British Beheading Plot Was 'Days Away'

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

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

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

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

The Islamic Mein Kampf

An important new initiative is underway. Details at FrontPage:

The Islamic Mein Kampf.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Iran role seen in attack on US troops

1938 Alert from The Australian, with thanks to Twostellas:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Iran: Khamenei proposes anti-U.S. alliance to Russia

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

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

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

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

Bush unveils security aid for "Palestinian" "ally"

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

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

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

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

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

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

British Muslim soldier 'was target of terror plot'

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

D'Souza/Spencer Round II canceled

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

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

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

Florida: Muslim doctor "volunteered as a medic for the al-Qaida military"

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

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

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

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

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

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

2 Accused of Terror Ties to Stay in U.S.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Radicalized convert to Islam: "I became persuaded intellectually by the theological case" of the jihadists

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

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

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

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

US Judge ok's case against accused jihad-funding bank

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

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

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

44 dead in attacks on Shi'ite ceremonies in Iraq

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[...]

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

Saudi Shi'ites troubled by Sunni rhetoric

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

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

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

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

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

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

American Muslim groups call for end to "harassment" of Sami Al-Arian

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sunni jihad/martyrdom attack targeting Shia procession kills 2 in Pakistan

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

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

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

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

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

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

Spencer: The D'Souza Follies

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

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

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

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

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

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

It is not surprising that D’Souza supported this deal, which would have turned over operation of six American ports to a UAE company -- for it manifested the same mistaken belief that D’Souza articulates in his new book: that the Islamic world hates the West because of something we have done, which we can undo with the proper display of good will. Throughout his book D’Souza shows no awareness whatsoever of the jihad ideology, which remains constant while the pretexts and grievances that fuel it shift. In fact, he asserts that “despite the religious enthusiasm of many suicide bombers, Islam has been around for more than a thousand years, and for most of its history it produced neither suicide attackers nor terrorists. It is only contemporary Islam that provides an inspiration for suicide missions and attacks on civilians.”

While comforting, this is false. Today’s jihadist predilection for suicide attacks is a matter of technological progress making possible what had hitherto been impossible; it does not represent a theological divergence from traditional Islam. Suicide attack recruiters today point to Qur’an 9:111, which guarantees Paradise to those who “kill and are killed” for Allah. This was not added into the Qur’an by contemporary Muslims, and has been acted upon by Muslims in the past: Andrew Bostom has found that John Paul Jones encountered suicide attacks by Muslim Turks in 1788. Jones described a naval encounter between the Turks and the Russians that took place when Jones served in the Russian Navy: “The Turks,” Jones explained, “had a very large force, and we have been informed by our prisoners that they were resolved to destroy us, even by burning themselves, (in setting fire to their own vessels after having grappled with ours.)” (Emphasis added.)

As for attacks on civilians, they are not forbidden in all cases in Islamic law. The prophet of Islam, Muhammad, himself ordered the assassinations of several poets who had made fun of him in their verses, and rewarded the killers – Muhammad’s first biographer, Ibn Ishaq, records these incidents approvingly. Here, as in all cases, Muhammad’s example became normative for Muslims. The Muslim jurist al-Mawardi in his legal manual al-Akham al-Sultaniyyah (4.2) allows for the killing of women and children who are perceived as in some way aiding the war effort against the Muslims. Other Islamic legal authorities echo this judgment (cf. ‘Umdat al-Salik o9.10).

And in Islamic history, the restriction that civilians were only liable to attack when they were perceived as aiding the war effort against Muslims was at times interpreted quite elastically. As Giles Milton documents in White Gold, the Muslim raiders who from the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries kidnapped thousands of British men, women and children and sold them into brutal slavery in North Africa believed they were warriors of Islam engaged in a jihad. Much earlier, in 1148, Muslim commander Nur ed-Din did not hesitate to order the killing of every Christian in Aleppo. In 1268, when the jihad forces of the Mamluk Sultan Baybars took Antioch from the Crusaders, Baybars was annoyed to find that the Crusader ruler, Count Bohemond VI, had already left the city. So he wrote to Bohemond to make sure he knew what his men had done in Antioch: “You would have seen your knights prostrate beneath the horses’ hooves, your houses stormed by pillagers and ransacked by looters, your wealth weighed by the quintal, your women sold four at a time and bought for a dinar of your own money!...You would have seen your Muslim enemy trampling on the place where you celebrate the Mass, cutting the throats of monks, priests and deacons upon the altars, bringing sudden death to the Patriarchs and slavery to the royal princes.”[1]

When jihadists entered Constantinople on May 29, 1453, again the rivers of blood ran, as historian Steven Runciman notes: the Muslim soldiers “slew everyone that they met in the streets, men, women, and children without discrimination. The blood ran in rivers down the steep streets from the heights of Petra toward the Golden Horn.”[2] Likewise, the Indian historian Sita Ram Goel notes that when the Muslim forces entered India, “the Sunnah [tradition] of the Prophet…required its warriors to fall upon the helpless civil population after a decisive victory had been won on the battlefield. It required them to sack and burn down villages and towns after the defenders had died fighting or had fled. The cows, the Brahmins, and the Bhikshus invited their special attention in mass murders of non-combatants….Those whom they did not kill, they captured and sold as slaves….And they did all this as mujahids (holy warriors) and ghazis (kafir [unbeliever]-killers) in the service of Allah and his Last Prophet.”[3]

Terrorism? If that word is understood to refer to attacks on civilians meant, at least in part, to demoralize an enemy population, then these incidents and many others like them were most assuredly terrorism. Moreover, they were part of an imperialistic pattern that even D’Souza acknowledges: “Inspired by Islam’s call to jihad,” he observes, “Muhammad’s armies conquered Jerusalem and the entire Middle East, then pushed south into Africa, east into Asia, and north into Europe.” Indeed, before Muhammad had been dead ten years (he died in 632), Muslim armies took Syria, Egypt, and Persia. Muslim armies conquered Damascus in 635, only three years after Muhammad’s death; substantial portions of Iraq in 636; Jerusalem in 638; Caesarea in 641; and Armenia in 643. The conquest of Egypt took place in the same period. The Muslims also won decisive victories over the Byzantines at Sufetula in Tunisia in 647, opening up North Africa; and over the Persians at Nihavand in 642. By 709 they had complete control of North Africa; by 711 they had subdued Spain and were moving into France. Sicily fell in 827. By 846 Rome was in danger of being captured by Muslim invaders; repulsed, the Muslims “sacked the cathedrals of St. Peter beside the Vatican and of St. Paul outside the walls, and desecrated the graves of the pontiffs.”[4]

Was this imperialist history motivated by the depravity of Western culture? The more one examines the historical record of jihad conquest, the more risible the question appears. An inventory of jihad wars across the world today achieves the same effect. Are Buddhist schoolteachers in Thailand the exponents of American pop culture? Are Christian schoolgirls beheaded in Indonesia on their way to school the vanguard of an invasion by Eve Ensler? Are churches torched in Nigeria because they are showing blue movies during off hours?

D’Souza takes no notice of the fact that these conquests were inspired by the same theological ideology that fuels today’s global jihad. Yet even Islamic apologist John Esposito acknowledges the reality of this theological ideology: “As Islam penetrated new areas,” Esposito writes, “people were offered three options: (1) conversion, that is, full membership in the Muslim community, with its rights and duties; (2) acceptance of Muslim rule as ‘protected’ people and payment of a poll tax; (3) battle or the sword if neither the first nor the second option was accepted.”[5] This triple choice was based on Muhammad’s words: “Fight in the name of Allah and in the way of Allah. Fight against those who disbelieve in Allah. Make a holy war…When you meet your enemies who are polytheists, invite them to three courses of action. If they respond to any one of these you also accept it and withhold yourself from doing them any harm. Invite them to (accept) Islam; if they respond to you, accept it from them and desist from fighting against them…If they refuse to accept Islam, demand from them the Jizya. If they agree to pay, accept it from them and hold off your hands. If they refuse to pay the tax, seek Allah’s help and fight them” (Sahih Muslim 4294).

Is this just a matter of “cherry-picking” negative material? D’Souza would probably say it was. He notes that “Islam is notorious for the harshness of some of its punishments, such as cutting off the arms and legs of thieves, flogging adulterers, and executing drug dealers.” However, “in this respect one may say, with only a hint of irony, that Muslims are in the Old Testament tradition.” He does not explain, however, why, if that were true, no Jews and Christians are cutting off the arms and legs of thieves or flogging adulterers today – in other words, he completely bypasses the interpretative traditions of Judaism, Christianity and Islam in order to make the crudest of moral equivalence arguments. Nor does he inform the reader that in fact the Old Testament says nothing whatsoever about cutting off arms and legs of thieves – in fact, the “eye for an eye” provision had already moved beyond the barbarism of such punishments.

However, in light of the above statements by Muhammad and many others like them that enjoin warfare against unbelievers, D’Souza’s assertion that blaming Muhammad “for the pathologies of radical Islam” is tantamount to blaming Martin Luther King “for the pathologies of inner-city black America” is absurd. For while it is doubtful that drug dealers and pimps ever quote King’s words to justify their actions, jihadists routinely invoke Muhammad’s example to justify theirs. At the beheading of American hostage Nicholas Berg in May 2004, Iraqi jihad leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi declared: “The Prophet, the most merciful, ordered [his army] to strike the necks of some prisoners in [the battle of] Badr and to kill them....And he set a good example for us.”[6] London Muslim leader Hani Al-Sibaai in February 2005 justified the slaughters being perpetrated by Al-Zarqawi’s mujahedin in Iraq: “[T]he Prophet drove nails into and gouged out the eyes of people from the ‘Urayna Tribe. They were merely a group of thieves who stole from sheep herders, and the Prophet drove nails into them and threw them into the Al-Hrara area, and left them there to die. He blinded them and cut off their opposite legs and arms. This is what the Prophet did on a trifling matter – let alone in war.”[7]

Moreover, Muhammad commanded his followers to fight “those who disbelieve in Allah,” not just to those who disbelieve in Allah and are threatening the stability of traditional Islamic culture. Likewise Qur’an 9:29 commands Muslims to fight against “the people of the book” – that is, principally Jews and Christians – “until they pay the jizya [a special tax on non-Muslims] with willing submission, and feel themselves subdued.” The verse does not stipulate that Jews and Christians should be fought if they are immoral and that immorality is threatening the Muslims: it commands war against them simply because they are Jews and Christians. This is a mainstream view in Islamic thought: the great Muslim philosopher Averroes (1126-1198) wrote: “the Muslims are agreed that the aim of warfare against the People of the Book...is twofold: either conversion to Islam, or payment of poll-tax (jizya).”[8] The tenth century Muslim writer Ibn Abi Zayd al-Qayrawani (922-996), a legal theorist of the Maliki school of jurisprudence (madhhab) wrote in a similar vein: “Jihad is a precept of Divine institution....We Malikis maintain that is preferable not to begin hostilities with the enemy before having invited the latter to embrace the religion of Allah except where the enemy attacks first. They have the alternative of either converting to Islam or paying the poll tax [jizya], short of which war will be declared against them.”[9]

This is the same ideology that motivates today’s jihadists – as Osama bin Laden wrote to the American people, “The first thing we are calling you to is Islam.” Because violent jihad is so deeply rooted in the Qur’an and Islamic theology and tradition, jihadists present themselves among Muslims as the exponents of “pure Islam” – and make recruits on that basis. This recruitment centers on the Qur’an and other key Islamic texts. Take, for example, the case of Sahim Alwan, an American citizen and leader of the Yemeni community in Lackawanna, New York and onetime president of the mosque there. He has the distinction of being the first American to attend an Al-Qaeda training camp. Why did he go? He was convinced to do so by Kamal Derwish, an Al-Qaeda recruiter. Alwan explained that Derwish taught him that the Qur’an “says you have to learn how to prepare. Like, you gotta be prepared just in case you do have to go to war. If there is war, then you would have to be called for jihad.”[10]

Jihadists are pressing forward with jihad activity around the world today, after a long period of relative quiescence, because Saudi oil billions and the Khomeini revolution in Iran have made this reassertion of the jihad ideology possible. Jihadists do use the depravity of American culture as a recruiting tool, but this is more of a pretext than a root cause. In confusing the two, of course, D’Souza is not alone. Others on both the Left and the Right today differ with him on the root cause, but not on his assumption that the jihad is a reaction to American provocation – in other words, it is not something that springs from motivations to be found within Islam. Some point to the invasion of Iraq, or the establishment of Israel in 1948, or the toppling of Iran’s Mossadegh in 1953 — or a more generalized offense such as “American neo-colonialism” or “the lust for oil.” Those who are particularly forgetful of history blame it on newly minted epiphenomena such as the Abu Ghraib prison scandals or the alleged atrocities at Guantanamo.

But the jihadists were fighting long before Abu Ghraib, Iraq, Israel, or even the independence of the United States. Indeed, they have been fighting and imitating their warrior prophet ever since the seventh century – and, incidentally, for most of that time they have played the innocent victim no matter how much violence they themselves perpetrated. During the Crusades, Islamic writers consistently portrayed the Europeans as aggressors who had carried out an unprovoked attack on the Islamic world (as most Europeans and Americans see them today). It never occurred to those writers that the attacks on Christians in the Holy Land, and 450 years of jihadist aggression that had overwhelmed over half of Christendom, might have had something to do with the arrival of the “Franks” – just as it never occurs to D’Souza or most analysts today that Islamic jihad could be anything but a defensive reaction to aggression by others.

What’s more, the immorality of the West has been a feature of Islamic anti-Western writings since long before Britney Spears took to the stage. Jihad theorist Sayyid Qutb was scandalized by the dancing at a church social in Greeley, Colorado in 1948; however, D’Souza errs in attributing his jihadist views to this trip. Before he went to America, Qutb wrote Social Justice In Islam, calling for Islamic Sharia law to rule the world. The immorality he saw in American culture did not itself turn him against America, but illustrated for him why America was unfit to rule the world, and why only Islam was fit for that role. That immorality was never for Qutb the root cause of his opposition to America. And eight centuries before Qutb’s birth, a recurring feature of Muslim polemic against the Crusaders was the sexual immorality of the “Franks.” According to an anonymous poet at the time of the First Crusade, the Europeans completely overturned the moral order: “What is right is null and void and what is forbidden is made licit.”[11]

Have Westerners always been less morally upright than Muslims? According to D’Souza’s thesis, that’s the only possibility that could explain the fact that every century since the advent of Islam has seen jihad warfare. But it should be borne in mind that from the Islamic perspective, Christians are inherently immoral simply by virtue of their – in the Muslim view – exalting Jesus to divine status. The Qur’an has Allah asking Jesus: “Didst thou say unto mankind: Take me and my mother for two gods beside Allah?” (5:116). The deification of Christ has earned Christians the curse of Allah: “The Christians call Christ the son of Allah…Allah’s curse be on them: how they are deluded away from the Truth!” (9:30). In the Muslim view, this “association of partners with Allah” – shirk -- is a more grievous immorality than the most heinous crimes. The apologetic Call to Islaam website explains: “Murder, rape, child molesting and genocide. These are all some of the appalling crimes which occur in our world today. Many would think that these are the worst possible offences which could be committed. But there is something which outweighs all of these crimes put together: It is the crime of shirk.”[12] From that perspective, no matter how upright Christians may be, they are still immoral in the Islamic view.

In any case, despite the fact that D’Souza is aware, as he puts it, that “traditional Muslims are not ‘moderates,’” and that there are no theological differences and few political differences between them and the jihadists, he recommends that conservatives ally with them. He seems to envision this alliance as a counterbalance to the Left’s alliance with the global jihad, which certainly exists. D’Souza spends a great deal of time explaining how a 2004 message from Osama bin Laden is dedicated to convincing “his allies in America to coordinate their actions more closely with his.” However, D’Souza ignores Osama’s 2002 message to the American people, which could be read as an appeal to social conservatives in exactly the same way that D’Souza reads his 2004 message as an appeal to liberals. In the 2002 letter, bin Laden says to Americans: “We call you to be a people of manners, principles, honour, and purity; to reject the immoral acts of fornication, homosexuality, intoxicants, gamblings, and trading with interest….You are a nation that permits acts of immorality, and you consider them to be pillars of personal freedom. You have continued to sink down this abyss from level to level until incest has spread amongst you, in the face of which neither your sense of honour nor your laws object.” Was bin Laden angling for an alliance with Pat Robertson, as well as Michael Moore?

In reality, the jihadists will ally with anyone foolish enough to enter into an alliance with them. The unhinged anti-Americanism of the Left has led them already to embark upon this path; now D’Souza is calling conservatives to follow their example with people he acknowledges have no theological differences with the jihadists. And what will this alliance look like? Conservative Americans will agree with D’Souza’s “traditional Muslims” against abortion and pornography. What, then, will they do when their new allies begin agitating for polygamy and the execution of apostates? Will conservatives be put into a position of opposing gay marriage while supporting polygamy? Will they be able to criticize Islam then?

Is this inconceivable? Why? D’Souza asserts that most Muslims oppose polygamy, but it nonetheless is widely practiced and enjoys the sanction of Muhammad’s example and Islamic law. Will then no “traditional Muslim” ever assert it – and even insist upon it in the face of opposition from mere infidels? On what grounds does D’Souza assume that “traditional Muslims” will happily enter into an alliance with non-Muslim Americans as equal partners? The answer, of course, is that he appears to be unaware of the mainstream character of jihad and Sharia supremacism within Islam; he doesn’t seem to know that Islamic tradition unanimously teaches that “Islam must dominate, and not be dominated.” On what grounds does he believe that “traditional Muslims” will set this principle aside indefinitely? Of course, the “traditional Muslims” upon which D’Souza places so much hope are the ordinary people of the Islamic world, who like ordinary people everywhere simply want to go about making a living and taking care of their families. He portrays them as rejecting polygamy, the execution of apostates, and other unpleasant features of Islamic law and practice. And certainly it’s true that for centuries -- notably, although not universally, in central Asia, Eastern Europe, and West Africa -- jihad supremacism and other elements of Islam for many Muslims lay dormant and even dropped out of the Muslim consciousness. But this is not a strong enough basis for an alliance, since these cultural Muslims do not have a theological foundation within Islamic theology and law -- and now jihadists are using chapter and verse of Qur’an and Sunnah to teach their vision of Islam to cultural Muslims. What will prevent D’Souza’s “traditional Muslims” from being susceptible to such recruitment?

This question becomes even more urgent in light of the fact that D’Souza believes that discussion of the elements of Islam that jihadists use to justify their actions will just drive these “traditional Muslims” to become jihadists. He insists that this is so despite the fact that he himself speaks forthrightly about negative aspects of Islamic culture, such as child marriage: “many traditional Muslims,” he says, “look with revulsion at the sight in their countries of young girls attached to men old enough to be their fathers.” Very well, but this practice is rooted in the example of Muhammad, who consummated his marriage with his favorite wife, Aisha, when he was in his early fifties and she was nine. Yet D’Souza would apparently forbid any discussion of how Muhammad’s example is deleterious here.

It is in this connection that he mentions my books Islam Unveiled and The Myth of Islamic Tolerance, along with Serge Trifkovic’s superb Sword of the Prophet. (Trifkovic has ably answered D’Souza here.) D’Souza’s point about such books, however, can again just as easily be used against him by inverting his thesis. While he claims that criticism of Islam breeds jihadists, it is just as easy to say that there is no better way to repel anti-jihad leftists and push them into the arms of the jihadists (with whom so much of the Left is already allied), than to dub them “the enemy at home.”

Even worse, when D’Souza assumes that peaceful Muslims will have a greater sense of solidarity with jihadists than with non-Muslims, he destroys his entire thesis. For if these peaceful Muslims really abhor jihadism, they should have no reason to object to critical presentations of the elements of Islam that foster jihadism. But if a few books will be enough to drive them into the arms of the jihadists, then how committed could they really have been to peace and moderation in the first place? D’Souza is assuming that they regard global jihad terrorism as less damaging to their religion than “Islamophobic tracts,” which in itself completely undermines D’Souza’s assumption that jihad terrorism is a twisting of “traditional” Islam. Shouldn’t violence perpetrated in the name of their cherished religion make them much more indignant than some books that explore the Islamic roots of jihad terrorism – even if those books were offensive (which they aren’t by any rational standard)? Throughout his book D’Souza makes moral equivalence arguments about the Judeo-Christian tradition and Islam. At one point he even asserts that the Islamic moral code of stonings and beheadings amounts to Old Testament morality (but doesn’t bother to explain why no Jews and Christians practice stoning or beheading). Yet the equivalence breaks down on the level of behavior: Christians have never embraced violence in reaction to innumerable insults to their faith in recent years. Why should we ask or expect less of Muslims?

And by the way, it is odd that D’Souza, for all his disgust for the Left, would pick up on the Leftist coinage “Islamophobia,” a trumped-up, politically manipulative term intended to stifle debate. I would have thought D’Souza would be ashamed of using it until I read his recommendation that “the right” stop producing books like mine. He has denied that this was a call to silence me and others like me, and I’m sure it wasn’t: if Trifkovic and I begin to retail the prevailing PC fictions about Islam as a religion of peace and join mainstream analysts in declining to hold Muslims accountable for their actions (since they’re just reacting to the depredations of bad old America), I am sure D’Souza will be happy if we flourish.

In a sermon broadcast on official Palestinian Authority television in 2000, Dr. Ahmad Abu Halabiya, a member of the Palestinian Authority’s Fatwa Council, anticipated D’Souza’s call to alliance and declared: “Allah the almighty has called upon us not to ally with the Jews or the Christians, not to like them, not to become their partners, not to support them, and not to sign agreements with them. And he who does that is one of them, as Allah said: ‘O you who believe, do not take the Jews and the Christians as allies, for they are allies of one another. Who from among you takes them as allies will indeed be one of them.’ . . . Have no mercy on the Jews, no matter where they are, in any country. Fight them, wherever you are. Wherever you meet them, kill them.”[13]

In this Abu Halabiya was quoting Qur’an 5:51 (“O ye who believe! Take not the Jews and the Christians for your friends and protectors: they are but friends and protectors to each other. And he amongst you that turns to them (for friendship) is of them”) and 9:5 (“slay the idolaters wherever ye find them”). His application of these words to the contemporary political situation would thus resonate even with “traditional Muslims,” whose Qur’an is the same as that of the jihadists. And Abu Halabiya intended it to resonate in that way.

If the exportation of American depravity were to end tomorrow, it would not efface these and other words from the Qur’an, or keep preachers from using them to prevent any peaceful accord between Muslims and non-Muslims. That D’Souza suggests that it would manifests an appalling ignorance of Islamic theology, history, and present reality. He writes that “no real understanding of Islamic culture is possible that refuses to take Islam seriously,” yet he ends up doing just that. In the fourteenth century, the Byzantine Emperor John VI Cantacuzenes entered into an alliance with the Ottoman Turks, whom he invited into Europe to help him win a dynastic dispute. In the fifteenth century, the Ottomans seized Constantinople and destroyed the Byzantine Empire, and were greatly aided in doing so by having a base in Europe.

Dinesh D’Souza, no less short-sighted and naïve as John VI Cantacuzenes, is exhorting conservatives today to rush into an alliance that would ultimately bring upon themselves the same disaster.

NOTES:

[1] Thomas Madden, The New Concise History of the Crusades, Rowman & Littlefield, 2005, pp. 181-182.

[2] Steven Runciman, The Fall of Constantinople 1453, Cambridge University Press, 1965, p. 145.

[3] Sita Ram Goel, The Story of Islamic Imperialism in India, Voice of India, revised edition 1994, p. 44.

[4] Hitti, p. 205.

[5] John Esposito, Islam: The Straight Path, Oxford University Press, third edition, 1998. P. 35.

[6] Steven Stalinsky, “Dealing in Death,” National Review Online, May 24, 2004.

[7] “London Islamist Dr. Hani Al-Sibaai Justifies Slaughters in Iraq: The Prophet Muhammad Used to Slaughter As Well,” Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI) Clip No. 576, February 22, 2005.

[8] Averroes, Al-Bidaya, excerpted in Rudolph Peters, Jihad in Classical and Modern Islam, Markus Wiener Publishers, 1996. P. 40.

[9] Ibn Abi Zayd al-Qayrawani, in Bat Ye’or, The Decline of Eastern Christianity Under Islam: From Jihad to Dhimmitude, Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1996, p. 295.

[10] “Interview Sahim Alwan,” Frontline, October 16, 2003. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/sleeper/interviews/alwan.html.

[11] Carole Hillenbrand, The Crusades: Islamic Perspectives, Routledge, 2000, p. 247.

[12] “Shirk: the ultimate crime,” Invitation to Islam Newsletter, Issue 2, July 1997. http://www.al-sunnah.com/call_to_islam/articles/shirk_the_ultimate_crime.html

[13] Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI), “PA TV Broadcasts call for Killing Jews and Americans,” MEMRI Special Dispatch No. 138, October 13, 2000. www.memri.org.

Virginia: Man once acquitted of aiding the Taliban on trial

Virginia Paintball Jihad Update: "Man once acquitted of aiding the Taliban on trial," from AP, with thanks to Jeffrey Imm:

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

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

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

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

Cartoon protester was 'cheerleader'

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

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

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

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

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

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

D'Souza and Spencer to debate again at CPAC

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

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

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

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

Suicide bomber's family: "We're very proud of him"

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

By Khaled Abu Toameh for the Jerusalem Post, with thanks to Jeffrey Imm:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Austere version of Islam finding a home in India

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

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

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

It contrasted starkly with the pastel saris she normally wore.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The men howled in protest.

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

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

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

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

Identity politics

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

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

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

Many worry that the status quo has begun to unravel.

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

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

A request from the BBC

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

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

"Allah on 480 occasions in the Holy Koran extols Muslims to wage jihad. We only fulfil God's orders"

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

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

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

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

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

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

[...]

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

[...]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Suicide bombers

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

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

[...]

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

Audio of the D'Souza/Spencer debate

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

Hamas: 'Attack is legitimate resistance'

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

More young Muslims back sharia, says poll

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

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

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

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

Global jihad encounters technical difficulties

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

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

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

D'Souza vs. Spencer tonight

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

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

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

Congress Pressured to Ban Racial Profiling

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mortars hit Iraqi girls' school; 5 dead

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

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

[...]

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

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

Former Israeli spy chief: nuclear strike by jihadists "very likely"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bomber kills 11, wounds 35 near mosque in Peshawar

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

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

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

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

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

Bush warns failure in Iraq could widen conflict

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

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

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

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

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

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

Unfortunately, there are nightmare scenarios all around.

Fitzgerald: Lewis would be appalled

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

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

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

D'Souza tells us that he "read Bernard Lewis." That's it? That's all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know, about Islam? Apparently he felt no need to read widely. But there are so many others, many dozens of others, he ought to have read, re-read, assimilated, made his own. There is Joseph Schacht. There is David Margoliouth. There is Snouck Hurgronje. There is Ignaz Goldziher. There is Theodor Noldeke. There is Samuel Zwemer. There is St. Clair Tisdall. There is Armand Abel. There is K. S. Lal. There is Georges Vajda (whom Lewis consulted, but apparently not enough, for his book on Jews in Islam). There is S. D. Goitein. There is Bat Ye'or, the great pioneer in scholarship devoted expressly to the fate of non-Muslims under Muslim rule -- the dhimmi -- a subject Lewis hardly touches, for in the 400 pages of his book for a mass audience ("The Middle East -- a History of the Last 2000 Years") he mentions the dhimmi in three paragraphs, two of them slyly exculpatory. Many have rightly been outraged that Le Pen called the murder of the Jews "a mere detail of World War II." For Lewis, it would seem from that book that the fate of hundreds of millions of non-Muslims, who over the past 1350 years had to endure Muslim rule, is merely a "detail" in the history of Islam and Islamic conquest. Oh no it isn't.

The Romans worried about The Man of One Book: homo unius libri. D'Souza appears, by his own admission, to be someone who has written a book about a subject he admittedly knew nothing about at the time of 9/11/2001, but has been "studying it for four years" largely by consulting, it seems, not One Book but close to that: One
Selected Authority.

But even that One Selected Authority, Lewis, would be horrified by how D'Souza understood him and what D'Souza took away from his reading of Lewis. For Bernard Lewis does not share a bit of D'Souza's interest in minimizing the menace of Islam and promoting this truly insane idea of a natural commonality of interest between "traditional Muslims" and "conservatives." Does D'Souza know what "traditional Muslims" think of Infidels? Does he know what they think of the Amish? Does he know what they think of him, Dinesh D'Souza? "Conservatives" in D’Souza’s view are, of course, those who are willing to overlook the Muslim view of the world in which there is a state of permanent war, not necessarily fighting but permanent war, between Believer and Infidel, all in order to get "traditional Muslims" to be for the same "family values." And how can D. D'S. conceivably think that Muslim "family values" -- beginning with the treatment and status of women in "traditional Islam," or the hostility toward freedom of conscience and freedom of speech -- could possibly allow for such a naive and dangerous alliance? It would be naive and dangerous, of course, for Infidels, and perfectly swell for Muslims, who are always seeking out those upon whose naivete and ignorance of Islam and goodwill they can take advantage of. Just go to one of those phony "Muslim-Christian" or "Muslim-Jewish" Groups for "Understanding," especially if it is Open House Night for Infidels at the mosque. There you will be treated to a smooth-tongued liquid-brown-eyed orator, well-practiced in taqiyya-and-tu-quoque, who will however become quickly alarmed, even confused, even discombobulated, if you begin to talk during the question period about the Hadith and the Sira, and if you are to mention the Banu Qurayza, the Khaybar Oasis attack, the murders of Asma bint Marwan and Abu Afak, or a few dozen other atrocities. And let's not forget little Aisha. Well, a good time will not be had by all, and you will, singlehandedly, have destroyed the evening's propagandistic (as in propaganda fide) purpose.

Unlike Dinesh D'Souza, Bernard Lewis himself has for the past year or two been going around warning about the islamization of Europe and the horror that would be. Apparently Lewis's study of Islam did not lead him, Lewis, to the conclusions reached by his great admirer and self-directed student, Dinesh D'Souza. For Lewis does not see any great alliance, any alliance at all, between Muslims and non-Muslims. But then, perhaps he's been studying Islam a bit longer than Dinesh D'Souza, and knows the real meaning, sometimes expressed in language sibylline or even Aesopic, of his words. Lewis has for too long tried to write for two distinct audiences: Muslims, including those Turks who so admire him (and he tends to admire those who admire him back) and Infidels. In pulling his punches, or perhaps not quite seeing or allowing himself to see the full danger of Islam and of Muslims other than those suave, plausible, highly unrepresentative figures he meets, he knows, he receives hospitality from, in Amman or Istanbul, Lewis has ill-served his mostly non-Muslim readership. For it is they who are being menaced, and they who need to be enlightened.

It would be wonderful if, at this stage, Lewis were to write something akin to Goitein's expression, in the introduction to his article on the Poll Tax, or Jizyah, inflicted on non-Muslims (see pp. 29-30 of "The Legacy of Jihad") of his change of opinion about the treatment of non-Muslims, once he came to realize, through his study of the material found in the Cairo Geniza, of how burdensome and grueling it really was. At the end of his life Goitein was preparing an enthusiastic review of Bat Ye'or's The Dhimmi. Lewis owes his readers and his acolyte-graduate students, and those to whom he so enthusiastically endorsed the Oslo Accords and then the fiasco of Iraq, the same kind of self-reckoning. He's always being fooled, Lewis, for all of his book-learning. He's always, when it comes to policy, underestimating the impossibility of expecting anything good -- rational negotiations, treaties signed that will be honored, or for that matter the ability of different sectarian and ethnic groups to get along in societies suffused with Islam.

