December 2008 Archives

As Ibn Taymiyya demonstrated some 700 years past, "Defensive warfare is the most critical form of warfare, [since we are] warding off an invader from [our] sanctities and religion. It is a unanimously accepted duty. After belief, there is no greater duty than to repulse the invading enemy who corrupts faith and the world. There are no rules or conditions for this; he must be expelled by all possible means. Our learned ulama and others have all agreed to this. It is imperative to distinguish between repulsing the invading, oppressive infidel [Defensive Jihad] and pursuing him in his own lands [Offensive Jihad]."

In other words, after faith itself, nothing is more obligatory to Muslims than "repelling" invading infidels -- which, of course, is precisely how Israel's actions are being rationalized. Moreover, there are "no rules or conditions" involved: i.e., suicide-bombings are unquestionably valid. The jihad against Israel is therefore obligatory to all Muslims -- including women and children; the latter need not even receive permission from their fathers, which may be required before going on an offensive jihad.

"Hamas Women Vow to Become 'Martyrdom-Seekers' and Blow Themselves Up Among 'the Apes and Pigs,'" from MEMRI, December 31 (thanks to all who sent this in):

Following are excerpts from footage of Hamas female martyrdom-seekers in Gaza, which aired on Al-Aqsa TV on December 30, 2008.

Masked woman clad in explosives belt: "I, the martyrdom-seeker Umm Suheib, have dedicated myself for the sake of Allah, and for the sake of redeeming my family, from which I have lost eight martyrs so far. I swear by Allah that I will turn my body parts into a fire that will burn the occupation soldiers, if they move towards my house.

"My beloved people, if Allah supports you, no one will be able to overcome you. We are confident of the support of Allah. There are thousands of martyrdom-seeking women like me, waiting for the occupier, in order to avenge these massacres. I pledge to my people that I will continue on the path of my family, and avenge the widows and the orphans. My people on the front-line, do not wait for any Arab president or king, but direct your appeal to Allah, the King of Kings. We are loyal to our oath, and will meet, Allah willing, in the paradise of eternity."

Masked woman holding rifle: "Allah said: 'Prepare against them what force and steeds of war you can, to strike terror in the hearts of the enemies of Allah and your own enemies.' We convey this message to the Israeli army high command, which bombards our sons day and night: We, the martyrdom-seeking women of Palestine, mothers as well as girls, are waiting impatiently for them to come. Allah willing, we will make them taste bitterness, if they move even an inch into our beloved Gaza Strip.

"I am the mother of two martyrs, and I will sacrifice myself as a martyr, Allah willing. I will turn my blood into bombs that will burn them. In every Palestinian home, a time bomb will await them. There will be days of battle between us, and this will be our opportunity to avenge our sons whom they have bombed, and the blood of the 400 martyrs who were killed in the headquarters. I am waiting for them.

My honorable people, have more forbearance and steadfastness. Your daughters march by your side on the path of Jihad and martyrdom."

Second masked woman holding a rifle: "If one of our men dies, a thousand men will set out in his place. We, the women, will set out. We are the granddaughters of Yassin, Al-Bana, and Al-Qassam. We are all the daughters of Palestine, the daughters of steadfast Gaza. We will set out, booby-trapped. From every home, a bomb will set out, and it will explode among the sons of Zion. We are no less than Fatima Al-Najjar and Rim Al-Riyashi [two Palestinian women who blew themselves up among Israelis]. We will blow ourselves up among those traitors, those apes and pigs."

This video is also being sent around on Muslim email lists in the United States today. Kufr is unbelief. Fasad is mischief or corruption, for which the Qur'an prescribes penalties: "The punishment of those who wage war against Allah and His Messenger, and strive with might and main for mischief through the land is: execution, or crucifixion, or the cutting off of hands and feet from opposite sides, or exile from the land: that is their disgrace in this world, and a heavy punishment is theirs in the Hereafter" (5:33).

That explains why, as we reported here a week ago, Hamas is just fine with crucifixion -- as WND and others are reporting now.

Anyway, here is the prayer in the video above:

O Allah, take care of the sources of injustice and oppression,

Oh Allah, direct your forces against America, the centre of kufr and fasad

Oh Allah, direct your forces against America, the centre of kufr and fasad

Oh Allah, direct your forces against America, the centre of kufr and fasad

Oh Allah, of them you are all Aware, They spread fasaad in Your lands,

And they killed Your slaves and they insulted Your religion

O Allah, of them You are all Aware, And over them All powerful,

O Allah direct Your forces against them

O Allah direct Your forces against them

O Allah send upon them the storms of 'Aad,

And the cry of Thamud, and the Typhoon of the people of Noah,

O Allah send upon them that which descends from the skies,

And that which exudes from the lands,

O Allah disintegrate their country

O Allah make them into divided countries and scattered parties,

O Allah Ever-living and Omnipotent,

Contain them within a fist's grip of Your slaves

Contain them within a fist's grip of Your slaves

O Allah, make hurricanes a constant for them

O Allah, make hurricanes a constant for them

O Allah release our captured brothers

O Allah release them, O Allah strengthen them

O Allah make them steady on their faith

O Allah make possible a means for them

O Allah handle those who torture them

O Allah handle those who torture them

O Allah handle those who torture them

O Allah eradicate them with Your power and Omnipotence

O Allah make their plots against us a cause for their destruction,

And their slyness a slyness against them

O Lord of the Worlds,

O Ever-Living, Omnipotent,

O Most High and Most Gracious,

Hearer of all prayer, ever so close, accepting to all prayers...

"From sea to sea, one day Palestine will be free" -- i.e., Israel won't exist

Uh, sure, pal

The slick Mahdi Bray (right), looking agitated

These pictures are from a rally last night in Washington, DC, sponsored by the ANSWER Coalition, the Muslim American Society Freedom Foundation, the Free Palestine Alliance, the National Council of Arab Americans, Al-Awda, and the International Palestine Right to Return Coalition.

No one in attendance seems to have minded the genocidal sign at the top of the page.

At the rally was the slick Islamic spokesman Mahdi Bray, about whom there is more here and here.

I am getting reports from sources inside American mosques that the dua qunoot -- a prayer for the destruction of Allah's enemies -- is being added to the regular prayers in American mosques. The prayer, which concludes, "Undoubtedly, your torment is going to overtake infidels," is being added to every raka'ah, or unit of Islamic prayer (salah). There are, of course, five prescribed prayers per day, and those are comprised of a total of 17 raka'ahs. So 17 times a day, pious Muslims in the United States are praying these days for the destruction of the enemies of Allah -- by which Israel is clearly meant.

The YouTube video features a famous imam, Mishary Rashid Al-Afasy, praying the qunoot prayer earlier this year for Gaza. This video is being sent around Muslim lists.

Israel targets an apartment building where weapons are being stored. The Israelis warn people to leave. Hamas tries to get people to stay and act as human shields -- and if they had succeeded in this, of course, they would have trumpeted to the world the deaths of more innocents at the hands of the bloodthirsty Zionists.

As Muhammad said, "War is deceit."

Does the mainstream media not know it is being had, or does it just not care?

"Death toll rises as Israel continues Gaza assault," by Dion Nissenbaum and Ahmed Abu Hamda for the McClatchy Newspapers, December 29 (thanks to JCB):

[...] Over the weekend, Kannan's mother received a recorded call on her cell phone from the Israeli military. When she heard who was calling, she hung up. Minutes later, the same call came to the landline in her apartment warning her to leave if she was storing weapons.

In an apartment building across the street from Kannan and her family live four brothers who are Hamas militants. Israeli intelligence called the Hamas members to warn them that they were targets, Kannan said.

Leaders at the local mosque urged neighbors to converge on the apartment building and act as human shields, she added. No one heeded the call, however, so the Hamas militants fled. [...]

A message from Allyson Rowen Taylor of Shariah Finance Watch:

There is going to be a huge anti Israel rally this Friday January 2, at 11 am. in front of the Federal Building in Westwood LA.

We need to get the message of support for Israel and Democracy out and bring a huge counter demonstration with signs, flags, and bullhorns.

Now is the time for Jews, Christians, Copts, and all people who have suffered from terrorism and radical Islam to support Israel. I need your help. There will be over a thousand protesters carrying signs that equate the Israeli flag to a Swastika, and calling for the elimination of the Jewish State. We are at war. What will it take for the Jews and others to get up, get out and make sure we have a chance to battle the media war too. We are losing the media war, and all of us are busy.

I have a son on the front lines in the Givati Brigade, He is 22. He is a Sargent Commander of other young men who are his age and younger. We need to show our support to these brave men and women in the IDF who are fighting the battle on the front lines. We need to fight this battle where we live.

These rallies are usually on Shabbat, Holidays, and times when most people cannot attend....on purpose. This is a war, and it trumps all other obligations and I need your help.

Go to www.standwithus.com for the signs
Bring Bullhorns
Bring American and Israeli Flags
Contact Evangelical, Copt, Mormon, Christian and other pro-Israel groups to stand together for democracy and against radical Islam.

Send this on to your email lists, so we create an "email tree" regardless of where you live. This will happen in your city too.

Thank you
Allyson Rowen Taylor
Facebook-Lipstick Haganah

"Free speech? Sure! You're free to agree with me!"

You have to lie about Israel's "crimes" in Gaza, or you can't publish in Iran. Here is a glimpse of the model of free speech that is rapidly coming to the West: "Iranian newspaper closed for pulishing [sic] article that was sympathetic to Israel," from Reuters, January 1 (thanks to JE):

A NEWSPAPER has been closed down for publishing an article the authorities said was sympathetic to Israel.

The moderate daily Kargozaran is regarded as close to former President Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, who was defeated by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in the 2005 presidential election.

"The reason for the closure of the newspaper is because it published an article yesterday in which it sanitised the Zionist regime's crimes in Gaza," Mohammad Parvizi of the Culture and Islamic Guidance Ministry said....

Kargozaran is the latest publication critical of Ahmadinejad's government to be shut down by the authorities. A prominent pre-reform weekly magazine, Shahrvand-e Emrouz, was closed in November.

Some political analysts say closures are aimed at stifling dissent, although the government says it welcomes constructive criticism and says it upholds the principle of free speech.

Hmmm, now where have I heard that one before?

When I posted this picture Monday of a Muslim in New York holding a sign saying, "Death to All Juice," a lot of people took it as the comical error of an illiterate. Jihad Watch commenter Urban Infidel knew better, and wrote this:

The sign is funny, but he's not kidding.

It's not the work of an illiterate. In fact the sign was probably made by jouseff al-khattab, a member of the Islamic Thinkers Society, or one of his cohorts.

You can see the sign and others at his webpage:

http://www.revolutionmuslim.com/index.php?option=com_morfeoshow&task=view&gallery=2&Itemid=13

It is his way of calling for genocide without getting busted for hate speech.

Today Pamela has some of the photos from Revolution Muslim, and here is another. Note the caricature of the Jew straight out of Nazi literature, and the reference to the Qur'an's designation of the accursed Jews as apes (2:62-65; 5:59-60; 7:166):

Eurabians inspired by the Messiah

"How do you protest violence [allegedly] against a civilian population? Attack a civilian population, of course."

More jihad and Jew-hatred in Europe. "Antwerp: Arab riots, Jewish neighborhood sealed," from Islam In Europe, December 31 (thanks to Rudi):

How do you protest violence against a civilian population? Attack a civilian population, of course. These riots were expected, given the massive incitement that accompanied the organization of the demonstrations.

----

The demonstration that the Arab European League (AEL) in Borgerhout (Antwerp) organized against the bombardments of the Gaza Strip, has gotten completely out of hand. After the protest disbanded the demonstrators marched towards the Jewish neighborhood in Antwerp, clashing with the police. In particular car windows suffered, but also trams and buses were attacked.

The AEL held a protest action in the Kerkstraat in Borgerhout from 2pm. The protesters demanded the immediate suspension of the bombardments of the Gaza Strip and of the violence against the civilian population. Already during the demonstration in Borgerhout there were heated moments here and there.

The situation truly got out of hand when the demonstration disbanded at about 3:15pm. A group of protesters then marched towards the Jewish neighborhood in Antwerp. The police had completely closed off the neighborhood upon which started a cat-and-mouse game. The situation threatened to get out of hand and at about 3:25pm the police arrived with more manpower in order to drive out the protesters. At about 4pm the riots moved again to Borgerhout, in the area of the Turnhoutsebaan.

The protesters caused much damage, in particular to car windows but also trams and basses were attacked. The De Lijn bus company is diverting all buses and trams on the Turnhoutsebaan-Carnotstraat-Rooseveltplaats route. [...]

During today's demonstration damage was done, also in the Antwerp Diamantwijk (Diamond Center) where many Jews live and work. Today there is no activity in the sector, according to Freilich. Most shops are closed. Meanwhile the riots of isolated groups of protesters moved to Borgerhout and the Turnhoutsebaan area. The police is out in force.

There's also an issue of the Hamas flags which were present in the demonstration in Brussels for the suspension of the bombardments on the Gaza Strip . According to Freilich the green flag with the white text of Hamas is a banned symbol in Belgium of a terrorist organization. [...]

Various protesters in Brussels held the famous Hamas flag. The Jewish community is shocked that this is allowed. [...]

Proportionate response

Eurabia Alert. By striking at Jews in Denmark, Islamic jihadists hit two of their prime enemies at once: the wicked and ubiquitous Zionists, and the country that published the dreaded Motoons. "Two Israelis attacked in Denmark mall," from the Jerusalem Post, December 31 (thanks to Kathy Shaidle and Kevin):

Two Israelis were lightly wounded when they were shot by a group of men in a mall in Copenhagen, Denmark on Wednesday afternoon.

The Israelis were selling Dead Sea cosmetics at a stand in the mall - a job many young Israelis pursue, usually following military service, in order to save money for their future, and to continue their travels.

A group of men with Middle Eastern-looking features approached them and an altercation developed. A man in the group then brandished a weapon and fired at the Israelis.

The public's assistance was requested in capturing the shooter, who was probably a Palestinian, police said. His getaway car was already found but he had fled on foot....

The always insightful and informative Andrew McCarthy explains why at The Corner:

I have an article coming soon which calls (among other things) for a complete reappraisal of what "international law" means in the context of the ongoing conflict. I argue that there is no international law of warfare because Israel, like the U.S., has wisely declined to join the 1977 Protocol I to the Geneva Conventions. It has therefore not consented to Protocol I's effort to convert warfare from a military campaign into a hyper-legal regulatory exercise that favors terrorist factions over national armed forces.

Most of the world has signed on to Protocol I — including, regrettably, our NATO allies (the Brits ratified it in 1998, the same year Blair's government incorporated the European Convention on Human Rights into UK law). It is on the basis of this consensus — among countries that have either abdicated their national-defense responsibilities or stand to gain by Protocol I's tilting of the field toward terrorists and so-called "national liberation" movements — that Israel and the U.S. are now routinely accused of war crimes. But a set of obligations only constitutes "international law" if a country has agreed to be bound by it. Israel and the U.S. have not agreed to be bound by Protocol I. Consequently, there is no law violation in failures by Israel or us to meet its impossible terms (impossible, that is, if the objective of a military campaign is to be victory).

No number of loopy "disproportionate" reports by CNN, MSNBC and their stable of human-rights experts can change this. We should understand, moreover, that these are not simply reports; they are very purposeful efforts to advance a leftist antiwar agenda. If adopted, they would prevent the U.S. and Israel from pursuing vital national interests — especially national defense. We ought to be attacking the premise of these war-crimes smears rather than trying to finesse the matter for the purportedly greater good of harmony within the "international community." A community is a place where everyone is bound by the same law. We don't have one.

United colors

Owned by a "Zionist millionaire."

"Iran: Italian fashion store attacked by protesters," from AKI, December 31 (thanks to Insubria):

Tehran, 31 Dec. (AKI) - A branch of the Italian clothing retailer Benetton was set on fire in Iran amid angry protests against the Israeli raids in the Gaza Strip, media reports said on Wednesday.

According to the conservative Iranian daily, Jomhuri Eslami, the shop in Dowlat Street, in the north of the capital Tehran, had been attacked by protesters on Tuesday.

"Conservative." Yes, conservatives support the torching of silly fashion stores in service of the advance of a totalitarian, genocidal belief system.

Benetton is said to be "linked with the Zionist network," a government newspaper said.

Several Benetton stores have opened in the past two years in Iran, where global brands have largely been absent since the 1979 Islamic revolution.

Last year a group of prominent MPs protested against Benetton's presence in Iran, alleging that it was owned by a "Zionist millionaire" and that its fashions were a bad influence on female consumers.

Headband: "Martyrdom" -- which can be attained via mass murder

Back when I was in school, we had volunteer service groups -- you know, to clean up the school grounds, take care of handicapped students, etc. In Iran, volunteer student groups are a bit different. They're hoping to gain Paradise by murdering Israeli civilians: "Allah hath 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.

"Volunteer suicide bombers seek to attack Israel," by Ali Akbar Dareini for Associated Press, December 31 (thanks to James):

TEHRAN, Iran – Hard-line Iranian student groups have asked the government to authorize volunteers to go carry out suicide bombings in Israel in response to the Israeli assault on the Gaza Strip.

The government of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad had not responded to the call by Wednesday. Five hard-line student groups and a conservative clerical group launched a registration drive on Monday, seeking volunteers to carry out suicide attacks against Israel.

"Conservative." Yes, conservatives regularly blow themselves up in order to murder their enemies in quantity.

In an open letter to Ahmadinjead, the students said "volunteer student suicide groups ... are determined to go to Gaza. You are expected to issue orders to the relevant authorities in order to pave the way for such action." A copy of the letter was made available to The Associated Press on Wednesday.

Volunteer suicide groups have made similar requests in the past and the government never responded to their calls. Some hard-liners have claimed previously they succeeded in secretly sending bombers to Israel, but their claims have never been verified, and there has not been any sign of Iranians carrying out suicide attacks in Israel — raising the likelihood the groups' activities are mainly for propaganda purposes....

Zarar Shah is not quite as good

Zarar Shah sings your jihadi favorites!

"Pakistani investigators find Mumbai link - paper," from Reuters, December 31 (thanks to JE):

PAKISTANI investigators have unearthed substantive links between the gunmen who attacked Mumbai in November and a banned Pakistani Islamist militant group.

Ten gunmen killed 179 people in the attack on India's financial hub that India has blamed on the Pakistan-based Islamist group Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) group.

The group was set up by Pakistani security agencies in the late 1980s to fight Indian rule in the disputed Kashmir region but was banned in 2002, after Pakistan had signed up to the US-led campaign against terrorism.

The Wall Street Journal said at least one top LeT leader, Zarar Shah, captured in a raid early this month in Pakistani-controlled Kashmir, had confessed to the group's involvement in the attack.

"He is singing," an unidentified Pakistani security official told the newspaper, referring to Shah....

Pakistan has condemned the Mumbai attacks and has denied any state role, blaming "non-state actors".

"Nuke, nuke Israel." Chilling video from Tom Trento of WatchObsession.org.

Pamela has more video and photos, just as chilling.

"The presence of the Ethiopian troops, whom many Somalis see as occupiers in their land..." Occupiers. And yet they will not stop fighting when the "occupation" is over. They will keep fighting until Islamic law is implemented. That, of course, is exactly the same situation with Israel and the jihad groups that threaten it, but the State Department, and Bush and Obama, continue to imagine that a Palestinian state will solve the problem there. In reality, a Palestinian state will simply become a base for continued jihad attacks against Israel, until the Jewish state is eliminated and Islamic law is implemented where that state had once been.

Somali Jihad Update. "Somali insurgents vow to keep fighting," by Mohamed Olad Hassan for AP, December 31 (thanks to James):

MOGADISHU, Somalia (AP) — A powerful insurgent group poised to take over Somalia said Wednesday it will fight until the country is ruled by Islamic law, even as Ethiopian troops who have been propping up the government packed up to leave.

The presence of the Ethiopian troops, whom many Somalis see as occupiers in their land, has been a rallying cry for the insurgents to gain recruits even as the militants' strict form of Islam terrified people into submission.

But on Wednesday, the most powerful insurgent group said the departure after two years will not be enough to stop them fighting the government.

"We will not stop fighting even if the Ethiopian troops withdraw because our aim is to implement Islamic law across Somalia," said Sheik Muktar Robow, leader of the most aggressive Islamic insurgency group, al-Shabab.

The Ethiopian troops were packing up to leave Wednesday amid fears their departure will allow the strengthening Islamic insurgency to take over. But it was unclear when the thousands of soldiers would actually depart. They are expected to leave in stages, not all at once....

Dhimmis are forbidden bells: "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

"Church bells strike false note with Muslims," from Russia Today, December 27 (thanks to James Jatras):

The Muslim community in Russia's Nizhny Novgorod region is opposing plans to include church bells in a proposed new regional anthem. Local authorities had earlier set a competition to compose an anthem for the region.

The work is still being composed and officials say the last thing they want to do is to hurt people's feelings.

The Muslim community wanted the regional governor to change some of the rules of the contest. Using the sound of church bells was mandatory and Muslim leaders thought this alienated other ethnic and religious groups.

"There should be no political or religious themes in the anthem. It should be something that uplifts people and brings them together. I think including religion goes against this." Said Gayaz Zakirov, spiritual leader of the region’s Muslims....

At least for now.

Islamic Tolerance Alert: The Indonesian year-in-review. "Religious Freedom Curtailed as Government Bows to Pressure," by Muninggar Sri Saraswati for the Jakarta Post, December 31:

Religious freedom in Indonesia took a few steps back in 2008 as the government buckled under pressure from both mainstream and minority hard-line Muslim groups, to the detriment of minority organizations.

One of the most high-profile cases was the bid, led by the Islam Defenders Front, or FPI, in October to ban the Islamic Ahmadiyah sect, which resulted in a joint ministerial decree ordering the group to restrict its religious activities.

The decision was taken despite FPI threats to use violence against minority religious groups, including the destruction of mosques and houses belonging to Ahmadiyah followers. Religious intolerance came to a head in June when the FPI ambushed a peaceful rally organized by the National Alliance for the Freedom of Faith and Religion at the National Monument park, or Monas, in Central Jakarta.

Although FPI Chairman Habib Rizieq was later sentenced to 18 months in prison, the government decree means that Ahmadiyah members face legal prosecution if they fully practice their faith.

Prior to the decree, Ahmadiyah followers were able to follow their beliefs peacefully, even though the Indonesia Ulema Council, or MUI, declared Ahmadiyah heretical in 2005.

Ahmadiyah members, unlike mainstream Islamic groups, believe its founder, Mirza Ghulam Ahmad, is the last prophet — rather than Muhammad.

Another minority sect, the Kingdom of Eden, led by Lia Eden, has been targeted by Muslim groups for tainting the teachings of what they say is “pure” Islam.

Lia was arrested by the police on Dec. 15 for releasing an edict that claimed major religions should cease to exist.

