April 2007 Archives

They're also linked to the 7/7 attacks. "5 Convicted in London Bomb Plot," by David Stringer for Associated Press, with thanks to all who sent this in:

LONDON (AP) - A judge sentenced five men to life in prison Monday for plotting to attack targets in London, including a popular nightclub, power plants and shopping mall, with bombs made from a half-ton stockpile of fertilizer.

The trial for the first time exposed connections between the defendants and the deadly 2005 al-Qaida-linked attack on the city's transit system.

Details kept secret to ensure a fair trial showed that counterterrorism agents tracking the five men had also stumbled onto the transit plotters. And despite disturbing signs that the transit plot was in the works, the agents failed to piece them together in time to prevent the July 7, 2005 bombings that killed 52 people, testimony and official briefings during the trial showed.

The revelations are at odds with statements by Tony Blair's government after the 2005 attack. Senior ministers, who a month earlier had lowered the country's alert status, said the 2005 attack was unexpected and the perpetrators unknown.

Omar Khyam was found guilty of conspiracy to cause explosions made from a chemical fertilizer that could endanger life. Also found guilty were Anthony Garcia, Jawad Akbar, Waheed Mahmood and Alahuddin Amin....

The jury that convicted the five men deliberated for nearly a month after nearly a year of testimony in Britain's longesrial. The men, all British citizens, were accused of plotting a series of attacks using more than 1,300 pounds of fertilizer they had placed in a storage unit....

Counterterrorism officials acknowledged that intelligence that could have raised alarms before the July 7 transit attacks was never thoroughly investigated, explaining they were overwhelmed by seemingly more urgent threats.

A government security official gave one-on-one briefings with reporters toward the end of the trial, detailing the path that security agents had followed.

As agents monitoring the fertilizer plot listened in on a bug, they heard one of the July 7 bombers, Mohammed Siddique Khan, warn that he planned to kill non-Muslims, the security official said during the briefing, demanding anonymity to discuss sensitive details of the cases.

A tracking device was placed in Khan's car a year before the 2005 suicide bombings and details of his phone calls and meetings with radicals were reported to Britain's domestic spy agency, MI5, on at least four occasions, he said.

Khan also took militia training in Pakistan with at least some of the fertilizer plotters, a witness in the case and officials said.

But, lacking resources, MI5 never pieced together the shreds of intelligence, the official acknowledged.

``There needs to be that killer fact and it just wasn't there,'' he said, noting that Khan had used several aliases.

Mohammed Junaid Babar, an American FBI al-Qaida informant, had reported that a Briton using an alias - later identified as Khan - attended a Pakistan militia camp with al-Qaida linked radicals from Britain and the United States in 2003.

With accomplice Shehzad Tanweer, Khan visited Pakistan again in 2004.

A surveillance team recorded Khan and Tanweer during a 2004 operation to monitor the fertilizer plot - bugging 100 phone lines, a vehicle and two houses. Agents also took pictures of Khan in the company of suspected terrorists.

As agents eavesdropped, Khan - who called himself Milly - warned he would join the ``Arab mujahedeen to fight abroad.'' But his threat was not uncommon or enough to prompt his arrest, the security official said.

Damian Thompson at the Telegraph blogs has noticed Karen Armstrong's light-on-truth review of my book The Truth About Muhammad, and has written a stinging response, "Defender of the wrong faith":

Karen Armstrong is a comically conceited feminist ex-nun who has assumed the duty of defending Islam from its critics. Yesterday’s Financial Times carried her review of an unflattering biography of Mohammed by the American Catholic scholar Robert Spencer.

Armstrong went ballistic. She is herself the author of a sanitised life of “the Prophet” (as she calls him, despite not being a believer) that she grandly offered as “a gift to the Muslim people”.

She accused Spencer of “writing in hatred” and said he “deliberately manipulates the evidence”. By the end of the day, Spencer had hit back online. Very hard. We have the beginnings of a mighty feud here, and I know whose side I am on.

According to Armstrong, “When discussing Mohammed’s war with Mecca, Spencer never cites the Koran’s condemnation of all warfare as an ‘awesome evil’.” There’s a reason for that, replies Spencer: the Koran doesn’t quite say that.

Writing on his website Jihadwatch yesterday, Spencer challenged his readers to find the relevant verse. Someone did. It’s 2:217, and it refers specifically to warfare in the “sacred month”, and then only to say that the prohibition can be set aside. So who is manipulating evidence here?

Armstrong reckons that descriptions of Islam that focus on its warlike origins are like “a description of Christianity based on the bellicose Book of Revelation that failed to mention the Sermon on the Mount.”

That is an unbelievably fatuous and sloppy analogy. The violence of Revelation springs from the imagination: it’s a literary apocalypse. It doesn’t describe any real events. Mohammed was a general whose army beheaded its captives: that’s a fact. The Muslim scriptures urge warfare against unbelievers and apostates; the Christian scriptures preach non-violence.

Read it all.

Walter Duranty was the New York Times correspondent in the Soviet Union in the 1930s. He also won a Pulitzer Press for his coverage of the Soviet Union. This was strange, because what he reported was nonstop apologetic nonsense, and perhaps worst of all was his supposedly splendid reporting in the Soviet-induced famine in Ukraine.

The Times did a terrible job in its coverage of the Soviet Union. But that was not all. It also did a terrible job in its reporting on Adolf Hitler, the Nazis, and the persecution of Jews throughout the 1930s, and then of course, on the mass round-ups ("Aktion") and murders during the war. Many things were not mentioned at all. Others were relegated to tiny paragraphs deep inside the paper. You can read all about it in excellent book by Laurie Leff (of Northeastern University).

A little background on the claque that has, for roughly the past three years, found Sistani to be the Man of the Hour in Iraq.

At My Weekly Standard the claque consists of Reuel Gerecht and the carriers of Weiss-Schwartz Syndrome. Fouad Ajami, whose usefulness is limited given his tiptoeing around the subject of Islam, was enchanted with his own reception by Sistani. In his book "The Foreigner's Gift" -- so tellingly mistitled (it ought to have been "The Infidel's Gift," but that would raise too many problems for Fouad Ajami) -- he describes, I am told, this meeting. But he does not explain what it was that prevented Sistani from meeting with any other American save for Zalmay Khalilzad. What could it be? And why shouldn't people have explained to them what it is that prevents this Holy Man of the Hour from meeting, say, with Bremer, or Rice, or any number of other Infidels?

In Washington, there are those who like to construct out of world politics something akin to soap operas, with the villains and the heroes. Everything is reduced to the "good guys" (i.e., the "moderate" Muslims in this case) and the "bad guys" (the "immoderate" Muslims). And a little shadow-play is put on, Chinese shadows, ombres chinoises. The Good Muslim needs to be supported to the hilt, because only he can stand up to the Bad Muslim.

Arab and Muslim states, or governments, although they now ask Israel to surrender still more, created the so-called "Palestinian refugee" problem. These were not classic refugees, hounded out, but rather people who left a war zone, for an Arab assault was anticipated even in 1947. They were confident that they would soon be returning. The evidence for this, written and spoken, is overwhelming. However, very few people bother to consult that evidence. Or if they do, they dismiss it with hardly a moment’s thought, since it does not correspond to their own deeply imbedded misinformation. An army of Arab propagandists, speaking both directly and through their willing Western megaphones (such as Jimmy Carter, morally the worst of our presidents), have fed them that misinformation for decades now.

One of the staples of modern journalism is the "Arab" or, in a little nunc-pro-tunc updating, the "Palestinian" family that "returns" to Jaffa or Jerusalem to stare wistfully at their old house. I remember one case a few years ago where someone came to "stare" at his "old house" and it turned out that the "old house" had been built long after 1948, and on an empty plot.

Thai Jihad Update. "Three-year-old boy shot dead in Thailand," from Agence France-Presse:

PATTANI, Thailand (AFP) - Suspected separatists shot dead a three-year-old boy in Thailand's restive south Sunday, police said, hours after hundreds of Muslims gathered to protest the killing of a retired teacher.

The child was killed when insurgents in a truck opened fire on the home of his father, a Muslim village headman, police said. The father was also injured in the attack in Narathiwat province.

The shooting came after suspected Islamic rebels threw a grenade into a crowd of people who were leaving the mosque in Pattani after evening prayers late Saturday.

Moments later, the insurgents opened fire on the crowd outside the mosque, police said, killing a former teacher and injuring three people.

[...]

Police said more than 100 veiled women and their children staged a short protest demanding peace in the south, where more than 2,100 people have been killed since the latest insurgency erupted in January 2004.

"Mostly women and children, hiding their faces behind veils, came to protest and call for peace. They only protested for one hour before leaving," said police colonel Thawal Nakrawong.

That sense of urgency, even from fellow Muslims, notwithstanding: "OIC urges Thailand to be patient in tackling insurgency," from United News of India:

Bangkok, Apr 27: The Organisation of Islamic Conference (OIC) has praised Thailand’s handling of insurgency in the country’s Muslim-majority southern border region but urged patience ahead of an OIC team visit here.

Ekmeleddin Ishanolgu, Secretary-General of the 57-Islamic nation grouping is scheduled to arrive in Bangkok on April 30 leading a delegation which will travel to Thailand’s troubled south.

An OIC advisor who met the top official in the Thai Ministry of Foreign Affairs here yesterday in preparation for the visit, said Thailand’s approach to the over three-year-old southern insurgency showed recognition of its root causes.

As defined and approved by the OIC.

The OIC found this encouraging and this was the reason the grouping has deferred discussion on the Thai insurgency till next month’s OIC foreign ministers’ conference in Pakistan which takes place after the OIC secretary-general’s Thailand visit, OIC advisor Sayed El-Masry told Thai foreign ministry’s Permanent Secretary Virasak Futrakul.

However, the OIC official added that it could take a number of years before the approach produces results and the Thai government must be patient.

[...]

It is, however, not correct to equate the Thai insurgency to similar situations involving Muslim minorities in other nations, Mr El-Masry, a former OIC assistant secretary -general added.

"Each situation has its own dimensions and different cases have different paths," he said.

The OIC has "to take care of one-third of the world's Muslim population of 1.8 billion who are minorities under the principle that we respect the sovereignty and territorial integrity of the country we are working with. But please note that the OIC has never supported separatist movements," the OIC official said.

Through action or inaction?

Another demonstration against the spread of Sharia in Turkey. This time 700,000 people participated. Apparently Turkish secularism will not go gentle into that good night.

By Benjamin Harvey for Associated Press, with thanks to all who sent this in:

ISTANBUL, Turkey - Some 700,000 Turks waving the red national flag flooded central Istanbul on Sunday to demand the resignation of the government, saying the Islamic roots of Turkey's leaders threatened to destroy the country's modern foundations.

Like the protesters — who gathered for the second large anti-government demonstration in two weeks — Turkey's powerful secular military has accused Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan of tolerating radical Islamic circles.

"They want to drag Turkey to the dark ages," said 63-year-old Ahmet Yurdakul, a retired government employee who attended the protest.

More than 300,000 people took part in a similar rally in Ankara two weeks ago. Police, who said Sunday's demonstrators numbered around 700,000, cordoned off the area and conducted body searches at several entry points.

Sunday's demonstration was organized more than a week ago, but it came a day after Erdogan's government rejected the military's warning about the disputed presidential election and called it interference that is unacceptable in a democracy.

The ruling party candidate, Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul, failed to win a first-round victory Friday in a parliamentary presidential vote marked by tensions between secularists and the pro-Islamic government. Most opposition legislators boycotted the vote and challenged its validity in the Constitutional Court....

Sunday's crowd chanted that the presidential palace was "closed to imams."

Some said Parliament Speaker Bulent Arinc was an enemy of the secular system, because he said the next president should be "pious."...

The ruling party, however, has supported religious schools and tried to lift the ban on Islamic head scarves in public offices and schools. Secularists are also uncomfortable with the idea of Gul's wife, Hayrunisa, being in the presidential palace because she wears the traditional Muslim head scarf.

"We don't want a covered woman in Ataturk's presidential palace," said Ayse Bari, a 67-year-old housewife. "We want civilized, modern people there."

The military, one of the most respected institutions in Turkey, regards itself as the guardian of the secular system and has staged three coups since 1960.

"Neither Sharia, nor coup but fully democratic Turkey," read a banner carried by a demonstrator on Sunday.

It's hard to discern much from this without seeing the actual questions that were asked, since the answers are somewhat confused and contradictory: two-thirds want a caliphate, but two-thirds also want a "democratic political system."

"Less than 25% of Muslims blame al-Qaeda for 9/11 attacks," from the Malaysia Sun, with thanks to Wally:

An in-depth poll of four major Muslim countries has found that in all of them large majorities believe that undermining Islam is a key goal of US foreign policy.

Most want US military forces out of the Middle East and many approve of attacks on US troops there.

Most respondents have mixed feelings about al Qaeda. Large majorities agree with many of its goals, but believe that terrorist attacks on civilians are contrary to Islam.

There is strong support for enhancing the role of Islam in all of the countries polled, through such measures as the imposition of sharia (Islamic law). This does not mean that they want to isolate their societies from outside influences: Most view globalization positively and favor democracy and freedom of religion.

Democracy for religious minorities? Unclear. Freedom of religion including freedom of conscience, i.e., the freedom to leave Islam if someone so desires? Unclear.

These findings are from surveys in Egypt, Morocco, Pakistan, and Indonesia conducted from December 2006 to February, 2007 by WorldPublicOpinion.org with support from the START Consortium at the University of Maryland.

Large majorities across all four countries believe the United States seeks to, “weaken and divide the Islamic world.” On average 79 percent say they perceive this as a US goal, ranging from 73 percent in Indonesia and Pakistan to 92 percent in Egypt. Equally large numbers perceive that the United States is trying to maintain “control over the oil resources of the Middle East” (average 79%). Strong majorities (average 64%) even believe it is a US goal to “spread Christianity in the region.”

“While US leaders may frame the conflict as a war on terrorism, people in the Islamic world clearly perceive the US as being at war with Islam,” said Steven Kull, editor of WorldPublicOpinion.org.

This is nothing new, of course, and it is partly why U.S. and European officials are so reluctant to speak about the role of Islam in inciting to jihad violence, despite the fact that their avoidance of the topic only allows the problem to metastasize. They are afraid that if they do discuss even measures to restrict the spread of the jihad ideology in mosques and madrasas, they will only reinforce the impression that they're at war with Islam. Yet clearly their efforts to efface this impression from the Islamic world aren't working -- so it might be more prudent in the long run to forget about trying to make headway against this, and instead take the measures that are necessary to protect their societies.

Consistent with this concern, large majorities in all countries (average 74%) support the goal of getting the United States to “remove its bases and military forces from all Islamic countries,” ranging from 64 percent in Indonesia to 92 percent in Egypt.

Substantial numbers also favor attacks on US troops in Iraq, Afghanistan, and in the Persian Gulf. Across the four countries polled approximately half support such attacks in each location, while three in ten are opposed. But there is substantial variation between countries: Support is strongest in Egypt, where at least eight in ten approve of attacking US troops in the region. A majority of Moroccans also support targeting US forces, whether stationed in the Persian Gulf (52%) or fighting in Iraq (68%). Pakistanis are divided about attacks on the American military, many do not answer or express mixed feelings, while Indonesians oppose them.

However, respondents roundly reject attacks on civilians. Asked about politically-motivated attacks on civilians, such as bombings or assassinations, majorities in all countries—usually overwhelming majorities—take the strongest position offered by saying such violence cannot be justified at all. More than three out of four Indonesians (84%), Pakistanis (81%), and Egyptians (77%) take this position, as well as 57 percent of Moroccans (an additional 19 percent of Moroccans say such attacks can only be “weakly justified”).

The problem here, as always, is in the definition of "civilians." While non-Muslim Westerners may assume that they know what is meant by “terrorism,” “innocent lives,” and “civilians,” these are in fact hotly-debated terms in the Islamic world. Anjem Choudhury of Omar Bakri’s jihadist group in Britain told an interviewer that the victims of the July 7, 2005 bombings in London were not innocent, because they were not Muslims: “When we say innocent people, we mean Muslims. As far as non-Muslims are concerned, they have not accepted Islam. As far we are concerned, that is a crime against God…As far as Muslims are concerned, you’re innocent if you are a Muslim. Then you are innocent in the eyes of God. If you are non-Muslim, then you are guilty of not believing in God.” One Palestinian Arab jihadist ruled out that category also, for at least some of the victims of Islamic jihad terrorism: “There are no civilians in Israel. All the Israelis are military, all of them,” he insisted. “They are all military and they all have weapons and guns, and the moment they are called up they are going to be using their weapons against me.” The Tunisian jihadist Rashid al-Ghannushi has issued a fatwa to the same effect, declaring: “There are no civilians in Israel. The population — males, females, and children — are the army reserve soldiers, and thus can be killed.”

Attitudes toward al-Qaeda are complex. On average, only three in ten view Osama bin Laden positively. Many respondents express mixed feelings about bin Laden and his followers and many others declined to answer.

They declined to answer. Hardly a ringing condemnation -- it's more likely that they figured that telling a pollster from Maryland that they supported Al-Qaeda might not be wise.

There is strong disapproval of attacks by “groups that use violence against civilians, such as al-Qaeda.” Large majorities in Egypt (88%), Indonesia (65%) and Morocco (66%) agree that such groups “are violating the principles of Islam.” Pakistanis are divided, however, with many not answering.

But there is also uncertainty about whether al-Qaeda actually conducts such attacks. On average less than one in four believes al-Qaeda was responsible for September 11th attacks. Pakistanis are the most skeptical, only 3 percent think al-Qaeda did it. There is no consensus about who is responsible for the attacks on New York and Washington; the most common answer is “don’t know.”

Most significantly, large majorities approve of many of al-Qaeda’s principal goals. Large majorities in all countries (average 70 percent or higher) support such goals as: “stand up to Americans and affirm the dignity of the Islamic people,” “push the US to remove its bases and its military forces from all Islamic countries,” and “pressure the United States to not favor Israel.”

Equally large majorities agree with goals that involve expanding the role of Islam in their society. On average, about three out of four agree with seeking to “require Islamic countries to impose a strict application of sharia,” and to “keep Western values out of Islamic countries.” Two-thirds would even like to “unify all Islamic counties into a single Islamic state or caliphate.”

But this does not appear to mean that the publics in these Muslim countries want to isolate themselves from the larger world. Asked how they feel about “the world becoming more connected through greater economic trade and faster communication,” majorities in all countries say it is a good thing (average 75%). While wary of Western values, overall 67 percent agree that “a democratic political system” is a good way to govern their country and 82 percent agree that in their country “people of any religion should be free to worship according to their own beliefs.”

Even as hundreds of thousands demonstrate in favor of secular government in Turkey, the Turkish government again demonstrates that it is not interested in according all religious groups equality of rights.

"Turkey: Four Street Evangelists Jailed," from Compass Direct:

ISTANBUL, April 27 (Compass Direct News) – Police jailed four Christian street evangelists in Istanbul for “missionary activity” this week, even as government officials openly defended the right of all religious groups to carry out evangelistic work in Turkey.

Officials released U.S. citizen David Byle this evening, more than 48 hours after he was arrested along with a Korean and two Turkish Christians, his wife said.

Christian sources maintained that Turkey plans to deport the Korean believer, though further details remain unknown.

The four men were detained Wednesday afternoon (April 25) while sharing their Christian faith with passersby at a park in Istanbul’s Taksim district.

Speaking earlier to Compass from his detention cell at the new foreigners branch of the Turkish security police in Kumkapi, Byle said that an official police report charged the evangelists with missionary activity, disturbing the peace and insulting Islam.

An excellent piece on the double game our Friend and Ally has long been playing. "Saudi Arabia's Domestic Crackdown," by Youssef Ibrahim in the New York Sun (thanks to the Constantinopolitan Irredentist):

For decades, Saudi Arabia's ruling family has lent political and financial support to the country's most fanatical Muslim clergy. The clergy received money to infest the world with their vision of violent jihad; the Al Sauds received religious support for their claims to absolute power. It has been a good marriage — but now the jihadi chickens have come home to roost.

Last week, the Saudi government rounded up 172 men on charges of plotting to assassinate public figures, blow up oil refineries, and fly airplanes into buildings. Quite a few of them turned out to be veterans of jihad in Iraq, where the same Saudi government had sent them to kill Shiite Muslims. Another 136 Saudis were arrested in a similar sweep six months ago, and more will follow.

Though the Saudi government calls them "deviants" today, the royal family used a more complimentary term when encouraging them to kill Shiites in Iraq, Russians in Afghanistan and Chechnya, Serbs in Bosnia, and Christians and Jews in Israel and the West: "heroes of the jihad."

Confusing? Not really. As part of their pact, Saudi royalty expects the clergy to keep the jihadists in line on their home ground. The Al Sauds have no compunction about exporting fanaticism and its inevitable violence but appear to have forgotten a central maxim for dealers of such volatile compounds: Pushers can't be users.

During the past 50 years, the Saudi clergy has infused a jihadi ethos into the country's mosques, schools, universities, and press — and, as a result, the daily lives of Saudi citizens.

Read it all.

Unless the West comes across with more jizya.

From Reuters, with thanks to the American Israeli Patriot:

RAMALLAH, West Bank (Reuters) - Hamas leader Khaled Meshaal warned Israel could face another Palestinian uprising unless conditions in the Gaza Strip and occupied West Bank improved.

Let it be remembered that the conditions in the Gaza Strip and West Bank are of Hamas' own making. The Israelis handed over the economy and infrastructure of Gaza to the "Palestinians," including the greenhouses that were worth many millions. The Palestinians destroyed the greenhouses and used Gaza as a base for jihad attacks on Israel.

Meshaal told the Palestinian daily al-Ayyam in an interview published on Monday continuation of a Western economic embargo of the Palestinian government and military actions by Israel would "give notice to a huge explosion that would not only affect the Palestinians but also the entire region, especially the Zionist entity".

"I warn and say that I see that the current situation is heading in the direction of the conditions that prevailed in the late 1990s ... that paved the way for the al-Aqsa intifada," Meshaal said. "I warn and under 'warn' I put many red lines."

"Iraq raids net al Qaeda suspects, bomb ingredients," from CNN:

BAGHDAD, Iraq (CNN) -- U.S. and Iraqi troops found 100 gallons of nitric acid and other bomb-making materials Sunday during raids that yielded the arrests of 72 suspected members of the al Qaeda in Iraq network, the U.S. military said.

The "constellation of overnight raids" was conducted in Anbar and Salaheddin provinces, the military said.

"Coalition operations like these continue to chip away at the al Qaeda in Iraq network, and we will continue to target them as long as they continue to injure and kill the innocent people of Iraq," said U.S. military spokesman Lt. Col. Christopher Garver.

Half of those arrested were captured during raids in Samarra, in Salaheddin province north of Baghdad, according to the military. The nitric acid and bomb-making ingredients were found during a raid in Karmah.

The Samarra arrests came as authorities banned all movement in the city in response to recent threats, most notably a threatened suicide attack on the Samarra bridge, a security official said.

Jihad against electricity and flood prevention:

The Samarra bridge has a dam that generates power and regulates water levels on the Tigris River.

The city went on high alert after the Islamic State of Iraq -- the insurgent umbrella group that includes al Qaeda in Iraq -- distributed leaflets to police in Samarra on Saturday, warning them that they have three days to "repent" or be killed.

The insurgent group also told police to use loudspeakers at mosques and marketplaces to announce their rejection of the "apostate state."

A daylight curfew went into effect at 6 a.m. (10 p.m. Saturday ET) until further notice, the official said.

Two hours after the curfew took effect, a group of gunmen traveling in about 30 vehicles attacked a convoy of fuel tankers just outside Samarra, kidnapping the drivers of 16 trucks and setting fire to the vehicles, a Tikrit police official said.

"The commission accepted that the men posed a security risk to Britain but said they should be granted bail under strict conditions." "Libyans win appeal against extradition," by Jill Lawless for the Associated Press:

LONDON - A British court ruled Friday that two Libyan terror suspects cannot be deported to their homeland even though they pose a danger to Britain's national security. The government said it planned to appeal the decision.

The Special Immigration Appeals Commission said the two men, identified only as DD and AS, faced the risk of ill treatment if they were sent home.

"There is also real risk that the trial of the appellants would amount to a complete denial of a fair trial," said the commission's chairman, judge Duncan Ouseley.

The government claims DD is the brother-in-law of Serhane Fakhet, who blew himself up in a raid by Spanish police after the March 2004 Madrid train bombings. It says another brother-in-law, Mustapha Maymouni, is serving 18 years in a Moroccan prison for his part in the Casablanca bombings which killed 45 people in May 2003.

Ouseley's ruling said DD was a "real and direct threat" to national security and a "global jihadist with links to the Taliban and al-Qaida."

When detained in October 2005, DD possessed a map marked with the flight path to Birmingham International Airport in central England.

"The markings might have been for reconnaissance purposes but might have a wholly innocent explanation," the court's ruling said.

The second man, AS, was "an Islamic extremist who has engaged actively and as a senior member with a terrorist group clearly engaged in support work for jihadist activities," the ruling said.

It said he was involved with a Milan-based group, monitored by Italian authorities, that planning a terrorist attack, most likely within Europe. He came to Britain in February 2002 and was arrested that May for immigration offenses.

The ruling is a blow to a diplomatic agreement between London and Tripoli in a bid to make the deportation of terrorist suspects easier.

In the wake of the July 7, 2005, London bombings that killed 52 commuters, Britain signed "memoranda of understanding" with several countries, including Libya, guaranteeing that suspects returned there would not be mistreated.

As a signatory to the European Convention on Human Rights, Britain is not allowed to deport people to countries where they may be mistreated.

The government said it would ask the Court of Appeal to overturn Friday's ruling.

"We believe that the assurances given to us by the Libyans do provide effective safeguards for the proper treatment of individuals being returned and do ensure that their rights will be respected," a Home Office spokesman said.

The commission accepted that the men posed a security risk to Britain but said they should be granted bail under strict conditions.

And it's not the first time this has happened:

The immigration commission struck down a similar challenge to the government's deportation policy in February, when judges ruled that radical cleric Abu Qatada could be sent back to Jordan.

Qatada, a London-based preacher described by a Spanish judge as Osama bin Laden's "spiritual ambassador in Europe," has been accused by the British government of raising funds for extremist groups and offering "spiritual advice and religious legitimacy" to militants planning attacks.

An update on this story, from Reuters:

TEHRAN, Iran (Reuters) -- Iranian police have warned barbers against offering Western-style hair cuts or plucking the eyebrows of their male customers, Iranian media said Sunday.

Only Westerners don't like a "unibrow," apparently.

The report by a reformist daily, later confirmed by an Iranian news agency, appeared to be another sign of authorities cracking down on clothing and other fashion deemed to be against Islamic values.

"Western hairstyles ... have been banned," the newspaper Etemad said in a front-page headline.

It came a week after police launched a crackdown against the growing number of young women testing the limits of the law with shorter, brighter and skimpier clothing ahead of the summer months.

[...]

The student news agency ISNA quoted a police statement as saying: "In an official order to barbershops, they have been warned to avoid using Western hair styles and doing men's eyebrows."

Iranian young men have in recent years started paying more attention to the way they look and dress, especially in affluent parts of the capital Tehran. Spiked up hair, by using gel, is known as the Khorusi (Rooster) style and some also use make-up.

Several hairdressers for men in Tehran offer cuts in the style of Hollywood movie stars and other Western celebrities. Clients can also have their eyebrows plucked.

The head of the barbers' union, Mohammad Eftekharifard, said police had instructed it to "exercise specific regulations in barbershops that work under its supervision."

Barbers who do not follow these rules might be closed down for a month and even lose their permits to operate, Etemad quoted him as saying.

