December 2005 Archives

The end of 2005 also spells the end for any ceasefire agreement with Israel, at least in the eyes of Palestinian terrorist group Islamic Jihad. From the Associated Press:

The Islamic Jihad and several armed groups with ties to the ruling Fatah movement said Saturday they won't necessarily observe a truce with Israel in 2006.

The limited cease-fire, negotiated in March, expires Saturday, and Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas and Egyptian mediators are trying to win an extension. Hamas has largely stuck to the agreement, as part of what has been portrayed as Hamas' gradual transformation into a political party.

The smaller Islamic Jihad never laid down its arms and carried out a series of suicide bombings and other attacks against Israel in recent months. Islamic Jihad claimed it was committed to the truce in 2005, and that the attacks were retaliation for perceived Israeli truce violations.

In a statement Saturday, Islamic Jihad said: "We reaffirm that the official end of the truce agreed to in Cairo last March comes at midnight on Saturday." It was not clear whether the group would participate in talks on extending the cease-fire.

Interesting to note that Islamic Jihad -- an organization which is substantially supported by Iran -- rather than Hamas is leading the effort to sabotage any sort of ceasefire negotiations with Israel.

Looks like the fears of increased jihadist violence against Indonesian Christians during the holiday season were warranted, according to the Associated Press:

A bomb ripped through a crowded meat market Saturday in an Indonesian province that has been plagued by sectarian violence, killing at least eight people and wounding 45, officials said. Many of the victims were believed to be Christians.

The attack occurred in the town of Palu on Sulawesi island as people were preparing for New Year's Eve celebrations, flocking to the morning market that sold and slaughtered pigs, said Brig. Gen. Oegroseno, police chief of Central Sulawesi province.

The bomb appeared to be a homemade device, he said, loaded with ball bearings and nails to maximize the number casualties.

"The explosion was so loud, I couldn't hear for a couple of seconds," said Tega, a resident who lives nearby and uses only one name, like many Indonesians. "I ran out of my house and saw bodies lying around."

Jihad Watch Board Vice President Hugh Fitzgerald reflects on the exclamations of surprise with which both Muslims and dhimmis generally greet the arrest of a Muslim on terror charges, and explores some of their implications:

Virtually every time a Muslim terrorist is arrested we hear it: “He was a quiet, soft-spoken young man….He was a normal young kid like all his peers...A normal kid, very polite but secluded. He didn’t mingle much with people...We never felt that or noticed any changes in his attitude."

Terrorists, in murdering Infidels, do not necessarily start out as fire-breathers. They may, in outward aspect, seem to be just like any "normal young kid." But that "normal young kid" is a normal young Muslim kid -- and that makes all the difference.

Indeed, they need not have been concealing, all this time, a particularly fervent and murderous faith at all -- as some have implied. That could happen. It is even possible that rising high in various Western governments are Muslim moles, concealing their real feelings until such time as they are able to exploit their positions, or perhaps even now exploiting them. But there is a much larger problem. It is not the fervent Muslim who is hiding his fervency. It is the Muslim who is not fervent, but for whom changes in his personal life transform the merely observant into the fanatic and the protector or supporter of killers, or even a killer himself.

The former President of Indonesia, Abdurrahman Wahid, has published a piece in the Wall Street Journal entitled "Right Islam vs. Wrong Islam: Muslims and non-Muslims must unite to defeat the Wahhabi ideology.

Many, many people sent to me in the course of the day yesterday, asking me to comment; but really, it contains nothing new. It is just more of the kind of analysis we have seen by the bushel since 9/11: Islam is a religion of tolerance and peace, and the big bad Wahhabis are hijacking it into something else. But as I show in my book The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (and the Crusades), the Wahhabis are neither the originators nor the sole proprieters of the ideology of conquest and supremacism that is Islamic jihad. Certainly they are its most powerful and energetic exponents today, but if anyone thinks the problems that the Islamic world has with non-Muslims would vanish if the Wahhabis somehow disappeared is just whistling in the dark. Even a cursory glance at Iranian Shi'ism should establish that.

Wahid says:

It is time for people of good will from every faith and nation to recognize that a terrible danger threatens humanity. We cannot afford to continue "business as usual" in the face of this existential threat. Rather, we must set aside our international and partisan bickering, and join to confront the danger that lies before us.

Agreed.

An extreme and perverse ideology in the minds of fanatics is what directly threatens us (specifically, Wahhabi/Salafi ideology--a minority fundamentalist religious cult fueled by petrodollars). Yet underlying, enabling and exacerbating this threat of religious extremism is a global crisis of misunderstanding.

Pretty much the only thing that distinguishes the jihad theology of the Wahhabi/Salafi "minority fundamentalist religious cult" from the jihad theology of all the eight schools of Islamic law (madhahib) is that the Wahhabis are much more willing than the traditional schools to declare other Muslims to be unbelievers and wage jihad against them. The teachings about offering unbelievers conversion, subjugation or death are not significantly different.

All too many Muslims fail to grasp Islam, which teaches one to be lenient towards others and to understand their value systems, knowing that these are tolerated by Islam as a religion. The essence of Islam is encapsulated in the words of the Quran, "For you, your religion; for me, my religion." That is the essence of tolerance. Religious fanatics--either purposely or out of ignorance--pervert Islam into a dogma of intolerance, hatred and bloodshed. They justify their brutality with slogans such as "Islam is above everything else." They seek to intimidate and subdue anyone who does not share their extremist views, regardless of nationality or religion. While a few are quick to shed blood themselves, countless millions of others sympathize with their violent actions, or join in the complicity of silence.

"For you, your religion; for me, my religion" is from Sura 109 of the Qur'an. Muslim scholars consider it an early Meccan sura. Traditional Islamic theology has held for centuries that on points of disagreement the later Medinan suras take precedence over the early Meccan ones -- and in what most Muslim authorities consider to be the last sura of all, Surat At-Tawba (sura 9), we find the "Ayat as-Seif" (Verse of the Sword, verse 5) and the call to wage war against Jews and Christians until they submit as inferiors under Islamic rule (verse 29). The idea that sura 109 must be understood in light of this material was not invented by Wahhabis: it is taught by the great medieval Qur'an commentator Ibn Kathir; by As-Suyuti, another revered commentator, and by many others.

Does Wahid not know all this, or does he just hope we don't? The jihadists have a coherent, developed, and traditionally-based theology explaining why they take sura 9 over 109. Does Wahid have a coherent theology explaining why Muslims should take 109 over 9 and leave non-believers in peace? If he does, he should share it with the world, which needs it desperately. But he gives no hint of it in the Wall Street Journal.

This crisis of misunderstanding--of Islam by Muslims themselves--is compounded by the failure of governments, people of other faiths, and the majority of well-intentioned Muslims to resist, isolate and discredit this dangerous ideology. The crisis thus afflicts Muslims and non-Muslims alike, with tragic consequences. Failure to understand the true nature of Islam permits the continued radicalization of Muslims world-wide, while blinding the rest of humanity to a solution which hides in plain sight.

Great. Then let's see you do it. Let's see you fight among Muslims what you call the Wahhabi theology, and teach that Muslims and non-Muslims should live together as equals in peace.

The most effective way to overcome Islamist extremism is to explain what Islam truly is to Muslims and non-Muslims alike. Without that explanation, people will tend to accept the unrefuted extremist view--further radicalizing Muslims, and turning the rest of the world against Islam itself.

Unrefuted is right.

Accomplishing this task will be neither quick nor easy. In recent decades, Wahhabi/Salafi ideology has made substantial inroads throughout the Muslim world. Islamic fundamentalism has become a well-financed, multifaceted global movement that operates like a juggernaut in much of the developing world, and even among immigrant Muslim communities in the West. To neutralize the virulent ideology that underlies fundamentalist terrorism and threatens the very foundations of modern civilization, we must identify its advocates, understand their goals and strategies, evaluate their strengths and weaknesses, and effectively counter their every move. What we are talking about is nothing less than a global struggle for the soul of Islam.

Yes, we are. And bland platitudes is all we have gotten so far. Much, much more is needed.

The Sunni (as opposed to Shiite) fundamentalists' goals generally include: claiming to restore the perfection of the early Islam practiced by Muhammad and his companions, who are known in Arabic as al-Salaf al-Salih, "the Righteous Ancestors"; establishing a utopian society based on these Salafi principles, by imposing their interpretation of Islamic law on all members of society; annihilating local variants of Islam in the name of authenticity and purity; transforming Islam from a personal faith into an authoritarian political system; establishing a pan-Islamic caliphate governed according to the strict tenets of Salafi Islam, and often conceived as stretching from Morocco to Indonesia and the Philippines; and, ultimately, bringing the entire world under the sway of their extremist ideology.

This is the kind of thing that makes me suspicious. "Transforming Islam from a personal faith into an authoritarian political system"? But Islam has never been a personal faith as opposed to a political system. It has always had a political dimension, and has never accepted the sacred/secular distinction. This kind of thing makes me wonder if Wahid is just engaging in the same kind of deceptive analysis we have seen so much of already. And another thing: Morocco to Indonesia and the Philippines? What about Spain and Western Europe? And the U.S.A.? The jihadists have made clear their global intentions. Why not speak plainly about this?

Fundamentalist strategy is often simple as well as brilliant. Extremists are quick to drape themselves in the mantle of Islam and declare their opponents kafir, or infidels, and thus smooth the way for slaughtering nonfundamentalist Muslims. Their theology rests upon a simplistic, literal and highly selective reading of the Quran and Sunnah (prophetic traditions), through which they seek to entrap the world-wide Muslim community in the confines of their narrow ideological grasp. Expansionist by nature, most fundamentalist groups constantly probe for weakness and an opportunity to strike, at any time or place, to further their authoritarian goals.

Fine. Show us, please, instead of telling us, as we have already heard so many times, exactly how Wahhabi theology is based on a "simplistic, literal and highly selective reading of the Quran and Sunnah." If you could just explain this once, with honest, straightforward reference to Islamic history and theology, it would go so far to dispelling suspicion and making people of good will really open to working with you.

Those who seek to promote a peaceful and tolerant understanding of Islam must overcome the paralyzing effects of inertia, and harness a number of actual or potential strengths, which can play a key role in neutralizing fundamentalist ideology. These strengths not only are assets in the struggle with religious extremism, but in their mirror form they point to the weakness at the heart of fundamentalist ideology. They are:

1) Human dignity, which demands freedom of conscience and rejects the forced imposition of religious views;

And yet, Mr. Wahid, the denial of freedom of conscience goes back to Muhammad's Baddala deenahu, faqtuluhu -- If anyone changes his religion, kill him (cf. Bukhari vol. 9, bk. 84, no. 57) and the death penalty for apostates is still taught by non-Wahhabi Muslim theologians. Please explain how you intend to overcome the influence of this.

2) the ability to mobilize immense resources to bring to bear on this problem, once it is identified and a global commitment is made to solve it; 3) the ability to leverage resources by supporting individuals and organizations that truly embrace a peaceful and tolerant Islam; 4) nearly 1,400 years of Islamic traditions and spirituality, which are inimical to fundamentalist ideology;

That needs to be spelled out, if true -- and there is a good deal of evidence that it isn't true.

5) appeals to local and national--as well as Islamic--culture/traditions/pride; 6) the power of the feminine spirit, and the fact that half of humanity consists of women, who have an inherent stake in the outcome of this struggle;

Please explain also Mr. Wahid how you intend to overcome this. The Qur'an, after all:

1. Likens a woman to a field (tilth), to be used by a man as he wills: "Your women are a tilth for you (to cultivate) so go to your tilth as ye will" (2:223);
2. Declares that a woman's testimony is worth half that of a man: "Get two witnesses, out of your own men, and if there are not two men, then a man and two women, such as ye choose, for witnesses, so that if one of them errs, the other can remind her" (2:282);
3. Allows men to marry up to four wives, and have sex with slave girls also: "If ye fear that ye shall not be able to deal justly with the orphans, marry women of your choice, two or three or four; but if ye fear that ye shall not be able to deal justly (with them), then only one, or (a captive) that your right hands possess, that will be more suitable, to prevent you from doing injustice" (4:3);
4. Rules that a son's inheritance should be twice the size of that of a daughter: "Allah (thus) directs you as regards your children's (inheritance): to the male, a portion equal to that of two females" (4:11);
5. Tells husbands to beat their disobedient wives: "Men are in charge of women, because Allah hath made the one of them to excel the other, and because they spend of their property (for the support of women). So good women are the obedient, guarding in secret that which Allah hath guarded. As for those from whom ye fear rebellion, admonish them and banish them to beds apart, and scourge them" (4:34).

What was that again about the power of the feminine spirit?

I am not saying that Wahid is trying to deceive us. But if he isn't, he needs to address the obvious gaping holes in his analysis and recommendations. And the world at large needs to know about those gaping holes. The Wall Street Journal should have known better than to publish this shallow and misleading piece -- but everyone is so hungry these days for the soothing syrup of Islamic moderation and reason that they will swallow any kind of trumped-up counterfeit without a second thought.

Quisling Search Alert. I hope they are squirming at the New Duranty Times, which has begun to cross the line from ignoring the global jihad (a la Walter "What Ukrainian Famine?" Duranty) to abetting it. From AP, with thanks to Richard:

WASHINGTON - The Justice Department has opened another investigation into leaks of classified information, this time to determine who divulged the existence of President Bush's secret domestic spying program.

The inquiry focuses on disclosures to The New York Times about warrantless surveillance conducted by the National Security Agency since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, officials said.

The newspaper recently revealed the existence of the program in a front-page story that also acknowledged that the news had been withheld from publication for a year, partly at the request of the administration and partly because the newspaper wanted more time to confirm various aspects of the program.

White House spokesman Trent Duffy said Justice undertook the action on its own, and Bush was informed of it Friday.

"The leaking of classified information is a serious issue. The fact is that al-Qaida's playbook is not printed on Page One and when America's is, it has serious ramifications," Duffy told reporters in Crawford, Texas, where Bush was spending the holidays.

Catherine Mathis, a spokeswoman for the Times, declined to comment.

Anti-dhimmitude in Germany. The uproar, as you can see from the end of the article, has already begun. But there is nothing wrong with this idea. Why must non-Muslim Westerners continue to assume that Muslim immigrants and Muslim populations in the West are completely loyal and accept Western values, when evidence continues to mount to the contrary in so many countries? From the Telegraph, with thanks to Don:

Muslims intent on becoming German citizens will have to undergo a rigorous cultural test to gauge their views on subjects ranging from bigamy to homosexuality.

Believed to be the first test of its kind in Europe, the southern state of Baden-Württemberg has created the two-hour oral exam to test the loyalty of Muslims towards Germany.

It is to be taken on top of the standard test for foreigners wishing to become German citizens, which includes language proficiency skills and general knowledge.

It also requires applicants to prove that they can provide for themselves and their families.

But there is one drawback: you get eight free years in Germany before you have to take the test.

Those applying must also have resided in Germany for the previous eight years and have no criminal record....

The 30 questions, which have been set by a special commission, range from sexual equality to school sports and are meant to trigger a more detailed discussion between the applicants and officials.

Until now, all applicants have simply had to tick a Yes or No box to answer whether they felt loyalty to Germany.

But now they will be quizzed on their attitudes to homosexuality and western clothing for young women, and whether husbands should be allowed to beat their wives.

Other questions covering topics such as bigamy and whether parents should allow their children to participate in school sports have been called "trick questions", meant to catch people off guard.

The state interior ministry said the test would be used to filter out Muslims who were unsuited for life in Germany. Those who answered "correctly" but later acted against expected behaviour, such as wife-beating, could have their citizenship removed.

Critics say that the test is biased and discriminatory and that if Muslims are obliged to take it, so should all applicants for citizenship.

Brigitte Lösch, a leading member of the Green party in the Baden-Wurttemberg parliament, called for the oral exam to be dropped, arguing that it inferred from the outset that all Muslims were "violent per se" and unable to abide by German law.

"This list of questions is only to be used for applicants from Islamic countries. It is an unbelievable form of discrimination," she said. "If Germans were asked some of the questions, they would find it difficult to answer them."

The European Assembly of Turkish Academics rejected the questionnaire as "strongly discriminatory and racist" against Germany's three million-strong Muslim population, most of whom are Turkish.

Kerim Arpad, an assembly spokesman, said: "The test is shaped by stereotypes and damages integration."

But Dieter Biller, of the foreign ministry in Stuttgart, the state capital, said the test would help bureaucrats to form opinions as to whether citizenship applicants were suitable or not.

"It covers everything from sexual equality, violence, school sports and religious freedom," he said. "How the applicants stand on the question of the attacks of September 11 will also be a key question."

More holiday cheer in Indonesia: "Christians threatened with terror attack: Jihad group warns of 'same bomb blasts as Bali' New Year's Eve," from World Net Daily, with thanks to Cindy:

Police are on a high state of alert in a predominantly Christian province of East Timor, Indonesia, after an Islamic group threatened an attack on local churches to coincide with New Year's Eve celebrations.

According to Asia News, a cellphone text message received Wednesday by radio Timor Voice read: "On New Year Eve, 31 churches in [East Tenggara Timor's] capital of Kupang shall receive the same bomb blasts as Bali did last October. [Signed:] From the Jemaah Islamiiyah Chief of the eastern region, Jihad for the Great Prophet Muhammad."

Provincial Police Chief Robert Bellarminus Sadarum said the threat must be considered "a serious and imminent danger" for the whole Christian community.

But the local chapter of the Indonesian Ulemas Council strongly denied claims the terrorist group Jemaah Islamiiyah is operating in the province.

What are you going to believe? Me or your lying eyes?

Nevertheless, according to Asia News, security officials have deployed about 2,250 soldiers and police officers, and Sadarum said "tighter security will be imposed around churches on New Year Eve."

Yet people the world over still think their cause is the cause of justice and freedom from oppression. "Islamic Jihad claims Thursday's West Bank suicide bombing," from Haaretz, with thanks to Olivia:

The Islamic Jihad militant group claimed responsibility Friday for a suicide bombing in the West Bank that killed one soldier and two other Palestinians.

Islamic Jihad activists in the West Bank village of Atil, near Tul Karm, announced on loudspeakers that their bomber, Sohieb Ibrahim Yassin, 19, carried out Thursday's attack.

Army sources said the suicide bomber who killed an Israel Defense Forces officer and two Palestinians at an army checkpoint near Tul Karm Thursday was apparently planning to blow himself up at one of the many children's events taking place in Tel Aviv during this week's Hanukkah holiday.

Had the bomber not been stopped at the checkpoint, the attack would have been far more deadly, said the sources.

"No one wants to provoke Jews or Muslims, but it's totally OK to provoke Christians." Imagine the outcry if this were an Islamic symbol on these jeans -- demonstrations, riots, international furor, possibly even deaths. Moral equivalency alert from AP, with thanks to the Constantinopolitan Irredentist:

STOCKHOLM, Sweden - Cheap Monday jeans are a hot commodity among young Swedes thanks to their trendy tight fit and low price, even if a few buyers are turned off by the logo: a skull with a cross turned upside down on its forehead.

Logo designer Bjorn Atldax says he's not just trying for an antiestablishment vibe.

"It is an active statement against Christianity," Atldax told The Associated Press. "I'm not a Satanist myself, but I have a great dislike for organized religion."

The label's makers say it's more of a joke, but Atldax insists his graphic designs have a purpose beyond selling denim: to make young people question Christianity, a "force of evil" that he blames for sparking wars throughout history.

In more religious countries, that might raise a furious response, maybe even prompt retailers to drop the brand.

Not in Sweden, a secular country that cherishes its free speech and where churchgoing has been declining for decades.

Cheap Mondays are flying off the shelves at 400 kronor (about $50) a pair. Makers say about 200,000 pairs have been sold since March 2004 — and little attention has been paid to the grinning skull and dark texts such as "Over My Dead Body."

Even the predominant Lutheran Church of Sweden reacts with a shrug.

"I don't think it's much to be horrified about," said Bo Larsson, director of the Church of Sweden's department of Education, Research and Culture.

"It is abundantly clear that this designer wants to create public opinion against the Christian faith ... but I believe that the way to deal with this is to start a discussion about what religion means."

Out in the parishes, however, some Christians believe that approach is too soft.

"One cannot just keep quiet about this," said the Rev. Karl-Erik Nylund, vicar of St. Mary Magdalene Church in Stockholm. "This is a deliberate provocation (against Christians) and I object to that."

Nylund complained that Swedish companies do not treat Christianity with the same respect in marketing that they afford other religions.

"No one wants to provoke Jews or Muslims, but it's totally OK to provoke Christians," he said.

Some buyers have ripped off the Cheap Monday labels, or even returned the jeans once they realized what the logo represents. But such cases are very few, said Orjan Andersson, the creator of the brand, who doesn't take Atldax' message too seriously....

Cheap Mondays have started to sell abroad. The jeans are being shipped to Norway, Denmark, Britain, the Netherlands, France and Australia. Andersson said they're working on introducing them in the United States and elsewhere....

Japanese jihad update from Reuters, with thanks to the Constantinopolitan Irredentist:

TOKYO (Reuters) - A member of an Islamist extremist group banned in Pakistan entered Japan two years ago to try to establish a foothold in the country, a Japanese newspaper said on Friday.

Japanese police had warned this month that Islamist extremists may tempt Muslim communities in Japan to turn radical and attack Japan, whose government has been a staunch backer of the U.S.-led war on Iraq.

In a report that underscores such concerns, police learned from an informant that a member of Sipah-e-Sahaba Pakistan (SSP), a Sunni extremist group outlawed in Pakistan, had entered Japan to start an SSP branch, the Sankei newspaper said.

After checking immigration records, police found that a Pakistani man in his 30s had entered Japan in 2003 with a visa for religious activities and that he had told others while worshipping that he came to Japan to establish an SSP offshoot, the newspaper said.

Sipah-e-Sahaba Pakistan is one of seven militant groups that were outlawed by Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf after the September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States....

Tokyo police have arrested the 40-year-old Pakistani on suspicion of violating immigration laws, and are continuing surveillance activities to track down the SSP network in Japan, the newspaper said.

Japan, which has sent some 550 ground troops to Iraq on a reconstruction mission, has been on guard against possible attacks since being mentioned by members of Islamist militant group al Qaeda as a possible target.

Prior to Japan's deployment of troops to Samawa in southern Iraq, al Qaeda had reportedly threatened to "strike in the heart of Tokyo" if Japan sent troops to Iraq. Japan dispatched its main contingent of troops to Iraq in February 2004.

In May 2004, Japanese police arrested several foreigners in a probe into the activities of Lionel Dumont, a French national with links to al Qaeda who entered Japan on a false passport in 2002 and stayed for over a year.

There is no official data on the number of Muslims in Japan, but police sources have put the number around 90,000. They are mainly from Indonesia, Pakistan, India, Iran and Turkey, the sources said.

