These concerns about indoctrination from the wrong teachers is fine, but it doesn't quite get to the heart of the problem, which is that the Qur'an's exhortations to violence against unbelievers are plain, and don't need "radical" instructors to tease them out. The North Carolina jihadist Mohammed Reza Taheri-azar became "radicalized" simply through reading the Qur'an on his own.

"Concerns over online Qur'an teaching as ex-Pakistan militants instruct pupils," by Jon Boone in The Guardian, June 17:

With his track record as a member of the political arm of a banned terrorist organisation, Mian Shahzib is unlikely to ever be given a visa to enter Britain.

But that does not stop the jovial 33-year-old from giving British children religious instruction every day from the comfort of his home in Pakistan.

He spends hours each night sitting under a fluorescent light in the courtyard of a small mosque in Lahore, peering into a laptop as children first from the Middle East, then Europe and North America spend half an hour after school talking to him over a faltering Skype line. "Put on your cap and wash your hands," he told a 12-year-old boy sitting in a large office chair in his parents' home in Edinburgh.

After checking the boy had memorised various prayers to get him through the day, including a special blessing for exiting and entering the toilet, he got down to business, helping the boy read aloud the classical Arabic of a few verses of the Qur'an.

The fact that a hardcore Islamist and long-term follower of the UN-proscribed Jamaat-ud-Dawa (JuD) has daily access to children in the west is likely to fuel concerns about religious radicals spreading their message.

Shahzib's website, Easy Qur'an Memorising, makes no mention of his history and is one of hundreds of such online companies, some of which advertise on satellite channels broadcasting to the Pakistani diaspora. They are part of a little-known outsourcing boom fuelled by parents of Pakistani origin turning to Qur'an teachers in Pakistan. "It's just like a call centre where you are saving a lot of money by getting someone overseas to do it much more cheaply," said Fawad Rana, a property developer in Solihull who has used Qur'an teachers for his two sons for the past three years.

Rana makes an online payment of £30 a month to Faiz-e-Quran, one of the larger online religious education companies, which gets his children three half-hour sessions a week.

"And there's the convenience factor – the last thing kids want to do is spend half an hour travelling to the nearest mosque and then not even getting 10 minutes of one-on-one tuition," he said.

Although Faiz-e-Quran say it takes care to scrutinise and monitor all the teachers it employs, the industry is increasingly dominated by one-man operations. After several years working on his business, Shahzib now has about a dozen students aged 12 to 18 scattered all over the world. It's a long way from his past role as an activist with JuD, a Pakistani Islamist organisation known for its holy war against Indian rule in the contested region of Kashmir.

The organisation is on the UN's list of sanctioned organisations because of its alleged association with al-Qaida and is considered a front for Lashkar-e-Taiba, the group behind the 2008 terrorist attacks on Mumbai.

As a young man, Shahzib helped prepare young JuD militants before they crossed the line of control that marks the unrecognised border between Pakistani and Indian-held Kashmir. His job was to motivate them with religious teachings and to fill their heads with tales of Indian soldiers raping Muslim women. He was briefly arrested after falling out with his old mentor, Hafiz Saeed, the JuD leader, who lives openly in Lahore but who is subject to a US reward of $10m (£6.36m) for information leading to his arrest. Shahzib believes Saeed has bent to demands from Pakistan's security establishment to rein in militancy in Kashmir.

"I told him to his face that he had betrayed the jihad," he said. These days he still follows the "philosophy" of JuD, even if he is not an active member.

He supports the fight against foreign forces in Afghanistan. But he does not think the struggle should be taken to the streets of Britain. "It is completely wrong to attack soldiers in Britain," he said. "If a young man in the UK wants to support jihad I support that, but come to Afghanistan to fight, not the UK."

The Guardian was told of other online tutors with radical backgrounds or who are members of extreme or sectarian organisations, but it is impossible to know how widespread the phenomenon is in a completely unregulated industry.

Sultan Chaudri, the owner of Faiz-e-Quran, said his company is at pains to scrutinise all 13 teachers who work for him to ensure radicals are not employed. "All the problems we are seeing in Pakistan and Afghanistan is because these young children get sent to madrasas where no one knows what sort of education they are getting or what kind of indoctrination is taking place."

When Chaudri, a retired colonel, started his business four years ago his marketing team had to assure parents that there would be no such risk with online teaching.

"They used to say we are not going to get education from a maulvi [Islamic scholar] in Pakistan because he is going to teach bad things to my child," he said. "Parents realise now that there is no risk because they can see the lessons right in front of their own eyes."...

This SION poster we are auctioning off will be signed by Pamela Geller and me (the only one of its kind). This is the SION flag, and it will be the waving it proudly (along with the American flag) at our demo with Tommy Robinson and the EDL on Armed Forces Day, June 29th, in the UK. Help us fund this trip, our ad campaigns and demo initiatives.

The above poster is not signed, but the winner will receive a signed poster.

Place your bids in the comment section -- largest bid takes the prize.

BID BIG AND BID OFTEN -- THE AUCTION ENDS FRIDAY NIGHT.

"Indonesia's president has accepted a statesmanship award from a U.S. interfaith foundation that says it hopes to encourage him to promote freedom of worship and tolerance in the world's most populous Muslim-majority nation." -- Associated Press, May 30, 2013

Irony of ironies.

"RI fails to protect religious minorities, says US report," from The Jakarta Post, June 18 (thanks to Phillip):

The US Department of State’s 2012 Report on International Religious Freedom has revealed that the Indonesian government has failed to properly address the banning and assault of religious minority groups.

The annual report was released by the US Embassy in Jakarta on Tuesday.

“The Indonesian government honors the freedom to choose religion but fails to prevent violent acts toward religious minority groups,” a statement in that report said as quoted by Antara news agency.

The report said the Indonesian government respected six official religions but that some religious sects were deemed as deviant by clerics.

The report also said that the police tended to be lenient on hard-liners that tried to implement laws that limited religious freedom.

“Police failed to protect religious minority groups when they are being attacked by hard-liners,” the report said.

I am scheduled to speak at a conference in Sacramento, California, on July 26 and 27, sponsored by Kolbe Academy, a national Catholic educational program in Napa, California. But my obsessive Internet stalker, the thuggish Nathan Lean, has found out about it. Lean, aka "Garibaldi," the creepy Travis Bickle of jihad enablers, is a stalker who has threatened me repeatedly, repeats what he knows to be falsehoods about my record, and has called on hackers to destroy this site. Consistent with the ongoing Leftist/Islamic supremacist war against the freedom of speech, and desperate fear that anyone will hear the truth about Islam and jihad, Lean mailed this threatening letter to several Kolbe Academy officials:

It has come to my attention that Mr. Robert Spencer, a prominent anti-Muslim blogger and activist, will appear at the Northern California Catholic Family Home School Conference in Sacramento, California on July 26/27, 2013. Spencer is listed on the website and Facebook page as a confirmed speaker.

