March 2004 Archives

As anti-Semitism skyrockets in Europe, "the government is very anxious not to upset the Muslim community." From The Telegraph:

Jewish leaders accused the European Union yesterday of covering up the true scale of anti-Semitic violence carried out by Muslim youths, reigniting a controversy over Europe's failure to confront Islamic extremism at home.

A study released by the EU's racism and xenophobia monitoring centre astounded experts by concluding that the wave of anti-Jewish persecution over the last two years stemmed from neo-Nazi or other racist groups.

"The largest group of the perpetrators of anti-Semitic activities appears to be young, disaffected white Europeans," said a summary released to the European Parliament. "A further source of anti-Semitism in some countries was young Muslims of North African or Asian extraction.

"Traditionally, anti-Semitic groups on the extreme Right played a part in stirring opinion," it added.

The headline findings contradict the body of the report. This says most of the 193 violent attacks on synagogues, Jewish schools, kosher shops, cemeteries and rabbis in France in 2002 - up from 32 in 2001 - were "ascribed to youth from neighbourhoods sensitive to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, principally of North African descent.

"The percentage attributable to the extreme Right was only nine per cent in 2002," it said.

The report on Belgium said most of the fire-bomb and machine-gun attacks on Jewish targets were the result of a spillover from the Palestinian intifada.

The European Jewish Congress accused the EU watchdog of twisting data from the 15 member states to suit its own ideological bias, describing the report as a catalogue of "enormous contradictions, errors and omissions."

"We cannot let it be said that the majority of anti-Semitic incidents come from young, disaffected white men. This is in complete contradiction with the facts recorded by the police," it said.

The EU suppressed a report last year by German academics concluding that Arab gangs were largely responsible for a sudden surge in the anti-Jewish violence, allegedly because the findings were politically unpalatable.

Victor Weitzel, who wrote a large section of yesterday's far more detailed study, told The Telegraph that the latest findings had been consistently massaged by the EU watchdog to play down the role of North African youth. "The European Union seems incapable of facing up to the truth on this," he said. "Everything is being tilted to ensure nice soft conclusions.

"When I told them that we need to monitor the inflammatory language being used by the Arab press in Europe, this was changed to the 'minority press'.

"Honestly, it's incredible," he said.

Mr Weitzel's 48-page section - compiled with a Polish academic, Magadalena Sroda - is the fruit of months of interviews with Jewish leaders across Europe. While far-Right and traditional "Christian" forms of anti-Semitism still exist, the report homes in on a new form of "anti-Zionist Left" prejudice.

This demonises Israel and subtly leaks into prejudice against all Jews. The study describes Belgium as a country where anti-Semitism has become almost fashionable among the Left-leaning intelligentsia.

But most of the report focuses on Jew-baiting by Muslim youths. It paints an alarming picture of daily life for France's 600,000 Jews, the EU's biggest community.

In schools, Jewish children are beaten with impunity, and teachers dare not talk about the Holocaust for fear of provoking Muslim pupils, it said.

Britain, which saw a 75 per cent rise in incidents last year, was gently rebuked for hesitating to take "politically awkward" measures against Islamic radicals.

"The government is very anxious not to upset the Muslim community," the report said.

Saif al-Adel

Hit easy targets that are not protected, it says. From The National Post via the SITE Institute, :

A new al-Qaeda manual posted on the Internet is calling for terrorist attacks against Canadians, and specifies that businessmen, politicians, scientists, soldiers and tourists should be targeted, according to U.S. researchers.

Canada is one of six nations whose citizens are identified as "human targets" in the Arabic-language publication, which is reported to be the work of senior Egyptian al-Qaeda figure Saif al-Adel.

The manual, called The Al-Battar Military Camp, ranks Canadians as the fifth most important "Christian" terrorist targets, behind Americans, Britons, Spaniards and Australians. Italians were ranked sixth.

The manual was obtained and translated by the SITE Institute, a terrorism research centre in Washington, D.C. It is the latest edition of a publication that is said to be aimed at new al-Qaeda adherents scattered around the world.

"This al-Qaeda magazine is published and circulated through the terrorist group's Web site, along with other propaganda," Rita Katz, executive director of the institute, told the National Post yesterday.

"It contains specific military guidance and instructions on how to effectively target al- Qaeda's enemies. There are physical training programs, diagrams of weapons and chapters dedicated to combat strategy. Canadians should take very seriously the fact that their country is identified as a top potential target by al-Qaeda."

This profile of the courageous Walid Shoebat is a few weeks old, but on this day of so much worldwide terrorist activity, it is worth perusing again. From FrontPage, via Abrahamic-Faith.com:

To devout Muslims, renouncing the “one true faith” is an act of apostasy warranting a death sentence. By Islamic measures, however, Walid Shoebat has three strikes against him: In 1993, he renounced Islam, converted to Christianity—and, unlike most Middle Eastern Christians tutored in replacement theology—Shoebat adopted ardent Zionism along with his new found faith.

“Christ is a Jewish rabbi,” he insists today. “He was a Zionist.” Shoebat believes that God loves Israel. “How can anyone claim to be Christian and hate Zionism?” he asks, citing Psalm 53. “Christians seek ‘salvation’ and true Christians know that ‘salvation’ comes out of Zion, ‘When God bringeth back the captivity of his people.’”

A Muslim who converts to Christianity takes his life in his hands. Even in the U.S., according to Shoebat, former Muslims are often murdered by their families. In such cases, he adds, news reports seldom cover the Islamic motives. One noted scholar of Islam, the former Muslim Ibn Warraq, writes under a pseudonym to protect his life. In Leaving Islam he collects the accounts of more than two dozen apostates that poignantly demonstrate the need of former Muslims for security precautions.

Yet Walid Shoebat’s journey from Islam to Christianity and Zionism is especially remarkable. A self-described former Palestinian terrorist, Shoebat’s dream in the 1970s was to die as a “shaheed, a martyr.” He spent his youth engaging in riots. He confronted soldiers, hoping to be shot—a virtual impossibility, since the Israelis never targeted the torso “without good reason.” Once, he tossed a fire bomb. Another time, he nearly killed an Israeli solider, who was saved only when Israeli reinforcements arrived. Today, Shoebat seeks forgiveness for his terrible crimes.

Born in 1960 in Beit Sahour near Bethlehem—in so-called West Bank territory that Jordan occupied illegally in 1948—Shoebat was raised in the jihad doctrine. Under Islam, he reports, Palestinian children are inculcated to hate non-Muslims, and especially to hate Jews and Israel.

“The Arab war against Israel is a jihad,” Shoebat says. “Of course it’s a jihad. It is a religious, holy war. What part of ‘religious, holy war’ can’t the world understand?” Even Christians are indoctrinated in jihad ideology, he notes. Rejection of Jewish rights and history in Israel underlies the foundation of this Islamic jihad doctrine. [1]

In the Middle East, jihad theology has deep historical roots even for some churches. In the mid 19th century, according to noted Islamic scholar Bat Ye’or, the papacy allied with French imperialists to promote Arab nationalism among Arabized Middle Eastern Christians in the Ottoman provinces. They hoped to defeat Britain and Zionism. These efforts failed, she writes in her seminal Islam and Dhimmitude. But in 1970, the Vatican dispatched an apostolic delegate to Jerusalem to establish a Catholic Justice and Peace Commission. That was when the Latin Catholic, Orthodox and other Palestinian churches began building “an Arab Palestinian identity hostile to Israel and shared by Christians and Muslims.”[2]

Coincidentally, as the seeds of these alliances began to bear their malicious fruit, Walid Shoebat came of age in Beit Sahour. Until fifth grade, he was the sole Muslim in a Christian school. He was taught that Jews were usurpers and thieves, fit only to be “beneficiaries” of virulent, mass-produced hatred—and all that implies. In Islamic school in sixth grade, Shoebat’s jihad indoctrination continued along the same lines. Every song he learned incited blood and murder. “The end product was a terrorist,” he explains.

Not surprisingly, Beit Sahour is also home to Ghasson Andoni and George Rishmawi, are the co-founders of the Rapprochement Center. They also co-founded the International Solidarity Movement with Huwaida Arraf and Adam Shapiro. Both organizations appear to be driven by the malevolent jihad ideology that Walid Shoebat describes. Indeed, at the third annual Palestine Solidarity Conference at Ohio State University in November, ISM featured such radical speakers as Khalid Turaani, executive director of American Muslims for Jerusalem. According to Steven Emerson, AMJ is a radical group that “routinely invokes ‘Zionist’ conspiracies and has featured calls at its conferences for the killing of Jews….” [3] Last May, the ISM held a $40 per plate dinner co-sponsored by an Islamist group, the Muslim Public Affairs Council. Another sponsor: the American Friends Service Committee.

The jihad against the Jewish people in the holy land dates back centuries. But in March 1920, Yasser Arafat’s idol and relation, Jerusalem Mufti Hajj Amin el-Husseini, reignited the Islamic reign of terror, says Shoebat. El-Husseini sent for muhajideen from Syria to stage bloody riots. Soon afterwards, he led violent agitations to win the coveted role of Jerusalem Mufti over another candidate who apparently did not espouse jihad. [4]

As a child, Shoebat heard tales of jihad incitements from Beit Sahour elders like Dheib Abd Rabbo: “Hajj Amin el-Husseini said, ‘Do not have pity on them. Take your gun and your sword, and murder the Jews and rape their women.’ At that point, Rabbo decided he would not do this. He would not rape. So he took his gun and his sword and he went home.”

Plenty of others participated, however. “In Hebron and in our village, even before World War II, jihad was genocide,” Shoebat notes. In 1920, Arabs murdered nine Jews in Halsa and Bnei Yehuda. On August 26, 1929, they killed 133 Jews in Hebron, Safed, Motza, Tel Aviv and elsewhere and wounded 339. In 1936, they murdered at least another 70 Jewish civilians, wounded hundreds more, and destroyed Jewish farms, homes, villages, crops and cattle. [5] El-Husseini influenced Hitler, saluted the Nazi Arab legion, helped create the Muslim S.S. unit that committed genocide in Bosnia and, in 1944, broadcast another call to jihad from Berlin:

“Kill the Jews wherever you find them. This pleases God, history and religion. This saves your honour. God is with you.” [6]

Prince Turki (Time)

Two private Saudi firms linked to Al-Qaeda are also mixed up with Saudi intelligence. From the Chicago Tribune, with thanks to LGF:

HAMBURG, Germany -- Two private Saudi companies linked with suspected Al Qaeda cells here and in Indonesia also have connections to the Saudi Arabian intelligence agency and its longtime chief, Prince Turki bin Faisal, according to information assembled by German intelligence analysts.

The Twaik Group and Rawasin Media Productions, both based in Riyadh, the Saudi capital, have served as fronts for the Saudi General Intelligence Directorate, according to an inquiry by Germany's foreign intelligence service, the BND.

Twaik, a $100 million-a-year conglomerate, has diverse holdings inside and outside Saudi Arabia. Rawasin reports earnings of about $4 million a year from producing and selling audio and videotapes promoting the Wahhabi version of Islam that is Saudi Arabia's dominant religion.

The conclusions reached by the BND inquiry were presented to the office of German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder late last year and subsequently circulated within the German intelligence community.

The inquiry determined that Twaik, like Rawasin, was what one source described as "an organ of Saudi Arabia intelligence."

In the late 1990s both Twaik and Rawasin employed Reda Seyam, a 44-year-old Egyptian suspected by Indonesian authorities of having helped finance the Bali nightclub bombing. Germany's federal prosecutor is investigating Seyam on suspicion of supporting a foreign terrorist organization, namely Al Qaeda.

The German inquiry also discovered that, during 1999 and 2000, Seyam took several flights from Saudi Arabia to destinations in Europe on aircraft operated by the Saudi General Intelligence Directorate, or GID.

The Tribune reported last year that between 1995 and 1998, Twaik deposited more than $250,000 in bank accounts controlled by Mamoun Darkazanli, a Syrian-born Hamburg businessman and longtime Al Qaeda associate with close ties to the Sept. 11 hijackers during their years in the northern port city of Hamburg.

Abdulrahman Al-Fahhad, then the Twaik executive responsible for the company's rental-car operations in the Balkans, acknowledged hiring Darkazanli in 1995 to supply cars from Germany for Twaik's branch office in Albania. The money, Al-Fahhad said, had been for Darkazanli's use in purchasing those cars.

Rental-car job

Al-Fahhad also acknowledged hiring Seyam to manage Twaik's rental-car office in nearby Bosnia-Herzegovina. In telephone interviews last year and earlier this month, Al-Fahhad continued to maintain that he could not remember how he met either Darkazanli or Seyam.

Twaik's founder and owner of record, Saudi businessman Saleh Abdulaziz Al-Fahhad, did not respond to several written requests for comment on his company's purported connections with Saudi intelligence, Rawasin and Seyam.

Rawasin did not respond to e-mailed requests for information beyond stating, "You can find our products in Islamic cassette shops."

The BND inquiry has concluded that Seyam, one of whose specialties was videotaping Muslim fighters in action around the world, was sent to Indonesia by Rawasin a year before the October 2002 Bali bombing that killed 202 people and wounded more than 300.

It is not clear whether Seyam was working on his own or on behalf of Rawasin while he was distributing what Indonesian investigators said was tens of thousands of dollars to militant Islamists in Indonesia, including the convicted mastermind of the Bali bombings.

Neither Seyam nor Darkazanli, both of whom emigrated to Germany in the early 1980s and subsequently became naturalized German citizens, has been charged with any crime in Germany. Darkazanli is the target of a separate investigation by the federal prosecutor into the suspected laundering of Al Qaeda funds.

In 2002 and 2003 Seyam served a 10-month jail sentence in Indonesia for violating that country's immigration laws. Darkazanli was accused in a Spanish indictment last year of having served as Osama bin Laden's "financier in Europe."

Link established

According to information gathered by the BND, the relationships between Twaik, Rawasin and the Saudi General Intelligence Directorate were established while the GID was headed by Prince Turki bin Faisal al Saud, the eighth and last son of the late Saudi King Faisal and currently the Saudi ambassador in London.

Prince Turki served as the chief of Saudi intelligence from 1978 until 2001. The Twaik Group was formed in 1985, and Rawasin in 1998, according to business records on file in Saudi Arabia and elsewhere. In a March 18 letter faxed to the Tribune, Prince Turki stated only that "I have not developed any relationship with either group."

Less than two weeks before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the United States, the prince surprised observers by resigning after 23 years as head of Saudi intelligence. The official Saudi news agency said the resignation had been the prince's decision.

In a February 2002 speech to an alumni reunion at Georgetown University, his alma mater, Turki recalled having met with Osama bin Laden on five occasions in the late 1980s, at a time when both the Saudis and the U.S. were supporting bin Laden and other Muslims battling the Soviet army in Afghanistan.

Turki described bin Laden, whom he met in Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, as "a relatively pleasant man, very shy, softspoken."

If the BND's conclusions are correct, the linkage of Twaik to Saudi intelligence may resolve a question that has puzzled criminal investigators: Why would a conglomerate that then ranked 67th among all Saudi corporations choose a Muslim ideologue with no apparent business experience to manage its struggling rental-car operation in Bosnia-Herzegovina?

Those conclusions may also explain why a company whose operations within Saudi Arabia range from waste removal to the management of government hospitals undertook not one but two risky business ventures in the strife-torn Balkans, where several Saudi-based Muslim charities were spending tens of millions of dollars to aid the Muslim population.

EU Parliament: the terrorists' bank? (EU Parliament photo)

For the first time, EU authorities have admitted that their money might have been used for terrorism. From the EU Observer, with thanks to LGF.

Tens of thousands of euro of EU funds may have been diverted to people linked with Palestinian terrorism, according to a report from the European Parliament, obtained by the EUobserver.

The report cites documentary evidence seen by a Parliamentary working group- set up last year after allegations that EU funds to the Palestinian Authority (PA) had been misused - that between 21,500-39,000 US dollars of EU funds may have been transferred to terrorists.

It is the first time that the EU has judged its own funds to Palestine may not been used for their intended purpose.

The allegations relate to funds given by the EU directly to the Palestinian Authority account from June 2001 until December 2002.

What constitutes evidence?

The report details the work of a 13-member cross-party parliamentary group. It is due to be finalised this evening (31 March) behind closed doors and is, in many ways, inconclusive.

The group says it does not yet have enough evidence to show funds were transferred directly to terrorists, but can show that monies were transferred from the PA to members of the Fatah group, which is linked to the 'Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades' - a group on the EU's terror list.

The Israeli intelligence services say that evidence yielded from military operations in the Palestinian territories show 2.5 million euro which was "requested and delivered" to the PA fell into terrorists hands, of which 39,000 US dollars can be proven to have been actually paid out.

"Examination of the documents by the European Commission showed that payments to alleged Fatah activists had been authorised for a sum of 21,000 US dollars", according to the report.

Although it adds: "a link between the Palestinian Authority budget structure and the financing of Fatah is difficult to clearly picture".

Direct assistance

The EU paid around 10 million euro a month directly into the Palestinian Authority's budget during between June 2001 and December 2002 to help avert its financial collapse after Israel withheld tax transfers.

The retention of the tax left the authority unable to pay staff and pay for basic public services, promoting the EU and other international donors to step in.

The EU withdrew its direct assistance shortly after Israel resumed payments in June 2002.

The Parliamentary report backed the Commission's aim of propping up the PA but criticised the method chosen.

"The Commissioner [External Relations Commissioner Chris Patten] showed his best intentions in order to stabilise the situation and to encourage the reform of the PA institutions in a very difficult context".

However it does conclude: "Budgetary Assistance was not the most appropriate financial instrument to be implemented".

Sources taking part in the talks say there is still discussion over what constitutes evidence of funding terror which could change some details of the final text of the document.

It is not clear when the Parliament will publish the report.

Smiling at the massacre

From Reuters:

The United States vowed on Wednesday to stay the course in Iraq after three American contractors were killed in an ambush and their bodies dragged through the streets of Falluja in an incident reminiscent of the grisly fate of U.S. soldiers attacked in Somalia in 1993.

Four contractors to the U.S.-led Coalition Provisional Authority that has run Iraq since last year' U.S.-led invasion to oust Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein were attacked by guerrillas on a main road in the town, 32 miles (50 km) west of Baghdad.

A crowd of Iraqis then set the vehicles ablaze, hurled stones into the burning wreckage and dragged the charred and mutilated bodies through the streets of the town, a center of resistance to the U.S.-led occupation.

Television film of a similar incident in Somalia sickened Americans over the U.S. mission there and was a factor in the decision to pull U.S. forces from the African state.

In a separate incident on Wednesday, five U.S. soldiers died when a roadside bomb was detonated near their convoy west of Baghdad.

"These are horrific attacks by people who are trying to prevent democracy from moving forward, but democracy is taking root," said White House spokesman Scott McClellan, saying the United States would stick to a June 30 deadline to hand over power in Iraq to some sort of transitional Iraqi government.

"We mourn the loss of life and there is an important effort that is well under way in Iraq to provide the Iraqi people freedom and democracy and we will not turn back from that effort," McClellan said.

A U.S. official in Washington who did not wish to be named said that three of the four contractors were U.S. citizens.

Television pictures showed one incinerated body being kicked and stamped on by a member of the jubilant crowd, while others dragged a blackened body down the road by its feet.

As one body lay burning on the ground, an Iraqi came and doused it with petrol, sending flames soaring. At least two bodies were tied to cars and pulled through the streets, witnesses said.

The treatment of the four -- who appear to have been among the many civilian security contractors operating in Iraq, according to one U.S. official -- revived memories of the brutal treatment of U.S. soldiers in Somalia in 1993.

Somali militia fighters ambushed U.S. Army Rangers and special forces troops in bloody street battles on Oct. 3, 1993, that left 18 Americans dead. Some of their corpses were dragged through the dusty streets of Mogadishu by jubilant mobs.

President Bill Clinton later withdrew U.S. forces, who had originally been sent to Somalia on a humanitarian mission.

Hassan al-Turabi (AP)

A major jihad leader has been arrested in Sudan. From VOA News:

Sudan's security forces have arrested Islamic opposition leader Hassan al-Turabi and close to a dozen of his sympathizers and accused them of attempting to overthrow the government.

Authorities surrounded the home of the 72-year-old head of Sudan's Popular Congress Party and took him into custody during the early morning hours.

A leader of the Islamic movement in Sudan since the 1960s, Mr. al-Turabi has close personal ties to Osama bin Laden, and is said to be the mentor of al-Qaida number-two man Ayman al-Zawahri.

In 1989, Mr. al-Turabi's National Islamic Front took part in a coup that overthrew Sudan's elected government and set up a police state that drew worldwide condemnation for mass executions, torture of prisoners, and suppression of political freedoms.

But an expert on Sudan at Cairo's Al-Ahram newspaper, Asmaa el-Husseiny, says she interviewed Mr. al-Turabi on Monday and he denied any attempt to overthrow the government.

She says Mr. al-Turabi acknowledged the failure of the last coup, which led Sudan into civil war. He said rather than resort to armed insurgency again, he and his followers would continue to put non-violent pressure on the government to resolve disputes over territory, security and authority in the troubled regions of Sudan.

Rebels in the western Sudan's Darfur region have been battling government forces for over a year, creating a humanitarian catastrophe. Peace talks collapsed late last year, but a new round has opened in neighboring Chad.

Ms. el-Husseiny says the Sudanese government believes Mr. al-Turabi enjoys significant support among ethnic rebel groups in southern, eastern and western Sudan, and may have been inciting sedition within the military.

She says his arrest reflects an escalation of the political unrest throughout the country.

Prior to Wednesday's arrest, Mr. al-Turabi had spent nearly three years in custody but was released in October of last year.

Rowan Williams: will the friendship he seeks have any substance? (BBC)

Their crime? Possessing Bibles and other Christian material. From Ekklesia:

Four Christians have been arrested in Sharm El-Sheikh in Egypt after police found that they had Bibles and Christian music tapes in their possession, according to reports received by the Jubilee Campaign.

The four Christians - Peter Nady Kamel, Ishaq Dawoud Yassa, John Adel and Andrew Sa'id - all University students at Cairo or Minya Universities. They had gone together to the beach resort town of Sharm El-Sheikh, by the Red Sea, for a Christian retreat and stayed at a hotel.

They were arrested in their hotel rooms by local police at 9 a.m on January 26th 2004. Their rooms were searched and all their possessions confiscated. The four Christians have been charged with forming a group that threatens the national unity, social peace and national security. They appeared before the District Prosecutor on January 29 and March 28. Their next appearance before the Prosecutor is scheduled for May 8 and their detention has been extended at least till that date.

Jubilee Campaign believes it is highly likely that the Christians have been wrongly accused of having the Bibles and Christian tapes for the purposes of evangelising Muslims, since such actions are often condemned by the authorities as "threatening national unity".

Pope Shenouda the Third, Patriarch of the Coptic Orthodox Church in Egypt, mentioned briefly the arrest of the Christians in a speech, but did not say who the detained Christians were. In that same speech Pope Shenouda publicly condemned the kidnapping of Christian girls at supermarkets. These girls are falsely told that they have won a prize and to go upstairs to collect it. When they go to collect it, they are kidnapped for forced conversion to Islam.

The families of the kidnapped girls met with Pope Shenouda on Sunday March 21st and had a second meeting with him on Thursday March 25th. At the second meeting, Colonel Ahmad Mostafa, a police officer with special responsibilities for affairs of the Christian community, was present. He listened to the families' accounts regarding the kidnapping of their family members but did not make any comments.

The Christian human rights organisation, Jubilee Campaign, has been campaigning for kidnapped Egyptian Christian girls for several years and believe that the forced conversion of Egyptian Christians to Islam is an escalating problem, fuelled by police and government indifference to the plight of Christian kidnap victims.

Jubilee Campaign's Researcher and Parliamentary Officer, Wilfred Wong, said; " While Jubilee Campaign welcomes the police officer's willingness to meet with the families of kidnap victims, we know that the Egyptian authorities have in the past shown apparent concern for the problems of Egyptian Christians, only to end up doing nothing concrete about it. We therefore intend to continue lobbying the Egyptian government regarding the kidnapping of Christians until they actually ensure that the victims are returned to their families and the kidnappers are punished.

"We are also campaigning for the release of the four detained Egyptian Christians. It is unusual for Egyptian Christians to get into trouble just for having Bibles and Christian tapes in their possession and these arrests signify an increasing willingness by the police to detain Christians on the slightest pretext."

Meanwhile, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, has opened a Christian-Muslim dialogue meeting with high hopes for a "deepening of understanding and of friendship between us." Will he ask his Muslim dialogue partners, in the interests of friendship, to denounce the persecution and harassment of Christians in Egypt?

Bhokin Bhalakula

The Thai jihad continues apace. From Reuters:

Heavily armed raiders stole a large quantity of explosives from a quarry in Thailand's largely Muslim south, just days after a bomb attack in the region and prompting fears of another, officials said on Wednesday.

"With this amount of fertilizer, you could blow up a whole town," Pallop Pinmanee, deputy chief of the Internal Security Operations Command, told Reuters at the scene of the robbery, which included 1.4 tonnes of ammonium nitrate.

The government ordered a full alert, not only in three provinces near the Malaysian border under martial law since January, but also two more along the frontier ahead of next month's Thai New Year celebrations which draw many Malaysians.

"These people are apparently seeking to destabilize the situation and hurt the tourism industry," Interior Minister Bhokin Bhalakula told reporters.

"We have ordered a full alert for government installations, public places and tourist resorts in many areas," he said after 10 masked men armed with AK-47 and M-16 assault rifles raided the quarry in Libon, 70 km (40 miles) from the Malaysian border.

They made off with 1.4 tonnes of ammonium nitrate used in making explosives for blasting, 58 sticks of dynamite and 180 detonators, police said.

The Manu Rock Grinding Co quarry was closed when the raid took place on Tuesday evening with only two security guards on duty and the raiders went straight to the separate, poorly locked sheds where each item was kept, they said.

That suggested they knew exactly what they were looking for and where to find it, they added.

SEPARATIST FEARS

Bhokin said the alert covered the southern commercial hub of Hat Yai and the west coast town of Satun which draw thousands of Malaysian tourists during Thailand's Songkran New Year celebrations from April 13 to 15.

"There is a possibility that they might act before or during Songkran," he said.

The two towns are in different provinces from the three put under martial law in January after armed men killed four soldiers and stole many weapons, including M-16s, in a raid on an army camp in the area in January.

Since then, 60 people, most of them officials and police but including three Buddhist monks, have been killed in a surge of violence some officials think marks a revival of a low-key separatist war fought in the 1970s and 1980s.

Fears the violence could escalate have risen sharply since a motorcycle bomb wounded 28 people, including eight Malaysians, at a karaoke bar in the border town of Sungai Kolok on Saturday.

That was the first major attack aimed at civilians since the raid on the army camp and the government believes it marked a shift in tactics.

"They have intensified their campaign, raising the level of violence and aiming at tourist spots so as to drive tourists away," Bhokin said of an industry which draws 10 million foreigners a year and accounts for six percent of gross domestic product.

"We are now trying to read their minds to find out where they will strike next to stop tourists from coming."

A forensics expert collects evidence at a suicide bombing site in Israel (AP)

Is suicide bombing really all about economic and social grievances? From MEMRI: "The London-based Arabic daily Al-Sharq Al-Awsat published the story of a member of the Islamic terrorist organization Ansar Al-Islam, who planned to blow himself up in the Interior Ministry building in Al-Suleimaniya, but was arrested by the Kurdish authorities. The Kurdish security authorities accuse Ansar Al-Islam of attacking American forces and their allies in Iraq and of responsibility for the suicide bombings at the headquarters of the Kurdish Democratic Party (KDP) and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) in early February, which killed 109 people. On March 23, 2004 the U.S. government officially listed Ansar Al-Islam as a terrorist organization. The following are excerpts from the article: [1]"

Recruitment Tactics of Ansar Al-Islam

"Kaywan Qader, 18-years old, grew up in Al-Suleimaniya. He was one of 10 brothers and sisters of a moderately religious family. His mother did not wear a veil and he prayed [only] once a day in the mosque where he met someone named Sawara Ahmad Ali, who later became his recruiter to Ansar Al-Islam. Qader says that Sawara Ali discussed religion with him and told him that it was his duty to carry out Jihad operations against the KDP and that prayer alone was not sufficient. He stressed to him the necessity to join Jihad in order to become a good Muslim. Qader says that he greatly fears Allah and that Ali exploited that.