Jihad Watch Board Vice President Hugh Fitzgerald discusses the alliance between the Aryan Nations and the global jihad:

A few selections from the Aryan Nations website:

“There never was a holocaust I wish there were but unfortunately it's nothing but another jewish fable, a holohoax as we call it, used to extort money out of countries, companies and anyone who will listen to the poor crying jews!”

“we are NOT adherents of the christian cult and we do not call ourselves christians!”

“When speaking of Aryan Islam, I'm referring to the spiritual and intellectual movement of those idealistic Aryan youth who embrace the TRUE Islam of the Qur'an and Sunnah. They include those who join or support the honorable warriors of Islam, the Mujahideen. We are an increasing number and can't be dismissed as "race-traitors" or any other labels attached to us by those who don't practice the TRUE National Socialism of honor and nobility.”

“‘...a link is created between Islam and National-Socialism on an open, honest basis. It will be directed in terms of blood and race from the North, and in the ideological-spiritual sphere from the East.’ - Obergruppenführer Gottlob Berger; 1942”

“There is much information on the respect and cooperation that Adolf Hitler and others of the Third Reich had for Islam. This would be a good read for all those that claim to be National Socialists…”

“The jew is a parasite, an enemy of our Western Civilization.”

“Islam is our ally, and the 1500 cults all claiming to be “Christian” are our opposition…”

This is the most natural alliance in the world. In its emphasis on the collective, the umma, and indifference to individual autonomy, including the right to freedom of conscience, Islam has a good deal in common with Fascism.

The best article on this subject is that of Ibn Warraq, who takes an essay by Umberto Eco, in which the latter attempts to construct a description of Fascism. Ibn Warraq then applies each of the fourteen defining characteristics of Fascism to Islam, to see how well or ill those characteristics apply -- from an emphasis on a remote and largely imaginary past glory, to the division of the world between Believer and Infidel, to the need for a Final Triumph of former over latter.

In a free society, you have to be willing to accept criticism -- or you don't have a free society. More prophet cartoon fallout. If only Dick Tracy or Steve Canyon were here to save the day. Or better yet, Mr. Winston S. Churchill. From IslamOnline, with thanks to Panos:

CAIRO, December 29, 2005 (IslamOnline.net & News Agencies) – Arab foreign ministers on Thursday, December 29, lambasted the Danish government's reaction to the controversial anti-Prophet cartoons published by the country's mass-circulation daily.

"The ministers have expressed their surprise and indignation at the reaction of the Danish government, which was disappointing despite its political, economic and cultural ties with the Muslim world," they said in a statement cited by Agence France-Presse (AFP).

Gathered at the Arab League, the ministers decided that Arab League Secretary General Amr Mussa would pursue the matter with the Danish authorities.

Twenty-two former Danish ambassadors, including many who have served in Muslim countries, on Tuesday, December 20, bashed the government over its handling of the crisis.

Liberal Danish Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen has refused to meet eleven Copenhagen-based ambassadors from Muslim countries who wanted to complain about the cartoons and demand an official apology....

The Arab foreign ministers also criticized "European human rights organizations who did not adopt a clear-cut stance on the issue."

Al-Azhar, the highest seat of religious learning in the Sunni world, has vowed to raise the issue of the provocative caricatures with the UN and international human rights organizations.

A five-member delegation representing 21 Islamic centers and organizations in Denmark has recently met Moussa, Grand Imam of Al-Azhar Sheikh Mohammad Sayyed Tantawi and Egyptian Foreign Minister Ahmed Abul-Gheit.

"Support from Arab and Muslim countries will help our demand for an official apology from the Danish government and a promise such violations would not be repeated," Mohamed al-Khalid Samha, the delegation's spokesman, told IOL then.

Abdel Rahman Abu Laban, a prominent Muslim figure in Denmark, told IOL on Friday, November 18, that the Muslim minority in Denmark wants to "internationalize" the issue.

Denmark wants to internationalize the issue? My goodness, the chutzpah of all this never ceases to amaze me. It is the Muslim ambassadors who took this matter to the OIC and the UN. And now even that they blame on the Danes.

Israeli "oppression" alert: Knesset members freely and openly agitate for Israel's mortal enemies, without any reprisal or retribution at all. An update to this story from Israel National News, with thanks to Sr. Soph:

Arab MKs continued to arouse anti-Israeli support in Nazareth. Legislator Barakeh said a strong Syria will help divide Jerusalem. The crowd sang the Syrian national anthem. Israeli Knesset Members Mohammed Barakeh and Azmi Bishara, along with Moslem clerics, denounced the United States and Israel at a pro-Syrian rally in the Galilee city on Thursday.

Barakeh told the crowd of 500 Arabs and Druze, "A strong and resistant Syria will bring closer the day in which Jerusalem will become Palestine's capital."

The rally was the second time in two weeks that Arab MKs gathered in Nazareth. Bishara rallied crowds against Israel and called for a return to the 1947 Armistice Lines.

"I will never recognize Zionism even if all Arabs do," Bishara declared. He had spoken the day after returning from an illegal visit to Lebanon, where visitors without Interior Ministry permits are considered as having entered an enemy country... We are the original residents of Palestine, not those who came from Poland and Russia."

Barakeh addressed the Arab and Druze crowd, comparing the United States and Israel to a large and small spider, and accused the two nations of trying to create a crisis between Syria and Lebanon. "We can clearly see the cobwebs" of the spiders, he told the audience as it cheered and waved Palestinian Authority (PA) flags and pictures of Syrian president Hafez Assad.

Moslem cleric Sheikh Ra'ad Salah stated, "We are facing an American-British-Israeli monster that threatens to swallow us all."

I have pointed out for quite some time that in traditional Islamic theology, any land belonging to the Dar Al-Islam belongs to it by right forever. Thus jihadists believe they have a natural right not only to Israel but to Spain. Dr. Rachel Ehrenfeld has more evidence of this in FrontPage:

Spanish Foreign Minister Miguel Angel Moratinos’ efforts earlier this year to remove HAMAS from the European Union’s terrorist list, have done little to change HAMAS’ agenda. It is not only Palestine that children in the West Bank and Gaza are asked to liberate; now they are asked to liberate Seville. The HAMAS children’s magazine, Al-Fateh, in a recent issue, (No. 66), tells the children about the city called Asbilia (Seville) and calls on them to free it, together with the whole country, from the infidels and to reinstate Muslim rule.

This is how the magazine has the city Asbilia (Seville) telling its story to Hamas’ children: “Salaam Aleykum my dear beloved. I would like to introduce myself: I am the city Asbilia, the bride of the country Andalus (Spain). In the past I was the Capital of the Kingdom of Asbilia… the Arab Muslims, led by the hero-commander Musa bin Nusair, conquered me in 713, after a siege, which lasted one month.

The Russians continue to manifest their eagerness to help Iran, ignoring Iran's support for the Chechens and the fact that they could be sealing their own fate. From AFP, with thanks to JE:

TEHRAN: Iran is ready to study a Russian proposal for the Islamic republic to enrich uranium on Russian soil, a top national security official has said in Tehran's warmest reaction yet to the offer.

"The new Russian proposal can be studied so that its economic, technical and scientific aspects will be clear," Supreme National Security Council member Javad Vaidi told the ISNA news agency yesterday.

He said the Russian proposal was based on the establishment of a "joint Iran-Russia company on Russian soil" for the enrichment of uranium, a key component of the nuclear fuel cycle....

Iran's enrichment demands have proved controversial, because highly enriched uranium can be used in the explosive core of a nuclear bomb. Tehran rejects US accusations it has a nuclear weapons program....

Moscow's proposal attacks the key sticking point in talks between Iran and the EU over Iran's nuclear program.

Its proposal would allow Iran to enrich uranium outside the country in Russia, giving Iran access to the nuclear fuel cycle but providing a guarantee its nuclear program is peaceful.

Yeah, surrrrrre.

Sudanese jihad fallout in Egypt. From AP, with thanks to JE:

CAIRO, Egypt - Egyptian police turned water cannons on Sudanese war refugees and beat them with sticks Friday, brutally clearing out a squatters camp in a city park. At least 10 people were killed, the government said.

Hundreds of Sudanese have been living in the park since September to protest the U.N. refugee agency's refusal to consider them for refugee status. They want to be resettled in a third country, such as the United States or Britain, rather than go home after a peace deal ended the 21-year-long civil war in Sudan.

In Geneva, Switzerland, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, Antonio Guterres, expressed his shock and sadness over the violence and deaths.

"Although we still do not have all of the details or a clear picture of what transpired, violence left several people dead and injured," Guterres said. "There is no justification for such violence and loss of life. This is a terrible tragedy and our condolences go to all the families of those who died and to the injured."

In a showdown played out during the first five hours of Friday, the protesters dismantled their plastic sheeting and cardboard, but most refused to leave on buses brought in to take them to camps elsewhere in Cairo.

Shortly before dawn, thousands of riot police encircled the camp, set up near the refugee agency to draw attention to the refugees' demands. Police fired water cannons at the protesters, then invaded the park when the Sudanese refused to leave.

Protesters could be seen fighting back with long sticks that appeared to be supports for makeshift tents.

Police beat the unarmed migrants with batons, continuing to hit them even as they were being dragged to the buses. One officer carried a girl of about 3 or 4 years old who was unconscious. An ambulance worker said the girl was dead.

A policeman clubbed a Sudanese man with a tree branch as two officers hauled the refugee away.

Authorities said 10 protesters were dead and 23 police wounded. Boutrous Deng, a protest leader, told The Associated Press that 15 Sudanese were killed, including two children.

Officials at the South Center, an independent Sudanese human rights group, said 1,280 refugees were taken by bus to three locations outside Cairo. In a statement faxed to AP in Cairo, the group described the police assault as "savage."

Of course, Islam forbids...Of course, we reject...Of course, we abhor...Yet the blood continues to flow while the bland talk bamboozles the unwary. "Govt talks resume; Shi'ite family massacred," from Reuters, with thanks to JE:

DUKAN, Iraq (Reuters) - Iraq's most powerful Shi'ite politician met its Kurdish president at a lakeside retreat on Thursday to sketch out plans for a grand coalition government capable of ending the country's violent sectarian unrest.

In an illustration of the size of the task they face, 11 members of a single Shi'ite family had their throats slit in an attack south of Baghdad. Police said insurgents had warned the family to move out of their largely Sunni neighborhood.

This film has been a long time in the making and features not only Bat Ye'or and me, but Serge Trifkovic and others. I am very much looking forward to seeing it myself. "Pro-freedom film festival hits Hollywood: Event to screen movies celebrating 'the triumph of the human spirit'," from WND:

American Film Renaissance, the organization presenting patriotic and pro-America alternatives to typical movie fare, goes to the heart of the industry to host its first festival in Hollywood, Calif., next month.

AFR was begun to encourage the production and promotion of more traditional-values oriented movies in the U.S.

"Conservatives have been on defense in this culture war going on 40 years," founder and President Jim Hubbard told WorldNetDaily last year. "No war has ever been won playing defense. … My notion is that we should go to the offense. That's the only way you can win any struggle."

The organization says it's dedicated to promoting "films that reflect free speech, free enterprise, rugged individualism, freedom of religion and the triumph of the human spirit."...

Some of the films featured at the event include:

[...]

"Islam: What the West Needs to Know" will have its world premiere at the festival. The film features commentary from expert on Islam Robert Spencer and Bat Ye'or.

Good thing Condi Rice prevailed upon the Israelis to give up control of this border crossing, eh? From AP, with thanks to JE:

GAZA CITY, Gaza Strip - Palestinian policemen angry over the killing of a fellow officer stormed the Gaza-Egypt border crossing Friday, firing shots in the air and forcing European monitors to close the border and flee, Palestinian and European officials said.

About 100 policemen entered the Rafah compound and took up positions alongside border patrol officers at the customs section of the crossing, Palestinian security officials and witnesses said.

The European observers — responsible for monitoring the crossing and ensuring the terms of an Israeli-Palestinian agreement are upheld — fled the area, officials said.

There were no immediate reports of any casualties....

The border was closed because according to the Israeli-Palestinian agreement the crossing cannot operate if the European contingent is not present, said Julio De La Guardia, spokesman for the European monitors....

The takeover is the latest in a rash of armed kidnappings and takeovers of government buildings that underscores the lawlessness in Gaza and Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas' inability to bring order to the coastal area following Israel's withdrawal in September.

A British woman and her parents were kidnapped Wednesday by armed gunmen near the Rafah crossing. The family's fate remains unknown. Palestinian security were searching for the family, while British diplomats monitored the situation.

FrontPage Magazine honors the Jihad Watch Anti-Dhimmi Internationale of the Year 2005, the great Oriana Fallaci (many good links in the original):

After spending most of the last century fighting against fascism, Oriana Fallaci continues to demonstrate the enduring grip of Orwellianism: she is to be tried in Italy for thought-crime. For spending her childhood fighting Hitler and Mussolini, and for dedicating the last four years of her life to rousing the West to the danger posed by Islamofascism, she more than merits designation as FrontPage Magazine’s Woman of the Year.

Oriana Fallaci has rebelled against fascism most of her life. She is not an ideologue, bound to implement any given ideology. Hers is a defensive mission. She is, by her own designation, neither a conservative nor a leftist, finding defects with both. Like FrontPage Magazine, her main concern is fighting encroaching totalitarianism, not advancing a narrow partisan agenda ruled by either orthodoxy.

This is, in fact, her second honor from FrontPage Magazine. David Horowitz bestowed the Center for the Study of Popular Culture's prestigious Annie Taylor Award upon Oriana in a special ceremony in New York last month. In his speech, he called the Italian firebrand author and journalist “a warrior in the cause of human freedom.”

How right he was.

Oriana commenced her lifelong insurrection against totalitarianism early, fighting the Axis powers as part of the Resistance. For her actions, the fascists tortured her father, who defiantly refused to collaborate. The lesson stuck. Oriana smuggled weapons to anti-Hitler forces within Germany. After Mussolini received his just deserts, she became a journalist, acting as a war correspondent in Vietnam. In the following decades, she would earn a reputation as one of the world’s most probing interviewers.

Over her career, she met with the world’s leading figures – for good or ill – interviewing everyone from Kissinger to Qaddafi. She examined a rage-filled Yasser Arafat, who revealed to her that he liked little boys. She sat down with the Shah and the Ayatollah Khomeini (separately, of course) – the latter so infuriating her that during one of his rants, she ripped off the headscarf she was forced to wear in his presence. After making an international impact in her chosen field, she retreated into semi-retirement.

Then after a lengthy hiatus, Oriana Fallaci found herself lured from a self-imposed exile by the clarion call of 9/11.

She spoke and wrote forcefully about the peril a free, pluralistic, democratic, and secular society faced at the hands of an Islamic jihad. She condemned terrorism everywhere and called out the Euro-leftists who marched in solidarity with Palestinian terrorists – including some elements of the Vatican. Straining against the vivid memories of a war correspondent and every inclination of her heart, she supported the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, writing of her anguish:

I hate [war] as the pacifists in bad or good faith never will. I loathe it. Every book I have written overflows with that loathing, and I cannot bear the sight of guns…When peace stands for surrender, fear, loss of dignity and freedom, it is no longer peace. It's suicide.

More disquieting developments in Florida, reported by Joe Kaufman in FrontPage (good news links in the original):

Watching the ball drop, twirling a noisemaker, kissing your sweetheart, and making a resolution that rarely comes to pass -- everyone looks forward to the memory of a new year. But one group will be ringing in the New Year a little differently…through a children’s jihad retreat, with a guest speaker who exalts terrorists and another who is linked to al-Qaeda.

The majority of Islamic organizations within the United States have, at one time or another, been cited for their connections to terrorism, whether by support of terror groups or through actual terrorist activity carried out by its members. Two of those organizations, the Islamic Circle of North America (ICNA) and the Muslim American Society (MAS) have been working together putting on joint conferences. As stated in the New York Daily News (January 30, 2004), the organizations “have held conferences featuring speakers accused of terror ties and have published material supporting suicide bombings against Israel.”

Both ICNA and MAS stress the need for providing forums for Muslim youth. ICNA, in order to address this “need,” has created an apparatus called Young Muslims (YM). Likewise, MAS has established its own Youth Division. Through the two groups, children can learn the tenets of radical Islam by attending winter and summer camps.

Prior to 9/11, the camps would be referred to as “Jihad Camps,” but given the greater meaning of the term (holy war), why attract more attention than what’s necessary? Today, though, while the name has changed, the same radical message is taught. In YM Newsletter Issue 3 (2002/2003), Young Muslims extols the virtues of the works of Osama bin Laden’s mentor, Abdullah Azzam. According to YM Newsletter Issue 4 (2003), one of its goals is to assist in outreach “designed to call people to Islam, strengthen their belief in it, and organize them to work and to wage jihad in its cause.”

From December 31st of this year through January 2nd, the Tampa chapter of MAS will be launching a new camp, or as they put it, an ‘ILM & TARBIYAH RETREAT. Taking place in Lithia, Florida, at the Cedarkirk Camp & Conference Center, the theme of the event is “A Generation with a Mission.” That title is a little more subdued than the YM August 2002 “Planning for Our Akhira (afterlife),” but make no mistake, the speakers are just as extreme.

Featured at the “retreat” is the former President of MAS-Chicago, Chantal Carnes. Carnes is well known in the radical Islamist American community; she has given speeches at such venues as ICNA, MAS and Muslim Students Association (MSA) conventions. In addition to being a lecturer, she has also hosted a radio program for the Islamic Broadcasting Network (IBN). Each half-hour program was spent reviewing a different book.

So was the defense of a Bahraini woman who said she had the right to have sex with her boyfriend in a parked car. The presiding judge disagreed. From GulfNews:

"[T]his is a democratic and free country," the student, who is above the age of 21, told the judge sentencing her. Police said they found the girl and her boyfriend in "an intimate position" in a car park.

"We are free and we have the right to do what we were doing, especially since he had promised to marry me," the girl said in her defence.

But the judge was not impressed. "This is an Islamic country and we all have to comply with the rules," he told her. "You should appreciate that our laws are different from those in the West," he said.

An anti-dhimmi update to this Dhimmi Watch post. From Reuters:

KUALA LUMPUR, 30 December 2005 — Leaders of Malaysia’s non-Muslim religions condemned yesterday the state’s decision to give a man a Muslim burial against his Hindu widow’s wishes, and called for a review of their constitutional rights.

“We are concerned that the fundamental rights of other religions in this country are being slowly eroded,” said Venki Sankar, an ethnic Indian business leader and Hindu. “It makes us feel very angry.”

Just over half of Malaysia’s population of 26 million are Muslim, and Islam is the state religion, but government is secular and the constitution guarantees religious minorities, such as Hindus, Buddhists and Christians, equality under the law.

The case of former army commander and mountain climber M. Moorthy, who was given a Muslim burial on Wednesday by officials of Malaysia’s Islamic-affairs department, has shaken the trust of some non-Muslims in their constitutional rights.

Ali R. Warrayat sounds crazier than a bedbug -- and "deeply religious." What does this all add up to? Probably just a lone nut doing nutty things. With enough fuel from his religious texts to stoke the fires of his hatred. "Crash into store was a personal statement," from the East Valley Tribune, with thanks to Brenda Walker:

TO OUR READERS: The following story is based on witness accounts and a police report released Wednesday.

He placed both hands on the steering wheel, stared straight ahead and barrelled toward the front entrance of Home Depot.

Ali R. Warrayat hadn’t slept in days, planning this moment down to the last detail. Now, his face was void of any expression. A store employee jumped out of the car’s path. To drown out the man’s yells, Warrayat reached over to his car radio and blasted Arabic music before crashing through the front doors.

The scene was only the beginning of a violent rampage through the Chandler store on Dec. 18. For the 24-year-old Arizona State University student, the motives behind the attack were personal.

He told Chandler police he was angry at Home Depot, where he worked as a paint stocker, about not getting a proper raise. He was mad at the United States for proposing a 700-mile fence along the Mexican border.

He wanted to make America "more free."

So the Jordanian-turned-U.S. citizen devised a plan to make a grand statement by crashing into the store at Alma School Road and Chandler Boulevard and setting it on fire.

At first, he wanted to wear a Palestinian flag, but later decided to place it in the trunk of his car, along with a copy of the Quran and a necklace....

War escalation alert: "Al-Qaida in Iraq took credit for Katyusha attack," from the Jerusalem Post, with thanks to Yacob:

Al-Qaida in Iraq, headed by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, on Thursday took responsibility on their website for the Katyusha attacks in northern Israel on Tuesday....

On Tuesday it was reported that six Katyushas landed in northern Israeli cities, including three in Shlomi and three in Kiryat Shmona, where two apartments took direct hits.

This was the first time that Al-Qaida took responsibility for attacks on Israel taking place from Lebanon.

News from the BBC:

Britain's top Jewish body has apologised for branding a Muslim charity a "terrorist organisation".

In an out-of-court settlement, the Board of Deputies of British Jews said it should not have described Interpal in these terms.

London-based Interpal, which raises millions for Palestinian causes, had launched a libel action against the Board, due in the High Court next year.

The board has now published a retraction and apology on its website.

In the statement, the Board said it had reached a settlement with Interpal in relation to a September 2003 article on its website which referred to "terrorist organisations such as Hamas and Interpal".

Does Interpal really deserve an apology, however? Even the BBC includes this caveat at the end of their article:

The row with the Board of Deputies began after the US Treasury Department accused Interpal of being part of the European "funding network" for Hamas, the largest militant Islamist organisation in the Palestinian territories involved in suicide bombings.

Hmmm..alright, so the Treasury Department at least thinks Interpal is a money front for Hamas (see their press release). And just last month, the UK Independent reported that Israeli prosecutors had provided documents showing that millions of Euros had been funnelled through Interpal to the families of Palestinian suicide bombers, including the family of the bomber who killed 15 Israelis inside a Sbarro pizza shop in 2001.

There's more. In 2000, American and German investigators arrested Sheikh Mohammad Ali Hassan al Moayad, a Hamas fundraiser who spent his spare time sending cash and arms to Al-Qaeda. During the investigation, Sheikh Moayad showed receipts for tens of thousands of dollars made out to Interpal to a FBI informer, so as to prove that he could "get money to the jihad." Additionally, Saudi organizations such as the International Islamic Relief Organization and the World Assembly of Muslim Youth also funnelled millions of dollars through Interpal, destined for unknown Palestinian coffers. Whats more, Interpal founder Ibrahim Hewitt once admitted that Interpal money could have "possibly" made its way to Hamas, but not to its "military wing."

It seems, considering all the available evidence indicating Interpal's perfidy, that the BDBJ's apology is more of an attempt to avoid Interpal's charges of libel than a realistic assessment of the group's obvious terroristic intentions. Chalk up another victory for lawsuit-happy terrorist organizations.

Jihad Watch Board Vice President Hugh Fitzgerald dismantles another prevailing dhimmi assumption:

We’re often told that the defense against global jihad is disproportionate, and its advocates fear-mongers, because “no Islamic country can ever hurt the West."