But Lewis would never endorse D'Souza. If he finds out about this book, written by someone who, explaining the extent of his preparation for this jejune book, proudly notes that he "read Bernard Lewis," it would certainly appall him. And Lewis would be right to be disturbed. It would force him to recognize that not only has he helped to undo the damage of the espositos and armstrongs and MESA Nostra, in setting people straight on many things, but that he has also helped, especially in his treatment of non-Muslims under Muslim rule, where the strategies of elision and allusion and sheer misstatement (the notion that the "antisemitism" of Muslims is merely a Europpean import) have set many people astray. And some think that he has led more astray, in minimizing unpleasant and permanent features of Muslim teachings and attitudes and behavior, than he has managed to set straight.

Australian Muslim speaker: revolution or civil war may be necessary in order to create an Islamic state

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Reconstruct mosques or else: Islamabad mullahs threaten suicide attacks

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

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

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

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

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

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

Let the debate begin

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

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

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

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

Israeli army destroys two Hizballah bunkers found inside Israel

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

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

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

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

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

"If they pay we kill them anyway"

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

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

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

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

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

[...]

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

Posted at 8:01 AM | Comments (29)

Dinesh D'Dhimmi

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

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

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

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

Two of the titles D'Souza finds so offensive that condemning them tops his list of "critical steps" are by my friend Robert Spencer, and "The Sword" is mine. D'Souza wants us, and presumably other similarly minded authors (Bat Ye'or, Ibn Warraq, Andrew Bostom, Walid Shoebat et al), to shut up.

As my fellow offender Spencer has noted has noted, D'Souza assumes that peaceful Muslims will have a greater sense of solidarity with jihadists than with non-Muslims, which is indeed the case, but it makes hash of his entire thesis—that social conservatives should ally themselves with these "traditional" Muslims:

"For if these peaceful Muslims really abhor jihadism, they should have no reason to object to critical presentations of the elements of Islam that foster jihadism. But if such presentations will just drive them into the arms of the jihadists, then how committed could they really have been to peace and moderation in the first place? If they think "Islamophobic tracts" are more threatening to their religion than acts of terrorism done in the name of Islam, how ‘traditional' and moderate could they possibly be?"

It is noteworthy that D'Souza is condemning our writings as "Islamophobic" without further elaboration. Like the term "Islamophobia" itself—a classic product of the Hate Crime Industry—his technique is characteristic of the totalitarian Left. I remember reading, as a teenager in Tito's Yugoslavia, similarly worded condemnations of dissident writers and their "tracts" in the communist-controlled press. Once they were defined as "anti- socialist," "reactionary," or "nationalist," no further elaboration was needed and no debate allowed.

Furthermore, D'Souza uses "Islamophobia" with the implicit assumption that the term's meaning is well familiar to his readers. For the uninitiated it is nevertheless necessary to spell out its formal, legally tested definition, however. It is provided by the European Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia (EUMC), a lavishly-funded organ of the European Union. Based in Vienna, this body diligently tracks the instances of "Islamophobia" all over the Old Continent and summarizes them in its reports. The Monitoring Center's definition of Islamophobia includes eight salient features:

1. Islam is seen as a monolithic bloc, static and unresponsive to change. 2. Islam is seen as separate and "other." 3. Islam is seen as inferior to the West, barbaric, irrational, primitive and sexist. 4. Islam is seen as violent, aggressive, supportive of terrorism and engaged in a clash of civilizations. 5. Islam is seen as a political ideology. 6. Criticisms made of the West by Islam are rejected out of hand. 7. Hostility towards Islam is used to justify discriminatory practices towards Muslims and exclusion of Muslims from mainstream society. 8. Anti-Muslim hostility is seen as natural or normal.

This definition is obviously intended to preclude any possibility of meaningful discussion of Islam. The implication that Islamophobia thus defined demands legal sanction is a regular feature of the Race Relations Industry output. It also routinely refers to "institutional Islamophobia" as an inherent social and cultural sickness of most Western societies that needs to be rooted out by education, re- education, and legislation. In reality, of course, all eight proscribed statements are to some extent true. As I have argued in these pages and elsewhere,

1. That Islam is fundamentally static and unresponsive to change is evident from the absence of an orthodox school of thought capable of reflecting critically upon jihad, Sharia, jizya, etc. and developing new Islamic interpretations that Western liberals (and notably the 9-11 Commission's Final Report) keep hoping for. Attempts to reformulate the doctrine are not new, but they have failed because they opposed centuries of orthodoxy. As Clement Huart pointed out back in 1907, "Until the newer conceptions, as to what the Koran teaches as to the duty of the believer towards non-believers, have spread further and have more generally leavened the mass of Moslem belief and opinion, it is the older and orthodox standpoint on this question which must be regarded by non-Moslems as representing Mohammedan teaching and as guiding Mohammedan action." Huart's near- contemporary Sir William Muir, noted that «a reformed faith that should question the divine authority on which the institutions of Islam rest, or attempt by rationalistic selection or abatement to effect a change, would be Islam no longer.» A century later the diagnosis still stands: it is not the jihadists who are "distorting" Islam; the would-be reformers are.

2. That Islam is separate from our (Western, Christian, European) culture and civilization, and other than our culture and civilization, is a fact that will not change even if the West (Christendom, Europe) eventually succumb to the ongoing jihadist demographic onslaught.

3. Whether Islam is "inferior to the West" is a matter of opinion. That it cannot create a prosperous, harmonious, stable, creative and attractive polity is not. Whether Islam is "barbaric, irrational, primitive and sexist" is at least debatable; but that its fruits are such is beyond reasonable doubt.

4. Islam is seen as "violent, aggressive, supportive of terrorism and engaged in a clash of civilizations" not because of an irrational "phobia" in the feverish mind of the beholder, but because of the clear mandate of its scripture, because of the record of almost 14 centuries of historical practice, and above all because of the timeless example of its founder.

5. "Islam is seen as a political ideology" because its defining characteristic is a highly developed program to improve man and create a new society; to impose complete control over that society; and to train cadres ready, even eager, to spill blood. The doctrine of Jihad makes Islam closer to Bolshevism or National Socialism than to any religion known to man. It breeds a gnostic paradigm within which the standard response to the challenge presented by non-Muslim cultural, technological and economic achievements is hostility and hatred. D'Souza's alleged distinction between Islamic "extremists" and "moderates" is a Western liberal construct, of course. The difference between them may concern the methods to be applied but not the final objective: to turn every last square mile of Dar al-Harb into Dar al-Islam.

6. Criticisms made of the West by Islam should not be rejected out of hand, they should be understood. Islam's chief "criticism" of the West—and each and every other non-Islamic culture, civilization, or tradition—is that it is infidel, and therefore undeserving of existence.

7. A priori hostility towards Islam should not be "used to justify discriminatory practices towards Muslims." Quite the contrary, a comprehensive education campaign about the teaching and practice of Islam should result in legislative action that would exclude Islam from the societies it is targeting, not because it is an offensive religion but because it is an inherently seditious totalitarian ideology incompatible with the fundamental values of the West—and all other civilized societies, India, China and Japan included.

8. "Anti-Muslim hostility" is not "natural or normal." The infidels' determination to defend their lands, families, cultures and faith against Islamic aggression is both natural and normal, however, and must not be neutralized by the Eurocrats from the left of by D'Souza and his likes on the "right." They will deny that Islam, in Muhammad's revelations, traditions and their codification, threatens the rest of us, that it is the cult of war and intolerance, but the truth will out. Until the petrodollars support a comprehensive and explicit Kuranic revisionism capable of growing popular roots, we should seek ways to defend ourselves by disengaging from the world of Islam, physically and figuratively, by learning to keep our distance from the affairs of the Muslim world and by keeping the Muslim world away from "the world of war" that it seeks to conquer or destroy.

It is entirely possible that Dinesh D'Souza subscribes to some other definition of "Islamophobia" than the one provided above. If he does, he should spell it out so that those he singles out for criticism can defend themselves. Until and unless he does so, we'll have to agree with a recent commentator who concludes that D'Souza wants me and others "to lie about Islam, like himself, or to be silent":

"Now think how amazing this is. Has it ever happened in this country—I'm not talking about some totalitarian country but America—has it ever happened that a prominent "intellectual" called on leading writers on a subject of major importance to stop writing what they're writing, because it would "offend" someone? No, this has never happened before. It has never happened before, because it's only in response to Mohammedanism that Westerners adopt the posture of pre-emptive surrender, which Bat Ye'or calls mental dhimmitude. Of all the social, ethnic, religious, political movements in the world, only Islam has the ability to evoke this eagerly cringing attitude, only Islam has this faculty of inducing people to surrender psychologically to it even before it has any actual power over them."

Dixit. A man is defined, to some extent, by his enemies. Counting D'Souza and his ilk among mine casts an eminently pleasing glow on this drab January morning.

Canadian intel agency grasps for clues into "jihadization" of youth

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Abu Bakar Bashir Threatens Jihad Against Indonesian Police

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

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

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

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

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

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

Islamic groups and politicians have criticized police following the raid.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Atomic Iran

Nutters with nukes unveil tomorrow's news today:

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

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

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

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

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

Petraeus lists mistakes in Iraq

Spreading democracy isn't working out. From UPI

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

Suicide blast at Marriott hotel in Pakistani capital

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

"Suicide blast at Marriott hotel in Pakistani capital," by Rana Jawad for AFP (thanks again to Jeffrey Imm):

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

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

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

Fitzgerald: Islamophobia? Not so fast

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

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

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

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

Likewise impossible to ignore are the problems of Muslims in Australia and England, in France and Germany, in Spain and Italy, in Belgium and the Netherlands, in Sweden and Denmark and Norway, or even, in far fewer numbers, in the United States and Canada. Everywhere they manifest the same kinds of hostility, the same kinds of wearing-away demands, the same false or real outrage, the same refusal to truly collaborate with the security services. They engage in constant attempts to undermine the most commonsensical of measures. They conduct sustained and cynical campaigns of Da'wa, often based on hiding the reality of Islam and offering the most superficial aspects of it (the rituals) to a vulnerable targeted audience of the economically and psychically marginal. And they do so many other things -- including the astonishing campaigns to shut down free speech everywhere, not only in Denmark (at Jyllands-Posten, which resulted in death threats directed at Danes from all over the Dar al-Islam) but also in The Netherlands (the murders of Pym Fortuyn and Theo van Gogh). Death threats have driven some out their jobs (Robert Redeker in France) and forced others to cease the expression of their views (Will Cummins in Great Britain). This is Islam On the March, completely determined to keep and hold and expand what it sees as its beachhead, and more than a beachhead, all over the Dar al-Harb.

The inability or willful refusal by many in the West to understand this is a product of many things. Among those things is sentimentalism about How All People Are the Same the Whole World Over and Everyone Wants the Same Thing, with its obvious variant, All Religions Are Equally Dangerous. Just look at a few of those blood-curdling lines about the Canaanites or some such in old Hebrew texts -- why, that makes Judaism just as dangerous, maybe more so, than Islam with whatever it is said to inculcate. Doesn't it?

What this transparent attempt at symmetry offers is not one falsehood but many. "Islamophobia" is a word used by apologists for Islam to avoid answering specific, detailed, and knowledgeable questions about Islam. These questions that cannot be answered, in truth, because if the truth were offered as an answer it would force Muslims themselves to indict Islam, to admit that what is in the texts is in the texts, and is taken seriously by a billion people -- and that those who do not take the texts seriously are not "moderate" Muslims but essentially bad Muslims, unobservant Muslims, Muslims who do not really believe. And there are far fewer of these than most non-Muslims assume. They are always open to the possibility of relapse, and certainly their progeny are, so that Infidels cannot base their own security and that of their institutions on the "hope" that those "moderate" -- i.e., bad -- Muslims will never change their minds, and that their children will continue in the same vein.

That is a wager that Infidels should not be asked to make: to bet their physical safety and that of their children and grandchildren, and that of their societies on those moderates. For those Infidel societies are already in various states of confusion and disarray, and are facing all kinds of problems. Such a bet could allow them to be done in by this Total Belief-System that originated 1350 years ago as an ideology, compounded of bits and pieces, distorted or misremembered, of both Judaism and Christianity, and with an admixture of pre-Islamic Arab paganism.

No. That should not be expected of us, the Infidels. We are not ready to concede or commit suicide.

Boxer, CAIR say dispute resolved, but Boxer won't return rescinded award

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

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

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

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

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

CAIR officials met with Boxer and her staff Tuesday.

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

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

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

Iran Revolutionary Guards Quds Force director detained in Iraq

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

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

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

[...]

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

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

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

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

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

[...]

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

[...]

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

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

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

U.S. had "catch and release" policy on suspected Iranian agents until recently

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yes.

[...]

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

But senior officials saw it as too timid.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Francis Fukuyama: "Whether there is anything specific to the Muslim religion that encourages this radicalisation is an open question"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"More people were victimized as a result of Islamophobia than the other way around"

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

Abukar Arman writes in the Baltimore Chronicle:

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

Indian, Pakistani troops exchange fire in Kashmir

Escalation. From Reuters:

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

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

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

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

Toothless UN rebuffed by Iran

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

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

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

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

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

Why did you kill your grandmother?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Lie: Israel is an apartheid state.

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

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

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

Fitzgerald: Final Exam (Take-Home): History 101: The War In Iraq

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

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

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

_____________________________________________________________

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here are the two passages for comment:

I. When Blitzer asked whether the administration's credibility had been hurt by "the blunders and the failures" in Iraq, Cheney interjected: "Wolf, Wolf, I simply don't accept the premise of your question. I just think it's hogwash."

In fact, Cheney said, the operation in Iraq has achieved its original mission. "What we did in Iraq in taking down Saddam Hussein was exactly the right thing to do," he said. "The world is much safer today because of it. There have been three national elections in Iraq. There's a democracy established there, a constitution, a new democratically elected government. Saddam has been brought to justice and executed. His sons are dead. His government is gone."

"If he were still there today," Cheney added, "we'd have a terrible situation."

"But there is," Blitzer said.

"No, there is not," Cheney retorted. "There is not. There's problems -- ongoing problems -- but we have in fact accomplished our objectives of getting rid of the old regime, and there is a new regime in place that's been here for less than a year, far too soon for you guys to write them off." He added: "Bottom line is that we've had enormous successes and we will continue to have enormous successes."

Cheney said Blitzer was advocating retreat. "What you're recommending, or at least what you seem to believe the right course is, is to bail out," the vice president said.

______________________________________________________

II. BAGHDAD, Jan. 24 — In the battle for Baghdad, Haifa Street has changed hands so often that it has taken on the feel of a no man’s land, the deadly space between opposing trenches. On Wednesday, as American and Iraqi troops poured in, the street showed why it is such a sensitive gauge of an urban conflict marked by front lines that melt into confusion, enemies with no clear identity and allies who disappear or do not show up at all. Skip to next paragraph Readers’ Opinions Forum: The Transition in Iraq

In a miniature version of the troop increase that the United States hopes will secure the city, American soldiers and armored vehicles raced onto Haifa Street before dawn to dislodge Sunni insurgents and Shiite militias who have been battling for a stretch of ragged slums and mostly abandoned high rises. But as the sun rose, many of the Iraqi Army units who were supposed to do the actual searches of the buildings did not arrive on time, forcing the Americans to start the job on their own.

When the Iraqi units finally did show up, it was with the air of a class outing, cheering and laughing as the Americans blew locks off doors with shotguns. As the morning wore on and the troops came under fire from all directions, another apparent flaw in this strategy became clear as empty apartments became lairs for gunmen who flitted from window to window and killed at least one American soldier, with a shot to the head.

Whether the gunfire was coming from Sunni or Shiite insurgents or militia fighters or some of the Iraqi soldiers who had disappeared into the Gotham-like cityscape, no one could say.

“Who the hell is shooting at us?” shouted Sgt. First Class Marc Biletski, whose platoon was jammed into a small room off an alley that was being swept by a sniper’s bullets. “Who’s shooting at us? Do we know who they are?”

Just before the platoon tossed smoke bombs and sprinted through the alley to a more secure position, Sergeant Biletski had a moment to reflect on this spot, which the United States has now fought to regain from a mysterious enemy at least three times in the past two years.

“This place is a failure,” Sergeant Biletski said. “Every time we come here, we have to come back.”

He paused, then said, “Well, maybe not a total failure,” since American troops have smashed opposition on Haifa Street each time they have come in.

With that, Sergeant Biletski ran through the billowing yellow smoke and took up a new position.

The Haifa Street operation, involving Bradley Fighting Vehicles as well as the highly mobile Stryker vehicles, is likely to cause plenty of reflection by the commanders in charge of the Baghdad buildup of more than 20,000 troops. Just how those extra troops will be used is not yet known, but it is likely to mirror at least broadly the Haifa Street strategy of working with Iraqi forces to take on unruly groups from both sides of the Sunni-Shiite sectarian divide.

The commander of the operation, Lt. Col. Avanulas Smiley of the Third Stryker Brigade Combat Team, Second Infantry Division, said his forces were not interested in whether opposition came from bullets fired by Sunnis or by Shiites. He conceded that the cost of letting the Iraqi forces learn on the job was to add to the risk involved in the operation.

“This was an Iraqi-led effort and with that come challenges and risks,” Colonel Smiley said. “It can be organized chaos.”

The American units in the operation began moving up Haifa Street from the south by 2 a.m. on Wednesday. A platoon of B Company in the Stryker Brigade secured the roof of a high rise, where an Eminem poster was stuck on the wall of what appeared to be an Iraqi teenager’s room on the top floor. But in a pattern that would be repeated again and again in a series of buildings, there was no one in the apartment.

Many of the Iraqi units that showed up late never seemed to take the task seriously, searching haphazardly, breaking dishes and rifling through personal CD collections in the apartments. Eventually the Americans realized that the Iraqis were searching no more than half of the apartments; at one point the Iraqis completely disappeared, leaving the American unit working with them flabbergasted.

“Where did they go?” yelled Sgt. Jeri A. Gillett. Another soldier suggested, “I say we just let them go and we do this ourselves.”

Then the gunfire began. It would come from high rises across the street, from behind trash piles and sandbags in alleys and from so many other directions that the soldiers began to worry that the Iraqi soldiers were firing at them. Mortars started dropping from across the Tigris River, to the east, in the direction of a Shiite slum.

The only thing that was clear was that no one knew who the enemy was. “The thing is, we wear uniforms — they don’t,” said Specialist Terry Wilson.

At one point the Americans were forced to jog alongside the Strykers on Haifa Street, sheltering themselves as best they could from the gunfire. The Americans finally found the Iraqis and ended up accompanying them into an extremely dangerous and exposed warren of low-slung hovels behind the high rises as gunfire rained down.

American officers tried to persuade the Iraqi soldiers to leave the slum area for better cover, but the Iraqis refused to risk crossing a lane that was being raked by machine-gun fire. “It’s their show,” said Lt. David Stroud, adding that the Americans have orders to defer to the Iraqis in cases like this.

In this surreal setting, about 20 American soldiers were forced at one point to pull themselves one by one up a canted tin roof by a dangling rubber hose and then shimmy along a ledge to another hut. The soldiers were stunned when a small child suddenly walked out of a darkened doorway and an old man started wheezing and crying somewhere inside.

Ultimately the group made it back to the high rises and escaped the sniper in the alley by throwing out the smoke bombs and sprinting to safety. Even though two Iraqis were struck by gunfire, many of the rest could not stop shouting and guffawing with amusement as they ran through the smoke.

One Iraqi soldier in the alley pointed his rifle at an American reporter and pulled the trigger. There was only a click: the weapon had no ammunition. The soldier laughed at his joke.

Jihad and Sharia preaching in British mosques, and its implications

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

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

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

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

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

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

* “Allah has created the woman – even if she gets a Ph.D. – deficient. Her intellect is incomplete, deficient. She may be suffering from hormones that will make her emotional. It takes two witnesses of a woman to equal the one witness of the man.” * “By the age of ten, it becomes an obligation on us to force her to wear hijab, and if she doesn’t wear hijab, we hit her.” * “Men are in charge of women. Wherever he goes she should follow him, and she shouldn’t be allowed leave the house without his permission.”

How inflammatory! How extremist! And how inveterately Qur’anic!

The Muslim holy book declares that a woman’s testimony is worth half that of a man: “Get two witnesses, out of your own men, and if there are not two men, then a man and two women, such as ye choose, for witnesses, so that if one of them errs, the other can remind her” (Qur’an 2:282). It also says that men are in charge of women, and that disobedient women should be beaten: “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” (4:34).

The same is true of other statements made in the mosque, including these about Britain and the Islamic state:

* “You have to live like a state within a state until you take over.”
* “We want the laws of Islam to be practiced, we want to do away with the man-made laws.”
* “Muslims shouldn’t be satisfied with living in other than the total Islamic state.”
* “I encourage all of you to be from amongst them, to begin to cultivate ourselves for the time that is fast approaching where the tables are going to turn and the Muslims are going to be in the position of being uppermost in strength, and when that happens, people won’t get killed – unjustly.”
* “Allah has decreed this thing, that I am going to be dominant. The dominance of course is a political dominance.”

Such statements have been vividly expressed in the writings of twentieth century jihad theorists such as the Egyptian Sayyid Qutb and the Pakistani Syed Abul Ala Maududi. Said Qutb:

It is not the function of Islam to compromise with the concepts of Jahiliyya [the society of unbelievers] which are current in the world or to co-exist in the same land together with a jahili system….Islam cannot accept any mixing with Jahiliyyah. Either Islam will remain, or Jahiliyyah; no half-half situation is possible. Command belongs to Allah, or otherwise to Jahiliyyah; Allah’s Shari’a [law] will prevail, or else people’s desires…The foremost duty of Islam is to depose Jahiliyyah from the leadership of man….

Maududi likewise wrote that non-Muslims have “absolutely no right to seize the reins of power in any part of God’s earth, nor to direct the collective affairs of human beings according to their own misconceived doctrines.” If they do, “the believers would be under an obligation to do their utmost to dislodge them from political power and to make them live in subservience to the Islamic way of life.”

But Qutb and Maududi did not originate these ideas. They are an extrapolation of Qur’anic passages such as 9:29, which assumes that Muslims will wield state power over Jews and Christians, exacting from them a poll tax (jizya) and making sure that they pay it “with willing submission, and feel themselves subdued.” There is no concept in the Qur’an, Islamic tradition, or Islamic law of non-Muslims living as equals with Muslims in an Islamic state: Muslims must be in a superior position. The Muslim prophet Muhammad emphasized this when he told his followers:

Fight in the name of Allah and in the way of Allah. Fight against those who disbelieve in Allah. Make a holy war…When you meet your enemies who are polytheists, invite them to three courses of action. If they respond to any one of these you also accept it and withhold yourself from doing them any harm. Invite them to (accept) Islam; if they respond to you, accept it from them and desist from fighting against them…If they refuse to accept Islam, demand from them the Jizya. If they agree to pay, accept it from them and hold off your hands. If they refuse to pay the tax, seek Allah’s help and fight them. (Sahih Muslim 4294)

Of course, there are many ways to understand all these passages and others like them. But the fact that the views expressed by the Muslims in the Channel Four documentary can be found in the Islamic scriptures without much effort suggests that the problem is far larger than a few mosques that were thought to be “moderate” but turn out to be “extremist.” It is a problem that is deeply rooted within traditional Islam, and must be treated as such. Muslims in Britain who sincerely reject the idea that Islam must be dominant and that Islamic law must be instituted in Britain, and that women and non-Muslims must be subjugated, and who accept the idea that non-Muslims and Muslims should live together as equals on an indefinite basis, should not condemn the “Dispatches” documentary. Instead, they should welcome it as a opportunity not only to expel “extremists” from their ranks, and to formulate a comprehensive rejection and refutation of their literalist understanding of the Qur’an and Sunnah.

But so far they are not doing that. Instead, the Muslim Council of Britain, the Muslim Public Affairs Committee of the United Kingdom, the Federation of Student Islamic Societies, and the UK Islamic Mission have all denounced the program as “Islamophobic.” None have taken even a single step to combat the spread of the understanding of Islam depicted in the show, or to mitigate the elements of Islam that incite to violence and inculcate Islamic supremacism.

And that itself is very, very telling.

Did the Cultural Left Cause 9/11?

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

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

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

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

Dinesh D’Souza: Thank you Jamie.

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

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

So we begin with the first round:

Round #1: Qutb a Democrat?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

D’Souza: Your question is based on the false presumption that I am defending Qutb. My point isn’t that Qutb is right to believe what he does, but that Qutb has been wrongly described as an enemy of science and capitalism and democracy and the freedom to choose Islam as a religion. Your question repeats all these mistakes.

Here is a line from Social Justice in Islam, “In the case of the pure sciences and their applied results of all kinds, we must not hesitate to use all things in the sphere of material life; our use of them should be unhampered and unconditional, unhesitating and unimpeded.” Sounds like an endorsement of science.

Democracy? This is from Milestones, “Islam is not a ‘theory’ based on assumptions; rather it is a ‘way of life.’ Thus it is first necessary that a Muslim community come into existence…which commits itself to obey none but God, denying all other authority. Only when such a society comes into being, faces various practical problems, and needs a system of law, then Islam initiates the constitution of law and injunctions, rules and regulations. It addresses only those people who in principle have already submitted themselves to its authority…It is necessary that believers in this faith be autonomous and have power in their own society, so that they may be able to implement this system and give currency to all its laws. Moreover, power is also needed to legislate according to the needs of the group as these present themselves in its day to day affairs.” Sounds to be like Qutb is saying that sharia should only exist in a community of committed Muslims, and that it should be the result of their active involvement in placing themselves under such rules.

Freedom of religion? Milestones: “Islam does not force people to accept its belief…What it wants is to abolish those oppressive political systems under which people are prevented from expressing their freedom to choose whatever beliefs they want, and after that it gives them complete freedom to decide whether they will accept Islam or not.” Qutb distinguishes compulsory conversion—this is not allowed—from imposing the political authority of Islam: this is allowed. No, Qutb’s view isn’t consistent with our idea of religious liberty, but I never said that it was.

What I try to do in this book is what you fail to do in your question, which is to take thinkers like Qutb seriously. I don’t attribute to Qutb things that he didn’t say and did not believe. I try to argue against his actual views. And I try to understand his appeal not only to the radical Muslims but also to the traditional Muslims.

You say that “freedom is freedom,” but I don’t agree with you and I don’t think the American founders would either. Here’s a hypothetical question. What if every adult American today used his freedom to become a pornographer? That would make two hundred million Americans whose role model is Al Goldstein and Larry Flynt. Would that make America a good society? Your libertarian principle forces you to say yes, because these people have chosen freely. But I don’t think the American founders would have agreed. To them, the American dream was an idea with content. Yes, it was based on freedom, but freedom to pursue a certain kind of dream, freedom to live a certain kind of life.

Glazov: Obviously, Qutb claimed science for Islam. Do you think that the Catholic Church attacked Galileo and made him repent because they were vocally against science? The Church claimed to protect faith and science from modern heresy. Whether or not Qutb said that the use of science should be unimpeded, his very radical faith undermined his supposed dedication to science. The very fact of modern science, with the rise of relativity, goes against authoritarian order, which Islamism seeks to instill.

The quote you use from Milestones to show that Qutb supports democracy doesn’t seem like any kind of democracy to me. It is clear that non-Muslims will not receive equality and that there won’t be real freedom in any sense of the word. In terms of freedom of religion, if Qutb’s view “isn’t consistent with our idea of religious liberty” then his view doesn’t support freedom of religion in any real way.

Mr. D’Souza, what do you think happens to people who “in principle” do not submit themselves to the authority of a state that Qutb envisions? Yes, Qutb paid lip service to some democratic principles. But the point is that non-Muslims were never included as equals in his vision of “democracy.” Nor were women. So Qutb’s democracy is not democracy by any definition. He advocated the dhimma, which institutionalizes inequality for non-Muslims. And this is based on Islamic theology.

In other words, Qutb was merely following Islamic doctrine and he sought to turn the whole world into committed Muslims, by force and jihad if necessary. And the society that will be created after this Islamic violence will not be a democracy. And that’s why there have been no real Muslim democracies.

Your example about Goldstein and Flynt is meaningless. First and foremost, when you use this pornography example, you dismiss what this society is all about and confuse the issue altogether. People here in America will always pursue different interests because this society nurtures the human reality of difference; they will never all become pornographers. But in authoritarian societies, men will be molded into types. They will be forced to obey certain laws and their emergent individualism will be stifled.

You can take exception to what you deem to be “immoral” behavior, but the question is: what exactly are you proposing to do to about it? How would you curtail the manner in which humans use their freedom in a free society that you disapprove of? Like Qutb would? Can you use your common sense and guess what he would have done to the people who were dancing in the church social in Colorado in 1940 had he been in power? What are you proposing to do to people who want to pursue a certain kind of dream, to live a certain kind of life, that you personally think is wrong? Who will be the self-appointed arbiters of morality in your proposed solutions? What will the punishments be?

I’m sorry, but when I hear these criticisms being articulated about peoples’ “morality” and “permissiveness” on the assumption that something is going to have to be done about it, especially in the context of Qutb being portrayed as some kind of democrat, the frightening images of the Taliban, the Ayatollah Khomeini and the Saudi religious police start floating though my mind.

The bottom line is that somewhere in your argument, Mr. D’Souza, is the premise that if only we cover up our women completely and start enforcing some kind of totalitarian Puritanism over our populace -- with grave punishments to enforce it -- then the Islamists will stop perpetrating terror against us. And the interlinked assumption is that all the victims of honor killings and of the other barbarities of Islamic gender apartheid somehow deserved their fate in the sense that, like us Westerners, they could have avoided being terrorized if they had just acted in a more morally pristine way. That’s the dark logic on which your thesis is based and it is highly insulting to the victims of Islamism and highly dangerous to all freedom-loving people who seek to fight and stop this totalitarian virus.

Round #2: Defensive Jihad?

Glazov: Mr. D’Souza, let me get back to your spin of jihad in our interview. You are correct that “the call to jihad is issued defensively,” in that in the absence of a caliph, defensive jihad is all that is allowed by the Islamic law that the jihadists so scrupulously respect. And certainly the so-called “immorality” of Western popular culture is used as a pretext to garner support for jihadist activity.

But the imperative to subjugate the world under the rule of Islamic law is deeply embedded within Islamic tradition (see Qur’an 9:29, discussed above; Sahih Muslim 4294; and a host of other evidence from all the Sunni madhahib and Shi’ite sources as well). It does not proceed on the basis of the sinfulness of non-Muslims, but simply on the foundation that they are non-Muslims. Even if they were sinless non-Muslims, this imperative would remain.

In the context of “morality,” the reality is that jihad is issued “defensively” because Islamic fundamentalists know that their societies are based on the demonization of the female and of female sexuality, and on the rigid control of sexuality and of private love. Obviously the reality of humans, especially females, doing what they want with their sexuality and exposing their bodies poses a threat to a death cult based on totalitarian Puritanism.

So again, the premise behind your argument, Mr. D’Souza, is that if only we were all moral and pristine and did what some morality police instructed us to do, that the Islamists would then not wage terror against us, since they wouldn’t be afraid that our values might liberate their enslaved women. But the bottom line is that in a free society like America, you can’t create laws that are going to stop Mariah Carey and Jennifer Lopez from dancing in music videos – despite what you may think about the “morality” of it. And the bottom line is that because of globalization, societies that are based on the hatred and fear of the female body, and on the hatred and fear of the possibility that a woman can do whatever she wants with her body, will succumb to terrorism in order to defend the cages on which those societies themselves are built.