"It was the year 2001, Ansar Al-Islam had not been established as of yet, and Ali was a member of one of the offshoots of the Islamist Movement in Kurdistan. The group was established in December of that year, and in 2003 the American and Kurdish forces in northern Iraq attacked its bases, its members fled to Iran where they regrouped and then infiltrated back into Iraq to join the fight against the American-led occupation. Later, Ali was able to convince Qader that Jihad would offer him paradise and save him from hell. Qader agreed to join Ali in one of the villages to prepare himself for Jihad, and all of his father's efforts to dissuade him from that failed. Qader told his father that Allah's wish supercedes the family's wish. He joined a camp where about 400 members of the group were training, but his father persuaded him to return [home] promising him a possible job ... but he continued his training with the rest of the members.

"Qader says that the Kurdish and American forces carried out an intensive attack on the group's position on the eve of the war against Iraq, which forced the survivors to infiltrate into Iran where he was arrested and returned to the border. But he was able to enter Iran again, where he stayed for a month."

'Suicide Mission is the Highest Level of Jihad'

"In the camp, Qader was paid $22 per month. He agreed to carry out a suicide mission because he was told that it is 'the highest level of Jihad.' Ali sent his name to the group's command in Biyara, their stronghold in the mountainous area adjacent to Iran.

72 Virgins in Paradise

"Another detainee who spent time in Ansar Al-Islam's camp says that they listened to lectures where they were told that [each of] the Shuhadaa [martyrs] will find 72 virgins [waiting for him] in paradise. He added that the group has what is known as 'TNT camps' where the suicide bombers wear protective jackets and are trained on how to blow themselves at the right location.

"Umar Fattah, the KDP's head of security, says that Ansar Al-Islam uses C4 explosives which are more powerful than TNT. He added that Ansar Al-Islam creates groups of 3-8 youngsters between the ages of 15 and 25, who participate in one month of lectures, brainwashing, and intensive military training.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

[1] Al-Sharq Al-Awsat (London), March 18, 2004.

Background on the jihad in Uzbekistan, from Asia Times. Note that the jihadis were from middle-class families:

Recent reports

Prior to the recent terror attacks in Uzbekistan which claimed at least 19 lives, a spate of reports from the region shows ongoing Islamist activity and law-enforcement efforts to contain it. One report details the state of affairs in the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU) in Pakistan and Afghanistan. Other reports suggest that Hizb ut-Tahrir al-Islami (Party of Islamic Liberation - HT), an organization that now stands at the center of concerns over rising Islamist activity in Central Asia, is increasingly tailoring its recruiting efforts to match local dynamics in Tajikistan and Kazakhstan, targeting individuals from the dominant ethnic group with a higher education and ties to state institutions.

In Tajikistan, the authorities arrested a group of HT activists in Khujand in February. Various reports placed the number of individuals detained between 14 and 22. Tribune.uz, an independent Internet publication funded by George Soros' Open Society foundation, reported on February 25 that the men were all aged 20-22 and from middle-class families. Moreover, they were all ethnic Tajiks "whose parents came from the most 'Tajik of regions' of southern Tajikistan". Previously, ethnic Uzbeks and Uzbek citizens from the Ferghana Valley had figured prominently in reports of HT activity in Tajikistan. Asia Plus-Blitz also reported that three of the activists were relatives of officials in the Kulob city government and prosecutor's office.

In Kazakhstan, a court in Shymkent sentenced 23-year-old Nurzhan Zhakipov to three years in prison for HT activities on March 2. In a March 3 report, Kazinform contrasted the Zhakipov case with another HT-related incident in November 2003: "Not long ago in Shymkent, Arysi, and a number of other regions in the southern Kazakhstan Okrug, some 20 HT members were tried. In November, they took to the streets for an unsanctioned demonstration in which their organization called for the overthrow of [Uzbek President Islam] Karimov's regime. They were fined 18,900 tenges [US$135] each; two participants who resisted arrest were sentenced to 10 days in jail. The majority of the people who have been 'nabbed' in connection with HT are poorly educated and ignorant. This is why Zhakipov so surprised the journalists at his trial - he is a man from an urban family who attended Soviet school and received a higher education ..." A March 5 report in Kazakhstanskaya Pravda noted that "while the recruitment activities of HT emissaries in Kazakhstan initially focused on low-income individuals, recent efforts have targeted potential members among government officials, law-enforcement authorities, well-off businessmen, intellectuals, and students".

In Kyrgyzstan, on February 17, a court in Bishkek sentenced two IMU members - both Uzbek citizens - to death for their role in a December 2002 explosion at a Bishkek market that killed seven people. A March 2 report in Vechernii Bishkek described how "unofficial" mullahs - possibly with HT ties - in the southern Aravan region were inculcating the tenets of radical Islam in young people. According to the report, if 100-120 young people in the area are receiving a religious education from "official clerics", an equal number is learning different lessons from what the article terms "nontraditionalists".

A March 1 report by Deutsche Welle focused on IMU members, many of whom fled to Pakistan after the US-led antiterrorist operation smashed the Taliban movement, and with it the IMU's stronghold in Afghanistan. According to the report, a group of approximately 120 militants has relocated to Pakistan's northern Balochistan province. The group consists of fighters from Central Asia, Tatarstan, ethnic Russian converts to Islam, and people from the Caucasus; many of them are IMU members. Operating in groups of 25-30, they have recently moved to mountainous regions of Pakistan, including the city of Quetta, capital of Balochistan province.

The same report featured an interview with a former IMU member, who said that the IMU's leaders now reside in Wana, Pakistan - scene of the recent Pakistani military operations to track down al-Qaeda and other foreign fighters seeking refuge in the tribal regions. The movement's key leader remains Tahir Yuldashev. His first deputy for financial affairs is Dilshod Hojiyev. The military commander is Ulug'bek Holik, who also goes under the name Mohammed Ayub. All of the men are originally from Uzbekistan's Namangan Oblast.

The IMU maintains a number of unofficial daftars, or offices, in Tajikistan, Afghanistan, Iran, Pakistan and Turkey. An office in the Pakistani port city of Karachi handles financial contributions, primarily from Arab countries. According to the main source for the report, a 34-year-old Uzbek native of Navoiy Oblast who recently took advantage of an amnesty offer and returned home from Pakistan, the fighters also earn money on their own "through military operations financed by Pakistani special services against American forces in Afghanistan and through raids in Kashmir".

The source also told Deutsche Welle that a split had taken place in the IMU, with a group of combat-weary fighters rebelling against Yuldashev. In order to combat the dissenters, Yuldashev apparently summoned Ilhom Hojiyev, also known as Commander Abdurahmon, from Tajikistan. Ilhom Hojiyev is the cousin of Juma (aka Jumaboi) Namangani, the IMU military commander believed (not confirmed) to have been killed when the Taliban fell in late 2001.

In Uzbekistan itself, harsh measures against any hint of Islamist activity remain the order of the day, with courts routinely meting out long prison terms for any real or suspected HT involvement. But with severe restrictions on the media, the situation is difficult to gauge. Human rights organizations charge that some 5,000 political prisoners are better characterized as victims of a repressive regime than as wild-eyed Islamists intent on installing a fundamentalist regime of their own. Meanwhile, Uzbekistan's role as a strategic partner of the United States in the "war on terror" has politicized the debate over the threat of radical Islam, often to the detriment of dispassionate analysis.

Who is responsible for all this? No clue from this article. From News24.com:

The number of anti-Semitic attacks in Europe has soared in recent years, according to a report by the EU's racism watchdog on Wednesday which singled out five countries for particular concern.

Belgium, Germany, France, the Netherlands and Britain have seen a notable rise in anti-Jewish attacks over the last two or three years, said the European Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia (EUMC) report.

Most countries also saw worrying trends, it said, although few problems were recorded in four countries: Ireland, Luxembourg, Portugal and Finland.

"Europe has a problem with anti-Semitism, manifestations of which have been getting more frequent in some parts of the EU over the last two or three years," said the EUMC in a report presented to the European Parliament.

The report comes after the EU held a high-level conference in February to clamp down on anti-Semitism --a "monster" that Jewish leaders warned had returned with a vengeance to the continent six decades after the Holocaust.

That conference was hastily organised after a shock opinion poll in November which found that Europeans believe Israel is the biggest threat to world peace.

The 344-page report by the Vienna-based EUMC was the first time that data have been collected systematically across the European Union, which expands from 15 to 25 members on May 1.

Areas of concern highlighted by the study, focussed on 2002 and 2003, include:

• in Belgium "a catalogue of incidents of varying extremity ... including the firebombing of Jewish property and some serious physical assaults."

• in Germany most acts were verbal rather than physical. Jewish groups reported increasing numbers of letters, emails and phone calls from 2002.

• in the Netherlands anti-Semitic acts increased "significantly" in particular in Amsterdam which has a relative large Jewish community.

• in Britain there were violent attacks on two synagogues, two cases of suspected arson and several attacks on Jewish cemeteries.

• in France there was a six-fold increase in anti-Semitic incidents in 2002. "There were many incidents of Jewish people assaulted and insulted, attacks against synagogues, cemeteries and other Jewish property," it said.

So who is responsible? Here's a hint.

Iqbal Sacranie (BBC)

What? You mean they haven't been doing this all along? From ABC:

Britain's Muslim leaders are urging followers of Islam to cooperate with the authorities to fight terrorism.

There is fear in the Muslim community that it will be stigmatised following the arrest of eight suspected terrorists and the seizure of half a tonne of the bomb making ingredient ammonium nitrate fertiliser.

The Muslim Council of Britain is concerned the public is already linking terrorism to followers of Islam.

I appreciate this concern. The MCB would have an easier task ahead if there weren't so many Muslims linking terrorism to followers of Islam.

General Secretary Iqbal Sacranie has reiterated that attacks like the recent bombings in Madrid are not sanctioned or supported by the wider Islamic community.

He is calling on Muslims to be vigilant and report any suspicious activities to police.

Prime Minister Tony Blair has congratulated Mr Sacranie for his public appeal.

Tashkent checkpoint (AP)

More Uzbek jihad. From AP:

An explosion ripped through a district of the Uzbek capital Wednesday evening and caused casualties, according to a report, apparently the latest incident in a wave of terrorist-related violence that has gripped the city.

Interfax news agency reported the blast hit the Sabir-Rakhimovski district, which is in northern Tashkent. Interior Ministry anti-terrorism department deputy chief Ilya Pyagay said that police were carrying out an operation in that neighborhood. He gave no further details.

That area is not far from the scene of fighting Tuesday that officials said left 23 people dead, including three police officers.

A Western security official also said he had been informed of a blast, and that people had seen fire trucks racing to the area. Witnesses also reported seeing police cars speeding through the city center toward the Sabir-Rakhimovski district.

Prosecutor-General spokeswoman Svetlana Artikova, however, said that no new outbreaks of violence had occurred in the city.

Russia's ITAR-Tass news agency earlier reported that a blast also struck a residential building in the Fergana Valley city of Andijan overnight, citing police sources. The explosion could have been an accident, but police weren't ruling out terrorism. Officials declined to confirm the report.

The reported Tashkent blast came at the end of a day where police scoured the capital in pursuit of fugitive militants, and reportedly arrested at least 30. A police official said those in custody so far were adherents of the strict Wahhabi Islamic sect, which was believed to have inspired Osama bin Laden, not members of an extremist group President Islam Karimov has implied were behind the attacks.

At least 42 people have been killed in terrorist-related violence that began Sunday in Uzbekistan — the first unrest here since this Central Asian nation became a key U.S. ally in the war on terror.

Oleg Bichenov, Tashkent city police anti-terrorism deputy chief, declined to confirm how many had been arrested so far.

"The number (of the arrested) will be changing, and I hope it will be going up," he told The Associated Press. "We are continuing to search for suspects and making arrests."

Earlier, a Western security official in Tashkent told AP on condition of anonymity that police and security officers were looking for five suspects.

Nineteen people were killed and 26 wounded on Sunday and Monday in violence that included the first suicide bombings in this Central Asian nation. On Tuesday, 23 people died as Uzbek forces battled for hours with suspected terrorists, and were struck by two suicide attacks.

All the attacks appeared to target Uzbek authorities.

The U.S. Embassy in Tashkent said no new violence was reported Wednesday in the country. However, the Friendship Bridge linking Uzbekistan to Afghanistan — where access already is strictly controlled — had been closed to all except diplomatic traffic, it said.

An embassy annex office remained closed, although visa operations resumed. Americans were urged to be on "highest alert," as the situation remained unclear.

Bichenov said those in custody were being questioned at length — but that interrogations so far found that none were members of the Hizb ut-Tahrir extremist group. Instead, he said the suspects were aligned with the Wahhabi sect of Islam.

On Monday, Kadyrov told journalists that religious literature from Hizb ut-Tahrir and the Wahhabi sect had been found at an alleged terrorist bomb-making factory in the central region of Bukhara.

Hizb ut-Tahrir — which claims to disavow violence, while not explicitly ruling it out in its quest to create an Islamic state across the world — has never been linked to any terrorist attacks. Its office in Britain, where the group is allowed to operate openly, denied responsibility for events in Uzbekistan.

From AP, and DC Watson:

Jubilant residents dragged the charred corpses of four foreign contractors, one a woman, at least one an American through the streets Wednesday and hanged them from the bridge spanning the Euphrates River. Five American soldiers died in a roadside bombing nearby.

The four contract workers for the U.S.-led coalition were killed in a rebel ambush of their SUVs in Fallujah, a Sunni Triangle city about 35 miles west of Baghdad and scene of some of the worst violence on both sides of the conflict since the beginning of the American occupation a year ago.

It was reminiscent of the 1993 scene in Somalia, when a mob dragged the corpse of a U.S. soldier through the streets of Mogadishu, eventually leading to the American withdrawal from the African nation.

In one of the bloodiest days for the U.S. military this year, five 1st Infantry Division soldiers died when their M-113 armored personnel carrier ran over a bomb in a separate incident 12 miles to the northwest, among the reed-lined roads running through some of Iraq's richest farmland.

Residents said the bomb attack occurred in Malahma, 12 miles northwest of Fallujah, where anti-U.S. insurgents are active. U.S. Marines operate in the area, but it was unclear whether the slain troops were Marines.

In the deadliest previous incident this year, nine soldiers were killed when their Black Hawk medevac helicopter crashed near Fallujah, apparently after being shot down.

In Baghdad, Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt said the four killed in Fallujah were contractors working with the coalition. He did not say what they were doing in the city.

Chanting ''Fallujah is the graveyard of Americans,'' residents cheered after the grisly assault on two four-wheel-drive civilian vehicles, which left both in flames. Others chanted, ''We sacrifice our blood and souls for Islam.''

From The Washington Times, :

The terrorist groups Hamas and Lebanon-based Hezbollah have opened offices in Iraq and are recruiting young men in the cities of Basra and Nasariyah, says the executive director of the American Islamic Congress.

"They have been recruiting young people. They pay them a little money and teach them their ideology," said Zainab al-Suwaij, who has been in Iraq for 10 months and travels in the country extensively under a U.S. Agency for International Development education contract.

But surely the vast majority of moderate Muslims will overwhelm these extremists with the peaceful teachings of the Qur'an, and doom their recruitment efforts to failure, right?

Some conflict resolution going on in Ottawa

More on the Ottawa raids from CP:

An Ottawa man was charged Tuesday with two terrorism-related offences after police raids at his home and office, while shocked family members insisted upon his innocence.

Sounds like they're reading the playbook.

Mohammad Momim Khawaja, 29, was arrested Monday at his workplace and charged with participating in or contributing to the activities of a terrorist group and facilitating terrorist activity, the RCMP said in a release. The charges fall under Canada's anti-terrorism law.

Television reports said the Canadian-born Khawaja, a software developer, worked on contract for the Department of Foreign Affairs.

Qasim Khawaja, Mohammad Momim Khawaja's 26-year-old brother, said there was no evidence of terrorist activities in the home for police to find.

"I guess it's part of someone's sick imagination," he said Tuesday.

"They are looking for something that doesn't exist. They want to fabricate or create it somehow," he said.

"I'm just shocked they would authorize something like this. I would say it's a sad, sad day for Canadian democracy." ...

The Ottawa home is owned by Dr. Mahboob A. Khawaja, the author of Muslims and the West, a book about Islamic fundamentalism that analyses global conflicts within the framework of Muslim civilization.

Mahboob Khawaja has also authored several other essays critical of American foreign policy, "corrupt Arab leadership," "American-Zionist political encroachment in the Middle East," and the West's response to terrorism and the war on terror.

He was once listed as a policy adviser and faculty member of International Affairs, Politics and Religions at Syracuse University but is currently in Saudi Arabia where he is the administrator of a polytechnical institute.

Mohammad Momim Khawaja's mother, Azra, was also detained Monday at a grocery store while his 18-year-old brother Mohsin was escorted away from the University of Ottawa where he is a student. Another brother, Tanzeel, 20, was detained when he arrived at the house later in the day.

The family was later released and put up in a hotel Monday night.

Feisal Abdul Rauf

From Australia's Catholic News, with thanks to Jean-Luc:

Cardinal George Pell of Sydney will welcome Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf to St Mary’s Cathedral tomorrow for a lunchtime Interfaith Prayer Service.

Imam Feisal is visiting Sydney at the invitation of Premier Bob Carr, who will also be in attendance at the Service.

Stressing that Imam Feisal is welcome at St Mary's, Cardinal Pell said: "One of the ambitions of Pope John Paul II is to encourage dialogue between mainstream and moderate Muslims, particularly with Catholics, but also with all Christians and all people of good will."

“He has an interesting set of views and we look forward to hearing more from him," said Cardinal Pell. “The stakes are very high. In our own small way we are talking about war or peace. Our Catholic and Christian faith compels us to work for peace.”

That's swell, but is Feisal Abdul Rauf really a good dialogue partner for Cardinal Pell? Abdul Rauf has said: "The Islamic method of waging war is not to kill innocent civilians. But it was Christians in World War II who bombed civilians in Dresden and Hiroshima, neither of which were military targets."

This is outrageously specious, but it depends on the ignorance of the listeners. The bombings of Dresden and Hiroshima were not justified by the bombers on the basis of Christian theology. The bombings by terrorists -- 9/11, 3/11, etc. -- are justified on the basis of Islamic theology. By claiming that they are equivalent, Abdul Rauf obscures the Islamic roots of modern-day terrorism, thus hindering the prospects for the reform within Islam that is so desperately needed if jihad terrorism is ever going to cease.

He has also said, according to the Sun Herald, that "there could be little progress until the US acknowledged backing dictators and the US President gave an 'America Culpa' speech to the Muslim world." Of course. The historical depredations of jihad, they were all the fault of the West. The fall of Constantinople? Probably because of Byzantium's support for Israel.

Zoud: What's the big deal?

Why would Zoud have called Abu Qatada? Isn't Abu Qatada an exponent of the tiny minority of extremists who have perverted Islam? From The Australian, with thanks to Jean-Luc:

IT'S late at night and Abdul Salam Zoud has a problem. The leader of Sydney's Islamic fundamentalists needs prompt answers to some serious and specific questions.

His fellow clerics around Australia are sound asleep or uncontactable.

So he telephones one of al-Qaeda's most dangerous figures halfway across the world.

Sheikh Zoud sees nothing wrong with speaking with Abu Qatada - accused of providing a British safehaven for terrorists, including the chief suspect in the Madrid train bombings. He knows nothing of these claims. Qatada, now detained as part of Britain's war on terror, is an expert in Islamic divorce and Sheikh Zoud needs his guidance.

This is Sheikh Zoud's explanation of a series of events that has led to him being named this month as a terrorist recruiter.

He denies claims in a French secret dossier that he is a recruiter for jihad in Australia and has links with terrorists around the world.

Prepared by a top anti-terrorism judge in France, the dossier is based on interrogations with jailed French terrorist suspect Willie Brigitte.

Zoud, by the way, is the guy who isn't sure that Osama bin Laden is guilty of the 9/11 attacks, despite Osama's boasting about them.

A controversy in Pakistan centers over jihad in the textbooks. From HiPakistan:

The religious parties in Pakistan are at loggerheads with the government on yet another issue: the so-called "exclusion" of some Quranic verses from the biology textbook for Intermediate classes. What has annoyed the MMA?

It all began three weeks ago when in reply to a question in the National Assembly, the federal education minister explained that the inclusion of Quranic verses is not a requirement of the curriculum.

While replying to a supplementary, the parliamentary secretary further provoked the self-appointed guardians of our morals, when he attempted to reinforce the minister's argument by questioning the relevance of the excluded verses to biology.

This created quite a rumpus in the House and the opposition staged a walk-out. It was later persuaded to return to the chamber to hear the information minister dutifully tender an apology and the education minister assure the House that no change was made in the curricula on any external pressure.

But, intriguingly, the controversy has refused to die down. A fortnight later the Punjab teachers union announced its decision to launch a protest movement from Gujranwala from April 15 if the verses, which pertain to jihad, were not reinstated.

It has been reported that at the heart of this controversy is a report released by the SDPI, an independent think tank. Titled The Subtle Subversion: The State of Curricula and Textbooks in Pakistan, this report, which draws extensively from the research on the subject by Dr Rubina Saigol, an educational sociologist, without adequately and specifically acknowledging it, points out that the curricula and textbooks in Pakistan were insensitive to the existing religious diversity of the nation, incited militancy and violence, and encouraged prejudice, bigotry and discrimination towards fellow-citizens, especially women and religious minorities.

The religious parties are not too pleased that the curricula prescribed by the curriculum wing of the Ministry of Education and the books produced by the textbook boards have come under the spotlight.

Since the days when General Ziaul Haq used his authority backed by military power to induct religion into every sphere of national life and then use it to perpetuate a narrow right-wing ideology, the public sector education system in the country has been harnessed to promote a mindset which upholds retrogressive values.

But why was no notice taken of this state of affairs before? The fact is that for at least two decades the media has been trying to draw the attention of the authorities to the dismal state of the textbooks and the distortions in their contents. But all the editorials and articles have proved to be a cry in the wilderness.

Much before the SDPI commissioned this report, Dr Rubina Saigol wrote a profoundly insightful paper, "The boundaries of consciousness: interface between the curriculum, gender and nationalism" in a book called Locating the Self (published by ASR, Lahore, in 1994).

In this paper she showed with several examples how our textbooks construct India and Hindus as enemies and how they incite permanent enmity, hatred and alienation with India. The author's contention was that these books promote militarism and violence and indirectly justify a heavy defence expenditure.

Tamer Khawireh (AP)

While Mohammed Dockrat dresses his 6-year-old son in a mock suicide bomber jacket and then pontificates about how Palestinians would never really use a child in a suicide attack, Islamic Jihad tried to recruit a 15-year-old for just such an attack. Nor is he the only one. From the Jerusalem Post:

On Sunday, 15-year-old Tamer Khawireh ran home and buried his head in his mother's arms. Sobbing, he repeated over and over: "They tricked me, they tricked me."

Islamic Jihad had recruited Khawireh to be a suicide bomber for martyrdom and limitless virgins thereafter.

Khawireh is one of four Nablus boys recruited by terrorist groups and then arrested for an attempted suicide attack against Israel in the past month. And with the city's mayor forced out of office by threats, a police force long-since imploded, and a population at best ambivalent about suicide attacks, nothing seems able to hinder the recruitment.

"I want to stay here with you, I want to be part of this life," cried the boy, as recounted Tuesday by his eldest brother, Raed. An Islamic Jihad religious leader had wooed the youth, captivating him with the prospects of heaven's rivers of honey and the beautiful women he would find there.

A few hours after Khawireh's confession to Raed, IDF troops swooped down on the family's Nablus home, arresting him and another young man. Both remain in Israeli detention.

Like the other boys his age, Khawireh was easily bought. NIS 100, a new set of clothes, a cellphone, and some cigarettes had done the trick. One day Raed caught his brother smoking and using the phone. "I cuffed him and he promised to give the phone back," said Raed.

"Am I not a rich man?" asked Khawireh's stunned father, Massoud, on Tuesday, as he passed out pictures of his son to reporters in his upper middle class home.

Massoud said he called Islamic Jihad to demand an explanation. They apologized, lamely arguing that they mistook the gawky 10th grader for an 18-year old. They then promised not to do it again, said Massoud.

He and Raed believe the Islamic Jihad, or collaborators with Israel embedded within the group, fingered his younger son after it became clear that he chose life.

Khawireh's family called on the Palestinian Authority to launch an investigation to find out who is responsible for recruiting children.

"We discovered the plan only three hours before my brother was supposed to set out on the suicide mission," Raed said. "It's clear that he had been manipulated by suspicious elements and people who do not represent the Palestinian resistance."

The brother said that, a few days before the arrest, he discovered that Khawireh was smoking. "I had a serious talk with him and asked him to stop smoking, because it was something he had never done before," he added.

"But a day before he was arrested, I saw him in the city center, and he was talking on a cellphone and smoking. I was very angry with him and told him to go home immediately. I questioned him about the cellphone, and he said that it belonged to one of his friends who gave it to him to repair."

The following morning, the family's suspicions grew when they discovered that the boy did not show up for school. When Khawireh returned home later that evening, his brothers started questioning him about the reason for his absence from school.

"When he saw how worried we were, he broke into tears and said, 'They have fooled me, they have deceived me,' " Raed recalled. "He told us that the armed wing of Islamic Jihad was trying to recruit him for a suicide mission and that he had retracted and decided to return home. They tried to brainwash him, exploiting his young age and innocence. To a certain extent, they were successful."

Uzair Dockrat, wearing his suicide bomber jacket, and his dad (Shayne Robinson, Sapa)

LGF has posted a couple of revealing articles about a South Africa boy who wants to grow up to be a suicide bomber. First, from AllAfrica.com:

This six-year-old boy, dressed as a Palestinian suicide bomber, complete with a belt of fake explosives strapped to his body, says he wants to go to heaven - and his father says his child wants to be a martyr.

Uzair Dockrat was taken by his father Mohammad to yesterday's march in Pretoria, organised by the Muslim community to voice anger at the killing of Hamas founder Sheik Ahmed Yassin in Gaza City last week. ...

After prompting from his father, Uzair swore revenge on Israel for the killing. According to his father, Uzair expressed a wish to become a martyr.

"Martyrs are heroes ... they go to heaven," Uzair said.

"They (Israel) kill our people with tanks and helicopters. We can blow them up," he said.

Mohammad Dockrat said his son's costume was a "symbolic act of self-defence" against Israeli aggression.

"We are violent towards those who are violent towards us, and in this case, Israel is the aggressor," he said.

Dockrat defended Uzair's costume, arguing it was not intended to encourage violence, but "is a statement against the unlawful Israeli occupation of Palestine".

According to Dockrat, little Uzair would prefer to strive for victory through justice rather than violence.

"He understands the status of a martyr, but will rather see justice instead," he said.

Mmm-hmm. Onlookers seem to have missed these nuances:

Uzair was told by an unidentified adult protester: "You will be a martyr one day."

Note also the Left's cooperation with Islamic radicalism:

A few hundred protesters gathered in Lynnwood, Pretoria, before marching to the Israeli embassy.

The march was supported by the SA Communist Party, the Pan Africanist Congress and the Muslim Youth Movement.

Meanwhile, another story reveals that Uzair's father is not a desperately poor, oppressed individual with no other recourse but suicide bombing. On the contrary, he is a "university lecturer."

Mohammed Dockrat, a university lecturer, said: "Muslim children in South Africa have been aware of the attack on Islam since the war in Afghanistan.

"They saw other children being killed and maimed and are very aware of who the enemy is."

The academic said his son, Uzair, decided to wear the jacket to a protest march in Pretoria attended by about 300 Muslims.

Yet while encouraging this attitude in his son, Mohammed Dockrat shows a keen awareness of how to speak to Western reporters:

"I don't think we should make too much of the jacket. As an adult, he will have a better understanding.

"To me, the fact that he wore it symbolises that one can kill one generation, but there will always be a next generation to continue the struggle."

Dockrat said he didn't want his sons to be pacifists and he wanted them to be able to defend themselves.

He agreed there could be negative feelings towards Jewish friends in South Africa.

"But if you see what is happening in Jewish communities here, how they send their children for military training in Israel, then it seems to me that our children should be the ones to be afraid and not the other way around."

And despite his encouraging his son to glorify those who murder civilians, he has the gall to claim the moral high ground and repeat Al-Jazeera's wild claim that the Israelis fabricated the recent story about a teenage would-be suicide bomber:

Dockrat claims the recent case of a Palestinian teenager, wearing a suicide jacket, being arrested at an Israeli checkpoint, was an Israeli set-up.

"The Hamas group never uses children in suicide-bomb attacks and it occurs mostly on buses where there is a civilian target.

"We do not use children in the struggle, this is a principal of Jihad (holy war)."

More on those eight terror suspects arrested near London, who, according to British officials, just happened to be Muslim and could very well have been Buddhist or Amish. From The Scotsman, with thanks to Nicolei:

Police today seized more than half a tonne of ammonium nitrate fertiliser which could have been used to carry out a terror bombing on UK soil.

