DURING a two-month undercover investigation The Sunday Times has amassed hours of taped evidence and pages of transcripts which show how Bakri and his acolytes promote hatred of �non-believers� and �egg� their followers on to commit acts of violence, including suicide bombings.
The evidence details how his group, the Saviour Sect, preaches a racist creed of Muslim supremacy which, in the words of Bakri, aims at one day �flying the Islamic flag over Downing Street�.
In his two months with the sect, our reporter witnessed a gang of Bakri�s followers brutally beating up a Muslim who challenged their views. He listened as a succession of �religious leaders� ridiculed moderate Muslims and repeatedly justified war against the �kuffar� � non-Muslims.
He discovered that the core of the group consisted of about 40 young men guided by a handful of spiritual mentors. Many are of Bangladeshi origin, jobless and living in council flats in east London. They use aliases, taking the names of the prophet Muhammad�s companions.
At their meetings � which often included school-age teenagers � they were fed a constant diet of propaganda warning that the kuffar are out to destroy them.
Integration with British society is scorned, as is any form of democratic process. Followers are encouraged to exploit the benefits system. They avoid jobs which could bring them into contact with western women or might lead them to contribute to the economy of a nation they are taught to despise.
In regular lectures and sermons it is instilled into them that Islam is a religion of violence. While publicly they did not defend the London attacks, they speak differently in private.

Read the whole thing.

CBC;

Ottawa has announced plans for new security upgrades, including barring some people from flying on commercial flights. Under the program, the government will identify people who pose “an immediate threat to aviation security” and will work with airlines to stop those people from flying, said Transport Minister Jean Lapierre.

So, if I am reading this correctly, either Transport Canada doesn’t currently work with airlines to identify (much less arrest and detain) people who pose an immediate threat to aviation security ….

[ ] cleared for flight [ ] please report to security [ x] Sir, you’ll have to remove your balaclava

– or, with the London bombings showing up in Liberal internal polling, Jean Lapierre was pushed out in front of the cameras and told to “say something”.
More skepticism at Newsbeat1.

The interviewer;

As a half-Indian, half-Pakistani with a strong connection to this country, I have observed the gulf between what it means to be British Pakistani and British Indian. To be Indian is to come from a safe, ancient country and, more recently, from an emerging power. In contrast, to be Pakistani is to begin with a depleted idea of nationhood. In the 55 years that Pakistan has been a country, it has been a dangerous, violent place, defined by hatred of the other–India.
For young British Muslims, if Pakistan was not the place to look for an identity, being second-generation British was still less inspiring. While their parents were pioneers, leaving Pakistan in search of economic opportunities, enduring the initial challenges of a strange land, the second generation’s experience has been one of drudgery and confusion. Mohammad, who owns a convenience store on Stratford Street in Beeston and who knew all the local bombers, says, “They were born and raised here, we did the work… and these kids grew up and they haven’t had a day’s worry. They’re bored, they don’t do any work, they have no sense of honour or belonging.”
Britishness is the most nominal aspect of identity to many young British Pakistanis. The thinking in Britain’s political class has at last begun to move on this front, but when our tube bombers were growing up, any notion that an idea of Britishness should be imposed on minorities was seen as offensive. Britons themselves were having a hard time believing in Britishness. If you denigrate your own culture you face the risk of your newer arrivals looking for one elsewhere. So far afield in this case, that for many second-generation British Pakistanis, the desert culture of the Arabs held more appeal than either British or subcontinental culture. Three times removed from a durable sense of identity, the energised extra-national worldview of radical Islam became one available identity for second-generation Pakistanis. The few who took it did so with the convert’s zeal: plus Arabe que les Arabes.

The interviewee;

There is a speech by the Prophet in which he says: Allah gave me five things. One of them was the power to strike fear, to strike terror into the heart of the enemy from a mile’s distance, and this was a reference to a battle he had commenced. The way the warriors had prepared themselves was so terrifying that the enemy didn’t even turn up to the battle. Besides that, in the Koran the word irhab is the root word for terror in Islam, and irhabiyun is the word for terrorist. Allah mentions the word in the Koran many times–the one who strikes terror into their hearts is an irhabiyun. If I could have that title Islamically then I would be more than happy to take it and be proud of it. But unfortunately, I haven’t reached that level yet.

