Kid Khadr
.. got a rare glimpse into a Guantanamo case — one of the first that will be prosecuted. Consider this: is Omar Khadr a hardened terrorist — a bad seed, or an obedient son, led astray by his family?
I’ll settle for dead ender.
Video here.
(h/t Sammy in the comments)
Not Since Christ Was A Black Belt
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(h/t reader dj)
On The Right To Give Offence
David Thompson revisits an essay by Steve Edwards;
[T]o place legal sanctions on any such piece of literature is to necessarily outlaw opposition to, and disagreement with, Islam to a logical denouement; this suggests we are implicitly calling for the abolition of the right to proclaim oneself a non-Muslim in clear and in certain terms. That is, one may still be a nominal ‘non-Muslim’ free of harassment, but one cannot explain and defend one’s position in any significant detail without committing the act of blasphemy.
Where Feminists Fear To Tread
“Al Qaeda in Iraq is defeated,”
Yon;
Speaking through an interpreter at a 31 October meeting at the Iraqi Islamic Party headquarters in downtown Baghdad, Sheik Omar said that al Qaeda had been “defeated mentally, and therefore is defeated physically,” referring to how clear it has become that the terrorist group’s tactics have backfired. Operatives who could once disappear back into the crowd after committing an increasingly atrocious attack no longer find safe haven among the Iraqis who live in the southern part of Baghdad. They are being hunted down and killed. Or, if they are lucky, captured by Americans.
Religion Of Peace: Today’s News Briefs
Ehsan Jami is an intelligent, softly-spoken 22 year-old council member for the Dutch Labour Party. He believes there should be no compromise, ever, on the rights of women and gay people and novelists and cartoonists. He became sick of hearing self-appointed Islamist organisations claiming to speak for him when they called for the banning of books and the “right” to abuse women. So he set up the Dutch Council of Ex-Muslims. Their manifesto called for secularism – and the end to the polite toleration of Islamist intolerance. As he put it: “We want people to be free to choose who they want to be and what they want to believe in.”
Ehsan was immediately threatened with death. He was kicked to the ground outside the supermarket. He was grabbed in a street with a knife put to his throat.
Many of the publications allegedly called on British Muslims to segregate themselves from non-Muslims and for unbelievers to be treated as second-class citizens wherever possible. The literature also allegedly contained repeated calls for gays to be thrown from mountains and tall buildings and for women to be subjugated.
collected were in English – raising questions about the emphasis placed by the Government in combating extremism by training more English-speaking imams.
Herouxville!
Where Feminists Fear To Tread
Related; “Useless idiots”
Religion of Peace Greater Understanding Outreach Program
“Make peace with us”. Or else;
Prominent Muslim scholars are warning that the “survival of the world” is at stake if Muslims and Christians do not make peace with each other.
In an unprecedented open letter signed by 138 leading Muslim scholars from every sect of Islam, the Muslims plead with Christian leaders “to come together with us on the common essentials of our two religions.”
The Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, and Pope Benedict are believed to have been sent copies of the document which calls for greater understanding between the two faiths.
The letter also spells out the similarities between passages of the Bible and the Koran.
The Muslim scholars state: “As Muslims, we say to Christians that we are not against them and that Islam is not against them – so long as they do not wage war against Muslims on account of their religion, oppress them and drive them out of their homes.”
The manager of a Christian bookstore in the Gaza Strip who was found dead last weekend was first publicly beaten and tortured by Islamic gunmen accusing him of spreading Christianity, according to witnesses and Palestinian security officials speaking to WND.
The body of Rami Ayyad, who managed the only Christian bookstore in Gaza, reportedly was found Sunday riddled with gunshot and stab wounds. Ayyad had been abducted the previous night as he closed his shop, according to a local Christian group.
Ayyad, a Baptist, was accused by Gaza-based Islamic groups of engaging in missionary activity. His bookstore, owned by the Palestinian Bible Society, was firebombed in April after which he told relatives he received numerous death threats from Islamists.
You can’t accuse them of inconsistency.
Just another day in Saudi Arabia
Another reminder, as if we needed one, at how equal rights and multicultarism are practiced in Arab countries:
As soon as the clock strikes 12 noon, only Saudis are allowed to buy water from the water distribution plant at Al-Faisaliah district in Jeddah. Two large signs on either side of the entrance state clearly “Expatriates served from 4 a.m. to 12 noon only.” A security guard is also on duty to check IDs.
