November 2008 Archives

Who said that? What greasy Islamophobe dared to call into question the sincerity or adequacy of Muslim condemnations of terrorism?

Would you believe Khaled al-Jenfawi, a columnist for Kuwait's Al-Seyassah daily?

Anyway, in this story, "Muslims condemn Mumbai attacks, worry about image," by Karin Laub for The Associated Press, November 30, Muslim leaders and spokesmen worry a great deal about the possibility that these jihad attacks in Mumbai by a Tiny Minority of Extremists™ will lead people to think ill of Islam.

Of course, there is one thing they could do about that that would actually begin to make people think better of Islam, but no one even whispers anything about doing it in this article or anywhere else. And that would be to begin to saturate mosques and madrassas with the message that jihad warfare is never justified, that the imperative to subjugate unbelievers under the rule of Islamic law must be decisively rejected, and that peaceful coexistence as equals with unbelievers is to be maintained indefinitely. If Islamic clerics stopped talking about conquering Europe and America, and began to teach the opposite, things might begin to improve. If Muslim leaders worldwide energetically pronounced takfir upon -- that is, declared to be non-Muslim -- all those who maintained belief in the Qur'an's literal words of warfare, and in the traditional Islamic doctrines regarding jihad warfare (whether hot war or otherwise), and upon anyone who wished to impose Sharia upon unbelievers by whatever means and at whatever speed, and if those leaders demonstrated their sincerity by actions instead of mere words, informed non-Muslims might begin to think better of Islam.

But these things will not happen. They're not even on the table. Instead, many of the same people quoted in this article work to brand any non-Muslim who points out the ways in which jihadists use Islamic texts and teachings to justify violence and supremacism as a "bigot" or a "racist." And that in itself, however effective a tactic it may be among the ignorant and easily intimidated, is revealing.

RAMALLAH, West Bank (AP) — Muslims from the Middle East to Britain and Austria condemned Sunday the Mumbai shooting rampage by suspected Islamic militants as senseless terrorism, but also found themselves on the defensive once again about bloodshed linked to their religion.

Intellectuals and community leaders called for greater efforts to combat religious fanaticism. [...]

"The occupation of the synagogue and killing people in hotels tarnishes the Muslim faith," said Kazim al-Muqdadi, a political science lecturer at Baghdad University. "Anyone who slaughters people and screams `Allahu Akbar' (God is Great) is sick and ignorant."

In Britain, home to nearly two million Muslims, a spokesman for the Muslim Council of Britain, Inayat Bunglawala, said that "a handful of terrorists like this bring the entire faith into disrepute." [...]

A man identified as Sheik Youssef al-Ayeri said the killings are in line with Islam.

"It's all right for Muslims to set the infidels' castles on fire, drown them with water .... and take some of them as prisoners, whether young or old, women or men, because it is one of many ways to beat them," he wrote in the al-Fallujah forum. [...]

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad referred to the attacks as terrorism, but added that the violence is rooted in "unjust policies" aimed at destabilizing the region. He did not elaborate. [...]

Saudi Arabia said in a statement carried earlier this week by the Saudi Press Agency that it "strongly condemns and denounces this criminal act." An editorial Friday in Saudi's English-language Arab News said that "no civilized person ... can be anything but revolted and sickened by the terrorist attacks in Mumbai."

However, Jonathan Fighel, an Israeli counterterrorism expert, said Saudi organizations have been funneling money to Muslim militants in Kashmir.

"This demonstrates exactly the double game and, I would say, the hypocrisy of the Saudi regime," said Fighel of the Israel-based International Institute for Counter-Terrorism.

Throughout the Muslim world, the attacks set off soul-searching.

"I think that Muslims should raise their voice against such actions. They should forge a coalition to fight such phenomena, because it harms them and damages their image," said Ali Abdel Muhsen, 22, a Muslim engineering student in the West Bank city of Nablus.

Muslims and Arabs must confront the violence "that is taking place in our name and in the name of our (Islamic) tenets," wrote Khaled al-Jenfawi, a columnist for Kuwait's Al-Seyassah daily.

"Unfortunately, we have yet to see a distinguished popular condemnation in the traditional Arab or Muslim communities that strongly rejects what is happening in the name of Islam or Arab nationalism," wrote al-Jenfawi.

Is this really the time to be talking about bringing large numbers of Pakistani butchers into the West?

"5,000 Pak butchers to get jobs in UK," by Asif Mehmood for Pakistan's The Nation, November 30 (thanks to all who sent this in):

LONDON - Over 5,000 butchers from Pakistan would get employment in the halal meat industry of UK through Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) signed between National Halal Foods Group (NHFG) of UK and Overseas Employment Cooperation of Pakistan. The MoU has been signed here at the Pakistan High Commission, London Friday.

Raphael Israeli was born in Fez, Morocco, and arrived in Israel at the age of 14. A professor of Islamic, Middle Eastern and Chinese history at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, he is the author of 25 books, including Islamikaze: Manifestations of Islamic Martyrology (Frank Cass, London, 2003) and The Spread of Islamikaze Terrorism in Europe: The Third Islamic Invasion (Vallentine Mitchell, London, 2008).

The events of Mumbai, the “surprise” they caused, the clumsy fashion in which they were treated, and the almost glorifying attitude meted out to them by the world media, demonstrate, seven years after the September 11 attacks, that little was learned in the West from them, while the pledges of Islamic terrorism to pursue its novel strategy proved credible and feasible. For after Madrid, London, Bali and other acts of mega-terrorism, the West still hesitates to pronounce the M-word, and talks about “Militants”, who draw sympathy in the Islamic world, instead of condemning them as Muslim terrorists and trying to rally moderate governments worldwide in support of the war against them. Moreover, instead of vigorously rejecting the Muslim notion of jihad, in the name of which all these horrors are done, the West has been indulging in the vain distinction between Islam and “Islamism”, ignoring the fact that they are one and the same faith and that jihad is the language of both.

Abu-‘Ubeid Qurashi, one of the aides of Osama Bin Laden, published after September 11 in the Arabic press and on the al-Qa’ida site on the Internet a stunning article regarding his organization’s strategy in its unseemly confrontation with the US and Western civilization in general. This article demonstrates that not only do those champions of evil do their homework adequately, and that they are equipped with the requisite patience, sophistication and methodical thinking, the fruits of which were seen in the deadly precision of their operation against the Twin Towers, but that Western democracies have something to learn in the war against terror. For it transpires that the Muslim terrorist organizations which have been waging war against the West directly are inspired by al-Qa’ida war doctrine, and it is not too early to try to comprehend their schemes.

Comments by David G. Littman, NGO Representative for the Association for World Education (AWE) and the World Union for Progressive Judaism (WUPJ), United Nations, Geneva. For David Littman's comments on the current human rights activities at the UN in Geneva, see: Stealth Jihad with Dialogue vs. Freedom of Expression at the UN (Act 2) (November 25).

The 8th Special Session of the Human Rights Council on the tragic “Situation of human rights in the East of the Democratic Republic of the Congo” began on Friday. It was called at the request of 16 Western countries; the number of co-sponsors soon reached 39 States, but not one from the African Union, the Organization of the Islamic Conference, or the NAM (Non-Aligned Movement). The DRC even alleged that the host country refused visas for two ministers, which the Swiss ambassador categorically refuted in diplomatic terms. The Egyptian ambassador, acting as coordinator of the African group, tried to halt the discussion at 5:30pm; this was unacceptable for France (on behalf of the European Union) and also for the Council president. The histrionic statement delivered by Sudan’s ambassador woke up some representative to the sheer absurdity of this UN masquerade, and the conclusion of the statement by the ambassador of Pakistan, speaking for the OIC, completed this grim ‘picture’:

In conclusion, the OIC reiterates its call that the Council’s Special sessions should not become tools for castigating weak and vulnerable countries, while condoning impunity in case of influential members of the international community. An ongoing siege in Gaza, which has been widely condemned by the International community and continues to pose severe hardships for hundreds of thousands, must also merit the attention of the Council as any situation in the world, on the basis of consensus.

Considering that four of the eight Special HRC sessions (1st, 2nd, 3rd, 6th), since July 2006, targeted Israel in “the occupied Palestinian territories” (with one on Gaza and another on Lebanon), and only one on Darfur, on Myanmar and on ‘food’, such a gross distortion portrays the HRC’s natural ‘climate’ – a UN body often referred to as “this august body” and “the conscience of the world”. A glance at the proposed draft resolution on the “human rights situation” in the DRC – as “submitted by Egypt on behalf of the African Group” – reveals a blatant refusal to face the manifold atrocities being carried out non-stop in that region and beyond. Its preamble states blandly: “Reiterating the principles and objectives of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the International Covenants on Human Rights” – but there is no mention throughout the text of either the grave ethnic strife or what the EU strongly deplores in its resolution: the “increasingly widespread cases of sexual violence, summary executions, recruitment and use of child soldiers by the armed groups, cases of torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment of punishment, massive displacement of populations and plundering of villages…”

Zardari may soon have to take those strong measures he promised if Pakistani involvement were proved. "Police: Pakistani militants behind Mumbai attacks," by Ramola Talwar Badam for Associated Press, November 30 (thanks to all who sent this in):

MUMBAI, India – The only gunman captured by police after a string of attacks on Mumbai told authorities he belonged to a Pakistani militant group with links to the disputed region of Kashmir, a senior police officer said Sunday.

India has blamed "elements" from Pakistan for the 60-hour siege during which suspected Muslim militants hit 10 sites across India's financial capital, leaving at least 174 dead.

Joint Police Commissioner Rakesh Maria said the assailant now in custody — the only one of 10 to survive — told police the group had intended to hit even more targets.

"Lashkar-e-Taiba is behind the terrorist acts in the city," Maria told reporters. "The terrorists were from a hardcore group in the L-e-T." [...]

A previously unknown group called Deccan Mujahideen — a name suggesting origins inside India — has claimed responsibility for the attacks. But suspicion in Indian media quickly settled on Lashkar-e-Taiba, long seen as a creation of the Pakistani intelligence service to help wage its clandestine war against India in disputed Kashmir. [...]

And here comes the usual finger-pointing and attempt to claim victim status that we have so often seen from Muslim spokesmen in the wake of Islamic jihad attacks or honest discussion of the Islamic texts and teachings that jihadists use to justify their actions:

Speaking earlier Sunday, a spokesman for a Jamat-ud Dawa denied any link to Lashkar-e-Taiba and said he condemned the attack.

"We condemn the killings of civilians. We condemn such killings in a terrorist activity, and at the same time we condemn it happening in the shape of state terrorism, as we see in Srinagar, Kashmir," Abdullah Muntazir said, referring to alleged Indian army atrocities in Kashmir, which is claimed by both Pakistan and India....

Yeah, it's all the same: resisting the jihad in Kashmir is just like torturing and murdering a rabbi and his wife, isn't it? Just as speaking out against jihad and Islamic supremacism is the same thing as flying a hijacked airplane into an office building. We have heard all this many times before.

Did the murderers feel justified in this torture by this Qur'anic injunction? "Strongest among men in enmity to the believers wilt thou find the Jews" (5:82)? This horrific news from Mumbai underscores the crucial importance of the point made by Bat Ye'or years ago: that those who are the potential victims of Islamic jihad need to unite together to fight against it. Dhimmi communities -- Jews, Christians, as well as the Hindus who were awarded dhimmi status during the Islamic conquest of India -- need to stand together against Islamic supremacism and jihadist barbarism. If we do not hang together, we shall assuredly hang separately.

"Doctors shocked at hostages's torture," by Krishnakumar P and Vicky Nanjappa for Rediff, November 30 (thanks to M3Pino):

They said that just one look at the bodies of the dead hostages as well as terrorists showed it was a battle of attrition that was fought over three days at the Oberoi and the Taj hotels in Mumbai.

Doctors working in a hospital where all the bodies, including that of the terrorists, were taken said they had not seen anything like this in their lives.

"Bombay has a long history of terror. I have seen bodies of riot victims, gang war and previous terror attacks like bomb blasts. But this was entirely different. It was shocking and disturbing," a doctor said.

Asked what was different about the victims of the incident, another doctor said: "It was very strange. I have seen so many dead bodies in my life, and was yet traumatised. A bomb blast victim's body might have been torn apart and could be a very disturbing sight. But the bodies of the victims in this attack bore such signs about the kind of violence of urban warfare that I am still unable to put my thoughts to words," he said.

Asked specifically if he was talking of torture marks, he said: "It was apparent that most of the dead were tortured. What shocked me were the telltale signs showing clearly how the hostages were executed in cold blood," one doctor said.

The other doctor, who had also conducted the post-mortem of the victims, said: "Of all the bodies, the Israeli victims bore the maximum torture marks. It was clear that they were killed on the 26th itself. It was obvious that they were tied up and tortured before they were killed. It was so bad that I do not want to go over the details even in my head again," he said.

Corroborating the doctors' claims about torture was the information that the Intelligence Bureau had about the terror plan. "During his interrogation, Ajmal Kamal said they were specifically asked to target the foreigners, especially the Israelis," an IB source said.

It is also said that the Israeli hostages were killed on the first day as keeping them hostage for too long would have focused too much international attention. "They also might have feared the chances of Israeli security agencies taking over the operations at the Nariman House," he reasoned.

On the other hand, there is enough to suggest that the terrorists also did not meet a clean, death.

The doctors who conducted the post mortem said the bodies of the terrorists were beyond recognition. "Their faces were beyond recognition."

There was no way of identifying them," he said. Asked how, if this is the case, they knew the bodies were indeed those of the terrorists, he said: "The security forces that brought the bodies told us that those were the bodies of the terrorists," he said, adding there was no other way they could have identified the bodies.

An intelligence agency source added: "One of the terrorists was shot through either eye."...

Pamela calls for a Constitutional remedy.

Inside the grand hotel today

A highly organized jihad plot. Most likely those who organized and carried it out believed they were taking hold of this Qur'anic promise: "Allah has purchased of the believers their persons and their goods; for theirs in return is the garden of Paradise: they fight in His cause, and slay and are slain..." (Qur'an 9:111). But that fact and its implications you will not find discussed in any of the endless media dissections of this jihad attack.

"Mumbai attacks: 300 feared dead as full horror of the terrorist attacks emerges," by Damien McElroy, Rahul Bedi, and Andrew Alderson for the Telegraph, November 30 (thanks to James):

The death toll in the Mumbai terror attack is expected to soar to nearly 300, Indian officials said, as details emerged of the highly-organised terror plot.

Piles of bodies were found yesterday after commandos stormed the Taj Mahal Palace hotel, the last of three buildings that terrorists had occupied in the city. Three terrorists were killed in the battle.

The end to four days of carnage came as tensions grew between India and Pakistan over the atrocity.

It is believed that just 10 highly-trained terrorists took part in the attack. Nine were killed and one suspect is under arrest.

British and Indian authorities were yesterday playing down reports that some of the attackers were British, although this had not been comprehensively ruled out.

The Sunday Telegraph was given the details of a secret interrogation report based on an interview with the surviving terrorist. The 19-year-old suspect, who lived near the Pakistani city of Multan, is said to have joined Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT), the Islamist fundamentalist group, a year ago. He is alleged to have confessed that he received weapons instruction at a training camp in Pakistan-administered Kashmir. The plot is said to have been planned from there. A group then made a reconnaissance of Bombay earlier this year.

India believes a Pakistani merchant ship was used to transport some, or all, of the terrorists before they seized control of a fishing trawler to reach Mumbai (Bombay). The final leg of their journey was completed in inflatable boats.

Pakistan called an emergency cabinet meeting after announcing that it would not send the country's secret service chief to New Delhi. The Indian government had demanded the head of the ISI travel in person to respond to questions.

Meanwhile, the former head of Britain's SAS has revealed that Britain is not adequately prepared for a Mumbai-style terror attack. He said hundreds of civilians would have been massacred if such an assault was carried out in this country.

The official death toll stands at 174, but authorities acknowledge that scores of bodies have not been included in the total. At least 22 of the dead are not Indian nationals, including a Briton, five US citizens and six Israelis. At least 295 people have been injured. Of those, 23 are foreigners, including several Britons....

When the sky is rent asunder

We have now entered into the section of the Qur'an in which the suras are Meccan, brief, poetic, striking in their vivid imagery, and generally focused on urgent warnings of the impending Day of Judgment. "Ah woe, that Day, to the Rejecters of Truth!" This is the focus and refrain of sura 77, "The Emissaries" (vv. 15, 19, 24, 28, 34, 37, 40, 45, 47, 49). Woe to them, for they will be punished severely on the Day of Sorting (vv. 13, 14, 38), when Allah will separate those who rejected Islam from those who accepted it. He taunts the unbelievers, saying that on that Day, "If now you have any wit, outwit Me" (v. 39).

Sura 78, "The Announcement," is similar, warning of that terrible Day of Sorting (v. 17), and warning that those damned to hell will be made to drink a "boiling fluid and a fluid, dark, murky, intensely cold" (v. 25), while the righteous in the garden will enjoy "voluptuous women of equal age" (v. 33). According to Ibn Abbas, Mujahid and others, "This means round breasts. They meant by this that the breasts of these girls will be fully rounded and not sagging, because they will be virgins, equal in age. This means that they will only have one age."

What's wrong with this picture?

"CAIR-OH Conducts Diversity Training for Columbus Police," from the CAIR site, November 25 (thanks to Jesse):

(COLUMBUS, OH, 11/24/08) – Representatives of the Columbus chapter of CAIR-Ohio, along with a Muslim law enforcement officer, recently conducted diversity training on “Islam and Muslims: What Law Enforcement Personnel Should Know” at the Columbus Police Training Academy.

Topics covered included the basic beliefs and practices of Islam, practical advice to help future law enforcement personnel develop cultural competency when interacting with the Muslim community, and a section on cultural awareness about the Somali community, as Columbus is home to one of the largest populations of Somali refugees in the United States. This is the 5th year that CAIR-Ohio has conducted the training.

“We welcome the opportunity to improve understanding and cooperation between Law Enforcement officials and the Muslim community,” said Dr. Asma Mobin-Uddin, president of CAIR-Ohio. “Educational sessions like the ones we have been participating in for the past five years help law enforcement personnel appreciate the needs and concerns of the members of the diverse communities they serve.”...

No reason to get excited

After all, these Mumbai attacks are not that big a deal, right? Don't "overreact."

"Pakistan president warns India not to over-react," from AFP, November 29 (thanks to James):

Pakistan President Asif Ali Zardari on Saturday warned India against any "over-reaction" after the militant attacks in Mumbai and vowed the "strictest" action if Pakistani involvement was proved.

"Whoever is responsible for the brutal and crude act against the Indian people and India are looking for reaction," Zardari said in an interview with Indian CNN-IBN television.

"We have to rise above them and make sure ourselves, yourself and world community guard against over-reaction," he said according to an interview transcript issued by the Press Trust of India.

The Indian government has blamed "elements in Pakistan" for the attack by Islamist militants against multiple targets in Mumbai that left nearly 200 people dead.

Zardari promised that he would take immediate and strong measures if proof was provided of Pakistani involvement.

"Let me assure you that if any evidence points to any individual or any group in this part of the world, I shall take the strictest of action in the light of this evidence and in front of the world," he said....

We'll see. We've heard that kind of thing before.

This story demonstrates why questions about the ultimate extent of sharia encroachment in the West are neither unfair nor merely academic: Stonings continue to occur under Islamic governments, as do executions by other means for "adultery," which so often includes what are actually cases of rape. Moreover, we have already seen that even in Britain, there has been no successful separation of the allegedly "good" sharia from "bad" sharia, and it continues to exist as an instrument to oppress and exploit women.

"Iran confirms stoning sentence against adulteress: report," from Agence France-Presse, November 29:

TEHRAN (AFP) — Iran's supreme court has confirmed a sentence of death by stoning against a woman convicted of adultery in the southern city of Shiraz, a newspaper reported on Saturday.

The woman identified as Afsaneh R., was also given a second death sentence for murdering her husband with the help of a man identified only as Reza, who had an affair with her, Etemad Melli newspaper reported.

The details of this case only highlight the absurdity inherent in imposing an arguably worse method of execution for adultery than murder.

The report said the supreme court had in August confirmed verdicts first issued in April, but gave no reason for the delay in making the decision public.

It said Reza had also been sentenced to 100 lashes for having an illegitimate relationship and 15 years in jail for collaborating in murder.

Under Iran's Islamic law, adultery is still theoretically punishable by stoning, which involves the public hurling stones at the convict buried up to his waist. A woman is buried up to her shoulders.

An Iranian rights group said in July that eight women and one man had been sentenced to death by stoning for adultery over the past few years and urged the Islamic republic to halt their executions.

In August, the judiciary said it had scrapped the punishment in Iran's new Islamic penal code, whose outlines have been adopted by the parliament but its details are yet to be debated by MPs before final approval and coming into effect.

The judiciary also said stoning sentences against several convicts had been suspended and commuted to either lashes or jail terms but it was not known if any of the nine convicts were among those whose lives have been spared.

In July 2007, the Islamic republic drew international outrage by stoning to death a man convicted of adultery, Jafar Kiani, in a village in the northwest of the country.

More failure: this guy was captured alive

Epic Fail: No virgins for you. "Mumbai gunmen 'planned to kill 5,000,'" from Australia's ABC, November 30 (thank to JE):

Indian officials say the gunmen who attacked Mumbai this week planned to kill up to 5,000 people.

At least 195 people died and hundreds more were injured when the gunmen launched their coordinated attacks at locations around the city on Wednesday evening (local time).

The Times of India is reporting that Indian police believe 10 terrorists carried out the attacks. Nine were killed and one, who was caught on camera during the attack at the city's main railway station, was captured alive.

Maharashtra's deputy chief state minister says initial investigations suggest the militants had hoped to kill up to 5,000 people. [...]

The Hindustan Times wrote: "India is under attack. The very idea of India is under attack ... Playing the headless chicken is no longer an option".

Oh, I'm sure some people will manage to continue doing so anyway.

A US counter-terrorism official said Lashkar-e-Taiba, a militant group fighting Indian rule in Kashmir, may have been responsible for the attacks. ...

Although James Taranto in the reliably dhimmi Wall Street Journal is not sure whether or not Geert Wilders is simply an "anti-Islamic provocateur."

(You can see my interview with Geert Wilders, in six parts, at the Jihad Watch YouTube channel.)

"'Our Culture Is Better': Champion of freedom or anti-Islamic provocateur? Both," by James Taranto in the Wall Street Journal, November 28 (thanks to all who sent this in):

By his own description, Geert Wilders is not a typical Dutch politician. "We are a country of consensus," he tells me on a recent Saturday morning at his midtown Manhattan hotel. "I hate consensus. I like confrontation. I am not a consensus politician. . . . This is something that is really very un-Dutch."

Yet the 45-year-old Mr. Wilders says he is the most famous politician in the Netherlands: "Everybody knows me. . . . There is no other politician -- not even the prime minister -- who is as well-known. . . . People hate me, or they love me. There's nothing in between. There is no gray area."

