GUANTANAMO BAY, Cuba, July 15 -- Salim Ahmed Hamdan, an alleged al-Qaeda driver who faces a historic military trial next week, testified Tuesday that a female interrogator elicited information from him using sexually suggestive behavior that he called "improper."

Hamdan, a former driver for Osama bin Laden who is accused in a terrorism conspiracy, told a military court that during questioning in 2002, a female interrogator "came close to me, she came very close, with her whole body towards me. I couldn't do anything. I was afraid of the soldiers."

"Did she touch your thigh?" asked Hamdan's attorney Charles Swift.

"Yes. . . . I said to her, 'What do you want?' " Hamdan said at a pretrial hearing. "She said, 'I want you to answer all of my questions.' "

"Did you answer all of her questions after that?" Swift asked. Hamdan said he did.
Talk about PC run amok. And -- beyond the point that apparently it worked -- are we now going to classify "suggestive behavior" as torture?

In fact, we have no idea as to the context of the "improper" brush of Hamdan's leg, which could have been completely innocent and a total fantasy by Hamdan -- and I can't believe we've really gotten to this point where such trivial matters become "news" -- but one can bet that for a true-believing Islamofascist like Hamdan the very fact that the US military had the audacity to send a female interrogator is, to him and those like him, "improper."

So we're now at the point where rather than ridiculing this sexist, gynophobic, oppressive and illiberal Islamic fundamentalist culture we will instead respect it and submit to it all in the name of cultural awareness, diversity and political correctness. Absolutely bassackwards ridiculous!

Labels: guantanamo, intelligence, interrogation, Islamic extremism, war on terror

ADEN, Yemen -- Almost eight years after al-Qaeda nearly sank the USS Cole with an explosives-stuffed motorboat, killing 17 sailors, all the defendants convicted in the attack have escaped from prison or been freed by Yemeni officials.

Jamal al-Badawi, a Yemeni who helped organize the plot to bomb the Cole as it refueled in this Yemeni port on Oct. 12, 2000, has broken out of prison twice. He was recaptured both times, but then secretly released by the government last fall. Yemeni authorities jailed him again after receiving complaints from Washington. But U.S. officials have so little faith that he's still in his cell that they have demanded the right to perform random inspections.

Two suspects, described as the key organizers, were captured outside Yemen and are being held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, beyond the jurisdiction of U.S. courts. Many details of their alleged involvement remain classified. It is unclear when -- or if -- they will be tried by the military.
Ya know... maybe if "allies" like Yemen proved to be more reliable in their counterterrorism policies the United States wouldn't feel the need to even have Guantanamo.

Labels: guantanamo, Islamic extremism, terrorism, war on terror

Labels: intelligence, Islamic extremism, surveillance, terrorism, war on terror

Here's a continuation of a post below regarding Democrat's odd and inaccurate insistence that we differentiate between al Qaeda versus other Islamic terror groups, differentiate between Sunni versus Shiite jihadists. When it comes to us, Amir Taheri explains, they make no differentiation in their hatred of Western civilization... nor do their bombs.

For more than a quarter century, Tehran has been host to the offices of more than three dozen terrorists organizations, from the Colombian FARC to the Palestinian Hamas and passing by half a dozen Trotskyite and Leninist outfits. It also finances many anti-American groups and parties of both extreme right and extreme left in Europe and the Americas. Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has bestowed the Muslim title of "brother" on Cuba's Fidel Castro, Venezuela's Hugo Chávez, Bolivia's Evo Morales and Nicaragua's Daniel Ortega. Communist North Korea is the only country with which the Islamic Republic maintains close military-industrial ties and holds joint annual staff sessions.

George Ibrahim Abdallah, the Lebanese maverick who led a campaign of terror in Paris in the 1980s on behalf of Tehran, was a Christian. So was Anis Naqqache, who led several hit-teams sent to kill Iranian exile opposition leaders. For years, and until a recent change of policy, Tehran financed and offered shelter to the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK), a Marxist movement fighting to overthrow the Turkish Republic. Why? Tehran's displeasure with Turkish membership of NATO and friendship with the U.S.

Yes, Mr. Obama might ask, but what about Sunni-Shiite cooperation?

The Islamic Republic has financed and armed the Afghan Sunni Hizb Islami (Islamic Party) since the 1990s. It's also financed the Front for Islamic Salvation (FIS), a Sunni political-terrorist outfit in Algeria between 1992 and 2005.

In 1993, a senior Iranian delegation, led by the then Islamic Parliament Speaker Ayatollah Mehdi Karrubi, attended the Arab-Muslim Popular Congress organized by Hassan al-Turabi, nicknamed "The Pope of Islamist Terror," in Khartoum. At the end of this anti-American jamboree a nine-man "Coordinating Committee" was announced. Karrubi was a member, along with such Sunni eminences as Osama Bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri, Mr. Turabi and the Algerian Abdallah Jaballah. The fact that Karrubi was a Shiite mullah did not prevent him from sitting alongside Sunni sheikhs.

In 1996, a suicide attack claimed the lives of 19 American servicemen in Al Khobar, eastern Saudi Arabia. The operation was carried out by the Hezbollah in Hejaz, an Iranian-financed outfit, with the help of the Sunni militant group "Sword of the Peninsula."

In 2000, Sunni groups linked to al Qaeda killed 17 U.S. servicemen in a suicide attack on USS Cole off the coast of Yemen. This time, a Shiite militant group led by Sheikh al-Houti, Tehran's man in Yemen, played second fiddle in the operation.

In Central Asia's Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, Tehran has for years supported two Sunni movements, the Rastakhiz Islami (Islamic Awakening) and Hizb Tahrir Islami (Islamic Liberation Party). In Azerbaijan, a former Soviet republic, Tehran supports the Sunni Taleshi groups against the Azeri Shiite majority. The reason? The Taleshi Sunnis are pro-Russian and anti-American, while the Shiite Azeris are pro-American and anti-Russian.

There are no Palestinian Shiites, yet Tehran has become the principal source of funding for radical Palestinian Sunni groups, notably Hamas, Islamic Jihad and half a dozen leftist-atheist minigroups. Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh refuses to pray alongside his Iranian hosts during his visits to Tehran. But when it comes to joining Khomeinist crowds in shouting "Death to America" he is in the forefront.

With Arab oil kingdoms no longer as generous as before, Iran has emerged as the chief source of funding for Hamas. The new Iranian budget, coming into effect on March 21, allocates over $2 billion to the promotion of "revolutionary causes." Much of the money will go to Hamas and the Lebanese branch of Hezbollah.

In Pakistan, the Iran-financed Shiite Tehrik Jaafari joined a coalition of Sunni parties to govern the Northwest Frontier Province, until they all suffered a crushing defeat at last month's parliamentary elections.

The fact that the Sunnis and Shiites in other provinces of Pakistan continued to kill each other did not prevent them from developing a joint, anti-U.S. strategy that included the revival of the Afghan Taliban and protection for the remnants of al Qaeda. Almost all self-styled "holy warriors" who go to Iraq on a mission of murder and mayhem are Sunnis. And, yet most pass through Syria, a country that, as already noted, is dominated by a sect with a militant anti-Sunni religious doctrine.

