Jihad Watch

From Yahoo News:

NEW YORK, Feb. 6, 2012 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Popular television host and bestselling author Michael Coren has been added to the speakers list of the first-ever human rights conference dedicated to exposing the plight of women under Islamic law in Dearborn, Michigan on the anniversary of the honor murder of Jessica Mokdad: the Jessica Mokdad Human Rights Conference. Hosted by the prominent human rights organization American Freedom Defense Initiative (AFDI), its Stop Islamization of America (SIOA) program and the Virginia Anti-Shariah Task Force (VAST), the conference will be held in the Hyatt Regency in Dearborn on April 29.

Michael Coren hosts The Arena with Michael Coren on Canada's Sun News TV every week night at 7 p.m. ET, repeated at midnight ET. The best of the week's shows is also repeated 7 p.m. ET Saturday and Sunday. Coren's last TV show won numerous awards, both in Canada and the U.S. The Arena features some of the most exciting, original, and provocative guests from all over the world, with interviews in studio, and in the U.S., Europe and the Middle East.

Michael Coren is also a weekly columnist, published every Saturday, with the Toronto, Ottawa, Calgary, Edmonton and Winnipeg Sun and The London Free Press and in more than a dozen other daily and weekly newspapers across Canada. He is also a columnist for Women's Post, The Catholic Register, The Landowner and The Interim. He is the best-selling author of thirteen books, including biographies of GK Chesterton, HG Wells, Arthur Conan Doyle, JRR Tolkien and CS Lewis. He has contributed to the Dictionary of National Biography and several other anthologies. He is published in many countries and in more than a dozen languages. He has received several honorary doctorates and awards for his writing and broadcasting. In 2005, he won The Ed Murrow Award for Radio Broadcasting, in 2006 The RTNDA Radio Broadcasting Award, in 2007 the Communicator Award in Hollywood and in 2008 the Omni Award for his television show.

The Jessica Mokdad Human Rights Conference will be held at the Hyatt Hotel in Dearborn. After bowing to Islamic supremacist pressure and canceling a speech by Pamela Geller that had been scheduled for a Hyatt in Nashville, Tennessee, the Hyatt reversed its stance, recovered its understanding of the American principle of free speech, apologized and offered AFDI space in a Hyatt for a future Conference to make it up to the human rights organization. Geller chose the Hyatt in Dearborn to stand in solidarity there with girls who are in danger of being victimized like Jessica Mokdad.

Along with Michael Coren, the confirmed list of speakers includes ex-Muslim human rights activist Nonie Darwish; Sudanese ex-slave and freedom fighter Simon Deng; and James Lafferty of the Virginia Anti-Shariah Taskforce (VAST), co-host of the Conference. Also speaking will be David Wood of Acts 17 Apologetics, a Christian group that is suing the city of Dearborn for covering up Islamic honor killings performed in the area - that cover-up, and the resulting suit, will also be a focus of the Jessica Mokdad Human Rights Conference. View a video about the conference here.

Hosting the Conference and also speaking are AFDI/SIOA executive director Pamela Geller, publisher of the acclaimed AtlasShrugs.com blog, executive director of AFDI and SIOA, and author of Stop the Islamization of America: A Practical Guide to the Resistance (WND Books); and AFDI/SIOA associate director Robert Spencer, the bestselling author and director of Jihad Watch.

Jessica Mokdad was a 20-year-old Muslim woman in Warren, Michigan, who was brutally murdered in May 2011. Fox News Detroit reported: "Authorities say a Minnesota man killed his 20-year-old stepdaughter in Michigan because she left home and wasn't following Islam." Jessica's stepfather, a devout Muslim, tracked his stepdaughter over four states to murder her for bringing dishonor on her family.

Geller said in a statement: "Despite pressure from the media and members of Jessica's family who want to cover up the honor killing aspect of her murder, we are not going to change the name of the conference. Unlike those closest to her, we are going to honor Jessica's memory and stand up against the brutal practice that took her life." Several Mokdad family members have alleged that Jessica's murder was not an honor killing, despite the overwhelming evidence that it was. However, multiple news reports on the murder were quite clear that her stepfather killed Jessica because she "wasn't following Islam" (report from TwinCities.com) and was "not adhering to Muslim customs" (Star Tribune).

Arab American News reported that the last recorded dispute between Jessica Mokdad and her stepfather was over the wearing of the hijab (head scarf), which he originally forced her to wear (just as in the honor murder of Canadian teen Aqsa Parvez). Jessica didn't want to wear it, thereby bringing shame on him and the family. Her stepfather, Rahim Alfetlawi, who murdered her, was pathologically controlling, after the pattern of honor killers. At one point she called her father and told him: "Dad, I can't live here anymore, he's too strict, I can't even go to the store to buy a pop if I want."

Macomb County Assistant Prosecutor Bill Contaldo said: "He thought she was becoming too Westernized. I think this was a very nice young lady wanting to experiment with Western culture without control and without abuse." The Detroit Free Press reported: "Mokdad's mother told police that Alfetlawi felt so shamed by her daughter's Western ways, he killed her in an honor killing," Warren Police Sgt. Stephen Mills said. Alfetlawi was so concerned about her behavior that he even forced her to go to a mosque and marry her boyfriend.

