January 2007 Archives

More on the latest foiled British jihad plot. "Source: British Beheading Plot Was 'Days Away,'" by Brian Ross and Alexis Debat at the ABC News blog :

A plot to kidnap and behead a British soldier on videotape was only "days away" and led to the arrests today of nine men in Birmingham, England, a Scotland Yard source tells ABC News.

Most of the nine men are described as British citizens of Pakistani descent who are being held under Britain's new anti-terror laws.

A British intelligence source tells ABC News that a British soldier had already been selected as the victim, based on instructions the men allegedly received by e-mail from "outside the country."

An important new initiative is underway. Details at FrontPage:

The Islamic Mein Kampf.

In a rational world, American universities would lead the way in exposing the noxious roots of Islamic terrorism. Instead of psychoanalyzing Rush Limbaugh or President Bush, they would devote their attentions to what makes terrorists tick. Readers of FrontPage Magazine are uniquely educated about the unholy alliance between academia and jihadists. Thus, we have launched the Terrorism Awareness Project -- www.TerrorismAwareness.org -- to educate college students directly.

In conjunction with the organization and website, we have produced the flash movie The Islamic Mein Kampf, as well as a scholarly pamphlet by the same name written by David Meir-Levi. Together, they provide a chilling and compelling testimony to the depths of bitter Islamic hatred and the threat a growing radical Muslim population poses to Europe, Israel, the United States, the Jewish people, and the world.

I am pleased to say that I'm part of this effort. From FrontPage today is also is this: "Introducing the Terrorism Awareness Project."

The David Horowitz Freedom Center has launched the Terrorism Awareness Project to combat the complacency and ignorance about the intentions of the radical Islamists who declared a holy war on the United States and the West on September 11, 2001.

If one thing was clear in the aftermath of the attack, it was this: the terrorists would be back. But the alarms 9/11 set off were soon muted by complacency and self doubt. After overthrowing the Taliban, the U.S. soon returned to the illusion of peace and security and confusion of purpose that had marked the Clinton era, when the Jihad first began to strike against our America. Because of the campaign by the “anti-war” movement, our populace as a whole is ignorant of the threat, doesn’t know the enemy, and is unaware of their true intent, capabilities and resolve. This is especially true of college students who face a daily barrage of anti-war and anti-American propaganda. The Terrorism Awareness Project is designed to make them aware of the threat of jihad and the struggle that lies ahead if this nation is to survive its assault.

The Freedom Center designed the Terrorism Awareness Project to put informative materials about the war on terror into the hands of millions of college students. The Project will identify campus coordinators at U.S. universities and colleges who want to make terrorism a priority at their schools. It will drop flash videos like The Islamic Mein Kampf directly into students’ and faculty members’ email boxes. It is placing a series of ads beginning with “What Americans Need to Know About Jihad” in all the leading college newspapers. It has prepared three pamphlets--The Nazi Roots of Palestinian Nationalism; The Islamic Mein Kampf, and What Every American Needs To Know About Jihad—which will be distributed throughout the university community. All three can be downloaded from the TAP website (www.terrorismawareness.org.)

The focal point for this campus campaign will be Terrorism Awareness Month. The Project’s campus coordinators including will distribute Terrorism Awareness Guide which will provide a brief history of the jihad and a bibliography of crucial books on the objectives of radical Islam. There will be well publicized screenings of “Obsession” (a documentary on the Islamists’ jihad recently featured on Fox News) and similar programs followed by panel discussions of experts on radical Islam such as Robert Spencer, Steven Emerson and Daniel Pipes. In addition to these public events, TAP chapter members will evaluate the Islamic or Mideast Studies departments of their campuses, analyze the bias of the reading materials and classroom discussions, and ask to present competing ideas in class. They will conduct an organized public relations campaign with their campus newspapers, including opeds and letters to the editor.

1938 Alert from The Australian, with thanks to Twostellas:

THE US believes it has the first evidence of direct involvement by Tehran against US forces in Iraq, suspecting Iranians were behind a January 20 attack on a military compound in Karbala in which five US soldiers were killed.

The news will boost the Bush administration's rhetoric on the need to forcibly curb Iran - a stance creating increasing nervousness among European allies and in the US Congress.

Citing unnamed US government officials, CNN said yesterday the Department of Defence was investigating whether the attack, carried out by men wearing uniforms resembling those of US troops, was carried out by Iranians or by Iraqi fighters taught by Iranians.

"We believe it's possible the executors of the attack were Iranian or Iranian-trained," one of the officials told CNN.

"This was beyond what we have seen militias or foreign fighters do," the official said.

Traditional Muslim Alert: of course Mohammed Saud, mohammed_souljha@hotmail.co.uk, who threatened to kill me in an email he sent me in December, is indeed not an extremist.

He recently wrote this in an email that was forwarded to me by a Jihad Watch reader who exchanged emails with him about his threatening me:

i am not an extremist, but i did threaten to kill a man who insulted islam.

What's "extremist" about that? The idea that people who insult Islam and Muhammad should be killed is mainstream in Islamic law, and is taught by all the schools of Islamic jurisprudence. I don't accept the assertion that I have done so by shedding light on the elements of Islam that jihadists use to justify their actions, but that is a separate matter. From the perspective of Islamic law there is nothing "extremist" about Mohammed Saud at all.

Saud also recalls romeosay@hotmail.com, who also threatened me some time ago. In the course of his threats he said:

I will be violent against anyone who hurts muslim feelings about Prophet.

It is a religion of peace for everyone until some duckhead sprews out his damn saliva on a senstive topic as this. Spencer will be delivered.

A religion of peace, until you insult us. Then we kill you.

John VI Cantacuzenes Alert from AKI, with thanks to Fjordman:

Tehran, 29 Jan. (AKI) - During a meeting with Russian foreign minister Igor Ivanov in Tehran, Iran's supreme leader Ali Khamenei was reported as calling on Monday for a cooperation between the two countries to halt US ambitions in the region. "The alliance between the Islamic Republic and the Russian Federation can stop US ambitions to conquer the region," Khamenei was quoted as saying by Iranian state television.

Russia and Iran are close commercial allies and Tehran's Bushehr nuclear power plant is being built with Russian technology despite the staunch opposition of the US which fears Iran is trying to build atomic weapons.

"Our two countries can forge a tie able to influence the political and economic choices of the region and halt America's ambition to rule the world," Khamenei said, also suggesting the creation of a joint gas exporting group like Opec based on their command of the world's largest natural gas reserves.

What madness has overtaken them, that they would betray a genuine ally for a false ally? Mahmoud "Raise rifles against Israel" Abbas is an ally? Of course, the genuine ally is doing it too. From AFP, with thanks to Kemaste:

WASHINGTON (AFP) - US President George W. Bush has ordered the transfer of about 86 million dollars in aid to strengthen security forces loyal to Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas, the White House said.

Confirmation of the US aid came a day after an Islamic militant carried out the first suicide bombing inside Israel in nine months and as Abbas' Fatah party is locked in a violent power struggle with the Islamist movement Hamas.

The aid is part of a broader US push to revive peace negotiations between Abbas and Israel and comes ahead of a meeting here Friday of the so-called Quartet of Mideast mediators -- the US, Russia,
European Union and United Nations.

US officials said the aid, described as non-lethal assistance including training, vehicles and uniforms, would help Abbas counter militant attacks on Israel like Monday's suicide bombing in the Red Sea resort of Eilat which killed three Israelis plus the bomber.

"The idea is to build the legitimate security forces, to help provide law and order in Gaza and the West Bank, fight terror, and to facilitate movement and access especially in Gaza," said national security spokesman Gordon Johndroe.

Muslims in Britain plotted to behead a Muslim soldier of the British military, and show the beheading on the Internet.

By Adam Fresco and Daniel McGrory for The TimesOnline, with thanks to all who sent this in:

Security services said today that they had foiled a suspected plot to kidnap and torture a British Muslim soldier recently returned from service abroad before beheading him live on the internet.

Eight men were arrested in a series of dawn raids at 12 addresses in Birmingham. John Reid, the Home Secretary, has been informed of the arrests and is receiving regular updates about the operation.

Security sources said that the carefully planned operation had averted the alleged plan to kill the soldier, which was in its later stages.

The sources said that the alleged plotters planned to force their victim to plead for his life in online videos before torturing him and executing him much as Ken Bigley, the Liverpool hostage, was killed in Iraq in October 2004. The beheading would have been shown live on an extremist website.

The target, a man in his 20s who has not been named, is thought to have found out about the plot. He is now said to be in protective police custody. It is understood that a surveillance operation by anti-terror officers had been going on for several months.

In an unusual move, West Midlands police have called a press conference for later today to give more details about the police operation and to reassure the local communities.

A Home Office spokeswoman said: "We can confirm that a major counter terrorism operation took place earlier today led by West Midlands Police.

"The Home Secretary was fully briefed on the operation and is receiving regular updates as developments occur. This operation is a reminder of the real and serious nature of the terrorist threat we face."

I was supposed to debate Dinesh D'Souza again tomorrow night on the online show "Libertarian Politics Live," but I have just received word that D'Souza has canceled. The show may be rescheduled at a later date.

You can hear the first debate, on the Lores Rizkalla Show a few nights ago, here, and my review of D'Souza's book here.

As far as I know, however, the CPAC debate is still on for March 1, and I am still willing and eager to debate Dinesh D'Souza anytime, anywhere.

More of this sort of thing, this time in Spain.

By Itamar Eichner for Ynet News, with thanks to Davida:

While the rest of Europe marked the UN-established International Holocaust Remembrance Day on January 27, a small town in Spain opted instead to commemorate the 'Day of Palestinian Genocide'.

Ciempozuelos, a Madrid suburb home to less than 20,000 residents, announced that it would hold ceremonies and public events in honor of the 'genocide of the Palestinian people'.

Following the town's announcement Israel's Ambassador to Spain Victor Harel issued an urgent message to Ciempozeulos mayor Susana León, a member of the ruling Spanish Socialist Workers Party (PSOE), asking him to reconsider his decision. Harel also turned to Spanish Minister of Foreign Affairs Miguel Moratinos and the PSOE secretary general.

The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) publicly slammed the decision as "shameful."

In an open letter to León the ADL wrote: "Applying the term 'genocide' to the Arab-Israeli conflict encourages hatred toward the State of Israel and deliberately insults those of us, both Jews and non-Jews, who seek to solemnly commemorate the victims of the Nazi campaign of slaughter."

The affair was covered extensively by the Spanish press. El Mundo, the country's largest daily newspaper, ran an editorial on the Ciempozeulos affair under the title – 'An insult to Israel'.

The coverage led to numerous Spanish citizens contacting the Israeli embassy to voice their support for Israel, while at the same time the Ciempozeulos administration was flooded by angry phone calls from outraged citizens.

Following the request of the Spanish Foreign Affairs Ministry the town eventually decided to cancel 'Palestinian Genocide Day' as well as choosing to forgo any of the original Holocaust ceremonies.

Any trace of the affair was stricken from the town's official website.

Down the memory hole.

Aid and comfort to the enemy. "Judge: Doctor Can't Treat Terrorists," by Larry Neumeister for Associated Press, with thanks to Mackie:

NEW YORK (AP) -- A doctor accused of pledging to treat al-Qaida members can be prosecuted because medical care counts as material support to terrorists under federal law, a judge said Tuesday.

Dr. Rafiq Abdus Sabir, an Ivy League-educated doctor, had argued it was unconstitutional to prosecute a doctor for providing medical services.

He was arrested in May 2005 at his home in Boca Raton, Fla., accused in a plot to assist terrorist organizations along with a New York jazz musician, a Brooklyn bookstore owner and a former Washington, D.C., cabdriver. Sabir has pleaded not guilty and remained jailed since his arrest....

The judge said Sabir is not charged merely for being a doctor or for performing medical services.

"Here, Sabir is alleged essentially to have volunteered as a medic for the al-Qaida military, offering to make himself available specifically to attend to the wounds of injured fighters," she said. "Much as a military force needs weapons, ammunition, trucks, food and shelter, it needs medical personnel to tend to its wounded."

"An embarrassment to the rule of law." Yes. This kind of shoddy effort by prosecutors not only victimizes people who are possibly innocent -- Khader Hamide and Michel Shehadeh -- but it victimizes the rest of us if they are guilty. From AP, with thanks to Mackie:

LOS ANGELES (AP) -- An immigration judge ordered the federal government Tuesday to halt its 20-year effort to deport two Palestinian men accused of terrorist ties.

Judge Bruce J. Einhorn ruled the government had denied Khader Hamide and Michel Shehadeh, members of the so-called "L.A. Eight," due process by keeping them in legal limbo for so many years and being unprepared to prosecute the case.

In his 11-page opinion, Einhorn described the proceedings as "a festering wound on the body of respondents and an embarrassment to the rule of law." He scolded the government for failing to release evidence favorable to the men after he had ordered it.

The two men, five other Palestinians and a Kenyan faced deportation since 1987. They were arrested on suspicion of association with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, a radical offshoot of the Palestine Liberation Organization, which has opposed peace negotiations between the PLO and Israel. The U.S. government considers it a terrorist organization.

The eight have denied being members, and immigrant rights groups have called the case politically motivated.

Attorney Marc Van Der Hout, who represents the "L.A. Eight," said the judge's order will make it safer for immigrants to express political views.

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement "finds the judge's decision troubling as a matter of fact and law, and the agency is considering its legal options," according to an agency statement.

Daveed Gartenstein-Ross explains in FrontPage, in the course of an interview about his new book My Year Inside Radical Islam, how he was convinced as a new convert to Islam that the jihadists were right -- by their theological arguments. He went to work at what turned out to be a terror-linked charity, and gradually they convinced him that their views were Qur'anically correct.

This is no surprise. The jihadist appeal within the larger Muslim community is theological, calling Muslims to the observance of what they characterize as "pure Islam." Moderate Muslims have never mounted any significant counter-movement to this, although virtually everyone takes for granted that they have a strong and traditional theological basis within Islam for their views. This is the great Emperor's New Clothes aspect of today's public debate.

FP: So what was the process of radicalization inside Al Haramain, the radical Islamic charity you worked for? And how did it happen that teachings that you once held as abhorrent eventually struck you as compelling?

Gartenstein-Ross: When I took the job, I assumed that I wouldn't see eye-to-eye with my coworkers on some spiritual matters, but that we could simply agree to disagree. Little did I realize that my ideas would instead fall into line with theirs. There were a number of reasons for this. I felt a great deal of peer pressure to accept radical conclusions. I complied more and more with external manifestations of the faith (growing a beard, eating only with my right hand, rolling my pants legs up above my ankles, refusing to pet a dog or shake hands with women) that were themselves not radical, but coupled with the prevalent teachings inside Al Haramain pushed me in a radical direction. The biggest factor, however, was that over time I became persuaded intellectually by the theological case advanced by my coworkers and the visiting scholars who frequently joined us.

In accord with Islamic law. "Jail loos turned from East," by Jamie Pyatt in The Sun:

JAIL bosses are rebuilding toilets so Muslim inmates don’t have to use them while facing Mecca.

Thousands of pounds of taxpayers money are being spent to ensure lags are not offended.

The Islamic religion prohibits Muslims from facing or turning their backs on the Kiblah — the direction of prayer — when they visit the lav.

Muslim lags claimed they have had to sit sideways on prison WCs.

But after pressure from faith leaders the Home Office has agreed to turn the existing toilets 90 degrees at HMP Brixton in London.

The Home Office refused to reveal the cost of the new facilities — part of an “on-going refurbishment”.

One Muslim former inmate said: “The least the Prison Service can do is make sure people can practise their religion correctly in prison.”

A major victory. "US oks cases against accused terror-funding bank, from AP, with thanks to Gabrielle Goldwater:

Israelis and other foreign nationals can pursue claims in US courts accusing the Jordan-based Arab Bank of promoting Palestinian suicide attacks by funneling Saudi money to bombers' families, a judge ruled.

In a written decision in federal court in Brooklyn, US District Judge Nina Gershon upheld a lawsuit Monday filed under US law that gives non-US citizens access to courts in order to challenge violations of international laws or treaties.

"Bat Ye'or saw all this in 1994, when she said: ‘I do not see serious signs of a Europeanization of Islam anywhere, a move that would be expressed in a relativization of religion, a self-critical view of the history of Islamic imperialism...we are light years away from such a development...On the contrary, I think that we are participating in the Islamization of Europe, reflected both in daily occurrences and in our way of thinking...All the racist fanaticism that permeates the Arab countries and Iran has been manifested in Europe in recent years...’ Lewis was light years away from saying anything like this at that time, but it is good to see that he is catching up." -- Robert Spencer on the Islamization of Europe

Bernard Lewis has been wrong about a number of things. He was wrong, dead wrong, in his enthusiasm for the Oslo Accords. Indeed, he debated Douglas Feith once on this, and Feith, who did not know about Islam enough to discuss Muslim treaty-making and the model of Al-Hudaibiyyah, was without a main weapon. Nevertheless, he still managed to defeat Lewis soundly, purely on the basis of the disastrous wording of that agreement and on the consistent pattern of "Palestinian" ignoring of even the most limited promises that it had had to make.

Ask Lewis about his support for the Oslo Accords, and he replies, testily and laconically, "I was wrong." But he has never written about this. He has never explained what it was that he was wrong about. Was he wrong because Arafat was a bad man who couldn't be trusted? Was it something in the particular circumstances? Or was it, rather, something deeper, wider, more profound, something that means that any agreement made by Muslims with Infidels is going to be breached whenever and wherever possible? Does Lewis read about the history of Arab treaty-making with Israel? Surely he knows that every single agreement made by Israel with the Arabs, while being scrupulously observed in every jot and tittle by the Israelis, has always been violated by the Arabs whenever they can get away with it, and they have been able to get away with it quite often.

More attacks on Ashura ceremonies. Sunni/Shi'ite Jihad Update. "On Shiites' holiest day, 44 dead in Iraq," by Kim Gamel for Associated Press:

BAGHDAD, Iraq - Assailants struck Shiite worshippers in three Iraqi cities Tuesday, killing at least 39 people in bombings and ambushes during the climax of ceremonies marking Ashoura, the holiest day in the Shiite calendar. In apparent retaliation, mortar shells slammed into predominantly Sunni neighborhoods in Baghdad hours later, killing at least five people and wounding 20, officials said.

Tens of thousands of Shiites Muslims converged on the holy city of Karbala — where the 7th-century battle took place that cemented the schism between Sunnis and Shiites — beating their chest and heads to mark the death of the Prophet Muhammad's grandson. The entire city was sealed off, all vehicles were banned, and pilgrims were searched at numerous checkpoints, a day after the Iraqi army said it had foiled a plot by a messianic Shiite group to storm the nearby city of Najaf.

The bloodiest attack Tuesday occurred when a suicide bomber blew himself up among a crowd of worshippers entering a Shiite mosque, killing 19 people and wounding 54 in Mandali, a predominantly Shiite city northeast of Baghdad and near the Iranian border.

To the north, a bomb in a garbage can exploded as scores of Shiites — most them Kurds — were performing rituals in Khanaqin, a majority Kurdish city also near the Iranian border. At least 13 people were killed and 39 were wounded, police Maj. Idriss Mohammed said.

"I was participating in Ashoura ceremonies with my son and all of a sudden the bloodshed hit," Abdul Jasim Hassan said, holding his 11-year-old son, Hussein, whose right leg was bleeding.

Nawal Hasson said she pleaded with her husband not to go to the ceremonies but went with him when he refused to stay home.

"I had a feeling that something might happen, because terrorists are always targeting Shiites," she said.

The two bombings occurred on the edge of Diyala province, not far from Baqouba, where fighting has raged for weeks between Sunni insurgents, Shiite militiamen and U.S.-Iraqi troops.

[...]

Last year's Ashoura commemorations were largely peaceful, but suicide bombers killed 55 Shiites in 2005 and twin blasts killed at least 181 people in 2004.

Sunni/Shi'ite Jihad Update by Donna Abu-Nasr for Associated Press:

QATIF, Saudi Arabia -- Like many Saudi Shi'ites, Abdullah Abdul-Hussein is worried that if the government does not end anti-Shi'ite tirades by influential Sunni clerics, the sectarian conflict ravaging Iraq and threatening Lebanon could spread to his country.

"This rhetoric provokes trouble," said Abdul-Hussein, referring to recent statements from key members in Saudi Arabia's clerical establishment that have urged Sunnis around the world to expel Shi'ites from their lands.

"We are all citizens of the same country. The government should not allow such excess," said the 37-year-old merchant, expressing a worry shared by many in this mainly Shi'ite town.

Fears of sectarian tensions go beyond this sleepy oasis in Saudi Arabia's Eastern Province, where the kingdom's Shi'ite minority is centered. The bloodshed in Iraq and turmoil in Lebanon have enflamed the Shi'ite-Sunni divide across the Middle East and in much of the Islamic world....

Read it all for examples of Sunni/Shi'ite tensions and violence around the Islamic world.

"The subject peoples," [i.e., the dhimmis] according to a manual of Islamic law endorsed by Al-Azhar University in Cairo, must "pay the non-Muslim poll tax (jizya)" and "are distinguished from Muslims in dress, wearing a wide cloth belt (zunnar); are not greeted with ‘as-Salamu ‘alaykum’ [the traditional Muslim greeting, 'Peace be with you']; must keep to the side of the street; may not build higher than or as high as the Muslims’ buildings, though if they acquire a tall house, it is not razed; are forbidden to openly display wine or pork...recite the Torah or Evangel aloud, or make public display of their funerals or feastdays; and are forbidden to build new churches." ('Umdat al-Salik, o11.3, 5).

"Islamists threaten Yemeni Jews for selling wine," from Reuters:

SANAA, Jan 29 (Reuters) - Nearly a quarter Yemen's Jews have fled their village and sought refuge at a hotel in the Arab country after militant Islamists threatened to kill them for selling alcohol, a government official said on Monday.

