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saturday, november 30, 2002

Sweden Hits a Double

Sweden has awarded the $50,000 Olof Palme Prize to Palestinian terror enabler Hanan Ashrawi.

Ashrawi was honored for her "consistent and fearless fight over the years for her people's independence and dignity," the Olof Palme Memorial Fund for International Understanding and Common Security said.

Ashrawi was a spokeswoman for the Palestinian side in peace talks in the early 1990s and served as Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat's higher education minister between 1996 and 1998. She's served as an elected member of the Palestinian Legislative Council since 1996.

The awards committee called Ashrawi "a leading force in the struggle for increased openness and democratic structures within her own Palestinian ranks" and said she was "an inspiring symbol of a new, democratic, peaceful Middle East."

A Swedish Welcome

Sweden has announced they will give political asylum to Palestinians from the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.

UN Admits Tipping Off Iraqis

In the latest chapter of this comic opera, our fearless UN inspectors in Iraq now admit they’ve been giving advance warning to the Iraqis that they’re on the way, magnifying glasses in hand.

BAGHDAD -- Serious doubts surfaced over the surprise nature of new arms inspections in Iraq when a United Nations spokesman admitted the head of a suspected weapons site had been given advance warning of the visit by the UN experts to his facility on Saturday.

'He was informed the day before, on Friday, that the team was coming to remove an air sampler and install a new one,' UN spokesman Hiro Ueki told AFP by phone shortly after denying at a press briefing that the UN had tipped off the Iraqis.

'That is all there is to it,' the spokesman added in an apparent bid to quash a possible controversy about whether UN inspections of suspected weapons sites, which resumed on Nov 27 were really on no-notice basis.

Reporters had pressed Mr Ueki earlier about remarks by Iraqi official Hussein Hammudeh who told journalists he had prior notice of a visit to his facility by International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) experts.

Missile Details

Details on the type of missiles used in the failed attack against an Israeli charter jet in Kenya: Kenyan Official Hints at al-Qaida Link.

Officials close to the investigation said it was likely the rockets were Russian-made Strelas. Sunkuli said the discarded missile launchers, which he said were originally olive green but had been painted blue by the terrorists, "most likely" were Russian, but could be German or American.

The Financial Times, whose reporter saw the launchers when police were showing them to Kenyan President Daniel arap Moi, said Saturday the serial number on one of them indicated they were manufactured by Zid or the V.A. Degtyarev weapons plant northeast of Moscow in March 1974.

AEL Leader Charged

Muslim radical Abou Jahjah, an ex-Hezbollah fighter and head of the extremist Arab European League in Belgium, has been charged with inciting two days of Arab rioting in Antwerp.

The Belgian prime minister, Guy Verhofstadt, vowed to put a stop to the open lawlessness of Abou Jahjah's militant organisation, the Arab European League. "The league is trying to terrorise the city," he said.

The authorities were shocked by the targeted nature of vandalism this week. Flemish pubs and black-owned businesses in the Borgerhout district were attacked, but shops displaying AEL stickers were spared.

Belgium's liberal media agreed yesterday that the country's experiment with tolerant multiculturalism had totally broken down.

The Flemish newspaper De Morgen said: "For a decade, the immigrant quarters of this country have turned into reservoirs of frustration, even hate. They have found a voice in Abou Jahjah."

Abou Jahjah rejects assimilation, demanding segregated schools and self-governing, Arab-speaking ghettos.

Palestinian Child Abuse

Here’s a piece at Ha'aretz about the street battles taking place in the terrorist hotbed of Nablus, where Palestinians are sending their children to do the fighting.

When the IDF started its operation in Nablus, officers noted that its success would be measured partly by its ability to avert causing harm to civilians. A previous IDF operation carried out by the Golani Brigade in Jenin was, by this criterion, a clear-cut success. During 17 days of IDF activity in Jenin, just one Palestinian was killed - a top terror suspect, Iyad Swalha. Nablus, however, is a completely different story. Virtually from the operation's first hours, Paratroopers have faced stormy, violent demonstrations involving hundreds of young people. Often, these demonstrations are a springboard to gunfire incidents. Two Palestinian teenagers were killed by IDF fire during such skirmishes, and two days ago a boy (either 8 or 11 years old - there are two different versions of his age) was also killed in Nablus.

For the first time in the West Bank, Nablus has displayed a phenomenon which had been seen only at Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip. Children are not content to stop at stone throwing; they also use Molotov cocktails, makeshift hand grenades and even small bombs. Children even climb atop IDF fortified vehicles and vandalize equipment which they carry, such as stretchers. These forays are filmed by television cameras.

In a talk last week with IDF Central Commander Maj. Gen. Moshe Kaplinski, Lt. Col. Shmuel said his soldiers have the authority to "take down" (hit with gunfire) Molotov cocktail throwers. Asked why he doesn't do so, if this is the case, Shmuel replied, "Because I don't want to kill 8 year olds."

Start With the Rule of Law

Robert Pollock says the journey to Middle East peace has to begin by instituting the rule of law.

In 1996, Mahmoud el Farra returned to the Gaza Strip. He had lived 30 years in Los Angeles, where he raised a family and built a construction business. He was precisely the sort of entrepreneur the emerging Palestinian Authority sorely needed, and in those heady days he built its first modern flour mill. But the business struggled against competition from Israeli imports, and PA officials began pressuring Mr. Farra to sell them shares. Led by Mohammed Rashid, Yasser Arafat's money man, they soon gained control of the company. Two days later they closed the market to Israeli flour.

Meanwhile in Ramallah, Mohamed Masrouji of Jerusalem Pharmaceuticals struggled with the large cuts Israeli importers took on the drugs he bought for his distribution company. Then one of Arafat's ministers formed a pharmaceutical distribution company of his own. In one day the official registered dozens of drugs with the Palestinian Ministry of Health, a process that often took Masrouji a year, and began importing drugs from Egypt. ...At a time like this, with violence a daily reality and the peace process all but forgotten, it might seem that a lack of economic freedom is the least of the Palestinians' problems. But with bread riots becoming almost as common in the Palestinian territories as anti-Israel demonstrations, many Palestinians see the lawlessness and economic misery inflicted by Arafat & Company as a major factor in a generalized rage. "We want to be a democracy," says Khalil Shikaki, a Palestinian scholar and pollster. "We don't want to be a corrupt, mismanaged entity--just another Arab country."

Surrenderville

Amir Taheri says it’s time for France to take sides.

Politics, as Aristotle taught over 2000 years ago, is about making a choice, which means taking sides. The subject of ethics is the choice between right and wrong. That of aesthetics is about beauty and ugliness. In politics the choice is between friend and foe. Of course, there would be room for doubt if the United States were to invade Canada, or even Mexico, in pursuit of imperial designs. But a normal person living in an open democratic society should have little difficulty in choosing between the United States on the one hand and Stalin, Kim Il-sung, Ho Chi Minh, Pol Pot, Khomeini and Saddam Hussein on the other.

The same normal person would understand that some regimes must be defeated by force when no other option is available. Hitler had to be removed by force. Had the Vietnamese army not invaded Cambodia, the Pol Pot gang might still be in power. The Tanzanian army did the world a service by invading Uganda and driving Idi Amin into exile. And Slobodan Milosevic would not be in the dock had it not been for the American-led campaign to drive him out of Kosovo.

But in a positive development from Surrenderville, French anti-globalization nutloaf Jose Bove, known for his courageous attacks on McDonalds restaurants and fields of rice, may be headed to prison.

Judy Davis Plays a Blind Woman

In a way it’s nice to know that American actors and pop stars don’t hold a monopoly on aggressive stupidity: Judy Davis slams Howard government.

World renowned Australian actor Judy Davis yesterday slammed the Howard government's stance on involvement in a possible war against Iraq.

The multi award-winning Hollywood star launched her stinging attack in a speech during the Walk Against the War rally in central Sydney.

Davis, 47, told the crowd war was the ultimate failure in communication, but the West has long believed it had the edge on civility.

"We can no longer take comfort in this fantasy," she said.

"Those who support John Howard's easy war rhetoric, those who believe in the fantasy, should educate themselves about the society they intend to destroy."

friday, november 29, 2002

Sho’ Is Good Eatin’

If the Islamists’ plans for us turn out like they hope, and we all convert to Islam and submit to the law of Allah, next Thanksgiving the family gathering may be feasting on this traditional Saudi Arabian delight, a veritable Chinese box of a meaty banquet meal: Whole Stuffed Camel. And Thanksgiving will be renamed Zionist Catastrophe Day of Mourning. Roll over, Turducken, and tell Tofurkey the news.

Stuffed Camel

1 whole camel, medium size
1 whole lamb, large size
20 whole chickens, medium size
60 eggs
12 kilos rice
2 kilos pine nuts
2 kilos almonds
1 kilo pistachio nuts
110 gallons water
5 pounds black pepper
Salt to taste

Skin, trim and clean camel (once you get over the hump), lamb and chicken. Boil until tender. Cook rice until fluffy. Fry nuts until brown and mix with rice. Hard boil eggs and peel. Stuff cooked chickens with hard boiled eggs and rice. Stuff the cooked lamb with stuffed chickens. Add more rice. Stuff the camel with the stuffed lamb and add rest of rice. Broil over large charcoal pit until brown. Spread any remaining rice on large tray and place camel on top of rice. Decorate with boiled eggs and nuts. Serves friendly crowd of 80-100.

Shararazod Eboli Home Economist, Dammam, Saudi Arabia

I suppose a honey-glazed ham or two is out of the question? (Hat tip: Fay Greenwood.)

UN Solidarity

One day after a bloody string of terrorist atrocities against Israel, the United Nations held its International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People. And the UN press release makes no mention of the previous day’s horrific events, only the typical morally bankrupt garbage from Kofi Annan:

“This Day of Solidarity is a day of mourning and a day of grief,” Secretary-General Kofi Annan told a commemorative meeting in a message delivered on his behalf by Chef de Cabinet S. Iqbal Riza. Deploring the situation in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, he noted that the human and material losses suffered by the Palestinians over the past two years have been “nothing short of catastrophic.”

The Secretary-General pointed out that Israel’s “excessive and disproportionate” use of force only serves to intensify rage, desperation and a desire for revenge. At the same time, “cruel and devastating” terrorist attacks on Israeli civilians, including suicide bombings, have claimed large numbers of innocent lives while setting back the Palestinian cause. “The result of these actions has been the near-total destruction of the belief on either side that there is genuine partner for a just peace,” he observed.

The Princess and Her 'Charities'

Stephen Schwartz writes about the Wahhabi extremism of the House of Saud, and how it permeates all their dealings: The Princess and Her 'Charities'.

Prince Bandar and Princess Haifa know that the Wahhabi religious hierarchy in Saudi Arabia preaches hatred and contempt for Christians, Jews, traditional Muslims, Shiites, Hindus, and Sikhs. They know that the same religious hierarchy has operated Islamic outreach and charitable institutions like the Muslim World League, the World Assembly of Muslim Youth, and the International Islamic Relief Organization (all with offices in the United States) that have served as cover for terrorism. They know that financial gifts or donations to these bodies or their hangers-on are likely to end up in the hands of the terrorists. They know that the cash-rich Saudi Joint Committee for Relief in Bosnia-Herzegovina, to cite the outstanding example, was used as a cover for terrorist infiltration into Europe.

The intentions of Princess Haifa in handing off money that wound up in terrorist hands are irrelevant, for the issue is not a charitable contribution gone astray. Rather, the issue is the overall nature of the Saudi state, the Wahhabi hierarchy, and the charitable and other institutions they control.

Extravagant Accusations

This may shed some light on why Henry Kissinger was picked to lead the September 11 panel. (Hat tip: Bala Ambati.)

Steyn Online

Mark Steyn’s web site, promised for decades, has finally launched.

A Thanksgiving Request

LGF reader Jonathan Wishnia has a family friend in need; please take a moment to see if you can help: Friends of Renee Drachman.

US Citizen Detained

An American woman and a Spanish man with US passports were detained in Kenya in connection with the Paradise Hotel bombing, but the latest release from the AP says they may have been mistakenly caught in the dragnet.

Hate Speech, Anyone?

Since it’s the last Friday of the holy month of Ramadan and also the anniversary of the UN vote that led to the creation of Israel, wild-eyed Islamic leaders throughout the Middle East unleashed torrents of vitriol today.

In Teheran, Former Iranian president Hashemi Rafsanjani delivered the Friday prayers sermon, saying the West remained indifferent to the suffering of Palestinians in the ongoing fighting with Israel, "despite pictures and (TV) films showing Israeli brutality."

In a warning to Israel, he said: "Don't think the war will be over if you expel Palestinians from their homes in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank."

"We saw an example of that in Kenya on Thursday," Rafsanjani said, referring to the suicide bomb attack outside Mombasa that killed 12 people at an Israeli-owned hotel.

Say what you like about Pat Robertson (and I’m not a fan), but I don’t recall ever hearing him gloat about the murder of innocent children.

Protesters at the Al-Azhar Mosque in Cairo called on their government to cut ties with Israel and the United States.

"We are here protesting the daily massacres against our brothers and sisters in Palestine," said Fawqiya Maher, a member of the Arab Nasserite Party.

Demonstrators carried posters of late Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser, an icon of pan-Arab nationalism, with the caption "The symbol of dignity."

I say we give them what they’re asking for, and stop sending Egypt $2 billion a year. But the funny part is the guy they choose for a role model—Gamal Abdel Nasser, a delusional egomaniac who led Egypt to a disastrous, humiliating defeat in the 1967 war with Israel. Only the Arab world could turn this pathetic loser of a dictator into a “symbol of dignity.”

Inspectors in Leather

The State Department (henceforth to be known as “Floggy Bottom”) recommended an S&M freak with no scientific degree for the Iraq inspection team: Weapons Inspectors' Experience Questioned.

The United Nations launched perhaps its most important weapons inspections ever yesterday with a team that includes a 53-year-old Virginia man with no specialized scientific degree and a leadership role in sadomasochistic sex clubs.

The United Nations acknowledged yesterday that it did not conduct a background check on Harvey John "Jack" McGeorge of Woodbridge, who was in New York waiting to be sent to Iraq as a munitions analyst. McGeorge was picked for the diplomatically sensitive mission over some of the most experienced disarmament sleuths in the world. A U.N. spokesman said McGeorge was part of a group recommended by the State Department, which in turn said it was merely forwarding names for consideration.

Now we know why the inspectors were so eager to have a day off.

Inspection Vaudeville

The official Iraqi paper says the arrogant United States, in league with the devilish Zionists, is concocting an arrogant, devilish scheme against innocent, peaceful Iraq.

"No one in the Bush administration will give a fig for optimism expressed by many countries after the start of the inspection process in Iraq," it said.

"The reason is that Washington has become a hostage of its arrogance, ambitions and Zionists' pressure."

The so-called “international community” is willing to tolerate an amazing amount of insane rhetoric—as long as it’s directed toward the US or Israel.

Meanwhile, the inspectors (remember them?) have been working hard, not finding anything in places where they know in advance they won’t find anything, while Saddam has commanded his followers to hide weapons components in their homes:

In London, The Times and the Independent dailies, citing unnamed British government sources and intelligence reports, said Saddam had ordered scientists, civil servants and even farmers to hide key weapons components and chemicals -- or face severe penalties if they refuse.

The Times also said British Prime Tony Blair and Bush took the concealment claims so seriously that they were considering making personal appeals to Iraqi officials to tell the inspectors what was going on.

Not the dreaded personal appeals! Please! Anything but that!

Oh yeah, the inspectors, right. Well, after two whole days of grueling work not finding anything, they took today off.

International Atomic Energy Agency head Mohamed ElBaradei said the first two days of the inspectors' work were unhindered.

"I think it's going smoothly and we have no reason to complain," ElBaradei told reporters in Vienna on Friday.

"We have been able to do what we set out to do in the first days and we hope that this will continue to be the pattern." ...

The 17 inspectors stayed at their headquarters in Baghdad on the Muslim weekend and were evaluating two days of work since they resumed inspections on Wednesday after a four-year gap, U.N. sources said. All Iraqi facilities close on Fridays.

thursday, november 28, 2002

The Latest Kissinger Outrage

Christopher Hitchens is probably not on Henry Kissinger’s Christmas card list.

The Bush administration has been saying in public for several months that it does not desire an independent inquiry into the gross "failures of intelligence" that left U.S. society defenseless 14 months ago. By announcing that Henry Kissinger will be chairing the inquiry that it did not want, the president has now made the same point in a different way. But the cynicism of the decision and the gross insult to democracy and to the families of the victims that it represents has to be analyzed to be believed.

You Don’t Say

Since James Taranto is on vacation, I’m going to appropriate his customary title for this bit of Foggy Bottom obviousness: U.S. Cautions Americans in Kenya.

WASHINGTON (AP) - Americans in Kenya should exercise "extra caution" at hotels, tourist locations and urban areas, the State Department said Thursday after simultaneous attacks in the east African nation on an Israeli-owned hotel and an Israeli airliner.

Postcards from Hell

Here’s a photo album of the carnage wreaked today by the Religion of Peace™.

Put Your Hands Up

This Cal Thomas column has a brilliant opening:

Raise your right hand if you believe the official Saudi Arabian explanation for how money supposedly sent to an Islamic charity in this country by the wife of Saudi Arabia's ambassador to the United States "unwittingly " wound up in the hands of two of the 9/11 terrorists. The explanation is that she was surprised by what was, at best, money laundering by someone.

Raise your left hand if you believe that the Bush administration's "road map " for "peace " in the Middle East, which mandates the creation of a Palestinian state, will not be used as a staging area for a final assault by Palestinians and the Arab states to eliminate Israel.

With both hands in the air, you have now assumed the surrender position, which is precisely what the enemies of America and Israel seek.

Debka On the Mark

I saw this warning at Debka a few days ago, but didn’t post anything about it because let’s face it: Debka’s reliability has been sporadic. But it looks like their credibility has to be upgraded considerably. This was the message posted by “ARAMCO boy” in an Arab discussion forum frequented by jihadi freakazoids:

”Today, at 6:20 hours, there will be a surprise program, one of the most beautiful I have ever seen over our Qatari channel. Anyone who knows what I mean must tell no one so as to keep the surprise whose content everyone will love. Only God knows what I mean. The program forced me to write these lines at great speed and I ask God to forgive me and reserve Paradise and not Hell for me. The zero hour has come.”

Notice the reference to “Paradise” — the name of the hotel attacked in Kenya.

Arab Riots in Antwerp

Another story coming in totally beneath US media radar is the Arab rioting in Antwerp, Belgium, in response to the murder of an Arab immigrant by a 66-year old Belgian with a history of mental problems. Maarten Schenk has lots of info at his blog; he says the mayor of Antwerp is blaming the militant Arab European League for fueling the violence.

The AEL web site features the famous photograph of the Palestinian boy with wet pants—the one that seems to really tweak the Muslim humiliation button—but naturally they don’t include the other photo that puts things in context. And another photo and caption on their home page makes the Arab European League’s intentions and methods perfectly clear:

And Again

Terrorist swine from Yasser Arafat’s Fatah gang sprayed a crowd of Israeli voters with automatic gunfire today, killing five people and wounding at least 20.

A woman who saw the 3 p.m. attack from her home near the Likud office described seeing one gunman in a military-style jacket firing on people as they fled.

"I simply saw the terrorist standing, smiling, laughing and shooting in all directions," Galit Cohen told Israel Army Radio. "He simply shot and shot and shot and he didn't stop. People were fleeing and falling."

The BBC applies the usual Blame Equalizing Formula, claims six dead (counting the terrorists killed by police), and opens their article about the mass murder with this:

At least six people are reported to have been killed in a running gun battle in the northern Israeli town of Beit Shean.

Happy Thanksgiving

To all our readers: best wishes for a happy and safe Thanksgiving day.

Attacks in Kenya

At least 11 people are dead in a car bombing at an Israeli-owned hotel in the Kenyan port of Mombasa, and missiles were fired at an Israeli jet taking off from the city’s airport.

wednesday, november 27, 2002

Respecting the Cultural Practices of Others

Fatma Abdalla, director of the press office at the Egyptian embassy in Ottawa, defends the Egyptian TV series based on notorious forgery The Protocols of the Elders of Zion:

Re: A lesson in hate, Nov. 11.

Egyptian media policy ensures equal respect for all religions and beliefs. It also does not allow for any dramatic work or program to contain innuendos aimed at religious institutions.

The drama series Knight without a Horse does not contain, in its dramatization nor its discourse, what could be taken as a "call for anti-Semitism."

Egyptian media policy respects the right to freedom of expression, as that is a human right. Denying individuals this right would not be synonymous with the democracy that Egyptian society has proved to follow, and that allows this society to respect the cultural practices of others, as well as their religious and sacred beliefs.

Stirring up an allegation of anti-Semitism at this time of crisis is an old tactic, and since the allegations have not been proved truthful, I think there is a hidden agenda.

In regards to the allegations that "anti-Semitism" is growing within Egyptian society, there is a big difference between anger toward Israeli politics and "anti-Semitism."

This drama series, like all the rest in Egypt, has passed a rigorous government censorship committee prior to receiving approval for broadcasting. This committee ensures that any material that might be doubted, in terms of religious innuendos, be removed.

It is our position that certain Zionist circles have created this propaganda to divert attention away from the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories and its daily consequences on the Palestinian people's freedom and right to practice their religious rituals and to earn a living.

Fatma Abdalla,
Ottawa
Director of the press office,
Embassy of the Arab Republic of Egypt

The United States gives Egypt about $2 billion a year in foreign aid.

Hezbollah in Canada

Hezbollah considers Canada to be very important to its future operations and has infiltrated the country to a terrifying degree, as this article from Stewart Bell makes ominously clear: Hezbollah sent kingpin to B.C. unit. (Hat tip: LGF reader Nina.)

The Hezbollah terrorist group dispatched one of its "major players" to Vancouver to operate a clandestine cell that raised money and bought military supplies for attacks, according to testimony before a U.S. Senate committee.

Mohammad Dbouk, ringleader of the Vancouver cell, was considered so important to the Lebanese Shiite group that it rejected his application to become a "martyr" five times, the Senate judiciary committee was told.

"Hezbollah is such an organized terrorist group that they actually have application forms for martyr duty," said Robert J. Conrad, the U.S. Attorney who has brought charges against the members of the Canadian cell. ...

Mr. Conrad also testified about chilling videotapes seized from the homes of the cell members, including one in which two boys, one of them three years old, are repeatedly slapped in the face and commanded: "Tell them who you are!" The hitting only stops when they reply: "Hezbollah."

In another seized video, Hezbollah recruits pledge to "detonate ourselves, to shake the grounds under our enemies, America and Israel." A third tape shows Hassan Nasrallah, the Hezbollah leader, leading a chant of "Death to America."

Jean Chrétien, the Prime Minister, stirred controversy when he attended a summit in Beirut last month that Sheik Nasrallah also attended. Since then, the Canadian government has been criticized for its reluctance to ban Hezbollah under the anti-terrorism act. ...

Hezbollah has been using Canada as an offshore base for a decade. The RCMP says the group raises money in Canada by stealing cars, and Canadian intelligence says its operatives are in every major city.

Mickey: You Can Have Mine

Mickey Kaus isn’t getting enough hate mail.

Hate Me, Please! My hate e-mail has all but disappeared, which is vaguely disconcerting. For the past two years (ever since the Florida recount) I've gotten at least two, sometimes 200, abusive missives a day -- until about three months ago, when the stream of vitriol seemed to dry up. Other bloggers still complain to me that they're oppressed by offensive correspondence. I join in the griping, not daring to tell them the truth. ... Does the link at the bottom of the page not work anymore? (No, it does.) Is nobody reading kf? (No, the stats look healthy.) Has the Web suddenly become more civil? Were all the nasty e-mails orchestrated by obscure talk shows and sites like Media Whores Online -- so that if you're not on their radar, you don't get flamed? I'm at a loss.

I can explain it, Mickey. It’s all being forwarded to me.

Threats and Denials

A couple of interesting new items at MEMRI today; first a statement in London-based Arabic-language daily Al-Quds Al-Arabi by a senior Iraqi official, threatening to use weapons of mass destruction if Iraq is attacked. You know, those weapons they don’t have.

"A senior Iraqi official who refused to reveal his name said that the Iraqi regime would defend its existence and its reputation. The Iraqi official said unequivocally: 'When the regime was under intense attack in Al-Fau and began to be under threat, it did not hesitate to use all the weapons of mass destruction in its possession. Similarly, when the people of Halabja, or some of them, became guides for the Iranian forces that tried to breach the northeast [front], the regime did not hesitate to use chemical weapons.' Therefore, 'do not expect us to stand idly by in the face of any aggression that seeks to destroy and banish us not only from the regime but also from life.'"

Also, a Saudi-owned London Arabic daily interviews Osama Basnan, the man who may have acted as a go-between in money transfers to two of the 9/11 hijackers. Unsurprisingly, he denies everything.

Question: "News reports speak of financial support from you and Al-Bayyumi to two of the 9/11 perpetrators. Did you follow these reports?"

Basnan: "What was reported in the press is false and unfounded. It is a distortion of facts. It is regrettable that such false accusations are published to add to the mental and psychological torture that I and my family were subjected to for 12 weeks in prison. I should point out that the immigration and security authorities would not have released me if there were any doubt about my wife's and my relations with the accusations that followed. I consider the accusations and the articles to be part of the continuing campaign of distortions by American groups who oppose Muslims and Arabs in general, and Saudi Arabia as an idea, [its] culture, and religion, in particular."

I wonder which American groups he’s talking about?

Arafat Deputy: Stupidfada Was a Mistake

In a meeting with Fatah terrorists, Arafat deputy Mahmoud Abbas apparently said the intifada was a big mistake. I got almost a dozen emails about this; I guess I’m supposed to see it as a positive sign.

"What happened in these two years, as we see it now, is a complete destruction of everything we built," Abbas was quoted as saying. "The reason for this is that many people diverted the uprising from its natural path and embarked on a path we can't handle, with the use of weapons ... such as mortars, grenades and shooting from houses and populated areas."

Abbas said shooting from populated areas endangered Palestinian lives and property, because it invited Israeli retaliation. "We have to control the situation, and I don't think there is anything that keeps us from succeeding," he said. "What is needed now is to say, clearly and firmly — until here and enough."

Well ... please excuse my realism, but this is the same good terrorist/bad terrorist routine the Palestinian leadership always runs after a particularly horrific atrocity, and if Abbas really did make this statement I anticipate it will have as little effect on their true agenda as a butterfly fart in a windstorm.

A Bomber’s Victim

Surgeons operating on 22-year old Michal Yaakovson, critically injured in the Jerusalem bus bombing, were shocked to discover a Calvin Klein wristwatch embedded in her neck.

During the course of the operation the surgeons also began to deal with the metallic objects that had lodged in Michal's neck, first detected in a CAT scan. At first it was assumed that these objects were just parts that had come loose from the rescue breathing apparatus. But the team, including Dr. El-Ami, felt that this was not the real reason and they continued to fish out the small pieces of metal.

Only when the surgeons had removed all of the pieces did the "puzzle" become clear, Yediot Aharonot reported. They were part of a man's Calvin Klein wristwatch, and included the clock face, dials and gears. The battery of the watch was not found.

It is not clear if the wristwatch belonged to one of the passengers on the bus, or to the suicide bomber. Doctors did determine that much of the tissue damage in Michal's neck was caused by the exploding metallic pieces that lodged there.

On Saturday doctors said that Michal's condition remained serious but added it was "definitely stable." The medical team was encouraged by the fact that Michal showed movement in her limbs.

Patten Dismisses Probe of EU Funds

Head EUnuch Chris Patten continues to block a probe into Palestinian misuse of European Union funds.

EU Commissioner for External Affairs Chris Patten dismissed the call for a probe, saying it would undermine moderates in the Palestinian Authority, and thus scupper any hopes of halting the cycle of violence in the Middle East.

"An inquiry would make it enormously difficult to continue providing aid (to the Palestinian Authority)," Patten told a meeting of the Parliament's foreign affairs committee. ...

Earlier this year, Israel accused the Palestinian Authority of using EU aid to finance "terrorism", but the Commission said at that time its checks uncovered no evidence of any wrongdoing.

In a robust rebuttal of suggestions that the EU had been soft on Palestinian militants, Patten said the Commission had led international pressure for reform of the Authority.

"We have insisted on reform since we began the administrative assistance in 2001," he said.

"If we sunder relations with the Palestinian Authority it will be very difficult to claim that the EU is playing any kind of role in the Middle East region," Patten added.

Saudis Still Funding Al Qaeda

A cadre of Saudi businessmen with close ties to the royal family has funneled tens of millions of dollars to Al Qaeda within the last year. (Via Drudge.)

The CIA has traced transfers of tens of millions of dollars from the Saudis to Al Qaida over the last year, U.S. officials and congressional sources said.