The Daily Mail reported this from London: "Devout Muslim stalks his step-daughter over four states 'before killing her for being too Western." The Daily Tribune reported: Stepfather charged with murder in Warren, upset victim didn't adhere to Muslim customs.

And Alexis Wiley of Fox Detroit reported, "He forced her to wear a traditional head scarf instead of allowing her to make that decision on her own, and when she stopped wearing a scarf, friends say he became furious."

Geller said in a statement: "We've named the Conference after her as part of our ongoing campaign to raise awareness and bring a stop to the phenomenon of Islamic honor killing. These girls have rights, too, they're human beings, and yet they're completely forgotten in our politically correct culture, in which speech that is offensive to Islam is increasingly forbidden. We're standing for the human rights of girls like Jessica Mokdad."

AFDI/SIOA is one of America's foremost organizations defending human rights, religious liberty, and the freedom of speech against Islamic supremacist intimidation and attempts to bring elements of Sharia to the United States.

Join the SIOA Facebook group here.

For more information, contact Pamela Geller at writeatlas@aol.com.

More shameless Islamophobia. "Chicago cabbie pleads guilty in terror case," by Michael Tarm for the Associated Press, February 6 (thanks to Bill):

CHICAGO—A Pakistani-born Chicago taxi driver who prosecutors say could be heard on FBI wiretaps discussing a plan to bomb a stadium pleaded guilty Monday to attempting to send money to a Pakistani-based terrorist with alleged ties to al-Qaida.

Standing before a federal judge in an orange jumpsuit and his ankles shackled, Raja Lahrasib Khan, 58, said he was pleading guilty to one count of two counts of attempting to provide material support terrorism. As part of the plea deal, prosecutors dropped the other count.

The agreement recommends a sentence of between five and eight years, well short of the maximum 15 years for a conviction of a single count of providing material support. A sentencing date was set for May 30, the U.S. attorney's office said.

Outside court, defense attorney Thomas Durkin said finding jurors who could give his client a fair trial would have been difficult, suggesting that was one reason Khan accepted the deal with prosecutors.

"The word 'al-Qaida' scares the bejesus out of people and that's all (jurors) have to hear," he said. "But it was a difficult case ... and the (agreement) was fair under the circumstances."

Prosecutors did not speak to reporters after Monday's hearing.

Khan was arrested in 2010 and accused of taking steps to send cash to Pakistan-based terrorist leader Ilyas Kashmiri after Kashmiri indicated he needed money to buy explosives. Khan, prosecutors said, believed Kashmiri was getting his orders from Osama bin Laden.

Khan, who became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 1988, sent $950 in 2009 to an individual in Pakistan for delivery to Kashmiri; he also took $1,000 from an undercover agent and said it would be used to buy weapons and possibly other supplies, prosecutors alleged.

A 35-page complaint affidavit filed after Khan's arrest also accused him of discussing the possibility of planting bags of bombs around an unspecified stadium, saying in one wiretap, "Put one bag here, one there, one there ... you know, boom, boom, boom, boom."

Khan, though, was never charged with such an attempted attack as prosecutors focused instead on allegations the he sent money intended as aid for Osama bin Laden's terrorist network, al-Qaida...

In a separate case, Lebanese immigrant Sami Samir Hassoun recently agreed to plead guilty to placing a backpack he thought held a bomb near the Chicago Cubs' Wrigley Field, in a deal experts have said may reflect the odds he, and other terror suspects, face at trial....

In my FrontPage column this morning I discuss some of the many indications that we are now living through Jimmy Carter's long-delayed second term:

The Egyptian Government has released the names of nineteen American citizens that it intends to prosecute for their role in fomenting anti-government protests – a charge they deny. Protests from the American Government have so far been futile, met with sneers of contempt.

The echoes are unmistakable. On November 4, 1979, Iranian thugs stormed the U.S. Embassy in Tehran and took 52 Americans hostage. Jimmy Carter’s government wrung its hands in futility for the next fourteen months, until finally the Islamic Republic released the hostages on January 20, 1981, the day Ronald Reagan took office as President of the United States.

The bitter irony in all that was that Carter had betrayed the Shah of Iran, a longtime U.S. ally, and thereby paved the way for the ascent to power of the Ayatollah Khomeini and the Iranian mullahcracy that has ruled Iran ever since. Rather than feel gratitude toward Carter, however, Khomeini viewed his abandonment of the Shah as a sign of weakness, and pressed forward with his jihad against the Great Satan.

Iran has maintained a hostile posture toward the United States ever since then, including gleeful predictions of our nation’s imminent demise. Just days ago, Iran’s Supreme Leader, the Ayatollah Khamenei, declared to an enthusiastic Tehran crowd that “in light of the realization of the divine promise by almighty God, the Zionists and the Great Satan (America) will soon be defeated….Allah’s promises will be delivered and Islam will be victorious.”

As the Iranian regime inches ever closer toward constructing nuclear weapons, as even Hillary Clinton has acknowledged it is trying to do, these words become more than just empty braggadocio and saber-rattling. The U.S. and Israel have one man to thank for the advent of a genocide-minded regime that considers them both the most implacable of enemies, is not deterred by the prospect of millions of its own people dead, and is racing toward completion of a nuclear weapon.