The official, who asked not to be named, said authorities had deployed policemen around the hotel to protect the Jews, numbering at least 45, after they escaped the village of Al Salem in the northern province of Saada two weeks ago.

Just 200 Jews live in Yemen after thousands were evacuated to Israel in 1948.

"The Shi'ite militants of (Abdel-Malik) al-Houthi sent threats to them (Jews) because they sell wine," the official told Reuters. The Jewish community denied they sold wine.

Islam forbids the sale or drinking of alcohol.

The American Muslim Alliance (AMA), Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), Islamic Circle of North America (ICNA), Muslim Alliance in North America (MANA), Muslim American Society (MAS), Muslim Student Association-National (MSA-N), Muslim Ummah of North America (MUNA), Project Islamic Hope (PIH), and United Muslims of America (UMA) rush to the defense of Sami Al-Arian, an admitted member of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad.

Yet most officials and media talking heads will continue to assume that these are "moderate" groups.

"American Muslims Call Al-Arian Imprisonment 'Double Jeopardy,'" a press release from a coalition group, The American Muslim Taskforce on Civil Rights and Elections (AMT):

WASHINGTON, Jan. 29 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- The American Muslim Taskforce on Civil Rights and Elections (AMT), a national coalition of major American Muslim organizations, today said the new prison sentence given to former Florida professor Sami Al-Arian amounted to unconstitutional "double jeopardy."

Al-Arian recently began a hunger strike after being given a sentence of up to 18 months for refusing to testify before a grand jury in Virginia. He and his attorney say an early plea agreement freed him from further cooperation with the government. Al-Arian's supporters say he is being held in a rat and cockroach-infested prison and is being forced to wear dirty and inadequate clothing as a form of harassment.

In 2005, a Florida jury rejected federal charges that Al-Arian operated a cell for the Palestinian Islamic Jihad. Al-Arian later pleaded guilty to a lesser charge and was scheduled for release and deportation in April.

A lesser charge. See here what he really admitted to.

"The Americans Love Pepsi-Cola, We Love Death" Alert: the procession was going down the street while cutting their heads until the blood streamed down their faces, and then the bomber tried to stop them by...blowing himself up.

"Suicide attack targeting Shia procession kills 2 in Pak," from the Times of India:

ISLAMABAD: A suicide bomber intending to target a Shia procession on Monday blew himself up killing two people, including a policeman, and injuring seven others in Pakistan's Northwest Frontier province despite a heavy security blanket to check sectarian violence during Muharram.

The suicide attack in Dera Ismail Khan is the third to rock Pakistan in the last four days and comes two days after another bombing left 14 people dead in the NWFP capital, Peshawar. "He had a bomb strapped to his stomach and blew himself up," a senior provincial official said.

State run PTV said the suicide bomber intended to target a Shia process procession taken out during Muharram period. The bomber apparently refused to be searched and detonated explosives strapped to his body, which killed three persons including the attacker and police officer....

The suicide bombers suspected to be from the extremist groups of Sunni sect target the processions taken out by Shias during the period. Pakistani police and para-military troops have been put on high alert throughout the country.

David A. Bell thinks we overreacted to the largest attack ever on American soil. I, on the other hand, think that we haven't reacted strongly enough -- not so much militarily, although our response in that regard hasn't been properly focused, but in other ways: in dealing with the foreign policy dependence that arises from our use of oil, and in dealing with Muslim immigration into the West, and in calling to account Muslim advocacy groups in the U.S., asking that they cooperate actively with anti-terror efforts and work actively against the jihad ideology in American mosques.

"Was 9/11 really that bad? The attacks were a horrible act of mass murder, but history says we're overreacting," by Johns Hopkins professor David A. Bell in the LA Times:

IMAGINE THAT on 9/11, six hours after the assault on the twin towers and the Pentagon, terrorists had carried out a second wave of attacks on the United States, taking an additional 3,000 lives. Imagine that six hours after that, there had been yet another wave. Now imagine that the attacks had continued, every six hours, for another four years, until nearly 20 million Americans were dead. This is roughly what the Soviet Union suffered during World War II, and contemplating these numbers may help put in perspective what the United States has so far experienced during the war against terrorism.

It also raises several questions. Has the American reaction to the attacks in fact been a massive overreaction? Is the widespread belief that 9/11 plunged us into one of the deadliest struggles of our time simply wrong? If we did overreact, why did we do so? Does history provide any insight?

Certainly, if we look at nothing but our enemies' objectives, it is hard to see any indication of an overreaction. The people who attacked us in 2001 are indeed hate-filled fanatics who would like nothing better than to destroy this country. But desire is not the same thing as capacity, and although Islamist extremists can certainly do huge amounts of harm around the world, it is quite different to suggest that they can threaten the existence of the United States.

Yet a great many Americans, particularly on the right, have failed to make this distinction. For them, the "Islamo-fascist" enemy has inherited not just Adolf Hitler's implacable hatreds but his capacity to destroy. The conservative author Norman Podhoretz has gone so far as to say that we are fighting World War IV (No. III being the Cold War).

But it is no disrespect to the victims of 9/11, or to the men and women of our armed forces, to say that, by the standards of past wars, the war against terrorism has so far inflicted a very small human cost on the United States. As an instance of mass murder, the attacks were unspeakable, but they still pale in comparison with any number of military assaults on civilian targets of the recent past, from Hiroshima on down.

Youssef Ibrahim speaks truth to power in the New York Sun (news links in the original):

Ever wondered what might be the correct "Islamic" way to beat your wife, or what a Saudi princess's greatest wish might be if she were king?

The wires were buzzing Thursday with reports of "oohs" and "ahs" from the elitist World Economic Forum gathering in Davos, Switzerland, complete with applause for a Saudi royal princess, Lolwah al-Faisal, after she asserted that her first executive move would be to "let women drive."

Amazingly, according to the Associated Press news dispatch on this lame comment, the audience erupted in applause.

How can what passes as an elemental right in today's world — when uttered by a Saudi female belonging to the most oppressive, religiously fanatical ruling family in the world — be treated as a sign of progress in a kingdom of darkness?

Read it all.

The featured article at FrontPage this morning is my full review of Dinesh D'Souza's The Enemy at Home: The Cultural Left and Its Responsibility for 9/11:

Dinesh D'Souza's new book, The Enemy At Home: The Cultural Left and Its Responsibility for 9/11, is not all bad. He is absolutely right that Osama bin Laden's perception that Bill Clinton was weak in the 1990s led to the stepping-up of global jihad efforts. But the central point of the book is that "the cultural left in this country is responsible for causing 9/11," not only by fostering a view that America was weak, but by spreading around the world "a decadent American culture that angers and repulses traditional societies, especially those in the Islamic world that are being overwhelmed with this culture. In addition, the left is waging an aggressive global campaign to undermine the traditional patriarchal family and to promote secular values in non-Western cultures. This campaign has provoked a violent reaction from Muslims who believe that their most cherished beliefs and institutions are under assault." Therefore, "without the cultural left, 9/11 would not have happened."

In response, D'Souza calls for the American right to build a traditional values coalition with what he calls "traditional Muslims," who abhor both bin Laden and Britney Spears. "Admittedly," he acknowledges, "some on the right may feel uncomfortable about teaming up with Muslims. Yes, I would rather go to a baseball game or have a drink with Michael Moore than with the grand mufti of Egypt. But when it comes to core beliefs, I'd have to confess that I'm closer to the dignified fellow in the long robe and prayer beads than to the slovenly fellow with the baseball cap." Which core beliefs? D'Souza doesn't say, but the grand mufti of Egypt has declared sculpture un-Islamic, so perhaps he and D'Souza could get together for a fun evening of statue-smashing. Of course, that is one of the core beliefs of the mufti that no doubt D'Souza does not share. But this is just one example of D'Souza's propensity to make statements without apparently having examined their implications.

For although his book is focused on the Left, D'Souza has criticism for the Right also. He asserts that in order to cement the necessary alliance with these "traditional" Muslims, "the right must take three critical steps. First, stop attacking Islam. Conservatives have to cease blaming Islam for the behavior of the radical Muslims. Recently the right has produced a spate of Islamophobic tracts with titles like Islam Unveiled, Sword of the Prophet, and The Myth of Islamic Tolerance. There is probably no better way to repel traditional Muslims, and push them into the radical camp, than to attack their religion and their prophet." He offers no prescription for how his "traditional Muslims" can repel the appeal to violence that jihadists everywhere base on the teachings of "their religion and their prophet," for presumably in D'Souza's ideal world even Muslim reformers, since they insult Muslim sensibilities, would be forbidden to discuss the Islamic teachings that jihadists use today to make their case among Muslims. How anyone would in that case counter or repel this jihadist appeal D'Souza does not explain.

Conservatives also must also "stop holding silly seminars on whether Islam is compatible with democracy. In reality, a majority of the world's Muslims today live under democratic governments - in Indonesia, Malaysia, India, Bangladesh, Nigeria, and Turkey, not to mention Muslims living in Western countries. There is nothing in the Koran or the Islamic tradition that forbids democracy." And "if they want Sharia, let them have it." Of course, even if most Muslims today do live under democracies, to assume that this means Islam is compatible with democracy is like saying that most Russians loved Stalin's reign of terror, since they lived under it regime for so long.

But that is just a small example from one of the most poorly reasoned books I have ever read. There is so much wrong with it that a review that noted it all would be as long as the book itself, and many have already pointed out some of the holes in D'Souza's thesis: although Kathryn Lopez fawned over D'Souza in National Review, the New York Times, Glenn Beck, and others have given him a hard time. D'Souza's central contention, that the left has allied with Islamic jihadists and therefore the right should ally with "traditional Muslims" on the basis of shared moral values, is wrong in numerous ways. First, who are these "traditional Muslims"? In his entire book, D'Souza offers not a single name, although his criticism of conservative opposition to the Dubai ports deal last year suggests that he may consider the United Arab Emirates (which he calls "the small country of Dubai") a "traditional Muslim" state. D'Souza doesn't mention the fact that the 9/11 hijackers used the Emirates as a base of operations, or that Al-Qaeda has claimed to have infiltrated the Emirati government.

This is the same Sheikh Ali Gomaa cited last night by Dinesh D'Souza as an example of a "traditional Muslim" with whom Americans should ally. Sharia Alert, from AFP:

CAIRO (AFP) - Islam bars women from becoming head of state, Egypt's top Muslim cleric or mufti, Sheikh Ali Gomaa, ruled in an official fatwa or religious edict published.

"Under Islamic sharia (religious law), a woman cannot be head of state because it is one of the duties of the position to lead Muslims in prayer and that role can only be carried out by men," said the fatwa carried by leading state daily Al-Ahram.

"If by political rights, we mean the right to vote, stand as candidate or assume public office, then the sharia has no objection to women enjoying them, but a woman cannot serve as head of state.

"Women can stand as candidates for parliament or the consultative council, in so far as they can reconcile their duties with the rights that their husbands and children have over them."

But the mufti said that women's conduct of their political rights must not infringe "the ethical laws of Islam" and that they should not therefore "take off the headscarf, deck themselves in fine clothes or be alone with men who are not their husbands or close relatives."

Egypt was the first Arab country to give women the franchise in 1956.

But in a country where the Muslim Brotherhood is the main opposition group, social pressures still limit women's political role.

Virginia Paintball Jihad Update: "Man once acquitted of aiding the Taliban on trial," from AP, :

A man who was acquitted three years ago of providing services to the Taliban went on trial again Monday, this time accused of lying to a US grand jury about his training as a jihadist.

The lawyer for Sabri Benkahla, 31, told a jury that prosecutors essentially laid a perjury trap for Benkahla after his acquittal. The defense has also accused the US government of pursuing a vindictive prosecution after its legal defeat.

Benkahla was one of only two defendants who were acquitted in the government's prosecution of a dozen Muslim men who participated in what the government called a "jihad network" that used paintball games in the Virginia woods in 2000 and 2001 as a means to train for holy war around the globe.

The government called it a "jihad network." That's AP for you. That they gained ten convictions on that basis might suggest that there was something accurate in this designation, but you wouldn't get that impression from this story.

And they don't mean he shouted "Yea, team." From The Guardian, with thanks to Charles:

A British Muslim chanted "7/7 on its way" and "Europe you will pay with your blood" at a demonstration over cartoons of the prophet Mohammed, a court has heard.

Abdul Saleem, 31, was the "cheerleader" of hundreds of protesters who gathered to protest over the publication in a number of European countries, the Old Bailey heard. David Perry QC, prosecuting, said the cartoons which were first published in Denmark had sparked demonstrations across the continent and in the Middle East.

A large number of Muslims believe their religion forbids "any pictorial depiction or representation" of the prophet, a jury was told. Mr Perry said Saleem had been captured on film chanting slogans, which also included "bin Laden on his way" for the crowd to respond.

"There is the defendant addressing the crowd denouncing democracy, making it clear that European countries will pay for what they have done, even the United Kingdom where the cartoons were not even published.

"He made it clear that Europeans had to pay, that blood would be spilled, and that this was necessary. He made reference to the suicide bombings in London and he encouraged the crowd to chant the words that he himself used."

It's on: Thursday, March 1, 2007 at 4:15 PM EST at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington DC:

Islam: Is Religious Extremism or Secular Extremism the Problem? - Empire Ballroom

Dinesh D'Souza, author of The Enemy at Home
Robert Spencer, author of The Truth About Muhammad
Moderator: Suhail Khan, Islamic Free Market Institute

How interesting. Suhail Khan was the moderator of the panel the last time I spoke at CPAC, in 2003. He ended the discussion with a long disquisition about how he had read the Qur'an twice and that it taught peace. I was just about to respond when he announced that the session was over.

"The attack was a "natural response to Israeli violations of the hudna.'" Yes, of course. Jihadists have no responsibility for anything they do.

By Khaled Abu Toameh for the Jerusalem Post, :

The mother of Muhammed Faisal Saksak, the 21-year-old suicide bomber who carried out Monday's attack in Eilat, said she was aware of her son's plan to blow himself up and that she had wished him "good luck."

Dozens of Palestinians, chanting slogans against Israel and the US, converged on the family's home to "congratulate" them on the success of the attack.

Although Muhammed's uncles claimed that he crossed the border into Israel from Jordan, PA security sources told The Jerusalem Post that he came from Egypt. They added that Muhammed's dispatchers were deliberately involving Jordan to avoid alienating the Egyptians and to create tensions between the Jordanians and Israel.

A spokesman for Islamic Jihad in the Gaza Strip claimed that preparations for the attack lasted seven months and that Muhammed had received training in the Jordanian port city of Aqaba.

The suicide attack is seen by many Palestinians as an attempt to divert attention from the Hamas-Fatah war that has claimed the lives of 34 people over the past four days. Fatah and Hamas leaders have repeatedly urged their followers to halt the fighting and to use their guns only against Israel.

Ruwaidah, 43, said she last saw her son on Friday morning, when he walked out of his home in the Slateen neighborhood near Bet Lahia in the northern Gaza Strip.

"As he walked out of the house, he asked me to wish him good luck," she said. "I wished him good luck and I knew of his decision to become a martyr. Although I was aware of his intention, I did not know exactly when he was planning to carry out a martyrdom attack."...

The mother of nine said she was proud of her son for carrying out the suicide attack. "I pray to Allah that Muhammed will be accepted as a shaheed [martyr]," she said shortly after hearing about the Eilat bombing. "I hope that his martyrdom will deliver a message to the Fatah and Hamas fighters to stop the fighting and direct their weapons against the one and only enemy - Israel."

Ruwaidah said she was prepared to "sacrifice" all her sons "for the sake of the Aqsa Mosque and Palestine." She added: "I hope that our politicians will stop fighting so that the blood of the martyrs will not be shed in vain."

Dinesh D'Souza recommends the American conservatives ally with what he calls "traditional Muslims," who are actually cultural Muslims who have little acquaintance with or interest in violent jihad. The problem is that such people are always susceptible to the jihadist appeal, based as it is on the Qur'an and Sunnah. Here is an example of this happening in D'Souza's native India.

"Austere version of Islam finding a home in India: Migrants returning from the Persian Gulf with stricter views are altering the melting pot in an Indian province," by Borzou Daragahi in the Los Angeles Times, with thanks to Looney Tunes:

VENGARA, INDIA — The change came several years ago for Maryam Arrakal. Her husband brought a black, all-covering abaya back to this steamy, subtropical town from the desert sands of Saudi Arabia.

It contrasted starkly with the pastel saris she normally wore.

But in the 12 years that her husband, Kunchava, had been running a Saudi fabric shop, he had become detached from this melting pot of Muslims, Hindus and Christians, and more drawn to the Saudis' strict version of Islam.

"I used to dress much more colorfully," said Arrakal, standing amid diesel fumes and frenetic auto-rickshaw drivers in Vengara's one-street downtown, a 7-month-old baby in her arms and a black cloak shrouding her figure. "But my husband brought this for me and prefers me to wear it."

The migration to oil-rich Persian Gulf monarchies of as many as one in five men from India's Kerala province has brought an influx of money that pays for food, shelter and education. It also funds dowries for their daughters and gifts for their wives.

But like many of the world's millions of economic migrants, the men bring back more than money.

In this case, they brim with provocative ideas about the proper way to worship. And they pay for plain green mosques with minarets and Arabic writing that are far different than the ornate and bulbous temples where Muslims have long worshiped here.

In Kerala, where Muslims are traditionally the poorest residents, those returning from the Persian Gulf say they are building pride in their community and connecting its members to the broader Islamic world. But others see the growth of sectarian politics and scattered religious violence as warning signs....

From the moment they arrive, migrants from Kerala are introduced to attitudes unknown at home. Some housing is for Hindus only; some employers openly prefer Muslims over Hindus or Christians.

Some migrant workers are invigorated by living in a country with a Muslim majority. Others less enthusiastic about their new home cling to their faith out of loneliness and a sense of isolation. But they find a different interpretation of Islam.

Arrakal's husband, Kunchava, 49, had little to do in his free time in Saudi Arabia but attend prayers and read the Koran. He gradually changed his views about life and faith, including how his wife dressed.

"In traditional Indian garb, the woman's stomach is bare," he said. "Islamic dress covers up all the body parts."

In study groups and at prayer gatherings throughout the Persian Gulf region, men such as Abdul Rahman Mohammed Peetee hammer away at Kerala's traditions. For them, paying homage to local saints or anyone other than God is sacrilege: The Koran and the sayings of the prophet Muhammad contain all that any Muslim needs.

"You must study the Arab culture," Peetee, a Kerala native, told a gathering on the sixth floor of an office tower in Dubai, United Arab Emirates.

The men howled in protest.

"Some Arabs behave worse than us!" one cried. "Why should we study them? We have our own practices and culture."

Peetee, a stout man with a collarless shirt buttoned to his neck, was relentless.

"These practices are established by society," he said. "Not by the Koran."...

"I am scared," said one moderate Muslim newspaper editor, who asked that his name not be published because it could harm his community standing. "The liberal Muslims, the moderate Muslims, are scared."

Identity politics

The religious awakening also has given rise to a new political assertiveness.

Critics say Muslim organizations have set up de facto political machines, forcing parties on the left and right to woo extreme Islamic groups funded by Persian Gulf riches....

"Social life has been politicized," Narayan said. "Muslim community organizations found that they could corner all the Muslim votes."

Many worry that the status quo has begun to unravel.

In January 2002 and May 2003, 14 people were killed in riots between Muslims and Hindus in Calicut. And in February 2005, suspected Hindu nationalists attacked a mosque in the town of Vallikunnam at the end of evening prayers, killing one and injuring two.

"Muslims themselves are worried by the rise of the militant Islamic organizations," said Ajai Mangat, Calicut correspondent for the Malayalam Manorama, the province's largest daily newspaper. "If they become more powerful, the Hindu nationalists become more powerful."

The BBC are researching the activities of Al-Muhajiroun in the town of Crawley in Sussex in the United Kingdom. It has been widely reported that the group and its leader Omar Bakri Mohammed were active in the town in the late 1990s, and that OBM lectured in a scout hut there. Anyone with any information about this, please contact Home Affairs Correspondent Richard Smith via r.smith@bbc.co.uk.

Please do not use this occasion to voice your opinion of the BBC's coverage of jihad-related activity.

Fjordman sends us this item, along with this comment: "These Taliban people must suffer from Islamophobia or something, since they believe there are numerous calls for violent Jihad in the Koran."

Indeed. Note Baitullah Mehsud's words: "Then we will attack them in the US and Britain until they either accept Islam or agree to pay jazia (a tax in Islam for non-Muslims living in an Islamic state)."

But try asking a self-proclaimed moderate leader in America about whether or not the Qur'an really calls on Muslims to wage war against non-Muslims and subjugate them, imposing a tax upon them. He will either not give you a straight answer or call you an "Islamophobe," or both.

And then there will be the inevitable charges that by calling attention to this jihadist use of the Qur'an, I am helping those jihadists instead of the moderates I should be helping. Fine: I invite any moderate to explain what he or she would say to Baitullah Mehsud to try to convince him that the Qur'an does not actually counsel war, and to alert him to the existence of a mainstream Islamic tradition that teaches peaceful coexistence with nonbelievers as equals on an indefinite basis.

"Pakistan Taleban vow more violence," from the BBC:

Pro-Taleban militants have been strengthening their hold in Pakistan's tribal areas following controversial peace deals with the authorities. Haroon Rashid of the BBC's Urdu service is one of the few reporters working for a Western media organisation with access to the area.

[...]

After visiting the site of the bombing, we were done with the basic purpose of the trip. I asked the militants if I could see their leader, Baitullah Mehsud.

[...]

Baitullah's private army along with other militant groups have imposed a strict Islamic code in North and parts of South Waziristan.

They run a parallel government here. Music and videos are banned while militants claim people approach them for settlement of their disputes.

