May 2005 Archives

I've been receiving some love notes over at RevivingIslam.com. The Forum there is by registration only, and some people have registered and sent me some posts from it, including this one. This led some at the Forum to think that I was registered there -- I was not and am not -- and to start railing against me and other "spies."

I don't ordinarily publicize threats I receive, and I had not originally planned to post this one. However, I ultimately decided to do so because I thought this one was noteworthy for several reasons: the mention of a "hit list" that is evidently well-known among the posters; the rabid anti-Semitism; the Qur'anic references; the forthright bloodlust; and the casual mixture of piety and murderousness that is common among jihad terrorists.

One poster put up my picture, with this underneath:

ROBERT SPENCER, the director of Jihad Watch, is a writer and researcher... http://www.jihadwatch.org/spencer/

To which one responded:

I believe he's already on the hit list, nothing new..

Other responses:

i support al qaida to the fullest... and what read that you munfiq [hypocrite] spy

aint no one stop us from supporting our brothers in JIHAD against these dirty crusaders, jews or mushriks [polytheists].

sis how you feel being singled out by this kafir [unbeliever]

Lol, i was shocked at first, but then, it made me more determined! Lol, if they think this is going 2 stop us ppl, then they got it rong.when ppl read ther stupid posts,they will want2 be more active and actually do something....Lol, and that robert, i feel like trowin him under a bus........or getting a missile and shootin him with it.Obviously i would need a missile first.Anyone got 1?..................LOL

Later on in the thread there came this:

To the Jew-lover Robert Spencer (may Allaah destroy him), if you or one of your brain-dead cult followers read this I want you to know that I hate you for the sake of Allaah and I make du'a [i.e., I pray] for your destruction. I want you to also keep in mind that while you may plot against Islaam, Allaah also plots. And Allaah is the best of those who plot. You are fighting a lost cause. You are following the same path as Abu Lahab in life and insha'Allaah [Allah willing] you will meet the same end as Abu Lahab in the aqirah (Hereafter).

Allah plotting is a reference to Qur'an 8:30: "And when those who disbelieve plot against thee (O Muhammad) to wound thee fatally, or to kill thee or to drive thee forth; they plot, but Allah (also) plotteth; and Allah is the best of plotters."

Abu Lahab was Muhammad's uncle. Muhammad cursed him to hell in the Qur'an for rejecting his claim to be a prophet: "The power of Abu Lahab will perish, and he will perish. His wealth and gains will not exempt him. He will be plunged in flaming Fire, and his wife, the wood-carrier, will have upon her neck a halter of palm-fibre" (111:1-5).

One responded to the "may Allaah destroy him" post above:

Subhanallah [Glory be to Allah], this made me smile :)

And another responded:

we make dua [i.e., we pray] Allah allows your blood to spill over our hands.

It is interesting that so many Muslim bulletin boards and forums so quickly are given over to this sort of thing. The posters at Reviving Islam are young Muslims in England and America. The "Contact Us" page at the site seems to be blank, but I hope authorities know who runs the site and are on the way to shutting it down.

Jihad Watch Board Vice President Hugh Fitzgerald assesses the new French Prime Minister, Dominique de Villepin:

Born in Sale, jeek-by-jowl to Rabat, Dominique de Villepin has always believed that having spent the first few years of his life in Morocco has given him great understanding of Islam. He knows nothing about it. He persists in believing that there is a "good" Islam, and that the teachings of that "good" Islam must be supported. What there really is, as Ataturk understood, is a "sanitized" Islam that can, with the army and the police ready to enforce it, be monitored in the mosques. This is not the "real" Islam. All of the texts, of Qur'an and hadith, and all of the commentators and jurisconsults, come down on the side of the real, "bad" Islam. But as long as police and army, as in Turkey, are willing to monitor the khutbas (sermons at Friday Prayers), to censor the radio and television and newspapers in Arabic, to have agents (probably Berbers) constantly reporting on what is going on with the boys in the banlieue, with their bullets and bombs, then things can be kept under control.

But as in Turkey, eternal vigilance is the price of liberty from real Islam. Secularist supporters of Kemalism in Turkey know that the army is the final guarantor of Kemalism, and that the attempts of the non-secularists to gain power, in schools, in the police, in the government, are unceasing and extremely cunning, and the survival of Kemalism can never be assumed. Is this the future of France?

Even if that preening poseur and poetaster, D. de V., were suddenly to have had a change of heart, which is scarcely to be believed, his insistence that there is a "good" Islam and that the "bad" Islam is an aberration simply prolongs the confusion, and the day of intellectual reckoning.

And what will be the cost, to French taxpayers, of all that monitoring, all that paying for the interception of phone calls, all those agents in the mosques, all those security forces everywhere -- and with only the hope of sweeping back, as Kemalism sweeps back, the tide of Islam? Vaste programme, monsieur.

Will D. de V. solve France’s problem? The idea that there is a "problem" and that there must therefore be a "solution" is, dare one say it, a very naive notion, betraying a worldview that is often ascribed to Americans -- you know, we'll just pitch right in and fix things up.

There is a "problem" but as there is no solution, so it might better be described simply as a situation. Islam owes its origins to the need by pagan Arabs -- perhaps prompted by others, either a Jewish or a Christian sect attempting to convert them with things going awry -- to have, while conquering other, far more advanced, wealthy, settled populations of Christians, Jews, Zoroastrians and others (in the initial centuries of conquest), to possess their "own religion" which might emphasize the superiority of the Arabs -- hence the need to read the Qur'an only in Arabic, which book has been handed to the "best of people" and in their own language, and all the other features of the Arab supremacist ideology contained within a supposedly universalist religion.

Good news for a change! Hamid Pourmand could have been sentenced to death, but international attention once again embarrasses Muslims into mitigating Sharia law, as it did in the infamous Amina Lawal stoning case in Nigeria. From AsiaNews, with thanks to Sparta:

Teheran (AsiaNews/Mec) - Christians in Iran have learned that Hamid Pourmand, a lay leader in a church and a convert from Islam, have been acquitted of charges of apostasy and proselytising. If found guilty he would have faced the death penalty. He remains imprisoned for allegedly deceiving the Iranian army about his being a Christian.

On Saturday 28th May an Islamic judge in Bandar-I Bushehr, on Iran's Gulf coast, acquitted pastor Pourmand of charges of apostasy and proselytising Muslims. Christians news agency Compass Direct has been told that the judge reportedly stated "I don't know who you are, but the rest-of-the-world does", a clear reference to the international attention that this case has attracted.

Pastor Pourmand was formally charged with apostasy from Islam and proselytising Muslims in early April. Starting on 13th April he appeared before an Islamic court in Tehran every two or three days. He was repeatedly pressed to return to Islam. These hearings stopped after two weeks. He was transferred to his home town of Bandar-i Bushehr on the 16th May.

Sunni Muslims destroy a Shi'ite mosque with a suicide bomb. In retaliation, Shi'ite Muslims burn down a Kentucky Fried Chicken, killing six people. This one is just as crystalline an example of linear reasoning as the killing of 17 Afghanis because a Gitmo interrogator may have flushed a Qur'an. "Six KFC workers die in Karachi violence," from the Financial Times:

Six employees of Kentucky Fried Chicken, the American fast food chain, were killed in Karachi overnight Monday when their restaurant was set on fire by Shi’ite youths seeking revenge for a suicide bomb attack on a local mosque, police and rescue workers said.

The KFC outlet, located in the southern city’s densely populated Gulshan-e-Iqbal district, was ransacked in a riot that also damaged petrol stations, bank branches, shops and dozens of vehicles.

The bodies of the KFC workers - five restaurant staff and a security guard - were found before sunrise Tuesday, when rescue workers entered the premises to check on the scale of damage. Four of the victims were burned to death while the two others froze to death after taking refuge in a refrigeration unit, a senior police official, Manzoor Mughal, was quoted as saying by Associated Press.

The riot followed an attack Monday on the Shi’ite Madinatul Ilm mosque in Gulshan, in which three assailants, suspected to be Sunni Muslim extremists, clashed with police before exploding a bomb that killed two of the attackers, two policemen and a worshipper. Twenty-six people were injured, AP said.

The surviving assailant told police he was associated with Jaish-e-Mohammad, a Sunni militant group accused of orchestrating several attacks against minority Shi’ites, Christians and government officials, and suspected of having links with al-Qaida, the AP report said. About 80 per cent of Pakistan’s 150m people are Sunnis, while 17 per cent are Shi’ites...

An update on this story from the San Francisco Chronicle:

Miami -- Rafiq Abdus Sabir, a doctor, kept mostly to himself, neighbors remembered Monday. He lived in a gated South Florida community west of the exclusive town of Boca Raton with a woman and two children. The couple drove a black sport utility vehicle and white two-door sedan, and fixed up the garage of their rented villa to serve as the youngsters' rumpus room.

Dan Kozan, an advertising consultant, had one encounter with his neighbor across the street when he moved into Villa San Remo three years ago, but it was enough. Kozan, 51, said he asked Sabir to move the cars of people visiting so Kozan could back out of his driveway more easily. The doctor, he said, ignored him.

"I'm friendly with most of the neighbors around here," Kozan said. "Not him."

Early Saturday, the FBI moved in and arrested Sabir, 50, as an alleged participant in a terrorist plot. Along with Tarik Shah, 42, a self-described martial arts expert who had been arrested the day before in New York, Sabir was accused of conspiring to provide material support to al Qaeda.

According to federal prosecutors, Shah agreed to train Islamic holy warriors in hand-to-hand combat techniques, while Sabir agreed to treat their wounds at a military base in Saudi Arabia...

According to the federal complaint, the result of a two-year sting operation, Shah and Sabir, both U.S. citizens, took an oath of loyalty to al Qaeda, the shadowy Islamic terror network blamed for the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon and some of the violence focusing on the U.S. occupation in Iraq.

Federal prosecutors said Shah had searched for locations suitable for secret weapons training, at one point inspecting a warehouse on Long Island, and agreed to provide a curriculum for hand-to-hand combat training.

The government said the men engaged in multiple recorded conversations with a confidential source and an FBI agent posing as an al Qaeda operative. During the conversations, Shah also described how he and Sabir tried to get to training camps in Afghanistan in 1998 and said they were a "package" deal, Kelley said....

If found guilty of conspiring to provide material support to a terrorist organization, each defendant faces a maximum sentence of 15 years in prison and a fine of as much as $250,000.

Jihad Watch director Robert Spencer's latest in FrontPage:

While the world media has been consumed with speculation about the health and whereabouts of jihad leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, it has hardly noted at all a challenge he issued just before he was injured. Yet this challenge could in the long run prove to be more potent than the suicide bombings he continues to inspire in Iraq. It came in the form of an audiotape he released on May 20, in which he presents a detailed justification of his operations. His defense unfolds not on prudential, but on theological grounds: making copious reference to Islamic sources, Zarqawi does his best to portray the murderous behavior of his al-Qaida in the Land of the Two Rivers group as legitimate jihad operations that every Muslim should endorse — and cheerfully torpedoes the Leftist dogma that all religions are equal in their capacity to inspire violence.

Since 9/11, American Muslim advocacy groups, influential elements of the government, and the establishment media have gone to great pains to assure us that the 9/11 attacks were perpetrated by a tiny minority of extremists who hijacked a peaceful religion. We were assured that Osama bin Laden and other jihad leaders were not Islamic scholars, and didn’t have an Islamic leg to stand on. The unquestioned assumption has been that the Islamic justifications they presented for their actions were transparently wrong from the mainstream Islamic standpoint. Soon the moderate mainstream would assert itself, we were told, and Muslims would denounce Al-Qaeda and other jihadists, repudiating and isolating them worldwide.

Why hasn’t this happened? Zarqawi’s May 20 communiqué suggests one reason why: it is the jihadists, not the moderates, who are reasoning from Islamic sources and presenting detailed Islamic theological arguments. By doing this, Zarqawi has thrown down the gauntlet to moderate Muslims worldwide, in effect saying to them: defend your vision of Islam or get out of the way. On the tape he criticizes them directly: “the wicked scholars have looked the other way and sold their Deen (religion) for a miserable price in this life.” He notes that one outcome of the present conflict will be to separate “the true believers from the rest.”

Daniel Pipes has an interesting piece in FrontPage today, discussing David Cook's new book Understanding Jihad, which I have not yet seen. In his review, Pipes succintly sums up the history of the concept of jihad in Islam, showing the hollowness of claims that it has always primarily represented a spiritual struggle:

The Koran invites Muslims to give their lives in exchange for assurances of paradise.

The Hadith (accounts of Muhammad’s actions and personal statements) elaborate on the Koran, providing specific injunctions about treaties, pay, booty, prisoners, tactics, and much else. Muslim jurisprudents then wove these precepts into a body of law.

Muhammad’s conquests: During his years in power, the prophet engaged in an average of nine military campaigns a year, or one every 5-6 weeks; thus did jihad help define Islam from its very dawn. Conquering and humiliating non-Muslims was a main feature of the prophet’s jihad.

The Arab conquests and after: During the first several centuries of Islam, “the interpretation of jihad was unabashedly aggressive and expansive.” After the conquests subsided, non-Muslims hardly threatened and Sufi notions of jihad as self-improvement developed in complement to the martial meaning.

The Crusades, the centuries-long European effort to control the Holy Land, gave jihad a new urgency and prompted what Cook calls the “classical” theory of jihad. Finding themselves on the defensive led to a hardening of Muslim attitudes.

The Mongol invasions of the thirteenth century subjugated much of the Muslim world, a catastrophe only partially mitigated by the Mongols’ nominal conversion to Islam. Some thinkers, Ibn Taymiya (d. 1328) in particular, came to distinguish between true and false Muslims; and to give jihad new prominence by judging the validity of a person’s faith according to his willingness to wage jihad.

Nineteenth century “purification jihads” took place in several regions against fellow Muslims. The most radical and consequential of these was the Wahhabis' jihad in Arabia. Drawing on Ibn Taymiya, they condemned most non-Wahhabi Muslims as infidels (kafirs) and waged jihad against them.

However, there are some elements of this analysis about which I have questions. Read on:

European imperialism inspired jihadi resistance efforts, notably in India, the Caucasus, Somalia, Sudan, Algeria, and Morocco, but all in the end failed. This disaster meant new thinking was needed.

Islamist new thinking began in Egypt and India in the 1920s but jihad acquired its contemporary quality of radical offensive warfare only with the Egyptian thinker Sayyid Qutb (d. 1966). Qutb developed Ibn Taymiya’s distinction between true and false Muslims to deem non-Islamists to be non-Muslims and then declare jihad on them. The group that assassinated Anwar El-Sadat in 1981 then added the idea of jihad as the path to world domination.

Does jihad's "contemporary quality of radical offensive warfare" refer to the idea that true Muslims must fight against false Muslims, or Islamists against non-Islamists? Or is the point that jihad is "radical offensive warfare" the contemporary innovation? The latter can't be so, since -- as this very analysis shows -- jihad has been conceived of as radical offensive warfare since the time of Muhammad. But the idea that Muslims declaring jihad against Muslims is a contemporary innovation is also false. This has occurred throughout history: the Muslim Mongols fought the Abbasids, the Abbasids fought the Fatimids, etc. etc. etc.

If anything, it is the "Islamist"/"non-Islamist" distinction that is the innovation. As this analysis shows, in earlier times every Muslim was a forthright Islamist, in that he knew that it was part of his religion to fight to extend Islam's political power.

In fact, Qutb and other contemporary jihad theorists such as Maududi were not innovators, but radical traditionalists who were fighting to restore what had been the mainstream understanding of jihad that had prevailed throughout most of Islamic history. You can find this explained in my book Onward Muslim Soldiers.

The article continues:

The anti-Soviet war in Afghanistan led to the final step (so far) in this evolution. In Afghanistan, for the first time, jihadis assembled from around the world to fight on behalf of Islam. Abdullah Azzam, a Palestinian, became the theorist of global jihad in the 1980s, giving it an unheard-of central role, judging each Muslim exclusively by his contribution to jihad, and making jihad the salvation of Muslims and Islam. Out of this quickly came suicide terrorism and bin Laden.

Again, to attribute all this to Azzam is ahistorical. Travel for jihad is nothing new. For example, as I show in my forthcoming book The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (and the Crusades) (Regnery), jihadis assembled from around the world in the tenth century to wage jihad against the Byzantines. Saif al-Dawla, ruler of the Shi’ite Hamdanid dynasty in Aleppo from 944 to 967, appealed to Muslims to fight the Byzantines on the pretext that the Byzantines were taking lands that belonged to the House of Islam; this appeal was so successful that Muslim warriors traveled to Hamdanid lands from as far off as Central Asia to fight in the jihads.

Nor is suicide terrorism an innovation: such operations are a feature of Islamic history. One example was recently unearthed by Dr. Andrew Bostom: John Paul Jones encountered suicide attacks by Muslim Turks in 1788!

“…for it was the intention of the Turks to attack us and board us, and if we had been only three versts further the attempt would have been made on the 16th [June 1788] (before the vessel of the Captain Pacha ran aground in advancing before the wind with all his forces to attack us,), God only knows what would have been the result…The Turks had a very large force, and we have been informed by our prisoners that they were resolved to destroy us, even by burning themselves, (in setting fire to their own vessels after having grappled with ours.) [note added by Jones: Before their departure from Constantinople, they swore by the beard of the Sultan to execute this horrible plan…if Providence had not caused its failure from two circumstances which no man could forsee.”]

That's from John Paul Jones’ Letter to Prince Potemkin, June 20, 1788, from Life and Character of John Paul Jones-A Captain in the Navy of the United States, John H. Sherburne, 1825, p. 308.

Pipes concludes that "the current understanding of jihad is more extreme than at any prior time in Islamic history." That may be, but just how that understanding is more "extreme" than that of previous times remains unclear. I have ordered Cook's book and am looking forward to receiving it.

Once havens of tolerance, Iraq's universities are becoming battlefields in an escalating civil war. From Time magazine, with thanks to Jihad Watch News Editor Rebecca Bynum:

On May 3, when the members of Iraq's new government were sworn in, Masar Sarhan al-Rubaiyi, 24, a pharmacy undergraduate at the University of Baghdad, decided to throw a party. As a supporter of a Shi'ite political party, al-Rubaiyi was celebrating the ascent of the country's Shi'ite majority after decades of repression under Saddam Hussein. But the revelry turned sour after officials at the college of pharmacy asked al-Rubaiyi and his friends to break up the event, saying it violated a university policy banning sectarian gatherings on campus. The students refused the request, and al-Rubaiyi scuffled with the bodyguard of the dean of the pharmacy college, Mustafa al-Hiti, before heading home. He never made it. A few hours later, he was shot and killed by unknown assailants on a street near his house.

It's what happened next that has put the school on edge—and induced worries that al-Rubaiyi's death could spark a wider, bloodier conflagration. In the aftermath of the killing, mobs of Shi'ite students rioted at the college of pharmacy, blaming al-Hiti and his bodyguard—both of them Sunnis—for al-Rubaiyi's murder and vowing revenge. Al-Hiti and his bodyguard deny having anything to do with the murder. As the violence spread to a cluster of adjacent colleges, Sunni faculty members had to be evacuated by security guards, colleagues and students. When the rioters showed up, they trashed classrooms and teachers' offices. Then came the reprisals: the next day, a Shi'ite law student who was close to al-Rubaiyi was found dead, fueling suspicions of an organized attempt to silence prominent Shi'ite voices on campus. "The atmosphere is now very tense," says Meitham, a pharmacy student who, along with others, does not want his full name used. "There is a sense that anything can happen, at any time."

For millions of Iraqis, it's a familiar concern. The country has been facing its most deadly spasm of violence in a year: last month alone, attacks killed more than 600 Iraqis, many of them Shi'ites targeted by Sunni jihadis bent on sowing civil war. The country's universities have long served as the bulwark of Iraq's secular society, refuges from the sectarian strife that threatens to rip the country apart. But now violence has come to the campuses. A rocket attack on an engineering college in the heart of Baghdad two weeks ago killed two students and injured 17 others. Bombs have been found at several colleges, leading many universities to institute full-body searches at their gates. Radical religious groups have infiltrated many student bodies, intimidating students and teachers alike. Some prominent Iraqis say the surge in extremism on campus holds grave portents for Iraq. "Once this poison enters the campus and infects the minds of our young people," says Mohammad Jaffer al-Samarrai, a geography professor in Baghdad, "then all hope is lost for society."...

Yes indeed. Read it all.

As evidenced by the opposition of Muslim scholars, practices like these are not sanctioned by Islam. But it must be honestly acknowledged, particularly by Islamic reformers in Pakistan and elsewhere, that the devaluation of women in Islam contributes to this kind of thinking. From News 24, with thanks to Skeetstreet:

Islamabad - A bride was gang-raped by her groom's friends on the first night of their marriage with her in-laws' consent in the southern part of Pakistan's Punjab province, a news report said on Monday.

The daily Times said Mujahid Hussain and his family allowed the bride, Kaneez Kubra, to be dishonoured in revenge for her brother's crime of having sexual relations with their daughter.

The bride's father, Ghulam Hussain, said four persons sexually assaulted his daughter in front of his son-in-law in his house in Punjab.

But her ordeal did not end there. Ghulam Hussain said on the following day she was taken to the residence of another friend and assaulted again.

Kubra was married to Mujahid last month on the directives of Panchayat (local jury) after it found her brother guilty of having illicit relations with Mujahid's sister.

In Pakistan's tribal and rural Punjab, women are married without their consent in compensation for the crime committed by their male family members to settle the dispute under "Swara" and "Vani" customs.

Human rights activists and Muslim scholars have opposed these customs and asked the government to take action against them...

In 2002, eight young women, including two sisters aged two and four, escaped vani marriages near the Punjab city of Mianwali after the Supreme Court of Pakistan said the practice violated the law and norms of civilised society.

of course.

From the Taipai Times, with thanks to Counterterrorism Operations:

The US is pouring more soldiers and millions more dollars into its anti-terrorism campaign in Africa, including in Algeria and chaotic Nigeria, both oil-rich nations where radical Islam has a following.

A new north and west African effort outlined Wednesday in a statement from the US Embassy in Senegal proposes spending US$100 million a year over five years to boost security in some of world's least policed areas, starting with a joint military exercise in the region next month.

An earlier anti-terror exercise with a budget of just US$6 million focused on troop training in four west African nations. The new campaign will target nine north and west African nations and seek to bolster regional cooperation.

Analysts were waiting to see if the program would be fully funded -- but said the intended budgetary increase shows the US is taking West Africa more seriously.

"If they're turning the corner to US$100 million, that's graduation into something much larger," said J. Stephen Morrison, Africa director at the Washington DC-based Center for Strategic and International Studies. "It's still modest, but it's a dramatic step up."

Major Holly Silkman, a US military spokeswoman, said underpopulated border areas in the region could be sanctuaries for "terrorists or would-be terrorists."...

"We're concerned with the radical movement," said Silkman. "Islam isn't the problem, it's only the radicals."...

Great, Major. Now please explain to us how you propose to tell the difference.

While untold numbers of Muslim women worldwide live lives of misery in polygamous relationships. "Harem role for Martine," from the Irish Examiner, with thanks to Susan:

Martine McCutcheon has landed a TV role in a new romantic drama about Islam.

She will star opposite Art Malik in ITV's The English Harem.

McCutcheon plays a supermarket checkout girl who falls in love with a Muslim restaurant owner and marries him - despite the fact he already has two wives.

The other wives encourage the marriage but her parents are appalled and her racist ex-boyfriend plots to get her back...

But of course! Who but racists would oppose such an arrangement!

The incomparable Melanie Phillips writes in her blog, which is always essential reading, about "Dhimmi Britain" and what ought to be called Stockport Syndrome:

Political correctness is turning lethal. Stockport Council is now using resource packs provided by the Muslim Council of Britain to teach schoolchildren about Islam, an initiative which is to be extended across the nation. According to the Stockport Express, councillors think this will promote 'multi-racial [sic] harmony'. Councillor John Pantall, executive member for 'diversity strategy', said:

'If we can get to pupils at an early age we hope they can grow up understanding other cultures and religions and without prejudice. There is a great deal of ignorance about major faiths, resulting in dangerous and destructive myths. The use of the new materials will help develop understanding and encourage community cohesion throughout Stockport. This is part of having a forward thinking education department and prevention of a problem rather than cure.'

Defeating prejudice and encouraging community cohesion, eh? Let us remind ourselves about some of the Muslim Council of Britain's contributions to education and cultural harmony.

*It offered condolences to the family of the leading Hamas mass murderer Abdul Aziz al Rantissi after he was killed by the Israelis, and described the founder and chief strategist of that genocidal outfit Sheikh Ahmed Yassin as 'the renowned Islamic scholar'.

*Its Secretary-General whips up anti-Israel hatred by branding it as a Nazi state and accusing it of 'murderous leadership', 'Zionist brutality' and the 'ethnic cleansing of Palestine'.

*It brands as an 'Islamophobe' anyone who even uses the term 'Islamic violence'.

*It issued a veiled threat to former Telegraph editor Charles Moore, who wrote a robust criticism of Islam, that he might suffer the same fate as Salman Rushdie who was subjected to a death-dealing fatwa over The Satanic Verses.

*It boycotted the ceremony commemorating the liberation of Auschwitz because it claimed it was not 'racially inclusive 'and did not commemorate the 'victims of the Palestinian conflict'.

*It was one of the organisers of a recent demonstration in London at which demonstators chanted: 'Kill, kill USA', 'Kill, kill George Bush', 'Bomb, bomb New York'and 'Your so-called democracy will fall under the sword of Allah. The day of judgment is coming.'

Yet these are the people who are, in the words of the 'diversity' councillor for Stockport, to be enlisted to help defeat prejudice and ignorance in our schools. What kind of country is this where elected councillors have become panders for the peddlers of hatred and murderous prejudice, and are enabling them to turn the minds of our children? Where are the public protests? Where are the letters to MPs, the stories and outraged editorials in our newspapers? Where is there the slightest indication that anyone grasps what is going on here?

Excellent question.

Here's a strange one. Have you heard that the Japanese are looking for a couple of World War II soldiers, both in their mid- to late-eighties, who may still be alive and in the Philippines? Well, some reports have indicated that Islamic jihadists from the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) have the old men and are demanding that Japan play the dhimmi and pay for their ransom. Japanese officials deny this. From the Gulf Times, with thanks to Skeetstreet:

GENERAL SANTOS: A Japanese embassy official denied yesterday that guerrillas had demanded a ransom for two former World War II soldiers reported to be hiding near this southern Philippines city.

"We have no such information on guerrillas," the Japanese embassy's press attache, Shuhei Ogawa, told reporters when questioned about a report in a Tokyo newspaper.

Asked if any money had been requested in return for the two soldiers, Ogawa said, "No, nothing".

He was commenting after Mainichi Shimbun reported yesterday that Philippine rebels are demanding $232,000 ransom in exchange for "delivering" the two men to Japanese authorities.