The Southern Poverty Law Center and the Anti-Defamation League list Spencer as a "hate group leader." The U.S. Government has rejected the trademark application for his group, Stop the Islamization of America, on the grounds that it disparages Muslims. Spencer regularly appears in public with members of the neo-Nazi street gang, the English Defence League, a group whose leaders have been arrested for assault, passport fraud, and other infractions. More alarmingly, Spencer was cited by the Norway terrorist Anders Breivik 162 in his manifesto; Breivik noted that Spencer inspired his views on Islam, which led him to slaughter 77 youth in the summer of 2010.

Why Kolbe Academy would knowingly host a man with these associations is unclear.

I have alerted several major civil rights organizations and watch groups about this and they have informed me that they are investigating the invitation and will respond. I have also contacted major national interfaith organizations. Additionally, I have spoken with news media outlets, both in the state of California and nationally, who regularly cover religion, politics, and civil rights issues. They were unaware of this speaking engagement and many are interested in pursuing stories about it.

While the work that Kolbe Academy does may impact young learners in a positive way, the invitation of a designated hate group leader to appear as part of a distinguished group of speakers is unacceptable.

Please contact me for further details or questions. The following five weeks will be devoted to shining a bright light on this important issue.

Lean says that the SPLC and the ADL classify me as a “hate group leader.” But who watches the watchmen? The SPLC tars as “hate groups” many conservative groups that simply disagree with its hard-Left political stance, while not classifying any jihad groups as hate groups, despite their rhetoric calling for the murder of Americans. And we’re appealing the rejection of our trademark application for Stop Islamization of America – it’s ironic that while large numbers of valiant secularist Turks and Egyptians are resisting the Islamization of their countries, that Lean would smear an attempt to preserve American freedoms from subversion by provisions of Islamic law that even many Muslims reject as oppressive.

Stooping even lower in his defamation, Lean claims that I inspired the Norwegian terrorist Anders Breivik. In reality, Breivik cited not only me but many people, including Barack Obama, John F. Kennedy, and Thomas Jefferson. Nor was Breivik really an opponent of jihad terror: he wrote about he wanted to aid Hamas and ally with jihad groups. Breivik also explained that his real inspiration for his violence was not us, but the Islamic jihad terror group al-Qaeda, about which Nathan Lean has never written a critical word.

Lean also claims falsely that I “regularly” team up with the English Defense League; in reality, I have done so twice – but I do not reject the association. Contrary to libelous claims by Lean and other foes of the foes of jihad terror, the EDL is not “a street gang of British skinheads” or neo-Nazis. The EDL was formed to defend British soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan, who were being physically attacked by Muslim mobs. It rejects all racism and violence; the only violence at its rallies come from Leftists and Islamic supremacists bent on silencing the group and brutalizing its members. Just last week, six jihadists were imprisoned for a plot to commit mass murder at an EDL rally.

Above all, note Lean's threat: he has alerted "several major civil rights organizations and watch groups," as well as "news media outlets, both in the state of California and nationally," all in hopes of getting them to publish enough defamation and lies about me to get Kolbe Academy to cancel my appearance at the conference. He is hoping that an avalanche of negative publicity will intimidate Kolbe Academy and make them toe the politically correct line. There are, however, a few people left in the U.S. who still believe in the freedom of speech and won't bow to intimidation.

This letter shows yet again how authoritarian and thuggish the Left and their Islamic supremacist allies have become. In the early years of the Third Reich, National Socialist brownshirts would show up at events where anti-Nazis were speaking, shouting down the speakers and physically menacing the people in the audience. Nathan Lean, his boss Reza Aslan, and their allies are the true sons and heirs of those brownshirts.

Clearly this man has fallen under the spell of greasy Islamophobes who convinced him that Islam had something to do with violence. "Hamburg: Libyan Refugee Threatens People With Knives While Holding Koran and Shouting 'Allahu Akbar!,'" from Islam Versus Europe, June 18 (thanks to The Religion of Peace):

This is the text of a Hamburg police report.

Officers from police station 11 have provisionally arrested a 24-year-old from the Republic of Côte d'Ivoire (Ivory Coast) on suspicion of threatening with a knife. The civil protection bureau in the state criminal office has taken over the investigation.

According to what has so far been discovered, the suspect entered a tent associated with the registered demonstration "Lampedusa refugees" in Steindamm, sat at a table and sang. After a short time he stepped in front of the tent and drew two knives. This led a 47-year-old man, who was standing in front of the tent, to feel threatened. The suspect then went to the subway station Hauptbahnhof-Süd and encountered a Hamburg Rail employee. The suspect circled the 30-year-old, holding a book in one hand and a knife in the other, and shouted "Allahu Akbar!". While doing this he continually moved the blade of the knife across the ground, as if he wanted to sharpen it. As the suspect again approached the 30-year-old in a threatening manner with the knife, the injured party fled in the direction of the central bus station and informed the police.

When the two police officers reached the scene, they encountered the suspect, who held two knives in his hands and several times shouted "Allahu Akbar!".

The officers arrested the 24-year-old on a provisional basis. Both knives (kitchen knives) were secured. During his arrest, a Koran fell out of the suspect's jacket pocket.

Source: Presseportal.de Via: PI

That Morsi would appoint this man who was involved in a jihad terror attack on a tourist site is a decisive step toward Sharia. Tourism is Western, un-Islamic, and often involves drinking. Also, tourists to Egypt are visiting the artifacts of Egyptian jahiliyya, the pre-Islamic period of ignorance.

"Morsi appoints governor linked to terror in Egypt," from DW, June 17 (thanks to all who sent this in):

Egyptians have voiced anger after Mohammed Morsi appointed an Islamist as provincial governor, who is linked to a deadly terrorist attack. Adel el-Khayat said he would not allow politics to influence his decisions.

Politicians, residents and activists in the Luxor province said they plan to seal off the office of the governor to prevent Adel el-Khayat from entering. Members of the tourism industry worry about the new governor's potential impact on tourism: The Islamist hard-liner comes from Gamaa Islamiya, a group that claimed responsibility for one of Egypt's bloodiest massacres.

"Is it unimaginable that those who plotted, participated or played any role in the massacre of Luxor, become the rulers even if they renounced and repented it," said Tharwat Agamy, the head of Luxor's Tourism Chamber.

Gamaa Islamiya waged a bloody insurgency against the Egyptian government in the 1990s, attacking police, Copts and tourists. In 1997, the group claimed responsibility for an attack on visitors to Luxor's 3,400-year-old Hatshepsut Temple (pictured), killing 58 in a stabbing spree and spray of gunfire. More than 1,200 people total died in the campaign of violence led by Gamaa and another militant group, Islamic Jihad....

This is especially ironic in light of the national surveillance scandal, which arises out of our officials' unwillingness to face the reality of Islamic jihad. Because they all agree that Islam is a religion of peace, they can't possibly address where the threat is really coming from, and monitor mosques or subject Muslims with Islamic supremacist ties to greater surveillance. Instead, they have to pretend that anyone and everyone is a potential terrorist, and surveil everyone. Our freedoms and privacy are now at risk because of our refusal to admit the truth about Islam.