Next month, Tehran will host what is billed as "The Islamic Convergence Conference," bringing together hundreds of Shiite and Sunni militants from all over the world. The man in charge, Ayatollah Ali-Muhammad Taskhiri, has described the goal of the gathering to be delivering "a punch in the face of the American Great Satan."

Labels: Iran, Iraq, Islamic extremism, mccain, terrorism, war on terror

The Archbishop of Canterbury says the introduction of sharia is inevitable in the United Kingdom, which is a tough break not just for those Brits who believe in quaint concepts like common law, but also for Muslims who left their moribund homelands in search of free societies unencumbered by Islamic jurisprudence.

-- Mark Steyn

Labels: immigration, Islamic extremism

There's been a lot of hair splitting lately vis-a-vis Saddam Hussein's relations with Islamic terrorism as reported by a new Pentagon report.

Most recently, there's criticism of Vice President Dick Cheney for the following statement: "Now, was that a link between Iraq and Al Qaeda? Seems to me pretty clear that there was."

But it's the administration's hair splitting opponents, such as The Miami Herald's Carl Hiaasen, who are engaging in some bait and switch:

True to form, the vice president repeated his dark assertion that former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein had close ties with al Qaeda, a claim discredited and rejected by every U.S. intelligence agency.
Note the language: "close ties." But those are Hiaasen's words, not Cheney's. Cheney only said there was "a link."

And, indeed, reading the Pentagon report, that's exactly what they reported -- most notably, that Iraq had provided funding and training for, among others, the Egyptian Islamic Jihad (EIJ).

Here's the rub: EIJ was headed by none other than Osama bin Laden's deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri. Thus, Iraq was providing money and support to Ayman al-Zawahiri. If that's not "a link," I don't know what the Hiaasens of the would would consider a link!

All the talk of "no smoking gun" is equally ridiculous! In the world of intelligence and spycraft there never is a smoking gun. That's Hollywood crap, like those last minute Perry Mason courtroom confessionals.

And, to show just how deceptive Hiaasen's take was, here's the whole statement by Cheney, from which Hiaasen extrapolated his own half truth:

[Cheney] Well, this is no operational link. But there was, as I recall from looking at it, extensive links with Egyptian Islamic Jihad. Egyptian Islamic Jihad was the organization headed by Zawahiri, and he merged EIJ with Al Qaeda when he became the deputy director of Al Qaida, Osama bin Laden’s number two. Now, was that a link between Iraq and Al Qaeda? Seems to me pretty clear that there was.

But it’s a question — I would urge you to go read the report. I know ABC reported on it. If you dig into the report in depth, I think you may find that there was an extensive relationship with a broad range of terrorist groups, that he was a state sponsor of terror. And I don’t think there’s any doubt about that.
Again, there's absolutely nothing untrue with Cheney's statement when matched to the Pentagon report. And he doesn't ever use the words "close ties," Mr. Hiaasen.

Zawahiri just this week, by the way, urged his followers to "attack the interest[s] of the Jews and the Americans."

And that's the point that fools like Hiaasen don't seem to get, no matter how often you knock them upside the head: Zawahiri, Osama bin Laden, al Qaeda... Islamic terrorists don't split hairs over who's a card carrying member of al Qaeda and who's just an Islamic fundamentalist ready to kill some civilians for the cause, whether or not their financial support comes from a true believer or a Middle Eastern despot.

Should Hiaasen's plane be hijacked by boxcutter wielding Islamists will he really be releived if they turn out to be neck-cutting EIJ members, not neck-cutting al Qaeda members?

Finally, here's a blast from the past -- an ABC News report from 1999 (thanks to Pat Dollard) highlighting Saddam's links to al Qaeda. I guess ABC News and Cheney are in on it together, eh Carl?

Labels: al qaeda, Cheney, Iraq, Islamic extremism, terrorism, war on terror

Same old, same old. Thanks to the gents over at Weekly Standard for debunking the latest in the 'Saddam had no ties to terror' myth. It's amazing the lengths the MSM go to split hairs between al Qaeda terrorism versus just plain Islamic-extremist terror. Okay, so Saddam didn't have have tea parties with bin Laden and Zawahiri, but he nonetheless had no problem fully supporting or funding persons and terror organizations cut from the same cloth.

A new Pentagon report on Iraq and Terrorism has the news media buzzing. An item on the New York Times blog snarks, "Oh, By the Way, There Was No Al Qaeda Link." The ABC News story that previews the full report concludes, "Report Shows No Link Between Saddam and al Qaeda."

How, then, to explain this sentence about Iraq and al Qaeda from the report's abstract: "At times, these organizations would work together in pursuit of shared goals but still maintain their autonomy and independence because of innate caution and mutual distrust"? And how to explain the "considerable overlap" between their activities which led not only to the appearances of ties but to a "de facto link between the organizations?" (See the entire abstract below.)

And what about this revelation from page 34? "Captured documents reveal that the regime was willing to co-opt or support organizations it knew to be part of al Qaeda -- as long as that organization's near-term goals supported Saddam's long-term vision." (The example given in the report is the Army of Muhammad in Bahrain, a group the Iraqi Intelligence Service describes as "under the wings of bin Laden.")

And there is this line from page 42: "Saddam supported groups that either associated directly with al Qaeda (such as the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, led at one time by bin Laden's deputy, Ayman al Zawahiri) or that generally shared al Qaeda's stated goals and objectives."

Really? Saddam Hussein "supported" a group that merged with al Qaeda in the late 1990s, run by al Qaeda's #2, and the New York Times thinks this is not a link between Iraq and al Qaeda? How does that work?
Here's a little more from Michael Goldfarb -- it's also another case where our intelligence agencies and thinktanks produce executive summaries (the only thing the media reads) that directly contradict the body of these reports:

The Iraqi Intelligence documents discussed in the report link Saddam’s regime to: the Egyptian Islamic Jihad (the “EIJ” is al Qaeda number-two Ayman al Zawahiri's group), the Islamic Group or “IG” (once headed by a key al Qaeda ideologue, Sheikh Omar Abdel-Rahman), the Army of Mohammed (al Qaeda's affiliate in Bahrain), the Islamic Movement of Kurdistan (a forerunner to Ansar al-Islam, al Qaeda's affiliate in Iraq), and Gulbuddin Hekmatyar (a long-time ally of Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan), among other terrorist groups. Documents cited by the report, but not discussed at length in the publicly available version (they may be in a redacted portion of the report), also detail Saddam’s ties to a sixth al Qaeda affiliate: the Abu Sayyaf group, an al Qaeda affiliate in the Philippines.

Both the EIJ and the IG were early and important core allies for Osama bin Laden as he forged the al Qaeda terror network, which comprises a number of affiliates around the world.
More by Eli Lake of the NY Sun, here.

Labels: al qaeda, bin Laden, Iraq, Islamic extremism, media bias, terrorism

In 1977, Jimmy Carter told Americans to get over their "inordinate fear of communism." This year, expect to be told to get over your "inordinate fear" of terrorism.

Among politicians, the case is still being made sotto voce. When Barack Obama lists the "common threats of the 21st century" as "nuclear weapons and terrorism, climate change and poverty, genocide and disease," the suggestion is that Islamist terrorism is one of many problems, and not, as John McCain insists, the "transcendent issue of our time."