Mainichi cited a Japanese businessman who reported their presence.
The newspaper did not say if the pair were being held against their will and did not identify the rebel group.

On Saturday Ogawa said Philippines national police had warned Japanese diplomats, who are in this Mindanao island city to try to confirm reports about the old soldiers, not to go into the mountains because of the rebel threat.

The area is home to both the communist New People's Army and the Muslim separatist Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) and other Muslim extremist groups. Muslim rebels are known to have conducted kidnappings for ransom.

But the MILF on Sunday said it had information on where the old soldiers were and offered to act as a go-between for the Japanese government.

"We would like to know what help the Japanese government want: Do they want us to assist in locating the men or assistance to bring them down from the mountains?" Eid Kabalu, MILF spokesman, told AFP in nearby Cotobato city where the MILF is holding a major conference on the future of peace talks with the Philippine government...

Diana West skewers Hollywood in her syndicated column, picked up here from Townhall, with thanks to all who sent this in:

Phew -- that was close. The creators of "24," Fox Television's thriller-diller starring Kiefer Sutherland as counter-terror super-agent Jack Bauer, almost put together a compelling television series rooted in the onerous reality of the war on jihad terrorism. But thanks, apparently, to a few helpful suggestions from the Council of American Islamic Relations (CAIR), they managed to steer clear of all political and historical relevance.

This couldn't have been easy. After all, CAIR didn't even come to their rescue until after the show's season had begun with a couple of episodes that featured a typical Islamic sleeper cell embedded in a typical American sleepy suburb. After these and other obvious blunders -- a terse exchange of "Allahu Akbar" between terrorists, for instance -- the creative types behind the hit series managed to get their act together and save the world for political correctness.

How? Two things: They laid down a suitably distracting Chinese subplot, and cast a bunch of Midwesterners, instead of Middle Easterners, to wear the key black hats. There was the ex-Air Force pilot -- obviously blond, obviously disgruntled -- who shot down Air Force One; a nefarious ex-marine; and a Patty-Hearst-like commando who just shot whatever.

By this week's season finale, Marwan, the head jihadist, had been comically stripped of all religious identity and motivation, and cloaked in a heavy disguise of moral equivalence. As in: You think we're evil and we think you're evil. This is pretty much what hero-Jack actually said to Marwan, the terror kingpin, who had just that day blown up a train, kidnapped the Secretary of Defense, sent multiple nuclear plants into meltdown and lobbed a nuclear warhead at Los Angeles. Oh well. Marwan was ultimately overshadowed by someone worse -- the president of the United States...

Read it all, please.

I have written on numerous occasions that there is no distinction in the American Muslim community between peaceful Muslims and jihadists. While Americans prefer to imagine that the vast majority of American Muslims are civic-minded patriots who accept wholeheartedly the parameters of American pluralism, this proposition has actually never been proven. And evidence continues to come in that jihadists view the aggregate of peaceful Muslims not as a challenge, but as a recruiting ground -- and make copious use of the Qur'an and Sunnah in that recruitment. Stateside jihad alert from the New York Times, with thanks to all who sent this in:

A martial arts expert from the Bronx and a doctor from Florida have been arrested on charges that they conspired to train and provide medical assistance to Al Qaeda terrorists, federal and local authorities said yesterday.

The men, United States citizens who were identified by the authorities as Tarik ibn Osman Shah of the Bronx and Rafiq Sabir of Boca Raton, were captured in early morning raids in the Bronx and in Boca Raton on Friday, according to Paul J. Browne, a New York City police spokesman.

The arrests came as part of a two-year sting operation that ended with each man facing a single conspiracy charge. While the authorities said that they had no evidence that either man had actually provided support to terrorists, they said they had taped each man swearing his allegiance to Osama bin Laden, Mr. Browne said.

According to a statement released by David N. Kelley, the United States attorney for the Southern District of New York, and John Klochan, the acting assistant director in charge of the New York office of the F.B.I., the complaint contends that between 2003 and sometime this month, the men met with a law enforcement informant and an F.B.I. agent who was posing as a Qaeda operative and recruiter.

The complaint said that in those meetings, which were recorded, Mr. Shah agreed to provide training in martial arts and hand-to-hand combat to Qaeda members and associates, while Dr. Sabir agreed to provide medical assistance to wounded jihadists in Saudi Arabia, the statement said.

"During these conversations, Mr. Shah repeatedly indicated his desire to train Muslim 'brothers' in the martial arts in order to wage jihad and also regularly discussed his desire to find people who were willing to press the fight," it said....

Cue the usual protestations of innocence and discrimination:

A report yesterday in The Sun-Sentinel of Fort Lauderdale quoted a friend of Dr. Sabir's saying that the charges were absurd. "He is a quality guy and a quality physician," the friend, Dr. Daniel McBride, a spokesman for the Islamic Center of Boca Raton, told the newspaper. "He's about helping others."

Mr. Browne said that Dr. Sabir attended City College of New York and received his medical degree from Columbia medical school. Last night, Lisa Kozan, a neighbor who lives across the way from Dr. Sabir in Villa San Remo, a gated community in Boca Raton, said she believed that Dr. Sabir had rented there for about four years.

She said that the doctor stood out from other neighbors by his Muslim dress and that the doctor and his family lived quietly in the community. "Other than that, we didn't talk to him, and they didn't talk to us," she said.

Mr. Browne said that Mr. Shah, who public records show lived in Beacon, N.Y., and Poughkeepsie before moving to the Bronx, was the son of an aide to Malcolm X.

Suicide bombings are happening almost daily in Iraq, but in the place where the practice became internationally famous, we are being assured that it is all over. A Bridge For Sale Alert from the Jerusalem Post, with thanks to JS:

Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas said in an interview aired on Sunday that the era of suicide bombings may be over.

"We have started to deal with the culture of violence," he said. "We stopped the culture of violence and the Palestinian people have started looking at it as something that should be condemned and it should stop." Asked on ABC whether the suicide bombing era had ended, he said: "I believe it is over."

But he warned that if progress toward a peace agreement was not achieved in meetings with Sharon next month, "despair and loss of hope will come back and a return to the old ideas" of armed resistance.

In other words, it's over unless we don't get what we want.

Don't they realize the UN is their best friend? Evidently not. From AP, with thanks to Jeffrey Imm:

KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) -- An explosion shook the headquarters of NATO's 8,000-strong security force in the Afghan capital on Monday but there were no immediate reports of injuries, a spokeswoman for the force said.

The blast occurred "in the vicinity" of the International Security Assistance Force compound, said Lt. Col. Karen Tissot Van Patot. She said officers were investigating the cause of the explosion.

An Afghan police officer outside the compound, speaking on condition of anonymity, said a rocket had hit inside the heavily fortified base, which is near the U.S. Embassy and other diplomatic missions in central Kabul.

Oh, the horror! Will the apostates stop at nothing?

Would singing "I'm a little teapot, short and stout" get you arrested for apostasy? A giant teapot built by apostates in Malaysia will be demolished for the offense it presents to Islam. "Sect leader will not resist action," from the StarOnline, with thanks to Nicolei:

JERTEH: The leader of the “Sky Kingdom” deviationist religious sect said he would not stop the authorities from demolishing the giant structures, including a teapot, on its commune near here.

“But the action will seriously tarnish the image of the Government internationally,” said Ariffin Mohamad, 65, better known as Ayah Pin.

Besides the teapot, the other giant structures on the sect’s commune on land bordering rubber trees and an orchard at Kampung Batu 13 near here, included a vase, umbrella, concrete boat and a “palace.”...

Rosli Abdul Samad, the liaison officer of the commune, said the structures combined the architectural elements of major religions such as Islam, Christianity, Hinduism and Buddhism.

“It is aimed at promoting universal unity. The teapot signifies the purity of water and its medicinal values. It is associated with all major religions, including the water oozing from Lord Shiva’s forehead....

Last October, Minister in the Prime Minister’s Department Datuk Dr Abdullah Md Zain had said Ayah Pin was jailed 11 months and fined RM2,900 in June 2001 for humiliating Islamic teachings.

He had also said that the teachings of Ayah Pin were dangerous since the members of the group had declared themselves as apostates.

But what happens to them after they're turned over to the Saudis? Are they released with encouragement to try again? From AKI, with thanks to the Constantinopolitan Irredentist:

Riyadh, 30 May (AKI) - Syria has handed more than 30 Saudis caught trying to cross the border into Iraq back to Saudi Arabia, according to the Saudi interior minister Prince Naif. The Saudi newspaper Arab News reports that in the last few weeks Syria has arrested more than 300 Saudis it suspected of travelling to Iraq to join the insurgency there. Syria is under immense pressure to tighten up security along its "porous border" with Iraq.

Saudi Arabia says it has no idea how many Saudis are in Iraq, but analysts believe hundreds, even thousands may have gone there since the US-led invasion two years ago, which brought down Saddam Hussein's regime.

Earlier this month one influential Saudi cleric, Safar al-Hawali, said that while he supports the jihad against the US in Iraq, no-one outside Iraq has the right to participate in the fight. He also urged families to immediately contact the authorities if a male relative goes missing, so he can be stopped before he leaves the country.

From AP, with thanks to the Constantinopolitan Irredentist:

BAGHDAD, Iraq - U.S. troops detained the head of Iraq's largest Sunni Muslim political party on Monday, according to party officials, police and the man's wife. South of the capital, two suicide bombers attacked a crowd of policemen in Hillah, killing 20 and wounding nearly 100....

The arrests came on the second day of Operation Lightning, a massive Iraqi-led anti-insurgent offensive in Baghdad that Abdul-Hamid's party opposes, believing security forces will trample on innocent people's rights.

Abdul-Hamid was taken from his home in the western Baghdad suburb of Khadra at about 6 a.m., along with his three sons and four guards, said party-secretary-general Ayad al-Samarei.

Al-Samarei accused American soldiers of raiding Abdul-Hamid's home and confiscating various items, including a computer. U.S. military officials could not immediately confirm the detentions. Iraqi officials were also reluctant to talk about the issue.

"This is a provocative and foolish act and this is part of the pressure exerted on the party," al-Samarei said.

"At the time when the Americans say they are keen on real Sunni participation, they are now arresting the head of the only Sunni party that calls for a peaceful solution and have participated in the political process," he added....

Iraq's president, Jalal Talabani, who is Kurdish, expressed "surprise and discontent" on learning of Abdul-Hamid's arrest and called for his immediate release, according to a statement from his office. The statement did not identify who detained Abdul-Hamid.

"The Iraqi president said that no one gave prior notice to the Presidential Council about the arrest of Dr. Mohsen Abdul-Hamid. This way of dealing with such a distinguished political figure is unacceptable," the statement added.

A top police official, speaking on customary condition of anonymity, claimed U.S. forces arrested Abdul-Hamid as did his wife, Awatif Ibrahim.

"They (U.S troops) raided our house and my son's house, using bullets and stun bombs," Ibrahim told Associated Press Television News. "And they arrested him (her son) and they also detained my husband, Mohsen Abdul-Hamid, head of the Iraqi Islamic Party."

The party also released a statement alleging "occupation forces arrested Abdul-Hamid" and that an Arabic translator had assisted in the detention.

The Iraqi Islamic Party issued a statement demanding Abdul-Hamid's immediate release, saying he "represents a large sector of the Iraqi people."

"This irresponsible behavior will only complicate the situation," the party statement said....

Abdul-Hamid, aged in his late 60s, is regarded as a moderate Islamic leader. He was a member of the now dissolved U.S.-appointed Iraqi Governing Council and has been involved with the party since the 1970s and headed it since 2003.

So why would Mohsen Abdul-Hamid have been detained? Is this a foolish and clumsy attempt to silence dissent? Maybe.

Or maybe it's that fiendish Mossad. From IranDaily:

TEHRAN, Jan. 2--State Expediency Council Chairman Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani in a meeting with the head of Iraq's Islamic Party, Mohsen Abdul-Hamid, on Sunday warned against the irreparable consequences of Iraqi people's failure to participate in political activities.

According to a report released by SEC's Public Relations Office, Rafsanjani referred to the critical situation in Iraq and said a delay in elections will further tighten the grip of occupying forces over the destiny of the Iraqi people and their national resources, IRNA reported.

"Despite paying excessive costs, the US is mainly concerned about securing its own interests and reluctant to leave the country," he said.

He underlined that no other factor is more pivotal in saving Iraq than holding elections and letting the people control their own destiny.

For his part, Abdul-Hamid explained the latest developments in his country and said the US forces in Iraq proved their country to be the number one enemy of the Muslim world.

"The US has occupied Iraq to support the Zionist regime and with the hope of controlling the region's oil resources," he said....

Abdul-Hamid declared that terrorist groups and Israel's intelligence service Mossad are currently causing many problems and trying to inflict damage on the Iraqi nation.

Or maybe it had something to do with his ties to the Muslim Brotherhood, the forefather of Al-Qaeda and Hamas, which he affirmed despite his peaceful rhetoric. From IslamOnline:

BAGHDAD, April 23 (IslamOnline.net) - The Iraqi Islamic Party (IIP) will not adopt violence as an approach to resist the U.S.-Anglo occupation of Iraq, the party's Secretary General Dr. Mohsen Abdul Hamid said Wednesday, April 23.

Speaking to IslamOnline.net, Abdul Hamid rejected any kind of cooperation with an occupation-installed government.

"It is abundantly clear that we reject the presence of the U.S. occupation in Iraq, but we will not use violence in resisting it," he said.

"Armed confrontation is useless and we will resist (the occupation) peacefully. The party and other Iraqi religious and national factions are on board when it comes to this, no doubt."...

"The parties in Iraq are a dime a dozen … Any body can stroll five persons together and form a party," Abdul Hamid said, referring to the anarchy and free-for-all looting that swept Iraq.

"But the IIP (Iraq's Muslim Brotherhood) is a time-honored party that dates back to 1944, when Imam Hassan al-Banna (the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood in 1928) dispatched his close ally Dr. Hussein Kamal Eddin.

"But the then government did not allow us to name the party after the Muslim Brotherhood and we instead established the society of Islamic brotherhood, which played a pivotal role in whipping up religious zeal in Iraq at that point in time," he added....

Asked whether or not the IIP would cooperate with the new U.S.-installed Iraqi government, Abdul Hamid said the party "will never cooperate with any government not elected by the Iraqi people under the umbrella of the international legitimacy."...

"The Americans would only bless a government that helps them set up military bases in Iraq and recognizes Israel. We, from the bottom of our hearts, are against this and we put it clear that they will not stay in Iraq for long."...

"We revived the party once again and are doing everything in our power to redraw its political, economic and social maps," he said, noting that the part had already set up ad hoc committees to draw up the executive regulation of the party and make some amendments to its constitution.

"We hope that we would succeed in lifting the blinkers that stand as a stumbling block between Islam and some of the Iraqi people…We do not care about the results, we only want to raise up the public awareness of the religion," he concluded.

What might he have been doing to raise up public awareness of the religion? Maybe we will be finding out soon.

UPDATE: Abdul-Hamid may already have been released.

I think this is only a matter of time, although there may be an awareness among jihad leaders of how difficult things would (probably) become for them after suicide attacks in the West. From WND, with thanks to Jeffrey Imm:

JERUSALEM – Hamas has several cells inside the United Kingdom and is capable of attacking the country, a senior Israeli security official told WND yesterday. The official spoke in response to a sermon, broadcast live on Palestinian television earlier this month, in which a cleric associated with Hamas threatened terror attacks against Britain.

Sheikh Ibrahim Mudeiras, a popular Palestinian Islamic leader, said in a live sermon broadcast May 13, "We take this opportunity to hold Britain accountable and say there is revenge we can never forget! We cannot forgo the revenge we want to exact from Britain. We hold Britain responsible for what happened in Palestine. Britain is the cause, till this very minute, of every drop of blood dripping into this land."

Mudeiras, who was lamenting Israeli Independence Day celebrations, continued, "I say to you: You must look at our situation with an outlook of confidence in Allah's victory! If you help Allah [spread Islam], Allah will bring you victory. We once ruled the world and the day will come when, by god, we will rule the entire world. The day will come when we will rule the United States, the day will come when we will rule Britain, we will rule the whole world [and all will live in peace and comfort under our rule] except the Jews."

Geert Wilders update from the Telegraph, with thanks to Vulcan:

Mr Wilders, 42, spent eight months sleeping in a cell in a high-security prison after receiving death threats from Islamist groups before emerging for his No bus tour across the Netherlands. For security reasons, his stops are unannounced.

In opposing the constitution, Mr Wilders finds himself in an uneasy alliance with much of the Dutch Left, which sees it as undermining Holland's social model and traditional liberalism.

Both ends of the spectrum are feeding off a growing distrust of mainstream politicians and resentment over a lack of consultation on Europe. Mr Wilders's message about the evils of immigration and the loss of sovereignty to a European superstate is, he said inspired by Margaret Thatcher. "She rejected Europe very strongly and as a result today, because we were weak, the Dutch are paying Brussels what the British should pay. British people know their history and are sceptical about Europe. They are very wise and we can learn from them," he said.

An update on this story, from AFX via Forbes, "Indonesian market bombing sparks fears of new sectarian clashes"

TENTENA, Indonesia - Security forces were deployed at churches on Indonesia's Sulawesi island today after yesterday's bomb attack on a Christian town killed 20 people and threatened to re-ignite a violent conflict with Muslims.

About 3,000 troops were on duty in the troubled Poso region and the town of Tentena where blasts hit a busy market on Saturday in an attack police said could be the work of Islamic militants behind other major atrocities.

In Jakarta, senior officials held an emergency meeting, agreeing to step up counter-terrorist intelligence, while Indonesia's president called for calm in Poso and across the country in the wake of the incident.

Officials said those killed included an infant and a Christian cleric. Victor Batara, a senior police officer in the provincial capital Palu, said 11 people were still fighting for their lives.

Tentena lies in a region where clashes between Muslims and Christians have killed hundreds of people in recent years. A peace deal was struck in 2001 after a year of fighting left 1,000 dead, but sporadic violence has persisted.

Although Indonesia is home to the world's largest Islamic following, Christians and Muslims account for roughly equal proportions of the population on Sulawesi...

Our Iraq update comes from the Lebanese Daily Star.

Thousands of Iraqi forces on Sunday threw a security net over Baghdad to snare insurgents, who quickly struck back with a string of car bombings said to have been masterminded by Al-Qaeda's Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.

Operation Lightning came a day after two of Iraq's most influential Shiite and Sunni organizations agreed to try to ease sectarian tensions pushing the country toward civil war.

Four car bombs in and around the capital killed 16 people, most of them security personnel, in a swift response to Iraq's widest homegrown clampdown since the fall of Saddam Hussein over two years ago.

Nine soldiers taking part in Operation Lightning died in a suicide car bombing at their roadblock just south of the capital, while two policemen were killed when a suicide car bomber targeted their patrol in southwestern Baghdad.

In an effort to mitigate escalating sectarian tensions, officials from the Sunni Committee of Muslim Scholars, considered close to some insurgent groups, met with representatives from the Badr Brigades - the military wing of Iraq's largest Shiite party, the Supreme Council of the Islamic Revolution in Iraq.

Organized by the radical cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, the gathering aimed to smother accusations that began earlier this month when the committee's leader, Harith al-Dhari, accused the Badr Brigades of killing Sunnis and executing their clerics. A number of Shiite clerics were also killed. The brigades denied the charges...

In western Baghdad, a car bomb targeting police commandos killed three people and wounded 20, an Interior Ministry source said.

An earlier suicide bombing near the Oil Ministry left two dead, while violence elsewhere claimed the lives of a British soldier and seven Iraqis. Insurgent attacks nationwide have claimed the lives of around 700 people so far this month.

"Squadrons and brigades directed by the sheikh of the mujihadeen Abu Musab al-Zarqawi on Sunday launched an operation planned and supervised by our sheikh," said an Internet statement attributed to his group...

Straight talk and refreshing honesty from General Myers. "Myers Defends Treatment of Guantanamo Prisoners," from AP, with thanks to DC Watson:

WASHINGTON (May 29) - The Pentagon's top general on Sunday defended the treatment of prisoners at the U.S. Navy prison camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba and said the U.S. believes al-Qaida leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi is wounded, though it's not known how badly.

Gen. Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said the U.S. has done a good job of humanely treating detainees. Muslims in several countries have protested in recent weeks about allegations that a Quran was flushed down a toilet at Guantanamo as part of an interrogation of a prisoner.

The human rights group Amnesty International released a report last week calling the prison camp "the gulag of our time."

Myers said that report was "absolutely irresponsible." He said the U.S. was doing its best to detain fighters who, if released, "would turn right around and try to slit our throats, slit our children's throats."

In accord with Qur'an 47:4: "Therefore, when ye meet the Unbelievers (in fight), smite at their necks..."

"This is a different kind of struggle, a different kind of war," Myers said on "Fox News Sunday."

"We struggle with how to handle them, but we've always handled them humanely and with the dignity that they should be accorded."

Hope for Europe? "French Reject EU Constitution, Gov't Says," from AP, with thanks to the Constantinopolitan Irredentist:

PARIS -- French voters rejected the European Union's first constitution Sunday, early government results showed _ a stinging repudiation of the ambitious, decades-long effort to further unite the continent.

With about 83 percent of the votes counted, the referendum was rejected by 57.26 percent of voters, the Interior Ministry said. The treaty was supported by 42.74 percent, the ministry said.

All 25 EU members must ratify the text for it to take effect _ and nine already have done so. The Dutch vote Wednesday, with polls showing opposition to the constitution running at about 60 percent.

"There is no more constitution," leading opponent Philippe de Villiers said. "It is necessary to reconstruct Europe on other foundations that don't currently exist."

De Villiers called on Chirac to submit his resignation _ something the French leader had said he would refuse to do _ and called for parliament to be dissolved.

"Tonight we face a major political crisis," he said.

Let's hope Chirac does resign, and that someone who realizes what is happening in Europe takes his place.

Word just in from Nidra Poller on France's vote on the EU charter:

55% NON 45% OUI

Let's hope it continues this way.

Lt. Col. Jonathan D. Halevi writes in IMRA, "What Drives Saudi Arabia to Persist in Terrorist Financing?"

The U.S. offensive against terrorism has succeeded in reducing the extent of global terrorism. However, under the surface, the financial channels that are the arteries of radical Islamic movements from Hamas to the Chechens continue to operate. U.S. pressure has managed to force Islamic financiers to alter their pattern of operations, but the substance of their support persists - in a financial jihad that backs the wider global jihad against the infidels.

Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states remain the most significant source of funds flowing to the Islamist movements. New documents found at "charitable foundations" linked to Hamas, as well as a careful examination of the Palestinian press, indicate a continuing flow of funds directly from official Saudi organizations to these foundations, which were declared by both Israel and the U.S. as terrorist organizations.

Palestinian Authority officials recently confirmed that Saudi Arabia
continues to fund charitable foundations controlled by Hamas. The World Assembly for Muslim Youth (WAMY) and the International Islamic Relief Organization (IIRO) are active in transferring these funds. Captured documents show that the Saudi charity al-Haramain transferred funds to the al-Quran and a-Sunna Society in Qalqilia in August 2003 - almost two months after President George W. Bush announced in a summit meeting in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, that he had assurances from Saudi Arabia's Crown Prince Abdullah and other Arab leaders that they would halt all financial assistance to terrorist organizations.

In a later captured document, dated 8 February 2004, the Hamas-linked Idhna foundation in the Hebron area thanked al-Haramain for its assistance. The chairman of the al-Haramain administrative council was the Saudi Minister of Islamic Affairs, a member of the Saudi cabinet...

Read it all.

Mark Houser continues his series in the Pittsburgh Tribune Review, with thanks to KAOSKTRL.

PARIS -- Waiting for his train in a metro station named for the battle of Stalingrad, Moun R'Quibe spoke with pride of the men he considers heroes fighting in another bloody conflict -- Iraq.

R'Quibe, 20, born in France of Moroccan parents, supports fellow Muslims willing to give their lives for jihad against the Americans.

"I would like to do it, God willing. I would like to do it, but my parents don't want me to," he said.

The high-rises here in Paris' 19th arrondissement, a residential district in the city's northeast where tourists rarely venture, are crowded with North African immigrants and their descendants along with native French. On narrow Rue de Tanger, across from a drab, concrete Catholic church, is the drab, concrete Addawa mosque.

French officials say it was in this mosque, and at later meetings in an apartment, that a jihad recruiter met with a group of young Muslims and convinced them to fly to Syria, sneak across the border, join the insurgency and pursue glory.

Three of them are dead -- two were killed in battle and one blew himself up in an October car bomb attack that injured two American soldiers and two Iraqi soldiers. Three more were captured and are being held by the U.S. military.

In January, French police arrested their alleged recruiter, Farid Benyettou, and two other young men who were preparing to follow in their friends' footsteps...

Read it all.

An unsurprising assessment from the New Duranty Times.

BAGHDAD - No one knows who tortured and killed Hassan al-Nuaimi, a Sunni Arab cleric whose body was found in an empty lot here last week, with a hole drilled in his head and both eyes missing. But the various theories have a distinctly sectarian tinge.

The Shiite police chief investigating the death said he suspected Sunni Arab extremists who have driven much of the insurgency in Iraq, much of it aimed at Shiites. The Sunni family mourning the cleric pointed the finger at the Badr Organization, a Shiite militia. But with Mr. Nuaimi buried, the truth, as so often with killings in Iraq, seems to be lost in rumor and allegations.

The only sure thing is that Mr. Nuaimi and another Sunni man who helped write sermons were killed within 12 hours of their disappearance from a mixed Sunni-Shiite neighborhood in northeast Baghdad.

Their deaths, amid violence that has taken more than 550 lives across Iraq this month, renewed concern that the bloodshed may be shifting ever more toward crudely sectarian killings.

Hard-line Sunni leaders have pressed the case. "The killing in Iraq now is according to religious identity," said Sheik Abdel Nasir al-Janabi, a religious Sunni and a hard-line member of the National Dialogue Council, a Sunni political group that claims to have ties to the insurgency. "Now you're killed because you're a Sunni Arab."

Shiite leaders, including Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, Iraq's most powerful Shiite cleric, have responded to such talk with calls for calm and renewed appeals to Shiites that they place their trust in Iraq's fledgling democracy, not revenge killings.

But the urgency of the Shiite leaders' appeals reflects a deepening fear that the welter of allegations about Shiite death squads going after Sunni Arabs, true or false, may create a new reality, prompting still more sectarian killings and pushing the country ever closer to the brink of civil war...

A long-overdue reassessment. "U.S. Is Expected to Look Beyond Al Qaeda," from the Washington Post, with thanks to Jeffrey Imm.

The Bush administration has launched a high-level internal review of its efforts to battle international terrorism, aimed at moving away from a policy that has stressed efforts to capture and kill al Qaeda leaders since Sept. 11, 2001, and toward what a senior official called a broader "strategy against violent extremism."