That man, of course, is Jimmy Carter. And from the looks of recent events, he is back in the White House.

In June 2009, when Barack Obama made his notorious appeal to the Muslim world from Cairo, he specifically stipulated that leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood be allowed to attend – despite the fact that at that time the Brotherhood was still an outlawed group. Last March, as the “Arab Spring” uprisings toppled the sclerotic and brutal regime of Hosni Mubarak, Obama hailed “the peaceful transition to democracy in both Tunisia and in Egypt.” As the regime fell, Obama exulted: “We’ve borne witness to the beginning of new chapter in the history of a great country and a longtime partner of the United States.”

At the same time, Obama signaled his willingness to open talks with the Muslim Brotherhood, and gave every indication that he would not oppose the establishment of an Islamic state in Egypt.

Now, as Egypt rushes headlong toward becoming a Sharia state and adopts a posture of increasing hostility toward the United States, Obama is scrambling to hold at bay the forces he is largely responsible for unleashing.

There is more.

Eric Allen Bell, with whom I'll be appearing on the Jamie Glazov Show tonight, has written a revealing overview of what happens to someone on the Left who discovers the truth about Islam: "The High Price of Telling the Truth About Islam," in FrontPage today:

[Editor's note: The article below is written by Eric Allen Bell, a filmmaker who was recently banned from blogging at the “Daily Kos” because he wrote three articles that ran afoul of the mindset there, specifically naming “Loonwatch.com” as a “terrorist spin control network.” Frontpage invited him to tell his story, which he does below.]

Bell recounts his experiences filming a documentary in favor of the controversial mosque in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, and then:

...Although I had left town to edit, there continued to be letters to the editor on a few of the local papers saying that I should leave TN and go back to where I came from. I could not believe the cartoonish way in which those who opposed the mosque were making their case. I felt like I was on the right side of this thing – absolutely certain. But in fact, I was wrong.

Everything I have told you up until now – this version of my story – is exactly how I was seeing things up until something changed. I went home to Los Angeles, showed my 25 minute short version of the documentary to some distributors and backers, and did the usual dog and pony show that had worked so well to raise funds, for other motion picture projects I had been involved with in the past. And sure enough someone said they would back the completion of the movie. It was decided that the focus would be on “the enemy at home” that being what we were calling “Apocalyptic Christianity” (as there was concern about using the word “Zionism” in “Christian Zionism”). The Murfreesboro issue was to be used as something of a jumping off point to take a look at the expanding influence of the End Times Evangelical lobby in the United States and how they use their influence to manufacture consent for the bombing of oil rich Islamic countries and to influence policy on social issues. The theme would focus on the problems we have in America, with our own religious lunatic fringe, rather than on a peaceful group of non-Christians who just wanted to build a place of worship.

After writing a few articles for Michael Moore, I also wrote for a liberal blog called Common Dreams and I wrote over a hundred articles for the Daily Kos, a liberal blog so popular that they receive over one million visitors a day. I felt I was protecting the underdog, going after the bullies. I really believed that I was on the right side of this thing.

But something kept nagging at me on a gut level. Something about all of this didn’t quite feel right. The Arab Spring, which I supported, started to degenerate into the Islamist Winter, and I grew more and more concerned. I flew back to Nashville to shoot a conference on whether or not Islam was conducive with Democratic Values and on the way to my hotel room I learned that my cab driver was from Egypt. I asked him how he felt about the fall of Mubarak, a dictator worth over $70 billion dollars while so much of his country was living in poverty and he told me he was concerned. Concerned? Wasn’t this good news? The cab driver was a Coptic Christian and he told me that he feared for his family back home. “If the Muslims take control, and they will, it will be very dangerous for my parents and my sisters. I’m scared for them right now”. After that conversation, I started to pay more attention to the news coming from the Islamic world in the Middle East.

Over the coming months I watched as the Muslim Brotherhood gained political power in Egypt. I saw that cab driver’s worst fears come true as Coptic Christians were attacked by Islamic mobs. I saw Tunisia institute Sharia, the brutal Islamic Law. After Libya fell, the Transitional Council also instituted Islamic Law. The nuclear armed Islamic government of Pakistan arrested and punished those who cooperated with the United States in killing Osama Bin Laden. A woman under the Islamic government of Afghanistan faced execution for the crime of being raped. Similar news stories emerged from Iran. A man who typed “there is no god” as his Facebook status in Indonesia, the largest Islamic country in the world, was arrested for blasphemy.

Several Muslim men in England were arrested for handing out leaflets to Londoners demanding that homosexuals be executed by hanging for violating Islamic Law with their lifestyle.

And it struck me. Even though these angry townspeople in Mufreesboro, TN had not articulated their concerns very well, they were only half wrong. I remember meeting Frank Gaffney and interviewing him in front of the courthouse and asking him if he really thought that the peaceful Muslims here actually presented a real threat to America and he said no. That caught me off guard so I asked if he really thought it was a credible threat that a community that makes up about one percent of the United States population was just going to suddenly rise up one day and try to take over the country and force Sharia Law onto all of us. Again he said no. Then he told me I was asking the wrong questions. He suggested that I was only looking for answers that would support the conclusions I had already arrived at. He said he had, after much research, arrived at a different set of conclusions and he challenged me to look a little deeper. He gave me a report to look at and many, many months later I did look at his report.