"Currently some barbershops apply make-up and use (hair) styles that are in line with those in European countries and America," Eftekharifard said.

He added: "An official order has been sent to the union ... not to apply make-up on men's faces (or) do eyebrows ... and hence the barbers are not allowed to do these things."

Since hardline President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad won the presidency in 2005 on a promise of returning to the values of the revolution, hardlinvers have pressed for tighter controls on what they consider immoral behavior.

More on this story. "7/7 ‘mastermind’ is seized in Iraq," by Sean O’Neill, Tim Reid and Michael Evans for the TimesOnline, with thanks to James:

The al-Qaeda leader who is thought to have devised the plan for the July 7 suicide bombings in London and an array of terrorist plots against Britain has been captured by the Americans.

Abd al-Hadi al-Iraqi, a former major in Saddam Hussein’s army, was apprehended as he tried to enter Iraq from Iran and was transferred this week to the “high-value detainee programme” at Guantanamo Bay.

Abd al-Hadi was taken into CIA custody last year, it emerged from US intelligence sources yesterday, in a move which suggests that he was interrogated for months in a “ghost prison” before being transferred to the internment camp in Cuba.

Abd al-Hadi, 45, was regarded as one of al-Qaeda’s most experienced, most intelligent and most ruthless commanders. Senior counter-terrorism sources told The Times that he was the man who, in 2003, identified Britain as the key battleground for exporting al-Qaeda’s holy war to Europe.

Abd al-Hadi recognised the potential for turning young Muslim radicals from Britain who wanted to become mujahidin in Afghanistan or Iraq into terrorists who could carry out attacks in their home country. He realised that their knowledge of Britain, possession of British passports and natural command of English made them ideal recruits. After al-Qaeda restructured its operations in Pakistan’s tribal areas he sought out young Britons for instruction at training camps. In late 2004 Abd al-Hadi met Mohammad Sidique Khan and Shehzad Tanweer, from Leeds, at a militant camp in Pakistan and, in the words of a senior investigator, “retasked them” to become suicide bombers.

They were sent back to Britain where they led the terrorist cell that carried out the 7/7 bombings, killing 52 Tube and bus passengers.

"With the blood of these shahids, with the lots of suffering of innocent people…we hope in the near future to be the newest state in the world."

Here's an intriguing story, sent in to us by Jim Jatras, Director of the American Council for Kosovo and a member of the Jihad Watch Board.

"Kosovo's top Islamic leader asks local Muslims for support," by Niraj Warikoo in the Detroit Free Press:

The top Islamic leader of Kosovo spoke to Muslims in metro Detroit today, asking them to support the independence of his province.

Mufti Naim Ternava, president of the Islamic Community of Kosovo, is in Michigan as part of a visit to the U.S. to garner support for making Kosovo an independent country. The Muslim-majority province is currently a part of Serbia.

"Pray for the independence of Kosovo," Ternava said through a translator during the Friday sermon to about two hundred Muslims at the Muslim Center of Detroit on Davison Ave. "Thousands of miles away from here, there are Muslim brothers in Kosovo who suffered for many, many years and who are close religious brothers with you."

Critics of Kosovo's independence worry that Kosovo would be a hotbed of extremism if it became a separate country, but Ternava and his assistant said that Kosovo's Muslim community is tolerant and modern.

Ternava also spoke with Muslims at the Southfield office of the Council on American-Islamic Relations and at the Albanian Islamic Center in Harper Woods.

During his talk at the Muslim Center, Ternava said that "thousands of people…went as shahids (martyrs) during all these sufferings" that Kosovo went through.

"With the blood of these shahids, with the lots of suffering of innocent people…we hope in the near future to be the newest state in the world," he said.

Ternava also urged the crowd to follow the teachings of Islam.

"Islam is such a comprehensive religion which includes all what the family needs and what an individual needs in this world," he said. "Help others to understand it. Teach it to others."

During his U.S. trip, which is sponsored by the U.S. State Dept., Ternava is also visiting New York, and Washington D.C. to meet with Muslims and State Dept. officials.

'Democracy is nothing, but counting of heads. It cannot differentiate between good and bad people, as in this system the vote of a devout Muslim equals the vote of a frail Muslim,' [Maulana Abdul Aziz, head of the Lal Masjid] said."-- from this article

Yet Bush and Cheney and Rice keep singing the praises of not one, not two, but three "elections" in Iraq. They apparently think that when, in January 2005, the Shi'a went out and voted as they were instructed to vote by those in the three main parties animated by Shi'a Islam -- SCIRI, Da'wa, and the new force of Moqtata al-Sadr -- voted in all their purple-thumbed majesty, voted as Shi'a Arabs for Shi'a Arabs and Shi'a Arab domination, they were "practicing democracy." They apparently think that the Sunnis, on the other hand, who did not vote in that first election, but then begrudgingly took part in the later two, were less interested in “practicing democracy.”

The Sunnis were no more, and no less, for the "democracy" that the electoral process supposedly represented than were the Shi'a. It is just that knowing they would lose (if they had been more numerous than the Shi'a they would have participated more energetically) they had no desire to take part.

No Compulsion in Religion Alert. "Hindu, Christian students struggle in Arabic in state-run schools," by Amar Guriro for the Daily Times:

KARACHI: Seven-year-old Angela finds it difficult to study Islamiyat at school. "I don't know if I have to study it or not, but it's really difficult to pronounce the Arabic properly," she said.

Angela, one of many children belonging to the Hindu Maheshwari, is a class three student at N. A. Bechar Government Primary School that has been converted into the Syed Mahmood Shah Ghazi Government Primary School in Old Kumbhar Para near Lee Market in Lyari Town.

She is one of thousands of other non-Muslim students, including Hindus and Christians, who are left with no choice but to study Islamic education rather than their own religion in state-run educational institutions. A majority of over two million Pakistani Hindus have lived and worked in Sindh for centuries and half a million of them live in Karachi city alone. The Sindh government and the education board of Karachi have failed to implement a separate syllabus in the city's primary and middle schools for minority students.

"Islamiyat" (Islamic studies) is compulsory for all Muslim students in state-run schools but there is no parallel curriculum in other religions. The education board has introduced "Akhlaqiyyat" or Ethics to cater to them but most of the state-run schools in Karachi do not allow non-Muslim students to take it up. In reality, teachers often force these students to sit in Islamiyat classes. This takes place even though no written permission has been acquired from the parents of the child in question.

When Daily Times visited schools in Old Kumbhar Para near Lee Market, Lyari and the Miran Naka area most teachers were unaware that there was a parallel subject to Islamic education. In most of these schools, the non-Muslim students were said to be studying Islamiyat. "What else we can do if the state is encouraging such practices," said Gunesh Maheshwari, a resident of Lee Market. His three children, studying in different classes, are studying Islamiyat rather than ethics or any other parallel religious studies. Aside from the fact that this is confusing for them, they don't do very well in the subject either. "How can a child who has never heard Arabic in his or her life at home suddenly study Islamic education," said Satipal, another resident.

But Abdul Salam Abbasi, the headmaster of N. A. Bechar (Syed Mahmood Shah Ghazi) Government Primary School tells an entirely different story. "Many non-Muslim students who study Islamic education appear to be keen about the subject and they get more marks as compared to the Muslim students," he said.

When asked about any possible solutions, former MNA Dr Khatoo Mal Jewan suggested Hinduism education for Hindu students. "Islam as well as the Constitution of Pakistan fully protects the basic rights of religious minorities and it is the duty of the State to protect their rights," he told Daily Times.

Blaming the parents:

Advisor to Sindh Chief Minister on Minority Affairs, provincial minister, Kishan Chand Parwani, bluntly rejected that such practices exist. "Islamic education is not a compulsory subject for all students, there is an option for non-Muslim students to study ethics but if the students and their parents do not want to avail the option then what can we do?" he said. He said that no school in Karachi forced students to study Islamic education. "I will personally look into the matter if any school has issued a written circular for non-Muslim students to study Islamic education by force."

And if there's no "written circular," no problem?

It is even more damaging for a minister to say foolish things than to do them. -- Cardinal De Retz

Paul Wolfowitz is in trouble, but for all the wrong reasons. Surely the main and overlooked aspect of the entire World Bank brouhaha is not any supposed “corruption” in the arrangements made for Shaha Ali Riza (the woman described sometimes demurely as his "girlfriend,” sometimes less primly as his "squeeze") or in Wolfowitz’s liberality in setting her salary and benefits, but her identity and role in his comprehension of, and decision-making about, both Islam and Iraq.

Shaha Riza was born in North Africa (some say in Libya, some say in Tunisia) but her origins are otherwise obscure. Is she from a Shi’a family? Sunni? Arab? Persian? She has lived in various parts of Dar al-Islam, including a stint, one has read, in Saudi Arabia, but not in Iraq. She is like so many who made friends in high places -- Ahmad Chalabi and Kanan Makiya and Rend al-Rahim come immediately to mind. Those friends in high places went on to do things based in not inconsequential part on what they learned or thought they learned from these “representative” most unrepresentative Iraqis and other Muslims.

If Wolfowitz is to be separated from his current princely allowance, it should not be because World Bank members are offended at his anti-corruption measures (measures not only not objectionable, but necessary), but because of his relationship with Shaha Riza -- a relationship that helped to cause the inexcusable mess of Tarbaby Iraq.

Wolfowitz was not the only one to favor this Light-Unto-the-Muslim-Nations scheme in Iraq. Bush, Cheney, Rice, Rumsfeld, and hundreds of others -- none of them correctly identified the enemy. For them it really was a “war on terror” and not a war of self-defense against Jihad, worldwide, and against all the instruments of Jihad -- including the money weapon, Da’wa, and demographic conquest. And therefore they did not set the right goal, which ought to have been defined succinctly as follows: whatever helps to weaken the Camp of Islam and Jihad, and possibly at the same time instruct, and hearten, the Camp of the Infidels, is desirable. In Iraq, that weakening of the Camp of Islam and Jihad can only be achieved by an American withdrawal, instead of American forces remaining to achieve a goal which is exactly the wrong one (a united and stable Iraq) and in any case, cannot conceivably be achieved.

This is because the requisite willingness to engage in compromise with one’s enemies or rivals is absent from Islam. Islam inculcates aggression toward enemies, and sees only two possible outcomes: that of being the Victor, or that of being the Vanquished. That is how the Sunnis, who will never acquiesce in their new, subordinate status, see it. That is how the Shi’a Arabs see it also. They will never agree to truly share political and economic power with the Sunnis who have persecuted and even killed them, not only during Saddam Hussein’s regime, not only during the entire history of modern Iraq, but since the very first century of Islam. “Taqiyya” was a doctrine that originated in Shi’a Islam, and answered the felt need of those Shi’a who had to deny their faith in order to escape from death at the hands of Sunni Muslims, not from non-Muslims.

Islamic Tolerance Alert. "Darfuri refugees say they face apathy, silence from most of their fellow Muslims," by Robert King for the Indianapolis Star:

FORT WAYNE, Ind. -- They are devoted to Islam but increasingly skeptical of Muslims.

This is the strange paradox Darfuri refugees in Fort Wayne are facing: A fundamentalist government in Sudan turned on them, and the Muslim world has largely stood by silently.

Both internationally, and apparently also in the U.S.:

Here in Indiana, the Darfurians say, mosques and Muslim groups have offered little help. Abu Baker Suliman-Mahaht, 37, a recent Darfuri immigrant, says that when he needed money to pay for his wife's doctor visits, a mosque turned him down. A local church gave him the money.

Another Darfurian, Suliman A. Giddo, said groups such as the Islamic Society of North America, based in Plainfield, could have made a difference early in the conflict by calling on the Sudanese government to stop the killing. Instead, a delegation ISNA sent to Darfur in 2004 came back saying there was no sign of genocide.

The greatest irony for many Darfuri immigrants is who has helped: Jews and Christians.

Giddo, 44, said the Sudanese schools he attended taught that Jews and Christians were the enemies.

"I was excited to find out that the thing that everybody has in his mind is completely wrong. We found that we are respected here," said Giddo, co-founder and president of Darfur Peace & Development in Fort Wayne.

[...]

The Darfurians say Muslim apathy is due to racism and that Arab Muslims see black African Muslims as inferior. They also say Muslim governments don't want to accuse another Islamic government of mass murder.

Remember that the next time you hear a da'wah pitch that casts Islam as being above and immune to the historical patterns of racism with which Europe and America (and just about everywhere but Antarctica) have struggled.

Local Muslim leaders agree that the Islamic world has done little to end the crisis in Darfur. But they say the situation is not about racism. They say the problem is systemic.

More convenient vaguery. (Are there "terrorists" in your "systemic" problem?)

"Now that we have built our mosques and our schools, we really need to build a social services infrastructure so that we can reach out to people that are poor and needy within our community," said Shariq Siddiqui, executive director of the Muslim Alliance of Indiana.

ISNA joined the Save Darfur Coalition in December 2005, a year and a half after it formed. And Muneer Fareed, ISNA's secretary general, calls the situation there a tragedy.

But Giddo and other Darfurians in Fort Wayne don't understand what took so long. "If from day one all the Muslim communities, especially here in the United States, had stood up and said, 'We are Muslims, and we don't want your Muslim country to kill your own Muslims,' that may have made a lot of difference," Giddo said.

"Instead, we the people of Darfur paid that price."

The Business Journal of Phoenix:

An Arizona lawmaker is upset with the Public Broadcasting Service for not airing a controversial documentary on radical and anti-American strains of Islam.

U.S. Rep. Trent Franks, R-Ariz., is joining other conservatives in criticizing the federally funded public television network for not running a documentary called "Islam vs. Islamists: Voices from the Muslim Center."

Franks saw the film this week at a special screening for congressional members and is upset it was not included in a recent PBS series about the Iraq war and terrorism.

"It is unfathomable that PBS has chosen to censure a film which so powerfully encapsulates a message every person needs to hear. The network's censorship of this documentary is one of the best examples to date of how the media refuses to acknowledge free speech being used to reveal the truth about crucial issues when they are deemed politically incorrect," said Franks in a statement.

PBS spokeswoman Lea Sloan provided The Business Journal with a statement saying "Islam vs. Islamists" was not slated to be part of the Iraq/Islamic terrorism series that aired earlier this month

[...]

The producers of the film claim it has not yet run because it has politically conservative themes and looks at radicals within the Muslim faith.

Franks will be joining with several other members of Congress in a bipartisan letter to address their serious concern regarding the PBS decision to drop the film. The Republican represents Sun City, Peoria, Glendale, Wickenburg and Kingman.

From the Gulf Daily News:

PESHAWAR, Pakistan: More than 26 people were killed and 25 wounded, including a federal minister, in a powerful suicide blast at a political rally in northwest Pakistan yesterday.

Interior Minister Aftab Sherpao had just addressed the public gathering when the bomber rushed towards the stage, setting off a huge explosion, witnesses said.

Interior ministry spokesman Brigadier Javed Cheema said five police were killed, apparently preventing the attacker from reaching Sherpao.

"Twenty-six people were killed and 25 others are wounded in the suicide attack," he said, adding that Sherpao escaped with minor injuries.

The attack took place in the town of Charsada in North West Frontier Province bordering Afghanistan.

Sherpao is staunch supporter of President Pervez Musharraf and has been a prominent figure in touting the government's achievements in the fight against terrorism.

Private TV channel footage showed the visibly shaken minister with blood on his clothes being escorted by a group of people.

Most of the men encircling Sherpao and taking him to a car also had blood on their long, white shirts.

The interior ministry said Sherpao was given first aid at a hospital in Charsada and then taken to his Peshawar residence.

A witness Gulzada said the bomber was a bearded man in his 40s.

"I was near the stage when the explosion occurred. I saw people on the stage thrown up several feet and there was screaming all around," the witness, who was also injured, said.

Gulzada said there were more than 400 people in the rally, mainly workers of Sherpao's political party.

President Pervez Musharraf, currently in Bosnia on a visit, and Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz issued statements condemning the attack and vowed it would not deter Pakistan's resolute campaign to wipe out terrorism.

Police officer Jehanzib Khan said more than 15 people were killed on the spot while others died in hospital. Ambulances ferried the wounded to hospitals in Charsada, 35km northeast of provincial capital Peshawar.

Provincial police chief Sharif Virk said the head of the bomber, who appeared to be an Afghan, was found at the scene.

The border province has a large community of Afghan refugees, most living in camps in the troubled region.

NWFP, the home province of the ethnic Pashtun minister, has been through years of violence in the semi-autonomous tribal areas where Pakistani forces are battling Al Qaeda and Taliban militants.

Witness Alaf Khan said Sherpao was receiving guests from his political party when the attacker struck. "The people were garlanding the minister when all of a sudden a big explosion took place," Khan said.

Peshawar and its surrounds have been plagued by bomb attacks following President Pervez Musharraf's decision in 2001 to join a US-led war on terrorism, with a spate of suicide attacks earlier this year, including one in the capital, Islamabad.

Earlier, there was a small blast outside a cafeteria at Peshawar International Airport that broke windows, but caused no casualties. Bordering Afghanistan, the North West Frontier province is one of the most volatile regions of Pakistan.

From the BBC:

A car bomb has killed at least 55 people and injured about 70 in the Iraqi city of Karbala, in the second such attack in two weeks.

The city houses two of Shia Islam's holiest shrines and reports say the bomb went off on a busy street as people headed to pray.

The bomb exploded near the golden-domed mosque of the Imam Abbas shrine.

Meanwhile, nine US soldiers were killed in Iraq in the past two days, the US military said.

[...]

Iraqi television images from Karbala showed a man running down a smoke-filled street holding a lifeless baby above his head.

Ambulances had rushed to the scene, in a crowded area full of shops and restaurants in the city, 100km (70 miles) south-west of Baghdad.

Angry people gathered at the blast site, many of them searching frantically for missing relatives, the Associated Press news agency reported.

Some began to throw stones at the police, accusing them of failing to protect the people.

Police fired weapons in the air to disperse the crowds, the agency says.

Karbala is the second most important shrine city for the Shia, the BBC's Andrew North reports from Baghdad.

He notes that attacks on shrines have become a hallmark of extremist Sunni Muslim groups, particularly al-Qaeda.

The group claimed responsibility for the bombing last year of another major Shia shrine, in Samarra, which sparked the sectarian violence that has torn through the country ever since, our correspondent adds.

A suicide bomber killed at least 42 people in Karbala on 14 April.

Earlier, the powerful Shia cleric, Moqtada al-Sadr, criticised US President George W Bush for refusing to establish a timetable for a US troop withdrawal from Iraq.

In a statement read out on his behalf in the Iraqi parliament, the cleric said the situation in Iraq could not be any worse following an American pull-out than it was already.

The news is grim, as usual, but it's the last two sentences that bother me. They make Sadr sound like a disinterested statesman whose criticism of the President of the United States merits the attention of the august BBC. Yes, he is a "powerful Shia cleric," but he is also a thug and a terrorist who has a vested interest in the US leaving. Worth mentioning, I'd say.

Kemalism on the brink. "Turkish government slams army intervention threat," by Gareth Jones and Hidir Goktas for Reuters, with thanks to Morgaan Sinclair:

ANKARA (Reuters) - Turkey's Islamist-rooted government sharply criticized an army threat to intervene in domestic politics and said on Saturday the military must remain under civilian control.

Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan spoke by telephone with Turkey's top general, Yasar Buyukanit, after Friday's statement in which the military said it was ready to act in defense of secularism, government spokesman Cemil Cicek said.

Cicek said the army statement was aimed against the government and was timed to influence the Constitutional Court which is set to study a legal challenge to the inconclusive first round of a presidential election on Friday.

"Turkey's problems will be solved in the framework of the law, there is no other way ... The chief of the General Staff is answerable to the Prime Minister," Cicek told a news conference.

The army, which has ousted four governments in the past 50 years, expressed concern in its statement late on Friday over the election. It said it was ready to act in defense of the secularist system separating religion and politics.

Karen Armstrong's second hagiographical and highly selective (i.e., quasi-fictional) biography of the Islamic prophet Muhammad appeared around the same time as my book The Truth About Muhammad. Armstrong, however, declined all invitations to debate me, turning down, among others, an O'Reilly Factor segment. (The truth-challenged Edina Lekovic of MPAC ultimately appeared with me, using her time to get in as many lies about me as she could.)

However, Armstrong has let loose in the Financial Times (thanks to Katherine), in a review almost as concocted and fantastic as her own book.

...The criminal activities of terrorists have given the old western prejudice a new lease of life. People often seem eager to believe the worst about Muhammad, are reluctant to put his life in its historical perspective and assume the Jewish and Christian traditions lack the flaws they attribute to Islam. This entrenched hostility informs Robert Spencer’s misnamed biography The Truth about Muhammad, subtitled Founder of the World’s Most Intolerant Religion.

Spencer has studied Islam for 20 years, largely, it seems, to prove that it is an evil, inherently violent religion.

Silliness. I am not out to prove anything except what Islam is. If it teaches warfare against unbelievers, as all its orthodox sects and schools of jurisprudence do, then it does no good for anyone except the jihadists to ignore or deny or minimize that fact.

He is a hero of the American right...

Uh-oh, "the American right." That's mainstream media code for "a bad guy who should not be accorded respect or taken seriously."

...and author of the US bestseller The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam. Like any book written in hatred, his new work is a depressing read.

This is, of course, a familiar tactic of Leftists, jihadists, and those who sympathize with them: characterize any accurate report of their activities as "hatred." Never mind that my book works strictly from the earliest extant Islamic sources, and only reports what they say. If there is any "hatred" in it, it comes from those sources, not from me.

Spencer makes no attempt to explain the historical, political, economic and spiritual circumstances of 7th-century Arabia, without which it is impossible to understand the complexities of Muhammad’s life.

Reading this, I doubt Armstrong actually read the book. Or maybe she just wants to make sure no one else reads it. In fact, anyway, the beginning of chapter three, and many other passages throughout the book, are devoted to explaining "the historical, political, economic and spiritual circumstances of 7th-century Arabia."

Consequently he makes basic and bad mistakes of fact. Even more damaging, he deliberately manipulates the evidence.

The traditions of any religion are multifarious. It is easy, therefore, to quote so selectively that the main thrust of the faith is distorted. But Spencer is not interested in balance. He picks out only those aspects of Islamic tradition that support his thesis. For example, he cites only passages from the Koran that are hostile to Jews and Christians and does not mention the numerous verses that insist on the continuity of Islam with the People of the Book: ”Say to them: We believe what you believe; your God and our God is one.”

Oh, Karen. Do you really think no one will check your work? Not only do I mention the verse you claim I don't mention (Qur'an 29:46), but I do so twice, on page 17 and again on page 51.

Islam has a far better record than either Christianity or Judaism of appreciating other faiths. In Muslim Spain, relations between the three religions of Abraham were uniquely harmonious in medieval Europe. The Christian Byzantines had forbidden Jews from residing in Jerusalem, but when Caliph Umar conquered the city in AD638, he invited them to return and was hailed as the precursor of the Messiah. Spencer doesn’t refer to this.

Of course I don't. And why not? Because my book is a biography of Muhammad. Muhammad died in 632. Thus events of 638, and of hundreds of years later in Spain, are beyond its purview. But in fact I discuss Muslim Spain at some length in my book Onward Muslim Soldiers, and Islamic and Christian anti-Semitism, also at length, in my forthcoming book Religion of Peace?.

Jewish-Muslim relations certainly have declined as a result of the Arab-Israeli conflict, but this departs from centuries of peaceful and often positive co-existence.

As long as the Jews knew their place. Watch for Andrew Bostom's new Legacy of Islamic Antisemitism, which provides a superabundance of evidence that Jews never enjoyed equality of rights with Muslims in Islamic societies.

When discussing Muhammad’s war with Mecca, Spencer never cites the Koran’s condemnation of all warfare as an ”awesome evil”, its prohibition of aggression or its insistence that only self-defence justifies armed conflict. He ignores the Koranic emphasis on the primacy of forgiveness and peaceful negotiation: the second the enemy asks for peace, Muslims must lay down their arms and accept any terms offered, however disadvantageous. There is no mention of Muhammad’s non-violent campaign that ended the conflict.

I don't know to which Qur'an verse Armstrong is referring. Perhaps someone can help me out here. I've read the Qur'an innumerable times, but don't recall any verse saying that all warfare is an "awesome evil." I looked around in it just now, and searched through the helpful Index of Qur'anic Topics by Ashfaque Ullah Syed, but came up empty. Search here for "warfare and evil" and "war and evil," and you don't come up with anything like that. There is this, but it is hardly the same thing: "Fighting is prescribed for you, and ye dislike it. But it is possible that ye dislike a thing which is good for you, and that ye love a thing which is bad for you. But Allah knoweth, and ye know not" (2:216).

Having exposed in The Truth About Muhammad Armstrong's misrepresentation of Tabari's evidence about Aisha's age when she married Muhammad (see page 170), and seeing her false statement above about my not quoting Qur'an 29:46, I am not inclined to take her word for the existence of this verse. Anyone who has an idea of what she's referring to, please let me know. And "Muhammad’s non-violent campaign that ended the conflict" is not a specific reference to anything -- which conflict? But if she means his conquest of Mecca, when there was little resistance, I discuss it on pages 145-147.

But in any case, the existence of this verse, if it exists, doesn't negate the fact that Armstrong's assertion that "only self-defence justifies armed conflict" and that the Qur'an directs Muslims to "lay down their arms and accept any terms offered, however disadvantageous" is wholly false. In fact, as I outline in the book (pages 76-78), Muhammad's earliest biographer, Ibn Ishaq, traces three stages of development in the Qur'anic doctrine of warfare, culminating in offensive warfare to establish the hegemony of Islamic law by force of arms. That has been understood throughout history by mainstream Islamic teachers (Ibn Kathir, Ibn Juzayy, As-Suyuti, Ibn Qayyim) as the Qur'an's last word on jihad. Contemporary jihad theorists have picked up on that and used it to revive jihadist sentiments among peaceful Muslims today.

People would be offended by an account of Judaism that dwelled exclusively on Joshua’s massacres and never mentioned Rabbi Hillel’s Golden Rule, or a description of Christianity based on the bellicose Book of Revelation that failed to cite the Sermon on the Mount. But the widespread ignorance about Islam in the west makes many vulnerable to Spencer’s polemic; he is telling them what they are predisposed to hear. His book is a gift to extremists who can use it to ”prove” to those Muslims who have been alienated by events in Palestine, Lebanon and Iraq that the west is incurably hostile to their faith.

Ignorance? I'd be happy to debate Karen Armstrong anytime. But I will not allow her false statements to go unchallenged. And that is why such a debate will probably never happen.

UPDATE: In the comments field below, Jihad Watch reader "Great Comet of 1577" has found the Qur'an verse to which Armstrong was referring. It's Qur'an 2:217:

"They question thee (O Muhammad) with regard to warfare in the sacred month. Say: Warfare therein is a great (transgression) [or an "awesome evil"], but to turn (men) from the way of Allah, and to disbelieve in Him and in the Inviolable Place of Worship, and to expel His people thence, is a greater with Allah; for persecution is worse than killing. And they will not cease from fighting against you till they have made you renegades from your religion, if they can. And whoso becometh a renegade and dieth in his disbelief: such are they whose works have fallen both in the world and the Hereafter. Such are rightful owners of the Fire: they will abide therein."

Thus, contrary to Armstrong's statement that this verse refers to "all warfare" as "an 'awesome evil,' in fact the verse refers only to warfare during the sacred month as evil at all, and then goes on to say that "persecution is worse than killing."

In context, this verse was revealed to justify a Muslim raid on a Quraysh caravan: the raid took place during a sacred month, during which war was forbidden. But the Quraysh were allegedly persecuting the Muslims, so this verse absolves the Muslims of guilt for the raid -- since "persecution is worse than killing."