Following the demands of thousands of Muslims, the police charged her with blasphemy.

Lia, who claims to be the Holy Spirit, God’s messenger Gabriel and a reincarnation of the Virgin Mary, was previously sentenced to two years in jail in 2006 on the same charge. She was found guilty of distributing books and video compact discs of her teachings, which were considered by some to be irreverent toward Islam.

Ahmadiyah was not the only target. The National Commission on Human Rights, or Komnas HAM, has documented violent and discriminative acts against other minority religious groups, such as Jamaah Al-Qiyadah, the Tani Mulya Church and the Dayeuh Kolot Christian Church.

However, Komnas HAM said it was most concerned about the general decline in religious freedom in the country through the enactment of laws and bylaws by the central and regional governments that show a total disregard for minority religious groups and national diversity.

President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono approved the vaguely worded anti-pornography bill in late November, despite continuing opposition from several provinces, ethnic groups, rights activists and pluralist organizations which claim it could allow majority groups to use violence and intimidation against minorities.

And these stories were far from the only ones. There were rampages against Christian schools and churches, worship permits withheld, and creeping sharia in general.

Regional-level bylaws to implement the spirit of sharia have also been seen as a threat to religious diversity in the country.

The Ministry of Home Affairs is currently reviewing 37 Sharia-based bylaws in force in several regions across the country, many of which are considered discriminatory and to violate existing laws.

Ifdhal Kasim, who chairs Komnas HAM, said that “the discrimination inherent in the bylaws threaten the basic freedom of a number of minority groups in Indonesia.”

“Ironically, the state tends to let these things happen by omission or, in some cases, by criminalizing the victims,” he said.

“Indonesia was founded on the spirit of diversity,” he said. “We should not forget that.”

Stabbed for being a priest

If a Christian had attacked and stabbed a Muslim in Turkey, would he too get four years, or would he be executed? This story also reminds that "moderate" Turkey's "small Christian community has been targeted in a spate of attacks over several years, prompting concern among human rights groups and the European Union, which Ankara hopes to join."

"Italian priest's attacker sentenced in Turkey," from Reuters, December 29 :

ANKARA (Reuters) – A Turkish court sentenced a man to four years in prison Monday for stabbing an Italian Catholic priest in 2007 in a case that has highlighted attacks against Christians in Muslim but secular Turkey.

A court in the coastal city of Izmir in western Turkey passed the sentence against Ramazan Bay for stabbing Adriano Franchini, Anatolian news agency reported. Franchini survived the attack.

Bay told the court he had been influenced by media reports of other attacks against Christians, including the shooting death of Andrea Santoro, another Italian Catholic priest, in the Turkish Black Sea city of Trabzon in 2006.

Turkey's small Christian community has been targeted in a spate of attacks over several years, prompting concern among human rights groups and the European Union, which Ankara hopes to join.

Three Christians, two Turks and a German, had their throats slit by youths who burst into their Bible publishing house in the southeastern town of Malatya last year.

Turkish Armenian writer Hrant Dink was also slain last year in Istanbul by a young nationalist gunman. A prosecutor on Monday indicted a colonel for failing to provide protection to Dink, who had received several death threats, Anatolian said.

Christians in Turkey number barely 100,000 in a total population of nearly 75 million.

Trying to emulate their "righteous forebears" of 1979 at the US embassy?

Surely Khomeini would be proud. Even though "Britain has called for an urgent ceasefire," that's not good enough. Nothing will ever be good enough -- not allowing sharia courts to operate in Britain, nor financially supporting Hamas. The more you concede, the more will be demanded of you -- till you live in complete submission in accordance to Koran 9:29: "Fight those who do not believe in Allah, nor in the latter day, nor do they prohibit what Allah and His Messenger have prohibited, nor follow the religion of truth, out of those who have been given the Book, until they pay the tax in acknowledgment of superiority and they are in a state of subjection."

"Iranian students raid British Embassy residence in Gaza protest," from the Telegraph, December 30:

A group of Iranian students stormed the British diplomatic compound in Tehran on Tuesday evening, accusing London of supporting the Israeli airstrikes on Gaza, Iran's official news agency reported.

"A large group of people and students entered the Gholhak gardens, which are occupied by the British embassy, to protest at Britain's policies in supporting the Zionist regime and put up the Palestinian flag there," state news agency IRNA reported.

The students stormed the compound on Tuesday evening and pulled down the British flag, replacing it with a Palestinian flag at compound's entrance before embassy police forced them to leave.

"We do confirm the raid on our premises. We are in contact with Islamic republic authorities to resolve the matter," Mitra Behnam, a British embassy spokesman, told AFP.

Gholhak gardens, a sprawling compound in north Tehran, provides accommodation for British diplomats and their families.

Britain has called for an urgent ceasefire by both sides in Gaza, where Israeli warplanes have launched waves of airstrikes against the Islamist Hamas movement since Saturday, killing at least 360 Palestinians, and Hamas militants have been firing volleys of rockets into Israel.

“Regrettably, we have become overwhelmed by arrogance and even racism, and we have begun to imagine that we are better..." Racism is one thing; being "overwhelmed by arrogance," on the other hand, and believing "that we are better," is simply a product of Islamic supremacism.

"Saudi minister warns against racism," from the Daily Times, December 30 :

RIYADH: Saudi Labour Minister Ghazi Al Gosaibi has warned against growing racism among Saudis towards the millions of foreign workers in the kingdom, media reports said on Monday. Gosaibi told senior Labour Ministry officials that the country should treat foreign workers better, protect their rights and not succumb to racism, local newspapers reported.

“Regrettably, we have become overwhelmed by arrogance and even racism, and we have begun to imagine that we are better than those who have come to share in shouldering the burden of development,” he said. Foreign workers have a huge presence throughout the kingdom, estimated at more than eight million altogether.

It's 1968 out there, man

The Anointed One apparently had nothing to say. Yet. "Pro-Palestinian protesters at Obama's Hawaii house," by Ross Colvin for Reuters, December 30 (thanks to James):

KAILUA, Hawaii (Reuters) - A small group of placard-waving pro-Palestinian demonstrators gathered near U.S. President-elect Barack Obama's vacation retreat in Hawaii on Tuesday to protest against the Israeli airstrikes in Gaza.

Obama has made no public comment on the strikes, which Israel launched on Saturday. Aides have repeatedly said he is monitoring the situation and continues to receive intelligence briefings but that there is only one U.S. president at a time....

"He is talking about how many jobs he is going to create but he is refusing to speak about this," said one of the protesters, Carolyn Hadfield, 66.

She was one of eight protesters standing with placards reading "No U.S. support for Israel" and "Gazans need food and medicine, not war" near Obama's rented vacation home in Kailua, an upmarket suburb on the Hawaiian island of Oahu, where he is in the second week of a vacation with his family.

CITIZEN PARTICIPATION

Obama did not acknowledge the protesters when his motorcade drove past to take him to play basketball at his old school. He stared straight ahead sipping from a bottle of water.

"The president-elect values citizen participation in our nation's foreign policy, but there is one president at a time, and we intend to respect that," said Brooke Anderson, his chief national security spokesperson.

Obama has in the past called Israel one of the United States' greatest allies and has vowed to ensure the security of the Jewish state.

He has also said he would make a sustained push to achieve the goal of two states -- a Jewish state in Israel and a Palestinian state....

Those are contradictory aspirations.

Twins separated at birth?

A 26 year-old man traveling to Pakistan using his sister's passport "passed three security checks unchallenged before boarding a flight to Islamabad." Just one of the reasons why the UK may well be al-Qaeda's next major target.

"Man flies to Pakistan using sister’s passport," from the Daily Times, December 30:

LONDON: The British authorities are investigating how a United Kingdom (UK) citizen flew to Pakistan using his sister’s passport before he was discovered by Pakistani officials and sent back.

According to a report in The Times, 26-year-old Kasim Raja from Moseley, Birmingham, travelled to Pakistan unknowingly on his younger sister’s passport.

Following the incident, security at Britain’s Birmingham airport was criticised as ‘a total failure’.

Raja passed three security checks unchallenged before boarding a flight to Islamabad. It was only on arrival that passport control staff noticed the error and he was sent back to the UK.

Who needs "protection" from whom?

After all, Australia wants all people from far and wide to feel welcome, and "at home," especially "If they've come from a Middle Eastern or Asian country [general PC-code for "Muslim country"] where women never go topless - in fact they usually wear a lot of clothing - I think it's important to respect all the different cultures that make up Australia." Indeed -- especially those that may attack you for not behaving like a subdued dhimmi.

"Topless ban to protect Muslims and Asians: Nile," by Georgina Robinson for the Sydney Morning Herald, December 30 (thanks to Kyros):

Conservative MP Fred Nile says he wants topless bathing banned in NSW to protect Sydney's Muslim and Asian communities.

The Reverend Nile has rejected allegations that prudishness is behind a bill he has prepared to ban nudity, including topless sunbathing, on the state's most popular beaches.

Australia's reputation as a conservative but culturally inclusive society was at risk of erosion by more liberal overseas visitors, he said.

"Our beaches should be a place where no one is offended, whether it's their religious or cultural views," he said.

"If they've come from a Middle Eastern or Asian country where women never go topless - in fact they usually wear a lot of clothing - I think it's important to respect all the different cultures that make up Australia."

The practice was at risk of raising the ire of Muslim men in particular, Mr Nile said.

"I don't want to have any provocations or disturbances on our public beaches," he said...

And there it is: All that talk of "inclusiveness" and "respect" is little more than fear of "raising Muslim ire" which would lead to "provocations and disturbances on our public beaches."

Who could object? "Shalev: Israel seeks to 'destroy' Hamas," from AP, December 30 (thanks to Dan):

Israel will push forward with its offensive in the Gaza Strip until it "completely destroys" Hamas, Israel's ambassador to the United Nations, Gabriela Shalev, said Monday, saying that the operation will continue as long as necessary to reach that goal....

Shalev expressed regret for civilian deaths in Gaza, but said Hamas was responsible for the bloodshed by operating in residential areas and using civilians as "human shields."

"We are very sorry, and really I say it as a mother, as a grandmother ... to speak of children and of women being killed," she said. But "it's only the Hamas to blame."

Shalev refused to discuss Israel's war strategy, but said the operation would continue "as long as it takes to dismantle Hamas completely."

"The main goal is to destroy completely this terrorist gang, which makes people on both sides of the border, in Gaza and in Israel, suffer daily," she said....

Shalev said Israel would not accept a return to the terms of the recent truce, which was repeatedly marred by sporadic Palestinian rocket fire. She noted that Hamas simply used the lull to restock its arsenal.

What a surprise! In Islamic theology, that's what a truce is for. But as everyone knows, Islamic theology illuminates nothing about this present conflict.

"What we want this time is a commitment and assurances that Hamas will not shoot any rockets and will not fire on Israeli citizens any more," she said.

Shalev said Israel is "concerned" about the international criticism, and has tried to send messages to the Arab world that it wants peace.

But of course, the Arab world doesn't want any peace except the peace of Sharia rule and dhimmitude for the Jews.

"But first of all, we have the right to defend ourselves and we have the duty to protect our citizens. This comes before the understanding, which we hope to receive, of the international community," she said.

Good luck with that.

Gee, what are the odds that the mainstream media would swallow uncritically Hamas propaganda?

Meryl Yourish has the details (thanks to James).

If they do this, they will thereby ensure that the bloodthirsty Hamas jihadists will survive to kill again. Is #8, here, just around the corner?

"Barak asks gov't to OK more reservists," from the Jerusalem Post, December 30 (thanks to Dan):

[...] Earlier, officials in the defense establishment have recommended to Prime Minister Ehud Olmert to suspend military operations against Hamas in Gaza for 48 hours and during that time to review a number of possible ceasefire solutions for Operation Cast Lead.

Senior Israeli ministers were reportedly set to discuss the proposal Tuesday night. According to reports, if the unilateral ceasefire were to fail, Israel would launch a ground offensive.

Olmert reportedly opposed suspending the operation while Defense Minister Ehud Barak was weighing the idea.

The recommendation, disclosed by defense sources on Tuesday evening, came after Barak spoke with French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner earlier in the day.

The IDF issued a statement that it was not recommending a ceasefire.

The defense establishment is suggesting that Israel use the suspension of operations to carefully study Hamas's intentions; whether the group was planning to escalate the violence by renewing attacks inside the country or whether it would opt to stop its rocket attacks against the South altogether....

It really is. And I condemn it! Jonathan Mark explains why in "Israel's Response Is Disproportionate" in Jewish World Review, December 30 (thanks to Doc Washburn):

I condemn Israel's disproportionate attack on Hamas because, so far, it has only lasted four days and I would like to see a proportionate response that terrifies Hamas for seven years, the years that have filled Sderot and neighboring towns with nightmares, death, amputations and trauma coming from rockets and mortars fired from Gaza.

Perhaps a proportionate response would have Gaza's leaders fearful of being killed every day for the next two years, as Gilad Shalit has been terrified of torture and death every day for the last two years in his solitary Gaza dungeon.

A proportionate response would have Hamas mothers and fathers as fearful for their children's lives as Shalit's mother and father have been fearful for Gilad's life.

A proportionate response would have Gaza's children crying for their mommies and daddies, the way at a Hamas pageant earlier in December a Palestinian actor dressed as Shalit got down on his knees, mock-begging in Hebrew for his Ima and Abba while the Gaza crowds laughed.

A proportionate response would so intimidate Hamas that they will grovel and, as a "gesture," send cocoa and jam into Sderot, the way Israel has groveled in response to rockets from Hamas, sending cocoa and jam into Gaza. Imagine Churchill sending cocoa and jam into Berlin as a humanitarian gesture after - during - the bombing of London.

A proportionate response would be one that will convince Hamas there is no military solution, no solution but surrender. They can then call surrender a "peace process," if they like, just as the mostly unanswered attacks on Jews have convinced some Jews that there is no military solution but surrender to any and all demands. They suggest a euthanasia by the euphemism of "peace process," that Israel become what some are already planning to call "Canaan," a non-Jewish state of all its citizens.

A proportionate response will convince Palestinians that if they insist that the starting point to peace negotiations is that no Jew be allowed to live on the West Bank, the proportionate response will be that Israel's starting point in negotiations is that no Arab be allowed to live in Tel Aviv. Horrible to contemplate? Fine, let there be a proportionate negotiation.

A proportionate response to Hamas, one might gather from the European scolds, would be as if the United States, after Pearl Harbor, would bomb just a few Japanese fishing boats and call it a day, believing the war would have ended with that.

A proportionate response will begin to remind Jews that there is no peace process like victory, just as Israel's decade of disproportionate restraint and self-doubt has convinced young Palestinians that their victory is inevitable, like Aryan youth in 1933 singing "Tomorrow Belongs To Me."

Let it be said to Israelis and Jews everywhere, in the words of Churchill: "You have enemies? Good. It means you've stood up for something." But remember: A war (and Hamas has repeatedly said this is war) is never won if you are disproportionately kind to someone who wants to destroy you and, failing in that, demands with indignation that you not destroy him.

When meeting that enemy, be proportionate.

Welcome to the wonderful new multicultural London. This is all part of the "Palestinians'" grievance theater -- if they mount a protest this big, they must have some serious grievances, no? And if they turn violent, well, we better give them what we want, no? And Gordon Brown is trying to do just that. In all the excitement, no one will remember the rocket attacks from Gaza that terrorized Israeli civilians. No, that was just fine.

"Palestinians to vent their fury in London all week," by Rashid Razaq and Felix Allen in the Evening Standard, December 30 (thanks to James):

PALESTINIANS and their supporters are planning a week-long series of protests in London ending in a Trafalgar Square rally of up to 5,000 demonstrators, the Standard can reveal.

Riot police have been placed on standby after about 1,000 protesters besieged the Israeli Embassy in Kensington for the second day of angry and heated demonstrations.

Seven people were arrested for public order offences, including assault on a police officer, after violence flared when a group of men attempted to scale the embassy gates on Palace Green.

Fireworks, sticks and smoke bombs were hurled at officers guarding the building and one policeman's helmet was set alight to loud cheers from the crowd.

The largely peaceful demonstration flared when protesters kicked down safety barriers after the police tried to hold them back from storming the embassy.

Holding placards, waving Palestinian flags and chanting "Free, free Palestine", the rally attracted Palestinian, Arab, Muslim and anti-war groups as well as nine rabbis from the International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network....

Ishmail Patel, chairman of Palestinian group Friends of Al-Aqsa, said the campaign's intention is to force the British government to intervene. He said: "Britain is a pivotal player with the ability to put pressure on the Israeli government to stop the killing of innocent civilians. Hopefully these protests should make an impact on the British government that not enough is being done to stop the bloodshed."...

Ahmad Tibi: What's his nationality?

If one believes that the Israeli/Palestinian conflict is a struggle over land, such that once the just-right negotiated settlement is found, peace will dawn, and if one thinks that poverty causes terrorism and that democracy cures it, one will find this story profoundly shocking. For it directly contradicts those core assumptions and others that currently prevail in official Washington and in the mainstream media -- not that it will get anyone who holds those views to question them.

But consider: these Israeli Arab Knesset members are not suffering refugees. They have political access and power. They are not poor, they are not voiceless. Yet they still align with the forces of jihad against those of the state they live in and represent in government. Thus Lieberman is quite right: they're a fifth column. And when one understands the Islamic doctrine of jihad as taught by all its sects and schools, and the supra-national character of the Islamic umma, the casual treason of these MK's becomes crystal clear.

But few, very few, wish to understand those things.

"MKs trade volleys over Gaza op," by Gil Hoffman for the Jerusalem Post, December 29 (thanks to James):

Some 200 kilometers away from the Gaza Strip, the Knesset became a battleground on Monday between Jewish MKs, who unanimously supported the IDF operation there, and Arab MKs, who united against it.

The Knesset endorsed the assault after Arab MKs failed to pass a proposal calling for an immediate cease-fire. Balad MKs boycotted the session while other Arab MKs took turns heckling Defense Minister Ehud Barak, Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni and opposition leader Binyamin Netanyahu.

United Arab List MK Taleb A-Sanaa was removed from the plenum when he responded to Barak's claim that 300 terrorists had been killed since the fighting began by shouting, "Tell the Knesset how many of them were women and children."

"The panicking in Sderot was unfortunate, but who said the reaction had to be rivers of blood in Gaza?" Ta'al MK Ahmed Tibi said in his speech from the Knesset podium. "I am against harming any citizen. But I admit that when Arabs - people of my nationality - are harmed, it hurts me more." Tibi accused the Jewish politicians who spoke before him of "counting bodies while they count mandates."

If Tibi is an "Arab" as opposed to being an "Israeli," what is he doing with a seat in Israel's parliamentary assembly? Did anyone stand up and say, "Wait a minute. Your nationality is Israeli"? Apparently not -- everyone takes this cognitive dissonance for granted.

Hadash MK Muhammad Barakei added that he was in his one and only homeland, while the Jewish MKs had other homelands to return to.

This is historical fantasy right out of Pallywood.

Israel Beiteinu leader Avigdor Lieberman called the Arab MKs traitors and a "fifth column for the Hamas."

Netanyahu called on all citizens of Israel, Arab and Jewish, to "remain loyal to the state of Israel during this just war against our enemy."

"We stand united in this war," Netanyahu said. "Not every citizen must automatically support every move the government makes, but it is unacceptable for Israeli citizens to support our enemies."

Indeed it is, and why is it happening? That is the question no one dares answer.

Here is more evidence of why the reaction to the Israeli actions in Gaza from the UN, the EU, and the other usual suspects is so hypocritical and reeking of a double standard. Did Hamas call people in southern Israel to warn them to get away, before shooting Kassam rockets into civilian areas? "Israel phones in warning to flee Gaza Strip strikes," by Abraham Rabinovich for The Australian, December 30 (thanks to all who sent this in):

RESIDENTS at certain addresses in the Gaza Strip have been receiving unusual phone calls since the Israeli air assault began on Saturday - a request that they and their families leave their homes as soon as possible for their own safety.

More unusual than the recorded message is the Arabic-speaking caller, who identifies himself as being from the Israeli defence forces, The Australian reports.

Dipping into their bag of tricks for the updated Gaza telephone numbers, Israel's intelligence services are warning Palestinian civilians in Gaza living close to Hamas facilities that they may be hurt unless they distance themselves from those targets.

In some cases, the warning comes not by telephone but from leaflets dropped from aircraft on selected districts.

Such warnings clearly eliminate the element of surprise, but for Israel it is of cardinal importance to minimise civilian casualties, and not just for humanitarian reasons.

The principal calculation is fear that a stray bomb hitting a school or any collection of innocent civilians could bring down the wrath of the international community on Israel, as has happened more than once in the past, and force it to halt its campaign before it has achieved its objectives.

Israel Radio reported that leaflets had been dropped at the beginning of the operation in the Rafah area near the border with Egypt, warning residents that the tunnels to Egypt through which weapons and civilian products were smuggled would be bombed....

Gaza is one of the most densely built-up areas in the world, making it extremely difficult to pinpoint targets without collateral damage.

Israeli officials say that the small percentage of civilians killed so far is due to precise intelligence regarding the location of Hamas targets and accurate bombing and rocketing.

Sharia Alert: "We cannot technically impede a marriage with a girl of this age. However, we can delay the process (by refusing to carry out the [state-mandated pre-marital] tests)."

"Saudi Arabia: Doctor stops wedding with five year-old," from Adnkronos International, December 30:

Riyadh, 30 Dec. (AKI) - A doctor in Saudi Arabia was able to stop the wedding of a five and 11 year-old whose family wanted to marry them to protect financial assets. "Thanks to the law that compels spouses to carry out blood analyses before marriage, we were able to stop a wedding with underage girls, among them a five year-old," said Hani Harsani, the doctor in charge of laboratory analysis in an interview with Saudi daily al-Watan.

"Two sisters came to us accompanied by their parents to undergo pre-marital blood analyses. The first one was five, and the other 11 years-old. When we asked the mother why they wanted to do the tests, she told us that she wanted to marry the girls to cousins to preserve the family's property rights."

During the interview, Harsani remembers an episode when a 10-year-old orphan was brought to do pre-marital blood tests by her brother, who wanted to marry the sister to a 40-year-old friend who already had two other wives.

"We cannot technically impede a marriage with a girl of this age. However, we can delay the process (by refusing to carry out the tests)," said Harsani.

"I hope a law can be passed sooner rather than later to establish a minimum age for marriage."

That would be nice. But opposition will be fierce, and the defenders of child marriage will invoke Muhammad's own example in marrying Aisha at the age of 6, and consummating the marriage when she was 9. They may also invoke Qur'an 65:4, which takes child marriage for granted in allowing for the divorce of pre-pubescent girls.

Pre-marital blood tests are compulsory in Saudi Arabia to ensure the spouses are in good health, but also to prevent the spread of hereditary diseases to the children.

