all, it's not the first time they've done so.

Meanwhile in Belgium, government officials have decided that the fact that Palestinian textbooks teach the The Protocols Of the Learned Elders of Zion is not evidence of anti-Semitism:

Although a new report states that some Palestinian Authority textbooks feature descriptions of "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion" as being an "integral part" of Zionist history that was approved in "a confidential resolution of the First Zionist Congress," the Belgian government says it is continuing to fund production of the textbooks and does not consider them offensive.

"We do not find [the textbooks] anti-Semitic in any way," said a spokesman from the Belgian government press office, speaking to The Jerusalem Post by telephone. "We have a screening process that goes through and reads the books. There has been some controversy about it in the past, but we have had people look into it."

However, other countries may be having second thoughts. While Finland, Italy and the Netherlands have also provided aid for PA textbooks in the past, this year's books only credit Belgium and "Arab nations" as providing aid.

Widely regarded as a cornerstone of anti-Semitic theory, the fabricated Protocols purport to disclose the secret plans of a Jewish conspiracy for world domination.

The description of the Protocols is one of many anti-Zionist and anti-Semitic statements made in PA textbooks, according to a report issued by the Center for Monitoring the Impact of Peace (CMIP) on Monday, a watchdog group.

The 122-page report notes that Israel is omitted from all maps of the Middle East, and that Palestinian martyrs are portrayed as "heroic" strugglers against the "occupying force."

I guess it shouldn't be too surprising that Belgians should approve of the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, after all in a survey just a few years back 55% of Belgians admitted that they are racist:

According to the latest edition of Eurobarometer - an EU survey of opinions around the 15 nations of the Union - the most racist people, by their own admission, are the Belgians. Fifty-five per cent of Belgians describe themselves as very or quite racist in attitude - for the record the figure in Austria was 42%.

You gotta love it when they tell the truth.

Uh, I Just Forgot, That's All

The other day Tony Blair gave a speech to the House of Commons where he enumerated the countries who have been hit by terrorism in the past few years. He left two off the list; Iraq and Israel. Here Michael Ledeen tells us why that might be:

In the growing recent literature about Great Britain's appeasement of Islamic terrorists over the past decade and more, we've come to understand that London was, in many ways, the epicenter of the terror network. Terrorists wanted in other countries were given safe haven in the United Kingdom, and the most amazingly hateful language was spewed out, openly and proudly, by various sheikhs and imams, all left to incite the faithful to terrible acts against innocent people the world over.

For all this, her majesty's government had its reasons. There was a reluctance to offend "the Arabs," the richest of whom had long used London as a home away from the sand, and as their financial and banking center of choice. Moreover, there was a traditional disdain of the Arabs, born out of long experience and expressed in open doubt that "those people" would ever constitute a serious threat, or indeed anything serious. Further, there was a long tradition of open and boisterous political speech, which reflexively protected even terrorist preachers from official rebuke or punishment.

Those of us who have had the frustrating experience of speaking with British diplomats (or journalists, especially those elegantly speaking fellows from the BBC) about the Middle East have invariably encountered a dismissive, slightly bemused, and firm conviction that anyone who worries greatly about "the Arabs" is at least ignorant and at worst malignant. And those of us who had the gall to argue — publicly, even — that the terror war is indeed serious and that appeasement of Saudis, Syrians, and Iranians would only lead to more and more terrible actions against us all, were relegated to the category of misguided souls, at best.

The Neocons!

The final component of British blindness on the subject of the Middle East is one we are not supposed to talk about in good company: the Jews. Yet I don't know any country this side of the Levant in which there has been so much anti-Semitism, so many complaints that "Zionists," "Likudniks," "Jewish hawks," and — the single epithet that sums up all of the above — "neocons" had manipulated America and its poodle Blair into the ghastly blunder of Iraq.

The BBC has devoted hours of radio and television to slanderous misrepresentations of places like the American Enterprise Institute, where I sit, and of such Jewish luminaries as Richard Perle, Douglas Feith, William Kristol, and Paul Wolfowitz. Sometimes it seemed one was reading translations from the Saudi or Egyptian or Iranian press, so total was the hatred of the Jews.

