The French government, in crisis mode, on Sunday called for the release of two French journalists kidnapped in Iraq by Islamic militants demanding that Paris rescind a ban on headscarves in state schools.
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[…]
The two men went missing on August 20, the day they were to have left Baghdad for the central holy city of Najaf, then the scene of fierce fighting between US forces and Shiite militia loyal to radical cleric Moqtada Sadr.
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Late Saturday, Arabic-language Al-Jazeera television broadcast images of Chesnot and Malbrunot along with an ultimatum from the Islamic Army in Iraq, the same group that killed Italian journalist Enzo Baldoni after kidnapping him.
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The group gave Paris 48 hours to meet its demands, describing the ban on the Islamic veil in state schools as “an injustice and an attack on the Islamic religion,” the Qatar-based network reported, citing its “own sources in Iraq.”

Now, isn’t this a fine kettle of fish? Will France capitulate, or is she willing to sacrifice two of her sons to take a principled stand on the right to limit religious expression?

… both Chesnot and Malbrunot’s employers and Sunni Muslim scholars had earlier expressed faith that if they had been kidnapped, they would be safe because France had staunchly opposed the US-led war against Iraq.�

I guess they hadn’t noticed the intelligence report revealing that planning for the Madrid train bombings began prior to the 9/11 attacks, when Spain wasn’t in Iraq or anywhere else. You’d think that journalists and their employers would be on top of details like that.
Crossposted at the Shotgun

Until now.

(AP photo)

Emad Mohammed’s 12-yard bicycle kick in the 64th minute gave Iraq a 1-0 victory over Australia in the quarterfinals Saturday, putting the invaded, war-torn country in position to compete for only its second Olympic medal in the nation’s history.

Courtesy of Kevin Jaeger;

Heh. Short of equipment, yes. Short of enthusiasm and professionalism? Nope.

Exerpted from a sermon delivered at Finsbury Park Mosque in London, by Sheikh Abu Hamza Al-Masri.

[O]ne should not pray for the souls of members of the security forces in our countries, if they are killed while fighting Islamists. One should under no circumstances pray for their souls because they fight for the taghut. [3] They are fighting for the legitimization of interest and for forcing it on people, for the legitimization of fornication and other forbidden things, and for the presence of Jews and Christians in the Arabian Peninsula. They are fighting for the throne of Genghis Khan, for the throne of [King] Fahd, for Mubarak, and not for Allah.
“‘The Believers fight for Allah, whereas the infidels fight for the taghut. Fight the allies of Satan. Indeed, Satan’s cunning is weak’ [Koran, 4:76]. To pray for such people in mosques makes a mockery of the religion of Allah, because it misleads people and makes them believe that these are fighters for Allah, whereas [in fact] they kill Muslim men and women unjustly.
[…]
“That is because the true believer sees the world-to-come as though through a sheer fabric, as though he hears the voices of paradise, and he longs for it and yearns for it. He weighs things with both the scales of this world and the next, not only the scales of this world. He overcomes desires and stiffens his resolve not to be entangled in dubious matters, and then he triumphs and dies a good death. This is what the infidels and the hypocrites do not understand. They do not understand those who love death because it is the gate through which they meet the Lord. The believer knows that he is married to both this world and the next. This world and the next are [like] two wives [married to the same man]; if he makes one of them happy, it is at the expense of the other. If a man gives charity from his wealth, it is for the hereafter and it affects him [adversely] in this world. If he goes to fight in Jihad, it is likely that his business will be damaged and he may be separated from his family, but it is done for the sake of the world-to-come. But if he does nothing about the world-to- come, and engages himself completely in this world, this is at the expense of the world-to-come, and the world-to-come will be angry with him because of it.”
“The infidel Americans who ruined their palaces [in paradise] with their own hands must pluck these ideas out of the heads and hearts of young men and women of the believers, of the people of our nation, so we would surrender to them as the red Indians had, so that our rights would be forfeited and we would lose both this world and the world-to-come, and so that we shall be their slavish followers in both this world and the world-to-come, in this world – to humiliation, and in the world-to-come – to the fires of hell, God forbid.”
“That is why they want to change the curricula, the curricula that edify believers, the curricula that educate people to persevere. They will never achieve it. They can win the sympathy of the hypocrites and those who apostatized and those whose hearts are sick, but they have no power over the believers, because Allah protects them and gives them his blessed protection. This is Allah’s rule: Do not be deceived by this world, do not be deceived by temptations: ‘Let not the fortunes of the disbelievers in the land deceive you. Their prosperity is brief, and then hell shall be their abode. What an evil resting place!’ [Koran, 3:197-8]. This is the rule of Allah.