To his admirers, Mr. Wilders is a champion of Western values on a continent that has lost confidence in them. To his detractors, he is an anti-Islamic provocateur. Both sides have a point.

It is a pity that Taranto would characterize speaking accurately about how Muslims use Islamic texts and teachings to justify violence and Islamic supremacism as being an "anti-Islamic provocateur." In this he plays into the hands of the stealth jihadists in the U.S. and the OIC initiatives at the UN -- both of which defame all Islamorealism as "Islamophobia."

In March, Mr. Wilders released a short film called "Fitna," a harsh treatment of Islam that begins by interspersing inflammatory Quran passages with newspaper and TV clips depicting threats and acts of violent jihad. The second half of the film, titled "The Netherlands Under the Spell of Islam," warns that Holland's growing Muslim population -- which more than doubled between 1990 and 2004, to 944,000, some 5.8% of the populace -- poses a threat to the country's traditional liberal values. Under the heading, "The Netherlands in the future?!" it shows brutal images from Muslim countries: men being hanged for homosexuality, a beheaded woman, another woman apparently undergoing genital mutilation. [...]

Harsh, yes, but whence the harshness? Was Fitna accurate or not in depicting how jihadists make use of the Qur'an to justify violence? See the answer here.

Having his own party liberates Mr. Wilders to speak his mind. As he sees it, the West suffers from an excess of toleration for those who do not share its tradition of tolerance. "We believe that -- 'we' means the political elite -- that all cultures are equal," he says. "I believe this is the biggest disease today facing Europe. . . . We should wake up and tell ourselves: You're not a xenophobe, you're not a racist, you're not a crazy guy if you say, 'My culture is better than yours.' A culture based on Christianity, Judaism, humanism is better. Look at how we treat women, look at how we treat apostates, look at how we go with the separation of church and state. I can give you 500 examples why our culture is better."

Those who would cry "Racist!" to this should consider whether stonings, amputations, death for apostasy, and other provisions of Islamic law are really something they consider to be ingredients of a just and harmonious society.

He acknowledges that "the majority of Muslims in Europe and America are not terrorists or violent people." But he says "it really doesn't matter that much, because if you don't define your own culture as the best, dominant one, and you allow through immigration people from those countries to come in, at the end of the day you will lose your own identity and your own culture, and your society will change. And our freedom will change -- all the freedoms we have will change."

The murder of van Gogh lends credence to this warning, as does the Muhammad cartoon controversy of 2005 in Denmark. As for "Fitna," it has not occasioned a violent response, but its foes have made efforts to suppress it. A Dutch Muslim organization went to court seeking to enjoin its release on the ground that, in Mr. Wilders's words, "it's not in the interest of Dutch security." The plaintiffs also charged Mr. Wilders with blasphemy and inciting hatred. Mr. Wilders thought the argument frivolous, but decided to pre-empt it: "The day before the verdict, I broadcasted ['Fitna'] . . . not because I was not confident in the outcome, but I thought: I'm not taking any chance, I'm doing it. And it was legal, because there was not a verdict yet." The judge held that the national-security claim was moot and ruled in Mr. Wilders's favor on the issues of blasphemy and incitement. [...]

An organization called The Netherlands Shows Its Colors filed a criminal complaint against Mr. Wilders for "inciting hatred." In June, Dutch prosecutors declined to pursue the charge, saying in a statement: "That comments are hurtful and offensive for a large number of Muslims does not mean that they are punishable." The group is appealing the prosecutors' decision.

That is a key case. If it becomes punishable to offend Muslims, as the OIC is trying to establish, then it will no longer be possible to speak about the ideology of those who would subjugate us. And so that subjugation will proceed while we remain mute.

In July, a Jordanian prosecutor, acting on a complaint from a pressure group there, charged Mr. Wilders with blasphemy and other crimes. The Netherlands has no extradition treaty with Jordan, but Mr. Wilders worries -- and the head of the group that filed the complaint has boasted -- that the indictment could restrict his ability to travel. Mr. Wilders says he does not visit a foreign country without receiving an assurance that he will not be arrested and extradited.

"The principle is not me -- it's not about Geert Wilders," he says. "If you look at the press and the rest of the political elite in the Netherlands, nobody cares. Nobody gives a damn. This is the worst thing, maybe. . . . A nondemocratic country cannot use the international or domestic legal system to silence you. . . . If this starts, we can get rid of all parliaments, and we should close down every newspaper, and we should shut up and all pray to Mecca five times a day."

It is difficult to fault Mr. Wilders's impassioned defense of free speech. And although the efforts to silence him via legal harassment have proved far from successful, he rightly points out that they could have a chilling effect, deterring others from speaking out.

Quite so.

Mr. Wilders's views on Islam, though, are problematic. Since 9/11, American political leaders have struggled with the question of how to describe the ideology of the enemy without making enemies of the world's billion or so Muslims. The various terms they have tried -- "Islamic extremism," "Islamism," "Islamofascism" -- have fallen short of both clarity and melioration. Melioration is not Mr. Wilders's highest priority, and to him the truth couldn't be clearer: The problem is Islam itself. "I see Islam more as an ideology than as a religion," he explains.

CAIR's Ibrahim Hooper said much the same thing. Could Honest Ibe himself be an "Islamophobe"? Who'd have imagined it? Will James Taranto characterize Hooper's view of Islam as "problematic"?

His own view of Islam is a fundamentalist one: "According to the Quran, there are no moderate Muslims. It's not Geert Wilders who's saying that, it's the Quran . . . saying that. It's many imams in the world who decide that. It's the people themselves who speak about it and talk about the terrible things -- the genital mutilation, the honor killings. This is all not Geert Wilders, but those imams themselves who say this is the best way of Islam."

Note that Wilders characterizes his views as being the views of Islamic imams and the statements of the Qur'an, and Taranto nonetheless willy-nilly reports this as "his own view of Islam," which is "fundamentalist." That there are indeed so many "fundamentalist" imams in Europe and elsewhere, and that mainstream, authoritative Islam does indeed teach these things, doesn't seem to interest him. Certainly there are voices within Islam that Taranto would consider "non-fundamentalist," but how much influence do they have? Is their following larger among non-Muslims than it is among Muslims? Taranto should have considered these questions.

Yet he insists that his antagonism toward Islam reflects no antipathy toward Muslims: "I make a distinction between the ideology . . . and the people. . . . There are people who call themselves Muslims and don't subscribe to the full part of the Quran. And those people, of course, we should invest [in], we should talk to." He says he would end Muslim immigration to the Netherlands but work to assimilate those already there.

Wilders "insists" that he has no "antipathy toward Muslims." When a writer uses "insists," generally he thinks that the facts are other than whatever position his subject is insisting upon. In other words, Taranto here seems to reveal his own assumption that someone who reports and warns about Islamic jihad and Islamic supremacism is doing so simply out of some irrational "antipathy toward Muslims."

His idea of how to do so, however, seems unlikely to win many converts: "You have to give up this stupid, fascist book" -- the Quran. "This is what you have to do. You have to give up that book."

Mr. Wilders is right to call for a vigilant defense of liberal principles. A society has a right, indeed a duty, to require that religious minorities comply with secular rules of civilized behavior. But to demand that they renounce their religious identity and holy books is itself an affront to liberal principles.

Does Taranto realize that his last two sentences contradict one another? Does he have any idea that to comply with "secular rules of civilized behavior," Muslims would have to discard large portions of the Qur'an and Sunnah and the Sharia rules that are derived from them? Probably he doesn't. Nonetheless, when the religion's foremost and central authorities teach that the religious law must dominate, and also teach supremacism, violence, the oppression of women and more, and justify these teachings by reference to the religion's core texts, there is a conflict when those who hold to the religion move into countries full of unbelievers. That conflict will eventually come to a head one way or another, unless the host country capitulates without any kind of resistance.

Maybe Wilders's call for them to discard the Qur'an is quixotic and unrealistic, and in any case I myself oppose any call to ban any book. Ideas should be fought with better ideas, not with censorship. Maybe Wilders would gain more traction calling for serious, honest reform based on a genuine rejection of literalism in interpreting the Qur'an and Sunnah, and upon a searching reevaluation of the legal superstructure of Sharia. In any case, neither one is likely to happen. But as long as James Taranto and those of his ilk are unable or unwilling to come to grips with the reality of the problem of Islamic supremacism, and slyly vilify people like Wilders who are standing up to it, one thing is certain: Islamic supremacists will continue to erode the freedoms and rights that have up to now been enjoyed by the free citizens of the West.

"The Prophet wrote the (marriage contract) with 'Aisha while she was six years old and consummated his marriage with her while she was nine years old and she remained with him for nine years (i.e. till his death)." -- Sahih Bukhari, volume 7, book 62, number 88

More Eurabian madness: an Austrian politician who made an accurate statement about Muhammad's marriage to Aisha, as shown by the hadith above, is facing prosecution for it. When someone can get put on trial for telling the truth, the society has already tipped over into totalitarian thought control, and the totalitarian fascists in question are the European EU elites.

An update on this story. A translation by VH from Die Presse, "Susanne Winter Loses Her Parliamentary Immunity," from Gates of Vienna, November 27:

Winter “welcomes the lifting of immunity”

The Immunity Committee of the National Assembly is expected to decide today on the handing over of the MPs Susanne Winter (FPÖ) and Peter Westenthaler (BZÖ) to the judiciary.

The Immunity Committee of the National Council will decide Tuesday whether immunity will be lifted from two parliamentary members, the FPÖ representative Susanne Winter, and former BZÖ leader Peter Westenthaler. It is expected that the committee will decide to hand them over to the judiciary.

[…]

Winter is to be sued over Islamophobic statements and because of citing hatred and vilifying religious teachings. She had said at an election event in Graz that the Islamic prophet Muhammad would be by today’s standards a child abuser, because he married a six year old.

Winter speaks of “political hatred”

The FPÖ representative said on Tuesday that she would welcome the lifting of immunity. “Only through the considerations of an independent court a clarification can be obtained on the issue,” Winter said in a broadcast. After all, their cause is clearly based on “political hatred by confused, self-proclaimed thought-guards.”

Gates of Vienna correspondent ESW adds:

Last January Susanne Winter, the infamous local FPÖ politician, now a member of parliament, declared that:

“In today’s system” the Prophet Muhammad would be considered a “child molester,” apparently referring to his marriage to a six-year-old child. She also said that it is time for Islam to be “thrown back where it came from, behind the Mediterranean.”

She was heavily attacked and denounced for these — true — words. Muslims in Austria were outraged, Muslims outside Austria resorted to the usual reaction: death threats. Her own political party deserted her.

Winter was quickly indicted on charges of incitement and degradation of religious symbols and religious agitation, an offense which carries a maximum sentence of two years. In the meantime she has won a seat in parliament. Still, no official reaction from her party....

The head man

Courage. "U.S. Troops Kill Taliban Commander, Clad in Woman's Clothes," from AP, November 29 (thanks to Sr. Soph):

KABUL, Afghanistan — U.S.-led coalition troops killed a Taliban commander dressed as a women [sic] during a raid in southern Afghanistan, officials said Saturday.

Soldiers killed four Taliban fighters in Friday's operation, including the Taliban commander named Haji Yakub who was dressed as a woman to evade capture, the U.S. military said in a statement....

In the Ghazni raid, the U.S. said coalition forces discovered Yakub as they questioned a group of women and children inside a compound. The Taliban commander was dressed in a burqa, a traditional robe that covers the entire body. He was killed when he "attempted to engage the force," the statement said.

Not all news organizations are ready to declare the siege over at this point. "Taj operation over with all militants dead, police say," from France 24, November 29:

Indian commandos on Saturday killed the last Islamic militants holed up inside Mumbai's Taj Mahal hotel, ending the more than two-day assault on India's financial capital, the city's police chief said.

"All (combat) operations are over. All the terrorists have been killed," Mumbai police commissioner Hassan Gafoor said, 59 hours after the attacks began.

Extremely heavy gunfire had been heard from inside the hotel at dawn Saturday, with a major blaze also breaking out as Indian commandos fought to clear the building of Islamic militants, an AFP correspondent said.

Massive flames in the ground floor and first floor of the hotel appeared to be spreading rapidly though the building, the last area in Mumbai where gunmen were still holed up more than 58 hours after coordinated attacks rocked the city.

Firefighters rushed to the historic hotel, a large part of which was obscured by a huge cloud of smoke.

Military sources had earlier said that commandos were fighting up to three heavily armed militants left inside the hotel.

On Friday, Indian security forces launched massive assaults on Mumbai’s Chabab Jewish centre as well as the Taj and Oberoi hotels on Friday to hunt down the remaining terrorists responsible for a deadly two-day hostage drama in India’s economic capital.

At least 155 people – including two French nationals and two US citizens – were killed and about 370 others wounded in a series of coordinated attacks across the city.

At the city’s landmark Taj Mahal Palace hotel, FRANCE 24’s Lise Thomas-Richard said the fighting had been intense during the peak of the operation. “We are reaching the final stages of the operation on the Taj Mahal hotel,” said Thomas-Richard. “I hear explosions or shooting every two minutes.”

Earlier, police found explosives capable of causing "major damage" after regaining control most of the Taj Mahal hotel from armed militants, a senior police official said Friday.

Commandos exited the luxury hotel shortly after the assault and were greeted by a cheering crowd, but fighting soon resumed inside the building.

Ajmal's claim that all of the jihadists were Pakistani citizens does not fit other accounts (except in possible cases of dual citizenship), but he also describes a smaller number of jihadists. Time will tell if the rest of his story holds up. "Arrested terrorist says gang hoped to get away," from the Times of India, November 29:

NEW DELHI: The gang of terrorists who wreaked mayhem in Mumbai for three days were made to believe by their Lashkar bosses that they were not being sent on a suicide mission and that they would be coming back alive.

In a sensational disclosure made by Ajmal, the jihadi nabbed alive by Mumbai cops, the group had planned to sail out on Thursday. Their recruiters had even charted out the return route for them and stored it on the GPS device which they had used to navigate their way to the Mumbai shoreline.

This suggests that the terrorists were willing to undertake a mission which they knew would be very risky, but not necessarily suicidal.

Sources said that the bait of safe return must have been used by the recruiters to convince the wavering among the group to join the audacious plot against Mumbai.

Ajmal made another important disclosure: that all terrorists were trained in marine warfare along with the special course Daura-e-Shifa conducted by the Lashkar-e-Taiba in what at once transforms the nature of the planning from a routine terror strike and into a specialized raid by commandos.

Battle-hardened ATS officials are surprised by the details of the training the terrorists were put through before being despatched for the macabre mission. This was very different from a terrorist attack, and amounted to an offensive from the seam, said a source.

Ajmal has revealed the name of his fellow jihadis all Pakistani citizens as Abu Ali, Fahad, Omar, Shoaib, Umer, Abu Akasha, Ismail, Abdul Rahman (Bara) and Abdul Rahman (Chhota).

The account of Ajmal also strengthens the doubt of the complicity of powerful elements in the Pakistani establishment. According to him, the group set off on November 21 from an isolated creek near Karachi without the deadly cargo of arms and ammunition they were to use against the innocents in Mumbai. The group received arms and ammunition on board a large Pakistani vessel which picked them up the following day. The vessel, whose ownership is now the subject of an international probe, had four Pakistanis apart from the crew.

A day later, they came across an Indian-owned trawler, Kuber, which was promptly commandeered on the seas. Four of the fishermen who were on the trawler were killed, but its skipper, or tandel in fishermen lingo, Amarjit Singh, was forced to proceed towards India. Amarjit was killed the next day, and Ismail the terrorist who was killed at Girgaum Chowpaty took the wheel.

A trained sailor, Ismail used the GPS to reach Mumbai coast on November 26. The group, however, slowed down its advance as they had reached during the day time while the landing was planned after dusk. The group shifted to inflatable boats, before disembarking at Badhwar Park in Cuffe Parade.

From there, they mandated to kill indiscriminately, particularly white foreign tourists, and spare Muslims split up into five batches. Two of them Ismail and Ajmal took a taxi to Victoria Terminus. Three other batches of two each headed for Oberoi Hotel, Cafe Leopold and Nariman House. The remaining four went to Taj Hotel. [...]

Kasab told the police that he and 9 others got off a vessel about 10 nautical miles from Mumbai and shifted to two boats hijacked from fishermen.

One source in ATS familiar with the details of the interrogation quoted him saying that in all 16 fidayeens came to Mumbai on Wednesday. A native of Faridkot in Pakistan-occupied Kashmir (PoK), 21-year-old Kasab told police they had done a reccee of Mumbai few months ago. He said he had come along with eight of the operatives to Mumbai as students and lived in a rented room at Colaba market, a stone's throw away from Nariman House.

An update on this story. "Seven Mumbai gunmen are from 'Leeds and Hartlepool'," from the Mirror, November 28:

Seven of the terrorists who brought carnage to Mumbai are British, Indian government sources claimed yesterday.

They said two British-born Pakistanis are under arrest. And another five suspects are said to have been born and raised here.

Two of the seven are from Leeds, one is from Bradford and one from Hartlepool, the sources claimed. All are aged between 20 and 26.

The claims were made as the death toll in Mumbai reached 155 – with predictions it could go as high as 200.

The Hartlepool suspect was allegedly found in the five-star Taj Mahal Palace hotel, scene of some of the most horrific killings. The man from Bradford and one from Leeds were allegedly discovered on the 17th floor of the Oberoi-Trident Hotel.

A second man from Leeds was allegedly captured near a jetty after a gang of around 25 terrorists landed in Mumbai by boat on Wednesday.

The suspects were allegedly found with documentation, possibly including passports, which revealed their origin.

The sources say they also spoke to each other in a heavily-accented Punjabi common in UK Pakistani communities. Gordon Brown yesterday urged caution saying it was “premature” to draw any conclusions.

He said Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh had not told of him of “any evidence at this stage” that Britons were behind the massacres. [...]

The Foreign Office and MI6 were last night trying to establish the facts amid chaotic scenes in Mumbai as Indian commandos continued operations to flush out the remaining gunmen.

If the terrorists are Britons, the UK security service will have to urgently discover how they slipped through the surveillance net. In the wake of 7/7 London bombings the monitoring of militant and disaffected Muslim groups has been tightened up.

The security services were criticised after 7/7 for not keeping better track of the bombers. Since the early 2000s Britain has had an unwelcome reputation as a haven for Islamic radicals. [...]

Piety. "The battle that is underway in Mumbai is a battle for Allah between its servants and the infidels." Will the UN charge the person who wrote that with "defaming Islam"?

"India: Al-Qaeda websites rejoice over Mumbai attacks," from AKI, November 27 (thanks to News4U):

Mumbai, 27 Nov. (AKI) - Al-Qaeda websites on Thursday were swamped with messages from people who were celebrating the devastating Mumbai attacks which have left over 100 people dead and 281 injured. "Oh Allah, destroy the Hindus and do it in the worst of ways," was one of the comments that appeared on Islamist forums on the Internet immediately after the attacks.

"The battle that is underway in Mumbai is a battle for Allah between its servants and the infidels," said another message published on the al-Falluja forum.

Several Al-Qaeda sites also posted several pictures of the victims in Mumbai and provocative statements....

That Somalis are the ones killing other Somalis -- that is, Muslims killing Muslims -- never figures in his speech. Instead, English and American infidels are told, "We're coming for you! We're going to exterminate you all!" More on the Somali-American jihad.

"Somali Jihadists Call on American and European Muslims to Join Jihad in Somalia," from MEMRI, November 27 :

In a video posted recently on Islamist websites, the Somali jihad group Shabab Al-Mujahideen called on Muslims living in the U.S. and Europe to come to Somalia and join the jihad there. The video is in Arabic, Somali and English.

Following are excerpts from the English part (quoted verbatim):

"To those people still sitting at home, relaxing, having good food, good sleep… what you see of Chichan [i.e., Chechnya], Iraq and Afghanistan and such likes… too much watching… with no action - it leads to nifaq [i.e., hypocrisy]… Jihad becomes something of talk. But jihad is real. There is no way you can tell the sweetness of jihad until you come to jihad... If you don't come to jihad, Allah… will ask you why you didn’t come to jihad...

"How can you sit at home when our brothers and sisters are being murdered in our land [Somalia]? How dare you sit at home, looking at the TV, seeing people being killed, Muslims getting killed?... Those who are in Europe and America: You should get out of those countries, you should make hijra [i.e., emigrate]!

"I'm telling the kuffar [i.e., infidels], the English People, the American people… We're coming for you! We're going to exterminate you all!

"We are muhajirun [i.e., foreigners fighting in Somalia]. We have come to the land of jihad, and we're doing OK. You guys can also do the same way. You can make hijra [i.e., immigrate] to this land, and fight the kuffar...

"To the people who say that there are no muhajirun in Somalia, I'd like to say that there are muhajirun. We are muhajirun… All I can say is, I invite you to come to this land of jihad."

It should be noted that, on November 25, 2008, ABC News aired a report about an American of Somali origin - Shirwa Ahmed of Minneapolis - who was allegedly involved in jihad in Somalia. According to the report, the FBI believes that Ahmed created a recruiting network in the Minneapolis area, and enlisted several young men who have since disappeared. U.S. officials suspect that most of them have departed for Somalia in order to fight there. They also suspect that Ahmed himself carried out a suicide bombing in Somalia a month ago.

Wonder if any of this money will -- somehow or other -- find its way to the jihadists, as part of the "financial jihad" (jihad al-mal)? "UAE to give $1bn to Pakistan," from the Daily Times, November 28 :

ISLAMABAD: The United Arab Emirates (UAE) has agreed to provide $1 billion to Pakistan to help improve the country’s balance of payment situation, Investment Board Chairman Saleem H Mandiwala said on Thursday. He said that President Asif Ali Zardari’s visit to the UAE was successful. He said that various UAE businessmen have shown great interest in exploring investment opportunities in Pakistan.

Man with a solution

Al-Zawahiri invites us to accept Islam, which Muhammad the prophet of Islam stipulates as the first step when meeting the unbelievers, before going to war with them (cf. Sahih Muslim 4294). But of course, he and his ilk are already at war with us; his statement here merely reveals yet again the goal for which he and the jihadists are fighting: to extend Islamic law over the world.

It is noteworthy also that the Telegraph article about which Raymond commented here has no mention of this invitation to Islam. Why would the Telegraph not consider that fit to print? Do they think it's meaningless religious boilerplate? Irrelevant? Or that it would offend Muslims in Britain if they called attention to it?

"Al-Qaida No. 2 to US: Overcome meltdown with Islam," from AP, November 28 (thanks to Mackie):

CAIRO, Egypt (AP) - Al-Qaida's No. 2 leader appeared in a new video posted Friday calling on Americans to embrace Islam to overcome the financial meltdown, which he said was a consequence of the Sept. 11 attacks and militant strikes in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Ayman al-Zawahri, whose 80-minute recording touched on a number of subjects, also lashed out at Afghanistan's government and said any U.S. gains in Iraq will be temporary.

Zawahri's new recording came in the form of a question-and-answer session with an off-camera interviewer.