This program was one of the only ones that was a bit more realistic, focused on the group from which the threat was likely to come -- had there been such a program involving Boston-area mosques, the Marathon jihad bombings might have been prevented. That the indefatigable dhimmi Bloomberg would defend these programs is an indication of how legal and non-intrusive they really were. The objective of suits like this one is to challenge any and every counter-terror measure except those that retail politically correct fictions about Islam and focus scrutiny more on "right-wing extremists" than on jihadis. And the goal is to clear away all obstacles to jihadis so that they can advance unimpeded. "Civil rights groups sue NYC mayor and top cop over post-9/11 Muslim surveillance programs," from the Associated Press, June 18 (thanks to Kenneth):

WASHINGTON – Civil rights lawyers say they plan to ask a federal judge to declare the New York Police Department's spying programs directed at Muslims to be unconstitutional, and to order police to stop their surveillance and destroy any records in police files.

In a lawsuit being filed Tuesday, the lawyers say the spying has hindered residents from freely practicing their religion. It is the third significant legal action filed against the NYPD Muslim surveillance program since details of the spy program were revealed in a series of Associated Press reports in 2011 and 2012.

The lawsuit says Muslim religious leaders in New York have modified their sermons and other behavior to not draw additional police attention.

The NYPD did not immediately respond to a phone call and email asking for comment.

"Nowhere in rebel-controlled Syria is there a secular fighting force to speak of" -- New York Times, April 28, 2013

Syrian rebels pledge loyalty to al-Qaeda -- USA Today, April 11, 2013

Bringing the total to $815 million for the allies of al-Qaeda and proponents of jihad and Sharia. "Obama announces extra $300 million in aid for Syrians, refugees," by Ian Johnston for NBC News, June 18:

The U.S. is to give more than $300 million in additional “life-saving humanitarian assistance” to Syrians caught up in the country’s civil war, Barack Obama has announced, taking the total amount given since the conflict began to nearly $815 million.

At the G-8 summit in Ireland, President Obama spoke with Russian President Vladimir Putin to discuss his goals in intervening in the Syrian conflict. Meanwhile polls show the American public does not want to arm Syrian rebels. NBC's Chuck Todd reports.

The extra money will be used to pay for food, medical care, clean water, shelter and other relief supplies for people in Syria and some of the 1.6 million refugees who have fled to neighboring countries.

The president announced the extra money during a meeting with world leaders at the Group of Eight summit in Lough Erne, Northern Ireland, on Monday.

“The United States remains the single-largest contributor of humanitarian assistance for the Syrian people,” a statement on the White House’s website said.

“The United States supports and appreciates the countries hosting the 1.6 million refugees who have fled the brutal conflict in Syria, and commends host-nation efforts to provide protection, assistance, and hospitality to all those fleeing violence,” the statement said.

“The United States recognizes the significant strains on host communities and the economic impact of providing refuge to such a large number of people,” it added. “We call on all host governments to continue to keep their borders open to those still fleeing violence in Syria.”...

"U.S. and Taliban representatives will meet soon for the first time to begin what are expected to be long and complex negotiations for a peaceful settlement to the war in Afghanistan." The U.S. entered Afghanistan to topple the Taliban from power and end their influence in the country. So these talks in themselves constitute an admission of failure.

"US, Taliban to meet in Qatar for 'key milestone' toward ending Afghanistan war," by Jim Miklaszewski, Courtney Kube and Erin McClam, NBC News, June 18:

U.S. and Taliban representatives will meet soon for the first time to begin what are expected to be long and complex negotiations for a peaceful settlement to the war in Afghanistan, senior Obama administration officials said Tuesday.

The officials told NBC News that the meeting will take place in the next several days in the Qatari capital of Doha. The Taliban will open an office there for the purpose of negotiating directly with the Afghan government, the officials said. A precise date was not announced.

"This is a key milestone on the way to the complete transition of responsibility for security to Afghans by the end of next year," a senior U.S. administration official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said via conference call after the announcement was made.

The news came after months of failed attempts to start peace talks, while Taliban insurgents continued attacks throughout Afghanistan.

The negotiating conditions require the Taliban to break their ties with al Qaeda, end the violence and accept the Afghan constitution, especially the protections for women and minorities, the officials said.

But because of deep distrust between the Afghan government and the Taliban, the process will be “complex, long and messy,” one official said. The officials emphasized that expectations were low, but said the opening of Doha office was a crucial step for Afghanistan.

"We have long said that this conflict will likely not be won on the battlefield, and that is why we support the opening of this office," said one senior administration official.

As for the American government's role in the talks, the United States "will have a role in direct talks, but this is a negotiation that will have to be led by Afghans," another said.

The disclosure came on the same day that international forces, led by the United States, handed control of Afghan national security to local forces — a milestone after almost 12 years of war. Most foreign combat troops will leave the country by the end of 2014.

Obama administration officials also told NBC News that the U.S. is pursuing a prisoner exchange with the Taliban to secure the release of Army Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl, held for several years by the Haqqani network, considered a dangerous element of the Taliban....

"The carnage poses a challenge for cricketer-turned-politician Imran Khan, whose party won the provincial election there on a platform of negotiating with the Pakistani Taliban to bring an end to the years of fighting and attacks there." Not an auspicious beginning. "Bombing at Pakistani funeral kills 27," by Riaz Khan for the Associated Press, June 18 (thanks to Kenneth):

PESHAWAR, Pakistan (AP) -- A suicide bomber blew himself up in a crowd of hundreds of mourners attending a funeral in northwestern Pakistan on Tuesday, killing 27 people. Among the dead was a newly elected lawmaker who may have been the target, authorities said.

The blast was the deadliest attack in the region since May 11 national and regional elections installed a new government in the northwestern province of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa.

The carnage poses a challenge for cricketer-turned-politician Imran Khan, whose party won the provincial election there on a platform of negotiating with the Pakistani Taliban to bring an end to the years of fighting and attacks there.

The bombing in the village of Sher Garh near the city of Mardan killed 27 people and wounded at least 57, said a senior police officer in Mardan, Tahir Ayub Khan.

Many of the wounded were taken to hospitals in the provincial capital of Peshawar, about 65 kilometers (40 miles) away.

Speaking as doctors examined him, Azeem Khan said a local cleric was leading the funeral prayers when Khan heard a deafening explosion and was knocked to the ground.

"People were running away for safety," he said. "Mourners at the funeral were crying for help after the blast."

A witness told Pakistan's Dunya television that 700 to 800 people were attending the funeral when the suicide bomber detonated the device.

The lawmaker, Imran Khan Mohmand, ran in Pakistan's May 11 elections as an independent candidate and later supported the party of Imran Khan, the ex-cricketer. He was the second provincial lawmaker affiliated with the party to be killed since the election. The other lawmaker, also an independent who later joined Khan's party, was shot dead earlier this month.

The Pakistani military has been fighting to root out Pakistani Taliban and affiliated militants from the tribal areas, a region that borders Afghanistan. The militants have vowed to overthrow the government and have carried out a campaign of bombings and shootings, mostly in the northwest, that have killed tens of thousands of civilians and security forces in recent years.

Khan campaigned on an anti-American platform in which he blamed the CIA's drone program and the war in Afghanistan for leading to much of the violence in Pakistan. He also favored negotiations with the Pakistani Taliban instead of military operations against them, and many of his aides and supporters said the party would not allow Pakistan to be used to ferry supplies to and from NATO troops in Afghanistan....