I am also not so sure that it is a given that Muslim societies have some kind of “morality” that is higher than ours -- or that it actually represents any kind of morality at all. Ok, sexual freedom is demonized and rigidly controlled and suffocated in Islamic environments. Great. But this suffocation of free will in connection to a powerful facet of the human condition engenders, as simple common sense would instruct it does, far greater immoralities and pathologies. Traditional Islamic culture’s violent control of women and its use of terror to maintain this control (i.e. female genital mutilation, honor killings, forced veiling and segregation, rape as punishment etc.) involves a barbarism that makes our “immorality” look like a Church service. And that’s to say nothing of Shi’ite “temporary marriage,” polygamy, divorce by a word from the husband, and more.

D’Souza: I agree with you that the classical Islamic tradition aspired to rule the whole world and bring everyone under the authority of Islamic law. This tradition was very powerful between the seventh and fifteenth centuries. But not only in Islam. The same tradition was very powerful in Christianity during that same period.

In the ancient world, once a religion got power it often sought to use that power to dominate other societies. Moses wasn’t exactly a believer in religious freedom. When he came down from the mountain and discovered the Israelites worshipping the golden calf he basically ordered a massacre. Don’t you think that if Moses could he would have imposed the laws of Yahweh on the whole world? Of course he would.

This is all another way of saying that we cannot use today’s notions of religious toleration and freedom of religion to judge other cultures or even Western culture when those notions were not yet invented. Historian Bernard Lewis points out that Islam historically was more tolerant than Christianity. The Muslim empires, from the Umayyad to the Abbasid to the Mughal to the Ottoman, tolerated Jews and Hindus in a way that no Christian society would have. Yes, this involved discriminatory laws against religious minorities like Christians and Jews, but these forms of discrimination were milder than those imposed by Christian societies on their religious minorities such as Jews. In the Spain of Ferdinand and Isabella, Jews were given three choices: convert, leave the country or be killed. What Muslim empire did that?

Glazov: I am a bit puzzled by your references to Moses and Christianity in your comparisons with Islam. The key is that when Christians have behaved in aggressive or intolerant ways, their acts were not based on Christian teachings; their acts were un-Christian. The same cannot be said for Muslims when they engage in aggression and intolerance, since such behavior is a fulfillment of their theological mandates. All the schools of Islamic jurisprudence teach that it is part of the responsibility of the umma to subjugate the non-Muslim world through jihad.

And so that is why today no legitimate Christian or Jewish leaders with any credibility and respect are calling for the bombing of Mecca or any other kind of indiscriminate violence. There is nothing analogous among Christians and Jews to the hate-filled sermons that are preached weekly in the Islamic world. The New and Old Testaments contain no universal, open-ended command to all believers to wage war against all unbelievers, as does the Qur'an in Suras such as 9:29 and 9:5. Millions of Muslims obviously take those verses seriously today, but no Christians or Jews are committing violence in the name of their religion and justifying it by their religious theology.

Your interpretation, Mr. D’Souza, does not explain why there are armed conflicts with jihadists today who, in the case of the Taliban in Afghanistan, Iran and recently Somalia, have even taken over whole countries. There are no more Christian Crusades, the equivalent of the Muslim jihad, in existence today. The only reason the Muslim jihad died down the last few centuries is because the Muslim world, in the form of its foremost martial power, Turkey, became militarily weak, while the Christian world became proportionately militarily stronger and was even able to colonize the Muslim countries. Now that colonization has ended, jihad is growing stronger again. The fact is, the jihad imperative in Islam has been there since this religion’s inception and becomes weak, or a non-factor, only when Muslim military strength is weak or negligible.

Scholars such as Bat Ye’or, meanwhile, have provided much evidence that discredits your view of how Muslims have treated minorities. Armenians would probably not be very appreciative of your view. And Muslim intolerance of other religions continues to this day, everywhere from Saudi Arabia and Pakistan to the Sudan.

In any case, the fact that you are comparing Islam today to medieval Christianity is telling. You do this because of the current backwardness of Islamic societies; since they cannot withstand scrutiny (being compared with modern, free societies), you hold them up to medieval Europe and find Europe wanting.

Round #3: Muslim Democracy?

Glazov: In terms of your belief in a possible Muslim democracy, Mr. D’Souza, I can say that I truly wish the best for Muslim reformers who are fighting the battle to modernize and democratize Islam.

But I must say that I have a hard time picturing a Muslim “democracy” in which individuals can freely criticize Muhammad and make cartoons ridiculing him, and even get together in a public demonstration articulating these themes, and the society allows and protects this behavior.

I also have difficulty picturing a Muslim “democracy” in which women, if they so wish, and regardless of what your own moral vision thinks about it, do what they want to do with their own bodies and sex lives -- and remain unharmed.

I also can’t picture Christians and other non-Muslim religions freely proselytizing in a Muslim “democracy” and remaining unharmed.

And the moment you say that these are not good examples because it will be a “different” kind of “democracy” and not the American “variety,” then I’m sorry, what you are describing is not a democracy. It is tyranny.

And if a future Islam will allow these things, then that is great. But it will be an Islam that will have its foundations transformed. This raises the question of how Islam can remain Islam without its main Islamic ingredients. But I guess this issue will have to be the subject for a discussion in another forum.

D’Souza: The radical Muslims don’t believe in free speech but most traditional Muslims do. They value free speech as a way to have a political debate. They also believe that free speech has limits, and one of those limits is blasphemy. We too in this society believe that free speech has limits, only our limits are different.

Recently, we celebrated Martin Luther King’s birthday. Now imagine if the New York Times were to print a series of cartoons showing Martin Luther King as a drive-by shooter, and a drug-dealer, and a pimp. What would be the reaction? There would be a nationwide howl of outrage. The guy who did the cartoons would most likely be fired, or at least forced to apologize profusely and enroll in sensitivity classes. But it would not stop with that. His editor who allowed the cartoons to be published would also be attacked. And there would be oceans of commentary about how the episode demonstrates the racism that is endemic in our society.

I doubt that free speech would even come up. Now to continue with my example, can you image dozens of other leading newspapers—the Boston Globe, the Washington Post, the LA Times—all reprinting the Martin Luther King cartoons to show their solidarity with the New York Times and affirm their support for free speech? It would never happen. So it’s easy to talk about free speech when the other guy’s sacred cow is being gored.

Glazov: Your Martin Luther King analogy doesn’t hold up. The difference is that the black thugs who would engage in their violent activity don’t point to Martin Luther King’s life and sayings to justify their criminal actions. Martin Luther King was never a gangster. Muslim terrorists, on the other hand, base their actions on Muhammad -- who invented jihad and was a jihadist himself.

Muslims believe that free speech has limits? Really? Is that why Jews and Westerners are constantly characterized as apes and pigs in the Middle Eastern media and in schools? Isn’t it because the Qur'an calls Jews apes and pigs in three places? (2: 62-65, 5:59-60, 7:166) Shouldn’t we be discussing this use of the Qur'an rather than pretending it doesn’t exist?

To say, as you do, that blasphemy is an acceptable limit to free speech is to misunderstand altogether the point of free speech. In a free society, speech, however, offensive, must be permitted. You may believe otherwise, but in so doing you are waging war on a fundamental American right and tradition. The one notable exception is direct indictment to violence. (The case of Brandenburg v. Ohio sets down the precedent well: "The constitutional guarantees of free speech and free press do not permit a State to forbid or proscribe advocacy of the use of force or of law violation except where such advocacy is directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is likely to incite or produce such action.")

Your example of Americans being appalled at a hypothetical cartoon mocking MLK Jr. is problematic. Do you really think anyone would be killed because of such a cartoon? All of your examples are of people voicing their disagreement; there is nothing wrong with that whatsoever. If "traditional Muslims" had objected to the Mohammed cartoons by writing angry letters to the editor that would have been entirely unobjectionable. In fact, most conservatives made a point of saying that they didn't think the cartoons especially clever. The problem was that Muslims responded by attacking and threatening attacks against non-Muslims. At that point, people defended the publication of the cartoons because they had news value and because Muslims were challenging the fundamental right to free expression, however crude. As Oliver Kamm put it, "The defense of a free society is the defense of its procedures, not its output."

Furthermore, the depictions of Mohammad by the Danes were not out of line. Indeed, the apparently most offensive cartoon, Mohammad with a bomb-turban on his head, asks a pertinent question that Islamic societies should be attempting to answer. Is terrorism compatible with the origins of Islam or is terror anathema to these origins? This seems to me to be an open question and one that must be answered in the Middle East if there is to be any reform. And, by the way, people in Western societies regularly depict Christian figures in really vile ways – Christ in urine, Mary made out of dung (to give two recent examples) – and Christians don’t resort to murder and violence as forms of protest. Instead, they have a debate about it. This is critical to keep in mind when we compare some of the problems and consequences of free speech in Western societies with those in the Muslim world.

The key questions: do you think the cartoonists of Muhammad should have been jailed or punished in some way? Do you denounce the violent reaction of Muslims? Whether you approve or disapprove of the cartoons themselves is meaningless. There are lots of cartoons that have offended me in my life but I vehemently support their publication, seeing that Stalinism will begin to creep in very quickly after we start suffocating freedom of expression and, more importantly, the freedom to offend.

Round #4: Abu Ghraib.

Glazov: Let me get back for a moment to your arguments regarding Abu Ghraib. The implication is that Muslim society is exempt from sexual perversion and that Abu Ghraib somehow scandalized a culture that knows nothing about torture -- including the sexual variety -- in jail, and is as pure as the driven snow. Surely you are aware of what Muslim Arabs do to prisoners and to the bodies of their enemies. The torture in which they engage is frequently sexual -- often involving rape of male prisoners. And Arab Muslims are all very much aware of this. So I am not sure how much a couple of morons who engaged in frat party idiocy really shocked Muslims.

Now, that Muslim Arabs were appalled that this was perpetrated by infidels is a given. That it hurt our cause tremendously is a given. But the moral indignation of the Islamic world raises different issues.

The real significance of Abu Ghraib was that what happened there was a Sunday school class compared to what happened under Saddam Hussein -- and all Iraqis and Arab Muslims know it. What happened at Abu Ghraib was a frat party compared to a history of peoples’ live bodies being passed through human shredders, lowered into boiling baths of acid, people having their kids raped in front of them, and humans having their body parts mutilated while they are alive.

In terms of the torture that is perpetrated by ruthless regimes around the world, any sane human being would only dream of being a prisoner in an American Abu Ghraib. Would you instead want to be the victim of what Fidel Castro perpetrated in his “Cuban Program” at the Cu Loc POW camp in Hanoi? Of what Stalin, the Khmer Rouge, Mao and Saddam perpetrated? Personally, I can say with full certainty that I would prefer a woman’s underwear to be placed over my head any day to having my eye sockets cut out, my head crushed in a vice and my limbs mutilated, or my body being torn apart in a meat shredder.

The key significance here is that the horror that exists in the Muslim world over a pair of woman’s underwear being placed on a man’s head is a reflection of that culture’s immorality, not ours. I am obviously not saying that a pair of woman’s underwear on a man’s head should represent a cultural norm. Obviously the guards were engaging in sadistic and juvenile behavior and they should be reprimanded or punished for their conduct accordingly. But there is a larger context here. And that is that the nightmarish dread with which the underwear scene was greeted in the Arab Muslim world reflected the hatred of women and of their sexuality in these societies. It exposed the terror that males experience when confronted with the notion of a woman having power over them, let alone even being an equal. That reality for a male is considered a virtual hell. This reveals the vile misogyny that exists in the Islamic world – and that should be the primary subject of our moral indignation.

My overall point here Mr. D’Souza is about the matter of emphasis. I would think that you would have shown a curiosity and indignation about why many Muslims find women’s underwear on a male head worse and more immoral than the torture and murder that went on not only in Abu Ghraib under Saddam Hussein, but throughout the Islamic Arab world. What kind of pathology would lead them to this conclusion? The fact that individuals in the Muslim world denounced the underwear on the head incident with such vehemence while hypocritically remaining silent for decades about the indescribable violence done to men, women and children in Iraqi prisons, and prisons throughout the Arab world, makes one wonder about how pathological their culture really is. Should not this be the subject of Western attention, rather than renewing the orgy of self-recrimination the West has been indulging in for the last few decades?

D’Souza: Once again you are confusing my description of what made the Muslims really upset about Abu Ghraib with what I would find personally most upsetting about Abu Ghraib. I agree with you that torture is worse than sexual degradation. So if I had to choose between having my head cut off and being forced to masturbate and having women’s underwear on my head, I would, I guess, choose the latter. But I would rather not have to choose at all. You cannot defend one kind of wrong by pointing to another kind of wrong.

Your statement expresses, if I may say so, a disgracefully cavalier attitude toward what to conservative and religious people are deeply humiliating actions. We may have lost much of our sense of modesty in America, but there are many cultures in the world where modesty and decency are very highly prized. I am not just talking about the Muslim world, but also about much of Asia and Africa and South America. These are honor cultures and if we cannot understand that they exist, and respect their values of sexual reticence and moral dignity, then that’s really a sad reflection on us. To represent these values, which are the traditional values of most of the world, which were held across this society until only a couple of generations ago, and are still held by many people in this country today, as simply hatred of women I think is simply foolish.

I do not think that it is a decent response to Abu Ghraib to dismiss it as a fraternity prank. For conservatives to minimize the sexual depravity of Abu Ghraib is to make ourselves the vehicles for covering up liberal depravity. And why should we defend Abu Ghraib? Because we are patriots and Abu Ghraib represents America? This is ridiculous. It does not represent America. Because all of this sexual degradation was necessary for the purposes of military interrogation? But Charles Graner and Lynndie England and the others were not carrying out any kind of interrogation. They were just screwing around. This was their idea of having fun. True, if this was done in a university department it might have won a grant from the National Endowment from the Arts. But I don’t understand why conservatives would want to make ourselves pimps for liberal debauchery. Who do we have to apologize for next, the North American Man Boy Love Association? It seems that our patriotism is being obtained at a very high price if we have to defend everything that goes on in America in the name of freedom. I don’t think Ronald Reagan would have laughed off Abu Ghraib.

Glazov: I have no idea what you mean when you say you “would rather not have to choose at all.” We don’t live in a perfect, disinfected and ideal world and it doesn’t really matter what you would “rather” choose. There are situations in life where we are confronted with extremely difficult and horrible decisions – especially when there are people planning to blow themselves up in a mall where innocent human beings, including women and infants, will be killed or crippled and maimed for life.

There is a whole other question here concerning what exactly you propose our interrogators do with a captured Islamic radical who has information about another 9/11 in its planning stages – but won’t talk.

I also don’t understand why you keep saying that I am “defending” Abu Ghraib. It’s easier arguing with straw men I guess. I clearly stated in my last comment that the American guards at Abu Ghraib were engaging in sadistic and juvenile behavior and that they should be punished accordingly.

You accuse me of having a “disgracefully cavalier attitude” about the underwear-on-the-head episode. It’s not the first time in my life I’ve been accused of being cavalier about something and it won’t be the last. But let me tell you something that I don’t have a “disgraceful” cavalier attitude about:

I am the child of Soviet dissidents. My mom’s father was shot in the back of the head by the NKVD. My dad’s dad was poisoned by the NKVD. Throughout my life the terror that the Soviet regime perpetrated against its citizens has been a nightmare that has lurked, without remission, in my heart and soul. The tortures outlined in Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago, which included the crushing of testicles of those who refused to sign false confessions, haunt my psyche. I live with Armando Valladares on my mind, reflecting on the horrors that he and other prisoners experienced in Castro’s Gulag -- experiences that Valladares has documented in his heart-wrenching memoir Against All Hope. The tortures involved being forced to take baths in human feces. Lt. Colonel Earl Cobeil and the vicious tortures he and other American POWs endured under Castro’s “Cuban Program” at the Cu Loc POW camp in Hanoi also rest, unabated, in my heart.

This evil perpetrated against human beings by totalitarian regimes has haunted me throughout my life and it has propelled me to try to make my own contribution, as humble as it may be, to fight totalitarianism and the leftist forces in the West who are in league with it.

Saddam Hussein’s crimes against humanity are part of this story. Yes, I consider it a good thing that U.S. forces liberated a country from an evil man who took live human beings and incinerated them in boiling baths of acid, who had children raped in front of their parents, who had every human body part possible dismembered from those he wished to victimize, and who perpetrated any and every horrible torture one’s human imagination can conceive.

So my point is this: when, in certain periods of my life, I have awoken in a frightened cold sweat in the middle of the night, there were some frightening mental images in my dream state that caused this particular disturbance. And I can tell you that the phenomenon of a woman’s pair of underwear resting on a man’s head was not one of them.

In terms of modesty and decency, again these are not aspects of life that Muslims have a monopoly on. The sexual perversion that exists in the Islamic-Arab world, and in its torture chambers, are well known, and why the American Abu Ghraib scandalized a culture that knows everything about it is my main point. Obviously the underwear-on-the-head incident was upsetting and humiliating in its own context. And my thesis is not that the idiocy of the likes of Lyndie England and her comrades was justified. The point is that it's hypocritical for anyone to scream about our insufficient respect for the Arab "shame culture" when for years Saddam Hussein enjoyed the support of the Arab world, while, under his watch, Abu Ghraib was an incomparably crueler place than it ever was under American supervision.

Were modesty and decency very highly prized in Saddam’s rape rooms and children’s prisons? Where were the protests among Muslims then? Many prisoners in Saddam’s Abu Ghraib were not allowed to wash; one prisoner reported that he went four years without a shower. Could not this be considered a great “shame” -- since Arabs place a high premium on cleanliness? Many prisoners were kept naked and beaten, often to death. Could this be considered a great shame? Executions were routine -- although it is heretical for Muslims to kill other Muslims. For instance, in 1984 alone, 4,000 prisoners were executed at Abu Ghraib. Where was the rage of Muslims then? We have first-hand accounts of women in Saddam’s torture chambers being stripped naked and having burning cigarettes stubbed out on their skin, with their children forced to look on. I’ll leave the other horrid tortures up to the imagination. Is female modesty supposedly not sacred in Islam? Where was all the rage in the Arab world that was so prominently displayed with the American Abu Ghraib regarding these crimes?

The point is that we never stooped to Saddam's level and we don't stoop to Saddam’s level. And it’s hypocritical for Muslims, and anyone else, to suddenly cry foul about our disrespect for the Muslim “shame” culture when no comparable outrage was on display throughout Saddam's reign of terror. And if you can’t grasp that when a bestial and ferocious fury occurs in response to a woman’s pair of underwear being placed on a man’s head, it is connected to a society’s misogyny -- where a terrifying dread exists in the notion of a woman’s equality to a man -- I don’t know what to say.

I am also speechless that you haven’t grasped that the hatred and fear of women and of their sexuality is at the core of Islamist terror, and that the vicious and sadistic structure of Islamic gender apartheid and the barbaric weapons that keep it in place -- female genital mutilation, forced veiling and marriage, honor killings, etc. -- are interconnected with the same reasons Islamists wage war on the West. Surely you are aware of the Muslim rape epidemic that is skyrocketing in Western Europe, where unveiled women are being punished for not putting themselves out of sight and sound. And most of these rape victims, for your information, weren’t even “dancing” the way to which Qutb objected at the church social in Colorado in 1940. They were raped as punishment for not forcing themselves into invisibility. And surely you are aware of how this violence against women is connected to the terror being perpetrated against us. Surely you understand that to try to blame Islamist terror on how Westerners use their freedom is a grave insult to the millions of women who are, and have been, brutally victimized by the vicious structures of Islamic gender apartheid.

Round #5: The Left Loves America?

Glazov: You stated in our interview, Mr. D’Souza, that the Left loves America in its own way. I would have to disagree. The Left wants to destroy America -- as well as its democratic-capitalist foundations. The America they love will be the one they yearn to build on the ashes of the one that exists, and the one they yearn to destroy. And the one they will build will have no resemblance to the one that exists and to the one whose freedoms they exploit in their effort to destroy it. It will resemble Mao’s China and Stalinist Russia and Castro’s Cuba, and that’s why the Left venerated those tyrannies throughout the 20th Century and offered them its own personal solidarity and affection.

D’Souza: Yes, the left loves America but it doesn’t love the same America that conservatives love. The left doesn’t so much want to destroy America as it wants to destroy traditional America, the America of conservative values. The left’s America is the America of the suffragettes and the Stonewall riots and Roe v. Wade. This is the America that the left will fight for, and that it feels patriotic about. So too the left hates American foreign policy when it serves conservative ends. The left would hate for Bush to win his war on terror because that would reinforce conservative values both abroad and at home. But the left would love for America to use its power to promote liberal values.

Glazov: I stand by my statement that the only America that the Left loves is the one that it yearns to build on the ashes on the existing America that is seeks to destroy.

Round #6: Drying Up Radical Islam’s Recruitment?

Glazov: Let’s move over to how your position that there are hardly any such people in the Muslim world who believe in women’s rights and separation of church and state, yet your simultaneous belief in some kind of foundation for a Muslim democracy. Would such a democracy really be democratic for women and non-Muslims?

Also, isn’t there a self-contradiction in your statement that “we have to find a way of drying up radical Islam’s recruitment” and your assertion that “whenever we attack Islam or say that Muhammad was the founder of terrorism, we are pursuing a self-defeating strategy because we are driving traditional Muslims into the hands of the radicals”? How can we dry up radical Islam’s recruitment while simultaneously ignoring the fact that that recruitment is based not solely on charges that America is immoral, but on Islamic principles and the words and deeds of Muhammad? Shouldn’t we engage in respectful, but honest and searching criticism of the Islamic texts and Muhammad’s example, so as to aid Muslim reformers in their work of reform?

D’Souza: Islam is not the problem. Islam has been around for 1300 years and the problem of Islamic radicalism and terrorism is now. So it’s silly to go around blaming the Koran and blaming the prophet Muhammad. He is no more responsible for today’s terrorism than Martin Luther King is responsible for drug-dealing and drive-by shooting in the inner city. Yes, the bad guys do it in the name of Muhammad, but as Bernard Lewis and so many others have pointed out, Islamic radicalism represents a break with the Islamic tradition. Never before have mullahs ruled a Muslim society, as they now do in Iran. The Khomeini revolution was totally unprecedented. So I think it’s historically wrong to blame Islam itself.

The intelligent question is to ask what it is about Islam today that has made it an incubator of a certain kind of radicalism and fanaticism. The other question to ask is how we can get traditional Muslims to break with the radicals. I’m afraid the main obstacle is the kind of attitude that you are taking in this interview. When you make America synonymous with permissiveness, when you dismiss serious moral offenses with a no-big-deal attitude, when you attack a religion of 1 billion people for the actions perpetrated by a miniscule fraction of that group, you are driving the traditional Muslims into the arms of the radicals. Meanwhile you are searching for liberal allies in the Muslim world, and except for Salman Rushdie and a few others, they don’t really exist. So how are you helping us win the war on terror? You actually seem to be making things worse.

Glazov: I am not so sure how “silly” it is to look at the Qur'an and the Prophet when diagnosing Islamic terror, especially in light of the fact that Islamic terrorists consistently point to the Qur'an and the Prophet, and quote their words, when justifying their violence.

Blaming the existence of people like me, I am afraid, is not going to wash away the fact that Islam has a developed doctrine, theology, and legal system that mandates warfare against unbelievers. To say that Islam has been around for 1300 years but that radicalism is somehow new ignores centuries of Islamic expansionism and violence that was justified by the doctrines of jihad.

Again, the Martin Luther King analogy does not hold up. King never engaged in drug-dealing and drive-by shooting in the inner city, nor did he ever promote such behavior. And that is why black gangsters and criminals don’t quote from King or emulate his conduct of non-violence. Islam, on the other hand, is an incubator of radicalism and terror because of the words and deeds of Muhammad – and that is why the radicals and terrorists always quote their Prophet and emulate his acts.

There is a self-contradiction when you say the radicals are only a tiny minority, but that Muslim liberals don't really exist. Moreover, to assert that Lewis and others say that Islamic radicalism represents a break with Islamic tradition unfortunately does not wash away Muhammad's own expansionist acts and commands. Saying something does not make it true. And people like me aren’t helping radicals by simply acknowledging that those commands exist. We are helping the radicals by ignoring or denying their existence, and thereby cutting the ground out from under serious Islamic reformers. If Islam has doctrines that are fueling radicalism, it does no good to demonize people like me or to show the faults of Christianity, and it undercuts reformers who don't need us to pretend that these Islamic doctrines don't exist or are not inspiring violence.

The bottom line is that it is not people like me who are driving traditional Muslims into the arms of radical Muslims; it is radical imams at Wahhabi mosques and religious schools the world over, funded by Saudi Arabia, and radical imams in prisons who are doing that job. And doing it very well, I might add. The subway bombers in England and some of the ‘Hamburg’ 9/11 cell members were radicalized in mosques in their respective countries – and that means something.

I am also not so consoled by your reference to the “miniscule fraction” of Muslims that adhere to radicalism. The percentage of Muslims living in Western societies who want to see the liberal democracies in their host countries replaced by Sharia law are not miniscule.

All in all, it is erroneous to suggest that if we speak honestly about the ingredients of Islam that give rise to terrorism, that we are somehow radicalizing more Muslims. Such sincerity about Islam will do the opposite, since crystallizing the truth will arm our Muslim allies who are fighting to modernize their religion. Muslim reformers can best eliminate the foundations of extremism within their religion if they can isolate exactly what they are.

*

Our time has unfortunately run out in this segment of our debate. Dinesh D’Souza it was a pleasure to have you as a guest at Frontpage to discuss your new book.

As mentioned in the beginning, because I got the last word in the rounds here today, Mr. D’Souza is most welcome to make replies when his schedule permits. And we will be most happy to publish them in what we hope will become a continuing dialogue.

For all of us here at Frontpage, we would like to thank all of our readers for joining us. We’ll see you all again soon.

[To see the first interview where Mr. D'Souza outlines his thesis click here.]

Muslims get angry at films depicting them as terrorists

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This just in: global warming causes jihad!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Osama said it too:

BIN LADEN ON CLIMATE CHANGE

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

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

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

London police chief: "the 'extreme view of one austere strand' of Islam was proving powerful"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

New Australian Courses to Teach Moderate Islam

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CAIR official refuses to condemn Hamas and Hizballah as terrorist organizations

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Threatened French teacher quits teaching

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

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

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

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

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

In German.

N Korea helping Iran with nuclear testing

Axis of Evil Update. By Con Coughlin in The Telegraph, with thanks to Jeffrey Imm:

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

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

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

Ahmadinejad: U.S., Israel will soon die

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

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

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

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

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

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

Iranian President Derides U.S. Threats

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

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

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

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

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

Spain: Moroccan Muslim arrested for links to Islamic terrorism

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

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

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

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

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

Jihadists flock to Indonesian island of Sulawesi amid intensified fighting

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

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

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

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

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

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

Scores of militant members of JI cells who apparently opposed attacks on Western targets such as the Australian embassy in Jakarta have travelled to Poso to fight.

"This is a dangerous development," terrorism expert Sidney Jones told The Age yesterday.

"The ramifications could well be an energising of the jihadist movement, which in my opinion had been steadily weakening," said Ms Jones, the Jakarta-based director of the International Crisis Group.

At least two high-ranking and influential JI figures have been killed in Poso this month, one of them in the battle late on Monday in which police killed the nine militants, captured 18 others and seized a large cache of bombs, weapons and ammunition.

Police killed a prominent JI leader, Rassyah, from the central Java city of Solo, in a battle in Poso on January 11, which apparently set the stage for more violent clashes in the area.

Rassyah was trained in terrorism in the same class in Afghanistan as Ali Ghufron, alias Mukhlas, one of three bombers on death row who carried out the 2002 Bali bombings that killed 202 people, including 82 holidaying Australians. He apparently turned up in Poso in 2004.

Since then, Islamic extremists in the town have been blamed for sporadic bombings, beheadings, shootings and other attacks, which prompted the Government in Jakarta to authorise the US and Australian-trained Detachment 88 anti-terror squad to go to Poso to crack down on them. The policeman killed on Monday was from the squad.

Hizballah-led protesters "paralyze" Lebanon

Tiny Minority of Extremists Update. "3 killed as protesters paralyze Lebanon," by Sam F. Ghattas for Associated Press:

BEIRUT, Lebanon - Hezbollah-led protesters paralyzed Lebanon Tuesday, clashing with government supporters and burning tires and cars on roads in and around the capital to enforce a general strike aimed at toppling U.S.-backed Prime Minister Fuad Saniora. Three people were killed and dozens injured.

What had been planned as a peaceful work-stoppage around the country turned into the worst violence since the pro-Syrian Shiite Hezbollah and its allies launched a campaign two months ago to oust the government.

In a televised speech, Saniora called for a special session of parliament to defuse the crisis, and gave every indication that he intended to stay in office.

"We will stand together against intimidation and confront sedition for the sake of Lebanon," he said. He added he remained ready for talks with the opposition.

Police said three people were killed and 43 others sustained gunshot wounds in clashes in the towns of central and northern Lebanon, including two bodyguards of a prominent pro-government politician. Commuters were stranded and business came to halt in many parts of the capital.

"The opposition is attempting a coup by force," Cabinet minister Ahmed Fatfat said. "This is not a strike. This is military action, a true aggression and I'm afraid this could develop into clashes between citizens," Fatfat, the youth and sports minister, told Al-Arabiya television.

Hezbollah chief Sheik Hassan Nasrallah and other opposition leaders called the strike, which was backed by labor unions. The Hezbollah-led opposition is demanding a new coalition government giving them more power, which Saniora has rejected.

The opposition has been camped out since Dec. 1 in front of the prime minister's office in downtown Beirut and has staged several protests to press its demands but Tuesday's strike escalated the nearly two-month demonstration. Troops have been deployed in central Beirut for weeks to keep order. But the action has largely been peaceful.

The conflict has strained the already fragile sectarian lines in a country that fought a 1975-1990 civil war between Muslims and Christians. In the current power struggle, Lebanon's Sunni Muslims largely support Saniora, while the Shiites back Hezbollah and the opposition. Many Christians back Saniora.

Nicholas Burns, the U.S. undersecretary of state for political affairs, called Tuesday for Arabs, the U.S. and Europe to support Saniora.

"We have indications they will try to go into the streets this week to overturn a democratically elected government, through the rule of people in the streets, through mobs," he said in a speech in Dubai, United Arab Emirates.

Meanwhile, black clouds billowed over parts of Beirut as opposition supporters set up burning roadblocks on main routes and at entrances to the capital, as well as in other major cities to enforce the strike. Opposition supporters clustered in small groups to man blazing roadblocks.

Police and troops deployed by the thousands across the country in an attempt to open roads and break up clashes. In some cases, troops negotiated the lifting of roadblocks. Elsewhere, they charged crowds to separate battling protesters and push open roads.

Hezbollah's deputy leader, Sheik Naim Kassem, told al-Jazeera television that the opposition would decide later in the day whether to call off the action or continue the escalating campaign.

"It was very successful and a clear message" to the government and its international backers, said Kassem.

Other opposition activists expressed frustration that the protests so far had not succeeded. Many workers stayed home, either in support of the strike or in fear of violence. Some schools closed due to unrest.

Blazing roadblocks cut off the road to Beirut international airport and the highway linking Beirut with the mountains and the road to Damascus, the Syrian capital.

British bomb plot suspects planned to continue jihad in Pakistan, Afghanistan after attacks in UK

An update on this jihadist cell. "British bomb plot suspects 'planned jihad'," from Reuters:

LONDON (Reuters) - Seven Britons accused of plotting to bomb clubs, trains and synagogues in England planned to take their fight to Pakistan and Afghanistan if they had succeeded, prosecutors told a court on Tuesday.