Eight suspected Islamic terrorists, all British citizens of Pakistani descent, were arrested as 700 officers carried out 24 raids across London and the Home Counties.

Anti-terrorist detectives believe an al Qaida-supporting cell could have been plotting a “spectacular” attack.

The fertiliser – a key bomb-making ingredient – would have been enough to cause a blast on the same scale as the 1996 IRA bombs at South Quay, station, Canary Wharf in London, and the Arndale Centre in Manchester.

Ammonium nitrate fertiliser, which requires a “booster” explosive to set it off, is believed to have been used by al Qaida in an attack on the US embassy in Nairobi in 1998 and in the first World Trade Centre bombing in New York in 1993.

It was the major ingredient in the biggest of the bombs used by Islamic terrorists in Bali which killed 202 people in 2002 and was also used in bombings against British targets in Istanbul last year and in the 1995 Oklahoma bombing. ...

The neighbour added: “They were very religious. They never mixed with other people. They never spoke to us.”

Unless the Muslim community worldwide confronts the reasons why terrorism grows worldwide among Muslims who are "very religious," terrorism will continue to grow and thrive in that community.

Jihad Watch is pleased to announce the publication of a new Indonesian edition of Jihad Watch director Robert Spencer's book Islam Unveiled. It is entitled Islam Ditelanjangi: Pertanyaan-Pertanyaan Subversif Seputar Doktrin dan Tradisi Kaum Muslim.

Thanks to publisher Paramadina and translator Mun'im A. Sirry. We applaud your courage and thank you for not caving in to intimidation and threats like the French.

Baker: now in Bahrain

"Islamic countries can save the West from its moral decay." Who said it? Bill Baker, who, according to the Orange County Weekly, "has resurfaced as a frequent guest speaker at Muslim functions across North America despite articles in OC Weekly in 2002 that outed the Laguna Hills resident as the former head of the neo-Nazi Populist Party and led to his ouster as a close associate to the Reverend Robert Schuller of Garden Grove’s Crystal Cathedral."

The MSA has hosted Baker at Western Michigan University.

Note the similarities of the soothing syrup of peace and harmony between Muslims and Christians that Baker peddles and that which is sold by American Muslim advocacy groups. Neither face the harsh realities of the persecution of Christians by Muslims, or lingering dhimmitude.

From the Gulf Daily News, with thanks to Nicolei:

ISLAMIC countries should come to the rescue of the Western world which is suffering from moral decay and deterioration, says a top US scholar and writer.

Muslims and Christians should join hands in the pursuit of peace, freedom, justice and moral values, said California-based Christians and Muslims for Peace (CAMP) president Professor Bill Baker.

No country, irrespective of its military and money power, can exist if its moral values are deteriorated, he told the GDN.

"Islamic countries can save the West from its moral decay, provided Muslims lead a life built on the five pillars of Islam," said Prof Baker.

"Islam is like a house built on the rock of submission and supported by five pillars: Witnessing, Prayer, Fasting, Almsgiving or Tithing, and Pilgrimage.

"These five pillars are the distinguishing marks of Islam from all other religions."

Prof Baker is in Bahrain at the invitation of Discover Islam.

He gave a talk on Zionism or Judaism, Justice or Injustice, Oppressor or Oppressed at Beit Al Quran last night.

Deputy Prime Minister and Islamic Affairs Minister Shaikh Abdulla bin Khalid Al Khalifa hosted a luncheon reception in honour of Prof Baker at his Riffa residence yesterday.

It was attended by Information Minister Nabeel Al Hamer, Municipalities and Agriculture Minister Dr Mohammed Al Sitri, Parliament second deputy chairman Shaikh Adel bin Abdulrahman Al Maawda, Islamic Affairs Under-Secretary Shaikh Khalifa bin Hamad Al Khalifa, Defence Under-Secretary Dr Shaikh Mohammed bin Abdulla Al Khalifa, GDN chairman Anwar Abdul Rahman, Discover Islam chairman Ishaq Kooheji and other guests.

Prof Baker presented to Shaikh Abdulla the copies of his latest books: More in Common than you think: The bridge between Islam and Christianity and Theft of a Nation.

Now is the time to build on the foundations of existing coalition and co-operation between Christians and Muslims, said Prof Baker.

"Now is the time to teach all Muslims and all Christians everywhere about the common ground they share," he noted.

"As a Christian who has lived, studied and interacted with Muslim believers for many years, I consider it my responsibility to set forth the basic history and teachings of Islam in an effort to educate the sincere individual who truly wants to know what Muslims believe and practise.

"Once learned, that individual may join with other Christians in building bridges of peace, dialogue, and understanding with the brothers and sisters of Islam."

America and the Western nations begin the new millennium by presenting Islam as the most dangerous threat to freedom and democracy, said Prof Baker.

"Politicians portray longtime Arab allies as untrustworthy and in need of close scrutiny, while the media too casts aspersions on the millions of honourable Muslim citizens living in the West," he added.

"My mission is to remove the distortions and prejudices created against Islam by bringing people and nations on common ground.

"I also appeal to Christians and Muslims to oppose the common evils of all mankind by joining hands in the pursuit of peace, freedom, justice and moral values."

CAMP, based in Southern California, has members in North America, Europe, Africa, Asia and Middle East, who are actively engaged in promoting dialogue between Muslims and Christians.

Prof Baker is a member of the Near East Institute of Archaeology, the Oxford Philosophical Society and numerous other organisations.

He had earlier addressed a dialogue session at the Bahrain Chamber of Commerce and Industry, entitled East meets West - Removing Mistrust between Islam and the West.

More Thai jihad. From The Straits Times, with thanks to Nicolei:

Tension in the border town of Sungai Golok in southern Thailand escalated dramatically following the discovery of another bomb here yesterday morning.

The bomb was found in a package at the Sungai Golok Customs Office, just metres from the Malaysian border, at 10am local time (11am Malaysian time) - peak hour at the gateway between the two countries, Bernama reported.

Thailand customs officials say the bomb was discovered in the luggage compartment of a four-wheel-drive vehicle belonging to the department.

According to Bernama, the Thai Army bomb disposal unit was called to detonate it. The border gate is only 2km from the town of Sungai Golok, in which Saturday's bomb blast occurred. In that incident, 28 people, including 10 Malaysians, were injured.

The bombing is part of a wave of violence in which 60 people have been killed since January.

Already, the fear and tension since the explosion over the weekend have caused tourists to desert Sungei Golok. The fear also hit the Thai stock market yesterday, causing it to fall 3 per cent.

The bombs are likely to have a devastating impact on the economy of Sungei Golok, at least in the short term.

'Certainly, the number of tourists will reduce and worries about safety and security will cause foreign tourists to cancel their trips to other spots along the border,' the chief of the Pattani Tourism Promotion Association Anusart Suwanmongkol told journalists.

Hasan-i Sabbah

Perceptive insight into the battle we're facing from James P. Lucier of Insight (thanks to EPG):

Reports were filtering back into the West about a mysterious spiritual leader holed up in a mountain fortress. He attracted hundreds of young men by offering training in religious doctrine, devotional discipline and terrorism. He singled out for attack those he judged to have been corrupted by power and luxury or who, in his view, were insufficiently dedicated to the principles of Islam. In the dead of night his trained terrorists would enter the highly guarded precinct of the targeted victim and slit his throat, even though they were almost certain to be killed when the alarm was raised. This disadvantage was offset by a carefully taught theological conviction that, when slain, they would be rewarded instantly with the joys of paradise. These terrorists were called assassins, the Hashishiyyin, because they used cannabis to give them courage.

This is how, in the 12th century, the word assassin became part of the vocabulary of the Western languages. According to accounts brought back by the Crusaders, the Old Man in the Mountain had such control over his followers that he would amuse and terrorize visitors to his castle by ordering a few of his young men to jump off a cliff to demonstrate that they would obey his slightest whim. This man, of course, was not Osama bin Laden. Nor were the Crusader accounts mythological.

The Old Man in the Mountain was a real person, Hasan-i Sabbah, and his mountain fastness was the Castle of Alamut, perched on a barren peak at the south end of the Caspian Sea. Its ruins still may be seen today. Alamut was, like al-Qaeda, the base for a secret society, the Ismailis. Hasan's goal was to return Islam to its fundamental roots, and he sent preachers throughout the region, to Baghdad, Damascus and Aleppo. And when preaching didn't work, there was always the dagger. He warred against the Seljuk Turks and assorted caliphs, sheiks and viziers. He was a believer in the Shia' tradition that the true succession of Islam came through Ali, married to the prophet's daughter, Fatima. The bewildering and complicated history is summed up for Westerners in a famous little book, The Assassins, by the indefatigable scholar Bernard Lewis.

In the public hearings of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States - the 9/11 Commission - many fingers were pointed. The common theme was that both the Clinton and the Bush administrations recognized al-Qaeda as a threat but there was little they could do about it until the Sept. 11 attacks changed the political calculation. There were no smoking guns. President Bill Clinton issued an order to kill bin Laden, but the CIA refused. Former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright whined that it would have been impossible to get Congress to approve a military operation (although that didn't stop the Clinton administration from going to war to install Islamic extremists in Kosovo). Former White House terrorism adviser Richard Clarke, a self-important fussbudget, complained bitterly that he didn't have the chummy one-on-one relationship with President George W. Bush that he had enjoyed with Bill Clinton - although Bush was being briefed personally by Director of Central Intelligence George Tenet every day. And Clarke's own parochial fixation on al-Qaeda blinded him to the fact that the war on terror has to reach much further than the activities of the contemporary Old Man in the Mountain.

The real failure of both administrations was the failure to take the long view of history. The attempt to pigeonhole the terrorist threat in terms of familiar 20th-century ideology and 21st-century political organization, and to try to counter it with law-enforcement, diplomatic and military assets, is bound to fail. And the notion that an advertising campaign or a flurry of public diplomacy will win hearts and minds is even sillier. The strength of al-Qaeda is not al-Qaeda itself. Its power is its preternatural instinct to uncork the bottle and release the dark jinns of the Islamic imagination.

Although President Bush has been careful to say that we are not at war with Islam but with terrorism - and it is prudent to say so - it is also not true to say that Islam is a peaceful worldwide religion that has been hijacked by a small group of bad actors. It is at war first of all within itself, and then with the outside world. There are many kinds of Islam containing splendorous mixtures of benevolence and belligerence. The secular Muslim scholar Ibn Warraq, author of Why I Am Not a Muslim and The Quest for the Historical Muhammed, points out that the approved holy books on the life of Mohammed report that the prophet and his band of followers participated in 80 political assassinations in their consolidation of power. But, of course, he uses Ibn Warraq as a pseudonym, since he has been threatened with assassination for saying so.

Three of the first four caliphs were, in fact, assassinated. But many Muslims belonged to the Shi'atu Ali, the party of Ali, the prophet's son-in-law, and they thought he should become caliph. He did so after the murder of Caliph Uthman in 656. But Caliph Ali was in turn murdered in 661, and the caliphate passed to the rival Umyyads, perpetrating the schism between the Shia' and the Sunni that has caused a bitter division in Islam ever since. Ali's son, Hussein, sought to overthrow the Umyyads, but in the year 680, on the 10th day of the Muslim month of Muharram, Hussein and his family and followers were slaughtered by the Umyyads at a place called Karbala. On March 2, 2004, the worst terrorist attack in Iraq since the overthrow of Saddam Hussein took place in Karbala as tens of thousands of Shia' mourners gathered at the tomb of the seventh-century Hussein on the anniversary of the murders. Islam takes the long view of history.

Senator Jon Corzine

Joel Mowbray reports that in New Jersey it wasn't just Jewish groups that were giving legitimacy to Islamic radicals; it was also two Democratic legislators: Congressman Bill Pascrell and Senator Jon Corzine. From the New York Sun, via FrontPage:

Rep. Bill Pascrell and Senator Corzine, both Democrats of New Jersey, addressed an annual "community brunch" last month co-sponsored by 11 Muslim organizations, including a mosque that has allegedly raised funds for Hamas and another New Jersey mosque whose former imam was convicted last year for smuggling more than a half-million dollars to an Egyptian group that the American Treasury Department subsequently designated a terrorist organization. Mr. Pascrell has also received campaign contributions and fund-raising support from the president of the event's primary sponsor.

The American Muslim Union's Annual Community Brunch on February 21, 2004, was co-sponsored by 10 other organizations, including the New Jersey chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, the Islamic Center of Passaic County of Paterson, the El Tawheed Islamic Center of Jersey City, and the Dar-ul-Islah Islamic Center of Teaneck.

The co-sponsor with the most apparent ties to radical Islam, including allegedly raising funds for Hamas and hosting as a speaker last year an alleged Hamas figure, is the Islamic Center of Passaic County. The American Muslim Union, though, appears to have close ties to the Islamic Center of Passaic County, as five of its current and former directors and executives have held or still hold leadership positions at the Islamic Center.

The American Muslim Union insists it is a mainstream group, and Mr. Pascrell says he doesn't regret the appearance. Neither Mr. Pascrell nor Mr. Corzine generally vote outside of the Democratic mainstream on Israel or terror-related matters.

The co-founder of and former imam at the Islamic Center of Passaic County, which was founded in 1989, was Mohamed El-Mezain. He worked with the ICPC to raise funds for Hamas in the mid-1990s, according to an FBI memo drafted in November 2001 by the FBI's assistant director of counterterrorism, Dale Watson. Mr. El-Mezain, who is no longer affiliated with the Islamic Center and could not be reached for comment, was never charged or arrested.

The FBI document, which provided the basis for the U.S. government to shut down the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development in December 2001, cited a "reliable" source in noting that "during a speech at the Islamic Center of Passaic County (ICPC) in November, 1994, Mohammad El-Mezain, the HLFRD's current Director of Endowments and former Chairman of the HLFRD Board, admitted that some of the money collected by the ICPC and the HLFRD goes to HAMAS or HAMAS activities in Israel. El-Mezain also defended HAMAS and the activities carried out by HAMAS."

The American Muslim Union's president, Mohamed Younes, who is a member of Islamic Center of Passaic County's board of trustees, told The New York Sun that people at the mosque "did not know everywhere their money was going, and they would not have meant to give to Hamas."

Mr. El-Mezain and the Islamic Center of Passaic County appear to have other ties to Hamas.

Mr. El-Mezain attended a conference in Los Angeles in the mid-1990s where more than $200,000 was raised for Hamas and the keynote speaker urged participants to "finish off the Israelis," according to the FBI memo.

The FBI memo cites a "reliable" source who says that at a Muslim Arab Youth Association conference held from December 30, 1994, to January 2, 1995, the keynote speaker was Sheikh Muhammed Siyam, who was introduced as "head of operations of Al Jihad Al Islamia in Gaza, the Hamas military wing." According to the FBI in formant, Mr. Siyam told the crowd, "Finish off the Israelis. Kill them all! Exterminate them!"

"Following Siyam's speech," the memo continues, "El-Mezain exhorted the crowd to contribute money. It was subsequently announced that $207,000 was raised for 'the cause."' The FBI informant also said that at the conference, Mr. El-Mezain announced that he had raised $1.8 million inside the United States for Hamas in 1994 alone.

Magdy Mahmoud, who is the cofounder and president of CAIR-NJ, one of the co-sponsors of the American Muslim Union brunch, was on the executive board of the Muslim Arab Youth Association and directed its Chapters Committee from 1993 to 1998, during which time the 1994-95 conference occurred. According to his biography on CAIR-NJ's Web site, Mr. Mahmoud later served as the chairman of the Chapters Committee for the American Muslim Union from 1999 to 2001. Mr. Mahmoud did not return a call requesting comment.

According to the Islamic Center of Passaic County's Web site, the mosque hosted a lecture in February 2003 by Abdelhaleem Ashqar, who was identified in the FBI memo as a prominent Hamas figure.

Another co-sponsor of last month's event attended by Messrs. Corzine and Pascrell, Dar-ul-Islah Islamic Center, was co-founded by Waheed Khalid, who has defended Hamas activities. When asked by the Bergen Record newspaper in 1998 about Hamas' terrorist activities, Mr. Khalid, who until late last year served as the mosque's president, responded, "They are trying to get the occupiers out of their home."

Mr. Pascrell said that allegations that any of the co-sponsors of the event are radical Islamists or tied to terrorist organizations are "pure crap." Asked if he felt that by appearing at the event he was lending legitimacy to radical organizations, he added, "I'm not going to deal in rumors; the rest is crap. I know these men as fine family men."

A spokesman for Mr. Pascrell later clarified that the congressman wasn't referring to Alaa Al-Sadawi, the former imam at El Tawheed Islamic Center, who was convicted last July of attempting to smuggle more than $650,000 in cash to the Global Relief Fund in Egypt in April 2002.The U.S. Treasury Department designated that fund as terrorist in October 2002.

The spokesman for the congressman said, "That guy should be in jail, but you can't hold the members of the mosque responsible for his actions."

Despite multiple calls from the Sun, Mr. Corzine's office offered no comment.

The American Muslim Union's president, Mr. Younes, stressed that his organization is both moderate and mainstream, adding that it has worked to "bring people together of all faiths."

According to both men, Mr. Younes and Rep. Pascrell have been friends for almost a decade. Mr. Younes and his wife have contributed more than $4,300 to Mr. Pascrell's campaigns since 1998, according to federal election records. Mr. Younes also said that he has hosted "several" fund-raisers for the congressman, including one that netted over $20,000 in October 2000. Messrs. Younes and Pascrell said they can't remember how many fund-raisers Mr. Younes has hosted, or when the most recent one was held.

Mr. Pascrell said he had no regrets about addressing the American Muslim Union- sponsored brunch last month, noting that he has never been given any warning about the group by authorities. "I'm on the Homeland Security Committee and I've never been briefed that they are something I should stay away from," he explained.

Who would have expected a jihad in the drive-thru line? (McDonald's Italy)

This is the latest in a string of jihadist incidents in Brescia. Note the arrest of the imam, mentioned at the end of the article. Didn't he read all the Qur'an's peaceful teachings? From The Independent, with thanks to LGF:

An apparent attempt to blow up a McDonald's drive-in restaurant in northern Italy was foiled on Sunday but the suspected terrorist died when his car exploded with him strapped inside.

Witnesses said a man, later identified as Moustafa Chaouki, a native of Casablanca, drove his Fiat Tempra into the queue of cars waiting at the restaurant in Brescia, 100km east of Milan, at 10 pm. His car contained four cylinders of kitchen gas, each with a capacity of more than 70 litres.

Police believe he opened the taps of the cylinders, filling the car with gas. Witnesses said he then suddenly opened the driver's door, and the car detonated into a fireball.

A woman in the car directly behind the Fiat, told the daily, Corriere della Sera: "I had just said to my boyfriend, 'Don't you smell something strange?' Then there was the blast. That man didn't even try to get out of the car. He stayed there, immobile in his seat, with one leg out of the door."

About 20 customers were inside the restaurant, and a firefighter told Corriere: "We arrived within three minutes, and it was fortunate that we did because we succeeded in containing the explosion, chilling some of the gas cylinders inside the car."

Otherwise, the unnamed officer added, the cylinders could have exploded, firing lethal metal fragments through the restaurant windows and possibly igniting other cylinders of carbon dioxide belonging to the restaurant which were close to the burning car.

Moustafa Chaouki was born in Casablanca, Morocco, in 1968 and was a resident of Brescia. Yesterday the assistant prosecutor of the city, Roberta di Martino, who is also the city's anti-terrorism boss, would only say of the incident: "It was not an accidental occurrence."

Last year, a Palestinian with a Kuwaiti passport, Al Khatib Muhammad, died in his car after it exploded close to a synagogue in the town of Modena, 160 kms south-east of Brescia. The crime is still unsolved.

And prosecutors in Brescia are also investigating an imam linked to the Iraq-based Islamist terror group Ansar-al-Islam, who was arrested one year ago.

Mourad Trabelsi, the former imam of a mosque in the town of Cremona, 50km south-west of Brescia, was arrested in April last year, after being under surveillance by the Brescia authorities for three years.

Investigators believe he helped raise funds for terrorist activities, recruited would-be terrorists and acted as the intermediary between a cell of Italy-based terrorists and international terrorist groups.

Jean-Christophe Mounicq zeroes in on the prevailing dhimmi mentality in the Washington Times:

The morning of Jan. 29, upon hearing about the attack on a bus in Jerusalem, I did not experience the expected emotion. It seemed such a "normal" thing, and I have not enough tears to shed for people I do not know.

The next day, on Jan. 30, I read an article about one of the victims — Avraham Belhassen, 26 years old, a young father — and realized that I could tolerate no more. I can no longer tolerate terrorist folly, Islamist hatred, the passivity of Muslims, the blindness of the West.

Following the attacks in Madrid, this feeling struck me again. The reaction of the Spanish people, cringing in fear before the Islamist claim of responsibility, bothered me even more. I can no longer tolerate such cowardly Munich-like behavior that leads inevitably to dishonor and war.

The reaction of the European media and political class to the elimination of Sheikh Yassin — the master of hate and terrorism, and one who had called for the murder of Jews — pushed me over the edge. I can no longer tolerate descriptions of the monster responsible for hundreds of deaths and thousands of wounded as a "spiritual leader," a poor "paralytic in a wheelchair." I can no longer tolerate murderous, barbaric Islamist hatred.

I can no longer tolerate the electoral victories of Islamists in Algeria, Turkey or France. I can no longer tolerate the indifference of Muslim leaders and the majority of Muslims to the suffering of non-Muslims. I can no longer tolerate their affected statements or their perpetual self-victimization.

I can no longer tolerate the double game of Yasser Arafat, the Saudi princes or Pakistani leaders. I can no longer tolerate watching Muslims dance with joy, in the Palestinian territories or in Paris, following attacks on the World Trade Center or an Israeli bus. I can no longer tolerate their anti-Semitism, anti-Christianism, anti-Buddhism or anti-Hinduism.

I can no longer tolerate those who hate liberty but take every advantage of it. I can no longer tolerate Islamist lack of respect for secularism and equality, between men and women, Muslims and others. I can no longer tolerate their lack of respect for the cultures of the very countries that shelter them. I can no longer tolerate the multiplication of veils on women in the streets of Paris.

I can no longer tolerate attacks on French officials, abusive complaints against the police, terrorism against judges, the ban against teaching about the Holocaust in schools, or the brutalization of male doctors who treat Muslim women in hospitals. I can no longer tolerate burning cars in Strasbourg and synagogues in Bondi. I can no longer tolerate catcalls when the Marseillaise is played during games at the Stadium of France. I can no longer tolerate the cries of "death to Jews" in their demonstrations or "death to Christians" written on walls.

I can no longer tolerate concealing the massacres of Christians and Jews in Islamic countries, Copts in the Middle East, of one-and-a-half million Orthodox Armenians in Turkey at the beginning of the last century, as well as a million-and-a-half Christian Sudanese at its end. I can no longer tolerate Muslim ethnic cleansing in Kosovo or Palestine. I can no longer tolerate Islamist totalitarianism.

I can no longer tolerate the relativism and masochism of a West incapable of recalling its own history other than to denounce it. I can no longer tolerate comparing the Crusades to jihad, when the Crusades were nothing but a parenthesis in the history of Christianity while jihad is an integral part of Islam.

I can no longer tolerate the cowardice, weakness and mediocrity of the majority of Western leaders, or the unwillingness of Westerners to affirm their own values and the superiority of liberty and democracy over all other principles and systems. I can no longer tolerate the inability of Europe to recall its Judeo-Christian heritage.

I can no longer tolerate taxes that the European Union transforms into subsidies for the Palestinian Authority or that France transforms into arms for Saddam Hussein. I can no longer tolerate paying the maternity bills for women ready to sacrifice their infants as suicide bombers or for teaching children hatred on the West Bank.

I'm going to pray in the memory of Avraham, pray that his death and those of so many others might finally open the eyes of the cowards in the West who refuse to face the truth. I'm going to pray for Westerners to understand that the war on terrorism is in reality a war against Islamism, and that Islamism is gaining ground among Muslims.

I'm going to pray that moderate Muslims might organize demonstrations against the terrorists just as Corsicans and Basques have demonstrated against their own terrorists. Pray that Islam, which is entering its nuclear era, might become neither conqueror nor warrior, but rather adapt to modernity before it is too late.

Canadian Mounties outside the home of Mahboob A. Khawaja in Orleans

"They think they were making bombs." From Canada.com, with thanks to LGF:

A handful of Ottawa Muslims were being questioned last night in what authorities described as an international terror probe that saw heavily-armed Mounties storm the home of one of the city's most prominent Muslims.

At 1:30 p.m. yesterday, RCMP tactical units, acting on security intelligence briefs, fanned out across the city, arresting one young Muslim man and questioning several others.

The raids followed a month-long RCMP surveillance operation targeting the Orleans home of Mahboob A. Khawaja, who is presently teaching at a university in Saudi Arabia.

Reached there last night, Mr. Khawaja said he was "extremely disturbed" by the raid.

"It's nothing more than a hoax to create embarrassment," he said in a telephone interview. "I don't have the facts about why they would raid my house and take my two children into custody."

The Mounties forced their way into his home, but their target was nowhere to be found. Instead, they found two of Mr. Khawaja's adult children.

His wife, Azra, had gone out for some afternoon shopping and was picked up by police at a shopping centre.

Later in the day, RCMP arrested a Muslim man linked to the house.

According to his friends, one of Mr. Khawaja's four sons was taken away yesterday by RCMP as he walked the hallways of the University of Ottawa, school books in hand.

Mohsan Khawaja has not been charged with any crime and the RCMP would not say why they wanted to talk with the economics student. His brother, Tanzeel Khawaja, studies at Carleton University.

The RCMP would not disclose details of the probe. However, Qamar Masood, president of the Canada-Pakistan Association of the National Capital Region, arrived at the home last night. He says he later spoke with Mr. Khawaja's wife. "She said they think that they were making bombs or something of that nature. But she said, of course, that's impossible."

Mr. Khawaja also said the police alleged that his children had been making bombs.

"Bombs? I don't think there is any substance to this allegation," said Mr. Khawaja. "No way. It's nothing more than a hoax. Maybe some kids were picking on them -- but no way, they're educated guys ... It doesn't make any sense."

"I know my children, they're not involved in this kind of thing. We are a very peaceful educated family. We have nothing to do with this notion of security risk, or bomb making This whole thing sounds absurd to me. It's created a lot of inconvenience for my family," Mr. Khawaja said.

So far, only one suspect has been arrested. He has yet to be named, let alone charged, although police expect to make a "major announcement" later this week.

The RCMP insisted yesterday that Mr. Khawaja's family, including his wife and some of the adult children, were not being held.

More formidable than Mr. Terrorism

The White House has agreed that National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice will testify before the 9/11 Commission.

Richard Clarke is trying to play Cassandra but Newsmax quotes

an audio clip unearthed by Fox News Channel's Sean Hannity and aired on "Hannity & Colmes".

During an interview on Detroit radio station WJR the year before the Clarke briefing, Rice mentioned bin Laden by name, then recommended: "You really have to get the intelligence agencies better organized to deal with the terrorist threat to the United States itself. One of the problems that we have is a kind of split responsibility, of course, between the CIA and foreign intelligence and the FBI and domestic intelligence."

Then, in a chillingly prescient comment, Rice named bin Laden a second time, warning, "There needs to be better cooperation because we don't want to wake up one day and find out that Osama bin Laden has been successful on our own territory."

The lessons of the 9/11 commission ought to be these

It was hard before 9/11 to get Americans to take the threat of terrorism seriously. Despite the attacks overseas, we felt safe behind our borders.

Aggresssive action has deterred further attacks

We ought to take seriously the threats of those who say they want to kill us

A further lesson comes from the Jerusalem Post. Israel has won many battles against terrorism, but has had no long term strategy for winning the war.

Do we?

Still standing

The Washington Times reports on what al Qaeda had planned after September 11.

LONDON — Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, al Qaeda's purported operations chief, has told U.S. interrogators that the group had been planning attacks on the Library Tower in Los Angeles and the Sears Tower in Chicago on the heels of the September 11, 2001, terror strikes.

Those plans were aborted mainly because of the decisive U.S. response to the New York and Washington attacks, which disrupted the terrorist organization's plans so thoroughly that it could not proceed, according to transcripts of his conversations with interrogators.

Mohammed told interrogators that he and Ramzi Yousuf, his nephew who was behind an earlier attack on the World Trade Center in 1993, had leafed through almanacs of American skyscrapers when planning the first operation.

"We were looking for symbols of economic might," he told his captors.

He specifically mentioned as potential targets the Library Tower in Los Angeles, which was "blown up" in the film "Independence Day," and the Sears Tower in Chicago.

A British newspaper over the weekend published a detailed account that it said was taken from transcripts of the interrogation of Mohammed, who was captured last year in Pakistan.