The key backers of Al Qaida are said to be 12 prominent Saudi businessmen — all of whom have extensive business and personal connections with the royal family. These include ties to such ministers as Saudi Defense Minister Prince Sultan Bin Abdul Aziz, Interior Minister Prince Nayef Bin Abdul Aziz and Riyad Governor Prince Salman.

In July, the Rand Corporation delivered a briefing the Defense Policy Board which warned that the Saudi royal family has grown dependent on Islamic insurgency groups linked to Al Qaida. The Saudis spend billions of dollars in supporting anti-Western religious activities throughout the world, Middle East Newsline reported.

The CIA has tracked the flow of the funds of the 12 businessmen and have urged U.S. allies in Africa, Asia and Europe to freeze the assets of the Saudis. So far, no action is said to have been taken.

Fanaticism As Usual

A great piece from Salman Rushdie recaps the week’s victims of the Religion of Peace™: No More Fanaticism as Usual.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali was accused of being "the Dutch Salman Rushdie," Mr. Aghajari of being the Iranian version, Isioma Daniel of being the Nigerian incarnation of the same demon.

A couple of months ago I said that I detested the sloganization of my name by Islamists around the world. I'm beginning to rethink that position. Maybe it's not so bad to be a Rushdie among other "Rushdies." For the most part I'm comfortable with, and often even proud of, the company I'm in.

Where, after all, is the Muslim outrage at these events? As their ancient, deeply civilized culture of love, art and philosophical reflection is hijacked by paranoiacs, racists, liars, male supremacists, tyrants, fanatics and violence junkies, why are they not screaming?

At least in Iran the students are demonstrating. But where else in the Muslim world can one hear the voices of the fair-minded, tolerant Muslim majority deploring what Nigerian, Egyptian, Arab and Dutch Muslims are doing? Muslims in the West, too, seem unnaturally silent on these topics. If you're yelling, we can't hear you.

NYT Feels the Saudis’ Pain

The New York Times joins the Washington Post in promoting Saudi propaganda today, with an obsequious article about Prince Bandar and his wife. The tone is summed up in the headline: Explaining Gift, Saudi Envoy Voices Pain for Strained Ties. Oh the humanity.

Princess Haifa, for her part, said she felt as if a bomb had been dropped on her head last weekend when reporters began telephoning to question her about the contributions. Since then, the princess, 51, has found herself at the center of a political storm, so much so that prominent Republicans have called her to offer support.

On Monday night, she was in the family area of the pool house attached to the ambassador's residence in McLean, Va., fielding calls from friends and family members. The two youngest of her eight children breezed through for good-night kisses. Then the phone rang again.

"Thank you so much for calling," she said to Barbara Bush, the president's mother, who called to express support and sympathy. Alma Powell, the secretary's wife, had called earlier.

The jaw-dropper in this article, though, is Bandar’s last sentence. I never cease to be amazed at the bald-faced hypocrisy of the Saudis—and at the fawning complicity of our own media, who let the Saudis get away unchallenged with statements like this:

Both Prince Bandar and Princess Haifa said they were concerned that the clash of civilizations that President Bush and other leaders had sought to prevent since Sept. 11 was beginning to take hold in both countries.

"Of course I am worried," he said. "When we start bad-mouthing other people's religion, common sense goes out the window."

A Funny Sort of Empire

Ladies and gentlemen ... Victor Davis Hanson: A Funny Sort of Empire.

Award from a Murderer

UNRWA Commissioner Peter Hansen takes the “Al Quds Sharif” award from decrepit old murderer Yasser Arafat, apparently proud to have UNRWA worker Iain Hook labeled a “martyr” by these thugs.

tuesday, november 26, 2002

UN Denials Ring False

People from UNRWA are screaming about the death of Iain Hook, brushing aside Israeli claims that Palestinian gunmen were firing at IDF troops from inside the UN compound: U.N. Death Reopens Israeli Allegations.

Rene Aquarone, a spokeswoman for the U.N. agency, said Tuesday in Geneva that Hook was shot in the back while he was trying to arrange for the evacuation of U.N. staff, and that the Israelis prevented an ambulance from reaching him for some time.

Paul McCann, another U.N. spokesman, said allegations that Palestinian gunmen were inside the compound were "incredible." The compound is sealed by an 8-foot cement block wall topped with another 6 feet of fencing, and closed to anyone without U.N. permission.

The only trouble is that Hook himself apparently called the IDF shortly before he was shot, to tell them that Palestinians were breaking into the compound.

The term the caller used to describe the youth was "shabab," an Arabic term for youth that often refers to armed gangs.

[IDF Capt. Peter] Lerner's voice mail service automatically dated the call at 12:53 p.m. on Friday, less than an hour before Hook was shot and killed. The caller said, '“'Hi Peter, it's Iain here. I'm just making a progress report, really. We're pinned down in the compound. The shabab have knocked a hole in the wall, which I'm not happy about at all. I'm trying to keep them out, and I will just keep my people pinned down in the corner until I hear from you. OK? Over."

Israel Gets Two More Terrorists

Israel Air Raid Kills Two Top Palestinian Militants:

JENIN, West Bank (Reuters) - Israel killed two top Palestinian militant commanders in an air strike on a house in Jenin refugee camp in the West Bank on Tuesday, witnesses said.

Hospital officials identified the dead men as Ala'a Sabbagh of the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, which is affiliated to Palestinian President Yasser Arafat's Fatah faction, and Imad Nasharti of the Izz el-Deen al-Qassam brigades, military arm of the Islamic fundamentalist group Hamas.

Palestinian security sources said both men, Jenin area commanders for their respective groups, had been wanted by Israeli security forces for months. The Israeli army had no immediate comment.

Witnesses said they saw an Israeli F-16 warplane fire a missile at a house in the refugee camp and that the body of one of the militants had been torn to pieces.

This Reuters story has yet another variation on their boilerplate blame equalizer:

Al-Aqsa and Qassam have killed dozens of Israelis in suicide bombings since the start of a Palestinian uprising for statehood in September 2000.

Suicide bombing as a method to gain statehood. What will Reuters retch up next?

Palestinian Child Abuse

I guess the Palestinian journalists’ union gave up trying to enforce their ban on photos of kids holding guns. This touching family portrait was taken at Islamic Jihad’s celebration of a suicide attack on an Israeli patrol boat.

Got Some More

Malaysia arrests suicide bombers amid concerns over surviving terror network.

KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia - Malaysia announced the arrest of three would-be suicide bombers Tuesday, but grappled with mounting worries over the extent that an Islamic terror network has survived intensive efforts to destroy it.

The suspects were part of a plot by an ally of al-Qaida, Jemaah Islamiyah, to blow up the U.S., Australian and British embassies in Singapore with truck bombs. It was thwarted by Malaysia and Singapore in December and January with scores of arrests.

France Arrests Seven in Shoe Bomb Probe.

French police on Tuesday detained seven suspected Islamic militants with possible ties to the so-called "shoe bomber" — the third anti-terrorism sweep in France in four days.

Police have arrested 18 people since Saturday, including an Islamic militant who escaped from a Dutch jail. The interior minister described the arrest of another suspect as "very important" for the fight against terrorism.

The push by anti-terrorism investigators comes amid mounting fears of terror attacks in western Europe. In the latest word of caution, Defense Minister Michele Alliot-Marie said in an interview published Tuesday that France "is among the countries most threatened."

Anti-terrorism judges Jean-Louis Bruguiere and Jean-Francois Ricard put out orders for the pre-dawn arrests Tuesday of six Algerians and Pakistanis, picked up in the Paris suburbs of Montreuil and Garges-les-Gonesse, police said. Among those detained was an imam at a mosque north of Paris.

Saudi Whining

The Washington Post has an outrageously slanted article today that could have appeared in the Arab News, exploring the horrible humiliation and paralyzing fear being inflicted on Saudi Arabia by the United States: 'I'll Never Go Back'.

Like so many other young Saudis, Dmaitri, 26, has been kicked out of the United States, where he was studying at a junior college in Texas. And like so many other educated, privileged Saudis who once considered America their second home, the suspicion and sometimes hostility directed at his people since Sept. 11, 2001, have left him embittered toward a country he once admired.

Did I miss something? Are we now conducting mass expulsions of Saudi citizens for no reason? Then why isn’t there one word in this article about why this whiny young man was deported?

Poetic Justice

Five Israelis detained after 9/11 for visa violations are planning to sue the state of New Jersey and poet laureate Amiri Baraka for libel, because of these lines in his monumental work of genius, “Who Blew Up America?”

Who know why Five Israelis was filming the explosion
And cracking they sides at the notion

Understanding Nigeria

At least a million people (OK, maybe only a couple thousand) have emailed me about this great Dennis Prager column: Understand Nigeria and you understand the Islamic threat.

To understand the threat the non-Muslim world faces, you need to understand the way in which Western news agencies report Islamic violence.

Blame is almost never placed on the Muslim rioters. Rather, the passive voice, "violence broke out," is regularly used, and Muslims and Christians are simply reported to be killing each other in "sectarian violence." The Voice of America news report actually identified with the Muslim rioters: "The riots were sparked after a newspaper published an article mocking the Islamic leaders' protest."

It is crucial to identify this each-side-is-at-fault reporting. It characterizes world news organizations' descriptions of Arab-Israeli violence as well. Just as in Nigeria, where the press blames "sectarian violence" rather than Muslim rioters, in the Arab-Israeli conflict, the press blames a "cycle of violence" rather than Muslim terrorists.

To understand the threat to the non-Muslim world, you must understand the official Muslim reaction to the Muslim rioters in Nigeria.

One would think that leaders of any great religion would condemn members of their faith who murdered innocent people, destroyed others' houses of worship and homes, and burned down a newspaper's offices.

Yet in all the statements made by Nigeria's leading Muslim officials in the Nigerian press, I could not find a word of condemnation of the Muslim murderers. The Muslim leaders called for calm after accepting the newspaper's abject apologies. But the leaders made it clear that they, not only the Muslim rioters, consider the original article a grave insult to Islam. In fact, they compared the woman who wrote it to Salman Rushdie, whose death sentence they reaffirmed.

Fueling Terror

James S. Robbins has a good piece today on the new accusations of Saudi involvement in 9/11. He makes the point—and I think he’s right—that the only long-term solution to the problem of Arab Islamic terrorism is a proactive, coherent energy policy. Without oil money, there would be no Al Qaeda.

Charges of terrorist ties to Saudi Arabia are not new, though the direct connection in this case to the wife of a senior Saudi diplomat is newsworthy. Saudi Interior Minister Prince Nayef called the charges "lies and baseless words," but added that many Saudis help others who live abroad, and it is impossible to check them all. And the fact that at least 15 of the 19 9/11 hijackers were Saudis is not the fault of that state's government. The Oklahoma City bombers were Americans, they argue, should the U.S. blame itself? Nor can the Saudi government be held directly responsible for the actions of an outlaw like Osama bin Laden, who after all is a wanted (and admired) man in his homeland. But beyond a point, as the links to Saudi Arabia pile up, they attain a fissionable state. There may be no smoking gun, but something certainly smells.

A Religious Duty

The author of the phrase that enraged the followers of the Religion of Peace™ in Nigeria has fled the country after the deputy governor of Zamfara called on all Muslims everywhere to kill her.

Zamfara's deputy governor Mamuda Aliyu Shinkafi told religious leaders in the state capital, Gusau: "Like Salman Rushdie, the blood of Isioma Daniel can be shed."

The speech was rebroadcast on local radio in Zamfara state, which was the first state in Nigeria to introduce Islamic law.

"It is binding on all Muslims wherever they are, to consider the killing of the writer as a religious duty".

monday, november 25, 2002

The Cocoon Effect

Steven Den Beste on the strange Internet phenomenon known as the Rittenhouse Cocoon.

C4 Inside

Today the IDF intercepted two Hamas suicide bombers on their way to Jerusalem, smuggling a large quantity of explosives inside computers.

Down with (Human) Beauty

As they bury the dead in Nigeria, back in London various British celebrities and high-profile nitwits are falling over each other in the rush to blame the Islamic rioting on the Miss World beauty pageant itself, and urging surrender.

Oscar-winning actress turned parliamentarian Glenda Jackson led calls for the contest due to take place on Dec. 7 to be scrapped. "The best thing to do after such fratricide and blood-letting is to cancel the competition," she said.

Australian feminist Germaine Greer said the prospect of staging the contest in London was horrifying while writer Muriel Gray said: "These girls will be wearing swimwear dripping with blood."

But do not be mistaken, oh infidel! Islam is not opposed to all beauty contests.

The United Arab Emirates has held its first national beauty contest for camels with a prize fond of about $27,000 and various trophies for winners.

"The aim is to mark the respect and love the UAE have for the camel," member of the UAE's National Federal Council Faraj bin Hamouda told the Khaleej Times newspaper.

In a special statement, Mr bin Hamouda stressed that the camel was the best companion of his countrymen during the pre-oil era, and the competition in Abu Dhabi would help to pass that feeling of respect to the younger generation.

(Hat tip: the Viking.)

Nigerian Music Under Shari'a

World Press Review—an interesting site I just discovered— has an excellent, scary look at the devastating effects of shari'a on Nigerian musicians: 'Shariahphrenia' Reigns in Northern Nigeria. Nigeria has its own version of the Islamic religious police known as the hisba, who patrol the streets making sure no one is deriving any enjoyment from life.

It’s hard to know where the line between religion and politics is drawn in this region where people are regularly exploited and manipulated in the name of one cause or another. It’s just as delicate a task to figure out whose side the hisbas are on—some of them have been recruited from the ranks of the beggars and small-time crooks.

Three hours away from Katsina by car, the singers of the 1,000-year-old market city of Kano find themselves under the same cloud. In this city, where hundreds of mosques have recruited their own hisbas to enforce Shariah law, Hausa musicians are being harassed continuously. “Even in Saudi Arabia, I’ve never heard of musicians being as badly treated as we are in Nigeria,” says the singer Kalengu Sani Dan Indo. “Since Shariah was brought in here in Kano state, my profession has been frowned upon. Fear is never far away when you start to play music.” One day, the hisbas pounced on the Central Hotel, one of Kano’s most prestigious music venues, where Sani Dan Indo was performing. By the time they were through, the damages came to 1.7 million nairas (US$13,250)-worth of broken equipment, he recalls. “But there’s no use complaining,” he adds. “People would think I was mixing music with religion, and that I’m not a true believer. And that could make me other enemies.”

Hezbollah Threatens US

In the official weekly journal of Hezbollah, Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah threatens the United States and calls for the worldwide spread of the culture of suicide bombing.

"We view America as an enemy of the [Islamic] nation yet we have not engaged it directly in a military act (as of yet)". "The nation has resumed the use of suicide attacks, without the act of suicide the struggle is meaningless. The American government and the experts in America and Israel as well as the military generals were unable to eliminate the concept of suicide (attacks) and the weapon of suicide attacks. Since the Sharm-El-Sheikh [summit] they speak of dismembering the organizations (of terror) and attacking the organizational infrastructure yet were unsuccessful [in achieving their goal]. Due to that we must act in order to spread the concept of death for the realization of Allah's way as well as the act of suicide among the [Islamic] nation in order to protect our land".

How Tyrannies Fall

At National Review, Michael Ledeen continues to pursue the great untold story of 2002: How Tyrannies Fall.

If the American government, or the chatterers, or the academy were at all serious about trying to understand the real world, we would be in the midst of a discussion of the potentially earth-shaking events in Iran. And the main topic of discussion would be how close we are to the downfall of the mullahcracy in Tehran. Last Friday something like half a million Iranian citizens took to the streets to demonstrate their disgust with the regime of the Islamic Republic (the very same Islamic Republic with which some of our diplomats unaccountably continue to make deals, and which our secretary of state unaccountably refuses to condemn in the same clear language used by the president, the national-security adviser, and the secretary of defense). Contrary to what little you have been able to read in the popular press, these demonstrations were not limited to Tehran, but spread all over the country, with amazing results. And it was particularly noteworthy that there were very large numbers of female participants; in Tehran, some people I spoke to estimated that between one-half and two-thirds of the demonstrators were women.

Arab Muslim Anti-Semitism

Several folks emailed about this great piece by Andrew Bostom on the roots of Arab Muslim Anti-Semitism.

True Love

Got Another One

Algeria says they killed Al Qaeda’s North Africa leader on September 12.

ALGIERS, Nov 25 (Reuters) - Algerian security forces have killed the top al Qaeda official in North Africa and the Sahel region in Batna province, 320 km (200 miles) east of Algiers, the official Algerian news agency APS reported on Monday.

Government security officials identified the man as Emad Abdelwahid Ahmed Alwan, alias abu Mohamed, a 37-year-old Yemeni citizen.

APS described Alwan as the "al Qaeda representative for the Sahel region and the Maghreb".

This Reuters story ends with their usual maddening PC boilerplate, calling bin Laden a “dissident” and casting doubt on his involvement in the September 11 attacks:

The al Qaeda network, headed by Saudi-born dissident Osama bin Laden, is thought to have been behind the September 11 hijacked aircraft attacks in the United States which killed some 3,000 people.

(Hat tip: reader m12edit.)

The House of Saud Squirms

Saudi denials of involvement in 9/11 are becoming increasingly strident; and now they’re blaming the latest accusations on you-know-who:

"These are nothing but lies and baseless words," Interior Minister Prince Nayef said in comments carried by the official Saudi Press Agency.

He said it was normal for Saudis to offer financial support to fellow nationals living abroad. "If they are going to make an accusation of every assistance extended by one Saudi to another, then there is a problem and this should not be the case." ...

"Under the current strategy to hit Iraq, suspicions and accusations are being used by American foxes to...pressure the kingdom to directly enter a war," the popular daily al-Riyadh said in an editorial. "Despite our commitment to being a friend to America, we refuse to be blackmailed," it said.

Saudi newspapers usually reflect government thinking. [...and the sun "usually" rises in the East.—ed.] ...

"The campaign is a political one which clearly aims to blackmail Saudi Arabia, distort its reputation and try to influence its positions and turn others against it," said an editorial in the daily al-Watan.

"The latest campaign by the Zionist lobby in America will fail and will not affect the kingdom or its stances and will not affect the strength of ties with the United States," it added. ...

Al-Nadwa newspaper said the allegations were part of a ploy by the "Zionist lobby" to harm relations between the United States and Saudi Arabia, the world's largest oil exporter.

The daily al-Riyadh said the campaign was the first step toward "severing ties with Muslims and waging a long war which places the two sides in a cycle of confrontation which does not benefit anybody."

Egyptians Praise Child Murder

Even as senior Egyptian officials met with representatives from Hamas and Fatah (supposedly trying to get them to cease suicide bombings), the Egyptian government press was spewing some of the most debased hate speech I have yet seen, hailing the Jerusalem bus bombing.

An editorial in the Egyptian government paper Al-Akhbar titled "The Jerusalem Operation: The Only Response to Israeli Terrorism," stated that "eleven Israeli terrorists were killed in this operation." The editorial continued: "Reacting to all of the inhuman acts of the Zionist entity intended to subdue the Palestinian people, a martyrdom operation took place yesterday [November 21, 2002] in occupied Jerusalem in order to prove conclusively that Israel deludes itself in its belief that its uncontrollable appetite to kill, destroy, and terrorize will bring security and peace."

"It is inconceivable that the ruling gang in Tel-Aviv will succeed in fulfilling its hope of subduing the Palestinians and forcing them to accept the conditions of submission that Israel has been trying to impose on them for more than half a century."

"This operation in which eleven Israeli terrorists were killed and dozens were wounded stems from a number of reasons, the first of which is that this operation is a consequence of a brave ambush prepared by Palestinian martyrs ... in Hebron which ... because of the state of madness that over took the ruling Israeli gang led by Ariel Sharon, who seeks to spill more Palestinian blood, especially the blood of children, women, the elderly, and the brave people of resistance."

"In essence, everybody knows that the resistance is the only way for liberation, and there is no alternative. This weapon, the weapon of legitimate force, is the only weapon that Israel fears. Only the resistance can smash the Israeli arrogance and idiocy of its leaders."

There’s a lot more in that poisonous vein. These raving freaks receive about $2 billion a year from the United States.

Here’s one of the Israeli “terrorists” whose murder the Egyptian swine are gloating over—9-year old Ilan Pearlman, who died along with his grandmother.

Osama’s Latest Deranged Rant

Here’s the latest letter from “Osama bin Laden,” who writes remarkably well for a dead man.

Reached for comment, Michael Moore said, “Hey! Now we know what we gotta do, right? How do you like my kaffiyeh?”

UPDATE: More details about the origin of the letter:

The translated letter was originally posted in Arabic on a Saudi Arabian website previously used by al-Qaeda to disseminate messages. Within the last two weeks British Islamists have translated the letter, the most comprehensive explanation of bin Laden's ideology to be issued for several years, and posted it on English-language websites run from the UK.

The letter was sent to hundreds of subscribers to an email list run by Mohammed al-Massari, the UK-based Saudi Arabian dissident whose Committee for the Defence of Legitimate Rights has opposed the al-Saud regime for more than a decade. Yesterday al-Massari denied he supported terrorism in any way. Al-Massari has recently been granted permanent residence in Britain, a move which angered foreign governments who claim that the UK is still a haven for extremists.

UPDATE: Some interesting observations from Andrew Sullivan.

Palace Intrigue

In the New Republic, Jason Zengerle writes about the Bush administration’s troubling silence on the new revelations of Saudi government involvement in 9/11: Palace Intrigue. The issue of Saudi Arabia may turn out to be George W. Bush’s Achilles heel.

sunday, november 24, 2002

Safe in My Warm Cocoon

Rick Heller says the Rittenhouse Review is trying to spin an “internet cocoon.”

UPDATE: Rick says I don’t link to positive stories from the Arab press—but that’s not true. Any regular will attest that when I discover an article that shows signs of rationality, I do feature it. Unfortunately, though, the simple fact is that such articles are very rare in the Arab media’s ocean of hate speech.

UPDATE: Walter in Denver also has some thoughts on the Rittenhouse cocoon.

Nuclear Barter

Reader Bala Ambati alerted us to this NYT article about the double game Pakistan is playing, using American C-130s to smuggle ballistic missiles from North Korea: In North Korea and Pakistan, Deep Roots of Nuclear Barter.

In Search of Al Qaeda

LGF reader William pointed out this excellent new PBS Frontline documentary: In Search of Al Qaeda. You can watch the entire show on this page, in either Windows Media or Real Player format.

Disgusting as Usual

The Arab News has no doubt about who’s responsible for the riots in Nigeria. It couldn’t be the rampaging Muslims who killed hundreds because of a sentence in a newspaper article, burning people alive with gasoline-filled tires. No way. They were justifiably enraged, and when Muslims are enraged, they kill infidels. That’s just the way it is.

No, the real blame has to go to the festival organizers, who should have known better than to invest in the Nigerian economy when Nigerian Muslims really really want to continue to live in poverty and ignorance and religious oppression, and they’ll kill (justifiably) anyone who tries to help them out of it: Tragic mistake.

It must be hoped that those who perpetrated this awful mistake will be properly pilloried for their error. Meanwhile, the main organizers are hastily leaving behind them the carnage they have created and taking their circus off to London. There, it will hopefully be treated with the disinterest, if not contempt, it deserves. Indeed, it may not be too much to expect that advertisers and sponsors of this unedifying event will decide that enough is enough and withdraw their financial support for the contest. It would be nice to believe that this cynical exercise has come to an end. It perverts the whole meaning of the word “contest” which at its highest incarnation is a genuine competition between athletes and a measure of sporting excellence. It has nothing to do with women parading around and telling a bunch of arbitrarily chosen judges about their hobbies and their ambition to be a hairdresser.

Letter to the editor: could you be any more misogynistic?

Meanwhile, in a story from France’s AFP that might have been filed from an alternate universe where the riots never happened, the Nigerian sports minister is preparing a bid to host the 2010 World Cup competition.

LAGOS, Nov 22 (AFP) - Nigeria will present a joint bid with several other west African countries to host the 2010 World Cup, sports minister Steven Akiga said Friday.

"We will bid to stage the World Cup but we will not go it alone. We will host it with some other countries from west Africa," Akiga said.

"The west African sub-region has a good, wonderful football culture thanks to the exploits of countries like Senegal, Nigeria and Ghana. That is one of the reasons we are considering this kind of bid."

Akiga also said the successful hosting of the 2002 World Cup by South Korea and Japan has given Nigeria the confidence to go for a joint staging of the competition.

I suppose a women’s soccer team is out of the question. Unless they’re willing to play fully veiled.

The Monsters Are No Longer Under the Bed

There’s some kind of bizarre blood-cult negative reinforcement cycle going on among the Islamic Arabs of “Palestine.” Faced with increasing international condemnation of suicide bombings and attacks against Israeli civilians, rather than moderate their speech (not to mention their barbaric actions) their response is to hold huge officially sanctioned parties celebrating the murder of children on their way to school. Hamas leader Rantisi again openly calls for genocide and the destruction of the state of Israel:

Speaking to the demonstrators on Friday, Rantisi declared: "The Kassam Brigades yesterday struck in Hebron, Jerusalem, and Deir el-Balah. Tomorrow, by God's will, they will strike in Haifa, Jaffa, Hadera, Afula, and every purified and usurped part of Palestine.

"We thank God for aiding the warriors in Hebron, Jerusalem, and Deir el-Balah.

"I want to tell the Zionists: There is no place for you here and there is no difference between one place in Palestine and the other. All of our land is usurped, and our warriors have the right to launch their strikes anywhere they wish."

Rantisi said Hamas is determined to pursue the fight "until the homeland is liberated and the last Zionist leaves our country."

And the leader of Islamic Jihad in the Gaza Strip, Abdallah Shami, wants the world to know that they are just as bloodthirsty and evil as Hamas. So there.

In an interview with the Nazareth-based Kul al-Arab weekly, Shami said: "The Islamic Jihad organization is a resistance movement against the occupation. Our land is occupied and our people are targeted, and as long as the occupation is there, we will continue to launch operations at all times and in all places."

Asked whether his organization is prepared to accept a solution that would give the Palestinians the West Bank and Gaza Strip, but not any part of pre-1967 Israel, Shami replied: "We don't trust Israeli and American intentions. We will continue to fight until the occupation is defeated. We have said that the current intifada should lead to the abolishment of the occupation, at least in the areas occupied in 1967. This is a tactical and phased goal that all the Palestinians factions have endorsed."

Who Is the Islamic Bomber?

Professor Louis Rene Beres writes about the Islamic suicide bomber. (Hat tip: M. Simon.)

"Suicide" killing of American men, women and children in New York stemmed from the very same sentiments that continue to animate "suicide" killings of Israeli men, women and children. Consider the statement by Jamal Abdel Hamid Yussif, explaining operations of the Izzadin al-Qassam Brigades (military wing of Hamas in Gaza): "Our suicide operations are a message...that our people love death. Our goal is to die for the sake of God, and if we live we want to humiliate Jews and trample on their necks." Hamas, which was loudly overjoyed at the murders of September 11th - because Americans are presumably just as evil as Jews - promises all Islamic "suicides" nothing less than freedom from death. By "dying" in the divinely-mandated act of killing "Jews" or "Americans" (it makes no difference that these are not mutually exclusive categories; Islamic terrorists are not interested in logic), the "suicide" terrorist conquers death, which he fears with unimaginable terror. In his eternal life, Hamas and Fatah and Al-Qaida videotapes reveal, there will be rivers of honey and 72 virgins as reward for being "martyred" in the glorious fight against the despised enemies of God.

We see, then, that the Islamic "suicide" terrorist sees absolutely nothing suicidal about his willful murder of "Jews" or "Americans." For him, a hideous coward immobilized by both fear of death and by fear of his unhappy and unsatisfying life - "suicide" is merely a momentary inconvenience on his fiery propulsion into heaven. Now the insufferable death fear of his ego is lessened by his SACRIFICE of the infidel "American." After September 11th, it is especially through the burning and maiming and murder of defenseless American men, women and children - actions that are sometimes called "military operations" in much of the Islamic press - that he buys himself free from personal death. The Islamic "suicide" terrorist knows, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that after executing his "suicidal" sacrifice of infidels, literally millions of other Muslim sympathizers will proudly raise their heads over images of the American corpses, smile broadly into the sun, and reaffirm God's greatness to the entire world.

A UN Martyr

Israel says a UN official killed during a West Bank firefight was shot because Palestinian gunmen were firing from inside the UN compound.

JERUSALEM - Israel said Saturday its troops fatally shot a U.N. official during a West Bank firefight with Palestinian gunmen because Palestinians were firing at troops from inside the U.N. compound and the official had what appeared to be a gun.

The United Nations denied Palestinian gunmen were in the U.N. compound and said the slain official, Iain Hook, was armed only with a cell phone he was using to try to evacuate U.N. staff.