Among policy experts, however, the argument is being stated more baldly. "The fear of terrorism has reached the bogeyman threshold," writes Marc Sageman, a forensic psychiatrist formerly with the CIA. His new book, "Leaderless Jihad," is worth reading if only because it makes the best of a bad case.

This case has been made before. "Americans are bedeviled by fantasies about terrorism," wrote Larry Johnson, a former State Department counterterrorism official, in a New York Times op-ed. "They seem to believe that terrorism is the greatest threat to the United States and that it is becoming more widespread and lethal. They are likely to think that the United States is the most popular target of terrorists. And they almost certainly have the impression that extremist Islamic groups cause most terrorism. None of these beliefs are based in fact."

Unfortunately for Mr. Johnson, his op-ed appeared in July 2001, two months and a day before 9/11. Mr. Sageman is a more sophisticated observer. He takes the terrorist threat seriously and understands that the U.S. is the chief target. He rubbishes most of the pop-sociological explanations for terrorism, including poverty, sexual frustration and so on. And he argues that, having mainly vanquished the old al Qaeda in Afghanistan, we are now faced with a "third generation" of jihadis who are disconnected from any kind of central organization and therefore harder to detect and thwart.

In Mr. Sageman's account, this third generation is mostly a byproduct of Muslim anger about the U.S. invasion of Iraq. "The sight of U.S. soldiers fighting Muslims around the world triggers moral outrage and inspires sympathizers to join the movement," he writes. "The sight of Muslims fighting back provides a heroic model to emulate." By erasing the U.S. footprint in Iraq, "demilitarizing" the fight against terrorism, working toward a settlement for the Palestinians and otherwise assuaging Muslim sensibilities while making terrorism "uncool," Mr. Sageman believes the air can slowly be let out of the jihadist balloon.

Implicit in this argument is the notion that, when it comes to fighting terrorism, doing less is more. As a political prescription, it fits nicely with the idea that the war in Iraq has only made our terrorism problem worse and that we can better address the threat as a criminal justice issue rather than as a "war" (as the U.S. mostly did during the Clinton administration). Mr. Sageman's one caveat is that we cannot allow terrorists to regain the territorial sanctuaries they enjoyed prior to 9/11.

That caveat, however, turns out to be broad enough to drive a truck bomb through. Mr. Sageman believes the third generation of jihadis only came into existence with the near-destruction of the first two, achieved by force of arms in Afghanistan and maintained by the presence of tens of thousands of U.S. and NATO troops in the country. He insists that the war in Afghanistan did not have a galvanizing effect on the third generation, and that the sanctuaries that still remain to Osama bin Laden in the Pakistan hinterland don't provide a particularly useful base for global jihad.

Really? Even before the U.S. toppled the Taliban, Yusuf Qaradawi, the most influential cleric in the Sunni world, took to the airwaves to insist that "Islamic law says that if a Muslim country is attacked, the other Muslim countries must help it, with their souls and their money, until it is liberated." As for the Pakistani sanctuaries, a National Intelligence Estimate from last summer noted that al Qaeda had "regenerated key elements of its Homeland attack capability, including: a safe haven in the Pakistan Federally Administered Tribal Areas, operational lieutenants, and its top leadership." Those capabilities are now making themselves felt through suicide terror in Pakistan and Afghanistan.

No doubt the invasion of Iraq did spur a younger generation of jihadis to new fits of apoplexy, particularly in Europe. Yet when Mohammed Bouyeri murdered Theo Van Gogh in the streets of Amsterdam, he was reacting to Mr. Van Gogh's film "Submission," which uncharitably depicts the treatment of women in Islam.

Similarly, when mobs burned down the Danish embassy in Beirut, the "rage" turned on a dozen or so offending cartoons. The threshold for jihadist violence, it turns out, falls below whatever levels are set by current U.S. foreign policy to include what used to be known as free speech.

Then, too, for all the anger over Iraq, it's curious that it is Europe -- with its hostility to the Bush administration and its longstanding Palestinian sympathies -- that has borne the brunt of "third generation" terror. Mr. Sageman's explanation rests on America's habits of assimilation and the greater economic opportunities for Muslims here. But that merely suggests that one solution to third generation terror lies in more accommodative labor market and immigration policies in Europe, not U.S. withdrawal from Iraq.

On the contrary, if recent experience in Iraq demonstrates anything, it's that nothing is likelier to deter future terrorists than the defeat of existing ones. In letters captured by U.S. forces in Iraq late last year, al Qaeda "sheikhs" lament how the flow of foreign suicide bombers has dried up as the likelihood dims that their "martyrdom" will result in anyone's death other than their own. There is, said one of these sheikhs about his dwindling minions, "panic, fear and an unwillingness to fight" ever since U.S. and Iraqi troops went on the offensive.

Which brings us back to the 39th president. Two years after he expressed a merely ordinate fear of communism, the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan. "History teaches, perhaps, very few clear lessons," Mr. Carter said in his response. "But surely one such lesson learned by the world at great cost is that aggression, unopposed, becomes a contagious disease." Mr. Carter learned that the hard way. Let's hope Mr. Obama won't have to learn the same lesson, the same way.
-- Bret Stephens

Labels: foreign policy, Islamic extremism, war on terror

Great "read the whole thing" commentary by Alan Dershowitz.

Sally Field, et. al., take note please. It's a similar theme to the film Death in Gaza, which I reviewed a couple years back.

Zahra Maladan is an educated woman who edits a women's magazine in Lebanon. She is also a mother, who undoubtedly loves her son. She has ambitions for him, but they are different from those of most mothers in the West. She wants her son to become a suicide bomber.

At the recent funeral for the assassinated Hezbollah terrorist Imad Moughnaya -- the mass murderer responsible for killing 241 marines in 1983 and more than 100 women, children and men in Buenos Aires in 1992 and 1994 -- Ms. Maladan was quoted in the New York Times giving the following warning to her son: "if you're not going to follow the steps of the Islamic resistance martyrs, then I don't want you."

Zahra Maladan represents a dramatic shift in the way we must fight to protect our citizens against enemies who are sworn to kill them by killing themselves. The traditional paradigm was that mothers who love their children want them to live in peace, marry and produce grandchildren. Women in general, and mothers in particular, were seen as a counterweight to male belligerence. The picture of the mother weeping as her son is led off to battle -- even a just battle -- has been a constant and powerful image.

Now there is a new image of mothers urging their children to die, and then celebrating the martyrdom of their suicidal sons and daughters by distributing sweets and singing wedding songs. More and more young women -- some married with infant children -- are strapping bombs to their (sometimes pregnant) bellies, because they have been taught to love death rather than life. Look at what is being preached by some influential Islamic leaders:

"We are going to win, because they love life and we love death," said Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah. He has also said: "[E]ach of us lives his days and nights hoping more than anything to be killed for the sake of Allah." Shortly after 9/11, Osama bin Laden told a reporter: "We love death. The U.S. loves life. That is the big difference between us."

"The Americans love Pepsi-Cola, we love death," explained Afghani al Qaeda operative Maulana Inyadullah. Sheik Feiz Mohammed, leader of the Global Islamic Youth Center in Sydney, Australia, preached: "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." Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said in a speech: "It is the zenith of honor for a man, a young person, boy or girl, to be prepared to sacrifice his life in order to serve the interests of his nation and his religion."

How should Western democracies fight against an enemy whose leaders preach a preference for death?