This fit nicely with the desire of the British establishment to carry on their special relationship with some Arab leaders, and many British elites often seemed a micro-step away from saying that the world would be a better place if only Israel weren't there. The Middle East would be so much easier, you know. And when London was bombed, you can be sure — indeed you can read it — many of these people blamed Israel and the Jews, both those in the Middle East and those in New York and Washington.

Indeed, within minutes of the attack, a story appeared according to which the Israelis had advance notice, and had instructed Finance Minister Netanyahu to stay put, instead of going to give a speech. The story was as false as the one according to which Israelis had stayed away from the World Trade Center on 9/11, but they both reflected a state of mind. An anti-Semitic mind.

All too many Brits (as some Americans, albeit far fewer) would prefer to devote their national energies to the elimination or "taming" of Israel, and, as they see it, the silencing of their own Jews, rather than fighting Islamic terrorism. Combined with the desire to keep Arab money in London and special access for British businessmen and diplomats and scholars in the Arab world, it explains why HMG gave sanctuary and indeed benevolent assistance to the jihadis in their HMG midst.

Iraqis — the New Jews?

And so Israel was not on the prime minister's list. What about Iraq?

The Iraqis are viewed much the same way, and are at some risk of becoming the new Jews of the Middle East. In the enormous hate literature directed against the neocons, Ahmed Chalabi is part and parcel of the anti-Semites' hateful vision. No matter that he is a Shiite, and no matter that he was rudely dismissed by the Israeli government before Operation Iraqi Freedom. He was in cahoots with the Jewish cabal, and was therefore "one of them." And as Chalabi, so the rest of the lot.

Anyone looking honestly at Iraq today would have to be filled with admiration for the enormous dignity and courage with which the Iraqis have reacted to the barbaric savagery to which they have been subjected. Ministers are killed, leaders of civil society are kidnapped and beheaded, independent thinkers are intimidated, yet others come forward to fight for their national independence and integrity.

When is the last time you read anything, anywhere (with all too few exceptions — like Arthur Chrenkoff's "good news" beat), celebrating these rare qualities of spirit? And this question goes hand in hand with its twin: When is the last time you read anything about the incredible performance of the State of Israel, similarly under siege and similarly stressed by the crisis that surrounds it?

It is therefore not surprising that Iraq and Israel were omitted from Blair's list; it is a symptom of the corrupt and self-destructive patterns of emotion (I will not call it "thought") that led Great Britain to house a vast terrorist infrastructure.

The War Within Islamic Civilization

In the article below, from the Weekly Australian, we were told that this was against the Jihadists is a crisis within Islamic civilization. In this next article, from National Review, Ismaili Muslim Alykhan Velshi tells us what that crisis looks like to a Western Muslim living in London:

The London terror attacks — indeed, al Qaeda’s war against civilization — is against ... moderate Muslims, too. It is a war against an Islam that is tolerant, adaptable to Western society, and that preaches respect and peace. Even if a significant number of moderate Muslims wanted to condemn terrorism and repudiate Islamist fanaticism, it might be very difficult to do so: The menace of fanaticism does not simply infect Islamist states, it also poisons its civil society, even in the West.

Sadly — dangerously — it is not uncommon for U.S. and British Muslim groups to be evasive when discussing the war on terror. Of course they’ll condemn individual terrorist attacks, though more out of sympathy for the victims and their families than out of a sense of solidarity with the West. When so much of Islamic civil society is corroded by the ideology of extremism, moderate Muslim dissenters have few outlets to voice their frustration and stop the tragic hijacking of their faith.

I experienced this firsthand while studying at the London School of Economics. Less than two weeks into my freshman year, after I expressed some interest in becoming involved in the student Islamic Society, I was invited to a screening of an incendiary video on the conflict in Chechnya, and another on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. These videos were clearly intended to recruit potential terrorists: Indeed, the London School of Economics has a grim history on this front, having educated the terrorist who murdered Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, and having unwittingly hosted the jihadist group al-Muhajiroun.