Required reading – in the British magazine, Prospect.

Update – Timely context for Tony Blair’s toughening stance.

The Daily Mail has this tidbit…

Leaked guidelines from the Bedfordshire force say that when officers raid Muslim homes they should remove their shoes, not use dogs and not mount pre-dawn raids because at that hour people might by ‘spiritually busy’.

Via Kathy Shaidle

Pieter Dorsman has translated portions of an interview with Dutch writer Leon de Winter on the difficult choices Europe is facing in confronting Islamic terrorism;

We have created a society based on laws in which our freedoms are anchored. The downside is that terrorists take advantage of these laws to organize themselves. If our existence is at stake, and that is the way I see it, than you shouldn’t be paralyzed by your attachment to your legal system, because that is precisely what the radicals are counting on. I do think that you should draw a line when it comes to applying physical violence to prisoners, but there are other techniques that have better results than violating someone’s physical integrity. I would lie if I said that we should reject them all.
[…]
We have to demand that the Muslim community will start to be open and honest. I really can’t imagine that you somehow fail to see that certain youths in your environment all of a sudden become fundamentalist. As a Muslim, you shouldn’t praise that, you should be afraid of that. Muslims will have to start co-operating with our police organizations, with people that do not believe in their God and who live in a very different world.

The quotes reminded me of a chapter in James H. Gray’s 1966 Canadian classic on the Depression – The Winter Years. Gray writes about Paul Ausborn, a “man who heard voices”, who had fled Germany for Manitoba when they told him that Hitler would lead the world to war ;

Through his old connections with the Social Democrats in exile, Ausborn obtained a large collection of pictures of the atrocities being committed by the Nazis in Germany. He rented a store on Logan Avenue to show his gallery of infamy to Winnipeg. Nazi sympathizers wrecked his exhibit. He started over and put another exhibition together. At the same time, he scoured the German Canadian community for supporters and could find only a handful. …. Unhappily, Ausborn was overwhelmed again and again by the force that the Nazis were exerting on the German population of western Canada, and by the lack of interest in his work on the part of other Canadians. He was beaten up by Bundists, and harried by city policemen who saw nothing wrong in Hitler, because the only people Hitler was bothering were Jews and Communists.
As an indication of Ausborn’s physical courage, he and two young friends once invaded a huge pro-Nazi picnic and distributed 6,000 anti-Nazi pamphlets and miraculously escaped unharmed. But in his efforts to rouse the city to the menace of Naziism, he lost every battle, every skirmish even. Nazi agents, on the other hand, infiltrated the university, the schools, the churches, and every other part of the German community. Ausborn was ostracized by the Germans, most of his family deserted him, and with his money gone he was reduced to living on relief.”

By the time hostilities broke out, “Ausborn’s stock rose”, albeit briefly. Germans, including some of his supporters, were being sent to internment camps. A piece of Canadian history that few have been told of, and that is well worth revisiting to help place current debates (and WWII revisionism) into historical context.

Wretchard on the murder of Stephen Vincent, freelance journalist and blogger, in Iraq.

Whether Sunni killed Shi’ite or Shi’ite killed Sunni, Mr. Vincent knew murder when he saw it. It will be interesting to see whether the media will attribute Mr. Vincent’s death to “guerillas” or to “paramilitary death squads”. But in a sense it will not matter. He was witness to the necessity for honesty and the survival of outrage; conscious of how near death stands to all of us in the workaday world without watchful men ready to give the alarm with just words.

Michelle Malkin has an extensive roundup of reaction, while Ed Morrissey recalls his interview with Vincent a few months ago.
Via NRO; His family asks that donations be made in his name to Spirit of America.