Appearing in a white turban and robe, Zawahri discussed the roots of the U.S. economic crisis. He said it was a repercussion of the Sept. 11 attacks in the United States, and that the crisis would continue "as long as the foolish American policy of wading in Muslim blood continues."

Yeah, I know I should cut down on doing that. It's a bad habit.

"The American economy was afflicted by a downturn and loss of investor confidence in the market following the events of Sept. 11," he said.

"The modern economy has been destroyed by the strikes of the mujahedeen (in Iraq and Afghanistan) and usury," he said, using the Arabic term for holy warriors.

Under Islamic Sharia law, usury, like drinking alcohol, is among the grand sins.

Zawahri then called on the American people to "embrace Islam to live a life free of greed, exploitation and forbidden wealth."...

Evidencing that al-Qaeda's Internet problems have been, at least for now, solved. "Zawahiri blames global financial crisis on 9/11 in latest al-Qaeda video," by Ben Farmer for the Telegraph, November 28:

Al-Qaeda's second-in-command, Ayman al-Zawahiri, has said in a new internet video that the international financial crisis is the result of a US war on Muslims and the Sept 11 attacks.

Zawahiri also claimed the recent security gains made by US forces in Iraq were only temporary and Afghan President Hamid Karzai's offers to negotiate with Taliban elements were a sign of his regime's weakness.

The comments in a new internet video come a week after Zawahiri compared US President-Elect Barack Obama to a "house negro" implying he did the bidding of whites.

The video, "Al-Azhar – The Lions' Den", was posted on jihadist websites earlier this week according to the SITE intelligence group, which monitors online Islamist militant propaganda.

Zawahiri said: "This crisis is one of ... the series of American economic haemorrhages after the strikes of September 11... And these ... will continue as long as the foolish American policy of wading in Muslim blood continues."

"The ones shouldering the burden are taxpayers, whose money was spent to rescue senior capitalists and to protect the fraudulent interest-based system from collapse."

The Egyptian militant claimed the US was doomed to failure in Afghanistan and the tribal regions of northern Pakistan and had been exaggerating its successes.

"I challenge you [US President George W Bush], if you are really a man, to send the entire American army to Pakistan and the tribal regions for it to end up in hell," he said.

In Iraq, he predicted US gains were temporary and the country's Sunni Awakening Councils of former insurgents who have been credited with stemming the country's bloodshed, would not be accepted by the Shiite majority government.

He also called on Egyptians to hold a general strike to pressure the Government to open the Gaza border to defeat an Israeli siege of the area ruled by militant Palestinian Islamist group Hamas.

"What is the problem if students, employees and workers were to refuse to study and work until the siege is lifted on Gaza?" he said.

"Are we unable to carry out such a peaceful strike?"

The 57-year-old fugitive is Osama bin Laden's most senior lieutenant and has a $25 million US government bounty on his head for involvement in the 1998 bombings of US embassies in East Africa.

During the 80-minute video he made no reference to the recent terrorist attacks in Bombay.

How many more such outrages, how many more wanton murders of innocent people, will the non-Muslim world endure before it wakes up? How many more iterations of "It's Just a Tiny Minority of Extremists" and "What About the Crusades?" and "Speaking About Jihad Violence is Islamophobia and Bigotry" must we endure before the mainstream media (liberal and conservative) begins to talk about this issue seriously?

"India: Rabbi among dead hostages discovered at Jewish centre in Mumbai," from AKI, November 28 (thanks to C. Cantoni):

Mumbai, 28 Nov. (AKI) - Indian commandos ended the siege at a Jewish centre in Mumbai on Friday while fighting continued at one of the luxury hotels two days after the city came under attack from extremists. Reports citing an Israeli diplomat said that five hostages had been killed, among them former Brooklyn Rabbi Gavriel Noach Holtzberg and his wife Rivka.

The couple ran the ultra-orthodox Jewish centre, known as Chabad Lubavitch, located at Nariman House.

An Israeli rescue service run by Orthodox Jews also said its staff sent to Mumbai to help at the siege believed that hostages in the Chabad centre had died....

More on this story. "Five hostages killed in Jewish center, chaos at hotel," from CNN, November 28:

MUMBAI, India (CNN) -- The bodies of five hostages have been found at a Jewish center in Mumbai, according to reports, but fighting still rages at a hotel in the city two days after terrorists launched a series of deadly attacks.

Israeli Foreign Ministry official spokesman Haim Hoshen told an Israel news station five bodies had been found.

CNN's Indian sister network, CNN-IBN, also reported the deaths and said the siege at the center -- Chabad House -- was close to ending.

Gunfire and explosions continued to ring out from the building.

Earlier, police said they had cleared the Oberoi Hotel, killing two militants and freeing hundreds of trapped guests. They found 30 bodies and were searching the building.

However, fighting continued to rage at the Taj Mahal Hotel -- where one gunmen was reportedly still holed up.

Mumbai Police Commissioner Hasan Gafoor told CNN-IBN the gunman was shooting and throwing grenades at security forces. [...]

CNN's International Security Correspondent Paula Newton said UK authorities were checking reports that some of the attackers were of British origin. [...]

The gunmen were young men in their 20s who "obviously had to be trained somewhere," a member of the Indian navy's commando unit said Friday.

They fired at guests "with no remorse" and knew the layout of the hotels well enough to "vanish" after confronting security forces, the commando said....

"Of all the pleasant surprises in the president-elect's appointments, John Brennan might have been the best." And that's almost certainly why he was torpedoed.

"Shrinks And Spooks," from Investor's Business Daily, November 26 (thanks to DFS):

Some 200 "psychologists and allies" on Monday sent an open letter to President-elect Obama calling on him to reject his likely appointment of quarter-century CIA veteran Brennan to head the spy agency, citing Brennan's support for what they repeatedly called "dark side" policies — specifically harsh interrogation of terrorist detainees. Brennan was ex-CIA Director George Tenet's chief of staff from 1999 to 2001, deputy executive director from 2001 to 2003, and was with the agency during its implementation of the "black sites" program.

If America starts letting shrinks and guidance counselors determine our intelligence practices, we will never be any match for the bloodthirsty fanatics who will stop at nothing to destroy the Western world's freedoms.

As the letter noted, members of the psychological profession recently concluded "a successful several-year struggle to remove psychologists from their roles in aiding or abetting" the use of tough interrogation methods on captured terrorists. Unfortunately, Brennan gave this group another victory, when, seeing the impending hullabaloo, he promptly withdrew his name from consideration for the job.

The leader of this pack of politically correct psychoanalysts, Stephen Soldz of the Boston Graduate School of Psychoanalysis, lists cultural and sexual humiliation, solitary confinement, sleep deprivation and the combination thereof as constituting torture, and he is troubled that Brennan has not repudiated its use by the CIA.

What a perfect example of arrogant "experts" wading out past their depth and beyond their field of knowledge. The business of protecting this country should be left to those who have proved they know how to do it. The CIA terrorist interrogation program and the National Security Agency terrorist surveillance program have been key components of a strategy that has prevented any repeat of the 9/11 terrorist attack....

Read it all.

Who are the attackers in Mumbai?

According to AFP, they're "militants" and "extremists."

According to the Press Trust of India, they're "terrorists."

According to the Indian Foreign Minister, they're backed by "elements in Pakistan."

AP speaks of "suspected Muslim militants," and the Jerusalem Post dares to write about "Islamic terrorists," but in general in the mainstream media there is the expected reticence about identifying the attackers as jihadists or as Muslims at all, and no discussion whatsoever of the Islamic texts and teachings that almost certainly inspired them to this spree of murder and mayhem.

And some will say: what does it matter? There are "extremists" in every religious tradition. You are intent on identifying these attackers as Muslims and jihadists solely out of some irrational hatred for Islam, or racism, or bigotry, or some such.

The response to this is that it is impossible to defeat an enemy one does not understand. Islamic theology and law provide innumerable insights into the behavior and priorities of the jihadists -- and that may be why the Organization of the Islamic Conference is so intent on getting the UN to criminalize any critical examination of Islamic texts and teachings, even for counter-terror purposes. It is not "insulting to Islam" to notice that the Mumbai attackers identify themselves as "mujahideen" -- that is, jihadists, and jihad is an Islamic religious, legal, and political concept. That concept is in play here in numerous ways, and this story reveals another: the Mumbai jihadists set free their Muslim hostages, almost certainly because of Islamic strictures against fighting against one's fellow Muslims (cf. Qur'an 4:92, which prohibits a Muslim from killing another Muslim).

"Turkish couple let off by terrorists for being Muslims," by Clara Lewis and Anahita Mukherji in the Times of India, November 28 (thanks to Pamela):

MUMBAI: When faced with a volley of gunshots, while sipping coffee at the Oberoi Hotel on Wednesday night, Ali Arpaciouglu, a Turkish citizen on a business trip to Mumbai, chose to escape through the hotel kitchen and down a flight of stairs that opened onto the road outside.

This was probably one of the best decisions he took. On the other hand, his business partner, Meltem Muezzinoglu, and her husband, Seyfi, both Turks, when faced with the same situation, decided to dash out of the restaurant and head upstairs instead. When terrorists laid siege to the hotel, the Muezzinoglus were held hostage....

The Muezzinoglus, however, found themselves in a hostage situation, along with a group of foreigners. That night, they shared a room with three foreigners - all women. Two machine-gun-wielding terrorists stood guard over them the whole night.

All the hostages were asked to reveal their religion. When the Muezzinoglus said they were Muslims, their captors told them that they would not be harmed. The other three Caucasian women were removed from the room next day, and the terrorists informed the Muezzinoglus that they had been shot....

Britain, exporter of jihadists. Will this revelation lead to any searching questions about what is being taught in mosques in Britain? Will it lead to any public discussion about immigration and assimilation, or about British values and Sharia? Somehow I doubt it.

"Mumbai gunmen 'were BRITISH': Indian authorities say two of arrested militants are from UK," by Justin Davenport , Rashid Razaq and Nicola Boden for the Daily Mail, November 28 (thanks to KM):

British-born Pakistanis were among the Mumbai terrorists, Indian government sources claimed today, as the death toll rose to more than 140.

Two Britons were among eight gunmen captured by commandos after they stormed two hotels and a Jewish centre to free hostages, the city's chief minister said.

Vilasrao Deshmukh also revealed that up to 25 terrorists were responsible for the series of bomb blasts and shootings that targeted tourists and foreign interests. [...]

It is known that dozens of British-born Pakistanis have travelled to Pakistan to train in its camps in recent years.

One security source said recently: 'The camps are full and many of the people inside are Brits.'

Last night, there was speculation that a British Al Qaeda suspect reportedly killed by a U.S. missile strike in Pakistan last weekend may have helped plot the attacks.

Rashid Rauf was among five killed in a missile attack in a tribal area in North Waziristan on Saturday.

Security sources believe that at the time of his death Rauf had been planning a major attack on Western targets.[...]

Meanwhile, jihadists in the UK -- like their stealth jihadist brethren stateside -- claim victim status and claim anti-Muslim bias in news coverage:

But firebrand British-based Muslim preacher Anjem Choudhary backed the terrorists and said any Britons killed or held hostage were legitimate targets because they should not have gone to India.

Choudhary, right-hand man to preacher of hate Omar Bakri, said Britain and America is at war with the Muslim world and their citizens must keep off the battlefield.

'Muslims are being killed in Pakistan, Iraq and Afghanistan every day through acts of atrocity against them. But the media only report events like Mumbai.'

This is the third part of last summer's FreedomFest 2008 debate between Professor Daniel Peterson and me on the topic of "Islam: Threat or Not?" It is the second part of my opening remarks, which turned somewhat unexpectedly into a response to Dr. Peterson's opening remarks.

You can see Part 1 here and Part 2 here.

What goodwill? "Pakistan warns India against attack accusations: Says linking it to Mumbai terrorism would 'destroy all the goodwill,'" from AP, November 27 (thanks to Chaza):

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan - Pakistan warned India against accusing of it links to the Mumbai terror attacks Thursday, saying doing so would "destroy all the goodwill" between the two nuclear-armed rivals.

The remarks by Pakistan's defense minister came hours after Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh said militants based outside his country carried out the atatcks [sic].

Singh did not single out Pakistan, which New Delhi has accused of complicity in terror attacks on its soil before, but his remarks are likely to be taken as a sign here that India suspects Pakistani links somewhere in the plot. [...]

Pakistan Defense Minister Ahmed Mukhtar condemned the attacks, but said "we should not be blamed like in the past."

"This will destroy all the goodwill we created together after years of bitterness," he told The Associated Press. "I will say in very categoric terms that Pakistan is not involved in these gory incidents."...

Sure. But of course the double game that Pakistan has been playing for years must lead open-eyed analysts to regard such claims with skepticism.

“Magnus Ranstorp, a terrorism specialist with the Swedish National Defense College, said there are ‘very strong suspicions’ that the coordinated Mumbai attacks have a link to al-Qaida....” -- from this news article

Yes, yes. We have all heard the solemn discussions about whether or not the "Deccan Mujahideen" is a new group, or an old one, or a made-up group, and whether or not there is a "link" to Al Qaeda. And this kind of focusing on the trivial, the nearly insignificant, goes on and on and on, when the real point is this: these are Muslims. They may be from within India. Or not. They may be from Pakistan. Or not. They may have been encouraged or funded by Arab Muslims. Or not. They may have links to Al Qaeda. Or not.

What matters is that they are Muslims attacking, attempting to kill, non-Muslims, in order to obtain their aims. And their aims are to weaken -- in this particular case -- India. And they wish to weaken India in order to make the government of India appease Muslims and meet their demands, whether in Kashmir or in India proper. And once those demands, whatever they may be, are met, other demands from Muslims will be made, and will have to be met, for there is no end to this. The Jihad does not have an end point. There is not a finite goal, but rather an endless series of goals, with each success feeding triumphalism.

New book by a "surprisingly mild-mannered" author

Kathy Shaidle is a great warrior of free speech in Canada, where that fundamental right is already largely lost -- as she chronicles in her book The Tyranny of Nice (which she wrote with Pete Vere). The book is "excellent, superb, rollicking, harrowing, much needed," as I told her in an email. And her weblog Five Feet of Fury maintains the same level of excellence as it chronicles, among other things, the demise of sanity and pusillanimity before Islamic supremacism in Canada in the most wildly entertaining fashion, full of Swiftian savage indignation, making it a daily must-read. If we had five Kathy Shaidles, there would be no stealth jihad in this country or on this continent.

Unfortunately, we have only one, and we do have a stealth jihad here, and that Lone Extant Kathy Shaidle has done me the great honor of reviewing my book about the stealth jihad.

"Author: halt all Muslim immigration to America," by Kathy Shaidle in The Examiner, November 24:

While the nation's juvenile delinquents of all ages remain elated by the election of President Hope N. Change (funniest nickname yet? "Teleprompter Jesus"), we grown ups are obliged to stay abreast of our enemies' plans.

When we hear the phrase "Muslim terrorism," we tend to visualize the mass murders of September 11, 2001. Yet as that day's events recede into memory, and might as well be considered forgotten by some Americans, we need to understand that the jihadist threat to our culture and security takes many forms.

These alternative methods of jihad aren't as dramatic as the attacks of 9/11, but in their own way they represent a kind of slow motion, under the radar attack on America.

Robert Spencer's new book delineates these low level attacks. Stealth Jihad: How Radical Islam is Subverting America without Guns or Bombs makes for depressing reading, not just because Muslim supremicists are trying to take over the U.S. through our courts, charities, colleges and even public elementary schools, but because -- as the election of Barack Obama (the ultimate "September 10" candidate) seems to indicate, millions of Americans couldn't care less. [...]

Spencer's diagnosis is dire, and his prescriptions are dramatic and definitely politically incorrect; halting all Muslim immigration to America is his most daring suggestion.

Yet this isn't a book by a raving fanatic. Spencer is a surprisingly mild mannered fellow, especially considering how many death threats he receives from members of "the religion of peace" every day. [...]

"Surprisingly mild mannered"? But only by day, Kathy, only by day: by night, I am Freakin' Batman.

There is not only the lack of a minimum age for marriage in the Qur'an, but also the permission for child marriage implied by the permission granted to divorce prepubescent girls (Qur'an 65:4), and of course, Muhammad's own example in marrying Aisha at the age of 6 and consummating the marriage when she was 9. And here is a detailed story of the human cost of the practice made sacrosanct by Muhammad's example (Qur'an 33:21).

"Broken lives: Nigeria's child brides who end up on the streets," by Ramita Navai for the Times Online, November 28:

In a small, dimly lit brothel in the red-light district of Kano in northern Nigeria nearly all the young prostitutes lined up on plastic chairs are runaway brides.

“I was married when I was 15 years old. I was forced into it,” said Hadiza.

Whenever her husband attempted to consummate the marriage, Hadiza would flee to her parents’ home, but they kept returning her to the man to whom she had been married off.

Finally her husband raped her: the attack was so violent that Hadiza was sent to hospital.

“We have no choice. If you’re not married by the time you’re 16, people think there must be something wrong with you,” she said. The girls around her nod silently - some of them had been forced to marry when they were only 12.

Northern Nigeria has one of the highest rates of child marriage in the world: nearly half of all girls here are married by the age of 15.

The consequences have been devastating. Nigeria has the highest maternal mortality rate in Africa and one of the world’s highest rates of fistula, a condition that can occur when the pressure of childbirth tears a hole between the vagina and the bladder or rectum. Many women are left incontinent for life. Up to 800,000 women suffer from fistula in Nigeria.

“They marry young, they get pregnant young, they deliver young and they pick up the fistula,” said Kees Waaldijk, the chief consultant surgeon at the Babbar Ruga hospital, the world’s largest fistula clinic, in the northern state of Katsina.

Most cases happen to young girls during their first pregnancy, and nearly half the patients at Babbar Ruga are under 16. [...]

The Nigerian federal Government has attempted to outlaw child marriage. In 2003 it passed the Child Rights Act, prohibiting marriage under the age of 18. In the Muslim northern states, though, there has been fierce resistance to the Act, with many people portraying it as antiIslamic. “Child marriage in Islam is permissible. In the Koran there is no specific age of marriage,” said Imam Sani, a liberal cleric in the northern state of Kaduna. He said that this was the root cause of the opposition among the more hardline mullahs, who believe that matters of Islamic “personal” law - marriage, divorce and inheritance - must be governed by the Koran, not the state.

“The Muslim clerics have a problem with this Child Rights Act and they decried it, they castigate it, they reject it and they don’t want it introduced in Nigeria,” Mr Sani said.

He said there would be serious repercussions if the federal Government attempted to impose a minimum age of marriage. “There will be violent conflict from the Muslims, saying that ‘no, we will not accept this, we’d rather die than accept something which is not a law from Allah’.”

Half of Nigeria’s 36 states have passed the Act, but it has been adopted by only one of the dozen Muslim states - and even that one made a crucial amendment substituting the age of 18 for the term “puberty”.

Each state in Nigeria has the constitutional right to amend legislation to comply with its local traditions and religion, meaning that central government is powerless to impose a minimum age of marriage.

Other vocal opponents to the Act include village heads and elders - almost all men - highlighting the tribal and cultural constraints that hamper attempts to stamp out child marriage.

“It is important we have the right to marry our girls young so there is no risk of pregnancy outside marriage. It is to preserve the purity of our girls,” said Usman, an 84-year-old man from the village of Yammaw Fulani, who married a 14-year-old girl four years ago. “We will never accept this law,” he said.

More on this story. "URGENT: Indian Forces Assault Besieged Jewish Center in Mumbai," from AP, November 27:

MUMBAI, India — Security forces assaulted a Jewish center in Mumbai where Muslim militants were believed holed up with possible hostages Friday, with black-clad commandos dropping from a Indian helicopter as sharpshooters opened fire on the five-story building.

The attack came as Indian commandoes scoured two luxury hotels room-by-room for survivors and holed-up militants, more than a day after a chain of attacks across India's financial center by suspected Muslim militants left at least 119 people dead.

The well-coordinated strikes by small bands of gunmen starting Wednesday night left the city shell-shocked, but the sporadic gunfire and explosions at the Taj Mahal and Oberoi hotels dwindled overnight, indicating the siege might be winding down.

At the headquarters of the ultra-orthodox Jewish outreach group Chabad Lubavitch, a commando assault began shortly after dawn following a tense night in which six trucks of soldiers had been brought in to surround the building.

Snipers stationed in buildings opposite the center began the attack, with sustained fire on the building as at least nine commandos lowered themselves by rope onto the roof from a circling Indian air force helicopter....

Read it all.

It wouldn't be a huge surprise. "Indian forces arrest militants, including Pakistani," from News.com.au, November 28 (thanks to JE):

INDIAN security forces have arrested three militants, including a Pakistani national, inside a Mumbai hotel attacked by a group of gunmen.

Quoting official sources, the Press Trust of India news agency reported the arrests were made inside the five-star Taj Mahal hotel, one of several targets in the city stormed by militants yesterday.

The report identified the Pakistani national as Ajmal Amir Kamal, a resident of Faridkot, Multan, in Pakistan.

It also said the militants were members of Lashkar-e-Toiba - a Pakistan-based group best known for an assault on the Indian parliament in 2001.

The report said the Pakistani detainee told Indian investigators that the group of 12 militants had been dropped off by a merchant vessel 10 nautical miles outside Indian waters, and had reached Mumbai in a small speedboat.

Earlier, A senior military official blamed Pakistani militants for the multiple attacks in Mumbai, killing at least 125 people and injuring hundreds more.

"They are from across the border and perhaps from Faridkot, Pakistan. They tried to pretend that they were from Hyderabad,'' said Major General R.K. Hooda, who is leading the military operation to flush out the extremists.

Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh also said the militants had come from "outside the country'' - a thinly veiled reference to arch-rival and fellow nuclear-armed nation Pakistan.

He also warned in his televised address against "neighbours'' who provide a haven to anti-India militants.

Pakistan's defence minister immediately said his country had played no role in the attacks.

"In previous cases they have acted like this, but later it all proved wrong,'' Ahmed Mukhtar said.

"We are very much positive that Pakistan is not involved in this.''

India has in the past frequently accused Pakistan of backing Islamic militants active in India.

Militant Pakistani group Lashkar-e-Taiba, which is fighting Indian rule in Kashmir and is best known for an assault on the Indian parliament in 2001, also denied any involvement....

Gunshots were audible on CNN-IBN's coverage, which went dark moments later, at least on the internet feed. "Fighting reported at Mumbai Jewish center," from CNN, November 27:

MUMBAI, India (CNN) -- Fighting broke out early Friday between government soldiers in a helicopter and gunmen holed up inside a Jewish center where two or three gunmen were believed to be remaining.

The helicopter dropped off seven or eight soldiers onto the roof of the Chabad house, and then moved away from the line of fire, CNN sister station CNN-IBN reported.

The operation followed after grenades had been tossed from inside the structure toward anyone approaching the building -- three such explosions occurred in four hours.

But movement appeared imminent shortly before dawn, when several jeeploads of police, firetrucks and at least one ambulance pulled up to the five-story structure.