What is more, another extremist group recently set up shop on campus, and invited a speaker who expressed his support for a nuclear Iran and a “global Islamic caliphate.” All this occurs because school authorities look the other way, refusing to monitor campus Islamic groups which are increasingly being taken over by extremists. When even Islamic civil society is controlled by fanatics and terror partisans, there is very little, if anything, that moderate Muslims can do. It is a sobering, sad, and thoroughly dispiriting truth.

The war on terror is not simply against terror-sponsoring states, but against the institutions of civil society that give terrorists quiet support, that inflame local Muslim populations, and that prevent the emergence of a moderate, peaceful form of Islam. The war on terror can never be won unless Muslims who have the privilege of living in the West stand up for civilization against the forces of barbarism and nihilism. I wish I could say otherwise, but I won’t be holding my breath.

A Reminder Of What We're Up Against

In the post below, we saw how Sheikh Omar Bakri gave advance warning that Al Qaeda Europe would attack London. The reality is, the Islamofascists are very good about telling us exactly what they are going to do, before they do it.

In this article, from The Weekly Australian, via Little Green Footballs, we are given the overall strategy of the Jihad, a list of targets, and a target number for slaughter:

THE attack in London has penetrated the best intelligence and security net in Europe. It confirms the difficulty faced by the most sophisticated nations in trying to manage the new age of asymmetrical warfare. The terrorists have no nation-state, wear no uniforms, recognise no rules of war, enshrine the murder of innocent civilians as a tactic, possess no identifiable sovereign assets and, as a result, are resistant to national defence by deterrence.

This is a terrorist attack, but the conflict is not really a war against terrorism. Its sources lie in religious fundamentalism and an ideological perversion within Islam. The enemy is not a nation but a global movement embedded within religion and this explains its formidable and elusive nature. It is a civil war within Islam that runs from Morocco to Indonesia, with its epicentre in Saudi Arabia. It is not a clash of civilisations but a crisis within one great civilisation.

The geopolitical aims of the jihadists are vast: the overthrow of moderate Muslim governments, the liquidation of Israel, the removal of US influence from the Gulf and the Middle East and the strategic eclipse of the West. Bin Laden declared after September11 that the world was divided “into two camps, the camp of the faithful and the camp of the infidels”. He says every Muslim has an obligation to take up arms.

Like all political madmen, it is the purity of bin Laden’s extremism that attracts fresh recruits and disarms Western opinion because it finds such extremism so incomprehensible.

In March last year, al-Qa’ida released targeting advice, saying: “We have to target Jews and Christians. We have to let anybody that fights God, his prophet or the believers know that we will be killing them. There should be no limits and no geographical borders. We have to turn the land of the infidels into hell as they have done to the lands of the Muslims.”

Jews were named as the priority human targets followed by Christians. The Christian order of importance by country was American, British, Spanish, Australian, Canadian and Italian.

In September 2002 al-Qa’ida spokesman Suleiman Abu Gheith said: “We have the right to kill four million Americans - two million of them children - and to exile twice as many and wound and cripple hundreds of thousands. It is our right to fight them with chemical and biological weapons.”

For this fanatical mind-set, the London attack is a celebration of God’s will. It is, however, minor compared with the scale of al-Qa’ida’s declarations. US expert Graham Allison, from Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government, who has studied nuclear proliferation at length, warns: “In my own considered judgment, on the current path, a nuclear attack on America in the decade ahead is more likely than not.”

Out Of The Blue
And Into The Black

In reaction to the bombings in London last week, the EU is suddenly motivated to ratchet up surveillance of possible terrorists. Apparently, they want to enact a Patriot Act-type plan:

The original proposal suggests data from phone and mobile calls, text messages and emails should be stored by providers of these services for a minimum of one year and a maximum of three years.

The stored information should only include the date, time and location of the communication by phone or internet, including numbers dialled - also in the case of unsuccessful calls, but not the content of the conversation.