Really? What about Islamic "groups" then? What about communities of Muslims, living in the West, working actively to transform that West, now by noisy demands, and now by ostentatious displays of sweet reason, and by a sudden great attachment to the beauties of "pluralism" and "dialogue" -- as on display in the taqiyya-kitman of the "new, improved" Islam that those Bright Young Muslim Things hold out as having so much promise, and that Tariq Ramadan, in his sinister way, is now flogging as well? "Dialogue," "pluralism" that is at the heart of Islam -- oh good god, spare us this nonsense.

Islam has been "hurting the West" for 1350 years. It took over what was once a central part of the Christian world -- Mesopotamia, Syria, Egypt, the rest of North Africa. It took over the ancient homeland of the Jews, and apparently they who had endured the rule of Romans and Byzantines found the Muslim overlords so oppressive that many of them had to leave the Land of Israel -- which is why eventually 90% of the world's Jews ultimately came to live under Western Christendom, terrible as its own intermittent persecutions may have been, rather than live in the "paradise" of Islam.

Islam has been "hurting the West" ever since Muslims conquered Byzantium and destroyed its civilization -- though the flight of Greek scholars to the West, it is true, helped to spark the Revival of Learning.

Good call, Nick. If you actually implement this you will do nothing but further enflame the resentments of French non-Muslims, and virtually guarantee that LePen will be the next President of France. And remember: among French leaders, Sarkozy was the tough one.

"Sarkozy call to help minorities," from BBC News, with thanks to JE:

Positive discrimination is the only way to guarantee equal opportunities for all people in France, Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy has said.

"Positive discrimination" in order to guarantee "equal opportunities"? Welcome to Multiculturalist Wonderland, where common sense just doesn't apply.

Mr Sarkozy says he wants the law to ensure equal opportunities in practice - without introducing ethnic quotas.

High unemployment and discrimination against young black and Arab people have been blamed for a wave of rioting in several French cities in late 2005.

President Jacques Chirac opposes the principle of positive discrimination.

For him and for Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin, such policies only increase the differences between communities and are against the traditional French republican model.

The government wants more use of anonymous CVs.

One scheme in Bordeaux showed that job seekers tended to get more interviews when employers could not see their name or address.

But for Interior Minister Sarkozy, voluntary measures are not enough.

He wants the law to impose what he calls French-style positive discrimination - not to introduce ethnic quotas, he says, but to ensure equal opportunity in practice.

Sharia Alert from "moderate" Malaysia, via AFP, with thanks to Sr. Soph:

KUALA LUMPUR - A rebellion is stirring in Malaysia over new legislation which critics say undermines the rights of Muslim women by making it easier for men to take multiple wives and claim property after divorce.

The government was forced to strike down opposition in the usually tame upper house Senate to push through the bill last week, only to face an avalanche of protest from civil society groups and ordinary citizens.

Letters pages in the usually tightly-controlled media have also been full of complaints over the “Islamic Family Law” bill which affects Malaysia’s Muslims, who make up about 60 percent of the population of 26 million people.

“Now I learn that if my husband were to marry another, he has the right to my property to support his new lifestyle!” wrote one outraged reader of the New Straits Times.

“Another provision makes it easier for men to obtain divorce ... it is hard to imagine how much easier it can be, given the current situation where men can divorce their wives for no reason and even via SMS,” said another.

Malaysian Muslim men are allowed four wives under Islamic law, but under the new amendments they no longer have to prove they are financially capable of treating all their wives equally before taking on another.

On taking a new wife, men can now seize property belonging to existing wives, and they are also given new rights to claim assets after a divorce, as well as less obligation to pay compensation and maintenance.

“They are giving more rights to the men whilst taking back the traditional Muslim women’s rights,” said Razlina Razali from Sisters in Islam, one of several activist groups in an alliance demanding that the bill be abandoned.

“It’s not justified under Islam because Islam promotes the principle of equality and justice, and traditionally it guards the rights of Muslim women,” she said....

Women’s groups are planning petitions, letter-writing campaigns and other strategies to put pressure on the government, which rarely faces such open opposition....

“How long will it take to amend? Fifteen years? And how many women will suffered under it by then?” asked Razlina.

Read it all.

Why shouldn't he be calm and unrepentant? By his lights, he has done a good and even holy thing. More on this story from AP, with thanks to all who sent this in:

MULTAN, Pakistan - Nazir Ahmed appears calm and unrepentant as he recounts how he slit the throats of his three young daughters and their 25-year old stepsister to salvage his family's "honor" a crime that shocked Pakistan.

The 40-year old laborer, speaking to The Associated Press in police detention as he was being shifted to prison, confessed to just one regret -- that he didn't murder the stepsister's alleged lover too.

Hundreds of girls and women are murdered by male relatives each year in this conservative Islamic nation, and rights groups said Wednesday such "honor killings" will only stop when authorities get serious about punishing perpetrators.

The independent Human Rights Commission of Pakistan said that in more than half of such cases that make it to court, most end with cash settlements paid by relatives to the victims' families, although under a law passed last year, the minimum penalty is 10 years, the maximum death by hanging.

Ahmed's killing spree [was] witnessed by his wife Rehmat Bibi as she cradled their 3 month-old baby son happened Friday night at their home in the cotton-growing village of Gago Mandi in eastern Punjab province.

It is the latest of more than 260 such honor killings documented by the rights commission, mostly from media reports, during the first 11 months of 2005.

Read it all.

I believe we can win this war without discarding our own Constitution. I also think that narrow understandings of probable cause in jihad cases could be the death of us. From the New York Times, with thanks to JE:

WASHINGTON, Dec. 27 - Defense lawyers in some of the country's biggest terrorism cases say they plan to bring legal challenges to determine whether the National Security Agency used illegal wiretaps against several dozen Muslim men tied to Al Qaeda.

The lawyers said in interviews that they wanted to learn whether the men were monitored by the agency and, if so, whether the government withheld critical information or misled judges and defense lawyers about how and why the men were singled out....

Trent Duffy, a spokesman for the White House, declined to comment in Crawford, Tex., when asked about a report in The New York Times that the security agency had tapped into some of the country's main telephone arteries to conduct broader data-mining operations in the search for terrorists.

But Mr. Duffy said: "This is a limited program. This is not about monitoring phone calls designed to arrange Little League practice or what to bring to a potluck dinner. These are designed to monitor calls from very bad people to very bad people who have a history of blowing up commuter trains, weddings and churches."

He added: "The president believes that he has the authority - and he does - under the Constitution to do this limited program. The Congress has been briefed. It is fully in line with the Constitution and also protecting American civil liberties."...

Government officials, in defending the value of the security agency's surveillance program, have said in interviews that it played a critical part in at least two cases that led to the convictions of Qaeda associates, Iyman Faris of Ohio, who admitted taking part in a failed plot to bring down the Brooklyn Bridge, and Mohammed Junaid Babar of Queens, who was implicated in a failed plot to bomb British targets....

The first challenge is likely to come in Florida, where lawyers for two men charged with Jose Padilla, who is jailed as an enemy combatant, plan to file a motion as early as next week to determine if the N.S.A. program was used to gain incriminating information on their clients and their suspected ties to Al Qaeda. Kenneth Swartz, one of the lawyers in the case, said, "I think they absolutely have an obligation to tell us" whether the agency was wiretapping the defendants. In a Virginia case, Edward B. MacMahon Jr., a lawyer for Ali al-Timimi, a Muslim scholar in Alexandria who is serving a life sentence for inciting his young followers to wage war against the United States overseas, said the government's explanation of how it came to suspect Mr. Timimi of terrorism ties never added up in his view.

F.B.I. agents were at Mr. Timimi's door days after the Sept. 11 attacks to question him about possible links to terrorism, Mr. MacMahon said, yet the government did not obtain a warrant through the foreign intelligence court to eavesdrop on his conversations until many months later.

Mr. MacMahon said he was so skeptical about the timing of the investigation that he questioned the Justice Department about whether some sort of unknown wiretap operation had been conducted on the scholar or his young followers, who were tied to what prosecutors described as a "Virginia jihad" cell.

"They told me there was no other surveillance," Mr. MacMahon said. "But the fact is that the case against a lot of these guys just came out of nowhere because they were really nobodies, and it makes you wonder whether they were being tapped."...

Defense lawyers in several other high-profile terrorism prosecutions, including the so-called Portland Seven and Lackawanna Six cases, said they were also planning to file legal challenges or were reviewing their options.

Yes, you see, WND made it all up: not only the present difficulties, but 1,400 years of oppression, jizya and dhimmitude.

From WND, with thanks to Twostellas:

JERUSALEM – An article published Sunday by WorldNetDaily quoting Bethlehem residents as saying local Muslim persecution prompted tens of thousands of Christians to flee the city is "all lies" and the "kind of American reporting [that] is the real reason for any rift between Muslims and Christians," a major Palestinian newspaper stated yesterday, claiming inter-religious relations in Bethlehem "have never been better."

"There is no problem between Christians and Muslims in Bethlehem, but any problem that may exist is because of this kind of article in the American media," stated a piece in the Al Manar Palestinian daily.

The Palestinian paper went on to quote several sections of WND's article, "Muslim grinches steal Bethlehem Christmas," calling the report "all lies. This is an effort to separate Christians and Muslims in Bethlehem."

WND reported many Christians in Bethlehem say they face constant Muslim hostility, prompting the Christian population to decline from 90 percent of the city to the current demographic of less than 25 percent. The drastic decline started in 1995, the year the Palestinian Authority took control of Bethlehem.

What a coincidence! But since they can't blame that one on Israel, WND will do for now. Read it all.

Bangladesh jihad update: the jihadists have friends in high places. No surprise in that, really, since the jihad ideology is (as so few wish to admit) so deeply rooted within Islam. "A disquieting revelation: Time has come for government to clean house," from The Daily Star, with thanks to JE:

The facts could not be any clearer. Elements within the government have for a long time been sponsoring and sheltering the outlawed JMB and JMJB militants. This original revelation was reported in the media long ago and has since been corroborated time and again through confessional statements made during the interrogations of suspected militants.

The evidence suggesting such links is now so great and disquieting that it can no longer be plausibly denied, and the revelations of recently arrested JMB leader Lutfar Rahman are merely the latest in what now amounts to a mountain of substantiation.

What is becoming clear is that, when it comes to the militants, the government has been pursuing a policy that can at best be described as extremely short-sighted, and at worst, utterly reckless and indefensible.

The evidence is incontrovertible that in response to banditry of so-called leftist groups in the north-west of Bangladesh, certain elements within the government took a decision to sponsor the rise of the militant religious groups to take up arms against those outlaws. This is how the religious militancy arose and how it was able to spread far and wide with relatively little check from the authorities.

I was an expert witness for the plaintiffs in this case -- seems like many years ago now. I have wanted to write about it but it just doesn't end. From AgapePress, with thanks to Cindy:

(AgapePress) - A federal appeals court is being asked to reconsider its ruling that allows public schools to teach junior high students how to "become Muslims." The Thomas More Law Center, a national public-interest law firm based in Ann Arbor, Michigan, is asking the entire Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals to rule on what can be done in public schools with regard to teaching Islam and other religions.

Several parents sued California's Byron Union School District for requiring their 7th-grade children to participate in a three-week class activity in which they not only had to study important Islamic figures and wear traditional Muslim attire, but were also required to observe the "five pillars" of the Islamic faith, adopt Muslim names, recite a portion of a Muslim prayer, and even stage their own "jihad" or "holy war." The plaintiffs' attorney, the Thomas More Law Center's Ed White, believes the school district violated the parents' and children's constitutional rights to free exercise of religion.

Earlier, White had asked a three-judge panel of the Ninth Circuit to overturn a previous San Francisco federal district court's ruling that the Byron Union School District did not violate the U.S. Constitution. However, the Ninth Circuit panel of judges upheld the lower court's determination in a brief, unpublished memorandum decision.

In that ruling, however, the panel overlooked and failed to rule on the plaintiff's claims that their free exercise and parental rights had been violated. The Thomas More Law Center has asked the three-judge panel to reconsider their decision and to issue a ruling on the claims not previously addressed. The Law Center has also asked all 24 active judges on the Ninth Circuit to consider and rule on the case....

White has filed a petition for a rehearing of the case before the entire Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. Chief counsel Richard Thompson says the appellate court needs to clarify in a published opinion just how far public schools can go in teaching about religion.

Peace In Our Time Update from the TimesOnline, with thanks to JE:

THREE Britons were kidnapped by Palestinian gunmen yesterday, the latest in a spate of seizures that has highlighted the growing lawlessness of the Gaza Strip.

A British aid worker, Kate Burton, 25, had been taking her visiting parents on a tour of the southern border town of Rafah when their car was stopped by masked gunmen. They were bundled into a white Mercedes and driven away at speed.

Last night police sources said that the kidnappers were negotiating with Palestinian officials for the release of the three Britons. It was not clear if any ransom demand had been made.

Numerous foreign citizens working in Gaza have been snatched by Palestinian groups over the past year, though invariably they have been freed unharmed within a few hours....

“Unlike in Iraq the kidnappings are not so much aimed at the foreigners themselves as at embarrassing the Palestinian leader, Mahmoud Abbas, and trying to show he has no control over the Gaza Strip,” John Strawson, a Middle East expert at Birzeit University in the West Bank, said.

Bravo, Ghada Jamshir. She speaks out against, among other things, mut'ah -- temporary marriages -- a thinly-disguised system of prostitution among Shi'ites which I discuss in Islam Unveiled. From MEMRITV, with thanks to Sr. Soph:

Following are excerpts from an interview with Bahraini women's rights activist Ghada Jamshir , which aired on Al-Arabiya TV on December 21, 2005.

Interviewer: What do you have against the Shari'a courts?

Ghada Jamshir: I have a lot against them. What they have done to the Bahraini women is not a trivial matter. For years women have been going into these courts, only to be oppressed and treated unjustly. We have reached the point that we say: enough. We have reached the breaking point.

[...]

Ghada Jamshir: Does the Islamic Shari'a authorize mut'ah marriages? Does the Islamic Shari'a authorize mut'ah according to the following classification: "Pleasure from sexual contact with her thighs." They have: "Pleasure from sexual touching." "pleasure from sexual contact with her breasts." "Pleasure from a little girl." Do you know what "pleasure from a little girl" means? It means that they derive sexual pleasure from a girl aged two, three, or four.

Interviewer: Let's not go into details...

Ghada Jamshir: Let me tell you what "Pleasure from sexual contact with her thighs" means...

Interviewer: Don't give me the details...

Ghada Jamshir: This is a violation of children's rights! This constitutes sexual assault of the girl. What does "pleasure from sexual contact with her thighs" mean? It means deriving sexual pleasure from an infant. How old is an infant? One year, a year and a half, a few months?

Is it conceivable for a grown man to have sex with an infant girl? And you people tell me that the Islamic Sharia authorizes this? Forget about the mut'ah. Let's talk about misyar. What do misyar marriages mean? You said that I'm a Sunni and that's why I'm attacking the Shiites. No!

Interviewer: Some people claim that.

Ghada Jamshir: No, no. What does the misyar marriage mean? A man marries a woman from another town, and goes to her once a month. He "visits" her. He calls her his "wife."

Interviewer: Not necessarily once a month. He might go there every day.

Ghada Jamshir: Brother Turki, this kind of marriage, this kind of behavior, diminishes the woman's honor as a human being....

"It exalts terrorism, wants to wipe out Israel, and is threatening a tax of non-Muslim residents." That would be the jizya (here, al-jeziya). Now isn't that funny: Islamic apologist Stephen Schwartz has denounced the "fear-mongering of those obsessed with jihad, shariah, and the dhimma." He says the dhimma is a thing of the past and should stay that way, and that "the dhimma is now held out by a demagogic element in the West as a terrifying symbol of Islamic domination, and Western advocates of any rational approach to Islam short of a crusader war are regularly insulted as dhimmis, or people who have surrendered to Muslim rule."

Yet the jizya is a cornerstone of the dhimma. I guess Hassam El-Masalmeh is part of a fear-mongering, demagogic element in the West.

From the estimable Sandro Magister in Chiesa, with thanks to Tom Syseskey:

ROMA, December 29, 2005 – Thirty thousand pilgrims from all over the world came to Bethlehem for Christmas, one third more than the previous year. The leader of the Palestinian National Authority, Mahmoud Abbas, a Muslim, attended the midnight Mass at the basilica of the Nativity. And in his homily, the Latin patriarch of Jerusalem, Michel Sabbah, an Arab, hailed him as a man of peace, reserving his protest for “the wall raised up before us, forcing us to live as if in a prison, our lands confiscated, our young men carried away at night and thrown into the Israeli prisons.”

But in the city where Jesus was born, relations between Christians and Muslims are more complicated than they appear.

Christians are no longer the majority of the 30,000 inhabitants of the city, as they always were in the past The Muslims are now more numerous than the Christians in the same proportion that the mosques exceed the churches, by a margin of 15 to 10....

The leader of the Hamas contingent in the municipal council of Bethlehem, Hassam El-Masalmeh, exalts the suicide attacks against the Jews, and asserts that these will continue until all of Palestine, including the territory of Israel, is under Palestinian control.

But mayor Victor Batarseh, a practicing Catholic, condemns the terrorist attacks and wants Hamas to stop carrying them out. He says that he is ready for a territorial compromise with Israel in order to bring about a true Palestinian state. But even before the latest municipal elections, he chose Hamas as his main ally, together with another extremist group called Islamic Jihad....

The general plan of Hamas also includes the imposition of a special tax, called al-jeziya, upon all of the non-Muslim residents in the Palestinian territories. This tax revives the one applied through all of Islamic history to the dhimmi, the second-class Jewish and Christian citizens.

In an interview with Karby Legget, published in the December 23-26 edition of “The Wall Street Journal,” Masalmeh, the leader of the Hamas contingent at the municipal council of Bethlehem, confirmed: “We in Hamas intend to implement this tax someday. We say it openly – we welcome everyone to Palestine but only if they agree to live under our rules.”

I am scheduled to appear on the Alan Colmes radio show tonight at 11:00 PM EST; Alan needs a foil to show how wrong it is to check mosques for radiation. Of course, I will be doing my best for Truth, Justice, and the American Way.

How easy it is for jihadists to operate under the cloak of multiculturalism. "German Authorities Close Islamic Center," from AP, with thanks to the Constantinopolitan Irredentist:

BERLIN - Authorities on Wednesday shut down an Islamic center once attended by a man who accuses the CIA of kidnapping him and sending him to a secret Afghan prison to be abused and interrogated.

The man's lawyer has linked the alleged kidnapping to the investigation of extremist activity at the center.

The state government of Bavaria said Wednesday it was shutting down the Multi-Kultur-Haus association in the southern town of Neu-Ulm after it seized material urging Muslims to carry out suicide attacks in Iraq.

Khaled al-Masri, a Kuwait-born German citizen who is suing the CIA for allegedly spiriting him to Afghanistan for interrogation, has said he visited the center several times before he was snatched....

Al-Masri has denied any connection to terrorism.

Bavarian Interior Minister Guenther Beckstein told The Associated Press on Wednesday that investigators had noticed al-Masri visiting the Multi-Kultur-Haus but called him "rather a marginal figure."

Beckstein's ministry said the association was promoting extremist ideas and armed "holy war."

Jihad Watch Board Vice President Hugh Fitzgerald discusses the dhimmitude of the moral equivalence "all-religions-are-equally-violent" crowd:

One form of denial of the global jihad is that of pseudo-symmetries and moral equivalences. There are those who have made comparisons between the American kid-glove treatment (well, the gloves which Infidel soldiers are instructed to wear when handling the Qur’an so as not to offend Muslims by touching it with their “unclean” –najis -- hands may not quite be made of kid) and the Nazis, or the Soviet secret police (whose idea of fun would be to insert a glass rod in a male prisoner’s urethra, and then to smash it in ways you can imagine -- so very like the Americans in Guantanamo, no?).

But another is the telling pluralization in such Karen-Armstrongesque titles as “Religious Fundamentalisms” or “The Fundamentalism Project” or anything which implies that Jerry Falwell or Jerry Vines (whose accurate description of Islam, one that no brave defector from Islam would quibble with, is actually one of the “exhibits” of so-called “intolerance” at one of those Museums of Intolerance that the Wiesenthal Center supports -- how stupid can some people be?), or those West Bank “settlers” who keep using those Biblical toponyms “Judea” and “Samaria” (my, my -- why then do we keep using the Biblical toponym “Gaza” if not because the Arabs forget to rename that in 1948 as well?), are of a piece with Osama bin Laden and Al-Zarqawi.

A follow-up to this story: "Israelis Attack Militant Base in Lebanon," from AP, with thanks to the Constantinopolitan Irredentist:

BEIRUT, Lebanon - Israeli jets blasted a Palestinian militant group's base a few miles outside the Lebanese capital Beirut on Wednesday, hours after rockets fired from Lebanon hit a northern Israeli border town.

In their deepest strike into Lebanon in 18 months, the Israeli planes attacked a base of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command, a small, Syrian-backed group that has been fighting the Jewish state for decades. Two guerrillas were lightly wounded, the group said.

Later Wednesday, Israeli warplanes flew low over southern Lebanon and the western Bekaa Valley in apparent reconnaissance flights that drew anti-aircraft fire from the Lebanese army, Lebanese security officials said.

Witnesses said warplanes roared over the PFLP-GC guerrilla base at Naameh, a hilltop base overlooking the Mediterranean five miles south of Beirut. They heard two booms.

The Israeli army said the attack was in response to rockets fired at the northern Israel town of Kiryat Shmona on Tuesday night. It said it views such attacks with "extreme severity" and holds Lebanon responsible.

Jihad Watch Board Vice President Hugh Fitzgerald makes some observations about the American Muslim community in the wake of the radiation scandal:

It is forbidden for a Believer to ally with an Infidel against other Believers. The American government should ponder that carefully -- especially the armed services, the diplomatic corps, and the intelligence services. There are people who may be Muslim-for-identification-purposes-only Muslims. There may be those who are bad Muslims, and who can be bribed to work against fellow Muslims. But those, one must assume, will be the exceptions. One must assume that when someone identifies himself as a Believer, he subscribes to the central idea of Islam (after monotheism): the idea that there is one division, and one only, that counts in the world: the division between Believer and Infidel.

This division has clear political implications, as the influential and high-profile Imam Muzammil H. Siddiqi of the Islamic Society of North America reminded us in 2002: “We must not forget that Allah's rules have to be established in all lands..."

And how can one do that when outright military conquest is not possible?

The answer, in the new conditions in which Mr. Siddiqi now finds himself, is clear: "..as Muslims, we should participate in the system to safeguard our interests and try to bring about gradual change..."

We "should participate" in order "to safeguard our [Muslim] interests" and "try to bring about gradual change..." which can only mean islamization -- a situation where, even if some Infidels remain, they are subjugated to the rule of Islam.