So in fact, the verse that Armstrong is using to argue that the Qur'an teaches that war is an "awesome evil" actually teaches that moral precepts, such as the prohibition on fighting during the sacred month, may be set aside to benefit the Muslims.

What has been the effect on weakening the Camp of Islam and Jihad by spending this $880 billion in Iraq, and how else might it have been spent to weaken that Camp?

For example, some of it could have been spent on the building of nuclear plants (on the model of what the French government has done), on subsidies to solar and wind energy projects, or for mass transit. Suppose $300 billion had been spent on all that?

And suppose some of the rest had been spent on propaganda, broadcasting akin to Radio Liberty and Radio Free Europe, not to tell Muslims how much we like and respect them, nor how well-off Muslims are in our country, but rather to tell other Infidels about Jihad News around the globe (the kind of thing one finds gathered at Jihad Watch every day, but on a much larger scale, disseminated hither and yon).

Would it be immoral for Americans to leave Iraq, or to allow it to dissolve? Some have said so. But as to the question of morality, I don't even understand the question. The Kurds resent the Arabs for good reason. Why should they not try to make a move for independence, and if by helping them the American government can weaken Syria and Iran, and have a semi-reliable ally in what was northern Iraq, why not? What is immoral about that?

And as to the sectarian divisions, they date back a thousand years before the founding of the United States. The depth and duration of that division, in other words, owes nothing to us. It is the Americans who have tried, at great human and economic cost, to make the Iraqis less tribal, less selfish, more imbued with a sense of a nation -- and a nation that is not merely a place to be controlled by their sect or tribe or family. The Americans have tried to encourage entrepreneurial activity instead of reliance, as in so many other Muslim states, on either oil money or foreign aid from Infidels, and to encourage the adoption of a Constitution that would actually move away from the Shari'a.

It has all failed. And that is despite the enormous efforts of American soldiers, who were never taught about Islam, and yet persevered, and were puzzled when the Muslims of Iraq did not behave, as those soldiers expected them to, as a grateful "Iraqi people," but rather as a collection -- with a handful of exceptions -- of grasping, whining, greedy, meretricious people, eager to have the Americans do everything for them, eager to have them lavish them with aid money (thrown around, by the billions, like confetti), and distinctly indifferent to American losses when not taking outright pleasure in such losses, yet always willing to blame the Americans for everything.

Does a Sunni bomb go off killing Shi'a? The Shi'a crowds gather, and tell reporters that they blame the Americans. The Sunnis are kidnapped by Shi'a militia, and the Sunnis rant against the Americans. And now 98% of the Sunni Arabs say that all attacks on Americans are justified and that they personally approve of them, and 75% of the Shi'a say the same thing. Only the Kurds express, by a large majority, lack of approval for such attacks.

What is the conceivable offense to morality in no longer sending Americans to fight and die for people who cannot overcome Islam, who will in large -- and ever-increasing -- numbers, take delight in the deaths of Americans? And does anyone, does even Bush, still think that Iraq could somehow become a Light Unto the Muslim Nations? Karen Hughes, Bush’s loyal and equally unintelligent aide, is the one who is most directly involved with "reaching out to Muslims." That is the extent of our propaganda effort, an effort that should be made not to win jihadists over, but to fill them with confusion and to demoralize them, and make at least some of them begin to see that their political, economic, and social failures are a direct result of what Islam inculcates -- not only the specific doctrines, but the habit of mental submission that it demands.

An update on this story. "U.S. says has nabbed four “terrorists” in Iraq with Iranian EFPs," from Iran Focus:

London, Apr. 28 – The United States military announced on Friday that it had arrested four “suspected terrorists” with links to Iran during an operation in the Baghdad slum Sadr City.

In a statement, the Multi-National Force – Iraq (MNF-I) said that the individuals targeted during the raid were suspected members of a “secret cell terrorist network known for facilitating the transport of weapons and explosively formed penetrators, or EFPs, from Iran to Iraq, as well as bringing militants from Iraq to Iran for terrorist training”.

The following is the full text of the statement:

[...]

BAGHDAD, Iraq – Coalition Forces detained four suspected terrorists Friday morning during an operation in Sadr City.

The individuals targeted during the raid are suspected members of a secret cell terrorist network known for facilitating the transport of weapons and explosively formed penetrators, or EFPs, from Iran to Iraq, as well as bringing militants from Iraq to Iran for terrorist training.

Intelligence reports also indicate the secret cell has ties to a kidnapping network that conducts attacks within Iraq.

“Individuals coming into Iraq from other countries for the purpose of endangering Iraqi civilians and disrupting security won’t be tolerated,” said Lt. Col. Christopher Garver, MNF-I spokesperson. “We will continue to work diligently to rid Iraq of foreign terrorists trying to thwart the development of a stable and peaceful Iraq.”

Meanwhile, we in the West face groups engaging in da'wah that are actually connected with "terror organizations." "Turkey - Four street evangelists jailed," from Compass Direct:

ISTANBUL, April 27 (Compass Direct News) – Police jailed four Christian street evangelists in Istanbul for “missionary activity” this week, even as government officials openly defended the right of all religious groups to carry out evangelistic work in Turkey. Officials released U.S. citizen David Byle this evening, more than 48 hours after he was arrested along with a Korean and two Turkish Christians, his wife said. Christian sources maintained that Turkey plans to deport the Korean believer, though further details remain unknown. The four men were detained Wednesday afternoon (April 25) while sharing their faith with passersby at a park in Istanbul’s Taksim district. The arrests occurred in the midst of tense national debate over the legitimacy of Christian missionary activity, sparked by the gruesome killing of three Christian men in southeastern Turkey last week. “Missionaries are more dangerous than terror organizations,” Niyazi Guney, Ministry of Justice director general of laws, reportedly commented only a day after the murders.

Some 35,000 petroglyphs located in Pakistan's Indus River area will soon be flooded by a giant dam. An archeologist from Heidelberg is trying to save as much as he can before encroaching modernity destroys the remote area's cultural history.” -- from this article

The destruction of pre-Islamic and non-Islamic artifacts, which took place everywhere that Islam conquered, continues to this day. The destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas by the Taliban in Afghanistan, with Pakistani and Saudi help, was not a unique event, but merely an event that happened to take place in the last decade rather than a century or two ago. And it took place in 2001, not 1901 or 1801, because the explosives and technical know-how (Pakistani and Saudi "engineers") had become available.

The Nazi soldiers who left explosives in trees along the streets of Florence as they retreated, and were obviously hoping to blow up a good part of that city, are the only ones comparable to the Muslims in their willingness to destroy art and artifacts.

The entire city of Constantinople might have been destroyed, had the Young Turks had their way.

Yes: Richardson, Dodd, Obama, Clinton. No: Edwards, Biden, Kucinich, Gravel

Yes, it's a silly and inadequate phrase -- a war on a tactic rather than on an opponent. But those whose hands are not raised are not calling for a correct understanding of the war as a defensive action against the global jihad. Rather, they would likely say that there is no problem that can't be solved by appeasement on our end.

I did think I sensed a disturbance in The Force.

"Romney: Democratic debate lacked focus on Iran, global jihad," by Daniel Lovering for the Associated Press, with thanks to the Constantinopolitan Irredentist:

PITTSBURGH --Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney said Friday he wished his Democratic counterparts had focused on Iran and the threat of global jihad rather than an Iraq troop withdrawal during their first primary debate.

The former Massachusetts governor said he had read reports about the 90-minute event Thursday at South Carolina State University, which came just hours after the Senate voted to begin pulling troops out of Iraq by Oct. 1.

"I wish they'd have spent more time as a democratic field talking about the threat of global jihad, talking about what specifically they would do to prevent the nuclear armament of Iran," he told reporters at the exclusive Duquesne Club.

His comments came a day after he likened Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to Adolf Hitler in a speech to Jewish students at New York's Yeshiva University.

Romney said everyone wants to bring U.S. troops home from Iraq as soon as possible, "but we don't want to do it in a way that would cause a potential further disruption of the region and cause us to have to come back again."

He said he wants to see the results of President Bush's troop surge, something he supports "as long as there's a pathway that has a reasonable probability of success."

"I think we're going to know whether this is working in a matter of months, not years," he said.

This is a generous courtesy, but will the demands stop with this? Unfortunately, they will not. This just will encourage the cab drivers to behave in accord with Sharia -- as the Minneapolis cabbies have already begun doing with their refusal to transport people carrying alcohol.

"Airport adds foot basins for Muslim cabbies: Police worry about Kansas City 'catering' to Islamic rituals," from WorldNetDaily.com, with thanks to Davida:

The Kansas City International Airport has added several foot-washing basins in restrooms to accommodate a growing number of Muslim taxicab drivers who requested the facilities to prepare for daily Islamic prayer, WND has learned.

The move concerns airport police who worry about Middle Eastern men loitering inside the building. After 9/11, the airport beefed up its police force to help prevent terrorist attacks.

"Why are we constructing places of worship for them inside our airports?" said an airport official who requested anonymity. "Why are we catering to their rituals? We don't do it for any other religion."

Other major airports also are dealing with increased demands from Muslim cabdrivers.

For instance, cabbies at Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport recently caused a stir when they refused to carry passengers possessing alcoholic beverages or accompanied by seeing-eye dogs. Alcohol is forbidden in Islam, and dogs are considered unclean.

There are approximately 250 taxicab drivers operating at KCI Airport in Missouri, one of the largest airports in the U.S., linking some 10 million passengers between mid-America and other U.S. cities. Approximately 70 percent of the drivers are of Middle Eastern heritage and practice the Islamic faith, sources say.

KCI Airport Police are responsible for the cab drivers, including the holding areas of the building. The KCI Aviation Department, which oversees the police, recently expanded the taxicab facility restroom area to include the construction of four individual foot-washing benches.

The cost of the project is not immediately known. A spokeswoman for the engineering department said she could not break out the figures.

KCI Airport Police Capt. Jim Harmon declined comment, explaining, "This is a touchy subject."

He referred questions to the KCI Aviation Department.

In a cleansing ritual known as ablution, Muslims are required to wash their feet before praying to Allah five times a day. They often complain that public restroom sinks do not accommodate their needs. Floor-level basins make it easier for them to perform their foot-washing ritual.

The Council on American-Islamic Relations has pressed government agencies and businesses to install the foot basins in restrooms.

Would they have hosted Hitler? Will they ask him about the calls for genocide that have gone out on PA TV?

"Report: Haniyeh to visit Switzerland in first official state visit," from Haaretz, with thanks to the American Israeli Patriot:

Palestinian Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh will visit Switzerland in May in what will be his first official state visit to Europe since becoming prime minister, according to a report in the French news agency AFP released Friday.

The report stated that a date has still not been set for the trip.

Ten days ago, Palestinian Information Minister Mustafa Barghouti said that China and Switzerland informed Palestinian officials that they would meet with the new unity government, a coalition of the Islamic militant Hamas and the moderate Fatah movement.

"We appreciate the position of China and Switzerland, the states that informed us that they are going to deal with our government, without any discrimination between its members," said Barghouti.

Many other countries have said they would meet with only meet with non-Hamas members of the Cabinet.

Somali Jihad and Stuff Update. "Somali Capital Now Calm After Month in Which 1,000 Were Killed," by Jeffrey Gettleman in the New York Times, with thanks to Arjun:

NAIROBI, Kenya, April 27 — An eerie calm slipped over Mogadishu, Somalia’s capital, on Friday for the first time in a month.

After intense combat that killed more than 1,000 people, insurgents melted back into the broken city, and hundreds of families began to return home.

The transitional Somali government claimed victory, saying that its troops had vanquished the insurgency and that peace and prosperity were just around the corner. “The fighting in Mogadishu is over,” said Abdikarim Farah, Somalia’s ambassador to Ethiopia, at a news conference in the Ethiopian capital, Addis Ababa.

“Mogadishu was once called the Pearl of the Indian Ocean,” he said. “God willing, it will come to deserve that name again.”

[...]

But the insurgency is probably not over.

Instead, it seems, the insurgents have simply absorbed the same lesson that the Islamist militias learned in December when the conflict started: that undisciplined bands of young fighters are no match for better trained, better equipped Ethiopian soldiers.

“Their snipers were killing us left and right,” said Mohammed Isse, 45, a gunman who left an Islamist militia to join an insurgent group.

Mr. Isse estimated that Ethiopian soldiers had killed more than 800 insurgents. Still, he was unbowed. “We’re just going to switch tactics,” he said. “We’re thinking suicide bombs, kidnappings and attacks on government hotels.”

“Stuff like that,” he added.

An Open Letter to UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon and to UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Louise Arbour from the World Union for Progressive Judaism and the Association for World Education, Palais des Nations, Geneva, Monday, 23 April 2007 (10:00a.m.).

On PA’s ongoing "direct and public incitement to commit genocide" (1948 Genocide Convention: Article IIIc)

On 13 April 2007, at a mosque in Sudan, the Acting Palestinian Legislative Council Speaker Sheikh Ahmad Bahr of Hamas brought greetings: "Our jihad-fighting Palestinian people salutes its brother, Sudan." He ended his sermon to a packed mosque audience with a "direct and public incitement to commit genocide": "Oh Allah, vanquish the Jews and their supporters. Oh Allah, vanquish the Americans and their supporters. Oh Allah, count their numbers, and kill them all, down to the very last one [sic]. Oh Allah, show them a day of darkness. Oh Allah, who sent down His Book [The Koran], the mover of the clouds who defeated the enemies of the Prophet – defeat the Jews and the Americans, and bring us victory over them."

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On 16 April we sent an Appeal to the HCHR for a reaction to Hamas Spokesman Dr. Ismail Radwan’s "direct and public incitement to commit genocide." He ended his sermon to a attentive mosque audience, broadcast on Palestinian Authority TV (30 March), with genocidal "prayers to Allah" (from a hadith):

"The Hour [Day of Judgment] will not come until the Muslims will fight the Jews and the Muslims will kill them, and the rock and the tree will say: 'Oh, Muslim, servant of Allah, there is a Jew behind me, kill him!'"

He concluded with a call for "victory for the Jihad-fighting worshippers, in Palestine and elsewhere." (PMWatch)

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The following are excerpts from the sermon delivered on 13 April 2007 by Ahmad Bahr of Hamas – Acting Speaker of the Palestinian Legislative Council that was aired on TV in Sudan; the translation is by MEMRI.

TO VIEW THIS CLIP: http://www.memritv.org/search.asp?ACT=S9&P1=1426

TO READ THIS TEXT: http://www.memri.org/bin/opener_latest.cgi?ID=SD155307

Ahmad Bahr:
[…] "The Palestinian woman bids her son farewell, and says to him: 'Son, go and don't be a coward. Go, and fight the Jews.' He bids her farewell and carries out a martyrdom operation. What did this Palestinian woman say when she was asked for her opinion, after the martyrdom of her son? She said: 'My son is my own flesh and blood. I love my son, but my love for Allah and His Messenger is greater than my love for my son.' Yes, this is the message of the Palestinian woman, who was over 70 years old – Fatima Al-Najjar. She was over 70 years old, but she blew herself up for the sake of Allah, bringing down many criminal Zionists." […]

"America will be annihilated, while Islam will remain. The Muslims 'will be victorious, if you are believers.' Oh Muslims, I guarantee you that the power of Allah is greater than America, by whom many are blinded today. Some people are blinded by the power of America. We say to them that with the might of Allah, with the might of His Messenger, and with the power of Allah, we are stronger than America and Israel." […]

"'You will be victorious on the face of this planet. You are the masters of the world on the face of this planet.' Yes, [the Koran says] 'you will be victorious,' but only 'if you are believers.' Allah willing, 'you will be victorious,' while America and Israel will be annihilated, Allah willing. I guarantee you that the power of belief and faith is greater than the power of America and Israel. They [the Jews] are cowards, as is said in the Book of Allah: 'You shall find them the people most eager to protect their lives.' [Koran 2:96] They are cowards, who are eager for life, while we are eager for death for the sake of Allah…"
* * * * *

We call on you Sir the UN Secretary-General, and to you Madam the High Commissioner of Human Rights, to remind the Palestinian Authority Government of the Principles of the UN Charter (Chapter I, Article 2:4); and that the 1948 Genocide Convention states: "direct and public incitement to commit genocide" (Article III c) by "public officials or private individuals"…"shall be punished" (Art. IV)

Respectfully,
David G. Littman and René V.L. Wadlow (Representatives to the UN Office in Geneva)
NGO doc. http://www.unhchr.ch/Huridocda/Huridoca.nsf/TestFrame/99cdd287d4323f56c1256d780034ba6f?Opendocument

As of today, there has been no reaction from a UN office for the two appeals (16 and 23 April) on 'incitement to genocide'. Silence speaks volumes!

Sharia Alert, and more on this story: 150,000 detained so far. "Iran: Enemies 'plotting' against new dress code says Ahmadinejad," from Adnkronos International:

Rome, 27 April (AKI) - One week after police started enforcing strict new Islamic dress code rules, Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said Friday that his opponents were manipulating the moralization campaign so as to create discontent. "Our enemies want a limited group of people, mostly youth, to hit the streets dressed in a vulgar manner to provoke police intervention and then use against our country the bad feelings of young people who have been mistreated by security officials," said the president.

The country's top police officer announced on Thursday that some 150,000 women ave been detained in Iran over the past week for violating strict new Islamic dress code rules.

"During the first four days [since the code came into effect] we have picked up 150,000 women who were not properly veiled, but many of them were released after they signed an admission of guilt and a formal apology," General Ismail Ahmadi Moghaddam said Thursday. An unspecified number of the women taken into custody were also forced to undergo psychological counseling, Moghaddam said.

“Only 13 of these women are still being held and they will have to stand trial," he explained.

Some prominent politicians have criticised the government and the security forces for the way the matter has been handled.

Some papers in Tehran ran articles recalling how the president had promised not to meddle into the dress codes of young Iranians during the electoral campaign leading to his June 2005 presidential election.

"Young men dressed Western style and women not covered well by the veil are not a problem in a country with much more serious problems," Ahmadinejad was quoted as saying at the time.

The moralization campaign was at the centre of most sermons at Friday prayers.

The leader of Tehran's prayer on Friday, ayatollah Ahmad Khatami, praised the new rules saying that "in the past week the great majority of the population has felt more secure and protected by police. Anyone criticizing police will attract the ire of the population."

The head prosecutor of Tehran, Saiid Mortazavi, the magistrate who banned dozens of papers and is suspected of a role in the murder of Canadian photographer Zahra Kazemi, during questioning said: "These women who infest our streets by dressing like vulgar models must be considered criminals as they threaten the security and decensy [sic] of our youth."

Mortazavi stressed that "offending Islam's sense of modesty is a crime to be [punished] with detention" under Iran's criminal law.

A significant catch, though the general unwillingness in the West to engage in discussion about the Islamic teachings that underlie the jihad waged by al-Qaeda, other groups, and individuals only helps ensure there will be someone to take al-Iraqi's place in the organization. But hopefully, his capture will yield actionable intelligence, including any documents and data found with him. From Agence France-Presse:

WASHINGTON - A top Al Qaeda commander who led operations in Afghanistan and plotted the assassination of Pakistan’s President Pervez Musharraf has been taken into US custody, the Pentagon said on Friday.

Abd Al Hadi Al Iraqi, who was taken to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba within the past week, was intercepted as he was trying to reach Iraq to manage Al Qaeda operations and possibly plot attacks against western targets outside Iraq, Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman said.

Whitman said al-Iraqi “was one of Al Qaeda’s highest ranking and senior operatives at the time of his detention.”

He was a key Al Qaeda commander in the late 1990s and from 2002 to 2004 was in charge of cross-border attacks against coalition forces, working directly with the Taliban, he said.

“He also in recent years was involved in plots to assassinate perceived opponents of Al Qaeda to include Pakistan President Musharraf as well as other officials,” he said.

Al-Iraqi was held by the CIA before being turned over to US military authorities, said Whitman.

A CIA spokesman said the interrogation methods it used in holding al-Iraqi “were legal, and thoroughly reviewed by our government to ensure they are in accordance with our laws and treaty obligations.”

“The information that CIA’s terrorist interrogation program has produced has prevented attacks and saved innocents lives,” said spokesman Paul Gimigliano.

President George W. Bush in September announced that all high value prisoners being held by the CIA at secret overseas detention centers had been transferred to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

A US intelligence official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said al-Iraqi was captured late last year, well after the president’s announcement, as part of a complex international organization.

“There were a lot of people who did a lot of hard work to make this operation a success,” the official said. “It’s not confined to the United States, but plainly US intelligence had a key role.”

The Pentagon and the CIA declined to comment on where al-Iraqi was captured or whether US forces were directly involved.

“At the time of his capture he was trying to return to his native country, Iraq, to manage Al Qaeda’s affairs and possibly focus on operations outside Iraq against western targets,” Whitman said.

“He was intercepted before he got there,” he said.

Whitman said al-Iraqi also met with Al Qaeda members in Iran, but would not say when.

A fact sheet released by the Pentagon said al-Iraqi believed that Al Qaeda members in Iran “should be doing more with the fight, including supporting efforts in Iraq and causing problems within Iran.”

As a senior Al Qaeda planner and operative, al-Iraqi “had fundamental responsibility for Al Qaeda operations in that whole stretch of the world as well as other responsibilities,” the intelligence official said.

“I would think of him in relation to the plot against Musharraf as someone who had a leadership or guiding role,” he said.

He was born in the northern Iraqi city of Mosul in 1961 and served in the Iraqi military before going to Afghanistan where he spent 15 years, it said.

Before the September 11, 2001 attacks, he was a member of the Al Qaeda military committee that oversaw terrorist and guerrilla operations and paramilitary training, according to the Pentagon.

He also was a member of a 10-member group of advisors to Osama bin Laden, and was known and trusted by the Al Qaeda leader and his deputy Ayman Al-Zawahiri, the Pentagon said.

It said that at one point he was Zawahiri’s caretaker and that he interacted with top Al-Qaeda planners and decision makers such as Khalid Sheikh Mohammad, Abu Faraj al-Libi, Hamza Rabi’a and Abd al-Rahman al Mujair.

More recently, he associated with leaders of other extremist groups allied with Al-Qaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan, including the Taleban, it said.

He worked “directly with the Taliban to determine responsibility and lines of communication between Taliban and AlQaeda leaders in Afghanistan, specifically with regard to the targeting of US forces,” it said.

"Afghan forces recapture district," by Amir Shah for the Associated Press:

KABUL, Afghanistan - Hundreds of Afghan soldiers and police retook a district outside the capital from the Taliban on Friday, pushing out militants who had seized the area in fierce fighting a day earlier, a senior Afghan official said.

Marajudin Pathan, the governor of Ghazni province, said a hastily organized force of more than 250 officers encountered no resistance when they swept into Giro.

"The district is under our control," Pathan told The Associated Press by telephone. "There was no resistance because the cowardly enemy escaped."

He said police, assisted by Afghan soldiers and troops from the U.S.-led military coalition, were combing villages in search of any fighters still hiding there.

The Taliban takeover of Giro, just 110 miles from Kabul, helped undermine claims by the Afghan government and its foreign backers that President Hamid Karzai has expanded government control of the country.

Militants have repeatedly overrun towns in rural areas, especially in the south and east, despite the presence of NATO and U.S. troops whose numbers have swelled to the current 47,000.

But the Taliban's hold is usually short-lived.

The Taliban's strategy appears at least in part to be projecting the message that while they are not in control, neither is Karzai, and as evidenced by previous operations like this one, they can swoop in more or less at will, at least until help arrives (most often involving NATO).

Officials said more than 100 suspected Taliban attacked Giro on Thursday evening, setting fire to buildings and cutting telephone lines.

The district mayor, police chief and three policemen were killed during several hours of fighting, deputy governor Kazim Allayer said. Pathan estimated that about 10 of the militants also died.

NATO and the U.S.-led coalition said they were aware of the incident, but had no details.

NATO-led forces are pushing forward with their biggest-ever offensive in southern Afghanistan to root out militants in the opium-producing heartland of Helmand province.

"172 Militants Planning Attack on Oil Fields Arrested in Saudi Arabia," from Fox News (thanks to Infidel Pride):

RIYADH, Saudi Arabia — Saudi police arrested 172 Islamic militants who were on the verge of carrying out a series of terror attacks on oil facilities, military zones and public figures, the Interior Ministry said Friday. A spokesman said all that remained in the plot "was to set the zero hour."

An Interior ministry statement said police seized weapons and more than 20 million riyals ($5.33 million) in cash, from seven armed cells.

"Some had been training on the use of weapons, and some were sent to other countries to study aviation in preparation to use them to carry out terrorist operations inside the kingdom," the statement said.

U.S. officials characterized the plot as "extremely serious" and said a connection to senior Al Qaeda leadership — Usama bin Laden or Ayman Al-Zawahiri — had not been ruled out.

The officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, noted that the plot was very similar to Sept. 11, by having militants train as pilots to use planes in the attacks and hitting several targets simultaneously.

"They had reached an advance stage of readiness and what remained only was to set the zero hour for their attacks," Interior Ministry spokesman Brig. Mansour al-Turki told the Associated Press in a phone call. "They had the personnel, the money, the arms. Almost all the elements for terror attacks were complete."

Al-Turki told the privately owned Al-Arabiya TV channel that the militants included non-Saudis.

The militants also planned to storm Saudi prisons to free the inmates, the statement said.

"Certainly anytime the Saudis or anyone else takes action against those involed in terrorism it's a good thing. It's something that makes the world safer and makes America safer," Tom Casey, a State Department spokesman, said in Washington.

The Saudi statement said some of the military targets were outside the kingdom. Al-Turki said the arrests occurred "at various and successive times" but did not elaborate.

The Saudi state TV channel Al-Ekhbariah broadcast footage of large weapons cache discovered buried in the desert. The arms included bricks of plastic explosives, ammunition cartridges, handguns and rifles wrapped in plastic sheeting.

The ministry referred to the militants only as a "deviant group" — the Saudi term for Islamic terrorist.

Al-Ekhbariah showed investigators breaking tiled floors with hammers to uncover pipes that contained weapons. In one scene, an official upends a plastic pipe and bullets and little packets of plastic explosives spill out.

The channel also showed investigators digging up plastic sacks in the desert.

Bin Laden has called for attacks on the kingdom's oil facilities as a means of crippling both the kingdom's economy and the hurting the West, which he accuses of paying too little for Arab oil.

Imagine some point in the future where technology and foreign policy meet in such a way that the foreign oilfields are no longer an issue. Getting there sooner rather than later will only help national security, as well as the economy, and yet in the absence of an immediate crisis, the political will to make that happen evaporates like... well, pick your volatile petrochemical.

More on this story. "Petraeus: More Iran involvement in Iraq," from United Press International:

WASHINGTON, April 26 (UPI) -- Iran's role in fomenting violence in Iraq is greater than the U.S. military understood even a month ago, Gen. David Petraeus said Thursday.

Iraqi Shiite militia members -- a secret cell of the Jaysh al-Mahdi, which is loyal to cleric Muqtada Sadr -- have received funding, advanced explosives and training on Iranian soil, and "in some cases advice and ... even a degree of direction," Petraeus, the commander of U.S. ground forces in Iraq, said.

"There's no question ... that Iranian financing is taking place through the Quds force of the Iranian Republican Guards Corps," he said.

The U.S. military is holding the leaders of the Khazali cell that in January attacked a U.S. Army team in Karbala, kidnapping four and killing five.

"The Iranian involvement has really become much clearer to us and brought into much more focus during the interrogation of ... the heads of the Khazali network, and some of the key members of that network that have been in detention now for a month or more," Petraeus said.

"We think that records are kept so that the individuals that carry out these attacks can demonstrate what they're doing to those who are providing the resources to them, providing the additional funding, training, arms, ammunition, advanced technologies and so forth," Petraeus said.

