In the Saudi daily bAl-Jazirah;

“The question that must be asked courageously is: Have the clerics of our times fulfilled their duty, as our forefathers did when they [fought] against the Khawarij? The most direct answer is: Sadly, no! Let’s assume that the government decides to allow women to drive without obligating them, for instance, to wear a veil; what would be the reaction of these clerics and students? How many protest delegations would come to Riyadh from all the provinces? How many fatwas would be signed? How many accusations would be leveled? How many noisy sermons would be delivered by many imams in the mosques?… Is a woman driving a car, or even not wearing a veil, a more serious prohibition in Allah’s eyes… than the acts of murder, slaughter, destruction, and violation of women’s honor [committed] by these ‘sick people?’ Why in the name of God [do we show] all this gentleness, forgiveness, and a tendency to ‘speak gently’ when it comes to terrorists, while [we show] extreme blatancy and harshness when it comes to women, for instance?…”
[…]
“In 1945, a short time after Nazi Germany’s surrender, a conference was held in Potsdam, Germany, in which one of the important articles [adopted] was ‘denazification.’ This conference is credited with uprooting the culture of Nazism from Europe. [The conference] aroused the world’s conscience against Nazism with the end of World War II, firmed up the revulsion towards it, and made it into something similar to a crime, not just in judicial and political terms, but also in terms of culture, ideology, and especially, the media. Thus, it suffices in Europe nowadays to accuse a politician of having Nazi tendencies, or of inciting to Nazism, for him to turn into something of a bandit. The [Potsdam] Agreement was signed by Britain, the U.S.S.R., the U.S., and China � the important world superpowers at that time.
“Why shouldn’t we learn a lesson [of the Potsdam] experience, which had the greatest impact on the uprooting of Nazism from the world?… Imagine that the way of dealing with statements by Al-Salafiyya Al-Jihadiyya� was comparable to the West’s way of dealing with Nazism. Would a [TV] channel, like Al- Jazeera, for example, dare to spread this ideology and to relate to statements by its leaders and preachers in the spirit of ‘point/counterpoint’ [5] and ‘freedom of speech’?
Everybody knows that this channel in particular has had the greatest media impact on the shaping, spreading, and strengthening of this dangerous trend, and that it provides it with wide space to express its ‘acts of heroism’, its statements, and its videotaped operations, to the point where it [Al-Jazeera] has become the primary platform of [Al-Salafiyya Al-Jihadiyya], as is happening today in Iraq.

Further to Occam’s question, I’m wondering if we’re seeing an indication that the supply of brainless young men is indeed finite? Why else would Hamas need a womens’ wing to wage jihad?

If there’s good news here, it’s the fact that women blowing themselves up will help lower the birthrate of those wackos.

Two Americans are dead and three Canadians injured in the Bali terrorist blast that killed at least 25 and injured 100.
CBC News: Three Canadians injured in Bali bombings (CBC News)

Three Canadians have been reported injured in Saturday’s Bali explosions. Dan McTeague, the parliamentary secretary to the minister of foreign affairs, says three Canadians were in one of the cafes, and suffered minor injuries. They have been treated at a clinic and released. At least 25 people were killed and 100 are injured during two simultaneous attacks Saturday.
The blasts hit two packed seafood restaurants in Jimbaran beach and a bustling tourist shopping centre 30 kilometres away in downtown Kuta. The attacks come almost three years to the day when bombings in Kuta killed 202, including two Canadians.
Those bombings, and two other subsequent bombings in Jakarta that killed at least 23, have been blamed on a group called Jemaah Islamiyah, which has been linked to al-Qaeda.
Indonesian President Suslio Bambang Yudhoyono has warned that more attacks could happen. “We will hunt down the perpetrators and bring them to justice,” he promised. He warned people to be on alert.
Two Americans have been reported dead, and the United States has condemned the bombings on and offered to help. “The United States stands with the people and government of Indonesia as they work to bring to justice those responsible for these acts of terrorism,” Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said in a statement. “We will continue to work together in our common fight against terror.”

One wonders what they have in mind in terms of a battle plan.
crosspost from OTB

AP;

The Iraqi government’s campaign to win support for the country’s new constitution has won the critical backing of the most influential Shiite religious leader, less than a month before a national referendum on the draft charter.
[…]
Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, meeting with aides Thursday in the holy city of Najaf, urged his followers to vote “yes” on the new basic law, according to two top officials in al-Sistani’s organization. The officials refused to be identified because they are not authorized to speak for the reclusive cleric. In January, millions of Shiites followed al-Sistani’s call to vote in Iraq’s first democratic elections in nearly half a century, and the ballot gave the Muslim sect a majority in the new parliament and government.