It was at this time that I went to my backers and told them that we were not making an honest documentary. I felt that everything I had put into the 25 minute short version (the one I used to raise the completion funds) was true, but only half true. It was critical that we also show the very real threats that exist within Islam. We needed to show that what is happening to these small communities of peaceful Muslims in America are the exception to the rule. I wanted to show what happens to countries when they gain a Muslim majority, how women are treated, that homosexuals were executed, that free speech did not exist, that the forced Islamic Law was not consistent with Democratic Values – anything and everything I could think of that ought to strike a chord with the Liberal mindset. And the response I received was, “Eric you are starting to sound like an Islamophobe. We don’t want to make a movie that promotes fear. Let’s just stick with the existing plan, okay?”

I fought and I fought. I showed them a book called “The Truth About Mohammed” but was struck down since the author was a man named Robert Spencer and my backers pointed out that the Southern Poverty Law Center named his “Jihad Watch” site as part of a hate group. I asked them to watch a documentary called “Islam: What the West Needs to Know” and pointed out that I had researched independently and verified the truth of what was being presented there, but they would not even watch this documentary as they were sure in advance that it was “hate speech” and “propaganda designed to spread fear”. It probably goes without saying that by now I was very frustrated. I showed my new backers several verses from the Koran that call for the killing of infidels and was told that these verses were probably being taken out of context. I showed them a video clip from MEMRI TV of a young Egyptian child reciting a Hadith that calls for the killing of Jews and was told that “you can’t trust MEMRI because they have an agenda”.

I mentioned the popular Islamophobia watchdog site “Loonwatch” and how I had noticed a pattern of deflection all criticisms of radical and violent Islam by calling anyone who publicly raises these concerns a “Loon” and how I felt this was an intentional effort to provide a smoke screen for the terrorists. I also noted that everything Loonwatch said was in lockstep with the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) and now CAIR was named an unindicted co-conspirator in the prosecution of the Holy Land Foundation – the largest Islamic charity at one time, which was found to be funneling monies to Islamic terrorist organizations. I also noted that CAIR had ties to both Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood and that Al Qeada had come out of the Muslim Brotherhood. I expressed my concerns that the Egyptian Imam of the Islamic Center of Murfreesboro might have ties to the MB, something I had failed to properly investigate. But since CAIR had the support of Glenn Greenwald and Amy Goodman’s show, Democracy Now, I was told that I had my facts all wrong. It was also pointed out to me that if CAIR was allegedly some kind of terrorist front then why do they still have a special tax status and why are they still around? When I said I do not know but it was possible that the government might prefer to watch them out in the open rather than risk them going underground I was told that my judgment was sounding less and less clear and that maybe I needed to take a step back from the project for a while.

As a last attempt I showed them footage of the Imam in Murfreesboro condoning stoning, admitting that Mohammed had stoned someone to death, saying that women cannot be trusted with money because they are irrational. Then I pointed out that a board member of the Islamic Center of Murfreesboro was investigated after pictures from his MySpace page had surfaced indicating his strong sympathies for Hamas. I was reminded that Hamas was also a political party which was voted in Democratically and that I needed to make a choice – either stick with the original blueprint or else give the money back and go find myself another backer. So I did. I walked. If I can’t make an honest documentary then I’m in the wrong business. I didn’t want to add to more of the noise that’s out there – I wanted to make something that told the truth, even if that truth is hard to swallow.

It’s funny because I run a website called Global One TV, which has had about 23 million visitors so far, and the theme of this blog is that “Inward Revolution Creates Outward Revolution”. And here I was having to take my own medicine. My own inward revolution – the questioning of one’s conclusions in search of a deeper truth – had led me to a very strange place. I thought of the famous Nietzsche quote that says “When you look into the abyss, the abyss also looks into you”. And with nothing left to lose, I used my position at Daily Kos to go about telling the truth.

In January of 2012 I wrote 3 consecutive articles for the Daily Kos. The first was entitled “Loowatch.com and Radical Islam”. Here I pointed out the how Loonwatch only deflects criticism of radical Islam. I was also critical of Islamic theology while noting over and over that most Muslims were peaceful. The comments section of Daily Kos made me feel like I was attending my own funeral. It was like a public stoning. There wasn’t much in the way of responding to any of the points laid out in my article but hundreds of comments accusing me of being “right wing” a “bigot” and an “lslamophobe”. This was disappointing.

The next day I received an email from Loonwatch.com with an article showing my name and a photograph of my face, going out to much of the Islamic world, calling me the “Loon at Large”. This article was picked up by IslamophobiaToday.com and TheAmericanMuslim.org – later being repurposed by numerous Islamic blogs around the world, including in places where we all know what happens to anyone who is perceived to be the enemy of Allah or who dares to “insult” Islam.