How odd that it wasn't right-wing extremists. "Suicide bombers attack Baghdad Shiites, kill 31," by Ammar Karim for AFP, June 18 (thanks to all who sent this in):

BAGHDAD (AFP) – Twin suicide bombings killed 31 people after midday prayers at a Shiite Muslim religious centre in Baghdad on Tuesday, the latest in violence sparking fears of a revival of full-blown sectarian bloodshed.

Several students from an adjacent university were among the dead, with dozens of others wounded, while security forces shut down the neighbourhood to vehicle traffic and sought to defuse a suspected car bomb nearby.

The attacks come amid a surge in nationwide unrest, with May the country's deadliest month since 2008, that along with a prolonged political deadlock have stoked concerns that Iraq is moving back to the brutal communal violence that blighted it in 2006 and 2007.

No group immediately claimed responsibility for the attacks, but Sunni militants linked to Al-Qaeda frequently carry out suicide bombings and look to target Shiite Muslims, whom they regard as apostates.

Tuesday's attacks struck at the Habib ibn al-Mudhaher husseiniyah, or Shiite Muslim religious hall, in north Baghdad. It lies next to the Imam al-Sadiq university, a private teaching institution.

Many victims were university students who were taking a break from studying for their exams to pray.

"What sins did these innocent students commit?" asked Mustafa Kamil, a student who was about to leave the site of the attacks to visit the morgue to help identify the dead.

"They gathered here for prayer. Does any religion accept killing innocent human beings?" the 20-year-old continued, his eyes red from crying.

"A few minutes ago, I was standing with my friend, and he asked me to go pray together. But I told him I wanted to study some more, to be ready for our exams.

"He said, 'I am going to pray, God will help me succeed'. He went, and now he will never come back."

According to witnesses and officials, the bombers, who were dressed in suits, began by gunning down the building's guard, followed by the first attacker blowing himself up at the entrance to the hall.

The second militant took advantage of the ensuing chaos and ran through the crowd before setting off his explosives inside the husseiniyah itself.

Soldiers standing guard at the scene said the inside of the building was covered in blood, with the walls and ceiling badly damaged by ball bearings, used by the suicide bombers to maximise the bloodshed.

Meanwhile, bombings elsewhere in Baghdad and north of the capital in Salaheddin province killed two people and wounded six....

"Vigilante groups armed with machetes and sticks have joined the effort to oust Islamist insurgents in the northeast, prompting concerns by some residents that this will lead to a breakdown in law and order." Law and order has already broken down. Vigilante groups are appearing because the Nigerian government has shown itself to be impotent against these bloodthirsty jihadists.

"11 killed during Islamist attack on school in Nigeria," from Reuters, June 17:

SEVEN students, two teachers and two insurgents were killed when suspected members of Nigerian Islamist sect Boko Haram attacked a school in the northeastern town of Damaturu, the military said.

Groups like Boko Haram and the al Qaeda-linked Ansaru have become the biggest risk to stability in Nigeria, Africa's top oil producer and second-largest economy.

Sunday's attack will raise fears that, as with past surges, a month-long offensive by government troops has merely pushed militants into hiding or across borders to Niger, Chad and Cameroon, where they can regroup and prepare new attacks.

"Two teachers and two insurgents were killed when Boko Haram terrorists attacked the Government Secondary School ... Also seven innocent students lost their lives," Eli Lazarus, military spokesman in Yobe state, said in a statement.

Boko Haram, which roughly translates as "Western education is sinful", has attacked several schools in the past. It was not clear how two of the attackers were killed.

Vigilante groups armed with machetes and sticks have joined the effort to oust Islamist insurgents in the northeast, prompting concerns by some residents that this will lead to a breakdown in law and order.

The military has cautiously welcomed the support, while warning it must not lead to witch-hunts or the settling of scores.

Lazarus said three soldiers were critically wounded during a separate attack by Boko Haram targeting the military in Damaturu, and three insurgents had been arrested.

Nigerian forces say their offensive has enabled them to wrest back control of the country's remote northeast from Boko Haram. They say they have destroyed key bases and arrested more than 150 suspected insurgents in the states of Borno, Yobe and Adamawa -- all covered by a state of emergency declared by President Goodluck Jonathan last month.

Some Nigerians saw the push as long overdue. But rights groups and aid agencies fear the longer it goes on, the more the region's vulnerable local population, which includes some of the poorest people on earth, will suffer.

The offensive has forced more than 6,000 refugees - mostly women, children and the elderly - to flee to neighbouring Niger, the U.N. refugee agency said last week.

In PJ Lifestyle today I discuss the Islamic nations' opposition to a UN resolution decrying violence against women:

Last Friday, Islamic member nations of the United Nations Human Rights Council rejected as un-Islamic a resolution condemning violence against women. The Kuwait News Agency reported that “the rejections include the paragraph, which gives women ‘the right to control matters concerning their sexual lives as well as their reproductive health without coercion, discrimination or violence.’”

It is likely that this rejection had as much or more to do with the idea that women should be protected from coercion and violence as it may have had to do with any pro-life concerns. After all, the Qur’an directs men to beat disobedient women (4:34), while Islamic law allows for abortion at least early in the pregnancy: the Muslim scholar Sayyid Sabiq explains that,

“abortion is not allowed after four months have passed since conception because at that time it is akin to taking a life, an act that entails penalty in this world and in the Hereafter. As regards the matter of abortion before this period elapses, it is considered allowed if necessary.”

The idea that it is un-Islamic for women to have the right to be free from coercion and violence is revealing of the mindset underlying the entire Islamic understanding of morality. Muslims and non-Muslims often tell us that Muslims hate the West for its decadence, its immorality, its lasciviousness, which they contrast unfavorably with the supposed morality and uprightness of the Islamic world. Often this boils down to a Muslim critique of Western “freedom,” especially as Bush and Obama pursued military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan ostensibly to bring Western-style freedom to those countries.

In line with that, the Mufti of Australia, Sheikh Taj al-Din al-Hilali, once complained that “Australian law guarantees freedoms up to a crazy level.” Yet genuine freedom is an indispensable prerequisite for any cultivation of real virtue.

Even the post-Christian West makes it more possible to be virtuous than the apparently much more straitlaced Islamic world. With its stonings, amputations, and death penalties for an array of offenses including apostasy, Islam has created – even in the family itself — not a framework in which people can become genuinely good, but an empire of fear. People don’t dare step out of line, not out of an authentic understanding that the path of moral and ethical uprightness is preferable to the alternative, much less out of love for God or a real desire to please him, but because they are afraid of what would happen to them if they did depart from Islam’s vision of morality.

Certainly the same critique can be leveled to some degree against societies that were more Christian than our present one, and this is not to say that society has no right or responsibility to legislate against immoral activity. Still, were people unable to choose to do evil, their choosing of the good would not be a manifestation of virtue, but merely of fear and the power of coercion. Those who have no choice but to be good demonstrate nothing about whether their beliefs enable or inspire them to choose the good when they could just as easily not do so.

