In a curious way, one is relieved to have this story. Relieved, because it is conclusive evidence, if such were needed, that those who so much as utter a peep about "why do they hate us?" must forever shut up. "They" "hate" "us" because "us" is every Infidel, and "they" are not a "handful of extremists" but those Muslims who have actually taken their views from an unmediated reading of Qur'an and hadith. And despite the crazy efforts, of so many in the Western world, to pretend that it is otherwise -- that "if only" this and "if only" that -- usually involving throwing Israel to the wolves, or rolling over and playing dead for every Muslim demand in Europe -- from the hijab to separate shari'a courts, to constant apologies and kid-glove treatment for every Muslim infraction or atrocity or foreign-policy demand. The UN was long ago infiltrated by Islamists -- some Muslims themselves, as well as many non-Muslimfellow-travellers who for other reaons (antisemitism and hatred of America being two pre-existing mental conditions that often explain the otherwise inexplicable promotion of the Muslim agenda, and focus on Muslim demands, feigned Muslim victimization). There have been efforts moderately successful elsewhere, ranging from the ICRC (International Red Cross) to assorted "human rights" groups with their diseased sympathies, and highly selective indignation.

What is going on in Thailand helps to complete the circle. It helps to remind people that Muslim hatreds are directed outward, not only at Christians (and one forgets that bearing the brunt of that hatred are Christians of the Third World -- in Nigeria, Pakistan, the Sudan, the Philippines, Indonesia), and Jews (everywhere), and at Hinduism (whose casualties, over time, amount to 60-70 million, and tens of thousands of Hindu temples), and the Sikhs (the Jihad known in 1869 as the Patna Conspiracy, but also Buddhists as well. The Bamiyan Buddhas were destroyed by the Taliban, and it was treated as an anomalous event, one that "only" the "madmen" of the Taliban would have undertaken; there was even some feigned indignation by various Arab states, claiming to be appalled. But the Bamiyan Buddhas were all that remained of the vast Buddhist treasures of Afghanistan that, over a long period, had been deliberately destroyed by the Muslim conquerors. Buddhist temples in India suffered as much as Hindu temples; when schoolbooks tell us that "Buddhism died out in India" they leave unexplained that, in India, Buddhism -- its temples, its artifacts, its largely helpless practitioners -- was murdered by Islam.

The non-Muslims of East Asia know perfectly well what Islam is all about. Just look at the code, in Singapore, to carefully control the practice of Islam, and of da'wa (efforts at conversion). Wherever Islam is, there dhimmitude has been inflicted. In Indonesia, last year, more than 2,300 churches were destroyed, according to the Barnabas Fund. Christians themselves are being murdered daily in the Moluccas and elsewhere, as 200.000 East Timorese Christians were murdered in years past. And in Malaysia, that supposed progressive Muslim state, bustling with business, the entire edifice of Bumiputra, that system which requires, by law, all non-Muslims (Chinese, Indians) to take Muslims as full partners in any economic undertaking -- from an architectural firm to a factory -- is nothing more than the old jizyah, the poll tax on non-Muslims, in modern guise.

Why does the press, why does television, who do political leaders simply refuse to even hint at the truth? Do they think this makes things better, makes us more able to conduct ourselves in what is a permanent war? When, to give one example, 60 Minutes last night had a segment devoted to Muslim mistreatment of women among the immigrants in France, did the bland and blind though endlessly self-assured Christine Amanpour never, not once, mention the word "Islam"? When one of her interviewees explains the oppression of young girls -- mass rapes, burning to death, that sort of thing -- as being the result of "tradition" she lets that vague word stand unchallenged and unglossed. The second story, on an Arab-language broadcast station financed by American taxpayers, was scarcely better in its tiptoeing around the murderous lies in the Arab media; it quoted one American (Tomlinson) connected to the station as referring to how "400 years ago" they "were way ahead of the West" (?), in that ritualistic, incantatory invocation of the "greatness of Islamic civilization" (when exactly was that "greatness" so superior to what the West offered, again? In time? And in space? And in what did that "greatness" consist, precisely? Artistic achievement? Scientific achievement other than the transmission of discoveries from India, China, and Greek texts?) And that segment ended with a flagellation of America by none other than the transparent, soft-spoken, entirely meretiricous Rami Khouri, one of those Arab "Christians" like Hanan Ashrawi or Hilarion Cappucci, who promotes and pushes the Islamic world-view.