"The overall desire was to further the (cause) of jihad (Holy War) wherever and however it could be achieved," prosecution lawyer David Waters said in what police have described as Britain's biggest terrorism trial since September 11 attacks on the United States.

[...]

The seven are accused of conspiring to bomb high profile targets, possibly including London's Ministry of Sound nightclub and the huge Bluewater shopping center in Kent using bombs made from fertilizer.

The defendants -- Anthony Garcia, Jawad Akbar, Omar Khyam, his brother Shujah Mahmood, Waheed Mahmood, Nabeel Hussain, and Salahuddin Amin -- deny conspiring to cause an explosion "likely to endanger life."

Garcia, Khyam and Hussain deny possessing an article for terrorism -- the fertilizer. Khyam and Mahmood deny having aluminum powder, an ingredient in explosives.

[...]

Meanwhile, the prosecution is somewhat on trial itself for Islamophobia:

The prosecution said the trial was not a witch-hunt against the defendants' religious beliefs.

"Of course it would be ludicrous to approach the allegations in a vacuum and pretend the backdrop or religious or political motivations does not exist," Waters said.

"But having acknowledged that it is only a backdrop, what we are concerned about are allegations of crime."

UK: Five Christian fundamentalists held after anti-terror raids -- no, wait...

They weren't actually Christians at all, of course -- not that the continued non-participation of Christians in terror plotting makes any impression on the moral equivalence crowd.

"Five held after anti-terror raids," from the BBC, with thanks to Wayne:

Five men have been arrested under terrorism laws in two separate operations, police have confirmed.

Police arrested two men, aged 25 and 29, during morning raids in Halifax, West Yorkshire.

Another two men, both 24, were arrested in Cheetham Hill, Manchester, and a fifth man, 32, was held after his arrest in that city's Longsight area.

Police said there was no evidence "any of the men were involved in planned terror activity in the UK".

The men in Halifax, thought to be British Pakistanis, are being held on suspicion of involvement in facilitating terrorist activities overseas....

Fitzgerald: Rice and worse than Rice

The Secretary of State recently stated that the Middle East will have to “overcome” the tendency to see things in Sunni-Shi’a terms. There are two things wrong with the statement of Condoleeza Rice.

The first is the o'erweening, history-ignoring idea that Sunni-Shi'a rivalries and hostilities can "be overcome." The Sunni-Shi'a split long ago transcended the initial quarrel over succession. Now there are differences in the organization of the Shi'a and Sunni variants of Islam: in organization (the power of the Shi'a ayatollahs and other Shi'a clergy has nothing similar in Sunni Islam); in ritual (the Shi'a Ashoura, with its emphasis on self-flagellation); and practice (the Shi'a shrines and visits to those shrines, so offensive to austere Sunnis, especially to the most austere of all, the Wahhabis of Saudi Arabia).

The belief that somehow deeply-held beliefs and attitudes can be "overcome" seems to approach all this as if it were a question of civil rights in the South. One of the silliest and most harmful aspects of American governments is the belief that many things are susceptible of change, or of change that will come quickly. "Let's have self-determination now" or "Let's end poverty the way Jeffery Sachs says we can" or "Let's just get right in there and reform Islam." A blend of naivete, ignorance, and arrogance, which yields a most unappetizing brew.

The second thing wrong with Rice's statement is that apparently she cannot conceive of why this Sunni-Shi'a split is a good thing for Infidels. She cannot conceive of why chaos and confusion and endless hostility between the two main branches or sects of Islam is something to be exploited, not to be deplored. It appears that American governments want always to take the side of this or that plausible group of Muslims. First, it was the Shi'a in exile who managed to woo and win so many in the American government with their tales of WMD (Chalabi and his group), and others who confidently predicted that once the Americans "liberated" Iraq they would be greeted, those Americans, with an outpouring of joy and presumably permanent gratitude that "would make the liberation of Kabul look like a funeral procession." It would cost, according to Wolfowitz and others, nothing like what it cost to maintain those sanctions -- possibly a few tens of billions of dollars. And then it would be over. A "cakewalk," wrote Kenneth Adelman (sometime purveyor of Shakespeare to corporations so that the tycoons and tycoonettes can apply "Shakespeare to the business world).

Many have in this farce, on all sides, in the government, and in the press, been weighted and found wanting.

Meanwhile, there's something just over here, freshly scribbled on this wall, that I'd like to show our rulers and our pundits:

"Mene, mene, tekel upharsin."

Do you think they'll be able to make it out?

Yet Rice is not the worst. She is far superior to others who preceded her. If she invites comparison with two former and still nattering-away National Security Advisers, Zbigniew Brzezinski and Brent Scowcroft, Condoleeza Rice only gains by the comparison. But that should not be the point of comparison. She, and all others in the government, should be spending their days and nights studying Islam, studying not only the texts -- Qur'an, Hadith, Sira -- but how those texts are naturally received by, not all, but almost all, Muslims, and figure out on what side the textual authority lies. They should learn about taqiyya. They should learn about the history of Islamic conquest and about the subjugation of non-Muslims -- which is not only a matter of history, but can be seen today in Pakistan, Bangladesh, Indonesia, Iraq, Sudan, Saudi Arabia (where the non-Muslims are to found only among the expatriate wage-slaves). They must learn what is so misleading about the phrase "moderate Muslim" -- misleading and unhelpful. They must learn to detect the plausible from the true, to discover the smyler with the knyf under his cloke, as Chaucer emblemized the figure of Treachery he found in Boccaccio, well in advance.

They must learn to understand it all, and to understand not only the texts and the history, but the other attitudes that naturally arise in Islam: aggression, violence, inability to compromise, susceptibility to the most primitive conspiracy theories, blaming of non-Muslims for all the ills that should rightly be attributed to Islam but of course cannot be, and so on.

These are the things she, and so many others, including all of the would-be Presidents now eagerly seeking our support, must learn. Now, not in five or ten years. Now.

Karbala attackers posed as U.S. military officials

This particularly brazen attack resulted in five U.S. casualties on Saturday, targeting troops meeting with Shi'ite authorities to discuss security for the upcoming Ashura pilgrimage. But it differs from the Sunni-Shi'ite violence the world is accustomed to seeing in that there were no Shi'ite casualties, and, while an intense investigation is ongoing, several events surrounding the case seem strange and somewhat improbable. From CNN:

KARBALA, Iraq (CNN) -- Attackers who killed five U.S. troops at a government building in Karbala posed as U.S. military officials to get past Iraqi guards, a Karbala police spokesman said.

The attack happened Saturday as the U.S. military convened a meeting to discuss security for Ashura, the upcoming Shiite pilgrimage to Karbala.

According to police spokesman Abdul Rahman al-Mishawi, about 30 gunmen traveling in a convoy of at least seven SUVs with tinted windows -- similar to the vehicles used by top U.S. military officials -- drove up to the Karbala Provincial Joint Coordination Center wearing uniforms similar to those worn by the U.S. military.

About a dozen U.S. troops were inside the compound at the time, al-Mishawi said.

Around 5:45 p.m., the gunmen cleared an Iraqi police checkpoint outside the center by flashing fake identification badges and speaking some English, al-Mishawi said.

Al-Mishawi said it is standard procedure for U.S. troops not to jointly man the checkpoint. He said U.S. personnel insist on passing without going through a security screening.

The attackers went through three checkpoints to enter the center, he said.

The first U.S. casualty in the attack was a soldier sitting in a Humvee outside a meeting of U.S. and Iraqi security officials.

The assailants targeted only U.S. soldiers, al-Mishawi said, adding that not a single Iraqi soldier or police officer was killed.

Several of the SUVs used in the attack were found late Saturday in neighboring Babil province, along with two of the suspected gunmen, an official in Baghdad said. The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said the gunmen were wounded and detained by the Americans, but the U.S. military said the two were found dead.

When asked why Iraqi police did not intervene to stop the gunmen from fleeing, al-Mishawi said "they assumed it was American-on-American violence and wanted to stay out of it."

This detail seems odd, coupled with the fact that the attackers cleared three checkpoints.

Al-Mishawi said Monday that "the Americans have shut down the provincial government compound and everyone is being interrogated from the police chief, officers, down to the average policemen."

Zawahiri video: "If we are secure, you might be secure, and if we are safe, you might be safe"

Like those odds? Didn't think so. "Dr. Ayman al-Zawahiri Addresses U.S. President Bush’s Baghdad Security Plan in Video Speech from as-Sahab, 'The Correct Equation' – 1/2007," from the SITE Institute:

Dr. Ayman al-Zawahiri, al-Qaeda’s number two, presents a speech titled: “The Correct Equation,” in a 14:11 minute video produced by the group’s multimedia arm, as-Sahab. The speech, including English-subtitles, concerns the Iraq security plan announced by U.S. President George W. Bush to send an additional 20,000 American troops to Baghdad, and the necessity of the Muslims joining the Mujahideen and supporting their jihad in all theaters of war, including Afghanistan, Iraq, Palestine, Chechnya, Somalia, and Algeria. Zawahiri taunts Bush, questioning: “why send 20,000 only - why not send 50 or 100 thousand? Aren't you aware that the dogs of Iraq are pining for your troops' dead bodies?.” He then invites the American President to send the entire American Army to Iraq as he believes the Mujahideen are capable of destroying the equivalent of ten armies.

Continuing his interpretation of Bush’s address, or “ravings,” Zawahiri clarifies that America has not deprived al-Qaeda of safe haven in Afghanistan, as the Taliban under the command of Mullah Muhammad Omar have deprived the Americans of such in that country, evidenced by their bringing NATO to the forefront of the war. He then turns to the American people, reminding of past offers of security by reaching an “understanding” with Muslims, and warns that if they continue to follow the policies of Bush and his administration, then peace is impossible. The “correct equation,” as Zawahiri puts it, is security being a shared destiny, but not guaranteed. He states: “if we are secure, you might be secure, and if we are safe, you might be safe. And if we are struck and killed, you will definitely - with Allah's permission - be struck and killed.”

The correct equation: 2 + 2 = 5.

The remainder of the speech serves to incite Muslims to jihad, using Bush’s security plan and continuing actions in Afghanistan and Iraq, and now Somalia, as justification. Zawahiri argues that every Muslim today is responsible for the defense of Islam and the efforts to “liberate” Muslim captives, foremost being the “Blind Sheikh” Omar Abdel Rahman. Zawahiri also entreats “Arab nationalists and leftists” to return to Islam and refuse international law that has divided their land and Muslim Nation.

Al Qaeda in Iraq considered getting jihadists into US for attacks by using student visas

Will this raise an eyebrow at any of the colleges and universities nationwide, which, attracted by the possible windfall of out-of-state tuition, have looked to places like Saudi Arabia for prospective students?

"Details Emerge About Possible Terror Threat," by Pierre Thomas for ABC News:

WASHINGTON, Jan. 22, 2007 — Mimicking the hijackers who executed the Sept. 11 attacks, insurgents reportedly tied to al Qaeda in Iraq considered using student visas to slip terrorists into the United States to orchestrate a new attack on American soil.

Lt. Gen. Michael D. Maples, head of the Defense Intelligence Agency, recently testified that documents captured by coalition forces during a raid of a safe house believed to house Iraqi members of al Qaeda six months ago "revealed [AQI] was planning terrorist operations in the U.S."

At the time, Maples offered little additional insight into the possible terror plot. ABC News, however, has learned new details of what remains a classified incident that has been dealt with at the highest levels of government.

Sources tell ABC News that the plot may have involved moving between 10 and 20 suspects believed to be affiliated with al Qaeda in Iraq into the United States with student visas — the same method used by the 19 al Qaeda terrorists who struck American targets on Sept. 11.

U.S. officials now require universities to closely track foreign nationals who use student visas to study in the United States. University officials must report international students who fail to arrive on campus or miss class regularly.

In August, the FBI and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement alerted intelligence agencies and state and local law enforcement about 11 Egyptian students who had failed to report to their classes at Montana State University. The students were ultimately apprehended.

Still, despite the heightened precautions, some security analysts fear that skilled terrorists — handpicked because of their clean records and because they are carefully trained — could still slip through an academic setting.

The plot was discovered six months ago, roughly the same time that Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of al Qaeda in Iraq, was killed by coalition forces. Sources tell ABC News that the suspects involved in the effort to launch the U.S. attack were closely associated with Zarqawi.

The plan also came only months after Ayman al-Zawahiri, al Qaeda's No. 2, had requested that Zarqawi attempt an attack inside the United States.

"This appears to be the first hard evidence al Qaeda in Iraq was trying to attack us here at home," said ABC News consultant Richard Clarke, former chief counterterrorism adviser on the U.S. National Security Council.

The plan was uncovered in its early stages, and sources say there is no indication that the suspects made it into the United States. Officials also emphasize that there is no evidence of an imminent attack.

The hunt for suspects continues, however, and some fear that al Qaeda recruits in Iraq could be easily redirected.

"Anyone willing to go to Iraq to fight American troops is probably willing to try to come to the United States," Clarke said.

1948 Alert

Dinesh D'Souza will have to get to work on a second edition of his book, perhaps titling it Fred Astaire, Doris Day and Bing Crosby's Responsibility for 9/11.

Some of the hit songs of 1948, the year Sayyid Qutb discovered American depravity:

• "I'm Looking Over a Four Leaf Clover" by Art Mooney
• "Buttons and Bows" by Dinah Shore
• "All I Want For Christmas is My Two Front Teeth" by Spike Jones
• "Now Is The Hour" by Bing Crosby
• "It's Magic" by Doris Day

Some of the hit movies of 1948:

• The Treasure of the Sierra Madre
• Laurence Olivier’s Hamlet
• I Remember Mama
• Key Largo
• Easter Parade

Filth, filth, filth. No wonder they hate us.

Taliban to spend $1 million to open "jihad schools" in Afghanistan

Jihadi junction, what's your function? "Taliban to open ‘jihad schools’," from the Daily Times:

KABUL: Afghanistan’s Taliban insurgents say they are going to spend $1 million on opening schools in areas they control to counter the propaganda of the West and the Western-backed government.

The Taliban banned girls from education during their rule, and have attacked hundreds of schools and killed some teachers and pupils in recent years as part of their war against the government and its Western backers.

“The aims are to reopen schools so children who are deprived can benefit and secondly, to counter the propaganda of the West and its puppets against Islam, jihad and the Taliban,” a Taliban spokesman, Abdul Hai Mutmaen, said by telephone from an undisclosed location. “Students will be taught subjects that are in line with Islamic teaching and jihad,” he said late on Saturday.

Islamic leader in Somalia surrenders

This article spends considerable time on the status of Sheik Sharif Sheik Ahmed -- chairman of the Executive Council of Islamic Courts -- as a "moderate," and thus, supposedly someone the Somali government can work with.

But aside from the vague and useless notion of what defines the sort of "moderate" that we're expected to be excited about, Ahmed's surrender is a significant blow to the Islamic Courts movement, and its lingering aspirations to return to power. By Chris Tomlinson for Associated Press:

NAIROBI, Kenya - A top leader of Somalia's ousted Islamic movement seen by the U.S. as a potential key to preventing a widespread insurgency there surrendered to authorities and is under protection in Nairobi, officials said Monday.

Sheik Sharif Sheik Ahmed, who has been described by a U.S. diplomat as a moderate who could play a role in reconciling Somali factions, crossed into Kenya, went to a police station along the border on Sunday and was flown to Nairobi, according to a police report seen by The Associated Press.

The U.S. said it was not involved in protecting Ahmed, who apparently feared for his life in Somalia, where the remnants of his Council of Islamic Courts are being hunted by Ethiopian troops and Somali government forces.

"The U.S. government is not holding or interrogating Sheik Sharif Sheik Ahmed and was not involved in his capture or surrender," a U.S. Embassy official said, speaking on condition of anonymity as they weren't authorized to talk to the media.

U.S. Ambassador Michael Ranneberger has repeatedly said Ahmed is a moderate Islamic leader who should be part of a national reconciliation process in Somalia.

Ahmed was the chairman of the Executive Council of Islamic Courts and shared the leadership with the Sheik Hassan Dahir Aweys, who was chairman of the court's legislative council. While Ahmed is considered a moderate, Aweys is on a U.S. list of people with suspected ties to the al-Qaida terror network, though he has repeatedly denied having links to international terrorists.

If Ahmed agrees to hold talks with Somalia's government, it could be a major step toward preventing the widespread insurgency that many Islamic leaders have promised in Somalia.

This assertion is offered without source or additional explanation. With Sheik Aweys still on the loose, there is still ample incentive to fight, and there would be even with him in custody for the jihadists who will not compromise with the Somali government, or lay down their arms for anything short of an Islamic state.

[...]

On Sunday, Somalia's government spokesman, Abdirahman Dinari, said Kenya has handed over 34 Islamic militiamen, and that some may be senior leaders of the Islamic movement.

Rice: “There’s still a tendency to see these things in Sunni-Shia terms. But the Middle East is going to have to overcome that.”

Yep, that'll fix it, all right.

Condoleeza Rice proclaims that Muslims are "going to have to overcome" 1,400 years of hostility rooted in what they view as divine revelation. And pronto.

“I don’t think about it in terms of my reputation,” says Ms. Rice. Good thing.

"Events will take their own course, which is basically generalized civil war"

Historians catch up with Jihad Watch. I was recently sent a piece from a blog saying that we were "racists" for never believing that democracy would take hold in Iraq the way it did in Japan and Germany after World War II. This charge ignores, of course, the fact that neither Hugh Fitzgerald nor I have ever argued this on the basis of race, but on the basis of the ineluctable Sunni/Shi'ite hostility, and of the strong attachment to Sharia, which both Sunnis and Shi'ites regard as the law of Allah and hence preferable to any law based on human consensus. "Historians Offer Dismal Iraq Forecast," by Charles J. Hanley for The Associated Press:

To historians and others pondering Iraq, forecasting a final outcome for that sad land is like finding your way through one of its "shamal" sandstorms. You may not know where you're headed, but you know it's going to be dark.

The Middle East historian David Fromkin sees a breakup of the jerry-built nation. Phebe Marr, doyenne of Iraq scholars, sees "distrust and suspicion" too deep to overcome. "Bleak," concludes Baghdad University's Saad al-Hadithi.

"At the moment," said the British historian Niall Ferguson, "a happy ending has a 1-in-100 look about it."

In interviews with The Associated Press, few experts see much chance that President Bush's plan to add 21,500 troops to the U.S. force in Baghdad and western Iraq will suppress either the anti-U.S. insurgency or the bloody underground warfare between Sunni and Shiite Muslims, or induce a political settlement among the Sunni, Shiite and Kurdish factions.

The Senate this week is expected to begin action on a nonbinding resolution repudiating the Bush troop buildup. The measure was introduced by the Democratic-majority but has attracted some Republican support.

Mohamed el-Sayed Said, of Cairo's al-Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies, said he expects the growing U.S. political opposition to the war will lead at some point to a redeployment of American troops to northern Iraq's Kurdistan and to elsewhere in the Gulf region.

After that, said this Arab scholar, "events will take their own course, which is basically generalized civil war."

Posted at 6:32 AM | Comments (18)

The problem is not America...or me: An invitation for Dinesh D'Souza

When I saw the above screenshot at Hot Air of a new Fox News promo, I immediately thought of Dinesh D'Souza, who in his new book The Enemy At Home says that "the cultural left in this country is responsible for causing 9/11." I do not believe that either the left or the right in America is responsible for causing 9/11, which I believe took place because of the expansionist and totalitarian jihad ideology and the renewed strength of some in the Islamic world to further its ends -- with, to be sure, a healthy sense of grievance against the West used for recruitment purposes. But I have long stressed, and continue to believe on the basis of numerous historical precedents, that those grievances, if redressed, would not end the jihad, which would simply continue to recruit on the basis of different grievances.

In any case, I just discovered, via referrals from Powerline, that D'Souza goes farther, and blames me also for Islamic terrorism. I have his book but haven't finished reading it yet -- when I wrote this and this about interviews he conducted, I didn't know this was in his book. But I just found this on page 278:

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

Two of the three books he mentions, of course, are mine: Islam Unveiled and The Myth of Islamic Tolerance. His point about them, however, can just as easily be used against him: I have many times emphasized that the jihad threatens all Americans, both leftists and rightists. There is probably no better way to repel anti-jihad leftists, and push them into the arms of the jihadists (with whom so much of the left is already allied), than to dub them "the enemy at home." But irony aside, D'Souza's point here is wrong in numerous ways. First and foremost, he seems to assume that the jihadists have -- that's right -- "hijacked" the Religion of Peace. Dean Barnett puts this very well:

This view of things is dangerously misguided, and dangerously ignorant. The Radical Islamic world doesn’t hate us because our TV shows are too racy or our women too provocative. The Radical Islamic world hates us not for what we are but for what we aren’t. Specifically, the haters at issue loathe us because we’re not Muslims.

Here’s how the Ayatollah Khomeini put it:

“Those who know nothing of Islam pretend that Islam counsels against war. Those who say this are witless. Islam says: Kill all the unbelievers just as they would kill you all! Kill them, put them to the sword and scatter their armies.”

One of the things that makes “The Enemy at Home” so strange is that D’Souza never grapples with this side of Islam. Especially odd is the fact that even though D’Souza quotes Khomeini at several points, he never cites this particular speech. This is almost inexplicable; the above quote comes from a 1942 Khomeini work that is more or less the equivalent of the madman’s Gettysburg Address. It’s his signature piece. It defies belief that D’Souza delved even superficially into the Khomeini collection and these comments didn’t catch his eye.

Second, he assumes that peaceful Muslims will have a greater sense of solidarity with jihadists than with non-Muslims. That is indeed very likely true, but it makes hash of his entire thesis -- that social conservatives should ally with these "traditional" Muslims. For if these peaceful Muslims really abhor jihadism, they should have no reason to object to critical presentations of the elements of Islam that foster jihadism. But if such presentations will just drive them into the arms of the jihadists, then how committed could they really have been to peace and moderation in the first place? If they think "Islamophobic tracts" (a characterization I do not accept) are more threatening to their religion than acts of terrorism done in the name of Islam, how "traditional" and moderate could they possibly be?

This is a fundamental question, and it warrants debate, not the mainstream media's usual treatment (yes, both liberal and conservative) of assuming the correctness of one point of view without due consideration.

With full awareness of how important this question is, I will be working on a full review of his book this week. Certainly there is a personal element in this now, since he named my books, and I believe a reputedly responsible commentator such as Dinesh D'Souza should know better than to blame me (and Srdja Trifkovic) for terrorism, but the issues involved are far more important than personal affronts. I am hereby inviting and challenging Dinesh D'Souza to a debate, on the topic of "Is Critical Examination of Islam Helping Or Hurting the Defense Against the Jihad?" Or a similar topic of his choosing, in a venue of his choice, to which I will happily travel at my own expense. I also invite C-Span or anyone else to film this debate when it happens, and broadcast it far and wide. Or I will debate him on television, on radio, in print, or in all three.

I have no contact information for Dinesh D'Souza -- we were scheduled to debate on a show last week but he didn't show up. If anyone reading this knows him, please convey this invitation to him.

UPDATE: Dinesh D'Souza tells me we are scheduled to debate at CPAC. I haven't heard anything about that from CPAC, but I look forward to it.

Netanyahu to bring Ahmadinejad to trial

Good luck with that, Bibi. Not that the Thug-In-Chief doesn't deserve it, and more. From Reuters, with thanks to Rosie:

ISRAEL'S opposition leader Benjamin Netanyahu said overnight he hoped to bring Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to international trial for incitement to genocide.

Mr Ahmadinejad has provoked international outcry by referring to the killing of six million Jews in World War Two as a "myth" and calling for Israel to be "wiped off the map".

Speaking at a conference in Israel, Mr Netanyahu said he and other Israelis were trying to bring the Iranian leader to the International Court of Justice.

"We are working to bring Ahmadinejad to stand trial as a war criminal for his call for genocide," he said.

"The 1948 universal declaration of human rights does not just prohibit acts of genocide but also deals with incitement to genocide. And according to this, we are aiming to lobby international figures."

Mr Netanyahu, a former Israeli prime minister, said he had already discussed the initiative with diplomats, adding that he planned to visit Britain this week to lobby MPs there.

"I want to call on the world, the world that did not stop the Holocaust last time, (to) stop any attempt at a future Holocaust this time," he said.

Hamas attacks Al Arabiya network for "blasphemy"

This incident highlights several aspects of Hamas' mindset that are also prominent throughout other jihadist movements. One is the displacement of blame: their rage is not directed at whoever made the damaging statement on the tape, but at Al Arabiya for recording and publicizing it. Closely connected to that is the disproportional response to insult or embarrassment, all the more amplified when it involves high-ranking officials who are both corrupted by power and inclined to believe that their work in a supposedly divine cause somehow places them beyond accountability.

Lastly, the incident demonstrates the pattern of disbelief in the face of evidence that would convince a reasonable person otherwise: While Hamas has not offered an explanation of its own for the voice on the recording, it won't be surprising if they denounce the tape as a forgery by foreign intelligence agencies, as was widely claimed about the 2001 video in which Osama bin Laden bragged about the 9/11 attacks.

"Threats by Hamas prompt Arabic network's shutdown," by Sa'id Ghazali for the Boston Globe:

JERUSALEM -- The Arabic satellite network Al Arabiya ordered its reporters to stop working in the Gaza Strip yesterday after the governing Palestinian Islamist party Hamas attacked the network for blasphemy.

The threats from Hamas against the network highlight the delicate balancing act faced by international Arab networks, which often come under fire from Western governments that accuse their coverage of inflaming tensions in places like Iraq and the Palestinian territories. The networks have come under attack from Arab governments as well; the Iraqi government has repeatedly suspended Al Jazeera after the network aired stories unfavorable to the Shi'ite-dominated government.

Al Arabiya drew the wrath of Hamas after airing a recording that quoted Palestinian Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh saying that Hamas "will not accept conditional aid, even if it came from God."

Hamas officials told Al Arabiya not to air the quote, which reportedly came from a Palestinian Cabinet meeting. The Dubai-based network instead aired the quote along with a denial by a Hamas spokesman.

In response, the Palestinian government threatened to sue Arabiya. "It is a clear and deliberate defamation," government spokesman Ghazi Hamad said.

Al Arabiya's director of operations in Israel and the Palestinian territories, Nidal Hasan, said he had ordered the 42 employees in the station's Gaza bureau to stay home after receiving death threats from anonymous gunmen. "There are some people who might wrongly attack us," Hasan said.

Hasan has refused to apologize for airing the statement.

"We did nothing wrong," he said. "We did our jobs as we should, getting comments on the tape from both sides."

Palestine Press, a local news agency linked to a Fatah leader, Mohammed Dahlan, leaked the tape of what it said was a Jan. 10 Cabinet meeting. In a statement, the Fatah faction excoriated the Hamas government for attacking the network.

"Hamas has lost its balance by making such crazy threats against Al Arabiya and its employees in Gaza," the statement said, describing the threats as "reflecting the spirit of darkness against local, Arab, and international media organizations."

NYT investigation: "It is not possible to go to Afghanistan without the help of the I.S.I."

Our Friend and Ally has an ever-increasing amount of explaining to do, if only it were held to account. "Pakistani Role Seen in Taliban Surge at Border," by Carlotta Gall for the New York Times:

QUETTA, Pakistan — The most explosive question about the Taliban resurgence here along the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan is this: Have Pakistani intelligence agencies been promoting the Islamic insurgency?

The government of Pakistan vehemently rejects the allegation and insists that it is fully committed to help American and NATO forces prevail against the Taliban militants who were driven from power in Afghanistan in 2001.

Western diplomats in both countries and Pakistani opposition figures say that Pakistani intelligence agencies — in particular the powerful Inter-Services Intelligence and Military Intelligence — have been supporting a Taliban restoration, motivated not only by Islamic fervor but also by a longstanding view that the jihadist movement allows them to assert greater influence on Pakistan’s vulnerable western flank.

More than two weeks of reporting along this frontier, including dozens of interviews with residents on each side of the porous border, leaves little doubt that Quetta is an important base for the Taliban, and found many signs that Pakistani authorities are encouraging the insurgents, if not sponsoring them.

The evidence is provided in fearful whispers, and it is anecdotal.

At Jamiya Islamiya, a religious school here in Quetta, Taliban sympathies are on flagrant display, and residents say students have gone with their teachers’ blessings to die in suicide bombings in Afghanistan.

Three families whose sons had died as suicide bombers in Afghanistan said they were afraid to talk about the deaths because of pressure from Pakistani intelligence agents. Local people say dozens of families have lost sons in Afghanistan as suicide bombers and fighters.

One former Taliban commander said in an interview that he had been jailed by Pakistani intelligence officials because he would not go to Afghanistan to fight. He said that, for Western and local consumption, his arrest had been billed as part of Pakistan’s crackdown on the Taliban in Pakistan. Former Taliban members who have refused to fight in Afghanistan have been arrested — or even mysteriously killed — after resisting pressure to re-enlist in the Taliban, Pakistani and Afghan tribal elders said.

“The Pakistanis are actively supporting the Taliban,” declared a Western diplomat in an interview in Kabul. He said he had seen an intelligence report of a recent meeting on the Afghan border between a senior Taliban commander and a retired colonel of the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence.

Pakistanis and Afghans interviewed on the frontier, frightened by the long reach of Pakistan’s intelligence agencies, spoke only with assurances that they would not be named. Even then, they spoke cautiously.

[...]

The Inter-Services Intelligence once had an entire wing dedicated to training jihadis, he said. Today the religious parties probably have enough of their own people to do the training, but, he added, the I.S.I. so thoroughly monitors phone calls and people’s movements that it would be almost impossible for any religious party to operate a training camp without its knowledge.

“They trained the people who are at the heart of it all, and they have done nothing to roll back their protégés,” Mr. Haqqani said.

[...]

Pakistan has long seen jihadi movements like the Taliban as a counter to Indian and Russian influence next door in Afghanistan, the Western diplomat and other analysts said, and as a way to provide Pakistan with “strategic depth,” or a friendly buffer on its western border.

[...]

Three students from the madrasa went to Afghanistan recently on suicide missions, he said. The family of one of the men admitted that he had blown himself up but denied that he had attended the school. The man’s brother suggested that he had been forced into the mission and that someone had recruited him for payment.

President Musharraf relies on the religious party Jamiat Ulema-i-Islam, or J.U.I., which dominates this province, Baluchistan, as an important partner in the provincial and national parliaments.

At a madrasa, called simply Jamiya Islamiya, on winding Hajji Ghabi Road, a board in the courtyard proudly declares “Long Live Mullah Omar,” in praise of the Taliban leader, and “Long Live Fazlur Rehman,” the leader of J.U.I.

Members of the provincial government and Jamiat Ulema-i-Islam are frequent visitors to the school, the local opposition party member said, asking that his name not be used because he feared Pakistan’s intelligence services. People on motorbikes with green government license plates visit at night, he said, as do luxurious sport utility vehicles with blackened windows, a favorite of Taliban commanders.

Maulvi Noor Muhammad, a Jamiat Ulema-i-Islam representative from Baluchistan in the National Assembly, recently received a guest barefoot while sitting on the floor of a grubby district office in Quetta, a map of the world above him painted on the wall to represent his belief in worldwide Islamic revolution.

He denied providing the militants any logistical support. “The J.U.I. is not supporting the Taliban anymore,” he said. “We are only providing moral support. We pray for their success in ousting the foreign troops from the land of Afghanistan.”

On a recent morning, the deputy director of the Jamiya Islamiya madrasa, Qari Muhammad Ibrahim, declined to meet a female reporter for The New York Times but answered a question from a local male reporter.