Censorship At Columbia
“What’s the most important thing Americans need to know about Iraq that they don’t currently know?”
Michael Totten has a first rate report out of Ramadi;
The Provincial Security Forces are a “national guard” of sorts controlled by the tribal authorities in addition to the Iraqi Army and Iraqi Police in the area. They resemble a militia in some ways, but they’re a legal branch of the Iraqi security forces, authorized and paid by the Ministry of Interior in Baghdad.
“An ice truck dropped off its ice at a checkpoint,” he continued. “The truck behind it in line exploded. Everybody was killed. For a five or six hour period we weren’t sure the PSF would go back to work. But eight hours later they were back in business. They are 100 percent committed to anti-terrorism and anti-sectarianism.”
“What’s the worst thing you’ve seen here?” I said.
He wasn’t sure what to say and had to think about his answer for a few moments.
“The worst thing I’ve seen, I think, is the aftermath of a VBIED,” he said.
A VBIED is a vehicle-born improvised explosive device. In other words, a car bomb.
“I’ve seen that about ten times,” he continued. “Some people are turned, literally, into red blotches. Some are just vaporized. Their families will never see them again, not even their bodies. And the smell…there’s this awful car bomb smell, the acrid stench of homemade explosives and diesel fuel. Nothing else in the world has that smell. Most of the VBIEDs were intended for civilians, but the Iraqi Police usually stopped them first at the checkpoints. So they were the ones who usually got blown up. The driver of the VBIED would panic because he was caught and then kill everyone at the checkpoint. Nevertheless, the Iraqi Police kept bravely manning the checkpoints and replacing the police who were murdered. I’m telling you, they aren’t doing that for 310 dollars a month.”
That’s just a taste, Be sure to read it all.
“We want revenge…”
The assassination of popular Sheik Abdul Sattar Abu Resha has backfired. Via AJStrata;
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Much more at the link.
“In a world of perfect karma”
“Ahmadinejad would be captured by American “students” and held hostage for over a year, paraded before TV cameras and threatened almost daily with death.”
There’s still time.
An Interview With A Mukhtar
INDC: Security has improved a lot; I was here in January and things were very bad. Why has security improved so much?
Mukhtar: The people of Fallujah, now they know the truth of the terrorists, the mujahadeen. Now they know that these people are not working for Fallujah; no, they are working against the people here. So they’ve changed their minds, all of their thinking about the terrorists. Fallujah was a city of peace for a long time. It’s the “city of mosques” and all the people are peaceful, hard workers.
INDC: Why was there so much conflict with the Americans initially?
Mukhtar: We thought America wanted to steal Iraq. And from our perspective as Muslims, you should fight against thieves. And all the people around the world … it’s the same in America … if Iraq went to America to take America, all the people would fight against Iraq. I think we can agree about that.
INDC: What do you think of Americans now?
Mukhtar: The Americans now are peaceful — more than us (laughs). They are helpful and give humanitarian support for the people here.
You can read the rest here.
Related – “American commanders in southern Iraq say Shiite sheiks are showing interest in joining forces with the U.S. military against extremists, in much the same way that Sunni clansmen in the western part of the country have worked with American forces against al-Qaida.”
Those Misunderstood Muslims
Justice Muhammad Taqi Usmani argues that Muslims should live peacefully in countries such as Britain, where they have the freedom to practise Islam, only until they gain enough power to engage in battle.
His views explode the myth that the creed of offensive, expansionist jihad represents a distortion of traditional Islamic thinking.
Mr Usmani, 64, sat for 20 years as a Sharia judge in Pakistan’s Supreme Court. He is an adviser to several global financial institutions and a regular visitor to Britain. Polite and softly spoken, he revealed to The Times a detailed knowledge of world events and his words, for the most part, were balanced and considered.
He agreed that it was wrong to suggest that the entire nonMuslim world was intent on destroying Islam. Yet this is a man who, in his published work, argues the case for Muslims to wage an expansionist war against nonMuslim lands.
Mr Usmani’s justification for aggressive military jihad as a means of establishing global Islamic supremacy is revealed at the climax of his book, Islam and Modernism. The work is a polemic against Islamic modernists who seek to convert the entire Koran into “a poetic and metaphorical book” because, he says, they have been bewitched by Western culture and ideology.