With a black-dyed beard, 34-year-old Baitullah greeted us in a big room with several of his armed men beside him. We sat on a new colourful quilt spread on the ground.

Baitullah seemed a man with only jihad (holy war) on his mind. During the interview he quoted several verses from the Koran to defend his stance that foreign forces must be evicted from Islamic countries.

"Allah on 480 occasions in the Holy Koran extols Muslims to wage jihad. We only fulfil God's orders. Only jihad can bring peace to the world," he says.

The militant leader on several occasions in the past had openly admitted crossing over into Afghanistan to fight foreign troops.

"We will continue our struggle until foreign troops are thrown out. Then we will attack them in the US and Britain until they either accept Islam or agree to pay jazia (a tax in Islam for non-Muslims living in an Islamic state)."

Suicide bombers

Baitullah predicted an even bloodier year for foreign forces in Afghanistan.

"The mujahideen will carry out even more severe attacks. If they [the West] have air power we have fidayeen [suicide bombers]... They will leave dishonoured."

[...]

Before we left, Baitullah gave us perfume and a book in Urdu on 'Why Jihad is a must'. On our way back, we saw newly built white graves on the roadside.

Lores Rizkalla has kindly posted audio of my debate last night with Dinesh D'Souza on her show -- the first, I hope, of my debates with him about his appalling new book. So if you missed the show, you can listen there now.

This story refers to a jihad martyrdom attack in an Israeli bakery (thanks to KA for the link). And of course this response is predictable. Everything Hamas does is legitimate. Every step Israel takes in response is illegitimate. Once you grasp that simple rule, you're ready for prime time, or a job at Reuters.

From the Jerusalem Post, with thanks to the Constantinopolitan Irredentist:

A Hamas spokesman defended Monday's suicide bombing in Eilat as legitimate "resistance" against Israel.

Fawzi Barhoum called the attack a "natural response" to IDF policies in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, as well as its ongoing boycott of the Hamas-led Palestinian Authority government. "So long as there is occupation, resistance is legitimate," he said.

He also said attacks on Israel were preferable to the recent bout of Palestinian infighting in Gaza. "The right thing is for Fatah weapons to be directed toward the occupation not toward Hamas," he said.

Fatah weapons paid for by the U.S. and Israel.

The Fatah-affiliated Al Aksa Martyrs Brigades, the Islamic Jihad, and a new group calling itself "Army of Believers" claimed responsibility for Monday's attack in Eilat that killed three people.

Meanwhile, the Islamic Jihad posted a statement on its Web site Monday saying that it had engineered the bombing in an attempt to "focus Palestinians' attention away from killing each other," Sky News reported.

Last night when I debated Dinesh D'Souza for what I hope is just the first time, he kept invoking Bernard Lewis. I would make a point about Islamic teaching or the jihad ideology, and he would respond by talking about Bernard Lewis. It wasn't so much an Argument From Authority as an Argument From Bernard Lewis. Now, we have taken issue with Bernard Lewis in the past, and will not hesitate to do so in the future if we think it necessary; we do not believe, as some apparently do, that being the leading and justly renowned authority in a field confers infallibility. Nevertheless, at the same time it remains true that my areas of agreement with Lewis are much larger than any areas of disagreement I may have with him, and D'Souza's attempt to portray me as the Anti-Lewis founders on any actual examination of what I have written (an examination D'Souza has clearly not made).

Anyway, Lewis has said this before, and he was right then, and he is right now. By D'Souza's thesis, these Muslims are enraged by the cultural Left, and have thus been radicalized.

And as Andrew Bostom points out to me, Bat Ye'or saw all this in 1994, when she said: "I do not see serious signs of a Europeanization of Islam anywhere, a move that would be expressed in a relativization of religion, a self-critical view of the history of Islamic imperialism...we are light years away from such a development...On the contrary, I think that we are participating in the Islamization of Europe, reflected both in daily occurrences and in our way of thinking...All the racist fanaticism that permeates the Arab countries and Iran has been manifested in Europe in recent years..." Lewis was light years away from saying anything like this at that time, but it is good to see that he is catching up.

"Muslims 'about to take over Europe,'" by David Machlis and Tovah Lazaroff in the Jerusalem Post, with thanks to the Constantinopolitan Irredentist:

Islam could soon be the dominant force in a Europe which, in the name of political correctness, has abdicated the battle for cultural and religious control, Prof. Bernard Lewis, the world-renowned Middle Eastern and Islamic scholar, said on Sunday.

The Muslims "seem to be about to take over Europe," Lewis said at a special briefing with the editorial staff of The Jerusalem Post. Asked what this meant for the continent's Jews, he responded, "The outlook for the Jewish communities of Europe is dim." Soon, he warned, the only pertinent question regarding Europe's future would be, "Will it be an Islamized Europe or Europeanized Islam?" The growing sway of Islam in Europe was of particular concern given the rising support within the Islamic world for extremist and terrorist movements, said Lewis.

Lewis, whose numerous books include the recent What Went Wrong?: The Clash Between Islam and Modernity in the Middle East, and The Crisis of Islam: Holy War and Unholy Terror, would set no timetable for this drastic shift in Europe, instead focusing on the process, which he said would be assisted by "immigration and democracy." Instead of fighting the threat, he elaborated, Europeans had given up.

"Europeans are losing their own loyalties and their own self-confidence," he said. "They have no respect for their own culture." Europeans had "surrendered" on every issue with regard to Islam in a mood of "self-abasement," "political correctness" and "multi-culturalism," said Lewis, who was born in London to middle-class Jewish parents but has long lived in the United States.

The Tiny Minority of Extremists is growing, especially among young people. By Stephen Bates and agencies in The Guardian, with thanks to Charles:

A growing minority of young Muslims are inspired by political Islam and feel they have less in common with non-Muslims than their parents do, a survey reveals today. The poll, carried out for the conservative-leaning Policy Exchange thinktank, found support for Sharia law, Islamic schools and wearing the veil in public is significantly stronger among young Muslims than their parents.

In the survey of 1,003 Muslims by the polling company Populus through internet and telephone questionnaires, nearly 60% said they would prefer to live under British law, while 37% of 16 to 24-year-olds said they would prefer sharia law, against 17% of those over 55. Eighty-six per cent said their religion was the most important thing in their lives.

Nearly a third of 16 to 24-year-olds believed that those converting to another religion should be executed, while less than a fifth of those over 55 believed the same. The survey claimed that British authorities and some Muslim groups have exaggerated the problem of Islamophobia and fuelled a sense of victimhood among some Muslims: 84% said they believed they had been well treated in British society, though only 28% thought the authorities had gone over the top in trying not to offend Muslims....

The Muslim Council of Britain has been working on this issue for a long time. "Bolton bans Holocaust Day," from the Jewish Telegraph, with thanks to all who sent this in:

IN A move widely seen to be bowing to Muslim pressure, Bolton Council has scrapped its Holocaust Memorial Day event.

The council is to replace it with a Genocide Memorial Day in June. This is in line with the policy of the Muslim Council of Britain, which continues to boycott HMD and is asking for a Genocide Day, which will also mark "the ongoing genocide and human rights abuses of Palestinians" by Israelis.

The council decision was made in consultation with the town's Interfaith Council.

But Rabbi Joseph Lever of United Synagogue who has participated in the Bolton event for around three years was not consulted on the decision. He said: "I mourn the fact that the Holocaust Memorial Day event will not take place in Bolton this year."

Louis Rapaport, president of the Jewish Representative Council of Greater Manchester, was equally disappointed that the Jewish community was not consulted.

He said: "Bolton, alone of all the local authorities in our area, is not having an HMD event which is a government recommendation." He added: "There may not be many Jews in Bolton but the day is supposed to have an educational message to the whole community.

"I can't help feeling the decision was influenced by Bolton's large Muslim community."

In September 2005, former Chief Ashkenazi Rabbi Israel Meir Lau said: "The so called 'religious' leader Haj Amin el Husseini, Mufti of Jerusalem, went out of his way to come all the way to Berlin to encourage Hitler to kill Jews. He did everything in his power to help the Nazis in their diabolical plot. So I do not buy it when Palestinians argue that they were victims of the Holocaust because it led to the establishment of the state of Israel. Before there was ever a state of Israel there was rabid anti-Semitism among radical Muslims."

Over at Brussels Journal, Fjordman has another terrific piece. A small excerpt:

The Swedish news website The Local writes about The Holocaust: Sweden’s complex legacy. That’s great. Unfortunately, it quickly degenerates into bashing all those who oppose Sweden’s policies of mass migration. According to The Local, “Leading the campaign for Holocaust education is the Forum for Living History, a government agency commissioned to promote democracy and human rights, with the Holocaust as its point of reference. Reports and studies published by the Forum deal with various forms of modern intolerance amongst young Swedes, including Islamophobia.”

I know that people such as Swedish historian of religion Matthias Gardell claim that Islamophobia is perhaps the greatest threat to democracy in the Western world today. Personally, I subscribe more to the view of Hugh Fitzgerald of Jihad Watch that “‘Islamophobia’ is a word concocted to intimidate those who are rightly troubled, and more than troubled, by what they have learned of Islam largely through the observable behavior of Muslims not only in the West, but around the world.” Has the Forum for Living History asked the French teacher Robert Redeker about Islamophobia, after he had to quit his job and go into hiding following numerous death threats for criticizing Islam?

Read it all.

Massive reeducation begins in the UK, to make sure that no one -- no one -- opposes the spread of the jihad there. Why, to do so would be "Islamophobic." By Laura Clark in the Daily Mail, with thanks to the Constantinopolitan Irredentist:

Children will be taught race relations and multiculturalism with every subject they study -from Spanish to science - under controversial changes to the school curriculum announced by the Government.

In music and art, they could have to learn Indian and Chinese songs and instruments, and West African drumming • 'School drop-outs regret leaving'

In maths and science, key Muslim contributions such algebra and the number zero will be emphasised to counter Islamophobia.

And in English, pupils will study literature on the experiences of migration - such as Zadie Smith's novel White Teeth, or Brick Lane, by Monica Ali.

Chaucer? Shakespeare? Milton? Donne? Keats? Wordsworth? Browning? Hardy? Austen? Nah. Zadie Smith and Monica Ali.

One critic accused Education Secretary Alan Johnson of 'politicising' lessons with the new agenda. Tory MP Douglas Carswell, a member of the Commons education select committee, said schools will be vehicles for multicultural propaganda and classrooms turned into 'laboratories for politically-correct thought'.

Mr Johnson was also attacked over attempts to put Britishness on the curriculum as it emerged that suggested core values are so woolly they could apply to many countries.

With concerns that standards in the three Rs are unacceptable, ministers will also face accusations that they are diverting attention away from vital subjects.

Under the recommendations - put forward in a report by former headmaster Sir Keith Ajegbo -teachers will be expected to make 'explicit references to cultural diversity' in as many subjects as possible....

However, Mr Carswell said: 'This report is prescribing precisely the wrong medicine to heal the wounds of a society that multiculturalism has divided. This is a stark example of the politically- correct lobby hijacking the citizenship agenda.

'Recent arrivals to this country have all the more reason to be given a sense of what we are all about so they can become part of it and share it. But instead this will give the green light to every politically-correct Left-Wing educationist to further undermine our society.'...

Andrew Bolt asks a trenchant question in his blog in the Herald Sun (news links in the original; thanks to Rosie):

How to make trouble for moderate Muslims with noisy “tolerance” for the extremists:

A ROW has erupted over Muslim-only washrooms at La Trobe University that can be accessed only with a secret push-button code.

Muslim students have exclusive access to male and female washrooms on campus, sparking claims of bias and discrimination.

What possible reason could there be for going to this expense in dividing Muslim students from everyone else, reinforcing the unhelpful notion that the two are so dangerously different?

Victorian Muslim community leader Yasser Soliman said the washrooms were necessary…

“Muslims need to wash their feet before prayer and in the past there have been complaints about them washing their feet in sinks, so this is a happy medium,” he said.

Let’s pretend we actually believe Soliman. Solution: Just put up notices explaining the feet-washing. Or install a separate sink in the communal toilets, at a handy foot-washing height.

But insist all faiths share the same toilets. If we can’t even share them…

Pakistan's blasphemy law is an easy way for Muslims to victimize Christians with whom they have a dispute. "Woman seeks lumber, gets jailed: Nation's blasphemy law criticized for ambiguities, improper use," from WorldNetDaily.com, with thanks to all who sent this in:

A woman in Pakistan went down the road from her family's construction supply business to check on some materials that had been borrowed, and returned with a charge of blasphemy against her, according to reports.

Martha Bibi, who lives in the small village of Kot Nanka Singh in Pakistan's Kasur District, was taken into custody after she went to a team of Muslims who are building a mosque and asked about the construction materials the group had borrowed.

The report comes from the international Christian human rights group International Christian Concern, as well as Assist News Service.

ICC said about six weeks ago, Martha and her husband, Butta Masih, loaned the Muslims some bamboos and logs for the project. But no one returned the equipment, or gave any notice of when that might happen.

"When Martha went to ask what had happened to the building materials, she got into a fierce argument with a shopowner near the mosque, but did not even mention religion. The woman she argued with told her husband, Mohammad Ramzan, that Martha blasphemed the prophet Muhammad," ICC said in a statement.

"Ramzan was so enraged that he gathered his neighbors and stirred them into a frenzy to march on Martha's home," the ICC continued.

Her husband reported the "large, furious mob" assembled and was marching toward his home so he and his wife fled, hiding in the home of a friendly neighbor. Accompanied and supported by police, the mob reached Butta and Martha's house late at night, and contacted Butta's parents, who had remained there.

"The fuming mob threatened my parents that our house would be gutted out if they had not handed us to them," the ICC report quoted Butta as saying.

The ICC said for hours, the mob threatened the family and searched the home, and finally dispersed so that the Butta and Martha could return.

"A relative of their neighbor Rashid came and said that the people wanted to burn Martha. He offered to speak for her innocence, but when they left to go speak to the leaders of the mob, the police accosted her and took her away in their patrol wagon," the ICC reported.

The jihad conference in Australia was supposed to be beamed to eager jihadists around the world, but the techies dropped the ball. World dominance may be a bit farther down the road than they're hoping. "Radical cause hits a glitch," by Sian Powell in The Australian, with thanks to JE:

A DAY-long conference in Sydney's Lakemba run by the fundamentalist Muslim organisation Hizb ut-Tahrir, known for its anti-democratic, anti-Semitic views, was meant to be beamed out across the world via a live webcast. "Hizb-ut Tahrir Australia is proud to present the Khilafah conference Sydney 2007," the site said. "This live webcast will bring together Islamic knowledge, content and community to deliver a connected experience throughout the day."

The keynote speaker was Hizb ut-Tahrir's Indonesian chairman Ismail Yusanto, the radical who has previously demanded the jailing of US President George Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair for the "war crime" of the 2003 Iraq invasion. But the Khilafah webcast was beset with all sorts of problems, boding ill for Hizb ut-Tahrir's future world dominance, or even an Islamic super-state (another of its favoured ideas). To begin with, there was neither vision nor sound. Then there were disjointed pictures, almost a frame at a time, but still no sound. Viewers from across the world, waiting for the webcast, sent in questioning messages but the site remained unresponsive, apart from some posted instructions, none of which worked.

UPDATE 1/29: Lores Rizkalla has kindly posted audio of the show, so you can catch it now if you missed it last night.

A reminder: I will be debating Dinesh D'Souza and his disastrous new book for what I hope will be only the first time, tonight at 7PM PST, 10PM EST, on Lores Rizkalla's radio show. You will be able to listen online here.

You can read my initial responses to D'Souza's book here, here, and here, and Hugh Fitzgerald's here, here, and here.

And the pressure is coming from the Flying Imams incident, just as I predicted -- with no notice given of the many questionable aspects of the incident, or of the questionable ties of the imams.

If this passes, as it probably will, and is signed by the President, as is likely, Islamic jihadists will have a free hand in American airports: authorities will be too afraid of prosecution to subject them to any scrutiny, no matter how suspiciously they're acting.

By Frederic J. Frommer for AP, with thanks to Kemaste:

WASHINGTON (Jan. 28) - The repercussions of an airline's decision to remove a group of imams from a commercial flight in Minneapolis could be heard in Congress this year, with civil rights groups pushing Democratic lawmakers to ban racial profiling.

The incident happened in November, made national news and reinvigorated an old proposal that got little attention from the GOP.

Now, a champion of the legislation, Rep. John Conyers, D-Mich., is chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, which has jurisdiction on the issue. Sen. Russ Feingold, D-Wis., who sponsored legislation to ban racial profiling in the last Congress, now chairs the Judiciary subcommittee on the Constitution.

No bill has been introduced so far, but Feingold made it clear the issue will be a priority for him.

"Many law-abiding African Americans, Arab Americans, Latino Americans and others live with the fear of being racially profiled as they go about their everyday lives," Feingold said. Although the vast majority of law enforcement officers don't engage in the practice, he added, some do and it must be addressed.

"I look forward to working with Chairman Conyers in the House as well as others to ensure that no one is judged by how they look or where they worship," he said....

Feingold's last bill would have banned federal, state and local law enforcement officials from "relying, to any degree, on race, ethnicity, national origin, or religion" during investigations.

An exemption would have been made for specific information that "links a person of a particular race, ethnicity, national origin, or religion to an identified incident or scheme."

Well, we have plenty of that, but the chilling effect will nevertheless be severe.

Some security-oriented groups are gearing up to fight a new version of the bill.

"It would have the effect of estranging police officers from the community that they serve," said Jim Pasco, executive director of the Fraternal Order of Police. "It would make them more hesitant to stop people who might well be in violation of the law for fear that they're going to get written up because of some racial protocol."

Peter Gadiel, of Kent, Conn., president of 9/11 Families for a Secure America, mocked the legislation.

"The 9/11 atrocity was committed by 19 young single men from Arab nations. If you want to hand this country over to terrorists, why don't you say it right out front?" said Gadiel, whose son, James, died in the attacks on the World Trade Center. "We don't have to worry about 80-year-old ladies with bleach-blonde hair and southern accents."

Steve Mustapha Elturk, an imam in Troy, Mich., said he would welcome a ban on racial profiling. He said U.S. authorities have detained him four times since Sept. 11, 2001 — twice at the Canadian border and twice while traveling by air — even though he has done nothing wrong.

"It is pathetic for an American citizen who has spent more than half his life in this country to have to fly fearing that I will be stopped and interrogated," said Elturk, 52, who was born in Lebanon. "This is not the country I came to know."

The jihad against education continues, with its fighters eager to stamp out any future ideological challenge, especially from women. By Sameer N. Yacoub for Associated Press:

BAGHDAD, Iraq - Mortar shells rained down Sunday on a girls' secondary school in a mostly Sunni area of western Baghdad, killing five pupils and wounding 20, witnesses and police said. At least seven other people died in a series of bombings and shootings across the capital, mostly in Shiite areas.

[...]

Sunday's mortar attack occurred about 11 a.m. at the Kholoud Secondary School in the Adil neighborhood of western Baghdad, police and school officials said. Several projectiles exploded in the courtyard, shattering windows and spraying pupils with glass. AP Television News footage showed blood smeared on the stone steps and walkways.

Hours after the attack, grieving parents wept as the bodies of the victims were placed inside wooden coffins. Police said four girls were killed instantly and a fifth died later. AP television footage showed the fin from one of the mortars lying in a walkway.

1938 Alert: "World War III has already begun, says Israeli spy chief," from AFP, with thanks to all who sent this in:

A third World War is already underway between Islamic militancy and the West but most people do not realize it, the former head of Israel’s intelligence service Mossad said in an interview published Saturday in Portugal.

‘We are in the midst of a third World War,’ former Mossad chief Efraim Halevy told weekly newspaper Expresso.

‘The world does not understand. A person walks through the streets of Tel Aviv, Barcelona or Buenos Aires and doesn’t get the sense that there is a war going on,’ said Halevy who headed Mossad between 1998 and 2003.

‘During World War I and II the entire world felt there was a war. Today no one is conscious of it. From time to time there is a terrorist attack in Madrid, London and New York and then everything stays the same.’

Violence by Islamic militants has already disrupted international travel and trade just as in the previous two world conflicts, he said.

Halevy, who was raised in war-time London, predicted it would take at least 25 years before the battle against Islamic fundamentalist terrorism is won and during this time a nuclear strike by Islamic militants was likely.

25 years? How optimistic. Why will a 1,400-year-old conflict be wrapped up in 25 years?

Three pressure groups are gunning for Glenn Beck, despite the fact that he has punted on the key issue of our time, and declined to aid genuine Muslim reformers who are exploring the elements of Islam that jihadists are using to justify their actions. For Beck says here that he is "asking all of the proud, peaceful Muslims here in America to take a more visible role in our fight against those who make a mockery of the Quran." But his assumption that the jihadists are making a mockery of the Qur'an is, at best, unproven, and is contradicted by both the jihadists and courageous Muslims and ex-Muslims including Tashbih Sayyed, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Nonie Darwish, Ibn Warraq, and Ali Sina. Will Beck help fight the jihad by making "airtime available, at any time" also to them and people like them, in order to foster the discussion that is actually necessary to create even the possibility that a "peaceful view of Islam" might prevail?

In any case, his temporizing and whitewashing does nothing to assuage these pressure groups, who are enraged that he would dare even to explore the possibility that some Muslims in the U.S. might harbor jihadist sentiments.

"Arab groups don't want Glenn Beck back as 'Good Morning America' commentator," from Associated Press, with thanks to all who sent this in:

NEW YORK (AP) — Three groups are urging ABC News not to keep CNN Headline News personality Glenn Beck on as a "Good Morning America" commentator because they believe he's biased against Arabs.

The Arab American Institute, American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee and the Muslim Public Affairs Council all said Thursday they had written to ABC News President David Westin about Beck.

"Good Morning America" executive producer Jim Murphy has spoken to a representative of the groups and has invited them on the air to talk about their grievances, said ABC News spokeswoman Jeffrey Schneider....