However, Petraeus said there was no evidence of a direct link between Iran and the Karbala operation. "I can't say it wasn't there either, but we did not find, if you will, a direct fingerprint to it," he said.

On the bright side, Secretary Rice, the Sunnis and Shi'ites overcame their differences for a moment there. By Eli Lake for the New York Sun:

BAGHDAD — The commander of the foreign operations wing of Iran's Revolutionary Guard met with Sunni Kurdish jihadist leaders in April 2005 to encourage them to launch attacks in Iraq.

News of the meeting was disclosed Tuesday in an interview with Osman Ali Mustapha, a former Kurdish police officer who was recruited by Iranian intelligence in 2004 to spy on American bases and eventually help facilitate the assassination of a Kurdish police chief in Halabja.

The meeting between the Iranian general, Qassem Suleimani, and the leaders of Kurdish Sunni jihadist groups was confirmed by two Kurdish counterterrorism officials and by an American intelligence officer contacted after the interview.

Mr. Mustapha, whose story appeared in The New York Sun on Thursday, said the commander of the Quds Force, General Suleimani, "spoke on behalf of Ali Khamenei," Iran's supreme leader, at a summit in the Iranian city of Kermanshah. Mr. Mustapha continued, "He said, ‘Ali Khamenei told us that any group of Islamists, Tawhid and Jihad, Ansar al Sunna, any group can go across the border to Iraq." (Tawhid and Jihad is the original organization founded by the late Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.)

The account of Mr. Mustapha would settle the question of whether the commander of Iran's Quds Force was acting on his own. Yesterday in Washington, General Petraeus, the commander of multinational forces in Iraq, would not answer questions from journalists as to whether the support from the Quds Force for terrorism in Iraq was the official policy of the regime.

"With respect to how high does it go and, you know, what do they know and when did they know it, I honestly cannot — that is such a sensitive issue," he said.

The general continued, "At least I do not know of anything that specifically identifies how high it goes beyond the level of the Quds Force, Commander Suleimani. Beyond that, it is very difficult to tell — we know where he is in the overall chain of command; he certainly reports to the very top — but again, nothing that would absolutely indicate, again, how high the knowledge of this actually goes."

[...]

He also said that coalition forces had received a 22-page memorandum on a computer that disclosed the details of a terror operation in Karbala that killed five American soldiers in January. He said the memo was an accounting of the operation to Iranian backers.

The Iranian role in Iraq is still hotly debated in Washington. As the New York Sun reported in a series of stories in January, the CIA and State Department have said the Iranian hand is less prevalent in Iraqi terrorism than the military commanders overseeing the war here.

Conflicting reports of the situation in Mogadishu. "Premier claims Somali 'victory'," from the BBC:

Ali Mohamed Ghedi said the worst of the fighting against Islamists and clan gunmen was now over.

Columns of tanks were deployed and reinforcements sent to Mogadishu from other parts of Somalia.

Earlier, a BBC correspondent in the city said the battles were the heaviest in recent days, spreading to new areas.

United Nations humanitarian relief co-ordinator John Holmes has described the situation in Somalia as critical.

He said up to 400,000 people had fled Mogadishu but aid was reaching just 60,000. A doctor who runs one of Mogadishu's hospitals estimates that two-thirds of the city's one million residents had left.

Some 300 people have been killed in the recent clashes, after 1,000 deaths last month, local human rights group say.

Mogadishu residents say government forces have taken control of some northern suburbs from the insurgents.

"We hope to completely conclude the war tomorrow, and government forces will secure the capital," Mr Ghedi said.

But some correspondents in Mogadishu have questioned Mr Ghedi's assessment - they say there are still reports of heavy fighting, and artillery and machine-gun fire can be heard across the city.

'Hijacked'

Somali Education Minister Ismail Mohamoud Hurre said the deaths and violence were a price worth paying to return normality to the country, which has not had a functioning national government for 16 years.

"The Ethiopian forces are doing very well, stopping the Jihadist elements from causing instability," he told the BBC's Network Africa programme.

"We have to bite the bullet."

But a UK think-tank has strongly criticised last December's operation to oust an Islamist group which had taken control of Mogadishu and much of southern Somalia.

"Genuine multilateral concern to support the reconstruction and rehabilitation of Somalia has been hijacked by unilateral actions of other international actors - especially Ethiopia and the United States - following their own foreign policy agendas," said the Chatham House report.

In an exceptional display of bias, the Chatham House report gets the last word in the article, without an opposing point of view. From the Ethiopian standpoint, for example, self-preservation is certainly a worthy "foreign policy agenda."

"Whatever the short-term future holds, the complex social forces behind the rise of the Islamic Courts will not go away," the authors said.

They're right about that much, though they clearly don't understand the war in Somalia as a facet of the global jihad, or how deeply rooted the Islamic Courts' policies were in Islamic teaching and texts. Simply put, the "complex social forces" are more complex than they appear to grasp.

"Bias against Islam has increased since September 11, 2001 and a series of terrorist acts in Europe." No way, really? From AFP:

BAKU: The head of the 57-nation Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC) accused the West of anti-Muslim bias on Thursday and warned journalists against automatically linking Islam with terrorism. "Bias against Islam has increased since September 11, 2001 and a series of terrorist acts in Europe ... What we see now is a monologue, not a dialogue, and that increases divisions," Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu said at the opening of an OIC conference on the media in the Azerbaijani capital, Baku. "The media must dispel the myth that terrorism and Islam are identical concepts," he said, adding that the misrepresentation of Islam "adds fuel to the fire" of Muslim discontent with the West.

Hmm. First, who, in Ihsanoglu's opinion, was behind 9/11? Second, whether or not he believes Muslims were responsible for 9/11 and other attacks, does he mean to justify current and future violence based on the fact that Western media may hurt Muslims' feelings?

And, by the way, it was Ihsanoglu who called the Danish cartoons of Muhammad the "9/11 of the Islamic world." Y'know, talk like that just "adds fuel to the fire" of Western discontent with the OIC. But no effigies will be burned, no bystanders injured.

While the U.S. rushes to fund Abbas the moderate.

By Aaron Klein for WorldNetDaily.com, with thanks to Davida:

JERUSALEM – Members of Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas' Fatah militias are celebrating a suicide car bombing that killed nine U.S. soldiers in Iraq earlier this week, stating the attack bolsters their belief the U.S. will soon be defeated and retreat from "Muslim lands."

"It was a very happy day for us Palestinians to hear nine American dogs were killed in Iraq. We feel encouraged and we feel great solidarity with our brothers in Iraq, and we consider this heroic operation, which aims to humiliate the Americans, as proof that the will of the our resistance is more powerful than any [big] American war airplanes," Abu Ahmed, the northern Gaza commander of the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades terror group, said in a WND interview today.

The Brigades is the declared military wing of Abbas' U.S.-backed Fatah party, which American policy largely considers moderate.

Some background that helps explain the easy victory won by the Lal Masjid.

From the Daily Times, with thanks to Nicolei:

ISLAMABAD: A newspaper warns that Jews and Christians are engaged in “genocide” against Muslims. A website says children should love guns instead of cricket. A video shows a child beheading a militant accused of betraying his comrades.

Despite government promises to crack down, hate-filled jihadist propaganda is thriving in Pakistan, especially in print and on the Internet. Critics say it is contributing to the demonisation of the West and the “Talibanisation” of Pakistan.

Some of the most vitriolic material is produced by affiliates of supposedly banned groups.

“I feel it has increased and the tone has become more hostile,” said Mohammad Shahzad, who runs a media monitoring service in Pakistan for clients including think tanks and embassies. “The level of extremism and fanaticism has gone up.”

Shahzad said there are no statistics on the output of extremist groups. However, examples are plentiful.

Tayyabat, a magazine for women published by Jamaatud Dawa says Pakistan’s support of the US war on terror amounts to surrendering to an America bent on eliminating Muslims.

“A white flag will not put out the fire from the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon. They are thirsty for the Muslim’s blood,” an article in February said.

A government ban against the al-Rashid trust, an Islamic charity proscribed in February for alleged links with terrorist groups, has failed to stop the associated Daily Islam newspaper from publishing in Karachi. Its content is not overtly militant, but often inflammatory.

“Jews, Christians and their allies are engaged in genocide of Muslims but Islam is spreading and its enemies are losing their nerve,” a recent article said.

Yes, most of those against whom the jihadists are arrayed have indeed lost their nerve, if they had any nerve in the first place.

"The veil has long been part of local culture and nobody is allowed to make fun of these values." Sharia Alert. From AFP:

ISLAMABAD (AFP) - Pakistani authorities have banned a stage play for ridiculing the burqa, the veil traditionally worn by Muslim women, a minister said after Islamist MPs raised the issue in parliament Thursday.

"The veil has long been part of local culture and nobody is allowed to make fun of these values," Minister for Culture Ghazi Gulab Jamal said.

The satirical play Burqa Vaganza was staged this month by Ajoka Theatre at the Arts Council in the eastern city of Lahore, known as the country's cultural capital.

Islamist women lawmakers raised the issue in the lower house, saying that the play was against the "Koranic injunctions on the veil."

The minister told the house that the government had banned the play and "stopped (its) staging it in other cities," following the end of its run in Lahore.

"We do not like that someone should ridicule our cultural values. Burqa is very much part of our culture," Jamal said.

The theatre's owner, Madiha Gohar, condemned the ban, saying that giving in to the Islamists' demands "negates the government's policy of enlightened moderation."

"We are trying to end the evils from the society, we are against forcing women to wear burqa. I condemn the ban," she said.

Gohar said the theme of the play reflected the aggressive behaviour of the burqa-clad female students of Jamia Hafsa school in Islamabad's Red Mosque.

This report from Reuters adds:

Predictably, religious conservative Pakistanis did not find it funny, going as far as to describe the play as blasphemous, a crime in Pakistan that can carry a death sentence.

"They have committed blasphemy against the Prophet (Mohammad)," Razia Aziz, a female lawmaker from the Islamist opposition alliance, told the National Assembly.

She demanded the government take action against people responsible for staging "Burqavaganza".

Alderman Lodewijk Asscher is right. And if nothing is done, assuredly the pressure won't stop with lessons about pigs. "School Scraps Nature Course As Pigs Enrage Muslim Pupils," from NIS News, with thanks to Fjordman:

AMSTERDAM, 27/04/07 - A school in Amsterdam has halted lessons on rural life because the Islamic children refused to talk about pigs. Reporting this, Alderman Lodewijk Asscher said he wants to take "tough measures." Subsidies for all kinds of dubious groups must stop and parents of unruly children penalised financially.

Asscher told newspaper De Volkskrant: "A primary school in Amsterdam-Noord has decided no longer to teach about living on a farm. Various pupils began to demolish the classroom when the pig came up for discussion. Apparently it has gone that far. These children, 9, 10 years old, have not been given even the most elementary rules at home about why they must go to school."

Obliterating Pakistan's Buddhist heritage.

By Joachim Hoelzgen for Spiegel Online, with thanks to Fjordman:

Some 35,000 petroglyphs located in Pakistan's Indus River area will soon be flooded by a giant dam. An archeologist from Heidelberg is trying to save as much as he can before encroaching modernity destroys the remote area's cultural history.

At first sight, it's difficult to tell whether the work going on near Nanga Parbat mountain (8,126 meters, 26,660 feet) has more to do with preserving the world or heralding its demise.

Down by the Indus River, near a farmers' settlement called Basha, workers have built landing sites for helicopters. They have set up a cargo cablecar above the stream and technicians on the northern banks are drilling holes into the rock in order to search out hollow spaces in the depths. This being an earthquake zone, seismic analyses are also being conducted.

Here, in an oppressively narrow and steep canyon, construction of a gigantic dam is planned -- as high as a skyscraper and kept in place by its sheer weight. The future power plant's turbines are to yield 4,400 megawatts of electricity -- the capacity of four nuclear power plants. Behind the retaining wall, a reservoir will flood 32 villages and force as many as 40,000 people to undergo evacuation in the name of progress.

But the reservoir will also bury beneath itself the witnesses of entire civilizations and ancient cultures along the Indus -- mainly stony messages and images from Buddhist times, whose loss is fully comparable to that of the famous Buddhas of Bamyan, which were demolished with explosives by the Taliban in March 2001.

Once a Muslim, always a Muslim. "Egypt: Converted-back Copts stay Muslim," From AKI, with thanks to Fjordman:

Cairo, 26 April (AKI) - The ten Egyptian Coptic Christians, who after having converted to Islam decided to return to their original faith, will remain Muslims at least on paper for the rest of their lives. A Cairo court has ruled that the ministry of the interior is not obliged to issue them new identity documents. The question of religious belief in Egypt often presents itself as an adminsitrative rather than a spiritual issue given that every Egyptian has an ID card which states his or her religion.

It is precisely for this reason that the ten Copt converts, after having rejected Islam and returned to Christianity, with a public ceremony, asked the ministry for new ID documents. But the ministry refused, on the grounds that according to Sharia law it was impossible to renounce the Islamic faith.

The law based on the Koran in fact forbids the faithful from passing from one religious creed to another and anyone who pronounces the "Shahada" or declaration of faith will be considered a Muslim forever.

The sentence handed down late Wednesday by a Cairo court explained that "the tribunal cannot uphold the request of the citizens" who were calling on the judiciary to force the government to issue new documents as "neither this nor other tribunals are able to see into the depths of the heart of a man, where only God can arrive."

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

Dadullah said bin Laden ordered the attack on February 27 at the U.S. Bagram base during a visit by U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney to Afghanistan.

"Do you remember the martyrdom operation inside the Bagram base which targeted a senior American official . . . this operation was the result of blessed plans put by him," Dadullah said. Jazeera said the U.S. official Dadullah was referring to was Cheney.

"He (bin Laden) guided us through it," he said, adding that no Afghan would have been able to penetrate the base if it was not for the world's most wanted militant.

About 14 people were killed, including one American and one South Korean soldier in the suicide bombing which militants said targeted Cheney. A U.S. official then said Cheney was about half a mile away on the base and was not in danger.

Jamie Glazov interviews the great Bat Ye'or at FrontPage (thanks to all who sent this in):

There is a weighty, almost iron collaboration at all institutional level between Europe and the Arab League countries. European anti-Americanism and anti-Zionism are built within this Arab and Muslim political nexus. Unless America accepts to enter into the same parallel disintegrative process of surrender and moral support to jihadist ideology that is rotting Europe, Europe hostility will not pass; on the contrary, it will increase. Europe now is chained to the Arab-Muslim world and cannot disengage or change direction. Blair tried to do it and failed miserably. In fact, after ten years at the head of government, he bears the main responsibility for this hapless situation.

Read it all.

I am late with this -- the story dates from April 14 -- but I missed it at that time, and it should not be missed. Did Britain's National Union of Journalists ever denounce anyone for the murder of Daniel Pearl? Was the identity of the perpetrators too nebulous? Was it too difficult to allow the word "jihad" to pass through their lips?

By George Conger for the Jerusalem Post, with thanks to John:

Britain's National Union of Journalists denounced Israel on Friday for its "military adventures" in Gaza and Lebanon, called on the government to impose sanctions and urged a boycott of Israeli goods.

By a vote of 66 to 54, the annual delegate's meeting of Britain's largest trade union for journalists called for "a boycott of Israeli goods similar to those boycotts in the struggles against apartheid South Africa led by trade unions, and [for] the [Trades Union Congress] to demand sanctions be imposed on Israel by the British government."

Some of the union's 40,000 members decried its "trendy lefty" agenda. Other motions before the four-day meeting in Birmingham, which ends Sunday, included condemnations of the US detention center in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and support for Venezuelan strongman Hugo Chavez.

Norway defies the West in its refusal to recognize the Hamas-led government in the Palestinian Authority, and wins praise from Condoleeza Rice.

"Norway defends its Palestinian ties to US's Rice," from Reuters, with thanks to the American Israeli Patriot:

OSLO (Reuters) - Norway told visiting U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice on Thursday that its recognition of the Palestinian unity government was designed to help diplomacy in the Middle East.

Last month Norway became the first Western state to recognize the Islamist Hamas-led Palestinian government -- prompting U.S. and Israeli criticism -- and said it would restore direct budget aid to it as soon as international banking sanctions were relaxed.

The United States and Israel say the Palestinian government must first recognize Israel's right to exist, renounce violence and adhere to the principles set by the Quartet of peace mediators -- the United States, European Union, United Nations and Russia.

"Norway has normalized relations with the government, which means that we talk to them," Norwegian Foreign Minister Jonas Gahr Stoere told a news conference with Rice.

"Norway will not be issuing carte blanche in any direction. We will be trying to pursue policies which draw in the right direction and which can also open (the way) for negotiations, and we also place very clear expectations on Israel."

No mention of any clear expectations on the Palestinians.

"The Quartet's principles are Norway's principles," Stoere said and added that Israel also had obligations to fulfil under previous agreements, which he said the Quartet also recognized.

He said Norway, which has said it expects its total aid to the Palestinian territory this year to reach about $100 million including direct budget support and other aid, had not been able to resume payments yet but hoped to do so soon.

Rice, on a 24-hour visit to the Norwegian capital during which she will attend a meeting of NATO foreign ministers, refrained from criticizing Norway and praised Stoere's efforts.

"We are in agreement that a Palestinian government that fully recognizes the Quartet principles would be a very good step forward, and I know the minister has worked very hard in the contacts that he has had to try to push forward towards that goal," she said.

You've broken ranks and defied us, but that's okay. We know you're working hard to try to push forward towards the goal.

Eurabia Alert from the Jerusalem Post, with thanks to Fjordman:

A 22-year-old Jewish woman suffered a vicious anti-Semitic attack by two men of Middle Eastern appearance in a train station in Marseille, France on Thursday night.

The attackers tore the Star of David chain from around the young woman's neck, lifted her up, painted a swastika on her stomach and then fled the scene.

Local police opened an investigation into the attack but had not yet found the assailants.

Head of the Jewish Agency delegation in France, David Roche, said the incident was the most severe anti-Semitic attack in France since the murder of the young Jewish male Ilan Halimi by a gang of Muslim youths in February 2006.

It is unfortunate, but not surprising, that no one quoted in this Reuters story explains why beheading is un-Islamic, or tells us how he would respond to a Muslim who justified beheading on the basis of Qur'an 47:4: "Therefore, when ye meet the Unbelievers (in fight), smite at their necks..." There is no hint of how these anti-beheading Muslims might respond to someone who invoked Muhammad's example, as well as that of numerous Muslim warriors throughout history, to justify beheading.

And that is always the problem. Peaceful Muslims flatly assert that this or that heinous practice -- a practice that other Muslims are justifying in the name of Islam and by means of Islamic texts -- is un-Islamic. Then, if someone like me dares to point out that a flat assertion is hardly likely to convince the jihadists that what they're doing is in fact un-Islamic, the cries of "bigotry" and "Islamophobia" fly thick and fast. I should be "supporting the moderates," you see, instead of "undercutting" them.

But the problem still remains: we're just supposed to take their word for it that these things are un-Islamic, but the mujahedin don't seem disposed to do so.

"Afghans enraged over Taliban video," from Reuters, with thanks to all who sent this in:

SPIN BOLDAK, Afghanistan — A Taliban video of a 12-year-old boy beheading a man accused of spying has angered many Afghans, drawing condemnation from tribal and religious leaders.

"It's very wrong for the Taliban to use a small boy to behead a man," religious teacher Mullah Attullah told Reuters on Thursday. "I appeal to the Taliban to please stop this because non-Muslims will think Islam is a cruel and terrorist religion.

"The Taliban do not follow the laws of Islam."

The video released this week shows the boy in a camouflage jacket and a white headband using a knife to behead a blindfolded man accused of being a spy for foreign forces as men cry "Allahu Akbar! (God is Great)."

The Taliban frequently behead suspected spies and often release video footage of the act.

A tribal leader in the south, the Taliban's heartland, said the beheading was un-Islamic.

"The Taliban are doing very bad things and it is against Islam to behead a man by a very young boy," Haji Saeed Jan told Reuters.

"Islam does not allow anyone to behead any man. The Taliban show the wrong image of Islam to the world. We condemn this."

David Horowitz, of whose Freedom Center Jihad Watch is a part, has alerted me to an ad in the Emory University campus newspaper, the Emory Wheel. While their statement makes serious -- one might say defamatory -- charges claiming that our ad “aims to intimidate, threaten, or reductively portray a religious group with the intent to antagonize or demean its members,” it fails to explain how our ad does this, or in what way it is inaccurate. This kind of undocumented smear constitutes a kind of hate speech itself.

Our ad notes that “the goal of jihad is world domination,” that “jihad demands the suppression of all infidels,” that its battle cry is “death to America,” and that it is a war against Christians, Jews, women and gays. Does the Emory Religious Life Staff deny that all around the globe there are movements – united under the banner of “jihad” – devoted to exactly these goals? We are well aware that there are within Islam other understandings of jihad, but that does not negate the fact that those who are pursuing the agenda we outlined call what they are doing “jihad.” It is demeaning, not empowering, to peaceful Muslims to deny or minimize this fact, for denying it robs them of an opportunity to work for reform within their own community, refuting the understanding of jihad put forward by bin Laden, Nasrallah, and their ilk. One cannot address a problem while simultaneously denying the existence of that problem.

Like the letters that appeared in the Emory Wheel after the publication of our ad, the Religious Life Staff ad contents itself with impugning our motives, without offering even one specific rebuttal of anything our ad asserts. Likewise, a Muslim writer who claimed to find my letter to the Wheel "full of glaring errors" was unable, in several windy posts, to come up with even one -- and showed himself to be utterly dishonest in framing his alleged refutation.

If anyone in the Emory community is willing to discuss the specifics of the problem of jihad terrorism and what can be done about it in a mutually respectful manner, dealing in substance rather than in disingenuousness and defamation, I would be happy to do so.

"I met Danny the week he converted, about seven years ago," said Uguz, identified by worshipers at the mosque yesterday as Maldonado's best friend. "He was cool. He dressed in T-shirts and jeans and didn't hide any of his tattoos. His hair was in dreadlocks. He was eager, and he had a lot of questions."

.............

Maldonado, who grew up in Pelham, N.H., and later lived in Methuen, became immersed in Islam and attended prayer sessions regularly at Selimiye Mosque. He began wearing traditional Arab clothing, including the galabeyah, an ankle-length gown with long sleeves that covered the tattoos on his arms. He struggled to grow the beard of a religious Muslim. When he could not, he blamed his Puerto Rican heritage and began chastising fellow Muslims who could grow a full beard and chose not to." -- from this article

Islam is so many wonderful things for a convert such as Danny Maldonado.

For the anomie-ridden empty-headed Spiritual Searcher, it offers the One-Stop Solution to the riddle of the universe. It offers, after all, a Complete Regulation of Daily Life. No thought required. Allah Ta'ala Knows Best. Yours is not to reason why: just ask Mr. Fatwa. Ask and ye shall be given the answer as to what you are commanded to do, and what you are prohibited from doing. And when you know what is halal, and what haram, you simply follow those rules, slavishly.

A Muslim poster at Jihad Watch recently gave us all this invitation: "Open your eyes and ask God to open your heart to the truth. Don't speak when you have no knowledge of what goes on in Muslim communities in America."

"No knowledge of what goes on in Muslim communities"?

Infidels can attend those absurd Open Houses, or Outreach Nights at the Mosque, or those Muslim-Christian and Muslim-Jewish "Dialogues." (Why are there no Muslim-Hindu Dialogues, some may wonder, but they needn't -- too many Hindus have had too much immediate experience with Muslims, know too much about Islam).

1938 Alert from the Jerusalem Post, with thanks to the American Israeli Patriot:

Iran's deputy interior minister, Muhammad Baqer Zolqadr, said Thursday that his country would attack Israel and American targets throughout the world if Teheran were attacked over its nuclear program, Israel Radio reported.

According to the official Iranian news agency, the official, who deals with defense issues, said that no American would be safe from Iran's long-range missiles.

"We are prepared to fire tens of thousands of these missiles every day," he said.

He added that the Shahab 3 missiles, which have a range of some 2,000 kilometers, could hit Israel, as well US Army bases in the Persian Gulf.

Meanwhile, Iran's top nuclear negotiator, Ali Larijani, expressed a more positive view of the situation, saying Thursday morning that Wednesday's talks with EU Foreign Police Chief Javier Solana had brought them closer to "a united view" of how to break a deadlock over Teheran's defiance of a UN Security Council demand to freeze uranium enrichment.

Larijani added that Iran was "aiming to reach out for a common paradigm."

Yes, and here it is: the West surrenders to all Iran's demands, and Iran has a free hand to pursue its genocidal goals. And everyone is happy. There's the common paradigm they're seeking.

"You must understand that Pakistan and Islam are synonymous." Misunderstanders of Islam growing ever more assertive and confident in Pakistan; where is the vast majority of moderates to explain to them that they are getting their religion all wrong? We saw the anti-Sharia demonstrators recently, but they were unable to stop the government's capitulation to the hardliners. Apparently the Musharraf regime knows which group is the Tiny Minority of Extremists, and which is the mainstream.

By Ziauddin Sardar for the New Statesman, with thanks to the Constantinopolitan Irredentist:

Pakistan is reverberating with the call of jihad. Taliban-style militias are spreading rapidly out from provinces in the far north-west. The danger to the country and to the rest of the world is escalating

"You must understand," says Maulana Sami ul-Haq, "that Pakistan and Islam are synonymous." The principal of Darul Uloom Haqqania, a seminary in Pakistan's North-West Frontier Province (NWFP), is a tall and jovial man. He grabs my hand as he takes me round the seminary. Maulana ul-Haq laughs when I ask his views on jihad. "It is the duty of all Muslims to support those groups fighting against oppression," he says.

The Haqqania is one of the largest madrasas in Pakistan. It produces about 3,000 graduates, most from exceptionally poor backgrounds, every year. The walls of the student dormitory are decorated with tanks and Kalashnikovs. A group of students, all with black beards, white turbans and grey dresses, surrounds me. They are curious and extremely polite. We chat under the watchful eye of two officers from Pakistan's intelligence services. What would they do after they graduate, I ask. "Serve Islam," they reply in unison. "We will dedicate our lives to jihad."

Pakistan is reverberating with the call of jihad. For more than two months, the capital, Islamabad, has been held hostage by a group of burqa-clad women, armed with sticks and shouting: "Al-jihad, al-jihad." These female students belong to two madrasas attached to the Lal Masjid, a large mosque near one of the city's main supermarkets. I found the atmosphere around the masjid tense, with heavily armed police surrounding the building. Though the students were allowed to go in and out freely, no one else could enter the mosque. The women are demanding the imposition of sharia law and the instant abolition of all "dens of vice". Away from the masjid, Islamabad looked like a city under siege.

A new generation of militants is emerging in Pakistan. Although they are generally referred to as "Taliban", they are a recent phenomenon. The original Taliban, who ruled Afghanistan briefly during the 1990s, were Afghan fighters, a product of the Soviet invasion of their country. They were created and moulded by the Pakistani army, with the active support of the United States and Saudi money, and the deliberate use of madrasas to prop up religious leaders. Many Taliban leaders were educated at Haqqania by Maulana Sami ul-Haq. The new generation of militants are all Pakistani; they emerged after the US invasion of Afghanistan and represent a revolt against the government's support for the US. Mostly unemployed, not all of them are madrasa-educated. They are led by young mullahs who, unlike the original Taliban, are technology- and media-savvy, and are also influenced by various indigenous tribal nationalisms, honouring the tribal codes that govern social life in Pakistan's rural areas. "They are Taliban in the sense that they share the same ideology as the Taliban in Afghanistan," says Rahimullah Yusufzai, Peshawar-based columnist on the News. "But they are totally Pakistani, with a better understanding of how the world works." Their jihad is aimed not just at "infidels occupying Afghanistan", but also the "infidels" who are ruling and running Pakistan and maintaining the secular values of Pakistani society. "They aim at nothing less than to cleanse Pakistan and turn it into a pure Islamic state," says Rashed Rahman, executive editor of the Lahore-based Post newspaper.