An AP Photo by Dita Alangkara. Caption:

Muslim students shout slogans during a protest against Israeli airstrikes in Gaza outside Egyptian embassy in Jakarta, Indonesia, Tuesday, Dec. 30. 2008....

Thanks to Brian C. Ledbetter at Snapped Shot, who observes:

Gee, that's funny—There was another historical group that considered genocide of the Jews to be the "final solution" to world peace, too.

One wonders if the irony of this observation was lost on the photo editors over at the Associated Press before they published this picture.

I doubt they would have cared if they had noticed. They probably favor that kind of "solution" as well.

Dazed and confused

Mr. Peres, I am very glad to clear this up for you. The Hamas Charter quotes the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood in this way: "Israel will exist and will continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it, just as it obliterated others before it" (The Martyr, Imam Hassan al-Banna, of blessed memory).

The Charter also says, in article six:

The Islamic Resistance Movement is a distinguished Palestinian movement, whose allegiance is to Allah, and whose way of life is Islam. It strives to raise the banner of Allah over every inch of Palestine, for under the wing of Islam followers of all religions can coexist in security and safety where their lives, possessions and rights are concerned.

That security and safety is elucidated by the Qur'an, in which Muslims are told to "fight those who believe not in Allah nor the Last Day, nor hold that forbidden which hath been forbidden by Allah and His Messenger, nor acknowledge the religion of Truth, even if they are of the People of the Book, until they pay the Jizya with willing submission, and feel themselves subdued." (9:29)

So once the rule of Islamic law is established over all the land of Israel, and the Jews pay the jizya tax with willing submission and feel themselves subdued, accepting a status of inferiority (dhimmitude) vis-a-vis the Muslims, their security and safety will be secured -- as long as they don't get out of line.

That is what Hamas' goals are: the destruction of the Jewish state and the subjugation of the Jews under the rule of Islamic Sharia. That's why it continues to fire missiles from Gaza.

Happy to be of service, sir!

"Peres: There's no logic to Hamas rocket attacks from Gaza," by Barak Ravid for Haaretz, December 30 (thanks to Mladen):

Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and President Shimon Peres held a meeting on Tuesday morning at the President's Residence in Jerusalem. The premier updated Peres on the latest developments as the Israel Defense Forces offensive in Gaza enters its fourth day....

"Israel is not fighting the Palestinian population but a terrorist organization whose raison d'etre is continued violence and destabilizing the region," said Peres, who also remarked that Hamas bears responsibility for the situation unfolding in Gaza.

"Nobody in this world understands what are Hamas' goals and why it continues to fire missiles," the president said. "This shooting has no point, no logic, and no chance."

Pranab Mukherjee is largely repeating himself. "Term 'Islamic terrorism' wrong : Pranab," from the Press Trust of India, December 29:

Kolkata, Dec 29 (PTI) Describing as "unacceptable" the term 'Islamic terrorism', External Affairs Minister Pranab Mukherjee today said a "disinformation campaign" has been launched to vitiate the atmosphere and asked the people to protest it.

"Not only is this expression Islamic terrorism unacceptable, there should be protest against it. Islam has nothing to do with terrorism. The patriotism of Muslims is no less than others in the country," Mukherjee told a programme to mark 200 years of the Bengali translation of the Quran here.

He said deliberate attempts were being made to vitiate the atmosphere but Islam, which preached love and communal harmony, was against terrorism. "Terrorism is against humanity." He said universal brotherhood was the basis of Islam which attracted people all over the world to it.

Mukherjee said that after 9/11, people in Europe and US coined the phrase 'Islamic terrorism' and tried to project it was a conflict between Islamic and Christian civilisations.

Challenging those who described Islam as a religion of fundamentalists, Mukherjee asked them to show which part of the Holy Book encouraged fundamentalism.

The danger of fundamentalism depends in large part on what the fundamentals are; Qur'an 33:21 upholds Muhammad as the supreme example of human conduct. Given the open-ended calls for violence against unbelievers in the Qur'an (e.g., 9:5), along with the biographies (Sira) and accounts of Muhammad's sayings and actions (ahadith) that are accepted as sound (sahih) by Muslims (e.g., Bukhari, Muslim) it becomes clearer why armed jihad just doesn't want to go away.

The Taliban's paradise is taking shape in the Swat valley and beyond: Among other things, polio has resurfaced, and the girls' schools have to close in less than three weeks. They must be so proud of their "progress."

"Scenic Pakistani valley falls to Taliban militants," by Nahal Toosi for the Associated Press, December 29 (thanks to all who sent this in):

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan – Taliban militants are beheading and burning their way through Pakistan's picturesque Swat Valley, and residents say the insurgents now control most of the mountainous region far from the lawless tribal areas where jihadists thrive.

The deteriorating situation in the former tourist haven comes despite an army offensive that began in 2007 and an attempted peace deal. It is especially worrisome to Pakistani officials because the valley lies outside the areas where al-Qaida and Taliban militants have traditionally operated and where the military is staging a separate offensive.

"You can't imagine how bad it is," said Muzaffar ul-Mulk, a federal lawmaker whose home in Swat was attacked by bomb-toting assailants in mid-December, weeks after he left. "It's worse day by day."

The Taliban activity in northwest Pakistan also comes as the country shifts forces east to the Indian border because of tensions over last month's terrorist attacks in Mumbai, potentially giving insurgents more space to maneuver along the Afghan frontier.

Militants began preying on Swat's lush mountain ranges about two years ago, and it is now too dangerous for foreign and Pakistani journalists to visit. Interviews with residents, lawmakers and officials who have fled the region paint a dire picture.

A suicide blast killed 40 people Sunday at a polling station in Buner, an area bordering Swat that had been relatively peaceful. The attack underscored fears that even so-called "settled" regions presumptively under government control are increasingly unsafe.

The 3,500-square-mile Swat Valley lies less than 100 miles from the capital, Islamabad.

A senior government official said he feared there could be a spillover effect if the government lost control of Swat and allowed the insurgency to infect other areas. Like nearly everyone interviewed, the official requested anonymity for fear of reprisal by militants. [...]

Swat's militants are led by Maulana Fazlullah, a cleric who rose to prominence through radio broadcasts demanding the imposition of a harsh brand of Islamic law. His appeal tapped into widespread frustration with the area's inefficient judicial system. [...]

In some places, just a handful of insurgents can control a village. They rule by fear: beheading government sympathizers, blowing up bridges and demanding women wear all-encompassing burqas. [...]

A lawmaker and the senior Swat government official said business and landowners had been told to give two-thirds of their income to the militants. Some local media reported last week that the militants have pronounced effective in mid-January.

Several people interviewed said the regional government made a mistake in May when it struck a peace deal with the militants. The agreement fell apart within two months but let the insurgents regroup....

Being a jihadist means never having to say you're sorry: it's always the other guy's fault. "MILF rebuffs Arroyo's New-Year greeting," from GMANews.tv, December 30 (thanks to James):

MANILA, Philippines - Accusing her of an inconsistent peace policy, the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) rebuffed President Gloria Arroyo's New Year greeting to the Islamic community.

MILF deputy spokesman Khaled Musa said it is hard for Muslims to help the government achieve lasting peace if it cannot honor an agreement like the one on ancestral domain.

"How could there be peace when you don't honor agreement?" he said in an article posted on the MILF website.

Musa said wishing is the forte of "children and weak minds" but added that honoring an agreement is the exclusive domain of honorable men and women....

Not that the MILF has honored its agreements.

Last August, the MILF's "rogue" commanders led attacks in Mindanao after the Supreme Court blocked the signing of a memorandum of agreement on ancestral domain.

The fighting prompted the stalling of peace talks as government shifted its policy from dealing with armed groups to conducting "peace consultations" in the countryside....

Earlier, Musa said Arroyo's Islamic New Year message asked Muslims to support government's resolve "in turning the fragile peace in Muslim Mindanao into a genuine ad [sic] lasting one."

"More than ever, our countrymen of whatever faith and culture should unite in our continuing search for peace and stability in Mindanao," the message said....

"Peace and stability in Mindanao" -- i.e., Sharia.

"Terrorism expert"

For the record, this "British terrorism expert" also happens to be Egyptian-born, Muslim brotherhood spokesman, Kamal El-Helbawy, who once questioned whether Israeli children are legitimate targets -- this before Israel's latest "blame-all" incursion. One must wonder, therefore, whether his "expertise" in terrorism is a product of theoretic knowledge or hands-on experience.

"Middle East: Israeli attacks may lead to new terror networks, says expert," from Adnkronos, December 29 :

Gaza, 29 Dec. (AKI) - The latest Israeli attacks on Gaza could promote the growth of 'new Al-Qaeda' terror networks, a British terrorism expert warned on Monday. Kamal El-Helbawy, director of The Centre for the Study of Terrorism, said the raids had provoked widespread anger throughout the Middle East and many people, even children, were now talking about revenge.[...]

Egyptian-born El-Helbawy, one of the founders of the Muslim Association of Britain, said if a solution was not found, he did not expect peace to prevail in the Middle East.

El-Helbawy who took part in an interfaith conference between Muslims and Christians in London on Monday, warned the conflict could worsen, particularly if Israel launched a ground invasion.

"It will get worse," he said. "The Palestinians will not stop, they will defend their country to the last citizen."

El-Helbawy's centre provides insights into global trends in Islamic resurgence, democratisation and extremism in the Muslim world.

Meanwhile, Israeli Defence Minister Ehud Barak told Parliament on Monday that his country was 'at an all-out war' with Hamas.

"We have stretched our hand in peace many times to the Palestinian people. We have nothing against the people of Gaza," Barak said. "But this is an all-out war against Hamas and its branches."

Barak said Israel was not fighting the residents of Gaza, but wanted to deal Hamas a "severe blow". He warned that the Israeli operation would be "widened and deepened as needed".

The United States - Israel's strongest ally - has said it is up to Hamas to end the violence and commit itself to a truce.

From a pro-jihad, anti-Israel demonstration on Fifth Avenue in New York City. Pamela has more.

"How we do that, the difference is in the details, and that's one of the things this class is going to address." At least that's how First Methodist church Rev. Susan Boegli sees it. "Details," indeed -- such as those "minor details" of jihad, martyrdom, sharia, dhimmitude, etc. But not to worry: John Esposito -- Islamic apologist extraordinaire -- will set the record straight.

"Islam class set for January at church," by Jillian Daley for the Statesman Journal, December 29:

Salem — A 13-week class about Islam will be available at First United Methodist Church starting in January.

The weekly class will feature the Islam section of the Great World Religions DVD series taught by John L. Esposito, professor of religion and international affairs and professor of Islam at Georgetown University.[...]

First United Methodist Church's the Rev. Susan Boegli said having an Islam class at a Christian church makes sense.

"We all share the same God, the same principles of loving one another, of peace and justice," Boegli said. "How we do that, the difference is in the details, and that's one of the things this class is going to address."

Palestinian "freedom fighter"? Mujahid fi sabil Allah?

Why would he be locked up? Because, according to Muslims, “Jesus was indeed a Muslim and like the Muslims today [such as Osama bin Laden, Ayman Zawahiri, Mullah Omar, et. al.], called mankind to obey the law of God [sharia] as opposed to the law of man.” In other words, he would have been an Islamic terrorist, out to overthrow "man-made" governments and zealously establishing sharia courts around the world. Well, that certainly does not sound like the Jesus of the Gospels -- the one who said "Render unto Caesar what is Caesar's [physical world], and unto God what is God's [spiritual world]." Ah, but Muslims don't believe Jesus said that in the first place; such are man-made interpolations and machinations introduced to distort the Bible -- hence the need for the Koran, "Allah's uncorrupted word." So, no, Jesus would not have been a sharia-enforcing jihadist. Isa, on the other hand -- Islam's name for "Jesus" -- would.

"Muslim extremists claim Jesus Christ would have been locked up in prison," by Ben Goldby for the Sunday Mercury, December 27:

IF JESUS were alive today, he would be behind bars, Muslim extremists are claiming.

A post on Islam4uk.com claims that the Son of God would be locked up under anti-terror laws, and would have been extradited to Palestine by the British government.[...]

The radical website is run by Anjem Choudary, aged 41, the former UK head of banned Islamist group al-Muhajiroun, and is popular with young Muslims in the Midlands.

Choudary, who once called for the Pope to be assassinated, was secretly filmed at an Alum Rock youth centre in February, preaching hatred against “unbelievers” and calling for violent Sharia law to be introduced on the streets of Birmingham.

At the bottom of the rant on the website, Choudary encourages readers to get in touch with him, and even leaves his mobile phone number.

The message, posted just days before Christmas, says: “We can envisage that if alive in the UK today, Jesus would undoubtedly have supported the struggle of the indigenous people in Afghanistan and Iraq, as opposed to the capitalist driven US-led alliance.

“As such, and being a Syrian or Palestinian refugee in the UK, he would also have been subjected to a loyalty and allegiance test to ensure that he put Britain and its Prime Minister Brown before God. He would also have been, no doubt, interned under Britain’s new terrorism laws.

“Or maybe he would have been kidnapped by MI5 or Special Branch to be flown on one of their notorious rendition flights, then held hostage and tortured like so many other Muslims in Guantanamo Bay.”

Radical preacher Choudary was a central figure in al-Muhajiroun, which was established by his Islamist mentor Sheikh Omar Bakri.

Earlier this year the Sunday Mercury exposed secret footage of a speech Bakri made calling for the beheading of British servicemen, which is thought to have inspired last year’s terror plot in Birmingham.

The website goes on to claim that Jesus was a Muslim and would have been branded a radical by the British government.

“Jesus was indeed a Muslim and like the Muslims today, called mankind to obey the law of God as opposed to the law of man,” it reads...

Due in part to the fact that Britain -- particularly Londonistan -- shelters "a substantial community of people who have links with, and can easily travel to, Pakistan."

"Al Qaeda may hit UK next," from the Dawn, December 29:

LONDON, Dec 28: Where is Al Qaeda going to hit next? tops a list of 14 key questions the Observer said would dominate the headlines in 2009 and concluded that the most likely next target would be the UK.[...]

Discussing the likely targets of Al Qaeda next year, Mr Burke said Britain was easier to get to than the US.

"Britain has close transatlantic links and a substantial community of people who have links with, and can easily travel to, Pakistan. If anywhere is in the firing line, it is," asserts Jason Burke, author of Al Qaeda: Casting a Shadow of Terror.[...]

The best target for Al Qaeda would be the US, said Mr Burke. But this, according to him, has been made hard by a combination of a huge security effort and the lack of Muslims to answer the call to arms.

The mainstream media and Islamic advocacy groups in the United States constantly tell us that female genital mutilation is a cultural practice that has nothing to do with Islam. They do this despite the fact that the among the schools of Islamic jurisprudence, Shafi'is consider circumcision obligatory for women; Hanbalis say it is an honorable custom, but not obligatory; Hanafis say it should be done as a courtesy to the husband. None of the three, you'll note, say that the practice is wrong, immoral, un-Islamic.

Anyway, the upshot of this situation is that while most Westerners take for granted, if they've ever heard of female genital mutilation at all, that it is un-Islamic, it remains only Muslims who haven't gotten this message.

"For Kurdish Girls, a Painful Ancient Ritual," by Amit R. Paley for the Washington Post, December 29 (thanks to Morgaan Sinclair):

TUZ KHURMATU, Iraq - Sheelan Anwar Omer, a shy 7-year-old Kurdish girl, bounded into her neighbor's house with an ear-to-ear smile, looking for the party her mother had promised.

There was no celebration. Instead, a local woman quickly locked a rusty red door behind Sheelan, who looked bewildered when her mother ordered the girl to remove her underpants. Sheelan began to whimper, then tremble, while the women pushed apart her legs and a midwife raised a stainless-steel razor blade in the air. "I do this in the name of Allah!" she intoned.

As the midwife sliced off part of Sheelan's genitals, the girl let out a high-pitched wail heard throughout the neighborhood. As she carried the sobbing child back home, Sheelan's mother smiled with pride.

"This is the practice of the Kurdish people for as long as anyone can remember," said the mother, Aisha Hameed, 30, a housewife in this ethnically mixed town about 100 miles north of Baghdad. "We don't know why we do it, but we will never stop because Islam and our elders require it."

Kurdistan is the only known part of Iraq --and one of the few places in the world--where female circumcision is widespread. More than 60 percent of women in Kurdish areas of northern Iraq have been circumcised, according to a study conducted this year. In at least one Kurdish territory, 95 percent of women have undergone the practice, which human rights groups call female genital mutilation.

The practice, and the Kurdish parliament's refusal to outlaw it, highlight the plight of women in a region with a reputation for having a more progressive society than the rest of Iraq. Advocates for women point to the increasing frequency of honor killings against women and female self-immolations in Kurdistan this year as further evidence that women in the area still face significant obstacles, despite efforts to raise public awareness of circumcision and violence against women. [...]

Supporters of female circumcision said the practice, which has been a ritual in their culture for countless generations, is rooted in sayings they attribute to the prophet Muhammad, though the accuracy of those sayings is disputed by other Muslim scholars....

Of course. But they don't seem to be able to dispute the accuracy of those sayings effectually enough to curb this practice where it is found among Muslims.

Combative clergy

Combatant Clergy? But...but...don't they have to study Islam to become clerics? And wouldn't they get the picture, in all that study, that Islam is a Religion of Peace™? Why is it that, all around the world, so many Islamic clerics seem to be Misunderstanders of Islam, and think that jihad has something to do with warfare?

But no worries. No number of stories like this will ever shake the PC and compromised mainstream media (liberal and conservative) out of its miasma.

"Iran Hardliners Register Volunteers to Fight Israel," from Reuters, December 29 (thanks to Sr. Soph):

TEHRAN (Reuters) - A group of Iranian hard-line clerics is signing up volunteers to fight in the Gaza Strip in response to Israel's air strikes that have killed at least 300 Palestinians, a news agency reported on Monday.

"From Monday the Combatant Clergy Society has activated its website www.rohaniatmobarez.com for a week to register volunteers to fight against the Zionist regime (Israel) in either the military, financial or propaganda fields," the semi-official Fars news agency said.

Israel patrols the coastal waters around Gaza and has declared areas around the enclave a "closed military zone."

The hard-line Iranian group, which is headed by some leading clergy, says it has no affiliation with the government and was formed shortly after Iran's 1979 Islamic revolution....

Fars said the hard-line group provided volunteers with a registration document called "Registration form for dispatching volunteers to Gaza." It said more than 1,100 people so far had registered for military service against Israel.

Khamenei said on Sunday that whoever was killed in the fight to defend Palestinians was "considered a martyr."

Iran will send its first ship carrying aid to the Gaza Strip on Monday, Foreign Ministry spokesman Hassan Qashqavi said.

"Iran has dispatched its first plane load of aid, including medicine, to Gaza on Sunday. The second cargo is on the verge of being dispatched," Qashqavi told reporters on Monday. "The first aircraft arrived in Egypt last night."...

This story makes no mention of Islam, but it is Islam that enables this practice to continue: the Qur'an takes slavery for granted, and there has never been an anti-slavery movement in the Islamic world. It is only in the Islamic world that slavery is still practiced and tolerated. "Child maid trafficking spreads from Africa to US," by Rukmini Callimachi for Associated Press, December 28 (thanks to Islam In Action):

IRVINE, Calif. – Late at night, the neighbors saw a little girl at the kitchen sink of the house next door.

They watched through their window as the child rinsed plates under the open faucet. She wasn't much taller than the counter and the soapy water swallowed her slender arms. To put the dishes away, she climbed on a chair.

But she was not the daughter of the couple next door doing chores. She was their maid.

Shyima was 10 when a wealthy Egyptian couple brought her from a poor village in northern Egypt to work in their California home. She awoke before dawn and often worked past midnight to iron their clothes, mop the marble floors and dust the family's crystal. She earned $45 a month working up to 20 hours a day. She had no breaks during the day and no days off.

The trafficking of children for domestic labor in the U.S. is an extension of an illegal but common practice in Africa. Families in remote villages send their daughters to work in cities for extra money and the opportunity to escape a dead-end life. Some girls work for free on the understanding that they will at least be better fed in the home of their employer.

The custom has led to the spread of trafficking, as well-to-do Africans accustomed to employing children immigrate to the U.S. Around one-third of the estimated 10,000 forced laborers in the United States are servants trapped behind the curtains of suburban homes, according to a study by the National Human Rights Center at the University of California at Berkeley and Free the Slaves, a nonprofit group. No one can say how many are children, especially since their work can so easily be masked as chores.

Once behind the walls of gated communities like this one, these children never go to school. Unbeknownst to their neighbors, they live as modern-day slaves, just like Shyima, whose story is pieced together through court records, police transcripts and interviews.

"I'd look down and see her at 10, 11 — even 12 — at night," said Shyima's neighbor at the time, Tina Font. "She'd be doing the dishes. We didn't put two and two together."
___

Shyima cried when she found out she was going to America in 2000. Her father, a bricklayer, had fallen ill a few years earlier, so her mother found a maid recruiter, signed a contract effectively leasing her daughter to the couple for 10 years and told Shyima to be strong.

For a year, Shyima, 9, worked in the Cairo apartment owned by Amal Motelib and Nasser Ibrahim. Every month, Shyima's mother came to pick up her salary.

Tens of thousands of children in Africa, some as young as 3, are recruited every year to work as domestic servants. They are on call 24 hours a day and are often beaten if they make a mistake. Children are in demand because they earn less than adults and are less likely to complain. In just one city — Casablanca — a 2001 survey by the Moroccan government found more than 15,000 girls under 15 working as maids.

The U.S. State Department found that over the past year, children have been trafficked to work as servants in at least 33 of Africa's 53 countries. Children from at least 10 African countries were sent as maids to the U.S. and Europe. But the problem is so well hidden that authorities — including the U.N., Interpol and the State Department — have no idea how many child maids now work in the West.

"In most homes, these girls are not allowed to use so much as the same spoon as the rest of the family," said Hany Helal, the Cairo-based director of the Egyptian Organization for Child Rights.

By the time the Ibrahims decided to leave, Shyima's family had taken several loans from them for medical bills. The Ibrahims said they could only be repaid by sending Shyima to work for them in the U.S. A friend posed as her father, and the U.S. embassy in Cairo issued her a six-month tourist visa.

She arrived at Los Angeles International Airport on Aug. 3, 2000, according to court documents. The family brought her back to their spacious five-bedroom, two-story home, decorated in the style of a Tuscan villa with a fountain of two angels spouting water through a conch. She was told to sleep in the garage.

It had no windows and was neither heated nor air-conditioned. Soon after she arrived, the garage's only light bulb went out. The Ibrahims didn't replace it. From then on, Shyima lived in the dark.

She was told to call them Madame Amal and Hajj Nasser, terms of respect. They called her "shaghala," or servant. Their five children called her "stupid."