He did not deny that some of the madrasa’s 280 students had gone to fight in Afghanistan. “In the Koran it is written that it is every Muslim’s right to fight jihad,” he said. “All we are telling them is what is in the Koran, and then it’s up to them to go to jihad.”

NATO officials and Western diplomats in Afghanistan have grown increasingly critical of Pakistan for allowing the Taliban leaders, commanders and soldiers to operate from their country, which has given an advantage to the insurgency in southern Afghanistan. In September, Gen. James L. Jones, then NATO’s supreme commander, told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that Quetta remained the headquarters of the Taliban movement.

Still, Pakistan has insisted that the Taliban leadership is not based in Quetta. “If there are Taliban in Quetta, they are few,” said Pakistan’s minister for information and broadcasting, Tariq Azim Khan. “You can count them on your fingers.”

American officials and Western diplomats noted that, when put under enough pressure, Pakistan had come through with flashes of cooperation. But that only seems to reinforce the view that Pakistan’s intelligence agencies are more in touch with what is going on in the Taliban insurgency than the government lets on publicly.

At the same time, a kind of dirty war is building between Afghan and Pakistani intelligence agencies. A senior Afghan intelligence official said one of its informers in Pakistan was recently killed and dumped in pieces in Peshawar, a border town. The Afghan intelligence service has also recently arrested two Afghan generals, one retired, who have been charged with spying for Pakistan, as well as a Pakistani suspected of being an intelligence agent.

[...]

Mr. Hai, 50, who is a Jamiat Ulema-i-Islam member, denied that his son had been persuaded to fight by anyone. “From the start it was his spirit to take part in jihad,” his father said. “It’s all to do with personal will. If someone agrees, then he goes. Even if someone wishes to, no one can stop him.”

It is an argument that supporters of the jihad use frequently. But for some of the families mourning their sons, there is no doubt that the madrasas and the religious parties are the first point of contact.

That was the conclusion reached by the family of Muhammad Daoud, a 22-year-old man from Pishin who disappeared more than a year ago.

Mr. Hai, 50, who is a Jamiat Ulema-i-Islam member, denied that his son had been persuaded to fight by anyone. “From the start it was his spirit to take part in jihad,” his father said. “It’s all to do with personal will. If someone agrees, then he goes. Even if someone wishes to, no one can stop him.”

It is an argument that supporters of the jihad use frequently. But for some of the families mourning their sons, there is no doubt that the madrasas and the religious parties are the first point of contact.

That was the conclusion reached by the family of Muhammad Daoud, a 22-year-old man from Pishin who disappeared more than a year ago.

[...]

Then, he said, a Taliban propaganda CD came out showing his son with a group of others taking an oath before the Taliban commander, Mullah Dadullah.

“He had a shawl over his head and was preparing for a suicide bombing,” Mr. Gul said. “He said, ‘I am fighting for God, and I am ready for this.’”

His eldest son, Allah Dad, 33, blamed the jihadi groups and the Inter-Services Intelligence. “We don’t know how he made contact with those jihadi groups,” he said. “There are some groups active in taking people to Afghanistan and they are active in Quetta.

“All Taliban are I.S.I. Taliban,” he added. “It is not possible to go to Afghanistan without the help of the I.S.I. Everyone says this.”

Muslims in police will rise up, Bakri insists

Jihadist Sheikh Omar Bakri casts aspersions on the loyalty of Muslim police officers to the British state. Expect in response a large-scale, no-holds-barred, noisy and exuberant display of British patriotism from an indignant, besmirched Muslim community in Britain (just kidding).

By Mike Hirst and Adam Lusher in the Sunday Telegraph, with thanks to Nicolei:

Moderate British Muslims in the police, Armed Forces and Civil Service will one day revolt against the system to "crush it from within", according to Omar Bakri Mohammed, the notorious Islamic extremist. In claims condemned as a cynical attempt to create division, the co-founder of the extremist al-Muhajiroun group said that Britain was "digging a deep hole" for itself by allowing Muslims into the Services and Whitehall.

Speaking exclusively to The Sunday Telegraph in Lebanon, where he moved in August 2005 — at about the time it emerged the British authorities might charge him with incitement to treason — he claimed police officers, soldiers and civil servants would one day become radicalised.

"When you start to ask Muslims to join your Army and your police you are making a grave mistake. That British Muslim who joins the police today will one day read the Koran and will have an awakening," he said.

Muslims in Britain should at least be so kind as to explain why non-Muslims should not actually be concerned about this.

"Those moderates are one day going to be practising Muslims. Now what happens if they are British police or in the Army and they have weapons? How much information do they have about you that they will use to serve the global struggle?

"They will revolt against the system if they have been failed by your foreign policy which is oppressive against Islam, or have been contacted by people who believe Britain is a domain of war."

In remarks almost certain to cause widespread anger among the survivors and relatives of victims, he also claimed that the world was a better place after the July 7 bombings in London. "I believe it is a better place for Islam and Muslims… but not for non-Muslims. What's happening around the world is good and positive for Islam."

Fitzgerald: Palestine [sic]

"Talking to newsmen at Chaklala Airbase before his departure, Musharraf said the world should resolve the problems faced by the Ummah urgently, to get rid of terrorism and extremism.

President Musharraf said an urgent solution of problems is must due to gravity of situation in Iraq, Iran, Palestine and Lebanon."
-- from this article

What is "Palestine" as referred to so blithely by Musharraf, and reported as if it were not to be questioned? The toponym "Palestine" was used in Western Christendom to refer to that land on both sides of the river Jordan which roughly corresponded to Biblical Palestine. More recently, it was the name given to that territory set aside by the League of Nations under the Mandate for Palestine for the establishment of the Jewish National Home that became the State of Israel -- after Israel successfully defended itself from the attacking Arabs during the War of Independence.

The use of the word "Palestine" by Arabs and Muslims is an attempt to efface Israel, and to replace it by a term that reifies that which does not exist -- an Arab "Palestine." It is not an innocent matter, devoid of meaning. Those non-Muslims who, like Blair, may refer to "Palestine" are in fact behaving, nolens-volens or perhaps willingly, as mouthpieces for Arab propaganda. No one who uses the term "Palestine" at present is doing anything other than furthering the Arab and Muslim worldview.

After each appearance of the word "Palestine" in the Western, i.e., non-Muslim press, there should be an indication that there is not now (and many hope there never will be) a state called "Palestine." It is as phony as a state called "Mandela" which some black-power advocates wished, a dozen years ago, to carve out of parts of Boston, or the "Caliphate" that was created by a certain Turk in Cologne and which attracted a few thousand potential inhabitants.

There is a "Palestinian" Authority. There are local Arabs carefully renamed after 1967 as the "Palestinian people" -- a phrase that appears nowhere in the statements of any Arab leader, or U.N. ambassador, or any other public figure, between 1948 and 1967. And even after the Six-Day War, it took several years for the new phrase, as with any propagandistic effort, to stick. There is not now a "Palestine." What was known in the West as "Palestine" is the current state of Israel and includes the land to which it had right by the terms of the League of Nations' Mandate. Israel has a legal, historic, and moral claim to that land that is much more considerable than anything concocted by the Arab Muslims. There are Arabs and Jews in Israel, as there are Arabs and Kurds in Iraq and Arabs and Berbers in Algeria and Morocco, and Arabs and Copts in Egypt. But there is not, even if the phrase is used a hundred million times, a distinct "Palestinian people." And there is no "Palestine" that should rightly be referred to without the reporter or news agency quoting someone using the phrase taking the time to simply indicate its not referring to a real country -- lest the ignorant be confused.

Here is how Musharraf's little comment, deplorable for many reasons, should appear if the Khaleej Times report is reprinted or quoted:

"President Musharraf said an urgent solution of problems is must due to gravity of situation in Iraq, Iran, Palestine [sic] and Lebanon."

One mo' time:

Palestine [sic], Palestine [sic], Palestine [sic].

Such a country does not exist. Muslims, both of the Slow and the Fast Jihad variety, would like it to exist. Infidels understand that the existence of such a state would create for Israel an intolerable threat to its existence, and would almost certainly lead after a suitable interval to Israel's disappearance and to the loss of the Holy Land to the Western world. That would be a colossal blow to Western morale, which is already still reeling, subliminally, from the effects of the Nazi murders and widespread participation or support by others in those murders and the battening on that loot. It would lead not to a sating of Muslim appetites in the world but to a whetting of those very appetites. For there is no such thing as "compromise" with Infidels. Either the forces of Islam can keep fighting, or they must stop fighting temporarily, or seek new instruments of warfare, if they are defeated on the battlefield. But the state of war between Dar al-Islam and Dar al-Harb continues forever, and is not affected by a temporary hudna, or by the inability of Muslims, for the moment, to attack.

Triumph in one area -- and the disappearance of Israel would be a great triumph -- does not lead to a willingness or desire to stop working steadily for the spread of Islam, and against all barriers to its ultimate dominance everywhere. The Qur'an does not say, and Allah never said: Win back from the Jews any land that they may control, and stop there. The Qur'an does not say, Allah never said: Take back all the lands that once were part of Dar al-Islam, including Spain, Sicily, parts of southern France, Greece, Serbia, Croatia, Slovenia, Rumania, Bulgaria, much of Hungary, most of India, and so on, and then the Jihad can stop. No: Allah commands that the world belongs to him, and to Islam, and to the Believers. Why should it be otherwise?

Indeed. Why should it be otherwise?

Terror watch on Mecca pilgrims

“It is absolutely wrong that people who are going to Mecca for entirely religious purposes should be monitored by the security services. It is a sad commentary on Britain’s relations with Saudi Arabia.” No, it's a sad commentary on the prevalence of attachment to violent jihad among all too many Muslims, and the failure of Muslims in Britain or anywhere else to separate the jihadists from their ranks. By David Leppard in the TimesOnline, with thanks to Sr. Soph:

THE intelligence agencies are monitoring every Muslim who travels from Britain to Mecca on pilgrimage in a wider effort to piece together intelligence on suspected Al-Qaeda terrorist activity.

A senior Whitehall official has disclosed that the operation targeting trips to the holy city in Saudi Arabia by more than 100,000 British Muslims is part of a trawl by MI5 and MI6 for information about movements of suspected terrorists. It follows evidence that British Islamic terrorists have visited the city before carrying out attacks in Britain and abroad.

The importance of the intelligence operation was one of the reasons given by spy chiefs for maintaining ties with Saudi Arabia when the Saudi government was threatening to break off intelligence ties over a bribery investigation by the Serious Fraud Office (SFO) into BAE, Britain’s prime defence contractor....

This weekend Muslim leaders voiced their unhappiness about the operation. Dr Ghayasuddin Siddiqui, leader of the Muslim parliament, said: “It is absolutely wrong that people who are going to Mecca for entirely religious purposes should be monitored by the security services. It is a sad commentary on Britain’s relations with Saudi Arabia.”

Teenager "kidnapped" for suicide mission

When recruitment fails, there's always force. Or is this story just Sadiqullah's attempt to avoid prosecution? "Waziristan teenager ‘kidnapped’ from Peshawar for suicide mission in Karachi," by Zar Nageen in the Daily Times, with thanks to DFS:

KARACHI: A teenager from South Waziristan has surfaced in Karachi with the extraordinary tale of being kidnapped by people who told him that they would make him carry out target killings and a suicide attack.

Sadiqullah, who says he is 14, told Daily Times from the office of the Ansar Burney Welfare Trust Friday that he was kept in a comfortable place with many other boys and five girls.

According to him, he is a class eight student who boards at a hostel of the Frontier Children Academy, Hayatabad, Peshawar. His father Sardar Ali Khan is a businessman from South Waziristan. He claims he was kidnapped from his hometown on January 16 and reached Karachi Thursday night where he turned up at the Karachi Press Club after spending three days with his kidnappers.

[...]

Sadiqullah asked the abductors how they managed to make a video of them while they were in the academy. He was told that they had been following him and his friend for several months and wanted them to perform some special task. They said that they would also bring Irfan in a few days and then they would have to commit several murders and a suicide attack.

Sadiqullah said that it was impossible for him to kill anything. Upon this, the kidnappers signalled to the other boys in the room who started beating him. He said that he fought back and was injured. He was tied in a corner of the room and was told that he should think over his decision for which he was given 25 minutes. Eventually, Sadiqullah said he agreed to kill others in order to protect his own life.

Read it all.

Fitzgerald: The murder of Hrant Dink

When awards are handed out, they often go to the wrong people. It is not the hapless Mohammed El Baradei, nor that apologist-for-Islam ("the mistreatment of women does not come from Islam") Shirin Ebadi, who deserve that Nobel for Peace, but rather Ayaan Hirsi Ali and other brave apostates. And the same is true for those prizes awarded to journalists.

Who has given a prize to Flemming Rose? Or to Hrant Dink?

Hrant (pronounced "Erant") Dink was a non-Muslim victim of Muslim hatred of non-Muslims. He was shot because he was an Armenian citizen of Turkey, who thought that the government and people of Turkey should own up to the mass-murder (genocide) of the Armenians. He was not, and could not be, a true "Turk" according to the definition supplied by Turkish nationalists.

The particular variant on Islam operative in the murder of Hrant Dink was the Kemalist cult of "the Turk" -- Kemalism, in constraining Islam, offered a replacement cult, the cult of Ataturk and of The Turk. But in this case it can be seen to have adopted to a new age essentially the same attitudes. The violence and aggression of Islam, the inability to conceive of non-Muslims as fully equal legally and socially to Muslims, have carried over into the Kemalist substitute for Islam -- the cult of "the Turk" by which the past civilizations of Anatolia, its entire history, back to the Hittites, is ascribed to "the Turks." This is another variant on the Muslim desire to ignore everything that happened before Islam arrived as merely the time of "Jahiliyya." That cannot be done in the case of Turkey: too many impressive remnants of classical antiquity, as well as of Byzantium, remain and must remain -- if only for the Western tourists. The solution of the Kemalist-nationalists was to take that pre-Islamic past and enroll it in a counter-myth: the myth of the Turk to whom all this somehow belongs, and for which he, the glorious Turk, is somehow responsible. The educated elite realize that this is absurd, but as in any country, and especially in such a country as Turkey, how few must be those members of the educated elite who are immune to both Islam and to the Myth of the Turk.

The re-emergence of Islam has led some Turks, including the one who waited to kill Hrant Dink, to be possessed by a syncretistic mix. The non-Turk means the non-Muslim citizen of Turkey -- Armenian, Greek, or Jew. No offense must be given by these inferior citizens to the cult of the Turk, or to "the Turkish Nation." There is the same readiness to be offended, the same division of the universe between Us and Them (in the case of Islam it is Believer and Infidel, and in the case of Muslim Turks who have embraced Kemalism it can be, for the primitive, the true Turk and the non-Turk), the same recourse to violence.

Hrant Dink should be remembered, and that memory honored, and not only in Sausalito or Watertown, but everywhere. And the reasons for his killing should be understood, including the reflection of the persistence of Islamic attitudes in Turks, even those who are "defending the Turkish nation from slander" rather than "defending Muhammad from blasphemy." In the minds of Turkish Muslims, these attitudes are mutually reinforcing.

One more thing.

This should be it, as far as entry into the EU is concerned. Call off the farce. And this should also be the time when the Bush Administration reads Turkey the riot act about Kurdistan, and starts to make plans for that independent state, and tells the Turkish government that it had better accept the American-extorted guarantees that there will be no territorial claim made on Turkey by the new and independent Kurdistan, but that Syria and Iran are fair game. And if it doesn't accept that? Then Turkey, whose military is entirely dependent on American re-quipping, American spare parts, American training, can see that American connection go up in smoke from the top of Mount Ararat. No more nonsense about being afraid of "the Turkish reaction." The Turkish government can get with the new program, with those guarantees given by the Kurds to the Americans (and without American diplomatic and military support an independent Kurdistan could never exist) or face abandonment by its main, and only sure ally. And if the Turkish government thinks that the Arabs would or could ever be an ally of Turkey, rather than mischief-makers intent on reversing 80 years of Kemalism, it should be disabused of that thought quickly.

Jihad group: Dialogue cannot replace guns

And in response, non-Muslim leaders will...call for more dialogue. And probably get a few aid packages ready.

"Dialogue cannot replace guns: LeT," from the Times of India, with thanks to Sr. Soph:

NEW DELHI: Even as the Hurriyat team visiting Pakistan met president Pervez Musharraf and made appropriate 'peace noises', the main driver of terror in Jammu & Kashmir, Lashkar-e-Taiba, made it clear that it was not prepared to buy the argument that dialogue could replace guns.

In an indication that it did not set much store from attempts at normalcy being mounted by Hurriyat, which has often been seen to be more than receptive to signals from Islamabad, LeT boss Hafiz Saeed said: "It is a historical fact that nations have always achieved their independence through sacrifices on the battlefront."

Promising to continue militancy in the Valley, he told a gathering after Friday prayers in Lahore that jehadis will "fully support the legitimate struggle for freedom of the Kashmiri people". This made it quite apparent that whatever the Hurriyet may say, the jehadis continue to see Kashmir as a religious and political cause that they are bent on achieving.

Saeed's statements were timed to offset, and even counter, the late-evening meeting of the moderate faction of Hurriyat with Musharraf.

World should resolve problems faced by Ummah: Musharraf

Dinesh D'Souza has found someone who agrees with him: Pervez Musharraf. There is no recognition from Musharraf here of the manifest fact that what are commonly known as terrorism and extremism spring from the jihad imperative, not from conditions within the Ummah that can be repaired by those outside, or from conditions outside the Ummah that enrage the Ummah. Maybe Pervez has been reading D'Souza's Enemy At Home.

Regular Jihad Watch readers will recognize this abdication of responsibility as pandemic among mujahedin and self-proclaimed moderate Islamic spokesmen. If a Muslim leader ever said anything to the effect of "Muslims themselves provoke 'Islamophobia': some by performing acts of violence in the name of Islam and others by blaming those acts of violence on non-Muslims instead of cleaning their own house," I would faint dead away.

From the Khaleej Times, with thanks to Sr. Soph:

ISLAMABAD — President Gen. Pervez Musharraf yesterday left for Riyadh as part of a 5-day trip to the Middle East which would also take him to the United Arab Emirates (UAE).

Talking to newsmen at Chaklala Airbase before his departure, Musharraf said the world should resolve the problems faced by the Ummah urgently, to get rid of terrorism and extremism.

President Musharraf said an urgent solution of problems is must due to gravity of situation in Iraq, Iran, Palestine and Lebanon.

Will they rest easy in Tel Aviv tonight?

Speaking of things people never said, try this one on for size:

"As the Imam said, Israel must be wiped off the map," said Ahmadinejad, referring to Iran's revolutionary leader Ayat Allah Khomeini.

That one is from Al-Jazeera: "Ahmadinejad: Wipe Israel off map." Posted October 28, 2005.

Now compare this one:

Across the world, a dangerous rumor has spread that could have catastrophic implications. According to the legend, Iran's President has threatened to destroy Israel, or, to quote the misquote, said that "Israel must be wiped off the map". Contrary to popular belief, this statement was never made, as the following article will prove.

That one is also from Al-Jazeera: "The rumor of the century," by Arash Norouzi. Posted January 19, 2007 (thanks to Doc Washburn).

In that piece, Norouzi attempts to debunk the common understanding of one statement Ahmadinejad made on October 25, 2005. But no one should be taken in by this. There is no word from Arash Norouzi on these other statements of Ahmadinejad:

"I say accomplishment of a world without America and Israel is both possible and feasible."

"We ask the West to remove what they created sixty years ago and if they do not listen to our recommendations, then the Palestinian nation and other nations will eventually do this for them."

"Soon all of Palestine will be liberated."

"The world will be in the hands of Islam over the next few years."

Mainstream media covering up jihad killing in Turkey

Jihad Watch reader Paul has informed me that in its coverage of the murder of journalist Hrant Dink in Turkey, the mainstream media is neglecting to mention that the killer cried, "I shot the non-Muslim," as we reported here yesterday.

That little detail appeared in a Reuters report, but now, Paul points out, it is gone. The original Reuters story containing the quote is still at Gulf Times.

Nor is it mentioned in the New York Times report on the assassination, or CNN's. AFP? Nope. AP? Forget it. It likewise goes unmentioned in AP's story on the arrest of three suspects in the murder.

Now why would this be initially reported and then disappear without a trace (or a retraction)? If it were inaccurate, I would expect some kind of correction or retraction to appear. And I certainly know from personal experience that the mainstream media, both liberal and conservative, is extremely reluctant to discuss the possibility that there might be some aspect of Islam that incites to violence, or that Muslims are committing violence because of religious principles, not because of poverty or ethnicity or Abu Ghraib or Britney Spears or whatever. And then there are the powerful Muslim advocacy groups in Western countries, which portray any honest depiction of jihad violence as "Islamophobia."

Was this "I shot the non-Muslim" cry killfiled because of political correctness and fear? So that the foolish kuffar would go back to sleep, untroubled by anxieties of jihad?

UPDATE: Paul tells me that Charles Johnson at LGF, who is far better at this sort of detective work than I am, has found a Telegraph story that translates the cry as "I shot the infidel." Paul observes that that is much more likely to be what was actually said, and I agree.

DNA confirms death of Abu Sayyaf chief

A major figure is out of the picture in the Philippines Jihad. Khadaffy Janjalani Update. By Oliver Teves for Associated Press:

MANILA, Philippines - DNA tests confirmed the death of the leader of the al-Qaida-linked Abu Sayyaf terror group that was responsible for the beheading of a California tourist and the kidnapping of two American missionaries, officials said Saturday.

The Abu Sayyaf leader, Khadaffy Janjalani, was killed in September in fighting with U.S.-backed Philippine troops, who also killed Janjalani's possible successor in an operation on Tuesday.

The deaths of Janjalani and Abu Sulaiman, who was wanted in the abduction of the three Americans and the deaths of two of them, mark a major victory in the campaign against Islamic militants in the south of the archipelago after years of bombings and kidnappings.

The FBI conducted the tests on remains found buried in the jungles of southern Jolo island in December, comparing the DNA with that of Janjalani's imprisoned brother, said military Chief of Staff Gen. Hermogenes Esperon.

"The Armed Forces of the Philippines is proud to announce that we have neutralized the center of gravity of terrorism in the Philippines," Esperon said.

Martin and Gracia Burnham, a missionary couple from Wichita, Kan., and Guillermo Sobero of Corona, Calif., were taken by Abu Sayyaf from a resort island in May 2001. Sobero was beheaded by the militants and Martin Burnham was killed during a military rescue in June 2002 in which his wife was wounded.

The U.S. Embassy said Janjalani's death marks "an important and positive step forward in the ultimate goal of eliminating the ruthless and dangerous Abu Sayyaf group, and in destroying its links with international terrorist groups," such as Indonesian-based Jemaah Islamiyah.

Police warned that Abu Sayyaf could stage retaliatory attacks.

[...]

Janjalani, who had a $5 million U.S. bounty for his capture or death, escaped from police detention in 1995. He took over Abu Sayyaf from his older brother, group founder Abdurajak Abubakar Janjalani, after he was killed in 1998.

Abu Sayyaf has been linked to several deadly attacks in the Philippines, including a 2004 bombing that gutted a ferry, killing 116 people.

The group, which is believed to have about 400 followers and says it is fighting to establish a separate Muslim state in the southern Philippines, has also carried out mass kidnappings. Among them was the seizure of dozens of students and teachers in the southern island province of Basilan in 2000, and the abduction of 17 Filipinos and the three Americans.

Janjalani was killed in a clash with soldiers on southern Jolo island on Sept. 4, about a month after the military launched a major offensive backed by U.S. troops, which provide training and intelligence support.

The offensive on Jolo, about 600 miles south of Manila, has targeted Janjalani, Sulaiman, and two top Indonesian terror suspects blamed for the October 2002 Bali, Indonesia, bombings that killed 202 people.

Police seize Muslim 'kill enemies' videos

Of course, he meant "kill them by means of a personal struggle against things like mischievousness, temptation and personal harm." Feiz Mohammed Update by Simon Kearney and Tracy Ong in The Australian, with thanks to all who sent this in:

FIREBRAND cleric Sheik Feiz Mohamed's defence of his comments on a DVD calling children to jihad has been undermined by revelations, the video also urges Muslims to kill the enemies of Islam and praises martyrs with a violent interpretation of jihad.

In the DVD, which runs for almost four hours, Sheik Feiz describes inmates of Guantanamo Bay as better Muslims than those in Australia, who would would not forsake their lifestyles for martyrdom.

"The brothers in Cuba are better than us," he said. "They are being examined through the best examination (a reference to God's judgment) and the like of them worldwide."

The sheik, who left Australia in 2005 to live in his father's homeland, Lebanon, exorts his followers to seek the honourable death of the believer, quoting from narrations about the prophet Mohammed.

"They fight in the cause, they kill others - the enemies who fight Islam and they themselves are killed as martyrs," he said. He gives the example of a mujaheddin who fought in Bosnia in the 1990s who spoke of nothing but jihad and was killed on the battlefield. "What a beautiful person to be associated with. Would you not like to be an associate of this person?"

"They fight in the cause, they kill others" is an echo of Qur'an 9:111: "they fight in His cause, and slay and are slain...."

The DVD was a recording of a series of passionate fire-and-brimstone sermons that told his audience over several weeks nearly four years ago his thoughts on the way to live their lives. "This is our intention that we want to have children and offer them as soldiers defending Islam, loving Islam," he said....

One of Sheik Feiz's former students, Zeky Mallah, who was acquitted of terrorism charges, said the sermon was normal. "That's something that's normal with any Islamic scholar. It's just a way of speaking about things," he said.

Sheik Feiz told The Australian on Thursday that his reference to jihad did not mean violence. He said he was against suicide bombing and violence against others.

However, the DVD is littered with references to violence and a call to arms - most of which is made using examples of historical warriors as an admonishment to modern Muslims for straying from their path.

"If you're a hardliner, you'll say these in lectures; if you're a moderate, you'll keep these views to yourself," Mr Mallah said. "It's not really inciting violence. It is saying to stand up for yourself, to defend yourself and defend your land."

Muslim internet forums were buzzing with criticism of the media for running the story yesterday, accusing news outlets of misinterpreting the meaning of jihad, which can also mean a peaceful quest to be a good Muslim.

Yes, of course. It's all the fault of misinterpretation by news outlets. Feiz Mohammed bears none of the responsibility. How could he? It's all Islamophobia.

Trial begins for Egyptian blogger accused of "insulting Islam"

An update on this story. "Trial begins in 'insulting Islam' case," by Nadia Abou El-Magd for Associated Press:

CAIRO, Egypt - An Egyptian blogger went on trial Thursday on charges of insulting Islam and causing sectarian strife with his Internet writings.

It was Egypt's first prosecution of a blogger, and it came as Washington has backed away from pressuring Egypt to improve its human rights record and bring democratic reform.

The defendant, Abdel Kareem Nabil, often denounced Islamic authorities and criticized Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak on his Arabic-language blog. He has been in detention since November and faces up to nine years in prison if convicted.

Egypt has arrested a string of pro-democracy bloggers over the past year, sparking condemnation from human rights groups.

Nabil's trial in Alexandria began two days after Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice met with Mubarak, seeking support for a new U.S. strategy on calming violence in Iraq. But unlike past visits to Egypt when she pressed demands for greater democracy, Rice made no reference to reform. Instead she praised the two countries' "important strategic relationship -- one that we value greatly."

In court Thursday, Nabil was charged with inciting sedition, insulting Islam, harming national unity and insulting the president, a court official said, speaking on condition of anonymity because of court rules.

Other bloggers have been detained and released without charges. They concentrated on politics, unlike Nabil, who wrote often on religion. In his blog Nabil was a fierce critic of conservative Muslims and in particularly of al-Azhar University, one of the most prestigious religious institutions in the Sunni Muslim world, where he was a law student.

He was thrown out of the university in March, and in his last blog entry before his arrest blamed al-Azhar for pushing the government to investigate him.

His blog can be found here, though most of it is in Arabic. There is also an English-language site in support of him, FreeKareem.org.

Bangkok New Year's Eve bombings the work of Islamic jihadist group

When these bombings took place, initial reports attributed them to the jihadists in southern Thailand. I posted a story to that effect here. Then later the current Prime Minister of Thailand, a Muslim, blamed them on his predecessor, whom he had removed from office in a coup. I noted this in an update to the story, and later took it down altogether since the incident didn't seem jihad-related -- which didn't stop the flood of "You rushed to judgment" emails from coming in from those who feel threatened by this site, despite the fact that in both the original posting and the update I had simply reported what was in the wire service reports.

Anyway, it looks as if those who "rushed to judgment" were correct: Thai intelligence has uncovered a link to Jemaah Islamiah. "Bangkok bombings the work of JI," by Ron Corben in The Australian, with thanks to JE:

THAI intelligence agencies say operatives of the regional terror network Jemaah Islamiah were directly involved in the New Year's Eve bombings in the Thai capital that left three dead and 40 wounded.

In reports seen by The Weekend Australian, the agencies say a key JI leader in Thailand's southern Narathiwat province was directly involved in the planning of the operation. The link contradicts earlier comments by military-installed Prime Minister Surayud Chulanont who said the bombings appeared to be unrelated to the violence in the south, which has claimed more than 1800 lives since early 2004.

"From the evidence we have gathered, there is a slim chance that it is related to the southern insurgency," Mr Surayud said in the early hours of New Year's Day soon after the bloodshed.

"It is likely related to people who lost political benefits," he said, referring to the former Thaksin Shinawatra administration that was ousted in a coup in September amid allegations of corruption and abuse of power and fears of street clashes.

In an interview with CNN this week, Mr Thaksin, who is now living in exile, denied any involvement with the attacks.

No group has claimed responsibility for the bombings.

The eight bombs, set in crowded tourist areas that left at least seven foreigners among the wounded, cast a pall over the city that had largely escaped violence in a year of political turmoil.

However, Thai intelligence reports draw a direct link with the southern insurgency, including JI.

Somali jihadists attack president

The Somali Jihad Is Not Over Update: "Somalian Islamists attack president," from the Telegraph, with thanks to DFS:

Fears grew of a resurgence of the Islamist movement in Somalia last night after rebels hammered the president's residence with mortar fire before attacking his Ethiopian guards.

A government source said that Abdullahi Yusuf, the president, was inside Villa Somalia in Mogadishu when five mortar rounds hit after dusk last night. Suspected rebels from the deposed Islamic Courts Union then launched an assault on the compound before being beaten back by his guards in a 20-minute battle.

The attack came as gunfire and explosions were heard across the capital, the most spectacular violence since Mr Yusuf took up residence in Mogadishu 11 days ago.

Brown: I'll get Muslims to take pride in Britain

And not just pride, but Churchillian pride. But he doesn't explain how he will do this, or how he intends to confront Islamic supremacism. From the Daily Mail, with thanks to the Constantinopolitan Irredentist:

Gordon Brown today signalled that his first task as Prime Minister would be to get Muslims to rally around a "Churchillian" pride in Britain.

Finally admitting that he expected to take over from Tony Blair this year, the Chancellor said that he wanted to promote a "modern patriotism" as an alternative to Islamic extremism. Mr Brown said: "I believe we can do more to separate some Muslims from the dark forces that they can be susceptible to."

Good luck, Mr. Skywalker.

"Uncovered meat" cleric planning to return to Australia

And he can commiserate with Sheik Feiz Mohammed about his having his statements supposedly misinterpreted and taken out of context. "Sheik due back as controversy continues," from The West:

It might sound improbable, but Sheik Taj Aldin Alhilali is hoping to sneak back into Sydney next week quietly and without fuss.