The Palestinian Authority has officially dubbed Iain Hook a “martyr,” putting him in the lofty company of savages who shoot little girls in their beds.

Late Saturday, the Palestinian leadership decided to award Hook its highest medal, the Al Quds Sharif medal, or the Noble Jerusalem medal, and declared him a "martyr" of the Palestinian people, Palestinian officials said.

Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat also sent a letter of condolence to Hook's family, the officials said

I hope he isn’t too old to fully enjoy his 72 virgins.

As usual, Israel investigated the killing of the official immediately, and owned right up to their responsibility. But that doesn’t stop the BBC from exercising their anti-Israel bias yet again, with a headline that shouts: Israel ADMITS killing British UN worker.

RoP: Down with Beauty

Attempting to quiet the followers of the Religion of Peace, the Miss World pageant has been moved to London. But Muslims in Nigeria are having too much fun spreading their message of love to stop now: Nigerian Miss World Riots Kill 175.

Emmanuel Ijewere said that violence continued on Sunday, despite a decision on Saturday to move the finale of the pageant from the Nigerian capital Abuja to London.

"The papers are reporting 200 dead, but our estimate would be slightly less than that. We are talking of about 175," said Ijewere.

About 12,000 people have so far been made homeless and the number of injured in hospital is between 1,100 and 1,200, he said.

The violence began on Wednesday when Muslims reacted angrily to comments on the Miss World beauty pageant in a national newspaper.

Meanwhile, the exhausted beauty queens have arrived in London, a safe harbor far from murderous 12th century religious hatred. Or so they thought.

But there’s no escape from the Religion of Peace.

Some Muslims in Britain also called for the event to be canceled.

"It is wrong that it should happen in Britain, in Nigeria or in any country," Sajjad Khan, of the Islamic Liberation Party in Britain, told British Broadcasting Corp. radio on Saturday.

"I think the whole idea of having a beauty contest anywhere would be against many forward-thinking people of whatever faith and whatever ideology."

saturday, november 23, 2002

LGF Weblog System Rules

I went on a serious coding binge today and implemented something that’s been on the to-do list for quite some time—a PHP archiving system that backs up all the LGF weblog entries, along with all their comments, by compressing them into a series of ZIP files that are easily downloadable.

Our web host limits the speed of FTP, and downloading all the entries (almost 5,000 now) used to take hours. Now, downloading the ZIP archives with Internet Explorer, it takes less than 5 minutes. Big score.

Coincidence?

An op-ed in Lebanon’s Daily Star fills in some important details on what’s happening in the city of Maan, where Jordanian forces are cracking down hard on the Abu Sayyaf terror gang: Clashes in Maan are no coincidence.

Havel’s Amazing Swan Song

Here’s a great Matt Welch column on the historic NATO summit, the crowning achievement of Vaclav Havel.

When Havel addressed a joint session of the U.S. Congress in February, 1990, as the new president of a wrecked country that would surely be asking for handouts, he raised quite a few eyebrows when he announced, "We, too, can offer something to you: our experience [of communism] and the knowledge that has come from it."

Twelve years later, what may have sounded like a delusional boast has become reality. As former U.S. State Department official Ronald Asmus put it in his new book, Opening NATO's Door, "The idea of enlarging NATO ... originated in Central and Eastern Europe."

A Bombing Pause?

I’m getting to it a day late, but the latest Mark Steyn column is a gem, sure to raise the blood pressure of the PoMoMultiCulti Krew: A bombing pause -- for 12 months?

...in his month-long Ramadan-a-ding-dong, George W. Bush is relentlessly on message: as he told Islamic bigwigs at the White House the other day, "Our nation is waging a war on a radical network of terrorists, not on a religion and not on a civilization."

Not true. The world is at war not with a Blofeldian "network" of crack evildoers, but with an ideology. Indeed, the evidence from Afghanistan, Chechnya, Bali and North London suggests that it's now the ideology of choice for the world's troublemakers, as Communism once was. In 1989, with the Soviet Union crumbling into irrelevance, poor old Mikhail Gorbachev even received a helpful bit of advice from the cocky young upstart on the block, the Ayatollah Khomeini: "I strongly urge that in breaking down the walls of Marxist fantasies you do not fall into the prison of the West and the Great Satan," wrote the prototype Islamist nutcake. "I openly announce that the Islamic Republic of Iran, as the greatest and most powerful base of the Islamic world, can easily help fill up the ideological vacuum of your system." Yes, indeed, folks. We're the one-stop shop for all your ideological needs: Call today for a free quotation ("Death to the Great Satan!"). The Ayatollah found no takers in the Kremlin, but there's been no shortage of customers elsewhere in the world.

Daniel Pipes and others have argued that this is the Islamists' great innovation -- an essentially political project piggybacking on an ancient religion. In the last year, we've seen the advantages of such a strategy: You can't even identify your enemy without being accused of bigotry and intolerance. What we still can only guess at is the overlap between the ideology and the religion. It seems unlikely that many Muslims in, say, Newark or Calgary or Singapore would wish to be suicide bombers themselves, but what seems clear is that in these and other places there is -- to put it at its most delicate -- a widespread lack of revulsion at the things done in Islam's name. On the one hand, Muslims deny it's anything to do with them: A year ago, in The Ottawa Citizen's coast-to-coast survey of Canadian imams, all but two refused to accept Muslims had been involved in the September 11th attacks. On the other hand, even though it's nothing to do with them, they party: In Copenhagen as in Ramallah, Muslims cheered 9/11; in Keighley, Yorkshire, you couldn't get a taxi that night because the drivers were whooping it up.

Where’s the Fear?

If innocent Palestinian civilians are being “massacred” by the hundreds by the monstrous Zionist Nazis (as Saeb Erekat and various British journalists are fond of alleging), and IDF soldiers are routinely firing on unarmed children out of sheer malice, would someone please tell me why these noble rock throwers, in their American jeans and athletic clothing, are staring right down the barrel of a Merkava tank’s cannon with no fear whatsoever?

Meanwhile, according to an Arab news site, Jordan is using tanks [hat tip: reader M. Simon] to crush Islamist militants in the city of Maan—and I guarantee there are no kids throwing rocks at those tanks.

And no international condemnation, either.

Lost Children

Wearing the headbands of an openly genocidal terrorist group and waving a Koran while celebrating the mass murder of Israeli children, these Palestinian girls don’t seem to agree with President Bush that “Islam is peace.”

friday, november 22, 2002

Saudi Bombshell

Is this the smoking gun of Saudi involvement in 9/11?

The FBI is investigating whether the Saudi Arabian government—using the bank account of the wife of a senior Saudi diplomat—sent tens of thousands of dollars to two Saudi students in the United States who provided assistance to two of the September 11 hijackers, according to law-enforcement sources.

THE BUREAU, THEY SAY, has uncovered financial records showing a steady stream of payments to the family of one of the students, Omar Al Bayoumi. The money moved into the family’s bank account beginning in early 2000, just a few months after hijackers Khalid Almidhar and Nawaf Alhazmi arrived in Los Angeles from an Al Qaeda planning summit in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, according to the sources. Within days of the terrorists’ arrival in the United State, Al Bayoumi befriended the two men who would eventually hijack American Flight 77, throwing them a welcoming party in San Diego and guaranteeing their lease on an apartment next door to his own. Al Bayoumi also paid $1,500 to cover the first two months of rent for Al Midhar and Alhazmi, although officials said it is possible that the hijackers later repaid the money.

Sources familiar with the evidence say the payments—amounting to about $3,500 a month—came from an account at Washington’s Riggs Bank in the name of Princess Haifa Al-Faisal, the wife of Saudi Ambassador to the United States, Prince Bandar bin Sultan, and the daughter of the late Saudi King Faisal. After Al Bayoumi left the country in July 2001—two months before the September 11 terror attacks—payments for roughly the same amount began flowing every month to Osama Basnan, a close associate of Al Bayoumi’s who also befriended the hijackers. A federal law-enforcement source told NEWSWEEK that Basnan—who was recently convicted of visa fraud and is awaiting deportation—was a known “Al Qaeda sympathizer” who “celebrated the heroes of September 11” at a party after the attacks and openly talked about “what a wonderful, glorious day it had been.”

’Za For the IDF

Michele has set up a donation page where you can send pizza and doughnuts to the IDF, the men and women who are on today’s front line of the fight against militant Islam.

Palestinian Culture

In the mostly Jewish neighborhood of Williamsburg, New York, an art exhibit for the Muslim month of Ramadan showcases Palestinian culture.

Almost every item has an anti-Israel slant. One item shows an Arab kafiyah (headdress) trapped in a Magen David made of barbed wire. Others are more graphic in depicting Arab suffering at the hands of their “oppressors”.

There are also ample displays of violence that the artists claim are showing the proud Arab masses standing up to the advanced ammunition of the Israeli invaders using only stones. An ammunition box that would normally hold bullets for an M-16 rifle is filled with rocks.

Another painting shows a group of people on a horse throwing rocks. One item shows the Hamas symbol of a raised fist holding a rifle.

Another piece that had not arrived in time for display depicts pipe bombs used to kill Israelis in terror attacks. The sign at the missing display says that the exhibit was delayed in transit, taking 29 days to arrive by mail, hinting at attempts of censorship.

The concept of peace is absent from the exhibit. There are no declarations of peace with Israel, no signs of hopeful coexistence. At the table where craft items are for sale, they have the usual kafiyahs, postcards and posters, but the largest number of items are hats and T-shirts depicting the Palestinian flag. Emblazoned on the flag is a map of the hoped for Palestinian state. This map consists of all the land from the Mediterranean Sea to the Jordan River.

(Hat tip: IsraPundit.)

MESA and Sins of Omission

At Campus Watch, Jonathan Calt Harris points out that at the entire 2002 Middle East Studies Association conference in Washington DC this weekend, not one scholar will present a paper on militant Islam’s jihad against America.

Other topics are also conspicuous by their absence from the meeting: Palestinian suicide bombing, the targeting of civilians, and anti-American incitement.

It's not as though the members of MESA have not been urged to take up subjects useful to the country as a whole. After 9/11, the Bush administration increased federal funding by over $20 million, or 26 %, for International Education and Foreign Language Studies, the largest single year increase in the program's history. This money, and the many more millions U.S taxpayers spend on Middle East studies through Dept. of Education fellowships and grants has essentially brought forth a big goose egg.

The conference reeks of apologetics. Take the subject of women, a topic taken up by over 60 papers or events. Only one specifically discusses Islamism and feminism, and then only in Morocco. Issues such as the oppression of women, their lack of basic rights, and the brutality they suffer under any militant Islamic rule would seem to rate more than a single paper.

Instead, such topics as "Coffee Houses in Bahrain" and "Persian Humor in an International Context"are discussed.

Despite the Middle East and militant Islam dominating the American national debate, the scholars of these subjects have chosen to opt out and either bury their heads in esoteric subjects or offer blatant apologetics.

A Troll Confesses

Someone who obviously considers himself a very important person has decided it’s not enough to bash LGF any more. He’s also going to punish everyone who links to us, by delinking them on his site.

I wouldn’t even mention this, except that in the course of his rant about how racist, bigoted, blah blah blah LGF is, he does reveal something interesting:

Worse, the site’s unwillingness to tolerate comments that deviate from the house line and its active and aggressive deletion of comments from readers that it deems objectionable -- and the “bright line” test involved is almost totalitarian in nature and scope -- is nothing less than a disgrace. (I know because I have tested it several times.)

First, the accusation that I delete every comment that disagrees with the “house line” is 100% pure horseshit. There are many, many comments on this weblog from people who disagree with me and with other posters, and I have NEVER deleted someone’s comment simply because I disagreed with what they said. Mr. Capozzola, you’re a liar.

But the interesting part is that you admit to trolling our site. Which troll were you?

Muslim Group Tries to Quiet Dershowitz

According to Rod Dreher, a Muslim legal group in California is trying to have Alan Dershowitz censured by the Massachusetts Board of Bar Overseers:

The complaint centers on a March 11 op-ed in the Jerusalem Post in which Dershowitz advocates a new counterterrorism measure for Israel. Under the Dershowitz plan, Israel would state publicly that upon the next terrorist attack, it will give residents of a specific Palestinian village known to have harbored terrorists 24 hours to leave, whereupon Israeli bulldozers would level the village. The Muslim lawyers call this tantamount to advocating war crimes.

"What the professor has stated is that there should be no due process, no judge and jury, [that] a mass reprisal against whole families, villages and communities take place," said Sareer Fazili, a board member of the Muslim Legal Defence & Education Fund (MLDEF), which brought the complaint. "That was a point where we felt, after a number of students at Harvard Law protested the professor and asked him to retract his statements, and he refused, that was when we decided to make a complaint on this end."

The complaint says that Dershowitz's op-ed calls for the violation of Article 33 of the Fourth Geneva Convention, which states: "No protected person may be punished for an offense he or she has not personally committed," and "collective penalties and likewise all measures of intimidation or of terrorism are prohibited." Because the United States is a signatory to the Geneva treaty, it has the force of U.S. law, the Islamic group says. Thus, if Dershowitz's views violate the Geneva Convention, the argument goes, they violate U.S. law, and therefore the Massachusetts Bar's rules of professional conduct.

Fazili, speaking to reporters in a conference call, stressed that MLDEF is not taking the Harvard scholar on because he is a Jew, but to defend the ethical integrity of the legal profession, and to protect Palestinians from being harmed by those who agree with Dershowitz's views.

Grasping at Straws?

Stefan Sharkansky discovered an editorial in the Lebanese Daily Star that actually seems to recognize Israel’s right to exist, and calls for an end to suicide bombings—even though the call is based on purely utilitarian grounds:

The choice Israeli voters are being asked to make is a clear one, so anything that clouds their judgment is a victory for Sharon and his allies. They need bloodshed to build support for their heavy-handed policies and so will continue to secretly applaud whenever a suicide bomber blows up a cafe. Palestinian militant groups that have fallen for this ruse need to end such attacks, and quickly. What is at stake here is not a debate between right and wrong but one between smart and stupid. Why help someone who hates you?

Stefan says this is a hopeful sign, and I guess I agree. But the real objective of the editorial is to convince Israelis to vote for the Labor Party’s Mitzna, who is pushing the Oslo appeasement line. And the language of the paragraph above is anything but moderate or conciliatory. It’s hopeful in the sense that any faint sign of sanity should be applauded, but I can’t help noticing how frail the straws we grasp at have become.

Removing Saddam from Baghdad

Victor Davis Hanson looks at the tactics we can expect Saddam Hussein to use, and what the US can do to counter them. Recommended.

Egyptian Embassy Responds

The Egyptian embassy responds to a Washington Post article critical of the anti-Semitic TV show Knight Without a Horse.

The Post holds the Egyptian government responsible for everything in the Egyptian press, in spite of the information minister's public opposition to intolerant references to the three monotheistic religions. Yet The Post publishes intolerant statements and stereotypes of Arabs and Muslims by Americans, while occasionally stating that it opposes these views.

Yes, the whole thing is that pathetic, and that hypocritical.

The US gives Egypt about $2 billion a year in foreign aid.

Victims of Arab Terror

Here are the faces of the victims of yesterday’s suicide bombing in Jerusalem.

Rantisi Tells It Like It Is

The Pediatrician of Death, Hamas leader Abdel Aziz Rantisi spelled out his organization’s genocidal goals quite clearly again, minutes after the mass murder of children on a Jerusalem bus:

"By order of Allah, the Palestinian nation must clear its soil of its occupying intruders. We must hunt the Zionists until the land is restored to the boundaries of 1948."

The Hamas official stated that the vast Palestinian population supports suicide bombing. Even so he said that "terrorist activity will continue whether the Palestinian population supports us or not".

Rantisi claims that the prolonged Palestinian resistance has been effective and has defied the Zionist enemy. It has succeeded in hurting the state's economic situation, and shattered the government. All this said he now calls for Palestinians to "give suicide bombing a chance".

All we are saying...

Religion of Slaughter

Muslim “worshippers” came out of Friday prayers in Nigeria and went on another slaughter spree. More than 100 people are now known to be dead.

Talbot Flails Again

Australian dirtbag Neale Talbot has launched another typically dishonest attack against our readers, selecting a bunch of angry sentence fragments totally out of context from this discussion and featuring them prominently on his homepage.

For a look inside the confused mind of Neale Talbot, see this thread where he pats himself on the back for being a pacifist—just like Leon Trotsky. And remember, Talbot’s pacifism is the kind that lets him describe suicide bombers as “noble.”

thursday, november 21, 2002

Innovative Solutions

Here’s a non-governmental organization to which I’d be happy to donate money.

Harvard Does the Wrong Thing

Jew-hating Irish poet Tom Paulin has been reinvited to speak at Harvard University.

Harvard University English professors have reinvited a controversial Irish poet to speak on campus, one week after his appearance was canceled because of his strong anti-Israeli comments.

Professors met for two hours Wednesday and voted to reinvite Tom Paulin, who has made statements comparing US-born settlers in the West Bank with Nazis, and saying they "should be shot dead."

"Free speech was a principle that needed upholding here," English professor Peter Sacks said Wednesday night. "This was a clear reaffirmation that the department stood strongly by the First Amendment."

What in the world does the First Amendment have to do with this? Harvard University has no obligation to provide anti-Semites with a venue to promote their ideas. You might think Harvard professors would have a better understanding of the First Amendment than this. But you’d be wrong.

Here are the faculty profiles of Harvard’s English Department, if you’d like to see the people who think Harvard University should provide a bully pulpit for a creature who says things like this:

In April, Paulin, quoted in the Egyptian newspaper Al-Ahram Weekly, said of American Jewish settlers: "I think they are Nazis, racists; I feel nothing but hatred for them."

In the same interview, Paulin said he understands "how suicide bombers feel," but suggested guerrilla warfare would be more effective because attacks on civilians could create a sense a solidarity.

In his poem "Killed in the Crossfire," he writes of "another little Palestinian boy in trainers jeans and a white teeshirt" killed by the "Zionist SS."

And meanwhile, exhibiting a hypocritical double standard so blatant it would induce cognitive dissonance in a Buddhist monk, Harvard Law School is considering a ban on offensive speech.

Was It Worth It?

An absolute must-read article in (of all places) the Guardian by Polly Toynbee, who went back to Kabul one year after the fall of the Taliban to ask, “Was the war on Afghanistan worth it?”

The answer is a resounding yes. There’s too much in this lengthy article to pull out a quote; just go ye now and read of it, for it is good. (Hat tip: LGF reader wordwarp.)

The Fifth Column

Hisham Sharabi, a professor of Arab Culture at Georgetown University in Washington DC, told an audience of students and teachers at Balamand University in Lebanon that Jews and Americans want to control the world.

The “international Zionist movement” is leading the United States to wage war against the Arab world with the intentions of colonizing the region, according to a professor speaking here during a lecture Tuesday.

Hisham Sharabi ... told an audience of students and faculty at Balamand University, that the region is currently under “a neocolonial attack” but insisted that the Arabs would not be vanquished.

“However, in the long run, neither the Jews nor Americans will be able to subdue us for we are not (Native Americans),” he said, adding that almost 280 million Arabs form a “massive force.” ...

Sharabi accused the Arab world of squandering its money in the past 50 years with no plans for organization or establishing an independent, viable economy.

He said there has been no attempt at building a weapons arsenal or establishing collective relations with the West.

“Only Iraq managed to build an arsenal, but proved to be insane when it directed it against Iran instead of using it to maintain a balance of power.”

“Jews are getting ready to take control of us and the Americans have entered the region to possess the oil resources and redraw the geopolitical map of the Arab world,” he added.

Colin Powell, of course, would like to encourage more people like Sharabi to come to the United States.

Religion of Peace Kills 50 More

At least 50 people have been killed and churches burned in anti-Christian rioting by followers of the Religion of Peace™ in Nigeria, after a newspaper published a story suggesting that Mohammed might have chosen one of the recent Miss World contestants as a wife. Many of the dead were burned alive when Muslims set fire to their homes.

UPDATE: the latest AP wire has horrifying details about the riots:

Shehu Sani of the Kaduna-based Civil Rights Congress said he watched a crowd stab one young man, then force a tire filled with gasoline around his neck and burn him alive. Sani said he saw three other bodies elsewhere in the city.

Alsa Hassan, founder of another human rights group, Alsa Care, said he saw a commuter being dragged out of his car and beaten to death by protesters.

Schools and shops hurriedly closed Thursday morning as hordes of young men, shouting "Allahu Akhbar," or "God is great," ignited makeshift street barricades made of tires and garbage, sending plumes of black smoke rising above the city. Others were heard chanting, "Down with beauty" and "Miss World is sin."

So Many Infidels, So Little Time

Followers of the Religion of Peace™ sure have been working hard at spreading their message of love and tolerance for the past couple of days.

In addition to murdering children on a bus, Islamic peacebots have murdered a female charity worker in Lebanon, and tried to murder two US soldiers in Kuwait.

Feel the love, people.

McInfidel Barbecue

Yesterday another devotee of the Religion of Peace in Saudi Arabia torched a McDonald’s restaurant because it stayed open during Ramadan.

About Concessions

It’s become a truism that Islamic terror groups see concessions as weakness. Now the evil slug Rantisi, in the course of confessing his guilt in today’s bus bombing, says it outright:

Hamas leader Abdel Aziz Rantisi was quoted today as justifying the bus bombing in Jerusalem because such attacks pressure Israel into making concessions to the Palestinians.

According to Army Radio., Rantisi said in an interview after the early morning bombing that such attacks are what led the newly elected leader of the Labor Party, Amram Mitzna, to seek an Israeli withdrawal from the Gaza Strip.

Mitzna promised on Tuesday, during the Labor primary, that if he is elected prime minister in the January 28 elections, he would move Israeli settlers and soldiers out of Gaza as part of a new peace deal with the Palestinians.

And Again

Another filthy Palestinian mass murderer: At Least 11 Killed as Homicide Bomber Blows Up Jerusalem Bus.

UPDATE: the bus was full of schoolchildren.

wednesday, november 20, 2002

Pakistani Nuke Threat

Why are we hearing all these nebulous orange alerts? Why did the government quarantine a freighter (that had picked up cargo in Pakistan) off the coast of New Jersey while Special Forces, CIA, and FBI teams searched it from top to bottom? Because, according to the Times of India, Bush feared al-Qaeda might use Pakistani nukes to attack the US.

Egyptian Anti-Semite Gloats

The headline on this AP story (for once, mincing no words) says it all: Anti-Semitic TV Star Vows More Shows.

CAIRO, Egypt (AP) - The star of an Egyptian television series based in part on an anti-Semitic work drew cheers and applause Wednesday when he vowed to produce similar programs despite criticism from home and abroad.

Actor Mohammed Sobhi co-wrote and stars in "Horseman without a Horse," a six-week series that explores the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion," a known 19th century forgery that depicts a secret plot by Jewish leaders to take over the world.

Sobhi, who also co-produced the series, told a crowd at the opening of a new cultural center that if the production "terrified Zionists, we will produce more series." ...

In the series, Sobhi plays an Egyptian journalist who seeks to find out if the Protocols are true. The 19th century work has long been dismissed by historians as a forgery of Russian Czar Nicholas II's secret police to blame the country's problems on Jews.

"It honors me very much that I was capable of revealing the great conspiracy aimed at swallowing our beloved nation," Sobhi said.

The Egyptian Organization for Human Rights, in the first domestic criticism, said Monday that free expression "should not be abused to ... incite hatred" and urged that the show begin with an acknowledgment that the Protocols are forged.

Sobhi dismissed the group, the country's best-known rights organization, as a "Zionist organization conspiring against Egypt."

Know Thy Terrorists

It’s a subject Daniel Pipes has visited before, but the message still needs to be heard: Know Thy Terrorists.

Why the readiness to confront Iraq head-on but reluctance to do so when it concerns militant Islam?

Because militant Islam benefits from two factors - political correctness and lobbying - that Saddam lacks. Iraq is a country ruled by an obviously evil megalomaniac. Militant Islam is an ideology grounded in a major religion. Saddam has few supporters in the United States; the Islamist vision has many convincing spokesmen.

Although everyone knows the enemy is motivated in something having to do with Islam, the United States and other governments refuse to say this out loud. Instead, they repeat pleasant statements disassociating the religion of Islam from violence.

Blix the Superpower

Kenneth Adelman says Hans Blix is the most powerful man in the world.

How did we get here? How did we get to Hans Blix, the power of the superpower? How did we get to the point where a Swedish lawyer -- whose entire career has been in the United Nations, and who gave Iraq an "exemplary" rating on non-proliferation right before its three covert nuclear programs were uncovered-- will make the most momentous U.S. national security decision?

The world is doomed.

(Hat tip: Carthaginian Peace.)

Religion of Slavery

FrontPage has more interesting excerpts from Dr. Serge Trifkovic’s new book The Sword of the Prophet: A Politically-Incorrect Guide to Islam, focusing on Islam's wretched record on slavery.

As the recent campaign for reparations has shown, the West is still being taken to task for the fact that it used to permit slavery.   But in fact the West, rather than being the origin of slavery in the world, is in fact the only civilization to have created from within itself a successful movement to abolish it.  Other civilizations, like Islamic civilization, have not yet achieved this.  To this day, the principal places in the world where one can buy a slave for ready cash are Moslem countries.

Reactions to the Protocols

The Egyptian Human Rights Organisation is urging all Arab TV stations showing Knight Without a Horse to broadcast a warning that the show contains anti-Jewish lies.

The head of the human rights group, Hafez Abu Seida, told the BBC that spreading views hostile to Jews breeds hatred which in turn causes bloodshed.

Well before it was aired, American officials and Jewish groups in the US urged the Egyptian authorities to drop the series.

But the Egyptian government has defended it.

The information ministry said stopping the series would violate freedom of expression.

The series is in part a dramatisation of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion - a document which alleges a Jewish conspiracy to dominate the world.

Historians believe that the document was forged in Tsarist Russia, as a pretext for the persecution of Jews.

In a statement issued in Cairo, the Egyptian Human Rights Organisation said the current hostility towards Israel - over its conduct in the Palestinian territories - should not mean that anti-Jewish views could be condoned.

This was particularly the case, it said, when the Arab world was asking the West to condemn prejudice against Muslims.

It’s always good to hear voices of reason, but one voice isn’t a choir. And MEMRI’s look at Arab press coverage of the Knight Without a Horse controversy shows that the vast majority of columnists and editorialists are singing a different tune—one that goes a little like this:

In ... Al-Akhbar was an article authored by Fatma Abdallah Mahmoud, who in April 2002 published an article castigating Hitler for not finishing the job of annihilating the Jews.[4]Mahmoud wrote: "Those murderers [the Jews], the slaughterers, the war criminals, the blood-letters, the enemies of all mankind ... never stop playing their worn-out record, the same lame charge and the same discordant tune not based on any foundation of truth – that we are antisemites!!"

"This charge has become no more than a pointless joke – a joke that arouses contempt and revulsion and reveals their absolute ignorance in all things concerning the simplest foundations of their religion. How can we be antisemites when we are Semitic in origin, even more Semitic than they? Our fathers and grandfathers were Semites. Can we be hostile towards ourselves? We are not mentally ill, and we are not afflicted with schizophrenia, that we should hate ourselves ... "

"If only those murderers of children who take refuge in their fathers' arms, who rip open the bellies of pregnant women and scatter their fetuses and their intestines in all directions, those war criminals whose hands drip from head to toe [sic] with the blood of innocent Palestinians – if only they would open the history books a little and read this simple sentence that faithfully expresses truth and reality: 'The Muslims are of Semitic origin' ... "

"The unshakable truth is that the 'Sons of Zion' are the antisemites and the enemies of all humanity ... What incriminates them more than anything else, and charges them with antisemitism and enmity towards humanity is the [book] ... [that is] satanic in its blood and loathsome in its baseness, called The Protocols of the Elders of Zion!! ... The book of protocols drips poison and hatred towards every non-Jew who lives on the face of the earth!! ... " Mahmoud's article continues, citing excerpts from the Protocols.