While the family slept, she ironed the school outfits of the Ibrahims' 5-year-old twin sons. She woke them, combed their hair, dressed them and made them breakfast. Then she ironed clothes and fixed breakfast for the three girls, including Heba, who at 10 was the same age as the family's servant.

Neither Ibrahim nor his wife worked, and they slept late. When they awoke, they yelled for her to make tea.

While they ate breakfast watching TV, she cleaned the palatial house. She vacuumed each bedroom, made the beds, dusted the shelves, wiped the windows, washed the dishes and did the laundry.

Her employers were not satisfied, she said. "Nothing was ever clean enough for her. She would come in and say, 'This is dirty,' or 'You didn't do this right,' or 'You ruined the food,'" said Shyima.

She started wetting her bed. Her sheets stank. So did her oversized T-shirt and the other hand-me-downs she wore.

While doing the family's laundry, she slipped her own clothes into the load. Madame slapped her. "She told me my clothes were dirtier than theirs. That I wasn't allowed to clean mine there," she said.

She washed her clothes in a bucket in the garage. She hung them to dry outside, next to the trash cans.

When the couple went out, she waited until she heard the car pull away and then she sat down. She sat with her back straight because she was afraid her clothes would dirty the upholstery.

It never occurred to her to run away.

"I thought this was normal," she said....

Read it all.

At last, someone says it. "Indulgence of Islam is harming society," by Damian Thompson in the Telegraph, December 26 (thanks to all who sent this in):

Channel 4's decision to invite President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to deliver its "alternative" Christmas message may have been offensive to many people, but no one can say the station is neglecting its obligation to cater for minorities. Muslim fundamentalists were thrilled by the broadcast.

Islam is the fastest-growing religion in Britain: the number of Muslims has grown from 1.6 million to two million since 2000. Moreover, every major public institution has changed its policies to accommodate the demands of Islamic "community leaders". The Government, the Opposition, the police, schools, the Church of England, the BBC and now Channel 4 are all helping Muslims construct a parallel Islamic state.

Early next year, the think tank Civitas will publish a survey of 100 British Muslim schools. Entitled When Worlds Collide, it will argue that some of them are pushing pupils into ghettos. Young women, in particular, are forbidden to pursue career opportunities. "Every year, an incalculable number of Muslim young women are lost to the wider world," says the report. One school website links to al-Qaeda; another directs pupils to a scholar who advocates the murder of Jews.

Until recently, these radical mullahs were blamed for turning disaffected youths into bombers. But, in August, a leaked MI5 report revealed that Islamist terrorists tend not to be obvious religious extremists. The Muslim community usually knows nothing about them.

For years, the Government has offered Muslim leaders self-governance in return for information about "dangerous" elements. But if terrorists cannot be accurately identified, this is a waste of time. Unelected community leaders extend control over Muslims, yet society is no safer.

Self-censorship is crucial to this growing separatism. The BBC's director-general, Mark Thompson, says that Muslims should be treated more sensitively than Christians....

Read it all.

That quotation comes from Dan Gillerman, in this posting from July.

Gillerman's observation is once again highly appropriate as Egypt fires on Gaza residents fleeing the territory and the Taliban kills 14 children, among countless other examples that appear in the news from one week to the next.

Mohamad Kamal Elzahabi's story is all too familiar: He got into the U.S. on a student visa, and entered into a sham marriage to stay in the country. "Suspected operative for al-Qaida held at center in El Paso," by Diana Washington Valdez for the El Paso Times, December 28:

EL PASO -- A Lebanese man who was part of a complex federal investigation into a suspected U.S. terrorist network with ties to al-Qaida is in custody at the El Paso immigration detention center facing deportation, officials have confirmed.

According to court documents, Mohamad Kamal Elzahabi, 44, told the FBI he was a freedom fighter in 1988 and 1989 against the Soviets in Afghanistan, where he also attended a jihad military training camp, provided small-arms instruction and was a sniper.

Elaine Komis, spokeswoman for the Executive Office of Immigration Review in Falls Church, Va., said her office could not discuss anything about the case due to a "non-disclosure order" by the Department of Justice. She said that the Department of Homeland Security initiated the case, and that it's now up to the Justice Department to decide Elzahabi's immigration status.

Adelina Pruneda, spokeswoman for the Department of Homeland Security, Immigration & Customs Enforcement, in San Antonio, said Elzahabi is being held at the El Paso federal detention center. No other details, including his hearing date and name of his new lawyer, will be released as long as the non-disclosure order is in effect.

Elzahabi caught the attention of authorities in Canada, Minnesota, New York and Massachusetts, who learned he and three other men fought in Afghanistan and all became cab drivers in Boston. Elzahabi has continually denied he was part of a sleeper cell or terrorist group.

A sleeper cell is a group of covert operatives inside a target population that is dormant until members receive orders to act.

"Elzahabi (alias Abu Kamal al Lubnani) stated that he was a Lebanese national who entered the United States in 1984 on a student visa. (He) admitted that he thereafter paid a woman in Houston, Texas, to enter into a marriage with him and help him obtain legal permanent resident alien status," according to a federal complaint filed in Minnesota.

The federal complaint also states Elzahabi decided to travel to Afghanistan in 1988 after he attended a religious conference in the U.S. Midwest. Elzahabi said that while in Afghan istan, "he knew Musab al Zarqawi, Raed Hijazi and Bassam Kanji, aka Abu Aisha, (and) identified photographs of each of these persons."

The document further states he told agents of "knowing of Khalid Sheik Muhammad," who U.S. authorities later said had masterminded the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks in New York City and Washington, D.C.

The others mentioned in the documents:

- Musab al Zarqawi, a Jordanian al-Qaida associate accused of directing terrorist attacks against U.S. and coalition members in Iraq. He was killed by U.S. forces in 2006 during an air raid in Iraq.

- Raed Hijazi, born in California, who was convicted in Jordan for his part in the failed "Millennium" bombing plot that targeted American and Israeli tourists in that country. He was sentenced to death and has appealed.

- Bassam Kanj, who was killed by Lebanese soldiers in 2000 while leading an attempted violent coup that sought to replace the Lebanese government with a fundamentalist Islamic state.

Elzahabi also told U.S. federal agents that he returned to Afghanistan in in 1991 and remained there until 1995. He also admitted acting as a combat sniper and being a small-arms instructor for jihadists at the Khalden training camp in eastern Afghan istan.

Military officials said the camp near Tora Bora, where Osama bin Laden was thought to have hidden, was used by al-Qaida to train terrorists. Hoping to strike bin Laden, U.S. forces bombed the camp.

The complaint also states Elzahabi admitted knowing Abu Zubaida, a senior al- Qaida associate.

Elzahabi told FBI agents he traveled to Lebanon and Chechnya and returned to the United States in 1995 "because he was in need of medical care after suffering an abdominal gunshot wound in combat," records state.

Elzahabi and his brother operated an axle-repair business in New York from 1995 to 1997 before he moved to Boston, where he worked as a cab driver "and he again associated with Raed Hijazi and Basam Kanj," who were employed by the same cab company.

The 2004 complaint signed by FBI Special Agent Kiann Vendenover alleges Elzahabi lied about not knowing the contents of packages he helped ship from his axle business to Pakistan and other countries -- packages that contained radios and other communications equipment.

The FBI also alleged he lied about helping Hijazi obtain a Massachusetts driver's license, and about letting him use Elzahabi's U.S. address for that purpose.

Classy:

Elzahabi, who has been in custody since May 2004, was convicted last year by a Minnesota court of possessing fraudulent immigration documents based on his marriage to a dancer who worked at the Pink Pussy Cat Club in Houston (he and the dancer had divorced in 1988). He was sentenced to time served and two years of supervised release.

After the trial, the Department of Homeland Security turned him over to the Department of Justice for deportation proceedings.

Despite Karzai's statement below, there has been no eruption of outrage from the Muslim world -- a reaction that is a certainty when non-Muslims fight back against jihadists.

"Afghan car bomb kills 14 children," from CNN, December 28 (thanks to all who sent this in):

KABUL, Afghanistan (CNN) -- A suicide car bomb blast near a voter registration site killed 16 people, 14 of them children, and wounded 58 in southeastern Afghanistan on Sunday morning, according to a senior police official and the U.S. military.

A Taliban spokesman said one of his group's fighters carried out the attack.

When security guards stopped the car at the entrance to the Mandozai district headquarters, the driver detonated the explosives inside the car, Khost provincial security chief Mohammad Yaqoub said.

A security guard and an Afghan National Army soldier were among the dead. There were no military casualties, said U.S. Col. Gregory Julian. Coalition and Afghan forces worked together to evacuate the wounded to military and civilian hospitals, he said.

The military released photos of the incident, saying they "provide further proof the Afghan militants are not interested in the welfare nor benefit of the Afghan people."

Dozens of tribal elders were meeting nearby in the district administrative office at the time of the bombing, the police official said. The Mandozai district is in the Khost province.

Zabiullah Mujahid, a Taliban spokesman speaking by phone from an undisclosed location, said the suicide bombing was carried out by Qari Hameedullah, a Taliban fighter.

Elsewhere, a rocket attack in Kabul killed three teenage sisters and injured four other people Saturday night, Afghan President Hamid Karzai's office said in a statement.

The girls died when one of two rockets fired on Kabul crashed into a house in the southern part of the city. In the statement, Karzai called those who fired the rockets "enemies of Afghanistan" who "can't achieve anything by firing rockets but the killing of innocent civilians."

Not unlike Hamas.

The president called the suicide bombing an "un-Islamic act" and said those behind it "are not aware of the Islamic teachings which outlaw the killing of innocent people. Those who ordered and executed this attack cannot escape the revenge of Afghans and God's punishment."

An update on the Taliban's encroachment in Pakistan, while Islamabad diverts troops from the area. "Taliban ‘enforce sharia’ in lower Orakzai Agency," by Abdul Saboor Khan for the Daily Times, December 28:

HANGU: The Taliban have announced the enforcement of sharia in the lower parts of Orakzai Agency, Taliban sources said. The Taliban announcement follows the ‘enforcement of sharia’ in the upper parts of the agency seven days ago. Sources said the Taliban were using loudspeakers in mosques to announce the decree and were asking the people to bring their issues to ‘Taliban Islamic courts’, which have been set up in Mashti Meela and Feroze Khel, for their resolution according to Islamic law. The Taliban have banned women from visiting bazaars and have imposed a complete ban on TV and CDs and video centres in the agency. They have, however, allowed women to visit bazaars for medical treatment, but that too if they are accompanied by a male elder of the family. There are 21 tribes in Orakzai and the Taliban have imposed Islamic law on 16 tribes. The other five tribes reside in areas where the Taliban have not announced sharia enforcement as yet. The tribal traditions earlier did not require women to veil their faces, but the Taliban decree has asked them to cover their bodies at all times. The Taliban have also established complaint cells in Ghiljo and Kandi Mishti (Upper Orakzai), and Mamoozai and Feroze Khel (Lower Orakzai).

All these Palestinians were trying to do was get out of Gaza. They lobbed no rockets into Egypt. They indulged in no genocidal rhetoric about wiping Egypt off the map and driving all the Egyptians into the sea. They never celebrated as heroes the murderers of Egyptian civilians on buses and in restaurants. Yet when the Egyptian border guards opened fire on these Palestinians, they could be secure in the knowledge that the world would not utter a peep of protest. Everyone will be fine with this. Only the Israelis engage in "disproportionate violence."

"Egyptians open fire on Palestinians," from The Press Association, December 28 (thanks to Looney Tunes):

Egyptian border guards have opened fire on Palestinians who breached the border to escape Israel's assault on Hamas in the Gaza Strip.

An Egyptian security official said there were at least five breaches along the nine-mile border and hundreds of Palestinian residents were pouring in.

At least 300 Egyptian border guards have been rushed to the area to reseal the border, the official added on condition on anonymity because he was not authorised to speak to the press.

A resident of the Gaza Strip side of the border, Fida Kishta, said that Egyptian border guards opened fire to drive back the Palestinians.

Residents have also commandeered a bulldozer to open new breaches.

Palestinians reported several people were wounded by the gunfire....

"He speaks via a video hook-up from his hideout due to fears of assassination by Israeli agents." What a lion!

"Hizbullah Vows to Open Second Front in Gaza Conflict," by Hana Levi Julian for Israel National News, December 29 (thanks to Carl in Jerusalem):

(IsraelNN.com) Hizbullah terrorists have vowed to open a second front against Israel in the north in retaliation for the IDF military operation against Hamas terrorists in Gaza.

Terrorist chief Hassan Nasrallah issued a statement on Hizbullah's Al-Manar television station Sunday, vowing that "northern Israel will burn as Gaza is burning." Nasrallah rarely appears in person; he speaks via a video hook-up from his hideout due to fears of assassination by Israeli agents, following the 2006 Second Lebanon War.

Hizbullah officials were quoted in a number of Arabic-language publications on Saturday warning that they would not permit Israel to attack Gaza without retaliating.

Last week seven Katyusha rockets were discovered primed and ready for launching in southern Lebanon, located near the northern border of Israel. All seven were aimed at targets in the Jewish State....

AP photo caption (thanks to James):

Palestinian children and a man wounded in Israeli missile strikes are seen in the emergency area at Shifa hospital in Gaza City, Saturday, Dec. 27, 2008. Israeli warplanes demolished dozens of Hamas security compounds across Gaza on Saturday in unprecedented waves of simultaneous air strikes. Gaza medics said at least 145 people were killed and more than 310 wounded in the single deadliest day in Gaza fighting in recent memory. (AP Photo/Khalil Hamra)

"Palestinian children and a man wounded..." What an odd locution! Why not just say, "Wounded Palestinians" or "wounded children lay next to wounded man" or some such? Are the children wounded at all? They look unhappy, but show no visible signs of injury. Did AP photographer Khalil Hamra or his Palestinian contacts place unhurt children next to this apparently wounded man in order to tug at the West's heartstrings?

Certainly when it comes to faking grievance issues and manipulating the mainstream media, the "Palestinians" are old hands.

"The heroes in the Strip will continue to fight and prove the youth and fighters of Islam and the Palestinian organizations cannot be defeated."

"Fighters of Islam"? But this is a struggle for land, isn't it? All the learned experts say so!

"Hamas threatens to harm Livni, Barak," by Ali Waked for Ynet News, December 28 :

Islamist group figure in Gaza Strip says organization will strike Foreign Minister Livni 'inside the Knesset compound…will hunt Defense Minister Ehud Barak down'; also threatens revenge against 'traitors in Ramallah, Arab world who took part in scheme against us'

The death toll in the Gaza Strip continued to climb on Sunday, and Hamas heads broke out with threats against the Israeli leadership.

Hamas figure in the northern Gaza Strip Fathi Hamad said his organization would hurt Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni and Defense Minister Ehud Barak.

"We will reach that Zionist in her house, inside the Knesset compound. We will also get to the traitors in the Muqata compound in Ramallah and to all those in the Arab world that had a hand in the scheme against us. We will hunt Barak down and reach all of them," Hamad said.

"Today we are sending a message through the sea of blood that was spilled here and we will not surrender and we will defeat the enemy. From here, from within the proud Strip, we say to all our enemies: We will get to you, defeat you, and hunt you down one by one.

"We will reach the Zionist leaders in their homes, we will get to you, the collaborators in the Muqata in Ramallah, and we will settle the score with you one by one."

Hamad added that "Hamas and the organizations will settle the score with anyone who was involved in the attack on Gaza, in the participation in this scheme and in supporting this attack.

"The heroes in the Strip will continue to fight and prove the youth and fighters of Islam and the Palestinian organizations cannot be defeated," he said....

Disproportionate Response. "Over 20 rockets launched on S. Israel -- spokesman," from KUNA, December 28 :

GAZA, Dec 28 (KUNA) -- More than 20 rockets were launched from Gaza on southern Israel, said a military spokesman on Sunday.

The attacks did result in the injury of an Israeli citizen who was rushed to hospital for treatment, stated the spokesman....

Israel has more work to do, if the UN, the US, and the EU will let it be done.

Hospital patients in bomb shelter, courtesy Hamas

Which didn't keep this hospital from being a target of Hamas rockets.

"Fear of rockets sends Israeli hospital underground," by Aron Heller for Associated Press, December 28 (thanks to Michael):

ASHKELON, Israel -- The largest hospital on Israel's southern coast has gone underground.

Wary of a missile strike against it from the nearby Gaza Strip, Ashkelon's Barzilai Hospital has moved its most essential departments into an underground bomb shelter.

The threat is a real one: In February a rocket from Gaza landed adjacent to the hospital's helicopter pad and in May a rocket crashed into a busy shopping mall in the city, injuring 14 people.

The hospital in this city of 120,000 people about 17 kilometers (11 miles) north of the Gaza border has sent half its patients home to get them out of harm's way. Those remaining are jammed in rooms previously used for storage.

[...]

In Barzilai's underground children's ward, sick Gazans lay alongside sick Israelis as a clown hopped around trying to coax smiles. Lobel said that his facility had close ties with Gaza's Shifa hospital, and accepted many of its patients who need treatment the Gazan hospital cannot provide. He said it wasn't uncommon to have a colleague in Gaza call him for assistance even as rockets rained down on Ashkelon.

"It might seem completely absurd," Lobel said. "But we have the privilege to be doctors. Our medical ethics do not distinguish between patients. We treat whoever needs to be treated."

A Gaza woman, whose two-month-old granddaughter was being treated for an unidentified ailment, wept when asked how she was coping. She said she was fortunate her granddaughter was getting the best medical treatment but was worried about her daughter and other grandchildren in Gaza City. She said some of their neighbors were among the more than 280 people killed in the Israeli airstrikes.

"I am very sad and hurt," she said, in Arabic. "We want peace, not war."

She refused to identify herself or have her picture taken, for fear of retribution if her presence in Israel was discovered in Gaza....

The pious man

Not that this has anything to do with religion. "Nasrallah Predicts Divine Victory for Hamas, Agitates Egyptians Against Their Government," from Naharnet, December 28 (thanks to Michael):

Hizbullah leader Hassan Nasrallah on Sunday ordered his resistance on maximum alert to confront any Israeli attack, and urged Egyptians to pressure their government into opening the Gaza crossing for "weapons" to Hamas fighters.

Nasrallah, in an address marking the first day of Ashoura, said what is underway in Gaza is similar to July-August war between Hizbullah and Israel in 2006 "and the outcome would be the same."

Nasrallah did not pledge direct support for allied Hamas in Gaza. However, he called for a mass rally scheduled for Monday in south Beirut in support of the "mujahideen (holy fighters) in Gaza.

The Hizbullah leader launched a vehement attack on Arab states that had signed peace with Israel, and urged "Arab and Muslim peoples" to pressure their governments into exerting pressures on the international community to halt the Israeli attack on Gaza that has claimed more than 300 lives.

Nasrallah, however, focused his attack on Egypt, calling Cairo to open the Rafah Crossing to Gaza "to those still alive, not to the dead."

He said the crossing should be opened to supplies of water, food, medicine and "weapons as well."

Addressing the Egyptian people, Egyptian Army officers and intellectuals, Nasrallah said "I'm not calling for a coup d'etat, but go talk to your leaders and tell them you do not accept what is happening in Gaza."

The Hizbullah leader blamed the recent deploying of Katyusha rockets in south Lebanon on "Israel or its agents."

He criticized calls for peace with Israel, saying such peace "would not give us back Palestine or Jerusalem."

Projection Alert:

Israel, Nasrallah said, has only "massacres and crimes for those who call for peace."...

Jumping on the bandwagon. While the Saudi king plays "diplomat," the Saudi sheikhs command Muslims "to strike anything that has a link to Israel, calling it a legitimate target for Muslims everywhere."

"Saudi cleric issues fatwa urging Muslims to avenge Gaza raids," from the Haaretz News, December 28:

A Saudi Web site on Sunday reported that a popular cleric has issued a fatwa urging Muslims to target Israeli interests everywhere, to avenge the attacks on the Gaza Strip.

The site, Rasid, posts news about Saudi Arabia's Shiite community and on Sunday said that Sheik Awadh al-Garni has issued a religious edict urging Muslims to strike anything that has a link to Israel, calling it a legitimate target for Muslims everywhere.

Al-Garni, whose [sic] is popular in the kingdom, is not a member of the official religious establishment.

Fatwas are not legally binding, and it is up to the individual Muslim to follow them...

These last two sentences say it all. For if fatwas are not "legally binding," it matters little whether Al-Garni is a member of the "official establishment" or not. Similarly, that he is "popular in the kingdom" indicates that many Saudis will take his decree quite seriously.

Pro-Hamas demo in Lebanon: "Oh our people in Gaza, you are honorable" -- Hamas is honorable?

Actually they're protesting against Israel defending itself, after making nary a peep about the Hamas Qassams lobbed at Israeli civilians. And why are they doing this now? Because they know how to tug on credulous Western heartstrings. "Across Mideast, thousands protest Israeli assault," by Bassem Mroue for Associated Press, December 28 (thanks to James):

BEIRUT, Lebanon – Crowds of thousands swept into the streets of cities around the Middle East on Sunday to denounce Israel's air assault on Hamas targets in the Gaza Strip.

Think about all the many things we have never seen thousands of Muslims protest against. 9/11, for one. The July 7, 2005 London bombings, for another. Mumbai, for a third. Shall I go on?

From Lebanon to Iran, Israel's adversaries used the weekend assault to marshal crowds into the streets for noisy demonstrations. And among regional allies there was also discontent: The prime minister of Turkey, one of the few Muslim countries to have relations with Israel, called the air assault a "crime against humanity."

Baseless, hysterical, and -- Erdogan hopes -- effective against Israel in the court of world opinion.

Several of Sunday's protests turned violent. A crowd of anti-Israel protesters in the northern Iraqi city of Mosul became a target for a suicide bomber on a bicycle.

A Zionist suicide biker in Mosul? More likely, the biker represented a sect of Islam that objected to the sect of the protesters.

In Lebanon, police fired tear gas to stop dozens of demonstrators from reaching the Egyptian Embassy. Some in the crowd hurled stones at the embassy compound. It was unclear if anyone was hurt.

Egypt, which has served as a mediator between Israel and the Palestinians as well as between Hamas and its rival Fatah, has been criticized for joining Israel in closing its borders with Gaza. Egyptian Foreign Minister Ahmed Aboul Gheit called on Hamas to renew its truce with Israel: "There has been a calm and we should work to restore it."

In Islamic law, a Muslim force may conclude a truce with a non-Muslim force only if the Muslims are losing and need some time to regroup.

France also called for the truce to be renewed and rallied European nations to use "all their weight" to stop the fighting between Israel and Hamas.

"We have entered a new spiral of despair," French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner told the Journal du Dimanche in an interview published Sunday. "The truce must be restored."...

Kouchner, of course, has no idea of the Islamic theology and law governing truces.

In Beirut, Hamas representative Osama Hamdan told the crowd that the militant group had no choice but to fight. Gaza militants have been lobbing dozens of rockets and mortars into southern Israel since a six-month truce expired over a week ago, prompting Israel's fierce retaliation.