The shift is meant to recognize the transformation of al Qaeda over the past three years into a far more amorphous, diffuse and difficult-to-target organization than the group that struck the United States in 2001. But critics say the policy review comes only after months of delay and lost opportunities while the administration left key counterterrorism jobs unfilled and argued internally over how best to confront the rapid spread of the pro-al Qaeda global Islamic jihad....

The review marks the first ambitious effort since the immediate aftermath of the 2001 attacks to take stock of what the administration has called the "global war on terrorism" -- or GWOT -- but is now considering changing to recognize the evolution of its fight. "What we really want now is a strategic approach to defeat violent extremism," said a senior administration official who described the review on the condition of anonymity because it is not finished. "GWOT is catchy, but there may be a better way to describe it, and those are things that ought to be incumbent on us to look at."

In many ways, this is the culmination of a heated debate that has been taking place inside and outside the government about how to target not only the remnants of al Qaeda but also broader support in the Muslim world for radical Islam. Administration officials refused to describe in detail what new policies are under consideration, and several sources familiar with the discussions said some issues remain sticking points, such as how central the ongoing war in Iraq is to the anti-terrorist effort, and how to accommodate State Department desires to normalize a foreign policy that has stressed terrorism to the exclusion of other priorities in recent years.

"There's been a perception, a sense of drift in overall terrorism policy. People have not figured out what we do next, so we just continue to pick 'em off one at a time," said Roger W. Cressey, who served as a counterterrorism official at the National Security Council under Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush. "We haven't gone to a new level to figure out how things have changed since 9/11."

"No question this is the next stage, the phase two," another senior counterterrorism official said. "We are coming to the point of decisions."...

A update on this story from the Washington Post, "Pakistanis Find Bloodied Head of Suicide Bomber," with thanks to Jeffrey Imm.

ISLAMABAD, Investigators have found the head of a suicide bomber who attacked a Muslim festival in the Pakistani capital, killing at least 19 people, and are trying to establish his identity, officials said on Saturday.

The attack occurred on Friday at Islamabad's Bari Imam shrine, less than half a mile from Pakistan's main government buildings and diplomatic enclave...

The bomber blew himself up in a gathering of minority Shiite Muslims at a festival also attended by majority Sunnis.

Nineteen people were killed and 65 wounded, six critically. Officials said most of the victims were Shiites.

Authorities have circulated a picture of the suspected bomber, shown with a bloodstained, clean-shaven face and announced an $8,300 reward for information...

From the Washington Times, "Critics want probe of Alexandria Islamic school"

The Islamic Saudi Academy in Alexandria is an outpost of militant Islam, say critics who point out that the school's 1999 valedictorian is charged with joining al Qaeda and plotting to assassinate President Bush.

Two other persons connected to the academy also have been linked to terrorism-related cases, and a U.S. senator has asked the Justice Department to investigate the school.

But the academy's teachers, students and administrators say suspicion of the school serving nearly 1,000 students in kindergarten through 12th grade at two campuses just beyond the Capital Beltway is based on misperceptions...

Sorry teachers, students and administrators, facts are facts, not "misperceptions."

From Arab News, "Syria Arrests 300 Saudis: Report," with thanks to Jeffrey Imm.

JEDDAH — More than 300 Saudis have been arrested at the airport in Damascus and along the Syrian border on suspicion they were en route to Iraq to fight alongside insurgents, press reports said yesterday.

Relatives of some of the arrested told Al-Watan Arabic daily that the Saudis had no intention of entering Iraq in order to take part in a jihad against American and other occupation forces. They said some of the Saudis were arrested on arrival at the airport in Damascus.

“The Saudis had gone to Syria to spend their holidays,” the paper quoted the relatives as saying. A Saudi woman, said her husband was arrested soon after his arrival at the airport in Damascus. “He called me from the airport to let me know he had arrived safely. Then we had no word for a while and later we learned he had been arrested at the airport,” she told the daily. The paper did not say when exactly the arrest had taken place.

According to the Syrian ambassador to the United Nations, Faisal Mekdad, his country has arrested some 1,200 people over the past few months to prevent them from entering Iraq. Many of the those trying to cross the border into Iraq, most likely to join the insurgents, were sent home “to face trial” or were being held in Syrian jails, Mekdad told Reuters. He would not say exactly where the detainees were from but that they were from “Iraq’s neighbors and other countries in the region.” Mekdad said: “We have done a great job in this respect, something which should be recognized by the United States and others. We have arrested (about) 1,200 people who had come into Syria from other countries and who were going to the front,” he explained. The Bush administration has complained frequently that Syria is not doing enough to halt the flow of men and money to the insurgency in Iraq. Hoshyar Zebari, the Iraqi foreign minister, said his country’s neighbors could do more to prevent foreign fighters from entering Iraq...

From Boston Globe, with thanks to Skeet Street.

BAGHDAD, Iraq -- The younger brother was slender and serious, a former bodyguard for Saddam Hussein. He became a Muslim fundamentalist, grew his beard, and prayed five times a day. The older brother was a used-car salesman who told off-color jokes and made regular trips to a Baghdad hotel for drinks.

The brothers, Ali and Khalid Mashhandani, grew up together in a poor suburb of Mosul, a cluster of small, stone houses with wooden and metal roofs along the river Euphrates. For years, their paths diverged. That changed the moment Ali died in Yarmouk Circle, in the center of Mosul.

The story of the Mashhandani brothers offers a glimpse into the lives of two Sunni Arab insurgents, their different motivations, and the toll their actions have taken on their family in Mosul, a northern city that has become a bastion of the insurgency.

With his Islamic convictions and his membership in Ansar al Sunna, a militant group based in northern Iraq, Ali Jassim Mohammed Mashhandani was fighting for an ideological goal.

''Ali was much more serious, much more practiced," said Hania Mashhandani, the men's sister. ''And he was a mujahideen prince."

Khalid Mashhandani was more of an opportunist. He created his own group of insurgents, she said, and set about smuggling cars, kidnapping for ransom, and hiring others to attack US convoys. He allegedly raped and killed at least two Iraqi women. He awaits trial in a Mosul jail.

The brothers represent two major strands of the insurgency: one organized, deadly, and internationally connected; the other less practiced and more individualistic, but just as dangerous...

Michel Elbaz, general coordinator of AxisGlobal writes about "the covert 'love affair' between Russia and Hezbollah."

Moscow Base for Recruiting "Shahids`"

With the collapse of Soviet rule, hundreds of Islamic extremists from all over the Muslim world spread across Russia. Emissaries of the different Sunni organizations started to compete for influence among the ex-Soviet Muslims. They also encouraged a religious "renaissance" in the North Caucasus, accompanied by separatist ambitions with an Islamic tint.

Hezbollah`s agents were also among the extremists flooding the country, yet in the beginning the Shia emissaries did not show any special interest in local population. They strived to expand their influence and "guardianship" among thousands of students, immigrants and merchants who came to Russia from the UAE, Lebanon, Jordan and Palestinian authority. Hezbollah`s humanitarian aid and preaching of Islam was meant mostly for Palestinians and Arabs – Shiites that constituted a pool of potential terrorists after their return to the Middle East. Hezbollah`s agents had one more interest. The military plants, which were unable to pay their workers, poverty and corruption at all levels of the local authorities and army, had turned Russia into the source of cheap modern weaponry for the Shia terrorist organization.

The first reports in the Russian media of Hezbollah`s presence in the country started in September, 1993. One of the stories noted that Russia had become a bridgehead for militant Shiite agents' infiltration into Western and Central Europe. Several years later, Hezbollah`s branches appeared in major cities, such as Moscow, Saint Petersburg and Voronezh. The central branch – in Moscow – controlled the other branches in Russia, additional ex-Soviet states (Kazakhstan, Ukraine Belorussia and Moldova) and in several countries of Eastern Europe. The Russian infrastructure of the Shia organization finally formed in the late nineties and was headed by Dr. Hassan Allek. He resided in Moscow, keeping in constant touch with high-ranking representatives of the Iranian and Lebanese embassies. Hadj Hassan Salame was second in command of the local organization's hierarchy, as he was a representative of its special operations unit ("Muntamat al-Jihad al-Islami" - MJI or "Islamic Jihad Organization"). His responsibilities were as follows: recruiting of activists to the military wing, purchasing of weaponry and its transfer to Lebanon. Dr. Muhammad Haidar headed the second branch in size in Saint Petersburg.

To cover up the dealings in Russia, the "Ahl al-Beit" ("The Prophet's Family") association for open cultural and religious activities was created by Hezbollah`s representatives. Through its first phase, it worked with Lebanese students only. Later it became open to Shiites from Iraq, UAE, Yemen, and African countries (and not just students). Today it unites thousands of the local Muslims, migrants and immigrants from Middle Eastern countries, Azerbaijan and Central Asia. The association also initiated several years ago an intensive campaign of conversion to Islam, directed at the Russian atheist population of Christian-orthodox origin. As a result of this campaign, the number of converts to Islam is rising progressively, and many of the recent converts became prominent activists in Russian Shia community. "The Prophet's Family" maintain close relations with the Shia leaders of Iran and Lebanon. Delegations on behalf of the association visit Kum and Tehran every year.

The major centers of the association's activities are Moscow and Saint Petersburg (there are 600 thousand Shiites in this city alone)...

Read it all.

Sami Al-Arian Walk Watch update from Haaretz, "U.S. court asked to move Israeli testimony to end of terror trial"

The defense team for four Arab Americans on trial for involvement in terror attacks has asked a Florida court not to let the Israeli witnesses testify at the trial's opening.

Professor Sami al-Arian, a computer lecturer at South Florida University, and three others are facing charges of aiding Islamic Jihad, which is responsible for dozens of terror attacks against Israelis.

The prosecution wants to open with testimony from several witnesses from Israel, including survivors of terror attacks, members of bereaved families and police officers.

The defense wants to avoid these testimonies at the very beginning of the trial, to prevent swaying the jurors' opinions before the prosecution has established a connection between the defendants and the terror attacks.

U.S. District Court Judge James Moody agreed with the defense, which made its request Thursday, that before the testimonies are heard the prosecution must prove that the suspects took part in plotting attacks and knew they would lead to murder. He also said these testimonies are more shocking than useful. But, in view of the prosecution's insistence, Moody said he would decide only after the trial begins.

Al-Arian and the other defendants are charged with transferring funds and messages to Islamic Jihad leaders for more than a decade. They also openly supported attacks in which both Israelis and Americans were killed, the charges say.

The prosecution said it intends to summon some 50 terror survivors, 17 Israeli police officers and 18 rescue team members to testify at the beginning of the trial on June 6...

Thomas Woods, author of How the Catholic Church Built Western Civilization, writes in RedState.org:

I was stunned to hear Islamic anti-defamation groups condemn Scott's "Kingdom of Heaven."

The Muslims appear much nobler than the Christians in the film, and on the Christian side the only remotely sympathetic characters are at best agnostic. Jonathan Riley-Smith, an expert on the Crusades, described the movie as "rubbish" for just this reason - the film, he says, is "not historically accurate at all" in its depiction of "the Muslims as sophisticated and civilized, and the Crusaders are all brutes and barbarians. It has nothing to do with reality."
More important than the film itself, though, is the history behind the Crusades themselves. Moviegoers who knew little of the period walked away with a distorted understanding of the Crusades that played into politically correct stereotypes.

Proper context for the Crusades must begin at the beginning, with the First Crusade (1096-1099). Yet - and here is the point - even the First Crusade was not the real beginning of the story.
The real beginning came in the century following the death of Muhammad in 632. During that incredible hundred years, Muslims spread their religion by force throughout Arabia, and into the modern Middle East, including Iran, Iraq, Lebanon, Palestine, and Syria, as well as into Egypt, north Africa, and Spain. Further progress into Western Europe was stopped cold by Charles Martel and his Frankish warriors at the battle of Poitiers/Tours in 732.

It is easily forgotten that some of these territories had been heavily Christian when the Muslims took them over. No one today thinks of Syria and Egypt as Christian centers, but in the seventh century they certainly were. The ancient city of Antioch had been home to a school of Christian thought second only to that of Alexandria, and Egypt had been the birthplace of Christian monasticism...

Read it all.

From Wisconsin's Gazette Extra, with thanks to Two Stellas.

MADISON, Wis. - An appeals court ordered state labor officials Thursday to reconsider forcing a Muslim woman to repay unemployment benefits after she turned down work so she could make a pilgrimage to Mecca.

The 4th District Court of Appeals reversed a finding by the state Labor and Industry Review Commission, which ruled Salwa Rashad didn't have to undertake the hajj immediately and could have accepted work. Every able-bodied Muslim is required to make the pilgrimage, or hajj, to Mecca in Saudi Arabia at least once in their lifetime if they can afford it.

The court ordered the commission to reconsider its ruling in light of the First Amendment, which protects freedom of religion...

Thomas F. Madden writes in NRO on Ridley Scott's execrable Kingdom of Heaven.

Every May thousands of medieval scholars descend on Kalamazoo, Michigan for the International Congress on Medieval Studies. It is the largest such gathering in the world, featuring hundreds of papers on virtually every imaginable topic in medieval history and culture. This year the meeting coincided with the release of the much-anticipated film, The Kingdom of Heaven, directed by Ridley Scott and starring Orlando Bloom — a film that is set during the period of the Crusades. As a Crusade historian, I knew I would be asked about the movie, so I decided to see it sooner rather than later. Ducking out on what I am sure was a fascinating session called “Focus on Fluids: Analyzing Urine in the Middle Ages,” I corralled a few of my graduate students and headed to the local cineplex to catch the matinee. The theater was largely empty — a bad omen, given the number of geeky medievalists in town.

If I were a film critic I would say that this movie is dead dull. After one hour of ponderous dialogue and assorted arrow wounds I was already checking my watch to see if I might still make that paper on medieval English uroscopy. The film can best be described as a series of bloody medieval battle scenes stitched loosely together with a thin, yet preachy, modern morality play. The moral of the story, which Scott cudgels his viewer with at every opportunity, is that religious tolerance is a good thing and we should all have more of it.

But I am not a film critic; I am a historian. As a historian it naturally irritates me that there are people who will leave theaters certain that Scott and his writer, William Monahan, have served up something that approximates reality in the Middle Ages. They haven’t. In fact, there is very little that is medieval about The Kingdom of Heaven. It is instead a mixture of 19th-century Romanticism and modern Hollywood wishful-thinking. The real Crusades began in 1095 as a response to centuries of Muslim conquests of Christian lands. Their purpose was to restore those territories, including the Holy Land, to Christian control. The Kingdom of Jerusalem, which was established by the First Crusade in 1099, was an outpost of European Christians planted in a largely Muslim world for the purpose of safeguarding the holy sites. Subsequent major Crusades were called in response to subsequent Muslim conquests...

Read it all.

From the Biblical Recorder, with thanks to Fanabba.

JALALPUR, Bangladesh - A Baptist lay pastor has been beheaded in Bangladesh, the second Christian leader to lose his life in that country in a year, according to a Christian news organization.

Dulal Sarkar, 35, was attacked as he returned home from discussing his faith with local villagers, reported Compass Direct, which tracks incidents of Christian persecution. One source later identified the assailants as a group of 10 local Muslim extremists. After reporting the incident, Sarkur's wife, mother and five children have been forced to move from place to place in fear for their lives.

According to local Christians, three arrests have been made, but the remaining seven alleged attackers, who reportedly have ties to the Jamaat-e-Islami political party, are still at large. They fear the political influence of Jamaat-e-Islami may prevent the case from going to court, Compass Direct reported.

Meanwhile, Sarkur's widow has asked a Christian orphanage to take three of their five children because she cannot afford to support them.

The incident is the second beheading in a year, the news service said. Abdul Gani, a prominent Christian and physician, reportedly was decapitated by a gang in the district of Jamalpur as he returned home from work in September 2004. Gani was a counsel member of the Bangladesh Baptist Fellowship.

In 2003 another Christian leader was murdered by a group of eight men who attacked him in his home. Christian evangelist Hridoy Roy was stabbed repeatedly after being tied "crucifixion style" to his bed. Roy was known for showing the Jesus film and others about the life of Christ. Muslim neighbors reportedly had warned him to stop...

From Reuters "Indonesian city orders Muslim students to cover up," with thanks to Nicolei.

PADANG, Indonesia - An Indonesian city has told teenage female Muslim students to wear head scarfs as part of an order for students to don conservative Islamic clothes, the first such directive outside the devout province of Aceh.

Fauzi Bahar, mayor of Padang on the west coast of Sumatra, said the ruling applied to all schools in the city of one million people. Non-Muslims should also "adjust", he said.

The ruling takes effect next month and underscores the growing Islamisation of the world's most populous Muslim nation -- especially in outer regions where local governments have more authority under decentralisation laws....

Until now, only the province of Aceh on the northern tip of Sumatra requires students to wear Islamic dress...

From the UK Telegraph, with thanks to Jeffrey Imm.

Insurgents in Iraq attached explosives to a dog and tried to blow up a military convoy near the northern oil centre of Kirkuk.

The canine bomb went off but the only casualty was the unfortunate animal, said police. The militants wrapped an explosive belt around the dog and detonated it as the convoy passed through Dakuk, 25 miles south of Kirkuk, said the town's police chief, Col Mohammed Barzaji.

"The dog was torn apart by the explosion which caused neither injury among the soldiers nor any damage."

Col Barzaji said the bomb had been detonated outside a Shia mosque. "Eight suspects have been detained."

This was not the first time that animals have been used in insurgent attacks. In 2003, donkey carts were used to conceal makeshift multiple rocket launchers in a flurry of attacks in Baghdad. Animal carcasses and human corpses have been used to conceal explosives.

From the New York Daily News, "Al Qaeda bust's a blow to terror," with thanks to Jeffrey Imm.

WASHINGTON - The capture this month of one of Al Qaeda's top commanders has led to the arrests of at least 17 more suspects, including a trusted "courier" for the group's top leaders. The courier, terrorist hunters hope, may bring them one step closer to Osama Bin Laden.

A notebook seized during the May 2 capture of Abu Faraj al-Libbi had coded entries, including names, and is being analyzed by a joint FBI and CIA exploitation unit in Virginia, sources said.

Al-Libbi has clammed up since his arrest, but at least 17 people - including some named in the notebook - have been rolled up.

One who was grabbed is an Uzbek operative who is suspected of being assigned to carry messages between top Al Qaeda leaders, a senior Pakistani official told the Daily News.

Officials have learned the Uzbek was in the U.S. prior to the Sept. 11 terror attacks to help an associate under arrest, another source said. Details of the trip were not available.

A U.S. counterterrorism official confirmed that the Uzbek man "was a courier" for al-Libbi. The source also said the presence of an Uzbek in the top ranks of the terror group proved reports of a rift in Al Qaeda between Arabs and Uzbek fighters "is wrong."

Uzbek and Chechen operatives of Al Qaeda have been known to marry into Pashtun tribal families in Pakistan's craggy northern frontier, ensuring their loyalty and protection. The CIA has long suspected Bin Laden was hiding there, along the border with Afghanistan.

But the Pakistani official said there are growing suspicions Bin Laden joined his son Saad in Iran long ago, since "there are no rumors he's been seen" in Pakistan's rough terrain...

"There would've at least been strong rumors and reports" of Bin Laden in Pakistan's northern frontier, he said, "and there haven't been any."

"They don't know where he is," Cannistraro added...

From the Jewish Telegraph, with thanks to Jeffrey Imm.

BRITAIN was this week reported to be planning to renew contacts with Hamas.

This follows the terror group's impressive showing in recent Palestinian municipal elections, says the Tel Aviv website Israel Insider. Israel is reported to be demanding clarification from Britain over the reports.

The website claims that senior British officials have confirmed that London is rethinking its approach to the terrorist group.

But foreign secretary Jack Straw recently told his Israeli counterpart Silvan Shalom that Britain would not modify its attitude towards Hamas.

And a senior official in London has said that Britain would not engage in talks with groups that are involved in terror or who do not accept Israel's existence...

Meanwhile, a Hamas spokesman in Gaza, Mushir al-Masri, claimed the group recently met British and US officials.

"We'll maintain a dialogue with any element in the world with the exception of Israel," he said.

From AP via Fox News:

JERUSALEM — Israel's Cabinet on Sunday approved the release of 400 Palestinian prisoners, a long-overdue gesture Israel had agreed to as part of a Mideast truce package.

Prime Minister Ariel Sharon told the Cabinet that the prisoner release would strengthen Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas and "the moderate forces in the Palestinian Authority." Sharon's appeal meshed with recent U.S. efforts to shore up Abbas in the face of severe challenges from Palestinian militants.

The ministers voted 18-3 to approve the release. A ministerial panel will now meet to compile a list of those eligible to be freed. No one directly involved in deadly attacks on Israelis would be released, but Israel might be more flexible than in the past and free prisoners who haven't completed two-thirds of their terms, a government official said, speaking on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of his position.

The Palestinians want Israel to consult them on which prisoners to release.

"This is not enough," Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat said. He also asked that Israel resume handing over West Bank cities to Palestinian control immediately, as it pledged to do as part of the February truce package...

Can anything the Israelis do ever be "enough?"

From AP via Fox News, with thanks to Jeffrey Imm.

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — Thousands of Muslims marched Friday in Islamic countries from Asia to the Middle East, burning symbols of America to protest the alleged desecration of the Koran by military personnel at a U.S. prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

The rallies in Pakistan, Egypt, Lebanon, Indonesia, Malaysia and elsewhere followed an admission Thursday by U.S. investigators that Islam's holy book was mishandled at Guantanamo Bay. But American officials claimed it was often inadvertent and denied that any Korans were flushed down a toilet, as Newsweek magazine had reported in a now-retracted article.

No injuries were reported in Friday's demonstrations, with police simply watching in most places. In India's Kashmir region, however, police fired tear gas and used batons to disperse hundreds of Muslims gathered outside a mosque in the capital of Srinagar.

Women in black veils marched through Kashmir, where schools and businesses were closed as part of the protest, and set American flags and copies of the U.S. Constitution ablaze...

And from AsiaNews, "Christians and Muslims together against Qu’ran desecration," with thanks to Nicolei:

Faisalabad – Pakistani Christians will join the ‘international day of protest against the desecration of the Holy Qu’ran” called by the Muttahida Majlis-i-Amal (MMA), an alliance of Islamic religious parties.

Mgr Evaristo Pinto, Auxiliary Bishop of Karachi, told AsiaNews that “we condemn the desecration of the Qu’ran by US soldier in Guantanamo Bay, because as we respect our sacred books so we respect and give honour to those of other religions. This type of insult is not justified under any circumstances,” he added.

Fr Aftab James Paul, diocesan director in Faisalabad for the National Commission for Inter-Religious Dialogue, said that “when we demand respect and honour for our religion, it is our duty to respect other religions and should not utter derogatory remarks or insult [their] holy books”.

“We are completely united in protest with our Muslim brothers,” he added...

From Fox News.

KABUL, Afghanistan — A video of an Italian aid worker who was kidnapped nearly two weeks ago in Kabul was broadcast Sunday on an Afghan television station. Meanwhile, Gunmen shot and killed the top Muslim leader in southern Afghanistan's Kandahar province on Sunday, police said.

Mullah Abdul Fayaz, a supporter of U.S.-backed President Hamid Karzai was shot while driving in the center of Kandahar city, said deputy police chief Gen Salim Khan. One of the cleric's aides, Haji Qari, said Fayaz died while being taken to a hospital in the city.

The hostage broadcast showed Clementina Cantoni, 32, a worker for CARE International, sitting with two men standing next to her with assault rifles in their hands pointed at her head.

Responding to prompts from a man who was not shown on the video, Cantoni identified herself and named her father, her mother and an uncle.

The tape, which was broadcast by independent Tolo TV, then zoomed in on the face of the Italian, who had a brown rug wrapped around her and a blue scarf over her head. Cantoni spoke quietly on the recording and looked nervous...

From Fox News, with thanks to Jeffrey Imm.

MOSCOW — A rebel-linked Web site said Friday that Chechen warlord Shamil Basayev had claimed responsibility for the power outage that plunged Moscow into chaos two days earlier.

"Our sabotage units delivered a major blow to one of the most important life-support systems of the Russian empire," the Kavkazcenter site quoted Basayev as saying in an e-mail.

Russian officials have blamed worn-out equipment for Wednesday's power failure, which began with an explosion and fire at a 40-year-old substation.

The Federal Security Service declined comment on Friday's claim and telephone calls to the Industry and Energy Ministry were not answered.

But Industry and Energy Minister Viktor Khristenko was quoted earlier in the day as rejecting speculation that a terrorist act was responsible for the blackout.

"I think that this is not a terrorist act. We are just using old equipment, from 1958, which needs to be replaced," Khristenko told the RIA-Novosti news agency, the Gazeta.ru news Web site reported.

The blackout affected millions of people in Moscow and the surrounding region, stranding subway riders and trolley passengers, and leaving entire neighborhoods in the dark...

A Senate panel is told that some traffickers of high-end counterfeits have ties to Hezbollah. From the LA Times, with thanks to EPG.

WASHINGTON — When Los Angeles County Sheriff's Lt. John Stedman was booking a clothing store owner last year on charges of selling counterfeit high-fashion merchandise, his attention was drawn to the large and colorful tattoo on the man's arm.

The tattoo included Arabic writing, suggesting it wasn't a gang symbol or the mark of one of the many organized crime syndicates that have helped make dealing in knockoff goods — like Gucci handbags, Prada shoes and Louis Vuitton watches — a multibillion-dollar industry in the United States.

It turned out to be a symbol of allegiance to Hezbollah, the Islamic militant organization that the U.S. government has designated as a terrorist group.

The case of the tattooed merchant was one of several in Southern California in which alleged Hezbollah operatives had been caught trafficking in counterfeit merchandise, Stedman and other experts told the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee on Wednesday.

They said that suspected Hezbollah operatives in the U.S. and other groups accused of terrorist activity were raising as much as $30 million a year in America through the sale of counterfeit merchandise and other criminal enterprises, and sending unknown but substantial sums back home...

From Indian Express, "Mob sets fire to 2 mosques after acid attack," with thanks to Two Stellas.

MANDI - An angry crowd set two mosques in the town on fire this evening after a man threw a bottle of acid at passengers of a private bus, seriously injuring at least 11 people, including a five-year-old.

Doctors attending to the injured said four persons with more than 50 per cent burns may even lose their eyesight due to the attack.

Police later arrested the culprit, Mohammad Mahboob, from Muzzafarnagar in Uttar Pradesh. He has reportedly confessed to the crime.

According to the Mandi police, the incident occurred outside a bus stand around 3 pm, when Mohammad threw a bottle of acid at 22-year-old Mamta from Drubal village. Mamta was sitting inside the bus which was leaving for Koon.

As news of the acid attack spread, crowds began pour onto the streets. They collected in city squares and marched to the two mosques — Moti Masjid in Ramnagar Mandi and Janta Masjid on Jail Road. Police sources said some of them raised slogans and incited the mob to set fire to the shrines in retaliation to the acid attack...