The groups said that Beck — who's drawing strong ratings with his evening show on CNN Headline News — has stated on his show that Arab and Muslim Americans are apathetic to terrorism. During an interview in November with Minnesota Rep. Keith Ellison, the first Muslim member of Congress, Beck asked him to "prove to me that you are not working with our enemies."...

Beck has said that his question to Ellison was poorly worded.

"My message is clear: Islam is a peaceful religion for over 90 percent of the world's Muslims," he said. "I have urged viewers repeatedly to understand this, while asking all of the proud, peaceful Muslims here in America to take a more visible role in our fight against those who make a mockery of the Quran. I also make airtime available, at any time, to any Muslim organization to help reinforce this realistic, peaceful view of Islam."

A Let Them Into the EU Alert from AP, with thanks to Sr. Soph:

Unknown assailants on Sunday stoned a two-story building housing a Protestant church in the Black Sea port city of Samsun, the pastor of the church said.

"The assailants broke at least 10 windows in an overnight attack," Mehmet Orhan Picaklar, the pastor of the Agape Church, told The Associated Press by telephone. "This is the seventh or eight such attack over the past three years. Separately, I am constantly receiving death threats by e-mail."

Nonviolent Islamization is A-OK. And evidently, calls for civil war are just fine too -- I guess the Australian government understands this as nonviolent civil war. Suicide of the West Update: "Ruddock: no ban on Muslim group," from AAP, with thanks to all who sent this in:

The Federal Government refuses to ban a radical Muslim group that has sparked outrage by bringing to Australia its calls for an Islamic superstate.

Indonesian firebrand cleric Ismail Yusanto outlined his vision for an Islamic utopia before a crowd of about 500 Muslims at Lakemba, in Sydney's south-west, today.

Dr Yusanto and fellow members of the extremist group Hizb-u-Tahrir believe it can ease suffering around the world by creating an Islamic superstate - ruled by Sharia law - through jihad, or holy war.

The NSW government and federal opposition are outraged, demanding the Commonwealth follow Britain, Germany and several Middle Eastern countries in banning the group.

But Attorney-General Philip Ruddock said today there was not enough evidence to justify using anti-terrorism laws to outlaw Hizb-u-Tahrir.

To be proscribed as a terrorist organisation, a group has to urge the use of force or violence.

"Evidence to sustain that has to be available," he told reporters.

"Just because people have messages that I don't regard as broadly in keeping with Australian values doesn't mean they can be proscribed as terrorist organisations," Mr Ruddock told reporters.

[...]

Dr Yusanto said if the utopian superstate fell, "all military-aged Muslims" and "Muslims living outside of the boundary" of the Sharia state should obtain military training and "join the jihad".

"Once successful, the new order would be just the beginning of the new era in the application of Islamic ideology," he said.

"There is no victory and glory without sacrifice and hard work. No pain no gain."

[...]

Opposition immigration spokesman Tony Burke called on newly appointed Immigration Minister Kevin Andrews to consider cancelling Dr Yusanto's visa.

"There are clear character provisions in the Immigration Act that mean that if the government didn't want Ismail Yusanto here it could have stopped him from coming," he told reporters.

"The only reason we have someone in western Sydney right now preaching Sharia law is because the federal government chose to allow him to be here.

"My question and my comment to anyone from around the world who hates Australia is simple - if you hate the place, don't come here."

Good idea. All non-Muslim states should adopt it. But it is already quite late in the game -- time, long past time, for authorities to start calling to account those who are already here.

How Britain will slide into Third World status, part one. Clash of Civilizations Update: "Muslim urged to shun 'unholy' vaccines," by Abul Taher in the TimesOnline, with thanks to all who sent this in:

A MUSLIM doctors’ leader has provoked an outcry by urging British Muslims not to vaccinate their children against diseases such as measles, mumps and rubella because it is “un-Islamic”.

Dr Abdul Majid Katme, head of the Islamic Medical Association, is telling Muslims that almost all vaccines contain products derived from animal and human tissue, which make them “haram”, or unlawful for Muslims to take.

Islam permits only the consumption of halal products, where the animal has had its throat cut and bled to death while God’s name is invoked.

Islam also forbids the eating of any pig meat, which Katme says is another reason why vaccines should be avoided, as some contain or have been made using pork-based gelatine.

His warning has been criticised by the Department of Health and the British Medical Association, who said Katme risked increasing infections ranging from flu and measles to polio and diphtheria in Muslim communities.

Katme, a psychiatrist who has worked in the National Health Service for 15 years, wields influence as the head of one of only two national Islamic medical organisations as well as being a member of the Muslim Council of Britain. Moderate Muslims are concerned at the potential impact because other Islamic doctors will have to confirm vaccines are derived from animal and human products.

There is already evidence of lower than average vaccination rates in Muslim areas, reducing the prospect of the “herd immunity” needed to curb infectious diseases such as measles, mumps and rubella.
Katme’s appeal reflects a global movement by some hardline Islamic leaders who are telling followers torefuse vaccines from the West.

In Nigeria, Afghanistan, Pakistan and parts of India, Muslims have refused to be immunised against polio after being told that the vaccines contain products that the West has deliberately added to make the recipients infertile....

He argued that leading “Islamically healthy lives” would be enough to ward off illnesses and diseases.

“You see, God created us perfect and with a very strong defence system. If you breast-feed your child for two years — as the Koran says — and you eat Koranic food like olives and black seed, and you do ablution each time you pray, then you will have a strong defence system,” he said.

“Many vaccines, especially those given to children, are full of haram substances — human parts, gelatine from pork, alcohol, animal/monkey parts, all coming from the West who do not have knowledge of halal or haram. It is forbidden in Islam to have any of these haram substances in our bodies.”...

No word on whether Bush plans to send American troops to Pakistan to stop Sunni-Shi'ite strife there. From The Associated Press:

A suspected suicide attacker exploded a bomb near a Shia mosque in the northwestern Pakistani city of Peshawar late Saturday, killing at least 11 people, including the city police chief, and wounding 35, police said.

Most of the victims were police and municipal officials who were clearing the route for a procession of Shias in a crowded old quarter of the city, said police officer Aziz Khan. The procession had yet to begin.

This weekend marks the start of the festival of Ashoura, when Shias mourn the seventh-century death of the prophet Muhammad's grandson, Imam Hussein. In the past the festival has been a target for sectarian attacks.

The blast went off in a bazaar area about 180 metres from the mosque that was the starting point for the Shia procession. It caused a power outage that left the city centre in darkness, complicating rescue efforts.

The "epic battle" between Sunnis and Shiites has been going on for fourteen hundred years. It will take a great deal more than a "surge" of American troops to prevent it indefinitely from breaking out again. From New Europe:

Trying to persuade a sceptical Congress to support sending more troops to Iraq, US President George W Bush warned January 22 that if the United States fails, sectarian violence could spill over into an “epic battle” between Sunnis and Shiites in a wider regional conflict.

The warning came in Bush’s annual “State of the Union” address, which was closely watched by European Union leaders, most of who have opposed the war in Iraq and have distanced themselves from the US leader.

Bush has begun deploying the first of 21,500 more troops to Iraq as part of his revised strategy announced earlier this month, but the Democratic-controlled Congress and some members of Bush’s Republican Party steadfastly oppose the plan.

“If American forces step back before Baghdad is secure, the Iraqi government would be overrun by extremists on all sides,” Bush said. “We could expect an epic battle between Shia extremists backed by Iran, and Sunni extremists aided by al-Qaeda and supporters of the old regime.”

“A contagion of violence could spill out across the country and in time the entire region could be drawn into the conflict,” he added in the State of the Union address. “For America, this is a nightmare scenario.”

Unfortunately, there are nightmare scenarios all around.

Surely the main thing about Dinesh D'Souza is that he is:

1) a careerist with his eye on the main chance. He was among the first of those Bright Young Conservative Things -- think of William Kristol -- who have managed to make lavish livings for themselves, with those lecture fees, those quasi-instant books on matters of perceived moment, and for a few, a little aupres-de-ma-blonde stuff to make the whole thing more entertaining and endurable.

2) unused to having to meet standards of research or study that might, in other contexts, naturally be asked of him. D’Souza is surprised and chagrined: he asked quite a few people to blurb the book, and was disturbed to discover that some, who had made it a point to find out much more about Islam, were horrified by his thesis and refused.

Still more UK dhimmi follies. "Islamic school raided by police stays open," by Julie Henry in the Sunday Telegraph, :

The Government has failed to close down a Muslim school that was raided by anti-terror police, despite being advised by Ofsted to deregister it.

More than 100 police carried out a dawn raid at Jameah Islamiyah, a private school near Crowborough in East Sussex, in September.

Officers remained at the site for more than three weeks before the investigation was wound up.

The operation was linked to the earlier arrest of 14 men in London in connection with an alleged terrorist recruitment network. Twelve people were charged and remanded in custody to await trial. No arrests were made in connection with the school.

At the time, the Department for Education and Skills (DfES) said that Ofsted was due to visit the school and, if improvements that were deemed necessary after an earlier inspection in 2005 had not been made, the department would "delete the school from the Register of Independent Schools and shut it down".

The Sunday Telegraph has obtained a confidential report which shows the school was the subject of a monitoring visit by Ofsted in November and that a report was sent to the DfES recommending the school be deregistered.

However, no action has been taken and the school remains on the Register of Independent schools.

"What is at stake is not just the destiny of the Muslim world but indeed the whole of mankind." Indeed.

"Sydney conference speaker demands Islamic state," from Australia's ABC News, with thanks to JE:

A speaker at a conference in Sydney's south-west says a revolution or a civil war may be necessary in order to create an Islamic state, or caliphate.

The meeting has been organised by the controversial Muslim group Hizb ut-Tahrir, which is banned in several countries overseas....

One of today's speakers, Ashraf Doureihi, told the audience action needs to be taken to ensure an Islamic state is created.

"It is important... [to move] collectively in the Muslim world to demand this change from such influential people in our lands, even if it means spilling onto the streets to create a revolution or staging a military coup," he said.

Hizb ut-Tahrir spokesman Wasim Durie has told the audience a number of speakers will address the meeting today and discuss ways of establishing an Islamic super-state.

"As we were here today, what is at stake is not just the destiny of the Muslim world but indeed the whole of mankind," he said.

How come these clerics haven't gotten the word that Islam forbids suicide? Could it be because they understand Qur'an 9:111 to promise Paradise to those who "kill and are killed" for Allah?

Anyway, this is one reason why it is so difficult for our Friend and Ally Pakistan to reform madrasas. By Mohammad Kamran and Mohammad Imran in the Daily Times, with thanks to all who sent this in:

ISLAMABAD: The administration of Lal Masjid on Friday threatened the government of suicide attacks if it continues to demolish mosques and madrassas. The clerics also acquired a commitment to this effect from thousands of worshippers at the Friday congregation.

Addressing the Friday sermon, Maulana Abdul Aziz, key prayer leader of Lal Masjid, asked the government to reconstruct the demolished mosques and urged President Musharraf to “seek Allah’s forgiveness” for demolishing “seven mosques in the country”. “We are ready to carry out suicide attacks if the government does not meet our demands,” he said, adding that the clerics would accept General Musharraf president for life if he accepts all their demands in letter and spirit.

Maulana Aziz, who is also the principal of Jamia Hafsa and Jamia Fareedia madrassas, issued a decree after citing verses from the Quran that jihad had become obligatory on all men and women against the backdrop of “prevailing evil in the country”. He demanded the government enforce a system based on the Quran and Sunnah in the country and stop dubbing jihad as terrorism....

Maulana Aziz said that millions of madrassa students had decided to sacrifice their lives in the name of Allah and the government must realise the gravity of the situation. He said that 10,000 students of Jamia Fareedia would sit in aitekaaf for 40 days to seek “divine help” and they would also be taught about the significance of jihad. “We do not want an armed conflict with the government, but we should not be pushed to the wall,” he added.

A welcome precedent. From Judeoscope, with thanks to Sr. Soph:

The Quebec village of Hérouxville, 1300 inhabitants, has formally banned this week the stoning of women, face veils, female genital mutilation, or throwing acid at unveiled women’s faces, reports Montreal daily La Presse....

The nature of the Hérouxville bans suggests however that local politicians had Quebec Muslims in mind, though not a single Muslim or member of any religious or ethnic minority calls Hérouxville home. But referring to Quebec’s policy of encouraging immigrants to settle outside Montreal, Drouin says it was important to inform potential immigrants of the villages cultural norms: "We must ensure that people who come here want to live as we do", he told La Presse, "The Muslims who wanted to impose Sharia, had they known that we do not stone women here, maybe they would not have come".

Along with the bans, the Hérouxville document states that Christmas trees are a Quebec tradition, that swimming pools are mixed, and that pork meat and beef are displayed on the same shelves. Asked whether he fears being labeled a racist, Drouin answers: “We are not racists, we are explaining our culture".

National Review is pushing Dinesh D'Souza's silly and misleading book hard, running an ad that proclaims "Let the Debate Begin." This is ironic in light of the fact that I have heard not a word from NR's Kathryn Lopez about my open invitation to debate D'Souza there. I guess what NR is running is really a Henry Ford-style debate invitation: you can have any color car you like as long as it's black, and let the debate begin, as long as there is only one participant.

Anyway, the debate between D'Souza and me really is going to begin, tomorrow night at 7PM PST, 10PM EST, on Lores Rizkalla's radio show. You will be able to listen online here.

Also, D'Souza himself has told me that we are scheduled to debate at CPAC in March, but I have heard nothing from CPAC about this myself and thus cannot consider it confirmed. I'll keep you posted.

You can read my initial responses to D'Souza's book here, here, and here, and Hugh Fitzgerald's here, here, and here. Also, I am just about to start writing a full review of the book.

Hizballah invades Israel. "Israeli army blows up two Hezbollah bunkers," from AFP, with thanks to James:

The Israeli army says it has blown up two Hezbollah bunkers discovered near the Jewish state's border with Lebanon.

Israeli forces "uncovered two connected bunkers which had been used by the Hezbollah terrorist organisation, apparently as a forward base for its operations," the army said in a statement.

"Inside the bunkers forces found food, shovels and other equipment. The bunkers were detonated in a controlled environment by IDF (Israeli Defence Forces) engineering forces," it said Friday.

The bunkers were on "Israeli territory south of the international border" but beyond the security fence that the Jewish state has constructed along its border with Lebanon, it said.

This story explains in microcosm why, contrary to what Dinesh D'Souza assumes, even cleaning up American pop culture will not end the jihad, which proceeds for reasons that spring from within Islam, and not as a reaction to outside outrages -- although those outrages are used as a pretext for recruitment purposes. Mutatis mutandis, after we become a decent, upright, moral people, the "traditional Muslims" of which D'Souza speaks won't become our allies. Their jihadist brethren will kill -- or subjugate -- us anyway.

"'If they pay we kill them anyway' - the kidnapper's story," from The Guardian, with thanks to Sr. Soph:

Fadhel is a slim, well-muscled 26-year-old Mahdi Army commander with a thin goatee beard and smoothed down hair that looks like a flat cap. One day last month he described how he and his men seized a group of three Sunni men suspected of killing his fellow Shia. "I followed the group for weeks and then one of them crossed the bridge to Karrada [a Shia district]. We first informed a nearby Iraqi army checkpoint that we were arresting terrorists then we attacked them and put them in the boots of the cars. We only have six to seven minutes when we grab someone - we have to act quickly, if he resists we shoot him."

In this case, he said, the men were taken to Sadr City, the Shia slum to the north-east of Baghdad, where they were interrogated by a "committee" which ordered their execution. "We ask the families of the terrorists for ransom money," said Fadhel. "And after they pay the ransom we kill them anyway."

Kidnapping in Baghdad these days is as much about economics as retribution or sectarian hatred. Another Shia man close to the Mahdi Army told me: "They kidnap 10 Sunnis, they get ransom on five, and kill them all, in each big kidnap operation they make at least $50 000, it's the best business in Baghdad."

[...]

Like many of their Sunni counterparts, the Mahdi commanders boast that they could wipe out the other sect and gain total control over Baghdad if the US left. "We control most of Baghdad, our main enemy is the Americans," said Fadhel. Then he paused for a second and continued: "Also we can't trust the other Shia factions. Imam Ali says 'God please protect me against my friends and I will take care of my enemies.'"

Serge Trifkovic, who along with me and Britney Spears causes jihad (at least in the mind of Dinesh D'Souza) responds brilliantly in "Dinesh the Dhimmi," from Chronicles (via FrontPage; news links in the original):

Nearly two years ago the Jihadist lobby in the United States made a concerted affort to have my book The Sword of the Prophet banned from National Review Online. Jihadi activists gathered around CAIR claimed the book defamed Islam and its "prophet." When it did not get immediate satisfaction from National Review, CAIR instructed its partisans to pressure the Boeing Corporation to withdraw its advertisements from the magazine. Faced with the loss of revenue National Review briefly took down The Sword, but then quickly reposted it, under pressure from mainly conservative quarters.

It is now, perhaps inevitably, the turn of a phony conservative to join CAIR's ranks. In his latest book, The Enemy At Home, Dinesh D'Souza writes that,

"In order to build alliances with traditional Muslims, the right must take three critical steps. First, stop attacking Islam. Conservatives have to cease blaming Islam for the behavior of the radical Muslims. Recently the right has produced a spate of Islamophobic tracts with titles like Islam Unveiled, Sword of the Prophet, and The Myth of Islamic Tolerance. There is probably no better way to repel traditional Muslims, and push them into the radical camp, than to attack their religion and their prophet."

"Whether there is anything specific to the Muslim religion that encourages this radicalisation is an open question" -- Francis Fukuyama in Prospect magazine

It's not an "open question" to Ibn Warraq, or Ali Sina, or Ayaan Hirsi Ali or Wafa Sultan or Azam Kamguian or Irfan Khawaja or Walid Shoebat or Anwar Shaikh or tens (or possibly hundreds) of thousands of articulate ex-Muslims now living in the West and able to speak and write freely. They know Islam a bit better than Francis Fukuyama. Of course, they would reject not only his use of the phrase "open question" but his larger assumption: that there might be something in what he too easily calls "the Muslim religion" (Islam is a Total System, Islam is a religion and a politics and a social theory and a geopolitics and a scientific explanation of the universe and much more): something "specific" that "encourages this radicalisation."

The way Fukuyama phrases things, it is clear that he thinks Islam alone is not the problem, but only the "radicalisation" of Islam. And both the declared apostates, and those few brave Muslim-for-identification-purposes-only Muslims, such as Magdi Allam, could explain how wrong Fukuyama is to make such a misleading distinction between an assumed peaceful, good, unmenacing "Islam" and this dangerous "radicalisation" that, Fukuyama complacently allows himself to believe, is somehow different in its texts and teachings, for regular, mainstream, ordinary Islam. There is no such difference.

The continuing assumption that Islam has been hijacked by a Tiny Minority of Extremists, and that "mainstream" Islam is "moderate" leads the Canadian Security Intelligence Service to a series of dead ends in attempting to explain the appearance of jihadists among Muslims in Canada.

"Jihadization of youth a 'rapid process'," by Stewart Bell for the National Post:

TORONTO - Canada's intelligence service says a "very rapid process" is transforming some youths from angry activists into jihadist terrorists intent on killing for their religion.

Enraged over what they perceive as a Western "war on Islam" and coaxed on by extremist preachers, a few have embraced terrorism with frightening speed, the service warns in a new study. "The transformation from radical to jihadist can be a very rapid process," says the "secret" report by the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, obtained by the National Post.

The study, released under the Access to Information Act, is the government's latest attempt to understand why a handful of Canadian Muslims are alleged to have become involved in terrorist plots. It comes as a preliminary hearing is underway in Brampton, Ont., for four of 18 suspects charged for their alleged role in a Canadian terrorist group accused of plotting attacks in southern Ontario.

For at least the past two years, CSIS has been studying how some young people have been lured into terrorism. They are particularly interested in what made them radicalized and how they evolved from radicals to violent terrorists, a process known as "jihadization."

The conclusion: It depends on the individual. But analysts have come up with a list of factors they say are leading some Muslims to radicalism. They include the belief in the need to defend Islam from perceived Western aggression, the influence of spiritual leaders and extremist family members, and overseas training, the report says.

"The most important factor for radicalization is the perception that Islam is under attack from the West. Jihadists also feel they must preemptively and violently defend Islam from these perceived enemies.

"They also watch what is happening in the Islamic world and the many conflicts that involve 'Western' or other aggression: Palestine, Kashmir, Iraq, Chechnya, Afghanistan, and others.

"A few will act on these events and support or carry out terrorism in an attempt to change Western foreign or military policy. These individuals take the violent defence of Islam as a personal goal and religious obligation."

Those who undergo this process of radicalization reject mainstream Islam and instead adopt a narrow, literal, intolerant interpretation, CSIS says.

Questions for CSIS: How many personnel opened a Qur'an in this study? Or a pre-packaged interpretation, accepted unquestioningly? Was the possibility that the Qur'an calls for open-ended warfare against unbelievers to impose Islamic law ever considered (e.g., 9:5, 9:29)? Anything about the life and example of Muhammad? And at what point might CSIS, in the face of continuing confusion and a persistent jihadist threat, re-examine its basic assumptions about the nature of "mainstream" Islam?

The CSIS report notes that the failure of some Muslim immigrants to integrate into Western society is also a factor, but "this is seen more in European countries where the Muslim communities are more homogenous and there has been less integration than in North America."

Many Canadians were shocked when the RCMP announced last June 3 it had arrested a group of adults and juveniles for allegedly planning truck bombings in Toronto. The group had also allegedly stockpiled firearms and intended to take hostages at the Parliament buildings in Ottawa and behead them unless Canada pulled its troops out of Afghanistan.

Prosecutors allege the suspected terrorists were encouraged partly by an extremist leader who has claimed that Canadian troops are only deployed to Afghanistan to rape Muslim women.

