Robert:

"Ancram seems to subscribe to the view that many hold in America: don't respond to terror by killing terrorists — that will only lead to more terrorism"

This reminds me of a statement that Benjamin Netanyahu gave to Steve Pakin of TVO a year or so ago. Bibi said, "the Arabs do not respect power... they worship it". I'd venture that we in the West, in addition to Israel, are going to have to put this posit to the test.

Straw is a classic dhimmi. He, like many Europeans and, I'm afraid, Americans, don't see the big picture. As politicians they are mostly concerned with their own political viability, in their attempt to maintain a base of voters. Thus, their focus is too narrow to understand, or even see, the truth.

Jack Straw -- who has never abandoned his National Union of Students world-view -- knows nothing of Islam, and little of history. A year or two ago he was ripped into by a constellaton of distinguishyed historians, including J. B. Kelly, Conor Cruise O'Brien, and others for his vaporings on the Middle East. Kelly's full remarks, unfortunately, were not published in the article (by Coughlin, in The Telegraph of London). Straw had been going on about the "colonial British" having drawn the boundaries of Iraq; what Kelly had pointed out in the unpublished remarks was that the most important boundary, that which now marks the boundary between Iraq and Iran, Arab and Persian, was established in the Treaty of Teheran, in 1847, concluded between the Persians and the Ottomans, and brokered by the Russians. The British had nothing to do with it. In general, Straw is an ignoramus about the relevant history (and of course knows nothing about the central tenets of Islam, about Jihad, about dhimmitude). Some may ascribe his views to the well-known phenomenon of certain people compensating for their antecedents (as the joke goes, Jewish "only on his parents' side"), but sheer ignorance, and the negligence which allows the high-and-mighty, once they are high, and very mighty, to forego the study of those matters which, in fact, they ought long ago to have thoroughly familiarized themselves with -- in Straw's case, the tenets of Islam has contained in Qur'an, hadith, sira, and enshrinted in the shari'a, and the history of the Middle East. He is not alone; anyone familiar with the pronouncments of assorted "MIddle Eastern experts" ranging from the egregious David Satterfield, that promoter of the "Arabness" of Lebanon at Taif, and of Djerijian, or those tireless negotiators such as Dennis Ross, knows that these people know nothing significant about Islam, or its well-established rules concerning Infidels and treaties with Infidels. Jack Straw, in his foolishness, is simply a representative of the Western elites that have turned their heads away from the Jihad, focussed manically on the "two tiny peoples" business in Israel, and permitted the demographic invasion, and possible conquest from within, of Western Europe (not to mention the massacres of Christians all over the Muslim East, as far as Indonesia, where 2,300 churches were destroyed in the last year alone).

Surely, in the British government, there are those who now realize, with increasing alarm, what the failure to comprehend the nature of Islam, and what a large Muslim population in Great Britain means for the future welfare and security of its non-Muslim population. Jack Straw, however, is not among them. There needs to be a housecleaning in Western governments. Those needing to be shown the door, or if they refuse to go to be defenestrated unceremoniously, include those area specialists, or arabists, who went native long ago and have always been apologists for, rather than defenders against, Arab and Muslim aggression world-wide; it would also include those whose antisemitic proclivities causes them, in their keen desire not to do anything that might, even tangentially, make the position of Israel or "the Jews" more secure, are willing to overlook the world-wide threat of Jihad, just as similar souls helped, in the 1930s, to delay the day of reckoning with Hitler. Those who are fifth columnists for what may accurately be called the Islamintern must be identified, and either isolated or cashiered, if the Western world in the next century, is to preserve itself and its own civilization, however unworthy its current possessors largely are, from Islam and the intellectual desertification that is its inevitable concomitant.

It isn't just Straw; France and Holland have condemned the killing of Yassin too. Probably all of the Eurodhimmi governments will follow suit.

It reminds me of Chamberlin just before WW2. We will not bend down to terrorist and will not not pray for their sole.

you guys are funny...all i see in all your writings is absolute fear and ignorance and spreading of fear and ignorance...a pathetic life to live indeed. All of the "scholarship" though is not lost on me, i just see it as a smoke screen for people who hate muslims. All of the blustering about anti-semitism rings hollow of the evident and unabashed hatred of a religion that none of you understand and only only to choose to educate yourselves with the most suspect of sources.

Cracker,

The problem for you with these posts is that the
people writing them know Islam all too well,
probably better than you in fact, seeing as the
only answer you can muster is the usual, pathetic Muslim whine. If you've nothing constructive to add to the discussion, please stop wasting space here.

Cracker - Sylvia's quite right. It's now over 2.1/2years since 9/11 and I'm still waiting for a significant 'moderate' muslim organisation come out and say that militant Islam is one big mistake and prove it by giving balanced references from the Koran. Until that happens, organisations like Jihadwatch have my support.

Hugh,

Your words are some of the most reasonable I've read here, and that's saying a lot given the caliber of the company. Still, pragmatically, how does one purge this hobbling "Islamintern" infestation without the bloody imperatives of a World War or relegating to McCarthian, top to bottom, tactics?

I SAY KILL EVERY DAMNABLE TERRORIST WE CAN FIND AND EVERY OTHER NATION SHOULD TOO.
Any one who gives to Jihad watch without knowing for sure where the money goes is foolish; the site is censores so its probably run by Islamofascists.