From Barnabas Fund, with thanks to Nicolei.

More than 300 Muslim protestors set fire to a wooden cross outside the American Embassy in London last Friday 20th May. The crowd, led by Omar Bakri Muhammad and Yassar al-Siri, were protesting against the alleged desecration of a Qur’an by American military interrogators at Guantanamo Bay. This followed claims by Newsweek magazine that a copy of the Qur’an had been put down a toilet. American and British flags were also burnt, and the protestors chanted calls for violence against the US and UK. Amongst the protestors were about 50 women, some of whom had brought their children.

At the time this protest took place, Newsweek had retracted their story about the alleged incident in Guantanamo Bay. Yet the cross-burning still took place, and has caused little interest in the British media...

From the New Duranty Times, "Violence Surges Across Iraq With 30 New Deaths Reported"

BAGHDAD, Iraq - The surge of violence that has swept Iraq since its first elected government took office nearly a month ago continued Saturday, with at least 30 new deaths reported across the country, some of them in what appeared to be sectarian killings.

The latest attacks raised the total number of Iraqis killed this month to about 650, in addition to at least 63 American troops who have been killed, the highest American toll since January.

In two of the worst incidents reported Saturday, three suicide bombers tried to blast into a base shared by American and Iraqi troops at Sinjar, 40 miles from the northwestern border with Syria, killing at least one Iraqi border policeman and wounding at least 18 others, including 15 civilians.

Farther south along the Syrian border, in the Sunni Arab city of Qaim, a police commander confirmed the killing in recent days of 10 Shiite pilgrims returning from a shrine in Syria, The Associated Press reported.

According to officers with the Army's Third Armored Cavalry, which oversees the area west of Mosul, the attack at Sinjar began at 8.20 a.m., when an Opel sedan approached the base at high speed, and Iraqi forces shot the driver. As the car exploded, a second suicide bomber raced forward in a truck, came under Iraqi fire and detonated. A third vehicle then tried to ram a walk-through gate, the officers said, but the driver detonated under fire.

In other attacks, two Sunni Arab tribal leaders, one in Baghdad and the other in the northern city of Kirkuk, were killed Friday, according to police reports. In the Kirkuk killing, local officials suggested that the victim, Sheik Sabhan Khalaf al-Jibouri, might have been a target because of his attempt to have friendly relations with Kurdish leaders...

Just weeks into its tenure, the government of Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari has been shaken by the level of violence, which has soared to levels not seen since before the elections in January. The government has announced a major security crackdown in Baghdad, which aides said they expect to begin on Sunday, with up to 40,000 Iraqi troops deployed and 600 checkpoints set up in an attempt to sweep up suicide-bombing cells and other insurgents...

Top insurgent may have been moved to Iran, source says. From Reuters:

LONDON - Al-Qaida’s leader in Iraq Abu Musab al-Zarqawi had fled the country after being seriously injured in a U.S. missile attack, a British newspaper reported on Sunday, quoting a senior commander of the Iraqi insurgency.

Al-Zarqawi has shrapnel lodged in his chest and may have been moved to Iran, The Sunday Times newspaper reported, adding his supporters may try to move him on to another country for an operation.

The paper quoted an unnamed insurgency commander as saying the Jordanian-born militant was wounded three weeks ago when a U.S. missile hit his convoy near the northwestern Iraqi city of al Qaim.

“Shrapnel went in between the right shoulder and his chest, ripped it open and is still stuck there,” the commander said, adding a second piece of shrapnel penetrated Zarqawi’s chest but exited from his back.

“There was concern about spinal injuries,” the commander said. “But his ability to move eliminated that fear.”

The Sunday Times said Zarqawi, accused of masterminding many of the worst insurgent attacks in Iraq, was carried from his vehicle after the missile strike and given basic first aid in a hideout.

When he became delirious with fever four days later he was taken to hospital in the city of Ramadi, 68 miles west of Baghdad, it said. The paper did not say when the commander was speaking but said the source had proved reliable in the past...

"Arab world urges EU to impose commercial embargo on Israel," from the Israel Insider, with thanks to JDSP:

The Arab Central Boycott Office for the Boycott of Israel has called on the European Union to ban products made in Israeli settlements, arguing the dwellings were "illegal and a violation of international law and the Geneva Convention."

The group also urged the European Union and other nations to pressure Israel to stop building more settlements on Palestinian territory, and to take "immediate measures to prevent Israeli settlement products from benefitting from any EU facilities or entering European markets," said Syria's delegate Ahmed al-O'datt.

O'datt said there was a need to "spread the boycott culture among Arab peoples as a noble and legitimate tool of resistance," against Israel.

The Arab Central Boycott Office for the Boycott of Israel made the statements at the end of a four-day meeting of delegates from 17 member states -- among them, representatives from Syria, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Algeria, Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates, Yemen, Morocco, Libya, Lebanon, Kuwait, Qatar, Palestine, Oman, Somalia, Tunisia, and Iraq -- convened to discuss strengthening cooperation and coordination "to activate the popular boycott."

Founded in 1951, the once-influential Damascus office was funded by the Arab League to track down foreigners who did business with, or support Israel, to ban them from operating in the Arab world.

More than 8,500 companies and people, including Coca-Cola, the Ford Motor Co. and Elizabeth Taylor's movies were blacklisted. The actress was seen as pro-Israel after converting to Judaism...

Speaking of reform, here's a Yemen update from the estimable Jane Novak in Religion Journal:

So did you hear the one about Yemen? They are "reforming" the press law. The proposed law now includes the death penalty for journalists.

How about this one? To unify the country, the government is confiscating Shia religious material.

How about this? This ally in the War on Terror is perpetuating an al-Qaeda jihad.

Recent public statements about Yemen paint a dire picture. Ayatollah al-Sistani and the religious establishment in Najaf, Iraq said there is a "brutal massacre" of Shiites going on. The defecting Yemeni Ambassador has stated that high ranking members of the Yemeni government and military are affiliated with al-Qaeda. Putting together the massacre with the al-Qaeda, it's like another 9/11 unfolding slowly in the mountains and cities of Yemen.

The Yemeni Ambassador to Syria, Ahmed Abdullah al-Hasani, is attempting to defect to the UK. He says that members of Al-Qaeda are in the highest ranks of Yemen's military and security forces. Al-Hasani says that it is very likely that President Ali Abdullah Saleh "knew in advance of the Cole explosion" which killed 17 U.S. servicemen. Indeed, Freedom House in 2003 reported that Saleh refused to even investigate the Cole bombing until the United States threatened military action. Also in 2003, al-Qaeda praised President Saleh as the only Arab and Muslim leader who is not an agent for the West or the East.

Currently President Saleh is refusing to act against terrorist financing, probably earning him more praise. Only one bank account in Yemen was frozen in response to a 2003 UN Security Council Sanctions Committee directive to freeze 144 terrorist affiliated accounts of persons, companies, and organizations. The other 143 terrorist associated bank accounts in Yemen remain fully functional. In 2004, the UN Sanctions Committee list of al-Qaeda owned Yemeni bank accounts was not even issued by the Yemeni government to Yemeni banks...

Read it all.

Joel Mowbray notes the tepid-to-hostile response from Kamal Nawash's fellow Muslim leaders to Nawash's Free Muslims March Against Terrorism -- especially an unsurprising dose of venom from the egregious Hussein Ibish. From FrontPage:

In the first of its kind for an event organized by a major national Muslim organization, Kamal Nawash and the Free Muslims Coalition (FMC) recently held the Free Muslims March Against Terrorism. Not surprisingly, the leaders of every other major Muslim organization shunned the march and declined to take a public stand against terrorism and extremism.

Noticeably missing from the list of over 80 sponsors Nawash rounded up was any of the Muslim groups that claim to be moderates, such as the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) and Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC). Though these groups pay lip service to opposing terrorism, they couldn't put their money where their mouth is and bring themselves to stand side-by-side with the Free Muslim Coalition.

The reasons for the absence of the major national Muslim groups are obvious. The empirical evidence has clearly demonstrated where the true loyalties of organizations such as CAIR and MPAC lie. In this particular case, it is anathema for many Muslim groups to identify themselves with the unambiguous message of the rally. Nawash is among the few Muslim leaders-and certainly one of the very few leaders of the overtly political Muslim groups-to explicitly confront the real threat, the real root cause of terrorism: radical Islam.

This is worth monitoring from Nawash. It will be interesting to see if he really discusses the jihad passages of the Qur'an and Sunnah, and the legal superstructure they inspired, and tries to formulate a response that Muslims will find compelling.

Where most prominent Muslim leaders prefer ambiguity and moral equivalence, Nawash stakes out an unmistakable position, not only opposing just violent jihad, but the doctrines of Wahhabism and political Islam, as well. Nawash is, without exception, against the creation of Islamic states-anywhere. The other major Islamic organizations simply can't take this position. Their refusal to back even Nawash's message exposes their true sympathies...

If there's one thing that Nawash hopes to accomplish, it is to encourage other Muslims to speak up just as he has. Notes Nawash, "People who might want to speak out want somebody else to go first. Nobody wants to be a lone voice." Though not exactly a lone voice, Nawash must feel like one some days-especially when he looks at his colleagues at the other national Muslim organizations.

Read it all.

From Kathleen Parker's syndicated column, picked up here from the Myrtle Beach Sun News, with thanks to Skeetstreet:

Let's hear it for outrage to religion.

So goes my prayerful response to news that Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci will be prosecuted on charges of "outrage to religion." Apparently, the outspoken Fallaci, now in her 70s, has offended some disciples of Islam with her book, "The Force of Reason," and, by Allah, they intend to see she pays for it.

At least they didn't shoot her. Yet.

You'll recall that last year in Holland, filmmaker Theo van Gogh was fatally shot and stabbed for work deemed unflattering to Islam. Mohammed B. confessed to the murder. Recently, two more suspects, both Chechen citizens believed to be linked to a group of Islamic fundamentalists, were arrested in connection with the crime.

These incidents followed another episode of perceived offense to Islam. In 2002, French author Michel Houellebecq faced trial for calling Islam "the dumbest religion," and for saying the Quran was so badly written it made him "fall to the ground in despair."

The courts acquitted him, but the trend is clear. Criticize Islam and face jail or justice at the hands of a true believer. Is it possible that radical Islam really does hate freedom?...

Golly, could that be possible? Read it all.

Nidra Poller comments on the French EU Referendum in a piece originally published in Hebrew in Makor Rishon on May 27: "To the surprise and dismay of mainstream political leaders on both the right and the left, French voters may well vote NON in the May 29th referendum for ratification of the Treaty to establish a European Constitution. French rejection will put a halt to the forward march of the European Union. Given the current state of European society, would this be good or bad for the forward march of democracy?"

Paris 25 May 2005: As of this writing, four days from the referendum on the Traité Constitutionel (Treaty to establish a Constitution), it looks like the French are really going to say NON. Unless of course the pollsters are mistaken. Or President Chirac pulls a rabbit out of a hat and convinces voters to say OUI. Unfortunately for the champions of a Great Europe, the president’s fervor seems to douse public enthusiasm. Watching from a safe distance, one is hard put to evaluate the meaning and eventual effect of this French NON. Is it a grouchy, retrograde, chauvinistic, reckless slap in the face to fellow Europeans, and a kick in the shins of the powers that be? Or does this refusal to go along with an opaque, cynical, top-down European Union contain the seeds of a salutary citizen’s revolt?

Is it any wonder if voters are dismayed? The referendum is asking, “Where shall we go from here?” And they have to answer YES or NO. Do they really have a choice? The most forceful arguments in favor of ratification of the Treaty actually reduce the choice to one single acceptable answer: YES. Voters are cajoled, flattered, seduced, and scolded all to the same tune. It’s either YES, we keep going, or NO, everything stops. Which of course is not true. And may rile some voters. Nevertheless, Chirac’s government has made it clear that the choice is between yes and yes. PM Raffarin promises that a refusal to ratify will lead to a long dark night of political and social chaos. And what if the yes prevails?

No chaos on the horizon? No backlash from the disgruntled, in a country where trade unions call a general strike because the government dares to rob them of a holiday—the Monday after Pentecost Sunday—in an admittedly clumsy plan to allocate the value of one day’s labor to help the aged and handicapped and prevent a remake of the 15,000 dead in the 2003 heat wave. An airport ground crew union went on strike after an employee was temporarily suspended while under investigation for pulling the mobile stairs away from a plane without respecting the safety rules, causing a stewardess to fall to her death. A few days ago, armed and enraged oyster farmers rammed into a police boat and tried to capsize it. They were protesting against a decree blocking the sale of their oysters because they are contaminated by toxic algae. And the winegrowers who tear up the town because of a drop in sales? Are the serial strikers going to swallow a vote that they interpret as a vicious triumph of ultraliberalism? Delivered into the hands of the big bad international capitalists to be chopped up and thrown on the garbage heap of history, will they go without a whimper?

Whatever way you look at the debate it reeks with dismay, fear and confusion…or floats on clouds of airy fantasy. The proposed constitution is an “auberge espagnole,” a Spanish Inn where every lodger brings what he expects to find there. Socialist Party leader François Hollande explains in his Sunday-best let’s-be-reasonable voice that a Constitution sets forth a form of government, it does not establish an economic policy. The Treaty, therefore, cannot be described as an ultraliberal plot for surrender to unbridled capitalism, unlimited Chinese imports, and bloodletting delocalizations. But the Socialist Party poster holds out its rose logo and invites voters to say OUI for a “social Europe.” Meaning a social democratic welfare state Europe, an economic paradise where everything is paid for and no one pays. A Europe in which Polish plumbers won’t be able to undercut their French comrades and Czech programmers will be stopped at the nonexistent border.

Refreshing Candor Alert. "Iran: Vote for Rafsanjani and We Will Have Nuclear Bombs, Says Religious Leader," from Adnkronos International, with thanks to MG:

Tehran, 27 May (AKI) - Hojatolislam Gholam Reza Hasani, a representative of Iran's supreme spiritual leader, Ayatollah Seyyed Ali Khamenei, in Iranian Azerbaijan, has no doubts as to who to vote for in the next presidential elections on 17 June. "You need to vote for Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani," said Hasani. "This way we will finally be able to have for ourselves the atomic bomb to fairly stand up to Israeli weapons," said Hasani.

"Freedom, democracy and stupidities of this type cannot be carried over to any part, and these concepts are out of sync with the principles of Islam," said Hasani, the imam who led Friday prayers in the main city of western Iranian Azerbaijian.

What's that? Hasani says freedom and democracy are incompatible with Islam? What is he, some kind of racist Islamophobe?

"Islam always spoke with the sword in the hand and I don't see why now we have changed attitudes and talk with the other civilisations."

Wear long skirts or Allah will give you cancer. "Woman and the display of body," from IslamWay (Sisters section), with thanks to Fjordman:

Describing women who are morally decayed. The prophet Mohammed (PBUH) said that they are “women dressed but naked, corrupt and corrupters, their hairs are like the inclined hump of female camel, they do not enter the Heaven nor smell its fragrance” [Refer to Abu Daud]

the prophet also said “the prayer of a mistreating woman is not acceptable until she purifies her self” [Refer to Imam Ahmed, Abu Daud & Ibn Maja].

The modern scientific researches confirmed that the nakedness of women, their body displaying & their moving in an obscene shape id a disaster on them. The current statistics showed that there is a clear spread of the malignant cancer which affects the naked and displayed part of the women bodies particularly those women who dress short clothes.

It was published in the British Medical Magazine that “the melanoma malignant cancer which was one of the most rare cancers is now spreading among women. The cases of this type of cancer is increasing among young women. It affects their legs. The medical publication went on saying that the main cause behind the spread of short dress & fashions which expose the body of women to the rays & light of the sun. Moreover, the transparent dress and legs gloves do not help in avoiding this type of cancer.

The Medical Magazine appealed to the environment doctors to participate in collecting information about this type of cancer, because it is becoming an epidemic phenomenon. This reminds us with the Quranic sign which says in the tongue of the obstinate unbeliever

“O God, if this is indeed The Truth from Thee, Rain down on us a shower of stones from the sky, or send us a grievous penalty” [8:32]

Now to torture has come down in the form of a malignant cancer. It is caused by the exposition of women’s body to the sunrays and ultraviolet rays for a long time it affects the whole body but with different proportion. Initially, it appears as a dark; small spot on either the foot or the leg, and some times in the eye. Then it spreads all over the body. It attacks the lymph knots at the upper part of the thigh. It also attacks blood and invades the liver & destroys it. It may settle in all the organs of the body such as bones, the belly & perhaps the kidneys. If it attacks the kidneys then the patient will experience black urine as a result of inner destruction of the kidneys. It may get transferred to the child in the womb of his mother.

However, this disease does not allows its patient to survive for a long time & it does not respond to surgical treatment like other types of cancers nor it responds to treatment by rays sessions like some other types of cancers.

Therefore have we realized the wisdom behind Islamic legislation which aimed to protect women not only from passers by but also from a skin disease called cancer. The subject Islamic legislation called upon women to corner their bodies properly & with loose and not narrow and not transparent clothes.

Therefore, Islamic uniform for women protect them from physical diseases, from teasing in the streets & from the torture of life on the judgement day.

Jihad bombings not only in Indonesia, but Iraq today.

BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) -- Two suicide attackers detonated car bombs in northern Iraq on Saturday, killing at least five Iraqis, and the government confirmed the death of a Japanese hostage abducted earlier this month....

At least 23 people have been killed in fighting in the past 24 hours, including three men trying to plant a roadside bomb that detonated in Baqouba, 35 miles northeast of Baghdad.

Another five Iraqis died in Saturday's twin suicide car bombings at the entrance to an Iraqi military base in Sinjar, about 75 miles northwest of Mosul, a police official said on condition of anonymity.

"Terror Gang: We Killed Hostage," from the New York Post, with thanks to Jeffrey Imm:

The Army of Ansar al-Sunna claimed responsibility for shooting Akihiko Saito, 44, who had been missing in Iraq since May 8.

The video showed identification papers and a passport allegedly belonging to Saito, a former paratrooper and veteran of the French Foreign Legion.

The video displayed the body of a dead man on his back with a bloodied face that resembled Saito.

From AP "Twin Bomb Explosions kill 20 in Indonesia"

JAKARTA, Indonesia — Suspected Muslim militants set off two bombs Saturday in a Christian-dominated town on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi, killing at least 20 people and wounding 40, police said.

Witnesses said both bombs in the town of Tentena struck a busy meat and produce market near a police station. The first was followed 15 minutes later by a much larger one that flattened food stands.

A Christian clergyman and a 3-year-old boy were among the dead, and two policemen were among the wounded, police said.

Later Saturday police found an unexploded bomb outside a church in the same town, part of an area where Muslim-Christian clashes have claimed hundreds of lives since 2000...

Saturday's blasts came two days after warnings of unspecified attacks that prompted the United States to close its embassy and other diplomatic offices in Indonesia until further notice.

Muslims account for 90 percent and Christians about 8 percent of people in Indonesia, the world's most populous Muslim nation. But on Sulawesi, the Muslim and Christian populations are roughly equal...

Four years ago, suspected militants from the al-Qaida-linked Jemaah Islamiyah terror group bombed 11 churches on Christmas Eve, killing 19 people.

The group was also blamed for the 2002 nightclub bombings that killed 202 people on the resort island of Bali, a 2003 attack on the JW Marriott hotel in Jakarta and a blast at the Australian Embassy in September.

In January, police discovered 60 homemade bombs stashed in an abandoned house in Poso, about 35 miles from Tentena...

From Andrew Bostom in The American Thinker:

Leaving Islam can be hazardous. Apostasy is a capital crime in a number of Islamic countries. But even in elite conservative circles in the United States, there is a tendency to dismiss or at least ignore some important former Muslims who have a lot to teach us about their former faith, as we face an era in which religious war on the West has been declared by radical Islam.

Two years ago, following a modest Washington, DC area reception celebrating the release of Leaving Islam, a compilation of Ibn Warraq's own brilliant essays, and poignant, harrowing testimonials from other ex-Muslim “apostates,” I received a disturbing communication from a former admirer and supporter of Warraq’s work (particularly the seminal Why I Am Not A Muslim) who attended the same event.

This individual dismissed Warraq’s unique and important collection on apostasy in Islam, because Warraq (and by extension, all Muslim apostates) was (were), “…no longer in the game.” It was astonishing to hear such a glib assessment from a conservative intellectual and self-appointed doyen (subsequently, government-appointed) examining Islamic terrorism. The pernicious effect of this mindset—apparently quite pervasive among the lemming-like denizens of the most influential Washington, DC area conservative “think tanks”—was reinforced during Warraq’s dismissive small audience (composed entirely of self-important, self-appointed doyens) at perhaps the pre-eminent Institute of this ilk. Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s rise to prominence as an openly avowed Muslim apostate Parliamentarian in the Netherlands—both before, and most decidedly after the murder of her colleague, Dutch filmmaker Theo Van Gogh—demonstrates that it is completely misguided to dismiss the profound intellectual and sociopolitical contributions courageous apostates can make to both the public discourse, and specific policy initiatives, regarding Islam.

Read it all.

Talks on Uranium Enrichment a Ruse. Sources say Bush stunned by news of N.Korea transfer. From WND, "Intel: Iran equipped for atomic weapon," with thanks to PC Kills.

While European negotiators focus on Iran's development of enriched plutonium, U.S. intelligence officials say Tehran already has completed all of the elements required for an atomic bomb.

The news has stunned President Bush, according to Geostrategy Direct, an intelligence news service led by national security reporter Bill Gertz of the Washington Times.

"It's an incredible piece of intelligence that overshadows everything we thought we knew on Iran's nuclear program," one U.S. intelligence source said.

Geostrategy says the intelligence information asserts North Korea this year transferred components to Iran to assemble a plutonium-based nuclear warhead.

The components were believed to have originated in Pakistan.

Iran insists its nuclear program is only for generation of electricity. But Washington contends Tehran's intentions are not peaceful, pointing to an enrichment program hidden from U.N. inspectors for nearly two decades before it was officially declared in October 2003.

The CIA has been tracking for the past two years Iran's efforts to enrich uranium for a nuclear weapon, Geostrategy reports.

All of the agency's assessments were based on how much technology and enriched uranium Iran had obtained for its first nuclear warhead.

While dismayed by Iran's efforts, the CIA believed Iran needed at least another three years before it could assemble an atomic bomb.

"Instead, the entire Iranian uranium enrichment effort appears to have concealed a much more immediate aim," Geostrategy says.

Meanwhile, the head of the U.N. atomic watchdog, Mohamed ElBaradei, praised Iran for its decision Wednesday to continue suspension of its enrichment program and to continue talks with the EU-3 -- France, German and Britain.

In exchange, the Europeans will present plans for economic and political incentives that will become part of a final deal.

Also, the World Trade Organization rewarded Tehran for its decision by opening membership negotiations...

In late 2004, says Geostrategy, the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps tested a command and control network that would permit a nuclear weapons warhead to be placed on an enhanced Shihab-3 intermediate-range missile.

The CIA believes Iran could immediately assemble several nuclear warheads for the Shihab-3 arsenal.

"This means that U.S. forces in Iraq and southern Europe are under immediate Iranian threat," Geostrategy says. "Israel and Saudi Arabia are already under Iranian nuclear threat."

The CIA first obtained reports in 1994 of Iran obtaining plutonium components from North Korea.

The latest information, however, comes from a new and far more reliable source, Geostrategy says...

Still more on the story that never goes away, from Reuters.

ISLAMABAD - Thousands of Islamists rallied across Pakistan on Friday to protest against alleged desecration of the Koran by U.S. forces at Guantanamo Bay prison in Cuba.

The rallies, called by hardline Islamic groups opposed to Pakistan's support for the U.S.-led war on terrorism, came hours after a deadly bomb blast at a Muslim shrine in Islamabad that killed at least 19 people and wounded dozens of others.

"We condemn sacrilege of the Koran by the U.S. extremists," said a banner held by women protesters at a rally in Islamabad attended by about 5,000 people in front of the parliament building about a km (half a mile) from the scene of the blast.

Protesters in the city of Quetta burned effigies of U.S. President George W. Bush and his key allies in the war on terrorism -- Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf and Afghan President Hamid Karzai.

"The desecration of Koran is a part of the conspiracies against Muslims," pro-Taliban leader and cleric Fazal-ur-Rehman told a rally in the northwestern city of Peshawar, close to the Afghan border.

Similar protests were staged in Karachi, Multan and other cities.

On Thursday, Brig. Gen Jay Hood, commander of the prison at Guantanamo Bay, told a Pentagon briefing that no credible evidence had been found that a Koran had been flushed down a toilet but said U.S. military had identified five incidents of "mishandling of a Koran" at the prison...

Another Update from the Jerusalem Post, "Jerusalem Mufti demands US apology"

The top Muslim cleric in the Holy Land on Friday demanded the US apologize for alleged mishandling of the Quran by American military personnel at a US prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

The mufti of Jerusalem, Ikrema Sabri, also called on Muslims around the world to boycott American products during his weekly sermon at the Aksa mosque.

"The United States should apologize to the Muslims for the mishandling of the Quran by US employees in Guantanamo and bring them to court," he said.

After the prayers, dozens of people, many holding Qurans, chanted anti-American and anti-Israeli slogans, saying both countries are enemies of Islam. The protest ended peacefully.

Meanwhile in Nazareth, more than 5,000 people took part in a protest to condemn US policy. Demonstrators called on the Muslim world to unify against attacks against Islam...

From AP via the Jerusalem Post, with thanks to Skeet Street and Jeffrey Imm.

The United States on Thursday designated the Islamic Jihad Group, active in Central Asia, as a global terrorist group.

State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said the group coordinated bombing attacks against the US and Israeli embassies in Tashkent, the capital of Uzbekistan, and the office of the Uzbek prosecutor general that killed at least two people and wounded nine last July.

He said the Islamic Jihad Group had broken away from the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, already designated a terrorist group in 2000 and under UN sanctions.

By designating a group a terrorist organization, the United States can block travel by any of its members to the United States and seize any financial assets they may have in the country.

According to Central Asian terrorism experts, the Islamic Jihad Group is believed to have 350 to 400 members, about a quarter of whom have undergone terrorist training.

A truly bizarre story from the BBC, Toddler acquitted of 'adultery'

A court in the northern Bangladeshi city of Bogra has acquitted a two-year-old child accused of adultery and theft, officials say. The infant appeared in court on his mother's lap to seek bail.

Saiful Islam was accused along with six others in the case. The Magistrate expressed "surprise" at the charges, and immediately released him.

They also ordered the complainant in the case to explain why he was filing such charges against a toddler.

Magistrate Naveed Shafiullah also told local politician Yunus Ali - who launched a preliminary investigation into the case - to explain how the incident happened...

The case is not the first in Bangladesh to involve infant children facing serious charges.