"We have one alternative which is to be steadfast and resist and then we will be victorious," Hamdan said.

In the capital of neighboring Syria, more than 5,000 people marched toward the central Youssef al-Azmeh square, where they burned an Israeli and an American flag.

One demonstrator carried a banner reading, "The aggression against Gaza is an aggression against the whole Arab nation."

"Down with America, the mother of terrorism," read another.

In Amman, Jordan, about 5,000 lawyers marched toward parliament to demand the Israeli ambassador's expulsion and the closure of the embassy. "No for peace, yes to the rifle," they chanted.

In Jordan's squalid Baqaa camp for Palestinian refugees and their descendants, protester Yassin Abu Taha, 32, blamed America and Israel for the Middle East's problems.

"The Israelis kill our people in Gaza and the West Bank. The Americans kill our people in Iraq. We're refugees, kicked out of our home in Tulkarem in 1967 and we're still displaced," he said, bemoaning his family's flight in the 1967 Mideast war....

Tired victimology. But it still plays in the West.

But that's just a religious department; it does not speak for Malaysia in general, and certainly not the government in particular, right? Actually, as this report indicates, "the police and the Malaysian Communications and Multimedia Commission are still trying to trace the blogger said to have insulted Prophet Muhammad."

"Moderate Malaysia" Alert: "Religious department to act against any blogger who insults Islam," by Hamidah Atan for the News Straits Times, December 28:

The Islamic Development Department (Jakim) will take stern action against bloggers who insult Islam, including non-Muslims.

Its director-general Datuk Wan Mohamad Sheikh Abdul Aziz said the department could act against irresponsible bloggers, regardless of their religious background.

"Right now, the police and the Malaysian Communications and Multimedia Commission are still trying to trace the blogger said to have insulted Prophet Muhammad.

"We will come in once the culprit is found," he said...

And dispense Islamic law, no doubt -- death to the offender.

By asking all Muslims to "expose them," in order to "protect our community" -- not Britain in general but rather the Muslim community living in Britain, that is, the umma. This is the price Muslims who help infidel governments must pay: will the infidel government reciprocate now by offering them protection, or at the very least recognizing MPAC for what it is?

"MPAC launches a witchhunt against 'Zio-Con' Muslims" by Damian Thompson for the Telegraph, December 28:

The Muslim Public Affairs Commitee (MPACUK) is appealing to its supporters to track down the Muslim researchers who worked with the think tank Policy Exchange on a project to expose the sale of hate literature in British mosques.

Under the heading "The Hunt for 8 Sufi Zio-Con Frauds", the MPAC website claims that the researchers were members of "Sufi underground cults" who teamed up with the Zionists to discredit Islam. And it adds:

Who are they, what are their backgrounds ... MPACUK will dig deeper and expose every last detail of the Sufis who tried to destroy their own community.

If you know who they are - please write in and we will expose these men and women for all the Muslim community to see. Write in now and let us do what the incompetent idiots in the Mosque should be doing, protecting our community.

Let us do what, precisely? I wonder if this sinister announcement of a manhunt will persuade the BBC to stop sucking up to MPAC, whose spokesman Ashgar Bukhari says that any Muslim killed fighting Israel goes straight to paradise. Probably not.[...]

What we have here is a threatening post on the MPAC official website which is apparently encouraging someone to dispense Islamic justice to Muslim traitors. "Protecting our community", MPAC calls it. That's a handy little euphemism, isn't it?

While the world is fixated on Israel, tensions rise between India and Pakistan, thanks to aggressive steps taken by the latter. Pakistan is even deploying its troops from "fighting" the Taliban and al-Qaeda -- fellow Muslims deemed heroes by many Pakistanis, including the government -- to face the real enemy: polytheistic Hindus who dare want to ensure that the Mumbai attacks are never repeated. Even Mumbai Muslims are blaming the Pakistani government of inaction towards terrorism and goading India to "destroy all militant camps operating in Pakistan."

"Tensions Rise as Pakistan Moves to Redeploy Troops," by Zahid Hussain and Matthew Rosenberg for the Wall Street Journal, December 28:

Tensions between India and Pakistan rose over the weekend as Pakistan said it was redeploying an unspecified number of troops from the fight against Islamic militants in the country's northwest, a move decried by Indian officials as needlessly provocative.

Pakistani officials wouldn't say where the troops were headed nor provide estimates of how many soldiers were on the move. But a Pakistani military spokesman suggested they will be redeployed to face Indian forces on the country's eastern border, calling the troop movements and the restriction of leave "defensive and precautionary steps" prompted by souring relations with India.

Another Pakistani security official said some of the country's soldiers were being moved from northwestern regions where there were no Islamic militants to fight, or where both sides were snowed in.

Both officials insisted the redeployment was modest and won't affect Pakistan's campaign against the Taliban and al Qaeda, which control wide swaths of territory along Pakistan's northwestern border with Afghanistan.[...]

But with tensions between India and Pakistan high in the weeks since terrorists armed with guns and grenades rampaged through Mumbai, leaving 171 people dead, Pakistani officials said Friday that the military was sharply curtailing leave for its soldiers and moving some away from the northwest, where they are battling Taliban and al Qaeda fighters.

Diplomats and political analysts said Pakistan's moves appeared intended to warn India from attempting any kind of retaliatory strike against militant targets inside Pakistan -- and not a mobilization for war between the nuclear-armed neighbors.[...]

In India, Foreign Minister Pranab Mukherjee said Saturday it was unfortunate that a "sort of war hysteria" has been created in Pakistan.

"I appeal to Pakistan and Pakistani leaders: do not unnecessarily try to create tension," he was quoted as saying by the Press Trust of India news agency. "Do not try to deflect the issue. A problem has to be tackled face to face[."]...

Tehran anti-Israel rally with banner in English -- Gee, who could the intended audience be?

A call to jihad. "Iran orders Muslims to defend Palestinians," by Dudi Cohen for Ynet News, December 28 (thanks to Michael, who comments: "North Americans should take special notice of this religious edict encouraging violent Jihad in support of the Palestinian terror forces. A 'Fatwa' is universal and can be interpreted as justifying acts of terrorism against the United States and Canada. With thousands of radical Islamists residing on the continent our security services should be on high alert in anticipation of operations carried out by Jihadists on our soil.")

Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei issued a religious decree to Muslims around the world on Sunday, ordering them to defend Palestinians against Israel's attacks on Gaza, state television said.

"All Palestinian combatants and all the Islamic world's pious people are obliged to defend the defenseless women, children and people in Gaza in any way possible. Whoever is killed in this legitimate defense is considered a martyr," state television quoted Khamenei as saying in a statement outlining the fatwa.

"Allah hath 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

Khamenei also criticized some Arab governments for their "encouraging silence" towards the Israel's raids on Gaza. "The Zionist regime must by held accountable by Islamic governments. The heads of this regime must be held personally accountable for these crimes and the ongoing siege," the religious leader said.

Accordingly, a state TV report late Saturday quoted President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as saying Iran will stand by the Palestinians. He also tried to garner greater support for the Palestinians by waging an informal PR campaign against Israel among Arab states.

"Israel is trying to take revenge against the Palestinians, but with God's help, it will be defeated," the president said to his Syrian counterpart, Bashar Assad. Ahmadinejad also spoke with Secretary General of the Islamic Jihad Ramadan Abdulla to express his support for the Palestinian group.

Projection Alert:

Also condemning Israel, Iran's Foreign Ministry called the attacks "genocide" and asked international bodies to defend the Palestinians.

Alaeddin Borujerdi, a legislator and head of the Iranian parliament's National Security and Foreign Policy Committee, endorsed these sentiments early Sunday when he compared Israel's aerial attack on Gaza to Nazi crimes.

"The Zionists are doing what Hitler did during World War II, when they attacked innocents in a barbaric manner," Borujerdi told the state-run Iranian news agency IRNA, during a pro-Palestinian rally in the nation's capitol, attended by several Iranian parliamentarians....

Propaganda tools

Why? Because they need them for propaganda purposes.

"Hamas 'bars injured leaving Gaza,'" from the BBC, December 28 (thanks to UsorThem):

Egypt says the Hamas militant group, which controls Gaza, is preventing hundreds of wounded Palestinians from leaving for treatment in Egypt.

Cairo says dozens of empty ambulances are at the Rafah crossing - the only one to Gaza which avoids Israel.

Hamas said it was drawing up lists of the injured but that it was difficult getting them to the border because of the ongoing Israeli air strikes.

Egypt has summoned Israel's ambassador to demand an end to the bombardment.

Hamas officials say 271 Palestinians have been killed and 600 wounded since Israel began its aerial assault on the Gaza Strip on Saturday, but none of the injured have yet left via Rafah....

From the Hate Mail Bag: this guy sent me several messages this morning from an IP address that traces to Damascus. This was the best one:

What is the guilt of all those innocent people who were killed with F-16 in Gaza; you will pay the price no doubt one day. Muhammad's Army will return

Of course, in this fellow's world, all the Israelis are guilty, so it doesn't matter what the Muslims do to them -- they have carte blanche. Meanwhile, "Muhammad's Army will return" is an echo of the familiar slogan “Khaybar, Khaybar, ya Yahoud, jaish Muhammad sa yaoud” -- that is, “Khaybar, Khaybar, O Jews, the army of Muhammad will return.”

Khaybar. As I explain in my book The Truth About Muhammad, Muhammad led a Muslim force against the Khaybar oasis, which was inhabited by Jews -- many of whom he had previously exiled from Medina. When he did so, he was not responding to any provocation. One of the Muslims later remembered: “When the apostle raided a people he waited until the morning. If he heard a call to prayer he held back; if he did not hear it he attacked. We came to Khaybar by night, and the apostle passed the night there; and when morning came he did not hear the call to prayer, so he rode and we rode with him….We met the workers of Khaybar coming out in the morning with their spades and baskets. When they saw the apostle and the army they cried, ‘Muhammad with his force,’ and turned tail and fled. The apostle said, ‘Allah Akbar! Khaybar is destroyed. When we arrive in a people’s square it is a bad morning for those who have been warned.’” [1]

The Muslim advance was inexorable. “The apostle,” according to Muhammad’s earliest biographer, Ibn Ishaq, “seized the property piece by piece and conquered the forts one by one as he came to them.” [2] Another biographer of Muhammad, Ibn Sa‘d, reports that the battle was fierce: the “polytheists…killed a large number of [Muhammad’s] Companions and he also put to death a very large number of them….He killed ninety-three men of the Jews…” [3] Muhammad and his men offered the fajr prayer, the Islamic dawn prayer, before it was light, and then entered Khaybar itself. The Muslims immediately set out to locate the inhabitants’ wealth. A Jewish leader of Khaybar, Kinana bin al-Rabi, was brought before Muhammad; Kinana was supposed to have been entrusted with the treasure of on of the Jewish tribes of Arabia, the Banu Nadir. Kinana denied knowing where this treasure was, but Muhammad pressed him: “Do you know that if we find you have it I shall kill you?” Kinana said yes, that he did know that.

Some of the treasure was found. To find the rest, Muhammad gave orders concerning Kinana: “Torture him until you extract what he has.” One of the Muslims built a fire on Kinana’s chest, but Kinana would not give up his secret. When he was at the point of death, one of the Muslims beheaded him. [4] Kinana’s wife was taken as a war prize; Muhammad claimed her for himself and hastily arranged a wedding ceremony that night. He halted the Muslims’ caravan out of Khaybar later that night in order to consummate the marriage. [5]

Muhammad agreed to let the people of Khaybar to go into exile, allowing them to keep as much of their property as they could carry. [6] The Prophet of Islam, however, commanded them to leave behind all their gold and silver. [7] He had intended to expel all of them, but some, who were farmers, begged him to allow them to let them stay if they gave him half their yield annually. [8] Muhammad agreed: “I will allow you to continue here, so long as we would desire.” [9] He warned them: “If we wish to expel you we will expel you.” [10] They no longer had any rights that did not depend upon the good will and sufferance of Muhammad and the Muslims. And indeed, when the Muslims discovered some treasure that some of the Khaybar Jews had hidden, he ordered the women of the tribe enslaved and seized the perpetrators’ land. [11] A hadith notes that “the Prophet had their warriors killed, their offspring and woman taken as captives.” [12]

Thus when modern-day jihadists invoke Khaybar, as this hate mailer did indirectly by echoing the familiar chant about Muhammad's Army, they are doing much more than just recalling the glory days of Islam and its prophet. They are recalling an aggressive, surprise raid by Muhammad which resulted in the final eradication of the once considerable Jewish presence in Arabia. To the jihadists, Khaybar means the destruction of the Jews and the seizure of their property by the Muslims.

That is the context in which today's Hate Mailer would dare to lecture us about justice and guilt and innocence.

----------------------------------------------------------------------

[1] Ibn Ishaq, The Life of Muhammad: A Translation of Ibn Ishaq’s Sirat Rasul Allah, A. Guillaume, translator, Oxford University Press, 1955. P. 511.
[2] Ibid.
[3] Ibn Sa‘d, Kitab Al-Tabaqat Al-Kabir, S. Moinul Haq and H K. Ghazanfar, translators, Kitab Bhavan, n.d. Vol. II, pp. 132-133.
[4] Ibn Ishaq, p. 515.
[5] Muhammed Ibn Ismaiel Al-Bukhari, Sahih al-Bukhari: The Translation of the Meanings, translated by Muhammad M. Khan, Darussalam, 1997, vol. 1, book 8, no. 371.
[6] Ibn Sa‘d, vol. II, p. 136.
[7] Ibn Sa‘d, vol. II, p. 137.
[8] Bukhari, vol. 4, book 57, no. 3152.
[9] Imam Muslim, Sahih Muslim, translated by Abdul Hamid Siddiqi, Kitab Bhavan, revised edition 2000. Book 10, no. 3761.
[10] Ibn Ishaq, p. 515.
[11] Ibn Sa‘d, vol. II, p. 137.
[12] Bukhari, vol. 5, book 64, no. 4200.

And Tantawi ain't the only one:

Not gonna play well in Cairo

"Lo! those who disbelieve, among the People of the Scripture and the idolaters, will abide in fire of hell. They are the worst of created beings." -- Qur'an 98:6. So why would the Grand Sheikh want to shake hands with one of them, and a wicked Zionist to boot?

"All shaken up," by Andrew M. Rosemarine for the Jerusalem Post, December 28 (thanks to James):

The leading cleric in Sunni Islam, Grand Imam Sheikh Muhammad Sayid Tantawi, rector of Al-Azhar University in Cairo, is coming under increasing pressure from Egyptian opposition forces to resign, for shaking hands with Shimon Peres, at a Saudi-sponsored UN conference in November in New York. Israel's enemies in Egypt did not like seeing a photo of their most famous sheikh being friendly with Israel's president. Hatred of Israel is particularly virulent in Egypt now, because of constant coverage of the deprivations of the citizens of Gaza.

"The hand that shook Peres's hand is tainted with the blood of Palestinians and reeks of the smell of their corpses," commented independent Egyptian newspaper al-Dustour recently. It called for Tantawi "to purify his hands," by resigning. The message had particular force, as it was issued on Id al-Adha, when Muslims concentrate on purification from sins. Other papers have also called for him to step down.

An Egyptian MP, Mustafa Bakri said, "This meeting was like Al-Azhar's clear normalization with the Zionist enemy... In the past, the sheikh has insisted on meeting with rabbis, with Rabbi [Yisrael Meir] Lau at the top of the list, but his meeting with the Zionist president is demeaning to all Muslims." Another MP, Hamdi Hassan, insisted Tantawi apologize to the entire world.

But...but...it was all a mistake, says the embattled Jew-hater:

TANTAWI ORIGINALLY claimed "I shook his hand without knowing what he looked like. The handshake was in passing... because I don't know him." But a photo shows them smiling at each other. Tantawi now says : "And suppose I knew him? So what... Isn't he from a country that we recognize?"

Tantawi is not known for his love of Israel, and even called for jihad against it, after excavations two years ago at Temple Mount. His Islamic credentials are beyond question, but hatred of Israel is unbounded in many Islamist circles, both Sunni and Shi'ite. Clerics in the Iranian parliament have also denounced the sheikh's handshake.

To his credit, he does attend multifaith conferences. (I've met him at one myself, and he even shook my hand!) Less laudible, he is reported to have accused, on Egyptian TV, Ma'ariv's editorial staff of being "liars and sons of 60 dogs" for reporting that he had taken the initiative in approaching Peres....

"Liars and sons of 60 dogs." Well, the man can turn a phrase.

Ban Ki-Moon with Saudi King Abdullah: Yes, master

Ban Ki-Moon, tool of the largest voting bloc in the UN, the Organization of the Islamic Conference, does his masters' bidding. "UN chief calls for immediate halt of violence in Gaza, southern Israel," from Xinhua, December 27 (thanks to Pamela):

UNITED NATIONS, Dec. 27 (Xinhua) -- U.N. Secretary-general Ban Ki-moon on Saturday called for an immediate halt to the violence in Gaza and southern Israel, condemning excessive use of force leading to civilian casualties and ongoing rocket attacks by militants.

In a statement issued by his spokesperson, Ban said that he is "deeply alarmed" by the heavy violence and bloodshed in Gaza, and the continuation of violence in southern Israel, and called for "an immediate halt to all violence."

While recognizing Israel's security concerns regarding the continued firing of rockets from Gaza [No, he doesn't -- RS], the UN chief firmly reiterated Israel's obligation to uphold international humanitarian and human rights law, and condemned excessive use of force leading to the killing and injuring of civilians.

Here again we see that the UN remains completely indifferent to the daily rocket barrages that Israeli civilians have had to endure, but any self-defense action by Israel is immediately deemed "excessive."

"He condemns the ongoing rocket attacks by Palestinian militants and is deeply distressed that repeated calls on Hamas for these attacks to end have gone unheeded," the statement added.

He is "distressed," but doesn't seem to think anyone should do anything about it.

"The secretary-general reiterates his previous calls for humanitarian supplies to be allowed into Gaza to aid the distressed civilian population," the statement said. "He is making immediate contact with regional and international leaders, including Quartet principals, in an effort to bring a swift end to the violence."...

As if humanitarian aid supplies have not been allowed in:

A book review by Henrik Raeder Clausen:

Turkey in the European Union: A Bridge Too Far By Philip Claeys & Koen Dillen ISBN 978-90-78898-13-9 Published by Uitgeverij Egmont, Belgium

Public debate about admitting Turkey as a full member of the European Union has been vague and late, the details of the matter as well as major decisions being taken by the European Commission and the heads of state. This book sets out to set the record straight, and despite occasional flaws does so with a vengeance.

Admittedly, the foreword by Taki Theodoracopulos almost put me off. I hate being served my conclusions in advance, in the bluntest of words. But the subject is important, and proceeding proved richly rewarding.

The book is structured in eleven chapters by subject, and is actually quite brief, just under 150 pages ahead of 70 pages of notes and documentation.

It sets out in chapter one describing the process that, surprisingly, granted Turkey candidate status for the European Union at the summit in Helsinki 1999. This was based on promises stemming back from 1963. In context, public debate or assessment of Turkish adherence to the Copenhagen Criteria were deemed unnecessary. At this point, one has to admire the quality of the Turkish diplomacy: Shifting instantly between the finest politesse and outright rudeness, the Turks are extremely good of getting what they want. Their European counterparts do not deserve this kind of praise.

Roy W. Brown was outraged by the speech by Ambassador Taib, adviser to the Secretary General of the Organization of the Islamic Conference, at the UN, Geneva on December 19. Here, in typical post-modernist literary style, he has deconstructed the Ambassador's speech and put it together again as it would have been given by an honest man speaking the truth.

Those of you who read the report of the statements at the OIC celebration of the 60th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights at the UN in Geneva on 19 December might have been forgiven for concluding that the OIC was either suffering from a severe case of collective schizophrenia or has fallen into the hands of a latter-day Dr Goebbels, so contradictory were the speeches and so outrageous were some of the claims.

The Secretary General of the OIC, Prof. Elmeleddin Ihsanoglu for example, stated in his keynote address that:

the OIC is firmly committed to respect for freedom of expression which is a fundamental human right. The OIC is not looking for limitation or restrictions of this freedom beyond those that already have been set by Articles 19 and 20 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.

One wonders therefore why the OIC has, for the last decade, been promoting with great success resolutions prohibiting “defamation of religions” at the United Nations.

Professor Ihsanoglu’s statement was flatly contradicted half an hour later by his advisor, Ambassador Saad Eddin Taib, who described freedom of expression as “a dishonest intellectual slight of hand [sic]” and “a trickery tool which is being exploited to cover up and conceal the real aim of Islamophobia”.

The speech by Ambassador Taib – which, luckily, had to be cut to five minutes because of time constraints – contains many distortions, errors of fact and serious omissions. But his speech was fully consistent with the OIC’s attempts to create an alternative reality in which Islam is defined exclusively as the religion of peace and no terrorist can ever be described as a Muslim or said to be acting in the name of Islam; in which freedom of expression is merely a license to insult Islam and offend Muslims; and where criticism of any aspect of the Sharia is condemned as “Islamophobia” and incitement to hatred. This alternative reality is then presented by the OIC as the only acceptable basis for a “Dialogue of Civilisations”.

Nevertheless, in this season of goodwill and for the sake of clarification I felt I should attempt to correct the errors of fact and replace some of the more egregious omissions in the Ambassador’s statement. I have therefore taken the liberty of editing his speech to better reflect what I believe His Excellency, the former Moroccan Ambassador to Japan, would have wished to say had he not been constrained by the OIC agenda and been able to speak freely.

I have retained the deleted text, but stricken through like this, and the added text is shown in bold italics.

What safeguards are in place -- are there any? -- to keep Islamic clerics in Britain and the state-approved sharia courts from being complicit in the abuses that result from polygamous marriage? Those abuses can range from the failure to inform one wife that there are others, to the settlement of resulting divorces, to fraud committed against the state for welfare benefits (though the state currently recognizes polygamous unions if the wedding took place legally in another country). Or would demanding transparency, accountability, and generally legal and ethical behavior be "Islamophobic?"

"How Sahar Daftary's death fall exposed polygamy in Britain," by Dominic Kennedy for the Times Online, December 28 (thanks to all who sent this in):

The death of a model who learnt that her husband was already married has shone a light into the murky world of Muslim polygamy in Britain.

Sahar Daftary, 23, fell 150ft from the twelfth storey of a block of flats where she had gone to collect her belongings at the home of a businessman whom she had married in a religious ceremony last year.

Her husband, Rashid Jamil, 33, was arrested on suspicion of murder but bailed by police after they found no evidence that the death was anything other than an accident or suicide.

Ghayasuddin Siddiqui, the head of the Muslim Parliament of Great Britain, told The Times: “This story is very common, unfortunately. We have tried to plug some of the holes in the whole system, but unfortunately our clerics do not live on this planet.