The two basic premises of conventional warfare have long been that soldiers and civilians prefer living to dying and can thus be deterred from killing by the fear of being killed; and that combatants (soldiers) can easily be distinguished from noncombatants (women, children, the elderly, the infirm and other ordinary citizens). These premises are being challenged by women like Zahra Maladan. Neither she nor her son -- if he listens to his mother -- can be deterred from killing by the fear of being killed. They must be prevented from succeeding in their ghoulish quest for martyrdom. Prevention, however, carries a high risk of error. The woman walking toward the group of soldiers or civilians might well be an innocent civilian. A moment's hesitation may cost innocent lives. But a failure to hesitate may also have a price.

Late last month, a young female bomber was shot as she approached some shops in central Baghdad. The Iraqi soldier who drew his gun hesitated as the bomber, hands raised, insisted that she wasn't armed. The soldier and a shop owner finally opened fire as she dashed for the stores; she was knocked to the ground but still managed to detonate the bomb, killing three and wounding eight. Had the soldier and other bystanders not called out a warning to others -- and had they not shot her before she could enter the shops -- the death toll certainly would have been higher. Had he not hesitated, it might have been lower.

As more women and children are recruited by their mothers and their religious leaders to become suicide bombers, more women and children will be shot at -- some mistakenly. That too is part of the grand plan of our enemies. They want us to kill their civilians, who they also consider martyrs, because when we accidentally kill a civilian, they win in the court of public opinion. One Western diplomat called this the "harsh arithmetic of pain," whereby civilian casualties on both sides "play in their favor." Democracies lose, both politically and emotionally, when they kill civilians, even inadvertently. As Golda Meir once put it: "We can perhaps someday forgive you for killing our children, but we cannot forgive you for making us kill your children."

Civilian casualties also increase when terrorists operate from within civilian enclaves and hide behind human shields. This relatively new phenomenon undercuts the second basic premise of conventional warfare: Combatants can easily be distinguished from noncombatants. Has Zahra Maladan become a combatant by urging her son to blow himself up? Have the religious leaders who preach a culture of death lost their status as noncombatants? What about "civilians" who willingly allow themselves to be used as human shields? Or their homes as launching pads for terrorist rockets?

The traditional sharp distinction between soldiers in uniform and civilians in nonmilitary garb has given way to a continuum. At the more civilian end are babies and true noncombatants; at the more military end are the religious leaders who incite mass murder; in the middle are ordinary citizens who facilitate, finance or encourage terrorism. There are no hard and fast lines of demarcation, and mistakes are inevitable -- as the terrorists well understand.

We need new rules, strategies and tactics to deal effectively and fairly with these dangerous new realities. We cannot simply wait until the son of Zahra Maladan -- and the sons and daughters of hundreds of others like her -- decide to follow his mother's demand. We must stop them before they export their sick and dangerous culture of death to our shores.

Labels: Islamic extremism, war on terror, why they hate us

[Der Speigel] Draw a picture offensive to Muslim extremists, and you might find yourself without a roof. Ask Kurt Westergaard, one of the twelve Danish cartoonists whose autumn 2005 Muhammad caricatures lead to violent protests throughout the Muslim world. He was booted from his police-protected hotel room on Feb. 15 for being "too much of a security risk." And now the 73-year-old cartoonist and his wife are without a place to live.
Read the rest.

Labels: america alone, immigration, Islamic extremism

'Tis sad but true. Liberal constitutional democracies are self-imposing policies against free speech and decreeing other restrictions on unalienable rights which were practices otherwise previously reserved to illiberal unconstitutional non-democracies from Bejing to Rayadh to Havana.

Mark Steyn comments from a personal level: recently the Canadian human rights system decided to judge whether to ban the magazine Maclean's from publishing excerpts of his latest book, America Alone. (Background here)

Since Maclean's got into a spot of bother with Canada's "human rights" pseudo-courts, I've been pleasantly surprised by the number of our media confreres who don't think it should be a "crime" for magazines to publish excerpts from books by yours truly. Nevertheless, in defending free speech in general, they usually feel obliged to deplore my exercise of it in particular:

"Maclean's published an alarmist screed by Mr. Steyn . . ." (The Economist)

"While the book may be alarmist . . ." (CFRB)

"Steyn's argument is indeed alarmist . . ." (The Guardian)

And, oh dear, even:

"The fear of 'a Muslim tide' was alarmist . . ." (Tarek Fatah and Farzana Hassan in Maclean's)

Okay, enough already. I get the picture: alarmist, alarmist, alarmist. My book's thesis — that most of the Western world is on course to become at least semi-Islamic in its political and cultural disposition within a very short time — is "alarmist."

The question then arises: fair enough, guys, what would it take to alarm you? The other day, in a characteristically clotted speech followed by a rather more careless BBC interview, the Archbishop of Canterbury said that it was dangerous to have one law for everyone and that the introduction of sharia — Islamic law — to the United Kingdom was "inevitable." No alarm bells going off yet? Can't say I blame you. After all, de facto creeping sharia is well established in the Western world. Last week, the British and Ontario governments confirmed within days of each other that thousands of polygamous men in their jurisdictions receive welfare payments for each of their wives. Still no alarm bells? I see female Muslim medical students in British hospitals are refusing to comply with hygiene procedures on the grounds that scrubbing requires them to bare their arms, which is un-Islamic. Would it be alarmist to bring that up — say, the day before your operation?

...Whether or not it's "alarmist" to ponder what those consequences might be, under Canada's "human rights" kangaroo courts it might soon be illegal. All Section 13 cases brought to the federal Human Rights Commission end in defeat for the defendant, so, if Maclean's fails to buck the 100 per cent conviction rate, it would be enjoined from publishing anything that might relate to the "hate speech" in question — in other words, we would be legally prevented from writing about Islam and the West, demographic trends in Canada, and many other topics.

Labels: activist courts, capitulation, dhimmitude, immigration, Islamic extremism, political correctness

Debra Burlingame is the sister of Charles Burlingame, pilot of American Airlines flight 77, whose flight was hijacked and flown into the WTC. Ms. Burlingame is also director of the World Trade Center Memorial Foundation.

What she's written below -- and you'll want to read the whole thing -- is an absolutely damning reminder of the Clinton's attitude towards terrorism. The sixth from the last paragraph is nothing short of the single most brilliant reason why the premise of a Hillary Clinton presidency is frightening. (Regarding that, I wrote something similar a few years ago.)

The Clintons' Terror Pardons
By DEBRA BURLINGAME
Wall Street Journal
February 12, 2008; Page A17

It was nearly 10 p.m. on New Year's Eve, 1982. Two officers on New York Police Department's elite bomb squad rushed to headquarters at One Police Plaza, where minutes earlier an explosion had destroyed the entrance to the building. Lying amid the carnage was Police Officer Rocco Pascarella, his lower leg blasted off.

"He was ripped up like someone took a box cutter and shredded his face," remembered Detective Anthony Senft, one of the bomb-squad officers who answered the call 25 years ago. "We really didn't even know that he was a uniformed man until we found his weapon, that's how badly he was injured."


About 20 minutes later, Mr. Senft and his partner, Richard Pastorella, were blown 15 feet in the air as they knelt in protective gear to defuse another bomb. Detective Senft was blinded in one eye, his facial bones shattered, his hip severely fractured. Mr. Pastorella was blinded in both eyes and lost all the fingers of his right hand. A total of four bombs exploded in a single hour on that night, including at FBI headquarters in Manhattan and the federal courthouse in Brooklyn.