In March, Bangladesh's High Court stepped in to halt the trial of four infants - all members of an extended family - who were accused of looting and causing criminal damage.

Four police officers were suspended for negligence in the case and an inquiry was ordered.

The infants, aged between three months to two years, appeared in court in their parents' arms, and were bailed.

Correspondents say that case highlighted the widespread practice of harassing people by filing false complaints.

Indoctinating children in Islam to promote "multi-racial harmony." From the UK Muslim News, "Borough kids first to get Muslim lessons"

STOCKPORT schoolchildren will be the first in the country to take part in a project to breed multi-racial harmony.

Council education bosses have teamed up with the Muslim Council of Britain to use new resource packs supporting the teaching of Islam in primary schools.

The initiative was launched at Cheadle Muslim association Community Centre and Mosque, Wilmslow Road, Heald Green, yesterday (Tuesday) and will now be rolled out across the borough.

Although it is a nationwide project Stockport was chosen for the launch after becoming the first area to use the resource packs.

Councillor John Pantall, executive member for diversity strategy, said: "If we can get to pupils at an early age we hope they can grow up understanding other cultures and religions and without prejudice.

"There is a great deal of ignorance about major faiths, resulting in dangerous and destructive myths. The use of the new materials will help develop understanding and encourage community cohesion throughout Stockport.

“This is part of having a forward thinking education department and prevention of a problem rather than cure.”

The resource packs were developed by the Muslim Council for Key Stage 1 (seven-year-olds) and Key Stage Two (11-year-olds). They contain books, CDs, videos and Islamic artefacts, which cover Muslim beliefs and practices...

In News from Wisconsin's Baraboo News Republic, "Prisons to change headwear policy" with thanks to Two Stellas.

MADISON - Wisconsin Secretary of Corrections Matthew Frank is ordering a change in the department's headwear policy for prison visitors, just one day after a Muslim woman sued his department in U.S. District Court for allegedly violating her religious beliefs by forcing her to remove a headscarf during a visit.

Frank said Thursday his order was directly prompted by the claim filed by 43-year-old Cynthia Rhouni, a Madison woman who visited her husband at Columbia Correctional Institution in Portage in February 2003. As Rhouni checked in for her visit, two male guards forced Rhouni to remove her headscarf, or hijab, despite her pleas to let a female guard conduct an inspection of her hijab to prove she wasn't carrying any contraband.

Frank said he was "very concerned about the allegations," and said he ordered the change without thinking about its impact on the lawsuit.

"I just think it's the right thing to do," Frank said.

The department-wide policy at issue in the lawsuit took effect in January 2003, Frank said. "As part of that policy, there was a provision that went into effect that said, among other things, hats and headgear are not allowed. That policy did not specifically address headwear that may be worn as part of someone's religious beliefs," he continued.

"It's certainly not our intent in any way to discriminate against anyone based on their religious beliefs," Frank said. Department policies are intended to provide a safe and secure facility for inmates, staff and visitors, he said...

A replay of the Somali Muslims vs. Dell story from KCAU TV, with thanks to Two Stellas.

CLEVELAND Somali immigrants who work as cab drivers at the Cleveland airport say police are ticketing them when they step out of their cabs for ritual Islamic prayers.

Police say they are enforcing a requirement that all drivers remain in their vehicles outside the terminal and are trying to maintain order in an increasingly competitive airport cab scene.

A sign warns taxi drivers not to leave their vehicles within 300 feet of the terminal or their car will be towed. Police are not towing, but they are issuing tickets that carry a 150-dollar fine, plus 69 dollars in court costs.

The U-S-A Taxi company says a third of its drivers have quit over the enforcement.

Can a CAIR lawsuit be far behind?

An update on this story from WCHS TV, "Suspect in bomb sale also allegedly plotted bombing during Super Bowl"

HOUSTON - A Pennsylvania man who was arrested last week for allegedly trying to sell a bomb to al-Qaida is now accused of a more sinister plot.

An FBI agent has testified that the suspect was ready to make and unleash a radioactive bomb at the Super Bowl. Ronald Grecula is also accused of suggesting that attackers use remote-controlled model airplanes, filled with explosives, to blow up bridges in the Northeast. He also allegedly discussed bombings at targets in New York and Washington, DC.

Grecula was arrested in Houston last week. He was caught in a sting operation, in which federal agents and local police were pretending to be part of the Russian mafia with ties to al-Qaida...

Mindboggling incomprehension disguised as science from Eurekalert, "U-M study shows devotion to Islam is not linked to terror,"

ANN ARBOR, Mich.--Islam is not to blame for suicide bombings, a University of Michigan study shows.

Personal devotion to Islam is unrelated to support for suicide bombing among Palestinian Muslims, according to the study, which will be presented May 27 at the annual meeting of the American Psychological Society in Los Angeles. But the more often Muslims attended mosques, the more likely they were to support suicide terrorism.

"The frequency of suicide terrorism is growing exponentially, motivated by a fusion of religious and political goals," said Jeremy Ginges, a researcher at the U-M Institute for Social Research (ISR).

At least 70 percent of more than 300 suicide attacks that occurred between 2000 and 2003 were carried out by religiously motivated organizations, recent research by Ginges' colleague Scott Atran has shown.

"But despite the appearance of a link between religiosity and support for suicide terrorism, the nature of this connection has been unclear. My analysis shows that Islamic beliefs and devotion are not, in themselves, linked to support for such terrorism," Ginges said...

To understand how he came to this conclusion, you'll have to read it all.

Welcome news from Canada's Macleans, "Quebec rejects introduction of Sharia law into legal system in the province," with thanks to Treehugger.

QUEBEC - Quebec has rejected the use of Islamic tribunals, which can be used to settle family disputes, in the province.

In a unanimous vote Thursday, the Quebec legislature passed a motion against allowing Sharia law to be used in the legal system.

"The application of Sharia in Canada is part of a strategy to isolate the Muslim community, so it will submit to an archaic vision of Islam," said Fatima Houda-Pepin, the Liberal member of the legislature, as she introduced the motion.

"These demands are being pushed by groups in the minority that are using the Charter of Rights to attack the foundation of our democratic institutions."

The debate over Sharia law surfaced in Canada two years ago when a Muslim group in Ontario proposed the arbitration of family disputes according to Islamic law.

No public debate over Sharia Law in Iraq. It could provoke rioting and bloodshed. From the Duluth News Tribune, with thanks to Skeet Street.

BAGHDAD, Iraq - Shiite legislators have decided not to push for a greater role for Islam in the new Iraqi constitution out of concern that the contentious issue will inflame religious sentiments and deepen sectarian tensions.

Instead, the United Iraqi Alliance, the Shiite coalition that won the most seats in January's elections, will advocate retaining the moderate language of Iraq's temporary constitution that was drawn up under the auspices of the American occupation authority.

Humam Hamoudi, the Shiite cleric who heads the 55-member constitutional committee that will draft the new document, said that any attempt to debate the issue of Islamic law could ignite a firestorm of competing sectarian demands and that the brief references to Islam in three paragraphs of the temporary constitution should be left untouched.

"These paragraphs represent the middle ground between the secularists and those who want Islamic government, and I think the wisest course of action is to keep them as they are," he said in an interview at his Baghdad home. "Opening up the subject for discussion would provoke religious sentiments in the street."...

Newsmax discusses Newsweek's interview with Al Jazeera. Full transcript available at MEMRI.

Just days after Newsweek "retracted" its Quran-flushing story, a top editor with the magazine seemingly backed away from its flat-out retraction, telling the U.S.-hostile al-Jazeera network that Newsweek was "neutral" on whether Americans had desecrated the Quran.

In a May 19 interview with the Arab TV network Al-Jazeera, Newsweek’s Washington bureau chief Daniel Klaidman admitted the magazine made a "mistake" in publishing the story, and promised: "In the future, we won’t make these kinds of mistakes."...

The Memri transcript shows that Newsweek was cleverly telling millions of Arab viewers there story may still be true – they just did not have the evidence to support their original allegations.

The Al-Jazeera reporter asked Newsweek’s [Daniel] Klaidman, "But there is no proof that it [the Quran desecration] did not happen either."

Klaidman replied, "We are neutral on whether any form of Quran desecration took place. There are allegations out there, but the allegations have not been subjected to the kind of scrutiny or legal processes that normally ... you need before you can establish whether they are true, and we certainly know that the military has not confirmed any of these allegations.

"As to whether these things happened or not, we are, like the rest of the people out there and news organizations – we don’t know. We have heard the allegations, we continue to report, and the U.S. military and other entities are investigating, and as I said, we are neutral on whether any of this ever happened."

Klaidman also said Newsweek is continuing to protect the identity of the anonymous source that provided the Quran desecration report, despite calls for the magazine to unmask the source.

Klaidman said: "We have to protect the anonymity of our source because we made an agreement of confidentiality with this person."

But veteran newsman David Gergen of U.S. News & World Report told CNN, "There was an old rule in journalism that if an unnamed source lies to a news organization, that source loses his anonymity, by definition, because he misled people."

They could get three years in prison and a fine. From the Pakistan Daily Times, with thanks to Skeet Street.

LAHORE: Five children, three elderly women and six men of the Shia sect have been accused of blasphemy under Section 298(A) of the Pakistan Penal Code (PPC) in Haveli Koranga, Khanewal district, for allegedly making derogatory remarks about one of the companions of the Prophet (Peace be upon him).

Police officials told Daily Times on Wednesday that the local sessions court had granted bail to the 14 accused, but the case hearing had not begun because the police had not submitted the challan.

Following the incident in Basti Mehar Shah on April 19/20, a police case was lodged on April 27. A Deobandi Sunni group affiliated with the Sipah-e-Sahaba Pakistan (now called the Millat-e-Islamia) allegedly set a backside portion of a mosque in the area on fire. Ownership of the mosque is disputed between the sects and the case is pending in the Lahore High Court. The mosque has been sealed.

Residents of the area told Daily Times that things had now calmed down. “The situation is not so tense anymore because the Shias, though in majority in the area, are surrounded by the Sipah-e-Sahaba, who are in majority in surrounding areas. Kabirwala tehsil is where Sipah-e-Sahaba was founded in 1986,” said one of the locals.

The complainant in the case is the station house officer (SHO) of the area, Muhammad Afsar Khan. According to the case FIR, written by the SHO, the children made an effigy and allegedly related it to one of the companions of the Prophet (pbuh), placed it on a donkey and chanted derogatory remarks. Zahran, Kaneeza and Hameedan, the accused women, had made the effigy for Faisal, Muhammad Shahbaz, Imran, Shahbaz and Najaf. These children then brought the effigy to the bazaar where Zufiqar, Rafqat, Hasan Nawaz, Zaigham, Ghulam Murtaza, and Zamir accompanied them. They chanted the derogatory remarks and made off when some elders scolded them.

Section 298(A) of the PPC says, “Use of derogatory remarks in respect of holy personages. Whoever by words, either, spoken or written, or by visible representation, or by any imputation, innuendo, or institution, directly or indirectly, defiles the sacred name of any wife (Ummul Mumineen), or members of the family (Ahle Bait) of the Holy Prophet (Peace Be Upon Him), or any of the righteous Caliphs (Khulafa-e-Rasshideen) or companions (Sahaaba) of the Holy Prophet (PBUH) shall be punished with imprisonment of either description for a term which may extended to three years, or with fine, or both.”

Police officials told Daily Times that according to prior investigations, the children were celebrating Milad on Rabiul Awal 9 (third Islamic month), which is an old tradition in the Shia community. Local Shias said that certain people had raised the issue, which had no significance or truth to it. They said that they were celebrating the death of Omar bin Saad, commander in chief of Yazid’s army that martyred Hazrat Imam Hussain (AS). They said they had not defiled the name of any companion of the Prophet Muhammad (pbuh)...

Sami Al-Arian walk watch from AP, with thanks to Skeet Street.

TAMPA, Fla. - The Palestinian Islamic Jihad, a terrorist group responsible for scores of killings in suicide attacks in Israel, once had 40 percent of its overall leadership operating out of a cell in Tampa, a federal prosecutor said Thursday.

The Tampa cell was primarily responsible for raising money and serving as a communications center for the Islamic Jihad during the mid-1990s, Assistant U.S. Attorney Terry Furr told a judge during a pretrial hearing for former University of South Florida professor Sami Al-Arian and three other men.

"This is an elitist, little group of people, all highly educated, trying to convince people to go kill themselves on their behalf," Furr said.

Al-Arian and his co-defendants are scheduled for trial June 6. They could get life in prison if convicted on charges that include racketeering, providing material support to terrorists and money laundering.

The hearing was held to determine what sort of evidence the government may use at the trial. The defense attorneys have argued, among other things, that some of terrorism allegations are hearsay and cannot be directly linked to the defendants.

U.S. District Judge James Moody did not immediately rule.

Furr said Tampa was so central to the terrorist group's organization that at times when Islamic Jihad members in different countries could not communicate with each other, three-way telephone calls would be placed through Tampa...

AAH Points to Anti-Jewish Passages from Americans Against Hate, with thanks to Joe Kaufman.

Coral Springs, FL - In response to the Newsweek article alleging an incident where a Quran was flushed down a toilet by U.S. interrogators at the Guantanamo Bay detention center, CAIR (Council on American-Islamic Relations) has announced that it will be giving away "free" Qurans. The name of the project is 'EXPLORE THE QURAN.'

According to the national headquarters of CAIR, the version of the book they are giving away is 'The Meaning of THE HOLY QURAN,' translated by Abdullah Yusuf Ali. This is the same version that had been permanently removed by the Los Angeles public school system for having anti-Jewish statements within its commentaries. The banned books had been donated to the schools by the Omar Ibn Khattab Foundation.

One of the cited offending passages reads, "The Jews in their arrogance claimed that all wisdom and all knowledge of Allah was enclosed in their hearts… Their claim was not only arrogance but blasphemy." Looking under "Jews" in the index of the book, one finds: "became apes and swine," "cursed," "enmity of," "greedy of life," "slew prophets," "took usury," "unbelief and blasphemy of," "work iniquity," and "write the Book with their own hands."...

CAIR calls this particular Quran the "most respected English translation of the Quran" and has been giving it away since September of 2002, in its own library project called 'Explore Islamic Culture & Civilization.' This initiative was funded in part by a donation of $500,000 from Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal. This is the same individual that ex-New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani rejected a $10 million donation for disaster relief from, after bin Talal suggested U.S. policies in the Middle East contributed to the September 11th attacks.

At a local press conference, CAIR-Florida Executive Director Altaf Ali said of the Quran giveaway and the circumstance that led to it, "We want to turn a negative image [of America] into a positive one." Joe Kaufman, the Chairman of Americans Against Hate (AAH), reacted to this by stating, "Mr. Ali should worry less about America's image and worry more about his group's image, a group that has been cited for its connections to a terrorist organization and that gives out materials that preach hatred against others."

Humm, I wonder where they're going to find a non-anti-Jewish Qur'an?

From the BBC, with thanks to mediawatch and Dutch Cares.

French police have arrested a 25-year-old Chechen in connection with the murder of controversial Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh.

Bislan Ismailov was arrested in Tours, central France, last week.

Dutch prosecutors want Mr Ismailov extradited as they suspect he was an accomplice of Van Gogh's alleged killer Mohammed Bouyeri - now awaiting trial.

Van Gogh, a critic of Islam, was shot and nearly decapitated in an Amsterdam street last November.

A militant Islamist diatribe was pinned to his chest with a knife, threatening the scriptwriter who had written his last film, which had denounced violence against women in Islamic society.

Dutch prosecutors claim that Mr Bouyeri, a Dutch Moroccan, was helped by Chechen separatists, among them Mr Ismailov.

Press reports say Mr Ismailov's fingerprints were found on a suicide note left behind by Mr Bouyeri...

At least 20 killed during Shiite religious festival near Islamabad, from AP:

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan - A suicide bomber set off explosives Friday in the midst of Shiite Muslims reciting the Quran, killing at least 20 and wounding dozens gathered for a religious festival at a shrine near the capital.

The motive was not immediately clear, but there are frequent sectarian attacks in this Islamic country by extremist elements of the Sunni and minority Shiite sects.

An AP photographer at the scene counted at least 20 bodies, many in pieces. An intelligence official said at least 20 people were killed and 150 were wounded.

The bomb ripped through hundreds of worshippers as they were reciting from the Muslim holy book beneath tents at the Bari Imam shrine outside Islamabad.

“It was like hell,” said Syed Muktar Hussain Shah, 40, who had been waiting for a prominent Shiite leader, Hamid Moasvi, to address the gathering when the bomb went off. “I fell down ... when I woke up I saw dead bodies around me.”

“None of the bodies was intact,” said Dr. Wahid Abbas, who helped treat the wounded. “Some had legs blown off, some had their hands blown off.”

He and other witnesses said police collected the head of a suspected suicide bomber. Authorities did not immediately confirm that information...

Shiite worshippers, weeping and moaning, beat their chests in grief. Some clashed with police after officers charged the crowd with their batons to clear the way for ambulances.

Many also chanted, “Down with America!”...

An update from Bloomberg News, "Islamabad Bombing Kills 50, Injures 200 at Shrine"

A suicide bombing at a Muslim shrine in Pakistan's capital, Islamabad, today killed at least 50 people, according to an ambulance service called to the scene.

Another 200 people were injured by the blast inside the Bari Imam shrine in the east of the city, the ambulance service, the Edhi Welfare Trust Group, said in an e-mailed statement. The bomber was 20 to 25 years old, the organization said without providing further details. Police estimated that 19 were killed and more than 100 hurt, according to duty officer Naseer Khan.

The shrine is behind the home of Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz. The bomb exploded at about 11:15 a.m. local time as hundreds of worshippers marked the anniversary of the death of Shah Abdul Latif, a spiritual leader buried there, Khan said in a telephone interview from Islamabad. There were no reports of casualties at Aziz's house...

Steve Stalinsky, executive director of the Middle East Media Research Institute, writes in FrontPage, "Incitement Official"

Under Yasser Arafat, Palestinian Authority sermons were filled with incitement, including calls to kill Jews and destroy America. Few in the West at the time understood the danger posed by these religious proclamations; those intimately involved in the peace process were often willing to overlook them.

The Khatibs, or preachers, who give such sermons, are paid employees of the PA. Their messages are broadcasted live every Friday at noon from mosques controlled by the PA and appear on official PA TV.

Sheikh Ibrahim Mudeiris was a favorite Khatib of Arafat. Mr. Mudeiris is based at the Sheikh 'Ijlin Mosque in Gaza and makes regular appearances during the coveted Friday noon timeslot. One of his notable proclamations about America, from September 5, 2003, was, "America will collapse ... we consider America to be our no. 1." On May 21, 2004, Mr. Mudeiris made reference to America again: "the American dog, the Byzantine dog of our days ... To the Byzantine dog, you son of a bitch, I have brought an enormous army upon you, that starts here and ends here." In sermon from March 21, 2003, he said, "Allah will drown the little Pharaoh, the dwarf, the Pharaoh of all times, of our time, the American president. Allah will drown America in our seas, in our skies, in our land ... America will be destroyed."

When Abu Mazen came to power following Arafat's death, he promised to end incitement. On December 3, 2004, he appeared live on PA TV at the President's Mosque as an audience member of an exceptionally moderate sermon calling for Palestinians to recognize and tolerate others, and to avoid extremism. Mr. Mudeiris was notably absent at the President's Mosque, but quietly reclaimed his pulpit and TV spot soon afterward.

Recent sermons by Mr. Mudeiris include one from April 15, 2005, in which he said that Muslims prisoners in Iraq and Afghanistan were forced to convert to Christianity. In his sermon on February 4, 2005, he called for Palestinians to conquer Israel. This year's New Year sermon was devoted to the destruction of America: "America has reached the top and we admit it, but it is headed for a bottomless pit, Allah willing. America, which is being led by its current president, to a bottomless pit. He leads it to death and destruction, Allah willing. America's grave was dug by Bush the day he invaded Afghanistan. Bush prepared this grave on the day he invaded Iraq."...

From our Stop the Presses Department and the Washington Times:

BENT JBAIL, Lebanon -- Hezbollah, the Shi'ite militia that dominates southern Lebanon, used the fifth anniversary of Israel's troop withdrawal to warn authorities not to try to disarm its fighters.

"Any hand that reaches out to our weapons is an Israeli hand that will be cut off," the group's leader, Sheik Hassan Nasrallah, told a rally in a rare public appearance.

"If anyone, anyone, thinks of disarming the resistance, we will fight them like the martyrs of Karbala," he added, referring to the epic battle in southern Iraq more than 1,300 years ago that led to a permanent split in Islam between the Shi'ites and Sunnis...

The United Nations passed a resolution in September that compelled Syrian forces to leave Lebanon and demanded that militias in Lebanon give up their weapons...

Hezbollah, a fundamentalist group that seeks an Islamic state in Lebanon similar to that in Iran, is widely respected in much of Lebanon, where it is credited with driving out the Israelis.

With 12 members of parliament and a vast network of social services, job training and hospitals that serve Lebanon's impoverished Shi'ite community, the group also commands near-fanatical loyalty from Lebanon's Shi'ites...

From Reuters:

WASHINGTON - The Guantanamo detainee who told an FBI agent in 2002 that U.S. personnel there had flushed a Koran in a toilet retracted his allegation when questioned this month by military investigators, the Pentagon said on Thursday.

"We've gone back to the detainee who allegedly made the allegation and he has said it didn't happen. So the underlying allegation, the detainee himself, within the last two weeks, said that didn't happen," chief Pentagon spokesman Lawrence Di Rita told a briefing.

As an indication of the twilight zone world we live in these days, the 14 (or was it 17?) people supposedly killed in rioting in Afghanistan over this incident that never happened have not been accounted for, so we do not know if those deaths were real or propaganda. Guess we'll have to put up those, "Newsweek lied, people died" bumper tickers. " Gitmo detainees lied, nobody died," just doesn't have the same ring to it.

Tom Regan in the Christian Science Monitor Blog (thanks to DC Watson) takes issue with Jeff Jacoby's Qur'an flushing column, which was remarkably similar to mine, and engages in an extended exercise of the theological equivalence that I have argued against for several years now, and which I believe interferes with effective resistance to the jihad.

Last week conservative columnist Jeff Jacoby of the Boston Globe looked at this "dark side of the force" as he saw it manifested in recent events. Jacoby asked an important question: why are we so upset with reports that Newsweek printed a short piece about the desecration of the Koran at Guantanamo, but not at the reaction in Afghanistan that led to the deaths of at least 16 people?...

But then Jacoby writes that this kind of reaction to a perceived slight is one reason why Muslims are so disrespected in the West - violence, it seems to Jacoby, is second nature to Muslims and to Islam, but not to other religions.

Christians, Jews, and Buddhists don't lash out in homicidal rage when their religion is insulted. They don't call for holy war and riot in the streets. It would be unthinkable for a mainstream priest, rabbi, or lama to demand that a blasphemer be slain.

The above paragraph makes an interesting point. There's only one problem with it - it's wrong.

Christians, Jews, and Buddhists don't "lash out in homicidal rage when their religion is insulted"? Would that it were so.

Unfortunately, even a cursury scan of the headlines from the past few years, or even this past week, shows how wrong it is.

Shall we talk about the religious leaders in Israel who have threatened violence and riots, and perhaps worse, to Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and his supporters, if he goes ahead with his disengagement plan?

Bait and Switch Alert: I thought we were going to get examples of Christians, Jews, and Buddhists lashing out in homicidal rage when their religion was insulted. And the first one Regan offers is a political matter: Jews protesting against Sharon's disengagement plan. In what way is their religion insulted by this? Did Sharon flush a Torah? Of course not. They are angered because they think his plan threatens Israel's survival, not because they think Sharon has insulted Judaism.

These religious leaders believe they have a 'God-given right' to the Gaza (and the West Bank), and have inspired their followers with the same belief. By defending the settlements through force and threats, they are carrying out God's will.

Maybe they do. This is still a red herring. They are defending land, not lashing out at those who don't share their religous point of view. "God gave us this land and we will defend it" still doesn't equal "We will murder innocent people because some other people insulted our holy book half a world away."

Let's not forget that one Israeli leader has already died at the hands of a Jewish religious zealot, who believed in 1995 that there was "a religious commandment" to kill Yitzhak Rabin.

One. He said, "one." He said "one" and expects to be taken seriously. You still have him, and only him, versus thousands of Islamic jihadists who have committed innumerable murders around the world in the name of Islam.

No Christian violence? Ignoring the whole decades-long situation in Northern Ireland, there are many other examples.

"I won't mention Northern Ireland," he said, casually mentioning Northern Ireland. And a good thing he didn't mention it, as it is another weak argument. The war in Northern Ireland was over political power in Ireland. The participants were fighting over land and political power, not killing innocents over a perceived slight to their religion.

It was Christian militias who murdered hundreds of people in the Lebanese refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila in 1982, and it was Serbian Christians who murdered 20,000 Muslims in 1995.

And did these Christian militias commit these murders because Christianity had been insulted? No. Both conflicts were again political, not religious.

The Associated Press reports that "Members of the Pentecostal religious community in the former Soviet republic of Georgia have been harassed and beaten this month" by members of the the country's dominant Orthodox Christian faith. The attacks, the report noted, had been taking place for years.

Did the Pentecostals flush an icon? The question here is not whether or not Christians commit violence. Of course they do. Human nature is everywhere the same. The question Regan is doing his best to obfuscate is whether or not Islam as an ideology exhorts people to violence. Manifestly it does, and violence committed by members of other religious traditions does nothing to mitigate that fact: Islam is unique among world religions in having a developed doctrine mandating violence against unbelievers. This has spawned in our day a global network of Muslims dedicated to jihad. Are these Orthodox Christians targeting Pentecostals worldwide? Of course not. It is a local dispute. Until the Muslim and non-Muslim world are ready to acknowledge the role of Islam in inspiring people to violence, that violence will continue on a global scale.

The recent Terri Schiavo controversy is chock-a-block with incidents where Christian religious leaders encouraged their followers to react in a manner that was often violent. Michael Schiavo and his family, as well as the Republican judge who ruled against Terri's family, have all received numerous death threats from Christians.

Schiavo himself is still in hiding, after being "Salman Rushdie'd" by the religious right in America.

And we all know how Republican House leader Tom DeLay made a not-so-veiled threat that these judges would get what was coming to them. He later said he "regretted the remark but not the sentiment." And there have been similar provocative remarks by other Christian right leaders.

Numerous people on the side of Terri Schiavo pleaded against violence. And in fact, no violence occurred: just a few people crossing police lines with glasses of water. No one, except Terri Schiavo, died. No Christian Church has endorsed or called for violence against Michael Schiavo, and I challenge Regan to come up with one. On the other hand, calls for violence against unbelievers are so common in mosques that the world yawns: they aren't even reported as news.

And what about Christian preachers who say, quite publicly, it's OK to kill abortion providers or the people who work for them?