Via OTB

A Toronto Sun editorial asks the obvious in the wake of Paul Coffins curfew for pleading guilty to 15 counts of fraud – “Is anyone ever going to be seriously punished for AdScam?”
Here in Saskatchewan, of course, we experienced our own highly publicized poltiical scandal in the 1980’s. In view of the severity of Paul Coffin’s sentence for defrauding the Canadian taxpayers (you can’t call it defrauding “the government” when the government is an accomplice) of $3 million, I thought it might be interesting to review those convicted and jailed over a total of $838,000 in misspent funds in our own province during the 1980’s;

– Lorne McLaren, former MLA: 3� years.
– John Scraba, former communications director: two years, $12,000 in restitution.
– John Gerich, former cabinet minister: two years, $12,264 in restitution.
– Michael Hopfner, former MLA: 18 months, $56,000 in restitution.
– Eric Berntson, former Saskatchewan deputy premier: one year; resigned Senate seat.
– Ralph Katzman, former MLA: one year, $100,000 in restitution

Source CBC archives.
Of course, unlike most of those listed above, Paul Coffin isn’t a politician. In fact, no politicians at all have been charged in the Adscam debacle, nor has there been any investigation into broader questions of inappropriate political acquisition of public funds outside of Gomery’s narrow mandate – despite the fact that the triggering event for the Governor General’s audit was a whistleblower complaint by Public Works employee Alan Cutler – who in 1995�questioned a $15,000 a month retainer that Paul Martin’s Finance Department was attempting to push through on behalf of his personal leadership campaign team the firm Earnscliffe.
Of course, the same provincial NDP premier whose party has flogged the “Devine” corruption horse in every election race since, had no problem at all endorsing the faltering minority government this spring. Apparently, Calvert suffers no twangs of ethical hypocrisy in standing shoulder to elbow with corrupt federal Liberals – so long as the cheques keep coming.
Reminscent of an old W.C. Fields joke, Lorne Calvert has established what he is. You can’t blame Saskatchewan taxpayers for wondering if there’s a secret price list.

Now the camera focuses on a man and a boy crouched behind a concrete barrel or culvert, their faces contorted in fear. Enderlin: “Here Jamal al-Dura and his son are targets of gunfire from Israeli positions.” The camera pans to a nearby Israeli outpost. The father waves with his right hand in the direction of the Israeli position. The father is hunched behind the barrel, the boy nestled against his back. Enderlin:

Muhammad is twelve years old. His father tries to protect him. He waves. But another round of fire bursts out. Muhammad is dead, and his father grievously wounded.