For a Believer, a True Believer such as Mr. Siddiqi, it cannot be otherwise. A past master, necessarily, at taqiyya and kitman, at obfuscation and speaking with forked tongue so that Muslims will understand clearly what he means and Infidels clearly misunderstand what he means -- this is a Muslim Everyman. For that he has earned what the courts like to call strict scrutiny. Every Muslim spokesman deserves such, especially in this New Season of Muslim Support for "Dialogue" and "Avoiding a Clash of Civilizations" and "Pluralism" -- meaning: let us take advantage of whatever freedoms are innocently proffered us until such time as Islam is fully entrenched and cannot be dislodged, and islamization is well underway through demography and a relentless campaign of Da'wa, aided and abetted by an equally relentless campaign of sweet nothings or when those won't do, intimidation and threat of litigation. It is the same everywhere, with the results we all see -- in Holland today, and in France and England tomorrow.

Is it beyond the wit of Americans to learn from the unhappy experience of others?

In FrontPage this morning I discuss the mosque-checking brouhaha. Many news links in the original:

New revelations that federal officials are checking mosques for radiation levels has the Council on American Islamic Relations in an uproar. CAIR’s Ibrahim Hooper fumed: “This creates the appearance that Muslims are targeted simply for being Muslims. I don’t think this is the message the government wants to send at this time.” A CAIR statement claimed that the monitoring “could lead to the perception that we are no longer a nation ruled by law, but instead one in which fear trumps constitutional rights. All Americans should be concerned about the apparent trend toward a two-tiered system of justice, with full rights for most citizens, and another diminished set of rights for Muslims.”

Indeed, the mainstream media has made much of potential Constitutional issues, trumpeting the fact that the radiation monitoring has been done without search warrants -- even though no actual searches have been carried out. Also, Justice Department spokesman Brian Roehrkasse maintained that “FBI agents do not intrude across any constitutionally protected areas without the proper legal authority,” and that it does not monitor groups in general but only acts on specific information. Is there any such information in this case? Roehrkasse spoke of official concern with “a growing body of sensitive reporting that continues to show al-Qaida has a clear intention to obtain and ultimately use chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear” weapons.

Islamic tolerance alert from Malaysia. Remember: the traditional penalty for someone who leaves Islam is death, so in a certain sense Kamariah Ali, a member of the late lamented Giant Teapot sect, is getting off easy. "ASIAN LIVES: Malaysian woman's lonely campaign for religious freedom," from AFP, with thanks to Hutchrun:

KUALA LUMPUR, Dec 28 (AFP) - No one will give Kamariah Ali a job, relatives and one-time friends shun her, and much of her time is spent in the law courts -- all because she no longer wants to be a Muslim.

"People look down on me because I renounced Islam. But people don't understand. Actually, religion belongs to God and you can access God in any way, not necessarily through Islam," says the soft-spoken 54-year-old.

Seven years ago, Kamariah publicly renounced Islam after being continually prosecuted and jailed by religious authorities in Malaysia's northern Kelantan state who accused her of deviating from the faith. She had become a member of a religious sect famous for quirky structures on its compound, including a giant teapot. Its leader, Ayah Pin, caused shockwaves by proclaiming that he was God and that his followers were free to practise whatever religion they pleased....

Kamariah's life has now shrunk to the confines of a compound which houses remaining sect members in northeastern Terengganu state, where she spends her days helping one of her children, who is a seamstress.

She rarely ventures out into the wider community, and state police and religious authorities have restricted the numbers of people who can see her.

But there's hardly a whiff of despair, or any sense that Kamariah considers herself a victim.

"I dont feel anything," she says of how she has been treated by the local community. "I dont feel sad, I feel pity for them because they dont understand."

Kamariah's renunciation was a rare challenge on an issue which remains completely taboo in Malaysia, where the constitution dictates that the ethnic Malays who dominate the multi-ethnic population are Muslim by definition.

Read it all.

This is, of course, just what we need -- if it is done sincerely and thoroughly. If and only if. But the jury is still very much out as to whether it will go to the core of the problem: the jihad teachings in the Qur'an, Hadith, Sira, and fiqh. More on this story from The Australian, with thanks to JE:

SELF-APPOINTED Muslim religious figures would be named and shamed and young followers warned away from them as part of a push to weed out extremist Islamic teachings in Australia.

Moderate leader Yasser Soliman yesterday backed the need to regulate and censor Muslim clerics, saying there was growing concern that Muslims "having read a few books in their back yard" were too often claiming "they're somehow sheiks, or imams, or clerics".

Under a plan being devised by moderate Muslim leaders -- and revealed in The Australian yesterday -- a new national board of imams would register clerics and set guidelines for religious figures, including setting qualification levels.

Under the plan, which has angered clerics such as Melbourne's hardline Sheik Mohammad Omran, sermons could also be monitored by the board.

The head of John Howard's Muslim Advisory Council, Ameer Ali, told The Australian that followers of the radical imams would be "told these whom they are following are not telling the right interpretation of Islam, and that's not what Islam is all about".

Dr Ali warned that clerics who failed to comply with the guidelines, which will be thrashed out at a national meeting of Muslim leaders next month, would be publicly identified.

"If the majority of the imams and the leaders are moderates and have to turn to set guidelines, then those who want to stay in the periphery will be identified," said Dr Ali, president of the Australian Federation of Islamic Councils.

Iranian Shi'ite expansionism update from The Australian, with thanks to JE:

BAGHDAD: Voting results from Iraq's election show that Sunnis, who ran Saddam Hussein's security apparatus, have been all but expunged from the nation's police and military.

The New York Times has reported that in contrast to the remarkable surge in Sunni participation in the political process, partial voting results made public yesterday show the group is severely under-represented in the new security forces.

What Alice Miles says about Britain applies equally well to other places -- including the U.S., if the current pressure ends up stopping the monitoring of mosques for radiation for good (some reports indicate that the program has already ended).

From the Times Online, with thanks to JE:

The current confusion, combined with unspecific, but dire, warnings from the police of an imminent terror “spectacular”, leaves politicians in a panic. The demand for a 90-day detention that was blocked, the control orders that were watered down, the summary expulsions that didn’t happen, the Britishness test for imams that was dropped, the mosques that weren’t closed . . . this is politics operating in a fog. Just so that they can say: we tried to do everything we could. When Tony Blair refused this month to hold a public inquiry into July 7, critics claimed that he had something to hide. Would that that were true.

Background that is pertinent to this story. Jamie Glazov of FrontPage interviews David Keyes, author of “Al-Qaeda Infiltration of Gaza: A Post-Disengagement Assessment”:

Frontpage Interview’s guest today is David Keyes, who assisted a former Israeli ambassador to the U.N. and specialized on terrorism at the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs. He recently returned from the Middle East where he co-authored academic papers with the former U.N. ambassador and the former head of Israeli military intelligence research and assessment. His latest paper, entitled “Al-Qaeda Infiltration of Gaza: A Post-Disengagement Assessment” was published by the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.

FP: David Keyes, welcome to Frontpage Interview.

Keyes: Thank you for inviting me.

FP: There have been some disturbing reports that after Israel’s disengagement from Gaza, al-Qaeda has crossed into that territory from Egypt. Can you tell us what you know about this disturbing possibility?

Keyes: The Israeli Ministry of Defense recently reported that in the wake of disengagement from Gaza, al-Qaeda members infiltrated the evacuated areas from Egypt. This is not the first time al-Qaeda has been spotted in Gaza. There is, in fact, increasing evidence of al-Qaeda influence and infiltration in Gaza and parts of the West Bank. Back in 2003, Israeli forces arrested Hamas terrorists after they returned from al-Qaeda training facilities in Afghanistan. That same year, two al-Qaeda operatives were recruited into Hamas in order to execute the Mike’s Place suicide bombing in Tel Aviv. More recently, according to the Palestinian Authority, a new al-Qaeda group called “Jundallah” (Allah’s Brigades) has formed in Gaza. In May 2005, this group executed its first attack against Israelis. Al-Qaeda’s presence in Gaza has also been confirmed by one of Hamas’ leading spokesmen, Mahmoud az-Zahar. Lastly, leaflets in Khan Yunis have been distributed by al-Qaeda’s “Palestine Branch.”

These are just a few of the recent developments regarding al-Qaeda in Gaza. As you can imagine, this does not portend well for the future of global counter-terrorism efforts. It is important to emphasize that this is not a danger to Israel alone. Rather, America and the entire free world are also threatened by the growing al-Qaeda presence in Gaza. Due to their global ambitions and uncompromising ideology, there is no safe place to hide from groups such as al-Qaeda. Nor is there a reasonable policy that will satisfy these fascists. Appeasement will only invite more terror and carnage. It is—quite literally—a fight to the death. New York, London, Madrid, Casablanca, Amman, Bali… this is only the beginning.

"Gunmen from the ruling Palestinian movement Fatah traded fire with police and shut election offices." The impulse to civil war in Gaza comes from those who wish to establish a Sharia state there; Abbas and Fatah represent the last confused (because already diluted beyond recognition) manifestation of the secular Arab nationalist impulse, with Arafat already having transformed himself from a leftist revolutionary into a virtual jihadist in his last years. Civil war update from Gaza, via Reuters, with thanks to JE:

GAZA (Reuters) - Gunmen from the ruling Palestinian movement Fatah traded fire with police and shut election offices in the Gaza Strip on Wednesday in a new challenge to President Mahmoud Abbas ahead of next month's election.

The gunmen demanded changes to the latest proposed list of election candidates, which was due to be submitted by Abbas on Wednesday as a way to patch up a damaging split between Fatah veterans and younger rivals.

The internal Palestinian squabbles, clashes with Israel, and the prospect of Israel's own elections early next year have stalled any hopes of peacemaking in the near future.

The growing violence has driven some officials to urge Abbas to postpone the election, in which Hamas Islamic militants stand to benefit from the confusion within long-dominant Fatah.

Shari'a alert from the AP:

A Malaysian court on Wednesday rejected a Hindu widow's claim over the body of her husband, who Islamic authorities say converted to Islam last year and should be buried as a Muslim.

The ruling by the High Court threatens to blow up into a rare interracial and religious dispute in this Muslim-majority nation, which prides itself on religious tolerance among a population that also includes Buddhists, Christians and Hindus.

The ruling clears the way for the Islamic Affairs Department to take possession of the body of ex-army commando M. Moorthy, 36, lying in a hospital mortuary since his death Dec. 20. His widow, Kaliammal Sinnasamy, has disputed an Islamic Sharia court's ruling last week that Moorthy is a Muslim convert and should be buried as a Muslim.

"So much for good interracial relations" in Malaysia, said Haris Mohamad Ibrahim, a lawyer representing Malaysia's Bar Council. "The judge has just told the widow and her family to go back and leave the body of their beloved to be buried by strangers."

High Court judge Raus Sharif, ruling on an appeal by Kaliammal, said he has no jurisdiction to overrule the Sharia court decision. Constitutionally, the Sharia court handles religious cases involving Muslims and cannot be touched by the other legal branches in the country.

Read it all.

One appendage shy of human form has not dulled a Taliban commander's cognisance of jihad. From the AP:

In an interview late on Sunday, the commander, Mullah Dadullah, ruled out any reconciliation with the US-backed government of President Hamid Karzai and claimed the country's new parliament -- its first in more than 30 years, inaugurated last week -- was "obedient to America."

"More than 200 Taliban have registered themselves for suicide attacks with us which shows that a Muslim can even sacrifice his life for the well-being of his faith. Our suicide attackers will continue jihad (holy war) until Americans and all of their Muslim and non-Muslim allies are pulled out of the country," he said.

Dadullah, who lost a leg fighting for the Taliban during its rise to power in the mid-1990s, is one of the hard-line militia's top commanders, responsible for operations in eastern and southeastern Afghanistan -- and as such, a man wanted by the US-led coalition hunting Taliban and al-Qaeda fighters.

[The Mullah] ruled out reconciliation and talks with Karzai's government, saying it "owed its existence" to non-Muslims, and to do so would amount to "joining Christianity and working for Christians."

"My talks with them will only be for their destruction and nothing else," he said.

In support of this article posted at Jihad Watch back in August, Iran's Majlis (Parliament) has stated their goal of a unified Islamic world.

“We strongly support unity among Islamic nations”, the Majlis Speaker said, adding that such unity was critical in preserving the interests of the nations.

Of course the "interests" of the Iranian nation come first because the comment was made in conjunction with a courtship of Indonesia regarding Iran's nuclear program.

Tehran is banking on Jakarta’s support in a possible upcoming showdown over its controversial nuclear activities which the West believes is for developing the A-bomb. Indonesia is one of 35 governing board members of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) that have the power to refer Tehran’s nuclear dossier to the United Nations Security Council.

However, it is obvious the Iranian Majlis view their republic to be the leader of this future pan Islamic nation.

Recent attention has focused primarily on the threat posed by the small rockets wielded by Hamas and Islamic Jihad. Those weapons, however, pale in comparison to what Hezbollah has deployed in Southern Lebanon. The Jerusalem Post is reporting that the Shi'ite terrorist group fired at least one such rocket into Israel on Tuesday night:

Four people were lightly wounded after a Kiryat Shmona home was hit by a Katyusha rocket fired by the Hizbullah late Tuesday evening.

Two impacts were reported in different locations in the city - one on Rehov Yehuda Halevi and one in the Vradim neighborhood in east Kiryat Shmona. Initial reports said that one of the impact sites was close to a high-tension wire, Israel Radio reported.

On the same street in 1974, terrorists stormed an apartment building and 18 people were killed, eight of whom were children, when PFLP terrorists detonated their explosives during a failed rescue attempt by Israeli security forces.

Kiryat Shmona residents have been advised to enter shelters.

Explosions were also reported in Moshav Shlomi in the western Galilee and in Nahariya. Security forces were checking whether the explosions in Shlomi were mortar shells or Katyushas.

For additional info on Hezbollah's rocket arsenal, refer to my article on the subject, featured in the Winter 2006 edition of the Middle East Quarterly.

Jihad Watch Board Vice President Hugh Fitzgerald examines the soul of that quintessential modern-day dhimmi, the islamochristian:

The phenomenon of the "islamochristian" deserves wider attention, and the word wider use. An “islamochristian” is a Christian Arab who identifies with and works to advance the Islamic agenda, out of fear or out of a belief that his "Arabness" requires loyalty to Islam. Islamization by the Arab Muslim conquerors of Mesopotamia, Syria, and North Africa was a vehicle for Arab imperialism. This imperialism, the most successful in human history, convinced those who accepted Islam to also forget their own pre-Islamic or non-Islamic pasts. It caused them, in many cases, to forget their own languages and to adopt Arabic -- and in using Arabic, and in adopting Arabic names, within a few generations they had convinced themselves that they were Arabs.

Some held out. The Copts in Egypt today are simply the remnants of a population that was entirely Coptic, and that has suffered steady and slow asphyxiation. How many of Egypt's Arabs are in fact Copts who fail to realize this, much less have any sympathy or interest in how their Coptic ancestors, out of intolerable pressure, assumed the identity of Arabs?

In Lebanon, the mountains provided a refuge for the Maronites, by far the most successful group to withstand the Muslims. And most Maronites are quick to make the important distinction that, while they are "users of Arabic," that does not make them "Arabs." When they claim that they predate the Arab invasion (which of course they do) and are the descendants of the previous inhabitants of Lebanon, the Phoenicians, they are greeted with ridicule. But why? Where did the Phoenicians go? Did they just disappear? It is far more plausible to believe that the Maronites and the others in Lebanon are, most of them (for how many real "Arabs" actually came from the Arabian peninsula to conquer far more numerous populations of non-Arabs?) the descendants of those Phoenicians. The Maronites recognize this; the Muslims do not, because for them the superior people, the people to whom the Qur'an was "given" and "in their language," are the Arabs. The sense of Arab supremacy comes not only from the fact that the Qur'an was written in Arabic (with bits of Aramaic still floating in it), but because the Sunna, the other great guide for Muslims, consists of, and is derived from, the hadith and the sira, and reflects the life of people in 7th century Arabia.

Dr. Rachel Ehrenfeld and Alyssa A. Lappen comment on the resurgent Muslim Brotherhood in FrontPage:

The recent electoral victory of the outlawed Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood (MB), which won 88 seats up from 15 in the 454 member Parliament, should not be celebrated as an indication of liberalization, democracy and freedom. Neither should the 62 seat win predicted for Hamas - the MB’s progeny - in the Palestinian territories. Both the MB and Hamas are exploiting the U.S. call for democratization in the Middle East, using free elections to gain legitimate political power. However, neither organization has changed its charter; both seek to create a global Islamic state, where life would be dictated by the Shari’a.

On October 28, 2005, President George W. Bush denounced IslamoFascist movements which call for a “violent and political vision: the establishment, by terrorism, subversion and insurgency, of a totalitarian empire that denies all political and religious freedom.”

The violent version of this vision is the heart of the MB’s ideology and was promoted publicly until 9/11. But true to its strategy, the MB, the parent of all Sunni terrorist groups, is using its “flexibility” to deflect attention.

Egypt served as the laboratory for the MB’s strategy. In the decades since it was established in 1928, it worked under the doctrine of “concealment” (kitman) towards the “Islamization” of the country’s institutions and populace. During that time, it periodically engaged in direct action. In the 1930’s and 1940’s, the MB collaborated with the Nazis. Later they engaged in many forms of civil disturbance, from rioting to the takeover of a police station, to an attempted coup d’etat, as with the October 1981 assassination of the Egyptian President Anwar Sadat. More recently, MB splinter groups, such as Gama'a al-Islamiya and the Abdullah Azzam Brigades, using suicide bombings, have focused attacks on Western tourists, killing hundreds of innocent visitors and Egyptian bystanders over the last decade alone.

Here is a marvelous bit of satire, unfortunately not all that farfetched, from the great Nidra Poller:

Despite the efforts of a small group of Zionist extremists, extreme right wing journalists, and pro-Zionist neocon extremists to torpedo the project, the US Oceanography Institute has finally moved into new state-of-the-art laboratories in the suburbs of Topeka Kansas. A highly vocal minority whose hidden agenda is a secret to no one had campaigned against the Tal-Felo Institute, peppering a host of right wing media with pernicious diatribes. The Institute, named after Prince Tal-Felo of the Kansas Wheat Dynasty, is equipped with the most advanced scientific instruments for plunging into the secrets of the lower depths, including pearl-handled hook-lines-and-sinkers, gold-encrusted sextants, and other precious artefacts of the dynasty. The Topeka, Kansas Oceanographic Institute, staffed with a bevy of brilliant scientists, under the direction of the distinguished Marabout Diop-Diallo of Timbuctu, will outshine the plethora of second-rate ocean-shore centers that have been bobbing on the waves of piddling continents for decades. While Dr. Diop-Diallo’s team will concentrate its study on masculine currents, a team of scientesses (seen here in matching pearl-embroidered hijab) will concentrate on female inhabitants of the deep seas. A series of conferences scheduled for the fiscal year 2006-7 will feature honoured guests from Prince Tal-Felo’s Oklahoma provinces, where oceanographic studies have reached unprecedented levels of finesse.

It will be no surprise to learn that disgruntled scientists from the dismantled facilities on the coast of Maine have joined the Opposition. Having lost the Oceanographic Institute battle, they are turning their sights on another fruitful initiative, the Prince Taltalatal Center for Interfaith Understanding, recently established in the east wing of the White House. Making no secret of their outrageous Islamophobia, the activists are circulating a petition against the broadcast of the muezzin’s call to prayer from the minaret erected on the roof of the Center for the purpose of spreading interfaith understanding throughout the nation’s capital. Pickets are being kept at a safe distance. A police spokesman explains that the gender mixing and improper dress of the picketers would be offensive to Professor Mullah, director of the Interfaith Understanding Center.

This reporter was invited to tour the Center, richly decorated with Oriental carpets and exotic lighting fixtures. What a touching sight it was to watch youngsters from all races, creeds, and colors gathered together in the Center’s madrassa, repeating chapters and verses illustrative of interfaith understanding. Their shoes—a multicultural collection of Nikes, Adidas, Geox, and Campers—were lined up like a troop of little soldiers in a war to bring interfaith understanding to all, united together in the faith of understanding, one faith, one understanding.

As we stand on the threshold of a new year, science and spirituality soar to new heights, with the Prince Tal-Felo Oceanographic Institute in Topeka, Kansas, and the Saudi Prince Taltalatal Center for Interfaith Understanding in Washington, DC. Bright prospects in the wake!

D. C. Watson offers CAIR some more advice:

Your concerns are of great importance, or at least they should be. You're the largest Muslim civil rights and advocacy group in the U.S. Congratulations. So perhaps you can explain why you, as a Muslim civil rights and advocacy group that, according to your mission statement, is here to "enhance understanding of Islam, encourage dialogue, protect civil liberties", "empower American Muslims, and build coalitions that promote justice and mutual understanding," oppose the government of the United States monitoring mosques, homes, businesses and warehouses for increased radiation levels?

Would you also be opposed to this activity if it were churches that were being monitored? At least the mosques in America remain standing. Can you say the same for the Churches situated in Islamic States, which are often on fire when they're shown on the news? In case you’ve been tucked away from reality for the past four years, there have been hundreds of arrests and convictions of Muslims inside the United States. Not for jaywalking, unpaid parking tickets, or vagrancy, but for the plotting of terrorist attacks, credit card fraud, drug trafficking, car theft, and money laundering activities, all of which have been determined to be for the purpose of financing Islamic terrorist attacks. And to this day, they continue.

http://www.usdoj.gov/usao/eousa/foia_reading_room/usab5104.pdf (A good read)

http://frontpagemagazine.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=19671

http://www.ajc.org/site/c.ijITI2PHKoG/b.1075803/k.22E/Other_Significant_Arrests_Indictments_and_Convictions.htm

http://news.findlaw.com/cnn/docs/infocom/uselashi121702sind.pdfhttp://www.homelandsecurityus.com/virginiajihadindict.pdf

If you're actually wondering why these facilities have been monitored, the following should serve as sufficient reasons:

1) 150 terrorist cells and threats from Portland, Ore., to Lackawanna, N.Y.
2) More than 3,000 known terrorist operatives inside the U.S.
3) 375 charged persons in terrorism-related cases, 195 of whom already have pleaded guilty or been convicted, and removed from the country (as of May 2005).
4) More than 500 people linked to September 11.
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20050503-114633-5129r.htm

As representatives of the Islamic community, shouldn't you be elated over the capture and disruption of these "misunderstanders" of Islam, which in turn has also protected Muslims who don't want to live under the thumb of Islamic law, and enjoy their freedom here?

Muhammad cartoon controversy update: instead of praising Rasmussen for his defense of Western values of free speech, the EU is demanding that he stand down and adopt their policy of appeasement. "EU Reacts Against Insulting Caricatures: Sheer Foolishness!," from Zaman.com, with thanks to the Constantinopolitan Irredentist:

The European Union (EU) seriously reacted on Friday for the first time against a Danish newspaper’s publication of insulting caricatures of the Prophet, Mohammed.