If you are a fan of SF novelist Robert Anson Heinlein and have read his book The Puppet Masters, then you might have felt an odd resonance (as I did) when I read the following news item this morning:

“Mohammed,” shouted the police. “Take your clothes off! Come out with your hands on your head and you will be all right!” — Time Online

In the novel, which is set in the 21st century, alien parasites have invaded Earth and are attaching themselves to human hosts, effectively turning them into zombies. While the parasites preferred to ride on the hosts’ shoulders (giving them a humped appearance), they could attach elsewhere. The only real way to be sure that a person was parasite free was to view them naked. It was for this reason that the U.S. government enacted ‘Operaton Bare Back’ in the novel, requiring the country’s citizens to walk around in the buff.

We have another parasite on the loose in the world today, and it is called Fanatical Islam. While it attaches itself to minds rather than bodies, some of the infected minds have a distressing habit of attaching explosives to their bodies. Reading the news this morning left me wondering if we are close to the point where a real-world ‘Operation Bare Back’ might be effective at stopping suicide bombers?

Of course, it probably wouldn’t be feasible. I’m sure that someone fanatical enough to blow themselves up along with innocents like children probably wouldn’t have much compunction about having some of their innards removed thru their anus (to avoid scarring) and getting a duffel bag’s worth of plastique shoved up there instead. Not sure how you’d detonate that, but I trust them to figure that sort of thing out. Operation Bare Back wouldn’t help here.

It’s also not feasible from the aspect of people still needing to carry objects with them on their journeys. I’m sure you can hide enough C4 and a detonator in a briefcase and put the trigger in the handle. Operation Bare Back wouldn’t help here, either.

In fact, the only area where I see a real world Operation Bare Back having a chance of working is that Osama and his nutbar Islamist friends prefer their women covered from head to toe in clothing. Having naked females everywhere would probably cause them to flee the country.

Any thoughts on this?

(Note: this post was made by Sean, one of Kate’s erstwhile guest authors. Please don’t blame the weirdness of it on her.)

Pieter Dorsman remembers the victim.

Buddhists are arming themselves in Thailand. Strategy Page;

July 22, 2005: The Islamic militants are trying to do some ethnic, and religious, cleansing in the Moslem south. The three southern provinces have a population of some 1.8 million, and only 360,000 of those are Buddhists (the religion of the majority of Thais, who are ethnically different from the Moslems, who are Malays). The terror campaign is having some success, as some ten percent of the southern Buddhists have left the south in the past six months. But many of the remaining Buddhists are arming and preparing to defend themselves, and stay in the south.�
[…]
July 14, 2005: In the southern provincial capital of Yala, five bombs went off, and a gun battle with Islamic terrorists left two policemen dead, and 17 civilians and three policemen wounded. One terrorists suspect was killed in the shoot out. One of the targets was a power station, which caused a local blackout. The other targets were a convenience store, a bank branch, a department store and a restaurant. The bombs went off at the same time, about 7 PM. In addition to the bombs, fires were set in some houses, a market and a factory. Earlier in the day, a bomb went off near a hospital, and two teachers were shot dead.��
The government is buying 24,439 assault rifles and machine guns, and seven helicopters, to equip troops fighting Islamic terrorism in the south.��
July 13, 2005: The Islamic terrorists war against education in the Moslem south is working. So far, about ten percent of the 10,000 teachers in the south have fled, and another 25 percent plan to leave. The Islamic terrorists see schools as the major obstacle to radicalizing the Moslem youth in the south.

Previous posts here, and here.

This is refreshing. The US Congressman, Tom Tancredo – who sparked controversy last week when he was quoted widely, and mostly out of context, as suggesting that an WMD attack by Islamists on the US could prompt a nuclear response towards Muslim holy sites – isn’t backing down from the shrill mavens of political correctness..