My next article sought to further substantiate my point with regard to these wolves in sheep’s clothing calling themselves “Islamophobia Watchdog sites” and their first line of defense, that being a blogosphere of liberal lemming infidels who are pre-programmed to blurt out the word “Islamophobe” on cue. That article was called “How and Why Loonwatch is a Terrorist Spin Control Network”. And as you might have guessed, this piece was met with the same mob mentality of those who, rather than read the article and criticize it on its merits, instead shot the messenger with charges of “Islamophobia”. There were also 2 Daily Kos articles written in response attacking me personally, another Loonwatch article where someone suggested I must be from TN and have no education, etc. And once again, my name was put out on the street through a network of Islamic Blogs, including the landing page for CAIR, using a form of Islamic double speak which translated to any serious Jihadist means “enemy of Allah” and “insulting Islam”.

Given the incredible density of the popular Liberal mind, how the readers of my articles were unable to see how the beliefs of Islam were in direct conflict with human rights, gay rights, women’s rights and basic Democratic Values, I wrote a final piece called, “Are You In Favor of Human Rights?” and that one of course got me banned from Daily Kos. It should be noted that in one of the Loonwatch.com articles the author, a person simply calling himself “Danios” demanded that DKOS silence me and provided a link for its readers to email the editors of the Daily Kos, demanding that this “Islamophobe” be censored. And it worked – once again proving the oil and water relationship between Islam and tolerance for free speech.

Things got even stranger from there. Robert Spencer himself wrote me an email and we had a rather interesting dialogue. It became apparent almost immediately that there was nothing about this man that was even remotely hateful. So when Robert Spencer asked if I minded if he reprint my email in response to his on Jihad Watch, I said “sure, why not?” Once that surfaced, the friend count on my Facebook fan page dropped suddenly. Friends and acquaintances told me I had become a hatemonger, a fear monger and an Islamophobe. I pointed out that an Islamophobe is someone with an irrational fear of Islam but there was no reasoning with anyone so deeply indoctrinated into the tyranny of political correctness....

Read it all.

Al-Qaeda did not invent the jihadist ideology that drives it, but it is an effective transmitter of tactics to distant theaters of jihad, most notably in the case of suicide bombings. Here, a tactic associated with the Palestinian jihad and the Chechen "black widow" jihadists threatens to make inroads in Britain. "Al-Qaeda bid for Brit girl bombers," by Graeme Wilson for The Sun, February 6:

Al-Qaeda is trying to recruit women to carry out suicide bombings in the UK, MPs warn today.

It is using extremist websites to radicalise the angels of death, says their chilling report.

The Commons home affairs committee says it has heard evidence the terror group is "specifically launching and targeting women for violent acts".

It is already a deadly tactic in the Middle East, where growing numbers of Palestinian women are volunteering for suicide missions against Israel. The MPs' report comes days after four Islamic extremists admitted plotting to bomb the London Stock Exchange.

Woolwich Crown Court heard how the gang — who also had London mayor Boris Johnson on a hit list — had been brainwashed by the twisted ideology of Anwar al-Awlaki, an al-Qaeda leader until the US killed him in Yemen last year.

His attempts to recruit UK Muslims were exposed by The Sun. Last night the committee chairman, Labour's Keith Vaz, said the gang's admissions show "we cannot let our vigilance slip"....

An update on the absurd and surreal saga of Abu Qatada. "Abu Qatada to be released within days," by Tom Whitehead for the Telegraph, February 7:

Abu Qatada, a radical Muslim cleric accused of posing a grave threat to Britain's national security, will be back on the streets within days after judges granted him bail.

Mr Justice Mitting released Qatada despite the Home Office arguing he remains a risk to national security.

His defence team had argued his detention of six and a half years while fighting deportation was unlawful because he did not face any imminent prospect of being removed.

The cleric is wanted in Jordan to stand trial for alleged terror offences and Home Secretary Theresa May battled to keep him behind bars while British diplomats continue to seek assurances from the Jordanian authorities that evidence gained through torture would not be used against him.

Ed Fitzgerald QC, representing Qatada, who is being held in high security conditions, said his client had now been held for six-and-a-half years while fighting deportation - more than anyone else in such a position.

He told the Special Immigration Appeals Commission (Siac) that that was "against a background of almost nine years detention without charges on the grounds of national security"....

He's done alright for himself, however, at one point enjoying an £800,000 home and government benefits. It now appears at this point that he may remain a ward of the British state he so despises for an indefinite period.

The aim of jihad in all of its forms is to impose Sharia law. That is why jihadist movements find common cause with one another, sometimes over vast geographical distances, and it is why purportedly "regional" jihadist conflicts become globally interconnected.

Think jihad globally, wage jihad locally. "Al-Qaeda’s hand in Boko Haram's deadly Nigerian attacks," by David Blair for the Telegraph, February 5:

The radical Islamist group, based in northern Nigeria, once specialised in robbing banks and attacking defenceless Christian congregations. In the past month, however, its gunmen or suicide bombers have struck 21 times, killing at least 253 people.

The Daily Telegraph understands this transformation has come about partly because of the help Boko Haram has received from al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), a branch of the international terrorist network based in the Saharan states of Mali, Niger and Algeria.

Boko Haram demonstrated its new potency on Jan 20, when at least 100 of the movement's fighters executed eight assaults in Nigeria's northern city of Kano, overwhelming the security forces and killing 185 people.