The transcripts are prefaced with a warning that Mohammed, the most senior al Qaeda member yet to be caught, "has been known to withhold information or deliberately mislead."

According to the transcript, Mohammed has maintained that Zacarias Moussaoui, the French-Moroccan facing trial in the United States as the "20th hijacker," had been sent to a flight school in Minnesota to train for a West Coast attack.

That would buttress Moussaoui's contention that he is improperly charged with participation in the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, because he was preparing for a different al Qaeda operation.

The new transcripts confirm an earlier report by the Associated Press that al Qaeda originally had planned to crash hijacked airliners into targets on both coasts.

The London Sunday Times said the transcripts covered interrogations
conducted during a period of four months after a bleary-eyed Mohammed was captured in a pre-dawn raid a little more than a year ago.

The confessions reveal that planning for the September 11 attacks started much earlier and was more elaborate than previously thought.

"The original plan was for a two-pronged attack with five targets on the East Coast of America and five on the West Coast," he told interrogators, according to the transcript.

"We talked about hitting California as it was America's richest state, and [al Qaeda leader Osama] bin Laden had talked about economic targets."

He is reported to have said that bin Laden, who like Mohammed had studied engineering, vetoed simultaneous coast-to-coast attacks, arguing that "it would be too difficult to synchronize."

Mohammed then decided to conduct two waves of attacks, hitting the East Coast first and following up with a second series of attacks.

"Osama had said the second wave should focus on the West Coast," he reportedly said.

But the terrorists seem to have been surprised by the strength of the American reaction to the September 11 attacks.

"Afterwards, we never got time to catch our breath, we were immediately on the run," Mohammed is quoted as saying.

Al Qaeda's communications network was severely disrupted, he said. Operatives could no longer use satellite phones and had to rely on couriers, although they continued to use Internet chat rooms.

"Before September 11, we could dispatch operatives with the expectation of follow-up contact, but after October 7 [when U.S. bombing started in Afghanistan], that changed 180 degrees. There was no longer a war room ... and operatives had more autonomy."

Mohammed told interrogators that he remained in Pakistan for 10 days after September 11, 2001, then went to Afghanistan to find bin Laden.

When he was captured in March last year in the home of a microbiologist in Rawalpindi, Pakistan, the 37-year-old was unshaven and wearing a baggy vest.

The interrogation reports also indicate that Mohammed had introduced bin Laden to Hambali, the Indonesian militant accused in the terror attack that killed more than 200 people in Bali, Indonesia, in October 2002.

Mohammed was running a hostel filtering al Qaeda recruits in Peshawar, Pakistan, when he scouted Hambali, whose real name is Riduan Ismuddin and who ran the Islamist group Jemaah Islamiyah in Asia.

Later, Mohammed moved to Karachi, Pakistan. There, posing as a businessman importing holy water from Mecca, Saudi Arabia, he acted as a fund-raiser and intermediary between militants and sponsors in the Gulf.

His first planned anti-American attack was Operation Bojinka (Serbo-Croatian for "big bang") — a plot to blow up 12 U.S. airliners over the Pacific.

Yousuf and Hambali were involved in the scheme, which failed when the conspirators' Manila bomb factory caught fire. The men fled to Pakistan, where Yousuf was arrested.

Mum's the word, guv'ner (AP)

Britain has arrested eight terror suspects whom one news agency reports to be Pakistani. Deputy Assistant Commissioner Peter Clarke said that the arrest had nothing to do with the Madrid bombong, nor with Irish terrorism, but when asked about the religous affiliation of the suspects said only, "As we have said on many occasions in the past, we in the police service know that the overwhelming majority of the Muslim community are law abiding and completely reject all forms of violence."

Gee, I wonder what kind of international terrorists they have arrested?

LONDON (

Clarke gave no details of the religious affiliation of the suspects, but he told reporters: "As we have said on many occasions in the past, we in the police service know that the overwhelming majority of the Muslim community are law abiding and completely reject all forms of violence. We have a responsibility to all communities to investigate suspected terrorist activity."

He's had a head start in making his case

The BBC seems to have momentarily forgotten that terrorism has nothing to do with religion. They report on the Rand Corporation's plan for waging a diplomatic offensive against the jihadis. According to the BBC, the report urges support of moderate Muslims. Note that one of the problems is that moderate Muslims lack infrastructure. While there are moderate Muslims, it is harder to find moderate Islam; moderate Muslims do not have a significant organization or widespread theological justification for their positions.

A strategy for the West to counter Islamic extremism by supporting Islamic moderates has been put forward in a report funded in part by a conservative American foundation.

It says that the West should help religious "modernists" in the Islamic world in order to prevent a "clash of civilisations."

It states: "It seems judicious to encourage the elements within the Islamic mix that are most compatible with global peace and the international community and that are friendly to democracy and modernity."

The report, called "Civil Democratic Islam: partners, resources and strategies", was drawn up by the Rand Corporation with financial help from the Smith Richardson Foundation, a conservative trust fund which hands out more than $120 million a year to universities and other research organisations.

It is a sign perhaps that some American conservatives, many of whom want to press democratic reform in Muslim countries, realize that a focused approach is needed.

It is a contribution to a debate well under way in the West. The latest manifestation of this debate was a recent speech by the former Archbishop of Canterbury Dr George Carey, who wondered why Islam was "associated with violence throughout the world." His conclusion is not dissimilar to that of this report.

"Is extremism so ineluctably bound up with its faith that we are at last seeing its true character? Or could it be that a fight for the soul of Islam is going on that requires another great faith, Christianity, to support and encourage the vast majority of Muslims who resist this identification of their faith with terrorism?" he asked.

The recommendations have also come as the Bush administration is proposing to use the G8 summit in the American state of Georgia in June to push the issue of democratic and social reform in the Middle East. The summit will coincide with the handover of power in Iraq to an interim Iraqi government.

The Bush initiative has raised suspicions in Arab countries and among some of America's European allies who do not want anything imposed from the outside.

The report's writer, Cheryl Benard, said: "The United States and its allies need to be more discriminating in the way they perceive and interact with groups who call themselves Islamic.

"The term is too vague, and it doesn't really help us when we are looking to encourage progress and democratic principles, while being supportive of religious beliefs."

The report states: "Islam's current crisis has two main components: a failure to thrive and a loss of connection to the global mainstream. The Islamic world has been marked by a long period of backwardness and comparative powerlessness."

It says that Muslims disagree on what to do about this and identifies four essential positions in Muslim societies:

Fundamentalists who "reject democratic values and contemporary Western culture."

Traditionalists who "are suspicious of modernity, innovation and change."

Modernists who "want the Islamic world to become part of global modernity."

Secularists who "want the Islamic world to accept a division of religion and state."

The report says that the modernists and secularists are closest to the West but are general in a weaker position than the other groups, lacking money, infrastructure and a public platform.

It suggests a strategy of supporting the modernists first. This would be done by, for example, publishing and distributing their works at subsidised cost, encouraging them to write for mass audiences and for youth, getting their views into the Islamic curriculum and helping them in the new media world which is dominated by fundamentalist and traditionalists.

It goes onto the say that traditionalists should be supported against the fundamentalists by publicising the traditionalist criticism of extremism and by" encouraging disagreements" between the two positions. It says that "in such places as Central Asia, they (traditionalists) may need to be educated and trained in orthodox Islam to be able to stand their ground."

A third strategy would be "to confront and oppose the fundamentalists" by, among other things, challenging their interpretation of Islam and revealing their links with illegal groups and activities.

Support for the secularists would be cautious and very selective, for example by encouraging "recognition of fundamentalism as a shared enemy."

The latest draft of the US government's own proposals are reported to include the promotion of parliamentary exchanges, the offering of advice on legislation, support for literacy campaigns, and the promotion of more access to personal and development finance.

The Rand approach is more overtly political and has definite diplomatic gains in mind.

It's a good approach, but it will encounter some opposition. In an essay that would be all to easy to dismiss as lunatic raving, one Abid Ullah Jan takes on "The Myth of Moderation." He is upset that the West classifies Muslims as fundamentalist or moderate, and is angry that states such as Pakistan and Turkey would ally with America against their Muslim brothers.

It is wrong to assume that Islamic resurgence is a movement in response to the dominance of Western civilisation. The moribund Western civilisation is not dominating the Muslim world. It is the crusade-infected mentality of some in the Western world, who dominate the Muslim world through the use of deputy tyrants, fully supported by economic, military and technological might. The movement in the Muslim world is not for the revival of Islam but for revival of Muslims.

Tech Central Station points out the dangers of a nuclear armed Iran:

While the "News Cycle" focuses its attention on a mid-level functionary's startling revelation that, had only everyone listened to him, this whole terror thing could have been averted (that is, had they listened then to what he's saying now, not to what he said before… oh well, never mind), let us avert our eyes from the posturing and finger-pointing for a moment and consider what to do about the next threat: a nuclear-armed Iran.

For those who haven't been paying attention to the danse macabre that has been going on between the Mad Mullahs and the International Atomic Energy Agency, a short review:

At Bushehr, they are building a light-water reactor with the aid of the Russians, which (even if our Slavic friends are sincere in their promise to monitor it faithfully and recover all spent fuel) will be a source of practical expertise for the Iranians and allow them to claim they need to have a uranium enrichment capability to ensure fuel supplies. (These reactors run on uranium that has been enriched from the natural 0.7% U-235 to 2-5%; but if you just keep running the same enrichment plant, you can keep going to above 80%, which will work as the core of a nuclear bomb.)

They've recently been caught red-handed and forced to admit that they have been developing two separate secret uranium enrichment programs for the better part of two decades.

At Natanz, a secret gas-centrifuge uranium enrichment plant has been discovered, and traces of highly-enriched (weapon-usable) uranium were found there.

At Arak, a secret (have you noticed the "secret" trend here?) heavy water production plant has been uncovered. Heavy water is used in the type of nuclear reactors that can run on natural, unenriched uranium (so if the enrichment part goes sour, they're still in business), and which are especially suited to produce plutonium (which, of course, is the other potential nuclear bomb core.)

Iran has purchased parts for advanced uranium-enriching centrifuges and probably actual bomb designs from A.Q. Khan's Pakistani Nuclear Warehouse.

As a matter of fact, it's beginning to look like they have a club membership card and are eligible for discounts and special members-only offers.

The Iranians, of course, claim they have no plans to build nuclear weapons. No sir. They are merely spending billions of dollars to develop nuclear power as an alternative energy source for when their oil runs out, say, somewhere around the year 3015.

Meanwhile, the Jerusalem Post writes that Iran binds Hizbullah to Hamas.

With the assassination of Hamas leader Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, history may repeat itself.

On October 26, 1995 in Malta, Israeli agents assassinated Fathi Shkaki, the secretary-general of Palestinian Islamic Jihad. He was replaced by Ramadan Abdallah Shallah, who was not as effective a leader.

As Islamic Jihad began to decline, Iran became its primary funder, and Islamic Jihad in turn became Iran's proxy in the West Bank and Gaza.

With Sheikh Yassin, Hamas's founder dead, Iran may again attempt to move into a power vacuum in order to extend the reach of its terror network both against Israel and worldwide.

The relationship between Hamas and Hizbullah, Iran's leading terrorist proxy, dates back to the early 1990s. After being released from Israeli prison in 1997, Yassin visited Iran and secured a multimillion dollar annual Iranian contribution to Hamas. In the Aksa Intifada, Hizbullah has been generous in sharing its expertise, smuggling plans, equipment, and operatives with the Palestinian territories.

Hizbullah has helped Hamas build rockets based on Katyushas and bombs – including the device used in the March 27, 2002 Passover Massacre. Hamas has also carried out ambushes, such as a February 2002 attack that destroyed an Israeli tank, based on tactics Hizbullah honed in its long fight against Israel in Lebanon.

In the wake of Yassin's assassination, Hizbullah shelled northern Israel, further demonstrating the expanding ties between the two organizations.

After charging two more Moroccans, Spain's interior minister Tuesday named a Moroccan extremist group as the main focus of the probe into the Madrid terror bombings.

MADRID, Spain (AP)- Spain's interior minister Tuesday named a Moroccan extremist group for the first time as the main focus of the probe into the Madrid terror bombings.

Minister Angel Acebes said authorities will investigate links between the prime suspects in detention and "terrorist groups or fundamentalist groups, very especially the Moroccan Islamic Combatant Group."

The group has surfaced in Spanish news reports but this was the first time Acebes or any other Spanish official had cited it publicly as a possibly behind the attacks that left 191 dead.

Moroccan investigators have also said they are focusing on two principal extremist groups — the Moroccan Islamic Combatant Group and Salafia Jihadia. Salafia Jihadia is accused by the Moroccan government of organizing five nearly simultaneous attacks on May 16, 2003, in Casablanca, Morocco, that killed 45 people, including 12 suicide bombers.

The Moroccan Islamic Combatant Group is a forerunner to the Salafia Jihadia and is considered to be the first radical jihad movement in Morocco.

Al-Jazeera has an opinion about Palestinian child jihadis. They are nothing but an Israeli fabrication.

Palestinian leaders have accused Israel of fabricating a story about a 14-year-old Palestinian boy who planned to blow himself up.

The Israeli army said he was caught wearing an explosive belt at an army roadblock in the northern West Bank.

The boy, identified as Husam Abdu from Nablus, was shown on TV screens around the world, with an explosive belt strapped to his waist.

The Israeli army said the boy told interrogators that his dispatchers promised that he would have sex with 72 virgins in heaven soon after his death.

"We know for sure this is a fabricated story from A to Z. Would you believe that a 13 or 14-year old would agree to blow up himself in return for a hundred shekels which he would receive after his death?

Yes.

It's déjà vu all over again. Police let the Madrid bombers go, just as a Maryland state trooper stopped and released Ziad Jarrah on Sept. 9. Maybe it's time to organize Mothers Against Jihad Driving.

MADRID - Spanish police came within a whisker of foiling the Madrid bombings when they stopped a stolen car carrying explosives used in the attacks.

The boot of the Volkswagen was packed with 100kg of stolen industrial dynamite, according to an El Pais newspaper report.

Three of the four train-bombing suspects were thought to have been in the car at the time, but its Arab driver was fined for a minor traffic offence and allowed to drive on.

The jihadis in the Philipines lose a battle. (from The Times of London )

The Philippines Government claimed an important victory in its long-running battle against Islamic terrorism today, with the seizure of a large cache of explosives and the arrest of four men suspected of links with al-Qaeda.

President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo, who faces re-election in May, claimed that the suspects were planning an atrocity on the scale of the train bombings in Madrid which killed 190 people three weeks ago.

Among those arrested was a man alleged to have decapitated a kidnapped American tourist two years ago, and another said to have confessed to the sinking last month of a ferry in which more than 100 people died.

The Weekly Standard has a piece this week on Islamic radicals in Europe. It points out that "the jihadists of Europe have drunk deeply from the virulently anti-American left-wing currents of Continental thought and mixed it with the Islamic emotions of 1,400 years of competition with the Christian West" and says it will be "interesting" (a milder word than I would use) "to see whether France's envy of American hegemony trumps its own experience and fear of Muslim holy warriors trying to blow their way into heaven."

As I have pointed out in the past, it is ironic that leftists are marching under the banner of "No Blood for Oil" when it is leftist governments who have decided to roll over and play dhimmi in exchange for petroleum.

ON AUGUST 26, 1995, a militant Islamic group led by a 24-year-old French Muslim named Khaled Kelkal attempted to blow one of France's high-speed trains off its rails. Luckily, the bomb's detonator, which used an ordinary 12-volt battery, failed. Later that fall, other bombs would go off in France: two in double-decked commuter rail cars in Paris, one in a trash can along the very bourgeois Avenue de Friedland, another in a Parisian open-air market, and one more in a provincial Jewish school. In all there were nine attacks in three months, which killed 10 people and wounded 114.

The bombings in 1995 provoked a widespread awareness for the first time in France that the country had a radical-Muslim problem, which was increasingly homegrown and not imported. Kelkal moved to France from Algeria when he was one month old; not known for being religious in his troubled youth, he became an Islamic militant in a French jail, as have hundreds of highly Westernized French Muslims. Many more thoroughly secularized French Muslims, who did not have crime-filled youths, have become Islamic radicals, culturally at war with the society that made them. Zacarias Moussaoui, the "twentieth hijacker" of 9/11, is the most notorious example of an areligious Frenchman who became intoxicated with the holy-war ideology preached in many radical mosques throughout Western Europe.

This phenomenon of highly Westernized Muslims and converted Christians becoming radicalized believers has happened throughout Western Europe. Relatively few Turks have joined radical Islamic organizations allied with Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda, even though Turkish fundamentalists are numerous and often hardcore. At home and abroad, they are perhaps more numerous and better organized than are fundamentalists of any other nationality. But the Turks who have been arrested for association with al Qaeda usually share one bond: They were either born or raised in Germany and are culturally more German than they are Turkish Muslim. These young men are part of what the Iranian-French scholar Farhad Khosrokhavar has called the néo-umma guerrière--"the new holy-war community of believers" that recognizes neither national nor ethnic identity nor traditional Islamic values. Their Islam is "a new type of Nietzscheanism" where suicide and murder become sacred acts of an elite, self-made race of believers who want to bring on a purifying Apocalypse.

March 29 Terrorist Attacks (REUTERS)

Reuters has an update on the situation in Uzbekistan (complete with quotes around the word "terrorist", but that is just part of their "objective" "journalistic" "style").

TASHKENT, Uzbekistan (Reuters) - At least 19 people were killed in a series of explosions and shoot-outs in Uzbekistan in "terrorist" actions aimed at splitting the U.S.-led anti-terror coalition, officials said Monday.

Prosecutor General Rashid Kadyrov said a further 26 people had been wounded in the ancient city of Bukhara late Sunday and the capital Tashkent Monday morning.

"This has been committed by the hands of international terror, including Hizb ut-Tahrir and Wahhabis," Foreign Minister Sadyk Safayev told a news conference. Hizb ut-Tahrir, which aims to set up a pan-Islamic state that would include post-Soviet Central Asia, and the austere Wahhabi school of Sunni Islam are both outlawed in Uzbekistan.

"That's the hallmark of the terrorist acts we have already witnessed abroad," Safayev said. "Attempts are being made to split the international anti-terror coalition."

Kadyrov said three policemen and one child died in two suicide bomb attacks in Tashkent. Both female suicide bombers also died.

He said that late Sunday about 10 people had died in a blast at an apartment block in Bukhara, some 600 km (375 miles) southwest of Tashkent, when a "terrorist" was preparing an explosive device.

Kadyrov also said that three policemen were killed in overnight shoot-outs with "suspected terrorists."

Uzbekistan is a close Washington ally in the U.S.-led "war on terror" in neighboring Afghanistan (news - web sites). It provided a key airbase for U.S. troops in operations there following the Sept. 11, 2001, hijacked plane attacks on the United States.

A series of killings of officials in Uzbekistan's Fergana Valley in 1997 was blamed on Islamic extremists and led to severe restrictions on any non-state-sponsored Islamic activity.

Under hard-line President Islam Karimov, Uzbekistan has been sharply criticized by human rights bodies and some West European nations for its intolerance of any opposition and the harsh treatment meted out to political and religious prisoners.

A United Nations (rapporteur on torture has said that torture is "systematic" in jails in the impoverished Central Asian nation of 25 million. But Karimov retorts that he has to be tough to stop the creeping influence of militant Islam from neighboring Afghanistan.

Tashkent, which has a population of some three million, has been subject to extremely tight security controls since February 1999 when a series of blasts in the center of the city killed 16 and wounded over 100 people.

Those bomb attacks were blamed on the radical Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU), which is closely linked to al Qaeda which the United States holds responsible for the September 2001 attacks on New York and Washington.

Update: Make that 21

The elusive Omar

This just in from Bloomberg.com:

Mullah Mohammad Omar, the fugitive leader of the Taliban, was wounded in a U.S. bombing raid earlier this month that killed four of his bodyguards, Deutsche Presse- Agentur said, citing a newspaper report in Pakistan.

Omar was injured in the legs and left side of his body and won't be able to move about for two months, DPA said, citing an interview in the Urdu language daily newspaper, Ausaf, with Jabbar Aziz, a doctor. The report said the raid took place in the southern Afghan province of Zabul.

The newspaper, which is known for having contacts with the Taliban, didn't say where or when the interview with Aziz took place, DPA reported.

Omar, who is said to be about 41, has been on the run since the Taliban regime was ousted in the U.S.-led war in Afghanistan in December 2001. The U.S. is sending 2,000 Marines to Afghanistan to help step up the hunt for Omar and other Taliban leaders, as well as members of the al-Qaeda terrorist network still hiding in Afghanistan.

Joel Mowbray shows why the standards for moderate Islam have been set too low, at least in New Jersey:

Sometimes, partnering with ostensibly moderate Muslim organizations in holding interfaith events can lead to a lot of trouble and controversy if proper homework isn't done in advance.

Just ask two Jewish groups in New Jersey.

The UJA Federation of Bergen County and North Hudson and the Jewish Community Relations Council of the Jewish Federation of New Jersey had both signed on to co-sponsor an interfaith brunch scheduled for this Sunday, March 28th, which was organized by the various members of a longstanding interfaith coalition.

When a large number of members of the two Jewish groups complained, the interfaith coalition uninvited the American Muslim Union, which was one of two Muslim co-sponsors and jointly listed along with the Dar-ul-Islah Islamic Center as the event's only two hosts.

But appearances can be deceiving.

According to officials at both the mosque and AMU, AMU is very still very much a part of the interfaith brunch. Both organizations, in fact, maintain that their respective levels of participation remain exactly the same as before. And the featured speaker, who was selected by the two groups (and has her own set of problems relating to radicalism), has not changed either.

Given the histories of people involved with AMU and Dar-ul-Islah Islamic Center, it's not difficult to see why so many in the local Jewish community were concerned.

Though the American Muslim Union appears moderate in its official literature — saying it is "dedicated to serving the American Muslim community and its unique needs" — the organization has interlocking leadership with a group that has allegedly raised funds for Hamas and hosted as a guest speaker last year an alleged Hamas member.

Four current and former AMU directors and executives have held or currently hold leadership positions with the Islamic Center of Passaic County (ICPC), a mosque located in Paterson, New Jersey. ICPC was founded in 1989 by, among others, Mohamed el-Mezain, who was the Chairman of the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development (HLFRD), which the Treasury Department designated a Specially Designated Global Terrorist in December 2001.

According to a November 2001 FBI report that served as a basis for Treasury's decision to shut down HLFRD, a "reliable" FBI informant "reported that during a speech at the Islamic Center of Passaic County (ICPC) in November, 1994, Mohammad El-Mezain… admitted that some of the money collected by the ICPC and the HLFRD goes to HAMAS or HAMAS activities in Israel. El-Mezain also defended HAMAS and the activities carried out by HAMAS." Just last February, ICPC hosted a speech by Abdelhaleem Ashqar (http://www.icpc.com/icpcv2/lectures/lectures.icpc?directory=Friday_Lectures), who is identified by several FBI informants cited in the memo as a prominent Hamas member. Ashqar was jailed for two months last fall for his refusal to testify before a federal grand jury probing Hamas.

Although the ties to Hamas are allegations — El-Mezain nor anyone else affiliated with AMU or ICPC has been arrested — AMU has co-sponsored several rallies that any genuinely moderate groups would not associate themselves with. Chief among these rallies is one held in Times Square in April 2002, which called for, among other things, an end to the Israeli "massacres" of Palestinians.

To judge for yourself, look at a flyer promoting the event by clicking here. The headline is "Stop Palestinian Genocide" and features an obviously forged photo of a baby lying in a pool of blood in a hospital bed. There may be many legitimate debates among reasonable, moderate people about Israel's treatment of Palestinians, but there are no widespread "massacres," nor is there any "genocide" of Palestinians. It is wildly false to claim either.

So when UJA issued a four-paragraph statement, which was read to this columnist over the phone by a UJA official, announcing that AMU was no longer a co-sponsor of the interfaith brunch, many members were relieved and considered the matter closed.

What Bergen County's interfaith coalition did, according to UJA's statement, was that it "determined that in the spirit of brotherhood, the faith communities rather than any organization will be the official sponsors of the Brunch." In other words, since AMU couldn't be called a co-sponsor, nobody else could either.

To put it another way: Nothing's changed, other than the elimination of the label "co-sponsor."

Halabi being escorted to his arraignment (AP)

Daniel Pipes reveals some extraordinary information about Guantanamo interpreter and US Air Force Senior Airman Ahmad al Halabi at FrontPage:

Halabi, a 25-year-old translator of Syrian origins, says he was naturalized as a U.S. citizen after joining the Air Force in January 2000, though this is a disputed matter. He spent nine months working as an Arabic language interpreter in Guantánamo and was arrested on July 23, 2003, at Jacksonville Naval Air Station, on his way to his own wedding ceremony in Syria. When apprehended, he had 186 unauthorized classified documents on on his laptop computer.

The 32 charges against him made public in September 2003 included 11 counts of failing to obey a lawful general order or regulation; 3 counts of aiding the enemy, 4 counts of espionage; 9 counts of making a false statement; bank fraud and violations of the Federal Espionage Act. More specifically, he was charged with:

• Downloading classified documents to his personal laptop computer;

• Making illegal contact with the Syria embassy in Washington;

• Failing to report unauthorized communications between U.S. troops and detainees;

• E-mailing details about the base's flight schedule to individuals in Syria;

• Attempting to deliver information about detainees at Guantánamo; and

• Collecting 180 messages from those detainees with the intent to deliver them to known enemies.

While the majority of the charges concern classified information (and their phrasing suggests that in most cases al Halabi did not succeed in delivering his information), three others catch the eye. As CNN describes these three:

One charge accuses al Halabi of delivering unauthorized food, including baklava pastries, to detainees. Another charge accuses al Halabi of “executing a scheme” to obtain credit from seven banks by providing false information. A third charge accuses al Halabi of denying any knowledge of Wahhabism, when the “statement was totally false.” … It is unclear what connection, if any, the Wahhabism has with the espionage charges.

In January 2004, the Air Force dropped several of the most serious charges, including the single count that carried the death penalty, that of “aiding the enemy.” Other dropped charges concerned e-mailing information about Guantánamo detainees and transmitting information to unauthorized recipients. Halabi now faces seventeen charges; the court-martial, expected to begin April 27, 2004, at Travis Air Force Base in northern California, could send him to prison for life without parole.

During court-martial proceedings, military prosecutors revealed that Halabi is also the subject of a second, separate counterintelligence probe; and he may face criminal charges in addition to the spying charges.

(To complicate matters further, Marc Palmosina, a special agent in the Air Force Office of Special Investigations who had worked on the Halabi case, is under investigation for mishandling classified documents and has been removed from this case.)

At the court-martial, Halabi will likely proclaim ignorance that the documents he was carrying were classified. But that will be a tough sell, as early on he acknowledged as much to investigators; and he also postal mailed 60 pages of classified documents to his home in California.

Then there is another piece of evidence, which I am revealing here, and it pertains to Halabi’s personal website at http://www.geocities.com/ahmad564/. (geocities.com is a free web page hosting service, so his site should remain indefinitely available, despite his incarceration.)

The website contains a miscellany of items that interested Halabi. He lists news from Arab League member states, the Islamic prayer times, pictures of Arab pop music stars, airplanes, and the like.

Then there are some items of greater relevance. Clicking on the “r” in “SrA/USAF” on the left side of the page takes you via a secret link leads to a hidden romantic page with flowers, several pictures of a woman, and this warning:

This is a private Web Page For RANA DALI
Only authorized persons may view this page.

Clicking on “Go to Ahmad’s Picture in Cuba” then brings up three pages of pictures of Halabi.

• The first has pictures taken at Captain Yee’s residence, with a tughra-style “In the Name of God, the Compassionate, the Merciful” at the top of the page.

• The second posts standard military-style pictures of Halabi in Kuwait – standard except for the anomalous presence of the Syrian flag waving at the top of the page.

• The third seems to be a Muslim-only page, with captions like “Group picture on EID Day,” “EID party, Dec 6 2002. From Right To left, Ahmad, Tabasom, Katib, Chaplin Yousif and Ahmad,” and “On the ferry from Right to left: Rabi, Tony, Bahlawan, Tariq and Ahmad.” This page features both the tughra and the Syrian flag.

In preliminary arguments, prosecutors stated that while Halabi was undergoing a preliminary hearing, someone accessed his website and altered it. Worries about Halabi’s computer skills are one reason why he will remain incarcerated as his case moves forward. In the words of Military Judge Col. Barbara Brand, “His computer prowess continues to pose a threat.”

Halabi’s website spurs two thoughts. First, Halabi appears to be computer savvy enough to have sent off information without the U.S. authorities being aware of what he had done.