Arested a month after this sermon, the Americans have been trying to extradite him for his alleged attempts to create a jihad camp in Oregon.

David Frum asks some obvious questions about intelligence “failures”;

I’m beginning to think that maybe the weakest link in America�s intelligence system isn’t the spooks who generate the intelligence. The weakest link may be the users, the policymakers. But then, the users, the policymakers are ultimately elected. So maybe the problem is us.
That’s the question that keeps hitting me as I read and reread the 9/11 report this summer. Yes, it tells of many disturbing intelligence failures. But even more disturbing are the intelligence successes – the many times that Osama bin Laden was within reach in 1998, 1999, 2000, and 2001 and yet still nothing was done.
Why not? Well ultimately because decision-makers flinched from the consequences of making a mistake. They feared alienating world opinion and offending and upsetting the voters. In other words – they didn’t act because they weren’t sure that the public wanted them to act.

I would point out that this is what divides politicians from statesman.
Policy makers who place public opinion above national security don’t deserve much sympathy for their errors – they have lost track of their priorities. When national security is at stake, priority number one is not re-election, no matter how you want to fold and tweak the rationale.
But I also agree with Frum about the responsibility of both the public and the media to grow up and behave like thinking adults.

We’re not going to get an intelligence service that takes risks until its leaders know that the public will accept that risks sometimes go wrong, sometimes badly wrong. Accepts – and forgives.
Any sign of that? Not much, not in the current media environment anyway. The current environment accepts bold risky intelligence strategies that succeed – while reserving the right to brutally condemn those that fail. Not exactly a good formula for curing gun-shyness.

That’s because the media has also found ways to rationalize their behavior in placing election of their favoured ideological sons over the security of nations and their citizenry.

Reader Charles MacDonald; “It’s now 30 years since the Syrians shot down flight 51 with the loss of all aboard:”

On Aug. 9, 1974, UN Flight 51 was flying from Beirut to Damascus on a routine supply run for Canadian peacekeepers manning the Golan Heights. The outcome was anything but routine.
Aboard the Buffalo aircraft were five crew and four passengers: Mirau, a native of Swift Current, Sask.; Capt. George Foster, 44, of Calgary; Master Cpl. Ronald Spencer, 29, of Quebec; Cpl. Bruce Stringer, 23, of Kitchener, Ont.; Capt. Robert Wicks, 39, of London, Ont.; Cpl. Morris Kennington, 30, of Britain; Cpl. Michael Simpson, 26; Master Warrant Officer Gaston Landry, 35, of St-Francois d’Assise, Que., and Warrant Officer Cyril Korejwo, 47.
The flight was cleared by air traffic control in Damascus to descend for landing.
“Just as they were letting down, the Syrian surface-to-air missile battery along the highway opened up with one missile,” said Roger Landry. “The pilot managed to avoid that first missile.”
But the pilot — it’s unclear whether Mirau or Foster was actually flying the plane — couldn’t avoid a second missile. It took out the left engine.
A third went through the fuselage. Everyone on board was killed — the largest single-day loss of life in Canada’s peacekeeping history. The time was 11:50 a.m.
Landry was allowed into the crash site a day later. The Syrian army had cleaned up most of the evidence, but he did find electrical wiring with Russian writing on it — from the missiles’ firing systems.

Today is the 30th Anniversary of the loss. And Charles is right – don’t look for our UN Peacekeeper lovin’ media to notice.

New information about the Madrid train bombings;

“One of the most sobering pieces of information to come out of the investigation of the March 11th bombings is that the planning for the attacks may have begun nearly a year before 9/11. In October, 2000, several of the suspects met in Istanbul with Amer Azizi, who had taken the nom de guerre Othman Al Andalusi-Othman of Al Andalus. Azizi later gave the conspirators permission to act in the name of Al Qaeda, although it is unclear whether he authorized money or other assistance- or, indeed, whether Al Qaeda had much support to offer. In June, Italian police released a surveillance tape of one of the alleged planners of the train bombings, an Egyptian housepainter named Rabei Osman Sayed Ahmed, who said that the operation ‘took me two and a half years.’ Ahmed had served as an explosives expert in the Egyptian Army. It appears that some kind of attack would have happened even if Spain had not joined the Coalition- or if the invasion of Iraq had never occurred.”

It also undermines the already flimsy hypothesis that the war on Islamic fascism is spawning new terrorists. So far, pretty much everyone they’ve nabbed has been a member of the “Blow ‘Em Up For Allah Glee Club” for quite a long time.
More from the Belmont Club.
hat tip – Paul Tuns at the Shotgun

“I’d see myself first of all as a jobs president, as a health care president, as an education president and also an Oprah Winfrey president. And add them all together, you can’t be safe at home today unless you are also safe abroad.”