During the 55-second sequence, two shots have hit a concrete-block wall that stands like a backdrop for the scene, landing far afield of the father and son. Other bullet holes, similarly off-target, can be seen in the wall as well. The father shields the boy; the father’s arm is clearly visible, perpendicular to the ground. Guttural cries are heard, adding to the feeling of panic. The last round of gunfire kicks up a cloud of dust, obscuring the man and boy. When the dust clears, the boy is stretched out at his father’s feet; the father bobs his head as if groggy.
And that was it. As Enderlin would later explain, the reason France-2’s scoop was offered free to the world was that the producers did not want to earn a profit from so tragic an incident. Only the terrible moments of the child’s death throes, he added, had been edited out, being “too unbearable.” The film sequence itself, attributed at first to a “France-2 cameraman,” was subsequently identified as the work of the station’s Palestinian stringer, Talal Abu Rahmeh. By then, the full authority and reputation of France-2 itself had been indelibly stamped on the footage.
[…]
In one version of his story, Talal Abu Rahmeh went to Netzarim junction at seven in the morning on a hunch that the children would be out demonstrating “because it was a school day,” and he knew they demonstrated on school days. In another version, he ran over to the junction at 3 PM, after someone called his office to inform him that there were fierce battles going on. The outtakes show he was there from early morning. Apparently, a dozen of his colleagues had the same intuition; they too can be seen in the raw footage.
The Reuters, AP, and France-2 outtakes that I viewed show two totally different and easily identifiable types of activity at Netzarim junction: real, intifada-style attacks, and crudely falsified battle scenes. Both the real and the fake scenes are played out against a background of normal civilian activity at a busy crossroads. In the “reality” zone, excited children and angry young men hurl rocks and Molotov cocktails at the Israeli outpost while shababs (“youths”) standing on the roof of the Twins throw burning tires down onto the caged lookout; this goes on seemingly for hours, without provoking the slightest military reaction from Israeli soldiers.
At the same time, in the “theatrical” zone, Palestinian stringers sporting prestigious logos on their vests and cameras are seen filming battle scenes staged behind the abandoned factory, well out of range of Israeli gunfire. The “wounded” sail through the air like modern dancers and then suddenly collapse. Cameramen jockey with hysterical youths who pounce on the “casualties,” pushing and shoving, howling Allahu akhbar!, clumsily grabbing the “injured,” pushing away the rare ambulance attendant in a pale green polyester jacket in order to shove, twist, haul, and dump the “victims” into UN and Red Crescent ambulances that pull up on a second’s notice and career back down the road again, sirens screaming. In one shot we recognize Talal Abu Rahmeh in his France-2 vest, filming a staged casualty scene.*
Split seconds of these ludicrous vignettes would later appear in newscasts and special reports; the husk, the raw footage that would reveal the fakery, had been removed, leaving the kernel rich in anti-Israel nutrients.
Such staged scenes showed up, for example, in a dramatic CBS 60 Minutes special report on Netzarim crossing – a place “now known,” intoned Bob Simon, echoing Palestinian sources, “as Martyr’s Junction.”
The al-Dura death scene was filmed right in the middle of these falsified incidents. It can be localized and situated. In one section of Reuters footage we see the man and the boy crouched behind the upended culvert as a jeep drives slowly up the road, stops in firing range of the Israeli position that is clearly visible in the near distance, makes a U-turn, drives in the opposite direction, stops short of the barrel/culvert, and helps perform the clearly faked evacuation of a man wounded in the right leg, as also shown in the France-2 news report. In fact, two ambulances stand for a long moment no more than fifteen feet from the al-Duras. There is no evidence of armed combat in their vicinity. No sound of gunfire. Men run down the road, passing in front of the al-Duras. No one is hit.

Read it all.
David Gelernter has the full sequence of photo stills, along with more on the consequences of this bit of film making.

Paul Tuns;

In March 2004, in the wake of the Adscam scandal, Auditor General Sheila Fraser released another damning report, this one on Ottawa’s inaction on addressing national security concerns. She highlighted the vulnerability of Canada’s ports and airports to terrorist attacks, especially with regard to those who work there. She found that 5.5 percent of a sample of airport employees had possible criminal connections, a flag for national security concerns. If extrapolated to the entire airport workforce, there would be 4,500 employees with possible criminal connections the implications being that employees are not being properly screened, and those with criminal connections may also be tied to terrorist groups.
Senator Kenny’s Security and Defence committee has released several reports over the last three years raising concerns about the country’s lack of preparedness for terrorist attacks. In December 2004, Kenny released the 2005 edition of the Canadian Security Guide Book, which highlighted the same concerns Fraser drew attention to: improperly guarded and underguarded borders, and vulnerable ports and airports. In one example, he noted that Canada’s ports of entry were jeopardized by the disappearance of 1,127 uniforms or uniform items belonging to Canadian airport screeners over a nine-month period, including 91 security badges.
Kenny’s committee also alleges that the government is “cutting corners on intelligence.” This seems to confirm Fraser’s findings that nearly $9 billion in anti-terrorism money is not ending up where it is supposed to go, and that there are intelligence gaps resulting from fiscal mismanagement and oversight confusion. Kenny says the problem is not merely money but training; he said it can take years to properly train intelligence officers, but that there is no commitment to train a sufficient number of analysts.
Fraser’s report also found other problems with the government’s response to 9-11. Fraser said the official watch lists of criminals and terrorists were outdated, and that such information was not being shared among departments so that, for instance, the list of 25,000 lost and stolen passports each year is given to front-line border officers. She concluded, “These matters are serious and need to be addressed.”

Juxtaposed against that summary of continuing Canadian sluggishness in addressing national security and internal terrorist groups, a story from the Montreal Gazette;

When an alert was sent to Canadian customs agents in Quebec warning of an “armed and dangerous” suspect, some 50 employees walked off the job for four hours at about 15 of 44 border crossings just before 9 a.m. yesterday.
[…]
…the protesting agents were exercising their right under the Canada Labour Code to withdraw services if they feel their life or health is threatened.
“We’re not armed, we’re not going to be a target,” said Jean-Pierre Fortin, a union spokesperson. The union wants the federal government to supply border agents with sidearms. Ottawa says the agents’ bulletproof vests, telescopic batons and pepper spray are sufficient.