The fighting at Chabad house comes as Indian security forces appear to be gaining control of two Mumbai five-star hotels attacked by gunmen in a wave of violence that has lasted more than 24 hours and killed at least 125 people.

A gunman was killed around 1 a.m. in the Oberoi hotel, where commandos were going room-to-room, trying to flush out attackers and rescue people, J.K. Dutt, the director of India's National Security Guard, told CNN-IBN, CNN's sister network in India.

Dutt said he could not say how many gunmen remained in the Oberoi, where hostages have been trickling out of the building for hours.

Security forces used in-house telephones to ask guests holed up in their rooms to switch on lights and open curtains, so that they could provide cover, CNN correspondent Andrew Stevens reported.

More lunacy re the Mumbai jihad attacks -- this time from the Muslim Victimology Department. Marika Vicziany is a Professor of South Asian Studies at Monash University in Victoria, Australia. She isn't saying that the Hindus mounted the attacks, but that they're revenge attacks for Hindu mistreatment of Muslims.

"Australian killed in Mumbai terror attacks," from the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, November 27 (thanks to Michael):

PROFESSOR MARIKA VICZIANY: Al-Qaeda could, of course, be involved. I think we should think of a number of possible scenarios.

But the Hindu Muslim situation in Bombay and Western India is so bad that you don't need Al-Qaeda to stir trouble.

The feeling is that these bombings are about revenge and retribution. Muslims in Western India feel that they have been under attack, and they attack is coming from Hindu fundamentalists and Hindu extremists.

Surprise, surprise: a possible Saudi connection to the Mumbai massacre. Are the "Indian Mujahideen" and the "Deccan Mujahideen" one and the same, or related in some way? Not necessarily, but that there would be a Saudi hand in the jihad in India at all is both unsurprising and something that bears further investigation.

A September article from the Times of India: "Saudi detained on suspicion of funding Indian Mujahideen," from the PTI, September 28 :

NEW DELHI: A man from Saudi Arabia was on Sunday detained by police at the Indira Gandhi International Airport here on suspicion of funding the terror outfit Indian Mujahideen suspected to be behind serial blasts in Delhi and other cities.

The person was taken into custody by the sleuths of Delhi Police and Intelligence Bureau at around 8:30am as soon as he reached here from Jeddah, sources said.

The suspect is being questioned at an undisclosed location and investigators are trying to ascertain if he has any role in the funding of the terror outfit, they said.

The Indian Mujahideen has been accused of carrying out several serial blasts in Delhi, Ahmedabad, Jaipur and Uttar Pradesh.

Police and the Intelligence Bureau are trying to ascertain the funding channel of Indian Mujahideen, a module of which has been cracked following the September 19 gunbattle in south Delhi's Jamia Nagar....

Any land that once belonged to the Dar al-Islam belongs to it by right forever, at least as far as Islamic jihadists are concerned, and so this strange demand is not all that surprising.

"Mumbai hostage rescue raids continue," from AP, November 26 (thanks to Israel Matzav):

[...] The terrorists issued a first statement saying, "We urge the Indian government to return stolen Muslim lands," Sky News reported.

An Indian media report said a previously unknown group calling itself the Deccan Mujahideen claimed responsibility for the attacks in e-mails to several media outlets. There was no way to verify that claim.

Magnus Ranstorp, a terrorism specialist with the Swedish National Defense College, said there are "very strong suspicions" that the coordinated Mumbai attacks have a link to al-Qaida....

Amaresh Misra, conspiracy fantasist

It was all a Mossad conspiracy, doncha know. The Muslim Brotherhood, the organization that is dedicated in its own words to "a kind of grand Jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and sabotaging its miserable house by their hands and the hands of the believers so that it is eliminated and God's religion is made victorious over all other religions," has done the inevitable and expected and unsurprising in blaming the jihad attacks in Mumbai not on the jihadists whose motives and goals it shares, but on none other than...the Jews.

And the author of this farrago, one Amaresh Misra, is calling for blood. "We will fight a civil war if need be," he declares, "against the pro-Hindutva, communal forces and their Israeli backers."

Conspiracy Fantasy and Projection Alert: "Mumbai and India Under Attack," by Amaresh Misra for Ikhwan Web, November 26 (thanks to Kisan):

It is 4AM in India right now. I am in Mumbai reporting from the ground. I have not slept a wink. Mumbai is under attack. People and forces who killed Mahatama Gandhi, who demolished the Babari Mosque have triumphed. More than 16 groups of terrorists have taken over Taj, Oberai and several hotels. Hundreds of people are dead. For the first time no one is blaming Muslim organizations.

The Mumbai ATS chief Hemant Karkare and other officers of the ATS have been killed. These were the same people who were investigating the Malegaon Blasts--in which Praggya Singh, an army officer and several other noted personalities of the BJP-RSS-Bajrang Dal-VHP were arrested. Karkare was the man to arrest them. Karkare was receiving threats from several quarters. LK Advani, the BJP chief and several other prominent leaders of the so-called Hindu terrorism squad were gunning for his head. And the first casualty in the terrorist attack was Karkare! He is dead--gone--the firing by terrorists began from Nariman House--which is the only building in Mumbai inhabited by Jews. Some Hindu Gujaratis of the Nariman area spoke live on several TV channels--they openly said that the firing by terrorists began from Nariman house. And that for two years suspicious activities were going on in this house. But no one took notice.

Our worst fears have come true. It is clear that Mossad is involved in the whole affair. An entire city has been attacked by Mossad and probably units of mercenaries. It is not possible for one single organization to plan and execute such a sophisticated operation. It is clear that this operation was backed by communal forces from within the Indian State. The Home Minister Shivraj Patil should resign. The RSS-BJP-VHP-Bajrang Dal should be banned. Advani and others ought to be arrested. Today is a day of shame for all Indians and all Hindus. Muslims and secular Hindus have been proven right. RSS type forces and Israel are all involved in not only destabilizing but finishing India. India should immediately snap all relations with Israel. We owe this much to Karkare and the brave ATS men who had shown the courage to arrest Praggya Singh, Raj Kumar Purohit, the army officer and several others.

A photograph published in Urdu Times, Mumbai, clearly shows that Mossad and ex-Mossad men came to India and met Sadhus and other pro-Hindutva elements recently. A conspiracy was clearly hatched.

This is a moment of reckoning especially for Hindus of India. The killers of Gandhi have struck again. If we are true Sanatanis and true Hindus and true nationalists and true patriots we have to see this act as a clear attack by anti-national deshdrohi forces. Praggya Singh, Advani and the entire brand is anti-national. They ought to be shot. Any Hindu siding with them is hereafter warned of serious consequences.

This is a question of nationalism. If no one else, the Indian army will not take this lying down. Communal, anti-national forces have attacked the very foundation of the Indian constitution and the nation. We will fight a civil war if need be against the pro-Hindutva, communal forces and their Israeli backers.

Inner spiritual struggle all over the city

Jihad against 73-year-old British entrepreneurs.

"Mumbai Massacre: British tycoon killed moments after TV interview as death toll hits 125," by Amar Singh, Richard Orange and Nicola Boden for the Daily Mail, November 27 (thanks to Alan):

A British shipping tycoon was gunned down by terrorists in a Mumbai hotel today, moments after telling of his panic by mobile phone.

Entrepreneur Andreas Liveras told reporters how he and other guests had locked themselves in the basement of the luxury Taj Mahal hotel while gunmen ran amok.

Moments - and possibly minutes - after he took the call, the 73-year-old entrepreneur died from several gunshot wounds.

He is the first Briton known to have been killed in the terror attacks, which left a total of 125 dead and another 325 wounded. Several other Britons were seriously injured.

Mr Liveras' death was confirmed by Mumbai's St George's Hospital. A hospital administrator said: 'We can confirm a British national Andreas Liveras, aged in his 70s, was brought in by ambulance.

'He had been shot multiple times, causing heavy bleeding and fatal injuries to his major organs. Doctor s pronounced him dead on arrival. The matter has been referred to the police and the British High Commission.'...

Happy Thanksgiving.

In past years I've written on this day that I'm thankful that there haven't been more jihad terror attacks on U.S. soil. I am thankful for that this year also, but this year's Thanksgiving comes in the shadow of the jihad attacks in Mumbai -- and we must not forget that their defense is our defense, their murders threaten us, they are facing the same jihad that we continue to face, although most Americans don't know it.

Above all this year I am thankful that I'm still able to write this. Now that the UN has approved an "anti-blasphemy" measure that is in reality an obvious and crude attempt to restrict open speech about the Islamic jihad threat, we shouldn't take for granted that those who are threatened by Islamic supremacism and jihad will always be able to speak freely about that threat -- and that includes Americans as well.

But this year, as hard a year as it has been in so very many ways, we have for the most part been able to do so (with the notable exception of some unlikely thoughtcrime states like Canada), and for that today we should give thanks, and hope and pray that we will continue to be able to do so long enough to turn back the tide of jihadist encroachment upon free societies everywhere.

"Kabul blast kills four near US embassy," from World News Australia, November 27 (thanks to JE):

A suicide car bomb blew up near the US embassy in the Afghan capital Kabul, killing at least four people and wounding several more.

The target of Thursday's attack, about 60 metres from the heavily secured entrance to the embassy, appeared to have been a passing convoy of foreign troops, an Afghan interior ministry official said.

The blast badly damaged several cars and a bus with the area packed with morning rush-hour traffic. A large pool of blood smeared the road and a tree was set alight.

"The information we have so far is that four people have been killed and three wounded. It was a suicide attack," a city police chief, General Alishah Paktiawal, told reporters at the scene....

CAIR, stung by the Holy Land Foundation terror charity verdict, which confirms Awad, Hooper, and Co. in their status as unindicted co-conspirators, says -- predictably enough -- that the case was all about hate and not at all about funding jihad terror. But it is -- predictably enough -- just an assertion, unsubstantiated by any facts.

"CAIR Says HLF Verdict Based on ‘Fear-Mongering,’" from CAIR.com, November 26 (thanks to A.):

“We believe this case was based more on fear-mongering than on the facts. It is particularly troubling that the government chose to use testimony from an anonymous witness, which deprives the defendants of their full right to confront their accusers. We expect the defendants to appeal this verdict and believe that it will eventually be overturned.”

Right. No anonymous witnesses. Everyone outed. Hmm. What would be the outcome of that, and who would be the beneficiaries?

And why not, exactly?

"Saudi Arabia to build a mosque in Moscow," from Interfax, November 21:

Moscow, November 21, Interfax – King of Saudi Arabia has initiated construction of a mosque and Islamic cultural center in Moscow.

“If Russian authorities allocate a parcel of land, then Saudi Arabia will finance the building,” Head of Foreign Department at the Russian Muftis Council Rushan Abbyasov told Interfax-Religion....

"Russian mufti recognizes the Saudi have right not to allow Christians to Mecca while Christians can build a church in Arabia," from Interfax, November 25:

Moscow, November 25, Interfax – Co-chairman of Russian Mufti Council Nafigullah Ashirov has recognized the right of Saudi Arabia not to let Christians to Mecca and Medina, though Christians have the right to build their own church in the country.

He told this to an Interfax-Religion correspondent commenting on the address of Russian Orthodox public figures to the Saudi king with the request to observe the rights of Christian living in Arabia.

“We can’t give instructions that contradict the acting laws of other country, no matter if it is America, Great Britain or Israel. My personal opinion is inseparable from acting laws,” the Mufti said.

I hope his coreligionists in America, Great Britain and Israel take those words to heart.

“If Christians can visit Mecca and Medina or not - this question doesn't fall within my province, but it is an absolutely different country, they have their own leaders and laws. Israel also has its own laws: for example, people under 45 are not allowed to Al-Aqsa Mosque, it is their country, and they decided such wise. There is a country – there is a law, the laws should be respected and stick to,” he went on to say.

Ashirov believes, when the number of Orthodox believers in Saudi Arabia will reach such a level that they could organize their own community, “there will be no problems with building an Orthodox Church in Saudi Arabia.”

And how exactly would the number of Orthodox believers in Saudi Arabia ever reach such a level, while Saudis so vehemently discourage all non-Muslim religious practice?

Answering the question, if an Orthodox community has a right to build a church in Saudi Arabia, the Mufti said, “Why not! However everything should be done on legal basis: if they turn to an appropriate state structure and have permission, they will surely do it.”

And how will they get legal permission when such a thing is illegal in Saudi Arabia?

Anyway, now it gets good:

"Russian Orthodox figures ask Saudi King’s permission to build a Christian church in Arabia," from Interfax, November 25:

Moscow, November 25, Interfax – Representatives of Orthodox public organizations addressed the King of Saudi Arabia an open letter with a request to build an Orthodox Church in his country.

The address, conveyed to Interfax-Religion, was initiated after the Saudi Kingdom announced its plans to build a mosque in Moscow.

“You often say that Islam is a religion of justice. However, if Saudi Arabia builds mosques in dozens of Christian countries, isn't it just to build a church for Christians living in Your Kingdom!" the letter says.

To support their words the authors quoted Chairman of the Pontifical Council for Interreligious Dialogue Jean-Louis Cardinal Tauran who said that "if Muslims believe it right to have a great striking mosque in Rome, than it is right for Christians to build a church in Riyadh.”

Orthodox believers remind that preachers of monotheism - Christians - came to Mecca and Medina several centuries before Muslims, while Jews historically resided there. Therefore, it is unjust not to allow them in the territories, where their ancestors lived, where their churches and cemeteries were located.

“Saudi Arabia, as any other country of the world, is a multiconfessional and policonfessional state. It would be just to grant the freedom of faith to Christian minority as their share exceeds 10 per cent,” the address further says.

Its authors consider it is very important to lift restrictions on visits of Christians to Mecca and Medina, to permit them to wear crosses, to publish religious literature and preach their religion. “It would be just to create the same conditions for Saudi Christians as Muslims have in Russia,” Orthodox activists stressed.

“It is the only way to make interreligious dialogue honest and just,” the address written by the Moscow Division of the Union of Orthodox citizens, the Radonezh Society and the Byzantium Club concludes.

“It is the only way to make interreligious dialogue honest and just.” Quite so!

Thanks to John Doe for all the links.

Here is the second part of the FreedomFest 2008 debate between Professor Daniel Peterson and me. The stated topic was something like "Islam: Radical or Peaceful?," which is a false dichotomy, and as you can see in Part I, the moderator stated the topic as I have it here: "Islam: Threat or Not?"

In any case, the topic of the debate was fairly clear to everyone, although Dr. Peterson did seem to wish to restate it himself as "Spencer: Threat or Not?" In this present segment he concludes his case for that, and about midway through the video above I begin my response. It will continue in part 3.

Why? Because they see their jihad in India as just one part of the larger jihad against America, Britain, and the West, and against Israel. And because the Qur'an says that "strongest among men in enmity to the believers you will find the Jews..." (5:82).

"Terrorist Killed in Chabad House," by Tzvi Ben Gedalyahu and Hana Levi Julian for Israel National News, November 27 (thanks to Pamela):

(IsraelNN.com) Commandos have killed at least one terrorist holed up inside Mumbai's Nariman House, the Chabad House where terrorists are holding a rabbi, his wife and a number of others hostage. Six other terrorists are still believed to be hiding in the building.

An unknown Muslim terrorist group linked to the international Al Qaeda terrorist organization has claimed responsibility for the massive multi-site terror attack carried out late Wednesday night in Mumbai, formerly known as Bombay, home to some 15 million people and India's largest city.

The terrorists struck two luxury hotels frequented by Americans and British nationals, the Taj Mahal Hotel and the Oberoi Hotel as well as the Cama Hospital with automatic weapons and grenades.

Also among the nine sites struck by the Deccan Mujahideen group throughout "the city that never sleeps" was the Mumbai Chabad House, known as Nariman House, run by Chabad-Lubavitch emissary Rabbi Gavriel Holtzberg and his wife Rivka. The Chabad House is a popular stop for Israeli tourists passing through the area, who are provided with kosher food and Jewish programs there.

Local police secured the release of the couple's one and a half-year-old son Moshe, but both parents were still being held captive. According to Yehudit Rozenberg, mother of Rivka Holtzberg, the family's babysitter said that both parents were alive, but unconscious at last report, prior to 9:00 a.m.

Commandos surrounded the Chabad House and were preparing to attack. The terrorists have demanded that India release "all mujahedins," and "Only after that will we release the people," they told a local television station.

At least 101 people, including six foreigners and five terrorists, have died since the attacks began, and 600 others have been wounded. As of 7:00 a.m. Israel time, at least 16 police officers were among the dead. The terrorists have held more than 250 people as hostages in the Chabad House, a hospital and luxury hotels.

Several other Israelis have maintained telephone contact from their eight floor hotel rooms. The Chabad website reported that "the situation is grim."...

"Otherwise we will find that there is a significant section of our society which is increasingly alienated, with very dangerous results."

Let's follow the logic here: Hockman must believe there are elements of sharia that are compatible with British law, and either those can be compartmentalized and separated from those that aren't, or there exists a "true" and more moderate sharia where those elements are less of an issue.

However, he does acknowledge that there is at least a Tiny Minority of Extremists that does threaten the United Kingdom. Then, from whom is Britain made safer by implementing a supposedly de-fanged sharia? If it's the "extremists," he is ultimately calling for negotiating with terrorists and giving in to blackmail. If it is the Vast Majority of Moderates whom he's afraid of alienating with "very dangerous results," he is simply underlining how flimsy a construct "moderation" generally is: How "moderate" is someone who can be so easily persuaded to violence, especially when it should be well understood that living in Britain entails living under Britain's laws?

"Sharia law should be introduced into legal system, says leading barrister," by John Swaine for the Telegraph, November 26:

Stephen Hockman QC, a former chairman of the Bar Council, reportedly suggested that a group of MPs and legal figures should be convened to plan how elements of the Muslim religious-legal code could be introduced.

After speaking at an event organised by the website Islam4UK at the National Liberal Club, Whitehall, Mr Hockman reportedly told The Daily Express: “Given our substantial Muslim population, it is vital that we look at ways to integrate Muslim culture into our traditions. Otherwise we will find that there is a significant section of our society which is increasingly alienated, with very dangerous results.

“There should perhaps be a standing committee comprising Parliamentarians, lawyers and religious leaders to consider how this could be achieved and what legal changes might be framed.”

Sharia law has been criticised for its prevention of some rights for women. Mr Hockman reportedly conceded: “The position of women is one area where the emphasis is, to the say the least, rather different.”

He reportedly added that the incorporation of Sharia could improve relations between faith groups and boost the country’s security.

He said: “I am also sometimes confronted by those who point out that there are elements within the Muslim community who pose a threat to our very security. My answer is not to dispute them but to suggest that it is for those of us forming part of the majority community to address such problems.”

What remains to be seen is whether those rulers have the political will to rein in the clerics despite the possibility of being labeled "un-Islamic." If not, they set a dangerous precedent for themselves and their country.

"Sultans' remarks cause a stir," from the Malaysian Insider, November 27:

KUALA LUMPUR, Nov 27 - When the National Fatwa Council issued an edict on yoga last week, it also warned Malaysians not to question it but did not figure on the powerful Malay rulers stepping in.

Three rulers - from Selangor, Perak and Negeri Sembilan - have expressed disapproval that the monarchy was bypassed in the matter.

Under Malaysian law, the sultans are the head of Islam in their states, and the King is the head of religion for the country.

Prime Minister Datuk Seri Abdullah Badawi added his voice to the issue yesterday, saying that "a physical regime with no elements of worship can continue".

He said that Muslims who performed yoga without chanting Hindu mantras could carry on with their activity as it was good for their health.

"I believe that Muslims are not easily swayed into polytheism," he told Bernama.

"What I understand from the decision of the National Fatwa Council is that it was aimed at explaining to Muslims the implications of yoga practice," he said, adding that the fatwa would be implemented only after the rulers had given their consent.

On Tuesday, Perak crown prince Raja Nazrin Shah told the Perak Fatwa Committee to consider the fatwa very carefully. He added it will have to be brought to the Perak Islamic Religious and Malay Customs Council which he chairs, before being presented to the Sultan of Perak for consent.

A day before that, the Sultan of Selangor, Sultan Sharafuddin Idris Shah, said any fatwa on public matters should be brought to the Conference of Rulers first. Yesterday, the Regent of Negeri Sembilan, Tunku Naquiyuddin Tuanku Ja'afar, made a similar comment.

"Recently, the council has come out with edicts on tomboys and yoga. I am not at all certain that members of the royalty had been consulted on these issues and if not, I would certainly encourage the council to do so," he said.

The public intervention of the rulers has caused a stir as it is unprecedented for them to come into conflict with the government's Islamic authorities. The Islamic bodies are rarely criticised by the politicians for fear of being labelled as un-Islamic.

The rulers' intervention has left the fatwa in limbo. So far, none of the states has gazetted the ruling that yoga is forbidden for Muslims if it included elements of chanting and worship. The physical exercises in themselves are discouraged as they might lead to an erosion of faith.

The fatwa has to be gazetted in each state for it to have the force of law for Muslims in that state.

There are mixed views. Kelantan Menteri Besar Nik Aziz Nik Mat said he personally agreed with the edict because of the Hindu beliefs associated with the exercise. But the Perlis Mufti, Dr Asri Zainal Abidin, had expressed reservations.

It is not clear if the rulers can reject the fatwa unilaterally. According to law professor Shad Faruqi, it is a grey area, but he believed that the sultans will have a strong say as they have wide discretion in matters of Islam in their states. [...]

"These discussions reportedly involved the use of suicide bombers or explosives placed on subway/passenger rail systems."

More on the New York City jihad plot. "Sources: Al Qaeda Targets Amtrak N'east Corridor," by Marcia Kramer for CBS, November 26:

NEW YORK (CBS) ― The world's economic fears were violently pushed aside on Wednesday by another global threat -- terrorism.

A massive coordinated attack was launched in Mumbai, India just hours after the FBI warned that Al Qaeda may be targeting New York's subways and railroads.

If Al Qaeda terrorists have their way there will be chaos and mayhem here this holiday season, a mass transit bomb plot that would probably affect all the subway and train lines at Penn and Grand Central stations.

"The threat is serious, the threat is significant, and it is plausible," said Congressman Peter King, R-Long Island, a member of the House Homeland Security Committee.

Uniformed officers, including this NYPD Counter Terrorism Squad members and Amtrak cops with M-16s, flooded Penn Station Wednesday after the FBI said it had received a "plausible but unsubstantiated" report that Al Qaeda operatives discussed a plan two months ago to bomb New York City's mass transit system.

The report said: "These discussions reportedly involved the use of suicide bombers or explosives placed on subway/passenger rail systems."...

They expected it to become between the election and the inauguration. And now it has. "Intelligence chiefs were expecting Al-Qaeda spectacular," by Michael Evans in the Times, November 27 (thanks to W):

Western intelligence services have been expecting an al-Qaeda spectacular terrorist attack in this crucial period between the end of President George Bush’s administration and the succession of Barack Obama.