Not much about Australia's senior Muslim cleric has been quiet or fuss-free since his comments last year comparing immodestly dressed women to uncovered meat, and last week's remarks to Egyptian television that Australians were liars.

Fearing another media circus greeting his return from his two-month self-imposed exile to Mecca and Egypt, the sheik is even keeping the date of his arrival from his closest advisers.

His absence from Sydney, however, has not dulled debate on his contentious role as the spiritual leader of Australia's 300,000 Muslims, with rival Islamic factions still divided over his future.

The newly established Australian National Imams Council has given itself the task of uniting the Islamic community's fractured leadership and will discuss the sheik's position as grand mufti at its first conference in April, after rescheduling it from January.

But rival groups in the splintered community dispute the authority of the council which is made up of 77 imams from around Australia, including Alhilali.

The controversial Islamic Charity Projects Association (ICPA) - an organisation with a long history of antagonism with Alhilali and his followers - says the National Imams Council is a whitewash group hand picked by Alhilali.

[...]

The ICPA has been a long-time opponent of Alhilali, and his followers have accused the organisation of being associated with the group Al-Ahbash, which was linked to the assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri in 2005.

Keysar Trad, founder of the Islamic Friendship Association and one of Alhilali's strongest allies and his regular spokesman and defender, said the mufti has huge support among the Muslim community in Australia.

[...]

He said the broader issues will test the credibility of the unproven Australian National Imams Council at its first conference.

"If the first thing this council does is deal with the mufti in a negative way, then it has lost its credibility in the Muslim community, it will lose its support," Mr Trad said.

"Because we have bigger issues than this."

Dems seek to bar U.S. attacks on Iran

"Do we have so little confidence in the diplomats of the United States that we're not willing to let them talk with somebody we disagree with?" All right. Let's talk to Herr Ahmadinejad, Mr. Chamberlain. Prepare a plane to Munich. Our diplomacy will be particularly effective once the Iranians know that there is no possibility that we will use force.

By Laurie Kellman for Associated Press, with thanks to Kemaste:

Democratic leaders in Congress lobbed a warning shot Friday at the White House not to launch an attack against Iran without first seeking approval from lawmakers.

"The president does not have the authority to launch military action in Iran without first seeking congressional authorization," Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., told the National Press Club....

President Bush said last week the U.S. will "seek out and destroy" networks providing that support. While top administration officials have said they have no plans to attack Iran itself, they have declined to rule it out....

Last week, Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Joseph Biden, D-Del., challenged the president's ability to make such a move. In a letter to Bush, Biden asked the president to explain whether the administration believes it could attack Iran or Syria "without the authorization of Congress, which does not now exist."

Meanwhile, Lee Hamilton, the Democratic co-chair of the Iraq Study Group, told the House Foreign Affairs Committee on Friday that the U.S. must try to engage Iran and Syria in a constructive dialogue on Iraq because of the countries' influence in the conflict.

The Bush administration, and several members of Congress, say they oppose talks with Iran and Syria because of their terrorist connections. Bringing the two countries into regional talks aimed at reducing violence in Iraq was one of the study group's recommendations.

"Do we have so little confidence in the diplomats of the United States that we're not willing to let them talk with somebody we disagree with?" Hamilton asked.

The 8-Million Muslim Lie

A trenchant editorial from Investor's Business Daily (thanks to PRCS):

Demographics: Since Muslim Keith Ellison's election to Congress, there's been a lot of noise in the media about the growing clout of the 8 million-Muslim electorate. Eight million?

'There are 8 million Muslims in America now," boasted a spokeswoman for something called the Muslim Advancement Society. She appeared on CNN to talk about what a proud day it was for her and other Muslim-Americans to see a Muslim brother sworn into Congress for the first time.

It seems the size of the Muslim population in America jumps by an additional million every other year or so. Just a couple of years ago the consensus number bandied about in the media was 7 million. Before 9/11 it was 6 million.

Politicians in Washington are intimidated by the figure. They believe it.

But it's a wildly inflated estimate manufactured by the Council on American-Islamic Relations, something that the media could easily refute if they dared — simply by deconstructing CAIR's unscientific methodology.

While the number of Muslims is growing thanks to higher birthrates and immigration, it's nowhere near CAIR's claim. Even the most generous independent estimate puts it at half that size, or 4 million....

"Today, 8 to 10 million Muslims live in the United States," claims Navy Lt. Cmdr. Abuhena Mohammed Saifulislam, who serves as Muslim chaplain for the new Marine mosque at Quantico, Va.

The Pentagon, which recently promoted Saifulislam, does not question the number. Neither does the White House, Congress nor the media — no matter how fantastic the number gets.

But it's the Wahhabi lobby's big lie. CAIR and other militant Muslim groups use it to intimidate politicians, corporations and media to change policy.

Eight-million-strong Muslims make the threat of bloc voting and boycotts a lot scarier. And the bigger the number, the bigger the foothold Islamists gain in American society.

Beck to D'Souza: "Why are you putting me into this situation where I have to just now tear you to shreds?"

Glenn Beck (thanks to Awake) demolishes the hapless Dinesh D'Souza:

Hillary Clinton and Michael Moore are in absolutely no way responsible for the attacks of 9/11. Now just wait. We`ll check back tomorrow. I`ll show you the letters. Because about 10 percent of the viewers just translated that into Glenn Beck says liberals caused the trade -- World Trade Centers to fall, which is clearly a view I don`t have. But my next guest does.

So let`s just see if there`s anybody there on the extreme left or the extreme right who will actually listen to the differences in our views or if they`re all just too busy right now blogging and logging onto their blog sites.

Dinesh D`Souza, he is the author of "The Enemy at Home: The Cultural Left and It`s Responsibility for 9/11".

Dinesh, I have to tell you, I`m -- I`m disappointed in this book. I`m a fan. I read your book -- I believe it was called "What`s so Great About America" -- and I found it inspiring. This book, or at least the premise - - I haven`t read it -- the premise is divisive and I believe untrue. Please explain your premise.

DINESH D`SOUZA, AUTHOR, "THE ENEMY AT HOME": Well, remember, after 9/11 there was a kind of gorgeous moment of national unity. And I think my earlier book, "What`s So Great About America", reflects that.

But the truth is, Glenn, we live in a divided country. I mean, look, one half of the people in this country seem to want to fight a war on terror, and there`s an organized camp in this country that seems to want Bush to lose the war on terror.

BECK: That`s not the same, Dinesh, as causing 9/11.

D`SOUZA: No, no. I agree with that. But what I`m saying is five years after 9/11, it`s not a bad idea to take a cold, critical look and see what are the roots of 9/11.

Take a simple example. The radical Muslims have been around since the 1920s. They first got a major stake when they captured Iran. Khomeini was the first guy to cal America the great Satan, who instigated Muslims to have martyrdom and jihad against us.

And how did we get Khomeini? Because Jimmy Carter came into office. He said, "I`m a virtuous man. I believe in human rights. We support the shah. The shah is a tyrant." So America pulls the Persian rug out from under the shah. And in trying to get rid of the bad guy, we get the worst guy.

So here`s a concrete way in which we put a major state into the hands of radical Islam.

This is a far cry, of course, from the actual thesis of D'Souza's book, which isn't about Jimmy Carter's short-sighted miscalucalations. In his book, he says flatly that "the cultural left in this country is responsible for causing 9/11" (that's right on page one) -- through immorality, not through Jimmy Carter. So Beck tries to get D'Souza back on point:

BECK: I can`t believe -- why would you put me in this situation? I mean, I`m a conservative. Why are you take -- putting me into this situation where I have to just now tear you to shreds?

What are you talking about, 1979 is the first time this reared its ugly head? Jimmy Carter caused this stuff? Are you crazy?

In 1950, the Muslim Brotherhood, in fact if I can give this guy`s name, Sayyid Qutb. He`s a guy who moved over to the United States in the 1940s. I mean, it took me a while to look this us, but I knew I had read this someplace before.

He moves over to the United States. He leaves. In about 1950, he goes back to Egypt, because he says America is just a decadent place.

And let me quote some of the things that he said. "The poor hair cuts in America, the enthusiasm for sports, the animal-like mixing of the sexes." This predates Jimmy Carter just by a few years.

D`SOUZA: I know. But see, Qutb was one of the thinkers of radical Islam. I`m talking about the radical Muslims moving from the theoretical phase to the phase of actually capturing a major state and making it a beachhead for launching the Khomeini revolution.

Look...

BECK: Dinesh...

D`SOUZA: ... you`ve done five minutes of Internet research but I`ve been researching this for four years. I look at all these thinkers. I look at their impact on action.

D'Souza here is just pulling rank on Beck. But the argument from authority is the weakest of all arguments. We should believe D'Souza because he has studied this for four years? Tell me another.

Now look, let me give you another example. After the Cold War the radical Muslims went back to their own countries. Bin Laden went back to Saudi Arabia. Al Zawahiri went back to Egypt. They were fighting the near enemy, their own governments.

But then they decided to shift strategy and attack the far enemy, which is us, the United States. Why? Because Bin Laden said, "I have come to the view that the United States, the far enemy, is more cowardly, is more vulnerable than the near enemy."

And how did he decide that? Because the radical Muslims launched a bunch of strikes, the first bombing of the World Trade Center, the Khobar Towers attack, the embassy attacks, the bombing of the Cole. And Bill Clinton did absolutely nothing. So this emboldened bin Laden, by his own account, was emboldened to strike at 9/11.

Here again, D'Souza still is not dealing with his book's main thrust, that American immorality caused 9/11. He is right that the perception of Bill Clinton's cowardice emboldened the jihadists. But from his book, we should expect D'Souza to be saying that drugs, pornography and abortion made the jihadists decide to focus on the United States. He can't say that, however, because it is patently false, as is his entire thesis, and so in defending it he resorts to irrelevancy.

BECK: Boy, you`ve done -- you`ve done a great job of mixing some fact with some fiction. You`re exactly right; that did embolden Osama bin Laden. But your point -- and please correct me if I have this wrong -- is that the liberals in America are the root of the problem.

I am a conservative, sir, who is telling you the nut jobs over in the Middle East have used the fertilizer of things like Hollywood and liberalism, or the idea here of, you know, Bill Clinton emboldening them or even, dare I say it, Ronald Reagan doing the same thing in Beirut. Yes, that`s fertilizer. That`s not the root, Dinesh.

D`SOUZA: No, true. But I agree with this. But you have to realize that the radical Muslims, while they are exploiting these things, are striking a resonant chord among traditional Muslims. And the traditional Muslims are the recruiting pool of radical Islam.

Indeed.

So we will not be able to drive a wedge between traditional Islam and radical Islam if we cannot effectively answer the charge that we are trying to impose secularism, family breakdown and moral decadence of Islamic society. Simply snorting about it isn`t going to solve the problem.

Nonsense. These are pretexts used to stir up anger against us. That's certainly true. But ultimately the jihad imperative rests on the words of the Qur'an, the teachings of Muhammad, and the rulings of the Islamic schools of law. All agree that Muslims must wage war against non-Muslims in order to establish Islamic law over the world. They must do this whether or not the non-Muslims are immoral. And as D'Souza himself points out here, the modern resurgance of the jihad is based on the perception that America is weak, not on the perception that America is immoral.

BECK: Simply separating ourselves and saying that anyone beside those hijackers flew those planes into those buildings, those are the people responsible.

Yes. As always with this sort of thing, much more needs to be said. But Beck did a good job within a short timeframe.

"I shot the non-Muslim"

Hrant Dink

But the murder is attributed here to "nationalist anger." "Turkish-Armenian editor shot dead in Istanbul," by Paul de Bendern and Thomas Grove for Reuters, with thanks to all who sent this in:

ISTANBUL (Reuters) - A high-profile Turkish-Armenian editor, convicted of insulting Turkey's identity, was shot dead outside his newspaper office in Istanbul on Friday.

Hrant Dink, a frequent target of nationalist anger for his comments on the mass killings of Armenians by Ottoman Turks during World War One, was shot as he left his weekly Agos around 1300 GMT in central Istanbul....

Muharrem Gozutok, a restaurant owner near the newspaper, said the assailant looked about 20, wore jeans and a cap and shouted "I shot the non-Muslim" as he left the scene.

Protesters outside the Agos office on one of Istanbul's busiest streets chanted "the murderer government will pay" and "shoulder-to-shoulder against fascism."...

"This bullet was fired against Turkey ... an image has been created about Turkey that its Armenian citizens have no safety," said CNN Turk editor Taha Akyol.

Last year Turkey's appeals court upheld a six-month suspended jail sentence against Dink for referring in an article to an Armenian nationalist idea of ethnic purity without Turkish blood.

The court said the comments went against article 301 of Turkey's revised penal code, which lets prosecutors pursue cases against writers and scholars for "insulting Turkish identity."

The ruling was sharply criticised by the EU.

INSULTING TURKISHNESS

Dink was one of dozens of writers who have been charged for insulting Turkishness, particularly over the alleged genocide of Armenians by Turks during World War One.

Turkey denies allegations that 1.5 million Armenians were killed in a systematic genocide. It says both Christian Armenians and Muslim Turks were killed in a partisan conflict that raged on Ottoman territory.

Sure. Some Nazis were killed during World War II also.

Fiery Australian cleric claims jihad remarks were misunderstood

Well, of course! Behold the glorious complexity of Sheikh Feiz Mohammed! He doth bestride the narrow world like a Colossus, and we petty men walk under his huge legs, and peep about, to find ourselves dishonourable graves! After all, when has a non-Muslim ever understood a jihadist sheikh, or the Qur'an, or the life of Muhammad correctly? These things are beyond the ken of ordinary mortals. We need them explained to us by those who possess Secret Qur'anic Decoder Rings, and then we will see that "beat her" (Qur'an 4:34) really means "give her a dozen roses," and that when Sheikh Feiz Mohammed says about children that we should "put in their soft, tender hearts the zeal of jihad and a love of martyrdom," he means that we should put in their soft, tender hearts the zeal of learning their multiplication tables and a love of Bob The Builder.

Feiz Mohammed Update from The Associated Press, with thanks to the Constantinopolitan Irredentist:

SYDNEY, Australia: A radical Australian cleric who sparked outrage by encouraging children to sacrifice their lives for Islam has claimed his remarks were misinterpreted, as Muslim leaders were divided Friday in their reaction to the outspoken cleric.

Sheik Feiz Mohammed, head of the Global Islamic Youth Center in western Sydney, was swiftly condemned Thursday by government leaders across Australia over a series of video lectures, in which he urged children to become "soldiers defending Islam" and sacrifice their lives for Allah.

"Teach them this: There is nothing more beloved to me than wanting to die as a mujahid," or holy warrior, the cleric said in the videos. "Put in their soft, tender hearts the zeal of jihad and a love of martyrdom."

The Australian Federal Police said they would investigate whether Mohammed had breached laws against sedition and was inciting violence or terrorism.

However, in an interview published Friday in The Australian newspaper, Mohammed said his words had been misconstrued.

"The jihad I speak of is not one of violence," he was quoted as saying. "It is one of personal struggle against things like mischievousness, temptation and personal harm."

"I don't believe in suicide bombing. I don't believe in violence against others," he said. "We denounce that. This is not Islamic law and it is not moral."

Mohammed also said in the interview he regretted implicitly referring to Jews as pigs in the videos, which were recorded in 2002 following the release of photographs showing bloody clashes between Israelis and Palestinians.

"That remark was made in the heat of the moment and I regret it," he was quoted as saying. "It was not something I should have said and is not something I believe."

So he disbelieves in Qur'an 2:62-65, 5:59-60, and 7:166? Or does he have some other interpretation of those verses? Get out your Secret Qur'anic Decoder Ring and enlighten us, Feiz.

In reality, some Muslim commentators posit that those verses refer to some Jews, but not to all Jews. However, the idea that they refer to all Jews, or at least to the Jews of today, is dominant among jihadists. Is it likely that Sheikh Feiz Mohammed really rejects that interpretation? No, it isn't.

Several Muslim leaders have sought to distance themselves from his comments.

Keysar Trad, head of the Islamic Friendship Association, said the jihad remarks might have been misinterpreted, but he conceded that they were not helpful to Australian Muslims.

Mohammed is the latest of several Muslim leaders to spur controversy in Australia, widening a cultural divide between the majority of Australians and the country's Muslim minority, which has been criticized for failing to suppress its extremist fringe.

Late last year Sheik Taj Aldin al-Hilali, the mufti of Australia since 1989, made international headlines when he likened unveiled women to "uncovered meat," suggesting they invite sexual assault.

However, Rahim Ghauri, leader of the Islamic Council of Western Australia, said the Islamic community should not be held accountable for one cleric's offensive remarks.

"Some lousy guy stands up and calls himself a leader of the Muslims, calls himself a cleric because he can read the Quran," Ghauri told the Australian Broadcasting Corp. radio. "Why do people like me (have to) sit here and give an interview because every Tom, Dick and Harry gets up an makes some stupid comments?"

Well, uh, maybe because al-Hilali is the leader of the Muslims in Australia.

Ghauri and other Muslim leaders declined to speculate on the meaning of Mohammed's videotaped remarks, but said the concept of jihad and religious martyrdom was often misunderstood by the non-Muslim public.

"Jihad ... means to eschew those types of things in our lives which we see as negative, such as promiscuity and drugs and stealing," said Kuranda Seyit, of the Forum on Australia's Islamic Relations.

Seyit dismissed the furor over the sheik's remarks as "another case of Islam bashing" in Australia, but acknowledged that Muslim leaders "do have to be very responsible about how they conduct themselves in public."

Jordan seeks nuclear power for peaceful means

Jordan jumps on the nuclear bandwagon. After all, everybody's doing it. From AFP, with thanks to Sr. Soph:

JERUSALEM - Jordan wants to develop nuclear power for peaceful means, King Abdullah II said in an interview with Israel’s Haaretz daily published on Friday.

‘The Egyptians are looking for a nuclear program. The GCC (Gulf Cooperation Council) are looking at one, and we are actually looking at nuclear power for peaceful and energy purposes. We’ve been discussing it with the West,’ he said.

‘I personally believe that any country that has a nuclear program should conform to international regulations and should have international regulatory bodies that check to make sure that any nuclear program moves in the right direction,’ he told the liberal daily.

‘The rules have changed on the nuclear subject throughout the whole region. Where I think Jordan was saying, ‘we’d like to have a nuclear-free zone in the area,’ after this summer, everybody’s going for nuclear programs,’ the Jordanian king said.

Pamela and me

Last night I was interviewed by the ever-charming Pamela Geller Oshry -- Atlas Shrugs -- and you can find the Podcast here. It was my seventh radio interview of the day, and it was late for this old man, so I'm not sure if I was particularly coherent, but anyway -- there it is.

"We are the Muslims. We drink the blood of the enemy...That is Islam and that is jihad"

This story, which insistently sounds upon the Tiny Minority of Extremists™ theme, seems to be designed to reverse some of the damage done by the Dispatches documentary. But the Vast Majority of Moderates™, alas, is still not much in evidence in Britain.

"Radicals vs. moderates: British Muslims at crossroads," from CNN, with thanks to all who sent this in:

DUBLIN, Ireland (CNN) -- At a recent debate over the battle for Islamic ideals in England, a British-born Muslim stood before the crowd and said Prophet Mohammed's message to nonbelievers is: "I come to slaughter all of you."

That's what Muhammad said to the pagan Quraysh: "I bring you slaughter." I recount the incident in my book The Truth About Muhammad.

"We are the Muslims," said Omar Brooks, an extremist also known as Abu Izzadeen. "We drink the blood of the enemy, and we can face them anywhere. That is Islam and that is jihad."

Anjem Choudary, the public face of Islamist extremism in Britain, added that Muslims have no choice but to take the fight to the West.

"What are Muslims supposed to do when they are being killed in the streets in Afghanistan and Baghdad and Palestine? Do they not have the same rights to defend themselves? In war, people die. People don't make love; they kill each other," he said....

But in the same debate, held on the prestigious grounds of Dublin's Trinity College in October, many people in the crowd objected.

"These people, ladies and gentleman, have a good look at them. They actually believe if you kill women and children, you will go to heaven," said one young Muslim who waved his finger at the radicals.

"This is not ideology. It's a mental illness."...

'Foreign policy has a lot to do with it'

This war of words is part of a larger debate going on in Britain -- the war within the Muslim community for the hearts and minds of young people. The battle of ideas came to the fore again this week when the trial began for six men who are accused of an "extremist Muslim plot" to target London on July 21, 2005.

The Woolwich Crown Court was told the men plotted to carry out a series of "murderous suicide bombings" on London's public transport system, just 14 days after the carnage of the July 7 London bombings, which killed 52 commuters and four bombers.

While Islamic extremists are believed to be a tiny minority of Britain's 1.6 million Muslims, they have no problem having their criticism heard. They have disdain for democracy -- and, most of all, the Bush administration's war on terror policies.

A poll taken in June 2006 for the Times of London newspaper suggested that 13 percent of British Muslims believe the July 7 London bombers were martyrs.

"Foreign policy has a lot to do with it," said Hanif Qadir, a youth worker and a moderate voice for Islam in Walthamstow, one of London's biggest Muslim neighborhoods. "But it's the minority radical groups that use that to get to our young people."...

"Our scholars ... are not coming out of their holes -- their mosques and their holes -- to engage with these people. They're frightened of that," Qadir said....

Indeed.

Choudary, whose group Al-Mahajiroun disbanded before the British government could outlaw it under its anti-terror laws, spoke to CNN and made clear he wants to see Islamic law for Britain.

"All of the world belongs to Allah, and we will live according to the Sharia wherever we are," said Choudary, a lawyer. "This is a fundamental belief of the Muslims."...

Asked if he believes in democracy, he said, "No, I don't at all."

"One day, the Sharia will be implemented in Britain. It's a matter of time."

Choudary cited the videotaped "will" of one of the London subway bombers, Mohammed Sidique Khan, who said, "Until you stop the bombing, gassing, imprisonment and torture of my people, we will not stop this fight."

Choudary said he sides strongly with that statement -- "we have everything we need in those wills" -- and he cited passages from the Muslim holy book, the Quran, that he says justify jihad.

"I happen to be in an ideological and political war," Choudary said. "My brothers in al Qaeda and other Mujahedeen are involved in a military campaign."

While Choudary and other radicals continue to try to spread their beliefs, others say there is no justification for jihad in England. Imam Usama Hasan memorized the Quran by the time he was 11 and at 19, he briefly fought in Afghanistan against the Soviets.

"If you have the wrong intention, you can justify your criminal actions from any text -- whether it's the Quran or Bible or Shakespeare," Hasan said.

Yes, watch out for those Shakespearean terror groups. They don't just sit upon the ground and tell sad stories of the deaths of kings. And they work fast; after all, if it were done when 'tis done, then 'twere well it were done quickly. These Shakespearean terrorists teach bloody instructions, which, being taught, return, to plague the inventor.

He said it makes him "furious" when radicals quote the Quran out of context to justify killing of innocents. It's a "very tiny" minority with such beliefs, he said, but "it only takes a handful, of course, to create devastation."

Can we please get the in-context refutation of the idea that a kafir harbi, an unbeliever considered to be at war with Islam, can lawfully be killed? This idea is deeply rooted in Islamic theology.

"Many people are terrified of Muslims. They are terrified of a brother walking down the road with his eastern dress and his hat and his beard, because they have seen these images associated with suicide bombers," he said.

"It is up to us to dispel that fear -- to smile at people to tell them that ... the message of Islam is not about bits of cloth. It is not about the beard or head scarf or the face veil or violence. It is about peace."

In addition to smiling at non-Muslims, Hasan might consider actively working against the spread of the jihad ideology among Muslims in Britain.

Jihadist cleric may face charges

But if he was just quoting the Qur'an (2:62-65; 5:59-60; 7:166) in calling Jews pigs, will they ban the Qur'an also? An update on this story. "Firebrand cleric may face charges," from the Sydney Morning Herald, with thanks to all who sent this in:

A firebrand Islamic leader who urged young Muslims to become holy warriors and labelled Jews as pigs could face charges of incitement to violence.

Australian Federal Police are looking into DVDs featuring Sheik Feiz Mohammed, the leader of the Global Islamic Youth Centre in Liverpool, in Sydney's west.

NSW Premier Morris Iemma today accused the sheik of inciting terrorism in the collection of DVDs, called the Death Series.

The Federal Government said the sheik's DVD preachings were "reprehensible and offensive", Opposition Leader Kevin Rudd said they were "obscene" and Mr Iemma labelled them "disgusting".

If it is found the sheik's comments breach sedition laws and incite acts of violence, the AFP will launch a full investigation and he could face charges.

NSW Jewish Board of Deputies chief executive Vic Alhadeff said the sheik was inciting racial hatred.

"It is of great concern when people in positions of influence abuse that power to incite racial hatred," Mr Alhadeff said.

In the DVDs, which are on sale through the youth centre's website, the Sydney-born cleric urges young Muslims to be prepared to sacrifice themselves for Islam.

The sheik, who has spent the past year living in Lebanon, also talks of a Muslim killing a Jew and ridiculed Jews as pigs.

American-Born Imam Spews Message of Hate in England

Abu Usamah is from New Jersey and preached at the Islamic Center of Peoria. Did anyone there agree with him? What are those who heard him doing now? Does anyone know? Does anyone care? No worries: his teachings there were "moderate."

A report by George Kindel for FoxNews, with thanks to Sr. Soph:

NEW YORK — A New Jersey-born Muslim cleric with links to a suspected Al Qaeda operative who surfaced at a college not far from the cleric's Peoria, Ill., mosque the day before the Sept. 11 attacks has found a new home.

The imam now is spewing his message of hate to a growing group of followers at a mosque in Birmingham, England.

His target: the United States, the United Kingdom, Christians and Jews.

Abu Usamah at-Thahabi, who preached at the Islamic Center of Peoria in 2001, is the subject of a British news documentary that revealed Monday how he regularly exhorts worshippers at the Green Lane Masjid, or mosque, in Birmingham to hate Westerners, whom he calls "pathological liars" and "kuffar," a derogatory term for non-Muslims.

Click here to view the British news documentary.

Abu Usamah also calls for the public crucifixion of all "kuffar" and says they should be "left there to bleed to death for three days."

Crucifixion of those who cause fitnah, or trouble in the land, is in accord with Qur'an 5:33: "The only reward of those who make war upon Allah and His messenger and strive after corruption in the land will be that they will be killed or crucified, or have their hands and feet on alternate sides cut off, or will be expelled out of the land. Such will be their degradation in the world, and in the Hereafter theirs will be an awful doom."

Abu Usamah, who was born in New Jersey and is 42 or 43 years old, was the imam in Peoria when federal agents swooped down in December 2001 and arrested Ali Saleh Kahlah al-Marri, a Qatari student at Bradley University, on charges that he used false documents to open bank accounts and was in possession of a telephone credit card used to call a number in Dubai that federal agents said was linked to reputed Al Qaeda financier and Sept. 11 organizer Mustafa al-Hawsawi.

Sources tell FOX News that Abu Usamah is a mysterious character — no one, including federal agents and fellow imams, seems to know what his name was prior to his conversion to Islam.

But sources in Peoria say that though his public teachings there were moderate, he occasionally stepped over the line into anti-Semitic rhetoric.

Just prior to the invasion of Iraq in 2003, he called President Bush a "pathological liar" and constantly argued to his followers that "Jews controlled the media."...

Abu Usamah, in the days immediately after Sept. 11, asked Peoria residents not to judge the Muslim community by the actions of the terrorists who carried out the attack and thanked the local Christian community for its support.

"More faiths, different groups reached out to us," he told the Peoria Journal Star newspaper a year after the attacks.

He went on to thank "those open-minded people who judge everyone individually."

The New Jersey-born imam, who claims to have studied a strict version of Islam at the Islamic University of Medina in Saudi Arabia, has since changed his tune.

"Lying is part of their religion," Abu Usamah is heard telling his followers in the special report produced by the British news show "Dispatches" on Channel 4.

"They do whatever they want to do. They are liars, they are terrorists themselves. They are lying, you can't believe them.

"They are pathological liars," he rants.

Ironic in light of, for example, Ibn Kathir's commentary on Qur'an 3:28: "...'unless you indeed fear a danger from them' meaning, except those believers who in some areas or times fear for their safety from the disbelievers. In this case, such believers are allowed to show friendship to the disbelievers outwardly, but never inwardly. For instance, Al-Bukhari recorded that Abu Ad-Darda' said, 'We smile in the face of some people although our hearts curse them.' Al-Bukhari said that Al-Hasan said, 'The Tuqyah [taqiyyah] is allowed until the Day of Resurrection.'"

He also is heard ticking off an enemies list that includes mainstream British culture.

"America, the U.K., Germany and France, they have come against the religion of Islam," he declares.

"Popular culture … if you're a person who gives yourself to that, your mind is going to be controlled by the so-called powers to be, who make these manmade laws."

The mosque's official Web site says its purpose is to counter Muslim stereotyping, but the Channel 4 report found there is a secret chat room area of the site that only mosque members know about, where At-Thahabi's lectures are broadcast.

It is in this chat room, the report says, that Abu Usamah preaches the creation of a "total Islamic state" that advocates harsh punishments for non-believers.

"Whoever changes his religion from Islam," he declares, "kill him, in the Islamic state."

This is a quote from Muhammad, who said: "Whoever changes his religion, kill him" (من بدل دينه فاقتلوه).

The jihad in Somalia is not over

The Islamic Courts in Somalia are not giving up despite their crushing defeat by Ethiopia. "Information for Mujahideen Seeking to Join the Jihad in Somalia," from MEMRI, with thanks to the Constantinopolitan Irredentist:

On January 15, 2007, an Islamist website posted information for mujahideen who wish to travel to Somalia in order to join the jihad there. The message included maps and satellite images showing various possible travel routes. One of the suggested routes goes from the port of Aden in Yemen to the port of Berbera in Somaliland, continues to Burao, capital of Togdheer region in Somalia, and ends in Lasanod, capital of Sool district, where a unit of the Islamic Courts Union is claimed to be stationed.

Fitzgerald: Victory in Iraq

Winning in Iraq is important. And we need a return on our investment: 3,000 dead, nearly 25,000 wounded, about $700 billion so far spent or committed in future unavoidable costs, with estimates for the total ranging between $1 trillion and $2 trillion.

And winning can only be done if the definition of "victory" is first made clear.

What is the correct definition of "victory" for the United States? It is the Camp of Islam and Jihad rendered weaker than it was before. The Administration keeps saying that bringing "democracy" itself somehow weakens the appeal of what it inaccurately describes as "extremists who have hijacked a great religion," but since those "extremists" or merely the more religious and less secular have only increased their power whenever free elections have been held -- in Algeria, in Egypt, in the "Palestinian"-controlled territories -- the clash of theory and reality is never explained. How can the Camp of Islam be weakened if American efforts are directed at ensuring a united, stable, and prosperous Iraq?

And if that impossible goal were somehow attained after another few years of expensive and depleting American efforts and expense, and focus remains on Iraq while every other matter is somehow pushed to the back or the side, including that of Iran's steady nuclear project, how would this Iraq serve as a Model? How could an Iraq that was once the place of the Abbasid Caliphate be lost to the Shi'a? After all, that was where so much of that "glorious Islamic past" upon which Muslims like to dwell took place. It is a place so important to their sense of themselves and their rightful role in the universe, that if it were lost by the Sunni Arabs and came to be dominated by the Shi'a, those "Persians," those Rafidite dogs, this would be worse in the eyes of both the Egyptian press and Saudi clerics than Jews and Christians dominating Iraq. Yes, that's just how bad those Shi'a are.