Nor are they equipped with chase vehicles. As a result, about 1500 vehicles “blew across the border” last year with impunity, as the only recourse for Customs officials is to place a call to the nearest RCMP detachment – which in many parts of the country, are being closed.

After living overseas for about a year and a half, I was now finally home in New York. This time around I had landed a sweet apartment in Lower Manhattan. Situated about six blocks from the World Trade Center and just two from the South Street Seaport. I could stand on my balcony and see through the canyon of skyscrapers that lined John Street to catch a glimpse of the World Trade Center.
All in all, it was a great place to live — very quiet and peaceful, especially for Manhattan.
Except for the night before the attack.
That whole day I was restless. Work was a stessful and I couldn’t concentrate all day. I had decided to take my camera along and take pictures of the WTC/Battery Park City area at lunchtime, but I ended up stuck in a meeting all day.
At the end of the day, I was still quite anxious and tense. So much so, that I decided to walk around a bit before going home. I would have taken pictures but the rain that hit the area pretty much killed that idea. My digital cameras was anything but waterproof.
Even after getting home I was still restless, so I watched a little TV. Then things got wierder.
The intro to the show Third Watch contained a monologue about some guy talking about how fast things can go wrong in life and started mumbling about Chaos Theory. After that show was over, I turned to the History Channel which was playing a [surprise!] WW2 documentary. Suddenly, a few Normandy veterans started saying basically the same thing. They commented about how one minute their friend would be next to them and then the next instant they were dead.
Needless to say, this sort of stuff didn’t sit well with me. So I turned off the tube and went to check my email. Imagine my shock when I saw the Yahoo Question of the Day was about Chaos Theory. At this point, I called my parents to make sure everything was OK. I was certain something bad was about to happen, but I didn’t know what.

Confused, I decided to go out onto my balcony to get some fresh air. To my shock and amazement, I saw a kind of odd glow in the sky and a strange kind calm in the streets. At this point, I ran back in to get a my camera and got a few shots of this phenommenon.

Later, I would try to get some sleep, but with all the odd vibes around me, how could I? I finally fell asleep around 1:30 AM only to awaken again around 3AM from a nightmare. At 5 AM, I fell back to sleep, only to be awoken at a quarter to nine, when a loud boom interrupted my sleep.

Frank LaVigne’s 9-11 photo diary
Joe Katzman at Winds of Change has collected dozens of links related to 9-11 and the aftermath.

A three-part series on China’s role in the War on Terror, at China E-Lobby. Intro:

The Unexamined Effect of the Hainan Island Outrage – This is the first of three posts that were inspired by Sunday’s anniversary of the 9/11/01 attacks. Tomorrow’s post will focus on occupied East Turkestan, which the Communists have used as their smokescreen to cover up their support of anti-American terrorists. The final post, on Sunday, will describe in detail those ties between Communist China and America’s enemies in the War on Terror.

Start here.
As a companion piece, Mark Helprin for the Opinion Journal. He has been sounding the alarm bells on China since the Clinton years, and has scathing words for both left and right.