Sounds like a good plan. Another good plan would be for their intelligence people to start reading the newspaper:

LONDON (AFP) - An Islamic leader warned in a Portuguese newspaper interview 15 months ago that a London-based group, Al-Qaeda Europe, was on the verge of a major attack.

"Here in London there is a very well-organized group, which calls itself Al-Qaeda-Europe," Sheikh Omar Bakri Mohammed, the Syrian head of the London-based group Al-Muhajiroun, told the Portuguese daily Publico in an interview published April 18 last year.

"I know they are on the verge of launching a big operation."

Bakri, 46, is suspected of having links with Abu Qatada, the alleged Al-Qaeda leader in Europe.
Speaking a month after the March 11, 2004 Madrid train bombings, Bakri said it was "inevitable" that London would be hit by a large attack "because they are being prepared by various groups."

British Home Secretary Charles Clarke had said the London attacks "came out of the blue" and insisted they did not represent a failure by intelligence services.

Tuesday, July 12, 2005

A Prophecy of Ascendant Islam
Written in 1938

TVD, of Philosodude, sent me this quote from Catholic writer Hilaire Belloc, writing about Islam, in 1938:

These things being so, the recrudescence of Islam, the possibilityof that terror under which we lived for centuries reappearing, and of ourcivilization again fighting for its life against what was its chief enemyfor a thousand years, seems fantastic. Who in the Mohammedan world todaycan manufacture and maintain the complicated instruments of modern war?

Where is the political machinery whereby the religion of Islam can play an equal part in the modern world?

I say the suggestion that Islam may re-arise sounds fantastic, but this is only because men are always powerfully affected by the immediatepast: one might say that they are blinded by it.

Cultures spring from religions; ultimately the vital force which maintains any culture is its philosophy, its attitude toward the universe; the decay of a religion involves the decay of the culture corresponding to it. We see that most clearly in the breakdown of Christendom today. The bad work begun at the Reformation is bearing its final fruit in the dissolution of our ancestral doctrines. The very structure of our society is dissolving ...

That Belloc wrote this in 1938 is amazing. It seems he was a prophet of sorts. I remember watching the rise of Islam beginning in the early 70's with the ascendancy of the PLO into the international spotlight via terrorism, but especially with OPEC and the Iranian revolution. Even as I watched those events unfold, I would have never guessed that one day such a brand of Jihadi Islam would threaten the world's very foundations.

Now it is clear. And it is also clear that the West is in dissolution.

We are lost.

What's more, I believe the threat of Islamofascism is going to get worse, before all this is through.

But, I don't believe we are doomed, because I think the Islamofascists are eventually going to become so emboldened that they are going to overstep their bounds. And then the people of Western Civilization will remember what it is they love about their culture. And then, they will truly fight to defend themselves.

I hope things don't get too dark, before we figure this all out.

"Today I Leave For The War"

Gates of Vienna points to this post, called "Today I Leave For The War," from a blog called the Makaha Surf Report:

For anyone that reads this; yes I am a 30 year old idealist, at 20 I was a cynic, but now I have a mission in life and a purpose. I found God, but I am far from a religious fanatic. I found a God that inspired me to do good deeds just for the sake of doing good.

I can feel his prescence in everything around me, the sunset, the waves crashing on a Hawaiian beach and even in the evening breeze that is laced with plumeria.

I would call myself a soldier of God, but not in any way that says he favors me or my cause. I am a soldier of our Lord because I choose to serve the side of good. Good is opening a door for a stranger, or helping your neighbor empty his trashcan, or going to Iraq because you want to help a people find their voice, and feel what we feel when we think of our freedoms.

The most fundamental question I ask myself everday is: If I have the chance to do good, even if there is a terrible price to pay, why wouldn’t I?

I wish more Americans would ask themselves this question, if you can do good, what on earth would stop you from following through?

That's the voice of a man to whom God is absolutely real. I wish I had that man's faith.

I am humbled. I believe, oh Lord. Help me in my unbelief.

I pray that this man and the works of his hands will be blessed by God. I pray that God will protect him and bring him home safely. And I pray that his faith will be an inspiration to all of us.