The report notes that younger jihadists are now often getting their inspiration online from spiritual leaders who are "available 24/7."

While most of those allegedly involved in the "homegrown" terror group were arrested, investigators say Canada harbours other pro-al-Qaeda extremists who could quickly escalate to violence.

An update on this story. "Suspected Terror Leader Abu Bakar Bashir Threatens 'Jihad' Against Indonesian Police," from Associated Press:

JAKARTA, Indonesia — An alleged Southeast Asian terror leader threatened to call for holy war against Indonesian police Thursday, days after an anti-terror squad shot dead 15 suspected Islamic extremists.

Abu Bakar Bashir, accused by Australia and the United States of being a key figure in the Al Qaeda-linked Jemaah Islamiyah, said Muslims should stop serving in the police's anti-terror squad on Indonesia's conflict-ridden Sulawesi island.

"If Muslims are being killed, then we must fight back," the 69-year-old cleric told around 100 hard-liners outside the National Human Rights Commission in the capital, Jakarta, where they were protesting Monday's killings.

"If necessary, we must organize a jihad," he said.

Police say they shot the 15 men Monday after coming under attack as they entered a militant stronghold in Poso, a flash-point town on Sulawesi. They recovered large numbers of guns, bombs and ammunition.

Islamic groups and politicians have criticized police following the raid.

However, Indonesia's vice president, other government officials and most of the media in the world's most populous Muslim nation have supported the operation.

"There is an attempt in Poso to eliminate the Muslims so the unbelievers will control the town," Bashir said. "I curse the actions of (the anti-terror squad) Densus 88 for killing Muslims and helping the unbelievers."

The International Crisis Group think tank said Wednesday that the operation appeared to be justified, but warned that it could backfire by inflaming Islamic terrorists on Sulawesi and elsewhere in Indonesia.

Six years ago, Sulawesi was the scene of bloody battles between Muslim and Christian gangs that left about 1,000 people dead and attracted Islamic militants from all over Indonesia.

Over the past two years, Islamic extremists — some believed to Jemaah Islamiyah members — have carried out a series of shootings, beheadings and bombings against Christian men, women and children.

Bashir was released from jail last year after serving 26 months behind bars for conspiracy in the deadly 2002 Bali bombings. In December, the Supreme Court overturned the conviction and ordered that his name be cleared.

Bashir, who founded a boarding school attended by some of Indonesia's most notorious terrorists, has always denied any wrongdoing. Since his release from jail, he has continued preaching a hard-line, intolerant brand of Islam, but has consistently condemned terrorism.

Nutters with nukes unveil tomorrow's news today:

From A.P. U.N. says Iran plans nuclear development

Iran expects to start installing thousands of centrifuges in an underground facility next month, the head of the U.N. nuclear watchdog agency said Friday. The installation would pave the way to large-scale uranium enrichment, a potential way of making nuclear weapons.

From Reuters International Atomic Energy Agency's Iran section head must go: Tehran

Iran, cranking up a war of nerves with the West, has demanded the removal of the official running U.N. nuclear inspections, diplomats said on Friday.

International Atomic Energy Agency head Mohammed ElBaradei said Friday he was calling for a timeout regarding the Iranian nuclear issue, hoping that talks on the matter can resume.

A 1938 alert from Der Spiegel:

This essay is an excerpt of Henryk M. Broder's book "Hurra, Wir Kapitulieren," ("Hurray! We're Capitulating") published by Wolf Jobst Siedler Verlag in 2006. The book spent a number of weeks atop the DER SPIEGEL bestseller list.

The controversy over the 12 Muhammad cartoons that were published in the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten in September 2005 and led to worldwide protests and unrest among Muslims was merely a taste of what is to come, a dress rehearsal for the kinds of disputes Europe can expect to face in the future if it does not rethink its current policy of appeasement. As was the case in the 1930s, when Czechoslovakia was sacrificed in the interest of peace under the Munich Agreement -- a move that ultimately did nothing to prevent World War II -- Europeans today also believe that an adversary, seemingly invincible due to a preference for death over life, can be mollified by good behavior, concessions and submission.

"The West should desist from engaging in all provocations that produce feelings of debasement and humiliation," says psychoanalyst Horst-Eberhard Richter. "We should show greater respect for the cultural identity of Muslim countries. ... For Muslims, it is important to be recognized and respected as equals." In Richter's view, what the Muslims need is "a partnership of equals."
But Richter neglects to describe what this partnership might look like. Does achieving such equality mean that we should set up separate sections for women on buses, as is the custom in Saudi Arabia? Should the marrying age for girls be reduced to 12, as is the case in Iran? And should death by stoning be our punishment for adultery, as Shariah law demands? What else could the West do to show its respect for the cultural identity of Islamic countries? Would it be sufficient to allow Horst-Eberhard Richter to decide whether, for example, a wet T-shirt contest in a German city rises to a level of criminal provocation that could cause the Muslim faithful in Hyderabad to feel debased and humiliated?
The discussion over which provocations WE should put an end to so that THEY do not feel upset inexorably leads to the realm of the absurd.
Should devout Jews be entitled to demand that non-Jews give up pork? And should they have the power to impose sanctions if their demands are not met? Can a Hindu in India run amok because the Dutch do not view cows as sacred beings?

"Nowadays acts of terrorism are not committed for their own sake, but in the name of an ideology one could call Nazi-Islamism," Romanian-American author Norman Manea told the German daily Die Welt in March 2004. The only difference, in Manea's view, is "that this ideology invokes a religion, whereas the Nazis were mythical without being religious." Manea believes that what he calls a "World War III" has already begun. "The Europeans are putting off the recognition -- as they did in the 1930s -- of the tremendous tragedy that awaits them and that has, in fact, already arrived."

Spreading democracy isn't working out. From UPI

The first problem was that the national elections, expected to unify the country behind a legitimate Iraqi government, did the opposite.

More Mush from the Wimp. But as Kenneth W. Stein writes in the Middle East Quarterly, Carter was president. His critics were not.

To support Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid's central theme that Israel is intransigent, Carter recasts Hamas as a moderate partner ready to negotiate with Israel. He launders its reputation both with careful word choice and omission. He uses the past tense, for example, to describe Hamas as an "Islamic militant group that opposed recognition of Israel [and] perpetrated acts of violence." Carter adds that he "urged them …to forgo violence." He omits mention that Hamas denies the right of a Jewish state to exist in the Middle East and the group's belief that historical Palestine belongs in its entirety to Muslims.

UPDATE: Carter has apologized for writing this:

"It is imperative that the general Arab community and all significant Palestinian groups make it clear that they will end the suicide bombings and other acts of terrorism when international laws and the ultimate goals of the road map for peace are accepted by Israel." ... "That was a terribly worded sentence which implied, obviously in a ridiculous way, that I approved terrorism and terrorist acts against Israeli citizens," Carter says. "My publishers have been informed about that and the sentence has been changed in all future editions of the book."

The factual errors remain.

If China capitulates first, there won't be any bombs at the Olympics...perhaps.

From the Sidney Morning Herald (whose headline gets the nod, but thanks to all who sent this in from various sources):

China's ruling Communist Party has banned images and mention of pigs in TV advertisements airing over the lunar new year to avoid offending the country's Muslims, an advertising agency said on Friday.

"We were told by the CCTV (China Central Television) censorship team that the CCTV advertising department announced a new regulation on pigs in its internal document," an executive at the Shanghai-based Mindshare agency said.

The ban also applies to cartoons and traditional paper-cut images of pigs, and to slogans such as "golden pig brings you fortune" and "wish you a happy pig year", the executive said.

So, all you Western teachers who were planning big multi-cultural celebrations of Chinese New Year, watch out. It may be that in your local school district, too, Muslim traditions trump Chinese ones. Perhaps it would be best to spend Chinese New Year quietly working on times tables with your students.

The blast took place at the hotel "where the Indian High Commission was to host a reception to mark the Republic Day," according to the Times of India .

"Suicide blast at Marriott hotel in Pakistani capital," by Rana Jawad for AFP :

ISLAMABAD (AFP) - A suicide bomber killed a security guard and himself when he set off explosives strapped to his body outside the Marriott Hotel in the Pakistani capital, the interior minister has said.

The powerful blast, which could be heard across the city, occurred when the guard prevented the attacker from entering the heavily-protected five-star hotel, Interior Minister Aftab Sherpao told AFP.

"It was a suicide attack. The suicide attacker and a guard were killed," Sherpao said. "The attacker tried to enter the hotel and was stopped by the security guard and there was a scuffle and the blast occurred."

"Analysts both in the Muslim and the Western world by and large agree that “fear” and lack of objective dialogue are the root cause of Islamophobia and Anti-Americanism." – a statement by Abukar Arman in this article

Not so fast, buster. The word "Islamophobia" is not an acceptable term for intelligent apprehensions over Islam. For Islam is for its adherents a total belief-system whose central and moving idea is that of a complete division between Believer and Infidel. It asks of Believers that they offer their sole loyalty to Islam as a Total System, and to the Jihad, furthered through many conceivable instruments, to spread the dominance of Islam to lands that for now may still be under Infidel rule. Believers are also to ensure that dominance of Islam by removing "all obstacles" to its spread. They are to ensure that Muslims rule, and not just here or there, not just in the lands now part of Dar al-Islam or once part of Dar al-Islam, but everywhere.

The large-scale presence of Muslims in the Lands of the Infidels has brought about a situation, for those indigenous Infidels (and also for other non-indigenous arrivals, non-Muslim immigrants), that is unpleasant, expensive (the costs of monitoring, the costs of security, spiralling ever upward), and physically dangerous. Ask a Frenchman who dares to enter the "quartiers chauds" which are all over France. Or ask English residents of Birmingham and Bradford and Leeds and Manchester and parts of London, or ask Swedes in Malmo, or Dutch in Rotterdam and parts of Amsterdam.

"Islamophobia" is a word concocted to intimidate those who are rightly troubled, and more than troubled, by what they have learned of Islam largely through the observable behavior of Muslims not only in the West, but around the world -- and also through more and deeper study of the canonical texts and of the history of Jihad-conquest over the past 1350 years, from Spain to the East Indies, and of the subsequent subjugation of many different non-Muslim peoples: Christians, Jews, Zoroastrians, Hindus, Buddhists, and others. The similarities in their treatment, and the similarities in the impulses and attitudes exhibited by Muslims over a wide area, are simply too great to ignore.

The surprise on the part of the former minister for religious minorities that there were Jews in Pakistan underscores how thoroughly their presence has been erased from history there. "Pakistan census poses question on remaining Jews," from Reuters:

ISLAMABAD - The Pakistan government census on civil servants raised curiosity on Thursday about one of the Islamic Republic’s smallest and most low-profile religious minorities -- the Jews.

The 2003 census, released on a government Web site last week, showed none of the 234,933 government employees declared themselves to be Jews, though 10 had done so in the previous census three years earlier.

“Whatever happened to the 10 Jew civil servants?,” read a headline in The News daily, Pakistan’s biggest-selling English language newspaper, on Thursday.

But, for many people the real news was that there were still any Jews living in Pakistan, given Pakistan’s longstanding antipathy towards Israel and Zionism.

Even a former minister for religious minorities was taken aback that there were Jews in the country.

“I never thought there were Jews in Pakistan. I have never seen them or met them, even when I was a minister,” remarked Colonel S.K. Tressler, who served in President Pervez Musharraf’s first cabinet in 1999.

“I was also surprised to see the report that there were Jews in the government service, also.”

Officials who conducted the census couldn’t say whether the Jews had retired, converted, migrated, died, or simply chose to mark themselves in an “Other Religions” category.

The census depended on what answers respondents submitted, and Jews might have chosen not to disclose their religion.

“In the latest census, they might not have indicated their religion. If it is not there, it will not reflect in the census,” Saeed-un-Nisa Abbasi, of the Establishment Division, which looks after civil service affairs, told Reuters.

The existence of Jews in Pakistan is seldom acknowledged, although the mostly Muslim country has sizable Hindu and Christian communities, who between them make up about four percent of Pakistan’s 160 million people.

The number of Jews living in Pakistan today is unknown, but must be very tiny.

There were a couple of thousand Jews living in Karachi and Peshawar before the partition of India and the formation of Pakistan in 1947.

Their families mostly migrated from Iraq in the 19th century.

A 55-year-old woman, who converted to Islam from Judaism when she married, remembered attending services at a synagogue in Karachi.

The woman, who asked not to be named, says all of her relatives have migrated to Israel, the United States and Europe, and she hasn’t seen any people from her old faith for years.

“I have been separated from them for a long time,” she said.

A commercial plaza now stands where the synagogue used to be, she added.

It's good news that Boxer didn't give in to pressure from CAIR. It would be even better news if she continued to pursue what she has begun to learn about the group. "Boxer, Muslim group say skirmish resolved," from Associated Press:

WASHINGTON - Sen. Barbara Boxer and officials from a Muslim advocacy group said Wednesday they have resolved to move forward on improving interfaith relations after smoothing over a skirmish about an honor rescinded by her office.

“I’m putting it all behind me, and we’re moving ahead to work with the civil rights community to better relations among people of all faiths,” Boxer said in an interview.

But a spokeswoman for the California Democrat said she does not intend to give back the certificate honoring Basim Elkarra, executive director of the Sacramento chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations. The senator also said the concerns prompting her to rescind his service award this month haven’t changed.

At the time, Boxer and her staff cited concerns about CAIR’s positions on terrorist groups, contending that CAIR had refused to label Hamas and Hezbollah as terrorist organizations. Boxer had been criticized on conservative Web sites for giving the award to Elkarra; she said she did not know her office had done so.

CAIR officials met with Boxer and her staff Tuesday.

“We have addressed the issues related to this unfortunate and unnecessary incident, and have agreed with Senator Boxer that we should all move forward to build a nation in which people of all faiths work together to promote respect and tolerance,” CAIR said in a statement.

CAIR-Los Angeles Executive Director Hussam Ayloush said the group condemns all acts of terrorism.

But apparently not terrorist -- more accurately, jihadist -- groups like Hizballah and Hamas, which is why the award was rescinded.

An update on this story. "U.S. envoy: Iran Revolutionary Guards Quds Force director detained," by Steven R. Hurst for Associated Press:

BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) - The U.S. ambassador said Wednesday that one of the Iranians detained by U.S. forces in Iraq during two raids over the past month was the director of operations for Iran's Revolutionary Guard Quds faction, the organization responsible for funding and arming Iraqi militants.

Zalmay Khalilzad said the recent raids were part of a "new strategy" to "go after their networks that are active here."

[...]

At least eight Iranians have been detained in Iraq recently, including two diplomats in a Dec. 21 roundup of a group of 10 suspects. The diplomats were interrogated and released to Iranian officials eight days later.

Six others were captured Jan. 11 at an Iranian liaison office in the northern city of Irbil. One was released and five are still believed in U.S. custody.

"Some of those we've arrested are Quds Force operatives. One of them was director of operations for the Quds Force" who was in the country without the knowledge of Iraqi security officials, he said.

The ambassador, who has been nominated by President Bush as Washington's envoy to the United Nations, said U.S. forces were detaining Iranians because "we've had a good understanding of the equipment that comes across (the border), particularly about the EFPs (explosively formed projectiles)." Those are high-tech roadside bombs capable of piercing armor on U.S. vehicles.

"And (we're) also concerned about the training and the money and the influence" by Iran inside Iraq.

[...]

He said Iran had set its sites on becoming the dominant power in the Middle East and was taking advantage of Iraq's "weakened state" and "throwing its weight around."

[...]

Khalilzad said Iranian agents were working with "a variety of groups, and there are groups that they fund and control, in my judgment, directly."

The ambassador said U.S. officials soon would outline in detail the activities of the arrested Iranians, as demanded by Tehran's ambassador in Baghdad.

"Since he was good enough to say we should present what we have, we will be helpful and try to do that - where we found them, what they were doing, what is coming from Iran across the border. ... We will have something for you in the coming days," he said.

As one U.S. official accurately described the policy: "We were bending over backwards not to fight back."

"Troops Authorized to Kill Iranian Operatives in Iraq," by Dafna Linzer for the Washington Post:

The Bush administration has authorized the U.S. military to kill or capture Iranian operatives inside Iraq as part of an aggressive new strategy to weaken Tehran's influence across the Middle East and compel it to give up its nuclear program, according to government and counterterrorism officials with direct knowledge of the effort.

For more than a year, U.S. forces in Iraq have secretly detained dozens of suspected Iranian agents, holding them for three to four days at a time. The "catch and release" policy was designed to avoid escalating tensions with Iran and yet intimidate its emissaries. U.S. forces collected DNA samples from some of the Iranians without their knowledge, subjected others to retina scans, and fingerprinted and photographed all of them before letting them go.

Last summer, however, senior administration officials decided that a more confrontational approach was necessary, as Iran's regional influence grew and U.S. efforts to isolate Tehran appeared to be failing. The country's nuclear work was advancing, U.S. allies were resisting robust sanctions against the Tehran government, and Iran was aggravating sectarian violence in Iraq.

"There were no costs for the Iranians," said one senior administration official. "They are hurting our mission in Iraq, and we were bending over backwards not to fight back."

Three officials said that about 150 Iranian intelligence officers, plus members of Iran's Revolutionary Guard Command, are believed to be active inside Iraq at any given time. There is no evidence the Iranians have directly attacked U.S. troops in Iraq, intelligence officials said.

But, for three years, the Iranians have operated an embedding program there, offering operational training, intelligence and weaponry to several Shiite militias connected to the Iraqi government, to the insurgency and to the violence against Sunni factions. Gen. Michael V. Hayden, the director of the CIA, told the Senate recently that the amount of Iranian-supplied materiel used against U.S. troops in Iraq "has been quite striking."

"Iran seems to be conducting a foreign policy with a sense of dangerous triumphalism," Hayden said.

Yes.

[...]

Information gleaned through the "catch and release" policy expanded what was once a limited intelligence community database on Iranians in Iraq. It also helped to avert a crisis between the United States and the Iraqi government over whether U.S. troops should be holding Iranians, several officials said, and dampened the possibility of Iranians directly targeting U.S. personnel in retaliation.

But senior officials saw it as too timid.

"We were making no traction" with "catch and release," a senior counterterrorism official said in a recent interview, explaining that it had failed to halt Iranian activities in Iraq or worry the Tehran leadership. "Our goal is to change the dynamic with the Iranians, to change the way the Iranians perceive us and perceive themselves. They need to understand that they cannot be a party to endangering U.S. soldiers' lives and American interests, as they have before. That is going to end."

A senior intelligence officer was more wary of the ambitions of the strategy.

"This has little to do with Iraq. It's all about pushing Iran's buttons. It is purely political," the official said. The official expressed similar views about other new efforts aimed at Iran, suggesting that the United States is escalating toward an unnecessary conflict to shift attention away from Iraq and to blame Iran for the United States' increasing inability to stanch the violence there.

But some officials within the Bush administration say that targeting Iran's Revolutionary Guard Command, and specifically a Guard unit known as the Quds Force, should be as much a priority as fighting al-Qaeda in Iraq. The Quds Force is considered by Western intelligence to be directed by Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, to support Iraqi militias, Hamas and Hezbollah.

In interviews, two senior administration officials separately compared the Tehran government to the Nazis and the Guard to the "SS." They also referred to Guard members as "terrorists." Such a formal designation could turn Iran's military into a target of what Bush calls a "war on terror," with its members potentially held as enemy combatants or in secret CIA detention.

Asked whether such a designation is imminent, Johndroe of the NSC said in a written response that the administration has "long been concerned about the activities of the IRGC and its components throughout the Middle East and beyond." He added: "The Iranian Revolutionary Guards Quds Force is a part of the Iranian state apparatus that supports and carries out these activities."

Didn't history end already? Why then are we still hearing from Francis Fukuyama?

In "Identity and Migration" in Prospect, he says this:

Whether there is anything specific to the Muslim religion that encourages this radicalisation is an open question. Since 11th September, a small industry has sprung up trying to show how violence and even suicide bombing have deep Koranic or historical roots. It is important to remember, however, that at many periods in history Muslim societies have been more tolerant than their Christian counterparts. The Jewish philosopher Maimonides was born in Muslim Córdoba, which was a diverse centre of culture and learning; Baghdad for many generations hosted one of the world's largest Jewish communities. It makes no more sense to see today's radical Islamism as an inevitable outgrowth of Islam than to see fascism as the culmination of centuries of European Christianity.

We see thus that it is an open question that he immediately closes. In other words, like Dinesh D'Souza, he proposes that we ignore the testimony of the jihadists themselves, when they make copious use of the Qur'an and Sunnah to justify their acts of violence. (See, to take just two examples out of a great many, here and here.) No, the equation of Islam with violence comes not from them but from a "small industry" -- of "Islamophobes," no doubt -- that has sprung up since 9/11. We should also ignore the doctrine of warfare against and subjugation of unbelievers that is taught by every single orthodox Islamic sect and school of jurisprudence. Instead, we should note that dhimmis were able to practice their religions within the Islamic state -- while ignoring also, of course, the institutionalized discrimination under which they labored even in vaunted Muslim Córdoba.

In fact, Muslim Spain was hardly a paradise for non-Muslims. Even Maria Rosa Menocal, in her extended whitewash of Muslim Spain called The Ornament of the World, admits that at the laws of dhimmitude were very much in force in the great Al-Andalus:

The dhimmi, as these covenanted peoples were called, were granted religious freedom, not forced to convert to Islam. They could continue to be Jews and Christians, and, as it turned out, they could share in much of Muslim social and economic life. In return for this freedom of religious conscience the Peoples of the Book (pagans had no such privilege) were required to pay a special tax — no Muslims paid taxes — and to observe a number of restrictive regulations: Christians and Jews were prohibited from attempting to proselytize Muslims, from building new places of worship, from displaying crosses or ringing bells. In sum, they were forbidden most public displays of their religious rituals.