An interesting bit in this MEMRI report: the canard that “Arabs cannot be anti-Semitic because they are Semites themselves” is quite effectively answered by an Egyptian intellectual who lives in the US (which is the only reason he gets away with writing these things):

The Egyptian intellectual Mamoun Fendi, who lives and writes in the U.S., also refuted the "Egyptian freedom of expression" argument. However, his article primarily dealt with another claim that has emerged repeatedly in the Arab media – that the Arabs are Semites and therefore cannot be antisemites. Fendi wrote: "When Arabs respond to accusations of antisemitism with the argument that 'we are Semites,' the West laughs... because the term 'antisemitism,' as it is understood here in the West, is not the result of an anthropological classification of the races ... The 'semitism' of the concept of 'antisemitism' ... is mostly connected to the Jewish holocausts in Europe – that is, to the hatred of those people [the Jews], which led directly to the gas chambers in which the Jews were cremated. Therefore, when some Arabs say 'We are Semites,' the ordinary man [asks]: 'When exactly were the Arabs cremated in the gas chambers of Europe, and how are the Arabs connected to this?' Of course the Arabs were not cremated by the Nazis. Therefore, the Arabs' claim that they are 'Semites' is... an attempt to shove themselves into someone else's history ... "

"There are [in the West]... some who ask whether this [Arab] attempt to shake free [of charges of antisemitism] is connected to the Arabs' denial of this history, and that therefore, they stand in the same ranks as Europe's Neo-Nazis who deny that the gas chambers existed and that the Holocaust [ever] happened ... While Germany purifies itself of this historical crime, we find that some Arabs celebrate the event [i.e. the Holocaust] ... "

Red Alert

Mark Riebling says Tom Ridge is not taking the latest Al Qaeda threats against New York and Washington seriously enough.

What strategic purpose is served by naming New York and Washington as targets — and then attempting to attack them? The answer is probably twofold.

1. By saying what they are going to do — and then doing it — the terrorists will dramatically demonstrate that we're unable to stop them. The result will be an exercise of "pure power," akin to the Mafia's placing of a horse's head in the bed of the recalcitrant film producer in The Godfather. The demoralization within the U.S. will be extreme. The terrorists will thus hope to advance their near-term political objective: persuading us that our support for Israel, our attempts to defang Saddam, and our military presence in the Middle East are not worth all the toe-tags.

2. By establishing that they can do what they say they will do, where they say they will do it, the terrorists will position themselves up for a masterstroke of disinformation preceding a more spectacular future attack. For instance: If, after carrying out the threatened attacks on New York and Washington, the terrorists then warn of similar attacks on Los Angeles and Chicago, public pressure for visible, intensive countermeasures in those locations will be politically irresistible. The diversion of resources and attention to those areas — encouraged also by false reporting through secret intelligence channels — would then be exploited by the terrorists, in attacks to follow soon after the diversionary threats. Since the success of these later attacks would presumably be the objective of the disinformation, a high strategic value — a capability and intention to inflict massive casualties — should be assumed.

Asia Times Salutes LGF

Someone from the Asia Times left a very nice comment last night, thanking us for helping debunk the Al Qaeda hoax they printed:

Little Green Footballs and its bloggers can be proud. Amid all the hysteria generated by our blunder, they remained calm, shrewd and witty. We are flattered that such a classy readership is aware of us. - Asia Times Online

tuesday, november 19, 2002

Iraq’s Crazy Uncle

Rufus Jones reviews a new documentary by a French filmmaker who gained unprecedented access to Saddam Hussein’s inner circles.

But there is perhaps no portrait of Saddam Hussein that has more effectively explored the non compos mentis angle than "Uncle Saddam," a documentary by French filmmaker Joel Soler, which Cinemax will air on November 26 at 7:00 p.m. Soler ingratiated himself to Saddam's inner circle (including his personal filmmaker, his architect, and his interior decorator) by convincing them he intended to document the country's suffering under U.N. sanctions. The anti-American pose served as a credible cover since Soler is, after all, French.

What everyone wants to know, of course, is just how crazy is Saddam?

Saddam is a fanatic about cleanliness, which he regards as no laughing matter, even if we do, since, we are told, "Saddam likes to be greeted with a kiss near the armpit"(indeed, we see footage of a steady stream of black-bereted minions with copycat mustaches puckering up to plant one between Saddam's armpit and areola). The Butcher of Baghdad, it turns out, has all sorts of ideas about personal hygiene. Sitting behind a desk in a wide-brimmed hat and flashy suit that make him look like a Newark pimp, he holds forth: "It's not appropriate for someone to attend a gathering or to be with his children with his body odor trailing behind emitting a sweet or stinky smell mixed with perspiration. It's preferable to bathe twice a day, but at least once a day. And when the male bathes once a day, the female should bathe twice a day, [the] female is more delicate, and the smell of a woman is more noticeable than the male."

Having established that females are pungent, Saddam adds that "If a woman can't afford to brush her teeth with toothpaste and a toothbrush, she should use her finger." With such statements, it's hard to decide which is more galling--the fact that Iraq's leader, or, as he prefers to be called "His Excellency, President Saddam Hussein, Servant of God, Believer, Leader of All Muslims," is giving brushing tips, or the fact that enough Iraqis can't afford toothbrushes that he would feel compelled to dispense such advice.

Saddam, it turns out, is a gold-plated weirdo of the Howard Hughesian stripe. His former trade minister tells us that he is scared to be contaminated by people (though he's shown no compunction about spreading his own germs--just ask the Kurds). His smallest cuts are dealt with immediately, and every week, doctors must determine the perfect temperature for Saddam's office. "There are several rules issued by doctors," says the minister. "When you meet with him, they tell you how to shake his hand, how many centimeters must be between you and him."

Besides decontamination, Saddam does have other hobbies: he enjoys joshing with his doubles, firing weapons into the air at mandatory-attendance rallies, dancing to traditional Arab music, smoking Cubans (cigars, not people), and going fishing with grenades. Risking life and limb, Soler periodically escaped his state-appointed minders (who he generously mentions in the documentary's credits: "Attempted to be directed by Abou Noor"), to film some of Saddam's palaces.

It begins to feel like an episode of MTV's "Cribs," except instead of the tacky "Scarface" posters typically favored by our nation's leading gangster rappers, Saddam's cribs come with all sorts of extra amenities: private casinos, gold-leaf thrones, escape bunkers, even underground runways. While Saddam does tend toward the ostentatious (after asking his people to donate their gold for the war effort against Iran, he later showed up in a solid-gold carriage), he's not above sharing his wealth. In 1998, we are informed, "When American planes began to bomb some of Saddam's palaces, Saddam invited the Iraqi people to sleep inside."

Outrage of the Day

A German tabloid says Winston Churchill was a war criminal.

Winston Churchill was effectively a war criminal who sanctioned the extermination of Germany's civilian population through indiscriminate bombing of towns and cities, an article in the country's biggest-circulation newspaper claimed yesterday.

In an unprecedented attack on Allied conduct during the Second World War, the tabloid Bild has called for recognition to be given to the suffering inflicted on the German population during the strategic air campaign of 1940-45.

The newspaper's campaign, provoked by a new German history of the bomber offensive, breaks six decades of virtual silence on the subject, and is being seen as the latest manifestation of a belief among Germans that they too were victims of the war - albeit a war started by their country.

(Hat tip: Jaroslav Flidr.)

Colin Wants More

Colin Powell wants more Muslims in the US.

WASHINGTON (AP) - Secretary of State Colin Powell said Monday he is trying to expand programs to bring educators, journalists and political and religious leaders from Islamic countries to the United States.

"We are committed to ensuring that our programs reach out to Muslims in all walks of life," Powell told a gathering of Muslim-Americans at an Iftaar, the end-of-the-day meal that breaks daylong fasts during the holy month of Ramadan.

Powell said the United States also is committed to enhancing understanding by building hope.

"From the mountains of Afghanistan to the valleys of Bosnia to the plains of Africa to the forests of Asia and around the world we are on the ground working with our Muslim partners to expand to the circle of peace, the circle of prosperity, the circle of freedom," he said.

Describing extremism and violence as America's greatest enemies, Powell said, "We must not listen to the siren song of the bigots, extremists who cloak themselves in false spirituality in an attempt to divide and to weaken us."

Unbelievable

We’re going way off topic here, but Michael Jackson’s tenuous hold on sanity has finally snapped completely, and he should be in custody before he hurts anyone else. In this picture he is dangling an infant over the balcony of his fourth-floor hotel room in Berlin, with one hand.

A Soldier of Islam

The Pakistani jihadi creep convicted and executed for the 1993 murders of two CIA agents in Virginia has been given a hero’s funeral in Pakistan.

QUETTA, Pakistan—Thousands of people packed a soccer stadium on Tuesday for the funeral of Aimal Kasi, a Pakistani man executed in Virginia last week for the 1993 murders of two CIA employees. Heavily armed police were on hand amid fears of an anti-American backlash.

As Kasi's body, draped in green cloth and sprinkled with flower petals, was brought into the stadium, an Islamic cleric began reciting verses from the Quran. About 20,000 people crowded the arena, and hundreds more were arriving by the minute.

Many pushed forward to catch a glimpse of Kasi's face. Black flags fluttered atop the stadium, and loudspeakers crackled with the cleric's sermon.

"Aimal Kasi was martyred by the imperialist America," said the cleric, Hussain Ahmed Sherodi. "Aimal Kasi's martyrdom has united Muslims against the United States."

Several placards were held aloft, one saying "Down with the U.S.A," and another reading "Shame, Shame, Bush!" Security was tight, but there was no immediate sign of violence and the crowd was somber during the funeral prayers.

After the prayers, thousands accompanied Kasi's body on the two-mile walk to the Kasi family's ancestral graveyard just outside of town.

Kasi was buried close to his father's grave at the old cemetery, his tearful family members looking on as the body was lowered into the ground. Afterward, the fresh grave was sprinkled with flower petals and water, in keeping with local tradition.

Meanwhile, lawmakers in the capital interrupted a parliamentary session to say a prayer for Kasi, regarded as a martyr and a hero by many here.

LGF Swag Question

Everyone seems to want Little Green Footballs T-shirts, and I do too. So it’s question time again for our readers.

I have a connection for silk-screening T-shirts; these would be good quality cotton shirts, Hanes or an equivalent brand. But since I’d have to commit to an order, and I don’t really want to warehouse these things, I’d like to get an idea of how many people would order shirts, and in which sizes. So if you have a few seconds to leave a comment and let me know if you’re interested, and how many you would order, that would be a great help.

The Saga of Blix the Wimp

In an article reeking of stale anti-American bias, the Guardian says that UN chief weapons inspector Hans Blix (known at LGF as “Blix the Wimp”) is accusing “US hawks” of conducting a smear campaign against him.

The United Nations chief weapons inspector, Hans Blix, yesterday accused hawks in Washington, who are bent on going to war with Iraq, of conducting a smear campaign against him. ...

Washington's alarm over Mr Blix intensified after a recent speech in which he said he favoured cooperation with the Iraqis rather than confrontation. His colleagues said Mr Blix was acutely aware of the animosity aroused by the last team of inspectors who were accused by Iraq of abrasive behaviour and of spying for the US.

The inspectors, who sought and destroyed Iraqi biological, chemical and nuclear-related weapons after the Gulf war, abandoned Baghdad in December 1998, claiming Iraqis were obstructing their work.

Mr Blix, 72, who came back from retirement to take over the job, has done much to change the culture of how inspectors work.

Interesting, isn’t it, that the Guardian sees fit to repeat the official Iraqi line that the previous inspection team was “abrasive” and contained “spies,” without even mentioning the outrageous harassment of the team by the Iraqis.

But don’t worry, because septuagenarian Blix the Wimp has done everything he can to neuter the inspectors and spare the delicate feelings of the Iraqis.

The whole article is full of this kind of stuff, but the real kicker is at the conclusion, where they actually take Iraq’s side in the recent exchange of fire in the no-fly zone:

The arrival of the UN team coincided with air attacks on Iraqi defensive positions. The Iraqis fired back, a move the US insists contravenes the UN resolution passed this month.

The self-loathing of the weenies at the Guardian has never been clearer—British planes were fired on by the Iraqi “defensive positions” too.

Inspection Scam

UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan has no problem with Iraq firing on US and British planes. This is a precursor of what’s going to happen when evidence of weapons is discovered in Iraq; Annan will obfuscate and deny and make light of the findings. Kofi Annan stood and watched and dithered as hundreds of thousands died in Rwanda, and now he wants to do the same thing as the ruthless thugs who rule Iraq frantically work to obtain the Arab bomb.

Retreats Into Fantasy

Here’s an excellent essay by David Pryce-Jones on the Arab/Islamic world’s retreats into fantasy, when confronted with the reality of their failed societies.

Returning home from a journey to Arabia in the latter part of the eighteenth century, the explorer and historian Carsten Niebuhr put in at Alexandria. Once ashore, he used an instrument for surveying the landscape. Some intrigued Egyptians asked to handle it. What they then saw through the lenses was incomprehensibly upside down. Niebuhr was thrown into prison for sorcery. Some decades later, the great Richard Burton, disguised as Haj Ibrahim, was on the pilgrimage to Mecca, a city forbidden to all except Muslims to this very day. In his baggage was a compass which he hardly dared use, living in fear that its discovery would lead to his murder. Stories of the kind encapsulate what was already by then the unequal relationship between the world of Islam and the West.

monday, november 18, 2002

Sleek as a Jaguar

My brother always convinces me that OS upgrades are going to be much less painful than they turn out to be in reality. I started upgrading my Mac to the latest version of OS X (Jaguar) this morning, and now, at last, 6 hours later I see the light at the end of the tunnel. Not to mention my Internet and email connections.

Someone needs to develop a small application that would do for OS X what Conflict Catcher did for OS 9: a “system merge” that lets you merge the stuff the Jaguar installer misses. If you occasionally log in as the “root” user, the installer misses almost all the root preferences. It also misses any sendmail, httpd.conf, or crontab changes, and doesn’t copy the web server folders or any custom installations of PHP. And the tricky part is that a lot of those settings and files are in directories that are invisible to the Finder, and you have to use the Unix Terminal to modify or move them—especially the Apache files, because if you open their folders from the Mac desktop (by using a system mod like Tinker Tool that shows invisible files), the Finder creates a desktop database file in that folder, and Apache gets very unhappy if it sees one of those files in the httpd directory.

Geeked out enough for you?

So I’ve been slowly piecing things back together by hand. And that’s where I’ve been all day, in geek heaven. Or hell. Depending on how you look at it.

The Tape is Authenticated

After comparing the latest Bin Laden audiotape with previous recordings, CIA and NSA experts are now convinced the tape is genuine.

Germany Sentences Palestinian

The Palestinian SOB who dressed his six-year old daughter as a suicide bomber for an anti-Israel demonstration in Berlin has been sentenced to five months’ probation by a German court.

The 33-year-old, identified only as Mohammed ell., was convicted by a district court of condoning criminal acts, and also was sentenced to do 300 hours' community work.

Justice officials in Berlin opened an investigation after photos published in German newspapers showed ell.s' youngest child, a six-year-old girl, perched on her father's shoulder with a cardboard mock-up of an explosives belt around her waist at a pro-Palestinian demonstration April 13. His other children, aged 10 and 12, wore similar belts.

Interior Minister Otto School, the German government's top law enforcement official, at the time called it an "outrageous" abuse of a child as an "advertisement for terrorist acts."

The accused, an asylum-seeker who has lived in Germany for two years, told the court his intention had not been to condone suicide attacks but to draw attention to the need for a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

"The misery in the occupied territories is too great," he said, adding he would never allow his children to become suicide bombers.

Gaza is Lousy with Terrorists

When the IDF raided the Gaza headquarters of the Palestinian Authority Preventative Security Forces, an organization formed to prevent terrorist activity, they discovered an explosives laboratory inside the building.

Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz said the army's discoveries in the Palestinian security headquarters "have again proven the strong link between the Palestinian Authority security services and Palestinian terrorist organizations, including Hamas and Islamic Jihad, whose members perpetrated last Friday's attack in Hebron," according to a statement released by the Defense Ministry.

"The Preventative Security apparatus in Gaza is a terrorist organization in every sense," Brigadier-General Yisrael Ziv, commander of the IDF's Gaza division, told Israel Radio.

Ziv said that the Palestinian force has, over the last two and a half years, "instigated, encouraged and provided support" for terror attacks and terrorist activities. Security officials said the Preventative Security's headquarters in Gaza has produced mortar shells, explosive charges, and grenade launchers against tanks, Maariv reported. These weapons were then distributed to Fatah, Hamas and Islamic Jihad terror cells.

Back in Business

Devoted followers of the religion of peace are training to kill Americans in Afghanistan again, according to Newsweek.

Jalal Shah, 30 (also a disguised name), is a Taliban bureaucrat who fled to Peshawar when the Americans took Kabul. In August he traveled with four other Afghan exiles to a largely deserted mountain village in a remote corner of eastern Afghanistan. There they were joined by five Arab recruits: three Saudis and two Yemenis. One carried an American passport, Shah recalls. The place was run by a leathery Qaeda veteran, a Saudi named Abu Yasser. He and the camp’s four other foreign instructors bunked with the 10 trainees in a crumbling two-story mud-walled house with no bathroom, little furniture, a few blankets and only rudimentary facilities for cooking and eating. The trainers seemed to expect trouble at any moment. They never took off the hand grenades that hung from their belts, and everyone was required to take turns on sentry duty at night.

The class spent two weeks learning to assemble car bombs, make time bombs and lay land mines. The subject of explosives had particular significance to Shah, who says he’s an old friend of convicted World Trade Center bomber Ramzi Yousef. Shah’s class also studied suicide bombing, especially how to pack explosives and strap them to their bodies. The camp’s director told the recruits he had trained a total of 26 Afghans and Arabs in three similar courses elsewhere during the preceding weeks. In his parting speech he told Shah’s group it was up to each individual to decide whether to become a suicide bomber. “We don’t want to push you,” he said. “It depends on the strength of your Islamic spirit.”

Now back in Pakistan, Shah says he’s prepared to go home and die. “I’m ready to sacrifice my life for Islam,” says Shah, a talkative man with a toothy grin and a close-cropped beard. He seems unconcerned about what will become of his wife and their three children—or the fourth child she’s expecting. If it’s a son, Shah plans to name him Osama. He says his four Afghan classmates have all returned to their home country on undisclosed “special missions,” and he expects to attend another camp soon for further training. Meanwhile he’s not wasting any time. Since returning from his summer session he says he has persuaded 15 Afghan volunteers to go for training.

(Hat tip: Carthaginian Peace.)

Iraq Charades

The charade begins, with Blix the Wimp already rushing to assure the Iraqis that he’ll be sensitive to their wishes, and make sure none of the inspectors get too aggressive.

David Kay was chief nuclear weapons inspector in the last go-round, and in a Washington Post article he looks back at that frustrating experience—a history of Iraqi evasion, bullying, and outright lying that the United Nations (and the “anti-war” crew) seems to have completely forgotten. He reminds us that the last round of inspections lasted 7 years; this one is supposed to be wrapped up in 60 days with half as many inspectors and a leader with a noticeable deficit in the cojone department. Let’s face it. These inspections are a joke. With More at Stake, Less Will Be Verified.

The cease-fire resolution of 1991, like the resolution just adopted, required Iraq to submit a complete list of the quantities and locations of its prohibited weapons and their production systems. But full disclosure was not in the cards. The Iraqi declaration submitted on April 18, 1991, acknowledged approximately 10,000 nerve-gas shells, 1,000 tons of nerve and mustard gas, 1,500 chemical weapon bombs and shells, and 52 Scud missiles with 30 chemical and 23 conventional high-explosive warheads, but denied having any biological or nuclear materials. Within three months, the U.N. inspectors found four times as many chemical weapons as Iraq had declared and a gigantic nuclear program that could have produced weapons in just two years. By October 1991, inspectors had found more than 100,000 chemical shells -- almost 10 times the amount in the declaration.

Critics of the current Bush administration's willingness to go to war should consider how little happened to Iraq a decade ago as a result of its lack of cooperation with UNSCOM. Economic sanctions were imposed, but had little effect and faint support. Hussein convinced the world that the sanctions were maintained only at the insistence of the United States and that they were hurting Iraqi children. Whether this was true or not became immaterial. Commercial pressures soon made smuggling both lucrative and effective, and the sanctions lost much of their impact. For coercive sanctions to be a credible alternative to military action, the international community must give inspectors greater support than that.

sunday, november 17, 2002

The Pakistani Connection

The NYT has interesting details about the latest “Bin Laden” audiotape, which was delivered (unsurprisingly) in the country that should be a member of the Axis of Evil, but isn’t: Pakistan.

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan, Nov. 14 — The audiotape that appears to be Osama bin Laden's latest message to the world was handed over by a man on the street here two days ago, the correspondent for Al Jazeera who received it said.

Ahmed Muhaffaq Zaidan, Al Jazeera's correspondent in Islamabad, said a man called him at 10 p.m. and asked to meet him at once, saying he had something important to give him. The man spoke English with a Pakistani accent. When they met, Mr. Zaidan said, the man had his face half-hidden with a scarf and left immediately without answering any questions.

"He said, `This is a bin Laden cassette,' " Mr. Zaidan said. "When I started to ask him questions, he said: `I am not answering any questions. I am going.' I rushed to the car and played the tape and recognized bin Laden's voice."

The handing over of the audio cassette in the middle of a public place here in the Pakistani capital was a potential source of embarrassment to Pakistan's president, Pervez Musharraf, who has said publicly that he thinks Mr. bin Laden is dead. It also raises questions as to whether the tape was made in Pakistan, and whether Mr. bin Laden himself is hiding in the country.

A Pakistani government official dismissed the idea that the presence of the tape in Islamabad meant that Mr. bin Laden was in Pakistan.

"It can originate from anywhere," said Brig. Javed Iqbal Cheema, director of the National Crisis Management Cell at the Ministry of Interior. "It does not mean anything that it was handed over in Pakistan."

(Hat tip: reader Bala Ambati, who thinks I’m way too soft on Musharraf.)

El Al Hijack Details

Here’s a detailed account of today’s El Al hijack attempt.

NY LGF Bash

Here’s a topic where our readers in New York can share stories about today’s get-together in Manhattan. It’s a shame that Anil and Rasheed couldn’t make it.

Al Qaeda Exposed

The mysterious Johnathan Galt has obtained rare Al Qaeda training videos from the Finsbury Park mosque in London, including one that I believe shows James Ujamaa, the Seattle man currently under arrest for terrorist connections, saying Osama bin Laden was framed. There is a lot of really creepy stuff here; with talk of killing and robbing kuffars, recruiting for jihad, etc.

UPDATE: and speaking of Al Qaeda training videos, LGF reader Elizabeth forwarded this scary item: new videos have been discovered in Afghanistan that show terrorists practicing an assault on a hotel.

One of the videos seen by The Sunday Telegraph shows heavily armed masked fighters scaling down from the roof of a large building on ropes and jumping through windows clutching grenades. Al-Qaida members playing the role of hostages scream -- like they are meant to represent women and children -- as they are herded together and hit with the butts of rifles while shots are fired into the air.

The cameraman can be heard laughing.

The "hostages" give their commands in English, shouting "Move!" "Stop!" "Go!", while the people playing the role of hostages scream, also in English, "Oh God!" and "Don't hurt me!"

Later, the hostages are moved onto the roof and executed. The hostage takers then pretend to throw their bodies to the ground.

"Anyone with a military background can see this is not just a general training exercise, but clearly planning for an actual operation with a specific location in mind," one military analyst said. "They know exactly what they are aiming for."

Abba Eban, 1915-2002

One of the great orators of the modern era, Abba Eban has died. This New York Times article looks back at his extraordinary career.

El Al Hijack Attempt

An Israeli Arab man armed with a knife attempted to hijack an El Al flight from Tel Aviv to Istanbul today, but was foiled by security guards.

Portrait of the Idiot as a Nude

A group of West Marin County women decided the best way to show “solidarity with the people of Iraq” was to strip off their clothes and lay in a baseball field, spelling the word “PEACE” with their corpulent white bodies: West Marin women strip for peace.

"Women from all ages and walks of life took off their clothes, not because they are exhibitionists but because they felt it was imperative to do so," the organizers added. "They wanted to unveil the truth about the horrors of war, to commune in their nudity with the vulnerability of Iraqi innocents, and to shock a seemingly indifferent Bush Administration into paying attention." The coordinators, who came up with the idea only a day earlier, said that the coming together of this group on short notice was a testament to the seriousness with which the women view the threat of war with Iraq. "Remembering that tens of thousands of civilians have already died in Iraq as a result of US bombing and sanctions, these women are not convinced by Bush Administration fear mongering that one more person should die," organizers said. They hope the president and news media take notice.

(LGF is not responsible for any psychic damage caused by viewing the photograph on the above page.)

UPDATE: reader PDM has obtained a photo of another fleshy statement, guaranteed to cause severe cognitive dissonance in Muslim supremacists.

Osama bin Dead?

Jeff Cooper points out this interesting interview with Mamoun Fandy, an Egyptian political scientist who has spoken with Osama bin Laden and is convinced that the voice on the audiotape aired recently by Al Jazeera is not his.

Note: the interview with Fandy is the third one on the page; NPR switched links for the Cain and Fandy interviews.

Peaceful Religion Watch

This week’s Peaceful Religion Watch (our summary of the insane hate speech that infests the Friday sermons of the Arab world) features two countries with intimate connections to Osama bin Laden, who are now supposed to be sorta-kinda helping the US—although you wouldn’t know it by the 100-proof vitriol spewing from these Muslim supremacist “spiritual leaders.”

From the Grand Mosque in Sanaa, Yemen:

"O God, support those supporting Islam, disappoint those disappointing Islam, and guide the steps of Muhammad's nation. O God, support the mujahidin in Palestine, Chechnya, and elsewhere and help them score victory over their enemies. O God, help them score a clear, quick victory. O God, destroy the aggressive Jews and the unjust Americans. O God, shake the ground under them, instill fear into their hearts, and freeze the blood in their veins."

On official Saudi Arabian TV, the freaky Shaykh exhibits the usual Saudi bloodlust, shrieking for God to destroy you know who. From the holy mosque in Mecca, the spiritual center of Islam:

"O God, protect Islam and Muslims and destroy the enemies of Islam, the tyrants, and the corrupt. O God, help Muslims close their ranks. O God, give wisdom to the Muslims' leaders. O God, support our leader and promote Islam through him. O God, help the mujahidin elevate your religion and your word. O God, support them in Palestine. O God, destroy the tyrant Jews, for they are within your power. O God, defeat these tyrant Jews."

No Golden Age

Several readers have emailed about this article at FrontPage, consisting of excerpts from a book by Dr. Serge Trifkovic titled The Sword of the Prophet: A Politically-Incorrect Guide to Islam: The Golden Age of Islam is a Myth.

Religion of Peace Says: Convert or Die

I’m lucky. I live near a mosque (the one Irv Rubin was allegedly planning to bomb) so I won’t have far to walk on Fridays, after we all convert to Islam.

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates (AP) - A statement attributed to al-Qaida threatened more attacks in New York and Washington unless America stops supporting Israel and converts to Islam, an Arab TV reporter who received the unsigned document said.

Yosri Fouda, correspondent for the satellite station Al-Jazeera, told The Associated Press on Saturday that he received the six-page document Wednesday. That was a day after the TV station broadcast an audiotape purportedly made by Osama bin Laden.

Fouda, who is known for good contacts within al-Qaida, would only say that the statement came from his sources with the group. But he insisted he was certain it came from the terrorist movement's leadership.

Fouda, speaking by telephone from London, said the statement called on Americans to stop supporting Israel and other governments that "oppress" Muslims or face more attacks. The statement also called on Americans to convert to Islam, he said.

saturday, november 16, 2002

Question Time

A question for our readers.

I’ve written a new application that creates a weekly summary of the posts at LGF, with a table of contents at the beginning followed by all the articles with their links in footnoted form, similar to what happens if you “email an article.”

I’m thinking of combining this with Paypal’s subscription system, so that interested folks can sign up for the weekly emails, agreeing to pay a certain amount for a certain length of time.

A mailing list, in other words.

The question is, what would you pay for this? For what length of time? Would you pay for this? What is a week’s worth of indexed, archived LGF posts worth to you? Anything? Am I just blowing smoke out of a nether orifice?

It takes time and effort (above and beyond what I’m already spending at LGF) to maintain a mailing list, which is why I’m asking. Opinions?

Cyanide Plot Foiled in UK

Three men (who just happen to be Muslims) from North Africa have been charged in a plot to release cyanide gas in the London Underground.

The men are north African muslims said to belong to a group linked to al Qaeda.

The alleged plot was foiled after the group was infiltrated by MI5 agents in a six month operation.

Six men were arrested. Three were charged.

The men are thought to be of either Tunisian or Moroccan background and belong to a group called the North African Front, said to have loose connections with Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda network.

(Via Drudge.)

MEMRI Videos

If you feel like visiting Bizarro World, check out MEMRI’s new page of videos from IQRAA TV.

IQRAA TV is an Arabic-language satellite TV station which describes itself as a channel dedicated to bringing "the teachings of Islam into the homes and hearts of Arabs world wide." It is owned by Arab Radio and Television (ART), which was formed in October 1993 as part of the Arab Media Corporation (AMC) group, which works with Arab Digital Distribution (ADD).