Teleportation
Whatever You Can Conceive and Believe
You Can Achieve

It seems that God has given us a will and an ability to create that is somewhat like his own. We are limited by time and space, meaning we can not create instantaneously as He Does. However, it seems that given enough time, and with the matter of the universe, we can create anything we dream up.

From Space.com:

Teleportation: Express Lane Space Travel

Think Star Trek: You are here. You want to go there. It's just a matter of teleportation.

Thanks to lab experiments, there is growth in the number of "beam me up" believers, but there is an equal amount of disbelief, too.

Over the last few years, however, researchers have successfully teleported beams of light across a laboratory bench. Also, the quantum state of a trapped calcium ion to another calcium ion has been teleported in a controlled way.

In his new book, Teleportation - The Impossible Leap, published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., writer David Darling contends that ""One way or another, teleportation is going to play a major role in all our futures. It will be a fundamental process at the heart of quantum computers, which will themselves radically change the world."

Darling suggests that some form of classical teleportation and replication for inanimate objects also seems inevitable. But whether humans can make the leap, well, that remains to be seen.

Teleporting a person would require a machine that isolates, appraises, and keeps track of over a trillion trillion atoms that constitute the human body, then sends that data to another locale for reassembly--and hopefully without mussing up your physical and mental makeup.

"One thing is certain: if that impossible leap turns out to be merely difficult--a question of simply overcoming technical challenges--it will someday be accomplished," Darling predicts.

In this regard, Darling writes that the quantum computer "is the joker in the deck, the factor that changes the rules of what is and isn't possible."

Just last month, in fact, scientists at Hewlett Packard announced that they've hammered out a new tactic for a creating a quantum computer—using switches of light beams rather than today's run of the mill, transistor-laden devices. What's in the offing is hardware capable of making calculations billions of times faster than any silicon-based computer.

Given quantum computers and the networking of these devices, Darling senses the day may not be far off for routine teleportation of individual atoms and molecules. That would lead to teleportation of macromolecules and microbeswith, perhaps, human teleportation to follow.

Yes, we seem to be able to create anything, with the exception of just one thing; a more moral human race.

Go read the rest of the article. It's fascinating.

Tell Us What You Really Think...

Like the previous post said, sometimes you gotta love it when your enemies are so honest...(Hat tip Hugh Hewitt )

'Israel will eventually disappear'

Senior Hamas leader tells Italian newspaper pullout plan a temporary solution; says Palestine will become a Muslim state
By Dian Bahur-Nir and Ali Waked

Hamas will not compromise on one inch of Greater Palestine, Hamas leader Mahmoud al-Zahar told an Italian newspaper earlier this week.

Speaking to the Corriere Della Sera newspaper, al-Zahar said Hamas would "definitely not" be prepared for coexistence with Israel should the IDF retreat to its 1967 borders.

"It can be a temporary solution, for a maximum of 5 to 10 years. But in the end Palestine must return to become Muslim, and in the long term Israel will disappear from the face of the earth."

Asked about Hamas's intentions to carry out terror attacks in coordination with the disengagement plan, al-Zahar said Hamas has already promised not to initiate violence, and that the group's actions would be in response to Israeli actions.

"We won't disrupt the Israeli withdrawal, let them get out of here and go to hell," he said. "The problem will be afterwards, because in the hearts of every Palestinian, the liberation of Gaza must be accompanied by the liberation of Jerusalem and the West Bank."

Read the Rest...

I can hear the Left in Europe and abroad now.."Oh Hamas doesn't really mean it, they are just speaking out of anger due to years of occupation and oppression." Oh Really? And I suppose Charles Manson really wanted to be a world class tap dancer if only his daddy would have given him the love he really wanted...Give me a break.

The conistent pushing of moral equivelancy between the Isreal and the Palestinian leaders by "head-in-the-sand know-nothings" is truly maddening. I challenge anyone to find any Isreali in an equivelant position of power that has said anything remotely similar to what Hamas just said above. Or as has been pointed out before on this site and others...where have the Isrealis expressed equivelant views as those expressed in the PLO charter calling for the destruction of Isreal?