Second, according to a search warrant prepared to have access to his mail, Halabi “made statements criticizing United States policy with regard to the detainees and U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East,” then lied about making such statements. Combining this hostile political outlook with the nearly exclusive focus on fellow Muslims in the web pages leads this observer to wonder about Halabi’s loyalties.

Lee Kuan Yew (newshub)

Singapore's Lee Kuan Yew notes that while radical Muslims operate in terror groups worldwide, "at the moment, the moderate Muslims are keeping out of sight." From The Star, with thanks to Nicolei:

IN an interview with the BBC’s East Asia Today programme, broadcast last night, Senior Minister Lee Kuan Yew addressed the issue of terrorism and spoke on the role of moderates within the Muslim community.

Speaking of his hopes and fears of the struggle to come, he said that if it becomes a clash or fight against Muslims, then, as he put it, “it’s a very stupid way to conduct this battle”.

“The problems are caused by an errant heretical group that wants to use the Muslim religion to turn it into a jihad, or a holy struggle, against the West,” Lee said during the interview, which took place at the Istana last Wednesday.

“Their objectives, well if you read Osama bin Laden – I don’t read him in the Arabic but I’ve read interpretations of what specialists think ... of what he means by what he’s said – it’s really to get the Americans and the West out of the Middle East, control the oil and control the world.

“But the crux of the battle really, the core battle, is between moderate and extreme Muslims.

“At the moment, the moderate Muslims are keeping out of sight.”

So it has been the extreme Muslims against the Americans, the Israelis and the West, and all those who support the Americans, including Singapore, said Lee.

“But if Madrid, 9/11, Bali and so on keep going on and the moderates in the Muslim world keep silent, either condone or duck the issue, then there is a danger that the West may begin to feel, that really, there are no champions to counter these terrorists,” he said, referring to recent and previous acts of terrorism.

“That would become a very dangerous problem.”

Asked by the interviewer if he were to mean it was the moderates in the Islamic world, rather than the war against terror, that were exacerbating the situation, Lee replied “no”.

He explained it thus: “I am saying that moderates in the Muslim world, by not being able to take a stand and take the lead and start the argument with the extremists in the mosques, in the madrasah, they are ducking the issue and allowing the extremists to hijack, not just Islam, but the whole of the Muslim community.”

Indeed, moderate Muslims have yet to demonstrate to their fellow Muslims that the radicals have not "highjacked" the religion.

As for whether Lee thought the war against terror could widen the gulf between Islam and the West, he acknowledged there was that danger.

However, it was not necessarily inevitable – provided the Muslim moderates take a stand, he added.

Lee said: “Let’s take 9/11 or Madrid. If nobody except Europeans and Americans and those who are already committed condemn this – I mean if all Muslim countries stay silent, or Muslim groups stay silent – then there is the danger that the Europeans and Americans may come to the conclusion, ‘Look, there’s really nobody on the other side, that’s standing up against this evil.'

“I think that would be bad. I believe the vast majority have no interest in this terrorism. It is not going to win them the battle and they must know it.

“The question is: Who makes a stand? President Mubarak of Egypt, King Abdullah of Jordan, President Bouteflika of Algeria, President Musharraf of Pakistan?

The whole world is waiting for the appearance of this moderate Islam.

More threats of destruction, this time with an apocalyptic twist. From WND, :

An Israeli intelligence analyst sees a frenzy of jihadist Internet communications as part of a "dangerous Islamic messianic whirlpool" featuring a number of prophecies culminating in the coming of the "Mahdi," reports the latest issue of the premium online intelligence newsletter Joseph Farah's G2 Bulletin.

Some of the documents obtained in a sweep of Internet communications just before the attack on the Madrid trains are signed by an unknown sheikh – assumed to be a nom de guerre for Osama bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri or others in leadership in al-Qaida.

The communications make a number of predictions about world events pointing to "The coming of the Mahdi" – a messianic figure Muslims expect to come and lead them in victory against the infidels in the last days.

Here is what these communications foresee:

• Two European countries will be attacked.

• Another attack is planned against the U.S.

• Followers are asked to get rid of euros and as true Muslims replace them with gold.

• There will be an assassination attempt against a high-ranking Egyptian official.

• A mass gathering of jihad warriors is expected in the cities of the twin holy mosques Mecca and Medina.

• A divine signal will be given when three celestial stars will be aligned on one axis.

• The appearance of a new star, never seen before, will be in plain sight to all humanity.

• Pakistani President Pervez Musharaf and Yasser Arafat will be annihilated in the same month.

The list includes other apocalyptic predictions such as "the march of Islam through Russia, the return of Islam to Andalusia and a victory parade in Jerusalem with liberated Saddam Hussein at the lead. This will follow after a war in Syria and the assassination of King Abdullah of Jordan."

There is no specific time frame for the apocalyptic prophecy, according to G2 Bulletin sources. The most important aspect of the communications is the subsequent attack in Spain, and an important threat to the continental U.S.

Islam Karimov (Vestnik.com)

That is, jihad in an Uzbeki market. From AP, :

An explosion has ripped through the Uzbek capital Tashkent, killing at least two people, the ITAR-Tass news agency reported.

The Uzbek Foreign Ministry has blamed terrorists.

Ministry spokesman Ilkhom Zakirov said that there were "several terrorist acts," arrests had been made and an investigation was underway. He confirmed that there were casualties but could not give further details.

At least one of the blasts occurred around 9 a.m. (0400 GMT) at the Chorsu market in the Old City, said Alimzhon Turdakulov, spokesman for the National Security Service.

Russia's Echo of Moscow radio, citing the RIA-Novosti news agency, said several people had been killed.

Police and intelligence agents closed off the sprawling market and vans with investigators were massed in front of the "Children's World" store, where the blast was believed to have occurred.

There was no visible sign of an explosion from afar.

The market would normally be filled with thousands of people selling everything from goat meat to clothing to carpets. On Monday, however, only cleaning crews could be seen. No shoppers or vendors were visible.

Officials at the Interior Ministry refused comment on the attack. President Islam Karimov was scheduled to make a televised address to the nation about the attack at 1 p.m. (0800 GMT). Prosecutors were expected to hold a briefing later in the day.

Zakirov, the Foreign Ministry spokesman, tied the explosions to the recent train bombings in Madrid and with continuing turbulence in neighboring Afghanistan.

A series of near-simultaneous bombings in Tashkent in February 1999 were blamed on the terrorist group Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, which has been linked to the al Qaeda terror network.

Uzbek authorities said the blasts, which killed 16 people, were an attempt to assassinate Karimov.

In Onward Muslim Soldiers I detail the jihad ideology held by Hamas, which prevents them from entering into negotiations for a lasting peace between Israel and the Palestinians. Now Itamar Marcus and Barbara Crook of Palestinian Media Watch explain in the Jerusalem Post why there is not all that much difference between the PA and Hamas anyway.

The Western world sees Hamas as a terrorist organization seeking Israel's destruction, but treats the Palestinian Authority (PA) as a peace partner, either actual or potential, for Israel. The fact that Israel continues to seek contact with PA leaders heightens the clear distinction made between the PA and Hamas.

But the distance between Hamas and the PA has been shrinking for years. And the way the PA has responded to the killing of Yassin shows just how close the two groups actually are. The PA has gone far beyond its expected level of condemnation of the killing, and has eulogized Yassin as a leader representing all the Palestinian Authority.

PA Prime Minister Ahmed Qurei, for example, told PA TV that just as "Yassin united the Palestinians in his life he united them again in his death." Yasser Arafat's official daily, Al Hayat Al Jadida, published a cartoon of a wheelchair shaped as a map of what the PA calls "Palestine" (which erases all of Israel) thereby stating graphically that Yassin and "Palestine" are one and the same.

In an unprecedented move, PA television ceased all regular programming for days, and except for brief news reports broadcast only slides of the Koran sung to mournful tunes. In the Arab world, this Koran broadcasting is usually reserved for the deaths of heads of state, as was done on Syrian TV after the death of Hafez Assad. That PA TV treated Yassin in this fashion demonstrates his elevated stature among PA leadership and PA society.

Anyone listening to PA leaders' pronouncements in Arabic over the years has recognized that there never was a meaningful ideological divide between the PA and Hamas. It is well understood, for example, that Hamas believes Islam demands Israel's destruction. As the Hamas charter states, "Palestine is an Islamic Wakf the liberation of Palestine is an individual duty binding on all Muslims everywhere."

Taunted by Al-Qaeda (CNN)

From CNN, :

Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf has accused Osama bin Laden's top deputy of taunting him and vowed to press on with an offensive against al Qaeda, saying, "I want to eliminate all of them."

Musharraf made his comment just days after Ayman al-Zawahiri, bin Laden's second-in-command, urged Pakistani tribes to resist government troops and to overthrow Musharraf.

"Now that he is taunting me, well, all that I would like to say, I want to eliminate all of them," Musharraf told ABC's This Week.

Musharraf survived two assassination attempts in December last year, both of which he blamed on al Qaeda.

Asked if he was confident he would get Zawahiri and bin Laden before they get him, Musharraf said, "I can't be 100 percent sure. I mean, I'm quite loose at my security, but I believe in destiny. ... I'm very sure that we'll eliminate this al Qaeda from our region."

OK, Pervez, but what about the madrassas?

More on Canada's usefulness to terrorists, from The Globe and Mail ():

Canada's anti-money-laundering centre uncovered $35-million in suspected terrorist financing in the first nine months of the fiscal year, outstripping the tally for the entire previous year.

The amount reflects the total detected by the Financial Transactions and Reports Analysis Centre from April through December 2003, forming the basis of 29 case files passed to police or intelligence officials for further investigation.

The figures obtained by The Canadian Press are the latest indication that dangerous organizations continue to try to use Canada's financial institutions as conduits for bankrolling terrorist acts.

Fintrac, as the federal centre is known, identified 25 cases of suspected terrorist financing involving $22-million in all of fiscal 2002-03. ...

The agency says terrorist financing may involve money raised from legitimate sources, such as personal donations and profits from businesses and charitable organizations, as well as from criminal activities, such as the drug trade, the smuggling of weapons and other goods, fraud, kidnapping and extortion.

Clarke: You probably won't see him here again (CBS)

I have been asked why Jihad Watch is not covering the Richard Clarke foofaw. The answer is simple: I agree with Neil Cavuto's view (thanks to Ruth):

I am focused not so much on threats, real or imagined, before Sept. 11, but on threats very real and far from imagined post-Sept. 11. I find it incredibly ironic that during a week past and present administration officials were being grilled on what they knew and when they knew it, the militant terrorist group Hamas put out a dire warning on what they want to do and when they want to do it.

Let's be very frank. Sept. 11 has come and gone. Nothing can bring those nearly 3,000 poor souls back. Mistakes were made, miscues were apparent, intelligence was anything but. But this isn't about correcting wrongs. This is about settling political scores.

And here's what I think: The terrorists are laughing at us. They're laughing at our political infighting. They're laughing at our obsession with all things shallow and nothing substantive. They're laughing at a country more concerned with scoring points than getting answers. And here's the killer, [they're] laughing at us ignoring real killers.

I mean, did anyone find it even a tad odd that as we're going back years, desperately reconstructing a tragic event, some of our worst enemies are reconstructing to do it again?

Hamas doesn't like us. Al Qaeda doesn't like us. A huge chunk of the Muslim world doesn't like us, is recruiting against us, and is focusing on destroying us and those close to us. Look at Madrid. Look at Baghdad. Look at us. And all we can do in turn is play games -- sifting old stories and old excuses in a pale attempt at justice.

Also — Barbara Amiel puts her finger on the core misapprehension :

If 9/11 can be reduced to being Washington's fault, the irrational hate and destruction becomes almost manageable. Change administrations, and the Islamists will go away. Such a seductive, comforting thought echoes in most political battles and elections today. The wind from the east blows gritty grains of fear and delusion into the West's eyes. One wonders apprehensively, which way the zeitgeist of this new millennium will turn. Worse, one fears the calamity that will really turn it hasn't happened yet.

From Reuters, with thanks to Ruth:

Hizbollah leader Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah told Hamas's new leader on Saturday to consider the Lebanese guerrilla group under his command following the assassination of Sheikh Ahmed Yassin this week.

In a show of unity between the two Islamist groups, Hamas new chief Khaled Meshaal also addressed thousands of Hizbollah supporters at a memorial service for his predecessor Yassin, whom Israel assassinated this week.

Nasrallah told him: "Consider us in Hizbollah, from the secretary-general and leadership down to our fighters and women, members of Hamas, and soldiers under your command."

The two Islamist groups have long been allies and keep in regular contact. Hizbollah is a staunch supporter of a more than three-year-old Palestinian uprising against Israeli occupation, and the group attacked Israeli posts in a disputed border area on Monday in response to Yassin's killing.

Mourners held pictures of the dead cleric, whose group has killed hundreds of Israelis in suicide bombings, amid a sea of Hizbollah and Palestinian flags.

"I say to our brothers in Palestine: We in Lebanon are with you. Be sure that your blood is our blood and your sheikh is our sheikh. We share the same destiny and this means that our fight is one," Nasrallah said.

Nasrallah told the gathering in Beirut's predominantly Shi'ite southern suburbs that Israelis were planning to plant explosives at unspecified targets, but gave no further details except to say:

"I'm saying that in some of these places we are going to be waiting for them."

Nasrallah, whose group fought Israel's 22-year occupation of southern Lebanon until it withdrew its forces in May 2000, said Israeli suggestions he could be next on its hit list did not scare him.

Meshaal, who lives in exile in Syria, called for similar support from an Arab summit, which was planned for early next week in Tunis but was postponed late on Saturday because of differences between Arab governments on reforms.

Speaking before the summit was postponed, he asked them to support what he called resistance in Palestine and Lebanon and to sever any relations they had with Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon.

Meshaal said Hamas's response to Israel's deadly missile strike against Yassin would be confined to Israel and the Palestinian territories.

"One of our priorities is to respond to Sharon's crime. We will not say what kind of response but I say that our resistance will be confined to fighting the Zionist occupation on Palestinian land," Meshaal said.

A new article by Jihad Watch director Robert Spencer, "Islam’s Anti-Christian Jihad," is available at FrontPage today.

A popular man

An interesting report on polling in Pakistan, from Mid Day:

Nearly two thirds of people in Pakistan hold favourable views of al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden and 86 per cent approve of President Pervez Musharraf, according to a survey by a major American organisation.

Nearly half of those interviewed said suicide bombings against Israelis and, in Iraq, against Americans and other Westerners are justified.

The report by the Washington-based Pew Global Attitudes Project survey found that 65 per cent favoured Osama and that pluralities of 47 per cent believed Palestinian suicide attacks on Israelis were justified. Forty-six per cent thought attacks on Westerners in Iraq were justified.

The Pew Research Centre is a non-profit and non-governmental organisation, which specialises in opinion surveys. Its reports are widely respected in Washington’s academic circles.

Pakistan was one of four Muslim-majority countries in the survey, which also included Turkey, Jordan and Morocco, the governments of all of which have strong ties with the US.

Pew, the polling organisation questioned 1220 people in Pakistan’s urban areas, 1000 nationwide in four Moroccan cities and about 1000 each nationwide in Turkey and Jordan between February 19 and March 3.

The survey had a margin of error of plus or minus 3.5 percentage points.
Pew also conducted polls during the same period in the United States, Britain, France, Germany and Russia.

Mahdi Karrubi

In Tehran a ceremony to honor Sheikh Yassin of Hamas was attended by high-level officials, according to Persian Journal. Apparently Iranian officials were undeterred by Yassin's ordering of targeted murders of civilians on buses and restaurants.

A ceremony to commemorate Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, teroorist Leader of Hamas was held in the Ark mosque in Tehran on Sunday.

The ceremony was attended by Akhtari representative of the So-called Supreme Leader of the Islamic Revolution and Majlis Speaker Mahdi Karrubi.

Also present in the ceremony were Hojatoleslam Shariati, representative of the president Khatami and several members of the cabinet as well as ambassadors of Islamic countries such as Lebanon, Syria, and Saudi Arabia.

The attendants insisted on continuing the path of terror and the Palestinian campaign against the Israel.

Meanwhile, in Iraq, AP headlines a story this way: "Revival of religious Shiite books as defining feature of community's empowerment."

Now that the dictator is gone, bookstores in this holy city south of Baghdad are busy again. For the first time in decades they are selling over-the-counter Shiite religious books that could have easily landed their owners and readers in jail, where torture was common. ...

"Being in the book business is not just a way to make money," said Saheb Jawad, whose shop is on al-Howeish alley along with many other bookstores near the shrine of Imam Ali, Shiism's 7th century founding father.

"It is the virtue of spreading the faith that makes it worthwhile," Jawad said.

Do these Shi'ite religious books glorify violent jihad and justify suicide attacks as "martrydom operations"? Does anyone know? If not, why not? And if the books do this, what will prevent Shi'ites in Iraq from trying to replicate Iran there? Will memorials to Sheikh Yassin be erected in Baghdad?

A headless statue of a pig has become the focal point of an attempt to Islamize a park in Derby. From IndustryWatch, with thanks to LGF:

FOR more than 100 years it stood proudly as the centrepiece of England's oldest public park before being decapitated during a Second World War air raid.

Now a row has broken out after plans to replace Derby's historic Florentine Boar statue were abandoned for fear of offending Muslims, whose religion considers pigs to be 'unclean'.

A replica of the statue, a crouching wild boar, was intended as the jewel in the crown of a Pounds 5 million National Lottery- funded restoration of the city's Arboretum Park.

But councillors have called for the proposal to be scrapped amid sinister warnings that the statue would be vandalised or stolen.

The Florentine Boar statue stood from 1840 until 1942 when it was beheaded by a German bomb. But it was last week branded 'offensive' during a meeting of Derby Council's minority ethnic communities advisory committee.

Councillor Suman Gupta, a Labour representative for Derby's Derwent ward, told the meeting: 'If the statue is put back in the Arboretum, I have been told it will not be there the next day, or at least it won't be in the same condition.

'We should not have the boar because it is offensive to some of the groups in the area.' The park is in an area known for its large Pakistani community.

Shokat Lal, a community leader, said at the meeting: 'In Normanton the majority of residents are Pakistani Muslims.

'I'm not saying we have to lose the boar, but we could put the boar in the city centre so it does not cause offence to people.' Local historian Christopher Harris told The Mail on Sunday: 'We are living in a multicultural society and I hope that would include English culture.

'If the boar had never been destroyed in 1941, these people would have grown up with it and would not have noticed it.

'Activists have jumped on the chance to make a statement. It is one that damns English culture-But the wild boar is part of Derby's culture.' He said a small minority of Muslims with extreme political views had issued veiled threats to the council over the statue.

The land for the park was donated to the council in September 1840 by Joseph Strutt, the first mayor of the Borough of Derby, a wealthy cotton mill owner who wanted to give the public a place to exercise.

He commissioned architect J.C. Loudon to landscape the area. The hollow ceramic boar was donated by Mr Strutt.

Sculpted on commission by W. J. Coffee - and based on drawings of a similar statue in the Market Nuovo in Florence - it was intended as a gift to the working classes of Derby.

Last week's committee meeting proposed that a statue of Mr Loudon should be erected at the Arboretum with a new site for the boar in the city centre.

Last night, Councillor Gupta told The Mail on Sunday: ' Communities change.'

Tory leader Philip Hickson said: 'The community is strong enough to stand a statue of a boar in a park. But we live in an age where sometimes things are a little more politically correct than they ought to be.'

Chretien: pleading on behalf of a terrorist

This Independent puff piece on the heroic wives of heroic Al-Qaeda men would be notable only for its sympathy with those who would destroy us were it not for one detail: former Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chretien personally intervened to gain the freedom of an associate of Osama bin Laden whose family business is, as the article says, jihad. Meet two sisters, Maha and Zaynab:

Maha's late husband, Ahmed Said Khadr, the recently deceased Egyptian-Canadian patriarch of the family, ran orphanages and schools in Taliban-ruled Afghanistan.

He was also named on a United Nations list of wanted terrorists and was once jailed on suspicion of involvement in the 1995 bombing of the Egyptian embassy in Islamabad. (He was released after a personal appeal from Canada's then prime minister, Jean Chretien.) His Arab associates in Afghanistan included Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri, his Egyptian strategist and No 2. Zawahiri is the "high-value target" who was recently alleged to have been cornered in the mountains of Waziristan, in the tribal belt of Pakistan that borders Afghanistan. His voice subsequently appeared on an audiotape urging Pakistanis to overthrow President Pervez Musharraf.

Zaynab went to school with Zawahiri's daughter, and Bin Laden was guest of honour at her 1999 marriage to her now ex-husband, a sharpshooter from Yemen. The family also briefly shared a sprawling Arab compound in Jalalabad with Zawahiri's family. All four sons were taught to shoot at the now-demolished al-Qa'ida training camp at Khalden in eastern Afghanistan.

From the Boston Globe, with thanks to Mackie, a glimpse inside a Shi'ite mosque in Baghdad:

Alternately raucous and sober, yesterday's prayers offered a stark glimpse of how Shi'ite clerics get their followers to speak in one voice on the social and political issues of the day.

"We thirst for martyrdom," said 24-year-old Abdul Allah Abed, a carpenter who also volunteers in the Army of the Mahdi. "We are not scared." He, like the hundreds of other Mahdi members ringing the mosque area, wore all black; the group, thousands strong, answers to Moqtada al-Sadr, the young firebrand anti-American cleric. ...

Shortly after noon, a crowd of 10,000 men on prayer rugs, filling the entire street in front of the mosque, chanted as one to the call of the imam, Sheik Nassir al-Saidi.

"Yes, yes to Islam! Yes, yes to al-Sadr!" they shouted after the imam offered a prayer to all the martyred descendants of the Prophet Mohammed. ...

He also denounced the interim constitution approved by the US-appointed Iraqi Governing Council, which sets the structure for a caretaker government to supervise national elections.

"You should not say you support the interim constitution. You should say you reject it," Saidi said, adding that God would send supporters of the plan to hell.

I have been predicting this sort of response would come for some time now.

Good observations from The Australian, with thanks to Jean-Luc:

ANYBODY who still doubts the appalling lengths Islamic terrorists will go to achieve their evil ends should check the news coverage of Thursday's failed suicide bombing on the West Bank.

The human bomb, a boy in his early teens, lost his nerve, broke down and pleaded with Israeli troops guarding a checkpoint to save him. The soldiers kept their nerve, and used a robot to cut him free from the 8 kilograms of explosives strapped to his body. If the whole incident had not been filmed by a passing Palestinian cameraman who works for a press agency, cynics would be dismissing it as a stunt organised by the Israelis. But it is an awfully routine part of life in the Middle East. Suicide bombers are generally young men, although a new tactic favoured by Palestinian terrorists is to bully young women into blowing themselves up, on the promise that by dying they will atone for their so-called sexual infidelities. The only thing that makes this latest attempted attack more grotesque than usual is the fact the bomber was so young. The corruption in the souls of terrorist commanders who sacrifice the lives of young people while they, and their own children, stay safe beggars belief.

It takes an extraordinarily brutal commitment to a cause, be it the destruction of Israel or the independence of Chechnya, to use suicide bombings as a standard strategy. But it is what nations around the world, including Australia, must understand they also face. The murder of 88 Australians and other innocents in Bali, bombings in Manhattan, Moscow and Madrid, and in any number of Muslim cities around the world demonstrate that ordinary people everywhere are at risk in the war on terror. And beyond breaking up the terror cells and capturing or killing their commanders, there is nothing we can do to stop them. We certainly cannot reason with Islamic fundamentalists who believe they are fighting decadent Westerners and apostate Muslims to establish God's rule on earth in a war that may take centuries. We no longer hear the guff about terrorism being caused by poverty as much as we did immediately after September 11, but people who still think we can appease the terrorists should consider Thursday's attack. People who will use a child to murder other children as part of a struggle to destroy Israel and impose religious rule throughout the Muslim world are interested in winning, not negotiating. That fundamentalists have no hope of ever taking power through the ballot box, as demonstrated by the trouncing of the Islamic fundamentalist party in last weekend's Malaysian elections, will only make the terrorists more determined to follow the path of violence.

Which means we have no option but to stand firm and not be swayed from prosecuting the war on terror on all fronts – Iraq included. In Washington this week, Richard Clarke, a former counter-intelligence chief, testified that the Bush administration was obsessed with Saddam Hussein and underestimated the threat from Osama bin Laden's al-Qa'ida organisation before September 11. His old colleague, former CIA director George Tenet, denied it. If Mr Clarke is right, it was a grievous operational failing. But this does not mean the United States should now lose sight of the need to fight terrorism on all fronts. To abandon the Iraqi people to the terrorists, who are now desperate to reduce Iraq to anarchy, and focus solely on hunting down bin laden in Afghanistan would be like the US ignoring Hitler's Germany and only fighting in the Pacific because it was surprised by the Japanese at Pearl Harbour. To defeat Islamic terror, the US and its allies, including Australia, must defend Iraq. As the Malaysian elections demonstrate, genuine Muslims will renounce fundamentalism when they have a chance, and a stable democratic Iraq will light a path away from terror throughout the Middle East. Labor leader Mark Latham talks of bringing our troops home from Iraq to defend Australia. What he does not get is that in the war on terror, conventional borders and battle-lines are meaningless. What Darwin represented for the national defence of Australia in 1942, Baghdad does today.

Rantisi ranting

Maybe Hamas really did mean it. From AP, :

The new leader of the militant group Hamas on Sunday called President Bush the enemy of Islam and said that "God declared war" against Bush, the United States and Israel. In a speech at Gaza's Islamic University, Hamas leader Abdel Aziz Rantisi said he was not surprised that the United States vetoed a U.N. Security Council resolution condemning Israel's assassination on Monday of Hamas spiritual leader Sheik Ahmed Yassin.

"We knew that Bush is the enemy of God, the enemy of Islam and Muslims. America declared war against God. Sharon declared war against God and God declared war against America, Bush and Sharon," Rantisi said. "The war of God continues against them and I can see the victory coming up from the land of Palestine by the hand of Hamas."

The United States lists Hamas as a terrorist organization. The militant group has carried out many of the suicide bombings that have killed more than 450 people in the current conflict between Israel and the Palestinians.

Immediately after the Israeli missile strike that killed Yassin, Rantisi and other Hamas leaders threatened to retaliate against the United States, Israel's staunchest ally. However, a few days later, Rantisi backed down from the threat, saying Hamas would only be active in the West Bank, Gaza Strip and Israel.

From Bloomberg.com, :

Osama bin Laden ordered a strike on London's Heathrow airport months after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the U.S., the Sunday Times reported, citing transcripts of interrogations of an al-Qaeda operations chief.

Bin Laden, leader of the terrorist network, wanted to punish U.K. Prime Minister Tony Blair, and considered him his ``principal enemy,'' according to Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the former operations chief and planner of the Sept. 11 attacks, the paper said. Mohammed was captured in Pakistan more than one year ago, the Times said.

Sir John Stevens, the U.K.'s Metropolitan police commissioner, has said that a terror attack on London is ``inevitable'' and that the bomb attacks in Madrid on March 11 should act as a ``wake-up call'' to Britain and Europe.

Mohammed also said that the original plan for the Sept. 11 attacks was to hijack 10 planes and crash them into landmark buildings including the Library Tower in Los Angeles and the Sears Towers in Chicago, before Bin Laden decided synchronising such an attack would be impossible, according to the report.

Tahir Yuldashev (Sobaka)

You've heard of Osama and Zawahri. There are tens of thousands of others. Meet Tahir Yuldashev. From AFP, :

A senior Al-Qaeda leader was injured and on the run in Pakistan, a military spokesman said as a bloody 12-day offensive to capture foreign Islamic militants and their local supporters appeared to be drawing to a close.

"Tahir Yuldashev is one of the top Al-Qaeda leaders and is also head of the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan," Major General Shaukat Sultan told AFP. "He has been injured along with his local faciliators in the ongoing military operation near Wana and is hiding somewhere."

Yuldashev is the most wanted man in Uzbekistan and is considered a close confidant of Osama bin Laden. In 1999, he was sentenced to death in his absence for a series of bombing in the Uzbek capital Tashkent.

The military operation, the largest of its kind ever carried out in Pakistan, began on March 16 to capture Al-Qaeda militants and their local backers in the tribal area of South Waziristan.

"Intelligence sources and other information gathered from those apprehended during operation indicate that over sixty miscreants have been killed, while scores of them injured since March 16," a military statement said.

Intelligence officials said Yuldashev had taken refuge in South Waziristan some time after the US-led military campaign ousted the Taliban regime in Afghanistan in late 2001.

The military statement claimed the operation had succeeded in destroying a sancutary for terrorists.

"A hardened den of miscreants has been completely dismantled," it said.