Franco Frattini, the Deputy EU commissioner for Justice, Freedom, and Security, noting the publication as "foolishness and indiscretion" condemned the cartoons Danish Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rassmussen backed up on the grounds of "freedom of speech and thought".

Such publications, Frattini emphasized, will serve to radicalism by fomenting hostility against Islam and foreigners.

I see. Portray Islam as having something violent about it and it will only make Muslims violent. See, there is nothing violent about it. Just ignore all those Islamic killers, suicide bombers, etc. If you notice them, you will only breed more.

And people swallow that as a serious analysis.

In response to the "freedom of press" that Mr. Rasmussen used as an excuse, the EU official said the media is not free to make a news story out of anything. Frattini assessing the issue in his personal perspective said if the publication were about his own values, it would hurt him personally as a Catholic Christian and he would have taken great offence.

Is that so, Frattini? Would you threaten to kill anyone in response? What do you think of the detractions of Catholicism that can be found by the bushel in Western countries? Do they move you to violent impulses?

To be honest, such codes of behavior will accelerate Islamophobia across Europe, said Frattini, emphasizing his respect for the freedom of speech.

Frattini emphasized the cartoons published in Jyllands Posten did not affect people's ideas on Islam and noted despite everything he is against restricting the freedom of the press.

Journalists and caricaturists of course, he said, have the right to publish such materials; however, when the case is evaluated in political terms the situation is not so proper. Frattini said he sees the point of Muslims who expressed offense and hurt and termed the incident as a scandal.

Now wait a minute. I thought they were so desperately poor they had to resort to suicide bombing for lack of any other weapons. This propaganda line is getting really hard to follow. "Terrorists threaten to upgrade missiles," from the Jerusalem Post, with thanks to Johnny and Lisa:

Three armed Palestinian groups in the Gaza Strip on Monday threatened to continue their attacks on Israel and said they have long-range missiles capable of reaching more Israeli towns and cities.

One of the groups belongs to Fatah, the ruling party headed by Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas. The two others are the Popular Resistance Committees, an alliance of various armed groups, and al-Quds Brigades, the armed wing of Islamic Jihad.

This little love note just in from a mysteriously anti-Semitic "Hindu," who appears to have forgotten the Muslim genocide in India that claimed as many as 70 million lives, and the fact that what Jews have done to India is, well, nothing at all:

This webpage of yours is a masterpiece of crap. All your readers,including Jews,Iam sure ,pity you for your thinly disguised artwork of deceit.Let me remind you that both Jews and Muslims have a common ancestor.They share many common features,both physical and moral.But they have been bickering over nonsensical issues for so long.To me ,as a Hindu,I believe they should both be shipped ,together in one bag,to another planet,and the further from our solar system,the better!. Maybe then this Earth could enjoy some peace at last!

Do you not agree,you wretched simpleton?

Uh, no. But thank you for your suggestion!

I am unwilling to give in to threats and attempts at intimidation. I hope you are too. If only a tiny minority is not cowed, we have already lost. Jihad in Bangladesh update from Reporters Without Borders, with thanks to Summiter:

Reporters Without Borders and the Bangladesh Centre for the Development of Journalism and Communication (BCDJC) voiced deep concern today about a mounting wave of Islamist terrorism in Bangladesh and its impact on the press. At least 50 journalists and 10 publications have been threatened by terrorist groups in the past four months over supposedly “anti-Islamic” articles yet the government seems unable to restore confidence in the face of this new danger for the media.

“After ignoring the terrorist threat for so long, the authorities now have a responsibility to come up with a response,” the two organisations said. “At stake is the safety of hundreds of threatened journalists who want to freely inform the public about the terrorism affecting their country. If the government fails to restore confidence among the journalists, investigative reports on jihadism will not be undertaken and self censorship will become the rule. We call on the authorities to establish a global plan for the protection of journalists and publications threatened by jihadist groups.

At least 55 journalists have received death threats since September from Jamatul Mujahideen Bangladesh (JMB), an Islamist group that has also promised to blow up eight newspapers and three press clubs. The latest victim, Amar Desh advisory editor Ataus Samad, received a letter from JMB on 22 December that said his newspaper would be “the next target.”

Women's rights in Islam update from Sharon Lapkin in FrontPage, with thanks to a tea-loving snail:

In Australia, Norway, Sweden and other Western nations, there is a distinct race-based crime in motion being ignored by the diversity police: Islamic men are raping Western women for ethnic reasons. We know this because the rapists have openly declared their sectarian motivations.

When a number of teenage Australian girls were subjected to hours of sexual degradation during a spate of gang rapes in Sydney that occurred between 1998 and 2002, the perpetrators of these assaults framed their rationale in ethnic terms. The young victims were informed that they were “sluts” and “Aussie pigs” while they were being hunted down and abused.

In Australia's New South Wales Supreme Court in December 2005, a visiting Pakistani rapist testified that his victims had no right to say no, because they were not wearing a headscarf.

And earlier this year Australians were outraged when Lebanese Sheik Faiz Mohammed gave a lecture in Sydney where he informed his audience that rape victims had no one to blame but themselves. Women, he said, who wore skimpy clothing, invited men to rape them.

A few months earlier, in Copenhagen, Islamic mufti and scholar, Shahid Mehdi created uproar when – like his peer in Australia – he stated that women who did not wear a headscarf were asking to be raped.

And with haunting synchronicity in 2004, the London Telegraph reported that visiting Egyptian scholar Sheik Yusaf al-Qaradawi claimed female rape victims should be punished if they were dressed immodestly when they were raped. He added, “For her to be absolved from guilt, a raped woman must have shown good conduct.”

In Norway and Sweden, journalist Fjordman warns of a rape epidemic. Police Inspector Gunnar Larsen stated that the steady increase of rape-cases and the link to ethnicity are clear, unmistakable trends. Two out of three persecutions for rape in Oslo are immigrants with a non-Western background and 80 percent of the victims are Norwegian women.

In Sweden, according to translator for Jihad Watch, Ali Dashti, “Gang rapes, usually involving Muslim immigrant males and native Swedish girls, have become commonplace.” A few weeks ago she said, “Five Kurds brutally raped a 13-year-old Swedish girl.”

In France, Samira Bellil broke her silence – after enduring years of repeated gang rapes in one of the Muslim populated public housing projects – and wrote a book, In the hell of the tournantes, that shocked France. Describing how gang rape is rampant in the banlieues, she explained to Time that, “any neighborhood girl who smokes, uses makeup or wears attractive clothes is a whore.”

Unfortunately, Western women are not the only victims in this epidemic. In Indonesia, in 1998, human rights groups documented the testimony of over 100 Chinese women who were gang raped during the riots that preceded the fall of President Suharto. Many of them were told: “You must be raped, because you are Chinese and non-Muslim.”

Christian Solidarity Worldwide reported that in April 2005, a 9-year-old Pakistani girl was raped, beaten with a cricket bat, hanged upside down from the ceiling, had spoonfuls of chillies poured into her mouth, and repeatedly bashed while handcuffed. Her Muslim neighbours told her they were taking revenge for the American bombing of Iraqi children and informed her they were doing it because she was an “infidel and a Christian.”

In Sudan – where Arab Muslims slaughter black Muslim and Christian Sudanese in an ongoing genocide – former Sudanese slave and now a human rights’ activist Simon Deng says he witnessed girls and women being raped and that the Arab regime of Khartoum sends its soldiers to the field to rape and murder. In other reports, women who are captured by government forces are asked; “Are you Christian or Muslim?” and those who answer Christian, are gang raped before having their breasts cut off.

This phenomenon of Islamic sexual violence against women should be treated as the urgent, violent, repressive epidemic it is. Instead, journalists, academics, and politicians ignore it, rationalize it, or ostracize those who dare discuss it.

Here's hoping they strike at the root of the problem -- at the root causes of what made them "Al-Qaeda-linked militants" to start with. No, I am not holding my breath. From Reuters, with thanks to Cindy:

KUWAIT (Reuters) - A Kuwaiti court on Tuesday sentenced to death six suspected militants linked to al Qaeda for bloody attacks in the country.

The six were among 37 Islamists on trial as members of the "Peninsula Lions" group believed to be linked to Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda in Iraq and Saudi Arabia.

They include 25 Kuwaitis, seven stateless Arabs, two Jordanians, a Saudi, an Australian and a Somali....

Seven were acquitted including Islamist cleric Sheikh Hamed al-Ali, lawyer Osama al-Munawer who represents Islamists as well as the wife of Amer al-Enezi -- one of al Qaeda's top leaders in Kuwait who died in custody in February.

"I thank God. I've believed in my innocence all along," Munawer told Reuters by phone. "The death sentence was very tough as it was never proven that they took up arms to fight against anyone. I hope they will get a fair trial on appeal."...

The suspects were charged with belonging to an "extremist" group, calling for attacks on state facilities, and trying to kill Kuwaiti security forces as well as members of "friendly forces" in the country....

Prosecutors had demanded the death penalty for about 20 suspects for four shootouts in January in which nine Islamists and four security personnel were killed.

Police have said some of the suspects had confessed to planning suicide attacks against U.S. military and Western targets in Kuwait, but several militants have denied the charges saying confessions were extracted under duress.

Kuwait has cracked down on Islamists opposing the U.S. military presence there. Diplomats say radical Islam is taking hold among Kuwaiti youth.

More evidence of the sharp distinction between believers and unbelievers in Islam -- a distinction that colors virtually every aspect of Muslim/infidel interaction and coexistence. From IslamOnline, with thanks to all who sent this in:

A German woman recently released in Iraq after being held hostage for more than three weeks said on Monday that her captors promised not to hurt her because she is a Muslim.

Susanne Osthoff, a 43-year-old aid worker and archaeologist, told an Arabic TV channel that her kidnappers also said they didn’t want money in exchange for her release.

“They said 'Ms. Susan, we know you and you are Iraq's friend'," said Osthoff, a convert to Islam.

"'We're informing you now this was a political reason why we kidnapped you, and we'll inform you later about what will happen, so don't be afraid, we don't harm women or children, and you are Muslim'," Osthoff quoted one of the kidnappers as saying.

The content of this code of conduct will be all-important. It could be a genuine effort, or just more deception and window-dressing. "Code to keep radical imams in check," from ABC.Net, with thanks to JE:

Members of the Prime Minister's Muslim Advisory Council want clerics to abide by a code of conduct in a bid to rein in radical imams.

The council is working on a code of conduct for clerics, which it hopes to introduce next year.

Council spokesman Yasser Soliman says the guidelines are in response to concerns from the community....

The idea of a set of guidelines was first discussed at a summit of Muslim leaders that was held in August.

It has the backing of many moderate leaders but some imams are angry about the proposals, which include the monitoring of sermons.

This should be done by the government of Australia, if it is concerned about sedition.

However, Mr Soliman believes very few clerics will refuse to participate in the new scheme.

"We can't enforce it," he said.

"I think most clerics will be happy to be on it and most of them will be happy to register and contribute to it.

"Those that aren't, when people are thinking of employing their services they'll check the register and see well they're self-appointed or they're not recognised."

Mr Soliman says the scheme will not further marginalise radical clerics.

"Part of the approach that is being discussed is to try and develop a dialogue where you bring down the temperature of, I guess, their preachings," he said.

How? In any case, he's right: it will not further marginalize radical clerics, because they are not any more likely to be the self-appointed types this article is concerned about than are more moderate clerics. The idea that only uneducated, self-appointed clerics are actually jihadists is yet another PC myth.

He denies the plan amounts to religious censorship.

"This happens in other religions as well," he said.

"Similar education and upgrading of their education happens in Christian religion, rabbis go through similar things, so why should we be any different?"

You shouldn't. In fact, your group should be subjected to greater scrutiny -- not because of "racism" or "Islamophobia," but because there are no Christian preachers or rabbis preaching hatred of and violence against people of another religions. But among Islamic clerics such preaching is so commonplace that it is scarcely even noticed anymore.

AP (thanks to Twostellas) notices the Poso jihad that we have covered here for months:

POSO, Indonesia — Masked, black-clad and brandishing machetes, the attackers sprang from behind a screen of tall grass and pounced on the four Christian girls as they walked to school. Within seconds, three of the teenagers were beheaded — fresh victims of violence that has turned this Indonesian island into yet another front in the terrorist wars.

"All I could do was pray to Jesus for his help," said 16-year-old Noviana Malewa, who fled with a gaping head wound. "I was streaming with blood." A thick scar runs from the back of her neck to just under her right eye.

Muslim militants are blamed for the October killings, the most gruesome yet in a campaign of terror against Christians on the island of Sulawesi.

Muslim-Christian violence from 2000 to 2002 killed some 1,000 people in Sulawesi and attracted Muslim militants from across Indonesia, including from Jemaah Islamiyah, a homegrown network linked to Al Qaeda, and even from the distant Middle East.

That is, Muslim violence against Christians, not "Muslim-Christian violence."

Despite a peace deal, bombings, shootings and other attacks on Christians have continued, especially around the small town of Poso in the heart of the octopus-shaped, Massachusetts-sized island.

Behind the attacks are Muslim islanders avenging their dead in that conflict, and terrorists bent on fomenting a new war, former fighters and security officials say.

"They want to see Poso become alive with the spirit of jihad again," said Fahirin Ibnu Achmad, an Afghan-trained militant who took part in the 2000-2002 war.

It was thrown on the floor. Allegedly. But never fear, Khalid Khawaja, a former official of Pakistan’s secret service and a friend of Osama bin Laden, is on the case of this immense human rights violation. From AKI, with thanks to Hutchrun:

Karachi, 27 Dec. (AKI) - (by Syed Saleem Shahzad) - After the reported desecration of the Koran in the Guantanamo Bay prison, which provoked riots in Afghanistan that killed at least fifteen people, a group of Islamic terror suspects in custody in Pakistan have gone on a hunger strike alleging that the Muslim sacred book has also been desecrated in their Pakistani jail. The 16 signatories of the letter, from Cell number 3 of Adyala Jail in Pakistan’s military capital Rawalpindi, have appealed to the media and to human right activists. Under Pakistan's blasphemy laws, desecration of the Koran can merit the death penalty.

"They belong to all classes of Jihadis, ranging from anti-Shiite sectarians to anti-western followers of Osama bin Laden. They are all awaiting trial and some of them have been waiting for the last five years,” said a source in Adyala Jail....

In their signed message the prisoners maintained that when Tipu Sultan visited their cell, the inmates were performing their prayers individually as they were in shackles and cannot perform prayers collectively.

In their account the assistant superintendent cursed them and forced them to stop their prayers and conducted a search during which a copy of the Koran was recovered. They say he threw it on the ground and yelled: "This is the book which teaches you terrorism. This is the book which has brought you here."

"We have also received the message and we shall not tolerate these sort of events," said retired squadron leader Khalid Khawaja. A former official of Pakistan’s secret service, ISI, Khalid Khawaja was forced to retire after which he joined the Afghan resistance against the Soviet occupation and allegedly became a close friend of Osama bin Laden. Recently he formed a human rights organization, Defence of Human Rights, primarily to fight for the human rights of Jihadis and their families.

Gee, isn't it great that the Israelis have given up Gaza? The peace that has ensued has just been wondrous. From AP, with thanks to the Constantinopolitan Irredentist:

GAZA CITY, Gaza Strip - The Israeli military fired a barrage of artillery and missiles at the Gaza Strip on Tuesday, hitting two offices of the Al Aqsa Martyrs' Brigades and a bridge the army said was used by militants to reach areas where they fire rockets.

Hours later, about two dozen armed Al Aqsa members briefly took over the governor's office and two other government buildings in northern Gaza — the latest outbreak of lawlessness that has undermined the rule of Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas.

Israel's pre-dawn aerial strikes were part of the army's attempt to halt rocket fire on Israeli towns bordering Gaza. Prime Minister Ariel Sharon has approved a buffer zone in northern Gaza, although the army said it has not yet implemented the plan — which including firing on anyone who enters the area — and was unlikely to on Tuesday.

And why do they not feel French in France? Of course the whole world knows the French reputation for unkindness to foreigners. But why is any discussion of the EU/Arab League agreements in which the EU foreswore assimilation at the Arab League's insistence off limits for the IHT? Why no discussion of the statement by Dyab Abou Jahjah of the Arab European League calling assimilation "cultural rape"? Now it is all the fault of the French that these young Muslims feel marginalized? Well, I'm not buying. There is too much evidence on the other side.

And now, this article suggests, an end to French discrimination, a little money, a few jobs, and everything will be all right. Well, this is certainly a theory that is going to be tested. But I doubt that it will be met with reciprocal efforts on the part of Muslim leaders to encourage assimilation.

From the International Herald Tribune, with thanks to Caratacus:

BONDY, France "Burn!" A knot of young men join their voices in a battle cry as they edge closer to the silhouette of a parked Mercedes, some of them aiming what look like handguns, others reaching for lighters.

In the harsh light of an underground parking lot in this grim suburb northwest of Paris, the guns and lighters are imaginary - but the sense of aggression is real. As one of the young men films with a digital camera, the others move to the angry beat of music blasting out of an open car door, echoing into the dark December night.

They sing about the riots that erupted two months ago, about being Muslim and about not feeling French in France. For them the unrest is not over, it is waiting to break loose again.

"The quiet is deceptive," said Bala "Balastik" Coulibaly, 24, of nearby Clichy-sous-Bois, his eyes scanning the deserted parking lot from deep inside his sweatshirt as he took a break between two songs. It was in Clichy that the accidental death of two teenagers on Oct. 27 set off three weeks of rioting in immigrant neighborhoods across France.

Since then, the whiff of gasoline and tear gas has disappeared. But the calm is fragile, impatient and tinged with the cynicism of youths who fear being let down again by a political class that allowed mass unemployment and social exclusion to accumulate over three decades in the poor suburbs ringing France's big cities.

"The rage in the suburbs is only asleep," said Balastik, a French youth of Mauritanian origin who has been jobless since dropping out of school seven years ago and is dreaming of a career as a rapper with his band, Styladone. "It wouldn't take much to wake it up again."...

At the same time, the government announced a raft of measures aimed at fighting joblessness and discrimination, and declared 2006 the year of "equal opportunity." Businesses will be offered tax breaks for setting up shop in difficult suburbs, local schools will receive more attention, a new apprenticeship program for teenagers is being drawn up, and state funds for nongovernmental organizations that were canceled three years ago will be restored.

President Jacques Chirac, clearly shaken by the riots, has urged French media and businesses to reflect the country's diverse population. The minister for equal opportunity, Azouz Begag, is pondering ways of measuring diversity in order to provide companies with a benchmark.

But in suburbs like Bondy and Clichy-sous-Bois, the buzz and debate sparked by the riots are dismissed by many as little more than political posturing.

"Right now they're afraid of us, so they're making a lot of promises," said a friend of Balastik's, Ker, 23, whose parents are from Cambodia and who sings in the same band. "What we need is concrete action that is felt, here, on the ground."...

Outside the Clichy-sous-Bois city hall, Mehdi, 24, who also works for an NGO for disadvantaged youth, confirmed that he had not seen any of the new funds promised by the government.

"The faster some of the promises are transformed into action the better," said Mehdi, a Frenchman of Algerian-Moroccan origin who grew up in Clichy. "We are taking the temperature with people every day. They are waiting for changes that they feel in everyday life - and they are also waiting for justice for the two dead teenagers."

The trigger for the November violence was the accidental electrocution of two teenagers of African origin who hid in a power substation. A third teenager, who survived the incident, says the three friends were being pursued by police, a claim officers deny. The outcome of an investigation is keenly awaited in the suburbs. If the police are exonerated, it could trigger new unrest, said Mehdi, who, like others interviewed for this article, did not give his last name.

Back in the parking lot in Bondy, Balastik mimes lighting a lighter, his eyes glimmering in the harsh neon light. One of his friends is wearing a red T-shirt with a big caption that reads "Rakaille" - a rap spelling of "racaille," or "thugs," which is what Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy called the rioters at one point, fueling their anger.

"We're thugs and we're proud," Balastik quipped, adding that music was "one way of dealing with the frustration of never getting a reply to your job application."

Others channel their anger differently. Cars have continued to burn every night since the riots ended, including more than 100 across France on Christmas Eve.

Islamic decree alert from our best and most "certified ally". From Reuters:

Saudi mobile operator Mobily has stopped users from text message voting for an Arab "Star Academy" competition because of an Islamic decree branding the reality show immoral, the company said on Monday.

Saudi religious scholars last May condemned the hugely popular talent show aired by Lebanese channel LBC as a crime against Islam when a young Saudi returned to a hero's welcome after winning in the Lebanese capital Beirut.

"The decision was taken last night because of a fatwa (religious decree) issued last year, since the program is culturally inappropriate," spokesman Humoud Alghodaini said.

"It shows men and women living in one house, sometimes semi-naked and in inappropriate situations," he added.

How gauche!

Seriously, if Western Civilization allows these "allies" to continue to promote their agenda, then all basic human rights which the Western world now enjoys will be compromised - freedom of expression being the first.

This report from The Christian Science Monitor purports to have the
reason(s):

PARIS - Mary Fallot looks as unlike a terrorist suspect as one could possibly imagine: a petite and demure white Frenchwoman chatting with friends on a cell-phone, indistinguishable from any other young woman in the café where she sits sipping coffee.

And that is exactly why European antiterrorist authorities have their eyes on thousands like her across the continent.

Ms. Fallot is a recent convert to Islam. In the eyes of the police, that makes her potentially dangerous.

The death of Muriel Degauque, a Belgian convert who blew herself up in a suicide attack on US troops in Iraq last month, has drawn fresh attention to the rising number of Islamic converts in Europe, most of them women.

"The phenomenon is booming, and it worries us," the head of the French domestic intelligence agency, Pascal Mailhos, told the Paris-based newspaper Le Monde in a recent interview. "But we must absolutely avoid lumping everyone together."

The difficulty, security experts explain, is that while the police may be alert to possible threats from young men of Middle Eastern origin, they are more relaxed about white European women. Terrorists can use converts who "have added operational benefits in very tight security situations" where they might not attract attention, says Magnus Ranstorp, a terrorism expert at the Swedish National Defense College in Stockholm.

Ms. Fallot, who converted to Islam three years ago after asking herself spiritual questions to which she found no answers in her childhood Catholicism, says she finds the suspicion her new religion attracts "wounding." "For me," she adds, "Islam is a message of love, of tolerance and peace."

It is a message that appeals to more and more Europeans as curiosity about Islam has grown since 9/11, say both Muslim and non-Muslim researchers. Although there are no precise figures, observers who monitor Europe's Muslim population estimate that several thousand men and women convert each year.

Only a fraction of converts are attracted to radical strands of Islam, they point out, and even fewer are drawn into violence. A handful have been convicted of terrorist offenses, such as Richard Reid, the "shoe bomber" and American John Walker Lindh, who was captured in Afghanistan.