“They don’t understand. For them, controlling the sexuality of the woman is far more important than justice, so we have this problem.”

Ms Daftary, a Sunni Muslim from London whose family comes from Afghanistan, was crowned Miss Face of Asia in a beauty contest last year. She was found critically injured by the apartment block in Salford Quays near the Manchester United football ground on Saturday. She had been helping with make-up at a fashion show in the city but left early to collect clothes from Mr Jamil’s home.

Ms Daftary also wanted to arrange an Islamic divorce from him. She had undergone a Muslim wedding ceremony in Brentford, West London, only to learn later that her husband already had a wife.

Her sister, Mariya Massumi, a hairdresser, said: “A few months after they got married we had a phone call from Narissa Amjad, and she said she was Rashid’s wife. We were very shocked and we confronted him.” Relatives learnt that Ms Amjad, 29, a marketing executive, was expecting a second child by Mr Jamil.

Islam traditionally allows husbands to take up to four wives at a time. A confrontation took place at Mr Jamil’s detached house in Altrincham, Manchester, where Ms Amjad lived.

Ms Massumi said: “When we arrived he was very calm. He said to Sahar he was not happy with his wife. He said in front of his wife he wanted to live with Sahar. His wife Narissa was also very calm and said that was OK. We were all so shocked. Rashid told Sahar he loved her.”

Mr Jamil also had a former wife, Sebina Malik, a lawyer. They had a daughter but were formally divorced. According to relatives, Mr Jamil had also undergone an arranged marriage in Pakistan that ended in divorce.

Dr Siddiqui said some British Muslim clerics performed polygamous marriages. The ceremonies are unrecog-nised by law. Clerics let husbands end marriages by saying “I divorce you” three times. Ex-wives have no rights.

Ahmad Thomson, a barrister and founder of the Association of Muslim Lawyers, said that polygamous marriages could work in Britain if all parties were open and in agreement. But he added: “Sometimes the husband has tried to keep the earlier marriage secret. When the second or third wife finds out, it’s devastating.”

This article is another in a series of several stories that have appeared over the years about vitamin D deficiencies brought on by Islamic prescriptions for veiling. And the problem is not limited to "cold climates."

"Ireland too grey for the burqa," by Colin Gleeson for the Times Online, December 28:

Muslim women who wear the burqa in Ireland are at increased risk of pelvic fractures during childbirth because of vitamin D deficiency due to a lack of sunlight, a consultant warns.

Babies born to women with vitamin D deficiency are also more prone to seizures in their first week of life, according to Dr Miriam Casey, of the Osteoporosis Unit in St James’s hospital in Dublin.

A burqa is an enveloping outer garment worn by some Muslim women. In hot countries, enough sunlight gets through to give them sufficient vitamin D, but this may not happen in countries where there is limited sunshine, such as Ireland and Britain.

Casey said she was aware of cases involving pelvic fractures, and warned that these could become more frequent as Ireland’s Muslim population increased. “Ireland’s temperate climate doesn’t have the intense sunlight that keeps burqa-clad women from becoming vitamin D-deficient in their own countries,” she said.

Vitamin D helps the body to absorb calcium and is crucial for making bones strong. The greatest source is sunlight.

Casey said the fractures occur at sites of particular weakness which develop in under-mineralised pelvic bones. In these women's babies, low calcium can cause “serious complications such as seizures, growth retardation, muscle weakness and fractures”.

“As a toddler, carrying the weight of the torso can force the development of a bow-legged appearance and a waddling gait,” she said. “Later, there can be rickets, which is caused by vitamin D deficiency, with swollen wrists and bones that fail to fuse in adolescence.”

Darker skins can produce as little as 1% of the vitamin D that fair skins produce. Moreover, studies have found that the rate of many diseases rises the further north one moves, leading researchers to suspect that vitamin D may play a greater role in health than previously thought.

Casey said: “As we see a rise in the number of Muslims in Ireland, it’s going to become a massive problem. It’s worse in England whose Muslim community is older. There are already problems in the Rotunda [a maternity hospital in Dublin] and the paediatric hospitals.”

A spokeswoman for the Islamic community in Ireland said she was unaware of health problems suffered by women wearing burqas.

Last year, Muslim women in the UK were warned that wearing the hijab could cause poor health for them and their babies. A UK government spokesman said: “We are not interfering in a Muslim woman’s right to wear the hijab, but we are stressing that we all need sunlight on our skins.”

Going steady

The Saudis have told Bush to jump. Will Bush say, "How high?"

"Bush, Saudi King talk amid Israel-Gaza bloodshed," from AFP, December 27 (thanks to Michael):

CRAWFORD, Texas (AFP) — Saudi King Abdullah told US President George W. Bush by telephone on Saturday that major countries must take action to halt Israel's attacks on Gaza, the Saudi state news agency SPA reported....

But SPA reported that King Abdullah had discussed "the Israeli aggression against Gaza" and the "implications of continuing Israel's policies of blockade, occupation and torture against the Palestinian people all over the Occupied Territories."

The king also called for "the major countries to shoulder their responsibilities to stop this Israeli attack and save the lives of the innocent and remaining infrastructure in the Palestinian territories."

Abdullah made the call after a meeting in Riyadh with Palestinian President Mahmud Abbas.

"The EU also criticized what it called Israel's disproportionate use of force..."

Question: Was four years of war, followed by eight years of occupation of Japan and the destruction of Japan's native religion (by compelling the Emperor to go on the radio and tell the Japanese that he wasn't divine) a proportionate response to the bombing of Pearl Harbor? Over 3,000 people were killed at Pearl Harbor. Wouldn't the bombing of a Japanese port, the sinking of some Japanese ships and the destruction of Japanese planes, resulting in the deaths of a few thousand Japanese, have been the only proportionate response? And so wasn't the Pacific theater of World War II a wildly disproportionate response on the part of the Allies?

Also, have you ever noticed that the only state in the world that is ever guilty of a disproportionate response to violent attacks from its enemies is Israel?

"Islam's borders are bloody, and so are its innards"

Though he was no theologian or historian of Islam, but rather a political scientist---a profession that typically ignores the metaphysical, the abstract---the late Samuel Huntington was objective enough to appreciate Islam's "peculiar" characteristics. As he famously observed, "Wherever one looks along the perimeter of Islam, Muslims have problems living peaceably with their neighbors. The question naturally rises as to whether this pattern of the late 20th century conflict between Muslim and non-Muslim groups is equally true of relations between groups from other civilizations. In fact, it is not. Muslims make up 1/5 of the world's population but in the 1990s they have been far more involved in intergroup violence than the people of any other civilization....Islam's borders are bloody, and so are its innards" (p. 256).

"'Clash of Civilizations' author Samuel Huntington dies," from Reuters, December 27:

BOSTON (Reuters) - Political scientist Samuel Huntington, whose controversial book "The Clash of Civilizations" predicted conflict between the West and the Islamic world, has died at age 81, Harvard University said on Saturday.

Huntington, who taught for 58 years at Harvard before retiring in 2007, died Wednesday at a nursing facility in Martha's Vineyard, Massachusetts, the university said on its website.

In his 1996 "The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order," which expanded on his 1993 article in Foreign Affairs magazine, Huntington divided the world into rival civilizations based mainly on religious traditions such as Christianity, Islam, Hinduism and Confucianism and said competition and conflict among them was inevitable.

His focus on religion rather than ideology as a source of conflict in the post-Cold War world triggered broad debate about relations between the Western and Islamic worlds, especially in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001, attacks on the United States.

Despite criticism his thesis was simplistic or in the words of Middle East scholar Edward Said promoted the idea of "West versus the rest," Huntington told Islamica magazine in 2007, "My argument remains that cultural identities, antagonisms and affiliations will not only play a role, but play a major role in relations between states."...

Criticism from Edward Said, of course, being a sign that one's assessment of Islam is honest and straightforward.

A Palestinian rock-throwing Santa illustrated the story

Agence France Presse headline on Israel's action in Gaza: "Gaza braces for invasion as Barak threatens children." (Thanks to Michael.)

They know how to tug on the West's guilty heartstrings. They know no one, or hardly anyone, will stop to consider the fact that the Jews didn't send 200+ rockets into Germany before the real Holocaust. They know no one, or hardly anyone, will consider how grotesque is an analogy between the calculated murder of six million innocents and the casualties resulting from an entirely justified military action.

"Israeli strikes in Gaza called 'Holocaust' by Hamas," from Ya Libnan, December 27 (thanks to Gateway Pundit):

Beirut- A wave of Israeli air strikes on Hamas bases in Gaza that killed more than 195 people and wounded scores more reverberated across the Middle East on Saturday, as graphic images of the dead and wounded were beamed to millions watching Arab satellite channels.

The Israeli attacks, in response to stepped up rocket salvos by militants in Gaza, drew dire warnings of retaliation from Hamas and threatened to ignite outrage on the streets of Arab nations whose governments were accused by critics of doing little to help the Palestinians in Gaza.

Protests erupted in Ramallah, the seat of the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank, and in the Jordanian capital Amman, where demonstrators urged Hamas fighters to "destroy Tel Aviv." Protests were also reported in Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon.

The Israeli attacks were called a "massacre" and "Holocaust" by Hamas spokesmen in Gaza, their voices broadcast over images of piled bodies in a morgue and wounded youths being tended on the floors of Shifa Hospital, which was overwhelmed with casualties. In one lingering image, a man kissed the head of a dead child carried out of the hospital.

Sheikh Yussuf al-Qaradawi, an influential Muslim cleric, decried what he called the "silence" of the Arab world and urged "the entire Islamic nation to stand against this criminal and savage aggression," in comments broadcast on the popular satellite channel Al-Jazeera....

Carl Brockelmann: "Islamophobe" or Scholar?

Recently reading through Professor Carl Brockelmann’s History of the Islamic Peoples (1948), I was struck by a particular passage that, inasmuch as it is objective and thoroughly grounded in Islamic law and Muslim practice, if asserted now by any scholar of whatever caliber would surely only earn the label “Islamophobe.” Brockelmann, of course, was one of the most premiere scholars of Islam in his day (1868-1956) and a prolific writer; so too was he one of those explicitly named and denounced by Edward Said for being an Orientalist—or, according to Said, for being a “tool” of colonialism and imperialism, not a “true” scholar.

The passage that impressed me for its forthrightness follows. After discussing the Five Pillars of Islam, Brockelmann wrote:

Besides these five canonical duties, which are regarded as inviolable, the Muslim’s entire private and public life is encompassed by a multiple chain of prescriptions, the observation of which is likewise part of the religion…

The Muslim may show only hostility to infidels when encountered: war against them is a religious duty. Idol-worshippers must always be attacked without more ado, Jews and Christians, however, only after they have ignored a summons, made three times, to accept Islam. After defeat the men are to be killed, women and children to be sold into slavery. Whoever is killed in the Holy War is sure of paradise, as a martyr. In addition, it is permitted to conclude treaties with Jews and Christians, following the example of the Prophet… But the obligation of the Holy War is merely postponed by such contracts, not annulled….

A child’s legitimacy does not depend on the position of the mother, but only on its recognition by the father…. [T]he slave, whether taken captive in war or purchased, or born in the household, is legally an object [of the Muslim master] that may be bequeathed in inheritance or given away….

The penal code of Islam has remained on a rather primitive level and only marks a slight advance over the ancient pagan concepts of law….Theft is punishable by amputation of the right hand, in case of relapse by additional maiming. Adultery is punished by a hundred strokes of a lash; but if an infidel seduces a Muslim woman, he is subject to the death penalty. Blasphemy with respect to God, the Prophet, and his predecessors is punishable by death, as is defection from Islam [apostasy], if the culprit persists in his disbelief (p. 43-45).

Brockelmann knew as much; these were not issues open to debate or “nuance.” But, then again, Brockelmann lived in a very different era—when empirical facts, no matter how ugly or unpleasant, were never clouded or ignored simply to make people feel good about themselves, and others.

"Israel Vows to Expand Deadly Gaza Airstrikes." They're "deadly," but Israel nevertheless, in defiance of all reason, and all decency, "vows" to "expand" them.

"At least 200 Palestinians killed as Israeli warplanes pound Gaza; Hamas vows revenge until 'the last drop of blood.'" No mention whatsoever of why "Israeli warplanes" now "pound" Gaza. Those 215 "Palestinian" rocket attacks against Israel in November and December? Not even the tiniest allusion to them. This is just a gratuitous action by the bloodthirsty Israelis, and Hamas, the aggrieved party, vows "revenge."

Flash back to billionaire Saudi Prince al-Walid bin Talal, December 2005:

Al-Walid also criticised US media which he described as "in general ... pro-Israel." But he also accused Arabs of not being pro-active in fighting the allegedly slanted media.

He said that during last month's street protests in France, the US television network Fox -- owned by Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation in which Al-Walid himself has shares -- ran a banner saying: "Muslim riots."

"I picked up the phone and called Murdoch... (and told him) these are not Muslim riots, these are riots out of poverty," he said.

"Within 30 minutes, the title was changed from Muslim riots to civil riots."

Crocodile tears: "A Jordanian woman cries during a demonstration against the Israeli air strikes in the Gaza Strip in Amman" -- Reuters

Where were they all when Gaza was shooting Kassams at Israeli civilians?

First, the predictable: Egypt, Jordan, Iran, and Turkey, plus a little Et Tu Brute action from Shirin Ebadi:

"Arab and Islamic leaders condemn deadly raids on Gaza," from DPA, December 27:

Cairo - Arab and Islamic leaders Saturday widely condemned the Israeli airstrikes on the Gaza Strip, in which at least 155 Palestinians were killed.

Egypt condemned the wave of the Israeli air raids on the Gaza Strip and announced it would open would its border crossing with Gaza at Rafah.

"Egypt condemns the Israeli military aggression on the Gaza Strip and blames Israel, as an occupying force, for the victims and the wounded," an Egyptian presidential statement read.

Remember, when Israel stopped "occupying" Gaza, it was supposed to be the dawn of a new era of peace. Some people knew better, of course, but no one was listening to them.

"Egypt will continue its contacts to prepare an atmosphere conducive to restoring the period of calm and achieving reconciliation between the Palestinian groups," it added. [...]

When was that period of calm again? It didn't end with Israel's action today. It ended long before that:

Meanwhile, Jordan urged an "immediate" halt to the attack.

"Jordan strongly condemns the aggression on Gaza [and] urges Israel to stop immediately its military operations and the policy of collective punishment being carried out against Palestinian civilians," the Minister of State for Media Affairs and Communication Nasser Judeh said in a statement.

Judeh added that Jordanian King Abdullah II would be "involved in moves with the world's influential powers to ensure a cessation of the military operations".

The Jordanian Foreign Minister Salab Bashir summoned the ambassadors to Amman of the five UN Security Council members to relay Amman's protest.

The Jordanian official reaction was supported by hundreds of Jordanian trade unionists and opposition party members who also staged a demonstration to protest the Israeli attack. [...]

Tehran also condemned the Israeli raids calling them savage, inhuman and contrary to all human rights norms.

"This savage and inhuman act by the Zionist regime (Israel) just adds another chapter to its dark criminal and terrorist record and is the result of the painful silence by relevant international organizations," Foreign Ministry Spokesman Hassan Ghashghavi said in a statement carried by ISNA news agency.

While calling on an urgent action by the United Nations Security Council and Organization of the Islamic Conference to stop the raids, the spokesman reiterated Iran's firm support for the Palestinian nation.

The head of parliament's foreign policy commission, Alaeddin Boroujerdi, said within the same context that "the new crimes by the Zionists (Israel) reflect their savage nature and that of those countries claiming to be civilized and defend human rights."

Boroujerdi told ISNA that support by the United States and other Western powers has de facto encouraged Israel to commit crimes such as the latest raids in Gaza Strip.

Also Iranian Nobel peace laureate and lawyer Shirin Ebadi condemned the raids and told Fars news agency "what is happening today in Gaza hurts the heart of every human being and is contrary to all human rights' norms."

In the Turkish capital Ankara, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan said that the Israeli airstrikes were "primarily a strike against peace."

Erdogan said that he had cancelled a scheduled telephone conversation with Israeli caretaker Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, on account of the airstrikes.

The Muslim Brotherhood jumped on also: "Muslim Brotherhood Condemns Attacks on Gaza, Blames Arab Regimes," from Ikhwan Web via Huliq.com, December 27:

Muslim Brotherhood Deputy Chairman Mohamed Habib slammed the deadly attacks on Gaza that were launched by Israeli occupation on Saturday leaving dozens dead and wounded.

"The Israeli occupation forces are proving to the entire world their disrespect of all international treaties and accords, let alone the values of humanity and divine religions," Habib said in a statement.

"Where is Egypt"s role towards the massacres on Palestinian territories? Unfortunately Egypt and Arab regimes appear to be complicit in the Israeli occupation"s crimes against the Palestinian people by their shameful silence and failure to take action that would prevent these crimes," Habib added....

Plus Yemen: "Yemen denounces Israeli aggression against Gaza citizens," from Saba, December 27:

SANA'A, Dec. 27 (Saba)- An authorized source in the government stated that Yemen strongly denounces Israeli aggression and annihilation war it carries out against innocent Palestinians in Gaza.

The Yemeni government is following up very anxiously development of Israeli barbaric aggression and brutal genocides its army carries out against armless Palestinians in Gaza Strip that took life and injured hundreds, said the source.

Yemen demands quick and instant interference of the United Nation Security Council to stop these Israeli barbaric genocides, added the source. Yemen also calls on international community to take its responsibility to oblige Israel to stop its repeated aggression against Palestinian people, enable them all their rights and to establish their independent state.

And with such champions of human rights as Egypt, Yemen and Iran chiming in, could Sudan be far behind? "Sudan strongly condemns Israel's massacre against Gaza Strip," from KUNA, December 27 (thanks to Rudi):

KHARTOUM, Dec 27 (KUNA) -- Sudan on Saturday strongly condemned the Israeli brutal raids against the Palestinian people in Gaza, which killed more than a hundred of innocent people.

Sudanese foreign undersecretary Mutrif Siddiq said in a statement that his country calls for an emergency meeting at the level of the leaders of the Arab and Muslim countries to address this barbaric act of terrorism against civilians in the Gaza Strip.

He denounced the international silence over the killing of children, women, the elderly in addition to the unprecedented siege....

Then come the Eurodhimmis -- the EU: "EU calls for immediate end to violence in Gaza Strip," from DPA, December 27:

Paris - The European Union on Saturday called for an immediate end to hostilities in the Gaza Strip, following Israeli airstrikes on the territory which have left at least 155 people dead.

The EU also criticized what it called Israel's disproportionate use of force, in a statement from the current presidency of the union in Paris.

The French foreign ministry on behalf of the EU renewed its call for a permanent ceasefire between Hamas and Israel, and said that there could be no military solution to the conflict in the Gaza Strip.

All crossing points into Gaza should be opened, to allow the supply of food and fuel to the Strip, which has suffered under an economic and military blockade by Israel since 2007, the statement said.

Plus Ireland:

"Martin condemns Gaza airstrikes," from The Press Association, December 27:

Foreign Affairs Minister Micheal Martin has strongly condemned Israel's devastating air strikes against Gaza which have killed 155 people.

Mr Martin urged Israel to immediately halt its attacks and allow humanitarian agencies access to the Hamas-controlled Palestinian territory.

"I condemn in the strongest terms Israel's action in launching air strikes in Gaza against Hamas targets which have resulted in widespread civilian fatalities," he said. "These actions, far from ending the cycle of violence which has gripped both Gaza and southern Israel in recent weeks, are unfortunately only likely to escalate the situation and make the search for an effective ceasefire in Gaza even more difficult."

And a tragically short-sighted and one-sided Vatican official: "Vatican official: Israeli attacks set to increase hatred in region," from DPA, December 17:

Vatican City - Israel's airstrikes on the Gaza Strip are likely to trigger more hatred in the region, the Vatican's chief spokesman said Saturday.

Father Federico Lombardi, speaking on Vatican Radio, said an Israeli reaction to the launching of rockets by Palestinian militants following Hamas' decision not to renew a ceasefire agreement, was 'expected'.

However, the scale of the raids and the number of victims has left a a strong 'impression,' Lombardi said.

'Certainly it has been a strong blow against Hamas. At the same time there will be... numerous innocent victims,' Lombardi said.

'Hamas is a prisoner of the logic of hatred. Israel (is the prisoner) of a logic that force is the best response to hatred. We have to try and find a different solution, even if this seems impossible,' he added....

And the rapacious Russian bear reiterated its opportunistic support for the global jihad: "Israel must stop large-scale operation against Gaza – spokesman," from Itar-Tass, December 27:

MOSCOW, December 27 (Itar-Tass) - Moscow believes Israel must immediately stop a large-scale use of force against the Gaza Strip, which has already resulted in numerous casualties and sufferings of the civilian Palestinian population, Russian Foreign Ministry spokesman Andrei Nesterenko said on Saturday.

“Early on December 27, the Israeli Air Force delivered numerous air strikes on different facilities in the Gaza Strip,” the diplomat informed. “According to media reports, the number of killed Palestinians is already about 120 people, and over 200 people were wounded,” he continued.

“Russia believes it is necessary to immediately stop a large-scale use of force against the Gaza Strip, which has already resulted in numerous casualties and sufferings of the civilian Palestinian population,” Nesterenko stressed.

“At the same time, we urge the HAMAS leadership to stop air strikes on Israel,” he added. “Moscow is confident that the most urgent thing for the present day is to stop an armed confrontation, restore truce and release civilians on both sides from horror and pain,” he stressed.

The diplomat pledged that “Russia will continue in different formats insistent efforts in order to break the vicious circle of violence as an indispensable condition for solving the existing problems through negotiations”.

Good luck with that.

Meanwhile, Israel's friend and ally, the U.S., issues a pious and hypocritical warning -- one that will play into the hands of those who wish to destroy Israel utterly in the name of Islamic jihad: "U.S. urges Israel avoid civilian casualties in Gaza," by Tabassum Zakaria for Reuters, December 27:

WACO, Texas, Dec 27 (Reuters) - The United States on Saturday urged Israel to avoid civilian casualties in air strikes on Gaza but did not call for an end to the attacks in pursuit of Hamas targets that killed at least 155 people.

The White House said for the violence to end, Hamas, which the United States considers a terrorist organization, must stop rocket attacks into Israel.

Israeli warplanes and combat helicopters pounded the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip killing at least 155 people in the bloodiest day for Palestinians in more than 20 years.

Palestinian militants responded with rocket fire that killed an Israeli, medics said.

"Hamas' continued rocket attacks into Israel must cease if the violence is to stop," White House spokesman Gordon Johndroe said in Texas where President George W. Bush is on vacation at his ranch.

"Hamas must end its terrorist activities if it wishes to play a role in the future of the Palestinian people," Johndroe said. "The United States urges Israel to avoid civilian casualties as it targets Hamas in Gaza."