The perpetrators were members of Armed Forces of National Liberation, FALN (the Spanish acronym), a clandestine terrorist group devoted to bringing about independence for Puerto Rico through violent means. Its members waged war on America with bombings, arson, kidnappings, prison escapes, threats and intimidation. The most gruesome attack was the 1975 Fraunces Tavern bombing in Lower Manhattan. Timed to go off during the lunch-hour rush, the explosion decapitated one of the four people killed and injured another 60.


FALN bragged about the bloodbath, calling the victims "reactionary corporate executives" and threatening: "You have unleashed a storm from which you comfortable Yankees can't escape." By 1996, the FBI had linked FALN to 146 bombings and a string of armed robberies -- a reign of terror that resulted in nine deaths and hundreds of injured victims.

On Aug. 7, 1999, the one-year anniversary of the U.S. African embassy bombings that killed 257 people and injured 5,000, President Bill Clinton reaffirmed his commitment to the victims of terrorism, vowing that he "will not rest until justice is done." Four days later, while Congress was on summer recess, the White House quietly issued a press release announcing that the president was granting clemency to 16 imprisoned members of FALN. What began as a simple paragraph on the AP wire exploded into a major controversy.

Mr. Clinton justified the clemencies by asserting that the sentences were disproportionate to the crimes. None of the petitioners, he stated, had been directly involved in crimes that caused bodily harm to anyone. "For me," the president concluded, "the question, therefore, was whether their continuing incarceration served any meaningful purpose."

His comments, including the astonishing claim that the FALN prisoners were being unfairly punished because of "guilt by association," were widely condemned as a concession to terrorists. Further, they were seen as an outrageous slap in the face of the victims and a bitter betrayal of the cops and federal law enforcement officers who had put their lives on the line to protect the public and who had invested years of their careers to put these people behind bars. The U.S. Sentencing Commission affirmed a pre-existing Justice Department assessment that the sentences, ranging from 30 to 90 years, were "in line with sentences imposed in other cases for similar terrorist activity."

The prisoners were convicted on a variety of charges that included conspiracy, sedition, violation of the Hobbes Act (extortion by force, violence or fear), armed robbery and illegal possession of weapons and explosives -- including large quantities of C-4 plastic explosive, dynamite and huge caches of ammunition. Mr. Clinton's action was opposed by the FBI, the Bureau of Prisons, the U.S. attorney offices that prosecuted the cases and the victims whose lives had been shattered. In contravention of standard procedures, none of these agencies, victims or families of victims were consulted or notified prior to the president's announcement.

"I know the chilling evidence that convicted the petitioners," wrote Deborah Devaney, one of the federal prosecutors who spent years on the cases. "The conspirators made every effort to murder and maim. . . . A few dedicated federal agents are the only people who stood in their way."

Observed Judge George Layton, who sentenced four FALN defendants for their conspiracy to use military-grade explosives to break an FALN leader from Ft. Leavenworth Penitentiary and detonate bombs at other public buildings, "[T]his case . . . represents one of the finest examples of preventive law enforcement that has ever come to this court's attention in the 20-odd years it has been a judge and in the 20 years before that as a practicing lawyer in criminal cases."

The FBI cracked the cases with the discovery of an FALN safe house and bomb factory. Video surveillance showed two of those on the clemency list firing weapons and building bombs intended for an imminent attack at a U.S. military installation. FBI agents obtained a warrant and entered the premises, surreptitiously disarming the bombs whose components bore the unmistakable FALN signature. They found 24 pounds of dynamite, 24 blasting caps, weapons, disguises, false IDs and thousands of rounds of ammunition.

A total of six safe houses were ultimately uncovered. Seven hundred hours of surveillance video were recorded, resulting in a mountain of evidence connecting the 16 prisoners to multiple FALN operations past and present.

Federal law enforcement agencies considered these individuals so dangerous, extraordinary security precautions were taken at their numerous trials. Courthouse elevators were restricted and no one, including the court officers, was permitted to carry a firearm in the courtroom.

Given all this, why would Bill Clinton, who had ignored the 3,226 clemency petitions that had piled up on his desk over the years, suddenly reach into the stack and pluck out these 16 meritless cases? (The New York Times ran a column with the headline, "Bill's Little Gift.")

Hillary Rodham Clinton was in the midst of her state-wide "listening tour" in anticipation of her run for the U.S. Senate in New York, a state which included 1.3 million Hispanics. Three members of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus -- Luis V. Gutierrez (D., Ill.), Jose E. Serrano, (D., N.Y.) and Nydia M. Velazquez, (D., N.Y.) -- along with local Hispanic politicians and leftist human-rights advocates, had been agitating for years on behalf of the FALN cases directly to the White House and first lady.

Initial reports stated that Mrs. Clinton supported the clemencies, but when public reaction went negative she changed course, issuing a short statement three weeks after the clemencies were announced. The prisoners' delay in refusing to renounce violence "speaks volumes," she said.

The Clintons were caught in an awkward predicament of their own making. The president had ignored federal guidelines for commutation of sentences, including the most fundamental: The prisoners hadn't actually asked for clemency.

To push the deal through, signed statements renouncing violence and expressing remorse were required by the Justice Department. The FALN prisoners, surely relishing the embarrassment and discomfiture they were causing the president and his wife, had previously declined to accept these conditions. Committed and unrepentant militants who did not accept the authority of the United States, they refused to apologize for activities they were proud of in order to obtain a clemency they never requested.

So desperate was the White House to get the deal finalized and out of the news, an unprecedented 16-way conference call was set up for the "petitioners" who were locked up in 11 different federal facilities so that they could strategize a response to the president's offer. Two eventually refused to renounce their cause, preferring to serve out their lengthy sentences rather than follow the White House script.

Mr. Clinton's fecklessness in the handling of these cases was demonstrated by the fact that none of the prisoners were required, as a standard condition of release, to cooperate in ongoing investigations of countless unsolved FALN bombing cases and other crimes. Mrs. Clinton's so-called disagreement with her husband on the matter made no mention of that fact. The risk of demanding such a requirement, of course, was that the prisoners might have proudly implicated themselves, causing the entire enterprise to implode, with maximum damage to the president and potentially sinking Hillary Clinton's Senate chances.

Meanwhile, Puerto Rican politicians in New York who'd been crowing to their constituents about the impending release of these "freedom fighters" were enraged and insulted at Hillary Clinton's withdrawal of support. "It was a horrible blunder," said State Sen. Olga A. Mendez. "She needs to learn the rules."

The first lady called her failure to consult the Puerto Rican political establishment before assessing the entire issue a mistake "that will never happen again" -- even as the cops who had been maimed and disfigured by FALN operations continued to be ignored. Tom and Joe Connor, two brothers who were little boys when their 33-year-old father, Frank, was killed in the Fraunces Tavern attack, were dumbstruck to learn that White House staffers referred to the FALN militants as "political prisoners" and were planning a meeting with their children to humanize their plight.