Signals intelligence “chatter” in recent weeks indicated that Osama bin Laden’s terrorist organisation might be plotting an attack “to grab the headlines” before Mr Obama takes over in the White House on January 20.

British security and intelligence sources said there had been increasing concern, particularly in the United States, that a “terrorist spectacular” was on the cards.

The multiple attacks on Westerners in Bombay last night showed all the signs of an al-Qaeda strategy — picking on vulnerable Western “soft targets” but not in a country where there would be maximum security. The attacks on Western targets in Bali in 2002 when al-Qaeda-linked terrorists planted bombs in tourist-favoured restaurants and clubs was another example where the group switched its resources to achieve maximum impact.

Counter-terrorist experts last night said that India would have been selected for the latest spectacular “probably because that’s where al-Qaeda has sufficient resources to carry out an attack on this scale. They don’t choose for the sake of it, they look to see where they have the greatest capability and then order an attack,” a counter-terror expert told The Times.

The key to this latest attack was the search by the armed terrorists for American and British passport holders. With a reported 40 Britons held hostage, the terrorists have the upper hand. The counter-terrorist sources said targeting Bombay’s most luxurious hotels and a crowded railway station had all the hallmarks of an al-Qaeda operation....

More disturbing -- but telling -- details regarding this story. "20,000 Muslims Attack a Church in Cairo," from AINA, November 26:

One thousand Christians were today trapped inside the Coptic Orthodox Church of the Virgin Mary in West Ain Shams,Cairo, after more than twenty thousand Muslims attacked them with stones and butane gas cylinders. The Church's priest Father Antonious said that the situation is extremely dangerous.

The Muslim mob that attacked the church blocked both sides of the street and encircled the church building, broke its doors and demolished its entire first floor. The mob were chanting Jihad verses as well as slogans saying "we will demolish the church" and "We sacrifice our blood and souls, we sacrifice ourselves for you, Islam", while the entrapped Christians chanted "Lord have mercy".

The incident started on the occasion of the inauguration of the Church today, when the Muslims hastily established a Mosque in the early hours of this morning, by taking over the first floor of a newly-built building facing the Church and started praying there.

When the security forces tried to disperse the mob, they went to nearby homes and shops owned by Christians, and were armed with sticks, butane, knives and other sharp objects. Witnesses said the mob included children from as young as 8-years old to men of over 50-years old, in addition to women.

The Church building was originally a factory that was adapted into its present state, the matter which took over five years to complete and to get the necessary permissions from the authorities to have a Church established.

Human rights organizations and lawyers were refused entry into the besieged Church.

Meanwhile, the Egyptian, and soon to follow, no doubt, Western press, portray this as "sectarian strife" where both sides, Muslims and Christians, are equally guilty of "intolerance."

The Pope evinces that he knows what the average Muslim -- let alone their ulema -- know. If theology represents the dividing-line between Christians and Muslims, and yet, if theology is eschewed at "inter-faith conferences," never broached, what is achieved?

"Pope Questions Interfaith Dialogue," by Rachel Donadio for the New York Times, November 24:

ROME — In comments on Sunday that could have broad implications in a period of intense religious conflict, Pope Benedict XVI cast doubt on the possibility of interfaith dialogue but called for more discussion of the practical consequences of religious differences.

The pope’s comments came in a letter he wrote to Marcello Pera, an Italian center-right politician and scholar whose forthcoming book, “Why We Must Call Ourselves Christian,” argues that Europe should stay true to its Christian roots. A central theme of Benedict’s papacy has been to focus attention on the Christian roots of an increasingly secular Europe.

In quotations from the letter that appeared on Sunday in Corriere della Sera, Italy’s leading daily newspaper, the pope said the book “explained with great clarity” that “an interreligious dialogue in the strict sense of the word is not possible.” In theological terms, added the pope, “a true dialogue is not possible without putting one’s faith in parentheses.”

But Benedict added that “intercultural dialogue which deepens the cultural consequences of basic religious ideas” was important. He called for confronting “in a public forum the cultural consequences of basic religious decisions.”

The Vatican spokesman, the Rev. Federico Lombardi, said the pope’s comments seemed intended to draw interest to Mr. Pera’s book, not to cast doubt on the Vatican’s many continuing interreligious dialogues.

“He has a papacy known for religious dialogue; he went to a mosque, he’s been to synagogues,” Father Lombardi said. “This means that he thinks we can meet and talk to the others and have a positive relationship.”...

"Warned"

And for all the Taliban's atrocities, here's Karzai expressing "dismay" at their tenacity and widespread influence, at the fact that 40 countries are unable to defeat them. More on this story. "Afghan acid attack girls warned not to go to school: police," from Agence France-Presse, November 26:

KABUL — Schoolgirls sprayed with acid in southern Afghanistan had been warned not to go to school a week before the attack, a deputy minister said Wednesday.

Authorities have arrested 10 suspects in connection with the November 12 attack in which two men on a motorbike used a water pistol to spray acid on the girls as they arrived at school in the city of Kandahar.

They say the attack, which drew international condemnation, was the work of extremist Islamic Taliban, which barred girls from going to school when they were in government between 1996 and 2001.

"Evidence shows and witnesses say they (the girls) were threatened a week before not to go to school," deputy interior minister General Mohammad Daud told reporters in Kabul.

Daud said four of the 10 arrested men had confessed their involvement.

"The leader of the group and the person who sprayed the acid have confessed to their crimes. The confession of two others is still being studied," he said.

Eleven girls and four female teachers were in the group that was attacked and most were protected by their burkas, all-covering garments that most Afghan women wear in public.

Six girls were treated in hospital for burns. A 17-year-old girl was badly hurt and transferred to hospital in Kabul.

A state attorney told the same press conference courts would demand the highest punishment for the crime and that information showed the attack was "organised across Afghan borders", a reference to the tribal belt of Pakistan where Taliban and their Al-Qaeda allies have bases.

"This is Taliban and Al-Qaeda policy to fight culture and civilisation," said the lawyer, who is named only Mohibullah.

The Taliban have denied involvement, but the insurgents have most often been blamed for a series of attacks on Afghanistan's education system, with about 230 schools targetted in the year to June and dozens of people killed.

About half of the attacks have been on girls' schools even though they make up only 15 percent of schools in the country, according to a report to the UN Security Council this month.

Such as, "The Afghans don't understand any more how a little force like the Taliban can continue to exist, can continue to flourish, can continue to launch attacks with 40 countries in Afghanistan, with entire NATO force in Afghanistan, with entire international community behind them - yet still we are not able to defeat the Taliban."

Indeed, why is that? Why does this "little force" have so much influence? When will bands like the Taliban -- or, for that matter, al-Qaeda -- be decisively defeated? When does one declare victory?

When one finally appreciates that the ideologies driving such groups are grounded in what they believe to be eternal, immutable commandments from the Almighty, one will understand that the threat of radical Islam is not temporal, that it transcends time and space, that it transcends grievances and psychoanalyses, that it, and its peculiar institution, jihad, have existed from the dawn of Islam and are not about to go away anytime soon; or what I dub, the Hydra-Monster syndrome.

"Afghan President doubts NATO's war against terrorism in Afghanistan," by Farhad Peikar for South Asia News, November 26 :

Kabul - Seven years after the fall of the Taliban in the US- led invasion in Afghanistan, the NATO war on terrorism remains 'unclear', President Hamid Karzai said on Wednesday - and demanded a timeline for its success.

'This fight against terrorism and civilian casualties has been continuing for the past seven years. Our villages are bombarded, our people are getting killed,' Karzai told a joint press conference with NATO Secretary General Jaap De Hoop Scheffer in his presidential palace.

Karzai said Afghanistan was burning because of 'a war which is unclear what it is for, and what we are doing.'

Karzai's remarks came a day after he told the representatives of 14 members of the UN Security Council in Kabul that the Afghan people wanted to know that how long the fight against terrorism would continue.

'The Afghans don't understand any more how a little force like the Taliban can continue to exist, can continue to flourish, can continue to launch attacks with 40 countries in Afghanistan, with entire NATO force in Afghanistan, with entire international community behind them - yet still we are not able to defeat the Taliban,' Karzai's office said in a statement.

The UNSC delegation headed by Giulio Terzi, Italy's ambassador to the Security Council arrived in Kabul for a three-day-visit on Monday.

'It is better that you should set a timeline for your victory, for the victory of all us against terrorism. Not a timeline for withdrawal, but set a date when this war can succeed, and under what conditions this war can succeed,' Karzai told reporters...

A profound question with critical implications.

The Deccan Mujahideen -- warriors of jihad. Is it all right to mention that fact? As Pamela asks, "Are we allowed to talk about it, or is this insulting to Islam and in violation of the UN resolution against 'defaming Islam'"?

"Report: Little-known group claims India attacks," from AP, November 26:

MUMBAI, India (AP) - A media report says a little-known group, the Deccan Mujahideen, has claimed responsibility for the Mumbai terrorist attacks.

The Press Trust of India news agency said Thursday the group sent emails to several media outlets.

Teams of heavily armed gunmen attacked a crowded train station in southern Mumbai and Leopold's restaurant, a well-known Mumbai landmark, along with the two hotels and a police station.

Officials say at least 78 people were killed and another 200 wounded. In addition, the attackers were holding hostages Thursday morning....

More on Mumbai, or Bombay, as it used to be more commonly known, in calmer days. "Foreigners targeted in coordinated Bombay attacks," by Rhys Blakely in the Times, November 26 (thanks to Alan):

Gunmen stalked a hotel in Bombay looking for British and US passport holders during co-ordinated attacks across the city that have left at least 80 dead.

A series of shootings and bomb blasts at luxury hotels and bars in the south of the city hit at least nine locations. Security sources said “a major terror attack” was unfolding amid reports that foreigners had been taken hostage in one hotel.

Shootings were reported in the lobby of the five-star Taj Mahal Palace hotel in the Colaba area of south Bombay and at the nearby Leopolds bar, a popular destination with western backpackers. Witnesses described pools of blood and bullet scarred walls at both locations.

A witness at the hotel told a local television station: “They wanted anyone with British or American passports.

"They wanted foreigners.”

It was feared that the death toll could rise significantly....

A police spokesman said: “We have only a very tenuous grasp on what is happening so far. People are scared. The incidents being reported are so many. Gunmen are under siege at several locations but we are worried about hitting civilians”

Because the police, unlike the attackers, are civilized human beings.

Mumbai Shootings Update. "Unknown terrorists have conducted a coordinated attack across Mumbai's major tourist hubs, with over a dozen deaths and many injuries reported," from SkyNews, November 26 (thanks to Alan):

Gunmen have targeted luxury hotels, a popular tourist attraction and a crowded train station in at least seven attacks across India's financial capital.

NDTVare reporting an eighth attack at the JW Marriott hotel.

Terrorists are reportedly still holed up at in three places, including Oberoi and Taj hotels.

The British Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) are advising all Britons in Mumbai to stay indoors.

The FCO also report a further explosion near Mumbai airport.

The death toll is unknown. Officials have said at least 25 people have been wounded.

Reuters are reporting at least 18 fatalities.

The Times of India are reporting as many as 80 people killed and 250 injured in the attacks.

The police commissioner A. N. Roy said: "These are terrorist strikes in at least seven places."

He added: "The terrorists have used automatic weapons and in some places grenades have been lobbed."

Tory MEP Witnessed Shootings

Gunmen opened fire on two of the city's best known luxury hotels, the Taj Mahal and the Oberoi.

They also attacked the crowded Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus station in southern Mumbai and Leopold's restaurant, a Mumbai landmark.

It was not immediately clear what the motive was for the attacks.

An eyewitness report says one of the attackers asked tourists if they were British or American before opening fire.

Alex Chamberlain added there was "no doubt in my mind" that the attacks were the result of a fundamentalist Islamic terror attack....

Mumbai on high alert

No indication yet as to the perpetrator, but of course there are many Islamic jihadists who desire to hit India. They may not be responsible for these attacks, but we have seen coordinated jihad attacks in India before.

"Many 'Terror Attacks' Hit Mumbai," from SkyNews, November 26 (thanks to all who sent this in):

Gunmen conduct a 'coordinated attack' across Mumbai's major tourist hubs, with over a dozen deaths and many injuries reported.

There are emerging reports of many fatalities and at least two dozen people injured in at least seven different attacks across the city.

Local television news report at least 10 deaths as a result of the attacks.

The APnews agency is reporting a local hospital official saying at least 25 people have been brought to the city's G.T. Hospital near the scene of the shootings.

Local police say they consider the attacks an act of terrorism....

Indian television channel NDTV says a major attack that hit the city's main link to the airport, the CST train station, where gunmen opened fire in the station hall.

They are also reporting more attacks in the suburbs, with five or six different incidents across the city. There may be three bombs involved, as well as gunfire.

Happy Thanksgiving. "Exclusive: NY Rail Plot Details Based on 'Reliable' FBI Source," by Richard Esposito for ABC News, November 26 :

Uniformed police officers have flooded New York City's Penn Station, home to the Long Island Rail Road, following a warning from the FBI of a "plausible but unsubstantiated" threat of a terrorist bomb attack against the system during the holidays.

Law enforcement officials tell ABCNews.com, the plot involved a "Madrid-like attack," a reference to the synchronized bombing of the commuter rail system in Spain in March 2004 that killed 191 people.

Following the public release of the warning by the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security, officials in Washington made efforts to dampen public concern.

"There is nothing concrete to suggest this plot ever went beyond the aspirational or talking stage," said a U.S. official familiar with the intelligence that led to the warning.

Law enforcement officials told ABCNews.com the information was based on an FBI source who has proved "reliable and knowledgeable in the past."

Officials told ABCNews.com unspecified new information in the last 48 hours led to the public warning "out of an abundance of caution."

Congressman Peter King (R-NY), the top Republican on the House Homeland Security Committee, told the Associated Press "authorities have very real specifics as to who it is and where the conversation took place and who conducted it."...

"The interior security minister had prohibited the Herald from using the word 'Allah' in its articles, affirming that its use ' by non-Muslims could increase tension and create confusion among Muslims in the country'."

Funny how there's no concern about creating confusion the other way around. That is because, while Qur'an 29:46 says "And argue not with the People of the Scripture unless it be in (a way) that is better, save with such of them as do wrong; and say: We believe in that which hath been revealed unto us and revealed unto you; our Allah and your Allah is One, and unto Him we surrender," that line of discourse is meant to be part of a one-way conversation: Clearly, a non-Muslim would be forbidden under Islamic law from preaching to Muslims along those lines in favor of another religion.

Still, the excuse of "creating confusion" does not cast the Islamic councils' opinion of their own faithful in a good light: Are they that prone to confusion and apostasy? Apparently, that matter is one the scholars are willing to sacrifice for the sake of sticking it to the unbelievers.

An update on this story. "Islamic councils against Catholic magazine of Kuala Lumpur: forbidden to use the word 'Allah'," from Asia News, November 25:

Kuala Lumpur (AsiaNews) - The Islamic religious councils of seven Malaysian states and the Malaysian Chinese Muslim Association (MACMA) are turning to the federal court for the ban of the use of the word "Allah" in the weekly Catholic Herald. Muslim representatives from Terengganu, Penang, Selangor, Kedah, Johor, Malacca, and the Federal territory of Kuala Lumpur want the court to rule on whether the law relative to the case has been applied according to constitutional principles.

The Malaysian constitution guarantees full religious freedom for all confessions, but an ordinance from the interior security ministry issued in 1986 prohibits the use of the word "Allah" in publications of the non-Islamic communities. But the law has never been applied consistently. To complicate the case of the Herald, and of other non-Muslim magazines, there is also the fact that there are two parallel judicial systems in the country: one is federal-civil, regulated by the constitution, and the other is juridical-religious, which is supposed to apply only to Muslims and is regulated by Koranic law.

The affair of the magazine of Kuala Lumpur emerged in December of last year. The interior security minister had prohibited the Herald from using the word "Allah" in its articles, affirming that its use "by non-Muslims could increase tension and create confusion among Muslims in the country." The ban brought the risk of shutdown for the only Catholic newspaper in the country, which with its 12,000 copies and 50,000 readers is the only instrument of communication for the 850,000 faithful.

In the last few days of 2007, after the protests of the Catholic community, the interior security minister withdrew the injunction, but on January 5, 2008, the minister of Islamic affairs intervened in of the affair, upholding the ban. Claiming the right to use the word "Allah," the Herald then opted to take the legal route, and the archbishop of the diocese of Kuala Lumpur, Murphy Pakiam, took the government to court.

Today, the seven states and the MACMA have been admitted to the court to intervene in the dispute, and have been named as parties in the case in the revision of the procedure initiated by the archbishop of the capital. In the meantime, the Malaysian Gurdwaras Council (MGC), a Sikh group, has informed the court that it intends to present the attorney general's office with documentation that would exclude the Islamic councils from the debate.

According to the documentation from the MGC, a request to ban the use of the word "Allah" for non-Muslims was presented in Perak ten years ago. The prime minister at the time, Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad, had communicated to the parties in the case that there was no cause for proceeding. Jagjit is now asking prime minister Datuk Seri Abdullah Ahmad Badawi to use the same approach in the case of the Herald.

Jagjit has asked the court to update the hearing with the request of the MGC. Judge Lau Bee Lan has established February 27 as the date for deciding whether to permit the parties to present a deposition as requested for judicial review.

Tiny Minority of Extremists Alert. "Most Islamic studies teachers oppose pluralism, survey finds," by Abdul Khalik for the Jakarta Post, November 26 (thanks to Kyros):

Most Islamic studies teachers in public and private schools in Java oppose pluralism, tending toward radicalism and conservatism, according to a survey released in Jakarta on Tuesday.

The study shows 62.4 percent of the surveyed Islamic teachers, including those from Nahdlatul Ulama and Muhammadiyah — the country’s two largest Muslim organizations — reject the notion of having non-Muslim leaders.

The survey was conducted last month by the Center for Islamic and Society Studies (PPIM) at Syarif Hidayatullah State Islamic University in Jakarta, involving some 500 Islamic studies teachers throughout Java.

It reveals 68.6 percent of the respondents are opposed to non-Muslims becoming their school principle and 33.8 percent are opposed to having non-Muslim teachers at their schools.

Some 73.1 percent of the teachers don’t want followers of other religions to build their houses of worship in their neighborhoods, it found.

Some 85.6 percent of the teachers prohibit their students from celebrating big events perceived as Western traditions, while 87 percent tell their students not to learn about other religions.

Some 48 percent of the teachers would prefer for female and male students to be separated into different classrooms.

PPIM director Jajat Burhanudin said the teachers’ anti-pluralist views would be reflected in their lessons and contribute to growing conservatism and radicalism among Muslims in the country.

“I think they play a key role in promoting conservatism and radicalism among Muslims nowadays. You can’t say now that conservatism and radicalism only develop on the streets like what has been campaigned by the FPI (the Islam Defenders Front), but rather deep within the education (system),” he said, referring to a radical Islamic group.

Jajat said such intolerance threatened the civil and political rights of citizens of other religions.

The survey also shows 75.4 percent of the respondents ask their students to call on non-Muslim teachers to convert to Islam, while 61.1 percent reject a new Islamic sect.

In line with their strict beliefs, 67.4 percent said they felt more Muslim than Indonesian.

The majority of the respondents also support the adoption of sharia law in the country to help fight crime.

According to the survey, 58.9 percent of the respondents back rajam (stoning) as a punishment for all kinds of criminal and 47.5 percent said the punishment for theft should be having one hand cut off, while 21.3 percent want the death sentence for those who convert from Islam.

Only 3 percent of the teachers said they felt it was their duty to produce tolerant students.

With 44.9 percent of the respondents claiming themselves members of Nahdlatul Ulama and 23.8 percent supporters of Muhammadiyah, Jajat said the two moderate organizations had failed to establish their values at the grassroots.

“Moderation and pluralism are only embraced by their elites. I am afraid that this kind of phenomenon has contributed to increasing radicalism and even terrorism in our country,” he said.

An Are-They-Or-Aren't-They? Update. I would say, "Only his hairdresser knows for sure," but the hairdresser has been blown up.

"Afghanistan: Taliban leader rejects prospect of truce," by Syed Saleem Shahzad for AKI, November 25 :

Kandahar, 25 Nov. (AKI) - While the western media raised hopes of a reconciliation between the Taliban and the Afghan government when Saudi Arabia sponsored talks during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, the man named as one of the main negotiators, Mullah Mohammad Hasan Rahmani, denied any involvement.

The Saudi government owned Al-Sharq al-Awsat even quoted the Afghan Minister of Information, Sheikh Mohammed Tashkiri, who said a second round of negotiations took place in Dubai between a delegation from Kabul and one from the Taliban movement.

According to Tashkiri, "on both occasions representatives of Mullah Omar participated in the meetings, the most authoritative among them was Mullah Mohammad Hasan Rahmani".

However, in an interview with AKI, Mullah Hasan Rahmani, a close advisor of Taliban leader, Mullah Mohammad Omar, rejected the claims saying they were a figment of the imagination of the Kabul administration led by President Hamid Karzai. [...]

“Today the Taliban is successful and the Americans and the NATO forces are in a state of defeat," Mullah Rahmani said.

"The enemy wants to engage the Taliban and deviate their minds. Sometimes they offer talks, sometimes they offer other fake issues. The Taliban never ever asked for talks, neither do we want these talks to be held.

"Neither the Saudi Arabian initiative [in Mecca] nor the Saudi Arabian proposal [regarding Mullah Omar] is acceptable,” Mullah Hasan Rahmani said.

Hasan Rahmani completely denied that any Taliban representatives attended King Abdullah’s dinner in September or any other talks with the Kabul government.

“In the last days of Ramadan, the former Taliban ambassador to Pakistan, Mullah Abdul Salam Zaeef, was invited for dinner, but later the media projected that talks had begun with the Taliban under Saudi mediation," he said.

"That was to weaken the Taliban and their jihad. The fact is that the Taliban were not part of such talks, nor are they ready to be so.”...

As you can see below, Nonie Darwish and I don't think this film is going to make cinematic history. Raymond posted this article here yesterday, but I didn't want to let it pass without chiming in as well. "Critics Decry Plans for a Movie Depicting Life of Prophet Muhammad," by Maxim Lott for FoxNews, November 25 (thanks to all who sent this in):

If film producer Oscar Zoghbi has his way, Americans will be soon be flocking to movie theaters to see a film about the Prophet Muhammad and his followers that Zoghbi hopes will clear up misconceptions about Muslims, including what he says is "the understanding that all Muslims are terrorists."

Come on, Zoghbi. Who is really saying that "all Muslims are terrorists"? I know of no analyst on the scene today who is saying that. When you set up a straw man before you're even out of the box, it casts a shadow over your entire project.

Zoghbi says he hopes to shoot some scenes for his movie in the holy cities of Medina and Mecca, and he predicts his film, "The Messenger of Peace," will rival Mel Gibson's "The Passion of The Christ."

If he plans to shoot in Mecca, he better plan to convert to Islam, if he isn't a Muslim already:

And that brings to mind a question: will his film depict Muhammad saying, "I will expel the Jews and Christians from the Arabian Peninsula and will not leave any but Muslims," and other things he said that don't shine brightly among the Pearls of Wisdom from the World's Religions? Somehow I doubt it.