Names, please? The murder of abortionists has been condemned by all mainstream Christian traditions. Where are the mainstream Muslim traditions that condemn jihad violence? The Free Muslims March Against Terror drew 50 people. Fifty. Why?

And Buddism? Many in North American see Buddhism personified in the presence of the Dalai Lama. But in Buddhist countries like Sri Lanka, and Thailand, violence against religious minorities is a serious problem.

Look again at Thailand. Search the archives here. The violence is coming from Islamic jihadists, not Buddhists.

In Sri Lanka, thousands of people have died in clashed between the Tamil Tigers, who are Hindu, and the Buddhist government. Catholic churches have been attacked as well. And the Thai government has come under heavy criticism for its treatment of its Muslim minority.

Mmm-hmm. Once again, except for the jihad in Thailand, these are political disputes that have nothing whatsoever to do with innocent people being killed because of a perceived slight to a religion.

And let us not forget Arum Shinrikyo, the Buddhist-inspired Japanese cult that carried out one of the worst acts of pre-9/11 terrorism the world had seen.

OK. Let's not forget them. When they start operating in countries around the world, exhorting their followers to violence by the millions, get back to me.

I could give you countless other examples of religious violence of the kind Jacoby ascribes to the Muslim world being committed by non-Muslim religious groups. But for me, the more important question is why is there religious violence at all....

And while it's right to decry any violence in the name of religion, as Jacoby did, it's wrong to say only one religion has a problem in that way. To do otherwise only serves to prevent us from stopping all religious violence, and keeps us from focusing on the messages of hope, justice and meaning that all religions contain at their cores.

No, it is not true that only Muslims commit violence. It would be silly to affirm that. But Regan's analysis only serves to prevent us from acting against Islamic jihad terrorism, as we divert our energies to fighting chimerical Christian Identity types or chasing Buddhist shadows.

Our need to consider this is not just Judeo-Christian boosterism, a chant of "Yea, team! The West is Best!" The nature of jihad violence has serious consequences for the Bush policy of attempting to destabilize terrorism by establishing democracies across the Middle East. It shows how difficult it will be to export the live-and-let-live attitude necessary to make for a society that enacts the will of the majority while protecting the rights of the minority. Thomas Jefferson said: "If my neighbor believes in one god, or twenty, is of no concern to me, it neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg." But is that exportable as a political credo to societies in which the legal tradition includes death for blasphemy and apostasy?

All religions are not the same, and do not have the same capacity to inspire violence. As un-PC as that is, it is the truth. It must be faced. Regan reflects conventional PC wisdom, to be sure -- views that are held across the spectrum, from the New York Times to National Review -- and until this wisdom is seen for the hollow and deceptive thing it is, we are all that much more vulnerable.

From CNN, with thanks to all who sent this in:

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- Detainees at the U.S. naval base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, alleged in 2002 that guards mistreated the Quran, according to some of the hundreds of FBI documents released by the American Civil Liberties Union.

The ACLU obtained the documents from the FBI through a federal court order in a lawsuit based on a Freedom of Information Act request. Most of them are records of detainee interviews with FBI agents.

According to the documents, released Wednesday by the ACLU, a detainee interviewed in August 2002 said guards had flushed a copy of the Quran in a toilet.

Others reported the Quran being kicked, withheld as punishment and thrown on the floor.

Prisoners also complained about "non-believers" touching the book, according to the documents....

White House press secretary Scott McClellan told reporters Wednesday that past accusations have had credibility issues.

"There have been allegations made by detainees," McClellan said. "We know that members of al Qaeda are trained to mislead and to provide false reports.

"We know that's one of their tactics that they use. And so I think you have to keep that in mind as well."

Indeed. See page 16 of this. It would be refreshing if the ACLU would address that and indicate why they think these reports are credible.

Michael Dennin of Amnesty International USA explores the human rights community's strange silence on jihad activity:

On January 28, 2005 Freedom House's Center for Religious Freedom released its report "Saudi Publications on Hate Ideology Fill American Mosques," revealing materials propagated by official Saudi government and religious institutions advocating the murder of apostates and homosexuals, hatred against non-Muslims on account of their religious beliefs and the subjugation of women. These materials were collected and translated by Muslims and other experts who expressed concern regarding the presence of these xenophobic, hate-filled publications in Islamic institutions and their negative impact on religious life in the United States.

While the sheer audacity of our Saudi "allies" to propagate these morally repugnant publications on American soil may have come as a shock to some, no less disconcerting was the failure of the US offices of Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International to join Freedom House Chairman of the Board R. James Woolsey in condemning the Saudi Arabian authorities for advocating and propagating an ideology of hatred that has "no place in a nation founded on religious freedom and toleration." Given that any advocacy of religious hatred that constitutes incitement to discrimination, hostility or violence is prohibited under Article 18 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and Article 20 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, the unwillingness of HRW and AIUSA to respond to these human rights violations appears to be yet another consequence of the increasing politicization and ideological drift that is undermining the effectiveness, reliability and credibility of these organizations, as well as the defense and promotion of human rights here in the United States. Nowhere is this more obvious than the failure of these NGOs to address the issue of Terrorism, which is arguably the American public's most pressing human rights concern since the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington on September 11, 2001 (a recent National Election Studies report reveals that American voters think that Terrorism has been the most important issue facing the United States over the last four years). Despite the catastrophic loss of life and the continuing threat terrorists and their support networks pose to the human rights of US citizens, Human Rights Watch and Amnesty USA still refuse to consider the American people's chief concern an issue worthy of their prioritization. On the other hand, HRW considers "Opportunism Watch: Repression in the Name of Anti-Terrorism" a Global Issue, and Amnesty USA includes "The "War on Terror"" on its Topics list. The priorities of these organizations sends a clear message to the perpetrators and victims of terrorist violence - the responses to Terrorism are a major human rights issue, but Terrorism is not. Certainly, the terrorists and their supporters must be delighted with this arrangement - despite their absolute contempt and disregard for human rights, terrorist networks have unwittingly become the beneficiaries of a de facto alliance between themselves and human rights establishments that waste no opportunity to anathematize US security initiatives while conversely ignoring, for all intensive purposes, the words and deeds of terrorists and the people who incite and finance their hatred and violence.

Despite the concerns that have been raised for years regarding the transformation of these human rights organizations into Leftist political action groups, both HRW and AIUSA appear to be moving towards increasing, not decreasing, politicization and ideological drift. Furthermore, there appears to be no inclination on the parts of these organizations to address the disconnect between their agendas and the concerns of the American people. While it may be a bit much to expect the ideologues at Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International USA to disabuse themselves of their own particular certitudes and blindness to bias, it should not be asking too much of them to respond to the needs of the people whose interests they claim to defend.

Update on this story. I never liked this guy's sign: it just feeds the perception that resistance to jihad terrorism is all motivated by bigotry and Christian triumphalism. It helps the appeasers of jihad to think they have the moral high ground. If a mosque had put up a sign saying "The Bible should be flushed," the same people who were excited about this sign would be outraged.

However, at the same time the sign was a manifestation of the freedom of our society. Christians in America today don't have to look hard to find numerous examples of their religion being ridiculed and denigrated, and if they complain they are warned against censorship and reminded of the parameters of a free society. And it's certainly true that if a society is going to stand for non-establishment of a religion and freedom in religious matters, that must include the freedom to reject a religion, and even to criticize and ridicule it publicly. If Muslims in the West cannot allow for this without resorting to threats and violence, then the very foundations of Western societies will be shaken.

Of course, in this case there were no threats and violence. Just pressure from CAIR. I am not sure whether that is a distinction with a difference, since CAIR still has the power to tar as bigoted and hateful anyone it opposes. This will have to be addressed sooner or later, if our freedoms are to be preserved.

It is also noteworthy that this press release from CAIR is headed: "N.C. Pastor Apologizes For Anti-Muslim Sign," although the sign was actually anti-Qur'an, not anti-Muslim -- a distinction CAIR insists on blurring. A CAIR press release:

CAIR applauds removal of message as boost for Christian-Muslim relations

WASHINGTON, May 26 /PRNewswire/ -- The Council on American-Islamic
Relations (CAIR) today applauded the decision of a North Carolina Baptist pastor to apologize for an anti-Muslim sign displayed outside his Forest City church.

Danieltown Baptist Church Pastor Rev. Creighton Lovelace had previously refused calls to take down the sign, reading "The Koran needs to be flushed," posted in front of his church.

CAIR reacted to the controversy by calling on mainstream religious and
political leaders to repudiate the sign's bigoted message. The Washington-based Islamic civil rights and advocacy group also urged Americans of all faiths to obtain and read a free Quran available through CAIR's new "Explore the Quran" campaign. Several thousand people have already taken advantage of CAIR's offer.

I hope people will read the Qur'an, although I haven't seen which translation CAIR is offering and don't know if it's jimmied. I hope people will read Sura 9 with particular attention, and then get back to me.

In today's apology, Lovelace said in part:

"When I posted the sign in front of the church, it was my intent only to affirm and exalt the Bible and its teachings. It was certainly not my intent to insult any people of faith, but instead to remind the people in this community of the preeminence of God's Word.

"When I posted the message on the sign, I did not realize how people of the Muslim faith view the Koran-that devoted Muslims view it more highly than many in the U.S. view the Bible.

"Now I realize how offensive this is to them, and after praying about it, I have chosen to remove the sign. I apologize for posting that message and deeply regret that it has offended so many in the Muslim community."...

"We thank Pastor Lovelace for his apology and hope this incident will
serve to improve relations between Christians and Muslims in North Carolina and throughout America," said CAIR Executive Director Nihad Awad. Awad suggested that American churches and mosques host Muslim-Christian dialogues on Jesus, who is revered by both faiths.

I hope they do that too: as long as it is done honestly, with reference, for example, to some of the points I raised here.

A housewife getting involved with jihad. This is more confirmation of a point I have often made: that jihadists are inseparable from the larger Muslim population. There is no reliable way to identify them within it until they do something. "City trio face terrorist charges at Old Bailey," from the Coventry Observer, with thanks to Jeffrey Imm:

A HOUSEWIFE and two city men look set to stand trial next year on charges of providing weapons and funds to a terrorist group.

Frzana Khan, a 41-year-old housewife from Anthony Way, Stoke, Mohammed Ajmal Khan, 30, of Broad Street, Foleshill, and Palvinder Singh, 29, of Freeman Street, Foleshill, face charges of conspiring to provide money and firearms to Kashmiri separatist group Lashkar-e-Tayyiba.

A chilling portrait of Imad Mugniyah from Patrick Devenny in FrontPage (thanks to EPG):

“He is the most dangerous terrorist we've ever faced. He's a--he's a pathological murderer. Mugniyah is probably the most intelligent, most capable operative we've ever run across, including the KGB or anybody else. He enters by one door, exits by another, changes his cars daily, never makes appointments on a telephone, never is predictable, will show up--he only uses people that are related to him that he can trust. He doesn't just recruit people. He is the master terrorist, the grail, we are after since 1983.”

Read it all.

There are reports that the mujahedin in Iraq have appointed a deputy commander, but the jihadists themselves have denied it. Apparently. "Militants 'deny Zarqawi claims,'" from the BBC, with thanks to Granny Weatherwax:

Claims that al-Qaeda militants in Iraq have appointed a deputy commander have been denied in a statement on a website often used by the group.

The message followed a posting on a lesser known website that a new chief would take control while leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi recovers from wounds.

The authenticity of either statement cannot be verified....

The statements containing the reports of injury to Zarqawi and his temporary replacement both called on Muslims to pray for the regional al-Qaeda leader.

"We will go on in our way of jihad until victory or martyrdom and we call upon Muslims to pray for the mujahideen and for the safety of our sheikh."

From UPI, with thanks to Jeffrey Imm:

Jakarta, Indonesia, May. 26 (UPI) -- The United States shut down its diplomatic missions in Indonesia Thursday, until further notice, citing a security threat.

In a message posted on its Web site and sent by e-mail to American residents in Indonesia, the U.S. Embassy in Jakarta stated that "the terrorist threat in Indonesia remains high."

The message warned, "Attacks could occur at any time and could be directed against any location, including those frequented by foreigners and identifiably American, and other western facilities or businesses in Indonesia."...

On May 22, thousands of Indonesian Muslim activists, including those from hard-line Islamic groups, rallied outside the U.S. Embassy in Jakarta, denouncing the alleged desecration of Islam's holy book, the Koran, by interrogators at the U.S. detention center in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

Hope for Europe? From the Times Online, with thanks to the Constantinopolitan Irredentist:

THE leader of France’s ruling party has privately admitted that Sunday’s referendum on the European constitution will result in a “no” vote, throwing Europe into turmoil.

“The thing is lost,” Nicolas Sarkozy told French ministers during an ill-tempered meeting. “It will be a little ‘no’ or a big ‘no’,” he was quoted as telling Jean-Pierre Raffarin, the Prime Minister, whom he accused of leading a feeble campaign.

Although Europe would be thrown into disarray, the Government would be greatly relieved if M Sarkozy were right.

Ministers have privately told The Times that Britain is prepared to ditch its commitment to a referendum if France, or the Netherlands next Wednesday, vote against the constitution. They believe that if the French say “no”, President Chirac will have to declare the constitution dead or promise a renegotiation.

The fellow who sent me this note has sent in a follow-up:

You are a servent of the devil and hell will be your abode if you do not stop fighting the religion of God I pray to the one true God that if Judaism, Christianity or any other religion you follow is true or is it Islam is true may God curse and destroy the liar.

Now there's an ecumenical spirit if I ever saw one.

your readers are so ignorant they dont study their own books, Muhammed is mentiones by name in the bible and so is Mecca.

Uh-huh. Chapter and verse, please?

and when I said conquer the world it was the religion I was talking about and not god you fool read the statement again god is the owner of all but christians are still obsessed with converting the world over and jews are obsessed with owning everything and controling the world.

Right. Got it. Today in PC America Jihad Watch was rejected by an accounting firm because their political views differ from mine. I find it astonishing that an accounting firm thinks anti-jihad money ain't green, and I don't know which clause of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights the accounting firm rejects, but it was refreshing after that to get this message spewing invective and falsehood, and to be reminded thereby that this struggle is that of the human rights and the human dignity of all people. The jihadists very skillfully, even in the comments section here, try to claim that the "hate" is coming from those who resist jihad, not from the jihadists. Messages like the one above, however, show vividly that that charge is as nonsensical as charging FDR or Churchill with "hate" for standing up to Hitler and the Nazis. Of course, Hitler made that charge. (No, I am not comparing myself to FDR or Churchill. I am merely saying that when one resists evil, evil will try to portray the one resisting as the real culprit. It has happened before.)

Now here's a strange twist. From WND, with thanks to TC:

Virtually every major news agency in the world has reported without verification that between 15 and 18 Afghanis were killed in the riots.

There's just one problem. There is no more evidence for these deaths than there is that a U.S. interrogator flushed a Quran down the toilet.

Not a single name of even one victim has been released. No details of the circumstances of the riots were released from any official sources – either U.S. or Afghan.

Who were these victims? Were they rioters killed by police or military forces? Were they innocent victims attacked by fanatics? Were they Afghanis? Were they relief workers?

G2B has examined every English-language news story about these deaths through Lexis Nexis. G2B has scoured the Internet, including foreign and non-English-language news sources for any details of these deaths. And G2B has queried both U.S. and Afghan official sources for any details about these alleged deaths.

No U.S. officials contacted can provide any corroboration for any deaths. And Afghan officials uniformly clam up with apprehension at the mere asking of questions.

"I have no comment," said one official at the Afghan embassy in Washington who asked not to be identified.

When told he wasn't being asked for a comment, just any public information about the casualties in what has become the biggest international news story, he said: "I cannot say anything."

"There should be an investigation," he said. "I cannot say any more. Please do not quote me. This is very sensitive."

Now, some sources inside the U.S. government are saying off the record that they believe the death toll may have been deliberately exaggerated by Islamists – perhaps even some Afghan government officials – who want to make a point about the grievous nature of the supposed Quran desecration.

From the courageous and insightful Ali Sina at Faithfreedom.org, with thanks to Ethelred Smith:

In an act of total insanity, the Council of Europe decided to ban criticism of Islam, equating it to anti-Semitism.

Selcuk Gultasli in zaman.com wrote: “Anti-Islamism has been included in the text as a “dangerous inclination” that has to be fought against upon the insistence of Turkey at the summit that 46 Council members attended. The conclusion draft of the summit included the notion of "Islamophobia". The inclusion of this notion in the European organizations' documents for the first time is described as the success of Turkey.

The 3rd Council of Europe summit has for the first time mentioned "Islamophobia" in the 9th paragraph of the Warsaw Declaration that was accepted on Tuesday, May 17. The Council has reached the following decisions regarding the issue: Condemnation of any kind of intolerance and discrimination based on gender, race and religious beliefs in particular, including Islamophobia and anti-Semitism, the fight against these within the framework of the Council of Europe and the use of effective mechanisms and rules to combat these problems.

Thus, anti-Islamism as well as anti-Semitism will be dealt with within the framework of legal proceedings. The Council reports will include anti-Islamist movements. The European Commission against Racism and Intolerance (ECRI) will closely monitor these movements. The Commission will record in which country anti-Islamism increases or how it is reflected.”

This is the beginning of the fall of Europe. Anti-Islamism is not the same as anti-Semitism. Islam is a belief system, Semites are a race. We can’t equate a race with a doctrine. Racism is sheer evil. Apart from the fact that no race is better or worse than other races, unless one is Michael Jackson, one can’t change his race. Instigating hate against a race is instigating hate against mankind. Doctrines that instigate racial hate must be condemned and those who engage in racial slurs must be brought to justice.

From the Times Online, with thanks to He Who Must Not Be Named:

CENTRAL ASIAN governments have accused Britain of providing a haven for members of Islamic organisations alleged to incite violence in their homelands.

Diplomats claim that intelligence services have evidence that the groups raise funds and run propaganda websites from their homes and high street offices in British cities. They have handed over lists of suspect addresses, leaflets and tape recordings of what they claim are ringleaders stirring up hatred against their regimes.

While insurgent groups in the region have proliferated over the past two years, only one, the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, is on the Home Office list of 25 outlawed international terrorist organisations. There is growing pressure for Britain to add to that list Hizb ut-Tahrir, which is held responsible for triggering bomb attacks.

One Uzbek diplomat said: “This organisation is proscribed by scores of countries yet in Britain they are allowed to operate”.

Hizb ut-Tahrir campaigns for a single Islamic state, a caliphate, which aims to unite all Muslim countries by peaceful means, then embrace the entire world. Imran Waheed, its spokesman in Britain, said: “We are a political organisation who condemn violence.”

The group is banned in almost all Muslim countries. Turkey and Pakistan have outlawed its members, as has Germany. Dr Waheed said that the ban was being challenged through the courts. In Britain the National Union of Students has barred it from colleges and universities for its anti-Semitism and homophobia.

This just in from AP, with thanks to the Constantinopolitan Irredentist:

AMMAN, Jordan - An Islamic Web site statement claimed Wednesday that Abu-Musab al-Zarqawi, al-Qaida's point man in Iraq, has fled to a "neighboring country" with two Arab doctors treating him for gunshot wounds to his lung.

The claim's authenticity could not be confirmed. The site used to carry messages from al-Qaida, but has fallen out of use recently. Soon, the statement appeared on another militant site, where other posters quickly denounced it as untrue and unauthorized by the terror group.

Lo and behold, the same day I post about Oprah's dhimmitude, Debbie Schlussel has a column about it:

Ann Coulter says Katie Couric is “the affable Eva Braun” of daytime TV.

But Couric’s got nothing on Oprah Winfrey.

Oprah is the affable Joseph Goebbels of daytime talk . . . of chick magazines . . . of Oprah seminars—and every other medium in which the self-anointed high priestess of the religion of Oprah has her hands.

Through all of these, Oprah preaches “how to be your best self” and “live your best life.” Unfortunately, a predilection for radical Islam and excusing terrorists is a prominent element of Oprah’s “best self.”

Cheating husbands don’t get off as easy as Islamic terrorists, murderers, and torturers in Winfrey’s world.

Take “O” Magazine, Oprah’s monthly print version of self-conceit. Like every other month, the cover of the June issue of “O” features Oprah—for the gazillionth time. Unfortunately, also for the gazillionth time, the inside of the glossy mag features Oprah’s unique brand of understanding and empathy for terrorists and radical Islam.

Last month, Oprah’s “O” asked readers to understand “The Heart of a Destroyer,” Mohammed Atta. You remember him—the Al-Qaeda ringleader of the 9/11 hijackers who murdered 3,000 Americans.

But that’s not exactly the way “O”’s “reading room” wants you to remember him.

Beneath a picture of young Mohammed and his smiling sister on the Egyptian beach, “O” exhorts you to read a book that “sets out to understand the hearts and minds of the men behind the photos” of the 9/11 hijackers, a group of “lonely, exiled young men.”

But the fatherless and motherless children who lost their parents to Atta—hey aren’t lonely, are they?

The book, “O” tells us, “is a simultaneously passionate, compassionate, and dispassionate book that [doesn’t] indict Islam.” Just what we need—the CEO of the Oprah Book Club urging America’s women to have compassion for Mohammed Atta. On the next Oprah, “Stupid Talk Show Hosts and the Terrorists Who Love Them.” (Or is that, “Brave Terrorists and the Stupid Talk Show Hosts Who Love Them”?)

I think Stedman’s starting to get jealous.

To add insult to injury, the latest issue, “O”'s June 2005 edition, demands that we understand the pain and turmoil of Yusra Abdu, a teen-age Palestinian would-be homicide bomber, fiancée of Hani Akad, leader of Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine terrorist group. Akad’s group, funded by Libya (one of “O” Mag’s “Five Places to See in Your Lifetime”), murdered 27 children and injured 134 when they attacked a Jewish school in Ma’a lot, Israel. Note the map of hate and swastika in the group’s May 22, 2005 Syrian-based newsletter.

But in Oprah’s world, Muslims aren’t terrorists, and terrorists aren’t Muslim (more on that, below). Instead, “O” calls Akad “a charismatic and young rebel.” “O” describes the cold-blooded, hateful Abdu and Akad as “a Shakespearean tragedy.” Yes, in Oprah’s world, Islamic terrorists aren’t terrorists. They’re James Deans, Romeos, and Juliets.

And it’s not their fault that they’re homicide bombers. Or Islam’s fault. “O” quotes Saudi-funded Islam apologist John Esposito blaming not Islam, but the desperate “context” of their lives. Reality: Most Palestinian homicide bombers, like the 9/11 hijackers, come from wealthy families, but they hate Jews, Christians, and Americans. That’s the “context.”

Incredibly, super-heroine Oprah calls this psychobabble-ish, understanding-the-world’s-Islamic-terrorists sob-story, “Rescuing the World’s Girls, Part Five.” And some people actually have the nerve to say Savioratrix Oprah is conceited.

And what is Oprah’s solution? That’s easy. Donate to Oprah’s Angel Network, “which is awarding a grant to one or more programs that work to prevent Palestinian children from becoming suicide bombers. No thanks. Or donate to UNICEF, “which runs summer camps and trauma programs for Palestinian children.” No, actually, UNICEF helps UNRWA (both UN agencies) propagandize future Islamic terrorists from cradle to grave.

What about Israeli children’s trauma? How about donating to some Israeli children who are victims of Palestinian terror and need prosthetic limbs, even face implants—because half of their faces were blown off at the Dolfinarium Disco in Tel Aviv? Not a word about them in “O.” They simply don’t exist.

Oprah’s agenda isn’t new. Her unique understanding of Islamic terrorists is manifest in:

A post-9/11 “Islam 101” show —a pandering presentation featuring Jordanian Queen Rania Al-Abdullah. Rania claimed she doesn’t have to wear a hijab head-covering and that honor-killings of raped women doesn’t really happen in her country. Of course it doesn’t, since “her country” is a swanky Fifth Avenue New York apartment in the US, where she mostly lives.

A September 2004 show, discussing the terrorist massacre of children in Beslan, Russia, on which Oprah banned the use of the word Islamic, saying the terrorists “came from the mountains.” (Okay, so they were Mountainese terrorists, not Islamic ones.) Oprah stated that the Beslan massacre was “a watershed because terrorists never before killed children.” Remember those murdered Jewish kids in Ma’alot (and throughout Israel) by the DFLP? I’m sure they’d disagree with the “Queen of Daytime Talk.” If they were still around.

An episode on which a guest claimed Jews practice ritual sacrifices of babies. Oprah: “I want to make it clear that this is one Jewish person, so don’t go around now, saying to people, you know, ‘Those Jewish people, they’re worshipping . . . .’ This is the first time I heard of any Jewish people sacrificing babies, but anyway – so you witnessed the sacrifice?”

Ignoring the mass-murder, rape, torture, and slavery of Black Christians by Sudan’s Arab Muslim government, despite repeatedly teasing a group of Colorado children (who bought some Black Christian slaves’ freedom) that they’d be on her show. She told them the issue was “too complicated.”

Refusing President Bush’s invitation to serve our country by touring Afghani girls’ schools on his behalf. The normally vocal Oprah had “The View’s” Star Jones speak on her behalf, saying the Bush White House “used” her.

Repeated fundraising for “Women to Women, International,” a Muslim women’s charity that claims it stops honor killings, but whose spokeswoman denies that honor killings have anything to do with Islam. Right.

Over the past year, Oprah and her publicity team have pushed Oprah’s latest weight loss—to loud, gushy media acclaim. Oprah, girlfriend, if only you could have gained the weight of a conscience.

The next time we need someone to “Rescue the World’s Girls,” keep Oprah out of it.

A bracing dose of anti-dhimmitude from DC Watson:

With the world seemingly spinning out of control, it's very easy for all of us to become confused from time to time. If you've ever wondered if all of these confrontations we have with Islamic militants and their apologists are turning you into the enemy, below are examples of what to look for.

You may have become a Muslim fanatic if you have, at any time:

Urinated or defecated on the scriptures, artifacts, or holy sites of other religions.

Accidentally set yourself on fire while burning an American or Israeli flag.

Killed your sister for dishonoring your family because she was raped by your father.

Gone to "Family Day" at the park to watch a public stoning, hanging, or beheading.

Expected the company that you work for to interrupt its entire production schedule so that you can pray.

Filed a discrimination lawsuit for being told "No, sorry, but we can't shut the company down simply because it's 'dusk.'"

Contacted the Council on American Islamic Relations, citing an "anti-Muslim hate crime" because someone threw a "Mr. Potato Head" at you in a toy store.

Thrown rocks at an Israeli tank.

Taken off your shoe and beat a burning helicopter with it.

Lied in an attempt to alter world history.

Used Islam as justification for strapping explosives to your kids.

Fraudulently set fire to your own business because you couldn't make the finance payments, then blamed Americans for committing an "anti-Muslim" hate crime.

Used the pages of a Holy Bible or Torah for toilet paper.

Insisted on wearing a hijab with your Police or Basketball uniform.