"A variety of explosives, timebomb devices, communication equipment and a wide range of weaponry retrieved from the stronghold, the type of fighting, trenches and tunnel in the area are indication of their involvement in terrorist activities."

Over 160 "miscreants" have been apprehended live so far, the statement said.

"We have achieved our target; we have destroyed and dismantled the terrorists' sanctuary," Sultan earlier told AFP.

Sultan would not declare the operation over, but another senior army official said the operation would be wrapped up by Sunday at the latest.

An Australian soldier in Baghdad. Will he go the way of the Spanish?

Will Australia follow in Spain's dhimmi footsteps? From AFP, with thanks to Nicolei:

Australia's Labor opposition faced intensifying pressure to reverse its promise to withdraw troops from Iraq if it won elections due late this year.

Opposition leader Mark Latham, currently well ahead in the opinion polls, gave no indication he intended to back down as defence experts warned that the 850 Australian troops in Iraq were more likely to be targeted if Islamic terrorists believed they could be forced to leave.

Prime minister-elect Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero of Spain, alone among the 35 nations with troops in Iraq, has already said he would withdraw Spanish soldiers unless the United Nations took command of the military operation by July 1.

Professor Ross Babbage, head of the Australian National University's Strategic and Defence Studies Centre, said Labor's decision to set an arbitrary deadline could only signal to the terrorists that Canberra's resolve in the war on terror was weakening.

"If the terrorists think they can make Australia leave Iraq, then the troops are more vulnerable to attack," he told The Australian newspaper.

Lowy Institute defence analyst Alan Dupont said Latham was delivering a message to the terrorists that they could force Western governments to capitulate in the wake of the Madrid bombings of March 11.

Prime Minister John Howard and his ministers have lambasted Latham's pledge as dangerous and irresponsible, a view backed this week by the US ambassador to Australia, Tom Schieffer.

The government says Latham did not even consult official experts nor his own senior colleagues before announcing in a radio interview on Tuesday that a Labor government would unconditionally pull the troops out by Christmas.

Howard, in an editorial page commentary published Friday by the Asian Wall Street Journal, said the need for unity in the face of the terrorist threat was as important now as it was immediately after September 11.

"Now is not the time for us to be diverted from this global mission," Howard wrote. "Words are weapons in the information age and there is a need for vigilance to ensure we are not signalling weakness in the face of this ongoing threat."

Most of Australia's major newspapers called on Latham to reconsider.

"Latham is doing what the terrorists want," The Australian said in an editorial. "It has become clear that their strategy is to fracture coalition unity and intimidate voters in democratic nations.

"Coming only 10 days after a terror-numbed Spanish electorate delivered unexpected victory to the Socialist Party, Labor's abandonment of birpartisanship on troops in Iraq looks even more like a cave-in to terror."

Even opposition foreign affairs spokesman Kevin Rudd appeared to back away from his leader's stance, saying a Labor government would consider leaving some soldiers to protect Australia's mission and diplomats in Iraq.

"As a government, we will be seeking advice from the diplomatic security service about how best the mission in Baghdad can be secured," Rudd said. "We will be taking that advice ... by Christmas, the situation in Baghdad could be worse or it might be better."

Tribal leaders in South Waziristan

From the BBC, with thanks to Nicolei:

Opposition parties in Pakistan have condemned an ongoing military operation against suspected al-Qaeda sympathisers in South Waziristan.

In a heated debate in parliament on Thursday, they denounced the killing of Muslims as an "un-Islamic act."

They also alleged that innocent local tribesmen were being targeted.

Meanwhile there has been a relative lull in fighting near the town of Wana, where a large number of militants are thought to be holed up.

Yassin: the Palestinians' worst enemy

A thoughtful piece by David Pryce-Jones, who wrote the Foreword to my book Islam Unveiled, on the hypocritical outcry following the killing of Sheikh Yassin. From the Jerusalem Post:

Christians and Muslims are defending themselves with the very same measures and moral values as Israelis

"Blood will have blood" is the grim observation Shakespeare puts into the mouth of Macbeth. Unlike that character, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin did not kill in person, but he organized murder, a great deal of it. He strove all his life to make a reality of the mind-set of the Muslim Brotherhood, in which good Muslims everywhere at last assert their deserved supremacy over irredeemably bad Christians and Jews. Compromise is excluded. The only available options are victory or martyrdom.

An unlikely figure with several severe physical disabilities, wheelchair bound all his adult years, Yassin nonetheless founded Hamas and thereby gave himself responsibility for the Palestine sector of the wider Islamist struggle. Palestine, he believed, was a land exclusively reserved by God for Muslims. With a consistency that has to be acknowledged, he rejected the existence of Israel in any shape or form and led jihad to eliminate it. His specialty was the recruiting and dispatching of suicide bombers. He wanted to kill Jews and didn't mind how many Muslims died in the process. Israel, he prophesied in a recent interview, would finally collapse in 2007. For him, then, peace meant war, and so he was the victim of his own violence. Blood will have blood.

Far and wide, from Morocco to Indonesia and Nigeria, personalities exactly in his mould are struggling in their sectors to implement the Muslim Brotherhood mind-set. For the likes of Osama bin-Laden, Ayman Zawahiri, and al-Qaida, compromise also means surrender, and peace means war.

At the very moment when an Israeli helicopter was targeting Yassin, American and British special forces, with Pakistani soldiers in support, were engaged in a fire-fight against a substantial unit of al-Qaida on the Pakistan-Afghan border. President George W. Bush has repeated several times that he would like to capture al-Qaida leaders dead or alive. If the opportunity were to arise for any or all of these special forces, Western or Pakistani, to kill bin-Laden or Zawahiri as expeditiously as Yassin was killed, they would take it without hesitation.

Both Christians and Muslims, in other words, are defending themselves with the very same measures and moral values as Israelis. What, then, explains the uproar of indignation and condemnation released by the killing of Yassin? Can British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw really believe that his description of Yassin as "an old man in a wheelchair" is a necessary or sufficient definition? The EU foreign ministers in collective session have declared that the killing "undermines the concept of the rule of law." Did that concept have any meaning either for Yassin or for those who attacked the Madrid railway station? Will observance of the concept be enough to thwart further terror attacks anywhere in Europe?

Beyond the usual humbug of diplomatic discourse, there seems to be an anxiety to pretend to Arabs and Muslims that all is well when evidently it is not. It is as if Arabs and Muslims were children who mustn't hear the truth; that assorted Islamists are destabilizing Islamic countries and dragging them by the scruff of the neck into suicidal wars with the neighbors.

THE ABSOLUTE rulers of the Arab and Muslim world make it difficult for themselves, it is true, by playing to the street in the hope of earning popularity. President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt says that the killing of Yassin is a "completely meaningless and miscalculated Israeli action." In 1998 Yassin had just been released from an Israeli prison after a botched Mossad assassination attempt on another Hamas organizer (and both the attempt and the release really were miscalculated actions). He then toured Arab states collecting millions of dollars for Hamas. At the time, Mubarak had been energetically suppressing his Islamists, hanging them by the hundreds, and he made sure to refuse Yassin an entry visa. His current fury is a pretense.

Similarly, King Abdullah of Jordan speaks of the crime of killing Yassin; but, like his father, he has taken every measure to throttle Hamas in his own country. As for Arafat, he and his men have often shot it out with Hamas and engaged in kidnapping, illegal imprisonment, and other skulduggeries in what amounts to subterranean civil war. In spite of the three days of mourning he has decreed, Arafat is freed, at no cost to himself, from the main rival to his monopoly of power. President Pervez Musharraf is on the front line for the time being because Islamists have several times come close to murdering him, and he knows that he has to kill them before they kill him.

Hamas rhetoric promises to open the gates of hell, and of course it is possible that the death of Yassin will activate the Palestine sector of the Islamist struggle to frenzies of revenge and suicide bombings. Ariel Sharon and most of his government evidently decided that this was a risk worth taking. The implication must be that Israel will indeed be withdrawing soon from the Gaza Strip, to shelter as best it can in isolation behind its fences while the Palestinians sort their society out. The previous withdrawal from southern Lebanon was certainly another miscalculation, not in itself but because it was carried out with slipshod haste. Palestinians jumped to conclude that Israel was on the run, and might run further.

As Sharon resorts to his time-honored tactic of showing strength in the face of violence, Hamas is in no position to claim with any plausibility that withdrawal from Gaza is another step towards Sheikh Yassin's goal of victory through the elimination of Israel. Nor is there anyone of equivalent authority or credentials to succeed Yassin. At least one report of his funeral mentioned a surprising atmosphere of depression in Gaza, partly because of the suspicion that some informer must have provided crucial information to Israeli intelligence and partly out of a general sense that the intifada has run its course.

The Arab and Muslim world is caught between a past that will not release its grip and a future not quite able to come to birth. Sheikh Yassin had no solution to this dilemma. His inhuman passion could only ensure that blood will have blood. Everyone, Palestinians first and foremost, is better off without him.

Carey: Bad, bad dhimmi!

The outcry against George Carey is growing. From The Telegraph:

British Muslims reacted with anger yesterday at an attack on Islamic culture delivered by Lord Carey, the former Archbishop of Canterbury.

Muslim leaders said his claim that moderates had failed to condemn suicide bombers was totally unjustified, and rejected his assertion that Islam, over the past 500 years, had displayed a "strong resistance to modernity".

In a public lecture in Rome on Thursday evening, Dr Carey had also criticised the "glaring absence" of democracy in Muslim countries and said Islamic culture had contributed "no great invention... for many hundred years".

Manzoor Moghal, chairman of the Federation of Muslim Organisations in Leicester, said Dr Carey's statement was "disastrous" for relations between Christians and Muslims.

"He has fallen prey to the campaign tactics of racists in this country," he said.

As to the suggestion that Muslim leaders were not doing enough to criticise terrorists, Mr Moghal said it was "nonsense".

"We condemn suicide bombers, we go on radio, on television, we have made statements. What more can we do?

"We cannot be responsible for the criminal actions of others - they are not under our control. The former archbishop has got it wrong."

Dr Zaki Badawi, regarded as a moderate voice in Muslim circles who has been consulted by Tony Blair on a number of issues, said he was "quite upset" by the comments.

"I think Dr Carey made a rather unfortunate statement at a time when there is about to be dialogue between Muslims and Christians in America," said Dr Badawi, principal of the Muslim College in Ealing, west London.

He said that Dr Carey's view of Islam was historically inaccurate and failed to recognise that the West had undermined democratic revolutions in Iran and Egypt in the 19th and 20th centuries.

The speech also omitted any mention of the British Empire, which colonised Muslim countries, said Dr Badawi.

He added that the West's recent dominance of technology was more to do with geography and development than religion.

"I have great affection for Dr Carey but it is unfortunate he delivered this lecture," he said.

Iqbal Sacranie, secretary general of the Muslim Council of Britain, was swift to dismiss the former archbishop's words, denouncing them as "myopic". He said: "Frankly, one is dismayed by Lord Carey's comments.

"One is surprised to find Lord Carey recycling the same old religious prejudice in the 21st century."

Ahmed Versi, editor of Muslim News, said: "We hope that the current Archbishop Rowan Williams - who is very different - will condemn these views."

But Lord Carey defended his speech yesterday on BBC Radio 4's The World At One programme.

"It is meant to provoke a reaction. In the same way I look at the West and Christianity and am equally critical," he said.

"I'm looking at the way we build stereotypes of each other and the way we must transcend this and I think that a person looking objectively at the entire speech - five and a half thousand words - will see there's a balance there...

"So to twist it as an attack on the Islamic world would be far too simplistic and sadly it does suggest how polarised the world is at the present moment.

"The positive is that I believe we can do more together. Two great faiths, Christianity and Islam, working together against extremists on both sides. That, in fact, was the thrust of my message."

Dr Carey's remarks came just before his successor as Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, leads talks between Christian and Muslim scholars in New York, which start on Monday.

Although Lambeth Palace would not be drawn into a reaction, the Bishop of Southwark, the Right Rev Tom Butler, attempted to calm emotions.

He said: "Sometimes opinions will be expressed robustly in either direction; if this can be handled with maturity and mutual respect, understanding can be deepened and our dialogue can emerge strengthened."

Dr Carey received encouragement from the leader of an organisation which supports Christian missionaries working in Islamic countries.

Dr Patrick Sookhdeo, director of the Barnabas Fund, said that Dr Carey's lecture had taken "great courage".

"He has spent years establishing dialogue with Islam. Now he recognises that the core of Islam must be radically changed if there is going to be any change in their attitude towards suicide bombing and so on. This is a departure for the Church," he said.

"He is going to get a lot of flak from the Muslim community, who will feel that he has betrayed them, and from the liberal wing of the Church of England who will feel that he has stepped out of line."

From The Guardian, and Nicolei:

An al-Qaida operative told the Italian police that his unit had been poised to carry out mass murder at the main Milan railway terminus, possibly before the September 11 attacks, the newspaper Corriere della Sera reported yesterday. The evidence of the Tunisian terrorist, who has been codenamed "Ahmed", includes the claim that in Italy alone there were several "sleeper" cells, formed well before the US attacks and still intact.

Ahmed is also said to have revealed that all al-Qaida's operational units could count on suicide bombers.

The Interior ministry called for an inquiry into how the information had been leaked to a newspaper.

The attack on the Milan central station was one of at least six operations outlined by the informer, who is apparently serving a four-and-a-half-year sentence for criminal conspiracy. Ahmed reportedly told investigators that he had been involved in preparing attacks on a Nato base at Mondragone, near Naples, and on the main police station and the city's carabinieri headquarters.

In statements he apparently explained that al-Qaida operatives were well aware of an operation in the US before 9/11. In the weeks leading up to the attacks several had themselves arrested for petty offences to avoid suspicion.

Corriere della Sera said Ahmed was a former cab driver arrested in October 2001 along with other members of a unit headed by Essid Sami Ben Khemais, a Tunisian.

The informer said that as part of his reconnaissance of the Nato base he had worked for months in a nearby potato field. To get a look inside the carabinieri's station in Milan, he had staged a traffic dispute and got himself escorted to it.

And at the rail terminus he and another al-Qaida terrorist had left bulky, oddly shaped bags to see if they aroused suspicion. He said 15 bombs were to have been used, four more than were probably planted in Madrid.

Muslim worshippers fight to shred an Israeli flag after prayers Friday during a mock funeral for Hamas founder Sheikh Ahmed Yassin

More peace and tolerance from the mosques, this time in Iraq. From CNN, :

An influential Shiite cleric in Iraq called Israel's targeted killing of the spiritual leader of Hamas a "dirty crime against Islam" and the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, "a miracle from God."

Moqtada al-Sadr delivered a charged sermon Friday at a mosque near the holy city of Najaf, blasting Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon for the killing of Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, founder of Hamas.

On Monday, Israeli helicopters fired rockets at Yassin as he left a mosque in Gaza City. Yassin and seven others were killed in the attack on the leader of what Israel, the United States and the European Union consider a terrorist group.

Hamas' military wing has claimed responsibility for terrorist attacks against Israeli civilians as well as attacks against the Israeli military.

But Friday, al-Sadr called Sharon the "biggest terrorist of all."

"He has committed this dirty crime and killed one of the greatest of Islamic mujahedeen," al-Sadr told hundreds of worshippers at the Kufa mosque. "This was once again a dirty crime against Islam."

He accused the United States of complicity in Yassin's killing and said Iraqis should react "in the way that satisfies God."

Al-Sadr led the worshippers in chants: "No, no Israel! No, no to the Jews! No, no America! No, no to terrorism!"

Al-Sadr railed against the United States' occupation of Iraq.

"I seek the spread of freedom and democracy in the way that satisfies God," he said. "They have planned and paved the ways for a long time, but it is God who is the real planner -- and the proof of this is the fall of the American twin towers."

He then referred to the September 11 attacks as "a miracle from God."

"As we say, 'The rain starts with a drop,' " he said.

Israel's targeted attack on Yassin provoked condemnation from many in the international community. U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan and British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw said the killing violated international law.

The United States criticized the attack but stopped short of condemning it. On Thursday, the United States vetoed a U.N. Security Council resolution that would have condemned the assassination.

In Australia, as you may know, the Islamic Council of Victoria has brought suit against two Christian preachers — simply for teaching the facts about Islam. So far this seens to have backfired on the Muslim group in a big way, as now Islamic witnesses have been compelled to read passages from Qur'an and Hadith and acknowledge that, well, yes, that is Islamic teaching.

In this pdf is the witness statement of Mark Durie, an Anglican priest and professor of linguistics. Durie has provided an outstanding summation of the Islamic sources of jihad ideology, dhimmitude, and related topics. If you are looking for a concise guide to these matters, here it is.

Mark Durie Witness statement

Muslims from moderate, secular Turkey burn an American flag after Friday prayers today (Reuters)

Yes, but what did they inspire? LGF has alerted me to worldwide Yassin demonstrations following Friday sermons in mosques today. Not a lot of peace and tolerance being preached, at least where these pictures were taken.

Another from Turkey
Jordan
Iran
Egypt
India

Gijs de Vries

No doubt the mujahedin are quaking with fear today. From EUbusiness.com:

Former Dutch deputy interior minister Gijs de Vries is in line to be appointed the European Union's new anti-terrorism coordinator at an EU summit this week, officials said Wednesday.

EU foreign affairs chief Javier Solana will nominate de Vries when EU leaders decide Thursday evening whether to press ahead with the new job, which was proposed after the March 11 attacks in Madrid, sources said.

The post of anti-terrorism coordinator was proposed by EU interior ministers last week to oversee the disparate fields involved in the fight against extremism.

De Vries, 47, is the only name in the frame so far, the sources said.

He was deputy interior minister of the Netherlands between 1998 and 2002. He sat on a convention that drafted the EU's first constitution, another major issue to be tackled by the heads of government Thursday.

De Vries' new post, of course, has been dubbed "Mr. Terrorism" by EU officials.

Marzook (ABC)

Hamas is using real estate deals in Maryland and around the US to raise money for terrorism, according to the Washington Times, with thanks to Joyce:

The terrorist organization Hamas invested millions of dollars during the past decade in real-estate projects nationwide, including in suburban Maryland, as part of a scheme to raise cash to fund acts of terrorism, records show.

The investments — involving the construction of hundreds of new homes, including many in Oxon Hill — were handled through BMI Inc., a defunct Secaucus, N.J., investment firm founded by Soliman S. Biheiri, an Egyptian and Hamas supporter, according to a newly released sentencing declaration by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

In the declaration, ICE senior agent David Kane said Biheiri, sentenced in January to a year in prison on immigration violations, used the firm beginning in 1991 to raise "large amounts of money" through investments and as a front to route cash from more than 100 bogus Hamas charities and businesses, most of which operated in Virginia.

The Oxon Hill investment included a project known as Barnaby Knolls, financed by a BMI subsidiary BMI Real Estate Development Inc., the declaration said. Begun in January 1991, it involved the construction of 57 homes in the working-class Prince George's County neighborhood.

ICE agents refer to the project as "Hamas West," although no one living in the subdivision has been identified as being involved in the scheme or with the terrorist organization that is pursuing a Palestinian state.

One of the principle BMI investors in the Oxon Hill project, according to the Kane declaration, was Mousa Mohammad Abu Marzook, the self-proclaimed political leader of Hamas detained by U.S. authorities in 1995 on suspicion of being involved in terrorist activities. He later was expelled to Jordan, where he was deported to Syria for his ties to Hamas.

The U.S.-educated Marzook, who had lived in Falls Church, has been named by Israeli authorities on charges of murder, attempted murder, manslaughter and conspiracy in truck and bus bombings in Israel that killed 14 and injured 56. He also is accused of ordering the killing of 37 others in Hamas attacks in Israel.

According to the declaration, Marzook told a confidential U.S. Customs Service informant during a May 1991 meeting in Ruston, La., that he "has and currently is investing money with BMI," including a real-estate project in Oxon Hill, where he intended to build "more than 56 homes." In the tape-recorded conversation, Marzook noted that the suburban Maryland site was close to Washington.

According to the declaration, more than $1 million was invested by BMI in various real-estate projects, many of which are described but not identified.

The declaration said hundreds of thousands of dollars invested in the projects was returned to investors or were re-invested in other real-estate developments, with much of the cash being routed through banks in Virginia and New Jersey to Dubai in the United Arab Emirates. It said significant amounts of cash obtained in the real-estate ventures were used "in furtherance of Hamas terrorist operations."

It was a U.S. investigation into Marzook's financial activities in this country that led to Biheiri, BMI and Ptech, a Boston-based computer software firm raided by customs agents in December 2002, authorities said. They said Biheiri and Yasin Qadi, a key BMI investor, were the primary Ptech financiers.

Qadi, a Saudi multimillionaire, was listed by the Treasury Department in 2002 as a terrorist and is thought by authorities to have diverted millions of dollars to Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda network through various charitable organizations.

Biheiri was a key figure in a scheme using private companies and interrelated Islamic charities operating out of business fronts in Herndon and Falls Church to divert millions of dollars to global terrorists, including Hamas and al Qaeda.

In 2002, federal agents raided 14 Islamic businesses in Virginia, seizing computers, bank statements and other documents in a customs investigation known as "Operation Green Quest." That probe focused on what authorities called a "financial relationship between" BMI and a Herndon corporation Sana-Bell Inc.

Authorities said Sana-Bell existed to generate funds for a Falls Church-based charity known as the International Islamic Relief Organization (IIRO). In an affidavit filed in connection with the Green Quest investigation, Mr. Kane said the CIA listed the IIRO as having "extremist connections" to Hamas and Al-Gamaa Al-Islamiya, the Egyptian terrorist organization that served as a precursor to al Qaeda.

Hamas was designated by the State Department as a terrorist organization in 1991. Although the number of hard-core members is unknown, supporters and sympathizers have been placed in the tens of thousands. Much of its fund raising takes place in the United States.

Pope Shenouda III

A press release from the Jubilee Campaign, with thanks to FreedomNowNews:

For immediate release

March 25th 2004

EGYPTIAN CHURCH LEADER CONDEMNS FORCED CONVERSIONS OF CHRISTIANS TO ISLAM

Pope Shenouda the Third, Patriarch of the Coptic Orthodox Church in Egypt, has publicly condemned the kidnapping and forced conversions of Christian women to Islam. In a speech on March 16 he said, "I have received so many letters about what's happening to the Christian girls who go to supermarket stores to shop. At the store they tell them that they have won and have to go upstairs to receive their award or prize. After that we don't know what's happening to these girls upstairs.

There is a lot of talking going on about this matter, and I see that what's happening will create a religious clash in the country. I'm urging the police to take a serious action against what's happening, because I have a numerous number of letters regarding this matter. We don't know where they took the girls. They could be anywhere.

This matter shouldn't be taken in a careless way as if nothing happened. I'm saying this and I know how dangerous the situation is. We don't want more disasters to happen to us. We've had enough."

Sine 1993, the Christian human rights organisation, the Jubilee Campaign, has been campaigning against the forced conversions of Egyptian Christians, especially women, to Islam, and has had numerous cases of such incidents brought to its attention.

In 1998, the late Bishop Athanasius of Beni Souif, gave a public talk in which he described an incident which took place some years beforehand, when a young Christian woman came to him for help after she managed to escape from Muslims who had held her captive with the intention of forcing her to convert to Islam.

She had fled from a house where different teams of Muslims were working to
pressure or force Christians to convert to Islam. She had been tricked by two Muslim friends into accompanying them to that house, where she was held captive. Her description of what happened there indicated that there was a very organised and systematic approach by these Muslims to waylaying and forcing Egyptian Christians to convert to Islam.

Jubilee's Researcher and Parliamentary Officer, Wilfred Wong, says, "The attempts to force Christians to convert to Islam in Egypt are on the increase and the methods are getting increasingly varied and well organised.

Some of these forced conversions are carried out by Muslim individuals, with the help of their friends, while others are being conducted by well funded groups. Christians of all denominations are seen as "fair game" for forced conversions, whether they be Protestants, Coptic Orthodox or Catholic. It is common for money to be offered to Christians to convert to Islam - no small matter in a country where poverty is very widespread - but it also common for intimidation and force, including kidnapping and the threat or use of rape to be adopted as a method of making Christians convert to Islam. Christian women and girls are especially vulnerable to these attacks and the Egyptian authorities do nothing to protect the Christians. The Egyptian police even order the families of kidnapped Christian women to forget about their daughters and not to try to get them back.

Pope Shenouda rarely ever makes public pronouncements regarding the persecution of Christians but for him to have recently publicly mentioned these kidnappings of Egyptian Christian women is one disturbing indication that the problem is escalating sharply. Since the Egyptian authorities do nothing to help, the Muslims involved in these forced conversions are emboldened to increase the scale of their operations. Much prayer is needed against this evil phenomenon."

In his speech, Pope Shenouda also referred to an incident where some young Christian men were travelling and carrying some Bibles. They were arrested and interrogated by the authorities simply because they were in possession of a few Bibles.

There are about ten million or more Christians in Egypt, making them by far the largest Christian community in the predominantly Islamic Arab world. For many years Jubilee Campaign has been warning the international community that this also makes Egyptian Christians a prime target for Muslim fundamentalists, who want to rid the Arab world of such a large Christian presence by either converting them to Islam, driving them out of the country or killing them.

**************

For further information you can contact Wilfred Wong on +44 (0)20 7219
5129.

Jubilee Campaign is an interdenominational Christian human rights organisation which has worked with over 150 British Parliamentarians on human rights issues all over the world.

Hussan Abdu

From Palestinian Media Watch, with thanks to Joyce:

This week's suicide terror attempt by a Palestinian teenager received world attention not because it was the first attempt but because TV captured the striking images of the young boy struggling out of the explosive belt. In fact tens of Palestinian Authority [PA] teenagers, some as young as 13 and 14 have gone on suicide missions, many dying and killing others, because PA society has been teaching children that combat and heroic Death for Allah - Shahada [Martyrdom] are expected of them. PMW has been documenting this Palestinian Authority indoctrination and below are the links to striking examples. When PMW presented these videos at a US Senate committee hearing, Senator Hillary Clinton called it: "horrific child abuse" and US Senator Arlen Specter said the PA were not merely "child abusers" but "civilization abusers".

Here is the full PMW report, with video links.

A press release from Americans Against Hate:

For Immediate Release Contact: Joe Kaufman

March 26, 2004
joe@joe4rep.com

SOUTH FLORIDA ANTI-HATE GROUP TO PROTEST CAIR AND HAMAS

(Coral Springs, FL) On Saturday, April 3rd, at 6:00 pm, Americans Against Hate (AAH) will be conducting a protest against the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) and the Palestinian terror group HAMAS. The event will take place outside the Wyndham Ft. Lauderdale Airport hotel, where CAIR's national Executive Director, Nihad Awad, is coming to speak.

At the rally, AAH will be highlighting:

* Nihad Awad's personal connection to a group that was founded by a HAMAS leader who was later deported by the U.S. government.
* Awad's statement in support of HAMAS, made at a Florida university symposium.
* Awad's position as an editor for a publication that celebrated terrorist attacks made by HAMAS.
* Awad's defense of HAMAS on a popular CBS television news show.

In addition, at the event, AAH will prove that CAIR, just after the 9/11 attacks, appeared to provide material support for terrorist organizations, and that this support resulted in the deaths of innocent people, including Americans.

Joe Kaufman, the Chairman of AAH, stated, "While the media has made the public aware of the fact that America has been threatened with attack by HAMAS, much of the public does not know that there is a HAMAS front existing and thriving right inside America. On Saturday, April 3rd, WE WILL EXPOSE THIS FRONT and hope that the media does not ignore it."

Where: Outside Wyndham Ft. Lauderdale Airport hotel
When: Saturday, April 3, 6:00 pm
Directions: From I-95, take Griffin Rd. exit (Exit 23), and head East
0.3 miles. Hotel is on the North side of the road (1870 Griffin Rd.)

There will be important speakers, and refreshments will be served.

Joe Kaufman is available for interview at: joe@joe4rep.com.

FOR MORE INFORMATION ABOUT THIS, READ JOE KAUFMAN'S LATEST FRONTPAGE MAGAZINE ARTICLE, A NIGHT OF HAMAS "HEROES."

Dhimmi Ralph

From Paul Sperry in FrontPage magazine, the sad story about how Ralph Nader is cozying up to the same elements who oppressed his dhimmi Maronite Christian forbears in Lebanon:

A hush fell over the packed ballroom of the Marriott Hotel in Arlington, Va., as the emcee asked Arab guests to join him in a moment of silence "in honor of all the heroes and martyrs" of the 2000 intifada. Ralph Nader, the event's keynote speaker, was among the participants.

The silence was soon replaced by thunderous chants of "Run, Ralph, run!" as presidential spoiler Nader took the stage to demand a "viable state" for Palestinians. He also slammed Washington for using secret terror evidence against illegal Arab immigrants, and called economic sanctions against Iraq one of the "great crimes of the U.S," according to an American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee newsletter account of its June 2001 convention.