This operation bore all the hallmarks of al-Qaeda: a mixture of suicide bombers and gunmen, some in police or army uniform, carried out multiple, carefully coordinated attacks on hard targets.

Boko Haram destroyed two police stations and the regional police headquarters, and damaged the local office of the State Security Service, Nigeria's version of MI5.

Al-Qaeda's influence was also evident from the choice of weapons: car bombs exploded outside some targets, while police found caches of "improvised explosive devices", with detonators and shrapnel packed into soft drinks cans.

Since then, Boko Haram has kept up the momentum, launching night raids on two more police stations in Kano.

Officials and experts in the Nigerian capital of Abuja believe Boko Haram has learnt its new capabilities from AQIM. Niger, a key operating theatre for AQIM, shares a largely unmarked frontier with Nigeria, spanning 900 miles of desert and scrub.

Boko Haram probably has little need for weapons or money as its fighters are accomplished bank robbers and whenever they raid a police station, they usually empty the armoury. AQIM's contribution is most likely to be in tactics and expertise, with Boko Haram fighters taken out of Nigeria for training.

While the country has a long history of political and religious violence, experts point to the novelty of Boko Haram's techniques.

"Suicide bombing was, until recently, something we saw in the movies," said Chinedu Nwagu, a security analyst from the Cleen Foundation, which monitors Nigeria's justice system.

"People never thought that anybody here would do that".

The Kano attacks, he added, showed a degree of "coordination that you would not just pick up without very specialised training"....

Join us -- "Fired For Islamophobia, Part II — on The Jamie Glazov Show," from FrontPage:

Join the Jamie Glazov Show on Tuesday, February 7, 2012 at 8-9 pm Pacific (11-12 pm EST) on Blog Talk Radio. This week’s guests are:

Eric Allen Bell, a regular blogger for the “Daily Kos” — where he was recently banned for the crime of writing three articles that ran afoul of the mindset there, specifically naming “Loonwatch.com” as a “terrorist spin control network.” He is currently producing a documentary entitled “Not Welcome” that is about the backlash against construction of a 53,000 square foot mega mosque in America’s Bible Belt.

and

Robert Spencer, the director of Jihad Watch, a program of the David Horowitz Freedom Center, and the author of ten books, including two New York Times bestsellers, The Truth About Muhammad and The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (and the Crusades) (both Regnery).

To read Robert Spencer’s report on the developments surrounding Eric Bell’s firing at the Daily Kos, click here.

To listen to the program, click here.

Or go to: http://www.blogtalkradio.com/radio-jihad/2012/02/08/the-jamie-glazov-show

Phone-in # is (347) 857-1380

See you on Tuesday night!

In Human Events this morning I call for the redress of an injustice:

The Obama administration’s willful blindness about the jihad threat doesn’t just make for bad policy inimical to the genuine interests of the United States – as is if that weren’t bad enough. It also perpetrates injustices against American heroes who deserved to be honored for their sacrifices for our country.

The Purple Heart, a United States military honor awarded for military merit, is specifically to be given, according to U.S. Army regulations, for “wounds received as a result of hostile action,” including fatal wounds. It can be awarded in peacetime “to military personnel wounded by terrorists or while members of a peacekeeping force.” Yet the 12 U.S. military personnel (plus one civilian) murdered by Islamic jihadist Army Major Nidal Malik Hasan at Fort Hood in Texas on November 5, 2009 have not been awarded the Purple Heart, and neither has Army Private William Long, who was murdered by Islamic jihadist Abdulhakim Mujahid Muhammad in Little Rock, Arkansas June 1, 2009.

The reason for this is obvious: the Obama administration has not recognized either the Fort Hood or the Little Rock jihad attack as an act of terrorism. Thus the military personnel killed at Fort Hood and Private Long were not “wounded by terrorists”; hence no Purple Heart. Thus they become casualties not only of the global and domestic jihad, but of the politically correct refusal of official Washington to call that jihad what it is, and to recognize its full dimensions.

Of the facts of each case there is no question. Obama has ignored the Little Rock shooting, and, in one of the most egregious whitewashings of jihad in a field thick with competition, termed the Fort Hood shooting “workplace violence.” Any objective examination of either, however, leaves no doubt that Nidal Malik Hasan and Abdulhakim Mujahid Muhammad were Islamic terrorists performing a terrorist action in the name of Islam, and thus their victims were precisely “military personnel wounded by terrorists.”

In April 2011, Muhammad, an American convert to Islam, explained that he had killed Long in a “jihad operation.” He was not a soldier fighting against Americans on a battlefield, or even apparently an al-Qaeda operative acting on behalf of a recognized terror organization. He was a Muslim who was acting in Accord with the teachings of his religion as he understood them – that is, as giving him a responsibility before Allah to wage war against and subjugate unbelievers. He was acting in imitation of his prophet, who said: “I have been made victorious through terror.” And in his terror operation, he killed Private Long.

The Defense Department has taken no notice of Long’s killing; it doesn’t fit their paradigm of what terrorism is and what jihad is, and so apparently they think it is best ignored. But they could not ignore Fort Hood. In January 2010, the Defense Department released its report Friday on the jihad massacre at Fort Hood, and it is hard to imagine a document more full of denial and deception. The Pentagon seemed intent on ignoring and obfuscating the reasons why Hasan committed his murders.