Members of Congress viewed the clemencies as a dangerous abuse of presidential power that could not go unchallenged. Resolutions condemning the president's action were passed with a vote of 95-2 in the Senate, 311-41 in the House. It was the most they could do; the president's pardon power, conferred by the Constitution, is absolute. The House launched an investigation, subpoenaing records from the White House and Justice in an effort to determine whether proper procedure had been followed. President Clinton promptly invoked executive privilege, putting Justice Department lawyers in the impossible position of admitting that they had sent the White House a recommendation on the issue, but barred from disclosing what it was.

Twenty-four hours before a scheduled Senate committee hearing, the DOJ withheld the FBI's written statement about the history of the FALN and an assessment of its current terrorist capability. "They pulled the plug on us," said an unnamed FBI official in a news report, referring to the Justice Department decision to prevent FBI testimony.

The investigation revealed that the White House was driving the effort to release the prisoners, rather than the other way around. White House aides created talking points and strategies for a public campaign on the prisoners' behalf included asking prominent individuals for letters supporting clemency.

Jeffrey Farrow, a key adviser on the White House Interagency Working Group for Puerto Rico recommended meetings with the president and the three leading members of Congressional Hispanic Caucus who were pushing the effort, stating in a March 6, 1999 email, "This is Gutierrez's [sic] top priority as well as of high constituent importance to Serrano and Velazquez." The next day, White House Deputy Chief of Staff Maria Echaveste sent an email to White House Counsel Charles Ruff, who was handling the clemency issue, supporting Mr. Farrow's view, saying, "Chuck -- Jeff's right about this -- very hot issue." Another adviser in the Working Group, Mayra Martinez-Fernandez, noted that releasing the prisoners would be "fairly easy to accomplish and will have a positive impact among strategic communities in the U.S. (read, voters)."

And there you have it. Votes.

While the pardon scandals that marked Bill and Hillary Clinton's final days in office are remembered as transactions involving cronies, criminals and campaign contributors, the FALN clemencies of 1999 should be remembered in the context of the increasing threat of domestic and transnational terrorism that was ramping up during the Clinton years of alleged peace and prosperity. To wit, the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, the 1995 Tokyo subway Sarin attack, the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, the 1995 "Bojinka" conspiracy to hijack airplanes and crash them into buildings, the 1996 Khobar Towers bombing, the 1996 Summer Olympics bombing, Osama bin Laden's 1996 and 1998 "Declarations of War" on America, the 1998 East African embassy bombings, the 2000 USS Sullivans bombing attempt, the 2000 USS Cole bombing, and the 2000 Millennium bombing plot.

It was within that context that the FBI gave its position on the FALN clemencies -- which the White House succeeded in keeping out of news coverage but ultimately failed to suppress -- stating that "the release of these individuals will psychologically and operationally enhance the ongoing violent and criminal activities of terrorist groups, not only in Puerto Rico, but throughout the world." The White House spun the clemencies as a sign of the president's universal commitment to "peace and reconciliation" just one year after Osama bin Laden told his followers that the United States is a "paper tiger" that can be attacked with impunity.

It would be a mistake to dismiss as "old news" the story of how and why these terrorists were released in light of the fact that it took place during the precise period when Bill Clinton now claims he was avidly engaged, even "obsessed," with efforts to protect the public from clandestine terrorist attacks. If Bill and Hillary Clinton were willing to pander to the demands of local Hispanic politicians and leftist human-rights activists defending bomb-makers convicted of seditious conspiracy, how might they stand up to pressure from other interest groups working in less obvious ways against U.S. interests in a post-9/11 world?

Radical Islamists are a sophisticated and determined enemy who understand that violence alone will not achieve their goals. Islamist front groups, representing themselves as rights organizations, are attempting to get a foothold here as they have already in parts of Western Europe by deftly exploiting ethnic and racial politics, agitating under the banner of civil liberties even as they are clamoring for the imposition of special Shariah law privileges in the public domain. They believe that the road to America's ultimate defeat is through the back door of policy and law and they are aggressively using money, influence and retail politics to achieve their goal.

On the campaign trail, the Clintons like to say that Bill is merely supportive and enthusiastic, "just like all the other candidates' spouses." Nothing could be further from the truth. Returning Bill and Hillary Clinton to the White House would present the country with the unprecedented situation of a former and current president simultaneously occupying the White House, the practical implications of which have yet to be fully explored.

The FALN clemencies provide a disturbing example of how the abuse or misuse of presidential prerogative, under the guise of policy, can be put in service of the personal and private activities of the president's spouse -- and beyond the reach of meaningful congressional oversight.

Labels: 9-11, Clinton, Islamic extremism, terrorism, war on terror

Dhimmi (noun): A non-Muslim subject of a Muslim state ruled under Sharia laws in which the subject must pay a tax, or jizya, to enjoy the protection, or zimmi, of the state.

In other words, think of it akin to Mob protection money. 'Da boys will come by and collect their share in return for the family's protection -- it's protection from the very guys collecting the protection money, but in this case 'da boys is the state.

[UK Express Mail] HUSBANDS who bring more than one wife to Britain can claim extra benefits for them at taxpayers' expense.

Ministers have ruled that men in polygamous marriages can receive state handouts for each wife, including additional income support, even though bigamy is illegal in the UK. A review of benefit rules for such marriages concluded in December that allowing husbands to claim for their additional wives remained the "best possible" option.

The decision will chiefly benefit Muslim men, as Islamic law allows them to have up to four wives.

Multi-marriages are recognised by the Government – provided the weddings took place in countries where the practice is legal. But critics last night attacked the decision as "completely unacceptable" and warned it could lead to demands for other changes in British laws.

Corin Taylor, of the Taxpayers' Alliance, said: "British taxpayers are paying a record amount of tax so the Government has a duty to make sure that every penny is spent properly. Polygamy is not something which British law allows and British taxpayers should not have to pay for extra benefits for second or third wives."

Tory spokesman Chris Grayling said: "You are not allowed to have multiple marriages in the UK, so to have a situation where the benefits system is treating people in different ways is totally unacceptable and will serve to undermine confidence in the system. This sets a precedent that will lead to more demands for the culture of other countries to be reflected in UK law and the benefits system."
Precedent? You're not kidding, Buster. Welcome to the slippery slope of state-enforced "diversity."

Labels: dhimmitude, Islamic extremism, political correctness

On the sixth anniversary of the murder by Islamic extremists of WSJ reporter Daniel Pearl, his father, Judea Pearl, opines on the responsibility of media.

One of the things that saddens me most is that the press and media have had an active, perhaps even major role in fermenting hate and inhumanity. It was not religious fanaticism alone [that killed Daniel Pearl].

This was first brought to my attention by the Pakistani Consul General who came to offer condolences at our home in California. When we spoke about the anti-Semitic element in Danny's murder she said: "What can you expect of these people who never saw a Jew in their lives and who have been exposed, day and night, to televised images of Israeli soldiers targeting and killing Palestinian children."

At the time, it was not clear whether she was trying to exonerate Pakistan from responsibility for Danny's murder, or to pass on the responsibility to European and Arab media for their persistent de-humanization of Jews, Americans and Israelis. The answer was unveiled in 2004, when a friend told me that photos of Muhammad Al Dura were used as background in the video tape of Danny's murder.