It’s Not Over By A Long Shot
This morning on local radio they are pondering the question – “is it time to put 9/11 behind us?”
My response – when did we put the invasion of Poland and Pearl Harbor “behind” us? When the war was over.
“A bomb-sniffing dog in Ankara helped Turkish authorities stop a massive terrorist attack on the anniversary of 9/11. A van full of explosives in a parking garage would have devastated the center of the large city, and it would have served as a counterpoint to the messages released by Osama bin Laden in the past week […] This would make three terrorist attacks thwarted in the past week.”
Letter to a Friend: On Islamic Fundamentalism (Sept. 11, 2006);
Today is September 11th and I suppose every single person in this country knows what they were doing on this date five years ago. I recall the feeling of unreality I had as I watched a small TV screen here at home repeatedly play tiny images of two towers collapsing. And then, in the immediate aftermath, do you remember how many in this country – especially among intellectuals and academics – wanted to discuss what “we” had done to “deserve” this? Those were hard days, and in many respects the years since then have been harder still, for although I had by then already spent decades in the strange ideological climate of American academic life, I never expected to see such an orgy of “blame America first” unleashed in this country. Nor did I have any way of anticipating how serious the real consequences would be when those attitudes, nurtured in the idle confines of academia, spilled over into the very dangerous world outside.
I would hate it if our old friendship were to dissolve over politics, mere politics. But I can’t not respond to your last letter, in which you stated that you were just as worried by Christian as by Muslim fundamentalists. Repeatedly in the past few years I’ve heard acquaintances, even relatives, express the same view. To my mind, however, this is a preposterous comment, for it evades the crucial recognition that something new has been unfolding before our eyes. Not that 9/11 inaugurated that new stage. I think, rather, it marked the end of the beginning, and the subsequent stage, the middle part, is still underway.
h/t
At Wizbang, 6 Years Later.
Roger Simon reviews World War IV: The Long Struggle Against Islamofascism – “You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you.”
And Lileks.
Related links are welcome in the comments.
Only When His Lips Move
Osama Bin Laden’s widely publicized video address to the American people has a peculiarity that casts serious doubt on its authenticity: the video freezes at about 1 minute and 36 58 seconds, and motion only resumes again at 12:30. The video then freezes again at 14:02 remains frozen until the end. All references to current events, such as the 62nd anniversary of the U.S. atomic bombing of Japan, and Sarkozy and Brown being the leaders of France and the UK, respectively, occur when the video is frozen! The words spoken when the video is in motion contain no references to contemporary events and could have been (and likely were) made before the U.S. invasion of Iraq.
Or during the Democratic national convention. There’s word today that there’s another Bin Laden video set for release. If the previous one is any indication, expect a cameo appearance by Michael Moore.
A Racist Ape In King Arthur’s Court
When the concept of “multiculturalism” was introduced to Canadians, most assumed it meant “more pavilions at Folkfest”.
Via Gay and Right;
I became exasperated and said ‘Is there no-one working here who speaks English? This is Paddington – this is still a London neighbourhood.’
A well-dressed man came over and said ‘I speak English.’ I thought he was going to intervene on my behalf but instead came out with this astonishing observation:
‘You are a racist! You are a racist ape! Look at you– you are an ape!’
I was dumbfounded. I came to London thirty-two years ago to soak up the culture of Dr Johnson and Chaucer and Milton, and in the autumn of my life am called an ape by a man from, well, perhaps Egypt, perhaps Palestine, perhaps Saudi Arabia.
More at the link.
Related: Speaking of Chaucer and Milton…
The “New Church Of England;
“Almost half of Britain’s mosques are under the control of a hardline Islamic sect whose leading preacher loathes Western values and has called on Muslims to “shed blood” for Allah, an investigation by The Times has found.
Riyadh ul Haq, who supports armed jihad and preaches contempt for Jews, Christians and Hindus, is in line to become the spiritual leader of the Deobandi sect in Britain. The ultra-conservative movement, which gave birth to the Taleban in Afghanistan, now runs more than 600 of Britain’s 1,350 mosques…”
Don’t let any of this interrupt your discussions in the comments, my leftist friends.
Because The Next Election Could Be A Close One
| Get your bids in now. Vote early, Vote Allah. |
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And because it deserves to be said again – When the concept of “multiculturalism” was introduced to Canadians, most assumed it meant “more pavilions at Folkfest”.