So much for paradise. Also, historian Kenneth Baxter Wolf observes that “much of this new legislation aimed at limiting those aspects of the Christian cult which seemed to compromise the dominant position of Islam.” After enumerating a list of laws much like Menocal’s, he adds: “Aside from such cultic restrictions most of the laws were simply designed to underscore the position of the dimmîs as second-class citizens.” These laws were not uniformly or strictly enforced; Christians were forbidden public funeral processions, but one contemporary account tells of priests merely “pelted with rocks and dung” rather than being arrested while on the way to a cemetery.

If Muslims, Christians, and Jews lived together peaceably and productively only with Christians and Jews relegated by law to second-class citizen status, then al-Andalus has absolutely no reason to be lionized in our age. The laws of dhimmitude give all of Menocal’s accounts of Jewish viziers and Christian diplomats the same hollow ring as the stories of prominent American blacks from the slavery and Jim Crow eras: yes, Frederick Douglass and Booker T. Washington were great men, but their accomplishments not only do not erase or contradict the records of the oppression of their people, but render them all the more poignant and haunting. Whatever the Christians and Jews of al-Andalus accomplished, they were still dhimmis. They enjoyed whatever rights and privileges they had not out of any sense of the dignity of all people before God, or the equality of all before the law, but at the sufferance of their Muslim overlords.

Refresh my memory: what was the name of that large skyscraper containing 3,000 people that was brought down by "Islamophobia"?

Abukar Arman writes in the Baltimore Chronicle:

Analysts both in the Muslim and the Western world by and large agree that “fear” and lack of objective dialogue are the root cause of Islamophobia and Anti-Americanism. And while the debate on which one of the two ignited the other is still ongoing, one fact remains irrefutable: more people were victimized as a result of Islamophobia than the other way around.

Few people are aware that Islamic law forbids music, and when I have pointed it out, I've been accused of distortion and "Islamophobia." Bahraini author Dhiyaa Al-Musawi knows better, and lists it along with several other points as evidence of his going against religious orthodoxy. He also has good things to say about rejecting the Islamic mandate to hate Jews and Christians.

"Bahraini Liberal Author Dhiyaa Al-Musawi: We Hang Our Thinkers on the Gallows of Ideology. I Listen to Music and Placed Pictures of Jesus and Martin Luther King in My Home," from MEMRI:

Following are excerpts from an interview with Bahraini intellectual Dhiyaa Al-Musawi, which aired on Abu Dhabi TV on December 29, 2006.

[...]

We need to reform and to reshape religious thinking, because, in all honesty, the pulpits of our mosques have begun to "booby trap" the people.

Interviewer: In what way?

Dhiyaa Al-Musawi: They booby trap them by generating hatred towards "the other." We have claimed a monopoly over Paradise, and each of us has recorded it in the land registry in his name.

[...]

The Koran is balanced. It talks about the fire of Hell and the fruits of Paradise, but we constantly preach about the horrors of Judgment Day, saying that a bald Satan, or a bald serpent, would visit them in the grave. It is constant terror. It is always a dark picture. Why? That is the problem. Unfortunately, some young men – out of a wrong interpretation of religion... The moment he becomes religious, he ceases to smile and to greet others. He accuses some people of heresy and others of sin. He begins all that discourse. He hates music, and refuses to dress neatly. His mind is abducted into the dungeons of ideology, I'm sad to say.

Interviewer: Let me ask you a question. If a Shiite, or even a Sunni, becomes a religious cleric, yet he listens to music, can the Arab public possibly accept him?

Dhiyaa Al-Musawi: In my view, the Arab disposition suffers from many problems. We have destroyed many things, including the beauty of the general disposition. Music is a beautiful thing...

Interviewer: Do you listen to music?

Dhiyaa Al-Musawi: Yes, I listen to music. I listen to classical music, and I think Beethoven's symphonies are very beautiful. They are among the masterpieces of human art. I believe that music develops the spirit of Man and humbles him. What is wrong with that?

[...]

As for the policy of non-violence, I'd like to give you the example of Gandhi, whom I consider a hero. If only we could obtain some of Gandhi's genes, and plant them in the brains of our youth in the Arab world...

Interviewer: In your home, you have pictures of Martin Luther King and Jesus on the wall.

Dhiyaa Al-Musawi: In my home, I put up a picture of Jesus, because whenever I look at his picture, worlds of peace and love open up before me. It was Jesus who said: "Love thy enemies, bless them who curse thee." We need this beautiful language in our society. I also have a picture of Gandhi, whom I consider to be a very fine person, and whose [image] we should plant in the minds of our youth.

[...]

Some of us say: "May Allah curse the Jews and the Christians, the offspring of apes and pigs." Is this the language of progress? Is this the language of enlightenment and tolerance? If you had been born in Rome, you would have been Christian, if you had been born in Tehran, you would have been Shiite, and if you had been born in Saudi Arabia, you would have been Sunni, and so on. How wonderful it would be if all these people could gather in love around the table of humanity.

"Violating our rights, confiscating our belongings and treating us badly has become costumary. Zoroastrians who denounce such violations to authorities are completely ignored."

Bravo, Kurosh Niknam. May you be safe. From AKI, with thanks to Fjordman:

Tehran, 23 Jan. (AKI) - Kurosh Niknam, an Iranian MP representing Zoroastrians in Parliament, has denounced state discriminations against members of his faith. "Violating our rights, confiscating our belongings and treating us badly has become costumary," he told Iranian daily Khatam Yazd on Tuesday. "Zoroastrians who denounce such violations to authorities are completely ignored."

Niknam also complained about the scrapping of his faith, the oldest religious community of that nation to have survived, from the list of officially recognized religions, which only includes Abrahamic religions.

"We have the impression that someone wants to cancel us gradually from the history of the country where our faith was born," he said....

The Zoroastrian community in Iran was estimated to number 32,000 individuals at the beginning of the 1980s but reports suggest that their number has halved since the 1979 Iranian revolution established an Islamic Republic. However, conservative Iranian papers have denounced that in the past few years an increasing number of Iranians, especially youths, have converted from Islam to the Evangelical Church and Zoroastrism, claiming the phenomenon is growing and becoming "extremely worrying."

Escalation. From Reuters:

JAMMU, India (Reuters) - Indian and Pakistani troops exchanged small arms fire on Thursday after an attempt by anti-India militants to cross their heavily guarded border in the disputed territory of Kashmir, an Indian army spokesman said.

"The (firing) has been going on for quite some time now between the two sides after an infiltration bid was foiled," Lieutenant Colonel G.D. Goswami said.

He said one militant had been killed in the incident in Poonch district, 250 km northwest of Jammu.

Security has been beefed up in Kashmir and other parts of India ahead of Republic Day on Friday when India marks the day in 1950 it adopted its republican constitution with a military parade through the capital New Delhi.

1938 Alert: "UN nuclear agency asks Iran to back off on rejection of 38 inspectors," and the second part of this headline should be: "Iran declines." From AFP, :

VIENNA (AFP) - The UN watchdog International Atomic Energy Agency has asked Iran to reverse its ban on 38 IAEA inspectors from working in the country, a spokeswoman told AFP.

The IAEA "requested Iranian authorities to reconsider their decision," spokeswoman Melissa Fleming said.

Fleming said the IAEA sent the letter Wednesday to Tehran, two days after an announcement in Iran that the Islamic Republic was blocking 38 IAEA inspectors from entering the country.

Alaeddin Borujerdi, the head of parliament's national security commission, told ISNA news agency on Monday that "the committee (in charge of implementing parliamentary legislation) decided not to allow 38 inspectors to enter Iran and this restriction has been officially announced to the IAEA."

Dhimmi Christians break their silence. By Khaled Abu Toameh in the Jerusalem Post, with thanks to all who sent this in:

A number of Christian families have finally decided to break their silence and talk openly about what they describe as Muslim persecution of the Christian minority in this city.

The move comes as a result of increased attacks on Christians by Muslims over the past few months. The families said they wrote letters to Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas, the Vatican, Church leaders and European governments complaining about the attacks, but their appeals have fallen on deaf ears.

According to the families, many Christians have long been afraid to complain in public about the campaign of "intimidation" for fear of retaliation by their Muslim neighbors and being branded "collaborators" with Israel.

But following an increase in attacks on Christian-owned property in the city over the past few months, some Christians are no longer afraid to talk about the ultra-sensitive issue. And they are talking openly about leaving the city.

"The situation is very dangerous," said Samir Qumsiyeh, owner of the Beit Sahur-based private Al-Mahd (Nativity) TV station. "I believe that 15 years from now there will be no Christians left in Bethlehem. Then you will need a torch to find a Christian here. This is a very sad situation."

Qumsiyeh, one of the few Christians willing to speak about the harsh conditions of their community, has been the subject of numerous death threats. His house was recently attacked with fire-bombs, but no one was hurt.

Qumsiyeh said he has documented more than 160 incidents of attacks on Christians in the area in recent years.

Read it all.

Honor killing in modern, moderate Jordan, where the Parliament rejected strengthening laws against this sort of thing.

By Shafika Mattar for AP, with thanks to all who sent this in:

AMMAN, Jordan - A Jordanian man fatally shot his 17-year-old daughter whom he suspected of having sex despite a medical exam that proved her chastity, an official said Thursday. The man surrendered to police hours after the killing, saying he had done it for family honor.

A state forensic pathologist, who works at the National Institute of Forensic Medicine in Amman where an autopsy was performed, said in a phone interview that the girl had run away from home several times for unknown reasons.

Weeks ago, the girl had returned home from a family protection clinic after doctors had vouched for her virginity and the father had signed a pledge not to harm her, the pathologist said on condition of anonymity due to the sensitive nature of the case.

"The tests proved that she was a virgin," the pathologist said. The girl returned home only after her father signed a statement promising not to harm her, he added.

The father shot the girl four times in the head on Tuesday. On Wednesday, an autopsy was performed that again showed "she was still a virgin," the pathologist said.

Authorities have not disclosed the names of the father or the daughter or even their hometown, saying only that they lived in a southern province.

The crime is the first "honor killing" this year in Jordan, where many men consider sex out of wedlock to be an almost indelible stain on a family's reputation. On average, about 20 women in the country are killed by their relatives in such cases each year. Women have been killed for simply dating.

"NEW: Questions As Weapons" by Charles Jacobs unmasks a little-noted rhetorical strategy often employed by the jihadists and their allies:

"Why did you kill your grandmother?” That’s what Professor Ruth Wisse said to an Arab student at Stanford who asked her, “Why is Israel an apartheid state?”

The student was flummoxed and tried again, “Why is Israel an apartheid state?” Wisse again responded, “Come on now, tell us why you killed your grandmother.” A few more rounds of this and the student relented.

According to the Chabad Rabbi who invited Harvard’s Wisse to speak, Wisse then explained how some questions are not questions at all, but weapons: If she would have answered his anti-Israel accusation, she would have been trapped, and done damage to her cause.

Her “grandmother” riposte was the perfect demonstration of that point:

Having to explain why you’re not guilty as charged is a losing proposition.

Yet Jews have allowed themselves to be trapped in a meta-discourse that continuously takes the form: “Israel is bad.” “No it’s not.” Or “It’s not as bad as you say.”

Indeed, much of the history of hasbara – Israeli PR – has been defense against slanderous accusations. The classic handy reference book many students use, “Myths and Facts,” a tome fat with expanded revisions to include the evolving set of lies and half-truths hurled at the Jewish state by Arabist propaganda. The formula of the book, which is the formula for much of hasbara training, is to set out the “myth” and then answer it with the true “facts.”

Sometimes the “factual” response shows how Israeli conduct is exemplary:

“Israel is an apartheid state?” “No,” reads the formula. “Apartheid is something very different and cannot be applied to the condition of Palestinians in Israel, who are in fact treated in many ways better than they are in Arab countries.” Etc.

But even this – “We are much better than you say” doesn¹t work, because as long as the discourse focuses on Israeli behavior, we lose.
What to do? Once armed with the realization that the anti-Israel formula accuses Israel of exactly those crimes the Arab/Muslim world has committed, we can work our way out of the corner:

“You say the Jews are guilty of oppression, apartheid, discrimination, expansion by land theft? Not true. What is true is that the Arab world is guilty of every one of these things.”

Here’s an enhanced “Myths, Facts, and Big Picture” approach:

The Lie: Israel is an apartheid state.

The Truth: That’s ridiculous. (See Myths and Facts on why.)

Transition: But I’m glad you brought up apartheid. Christians are fleeing Palestinian-controlled areas due to Muslim violence. Violence against women, especially “honor killings” where male relatives kill females for “improper” sexual relations, are common in Palestinian territories and throughout the Muslim world. Jews are not even permitted to set foot in Saudi Arabia.

The Big Picture: Something similar to apartheid is found in the Arab world, where women and children, gays and lesbians, and Christians and Jews, are controlled, expelled, tormented and killed. That’s what we should be protesting.

Clash of Civilizations Update. "French Muslim jailed for attacking gynaecologist," from Reuters:

PARIS: A French Muslim who attacked a male gynaecologist for examining his wife just after she had given birth, saying it was against Islam, has been jailed for six months by a Paris court.

Fouad ben Moussa burst into the delivery room at a Paris hospital last November and shoved, slapped and insulted Dr Jean-Francois Oury as he examined the woman after a complicated birth, the prosecution said in court on Wednesday.

Police had to intervene to remove him.

Ben Moussa, a 23-year-old lorry driver, apologised for the attack and said he had requested a female doctor. French state hospitals comply with such requests when staffing permits but say patients must accept treatment from the doctors on duty.

"This is a public and secular place," prosecution lawyer Georges Holleaux said of the state hospital where the attack occurred. "This is not the place where one can invoke religion to get different treatment."

French media have reported cases in recent years of Muslim men barring male doctors from treating their wives, sometimes resorting to violence, but legal cases against them are rare.

France's five million Muslims make up eight per cent of the French population, Europe's largest Islamic minority.

This is an Open Book Examination. You may use any materials you can find, including other newspaper reports, and of course you are encouraged to use the work of genuine scholars on Islam, Iraq, the history of Sunni-Shi’a relations and of Arab Muslim relations with Kurds and other non-Arab peoples.

You may even consult with others. But the thinking, in the end, must be yours, and so must the expression, in writing, of your thoughts and analysis.

You have one week to complete this task. Examination papers are due by 5 p.m. on January 31, 2007.

_____________________________________________________________

There are two passages below. One consists of an excerpt from an interview with Vice-President Cheney, conducted and broadcast on CNN on January 24, 2007 and reported in The Bandar Beacon (Washington Post) the next day. The other consists of an excerpt from a report from Iraq in The New Duranty Times [New York Times], written the same day, January 24, 2007, and appearing in that paper on January 25, 2007.

You are asked to comment on both of these passages, and on their usefulness to an American audience in illuminating the reality of Iraq today. Discuss the ratio of fact to mere assertion contained in each. Evaluate their overall usefulness, for the public, in judging what might make sense for American national interests.

Wherever possible, be careful to analyze examples of rhetoric that you feel contribute to, or take away from, the understanding of or expression of reality in each article.

Please be careful to support all your assertions with facts. You are encouraged to apply whatever knowledge you possess of the belief-system of Islam as you understand it, and of the attitudes and atmospherics to which the teachings of Islam may naturally give rise.

You are further encouraged to apply in your answer as detailed a knowledge as you possibly can of the history of Iraq and of its sectarian and ethnic fissures, and of how those fissures arise from the nature and history of Islam. You are asked to speculate on how the further development of such fissures might contribute to, or take away from, the security of the people of the United States and of other countries in what may be called, using the term used in Islam, the Dar al-Harb, or House of War.

The more deeply your answer is based on a knowledge both of Islam’s teachings and its history, and of the history of modern Iraq itself and the relations among the varied peoples who live within the state of Iraq, the better. The more you can bring to bear such knowledge, the more likely it is that you will be able to make an intelligent assessment of the effect, both inside and outside Iraq, of the presence or withdrawal of American troops.

Be sure to write from the viewpoint of one determined to further American national interests, broadly conceived, and also to further the interests of those who, while they may differ on all sorts of matters, share the basic assumptions and hierarchy of values of what may be called the West, or Western civilization, or perhaps, even more broadly and more accurately, the non-Islamic world or Camp of the Infidels.

Here are the two passages for comment:

In this week's Jihad Watch videoblog at Hot Air, I discuss the Dispatches documentary that recently uncovered Islamic supremacism being preached in mosques that had been considered moderate. This underscores the necessity of doing what so few dare to do: discuss the elements of Islam that are fueling the jihad. This must be done, for the "extremists" are using those elements of Islam to recruit terrorists, and thus that recruitment cannot be stopped without confronting the way in which it is being done. Contrary to D'Souza, Lowry, and others, this shouldn't hurt and radicalize genuine moderates: if they're serious about Islamic reform, they shouldn't be enraged by a discussion of what needs reforming.

This Hot Air video piece is expanded in this FrontPage article, "Islamic Prejudice, Islamic Denial" (news links in the original):

For last week’s “Dispatches” program on Britain’s Channel Four, a reporter with a hidden camera entered Birmingham’s Green Lane mosque (which has won praise from Britain’s Muslim peer, Lord Ahmed) and other leading mosques in Britain. He found they preached Islamic supremacism, hatred of Jews and Christians, and the subjugation of women.

The mosques, of course, are in heavy damage-control mode. A press release at the Green Lane mosque website complains that “it is extremely disappointing but not at all surprising that ‘Dispatches’ has chosen to portray Muslims in the worst possible light. ‘Dispatches’ has opted for sensationalism over substance with total disregard for peaceful community relations.” And not only that: “This so-called ‘undercover’ investigation merely panders to age-old anti-Muslim prejudices by employing the time-honoured tradition of cherry picking statements and presenting them in the most inflammatory manner.”

The statement doesn’t address the obvious fact that it would be difficult, if not impossible, to cherry-pick statements anywhere near as hateful and inflammatory as those recorded in the Green Lane mosque from proceedings in any Jewish, Christian, Hindu, or Buddhist house of worship.

Among the statements recorded in the Green Lane mosque were these about women:

Jamie Glazov serves up Cream of Dinesh soup in FrontPage today. You can also read my initial responses to Dinesh D'Souza's disastrously misleading thesis here, here, and here, and Hugh Fitzgerald's here, here, and here. And the funniest response comes from Jihad Watch News Editor Anne Crockett, here.

Note also Glazov's invitation to D'Souza to respond to his points whenever he can make the time to do so. It would seem to be a matter of some little moment to address direct, detailed, and well-reasoned challenges to one's central thesis. I hope he does so soon.

Frontpage Magazine’s guest today is Dinesh D’Souza, the Rishwain Research Scholar at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. He is the author of several bestselling books, including Illiberal Education, The Virtue of Prosperity, and What's So Great About America. He is the author of the new book The Enemy At Home: The Cultural Left and Its Responsibility for 9/11.

Jamie Glazov: Dinesh D’Souza, welcome back to Frontpage.

Dinesh D’Souza: Thank you Jamie.

Glazov: As we announced in our interview on January 23, today Mr. D’Souza and I will engage in a detailed exchange on some of our points of disagreement. We break the debate up into the category of “rounds” so that the themes remain clear and concise.

As a side note, I ended up getting the last word in each round in this particular segment. But Mr. D’Souza is most welcome to volley back whenever his schedule permits and we will be most happy to publish his responses.

So we begin with the first round:

Round #1: Qutb a Democrat?

Glazov: Let us begin our discussion, Mr. D’Souza, with your interpretation of Sayyid Qutb. With all due respect, I am not so sure what kind of great supporter Qutb was of democracy and capitalism. Qutb was an Islamic fanatic who was full of hatred. He was intoxicated by a death cult based on martyrdom through jihad.

Yes, Qutb obviously believed that we were “immoral” -- in the sense that any Muslim radical believes that anything non-Muslim is immoral. In his view, immorality was anything connected to humans pursuing earthly happiness and joy -- and anything that didn’t involve giving one’s life through jihad.

In terms of the U.S., Qutb was enraged when he saw people dancing at a church social in Colorado in the 1940s. And let’s just get a glimpse of the mindset here: the dancing there was nothing compared to the dancing of today. And whatever it is that one might think of the dancing today, one thing is for sure: no one of sound mind would have called the dancing at the church social in Colorado in 1940 as being “immoral” by any rational standard.

The bottom line is that Qutb was enraged that people were enjoying music and life, because the purpose of life was death through jihad. And this disposition was akin to the Leninist hatred of cheer on earth.

Qutb was opposed to democracy, first and foremost, for the simple reason that it placed sovereignty with the people rather than with God and was, therefore, contrary to Islam. And let’s also just bring up one anti-democratic theme in a sea of many: In In the Shade of the Qur'an, commenting on Sura 9:29 of the Qur’an, which commands Muslims to fight Jews and Christians (“the People of the Book”) until they “pay the jizya [a non-Muslim poll tax] with willing submission, and feel themselves subdued,” Qutb echoes the Qur’anic verse directly. He says that Muslims must “smash the power of those authorities based on false beliefs until they declare their submission and demonstrate this by paying the submission tax.”

Is this subjugation of Jews and Christians under the rule of Islamic law consistent with our idea of democracy and freedom?

Saying that Qutb hated us for how we used our freedom is, I am afraid, meaningless. Freedom is freedom. When humans are free, they are going to use their human agency in ways that tyranny supporters despise. A person who yearns for totalitarianism and wants to veil women, segregate the genders, ban the privatization of love, etc., will never support a society where people can “use” their freedom in the way they see fit. Once you start making rules on how people can “use” their freedom, then you aren’t talking about real freedom. And so when you have Sharia, people don’t “use” freedom in any way at all, because there is no freedom.