Why? What will it take? Must there now be bombs in Jain temples, or at a Confucian altar, sufficiently publicized to make clear to all but the hopelessly stupid (Tom Friedman et al) who are wedded to false symmetries anbd pat phrases (Tom Friedman, with his platitudes, and fake plongitudes, comes nautically to mind)? How much evidence had to be assembled before Copernicus could dare suggest that, after all, the earth really did travel around the sun? How much evidence needs to be accumulated, of what is happening now, and what has been happening for 1350 years of Islam's aggression against all non--Muslims, for people to become their own little Copernicuses, and arrive at the unstoppable and ineluctable and unavoidable explanation of what is going on?

I'm sorry. The more I look at things, the more it looks like it is time to unleash the CIA and begin Targeting these 'teachers.' If any reader here thinks that is too extreme, let's hope the bombs, the poison gases, the attacks that go off in Your country aren't too close to where You live.

And I Will add: You think my statements above are an over-reaction?

Do a little research. People were warning about Japan in 1935. Others were warning about Hitler even earlier than that. There were German agents and sympathisers (sp) in our country long before WW II got under way. How is This any different?

People were warning about both Japanese militarism and the cult of the emperor, known as Kodo, even before 1935. The best book warning precisely about Japanese intentions -- from Pearl Harbor to Singapore, to the Dutch East Indies -- was by Professor Taid O'Conroy, an Irishman who, having travelled and worked around the world, finally settled in Japan, where he married a lady of high degree and lived all through the 1920s.

His book "The Menace of Japan" was completed in 1929; it was published, by H. C. Kinsey & Company, in 1934. It sets out exactly, with all the evidence marshalled, the cult of Japanese militarism and its threat.

Many people seem to think that only Churchill saw through Hitler, too. No, there were many studies of Hitler and the Nazi threat -- hundreds and thousands of works, by German refugees and by non-German observers. But the London Times, and the New York Times, and the press in the advanced world, was determined to avoid seeing what was staring it in the face.

And the same was true, to a lesser extent, for those bewitched by Communist propaganda. There were many books, about the purge trials (Alexander Weissberg's The Accused), about Lenin (as long ago as 1919, Mark Aldanov's Lenine, written in French by a Russian emigre), about the Communist system from the inside (the works of the former Communist Victor Serge).

In all these cases, everything was known and nothing was paid attention to, or believed.

It is the same, right now, with Islam and its tenets. If there were 5 million Muslims, and not "one billion" (incidentally, that figure seems high, apparently calculated in large part by simply adding up the total population, men, women, and children, of all the predominantly Muslim countries, ignoring all the non-Muslims or those who, born into Islam, are undeclared freethinkers --though lower than the 1.2 or 1.3 billion often casually used by Muslims who keep inflating the numbers, and telling us that "Islam is the world's fastest growing religion" -- on what basis do they make this claim?), we would have no difficulty in seeing the crazy-cult aspects of it.

I'm wondering if Muslims were also responsible for the desecration of the Bhika Behram well in Mumbai, India back in March of this year. It's considered a sacred place to Parsis. And I already know about Islamic attitudes towards Zoroastrians/Parsis.

The Koran’s 150 Jihad Verses, Compiled by Yoel Natan
www.angelfire.com/moon/yoelnatan/koranwarpassages.htm

Just looking at things historically, the U.S. tends to need moral outrage to motivate enough of the public into support of a fight. We had 9/11 as that galvanizing action, but for the first time in a situation where we were attacked, the media wanted to place the blame for the attack at our own feet.

Can you imagine the American press of the time explaining away the Lusitania, saying that it was our fault that a civilian U.S. ship was targeted running through waters in a war zone?

Can you hear Walter Winchell explaining it was our Pacific foreign policy that led to Pearl Harbor?

If the media had rallied around the government, odds are the Iraqi insurgents would have realized the futility of their actions, and would have given up organized uprising some time ago. I wonder how many American soldiers and Iraqi civilians might still be alive if the media had not given hope to the enemy that the American people would cut and run at the first sign of difficulty.

I’ll be very interested to see what “we, the people” will allow the media to spin at us after the next terrorist attack on our homeland. Will we allow them to turn it into a political circus again, or will we force them to return to a level objectivity unseen since the 1950s?