Hacked innocent women and children with a machete.

Left your empty bottles of booze and cigarette butts all over the floor at the Church of the Nativity.

Ransacked a Jewish Cemetery.

Destroyed a Hindu Temple.

Tied a charred corpse to a bridge.

Poked a charred corpse with a stick.

Had a light bulb burn out and blamed the Jews for it.

Killed someone for having their feet facing toward Mecca.

Danced in the streets of a run down slum on 9/11/2001.

Been offended by statues and pictures of pigs.

Become infuriated when you were told that Muhammad was a false prophet, and a violent, caravan raiding pedophile.

Jumped up and down on a flaming car.

Participated in a deadly riot because you heard from your local Imam that perhaps, there was a possibility, that a copy of the Koran was dunked in a toilet, but you still weren't exactly sure why you were rioting, and didn't care, as long as you didn't have to stop.

If none of these situations describe your activity, congratulations, you still have your bearings.

Keep fighting the good fight.

May God bless all of you.

Is Europe awakening to how severely it is threatened? "Dutch Voters Seen Losing Interest in EU," from the Washington Post, with thanks to JS:

AMSTERDAM, Netherlands -- Are the Dutch tired of Europe? That will be the real question on June 1, when the Netherlands holds its referendum on the European constitution, just three days after a crucial vote on the charter in France.

Polls show voters who reject the constitution have the edge over those likely to vote "yes," and the gap is growing. But they also show a majority either won't vote or are confused by the paperback-sized document and haven't made up their minds.

"Holland is in a very inward mood. It's hiding behind the dikes," said historian Han van der Horst.

The constitution, a compilation of rules and procedures to make the 25-nation European Union easier to run after last year's historic expansion, has a wide range of detractors.

Liberals worry a stronger federal structure could infringe on their tolerant attitudes toward euthanasia, soft drugs and gay marriage. Christians complain the constitution makes no mention of God. Animal rights groups object that it exempts religious rites and cultural traditions from protecting animals.

Whatever the particular reason, the underlying motive seems to be discontent with Europe itself.

"Dutch people are not interested in Europe," said Daniel de Jongh, a volunteer for a committee campaigning against the referendum. "People felt they never really had a chance to speak out. But with this referendum, now I can say, 'Stop. No. I don't want it.'"

The government is spending $4.4 million on last-minute campaigning, saying it is confident it can still swing the vote. Government ministers have hit the streets to pass out leaflets and talk up the constitution. Mailboxes are stuffed with pro-Europe brochures, printed at taxpayer expense.

Prime Minister Jan Peter Balkenende even plugged the constitution during the May 8 World War II memorial attended by President Bush _ remarks many criticized as inappropriate at a graveyard ceremony eulogizing American dead.

Opponents have been equally energetic. Leading the most colorful "no" campaign is Geert Wilders, a maverick lawmaker who has received death threats because of his anti-Islamic views. Escorted by dozens of guards, Wilders is on a two-week bus tour warning that further European integration could cost the Netherlands control over its tough immigration policy.

Wilders has tapped into fears that last year's admission of 10 mostly eastern European countries will undermine the Dutch standard of living. He has also capitalized on concern about Muslim Turkey's bid to become a member and on widespread disapproval of the current government. He represents the far right, but opposition here spans the political spectrum.

Why does he represent the "far right"? Because he says what he says, and that's how the media classifies people who say such things. But what he is saying is just as much in the interests of the Left to support, if the Left wishes to survive.

"Jury: City Didn't Violate Muslims' Rights," from AP, with thanks to The Frozen Ghost:

May 22, 2005 - A federal jury has found that a Chicago suburb didn't violate the civil rights of a Muslim group that claims city officials conspired to foil its plans to turn a vacant church into a mosque and school.

The Al Salam Mosque Foundation sued the city of Palos Heights in 2000, alleging religious discrimination and breach of contract, but the jury rejected the claims Friday.

The City Council had offered the foundation $200,000 to drop its plan to buy the Reformed Church of Palos Heights. At the time, aldermen insisted they offered the payment so the city could buy the church and convert it into much-needed recreation space.

An attorney representing the mosque originally said the group would turn down the offer. Later, he said the group would rather accept the money and remove itself from the politically charged debate.

But the deal fell apart when former Mayor Dean Koldenhoven vetoed the payout, calling it "an insult" to the community's Muslims.

Abdallah El Sheikh, the foundation's president, testified Wednesday that Koldenhoven's move actually was a calculated "slap in the face."

Koldenhoven, a defendant in the case, said the verdict will allow the city and community to put a tense issue to rest.

"I'm very happy for the people of Palos Heights," Koldenhoven said. "I'm sure they'll be well pleased."

El Sheikh said the group would consider appealing the ruling.

The foundation's attorney, Gregory Kulis, said he hoped the verdict would not send the wrong message to other cities or Muslim groups seeking to purchase property.

"People are talking about it and realizing we are all equal in this country," Kulis said. "We are proud that this case has brought the issue of religious freedom to the forefront not only locally but across the nation. I hope the rest of the country will accept Muslims for what they are: American."

Sure. I'll be happy to. Let them prove it, please, by renouncing Sharia, refusing all money and support from Sharia states, and actively aiding anti-terror efforts.

Anti-dhimmitude from US officialdom? Hard to believe, but here it is: "Saudi paper: U.S. studies Islam in Europe," from UPI, with thanks to Skeetstreet:

The semi-official daily al-Watan quoted an unidentified Dutch political source as saying the initiative was drawn up by a team of 15 political experts, security, science and social advisers, and led by a former CIA official who headed the Middle East department for several years.

The source told the pro-government paper the initiative would deal with the actual number of Muslims in Europe and the effect their population growth will have on European demographics.

He said the project is the result of American fears of the effect of Muslims on the European political systems and governments, "especially with the trend of Europeans to choose leftist and socialist governments in the aftermath of growing violence and Islamic threats."

Will they mention that non-Muslims are not allowed, on pain of death, to get anywhere near the actual Kaabah? Somehow I doubt it. From the California Aggie, with thanks to Skeetstreet:

For the first event for Islam Awareness Week, the Muslim Student Association at UC Davis created a replica of the Kaabah in Mecca on the West Quad to educate the campus community and fight stereotypes of Islam and Muslims, according to junior Rabia Khan.

Rabia said the Kaabah is a symbolic representation of Islam and Muslims.

“Muslims face the Kaabah when they pray five times a day,” she said. “It is the one structure that unites all Muslims.”

Along with the Kaabah exhibit, the event featured Islamic art, artifacts and food....

Yasmine and Rabia said they hope that this week will dispel some of the stereotypes surrounding Islam and Muslims.

From this morning's Hate Mail Bag, more refreshing candor from another Muslim who does not bother to conceal that Islam has expansionist designs on the rest of the world:

Do you know that the religion of Adam, Noah, Moses and Jesus was Islam. the almighty is forgiving, you still have time to repent and stop helping the cause of satan a instead of helpin the true religion of god to conquer the universe and if you do not cease HELL is your abode. you dirty zionist pagan

As I have long argued. From Barry Rubin in Lebanon's Daily Star, with thanks to the Constantinopolitan Irredentist:

The central question of the Arab-Israeli - or at least the Israeli-Palestinian - conflict is whether it is a "normal" struggle over territory or an existential battle set by religion, identit, and other factors much less susceptible to resolution through compromise.

Many observers, drawing analogies from other issues without properly examining the specifics of the Arab-Israel case, conclude that it is a normal conflict and, consequently, can be easily settled if only the right formula is found. In fact, though, for much of the Palestinian side the question has remained one of total victory, in which only Israel's extinction and replacement by a Palestinian Arab, and perhaps Islamic, state extending between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea is the acceptable solution....

The methodology of terrorism, the continuing demonization of Israel on a daily basis by the Palestinian Authority and its media, the insistence, even in 2005, of officially mourning Israel's original creation, and many other practices, reflect this world view. A more subtle aspect is putting the priority on violence and agitation rather than on building the infrastructure of a future state. In pursuit of total victory - or at least keeping the door open for its pursuit - the Palestinian movement has squandered international goodwill and the huge financial aid it received in the 1990s.

Huge financial aid? Why, I thought we were supposed to believe they were penniless.

"Dangerous liaisons: covert ''love affair" between Russia and Hezbollah," from Michel Elbaz at Axisglobe.com:

Since the tragedy of 9/11, the President of the Russian Federation has never missed an opportunity to remind the Western world that his country was the first one to stage a war against global terrorism. Translated from the "Kremlin language" it meant fighting against the Chechens, who refuse to disarm themselves. Putin is definitely right in claiming that Russia's battle against them had started much earlier than the 9/11-terror attack took place. Revolt of the nations of North Caucasus opposing foreign occupation dates back to the end of the 18th century, even before Tsarist Russia finished conquering the region. Since then each and every uprising was quelled brutally accompanied by genocide and deportation of the local population. Every new generation of the North Caucasian people tried, in vain, to regain its freedom.

The same repeated itself during the nineties of the previous century. But then, the new players – Islamic extremist organizations from abroad, entered the scene. They decided to transform Chechnya, which managed to gain its independence, into their main bridgehead inside the collapsed Soviet Union. Putin, who rose to power against the background of the infiltration of Islamic militants to Daghestan, used the situation to declare that the Chechen liberation movement is an indivisible part of the global terrorist network. Foreign Islamic elements, which supported Chechnya, were put on the Russian terror list. But there was "not enough room" on this list for the rest of the terrorist organizations, which were not suspected of hostile activity against the Kremlin.

Furthermore, several of them earned Russian sympathy and were "honored" with Moscow's courting. This was Putin`s revival of the traditional Soviet policy. During the USSR era its leadership used to divide the international terrorists into categories; "freedom fighters" and "radical elements". The first served Moscow's geopolitical interests and received its support. The others, acting against the USSR, or declining to accept its sponsorship, were labeled "terrorists". Today Moscow's policies and methods are identical.

The pro-Iranian Hezbollah stands out among those who benefit from the Kremlin's support. Its fighters are guilty of murdering hundreds of American and French citizens in the eighties. During the previous decade its emissaries committed two huge terrorist acts in Argentina, killing almost 120 people. Today Hezbollah`s terrorists are fighting coalition forces in Iraq. Putin`s declarations about "Russia's uncompromising battle against international terrorism" are taking place simultaneously with the contacts of the Russian Ministry of foreign Affairs with the leaders of Hezbollah. Their emissaries in Russia recruit potential suicide bombers without restraint or opposition on behalf of the local authorities. They purchase arms in the areas of the ex-USSR, which are now under Russian control. Russian ex-military experts train militants of Hezbollah before they infiltrate Iraq.

Read it all.

Of course, if CNN had been reading Jihad Watch, they would have known this long ago. Search the archives here and you will find stories going back to the beginning about Sageman's and other studies establishing that jihadists are generally better educated and wealthier than their peers. From the Stop the Presses Department, via CNN: "Expert: Not all al Qaeda poor, uneducated, devout" (thanks to Mediawatch):

(CNN) -- With his penchant for bow ties and sport jackets, Dr. Marc Sageman looks every inch the psychiatrist and professor that he is -- not the spy he used to be, nor the agent provocateur he is now.

Sageman has emerged as something of an intellectual bomb thrower, producing a groundbreaking study about Islamic terrorists and their terror networks that challenges conventional beliefs.

His research shows that many of these terrorists -- including the September 11 hijackers and other al Qaeda members -- tend to be fairly well educated and affluent, and don't come from deeply religious backgrounds.

After the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks, Sageman says he saw a void in knowledge about Islamic terrorists, at that point deciding to help fill it by building on his first-hand experience with in-depth research.

"There were a lot of talking heads, I just didn't think they knew what they were talking about," he recalls. "There were no real facts."

Sageman got his first glimpse inside the world of jihadis between 1987 and 1989, when he lived in Islamabad, Pakistan.

Officially, he worked as a political officer at the U.S. Embassy. But Sageman's real job was with the Central Intelligence Agency, working with members of what was then known as the mujahideen in the fight against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan.

Sageman left the CIA in 1991, having previously earned a medical school degree and Ph.D. in political sociology. He then trained as a forensic psychiatrist, saying that he eventually interviewed close to 500 murderers.

That background -- examining killers' psychiatric profiles, working for the CIA and living in the combustible and terrorist-heavy region of South Central Asia -- gives him the skills and perspective to study the September 11 hijackers and their ilk, he says.

Sageman began by compiling biographical information -- using material from public sources, including court documents and investigative news reports -- on the hijackers and the few associates named in the press.

"Even at the small number of 25 [terrorists], I realized the conventional wisdom was wrong."

The conventional wisdom, he says, being that these were poor, uneducated young men who had a long-term exposure to fundamentalist religious beliefs.

Cliques becoming terror cells

While teaching at the University of Pennsylvania, Sageman expanded on his research to include 162 terrorists and turned it into the groundbreaking book, "Understanding Terror Networks." He came across some compelling numbers:

• About two-thirds of the terrorists went to college, in an area of the world where only about 10 percent of young men get a post-secondary education

• About 87 percent came from generally secular backgrounds (most of the other 13 percent, who studied at the Muslim schools known as madrassas, were Indonesians)

• Most came from middle or upper-middle class households

Sageman calls "kinship and friendship" the main reasons young men join al Qaeda, claiming that friends and relatives brought more than 90 percent of the membership into the fold.

This means recruitment is much more personal than previously thought, he says.

He cites several cases, including that of September 11 hijacker Mohammad Atta and the so-called Hamburg cell, consisting of a group of like-minded young men. As their religious views became more extreme, they cut themselves off from the outside world and became involved in terrorist activity.

"They are very ordinary," he said. "They form cliques and radicalize each other.

Invariably, most of the groups that became al Qaeda followed that trajectory."

In "Newsweek Story: Missing the Woods for the Trees," American Muslim columnist Ramzy Baroud fumes about Jeff Jacoby's Qur'an flushing column, which was remarkably similar to one I wrote a day earlier. From Aljazeera.net via Arab News, with thanks to Skeetstreet:

Jeff Jacoby, a columnist for the Boston Globe, chose to push the limits of cultural insensitivity to downright insult in his piece entitled, “Why Islam is disrespected.”

He opens his article with imaginary scenarios of Christians, Jews and Buddhists violently rioting in response to the desecration of their religious symbols. This was to draw a comparison between the “barbarism” of Muslims and the nonviolent and civilized everyone else.

The message was: Christians, Jews and Buddhists don’t lash out in homicidal rage when their religion is insulted.

Well, do they? If Ramzy Baroud is going to find this insulting, he should supply incidents in which Christians, Jews or Buddhists lashed out in homicidal rage when their religion was insulted. Otherwise he has no leg to stand on.

Jihad Watch Board Vice President Hugh Fitzgerald offers some recommendations on how to deal with Al-Jazeera, and what the American media presence in the Middle East should be like:

1) The kid-gloves treatment of Qatar is based on the smiles of the al-Thani ruler -- what is he called now? Prince? King? These sheiks of petty sheikdoms like to give themselves grand titles! Like the man whom the British used to call "The Ruler of Bahrain," who then promoted himself to Prince and then just recently to king, much to the amusement of J. B. Kelly and others who had spent time in the Gulf. It rests also upon the good looks and supposed "feminist" credentials of his "progressive" wife (in those circles, it doesn't take much to be a far-sighed progressive -- why, appearing hijabless or having a job, or even driving a car will do the trick). Oh, the rich fantasy life of American diplomats and policymakers, and of course the world press, whether in their Lawrence-of-Arabia swoon (Lowell Thomas), or their “eternal verities of the wide Arabian sky and desert” swoon (Freya Stark) or in their can’t-stand-that-little-Jewish-Sparta-or-its-supporters so the Arabs-and-Muslims-and-especially-the-“Palestinians” must-be-promoted-on-every-occasion swoon (Peter Jennings, John Simpson, Edward Mortimer) -- take your pick.

Qatar needs America, America does not need Qatar. Qatar must stop subsidizing al-Jazeera, and while it is at it, it should be asked to send the influential and sinister Qaradawi packing. To Egypt, or Saudi Arabia. If he’s truly interested in what is Halal and what is Haram, Saudi Arabia’s the only place for him. And what beaches!

2) Al-Jazeera needs to be shut down or at least treated as, during the Cold War, one would treat Pravda and Tass, or during World War II, Der Beobachter Zeitung, and Der Stuermer, and Radio Berlin (Lord Haw Haw included) and Radio Tokyo (Tokyo Rose included). This requires thought. Shooting down the satellite that makes it possible? Interfering with transmissions? Are these technically possible, or not? No one need announce it is being done. It should "just happen." Too bad.

From Expatica, with thanks to Jeffrey Imm:

ALICANTE — An aeronautical engineer has been arrested for allegedly designing missiles for the Palestinian terrorist organisations Hamas and Islamic Jihad.

Marwan Ismail Dahman, who was born in Gaza, in Palestine but is a naturalised Spaniard, was arrested in Benidorm in the Alicante province, the Spanish daily El Pais reported.

He allegedly offered to design a new type of Qasam missile which can potentially be used for attacks on Israel.

Police sources said plans for the missile design, which had been sent by fax to the two Palestinian terrorist organisations were found in Dahman's house.

Dhimmitude or just plain stupidity? "Operation Charm Offensive Towards Islamists," from Olivier Guitta in Tech Central Station, with thanks to JJohnson:

In the past few weeks, the Arab media have been buzzing with shocking news: the West is engaging in open talks with Islamists. While this is not really unexpected coming from the European Union, which has always been quite appeasing with Islamists, it is all the more surprising coming from the Bush administration.

It all really started with reports in the Arab press of a "secret" meeting in Beirut on March 22 between US officials and representatives of terrorist organizations. In attendance: Musa Abu Marzuk, Sami Kheter and Osama Hamdan from the Palestinian Hamas; Nawaf Mousawi from the Lebanese Hizbullah; Ibrahim al Masri and Assad Harmouche from the Lebanese Gamaa Islamiya; and three representatives from the Pakistani Gamaa Islamiya. Eli Lake from the New York Sun is among the only journalists in the US media who has reported at length about this meeting.

At the same time, the European Union was on the same active path of engaging dialogue. At an EU meeting in Luxembourg on April 16 foreign ministers decided it was high time to get into talks with "moderate" Islamists. They regretted that in the past they only dealt with the seculars in the Middle East....

Indeed, as Rifaat al Said, the President of a leftist opposition Egyptian party, said it:" The moderate Islamists do not exist. To be moderate is to accept the Other. And the very Muslim Brothers' doctrine is based on the non respect of other religions." Said deemed it a major mistake to think -- like Europeans and Americans do -- that democracy in a Muslim country has to go through a "moderate" Islamist power phase....

At least, before engaging Islamists, the US should wait that they stop, once and for all, terrorism and lay down arms. By dialoguing with our very own enemies so early in the War, we are shooting ourselves in the foot. The Bush administration is on a very slippery slope: how can you justify speaking with Hamas, Hizbullah and the Muslim Brotherhood? Where is the "We don't negotiate with terrorists."? What kind of credibility will the US have? If on one hand, we are fighting terrorism but on the other we are talking to these very same terrorists…We went from "Shock and Awe" to "Charm and Talk" and thus we just handed ourselves our first defeat in this war.

Read it all. I tried to tell 'em.

Daveed Gartenstein-Ross meets the slick Mahdi Bray on PAX-TV to debate the prevalence of Sharia sentiments in the US. "MAS's Muslim Brotherhood Problem," by Gartenstein-Ross in the Weekly Standard:

ON MAY 14, 2005, PAX-TV's Faith Under Fire broadcast a debate that I took part in against Mahdi Bray, the executive director of the Muslim American Society's (MAS) Freedom Foundation. Bray had selected the debate topic in advance, and chose to argue about "The United States of Islam?"--that is, whether American Muslims wanted to see Islamic law (sharia) implemented in the United States. While I unwaveringly agreed that most American Muslims don't want to see the United States ruled by Islamic law, I nonetheless jumped at the chance to debate this topic against Bray. After all, the Chicago Tribune recently published a story detailing how the fundamentalist Muslim Brotherhood operates in the United States as none other than MAS. So while most American Muslims don't want to see the United States governed by sharia, Bray's organization does. And while researching for the debate, I found that MAS--except in its most public of statements--is quite open about its agenda and allegiances. Even a brief review of various MAS chapters' websites provides a revealing look at what the national organization is teaching its members.

THE MUSLIM BROTHERHOOD is an international Islamist group that largely operates underground and behind the scenes, with branches in about 70 countries. The Brotherhood was founded in 1928 by Hassan al-Banna, an Egyptian schoolteacher who--in the wake of the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and abolition of the caliphate--bemoaned the sickness of the Ummah, or larger Muslim community. The Brotherhood's response to this perceived sickness was to emphasize doctrinally that Islam encompasses all the affairs of man. As al-Banna wrote, "Islam is faith and worship, a country and a citizenship, a religion and a state. It is spirituality and hard work. It is a Qur'an and a sword." The group also emphasizes that Islam is a universal faith. As al-Banna put it, Islam "has encompassed all aspects of human life, for all peoples and nations, and for all times and ages."

Because the Brotherhood views Islam as all-encompassing and universal, one of its highest goals is to spread Islamic law. The Chicago Tribune explains that the controversial "ultimate goal" of the U.S. Brotherhood is "to create Muslim states overseas and, they hope, someday in America as well." Brotherhood members did emphasize to the Tribune that they operate within the laws of the countries where they live:

They stress that they do not believe in overthrowing the U.S. government, but rather that they want as many people as possible to convert to Islam so that one day--perhaps generations from now--a majority of Americans will support a society governed by Islamic law.

Read it all.

With a little help from the notorious dhimmi academic John Esposito. "Rescuing the World's Girls, Part Five," from O, the Oprah Magazine, with thanks to a tea-loving snail:

In the 1980s, when suicide bombings first made headlines, psychologists tended to label the perpetrators as mentally unstable religious fanatics. But today scholars agree that most are otherwise ordinary people whose ready passions and chronic disappointments make them easy recruits for larger political powers. "What people miss is the fact that religion is not the cause; it's the context," says Georgetown University professor of Islamic studies John L. Esposito, PhD, author of Unholy War: Terror in the Name of Islam. Esposito offers another explanation—though not a justification—for what motivates bombers. "These are people who define their situation as hopeless. They feel that they have no way to respond against what they see as Israeli military aggression. They say, 'They have weapons on that side, and [we have] none on our side.' So they turn themselves into weapons."

Esposito here echoes an argument made by Zarqawi and many others. Neither Esposito nor Zarqawi mention why it is so easy for them to obtain bombs with which they kill themselves and others, if it is so hard for them to get weapons. Also, Esposito unsurprisingly doesn't tell Oprah that Muslim clerics and political leaders encourage suicide attacks.

An Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) press release (thanks to Jeffrey Imm):

WASHINGTON, D.C. - Michael J. Garcia, Department of Homeland Security Assistant Secretary for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), today announced that a nationwide campaign by ICE agents against unlicensed money transmittal businesses and underground “hawalas” has resulted in the arrest of 140 individuals, 138 criminal indictments, and the seizure of more than $25.5 million in illicit proceeds since the enactment of the USA Patriot Act, which requires such businesses to be licensed and registered.

“Over the past two weeks, ICE has shut down a number of unlicensed money transmittal businesses that were responsible for the transfer of millions of dollars to Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Iran," said Assistant Secretary Garcia. "ICE targets these illegal operations because we know that terrorist and other criminal organizations can use these underground businesses to move illicit funds anywhere in the world with no questions asked."

In recent days, ICE has won guilty pleas from two defendants and arrested another on charges of operating unlicensed money transmittal businesses.

On Friday, May 20, Rahim Bariek, 46, a naturalized U.S. citizen from Afghanistan and resident of Herndon, Virginia, pleaded guilty in Alexandria to operating an unlicensed money transmittal business that wired millions of dollars to Iran, Pakistan, and areas in Afghanistan under the control of the Taliban between 2001 and 2003. On November 14, 2001, roughly two months after the 9/11 attacks, Bariek testified before the U.S. Senate about how important it was for “hawaladars” like himself to abide by federal laws governing such businesses. Those who skirt the rules “give all hawala a bad name,” he testified. A subsequent ICE probe revealed that Bariek was operating an illegal money transmittal firm in Virginia that illegally wired $4.9 million to Iran, Pakistan, and Afghanistan. Bariek faces a maximum five-year sentence when sentenced on July 29, 2005.

On Friday, May 20, Noor Alocozy, 41, a native of Afghanistan native living in San Francisco, pleaded guilty to federal charges of operating an unlicensed money transmittal business that funneled nearly $1 million to Afghanistan, Pakistan, and elsewhere. The investigation by ICE, the FBI, DEA, and IRS revealed that Alocozy’s business had been utilized by Jack Idema, the former Green Beret-turned bounty hunter who is currently imprisoned in Afghanistan for allegedly torturing Afghan civilians. During the investigation, Alocozy provided ICE investigators with copies of business ledgers indicating that Idema used Alocozy’s business to send funds from the U.S. to Afghanistan, presumably in support of his quest to capture Osama bin Laden and collect the $50 million reward. Alocozy is scheduled to be sentenced on August 26, 2005.

On May 13, 2005, Eltaib Yousif, 41, a resident of Castro Valley, California, made his initial court appearance in federal court in San Francisco after being arrested by ICE agents on charges of operating an unlicensed money transmitting business. According to the indictment, Yousif illegally moved more than $1.5 million outside the country between September 2001 and November 2003. The investigation began after San Francisco ICE agents received a tip from ICE agents in New York about suspicious deposits being made into accounts at Citibank branches there and in the Bay Area.

Stop the presses! It seems that Osama bin Laden is working to establish (gasp) an Islamic state! I have discussed this in five books now and innumerable articles, and so I am glad to see that AP is coming around. (Thanks to OBL r Us for the link.)

An alleged militant on trial for a terror conspiracy targeting the US and Israeli embassies claimed today that terror masterminds Osama bin Laden and Abu Musab al-Zarqawi will soon set up a Muslim caliphate state.

Abed al-Tahawi made the statement in brief remarks to reporters before the military court convened to hear the prosecution sum up its case in his trial.

"Although they accuse them of being terrorists, the heroes Osama bin Laden and Abu Musab al-Zarqawi will come back to the scene soon to set up an Islamic caliphate state," he said....

Saudi-born bin Laden has long advocated the creation of a caliphate, where Islam would be the source of the law and the state ruled by a religious leader, known as the caliph -- a title taken by the successors of the prophet Muhammad....

"Some groups say Muslims were monopolizing space," from the Flint Journal, with thanks to EPG:

FLINT - A room for peaceful reflection and prayer at the University of Michigan-Flint has become anything but.

Instead, Room 386 at the University Center - known as the Meditation Room - is at the heart of a months-long religious dispute between Muslim and non-Muslim students.

The non-Muslims began complaining in November that Muslim students were monopolizing the room and filling the tiny space with religious paraphernalia and anti-Israel literature.