Admittedly patchy research suggests that more women than men convert, experts say, but that - contrary to popular perception - only a minority do so in order to marry Muslim men.

"That used to be the most common way, but recently more [women] are coming out of conviction," says Haifa Jawad, who teaches at Birmingham University in Britain. Though non-Muslim men must convert in order to marry a Muslim woman, she points out, the opposite is not true.

Fallot laughs when she is asked whether her love life had anything to do with her decision. "When I told my colleagues at work that I had converted, their first reaction was to ask whether I had a Muslim boyfriend," she recalls. "They couldn't believe I had done it of my own free will."

In fact, she explains, she liked the way "Islam demands a closeness to God. Islam is simpler, more rigorous, and it's easier because it is explicit. I was looking for a framework; man needs rules and behavior to follow. Christianity did not give me the same reference points."

Those reasons reflect many female converts' thinking, say experts who have studied the phenomenon. "A lot of women are reacting to the moral uncertainties of Western society," says Dr. Jawad. "They like the sense of belonging and caring and sharing that Islam offers."

There is more to bear so please read it all.

Of course, Red Ken's friendship with Sheikh Qaradawi suggests that the peaceful subjugation and Islamization of the West, which Qaradawi has predicted, is perfectly fine with him. He just wishes these good people wouldn't use bombs. From AP, with thanks to the Constantinopolitan Irredentist:

LONDON - Terrorists tried to attack London eight times between the Sept. 11 attacks in the United States and last July 7, when suicide bombers killed dozens on the city's transport system, London's mayor said Monday.

Ken Livingstone said there had been two attempted attacks since July 7, including a failed attack on the transport network on July 21....

He dismissed suggestions by some government ministers and police chiefs that the city is the target of a "great organized international conspiracy."

"Largely what you're talking about is fairly disorganized and small groups of disaffected people," Livingstone said in an interview on British Broadcasting Corp. radio.

"This not a great organized international conspiracy with orders flowing down the chain."

No indeed, not a conspiracy as such. Just an immense group of people with identical goals. But that nicety has escaped the Lord Mayor.

CORRECTION: Befuddled Yank that I am, I thought the Mayor of London was the Lord Mayor, but the commenters have corrected me below. I am just gobsmacked to learn that there are two mayors of London, and dead chuffed that there are kind people here willing to set me straight. Thanks to all!

Gee whiz, AP and everybody had all those great Christian pilgrims "flock" to Bethlehem headlines (although some of the headlines were above articles which did mumble quietly that 30,000 was a fraction of the number that came for Christmas before the 2000 intifada began). From World Net Daily:

With Christmas services here drawing far fewer tourists than in the 1990s and the town's Christian population now at an all-time low, many world leaders and hundreds of major media outlets this week blamed Israel for Bethlehem's decline – often citing false information – while a simple talk with the town's residents reveals a drastically different picture. They say Muslim persecution has been keeping Christians away.

"All this talk about Israel driving Christians out and causing pain is nonsense," a Bethlehem Christian community leader told WND. "You want to know what is at play here, just come throughout the year and see the intimidation from the Muslims. They have burned down our stores, built mosques in front of our churches, stole our real estate and took away our rights. Women have been raped and abducted. So don't tell me about Israel. It's the Muslims."

The New York Post reports on questions being asked at the State Department.

The State Department has launched an investigation into whether hard-line Islamic employees at the U.S Embassy in Egypt are working behind the scenes to deny visas to Coptic Christians, The Post has learned.

State Department officials are closely examining 15 to 20 Egyptian employees of the embassy's consular section after top officials received complaints from lawyers and human-rights groups about discriminatory behavior toward the Copts seeking visas to the United States, sources said.

Umm, excuse me, could you please tell me why "hard-line Islamic employees" are working in our embassy?

In a recent meeting organized by Rep. Frank Wolf (R-Va.), top State Department officials were told that these employees, who conduct prescreening interviews and translations, appear to have unusual influence over a process that is supposed to be controlled by Americans.

The more I think about it, the less I like the idea of "hard-line Islamic employees" deciding who should come into our country. I am even more worried about who they want to let in than I am about who they want to keep out.

Among those making complaints to the State Department is a Christian man who was seeking to donate a kidney to an uncle in New Jersey.

He says he was twice told to remove the cross he was wearing if he wanted a visa.

Oh, so maybe it was just the ACLU's Egyptian branch.

Peace In Our Time Update from TurkishPress.com, with thanks to Mackie:

JERUSALEM - Israel is prepared for a possible "collapse" in the Palestinian Authority that could render Palestinian leader Mahmud Abbas incapable of imposing law and order, a senior official said Sunday. "We are prepared for a possible collapse in the Palestinian Authority that could risk seeing Mahmud Abbas unable to impose law and order on the ground as well as within his own Fatah party," the source told AFP.

"At this point, Mahmud Abbas is so weak in relation to Hamas that he is unable to implement the smallest decision," said the official, speaking on condition of anonymity.

The powerful Islamist movement Hamas is gearing up to contest its first Palestinian parliamentary election on January 25, posing a serious challenge to Fatah's decade-long grip on power.

The official accused the Palestinian leader of being content to point the finger at Israel.

"We cannot always blame others for our own weakness," he said.

Oh, but we can sure try.

If husbands and brothers want it, then what could be a problem? The wishes of the women involved don't seem to matter at all. From Arab News, with thanks to Sr. Soph:

JEDDAH, 26 December 2005 — Crown Prince Sultan, deputy premier and minister of defense and aviation, yesterday emphasized the government’s readiness to open the way for women driving once they get consent from their families.

“When fathers, husbands and brothers ask us for women to drive we will look into it, but if they ask us the opposite we can’t force them (to let women drive),” the Saudi Press Agency quoted the crown prince as saying. In a previous statement, Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques King Abdullah had said that Saudi women would be permitted to drive someday.

“I believe strongly in the rights of women,” the king had said in his first television interview since acceding to the throne on Aug. 1.

“I believe the day will come when women will drive. I believe it will be possible and I believe patience is a virtue,” the king had told Barbara Walters of ABC News. However, he had said he would not impose it against the will of his people by issuing a royal decree.

Jihad Watch Board Vice President Hugh Fitzgerald offers some considerations on the Boston mosque:

When a Mosque Project is proposed on land owned by the government (federal, state, local) or that requires any government permission (as zoning and building permits):

1) Investigate everyone connected with the mosque, not merely the front men.

2) Find out who is signing the papers. Note: if a city employee of the local redevelopment authority (in this case the BRA) seems to take an unusual interest in expediting the whole thing, take note.

3) If the papers for the sale of land are sent to Saudi Arabia for signing, be a little suspicious. Who is paying? Could it the Saudis? Could it be part of the nearly $100 billion they have used to promote not merely Islam, but their own special brand that even orthodox Muslims (and Bernard Lewis, and James Woolsey) like to pretend is the real source of the problem? Mosques and madrasas help in the conduct of Da'wa, the main instrument of the Jihad -- the Office of War Propaganda.

4) When a sweetheart deal is made, so that public land is sold at below-market prices, ask who has been involved in the deal at every level. Any reason to think anyone at the BRA (the Boston Redevelopment Authority) took a special interest?

Fareed Al-Miftah is a refreshingly sensible fellow. But his view has significant opposition among Muslims.

From GulfNews, with thanks to Sr. Soph:

Manama: Bahrain's Islamic Affairs Undersecretary Shaikh Fareed Al Miftah has shrugged off as "nonsensical" calls not to offer festive and New Year greetings....

"There is no problem with giving or receiving gifts, either." According to the official, the only condition is that cards should not carry icons or symbols that contradict Islamic principles, such as the cross.

Hundreds of leaflets distributed in front of mosques and chat forums have called upon Muslims not to wish non-Muslims on Christmas or New Year.

Christians still under fire in Iraq as jihadists identify them as unbelievers at war with Islam, and continue to impose Sharia upon the country. From the TimesOnline, with thanks to Twostellas:

IRAQIS gathered for Christmas behind Kalashnikovs yesterday. Midnight Mass was cancelled because of bombing fears and curfews, but the country’s rapidly dwindling Christian minority turned out in their thousands for early morning services.

Protected under Saddam, Christians once numbered between 600,000 and 700,000 in Iraq, but church officials say that about half have now fled, especially from the south, where militias linked to Iraq’s ruling parties have waged a three-year campaign to Islamise the country at gunpoint.

The worst attacks were by insurgents in central and northern Iraq in August last year, when bomb attacks on four churches in Baghdad and one in Mosul killed a dozen Christians during Sunday services.

Priests have been threatened and killed, women abused in the street for not wearing veils and three months ago the entire lay leadership of Iraq’s main Anglican church were ambushed and killed.

Despite the fears of insurgent bombings and Islamist intolerance, congregations turned out in greater numbers yesterday than last year. “We are now back to the numbers of three years ago. People now want to go to church to keep challenging these people, we are defiant,” said Faadi Victor, a lay official at Our Lady of Salvation, a Catholic church that was hit by one of the August 2004 bombs.

More power to you, Faadi.

In an article published on April 1, 2003, I wrote that "there is no reason to think that any secular democracy established in an Islamic country will escape pressure from Muslims who want to restore Shariah. None has so far." That pressure, of course, could just as easily come from within democratic structures as from outside them.

From AP, with thanks to the Constantinopolitan Irredentist:

BAGHDAD, Iraq — Hundreds of Shiites spilled into Baghdad streets on Sunday to support their governing coalition, which took a large lead in the Dec. 15 elections and has been the target of opposition vote-rigging accusations.

Sunni Arab groups staged smaller demonstrations in the western Anbar Province city of Fallujah and in eastern Baqouba to support demands for a rerun of the parliamentary elections, which they claim were tainted by fraud.

At least 16 people were killed in violence around Iraq on Sunday....

In the sprawling Shiite slum of Sadr City, about 1,000 demonstrators held a rally to support preliminary results showing the governing United Iraqi Alliance, a religious Shiite coalition, leading in the elections....

The Alliance has called on Iraqis to accept the results and has been moving ahead with efforts to form a "national unity" government....

The Alliance, headed by the cleric Abdul-Aziz al-Hakim, said preliminary results showing it with a clear lead in the elections were not the result of fraud or intimidation. It charged that many violations took place in Sunni Arab areas, and claimed that many of its opponents conspired with insurgents to alter results.

"There will be no going back and no new elections," Jawad al-Maliki, a senior Alliance official, said at a news conference. "The results must be accepted and the will of the people must be respected."...

Charles Jacobs of the David Project writes in to the Boston Globe with some disturbing information about the Islamic Society of Boston's associations.

THE STORY on the lawsuit filed against us by the Islamic Society of Boston (''Praised by beacon, mosque project stalls amid rancor," Page A1, Dec. 18) did mention that the society's founder, Abdurahman Alamoudi, raised money for Al Qaeda and is in jail (in connection with a plot to assassinate a Saudi prince). But the story omitted even more worrisome facts.

The society's leaders have praised suicide bombers and called for attacks on Americans. A website in Qatar associated with society trustee Yousef al-Qaradawi, an internationally known leader of extremists, calls for gays to be executed by either stoning or burning. Al-Qaradawi has been barred from the United States. The society website praises as ''very good" a book that refers to the women's liberation movement as a ''Jewish plot" to corrupt society and argues that wife-beating is at times necessary. The library of the society's current Cambridge mosque contains literature containing vitriol directed against Christians, Jews, and Americans. While mosque spokesmen speak of ''dialogue" and tolerance, Qaradawi says ''there is no dialogue between us [and the Jews] except by the sword and the rifle.' "

As citizens, we were concerned. We wanted the society to answer simple questions, questions that it took pains to avoid answering. As a result, we have been sued by the society and forced to spend tens of thousands of dollars to defend ourselves. This is not a case about Boston bigots with discriminatory suspicions. It is a case of citizens rightfully worried that their city might be importing -- and subsidizing -- hatred and misogyny with links to terror.

CHARLES JACOBS
President
The David Project
Boston

Residents of Indonesia's Aceh Province, already burdened with the devastating effects of last year's catastrophic tsunami, are now being forced to deal with an emboldened Taliban-style vice squad, according to the San Francisco Chronicle:

The morality enforcers, a squad of men clad in green trousers and white shirts and women in white head scarves, stride on to this provincial capital's tsunami-scarred beach to weed out sin.

After descending from a pickup truck, the enforcers -- patterned after the religious police of Saudi Arabia -- check identity cards of a couple who had been munching corn on the cob while staring at the sea. The man and woman, obviously sweethearts, are given a stern warning and told to go their separate ways.

Next, they rebuke a young woman for wearing "un-Islamic" blue jeans, even though she is wearing a head scarf as required by Aceh province's 2-year-old Shariah law, based on Islamic principles as set out in the Quran.

"I hate this place; there are so many rules," the young woman, who identified herself only as Wiva, said in fluent English. "I mean, who do these guys think they are?"

The Wilayatul Hisbah, which loosely translates as "the control team," scour the ruins for other would-be sinners, and appear disappointed when they don't find any. After their arrival, most young couples had fled the beach on motor scooters.

Aceh's religious police were created a year before the earthquake and tsunami struck a year ago, killing an estimated 170,000 Acehnese and devastating one of Indonesia's richest provinces.

They had kept a low profile, largely ignored by a populace that most observers say has never been too keen on the hard-line Islamic legal system imposed by Jakarta in 2002. Critics say it was a cynical ploy to win over Muslim clerics during the government's nearly three-decade war with separatist guerrillas of the Free Aceh Movement, or GAM. A peace agreement was signed in August.

Since the tsunami hit Aceh, Islamic fundamentalists, emboldened by a common belief that the disaster was heaven-sent to punish nonpracticing Muslims, have redoubled their efforts to punish so-called sinners. Some have even blamed the giant waves on women for ignoring Islam.

The American war on terror is not the only Western effort against jihad being hamstrung by overzealous rights advocates and their elitist sycophants in the judiciary and legislature. In the Netherlands, the recent case of suspected terrorist Samir Azzouz, as summarized by The New York Times, seems oddly similar to the trial of Sami Al-Arian :

Samir Azzouz is only 19, but for almost three years Dutch authorities have struggled without success to punish him for what they see as plotting terrorism.

Police records show that he was first placed under surveillance in early 2003, when he was in high school, after he was stopped at the Ukrainian border while trying to join Islamic militants in Chechnya.

He was arrested months later in Amsterdam but released in days for lack of evidence. Arrested again in June 2004 on terrorist-related charges, he was convicted only of weapons possession. The police had found an array of materials that could be used to make bombs at his home in Amsterdam, including detonators and a yellow plastic lemon juice bottle, with bits of fertilizer inside, attached to a Christmas tree bulb.

They had also discovered crude hand-drawn sketches of some of the Netherlands' most important symbols of power, including the Parliament, the Amsterdam airport, the Ministry of Defense and the Dutch nuclear reactor, as well as CD's, videos and Internet sites showing how to make explosive devices.

In October, prosecutors arrested him for a third time, with new evidence, and will put him and six others on trial.

The prosecution says it is confident that its case is strong this time. But since no terrorist act was committed, it faces a tough challenge: proving that Mr. Azzouz's seeming intentions constituted crimes.

The folks at the New York Times would have us believe that these intentions remain mysterious and that the prosecution of Mr. Azzouz is some sort of covert attempt to criminalize political thought. However, if one reads a bit further...

The case of Mr. Azzouz has been particularly frustrating for prosecutors. In the case against him in 2004, prosecutors had records of chat-room conversations on the Internet in which Mr. Azzouz vowed to kill non-Muslims in the Netherlands and proclaimed his support for the violent overthrow of the Dutch government and its replacement with a government of Islamic law.

Besides the sketches of what appeared to be targets, the police raid of his home turned up homemade detonators, a pellet gun, a silencer, night-vision goggles, a bulletproof vest, ammunition clips, fertilizer, chemicals and handwritten lists of where to buy fertilizer.

The police also found a signed, handwritten letter from Mr. Azzouz to his expected child, expressing the hope that if the child was a boy, he would pursue jihad and go to a training camp when he turned 15.

Prosecutors and much of the public were stunned in April when a panel of judges acquitted Mr. Azzouz of plotting attacks. Adding to the frustration was Mr. Azzouz's smiling, triumphant appearance before his friends and reporters on the day of his release, before he suddenly turned angry and punched a photographer.

Prosecutors appealed, but an appeals court upheld the acquittal in November. It ruled that although Mr. Azzouz had "terrorist intentions," his preparations were "in such an early stage and so clumsy and primitive that there was no concrete threat."

Hopefully the robed clowns who set this ticking time bomb free last time will take advantage of their second chance.

Jihad Watch Board Vice President Hugh Fitzgerald, in the spirit of the day, offers some reflections on the use of strategic gift-giving in the advancement of the global jihad agenda:

The more we have to do with Muslim mores and manners, Muslim ways and Muslim byways, inevitably there will be more opportunities for Infidels to be fooled, to be inveigled, to be impressed, to be treated with such outward respect, to be subject to people well-versed in using personal charm (those soft voices, those looks of deep sincerity, the whole bit), that the clarity and resolve of many will be weakened.

People like to be treated well. Ready to do so are the gracious host with the limitless resources, who invites you to "see for yourself" what "our problems are," who invites you (all expenses paid, and a fat honorarium at the end, with promises of future invitations if you play your cards right) to a "Dialogue of Civilizations" in Marrakesh, and the Turkish officials who "have you over to discuss what Turkey is doing now to comply with E.U. requirements and why it makes sense to let Turkey into the tent, in order to encourage the forces of moderate Islam."

And then there is the surprise gift at the end: the wrapped dishdashas for your kids, that silver dagger you admired, perhaps even a rug or two if you happen to be in the right place ("No, it was nothing, really. When you said you were interested in buying a rug and I couldn't accompany you to the souk that day, I felt badly, so I thought I'd just get it and have it wrapped and waiting at the plane when you left. Tell your wife I hope it works in her dining room"). Do you know just how easy it is to set up a warm feeling inside people? How they will trade their own futures, their own security, for a dishdasha or a dagger or a rug, or a fat envelope with cash, or promise of a donation to one's "academic center" or anything else?

Another honor killing in Pakistan. Those who claim that this sort of thing has nothing to do with Islam and the Sharia imperative have yet to explain why the overwhelming majority of such cases happen in an Islamic context. The shame/honor culture, rooted in Islamic ideas of purity and impurity, is what gives rise to this. From AP, with thanks to JE:

MULTAN, Pakistan - A father, angry that his eldest daughter had married against his wishes, slit her throat as she slept and then killed three of his other daughters in a remote village in eastern Pakistan, police said Saturday.

Nazir Ahmad, a laborer in his 40s, feared the younger girls, aged 4, 8, and 12, would follow in their sister's footsteps, police officer Shahzad Gul said.

Ahmad surrendered to police after the killings late Friday in Burewala, about 70 miles east of Multan, a main city in eastern Punjab province, Gul said.

"He (Ahmad) told us today that he has killed his daughters, and we arrested him," he said.

Gul said the man's 25-year-old daughter, Muqadas Bibi, had married the man of her choice against her father's wishes some weeks ago. Ahmad contacted Bibi this week, saying he was ready to forgive her, Gul said.

During a visit by Bibi to her parents' house, Ahmad slit her throat as she slept and then killed the other three girls, Gul said. He said police were investigating whether other relatives helped in the killings and were also looking for Bibi's husband....

Hundreds of women are killed in Pakistan every year, many by male relatives, after they are accused of staining their families' honor by having affairs or marrying for love without family consent.

Voted in by free elections. Indicating, as I have said here many times and elsewhere over the years, that the simple act of voting is not nearly enough to establish a viable free society. From IranFocus, with thanks to JE:

Tehran, Iran, Dec. 23 – The editorial of Iran’s leading hard-line daily hailed the outcome of Iraq’s parliamentary elections as “the creation of the first Islamist state in the Arab world”, and warned against “American plots” to prevent the formation of the new Iraqi government by Iranian-backed Shiite groups.

“Of the 275 seats in Iraq’s new parliament, 140 will belong to pious Islamists, 60 will be occupied by Kurds with excellent ties with Iran, and 40 will belong to Sunni Arabs, most of whom want a sovereign, Islamist state”, the daily Kayhan’s Saturday editorial noted. “The new government – including the President, the Prime Minister, the cabinet, the armed forces and the judiciary – will emerge from this new assembly”.

Kayhan said the election outcome will “increase pressures, both inside and outside the U.S., on [President George W.] Bush to withdraw American troops from Iraq”. “Bush will have to give in and withdraw the bulk of his forces from Iraq in the next few months”, the daily, which reflects the views of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, wrote.

A few words from one of the jurors who voted the Rumpled Academic guilty on some counts, but who was, of course, outvoted. "'I Can Sleep At Night,' Juror Says," from the Tampa Tribune, with thanks to the Constantinopolitan Irredentist:

TAMPA - Juror 211 is one of the reasons that the fate of Sami Al-Arian remains unsettled after a trial lasting half a year.

As one of two holdouts favoring conviction for the former University of South Florida professor, she said she's glad federal prosecutors may get a second chance to bring terror-support charges against Al-Arian.

"After six months, I didn't like it left hanging like this," she said in an interview last week. "I wanted it left with a definite result."

Deliberations lasted 13 days and were tense at times, said juror 211, known as "Char" to her friends. She wasn't ready to talk about the case in the days that followed. But she did keep track of news reports and Internet postings about the case - and felt frustrated all over again.

She responded to TBO.com, the Internet affiliate of The Tampa Tribune, after several readers posted criticisms of the case and its outcome.

"I was one of the jurors that voted Sami Al-Arian and Hatem Fariz guilty on several counts," she said in a Dec. 14 post. "I can sleep at night knowing I saw all of the evidence and my votes were based upon that evidence.

"Other jurors did not agree but that is their right."

She said she respects the 10 jurors who wanted to acquit on all charges. She said she simply saw the evidence differently.

Char did vote to acquit Al-Arian on eight counts, including conspiracy to murder and maim people abroad. And she agreed to acquit co-defendants Ghassan Ballut and Sameeh Hammoudeh of all charges.

But she would not budge from her belief that Al-Arian and co-defendant Hatim Fariz were guilty of conspiracies to commit racketeering and to provide material support to terrorists.

The result was a hung jury on those charges. The Justice Department hasn't indicated whether it will seek a new trial. Defense attorneys want U.S. District Judge James Moody to acquit Al-Arian and Fariz on the remaining charges based on evidence at the first trial.

The Department of Homeland Security also could initiate deportation proceedings against Al-Arian if the criminal case dies....

They all went over the evidence during deliberations, she said. In her discussions, she emphasized the bylaws of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, the terrorist group Al-Arian was accused of helping to finance and run. They call for "a state of terror, instability and panic in the souls of Zionists and especially the group of settlers, and force them to leave their houses."

The bylaws were found on a computer during a 1995 raid at a think-tank Al-Arian founded. Researchers who studied the Islamic Jihad had not been aware of such a document until it was discovered in Tampa. Other jurors seemed to think the document was found on the Internet, available for anyone to read, Char said.