ADD is backed through its holding company, Arab Media Corporation (AMC), by the multi-million dollar Dallah Al-baraka Group and Saudi Prince Al-Waleed bin Talal. Dallah Al-Baraka Group was founded by renowned Saudi Arabian businessman Sheikh Saleh Kamel, who also established ART, a company in which Prince Al-Waleed bin Talal is also a major shareholder. ADD's CEO is John Tydeman.

ART is a privately owned company with administrative headquarters in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia; technical headquarters in Amman, Jordan; playout and uplink facilities in Avezanno, Italy; and production facilities throughout the Middle East, North Africa, Europe and North America.

The casual hatred nakedly displayed in these videos is truly breathtaking—and it’s all said with a smile. From the interview with professor Adel Sadeq, head of psychiatry at Ein Shams University in Cairo:

Host: Let us begin at the beginning and ask, what is the psychological structure of the martyr? Who is the martyr? Who is this 17-year-old girl, planning to marry in 2 or 3 months, a beauty queen, who straps on an explosive belt and turns herself into a human bomb? What is the psychological structure of the martyr?

Prof. 'Adel Sadeq: The psychological structure is that of a person who loves life. Praise Allah, he is seeking death! This is the thing that may appear peculiar to people who see the human soul as the most supreme thing. They are incapable of understanding this because their cultural structure has no concepts such as self-sacrifice and honor. These concepts do not exist in some cultures and thus they find themselves, in the face of these models (suicide bombers), in a state of denial, in a state of total denial they think that this is impossible, and therefore they begin to present idiotic and silly interpretations.

Interviewer: You mean that the martyr is a person who loves life!

Prof. 'Adel Sadeq: Of course. When he is martyred, he reaches the apex of happiness. He reaches the height of ecstasy, a level of (ecstasy) that you and I do not know. We feel happiness when we pray to Allah, or, for example, when we win a large sum of money or have a great success. Then you feel happiness, joy, as if you are flying. The height of ecstasy and happiness - and I am talking to you as a professional, a psychiatrist - comes the moment just like the producer told you: ten, nine, eight, seven, six, two, six, five, four, three, two, and then he presses the button to blow himself up. The most beautiful moment, for which he would have time speed up, is the moment he says "one - hop" - this man explodes, and he feels that he is flying, because he is completely convinced that he will not die, and this is the difference between us and the West. [The Westerner] thinks that he turns into a corpse that burns and flies through the air. Look what kind of culture they have... But, in fact, this is the act of transition to another and more beautiful world and he knows very well that within seconds he will see the light of his Creator. He will be at the closest possible point to Allah. On the strategic level, there must be a pan-Arab plan to reach our goal. The goal of all of us is to liberate Palestine from the Israeli aggressors. To use words that people do not like: we will throw Israel into the sea. This phrase, by the way, is the truth. Either they will throw us into the sea, or we will throw them into the sea. There is no compromise. Coexistence is all (nonsense)...

Interviewer: No, either us or them. Either us or them.

UPDATE: ART, the Saudi production company responsible for these appalling videos, also produced the Egyptian TV series based on The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

Flit Debunks Herold

Bruce Rolston is on a crusade (am I still allowed to use that word?) to make sure that professor Marc Herold’s transparently bogus Afghan civilian casualty estimates are thoroughly debunked.

Palestinian Child Abuse

Nine-year old Suheib Saade wants to be an Islamic Jihad warrior when he grows up, just like his brother.

His brother is the dead guy.

The Rats Are Scurrying

At the beginning of this month we wrote about a visit to Libya by Saddam Hussein’s cousin “Chemical Ali.” Today the Times Online reports that the purpose of the visit was to plan a safe haven for Saddam’s family—purchased with $3.5 billion that Saddam apparently found in the pocket of some old jeans.

Word of Saddam’s deal with the Libyan leader has emerged from diplomatic sources in Tripoli following a visit to the Libyan capital on September 8 by General Ali Hasan al-Majid, a cousin and trusted member of Saddam’s clan.

General al-Majid is known by the Kurds of northern Iraq as “Chemical Ali” because he was in charge of the Iraqi forces which launched a chemical weapons attack on the Kurdish town of Halabja in 1988. He was also initially the “Governor” of Kuwait after Iraq’s invasion of the Gulf state in August 1990, and is now one of the Baath Party regional command leaders. He is believed to have travelled to Tripoli to deliver a personal missive from Saddam to the Libyan leader, confirming the arrangements for his family.

The sources said that in return for the $3.5 billion deposited in Libyan bank accounts, Colonel Gaddafi has agreed to give sanctuary to members of Saddam’s family and to about a dozen senior officials of the Baghdad regime, with their families.

The sources said they believed the regime members would include Tariq Aziz, the Iraqi Deputy Prime Minister, Naji Sabri, the Foreign Minister, and Izzat Ibrahim al-Duri, deputy chairman of the Revolutionary Command Council. The other officials were believed to be less well known members of the ruling Baath Party’s regional command.

In a separate arrangement, said to have been agreed in October during a visit by senior Iraqi officials to Damascus, an overland escape route was devised. It would involve Saddam’s family members and regime leaders travelling from Tikrit, home of the Saddam clan, to the Syrian border via the Badiyat al-Sham desert which divides Syria from Iraq.

It is not clear whether the sanctuary deal includes Qusay Hussein, the Iraqi leader’s second — and favourite — son.

friday, november 15, 2002

Violation One

The first violation of the resolution has happened, less than 24 hours after Iraq’s “acceptance.”

Palestinians Celebrate Cold-Blooded Murder

The terrorist atrocity perpetrated by Islamic Jihad today in Hebron has now claimed 12 lives. It was deliberate cold-blooded murder; after the initial attack, the Palestinian swine waited for the ambulances and rescue personnel to arrive, and ambushed them.

Then they had a big party.

Senior Al Qaeda Freak Captured

Breaking: A senior Al Qaeda leader has been arrested and is in US hands.

Sources said the suspect was neither Usama bin Laden nor his number two man,  Ayman Al-Zawahiri, but he is one of the "top handful of Al Qaeda leaders."

"Someone who knows al Qaeda would know his name," one official said. "This is a big deal."

Imad Mughniyeh?

And Again

Islamic Jihad has admitted their guilt in an ambush against Jewish worshippers in Hebron that killed 11 people and injured more than 20.

Suicide Bomber Chic

James Lileks has a great piece today on the skewed reporting about a truly repulsive award-winning painting titled “Self Portrait of a Martyr.”

UPDATE: Here’s the artist’s web site.

It’s Not About Oil

In the National Post, an op-ed by Mark Proudman makes a strong case that it’s not about oil.

Those who believe that the United States is a rapacious imperial power might be surprised to learn that the U.S. has never deployed its forces in order to seize oil wells. That the United States does not use its overwhelming military power to grab control of an immense source of wealth is historically unique.

Had the United States been a real imperial power, it would have capitalized on the 1991 Gulf War victory to demand the cession of some Iraqi oil fields, as reparation for the costs and risks of war. But the idea was never even mooted. Were the United States a real imperial power, it would have demanded the same form of compensation from Gaddafi's Libya in recompense for that regime's air piracy -- and it would not have bothered with the long and unsatisfactory pseudo-legal process that eventually put one minor official in jail.

It is commonly asserted that the foreign policies of modern capitalist countries are driven by economic needs: This is what the more self-consciously "sophisticated" brand of scribbler means by that omnipresent epithet "imperialist." In fact, capitalist countries have, for most of the past century, found it almost impossible to use force in a directly imperialist way.

Secular Martyrdom in Iran

In Reason Online, Charles Paul Freund writes about the extraordinary courage of Iranian professor Hashem Aghajari: Secular Martyrdom in Iran.

Aghajari has the right to appeal his verdict, presumably allowing a deal to be worked out that could defuse the crisis. (Similar death sentences have been reduced on appeal.) But his lawyer now says that Aghajari doesn't want to appeal. According to the lawyer, Aghajari says that "those who have issued this verdict have to implement it if they think it is right or else the Judiciary has to handle it." He thus appears to be risking his life so as to force Iran's judicial establishment to confront its own barbarity. In the meantime, he is reportedly suffering in prison, where his right leg, amputated at the knee as a result of the Iran-Iraq war, has become infected. He cannot stand or walk, even to the prison bathrooms. Nevertheless, he appears to be prepared to sacrifice himself in the name of his liberal principles, an act of potential martyrdom that contrasts dramatically with the acts of the unspeakable but celebrated ghoul "martyrs" who detonate themselves to kill Jewish children in strollers.

(Hat tip: M. Simon.)

Religion of Peace, Iran Branch

Iranian students continue to protest Tehran University professor Hashem Aghajari’s death sentence for blasphemy.

But in a rather ominous development, a group of hard core Islamofreaks came out of Friday prayers today screaming for the death of Aghajari—and of Salman Rushdie.

"Iran's Salman Rushdie should be executed," the hard-liners chanted in a reference to the British author condemned to death by Iran's former leader, the late Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, for his book "The Satanic Verses."

"Aghajari should be hanged," the male worshipers shouted as they emerged from Friday prayers at Tehran University.

Asia Times Prints Retraction

The Asia Times has published the following retraction on the front page of their web site: The Big Hoax: We Fell For It.

Asia Times Online uploaded an article in this space entitled Apocalypse Now, or Alottanukes soon. The article has been withdrawn as it was based on the transcript of an interview that now appears to have been a hoax. We sincerely apologize to readers who were alarmed by the contents of the article. We thank those readers who pointed us to this page in antivirus.about.com, which, we would add, does not appear in aGoogle search for the name "Usuquf" or "Asuquf". We'd also like to point out that we added a caveat at the top of the article that "the identity of the man [al-Usuquf] has not been confirmed, nor has his membership within al-Qaeda".

The LGF entry about this story drew more than 200 comments in just a few hours.

Our Gordian Knot

This morning I received a lovely email of support from a gentleman in the Netherlands:

I been reading thru your website and its messages. You guys really make me proud well done!

But wait! All is not as it seems! In a hilarious stroke of wit, this person sent the email under the address adolphhitler@jdl.com! I wish I could be that funny!

No wonder the Netherlands is currently in second place.

Luckily it’s Friday, and that means I can clear my brain of the polluted ravings of this idiotarian with an excellent new column by Victor Davis Hanson: Our Gordian Knot.

One of the most recounted stories about Alexander the Great concerns the legendary knot of King Gordius of Phrygia. Despite the Phrygians' promise that anyone who could untie its labyrinth of coils would become their future king, none succeeded. The glob became a tourist attraction of sorts, as itinerant wise men sought in vain to demonstrate their acuity by unraveling the mess.

As Alexander the Great made his way east, he too was taken to Gordium. There the legendary conqueror was supposed to test his wits against the knot — and be properly embarrassed by the impossibility of the task. Instead, he promptly pulled out his sword and sliced the knot in two. The story became a popular morality tale illustrating how bold and audacious action can quickly solve a problem previously considered unsolvable under the given customs and timid protocols of the day.

thursday, november 14, 2002

Objectivity

A thought-provoking, poetic essay by Hillel Halkin makes the compelling argument that objectivity is morally overrated.

How often do we hear of someone who, struck by personal tragedy (the death, say, of a child), loses his or her religious faith - and yet if the death of innocent children could call religious faith into question, how could there be a drop of faith left in the world? Even Job, who by all accounts was a thinking man, only began to think deeply when he himself became the victim of circumstances. Before that he saw the suffering of all around him - was no doubt upset by it, because he was a thinking man - and went on believing whatever he believed.

It's a good thing we're made that way. We have to be to survive. If all suffering affected us equally, we would be psychologically demolished in an instant. If we mourned the deaths of those we don't know as we mourn the deaths of those we do, life would be nothing but mourning. This is why there are families and clans and tribes and communities and nations in the world. They represent circles of mourning and circles of caring, circle within circle.

Got Another One

Muhammad Naifeh, the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades commander believed to be the mastermind of the Kibbutz Metzer atrocity, has been arrested.

Early Thursday morning, naval commandos and paratroopers surrounded the house and called on Naifeh to surrender. Occupants of the house came outside, but Naifeh, fearing he would be shot, did not. He called his brother, Nimer, who contacted a Fatah official named Muhammad to ask for help.

Muhammad told The Jerusalem Post that Nimer Naifeh spoke to him at 6:15 a.m. and asked him to get international officials to make sure his brother would not be killed.

Muhammad said he contacted colleagues who work for UNESCO, then spoke with Lior Yavne, the spokesman for B'tselem, and asked for the human rights organization's assistance in contacting the army to receive assurances that Naifeh would not be killed.

"The army said that no harm would come to him if he left the house with his hands in the air wearing only his underpants," said Muhammad, who informed Nimer of the army's conditions, to which Naifeh agreed.

Al Qaeda Nuclear Threats

The publicity spotlight is on the new audio tape purportedly from Osama bin Laden.

But the Asia Times reports today on another recent Al Jazeera interview, with Mohammed al-Usuquf (allegedly al-Qaeda's number three man), that is so frightening I debated with myself whether I should post it. I sincerely hope and pray that this interview is bogus, and that what it reveals is a pipe dream or a hoax. But it’s so chillingly plausible that reading it literally raised the hairs on my neck.

Al-Qaeda, according to him, has 5,000 first rank operatives and around 20,000 all over the world. Of all the prisoners in the US, only "20 or 30" are al-Qaeda, and all of them "second-rank". Confirming Asia Times Online information, he swears that there are no first-rank prisoners in Guantanamo in Cuba. Al-Usuquf says, "We have more than 500 first-rank and 800 second-rank [operatives] inside the US." "First rank" are considered ones that have lived in the US for more than 10 years, most of them married with children. "They have an idea about the plans, and they are just waiting for a call." "Second-rank" operatives arrived in the past five years and "have no idea about the plans". They are all willing to die.

Al-Usuquf insists that September 11 "was just the beginning. It was a way to call the world's attention to what's going to happen." He then details a plan to destroy the US by "attacking the heart of what they consider the most important thing in the world: money".

"The American economy is an economy of false appearances," says al-Usuquf. "There's no real economic weight. American GNP is something around $10 trillion, but only 1 percent comes from agriculture, and only 24 percent from industry. So 75 percent of its GNP comes from services, and most of it is financial speculation. For someone who understands economics, and apparently America's Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill does not, or cannot, the US as a whole behaves like an immense dot.com, and dollars are its stocks. The value of stocks from a given company is directly proportional to its profitability. When a company only provides services, but does not produce goods, the value of its stocks depends on its credibility. What I'm saying is if US credibility is affected, its stocks - the US dollar - will fall at tremendous speed, and the whole American economy will collapse."

Al-Usuquf is absolutely positive, "because, in a smaller scale, this is exactly what big financial conglomerates do with Third World countries to collect profits in one month that no Swiss bank would guarantee in four to five years". Al-Usuquf says that al-Qaeda could do the same by "provoking a deficit of $50 to 70 trillion, the equivalent to five to seven years of the GNP of the US". How? By "destroying America's seven largest cities and some other measures". The means? "Atomic bombs." Al-Usuquf's most startling revelation is that the bombs "won't be launched, they are already there". "Seven nuclear heads have already been positioned on American soil, before September 11, and they are ready to be detonated. Before September 11, American security was a fiasco, and even later, if we needed, we could position the bombs there. They arrived through seaports, as normal cargo. A nuclear head is not bigger than a fridge, so it can easily be camouflaged as one. Thousands of containers arrive at a seaport every day, and even with very efficient security, it's impossible to check and examine each one of them."

Al-Usuquf says that the bombs were bought on the black market: five from the former USSR and two from Pakistan. The five Russian heads "are from T-3 missiles, also known as RD-107, and their power is around 100 kilotons each, that is five times the Hiroshima bomb. The Pakistani ones are less powerful, something around 10 kilotons each."

Each of the Russian bombs would have cost around $200 million. Al-Qaeda was able to raise the money "because we have many sponsors. Many countries sponsor us, and also some very rich people." And not all of these are Arab countries. "Some European countries as well are also interested in the fall of the US." As to the "rich people", they are "people who are also tired of seeing the US bleeding the rest of the world."

And Iraq's Saddam Hussein, says Al-Usuquf, is not one of these people, "but just a collaborator, represented by Abdul Tawab Hawaish, his vice prime minister and responsible for Iraq's arms program".

Al-Usuquf says that the bombs cannot be detected by US authorities. "Even if they are old, they were modernized and are very well hidden. Even if they were located, they have autodetonation mechanisms in case something or someone gets close. Even an electromagnetic pulse is not capable of deactivating them." The bombs allegedly cannot be detected because "they are enveloped in thick layers of lead". They could be detonated "by various methods - cellphone call, radio frequency, seismic shock or by their regressive clock".

Al-Usuquf details the whole plan. "First, one head would be detonated, which would cause the deaths of 800,000 to 1 million people and a chaos never seen before. During this chaos, two or three planes, which are now disassembled inside barns near empty roads in the US countryside, would take off in suicide missions to pulverize another two or three big American cities with chemicals. Once the disease was identified, all seaports and airports would be quarantined. Land borders would also be closed. No plane, boat or car would enter or leave the US. This would be total chaos." The first target would be the city "that would offer the best conditions, for example bright sky and winds of eight or more miles an hour blowing towards the center of the country, so radioactive dust can contaminate the largest possible area".

IMPORTANT UPDATE: Bzzzt! According to About.com, this story is a hoax. Thanks to reader Kalle for the heads-up.

Nought in Our Brain

There was nothing in the local Los Angeles papers about it, but at the recent “Not In Our Name” rally in Westwood a pro-Israel group encountered the anti-Jewish hatred that lurks just beneath the surface of so many of these so-called “peace” demonstrations: From Peace to Hate.

It was a very, very hot day. Our group couldn’t drink enough water and Gatorade. We stood and held American and Israeli flags and our pro-Israel banners. People began gathering at the crosswalk signal in order to get to the Federal Building. When they saw us they started cursing. Without first saying hello, or anything, a young Latino man told us to "f--- off."

He began yelling at one of our older Russian Jewish supporters, Isaac, "You are Zionist Nazi pigs. You are Nazis!" It was surreal. People on the corner were all yelling at us in such a fevered pitch I couldn’t hear myself talk.

I stepped between the Hispanic man and Isaac and said — or rather, yelled — "That’s enough. It’s enough already."

A woman in the crowd told me to mind my own business and that it wasn’t enough.

The “Protocols” Surface

The Palestinian Media Watch mailing list has a lot of interesting stuff about the Egyptian TV series Knight Without a Horse, based on the infamous anti-Semitic forgery The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. After the first six chapters aired, Arab viewers were getting impatient for the anti-Israel themes:

At midnight, patrons of one of the popular cafes in Egypt’s capitol awaited the broadcast of the disputed TV series Knight without a Horse. Within minutes the clientele, who filled the cafe to the limit, turned their attention from the TV series and concentrated on sipping the local black tea and inhaling deeply from the nargila... Aatef, a 35 year-old man complained: “I thought I would see [lead actor] Muhammad Subhi fighting Jews, not some story from 100 years ago!” —Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, November 12, 2002

Well, your wait is over, Aatef, because today’s episode serves up a heaping helping of Jew-hate and conspiracy lunacy.

Three old Jews with long gray beards and large black Kippot [skull caps] are sitting in a room filled with religious symbols, numerous burning candles, including two Menorahs [7 branched candelabras - reminiscent of the Menorah of the Temple.] They are shown whispering, in conspiring manner, about “the book” the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. The Jews are expressing their fear that “the book” may reach Egypt from Russia where there are numerous copies, and will lead to its being publicized in Egypt. Their immediate problem is that one copy of “the book” is about to reach Egypt - with a woman named Margaret - and they are conspiring to prevent it from reaching the general public. Various options are discussed, including threatening Margaret. Following is the dialogue among the Jews:

The scene:
Elderly Jews with skullcaps sitting around a table, religious symbols, Menorahs above them and around the room.

Ovad: “The Others are Hell. Our problem is the Goyim, those who are not Jews. The problem right now is Margaret. We must be sure that the book is in her possession, Yitzhak.”
Yitzhak: “My information confirms that Dr. Edward, her husband, smuggled it out of Russia and intends to bring it into Egypt.”
Binyamin: “This is a catastrophe.”
Ovad: “Our group in Russia confirmed that all of the copies of the book ‘The Protocols of Elders of Zion’ have been taken from the market.”
Yitzhak: “There is another edition of the book , Binyamin, from 1905, last year. In two days all the copies disappeared from the market. It is a false version.”
Ovad: “What about them? What can we do about that one book?”
Yitzhak? “The British know what the contents of the book are, but if the Egyptians find out there will be more trouble than there was in Russia. It can publicly expose our plans.”
Binyamin: “Our group can spread rumors throughout Egypt that the book is a forgery.”
Yitzhak: “Our problem is that someone will read the book and fit the contents to what we are trying to accomplish, and will believe in [its truth] thoroughly.”
Ovad: “What shall we do?”
Yitzhak: “Go to Margaret, exploit her interests to our benefit. Maybe she will suffice with having read [the book] and you can take it from her.If she denies or refuses, she will be exposing herself to big trouble that is beyond her capacity.”

Isn’t it nice that the US State Department has accepted Egypt’s explanation that there’s nothing anti-Semitic about this show?

Hospital Threat

AP reports that the Houston branch of the FBI is warning of possible terrorist threats against US hospitals.

HOUSTON (AP) - Hospitals in Houston, San Francisco, Chicago and Washington have been alerted they may be targets of a terrorist threat, the Houston FBI says.

FBI agent Bob Doguim said Wednesday that the agency received the uncorroborated information from overseas intelligence sources. He said the threat to hospitals in the four cities was not specific, though it mentioned a time between December and April — and the possibility of anthrax or explosives.

The Chicago FBI said such an attack "would take place in reaction to the continued arrest of a Pakistani national by Pakistani authorities," and could come leading up to the holiday season.

Europeans of the Year

Here’s your chance to vote for the Europeans of the Year. Hey! How did Pym Fortuyn’s name get in there? (Hat tip: M. Simon.)

Concordia to Block Mideast Talk

After the disgraceful riot by Arab students that forced the cancellation of a speech by Binyamin Netanyahu, Concordia University in Montreal enacted a moratorium against public discussion of events related to the Israel-Palestinian conflict.

The Concordia Student Union, which has denied any wrongdoing in the riot (even though 12 students are facing charges for the violence), defied the moratorium and invited several virulently anti-Israel speakers to a discussion on “Peace and Justice in the Middle East,” including Canadian MP Svend Robinson (who has accused Israel of torture and murder), and Judy Rebick, publisher of the far left (which has become a synonym for “anti-Israel”) web site www.rabble.ca.

Now Concordia University is threatening legal action to block the discussion.

wednesday, november 13, 2002

What the Hell is Wrong With These People?

I don’t even know what to think about this: The laughing Bali bomber tells of his delight.

The chief suspect in the Bali bombing joked and laughed with Indonesia's police chief last night during a bizarre public interrogation in which he told of his "delight" at the carnage caused by his crime.

Amrozi, the 40-year-old mechanic from Java detained over the bombing earlier this month, spoke of his role in the attack in a taped interview at Denpasar police headquarters.

During the 50-minute interview with police chief General Da'i Bachtiar, both men frequently smiled and laughed.

Most of the conversation was inaudible to dozens of journalists and photographers who watched from behind glass, but at one moment Amrozi pointed to Western journalists and said in Indonesian: "Those are the sorts of people that I wanted to kill," prompting laughter in the room full of police.

(Hat tip: Meryl.)

Kuwaiti Sought By FBI

The FBI says to be on the lookout for Amer El-Maati, a Kuwaiti-born man sought for possible terrorist threats against the United States. Here’s the official FBI Alert. (Hat tip: Spoons.)

UPDATE: Please do not get this photograph confused with the one in the previous entry. Thank you.

Arafish!

Shut up!

You must be accurately when you are speaking to General Arafish!

Separated at Birth?

Iran on the Brink

For the fourth straight day, thousands of Iranian students have taken to the streets to protest the death sentence given to history professor Hashem Aghajari: Prof's death sentence outrages many.

The students' message yesterday was unusually bold: "This is our last warning to you," 5,000 students chanted in unison at Tehran University. "Iranian students are ready for an uprising."

They clapped their hands and shouted "Death to dictatorship," "Long live freedom of thought" and "Free political prisoners."

Surprisingly, the crowd -- which included men and women, professors and clerics -- called for President Mohammad Khatami to resign and for his reformist-dominated parliament to dissolve if it is incapable of defending the "people's will." Khatami has been seen as a force for change in opposition to the real power in Iran -- the mullahs in the Guardian Council and the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

"The reality is these officials deem themselves as prophets on Earth," a male student screamed into a microphone. "The biggest blow to the Islamic establishment has been from some of these clergies themselves."

The crowd went into a frenzy of claps and chants.

"They have tied our feet, they have broken our hands and cut our tongues," said another student speaker. "Until when shall we remain silent? Until when shall we close our eyes? We will not tolerate oppression anymore."

The crowd replied by shouting, "Freedom, freedom" and "Death to oppression."

(Hat tip: M. Simon.)

Referrer Spamming

Last week, I read about an incredibly obnoxious new advertising technique. Today we’re being hit by it.

In a hellish cubicle somewhere, an advertising droid with the soul of a dung beetle and the IQ of a blue soap dish figured out that some websites have a visible list of referrers. LGF’s is over there in the left sidebar; it lets you see where the most recent visitors to the site came from. The script I wrote to do this has actually been used by lots of webloggers, and I shudder to think I may have been partially responsible for inspiring the slime mold masquerading as a human being who came up with this idea.

In one of the most morally bankrupt, self-defeating, flat-out pain-in-the-ass annoying ploys I’ve yet encountered, they run software that deliberately “spams” these referrer pages with multiple hits from the site they want people to visit. Unsurprisingly, the sites they’re promoting are pr0n sites, the kind that go into a loop of respawning windows in a brain-dead attempt to prevent you from leaving.

I’m blocking the common ones as soon as I identify them, but BE CAREFUL when clicking on a link in our referrers page. If this gets worse, I’ll probably remove the page.

Bastards.

The Glitter of Contempt

Martin Walker recounts an extraordinary conversation with a senior US State Department official: The American view of Europe.

WASHINGTON, Nov. 13 (UPI) -- "You want to know what I really think of the Europeans?" asked the senior State Department official. "I think they have been wrong on just about every major international issue for the past 20 years."

"They told us they could fix the Bosnian mess all on their own. Wrong."

"They told us the Russians would never accept NATO enlargement. Wrong."

"They told us that the Russians would never accept National Missile Defense. Wrong."

"They told us that if we withdrew from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty of 1972 the whole structure of international arms control agreements would come crashing down. Wrong."

"They told us that the Kyoto Protocol was a good and worthwhile treaty, more than just cosmetics. Wrong."

"They told us that the European Union's new common security and defense policy would improve the military abilities of the NATO allies in Europe. Wrong."

"These were also the people who were wrong about Ronald Reagan and the Evil Empire, the same 'friends' who helped vote us off the United Nations Human Rights Commission. These are the people who whine about our Farm Bill when they are the world's prime protectionists. They are not just repeatedly wrong; they are also a bunch of hypocrites. So why should we pay attention to a single thing they say?"

The official, a career diplomat who speaks fluent French and likes to vacation in Italy, sat back and took an appreciative sip from his glass of good red wine from Bordeaux.

"One more thing," he added. "Whenever I use the word Europeans, I don't mean the Brits."

It was perhaps the most interesting and informative off-the-record lunch this reporter had attended in some three decades in the news business. The speaker was not a political appointee with a cursory knowledge of international affairs, but a professional and highly experienced Foreign Service officer with a wide range of friends and contacts across Europe.

He is a cultivated and courteous man, but he was angry, in that dangerous way quiet men can be. And the unveiled contempt in his voice and the curl of his lip when he drawled out the word "Europeans" said as much for the depth of his feelings as his bitter rhetoric.

The New Tape

I guess I should start a topic for the latest “bin Laden” tape, but as you can probably tell from the scare quotes I’m still very skeptical about its authenticity: Bush Takes 'bin Laden' Tape Seriously.

Iraq Allows Wimp to Inspect

Surprise. Iraq has accepted the UN resolution, and an advance team of inspectors led by chief wimp Hans Blix will arrive in Iraq on Monday.

Opposition to Hate

Another great column from Dr. Bala Ambati in the Duke University Chronicle, calling for the Muslim community to take out their garbage: Opposition to hate should cut both ways.

Harvard Does the Right Thing

I missed this piece by Tom Gross yesterday, on Harvard’s disgraceful invitation of anti-Semitic “poet” Tom Paulin, who advocates the murder of Jews in the disputed territories: Welcome Voice? Gross’s article got results; yesterday’s Best of the Web reported that Harvard has “uninvited” Paulin. But their announcement of the cancellation sidesteps responsibility, regretting the “widespread consternation,” not the invitation itself.