The Muslim students countered that they were being unfairly targeted and appealed to the university for religious tolerance.

"I do think that the current political climate does contribute to Islamophobia," said Bishr Aldabagh, a former UM-Flint Student Government Council president and student commencement speaker.

"The room serves the needs of students from different religions, but I do think that the reaction would have been different if the room was used predominantly by Christians or Jews."

UM-Flint student Zea Miller, 22 of Flint asked the university, in a written petition, to allow a more balanced use of the room, urging it to "whitewash" the walls and remove all religious items - a move that he said caused him to be stalked and harassed.

The university investigated Miller's claims about being harassed and said they were unfounded.

"There are people who feel offended and intimidated being in the Meditation Room or within the presence of artifacts representative of beliefs not their own," Miller said in his petition.

Miller said he was acting on his own, but others feel the same. Miller, a staff member of the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Center, doesn't belong to any of UM-Flint's four student religious organizations.

The walls of the room, about the size of a storage room, once held posters, Muslim Student Association awards and framed pictures. Prayer rugs and other books also were stored in the room. Muslim students use the space to perform religious practices, such as praying five times a day, as required by their faith.

"I took it upon myself to file the petition; I did this on behalf of others who were afraid to," Miller said. "It was not bigoted. I would have done this against any group who usurped the room. Now, at every move I'm being accused of anti-Muslim behavior. I am not anti-Muslim."

Join the club, Zea. I can tell you from long experience that anyone who speaks out about anything Muslims have said and done will swiftly be accused of being "anti-Muslim."

"Capps meets with local Muslim organizations," from the Santa Maria Times, with thanks to EPG:

Congresswoman Lois Capps was honored May 14 by the Central Coast Islamic Center of Santa Maria and the Central Coast chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations.

The groups held a round-table meeting with Capps to discuss social issues currently facing Muslims on the Central Coast and throughout the United States.

The conversation centered on post-Sept. 11 attitudes toward Muslims in America and concern over whether consequential acts of government, like the Patriot Act, infringe on civil liberties.

"What we request of you (Capps) is to enlighten the rest of Americans about Muslims, about Islam, about who we are and what we do," said Mohammed Diab, a participant in the meeting.

Nary a word, evidently, from Capps asking them to be more cooperative with anti-terror efforts.

"Hezbollah in America," from the Washington Times, with thanks to omdb2ar:

Aside from al Qaeda, no terrorist group has killed more Americans than Hezbollah, which is bankrolled by Iran to the tune of at least $100 million a year. Hezbollah's main theaters of operation are Lebanon, its home country (where it killed hundreds of Americans during the 1980s), and the West Bank and Gaza, where it helps Palestinian rejectionists target Israel. But the group is active in the United States as well. Hezbollah is believed to have cells in at least 10 U.S. cities.

Although the organization has yet to launch an attack on U.S. soil, its U.S. activities are far from benign....

Outside of metropolitan Detroit, last month's arrest of Nemr Ali Rahal, a 41-year-old businessman, at his Dearborn home on charges of smuggling funds to Hezbollah, went largely unreported by the news media around the United States. But the story deserves our attention. In Mr. Rahal's house, agents found a videotape of a Hezbollah rally he attended in Lebanon three years ago. The FBI said it found $600 worth of change in buckets in the Rahal home, and that he said the money was meant to go to "orphans" -- the children of suicide bombers. Mr. Rahal has been charged with stealing more than $400,000 by means of credit-card fraud. When Mr. Rahal returned Feb. 9 from a trip to Canada, Customs agents found traces of explosives on his passport.

In March, Mahmoud Kourani of Dearborn pleaded guilty to providing material support for Hezbollah. He will be sentenced next month. Kourani ( whose brother is Hezbollah's chief of military security in southern Lebanon) is an illegal alien who sneaked into the United States from Mexico in February 2001. Federal authorities have repeatedly arrested suspected Hezbollah operatives for attempting to smuggle night-vision goggles and other military equipment to the organization. One suspect, arrested in 1998, skipped bail and fled to Lebanon before returning to the United States last year to face federal charges. In 2003, a federal court convicted a Hezbollah cell based in Charlotte, N.C., on charges of aiding Hezbollah by operating a cigarette-smuggling ring. The leader of that group, Mohammed Hammoud, received 155 years in prison.

In "Confessions of a Former Islamist," ex-Muslim Ahmed Awny Shalakamy at FrontPage (thanks to Judy) details how he and his cohorts connived to convert Christians to Islam by any means possible.

My father hated Christians. He taught me that they are infidels who contradict themselves by saying that Jesus Christ is God while their distorted book has verses that prove he is a prophet. It was all part of the rhetoric we got used to hearing from booming mosque loudspeakers, and from the playing of radio and audio cassettes in the streets. In such an atmosphere, a Muslim child in Egypt is breast-fed hatred along with his mother’s milk.

What? He wasn't taught that Islam reveres Jesus and respects Christians?

Read it all.

Charles Taylor may find that in accepting this support he has taken on more than he can handle. In my forthcoming book The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (and the Crusades) (Regnery) I discuss how the Byzantine Emperor John VI Cantacuzenes appealed to Muslims for help in a dynastic dispute. They came into Europe and stayed.

John VI was not the first Christian ruler to make alliances with Muslims; nor was he the first to pay for doing so. But his alliance may have had the worst long-lasting effects. Unfortunately, the short-sightedness of modern Western rulers makes them all liable to be the next John VI Cantacuzenes. From AP, with thanks to Twostellas:

UNITED NATIONS (AP) — Liberia's exiled former president, Charles Taylor, received money recently from an al-Qaeda operative and is trying to destabilize west Africa, prosecutors for Sierra Leone's U.N.-backed war crimes tribunal said Tuesday. Chief prosecutor David Crane said Taylor harbored members of al-Qaeda including those who allegedly took part in the bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1997, and was allegedly in contact with a member of the terrorist network as recently as last month.

"Al-Qaeda has been in west Africa. It continues to be in west Africa, and Charles Taylor has been harboring members of al-Qaeda," Crane said, adding that he believes west Africa is going to become the next Afghanistan.

Quiet resistance in Bangladesh to Sharia provisions discriminating against women, which are akin to those discriminating against dhimmis. From the Washington Times, with thanks to EPG:

Bangladesh has used a "silent social revolution" to boost women's rights and avoid the religious extremism that has plagued other Muslim countries, Foreign Minister M. Morshed Khan said in an interview yesterday.

On a visit to Washington this week, Mr. Khan said that free and subsidized schooling for girls, expanded job opportunities for young women and political power -- the country's prime minister and opposition-party leader are both women -- have been critical to the country's stability.

"It is our policy to bring women into the mainstream, into the work force," Mr. Khan said in a luncheon interview with editors and reporters at The Washington Times.

"It amounts to a silent social revolution for us," he said. "We could not send our women back to the kitchen now if we wanted, because without economic opportunity, they become a target for extremists. Extremism flourishes in poverty."

Well, no. Still, I appreciate his other remarks.

It may have been an honor killing. Shaima Rezayee update, from the Christian Science Monitor, with thanks to EPG:

Staff at a controversial TV station in Kabul are taking extra security precautions in the wake of a killing last Wednesday of a former colleague who was shot dead in her Kabul home.

Shaima Rezayee had worked for Tolo TV before being dismissed two months ago amid complaints by conservatives over her on-air demeanor. In a departure from the public personae of many Afghan women, Ms. Rezayee adopted Western-style dress and chatted with male counterparts as a veejay for a music-video program named "Hop."

A council of religious scholars criticized Tolo and other broadcasters this spring for airing "programs opposed to Islam and national values."

Police are still investigating Rezayee's death, but they have told reporters that the young woman's brothers may have been involved. In Afghanistan and other conservative societies, women may face violence at the hands of male relatives over perceived affronts to family "honor."

Global protest update. "Extremist Islamic groups behind unrest over Newsweek story," from WND, with thanks to EPG:

Despite Newsweek's retraction of its Quran-in-the-toilet story, plans are proceeding for a global anti-American protest Friday involving leading Islamic organizations.

Since the story broke, evidence shows that supporters of Osama bin Laden and the Taliban have been at the forefront of fomenting the protests around the world, and they are continuing to do so.

Jihad Watch director Robert Spencer in FrontPage today:

Robert Redford and Paul Newman aren’t in on it this time, but The Sting has become a key weapon in stateside anti-terror efforts. Last week a 68-year-old Pennsylvania man named Ronald A. Grecula went to Houston for a meeting. He told the men he had arranged to meet there that he had “no loyalty for America.” Blaming the U.S. government for his losing a custody battle for his children, Grecula was prepared to build a bomb and sell it to Al-Qaeda for use in the United States.

But Grecula’s Houston meeting didn’t go entirely as planned: the men he met were undercover FBI agents, and Grecula is now under arrest.

Last August, Yassin M. Aref, imam at the Masjid Al-Salam in Albany, New York, was arrested along with one of the mosque’s leaders, Mohammed Hossain. They were allegedly involved in a money-laundering scheme connected to a plot to kill Pakistan’s Ambassador to the United Nations with a shoulder-fired missile. But like Grecula, they were dealing with FBI agents, and are now awaiting trial.

Two months later in Nashville, Tennessee, an Iraqi named Ahmed Hassan Al-Uqaily, who had spoken to a friend about “going jihad” and planning to “blow something up,” took $1,000 out of the bank to buy weapons. According to a Justice Department press release, Al-Uqaily made inquiries about buying “four grenades and two handguns….Al-Uqaily told the individual he wanted two or three machine guns with clips and bullets, as well as ‘missiles.’ After discussing prices for the weapons, Al-Uqaily allegedly expressed an interest in a missile designed for use against a tank.”

But this again was a sting, although Al-Uqaily claimed that he himself was working on a “reverse sting.”

In January 2005, federal agents cooperated with Nicaraguan officials in a sting operation that headed off the sale in Managua of SA-7 shoulder-fired missiles that could have been used to bring down commercial airliners. Another sting led to the August 2003 arrest of Hemant Lakhani, who got caught trying to do the same thing: sell missiles to jihad terrorists. Lakhani is now 69 and awaiting trial in New Jersey, although his severe ill health — he has undergone three operations this year alone — may make a trial impossible. And in March 2004, Ilyas Ali, an American citizen, and Muhamed Abid Afridi, a Pakistani, pleaded guilty to plotting to sell Stinger anti-aircraft missiles to Al-Qaeda and the Taliban. They too were dealing with undercover agents.

Six separate cases, six successful sting operations. It is reassuring to see the feds doing their jobs well, preventing the names of Ahmed Hassan Al-Uqaily, Hemant Lakhani, Ronald A. Grecula and the rest from joining those of Muhammad Atta and Abdulaziz Alomari in murderous infamy. It seems as if whenever a would-be jihad terrorist wants to plot large-scale mayhem in the United States, he runs into an FBI agent. If agents are really as thick on the ground as they seem to be from the frequency of these stings, the day will come when one agent will attempt to buy shoulder-fired missiles from another agent, with nary a genuine jihadist in the room.

But of course each of these cases also suggests that a day may come in which jihad terrorists actually succeed in buying shoulder-fired missiles, with nary an FBI agent around, and bring down aircraft with them. They emphasize that there is an unknown number of Muslims in America who are actively plotting the deaths of Americans and the destruction of American institutions -- despite the blanket denials of groups like the Council on American Islamic Relations and the willful silence of media outlets anxious to appease those groups. Media attention tends to focus not on the presence of Muslims with violent jihadist sympathies in the United States, but on the discomfort and pain that law enforcement operations cause for American Muslims.

Unless all these men caught in stings have been framed — as some of their defenders have claimed — their arrests are evidence that that focus is misplaced. After all, virtually every day the news brings us more curious little details: in September 2004, a man arrested by American authorities was found to have a computer disc containing a crisis management plan for the San Diego Unified School District. In late April 2005, firefighters conducting a routine inspection in a Brooklyn supermarket found 200 automobile airbags and a room lined with posters of Osama bin Laden and beheadings in Iraq. An element in the airbags can be used to make pipe bombs. That same week a 19-year-old resident of New York State, Mark Robert Walker, pleaded guilty to charges of trying to aid a terrorist organization. According to the Rochester Democrat & Chronicle, “prosecutors determined Walker, who also used the name ‘Abduallah,’ was an administrator of an Islamic Web site that supported the terrorist group Al-Ittihad Al-Isiami.” One official remarked that Walker seemed “like a lost guy who got obsessed with jihad.”

As long as there continue to be young men in the United States who are “obsessed with jihad,” we can all be grateful that the sting operations seem to be going so well. What would complement them perfectly at this point would be a searching and honest public debate about what has made them necessary: what makes young men “obsessed with jihad” in the first place. Only then can we afford to be confident that officials are dealing with the cause, and not just the symptoms, of our present troubles.

A Let-Them-Into-The-EU Alert from Alyssa A. Lappen in FrontPage:

For 50 years, historians, diplomats and state department officials have touted Mustafa Kemal Ataturk as a great secular leader in a predominantly Muslim region, whose policies modernized and democratized Turkey, shaping it into a Western-style state. But Ataturk was western only insofar as he implemented the Turkification of Gobineau, wherein he substituted the Turks for the Aryans, whose ideology had terrible results in the rise of European Nazism. Regardless, in 1955, barely 17 years after the dictator's death, a little-known pogrom, driven primarily by Islamic fanaticism, targeted the Greek population of Istanbul, with the intent of driving non-Muslims from Turkey.

From 1950 to 1960 Turkey experienced a profound reawakening of Islam, which the government and Demokrat Parti (DP) of Prime Minister Adnan Menderes both exploited and encouraged. Today, the policies Turkey set in motion in that pogrom remain in sway.

According to Speros Vryonis Jr.'s landmark new study, The Mechanism of Catastrophe, the September 1955 government-orchestrated pogrom against the Greek Orthodox community “included the systematic destruction of the majority of its churches,” monasteries and cemeteries. Published this month by Greekworks.com, the work subtitled The Turkish Pogrom of September 6-7, 1955, and the Destruction of the Greek Community of Istanbul shows that riots which destroyed 4,500 Greek homes, 3,500 businesses, 90 religious institutions and 36 schools in 45 distinct communities, resulted not only from “fervid chauvinism, or even [from] the economic resentment of many impoverished rioters, but [from] the profound religious fanaticism in many segments of Turkish society.”

American, British and Greek diplomats all agreed that the violence was “indicative of religious fanaticism,” a fact with which even some Turkish commentators concurred.

Read it all.

From John Conyers' Website, with thanks to KAOSKTRL.

Text of My Resolution Regarding Relgious [sic] Intolerance

[Conyers says]I received a large number of comments, and quite a spirited debate, concerning my resolution opposing religious intolerance, including desecration of the Quran. I appreciate all of the comments, both those supporting and opposing my actions. I continue to believe that given recent events, it is worthwhile for the Congress to actually express its support for the freedom of religion. The resolution was drafted to oppose all religious intolerance. To the extent it mentions the Quran and Islam specifically, that is obviously to respond to those who believe our nation would tolerate disrespect of that religion or its holy book. Clearly we should not, at least in my opinion.

Anyway, below in the extended entry is the full text of H. Res. 288. I hope you agree that read in its totality, it is a fair and appropriate resolution.

Expressing the sense of the House of Representatives condemning bigotry and religious intolerance, and recognizing that holy books of every religion should be treated with dignity and respect.

Whereas believers of all religions, including the Abrahamic faiths of Christianity, Judaism and Islam, should be treated with respect and dignity;

Whereas the word Islam comes from the Arabic root word meaning “peace” and “submission”;

Whereas there are an estimated 7,000,000 Muslims in America, from a wide variety of ethnic backgrounds, forming an integral part of the social fabric of America;

Whereas the Quran is the holy book for Muslims who recite passages from it in prayer and learn valuable lessons about peace, humanity and spirituality;
Whereas it should never be official policy of the United States Government to disparage the Quran, Islam, or any religion in any way, shape, or form;

Whereas mistreatment of prisoners and disrespect toward the holy book of any religion is unacceptable and against civilized humanity;

Whereas the infringement of an individual’s right to freedom of religion violates the Constitution and laws of the United States: Now, therefore, be it

1 Resolved, That the House of Representatives–

(1) condemns bigotry, acts of violence, and intolerance against any religious group, including our friends, neighbors, and citizens of the Islamic faith;

(2) declares that the civil rights and civil liberties of all individuals, including those of the Islamic faith, should be protected;

(3) recognizes that the Quran, the holy book of Islam, as any other holy book of any religion, should be treated with dignity and respect; and

(4) calls upon local, State, and Federal authorities to work to prevent bias-motivated crimes and acts against all individuals, including those of the Islamic faith.

From the North Carolina News & Observer, with thanks to disillusioned german.

CHARLOTTE, N.C. - The pastor of a small Baptist church has refused calls to take down a sign posted in front of his church reading "The Koran needs to be flushed," saying Tuesday he has nothing to apologize for.

"My creed is the Bible, which tells me I am supposed to stand up and defend my faith," said the Rev. Creighton Lovelace, pastor of the 55-member Danieltown Baptist Church in Forest City. "I don't hate Muslims, I just hate their false doctrines."

But the Council on American-Islamic Relations, based in Washington, D.C., called on Americans of all faiths to demand the message displayed outside the church be removed.

"Christians often ask themselves, 'What would Jesus do?'" said the group's spokesman, Ibrahim Hooper. "I don't think Jesus, who is loved by Muslims and mentioned frequently in the Quran, would use such hate-filled and divisive rhetoric."...

Lovelace said he knew before he put up the sign that some people would disagree with its message.

"I expected some people would be offended, just as if someone put up a sign that said the Bible should be flushed," he said. "That would offend me as a Christian.

"This is America and we have the freedom of the press, so I have the right to put up this sign."...

Lovelace said he does not believe he is being intolerant.

"We are all told to be tolerant," he said. "You can be tolerant of other people, but that doesn't mean you have to accept anything that teaches against what is in the Bible."

From the BBC, with thanks to all who sent this in.

Controversial Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci is to face trial for allegedly insulting the Muslim faith in her latest book, a court in Italy says.

Ms Fallaci is being sued by the head of the Muslim Union of Italy, who says The Force of Reason is defamatory.

The journalist caused an uproar with The Rage and the Pride, published two weeks after the 11 September attacks.

In it, she said Western culture was superior to Islam and Muslim immigrants in the West had "multiplied like rats".

Her lawyers have defended her right to express controversial opinions.

"At the heart of her thinking is the following reasoning: the fight against Islamic terrorism is made more difficult by intellectual terrorism cloaked in anti-racism," Gilles Goldhagen, said in 2002, when a French judge was hearing a case to ban The Rage and the Pride.

The Force of Reason is said to have gone to print about 24 hours after the 11 March 2004 train bombings in Spain.

In it, Ms Fallaci argues that Europe is turning into "an Islamic province, an Islamic colony" and that "to believe that a good Islam and a bad Islam exist goes against all reason"...

Ms Fallaci, who lives in New York, was a Resistance fighter in World War II and a former war correspondent.

From IslamOnline, "Special Ward, Halal Food for Muslims in German Hospital," with thanks to Two Stellas.

BERLIN – In an unprecedented step in the European country, a German hospital has set up a special ward for its Muslim patients to be treated by an all-Muslim medical team.

Betra hospital in the northwestern city of Hannover also intends to provide a prayer hall for the Muslim patients, the Islamic association Milli Gorus reported Tuesday, May 24, on its Web site.

"We are to respect the Muslims' cultural values and understand their traditions," said Dr. Axel Düsenberg.

To guarantee the success of the experiment, the hospital has hired an entire team of Muslim doctors and nurses.

"It is very important to get acquainted with the Islamic culture and talk to the Muslim patients in their own language, especially those who don't speak German, to guarantee accurate diagnoses," said Düsenberg.

Atela Telas, a Muslim doctor, said many Muslim patients are not comfortable receiving treatment at "ordinary" hospitals.

"Their poor language skills stand in the way of dealing with German-speaking doctors," he noted...

It's not that we're doubting you, Dr. Telas, but do you really think poor language skills is what this is about? You don't think it could have anything to do with Muslims thinking German doctors are "unclean" do you? We were just wondering.

There are some 3.4 million Muslims in the country, including 220,000 in Berlin alone.

Pentagon and U.S. intelligence officials question authenticity, from CNN.

Abu Musab al-Zarqawi -- the Jordanian-born insurgent leader in Iraq -- has been wounded, several Islamist militant Web sites reported Tuesday.

The message could not be independently verified.

In Washington one Pentagon official with access to military intelligence said, "We have no information that would confirm that he has been wounded or injured." The official added, "Nor have we seen anything that says he hasn't been. We just don't know."

Some Pentagon and U.S military officials find the claim doubtful, saying similar rumors in the past have never been confirmed.

The latest message is attributed to militant Abu Maysara al-Iraqi, who has posted messages from al Qaeda in Iraq before.

It said that al-Zarqawi's comrades are very proud of what they described as his heroic wounds. The message also threatened that the "resistance will get tougher" as U.S.-led attacks on insurgents intensify.

The message also asks for "prayers for our leader."

The author "doesn't go into the seriousness of the injuries," said Octavia Nasr, CNN's senior editor for Arab affairs, who analyzed the posting.

"He asks the brothers, as he calls them, to pray for his health and to pray that God will protect him. He does also say that they see this injury as an honor, a mark of honor and there was a little threat there in that message, threatening what they call the enemy -- that is, of course, the U.S. forces.

"If indeed there is an injury, the injury is serious enough for the group to be inclined to announce it publicly so that in case of death, it won't be a total shock."

The message "could be just a prelude to announcing something even more serious," Nasr said.

While the statement is similar to previous messages from al-Zarqawi's group, it doesn't bear the group's logo...

They have a logo?

From AKI, EGYPT: SUNNI AUTHORITY PLANS TV CHANNEL TO PROMOTE ISLAM, with thanks to Skeet Street.

Cairo - The most authoritative Sunni Muslim academic body, the al-Azhar University, is planning to launch a satellite TV channel with the aim of countering "anti-Islam onslaughts" and fighting "radical Islamic thoughts" broadcast on other Arabic satellite channels. The project was recently approved by the Islamic Research Academy (IRA), the highest authority at the al-Azhar University, the Saudi newspaper Arab News reports.

The channel was first proposed a year ago, but lack of funding proved a problem, and earlier this year the Egyptian information ministry turned down another request for a religious satellite channel, or even to allocate airtime on Egyptian television to defend Islam. However, the man behind the plan, academy committee member Abdel Rahman al-Adawi, says it has become their religious duty to launch the channel, following recent media attacks on Islam, the Koran, and the Prophet Muhammad's sayings and teachings.

"The academy's follow-up committee was alerted to this danger and realised that we should stop any attempt to demean the image of Islam and Prophet Muhammad," Sadawi said. "Part of our campaign is to counter a colonial war against Muslims and their faith."

He stresses, however, that the channel would not attack other people or groups, saying, "We will carry out what Islam preaches, which is to embrace other religions."..

Stockholm wants persecuted family to return to war-torn Africa
From WND, with thanks to EPG.

SWEDEN – Members of a Sudanese Christian family now living in hiding in Sweden say they have been told to leave the country and return to Sudan or Nigeria where they could face death.

The history of Sudan, embroiled in civil war, is long and complicated. Over simplistically, Northern Sudan is Islamic and Southern Sudan is Christian. However, also practiced are a variety of traditional African religions.

In an e-mail interview, Sara told the story of her attempted flight to freedom, along with husband David (first names only used for protection) and their baby daughter.

Meeting Jesus in a dream

Sara said she is from Khartoum in North Sudan. She met Christ in Bombay, India, where she was attending university and pursuing a degree in zoology. During that time, Sara had a reoccurring dream in which she heard a voice saying to her, "You must be born again."

Sara told her roommate Gloria, who said she needed to go see a pastor and have him pray for her. While Sara initially rejected that advice, she continued intermittently to have the same dream. However, one night the dream increased in intensity.

"(A) man wearing white came to me in my dream and said to me, 'follow Me.' He introduced me to some people. All of them were all wearing white and I never recognized anybody there. As I was entering the gathering, I removed my scarf which I has been wearing all my life. After the gathering a prayer was (said for me), and (the man) asked me to go and tell my friends that Jesus Christ is the Savior, and He is the only way, the life and the truth. 'Go,' He said, 'you must be born again.'"...

Read it all.

From CNS News, with thanks to EPG.

A U.S.-based think tank critical of the Saudi government has added its voice to allegations that authorities in the kingdom routinely destroy Bibles.

"As a matter of official policy, the government either incinerates or dumps Bibles, crosses and other Christian paraphernalia," the Saudi Institute said in an article posted on its website.

"Although considered as holy in Islam and mentioned in the Koran dozens of times, the Bible is banned in Saudi Arabia, and is confiscated and destroyed by government officials," it said.

Last week a Christian pastor who worked in Saudi Arabia during the 1990s told Cybercast News Service it was widely known among underground Christians there that Bibles were confiscated -- and sometimes shredded -- by Saudi customs officials at ports of entry.

The Saudi Embassy in Washington has yet to respond to emailed queries about its policies regarding the Bibles and the shredding allegations.

Saudi Arabia was one of the first governments to protest after Newsweek reported earlier this month that U.S. troops had thrown a Koran into a toilet to fluster Muslim terror suspects being detained by the U.S. military at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba.

A statement issued on May 12 said the Saudi government was "following with great concern and apprehension reports that the sanctity of the Holy Koran has been violated on several occasions at Guantanamo Bay."..

Alec Rawls at the Error Theory blogspot has pointed out to me an appalling example of academic dhimmitude. I don't agree with his point about using "Koran" rather than "Qur'an," as I prefer the more accurate Arabic transliteration. However, what he reveals about the Columbia Encyclopedia is astonishing:

Want to see a truly sick example of al-Newsweek-like dhimmitude? Infoseek's Koran entry describes the Koran as: "Revealed by God to the Prophet Muhammad..." It does not say: "Believed by Muslims to be revealed by God." It says "Revealed by God." What dirtbags. I don't care if they are true-believing fundamentalist Muslims. This is an encyclopedia entry, borrowed from The Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia, 6th ed., 2005, Columbia University Press. It is supposed to state facts. The fact is that Muslims believe that the Koran is the word of God. It is NOT a fact that the Koran IS the word of God. Anyone who confuses these two is moral trash, which explains a lot about our Islamist enemy, but what explains Columbia University?

Let's see what Infoseek/Columbia says about the Bible. Ah, this is better. The first line reads:

The traditional Christian view of the Bible is that it was written under the guidance of God and that it therefore conveys truth, either literally or figuratively.

Al-Arian walk watch. From AP, with thanks to Teri:

A federal judge Monday denied a request by Sami Al-Arian to move his terrorist financing trial out of Florida, where defense attorneys say they fear jurors might have been tainted by publicity and politics.

U.S. District Judge James Moody said the pleadings by Al-Arian and co-defendant Hatim Naji Fariz did not convince him that jurors wou