Washington Times;

In a massive security blunder, passes allowing vehicles into the Olympic Village in Athens reportedly have been stolen from unlocked cars.

It gets better.

Organizers began recruiting 7,000 workers in mid- May to undertake jobs from receptionists to housekeepers at the Olympic village. But with so many people to process in only three months, the planned background checks were scrapped.

I’m wondering why there’s been no discussion yet on the security problems that will be facing the Vancouver-Whistler games, and what the political fallout may be if the US decides to provide security for their own athletes….

Here’s a question for you. If the pastor and organist of the United Church you attended each Sunday were selling arms out the back door, do you think the parishioners��would “see no evil, hear no evil”?

Steven Taylor addresses today’s questioning (by the NYT, WaPo and others) of the heightened security in New York and Washington succinctly;

The damned-if-do, damned-if-you-don’t nature of the politics and analysis of this type of situation is growing wearisome. On the one hand, dots are supposed to be connected and imagination is supposed to be deployed, yet: don’t cry wolf!

He also has a question for the Washington Post’s Dan Eggen and Dana Priest;

why is there a quote from “a senior law enforcement official” expressing doubts about the alerts in the first three paragraphs of the piece (along with the description of the data as being old), but the quote that notes that the information may have post-9/11 components, along with quotes from officials who think that this may be part of an ongoing plot are all well down the piece?

I can answer that one.

On the eve of Michael Moore’s Crawford, Texas screening of his blockbuster documentary, Farenheit 9/11, federal officials have begun to arrest his Texas bound movie fans.

More good news that the mainstream media deems unfit to print. Aussie blogger Arthur Chrenkoff in the WSJ Opinion Journal;

For all the fashionable talk about Iraq distracting the Bush Administration from the war on terror, it’s largely been the media that have ignored Afghanistan except for the occasional story about another skirmish with the Taliban remnants or the explosion in opium cultivation.
CBS’s veteran journalist Tom Fenton recently had this to say about the work of his media colleagues: “You know the old saying: No news is good news. But in the news business, it is just the opposite: Good news is no news–which is why you have been hearing so little from Afghanistan recently.”

Some of that good news: the status of women has improved dramatically, with 2.1 million now registered to vote. Afghan refugees continue to return. Polls indicate that the US is favoured over the Taliban by a margin of six to one. Two thirds of the population believe the country is moving in the right direction, and the interim government enjoys solid support. 81% intend to vote in the elections in October.

“And for the first time, female athletes will represent Afghanistan at the Olympic Games in Athens. Robina Muqimyar will run in the 100 meters, and Friba Rezihi will compete in judo. “

The full article is worth a read.
While they Afghans will continue to be dogged by setbacks, and certainly face the prospect of opposition attacks as they near their elections. it is hard to believe that this much progress has been achieved in only two years time – and at such a low cost in human life.
No word yet of a rebuttal from Noam Chomsky.
hat tip – the excellent Pejmanesque

Bill Graham has been out combing the world to repatriate stranded Canadian terrorists citizens. National Post –

A Foreign Affairs official and an immigration officer visited the MEK’s massive complex on May 31 and June 1. Thirteen of the detainees said they were Canadian citizens, while 24 said they were permanent residents and 44 said they had relatives in Canada.
Some of the landed immigrants may no longer be eligible to return to Canada since they have been out of the country for so long. Those with status in Canada are free to return, an official said.
“They have been told that they are totally at liberty to come back to Canada if it is their wish,” said Reynald Doiron, a Foreign Affairs spokesman.

The MEK is designated a terrorist organization by both the US and Britain, though the Liberals haven’t been as judgemental. (Marxism x Islamism, how can you lose?)
The Iranians are none too happy.
Tehran Times – Canada on the Wrong Track

Recent reports indicate that two Canadian officials met with members of the terrorist Mujahedin Khalq Organization (MKO) in Iraq from May 31 to June 1.
The Canadian daily the National Post recently confirmed the news in an official report.
Over the past year, the Canadian government, which enjoyed an appropriate relationship with Iran during the years after the Islamic Revolution due to its reasonable and balanced policies, was influenced by the media propaganda about the death of Zahra Kazemi. Canada immediately abandoned its logical and realistic approach in favor of impulsive reactions.
It seems that Canada’s diplomacy toward Iran is currently moving swiftly downhill and has also influenced the country’s internal affairs and has caused certain changes in the cabinet. This has led the Canadian government to choose the wrong course of action, namely playing with dead pieces like the MKO. Due to the two countries’ good relationship in the past, the Canadian government should take the following issues into consideration:

Perhaps now that Iran is crying foul, they’ll review the MEK status…

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