October 2006 Archives

More evidence of support for the jihad in Pakistan. From AFP, :

KABUL - Afghanistan’s intelligence agency said on Tuesday it had arrested three men planning suicide attacks in Kabul, including two from a Pakistan-based cell run by the capital’s Taleban-era deputy police chief.

The two were seized this week while trying to enter the city from neighbouring Logar province, spokesman Sayed Ansari told reporters.

They were part of a Pakistan-based cell organised by Mullah Mohammad Ibrahim Hanifi, who was the deputy police chief of Kabul during the 1996-2001 Taleban regime, he said.

“Mullah Ibrahim Hanifi, who is living in Pakistan, has been organising suicide attacks in southern Afghanistan. The two men we captured were also sent by him,” he said.

A mullah? An Islamic cleric? Doesn't he realize the Qur'an forbids suicide? (He does, of course. He just doesn't regard suicide bombing as suicide per se -- and to this, Muslim moderates have never formulated a response.)

I recently received a series of venomous emails from a prominent moderate Muslim apologist, whose work has appeared at FrontPage magazine and elsewhere, and who makes false charges about this site at his own website. He had accused me of "shameless lies," so I asked him to specify the lies, or retract the charge. He responded: "As for shameless lies, I stand by my assertion, especially after received material in which you claim Muhammad married his daughter in law etc."

This was rather amazing, given the fact that this story is referred to obliquely in the Qur'an (33:37), as well as in Bukhari, Tabari, Tafsir al-Jalalayn, and other sources respected by Muslims. Apparently, my black Zionist arts are more powerful than I thought, for I was able to conjure the story of Muhammad's marriage to his daughter-in-law Zaynab into all these sources. You can read the whole story in my book The Truth About Muhammad.

And tonight I discovered that my Zionist powers of conjuration are even more powerful than that. I was relaxing with an adult beverage and some light reading: non-Muslim Islamic apologist Karen Armstrong's new apologetic, Muhammad: A Prophet for Our Time. And lo and behold, on pages 167 and 168, there it was: the story of Muhammad's marriage to his daughter-in-law, Zaynab! Armstrong even acknowledges that "this story has shocked some of Muhammad's Western critics who are used to more ascetic, Christian heroes, but the Muslim sources seem to find nothing untoward in this demonstration of their Prophet's virility."

Victory! My sinister mind-rays have now convinced even Karen Armstrong that this incident actually took place! Oh, the shamelessness of it all! The august professor who sent me the email above has promised a full-length article detailing my "shameless lies," and no doubt he will reveal all the Zionist secrets of mind control that have enabled me to convince millions of Muslims that Muhammad married his daughter-in-law. But until that article appears, I shall carry on, shameless as ever. Perhaps next I will invent, and plant into the minds of Muslims, the idea that a middle-aged Muhammad consummated a marriage with a nine-year-old. Oh, I blush at my own shamelessness! But...it is already working!

More Churchillian courage in the face of evil from Ken Livingstone. From the Daily Mail, :

Ken Livingstone today defended the right of Abu Hamza's son to work for a Tube contractor - despite his conviction for terrorism in Yemen.

Mohammed Kamel Mostafa, 25, from Wembley, was given a security pass and had access to restricted areas - including tunnels under Parliament - during his time as a labourer at nights and weekends on the Underground.

But the Mayor said he doubted the veracity of any conviction from Yemen and said Mostafa had passed Tube security checks.

He said it was wrong to restrict his ability to work simply because he was the son of Abu Hamza. Mr Livingstone said: "Has he broken any laws here in Britain? The answer is no. We are happy to have him working for us.

"No one can be blamed for what their parents do. All we ask is that they respect the law of the land and do not hurt anyone."

His extraordinary intervention came after Tube chiefs were accused of an appalling blunder after allowing Mostafa to work in restricted areas.

Don't even think about looking at Muslim women. And cut out that humming, buster. Sharia Alert from Iran's supreme leader Sayyid Ali Khamenei, by Yaakov Lappin in Ynet News, with thanks to the Constantinopolitan Irredentist:

Looking at non-Muslim women can lead to "vile consequences," Iran's supreme leader Sayyid Ali Khamenei warned a reader on his website.

The question and answer session is the most recent in a series of online religious rulings made by the Islamic Republic's highest religious and political authority....

"Is it permissible to look at the body parts — excluding the two private areas — that a non-Muslim woman used to show? And in this regard is there a difference between seeing in the flesh or in movies?" a reader asked Khamenei.

"There is no objection to unintentional looking at the non-Muslim woman's body regarding the amount they are used to uncover," Khamenei said. He added: "Of course, It is even haram (forbidden) to intentionally look at that in case it is sexually exciting, is associated with fear of falling victim to that which is haram or leads to vile consequences."

Sexual intercourse with a Christian woman?

Another reader asked Khamenei whether he could hold sexual intercourse with a Christian woman who was still married: "I am a young man living in a foreign country. Sometime ago I contracted a temporary marriage with a Christian girl, but after a while I came to know that she was (already) married. What about my relationship with her?"

"Temporary marriage" -- mut'a -- is a Shi'ite notion. One enters into a marriage contract with a time limit. Quite common in seminary towns full of lonely young men.

"…She is permanently forbidden for you no matter whether she finishes divorce matters in the court of law after that or not," Khamenei told the reader.

Another reader told Khamenei: "I heard that it is allowed to eat meat which has been slaughtered by a Jew, is it correct?"

"The meat of the animal slaughtered by a non-Muslim is not halal (permissible to eat) even though all other conditions required for Sharia (Islamic law) slaughtering are observed," the supreme leader said.

Khamenei also went on to rule against providing "children with musical instruments to be used in songs," and "singing/humming to oneself."

But is he saying this with anything beyond Saudi interests in mind? A CNSNews.com story by Monisha Bansal (thanks to Mackie):

(CNSNews.com) - Voicing support for U.S. involvement in Iraq, the Saudi ambassador to the United States said the U.S. has a important role to play in the Middle East, "whether it wants to or not."

"It is of vital interest to us as well as the United States that Iraq would remain a unified country," said Saudi Ambassador to the United States Prince Turki al-Faisal.

If Iraq were to be divided on ethnic or sectarian lines, he warned, problems in the country would increase three-fold, and there would be "ethnic cleansing on a massive scale."

Faisal talked about the role the U.S. plays in the region at a conference held by the National Council on U.S. Arab Relations in Washington, D.C. on Monday.

"The United States is the only one who can do the right thing for everybody in the Middle East," Faisal said.

"Not only because of the size and strength of the United States, but because the United States is engaged and enmeshed in our political situation and has been for the last 50 years or so, whether it likes it or not," he said.

But Faisal added that it was in U.S. interests for "peace to reign, so we can turn to more fruitful endeavors."

Our old friend D.C. Watson has a store in which he is selling a variety of anti-jihad shirts, stickers, and tschotschkes. Sure, it's early to do your Christmas shopping, but D.C. tells me he is closing the store at the end of November, so now's the time to do your shopping for that special anti-jihadist in your life. This Christmas, give the gift that keeps on giving: the gift of anti-jihad resistance!

A bracing bit of anti-dhimmitude regarding the Al-Hilali "uncovered meat" uproar from Janet Albrechtsen in The Australian, with thanks to Ynkedoodl:

THIRTY years ago, Elton John may have crooned that "sorry seems to be the hardest word", but these days the sorry word rolls off the tongue too easily. So it's no surprise that Muslim cleric Taj Din al-Hilali thought a few apologies would get him off the hook for claiming that women in short skirts who smile and sway their hips are to blame for unleashing unlawful sexual appetites in men.

The mufti was tapping into the modern-day disease of apologitis. Say you're sorry and endless Western tenderness and tolerance will forgive all. The West has mistakenly believed tolerance begets tolerance. Having discovered that it spawns intolerance, we are finally getting back into the values debate. That means realising that sorry just won't cut it any more.

But right on cue, the first reaction from Abdul El Ayoubi of the Lebanese Muslim Association was: "We did accept his apology and we want to move on." Whoa. Before we move on, let's figure out precisely why sorry does not work any more. The sheik's apology has the distinct smell of someone being sorry that he was caught. There was no hint of contrition from Hilali in the weeks between his speech and The Australian reporting it. His faint-hearted mea culpa once the media arrived looked more like one of those PR-spun apologies. You know the kind, like the one AWB was advised to make but declined.

Going into further damage control last Friday, the wily cleric from Sydney's Lakemba mosque said his words were misinterpreted just like the Pope's address at Regensburg University. Full marks for cunning, with Hilali and his supporters believing that if good-hearted people cut a Christian leader some slack, then a Muslim leader deserves the same courtesy. The argument fails on logic. The Pope is entitled to ask whether violence is part of Islam in an attempt to encourage Muslim leaders to talk openly about what it is within Islam that encourages jihadists. The validity of that question was instantly proved by the violent response it triggered. By contrast, Hilali's medieval comments about women as meat pose no valid question. They are unacceptable in an enlightened world.

Read it all.

A note from Fjordman:

I got some angry comments at Jihad Watch some days ago when I posted an essay saying that: "The welfare state is now just a big pyramid scheme where Leftist parties take our money and give it to Muslim immigrants in return for voter support. The welfare state in fact provides insecurity, since it is used to fund the Muslim colonization of the continent."

Well, read this:

Half of the first immigrants to Norway in the first half of the 1970s are now living on state payments. The study focused on 2,500 immigrants from Pakistan, India, Turkey and Morocco born between 1936 and 1955, and compared with a control group of Norwegians of the same age. In their first ten years the immigrants were actively employed, and as many were employed as Norwegians. But after this period their activity declined sharply, and by 2000 half of the immigrants were unemployed, compared to 13 percent of their Norwegian peers.

Yet despite this, the Norwegian Minister for Labor and Social Inclusion Bjarne Håkon Hanssen from the Labor Party was in Pakistan a few weeks ago and asked for more immigrants from Pakistan, because this would be good for the Norwegian economy. I think what he really meant was that it would be good for the Labor Party, since most Muslims vote for the left-wing parties because they give them more money:

http://www.vg.no/pub/vgart.hbs?artid=131085

http://www.jihadwatch.org/dhimmiwatch/archives/011958.php

The mosques have to be monitored. What is being preached in the sermons has to be known. The alternative? Many, many more murders and terror attacks. A provocative story by Barry Thorne and Claire Cavanagh for Radio Netherlands (thanks to Ana):

Mohammed Bouyeri, the man who murdered Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh almost exactly two years ago is serving a life prison sentence, but now questions are being asked about whether the sermon of a Muslim cleric played a role in the crime.

During the ongoing trial of another Dutch terrorism suspect, Samir Azzouz, it's emerged that Imam Fawaz of the as-Sunnah mosque in The Hague gave a sermon condemning Theo van Gogh just a few weeks before his murder. A recording of the sermon exists and in it the imam is heard uttering a curse against the Dutch director for his film Submission, which is critical of Islam. The film had been shown on television shortly before the sermon.

Criminal bastard

In the recording of the sermon, Imam Fawaz calls Theo van Gogh a 'criminal bastard' and beseeches Allah to visit an incurable disease upon the filmmaker. He also condemns former Dutch MP Ayaan Hirsi Ali who was involved in writing the script for Submission. The imam asks Allah to make Ms Hirsi Ali go blind and give her cancer of the tongue and brain.

What inspiring, moving, loving prayers. Nevertheless, they aren't enough in themselves:

Despite the claims in the recording, Ruud Peters, a professor of Islamic Law doesn't believe the imam's words are incitement to commit murder:

"I have a couple of arguments for that - the most important is that he [Imam Fawaz] says, 'the people who have insulted the Prophet Muhammad should die through the hands of God' - he was very specific in that… he says, 'leave it to God'."

Key witness

Professor Peters was a key expert witness at the trial of Mohammed Bouyeri and was asked to study Bouyeri's writing up until he carried out the murder of Theo van Gogh on 2 November 2004 in Amsterdam.

"I found no clue that [Imam] Fawaz had had any impact on him. On the contrary, we know that already more than a year before he killed Van Gogh, that he… deliberately turned away from the mosques, the […] mosques which are considered to be radical."

The wise, knowledgeable and perceptive Hans Jansen, however, disagrees:

Rhetoric

However, another writer and academic on Islam from Utrecht University, Hans Jansen, believes the sermon went much further than the usual rhetoric heard in Dutch mosques,

"It is simply incitement to violence. I can't judge the legal angles, but somebody who hears this sermon would get very excited and would want to do anything in the cause of Islam."

"I've heard fire and brimstone sermons before, one long speech which builds up tension and when you leave the mosque after having heard such a sermon, especially when you're young, you'll be very excited, almost ready to do anything."

"This sermon is much worse than anything in mosques, certainly worse than anything presented in mosques in the Middle East."

Well, that's debatable. But it is bad.

"Using his membership in a prestigious scientific organization to gain access, Rauf traveled through Europe on a quest, officials say, to obtain both anthrax spores and the equipment needed to turn them into highly lethal biological weapons." Wouldn't it be a good idea for such scientific organizations to begin at least attempting to screen prospective members for adherence to the jihad ideology? But of course, no one is considering such measures. To do so would (somehow) constitute "bigotry."

"Suspect and A Setback In Al-Qaeda Anthrax Case: Scientist With Ties To Group Goes Free," by Joby Warrick in the Washington Post, :

In December 2001, as the investigation into the U.S. anthrax attacks was gathering steam, coalition soldiers in Afghanistan uncovered what appeared to be an important clue: a trail of documents chronicling an attempt by al-Qaeda to create its own anthrax weapon.

The documents told of a singular mission by a scientist named Abdur Rauf, an obscure, middle-aged Pakistani with alleged al-Qaeda sympathies and an advanced degree in microbiology.

Documents seized by U.S. forces in Afghanistan in 2001 included letters from a Pakistani scientist to al-Qaeda's No. 2 commander, Ayman al-Zawahiri. The scientist, identified by U.S. and Pakistani officials as Abdur Rauf, traveled through Europe in search of anthrax spores and bioweapons equipment. The result of his work for al-Qaeda remains unclear.

Using his membership in a prestigious scientific organization to gain access, Rauf traveled through Europe on a quest, officials say, to obtain both anthrax spores and the equipment needed to turn them into highly lethal biological weapons. He reported directly to al-Qaeda's No. 2 commander, Ayman al-Zawahiri, and in one document he appeared to signal a breakthrough.

"I successfully achieved the targets," he wrote cryptically to Zawahiri in a note in 1999.

Precisely what Rauf achieved may never be known with certainty. That's because U.S. officials remain stymied in their nearly five-year quest to bring charges against a man who they say admitted serving as a top consultant to al-Qaeda on anthrax -- a claim that makes him one of a handful of people linked publicly to the group's effort to wage biological warfare against Western targets.

Rauf, 47, has been under scrutiny in Pakistan since he was detained there for questioning in late 2001, according to U.S. and Pakistani officials who agreed to talk about the case for the first time. But officially he remains free, and Pakistan now says it has no grounds for arrest. Last year, in an acknowledgment of the impasse in its four-year joint investigation with Pakistan, the FBI officially put the case on inactive status.

"We will never close the door, but the chances of getting him into the United States are slim to none," said one U.S. intelligence official, who, like others, agreed to discuss the case on the condition that he not be identified by name.

During the last round of the endless Esmay imbroglio, I followed a link from Esmay's site to an anonymous blog that invoked me, gratuitously and without any specific examples of inaccuracies in my writing, in writing about the alleged sins of Little Green Footballs:

To top it off, LGF has become an Internet Book Tour for anti-Muslim viewpoints from non-Muslims (yes, I believe that the head of Jihad Watch can actually present a completely unbiased view of the Muslim community – NOT).

You're right, of course, whoever you are. The head of Jihad Watch cannot actually present a completely unbiased view of the Muslim community. Nor has the head of Jihad Watch ever claimed to present a completely unbiased view of the Muslim community.

If you find someone who presents a completely unbiased view of the Muslim community, you have discovered the elusive unicorn, and out-Diogenesed Diogenes. If you find someone who claims to present a completely unbiased view of the Muslim community, you have found a liar.

In fact, the head of Jihad Watch is biased. Quite spectacularly biased.

The head of Jihad Watch is biased against the proponents of a totalitarian, genocidal ideology that has announced its intention to destroy Western civilization and subjugate all those outside that ideology. The head of Jihad Watch is biased against those who would ignore, deny, or make excuses for the adherents of this totalitarian, genocidal ideology. The head of Jihad Watch is biased against liars and deceivers, and those who abet jihad terrorism in any way.

I agree with the publisher of the Atlanta Constitution, Ralph McGill, who wrote this in 1963: "I believe in being strongly partisan on issues which require a choice. There are some newspapers which are mute and others which carefully engage only editors with chronic laryngitis. But there comes a time in all controversies when one must hit the issue right on the nose or turn tail and die a little."

I agree with William Cobbett, publisher of the colonial-era Federalist newspaper, the Porcupine's Gazette: "To profess impartiality here would be as absurd as to profess it in a war between virtue and vice, good and evil, happiness and misery." Indeed. Impartiality between the jihadists and their victims? No, thank you.

I agree with the New Jersey printer who wrote in 1798, according to Cynthia Crossen in the Wall Street Journal: "The times demand decision: there is a right and a wrong, and the printer, who under the specious name of impartiality jumbles both truth and falsehood into the same paper, is either doubtful of his own judgment or is governed by ulterior motives."

All that said, does that mean that anything I have written here, or in my books, or monographs, or articles, is inaccurate? If you think so, bring it. Bias does not equal inaccuracy, and I stand by what I have written. Attempts to show me wrong have thus far involved unsupported, sweeping generalizations, or outright falsehoods, or ludicrous errors and misrepresentations on the part of the one making the charges.

And one thing all those people who made those charges have in common: they're all biased. It may surprise you to learn, in fact, that bias is universal and inescapable. No one can escape his point of view. The virtue of the early partisan press of the United States was that in those days newsmen owned up to their biases, whereas today those biases are just as strong, but covered over by a profession of objectivity that is as hollow as it is impossible.

Likewise in academia: professors like Omid Safi and Carl Ernst preen and strut in the Emperor's New Clothes of academic objectivity, which they think will hide the fact that they are nothing more and nothing less than shallow and manipulative propagandists.

Not that I mind the bias of the professors. I don't mind it at all. They can't escape it, after all, and just as I ask that my own work be judged on its accuracy or inaccuracy, so I believe theirs should be also. Biases should be noted and held in mind as an interpretative tool, but never used to dismiss anyone's work out of hand. That would be like dismissing the writings of everyone who has a nose on his face. What I despise about Safi and Ernst and their ilk is the sham of their objectivity, but their work is not worthless because of their biases; it is worthless because it is inaccurate and propagandistic -- as I have shown of Safi at Dhimmi Watch and of Ernst (quite briefly) in my new book.

In any case, all those engaged in this new "rightosphere" (whatever that is) crusade against bias in reporting about jihad should beware of placing themselves in an impossible and untenable position.

Oh yes, I'm biased, and so are you. And when it comes to the ideology of jihad and Sharia supremacism, you should be, if you have any moral sense left at all. It is time, in McGill's words, either to hit the issue right on the nose or to turn tail and die a little.

One final word: before you tell me again not to dignify these silly attacks with responses, please note that I am replying not in order to engage in a discussion with those with whom rational discussion has proved impossible, but in order to illustrate certain principles and bring certain truths to light -- principles and truths that are larger than one particular reply to some anonymous sniping blogpost -- for people of good will.

Two joyous fellows

Is al-Maliki on the road to creating the Shi'ite client state that the Iranians have been trying to foster in Iraq for quite some time now?

From AP, :

BAGHDAD, Iraq — Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki on Tuesday ordered the lifting of joint U.S.-Iraqi military checkpoints around the Shiite militant stronghold of Sadr City and other parts of Baghdad — another apparent move to assert his authority with the Americans and appeal to his Shiite support base.

U.S. officials apparently did not have advance warning of the order to remove the around-the-clock barriers by 5 p.m. Tuesday. A military spokesman, Lt. Col. Christopher Garver, said officers were meeting to "formulate a response to address the prime minister's concerns."

Witnesses said U.S. forces were seen dismantling checkpoints around Sadr City made of sandbags and concrete blocks Tuesday afternoon.

The tightened security had been credited by some for producing a temporary decline in violence, possibly because they curbed the activities of Shiite death squads blamed for waves of sectarian killings of Sunnis.

But a car bomb exploded in the neighborhood on Tuesday, killing three people and wounding five, police said. On Monday, a bombing there killed at least 33 people.

The extra checkpoints were set up last week around Sadr City as U.S. troops launched an intensive search for a missing American soldier and raided homes looking for death squad leaders in the sprawling slum that is home to an overwhelmingly Shiite population of 2.5 million people.

Today I suspect that many of you will be dressing in wild and gaudy costumes and indulging in revels to celebrate the anniversary of Reza Pahlavi's declaring himself, on this day in 1980, the rightful heir to the Peacock Throne.

Others will be doing the same thing to honor Martin Luther's 95 Theses, nailed defiantly to the Wittenberg door on this day in 1517, and of which an on-topic version can be found here.

As for me, if it were not for the fact that my heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains my sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk, or emptied some dull opiate to the drains one minute past, and Lethe-wards had sunk, I would tell you that today is also John Keats' birthday. Celebrate his birthday today in honor of the civilization of which his work is a small but luminous component, and commit yourself anew to defending that civilization.

It is absurd to think that Muslim hearts and minds can be won. They can be rented, not bought, and rented only for the shortest of periods. Meanwhile, the rent -- that is the further transfer of wealth from the Camp of the Infidels to the Camp of Islam -- only helps to pay for mosques, madrasas, worldwide campaigns of Da'wa, and armies of Western hirelings who conduct public relations and disinformation efforts on behalf of Saudi Arabia, the Arabs and Muslims more generally, and Islam itself.

Sixty billion dollars has been given by successive American governments to Egypt. Egypt today has still failed to honor any of its solemn commitments under the Camp David Accords (save for that not to engage in open warfare, a commitment that it keeps for the same reason that Syria does not attack Israel -- because of the likely consequences). Tens of billions have over many decades gone from the American government to Pakistan, a country whose military actively encouraged A. Q. Khan in his theft from Western laboratories of nuclear secrets and his subsequent effort to share those secrets with, inter alios, North Korea and Iran.

"They killed 80 teenagers who were students of the Quran." Yes, and how does that establish in any way that this was not a "terrorist-training facility," as Major General Shaukat Sultan called it?

An update to this story from AP, with thanks to all who sent this in:

KHAR, Pakistan Pakistan's army spokesman said Tuesday the military used intelligence provided by U.S.-led coalition forces in an air raid that left 80 people dead, while thousands of pro-Taliban tribesmen threatened to send suicide bombers to attack Pakistan forces and execute people found spying for the Americans....

Meanwhile, up to 20,000 people protested Tuesday in Khar, the main town in Pakistan's northwestern tribal Bajur district, claiming innocent students and teachers were killed in the attack. They chanted," "Death to Bush! Death to Musharraf!"

In a fiery speech, local pro-Taliban elder Inayatur Rahman said he has prepared a "squad of suicide bombers" to target Pakistani security forces in the same way that militants are attacking Americans in Afghanistan and Iraq.

"We will carry out these suicide attacks soon," he said, asking the crowd if they approved the idea. The angry mob yelled back in unison, "Yes!"

The rally also adopted a verbal resolution to stone to death anyone found spying for the Pakistan army or U.S. government. Protesters demanded compensation for the families of those killed.

Islamic leaders had called for nationwide protests Tuesday to denounce the air raid in Chingai village, located 10 kilometers (about 6 miles) from Khar near the Afghan border. It was the deadliest-ever military operation launched against suspected militants in the country....

The attack threatened efforts by President Gen. Pervez Musharraf to persuade deeply conservative tribespeople to back his government over pro-Taliban and al-Qaida fighters, who enjoy strong support in many semiautonomous regions in northern Pakistan.

The attack also sparked claims of U.S. collusion with Pakistan, with villagers saying fixed-wing drone aircraft were seen flying over the town in the days before the attack, according to the Dawn daily newspaper....