Hasan had passed out Qur’ans on the morning of the shooting, and shouted “Allahu akbar” as he shot. He had raised alarm among his fellow Army psychiatrists by preaching jihad and hatred from the Qur’an when he was supposed to be giving a lecture about psychiatry. Yet despite these and other indications that Hasan was an Islamic jihadist who believed it part of his religious responsibility as a Muslim to wage war against Infidels, the words “jihad,” “Muslim,” “Islam” and even “Islamist” never appear in the Defense Department’s 86-page mélange of droning bureaucratese.

The irony was thick when the report recommended that the military improve its ability to identify and monitor “potential threats” — this from a report that steadfastly refused to acknowledge the existence of the Islamic jihad doctrine that motivated Nidal Hasan to murder in the first place.

Political correctness was responsible for the murders of 13 people at Fort Hood and the murder of Private William Long in Little Rock. And if political correctness had not held the political and military establishments in a stranglehold, the victims of these jihads would already have received Purple Hearts. That they have not received this honor is yet another monument to the cowardice and myopia that holds sway at the highest levels in Washington during the Obama administration.

Hamas, of course, remains openly committed to the destruction of Israel, and the propaganda from the Palestinian Authority's media outlets tells us plenty about their intentions. Obviously, this government cannot negotiate for "peace" in good faith, but the pressure will remain on Israel to compromise with an even more hostile Palestinian entity than before.

An update on this story. "Palestinians take step toward unity," from Associated Press, February 6:

RAMALLAH, West Bank (AP) – After months of wavering, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas took a decisive step Monday toward reconciliation with the Islamic militant group Hamas, a move Israel promptly warned would close the door to any future peace talks.

In a deal brokered by Qatar, Abbas will head an interim unity government to prepare for general elections in the Palestinian territories in the coming months. The agreement appeared to bring reconciliation — key to any statehood ambitions — within reach for the first time since the two sides set up rival Palestinian governments in the West Bank and Gaza in 2007.

Monday's deal, signed in the Qatari capital of Doha by Abbas and Hamas chief Khaled Mashaal, put an end to recent efforts by the international community to revive long-stalled negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians on the terms of Palestinian statehood. Abbas appears to have concluded that he has a better chance of repairing relations with Hamas, shunned by the West as a terror group, than reaching an agreement with Israel's hardline prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu.

Netanyahu quickly condemned the Doha deal. "It's either peace with Hamas or peace with Israel. You can't have them both," he said in a warning to Abbas, who has enjoyed broad international support.

In moving closer to Hamas, Abbas risks losing some of that backing and hundreds of millions of dollars a year in aid.

Qatar, awash with cash from vast oil and gas reserves, assured the Palestinians that it would help limit any political and financial damages, according to Palestinian officials close to the talks.

Whether the Palestinian Authority loses any of the roughly $1 billion in foreign aid it received each year may partly depend on the interim government's political platform and Hamas' willingness to stay in the background.

The new government is to be made up of politically independent experts, according to the Doha agreement. If headed by Abbas, devoid of Hamas members and run according to his political principles, it could try to make a case to be accepted by the West. Abbas aides said they were optimistic they could win international recognition....

PUTRAJAYA: The Yang di-Pertuan Agong Tuanku Abdul Halim Mua'dzam Shah has called on Muslims to emulate Prophet Muhammad's exemplary character in the effort to create an exceptional Muslim society and be a sterling example to the world.

Whose prophet?

He said that in order to achieve that distinction, Muslims should strive to correct the Islamic tasawur (notions) in themselves and those of their family and the society.

“The concept of life of Muslims as the servants and caliphs of Allah, and to regard work or business as an ibadah' (deeds) should be appreciated so that the impact of Islam as a great religion can be felt on a global scale,” he said, when declaring open the national-level Maulidur Rasul celebration at the Putra Mosque, here on Sunday.

I'd say that in this regard, Islam has succeeded handsomely. With more than 18,000 jihadist atrocities and counting since September 11, 2001, the impact of Islam on the world is definitely being felt on a global scale. And all indications point to that impact metastasizing to even larger dimensions in the future.

Boko Haram consistently targets people, institutions, and practices that would stand in the way of its imposition of Sharia. This time, the epicenter of the violence was a police station. "Nigeria unrest: Blasts rock Kano and Maiduguri," from BBC News, February 6:

A police station has been hit by an explosion and attacked by gunmen in the flashpoint northern Nigerian city of Kano, injuring an officer.

Further east, at around the same time, witnesses spoke of hearing explosions in the market area of Maiduguri.

Suspicion for the attacks will fall on Islamist militant group Boko Haram.

Boko Haram is waging an insurgency in the region in a bid to try and overthrow the national government and install an Islamic state.

Kano saw a series of attacks last month that left more than 185 people dead.

'Plumes of smoke'

The attack on the police station in the Sharada district of Kano happened at just after 18:00 (17:00 GMT).

Gunmen carrying bombs had descended on the police station from different directions, Kano police spokesman Magaji Musa Maji'a told Reuters news agency.