Read it all.

More on this story. "Florida doctor accused of being al-Qaeda volunteer," by Edith Honan for Reuters:

NEW YORK (Reuters) - A Florida doctor accused of swearing allegiance to al Qaeda and agreeing to treat wounded militants has been unfairly ensnared in the scheme of a longtime friend, a defense lawyer argued on Wednesday.

Rafiq Abdus Sabir, 52, was arrested in May 2005 and later charged in a four-person conspiracy to provide material support to al Qaeda and another group listed as a foreign terrorist organization by the U.S. State Department.

His trial began with opening arguments in U.S. District Court in Manhattan on Wednesday.

Sabir and his longtime friend Tarik Shah, a New York jazz musician, offered themselves as a "package," with Sabir providing skills as a doctor and Shah agreeing to train would-be warriors in hand-to-hand combat, Assistant U.S. Attorney Jennifer Rodgers told jurors.

"With these unique skills, Sabir and Shah knew that they could help al Qaeda," Rodgers said.

But Edward Wilford, Sabir's defense attorney, said Sabir was "just a tool" in Shah's scheme.

"This is about Shah, Shah, Shah," he said.

Earlier this month, Shah and another defendant in the case, Maryland cab driver Mahmud Faruq Brent, pleaded guilty to charges connected to the conspiracy.

A fourth defendant, Brooklyn bookstore owner Abdulrahman Farhane, was sentenced to 13 years in prison.

At the center of the case against Sabir is a May 20, 2005, meeting at Shah's Bronx apartment, where Shah and Sabir took part in a ceremony swearing allegiance to al Qaeda in the presence of an FBI agent posing as an al Qaeda recruiter.

In the year and a half leading up to that meeting, Shah had been caught in hours of tape-recorded conversations, confiding he wanted to open a martial arts studio for "jihad training" and that he dreamed of being a "martyr on the battlefield," Rodgers said.

Those conversations were conducted with Mohamed Alanssi, a paid Yemeni FBI informant who defense attorneys have said is unreliable because, in 2004, he attempted suicide by setting himself on fire in front of the White House.

At the May 20 meeting, Sabir's first meeting in the alleged scheme, Shah and Sabir swore to obey "Sheikh Osama," who prosecutors said is Osama bin Laden.

"I'm ready. I've been preparing for a long time. My spirit is ready," Sabir said at the time, according to Rodgers.

Wilford portrayed the meeting as a legitimate step in Sabir's spiritual development that had nothing to do with al Qaeda. "There is no instance on those tapes where Sabir says, 'Oh yes, I want to treat wounded jihadists.' That's just spin," he said.

Wilford said Sabir, who could face 30 years in prison, has agreed to testify.

From Reuters:

MOMBASA, Kenya (Reuters) -- Kenyan police arrested 11 people on Wednesday including an Islamic preacher and a 15-year-old boy on suspicion of links to al Qaeda.

Dozens of officers launched pre-dawn raids on an Islamic school and three other locations in the coastal city of Mombasa.

"The raid is intended to arrest suspects in connection with terrorism activities and the al Qaeda network," said one senior police commander who asked not to be named.

The suspects are being held at two Mombasa police stations.

Al Qaeda claimed responsibility for the 1998 bombing of the U.S. Embassy in Kenya and for a hotel bombing four years later.

Security experts say the country is at risk from more attacks because of its proximity to neighboring lawless Somalia, and the ease with which its borders can be crossed by extremists taking advantage of their remoteness or easily bribed officials.

Kenya's Muslims, who live mostly on the coast and make up about 10 percent of the mainly Christian country's 35 million people, say they are unfairly targeted by the security services.

Residents caught up in Wednesday's swoops said they were forced from their beds and made to lie in torrential rain for more than an hour while officers searched inside.

Local Islamic leaders also condemned the raids, linking them to an ongoing U.S. visit by Kenya's internal security minister.

"We are always being used as bait especially when the government is expecting aid," said Sheikh Mohammed Dor, secretary general of the Council of Imams and Preachers of Kenya. "They are trying to please the United States at the expense of Muslims."

How about taking a serious look at the level of support for al-Qaeda within your community, Sheikh Dor? Or do you care?

Eurabia Alert, and an update on this story. By James Blitz and Gilian Tett the Financial Times:

Britain is to become the first western government to issue shariah-compliant bonds as it seeks to turn London into the world centre of Islamic finance and build bridges to the Muslim community.

The Treasury will announce today that it is paving the way for the launch of the first bonds no later than next year - and perhaps within the current financial year.

The move, to be unveiled by Ed Balls, the City minister, is unprecedented. Shariah-compliant bonds have previously been issued by the governments of Pakistan and Malaysia and also by corporate issuers around the world but never by a western nation.

The UK would aim not only to issue the new bonds on wholesale financial markets but also to use them as vehicles to allow Muslims in Britain to invest in National Savings products through banks and post offices.

Mr Balls believes that the launch of Islamic bonds by the government will help to underpin London's role as an international financial centre. The Treasury estimates that total Islamic finance assets worldwide, including private equity and bonds exceed $250bn (£124.7bn).

But Mr Balls also believes that today's move will send a powerful message to the Muslim community both in Britain and around the world that the UK authorities are intent on engaging with them in innovative ways.

Mr Balls held a meeting with leading Muslim figures in the UK, including the Muslim Council of Great Britain, last Monday.

He came away convinced of the strength of support for government action in this area.

A senior Treasury figure said last night: "We hope Muslim leaders will be impressed that we are now moving towards doing the technical work on this bond issue so quickly."

The Treasury has not yet worked out what the underlying structure of UK-issued Islamic bonds will be. However, Mr Balls is confident that the technical details can be worked out by the Debt Management Office and Treasury officials.

Issuing sukuk, or Islamic bonds that make regular payments to investors, is usually slightly more expensive than raising funds with western-style bonds, because these instruments require extensive, costly legal and religious advice. Moreover, the market is so young that activity is more fragmented and opaque than in other sectors of finance.

London is far ahead of rival western financial centres, such as New York, Tokyo or Frankfurt, in terms of its success in attracting Islamic financial business.

However, it faces growing competition from centres in the Islamic world, such as Riyadh, Bahrain, Dubai or Kuala Lumpur.

In an attempt to maintain an edge, the government has already taken a number of measures designed to promote the UK as a hospitable environment for Islamic finance.

They include measures that allow sukuk to be issued, held and traded in the same way as corporate bonds. The move is expected to increase primary issuance in the UK. There is also an increasingly lively secondary sukuk market.

An update on this story. "Four UK men plead guilty on terror-related charge," from Reuters:

LONDON (Reuters) - Four British men pleaded guilty on Wednesday to charges of conspiring to cause explosions in a case linked to that of a Briton jailed last year for plotting to blow up the New York Stock Exchange.

The men -- Junade Feroze, 31, Mohammed Zia ul-Haq, 28, Abdul Aziz Jalil, 34, and Omar Abdul Rehman, 23 -- pleaded guilty to conspiring with Dhiren Barot between February 2001 and August 2004 to cause an explosion or explosions, the court said.

Barot, 34, was sentenced last year to 40 years in prison for the stock exchange plot and his plans for other attacks in Britain involving gas-filled limousines and a "dirty bomb".

Another suspect in the ongoing trial, Mohammed Naveed Bhatti, 27, pleaded guilty last week, while a sixth has pleaded not guilty. A seventh suspect has not yet been indicted.

Those who have pleaded guilty are due to be sentenced once the trail against the outstanding suspects is completed, an official from Britain's Crown Prosecution Service said.

Barot, a Muslim convert, was convicted of plotting to blow up the headquarters of New York Stock Exchange as well as Citigroup, the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and Prudential in New York, Washington and Newark, New Jersey.

The judge who sentenced Barot said that, but for the September 11 attacks, he had little doubt that one or more of Barot's plans, presented to al Qaeda's leaders for approval, would have become a reality.

Lal Masjid Update."Govt accepts Lal Masjid demands: All issues settled: Shujaat," by Syed Irfan Raza for Dawn:

ISLAMABAD, April 24: The government has agreed to accept all demands put forward by the Lal Masjid management, including the enforcement of Sharia in the country.

The second round of talks started on Tuesday night when Pakistan Muslim League president Chaudhry Shujaat Hussain paid a surprise visit to Lal Masjid and met its in-charge Maulana Abdul Aziz and deputy in-charge Maulana Abdul Rashid Ghazi.

The PML chief assured the mosque administration and girl students of Jamia Hasfa that the government was ready to accept all their demands, including the enforcement of Sharia.

Talking to journalists after the meeting, Chaudhry Shujaat said all contentious issues between the government and Lal Masjid clerics had been settled, adding that he would tell details of the talks before the parliament on Wednesday.

Responding to a question about the situation inside the mosque, the Pakistan Muslim League president denied the presence of activists of banned outfits and illegal arms in the mosque.

President Gen Musharraf had said many times in the recent past that the mosque administration had provided shelter to suicide bombers.

Two security officials, who were made hostage by the students of Jamia Hasfa last month, had also told the media that they had seen a bulk of arms and ammunitions in the mosque.

About enforcement of Shariat, the PML chief said: “No Muslim rejects the enforcement of the Islamic system in the country.”

[...]

Later, Chaudhry Shujaat took a round of Jamia Hafsa and said that female students were studying in a good atmosphere.

The first round of talks was suspended after a military helicopter had continued hovering over the mosque for 20 minutes last week.

The mosque administration condemned what it called aerial surveillance of the mosque and spraying of some gases.

Earlier, according to this report from ANI, Aziz had threatened the Musharraf regime with jihad:

Maulana Abdul Aziz, the chief cleric of the controversial Lal Masjid, has reportedly said that Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf's regime was "un-Islamic", and that it was obligatory for every Muslim to wage jihad against it for rule of law and speedy dispensation of justice.

He also said that Musharraf regime had failed to give the desired results.

"The government is un-Islamic and the present system and political hierarchy have failed to deliver," the Daily Times quoted Aziz as saying in an interview.

He added: "We have no intention to wage a war against the government leading to a bloodbath. However, if it launches a crackdown on Jamia Hafsa or Lal Masjid, of course our movement would automatically turn into a militant movement."

The cleric also criticised democracy, saying it was a flawed system. "Democracy is nothing, but counting of heads. It cannot differentiate between good and bad people, as in this system the vote of a devout Muslim equals the vote of a frail Muslim," he said.

But suicide attacks are always wrong (at least in Pakistan), except when they aren't:

On the recent spate in suicide attacks in Pakistan, he said: "Suicide attacks in Pakistan are un-Islamic, but if the government took action against Jamia Hafsa, we would allow our followers to launch suicide attacks against it to save the honour of our female students."

There is much discussion in the article about how difficult the situation is, but almost nothing about what they intend to do in order to manage and reduce the threat. "Islamist militants may strike in Britain again," by Adrian Croft for Reuters:

LONDON (Reuters) - London police's anti-terrorist chief said on Tuesday it was a "sensible assumption" that Islamist militants will strike again in Britain.

Reviewing British counter-terrorism efforts since the September 11 attacks on U.S. cities, Peter Clarke said the strategic threat from Islamist militants was "enduring and to a significant extent targeted at the United Kingdom."

"Within the country we have people who are sympathetic to the terrorist cause and prepared to carry out attacks against their fellow citizens," he said in a lecture.

The police and security service had stopped a number of attacks in Britain and more than 100 people were awaiting trial on terrorist-related charges, he said.

"Nevertheless, we suffered the appalling attacks of July 2005 and the only sensible assumption is that we shall be attacked again," he said.

[...]

"The extremists have a momentum that must be stopped," he added.

In the 2005 London attacks and in other cases, police had spotted a trend for groups of British citizens to travel to Pakistan for training and then returning to Britain and building up their networks in preparation for launching attacks, he said.

This has become known as the "Al-Qaeda Pipeline."

Clarke said the threat from al Qaeda was very different from the threat Britain faced for 30 years from Irish Republican Army (IRA) guerrillas opposed to British rule in Northern Ireland.

The al Qaeda networks are large, mobile and resilient, he said.

"We have seen how al Qaeda has been able to survive a prolonged, multinational assault on its structures, personnel and logistics. It has certainly retained its ability to deliver centrally directed attacks here in the UK," he said.

"Arrested leaders or key players are quickly replaced, and disrupted networks will re-form quickly. Suicide has been a frequent feature of attack planning and delivery," he said.

An update on this story. "Exile for Teheran women who flout dress code," from Reuters:

TEHERAN - Women in Teheran who repeatedly flout the Islamic dress code in defiance of a police crackdown may be banned from the Iranian capital for up to five years, Teheran’s prosecutor said in comments published on Tuesday.

‘Those women who appear in public like decadent models endanger the security and dignity of young men,’ prosecutor Saeed Mortazavi was quoted as saying by the Etemad newspaper.

In what has become a regular occurrence ahead of the warm summer months, police on Saturday launched a campaign against the growing numbers of young women testing the limits of the law with shorter, brighter and skimpier clothing.

Under sharia, Islamic law, imposed after Iran’s 1979 revolution, women are obliged to cover their hair and wear long, loose-fitting clothes to disguise their figures and protect their modesty.

Violators can be given lashes, fines and imprisonment.

‘If primary punishments are not effective, repeat violators may receive up to five years exile from Teheran,’ Mortazavi said.

Since Mahmoud Ahmadinejad won the presidency in 2005, promising a return to the values of the revolution, hardliners have pressed for tighter controls on ‘immoral behaviour’.

A Teheran police spokesman said that since Saturday 3,242 people had received a warning for breaching the dress code in the capital, the semi-official Fars news agency said. The code also covers men who are not allowed to wear shorts.

Police have also stopped foreign tourists, who have to respect the dress code, Iranian media reported.

Iran’s judiciary chief criticised the crackdown.

‘Dragging young men and women to police stations will only have negative social impacts,’ daily Etemad-e Melli quoted Ayatollah Mahmoud Hashemi-Shahroudi as saying.

The story of Daniel Aljughaifi follows a trajectory we have seen in other converts, such as John Walker Lindh and Adam Gadahn.

By Charles A. Radin for the Boston Globe, with thanks to WR:

METHUEN -- Daniel Maldonado, a slender young man in his early 20s with tattoos and dreadlocks, entered the Selimiye Mosque in a densely populated neighborhood of central Methuen with a humble request for help converting to Islam.

But as his commitment to ever purer, more intense religious observance deepened over the next several years, he became critical of other Muslims' observance of the faith, until the imam who helped him convert told him to refrain from judging others or to leave the mosque.

Maldonado, on the road to the Islamic fundamentalism that would ultimately lead him to Somalia, decided to leave.

Soner Uguz knew Maldonado, who has taken the name Daniel Aljughaifi, from the beginning of his journey into Islam.

"I met Danny the week he converted, about seven years ago," said Uguz, identified by worshipers at the mosque yesterday as Maldonado's best friend. "He was cool. He dressed in T-shirts and jeans and didn't hide any of his tattoos. His hair was in dreadlocks. He was eager, and he had a lot of questions."

All that changed radically.

Last week in a federal court in Houston, where he had been living for a while before he went overseas, Maldonado became the first US citizen to be charged with participating in terrorist activities in Somalia.

Maldonado, who grew up in Pelham, N.H., and later lived in Methuen, became immersed in Islam and attended prayer sessions regularly at Selimiye Mosque. He began wearing traditional Arab clothing, including the galabeyah, an ankle-length gown with long sleeves that covered the tattoos on his arms. He struggled to grow the beard of a religious Muslim. When he could not, he blamed his Puerto Rican heritage and began chastising fellow Muslims who could grow a full beard and chose not to.

His wife dressed in a burkah, exposing only her eyes, and wore gloves in public. The couple's daughter, a toddler at the time, wore the hijab headcovering, though under most interpretations of Muslim law this practice is required only after a girl reaches puberty. They renamed their son, Anthony, as Mohammed.

He was no longer the eager and humble young man he had been when he entered the mosque for the first time around 2000.

"He was arrogant; he knew the book [the Koran] better than anyone," Uguz said at the mosque yesterday afternoon after prayers. "He went from loving rap to hating poetry."

Read it all.

Publius Pundit (thanks to Kemaste) has photos of this activity.

A Protestant pastor in AsiaNews (thanks to all who sent this in) calls the "secular" Turkish government on its manifest hypocrisy toward Christians.

The Christian religious tells AsiaNews that the arrest of five young men, in connection with the Malatya massacre, and the cries of condemnation hide the far worse reality of an Islamic country where religious freedom is non existent and false propaganda is spread to target followers of Christ.

Ankara (AsiaNews) – Five young men arrested in connection to yesterday’s murder of three employees of Zirve Christian publishing house in Malatya. Little more than boys, as were the assassins of Don Andrea Santoro and the Christian journalist Hrant Dink, it appears that fanatical religious declarations were found on them. This is where news of the story ends, accompanied by condemnation – mainly of a generic nature – from Turkey’s political leaders.

Speaking to AsiaNews a Protestant Pastor outlines the situation in Turkey, where the “secular” State only counts for Christians, while the mass media all too often make use of, indeed even promote, a campaign of disinformation and defamation. In this case too, the Malata governor Ibrahim Dasoz’s immediate reaction is highly significant; he maintains that it was “not an attack” but rather the result of “internal clashes" within the publishing house, while media reports seek to place responsibility at the door of the deceased whom they accuse of “distributing” Bibles, an activity regarded as proselytism and thus were “enemies of Turkey”. Even the Turkish Minister for Religious Affairs, Mehmet Aydin, recently declared that those who practise proselytism “divide the nation”. This is the testimony of a Pastor who for obvious reasons will remain anonymous.

“Where are we? I am disgusted by theses atrocities which seem to repeat themselves again and again with ever increasing violence, in a country which promotes itself as a secular and democratic majority Muslim nation. But where is the respect for differences, for the religious and ethnic minorities present on the territory? We were almost used to the continual background slander and accusations of proselytism, of giving out money and faith, we were almost used to being ladled as “infidel Muslim grabbers”, who – poor things – allow themselves be brainwashed by us, convinced by a mere handful of dollars hidden in a Bible. But we never could have imagined that all of this would have led to such an atrocious gesture, prepared in the name of God, carried out against Christians”.

[...]

Yesterdays act was a horrific one: three employees were brutally slaughtered, blindfolded them, their hands and feet bound and their throats slit. Yet again it appears to have been carried out by five young fanatical university students, who completely out of their minds carried out this ferocious act for the love of Allah.

Why to they persist in mocking us? Today, Turkey cries out at the shocking scandal, against the nightmare of religious hatred which persists, yet no-one is courageous enough to really take a stand, to condemn not only this religious hatred, but also the mass media which with great subtly and cunning continues to brainwash people with propaganda which incites them to believe that we are evil, that we want to wipe them out, to take away their faith and turn them from their beliefs in the God of Mohammad. Is it not perhaps the opposite? Look at the figures, look at the statistics: they tell us that since the era of Ataturk the construction of places of worship have been banned, and for this we are not authorized to open new churches, only there where there is already a Christian presence (usually foreigners), but the mosques sprout up like mushrooms all over Turkey. They tells us that , once again due to Ataturks’ laws, we cannot run courses of Christian formation, seminars, nor – taking into account what happened yesterday – can we produce didactic materials to educate or inform Christians. Why, I ask, does no-one speak out against courses on the Koran which are held each summer in public schools for children?

They fear conversions, but its nota s if we are a pack of missionaries who go around baptizing all everybody we meet: let us count the numbers of newly converted, let us count the numbers of pastors and religious who live on Turkish soil, then let us count the number of Imams who receive a monthly wage from the State, let us count the number of Christians who go to Islam due to work pressures or marriage, if we do so we see there can be no doubts about the massive imbalance.

If Turkey truly wants to be a free, democratic, secular republic, then it has to stop mocking us. Rather it should seriously commit itself to defending and safeguarding the rights of each citizen, of each person despite their ethnic or religious background. But is their really the will to do so? Who is it that wants to make us hate this land and these people who we came to serve and help, and for whom we are ready to give our own lives? Let us begin to admit in all honesty and transparency who is behind the murders, which for over a year now, have been plaguing the nation of Turkey: after don Andrea Santoro, Hrant Dink, and our three Presbyterian employees, whose turn is it next?

The moderate Khatami, voice of sweet reason, champion of dialogue with the West, Gallant to Ahmadinejad's Goofus, shows another side to his delightfully complex personality.

By Alex Kogan for the Jerusalem Post, with thanks to Andrew Bostom:

Former Iranian president Mohammad Khatami has called for peaceful dialogue with the West, but last week cursed Israeli journalists who approached him at the sixth Eurasion Media Forum in Kazakhstan.

Khatami reiterated that Iran had a right to a peaceful civilian nuclear energy program and that it did not intend to develop nuclear weapons. "We want to use atomic energy for peaceful purposes only," he claimed....

Iran's former president also said that the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) was overseeing Iran's nuclear activity, and pointed out that Iran was a member of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, while "other states in the Middle East" were treated differently....

Nevertheless, despite his calls for "dialogue," Khatami refused to speak to the Israeli reporters present at the talks.

Channel 10 later reported that Khatami, heading for his suite, had cursed them, saying, "Go to hell!"

On Friday, Khatami decided to skip the scheduled panel on Iran's nuclear program because an Israeli representative was slated to speak.

The headline, of course, comes from the occasional LGF tagline. But here is new evidence of its truth. This afternoon, after I arrived in Boise, Idaho, to speak at Boise State University, I had the pleasure of having lunch with two members of the campus chapter of the College Republicans. One was John Sawmiller, president of the chapter, who told me that when Hans Blix spoke at the campus some time ago, he had the unenviable task of driving him around Boise.

So in the course of things, Sawmiller asked Blix how he could advocate negotiations with Iran, given the intransigence of Ahmadinejad.

Ahmadinejad, Blix countered, was in fact a "pragmatist" and a "pluralist." A man who could be reasoned with. George W. Bush, by contrast, said Blix, was a "theologian," driven by a religious fanaticism that was not open to reason.

A very neat inversion of reality, Mr. Blix.

Because I had to make my way out here to Idaho today in the Maxwell, I had to pass up (with immense regret) an invitation to be on the Laura Ingraham show along with Imam Fouad ElBayly of Johnstown, PA, who has said that Ayaan Hirsi Ali should be killed.

Now Bryan Preston of Hot Air reports that ElBayly didn't appear on the show either. He backed out at the last minute.

I'm sorry to hear that. I'd be happy to discuss matters with him anywhere, whenever my schedule permits. And so would our friend D. C. Watson, who sends in this invitation of his own to the illustrious imam:

After reading the comments made by the Islamic Center of Johnstown’s very own Fouad ElBayly regarding Ayaan Hirsi Ali, I took some time, and attempted to reach him by phone. After all, it’s not every day that I get a chance to speak with a “leader” in the Muslim community who publicly states that someone living in the United States should be killed for simply sharing information about the Islamic belief system with the American public.

Yesterday evening, I attempted to reach the Islamic Center of Johnstown, at 814-467-0640. An answering machine picked up, advising that no one was available to come to the phone, and that anyone wanting more information could call 814-443-2694. So I hung up and dialed that number. The phone rang, and a man answered. The voice sounded quite familiar, like the one on the answering machine at the Islamic Center.

The call was certainly brief and disappointing, but was certainly not surprising. It went something like this:

Male answering the phone: “Hello.”

D.C. Watson: "Hello, may I speak with Fouad ElBayly."

Male: “Who is this?”

Watson: “This is D.C. Watson.”

Male: “What do you want?”

Watson: “I want to speak with Imam Fouad ElBayly, is that you?”

Male: "Why are you calling?"

Watson: "I'm calling to speak with Mr. ElBayly, is this he?"

Male: “No, you have the wrong number.”

Then he hung up on me.

Today I again tried to reach ElBayly at the Islamic Center, but again received an answering machine. Then I called the alternate number again. This time, an answering machine picked up which said, “You’ve reached the ElBaylys.” I guess I had the right number, but I had perhaps misjudged ElBayly's courage.

It appears that this “holy man” who has stirred up trouble with his radical comments has decided to pass up his opportunity to have “mutual understanding” and “dialogue” with yours truly.

Tough talk is cheap. Mr. ElBayly, you have become another in a growing list of Islamic Imams in the United States who have made militant and fanatical public statements -- and really, you should be upstanding enough to answer for that.

If you refuse, you reinforce the perception that Ayaan Hirsi Ali's statements must be accurate. In fact, you tried to shut her lecture down, not because she is defaming anything, but because you don't want the public to hear the truth.

Here’s another opportunity for you.

Since you refused to acknowledge to me that it was you I was speaking to on the phone last night, telling me I had the wrong number and then hanging up the phone, perhaps you and I can go a couple of rounds in a debate, either live and in color, or online.

Please contact the director of this site if you are ready and willing to stand and defend your words. Otherwise, you, like so many of your fellow Imams, have proven the validity of some of the points being made about Islam here and around the world.

After traveling all day in the Jihad Watch Maxwell Roadster, I just arrived at Boise State University in Idaho, where I'll be speaking tonight -- unless the Muslim Students Association gets its way, as they're circulating a petition to bar me from speaking. I'm told that one Muslim woman here on campus, demonstrating a grasp beyond her years of the use of victimhood as a political tool, told a local TV station that she feared for her life because I was coming to campus.

Yes, it's true, my friends. Muslims must fear for their lives, because every day, somewhere in the U.S., fiendish Islamophobes beat them senseless, stop them on buses and murder them, blow up their schools, kidnap, torture, and murder them, and announce their plans to conquer and Christianize their countries.

Of course, if you click on the links, you'll see that "Islamophobes" did none of those things, but Muslims did them all in the last few days. Need this young Boise State coed fear for her life because of me? Well, let's look at the record: just how many Muslims in America have I killed? None. How many have I called for to be killed? None. How many Muslims in America have been killed because they were Muslims? None. While Christians and other non-Muslims must live in fear for their lives every day in countries like Iraq (where Christians have been kidnapped and murdered), Indonesia (where those three Christian schoolgirls were beheaded), and Pakistan (where there was a spate of shootings in churches and church schools a few years ago), none of these things are happening to Muslims in the United States.

In this country, Muslims may practice their religion freely, and authorities often work to accommodate them. There are incidents of bigotry, but these are minor, and sometimes trumped-up. The only fly in the ointment is that sometimes people like me come around -- with a message of hate, they say, but that is just manipulative propaganda designed to get people of good will to turn away. In reality, tonight I will deliver a message of reality, a real inconvenient truth, about how the jihadists use the core texts of Islam to justify their actions and make recruits among peaceful Muslims. Instead of wringing her hands and retailing outrageous libels and hyperbole about me on television, this Muslim woman would do better to work to combat that reality within the Islamic community.

And if she made any headway, all of us could breathe easier.

UPDATE: Here is a story from Boise's 2NewsTV:

This noon time prayer is a daily practice for Muslims here in the Treasure Valley. It's also a part of Hosy Nasimi's everyday life. So is this, being a student at Boise State University. Combining the two can be tough, "There's really few people who know anything about Islam, they have no idea." Hosy is afraid that bringing author Robert Spencer on campus to talk about radical Islam won't help. In fact, she says it has the potential of making campus life dangerous for her and other Muslim students, "I want the school to be a safe place for me and other Muslims, not a place to be afraid to go."

And it's true -- there will be guards at the event tonight. But not because Hosy's life is threatened. Because mine is.

"Suspected of inciting terrorism abroad and raising money for terrorists." By Robin Millard for Agence France-Presse:

LONDON (AFP) - British police arrested six men in pre-dawn anti-terror raids Tuesday, including radical Muslim Abu Izzadeen, known for calling western leaders "terrorists" and heckling Home Secretary John Reid.