September 11 was not so much a discrete event as part of a continuum. It was the result of broad strategic failures that, preceding it by decades, continue to this day and are likely to continue on. It is as if the country has lost, as exemplified by the Left now out of power, a great deal of the will to self-preservation, and, as exemplified by the Right now in charge, not a little of its capacity for self-defense. Our politics and policies have somehow been parceled out to opportunists like Michael Moore–purveyor of conspiracy theories and hatreds, whose presentation, unclean in every respect, is honored nonetheless by the controlling rump of Democrats–and to Bushmen like “Kip” Hawley of Homeland Security, father of the proposal to allow carry-on ice-picks, bows and arrows, and knives with blades up to five-inches long.
For more than 20 years prior to September 11, Islamic terrorists imprisoned and murdered our diplomats and military personnel, destroyed our civil aviation, machine-gunned our civilians, razed our embassies, attacked an American warship and, in 1993, the U.S. itself. For varying reasons, none legitimate, we hesitated to mount an offensive against the terrorists’ infrastructure, hunt them down, eliminate a single rogue regime that supported them, or properly disconcert our fatted allies whose robes they infested. This was comparable in its way to Munich. Only in 2001, when it became obvious to any rational being that we must, did we retaliate, but even then in the face of domestic pressure to judicialize the response, which was exactly what we had done all along.
[…]
Having made many wrong choices, we find ourselves at yet another strategic crossroads, where invisibly to the general public we are about to choose wrongly again. We are reshaping the military into a gendarmerie, configured for small wars, counterinsurgency, peacekeeping and nation-building, all at the expense of the type of force that could deter or defeat a rising China. Although we need a gendarmerie, we cannot do without heavy formations and the many additional ships required for a navy–now less than half the size of the Reagan fleet and shrinking–to exploit our natural advantage in the Pacific.
The U.S. will chase every terrorist mouse (which is good, unless it means also neglecting the core competencies of the armed forces), while lessening and dispersing its power, and moving from previous centers of gravity (Europe, the Western Pacific) to Africa, Central Asia and the Middle East. This will create a long and open alley through which China will run. Among other things, by placing markers in every trouble spot, we will probably be tied down and distracted, taxingly and often, to our enemies’ delight.

From the Dep’t of You Can’t Make This Stuff Up;

“The Vatican, which is nothing but a government placed within a building, has moved to support the Christian side of the countries in the world, and if possible, the Catholic side…

Imagine that!
Via Upper Canada Catholic.

Times of London is reporting that codebreakers have thwarted an Al Qaeda gas attack on Parliament.

The plot, hatched last year, is understood to have been discovered in coded e-mails on computers seized from terror suspects in Britain and Pakistan. Police and MI5 then identified an Al-Qaeda cell that had carried out extensive research and video- recorded reconnaissance missions in preparation for the attack.

Via Hugh Hewitt, who observes “Nothing yet at the Washington Post or the New York Times, where staffs are probably too focused on Crawford demonstrators to notice the news from London.”

Today, I received a real-time translation of an Arabic interview with the Gaza head of Hamas. Let me share a couple of points made by the terrorist leader. It reflects the feelings of those who hate Israel and the United States. The statements are from the interview:
1.The disengagement expresses the collapse of the Zionist concept.
2.Gaza withdrawal will raise Arab morale and the Islamic world and will have positive implications in Afghanistan and Iraq. (i.e. more terrorism against Americans)
3.We are part of the global Islamic movement
4.The tools we used in Gaza will be more effective on the West Bank
5.The ceasefire will end at the end of the year.
Meantime, our friend Dore Gold has helped publicize the fact that the United Nations is paying for the production of bumper stickers that the terrorists are distributing with the slogan, “Today Gaza, tomorrow the West Bank and Jerusalem.” The UN money being used was earmarked for anti-poverty programs. I guess Kofi was too busy with the Oil For Food scandal to monitor these funds.

more – from Frum who sees things from a strategic viewpoint.

The world wants a Palestinian state? Very well – let them have it. And the result, as we are seeing, is something close to panic in the foreign ministries of the West. Not just the West: the Middle East too. The Egyptians do not want a Hamas state on their borders. They had expected Ariel Sharon to place a cordon between Egypt and Gaza. He has said he will not do so – that he is leaving the job up to the Egyptians. And indeed last month Israeli Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz announced that 750 Egyptian soldiers would soon arrive to replace the Israeli Defense Forces.
Is this Egyptian role on the border a precursor to a larger Egyptian role within Gaza? Egypt after all remains far more vulnerable to Islamic extremist ideology than Israel. The Egyptian authorities have crushed the extremist movement within their borders. Do they wish to see a jihadist state emerge on their borders? It seems unlikely.
Could it be that Sharon is calling the bluff of Western governments and the Arab states? By creating the very Palestinian state that those governments and those states pretend to want but actually dread – Sharon is forcing them to end their pretense and acknowledge the truth:
The Palestinian leadership is incapable of creating a state that can live at peace with anyone, not Israel, not the other Arab states, not Europe, not the world. Somebody else must govern the restless and violent Arab-majority territories west of the Jordan River. Israel has suffered four decades of condemnation for doing the job. Sharon is now resigning the task to anybody else who would like to step in and take over the job. Nobody wants to. But Egypt and Jordan may soon realize that they have no choice. If there is a secret behind Sharon’s plan – that is it.

A new book by Stewart Bell, author of Cold Terror.

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.)