In addition to armed attacks, the bylaws envisioned a series of committees for things such as a governing board, financial management, charity and education. Those were roles Char concluded Al-Arian helped serve.

Jurors who favored acquittal have said the flow of money documented during the trial went to the Islamic Jihad's charitable arm rather than to anything violent.

"I saw the [Islamic Jihad] as a complete unit," Char said, "not as a charitable side or a military side."

Sparring Behind Closed Doors

She said her voice was often drowned out by the shouts of another juror when she tried to explain her position. After a while, the argument devolved into people simply repeating points they had already made.

Only one other juror agreed with her by the time deliberations ended Dec. 6. The other juror told Moody she felt "whipped into submission" by those favoring acquittal.

"It was very difficult at times in the deliberation area," she said. "It was hard. We would state the way we felt and vote the way we felt and continually we were asked, 'Where do you come up with this?' We would go over our points and other people couldn't see that. It was frustrating. I'm glad there is a chance they can still do something."

Like other jurors, she agreed Al-Arian was an Islamic Jihad member and a part of its governing board called the Shura Council. But other jurors thought that wasn't enough to show he was more than just a member of the group, a requirement for conviction.

In the end, she respected the views of those who disagreed with her.

"Initially, I was upset because people didn't see what I saw. Then again, we all come from different directions."

The hate mail bag doesn't rest even for Christmas:

To: director@jihadwatch.org

Subject: you spreader of evil and corruption on gods earth

I am a liberal muslim who celebrates christmas with my children also my doctor is a jewish friend but after viewing your website and reading some of the comments I will start practising my religion which after all is the fastests growing religion on earth and is the final message revealed by the one true god. I will no longer celebrate christmas as you know that is does not stem from christianity and I will change my Doctor as you know that Jews believe that they are superior to gentiles, constituting racism.

Of course, there is a good deal that doesn't ring true about this message from a non-practicing, liberal Muslim, starting with the fact that he is familiar enough with his religion to know the phrase "corruption on gods earth," which comes from Qur'an 5:33: "The only reward of those who make war upon Allah and His messenger and strive after corruption in the land will be that they will be killed or crucified, or have their hands and feet on alternate sides cut off, or will be expelled out of the land. Such will be their degradation in the world, and in the Hereafter theirs will be an awful doom."

Another is that a site dedicated to universal human rights and the equality of dignity of all people would lead him to break his putative friendship with his alleged Jewish doctor and to stop his supposed syncretistic and tolerant celebration of Christmas. Even if this really were the kind of site its enemies claim that it is, a man so broad-minded as he suggests he is should be able simply to dismiss it and go about his business.

But I assure you, I do not take the claims this man has made about himself seriously. I post this merely to point out that the crude propaganda never ends, and that it is usually more sophisticated than this, and many are taken in by it. And also, above all, I post it to emphasize that our struggle is against those who think that penalties such as those stipulated by Qur'an 5:33 for "corruption in the land" constitute justice. Let us continue to defend true canons of justice, the dignity of all people, and equality of rights for all (even women and non-Muslims), for as long as the global jihad threatens such principles.

...to all those who observe either.

May we grow stronger in the coming year to defend the civilization built by those who through history have celebrated these holy days.

Update from Anne Crockett: Yalto points out he did not originate the Islamic Christian Forum postings. My mistake. He more recently added, "Frankly, I am disgusted by Spencer and the hypocrisy that he practices. I find the level of pure hatred and bigotry expressed on the JihadWatch site, by both "commenters" and staff, to be disgusting and un-American." Kind of proves my point about Wikipedia's lack of objectivity.
Yalto when exposed, took his marbles and went home (although what is to keep him from coming back under another name I have no idea). In his whining “Farewell Address”, he said, “On the issue of bias, at least I can admit mine but still feel compelled to make changes try to make the article more fair to Spencer.” Clearly he is not as clever at hiding his opinions as he thought. His edits looked biased, he was called on it, and he finally admitted it.
Before leaving he complained that several changes which I thought were his were not. The point of this article is about Wikipedia, not the august person of Yalto who is only a screen name. If you really care about Yalto his oeuvre can be found here: You can see that editing Islam in the United States and Robert Spencer take up most of his time. How about that?
By clicking on the link marked “diff”, you can see which changes Yalto made. For example, in his first signed edit, he took it upon himself to change the correct spelling of denunciation, take out Spencer’s words, add in Hugh Fitzgerald’s while attributing them to Spencer, to change the neutral phrase “Spencer's Jihad Watch features unmoderated forums, with a disclaimer by Spencer” to the insinuating “Spencer claims…” and to bring the defunct Christian Islamic Forum back to life.
However, I am happy to remove Yalto's screen name where he was only taking up an argument begun by someone else. The point is not who said what, but that it was said at all.

Jihad Watch News Editor Anne Crockett, who many of you may remember for her superb work on the site while I was out of the country in November, has informed me that she has been engaged in a series of pitched battles at that bastion of objectivity and pillar of truth, Wikipedia -- over my own biography. I appreciate her kindness and persistence in tilting at this particular windmill, and thought her caveat emptor about her experiences and Wikipedia in general was worth sharing with you:

Bravo for life’s little ironies: Wired News reports recently that Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales has edited his own biography -- in spite of Wikipeida’s policy that “You should not write about yourself, since objectivity on the subject is hard — but you can assist by providing references, by challenging unsourced statements, and by assisting other editors.”

Why do I mention this at Jihad Watch? Because some time ago I noticed some odd things about Mr. Spencer’s Wikipedia entry. Not only the strange entry about imaginary sephardic ancestry, but also odd diatribes about his Inside Islam coauthor Daniel Ali that had also -- in a coincidence that strains all credulity -- popped up on other web sites at the same time. The other web sites with accountable editors noticed them and deleted them as irrelevant, but not Wikipedia. Once I noticed them I tried to correct the record, only to have my changes reverted and various accusations thrown about suggesting that I was in fact Robert Spencer (last time I checked I was both beardless and female so I rather think that I am not) by people seemingly unfamiliar with the concepts of a routers or computer networks. Yet even as a volunteer at Jihad Watch, I was warned by “editor” and Wikipedia scribbler “Yalto,” who was bickering with “editor” “Chalko,” that I was probably too close to the subject to post. After checking the above policy I more or less confined myself to comments on the talk page. When I asked “Yalto” what exactly his interest was in the subject, he of course, declined to answer.

A choice snippet from the discussion page:

“His religious affiliation is Roman Catholic. But his handlers don't want anyone talking about it or his board membership in a Catholic Group (the Christian-Islamic Forum) that works to convert Muslims to Christianity.”

Handlers? Come on. But the more important issue (aside from another opportunity to make merry at the expense of the terminally paranoid) is this: Wikipedia’s own rules enforce the kind of shoddy research that would get any journalist fired. According to Wikipedia, the one thing you absolutely must not do is contact a source. Not even Spencer’s own website is considered as reliable as third party sources that write about him. What nonsense!

One of the more unfortunate consequences of the Israeli pullout from Gaza has been their continuing inability to quiet the rocket salvos that now pour into Israel from newly "liberated" Palestinian territory. Once considered a nuisance, the rocket fire has been increasing in intensity, and is causing Israel to consider new security measures, since the vaunted Palestinian Authority appears unwilling to do anything about it. From the New York Times:

Frustrated by continuing rocket fire from Gaza, the territory Israel evacuated over the summer, Israel is trying to enforce a buffer zone in northern Gaza through air and artillery strikes, a deputy defense minister, Zeev Boim, said Friday.

The intention is to prevent Palestinian militants from using former northern Gaza settlements like Dugit and Nissanit, now piles of rubble, to fire rockets into Israel. In the last few days, rockets have hit the outskirts of Ashkelon, raising concerns about a big power plant there, and in Sederot, a regular target of rocket fire. On Thursday, a rocket landed in an Israeli Army base on the border, slightly wounding five soldiers, and Israeli shelling in response killed a Palestinian in Jabaliya.

Israel, in the midst of an election campaign, is threatening a temporary reinvasion of northern Gaza with ground troops, though the preference is to discourage the rocket firing through shelling and airstrikes - mostly on open fields where rockets are sometimes fired.

But Mr. Boim on Friday suggested that Israel might fire artillery toward populated areas as well. "We need to tell the residents of Beit Hanoun, Beit Lahiya and the suburbs of Jabaliya: 'In 12 hours, artillery will land in the area; evacuate these areas,' " he told Israeli Army radio. "I think one operation of this sort can solve the problem."

Palestinian security forces who are patrolling northern Gaza and say they are trying to stop the rocket fire also say they will not evacuate the area, which they now consider sovereign and liberated Palestinian land.

So Israelis are imagining other ways to create popular pressure on the militants to stop firing, with suggestions that Israel cut off all electrical power to Gaza, a move of dubious legality. Human Rights Watch, for instance, says that such a cutoff would constitute collective punishment of a civilian population under international law.

Of course, and obeying the strictures of war as set down by Human Rights Watch should be the primary assignment for Israeli government officials.

Gotta watch out for those Canadian terrorists, eh? What's that? A Muslim? No, that's not important. What's that? The common denominator of some of the primary groups committing terrorist acts today? What are you, some kind of Islamophobe? And on Christmas Eve, yet! From the Globe and Mail, with thanks to the Constantinopolitan Irredentist:

A Canadian played a major role in a failed 2004 terrorist plot by showing accomplices how to develop detonators, build a bomb and move money so that they could attack Britain, according to Crown prosecutors.

New charges filed in Ottawa on Dec. 16 reveal the specifics of the government's case against Mohammad Momin Khawaja, who was arrested in 2004 as Canadian and British police staged co-ordinated antiterrorism raids against nearly a dozen suspects.

The charges filed in court last week say that Mr. Khawaja was involved in several aspects of an alleged al-Qaeda-style conspiracy, a scheme that was ultimately thwarted....

The case is crucial, because it will help determine whether Canada can openly prosecute terrorism cases within its borders....

That this is even a question shows what deep trouble we are in.

Mr. Khawaja, a 26-year-old Canadian of Pakistani heritage, has denied being a terrorist ever since March, 2004, when RCMP officers arrested him at work fixing computers for Canada's Department of Foreign Affairs. At the same time, British police rounded up nine suspects and 600 kilograms of ammonium nitrate fertilizer, which can be used to make explosives, stored in a London suburb.

At first, Mr. Khawaja was charged with knowingly participating in a terrorist group and knowingly facilitating a terrorist activity. The additional charges filed last week allege that he also:

"Did work on the development of a device to activate a detonator;"

Had "in his possession or under his care or control an explosive substance;"

Instructed a friend "to open a bank account and conduct financial transactions on his behalf for the benefit of a terrorist group;"

Participated "in dialogue, meetings, or exchanges of information relating to the development of an explosive device."

A welcome and surprising bit of anti-dhimmitude, this. From AP, with thanks to all who sent this in:

BUFFALO, N.Y. -- A judge Thursday refused to prohibit U.S. border officers from conducting potentially lengthy security checks on Muslim-Americans on their way home from a religious conference in Canada that begins Friday.

The New York Civil Liberties Union sought the court action on behalf of five New York residents who were among dozens of people fingerprinted, photographed, questioned and delayed for up to six hours at the border following last year's "Reviving the Islamic Spirit" convention in Toronto.

U.S. District Judge William Skretny, while characterizing last year's stops as "understandably frustrating," disagreed with the NYCLU's contention that they violated the group's constitutional rights to practice religion and avoid unlawful searches.

"Plaintiffs were delayed for an extended period of time and subjected to unexplained inspection techniques that were inconvenient and made them feel uncomfortable," Skretny wrote. "The government readily admits that plaintiffs' experience at the border was not ideal ... As unfortunate as this incident may have been, I find that it was not unconstitutional."

The NYCLU sought the injunction preventing similar inspections based solely on attendance at this year's conference as part of a lawsuit that also sought the destruction of any personal information collected during the stops.

In addition to denying the injunction, Skretny dismissed the case altogether.

Anti-dhimmi Christmas (and Hanukkah) wishes from Jihad Watch Board Vice President Hugh Fitzgerald:

While wishing all who observe the day the merriest of Christmases (or Hanukkahs, which custom now holds to be "happy" rather than "merry") I also wish that you give a sobering thought to those who, though they may ardently desire to, cannot join in the celebration or the observance. About ten years ago in Saudi Arabia, for example, some British nurses were arrested for singing Christmas carols, behind closed doors, in their living quarters. They were held for a while, then expelled. That they did not receive harsher punishment was the result only of British diplomatic intervention.

Then there was the more recent case of Brian O'Connor, the Indian convert to Christianity who was seized and tortured by the Saudi police for being a Christian, accused furthermore of trying to convert others.

In the late 1990s, a wealthy Kuwaiti, Hussein Qambar Ali (Robert Hussein) converted to Christianity. First his entire business was taken away from him. Then his wife, and then his children. He was left with nothing. And then he was sentenced to death. There was an outcry in Britain (it hardly got any notice elsewhere). In the end, he was not executed. I recall this story well on this Christmas Eve because I once spoke with a rich Kuwaiti contractor who had been voluble on the subject of the "real Islam" which, he said, was aggressive and violent. He enjoyed being a truth-teller just as long as I feigned ignorance of Islam and pretended to be amused – but he changed tack completely when I raised the subject of the treatment of the Kuwaiti convert. Now, sensing that I was not only listening to him, but joining in his criticism of Islam, he began to deny that the Kuwaiti convert story was true, claimed that I didn't understand all the details, etc. A sudden transformation. Similar experiences since suggest that unless someone goes all the way and makes a clean break with Islam, there is some kind of inability to recognize, or allow Infidels to recognize, the full truth. The urge to defend, to protect, the Faith kicks in. Infidels may be allowed to learn some things, but they must not volunteer criticism. That would be to accord them too much freedom.

Can you feel it? The Christmas cheer just keeps spreading in Indonesia. From AP, with thanks to JE:

JAKARTA, Indonesia - Bomb squads searched for explosives Saturday at churches in the capital Jakarta and its satellite cities hours before Christmas Eve celebrations amid fears that terrorists might carry out attacks to mar the holiday.

Police Lt. Sulianto, who uses only one name, told The Associated Press that 80 bomb squads were being deployed at dozens of churches in Jakarta, Bekasi, Tangerang and Depok....

The Southeast Asian terrorist network Jemaah Islamiyah have been blamed for at least five suicide bombings targeting Western interests since 2002 — including Oct. 1 restaurant attacks on Bali island — that together killed more than 240 people.

It is also accused in Christmas Eve church bombings five years ago that left 19 dead.

Sulianto said his men also will sweep two main Catholic Cathedral Church and Protestant Immanuel Church, both located in downtown Jakarta. Some 15,000 churchgoers are expected to worship at the churches on Christmas Eve....

Tens of thousands of police are on duty nationwide, and churches in many Indonesian towns have been checked, intelligence officials said. In Poso, where three Christian schoolgirls were beheaded last October, police tightly guarded dozens of churches.

Whatever the domestic political motives are behind this, she is right. From NewsMax, with thanks to Banafsheh Zand-Bonazzi:

Teresa Heinz Kerry says she is "outraged" that President Bush didn't react more forcefully to Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's recent recommendation that Israel be "wiped off the map," saying that the way to deal with Iranian threats is by issuing "the strongest possible condemnations."

Re-adopting her husband's last name for a column in Thursday's Jewish Forward, Heinz Kerry complained:

"The Bush administration - which so often answers challenges with confrontational language - took this occasion to whisper. With the exception of America's ambassador to the United Nations, John Bolton, who denounced the remarks as "pernicious and unacceptable," the Bush administration explained those comments as if they had been uttered by a crazy relative - and then returned to its talking points on Iran's nuclear weapons program."

That is the original headline of this piece from ChannelNewsAsia (thanks to Daryl), and it is of course quite true. The "true voice of Islam," whatever that may be, could be decisive in the success or failure of the global jihad. But this article once again assumes that the jihadists are twisting the true peaceful teachings of Islam -- an assertion that, for all the lip service that is paid to it, has never been adequately established.

And in the absence of that, when these clerics speak out about the "hijacking" of Islam, I can't help but wonder if they are just engaging again in the deceit of non-Muslims that is so widespread. After all, in the whole world over there is not a single program run by Muslims to convince their fellow Muslims that violence is not the true path of Islam. Much-ballyhooed programs of that kind have been shown to be fraudulent.

With the recent spate of bombings by extremists in Jordan and in Indonesia, Muslim leaders and clerics are trying to play a bigger role in the fight against terrorism and in guiding people to follow the path of peace and tolerance.

This sentiment surfaced in Thursday's Institute of Southeast Asian Studies public seminar, "Listening to the True Voice of Muslims in Indonesia."

The seminar featured speakers from Indonesia's largest Islamic groups, Muhammadiyah and Nadhlatul Ulama.

What part will Indonesia's Muslim leaders play in voicing the true values of Islam?

Justin Teo reports.

JT: Indonesia will play a vital role in representing the Muslim faith worldwide because the republic has the largest number of Muslims in the world and its society demonstrates a unique blend of Muslim and Western values.

The teachings and words of Indonesia's Muslim leaders will have a great influence over followers of the faith.

This point was emphasized by the Chairman of the seminar, Singapore's Senior Parliamentary Secretary for the Ministry of Information, Communication and the Arts, Mr. Yatiman Yusof.

YF: Indonesia is the largest country in ASEAN, with the biggest population, as well as having the largest Muslim population in the world. What happens in Indonesia is of great interest to close neighbors in ASEAN and to Muslims all over the world. When scholars and leaders such as those on our distinguished panel speak about this important topic, their thoughts and words will resonate beyond this venue. Muslims in other countries will access their papers via the Internet. We should not forget that the media, non-Muslims, and the followers of Al-Qaeda will also closely monitor their thoughts. They want to assess who is winning the battle for Muslim hearts and minds.

JT: Mr. Yusof also noted that the fight against terrorism starts from the words and deeds of Muslims in the region against the violence inflicted by the terrorists.

YF: If we the Muslims do not speak up in public against the hijacking of our beloved Islam by terrorists, then they will assume that our silence means support for their crimes. Secondly, if we, as Muslims, do not assume leadership, in the long battle against terrorism, by words and by deeds, then others will take over this effort and we may not like how they conduct their war against terrorism.

An update to this Dhimmi Watch post. From the AP:

U.S. and European officials have agreed with Libya on setting up a fund to offer financial assistance to the families of AIDS-infected children in the Libyan city of Benghazi, Bulgaria's Foreign Ministry said Friday.

The move is part of international efforts to secure the release of five Bulgarian nurses and a Palestinian doctor sentenced to death by a Libyan court for allegedly infecting some 400 children with the AIDS virus as part of an experiment.

Conspiracy theories amongst "Muslims in general and Arabs in particular" is candidly acknowledged by the editor of The Yemen Times.

Meanwhile,

A Libyan appeals hearing in the case is scheduled for Sunday, and Bulgarian President Georgi Parvanov expressed optimism that negotiations have reached a new stage.

"Recent developments made me positive that the trial would be concluded soon in a manner acceptable for Bulgaria," Parvanov told journalists. He added, however, that "a high price has to be paid for the release of the nurses."

In her landmark work "Eurabia," author Bat Ye'or points out that the most effective agents of dhimmitude are often Christian clerics who defend the excesses of their Muslim overlords, usually at their congregation's expense. A good example of this phenomenon is Jerusalem Patriarch Michel Sabbah, whose latest Christmas message not only praises the "efforts" of PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas, but rationalizes the murder of Israelis:

Israeli and Palestinian political leaders must be "builders of life, not death," Latin-rite Patriarch Michel Sabbah of Jerusalem said in his Christmas message. "Understand, after such a long time of demolition, death and fighting, that these ways could not and will never produce but more demolition, death and fighting," he said in his message, delivered to journalists Dec. 21.

Injustices such as the Israeli separation barrier, imprisonments and assassinations only "add fuel for violence," he said. "When injustice - the cause of violence - ceases, violence will stop and security will reign. We hope that we can begin a new period in which all violence will stop on both sides, Israeli and Palestinian alike," the patriarch said. "Half-measures, half-liberty and half-sovereignty lead nowhere except to fall again in an interminable cycle of violence and insecurity."

He said that Palestinian Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas has come out against violence, convincing extremist groups such as Hamas and Islamic Jihad to abstain from violence. When asked about the recent suicide bombing that killed five Israelis in early December in the Israeli coastal city of Netanya, the patriarch said the continuation of Israeli violence provoked once again Palestinian violence. "The solution is very simple. The Palestinian Authority said no to violence… but Israel continues with its own violence… so Palestinians react.

The willingness of Mr. Sabbah to grovel before the Palestinian leadership is hardly an isolated incident among Christian leaders, as explained in detail by Justus Weiner, a scholar at the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs who was interviewed for Front Page Magazine today.

New arrests of Al-Qaeda related militants reported in Europe, according to the Associated Press:

Police in southern Italy arrested three Algerians Friday on international terrorism charges and accused them of planning attacks in Iraq and Italy, police and the Interior Ministry said.

The three were arrested in a nationwide sweep against an extremist group in Algeria, for whom they allegedly provided logistical support, the Carabinieri paramilitary police said.

Officials suspect that they are members of the Salafist Group for Call and Combat, or GSPC, an Algerian group that allegedly provides fake documents to al-Qaida and seeks recruits.

But recently the cell had acquired a new role, said Gen. Giampaolo Ganzer, head of the Carabinieri special forces group that made the arrests.

"They were set to move to Iraq for terrorist actions, also suicide ones, and at the same time they studied more wide-ranging actions on Italian territory" Ganzer told news agency ANSA in quotes confirmed by his office.

In recent years, the GSPC has turned its sights on jihad, or holy war, beyond Algerian borders.

All right, let's go through this one more time. Are there any Muslims who are hoping to launch a chemical or nuclear attack against the United States? Yes. Is there a strict wall of separation in the American Muslim community between them and peaceful Muslims? No, there isn't. Is there any easy way to tell, or any reliable way to tell at all, which Muslim may be working to launch such a strike and which abhors the very idea? No, there isn't. Do the Muslims who hope to perpetrate such violence operate in mosques? Yes, they do.

And finally: will the result of this report be less of such surveillance, making it easier for these violent thugs to operate under cover of darkness? Could be.

From Reuters:

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. officials have secretly monitored radiation levels at Muslim sites, including mosques and private homes, since September 11, 2001 as part of a top secret program searching for nuclear bombs, U.S. News and World Report said on Friday.

The news magazine said in its online edition that the far-reaching program covered more than a hundred sites in the Washington, D.C., area and at least five other cities.

"In numerous cases, the monitoring required investigators to go on to the property under surveillance, although no search warrants or court orders were ever obtained, according to those with knowledge of the program," the magazine said.

The report comes a week after revelations that the Bush administration had authorized eavesdropping on people in the United States. U.S. President George W. Bush has defended that covert program and vowed to continue the practice, saying it was vital to protect the country.