But some critics predict Zoghbi's movie, which is scheduled to begin production early next year, will be a whitewash, and that it won't tell the whole story about Muhammad or Islam.

Nonie Darwish, the author of the upcoming book "Cruel and Usual Punishment: The Terrifying Global Implications of Islamic Law," said the film will likely try too hard not to offend.

"The movie will probably avoid or justify Muhammad's violent and unprovoked battling years in Medina, where assassination and mass murder were done by Muhammad … in order to spread the religion, take control and silence his critics," Darwish said.

"We will probably see the image of Muhammad that most Muslims were spoon-fed in their religious education."

Robert Spencer, director of JihadWatch.com, said Western audiences looking to learn more about a religion tangled in stereotypes of suicide bombers will be disappointed by "The Messenger of Peace."

"They're already taking a stand on a controversial issue with the title alone, denying and downplaying the manifest fact that numerous Muslims around the world have justified acts of violence by invoking Muhammad's words and example," Spencer said.

But Zoghbi says his film will very deliberately take a moderate approach.

"We are trying to depict the values and teachings of the Prophet. It's not a historical film in any way," he said.

That is a distinction without a difference. Muhammad taught certain things, and he lived out those teachings. He taught, "I have been commanded to fight against people so long as they do not declare that there is no god but Allah, and he who professed it was guaranteed the protection of his property and life on my behalf except for the right affairs rest with Allah," and he lived that out by participating in numerous battles against unbelievers.

Will Zoghbi's film depict that "value"?

"And it's not a Muslim propaganda film. This film is also for Muslims, and I hope it will encourage them to condemn violence."

I hope so also, but how does Zoghbi intend to accomplish that? Does he think that by presenting a whitewashed picture of Muhammad, bereft of battles and commands to do battle, he will inspire Muslims to "condemn violence"? Does he think they will have no other sources for Muhammad's words and deeds besides his film?

One thing Zoghbi hopes to avoid is the violence and outrage in the Muslim world that has followed some recent depictions of the prophet Muhammad.

Islamic conventions forbid the showing of Muhammad in any form, and violence has often followed the release of newspaper cartoons, books and films that criticized or simply depicted the Muslim prophet.

In 2005, the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten ran a cartoon depicting Muhammad wearing a turban with a bomb in it, sparking riots that killed more than 30 people throughout the Islamic world. This year, protests began on news of "Fitna," a film critical of Islam, and Random House cancelled distribution of the widely anticipated book "Jewel of Medina" out of fear of such a reaction.

Zoghbi said that he will make every effort to ensure that "The Messenger of Peace" is in line with Islamic traditions.

"Islam itself doesn't stop you from showing the Prophet," Zoghbi said. "But it is convention and tradition, and we will abide by that. We do not want to offend anyone."

Of course not!

Last summer at FreedomFest 2008 I debated Dr. Daniel Peterson, a professor at Brigham Young University and author of Muhammad: Prophet of God, on the topic "Islam: Threat or Not?" The panel was moderated by Matt Sanchez, war correspondent for World Net Daily.

The FreedomFest folks kindly allowed me to post video of the debate, which I will now do, in parts owing to the YouTube time limits. Here is the first part, in which Dr. Peterson rips me but good. Stay tuned for what happened next!

"In parliament, she says, she is often greeted with screams of “kill her” when she stands up to speak, and she has had no shortage of personal threats from fellow MPs."

"Afghanistan’s women lawmakers speak out as conditions worsen," by Clancy Chassey for the Guardian, November 26:

They were walking to school in the southern city of Kandahar, a group of teenage girls discussing a test they had coming up, when two men on a motorcycle sprayed them with a strange liquid. Within seconds a painful tingling began, and there was an unusual smell as the skin of 16-year-old Atifa Biba began to burn.

Her friend rushed over to help her, struggling to wipe the liquid away, when she too was showered with acid. She covered her face, crying out for help as they sprayed her again, trying to aim the acid into her face. The weapon was a water bottle containing battery acid; the result was at least one girl blinded and two others permanently disfigured. Their only crime was attending school.

It was not an isolated incident. For women and girls across Afghanistan, conditions are worsening — and those women who dare to publicly oppose the traditional order now live in fear for their lives.

Member of Parliament (MP) Shukria Barakzai receives regular death threats for speaking out on women’s issues. Talking at her home in central Kabul, she closed the living room door as her three young daughters played in the hall.

“You can’t imagine what it feels like as a mother to leave the house each day and not know if you will come back again,” she said, her eyes welling up as she spoke.

“But there is no choice. I would rather die for the dignity of women than die for nothing. Should I stop my work because there is a chance I might be killed? I must go on, and if it happens it happens,” she said.

Barakzai receives frequent but cryptic warnings about planned suicide attacks on her car, but no help from the government. Officials advise her to stay at home and not go to work, but offer nothing in the way of security assistance, despite her requests. She said warlords in parliament who received similar threats were immediately provided with armored vehicles, armed guards and a safe house by the government.

Afghan women are feeling increasingly vulnerable as the security situation worsens and a growing number of Western and Afghan officials call for the Taliban to join the government.

“We are very worried that, now the government is talking with the Taliban, our rights will be compromised,” said Shinkai Karokhail, an outspoken MP for Kabul. “We must not be the sacrifice by which peace with the Taliban is made.”

Under Taliban rule, up until 2001, women were not allowed to work and were forbidden from venturing outside the home without a male escort.

Afghan women who defy traditional gender roles and speak out against the oppression of women are routinely subject to threats, intimidation and assassination. An increasingly powerful Taliban regularly attacks projects, schools and businesses run by women.

Six weeks ago, Lieutenant-Colonel Malalai Kakar was assassinated in her car on her way to work in Kandahar. She was Afghanistan’s highest-ranking female police officer and a fierce defender of women’s rights. Only 1.5m tall, she was known to have beaten men she found to be abusing their wives. Another senior female police officer was killed in the province of Herat in June.

Talking at a safe house on the outskirts of Kabul, Mullah Zubiallah Akhond, a Taliban commander from the southern province of Uruzgan, said the group’s attacks on women were always political and not based on any desire to target or punish women specifically. [...]

The Islamist group is just one of the many threats facing Afghanistan’s few outspoken female MPs.

“Our parliament is a collection of lords,” Barakzai said. “Warlords, drug lords, crime lords.”

In parliament, she says, she is often greeted with screams of “kill her” when she stands up to speak, and she has had no shortage of personal threats from fellow MPs.

They visit her privately to tell her she will be killed if she continues to speak out on such issues as the right of a woman to have a personal passport (separate from the standard “family passport”) or against compulsory virginity tests for young women, and the right of a man to have custody of a child at two-years old. It is not only men who oppose women in parliament — both Barakzai and Karokhail have faced obstruction from other female MPs on key women’s issues.

Karokhail said that, of the 68 women in the 249-strong parliament, only five were vocal on women’s issues. The majority of women in parliament vote in favor of more traditional legislation that often rules against women’s rights.

Some women now fear the parliament is becoming more conservative towards women.

“Talibani ideas are natural among our people, particularly their vision about women,” Barakzai said.

And to make matters worse, the "new" Afghan constitution itself stipulates that ""no law can be contrary to the beliefs and provisions of the sacred religion of Islam" (Chapter 1, Article 3)."

Afghan commentators say President Hamid Karzai, desperate to win next year’s elections, has been bringing former mujahidin commanders into parliament in the hope they will support him at election time.

Most of these former jihadi commanders share the Taliban’s ideas about women and are expected to support legislation that will once again limit women’s freedom. In addition, according to the Taliban commander, the group has a growing number of MPs in parliament lobbying for their policies. [...]

Najla Zewari, who works for the UN’s gender and justice unit, believes violence against women is increasing, fuelled by growing frustrations caused by the economic crisis and lack of security.

She said there had also been a sharp increase in rapes by men who claimed they could not afford the pay the dowry needed to marry. After the public shame of an attack, the victim is usually outcast and the rapist is then the only man who will have the woman as his wife.

It is crimes like this that make many Afghans nostalgic for the harsh justice of Taliban rule. Barakzai countered: “Women were safe, in one sense, under the Taliban — but they were kept as slaves, they were not allowed to do what they wanted even in their own home.”

As the Taliban strengthen, the future for women in Afghanistan looks bleaker. Barakzai said women’s rights, once heralded as the great success of post-invasion Afghanistan, had been sidelined and might suffer more in the struggle to find a solution to the fighting.

Last week, a council of 400 women politicians met in Kabul to discuss this possibility and prepare ways to counter it.

“Our biggest fear at the moment is that the return of Talibani ideas to government will wind back the gains we have made in these last years,” Karokhail said.

Eurabia Alert. "2 Germans accused of supporting al-Qaida arrested," by Patrick McGroarty for the Associated Press, November 25:

BERLIN (AP) — Two German citizens suspected of distributing propaganda over the Internet supporting al-Qaida and other terrorist organizations were arrested Tuesday, German prosecutors said.

The men — identified only as Daniel P., 26 and Harun Can A., 23 — were among eight suspects whose homes were raided on Tuesday, federal prosecutors said in a statement.

A 19-year-old German citizen identified as Irfan P. was already in custody on separate charges before the morning raids in cities including Augsburg, Duesseldorf and Bremen, where investigators combed through the suspects' computer equipment.

Prosecutors said the three Germans are accused of belonging to the Global Islamic Media Front and of supporting a foreign terrorist organization.

"The suspects are, among other things, strongly suspected of being responsible for many German-language Internet sites," the statement said, "Through them (the suspects) supported and solicited members and supporters for al-Qaida, al-Qaida in Iraq and Ansar Al Islam."

According to prosecutors, the men posted propaganda videos and messages to the group's German-language site and created links to other sites hosted by Islamic terrorist groups.

Federal prosecutor's spokesman Frank Wallenta said two of the videos included a German speaker calling for Germany and Austria to pull their troops out of Afghanistan.

Daniel P. is accused of 18 counts of publishing propaganda to the sites between November 2006 and November 2007. Irfan P. faces 10 counts of the same charge and Harun Can A. faces four.

Wallenta said he could not estimate the maximum prison sentence that each suspect might face because a judge will need to decide which charges they will face and whether to hold them in investigative custody, which could reduce their sentence if convicted.

"It's much to early for that," Wallenta said. [...]

A small step forward. If authorities enforce penalties properly and aren't deterred from pursuing cases for fear of "alienating" or allegedly "radicalizing" Muslim populations, that will be another step forward. British law aims at preventing forced marriage," by Jennifer Quinn for the Associated Press, November 25:

LONDON – (AP) — A British law went into effect Tuesday that allows courts to prevent someone from being forced into marriage — a move that comes as governments across Europe confront immigrant practices that sometimes clash with more liberal values.

The right to resist a forced marriage is more than simply a "more liberal value." But there is more politically correct understatement later in the article.

In the first nine months of 2008, the Forced Marriage Unit — part of Britain's Foreign Office — handled more than 1,300 cases in which there were concerns someone was about to be forced into marriage, or already had been.

Nearly 85 percent of the cases had female victims, and the majority involved families of Pakistani, Indian, and Bangladeshi descent, the unit said. About half involved minors.

The Forced Marriage Act gives British courts the power to issue protection orders that can stop intimidation or violence, prevent someone from having to go abroad, and compel someone to reveal the whereabouts of a person believed to be at risk.

The act allows the victim, a friend, or an agency working with the person at risk — like the police, social services or organizers of a women's refuge — to apply for a protection order. Anyone who violates such an order can be jailed for two years.

A curious detail:

It is not a crime in Britain to force someone into marriage. But the practice often includes offenses such as abuse, assault, rape and kidnapping.

Women who had been forced into marriage — or who had escaped a forced marriage — were consulted on the act before it became law, said Shaminder Ubhi, the director of London's Ashiana Project.

"You want to be able to say to the community that this won't be tolerated, that if you are a perpetrator, you will be held accountable," Ubhi said.

The effort to curb forced marriage is part of a wider debate across Europe over the proper balance between accepting diversity and demanding that immigrants accept the values of their new country. France, with a secular tradition, set of a furious debate in 2004 by banning Muslim headscarves and other religious symbols from schools.

The issue of forced marriage is in quite a different league from other "traditions," but that sets up a handy litmus test: If it's a crime and/or an institutionalized violation of human rights, it isn't "diversity."

Once more, the Egyptian press depicts Islamic discrimination/persecution against dhimmi Christians as a product of "sectarian strife," wherein both parties are equally guilty, or "intolerant." But why shouldn't it, when the Western press does the same thing? See the Pact of Omar for more on why the Muslims must have been incensed. More on this story.

"13 Injured in Clashes between Muslims and Christians in Ain Shams," by Mustafa el-Marsafawi and Fatma Abu Shanab for Al-Masri Al-Yawm, November 25 (thanks to Robert):

There were clashes between Muslims and Christians in Ain Shams district two days ago after some Christians prayed inside a closed plant turned into a Church, which is a stone's throw away from a mosque. After the two sides pelted each others with stones, the police dropped tear bombs and arrested eight people.

Leaderships at Cairo Security Directorate, Azhar Sheikhs and priests moved to the scene of the accident to defuse the situation and reach a solution for the problem.

Eyewitnesses said seven central security vehicles and anti-riot forces cordoned off Tawfiqia Street in which security forces used sticks and tear bombs to disperse the people who pelted them with stones. This resulted in the injury of eight people and five soldiers. In addition, two cars and a number of facades were destroyed.

Some Muslims from the district said the Christians turned a closed plant into a church without getting a license. They wondered how the Christians want to establish a church adjacent to a mosque.

Muslims and Christians exchanged accusations of pelting with stones and bottles.

"We sought protection in the church because we were not a party in the problem, as clashes erupted between the police and the Muslims," the Christians said.

The menacing-looking throng standing against the police, depicted in pictures, would seem to verify this.

The "Burqini"

Where's Naomi Wolf to help explain why Western women should give the hijab a try? More on such stories. "Islam makes modest inroad in fashion," by Liz Gooch, Kuala Lumpur for The Age, November 25 (thanks to Shechild):

THE shorter, tighter and more revealing the better may be the rule on most catwalks, but there is not a miniskirt or plunging neckline in sight as Malaysia's Islamic Fashion Festival gets into full swing.

Models covered from head to toe are strutting down catwalks in Kuala Lumpur wearing designs from around the world during the week-long festival, which emphasises fabric over flesh.

The event is becoming a regular fixture on the fashion calendar in Kuala Lumpur, Jakarta and Dubai as organisers seek to transform the three cities into the London, Paris and New York of the Islamic fashion scene.

This week's festival, the sixth since the show began in Kuala Lumpur two years ago, features Islamic designs for every occasion, from office wear, prayer wear and bridal wear to swimwear, couture and avant-garde.

The festival's founder, Rezza Shah, says his aim is to show that Islamic clothing can be fashionable.

"When I say 'Islamic fashion', they think it's a fashion show where you can see two eyeballs. Even Muslims themselves think this," said Mr Shah, a former model and actor who used to run his own modelling agency. "I do agree that women should be covered but they should be allowed to express their fashion, because we are living in a modern world."

While there are no official statistics indicating the value of the Islamic fashion industry, some have estimated that it could be worth $US96 billion ($A152 billion) a year at least.

"A lot of ladies are covered but are dying to dress up well," said Mr Shah, adding that he aimed to show clothing that ranged from minimal to maximum coverings. "It's not about saying what's right or wrong. It's about showing variety."

Another contradiction: It is about saying what's right (dressing according to Islamic principles) and wrong (not dressing in infidel mini-skirts).

More on this story. "Critics Decry Plans for a Movie Depicting Life of Prophet Muhammad," by Maxim Lott for Fox News, November 25 (thanks to Christopher):

If film producer Oscar Zoghbi has his way, Americans will be soon be flocking to movie theaters to see a film about the Prophet Muhammad and his followers that Zoghbi hopes will clear up misconceptions about Muslims, including what he says is "the understanding that all Muslims are terrorists."

Zoghbi says he hopes to shoot some scenes for his movie in the holy cities of Medina and Mecca, and he predicts his film, "The Messenger of Peace," will rival Mel Gibson's "The Passion of The Christ."

But some critics predict Zoghbi's movie, which is scheduled to begin production early next year, will be a whitewash, and that it won't tell the whole story about Muhammad or Islam.

Nonie Darwish, the author of the upcoming book "Cruel and Usual Punishment: The Terrifying Global Implications of Islamic Law," said the film will likely try too hard not to offend.

"The movie will probably avoid or justify Muhammad's violent and unprovoked battling years in Medina, where assassination and mass murder were done by Muhammad … in order to spread the religion, take control and silence his critics," Darwish said.

"We will probably see the image of Muhammad that most Muslims were spoon-fed in their religious education."

Robert Spencer, director of JihadWatch.com, said Western audiences looking to learn more about a religion tangled in stereotypes of suicide bombers will be disappointed by "The Messenger of Peace."

"They're already taking a stand on a controversial issue with the title alone, denying and downplaying the manifest fact that numerous Muslims around the world have justified acts of violence by invoking Muhammad's words and example," Spencer said.

But Zoghbi says his film will very deliberately take a moderate approach.

"We are trying to depict the values and teachings of the Prophet. It's not a historical film in any way," he said...

Naturally, since if it was a "historical" film, Zoghbi would have to rely on Muhammad's biographers, Ibn Hisham, al-Waqidi, Ibn Ishaq -- or, for a succint sum, Robert's Truth About Muhammad -- something he would not want to do.

Unfortunately for her, revenge in Islam seems to be reserved for men only. More on this story. "Afghan teacher wants acid thrown on her attackers," from the Associated Press, November 25:

KANDAHAR, Afghanistan -- A 23-year-old teacher burned in an acid attack on 15 schoolgirls and instructors wants the Afghan government to throw acid on her attackers and then hang them.

Kandahar's governor said Tuesday that authorities had arrested 10 alleged Taliban militants for the Nov. 12 attack in this southern city and that several confessed to taking part.

Gov. Rahmatullah Raufi said the men would be tried in open court, a pledge that pleased Nuskaal, a first-year math teacher who suffered acid burns on her shoulders.

"Those girls were simply going to school to get an education," said Nuskaal, who like many Afghans goes by one name. "My parents told me that security isn't good enough and that they were worried about me teaching. But I told my parents I won't stop teaching. I'm not afraid."

After the attack, President Hamid Karzai called for the perpetrators to be executed in public. Nuskaal said the attackers should have acid thrown on them first.

Men riding motorbikes squirted acid from water bottles onto three groups of students and teachers walking to school. Several girls suffered burned faces and were hospitalized. One teenager couldn't open her eyes for days after the attack, which sparked condemnation around the world.

Afghanistan's government called the attack "un-Islamic," while the United Nations labeled it "a hideous crime." First lady Laura Bush decried the attackers as cowardly.

The government charged Tuesday that high-ranking Taliban fighters paid the suspects a total of $2,000 to carry out the attack. The assailants came from Pakistan but were Afghan nationals, said Doud Doud, an Interior Ministry official...

Killing and being killed for Allah (cf. Qur'an 9:111)

More on the Somali jihad in Minneapolis -- home also of several notable Stealth Jihad efforts, including the attempt to impose Sharia law on the patrons of taxicabs at Minneapolis airport, and the refusal of Muslim cashiers at local Target stores to check out pork products.

Anyway, have any authorities stopped to consider the question of whether we really want to import into the United States people who would blow themselves up as suicide bombers? Why not?

"FEDS: Twin Cities man behind Somalia bombing, investigating network," by Sam Zeff, Bob McNaney, and Nicole Muehlhausen for KSTP.com (thanks to Refugee Resettlement Watch):

5 EYEWITNESS NEWS has learned that federal law enforcement sources believe that a Twin Cities man blew himself up in a suicide bombing in Northern Somalia last month.

The FBI and Homeland Security are investigating whether Shirwa Ahmed had developed a terrorist recruiting network in the area.

5 EYEWITNESS NEWS learned that Ahmed came to the Twin Cities in 1996 and graduated from Roosevelt High School in Minneapolis. He was a naturalized U.S. citizen.

More than a dozen young men of Somali descent, mostly in their 20s, from the Minneapolis area have recently disappeared, U.S. law enforcement officials tell 5 EYEWITNESS NEWS. All are thought to be associates of Ahmed. U.S. officials suspect most of the young men have departed for Somalia to fight in ongoing violence there or to train in terrorist camps. Family members of the young men are said to be distraught, trying to figure to out what happened to them, sources say.

So far, the investigation has not uncovered credible evidence of a plot targeting the U.S. but American officials want to track down all these young men before they can say for certain what this is or is not, according to ABC News. Sources say the situation is being closely monitored by senior law enforcement and intelligence officials in Washington....

"Some were said to be deeply religious."

"The Missing: Somali Men Off Twin Cities Streets, Back in Somalia," by Tom Lyden for MyFoxTwinCities, November 24 (thanks to all sent this in):

MINNEAPOLIS -- Young Somali men are vanishing off the streets of the Twin Cities. More than 20 have left in the last few months, and the community fears they’ve gone back to Somalia to fight in a holy war.

They’re known in the Somali community simply at The Missing. More than 20 young Somali men, between the ages of 17 and 22, who have left the Twin Cities in the last few months, without a single word to their families.

The families and community leaders believe the men have gone back to fight in a bloody civil war, in which Al Quiada is a major player.

"They're concerned, emotional and in shock,” Omar Jamal, of the Somali Justice Center said. “They're completely grief stricken.

From multiple sources in the Somali community, FOX 9 has learned eight men are believed to have left on August 1, and another ten on November 4....

Then, last week, five families went to the FBI, worries their kids were part of some jihad in Somalia. For their part, the FBI would not confirm or deny whether they have an ongoing investigation....

Some of The Missing are believed to be former gang members, escaping the street violence that’s claimed the life of seven young Somali men this year. Others are in college, and some were said to be deeply religious.

The irony is their families risked everything to escape the violence and religious wars, yet something or someone is luring the young men back....

Hmmm. What could it be?

Ghassan Elashi, under arrest in 2002

More on this story. "Guilty verdicts in terror case deal blow to CAIR: Founding director of U.S. Muslim lobby group could face 20 years in prison," from WND, November 25 (thanks to Doug):

In a major blow to the terror-support network in America, the nation's largest Muslim charity and five of its former organizers were found guilty of illegally funneling more than $12 million to the Palestinan terrorist group Hamas.

The 108-count verdict against the Holy Land Foundation also deals a blow to the Council on American-Islamic Relations, which was named as an unindicted co-conspirator in the terror-fundraising scheme.

One of the guilty defendants in the federal case, Ghassan Elashi, was a founding director of Washington-based CAIR, the most powerful Muslim lobbyist group in the nation.

Elashi and the other defendants – Mohamed El-Mezain, Shukri Abu-Baker, Mufid Abdulqader and Abdelrahman Odeh – could face up to 20 years in prison for their convictions on conspiring to provide material support to terrorists.