By mutual consent of the poet and the English Department, the Morris Gray poetry reading by Tom Paulin, originally scheduled for Thursday, November 14th, will not take place. The English Department sincerely regret [sic] the widespread consternation that has arisen as a result of this invitation, which had been originally decided on last winter solely on the basis of Mr. Paulin's lifetime accomplishments as a poet.

Enemy Sightings

Here’s a good piece by Tom Nichols on the inherent stupidity of Al Qaeda: Enemy Sightings.

Why are our opponents so politically ungainly, so unable to comprehend the consequences of their actions? There are several possibilities, chief among them that they have been so insulated from the West for so long that they have no idea what sorts of states and cultures they're attacking, or of how relations among those states even work. It's also possible that they have imbibed their own poisonous ideology for so long that they cannot imagine that it is failing them now, preferring to see — as Saddam Hussein apparently does as well — a West characterized more by bickering and weakness than by strength and resolve. (The Chinese made this mistake when watching the UN allies disagreeing at times over the Korean War, much to their regret.)

But there's one more possible explanation: They don't care. They may not really care how far along they progress toward their alleged "goals," and in the meantime are more entranced by the images and sounds of human suffering than by how that suffering does or does not further their agenda. This would not be the first time this has happened: Hitler's irrational need, for example, to inflict as much monstrous punishment as possible on the Soviet Union helped to seal his doom, as he ignored the more sound strategic advice of his commanders while he continued to pursue his vendetta.

Child Abuse in Berkeley

As Palestinians and Gulf Arabs teach their children to hate and kill, in Berkeley the parents are teaching their children to be good targets, and cynically using them to promote the loony left agenda: Pre-schoolers protest possible war in Iraq.

Two hundred students from Berkeley schools met local dignitaries, including Mayor Shirley Dean, city council members and a representative for Congresswoman Barbara Lee, D-Berkeley. Surrounding a ‘peace bell’ fashioned out of melted guns taken off of East Bay streets, children took to the microphone saying, “I don’t want people to die,” and, “we can’t keep killing each other. Then we will all die and suffer.”

Though most students at the rally could not even name Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, many seemed certain the pending U.S. led war in Iraq is about oil.

Celia, age 6, who could not spell her hyphenated last name, told the crowd President Bush “wants to make war because he wants oil.”

“What is so important about cars anyway,” she asked.

Later, when asked if she could name the president of Iraq, Celia, stumped, turned to a friend and asked, “Is it a boy or a girl?” Her friend, equally puzzled, responded, “I think it’s a boy.”

IDF in Nablus

The IDF has launched a large operation into the home of An-Najah University (known unaffectionately at LGF as Suicide Bomber U), Nablus—where Palestinians partied in the streets on September 11, 2001.

NABLUS, West Bank (Reuters) - Dozens of Israeli tanks backed by helicopter gunships swept into the West Bank city of Nablus Wednesday in a stepped-up military response to a Palestinian attack that killed five Israelis on a kibbutz.

Witnesses said Israeli forces entered the Palestinian-ruled city from four directions under cover of darkness, with tank-mounted machineguns firing in the air as they advanced. There were no immediate reports of casualties.

The large-scale incursion, which could further complicate a new U.S. peace mission to the region, was launched just 24 hours after Israel troops and armor raided the town of Tulkarm and an adjacent refugee camp.

How many times have we seen Reuters and AP and the New York Times and the Washington Post mindlessly parrot this line? “Israeli actions could further complicate the peace process.” Why does this phrase never appear in stories about Palestinian war crimes and atrocities? Why do we never hear international leaders calling for Palestinians to “show restraint” and not respond to Israeli actions?

And after predicting “further complications” hundreds (if not thousands) of times since the beginning of the stupidfada, doesn’t there come a point where things just can’t get any more complicated?

To the little boy in this photo, there’s nothing complicated about it at all.

UPDATE: As I look at this photo, I’m getting more outraged by the second. These loser parents are letting their child stand in a window waving a toy gun, as Israeli soldiers secure the area! What in the hell is wrong with these people?

The Life of a Liberal Muslim

UCLA law professor Khaled Abou El Fadl has been speaking out against the Wahhabi extremism that is poisoning Islam around the world—and as a result, his life has been threatened and he has been ostracized by the Muslim community in the US. An excellent piece in the New Republic makes it clear just how difficult it can be for liberal Muslims to avoid being dragged into the Saudi cesspool of hate: Moral Hazard.

...the post-September 11 backlash was much greater. The criticism that followed his Los Angeles Times op-ed was not limited to anonymous threats; it came from good friends, too. This past summer, he was banned from The Minaret magazine, a publication to which he had contributed a monthly column for nearly 20 years. "Good luck with your career that is based on self-promotion and self-aggrandizement," the magazine's editor wrote in an e-mail. The Los Angeles-based Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC) posted condemnations of Abou El Fadl on the American Muslims Intent on Learning and Activism (AMILA) Internet site. And, several days after he published another contentious op-ed this summer, a lawyer with ties to MPAC began representing Abou El Fadl's ex-wife of ten years in a custody battle. "My son has been living with me for the past ten years. Suddenly, their lawyer is representing her in her lawsuit filed against me," he says. "They've made it personal." In an e-mail to Abou El Fadl, MPAC denied all involvement in the custody suit.

Last month, Abou El Fadl had been scheduled to lecture at the University of Kuwait on the subject of Islam and democracy. He'd been looking forward to the talk, a rare opportunity to address Islamic intellectuals in the Middle East. But, a week before the lecture, he caught wind of a disturbing rumor. A dissident within the Saudi government told a friend of his that the Saudis planned to pick him up and make him disappear. "The Kuwaitis would say, `We don't know what happened,'" he explains. "Everyone would be interested for a while; then, it would be forgotten like everyone else." Abou El Fadl canceled the trip.

(Hat tip: reader Jamie Irons. Other LGF entries about Khaled Abou El Fadl are here, here, and here.)

tuesday, november 12, 2002

Unforgiven

A powerful essay by Steven Zak: Some Things Must Never Be Forgiven.

Peaceful Religion Watch

This week our Peaceful Religion Watch consists of only one country: Iraq. It’s no surprise that the imams in Baghdad are screaming jihad right now, but the sheer over-the-top insanity of this stuff makes it noteworthy. From Abd-al-Qadir al-Jaylani mosque in Baghdad:

The imam alludes to Islamic jihad in early Islam and says Muslims are in dire need of this virtue, especially in this critical hour through which the Islamic nation is challenged "by Jews and crusaders, Americans and British," he says. "They think," he adds, "that they can intimidate us with their bombs, missiles, and sophisticated technology." But, we have the power of the Almighty God on our side, he says.

The imam then lets off an emotional tirade: "Who are you, O scum of earth? Who are you, O sons of monkeys and pigs, to threaten Muhammad? God is his Lord." He goes on: "Who are you Bush, you tiny midget, to threaten Muhammad and the sons of Muhammad? By God, we defy you with our words before our weapons. Who are you to threaten our sentiments and sanctities? May you be damned."

In an appeal to the Islamic nation, the imam says: "We will fight them with all weapons. Jihad, jihad, jihad O nation of the Koran, O nation of Muhammad, O Muslims, come to jihad for the sake of God and in defense of the sanctity of Muhammad. Whoever does not defend Muhammad and the Koran will never see paradise." He asks: "Why the slumber and why the poor statements that do not rise to the level of responsibility? After the occupation of Jerusalem, the presence of the infidels in the Arabian Peninsula, and the threats by infidels to the Arabs, Muslims, the holy places, and Iraq in particular, jihad has become a duty for every Muslim. Whoever lags behind will be a great loser."

The imam devotes the second sermon to a prayer to God to support Islam and Muslims and to inflict His might on the infidels. He prays: "O God, shake the land under their feet, destroy their fleets and equipment, disperse their troops, and instill fear and grief in their hearts." He also prays: "O God, the sedition is asleep. Accursed is the one who wakes it up. But, they are waking it up. We do not want to meet the enemy. But, if they came we would be steadfast. O God, make us steadfast." He continues: "We depend on God, O Bush; we depend on God, O Ariel Sharon. We depend on God, O British. We depend on God, O enemies of God."

The Murderous Sirhan Clan

DEBKAfile is reporting that the Palestinian terrorist who murdered five people in an Israeli kibbutz last weekend is named Sirhan Sirhan.

An operative of Arafat’s Fatah, he belongs to the same Sirhan family and carries the same name as the man who murdered Robert Kennedy on June 5, 1968.

Military sources: His dispatcher Naifa has close ties with European Union Representatives.

Say Goodbye to Moreover

Well, the time has come to say “Sayonara!” to our news feeds from Moreover. They recently changed their terms of use, and free XML feeds are now available only to “accredited charitable organizations.” Which isn’t us, as a polite email from Moreover pointed out this morning. Too bad. Another free internet service gone.

Fortune Sponsors Arab Anti-Semitism

At a high-profile meeting in New York co-sponsored by Fortune Magazine and the Saudi-backed Arab Thought Foundation, Arab News editor Khaled Al-Maeena defended his newspaper’s description of the pro-Israel lobby as “subhuman.”

Speakers at the symposium included America’s ambassador to Saudi Arabia, Robert Jordan; a former Republican nominee for vice president, Jack Kemp, and prominent Arab business leaders. The event was opened by Geoff Colvin, Fortune magazine’s editorial director, and by Prince Bandar bin Khalid Al Faisal, the son of Prince Khalid Al-Faisal, the governor of Saudi Arabia’s Asir region.

The editor of the Saudi-based Arab News, a newspaper that has published a cartoon of President Bush morphing into Hitler and also published disparaging remarks about Jews, Khaled Al-Maeena, was a speaker. He defended his newspaper’s publishing of a recent article that referred to the “subhuman Zionist lobby.”

“The Zionist lobby is a lobby that is working against the interest of peace in the Middle East. It is working against the interests of Israel and against the interests of Palestinians,” Mr. Al-Maeena told The New York Sun. “The Zionist lobby is negating all the good characteristics of the Israeli people.”

When the Sun asked if that makes them “subhuman,” he said: “as a human being, your interests should be peace and prosperity in Israel and in all the lands ... I believe there should be peace in the Middle East, but to go on and create problems and trouble is really upsetting me ... Israel was made so that the Jews would live in peace. Jews everywhere around the world are living in peace except in Israel.”

(Hat tip: reader davesax.)

Religion of Hate

The Discover Islam Centre in Bahrain is sponsoring a four-day visit by a certain well-known former state senator from Louisiana: David Duke due in Bahrain for lecture.

David Duke, who represented Louisiana in the U.S. Senate from 1989 to 1991 [this is false; Duke was a state senator, not a US senator —ed.] and ran unsuccessfully for governor the same year, "is a well-known critic of the Zionist lobby in the U.S. and its threat to the U.S. national security," said Mohammed Zuhair, manager of Discover Islam Centre.

The centre, an educational institute serving mostly the non-Muslim community in Bahrain, is sponsoring Duke's four-day visit.

"During his stay, he will deliver two lectures, 'Global Struggle against Zionism' and "Israeli Involvement in September 11 (attacks)'. Both will be open to the public and followed by a question and answer session," Zuhair said. ...

He said Duke was not being invited because of his perceived anti-Jewish stand but because he has recently authored a book that 'exposes the Zionist agenda for world domination."

Looks like David Duke has finally found his audience—in the Arab world.

FBI Not Ready

The Washington Post reports that government officials are worried that the FBI is dangerously unprepared to detect and prevent terrorist attacks in the US.

"They still don't know where the terrorists are, how many are here, what their intentions are, what kind of support network they have," said Sen. Bob Graham (D-Fla.), chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, who has been regularly briefed on FBI plans and the bureau's knowledge of suspected U.S.-based terrorists. "They can't give me an answer because they don't have one. . . . They have so little to show for their work and we have so little time to take action now.

"No evidence I've seen shows they have a sense of urgency or a thoughtful plan or very much information to predicate a plan on," Graham added. "There will be hell to pay if we don't use the next 60 days [before a war with Iraq might begin] to do everything in our power to dismantle their capability."

Graham is not alone in his concerns. The FBI's ability to convert from a primarily case-oriented criminal justice agency into a domestic investigatory body is being questioned and debated with great urgency by the National Security Council, members of Congress and intelligence experts who have been called upon to help out.

We’re Here to Help

Political correctness isn’t exactly a priority in Russia. Contrast Dubya’s “Islam is peace” with this statement from Russian President Vladimir Putin:

He said Western civilisation faced a mortal threat from Muslim terrorists, who planned to create a "worldwide caliphate". ...

"They talk about the need to kill all non-Muslims, all cross-bearers," Mr Putin told a news conference with EU leaders.

"If you are Christian, your life is threatened. If you reject your religion and become an atheist you are also in danger. If you will decide to become Muslim, even this will not save you because traditional Islam is from their perspective hostile to their purposes and goals."

And for those who, like John Walker Lindh, wish to convert to a radical form of Islam, Vladimir would like to help:

"If you want to become a complete Islamic radical," he said, "and are ready to undergo circumcision, then I invite you to Moscow. We're a multi-denominational country. We have specialists in this question as well. I will recommend that he carry out the operation in such a way that after it nothing else will grow."

monday, november 11, 2002

Hawkins Interviews Hanson

John Hawkins scored a great interview with one of LGF’s most admired writers, Victor Davis Hanson. Go ye and read of it.

Scary News of the Day

Today the Washington Post reports that an unknown number of powerful radioactive devices were dispersed throughout the Soviet empire during the 1970s, to test the effects of nuclear war on agriculture. The radioactive substance in these devices was cesium 137, and each one contained enough to contaminate a small city.

Unknown in the West until recently, the Soviet project is viewed as especially dangerous because its cesium devices could be easily exploited for terrorism: small, portable and possessing a potent core of cesium chloride in the form of pellets or, more frequently, a fine powder. Cesium 137, a silvery metal isotope used commonly in medical radiotherapy, emits powerful gamma radiation and has a half-life of three decades.

"It's like talc -- extremely dispersible," said Abel Gonzales, director of radiation and waste safety for the International Atomic Energy Agency, the United Nations-chartered nuclear watchdog. "You don't even need a bomb. Just open a can and people will die."

With heightened urgency and new backing from the U.S. Energy Department, the IAEA led a 10-month sweep of the former Soviet republic of Georgia, now a troubled but independent state. The search turned up five of the Gamma Kolos devices, all of which are now in safe storage. Four more devices have been found in Moldova, while in Russia U.S. officials are helping to construct security systems for agricultural research centers where large quantities of powdered cesium are stored.

But elsewhere across the old Soviet empire, the search is hampered by a lack of funding and a dearth of information. None of the cesium devices is known to have been stolen, but in some Central Asian states there are no records showing how many of the devices exist or what has happened to them. Estimates of the total number of devices are vague -- "anywhere from 100 to 1,000," not counting stocks of cesium in loose storage in Russia, a senior IAEA official said.

Iraq “Parliament” Scorns UN

When the UN Security Council approved the resolution demanding that Iraq disarm or face the consequences, I thought Saddam Hussein would probably wait the full seven days, then accept the inspectors and continue playing his obfuscation games to buy more time; he could have stretched things out for months that way. But it’s beginning to look like he’d rather take it to the wall.

BAGHDAD (Reuters) - The head of an Iraqi parliamentary committee on Monday recommended that the assembly reject a tough new U.N. resolution demanding that Iraq disarm.

Terror Talks in Cairo

At a meeting of the murderers in Cairo, Egypt, leaders of Hamas reaffirmed their intention to continue killing Jewish men, women, and children wherever they can: Hamas refuses to halt suicide attacks in Israel.

In Cairo, representatives of Hamas and Fatah held another round of talks at an undisclosed venue to try to work out a common strategy that would confine terrorist attacks to the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

The Fatah delegation, led by Dr. Zakariya al-Agha, is trying to convince Hamas to agree to a temporary suspension of suicide bombings inside Israel. Fatah argues that the attacks have caused harm to the Palestinians and lost them the sympathy of friends, especially in the US and Europe.

Fatah's position also states that the attacks should be halted at least in the period leading up to Israeli elections because they would play into the hands of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's Likud party and weaken the Left and Israel's peace camp. ...

But Hamas leader Abdel Aziz Rantisi said Sunday the general goal of the Cairo talks was "to reach common grounds, to unite Palestinian ranks in one trench." He said Hamas believed in resistance as the only option serving the Palestinian people's higher interests.

Another Hamas leader in Gaza City said Sunday that Hamas's conditions for ending suicide attacks are the same as those of Fatah and the entire Palestinian people. "These conditions are that the Israeli occupation must end," said Dr. Mahmoud Zahar, a prominent Hamas official.

And by “Israeli occupation,” of course, Hamas means the existence of Jews in the Middle East.

Why Won’t Patten Investigate?

European Foreign Affairs Commissioner Chris Patten is flatly refusing to investigate the Palestinian Authority’s blatant misuse of EU aid money.

In response to a question by Charles Tanner, Conservative foreign affairs spokesman in the European Parliament, about charges that European aid to the Palestinians currently running at 10 million euros a month is being diverted to fund terrorist activity, Patten said he wants the issue investigated "like a hole in the head."

Could this loathsome EU reptile’s corruption and anti-Semitism be any clearer? With volumes of evidence captured from Arafat’s own office, and the testimony of countless witnesses (including PA officials), the only reason to be opposed to an investigation is because there’s something there that Chris Patten doesn’t want found.

NYC Get-Together

A group of LGF readers in New York City are planning a get-together this weekend. If you’re interested in going, please email David for the details.

Veterans Day

IN FLANDERS FIELDS

by John McCrae

In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row
   That mark our place; and in the sky
   The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
   Loved and were loved, and now we lie
      in Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
   The torch; be yours to hold it high.
   If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
      in Flanders fields.

sunday, november 10, 2002

Fisk Downhearted

The US and its allies are going to stop Saddam Hussein’s quest for the Arab Bomb, and the Arab League is powerless to stand in our way. Robert Fisk gets it. And his disappointment is palpable.

And Again

Once again Palestinian mass murderers have slaughtered Israeli children in their homes: Terrorist attack in kibbutz kills five, wounds three.

One or more terrorists entered Kibbutz Metzer in the Wadi Ara region on the Israeli side of the Green Line. At least two Israelis have been killed, including one woman. Three are seriously wounded. The attacker(s) are at large, and may be barricaded in a home, or possibly have escaped to a nearby village. Security forces and ambulances are in the area. Residents have locked themselves in their homes and a blackout has been imposed.

Police sources said that the bodies of two adults - a man and woman in their fifties - and three children had been found. There are reports that they are members of one family, in whose house the terrorist entered after shooting kibbutz members outside the dining hall.

Yasser Arafat’s Al Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades have admitted their guilt in the crime.

And tomorrow, US Deputy Assistant Secretary of State David Satterfield arrives in Israel for a round of talks intended to pressure the Israelis to ease up on restrictions on the Palestinians, and give them a whole lot of money instead.

“Peace Activists” Get Violent

In Brussels, an anti-American, anti-Israel protest march got ugly when Palestinian Arab supporters showed up: 29 protesters arrested in Brussels:

Masked, stone-throwing youths broke windows at a McDonald's fast food restaurant and a Marriot hotel, as well as a local temporary employment agency. Only minor damage was done however as riot police moved in, backed by water canons. No tear gas was used.

Police said up to a hundred youths, many of them of Arab origin, broke away from the main body of the anti-war protesters who were marching through the city center.

They hurled stones at businesses and police who responded with baton charges. Photographers and TV camera operators were also targeted by the rioters.

UPDATE: James Morrow has more on the blatant anti-Semitism at these Euroweenie protests.

Intelligence Warnings

Mansoor Ijaz, the Pakistani businessman who helped negotiate a deal turned down by the Clinton administration for Osama Bin Laden’s extradition, told Fox News yesterday that major Al Qaeda attacks are expected by the end of this month.

A WWII Veteran’s Story

South Knox Bubba has posting a moving story for Veterans Day. Highly recommended. (Hat tip: Laurence Simon.)

Whitehall Evacuated

Buried in this story about tightening security in Britain is the surprising revelation that government offices in Whitehall were evacuated last week due to an anthrax scare—while Tom Ridge was meeting with British environment secretary Margaret Beckett. How did they keep this quiet? (Hat tip: LGF reader “wordwarp.”)

Return of the Taliban

The Islamist parties that recently won 59 seats out of 342 in Pakistan’s parliament are telling the US to get out of Pakistan, and openly expressing support for the Taliban and Al Qaeda.

The six-party alliance of religious parties, of which [Fazl-ur] Rahman's party is a dominant partner, campaigned almost exclusively on an anti-American platform. It demanded U.S. soldiers leave Pakistan and neighboring Afghanistan, criticizing President Pervez Musharraf's support for the war on terror.

His voice soft, his head swathed in his trademark orange turban, Rahman chose his words carefully.

He said he did not want to answer questions about the Taliban and al-Qaida, or about them finding sanctuary here under a government that included the religious right. "These are issues we will speak about in detail after the government is formed," he said.

But his lieutenant, Mir Hussain Gillani, a squat white-bearded cleric who sat at his side, said his party's policies are clear.

"Absolutely the Americans will be told to go. Leave Pakistan. This is our country," said Gillani.

He also said that it was the religious duty of every Muslim Pakistani to protect and offer sanctuary to Taliban and al-Qaida. He said Osama bin Laden was not a terrorist, but "Osama is one of the biggest followers of Islam. And what has he done? What has the United States and the West proven that he has done?"

Gillani is vice president of Rahman's Jamiat-e-Ulema Islam, or Party of Islamic Clerics. He said that the Taliban were attacked by the U.S.-led coalition because "America is an enemy of Islam. It is our duty to give protection to the oppressed Muslims and America is the biggest oppressor."

No Virgins for Them

Two homicidal Palestinians on their way to commit mass murder blew themselves up near a West Bank checkpoint today, when the explosive belt they were smuggling into Israel went off prematurely.

Anti-Semitism on Campus

In the Montreal Gazette, Cynthia Yacowar-Sweeney gives a wake-up call to the campuses of Canada and the US: Stamping out anti-Semitism in universities. (Hat tip: LGF reader Elizabeth.)

Kuwaiti Suspects Recant

Six Kuwaitis arrested for the attack on US Marines are recanting their confessions, saying they were beaten by police.

The young men, including a 17-year-old suspect, said they had nothing to do with the Oct. 8 attack by two Muslim fundamentalist Kuwaitis but had to confess because they were beaten or "mistreated" by police, the attorney, Najib al-Wugayyan, told The Associated Press.

The suspects have not been formally charged or referred to trial, but they were questioned Saturday by a judge to decide whether they should be released on bail. He ruled their detention should be extended while prosecution finished investigating the case.

Police officials were not immediately available to comment about the alleged beatings. In the past, police have rarely responded when asked about frequent reports of mistreatment of criminal suspects.

Five of the six suspects are members of the al-Kandari family, close or distant relatives of Anas al-Kandari, one of the two attackers who shot at the U.S. Marines while they trained on Failaka, an island off Kuwait's coast.

MoDo Meets the Mutawwa

If the Saudis were hoping she’d write favorably about their godforsaken country when they invited Maureen Dowd to visit, they must be starting to feel a bit disappointed: Frederick's of Riyadh.

I made some notes on Harvey Nichols's lingerie apartheid — racks of sheer zebra and leopard Dolce & Gabbana nighties and lacy Donna Karan items — and Mr. Jubeir and I headed back to the hotel. Suddenly, four men bore down on us, two in white robes, one in a brown policeman's uniform and one in a floor-length brown A-line skirt (not a good look). They pointed to my neck and hips, and the embarrassed diplomat explained that I had been busted by the vice squad.

"They say they can see the outline of your body," he translated. "They say they welcome you to the mall, which is a sign of our modernity, but that we are also proud of our tradition and faith, and you must respect that." The police took my passport and began making notes about the crime, oblivious to the irony of detaining me in front of the window of another lingerie shop displaying a short lacy red slip.

I figured they'd shrink away upon learning that Mr. Jubeir's boss was Crown Prince Abdullah. But they didn't. I thought I'd catch a break because I'm an American Catholic, not a Muslim. I didn't. Apparently, the mutawwa are not on board with the Saudis' multimillion-dollar charm offensive to persuade America that the kingdom is not a hotbed of hostile religious zealots.

Mr. Jubeir asked whether I'd "placate" the mutawwa by putting on an abaya from a nearby shop. I'd had to wear one of the macabre, hot black shrouds that day to see the crown prince, and I was loath to get shrouded up again to walk a few yards.

After the men argued for 15 minutes, I fretted that I was in one of those movies where an American makes one mistake in a repressive country and ends up rotting in a dungeon. I missed John Ashcroft desperately.

But you know she doesn’t mean it. I suspect MoDo’s ironic veneer would crack pretty quickly if she really were tossed into a dungeon. It might not be a bad idea to ship some of our more hare-brained celebrities (Susan Sarandon, Babs, Woody) over to the Saudi entity for a little vacation.

saturday, november 09, 2002

National Military Appreciation Month

Here’s a website where you can quickly and easily (although they deserve more than that) send a message of support to the men and women who are committed to defending the United States: National Military Appreciation Month.

Fallaci on Florence

Oriana Fallaci makes it very clear how she feels about the hordes of anti-globo bozos befouling Florence. (Gracias: El Pundito Instante.)

Arab News vs LGF, Round Two

Since the last two threads about Rasheed Abou-Alsamh’s attack on LGF filled up in a matter of hours, I’m starting one more (the last). To kick it off, I’ll make sure we’re on the same page by reprinting what Abou-Alsamh actually wrote for the Arab News:

Attacking Muslims is the new anti-Semitism

FOLLOWING THE Sept. 11 attacks on New York and Washington by Muslim terrorists, it has sadly now become increasingly acceptable to be anti-Muslim in the United States. Racial profiling at airports and nasty diatribes against Muslims on the Internet are the norm nowadays. The Canadian author Rohiton Mistry, of Indian origin but not even Muslim, recently canceled the second half of his US book tour after being constantly stopped at American airports along with his wife for security checks.

The conservative press has been the guiltiest of whipping up anti-Muslim sentiment, especially the National Review, the Weekly Standard and the Wall Street Journal. Most of these publications have published alarmist articles about the rise of a fanatical Islam, mistakenly making the religion of over 2 billion people seem to be a monolithic bloc of anti-West hatred. On the Internet there is a plethora of American weblogs that just spend their whole time analyzing every single statement and action coming out of the Muslim world, ready to pounce upon and denounce Muslims at every turn.

One weblog particularly guilty of this new anti-Semitism is Charles Johnson’s Little Green Footballs website. Just trawling through the comments (I should really say diatribes) left by regulars of the website, one is shocked by the virulent anti-Muslim sentiments expressed. If the same sentiments were expressed about Jews or Christians on a Muslim website, you can be sure that there would be an almighty uproar about it in the US. A few Americans have dared criticize LGF, most notably the weblog editor of MSNBC, but they have been few and far between.

For sure the childish comments on LGF have perhaps allowed Johnson to keep running such a racist and nasty website. After all, who will take seriously the slurs produced by what seem to be 10-year-old brats high on steroids? Many regulars on the site talk about how the US should obliterate Iraq and Saudi Arabia with nuclear weapons and then take them over. For sure this is psychotherapy for those still managing their Sept. 11 anger, but does the whole world have to be subjected to it? LGF claims that it will remove offensive posts, but I have yet to see any of the anti-Muslim drivel removed. On LGF it’s unfortunately OK to hate Muslims.

New Feature

For the HTML-phobic among us, I’ve added a new feature to the comment form. At the top right of the comment entry area are three new options: Bold, Italic, and Quote. Clicking any of them brings up a Javascript prompt, in which you can enter the text you wish to make bold or italic, or to quote. When you click the OK button in the prompt, the text is inserted into the comment with all the necessary HTML formatting done for you.

UPDATE: and now I’ve also added two functions to create HTML hyperlinks. Click Link or Link (New) and you’ll be prompted for the web address of the link, then the text description that will display in your comment. Link (New) does the same thing as Link, but creates a link that opens in a new window.

Note: the easiest way to add a link to a comment is still to simply copy it from the browser’s address line and paste it into your comment, and let my automagic replacement routines take care of the HTML. This has another advantage; it respects each visitor’s preferences for whether the links open in the same window or a new one.

Got Another One

Another mass murderer bites the dust: the most senior Islamic Jihad freakazoid on Israel’s wanted list, Iyad Sawalhe, responsible for more than 30 killings.

Israel said that Sawalhe, 28, is directly responsible for attacks that killed 31 Israelis and wounded scores, including the recent car bomb at Karkur junction that killed 14, the bus bombing at the Merom junction and the preparation of a 300 kg car bomb that was discovered by IDF troops.

Following intelligence information a force from the Golani reconnaissance unit arrived at Sawalhe's house in the Casbah of Jenin. Sawalhe and his wife were hidden in a secret room behind a revolving wall in the kitchen. The troops called on them to come out, the wife came out, however Sawalhe remained in the hiding place and then fired a number of shots at the troops and threw a hand grenade, which lightly wounded three of the soldiers.