Islam does not see virtue this way. Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini once thundered:

“Whatever good there is exists thanks to the sword and in the shadow of the sword! People cannot be made obedient except with the sword! The sword is the key to Paradise, which can be opened only for the Holy Warriors!”

Even the popular conservative writer Dinesh D’Souza, before he came to agree with the Islamic critique of Western immorality, wrote in 2004: “Consider the woman in Afghanistan or Iran who is required to wear the veil. There is no real modesty in this, because the woman is being compelled. Compulsion cannot produce virtue; it can only produce the outward semblance of virtue.” Yet three years later D’Souza had moved to the other side of the fence: “When you make America synonymous with permissiveness, when you dismiss serious moral offenses with a no-big-deal attitude… you are driving the traditional Muslims into the arms of the radicals.”

D’Souza appeared to be unaware that something quite similar to Western “permissiveness” was already written into Islamic law, albeit with a fig leaf of morality over it. In Islamic law we see circumstances permitting lying (cf. Muhammad’s dictum “war is deceit”), stealing (under the guise of the lawful seizure of the property of the victims of jihad, and the collection of the poll tax — jizya — from the subjugated Jews and Christians), rape (understood as the lawful sexual enslavement of infidel women captured in jihad warfare), and murder (if the victim is a non-Muslim who is understood to be at war with Islam, or someone who has simply been accused of “blaspheming” Islam or Muhammad).

These outrages, and others like them, blunt Islam’s moral critique of the West and should deter American social conservatives from seeing “conservative Muslims,” in D’Souza’s phrase, as potential allies in the culture wars. They also highlight how radically different Islamic law is from the core values and principles of American society. However, since “war is deceit” after all, the Islamic supremacist propaganda machine, with the willing help of the mainstream media, will continue to obscure these vital truths for most Americans.

Nonetheless, as Islam continues to expand its presence in the U.S., the horrors of Sharia and the Empire of Fear it creates will eventually become obvious here – although probably only when it is too late.

Pamela Geller tells the appalling story of how our pro-freedom ads have been delayed:

After months of procrastination and dhimmitude, the San Francisco MTA finally posted our Islamic apartheid ads on city buses (above are the first of the pics). They have been running the libelous "Israel is an apartheid state" ad without hesitation (or substantiation), mind you. I, on the other hand, had to provide numerous links and references to back up my ads. Why me and not them? Because I was stating fact, but the Jew-haters were merely expressing their opinion. You can't make this stuff up, folks.

San Francisco turned over the revenue from our ads to Muslim groups to study the effect AFDI ads had on the Muslim community, I kid you not. But they kept the revenue from the Jew-hatred ads.

We will educate the American people despite the difficulty, despite the obstacles.

Our fight is now in Seattle, to get this campaign up where another vicious anti-Jewish ad is currently running. Please help us fight. Contribute via Paypal.com. Send funds to americanfreedomdefense@aol.com. It took three years, but we are a 501C3 :)

Pamela Geller has more pictures here.

As I have noted many times, our increasingly authoritarian politically correct culture has thrust all sorts of mediocrities into the limelight -- people who never would have garnered any public attention were it not for the fact that they mouth the accepted dogmas of the day. One of the foremost among these is the adolescent pseudo-scholar Reza Aslan, who has just written this encomium to Ahmadinejad in Foreign Policy.

Actually, I doubt that Reza Aslan wrote this piece himself, at least in its published form -- it is too lucidly written and well-organized to come from a man who doesn't know basic grammar or elementary facts about the Muslim world (he thinks Turkey is the second most populous Muslim country), and who behaves like an obnoxious, immature and sexually conflicted pre-teen. But whoever ghost-wrote it or cleaned it up for Aslan, it is probable that Aslan stands by it, and so I will discuss it as if it came from him.

And yet it would make more sense if someone else wrote it for the boy, as it raises some odd questions. Aslan here appears to oppose the mullahcracy in Iran, and yet he is a Board member of the National Iranian American Council (NIAC). NIAC has been established in court as a front group for the Islamic Republic of Iran. Said Michael Rubin in February: "Jamal Abdi, NIAC’s policy director, now appears to push aside any pretense that NIAC is something other than Iran’s lobby. Speaking at the forthcoming 'Expose AIPAC' conference, Abdi is featured on the 'Training: Constituent Lobbying for Iran' panel. Oops." According to Charles C. Johnson in the Daily Caller: "Iranian state-run media have referred to the National Iranian-American Council (NIAC) since at least 2006 as 'Iran’s lobby' in the U.S." Iranian freedom activist Hassan Daioleslam "documented over a two-year period that NIAC is a front group lobbying on behalf of the Iranian regime." NIAC had to pay him nearly $200,000 in legal fees after they sued him for defamation over his accusation that they were a front group for the mullahs, and lost.

Yet Aslan remains on their Board. He is therefore either abysmally stupid and thus cannot be expected to be consistent, or an active supporter of the Islamic regime that currently tyrannizes Iran. While the former option can't be ruled out in light of his grammatical infelicities and manifest ignorance, the latter is much more likely, given the fact that NIAC's status as a front group for the mullahs is almost certain to have come to his notice. So why does he sound in this piece as if he were an opponent of the Islamic Republic?

The first possibility, of course, is that he may simply be lying, so as to continue his lucrative and highly deceptive career as a "bridge-builder." We know that Reza Aslan lies without any apparent pangs of conscience about people he hates, Israeli "atrocities," the extent of Islamic supremacism in U.S. mosques, and about Muhammad's career, and so there is no reason to assume that he is being truthful here. (Note also that there is no reason to take at face value any of his assertions about Ahmadinejad or Iran in this piece. My discussing them should not be taken as uncritical acceptance that they're actually true at all.)

The other possibility is that he really wants to see change in Iran, but not as drastic a change as most of those who read his piece below will assume that he is calling for. And there are some hints of that in this piece.

"Comment: Iran - Missing Ahmadinejad," by Reza Aslan for Foreign Policy via World News Australia, June 17:

What's that saying? You don't know what you've got 'til it's gone? Well, after eight long years of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as president of Iran, I'm willing to bet that even those of us who loathe the man are going to end up missing him -- not just because of the comedy he provided with his bellicose rhetoric and his inane populism, but because he may have been the last, best hope of stripping the clerical regime of its "God-given" right to rule Iran.

Far from mocking Ahmadinejad as a comic figure, Aslan has previously praised him as a liberal reformer -- as he does again in this piece. This is, of course, just the kind of thing that plays to his core audience: Western secular Leftists who get a thrill out of hearing that someone who has predicted the imminent demise of America and clearly relishes the prospect really isn't all that bad. This kind of thing has been laying them in the aisles as far back as Walter Duranty's puff pieces on Stalin's Russia in the New York Times. Anyway, Aslan's placing himself here among those who "loathe" Ahmadinejad forestalls the most obvious criticism of this piece: a listing of Ahmadinejad's genocidal, anti-Semitic, pro-jihad, hate-filled, violent statements. But note that in almost the same breath, Aslan passes up an opportunity to place himself among those who oppose the Islamic Republic altogether: he refers to "those who oppose the clerical regime in Iran," almost immediately after referring to "those of us who loathe the man":

Back in 2011, I argued that those who oppose the clerical regime in Iran and who yearn for a more secular nation that looks for inspiration in the glories of its Persian past instead of its Islamist present may have an unexpected champion in their corner: Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

I was not suggesting that Ahmadinejad is some sort of democracy icon or that he is even a good guy, let alone a competent president -- though he is far more politically sophisticated than his critics generally assume. It is a Western fallacy that "more secular" necessarily means "more free." But the fact remains that no president in the history of the Islamic Republic has so openly challenged the ruling religious hierarchy, and so brazenly tried to channel the government's decision-making powers away from the unelected clerical bodies that hold sway in Iran.