That was three months before the 9-11 terrorist attacks, which were carried out by 19 Arab immigrants who got substantial assistance from the Muslim community while they prepared for the attacks. Did that terrible day change Nader's views? Not one bit.

In July 2002, at another Washington-area Islamic convention, he accused the FBI of using McCarthyite tactics to question Arab immigrants -- the new American bogeymen, according to Nader. "They used to be called communists," he said. "Now they are called terrorists."

As a keynote speaker there at the Islamic Circle of North America's confab in Baltimore, he shared the stage with Imam Siraj Wahhaj, an unindicted co-conspirator in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, and Anwar Aulaqi, the Wahhabi imam who ministered to two of the 9-11 hijackers in closed-door sessions.

Nader must have made quite an impression, because the next year, ICNA's former president invited him to headline an Islamic conference in Florida with none other than Shaikh Abdur-Rahman Al-Sudais, a top Saudi cleric who has called on Allah to "terminate" Jews -- "the scum of humanity" and "grandsons of monkeys and pigs" -- while urging Muslims to shun peace with Israel.

While no anti-Semite, Nader has publicly deplored Israeli retaliation for Palestinian suicide attacks and recommended suspending U.S. aid to Israel.

The promotional flier bills him and Al-Sudais, senior imam at the Grand Mosque in Mecca, as "specially invited guests" at the December 2003 event near Orlando, which featured co-conspirator Wahhaj again, along with the imam of dirty-bomb suspect Jose Padilla and an official of an Islamic
charity raided by federal agents for suspected terror financing. Nader declined the invitation only after the press got a hold of it.

A speech by Azam Kamguian on the Sharia courts in Canada. From the Institute for the Secularisation of Islamic Society:

In my speech, I will argue against the Islamic tribunals and will discuss how the Islamic Sharia law brutally violates human and women’s rights. I will try to demonstrate how Islamism and multi - culturalism are a united camp against universal human rights in Canada. At the end, I will emphasise the urgency of stopping the Islamic tribunals in Canada.

As we all know, Islamists in Canada have recently set up an Islamic Institute of Civil Justice to oversee tribunals that would arbitrate family disputes and other civil matters between people from Muslim origin on the basis of the Islamic Sharia law. This is the first time in any western country that the medieval precepts of the Sharia have been given any validity. One can imagine that the Islamists will use this as a lever to work for similar recognition in many other western countries. After all, if Canada is prepared to recognise Sharia law in this way why not every other country in the west.

This move is yet another effort by Islamists to impose the barbaric Sharia law, but this time on the people in the west. This move belongs to political Islam, a major force that has brutally suppressed people’s rights and freedom in general and women’s rights in particular in the Middle East. It is a political movement that came to the fore against the secular and progressive movements for liberation and egalitarianism in the Middle East. In Iran, the Sudan, Pakistan and Afghanistan, Islamic regimes proceeded to transform women's homes into prison houses, where confinement of women, their exclusion from many fields of work and education, and their brutal treatment became the law of the land.

Sadly and unfortunately, the setting up of the Sharia tribunals in Canada will be given validity, due to the reactionary politics of multi-culturalism. This is yet another fruit of a policy that causes fragmentation; apartheid based legal system and racism. Of course, this politics of fragmentation and apartheid suits the purpose of Islamists best. Mr. Mohamed El Masry, president of the Canadian Islamic Congress, has argued that Canada needs "a multiplicity of laws" to accommodate different groups when their moral standards clash. Mr. El Masry says the tribunals, which would include imams, elders and lawyers, will provide Muslims with the means to settle civil disputes out of court according to their beliefs.

Advocates for the Islamic tribunals have argued that one of the beauties of free and open societies in the west is their flexibility. But the very same ‘flexibility” provides the Islamists with the opportunity to impose their own rigid and oppressive rules on a specific community in the society. Mr. Momtaz Ali, president of the Canadian Society of Muslims, and a leading proponent of the Islamic tribunals has said: "It - the Islamic tribunal - offers not only a variety of choices, but shows the real spirit of our multicultural society," The very same Mr. Ali also says: “…On religious grounds, a Muslim who would choose to opt out … would be guilty of a far greater crime than a mere breach of contract – and this would be tantamount to blasphemy or apostasy”. You are aware that blasphemy and apostasy are among the worst crimes in Islam, in many countries punishable by death.

This project is against the equality of all citizens before the law, regardless of race, religion or gender. Such equality does not exist under the Islamic Sharia law. Sharia tribunals effectively establish a parallel legal system based on religion, which I believe will lead to an apartheid-based legal system. The principles of individual freedom and equality before the law should take precedence over any collective goals that members of a particular group might claim for themselves.

The Economist gives the terrorists a guide to which countries to target next

As is well known, the Madrid bombings and their aftermath have taught the terrorists that terrorism works. Expect more of it. From AP, with thanks to Mrs. Obelix and DC Watson:

The deadly train bombings in Spain and the impact they had on Spanish elections are increasing concern that terrorists might target the U.S. presidential nominating conventions and the Olympics to make an even bolder statement, FBI Director Robert Mueller says.

"We understand that between now and the election, there is a window of time in which terrorists may well wish to influence events, whether it's in the United States or overseas," Mueller said in an interview with The Associated Press.

He also said Islamic extremists are changing tactics to focus on recruitment of local sympathizers less likely to arouse suspicion than outsiders. And terrorist groups may well move away from fortified targets, such as airports and government buildings, he said Thursday.

"I do believe that when we enhance our security, harden targets, terrorists look for other targets that are soft targets," Mueller said. When new security measures are taken, he said, "the terrorists are thinking about ways to circumvent them."

The March 11 train bombings in Madrid that killed 190 people were a factor in the ouster of Spain's government. That has added to uneasiness about the U.S. political conventions in New York and Boston this summer.

"In the wake of what happened in Madrid, we have to be concerned about the possibility of terrorists attempting to influence elections in the United States by committing a terrorist act," Mueller said. "Quite clearly, there will be substantial preparations for each of the conventions."

From Reuters, with thanks to FreedomNowNews:

A spate of weekend bombings on Zanzibar, which hosted visiting German President Johannes Rau on Monday, hit the homes of local political and religious leaders and a restaurant being used by Western diplomats, police said.

There were no casualties from the homemade bomb blasts at the house of Zubeir Ali Maulid, a cabinet minister in the Tanzanian semi-autonomous island's government, and the home of Zanzibar's Mufti and top Islamic leader, Harith bin Khelef, said police spokesman George Kizuguto.

A grenade hurled at the Mercury restaurant landed on the dinner table of a British diplomat on Saturday evening, but failed to go off. An American diplomat and about 25 foreigners were also dining in the restaurant at the time, police said.

Rau, who is on a tour of Africa, is making a one-day visit to the Indian Ocean island of one million people to meet government leaders, welfare groups and visit historical sites.

Police said they suspected the Society for Islamic Awareness (UAMSHO), a religious movement which has been at loggerheads with the government recently, was behind the weekend explosions.

UAMSHO has been angry with the Tanzanian government since it appointed Khelef as Mufti over a religious leader who had been chosen by the islanders. The weekend blasts followed bomb attacks last week on a church, a school bus and a number of electric transformers.

Kizuguto said five Muslim leaders held over last week's attacks would be charged in court on Monday.

"We are still investigating those involved in the weekend activities," he said.

In January 2002, four people were seriously injured on Zanzibar when suspected Islamic militants attacked bars and stores selling alcohol with firebombs.

On the payroll of the House of Saud?

Are the Saudis still playing a double game? From WND:

Prominent members of the Saudi royal family continue to supply millions of dollars to al-Qaida and related groups, U.S. officials said, according to Geostrategy-Direct, the global intelligence service

The money is funneled through so-called charities, such as the Al Haramayn Islamic Foundation, they said.

On Feb. 19, the Treasury Department ordered banks to freeze accounts of the Oregon and Missouri branches of Al Haramayn. The foundation's U.S. headquarters is in Ashland, Ore.

An affidavit filed in U.S. District Court in Oregon asserted Al Haramayn was used to relay $131,000 from Saudi Arabia to al-Qaida-aligned fighters in Chechnya. The affidavit also reported a federal grand jury investigation of Al Haramayn.

"We have to stop the princes soliciting support among the radical militants in Saudi Arabia," former CIA official Robert Bauer told the International Commission on Religious Freedom in November 2003. "We have to stop them from giving money. We have to encourage them to start reforms throughout the kingdom or it's going to bring the whole system down."

In January, Riyadh and Washington agreed to relay a request to the United Nations to freeze the assets of Al Haramayn in Indonesia, Kenya, Pakistan and Tanzania. But officials said Saudi Arabia has refused to take responsibility for Al Haramayn, which is overseen by Islamic Affairs Minister Saleh Al Sheik.

The Bush administration is disappointed with Saudi Arabia's lack of cooperation to halt the financing to al-Qaida and related groups.

Despite the administration's insistence of growing cooperation, U.S. officials said Riyadh and Washington have made little progress in stopping the flow of funds from the kingdom to al-Qaida operatives in Europe and Asia. The officials said the administration's policy has been to publicly express optimism in hopes that Riyadh would improve cooperation.

"Saudi Arabia we're still dealing with," said Sen. Jon Kyl, an Arizona Republican and regarded as close to the White House. "I mean, we've made progress there, but a lot of the money that supports terrorism comes right out of one place. We had to deal with that in a different way," he told the Council on Foreign Relations on March 12.

"Talking to the Saudis has been very frustrating," an administration official familiar with the U.S. effort with Riyadh said. "There's been some promises of cooperation, but they were quickly forgotten."

"Now, think for a minute. Al Haramayn is established by the Saudi royal family," said former Treasury Department general counsel David Aufhauser. "It strikes me that there is too much abdication of actual power and responsibility when you say you do not have the ability to actually close down these offices abroad and the best you can do is to freeze what assets they have within the jurisdiction and to prohibit further contributions."

Aufhauser made his comments to a conference of the Middle East Policy Council on Jan. 23.

Until November 2003, Aufhauser was the administration's point man in the effort to prevent al-Qaida financing. He said Saudi Arabia has not prosecuted any of its nationals on charges of relaying funding to Islamic insurgency groups.

"In the two and a half years I spent on this matter, I cannot remember a single Saudi who was held accountable for being a donor to terrorist financing," Aufhauser said. "Until we get to the donors, the exercise is a fool's errand."

Carey: Bad dhimmi!

Former Anglican Archbishop of Canterbury George Carey is under fire from Muslim groups for remarks he made during a lecture in Rome. From the Telegraph via Smh.com.au, with thanks to Susan and Fanabba:

The former archbishop of Canterbury George Carey has made a trenchant attack on Islamic culture, saying it is authoritarian, inflexible and under-achieving.

In a speech that will upset sensitive relations between the faiths, he denounced moderate Muslims for failing unequivocally to condemn the "evil" of suicide bombers.

Why will this upset "sensitive relations between the faiths"? Carey isn't covering up unequivocal condemnations of suicide bombing by moderate Muslims. In Onward Muslim Soldiers I point out that moderates have repeatedly insisted that Islam forbids suicide, which is beside the point: radical justifications for suicide bombing don't consider that it comes under the heading of suicide at all. Rather, it is covered by verses of the Qur'an such as this one: "When ye meet the Unbelievers (in fight), smite at their necks. . . . But those who are slain in the Way of Allah, He will never let their deeds be lost. Soon will He guide them and improve their condition, and admit them to the Garden which He has announced for them" (Sura 47:4-6). The moderate response to this idea has been wholly inadequate.

He attacked the "glaring absence" of democracy in Muslim countries, suggested they had contributed little of major significance to world culture for centuries and criticised the Islamic faith.

Well, these are harsh things to say, but where exactly are they inaccurate? I discuss the decline of Islamic culture and the difficulty democracy has had in the Islamic world in Islam Unveiled, and show how these tendencies are encouraged by a particular approach to the Qur'an. These may not be pleasant topics, but Carey certainly isn't making these things up.

Dr Carey's criticism, during a lecture in Rome, is the most forthright by a senior church leader in recent times.

He acknowledged that most Muslims were peaceful people who should not be demonised. But he said outrages such as the September 11 attacks and the Madrid bombings raised difficult questions.

What's unreasonable about that?

Contrasting Western democracy with Islamic societies, he said: "Throughout the Middle East and North Africa we find authoritarian regimes with deeply entrenched leadership, some of which rose to power at the point of a gun and are retained in power by massive investment in security forces."

"Whether they are military dictatorships or traditional sovereignties, each ruler seems committed to retaining power and privilege."

Dr Carey said he was not convinced by arguments that Islam and democracy were incompatible, citing the example of Turkey. He urged Europeans and Americans to resist claims that Islamic states were morally, spiritually and culturally superior.

Carey has thus issued a challenge to the culture of dhimmitude that is fast spreading across Europe and is already being seen in America. Cultural myths, such as that Muslim Andalucia was a beacon of tolerance (which I explode in Onward Muslim Soldiers) are taken for granted everywhere, and are being used as political tools. Carey is unusually perceptive to take note of this.

"Although we owe much to Islam handing on to the West many of the treasures of Greek thought, the beginnings of calculus, Aristotelian thought during the period known in the West as the Dark Ages, it is sad to relate that no great invention has come for many hundred years from Muslim countries," he said.

"This is a puzzle, because Muslim peoples are not bereft of brilliant minds. They have much to contribute to the human family, and we look forward to the close co-operation that might make this possible.

"Yes, the West has still much to be proud of, and we should say so strongly. We should also encourage Muslims living in the West to be proud of it and say so to their brothers and sisters living elsewhere."

Dr Carey said moderate Muslims must "resist strongly" the taking over of Islam by radical activist elements, and "express strongly . . . their abhorrence of violence done in the name of Allah".

I don't see how any reasonable person could take issue with that last paragraph.

Christians, who shared many admirable moral values with Muslims, such as respect for the family, must speak out against the persecution they often encountered in Muslim countries.

"During my time as archbishop, this was my constant refrain - that the welcome we have given to Muslims in the West, with the accompanying freedom to worship freely and build their mosques, should be reciprocated in Muslim lands," he said.

A perfectly reasonable thing to call for.

But here is the predictable response. From icWales: Ex-Archbishop accused of prejudice.

Muslims in Britain have attacked a former Archbishop of Canterbury, accusing him of "recycling" religious prejudice after he criticised Islamic culture.

Lord Carey accused Islamic societies of being authoritarian and committed to power and privilege - often led by people who rose to power "at the point of a gun".

He also criticised the Islamic faith, saying Muslim theological scholarship had declined over the last 500 years, "leading to strong resistance to modernity".

Lord Carey made his comments during a lecture in Rome, on the eve of a seminar between Christians and Muslims in New York.

"Throughout the Middle East and North Africa we find authoritarian regimes with deeply entrenched leadership, some of which rose to power at the point of a gun and are retained in power by massive investment in security forces," it was reported by the Daily Telegraph.

"Whether they are military dictatorships or traditional sovereignties, each ruler seems committed to retaining power and privilege."

Iqbal Sacranie, secretary general of the Muslim Council of Britain, was swift to dismiss the former archbishop's words.

He said: "Frankly, one is dismayed by Lord Carey's comments.

"One is surprised to find Lord Carey recycling the same old religious prejudice in the 21st Century."

Once again: what did Carey say that was untrue? I haven't seen all of his remarks, but I can document everything in this report. Why is any negative observation about the Islamic world immediately classified as prejudice? Iqbal Sacranie would do his community a far greater service by showing a willingness to engage in self-criticism and dialogue with outsiders. That is, after all, what he and his colleagues repeatedly demand from the West.

Excellent observations from Saul Singer in the Jerusalem Post:

It is amazing how sophisticated the war against terrorism has become. According to almost every government in the world, the elimination of Ahmed Yassin was counterproductive, if not downright idiotic. Peace Now called it a "prize for Hamas."

Someone really ought to alert those commandos hunting down Osama bin Laden to stop before it's too late. Kill Bin Laden? What a prize for al-Qaida that would be.

What a rube I am for clinging to the primitive notion that eliminating a terrorist organization's undisputed leader might prove to be a setback for it.

How could I have missed what was obvious to Palestinian Prime Minister Ahmed Qurei, that Yassin was a "moderating influence" on Hamas? And now it's too late.

"We are deeply troubled by this action by the government of Israel," said America's UN Ambassador John Negroponte. "We didn't think it contributed to the peace process." And I thought that removing a leader who makes Yasser Arafat look like Mahatma Gandhi might be good for peace!

It is easy to dismiss such reactions, especially from a friend like the US, as lip service to ease doing what counts, namely blocking a Security Council resolution from Algeria - a country known for its delicate touch with fundamentalists. The same Negroponte said of Yassin, "He preached hatred and glorified suicide bombings of buses, restaurants and cafes. This Security Council should not, and the United States will not, support initiatives which ignore this reality."

So what does it matter if the US gets in little digs while doing the right thing? It matters because it perpetuates a paradigm that is harmful to both the US and Israel.

Since 9/11, Israel's enemies have clung desperately to the notion that their fight has nothing to do with the jihad against America. Embarrassing cracks in this facade do appear, such as when Palestinians cheered 9/11 itself and led the world among peoples choosing bin Laden as a leader who could be most trusted to "do the right thing."

More typical, however, is the move of Hamas's new leader, pediatrician and media favorite Abdel Aziz Rantisi, who already has said that Hamas has "no plans" to attack American targets. Message: I'm no bin Laden, so take me off your radar screen.

Even Hamas, which is not shy about refusing to contemplate Israel's right to exist in any borders, must give the impression that the fight against Israel is not part of a global jihad. Yassin let it be known that he was willing to discuss a truce with Israel for 40 years. This was an attempt to have it both ways: not to give up on destroying Israel, but play into the idea that Israel can increase its acceptability by giving up territory.

THE PALESTINIANS understand that the world cannot bring itself to really oppose anything in the name of a struggle for their own state, but that there is little sympathy for a jihad to destroy Israel.

But what kind of war is the Arab-Israeli struggle? Are we witnessing a brutal but temporary interlude in a fundamentally negotiable conflict? Or a total war, fought only by armies and terrorists, that must end in one side's total victory, like al-Qaida's war against America?

The difference is critical, because negotiable conflicts, it is argued, need to be fought differently. This nuance is to be found in President George W. Bush's response to the Yassin hit, "Israel has the right to defend herself from terror. And as she does so, I hope she keeps consequences in mind as to how to make sure we stay on the path to peace."

There is no path to peace with al-Qaida, but there is one with the Palestinians. But here's the rub: we can't get near the path to peace until we beat the jihad that prevents this conflict from becoming a negotiable one.

Beating jihad requires tearing off, not participating in, its disguises. Hamas must be destroyed because its raison d'etre is to destroy Israel. For peace to have a chance, as Bush observed in June 2002, the Palestinians must choose "new leaders, leaders not compromised by terror." The "right of return" is not about resettling refugees, but about employing demography where tanks and terrorists have failed.

Every place jihad is allowed to masquerade as a nationalist struggle, it should be unmasked, with the explicit purpose of endorsing total war against it. Total war does not mean that a democracy should abandon its values and respect for innocent life, but it does mean fighting to win, not to negotiate.

The Yassin hit was a missed opportunity for the US to explain that groups like Hamas, Hizbullah, and Islamic Jihad may specialize in the "Palestine sector," but they are blood brothers of al-Qaida and should be treated as such. The Bush administration's lack of moral clarity on this does not just harm Israel's security. It harms America's. So long as even the US fears exposing the jihad against Israel, the war against global jihad cannot be won.

Gillerman: good questions

The US has blocked a UN resolution condemning Israel for killing Sheikh Yassin. Most stories don't tell you what Israeli Ambassador Dan Gillerman said, and it is worth knowing. From AFP, with thanks to Nicolei:

The United States on Thursday vetoed a resolution condemning Israel's killing of Palestinian militant leader Sheikh Ahmed Yassin at an unusually bitter meeting of the UN Security Council.

ONE HEATED EXCHANGE

ISRAELI ambassador Dan Gillerman took aim at his counterpart Inocencio Arias of Spain, staring him down and asking whether the Spanish government would have tried to kill the attackers who left 200 dead in March 11 bomb attacks in Madrid.

'If you knew before the bloody massacre of your citizens took place who was going to carry that horrendous act out, would you have sat still and let it happen?' Mr Gillerman said.

Referring to the use of Palestinian children as suicide attackers, he said there could be no peace in the Middle East 'until the Palestinians learn to love their children more than they hate us'.

In response, the PA's Nasser al-Kidwa resorted to name-calling and ad hominem attacks — the usual response from radical Muslims and their allies.

Palestinian representative Nasser al-Kidwa retorted that Mr Gillerman's comments were 'full of racism' and added: 'Israel is a terror group.'

On Wednesday, the UN Human Rights Commission in Geneva voted 31-2 to condemn Israel for Yassin's death, but the body has no power to punish countries. A resolution by the Security Council would have carried more international weight.

The vetoed resolution condemned Yassin's death and called for a 'complete cessation of extrajudicial executions'.

It also condemned 'all terrorist attacks against any civilians, as well as all acts of violence and destruction'.

However, it did not mention any militant groups by name -- a traditional US demand.

Why does the US demand such a thing?

Thaksin: did the jihad reach into his government?

A prominent Thai governing official has been arrested in connection with jihad attacks in southern Thailand. From The Straits Times, with thanks to Nicolei:

A prominent member of Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra's ruling party faced treason charges yesterday over a deadly January attack on an army base in the Muslim south after a court ordered his arrest.

Najmuddin Umar, a Muslim member of Mr Thaksin's Thai Rak Thai party, was implicated by one of five people arrested last month over the highly planned raid in Narathiwat province which left four soldiers dead.

'The court has approved the arrest warrants for Najmuddin and eight others,' a court official said, declining to identify the co-accused.

The charges relate to treason, rebellion, separatist activities and the theft of weapons, he said.

Najmuddin, along with another Thai Rak Thai parliamentarian and a senator, were named by police investigating the Jan 4 attack which sparked a spate of violence in the region that the government is struggling to control.

More than 50 people including soldiers, police, government officials and even Buddhist monks have been killed this year.

Suspicions about Najmuddin's involvement - which surfaced earlier this month - have severely embarrassed Mr Thaksin's Thai Rak Thai party.

He told reporters yesterday that he was not concerned about the allegation against his party member.

'We're not going to look at the political angle because even though I'm the head of a political party, I have to put the nation first,' he said.

According to police documents submitted to court, Najmuddin took part in three secret meetings to plan the raid in Narathiwat province.

The police had also sought arrest warrants against another Thai Rak Thai lawmaker and a non-partisan senator, but the request was turned down by the court.

Najmuddin said earlier yesterday that he would not use political privilege to avoid arrest.

A decades-old separatist movement in the south was contained in the late 1980s, but violence resurfaced two years ago. It intensified after the Jan 4 raid.

Earlier yesterday, a police officer died after he was shot on Wednesday night in Songhkla province, which neighbours the violence-scarred, Muslim-dominated Narathiwat, Pattani and Yala provinces.

The killing raised fears that the violence was spreading to Songhkla, a Buddhist majority province with a sizeable Muslim province.

No Stars of David allowed in an art exhibit promoting peace and love at the Egyptian Cultural and Educational Bureau in Washington, DC. From the Washington City Paper, with thanks to Seafarious. (This is "Star Search," the second item on the page.)

It was just supposed to be about peace, love, and understanding, say the artist and the curator. But that was before somebody spotted the Star of David.

Three stars, actually, painted into three works by painter Jorge Perez-Rubio that were part of his recent “People and Places of Egypt” exhibition at the Egyptian Cultural and Educational Bureau on New Hampshire Avenue NW. Both Perez-Rubio and the show’s curator, Aaron Pomerantz, say that Ala El Din Sarhan, a cultural attaché with the bureau, asked them repeatedly to take down the three paintings as the show was installed on Feb. 23.

“And as the show was being hung, [Sarhan] looked at [all the other paintings] very thoroughly,” says Pomerantz, a Chevy Chase consultant who says he’d showed Sarhan the exhibition catalog months before. “He was being proactive in discovering any Stars of David.”

The Miami-based Perez-Rubio, who lived in Cairo for two years, has painted more than 20 works in what he calls his “New Jerusalem” series—a kind of Where’s Waldo? of monotheism in which a cross, a crescent, and a Star of David are tucked into topsy-turvy, four-horizoned cityscapes. “In every great city—Cairo, New York, Miami—you make room for everybody,” he says. “[The concept] makes some people uncomfortable, and that’s what I felt that evening.”

Sarhan denies asking for the paintings to come down. And he now says that he’s even come to appreciate Perez-Rubio’s project. “The way he explained [the works],” says Sarhan, “he’s able to portray himself better than the curator. I liked the idea very much. Tolerance. If you rotate it 180 degrees, you can still get the same idea: We’re all living under the same sun.”

But the day before the show closed on March 9, the exhibition languished unmarked, unlit, and unguarded. A long table and a podium obscured access to a whole wall of works.

“Dr. Sarhan didn’t honor the art,” says Pomerantz, who adds that the attaché pestered him to remove the works as quickly as possible after the opening. “I would love to do another show at the Egyptian Embassy,” he adds. “Just not with Dr. Sarhan.”

Al-Bawaba reports (with thanks to "Allah") that Nelson Mandela has just wrapped up a state visit to the Wahhabi kingdom:

Former South African President Nelson Mandela left the Saudi capital of Riyadh Wednesday, according to SPA news agency.

At the King Khaled International Airport, he was seen off by the kingdom's Minister of Health Dr. Hamad bin Abdullah Al-Manei and South Africa's ambassador to the Kingdom Abdul-Hameed Khabir, the agency added.

I trust that while he was there he rocked the House of Saud with his trademark eloquent, ringing denunciations of injustice and inequality of rights among peoples. He probably took them apart for their religious discrimination (chiefly against Jews and Christians), slavery, and much more.

What's that? He didn't say a word about any of that? Hmm. Why not, Nelson?

The headline says: "Man charged in anti-Semitic incident." It takes nine paragraphs for them to tell you what the man's name is. And of course there is no mention of the possibility that his anti-Semitism was part of the larger epidemic of Muslim anti-Semitism. By covering each incident like this as a one-of-a-kind aberration, the media misleads the public and keeps it unaware of a massive and growing problem. (Thanks to "Allah.")

As Toronto police announced the first arrest yesterday in connection with a recent spate of anti-Semitic crimes, political leaders of all stripes united to issue strong condemnations of the "deplorable" vandalism of the past week.

"It can be tempting to remain silent in the hope that that would make the ugliness go away," Premier Dalton McGuinty said, "but to remain silent would be wrong."

At Queen's Park, all three parties unanimously agreed to take a stand against the anti-Semitic acts with a resolution reading, "As representatives of the people of Ontario, the Legislative Assembly condemns the recent acts of anti-Semitism and expresses its continuing support for the government of Ontario's long-standing zero-tolerance policy towards hate crimes."

Offering his sympathies to members of the Jewish community, Mayor David Miller added that Toronto will "stand together in our condemnation of all hate-motivated crimes."

The condemnations -- voiced yesterday everywhere from Toronto City Hall to the House of Commons -- came after a week in which numerous houses, cars and gravestones were damaged or defaced with painted swastikas and other messages of hate.

In the most recent incident, police say they caught a man early yesterday morning as he painted anti-Semitic graffiti on the hoarding surrounding a construction site on Bloor Street West near High Park.

He had painted three identical drawings with an equal sign between a Star of David and a swastika, police said.

"It's not the first time this has happened," said Lewis Poplak, director of planning for Context Development Inc., the company building a condominium on the site. Police records indicate identical graffiti have appeared at the site several times during the past three to four months.

Reza Safaei, a 46-year-old from Toronto, has been charged with three counts of mischief under $5,000. The company has numerous Jewish employees, including both its president and chairman, Mr. Poplak said, and he believes the vandalism to be a "hate-based crime." He added he has spoken to the Toronto police hate-crimes unit about bringing his concerns before the courts for consideration at sentencing if the man is convicted on any of the three counts.

Toronto police Staff Inspector Brody Smollet said yesterday that he did not believe the suspect belongs to any racist organizations and that there was no initial indication the vandalism near High Park was connected to the other incidents in Thornhill, north of Toronto.

"I'd like to think the Jewish community can take some solace in the fact that we have made an arrest," he said.

"[But] this is only one individual and one set of charges that have been laid."

The board of directors of Toronto's Crime Stoppers program offered a reward of up to $1,000 for information leading to the arrest of people responsible for the recent vandalism.

The Canadian Jewish Congress has also organized a rally for tomorrow night.

Ed Morgan, Ontario chairman of the congress and a law professor at the University of Toronto, said he thinks it's very important for community leaders to quickly denounce the vandalism.