Overall, Mr. D’Souza, the troubling implication of your argument appears to be -- and correct me if I am wrong -- that it is our fault that we enraged Qutb because we allowed people to be free, and that they did things with their freedom that enraged totalitarians. In other words, when it comes to the terrorists and their terror, you are implying that the devil made them do it. And the devil is us. This is a leftist argument, which blames us rather than the terrorists who are responsible for the destruction they perpetrate.

Pakistan blasphemy law news from Compass Direct:

ISTANBUL, January 22 (Compass Direct News) – A Pakistani court last week acquitted a Christian “blasphemy” prisoner on grounds that the convict was mentally unstable, while another Christian facing the same accusation was released on bail.

Justice Muhammad Ijaz Chaudhry overturned Shahbaz Masih’s life sentence at a Lahore High Court hearing on Friday (January 19), citing evidence that the Christian was mentally handicapped. He has been incarcerated for more than five years.

The judge also noted that no one had seen Masih, 28, commit the alleged crime, defense lawyer Khalil Tahir Sindhu said.

A Faisalabad court condemned the Christian to 25 years in prison in September 2004 for allegedly tearing up a Quran in a Muslim graveyard in Faisalabad.

Though psychiatrist Dr. Pervez Ahmed had testified under oath that Masih suffered from a “bipolar effective disorder,” the mentally unstable man was found guilty under sections 295 A and B of Pakistan’s Penal Code, two of the country’s blasphemy laws.

Defense lawyer Sindhu told Compass that tomorrow he plans to secure his client’s release from Faisalabad District Jail’s mental ward, where he has been jailed since June 4, 2001.

‘I will get him tomorrow and keep him in a secret place,” Sindhu said, noting that his client’s life may still be in danger from Muslim fanatics angered by the verdict.

Threats from radical groups have forced Masih’s family into hiding several times during the case. More than 60 armed Muslim clerics were present at the Christian’s final Faisalabad court hearing in 2004, chanting slogans and praising the judge and Islamic law when he was found guilty.

These films fuel "Islamophobia," you see. Some even dare to link Islamic ritual to terrorist attacks. No one seems to have considered the possibility that actual terrorist attacks perpetrated by Islamic terrorists who perform Islamic rituals and ascribe their terrorist acts to Islamic teachings fuel "Islamophobia" far more than any film ever could. "From Aladdin to Lost Ark, Muslims get angry at 'bad guy' film images: Crude and exaggerated stereotypes are fuelling Islamophobia, says study," by Lucy Ward in The Guardian, with thanks to D. C. Watson:

Popular films ranging from Hollywood blockbusters to children's cartoons are depicting "crude and exaggerated" stereotypes of Muslims and perpetuating Islamophobia, according to a study published today.

A report by the Islamic Human Rights Commission argues that films as diverse as The Siege, a portrayal of a terrorist attack on New York starring Denzel Washington and Bruce Willis, the Disney film Aladdin and the British comedy East is East have helped demonise Muslims as violent, dangerous and threatening, and reinforce prejudices.

While The Siege is attacked for inter-cutting Islamic ritual and terrorist violence, potentially linking the two in the minds of audiences, Aladdin faces criticism for depicting Arabs as "ruthless caricatures" with "exaggerated and ridiculous accents".

The study, titled The British media and Muslim representation: the ideology of demonisation, argues that Hollywood has a crucial role in influencing how the public views Muslims.

A survey conducted as part of the research revealed that Muslims in Britain felt negative images of their faith on the big and small screen had consequences in their daily lives. Those interviewed "found a direct correlation between media portrayal and their social experiences of exclusion, hatred, discrimination and violence".

Do Muslims in Britain really want to lessen experiences of exclusion, hatred, discrimination and violence? Easy. Just follow these four simple steps:

1. Stop blaming violent acts committed by Muslims in the name of Islam on the various sins of unbelievers.

2. Establish nationwide, compulsory programs in mosques to teach against the jihad ideology and Islamic supremacism, by means including an explicit and definitive rejection of the literal meaning of many passages of Qur'an and Hadith.

3. Stop saying violent or hateful things in private when you think no non-Muslims are around. The most notorious recent example is the Dispatches documentary. There was also the imam Umar Abdul-Jalil, executive director of ministerial services for the New York City Department of Correction, was secretly recorded last year while speaking at an Islamic conference in Arizona. Muslims, he said, invoking Qur’an 48:29, must be "compassionate with each other" and "hard against the kufr [unbeliever]." In Britain, Hamid Ali, imam of the mosque frequented by the July 7 bombers, praised the bombers and called their terror attack "good" in a conversation secretly recorded by an undercover journalist. Publicly, he had condemned the attacks. In a mosque in the Czech Republic, a Muslim secretly filmed by a documentary filmmaker says Islamic Shari’a law, including the stoning of adulterers, should be adopted by the Czech Republic. Cleveland imam Fawaz Damra, who has since been deported for failing to disclose his ties to terror groups, signed the Fiqh Council of North America’s condemnation of terrorism, despite having declared at an Islamic conference that "terrorism, and terrorism alone, is the path to liberation."

Do such incidents mean that every Muslim who professes to have adopted Western notions of pluralism and the equality of dignity and rights of non-Muslims and Muslims is dissembling? Of course not. But they do mean that non-Muslims are perfectly justified in being suspicious even when Muslim profess moderation and opposition to terror. Consequently deeds, not just words, are needed. To conclude my four recommendations, genuinely anti-terror Muslims should:

4. Actively work with Western law enforcement officials to identify and apprehend jihadists within Western Muslim communities.

But it is unlikely that any of that will be done. Instead, these poor mistrusted, misunderstood folks will keep crying "Islamophobia" and trying to manipulate the American legal and political systems.

Some people will resort to anything to avoid looking squarely at the implications of the Islamic jihad ideology. Watch this space for next week's feature, "Chicken Salad Causes Jihad."

"Climate change seen fanning conflict and terrorism," by Mark Trevelyan for Reuters, with thanks to Paul:

LONDON (Reuters) - Global warming could exacerbate the world's rich-poor divide and help to radicalize populations and fan terrorism in the countries worst affected, security and climate experts said on Wednesday.

If poverty causes jihad, why isn't Haiti teeming with suicide bombers?

"We have to reckon with the human propensity for violence," Sir Crispin Tickell, Britain's former ambassador to the United Nations, told a London conference on "Climate Change: the Global Security Impact."

"Violence within and between communities and between nation states, we must accept, could possibly increase, because the precedents are all around."

He cited Rwanda and Sudan's Darfur region as two examples where drought and overpopulation, relative to scarce resources, had helped to fuel deadly conflicts.

Experts at the conference hosted by the Royal United Services Institute said it was likely that global warming would create huge flows of refugees as people tried to escape areas swamped by rising sea levels or rendered uninhabitable by desertification.

Tickell said terrorists were likely to seek to exploit the tensions created.

"Those who are short of food, those who are short of water, those who can't move to countries where it looks as if everything is marvelous are going to be people who are going to adopt desperate measures to try and make their point."

Osama said it too:

BIN LADEN ON CLIMATE CHANGE

John Mitchell, chief scientist at Britain's Met Office, noted al Qaeda had already listed environmental damage among its litany of grievances against the United States.

"You have destroyed nature with your industrial waste and gases more than any other nation in history. Despite this, you refuse to sign the Kyoto agreement so that you can secure the profit of your greedy companies and industries," al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden wrote in a 2002 "letter to the American people."

Well, by all means we must redress all of bin Laden's grievances. Then there will be peace. What's that? Even if we give him everything he wants, the jihad ideology still mandates warfare against and the subjugation of unbelievers? What are you, some kind of Islamophobe?

But he doesn't consider the possibility that this "view" of a "strand" of Islam is "proving powerful" because its proponents successfully present it as pure and authentic Islam, faithful to the Qur'an and Sunnah, and peaceful Muslims have mounted no effective response to this challenge. "Bomb suspects 'radicalised in weeks,'" by Michael Holden for Reuters, with thanks to Montague:

LONDON (Reuters) - A group of British Muslims suspected of plotting to blow up U.S.-bound airliners flying from Britain had been radicalised in just weeks or months, London's police chief said on Wednesday.

British detectives announced last August they had foiled a suicide bomb plot to blow up planes using liquid explosives.

Officers have charged 15 people over the suspected plot with offences including conspiracy to murder and planning acts of terrorism. The suspects are due to go on trial next year.

"One of the really shocking things ... is the apparent speed with which young, reasonably affluent, some reasonably well-educated, British-born people were converted," police chief Ian Blair told a conference on Islamophobia.

It is only shocking because he still clings to what has been disproven many times: that jihadists are poor and uneducated. Note also that he was speaking at a conference on "Islamophobia," not on...jihad terrorism.

He said the suspects had been converted "from what would appear to be ordinary lives in a matter of some weeks and months, not years, to a position where they were allegedly prepared to commit suicide and murder thousands of people".

Authorities are trying to understand what has caused a growth in extremism among the Britain's 1.8 million Muslims, dramatically exemplified by the July 2005 suicide bomb attacks on London's transport system by four British Islamists who killed themselves and 52 other people....

Blair said the "extreme view of one austere strand" of Islam was proving powerful.

"It seems to be very potent," he said, repeating his warning that the threat to Britain was "growing, and extremely grave" and the conspiracies were growing in "number and gravity".

He said he was concerned about recent opinion polls taken amongst British Muslims which found support in "principle at least" for terrorist action.

A poll of Islamic students and Muslims generally found that 4 and 6 percent of those questioned thought the July 7 London bombings were justified -- the equivalent of about 80,000 and 120,000 people, Blair said.

"I'm not suggesting that means there are that many terrorists. It does however indicate the power of the ideology involved."

Blair said it was vital to get over the message of "Britishness" based on values of tolerance, fairness and respect for faiths and traditions of others.

"We have to get over the message this is not a clash of civilisations."

And of course, it is entirely incumbent upon British authorities, in Ian Blair's mind, to get that message out. Muslim leaders have no responsibility whatsoever to demonstrate their loyalty.

"Australian-friendly Islam" -- presumably featuring a Qur'an more full of cut-out passages than a Christmas catalogue in Saudi Arabia. By Phil Mercer in VOA News, with thanks to all who sent this in:

Young Muslims are to be taught Australian-friendly Islam under a government plan to stop them being influenced by extremists. An approved curriculum will be introduced at universities in an attempt to counter the teachings of controversial Muslim clerics. Phil Mercer in Sydney reports.

The program announced this week is aimed at challenging firebrand clerics in Australia, who preach a radical version Islam that is peppered with intolerance and hate.

The university courses, which are intended to help train young Australian imams, will look at Islam with an international perspective.

The centers for Islamic excellence will be concentrated at a handful of campuses and are part of an Australian government plan to enhance social harmony and integration. The program will cost about $6 million and the government says courses should start by the end of the year.

The precise details and content of the courses are still being worked out.

Let's see...sura 9 will have to go. And much of sura 8. And 47:4. And 2:62-5; 5:59-60; and 7:166. And 5:82. And 98:6. And dozens of other passages. And after that you'll have to tackle the Hadith...

...as CAIR keeps pounding away at an increasingly contrite-sounding Dennis Prager. "Controversy follows Dennis Prager to Yorba Linda," by Christopher Goffard in the Los Angeles Times, with thanks to all who sent this in:

When talk-show host Dennis Prager wrote a column in November decrying a congressman-elect's decision to take his oath of office on the Koran rather than the Bible, he argued that it would "embolden Islamic extremists and make new ones."

In a column for Townhall.com, Prager wrote that Keith Ellison (D-Minn.), the first Muslim elected to Congress, "should not be allowed" to swear on the Koran because "the act undermines American civilization."

Soon, the Los Angeles radio host was at the center of the biggest controversy he has faced during decades in public life. Op-ed pages around the country rushed to pillory him. The Anti-Defamation League condemned his remarks. Former New York Mayor Ed Koch characterized him as a bigot and called for his ouster as a member of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Council.

Now, the tumult is extending to Prager's scheduled appearance at the North County Chabad Center in Yorba Linda, where he will speak tonight on "Islam, Iran, the West and Israel."

The Southern California office of the Council on American-Islamic Relations is calling him an "Islamophobic speaker," while the director of the Islamic Shura Council of Southern California has said he "seeks the marginalization of American Muslims."...

Rabbi David Eliezrie, who heads the Yorba Linda congregation, said the criticism of Prager in a press release issued Monday by the Islamic relations group was "outrageous" and "akin to a blood libel."

"I think CAIR in this case has smeared a wonderful Jewish leader, somebody respected by Jews all over the country, in a despicable fashion," Eliezrie said....

"If they were interested in dialogue with the Jewish community, they would have sent me a gentle letter" or placed a phone call, Eliezrie said. He added the group was trying to bully into silence those who disagreed with its positions.

"I have great skepticism of CAIR," Eliezrie said. "I haven't seen them condemn specific groups who are involved in terror in the Middle East, and that to me is very scary."

The council describes itself as a mainstream civil-rights organization. In an interview with The Times, the group's Southern California spokeswoman Munira Syeda generically condemned "terrorist actions" but declined to condemn Hamas or Hezbollah as terrorist organizations. "I don't understand what the relevance is," Syeda said.

Watch for Sir Cyril Taylor to be called an "Islamophobe" and worse. "Replace Muslim schools says top Blair aide," by Rob Waugh in the Yorkshire Post, with thanks to Twostellas:

SCHOOLS which are dominated by children from Muslim families should be closed and replaced with "multi-faith" academies, a senior Government adviser has said.

Sir Cyril Taylor, chairman of the Specialist Schools and Academies Trust, said police faced problems in areas where different communities were concentrated in separate schools.

He suggested that such "segregated" schools should be replaced with privately sponsored academies.

Bradford and Leeds were among the areas where such changes could be implemented, Sir Cyril said.

But his comments were severely criticised by one senior Bradford councillor who described them as "staggering" and unfairly singling out Muslims.

That someone would say that after the Dispatches documentary, to say nothing of 7/7, is...staggering.

Robert Redeker Update. A professor of philosophy who goes by the tag "Das Ding an sich" has kindly translated this item from the superb German-language Politically Incorrect blog:

The French philosophy teacher Robert Redeker who, because of his criticism of Islam was threatened with death, is giving up. Shamefully left in a bind by the authorities and insulted by the depraved Left, Redeker had to hide with his family for months in different locations -- of course on his own dime, while the Muslim who threatened him was permitted to move about freely.

Now Redeker has had enough and explains, that he will no longer practice his profession as a teacher.

"The French critic of Islam, teacher Robert Redeker, no longer wants to teach in school after death threats were directed at him. Redeker said on Saturday to French broadcasting that instead of teaching he will take a post in the state research institute CNRS. He agreed on that with Education Minister Gilles de Robien. In interviews he complained that the Ministry of Education had left him without help. On Saturday Redeker said further that he wasn’t sorry for his article. In the article he had called the Quran a 'book of unbelievable violence' and the Prophet Muhammad a 'merciless warmonger.'"

Excellent research and fascinating articles about the Redeker case can be found at the blog of Gudrun Eussner, for example here.

In German.

"As soon as people see Arabic, they immediately make an association with terrorism." The best way to combat that is not to write "I'm a little teapot." It is to have Arabic-speaking people stop committing acts of terrorism.

Absolutely terrific piece by Julia Gorin in FrontPage: "To Serve Man."

In a recent piece by Rabbi Avi Shafran, the rabbi asks, “You suddenly begin noticing signs bearing Arabic script in buses. What do you do?”

Well, what bus riders in Richmond, Virginia did was call the local Transit Authority to find out what it might know about the signs, which had been turning up on buses and the walls of local universities.

The Associated Press and other media outlets subtly scoffed at the concerned citizens, explaining that the Arabic phrases were in fact innocuous — translating as things like “paper or plastic?” or “paper, scissors, rock” or “I’m a little teapot.” Those translations in fact appeared at the bottom of the signs, along with admonishments like “Misunderstanding can make anything scary” or “What did you think it said?”

The provocative ads were the work of the Virginia Interfaith Center, which placed them in public venues as part of an effort to change the fact that, as the center’s executive director put it, “as soon as people see Arabic, they immediately make an association with terrorism.”

Imagine German writing turning up on public buses and university walls in 1942, and the citizenry being expected to not bat an eyelash, with the Germans and the media, who do the enemy’s bidding, admonishing us, “What did you think it said?”

But Islam and our media want us to hit the snooze button again. When we see ominous Arabic writing (and for now, all Arabic writing is ominous -- sorry), we’re supposed to think “Oh, it just says ‘I’m a little teapot.’” In fact, intelligence shouldn’t even be intercepting Arabic conversations, because the talkers are merely discussing recycling programs or calling themselves teapots.

Read it all.

Ain't multiculturalism grand? "Baby-stabber refuses to grant wife sharia divorce: Blames attack on his drug abuse. She wants to return to Lebanon but fears she could face arrest for child abduction," by Katherine Wilton in the Gazette, with thanks to TeeCee:

A man who stabbed his wife seven times, then knifed their infant daughter, told a Quebec Court hearing yesterday he regretted the assaults and blamed his actions on a drug problem.

The man, whose name cannot be published to protect his child's identity, attacked his wife last February in their Snowdon apartment before stabbing the 15-month-old girl in the stomach.

The man pleaded guilty in December to two counts of aggravated assault, rather than stand trial for attempted murder.

The couple are Muslim. His wife wants to return with her daughter to her family in her native Lebanon, but is reluctant to do so unless her husband grants her a sharia divorce, conducted by an imam.

The man testified yesterday he has no intention of granting his wife a divorce in Canada under sharia law.

How's that again? Sharia law in Canada?

"The issue of the divorce will be decided over there," he told Judge Martin Vauclair.

Without such a divorce, the woman says, she fears she could be forced to live with her husband in Lebanon when he returns, or be arrested for abducting her daughter if she takes the girls there without her spouse.

The man also told the prosecutor he didn't think he needed treatment for violent behaviour, saying he is normally a peaceful person.

Incredible. "Police chief calls on communities," by Nasreen Suleaman for BBC News, with thanks to the Constantinopolitan Irredentist:

The police are considering proposals to share intelligence and information with Muslims before launching anti-terror operations.

The plans, announced by the Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Ian Blair, are part of a wider vision to engage more with British Muslims whose support police need in fighting terrorism.

Community help was vital in combating terrorism, Sir Ian said.

At a conference on Islamophobia, Sir Ian told his largely Muslim audience that combating the threat of extremism and terrorism was something his officers could not do alone.

"It will not be the police and intelligence services that defeat terrorism, it will be communities," he said.

"The most single important component in the domestic defeat of terror in the next decade is the ability of the police to work with communities to do just that."...

Commander Richard Gargini has been in the police service since 1976 and has extensive experience in dealing with high-risk police operations dealing with murder and other serious crime.

But this job could be his most challenging yet.

In his first interview since his appointment, Mr Gargini explained what he intends to do to heal the rift and restore trust.

He says that the next 12 months will be crucial in broadening and strengthening the links with Muslim communities.

One of his key tasks, and perhaps a controversial one, is to develop a policy whereby Muslims will be consulted before an anti-terror raid happens.

'Influential leaders'

"What we intend to do is invite selected, influential leaders from the Muslim community to come in and assist us when we are planning and dealing with new information - this has worked extremely well in the black community and the shootings that have taken place amongst black men," he said.

Axis of Evil Update. By Con Coughlin in The Telegraph, :

North Korea is helping Iran to prepare an underground nuclear test similar to the one Pyongyang carried out last year.

Under the terms of a new understanding between the two countries, the North Koreans have agreed to share all the data and information they received from their successful test last October with Teheran's nuclear scientists....

A senior European defence official told The Daily Telegraph that North Korea had invited a team of Iranian nuclear scientists to study the results of last October's underground test to assist Teheran's preparations to conduct its own — possibly by the end of this year.

Jimmy Carter went to Brandeis, and one of the protest signs greeting him called him by his right name: Dhimmi Jimmy.

"At Brandeis, Carter Responds to Critics," by Pam Belluck in The New York Times:

WALTHAM, Mass., Jan. 23 — In his first major public speech about his controversial book “Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid,” former President Jimmy Carter told an audience at Brandeis University on Tuesday that he stood by the book and its title, that he apologized for what he called an “improper and stupid” sentence in the book and that he had been disturbed by accusations that he was anti-Semitic.

Mr. Carter’s book, “Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid,” drew protesters to Brandeis on Tuesday. Critics have said the book contains errors and misrepresentations of the roles of both the Israelis and the Palestinians.

Although controversy had preceded his visit here, Mr. Carter was greeted with a standing ovation and treated with obvious respect by the audience, even as students asked questions that were critical of his assertions.

A standing ovation? Shameful.

“This is the first time that I’ve ever been called a liar and a bigot and an anti-Semite and a coward and a plagiarist,” Mr. Carter told the crowd of about 1,700 at Brandeis, a nonsectarian university founded by American Jews, where about half the students are Jewish. “This is hurting me.”

The first time he has been called a coward? Really?

He added, “The fact that they deteriorate into ad hominem attacks on my character has probably been a greater barrier to progress than the fact that I chose a particular word in the title.”...

No, the greatest barrier to progress has been your arrogant refusal to debate -- you are probably aware that your carelessness and inaccuracy would be exposed.

Mr. Carter initially rejected an invitation to speak at Brandeis because it suggested that he debate Alan M. Dershowitz, a Harvard law professor who has sharply criticized the book. Wanting the university to welcome contrary views, more than 100 students and faculty members signed a petition contending that Mr. Carter should be invited without conditions. Questions were preselected by the committee that invited Mr. Carter, and the questioners included an Israeli student and a Palestinian student.

After Mr. Carter left, Mr. Dershowitz spoke in the same gymnasium, saying that the former president oversimplified the situation and that his conciliatory and sensible-sounding speech at Brandeis belied his words in some other interviews.

“There are two different Jimmy Carters,” Mr. Dershowitz said. “You heard the Brandeis Jimmy Carter today, and he was terrific. I support almost everything he said. But if you listen to the Al Jazeera Jimmy Carter, you’ll hear a very different perspective.”