The Bush administration has typically taken the position that Israel has the right to defend itself....

Mighty big of the Bush administration to "typically" take such a stance!

Pamela has photos of hypocritical reactions from around the Islamic world.

Rushdie's coffin, from an exhibit in Tehran

"Ask yourself the question that if the Kashmir problem were resolve tomorrow, if Israel-Palestine reached a lasting peace, do we believe that al-Qaeda would disband? Do we believe that Lashkar-e-Toiba and Jaish-e-Mohammad would put their guns down and beat them into plough-shears and say we would now be farmers because our job is done. I mean the point about is that is laughable, right? And the point about that is that that is not their project. Their project is power. This is a power grab by the most obscurantist, revanchist, old-fashioned, medievalist idea of modern culture that attempts to drag the world back into the middle ages at the point of modern weaponry ..." - Salman Rushdie, in "'Brutality, Incompetence And Cynical Duplicity,'" Outlook India, December 19 (thanks to Axel).

Their surprise is entirely warranted, with Olmert still in power. In any case, their victimology mill is already grinding into high gear. Watch for staged photos of civilians being hit, coming soon from all the wire services.

"Hamas source: IDF strike unexpected: Organization admits Air Force offensive in Gaza caught its people off guard since no one thought Israel would strike on Shabbat," by Ali Waked for Ynet News, December 27 (thanks to Ruth King):

A Hamas source in Gaza confirmed Saturday that the Israeli Air Force attack on the Gaza Strip, caught the organization completely off guard. Hamas, said the source, did not believe the IDF would launch a strike on Shabbat.

Earlier in the week, many Hamas operative went underground, fearing an Israeli assault, but despite the precautions taken by Hamas, many of its police stations across the Strip were operating as usual, again – believing an Israeli attack will not begin over the weekend.

Hamas spokesman Fauzi Barhum told the media that the organization learned on Friday that Israel was not going to launch any military operation in Gaza. Egypt had recommended Hamas cease all rocket fire immediately, in order to allow Israel to postpone its planned offensive in the Strip.

According to a Hamas source, the organization believed an Israeli offensive would mimic past ones and target Hamas training and other minor facilities, and not offices meant to provide services to the general population.

Among the offices hit were the Gaza passport bureau and the Preventive Security Headquarters.

Hamas further said that the message sent by Israel was one stipulating that that are no more line in the sand, and therefore the organization's would respond accordingly.

Earlier Saturday, Hamas interior minister confirmed that all Hamas infrastructure in the Strip was hit during the string of IAF strikes. The Palestinians further reported that one of the strikes was aimed at a Hamas cadet course readying for its graduation ceremony. According to the Palestinian police spokesman in Gaza, many of the cadets were killed, including Tawfiq Jabar, commander of the Gaza Police.

Eyewitnesses reported black smoke towering over the Gaza Harbor, as well as over several building used by Hamas' armed forces in the city. The Palestinian television is broadcasting images of dead bodied across the city, and of the wounded being rushed to medical facilities.

Official Palestinian reports estimate 150 people were killed in the strike and 300 injured.

Bosnia is flooded with Wahhabis and Saudi money, mosques and madrasas are springing up everywhere, women are in hijabs -- but no worries. Bosnia is a secular, moderate Muslim country and will stay that way, and you better not dare to take too much notice of its rapid descent into jihadist fanaticism, unless you want to be labeled a neofascist supporter of Serbian genocide!

Such febrile fantasies and frequently libelous charges hurled against critics of the spread of jihadism in the Balkans, even by some who claim to oppose the global jihad, continue to prevent a sober analysis of what is happening there. And they help enable the jihadists to continue their work there unhindered, enjoying even the support of the abysmally clueless State Department.

"Islamic Revival Tests Bosnia’s Secular Cast," by Dan Bilefsky for the New York Times, December 26 (thanks to Sr. Soph):

SARAJEVO, Bosnia and Herzegovina — Thirteen years after a war in which 100,000 people were killed, a majority of them Muslims, Bosnia is undergoing an Islamic revival.

More than half a dozen new madrasas, or religious high schools, have been built in recent years, while dozens of mosques have sprouted, including the King Fahd, a sprawling $28 million complex with a sports and cultural center.

Before the war, fully covered women and men with long beards were almost unheard of. Today, they are common.

Many here welcome the Muslim revival as a healthy assertion of identity in a multiethnic country where Muslims make up close to half the population.

But others warn of a growing culture clash between conservative Islam and Bosnia’s avowed secularism in an already fragile state.

Two months ago, men in hoods attacked participants at a gay festival in Sarajevo, dragging some people from vehicles and beating others while they chanted, “Kill the gays!” and “Allahu Akbar!” Eight people were injured.

Muslim religious leaders complained that the event, which coincided with the holy month of Ramadan, was a provocation. The organizers said they had sought to promote minority rights and meant no offense.

In this cosmopolitan capital, where bars have long outnumbered mosques, Muslim religious education was recently introduced in state kindergartens, prompting some secular Muslim parents to complain that the separation between mosque and state was being breached....

“The Serbs committed genocide against us, raped our women, made us refugees in our own country,” said Mustafa Efendi Ceric, the grand mufti and main spiritual leader of Bosnia’s Muslim community.

“And now we have a tribal constitution that says we have to share political power and land with our killers,” he said. “We Bosnian Muslims still feel besieged in the city of Sarajevo.”

That resentment is evident. As several thousand worshipers streamed into the imposing King Fahd mosque on a recent Friday, a young man sat outside selling a popular conservative Muslim magazine with President-elect Barack Obama on the cover.

"Hussein, Will Your America Kill Muslims?" the headline asked, using Mr. Obama’s middle name, a source of pride for many Muslims here....

In Sarajevo, a predominantly Muslim city, dozens of streets named after Communist revolutionaries were renamed after Muslim heroes, and political parties stressing Muslim identity gained large constituencies.

Catholic Croats and Orthodox Serbs, meanwhile, cleave to their own religious and cultural identities. Church attendance is on the rise; in the Serb Republic, even ministries and police departments have their own Orthodox patron saints.

Muharem Bazdulj, deputy editor of the daily Oslobodenje, the voice of liberal, secular Bosnia, said he feared the growth of Wahhabism, the conservative Sunni movement originating in Saudi Arabia that aims to strip away foreign and corrupting influences....

"Conservative." As if conservatives chop of the hands of thieves and stone adulterers. But of course, that is just the kind of image of conservatives that the New York Times wishes to promote.

Analysts say Saudi-financed organizations have invested about $700 million in Bosnia since the war, often in mosques.

Wahhabism arrived via hundreds of warriors from the Arab world during the war and with Arab humanitarian and charity workers since, though sociologists here stress that most Bosnian Muslims still believe that Islam has no place in public life.

Dino Abazovic, a sociologist of religion at the University of Sarajevo, who recently conducted a detailed survey of 600 Bosnian Muslims, said 60 percent favored keeping religion a private matter; only a small minority prayed five times a day.

Still, violent episodes have occurred. Earlier this year, after an explosion at a shopping mall in the town of Vitez killed one person and wounded seven, Zlatko Miletic, head of uniformed police of the Muslim-Croat Federation Interior Ministry, warned that a group in Bosnia linked to Salafism, an ultraconservative Sunni Islamic movement, was bent on terrorism....

Vedrana Pinjo-Neuschul, who comes from a mixed Serb and Muslim household, has led the fight against Islamic classes in state-financed kindergartens across Sarajevo. Parents may remove their children from the religious classes, but Ms. Pinjo-Neuschul, whose husband is part Jewish, Catholic and Serb, said the policy would stigmatize non-Muslim children.

She recently withdrew her two young children from a public kindergarten and gathered 5,000 signatures against the policy, which has also been criticized by the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, the Vienna-based group monitoring democracy. “I do not want to explain to my 4-year-old son, Sven, who is in love with his Muslim classmate Esma, why they suddenly have to sit in different rooms,” she said at a Jewish community center in Sarajevo. “Nobody has the right to separate them.”

But she says she has been harassed by Islamic radicals on the street and has received hate mail in Arabic. “There are some people who want to turn Bosnia into a Muslim state,” she said....

Milorad Dodik, prime minister of Bosnia’s Serb Republic, has referred to Sarajevo as the new Tehran, and talks of a “political Islam and a fight against people who don’t share the same vision.”

But Muslim leaders and most Western analysts here counter such assertions, saying they do not correspond to Bosnia’s secular reality and are part of an attempt by Serb nationalists to justify the brutal wartime subjugation of Muslims by both Serbs and Croats.

And stateside, those who oppose the spread of the jihad ideology and Islamic supremacism in the Balkans are similarly tarred -- but that doesn't stop the jihadization of the Balkans.

Caroline Glick sums up the festive week (thanks to Tommy):

Both Iran and its Hamas proxy in Gaza have been busy this Christmas week showing Christendom just what they think of it. But no one seemed to have noticed.

On Tuesday Hamas legislators marked the Christmas season by passing a Sharia criminal code for the Palestinian Authority. Among other things, the code legalizes crucifixion.

Hamas's endorsement of nailing enemies of Islam to crosses came at the same time as it renewed its jihad. Here too, Hamas wanted to make sure that Christians didn't neglected as its fighters launched missiles at Jewish day care centers and schools. So on Wednesday Hamas lobbed a mortar at Erez crossing point into Israel just as a group of Gazan Christians were standing on line waiting to travel to Bethlehem for Christmas.

While Hamas joyously renewed its jihad against Jews and Christians, its overlords in Iran also basked in jihadist triumphalism. The source of Iran's sense of ascendancy this week was Britain's state-owned Channel 4 network's decision to request that Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad give a special Christmas Day address to the British people. Ahmadinejad's speech was supposed to be a response to Queen Elizabeth II's traditional Christmas Day address to her subjects. That is, Channel 4 presented his message as a reasonable counterpoint to the Christmas greetings of the head of the Church of England.

Channel 4 justified its move by proclaiming that it was providing a public service. As a Channel 4 spokesman told the Jerusalem Post, "We're offering [Ahmadinejad] the chance to speak for himself, which people in the West don't often get the chance to see."

While that sounds reasonable, the fact is that Westerners see Ahmadinejad speaking for himself all the time. They saw him at the UN two years in a row as he called for the countries of the world to submit to Islam; claimed that Iran's nuclear weapons program is divinely inspired; and castigated Jews as subhuman menaces to humanity.

They saw him gather leading anti-Semites from all over the world at his Holocaust denial conference.

They heard him speak in his own words when he called for Israel to be "wiped off the map."

And of course, over the years Ahmadinejad has often communicated directly to the British people. For instance, in 2007 he received unlimited airtime on British television as he paraded kidnapped British sailors and marines in front of television cameras; forced them to make videotaped "confessions" of their "crime" of entering Iranian territorial waters; and compelled them to grovel at his knee and thank him for "forgiving" them.

The British people listened to Ahmadinejad as he condemned Britain as a warmongering nation after its leaders had surrendered Basra to Iranian proxies. They heard him -- speaking in his own voice -- when he announced that in a gesture of Islamic mercy, he was freeing their humiliated sailors and marines in honor of Muhammad's birthday and Easter and then called on all Britons to convert to Islam.

Yet as far as Channel 4 is concerned, Ahmadinejad is still an unknown quantity for most Britons. So they asked him to address the British on Christmas. And not surprisingly, in his address, he attacked their way of life and co-opted their Jewish savior Jesus, saying, "If Christ was on earth today undoubtedly he would stand with the people in opposition to bullying, ill-tempered and expansionist powers."

He then reiterated his call for non-Muslims to convert to Islam saying, "The solution to today's problems can be found in a return to the call of the divine prophets."...

Read it all.

A spokesman for the mosque insists the conference organizers are just using their facilities. But no one seems perturbed enough about this "misunderstanding" and "hijacking" of Islam to cancel the conference or appearances by speakers like Anwar al-Awlaki and others named below. The full schedule of festivities can be found here.

"Muslim groups 'linked to September 11 hijackers spark fury over conference'," by Gordon Rayner for the Telegraph, December 27:

The End of Time event at the East London Mosque, which is being publicised on internet sites including Facebook, will feature a videotaped lecture from Anwar al-Awlaki, who is banned from entering the United States after allegedly acting as a spiritual adviser to three of the September 11 terrorists.

Mr Awlaki, who lives in Yemen, has been described as "an al-Qaeda supporter" by the US Department of Homeland Security, which has accused him in recent months of using video lectures to "encourage terrorist attacks".

He is due to deliver a video lecture at the mosque in Whitechapel on New Year's Day. Speeches will have titles such as The sound of the trumpet – the real terror starts.

Other speakers will include Suhaib Hasan, who advocates implementing sharia in Britain, and Khalid Yasin, who has described the beliefs of Christians and Jews as "filth".

More on Khalid Yasin can be found here.

The publicity material for the all-day event appears to be a clear reference to the attacks on New York, and features meteors raining down on Manhattan, setting fire to the city and shattering the Statue of Liberty.

It has already drawn comparisons with the "Magnificent 19" poster, which praised the September 11 hijackers and was used to publicise a 2003 event organised by Al-Muhajiroun, whose leader Omar Bakri Mohammed was later banned from Britain.

Dominic Grieve, the shadow home secretary, said: "I would be extremely concerned if the East London Mosque, which has said it is committed to peace, diversity and interfaith dialogue, is giving a platform to such individuals."

In October, Charles Allen, America's undersecretary of homeland security for intelligence and analysis, described Mr Awlaki as "an al-Qaeda supporter, and former spiritual leader to three of the September 11 hijackers".

He claimed the cleric "targets US Muslims with radical online lectures encouraging terrorist attacks from his new home in Yemen".

A trial in New Jersey this month heard that three men accused of plotting to attack a US Army base had watched one of Mr Awlaki's internet sermons, Constants of jihad, the day before they agreed details of the alleged plot.

An informant told the hearing that the message the three men had taken from the video was that: "The time is now."

On his website, Mr Awlaki says: "We will implement the rule of Allah on earth by the tip of the sword whether the masses like it or not".

Publicity material for the event lists other lectures titled Flat line – the point of no return and Your just reward – paradise or hell.

Robin Simcox, of the Centre for Social Cohesion, said: "That these extremist speakers are being given a platform by such an allegedly mainstream mosque, in one of the most Muslim-populous areas in the country, should be cause for serious concern."

Tickets for the event are being sold on the internet by a little-known company called Noor Pro Media Events, based in East Ham in London.

No one from the company was available for comment.

A spokesman for the mosque said: "We didn't organise this event, they are just using our facilities."

In other words, India is controlled by infidels who have no right under Islamic law to do so; the partition was just an act of reclaiming some of the land for its rightful owners. More wild historical revisionism and incitement below.

"Pak textbooks build hate culture against India," by Arif Mohammed Khan for the Times of India, December 27:

The empowerment of terror in Pakistan has not happened overnight. This is the logical culmination of the politics and policies pursued by Pakistan for years now.

Terrorism in Pakistan has its roots in the culture of hate and the ethos of inequality on the ground of religious faith, leading to their being deeply ingrained in the Pakistani psyche and mindset.

One factor that has played a crucial role in creating this culture of hate is the educational policy of the government of Pakistan pursued since 1977. The officially prescribed textbooks, especially for school students, are full of references that promote hate against India in general, and Hindus in particular.

A cursory glance at Pakistani school textbooks - especially the compulsory subjects like Pakistan studies and social studies - gives an idea of how history has been distorted and a garbled version prescribed to build this mindset and attitude.

The objective of Pakistan's education policy has been defined thus in the preface to a Class 6 book: "Social studies have been given special importance in educational policy so that Pakistan's basic ideology assumes the shape of a way of life, its practical enforcement is assured, the concept of social uniformity adopts a practical form and the whole personality of the individual is developed." This statement leaves no doubt that "social uniformity", not national unity, is a part of Pakistan's basic ideology.

The Class 5 book has this original discovery about Hindu help to bring British rule to India: "The British had the objective to take over India and to achieve this, they made Hindus join them and Hindus were very glad to side with the British. After capturing the subcontinent, the British began on the one hand the loot of all things produced in this area, and on the other, in conjunction with Hindus, to greatly suppress the Muslims."

The Std VIII book says, "Their (Muslim saints) teachings dispelled many superstitions of the Hindus and reformed their bad practices. Thereby Hindu religion of the olden times came to an end."

On Indo-Pak wars, the books give detailed descriptions and openly eulogize ‘jihad' and ‘shahadat' and urge students to become ‘mujahids' and martyrs and leave no room for future friendship and cordial relations with India.

According to a Class 5 book, "In 1965, the Pakistani army conquered several areas of India, and when India was on the point of being defeated, she requested the United Nations to arrange a ceasefire. After 1965, India, with the help of Hindus living in East Pakistan, instigated the people living there against the people of West Pakistan, and finally invaded East Pakistan in December 1971. The conspiracy resulted in the separation of East Pakistan from us. All of us should receive military training and be prepared to fight the enemy."

The book prescribed for higher secondary students makes no mention of the uprising in East Pakistan in 1971 or the surrender by more than 90,000 Pakistani soldiers. Instead, it claims, "In the 1971 India-Pakistan war, the Pakistan armed forces created new records of bravery and the Indian forces were defeated everywhere."

The students of Class 3 are taught that "Muhammad Ali (Jinnah) felt that Hindus wanted to make Muslims their slaves and since he hated slavery, he left the Congress". At another place it says, "The Congress was actually a party of Hindus. Muslims felt that after getting freedom, Hindus would make them their slaves."

And this great historic discovery is taught to Std V students, "Previously, India was part of Pakistan."

Commenting on this literature that spreads hate, leading Pakistani educationist Tariq Rahman wrote, "It is a fact that the textbooks cannot mention Hindus without calling them cunning, scheming, deceptive or something equally insulting. Students are taught and made to believe that Pakistan needs strong and aggressive policies against India or else Pakistan will be annihilated by it."

"Officials of the Moro Islamic Liberation Front denied that its forces had tried to attack civilians. Eid Kabalu, a spokesman for the front, instead blamed the military for stepping up its offensives in the past several days."

Of course. Fighting back against jihadist aggression is always a "provocation." "Fighting flares in southern Philippines," by Charles H. Conde for the International Herald Tribune, December 26:

MANILA: A series of rebel attacks this past week in the southern Philippines that left least nine civilians dead underscores the need for the government and Muslim separatists to resume peace negotiations, analysts said Friday.

While civilian casualties are not uncommon in the troubled region of Mindanao, some analysts view recent actions as the insurgents' way of pressuring the government to restart the peace process that has been stalled since August, when the government nullified a landmark agreement that would have expanded a Muslim autonomous region.

On Tuesday, members of the Moro Islamic Liberation Front, the main group that has been fighting for Muslim self-rule in the predominantly Roman Catholic region since the 1970s, attacked villages in Sultan Kudarat township, killing nine civilians and wounding more, the military said.

The next day, Christmas Eve, the rebels reportedly staged another attack, this time in the town of Alamada.

"The attacks came while the people were setting off firecrackers. The attackers timed their attacks during the revelry," said Ernesto Concepcion, mayor of Alamada, according to ABS-CBN television.

The military said the rebels attacked other areas on Christmas Day, firing rocket-propelled grenades at power lines in Sultan Kudarat and looting.

"They ransacked the houses of civilians and extorted money from them. They even stole the guns of retired soldiers living in the area," Lieutenant Colonel Ernesto Torres Jr., an army spokesman, said Friday.

Officials of the Moro Islamic Liberation Front denied that its forces had tried to attack civilians. Eid Kabalu, a spokesman for the front, instead blamed the military for stepping up its offensives in the past several days.

That elephant is, of course, Qur'an 4:34, which states: "Men are in charge of women, because Allah hath made the one of them to excel the other, and because they spend of their property (for the support of women). So good women are the obedient, guarding in secret that which Allah hath guarded. As for those from whom ye fear rebellion, admonish them and banish them to beds apart, and scourge them. Then if they obey you, seek not a way against them. Lo! Allah is ever High, Exalted, Great."

Granted, starting such a discussion in Saudi Arabia could result in the separation of one's head from one's neck for blasphemy. But that is precisely why violence against women will remain such an intractable problem: As long as sharia is the law of the land, no mere mortal can take away a man's "right," granted by divine fiat, to strike the women under his control.

Those who are interviewed below tread lightly for obvious reasons, and there are some vague and unenforceable platitudes about kindness. "Be kind" is a relative statement, especially if one should choose to define kindness as doing what one believes to be "best" for another person. "Don't beat your wife" is a much clearer injunction, but since the Qur'an says otherwise, the only "progress" that may come in this context is hair-splitting on the frequency and severity of the beatings. And since women are shrouded from head to toe and largely confined to the home anyway, there is no reliable verification of "acceptable" or "unacceptable" beatings until a woman winds up in the hospital, or worse.

"Saudi Rights Body to Launch Drive to Check Violence against Women," by Habib Shaikh for the Khaleej Times, December 27:

JEDDAH — The Human Rights Commission (HRC) is to launch a kingdom-wide campaign to stop violence against women. The year-long drive will be inaugurated by Princess Hussa bint Tarad Ashaalan, wife of the Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques King Abdullah bin Abdulaziz, on Monday.

Wafiqa Al Dakheel, supervisor of HRC’s women’s wing, explained that the campaign is aimed at enlightening women of their rights as part of its responsibility to Saudi society.

According to press information, the campaign comes in the wake of the growing number of cases of domestic violence across the kingdom. Nearly 230 such cases were reported in Riyadh this year. The capital accounts for around 29 per cent of divorces in the kingdom.

Enaam Raboue, president of the Association for Family Protection in Jeddah, said her organisation received more than 250 family violence cases in the last five months.

She added that mental illness, drug abuse, alcoholism, poverty, unemployment and a lack of religious commitment and education were some of the reasons for family violence. The Council of Ministers last month reiterated the government’s resolve to protect the rights of women. It also called for more efforts to increase awareness among women about their rights.

Abdullah Saaty of the Jeddah Community College said that there was a dire need to change the attitude of society to women’s rights. “Islam protects the rights of women. The holy Quran and Sunnah urge Muslims to be kind to women. But we are not doing that,” he said.

Abdul Razak Al Zahrani of Imam Muhammad bin Saud Islamic University said a committee of experts should be formed to look into family violence cases. “Newly married couples must be given guidance on how to avoid conflicts in family life,” he said, and added that mosques, schools and the media have their roles to play.

Al Dakheel stressed the need to provide legal and social assistance to women who are victims of family violence. “The campaign will highlight the importance of devising an effective plan to stop violence against women and establish centres to treat the victims of such violence,” she added.

The campaign also aims to educate men on the need to improve their treatment of women. [...]

According to a study conducted by Khaled Al Radihan, an assistant professor of anthropology at King Saud University in Riyadh, involving 267 women, social, verbal and economic abuse of women is more widespread in Saudi society than physical and sexual abuse.