The men, aged between 21 and 35, are suspected of inciting terrorism abroad and raising money for terrorists. They were arrested in and around London and are in custody in a central London police station.

A well-known figure towards the extreme end of British Muslim opinion, convert Izzadeen called Reid "an enemy of Islam" and "a tyrant" when he repeatedly disrupted a speech by the interior minister in east London last September.

"Six men have been arrested under the Terrorism Act 2000 in connection with inciting others to commit acts of terrorism overseas and terrorist fundraising," a Metropolitan Police spokesman told AFP.

"A number of searches are ongoing in connection with the investigation.

"The arrests form part of a long-term pro-active and complex investigation into alleged incitement and radicalisation for the purposes of terrorism, as well as alleged provision of financial support for international terrorism."

The BBC said it understood that the arrests were connected to an alleged incident at a mosque in 2004.

The men, aged 21, 24, 27, 28, 32 and 35, were arrested at four addresses in east London, one in the Southall suburb in west London, and one in Luton, a town north of the capital.

The men were arrested at 5:00am (0400 GMT) by the Metropolitan Police Counter Terrorism Command and local police officers.

They were being held at the high-security Paddington Green police station in central London, Sky News television reported.

Izzadeen, a former electrician, is said to be an ex-spokesman for the radical Islamist group Al-Ghurabaa, an offshoot of the now disbanded Al-Muhajiroun led by radical cleric Omar Bakri Mohammed, both of which are now banned in Britain.

He came to prominence for refusing to condemn the deadly July 2005 suicide bombings in London and has described Prime Minister Tony Blair and US President George W. Bush as the "real terrorists" for military action in Iraq and Afghanistan.

He was arrested on February 8 on suspicion of encouraging terrorism but was freed on bail.

Former Al-Muhajiroun spokesman Anjem Choudhury, also said to be a prominent figure in Al-Ghurabaa, confirmed that his "close friend" had been arrested.

"They are saying it's in relation to something around November 2004, allegedly collecting funds for terrorism, inciting terrorism," the scolar said.

"People collect a lot of money for orphans and widows at Ramadan, but we know Muslims are guilty until they can prove themselves innocent.

"All these arrests must be seen in the light of the crusade which the Blair regime has launched against the Muslim community, trying to justify their foreign policy through demonising Muslims, and targeting ordinary innocent Muslims who have the fortitude to speak up.

"Abu Izzadeen and other individuals are completely innocent, they do not support any terrorist activities, in this country or abroad."

There's that term again, which so many find so usefully vague.

Stop the presses: The hudna's over. "Hamas: Truce with Israel at end," by Ibrahim Barzak for The Associated Press:

GAZA CITY, Gaza Strip - Hamas militants fired a barrage of rockets and mortar shells toward Israel on its independence day Tuesday, and said they considered it the end of a five-month truce with Israel.

Palestinian Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh, whose Hamas-led government negotiated the cease-fire with its militant wing, blamed Israel: "We made great efforts at keeping the truce and there was a positive Palestinian position, but unfortunately this position was met by expanding the aggression and escalating it against the Palestinian people," he said. "It's not a Palestinian problem, it is an Israeli problem."

Nine Palestinians were killed in fighting with Israel over the weekend, most of the militants, but also two civilians.

The barrage, which came on Israel's 59th independence day, did not cause any damage or injury, but it marked the first time Hamas acknowledged firing shells toward Israel since agreeing to a cease-fire along the Gaza-Israel border in November. Hamas is tightly organized, and Israel says attacks from Gaza have the tacit approval from the militant group's political leaders.

Israel Radio, citing military officials, said the rocket attack appeared to be an unsuccessful attempt to create a diversion in order to capture an Israeli soldier posted at the Gaza border. In June, Hamas-allied militants had tunneled from Gaza into Israel and seized an Israeli soldier, Cpl. Gilad Shalit, who is still being held.

In Israel, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and his defense minister discussed a possible response. More security consultations were planned for Wednesday, government officials said.

The Israeli military has warned of a Hamas arms buildup in Gaza, and has readied contingency plans for a large-scale invasion of the territory. However, Olmert said earlier this month that the time is not ripe for a major ground campaign.

Hamas had held back attacks on Israel for months, especially during power-sharing talks with the Fatah movement of moderate President Mahmoud Abbas. A spokesman for the Islamic group's armed wing said the group considered the truce over.

"The cease-fire has been over for a long time, and Israel is responsible for that," the spokesman, Abu Obeida, told the Voice of Palestine radio station. "We are readby to kidnap more and more, and kill more and more of your soldiers."

Hamas-allied militants have demanded hundreds of Palestinian prisoners for the release of Shalit, the captured Israeli soldier.

On Monday, Olmert said freeing soldiers is important to the government, but that it would not repeat "mistakes made in the past" by releasing violent prisoners who then carried out more attacks against Israelis. But Olmert said there would be "no escape in the end from making a difficult decision" on trading prisoners for the captured troops.

[...]

In a growing problem for Gaza, Palestinian smugglers and clansmen settle differences with guns, and bands of self-styled vigilantes have killed suspected pimps, prostitutes, drug dealers, owners of music shops, internet cafes, pool halls — activities which could divert people from worship — and women suspected of sexual misconduct. Bystanders are often wounded or killed.

Anti-dhimmitude in Italy, in the form of a charter stating Italian and European values. From Agence France-Presse:

ROME -- Italy's interior ministry has published a "values charter" for religious minorities that promotes integration while shunning polygamy and the wearing of face-concealing veils.

The charter, presented late Monday by Interior Minister Giuliano Amato, enshrines "the right to religious freedom and equality between man and woman," according to the ministry's Web site.

The charter advocates the "monogamous family and wants to prevent women from experiencing humiliation and polygamy," said Carlo Cardia, the head of the committee that drafted the accord, according to the ANSA news agency.

The seven-page document refers to European values and those of the Italian constitution, and condemns terrorism, anti-Semitism, and xenophobia.

Regarding the veil, it says that while "no restrictions on clothing exist in Italy ... [veils that] cover the face are not acceptable because they prevent the recognition of the person and are an obstacle for establishing relationships with others."

Amato said the document would serve as a guide for relations between the ministry and Italy's various religious communities, and should help "consolidate Italian Islam."

The non-binding charter "cannot be imposed on anyone," Amato said, adding that it was just the start of a process.

More than a million Muslims make up the second-largest religious community in Italy, after Roman Catholicism.

The largest Muslim organization, UCOII, was critical of the charter even though it took part in its drafting.

"The veil has never been humiliating to women," said UCOII president Mohamed Nour Dachan, adding that he felt the charter should mention "the positive role of Islam in the history of Europe."

Lal Masjid Update. "‘Banned terror group’ to help defend mosque," from Deutsche Presse-Agentur:

ISLAMABAD: Members of Pakistan’s banned Jaish-e-Mohamed jihadi organisation have come to Islamabad to help defend a radical mosque against any incursion by security forces, a press report said yesterday.

Mufti Abdul Rauf, a leader of the movement that is accused of carrying out numerous terrorist attacks in Indian-controlled Kashmir and other parts of India, arrived in the capital with a number of associates, the Pakistani daily The News reported.

Rauf was last seen at the Lal Masjid, or Red Mosque, on April 17, a day after he was detained by police in the twin city of Rawalpindi but promptly released after a call from an intelligence agency vouching for him as “their man,” the paper said.

That fuelled speculation that the leadership of the mosque and adjoining madrassa enjoys the backing of some highly placed officials, it added.

The complex is at the centre of a prolonged stand-off with the authorities as clerics there encourage many of its 11,000 students to join the fight against foreign troops in Afghanistan, while others strive towards the imposition of Taliban-style law in Islamabad.

Jaish-e-Mohamed is believed to have close links with the Taliban and Al Qaeda and has been held responsible for the December 13, 2001 terrorist attack on the Indian Parliament in New Delhi. Thirteen people died, including five terrorists.

The group’s arrival at the mosque follows threats by the clerics to mount bombings if the government makes any attempt to storm the premises.

[...]

Meanwhile, preparations for a forceful solution to the confrontation were thought to be underway, with large units of army rangers reportedly having been drafted into the city.

Islamic students associated with a radical mosque in the Pakistani capital Islamabad have been indoctrinated and trained to mount suicide attacks, a ruling coalition party claimed in a report released Monday.

[...]

Two brothers - Abdul Aziz and Abdul Rashid Ghazi - are thought to be using the female students as human shields to evade any official attempt to end the illegal occupation of land, govern the Red Mosque and its seminaries.

If action were taken against them, the mosque administration planned to kill a few women and children and accuse the government of oppression with a view to justifying suicide attacks, the report alleged.

More on this story. "Prisoners convert to Islam in escape plot," by Nick Squires for The New Zealand Herald:

One of Australia's most dangerous criminals paid fellow inmates to convert to Islam as a prelude to planning an audacious escape from the country's toughest jail, it was alleged yesterday.

Convicted murderer Bassam Hamzy arranged for cash payments to be secretly made to prisoners prepared to worship Allah and help him plot an escape from the Super Max section of Goulburn jail in New South Wales.

In what prison authorities described as a "pay to pray" conspiracy, 12 of the 37 inmates at the Super Max facility became Muslim fundamentalists or converts. They all shaved their heads, grew long beards and prayed in their cells up to five times a day. Some are of Muslim background but others are white Australians or Aborigines.

A small but growing number of Aborigines are turning to Islam, in part as a source of spiritual pride but also as a rejection of the drug and alcohol abuse which has wreaked havoc among indigenous people.

"The officers are using a term down there now at Goulburn jail - 'pay to pray'," said Ron Woodham, the head of New South Wales Corrective Services. "These people have never had any contact or interest in religion before and all of a sudden they're converting to Islam. Hamzy is the powerbroker or the organiser, as if he's forming a gang," Woodham told Southern Cross radio.

Using surveillance and intelligence gathering, authorities moved swiftly to disrupt what they described as a "carefully orchestrated" plot. Prisoners have been banned from accessing the outside funds, visits by friends and family have been curtailed and gang members have been ordered to speak only in English. Hamzy has been moved to a prison in Lithgow, west of Sydney.

He is alleged to have been building a web of support in which murderers, rapists and armed robbers were receiving regular payments of A$100 - a modest amount in the outside world, but more than enough to enable inmates to buy radios, cigarettes and other luxuries. The payments were traced to a bank account in Bankstown, a Sydney suburb with a large Arabic and Muslim population.

The prisoners who converted to Islam probably did so as an act of rebellion rather than out of a genuine interest in the religion, a criminologist said. "It's a way of exercising control over your circumstances and flexing some collective muscle," said Stephen Smallbone, a former prison psychiatrist and now an associate professor in criminology at Griffith University in Queensland. "It's chest beating - they know it's a scary proposition for prison officers. They are living in an environment in which there is otherwise very little opportunity to establish their authority."

One could conceivably embrace one of any number of religions out of sheer contrarianism. But clearly, the opportunity to frame their grievances against society in the concept of open-ended warfare against unbelievers had a certain resonance with these inmates.

Hamzy was one of the gravest threats to the security of a prison ever encountered in New South Wales, Woodham said. The 28-year-old is serving 21 years for shooting dead an 18-year-old man outside a Sydney nightclub in 1998. A Muslim fundamentalist, he is an admirer of Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda.

Such was his hold over fellow inmates that some were observed by prison officers kneeling at his feet and kissing his hand. They held meetings in which they discussed Islam and martyrdom.

An update on this story. "Al-Qaeda’s 'British propagandists'," by Sean O'Neill for The Times:

Violent al-Qaeda propaganda, including footage of the beheading of hostages, was distributed around the globe by computer by young men sitting in their bedrooms in Britain, a court heard yesterday.

Three men appeared before Woolwich Crown Court accused of inciting terrorism abroad. They were said to have a “close affiliation” with al-Qaeda in Iraq, the group founded by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.

Younis Tsouli, 23, Waseem Mughal, 24, and Tariq al-Daour, 21, allegedly played important roles in al-Qaeda’s “media war” and had massive quantities of films, audio recordings, books and documents promoting the extremist ideology of Osama bin Laden and global jihad.

Among the footage found in police raids on their homes in London and Kent were films of the beheading of the British engineer Kenneth Bigley as well as the executions of American, Korean, Japanese, Egyptian, Iraqi, Turkish and Bulgarian hostages.

[...]

Other films found on the men’s computers or on discs in their rooms included footage of suicide attacks in Iraq, the video wills of “martyrs” and stylised productions eulogising the 9/11 hijackers.

“Possession of this material is strong evidence of the depth of their adherence to the cause,” Mark Ellison, for the prosecution, told the court.

“Collecting it, providing links for others to obtain it, applauding it, defending it — as we say these defendants did — as well as making it available to a wide audience on websites is strong evidence of the approval of it and of the ideology it seeks to justify.”

Mr Tsouli had a Powerpoint presentation entitled “carbom-bzip” and another file containing video clips of the World Bank building and the US Capitol in Washington DC and the George Washington National Masonic Memorial.

A CD was found in the home of Mr Mughal containing a file giving instructions on how to make a suicide-bomb vest.

Mr al-Daour had a CD file entitled “special course in manufacturing explosives”, a document with instructions for firing a rocket-propelled grenade and a data file, “The Mujahidin Explosives Handbook”.

Mr Ellison said that the defendants, who were arrested in October 2005, were “intelligent young men” who appeared to lead normal lives.

“Behind the apparent normality of their daily lives and for at least a year before they were arrested, the truth is that each of these young men firmly believed in, supported and set about inciting others to follow an extreme ideology of violent holy war,” he said.

[...]

Mr Ellison said: “The effective recruitment of new adherents to the cause and the inciting of them to join in the fighting and killing and become mujahidin, if not also martyrs, is the very lifeblood of achieving the religious dominance that has its root in this ideology.

“The central importance of powerfully expressed and constructed media in that process, and having the means of distributing and pushing the message to those prepared to listen and likely to be persuaded to join in themselves, is at the very heart of advancing this ideology.

[...]

All three deny possession of documents or records likely to be of use to a person preparing an act of terrorism, and incitement to commit an act of terrorism outside Britain. Mr Tsouli and Mr Mughal deny a charge of conspiracy to murder which, the jury heard, was connected to a plot involving individuals in Bosnia. The trial continues.

The accused

Younis Tsouli, from Shepherds Bush, West London, was born in Morocco but was granted indefinite leave to remain in Britain two months before his arrest. He studied Information Technology and computer technology at Westminster College of Computing in 2001-03 and, according to his CV, was fluent in French and Arabic

Waseem Mughal lived with his family in Chatham, Kent, and is a biochemistry graduate from the University of Leicester. While a student, he ran the website of the university’s Islamic Society

Tariq al-Daour was born in the United Arab Emirates of Palestinian parents and became a British citizen in May 2004. Shortly before his arrest he had applied to study for a law degree

The laws concerning food purity and quality in the U.S. are designed to provide the reasonable assurance that the food you buy will not make you physically ill. Your soul, however, is necessarily your business, because due to varying beliefs, one man's ticket to perdition is another man's brunch.

Meanwhile, in Illinois, "many Muslims, however, are frustrated that the law fails to define exactly what is halal," which would, of course, start the state on the slippery slope of mediating the application of Sharia law.

"Muslims in quandary over state food law," by Margaret Ramirez for the Chicago Tribune:

As a Muslim mom and teacher, Dilara Sayeed struggles to find the best food to nourish her family and feed their devout faith.

She wants beef and chicken that are healthy as well as halal: slaughtered and blessed according to Islamic law. Yet often she finds there are limits to the information available from the supermarket or even her neighborhood Muslim grocer. So she, like many Muslims, must trust in God that she is not being deceived.

"Sometimes I just can't get all the answers, so I make an assumption that I'm being served in an honorable way," said Sayeed, of Naperville. "I wish it wasn't true, but there may be some people who are abusing that trust."

Five years after Illinois lawmakers passed legislation making it illegal to falsely label or sell food as halal, the rules still have not gone into effect and the law is not being enforced. Because there are multiple interpretations of what constitutes halal, debates about how the law would work have proved difficult and divisive.

But after years of stalled discussions, Muslim leaders are hammering out a plan to implement the law. Many, however, say the result is likely to be a bureaucratic mess because of the new registration process and the nearly 30-page questionnaire that must be filled out by every grocer, restaurant owner, meat processor and farmer who prepares or sells halal food.

The Illinois statute, modeled after a New Jersey law, requires anyone selling or producing halal food to register with the state for a $75 fee and fill out a disclosure form by checking off boxes indicating how the food was obtained and who certified the product as halal. Since New Jersey passed the nation's first halal law in 2000, similar laws have taken effect in nearly a dozen states.

"With this law, a Muslim consumer is empowered," said Mazhar Hussaini, director of the halal food program for the Islamic Society of North America. "He has to show [the disclosure form to] whoever asks for it. We cannot rely on just the grocer's word, and we can trace the meat from farm to retail store."

Illinois lawmakers say the act purposely does not define halal to allow for the multiple standards in the community. For some Muslims, halal means only avoiding pork or alcohol; others favor hand-slaughter by a Muslim over machine slaughter. Still another growing movement of Muslims argues that halal goes beyond slaughter to how the animals are raised. These Muslims insist that only meat from animals that were raised on organic or natural farms and were slaughtered in a humane way are halal.

Meeting with lawmakers

Last month, several Muslim community leaders met with state lawmakers at a public hearing to discuss what questions would be on the disclosure form. The state Department of Agriculture submitted comments from the hearing to a joint committee and is awaiting approval.

Because the state cannot certify what is halal, officials want all pertinent information on the form so consumers can make purchases according to their own standard. Statements on the form ask, for example, whether the animal was facing Mecca when slaughtered and whether the person performing slaughter is Muslim.

Many Muslims, however, are frustrated that the law fails to define exactly what is halal. Others say the check-box system is inadequate, unenforceable and likely to encourage more fraud.

Shireen Pishdadi, Muslim outreach coordinator for Faith in Place, a religious environmentalist group in Chicago and one of the law's most vocal opponents, believes the statute should be rewritten to provide better oversight and stricter limits for the use of the word "halal." Pishdadi, who created the Taqwa food cooperative that provides halal organic meat to Chicago's Muslim community, fears the law would discourage farmers from working with Muslims.

"The problem we have is that the Muslim community knows little about the food industry and the lawmakers have little understanding of Islam," she said. "Muslims could really raise the standard of food and be part of the solution."

[...]

Independent certification

Because there is no single Islamic authority that supervises halal, dozens of companies and Islamic centers have established their own halal certification for food, meat and products like cosmetics and vitamins. Some Muslim certification companies have begun selling their own products, presenting a conflict of interest.

Muhammad Munir Chaudry, president of the Islamic Food and Nutrition Council of America, based in Chicago, heads the largest Muslim certification company in the nation and labels approved products with a big "M" set inside a crescent. Chaudry had hoped the law would provide for oversight of certification agencies to ensure they are objective.

For Chaudry, the halal law is largely symbolic and the burden remains on the consumer to find out whether the food is halal. Chaudry said he has investigated local markets that claimed to sell halal meat and found that in two cases the meat came from a kosher plant.

"There is a false sense of security because the consumers think, 'Well, now there is a halal law, so everybody must be following it.' And the shopkeepers are saying, 'No one is stopping us, so let's keep doing it,'" Chaudry said.

Enforcement of the law is sure to be difficult, said Dr. Colleen O'Keefe, a veterinarian who manages the state Department of Agriculture's food safety and animal protection division. O'Keefe, who is overseeing the law's implementation, said there is no budget for halal inspectors.

As it should be.

"The community is going to have to enforce the law," she said. "The purchaser will have to do their homework, and the buyers will have to investigate whether the check marks are correct."

[...]

Besides enforcement, some Muslims are troubled that the law does not take into account the origin of the animals and whether they were disease-free, fed with pork-based protein or treated with hormones or antibiotics. There are also no questions about the disclosure form addressing humane slaughter.

Julia Gorin has the story at, of all places, HuffPo:

Rep. Tom Lantos (D-CA) -- Chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee -- said the following:

Just a reminder to the predominantly Muslim-led government[s] in this world that here is yet another example that the United States leads the way for the creation of a predominantly Muslim country in the very heart of Europe. This should be noted by both responsible leaders of Islamic governments, such as Indonesia, and also for jihadists of all color and hue. The United States' principles are universal, and in this instance, the United States stands foursquare for the creation of an overwhelmingly Muslim country in the very heart of Europe.

Why should jihadists note this? Because it will make them think that the U.S. is not an enemy of Muslims, presumably. But neither Lantos nor other American officials busy patting themselves on the back about this have given even a moment's consideration to the possibility that those same jihadists might take advantage of American goodwill in this to...wage jihad against the West.

Now why would they be so ungrateful? Because they are not fighting against us because we are bad guys. We could be the best of peoples, as Muslims are called in the Qur'an (3:110), and because we are not Muslim, many Muslims will believe that it remains their responsibility to fight against and subjugate us (cf. Qur'an 9:29), no matter how pliant and helpful we are to their cause.

A Jihad Watch reader picked up the phone earlier today and called Johnstown, Pennsylvania Imam Fouad ElBayly, who has said that Ayaan Hirsi Ali should be killed. To his surprise, ElBayly picked up the phone. From the reader's email to me:

I called the number and someone picked up and said hello. I said I was calling with regard to Imam Fouad ElBayly.

The person on the other end said, "Speaking." (!!!!)

Me: Is this Imam Fouad ElBayly?

ElBayly: Speaking.

Me: I understand that you called for the murder of Ayaan Hirsi Ali.

ElBayly: Oh no no, that was not correct.

Me: I have the quote right here. You said, "She has been identified as one who has defamed the faith. If you come into the faith, you must abide by the laws, and when you decide to defame it deliberately, the sentence is death."

ElBayly: Yes, but that is not my word. That is the call of God.

Me: So you said that.

ElBayly: Before anybody gets into the relations with Islam [I couldn't type fast enough to type everything he said] ... you don't get into the relationship with Islam [...] what Ali did is called corruption on earth. It is worse than murder. She was disturbing the peace. That is not a peaceful life.

Qur'an 5:33 speaks about corruption on earth, or "corruption in the land" as the Muslim translator Mohammed Marmaduke Pickthall has it: "The only reward of those who make war upon Allah and His messenger and strive after corruption in the land will be that they will be killed or crucified, or have their hands and feet on alternate sides cut off, or will be expelled out of the land. Such will be their degradation in the world, and in the Hereafter theirs will be an awful doom."

ElBayly then started to segue into how he only called for action to be taken against her in another country. I cut him off:

Me: No no no no no. Now YOU listen to ME.

And I said it with righteous passion and plenty of it. Not loudly, but with tremendous passion.

Me: It is ILLEGAL in the state of Pennsylvania to threaten anyone. There is no special distinction for any religion.

I went on telling him about the law, with the same tremendous passionate energy, and then he hung up on me.

I feel pretty sure that I rattled his cage big-time.

I hope so. I hope a prosecutor in Pennsylvania has enough spine to grasp the multicultural third rail and make it clear to Imam Fouad ElBayly that saying that someone should be killed is not something we take lightly in the U.S.

Did you know that two people in the West -- one in Norway and one in Canada -- have been physically attacked recently for remarks that Muslims perceived as critical of Islam?

I didn't think so. That's the subject of this week's Jihad Watch videoblog at Hot Air.

"The second stop of the Islamic conquest of Europe, France, after Andalusia, Spain."

"Jihadis aspire to 'conquer France': Al-Qaeda forum calls for jihadis to 'complete' medieval war and take over France," by Yaakov Lappin for Ynet News, with thanks to the American Israeli Patriot:

As the French people went to the polls to select a president, jihadi members of an al-Qaeda online forum exchanged messages discussing their aspiration to "reinvade France (and convert it into) an Islamic country." The internet discussion appeared as Spanish security forces warned that both Spain and France were targets of al-Qaeda terror plots.

A post that appeared on the al-Firdaws jihadi forum, submitted by a user named Faisal al-Baghdadi, contained a lengthy historical account of "the second stop of the Islamic conquest of Europe, France, after Andalusia, Spain."

The post took a nostalgic look at the battle of Tours in 732, in which Muslim forces, commanded by Rahman al-Ghafiqi, who invaded a portion of France, were repelled by the Frankish general Charles Martel ("the hammer"), and forced to retreat. The battle stemmed the medieval Islamic conquest of Europe.

"The Islamic army was left with a large number of martyrs, especially the great shahid (martyr) Abdul Rahman a-Ghafiqi… this battle is mentioned in history, and is known at the battle of Tours," the post explained.

"We ask that Allah sends us a genuine Rahman al-Ghafiqi, to finish what he started in Europe, and conquer the Vatican as promised in our beautiful Islamic verses," the post concluded.

"Allah bless the writer and carrier of the message which recalls the days of glory and honor of Islam," another user responded.

Youssef Ibrahim reports on the Saudi double game in the New York Sun (thanks to James):

...For half a century, the West has preferred to believe that its choice in Saudi Arabia is the moderate, friendly Saudi royal family or the wild-eyed, sandal-clad zombies of jihad, disregarding the seamless relationship between the two.

We have blithely ignored that Mr. bin Laden was a product and a protégé — even a full-fledged member — of the ruling establishment in Saudi Arabia. Indeed, his 52 brothers and other members of his family have intermarried widely with the royal family.

Since Abdulaziz Al-Saud founded his kingdom in 1932, power in Saudi Arabia has rested in the hands of one rabid group of Muslim jihadists: the 40,000 perfumed princes and princesses of the Saud tribal dynasty. They are the public face of Saudi Arabia, the folks who show up in the White House as ambassadors to America.

In Saudi Arabia, these royals nurture a vast entourage and infrastructure of palaces, attached mosques, religious schools, and charitable networks at home and, more important, abroad. These institutions are tied to elegant public princes, but also to many more we never see overseas. They dole out the money and in return demand blind obedience and a steady stream of Wahhabite devotees.

Saudi royal wealth has funded not only hundreds of religious schools inside the kingdom, but also hundreds more in Pakistan, Egypt, Afghanistan, Britain, America, and Asia. The network stretches far and wide, and Wahhabi recruits create the fodder that supplies suicide bombers for Hamas, the Taliban, Iraqi jihadis, and Pakistani-British transit bombers.

Read it all.

"Since the plan started at 10:00 am on Saturday, 1,347 women have been warned and given Islamic guidance."

Sharia Alert. By Farhad Pouladi for AFP, with thanks to the Constantinopolitan Irredentist:

TEHRAN (AFP) - Iran has issued more than a thousand warnings and arrested dozens in a new drive aimed at forcing women whose dress is deemed inappropriate to adhere to Islamic dress rules, officials said Sunday.

The nationwide drive -- an annual pre-summer crackdown given greater prominence this year -- is aimed primarily at women whose coats are seen as too tight, trousers excessively short or hejabs (headscarves) overly loose.

It foresees handing out warnings and guidance to women found to have infringed its dress code in public. Those who show resistance to change can be arrested and then be the subject of legal proceedings.

"Since the plan started at 10:00 am on Saturday, 1,347 women have been warned and given Islamic guidance," the head of information at Tehran city's police force, Mehdi Ahmadi, told AFP.

"There were 170 arrests. Of these, 58 were released after making a written commitment and rectifying their appearance. The cases of the rest, who already had a record, were handed over to the judiciary," he said.

Iranian newspapers printed pictures of women in tight and colourful clothing being given warnings on Tehran's streets by female police officers dressed in chadors as the crackdown got underway on Saturday.

Twenty shops selling inappropriate clothing were also closed down, Ahmadi said.

The programme was aimed at "improving the security of society with an approach of moral security," he added.