For the first time, wiretap evidence heard in the Holy Land case put CAIR's executive director, Nihad Awad, at a Philadelphia meeting of Hamas leaders and activists that was secretly recorded by the FBI. Participants hatched a plot to disguise payments to Hamas terrorists as charitable giving.

"Government officials ought to study that evidence to realize CAIR is not what it presents itself as," said Steve Emerson of the Investigative Project on Terrorism.

Indeed it isn't. Read it all.

Stockholm Syndrome, based on Qur'an 4:34. "Violence Against Women: Jordan, 20% Approve To Be Beaten," from ANSAmed, November 25 (thanks to Insubria):

(ANSAmed) - AMMAN, NOVEMBER 25 - Around 20 percent of Jordanian women approve being beaten by husbands to discipline them, according to a survey conducted by the department of statistics that was published today. The study included nearly 15,000 families and 11,000 women who got married, said the report. Most of the respondents aged between 15 to 49 years old. Luck Steve, representative of UN Agencies which helped conduct the study, said measures must be taken to fight violence against women following surprising results of the survey. "The result of the survey shows we have work to do regarding state of women in the society and how they are being treated," said Steve.

...Every year between 15 to 20 women are killed in the name of honour, with killers receiving sentences for just a few months behind bars. (ANSAmed).

An American in Somalia. "Somalian Terror Organization Shabaab al Mujahideen Looks to 'Throw the West Into Hell,'" by Allison A. McGevna for FoxNews, November 25:

In the summer of 2007, a 28-year-old father of three from Houston, Texas, shocked his country when he became the first American ever to be convicted of receiving military training at a terrorist camp in Somalia.

Daniel Maldonado, an offbeat, outspoken young man who sported tattoos and dreadlocks, committed himself to wage jihad outside the United States and went to Somalia to receive training. It was there that he mastered the violent “arts” of homicide bombing, building IEDs and engaging in hand-to-hand combat.

Maldonado’s training in jihad came from Shabaab al Mujahideen, a group the State Department on Feb. 29, 2008, designated as a highly dangerous foreign terrorist organization.

Shabaab al Mujahideen, which espouses radical Islamic rule and has close ties to Al Qaeda, is best known for operating training camps for people seeking a more extreme form of Jihad. It also has been forging relations with Somali pirates who have recently been intercepting and holding for ransom several international shipping vessels.

Shabaab's ultimate goal, as articulated in an April statement, is to throw the West "into hell.”...

Read it all.

Surprise of surprises, he turns out not to have been a Methodist at all, but a Jordanian who was able to supply Palestinian passports, and who said: "You want to hit the Pentagon. You can put the bottle on it, the blue bottle, and hit the Pentagon."

Now why on earth would a Jordanian in Annandale, Virginia, want to "hit the Pentagon" or help others to do so? What ideology might motivate him? Of course, as far as the Fairfax County Times is concerned, he is just some sort of rogue. Why he might have wanted to do this is not news that is fit to print.

"Annandale man offers to sell missile to FBI informant," by Gregg MacDonald for the Fairfax County Times, November 25 (thanks to Brian at Snapped Shot):

Two Annandale men have been arrested in an FBI sting that uncovered visa fraud, gun smuggling and references to Lebanon, Yasir Arafat and bombing the Pentagon with a missile.

According to a recently unsealed U.S. District Court affidavit, an FBI informant met with Annandale resident Amjad Hamed, a Jordanian native, in April 2006.

Hamed provided the informant with six valid Palestinian passports and asked him to obtain U.S. visas for them.

According to the affidavit, Hamed revealed that he was part of an international visa fraud scheme. "I challenge anyone in the world who can bring so many passports without being inspected," he is quoted as saying.

Hamed is also quoted as saying he was a member of the Palestinian Authority who met regularly with Yasir Arafat.

Hamed's references to smuggling were also quoted in the affidavit. "Yes, I have connections to transport from America directly to the middle of Lebanon ... no one does anything through the airport ... the airport is hard. All the companies have to disclose their shipment. Do you know through what? ... via the port ... By the sea."

According to the affidavit, Hamed also sold the FBI informant an 8 mm semi-automatic handgun and a SKS sniper rifle on June 21, 2007.

During that transaction, Hamed is quoted as saying that he could obtain a missile that could reach the Pentagon. "You want to hit the Pentagon. You can put the bottle on it, the blue bottle, and hit the Pentagon," he is quoted as saying in the affidavit.

Hamed's cousin, Ibrahim Hamed, allegedly also sold the FBI informant an altered 9 mm handgun in August 2007, and offered to sell him other weapons that he said would come from a source in Florida....

Discussing the Holy Land Foundation convictions in Human Events today:

Justice has been served: on Monday, five former officials of the Holy Land Foundation (HLF), once the largest Islamic charity in the United States, were found guilty of funneling at least $12 million of the charity’s funds to the jihad terror group Hamas. Shukri Abu-Baker, Ghassan Elashi (founder of the Texas chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations), Mohamed El-Mezain, Mufid Abdulqader, and Abdelrahman Odeh could get sentences of as long as twenty years in prison for providing support to terrorists.

This verdict is a huge setback for the Stealth Jihad initiative in the United States, which I chronicle in my book by that name.

According to the Federation of American Scientists, “today, a very complex financial network connects the operations of over seventy branches of the Muslim Brothers worldwide. During the Muslim Brothers' seventy-plus years of existence, there have been cycles of growth, followed by divisions into factions, including clandestine financial networks, and violent jihad groups, such as al-Jihad and al-Gama'at al-Islamiyya in Egypt, HAMAS in Palestine and mujahideen groups in Afghanistan.”

This has been a long time coming. The UN anti-blasphemy measure, although non-binding at this point, is part of a larger and long-term effort to restrict speech that Islamic authorities dislike, including honest examination of the motives and goals of jihad terrorists. The only victors can be the jihadists themselves: Western authorities, already mired in politically correct myopia, will grow even more afraid to speak openly about what they're trying to do and what we can do to stop it. The losers can only be those who value freedom of speech and understand why it is so important in a genuinely pluralistic society. The UN measure moves the West one step closer to submitting to the hegemony of Islamic norms.

"UN anti-blasphemy measures have sinister goals, observers say," by Steven Edwards for Canwest News Service, November 24 (thanks to Kathy Shaidle):

UNITED NATIONS - Islamic countries Monday won United Nations backing for an anti-blasphemy measure Canada and other Western critics say risks being used to limit freedom of speech.

What? Canada still has free speech?

Combating Defamation of Religions passed 85-50 with 42 abstentions in a key UN General Assembly committee, and will enter into the international record after an expected rubber stamp by the plenary later in the year.

But while the draft's sponsors say it and earlier similar measures are aimed at preventing violence against worshippers regardless of religion, religious tolerance advocates warn the resolutions are being accumulated for a more sinister goal.

"It provides international cover for domestic anti-blasphemy laws, and there are a number of people who are in prison today because they have been accused of committing blasphemy," said Bennett Graham, international program director with the Becket Fund, a think tank aimed at promoting religious liberty.

"Those arrests are made legitimate by the UN body's (effective) stamp of approval."

Passage of the resolution is part of a 10-year action plan the 57-state Organization of Islamic Conference launched in 2005 to ensure "renaissance" of the "Muslim Ummah" or community.

While the current resolution is non-binding, Pakistan's Ambassador Masood Khan reminded the UN's Human Rights Council this year that the OIC ultimately seeks a "new instrument or convention" on the issue. Such a measure would impose its terms on signatory states.

"Each time the resolution comes up, we get a measure of where the world is on this issue, and we see that the campaign has been ramped up," said Hillel Neuer, executive director of the Geneva-based monitoring group UN Watch.

While this year's draft is less Islam-centric that resolutions of earlier years, analysts note it is more emphatic in linking religion defamation and incitement to violence.

That "risks limiting a broad range of peaceful speech and expression," Neuer argues.

The 2008 draft "underscores the need to combat defamation of religions, and incitement to religious hatred in general, by strategizing and harmonizing actions at the local, national regional and international levels."

It also laments "Islam is frequently and wrongly associated with human rights violations and terrorism."

But of course they are referring to non-Muslims who report on how Muslims associate Islam with human rights violations and terrorism. They are not referring to the Muslims who actually make these associations.

But Western democracies argue that a religion can't enjoy protection from criticism because that would require a judicial ruling that its teachings are the "truth."

"Defamation carries a particular legal meaning and application in domestic systems that makes the term wholly unsuitable in the context of religions," says the U.S. government in a response on the issue to the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights.

"A defamatory statement . . . is more than just an offensive one. It is also a statement that is false."

And that's just it. Here, here and here are three examples of Islamic groups regarding true statements about Islam as defamatory. And that reveals the real agenda of anti-blasphemy measures.

The paper also points out the legal difficulty of even defining the term "defamation" since "one individual's sincere belief that his or her creed alone is the truth conflicts with another's sincerely held view of the truth."

Precisely.

Yemen, on behalf of OIC, successfully introduced the measure to the UN General Assembly for the first time in 2005 after Pakistan first tabled it 1999 for annual consideration in the Human Rights Commission - the Council's forerunner. [...]

Muslim countries say they are only trying to cut down of what they see as extensive bias against Islam in the West. In the lead-up to Monday's vote, many referred, for example, to the 2005 publication of Danish cartoons that satirized Muhammad, and which touched off riots through the Muslim world....

Cut down on Islamic terrorism, and you will see an end to this alleged "extensive bias against Islam in the West."

Read it all.

Comments by David G. Littman, NGO Representative (UN, Geneva) of the Association for World Education (AWE) and the World Union for Progressive Judaism (WUPJ):

On 18 November, a grandiose, 1,500 m2 grotto-like ceiling by Spanish artist Miquel Barcelo was unveiled at the Palais des Nations after a year's work, involving 20 assistants and at a controversial cost of $25 million of Spanish taxpayers' money. The former 'Swiss' Room XX was inaugurated in royal pomp by King Juan Carlos and Queen Sofia, Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, Spanish Prime Minister Jose Luis Zapatero and Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan - co-sponsors of the 'Alliance of Civilisations' - as well as other dignitaries, the artist and 700 guests. Renamed 'Chamber for Human Rights and the Alliance of Civilizations', it is slated for the Human Rights Council with a special session in December to celebrate the Sixtieth Anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. At the 6th meeting of the 'Eurasian Islamic Council' in Istanbul on September 15, Prime Minister Erdogan - with Prime Minister Zapatero by his side - defined 'Islamophobia' as a grave pathological state of mind, and voiced his expectation that members of different civilizations would soon consider it a 'crime against humanity'.

Irony of irony, this grandiose artistic creation, with its thousands of stalactites - representing dripstone hanging from the roof of a cave - is a symbolic representation of the current state of the Human Rights Council, which might be described by echoing Churchill's dramatic words in the House of Commons seventy years ago:

I have watched this famous island ['Council'] descending incontinently, recklessly, the stairway which leads to a dark gulf. It is a fine broad staircase at the beginning, but, after a bit, the carpet ends. A little further on there are only flagstones, and, a little further on still, these break beneath your feet. (Speech, March 24, 1938 - at a fateful moment in European and world history.)

A stealth-like 'struggle' is gaining ground at the Human Rights Council and elsewhere in a 'Jihad atmosphere'. * The last flagstones are constantly breaking beneath the feet of delegates - especially concerned NGOs -and these 'points of order' stalactites from dictatorial regimes are more dangerous than the picturesque ones dangling above.

Stella L. Jatras reports on the building of a grand new mosque in Athens:

Greek authorities have given approval for a mosque to be built in Athens. Saudi Arabia first requested that the mosque be built near the Athens airport. Undoubtedly, the intent was that the first thing tourists and visitors to Greece would see would be the huge mosque, giving the impression that Greece was or soon would be a Muslim country rather than a Christian one. Fortunately, this did not happen.

Saudi Arabia made its original proposal for the mosque in 1983; some local citizens and the powerful Greek Orthodox Church objected. European critics shamed Athens for being the only capital in Europe not to have a mosque. An International Herald Tribune article in 2007 reported that a large-size temporary mosque had been established in an abandoned factory at Moschato in the greater Athens area. It lacked minarets, and its presence has not created any issues with the locals. Now, the state-funded mosque is to be built on 18 acres currently used by the Greek Navy, according to Greece's Ekathimerini newspaper, in an area of the city that is being revitalized as a sports and parks complex.

Mr. Awad, you are served

"They are not allowed to be operating, according to the law." But go and enforce it.

"Lawsuit's claim: CAIR no longer even exists," from WND, November 24:

The Washington-based Council on American-Islamic Relations, a pro-Muslim lobby named as an unindicted co-conspirator in one of the largest terror-funding cases ever brought by the U.S. government, continues to operate even though it no longer exists as a corporate entity, according to a lawyer suing the organization.

As WND reported last night, CAIR officials were surprised at their 14th annual banquet in Washington when lawyer David Yerushalmi arranged for them publicly to be served with legal notice of a new lawsuit over a staff member accused of representing himself as a lawyer and improperly taking clients' money.

Yerushalmi represents four plaintiffs, two of whom are African-American Muslims, in the case that claims CAIR internal documents reveal hundreds of people were victimized in the fraud scheme.

Yerushalmi discussed the developments today with WND founder and editor Joseph Farah, who was at the microphone in G. Gordon Liddy's absence on Liddy's regular radio program.

"We have CAIR documents which demonstrate there are at least 30 other victim-clients who paid money and were victimized by CAIR," Yerushalmi said, "And hundreds of other victims who don't even know they were victims."

The lawyer suggested allegations of that kind could spell the beginning of the end for CAIR's operations.

"If we have our way it certainly is," Yerushalmi told Farah. He said organizations that are proven to have a record of criminal activities should not exist.

Then came the suggestion of further defiance of the law by CAIR.

"The organization is no longer a valid corporation," Yerushalmi revealed on the program. "The District of Columbia delisted it on Sept. 8, 2008."

He said the organization failed to file its paperwork to continue to exist.

"They are not allowed to be operating, according to the law," he said.

A spokesman for CAIR, contacted by WND for a comment, said, "Thank you and have a nice day," and hung up on the reporter....

Ah, there's a tactic in CAIR's diplomatic arsenal that has been hallowed by long use.

JihadWatch.org director Robert Spencer, a longtime critic of CAIR, said the lawsuit "is an extraordinarily significant action."

"For years CAIR has used litigation as a weapon to silence and intimidate both its critics and anyone who has advocated measures to protect Americans against jihad terror. But the convictions of various of its former officials on jihad terror-related charges, as well as Islamic supremacist statements that have come to light from some of its spokesmen, have long suggested that CAIR is quite different from what all too many in the government and the mainstream media take it to be," Spencer told WND.

"This suit further suggests that they have not hesitated to use the same tactics they've used with non-Muslims against their fellow Muslims, and is an important step in exposing this unsavory organization for what it really is," he said....

On Spencer's comment page, the participants were awestruck by the legal move.

"This basically discredits all their leadership," wrote one person.

"It's about time that they are unmasked, and this suit directly strikes at their cover operation as a 'civil rights organization,'" said another.

"Give them enough rope … wonderful," said a third. [...]

Rioting into the night

While professing "loyalty to Islam" (e.g., cries of Allah Akbar, no doubt). "Muslims riot over plans for Christian church in Cairo," from the Daily Mail, November 24 (thanks to Robert):

A riot broke out over plans to convert a building in a Cairo suburb into a Christian church on Sunday.

Muslims and Christians clashed in Mataria after worshippers arrived for a service at the site of the planned church.[...]

Police in Mataria intervened when large numbers of Muslims and Christians faced off over a building which the Christians want to convert into a church. The police then clashed mainly with the Muslim side, they said.

In both cases people threw stones and bottles at the police. Two of the policemen were injured in Aswan and two in Cairo, and the protesters damaged shop fronts in both places, they said.

In the incident in Mataria, the confrontation between Muslims and Christians was the culmination of a long-running dispute over the plan to build a church there.

Residents said Christians had come from other parts of the city for the Sunday service at the building, which is not licensed as a church, and Muslims opposed to a church gathered against them. Some chanted: 'We're going to knock down the church' and shouted slogans of loyalty to Islam, witnesses said.

Wah.

We've received a number of emails about difficulties logging in since TypeKey rebranded itself as TypePad at some point late last week. We are aware of the problem, and while the ball is in TypePad's court to fix it, apparently if you keep trying to log in, it will eventually go through.

"The future ain't what it used to be." -- Yogi Berra

I'm very pleased to announce that I have agreed to become a contributing writer for Steven Emerson's Investigative Project -- and here is their report on the Holy Land Foundation verdicts:

"HLF Officials Convicted on All Counts," from IPT News, November 24 (many links in the original):

DALLAS – A jury convicted five former officials at the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development (HLF) on all counts in the Hamas-support case after 8 days of deliberations.

The men, Shukri Abu-Baker, Ghassan Elashi, Mohamed El-Mezain, Mufid Abdulqader and Abdelrahman Odeh, could face up to 20 years in prison for their convictions on conspiracy counts, including conspiring to provide material support to terrorists. The verdicts, read Monday afternoon, ended a two-year saga in what is considered the largest terror financing case since the 9/11 attacks.

In the original trial last year, jurors acquitted El-Mezain on 31 of the 32 counts against him, but could not reach unanimous verdicts on any other counts, prompting a mistrial.

Prosecutors made a series of significant adjustments, from dropping 29 counts each against defendants Mufid Abdulqader and Abdelrahman Odeh, to adding new witnesses who could put the charity support in context. In addition, jurors in this trial saw three exhibits Israeli military officials seized from the Palestinian Authority which showed the PA also considered HLF to be a Hamas financer and that an HLF-supported charity committee was controlled by Hamas.

The result was a much more streamlined case that followed a logical narrative, said Peter Margulies, a law professor at Roger Williams University in Rhode Island. Seeing the Palestinian Authority reach the same conclusion as the U.S. government had to have helped, he said.

In addition, prosecutors provided summary exhibits that served as "a road map" to the case and had to help jurors deliberate, Margulies said. "The jury was able to look at the evidence and get past the perceived biases of any of the witnesses and see the evidence as a whole."

That evidence made clear that the defendants knew where the money raised in the U.S. was going despite legal prohibitions against support for Hamas. [...]

Prosecutors say HLF was part of a Palestine Committee – a conglomerate of U.S. based Muslim organizations and individuals committed to helping Hamas financially and politically. HLF was its fundraising arm, a designation formalized by Hamas deputy political director Mousa Abu Marzook in 1994. Support for Hamas became illegal with a 1995 executive order by President Bill Clinton and subsequent congressional action. [...]

"This is one of the most significant victories the Justice Department has won in the war on terror," said Andrew McCarthy, who prosecuted blind cleric Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman and 11 others for conspiring to blow up a series of New York landmarks. "Financing is the life-blood of jihadist organizations like Hamas. With the assistance of willing co-conspirators, they conceal their activities and use the Muslim obligation of charitable giving to mask support that is actually channeled to their murderous agenda. Today's verdicts say, loudly and clearly, that Americans aren't fooled and won't tolerate it. As a former federal prosecutor, I am especially proud of the assistant U.S. attorneys who persevered through some real travails in securing justice for the American people."...

Read it all.

In anticipation of Obama's term. A taste of things to come? Incidentally, why not also teach the jihadists to be stand-up comics -- they seem so serious all the time?

"Guantanamo detainees to have art lessons and video games to distract from jihad," by Tom Leonard for the Telegraph, November 24 (thanks to Christopher):

Terror suspects being held at Guantanamo Bay are to be offered art classes, Game Boys and film nights to distract them from thoughts of global jihad.

Detention camp staff at the US Navy base in Cuba are already teaching English to the 255 inmates despite fears that it might allow them to eavesdrop on their guards.

Barack Obama, the US president-elect, has promised to close the camp, which was set up to hold foreign terrorism suspects captured after the American-led invasion of Afghanistan in 2001.

However, convinced that such a decision is a long way from being carried out, camp staff are attempting to soften the notoriously Spartan existence of Guantanamo inmates.

"We want to keep their brains stimulated. We're not here to give degrees," Zak, the camp's Arab-American cultural advisor, told the Miami Herald.

"Once they are engaged and busy, they leave the guards alone."

Initiatives will include circulating Egyptian newspapers and Game Boy-style electronic games around the tiny cells and holding more "movie nights" featuring pre-recorded sport.

Art and geology classes will also be offered, although the former will not include sharp objects. Prisoners are already allowed to have crayons and Zak said some were "good artists".

Geology was chosen as a subject because it is grounded in earth and science issues rather than more sensitive areas such as politics and religion, he said.

"They draw greeting cards for family. They draw weapons," he said. "They draw whatever they want. You can't stop a detainee from thinking." Kristin Wilhelm, a lawyer who represents Guantanamo detainees, said the cultural programme was seven years too late.

She said that when one of her clients made greetings cards for people at her law firm, camp censors stamped each of them "secret" and confiscated them.

"It was always my view that the government was afraid to allow the drawings to be released, because it humanised my client," she said.

I've been so busy today I haven't had a chance to post today's radio schedule. I was on a few shows earlier today and am scheduled to be right at this very moment on the Infidel Bloggers Alliance Blog Talk Radio show with Pastorius, but there appear to be some technical difficulties -- I can't get through on the phone. (Sorry, Pastorius!)

Coming up, however, at 5:45 PM PST, I'll be taking pitches from the always-superb Frank Pastore on his show on KKLA.

UPDATE: I just heard from Pastorius and he is indeed experiencing technical difficulties. We will reschedule.

Despite the fact of 9/11. Perhaps Castro is still sore about the fact that U.S. government had more agents tracking him than Osama bin Laden in 2004?

"Castro: U.S. uses al-Qaeda to justify foreign policy," from USA Today, November 24:

HAVANA— Fidel Castro suggested Sunday that the U.S. government has promoted Americans' fears about al-Qaeda and other terrorist groups to justify its plans for world domination.

In an essay published on a government website, the 82-year-old former Cuban president wrote that al-Qaeda "was born from the empire's own entrails," using "the empire" to refer to the United States, but failing to elaborate.

He said the terrorist group was "a typical example of an enemy that the hegemonic power dangles in a place of its choosing where it needs to justify its actions, as it has done throughout its history, fabricating enemies and attacks destined to strengthen its plans of domination."

The U.S. has used al-Qaeda as a pretext to carry out plans "outlined long before the attacks that brought down the Twin Towers on Sept. 11, 2001," Castro wrote.

Castro has previously accused the U.S. government of misleading the public about the Sept. 11 attacks, and his close friend and ally Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez says it is plausible that Washington was somehow involved in planning the attacks.

As expected. Adding, "It would have been better if our [Pakistani] authorities had been alerted for local action." Perhaps the US has learned that "alerting" their Pakistani counterparts of planned strikes results in failed missions. Indeed, Rauf "escaped" from a Pakistani prison a year earlier; some have accused the Pakistani police of facilitating this escape. More on this story.