Al Dura, readers may recall, is the 12-year-old Palestinian boy who allegedly died from Israeli bullets in Gaza in September of 2001. As we now know, the whole scene is very likely to have been a fraud, choreographed by stringers and cameramen of France 2, the official news channel of France. France 2 aired the tape repeatedly and distributed it all over the world to anyone who needed an excuse to ratchet up anger or violence, among them Danny's killers.

The Pakistani Consul was right. The media cannot be totally exonerated from responsibility for Daniel's murder, as well as for the "tsunami of hate" that has swept the world and continues to rise.

Ironically, the increase of independent news channels in the Arab world, a process which is generally considered a positive step forward, has contributed significantly to this spread of hatred and violence. On the one hand, this process has led to the democratization of the media, for it allows viewers to examine alternative viewpoints, occasionally opposing the official party line. On the other hand, democratization has led to vulgarization. Competition has forced news channels to echo, rather than inform, viewers' sentiments -- to reinforce, rather than examine, long-held prejudices.

Eager to satisfy their customers' appetite for self-righteousness, these channels have not thought through the harmful, in fact lethal, long-term effects of choreographing victim-victimizer narratives as news coverage.

Surely they have an obligation to expose villainy and excess. This is what journalism is all about. But in a world infected with fanatics who run around with lit matches, journalists cannot simply pour gasoline into the street and pretend they bear no responsibility for the inevitable explosion.

Labels: Islamic extremism, Journalism scandals, media bias, palestinians, war on terror

Question: If Spain's 2004 elected government pulled troops from Iraq in order to appease Islamic militants who bombed their rail stations, why did a new batch of Islamic militants plan to do the same two weeks from today?

To repeat: Islamic militants don't hate us for our policies, but for the liberties of religion, assembly and speech and others upon which our democracies are based.

MADRID (Reuters) - Islamist extremists were planning attacks across Europe, especially against public transport, before their arrests in Barcelona last weekend, a Spanish paper reported on Saturday, citing a would-be attacker's testimony.

The Al Qaeda-inspired cell planned to attack the Barcelona metro and other targets in Spain, Germany, France, Portugal and the United Kingdom, said the bomber turned police informant.

In testimony that led to the arrest of 14 South Asians last Saturday, the informant told police the group had a preference for attacks on public transport, especially metro systems, El Pais newspaper reported.

"If we attack the metro, the emergency services can't get there," the informant said he was told by a fellow suicide bomber, El Pais reported.

Two pairs with explosive-filled bags were to enter separate Barcelona subway stations and other members of the group were to detonate their bombs by remote control, said the witness.

On Friday, Spain's government said the Barcelona cell was preparing to carry out the metro attack either last weekend or in the following 15 days.

Two other pairs of suicide bombers had been assigned targets elsewhere in Spain, another was to attack Germany, three were given objectives in France and two more were to strike Portugal.

The informant said the Barcelona cell had six suicide bombers and other members responsible for preparing explosives and planning attacks in other European states. Four of those arrested have since been released due to lack of evidence.

Al Qaeda was to take responsibility for the Barcelona attacks through Baitullah Mehsud, a Taliban commander the Pakistani government says was behind the assassination of opposition leader Benazir Bhutto, El Pais said.

"Only the leadership of the organization knows what requests the emir (Baitullah) will make after the first attack, but if they are not carried out, there will be a second attack, a third in Spain. And next Germany, France, Portugal, United Kingdom," the head of the cell told the police informer, El Pais reported.

The Barcelona bombings could have taken place less than two months before Spain's March 9 general election.

Islamic militants attacked Madrid commuter trains days before Spain's last general election in March 2004, killing 191 people and wounding 1,800. They said the attacks were made in revenge for Spain sending troops to Afghanistan and Iraq.

Labels: Islamic extremism, war on terror, why they hate us

Via John Podhoretz, some interesting comments by Sly...

Sylvester Stallone has made a fourth Rambo movie, which will be released later this month, in which Rambo helps Burmese rebels. This would be a matter of no interest — Stallone is 60 years old, after all, the scandalously successful second Rambo was released 22 years ago, and an afterthought Rambo III came out in 1988 — except that Stallone's sixth Rocky movie, released last year, was surprisingly decent. The movie-idolator audience of the website Aint It Cool News interviewed Stallone in connection with the new film, and he gave a quite remarkable answer to a quite remarkable question.

The question:

In the eighties, John Rambo took on villains who were the real villains of the day: ruthless, invading Russian commie b—-rds hellbent on global communism. So I always assumed that if Rambo returned he'd be taking on the real villain of this day: extreme, radical Islamist b—rds hellbent on worldwide jihad. It seems like all of today's movies have [wimped] out on making Islamofacists the bad guys even though they are clearly the bad guys in the real world right now. Why is Rambo [wimping] out on this mission? Has he become politically correct?

Stallone: I thought the idea of Rambo dealing with Al-Qaeda, etc. would be an insult to our American forces that are actually dying trying to rid the world of this cancer. To have at the end of a 90 minute movie the character of Rambo seizing Osama bin Laden in a choke hold then dragging him into the Oval Office then tossing him in the President's lap declaring "The world is now safe, Chief" would be a bit insulting.
We've seen today every film that deals with the Middle Eastern situation has failed because it is a subject people find incredibly painful to sit through while it is ongoing. Maybe ten years in the future a good film will be produced on the subject. Right now I believe revealing a situation like the ongoing genocide in Burma provides a compelling story simply because it is true and is the longest running civil war in the world.

Labels: Hollywood bias, Islamic extremism, war on terror

This letter to the Wall Street Journal hits the mark: We fail to take the Islamist rhetoric at its face value. They mean exactly what what they say. Yet we repetitively and mistakenly attempt to reduce the "root causes" of conflict to our Western mindset.

I continue to be amused at how the language of Marxist-Leninist "class struggle" has become such an integral part of the political analysis of Americans -- even the Journal.

Commenting on an op-ed column by Frederick Kagan (" Our Friends in Baghdad," Dec. 21), Steven Ross ("Well-Heeled Terrorists Responded to U.S. Presence ," letters, Dec. 27) borrows -- pretty much whole-cloth -- the language of "class struggle" as a means to explain just what it is that is motivating the world's Islamists. But while he is correct in pointing out that it is not the Muslim poor who account for the strength of the Islamists, he too falls into the trap of seeing this "struggle" in terms of a conflict between social and economic classes.

The simple fact is that what we are facing today is a religious, not a class, "struggle." If anything, the Islamists would undoubtedly point out that the Quran recognizes no social classes and, therefore, that Mr. Kagan, Mr. Ross, and the rest of the West continue to misunderstand Islam and the motivations of the Islamists.

This is not a Western-style conflict, born of the lessons of the West. It is a "struggle" to regain and expand the strength of Islam, to resurrect dar al Islam, the Khilafah, and the Shariah as the foundations of the governance of Islam, and ensure that Western influences are completely eliminated from Islam. It is a struggle both within Islam for what we in the West often refer to as "hearts and minds" and it is a struggle against dar al Harb -- the infidels -- to eliminate the growing influence of Western ideas -- such as the "class struggle."

Stephen Gale, Ph.D. - University of Pennsylvania and the Foreign Policy Research Institute Philadelphia
Time and again many persons first reaction is to ignore truthful statements and fact, preferring instead to believe that were the United States and Western leaders to simply adopt a foreign-policy of pseudo-isolationism all of our troubles with radical Islam would disappear. But, as Lawrence Wright points out in his book The Looming Tower: Al Qaeda And The Road to 9/11, the enemy makes their point quite clear regardless of those ingrained in western thought and "willing disbelief."