Fears are high that the attack will fan unrest across Pakistan. In the northwestern city of Peshawar, 500 members of a hard-line Islamic group burned an effigy of U.S. President George W. Bush on Tuesday and denounced Musharraf. A smaller protest was also held in the southern city of Multan.

The unrest caused Britain's Prince Charles, currently in Pakistan, to cancel his planned Tuesday trip to Peshawar, located in the country's northwest.

Many local lawmakers and regional Cabinet ministers resigned in protest over the attack. The planned signing of a peace deal between tribal leaders and the military was also canceled Monday in response to the airstrike....

Pakistan's most influential Islamist political leader, Qazi Hussain Ahmed, was to lead a convoy of cars Tuesday from the northwestern city of Peshawar to Khar and Chingai, his spokesman, Shahid Shamsi, said.

"They killed 80 teenagers who were students of the Quran," Ahmed told reporters on Monday.

I hope she heeds. From AINA, with thanks to DFS:

WASHINGTON -- The chairman of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops' (USCCB) Committee on International Policy has asked Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to consider measures that would help improve the deteriorating situation for Christians and other religious minorities in Iraq.

[...]

The complete text of Bishop Wenski's letter follows.

The Honorable Condoleezza Rice
Secretary of State
Department of State
2201 C. Street, N.W.
Room 7327
Washington, DC 20520

Dear Madame Secretary:

On behalf of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, I am writing to you to express our deep concern and growing alarm at the rapidly deteriorating situation of Christians and other religious minorities in Iraq.

We deplore the sectarian violence engulfing the Shia and Sunni communities in Iraq. We are especially and acutely aware of the deliberate violence perpetrated against Christians and other vulnerable minorities. Christians continue to decline from a pre-war population of over 1.2 million to a current estimate of about 600,000. The growing and deliberate targeting of Christians is an ominous sign of the breakdown in Iraqi society of civil order and inter-religious respect and represents a grave violation of human rights and religious liberty.

The recent beheading of a Syriac Orthodox priest in Mosul, the crucifixion of a Christian teenager in Albasra, the frequent kidnappings for ransom of Christians including four priests--one of whom was the secretary of Patriarch Delly, the rape of Christian women and teenage girls, and the bombings of churches are all indicators that the situation has reached a crisis point. The United Nations High Commission for Refugees estimates that approximately 44% of Iraqi refugees are Christian, even though they represent only about 4% of the total population of Iraq.

While thousands have fled to Syria, Jordan and Turkey, the remainder in Iraq are increasingly leading lives of desperation. Many no longer feel safe gathering in churches and Christian institutions, resulting in the closing of parishes, seminaries and convents. Others are fleeing to the north of Iraq in search of some measure of safety and sanctuary.

The vulnerability of Christians and other religious minorities is dramatic evidence of the serious and growing security challenges facing the entire nation of Iraq. Efforts must continue to end all sectarian violence and to make Iraq secure for everyone. At the same time, we also urge you to take several specific measures to improve the particular security situation of Christians and other minorities in Iraq. First, we hope that the U.S. government will consider the creation of a new "Administrative Region" in the Nineveh Plain Area that would be directly related to the central government in Baghdad. This could provide Christians and other minorities with greater safety and offer more opportunity to control their own affairs with assistance from the central government. Since the Kurds are key to any real efforts to stabilize Iraq and many Christians and other minorities are fleeing to the north of Iraq, we ask that the U.S. government work with Kurdish authorities to ensure the safety of Christians in the Plain of Nineveh and to provide adequate protection and assistance for religious minorities in areas controlled directly by the Kurds.

We also believe that an urgent review of economic reconstruction aid programs is needed to make sure that the aid is distributed fairly so that all elements of Iraqi society are able to rebuild their communities. Finally, we urge the U.S. government to adopt a more generous refugee and asylum policy, including the possible resettlement of at-risk cases to the United States, and to work with the governments of Turkey, Jordan and Syria to grant visas to allow Iraqi Christians and others compelled to leave Iraq access to economic, health and other necessary assistance and help until they are able to stabilize their own situation, return to Iraq or make other plans for their future.

Thank you for your attention to this important concern. We would be happy to meet with you to discuss this urgent and dangerous situation further.

Sincerely yours,

Most Reverend Thomas G. Wenski
Bishop of Orlando
Chairman, Committee on International Policy

In the featured article at FrontPage this morning I discuss the al-Hilali controversy (news links in the original):

The Mufti of Australia, Sheikh Taj al-Din al-Hilali, has gained international attention this week by saying that women are generally at fault if they are raped. Speaking to a Muslim audience in Sydney, he explained that rape (specifically, zina, sexual activity forbidden under Islamic law -- a word mistranslated in published accounts of the Sheikh’s words as “adultery”) is “90 percent the woman’s responsibility. Why? Because a woman owns the weapon of seduction. It’s she who takes off her clothes, shortens them, flirts, puts on make-up and powder and takes to the streets, God protect us, dallying. It’s she who shortens, raises and lowers. Then, it’s a look, a smile, a conversation, a greeting, a talk, a date, a meeting, a crime, then Long Bay jail. Then you get a judge, who has no mercy, and he gives you 65 years.”

Al-Hilali invoked another Islamic scholar in support of his views: “But when it comes to this disaster, who started it? In his literature, writer al-Rafee says, if I came across a rape crime, I would discipline the man and order that the woman be jailed for life. Why would you do this, Rafee? He said because if she had not left the meat uncovered, the cat wouldn’t have snatched it. If you get a kilo of meat, and you don’t put it in the fridge or in the pot or in the kitchen but you leave it on a plate in the backyard, and then you have a fight with the neighbour because his cats eat the meat, you’re crazy. Isn’t this true? If you take uncovered meat and put it on the street, on the pavement, in a garden, in a park, or in the backyard, without a cover and the cats eat it, then whose fault will it be, the cats, or the uncovered meat’s? The uncovered meat is the disaster. If the meat was covered the cats wouldn’t roam around it. If the meat is inside the fridge, they won’t get it. If the woman is in her boudoir, in her house and if she’s wearing the veil and if she shows modesty, disasters don’t happen.”

In the uproar that followed, Muslim leaders in Australia and elsewhere distanced themselves from Al-Hilali. Ali Roude of the New South Wales Islamic Council declared that Al-Hilali had “failed both himself and the Muslim community…As a father, brother and son myself, I take offence at the portrayal of both men and women in the alleged published comments.”

13,180 semiautomatic pistols, 751 assault rifles and 99 machine guns. And rocket-propelled grenades. It's likely they'll be seen again, of course, only in the hands of insurgents and death squads. "Audit reveals 14,000 arms given to Iraq are missing," by John Heilprin for AP:

WASHINGTON -- Nearly one of every 25 weapons the military bought for Iraqi security forces is missing, a government audit said Sunday. Many others cannot be repaired because parts or technical manuals are lacking.

[...]

The Pentagon cannot account for 14,030 weapons -- almost 4 percent of the semiautomatic pistols, assault rifles, machine guns, rocket-propelled grenade launchers and other weapons it began supplying to Iraq since the end of 2003, according to a report from the office of the special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction.

The missing weapons will not be tracked easily: The Defense Department registered the serial numbers of only about 10,000 of the 370,251 weapons it provided -- less than 3 percent.

The Pentagon spent $133 million on the weapons, and "the capacity of the Iraqi government to provide national security and public order is partly contingent on arming the Iraqi security forces, under the ministries of defense and interior," the report notes. Military officials insisted the weapons either had to be new or never issued to a previous soldier.

By December, the U.S. military had planned to put those weapons in the hands of 325,500 personnel.

Missing from the Defense Department’s inventory books were 13,180 semiautomatic pistols, 751 assault rifles and 99 machine guns, according to an audit requested by Sen. John Warner, R-Va., chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee.

The audit does not make clear at what point the weapons were lost. But it notes that "there could have been undetected losses" before weapons were ever issued to Iraqi security forces -- who also lack many needed spare parts, technical repair manuals and arms maintenance personnel.

This is likely to cause a firestorm, but of course it is simple common sense to recognize what the enemy invokes as his guiding principle, and learn what can be learned from it. In a sane world, the failure to have done this in the five years since 9/11 would be the cause for the firestorm, not the idea of studying Muhammad in order to understand the jihadists. To this, of course, my work has been dedicated for years.

"Ex-official: Muhammad reveals key to overcoming jihadists: Failure to analyze military plan of 'prophet' hurts U.S. military," from WorldNetDaily.com, with thanks to Doc Washburn:

The Pentagon must study the Muslim prophet Muhammad and his military doctrine to beat the growing number of jihadists, a former senior Pentagon intelligence official warns.

The failure of Pentagon brass to implement a "systematic study" of Muhammad's military doctrine is hurting the U.S. military's effort to control and defeat insurgents and terrorists, complains William Gawthrop, who until recent months headed a key counterintelligence and counterterrorism program set up at the Pentagon after 9/11.

During this year's Ramadan, just ended, U.S. troops suffered another spike in casualties. Ramadan is the Islamic holy month when Muslims believe Muhammad received the Quran, the Muslim scripture, in a divine revelation. Almost 100 GIs have been killed in Iraq this month alone. Attacks on U.S. and other coalition soldiers in Afghanistan also increased during Ramadan.

The U.S. still does not have an in-depth understanding of the war-fighting doctrine laid down by Muhammad, says Gawthrop, who recently stepped down as program manager for the Joint Terrorism Task Force of the Defense Department's Counterintelligence Field Activity, or CIFA.

"As late as early 2006, the senior service colleges of the Department of Defense had not incorporated into their curriculum a systematic study of Muhammad as a military or political leader," Gawthrop said. "As a consequence, we still do not have an in-depth understanding of the war-fighting doctrine laid down by Muhammad, how it might be applied today by an increasing number of Islamic groups, or how it might be countered...."

Gawthrop says jihadists in Iraq and Afghanistan are simply following the example of Muhammad, who some 1,400 years ago personally led 27 attacks and sent his armies out 47 additional times against non-Islamic communities averaging about seven operations a year.

He says the Muslim prophet's military doctrine is contained in the Quran and its supplements, and the insurgents and terrorists are using them as their manual of warfare. They are Muhammad's soldiers in the 21st century. Homegrown and freelance terrorists are also following his example, he notes.

"There is evidence to support the contention that sources of terrorism in Islam may reside within the strategic themes of Islam," Gawthrop said. They include "the example of Muhammad, the Quran, the hadiths, Islamic law, the pillars of faith and jihad."

The Muslim sacred books cover all aspects of warfare, from methods and tactics of violence against kafirs to war booty to truces, he says. Even alms-giving is directed toward jihad, which is obligatory for Muslims, who are told by the Quran that "fighting is prescribed for you" (another translation says "warfare is ordained for you").

Gawthrop says the Pentagon needs to develop a broad new strategy to deal with the threat from Islamic terrorists. But to do so, officials must first overcome the political taboo of linking Islamic violence to the religion of Islam, its sacred scripture and the personal example of its revered prophet.

"Muhammad's mindset is a source for terrorism," Gawthrop flatly says.

Dealing with the threat on a tactical and operational level through counterstrikes and capture has proven only marginally successful. Gawthrop and other military leaders want to combat it from a strategic standpoint, using informational warfare, among other things. A critical part of that strategy involves studying Islam, including the Quran and the hadiths, or traditions of Muhammad, and exploiting critical vulnerabilities and controversies within the faith itself.

"The ideological lever has largely been ignored," he said, while the threat from Islamic terrorism and jihadism grows stronger and stronger – now now infecting Great Britain, France, Germany, The Netherlands, Belgium, in addition to Thailand, Indonesia (and indirectly Australia), Somalia, Russia and India.

"Today the United States and an increasing number of other governments are beleaguered by an expanding array of states, groups and individuals whose goals, actions and norms are animated by Islamic values," Gawthrop said. "This places the defenders in the unenviable position of having to fight, at the strategic level, against an idea."

How do you attack an idea? By hitting "soft spots" in the Islamic faith that, once exploited, "may induce a deteriorating cascade effect upon the target," Gawthrop says.

"Critical vulnerabilities of the Quran, for example, are that it was uttered by a mortal," Gawthrop said. "Similar vulnerabilities may be found in Muhammad's character."

As the jihad spreads, he says the government eventually will have to get involved in a such a controversial national education campaign, politically incorrect as it may be.

"If the United States, moderate Muslim governments and the non-Muslim world seek to engage ideological adversaries on their own ground," he said, "they will have to develop, use and maintain the full range of capabilities in the ideological component of national power, and address Islam's strategic themes directly."

Gawthrop notes that the Defense Intelligence Agency has produced reports on jihad, but not any detailed reports on Muhammad and his political and military doctrine. The reports discussing jihad include: "Y: The Sources of Islamic Revolutionary Conduct" by Air Force Lt. Col. Stephen P. Lambert and "Islam: The Peaceful Religion in Perpetual War" by the Joint Military Intelligence College.

Gawthrop's analysis appears in the new fall 2006 edition of "The Vanguard," the professional journal of the Military Intelligence Corps Association published out of Fort Huachuca, Ariz., the Army's intelligence headquarters.

An update on this story from Alexis Debat at ABC's Blotter :

Ayman al Zawahiri was the target of a Predator missile attack this morning on a religious school in Pakistan, according to Pakistani intelligence sources.

ABC News has learned the raid was launched after U.S. intelligence received tips and examined Predator reconnaissance indicating that al Qaeda's No. 2 man may have been staying at the school, which is located in the Bajaur region near the village that is thought to be al Qaeda's winter headquarters.

Despite earlier reports that the missiles had been launched by Pakistani military helicopters, Pakistani intelligence sources now tell ABC News that the missiles were fired from a U.S. Predator drone plane.

Between two and five senior al Qaeda militants were killed in the attack, including the mastermind of the airliners plot in the U.K., according to Pakistani intelligence sources.

No word yet on whether or not Zawahiri was killed in the raid, but one Pakistani intelligence source did express doubt that Zawahiri would have been staying in a madrassa, which is an obvious target for strikes against militants. That source, however, did express confidence that Pakistani intelligence is closing in on Zawahiri's location.

A bleak prognosis from Paul Belien in The Brussels Journal, with thanks to Mackie:

The German author Henryk M. Broder recently told the Dutch newspaper De Volkskrant (12 October) that young Europeans who love freedom, better emigrate. Europe as we know it will no longer exist 20 years from now. Whilst sitting on a terrace in Berlin, Broder pointed to the other customers and the passers-by and said melancholically: “We are watching the world of yesterday.”

Europe is turning Muslim. As Broder is sixty years old he is not going to emigrate himself. “I am too old,” he said. However, he urged young people to get out and “move to Australia or New Zealand. That is the only option they have if they want to avoid the plagues that will turn the old continent uninhabitable.”

Many Germans and Dutch, apparently, did not wait for Broder’s advice. The number of emigrants leaving the Netherlands and Germany has already surpassed the number of immigrants moving in. One does not have to be prophetic to predict, like Henryk Broder, that Europe is becoming Islamic. Just consider the demographics. The number of Muslims in contemporary Europe is estimated to be 50 million. It is expected to double in twenty years. By 2025, one third of all European children will be born to Muslim families. Today Mohammed is already the most popular name for new-born boys in Brussels, Amsterdam, Rotterdam, and other major European cities.

Broder is convinced that the Europeans are not willing to oppose islamization. “The dominant ethos,” he told De Volkskrant, “is perfectly voiced by the stupid blonde woman author with whom I recently debated. She said that it is sometimes better to let yourself be raped than to risk serious injuries while resisting. She said it is sometimes better to avoid fighting than run the risk of death.”

In a recent op-ed piece in the Brussels newspaper De Standaard (23 October) the Dutch (gay and self-declared “humanist”) author Oscar Van den Boogaard refers to Broder’s interview. Van den Boogaard says that to him coping with the islamization of Europe is like “a process of mourning.” He is overwhelmed by a “feeling of sadness.” “I am not a warrior,” he says, “but who is? I have never learned to fight for my freedom. I was only good at enjoying it.”

Aye, there's the rub.

Read it all, and don't miss the links.

Head In The Sand Alert: "'Hamas doesn't want to destroy Israel,'" by David Horovitz for the Jerusalem Post:

Hamas wants to "liberate the Palestinians," not to destroy Israel, Javier Solana, the European Union's foreign policy chief, told The Jerusalem Post on Thursday.

In an interview following his talks in Tel Aviv with Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, Solana insisted that it was "not impossible" for Hamas to change and "recognize the existence of Israel." History had shown that people and nations "adapt to reality," he said. "I don't want to lose hope."

Many, many others in the West are in Solana's position. They would rather believe arrant fantasies than face uncomfortable realities.

Pressed as to whether he was underestimating the fundamentalist religious imperative at the heart of the Hamas ideology, Solana said, "I cannot imagine that the religious imperative, the real religious imperative, can make anybody destroy another country... Therefore that is an abuse of religion...

"I don't think the essence of Hamas is the destruction of Israel. The essence of Hamas is the liberation of the Palestinians," he added. "The liberation of their people, not the destruction of Israel."

Sharia Alert: "Pakistanis deface women on hoardings," by Meenakshi Iyer for the Hindustan Times:

"No nation can rise to the height of glory unless your women are side by side with you; we are victims of evil customs. It is a crime against humanity that our women are shut up within the four walls of the houses as prisoners. There is no sanction anywhere for the deplorable condition in which our women have to live." - Mohammad Ali Jinnah, 1944 She can tame the tide and even lead a nation bristling with religious zealots, but the plight of the average woman – no matter where she is – is pitiable. Empty rhetoric about the deplorable condition of women in South Asia is only adding insult to injury.

But the recent rage against women, especially in Pakistan, forces one to sit up and think: Is this the same nation where once Benazir Bhutto dared to take on the male bastion?

Rapes, honour killings and a plethora of religious edicts against women are not new to Islamic society, and the status of women keeps getting worse.

In a fresh twist, women's faces on billboards across Pakistan, especially in the North West Frontier Province (NWFP), are now being defaced.

Reason? "These multinational companies want to promote obscenity, lewdness and vulgarity," religious leader, Shehzada Babar is quoted as saying in UK's First Post magazine.

The depiction of women sans hijab or headscarf is considered un-Islamic by Muslim radicals and the Taliban, whose influence is growing in the North West Frontier Province (NWFP).

"Although the trend has been noticed in many cities across Pakistan, recently it's been on a decline. However, it is still largely prevalent in the city of Peshawar. The local government there is following a Talibanisation drive in the province," the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan (HRCP) told HindustanTimes.com.

Aatekah Mir, a resident of Lahore, confirms that billboards showing women are being removed/defaced, but says that it is confined to NWFP.

"It is only in the NWFP that billboards with women are being removed. The provincial government there has this ludicrous bill that forbids music and dance mehfils in public places as well as homes," rues Mir.

"They (women) live their lives in utter fear and under restrictions. Even girls studying in the best of the colleges don't have freedom to carry out their dreams or even speak against harsh rules made by men. They are captive in their own houses. They can't move like American girls buying apartments of their own," says writer Abeer Khan....

Terror Free Tomorrow recommends jizya as an antidote to terror. Aethelred the Unready Alert: "Analysis: Aid could impact Muslim opinion," by Aaron Rupar for UPI, with thanks to DP:

WASHINGTON, Oct. 27 (UPI) -- Foreign aid could be a vital tool in the struggle to win over hearts and minds throughout the Muslim world, according to new polling data.

During the past six months, Terror Free Tomorrow has administered polls in Indonesia, Bangladesh and Pakistan -- the world's three most populous Muslim countries -- in which at least half of all respondents replied that American aid "makes them more favorable to the U.S."

"The bottom line is that American aid is the single most important action the people of the three largest Muslim countries want from the United States," writes Ken Ballen, TFT president, in the report's executive summary. "And here's the key to winning hearts and minds: deeper American assistance directly to the people, following their expressed priorities."

Terror Free Tomorrow is a non-partisan, non-profit organization, whose mission includes understanding the popular support behind global terrorists. Its advisory board includes Republican Sen. John McCain of Arizona.

At a press conference publicizing the report, Ballen argued against the media-fueled misconception that "the U.S. is public enemy number one" in the Islamic world. Ballen used TFT's polling data to suggest the majority of Muslims throughout the Middle East and Asia don't dislike the United States, but "do not have a recognized voice" through which they can express their views.

However, in order to change the opinions of those sections of the Islamic world where anti-American sentiment runs deep, Ballen argued increased U.S. aid can play a remedial role. "We should reach out more forcefully to deliver aid directly to the Islamic world" in order to further swing public opinion behind U.S. policy, he said.

While TFT's report emphasizes the positive role of foreign aid, it also recognizes the significant negative impact that the war on terror has had on Muslim public opinion. "The same consensus view on the approval of American aid is mirrored by an equally strong unfavorable view of the anti-Muslim character of the U.S.-led fight against terrorism," the report states.

Ballen emphasized that simply piping money into Islamic countries is not enough. Equally important as the quantity of aid is the way in which aid is administered. "Aid is important, but interaction between Americans and Muslims and people-to-people contact is perhaps more important," he said.

To illustrate his point, Ballen cited the example of Egypt, which was the second-largest recipient of official U.S. aid in 2004. Despite the nearly $43 billion which Egypt received from the United States, Egyptians generally remain highly anti-American. Ballen argued the situation in Egypt could be changed if American diplomats made a concerted effort to establish their presence on the Egyptian street by getting out from behind the fortified walls of the embassy. Although this strategy could potentially put the security of American diplomats at risk, Ballen argued that without such efforts the impact of American aid is nullified.

Others, however, argue that TFT's suggestions regarding aid are superficial to the deeper issues which are affecting Muslim opinion of the United States.

Roberta Cohen, a senior fellow of foreign policy studies at the Brookings Institution, told United Press International that American policy must be fundametally altered in order to affect a serious change in Muslim public opinion.

"You can't really buy favorable public opinion," Cohen said. "Frankly, I think a change in U.S. policies would be more beneficial -- changed policies towards Iraq, global terrorism, the Middle East, detainee treatment, and a more sustained effort to get an Israeli-Palestinian settlement."

Ah. A different kind of jizya: give them what they want peacefully, and they won't need to fight for it.

Even though the notorious Sheikh Al-Hilali, who blamed women for their own rape, has taken a leave of absence, things are getting worse in Australia. You see, Australian judges discriminate against Muslim rapists -- which charge is an attempt to lessen rape sentences in Australia, as part of the larger makeover of Australian society after the pattern of Islamic law. An update by Cameron Stewart and Richard Kerbaj in The Australian, with thanks to Rosie:

THE leader of Australia's most radical Islamic group has fuelled the Taj al-Din al-Hilaly controversy by accusing Australian judges of discriminating against Muslim rapists.

As Sheik Hilaly yesterday took "indefinite leave" from preaching after a "heart attack", The Australian can reveal Melbourne cleric Sheik Mohammed Omran told his flock on Friday that rapes committed by Australian non-Muslims - such as "bikies" or "football stars" - were treated more leniently than those committed by Muslims.

"I feel there is no justice here. Not 60 years and someone else three years and they did the same crime. Why?" Sheik Omran told worshippers at his Brunswick mosque.

"They make a big fuss about these kids because one of them, his name is Mohamed. Even if you kill someone you don't go for 60 years," he said, referring to Sydney's 2000 gang rapes in which Lebanese Muslim Bilal Skaf was initially sentenced to 55 years jail, but later had the sentence reduced on appeal.

"This is where I think everything has gone unbalanced," Sheik Omran said. "We don't support criminals or crimes, but at same time we want justice for everyone."

Sheik Omran strongly defended the besieged mufti, who until yesterday had defiantly resisted demands from Muslims and the wider community to step aside for likening women to uncovered meat and suggesting rape victims should be held responsible for enticing attackers....

Sheik Omran, one of the country's most outspoken and controversial fundamentalist clerics, said on Friday that attacks on Sheik Hilaly were attacks on Islam.

"His name is a mufti and we should respect that name - we should respect the turban on his head," Sheik Omran said in the sermon, an audio copy of which was posted on his Ahlus Sunnah Wal-Jamaah Association website yesterday. "This is the sign of a scholar - you are not attacking Sheik Taj here, you are attacking the scholars, you are attacking Islam."