“Many critics of my statements have characterized them as ‘offensive,’ and indeed they may have offended some,” writes Tancredo in a guest commentary in the Denver Post. “But in this battle against fundamentalist Islam, I am hardly preoccupied with political correctness, or who may or may not be offended. Indeed, al-Qaida cares little if the Western world is ‘offended’ by televised images of hostages beheaded in Iraq, subway bombings in London, train attacks in Madrid, or Americans jumping to their death from the Twin Towers as they collapsed.”
Tancredo, who in recent months has been an outspoken critic of immigration policies allowing illegal aliens to stream across U.S. borders, says few can argue the current approach to the war on terror has deterred fundamentalists from killing Westerners, adding so-called moderate Muslims and leaders of Muslim countries have done little to crack down on extremists.
“That being the case, perhaps the civilized world must intensify its approach,” Tancredo says. “Does that mean the United States should be retargeting its entire missile arsenal on Mecca today? Does it mean we ought to be sending Stealth bombers on runs over Medina? Clearly not.
“But should we take any option or target off the table, regardless of the circumstances? Absolutely not, particularly if the mere discussion of an option or target may dissuade a fundamentalist Muslim extremist from strapping on a bomb-filled backpack, or if it might encourage ‘moderate’ Muslims to do a better job cracking down on extremism in their ranks.”

Of course, in Canada, the shrill maven in charge of national security takes a sophisticated, nuanced and culturally senstive approach – she listens, while the Imams do the tough talking. Globe & Mail;

“If you try to cross the line I can’t guarantee what is going to happen. Our young people, we can’t control,” Aly Hindy, the head of Scarborough’s Salaheddin Islamic Centre, recalls telling the minister at the May meeting she held in Toronto with dozens of Muslim leaders.
The meeting was part of an effort by Ms. McLellan to reach out to Canadian Muslims amid complaints that the RCMP and Canadian Security Intelligence Service are engaging in racial profiling.
The minister and her officials have been meeting community leaders to explain they are not targeting Muslims generally, only individuals with possible terrorist links.
[…]
He made the point to the minister. Several people who attended shrugged off the imam’s remarks, but some Muslims and government agents later approached Mr. Hindy asking him to explain himself.
“The police came to me and said, ‘This is a kind of threat,’ and I said yes,” he said. “But it’s for the good of this country.
“And they said, ‘Do you know some of the names of those people you expect to cause some problems?’ And I said, ‘You just open the telephone directory.’ ”
While government investigators probing the woman’s complaint told Mr. Hindy they have not found evidence of wrongdoing, he isn’t giving the spy service the benefit of the doubt.
“We believe CSIS should stop terrorizing us,” he says in a flyer he is circulating to mosques. “CSIS is powerless. CSIS has no authority over you. If CSIS agents come to your door, do not open [it] for them.”
Toronto’s Coalition of Muslim Organizations arranged the meeting, and said about 100 Muslim leaders attended. While COMO president Adam Esse noted that, “some people, when they talk, they get a little heated,” he said the ministerial visit was “a sign of respect” and was worthwhile overall. “If you talk, you remove a lot of misconceptions, a lot of misunderstandings.”
A spokesman for Ms. McLellan agreed. “We feel it was constructive, positive,” Alex Swann said.
Even Mr. Hindy said that despite his differences with security agencies “the Deputy Prime Minister, she was very understanding.”

Group hug, everyone.

Newsweek on the latest terrorist attack in Egypt in a piece titled “It Can Happen Anywhere”;

At least 88 people died in that and two other coordinated blasts that night. Patel, who was back at the Movenpick pool sunning himself the next day, seems resigned to the new facts of global terror in the 21st century: “We can’t keep running away. It’s life.” Kashmira Patel, on the other hand, has nothing like her husband’s aplomb. “I’m frightened for everyone,” she says. “It can happen to anyone, anywhere.”
That seems to be the message that this latest wave of terrorists badly want to drive home. No one is safe.

Are they just figuring this out now? BBC November, 2002;

At least 15 people have died in a suicide bombing at an Israeli-owned hotel in Mombasa, Kenya, just as two missiles were fired at an Israeli holiday jet that had taken off from the city’s airport.
The missiles narrowly missed the Arkia airline plane – a Boeing 757 carrying 261 passengers – but a large part of the Paradise Hotel was reduced to rubble and the rest is a smouldering shell.
Kenyan police said three suicide bombers were killed, along with nine Kenyans and three Israelis, two of whom were children.
About 80 people, most of them Kenyans, were injured in the attack and many are being treated for burns.

Via Newsbeat1.