How would the achievement of the stated goals of the Bush Administration in Iraq weaken the Camp of Islam?

The way to weaken the Camp of Islam, and thus to justify the incredible expense in men, money, materiel, and morale both civilian and military, is to allow a situation within Iraq to be created (and still better if that situation is entirely a creation of the people in Iraq -- not "the Iraqis" who do not exist – themselves) in which Muslims who would otherwise be waging jihad against us are divided and demoralized. This will weaken the Camp of Islam. Two of the three major fissures within Islam -- sectarian and ethnic -- are pre-existing conditions. Their origins can be found in the first century of Islam.

The ethnic fissure is that between Arabs and Kurds. The Americans did not cause the mistreatment of the Kurds by both kinds of Arabs, but a not-impossible Kurdish state would serve American interests in two ways. It could weaken both Syria and Iran, that have circumjacent Kurdish populations. And in the case of Iran, not only Iranian Kurds but other non-Persian minorities (Arabs, Azeris, Baluchis) might be inspired by an independent Kurdistan. And the very existence of an independent Kurdistan could have effects far beyond the immediate area for other non-Arabs, including Berbers in North Africa and black Africans in Darfur. They might be heartened by the example of a non-Arab Muslim people throwing off the Arab yoke. And in the "war of ideas" that some like to refer to, anything that reveals Islam to have been and to remain a vehicle of Arab imperialism, cultural, linguistic, economic, and political, is to be encouraged -- so that non-Arab Muslims will begin to view Islam in a new, more accurate, less attractive and more disturbing light.

The much larger fissure is that between Sunni and Shi'a. It goes back to the seventh century and the proper succession, after the Four Rightly-Guided Caliphs, to Muhammad. But it became a difference in ritual and in some doctrines as well, though not in the teachings about, and attitudes exhibited, toward non-Muslims. This too was not encouraged by the Americans. The war being conducted on Shi'a by Sunnis centuries ago led to the former adopting the doctrine of taqiyya (which is now essentially practiced by Sunni Muslims as well, relying on Qur'an and Hadith for justification), that is, religiously-sanctioned dissimulation about the faith. Sunni-Shi'a tensions, and Sunni discrimination against or persecution of the Shi'a, including deliberate campaigns of murder as in both Iraq and in Pakistan, will go on whatever the Americans do. These tensions can be seen in Saudi Arabia, in Pakistan, in Lebanon, in Bahrain, in Kuwait.

The "victory" in Iraq that would result from the continuation, and enlargement, even beyond Iraq's borders, of ethnic and sectarian hostilities and warfare within the Camp of Islam, is the only kind of "victory" that makes sense. And though it was made possible by the removal of the iron regime and mailed fist of Saddam Hussein, the conditions that cause those fissures were none of America's doing. All the Americans have done is try to prevent the very things that they should be deliberately not preventing, but exploiting.

A topsy-turvy strategy. A crazy quilt of plans and counter-plans that miss the essential point.

A mad world, my masters!

The Qur'anic Concept of War

Lieutenant Colonel Joseph C. Myers, the Senior Army Advisor to the Air Command and Staff College at Maxwell AFB, Alabama, has published in Parameters a superb review of Pakistani Brigadier S. K. Malik's The Quranic Concept of War, which I discussed at some length in my book Onward Muslim Soldiers.

“The universalism of Islam, in its all-embracing creed, is imposed on the believers as a continuous process of warfare, psychological and political, if not strictly military. . . . The Jihad, accordingly, may be stated as a doctrine of a permanent state of war, not continuous fighting.” — Majid Khadduri

[...]

To understand war, one has to study its philosophy; the grammar and logic of your opponent. Only then are you approaching strategic comprehension. To understand the war against Islamist terrorism one must begin to understand the Islamic way of war, its philosophy and doctrine, the meanings of jihad in Islam—and one needs to understand that those meanings are highly varied and utilitarian depending on the source.

With respect to the war against the global jihad and its associated terror groups, individual terrorists, and clandestine adherents, one should ask if there is a unique method or attitude to their approach to war. Is there a philosophy, or treatise such as Clausewitz’s On War that attempts to form their thinking about war? Is there a document that can be reviewed and understood in such a manner that we may begin to think strategically about our opponent. There is one work that stands out from the many.

The Quranic Concept of War

The Quranic Concept of War, by Brigadier General S. K. Malik of the Pakistani Army provides readers with unequalled insight. Originally published in Pakistan in 1979, most available copies are found in India, or in small non-descript Muslim bookstores. One major point to ponder, when thinking about The Quranic Concept of War, is the title itself. The Quran is presumed to be the revealed word of God as spoken through his chosen prophet, Mohammed. According to Malik, the Quran places warfighting doctrine and its theory in a much different category than western thinkers are accustomed to, because it is not a theory of war derived by man, but of God. This is God’s warfighting principles and commandments revealed. Malik attempts to distill God’s doctrine for war through the examples of the Prophet. By contrast, the closest that Clausewitz comes to divine presentation is in his discussion of the trinity: the people, the state, and the military. In the Islamic context, the discussion of war is at the level of revealed truth and example, well above theory—God has no need to theorize. Malik notes, “As a complete Code of Life, the Holy Quran gives us a philosophy of war as well. . . . This divine philosophy is an integral part of the total Quranic ideology.”

Historiography

In The Quranic Concept of War, Malik seeks to instruct readers in the uniquely important doctrinal aspects of Quranic warfare. The Quranic approach to war is “infinitely supreme and effective . . . [and] points towards the realization of universal peace and justice . . . and makes maximum allowance to its adversaries to co-operate [with Islam] in a combined search for a just and peaceful order.” For purposes of this review, the term “doctrine” refers to both religious and broad strategic approaches, not methods and procedures. Malik’s work is a treatise with historical, political, legalistic, and moralistic ramifications on Islamic warfare. It seemingly is without parallel in the western sense of warfare since the “Quran is a source of eternal guidance for mankind.”

The approach is not new to Islamists and other jihad theorists fighting according to the “Method of Mohammed” or hadith. The lessons learned are recorded and form an important part of Quranic surah and jihadist’s scholarship. Islamic scholars both Muslim and non-Muslim will find much to debate in terms of Malik’s view of jihad doctrine and Quranic warfare. Malik’s work is essentially modern scholarship; although he does acknowledge the classical views of jihad in many respects.

[...]

Malik’s most controversial dictum is summarized in the following manner: in war, “the point where the means and the end meet” is in terror. He formulates terror as an objective principal of war; once terror is achieved the enemy reaches his culminating point. “Terror is not a means of imposing decision upon the enemy; it is the decision we wish to impose . . . .” Malik’s divine principal of Islamic warfare may be restated as “strike terror; never feel terror.” The ultimate objective of this form of warfare “revolves around the human heart, [the enemies] soul, spirit, and Faith.” Terror “can be instilled only if the opponent’s Faith is destroyed . . . . It is essential in the ultimate analysis, to dislocate [the enemies] Faith.” Those who are firm in their religious conviction are immune to terror, “a weak Faith offers inroads to terror.” Therefore, as part of preparations for jihad, actions will be oriented on weakening the non-Islamic’s “Faith,” while strengthening the Islamic’s. What that weakening or “dislocation” entails in practice remains ambiguous. Malik concludes, “Psychological dislocation is temporary; spiritual dislocation is permanent.” The soul of man can only be touched by terror.

Read it all.

The shark's gone. Everybody back in the water.

That jihad crisis thing is, like, so 2002. "`No Fly' List of Terror Suspects Will Be Cut in Half (Update1)," by John Hughes for Bloomberg News, with thanks to Doc Washburn:

Jan. 17 (Bloomberg) -- The U.S. government will cut in half the ``no fly'' list of terror suspects banned from flights so it can better focus on people who pose the greatest threat, the head of the transportation security agency said.

The paring, to be complete in a month, will drop ``those who were feared to have presented a threat in the past but no longer do,'' said Kip Hawley, chief of the Transportation Security Administration.

The ``no fly'' list and a roster of people who warrant extra checks were expanded after Sept. 11 to prevent a repeat of the terrorist attacks. The lists have frustrated travelers, including Massachusetts Senator Edward Kennedy, who was delayed from boarding flights in 2004 because his name matched an alias of someone on a list.

The security agency processed 20,000 requests last year from people who believed they were wrongly on lists or were being mistaken for people on the lists, Hawley told the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee today in Washington. Agency spokesman Christopher White declined to discuss the size of the lists, citing security concerns.

So what? I was on the list myself at one point. Anyone who is a loyal citizen and isn't doing anything illegal shouldn't mind putting up with some inconvenience.

Chanting "Jihad!," hundreds protest Pakistani hit on Al-Qaeda hideout

Tiny Minority of Extremists Update: "Masses protest Pakistani hit on alleged al-Qaida hide-out," from the Jerusalem Post, with thanks to Andrew Bostom:

Hundreds of religious hard-liners chanting "Jihad!" staged rallies in a Pakistani town against an army airstrike on a suspected al-Qaida hide-out and claimed it had killed innocent laborers, police and witnesses said Wednesday.

In the protest, about 1,000 supporters of the Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam (JUI) party marched through Tank, a city about 160 kilometers north of the scene of Tuesday's attack in the South Waziristan tribal region near the Afghan border that the army said killed eight militants.

"They killed innocent laborers. There were no foreigners or [militant] training centers," witnesses quoted rally leader Maulana Tahir as saying.

Activists of the JUI, a pro-Taliban Islamic group in the provincial government, chanted, "Jihad! [holy war]" during the protest and "Death to Musharraf!" - referring to Pakistan's military leader, President Gen. Pervez Musharraf, a key US ally.

A tribal militant vowed to take revenge for the airstrike, the British Broadcasting Corporation reported on its Urdu-language news Web site Wednesday.

"We will take revenge within 10 to 15 days," the BBC quoted Baitullah Mehsud as saying.

MP: Investigate Mosques

A reaction to the hate speech in UK mosques. By Marc Shoffman at TotallyJewish.com, with thanks to FM:

Jewish politicians are demanding an official investigation after a television documentary revealed anti-Semitic DVDs on sale at London's most prestigious mosque.

The Channel 4 Dispatches programme also revealed that speakers were preaching hatred against Jews at Green Lane Mosque in Birmingham – one of the country’s biggest.

One of the country's biggest? Why didn't the Vast Majority of Moderates™ protest?

Despite condemnation of the Undercover Mosque investigation by mainstream Muslim groups such as the Muslim Council of Britain, Jewish MPs have questioned how religious leaders could not know what was happening on their premises.

West Midlands Police and the Metropolitan Police are investigating the content of the programme, which was broadcast on Monday.

Both mosques are seen as representative of mainstream Islam, but they have refused to take responsibility for the lectures.

Green Lane Mosque claimed the building had been rented out, and Regents Park Mosque said its bookshop is owned by a separate company, Darussalam publications, based in Saudi Arabia.

Excuses, excuses. Read it all.

"Hizballah is a tool, and it is an integral part of the Iranian intelligence apparatus"

So says the former Secretary General of Hizballah. "Former Hizbullah Sec-Gen: Hizbullah is an Integral Part of Iranian Intelligence; The Abduction of the Israeli Soldiers Was an 'Unsuccessful Adventure,'" from MEMRI:

In an interview with the Kuwaiti daily Al-Siyassa, former Hizbullah secretary-general Sheikh Subhi Al-Tufeili said that Hizbullah was part of Iranian intelligence, and called the July 12, 2006 abduction of two Israeli soldiers, which sparked the July-August 2006 war with Israel, an "unsuccessful adventure."

The following are excerpts from the interview.(1)

Hizbullah is an Integral Part of the Iranian Intelligence Apparatus

Question: "You were formerly Hizbullah secretary-general. Is the [situation in Lebanon] within the strategic framework of Hizbullah? Does Hizbullah have an outlined and prepared plan that is being implemented today? Why do you think Hizbullah has become a source of anxiety for the Lebanese? "

Al-Tufeili: "It wasn't like this in the beginning. Hizbullah's activity was limited to resistance [operations]... But, unfortunately, the problem has developed today to the point where they have succeeded in changing Hizbullah from a resistance force into a tool to be used in [whatever] direction they want."

Question: "Does this mean that Hizbullah does not make its own decisions, and that its orders come from outside [Lebanon]?"

Al-Tufeili: "Yes, Hizbullah is a tool, and it is an integral part of the Iranian intelligence apparatus. Unfortunately, all the elements in the [Lebanese] arena have become tools, and take orders from outside [Lebanon]..."

How to Win in Iraq

Provocative suggestions from H. W. Crocker III in The American Spectator:

All right, let's skip all the introductory remarks and get to the point. Is victory still possible in Iraq? Yes, though the Bush administration keeps doing its level best to kick that prize away from our troops.

We can tally up the mistakes later (I'll mention two of the worst ones at the end) but the first step to winning in Iraq is to define victory -- and not to define it in such a way, as the Bush administration has done, that leaves us hostages to the Iraqi government. That is a strategic error of the first magnitude.

Even after the president's recent address, announcing that America's patience with the Iraqi government is not limitless, and promising a -- by my lights, not very dramatic -- surge of troops, not enough has changed. The Bush administration's rhetoric of why we fight has shifted from the politically cynical -- and deeply stupid and insensate -- mantra of "stay the course (because you can't trust the cut-'n'-run Democrats)," which the American people rightly recognized as no course at all, to an equally pitiful emphasis that American defeat in Iraq would be a disaster.

No one ever won a war by fighting for "not defeat." You win a war by smashing up the enemy, by so overwhelming him but that he has no choice but to surrender or die. Instead we have "stayed the course" (where is the urgency in that?) and we have whined that losing would be a bad thing.

Yes, losing would be a bad thing -- and the Bush administration should know, given that it has managed to lose both houses of Congress, alienate its own supporters, and convince the American people by a whopping majority that we cannot "win" in Iraq. Well done, Mr. President!

A PRESIDENT WITH SO LITTLE understanding of his own electorate can hardly, in fairness, be held to account for failing to understand the political realities in a country far away and of which he knows little -- though this is scant consolation for those of us who not only think the war was the right and necessary thing to do but who share Mark Steyn's conviction that "if Iraq's lost, the Dems and the media will have a whole new quagmire template for the next 40 years."

But whatever the failures of the administration, it is always a bad idea to bet against the American military.

Indeed, on the military front, things are not so dire as you might think.

Read it all.

Fitzgerald: Dinesh D'Souza's book

D'Souza begins his book thus:

In this book I make a claim that will seem startling at the outset. The cultural left in this country is responsible for causing 9/11. … In faulting the cultural left, I am not making the absurd accusation that this group blew up the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. I am saying that the cultural left and its allies in Congress, the media, Hollywood, the nonprofit sector, and the universities are the primary cause of the volcano of anger toward America that is erupting from the Islamic world.

Also from this idiotic book by D'Souza:

Muslims who carried out the 9/11 attacks were the product of this visceral rage—some of it based on legitimate concerns, some of it based on wrongful prejudice, but all of it fueled and encouraged by the cultural left. Thus without the cultural left, 9/11 would not have happened.

I realize that this is a strong charge, one that no one has made before. But it is a neglected aspect of the 9/11 debate, and it is critical to understanding the current controversy over the ‘war against terrorism.’ … I intend to show that the left has actively fostered the intense hatred of America that has led to numerous attacks such as 9/11. If I am right, then no war against terrorism can be effectively fought using the left-wing premises that are now accepted doctrine among mainstream liberals and Democrats.

And the Jihad -- Col. Ojukwu's own word -- against the Nigerian Christians, that led to the 1967-1969 Biafran War -- was caused by what "cultural left" among the Ibo? Doesn't Dinesh D'Souza know that the most straitlaced and conservative Anglicans in the world are the black African Anglicans?

And what "cultural left" is on display among the Buddhist monks and schoolteachers of southern Thailand, being killed by the thousands? Have they been handing out Gramsci and Susan Sontag, and showing videos of Harvey Fierstein in those Thai one-room schoolhouses and temples? Is that what gets the Muslims into such a murderous mood?

And those Hindus murdered or driven out of Bangladesh, of Pakistan, of Kashmir -- what is that "cultural left" they must, in the vision of D'Souza, have been part of? How many subscriptions to the New Left Review go to Hindu homes in Dacca or Rawalpindi? How many secret sympathizers with that "cultural left" that is such an enemy of Islam -- you know, people like Arundhati Roy, or Ken Livingstone, well-known to send Muslims into a fury?

What a total ass this Rishwain Fellow at the Hoover Institution turns out to be. How can a place that once had Sidney Hook and Robert Conquest as fellows continue to subsidize and permit to sully its walks someone at the level of Dinesh D'Souza, spouting such nonsense, and dangerous nonsense?

The Hoover Institution is a repository for many things, but above all other things, for material on the Russian Revolution, the emigration, and Soviet Russia. It is maintained by a smooth Development Office that obtains funds from so-called conservative contributors and their foundations. But the Cold War is no more, and the main totalitarian threat today comes from Islam, a belief-system that is naturally collectivist. It includes both a Complete Regulation of Life a Total Explanation of the Universe, and is much more than a religion, but a Way that appeals to the primitive and the primitivizing, those who seek simple answers to the universe -- as Dinesh D'Souza does.

From the Dartmouth Review days on, he has not been a thinker, but a figure in opposition to some perceived "leftist" threat or piety. Now he has gone over the edge, still thinking that Islam, the true, good, Islam that we all know -- don't we? -- is there, the Islam that is "conservative" only in the sense of not admitting change for a millennium or so, of being rigid and fixated on seventh-century Arabia and on a few biographers and jurisconsults and muhaddithin, all of whom appeared within the first few hundred years of Islam and made immutable and therefore permanent doctrines, including that which was always in Islam, that division between Believer and Infidel, and between Dar al-Islam and Dar al-Harb, about which Dinesh D'Souza appears to know so very little.

Why we must profile

In this week's Jihad Watch videoblog at Hot Air, I discuss the imminent efforts to outlaw religious profiling, and explain why those efforts should be resisted.

D'Souza: "There is no 'inherent conquering spirit' in Islam"

I don't want to belabor the point about Dinesh D'Souza and his irresponsible new book, but as I expected, he is getting tons of publicity -- O'Reilly, Zahn, Beck, Carlson, Cavuto -- because he is telling people what they want to hear: a new variation of the "It's All Our Fault" theme. At least here you will be able to find the truth about what he is saying. In this tothesource interview, whose views we have already discussed here and here, continues to deny the reality of the jihad ideology:

tts: Many Americans believe Islam is caught up in a Constantinian vision to conquer and convert by force.

D'Souza: There is no "inherent conquering spirit" in Islam, any more than there is one in Christianity. Yes, early Islam did conquer a great deal of territory and early Christianity didn't. But that's because Christianity began in defeat, with the early Christians harassed and persecuted, while Islam began with success, with the prophet Muhammad becoming the ruler of a large domain.

Highly ironic, this. For if you read Islamic apologetics about Muhammad's battles, they will tell you that Muhammad took up arms precisely because the Muslims were being "harassed and persecuted," and that fighting against oppression is justified. After all, the Qur'an says that "persecution is worse than slaughter" (2:191) -- in other words, slaughtering persecutors is justified.

Anyway, the key point is that a strong theological justification was developed in Islam for Muhammad's "becoming the ruler of a large domain." And that theological justification perdured throughout the centuries, and has never been reformed away. Thus it remains today as a basis for Islamic expansionism. In that light, what Christians did or did not do doesn't matter: the supremacist, expansionist, totalitarian ideology threatening the world today comes from Islam, not from Christianity.

So Islam began to spread through force and conquest, but this is no different than the Roman empire which, let us remember, also carried Christianity to the far corners of Europe.

Not true. The Christian Romans did not conquer territories and then offer the conquered people conversion to Christianity or dhimmi status. The Roman Empire was converted by missionaries, not by force, although there were many conversions of convenience in the post-Constantine period. The contrast with the conquered countries of the Middle East and North Africa, where the jizya was exacted from the dhimmi populations, and those populations steadily converted to Islam so as to obtain equality of rights in the society, is stark.

Since the founding period there have been several Islamic empires: the Umayyad, the Abassid, the Mughal, the Ottoman, and so on. All have behaved like conventional dynasties, sometimes imperialist, usually valuing stability over everything else.

All were, to the extent of their ability, imperialist on the basis of Muhammad's command to convert or subjugate the infidels. This command remains in place today. Should we not direct attention to it? In doing so, we may awaken non-Muslims to the gravity of the threat, and help Muslims of good will with their reform efforts.

Despite the Koran's call to "slay the infidels" this has never been read as a mandate to forcibly convert or kill non-Muslims.

Right. This is a common red herring. Forced conversion is forbidden in Islam, although this law was often honored in the breach. And the choice, as I explained above, was not "convert or kill non-Muslims," it was to convert or subjugate non-Muslims, or go to war with them. That this mandate has never been operative in Islam is false. A Hanafi manual of Islamic law insists that people must be called to embrace Islam before being fought, “because the Prophet so instructed his commanders, directing them to call the infidels to the faith.” It emphasizes that jihad must not be waged for economic gain, but solely for religious reasons: from the call to Islam “the people will hence perceive that they are attacked for the sake of religion, and not for the sake of taking their property, or making slaves of their children, and on this consideration it is possible that they may be induced to agree to the call, in order to save themselves from the troubles of war.”

However, “if the infidels, upon receiving the call, neither consent to it nor agree to pay capitation tax [jizya], it is then incumbent on the Muslims to call upon God for assistance, and to make war upon them, because God is the assistant of those who serve Him, and the destroyer of His enemies, the infidels, and it is necessary to implore His aid upon every occasion; the Prophet, moreover, commands us so to do.”

Ibn Khaldun (1332-1406), a pioneering historian and philosopher, was also a Maliki legal theorist. In his renowned Muqaddimah, the first work of historical theory, he notes that “in the Muslim community, the holy war is a religious duty, because of the universalism of the Muslim mission and (the obligation to) convert everybody to Islam either by persuasion or by force.” In Islam, the person in charge of religious affairs is concerned with “power politics,” because Islam is “under obligation to gain power over other nations.”

The great medieval theorist of what is now known as radical or fundamentalist Islam, Ibn Taymiyya (Taqi al-Din Ahmad Ibn Taymiyya, 1263-1328), was a Hanbali jurist. He directed that “since lawful warfare is essentially jihad and since its aim is that the religion is God’s entirely and God’s word is uppermost, therefore according to all Muslims, those who stand in the way of this aim must be fought.”

Violent jihad is a constant of Islamic history. Calls for jihad went out in the seventh century against the Christians of Egypt and Syria and the other areas of what is now known as the Muslim world. Such calls sounded innumerable times against the Christians of Europe until 1683.

After that, although jihads became less common (particularly in Europe), at no point did Islamic theology evolve beyond the legal manuals and medieval theorists I have just quoted. Jihad remained part of Islamic thought and practice, but as the Islamic world went into economic and cultural decline so did jihad. Jihad is not a suicide pact; those who fight must have some reasonable chance of success; and such success became less assured as the West gained military predominance.

Still, Indian Muslims declared jihad against their colonial occupiers and the Ottomans against their enemies in Europe as late as 1914. Turkish Muslims proclaimed jihad against the secular state that was ultimately established by Kemal Ataturk. Yasir Arafat and Hamas have both called for jihad against Israel. Just as Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden declared jihad against the United States.

No Muslim empire ever did that. The Mughals ruled northern India for 200 years. They could have killed the Hindus. They could have forcibly converted them all. They did none of this. Similarly under the Ottomans there were Jews and Christians who went to synagogue and church. The Ottomans gave them relative autonomy over their own communities. If you go to Istanbul today you can see these Jewish and Christian churches. These were not built after the secular Ataturk regime. They were built during the Ottoman period.

Sure. But the reality of the subjugation of non-Muslims goes back to the beginning of Islam. The 7-century caliph Umar’s agreement with the Christians mandates a number of humiliating regulations to make sure that the dhimmis “feel themselves subdued.” The Christians concede:

We will not...prevent any of our fellows from embracing Islam, if they choose to do so. We will respect Muslims, move from the places we sit in if they choose to sit in them. We will not imitate their clothing, caps, turbans, sandals, hairstyles, speech, nicknames and title names, or ride on saddles, hang swords on the shoulders, collect weapons of any kind or carry these weapons.

The regulations about different clothing and hairstyle, of course, made it easier to spot a dhimmi in a crowd and to make sure that he had paid the jizya and submitted to other legal requirements. The prohibition against weapons made it less likely that such investigations would meet with resistance.

We will not encrypt our stamps in Arabic, or sell liquor. We will have the front of our hair cut, wear our customary clothes wherever we are, wear belts around our waist, refrain from erecting crosses on the outside of our churches and demonstrating them and our books in public in Muslim fairways and markets. We will not sound the bells in our churches, except discreetly, or raise our voices while reciting our holy books inside our churches in the presence of Muslims....

After these and other rules are fully laid out, the agreement concludes: “These are the conditions that we set against ourselves and followers of our religion in return for safety and protection. If we break any of these promises that we set for your benefit against ourselves, then our Dhimmah (promise of protection) is broken and you are allowed to do with us what you are allowed of people of defiance and rebellion.”

The Verse of the Sword, Qur'an 9:5, is still in effect, and various other passages of Sura 9 clarify its precise meaning and applicability. While the regulations of dhimmitude are not enforced in countries where the Sharia is not the law of the land, and is ignored in whole or part in many places that do hold to the Sharia, they are still a part of Islamic law — as a Saudi preacher recently emphasized. In a Friday sermon at a mosque in Mecca, Sheikh Marzouq Salem Al-Ghamdi declared: “The Jews and Christians are infidels, enemies of Allah, his Messenger, and the believers. They deny and curse Allah and his Messenger....How can we draw near to these infidels?...They deny even the messengers sent to them. They do not believe in Moses, they do not believe in Jesus — because if they really believed in them, they would join Islam, because every prophet heralded to his nation the coming of the Prophet Muhammad and the need to believe in him.”

Sheikh Marzouq Salem Al-Ghamdi also repeated the Sharia’s classic injunctions on dhimmitude:

If the infidels live among the Muslims, in accordance with the conditions set out by the Prophet — there is nothing wrong with it provided they pay Jizya to the Islamic treasury. Other conditions are...that they do not renovate a church or a monastery, do not rebuild ones that were destroyed, that they feed for three days any Muslim who passes by their homes...that they rise when a Muslim wishes to sit, that they do not imitate Muslims in dress and speech, nor ride horses, nor own swords, nor arm themselves with any kind of weapon; that they do not sell wine, do not show the cross, do not ring church bells, do not raise their voices during prayer, that they shave their hair in front so as to make them easily identifiable, do not incite anyone against the Muslims, and do not strike a Muslim... If they violate these conditions, they have no protection.

Even in Saddam Hussein’s relatively secular Iraq, Christians had a hard time. The Reverend Said Bello, a Chaldean Catholic who left Iraq for Canada in 1990 but has maintained close ties with the Christian community there, reported toward the end of Saddam's regime that Christians in Iraq are “living like slaves....The Christians have no work, and no revenue. The powerful are taking advantage of the weak. In some cases, young mothers whose husbands were killed in war have been obliged to become Muslims to feed their children.”

D'Souza:

There is a great deal of nonsense being said today about how Islam is the problem and how Islam leads to terrorism. But Islam has been around for 1300 years and the problem of Islamic terrorism dates back around 25 years, to the Khomeini revolution. The reasonable question to ask is what is it about Islam today that has made it an incubator of fanaticism? Why has traditional Islam become such a fertile recruiting pool for radical Islam?

I responded to this yesterday: "This suggests that he does not regard the relentless jihad against Israel as "Islamic terrorism"; that he doesn't regard the founding of the Muslim Brotherhood, the direct forerunner of Hamas and Al-Qaeda, in Egypt in 1928 as having anything to do with 'Islamic terrorism'; and that he either doesn't know or care that the ideology held by Osama bin Laden and other jihad terrorists today is identical to that held by jihad armies of the past, which overwhelmed and islamized the Middle East, North Africa, Persia, and significant portions of Europe and Asia."

tts: OK. Why has it?

D'Souza: The Islamic world is divided into traditional Muslims and radical Muslims. The traditional Muslims are the ones who have practiced Islam in the way it has been practiced since the days of Muhammad. The Islamic radicals are a new force that has gained power in the last few decades. My point is that we cannot win the war on terror without driving a wedge between these two groups. The reason is that the radical Muslims are recruiting from the pool of traditional Muslims. So no matter how many radicals America captures or kills, it's no use if twice as many traditional Muslims join the radical camp. What unites the radical and the traditional Muslims is not merely opposition to American values or culture, but a deep conviction that their religion is threatened. This is their unifying slogan: "Islam is under attack." What differentiates the two groups is that the radicals want to fight a jihad against America, using any means necessary, including terrorism, while the traditionalists would prefer to find a different approach.

tts: What should America do?

D'Souza: We should show them the other America, which is conservative and traditional America. When Muslims look at America, all they see is Hollywood and family breakdown. They don't see the Americans who work hard, look after their families, and go to church. If traditional Muslims understood that there is a part of America that shares its traditional values, and that there are Americans who are working hard to combat the depravities of American society, then this would go a long way to diminish their attraction to radical and terrorist strategies. They will see, for the first time, that they have potential allies in Americans who share their respect for traditional values, and who have no problem with Muslims living by those values in their own countries.

Attacks on Islam, the religion, or on the founder of the religion are going to have the effect of alienating traditional Muslims and pushing them into the radical camp. The radicals are going to say, "See, we've always told you that Islam is the West's real target. That's what they want to get rid of." So it's very imprudent for us to blame Islam as a whole, even if Islam is to blame. But as a matter of fact Islam is not to blame. Remember that Islam has been around for 1300 years. It's absurd to blame the prophet Muhammad or the Koran for something that's quite recent.

Yet the jihadists routinely point to Muhammad and the Qur'an to justify their actions. We must ignore this because it will offend moderates? But why should moderates be offended if we point out the elements of Islam that they reject, or should reject, if their moderation is to have any substance and be able to withstand the challenge from jihadists?

Fitzgerald: A tribute to Dinesh D'Souza

Dinesh D'Souza's arrogance, in presuming to write about matters that he could not possibly have studied, arrogance about the most important matters, disqualifies him from ever again being taken seriously about anything.

His dreamy belief that Islamic terrorism dates back to 1979 and the Ayatollah Khomeini returning from Neauphle-le-chateau to Teheran, ignores, as Robert Spencer mentions here, the entire history of terrorism directed against Israel, Israel as a state, and even before it was a state, against the Jews who lived in what was, historically, the Land of Israel. D'Souza ignores the terrorism used against the French in Algeria. (Incidentally, apparently Bush is reading Alistair Horne, who got so much wrong in his history of that conflict, because Henry Kissinger, ever the Islam-avoider, recommended his book to Bush as a guide to the situation in Iraq. Yet a moment's thought would show ten ways in which the situations are different. Horne's book refuses to recognize the centrality of Islam in the Algerian war against the Infidels, who included not only the French, but also all kinds of other non-Muslims -- Spanish, Italians, Jews -- who had been living for a long time in Algeria and whose only crime was to not be Muslim.)

But more than that, D’Souza ignores the 1350 years of Jihad-conquest, or apparently thinks that because the military means involved did not include bombs on airplanes, those conquests were not Jihad and certainly not terrorism. No, there were no bombs on airplanes during those 1300 years of Jihad-conquest. Nor were there I.E.D.s blowing up Humvees when the Muslims conquered the Middle East and North Africa, or when the Seljuk Turks conquered most of Anatolia and the Ottoman Turks finished the rest of the conquering, nor when Sassanian Persia, or Hindu India, were conquered.