I predict an utter lack of outrage amongst the left and most Euros regarding these statements. This lack of outrage that will occur is just one more example of the moral impairment that characterizes much of the left on this issue. It is a blatant paternalism towards Palestinians that in the end only hurts Isreal. They expect more from Isreal (as Isreal is actually a civilized nation), but how can they expect the Palestinians (who they don't expect much of) to react any better when faced with raw Isreali power? This double standard works in a twisted manner to draw support for the Palestinians at Isreal's expense...hmm...I wonder why?

The BBC Proclaims,
"My Terrorists Boys Are Good Boys"

In LA, it seems that whenever some idiot gang member unloads an AK into a house, killing a baby in a crib, or a ghetto kid just starting college, the media will trot our some woman in a moo moo who will opine of her murderous son,

"My boy didn't mean to do it. My boy is a good boy."

Well, it seems the BBC has become that woman in a moo moo. The BBC is making excuses for the terrorists who attacked London:

Now that the bombs have exploded, and thousands of newspaper pages and entire days of air time have been devoted to the horror of it all, and to the poor, decent people who are dead and missing, and to the misguided criminals responsible, perhaps we can stand back from it all and catch our breath.

See? They're good boys. They're just misguided.

Sometimes You Just Gotta Love Your Enemies

From the Singapore News:

The man accused of killing Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh confessed to a Dutch court that he acted out of his religious beliefs, saying he would do "exactly the same" if he were ever set free.

"I take complete responsibility for my actions. I acted purely in the name of my religion," 27-year-old Dutch-Moroccan national Mohammed Bouyeri told the court in Amsterdam on the final day of his trial.

In addition to a life sentence, the prosecution also demanded that Bouyeri be stripped of his right to vote or stand for election for the rest of his life, "to literally place him outside of our democracy".

After the prosecution's closing statement Bouyeri, who had refused to say anything about his motives during the trial, took the opportunity to make a final statement.

"I can assure you that one day, should I be set free, I would do exactly the same, exactly the same," he said, speaking slowly in sometimes halted Dutch.

He said he felt an obligation to Van Gogh's mother Anneke, present in court, to speak, but offered no sympathy.

"I have to admit I do not feel for you, I do not feel your pain, I cannot -- I don't know what it is like to lose a child," he said as Van Gogh's family and friends looked on.

"I cannot feel for you ... because I believe you are an infidel," he added.

"I acted out of conviction -- not because I hated your son."

You gotta love your enemies when they tell the truth. Thanks, Mohammed.

Is That All They Want?

Enjoy this piece from Scrappleface. As his "news report" illustrates the London bombings show that war is clearly not the answer...

July 07, 2005
G8 Mulls Qaeda Offer to End Modern Civilization
by Scott Ott

(2005-07-07) -- Leaders of the world's major industrialized nations, meeting in Scotland at the G8 Summit today, said they would consider al-Qaeda's latest proposal to "end modern civilization and return to the glorious days of feudalism."

The al-Qaeda offer came in the form of multiple explosions during rush hour in London, drenching buses and trains with the blood of ordinary working people.

"Modern civilization had a good long run," said one unnamed global diplomat, "and these Qaeda chaps have made a serious proposal that one must consider. It should spark thoughtful discussion at the G8 about whether Western values have become obsolete in the face of the growing popularity of this progressive Islamic lifestyle."

In related news, we're all Britons now.

If we knew the enemy would be so easy to negotiate with I doubt we would have gone through all the trouble of liberating Iraq...Who knew?

Will The British Disarm Themselves?

The British House of Commons passed the religious hate bill which some British Muslims seem to hope will help quell all criticism of Islam:

(CNSNews.com) - In a victory for British Muslim campaigners, the House of Commons Monday passed a bill aimed at curbing religious hatred, despite critics' warnings that it could worsen relations between religious communities.