In his questionnaire, Al Radihan classified violence into eight categories — physical, verbal, sexual, social, psychological, health-related, economic and violence in the form of negligence and deprivation — and gave examples illustrating each type of violence.

He categorised the 267 women into married and single. Results showed that married women are abused mainly by their husbands; single women are abused by their male siblings more frequently than their fathers.

He said that economic abuse is when the husband forcefully takes his wife’s money or when he applies for a bank loan under her name without her 
consent.

The results of his research showed that 67 per cent of women suffer from economic abuse. “Economically abusing a woman also includes depriving her of her inheritance, which is very common here,” he added.

According to Al Radihan, there are many reasons for violence against women. She could be really stubborn and difficult to deal with, she might have unbearable financial demands and she might not obey her male guardian.

“The majority of men who abuse their women violently do so because of ‘male honour and female infidelity,’ which damages a man’s reputation that he believes, can be partially restored through the use of violence,” he added.

Moreover, women are subjected to violence because of a lack of solid safeguards. It is difficult for victims to reach out for help because of the bureaucracy of security organisations, and lack of family guidance centres.

“It’s still a taboo for women to talk about these issues to people outside their family. We need to spread awareness among these women and educate them about their rights. We need to provide enough support and assistance while maintaining confidentiality to encourage women to seek help when they need it,” Al Radihan said.

They were able to reach the armory and get weapons: Costly incompetence at best, collaboration at worst. "Qaeda ‘emirs’ flee in deadly Iraq jailbreak," from Agence France-Presse, December 26:

RAMADI, Iraq - A local Al-Qaeda chief known as ‘Imad the killer’ escaped in a pre-dawn breakout from an Iraqi police station on Friday, triggering a wild shootout that left 13 militants and policemen dead.

Imad Ahmed Farhan, who police say has admitted to murdering at least 100 people, is on the run with two other ‘emirs’ or local leaders of Al-Qaeda who broke out of their cells in a police station in the western city of Ramadi.

‘During an exchange of fire between prisoners trying to escape and police officers in the station, six policemen and seven prisoners were killed,’ provincial police chief Tareq al-Dulaimi said.

The three prisoners managed to flee but one was recaptured, Dulaimi said, adding that another four policemen were wounded in the shootout that occurred at 2 am (2300 GMT Thursday) at Forsan police station in the centre of Ramadi.

Ramadi police have imposed a curfew in the city following the incident, an interior ministry source said, adding that it appeared to be a well planned operation.

Several police either directly involved in the battle or in the search afterwards told AFP that the incident began when a prisoner started to shout that he was sick at around 2 am, prompting a policeman to go to his cell.

When the captain entered the cell holding 40 men, 13 of them Qaeda members, they grabbed him and cut his throat with a makeshift knife. They then took his gun and went to the police chief’s office and slit his throat.

The 13 Qaeda prisoners then scrambled into the courtyard where they shot a lieutenant and made it to the armory before the gunbattle began in earnest.

The prisoners fought police for two hours before officers managed to regain control of the station. The recaptured prisoner suffered minor injuries.

Farhan is locally know as ‘Imad Omaya’ which in Arabic means ‘Imad the Killer.’

On Friday the streets of Ramadi, a city of 540,000 people, were deserted and shops were shut as a heavy police presence fanned out in an urgent hunt for the Al-Qaeda escapees, an AFP reporter said....

The "Shebab" -- that is, "the youth" -- are now in control of 80% of Somalia. If the youth of any civilization are that civilization's future, and if wherever one looks, Islam's youth are the most militant in their views, tenaciously upholding the doctrine of jihad, what does this bode for the future of Islam and its interactions with the rest of the non-Islamic world?

"Radical Islamists linked to al-Qaeda set to take control of Somalia," by Mike Pflanz for the Telegraph, December 26:

Hardline Islamists are poised to take control of large areas of southern Somalia, opening a possible new front in the war on terrorism.

Fears are growing that this lawless area, bordering Kenya and Ethiopia, could become a stronghold for terrorists with possible links to al-Qaeda.

Somalia's weak official government, the 14th in the last 17 years, depends entirely on the presence of Ethiopian troops, who are deployed in and around the capital, Mogadishu.

They invaded in December 2006, mounting an American-supported operation which overthrew an earlier Islamist regime, styling itself the Islamic Courts Union.

But Ethiopia has pledged to withdraw its troops at the end of December. When they leave, the official government is likely to fall - or be forced to evacuate Mogadishu.

An armed group styling itself Al-Shebab is likely to take over. Already, its fighters are believed to control more than 80 per cent of southern Somalia. These radical Islamists believe in imposing Sharia law and they recently approved the stoning of a 13-year-old girl.

Al Shebab, the fanatical armed wing which broke from the Islamic Courts Union which ran Somalia for the second half of 2006, now holds more than 80 per cent of the country – more territory than the Courts controlled during their reign.[...]

Al Shebab's chief military commander, Muktar Robow, said earlier this year that he was ready "to take orders from Sheikh Osama bin Laden".[...]

But there are concerns whether al Shebab, whose name means "the youth" and whose forces are largely illiterate and disaffected young men, can peacefully consolidate their power once they are in charge.

"Unless they can reach out and form some new alliances, which is not an easy thing to do among Somalia's clans, they will fail and we will see the start of yet another civil war," said Mr Abdi.

"I'm not optimistic. The future looks bleak and is likely to be bloody."

The Masked Armies of Allah

Collateral damage of the jihad. "Palestinian rocket misfires, kills 2 girls in Gaza," by Ibrahim Barzak for the Associated Press, December 26, thanks to JCB:

Gaza Strip – A crude rocket fired by Palestinian militants fell short of its target in Israel on Friday, striking a house in the northern Gaza Strip and killing two schoolgirls.

The attack came as Israel sent mixed signals over its plans to respond to continuing Palestinian rocket fire. Israeli defense officials say politicians have approved a large-scale incursion into the territory once rainy conditions clear. But at the same time, Israel appeared receptive to international pressure against an invasion, opening the Gaza border Friday to allow in deliveries of humanitarian aid.

None of Gaza's militant factions claimed responsibility for the deadly attack on the house in Beit Lahiya. Gaza Health Ministry official Dr. Moiaya Hassanain said the two victims, ages 5 and 12, were cousins. Three other children were wounded, he said.[...]

Ben-Eliezer echoed the message Prime Minister Ehud Olmert tried to deliver a day earlier in an interview with the Arabic language Al-Arabiya TV station: that Gaza's Islamic Hamas militant rulers were to blame for the suffering in Gaza, home to 1.4 million Palestinians.

But, as with similar cases involving unintended civilian casualties in the past, there were no immediate signs of backlash against the militants after the girls' death...

Doing a little light reading today, I came across this:

"The truth is that Western civilization is rotten through and through and only continues because of the absence of its rightful heirs, namely the Muslims, who have themselves forgotten their deen [religion] and failed to take their divinely appointed task of re-establishing Allah's guidance for the whole of mankind." -- Muhammad al-Ghazali, Journey Through the Qur'an: The Content and Context of the Suras, Dar al-Taqwa, 1998, p. 47.

Who was Muhammad al-Ghazali? Why, he was one of those scholars who was working "so hard to bring Islam into the contemporary world." So says the celebrated Islamic reformist Khaleel Mohammed of San Diego State University:

"I find it difficult that Mr. Spencer should seek to devalue the work of those who work so hard to bring Islam into the contemporary world....But even so, the scholars who share the opinion that I have on the issues that I raised are many -- amongst them Fazlur Rahman, Muhammad al-Ghazali, Taha al-Alwani. I guess they are not authorities and need to be vetted by Mr. Spencer and his ilk?" -- Khaleel Mohammed, "Spencer’s Errors," FrontPageMag.com, May 10, 2005.

Oh, no, Dr. Mohammed. Muhammad al-Ghazali doesn't need to be vetted by me. You go right on citing him as a reformist, and I will go right on quoting him.

Projection and belligerence from the practiced practitioners of the double game. "Pakistan troops move to Indian borders," by Sajjad Malik for the Daily Times, December 26:

ISLAMABAD: Pakistan troops were deployed on Thursday to protect vital points along the Line of Control in Kashmir and the international border with India, defence sources told Daily Times. Reports in Indian media said Pakistan moved its 10th Brigade to Lahore and ordered the 3rd Armoured Brigade to march towards Jhelum, following a heavy concentration of Indian troops on the borders. Pakistan’s 10th and 11th divisions have been put on high alert, Indian media said, and troops had been stationed in Rajouri and Poonch sectors of Kashmir. Sources in the Defence Department declined to give details of any fresh movement but did not deny reports that Pakistan was moving certain brigades towards Lahore. Indian TV channels also reported that Pakistan Air Force continued its state of high alert and started aerial surveillance of the Chashma power plant and other sensitive sites on Thursday amid fears of a ‘surgical strike’ by India.

The always acute and perceptive David Yerushalmi of SANE sent me the following message about Jacob Laksin's review of my book Stealth Jihad, and my response to that review.

Dear Mr. Spencer:

I saw your response to Jacob Laksin’s Pajamas Media Book Review and was sufficiently curious to take a look at it. Your response, while polite to a fault, was not properly focused on what the Laksin critique really means.

Since you chose not to, for whatever reason, let me respond more substantively to Mr. Laksin’s critique of your valuable and timely book, Stealth Jihad. Let me begin with this. While Mr. Laksin frames his critique as but a minor one of style—you exaggerate the threat to America’s existence and national security created by stealth jihad-- in truth, and he of course knows this full well, his criticism is a central antithesis to your book and its purposes.

Stealth jihad works precisely because there are three responses to it—or, more accurately two responses and one non-response. The non-response we can identify quickly. The vast majority of Americans who just don’t care or for whatever reason don’t know anything about the threat. They are either too busy raising a family (hard working) or texting on their cell phones (banality).

The first of the responses to stealth jihad and your book’s warning about it comes from the Elite and the Stealth Jihadists and I need not spell that out here. In a word, attack the messenger typically on ad hominem basis.

The second of the responses is an acceptance of the stealth jihad phenomenon but dismissing it as not an existential threat because it is: (A) Simply the way America assimilates the violent jihad—that is, the way America’s melting pot forces the mujahideen to act western and use courts, finance, etc. and thereby launders the dirty laundry and turns it into a clean, if not a bit stained, western assimilated version of its once foreign and threatening self. By the 2nd or 3rd generation, all is well. Or, (B) It is a problem of assimilation but overstated and America will push back at the right time.

Laksin’s argument is really a bit of both A and B. But if the Laksin argument is true, your book is without point or merit. And, indeed, if the assimilation argument is true in fact then efforts like yours (and mine in the policy-legal worlds) are counterproductive because it creates noise and a bogey when the correct response should be silence and acceptance of a cultural phenomenon oft repeated in our history. Indeed, I have heard the refrain that by making stealth jihad an issue of US-THEM, we are exacerbating the problem and making it more difficult to “assimilate” these stealth mujahideen (and, the argument goes, we are antagonizing all those otherwise assimilated and peaceful Muslims). This is of course the American version of the Jewish response to Nazis, both the original ones and the neo-Nazis in Europe and America. I often heard growing up in the 1960s and early 70s that we should just ignore the neo-Nazi types lest we bring them more attention (and embolden them and otherwise awaken a dormant anti-Semitism in the broader population).

While it would seem odd that Laksin would fall into that category since he works at FrontPageMag, his criticism of your book, properly understood, is a central criticism on its face and so irrational and contrary to fact (there has never been such a hostile immigrant group/movement as the Shariah-faithful or Shariah-sympathetic in the US) that one is hard pressed to understand the motivation.

NB: As an aside, the only similar hostile group of immigrants were the Russian/East European Jewish anarchists and their follow-on Marxist brethren who immigrated here at the turn of the last century through the 1940s. These folks were also both outright revolutionaries and stealth revolutionaries (they used labor-union tactics and university academics as stealth). The difference is that they preached what we can properly call “ideology” since that is what they called it. But ideas are easy to destroy especially if they are beaten in the real world of facts by better ideas. Thus, Marxism failed in the world of ideas as against free markets and representative government and now free markets are failing and we are turning back to socialism and statism. Always in flux because ideas are just that: ideas. Nothing concrete; nothing real. (Don’t get me wrong; this country has in addition to the idea of liberty and representative government strong but vastly weakened institutional biases toward individual freedom and free markets brought to these shores by hard working Christians and memorialized in the original Constitution, but these have been under assault at least since the New Deal and ramped up since the revolutionary 60s.

But that is why I always insist on making the point that Shariah is NOT an ideology because it is not an idea that you can point to and say, “You see, it fails to be the basis of a just society in the real world of facts; ergo change your ideas!” Precisely because Shariah is a faith-based legal-political-religious-cultural institution that need not prove itself on a consistent basis to be accepted. And, because it is predicated upon faith, it is NOT an idea or “belief”. Modern religious men tend to talk of “faith” as “belief” but those two things are opposites. Faith is knowing the truth of something a priori (Gd’s existence and love are examples). With all the good efforts by Aristotle (prime mover), Maimonides (neo-Platonic), St. Thomas Aquinas etc, Gd’s existence and love have hardly been demonstrated logically. They exist within faithful men as an unwavering truth of existence, NOT BELIEF which can come and go with the day and time. Shariah is such a faith but wholly protected by a 1200 year old institutional framework that resists any effort from within or without to undermine its authority. (See here and here for a discussion of Shariah as an institution that protects itself against change.) That is what makes Shariah so dangerous in our time. And, the fact that Mr. Laksin and so many others can simply laugh it off as he does in his book review, makes it exponentially more so.

That is what makes your book invaluable and Laksin’s criticism so devastating.

Barbarity upon barbarity from those who style themselves as the warriors of the one true God. "Terrorists sexually Humiliated guests before killing them," by Santosh Mishra for the Mumbai Mirror, December 25 (thanks to all who sent this in):

Disturbing photographs made available to this newspapers by police sources indicate that several of the guests at the Taj Mahal Hotel during the siege November 26 were sexually humiliated by the terrorists and then shot dead.

Police sources confirm that even as the terrorists were engaged in a fierce combat with NSG commandos, they were humiliating their hostages before ending their terrifying ordeal.

Foreign guests were their particular target. Eight of the 31 killed at the Taj were foreign nationals.

Photographs taken by a police forensic team after the hotel was sanitised yield a gruesome picture of some of the guests in the nude.

These bodies were found away from the hotel's swimming pool which makes it clear that they were not those guests who were taken hostage from the poolside.

"Even the Rabbi and his wife at Nariman House were sexually assaulted and their genitalia mutilated," said a senior officer of the investigating team, not wishing to be quoted.

“We have CCTV footage which reveals how these terrorists forced some of the guests who were holed up in restuarants to strip, but there is not evidence of rape,” he added.

These pictures, most of which we have refrained from printing, are in the records of the police and are now part of the investigation.

When a Jordanian soldier shot and killed Israeli third-graders who had come from their school to visit a "Peace Garden" planted on both sides of the Israel-Jordan border, he was described as "insane." When an Egyptian soldier, on the other side of Israel, opened fire on a group of Israeli tourists and killed men, women, and children, he was described as "insane."

Now if you do not know what texts the killers had read, what they believed, and the atmospherics of their existence, then you would of course describe both men as "insane." And you might also think them "insane" if you did not know about Islam, and had been very careful not ever to find out it, because then you might have to warn your people, and in warning them you might feel you were not so much arming them as depressing them, lowering their morale. For they would have to come to grips with the awful truth: that the Lesser Jihad against Israel is permanent, that it is rooted in Islam, immutable Islam, and that nothing Israel does, no further surrenders of territory, will assuage the Muslim Arabs. A state of permanent war (though not always of open warfare, as long as deterrence can be made to work) will simply have to be endured.

"The enemy is in a state of confusion and doesn't know what to do" -- from this article, quoting Hamas

If the "enemy" is Israel, the statement is true. And it is just as true if the "enemy" is not Israel alone, but all the Infidel states, and their conventional, ill-informed, whistling-in-the-dark political and media elites. Those elites still have not been able to sit and study Islam, and they promote and support policies designed to deal with Muslim countries and causes (Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, or "Palestine," Kashmir, Bosnia), all without anyone thinking that just possibly all of these policies should be based on a simple idea: weakening the Camp of Islam, weakening the unity of the Umma by exploiting the pre-existing fissures, sectarian, ethnic, and economic, among Muslims, or at the very least doing nothing to heal those fissures (which is the mad American strategy in Iraq and, to a lesser extent, Afghanistan) – and thereby turning back the Jihad.

The texts and tenets of Islam are immutable. They were fixed long ago. They have been acted on, in ways unremarkably similar, by Muslims over the past 1350 years. They have been acted on in the way those Muslims conquered vast non-Muslim lands and peoples, and stopped only where they were confronted by superior military force and defeat. But they never gave up, never, on the idea of Jihad. And then these texts and tenets were acted on not only in the conquest, but in the subsequent subjugation of all the non-Muslim peoples so conquered. Those peoples were then subject in some cases to mass-murder (the Hindus of India), and in others, as with the Christians and Jews, to the permanent status of humiliation, degradation, and physical insecurity that led so many, over time, to convert to Islam -- so, though not at the immediate point of a sword, this was certainly a forcible conversion, a conversion to escape a situation that was too painful for many to continue to endure.

Ehud Olmert said this week to the people of Gaza: “Don't let Hamas, which is acting against the values of Islam, put you in danger. Stop them. Stop your enemies and ours.” Olmert did not have to say that Islam explains the endless hostility toward Israel. That would be asking too much, and at this point it would not be an intelligent thing to say. But it would be intelligent to grasp that truth, and to fashion policies based on that truth. He could, and should, in any statement have left Islam out of it. But he did something still worse. Olment mentioned Islam, and claimed, on the basis of no detailed knowledge whatsoever, to exculpate Islam.

In this respect he was not different from some others, such as Bush and Rice, or Blair, who keep thinking that they must say nice things about Islam even if they don't know what they are talking about, mainly because they know that Islam is a "religion," even "one of the world's great religions." (Why not for the word "great" substitute the more accurate word "major" and for the word "religion" substitute the ungainly but more accurate "belief-system"?)

Carl Ernst is the one who pushed on unwitting colleagues the notion that incoming freshmen to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill should be forced to read that comically bowdlerized version of the Qur'an, Michael Sells' Approaching the Qur'an: The Lyrical Suras. Carl Ernst is also the one who schemed to have Omid Safi hired at Chapel Hill after Safi was turned down at Harvard Divinity School, when Leila Ahmed, ably aided by Diana Eck and William Graham (who could not receive tenure himself in the ordinary fashion), were foiled by the other faculty, more alert than most.

Omid Safi is there in Chapel Hill now, smilingly working among the young and naive his defender-of-the-faith apologetics. And there are those who will be taken in by a little carefully ostentatious "concern" for them, as shown by invitations to share a meal of chicken-and-pita -- what a swell guy, what a genuine good guy, what a contrast to all those other professors who are so aloof and standoffish -- or by one of the other MESA-Nostra bag of tricks for winning the allegiance of students who will have no idea whether what they are being taught makes sense, or is studiously and hideously misleading, because that professor is that "swell guy" who, gosh darn it, "really cares about his students."

"You got jihad books in my explosives!"

"You got explosives in my jihad books!"

But they don't mix well. "Bangladeshi Police Seize Explosives, Books on Jihad in Raid," from the Associated Press, December 25:

DHAKA, Bangladesh — Police in northern Bangladesh arrested three suspected militants tied to a banned Islamic group and seized a large cache of bomb-making materials, an official said Thursday.

The raids came days before national elections to restore democracy, though police said it was unclear whether the explosives were part of any plot to disrupt the polls.

Officials seized at least 50 casings of grenades, explosives, batteries and books on jihad, or holy war, according to S.M. Muniruzzaman, police chief of the Gaibandha district where the arrests were made in separate raids Wednesday and Thursday.

He said the suspects are members of the Jumatul Mujahedeen Bangladesh group, which has been blamed for bombings in Bangladesh in recent years.

Muniruzzaman said all three confessed that they are linked with the banned group.

"They have given some other names, we are trying to arrest them too," he said.

Jumatul Mujahedeen Bangladesh has been blamed for more than 400 small bombs that exploded across Bangladesh on one day in 2005, killing two people and wounding dozens. Since then, the militants are believed to have killed another 24 people and wounded dozens.

The group wants to establish Islamic rule in Bangladesh, a Muslim-majority nation of 150 million people that is ruled by secular laws....

The historical presence of non-Muslims in lands currently controlled by Muslims is obvious, but often overlooked. And the fact of their presence is crucial in answering the skewed or nearsighted historical narratives that inform many a discussion on foreign policy: It can be employed to highlight the double standards that exist with respect to Islamic law and the "right" to possess a particular territory (e.g. Israel, the "right of return," etc.).

Those inconsistencies depend on the inequality of believers and unbelievers under Islamic law, as well as the historical revisionism in Islamic teachings, whereby Adam, Moses, Abraham, and Jesus are prophets of Islam, and Christianity and Judaism are corrupted versions of a pre-existing Islamic monotheism. By modern standards, those factors are no justification for any right to rule.

"On Christmas, Iraq Christians eye uncertain future," by Missy Ryan for Reuters, December 25:

BAGHDAD, Dec 25 (Reuters) - Rushing to Christmas mass, Iraqis in their Sunday best hurried into Baghdad's Sacred Heart church, pausing just long enough so a uniformed security guard could pat them down for suicide vests or dangerous weapons.

The juxtaposition of faith and fear is one that resonates across Iraq, where as violence drops people are cautiously venturing out from homes bunkered by blast walls and sand bags and taking up activities abandoned during years of bloodshed.

Christians, who with Yazidis, Shabaks and others make up Iraq's fragile minorities, marked perhaps their safest Christmas since 2003 on Thursday, but many still talk of a precarious future in a nation at risk of backsliding into civil war.

Iraqi Christians, believed to number around 750,000, have been targeted like others in Iraq's 28-million, mainly Muslim population by the horrific violence since the 2003 invasion. Their plight often gains heightened attention in the West.

Reliable figures are hard to find on how many Christians are among the millions who have fled the country, but some Christian leaders warn of a threat to the existence for their community.

A series of high-profile attacks against Christians in the northern city of Mosul this fall prompted the flight of thousands of families and fuelled a fear of being singled out.

"Christians have no political ambitions and they don't have militias to defend themselves. They are peaceful people," Thaier al-Sheikh, the pastor of the Sacred Heart church, said as he sipped tea in his rectory.

"Christians have been here longer than Muslims, 600 years longer. We are the roots of Iraq," he said. [...]

Suspicions that religious minorities had no future in Shi'ite Muslim-led Iraq were aggravated in November by parliament's decision to give minorities just six out of 440 local government seats in provincial elections next month.

Christians were set aside three seats nationally, with only one in Baghdad -- too few in the eyes of many Christians.

The government of Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki had sought a greater share of seats for minorities, but many Christians felt slighted when it approved the law with a smaller number anyway. [...]