“Life’s just much too hard today,”
“I hear ev’ry martyr say
“The pursuit of paradise just seems a bore
“And if you take more of those, you will get an overdose
“No more running for the shelter of Mohammed’s little helper
“They just helped you on your way, through your busy dying day*
Related

Daily Mail;

Suicide bomber Mohammad Sidique Khan was given a guided tour of the House of Commons last year – raising the disturbing prospect that Parliament was on the hit list of targets.
Khan, 30, was a guest of Labour MP Jon Trickett, whose wife Sarah is head of a school where the bomber taught.
During the visit in July he also met International Development Minister Hilary Benn, whose constituency includes the school, and was shown areas of Parliament which are off-limits to unaccompanied members of the public.
During the visit in July he also met International Development Minister Hilary Benn, whose constituency includes the school, and was shown areas of Parliament which are off-limits to unaccompanied members of the public.

Via LGF
Also, over at Winds of Change, the Hatewatch Briefing;

This briefing will be looking hard at the dark places the mainstream media sometimes seem determined to look away from, to better understand our declared enemies on their own terms and without illusions. Our goal is to bring you some of the top jihadi rants, idiotarian seething, and old-school Jew-hatred from around the world, leaving you more informed, more aware, and pretty disgusted every month.

Zachary Shore is a fellow at the Institute of International Studies, University of California, Berkeley. He argues that despite the German opposition to the war in Iraq, they are nonetheless, firmly in the sights of Islamists;

If interethnic tensions are potent in Italy and Denmark, they are worse in Germany. Most of Germany’s Muslims hail from Turkey’s less-developed hinterlands. Many do not speak German, live in predominantly Muslim neighborhoods and have limited social interactions with ethnic Germans.
Their unemployment and high-school dropout rates are above the already depressing national averages.
Most disturbing, some surveys find that the younger generation of Turkish Germans express surprising hostility toward Europe and the West. In one study, the sociologist Wilhelm Heitmeyer and his colleagues at the University of Bielefeld found that almost one-third of those polled agreed that Islam must become the state religion in every country.
Even though they live in Europe, 56 percent declared that they should not adapt too much to Western ways, but should live by Islam. More than a third insisted that if it serves the Islamic community, they are ready to use violence against nonbelievers. Almost 40 percent said that Zionism, the European Union and the United States threaten Islam.

It puts “Aktion Kehraus” in perspective.
(Via commentor Stephen McAllister)

BBC;

Another bomb exploded in Yala on Friday, injuring four Shinawatra has been granted sweeping new powers to deal with attacks by suspected Muslim militants in the country’s south.
The new measures allow him to order the detention of suspects for seven days, censor newspapers and tap phones.
The Thai Cabinet agreed to issue the powerful decree after a series of co-ordinated attacks in the southern city of Yala on Thursday night.
More than 800 people have died in the southern unrest since January 2004.
The emergency powers, which Mr Thaksin was granted without judicial approval, replace the existing martial law.
As the cabinet meeting ended, another bomb went off behind a hospital where many of the injured from the previous night’s attacks were being treated.

Previous SDA posts on Islamic violence in Thailand here and here.
.
Via Bourque

[I’m well aware that I’m covering this topic rather heavily at the moment. There are over 50 dead Britons who are demanding we do. Deal with it.]
Belmont Club is following developments in the investigations in London.
In a preceeding post titled Two Points Of View;

“The feud is eternal.” Hence, the Jihad, unlike the war waged by the West, can never be surrendered. Only the West can surrender. But blogs like In a State of Flux, though guilty of Ledeen’s indictment of narrowness, are an important indicator that the feud is becoming symmetrical. Western citizens are still focused on the ‘larger issues’ but personal loss and anger are making the war less abstract. They want to find particular people who attacked them on specific occasions for the purpose of visiting upon them individual punishment. For many, the war is no longer business, it’s personal.
One route to victory, the ugly route, is to match the entropy within Islamic societies with a corresponding entropy within the West. The rising resentment against Islamic immigrants in Europe and the growing willingness in the West to see Islam and even Muslims as the enemy, are all early signs of the transformation of war into a corresponding blood feud. One of the constant themes of the Belmont Club is how this development is undesirable because it will, at the limit, result in the destruction of Islamic society and make us all murderers. The alternative route chosen by President Bush, but only half-heartedly pursued by mainstream politicians, is to decrease entropy within
the Islamic world by making those countries functional, modern and free so that the “blood feud” concept becomes as anachronistic in Riyadh as it is in Cleveland.