Sheik Omran has said bin Laden was a good man and the US, rather than the al-Qaeda leader, was behind the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.

Now it looks as if the destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas in 2001 in Afghanistan was an act of jihadists from all over. "Bin Laden's prints seen on ruins of Bamiyan Buddhas," by Selim Saheb Ettaba for AFP, with thanks to Fjordman:

BAMIYAN, Afghanistan -- In a huge cavity dug into the side of a cliff, workers search through the rubble to exhume the remains of the giant Buddhas of Bamiyan.

At the scene of the crime carried out in 2001 all evidence points to Osama Bin Laden as the mastermind. "This is the terrorism of the Taliban," says Rahim, an official at the work site in front of the empty niche of the biggest of the two statues, one of which stood 55 meters (182 feet) tall and the other 38 meters.

Wearing a hard hat and a mask over his mouth, one of the workers, Rajab, is trying to save the remains of the destruction in which one of his family members played a part. "The Taliban took Ali Reza, one of my relatives, and they suspended him from a cable at the side of the Buddhas. Then they forced him to beat at the statues with an axe and an iron rod," he says. "They took four or five like him, to punish them for having fought against them."

He says that there were Arabs, Pakistanis, and Chechens among the Taliban fanatics who oversaw the demolition of the ancient relics - until then the largest standing Buddhist statues in the world - carried out on the orders of the head of the Taliban regime because they were deemed idolatrous.

One of his colleagues, Abdul Ali, adds: "The Taliban were the executors, but the masterminds were the Arabs and the Pakistanis."

At the nearby village of Sangchaspon, where the government has sent people who once lived in caves dug into the cliff around the Buddhas, two more witnesses give a similar account. "They started with tanks but that did not do much damage so they brought in explosives," says Mirza Hussein, another of the prisoners that the Taliban brought in to destroy the Buddhas.

"There were Arabs and Pakistanis," says Hussein, who was present for all 25 days it took to demolish the statues. As he recalls it, the foreigners "came by helicopter."...

Tora Bora is 100% safe, says Gul Agha Sherazi. Getting there through Pakistan and Afghanistan might be somewhat less so. "'Come To Tora Bora Caves,'" from Sky News, with thanks to Mackie:

There will soon be a new holiday destination for the most intrepid tourists, according to one newspaper.

Osama bin Laden's infamous Tora Bora caves hideout is reportedly being converted - into a £5.3m holiday resort.

It seems hotels and restaurants are being built on mountains overlooking the al Qaeda leader's secret lair in Afghanistan, says The Sun.

The newspaper quotes a former warlord-turned local governor as saying the area is now completely safe.

Gul Agha Sherazi said: "Tora Bora is world famous - but we want it to be known for tourism, not terrorism," claims the paper.

Bin Laden hid out in the network of caves in 2001 after the Taliban government was ousted.

It is believed he fled after a US bombing blitz.

Despite the fact two journalists have been killed in the area this month, Sherazi apparently insisted: "Tora Bora is 100% safe".

"The Middle East is the center of graft and corruption in the universe." Financial Jihad Update from Rowan Scarborough in the Washington Times, :

The U.S. military is not only trying to stop terrorists and arms from leaking into Iraq from Syria and Iran but also another just as dangerous commodity -- cash.

It's the lifeblood of the enemy -- whether they be al Qaeda terrorists, death squads or Sunnis trying to evict American forces and bring back dictator Saddam Hussein -- and U.S. raiders have seized millions of dollars in cash during the conflict.

Military officials point to Syria and its secretive banking system as the main source of Sunni walking-around money, while Iran's Revolutionary Guard funnels money to Shi'ite militias, such as cleric Muqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army.

The enemy's money began flowing into Iraq with the start of the insurgency in the summer of 2003, and the shipments are still coming in.

"There are billions coming in," said Daniel Gallington, a former aide to Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld. "The Middle East is the center of graft and corruption in the universe. It really always has been. The fight in Iraq is about who controls what area is really all about who controls the money."

Read it all.

Al-Hilali Update. Sheik apologises to 'cherished pearls,'" from The Australian, with thanks to the Constantinopolitan Irredentist:

SHEIK Taj al-Din al-Hilaly described women as "cherished pearls" and said rape was abominable as he tried to explain the comments which have engulfed him in controversy.

While he expressed some contrition to the women of Australia, he attacked the "dubious media" and "devious groups" which he says have slandered and defamed him.

Australia's most senior Muslim cleric collapsed with chest pains and was taken to hospital today following widespread calls for him to quit after delivering a sermon in which he compared immodestly dressed women to uncovered meat eaten by cats.

In a written statement given to the media at Canterbury Hospital in Sydney today, he admitted the metaphor was inappropriate for western society.

But he said the comments were made in a private lesson at Lakemba mosque during Ramadan and were not meant for the general public "and particularly not the general women of our Australian society".

In other words, I'm sorry this was publicized.

"The metaphor ... has been quoted and misinterpreted by some groups with ill intention," the statement said.

Of course. When have a jihadist's uncomfortable words, when they have come to the attention of the general public, ever been interpreted correctly?

"I am deeply saddened and distressed by the acts of some devious groups which lurk in the dark watching me, and who cannot tolerate the moderate balanced way which I adopt to advocate for women's issues.

"Yes, I feel deeply saddened that such an ordinary lesson has been used to slander and defame me after it had been translated with the ill intention of a dubious media that wishes to incite and they present an unfair campaign, the aims of which are very well known."

He said a verse in the Koran dealing with adultery named `woman' before `man' because "she possessed the charm, the methods of seduction and all similar devices given to her by Allah to tempt the man.

"For that I borrowed a metaphor used by an author called Ar-Rifa'i.

"He said exposing the meat in an illicit way would encourage the cats to devour it. I didn't mean by that to humiliate immodest women; I meant to censure the person who would abandon his humility and turn into a vicious animal."

He said western women and Muslim women are entitled to wear what they like, but "Islamic Sharia made it incumbent upon Muslim men to lower their gaze. It is prohibited for them to stare at the beauty of strange women."

Rape, he said, was "an abominable crime; it has no justification, and the perpetrator deserves the severest punishment and would not deserve to belong to a religion or to humanity."

But he still urged women not to tempt men.

"I turn to all the women of Australia and the world. You are the shining lights of the world ... How could any sane person think of humiliating you?" he wrote.

"You are the cherished pearls, the dearest thing in the world. So don't be taken as offerings at the temples of the merchants of pleasure, or advocates of decadence and corruption.

"Once again I am very sorry and apologise for what resulted from an unintentional analogy."

Here is another review that has appeared today of my new book The Truth About Muhammad. This one is an erudite and generous perspective from Serge Trifkovic in Human Events. Trifkovic, of course, is the author of two essential books, Sword of the Prophet and Defeating Jihad.

At least since Georgi Plekhanov’s influential essay “The Role of the Individual in History” (1898), the proponents of the Great Man model—initiated in Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave” and famously elaborated by Carlyle—have been on the defensive. For some decades now, the Western academe has been dominated by the upholders of the primacy of the relationships and conflicts between social forces in determining the course of history. Most chairs that count are held by Emeriti who see history as a linear struggle between social classes and their key fractions. Over the past generation the “proletarian” has been replaced by "RaceGenderSexuality" and the “capitalist” by the non-self-hating straight white male, but the dogma that history is determined by social forces has survived the fall of the Wall.

Robert Spencer’s “The Truth About Muhammad” (Regnery, a HUMAN EVENTS sister company) was not written in order to disprove the gnostic notion that history has a comprehensible pattern, a determinate logic and a finite number of possible resolutions or outcomes. But that is, indirectly, what the book achieves. This brief and readable summary of the life and times of the prophet of Islam, derived from eminently orthodox Muslim sources, reveals the centrality of Muhammad not only to Islam-as-religion but also to Islam as a totalitarian ideology, Islam as a geopolitical project, and Islam as a normative moral and legal system devoid of any “natural” foundation.

Hot and bothered

In the course of a recent interview on MSNBC, Tucker Carlson asked Hooper three pointed questions:

"Would you say that most American Muslims are horrified by the thought that Iran might possess nuclear weapons, or not?"

No clear answer from Hooper.

Do American Muslims believe that this is a "war against Islam"?

A slippery answer from Hooper, suggesting that he himself believes that America is waging a war against Islam.

"Are Muslims more likely to commit acts of terror than members of other faiths?"

A flat no from Hooper, in the face of mountains of evidence. Click on that link. 6,276 Islamic terrorist attacks since 9/11. And then, just try to compile a similar list of violent acts committed recently by members of any other faith, in the name of that faith and justified by its core texts, and see how far you get. I'm glad Carlson asked the question, and wish there had been time for an extended discussion of this, and the introduction of some distinctions. Human nature is everywhere the same, but is Islamic teaching inspiring violence today? That is plain to all but those who do not wish to see. Instead of bland denials from Hooper, it would be refreshing to see him offer some constructive way to counter this phenomenon. But apparently that must be left up to the "Islamophobes."

Expect CAIR to denounce this. And don't tell me, "Well, CAIR is an American group, you see, so you can't expect them to denounce atrocities committed outside America." That might have held water before they denounced the ban on headscarves in Tunisia, but it doesn't anymore. If they can denounce that, they can denounce this.

Can't they?

Islamic Tolerance Alert from AINA, :

(AINA) -- According to the Assyrian website ankawa.com, a 14 year old Christian Assyrian boy, Ayad Tariq, from Baqouba, Iraq was decapitated at his work place on October 21.

Ayad Tariq was working his 12 hour shift, maintaining an electric generator, when a group of disguised Muslim insurgents walked in at the beginning of his shift shortly after 6 a.m. and asked him for his ID.

According to another employee who witnessed the events, and who hid when he saw the insurgents approach, the insurgents questioned Ayad after seeing that his ID stated "Christian", asking if he was truly a "Christian sinner." Ayad replied "yes, I am Christian but I am not a sinner." The insurgents quickly said this is a "dirty Christian sinner!" Then they proceeded to each hold one limb, shouting "Allahu akbar! Allahu akbar!" while beheading the boy.

Good thing they weren't dirty sinners themselves, eh? And of course, they aren't, not even after they committed this cold-blooded murder. They aren't, that is, according to the Sharia stipulations that a Christian's life is forfeit if he violates the terms of his dhimma -- which they might have thought Ayad Tariq somehow did, perhaps simply by virtue of sharing the religion of the majority of the population of the Great Satan, the invaders of Iraq.

In any case, Islamic law sets a lighter punishment for the killing of a Christian than it does for the killing of a Muslim. The Iranian Sufi Sheikh Tabandeh even defended this in his book-length Islamic critique of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Probably the killers of Ayad Tariq share this view. So it is likely that today they have no fear that they will receive any punishment either on earth or from God.

The jihad against Israel continues without let-up, while Abbas struts and postures. From Xinhua:

A Palestinian home-made rocket landed in an open area near "a strategic site" in the south of Israel's coastal city of Ashkelon, Israeli Radio quoted Israeli army sources on Monday.

The rocket, fired from northern Gaza Strip, caused slight damages, said the sources, adding the timing of the attack which happened early in the morning has prevented more casualties among workers who were not there at that site.

Al-Quds Brigades, the military wing of the Islamic Jihad (Holy War), claimed responsibility. In a statement faxed to the press, the brigades said their fighters launched a medium-range rocket on Ashkelon at about 6:00 a.m.

According to the Israeli sources, situation in Ashkelon city has been relatively quiet recently, but the Palestinian rocket attacks against southern Israel's town of Sderot continued in spite of the ongoing military operations by the Israeli army in Gaza to curb rocket attacks.

Brigitte Gabriel's review of my new book this morning puts me in mind of her superb new book, which is not to be missed.

Because They Hate is her own harrowing -- beyond harrowing -- story, the story of her childhood in Lebanon, when jihadists sowed mayhem and destruction, keeping the Christian population in terror for years on end. And Brigitte Gabriel is not afraid to draw the necessary conclusions from her experience, as politically incorrect as they may be. Here is a first-hand account of how jihad terrorists destroy lives, and how they plan and hope to do to the entire world what they did to southern Lebanon.

Brigitte Gabriel was able to escape from the physical and psychological nets the jihadists wove, becoming a fervent and articulate defender of Israel and all the nations and peoples that are threatened by jihad terror and supremacism today. If you haven't read her book or heard her speak, do both as soon as you can, and give this book to all those who still need to wake up.

Here are the endorsements, including my own, that appear on the jacket of Because They Hate:

“Brigitte Gabriel eloquently reminds America what is truly at stake in this struggle against terrorism: our families, our way of life, and our hopes. Ms. Gabriel's personal account of her own experience is riveting, compelling and spellbinding. This is a must read for the entire American public . . . This book contains monumental revelations that will shock and disturb you. But it is also a story of an indomitable spirit--Brigitte's-- that will move you.”--Steve Emerson, author of American Jihad: The Terrorists Living Amongst Us, Executive Director, the Investigative Project on Terrorism

"A compelling and captivating personal story with a powerful lesson about threats to freedom in our time." --R. James Woolsey, Director of Central Intelligence, 1993-95

“Brigitte Gabriel's story is at once intensely personal and possessing global significance . . . the story of her family and her childhood encapsulates the threat that faces the entire free world today. Brigitte Gabriel's words should be read, and studied carefully, by all the law enforcement and government officials of the West -- as well as by everyone who values freedom.” -- Robert Spencer, author of The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (and the Crusades)

“Because They Hate should be read by all to understand radical Islam. Brigitte . . . . This book gives dire warning of what is to come if the democratic and Western world does not take responsible action to protect its people and societies. The United States is the primary target as Islamic Radicalism attempts to spread its worldwide dominance.”-- Paul E. Vallely, Maj. General US Army (Ret.), FOX News Channel Military Analyst, and coauthor of Endgame: The Blueprint for Victory in the War on Terror

The courageous president of the American Congress for Truth, Brigitte Gabriel -- one of the most passionate and riveting speakers I have ever had the privilege to hear -- has written this review of my new book The Truth About Muhammad in FrontPage this morning:

“Freedom of inquiry and speech, the quest for truth, should not be cowed into silence by violent intimidation or the acceptance of half-truths and propaganda meant to appease freedom’s enemies. One thing is certain: if no one is willing to take such risks, freedom of speech will swiftly become a relic of history.”

These are the words of author Robert Spencer, who is risking his life to educate Westerners about the life of the founder of Islam. He has just come out with a new book, The Truth About Muhammad: Founder of the World's Most Intolerant Religion. In this biography, Spencer tells the story of the founder of Islam -- a story that many Muslims themselves apparently either do not know about or do not want non-Muslims to hear.

Yet it's strange that any Muslim would react with anger to Spencer's book, since he bases it strictly on Islamic sources, all written by pious and serious Muslims. No critic can rightly say that anything Spencer has said about Muhammad in this book is inaccurate. But the problem Muslims find with it is that Spencer doesn't treat Muhammad as if he were the highest moral standard.

What kind of threats had to be made to Musharraf to get him to agree to this? An AP story by Habibullah Khan:

KHAR, Pakistan - Pakistani troops backed by missile-firing helicopters destroyed a purported al-Qaida-linked training facility in a northwestern tribal area near the Afghan border Monday, officials said. At least 20 people were killed.

The pre-dawn attack targeted a religious school, or madrassa, holding 70-80 militants in Chingai village near Khar, the main town in the Bajur tribal district, said army spokesman Maj. Gen. Shaukat Sultan....

Sultan said the attack targeted terrorists training at the al-Qaida-linked facility, but local leaders said those killed in the raid were innocent civilians.

Among the dead was Liaquat Hussain, a local Islamic cleric who ran the madrassa and is believed to have been sheltering al-Qaida militants, locals said. Several of his aides also died, they said.

The attack came two days after 5,000 pro-Taliban tribesmen held an anti-American rally in the Bajur area near Damadola, a village close to the site of an alleged U.S. missile attack that killed several al-Qaida members and civilians in January.

"We received confirmed intelligence reports that 70-80 militants were hiding in a madrassa used as a terrorist-training facility, which was destroyed by an army strike, led by helicopters," Sultan said....

Siraj ul-Haq, a Cabinet minister from the North West Frontier Province, condemned the attack and announced he would resign from the government in protest.

"This is a very wrong action. The government has launched an attack during the night, which is against Islam and the traditions of the area," ul-Haq told the AP during the funeral. "They (the victims) were not given any warning. This was an unprovoked attack on a madrassa. They were innocent people."...

Ul-Haq, who belongs to the powerful Islamic political party, Jamaat-e-Islami, said protests would be staged throughout the northern tribal region on Tuesday to denounce the attack.

First Iran, now Turkey. Sharia Alert. "Women-only park plan causes stir in secular Turkey," from Reuters:

ISTANBUL: Strong reaction to a plan for a women-only park in Istanbul has focused attention on the divisions between Turkey’s secularists and supporters of the ruling AK Party, which has its roots in political Islam.

Critics of the plan see it as the latest sign that the ruling party is trying to push through an Islamist agenda, but several female voters in the district said yesterday they loved the idea.

News that the AK Party-run municipality of Bagcilar was planning to create a park exclusively for women, reported in the local press this week, prompted a fierce reaction among secular Turks who say the party is trying to give Islam a greater role in public life.

The controversy reached parliament on Thursday, when opposition CHP lawmaker Bihlun Tamayligil asked the assembly: "Can you reconcile the principles of the Republic with applying the segregation of men and women?" according to local media.

The row is the latest of several between pro-secular and Islamist-leaning camps in Turkey, which is officially secular but overwhelmingly Muslim.

Municipalities run by the AK Party caused outrage in some quarters last year by banning alcohol in restaurants they run. Islam bans alcoholic drinks. The party also wants to lift a ban on women wearing headscarves in official buildings.

Tension between the two sides is likely to increase as the November 2007 general election draws nearer.

"They’re talking about (protecting women from) sexual harassment but this is an Islamist agenda ... it’s very obviously an application of harem-selamlik (separating men and women)," Pinar Ilkkaracan, founder of the NGO Women for Women’s Human Rights, told Reuters.

In some parts of Istanbul skimpily-clad women hop between nightclubs, but in Bagcilar, where nearly all the women on the street wear headscarves, the AK Party seems to be in tune with voters -- at least with a handful of local women.

"It’s good, I hope it happens. It’d be more comfortable," 21-year-old textile worker Nurgul Karayanik told Reuters in the neighbourhood. "Men make comments, leer at women a lot in Turkey," she said.

Some were puzzled by other women’s opposition to the plan.

"There are women who don’t go out because of men ... because (they think) it’s sinful. And men make comments, it’s uncomfortable," said 49-year-old Muteber Kucukkaraca.

Local mayor Feyzullah Kiyiklik, angered by the controversy, declined to give any details.

"We haven’t finished the park yet, we haven’t opened it, no decision has been taken ... but if you are interested, the day we open our park you could also come, inshallah," he said.

There was a time when the British were made of sterner stuff. "British troops hide from bombers," by Michael Smith in the TimesOnline, :

BRITISH troops in the two main towns in the southern Afghan province of Helmand have been forced to stay in their barracks by the threat of Taliban suicide bombers.

The decision to keep the troops in their bases follows intelligence that suicide bombers are waiting in the province’s two main towns to attack British troops, said Lieutenant-Colonel Andy Price.

The would-be suicide bombers in the provincial capital of Lashkar Gah and in the town of Gereshk were wired up with explosives and waiting for a British convoy. “We have suicide bombers physically walking around in Lashkar Gah and Gereshk looking for us — a lot of them are not locals,” Price said. “More and more they’re following the Iraqi example.”

Price, spokesman for the British forces in Helmand, said there was a “lockdown” of the two British bases. “There is no movement, no soldier, no police or the Afghan army,” he said. “We’re not going out and the Afghan police and army aren’t going out.”

The “lockdown” raises questions about how the Royal Marine commandos who last month replaced British paratroopers in Helmand will provide security to allow reconstruction projects to go ahead.

Lieutenant-General David Richards, the Nato commander in Afghanistan, has said that he wants British troops to withdraw from the northern outposts of Helmand and concentrate on creating safe development zones in Lashkar Gah and Gereshk.

By focusing reconstruction efforts on those two towns, Richards hopes to persuade residents that they are better off without the Taliban. But that will be impossible unless British and Afghan forces can provide security.

Reconstruction won't persuade them of anything. The Taliban argue on Islamic grounds. The British have no response to that. Neither does Hamid Karzai.

Imagine! Two new books shed light on the Prophet of Islam! The Boston Globe has a review of both:

The path of the prophet
Two new works seek to uncover the man who was Muhammad

By Ilan Stavans | October 29, 2006

Muhammad
By Eliot Weinberger
Verso, 64 pp., $10.95

Muhammad: A Prophet for Our Time
By Karen Armstrong
HarperCollins/Atlas, 249 pp., $21.95

Muhammad by Eliot Weinberger, Amazon.com Sales Rank at the hour of this writing: #752,092. The publisher calls it "a luminous portrait of the Prophet, in the Islamic tradition....Muhammad is a shimmering, lyrical biography of the Prophet, composed from the words of Muslims throughout the centuries."

Muhammad: A Prophet for Our Time by Karen Armstrong, Amazon.com sales rank this hour: #6,480. Booklist says of it: "It puts the best face possible on its subject. The Muhammad it projects gave his followers 'a mission: to create a just and decent society, in which all members were treated with respect.'"

Funny thing: I've heard there is a third new book out recently about Muhammad. This hour it is ranked #56 at Amazon. Now, of course the Globe can review any book it wants, and decline to review any book it wants, but I can't help but wonder why the paper would choose to run a review feature on books about Muhammad that deals with two books that have aroused much less reader interest (thus far, to be sure) than a third book on the same subject.

Could it be because Weinberger's and Armstrong's are both hagiographical and that third book isn't? I can't help but wonder.

CLARIFICATION: The salient issue here is obscured somewhat by the fact that I wrote the third book to which I refer above. The issue here is not that my book didn't get a review in the Globe. As I said above, they can review or not review any book they want. This post is about media bias, and the mainstream media's unwillingness to discuss anything that might appear unfavorable to Islam.

UPDATE: Please don't write to Ilan Stavans. It has come to my attention that some of you have done so -- if I had thought to do so I would have asked you not to in the first place. But in any case, he responded quite favorably to one person who emailed, saying: "Thanks for your e-mail. I'd love to see Robert Spencer's book, lathough I don't know if the Globe would be ready for a review." I will see to it that he gets a copy.

Al-Hilali Update. Tanveer Ahmed says in The Australian what I get called "Islamophobic" for saying. Is it true if a Muslim says it, but "Islamophobia" if a non-Muslim says it?

As long as Muslims view their religion as sitting above history and culture - with the Koran as the literal word of God, which in their view makes Islam undebatable - there will always be Hilalis who can point to certain texts and argue for a social and legal structure consistent with 7th-century Arabia. Let's not forget that a senior British cleric lavished praise on Hilali in response to this incident, saying Australia was lucky to have him, and suggesting he was "one of the greatest Islamic scholars in the world".

This is a man who knows the Koran in intimate detail and his views are consistent with a strict reading of the Muslim holy book.

And if you believe the Koran is the literal word of God, how is anything other than a strict interpretation appropriate?

All the world's religions have passages that are abhorrent or inappropriate to the modern age. But they were revolutionary in their time and can still inspire us today.

If Islam is seen in its context, as a product of history and not above it, there could be a meaningful debate about whether a version of the religion, inspired by but not chained to its past, can and contribute to modernity and human progress.

The Hilali incident and the loud chorus of his defenders suggest this is still some way off.

Women need only "cover their head and a little of their face." There now, don't you feel better?

"Islam against Talibani veil: Sadiq," by M Hasan in the Hindustan Times:

SENIOR VICE-CHAIRMAN of the All-India Muslim Personal Law Board (AIMPLB) and renowned Islamic scholar Dr Kalbe Sadiq today announced that Islam was against ‘Talibani Purdah (rigid purdah system imposed by the Taliban in Afghanistan)’.

Coming to the rescue of film star Shabana Azmi over her statement on ‘purdah’ (veil), Dr Sadiq said Shabana was right in her interpretation of veil in Islam, as Islam never talked about the purdah system as prevalent in Afghanistan.