After a gunbattle that lasted a number of hours the troops found Sawalhe's body.

Sawalhe was the primary target of the IDF operation in Jenin over the last two weeks that was launched after the Karkur junction attack.

Get the Military Out of the Drug War

A great idea whose time has come: U.S. may divert Special Forces from drug war.

Freeing up some of the military's highly skilled forces for assignment in the war on terrorism has become a major effort for [Andre] Hollis since he became deputy assistant secretary for counternarcotics in August 2001.

”One of my first tasks was to do a bottom-up review,” he said.

Part of the military's $1 billion annual anti-drug effort, begun in 1988, involves working with other agencies to detect air and marine drug shipments.

Hollis has been evaluating what should be kept, jettisoned or turned over to others, an effort that took on greater importance after the Sept. 11 attacks.

Hollis anticipates significant changes. Some operations will die. Those that benefit the war on terrorism could expand.

”So I can't say to you there are X number of programs we're going to cut because what I'm looking at is, 'What is the benefit in terms of our priorities?' ” Hollis said.

He added that he would like the see the military ”get out of the things that either law enforcement should be doing or can do.”

(Hat tip: reader M. Simon.)

A Muslim Woman Speaks Out

When Somalian political scientist Ayaan Hirsi Ali (who fled from Somalia to the Netherlands as a young woman) spoke out publicly against the hidden abuse of Muslim women, she received a flood of hate mail and death threats. Islamic web sites in the Netherlands called for her to be beheaded or shot.

We first wrote about Ayaan Hirsi Ali at the beginning of October, when the threats had forced her into hiding. Now she’s had to flee the country—because nothing enrages fundamentalist Muslims more than a free-thinking independent woman speaking the truth about Islam’s barbaric treatment of women: Behind the Veil: A Muslim Woman Speaks Out.

The theme of injustice toward women in Islamic countries has become common in the West, but it has gained fresh currency through Ms. Hirsi Ali's European perspective, her study of Dutch immigrants and her own life. Born in Mogadishu, she grew up a typical Muslim girl in Somalia. When she was 5, she underwent the "cruel ritual," as she called it, of genital cutting. When her father, a Somali opposition politician, had to flee the country's political troubles, the family went to Saudi Arabia, where, she said, she was kept veiled and, much of the time, indoors.

At 22, her father forced her to marry a distant cousin, a man she had never seen. But a friend helped her to escape and she finally obtained political asylum in the Netherlands.

She was shocked when, as a university student, she held a job as an interpreter for Dutch immigration and social workers and discovered hidden "suffering on a terrible scale" among Muslim women even in the Netherlands. She entered safe houses for women and girls, most of them Turkish and Moroccan immigrants, who had run away from domestic violence or forced marriages. Many had secret abortions.

"Sexual abuse in the family causes the most pain because the trust is violated on all levels," she said. "The father or the uncle say nothing, nor do the mother and the sisters. It happens regularly — the incest, the beatings, the abortions. Girls commit suicide. But no one says anything. And social workers are sworn to professional secrecy."

From the Arab News to LGF

After attacking LGF in the Arab News, Rasheed Abou-Alsamh has replied to LGF. Since the thread in which he posted is getting quite long, I’m reposting his comment here. I’ll reply immediately after.

friday, november 08, 2002

Of Colas and Propaganda

The official Mecca-Cola site has a charming montage of photographs of Palestinian children stupidly courageously throwing rocks at tanks, being oppressed, and showing off their Nikes and soccer shirts. All the Big Lies are represented here, including Mohammed al-Dura (who was killed by Palestinians, not Israelis) and this semi-famous Reuters photo of a Palestinian boy being arrested by Israeli police:

In Palestinian propaganda mythology, the implication of the photo is that the poor little boy was so brutalized by the inhuman Jews that he lost control of his bladder. But another photo taken a few minutes earlier on the same day (and mostly ignored by the biased media) provides some important context, catching the little turd in a somewhat different pose:

(Hat tip: HonestReporting.com.)

Knight Sans Horse

MEMRI has a summary of discussions in the Arab press about Egypt’s broadcast of A Knight Without a Horse, the TV series based on anti-Semitic forgery The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. A few writers were critical of Egypt for the show; one of the critics makes an interesting (and highly plausible) charge:

"For months, people with awareness in Egypt have been talking about this project. Some say that the main support for Muhammad Subhi's project came from Iraqi President Saddam Hussein personally - as if the damage he has caused the Arabs was not sufficient and he is now setting a trap for Egypt, its artists, and its reputation in the world…"

But most of the Arab press reacted more like this:

"Thomas Friedman, the Zionist agent with the Israeli identity and the American citizenship, continued his hostile, filthy attack against Egypt and on behalf of the goals of the aggressive Israel, with his condemnation, in a New York Times article, of Egyptian Television's intent to air this series during the month of Ramadan. [He] claim[ed] that it focuses on a Zionist plot to take over Arab land -which is a fact. He attacked the program, but ignored the fact that at issue was scientific literature based on legitimate history. He continued by accusing the Egyptian leadership of disseminating hatred against the Jews... This despicable Friedman did not find a weapon to wave in the face of Egyptian and Arab thought except the weapon of extortion and terror based on the charge of antisemitism…"

Thomas Friedman, terrorist.

Do Not Drink Idiotic!

Zamzam Cola’s hold on the Islamic cola market is being challenged by a new upstart: Mecca Cola, with the catchy slogan Ne buvez plus idiot, buvez engagé!

Which Google translates as “Do not drink idiotic any more, drink engages!”

The photo caption says that ten percent of Mecca Cola’s profits will go to “Palestinian humanitarian causes in aid of children, education, and preserving the heritage.”

Saddam's Brain

Here’s a great piece by David Brooks on the historical origins and Arab supremacist ideology of Iraq’s (and Syria’s) Baath party: Saddam's Brain.

The End of An Era

Today Victor Davis Hanson dissects the anti-American left in an excellent, devastating new column: The End of an Era.

We are learning that resistance never really entailed opposition to fascism at all, much less the need for intervention to support democracy, but was simply a strange desire to vent displeasure with our own culture. That so many of these ideological teenagers mad at their opulent and indulgent parents are affluent suburbanites suggests the deleterious effects of leisure and wealth; that so many enjoy the appurtenances of nice cars, houses, and travel denotes abject hypocrisy; that so many mindlessly repeat cant and fad reflects the power of belonging to a clique that promises status by being more "sophisticated" and "subtle" than ordinary Americans; that so many demand utopian perfection reminds us that their god Reason is an unforgiving totem; that so many are shrill and angry suggests that they seek global causes to assuage personal unhappiness and anger at a system that has not met their own high demands upon it.

So we have at last arrived at Cloudcuckooland: A hierarchal United States military is more tolerant of liberals in its ranks than liberal universities are of their critics on campus. Republicans support dangerous interventions abroad to remove dictators and free oppressed peoples, as leftist dissidents agitate for hands-off mass murderers and medieval theocrats. A democratic Israel is slandered as imperialistic and fascistic while an authoritarian Palestinian regime is given a pass for theft, murder, and torture. And liberals, women, and homosexuals are saved in Afghanistan thanks to the work of Air Force pilots and special forces, as reactionary fundamentalists and thugs seek to hold onto their autocracy in part by finding solace with anti-American leftists. Who would have ever thought that democratic Iraqis would seek our military's help, while agents of Saddam Hussein would line up to find solidarity with those now marching?

Tick, Tock

The UN Security Council has approved a resolution demanding that Saddam Hussein disarm or face “serious consequences.” Iraq has seven days to indicate acceptance of the resolution.

Rosenbaum Fisks Vidal

In the New York Observer, Ron Rosenbaum utterly destroys Gore Vidal’s pathetic conspiracy essay: Protocols of Elder Named Gore Vidal: Wacko 9/11 Piece. (Rosenbaum calls it a MiSTing, but actually it’s a fisk. You can’t have a MiSTing without robots. Everybody knows that. And Rosenbaum’s essay, excellent as it may be, contains no robots whatsoever.)

What’s In a “No?”

When asked last weekend whether the Saudi entity would let the US launch attacks against Iraq from Saudi soil, prince Saud said, “No.” But apparently, their “no” means “maybe.”

In a telephone interview with the Times, Prince Saud said there was a misunderstanding when he answered "no" when asked in the CNN interview if Saudi bases could be used in a military operation against Iraq.

Prince Saud told the Times that Saudi Arabia would be obliged to "cooperate" with the United Nations if Iraq "refuses the implementation" of the United Nations resolutions "concerning inspections" of its programs for weapons of mass destruction.

"But that does not mean we have to join the fighting, or indeed to leave our bases for use," Prince Saud told the newspaper. "This is a sovereign right of Saudi Arabia to decide when the time comes."

When asked whether Crown Prince Abdullah had decided to support a U.S.-led military campaign, Prince Saud said he could not say more.

thursday, november 07, 2002

Notes After a Meltdown

In the Great Email Meltdown today, I lost a few messages that I need to mention. If you’ve donated to LGF in the past week through Amazon or Paypal, I’ve lost the notification email and can’t send you a personal thank-you note—as I normally would. Please accept my sincere gratitude instead.

Also, would the person from the New York Press who contacted me for an interview please email me again?

About Rasheed

In today’s Arab News, Rasheed Abou-Alsamh attacks Little Green Footballs.

That’s how Rasheed repays us for featuring his columns several times at LGF, as a voice of Arab sanity. That’s how he repays me for taking special notice of his comments, and letting him know when he was being blocked by our Saudi troll filter. And that’s how he repays LGF readers who expressed concern when his byline didn’t appear in the Arab News for a few weeks. Hey, Rasheed: they were worried. About you. And so was I. But I guess you’ve given up that dream of writing for the National Review you once emailed me about.

I guess I was wrong about you.

Aarrgghh

Computers. Can’t live with ’em, can’t live without ’em. Can’t shoot ’em either. But keep the guns away from me right now, or I just might.

Microsoft’s lovely Entourage email program decided to throw a tantrum this morning, rendering my email database unreadable. I’ve been in computer hell all morning trying to slap that database awake.

So far I haven’t been able to recover any email past April of this year, but I have a few more things to try.

If you’ve been curious why there aren’t many new posts today, that’s the reason.

Religion of Tolerance

An Iranian university professor has been sentenced to death for blasphemy.

In his speech, Aghajari had said clerics' teachings on Islam were considered sacred simply because they were part of history, and he questioned why clerics were the only ones authorized to interpret Islam.

wednesday, november 06, 2002

M. Kahil Gloats for Egypt

Arab News cartoonist M. Kahil gloats that the cowboy president of the United States (wearing a 'CENSOR' badge) was unable to stop Egypt from broadcasting their Nazi-like anti-Semitic television series based on The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Gloat while you can, M.

News Junkies Need a Fix

I just wanted to mention that Google News is starting to become an indispensable resource. If you haven’t looked at it in a while (like me), you’ll be surprised at how far it has come.

Also, I’ve added a brand new, gentle on your stomach, guaranteed fat-free search function at the bottom of our news links, to let you search the Moreover news feeds.

Actually, it’s to let me easily search the Moreover news feeds. Heh. But you can use it too if you want.

Egyptian Criticizes Al-Azhar U

As a postscript to our entry about the homicidal scholars of Al-Azhar University, MEMRI has translations from several recent articles by Egyptian intellectual Ahmad Abd Al-M'uti Higazi, sharply criticizing the University for “producing terrorism.”

"...Those who quote [religious scriptures] and impose the word [namely, the chief clerics] are the ones responsible for producing fundamentalist terror; it is they who kill thought and the development of a language of dialogue, and who eradicate democracy - which is the basis for society's progress ... The positions of the sheikh of Al-Azhar and the mufti were established by the state, but they serve only to root the principle of quote-hear-obey. They kill creativity and lead to the atrophy of the Arab mind."

"Had we truly tried to defend Islam and correct its image, [which was] distorted by extremism and fanaticism, we would have had to revive the principles of Islam. Fanaticism is barbaric and a throwback to the times when man was an animal, responding only to blood ties and using not his head, but his horns."

"Fanaticism is ignorance and blind zeal. The extremist [who] surrenders ... to transient passions, does not think, does not examine himself, and does not control his excitement. The Islamic revival will not be Islamic and will not be a revival, if it is no more than emotions, radicalization, and a return to what was said in the past ... "

"The [true] revival is a return to the faith itself ... not the return, in our generation, to the rulings made under the conditions of another generation ... All those who invest their best efforts in learning ancient texts by heart, and draw every answer from the ancient texts, are at best [donkeys] bearing books, sometimes on two legs and sometimes on four, because they transform Islam from a living and constantly self-renewing experiment to mummified texts."

Holocaust Denial in French Encyclopedia

The publishers of a French encyclopedia-like reference book known as The Quid have been ordered to remove a Holocaust revisionist’s claim that the figure of six million deaths was exaggerated.

In a section on World War II extermination camps, the book says that the official number of deaths at Auschwitz-Birkenau was 1.2 million. However, it adds that "other figures have circulated," and cites one by a revisionist historian, Robert Faurisson, who claims that 150,000 people died at the camp, of which 100,000 were Jews.

A Religion of Peace?

Kenneth R. Timmerman interviewed top Islamic scholars in Egypt about suicide bombings and terrorism, and encountered a shockingly alien moral code: A Religion of Peace?

The Egyptian state appoints the Grand Mufti, the highest religious authority in the land and a man who has the power to issue fatwas and interpretations of shari'a law. Grand Mufti Sheikh Ahmad Al-Tayyeb was named by Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak to the post earlier this year after his predecessor issued a ruling in favor of Palestinian suicide bombers. But if Mr. Mubarak was embarrassed by that Mufti's public embrace of murder, he may have to reconsider his new choice.

Mr. Al-Tayyeb received me in his office near Al Azhar University, the oldest institution of higher learning in the Arab world. Throughout a 90-minute interview, conducted mostly in Arabic through a government-provided translator, he repeated in excruciating detail his reasoning for encouraging Palestinians to murder innocent civilians through suicide attacks. He also displayed a remarkable flexibility when it came to defining terrorism. To him, American Christian leader Jerry Falwell is a "terrorist" because he has said things that offended Muslims. Palestinians, on the other hand, are justified in massacring Israeli civilians in cold blood "because they are defending their land and have no other weapons at their disposal." Pointedly he added: "If you do not do this, you have no loyalty to your country." As I interviewed him I remembered that President Mubarak is ostensibly a U.S. "partner" in the war on terrorism. And yet he appointed this cleric who believes that Palestinian suicide bombers who enter restaurants, pool halls, discotheques, and shopping malls to murder innocents--children and adults, Israelis and foreign tourists and whoever else happens to be around--are doing God's work. Furthermore, the cleric openly condemns any Palestinian who refuses to take such a step as a traitor. ...

My interviews with these scholars made it clear that Westerners concerned by the violence in the Middle East need to understand that the two parties to this conflict do not use the same logic, nor do they believe in the same moral code. Those of us who have been brought up in the Judeo-Christian tradition have been taught that respect for life is one of God's most basic commandments.

But according to these Islamic scholars--and they are not alone--the search for "justice" legitimizes the wanton targeting of innocent civilians. Targeting is the key word here. Civilians die in all wars, something known as "collateral deaths." But according to these scholars, Islam accepts purposely seeking out innocent civilians in order to sow terror in their society.

Al Qaeda in San Diego

In San Diego the FBI has uncovered an Al Qaeda plot to exchange heroin and hashish for Stinger anti-aircraft missiles.

Agents posing as drug lords followed the case to Hong Kong, where the deal was consummated. As a result, two Pakistanis and an Indian-born U.S. citizen are in custody there awaiting extradition to San Diego to face charges of drug smuggling and providing resources to terror groups. At least one of the men lived in San Diego.

The indictment – the first terrorism crime charged in San Diego in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks – is scheduled to be unsealed in San Diego today. A morning news conference is planned in Washington, D.C., with Attorney General John Ashcroft and FBI Director Robert Mueller.

"This is a very significant case; this shows the importance of the San Diego connection as far as Middle Eastern terrorist activities," a federal source said. "I mean, these guys were seriously looking to buy missiles. The agents risked their lives for this case."

The men in custody, identified by Hong Kong authorities as Pakistanis Syed Mustajab Shah and Muhammed Abid Afridi and naturalized U.S. citizen Ilyas Ali, are accused of seeking to sell or trade a half-ton of heroin and 5 tons of hashish for four Stinger anti-aircraft missiles.

"Based on remarks made to the FBI agents, it is believed that the defendants intended to deliver the Stinger missile systems to a designated foreign terrorist organization, namely the al-Qaeda," the Hong Kong Justice Department said in a statement.

WTF????

We received an intriguing, thought-provoking email from the UK yesterday. But after pondering it for countless hours, I must admit I’m at a loss for a reply. So I’m going to toss it out to our readers, hoping that maybe you can show this gentleman the way out of his confusion, to the state of enlightment he so clearly craves. Both the subject and text of the email consisted solely of the poignant question:

WTF????

Dowd Visits Saud

MoDo goes to Jiddah: Under the Ramadan Moon.

I went to see the minister of education at his home in Riyadh. Mohammed Ahmed Rasheed and half a dozen deputies, men in long white robes and headdresses, arrayed themselves on chairs against the walls and worried their beads. They talked fondly about time spent at American universities — Stanford, Indiana, Oklahoma, Michigan; Khedir al-Qurashi, the vice minister for girls' education, spoke of his love of Hoosiers basketball.

They were defensive about American suspicion of the religious hard-liners' influence on boys' schooling. "Why don't you go to Israeli math textbooks and see what they're saying — `If you kill 10 Arabs one day and 12 the next day, what would be the total?' " demanded one deputy. Agreed another: "If 5 or 8 percent of our curriculum has to be changed, then 80 to 90 percent of the content of American media has to be changed."

So-Called Liberals

LGF reader Bala Ambati has another great op-ed in the Duke University Chronicle today: So-called liberals need to address the facts about terrorism. Judging from yesterday’s election results, Dr. Ambati is far from the only one disenchanted with liberal Democrat positions.

Netanyahu: Expel Arafat

Binyamin Netanyahu has been sworn in as Israel’s foreign minister, and again he is calling for the expulsion of Yasser Arafat.

Responding to Netanyahu, Arafat said Wednesday: "No one can deport me from my homeland ... They have to remember that they are dealing with Yasser Arafat."

Obsessive Compulsive Disorder

The State Department is sponsoring a series of advertisements in Malaysia and Indonesia, showing American Muslims living and worshipping freely. But Islamic scholars and leaders in the region say the ads won’t help America’s image, because even in Indonesia, a country thousands of miles away from the Middle East with a minuscule Jewish population, it’s all about the Jews.

Broadcast in Malaysia this week and Indonesia last week, the series of short documentaries seeks to dispel any notion that Muslims in the United States are a persecuted minority.

But critics say the ads, funded by the State Department, fail to address the root causes of anti-U.S. sentiment among Muslims, namely Washington's support for Israel, the injustices suffered by Palestinians and the plight of ordinary Iraqis.

"The U.S. is spending millions of dollars to change public opinion in the Muslim world which is against U.S. views," said Ghani Shamsuddin, head of Malaysia's Ulama (Islamic scholars) Association. "But I don't think it will work."

As usual, when they talk about the issue, Islamic spokesmen are vague.

"How it treats its Muslims at home is not an issue," said Zulkifli Alwi, a leader of Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad's United Malays National Organization (UMNO) party.

"The issue is the U.S. administration's overall policy toward the Muslim world. It should go to the roots," he said. ...

Dadi Darmadi, a moderate Muslim intellectual in Indonesia said the campaign reinforced a message that Washington is not an enemy of Islam.

"But it overlooks the fact that there are flaws in the U.S. foreign policy with regards to Muslim countries," said Darmadi, who runs the Center for the Study of Islam and Society in Jakarta.

“Flaws.” In the “overall policy.” An honest translation of these murky code words might be, “The issue is the U.S. administration’s refusal to allow us to purge the Jews from our Islamic paradise.”

tuesday, november 05, 2002

The Smallpox Factor

A new intelligence report says that four nations possess smallpox. One of them is France.

Oh man.

That means everybody has it.

Repent, Sinners

The president-for-life of Yemen is calling on Al Qaeda members to repent.

"We call on everyone from among our countrymen who have been entangled in membership of the al-Qaida organization to repent ... and renounce all means of violence," President Ali Abdullah Saleh said in a statement read by a Cabinet minister on national television.

Saleh said that those who "return to the path of righteousness" would be allowed to "return to society as good citizens with rights and obligations."

Yemeni analysts believed the statement was not an amnesty but a signal that al-Qaida members who surrender would face trial in Yemen and not be turned over to U.S. authorities.

SOTW at Israpundit

Gracias and shalom to Israpundit for making us one of their sites of the week.

Vote! Vote Now! Vote!

LGF: The blog that doesn’t hector you to vote. I assume our readers already know the importance of exercising your constitutional rights. Right? Of course you do.

But I must say, it’s damned hard to give much of a #%*! about the California governor’s race.

Where’s the Anti-Idiotarian candidate?

Don’t Mess with Deir Yassin

Lynn B has some very interesting stuff about Palestinian Arab claims of a massacre at Deir Yassin in 1948.

No Alternative

Hamas tells the Palestinian Authority there is no alternative to suicide bombings.

"Those who are criticizing suicide operations don't have an alternative," said a statement issued by the Eziddin al-Qassam group. "They can't even stop the killing of innocent Palestinians. These people don't believe in any form of resistance. Our operations are carried out on the basis of fatwas (religious decrees) issued by the majority of Muslim scholars."

The statement is seen as a warning to the political leadership of Hamas that it has no authority to strike any deal with the PA regarding suicide bombings. The Cairo talks are to be held under the auspices of the European Union, whose representatives hope the PA would be able to persuade Hamas to halt suicide attacks inside the Green Line.

Defending the movement's right to pursue suicide attacks, the statement claimed that these operations have "struck the Israeli enemy in the heart, terrorized it, made it lose its sense of security, and destroyed its economy and morale."

The statement said that had it not been for the Palestinian voices of criticism, the suicide attacks would have brought Israel to its knees.

Here we have the dead-end absolutist Arab mindset in a nutshell. If a behavior (suicide bombing) isn’t producing the intended result (destruction of Israel’s resolve), never examine the validity of the behavior; instead, blame someone else (voices of sanity) for the failure and repeat the behavior. As their society crumbles around them.

An Egyptian Visitor

A visitor from Cairo, Egypt comments on American outrage about the Egyptian TV show based on the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

i dont know why u people r making a huge deal out of this? dont u believe in the freedom of speech...or is this just a cliche or something u pretend to believe in...and still how can u judge something that u didn't even see...and about Egypt not respecting the peace treaty...mmmmm i dont really think Israel is respecting anything too or else the world would have really changed to the better. i would just like u to know, that watching those series wont increase the hatred, or else arabs should stop watching news too. thanx.

Racism as the Will of Allah

Yesterday the Palestinian Media Watch mailing list contained an extensive translation of the Friday sermon (khutba) from Shaykh Ijlin mosque in Gaza, one of the subjects of this week’s Peaceful Religion Watch. This is nothing less than religious incitement to murder—poisonous racism disguised as piety. I’m publishing the longer translation at LGF as part of the historical record. My apologies if it makes anyone sick; I feel a little nauseous myself after reading it.

Praise unto Allah, Who cursed our enemies; curse upon curse up to Judgment Day. And He has cursed them as well through the words of His prophets and emissaries, may they rest in peace...

It is He who warned us of the Jews and of the Jews‚ nature in the clearest of terms. We shall battle them and wage Jihad against them -after they attempted to kill the Call [to Allah] and to assassinate the Prophet [Muhammad] ...

Their attempts were repeated more than once; but Allah, Who said of the Prophet: Allah will protect you from man, shielded His prophet from their [the Jews] trickery, plotting and treachery, and their ideological terrorism...

The Prophet, upon emigrating from Mecca to Medina where Allah granted him victory over his enemies, wrote a document between himself and the residents of Medina, among them Jews... The Prophet and the Moslems upheld this contract. The Jews, however, as is typical of them and as Allah described them in His Book, characterized by conceit, pride, arrogance, disloyalty and treachery... Each time they forge a treaty a group within them breaches it. [Sura 3]....

And they coveted the Moslems for the Prophet not having come from among them. They coveted, and they covet still. They killed, and they kill still. They betrayed, and betray still. They spilled blood, and they spill blood still. They ignited and still ignite the flames of war. And each time they ignite the flame of war, Allah extinguishes it. And still, they light it up... They have a single common denominator: enmity of Islam and Moslems, enmity of the bearers of truth, enmity of the sons of the Al-Aqsa Mosque, enmity of the bearers of the historical and religious truth in this good, blessed land.

...Allah lifted Mount Sinai over them and commanded that they bow down, and they bowed on their left eyebrows while, with their right eyes, they looked at the mountain. Note the deceit and cunning. And therefore it [violence and crime] is not an exception to their character or their nature, for which Allah transformed them to monkeys and pigs.

...Then Allah threatened them with a promise [of punishment] which remains valid until Allah will conquer the world and its people. And if shall be just in the eyes of your Lord, He will not resurrect them until Judgment Day, and then they will be tortured harsh torture. Indeed, your Lord is quick to punish and is forgiving and merciful. Oh, servants of Allah, be you the ones by whom Allah tortures the Jews with harsh torment, this through your unity... This will only come to pass through unity, based on Allah‚s, may He be exalted, words: ...Indeed Allah loves those who battle for Him in one line... [Koran].

...Our enemies do not adhere, as they do not commit now to any contract and to any accord. This is their tradition, this their habit, this is their nature. They battle us based on untrue faith.

We must know the true situation and be on our guard, for our enemy does not distinguish between the mighty and the dependent, between big and small nor between the aged and the nursing baby. They carry on according to their own point of view, based on their untrue faith, which is comprised of license upon license upon license. Moreover, they believe they will become more united the more they spill our blood. We should, then, be on our guard, understand our Islam properly and prepare as we should for Ramadan...

Allah render us victorious over the devils and demons and over our submission to them...

Allah render us victorious over the Jews and those who side with them!

Allah render us victorious over the Jews and those who side with them!

Allah render us victorious over the Jews and the patrons of their arrogance!

Allah unite our ranks and raise our flag!

Allah render victory upon Islam and Muslims!

Shari'a Housing in America

Freddie Mac, the stockholder-owned corporation established by Congress in 1970 to support homeownership and rental housing, is now offering “Islamic mortgages.”

MCLEAN, Va., March 28 /PRNewswire/ -- Freddie Mac announced today it is investing in home financing contracts that are acceptable under both Islamic and American law, paving the way for a major expansion in affordable homeownership opportunities for observant Muslim families in this country. Freddie Mac has invested an estimated $1 million in contracts from American Finance House - LARIBA under an agreement that makes it the nation's first Islamic financial institution to achieve Freddie Mac Seller/Servicer status.

Observant American-Muslim families require a special housing contract because Islamic religious law prohibits the payment of interest on mortgages and other types of debt. American Finance House - LARIBA is the Pasadena, Ca.-based institution that developed a Home Finance model for the American-Muslim community.

"Today's announcement is a milestone. It shows how Freddie Mac and its lender partners continue to explore new ways to help diverse communities, like the American-Muslim community, take advantage of homeownership opportunities in America," said Saber Salam, vice president of customer strategies and offerings at Freddie Mac. "By supporting Islamic model mortgages, Freddie Mac is realizing its mission to foster homeownership opportunities in new and exciting ways."

Outrage of the Day

Arab Voice, an Arabic-language newspaper published in Paterson, New Jersey, featuring James Zogby as a columnist, is running a serialized version of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Daniel Pipes says it all:

That a forgery that helped cause the Holocaust is now openly published in New Jersey points to two important realities:

* Arab and Muslim institutional life in the United States remains as radicalized after 9/11 as it was before.

* Arab and Muslim institutions are now the primary advocates of anti-Semitism worldwide, including in the West.

To prevent "The Protocols" from making further inroads in the United States, advertisers, James Zogby and the newspaper's printer must immediately and completely disassociate themselves from the Arab Voice. In addition, Arab and Muslim groups in the United States must explicitly denounce "The Protocols" and condemn all those who forward it, whether the Arab Voice or Egyptian television.

Not to do so makes them complicit in the prejudice and villainy of this foul tract.

Columbia U Tries to Hire Terror Apologist

New York’s Columbia University has offered a position (the “Edward Said” chair) to Rashid Khalidi, a pro-Palestinian professor who has compared the creation of Israel to Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor.

While Mr. Khalidi is respected among his fellow Middle East scholars, many of whom share his hostility toward Israel, he has also come under attack from other Middle East experts who say he is soft on militant Islam and excuses terrorism.