"Its duration depends on when society feels that there are no longer signs of short trousers, tight mantos (coats), tight clothing and very skimpy hejabs."

The authorities have argued the "bad hejab" drive is aimed at encouraging women to dress in line with Islamic dress code and it appeared the emphasis is more on handing out warnings than detaining offenders.

Sharia Alert: his action -- leaving the Qur'an in mosque washrooms -- led them to conclude that he had renounced Islam, which carries a death sentence, in line with Muhammad's words, "Whoever changed his Islamic religion, then kill him'" (Bukhari 9.84.57).

"Egyptian faces death over Saudi Koran desecration," from Reuters, with thanks to David:

RIYADH – An Egyptian living in Saudi Arabia has been sentenced to death for desecrating the Koran and renouncing Islam, Saudi newspapers and a rights activist said on Wednesday.

Okaz and al-Hayat newspapers said worshippers at a mosque in the desert town of Arar in north Saudi Arabia lodged a complaint with police saying the man, a pharmacist, had left copies of the Muslim holy book in the mosque washrooms.

They said a court found the man guilty on Tuesday of no longer being a Muslim because of his acts and 'violating the boundaries set by God'. They said the man, whom they identified only as an Arab national, pleaded guilty.

Saudi Arabia executes murderers, rapists and drug traffickers to death by public beheading, according to an austere version of Sunni Islam. Anyone found guilty of apostasy can also face death.

With help from Iran, but could some of these young men be helping also? By Dipesh Gadher in the Times, with thanks to Frank:

AL-QAEDA leaders in Iraq are planning the first “large-scale” terrorist attacks on Britain and other western targets with the help of supporters in Iran, according to a leaked intelligence report.

Spy chiefs warn that one operative had said he was planning an attack on “a par with Hiroshima and Nagasaki” in an attempt to “shake the Roman throne”, a reference to the West.

Another plot could be timed to coincide with Tony Blair stepping down as prime minister, an event described by Al-Qaeda planners as a “change in the head of the company”.

The report, produced earlier this month and seen by The Sunday Times, appears to provide evidence that Al-Qaeda is active in Iran and has ambitions far beyond the improvised attacks it has been waging against British and American soldiers in Iraq.

There is no evidence of a formal relationship between Al-Qaeda, a Sunni group, and the Shi’ite regime of President Mah-moud Ahmadinejad, but experts suggest that Iran’s leaders may be turning a blind eye to the terrorist organisation’s activities.

The intelligence report also makes it clear that senior Al-Qaeda figures in the region have been in recent contact with operatives in Britain.

It follows revelations last year that up to 150 Britons had travelled to Iraq to fight as part of Al-Qaeda’s “foreign legion”. A number are thought to have returned to the UK, after receiving terrorist training, to form sleeper cells.

Ed Hussain, a Muslim from London, found racism, sexual hypocrisy, and widespread jihadist sentiment as a teacher in Saudi Arabia. Read it all -- here are just a few salient excerpts. "How a British jihadi saw the light," from the Times, with thanks to all who sent this in:

...Many of the African women lived in an area of Jeddah known as Karantina, a slum full of poverty, prostitution and disease.

A visit to Karantina, a perversion of the term “quarantine”, was one of the worst of my life. Thousands of people who had been living in Saudi Arabia for decades, but without passports, had been deemed “illegal” by the government and, quite literally, abandoned under a flyover.

A non-Saudi black student I had met at the British Council accompanied me. “Last week a woman gave birth here,” he said, pointing to a ramshackle cardboard shanty. Disturbed, I now realised that the materials I had seen those women carrying were not always for sale but for shelter.

I had never expected to see such naked poverty in Saudi Arabia.

At that moment it dawned on me that Britain, my home, had given refuge to thousands of black Africans from Somalia and Sudan: I had seen them in their droves in Whitechapel. They prayed, had their own mosques, were free and were given government housing.

Many Muslims enjoyed a better lifestyle in non-Muslim Britain than they did in Muslim Saudi Arabia. At that moment I longed to be home again.

All my talk of ummah seemed so juvenile now. It was only in the comfort of Britain that Islamists could come out with such radical utopian slogans as one government, one ever expanding country, for one Muslim nation. The racist reality of the Arab psyche would never accept black and white people as equal....

Racism was an integral part of Saudi society. My students often used the word “nigger” to describe black people. Even dark-skinned Arabs were considered inferior to their lighter-skinned cousins. I was living in the world’s most avowedly Muslim country, yet I found it anything but. I was appalled by the imposition of Wahhabism in the public realm, something I had implicitly sought as an Islamist.

Part of this local culture consisted of public institutions being segregated and women banned from driving on the grounds that it would give rise to “licentiousness”. I was repeatedly astounded at the stares Faye got from Saudi men and I from Saudi women.

Faye was not immodest in her dress. Out of respect for local custom, she wore the long black abaya and covered her hair in a black scarf. In all the years I had known my wife, never had I seen her appear so dull. Yet on two occasions she was accosted by passing Saudi youths from their cars. On another occasion a man pulled up beside our car and offered her his phone number.

In supermarkets I only had to be away from Faye for five minutes and Saudi men would hiss or whisper obscenities as they walked past. When Faye discussed her experiences with local women at the British Council they said: “Welcome to Saudi Arabia.”...

Why had the veil and segregation not prevented such behaviour? My Saudi acquaintances, many of them university graduates, argued strongly that, on the contrary, it was the veil and other social norms that were responsible for such widespread sexual frustration among Saudi youth....

D'Souza Alert:

In my Islamist days we relished stating that Aids and other sexually transmitted diseases were the result of the moral degeneracy of the West. Large numbers of Islamists in Britain hounded prostitutes in Brick Lane and flippantly quoted divorce and abortion rates in Britain. The implication was that Muslim morality was superior. Now, more than ever, I was convinced that this too was Islamist propaganda, designed to undermine the West and inject false confidence in Muslim minds....

In Mecca, Medina and Jeddah I met young men with angry faces from Europe, students at various Wahhabi seminaries. They reminded me of my extremist days.

They were candid in discussing their frustrations with Saudi Arabia. The country was not sufficiently Islamic; it had strayed from the teachings of Wahhabism. They were firmly on the side of the monarchy and the clerics who supported it. Soon they were to return to the West, well versed in Arabic, fully indoctrinated by Wahhabism, to become imams in British mosques.

By the summer of 2005 Faye and I had only eight weeks left in Saudi Arabia before we would return home to London. Thursday, July 7, was the beginning of the Saudi weekend. Faye and I were due to lunch with Sultan, a Saudi banker who was financial adviser to four government ministers. I wanted to gauge what he and his wife, Faye’s student, thought about life inside the land of their birth....

My initial suspicion was that the perpetrators were Saudis. My experience of them, their virulence towards my non-Muslim friends, their hate-filled textbooks, made me think that Bin Laden’s Saudi soldiers had now targeted my home town. It never crossed my mind that the rhetoric of jihad introduced to Britain by Hizb ut-Tahrir could have anything to do with such horror....

The fact that hundreds of children die in Africa every day would be of no relevance to a committed Islamist. In the extremist mind the plight of the tiny Palestinian nation is more important than the deaths of millions of black Africans. Let them die, they’re not Muslims, would be the unspoken line of argument. As an Islamist it was only the suffering of Muslims that had moved me. Now human suffering mattered to me, regardless of religion....

Sultan spoke fondly of his time in London, particularly his placement at Coutts as a trainee banker. We then moved on to the subject uppermost in my mind, the terrorist attacks on London. My host did not really seem to care. He expressed no real sympathy or shock, despite speaking so warmly of his time in London.

“I suppose they will say Bin Laden was behind the attacks. They blamed us for 9/11,” he said.

Keen to take him up on his comment, I asked him: “Based on your education in Saudi Arabian schools, do you think there is a connection between the form of Islam children are taught here and the action of 15 Saudi men on September 11?”

Without thinking, his immediate response was, ‘No. No, because Saudis were not behind 9/11. The plane hijackers were not Saudi men. One thousand two hundred and forty-six Jews were absent from work on that day and there is the proof that they, the Jews, were behind the killings. Not Saudis.”

It was the first time I heard so precise a number of Jewish absentees. I sat there pondering on the pan-Arab denial of the truth, a refusal to accept that the Wahhabi jihadi terrorism festering in their midst had inflicted calamities on the entire world....

Two weeks after the terrorist attacks in London another Saudi student raised his hand and asked: “Teacher, how can I go to London?”

“Much depends on your reason for going to Britain. Do you want to study or just be a tourist?”

“Teacher, I want to go London next month. I want bomb, big bomb in London, again. I want make jihad!”

“What?” I exclaimed. Another student raised both hands and shouted: “Me too! Me too!”

Other students applauded those who had just articulated what many of them were thinking. I was incandescent. In protest I walked out of the classroom to a chorus of jeering and catcalls.

But only in a Muslim country, not in America, and "it's a very merciful religion if you try to understand it."

A "community debate" in Pennsylvania: "Furor over author Ayaan Hirsi Ali's visit stirs debate on religious freedom," by Robin Acton in the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, with thanks to Joe:

...A community debate over religious freedom surfaced in Western Pennsylvania last week when Dutch feminist author Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a Somali refugee who has lived under the threat of death for denouncing her Muslim upbringing, made an appearance at the University of Pittsburgh at Johnstown.

Islamic leaders tried to block the lecture, which was sponsored through an endowment from the Frank J. and Sylvia T. Pasquerilla Lecture Series. They argued that Hirsi Ali's attacks against the Muslim faith in her book, "Infidel," and movie, "Submission," are "poisonous and unjustified" and create dissension in their community.

Although university officials listened to Islamic leaders' concerns, the lecture planned last year took place Tuesday evening under tight security, with no incidents.

Imam Fouad ElBayly, president of the Johnstown Islamic Center, was among those who objected to Hirsi Ali's appearance.

"She has been identified as one who has defamed the faith. If you come into the faith, you must abide by the laws, and when you decide to defame it deliberately, the sentence is death," said ElBayly, who came to the U.S. from Egypt in 1976.

Hirsi Ali, an atheist, has been critical of many Muslim beliefs, particularly on subjects of sexual morality, the treatment of women and female genital mutilation. In her essay "The Caged Virgin," she also wrote of punishment, noting that "a Muslim's relationship with God is one of fear."

"Our God demands total submission. He rewards you if you follow His rules meticulously. He punishes you cruelly if you break His rules, both on earth, with illness and natural disasters, and in the hereafter, with hellfire," she wrote....

Although ElBayly believes a death sentence is warranted for Hirsi Ali, he stressed that America is not the jurisdiction where such a crime should be punished. Instead, Hirsi Ali should be judged in a Muslim country after being given a trial, he added.

"If it is found that a person is mentally unstable, or a child or disabled, there should be no punishment," he said. "It's a very merciful religion if you try to understand it."

Zahida Chaudhary, a member of the education council and education secretary at the Muslim Community Center of Greater Pittsburgh in Monroeville, insisted that Islam is a peaceful religion.

"The Prophet Mohammed was a peacemaker and a role model for humanity," she said. "My understanding is that he was a peaceful person who believed that religion was a choice. He tried to teach people and bring them into it, not punish them."

In fact, he said, "Whoever changed his Islamic religion, then kill him'" (Bukhari 9.84.57).

All of the dead appear to be Yazidis, apparently killed in revenge after a Yazidi woman who converted to Islam was stoned to death by relatives. In response, the gunmen killed 23 Yazidis, and one can't rule out further reprisals. "Gunmen kill 23 from tiny sect in Iraq," by Lauren Frayer for The Associated Press:

BAGHDAD - Gunmen in northern Iraq stopped a bus filled with Christians and members of a tiny, mostly Kurdish religious sect on Sunday, police said, separating out the groups and taking 23 of the passengers away to be shot.

The attack came on a violent day in Baghdad, with at least 20 people killed in car bombings, most in a double suicide strike against a police station in a religiously mixed neighborhood.

Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, on a tour abroad to ask the Arab world's Sunni-led governments to help his struggling government stop the violence in Iraq, said he told Egypt's president that Iraq's reality is "not a civil or sectarian war."

Police said the execution-style killings of the Yazidis — a primarily Kurdish sect that worships an angel figure considered to be the devil by some Muslims and Christians — appeared to be in response to the stoning death of a Yazidi woman who had recently converted to Islam.

In the northern Iraq killings, armed men in several cars stopped the bus as it was carrying workers from the Mosul Textile Factory to their hometown of Bashika, which has a mixed population of Christians and Yazidis.

The gunmen checked passengers' identification, then asked the Christians to get off the bus, said police Brig. Mohammed al-Wagga.

With the Yazidis still inside, the gunmen drove them to eastern Mosul, where they were lined up along a wall and shot to death, al-Wagga said.

After the killings, hundreds of Yazidis took to the streets of Bashika, a town in Ninevah province that is 80 percent Yazidi, 15 percent Christian and about five percent Muslim. Shops were shuttered and many Muslims closed themselves in their homes, fearing reprisal attacks.

Abdul-Karim Khalaf, a provincial police spokesman said the executions were in response to the killing two weeks ago of a Yazidi woman who had recently converted to Islam after she fell in love with a Muslim and ran off with him.

Disapproving relatives dragged her back to Bashika, where she was stoned to death, he said. A grainy video showing gruesome scenes of the stoning was distributed on Iraqi Web sites in recent weeks.

A Muslim man who said he released from the bus with six Christians said 10 gunmen stopped the vehicle, then ordered the driver to steer it into a narrow alley, where they ordered the passengers off and separated them according to their identification cards, which indicate the holders' religion.

"Then they asked the Yazidis to get back on the bus. The gunmen started to shout 'God curse your devil' and they were telling the Yazidis that 'It is not your business if the woman decided to convert to Islam," said the passenger, Mustafa Ali Mustafa.

The crackdown on da'wah is both from inside and outside the prison, as it aims to "stop money being sent by sympathisers on the outside to influence inmates to convert to Islam." "Mastermind recruiting Islamic gang inside super jail," by Alex Mitchell for the Sydney Morning Herald:

THE NSW Government has launched a prison crackdown on a group of the state's most dangerous criminals who have converted to Islam.

The targets are held in the highest security jail in Australia, the Super Max facility inside the walls of Goulburn jail, where one in three of the inmates is a Muslim fundamentalist or a convert.

Two prison converts, one a convicted murderer and the other a rapist, have married Muslim women in marriage ceremonies conducted over the telephone on party lines.

Attorney-General John Hatzistergos is introducing sweeping changes to the prison regulations so the Super Max Muslims are monitored 24/7 because of safety and security fears.

"We have to be able to control every movement and every utterance because of the threat they pose," Mr Hatzistergos told The Sun-Herald. "We don't want to see any risk to people either inside or outside the system. We simply can't take our eye off them."

Called the "Super Max Jihadists", they are easily identifiable, with shaven heads, long beards, carrying prayer beads and conducting prayers at least three times a day in their cells.

Their ringleader and powerbroker is Bassam Hamzy, jailed for 21 years for the cold-blooded shooting murder of an 18-year-old man outside the Mr Goodbar nightclub in Oxford Street in 1998.

Prison officers have confiscated pictures of Osama bin Laden from the walls of Hamzy's cell. Prisoners have been captured on surveillance tapes kneeling in front of Hamzy and kissing his hands.

The 37 Super Max inmates, including backpacker serial killer Ivan Milat, have committed 48 murders and are serving combined sentences of 550 years.

Now 12 of them claim adherence to Islam and form a close-knit culture in the purpose-built jail within a jail. Under Mr Hatzistergos's new measures, Hamzy and his apostles will be deemed "extreme high security" and be subject to controls that can be ordered at any time by NSW Corrective Services commissioner Ron Woodham.

The crackdown will stop money being sent by sympathisers on the outside to influence inmates to convert to Islam.

In future, Mr Woodham will have to approve in advance any sums of money sent to inmates' accounts in the "extreme high security" category.

"We don't have a difficulty with people taking up a religion per se in jail," Mr Hatzistergos said.

"A lot of people do and that can be beneficial.

"Where we do draw the line is where religion is really a camouflage for other activities.

"If any person thinks that by taking up religion, that somehow it is going to lead to them being treated differently on a day-to-day basis, they will be sadly mistaken."

He was supported by Mr Woodham, who said: "We're concerned about real heavy criminals who have had no interest in religion at all during their lives but, on coming to jail, then convert to Islam.

"A number of Aboriginal prisoners, unfortunately, doing impossible sentences, have converted to Islam. They denounce their Aboriginality for Islam."

[...]

Mr Hatzistergos, who is also Justice Minister, said the Department of Corrective Services would face justifiable criticism if it didn't act in response to the safety and security of the prison system being compromised. "We make no apologies for it," he said. "We are dealing here with, religion or no religion, some of the worst of the worst offenders who have no respect for authority.

No apologies needed. After all, it's a prison.

Because they're "un-Islamic." Islamic law forbids music (cf. 'Umdat al-Salik r40.1), although this law has of course often been ignored. There is some terrific music created in the Islamic world. And of course there was beginning in the Fifties an Islamic vogue in American jazz, with prominent musicians -- Art Blakey (Abdullah ibn Buhaina), Yusef Lateef -- converting to Islam. Of course music can be and has been used as a vehicle for da'wah: this excellent 1970 recording takes its name from an imprecation against the unbelievers in Qur'an 2:18.

But the law remains -- it has never been reformed or rejected by any significant Islamic authority. Consequently it can always be reasserted, as here.

From AFP, with thanks to Sr. Soph:

PESHAWAR, Pakistan - A homemade bomb blew up three video and music shops in a market in northwest Pakistan where hardliners believe the businesses are un-Islamic, police said Sunday.

The blast happened late Saturday in Swabi, about 100 kilometers (60 miles) northeast of Peshawar, the capital of the deeply conservative North West Frontier Province bordering Afghanistan, they said.

“It destroyed one shop and partially damaged two others, but there were no casualties as the market was closed,” local police chief Fazal Elahi Badshah told AFP.

The blast occurred in the Gulzada Market, which has some 80 shops of CDs, DVDs, tape recorders and also houses groups of bands usually hired to perform in wedding ceremonies, residents said.

Islamic hardliners who say music and movies are un-Islamic have dubbed the shopping complex the “Hell market,” they said, adding that some shopkeepers had received warning letters in the past.

The province has seen previous attacks on video and music shops blamed on extremists emulating the ultra-orthodox Taleban, who ruled Afghanistan from 1996 to 2001.

An extreme Sharia Alert from Baghdad:

American commanders cite al-Qaida's severe brand of Islam, which is so extreme that in Baqouba, al-Qaida has warned street vendors not to place tomatoes beside cucumbers because the vegetables are different genders, Col. David Sutherland said.

From "Insurgents battling al-Qaida outside Baghdad, U.S. says," by Todd Pitman for The Associated Press (thanks to the Constantinopolitan Irredentist).

From Michelle Vu in the Gospel Herald:

The most populous country in Africa will witness its first civilian-civilian democratic handover of the presidency on Saturday when the outgoing Christian president of Nigeria will likely be succeeded by one of three Muslim candidates in the country plagued by years of Christian-Muslim strife.

President Olusegun Obasanjo’s election in 1999 ended 15 years of almost completely military rule. There are no Christian candidates among the current presidential front-runners, but Christians are said to favor Umar Musa Yar’adua of the People’s Democratic Party who is thought to be more sympathetic than the other candidates, according to Open Doors USA.

The other candidates are vice president Atiku Abubakar of the Action Congress and former military ruler Muhammadu Buhari of the All Nigeria Peoples Party.

Christians in Nigeria and abroad have raised concern about the effect of a new Muslim president on religious freedom in the country, especially after recent shocking persecution events.

"If there's a Muslim-elected president – and the two leading candidates are both Muslim - Christian rights in that country will continue to suffer," Open Doors USA president Car Moeller told Mission Network News. "We know that Nigeria is the home to some of the largest and fastest growing churches in Africa. However, there's also a great deal of persecution going on in the northern states."

A Christian teacher was recently brutally beaten and burned alive by her students in a Muslim dominated northern town. Two days later in the same town, an evangelical church was burned.

Nigeria’s population of 135 million is nearly equally divided between Muslims and Christians, with Muslims primarily settling in the north and Christians in the south. Since democracy was restored in 1999, there have been at least 15,000 deaths due to religious, communal or political violence, according to BBC.

Yet Obasanjo remains hopeful that Saturday’s election will move Nigeria one step closer to setting up a strong democratic nation. The president along with the country’s citizens hope the federal election on Saturday will turn out better than last week’s state election where accusations of vote-rigging, fraud and violence marred the event. At least 21 people were killed throughout the country last weekend and many fear a similar scenario will take place on Saturday, according to The Associated Press.

"Let us seize the high tide of history," said Obasanjo, according to AP. "Never have we progressed this far in our democratic journey."

"I appeal to all Nigerians to exercise their civic responsibility of voting peacefully, diligently and without indulging in any malpractices."

The Nigerian federal election will be keenly watched by the world which depends on the country’s oil being that it is the world’s sixth biggest oil exporter and Africa’s biggest oil producer, according to Agence France-Presse.

"The world is watching us and we cannot afford to disappoint ourselves, our friends and the world," said Obasanjo on Friday, according to AFP.

Nigeria’s 61 million registered voters will elect their next president and more than 300 lawmakers in Nigeria’s federal legislature at 120,000 polling centers on Saturday.

The new government will take power on May 29.

One has the sneaking suspicion that President Obasanjo's optimism about "democracy" may be rather naive as Nigeria makes the transition to a Muslim administration. It certainly does not bode well for Nigerian Christians or for the rest of us in dar al-harb. One fears that Nigeria may be about to go down the path of Algeria, Lebanon, Bosnia, etc., etc. If so - what will the West do about it?

By Stephen Boykewich in the Turkish Daily News:

One of the fiercest enemies Russia ever saw, Dagestani resistance leader Imam Shamil helped launch a holy war in this mountain village in 1829 -- and from the shouting in the street, the struggle is not yet over.

"If you want a war, declare a war, but this is mockery!" cried Patima, a woman in her 50s who appeared on a cobbled lane beside the mosque that villagers said Imam Shamil had helped build with his own hands.

Elite police troops had raided the town two nights before, demonstrating that in Imam Shamil's birthplace, his anti-Russian battle was as fresh to the authorities as it was to the villagers.

Magomed Ibraimov, the pot-bellied deputy head of the village administration, first denied there had been a raid, then relented as villagers accosted him.

Special forces targeted Ghimri "because Imam Shamil and Imam Gazimagomed grew up here," he told AFP, referring to the village's most famous son and his childhood friend and fellow "freedom fighter."

"They began the very first war against Russia, they started it all, and that's why everybody wants to find something here."

Today's Russian authorities say they are combating separatists and Muslim radicals in the North Caucasus, all the way from Kabardino-Balkaria to Ingushetia, Chechnya and Dagestan.

[...]

Residents said special forces had filled the night with machinegun fire and dragged three young men out into the steep, winding lanes of the village of 3,600. They said the three hadn't been heard from since.

"There was no reason for it, no evidence, and it wasn't the first time. We're sick of this!" Fatima said. "Three grandmothers -- forgive me for saying this -- pissed themselves from fear at the sound of the machine guns. My 72-year-old mother nearly died of fright."

Ibraimov insisted that the radical Islam advocated by Imam Shamil had not taken root, as did Ruslan Dzhamalov, a federal migration service official based in Ghimri. But Dzhamalov also said Imam Shamil cast a long shadow there.

"It's historical," he said. "We Dagestanis never forget our history."

[...]

While Dagestan never saw the separatist fighting in the post-Soviet era that engulfed Chechnya from 1994-96 and again from 1999, guerrillas still carry out dozens of attacks each year, mostly against police.

A Chechen namesake of the 19th century imam, Shamil Basayev, often crossed the border into the Dagestani mountains before his death last year.

Officials and residents in Ghimri denied there were guerrillas there, referring cryptically to "two or three bad seeds."

A source close to law enforcement in the regional capital Makhachkala, however, said Islamist groups were deeply rooted in Ghimri, and that the raid had been ordered to secure the area before a delegation of foreign journalists were brought to the region.

"They are there," he said of the guerrillas. "They haven't all been caught, and they won't be."

And while most Dagestanis say they cannot imagine a life independent from Moscow, which provides 70 percent of the poverty-stricken region's budget, many grow uneasy when asked whether Imam Shamil was right to surrender in 1859 and cede control of the region to Russia.

"We're not saying he struggled in vain," said Eduard Urazayev, the region's minister for nationalities, choosing his words carefully. "But in the end, life is quieter and more stable for us under Russia's wing. We put our confidence in that."

Terror may be the symptom, but as usual, officials stop short of naming the cause: jihad. "Citing terror threat, U.S. boosts security in Germany," by Louis Charbonneau for Reuters:

BERLIN (Reuters) - The U.S. embassy in Germany said on Friday it was boosting security at its facilities in response to what it described as an increased threat of terrorism there.

Neither U.S. nor German officials would provide specific details, but one diplomat said the steps were taken to guard against a particular threat and two newspapers reported that Iraqi militants were scouting U.S. facilities in Germany.

"U.S. diplomatic and consular facilities in Germany are increasing their security posture," the embassy said in a statement sent by email.

"We are taking these steps in response to a heightened threat situation. The U.S. embassy encourages Americans in Germany to increase their vigilance and take appropriate steps to bolster their own personal security."

An official at the embassy said the announcement was related to an increased threat of terrorism, citing recent warnings by Germany's BKA federal police.

This view was echoed by U.S. State Department spokesman Tom Casey, who said in Washington he was not aware of any specific, credible threat that led the embassy to issue its warning.

Germany's interior ministry said the tightening of security came amidst signs that U.S. facilities were at higher risk.

"German security officials share these concerns and have been working closely with the U.S. side to ensure appropriate measures are taken," it said in a statement.

Germany, which holds the rotating presidency of the European Union, has not recently suffered a major attack like Spain and Britain, but government and intelligence officials have urged vigilance in recent months.

DANGER LEVEL HIGH

This week a German newspaper quoted Interior Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble as saying the threat of attacks by Islamist militants had increased in past months and become more specific.

"The danger level is high," Schaeuble said.

According to Germany's Tagesspiegel newspaper, U.S. intelligence services warned this month that members of Ansar al Sunna, an Islamist group fighting the U.S. occupation in Iraq, had conducted surveillance on U.S. sites in southern Germany.

Asked about the Tagesspiegel report, the State Department's Casey said: "Never heard of that, sorry."

Die Welt newspaper cited security sources as saying that German and U.S. intelligence services had received new information relating to possible attacks on U.S. facilities in Germany by Iraqi militants.

But the Feds say it's no big deal. A jaw-dropping story from the Arizona Republic: "Palo Verde software is breached: Ex-employee used it during trip to Iran, officials say," by Robert Anglen and Ken Alltucker (thanks to LGF):

Federal authorities are accusing a former engineer at Palo Verde Nuclear Generating Station of illegally taking software codes to Iran and downloading details of control rooms, reactors and designs of the nation's largest nuclear plant.

Officers arrested Mohammad "Mo" Alavi, 49, in Los Angeles this month and charged him with one count of violating a trade embargo, which prohibits Americans from exporting goods and services to Iran.

Authorities say there is no evidence to suggest the use of the software was linked to terrorists or the Iranian government, which has clashed with the U.S. over attempts to develop a nuclear program.

"The investigation has not led us to believe this information was taken for the purpose of being used by a foreign government or terrorists to attack us," FBI spokeswoman Deborah McCarley told The Arizona Republic on Friday. "This does not appear to be terrorist-related."

Then for what purpose, exactly, would an individual take software codes, details of control rooms, reactors and designs of the nation's largest nuclear plant to Iran and deliver them to anyone?

Officials with Arizona Public Service Co., which operates Palo Verde, said the software does not pose a security risk because it doesn't control any of the nuclear plant's operating systems and is mostly used to train employees.