"It is a Western fallacy that 'more secular' necessarily means 'more free.'" This may be the most telling sentence in this entire windy piece. Aslan offers no examples, because he cannot: there is no historical evidence whatsoever of a state based on Islamic law that was free in any sense of the word. There have been and are decidely unfree secular states, but there is no example at all of what Reza Aslan is here implying the existence of: an Islamic religious state that is a free society.

And that's the fundamental error of this entire piece: Ahmadinejad has repeatedly proclaimed his Muslim piety. While he may have opposed the style or structure of clerical rule in Iran, there is no indication whatsoever that he wanted Iran to become a secular state or envisioned it as being governed by anything other than Islamic law. Aslan is taking what is essentially an internal dispute about how the Islamic Republic should be run and portraying it as a threat to the regime itself. This would be like taking disagreements between Democrats and Republicans today as evidence that the foundations of our contemporary leviathan state itself were being questioned. They aren't, and neither are the foundations of the Islamic Republic. And since Aslan hastens to remind us that "more secular" doesn't equal "more free," there is no indication that he has any interest in seeing Iran become more secular, either.

Under Ahmadinejad, the presidency has become a legitimate base of power in a way it never had been before. That may explain why Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has lately been threatening to get rid of the office altogether.

At the time, I was skewered for the article by many in the Iranian-American community. My critics did not object to the content, they simply hated that I said something remotely positive about a man who had become the poster child for everything loathsome about the Iranian regime. I was equally taken to task by some American journalists, who seem incapable of viewing Ahmadinejad through any other lens save his absurd and odious views on Israel.

...which differ primarily only in tone from Aslan's own -- and not that much, either.

Today, Ahmadinejad's unprecedented challenge to the unchecked powers of the supreme leader is something even those who can't stand the man recognize and grudgingly admire. And now, as Ahmadinejad is about to be replaced by one of a claque of Ayatollah Khamenei's fawning admirers, we may start to think a little more kindly of these last few years.

The mullahs' conflict with Ahmadinejad goes to the very heart of what constitutes political legitimacy in the Islamic Republic. In Iran's byzantine government, the elected president is supposed to represent the sovereignty of the people while the unelected supreme leader represents the sovereignty of God. In practice, however, nearly all levers of political power rest in the hands of the supreme leader, leaving the president with very little control over policy decisions.

That is just how the founder of the Islamic Republic, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, wanted it. Khomeini's religio-political concept of velayat-e faqih, or "guardianship of the jurist" argued that in the absence of the Muslim messiah (known as the Mahdi), the powers of government should rest with the messiah's representatives on Earth -- that is, the ayatollahs. After creating the position of supreme leader, Khomeini named himself to the office and began accumulating absolute religious, economic, and political authority, paving the way for complete clerical dominance.

This clerical dominance extended even into the elected branches of government. The clergy made up more than half of the representatives in Iran's first two parliaments, though that number has gradually declined to less than a quarter today. With the exception of the Islamic Republic's first and second presidents -- who served a total of less than two years in office before being impeached and assassinated, respectively -- every president elected in post-revolutionary Iran before 2005 had been a cleric.

Ahmadinejad broke that clerical precedent when he trounced his opponent, Ali Akbar Rafsanjani, by painting him as a wealthy, corrupt, out-of-touch mullah with no appreciation for the common man's concerns. In contrast to the fantastically wealthy Rafsanjani, whose speeches were peppered with Arabic words and Quranic recitations, Ahmadinejad dressed simply, spoke colloquial Persian, and clothed himself in a provincial religiosity deliberately stripped of clerical learning.

The strategy was so successful that Ahmadinejad won 62 percent of the vote in the run-off election against Rafsanjani, who mustered a mere 36 percent. Nor did Ahmadinejad back away from his controversial public persona after taking office -- long before his sham reelection in 2009, he had begun distancing himself from the clerical elite and consolidating power in the presidency. Ironically, it was after the so-called Green Movement uprising was violently suppressed and his reelection staunchly supported by Khamenei that Ahmadinejad's anti-clerical agenda became more pronounced.

In his second term, Ahmadinejad steadily chipped away at the clergy's religious, economic, and political control. First, he started questioning the mullahs' self-proclaimed status as the arbiters of Islamic morality -- and especially its obsession with proper Islamic dress. He condemned the actions of the country's dreaded morality police, saying, "it is an insult to ask a man and woman walking on the street about their relation to each other." Ahmadinejad's media advisor, Ali Akbar Javanfekr, was even arrested for printing articles criticizing the law forcing women to wear veils.

There is no indication that Ahmadinejad ever spoke out against the stoning of adulterers.

The president then began repeatedly criticizing the clergy for their enormous wealth, which stood in stark contrast to most Iranians' economic suffering under international sanctions. In a surprise move, Ahmadinejad curtailed the amount of money that the government pays to religious institutions, which have ballooned over the past three decades into a source of tremendous personal enrichment for many in the clerical elite.

Ahmadinejad also took a number of bold steps to wrest political power away from the mullahs. He ceased attending meetings of the Expediency Council, one of Iran's many Orwellian committees whose purpose is to protect the political interests of the clergy. When Iran's oil minister stepped down, Ahmadinejad took over the ministry himself until a permanent replacement could be found, establishing an extremely significant presidential precedent in the process.

Even in those cases when his attempts to consolidate power were foiled by Khamenei and his allies, Ahmadinejad showed a brazen unwillingness to bend to the supreme leader's whims. When Khamenei overruled the dismissal of his intelligence chief, Heider Moslehi, Ahmadinejad went on a week-long "strike," refusing to attend cabinet meetings in protest. When Khamenei rejected the appointment of his close ally, Esfandiar Rahim Mashaei, as first vice president, Ahmadinejad made him chief of staff instead -- an arguably more influential position that did not require Khamenei's approval. When Khamenei balked at Ahmadinejad's habit of appointing "special envoys" -- an attempt to sidestep the Foreign Ministry, which is under Khamenei's control -- Ahmadinejad simply changed the envoys into "advisors" and carried on.

But Ahmadinejad's challenge to the clerical regime goes beyond any single skirmish with the supreme leader. Perhaps more important is his very public questioning of the foundation of the Islamic Republic's political and religious authority. "Administering the country should not be left to the [supreme] leader, the religious scholars, and other [clerics]," the president said in 2011. Mashaei went further, flatly arguing that an Islamic government is not capable of running a vast and populous country like Iran.