In an article published in June by the American Committee on Jerusalem, an Arab-American group, Mr. Khalidi compared Israeli treatment of Palestinian Arabs to the Holocaust. He wrote, “We all feel intensely a sense of urgency about what is happening to our communities in the Middle East and to our communities here, on par with what Jews in America felt in the 1940s ... ”

In the same article, he suggests that Arab-Americans build a memorial to the “Palestinian Nakba [catastrophe] of 1948” modeled after the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C. In his writings, Mr. Khalidi has also likened the creation of the Israeli state to Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, which killed more than 2,000 Americans.

In his 1985 book, “Under Siege: P.L.O. Decisionmaking During the 1982 War,” Mr. Khalidi thanked Yasser Arafat, chairman of the Palestinian Liberation Organization, for giving him access to PLO archives. Writing in the acknowledgments, he said, “To him [Mr. Arafat] and to the dedicated individuals working in the office of the Chairman, the P.L.O. archive and the Palestine News Agency (WAFA), who extended every possible assistance to me on three trips to Tunis, I owe deep thanks.” In 1985 Mr. Arafat had not yet accepted Israel’s right to exist and was considered a terrorist by the American government.

UPDATE: Martin Kramer has more on the proposed appointment of Khalidi.

Edmonton Sun: Murderer = Martyr

Edmonton, the capital city of Alberta, has a large Arab population. That’s the only explanation for the outrageous headline the Edmonton Sun put on this AP story about yesterday’s suicide bombing: Martyr bomber kills 2 in Israel. Unbelievable.

UPDATE: Here’s the original AP story at Yahoo: Suicide Bomber Kills 2 in Israel. It’s clear that someone at the Edmonton Sun changed the headline deliberately.

monday, november 04, 2002

New CNN Poll

CNN is running a poll asking whether the US was “right” to fire missiles at an Al Qaeda chief wanted for the bombing of the USS Cole: Was the U.S. right to execute terror suspects without a trial? Please let CNN know how you feel.

Blind Side

Courtesy The Intellectual Activist. For more like this, check out Cox and Forkum’s book “Black & White World.”

Shariatopia Sweepstakes Update

LGF reader Susan points out this report from multi-culti group the Open Society Institute, that says children should be taught Arabic in British state schools, to prevent Muslim children from “feeling isolated.”

Teaching the language alongside French or German, would help Muslim children to feel less cut off from their classroom colleagues, says a report from the Open Society Institute.

It also says anti-discrimination laws need to be changed so they also focus on religion, because of the problems faced by Muslims.

Government and society should also take steps to remove barriers which prevent Muslims taking a stake in their communities, it said.

Rubin Attempts Suicide

JDL leader Irv Rubin, jailed for allegedly plotting to bomb the King Fahd mosque in LA, has tried to commit suicide.

Blix a Wimp

The former deputy foreign minister of Sweden is warning that Hans Blix, chief of the UN inspection team in Iraq, is a wimp.

In surprisingly un-diplomatic language, Per Ahlmark, former deputy foreign minister of Sweden, warns that Blix, whom he has known for 40 years, is "weak and easily fooled," unsuitable "for a showdown with Saddam," "naive and relatively ignorant of technical details," a "wimp" with a "track record of compounded failure," and "a man repeatedly duped [by] the Iraqi regime."

Blix falsely issued Iraq a clean bill of health before, wants to avoid confrontation with Saddam, and reproached a senior colleague, David Kay, for disbelieving official Iraqi statements, Ahlmark writes.

Palestinians React to HRW Report

So Human Rights Watch finally does the right thing and labels Palestinian suicide bombings as war crimes.

To nobody’s surprise, the HRW report has provoked a reaction from the Palestinians that exhibits the winning combination of raging paranoia, murderous intent, and propensity for outrageous lying that has endeared them to so many Europeans and NGOs: PA rejects rights group report about suicide bombers. The Palestinian Authority says everything is Israel’s fault.

A top advisor to Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat condemned the report by the US-based Human Rights Watch, arguing that Israel's occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip was behind suicide bombings.

"We strongly criticize the report's content, especially those passages that say the president (Arafat) and the PA bear the responsibility," for suicide attacks, Nabil Abu Rudeina told AFP. Abu Rudeina noted Friday that "the occupation is entirely responsible for everything that occurs and it must be ended."

"We demand that Human Rights Watch also criticize the occupation, which leads to those (suicide) operations and criticize the Jenin and Rafah massacres caused by that very occupation," he added.

You mean like they did in the last 274 reports?

The Islamozoids, on the other hand, don’t bother trying to blame or justify. You almost have to admire their psychotic single-mindedness as they launch straight into the Jew-hate. Almost.

Hamas and Islamic Jihad also slammed the rights watchdog. HRW's "way of thinking is Zionist and one-sided," charged Islamic Jihad official Mohammed al-Hindi. "The report speaks the same language as (Israeli Prime Minister Ariel) Sharon and the Israeli extremists," he said.

A top Hamas spokesman described the report as "exactly biased toward the Zionist enemy." "It omits every crime committed by Israel" against the Palestinians, said Abdelaziz Rantissi, adding that he saw "a suspect Zionist hand" in this report.

Exploding Cars

Statistics show that if you’re an Islamic militant, you’re safer hijacking a plane than you are driving a car.

And Again

There’s been an explosion in a shopping mall in Israel. The Ha'aretz news flash:

At least 11 people were injured, one seriously, in an explosion just after 6:15 P.M. Monday in a shopping mall in Kfar Sava.

Three people suffered moderate injuries and seven were lightly wounded.

Channel Two said there were reports of one person killed.

Magen David Adom (MDA) official Doron Kotler said that all of the injured had been evacuated to hospitals in the area.

MDA spokesman Yeruha Mendola said the four seriously injured had been evacuated to Beilinson and Meir hospitals.

According to police, the blast was most likely caused by a suicide bomber. Kfar Sava is situated close to the 1967 Green Line border and the West Bank town of Qalqilya.

Israel Radio reported that the blast occurred in an electrical store.

About Those Checkpoints

Palestinians complain bitterly about the humiliation and hardships they suffer due to Israeli army checkpoints. NGOs continually demand the checkpoints be lifted, so Palestinians can travel freely. The restrictions are routinely held up as examples of Israel’s oppression of the Palestinian population.

There’s just one problem with all this whining, one small detail that always seems to escape notice.

Palestinians often attempt to smuggle these things into Israel.

The Best of Friends

Yesterday the oil parasites of the House of Saud told the US and the UN that they wouldn’t participate in action against Iraq. Today Iraq is gloating.

BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Iraq hailed Saudi Arabia, a key U.S. regional ally, on Monday for saying it would not allow the United States to use its territory to launch a military attack against Iraq.

"Saudi Arabia is thanked for its position which goes in line with Arab solidarity," Iraq's Culture Minister Hamed Yousif Hummadi told reporters.

Hummadi was commenting on Saudi Foreign Minister Saud al- Faisal's comments on CNN on Sunday in which he said his country would not allow Washington to use its facilities for any attack against neighboring Iraq even if a strike was sanctioned by the United Nations.

sunday, november 03, 2002

Our Allies in the War on Terror

Once again the House of Saud thumbs its nose at the United States.

"We will cooperate with the [U.N.] Security Council, but as to entering the conflict or using the facilities as part of the conflict, that's something else," Prince Saud al-Faisal told CNN's Christiane Amanpour in a recent interview, when asked about allowing overflights by U.S. forces.

"So that's a 'no'?" Amanpour asked. "No," al-Faisal said.

Who Poison da Atmosphere? Who?

Joseph Alexander Norland asks himself if his attitude toward Saudi Arabia has been poisoned by the International Zionist Conspiracy™, as Saudi foreign minister Saud al-Faisal recently told the Arab Thought Foundation. (No jokes, please.) Joseph’s answer is illuminating.

Who Shot Mohammed al-Dura?

Phil Essing emailed a link to this excellent German documentary film about the death of Mohammed al-Dura, poster boy for the Palestinian intifada. It’s about an hour long, in Real video format.

Jordanian Fatwas

Last week US diplomat Laurence Foley was murdered in Jordan. Unless I missed it somehow, the US did nothing in response.

Today a gathering of Islamist preachers in Jordan, organized by the Muslim Brotherhood, called for jihad against the United States.

Scores of Islamist preachers concluded a gathering in Amman on Sunday by issuing a series of fatwas, or religious diktats, calling on Jordanians to wage a jihad against the US.

The meeting, which branded Washington "an enemy of God" was organised by the Islamic Action Front, the political wing of the powerful Muslim Brotherhood, and reflected a widening chasm in the government's relations with its Islamist opposition over Jordan's alliance with the US and Israel.

The fatwas come as the Jordanian authorities continue their hunt for the assassin of Larry Foley, a US aid worker, gunned down in his driveway in West Amman a week ago. No one has yet been charged with the country's first killing of a western official, but the Muslim Brotherhood say dozens of Islamists have been detained in raids across the kingdom, including one member of their executive committee, Mohammed Abu Louz, a preacher in Madaba.

In a thinly veiled address to King Abdullah II (pictured), the fatwa demanded leaders stop hosting US military exercises on Muslim soil, and dubbed those who co-operated with Washington on Iraq as traitors. The preachers also banned Muslims from "selling the American aggressor a morsel of bread or a drop of water," the same day as ministers announced a 77 per cent surge in Jordan's annual exports to the United States.

Islamists Hate Dogs

“Conservative” Iranian cleric (conservative apparently meaning “raving mean-hearted creep” in this instance) Hojatolislam Hassani has called for all dogs to be arrested.

A conservative Iranian cleric has denounced the "moral depravity" of owning a dog, and called for the arrest of all dogs and their owners.

Dogs are considered unclean in Islamic law and the spread of dog ownership in Westernised secular circles in Iran is frowned upon by the religious establishment.

"I demand the judiciary arrest all dogs with long, medium or short legs - together with their long-legged owners," Hojatolislam Hassani is quoted as saying in the reformist Etemad newspaper.

"Otherwise I'll do it myself," said the outspoken cleric, who leads Friday prayers in the north-western city of Urumiyeh.

"In our country there is freedom of speech, but not freedom for corruption," he said.

It must be lonely to be a hate-bound militant Muslim fanatic.

Jeez. That picture above is why LGF is falling way behind in the BLOODY HUNGRY Contest.

Dictator on the Make

These photos from the Libyan beauty pageant mentioned below are such surreal jaw-droppers I had to make copies, because who knows how long they’ll be available on the Miss Net World 2002 site? I’ve included the original captions. This is true comedy gold.

Miss @ Net USA Tecca Zendik and Colonel Ghadafi

Ghadafi excuses for telling bad about America

Miss @ Net USA cries listening to the story about the bombing of Ghadafi's house

Peaceful Religion Watch

Once again we visit the mosques of the Arab world and listen to what the spiritual leaders of Islam are saying to the flock.

It ain’t “love thy neighbor.”

On the official television station of the Palestinian Authority, from Shaykh Ijlin mosque in Gaza:

An unidentified shaykh delivers the sermon. He praises God, the messenger, and his companions, saying that Almighty God "warns us of the Jews and their characters." He also says God protected the prophet "from Jews' cunning, treachery, and ideological terrorism." The imam then congratulates those "who have won the confidence of the Palestinian Legislative Council and the brother president," hoping that they will succeed in serving the people and the country. He says that the Koran and the prophet's tradition brand the Jews "with arrogance, rampaging, treachery, and deception," accusing them of "killing people, shedding blood, and triggering wars" on the blessed land of Palestine. Therefore, he says, God "transformed them into monkeys and pigs," stressing that God will punish them and urging Muslims to close ranks and abide by the Islamic law.

Only then, he says, will God stand by us, have mercy on us, and grant us success and victory.

Concluding, the imam prays to God: "O God, give us victory over our enemies and have mercy on our martyrs. O God, destroy the hypocrite agents. O God, destroy them. O God, give us victory over the Jews and their supporters."

On one of the official TV stations of Saudi Arabia, from the holy mosque in Mecca:

Concluding, he prays to God: "O God, give power to Islam and Muslims, humiliate infidelity and infidels, destroy Islam's enemies, and protect the Islamic countries." He goes on: "O God, support our mujahidin bothers in Palestine, Kashmir, and Chechnya and destroy the aggressor Jews and the tyrannical Zionists, for they are within your power."

On official Iraqi television, from Umm-al-Ma'arik (Mother of Battles) Mosque in Baghdad:

Concluding, the imam prays to God: "O God, support Islam and Muslims, elevate justice and Islam, help believers score victory over infidels, and protect our country. O God, give victory to your mujahidin servants in Iraq and Palestine." He goes on: "O God, destroy the Americans and Zionists. O God, hang their flags at half-mast. O God, weaken them. O God, shake the ground under them. O God, give success to mujahid leader President Saddam Husayn."

On the official television station of the Republic of Yemen, from the Grand Mosque in Sanaa:

Shaykh Akram Abd-al-Razzaq al-Ruqayhi delivers the sermon...

Turning to politics, the imam says: "The sons of monkeys and the grandsons of pigs are committing aggression against the Palestinian people. ...

Concluding, the imam prays to God: "O God, support those supporting Islam. O God, support the mujahidin in Palestine and elsewhere. O God, help them score victory over their enemy. O God, destroy the Zionist aggressors and the unjust Americans and their supporters."

And on the official television station of the State of Qatar (who is supposed to be one of our main allies in the region), from Umar Bin-al-Khattab Mosque in Doha:

Saykh Yusuf al-Qaradawi delivers the sermon. ...

The imam then urges Qataris to abide by the law issued by the State of Qatar banning smoking at public places, schools, universities, and elsewhere. He also calls on Muslims to send the price they pay for cigarettes to the Palestinians and "to boycott Zionist and US goods," because "the battle is becoming fiercer." ...

Concluding, the imam prays to God: "O God, give us victory over your enemies, the enemies of Islam. O God, protect us from their evils, weaken them, wipe them out, destroy their power, and prevent them from committing aggression against your servants. O God, destroy the aggressor, treacherous Jews. O God, destroy the aggressor Americans. O God, destroy the fanatic pagans. O God, destroy the tyrannical Crusaders."

Suddenly He’s Everywhere

Saddam Hussein has ordered his agents to murder Iraqi opposition leaders in Britain. He’s also making a last-ditch attempt to get help (the exploding kind) from other Arab leaders, including wacky old Muammar Gaddafi.

In the past few months, senior members of his Ba'athist regime have visited a number of Arab countries to lobby for support. Intelligence officials were particularly interested in a recent visit to Libya by Saddam's cousin, Ali Hassan al-Majid, who is wanted for war crimes over his role in using chemical weapons against the Kurds at Halabja in 1988. "Chemical Ali", as he is known in Baghdad, spent several hours with Col Gaddafi.

Apart from asking for assistance with killing opposition figures, al-Majid is also believed to have asked for Libyan help in carrying out terrorist attacks against British and US targets in Europe and the Middle East. Saddam is also keen to target the Gulf states of Bahrain and Qatar, which are the main bases for US forces in the region. The Libyan leader's response to the requests is not known.

Kooky Kolonel Gaddafi has a lot on his plate these days; he’s leaving the Arab League, trying to cut a deal with the Pan Am Flight 103 families, training Indonesian terrorists, trying to restart diplomatic relations with Italy and France, and manufacturing nerve gas with help from German technicians.

Yet somehow, in among the diplomacy and the chemical weapons and the legal maneuvering, the old lizard still finds time to party.

saturday, november 02, 2002

Osama Spawn Nabbed?

One of Osama Bin Laden’s many sons may have been captured in Iran.

LONDON (AP) - Iranian security forces have detained one of Osama bin Laden's sons among several hundred people suspected of links to the al-Qaida terror network, the Financial Times reported on its Web site Saturday.

Citing an unidentified Iranian official, the newspaper said Iran had handed bin Laden's son over to authorities in either Saudi Arabia or Pakistan. The paper, which does not appear on Sundays, planned to publish the story in its Monday edition, said spokesman Gregory Roth.

The newspaper's report could not be independently verified.

In Washington, State Department spokeswoman Anne Marks said, "We are aware of the report and are looking into it."

Bin Laden has at least 23 children by several wives. One of the oldest, Saad bin Laden, who is about 22, has emerged as an al-Qaida leader and one of America's top two dozen targets in the network. Mohammed and Ahmed bin Laden also support their father's efforts, U.S. officials say.

The official quoted by the Financial Times did not identify the son he said was detained. He reportedly said the man was captured with a group of people suspected of having links to al-Qaida as they fled Afghanistan.

Saudis Ready for Jihad

The BBC quotes an anonymous Saudi “religious scholar” who says if the US attacks Iraq, there are whole regions in Saudi Arabia ready for jihad.

The religious leader, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said thousands of people in tribal areas in the north and the south of the country knew how to use arms and would not stand idly by if America invaded Iraq.

And many weapons were available on the black market at an affordable price to most Saudis.

The Saudi government categorically rejects any suggestion that there are many Islamic militants in the country.

But the Muslim scholar said the Saudi Government could not control young Saudi fighters, or jihadis, who were determined to cross the border into Iraq in the event of an American attack.

He said the Americans might have been justified in the past to strike Iraq in order to liberate Kuwait, but a war this time would be an act of aggression without justification.

The sheikh is well-known figure in some parts of Saudi Arabia and is banned from preaching because of his criticism of the government.

The BBC has not been able to ascertain whether he has a large following in Saudi Arabia.

He said many young Saudis had been seeking his advice on jihad in case America attacks Iraq.

"I fear they won't even listen to me," he said.

"Their religious sentiment has become so strong I fear it's too late to do anything about it.

"But if someone comes to me wanting to go to Jihad and has military training, I cannot advise him against it because, in Islamic law, if a Muslim country is attacked, all neighbouring countries should support it in the battle."

Welcome to the Dark Side

I had Michele’s blog in our links from almost the first day LGF was up. She’s a pissed off chick who writes really well, and doesn’t take scheisse from anyone. What’s not to like?

Now Michele’s been the target of a smear campaign similar to the one mounted against LGF, with holier-than-thou “friends” who make sanctimonious public statements about how Michele has gone over to the dark side, and remove their links to her.

Well, I’d like to welcome Michele to the dark side. You’ll find it’s actually not dark at all; in fact, it’s a lot like taking off a blindfold.

Inept Arab Hackers

Andrew Weisburd noticed some Arab script kiddies trying to hack into his site last week, using a program that searches for more than 500 known vulnerabilities. We saw the same thing at LGF on Monday and Tuesday night; in fact, every day we see script kiddies from Arab countries attempting various hacks. The effort last week was unusual in its sheer persistence. I picture a kid at an Aramco terminal, swearing to himself, “O God, show the infidel server a black day. Though my script has failed to find formmail.pl the past 37 times, let it magically appear among the directories of the infidel, that I may destroy them, in sh'allah.”

A Hostage’s Story

Elena Yaroshuk was one of the hostages in the Moscow theater; here’s her story, with lots of new details about the nightmarish ordeal. (Hat tip: Jal Hampson.)

Angry Cyclist Confronts Weenie Prof

Roger Bournival has posted a very amusing (and revealing) email exchange with New Hampshire professor Marc Herold, author of the spurious Afghan civilian casualties study that has been soundly debunked by many sources—yet still continues to be quoted by media. Herold turns out to be (surprise!) quite the weenie.

Dubious Council

The New Republic advocates kicking France out of the UN Security Council.

In truth, France's fantasies of grandeur--fantasies that are decades, if not centuries, out of date--would be laughable, except that they are taken seriously in Turtle Bay. And so the Bush administration must endlessly negotiate with a country whose Iraq policy is motivated by petro-dollars and anti-American resentment, particularly the anti-American (and anti-Western) resentment of its Muslim immigrant masses. Why not stop the charade and let France veto the Iraq resolution? The United States and its allies could, on their own, eliminate the unconventional weapons of that most unconventional tyrant, Saddam Hussein. And, as a side benefit, the United Nations would suffer a humiliation so profound that it might force some long-overdue reconsideration of the Security Council's anachronistic composition. For international organizations to be relevant, privilege must follow power, and for them to be admirable, privilege must follow decency. Nothing would more dramatically further both goals than dethroning France.

NPR: Oily As Usual

I haven’t listened to NPR (National Palestinian Radio) for quite a while, and the program I just heard reminded me why. In at least a half hour of slobbery pro-Arab coverage, speaker after speaker talked about Arab “anger” at “US policy” toward Israel. No one mentioned specifics. The “news” report from Saudi Arabia uncritically repeated Saudi claims that they have “called” for an end to the hate speech in their mosques and media, without mentioning that the hate speech hasn’t actually stopped. In the whole program there was not one word of truth about Arab rejectionism and anti-Semitism, or their open support of Palestinian terrorism. And not one word of balancing opinion from the Israeli side. It was pretty shameful, and all delivered in that semi-spooky over-earnest NPR voice.

But a columnist for the Jordan Times revealed something I haven’t seen reported anywhere else; he said numerous polls throughout the Arab world show that 60-70% of Arabs strongly support Bin Laden and Al Qaeda.

A clash of civilizations, indeed.

Genocide: Sudan Found Guilty

Nat Hentoff writes about the long-overdue passage of the Sudan Peace Act, a landmark document accusing the Sudanese National Islamic Front of genocide.

"The National Assembly in Khartoum urged Arabs and Muslims throughout the world to denounce the law, calling it 'a breach of Sudan's sovereignty' . . . The Sudanese chargé d'affaires in Washington, Dr. Harun Khidir, blamed 'members of the extremist Christian right groups and a group of the black masses' for pushing the Sudan Peace Act through Congress. . . .

"Following congressional approval of the legislation, Islamist officials organized a mass demonstration in Khartoum in support of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, during which an effigy of President Bush, wrapped in American and Israeli flags and labeled 'the corpse of imperialism,' was torn to shreds and burnt." (The latter story was reported by Agence France-Presse on October 16).

Colin Powell might have been added to the bonfire had the slavemasters known—as I have found out—that Powell, behind the scenes, was an important factor in getting the Bush administration to finally move on abolishing slavery in Sudan. Powell is the man Harry Belafonte calls "a house slave." In all the years I've been involved in this story, I do not recall Belafonte being an active, persistent member of the New Abolitionists working to liberate the blacks of Sudan—although he has been prominent in other human rights causes. Powell has been significantly involved in the anti-slavery movement.

friday, november 01, 2002

Too Soft on Pakistan

India’s foreign minister Yashwant Sinha says the West is being too soft on Pakistan. He’s right.

New Delhi has been furious that the west has not taken a harder line with President Musharraf, who pledged to crack down on militants crossing into Indian Kashmir before the elections in the state earlier this month.

Mr Sinha said 800 people were killed in terrorist violence during the election campaign, including candidates and a state minister.

"Terrorism in Kashmir is entirely imported and exported by Pakistan," he said. "The international community calls Pakistan a stalwart ally, so the terrorists in Pakistan are bad and the terrorists in Jammu and Kashmir are good.

"If the international community want to live with this definition then good luck to the international community. But it is the same al-Qaida fellow who comes into Jammu and Kashmir, who goes to Bali, who goes Singapore, who goes to the US and who comes to Europe."

It was the responsibility of countries such as the US and Britain to force Pakistan to act, he said. If they could not, then India would respond "without restraint".

The Cairo Chronicle

For once the State Department does the right thing.

WASHINGTON - The United States has told Egypt and other Arab governments that their state-run television stations should not broadcast a series alleged to give credence to the forged Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

"We don't think government TV stations should be broadcasting programs that we consider racist and untrue," a senior State Department official said on Thursday.

"It is a series ... supposedly on other topics, but that incorporates or is based on these odious protocols, the Elders of Zion. We have raised it with (Egypt and) other governments," said State Department spokesman Richard Boucher.

Of course, there are no teeth in this statement, and the Egyptians are denying there’s anything anti-Semitic about the program.

But Egyptian Information Minister Safwat el-Sherif denied that the series included anything anti-Semitic.

Meanwhile, on the left coast of the US the San Francisco Chronicle seems to agree—with the Egyptians.

Sobhi's series appears to take much of its inspiration from the infamous "Protocols of the Elders of Zion," the alleged blueprint for Jewish global domination almost universally regarded in the West as an anti-Semitic fraud first perpetrated by czarist secret police in 19th century Russia. ...

Despite the thick anti-Israel sentiments in the Middle East, many Mideast scholars doubt the authenticity of the "Protocols."

The author, Ashraf Khalil of the “Chronicle Foreign Service,” actually seems to be implying that the authenticity of the “Protocols” is open to debate.

This isn’t the first time Khalil’s byline has appeared in the Chronicle; we busted them last May when they reprinted a piece of his that originally appeared in Egypt’s Cairo Times. Once again the Chronicle is acting as a mouthpiece for Egyptian propaganda, unquestioned and uncredited.

Hamas in the US

Bill Gertz reports that US intelligence agencies have received “uncorroborated” warnings that Hamas is planning attacks inside the United States.

Jihad and the Professors

Recently Daniel Pipes surveyed more than two dozen academic experts on Islam, about the meaning of the word jihad—and the results paint a disturbing picture of near universal falsification and whitewashing. His new essay about the survey is an authoritative history lesson, and a crushing refutation to the apologists: Jihad and the Professors.

It is an intellectual scandal that, since September 11, 2001, scholars at American universities have repeatedly and all but unanimously issued public statements that avoid or whitewash the primary meaning of jihad in Islamic law and Muslim history. It is quite as if historians of medieval Europe were to deny that the word "crusade" ever had martial overtones, instead pointing to such terms as "crusade on hunger" or "crusade against drugs" to demonstrate that the term signifies an effort to improve society.

Among today's academic specialists who have undertaken to sanitize this key Islamic concept, many are no doubt acting out of the impulses of political correctness and the multiculturalist urge to protect a non-Western civilization from criticism by making it appear just like our own. As for Islamists among those academics, at least some have a different purpose: like CAIR and other, similar organizations, they are endeavoring to camouflage a threatening concept by rendering it in terms acceptable within university discourse. Non-Muslim colleagues who play along with this deception may be seen as having effectively assumed the role of dhimmi, the Islamic term for a Christian or Jew living under Muslim rule who is tolerated so long as he bends the knee and accepts Islam's superiority.

As I can attest, one who dares to dissent and utter the truth on the matter of jihad falls under enormous censure—and not just in universities. In June of this year, in a debate with an Islamist on ABC's Nightline, I stated: "The fact is, historically speaking—I speak as a historian—jihad has meant expanding the realm of Islam through armed warfare." More recently, on a PBS Lehrer NewsHour program about alleged discrimination against Muslims in the United States, a clip was shown of a role-playing seminar, conducted by the Muslim Public Affairs Council, in which Muslim "activists" were practicing how to deal with "hostile" critics. As part of this exercise, my image was shown to the seminar as I spoke my sentence from the Nightline debate. The comment on this scene by the show's PBS narrator ran as follows: "Muslim activists have been troubled by critics who have publicly condemned Islam as a violent and evil religion." We have thus reached a point where merely to state a well-known fact about Islam earns one the status of a hostile bigot on a prestigious and publicly funded television show.

Graham Defends Hezbollah

Yesterday Canadian Foreign Affairs Minister Bill Graham defended his government’s refusal to outlaw Hezbollah, because it would “hurt charity workers.”

The Canadian Alliance, questioning Graham in both the Commons foreign affairs committee and in question period, said the government is "irresponsible" for not banning the group.

But Graham made a clear distinction between Hezbollah's military side and its social and religious arm.

"Hezbollah has two dimensions to it and we clearly put the Hezbollah military wing on our United Nations terrorist list," he said.

"They're prohibited from raising funds in this country ... they are frozen."

But he pointed out that Hezbollah's social wing in the Middle East contains politicians, lawyers, doctors and teachers.

"We are not going to label as terrorists innocent people without a clear proof that they are actually engaged in terrorist activities," he said.

Graham also said outlawing all of Hezbollah might hamper Canada's ability to act in Middle East peace negotiations.

My only question after reading this: is Bill Graham stupid, or is he a liar?

Solidarity with Apologists

When Daniel Pipes launched Campus Watch he received a flood of emails from faculty and graduate students requesting to be listed on the site in “solidarity” with the apologists for suicide bombings and militant Islam. So he complied with their requests.

Most of the writers are academics from fields other than Middle East studies (and so are not qualified to judge the work of the academics we listed) and few of them addressed the concerns and problems listed by Campus Watch on its homepage. Still, the fact that these individuals insist on declaring solidarity in public with academics that Campus Watch has identified as apologists for Palestinian and Islamist violence is important information for university stakeholders to be aware of, so we are posting their names, in compliance with their wishes.

Al Qaedism

Victor Davis Hanson says you don’t need a membership card to work for Al Qaeda.

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 frank says:

Lord have mercy on the people in England for the terrible food these people must eat. And Lord have mercy on the fate of this movie and God bless the mind of the man in the street.