"I think statements by elected officials and police officials are incredibly important at this stage, as are statements by school officials and school boards, as well as redoubling anti-racism efforts in the classroom," he said yesterday.

"If there is no atmosphere in Canada that says this is at all tolerated or admired," he added, "it will eventually subside."

Indeed. But there is such an atmosphere in Canada, created by an unwillingness to do anything that might remotely offend Muslims.

Yassin: No negotiations, no compromise, no peace without total jihad victory

When world leaders tut-tut over the death of Yassin, these people take heart. Is this kind of thinking really something that Jack Straw wants to encourage? From Supporters of Shari'ah via Jihad Unspun, with thanks to Nicolei:

Supporters Of Shari’ah condemns in the strongest terms the Zionists criminal assassination of Shaykh Ahmad Isma'il Yasin, the renowned Islamic scholar and founder of the leading Palestinian Resistance Movement - Hamas.

• We reiterate the Zionist Entity does not have the right to exist in its illegitimate capacity as the so-called “state of israel”.

• We reiterate that the Zionist Entity is a colonialist-imposed state, which the colonialists never had the right to give to the jews after robbing Muslim Lands including Palestine via colonialism and its policy of divide and rule.

• Justifying its right to exist is tantamount to supporting colonialism, as the Zionist Entity is itself a by-product of colonialism. Any State supporting the Zionist Entity is either a colonialist sympathiser or an actual colonialist state like Britain; who has shown through its continual support for the existence of the Zionist Entity that it has never really severed itself from its colonialist past.

• The only legitimate solution is a solution derived from the Islamic Shari’ah. All other Laws including International Law have no legitimacy for Islam and Muslims.

• The Zionist Government and its citizens can either peacefully surrender, dissolve the Zionist Entity and migrate to non-Muslim territories (like Austria, Germany, Poland, UK etc), or face a permanent state of war against Muslims until the Zionist Entity is physically destroyed in its entirety.

• The Zionist Entity has officially been a war zone since its illegal conception in 1948; no individual life is guaranteed safety on this occupied soil.

• Muslims have the obligation to conduct this war through Jihad operations [i.e., suicide bombings and more] and to support the cause militarily, financially and verbally - against the colonialist-imposed Zionist Entity and those States who give it military, financial, or vocal support. Such States are belligerent enemies to Islam and Muslims.

• Our Muslim Martyrs shall remain alive with Paradise as their Eternal Reward, but the dead Disbelievers will be cast into the Hellfire and abide therein Forever.

Supporters Of Shari’ah
Enemies Of Israel & Her Allies

From Reuters, with thanks to Nicolei:

Spain has arrested three suspected members of a radical Islamic group and sent four others back to jail amid signs of a crackdown on Muslim groups following the Madrid rail bombings.

Police detained two Algerians and a Syrian near the eastern city of Valencia who they believe may be part of a radical Muslim cell under investigation, a police statement said on Wednesday.

There is no indication the men, all in their forties, had any involvement in the March 11 train bombs that killed 190 people, the statement said.

The two Algerians may be linked to members of the Algerian Islamic Group arrested in Valencia in 1997, police believe.

Separately, Spain's most famous High Court judge, Baltasar Garzon, ordered the return to prison of four suspected Muslim radicals who were released last year by another judge, court sources said.

The four were among 16 men arrested in January 2003 in the northeast region of Catalonia and are suspected of belonging to Algeria's Salafist movement, a splinter organisation of the Armed Islamic Group with links to al Qaeda.

Garzon has accused the men of belonging to a terrorist group, but has not yet presented formal charges, the sources said. They are not suspected of links to the March 11 bombs.

The decision to send them back to prison was taken in light of new police reports, a court source said, but the judge provided no details.

When the men were arrested in January last year, Spanish Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar said his government had smashed a "major terrorist network". But authorities released all but two of the men in March 2003 after suspected chemical weapons found at their homes turned out to be laundry soap.

After the Madrid train bombings, Interior Minister Angel Acebes announced Spain would take additional security measures, but did not provide details.

Spain's El Mundo newspaper reported on Tuesday the Interior Ministry was considering imposing border controls and suspending the Schengen treaty between May 15 and 23 to tighten security for the wedding of heir-to-the-throne Prince Felipe on May 22.

An Interior Ministry spokesman had no comment on the report.

The Schengen agreement allows people to travel through much of the European Union without border checks.

Pankhurst, Nawaz, and Nisbet (BBC)

Egypt, which has an authoritarian government still to some degree rooted in Gamel Abdel Nasser's Arab nationalism, has convicted 26 men of trying to revive the outlawed Hizb-ut-Tahrir group, which states openly that it wants to restore the caliphate and sharia — ostensibly through peaceful means, although that is hardly comforting to all those who would suffer as dhimmis under their rule. From AP:

Shouts of "God is great!" rang out in a court Thursday after judges sentenced 26 men, including three Britons, to prison terms of one to five years for trying to revive an outlawed Islamic group.

One of the Britons, Ian Malcolm Nisbett, accused the Egyptian government of oppression and said he hoped God would reward the defendants after death. Nisbett and fellow Britons Maajid Nawaz and Reza Pankhurst received five years' imprisonment each, as did nine Egyptian defendants.

The defendants trooped into the court in white robes, escorted by police officers. Many held up copies of the sacred Islamic book, the Qur'an.

The chairman of the three-judge panel read out the verdicts and sentences and left the court. The text of the judge's findings is expected to appear within a month.

"This demonstrates the weakness of Egypt, which can't even tolerate peaceful dissent," Nawaz, 26, told reporters afterward. "I stand here as a prisoner of conscience and my beliefs are stronger than ever."

His mother, Abida Nawaz, called the verdict an "injustice against not only Islam, but humanity."

Zara Pankhurst, the mother of Reza, said the proceedings were "a goofy trial with a goofy judge."

"They are not going to beat us. We are strong," she told The Associated Press.

Nisbett's British wife, Humera, who does not understand Arabic, started weeping when her husband in the caged dock held up five fingers to indicate his sentence.

The defendants do not have the right of appeal as they were tried in an Emergency State Security court. They may only ask President Hosni Mubarak for clemency.

"I would rather die than appeal to the president," Reza Pankhurst, 28, said.

The rights group Amnesty International condemned the convictions and accused the authorities of failing to investigate the defendants' allegations of torture.

"We believe that they have been convicted solely for their peacefully held views and consider them prisoners of conscience who should be released immediately," said Amnesty spokeswoman Lesley Warner in London.

"Most worryingly of all, reports that the men were tortured during the initial period of detention have never been properly investigated," she added.

During the trial, the court said that medical examinations of the Britons found no evidence of torture, but the defendants told reporters they were only examined several weeks after they were tortured.

The defendants were arrested in April 2002 and charged with attempting to revive an Islamic group called Hizb ut-Tahrir or the Liberation party, which the government banned in 1974.

The chief defendants in the trial, which began in October 2002, were also charged with possession of propaganda leaflets of the Liberation party.

Defence lawyers argued in court that the defendants had only studied the ideology of the Liberation party and had not recruited to revive the group.

"This case shouldn't have been transferred to the judiciary in the first place," lawyer Montasser el-Zayat told the Associated Press on Thursday. "It doesn't have violence, weapons or overthrowing the regime. It's a case against peaceful thought."

El-Zayat said that he thought the British defendants would be used as bargaining chip with the London government. Egypt has long asked Britain to extradite Egyptian dissidents whom it regards as militants.

"It's not anti-British case, but anti-Islam case," said Nisbett, 29, who has adopted the Arabic first name Yehiya.

"Thank God for everything," Nisbett added. "We hope God is going to award us in the afterlife. We tried to change oppression in Egypt. Now, they are admitting that they are oppressors."

One of the Egyptian accused, Medahat Hamdi, 36, an engineer, told reporters from the dock: "It's very strange that we are being tried in Egypt for our beliefs, which don't call for violence, but prohibit it."

Seven defendants were sentenced to three years. Another seven received one year in prison. One defendant was convicted in absentia.

The Britons and Egyptians who received five years' imprisonment have 22 months left to serve, according to their time in detention and Egypt's sentencing procedures.

The Liberation party was founded in Jordan in 1953. It has long operated underground. Its current leader, Ata Abu-Rushta, a Jordanian of Palestinian origin, was elected in 2003 and lives in Lebanon.

Abu Bakar Bashir

How are these guys able to keep making recruits? By presenting themselves as the true Islam, just like my friend Amir. From the Washington Post, :

The sun was bright, the sky a flawless blue -- a perfect day for a graduation. In a mountain clearing in the southern Philippines four years ago, 17 young Indonesians snapped to attention in their camouflage fatigues, two instructors recalled. They marched in formation. They assembled a low-explosive bomb and detonated it. They crawled on the ground with AK-47s.

"Allahu Akbar!" the audience cheered: "God is greatest."

The men were the first graduates of the military academy established by Jemaah Islamiah, a Southeast Asian militant network allied with al Qaeda. That day in April 2000, as described by two men who were there, was a high point in the life of the organization.

During the next two years, hard-liners in Jemaah Islamiah gained influence. The group's biggest attacks were the October 2002 bombings of two Bali nightclubs and the August 2003 bombing of the JW Marriott Hotel in Jakarta, which together killed 214 people. At least one of the 17 graduates was arrested last year for hiding a Bali bomber, said Muhaimin, 42, one of the instructors in the Philippines and now an imam at a Jakarta mosque. Like many Indonesians, he uses only one name.

The death toll from the March 11 bombings in Madrid is listed at 190, slightly less than Bali, and a group saying it represents al Qaeda has asserted responsibility. A similar claim was made after the Bali bombings.

Although al Qaeda provided financing for the Bali attacks, Jemaah Islamiah operates largely independently, analysts and police say. Indonesian, Malaysian and Singaporean members, who met and were molded in Islamic boarding schools and training camps in Afghanistan and the Philippines, share al Qaeda's ideology but do not need an order from Osama bin Laden to act, according to police and former members such as Muhaimin.

More than 240 of Jemaah Islamiah's members have been arrested since the Bali and Jakarta attacks, including many of its leaders. But interviews with captured members, former members and relatives portray a network that continues to defy police efforts to quash it, exploiting school, family and religious connections to stay alive.

"At the same time that the police arrest them, they always find someone to replace them," Mohammad Nasir bin Abbas, 34, a former instructor at the camp, said in an interview. "Even if the entire Jemaah Islamiah membership is wiped out, other groups will arise and do the same thing."

Some trenchant observations from William Webb:

Richard Clarke started his testimony before the commission investigating 9/11 yesterday by stating, “Your government failed you, those entrusted with protecting you failed you and I failed you. We tried hard, but that doesn't matter because we failed," he said. "And for that failure, I would ask once all the facts are out for your understanding and for your forgiveness."

Unfortunately, there are going to be many more apologies, failures and laughably titled “bipartisan” commissions in the coming years, while a religiously-motivated enemy uses our own freedoms, political correctness, government inefficiencies and the politicization of the war on terror against us.

You have not seen the end of grieving relatives and 24-hour coverage of devastation. If you strip all the spin from the current commission testimony, all the political interests from media outlets, campaigns and pundits, the horrible truth was uttered in an exchange between former Republican Senator Slade Gorton. He asked Clarke if there was "the remotest chance" that the attacks could have been prevented if the Bush administration had adopted his aggressive counterterrorism recommendations upon taking office in January 2001.

"No," Clarke said.

For all those posturing for political results or a kind footnote in history, the awful truth is that we weren’t prepared for 9/11 and we couldn’t have stopped it anyway.

I predict you will hear similar testimony yet again.

It’s time to quit criticizing those in the government administrations and agencies in this newest manifestation of Islamist terror and conquest, begin to accept the unpopular realities, make the hard choices necessary to minimize death and destruction of innocent American civilians, and maximize the death and destruction of the radical Islamists.

At the end of the day, you as an American are going to be only as safe as you force the government to make you. Policy is driven by politics and homeland security has become as politicized as Medicare reform. Most Americans still don’t really understand either the true nature of the threat or the hard decisions that must be made.

Unfortunately, we are approaching the time for the next wave of attacks with the predictable next wave of hand-wringing and attempting to place blame for political or historical vindication. This time the death toll will be far greater.

As a society, we have still not come to grips with several “essence” issues and the nature of our society is such that we will have to lose 30,000—300,000—or heaven forbid—3 million before we begin to make the real changes in our counter-terrorism and homeland defense strategy.

Those essence issues follow and will be discussed separately in a series of articles:

• We must acknowledge the politically incorrect and admit that we truly face a religiously-motivated war that has both a shooting element (Madrid, 9/11) and a more subtle, yet much more dangerous religious insurgency funded by rich Muslim individuals and countries.

• There is only one way to truly prevent terrorists from striking—find the terrorists and kill them first. To do this means we must have a policy to strike them wherever we find them. This is an unpopular policy for most of the world.

• Prevention of terrorist actions in the United States means identifying and investigating people or groups before they have attacked. As Lou Scanlon, Director of Homeland Security for the city of San Diego, told me in an interview for my upcoming book: “Common sense tells you that prevention is really our big gap in the war on terror. We must be able to identify and investigate to prevent terrorist acts before they occur. The entire clamor over first-responder inadequacies is for the after-event response. It does not make you safer. Only identifying, investigation, and prevention makes you safe. Everything else is about body bags and cleaning up the rubble.”

This means surveillance and intelligence gathering within the United States. Many people from all political persuasions are working to defeat various homeland security initiatives that would block identifying and investigating terrorists at home.

It is time to for you to understand the basic issues stripped of political correctness and political machination. You must re-evaluate the delicate balance of living safely with the clash of counter-intelligence and counter-terrorism operational necessities. Basic views concerning privacy, freedoms of religion and expression, and the role of government in identifying, tracking, and stopping terrorists who practice violence and subversion must be reevaluated.

You must influence policies that truly deal with preventing terrorism and you must stand fast when the inevitable criticism starts.

Otherwise, there will be a long line of apologizing Richard Clarkes and grieving family members.

Zawahri guns for Musharraf: will anyone listen?

From FoxNews:

A tape purportedly recorded by Ayman al-Zawahri, the No. 2 in the Al Qaeda terror group, called Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf a traitor Thursday and urged people to get rid of his government.

The audiotape was broadcast by the pan-Arab satellite channel Al-Jazeera.

The speaker, who sounded like al-Zawahri, also called for a military uprising in Pakistan.

"Musharraf seeks to stab the Islamic resistance in Afghanistan in the back," the speaker on the tape said.

"Every Muslim in Pakistan should work hard to get rid of this agent government, which will continue to submit to America until it destroys Pakistan."

Abu Qatada: they trusted him, and they're paying for it (BBC)

An Al-Qaeda operative has fooled Britain's MI5. From The Times, via The Australian, :

LONDON: One of al-Qa'ida's most dangerous figures has been revealed as a double agent who fooled MI5, raising intense criticism from European governments who had repeatedly called for his arrest.

Britain ignored warnings from friendly governments about Abu Qatada's links with terrorist groups and refused to arrest him.

A leaked copy of a judgment by the Special Immigration Appeals Commission has revealed how British intelligence chiefs hid from their European allies how they were hoping to use the cleric as an informer against Islamic militants in Britain.

Qatada boasted to MI5 how he could prevent terrorist attacks in Britain and hoodwinked agents into believing he would expose dangerous extremists arriving, while all along he was setting up a safe haven for his terror organisation in the country.

Among the scores of young militants who visited him was the chief suspect in the Madrid train bombings. His followers also included volunteers to be suicide bombers for al-Qa'ida, including Richard Reid, the shoe bomber. The judgment copy, obtained by Britain's Channel 4, revealed yesterday there was evidence that Qatada "has been concerned in the instigation of acts of international terrorism".

A security source in Madrid said: "How much violence and bloodshed could have been prevented if Britain had heeded the warnings about this man a long time ago."

Authorities in many countries asked to question Qatada about his links to al-Qa'ida, but were refused.

A Jordanian, Qatada arrived in Britain with a forged passport in 1993 claiming asylum. Jordan told Britain he had been convicted of terror attacks in Amman seven months before September 11. Spanish investigators produced evidence of how a militant in custody in Madrid - Abu Dahdah - had visited the cleric more than 25 times, bringing money and recruits.

From WND, with thanks to Cathy:

A controversial Islamic lobby group has published an ad in California newspapers seeking to win acceptance with the message that Muslims "respect and revere Jesus" as do Christians.

The ad by the Southern California office of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, or CAIR, is headlined "More In Common Than You Think," with a photograph of the old city of Jerusalem.

CAIR has launched an advertising campaign called "Islam in America," which in the wake of tensions resulting from the 9-11 terrorist attacks aims to dispel stereotypes and portray Muslims as ordinary citizens who love their country.

The "Jesus" ad, quoting from Islam's book the Quran, reads:

'''Behold (O Mary!)' The Angel said, 'God has chosen you, and purified you, and chosen you above the women of all nations. O Mary, God gives you good news of a word from Him, whose name shall be the Christ (Masih or Messiah), Jesus son of Mary, honored in this world and in the hereafter, and one of those brought near to God.' (Holy Qur'an, 3:45)

"Like Christians, Muslims respect and revere Jesus. Islam teaches that Jesus is one of the greatest of God's prophets and messengers to humankind.

"Like Christians, every day, over 1.3 billion Muslims strive to live by his teachings of love, peace, and forgiveness. Those teachings, which have become universal values, remind us that all of us, Christians, Muslims, Jews, and all others have more in common than we think."

Muslims point out, however, that they reject Christian belief in Jesus' divinity and regard him only as a prophet.

Muhammad, in fact, is considered by Muslims to be superior to Jesus because Islam's founder is believed to have brought God's final revelation.

CAIR claims to be a civil-rights group that represents mainstream Muslims in the U.S., but the group is a spin-off of the Islamic Association For Palestine, labeled a "front group" for the terrorist organization Hamas by two former heads of the FBI's counterterrorism section.

CAIR issued a condemnation Monday of Israel's assassination of Hamas leader Sheik Ahmed Yassin that made no mention of Hamas or Yassin's responsibility for countless terrorist attacks against Israel, which were part of his stated objective to destroy Jews and the Jewish nation.

I am all for diminishing prejudice and building bridges, but not under false pretenses. Why doesn't CAIR confront the roots of Muslim hostility toward Christians, and repudiate those roots? Why doesn't CAIR quote verses of the Qur'an, like this one, which places all Christians under a curse, and then show why Muslims must reject this kind of thinking? (This is the verse: "The Christians call Christ the son of Allah. That is a saying from their mouth; (in this) they but imitate what the unbelievers of old used to say. Allah's curse be on them: how they are deluded away from the Truth!" — Sura 9:30).

Blair with Portugal's Prime Minister Jose Manuel Durao Barraso

Tony Blair is not giving up to the European dhimmis without a fight. I don't go along with everything he says in this speech, but his heart is in the right place. From the BBC, with thanks to Peter:

September 11th was not in retaliation for an attack by the US on al-Qaeda. But an entirely unprovoked attack by al-Qaeda on the US.

Of course they demand we withdraw from Iraq. But their demands do not stop there.

They also demand we withdraw from Afghanistan.

They demand we withdraw from all places in the Middle East, even when there with the consent of the country.

They demand the elimination of Israel.

They even have demanded the reintroduction of a caliphate on the Iberian Peninsula.

And they demand in any Muslim country anywhere, a Taliban state, where human rights are curtailed, freedom reduced to religious slavery, women sent back to the dark ages.

Recall the words they used just a few weeks ago in a statement celebrating their terrorism: "You love life, we love death".

I came to Spain yesterday from Northern Ireland, where we have worked so hard, for so long, to bring a durable peace in place of terrorism.

I believe in trying to negotiate where negotiation can achieve peace on honourable terms.

But al-Qaeda and the religious fanaticism that unites them and similar groups, have no demands we can negotiate upon, honourably or otherwise.

We either defeat them or live under their shadow of fear. . . .

It can show our dedication to defeating terrorism not only by pursuing terrorists but by remedying injustice, showing by our actions that we are also dedicated to eliminating the causes upon which the terrorists prey; doing all we can to prevent a new generation of terrorists arising, based on this perversion of the true and peaceful faith of Islam.

Uh, Tony, you might find this illuminating.

At this time, with the tears and tragedy of Madrid in our minds, let us unite, put aside our differences, refuse to be divided by terrorism and express our strength and confidence in our own way of life which we will defend to the end.

Here is a personal attack on me and on Jihad Watch from Amir, a Muslim in Britain. (Thanks to Harry.) I get attacked all the time, and ordinarily wouldn't bore you with the details, but this one is interesting. Look at why this guy is angry:

AoA. I hope there isn't a Muslim in the whole world who stumbles across "Jihad Watch" and falls for the crap Robert Spencer is pumping out. Him and his loyal band of anti-Islamics (who flood his article comments with Islamaphobic preaching) have dedicated time and effort to make an influential impression on people, mainly Muslims, to re-write the meaning of Jihaad and make people believe it. Mainly Muslims.

Spencer hasn't necessarily studied Islam for the purpose of calling people away from it, he isn't a fanatical enough of a Christian to be doing that, he's instead studied Islam for the purpose of convincing Muslims to adopt incorrect Islamic concepts -- namely on the issue of jihaad. From the Muslim perspective it's not as bad as apostasy, but still pretty damn bad.

Leaving aside his characterization of my own religious faith, look at what he says about jihad. In his view, evidently, violent jihad — warfare against unbelievers — is the correct Islamic concept, and when I call upon Muslims to reject it I am asking them to veer close to apostasy.

Here is an example of the depths of deviousness his tactics and styles droop to. Muslims recognise that Islam is not a secular religion, that it is not just a bunch of worship rituals and is in fact a lot more than that -- Islam is a complete ideology. An ideology that must be implemented in a state. An Islamic state. Thanks to Islamic groups such as Hizb ut-Tahrir and al-Muhajiroon, to name a few, the majority Muslims are aware of the need and Islamic obligation of the Khilafah State. But, to cast doubt and fear in the hearts of some unaware Muslims, here we have Spencer slyly attacking the Muslims in Canada advocating the notion of re-establishing the Khilafah as something sinister because "That's the Islamic state that Osama bin Laden and other radical Muslims around the world have declared their intention to restore."

So Hizb-ut-Tahrir and Al-Muhajiroun, two groups that forthrightly call for restoration of the caliphate and full implementation of the Sharia (including the oppression of non-Muslims as dhimmis) have the right idea, eh? So Al-Muhajiroun, a group that has praised the 9/11 highjackers and Osama, has the correct Islam?

Note that he is not angry with me for talking about the Islamic roots of modern-day jihad violence, as are the pseudo-moderate American Muslim advocacy groups. Instead, he is angry with me for trying to stop this jihad.

This is the great challenge that anyone who calls himself a moderate Muslim faces: to convince people like Amir that their "correct" version of Islam is actually incorrect. This was what I emphasized at UNC Tuesday night. It will be interesting to see if anyone even attempts it in any significant way.

UPDATE: Here is a response from Amir. It speaks for itself, and only underscores the point I have made in three books now: that radical Islam has the intellectual ascendancy in the Muslim world, and that, as Ibn Warraq put it (as I quote him in Onward Muslim Soldiers): "For every text the liberal Muslims produce, the mullahs will use dozens of counter-examples [that are] exegetically, philosophically, historically far more legitimate." This guy is proving that Ibn Warraq and I are correct.

Now: among the UNC Muslim students to whom I spoke the other night was a young man who maintained just the opposite: that moderate Islam is accepted everywhere, and that Amir's kind of radicalism is just a lunatic fringe. I did not agree with him then, and my praise for the openness of some of the Muslim students did not constitute (contrary to the apparent understanding of many posters here) a pollyana-like endorsement of the idea that militant Islam is really nothing much to be concerned about, or could be reformed easily. In fact, I have been one of the few public spokesmen to dare to discuss the gravity and enormity of the problem that terrorism poses within Islam.

But when Muslims claim to denounce Amir's position and refute it on Islamic grounds, I am willing to listen. I would ask the UNC student to whom I referred above, if he reads this, to respond to Amir. I would also like to hear from those self-proclaimed moderate Muslims who have taken me to task over the years for finding a connection between Islam and violence to show Amir where he is wrong: Ibrahim Hooper, where are you? Hussam Ayloush? Asad Abou Khalil? Salam Al-Maryati? Hussein Ibish? Now is the time to put up — show us some of your moderate Islamic theology — or shut up.

Anyway, here is Amir:

Spencer: "Leaving aside his characterization of my own religious faith, look at what he says about jihad. In his view, evidently, violent jihad - warfare against unbelievers - is the correct Islamic concept, and when I call upon Muslims to reject it I am asking them to veer close to apostasy."

Jihaad can be practised in a number of ways, by one's speech, by one's actions and even by one's intent. The correct way to practise Jihaad is to look at the reality and situation being faced and then reacting accordingly. I am in Britain; here speech is the correct Jihaad to be practised, unless the reality changes. My Muslim brothers and sisters who are in Palestine, where their land is being illegally occupied by the illegitimate state of Israel, Jihaad in the form of action is correct. The Jihad Watch project is all about looking at the case of any Muslim undertaking actions of this nature and then insulting them, ridiculing them and slandering them for the sole purpose of enforcing the concept that Muslims should be pacifist and phase out Jihad completely and remould Islam to something that the non-Muslims, like those at Jihad Watch, approve of.

I wouldn't know what Spencer's 20 years worth of studying Islam is worth, but if it was worth much he would understand that if a Muslim abandons a clear Islamic obligation for a man-made alternative option, it is sinful for the Muslim. Like I said it's not as bad as apostasy but it is still, nonetheless, very bad and must be avoided (it is a sin referred to as "like denouncing Islam", which highlights the severity of it). Studying Islam and caring about Islam are clearly two very different things, eh Mr Spencer?

Spencer:
"So Hizb-ut-Tahrir and Al-Muhajiroun, two groups that forthrightly call for restoration of the caliphate and full implementation of the Sharia (including the oppression of non-Muslims as dhimmis) have the right idea, eh? So Al-Muhajiroun, a group that has praised the 9/11 highjackers and Osama, has the correct Islam?"

"Correct Islam" is Islam as demonstrated by RasoolAllah (saw) and the Prophets companions. Any Islamic group that makes a sincere effort, clearly indicating its evidences, work and motivation to be genuinely and exclusively from Islam, is following Islam correctly. Al-Muhajiroon is more hard-line compared to Hizb ut-Tahrir, and although both these groups have the correct objectives, it is only their methodologies that need some attention paid to (for an individual to deduce which is stronger). The answer to that question is, however: the establishment of an Islamic State with Shar'ia rules in full implementation is an obligation for Muslims to actively work to re-establish by following the method shown to mankind by RasoolAllah (saw). This is clearly evident by numurous daleels.

Indeed it is, Amir, and I have caught hell hundreds of times from Muslims for pointing it out. Thanks for going to bat in my defense in this way, Sir!

Usama bin Laden and the 9/11 hijackers did nothing less than hand the US administration the right to invade Muslim Lands on a silver plate -- that was their biggest crime.

Spencer:
"This is the great challenge that anyone who calls himself a moderate Muslim faces: to convince people like Amir that their "correct" version of Islam is actually incorrect. This was what I emphasized at UNC Tuesday night. It will be interesting to see if anyone even attempts it in any significant way."

Once again the same rhetoric comes in to play by the propagandists. If there's any Muslim reading this who calls him or her self a "moderate Muslim" ask yourself what that really means? Are you trying to say you are proud of the fact that you pick and choose what to believe and practice from Islam? You are proud or pleased of the fact that you moderate what chunks of Islam you adopt and what chunks of Islam you decide to reject?! You think its right to say "God got this wrong, but the rest is okay"?! You don't realise doing this is putting your own intelligence above that of your Creator's?!... This is a sin referred to as "like denouncing Islam", which should highlight the severity of it.

I would ask the same questions. In other words, any moderates out there should show this guy where he is wrong — if you can. As I have said many times, and people still don't seem to understand the point, I have known innumerable moderate Muslims, but I have yet to see a convincing, comprehensive presentation of moderate Islam. Get the difference?

The same goes for the labels "fundamentalist", "radical", "extremist", etc. These are incorrect labels to put on yourself or other Muslims, simply because one is not even a Muslim unless one submits holistically to the deen of Islam and follows all that which is required of and leaves that which is required to be left. Using these labels are an insult... but that is exactly why the West insists on using them on Muslims, and encouraging us to use them.

I use "radical" to denote someone who acts on Amir's views, and "moderate" to refer to Muslims who, even just ostensibly, opposes them. But those moderates need to show how to refute Amir's theology, or there will be more and more radicals recruited in mosques every day. To date, they have not done so.

London's high security Belmarsh prison: Qatada's new home

Some encouraging news from The Scotsman, with thanks to Earl. I hope the British authorities