While mullahs have been trying to hound out Shabana for her comment that there was no Quranic injunction about the present form of veil, Dr Sadiq said, “There is no mention of Talibani ‘purdah’ in the holy book.”

Dr Sadiq said while dealing with the issue, the Quran had only said that women should cover their head and a little of their face. He said there was no need to cover the whole face.

Actually, this is all the Qur'an says about it. It has been variously interpreted, although most scholars agree that it does involve a head covering: "And say to the believing women that they should lower their gaze and guard their modesty; that they should not display their beauty and ornaments except what (must ordinarily) appear thereof; that they should draw their veils over their bosoms and not display their beauty except to their husbands, their fathers, their husband's fathers, their sons, their husbands' sons, their brothers or their brothers' sons, or their sisters' sons, or their women, or the slaves whom their right hands possess, or male servants free of physical needs, or small children who have no sense of the shame of sex; and that they should not strike their feet in order to draw attention to their hidden ornaments. And O ye Believers! turn ye all together towards Allah, that ye may attain Bliss" (24:31).

As I have long noted, any secular, democratic or republican or semi-democratic government in the Islamic world -- indeed, any government that does not fully implement Sharia -- faces mounting pressure from forces that believe that no non-Sharia government has any legitimacy at all. And that is true even in the country that is most often held up as the model and proof that Islam and democracy can coexist (despite the fact that its secularism was established in an atmosphere of war with Islam): Turkey.

"FEATURE-Islam challenges secularism in Turkey's east," by Paul de Bendern for Reuters:

DIYARBAKIR, Turkey, Oct 30 (Reuters) - In the heartland of Turkey's southeast, plagued by decades of conflict between separatist Kurdish rebels and the state, a new threat to secularism is emerging -- Islamist groups.

Local politicians say these organisations are becoming more active in the poor region that borders Iraq and Syria, and some fear this could fan fundamentalism, especially among young people who have grown up with violence.

As in the rest of predominantly Sunni Muslim Turkey, practising one's religion here long took a backseat to a public espousal of the secularism of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the republic's founder.

However, since the AK Party, which has roots in political Islam, swept to power in 2002, Muslims are now being more open about their faith.

"We feel much freer to practise Islam," said Engin Aydin, a teacher and physics graduate who was selling religious books near Diyarbakir's 11th century Ulu Cami mosque. "It's getting better by the day."

In the southeast's largest city, mosques are welcoming more worshippers, non governmental organisations (NGOs) with a religious overtone are helping the poor and the number of unofficial prayer rooms is on the rise, say politicians and lawyers.

"In every poor neighbourhood, new radical Islamic associations are giving hot food, they have meetings at people's homes. They pay for students to go to school," said Firat Anli, mayor of a district of Diyarbakir and member of the main Kurdish party, the Democratic Society Party (DTP).

"I'm very worried ... I fear they'll become more powerful and could turn to violence like the (Turkish) Hezbollah," he said, referring to a defunct armed group, active in the 1990s.

A breathtaking apex of French dhimmitude. No wonder the French "youths" are growing bolder and more assertive: they see that the French have no will to resist whatsoever, and reward those who engage in criminal activity. "Peace Gesture: French Unveil Monument to Boys Who Fled Police," from Gateway Pundit, with thanks to LGF:

You run from police... You accidentally get electrocuted while hiding from police at an electrical substation... You get a monument built in your honor!

A monument is unveiled to honor Zyed Benna and Bouna Traore who died on Oct. 27, 2005 by accidental electrocution while fleeing a police identification check.

A silent march ended in a mostly immigrant Paris suburb on Friday where French officials unveiled a monument to two youths who died while fleeing from police:

Relatives and friends of two French teenagers who were electrocuted as they fled from police a year ago have gathered in Clichy-sous-Bois near Paris. A plaque was unveiled in front of their school, and a wreath-laying ceremony was held at the power sub-station where the teenagers tried to hide.

The deaths of Zyed Benna and Bouna Traore sparked three weeks of violent riots in France's poor suburbs as the young and unemployed vented their anger over what they saw as lack of opportunity and racial discrimination. The crowd gathered in silent prayer wearing t-shirts with the slogan "Dead for nothing".

They also laid wreaths at the electrical sub-station.

Read it all.

Tensions rising. From the Jerusalem Post, :

Egypt on Saturday deployed no less than 5,000 security personnel on the Gaza border, news agencies reported.

Officials in Cairo said the move came in response to reports that Israel planned to intensify action to weed out smuggling tunnels, including bombing them from the air.

Yes, the "women are like uncovered meat" Sheikh. By Richard Kerbaj in The Australian, with thanks to LGF:

TAJ Din al-Hilali has praised militant jihadists in Iraq and Afghanistan, calling them men of the highest order for fighting against coalition forces - which include Australian soldiers - to "liberate" their homelands.

In an interview on Arabic radio two weeks ago, the imam based at Sydney's Lakemba mosque said he was opposed to terror attacks in Madrid, London and New York but strongly endorsed fighters in the Palestinian territories, Iraq and Afghanistan.

In the interview, Sheik Hilali pays tribute to Sayyid Qutb, the ideologue of the Muslim Brotherhood and intellectual mentor of Osama bin Laden and al-Qa'ida.

"Jihad of the liberator of Palestine, that's the greatest and cleanest and highest ... jihad which lifts our heads in pride in south Lebanon," Sheik Hilali says in the October 17 interview.

He tells broadcaster Abrahim Zoabi that he endorses jihad for liberation. "We are talking about ... jihad of liberating our land, jihad of Muslim Afghanis in their land - that's jihad.

"Jihad of Iraqi Muslims is jihad, but not when Sunnis and Shias are killing each other - that's not jihad."...

Walk back the cat.

Walk the cat all the way back to the real problem, which is not the nauseating speech given by Rice, wildly inaccurate and wrong in its every phrase, wrong in its diseased sympathy, wrong in its implied geopolitical calculation.

Whoever crafted this speech with and for her (was Philip Zelikow now coming into his own?) and whoever has been bending the ear of this dutiful student of Kremlinology (who is not particularly adept either at Russian history or Russian language -- her one attempt to use it in public, while in Russia, led to all kinds of mockery, and she won't be repeating that kind of thing) is ignorant about virtually everything that is important to know about this present crisis. But as far as George Bush is concerned, she is a towering intellect. One understands why he may think that.

The good news is, this has not been well received. The bad news is, he's Deputy Prime Minister. "Prescott heaps praise on 'tolerant' Malaysia, despite its crumbling human rights," by Ben Leapman and Jonathan Wynne-Jones for the Telegraph:

He has been lampooned as a lost soul, bumbling around the Far East with his retinue of aides in search of a purpose. John Prescott, the Deputy Prime Minister, today concludes a week-long tour that has taken in Japan, South Korea and China.

Up to now he has kept a low profile. Apart from a speech in Seoul and a school visit in China, he has avoided public engagements and media appearances in favour of private meetings with his foreign counterparts.

But on his final stopover, in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia's capital, Mr Prescott broke cover by penning a 1,000-word article for the city's Star newspaper in which he reveals he wants to learn lessons for Britain about how different faiths live in harmony there. Malaysia is 60 per cent Muslim with sizeable Buddhist, Christian and Hindu minorities. On the surface, the groups live together peacefully. But underneath lies simmering resentment which has led human rights groups to observe that Malaysia treats its minorities unfairly. Christian campaigners in Britain have called his mission wrong-headed.

In his article, published yesterday, he speaks warmly of Islam, adding: "Islam enriches British society in many ways."

Somewhat bafflingly for his readers, Mr Prescott even digresses into the arcane topic of British motorcycle safety legislation, pointing out that our law allows Sikh bikers to wear turbans instead of helmets. Critics say it is that kind of tolerance that Malaysia lacks. Since the 1970s, the country has operated a "positive discrimination" policy, which gives priority to ethnic-Malay Muslims in applying for civil service jobs or university places.

The Sharia court system, which operates alongside civil courts, should not affect non-Muslims; but it has caused problems for Lina Joy, a Muslim who converted to Christianity. She has spent five years battling for permission to marry her Christian fiancé. And Malik Imtiaz Sarwar, a human rights lawyer, was this year ordered by the government to disband his organisation promoting religious freedom.

Baroness Cox, a human rights campaigner, called Mr Prescott's praise for Malaysian tolerance "gratuitously misleading". She said: "There is a great deal of religious discrimination. Christians there are finding that human rights and religious rights are crumbling away."

There should be nothing surprising about this. It is in line with Muhammad's words: "If a husband calls his wife to his bed (i.e. to have sexual relation) and she refuses and causes him to sleep in anger, the angels will curse her till morning" (Bukhari 4:54:460)

"Women can't refuse," from the Sydney Morning Herald, with thanks to the Constantinopolitan Irredentist:

AN Islamic group praised by the Howard Government as preaching moderation has advised its followers that a woman cannot refuse to have sex with her husband.

The advice was posted on the website of the Darulfatwa organisation, in response to questions posed by readers.

One asked: "Is it haram [forbidden] for a lady to say no if her male partner wants to make love with her?"

The Islamic scholars replied: "In this case she should not refrain from such a legitimate right of marriage, but she could Islamically request for a place of living from her husband."

Darulfatwa spokesman Mohammad Mehio said Islamic teaching was that a wife could not refuse sex unless she had a good excuse such as being ill, tired or depressed.

Note that this was altered after it came to the attention of the media:

After The Sun-Herald questioned Mr Mehio about the answers on the website, he said they posted a "clarification".

The answer to the sex-in-marriage question was changed to: "In this case she has the right to refuse."

But when the media turns away again, will this caveat remain? That's doubtful. After all, Muhammad did not specify such an exception.

In "Palestinian 'humiliation'?" in the Washington Times (thanks to Doc Washburn), Joel Mowbray speaks truth to power about Condoleeza Rice's appalling myopia and inability or refusal to confront the reality of the jihad ideology:

In a keynote speech earlier this month to the American Task Force on Palestine, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice sounded very unlike President Bush on the Middle East, lavishing praise on Palestinians and implicitly attacking Israel.

While the words she chose have invited criticism, much more concerning is that the top U.S. diplomat has the same fundamental misunderstanding of the Middle East that most do, namely that Palestinians are ready to coexist peacefully next to a Jewish state. This conventional diplomatic wisdom, however, ignores the history of the region since the Oslo accords in 1993: The once largely secular Palestinian society has become increasingly Islamic-and deeply radicalized.

Comparing the Palestinian cause to her own civil rights struggle growing up in "segregated Birmingham, Alabama," Miss Rice reminded the activist audience that if she could overcome such tremendous odds to become Secretary of State, Palestinians could achieve their dream of statehood. She based this belief on "the commitment of the Palestinian people to a better future."

Where does Mr. Bush's most loyal and trusted aide find evidence of this "commitment?" She offered none in her speech. Even if she had wanted to, though, such proof is in short supply. Poll after poll has indicated majority Palestinian support for suicide bombings. Even the term used for bombers, "shahids," is one of glorification, the equivalent of calling someone a saint. And whereas children across the world have posters in their room of sports stars or famous artists, Palestinian youths decorate their living space with posters celebrating "shahids."

In view of the radicalization of Palestinian society, the election this year of Hamas seems far less a vote against corruption-as the State Department explained it-and far more a statement of principle. Yet Miss Rice not only defended the election of Hamas but characterized it as an opportunity since "the Palestinian people and the international community can hold Hamas accountable. And Hamas now faces a hard choice that it has always sought to avoid: Either you are a peaceful political party, or a violent terrorist group -- but you cannot be both."

But what about the very real possibility, or even likelihood, that the Palestinian people elected Hamas precisely because it's a "violent terrorist group?" One thing Palestinians are not is stupid. Is it even possible that Palestinians didn't understand that they were electing a "violent terrorist group" with the stated goal of eliminating the Jewish state?

Read it all.

Morocco's relatively reformist leadership is, by virtue of its reformist tendencies, not sufficiently Islamic. And so it must be fought. From Reuters, with thanks to DFS:

RABAT: Moroccan authorities are holding 14 people suspected of belonging to a regional radical Islamist group linked to Al Qaeda, government officials said yesterday.

The 14 suspects had planned to carry out an unspecified "terrorist plot" on Morocco, with the help of Al Qaeda-linked foreign fighters who would travel from the Sahel-Sahara region, they said.

Morocco, a staunch US ally in the global fight on terror, has been on alert since 2003 when suicide bombings killed 45 people in Casablanca, the country’s commercial capital.

It has arrested more than 3,000 people since then and broken up more than 50 radical Islamist cells.

But it is the first time that the authorities have announced the arrest of people with suspected links to foreign cells.

"The 14 persons are suspected of being linked to a global terrorist movement which has connections with small groups operating in the Sahel-Sahara region and links with members of a group based on the Algeria-Mali border," an official statement said.

The statement did not name the groups but government officials said the small groups were Islamist cells linked to the main Algerian Islamic rebel Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat (GSPC) faction.

Anti-terrorism police officials in North Africa and Europe have voiced concerns that the GSPC might turn itself into a magnet for radical Islamists in the region, providing them with weapons and military training in lawless areas of the Sahara desert.

The GSPC said in September it had joined Al Qaeda, whose leader Ayman al-Zawhiri urged the Algerian rebel group to become a "bone in the throat of the American and French crusaders".

In a statement regarding the Minneapolis Shari’a taxicab dispute that recently came to Charles Johnson of Little Green Footballs from the Muslim Brotherhood, "Dr. Habib described the cabbies’ position as 'absurd' and added 'Muslims must respect and comply with the laws and regulations of the countries they live in and be a good example for their fellow citizens.'"

This is akin to the about-face of the imam Hilali in Australia who, having been secretly taped at his mosque making his now-famous remarks about women dressed in non-Muslim fashion as "meat" who deserved whatever they got from inflamed Muslim men (apparently likened, in the somewhat clumsy metaphor, to the beasts that are attracted to that "meat"), and after indignation had been expressed too loudly and consistently to be ignored, pretended he had meant no such thing and apologized for any malentendu. He did the same thing a few years ago after praising the 9.11 attacks as “God’s work.”

Anti-dhimmitude in Italy. "Veils gag falls flat: An imam's 'death threat' to an Italian MP has not stopped her speaking out on Islam and feminism," by John Hooper in The Guardian, with thanks to Mackie:

Britain and Australia are not the only countries where debate is raging over the Islamic veil. In Italy, the issue burst into the news this week after the interior ministry ordered round-the-clock police protection for an MP, believing she had been threatened for expressing her views on the subject.

Daniela Santanche, an MP for the formerly neo-fascist National Alliance, clashed in a TV chat show with the imam of a mosque near Milan. After Ms Santanche insisted that the Qur'an did not call for women to wear a veil, the other guest, Ali Abu Shwaima, angrily replied: "I am an imam and I will not permit those who are ignorant to speak of Islam. You are ignorant of Islam and do not have the right to interpret the Qur'an."

Ali Abu Shwaima's charge is interesting. In the U.S. those who speak about the roots of the jihad ideology in the Qur'an and Sunnah are routinely called "ignorant" by Islamic apologists. Yet here Santanche is asserting that a more moderate view on veiling is supported by the Qur'an, and she is called "ignorant" by a hardline Muslim. So in the U.S. we are ignorant if we say Islam is radical, and in Italy we are ignorant if we say Islam is moderate. This is perhaps a measure of the relative strength and assertiveness of the Muslim communities in these two countries.

The ministry said it had been advised that the words used by the imam might amount to a coded death sentence - which the imam has vigorously denied.

At all events, his admonition has done nothing to silence Ms Santanche. A few days later she returned to the attack, comparing the veil to the yellow Star of David the Jews were forced to wear by the Nazis.

Her words have so far had two results. The first has been a debate among Muslims themselves. One imam has gone so far as to argue that the niqab, which leaves only the eyes visible, is obligatory for Muslim women. Not so, said the president of the Muslim Assembly of Italy, Abdul Hadi Massimo Palazzi: "The veil is a tradition that spread at a late stage among Muslims".

The other has been discussion of the position to be taken by non-Muslim Italian women. "Muslim males want to show that their women are submissive. They want to assert their macho, autocratic culture," Ms Santanche said this week. "I'm not worried by the threats. What worries me is the deafening silence of feminists."

Aishah Azmi, I think

Aishah Azmi Update from the TimesOnline, with thanks to Dragon:

THE Muslim teacher who insisted on wearing a veil in class has been following a fatwa issued personally to her by a Islamic cleric belonging to a hardline sect.

Aishah Azmi found herself in the middle of a national row about integration when she took her school to an employment tribunal after it suspended her for refusing to remove the veil in class.

Tony Blair joined the debate about the wearing of veils — opened by Jack Straw, the Commons leader — and supported the school’s actions.

Azmi, 24, has maintained that her decision to wear the veil was driven entirely by her personal beliefs, rather than the advice or instruction of a third party. But this weekend it emerged that she refused to take the veil off at school after receiving a fatwa, or religious ruling, from Mufti Yusuf Sacha, a Muslim cleric in West Yorkshire.

Her legal team revealed that the advice Sacha issued to Azmi ruled that it was obligatory for women to wear the niqab (face-veil) in the presence of men who were not their blood relatives.

Sacha is one of several hundred Islamic clerics in Britain with the status of mufti, entitling him to issue fatwas based on Islamic law. Although Muslims are expected to follow fatwas, they are not obliged to do so, particularly if they live in a non-Muslim state....

Whittingham said that Azmi, who had been wearing the niqab since the age of 15, asked Sacha whether women had a choice whether or not to wear the niqab. She was told it was obligatory, Whittingham said.

Azmi, who was employed as a bilingual support worker helping British Pakistani children learn English, was told to remove the veil because pupils found it difficult to understand her as they could not see her lips move....

During Azmi’s employment tribunal, Sacha was asked to give a written statement. He set out his reasons for insisting that the niqab was obligatory for women.

Whittingham said: “I know she went to Sacha for advice before starting the job. And at the tribunal Sacha also set out the religious position, which was accepted by both sides. It said that she is required to wear it in the presence of men who are not her blood relatives, or whom she can potentially marry.”

The tribunal ruled that Kirklees council — which runs the school — was within its rights to suspend her from work. But Azmi was awarded £1,100 on the grounds of victimisation....

Sacha follows the teachings of the Tablighi Jamaat, a hardline Muslim group, elements of which are suspected by western intelligence agencies of having links with terrorism. The majority of Tablighis are, however, regarded as moderate.

A colleague of Sacha, who did not want to be named, said that the cleric teaches at the Tablighi mosque in Dewsbury, which has become the organisation’s European headquarters.

Mohammad Sidique Khan and Shehzad Tanweer, two of the London bombers, are said to have been regular worshippers there.

Sacha’s ruling on the veil is disputed. Mufti Abdul Kadir Barkatullah, who is affiliated to the Muslim Council of Britain, said: “I am 100% sure that wearing the niqab is not obligatory on Muslim women — it is a matter of choice. It’s more about habit than religion. The Tablighis observe the niqab very strictly.”

Good grief! I mean -- Allahu akbar! Charlie Brown and Linus become mujahedin! Over at the Jawa Report (thanks to Steve).

Oddly enough, this AP story actually mentions "Muslims." Perhaps the censor had gone to retrieve his liverwurst sandwich, and this one slipped through. "Rioting youths burn hundreds of cars in France: Authorities upbeat despite violence marking anniversary of ’05 unrest," from AP, with thanks to Andrea:

CLICHY-SOUS-BOIS, France - Marauding youths torched hundreds of vehicles overnight and on Saturday in renewed violence coinciding with the first anniversary of riots that exposed a deep schism between poor North African immigrants and mainstream France.

A group of teenagers set one bus on fire Saturday in the southern French port city of Marseille, seriously wounding a passenger. Three others suffered from smoke inhalation, police said. Two other public buses and 277 vehicles around the country were burned overnight, police said.

Six police were injured and 47 people were arrested, ministry officials said. Still the Interior Ministry described the night as “relative calm,” noting that up to 100 cars are torched by youths in troubled neighborhoods on an average night.

Police had braced for a bigger replay of violence in the poor suburbs predominantly made up of Muslims from former French colonies in Africa. Friday marked the one-year anniversary of the deaths of two teens that ignited three weeks of riots in 2005.

The rioting was fueled by anger at France’s failure to offer equal opportunities to many minorities — especially Arabs and blacks — and France’s 5 million-strong Muslim population.

France’s trouble integrating minorities and the suburban unrest are becoming hot political issues in the campaign for next year’s presidential and parliamentary elections. The government passed an equal opportunities law this spring and has poured funds into “sensitive” areas, but disenchantment is still pervasive....

Hmm. You mean they've given the rioters money and favorable treatment, and that still hasn't solved the problem? Do you think maybe it springs from the ideology of Islamic supremacism, and not from poverty at all?

“Four guys attacked Bus 346,” said witness Thierry Ange, 19. “They made everyone get off, then they hit a woman and dragged out the bus driver by his tie,” then torched the bus with a gasoline bomb in a bottle, he said.

The blackened remains of another bus burned earlier stood across town. Two armed men had forced passengers off the bus, police said.

Youths also tried to burn a bus in Reims in eastern France, and attackers hurled metal balls at an empty bus in Trappes, west of Paris, the Interior Ministry said.

Scores of police, wielding shields and backed by a helicopter shining its searchlight, swept into a tough housing project in Montfermeil, a town near Clichy-sous-Bois, and several youths responded by throwing stones.

Paris’ transport authority responded to the violence by curtailing bus services in the Seine-Saint-Denis region north of the capital, which is home to thousands of immigrants and their French-born children.

And thus Paris slides toward Third World conditions.

To deny this story about their role in the Minneapolis Sharia Cab Controversy. Charles Johnson's comments are apposite: "It’s the standard denial. This comes from the political and public relations wing of the global jihad. No need for them to threaten. When someone in their network goes too far, they’ll back down and pretend they had nothing to do with it. They’re in this for the long haul."

A portion of the letter, via LGF:

The Muslim Brotherhood (MB) denied completely any involvement in the current dispute caused by a group of Somali Muslim cab drivers at the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport, U.S.A, who are refusing to pick up drunk passengers or those carrying alcoholic beverages claiming that Islam prohibits them from driving passengers with Alcohol. Dr. Mohamed Habib, the first Deputy Chairman of the Muslim Brotherhood, affirmed that Muslim Brotherhood has nothing to do whatsoever with what these Muslim cab drivers believe or view mistakenly as religious decree. Dr. Habib described the cabbies’ position as “absurd” and added “Muslims must respect and comply with the laws and regulations of the countries they live in and be a good example for their fellow citizens”

The question naturally presents itself: is that an unshakeable principle, or a temporary expedient?

It is unopposed not only for the clueless indifference scored in this article. It is unopposed because the vaunted overwhelming majority of moderate Muslims has as yet framed no response to the theological presentations of the jihadists. Only the willfully self-deceived and irredeemably credulous believe that this immense work has already been done.

And Rita Katz is right. It can't be done only by the Bush Administration, and not only because they show no signs of understanding the jihad ideology. It has to be done by those who have moral and intellectual credibility among Muslims -- and yes, this is another virtually insurmountable hurdle, since reformers immediately open themselves to charges from jihadists that they are disloyal Muslims for questioning the literal words of the Qur'an and Muhammad.

"U.S. seen balking at challenge by Islamist Web," by David Morgan for Reuters, with thanks to the Constantinopolitan Irredentist:

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The Bush administration is failing to counter Islamist online propaganda that could propel militancy into the next generation, experts say.

From the Middle East, Asia and Europe, Islamists have built an expansive Internet library of sophisticated texts on the ideology that underpins violence against the West and other enemies, analysts and intelligence officials said.

"It's a steady, stealthy indoctrination aimed at creating a whole new generation of jihadists. And scandalously, it is unopposed," said Stephen Ulph, who studies the Islamist Web for the Jamestown Foundation, a Washington think tank.

E-books and online pamphlets, with titles such as "39 Ways to Serve and Participate in Jihad," encourage the growth of home-grown militant cells across the world, including in such Western countries as Canada and Britain, the experts believe.