"Rashid Rauf was linked to al-Qaeda's number two Ayman al-Zawahiri," by Isambard Wilkinson for the Telegraph, November 24:

A British al-Qaeda suspect reportedly killed by a US missile strike in a Pakistani tribal area was linked to the group's second-in-command, Ayman al-Zawahiri, according to officials.

Rashid Rauf and a Saudi militant called Abu Zubair al-Masri were among five killed in a missile attack in North Waziristan on Saturday.

Rauf, a British national, was alleged to have been the mastermind of an al-Qaeda plot to blow up passenger aircraft in mid-air after they left London bound for the United States.[...]

Pakistan has officially protested to the United States that missile strikes violate its sovereign territory, although some officials say there was a tacit understanding between the two militaries to allow such action.[...]

"In fact, for some time now the US has totally by-passed our [intelligence] agencies," he [Pakistani authority] added.

A Pakistani intelligence official said that the US believed that Rauf was staying with a group connected to Zawahiri. Zawahiri is believed by American officials to operate from Pakistan's lawless, tribal border areas.[...]

Rehman reiterated her government's complaint that missile attacks, apparently launched from unmanned aircraft, are fanning anti- Americanism and Islamic extremism tearing at both Pakistan and Afghanistan.

"It would have been better if our authorities had been alerted for local action," said Ms Rehman. "Drone incursions create a strong backlash." Rauf, who is of Pakistani origin, has been on the run since last December, when he escaped from police escorting him back to jail after an extradition hearing in Pakistan's capital, Islamabad.

Britain was seeking his extradition ostensibly as a suspect in the 2002 killing of his uncle there, but Rauf had allegedly been in contact with a group in Britain planning to smuggle liquid explosives onto trans-Atlantic flights and also with a suspected al-Qaeda mastermind of the plot in Afghanistan.

"Some 200 inmates at Whitemoor prison near March in Cambridgeshire had meals worth around £18 each after complaining about the quality of jail food."

Whitemoor Prison Follies Update. "Prison staff drove 40 miles to buy £3,500 worth of takeaway curries for Muslim inmates," from the Daily Mail, November 24 (thanks to Wayne):

Muslim prisoners at a maximum security jail were treated to £3,500 of takeaway curries to mark a religious festival.

Some 200 inmates at Whitemoor prison near March in Cambridgeshire had meals worth around £18 each after complaining about the quality of jail food.

At the current exchange rate, that's a little over $27.

Staff, who also tucked into the meals, drove 40 miles to pick them up from a takeaway in Peterborough.

The meals were bought at the end of October this year to celebrate Eid, a Muslim holiday that marks the end of Ramadan, the Islamic holy month of fasting.

Main dishes included lamb rogan josh and beef madras.

A former non-Muslim inmate said: 'They tried to do the curries in-house but the prison chefs couldn't meet the budget of £1.80 per prisoner - and the Muslim inmates complained that it tasted rubbish.

'The smell of it wafting was torture for the rest of us.'

A Prison Service investigation is to now look at the 'unacceptably' high costs of the meals.

It is also likely to look into reports that standard security checks to ensure weapons or contraband were not being smuggled in with the dishes were not carried out in case the meals got cold.

The prison houses 458 of the most dangerous men in the country, including one third who are Muslim. Among them are al-Qa'eda terrorists.

Stewart Jackson, Tory MP for Peterborough, said yesterday: 'It is an absolute disgrace that this happened. Decent, law-abiding taxpayers will be appalled that their taxes are going on this.

'The Government, and particularly the Ministry of Justice, needs to get a grip on penal policy.'

Mark Wallace, of the TaxPayers' Alliance said: 'This is totally outrageous.

'This is meant to be a prison, not a luxury hotel. If they don't like prison food then don't commit the crime.'

HMP Whitemoor opened in 1992 and two years later was at the centre of a scandal after six prisoners, including five IRA members, escaped from the Special Secure Unit after smuggling guns into the prison.

In recent years its Muslim population has swelled as security services have begun investigating terrorist plots. It now has the highest proportion of Muslim inmates of any jail in the country.

In August, documents revealed emergency plans had been drawn up amid fears a prison officer could be taken hostage and beheaded by Muslim fanatics following mounting racial tension.

There was uproar last week when it emerged a convicted al-Qa'eda terrorist who planned a 'dirty bomb' attack in London had taken part in comedy workshops in the prison. [...]

It was during the first Holy Land Foundation trial last year that the Muslim Brotherhood memorandum about their "grand jihad in eliminating and destroying Western civilization from within" came to light. This verdict is a huge official recognition of the reality of that stealth jihad, and a huge setback for the likes of CAIR, which was named an unindicted co-conspirator in this case.

"Holy Land Foundation defendants guilty on all counts," by Jason Trahan for the Dallas Morning News, November 24 (thanks to K.):

A jury on Monday determined that the Holy Land Foundation and five men who worked with the Muslim charity were guilty of three dozen counts related to the illegal funneling of at least $12 million to the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas.

The unanimous verdicts are a complete victory for the government, which streamlined its case and worked hard to carefully educate jurors on the complex, massive evidence presented in the trial.

The prosecution's victory is also a major one for the lame duck administration of President George W. Bush, whose efforts at fighting terrorism financing in court have been troubled, even though the flow of funds seems to be effectively shut down.

It was the second trial where the government attempted to convict the men and the now-defunct, Richardson-based Holy Land Foundation itself. It took the jury eight days of deliberations to reach its decisions – less than half the time it took jurors to deadlock end up with an almost complete mistrial last year on the first go-around.

"My dad is not a criminal!" sobbed one courtroom observer after the verdicts were read. "He's a human!"

Huh? Criminals aren't human now? Cut the victimology, "courtroom observer." For one day, at least, your plots are exposed. But of course, we will see more and more of this as time goes by. Read on.

Opening statements at the Earle Cabell Federal Courthouse in downtown Dallas began Sept. 22. Over the past two months, prosecutors attempted to prove that five former charity organizers used Holy Land, once the largest Muslim charity in the U.S., to funnel an estimated $60 million to the militant group – most of it before 1995.

Hamas was designated as a terrorist organization by the U.S. in 1995, and the trial centered on the $12 million the government said Holy Land and supporters funneled to the group after that date.

Defense attorneys argued that the foundation was a legitimate, non-political charity that helped distressed Palestinians under Israeli occupation. They accused the government of bending to Israeli pressure to prosecute the charity, and of relying on old evidence predating the 1995 designation.

Holy Land was formed in the late 1980s, and was shut down by U.S. government regulators in December 2001. The case was indicted in 2004.

Last year's trial of the same five defendants ended in a hung jury Oct. 22, 2007. Jurors deliberated for 19 days before they deadlocked.

Even before the verdicts were read, supporters on both side of the aisle were prepared to claim a moral victory.

Critics of the government case argued that even convictions would carry an asterisk noting that it took untold millions of taxpayer dollars, 15 years of investigation and two long, high-profile trials to finally convince a jury of the defendants' guilt.

The strategy now, of course, will be to portray these jihadists as martyrs -- a tried-and-true strategy that has been used for decades, going back to the fog of disinformation that for years surrounded that old Communist spy, Alger Hiss:

"I suspect that they will be viewed much the same way that Mandela was viewed by the black South African population – as freedom fighters who have dedicated their lives to the liberation of Palestine," William Moffitt, the Virginia defense attorney who represented two former university professors, Abdelhaleem Ashqar and Sami Al-Arian, said before the Holy Land verdicts.

Mr. Ashqar and Mr. Al-Arian were acquitted in trials in Chicago and Florida on similar charges that they steered support to Palestinian terrorists.

Mr. Ashqar was sentenced to 11 years in prison last year for refusing to testify for a grand jury about his Hamas ties. Dr. Al-Arian pleaded guilty in 2006 to a charge of supporting Palestinian Islamic Jihad and is being held on contempt charges for refusing to co-operate in another terrorism support investigation. But both are viewed as folk heroes by some in the Muslim community.

Mr. Moffitt said Holy Land and the other cases are "show trials" where the government attempted to use "events that happened over 10 years ago" as evidence of crimes well before statutes specifically outlawing terrorism support were enacted.

"I think that the purpose of these trials was to further, in the minds of the public, the so-called ‘war on terrorism,'" he said. "There are legitimate terrorist organizations out there. But we've tried to make every group that doesn't agree with us like al-Qaeda."...

Hamas has gloried in the murders of civilians. That is not a simple matter of demonizing "every group that doesn't agree with us."

Courage. "Iraqi bomber was mentally disabled woman," from UPI, November 24 (thanks to Writer Mom):

BAGHDAD, Nov. 24 (UPI) -- One of two bombers who struck in Baghdad Monday was a mentally disabled woman whose explosives were detonated by remote control, officials said.

Brig. Gen. Qassim Atta, an Iraqi military spokesman, told CNN the incident outside the city's Green Zone was the latest in a series of terrorist bombings in which woman have been used to launch attacks.

At least 18 people, including 15 women, died in the two Monday attacks, officials said.

In the Green Zone incident, two women -- one reportedly pregnant -- were among the five victims when an explosives vest strapped to the mentally disabled woman detonated in a line of workers waiting to be searched at a checkpoint, The Times of London reported....

In an earlier explosion, 13 women died on a bus taking them to work at the Iraqi Trade Ministry building when the vehicle was blasted by a so-called sticky bomb attached to its side, the newspaper said....

Hanged for spying for Israel

"This network sought to gather important information from the Guards' military section, the country's nuclear centres and some security officials."

"Iran says Israel-linked spy network arrested," from AFP, November 24 (thanks to all who sent this in):

TEHRAN (AFP) – Iran's Revolutionary Guards have arrested a spy network linked to Israeli intelligence who tried to gather information on Iranian nuclear and military programmes, the guard's chief said on Monday.

"The intelligence bureau of the Revolutionary Guards Corps has recently discovered a spy network linked with the Israeli Mossad," Mohammad Ali Jafari said on state radio.

"This network sought to gather important information from the Guards' military section, the country's nuclear centres and some security officials," he said.

"Very good information as well as equipment that this network were supplied with have been discovered and people will be informed of the evidence in the near future," he said.

Jafari did not specify how many people were detained or where and when the group was arrested.

He said the detainees had confessed to "being trained in bombing and assassination in Israel and had bought vehicles and lots of equipment with Mossad support," the state broadcaster's website said.

Iran said on Saturday it had hanged an Iranian telecoms salesman convicted of spying for arch-enemy Israel and warned that a "more serious intelligence war" had begun with the Jewish state.

Tehran does not recognise Israel and tensions have flared since the 2005 election of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who has repeatedly said the Jewish state is doomed to vanish and branded the Holocaust a "myth"....

"Such non-Muslim subjects [of the Islamic state] are obliged to comply with Islamic rules that pertain to the safety and indemnity of life, reputation, and property. In addition, they...are forbidden to openly display wine or pork, (A: to ring church bells or display crosses,) recite the Torah or Evangel aloud, or make public display of their funerals and feastdays..." -- 'Umdat al-Salik o11.5

"Bosnia: Radical Muslims arrested for entering church," from AKI, November 24 (thanks to C. Cantoni):

Sarajevo, 24 Nov. (AKI) – Bosnian police arrested two Muslims allegedly linked to a radical 'Wahabi' sect after they sought access to a Catholic church in Sarajevo on Sunday. Inspector Dragan Miokovic confirmed on Monday two men were detained by police.

Church of Trinity vicar Ivan Ravlic said the two men knocked on the door of the church late Saturday and asked to see inside the building.

"My answer was that there was no need for them to look at the church at that late hour and that was when they explained they were disturbed by the church bell," Ravlic said....

UN Resolution 1701: Epic Fail. "Barak: Hizbullah has 42,000 missiles; some can hit Dimona," from the Jerusalem Post, November 24:

Defense Minister Ehud Barak on Monday cautioned that Hizbullah had greatly improved its abilities since the Second Lebanon War and was in possession of rockets that could reach as far south as Dimona. The defense minister also warned Beirut that the Shi'ite militia's integration in the Lebanese government could lead to extensive attacks on Lebanese infrastructure in the event of a military conflagration.

"Hizbullah has three times the ability it had before the Second Lebanon War and now has 42,000 missiles in its possession, as opposed to the 14,000 it had before the war," Barak said in a Knesset speech, warning that Hizbullah's recent maneuvers south of the Litani River were a liability for Lebanon. "In practice, UN Resolution 1701 isn't working, and Hizbullah's integration within the Lebanese republic exposes Lebanon and its infrastructures to a more massive hit in the event of a future standoff."

Barak went on to threaten Iran, which he said "continues to thumb its nose at the world and act vigorously to promote its military nuclear program. Israel is not taking any option off the table and I recommend that neither do others. Beyond that, any explicit statement would be harmful."

And now, some wishful thinking:

Earlier, addressing the Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee, the defense minister said that he did not regret the truce with Hamas, and assessed that the situation in the South would stabilize once more.

After which it will de-stabilize once more.

"I'm not sorry for any day or month of quiet," he said. "In each of the two months leading up to the truce there were 500 incidences of Kassam rocket fire and mortar fire, a figure which dropped to roughly ten a month when the truce kicked in."

Barak pointed out the resurgence of rocket attacks since an IDF operation targeted a tunnel on the Gaza border several weeks ago, but predicted that the truce would eventually reestablish itself.

High-spirited "youths" at it again in Europe. "Gouda: Church firebombed," from Islam in Europe, November 24 (thanks to John Doe):

Four teenagers of Moroccan origin were arrested Saturday evening for setting fire to the Vaste Burcht Reformed church in Gouda. A Molotov cocktail was thrown at the door of the church, according to the police. The bottom part of the door and the doormat were damaged.

The four Gouda residents, three aged 14 and one aged 15, are suspected of arson. The fire was reported at 5:45pm and the directions given by the reporter led to the residence of one of them, where three youth were arrested. The 15 year old suspect was arrested later that evening.

Three of the suspects spent the night in jail. They will appear in court Tuesday. A 14 year old was released after interrogation since there was no evidence of his involvement. The police is continuing with the investigation.

A spokesperson of the church said that there are often fights there but this is the first time a Molotov cocktail was thrown at them. The administrator of the church said that they had windows broken in in the past which they put down to street youth....

Doug Giles of Clash Radio reviews Stealth Jihad:

What if Christians demanded the following:

1. If anyone around Christians at work or school eats pork then they would get fired or severely chastised because we believe that scarfing down pig really offends God (and of course his people). Yep, BLTs—according to our take on Christ’s commands—really ticks him off and therefore bacon should be banned. Not only that, but any food that has even trace amounts of Porky the Pig in it must be verboten and banished from our presence everywhere we go because we’re Christians, and Christians don’t dine on swine. This means Jell-O shots at Tu-Tu-Tango’s and Jell-O served to kids at school ceases to be because Jell-O, hello, contains a wee little bit of a wee little pig, and this pisseth the Lord our God off!

2. All public schools must have several regularly scheduled 15 minute breaks throughout the school day for Christians to roll out their TBN prayer rugs and pray for revival. If not, we will raise Cain and Abel.

3. Public schools must become sex-segregated so that we, the washed, sanctified, filled with the Holy Ghost and fire crowd won’t be sorely tempted to swap spit with the hot Daisy Mae looking chick in pottery class. Matter of fact, why don’t public schools just carve out for us Christians a special school within the school, lest we become sullied via association with the unwashed masses and other religious persuasions, which we utterly detest. Howzabout that, mamasita?

4. Any and all the stupid, violent or sexually weird stuff that misguided Christians have done and are doing is to be scrubbed from the historical record, and the only thing that gets reported and taught is that we are the most peaceful, perfect people to ever schlep this planet. Anyone who thinks or speaks to the contrary will get the stink eye and be called a hater. Indeed, all criticism of Christians should be banned, and those who bring up our foibles, draw unfavorable cartoons of us, and don’t parrot our squeaky-clean spin get branded as bigots or Christophobes and should be threatened with prison.

5. Footbaths are to be installed in whichever universities my brethren and I attend (at the public’s expense) because Jesus was into foot washing, so I want a footbath, dammit! And if this means tuition gets hiked up to provide this for all Christians on campus, well . . . tough. I don’t care. My feet must be ritually washed, or Jesus gets angry—and when he gets angry, people die.

6. Any video games that Sony or whoever puts out that might accidentally offend Christians must be 86’ed. However, if other religions get offended via video it’s okay, just as long as my flavor ain’t disssed, can you dig it?

7. We must receive exemptions from the IRS from paying interest on back taxes because that’s against Christianity.

8. When the Christian church accidentally yields up a violent vocal dillweed from our ranks who hates America and is on the State Department’s terrorist watch list, instead of throwing that loopy bastard in prison we demand that the U.S. Army make him a sergeant. Capice?

9. Encourage the Christian high school student who wants to assassinate our President by giving him the “Most Likely to Become a Martyr” award during graduation.

10. Make students in the public school system who don’t believe in Jesus memorize portions of the Gospel of John, adopt Christian names and shout in the classroom, “I love Jesus, yes I do. I love Jesus. How ‘bout you?!”

Would any of points 1- 10 tick you secularists, atheists and agnostics off?

If Christians ever attempted any of the above they would be righteously ridiculed, castigated and condemned by the MSM, school administrators, cartoonists, talk radio, the blogosphere, Rosie, the coven on the View, religious leaders, the ACLU, Alec Baldwin and president elect Barack Obama. All of the aforementioned people would land on our crotch firmly with both feet. Heck, Christians can’t even say “merry Christmas,” cheer on traditional marriage, or champion the life of an unborn baby without being called Hitler, haters of humanity and intolerant bigots of other people’s values.

But Islam can.

Yep, Islam is making outrageous demands upon American life and culture, and we’re bending over and taking it from them, though we would be insanely intolerant of any other religious group—especially Christians—who had such particular and peculiar demands.

In Stealth Jihad, Islam expert and New York Times bestselling author Robert Spencer blows the whistle on a long-term plot by Islamic Jihadists to undermine the United States. According to Spencer, this effort aims not to bring America to its knees through attacks with guns or bombs, but to subvert the country from within—by gradually Islamizing America. The ultimate goal, the stealth jihadists themselves declare, is nothing less than the adoption of Islamic law in the United States, that’s all!

BTW . . . this is already happening, and Robert shows the reader in blistering detail how American liberties are having to bow and kiss the ring of Islamic rules and regulations. Indeed, the stealth jihadists are already warm and snuggly within the American political, educational and media landscapes.

My advice, boys and girls, is . . . buy Bob’s book, drink a red bull, wake the heck up and fight for your liberties not to be walked on by anyone anywhere.

One last ditty for the skeptics who don’t think “it” could happen here: I’m sure that’s what the Brits thought 20 years ago. Red Bull, anyone?

Today is the 45th anniversary of the shooting of Lee Harvey Oswald. As the nation remembered this weekend the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, a common theme of many stories was that questions still remain about the identity of the real killers. Here via MEMRITV (thanks to Anne) is a fresh steaming pile of conspiracy theory, returning to that tried-and-true theme of political analysis in the Islamic world: the Jews did it!

Never forget Amina and Sarah

America's Most Wanted did a story on the honor killings in Texas of Amina and Sarah Said by their father, Yaser Said, but -- not surprisingly -- they glossed over the honor killing angle.

As long as the mainstream media keeps doing this, instead of calling the American Muslim community to some accountability, more Muslim girls will be murdered for honor in the United States.

Pamela has a heartbroken letter from the girls' Aunt Gail about the shoddiness and inaccuracy of the America's Most Wanted presentation.

You know, the facts were all wrong. Why? I know that I have spoken to this producer for months now! So has Joyce Boucher as well! Let me do a reality check! Here are the facts they misrepresented: My niece is not Arabic nor, is she Hispanic looking! She is pale skinned and blue eyed! They represented this as an Arabic family with a dictator father and husband. Another fact totally avoided...ISLAM, the brother and son of the parents from hell. The very one who promises to kill me? Where was Yasser's and Tissy's beloved son who spied on these girls and bullied his mother? To me, this was an intentional omission! To have added a character as radical as Islam, this might have given CAIR the wrong impression! God forbid!

Another, Amina DID NOT come home on her own! No way, as she told Connie that she would rather be dead than ever go back home. She meant that too! Amina was coerced by my own niece to go back. This, after hours of calling Amina and telling her to come home. Tissy went as far as to put Yasser on the phone but, Amina knew death was awaiting her if she returned. When Amina did return, she and Sarah were taken into Yasser's cab and she did not go into that kitchen and rummage through the fridge. Give me a break! One of the biggest misrepresentation of the facts, Amina was in the front seat and Sarah was in the back seat. Amina, was sitting facing Yasser as a friend saw them and said so. If you simply listen to the 9-1-1 phone call from the cabbie who found them, he says there are two women, one in the front seat and one in the backseat! He describes what he sees in this call as he was asked too. He saw a woman in the front seat, "I have not seen her hand move, there is blood coming from her ear and she is slumped over." THESE ARE EYEWITNESS FACTS!

Yasser also knew exactly where to park that cab! It could not be seen by the cameras which are on the Omni Mandalay. No mention of this premeditated fact! I could go on and on about how they misrepresented the facts and truth about this tragic HONOR KILLING of my sister's granddaughters.

And at FrontPage, Phyllis Chesler has more:

Patricia, the girls' mother, is and was a white, blonde, blue-eyed Texas-born Christian woman, a child really, when Yaser first married her. The dramatization chose to portray her as an Arab- or Hispanic-looking woman. Although the program has an on-camera interview with the real Patricia, their choice of an Arab-looking actress to play Patricia accomplishes the following:

Viewers might think that the girls really were rebelling against their culture when, in fact, their mother and her extended family are Christian-Americans whose customs the girls were choosing. Second, by failing to show the real Patricia as she enticed her daughters to come home, promised them that their father only wanted to make up, the program blurs, renders indistinct, the fact that this was a classic honor killing, one which always involves a family collaboration. That is probably why they did not include the girls' older brother Islam. He would have also visually and verbally confirmed the concept that an honor killing is characterized by family collaboration. Of course, Islam may also have cursed the producers and threatened to kill or sue them if he was included. Nice guy.

In other words folks, the producers did not want to inflame any white "ethnic" or "racist" passion by showing an Arab Muslim male tyrant dominating a white Christian American woman (his wife) and their daughters. The program wanted no part of the long, historical stench which has attended the usually false, but sometimes true allegations about "Indians" or "blacks" raping white women, and the terrible lynchings that have occurred thereafter.

But, even more: The producers did not want to be charged with 'Islamophobia" by showing what a real, full-blown honor killing looks like. Further, they wanted to appear and present a "balanced" re-creation even if they had to make things up in order to do so. Thus, they showed the two girls as plotting revenge or preemptive self-defense against their father. If only Sarah and Amina had followed through on this imaginary course of action, they might be alive today. But, knowing how American law works, they might also be in jail for life.

Read it all.

The interview was last Thursday.

Note: I'd appreciate it if the comments field here did not degenerate into a discussion about the merits or demerits of Pat Robertson. He was courageous enough to want to discuss the stealth jihad agenda, and I am grateful to him for that. I've also discussed jihad activity on TV shows with Keith Olbermann and Ibrahim Hooper, and I am willing to discuss it with anyone.