He sees a glimmer of hope in an Afghan village.
update – Austin Bay discusses post-bombing polls showing a hardening of British attitudes.

Over the past few weeks I’ve heard Canadian media sanitize this incident. According to some news outlets, Theo Van Gogh was murdered by an unnamed “deranged youth” who “pinned a note” to his chest..
They rarely mention that he used a knife.

Witnesses described how the man shot Van Gogh again from a distance of about half a metre. He then produced a large knife and cut Van Gogh’s throat before plunging the knife into his chest. He then took a smaller knife from a bag he was carrying and used it to pin a letter to Van Gogh’s body.

To place Bouyeri in the larger context of the Dutch experiment in multi-culturalism, this Chris Caldwell piece from The Weekly Standard in December 2004. (The second page seems to have gone offline – I’ve got a bit of it here);

Muslim immigrants had begun to scare people long before Pim Fortuyn, the charismatic populist, turned himself into the country’s most popular politician in the space of a few weeks in 2002, by arguing that the country was already overloaded with newcomers. (Fortuyn was assassinated by an animal-rights activist in May of that year.) Already in the 1990s, there were reports of American-style shootouts in schools, one involving two Turkish students in the town of Veghel. This past October, newspaper readers were riveted by the running saga of a quiet married couple who had been hounded out of the previously livable Amsterdam neighborhood of Diamantbuurt by gangs of Muslim youths. There were incidents of wild rejoicing across Holland in the wake of the September 11 attacks, notably in the eastern city of Ede. The weekly magazine Contrast took a poll showing that just under half the Muslims in the Netherlands were in “complete sympathy” with the September 11 attacks. At least some wish to turn to terrorism. In the wake of the van Gogh murder, Pakistani, Kurdish, and Moroccan terrorist cells were discovered. The Hague-based “Capital Network,” out of which van Gogh’s killer Mohammed Bouyeri came, had contact with terrorists who carried out bombings in Casablanca in 2003. Perhaps the most alarming revelation was that an Islamist mole was working as a translator in the AIVD, the national investigative service, and tipping off local radicals to impending operations.

(update – a reader found the “missing” second page).
Quoted from Peaktalk, where there’s much more;

One of the absolute benefits of the Van Gogh trial is the fact that in Mohammed Bouyeri we have pure, unrefined jihadist material at our disposal like we have never had it before. The 9/11 hijackers perished together with their innocent victims, many hardcore al-Qaeda and Taliban members have been killed in Afghanistan, the al-Zarqawi division in Iraq is decimated regularly, a number of the Madrid bombers equally perished to the afterlife, and there�s no sign of the London attackers as of yet. What we have been able to incarcerate so far in my opinion is second-tier material, a number of the residents of Gitmo have started talking and some of them have even been released. Not so with Bouyeri, who is likely to remain behind bars forever, silently. And although he won�t say anything and refuses to co-operate, just by observing him we can paint a pretty scary picture, one that reminds us again of what we’re actually fighting.

Of course, Canadians can rest assured that our government is working very, very hard on our , while “gauging feedback from ethnic communities on dealings with border security officials”.

A flash presentation of Al Qaeda attacks since 1998 at Winds of Change;

There have been 30 major mass casualty attacks directed against the United States, Britain, France, Spain, Pakistan, Kenya, Tanzania, India, Iraq, Morocco, Yemen, Tunisia, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and North Osetia. 14 of the 30 attacks were conducted prior to the invasion of Iraq, making claims of the occupation of Iraq as a casus belli for al Qaeda’s terrorism to be disingenuous at best. 4,895 people have been killed in these attacks, and 12,345 plus have been wounded. The majority of the countries attacked are Muslim countries. And although not stated, the vast majority of the victims of al Qaeda’s violence are Muslims.

H/t Instapundit

Charles Moore in the Telegraph.