Senior U.S. officials, including FBI Director Robert Mueller, have repeatedly said Islamic militants appeared intent on acquiring weapons of mass destruction for an attack against the United States.

Mueller said in February he was "very concerned with the growing body of sensitive reporting that continues to show al Qaeda's clear intention to obtain and ultimately use some form of chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear or high-energy explosives material in its attacks against America."

An FBI spokesman declined to confirm or deny the U.S. News and World Report article and said, "We can't talk about a classified program."

"The FBI's overriding priority is to prevent, disrupt and defeat terrorist operations in the U.S. All investigations and operations conducted by the FBI are intelligence driven and predicated on specific information about potential criminal acts or terrorist threats, and are conducted in strict conformance with federal law," he added.

The Council on American-Islamic Relations advocacy group said the report, coupled with news of the domestic eavesdropping, "could lead to the perception that we are no longer a nation ruled by law, but instead one in which fear trumps constitutional rights."

See the disjunction between those two statements? These issues should be studied and settled by the Supreme Court, sooner rather than later, if possible in a way that clears up the legal and Constitutional issues rather than adding to them. I know that in that I may be asking too much.

"All Americans should be concerned about the apparent trend toward a two-tiered system of justice, with full rights for most citizens, and another diminished set of rights for Muslims," it said in a statement.

Federal officials cited by U.S. News and World Report maintained the program was legal and said warrants were not needed for the kind of radiation sampling it conducted. Officials also rejected any notion that the program specifically targeted Muslims, the magazine said....

What a shame. Until Methodists start committing acts of terrorism and violence the world over, justifying these acts by reference to their theology, I will not understand why government and law enforcement officials cannot simply say that it is Muslims who want to kill us for Islamic reasons, and so we will be deploying our resources accordingly.

At its peak, the effort involved three vehicles in the Washington area monitoring 120 sites a day, nearly all of them Muslim targets such as prominent mosques and office buildings selected by the FBI, it said.

The program has also operated in at least five other cities -- namely Chicago, Detroit, Las Vegas, New York, and Seattle -- when threat levels there have risen, it said.

Before Libi was canned, he had giant plans. From UPI, with thanks to the Constantinopolitan Irredentist:

WASHINGTON, Dec. 23 (UPI) -- Before he was captured last spring, Osama bin Laden's top operational commander planned to assassinate U.S. President George Bush, it was reported Friday....

The capture last May of al-Qaida's No. 3 leader, Abu Faraj Al-Libi, apparently thwarted plots to assassinate the two partners in the global war on terror, according to a senior Pakistani official. His information was reported corroborated by two senior U.S. counterterrorism officials.

"Al-Libi had one mission: Kill Bush and Musharraf," the Pakistani official told the Daily News. "He wanted to kill Bush in the White House, preferably."

"It was clearly something they wanted to do. It's the holy grail of jihad," a senior U.S. counterterrorism official confirmed.

Just in case you missed it last night.

Story here.

Jihad Watch Board Vice President Hugh Fitzgerald discusses some aspects of the question of monitoring mosques in the West:

The governments of the West will all have to monitor the mosques. That means they will have to hire agents who 1) know Arabic and other relevant languages, Urdu, Turkish, Farsi, and who are 2) are either non-Muslim, but can pass as Muslims (Copts, who are forced to receive some training in Islam, might be helpful; so too would Maronites, Arabic-speaking Jews, Chaldeans, Pakistani Christians, and Berbers who have turned). One would be foolish to rely on Muslim agents to monitor the khutbas and other goings-on in mosques.

Monitoring the mosques all over the non-Muslim world, of course, is a tall order. And a very expensive one, added to all the other huge expenses incurred in the campaign to make Infidel lands safe from the very people who are, paradoxically, still allowed in when should have been clear to all who had bothered to study the doctrines of Islam and the history of Islamic rule over non-Muslims, what was to have been expected.

These costs include those for the local police to monitor individuals, and for the lawyers and judges who must give their time to approving, or explaining, taps and search warrants and suchlike, and for the extra costs of guarding power plants and LNG terminals, and ports, and airports, and marshals on planes, and ...on and on. Economists need to figure out just what the cost of this internal security against Muslim terrorist threats actually is. It would be instructive for taxpayers to know this: the real cost, in terms of all this monitoring and societal anxiety, and the constant need to worry about the latest demands -- for a prayer room in schools, or a lawsuit demanding that a Muslim woman be shown with her face completely covered for her driver's license, or all the other demands, big and small, ludicrous and plausible, that are made by Muslims who do not believe in pluralism. (That is, they do not believe in it except insofar as in the West they must use it to their own advantage, and only until they attain sufficient numbers.)

It would be instructive for taxpayers to know the full cost of protecting ourselves against (and accommodating with the other hand) those who do not believe that power should flow from the expressed will of the people, but from the codified will of Allah in the shari'a. It would be enlightening to know how much they cost, those who do not believe in the equality of the sexes, nor in individualism, nor in free and skeptical inquiry. Indeed, it is hard to see how, and in what way, Muslims who are true believers share many of the beliefs that are essential to, and defining of, our civilization. Why then do we so blithely allow ourselves to welcome those who do not wish us, our ideals, our society, our own beings, well? What sort of nonsense is this?

Jihad Watch Board Vice President Hugh Fitzgerald discusses the peaceful advance of the goals of the global jihad:

Jihad to spread Islam does not rely on military conquest alone. Where outright military conquest has not been possible, the fruits of Da'wa and demographic conquest (migration to Lands of the Infidels, and then outbreeding them) certainly can lead and has led to Muslim dominance. "Migration" as a new weapon of Jihad is in fact discussed explicitly in the most mainstream publications -- e.g., the newspaper "Dawn" in Pakistan.

Immigrants may come for all sorts of reasons. But there is no reason why Infidels should not wonder if, whatever their other reasons, as long as they remain Believers, that they will not lend their support, direct or indirect, to the Jihad -- if only by helping to misinform unwary Infidels. Furthermore, the first-generation economic immigrant can be transformed from "moderate” who seems fully integrated to "immoderate" prepared to kill Infidels: see the case of Intel engineer Mike Hawash, who was a smashing American success story until he got that old-time religion and went off to western China, hoping to join the Taliban and Al Qaeda in Afghanistan and kill his fellow Americans. And still another problem is that of "My Son the Fanatic" -- the second or third-generation Muslim who, for all sorts of reasons (personal setbacks or depression, which can strike anyone, and which may have certain consequences if one views the universe through the prism of Islam) may embrace completely what Qur'an, Hadith, and Sira teach -- rather than ignore those teachings, or the most dangerous of them. Again, how can Infidels separate out those who come and will never be a threat from those who come and seem harmless but can change, or from those whose children may, at some Manchurian-Candidate point in the future, be set off?

The answer is: those helpless Infidels can not. Surely that is worth pointing out.

Jihad Watch News Editor Patrick Devenny explores Presbyterian dhimmitude at FrontPage:

Hezbollah official Nabil Qawuq is undoubtedly a busy man. As Hezbollah’s commander in Southern Lebanon, Qawuq is responsible for leading the bulk of the Shi’ite terrorist group’s combat forces, while frequently overseeing attacks on Israeli positions and attempts to kidnap Israeli soldiers or civilians. A confidante of Hezbollah General Secretary Hassan Nasrallah, Qawuq is also a fixture on Al-Jazeera and Lebanese television, his appearances generously mottled with calls for the destruction of the Jewish state.

Nevertheless, Qawuq recently found the time in his busy schedule to meet with -- of all things -- a church group. On October 20th, a delegation from the Presbyterian Church of the USA (PCUSA) met with Qawuq and other Hezbollah leaders for an hour in southern Lebanon as part of their three-week regional tour. Led by the head of the Chicago Presbytery Reverend Bob Reynolds, the meeting was convened for supposedly “educational” purposes, with Reverend Reynolds suggesting “I think one way people can learn from one another is to learn the way people talk about themselves and describe their own reality.”

Unfortunately, the conversations which took place between the two parties were anything but realistic. Quwaq opened the conference with a lengthy harangue against the “chaos” and “fear” created by President Bush and “American policy,” whose true purpose he defined roughly as enabling Ariel Sharon to “turn Lebanon into a bridge to harm Syria.” Eager to endear himself to the perturbed Hezbollah commander, PCUSA delegation spokesman Robert Worley, a retired seminary professor, assured Quwaq that all delegation members had voted for John Kerry. Furthermore, Worley promised his host to help disavow Americans of the notion -- impressed upon them by the Western media -- that Hezbollah was a terrorist group, stating:

“Americans hear in the Western media that Hizbullah is a terrorist organization, and they do not hear any other opinion. They know nothing about the party’s concern for the people of the south.”

Worley then pointed out that Hezbollah and his church share similar goals, along with comparable opponents:

At FrontPage, Jamie Glazov interviews Justus Weiner of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs about the plight of Christians in the Holy Land and Weiner's new book Human Rights of Christians in Palestinian Society.

Frontpage Interview’s guest today is Justus Reid Weiner, a Scholar-in-Residence at the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, an independent policy studies center. He currently teaches courses on human rights and international law at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. His main research field is the human rights challenges facing Arab Christians. He is the author of the new book, "Human Rights of Christians in Palestinian Society".

FP: Justus Reid Weiner, welcome to Frontpage Interview.

Weiner: Thank you Jamie.

FP: First things first, what motivated you to write this book?

Weiner: My initial interest in human rights began at the age of 10 or 11 when my great-grandfather, then almost 90, came for an extended visit. Jacob, who spoke with a heavy Yiddish accent and was missing the index finger on his right hand, regaled me with stories about his childhood in Odessa during the reign of the Czar. He described what it was like for Jews living in fear of pogroms in which the police looked the other way as drunken anti-Semites roamed the streets murdering any Jews they came across. I was embarrassed to ask him what happened to his finger, but Jacob told me anyway. Like in other Jewish families, Jacob's parents feared the Czar's conscription gangs who, without asking for permission, would kidnap boys of 12 and ship them off to serve in Siberia or the Far East. The term of service was 20 years and few ever returned to their families. To prevent this, Jacob's parents got him drunk and took him to the butcher who chopped off his trigger finger, rendering him unsuitable for army service. As I was then almost the age at which Jacob lost his index finger, I had nightmares about what he told me.

My specific interest in the plight of Christians living in Palestinian society is more recent. Eight years ago I met a Christian pastor who, knowing that I was a human rights lawyer, urged me to investigate the human rights abuses directed at Muslims who converted to Christianity. I knew nothing about this, and frankly doubted that anyone would victimize the adherents of the world's largest religion. But as I began to interview people most were reluctant to even meet me. If they agreed to reveal what they had suffered, they insisted that I refer to them by a pseudonym.

How many obstructions will CAIR attempt to put in the way of the resistance to the global jihad? From WND, with thanks to all who sent this in:

A controversial Islamic lobby group filed a Freedom of Information Act request for all government records related to President Bush's post-9/11 executive orders authorizing wiretaps of communications between Americans and al-Qaida suspects overseas without a court order.

"It is the duty of all those who value the Constitution to state that no one, not even a president, is above the law," said Arsalan Iftikhar, national legal director for the Council on American-Islamic Relations.

The group's executive director, Nihad Awad, charged Bush's "wiretapping policy is not only an apparent violation of existing law, it also gives carte blanche for spying, without legal oversight, on any American."

"Such wide-ranging and unrestricted powers are an invitation to abuse of constitutional rights and freedoms, and should be of concern to everyone in a society based on respect for the law," he asserted.

Awad said he fears such surveillance powers could be expanded and used to spy on people who hold dissenting political views.

Yeah. Such as people who say, "I am in support of the Hamas movement."

Everybody's jumping on the Holocaust denial bandwagon in the Islamic world. From AP, with thanks to all who sent this in:

CAIRO, Egypt - The leader of Egypt’s main Islamic opposition group said the Holocaust was a “myth,” and he slammed Western governments for criticizing disclaimers of the Jewish genocide.

The comments by Muslim Brotherhood chief Mohammed Mahdi Akef - made on the heels of his group’s strong showing in Egyptian parliamentary elections - echoed remarks made recently by Iran’s hard-line president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, which sparked international outrage.

“Western democracies have slammed all those who don’t see eye to eye with the Zionists regarding the myth of the Holocaust,” Akef wrote in a weekly article meant as a directive to the group’s followers on its official Web site....

It was not clear why Akef made the remarks, but his article was full of criticism of Western democracy, which he said “was drawn up by the sons of Zion.”...

Following the elections, Akef promised that Brotherhood parliamentarians would represent all Egyptians - Muslims, Coptic Christians, men and women - in an attempt to calm widespread fear of the group among Christians, women and secularists.

But in his Thursday article, Akef said the group will press to implement “the correct teachings of Islam.”

“You Brothers, you are the guardians of Shariah. Your main concern should be the heritage of Shariah, which you uphold,” he wrote.

Carrying out the death sentence mandated by Islamic law for those who attempt to convert Muslims away from the faith. From the Telegraph, with thanks to Sr. Soph:

A husband and wife who dedicated their lives to helping African children were murdered in cold blood by Islamic terrorists, an inquest heard yesterday.

Dick and Enid Eyeington were watching television at their home in Somaliland when a terrorist linked to al-Qaeda shot them.

Dick and Enid Eyeington had lived in Africa since marrying in 1963
The couple were considered "infidels" by their attackers, who wrongly believed that they were trying to convert Africans to Christianity.

Four men were involved in the attack in which a gunman wielding an AK47 put the weapon through the living room window and opened fire on Oct 20, 2003.

Mr Eyeington, 62, was shot four times. He was still holding the television remote control when he was found, Westminster coroner's court heard. Mrs Eyeington, 60, died from a single shot to the head.

And Islam's honor was saved.

From the Telegraph, with thanks to Sr. Soph:

A Muslim man who planned to "hunt down" and kill a soldier who had won the Military Cross in Iraq was yesterday found guilty of terrorism offences.

Abu Bakr Mansha from Thamesmead, south London, was found with a balaclava and a blank-firing pistol which was being converted for live rounds when his flat was raided by police.

Alongside inflammatory videos of rebels attacking troops in Iraq was a newspaper article describing the exploits of Cpl Mark Byles, who was later decorated with the Military Cross.

Police also found a piece of paper with Cpl Byles's former address on it and indentations on note paper requesting information on a rich Jewish man and the Hindu owner of a cash and carry business.

David Cocks, QC, prosecuting, told the jury at Southwark Crown Court, south London: "In their case, it is nothing to do with harm they may have done to the Muslim community. It was because of their religious beliefs."...

A number of DVDs were recovered from Mansha's flat which included Arabic chanting that called for Muslims to take part in jihad and martyrdom following the allied attack on the Iraqi city of Fallujah.

Some featured the al-Qa'eda leader Osama bin Laden, while one depicted the beheading of the British hostage Ken Bigley....

Mansha, 21, said most of the items found in his apartment were connected with research he was helping a journalist friend with.

Add that to the ever lengthening list of flimsy explanations. This too:

He told jurors he was neither a strict Muslim nor had any strong political views and said he had bought the pistol for £25 from a market stall as a souvenir.

Because, you see, every group can assert its own culture except Westerners. A follow-up to this story from AP, with thanks to Sr. Soph:

Amsterdam: A Muslim political leader in the Netherlands on Wednesday dismissed as "ridiculous" a motion in parliament to forbid women from wearing burqas in public, calling it an overreaction to an issue that barely exists in the country.

A motion to ban burqas robes that cover the entire body and veil the face passed in an 80-70 vote in parliament late on Tuesday, and the government is drafting a Bill to make the proposal into law....

It is "an overreaction to a very marginal problem" because hardly any Dutch women wear burqa, said Ayhan Tonca of the Muslim political organisation known by its acronym CMO. "It's just ridiculous," Tonca told The Associated Press.

The idea was proposed by maverick lawmaker Geert Wilders, a politician known for his criticism of religious fundamentalism and for his anti-immigration policies. Wilders has received death threats from radicals.

Burqas are "medieval, and unfriendly to women", Wilders said in a telephone interview. "This measure will serve to promote integration by preventing Muslim women from separating themselves from Dutch society, and by giving comfort and support to moderate Muslims." He conceded that few women in Holland wear burqas, but said there is evidence the trend is growing....

Wilders argued that the law also was needed for safety reasons, so that a terrorist cannot use the burqa to conceal a weapon or his or her identity.

An important update and correction to this story:

Toronto, Canada - Thursday, December 22, 2005 - On December 19, 2005, The Canadian Coalition for Democracies (CCD) issued a press release that contained inaccuracies. We would like to correct those inaccuracies and to apologize for any misunderstanding that resulted.

On December 20, the Liberal Party of Canada issued a press release suggesting, among other allegations, that CCD had launched an "ethnic smear campaign" by commenting on the purported words of Mr. Alghabra on December 1, 2005.

CCD has no vested interest in any allegations that are not true and defensible, and would like to take this opportunity to set the record straight.

The December 19 press release from CCD was based on reports from several independent individuals who were present at the Liberal nomination of Omar Alghabra. While those reports were consistent, the resultant release was wrong on two key points and the inferences it drew from them. Firstly, the date of the nomination meeting was December 1, not December 2 as reported. Secondly, witnesses reported that the statements attributed to Omar Alghabra were actually spoken by Khalid Usman, the individual introduced by Mr. Alghabra as his major supporter following Mr. Alghabra's nomination victory. Witnesses reported that Mr. Alghabra's celebratory actions on the podium appeared supportive of Mr. Usman's declarations, and that Mr. Alghabra did not distance himself from the comments nor offer any correction.

On December 22, Carolyn Parrish, the former MP for Mississauga-Erindale, was quoted in the Mississauga News as saying that "He [Khalid Usman] made comments about Muslims eventually being [represented] in every riding in Mississauga ... He made it sound like [Muslims] were taking over. It was extremely inappropriate." Elias Hazineh, president of the Mississauga-Erindale Federal Liberal Riding Association, was also quoted as hearing the Markham councillor say, "this is a victory for Muslims."

Failing to distance oneself from inappropriate statements from a supporter that mix religion and politics is not the same as uttering those statements, and CCD regrets the mistake it made. CCD is forwarding this correction to all those on its original distribution list.

CCD would like to take this opportunity to respond to several damaging assertions in the Liberal Party of Canada press release of December 20 (below) distributed to media and others over the name of "Stephen Heckbert, Ontario Liberal campaign headquarters".

It was a gala evening at the Freedom Palace here in Secure Undisclosed Locationville when we awarded the 2005 Dhimmi and Anti-Dhimmi Awards, and the great Cox and Forkum were there.

Another Methodist arrested in Britain in connection with the failed July 21 bombings. From AP, with thanks to the Constantinopolitan Irredentist:

LONDON - British police investigating the failed July 21 London bombings on Thursday charged a student with conspiracy to cause explosions, authorities said.

London's Metropolitan Police identified the man as 23-year-old Adel Yahya. He was arrested Tuesday at Gatwick Airport as he got off a flight from Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.

He was charged with conspiring with four other men — all of whom are awaiting trial over the plot to attack three subway trains and a double-decker bus — "to cause by an explosive substance, explosions of a nature likely to endanger life or cause serious injury to property."...

A total of 16 people have now been charged in connection with the attempted attacks, which did not kill anyone as the bombs failed to detonate. But they shook Britain's capital two weeks after near identical suicide bombings killed 52 commuters on July 7.

Five men are accused of plotting to murder passengers on London's transit system on July 21 and face trial in September.

Muktar Said Ibrahim, 27, Ramzi Mohamed, 23, Yassin Omar, 24, Hussein Osman, 27, are accused of trying to bomb three subway trains and a bus.

The fifth suspect, Manfo Kwaku Asiedu, 32, was arrested after a backpack of explosives was found in a raid. All face a charge of conspiracy to murder.

Ethiopian-born Osman has said through his lawyer that the bombing attempt was meant to scare people, not kill them.

Yahya is accused of conspiring with Osman, Ibrahim, Asiedu and Omar.

A further 10 people have been charged in connection with the attempted attacks — for failing to disclose information about the suspects and helping them evade arrest.

Not that this small dinner of crow is likely to bring about any real reconsideration of any long-held positions. From WorldNetDaily.com, with thanks to all who sent this in:

The Palestinians who took over the Jewish greenhouses in the Gaza Strip when Israel withdrew its communities from the area now are asking expelled farmers for advice after reportedly failing to reproduce the region's famous insect-free vegetables, WND has learned.

Prior to Israel's August withdrawal, the residents of Gaza's Gush Katif slate of Jewish communities ran greenhouses known for producing high-quality insect-free vegetables. The Gush Katif gardens featured some of the most technologically advanced agricultural equipment and accounted for more than $100 million per year in exports to Europe. The greenhouses also supplied Israel with 75 percent of its own produce.

The hothouses were passed to the Palestinians in September in a $14 million deal brokered by former World Bank President James Wolfenson and several wealthy Jewish Americans.

Earlier this month, the Palestinians now running the greenhouses reportedly told the Israeli-Palestinian Economic Cooperation Fund they failed in their efforts to grow bug-free produce.

Now the Palestinian owners have asked the United States Agency for International Development, which has been involved in reconstruction efforts in Gaza, to hire former Jewish Gaza greenhouse owners as consultants for their declining vegetable businesses.

Eitan Hederi, a former Gaza farmer who represented Gush Katif residents in the Wolfenson greenhouse transfer told WND, "The Palestinians are privately turning to U.S. AID to hire us because we are experts in this kind of farming. It's a really complex process that we engineered."

Anita Tucker, an expelled Gaza resident and one of the pioneer farmers of Gush Katif, told WND, "I am not at all surprised the Palestinians are failing. When they worked in our greenhouses they needed to be monitored closely. Many didn't understand certain things, like not using different kinds of chemicals. Plus when we were in Gaza, our efforts were blessed by God."

In full accord with Qur'an 9:111. From GulfNews, with thanks to Sr. Soph:

"They promised us paradise through martyrdom," said a Saudi youth who has abandoned extremism. A number of other reformed young men echoed his view.

Their revelations were broadcast live on Saudi television as part of a serial entitled Experiments in the name of Jihad. Twelve youths who gave up deviant thoughts appeared on Tuesday on the fourth episode of the programme titled 'Regions of clash'.

The episode focused on five major aspects related with extremism. These included temptations for waging holy war (jihad), impact of the decision to join extremist camps, influence of media that illustrate the immensity of death and destruction caused to Muslims across the world, especially in Palestine and Iraq, wrong notions about jihad, and possibility of bringing these youths back from their deviant paths and accommodating those returning from the "regions of clashes".

The youths narrated the circumstances that led them to extremist camps. "The plight of the Muslim ummah as well as the death and destruction caused to our brethren forced us to join with deviant groups. We were easily lured with the promise of paradise through joining in the efforts to alleviate the suffering of our brethren," one of them said.

If all that is the case, what has "reformed" them?