This seems unlikely to have been more than an objection to the manner of Islamic government in Iran, not to Islamic government itself. After all, last September at the UN, Ahmadinejad delivered a speech that was heavy on Islamic proselytizing, asking: “Does anybody believe that continuation of the current order is capable of bringing happiness for human society?” The clear implication was that Sharia was the only viable alternative. He continued: “There is no doubt that the world is in need of a new order and a fresh way of thinking.” This would be “an order in which man is recognized as God’s Supreme Creature, enjoying material and spiritual qualities and possessing a pure and divine nature filled with a desire to seek justice and truth.” Consequently he called upon the nations to “place our trust in God Almighty and stand against the acquisitive minority” – in other words, to adopt Sharia and stand against Israel.

These are astounding statements for the president and his closest advisor to make. Indeed, they are downright seditious -- it would be like the president of the United States questioning the viability of constitutional democracy. No one in the Iranian government -- not even the most liberal reformists in parliament -- has ever dared to overtly challenge the divine right of the supreme leader to run the country. But for Ahmadinejad, direct assaults on the velayat-e faqih have become a standard part of his rhetoric.

Consider, for example, Ahmadinejad's much-maligned claims of being in direct communication with the Mahdi. Such statements are not the mad ravings of a religious fanatic -- they are a public repudiation of the entire system upon which the Islamic Republic was built. After all, if a layperson like Ahmadinejad can directly consult with the Mahdi, then what use are the ayatollahs? And if the clerics are not the only ones with a direct line to the Mahdi, why have they been given political powers over the Mahdi's government? As Mashaei put it, "Running a country is like a horse race, but the problem is that [the clerics] are not horse racers."

Yes, "if a layperson like Ahmadinejad can directly consult with the Mahdi, then what use are the ayatollahs?" But this is not remotely the foundation for a secular regime -- just possibly for a different kind of Islamic one.

Khamenei immediately grasped the challenge that Ahmadinejad and Mashaei's statements represented for religious rule, issuing a fatwa announcing that he and only he represents the Mahdi. But despite the backlash from the clergy, Ahmadinejad has continued to use the president's bully pulpit to push for a new ethos of "Persian nationalism" over Iran's Islamic identity. He has called for an "Iranian Islam" that contrasts with the theocratic ideology pushed by the clerical regime -- what some Iranians refer to derisively as "Arabism."

It may contrast, but not in that it would not be theocratic itself. Aslan is trying to portray Ahmadinejad as some sort of clandestine secularist when he is clearly calling for what is just a different application of Islamic law.

Ahmadinejad has also broken a taboo among Iranian politicians by heaping praise on Cyrus the Great, the first and greatest king of the ancient Persian Empire. This nostalgia for Iran's pre-Islamic past has led to strict warnings from Khamenei's allies, with one conservative parliamentarian saying that the president "should be aware that he is obligated to promote Islam and not ancient Iran, and if he fails to fulfill his obligation, he will lose the support and trust of the Muslim nation of Iran."

However, Ahmadinejad's Persian nationalism has proven enormously popular in Iran. It has even led to a new political movement in the country, one which the clerical regime's most fanatical supporters decry as a "deviant movement" and "a third pillar of sedition." Ahmadinejad, for his part, has dismissed his critics as the kind of people who go "running to Qom [the religious capital of Iran] for every instruction."

With this description, Ahmadinejad could be speaking of any of Iran's presidential frontrunners. After all, the one thing that the top contenders to replace him have in common is their comical obeisance to the supreme leader. Iran's nuclear negotiator Saeed Jalili recently argued that "those with the slightest disagreement with the supreme leader have no place in our discourse" and that "all our attention should be devoted to listening to what our leader wants."

Such professions of mindless obedience seem to be the only way to secure the presidency in the coming election. Ali Akbar Velayati, another presidential frontrunner, has said that his greatest strength as president would be his willingness to unquestioningly obey whatever the supreme leader tells him to do: "I see this as a strong point.... I believe that having a person who has the last word and makes the final decision is in the country's political interest."

Mohammad Bagher Qalibaf, the brutish mayor of Tehran, has boasted about standing up for the supreme leader's right to rule by personally bashing in the heads of student protesters who question it. "When it is necessary to come to the street and hit [the protesters] with batons I am there with a baton and I am proud of that," he said.

In fact, none of the current presidential candidates, not even the moderate Hassan Rouhani, who, despite his brash criticisms of the "excesses" of the clerical regime is himself a mullah, seem too eager to carry Ahmadinejad's mantle of anti-clericalism into their administrations.

Barring some major surprise, which Khamenei has done everything in his power to prevent, one of the three sycophants listed above will likely be the next president of Iran. That will also mark the end to Ahmadinejad's unprecedented challenge to the guiding philosophy of the Islamic Republic. As clerical control over the Iranian government becomes more severe, those who blame the mullahs for everything wrong in Iran may one day come to miss the little man with the unkempt beard and rumpled jacket who dared defy the Mahdi's representative on Earth.

His replacement will not be better than he was. But no, he will not be missed, except in Reza Aslan's fascist little heart.

When you have a religion that teaches that human beings are the executors of the wrath and vengeance of the supreme being, and that apostates and heretics should be murdered, this kind of thing is going to happen. "'Allah will punish you all!': Terror at mosque as worshipers and policeman slashed with machete by 'Taser-proof' madman after row over whether they were praying properly," by Paul Bentley and John Stevens in the Daily Mail, June 16:

A Somali Muslim allegedly stabbed a policeman and three mosque worshippers after screaming: ‘Allah is going to punish you all.’

The 32-year-old is said to have tried to kill the worshippers during an argument over whether they were praying correctly.

It is thought the man, who was not a regular at the mosque in Birmingham, became upset because the prayers were not being performed in the manner of his denomination.

One witness, who asked not to be named, said: ‘I heard shouting behind me as I was praying. I turned around and saw two men grappling with each other.

‘Suddenly a man pulled out a knife and stabbed the other man in the leg, near the groin.

'Someone tried to intervene but the man just went for him and thrust a knife into his abdomen. It was absolutely terrifying.’

Minutes later two police officers, one male and one female, arrived at the Madrasah Qasim-ul-Uloom mosque in Ward End and the man allegedly ran at them with a large combat knife.

Despite the male officer shooting him with a Taser, the man is said to have stabbed him in his chest and stomach.

‘The police tried to Taser the man but he didn’t fall down,’ the witness continued. ‘Instead he just lunged at the officer after pulling out his knife again and stabbed him. There was blood everywhere.’

Despite his serious injuries the 31-year-old officer ‘heroically’ overcame the man.

The officer was with his family in hospital yesterday preparing for surgery. Two of the other men were being treated for multiple stab wounds following the attack just after 11pm on Saturday.

An off-duty surgeon who happened to be at prayers fought to keep them alive before paramedics arrived.

Another man, Dr Arshad Mahmood, who had his hand stabbed while trying to disarm the attacker, said: ‘Everyone was frightened. It was so sudden.

‘A man started stabbing one of the guys who was just sitting right next to him.

'We went to save him. He had multiple injuries, three or four wounds.

'A few of us went to stop him. One of the guys was strong enough to stop him. I held his hand. One also had an injury on his thigh.’