But "striking terror" in the hearts of the enemy was always Muslim war policy, and was practiced even without the particular technologies or techniques used today. Apparently Dinesh D'Souza thinks that that is all that "terrorism" is: not a method, but the precise technologies that go back just a few decades. He might as well suggest that the Muslims have never used propaganda, either, because they lacked, in the old days, audiocassettes, videocassettes, satellite television, and the Internet. That is his level. That is what we are being asked to take seriously.

And then there are the texts. The most obvious apologetics are based on the notion that "everyone does it." All the texts, we are told, are more or less the same. Are they? Are the texts of Judaism and Christianity just as bloodthirsty, just as likely to whip up hatreds and violence, as are the Qur'an and Hadith? We all know that in some of those texts terrible things are written about the ancient Israelites and the Canaanites. But do Jews, have Jews, been going to temple and had rabbis whipping them up so that as they leave those temples they grab non-Jews yelling "kill the Cananites"? Has that been a feature of Judaism for the past hundred years? Thousand years? Two thousand years? It is nonsense to compare the texts of either of the prior two monotheisms with those of Islam. Dinesh D'Souza has not read Arthur Jeffery, Sir William Muir, Willem Noldeke. He has not read Snouck Hurgronje or St. Clair Tisdall or Joseph Schacht or Antoine Fattal. He has not read K. S. Lal, or any of the other Indian historians who might provide him with figures on how many Hindu victims -- 60-70 million of them -- were murdered by Muslims, and the murdering only stopped, as did the forced conversions, when it was realized that if every Hindu disappeared, then so too would those who could pay the Jizyah.

And his airy allusion to the possibilities of "selective quotation" suggests that he thinks that that is all that is worrisome in Islam, when the Qur'an is riddled with Jihad verses, and when the softer suras are essentially cancelled and superseded by the harsher more violent verses. Has Dinesh D'Souza heard about "naskh" or abrogation? And has he taken it seriously? Or has he relied on one of those smiling, plausible Muslim informants who assures him that this doctrine is not used, that it is a figment of the islamophobic imagination -- something concocted in the fervid brain, say, of Ibn Warraq, or Ayaan Hirsi Ali, those crazed interpreters of Islam who know so little, while Dinesh D'Souza knows so very much?

What does Dinesh D'Souza make of the contents of the khutbas, sermons, that are delivered in Bangladesh, after which the Muslims streaming out of the mosque feel inspired enough to beat to death passing Hindus? For that matter, what does he make of the murder of the most peaceful, programmatically peaceful, Buddhists of southern Thailand by Muslims? What does he think of the strange outward flow of non-Muslims, observable everywhere that Muslims now rule where they once did not -- as in the lands that were once part of the Raj and are now known as Pakistan and Bangladesh, where the Hindu percentage of the population is now 10% of what it was in 1947 in Pakistan, and a quarter of what it was in Bangladesh in 1947, and yet, at the same time, the Muslim proportion of India's population has gone steadily up? And what does he think about the steady diminution in the numbers of Christians in Arab lands? And never mind the disappearance of a million Jews who, experiencing pogroms in Cairo and Tripoli and Baghdad, were not about to remain to enjoy the famed "tolerance" of Islam?

Dinesh D'Souza has fallen for that nonsense about "family values" in Islam. He is apparently so offended by the obvious decadence of the Western world that he likes the idea of fine, upstanding people who don't use tattoos or practice body-piercing, and whose children must listen to their parents -- as long as those parents are Muslim. If you convert to Islam, however, you need not have any respect for your non-Muslim parents who have been Left Behind. In the world of Dinesh D'Souza, a humorless and self-preening little world, some kinds of "morality" are accepted -- presumably the official Muslim hatred for homosexuality appeals to straight-laced Dinesh D'Souza -- but others are not.

What does Dinesh D'Souza find "moral" in polygamy, or in the contemptible treatment of women, not least in their inability to make a rape charge stick, or in the unequal punishments for women and men accused of sexual misconduct? How does he like lapidation as a form of execution? And the four male witnesses rule in cases of rape? What kind of "family values" are these? And what about being able to divorce -- for the man -- merely by saying "I divorce you" three times? Does that impress Dinesh D'Souza as an advance on Western ways? Can't one deplore many of the things that go on in the West without embracing or defending Islam?

What does Dinesh D'Souza think of Qutb? He remembers Qutb, doesn't he -- the man who came to America in the late 1940s for two years, the man who was disgusted by those church socials, and above all that hideous and dangerous square-dancing -- "Swing your ladies and dosido, and don't step on your partner's toe"? Does he not realize that it was this, and not Internet pornography or Howard Stern's surpassing vulgarity, that offended and offends Muslims?

The humorlessness ("There is no humor in Islam," said the Ayatollah Khomeini) and joylessness of Islam manifests the phoniness of its "morality," a morality that is phony because it is merely the outward face of hidden decadence. Does Dinesh D'Souze not know that Saudi Arabia, where "morality" on the street is a function of the mutawwa, the Saudi version of religious enforcers for which there are analogues in other Muslim countries with rigorously faith-based legal systems, the real behavior of any Saudi who can get away with it is far more decadent than anything that could be dreamed up by the most decadent Westerners? Has he no idea how Saudis and other rich Arabs behave in the capitals of the West? Does he not know what they all do behind their palace walls in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, the U.A.E.? What does he think goes on? And aside from the sexual behavior, what does he make of the camel-racing in which four and five year old boys, Pakistanis for the most part, are tied to the camels, and frequently are severely wounded or killed, and are treated as expendable beings, as are so many non-Arabs all over those horrific countries?

And what does he think is the Muslim attitude toward devout, pious, Orthodox Jews, family values and all -- whether in Antwerp, or Jerusalem, or Williamsburg? Does he think that Muslims are so pleased by the "family values" of these people that they find a natural affinity with them, wish them well, do not wish them harm? Is that what it says in the Qur'an: respect and honor Jews and Christians until such time as they begin to exhibit the features of modern, early 21st century, corrupted Western man, and only then? If so, why are the canonical texts full of inculcated hatred, even murderous hatred, of Jews and Christians who were as devout, as self-effacing, as pious, as full of family values, as a hundred Leagues of Decency together could not possibly observe?

Dinesh D'Souza is in some ways akin to Pat Buchanan. Buchanan's antisemitism prevents him from supporting Israel or understanding that the Lesser Jihad against Israel is no different in kind from the Jihad now being pursued against non-Muslims in Western Europe and elsewhere. In Dinesh D'Souza's case, he seems to have become such a Moralist of the cheapest, most narrow and obvious League-of-Decency kind, that seeing Muslim girls, for example, modestly dressed, has led him to forget all the rest of Islam: the Islam that divides the world between Believer and Infidel.

Part of the sinister missionary work being undertaken by the members of Hizb al Tahrir is devoted to converting prisoners, especially those who are black or Hispanic. They appeal to them by claiming that Islam is all about "social justice." It isn't. It is in the Muslim countries where whoever seizes or inherits power manages to steal much of the country's wealth: think of Mubarak in Egypt. Think of the Hashemites in Jordan (not much wealth, so the CIA has been supplementing, or at least used to, the call-girl bills of the ruler). Think of the al-Saud princes, tens of thousands of them, helping themselves to trillions of dollars of money that rightly belongs to every person in "Saudi" Arabia. And the same is true in Kuwait, in the U.A.E., in Qatar. And in Algeria, and Syria, and Morocco and Pakistan. This business of "social justice" is nonsense, a misunderstanding of the fact that people can attend the same mosque, and prostrate themselves next to someone much richer or much poorer. But that has no effect on political power or the sharing or proper distribution of the national wealth.

Dinesh D'Souza is, on the right, the equivalent of Richard Reid or Jose Padilla or any black radical who converts to Islam or joins the Nation of Islam (which is not strictly orthodox Islam), thinking that this will hasten the day of "social justice."

In Dinesh D'Souza's case, he sees Islam, the true and good and conservative family-values Islam, as the natural ally of all those who are offended by Western decadence. You don't like body-piercing or cocaine sniffing or non-stop sex at some bathhouse? Well, Dinesh D'Souza apparently believes that help is on the way-- help in the form of the inoffensive Qur'an, the innocent Hadith, the mild-mannered "peacemaker" (Karen Armstrong's epithet) Muhammad as described in the Sira.

Dinesh D'Souza -- brother under the skin to Richard Reid. To Jose Padilla. To Mahdi Bray. They joined an imaginary Islam of "social justice." And Dinesh D'Souza defends an imaginary Islam of "family values."

The first two are behind bars (Padilla is awaiting trial). Dinesh D'Souza, however, is published by Doubleday and National Review, and is not being denounced by his colleagues, or sent to permanent Coventry.

When the day of reckoning comes, when those who wrote truthfully and intelligently about Islam, liberal or conservative, are validated in every way, and the assorted "liberals" and "conservatives" who told nonsense and lies about Islam are exposed, then all kinds of things will happen. Many will, or should, lose their Important Positions.

He's a fool, but not a fool to be taken in isolation. His foolishness is that of the self-assured know-nothing, the Podsnap of this New Age, who does not know, and does not wish to know, about all kinds of things, for if he did know, they would Offend Him. Like Podsnap, Dinesh D'Souza has the habit of putting all disagreeables about Islam out of sight, out of mind.

With this book, he should lose any residual respect any one of sense might once have harbored for him. He has lost the right to an audience. He should no longer be given a hearing at National Review or, for that matter, anywhere else that wishes to be taken seriously.

This book is beyond the pale. Beyond all pales.

Afghan civilians stop terror attack at U.S. base

Bravo. This is the kind of thing we should have been seeing in Iraq and Afghanistan all along, and not infrequently, if what the media and government have had us believe were true. From CNN, with thanks to the Constantinopolitan Irredentist:

KABUL, Afghanistan (CNN) -- Two civilians thwarted an attempted terrorist attack Tuesday when a vehicle loaded with explosives attempted to crash through the front gate of a U.S. base in the Afghan capital, according to the U.S. military.

The two men, an interpreter and a security guard, dragged the apparent suicide bomber from the vehicle before he could detonate explosives, said Col. Tom Collins, the chief spokesman for U.S. forces in Afghanistan.

"I think it's a pretty amazing and heroic event," Collins said.

He said that at about 9 a.m. Tuesday (10:30 p.m. ET Monday) a driver crashed his vehicle into Camp Phoenix, the base where the Afghan National Army and police are trained. The driver reached for what appeared to be a cord to detonate a bomb, he said.

"Amazingly, a couple of Afghans who just happened to be on the scene there realized what was happening," Collins said.

"Anyone's inclination would have been to run away but these guys are genuine heroes," Collins said.

Bush won't reauthorize domestic surveillance program

Giving in to pressure, but Gonzales says the job will still be done. "Bush won't reauthorize eavesdropping," by James Vicini for Reuters, with thanks to the Constantinopolitan Irredentist:

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President Bush has decided not to renew a program of domestic spying on terrorism suspects, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales said on Wednesday, ending an law-enforcement tactic criticized for infringing on civil liberties.

"The president has determined not to reauthorize the Terrorist Surveillance Program when the current authorization expires," Gonzales wrote in a letter to congressional leaders.

Bush has reauthorized the program every 45 days, and the current authorization is mid-cycle, a senior Justice Department official said. Gonzales said a recent secret-court approval allowed the government to act effectively without the program.

The program, adopted after the September 11 attacks, allowed the government to eavesdrop on the international phone calls and e-mails of U.S. citizens without a warrant, if those wiretaps were made to track suspected al Qaeda operatives.

Australia: Muslim cleric calls Jews pigs and urges children to die for Allah

In accord with Qur'an 2:62-5; 5:59-60; and 7:166. "Sydney cleric ridicules Jews: report," from AAP, with thanks to David:

Sydney's most influential radical Muslim cleric has been reportedly caught on film calling Jews pigs and urging children to die for Allah.

Sheikh Feiz Mohammed, head of the Global Islamic Youth Centre in Liverpool, delivers the hateful rants on a collection of DVDs called the Death Series, sold in Australia and overseas, News Limited newspapers report.

An Australian citizen born in Sydney, he has spent the past year living in Lebanon.

Sheikh Feiz was exposed this week in the British documentary, Undercover Mosque.

"Today many parents, they prevent their children from attending lessons," he says in the video.

"Why? They fear that they might create a place in the their hearts, the love, just a bit of the love, of sacrificing their lives for Allah."

"We want to have children and offer them as soldiers defending Islam.

"Teach them this: There is nothing more beloved to me than wanting to die as a mujahid (holy warrior).

"Put in their soft, tender hearts the zeal of jihad and a love of martyrdom."

British investigators found the DVDs being sold by children in the carpark of the Green Lane Mosque in Birmingham and other Islamic bookshops.

The entire set is available on the internet for $150.

His rants on video include denouncing "kaffirs" or non-Muslims.

"(Kaffir) is the worst word ever written, a sign of infidelity, disbelief, filth, a sign of dirt," Sheikh Feiz says.

In an excerpt from a video lecture series called Signs of the Hour, he ridicules Jews as pigs.

CAIR charges 40 kept from post-Hajj flight -- Northwest says they were late for flight

CAIR has found what it has been fishing for -- or thinks it has. But it looks as if they're trying to make something out of people being late for their flight.

"40 kept from Detroit flight, council says: Northwest: Muslim pilgrims were late," by Shabina S. Khatri for the Detroit Free Press, with thanks to all who sent this in:

Thousands of American Muslims returned to Michigan this month exhausted in body but revitalized in spirit after performing the hajj, a pilgrimage to Mecca, Saudi Arabia, that is a religious duty.

But not all travelers had an easy time getting home.

The Michigan chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations is expected to hold a news conference today regarding the treatment of 40 American Muslim pilgrims - some from Canton, Dearborn and Dearborn Heights - who were allegedly denied passage on a flight to Detroit.

The men were reportedly denied boarding on Northwest Airlines Flight 51 from Germany on Jan. 7. CAIR-Michigan is asking the Federal Aviation Administration to investigate the incident.

Northwest spokesman Roman Blahoski said Monday that the passengers were denied boarding because they arrived for the flight just 20 minutes before departure, a violation of airline and governmental regulations.

"These passengers did not meet the standard check-in deadline of 60 minutes or onboard deadline of 20 minutes," he said. "It's nothing beyond that."

Debbie Schlussel has more, about the ties of Shi'ite Imam Hassan Qazwini, who is leading the complaints, to Hizballah.

Taliban Leader Is Hiding and Being Protected in Pakistan, Says Spokesman

Wouldn't be surprising, if true. By Maddy Sauer and Gretchen Peters at ABC's The Blotter (thanks to James):

Fugitive Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar is alive and well and living in Pakistan under the protection of the Pakistan intelligence agency, according to the captured spokesman for the Taliban, Mohammad Hanif.

Hanif was captured in Afghanistan yesterday, and today the Afghan government released video footage of him in which he claims to know the location of Omar.

"He is living in Quetta," says Hanif, "and the ISI [Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence Agency] is protecting him."

While Pakistani officials dismiss this statement, the information coincides with secret U.S. military documents obtained by ABC News earlier this year. The documents were part of a U.S. targeting assessment produced in January 2005 and, incredibly, were bought at an Afghanistan street bazaar, just a few hundred feet from the front gate of the U.S. air base in Bagram.

Dinesh D'Souza: "It’s foolish to blame Islam when Islam has been around for 1,300 years and Islamic terrorism has been a problem for the past 25 years"

Dinesh D'Souza has written a spectacularly wrongheaded and potentially immensely damaging new book, The Enemy At Home: The Cultural Left and Its Responsibility for 9/11, in which he argues essentially that the jihadists hate us because we are immoral. It is, of course, already getting lavish attention from those who, out of political correctness and fear, as well as a miscalculation of the most effective ways to deal with the problem we face, have steadily ignored the jihad ideology and its influence among those who are waging war against the U.S. and its allies.

D'Souza showed up in a National Review Q & A with Kathryn Lopez yesterday, wherein he breezily discounted the possibility that they hate us because of imperatives arising from within the Islamic religion.

Lopez: On Islam: It has been argued that the Koran itself is violent. That moderate Muslims, in fact, have to distance themselves from more than Osama bin Laden. Is it possible that you are part of the not-understanding-the-threat-we-face problem by suggesting that line of examination be shut down?

D’Souza: I’m not urging that any line of inquiry be “shut down.”

It's ironic that this question would even have been asked and answered, since, with the notable and noble exception of the articles of Andrew McCarthy, this line of inquiry has effectively been shut down at National Review. For reasons I do not know, after my 2005 skirmish with Rich Lowry over J. L. Menezes' book on Muhammad, NR has tended to shy away from considering the possibility that there might be something within Islam that fuels jihad terror -- Lowry, if I understand him correctly, thinks (as does D'Souza -- see below) that to do so alienates moderates. This is ironic, however, because by declining, at least so far, to enter into this discussion they cut the ground out from under those moderates, by pretending that nothing in Islam actually needs reform.

I'd like to invite Kathryn Lopez and NR to take D'Souza's words to heart and not shut down this line of inquiry. I'd be happy to debate D'Souza in the pages of National Review or at NRO on whether or not there is something about Islam that fuels today's jihad violence, and whether our immorality is the paramount cause of jihad. I contend that, pace D'Souza, that we could be the most moral people on earth and the jihad would continue nevertheless. The Qur'an (9:29) directs Muslims to fight Jews and Christians, not just immoral Jews and Christians. What has changed in the last 25 years is the material ability of Muslims to pursue the jihad imperative.

After all, Egyptian jihad theorist Sayyid Qutb was enraged by the immorality of the dancing at a church social in Colorado in the late 1940s; how immoral do you think that dancing really was, compared to today's standards? Yet despite its relative innocuousness, it still enraged him. He would not have been pacified by anything short of full Islamic separation of the sexes, and the covering of women. In other words, he would not have been satisfied by anything short of our islamization.

D'Souza continues:

I’m saying it’s foolish to blame Islam when Islam has been around for 1,300 years and Islamic terrorism has been a problem for the past 25 years.

I expect in this D'Souza is dating the beginning of Islamic terrorism to the Khomeini revolution in Iran in 1979. This suggests that he does not regard the relentless jihad against Israel as "Islamic terrorism"; that he doesn't regard the founding of the Muslim Brotherhood, the direct forerunner of Hamas and Al-Qaeda, in Egypt in 1928 as having anything to do with "Islamic terrorism"; and that he either doesn't know or care that the ideology held by Osama bin Laden and other jihad terrorists today is identical to that held by jihad armies of the past, which overwhelmed and islamized the Middle East, North Africa, Persia, and significant portions of Europe and Asia.

So is it even reasonable to blame Mohammad or the Koran? I realize that you can fish out this passage or that passage and make it sound like the Muslims want to convert or kill everybody. But that would be like taking passages out of the Old Testament to make Moses sound like Hitler.

Would it really? The question here is who is doing the fishing. D'Souza refers to Osama's communiques -- what about all the Qur'an quotes in them? Here's the one from November 24, 2002. Lots of Qur'an in it. As I have pointed out many, many times, jihadists quote Qur'an and Hadith copiously, and portray themselves as the exponents of "pure Islam." It is not "Islamophobes" who are "fish[ing] out this passage or that passage," it is the jihadists. Are we to avoid examining this phenomenon and discussing its implications because of fear of "blam[ing] blame Mohammad or the Koran"? Would it not be more prudent to explore it and try to formulate positive ways to deal with it?

After all, there is no body of Jews corresponding to the Islamic jihadists, quoting the Old Testament to justify Hitlerian genocide. And that's why D'Souza's analogy fails utterly.

And also, Muslims don't want to "convert or kill everybody." That is a false oversimplification. Muhammad commanded Muslims to convert or subjugate or kill everybody. And that explains much of what D'Souza brings up next:

Besides, you have to look at what the Islamic empires actually did. There were Christians and Jews who lived under the various Muslim dynasties, from the Abbasid to the Ottoman. In fact, Jews were much safer in the Ottoman empire than in just about any of the Christian kingdoms, such as that of Ferdinand and Isabella in Spain.

In fact, Jews as dhimmis were in Ottoman domains, as Andrew Bostom put it in an email to me, "subject to grinding persecution interspersed with massacres." Bostom says that D'Souza's contention that "Jews were much safer in the Ottoman empire than in just about any of the Christian kingdoms" is flatly false. In fact, "it was a cycle of going from Islamdom to Christendom to Islamdom -- the Almohads slaughtered and forcibly converted thousands of Jews whose survivors fled to Christian areas of Spain, like the Kingdom of Aragon, where they were welcomed. Then the descendants of these Jews fled the Inquisition for the Ottoman Empire, filling a void created by the slaughter and deportation ["surgun" in Turkish] of the Jews conquered by the Ottoman jihad against the Byzantine Empire."

D'Souza continues:

The Mughals ruled northern India for 200 years. They could have forcibly converted the Hindus or killed all of them. But they did no such thing.

Bostom: "BOTH were done, under the Mughals, especially Aurangzeb and their predecessors in the Delhi Sultanate, some of whom were known as killers of lakhs of Hindus, each lakh being 100,000. Indeed, not all Hindus were killed, although that was pined for by some leading Muslim ulema like Shah Wali Allah, who went so far as to invite a brutal Afghan invasion of 'his' country in the 18th century because the Afghan Muslims were more fanatical."

D'Souza:

So we have to be careful about simply describing a religion of one billion people as “violent.” This would be tactically imprudent even if it were true, but it is not true, so why repeat a canard that has the terrible effect of driving the traditional Muslims into the radical camp?

Although this idea is taken for granted by most analysts, no one has ever yet explained to me why describing Islam as containing elements that incite to violence will make otherwise peaceful Muslims become violent or begin to condone religious violence. Why wouldn't it lead them to begin much more active reform efforts? D'Souza thinks talking about the elements of Islam that give rise to violence is "tactically imprudent"; I think his avoiding doing so is tactically disastrous. He wants to foster the growth of an Islam that accepts the idea of Muslims coexisting peacefully as equals with non-Muslims by ignoring the elements of Islam that make this increasingly difficult in the modern world. Yet while D'Souza is calling upon us to ignore these elements of Islam, jihad terrorists are not ignoring them. They continue to use them to recruit and motivate terrorists. Thus in reality the only viable way to encourage moderate Muslims is to help them confront and reject these elements of Islam, so as to forestall such recruitment.

So how about it, Ms. Lopez? Mr. D'Souza? I am up for a debate anytime you're ready.

Jihad terror suspect evades police by taking shelter in mosque

Why didn't the Vast Majority of Moderates™ in the mosque turn him over to police? "Terrorist suspect flees police in mosque," by Daniel McGrory and Richard Ford in the TimesOnline, with thanks to Ben:

A British-born terror suspect was on the run last night after breaking his control order and evading police by taking shelter in a mosque.

The man, aged 26, is thought to have escaped abroad after claiming that he wanted to undertake terror training in Afghanistan.

His disappearance is a further embarrassment for John Reid, the Home Secretary, as he is the third terror suspect under a control order to escape in less than six months.

It raises serious questions about the effectiveness of the orders, which were introduced by Government in 2005 and are designed to control and monitor terrorist suspects who can’t be prosected or deported from Britain.

Opposition MPs last night demanded that the suspect be identified. Currently there is an anonymity order in place and the Government has not applied to overturn it.

The man, who is of Pakistani origin and lives in Manchester, was only placed under the control order this month. But within four days he disappeared. Police sources say that the man failed to show up at a local police station to surrender his passport. He was traced to a nearby mosque, where community leaders say he had sought sanctuary. Police rarely enter a mosque: they began discussions with both local community figures and leading officials connected to the mosque.

It is understood that while these talks were taking place, the young suspect was helped to escape through a back entrance while officers from Greater Manchester Police were stationed outside.

Spencer reviews Steven Emerson's new book

"New Book Details Militant Islam in U.S." in Human Events is my review of Steven Emerson's Jihad Incorporated.

Are you aware of the al Qaeda plot to assassinate President Bush that was uncovered in 2005? Did you know that jihad terrorists in the U.S. financed the 1993 World Trade Center bombing partially through the sale of counterfeit T-shirts? Did you know that a professor at the University of South Florida in the 1990s was one of the international leaders of the terrorist group Palestinian Islamic Jihad and that he used his university activities as a cover while he raised money, gained recruits and disseminated propaganda for the jihad group? Had you heard that in May 2003, an American citizen living in Ohio pled guilty to conducting surveillance of the Brooklyn Bridge and other potential targets for al Qaeda?

These were not isolated incidents. In fact, they are just a few of the known activities of a huge jihad network that still operates in the United States, but of which few Americans are aware. That lack of awareness, however, is not because the information is unavailable: Steven Emerson’s “Jihad Incorporated: A Guide to Militant Islam in the U.S.” tears the cover off this American jihad network. It is a comprehensive summation of what is known about the activities of al Qaeda, Hamas, Hezbollah, Palestinian Islamic Jihad and other jihad groups within the United States. Although the tone of this book is sober and straightforward throughout, the cumulative effect is startling: The extent to which these jihad groups have penetrated American society is likely to come as a surprise even to relatively informed readers.

Emerson, who has been tracking jihad terror activity in the U.S. for years (he is the producer of the riveting 1994 episode of PBS’s “Frontline” titled “Terrorists Among Us—Jihad in America,” which is still essential viewing for all those concerned about the security of the United States), in his book lays out evidence that jihadists are pursuing their goal of Islamic supremacism in myriad ways in America today, including through “advocacy groups, an array of disingenuous charities and foundations, corporate financing networks, and the halls of academia.” He and the staffers of his Investigative Project on Terrorism explain how al Qaeda continues to operate on our soil even after 9/11, how its operational strategy has evolved since then, and the extent of its American network.

Unimpeded Terror Financing

But al Qaeda, of course, is not the only jihad organization operating on American soil today. Emerson explores the activities of many of them, including their actions within American mosques, their operations through charitable organizations and through the Internet and their involvement in money-laundering activities that allow terror financing to continue virtually unimpeded.

At the same time, he chronicles how American Muslim advocacy groups in Washington have worked to impede law enforcement endeavors against these operations at virtually every step—raising questions about their own larger goals. And of course, these advocacy groups have benefited from friends in high places.

“Homegrown plotters, sleeper cells, intolerant and hateful imams, and their domestic apologists,” Emerson explains, “all seek to undermine the foundations of this country through a variety of means: rhetoric, fund-raising, and violence. Intricate webs of interconnected groups and organizations have been established to pursue—and often to obfuscate—the zealots’ destructive objectives.”

It is disquieting reading, but in “Jihad Incorporated,” Steven Emerson has provided a useful summary of jihad activity in the United States at this time. We may only hope that law enforcement officials around the country are studying this book diligently, absorbing its lessons and devising strategies to head off the further growth of the jihad network in America.

Fitzgerald: Dissent in Iran Must Not Distract the West

Conservatives and reformists are openly challenging President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's hard-line nuclear diplomacy - an unusual agreement across Iran's political spectrum, with many saying his provocative remarks have increasingly isolated their country. -– from this article

But there is also the siren-song sung by those who insist that if no measures are taken, then within Iran a better regime will come to power. And so what? Had the Shah acquired nuclear weapons -- and he certainly wanted to -- then the Khomeini regime would have inherited those weapons. And even if the Shah's son were somehow to take over from those now running the Islamic Republic, given the makeup of the population in Iran, who can say that the Shah's son would not be followed by a regime similar to the one now in power?

One has to plan for the future, the long future. No Muslim country can be permitted to acquire weapons of mass destruction. And where a Muslim country -- i.e. Pakistan -- has managed to do so, with the collaboration of some Westerners and the criminal negligence of several Western powers, then all measures must be taken to ensure that that country lacks the ability to deliver that weaponry. All measures must also be taken to ensure that constant pressure is put on that country to put those weapons, for "permanent safekeeping," into the hands of a powerful, insistent, and if necessary most ferocious non-Muslim power.

It is not only a question of the current regime, but of future regimes in Iran. And it is not only a question of regimes but of groups and groupuscules and individuals who, inspired by their faith, might lay their hands on such weaponry or help other groups to do so. That is the problem.

And that is why those reports of some dissension within the ranks may be of interest, but cannot be allowed to prevent sensible action against that nuclear project itself, however tenuous one may guess or know that a particular unsavory regime is in power.

The existence or possession of such weapons by a state populated by Muslims, whatever the regime in question, is what must not be forgotten.

But of course, much more than a little dissension in the ranks of the Iranian leadership is being used as an excuse to do nothing. Consider: Shah Abbas forced the Armenians and Jews of Tabriz to convert overnight. And there is a direct line from that incident to the sign, required by a law of the Islamic Republic of Iran, in the window of a restaurant that Ms. Nafisi mentioned en passant -- very much en passant. Ms. Nafisi is of course still counting her royalties from the inspirational "Reading 'Lolita' in Tehran," the book that shows there is nothing to worry about because Literature Offers Liberation and a Way Out. But she does casually note, in her uplifting and feelgood narrative, a sign in a restaurant window that let would-be diners know that they should watch out, because the owner was Armenian and hence "najis," unclean.

One wonders how many intelligent people in Iran, or among the Iranians intelligently in exile, wish that Islam had never arrived. For it was a "gift" from far more primitive people, a gift that for the Iranians keeps on giving -- trouble, pain, anguish, mental desarroi. How many secretly would wish they could tow their own country out to sea somewhere, away from the Arabs and the other Muslims, adopt Zoroastrianism or Christianity or nothing at all but the cult of poesy (Sa'adi, Hafiz, Firdowsi, Omar Khayyam) and let Persians, as they see it, be Persians?

But even that wish from so many hearts, unfortunately, is no excuse to do nothing.

Jihadist TV channel a hit in Iraq

"Its chief targets are the US-led forces and 'collaborators.'" As long as there are American and coalition troops in Iraq, why is al-Zawraa still on the air? "Insurgent TV channel turns into Iraq's newest cult hit," by Michael Howard for the Guardian:

An American soldier slumps in the turret of his tank, felled by the infamous Baghdad sniper. A Humvee is vapourised by a roadside bomb. Rockets launch from a pick-up truck to shouts of "Allah u Akhbar [God is great]".

Back in the studio a TV anchorman, dressed in fatigues, urges viewers to rise up and fight the invaders. "We will not surrender. Either death or victory," he vows, while warning US forces and their "Iranian" friends in Iraq's government that they face a shameful defeat.

This is al-Zawraa TV, a 24-hour satellite station that lionises Iraq's insurgency to the drumbeat of Saddam-era martial music. It is a crude and dizzying mix of images and videos harvested from jihadi websites - and a cult hit. There are grainy loops of car bombs and mortar attacks interspersed with images of prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib and bloodied children. "Mujahideen" are seen training. Clips of Michael Moore's film, Fahrenheit 9/11 are thrown in for good measure.

Its chief targets are the US-led forces and "collaborators". But it reserves some of its strongest venom for the Safawis, a derogatory term used by Sunni Arabs to describe Iraq's resurgent Shia political and religious establishment. The name harks back to the Persian Safavid empire which ran amok in Baghdad in the 16th century.

The radical Shia cleric Moqtada al-Sadr and his Mahdi militia, thought to be behind many of today's anti-Sunni attacks, are excoriated as "murderous gangsters", while the Shia-led government is labelled as Iranian stooges. "We are not against the Shia, we are against the Safawis," the station proclaims.

Al-Zawraa started life as a mostly song-and-dance channel, but following the closure of its Baghdad offices by the Iraqi government in November for "inciting violence" it made an abrupt change of tone.

Iraqi officials say al-Zawraa is a mouthpiece for the Islamic Army in Iraq, a Baathist-dominated insurgent group. It is transmitted from an unknown location into the Middle East and north Africa by the Egyptian-owned Nilesat network.

The station i