But they acknowledged that they changed procedures after the incident to prohibit former employees from accessing software when they leave the company. No such procedure was in place when Alavi quit APS in August after working there for 16 years.

A Nuclear Regulatory Commission official said Friday that "this incident has not compromised plant security."

The incident is the latest in a string of problems that has plagued the nuclear power plant, located 50 miles west of downtown Phoenix.

Alavi, an Iranian native who has lived in the United States as a naturalized citizen since 1976, is being held without bail in California. Alavi's lawyer said Friday that he denies any wrongdoing.

"Mr. Alavi is a U.S. citizen. He respects the court process, and he asserts his innocence," said Milagros Cisneros of the Federal Defender's Office in Phoenix. She said the government's indictment of her client is "more smoke than fire."

She declined to address specific allegations in the indictment, including whether Alavi gained unauthorized access to software and bought a laptop computer weeks before he resigned and moved to Iran.

A federal judge in Phoenix denied Alavi bail Friday, saying he posed a substantial flight risk.

"If released, it would not be difficult for him to sever electronic monitoring and leave the country by land," Judge Neil Wake said. "Ultimately, returning to Iran would require some effort but would not be difficult once he left the United States.

"Alavi's most important associations - family, home, business investment, intended employment and future plans - are all with Iran, not the United States."

Alavi faces up to 21 months in prison if convicted of the charge. One factor in determining any sentence could be whether the software and schematics of Palo Verde landed in the wrong hands, Wake said.

Alavi was arrested at Los Angeles International Airport on April 9 when he returned from Iran to join his wife, who arrived in the United States two weeks earlier to give birth to their child.

Instant citizen. But if he lived here for 30 years, where has his wife been all this time?

Wake said Alavi intended to immediately return to Iran to live.

"He has no intention of resuming residence in the United States," Wake said. "He is seeking employment in Iran, having invested $60,000 in a company with the expectation of getting employment. Alavi owns a house in Tehran valued at $150,000, in which relatives live."

So a man who lived here for 30 years and was an engineer in a nuclear plant is now suddenly going to live in Ahmadinejad's Iran, and we should not think anything is amiss.

Alavi's only connections to the United States, the judge said, are a $200,000 retirement fund, his friends, citizenship "and the possibility that he may want to return if he becomes disappointed in his plan to make his life in Iran."

Gee, why would he be disappointed in Iran?

Authorities say he recently deposited $98,000 into a U.S. bank account.

They also say Alavi's motivation for taking the software was to help set up his life in Iran.

After his resignation, authorities said, Alavi told fellow employees at Palo Verde and his apartment landlord that he was going to visit Iran for a few weeks and would then return to the United States and look for a new job.

But a month before giving his resignation notice, authorities said, Alavi bought a laptop computer and used it to download the 3KeyMaster software system.

The software is used to train employees on the operation of nuclear reactors.

It provides employees with emergency scenarios and instructs them to react with proper procedures. According to court records, the system contains detailed information on the reactor control rooms as well as maps, drawings, schematics and designs of the power plant.

Authorities said Alavi asked a Palo Verde software engineer to recommend a laptop and help him obtain a user name and password to access the software system.

Another employee saw Alavi with that laptop in the simulator room, with a 3KeyMasterand screen displayed. The employee didn't raise any alarms.

On Aug. 9, Alavi bought a one-way ticket to Tehran, Iran. His last day at the company was Aug. 14. Two days later, he left the country with his wife. In October, authorities say, the software system was accessed from a person using the Palo Verde user ID in Tehran.

An Al-Qaeda group operating in Gaza. "Militants blow up part of American school in Gaza," from Reuters, with thanks to Sr. Soph:

GAZA - Palestinian militants blew up parts of the American International School in Gaza on Saturday, causing damage but no injuries, Palestinian security sources and witnesses said.

The security sources and school officials said the militants detonated three explosive devices in two of the buildings of the school in the northern Gaza Strip. The blast occurred before the start of the school day and no one was injured in the attack.

“A large number of masked gunmen attacked the school at dawn. They poured petrol all around and blew up several explosive devices and destroyed some of the premises,” said Rebhi Salem, the school’s director.

The gunmen identified themselves as an Al Qaeda organization operating in Gaza, Salem said. There have been a rash of attacks in Gaza in recent months attributed to Islamist groups that claim to be followers of Al Qaeda.

The school is a private institution that is part of an association of “American Schools” in the Middle East. The curriculum stresses English as well as Arabic studies. None of the teachers are American.

Lal Masjid Update from the Times of India, with thanks to Sr. Soph:

ISLAMABAD: Notwithstanding the nationwide rallies which are being held against attempts to enforce strict Islamic law here, a radical cleric has said that dance and music would not be permitted in Pakistan and those interested in these should go to India.

"We will not wait more. It will now be Sharia (law) or shahadat (martyrdom)," said Maulana Abdul Aziz, one of the clerics of Lal Masjid who have threatened to impose the strict Islamic law in a month's time in the capital.

In his Friday prayer sermon, he said those interested in dance and music should go to India, the media here reported.

Aziz vowed to enforce Sharia in the country even if the government did not itself do so, saying the Sharia would be enforced at any cost for which the whole nation should support the mosque's management.

"We don't need the government's help for the enforcement of an Islamic system because we are capable enough to do it without its assistance," he said.

His comments came as moderate political parties like Muttahida Quami Movement (MQM), Pakistan People's Party (PPP) and human rights and women rights groups held massive rallies all over Pakistan, opposing threats by the Lal Masjid clerics and their supporters to resort to moral policing and impose Sharia law.

The New Duranty Times rakes in another Pulitzer for a piece that would have made old Walter Duranty proud.

By Gary Shapiro for the New York Sun, with thanks to Ruth King:

A feature by a New York Times reporter, Andrea Elliott, that this week was awarded a Pulitzer Prize has come under fire from critics because it did not mention that a murderer who committed a 1994 terrorist attack had been incited by a former imam at the Islamic Society of Bay Ridge, as well as for portraying a succeeding imam as moderate when he had praised the leader of Hamas and a female suicide bomber.

"The article is not complete," a Middle East terrorism specialist at the American Jewish Committee, Yehudit Barsky, said. In a letter to the editor published in the New York Times on March 12, 2006, Ms. Barsky raised the fact an anti-Semitic sermon of a former imam, Mohammed Moussa, was cited as motivation for the killing of a rabbinical student, Ari Halberstam.

Pulitzer Prize entrants are supposed to tell jurors about any "significant challenges" to their work, the administrator of the Pulitzer Prizes, Sig Gissler, said.

Asked if the Pulitzer board did review any challenges, Mr. Gissler said the deliberations are confidential. "We don't disclose what does or does not come before the board," he said.

Not surprising.

It just wouldn't be summer without the "Modesty Guard" corps. By Dudi Cohen for Ynet News:

Iran has announced the launch of "Operation Cover-up" next week in attempt to control young men and women who have deviated from the country's Islamic dress codes and adopted "too Western" an appearance.

Deputy commander of the Iranian police force warned women that "the police will operate against women who dress like models in town. Women that are arrested will be taken to four centers, where they will receive guidance and advice. They will commit in writing not to dress in violation of the dress code again, and they will be released only after their families come to pick them up and bring them proper attire."

According to Iranian law, women must wear the hijab head covering, a veil to hide women's hair which constitutes a symbol of female modesty in Islam.

Each year the Iranian administration announces an "Operation Cover-up" ahead of summer, when the weather warms up and sleeves start getting shorter. The rest of the year, the "Modesty Guard", made up of a volunteer staff, patrols the streets and comments to women who do not maintain a sufficiently modest appearance.

In addition to the hijab, Iranian women are required to wear a long coat to conceal any trace of the outline of their figure.

Letting loose

In spite of the strict dress code, in recent years many women in Iran, especially in the larger cities, have been testing the limits and overlooking the laws, in particular regarding the head covering. Many women can be seen in Tehran's streets letting more and more hair out from under their head scarves and donning shorter, hip-length jackets and tight-fitting shirts.

The Islamic dress code also applies to non-Islamic women, as well as to tourists visiting Iran.

And not only women need be concerned, but men as well. The Tehran police commander announced that "the first phase of the operation, which starts on Saturday, will focus on women. The second phase will also deal with men who dress inappropriately."

Short pants, T-shirts with "harmful slogans" and chains with "certain ornamentation" are included in the list of forbidden male attire.

The goal of the operation, according to Tehran police, is to ensure "moral behavior in society."

The election of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in June, 2005, raised expectations that the new administration would exhibit stricter determination in enforcing public dress codes.

Despite this, there have been no signs of a change of policy, and the government has noted on multiple occasions that it prefers to encourage the public to dress according to Islamic values in manners that avoid the use of force.

It would rather not use force, but clearly won't rule it out.

While learned Western analysts call for negotiations with the Brotherhood and pretend that it is somehow "moderate."

"Muslim Brotherhood General Guide Muhammad Mahdi 'Akef's Weekly Sermon Calls For Attacks in Palestine, Iraq, and Afghanistan: Direct Energy Of Resistance At Real Enemy 'Concealed In Jerusalem,'" from the MEMRI Blog, with thanks to Sr. Soph:

In his weekly sermon, the general guide of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, Muhammad Mahdi 'Akef, called for attacks in Palestine, Iraq, and Afghanistan.

He said that the U.S.'s plan was based on imposed rule according to a unilateral view characterized by extremism without taking into account the simplest principles of the unique faith, culture, and society of other peoples.

'Akef called for directing the energy of the resistance, with all the means at its disposal, towards the real enemy of the nation, the occupying, murdering, torturing, and plundering enemy of all good things, the enemy concealed in Jerusalem, Baghdad, and Kabul, the enemy who thinks itself the only human race with the right to live, even at the expense of abandoning the others.

Source: www.ikhwan.com, April 20, 2007

"The international tender for construction of the two nuclear power plants ... is a good yardstick to test the Westerners' good will," so be a sport and help us build a front operation for our weapons program. "Iran invites West to build nuclear plants," from the Associated Press:

Tehran on Friday invited Western nations to participate in the construction of nuclear power plants across Iran, in the latest round of the country reiterating its tough stance on a disputed nuclear issue.

"The invitation would test the West's good will and restore Iran's trust in the West, shaken after the years of the country's suspension of nuclear activities," Vice President Gholam Reza Aghazadeh said.

It comes after Iran announced on Monday an international bid for the building of two more nuclear power plants, despite international pressures to curb its controversial program.

Tehran says the plants would be light-water reactors, each with the capacity to generate up to 1,600 megawatts of electricity and would cost up to $1.7 billion and take up to 11 years to construct. It was not immediately known if there were responses to the bid.

"The international tender for construction of the two nuclear power plants ... is a good yardstick to test the Westerners' good will," Aghazadeh told the official IRNA news agency but did not mention any specific country.

Aghazadeh said that Iran will never again stop uranium enrichment and vowed that Tehran will continue to work around the clock to install more centrifuges at its underground enrichment plant in Natanz, until all 50,000 planned centrifuges are in place, IRNA reported.

Aghazadeh claimed that Iran showed good will when it suspended uranium enrichment in 2003 for three years, but later lost trust in Western nations after learning they were seeking a permanent halt to Iran's nuclear activities rather than guarantees the program would not be diverted to weapons making. "Therefore, we won't repeat this experience," he said of the possibility of another suspension.

Something verifiable? Sorry, no deal.

An update on this story.

"Turkish doctor details torture of victims at publishing house," from Agence France Presse, with thanks to Bear:

MALATYA, Turkey: Three Protestants murdered at a Christian publishing house here were tortured for three hours before their assailants slit their throats, a press report said Friday, quoting one of the doctors involved in the grisly case. Dr. Murat Ugras, a spokesman for the Turgut Ozal Medical center, told the daily Hurriyet of hospital surgeons' fruitless efforts to save Ugur Yuksel, one of the three victims of the massacre at the Zirve (summit) publishing house, which distributed Christian literature.

"He had scores of knife cuts on his thighs, his testicles, his rectum and his back," Ugras said. "His fingers were sliced to the bone. It is obvious that these wounds had been inflicted to torture him," he said.

The two others who were killed, Necati Aydin, pastor of Malatya's tiny Protestant community, and German Tilmann Geske, a Malatya resident with his wife and three children since 2003, were also tortured, press reports said.

The abuse lasted for three hours as the five men detained at the crime scene interrogated the three on their missionary activities, they said.

"We tied their hands and feet and later gagged them," the mass daily Sabah quoted one of the suspects as telling police.

"Emre slit their throats," said the youth, who was not identified, referring to Emre Gunaydin, the alleged leader of the gang, who is at the same hospital in serious condition after jumping out of the publishers' third floor office in a bid to flee police.

More calls for genocide, while the world yawns.

"Acting Speaker of the Palestinian Legislative Council Sheik Ahmad Bahr from Hamas, Declared during a Friday Sermon at a Sudan Mosque that America and Israel Will Be Annihilated and Called upon Allah to Kill the Jews and the Americans 'to the Very Last One,'" from MEMRITV, with thanks to all who sent this in:

Following are excerpts from a sermon delivered by Ahmad Bahr, acting speaker of the Palestinian Legislative Council, which aired on Sudan TV on April 13, 2007.

Ahmad Bahr: "You will be victorious" on the face of this planet. You are the masters of the world on the face of this planet. Yes, [the Koran says that] "you will be victorious," but only "if you are believers." Allah willing, "you will be victorious," while America and Israel will be annihilated, Allah willing. I guarantee you that the power of belief and faith is greater than the power of America and Israel. They are cowards, as is said in the Book of Allah: "You shall find them the people most eager to protect their lives." They are cowards, who are eager for life, while we are eager for death for the sake of Allah. That is why America's nose was rubbed in the mud in Iraq, in Afghanistan, in Somalia, and everywhere.

[...]
America will be annihilated, while Islam will remain. The Muslims "will be victorious, if you are believers." Oh Muslims, I guarantee you that the power of Allah is greater than America, by whom many are blinded today. Some people are blinded by the power of America. We say to them that with the might of Allah, with the might of His Messenger, and with the power of Allah, we are stronger than America and Israel.

[...]

The Palestinian woman bids her son farewell, and says to him: "Son, go and don't be a coward. Go, and fight the Jews." He bids her farewell and carries out a martyrdom operation. What did this Palestinian woman say when she was asked for her opinion, after the martyrdom of her son? She said: "My son is my own flesh and blood. I love my son, but my love for Allah and His Messenger is greater than my love for my son." Yes, this is the message of the Palestinian woman, who was over seventy years old – Fatima Al-Najjar. She was over seventy years old, but she blew herself up for the sake of Allah, bringing down many criminal Zionists.

[...]

Oh Allah, vanquish the Jews and their supporters. Oh Allah, vanquish the Americans and their supporters. Oh Allah, count their numbers, and kill them all, down to the very last one. Oh Allah, show them a day of darkness. Oh Allah, who sent down His Book, the mover of the clouds, who defeated the enemies of the Prophet – defeat the Jews and the Americans, and bring us victory over them.

In order to target the West more efficiently.

"Al-Qaeda seeks to expand its operations," by Stephen Fidler and Roula Khalaf in the Financial Times, with thanks to Jeffrey Imm:

Al-Qaeda is reaching out from its base in Pakistan to turn militant Islamist groups in the Middle East and Africa into franchises charged with intensifying attacks on western targets, according to European officials and terrorism specialists.

The development could see radical groups use al-Qaeda expertise to switch their attention from local targets to western interests in their countries and abroad. “For al-Qaeda, this is a force multiplier,” said a British official who follows terrorism.

One of the first signs of the development was an announcement on September 11 last year by Ayman al-Zawahiri, al-Qaeda’s number two, of a “merger” between al-Qaeda in the Maghreb and Algeria’s Salafist Group for Call and Combat, known by its French initials, GSPC.

Western officials expect to see a similar merger be­tween al-Qaeda and the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, a mainly exiled organisation devoted until now to the overthrow of Muammer Gadaffi, the Libyan leader.

They say there are signs that similar moves are under way in Lebanon, Syria and East Africa and that there is an effort to unite militant groups across north Africa.

The Algerian “merger” was followed by a series of attacks, culminating in two suicide bombings last week that killed 33 and wounded 220. It is too early to say whether last week’s attacks were influenced by al-Qaeda central, officials said. The targeting – including of the prime minister’s residence – was ambitious but traditional for the GSPC, analysts said. However, before these latest attacks, Algeria had suffered only one suicide bomb.

John VI Cantacuzenes Alert. Israel has every reason to deplore this.

By Ryan R. Jones for All Headline News, with thanks to Nariz:

Jerusalem, Israel (AHN) - Visiting U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates on Thursday told his Israeli hosts that the Bush administration will go forward with the sale of smart bombs to Saudi Arabia, despite Jerusalem's protests.

Israel fears Saudi's possession of the weapons will erode its qualitative military edge in the region, and has argued that if the current regime in Riyadh is overthrown - not an uncommon occurrence in the Middle East - the highly-accurate Joint Direct Attack Munition (JDAM) bombs could reach the hands of extremists.

Gates sought to allay the Israeli concerns, insisting that Washington remains committed to the Jewish state's military edge over neighbors that have three times tried to destroy it.

In remarks carried by The Jerusalem Post, Gates said Israel should see the deal in terms of the "overall strategic environment," supporting earlier reports that the JDAM sale to Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states is meant to bolster regional opponents of Iran's growing influence.

Andrew Bostom has just completed a new collection of resource material, The Legacy of Islamic Antisemitism. I have seen it, and it is fantastic work, definitively laying to rest the common canard that Islamic antisemitism is an import from Christianity, and has no roots in the Qur'an or Islamic tradition.

In this American Thinker piece, he uses a bit of the massive amount of material he has gathered to evaluate the curious incident of Dr. Walid Fataihi, his inflammatory words after 9/11, and his more recent apology:

Two months after the mass murdering acts of jihad terrorism on 9/11/01, Dr. Walid Fataihi, director of "outreach" for the Islamic Society of Boston (ISB), who still serves on the ISB Board of Directors, boasted that this carnage engendered two related "successes" -enhanced Muslim proselytization efforts, and damage to Christian-Jewish relations in the U.S.

Fitaihi crowed,

"...the Muslim community in the U.S. in general, and in Boston in particular, has begun to trouble the Zionist lobby."

He continued triumphantly, quoting the Koran (3:112/ 2:61 (see also this).

The words of the Koran on this matter are true: "They [the Jews] will be humiliated wherever they are found, unless they are protected under a covenant with Allah, or a covenant with another people. They [the Jews] have incurred Allah's wrath and they have been afflicted with misery. That is because they continuously rejected the Signs of Allah and were after slaying the Prophets without just cause, and this resulted from their disobedience and their habit of transgression." The great Allah spoke words of truth. Their covenant with America is the strongest possible in the U.S., but it is weaker than they think, and one day their covenant with the [American] people will be cut off.

During a private meeting with some 25 lay and religious leaders convened at the Workmen's Circle in Brookline, Massachusetts on April 6, 2007-nearly 5 ½ years later-Fitaihi was reported to have offered a belated apology for his November 11, 2001 remarks. The dubious sincerity of this putative act of contrition aside-it occurred as the ISB is embroiled in a bitter and debilitating legal dispute with members of the local Jewish community-did Fitaihi actually apologize for invoking Koran 3:112/2:61, and their virulently antisemitic contents?

But did he really apologize? Read it all.

Did Christa Datz-Winter draft this proposal?

"Opposition to EU divorce rules plan," from DPA, with thanks to Sr. Soph:

Luxembourg (dpa) - A European Union proposal that would allow the laws of non-EU countries to be applicable in divorce cases ran into fierce opposition from Sweden on Thursday.

Liberal Sweden strongly resists the plan, which it says could force EU member states to dissolve marriages on the basis of foreign law, including traditional Islamic law, or Sharia.

"It is not acceptable that the planned rules would lead to Swedish courts having to apply foreign law," a Swedish diplomat told reporters at a meeting of EU foreign ministers in Luxembourg.

Germany is pushing for new rules under which international couples, prior to marriage, would be able to set out in a contract which country's laws will reign in a divorce court.

Germany currently holds the rotating EU presidency.

Stay tuned for the outcry, and I expect that it will come not just from Muslims on civil rights and victimization grounds, but from people, non-Muslim or Muslim, behaving in a manner that the camera deems suspicious, but who don't turn out to have been doing anything untoward. From WorldNetDaily.com, with thanks to D. C. Watson:

Britain's national security service MI5 is testing surveillance cameras in enclaves of London and other Muslim-dominated area of Britain where terrorists are known to operate.

Based on the latest satellite technology, the $10,000 cameras have a ring of eight powerful lenses that can provide a panoramic view.

Software in the system can also indicate up to 50 behavior traits to identify a person "as a potential terrorist."

Within a year the cameras will be able to signify "facial movements indicating tension and other furtive behavior," confirmed an MI5 officer.

Known as "The Bug," the camera can pinpoint "individual groups loitering or acting in a suspicious manner," the officer added.

The moment a target is identified, a ninth lens mounted on the base of the system zooms in and follows every move of suspected individuals.

"It can track him down a street, in and out of a building and follow him as he drives away," said the MI5 officer.

The cameras have undergone exhaustive tests in Muslim areas of London, Bradford, Luton and other Midland cities.

Can telescreens be far behind?

Can you give to the Nazi Party too?

"Sheik 'committed no offence,'" from AAP, with thanks to Paying Attention:

It is unlikely controversial mufti Sheik Taj Aldin Alhilali committed an offence if he gave charity money donated by Sydney Muslims to Hezbollah, Australian Federal Police Commissioner Mick Keelty says.

The claims are being investigated by the Australian Federal Police as a possible breach of Australia's anti-terrorism laws.

But Mr Keelty today said if proved to be correct it was more likely to be an issue of governance than an offence.

"We are obviously looking at the circumstances surrounding the donations, but I would caution against any speculation about any offence being committed here," Mr Keelty said.

"I suspect that it's more an issue of governance and the governance arrangements about the money.

"I wouldn't certainly be speculating that there would be any intension for us to charge or take action against Mr Alhilali," he said.

Why, of course not!

A new low in jihadist propaganda. By Abdul Sattar for Associated Press:

KILI FAQIRAN, Pakistan - The boy with the knife looks barely 12. In a high-pitched voice, he denounces the bound, blindfolded man before him as an American spy. Then he hacks off the captive's head to cries of "God is great!" and hoists it in triumph by the hair.

A video circulating in Pakistan records the grisly death of Ghulam Nabi, a Pakistani militant accused of betraying a top Taliban official who was killed in a December airstrike in Afghanistan.

An Associated Press reporter confirmed Nabi's identity by visiting his family in Kili Faqiran, their remote village in southwestern Pakistan.

The video, which was obtained by AP Television News in the border city of Peshawar on Tuesday, appears authentic and is unprecedented in jihadist propaganda because of the youth of the executioner.

Captions mention Mullah Dadullah, the Taliban's current top commander in southern Afghanistan, although he does not appear in the video. The soundtrack features songs praising Taliban supreme leader Mullah Omar and "Sheikh Osama" — an apparent reference to Osama bin Laden, who is suspected of hiding along the Afghan-Pakistan border.

The footage shows Nabi making what is described as a confession, being blindfolded with a checkered scarf.

"He is an American spy. Those who do this kind of thing will get this kind of fate," says his baby-faced executioner, who is not identified.

A continuous 2 1/2-minute shot then shows the victim lying on his side on a patch of rubble-strewn ground. A man holds Nabi by his beard while the boy, wearing a camouflage military jacket and oversized white sneakers, cuts into the throat. Other men and boys call out "Allahu akbar!" — "God is great!" — as blood spurts from the wound.

The film, overlain with jihadi songs, then shows the boy hacking and slashing at the man's neck until the head is severed.

[...]

The method of Nabi's death was not unusual for Pakistan's lawless tribal regions. Suspected informers are regularly found beheaded and dumped along the side of the road in the lawless, mountainous regions along the Afghan-Pakistani border where al-Qaida and Taliban militants find sanctuary.

But such al-Qaida-style killings are rarely featured in the Taliban's increasingly frequent propaganda videos. The use of a child to conduct the beheading stands out even among those filmed by militants in Iraq.

[...]

Sam Zarifi, Asia research director for Human Rights Watch, said the use of a child to commit such an act constituted a war crime and was a "new low" in the conflict in Afghanistan.

He noted the Taliban had teenage combatants but they were not recruited on a large scale because of the availability of adult fighters. He said he had seen children in the background of some jihadist videos but none in which they were directly involved in violence.

"I don't know why they would do this," Zarifi said. "The Taliban have to some extent tried to play to the public in Afghanistan and have not engaged in the complete sowing of mayhem that we have seen in Iraq. But this kind of act is really egregious. It's off the charts."

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

"Severed heads delivered to military," from Agence France-Presse, with thanks to all who sent this in:

Al-Qaeda-linked extremists ordered civilians to deliver the severed heads of seven Christians to military outposts in the southern Philippine island of Jolo, the army said today.

The six road workers and a fisherman were kidnapped in separate incidents on Monday by the Abu Sayyaf extremist group amid a military operation against the Muslim movement.

Yesterday afternoon, the driver of a commuter minibus was flagged down and ordered to deliver a sack containing two heads to a military outpost in Parang town.

A few hours later the other five heads turned up at an outpost in Indanan, said regional military spokesman Major Eugene Batara, after being delivered by local residents in another sack.

"We don't know where the bodies are but the operations against the Abu Sayyaf will continue,'' Maj Batara said....

Abu Sayyaf commander Al Bader Parad, who seized the seven men, had earlier demanded a ransom of five million pesos ($125,000) for the hostages but the local government had said it could not pay it....

More than 8000 troops are on the island with orders from President Gloria Arroyo to crush the Abu Sayyaf.

The group has been blamed for a series of bomb attacks in the Philippines in recent years as well as high-profile kidnappings of Christians, foreigners and missionaries.

According to Aafaq, the dean of student affairs at American International University, Abu Hamza Hijji, responded, writing that Allah the Most Merciful forbids praying for mercy for the non-Muslim dead, or even for the non-Muslim living, and that it is only permitted to pray that they be rightly guided. He added that what happened was a sad occurrence, but that does not give Muslims the right to transgress the laws of Allah the Most Merciful. – from this article

News of this reply, by the Muslim dean at American University, should be spread far and wide.

It will shock many, and it will attract the attention of a great many, for it connects to an event that has, and will receive, a great deal of coverage. Merely pointing out what is the standard Muslim view of not praying for Infidels, when those Infidels have just been murdered, will allow for a discussion of a much larger question. But think of the hypotheticals. Did Muslims pray for the victims of the 9/ll attacks? Of course not (many celebrated, in fact). What if the attacker at Virginia Tech had been a Muslim? Would Muslims then have prayed for those killed? Answer: of course not.

What does this answer from the American University dean point up? (He is no doubt chagrined that an Arabic-speaker was eavesdropping and could write about it, as Mohammed Ibn Guadi has.) It points up how, in Islam, there is a complete division of the world between Believer and Infidel. Until someone is following "the right path," he has no claim to sympathy or loyalty of any kind. That is owed by Believers only to Believers. There is nothing of the human fellow-feeling that has developed in all other religions, so that one can certainly sympathize with, and help protect, others not of the same faith -- see Liviu Librescu, holding the door against the gunman with his body, so his students could escape.

One jihadist killed. Apparently officials believe he was planning "possible suicide bomb attacks on mosques in Novi Pazar." Takfir in action.

"Wahhabi killed in clash with police," from B92 News, with thanks to all who sent this in:

NOVI PAZAR, PRIŠTINA -- One person was killed, and two wounded early Friday in a clash between police and a group of Wahhabis near Novi Pazar.

Around 4:50 a.m. Friday police arrived in the village of Donja Trnava near Nov