U.S. intelligence is reluctant to mount an effective counteroffensive by recruiting Islamic experts from overseas to rebut and even ridicule Islamist authors, according to experts and U.S. officials.

"Anything exposing the West as a supporter would destroy Islamic opposition to the jihadis," one intelligence official on condition of anonymity. "We are completely out of luck with the Muslim world, across the board."

Several agencies including the CIA, FBI and the office of U.S. National Intelligence Director John Negroponte are part of a closely guarded effort to monitor the content of Islamist Web sites.

But the program is hampered by stringent security standards that make it hard for intelligence agencies to employ Islamist experts from the Arab world.

"Even if we think we understand elements of the religion, we certainly don't understand elements of their cultural communications," the intelligence official said.

POP JIHAD PROPAGANDA

Others warned that U.S. policy-makers could be making a fatal error by ignoring doctrinal online texts that lay bare the substance of a violent Islamist mind-set.

"In order to be able to fight something, you have first of all to understand what is going on. And I don't think that at this stage they understand it well enough to fight it," said Rita Katz, director of the SITE Institute, which tracks and analyzes international terrorism.

In a presentation this week, Ulph said doctrinal material accounts for 60 percent of Islamist Web content and most texts are in Arabic. But many have begun to reappear in English and other European languages in an apparent appeal to Muslims living in the West.

One of the most popular is the 1,600-page treatise, "Call to Global Islamic Resistance," a comprehensive guide to militant life by al Qaeda ideologue Mustafa Setmariam Nasar, also known as Abu Musab al-Suri, who was captured in Pakistan a year ago.

The Islamist Web became a center for al Qaeda operational planning, training and fund-raising after the fall of the Taliban regime in
Afghanistan.

Thousands of Islamist Web sites have since sprouted, many appealing to disenfranchised Muslim youth with so-called Pop Jihad propaganda that can include films of beheadings and spectacular attacks on U.S. troops in
Iraq.

But Ulph and others, including former intelligence officials, say the future of Islamist militancy depends on the more sophisticated doctrinal material, capable of guiding the life of the committed militant from childhood to martyrdom.

"The focus has been on how these guys use the Internet for fund-raising and operations," said Jarret Brachman of the Combating Terrorism Center at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, New York. "Only recently have we realized there are strategic implications."

Only recently, eh, Brachman? Well, some of us have been trying to tell you for quite some time.

All four were studying at al-Iman University in Sanaa, Yemen, a university once suspended by the Supreme Yemeni Council for Universities for overlooking students' academic qualifications (or lack thereof) as long as they could recite 5 excerpts from the Qur'an (no word on which ones).

The Danish suspect is said to be a convert to Islam -- another convert, another alleged "misunderstander" of his new religion. "3 Australians, Dane Held in Yemen Over Arms Smuggling," from AP:

SANAA, 28 October 2006 -- Three Australians and a Dane have been arrested for allegedly trying to smuggle weapons to Somalia, a security official said late Thursday.

All four have been studying at the Islamist Iman University, which is run by Sheik Abdul-Majid Al-Zindani. The United States lists Al-Zindani as an Al-Qaeda supporter.

[...]

However, a Danish Foreign Ministry official confirmed the arrest of the Dane but refused to identify him. "All I can say is that a Danish national has been arrested according to our information," said Uffe Wolffheckel of the Foreign Ministry’s Consular Service.

Danish media said the suspect is a 23-year-old male who converted to Islam and moved to Yemen two months ago with his wife and child.

[...]

Yemen is believed to be a frequent route for smuggling arms to Somali factions.

And this has been known for 20 years.

Here is a story about the "uncovered meat" remarks. And here is the same Sheikh saying that 9/11 was God's work.

"Muslim cleric linked with terror groups," by Jim Dickens and Glenn Milne for The Sunday Telegraph, with thanks to LGF:

ASIO warned authorities 20 years ago that Sheik Taj al-Din Al-hilaly could inflame communal violence in Australia.

Court judgments show ASIO initially believed the controversial mufti posed a risk to the community because of his alleged propensity to cause or promote violence.

Shortly after his arrival in Australia as the new imam of Lakemba Mosque in 1982, Sheik Hilaly was also linked with a shadowy terrorist group, Soldiers of God, which is thought to have been involved in the assassination of Egyptian president Anwar Sadat in 1981.

A group of the same name, also known as Ansar al Islam, is among those listed by the Federal Government as a banned terrorist organisation.

Western governments believe Ansar al Islam has close ideological and operational links with al-Qaeda.

Sheik Hilaly was also alleged to have endorsed suicide bombing, verbally attacked women and preached a highly political message of extremism.

The Sunday Telegraph columnist Piers Akerman writes today that a former intelligence officer said Sheik Hilaly's name first surfaced in a report by one of Australia's most senior intelligence assets in Cairo. The claimed the sheik spent a number of years training in Libya and was sent to Australia to train extremists.

Akerman writes the report was shelved and the agent who sent it believes that a campaign was waged against its contents.

Not surprising, given the campaigns that are waged against those who tell the truth about such matters today.

Cox and Forkum nail the Minnesota Sharia Cab Controversy.

And don't miss the nifty "9:29" license plate.

"The lives of women" -- as well as those of non-Muslims "in Iraqi society have worsened dramatically since the US-led invasion of March 2003, amid a general break down in law and order and the rise of conservative Islamist militias."

"Women's rights champion murdered," from AFP, with thanks to Morgaan Sinclair and PRCS:

GUNMEN broke into the house of an Iraqi women's rights campaigner and shot her dead in front of her three children.

Human rights activists say the lives of women in Iraqi society have worsened dramatically since the US-led invasion of March 2003, amid a general break down in law and order and the rise of conservative Islamist militias.

Captain Imad Khudhir of the Kirkuk police said 38-year-old Halima Ahmed Hussein al-Juburi was killed late yesterday by 10 unidentified attackers who broke into her home in the northern town of Hawijah.

``We do not know the motive behind the crime,'' he said.

Oh really?

...Professional women and rights campaigners are often targeted by conservative Islamist groups who adhere to a strictly traditional view of women's role in society and use violence to drive women out of public life.

Canada's "fanatic adherence to Christianity"? Are they talking about the Canada that's just north of the United States, or is there some other Canada I don't know about? "Al-Qaeda warns Canada: Quit Afghan mission or endure attack like 9/11, threat says," by Stewart Bell in the National Post, with thanks to LGF:

OTTAWA - An al-Qaeda strategist has warned Canada to withdraw its troops from Afghanistan or face terrorist attacks similar to 9/11, Madrid and the London transit bombings.

The threat, attributed to a member of the al-Qaeda information and strategy committee, condemns Prime Minister Stephen Harper for refusing to pull out of Afghanistan.

It also refers to Canada's "fanatic adherence to Christianity" as well as its purported attempts to "damage the Muslims" and its support for the "Christian Crusade" against al-Qaeda.

"Despite the strong, increasing opposition to spread its forces in the fire of South Afghanistan, it seems that they will not learn the lesson easily," Hossam Abdul Raouf writes.

"They will either be forced to withdraw their forces or face an operation similar to New York, Madrid, London and their sisters, with the help of Allah."

Three years ago today, in a climate-controlled vault sealed with three feet of concrete, located somewhere in the vicinity of the Jefferson Memorial and the Golden Gate Bridge and accessible only by helicopter and bungee rope, I began Jihad Watch. I hoped to raise general awareness of the nature of the jihad ideology, the activities of jihadists around the world, and the ways in which both of these were being obscured by academic apologists and the mainstream media.

It has been a tumultuous three years. The site has grown considerably, such that we now average over 30,000 unique visitors daily, and about 600,000 to a million hits each day. ("Hits," as far as I understand it, refers to files viewed. If you look at the front page, it's a hit. If you open an article, it's a hit. If you go back to the front page and open up another article, that's two more hits. Hits also multiply if picture files are involved. There are about 20 to 30, or more, hits per person. Some have charged that by noting that we receive about 30 million hits per month, we are claiming 30 million different visitors. That is not in fact the case.)

Largely, I believe, because this site has captured attention, I have spoken about the jihad ideology on the BBC, the VOA, numerous other radio and television outlets, and to audiences all over this country, as well as in Europe and Israel. I've spoken at a workshop sponsored by the U.S. State Department and the German Foreign Ministry, given presentations to U.S. Central Command and to a Joint Terrorism Task Force group, and also addressed influential fora that I am not at liberty to name. I've given information on jihadist activity to media outlets on which (or in which, as the case may be) I've never appeared personally, including ABC News, the Washington Post, and the O'Reilly Factor. And I've written two books that made the New York Times Bestseller List. All this is personally gratifying, but it is all much more important as an indication that, increasingly, word is getting out. The truth is getting out.

Much of this I attribute to this site. Hugh Fitzgerald and I, with immense help from Marisol Seibold and others over the last three years, have endeavored to present the facts, no matter how politically incorrect and uncomfortable those facts may be. Although there is the expected drumbeat of calumnies and falsehoods about what we stand for and what we are doing, we have also seen that many people of good will have come to respect this site as a trustworthy and reliable source of information and commentary. We offer rational analysis, while those who tell others to slit the throats of their children lecture us about spreading "hate."

Of course, the fog of misinformation and propaganda still blankets the West and largely strangles public discourse about the nature of the jihad threat and what can be done about it. And for that reason, Year Four of The Jihad Watch Era hereby begins.

From the announcement of this Contest by the "Islamic Human Rights Commission":

What is Islamophobia? A contemporary and emerging form of prejudice Islamophobia can be described as stereotypes, bias or acts of hostility towards individual Muslims or followers of Islam in general. In addition to individual acts of intolerance and racial profiling, Islamophobia leads to viewing Muslims as a greater security threat on an institutional, systemic and societal level and perceiving their views to be intrinsically problematic, violent or unethical.

And the Awards:

Islamophobia Awards: The Islamophobia Awards is an annual event to acknowledge - through satire, revue and comedy - the worst Islamophobes of that year. Centred around a gala dinner, the 'awards' themsleves are both entertaining and raise awarness of a serious and growing prejudice. Real awards are given to those who have battled against Islamophobia - often against enormous odds.

Note the last sentence in the definition of "Islamophobia":

Islamophobia leads to viewing Muslims as a greater security threat on an institutional, systemic and societal level and perceiving their views to be intrinsically problematic, violent or unethical.

A security threat "greater" than what? Greater than that posed to non-Muslims, by other non-Muslims, in non-Muslims societies? But surely we don't need to know much of anything to know that that is true. After familiarizing yourself with Qur'an, Hadith, and the biography of Muhammad, do you perceive that those who claim to believe that the Qur'an is the uncreated and immutable word of God, and who take Muhammad to be the Perfect Man, uswa hasana, al-insan al-kamil, to hold views that might be described by you as "intrinsically problematic, violent, or unethical"?

An indication that, unfortunately, Sheikh al-Hilali's views are not all that uncommon. "Briton backs imam in 'uncovered meat' row," by Bernard Lagan in the TimesOnline, :

ONE of Britain’s most senior Muslims has defended as “a great scholar” the Australian imam who likened scantily clad women to uncovered meat that draws predators.

Abduljalil Sajid, a senior figure in the Muslim Council of Britain, offered support for Sheikh Taj Din al-Hilali’s views, saying that “loose women like prostitutes” encouraged men to be immoral. Dr Sajid, visiting Australia, said that Sheikh al-Hilali was attacking immodesty and loose dress, or “standing in the streets, inviting men to do these bad acts”.

Although the Australian cleric did not use the word prostitute, but appeared to be attacking women wearing revealing clothes, Dr Sajid said that the sermon had been taken out of context. Referring to the thrust of the Sheikh’s argument, he said: “So what is wrong in it? Who will object to that?” Dr Sajid, who is on a speaking tour, met the controversial Sheikh at his Sydney mosque yesterday.

Sheikh al-Hilali bowed yesterday to pressure and agreed not to preach for three months. But he defied those pressing for him to quit as the leading Muslim cleric in Australia.

After meeting him yesterday, Dr Sajid said: “As far as I am concerned he is a great scholar and he has a great knowledge of Islamic jurisprudence.” Dr Sajid added that he believed that the inflammatory excerpts from a speech, given last month, had been quoted out of context. “I respect his views. His intentions are noble in order to make morality and modesty part of our overall society,” the British cleric said.

Here is a story about the French Intifada that does not shy away from identifying the rioters as Muslims, or noting the jihadist element of the riots: "Ongoing 'intifada' in France has injured 2,500 police in 2006," from the World Tribune.com:

This might have dropped below the radar, but Al Qaida and its allies are literally battling the Crusaders every day in Europe. And so far, Europe isn't doing so well.

"We are in a state of civil war, orchestrated by radical Islamists," said Michel Thoomis, secretary general of the Action Police trade union. "This is not a question of urban violence any more. It is an intifada, with stones and firebombs."

The French Interior Ministry has acknowledged the Muslim uprising. The ministry said more than 2,500 police officers have been injured in 2006. This amounts to at least 14 officers each day.

The battles have been under-reported but alarming to French authorities. Muslim street commanders, who run lucrative drug networks, have organized youngsters in housing projects to ambush police and confront security forces. The response time allows hundreds of Muslims to storm police cars and patrols within minutes.

"You no longer see two or three youths confronting police," Thoomis said. "You see whole tower blocks emptying into the streets to set their comrades free when they are arrested."

France's huge Muslim minority community has come under the influence of agents often influenced and financed by Al Qaida. These agents have recruited Muslim youngsters for urban warfare in which police and government representatives are injured daily.

Not surprisingly, Muslim neighborhoods are becoming autonomous zones, with police and government workers too scared to enter. The police union is demanding the Interior Ministry supply officers with armored cars.

Inner Spiritual Strugglers thwarted in central Sinai. From Reuters:

ISMAILIA, (Reuters) - Egyptian police have recovered nearly one tonne of high explosives hidden in a mountainous area of central Sinai, security sources said on Friday.

The explosives were buried in 13 plastic bags and were discovered by bedouin trackers working for the government, according to the sources, who did not specify the type of explosive.

The area where the discovery was made has been the site of previous shootouts between police and suspects wanted for bombings in Sinai over the past two years.

More than 100 people were killed in bomb attacks in tourist resorts throughout Sinai since October 2004. Egypt has blamed the attacks on an Islamist militant group called al-Tawhid wal Jihad (One God and Jihad).

While looking around in the fever swamps of Dean Esmay's site in order to write this post, I discovered here that I have been nominated for "Islamophobe of the Year" by the Islamic Human Rights Commission of the UK.

"Islamophobia" is, in reality, a politically motivated construct designed to deflect attention away from the depredations of jihad terrorists. No one, of course, would have any "phobia" toward Muslims at all were it not for the acts of violence committed daily by Muslims and justified by those who commit them by reference to Islamic teachings. You will note that there is no worldwide "Buddhismophobia" or "Confucianismophobia." Now why is that?

Anyway, I'm in very good company among the international nominees (I'm in the U.S. category). Here are a few of them, along with the taglines from the Islamic Human Rights Commission:

Ehud Olmert For his massacre of the Palestinian and Lebanese people.

King Abdullah of Jordan For his submission to the Israelis and abandoning the Palestinians and Lebanese.

King Mohammed VI of Morocco For his 'so called reforms' aimed at removing Islam from the the Moroccan people.

Meles Zenawi (Ethiopia's Prime Minister) For saying that the war on terror is "something of a godsend" and that Ethiopia is at the "epicenter of terrorism" and "a secular island in the sea of Islam."

Daniel Pipes For his anti-Arab, anti-Islam articles and his campaigns and discrimination against Muslims.

George W Bush For the promoting the phrase 'Islamofascist'

Robert Spencer The author of anti-Islamic books such as ‘The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam’, as well as ‘Islam Unveiled: Disturbing Questions About the World's Fastest Growing Faith’. Islam is often vented in hateful websites such as Jihad Watch and Dhimmi Watch.

John Howard For stating that Muslims migrating to Australia are bringing problems such as jihadist views and conservative attitudes to women not encountered with other immigrant groups.

Ayan Hirsi For trading on a false reputation that she was a victim of Muslim abuse.

Jose Maria Aznar (Former Spanish PM) For his speech on 22 September 2006 at the Hudson Institute in Washington.

Jack Straw For stoking the flames of Islamophobia with his ‘request’ that Muslim women should remove their veils before he graces them with his presence.

John Reid For whipping up anti-Muslim sentiment and continuing his witch hunt against the Muslims.

Melanie Phillips For (amongst others) suggesting that Iran might attack Jerusalem on 22nd August to commemorate Meraj and for writing her book 'Londonistan'.

Tony Blair For everything.

I suspect that George Bush will sweep my category, so I won't be preparing my "I'd like to thank the Academy...You like me! You really like me!" speech, but I am honored to be nominated, as perhaps it suggests that my efforts against global jihad supremacism are making a difference.

Last Saturday I received an email from Aziz H. Poonawalla, a blogger at Dean Esmay's site, with the subject line "an olive branch." Mr. Poonawalla was alerting me to a post he had written at Esmay's site entitled "the jihadwatch," which he was characterizing as that olive branch.

When I received the email I was at the Objectivist Conference in Boston, where I spoke along with Daniel Pipes, Flemming Rose (the Danish newspaper editor who published the Muhammad cartoons last year), Professor John Lewis, and others. Then I took off for Norfolk, Virginia, where I gave a half-day introduction to Islamic jihad theology to the Tidewater Joint Terrorism Task Force. After that I went to Dallas, where I spoke to a Lumen Institute group Wednesday night. Only now am I getting a chance to respond -- which I am doing at this late date for two reasons: because I have had many other exchanges with Esmay (see here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here) and I believe it would be churlish not to respond to what is being characterized as an olive branch, and because it is certain that many people of good will believe the things that Esmay and Mr. Poonawalla apparently believe, and they may find this response helpful.

The funny thing about being a muslim in America is how you often feel like you're sidelined from the debate.

Mr. Poonawalla has no reason to feel sidelined as far as I am concerned. In fact, as I posted here last June, he and I had been enjoying a cordial and mutually respectful email exchange when I asked him politely to explain why he had apparently intended to mislead Dean Esmay's readers into thinking that my Arabic rendering of my own name was erroneous when it wasn't, taking advantage of their ignorance of Arabic to portray me as an ignorant buffoon. Then Mr. Poonawalla grew silent. Esmay, meanwhile, has gleefully referred to me as "Roobart Sbunsar" quite often since then, and apparently Mr. Poonawalla has never taken him aside and explained to him about p's and vowels in Arabic. Sidelined? Only by his own choosing. I would have been happy to continue our exchange, and to post his explanation of the transliteration deception, if he had cared to offer one.

In any case, in his "olive branch" Mr. Poonawalla goes on to praise Dean Esmay (whom he praises for his "jihad," while I am on a "crusade" -- loaded and significant word choices in Mr. Poonawalla's circles), and then comes to this:

Robert Spencer is on a crusade of a similarly noble intent. That is, to identify the rhetoric of the extremists within Islam and put it on naked display. In so doing he provides a benchmark against which other behavior and rhetoric can be compared. The purpose of this is to stand guard against the rise of such similar rhetoric here at home and thus prevent the ideology of bin Laden from gaining a toehold.

However the problem with both of these causes [that is, Esmay's and mine] is that they don't recognize or honor the other.

This reminds me of when Ibrahim Hooper called me a "hatemonger" on MSNBC, and Keith Olbermann told both of us, "Don't call each other hatemongers." Well, I hadn't actually called Hooper a hatemonger. Nor had I ever said one word about Dean Esmay, or even heard of him, very long before he started calling me a liar, an ignoramus, a traitor -- and since then, in carpet-chewing, eye-socket-popping rage, a man without conscience, destined to die unloved and unmourned, and to fry in hell. Among other things.

Now I am told that we don't "honor" each other, and that we should. Search for "Robert Spencer" and "Roobart Sbunsar" at Dean Esmay's site and you will find a rather steady torrent of abuse and assaults on my honesty, my intelligence, my integrity, my patriotism, my good will, and more. In his relentless attacks Esmay has never accorded me even a modicum of simple human courtesy or good will, as he did to Michelle Malkin and Rusty Shackleford when he attacked them (on false pretenses, I should add), and he has transgressed his own self-righteous exhortation never to assume that one knows the motives of one's opponents. Should Dean Esmay and I "honor" one another? That is not up to me.

Because Robert makes no effort to say to his audience of muslims, "they are more alike us than they are different. In fact, they ARE us", his site fills with the most egregious and xenophobic bile. Robert, like Charles Johnson of LGF, prefers to take no responsibility for the contents of his comment threads, but the problem is that his crusade cannot be separated from the miasma that lurkes beneath it. Simply put, the crusade of Jihadwatch becomes, because it has no emphasis on humanizing muslims, a witch hunt.

I don't accept this characterization on many levels. In the first place, Muslims don't need to be "humanized." They are human already. I am not sure what Mr. Poonawalla means when he faults Jihad Watch for having "no emphasis on humanizing muslims." Does he mean that we never post about Muslims doing good? But that is false. Do we decline to cover Muslims fighting against the global jihad? Of course not. As I pointed out to Mr. Poonawalla's fellow Esmay blogger Ali Eteraz here, we frequently cover Muslim activism against Muslim oppression. I noted two posts for Mr. Eteraz: this one from the early days of the site, recounting the travails of a member of the Islamic Iran Participation Front, a group that opposes the mullahocracy; and this one about Muslims opposing the Talibanization of Somalia. Search the archives and you'll find many more. Perhaps Mr. Poonawalla would be surprised to see posts like this one, or to learn that Tashbih Sayyed, editor of Muslim World Today, is a member of the Jihad Watch Board of Directors. As I have said from the beginning of Jihad Watch, "any Muslim who renounces the ideologies of jihad and dhimmitude is most welcome to join forces with us." But to my knowledge Dean Esmay has never troubled to tell his readers such things about Jihad Watch.

It also does not help that Robert routinely ascribes the CAUSE of Islamic extremist ideology to the faith of Islam. That the extremists use this or that Qur'an verse for their justification is not surprising; but were their holy text the phone directory would they act any differently? Throughout history every holy text - and even some non-holy ones - have been used to justify all manner of evil. Let us be frank about personal responsibility here: the CAUSE of the extremists' actions is their own souls and their own dark ambitions. Not their vision of Shari'a for its own sake, but rather the benefits that they imagine such to accrue to them in this life and the hereafter. THAT is what drives them and it is what has driven their predecesors of all faiths and none throughout history's bloody sweep.

All right. Here we come to the heart of the matter. I am wrong in ascribing "the CAUSE of Islamic extremist ideology to the faith of Islam," when in fact, according to Mr. Poonawalla, this ideology could have come from anywhere, even the phone book, and after all, the holy texts of every faith have been used to justify violence.

Yet there seems to be a bit of confusion here. In the first place, it is the "extremists" themselves, not I, who "routinely" ascribe "the CAUSE of Islamic extremist ideology to the faith of Islam." I have posted hundreds and hundreds of examples of this in the three years of Jihad Watch, and have many, many times asked moderate Muslims for some compelling Islamic refutation of the jihad theology. None has ever been forthcoming -- even from Mr. Poonawalla, who promised me in those cordial emails some anti-jihad material from Al-Azhar but never quite got around to getting it to me.

With jihadists daily recruiting for their ranks by appealing to the Qur'an and Sunnah, this is a grave and glaring omission. And it is not my doing. For it is not a matter of the jihadists using, in Mr. Poonawalla's words, "this or that Qur'an verse for their justification." Contrary to Esmay's repeated contention that finding justification for the jihad in the Qur'an is a matter of "cherry-picking" a few verses here and there that Muslims otherwise do not understand in a violent way, the jihad in order to establish the supremacy of Sharia is taught not only in the Qur'an, but in the Hadith, in the words and deeds of Muhammad, and by all the schools (madhahib) of Islamic jurisprudence.