What strikes one again and again about the reaction of the public authorities, of commentators, of the media, is the terrible lethargy about studying what it is we are up against. We are dealing with an extreme interpretation of one of the great religions of the world.
We flap around, looking for moderates and giving them knighthoods, making placatory noises, putting bits of Islam on to the multi-faith menu in schools, banishing Bibles from hospital beds, trying to criminalise the expression of “religious hatred”, blaming George Bush and Tony Blair. But if we do not know the way the faith in question works, its history, its quarrels, its laws and demands, we will not have the faintest chance of distinguishing the true moderate from the fellow-traveller or of bearing down on the fanaticism.
If you look at the Koran, you will find many glorifications of violence. In Sura No 8, for example, God is quoted as saying: “I shall cast terror into the hearts of the infidels. Strike off their heads, strike off the very tips of their fingers!” This punishment comes to them for having “defied God and His apostle”. It seems reasonable to ask Muslims what this sort of remark means in the modern world.
[…]
I have asked, for example, if the Muslim Council of Britain, the mainstream umbrella organisation in this country, will condemn the killing of British troops in Iraq. They will not do so in absolute terms. They prefer instead to condemn the war itself, which is by no means the same thing.
Take a case from the dramas on Thursday. One heartening tableau was of the Bishop of Stepney, Stephen Oliver, appearing with Mohammed Abdul Bari from the East London Mosque, both condemning the attacks. But if you look up Mohammed Abdul Bari, you find that he welcomed to the opening of the London Muslim Centre Sheikh Abdul Rahman al Sudais, the Saudi-government-appointed imam of the Grand Mosque in Mecca.
In Mecca two years ago, al Sudais described Jews as “scum of the earth”, “rats of the world” and “monkeys and pigs who should be annihilated”. Yet, criticise al Sudais, and Mohammed Abdul Bari leaps furiously to his defence.
As I write, I have beside me an article that appeared during our recent election campaign in Muslim Weekly. By Sheikh Dr Abdalqadir as-Sufi, it calls for the replacement of British parliamentary democracy with “a new civilisation based on the worship of Allah”, attacks the Conservatives for being “in the hands of an illegal Jewish immigrant from Romania” and speaks of the “near-demented judaic banking elite”.
These views are expressed by an educated Muslim in a Muslim publication. Are these Muslim views, non-Muslim views, anti-Muslim views?

Meanwhile, the BBC is sanitizing its reporting.

Victor Davis Hanson sketches an outline of what to expect in the months ahead: more of the same.

The jihadists expect that Westerners will slink out of the Middle East, allowing fascist fundamentalists to gain control of half the world’s oil and thus buy enough weapons to blackmail their way back to the caliphate.
Destroying Israel, killing Christians in Africa, running Westerners out of the Middle East, Pakistan, Indonesia, or Bali, all that is mere relish. In Europe, the goal for the unhinged is the creation of another al Andalus; for the more calculating it is enough intimidation and terror to carve out zones of Muslim sanctuary, where millions can live parasite-like, within the largess of Western society, but without its bothersome liberal agenda of freedom and equality, in hopes of implanting the universal law of sharia.
So here we are. Even though the killers profess revenge equally for Afghanistan (the so- called �right� war), they expect Westerners to scream “Iraq.”
Even though such bombings are predicated on infiltration, careful stealthy reconnaissance, and long sojourns within London, expect cries of anguish and worrying about the stereotyping of Middle Eastern males.
Look for the same scripted crocodile tears and “concern” from the Middle East’s illegitimate leaders, even as much of the Islamic Street takes a secret delight in the daring of the jihadists, and the governments sense relief that the target was Westerners and not themselves.
Anticipate Western leaders condemning the terrorists in the same breadth as they call for “eliminating poverty” and “bringing them to justice – as if the jihadists and their patrons are mere wayward and impoverished felons.
In the short term, Bush and Blair will appear as islands in the storm amid an angry and anguished public. But as 7/7 fades, as did 9/11, expect them to become even more unpopular, as the voices of appeasement assure us that if they just go away, maybe so will the terrorists.
It is our task, each of us according to our station, to speak the truth to all these falsehoods, and remember that we did not inherit a wonderful civilization just to lose it to the Dark Ages.