Oh, this will make the Afghanis love the Dutch, for sure. From NIS News Bulletin, with thanks to Fjordman:

TARIN KOWT, 24/01/07 - The Netherlands is considering financing a Koran school in Afghanistan. The population of Uruzgan has a need for this, according to Governor Abdul Hakim Munib.

Uruzgan currently has no official Koran school, with the result that children now end up at madrassas just over the border in Pakistan. There they receive Islamic education that is influenced by the extreme Taliban, said Munib yesterday.

Qur'an 4:34 Alert: he said, she said. Update on this story: "Wife of imam tells of persistent abuse: His representatives say her story is full of lies and is one-sided," by Jason Bergreen and Jessica Ravitz in The Salt Lake Tribune, with thanks to LHK:

Apparently angry with how his dinner was prepared, Imam Shuaib-ud Din on Jan. 2 punched and kicked his wife and beat her head against a freezer until the door broke, the woman alleged in a petition for a protective order.

The next day, the imam - the recently fired religious leader of the Islamic Society of Greater Salt Lake - threw a kitchen knife at her and threatened to kill her, according to a petition for a temporary protective order filed last week by Ayesha Siddiqa Din.

The order, signed by 3rd District Judge John Paul Kennedy on Jan. 16, requires that the imam not contact his wife. It also requires him to stay away from their home and that he may not take his two children out of Utah, among other restrictions.

The allegations of abuse - and the Islamic Society board's reaction to them - have sparked a schism in the Muslim community, with many members criticizing the way the board has handled the situation.

Shuaib-ud Din was not available for comment Monday. But a family representative in Chicago, where he has taken refuge, insisted that while there were marital concerns, the allegations in his wife's petition are "lies," inherently one-sided and do not tell the whole story.

More declarations of war. "Iran: Israel, US will soon die: Ahmadinejad: Be assured that the US and Israel will soon end lives," by Yaakov Lappin in YnetNews, with thanks to Mackie:

Israel and the United States will soon be destroyed, Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said Tuesday during a meeting with Syria's foreign minister, the Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting (IRIB) website said in a report.

"Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad… assured that the United States and the Zionist regime of Israel will soon come to the end of their lives," the Iranian president was quoted as saying.

"Sparking discord among Muslims, especially between the Shiites and Sunnis, is a plot hatched by the Zionists and the US for dominating regional nations and looting their resources," Ahmadinejad added, according to the report.

The Iranian president also directly tied events in Lebanon to a wider plan aimed at Israel's destruction. He called on "regional countries" to "support the Islamic resistance of the Lebanese people and strive to enhance solidarity and unity among the different Palestinian groups in a bid to pave the ground for the undermining of the Zionist regime whose demise is, of course, imminent."

Ahmadinejad has threatened the State of Israel with annihilation several times in recent months, and has recently added the US and Britain to the list of countries he says will be destroyed.

The Americans can do nothing, says the Thug-In-Chief. I'm not sure about that, but I think he is probably right that the Americans lack the will to do anything. By Ali Akbar Dareini for AP, with thanks to Mackie:

TEHRAN, Iran (AP) - The United States is incapable of inflicting "serious damage" on Iran, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said Tuesday, as a second U.S. aircraft carrier group steamed toward the Gulf as a warning from Washington for Iran to back down in its attempts to dominate the region.

In an interview with Iranian state television, Ahmadinejad said Washington had not stepped up its campaign against Tehran, despite the standoff with the West over Iran's defiance of U.N. demands to halt uranium enrichment. The U.N. Security Council imposed limited sanctions on Iran last month.

"U.S. rhetoric against Iran has not increased," Ahmadinejad said. "In 2003, they openly threatened to attack Iran. Now they have indirectly made such threats."

He spoke with confidence over Iran's ability to withstand a strike. "The United States is unable to inflict serious damage on Iran," the president said. He also noted, "They (U.S.) are not really in a position to carry out this action (of attacking Iran). I believe there are many wise people in the United States who would not let it happen."

When Abdellatif Nekkavi entered Spain, no doubt no one asked him a single question designed to determine his views on jihad and Islamic supremacism. Why not? "Man arrested for links to Islamic terrorism," from Expatica, with thanks to Sr. Soph:

BARCELONA — A Moroccan man was arrested on Wednesday for alleged links to an Islamic terrorist organisation.

Abdellatif Nekkavi alleged sent cash to help the 'yihad' in Iraq.

The operation, which is ongoing, has involved raids on a number of addresses in the Badalona area of Barcelona.

It is the latest arrest in an operation against alleged sympathisers who are sending money and false documenation to help the insurgency against the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq.

New Inner Spiritual Struggle-related violence on Sulawesi. "Terrorists open new front in Indonesia," by Lindsay Murdoch for the Sydney Morning Herald:

HIGH-RANKING figures in the Jemaah Islamiah organisation have opened a new front in their terror campaign on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi, where nine of their fighters and a police officer have been killed in the latest gun battle.

Terrorism experts say dormant Java-based cells of the organisation appear to have been reactivated by US and Australian-trained anti-terror squad attacks on militant strongholds near the Sulawesi town of Poso, 1700 kilometres east of Jakarta.

They say the violence in Poso during January has caused a dangerous escalation of what radical Islamic militants see as their jihad, or war, against non-Muslims in the mainly Muslim country of 210 million people.

One will recall that Poso, in the Central Sulawesi province, has been a center of ongoing violence and persecution of local Christians.

Jemaah Islamiah, or JI, planned and carried out the two Bali bombings and a string of other attacks on mainly Western targets in Indonesia which have killed hundreds of people since 2002.

Scores of militant members of JI cells who apparently opposed attacks on Western targets such as the Australian embassy in Jakarta have travelled to Poso to fight.

"This is a dangerous development," terrorism expert Sidney Jones told The Age yesterday.

"The ramifications could well be an energising of the jihadist movement, which in my opinion had been steadily weakening," said Ms Jones, the Jakarta-based director of the International Crisis Group.

At least two high-ranking and influential JI figures have been killed in Poso this month, one of them in the battle late on Monday in which police killed the nine militants, captured 18 others and seized a large cache of bombs, weapons and ammunition.

Police killed a prominent JI leader, Rassyah, from the central Java city of Solo, in a battle in Poso on January 11, which apparently set the stage for more violent clashes in the area.

Rassyah was trained in terrorism in the same class in Afghanistan as Ali Ghufron, alias Mukhlas, one of three bombers on death row who carried out the 2002 Bali bombings that killed 202 people, including 82 holidaying Australians. He apparently turned up in Poso in 2004.

Since then, Islamic extremists in the town have been blamed for sporadic bombings, beheadings, shootings and other attacks, which prompted the Government in Jakarta to authorise the US and Australian-trained Detachment 88 anti-terror squad to go to Poso to crack down on them. The policeman killed on Monday was from the squad.

Tiny Minority of Extremists Update. "3 killed as protesters paralyze Lebanon," by Sam F. Ghattas for Associated Press:

BEIRUT, Lebanon - Hezbollah-led protesters paralyzed Lebanon Tuesday, clashing with government supporters and burning tires and cars on roads in and around the capital to enforce a general strike aimed at toppling U.S.-backed Prime Minister Fuad Saniora. Three people were killed and dozens injured.

What had been planned as a peaceful work-stoppage around the country turned into the worst violence since the pro-Syrian Shiite Hezbollah and its allies launched a campaign two months ago to oust the government.

In a televised speech, Saniora called for a special session of parliament to defuse the crisis, and gave every indication that he intended to stay in office.

"We will stand together against intimidation and confront sedition for the sake of Lebanon," he said. He added he remained ready for talks with the opposition.

Police said three people were killed and 43 others sustained gunshot wounds in clashes in the towns of central and northern Lebanon, including two bodyguards of a prominent pro-government politician. Commuters were stranded and business came to halt in many parts of the capital.

"The opposition is attempting a coup by force," Cabinet minister Ahmed Fatfat said. "This is not a strike. This is military action, a true aggression and I'm afraid this could develop into clashes between citizens," Fatfat, the youth and sports minister, told Al-Arabiya television.

Hezbollah chief Sheik Hassan Nasrallah and other opposition leaders called the strike, which was backed by labor unions. The Hezbollah-led opposition is demanding a new coalition government giving them more power, which Saniora has rejected.

The opposition has been camped out since Dec. 1 in front of the prime minister's office in downtown Beirut and has staged several protests to press its demands but Tuesday's strike escalated the nearly two-month demonstration. Troops have been deployed in central Beirut for weeks to keep order. But the action has largely been peaceful.

The conflict has strained the already fragile sectarian lines in a country that fought a 1975-1990 civil war between Muslims and Christians. In the current power struggle, Lebanon's Sunni Muslims largely support Saniora, while the Shiites back Hezbollah and the opposition. Many Christians back Saniora.

Nicholas Burns, the U.S. undersecretary of state for political affairs, called Tuesday for Arabs, the U.S. and Europe to support Saniora.

"We have indications they will try to go into the streets this week to overturn a democratically elected government, through the rule of people in the streets, through mobs," he said in a speech in Dubai, United Arab Emirates.

Meanwhile, black clouds billowed over parts of Beirut as opposition supporters set up burning roadblocks on main routes and at entrances to the capital, as well as in other major cities to enforce the strike. Opposition supporters clustered in small groups to man blazing roadblocks.

Police and troops deployed by the thousands across the country in an attempt to open roads and break up clashes. In some cases, troops negotiated the lifting of roadblocks. Elsewhere, they charged crowds to separate battling protesters and push open roads.

Hezbollah's deputy leader, Sheik Naim Kassem, told al-Jazeera television that the opposition would decide later in the day whether to call off the action or continue the escalating campaign.

"It was very successful and a clear message" to the government and its international backers, said Kassem.

Other opposition activists expressed frustration that the protests so far had not succeeded. Many workers stayed home, either in support of the strike or in fear of violence. Some schools closed due to unrest.

Blazing roadblocks cut off the road to Beirut international airport and the highway linking Beirut with the mountains and the road to Damascus, the Syrian capital.

An update on this jihadist cell. "British bomb plot suspects 'planned jihad'," from Reuters:

LONDON (Reuters) - Seven Britons accused of plotting to bomb clubs, trains and synagogues in England planned to take their fight to Pakistan and Afghanistan if they had succeeded, prosecutors told a court on Tuesday.

"The overall desire was to further the (cause) of jihad (Holy War) wherever and however it could be achieved," prosecution lawyer David Waters said in what police have described as Britain's biggest terrorism trial since September 11 attacks on the United States.

[...]

The seven are accused of conspiring to bomb high profile targets, possibly including London's Ministry of Sound nightclub and the huge Bluewater shopping center in Kent using bombs made from fertilizer.

The defendants -- Anthony Garcia, Jawad Akbar, Omar Khyam, his brother Shujah Mahmood, Waheed Mahmood, Nabeel Hussain, and Salahuddin Amin -- deny conspiring to cause an explosion "likely to endanger life."

Garcia, Khyam and Hussain deny possessing an article for terrorism -- the fertilizer. Khyam and Mahmood deny having aluminum powder, an ingredient in explosives.

[...]

Meanwhile, the prosecution is somewhat on trial itself for Islamophobia:

The prosecution said the trial was not a witch-hunt against the defendants' religious beliefs.

"Of course it would be ludicrous to approach the allegations in a vacuum and pretend the backdrop or religious or political motivations does not exist," Waters said.

"But having acknowledged that it is only a backdrop, what we are concerned about are allegations of crime."

Hatred has nothing to do with it. It is not a manifestation of hatred to want to defend oneself against forces that have declared explicitly many times that they are dedicated to our destruction. And it certainly has nothing to do with hating "people who don't worship the way we do." Has this sanctimonious blowhard ever noticed that no one seems to be filled with Buddhismophobia, or Hinduphobia? Might that be connected to the fact that Buddhists and Hindus haven't flown any planes into any buildings -- and justified that action by means of their religious texts as they have been traditionally understood by believers?

"Carter urges Americans to abandon fear, hatred," by Richard Hyatt in the Ledger-Enquirer, with thanks to DFS:

ATHENS, Ga. - With the zeal of a Baptist Sunday School teacher, Jimmy Carter ended a conference on his presidency Sunday morning by telling Americans they should not fear and they should not hate....

"We are developing an ingrained hatred for people who aren't Christians," said Carter, a Sunday School teacher since he was 18 years old.

Unwarranted fear of terrorism is behind these feelings, he said.

"The distortion that we are about to be destroyed makes us suspicious of those who don't worship the way we do," he said. "And our country has no reason to be afraid."...

Sure. It's all a matter of translation, you see, just like with the Qur'an. When they say, "Death to America!" they mean, "Gee, we think America is just swell!"

Meanwhile, the assembled idiots agreed that Carter's disastrous presidency would have been a brilliant success were it not for those mean old Iranian hostage-takers, whom we do not hate for their non-Christian status. Carter's utterly inept and pusillanimous handling of that hostage crisis seems to have gone unmentioned:

Tom Johnson, former president of CNN, said Carter should be judged by his body of work, not the disappointments of his final year in the White House.

"That obscured four years of achievement," Johnson said.

In 1980, Americans were held hostage in Iran and Carter was held hostage in the Oval Office. That was also the year that ABC gave birth to "Nightline," a program that counted down the number of days the Americans had been locked up.

"Iran was the drumbeat," said Chris Matthews of MSNBC's "Hardball" and a former speechwriter in the Carter administration.

They weren't actually Christians at all, of course -- not that the continued non-participation of Christians in terror plotting makes any impression on the moral equivalence crowd.

"Five held after anti-terror raids," from the BBC, with thanks to Wayne:

Five men have been arrested under terrorism laws in two separate operations, police have confirmed.

Police arrested two men, aged 25 and 29, during morning raids in Halifax, West Yorkshire.

Another two men, both 24, were arrested in Cheetham Hill, Manchester, and a fifth man, 32, was held after his arrest in that city's Longsight area.

Police said there was no evidence "any of the men were involved in planned terror activity in the UK".

The men in Halifax, thought to be British Pakistanis, are being held on suspicion of involvement in facilitating terrorist activities overseas....

The Secretary of State recently stated that the Middle East will have to “overcome” the tendency to see things in Sunni-Shi’a terms. There are two things wrong with the statement of Condoleeza Rice.

The first is the o'erweening, history-ignoring idea that Sunni-Shi'a rivalries and hostilities can "be overcome." The Sunni-Shi'a split long ago transcended the initial quarrel over succession. Now there are differences in the organization of the Shi'a and Sunni variants of Islam: in organization (the power of the Shi'a ayatollahs and other Shi'a clergy has nothing similar in Sunni Islam); in ritual (the Shi'a Ashoura, with its emphasis on self-flagellation); and practice (the Shi'a shrines and visits to those shrines, so offensive to austere Sunnis, especially to the most austere of all, the Wahhabis of Saudi Arabia).

Courtroom Jihad meets UK dhimmitude and cultural weariness. Guess who wins? "Muslim father gets legal aid to fight school over veil ban," by Neil Sears in the Daily Mail, with thanks to Kasper:

A school may be forced to allow a 12-year-old Muslim to wear a full-face veil because its local council is refusing to fund a court battle against the child's fundamentalist father.

The school told the girl it was not acceptable for her to wear the niqab – which covers all of her face except her eyes – because teachers believe it will make communication and learning difficult.

Call to tackle 'segregated' schools

But the child's Pakistan-born father is seeking a judicial review of the decision in the High Court in London.

He argues that the ban amounts to an infringement of his daughter's human rights and is understood to be receiving legal aid for his case....

The British government could ask for reciprocal recognition of the human rights of non-Muslim minorities in Muslim countries. But it won't, of course.

Its governors are meeting tonight and may vote for a climbdown because of the council's refusal to support them, fearing costs for contesting the action could climb to £500,000.

Last year the Law Lords ruled that a Luton school was justified in barring Muslim schoolgirl Shabina Begum from wearing a jilbab, a long loose gown, to classes – but it took a long and expensive legal fight.

Even though court costs are currently low, neighbouring Buckinghamshire County Council fears the bill could rocket if its case drags on.

Many of the school’s 1,000-plus pupils are Muslim girls, and they are allowed to wear headscarves.

The girl is the only pupil demanding the right to wear the full-face veil. Her three elder sisters, who attended in the past, were allowed to wear the niqab when a different head was in charge.

A source at the Conservative-led council said: "With 250 other schools in the area and severe cuts to the social care budget, it would be inappropriate to spend taxpayers' money on this.

"The council backs the right of the head to enforce her uniform policy, but is not commenting about its stand on the veil."

The girl is understood to have come to school with her face covered in September and the head and governors tried to reach a compromise with her parents to no avail.

She has not been excluded, but has been out of school since early October.

A source close to the school said: "The school feels it would be inappropriate to allow the veil because it could bring difficulties interacting with the girl, especially in lessons like drama.

"The teachers are also concerned they would not be able to see whether or not she has understood something if they cannot see her face."

Yes, drama might be tough. Of course, they could always put on The Great Train Robbery.

Zachariah Anani is a former jihadist, and a convert to Christianity who recently gave a lecture in Windsor, Ontario on "the dangers of radical extremism," in which passages from the Qur'an figured prominently. Now, there is a movement among Muslim interest groups, including CAIR Canada, to charge him under a criminal code concerned with "spreading hatred in the community."

Not surprisingly, there is rather little in the national media about this affair, aside from this press release. "CAIR Canada Should Stop Bias Campaign to Arrest and Deport Muslim Convert and Refugee from Lebanon Says Shoebat" from the Walid Shoebat Foundation, via PRNewswire:

ONTARIO, Jan. 22 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- There is a growing and forceful campaign by CAIR and other Islamist organizations in Canada to silence the free speech of Zachariah Anani and undermine his legitimacy as a Canadian citizen, by calling for his arrest and deportation. Anani is a former terrorist-militant, a refugee from Lebanon and Muslim convert to Christianity. CAIR, an organization which claims to be the voice of moderation, should be embracing Anani's message against violence and the dangers of extremism instead of mounting a witch hunt against him.

It is no wonder that CAIR is attacking Anani, as it has been documented that many of the leaders of CAIR have openly supported the positions of Hamas, Hizballah and al-Queda -- all recognized terrorist organizations.

Recently, Anani spoke on the dangers of radical extremism at a church in Ontario. A backlash ensued, with CAIR and other Islamist groups pressuring political leaders to throw Anani and his family out of the country. Two members of Parliament, and one member of City Council joined the mayor of Windsor in denouncing Anani. None of these political officials, however, attended the lecture or even watched a video of it. The content of Anani's speech was almost exclusively from passages he read directly from the Koran.

Wally Chafchak, a member of the Windsor Police Services Board and the Windsor Islamic Association, is leading the charge to have Anani arrested. According to Arab American News of Michigan, CAIR Canada is also calling for Anani's arrest.

In the Criminal Code there is a section that deals with spreading hatred in the community, Chafchak said. This instance should fall under those laws. Justice can only be served if this person is charged.

But Walid Shoebat, a former terrorist from the West Bank, believes silencing Anani is a dangerous trend with far reaching implications for the future of Canadian and eventually US freedoms.

"Incarcerating or deporting a former terrorist who wants to warn the world about extremism will set a dangerous precedence for Canada," Shoebat says. "Instead of censoring free speech, CAIR should be encouraging Muslims to embrace Canadian culture, as other groups have, and not try to change it in a way that will censor the freedoms Canadians have fought and died for."

Shoebat believes that CAIR and other Islamist organizations should join Anani in encouraging Muslims to speak out against terrorism and the killing, raping, forced conversion, mutilation and other acts of violence perpetrated by Jihadist groups worldwide against non-Muslims.

This particularly brazen attack resulted in five U.S. casualties on Saturday, targeting troops meeting with Shi'ite authorities to discuss security for the upcoming Ashura pilgrimage. But it differs from the Sunni-Shi'ite violence the world is accustomed to seeing in that there were no Shi'ite casualties, and, while an intense investigation is ongoing, several events surrounding the case seem strange and somewhat improbable. From CNN:

KARBALA, Iraq (CNN) -- Attackers who killed five U.S. troops at a government building in Karbala posed as U.S. military officials to get past Iraqi guards, a Karbala police spokesman said.

The attack happened Saturday as the U.S. military convened a meeting to discuss security for Ashura, the upcoming Shiite pilgrimage to Karbala.

According to police spokesman Abdul Rahman al-Mishawi, about 30 gunmen traveling in a convoy of at least seven SUVs with tinted windows -- similar to the vehicles used by top U.S. military officials -- drove up to the Karbala Provincial Joint Coordination Center wearing uniforms similar to those worn by the U.S. military.

About a dozen U.S. troops were inside the compound at the time, al-Mishawi said.

Around 5:45 p.m., the gunmen cleared an Iraqi police checkpoint outside the center by flashing fake identification badges and speaking some English, al-Mishawi said.

Al-Mishawi said it is standard procedure for U.S. troops not to jointly man the checkpoint. He said U.S. personnel insist on passing without going through a security screening.

The attackers went through three checkpoints to enter the center, he said.

The first U.S. casualty in the attack was a soldier sitting in a Humvee outside a meeting of U.S. and Iraqi security officials.

The assailants targeted only U.S. soldiers, al-Mishawi said, adding that not a single Iraqi soldier or police officer was killed.

Several of the SUVs used in the attack were found late Saturday in neighboring Babil province, along with two of the suspected gunmen, an official in Baghdad said. The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said the gunmen were wounded and detained by the Americans, but the U.S. military said the two were found dead.

When asked why Iraqi police did not intervene to stop the gunmen from fleeing, al-Mishawi said "they assumed it was American-on-American violence and wanted to stay out of it."

This detail seems odd, coupled with the fact that the attackers cleared three checkpoints.

Al-Mishawi said Monday that "the Americans have shut down the provincial government compound and everyone is being interrogated from the police chief, officers, down to the average policemen."