Jihadists are well aware of this, and work hard to situate "the CAUSE of Islamic extremist ideology" within "the faith of Islam." See, to take just one of many examples, this article I wrote a couple of years ago about a theological exposition by Zarqawi. In it, I wrote this:

Zarqawi’s tape amounts to a direct frontal assault on the glib and still oft-repeated assertion that the 9/11 attacks are condemned by Islam because Islam forbids the killing of innocent civilians. It is urgently to be hoped that all those courageous groups that identify themselves as forces for Muslim moderation...construct responses to Zarqawi that reason from Islamic principles....With this audiotape, Zarqawi has seized the intellectual and theological initiative within the global Islamic community, and reinforced the jihadist claim to represent “pure Islam” — a claim that has proved to be a potent recruitment tool among Muslims worldwide, as well as here in the United States. If moderates do not or cannot take that initiative from him, the consequences could reverberate across the world for decades to come.

Did I write Zarqawi's exposition of Islamic theology? Or any of the other similar writings by jihadists? Did I ask Zarqawi to invoke Muhammad's example when justifying his beheadings in Iraq? With respect, Mr. Poonawalla's focus is misplaced. He is shooting the messenger instead of dealing with the real problem: the Muslims who justify violence by referring to Islamic teachings, not the one who reports on their doing so -- me. He is asking me either to look the other way when they quote the Qur'an and invoke Muhammad, or else to tell people that they are doing so incorrectly.

Well, it is not up to me to say whether they are doing so correctly or incorrectly. I just report that they are doing so, and show the deep roots of their perspective in Islamic theology and sacred texts. That's just reality. It is up to peaceful Muslims to challenge this perspective among Muslims if they do not wish it to prevail.

What's more, Mr. Poonawalla himself acknowledges that jihadists act in view of "the benefits that they imagine such to accrue to them in this life and the hereafter." Now, where did they get the idea that they would receive such benefits? From the Qur'an, of course, which promises Paradise to those who "kill and are killed" for Allah (9:111), and from Muslim preachers worldwide who invoke that verse and others to justify suicide bombing. Is that not a "CAUSE of Islamic extremist ideology" that is derived from and rooted within "the faith of Islam"? I believe it is. What does Mr. Poonawalla propose we do about this? Ignore it? Deny it is happening? I would rather he and other anti-jihadist Muslims confront and refute it, so as to try to discourage Muslims from having recourse to such actions in the future.

The result is that Robert's readers do indeed come to believe - fed upon a diet of one-sided interpretation as they are - that all muslims are the enemy, potentially.

Of course, I have never said that, in fact, but I have noted that the American Muslim community has made no effort to expel jihadist sympathizers from its ranks, and that some who were apparently moderates turned out to be deceivers. There has been no large-scale, organized effort of takfir by American Muslims: takfir is the process of declaring another group of Muslims to be unbelievers because of their heretical views. Why haven't American Muslims done this for Al-Qaeda, or Hamas, or Hizballah? And in the absence of such an effort, what are infidels to do? I look forward to Mr. Poonawalla's explanation of how non-Muslims in America can reliably distinguish between Muslims who sympathize with the jihad, and may someday act on those sympathies, and those who do not.

The only muslims that become non-threats are those that are externally non-muslim and secular.

That's false also. And I repeat: "any Muslim who renounces the ideologies of jihad and dhimmitude is most welcome to join forces with us."

Hence the popularity of the three Goddesses (Manji, Sultan, and Hirsi Ali) in their circles. Muslims such as myself have no margin for error - the slightest misstatement and we are damned, our motives and intentions pre-ordained. And the times we seek to reach out, we are dismissed as practicing taqqiya or decitful. Isn't it profoundly obvious how such alienation is counter to the self-interest of us all?

Esmay has denounced me repeatedly for taking issue with Ali Eteraz in this post. He has taken this as evidence that when Islamic reformers do appear, I condemn them as deceivers. In fact, you will find no such characterization of Ali Eteraz's motives in that post. But I do point out some rather glaring inaccuracies in his presentation. Why? Because if I can see them, knowledgeable Muslims can see even more -- and this attempt at "reform" will founder. I make no apologies for pointing out such things. Serious Muslims know what their religious texts say, and will not be moved by efforts at "reform" that pretend that large portions of those texts do not exist. Reformers should not ignore, but should refute, the jihad ideology. Why is that too much to ask?

The challenge I pose to Robert then is this: to simply acknowledge the fact that his work has attracted a community of hatred, and that is a problem. And not a harmless one, but rather one that genuinely hinders his very own cause.

Well, it's certainly true that CAIR and others have quoted unhinged comments from Jihad Watch -- which indicates that they can't find the "hatred" they're looking for in my own writings, so they have to resort to trying to hold me responsible for intemperate comments here. But as I have said many times, if you think I agree with the comment, provide evidence of that agreement from my own writings. If you can't, then the comment no more reflects on my own positions than do the comments of the many Islamic apologists and jihad apologists who also post comments at Jihad Watch.

But in any case, a "community of hatred"? No. There are angry people who come here, to be sure. But their anger is not without cause. I think that if Mr. Poonawalla and Dean Esmay had scolded Americans in 1943 for speaking in abusive terms about Germans and Japanese, they would not have found as sympathetic a hearing as Esmay does for his "Islamophobia" charges today. And this constant denial and shift of focus -- the blaming of me rather than the jihadists for using the teachings of Muhammad and Islam to justify their actions -- does nothing to assuage that anger. A "community of hatred"? No. A community of patriots, of lovers of Western civilization and human rights, of people who are passionately committed to defending those things.

In any case, comments are, when all is said and done, unmoderated. I don't have time to read most of them, especially these days, but when particularly abusive ones are brought to my attention, I do remove them. Unlike Esmay, who would not allow Jihad Watch commenters to comment in my defense at his site, I believe in freedom of speech, and that the antidote to bad speech is more speech. And I believe that if comments here offend Aziz H. Poonawalla, he should strive all the harder to eradicate the causes of that anger from the American Muslim community and from the umma worldwide.

Meanwhile, however, Esmay continues his attacks, with a screed against unmoderated comments at Little Green Footballs. Perhaps because I am not directly involved, his characteristic wall-climbing, straitjacket-worthy hysteria is not in evidence (if you like that sort of thing, check out his maniacal anti-Christian rantings in the comments field here), but he does make a number of simply false assertions:

The believer in the Taqqiya Libel against Muslims says that any Muslim can be assumed to be lying to you if you're not a Muslim. They further tell you that any Muslim who expresses hatred of terrorism, hatred of political violence, love for America, or love for Freedom is simply a liar. After all, the Koran "directs" them to lie about these things.

But of course the Koran contains no such direction. Taqqiya is only to be invoked in extreme circumstances, so as to avoid bloodshed and horror. Furthermore, Taqqiya is actually rejected by a majority of Muslims worldwide. Indeed, most conservative Muslim scholars say that "taqqiya" is just code-word for "liar" and that lying is never acceptable under Islam.

Of course, the idea that taqiyya means that "any Muslim can be assumed to be lying to you if you're not a Muslim" is absurd, but aside from that, his assertion that "the Koran contains no such direction" is false. For example: commenting on Qur'an 3:28, the great (and quite mainstream) Qur'an commentator Ibn Kathir says this: if believers "in some areas or times fear for their safety from the disbelievers," they "are allowed to show friendship outwardly, but never inwardly. For instance, Al-Bukhari recorded that Abu Ad-Darda said, 'We smile in the face of some people although our hearts curse them.' Al-Bukhari said that Al-Hasan said, 'The Tuqyah [or taqiyya, the shielding of what is in one's heart] is allowed until the Day of Resurrection.'"

Ibn Kathir, a pious Muslim and a renowned scholar whose work has been revered by Muslims for centuries, believes that the Qur'an allows believers to deceive unbelievers. Dean Esmay says that the Qur'an says no such thing, but gives no actual evidence beyond nameless authorities to support his view. And I'm an evil Islamophobe, repeating the equivalent of the blood libel against the Jews (Esmay makes the equation elsewhere in his post), for quoting an actual Muslim source (and I have many, many others that speak in the same vein) that says deception is acceptable, and pointing out that it is quite possible, and indeed probable, that some Muslims in the world today agree with Ibn Kathir. Get the picture?

Esmay also says that "Nowhere anywhere [sic] in the Koran is suicide bombing endorsed. This is yet another Libel against Muslims."

Call the Pentagon, Dean. You also might want to call in the authors of this detailed defense of suicide bombing on Islamic grounds for a little Islamic instruction.

Aziz H. Poonawalla wrote me again last Monday, saying: "Matoko clearly was mistaken, and I'll post ot that effect later. Also, Dean owes you an apology. Which I will make plain to him." "Matoko" is one of Esmay's favorite attack dogs, who doesn't seem to care how wild or inaccurate her charges are. See here and here, and so much for her. But so far no such post has appeared from Mr. Poonawalla. Instead, Esmay today links to a blogger who calls herself "Isis," who includes a gratuitous swipe at me in a post about how people should and should not talk about Islamic terrorism: "Reading Robert Spencer’s latest book or citing 'the Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam' does not make you an Islamic scholar." I do not know "Isis" and had never heard of her before this afternoon, but I repeat the request of her that I have always extended to reasonable people, and even to Dean Esmay: rather than simply sneering, please show me where I'm wrong, and let's discuss these issues in a rational manner. But I know: it is easier to throw stones and set up straw men to knock down than to defend one's own position. So I'm not expecting anything.

Esmay, finally, has been spending quite a bit of time today discussing a Muslim soldier who was killed in Iraq, as if his death proves everything he charges about "Islamophobia." I suggest on the contrary that that soldier's memory would be far better served by an honest discussion by both Muslims and non-Muslims of good will of the elements of Islam that give rise to violence and fanaticism, and positive strategies developed for how both groups can work to neutralize this threat. But good will, it seems, is in short supply these days.

UPDATE: A Jihad Watch reader has notified me that Esmay keeps hammering, saying here: "Ditto idiots like Brian Macker who ran around claiming that no Muslim could be trusted until he entirely repudiated Muhammed and repudiated entire swaths of the Koran, and accused any Muslims who disagreed with his interpretations as being liars. Which is also, interestingly enough, what Robert Spencer does for a living." (Brian Macker is or was a commenter at Esmay's site.) Of course, Esmay would never be able to produce any actual statements I have ever made to back up this characterization of my work, but who cares about accuracy when you can puff your chest out with self-righteous rage? For the record, I do not interpret the Qur'an or any other Islamic texts. Never have, never will. I report on their contents, and on how jihadists use them. I ask moderate Muslims to formulate a reponse to those jihadists. And I will not be intimidated by Esmay's rabid fulminations against me, and repeated attempts at character assassination, into stopping doing so.

No hint of the identity of these "youths" beyond their immigrant status. No hint of the fact that they are shouting, as they shouted last year, "Allahu akbar." French Intifada Update from AFP:

Hundreds of people marched in a silent tribute to two teenagers whose death exactly one year ago sent a wave of urban riots surging through France, sparking the country's most serious social crisis in 30 years.

French authorities were on alert for a new flare-up of violence after youth gangs, some carrying handguns, torched -- and in one case hijacked -- three buses near Paris on Wednesday, but police reported no major trouble overnight.

In Clichy-sous-Bois, the poor northeast Paris suburb where the riots erupted on October 27, 2005, around 1,000 people, most of them youngsters, filed quietly Friday morning past the spot where the two boys died.

"Once again, France and the world are watching us," the mayor of Clichy Claude Dilain told the crowd. "We need the calm, dignity and courage that are visible here to prevail. Let us show them who we really are."

"Let's not give anyone cause to point the finger at us," added local association leader Samir Mihi.

Many of the marchers wore white T-shirts printed with the words "Zyed and Bouna, Dead for nothing."

Zyed Benna, 17, and Bouna Traore, 15, both from immigrant families of African descent, were electrocuted as they hid from a police patrol in a power sub-station.

Riots broke out in Clichy that night, quickly spreading to dozens of immigrant-populated suburbs in the Paris region and beyond.

Night after night for three weeks, youth gangs clashed with police, torching more than 10,000 cars and firebombing 300 buildings in around 275 towns, until order was officially restored on November 17.

With the approach of the anniversary, police and local mayors have warned that the conditions that led to the riots remain firmly in place in the poor out-of-town neighbourhoods, plagued by unemployment of 30 to 40 percent.

Nationwide, police were under orders to be vigilant but to keep their presence low-key, to avoid encouraging confrontations with youths, officers told AFP....

Last year's riots -- which led the government to declare a state of emergency, a measure not enacted since the Algerian war half a century earlier -- cast an unforgiving spotlight on France's trouble in integrating its Arab-origin and black communities.

Badly shaken by the crisis, the government promised measures such as an extra 100 million euros (125 million dollars) for local associations, bigger training schemes and a crackdown on racial discrimination for jobs.

The dhimmis at the Beeb admit they're dhimmis. "BBC Internal Memo Admits Anti-Christian Bias," by Gudrun Schultz for LifeSiteNews.com, with thanks to Angie:

LONDON, United Kingdom, October 24, 2006 (LifeSiteNews.com) - The British Broadcasting Corporation has admitted to a marked bias against Christianity and a strong inclination to pro-Muslim reporting among the network’s executives and key anchors, in a leaked account of an “impartiality summit.”

The Daily Mail reported Sunday on the secret London meeting of key executives, called by BBC chairman Michael Grade and hosted by veteran broadcaster Sue Lawley. The report revealed that many senior executives are deeply frustrated with the corporation’s commitment to “political correctness” and liberal policies at the expense of journalistic integrity and objectivity.

BBC executives admitted the corporation is dominated by homosexuals. They acknowledged that ethnic minorities held a disproportionate number of positions and said the BBC deliberately encourages multiculturalism and is more careful to avoid offending the Muslim community than Christians.

Tossing the Bible into a garbage can on a comedy show would be acceptable, they said, but not the Koran, and if possible they would broadcast an interview with Osama Bin Laden, giving him the opportunity to explain his views.

"According to the police, Fahaad, a native of Karachi, is a post-graduate in Analytical Chemistry while Mohammad Ali is 9th standard pass from Manshera in Pakistan." A post-graduate in Analytical Chemistry, no doubt driven to jihad by his lack of education and grinding poverty. "Mysore: Two Pakistan militants nabbed," from DHNS, with thanks to Kisan:

MYSORE: The militants who are suspected to be the key functionaries of Al-Badr, a Pakistan-based militant outfit, were on a ‘specific mission’ to create terror in Karnataka, especially in Bangalore.

In a significant breakthrough against terrorism, a special team of Mysore City Police nabbed two Pakistani extremists after a shoot-out on the Outer Ring Road in Vijayanagar Police Station limits at around 12:10 am here on Friday.

The militants who are suspected to be the key functionaries of Al-Badr, a Pakistan-based militant outfit, were on a ‘specific mission’ to create terror in Karnataka, especially in Bangalore.

The militants have been identified as 24-year-old Fahaad (Pakistani identity) alias Nedu Thanni alias Mohammada Koya (Indian identity) and 22-year-old Mohammad Ali (Pakistan identity) alias Hussain alias Jehangir alias Asif Khan (Indian identity).

Acting on a definite information, the 12-member team led by Deputy Commissioner of Police K T Balakrishna intercepted the unsuspecting militant duo who were riding a moped at 12 am at the ring road. Sensing trouble, the militants opened fire at the police party from an AK-47 rifle. The DCP countered firing two rounds from his revolver before the police team overpowered the duo in a 10-minute-long gun-fire.

A police constable was injured on his forehead when a militant assaulted him with his rifle. The militants also suffered minor bruises during a scuffle with the police. The window panes of a police jeep were damaged in the crossfire.

According to the police, Fahaad, a native of Karachi, is a post-graduate in Analytical Chemistry while Mohammad Ali is 9th standard pass from Manshera in Pakistan. Two mobile phones, and a hi-tech satellite-based telephone (duo were speaking directly to militants in Pakistan via satellite) had been seized from them.

After receiving $20 million from Prince Al-Waleed bin Talal, the Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding at Georgetown University has been renamed the Alwaleed bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding. According to this article, "The Center's leaders say it now will be used to put on workshops regarding Islam, fostering exchanges with the Muslim world, addressing U.S. policy towards the Muslim world, working on the relationship of Islam and Arab culture, addressing Muslim citizenship and civil liberties, and developing exchange programs for students from the Muslim world."

Why, it sounds as though the activities it plans are no different from those of the State Department or, more generally, the idiotized and paralyzed American government: explaining and explaining away Islam through the "workshops" and "fostering exchanges" and "working on relationships" and "addressing Muslim citizenship and civil liberties." Would that include discussing the relation of Islam and the conceivable loyalty of Muslims to the American Constitution and especially to the Bill of Rights?

"One day, my professor even had us act out the five pillars of Islam in class..."
-- from this article about the teaching of Islam at Butler University

This is a dead giveaway. The focus is on what is hardly doctrine, but essentially, for Infidels, the utterly trivial rituals of worship. They are trivial because they are seemingly devoid of ideological content.

Who would object if some people in some religion or cult pray five times a day? Or once? Or twenty? Who would object to those people prostrating themselves toward Mecca without knowing the significance of this in making Islam a vehicle for Arab imperialism? Who would object, unless they understand the ferocious collectivism of the prayers, and especially of the Friday Prayers, and especially of the sermons (khutbas) at those Friday Prayers? And who would object to the hajj, unless you knew exactly what was done at the hajj, the primitive pagan worship, the throwing of stones at a pillar that symbolizes not merely Evil, but the evil embodied in the Unbeliever. And why should you object to Ramadan? Or to the giving of zakat -- but only to fellow Muslims, unless by occasionally giving to Unbelievers that furthers the cause of Islam (see bin Talal's check ostentatiously handed over to Giuliani just after 9.11.2001)?

Vali Nasr (Member of the US Council on Foreign Relations): "We Need Engagement with Iran"

No doubt Vali Nasr, the son of a well-known Shi'ite writer and apologist, Seyyed Hossein Nasr, wishes to enroll the Americans in Iraq in order to dampen the Sunni-Shi'a clash. But his perspective is that of a Shi'a, loyal to Shi'a Islam, although not to the Islamic Republic of Iran, which he no doubt deplores. That is understandable. What is not understandable is why his views should coincide with those of Infidels, or that Americans should heed his desire to "avoid radicalization" of "both sides" by, of course, having the Americans remain and stick it out -- not for their own good, but for the good of both Sunni and Shi'a Muslims in Iraq.

Particularly piquant is Vali Nasr's inability to see that wherever Infidels are concerned, all the supposed assumptions about Sunni-Shi'a rivalry -- remember during Israel's attack on Hezbollah how we kept being assured that the Sunni Arab states were secretly delighted, and wanted Israel to keep going? -- tend to be muted, for the Infidels are the real enemy who will unite even warring sects of Islam.

We were recently told that the renewed French riots spring “in part from anger over entrenched discrimination against immigrants and their French-born children, many of them Muslims from former French colonies in Africa."

And in the same article this as well:

"Defense Minister Michele Alliot-Marie, who is considering whether to run for president, said that attacks demonstrate 'a desire to kill.'

'Some individuals are looking for provocations, and sometimes go further,' she said on i-Tele television. She acknowledged people facing unemployment and living in overcrowded housing projects 'have trouble finding their place' in society." -- from this article

The article's author apparently thinks it is part of his job to tell us that when people in gangs, many of them with handguns, hijack busses, and turn the terrified passengers out, and then burn those busses, "many of them [are] Muslims." Yet ordinarily all of them are Muslims, with the appearance occasionally of one or two non-Muslim immigrants who are too terrified not to go along, and have already imbibed from the ambient air the same attitudes exhibited by Muslims who grow up in societies suffused with Islam -- in Paris as in Quetta or Riyadh or Baghdad.

And that author also takes it upon himself to supply the reader with a motive -- the motive never being Islam, but always being something else, in this case "anger over entrenched discrimination." What "entrenched discrimination"? Ask the non-Muslim immigrants, the Chinese or Vietnamese or Hindus or Antillais. Ask Madame Belaya, or for that matter de author of "Un plat de porc..." if they suffer discrimination in that land of la carriere ouverte aux talents.

The difference in Muslim behavior in the U.S., as compared to that demonstrated in Western Europe, is owed primarily to several factors.

First, and most important, the Muslim population is a much smaller proportion of the American population -- scarcely 1%. And of even that 1%, most of the Muslims are homegrown Black Muslims, whose own easygoing and at times even syncretistic interpretation of Islam in the past caused the orthodox at Al Azhar to refuse to recognize Elijah Mohammad's group as really Islamic at all.

But what if there were not 3 million Muslims (two million of them identified as belonging to the "Black Muslims") but rather 15 million -- that is, 5% of the total population -- or even 30 million, or 10% of the total population, as may already be true in France? Wouldn't local Muslims, already so aggressive and unyielding in the demands of their so-called representative groups (e.g. CAIR), be far more aggressive and even more demanding, even more uncooperative with the authorities on matters of security, even more aggressive in demands to changes in our legal and political institutions, in our schools, in our social understandings and arrangements, in our everything?

A Stop-The-Presses Alert from AFP : "UN peacekeepers unlikely to disarm Hezbollah: Russia":

MOSCOW - UN peacekeepers deployed in Lebanon are unlikely to be able to disarm the militant group Hezbollah, as required under UN Security Council Resolution 1701, Russian Defence Minister Sergei Ivanov said on Friday, RIA-Novosti reported.

‘Under the UN mandate, one of the main functions of the peacekeepers is to disarm Hezbollah,’ Ivanov was quoted as saying by the state-run news agency. ‘I strongly doubt that the UN will fulfill this task.’

Ivanov said that concern over this aspect of the peacekeepers’ mission was one of the reasons Moscow decided to send a peacekeeping contingent to Lebanon under an accord reached separately with the Lebanese government, instead of under the UN mandate, RIA-Novosti reported.

UN Security Council Resolution 1701 requires the Shia militant group Hezbollah, which fought a 34-day war against Israel in July-August, to disarm.

Peacekeepers are instructed to ensure the south Lebanon border area with Israel is ‘free of any armed personnel and weapons other than those of the Lebanese armed forces and UNIFIL (peacekeepers).’

Hezbollah guerrillas have kept a low profile since the resolution, but refused to disarm.

Iraqi Jihad Update by Dave Clark for AFP, :

BAGHDAD (AFP) - An eerie calm has descended on Baghdad during the weekly day of prayers after a Ramadan of unprecedented bloodshed in Iraq, while US troops scoured the city for a missing soldier.

Reports of violence in the war torn capital dropped in the three days since the end of the Islamic holy month, in part because thousands of US troops are deployed in the city hunting a comrade who was kidnapped by masked gunmen.

Police found the bodies of 11 murder victims on Thursday and overnight, a US military spokeswoman said Friday, a toll considered low by the standards of Baghdad's vicious dirty war between rival Sunni and Shiite death squads.

On Friday, US troops were still manning cordons around the Karrada district, where the soldier was kidnapped on Monday, and on the approaches to Sadr City, the Shiite militia bastion where they fear he is being held.

Meanwhile, with US casualties for the month so far running at their highest level in a year and 24 Iraqi police killed in an insurgent ambush on Thursday, the Al-Qaeda militant group issued a triumphant statement.

"We call on all mujahideen... to support the young Islamic state in Iraq. Weakness has gripped the infidel nations. The first signs of victory can be seen on the horizon," the group said in an Internet statement.

The message, which could not be independently authenticated, was issued in the name of the self-proclaimed Islamic Emirate of Iraq, which was declared on October 15 by a Qaeda-led coalition of Sunni insurgent groups.

[...]

His family report that he was seized from their home by gunmen, and the US military has said that Wednesday's raid was in part following up on a tip that his kidnappers were based in a Sadr City mosque.

Sharia Alert from Britain, via GCN, :

The leading imam in Manchester, confirms that he thinks the execution of sexually active gay men is justified, the rights group Outrage reported.

Arshad Misbahi of the Manchester Central Mosque confirmed his views in a conversation to John Casson, a local psychotherapist.

Casson said: "I asked him if the execution of gay Muslims in Iran and Iraq was an acceptable punishment in Sharia law, or the result of culture, not religion.

"He told me that in a true Islamic state, such punishments were part of Islam: If the person had had a trial, at which four witnesses testified that they had seen the actual homosexual acts."

"I asked him what would be the British Muslim view? He repeated that in an Islamic state these punishments were justified. They might result in the deaths of thousands but if this deterred millions from having sex, and spreading disease, then it was worthwhile to protect the wider community."