The Racial and Religious Hatred Bill passed its third reading by a 301-229 vote, just hours after Prime Minister Tony Blair's press secretary declined to rule out using the measure, if it becomes law, against Muslim figures who may incite violence against Christians and Jews.

Spokesman Tom Kelly told a Downing Street press conference he would not get into hypothetical speculation about individuals, but the law would be there and it would be applied correctly.

Last Thursday's terrorist bombings in London have focused renewed attention on controversial Muslim figures based in the capital who have long advocated jihad against the West.

Islamic organizations have lobbied hardest for the legislation, saying their community needed protection, given an increase in anti-Muslim sentiment after 9/11.

They argued that while Jews and Sikhs were already protected by race-hate laws -- because they are seen as ethnic groups as well as religious ones -- Muslims were not covered in this way, hence the need for a specific religious hatred law.

Of course, Islam is a religion, which means it is an ideology. So, in effect, this bill, were it to become law is a law against free speech.

Opposition parties -- and some Labor MPs -- oppose the bill for various reasons, including concerns that it could stifle free speech or infringe the right of the adherents of one faith to question the claims of another.

But, that's not all it would do. It would also infringe upon the right of any member of society to criticize the political elements of Islam. Islam is not simply a religion, it is a political movement whose goal is the implementation of the Sharia law code in countries all over the world.

People who are concerned with Evangelical Christianity as a political movement, and who profess fear that America is turning into a Theocracy, would be enraged by the idea that they would not be able to express their concerns and fears.

If Britain passes this law they will have effectively disarmed themselves in the ideological battle of the War of Jihadic Terror.

The Edifice Is Crumbling

Front Page Magazine brings us an article this morning which establishes new evidence, unearthed by efforts in the War on Terror, for cooperation between Al Qaeda and the Hussein regime:

"In August 1998, the detainee traveled to Pakistan with a member of Iraqi Intelligence for the purpose of blowing up the Pakistan, United States and British embassies with chemical mortars."

---U.S. government "Summary of Evidence" for an Iraqi member of al Qaeda detained at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba

FOR MANY, the debate over the former Iraqi regime's ties to Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda network ended a year ago with the release of the 9/11 Commission report. Media outlets seized on a carefully worded summary that the commission had found no evidence "indicating that Iraq cooperated with al Qaeda in developing or carrying out any attacks against the United States" and ran blaring headlines like the one on the June 17, 2004, front page of the New York Times: "Panel Finds No Qaeda-Iraq Tie."

But this was woefully imprecise.

A recently unclassified document was released by the Pentagon, which details the case for designating an Iraqi member of al Qaeda, currently detained in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, as an "enemy combatant.":

1. From 1987 to 1989, the detainee served as an infantryman in the Iraqi Army and received training on the mortar and rocket propelled grenades.

2. A Taliban recruiter in Baghdad convinced the detainee to travel to Afghanistan to join the Taliban in 1994.

3. The detainee admitted he was a member of the Taliban.

4. The detainee pledged allegiance to the supreme leader of the Taliban to help them take over all of Afghanistan.

5. The Taliban issued the detainee a Kalishnikov rifle in November 2000.

6. The detainee worked in a Taliban ammo and arms storage arsenal in Mazar-Es-Sharif organizing weapons and ammunition.

7. The detainee willingly associated with al Qaida members.

8. The detainee was a member of al Qaida.

9. An assistant to Usama Bin Ladin paid the detainee on three separate occasions between 1995 and 1997.

10. The detainee stayed at the al Farouq camp in Darwanta, Afghanistan, where he received 1,000 Rupees to continue his travels.

11. From 1997 to 1998, the detainee acted as a trusted agent for Usama Bin Ladin, executing three separate reconnaissance missions for the al Qaeda leader in Oman, Iraq, and Afghanistan.

12. In August 1998, the detainee traveled to Pakistan with a member of Iraqi Intelligence for the purpose of blowing up the Pakistan, United States and British embassies with chemical mortars.

13. Detainee was arrested by Pakistani authorities in Khudzar, Pakistan, in July 2002.

The plot to blow up the embassies in Pakistan was