Between 10 and 20,000 trainees passed through the Afghan camps from 1996 until they were destroyed in 2001... in addition to the strenuous physical training the new recruits endured, they were also indoctrinated with the Al Qaeda worldview. The class notes of some of the trainees spelled out the utopian goals of the organization:

1. Establishing the rule of God on Earth.
2. Attaining martyrdom in the cause of God.
3. Purification of the ranks of Islam from the elements of depravity.

... their text was a 180 page manual, Military Studies in the Jihad against the Tyrants, which included chapters on counterfeiting, weapons training, security, and espionage. "The confrontation that we are calling for with the apostate regimes does not know Socratic debates... Platonic ideals... nor Aristotelian diplomacy," the manual begins. "But it does know the dialogue of bullets, the ideals of assassination, bombing and destruction, and the diplomacy of the cannon and machine gun."
This point - a total rejection of all civilized discussion to attain any happy medium - is further underscored by Wright when he points out that well before US troops were planted in Baghdad, on November 17, 1997, Islamic radicals had no compunction with murdering innocent civilians whose foreign-policy leanings and voting habits were never known to their murderers. On that day members of Ayman Zawahiri's Islamic Group indiscriminately murdered 62 people in an Egyptian temple.

Six young men dressed in black police uniforms and carrying vinyl bags entered the temple precinct shortly before nine in the morning. One of the men shot a guard, and then they all put on the red headbands identifying themselves as members of the Islamic group. Two the attackers remained at the gate to await the shootout with the police, who never arrived.

The other men crisscrossed the terraced temple grounds, mowing down the tourists by shooting their legs, then methodically finishing them off with close shots to the head. The paused to mutilate some of the bodies with butcher knives. One elderly Japanese man was eviscerated. A pamphlet was later found stuffed in his body that said, "no to tourists in Egypt."... the killing went on for 45 minutes, until the floors streamed with blood. The dead included a five year old British child and four Japanese couples on their honeymoons.... 58 tourists and four Egyptians had died, not counting the attackers.

It was the worst act of terror in modern Egyptian history. The majority of the victims, 35 of them, were Swiss others came from Japan, Germany, United Kingdom, France, Bulgaria, and Columbia. 17 other tourists and nine Egyptians were wounded. One Swiss woman had seen her father's head cut off in front of her eyes.
One does not recall the Swiss ever stationing troops in Arabia or partaking in any no-fly zone sorties. Rather, they were murdered only because they were different, and their religious-political belief system was not the same as those who shamelessly took their lives.

Labels: Islamic extremism, terrorism, war on terror, why they hate us

Who is Nihad Awad? Oh, just one of 14 officials from the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) whom federal authorities have investigated for having ties to terrorist organizations. One FBI veteran called CAIR "a turnstile for terrorists and their supporters," according to World Net Daily.

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

During the meeting, according to FBI transcripts, Awad was recorded discussing the propaganda effort. He mentions Ghassan Dahduli, whom he worked with at the time at the Islamic Association for Palestine, another Hamas front. Both were IAP officers. Dahduli's name also was listed in the address book of bin Laden's personal secretary, Wadi al-Hage, who is serving a life sentence in prison for his role in the U.S. embassy bombings. Dahduli, an ethnic-Palestinian like Awad, was deported to Jordan after 9/11 for refusing to cooperate in the terror investigation.

Awad's and Dahduli's phone numbers are listed in a Muslim Brotherhood document seized by federal investigators revealing "important phone numbers" for the "Palestine Section" of the Brotherhood in America. The court exhibit shows Hamas fugitive Mousa Abu Marzook listed on the same page with Awad.
Read about the other 13 in the WND article.

Labels: Islamic extremism, war on terror

Well there's a first for everything apparently. Finally, The New York Times has published a thoughtful, unapologist, solid opinon piece condemning recent Islamic outrages without resorting to blaming American foreign policy, Israel, Dick Cheney, Fox News, or Rush Limbaugh. I'm speechless.

Muslims who wonder why non-Muslims are often baffled, angered, even frightened by some governments’ interpretation of Islamic law need only look to the cases of two women in Saudi Arabia and Sudan threatened with barbaric lashings.

In Saudi Arabia, a woman who was gang-raped was sentenced to 90 lashes. The reason? Before the rape, the woman, who was then 19, had been in a car with a man who was not a family member — a crime under the kingdom’s legal code, which is based on a strict Wahabi reading of Islamic law. Punishing the victim of a brutal rape is reprehensible. Then a Saudi appeals court more than doubled her lashings to 200 and added six months’ jail time, apparently because she had the audacity to publicly challenge the court’s ruling. Her lawyer had his license to practice suspended.

In Sudan, a British primary school teacher was originally threatened with 40 lashes, a fine, or six months in jail after her class of 7-year-olds voted to name a teddy bear Muhammad. The government accused her of insulting the Prophet Muhammad. Muhammad is one of the most common names among Muslims, including the student who suggested it for the teddy bear. On Thursday, the court reduced the teacher’s sentence to 15 days in jail, but found her guilty and ordered her deported.

Saudi Arabia and Sudan have notoriously bad human rights records and the cases have ominous political overtones. The Khartoum government — so willing to punish the crime of naming a teddy bear — is responsible for the genocide in Darfur. The case was widely seen as a warning against Westerners who protest that mass slaughter. In the Saudi case, the girl was a member of the country’s persecuted Shiite minority, and experts said her sentence was harsh even by Saudi standards.

Khartoum’s few friends, in the Arab League and China, should make clear that such cynical games will only increase its isolation. The world should expect better from Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah, who has introduced some — but not nearly enough — political and judicial reforms. The king has a hallowed responsibility in Islam as Keeper of the Two Holy Mosques of Mecca and Medina. What one Muslim leader, Ibrahim Mogra of the Muslim Council of Britain, said about the Sudan case can also be applied to the Saudis’: “How does this help the cause of Islam? What kind of message and image are we portraying about our religion and our culture?”

Labels: Islamic extremism, NYT, Saudi Arabia, sudan

Islamabad (PTI): In a repeat of the horrendous vandalism that destroyed the Bamiyan Buddha statues in Afghanistan in 2001, militants in northwest Pakistan's troubled Swat valley have destroyed one of the oldest and most important Buddhist sculptures, second in importance in South Asia.

Despite repeated requests by Pakistani archaeologists to the local authorities to protect the seated Buddha and other sites, especially after the first attack, no action was taken. "In fact, militants were able to carry out their work in broad daylight," said President of the Asia Society, Vishakha N Desai in an article in Lebanon's Daily Star newspaper.
Perhaps it has to do with the Buddhist's Middle East policies? Perhaps it's because the Buddhist's support for the war in Iraq? Perhaps it's because of the Buddhist's dependence on foreign oil? Perhaps it's the Buddhist's support for Israel? Perhaps it's because Perhaps the Buddhists need more introspection and should ask why they so offend Islamic extremists? No..?

Oh, then, perhaps it's because Islamic extremists have a deadly zero tolerance policy for any person, any group, any ideology or any religion that does not espouse the exact same views as them? Yeah, that must be it.

Labels: Islamic extremism, war on terror, why they hate us