"I checked again that this was not a matter of tradition, culture or local prejudice. 'No,' he said, 'It is part of the central tenets of Islam: that sex outside marriage is forbidden; this is stated in the Koran and the prophet (peace and blessings be upon him) had stated that these punishments were due to such behaviours.'"

This is ironic on so many levels. One is that the EU has discouraged assimilation at the behest of the Arab League and Muslim leaders in Europe since 1973 -- see Bat Ye'or's Eurabia. The other irony is that statements like Straw's were calls to assimilate -- and were greeted only with hostility by Muslim leaders. From AP, with thanks to Fjordman:

Stratford-Upon-Avon, England: Interior ministers from six of Europe's most populous nations met to seek ways to curtail alienation among the continent's Muslims.

The issue topped the agenda of the interior ministers of Britain, France, Germany, Spain, Italy and Poland who concluded a two-day summit yesterday.

Concerns about alienation of European Muslims were highlighted by violence in the deprived suburbs of Paris, where youths - many from immigrant families - set three buses on fire before the first anniversary of three weeks of rioting that raged there last year.

Relations between Europe's Muslims and non-Muslims have become a contentious issue around the continent, with strains growing and many fearing that increasing numbers of disaffected young people are being seduced by extremism.

The ministers agreed to work together to promote integration and said they would stage media campaigns and public events to try to persuade young Muslims to reject radical ideologies and embrace democratic values.

They said they would target young audiences with messages from 'secular Muslim' role models as part of the effort.

A debate over the veils some women wear has prompted emotionally charged arguments about minority groups' identities and integration. Former Foreign Secretary Jack Straw set off the argument by announcing he had asked Muslim women to remove their veils when they came for meetings in his district office.

The dhimmis in Belgium are beginning to awaken to the fix they're in. Still, a large number would happily throw freedom of speech overboard. From Expatica, with thanks to Fjordman:

BRUSSELS - More then six citizens in ten fear an increase in religious tensions in Belgium according to a survey by Belgian newspaper Le Soir.

A "pessimistic" attitude in contrast with the overall "moderate attitude" of Belgians towards religions, notes the evening paper.
The majority of interviewees supported a 'respectful criticism' of religions, meaning that criticism can be expressed so long as personal religious beliefs are respected.

But not all Belgians follow this moderated view: 23 percent are opposed to all critics of religion, half as much as the French notes Le Soir, while 16 percent assume a highly critical standpoint, three times more then in France.

Eric de Beukelaer, spokesman of Belgium's Francophone Bishops, said he was satisfied with the results.

"All religions can be criticised, but there are limits," he said, emphasizing the difference between "criticising" and "offending someone in his or her conviction."

The CAL, the Centre for Secular Action (Centre d’Action Laïque), agreed, although its president, Philippe Grollet said that 23 percent of Belgians thinking religion should not be criticised is "too much." He deplores such attitudes which leave no space for debate.

Abdelmajid Mhauchi, Belgians representative of the European Muslim Network, said that Belgium has a long history of conflict between Seculars and Catholics and has learnt to respect religious liberties. "As a Muslim" he said "I accept critics of Islam … but I cannot tolerate mockery and provocation."

[...]

Despite these reasonable views, 60 percent of the people interviewed predict an increase in tensions between Christians and Muslims with Flemish men being the most pessimistic.

Another pretext is fabricated to stir up rage among Muslims, thereby increasing jihad recruitment tallies. From Reuters, :

SPIN BOLDAK, Afghanistan - The Taleban accused NATO forces of genocide on Friday after the latest in a series of civilian combat deaths, and said they would step up already rising suicide attacks.

The strict Islamist group’s one-legged military commander, Mullah Dadullah, also denied NATO charges the guerrillas used villagers as human shields in combat against foreign forces.

The warning came as a a provincial official said a bomb had killed at least 14 civilians in the rugged southern province of Uruzgan on Friday.

‘We want to inform the foreign forces and their slaves that their defeat is inevitable in Afghanistan,’ Dadullah told Reuters by satellite phone from a secret location.

‘The Taleban’s mujahideen are ready to fight until death and in the coming days will increase their activities and suicide attacks to such an extent that the infidel forces will not get a chance to rest.

‘The Taleban will not let the the killers of Afghan women and children rest in peace and will continue to target them.’

Bruce Thornton is a professor of Classics at Cal State Fresno and co-author with Victor Davis Hanson of Bonfire of the Humanities: Rescuing the Classics in an Impoverished Age and author of Greek Ways: How the Greeks Created Western Civilization (Encounter Books). His most recent book is Searching for Joaquin: Myth, Murieta, and History in California (Encounter Books). This review appears at California Republic.

Ambrose Bierce once quipped that war was God’s way of teaching Americans geography. He could have said “teaching us history,” for the enemy is emboldened by our ignorance not just of where he lives but of how he lives, his beliefs and values, and to understand these traditions we must understand their history. Unfortunately, in the current war against Islamic jihad we persist in ignoring the documented history of Islam and its beliefs, accepting instead the spin and propaganda of various propagandists, apologists, and Western useful idiots.

This imperative to know the enemy’s beliefs is particularly important for understanding the jihadists, for Islam is a fiercely traditional faith, one brooking no deviation from the revelation granted to Muhammad and codified in the Koran, Hadith, and the sira or biography of the Prophet. As Robert Spencer shows in his invaluable resource The Truth about Muhammad, in these sources Muhammad is presented as “an excellent model of conduct,” as the Koran puts it, his words and deeds forming the pattern for all pious Muslims to follow. “Muslims,” according to Muqtedar Khan of the Center for the Study of Islam and Democracy, “as a part of religious observance, not only obey, but also seek to emulate and imitate their Prophet in every aspect of life.” The facts of Muhammad’s life, then, are paramount for understanding the beliefs that warrant and validate jihadist terror.

Presenting those facts clearly and fairly is precisely what Spencer accomplishes in his new book. Spencer has been for years a bastion of plain-speaking truth. Through books like Islam Unveiled, Onward Muslim Soldiers: How Jihad Still Threatens America and the West, and The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (And the Crusades), and as director of Jihad Watch, Spencer has courageously presented the simple facts of Islamic history and thought that too many Americans, including some in the current administration, ignore or distort. Spencer’s new book continues this important service of arming us with the facts we need in order to understand an enemy who wants nothing from us other than our conversion, death, or subjection.

Basing his description of Muhammad on the same Islamic sources revered by believers themselves, Spencer paints a portrait of the Prophet unrecognizable to any who have been deceived by the idealizations of apologists like Farida Khanam, whom Spencer quotes as claiming that Muhammad’s “heart was filled with intense love for all humankind irrespective of caste, creed or color,” or the British religious writer Karen Armstrong, who claims that “Muhammad eventually abjured violence and pursued a daring, inspired policy of non-violence that was worthy of Ghandi.” Such fantastic delusions cannot stand up to the relentless quotations and facts Spencer gathers from Islamic sources, all of which show us a Mohammad justifying and practicing violence in the service of the faith he invented.

In the weeks just after 9.11.2001, the American government still did not understand Islam. It had spent the past fifty years not understanding Islam. It had spent the past fifty years thinking of Islam only as a "bulwark against Communism" and attempting to curry favor with such "staunch allies" as Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, while taking an indignant stand against its main allies at Suez (when Nasser might have been, and should have been, knocked right down). It constantly pressured Israel after 1967 to give up the Sinai for worthless guarantees. Later, in the post-1967 world, with all that Kissinger "shuttle diplomacy" and then the Rogers Plan, and then a dozen other plans and schemes, not a single thing was done about the menace of OPEC. Nothing, or close to nothing, has been done to diminish these monstrous revenues in the one-third of a century since 1973.

Nothing has been done to prevent, or even to study or wonder about or question aloud, the policy of permitting the mass settlement of Muslims within the Western countries, a policy of criminal negligence toward all Infidel peoples by all Infidel governments. This policy has been based on sheer laziness and sheer unwillingness to learn enough about Islam, or to listen to the diminishing number of real scholars -- as opposed to Muslim and non-Muslim apologists carefully infiltrating and rising in the ranks of academic and government "experts" and "advisers" on Islam: John Esposito was consulted by the Clinton Administration; Gilles Kepel and Olivier Roy by the French government; Tariq Ramadan was appointed to all sorts of E.U. commissions and is even now, in his pseudo-academic post at St. Antony's, "advising" the Blair regime that does not know where to put its feet and hands -- but its opponents promise no better.

Many times, when speaking of the nature of Sharia and the rights of women and non-Muslim dhimmis under Islamic law, I have in reference to women quoted Qur'an 4:34: "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. Then if they obey you, seek not a way against them. Lo! Allah is ever High, Exalted, Great."

And often, when I have quoted this verse, I have been charged with "cherry-picking" unpleasant verses from the Qur'an, and told that no Muslim takes this verse literally in the modern age. I wish that were so, but here is more evidence that it isn't.

"Iran: Men Can Hit Their Wives, Cleric Says," from AKI, with thanks to the Constantinopolitan Irredentist:

Tehran, 26 Oct. (AKI) - Iranian Grand Ayatollah Makarem Shirazi has issued a fatwa - a Muslim religious edict - saying it is legitimate for men to hit their disobedient wives. Shirazi, one of the leading clerics of the Shiite holy city of Qom, wrote on his website that "the Koran first of all advises a man to try and convince his wife to obey to him in a polite way and through advice, then by refusing to have sexual relations with her and, finally, if all this will have failed to make her reason, with physical punishment."

The punishment, the leading cleric said, "must be light and considered an exceptional event, like surgery in case of a serious illness."

Makarem Shirazi advised his readers against "physical punishment which leaves signs and wounds." Women, he axplained, "are masochistic and sometimes they have a crisis and need light physical punishment to get back to normal."

The Islamic Courts fighters may be positioning themselves to attack the seat of the Somali government, as leverage for, or pending an expected outcome of peace talks scheduled for next week. Somali Jihad Update. "Somalia's Islamists take key town," from the BBC:

Fighters loyal to Somalia's Islamic courts have taken control of a key trading town from the transitional government without bloodshed.

They drove into Sakow on Wednesday evening moving closer to the seat of the interim administration in Baidoa.

Islamists are reported to be massing to the east of Baidoa, where government troops have been seen building defences with the aid of Ethiopian soldiers.

The opposing sides are due to meet in Sudan next week for peace talks.

There's a country that doesn't exactly leap to mind when "peace talks" are mentioned.

[...]

"It was simple because we did not encounter any fighting when we entered the town," Sheikh Hassan Derow, an Islamist commander told AFP news agency.

Residents of the town which is 170km south-west of Baidoa, said pro-government forces fled to the north.

The BBC's East Africa correspondent Adam Mynott says the pressure is building towards a confrontation between the two sides.

But the UIC said it dids not intend to attack the transitional government but would defend itself against Ethiopian forces.

"The Courts' forces are still in their positions to defend the town (Baidoa) against the Ethiopian troops which began to move towards the Courts' forces," leading Islamic Courts offical [sic] Shaykh Sharif Shaykh Ahmad told the BBC.

Developing a pretext: "Defending" Baidoa.

The Taliban takes a cue from Hizballah, perhaps, in exploiting casualties caused by the use of human shields, a practice banned by the Fourth Geneva Convention (see Article 28). "NATO says Taleban using civilians as shields, as high toll feared," from AFP:

KABUL - The NATO force in Afghanistan Thursday accused the Taleban of using civilians as human shields, as authorities scrambled to verify reports that at least 60 people were killed in military strikes.

The International Security Assistance Force said it could not say how many civilians were killed in a series of operations in the southern province of Kandahar late Tuesday, but was helping Afghan authorities to find out.

ISAF said late Wednesday that 48 Taleban were killed in three engagements, including air strikes, in Kandahar’s Panjwayi area late Tuesday.

However, the chief of Panjwayi district, Niaz Mohammad Sarhadi, said he had reports that about 60 locals were killed in aerial bombing that also destroyed a number of houses.

Deputy director of Kandahar provincial council, Bismellah Afghanmal, put the figure as high as 85, but national authorities could not immediately confirm the local reports, which have in the past been exaggerated.

Asked about civilian casualties, NATO civilian representative Mark Laity said "at the moment we don’t know", adding any that had occurred were deeply regretted.

ISAF took great care to avoid civilian casualties, but the Taleban were mixing themselves among residents when attacked, NATO officials told reporters in the capital, Kabul.

"With insurgents who regard the population as a form of human shield for themselves, it obviously makes life very difficult for us, but it doesn’t stop us making every effort to ensure we minimise any problems," Laity said.

"We know that the public rely on us and expect us to take every care, and if they (civilians) are accidentally killed then it can affect (public) faith in us," he said.

ISAF was working with an Afghan defence ministry team that had been tasked to find out what had happened, he told reporters in Kabul.

"We are helping Afghan leaders there fly over the area to make an assessment," added ISAF spokesman Major Luke Knittig at the same briefing.

The force would also attend a shura (council) being convened in the area to discuss the matter, he said.

Anti-dhimmitude in Danish courts. From AP:

COPENHAGEN, Denmark (AP) -- A Danish court on Thursday dismissed a lawsuit filed by Muslim organizations against the newspaper that first published the Prophet Mohammed cartoons that touched off protests in the Islamic world.

The City Court in Aarhus said it could not be ruled out that some Muslims had been offended by the 12 drawings printed in Jyllands-Posten, but said there was no reason to assume that the cartoons were meant to "belittle Muslims."

The newspaper published the cartoons on September 30, 2005 with a text saying it was challenging a perceived self-censorship among artists afraid to offend Islam.

The caricatures were reprinted in European papers in January and February, fueling a fury of protests in the Islamic world. Some turned violent, with protesters killed in Libya and Afghanistan and several European embassies attacked.

Islamic law forbids any depiction of the prophet, even positive ones, to prevent idolatry.

"It cannot be ruled out that the drawings have offended some Muslims' honor, but there is no basis to assume that the drawings are, or were conceived as, insulting or that the purpose of the drawings was to present opinions that can belittle Muslims," the court said.

The seven Muslim groups filed the defamation lawsuit against the paper in March, after Denmark's top prosecutor declined to press criminal charges, saying the drawings did not violate laws against racism or blasphemy.

The plaintiffs, who claimed to have the backing of 20 more Islamic organizations in the Scandinavian country, had sought $16,860 in damages from Jyllands-Posten Editor in Chief Carsten Juste and Culture Editor Flemming Rose, who supervised the cartoon project.

The lawsuit said the cartoons depict Mohammed "as belligerent, oppressing women, criminal, crazy and unintelligent, and a connection is made between the Prophet and war and terror."

Yep.

It said the drawings were published "solely to provoke and mock not only the Prophet Mohammed but also the Muslim population."

T Thomas wrings his hands in the Business Standard of India over the widespread misunderstanding of Islam: not those committing violence in the name of Islam, mind you, but those who have the audacity to think that Islam may have something to do with inciting violence as a result.

We need to ask, is Islam perhaps a much-misunderstood religion. The 1993 bomb blasts, following the demolition of Babri Masjid, and the more recent July 2006 bomb blasts in Mumbai’s suburban trains have led many people in India to equate aspects of Islam with terrorism. The September 11, 2001, incident in New York turned most of the Western world to that way of thinking. Yet Prophet Mohammed never propagated violence while imparting his teachings. He urged his followers to fast and pray and to give a part of their wealth to charity. Many Muslims carry out these obligations very diligently even today. Muslims revere Jesus Christ as a prophet. According to Islam, Jesus did not die on the Cross and it will be Christ who will return on Judgment Day. In spite of this acknowledgement of Christ in Islam, the Christian West is more anti-Islam than even the Hindus of India, who suffered under Islam for five centuries.

"Prophet Mohammed never propagated violence while imparting his teachings." Except when he did. Get the whole story in my new book, The Truth About Muhammad. A couple of ahadith that T Thomas may have missed:

Narrated Abu Qilaba:

Anas said, "Some people of 'Ukl or 'Uraina tribe came to Medina and its climate did not suit them. So the Prophet ordered them to go to the herd of (Milch) camels and to drink their milk and urine (as a medicine). So they went as directed and after they became healthy, they killed the shepherd of the Prophet and drove away all the camels. The news reached the Prophet early in the morning and he sent (men) in their pursuit and they were captured and brought at noon. He then ordered to cut their hands and feet (and it was done), and their eyes were branded with heated pieces of iron, They were put in 'Al-Harra' and when they asked for water, no water was given to them." Abu Qilaba said, "Those people committed theft and murder, became infidels after embracing Islam and fought against Allah and His Apostle ."

It has been reported from Sulaiman b. Buraid through his father that when the Messenger of Allah (may peace be upon him) appointed anyone as leader of an army or detachment he would especially exhort him to fear Allah and to be good to the Muslims who were with him. He would say: Fight in the name of Allah and in the way of Allah. Fight against those who disbelieve in Allah. Make a holy war, do not embezzle the spoils; do not break your pledge; and do not mutilate (the dead) bodies; do not kill the children. When you meet your enemies who are polytheists, invite them to three courses of action. If they respond to any one of these, you also accept it and withold yourself from doing them any harm. Invite them to (accept) Islam; if they respond to you, accept it from them and desist from fighting against them....If they refuse to accept Islam, demand from them the Jizya. If they agree to pay, accept it from them and hold off your hands. If they refuse to pay the tax, seek Allah's help and fight them.

There are many, many others like that. You'll find them in the book.

In this week's Jihad Watch segment at Hot Air, I discuss the implications of the Afghan jihadist demand that apostate Abdul Rahman be returned to Afghanistan in exchange for hostage Gabriele Torsello.

A new essay by the prolific and profound European essayist Fjordman:

In my criticism of the European Union, I have been accused of being too positive towards the nation state. It is true that Western civilization isn't exclusively about nation states. The Renaissance took place in the city states of Italy while nation states were non-existent or weak. It is also true that there is a potentially destructive side to nationalism as opposed to defensive patriotism. However, our current democratic system is tied to nation states. The EU didn't cause all of Europe's problems, but it made some of them worse, and added a few new ones. If the EU collapsed tomorrow, we would still be in a lot of trouble, but at least we would have a fighting chance. I have heard a number of people say that "Europe is already lost." I do agree with them that if the political situation remains as it is today, then yes, Europe is lost to Islam, or at least significant parts of Western Europe, maybe not all of Eastern Europe. But I'm not so sure whether the political situation will, or has to, remain as it is today.

Tens of millions of ordinary citizens are now rapidly waking up to the full scale of the Islamic threat. The problem is that many Western Europeans have a sense of hopelessness because they need to confront so many enemies at the same time. Let's call them Enemy 1, 2 and 3. Enemy 1 is Islam and Muslim immigration. Enemy 2 is the anti-Western bias of our media and academia.

Enemy number 2 is common to all Western nations, also the USA, Canada and Australia. Enemy 1 is also common to all Western nations, but more powerful in Europe because of sheer numbers and proximity to the heartland of the Islamic world.

Enemy 3 consists of Eurabians and EU federalists, who are unique to Europe and make the situation more critical here than it is in North America or Australia.

The feeling among many of those Europeans who now understand the threat is that we can face down and defeat one of these enemies, maybe two, but not all three at the same time. We need a major shake-up in the political situation, something that is visible to everybody, to demonstrate that change is possible. The downfall of the European Union could do the trick.

Muslims may actually have done us a favor. The massive infiltration of Leftist and anti-Western rhetoric that now permeates our media and academia predates Islam, but the failure to identify the threat posed by Muslim immigration has exposed it. Many ordinary citizens still remember that our so-called academic experts and media columnists hailed Multiculturalism and Muslim immigration, which are turning out to be the most massive mistakes in modern Western history. This will sooner or later trigger a backlash.

The bad news is that all our various enemies are closely tied together. The good news is also that all our various enemies are closely tied together, and may all go down if one of them falls.

We can start with the Muslims. Their greatest flaw is that they are insanely aggressive and can't handle criticism or mockery at all. A
smart move would be to deliberately provoke Muslims as much as humanly possible. The more they rage and rant and threaten, the more they will discredit the ones who said it was a good idea to let them into our countries and that everybody who said otherwise were "racists."

An update on this story. "Somali Islamists recruit for jihad against Ethiopia," by Mustafa Haji Abdinur for AFP:

MOGADISHU -- Somali Islamists have begun recruiting thousands of young fighters to fight a jihad against Ethiopia, officials said Wednesday, amid fears of all-out war across the lawless Horn of Africa nation.

A day after claiming to have captured an Ethiopian military officer in fierce weekend battles with a militia allied to Somalia's weak government, the Islamists said that at least 3,000 people had enlisted for combat in the holy war.

Many of the new recruits have signed up in the last two days, since the supreme leader of the powerful Islamist movement announced the start of a threatened jihad against Ethiopian troops alleged in Somalia, officials said.

"We have at least 3,000 young fighters who have now registered to fight the enemy of Allah," a senior official with the Supreme Council of Islamic Courts (SICS) official said in Mogadishu.

The newcomers, including women, will join what the Islamists claim are tens of thousands of battle-hardened gunmen who seized Mogadishu in June from warlords and now control most of southern and central Somalia.

The Islamic Courts are already making use of their training camps and registration centers:

"We have trained them to fight and that is religious obligation," said Sheikh Abdinur Farah, a senior Islamist commander who runs a jihad recruitment center in Qoryoley, about 120 kilometers (75 miles) south of Mogadishu.

"Ethiopia has made clear its intention: that is a war against us," he said from the town. "So we are calling an open war against Ethiopia and every young fighter is welcome to join the jihad against the Ethiopian invaders."

Ethiopia and the Somali government have repeatedly denied eyewitness accounts of Ethiopian soldiers in Somalia, although Addis Ababa has said several times that it has sent trainers and advisors.

But mainly Christian Ethiopia has vowed to protect itself and the Somali government from the jihadists, whom, together with the transitional government, it accuses of links with Osama Bin Laden's Al Qaeda network.

[...]

On Monday, Sheikh Hassan Dahir Aweys, chief of the Supreme Islamic Council of Somalia (SICS) and a hardline cleric designated a "terrorist" by the United States, urged Somalis to take up arms against Ethiopian troops.

Several recruits from Qoryoley Wednesday said that they had been inspired to join the jihad by Aweys' speech in which he vowed that the graves of Ethiopian troops would "be littered everywhere in Somalia."

"I have been looking for somewhere to devote my passion for my religion and country," said 23-year-old Abdullahi Sidow Hassan. "Now that the righteous jihad has started, I have found it. Fadumo Isaq Duale, 20, a female student, echoed that sentiment. "I am ready to die for my religion because it is a religious obligation on every Muslim, be it man or woman," she said. "We have nothing to lose because Ethiopia is violating our religion and our land." Soaring tensions between the Islamists and the government and worsening security in south and central Somalia have forced tens of thousands to flee into neighboring Kenya and added to concerns of widespread conflict.

The Taliban are solidifying their state-within-a-state in North Waziristan. "Taliban militias take control," by Isambard Wilkinson for the London Daily Telegraph:

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan -- Taliban militias in Pakistan have set up offices, introduced taxes and taken control of justice in the tribal agency of North Waziristan, where last month the government signed a peace agreement with militants.

In violation of the agreement, a Taliban shura, or council, distributed pamphlets of its policies while militants patrolled the area's streets. They have already killed numerous "American spies."

A "tax schedule" detailed how businesses are liable for paying charges to the Taliban. Trucks entering the agency will pay for a six-month pass, and gas-pump owners will have to make contributions to the Taliban shura. The taxes were described as a "donation" in the pamphlet.

The deal signed by the government on Sept. 5 stipulated that al Qaeda fighters were to be expelled from North Waziristan, and pro-Taliban militants were not to run a "parallel administration" or take part in fighting against coalition forces across the border. In return, Pakistani forces, who had been fighting local militants over the summer, withdrew from combat. The army retained the right to carry out strikes in the area if militants did not adhere to the deal.

But it was later discovered by Pakistani journalists that the deal was signed with wanted militants and not with tribal elders, as was officially claimed. Pakistani officials hoped the deal would empower tribal elders to control militants in their region, but an estimated 120 of them have been killed in the past year.