Another witness said: ‘He shouted “Allah is going to punish you all”. He stabbed two people then one guy restrained him and someone called the police.’

The suspect was being held yesterday in a mental health facility on suspicion of attempted murder.

The attack comes less than a month after soldier Lee Rigby was murdered in Woolwich, south London, allegedly by knifemen boasting they were avenging the death of Muslims by the military.

The male officer, who has not yet been named, was due to receive a bravery award this week for helping to save the life of a young child in a separate incident last year.

Chief Superintendent Alex Murray, of West Midlands Police, praised the policeman, saying: ‘There was some real brave action going on inside that mosque.’

He added: ‘There’s no connection with any other incidents that we can see at the moment – for example, Woolwich or other incidents around the country.

'There’s no information at this stage to suggest it was a hate crime.’

West Midlands Police would be ‘looking into details’ about why the Taser had no effect on the suspect.

Liam Byrne, MP for Birmingham Hodge Hill, said: ‘This was not a hate crime, this was a tragic, sad, and isolated incident.’

Mohammed Shafiq, of national Muslim organisation the Ramadhan Foundation, said: ‘We must be clear there should be no place for this sort of violence in our country.’

Yes, we must.

In October 2001, right after 9/11, the New York Times called Al-Azhar "the revered mosque, the distinguished university, the leading voice of the Sunni Muslim establishment." It quoted a Muslim cleric: "Al Azhar is the only institution in the world that has learned the moderate Islam and taught it in a moderate way without fanaticism, and without abiding by the teachings of a school that promotes rigidity or violence."

In June 2009 at al-Azhar, Barack Obama said: "For over a thousand years, Al-Azhar has stood as a beacon of Islamic learning, and for over a century, Cairo University has been a source of Egypt’s advancement."

"You shall find the Jews and the polytheists to be the most hostile towards the believers" -- Qur'an 5:82

Muhammad said that “the last hour would not come unless the Muslims will fight against the Jews and the Muslims would kill them until the Jews would hide themselves behind a stone or a tree and a stone or a tree would say: Muslim, or the servant of Allah, there is a Jew behind me; come and kill him” -- Sahih Muslim 6985

No negotiations, no settlement moratorium, will change this.

"Antisemitism in Al-Azhar University's Friday Sermon: The Jews Are The Muslims' Worst Enemies," from MEMRI, May 10:

Following are excerpts from a Friday sermon at Al-Azhar University in Cairo, delivered by Muhammad Al-Mukhtar Al-Mahdi, which aired on Channel 1, Egyptian TV, on May 10, 2013:

Muhammad Al-Mukhtar Al-Mahdi: The Islamic nation, which is the guardian of Truth, must be aware of the conspiracies of Falsehood, and of the snares of those who lie in wait. Allah has taught [Muslims] that their worst enemies are those about whom He said: "You shall find the Jews and the polytheists to be the most hostile towards the believers" [Koran 5:82]. Thus, Allah made Jihad for His sake and endurance of pain and hardship effective means to fight the people of Falsehood.

[...]

The confrontation [with the Jews] is inevitable. Our Prophet does not lie. He told us that there would be a confrontation between the Muslims and the Jews before the Day of Judgment, and that the Muslims would vanquish them to the point that the Jews would hide behind the stones and the trees, but the stones and the trees would say: "Oh Muslim, oh servant of Allah, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him." Prepare for that day, for it will surely arrive, because the divine revelation harbors no lies.

Apparently there are not enough Infidels around to finance the jihad by means of the jizya, as Islamic law envisions. "TTP demands 'protection money' from Pakistani businessmen to sustain jihad," from ANI, June 17:

The Pakistani Taliban has reportedly asked two local businessmen to pay 'protection money' to help militants carry out 'jihad'.

A senior police official told Dawn News that the chief executive of an Islamabad-based business establishment had received four letters allegedly from the head of the banned organization Tehreek-i-Taliban Pakistan's (TTP) 'finance wing'.

The businessman has been asked to pay 25 million dollars. The letter, bearing the name of its sender, said the money was needed for jihad and it would be received abroad (in Dubai).

According to the report, the TTP threatened that its 'operational wing' would come into action if the money was not paid.

Police said a man delivered a letter and a Universal Serial Bus or USB (a data storage device) at the office of Raja Hanif, who is the father-in-law of Sadaqat Abbasi, who contested the recent general elections as a candidate of the Pakistan Tehreek-i-Insaf from Murree.

Hanif said in a statement recorded by the police that the letter had been written on the TTP's letterhead.

#Live: President-elect #Rowhani says #Iran not ready to suspend enrichment of uranium

— Al Arabiya English (@AlArabiya_Eng) June 17, 2013

But...but...he's a "moderate"!

Islamophobia once again rears its ugly head as Sunni Muslims murder Shi'ites in Syria, and it is all no doubt the fault of Zionists and/or "right-wing extremists." The Sunni-Shi'ite Jihad continues to escalate in Syria, where it could turn into an international confrontation when American (pro-Sunni jihadists) and Iranian (pro-Shi'ite jihadists) troops get there. "Sunni extremists blow up Shiite mosque in Syria," from ZeeNews, June 17:

Amman: Sunni extremists blew up a Shiite mosque in a village in eastern Syria stormed by rebels earlier this week, another sign of the growing sectarian hatred in the country's civil war, activists said on Sunday.

They said al-Qaeda's affiliate in Syria carried out the destruction. It showed the determination of extremists to drive Shiites out of the village of Hatla in the Deir el-Zour region near Iraq. Last week rebels battled pro-regime militiamen there, killing more than 60 Shiite fighters and civilians, according to activists.

In Lebanon, gunmen deployed in the streets of the northeast and set up roadblocks in protest following the killing of four Lebanese Shiite men in an ambush, security officials said today.

The security officials, speaking on condition of anonymity in line with regulations, said the four were found dead in the Wadi Rafeq area between Ras Baalbek and al-Qaa near the border with Syria.

They said the men were from the powerful Jaafar and Amhaz clans, triggering fears of retaliation.

It was not immediately clear how they were killed or what the motive was, but today's ambush is believed to be related to sectarian tensions related to the Syrian civil war.

Tensions between Sunnis and Shiites in Lebanon increased after the Shiite Iranian-backed Hezbollah openly joined the fight in Syria on the side of President Bashar Assad.

Most Sunnis in Lebanon support the mostly Sunni rebels fighting to oust Assad.

In amateur videos of the mosque destruction in Syria, fighters walked into the mosque in Hatla and trampled on books, some with covers showing pictures of Shiite clerics. The videos then showed an explosion that brought down the building.

Today's video posted on the Internet appeared genuine and corresponded with other Associated Press reporting from the area.

Rami Abdul-Rahman, director of the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, said that the mosque was demolished on Friday, three days after the battle.

Other videos that emerged earlier have showed rebels cursing Shiites and suggested fighters had burned Shiite homes.

"It's clear that they want to root out Hatla's Shiite inhabitants," he told The Associated Press.

The town is home to several thousand people, about 30 per cent of them Shiites. It was considered a pro-regime community in the Euphrates River valley, where rebels, including the al-Qaida-linked group Jabhat el-Nusra, have taken over much of the surrounding territory.