After the withdrawal of the army, a power vacuum was filled by mullahs and their long-haired, bearded, weapon-toting militants. According to Pakistani reporters, some of the militants wear badges that read: "Appointed by the office of the Taliban, the mujahedeen of the North Waziristan Agency."

Power is now in the hands of a so-called "mullahcracy" and people who Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf recently dismissed as hashish-smoking thugs who use the Taliban's mantle to coerce locals.

Maulana Abdul Khaliq Haqqani, a member of North Waziristan's Taliban shura, said his followers were abiding by the pact. But he said they still offered "moral support" to those fighting in Afghanistan.

"There is no doubt that we support this jihad against infidels, against these Christians who have invaded a Muslim land," he said.

Instead of crossing from Waziristan, fighters continue to cross into Afghanistan from other areas.

"If you can't go into Afghanistan from Waziristan, you can go from other areas. There are many, many other ways to go," a fighter from North Waziristan told Reuters news agency.

NATO officials in Afghanistan said militant activity has increased 300 percent in the border regions since the pact was signed.

The intifada continues in France. And this latest round of bus attacks shows that it is spreading to previously unexpected places. "Youths torch buses around Paris," by Cecile Brisson for AP:

PARIS - Youths forced passengers off three buses and set them on fire overnight in suburban Paris, raising tensions Thursday ahead of the first anniversary of the riots that engulfed France's rundown, heavily immigrant neighborhoods.

No injuries were reported, but worried bus drivers refused to enter some suburbs after dark, and the prime minister urged a swift, stern response.

The riots in October 2005 raged through housing projects in suburbs nationwide, springing in part from anger over entrenched discrimination against immigrants and their French-born children, many of them Muslims from former French colonies in Africa. Despite an influx of funds and promises, disenchantment still thrives in those communities.

About 10 attackers -- five of them with handguns -- stormed a bus in Montreuil east of Paris early Thursday and forced the passengers off, the RATP transport authority said. They then drove off and set the bus on fire.

Late Wednesday, three attackers forced passengers off another bus in Athis-Mons, south of Paris, and tossed a Molotov cocktail inside, police officials said. The driver managed to put out the fire. Elsewhere, between six and 10 youths herded passengers off a bus in the western suburb of Nanterre late Wednesday and set it alight.

Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin said the events "should lead to an immediate response."

"We cannot accept the unacceptable," he told reporters in the northern suburb of Cergy-Pontoise. "There will be arrests. ... That is our responsibility."

Villepin also said efforts should be directed to "revitalize" troubled neighborhoods, and repeated the government's insistence that authorities rid France of "lawless zones" where youth gangs operate.

The overnight attacks and recent ambushes on police have raised concern about the changing character of suburban violence, which is seemingly more premeditated than last year's spontaneous outcry and no longer restricted to the housing projects. The use of handguns was unusual -- last year's rioters were armed primarily with crowbars, stones, sticks or gasoline bombs.

Regional authorities said the Nanterre bus line, which passes near Paris' financial district, had not been considered at a high risk of attack. Francois Saglier, director of bus service at the RATP, said the attacks happened "without prior warning and not necessarily in neighborhoods considered difficult."

[...]

The transit authority in the Essonne region south of Paris on Wednesday suspended nighttime bus service for security reasons following "multiple incidents," including a tear gas bomb.

France's inability to better integrate minorities and recent violence against police are becoming major political issues as the campaign heats up for next year's presidential and parliamentary elections.

Defense Minister Michele Alliot-Marie, who is considering whether to run for president, said that attacks demonstrate "a desire to kill."

"Some individuals are looking for provocations, and sometimes go further," she said on i-Tele television. She acknowledged people facing unemployment and living in overcrowded housing projects "have trouble finding their place" in society.

More evidence of support for the jihad in high places in modern, moderate Indonesia. From AP, with thanks to DFS:

Two Islamic militants jailed for the Bali bombings that killed 202 people were freed yesterday and nine others had their sentences reduced to mark the end of the Islamic fasting month, officials said.

Indonesia traditionally cuts prison terms for inmates who exhibit good behavior on national holidays and the justice ministry said more than 43,000 convicts benefited this time.

But the decision to include convicted terrorists was likely to anger countries that lost citizens in the Oct. 12, 2002, attacks on two crowded nightclubs.

"After what I've survived, to see these people get rewarded ... it's something we Westerners just don't understand," said Australian Peter Hughes, who suffered burns over 54 percent of his body.

Yep.

It turns out that the Somali cabdrivers in Minneapolis who refused to carry passengers with alcohol were inspired by the Muslim Brotherhood, as part of a larger effort to bring Sharia to the United States. For what may seem to be a pragmatic and fair solution -- the airport's initial plan to color-code the cabs as Sharia-compliant and non-Sharia-compliant -- actually opens the door to numerous other Sharia provisions in the U.S., as Daniel Pipes has pointed out. Will an unmarried man and woman be allowed to share a cab? A man carrying a ham sandwich? This kind of effort, especially now that the Ikhwan turns out to be behind it, must be seen for what it is and resisted strenuously.

"Airport taxi flap about alcohol has deeper significance," by Katherine Kersten in the Star Tribune, with thanks to Fjordman:

The taxi controversy at the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport has caught the nation's attention. But the dispute may go deeper than the quandary over whether to accommodate Somali Muslim cabdrivers who refuse to carry passengers carrying alcohol. Behind the scenes, a struggle for power and religious authority is apparently playing out.

At the Starbucks coffee shop in Minneapolis' Cedar-Riverside neighborhood, a favorite Somali gathering spot, holidaymakers celebrating Eid, the end of Ramadan, filled the tables on Monday. Several taxis were parked outside.

An animated circle of Somalis gathered when the question of the airport controversy was raised.

"I was surprised and shocked when I heard it was an issue at the airport," said Faysal Omar. "Back in Somalia, there was never any problem with taking alcohol in a taxi."

Jama Dirie said, "If a driver doesn't pick up everyone, he should get his license canceled and get kicked out of the airport."

Two of the Somalis present defended the idea that Islam prohibits cabdrivers from transporting passengers with alcohol. An argument erupted. The consensus seemed to be that only a small number of Somalis object to transporting alcohol. It's a matter of personal opinion, not Islamic law, several men said.

Ahmed Samatar, a nationally recognized expert on Somali society at Macalester College, confirmed that view. "There is a general Islamic prohibition against drinking," he said, "but carrying alcohol for people in commercial enterprise has never been forbidden. There is no basis in Somali cultural practice or legal tradition for that.

"This is one of those new concoctions."It is being foisted on the Somali community by an inside or outside group," he added. "I do not know who."

But many Somali drivers at the airport are refusing to carry passengers with alcohol. When I asked Patrick Hogan, Metropolitan Airports Commission spokesman, for his explanation, he forwarded a fatwa, or religious edict, that the MAC had received. The fatwa proclaims that "Islamic jurisprudence" prohibits taxi drivers from carrying passengers with alcohol, "because it involves cooperating in sin according to the Islam."

The fatwa, dated June 6, 2006, was issued by the "fatwa department" of the Muslim American Society, Minnesota chapter, and signed by society officials.

The society is mediating the conflict between the cab drivers and the MAC. That seems odd, since the society itself clearly has a stake in the controversy's outcome.

How did the MAC connect with the society? "The Minnesota Department of Human Rights recommended them to us to help us figure out how to handle this problem," Hogan said.

Omar Jamal, director of the Somali Justice Advocacy Center, thinks he knows why the society is promoting a "no-alcohol-carry" agenda with no basis in Somali culture. "MAS is an Arab group; we Somalis are African, not Arabs," he said. "MAS wants to polarize the world, create two camps. I think they are trying to hijack the Somali community for their Middle East agenda. They look for issues they can capitalize on, like religion, to rally the community around. The majority of Somalis oppose this, but they are vulnerable because of their social and economic situation."

The society

What is the Muslim American Society? In September 2004 the Chicago Tribune published an investigative article. The society was incorporated in 1993, the paper reported, and is the name under which the U.S. branch of the Muslim Brotherhood operates.

The Muslim Brotherhood was founded in Egypt in 1928 by Hassan al-Banna. The Tribune described the Brotherhood as "the world's most influential Islamic fundamentalist group."Because of its hard-line beliefs, the U.S. Brotherhood has been an increasingly divisive force within Islam in America, fueling the often bitter struggle between moderate and conservative Muslims," the paper reported.

The international Muslim Brotherhood "preaches that religion and politics cannot be separated and that governments eventually should be Islamic," according to the Tribune. U.S. members emphasize that they follow American laws, but want people here to convert to Islam so that one day a majority will support a society governed by Islamic law.

In Mason, Ohio, as well as in many other places around the country, religious observance suddenly appears to be acceptable in public schools, after decades of court rulings against it -- provided, that is, that the religious people in question are Muslim. "Parents Claim Discrimination Against Christian Students," from WCPO.com, with thanks to Janet Levy:

Some Mason residents are claiming their school district is discriminating against Christian students, and giving special treatment to Muslim students.

The accusations came after office space was made available to two students who were observing Ramadan.

District leaders said they set aside the space so Muslim students who were fasting for Ramadan didn't have to be in the cafeteria during lunchtime.

They said the students could have prayed in that room if they wanted to.

Some say that decision is favoring one religion over another.

Sharon Poe and Mason School Board Member Jennifer Miller said public schools like Mason High School are forcing Christianity out of the hallways.

Examples they give include the fact that Easter break is now called Spring break.

And nativity scenes are also not allowed on school grounds.

They claim that Christian students are being discriminated against.

They argue that if Christian students can't share their religion at school, no one should be able to.

Sharon Poe is a Mason resident.

"I want to make sure that it is being fair for every religious group in the school. We can't stipulate that's what's good for one is not good for another. This is a public education facility."

All too often this happens: the victim of rape is punished -- in part because, after all, she must have brought it on herself, and also because the moral crime involved is that which results from her own impurity, however unwilling she was. "Teenage girl murdered by brother in 'honor killing,'" from AFP, with thanks to DFS:

ANKARA -- A 15-year-old girl who gave birth to a child that she said resulted from a rape became the latest victim of so-called "honor killings" in Turkey, newspapers said Monday.

The young girl, from a mainly Kurdish town near Turkey's eastern border with Iran, was murdered by an elder brother Saturday, press reports said. The victim, named only as Naile, had apparently not been aware that she was pregnant until she started feeling unwell and was admitted to a hospital, where she gave birth to a boy, the reports added.

She later told her mother that the pregnancy had resulted from a rape. When other members of the family heard the news, the elder brother shot her dead at point-blank range in a street of the town, and then fled.

Anti-dhimmitude from Australia's Federal Sex Discrimination Commissioner Pru Goward. "Sheik's sexist comments create storm," an update on this story from AAP:

Federal Sex Discrimination Commissioner Pru Goward believes the comments are an incitement to crime.

"Young Muslim men who now rape women can cite this in court, can quote this man ... their leader in court," she told the Nine Network.

She wants him to go, but did not make clear whether she wanted to him to leave the country or step down as a leader of the Islamic community.

"It's time we stopped just saying he should apologise. It is time the Islamic community did more then say they were horrified. I think it is time he left," Ms Goward said.

Victorian Liberal backbencher Sophie Mirabella wants the sheik to consider moving back to the Middle East.

"I have a message for Sheik Alhilali: This is Australia, not Iran, and violence and degradation of women is not acceptable," she said.

More senior members of government were also scathing.

"Certainly I think if a religious leader in the Catholic Church or the Anglican Church or in Judaism was to make these sorts of statements, they would be getting a very severe rap over the knuckles, at the very least," Health Minister Tony Abbott told the Nine Network.

"He's wrong. He should be reprimanded and it's up to ordinary, decent Australians to make it clear that he is wrong."

Treasurer Peter Costello urged other Muslims to pull the sheik into line.

"I hope that the moderate Muslim leaders will speak out today and condemn these comments," he told the Seven Network."

Opposition Leader Kim Beazley said the sheik's comments were offensive and should be corrected by the Islamic community.

Not much luck so far: Keysar Trad says earlier in the article that this has all been taken out of context:

President of the Islamic Friendship Council of Australia, Keysar Trad, said the sheik's comments had been misrepresented, although he admitted his analogies could have been better.

"From what I understand, he was talking about the context of encouraging people to abstinence before getting married," Mr Trad said.

"His references to exposed meat etc was a very poor example that was meant to be a reference to both men and women, he wasn't talking about Islamic dress, he wasn't talking about rape."

Oh, really now. From the earlier item:

Sheik Hilali said there were women who "sway suggestively" and wore make-up and immodest dress ... "and then you get a judge without mercy (rahma) and gives you 65 years".

It appears that Musharraf's recent book-tour attempts to present himself as only a reluctant anti-jihadist have not mollified the Islamic hardliners in Pakistan. "Pakistan Islamists slam Musharraf, US in Eid sermons," from AFP, :

ISLAMABAD - President Pervez Musharraf led millions of Pakistanis in prayer on the Muslim holiday of Eid Al Fitr Wednesday, amid calls by Islamic hardliners for his ousting and for the defeat of the United States.

Security was heavy from the capital Islamabad to the southern port city of Karachi as people flocked to mosques and open air services, with thousands of extra police guarding places of worship and commercial areas.

Musharraf and senior officials offered prayers at the giant Faisal Mosque in Islamabad, where he later mixed with the congregation, the state-run Associated Press of Pakistan said.

In a message issued on the eve of Eid, Musharraf urged Pakistanis to counter terrorists and the “misleading propaganda of those possessing negative tendencies”.

But leading Islamist politician Qazi Hussain Ahmad used his Eid sermon to thousands of people in the eastern city of Lahore to oppose American policies and Musharraf’s support of the US since 2001.

“America and its allies will face defeat in Iraq and Afghanistan.... We will take back our land from American agents,” Ahmad said at the Mansoora complex of his Jamaat-e-Islami fundamentalist party.

Ahmad also said an alleged US threat to bomb Pakistan “back to the Stone Age” unless it backed the invasion of Afghanistan following the September 11, 2001 attacks was itself “a threat amounting to terrorism”.

Musharraf said in his memoirs published last month that former deputy US secretary of state Richard Armitage gave the warning to Pakistan’s then-head of intelligence in September 2001. Armitage denies the claim.

Meanwhile the founder of Pakistan’s Lashkar-e-Taiba Kashmiri militant group, Hafez Mohammad Saeed, called in a separate sermon for “holy war” against anyone who showed aggression towards Islam.

Aggression against Islam, of course, being any defense against the global jihad.

An update to this story. "BA employee rejects 'cross' offer," from the BBC, with thanks to Kasper:

A British Airways employee fighting to openly wear a cross necklace at work has rejected a compromise deal.

Nadia Eweida, 55, said BA has offered her a job in recruitment where she would not have to conceal her cross.

The check-in worker, from Twickenham, south-west London, plans to sue BA for religious discrimination after being told to conceal her necklace.

The airline said its uniform policy stated such items could be worn if concealed underneath the uniform.

Ms Eweida told the BBC she did not see why she should compromise "when my colleagues of other faiths are there in public view in uniform and they are accepting of their religious apparel".

One will recall that the original deadline was June 29 for Iran to respond to the incentives package proposal, some of which it is apparently receiving anyway in spite of its lack of compliance. Western diplomats said they would expect that response in "weeks, not months." Nearly four months later, nothing has happened.

Well, one thing has: Iran has expanded its capacity to enrich uranium, the very thing it was supposed to stop. "Iran expands controversial nuclear work," by Nasser Karimi, from AP:

TEHRAN, Iran - Iran has expanded its controversial nuclear work by starting a second cascade of centrifuges to enrich uranium, a semiofficial news agency reported Wednesday

The news came as world powers moved toward introducing a draft resolution in the U.N. Security Council that would impose limited sanctions on Iran because of its refusal to cease enrichment -- a process that can produce material for nuclear power reactors or weapons.

The Iranian Students News Agency quoted an anonymous official Wednesday as saying that Iran had started a second cascade of centrifuges two weeks ago and that "gas will be injected into the cascade during the current week."

"We will exploit the new product from the injection," ISNA quoted the official as saying, meaning that Iran would use the enriched uranium obtained by inserting gas into the centrifuges.

The report could not be immediately corroborated as Iranian officials were on holiday for the Muslim holiday of Eid al-Fitr that marks the end of the holy month of Ramadan.

Neither the official Islamic Republic News Agency nor state television and radio carried the report by ISNA, an agency that receives state funding via the national universities.

Diplomats in Vienna said this week that Iran has started its second cascade of centrifuges in Natanz. The move violates a resolution of the International Atomic Energy Agency, a U.N. watchdog group that has required that Iran cease all enrichment-related activity.

Iran produced a small batch of enriched uranium in February from a cascade of 164 centrifuges at its nuclear plant at Natanz in central Iran. Iran says it plans to install 3,000 centrifuges at Natanz by the end of this year.

Production of enough uranium to fuel a reactor would require 54,000 centrifuges. Although Iran is nowhere near that goal, its successful operation of more cascades of centrifuges indicates the country is gradually mastering the complexities of producing enriched uranium.

President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said Monday his country's nuclear capability had increased tenfold despite Western pressure to curb its atomic program.

[...]

The U.S. and its European allies are circulating a draft U.N. Security Council resolution that would ban the sale of missile and nuclear technology to Iran and deny the country certain assistance from the International Atomic Energy Agency.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel said there is "no choice" but to pursue sanctions against Iran after Tehran's refusal to halt uranium enrichment.

[...]

China and Russia, which can veto Security Council resolutions, are reportedly pushing for continued dialogue with Iran instead of punishment.

Anti-dhimmitude from Argentine prosecutors. By Oscar Serrat for AP, with thanks to Looney Tunes:

BUENOS AIRES, Argentina - Argentine prosecutors asked a federal judge on Wednesday to order the arrest of former Iranian President Hashemi Rafsanjani and seven others for the 1994 bombing of a Jewish cultural center that killed scores of people.

The decision to attack the center "was undertaken in 1993 by the highest authorities of the then-government of
Iran," prosecutor Alberto Nisman said at a news conference.

He said the actual attack was entrusted to the Lebanon-based group Hezbollah.

The worst terrorist attack ever on Argentine soil, the bombing of the Jewish cultural center in Buenos Aires killed 85 people and injured more than 200 when an explosive-laden vehicle detonated near the building.

Iran's government has vehemently denied any involvement in the attack following repeated accusations by Jewish community and other leaders here.

Iranian authorities contacted here by The Associated Press said they would have no comment.

Women are abandoned "meat" and temptations from Satan. All this justifies Sharia provisions about veiling, of course, and thus is part of the overall imperative to impose Sharia on the rest of us.

Taj Din al-Hilali has a history of outrageous statements.

By Richard Kerbaj in The Australian, with thanks to David:

THE nation's most senior Muslim cleric has blamed immodestly dressed women who don't wear Islamic headdress for being preyed on by men and likened them to abandoned "meat" that attracts voracious animals.

In a Ramadan sermon that has outraged Muslim women leaders, Sydney-based Sheik Taj Din al-Hilali also alluded to the infamous Sydney gang rapes, suggesting the attackers were not entirely to blame.

While not specifically referring to the rapes, brutal attacks on four women for which a group of young Lebanese men received long jail sentences, Sheik Hilali said there were women who "sway suggestively" and wore make-up and immodest dress ... "and then you get a judge without mercy (rahma) and gives you 65 years".

"But the problem, but the problem all began with who?" he asked....

In the religious address on adultery to about 500 worshippers in Sydney last month, Sheik Hilali said: "If you take out uncovered meat and place it outside on the street, or in the garden or in the park, or in the backyard without a cover, and the cats come and eat it ... whose fault is it, the cats or the uncovered meat?

"The uncovered meat is the problem."

The sheik then said: "If she was in her room, in her home, in her hijab, no problem would have occurred."

He said women were "weapons" used by "Satan" to control men.

"It is said in the state of zina (adultery), the responsibility falls 90 per cent of the time on the woman. Why? Because she possesses the weapon of enticement (igraa)."

For centuries -- notably, although not universally, in central Asia, Eastern Europe, and West Africa -- jihad supremacism for many Muslims lay dormant and even dropped out of the Muslim consciousness. But now jihadists are using chapter and verse of Qur'an and Sunnah to teach their vision of Islam to cultural Muslims. And they are doing so quite often through the Internet.

From MEMRI:

In an article in the Saudi daily Al-Riyadh, columnist Fares bin Hazam reports that both preachers in mosques and online propaganda are inciting young Muslims to wage jihad. [1] An interview with a young Muslim who went to fight in Afghanistan, also in Al-Riyadh, provides first-hand testimony confirming this claim.

The following are excerpts from the article and the interview:
Saudi Columnist: Preachers in Mosques Urge Worshipers to Join the Jihad in Iraq and Afghanistan

Bin Hazam writes in his article: "The business with Afghanistan will never end as long as the 'duty of jihad' continues to live in [our] society, in mosques, in Friday [sermons], and on the Internet...

"After the fall of the Taliban and the subsequent Guantanamo crisis... there was increasing talk about the need to investigate our youth's growing [inclination] towards jihad, and about the need to search for the reasons that motivate them to go to Afghanistan and to other countries...

"The call to investigate these reasons is despicable; it is a tasteless joke. [One might think] that the reasons are unknown, that we are not aware of our situation [and need to conduct an] investigation in order to discover why [our young people] went forth and are still going forth [to wage jihad]... The reasons are obvious. Many of us know them, and there is no need for a scientific study or for any other [kind of study] to reveal them...

"Since the causes are known, do we lack courage to deal with [this problem]? [I believe that] we do. Our lack of courage has been apparent ever since we invented the excuse of 'external [influences],' and began to toy with it and wave it at every opportunity. I do not know where these [external influences] come from, since it was we who sent our young men [to Afghanistan] in the first place, before we ever heard of [these influences] that allegedly come [from outside].

"Some preachers, [namely] those who fear the censor, deceive him by being implicit in their incitement to [wage] jihad in Iraq or Afghanistan. They speak in their sermons about the merits of jihad without mentioning a particular region. They speak in general terms that can be applied to any location, even to our [own] country. During the prayer, the details start to pour in thick and fast: first, [a call to wage jihad] in Palestine, [which serve as] a smokescreen, and then [calls for jihad] in Afghanistan, Iraq and Chechnya, and finally... the call 'oh Allah, grant them victory everywhere!' 'Everywhere' includes our [own] country... and we say 'amen' after the preacher calls [upon Allah] to help the mujahideen in our [own] country..."

Read it all.

While many Western analysts continue to portray them as a series of nationalist struggles, the jihads in Afghanistan, the Balkans, Iraq and elsewhere continue to attract many fighters from other countries, who wish to participate in jihad in the way of Allah -- jihad fi sabeel Allah. "Jihadis turn from Iraq to Afghanistan: Western forces offer more inviting targets," by Sebastian Rotella in the Chicago Tribune:

PARIS -- The conflict in Iraq is drawing fewer foreign fighters as Muslim extremists aspiring to battle the West turn their attention back to the symbolically important and increasingly violent turf of Afghanistan, European and U.S. anti-terror officials say.

The shift of jihadis to Afghanistan this year suggests that Al Qaeda and its allies, armed with new tactics honed in Iraq, are coming full circle five years after U.S.-led forces ousted the Taliban mullahs.

Until Sept. 11, 2001, Afghanistan was the land of jihad, hallowed ground where fighters from across the Muslim world helped vanquish the Soviet Union in the 1980s, fought alongside the Taliban in the 1990s and filled terror training camps overseen by Osama bin Laden. Loss of the Afghan sanctuary scattered the networks and sent bin Laden fleeing toward the Pakistani border region, where many anti-terror officials believe he remains.

After the fall of Saddam Hussein in 2003, jihadis from the Arabian Peninsula, North Africa and Europe flocked to confront the U.S.-led coalition in Iraq. Although foreigners have been a minority in the Iraqi insurgency, militants such as Jordanian Abu Musab al-Zarqawi played a major role in spectacular suicide attacks and kidnap-murders.

But insurgent leaders in Iraq are now mainly interested in foreign recruits ready to die in suicide attacks, anti-terror officials say. Moreover, the conflict is dominated by sectarian violence between Sunni and Shiite Mu