"One policeman was shot on the leg and he is receiving treatment in hospital," he said.

Resident Bala Salisu told the AFP news agency he had just arrived home in time for a curfew when he heard a loud blast.

"Shortly, gunshots followed. From what I heard it sounded like a shoot-out," he said.

A Reuters reporter in the area said the explosion - so powerful it shook windows - was followed by a sustained gun battle which lasted more than an hour.

Magaji Musa Maji'a said that the police officers eventually got control of the station.

Meanwhile, in Maiduguri - Boko Haram's heartland - a series of explosions were heard in the market and black smoke was seen billowing from the area.

"I heard five explosions around the market and plumes of black smoke... filled the air," nearby resident Aisha Goni told AFP.

"The market is still on fire. Soldiers and policeman have taken over the whole area."

Indonesia is generally tougher on jihadists with international connections, like Umar Patek, than it is with homegrown Islamic supremacist thugs, to whom the government generally seems content to turn a blind eye as long as they restrict themselves to targeting non-Muslims.

More on this story. "Alleged Bali bomber to face six charges," from the Australian Associated Press, February 7:

The man believed to have built the devices used in the first Bali bombings which killed 202 people, including 88 Australians, will be charged with mass murder for his alleged role in the 2002 attacks.

Prosecutors today delivered a 50-page indictment to the West Jakarta District Court where Umar Patek is expected to face trial later this month on six charges related to his suspected involvement in terrorist activities over more than a decade.

Patek, who has allegedly already admitted to a role in the Bali bombings, won't be charged with terrorism offences over the 2002 attacks because Indonesia's tough anti-terrorism laws, introduced in 2003, cannot be applied retrospectively.

However, he will face a charge of premeditated mass murder in relation to the bombing of two nightclubs in the popular holiday area of Kuta 10 years ago, as well as a series of bombings of churches in Indonesia in 2000.

If found guilty of the murder charges he could be sentenced to death.

A copy of the indictment, seen by AAP, also lists charges of conspiracy to commit terrorism, harbouring information on terrorism, possession of explosives and firearms, as well as two counts of document fraud.

Indonesian authorities, including a special counter-terrorism unit with the Attorney-General's Department, have been working on building a watertight case against Patek since his extradition from Pakistan in August last year.

Bambang Suharyadi, one of a team of 15 prosecutors who will be involved in the trial, told AAP last night that the indictment covered Patek's alleged involvement in terrorist activities "from the Christmas bombings up to his arrest in Pakistan".

The 43-year-old spent almost 10 years at the top of Southeast Asia's most-wanted list before his capture in January 2011 in Abbottabad, the same Pakistani town where US forces killed al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden last May.

Prosecutors will present evidence from up to 80 witnesses during the trial, including testimony from Australian and American survivors who lived through the horror of the Bali attacks.

They will also rely on evidence already provided by Patek, who in October last year retraced his steps in the final hours before bombs were detonated at the Sari Club and Paddy's Bar.

The evidence also includes video of Patek showing police where he finished assembling the bombs.

Patek is the last of the key members of Jemaah Islamiyah (JI) - the group behind the Bali bombings - to face justice over what remains Indonesia's most deadly terrorist attack.

His trial comes after the conviction last year of high-profile JI co-founder and the spiritual leader of the jihadist movement in Indonesia, Abu Bakar Bashir, following the discovery of a secret paramilitary training camp in Aceh.

The bespectacled cleric served almost 26 months behind bars for conspiracy over the 2002 Bali bombings but that conviction was later overturned.

Patek's trial will be conducted amid heavy security, with authorities concerned about the possibility of reprisal attacks from his old network, which they believe may still be active in Indonesia.

It is expected to run until late May or early June.

Jihad Watch readers, we need your action now. James Lafferty, chairman of the Virginia Anti-Shariah Task Force (VAST) and SIOA board member, has been working hard to get Sharia prohibition legislation passed.

Delegate Bob Marshall of Virginia has introduced HB 825, which restricts any Virginia court from using "foreign law" as the basis for any decision or action. An odd alliance of the Virginia Chamber of Commerce, Virginia Bar Association, Muslim Association of Virginia and the All Dulles Area Muslim Society (ADAMS) Center of Northern Virginia testified against Marshall's bill Friday and are working against the bill's supporters -- the Virginia Anti-Shariah Task Force (VAST), SIOA and elements of the Tea Party.

Please contact Virginia House Speaker Bill Howell. Tell Speaker Howell to vote for HB825 with no amendments.

It is up to you to fight Muslim Brotherhood groups and the imposition of their anti-freedom agenda. Please contact Speaker Howell and get this out to everyone you can. We are the soldiers in this battle. It is up to us.

German politicians once again make room for totalitarian barbarism:

Most politicians in Germany have gotten the message: The quickest way to spark a career-damaging controversy is to make a facile comment about Nazis or the Holocaust. Media critics and political opponents are quick to pounce.

But that isn't the only way to attract unwanted attention, as Jochen Hartloff, the interior minister of the German state of Rhineland-Palatinate, found out this week. In an interview with the Berlin tabloid BZ, Hartloff said that Sharia law, in a "modern form," would be acceptable in Germany. In comments published on Friday in the center-left daily Süddeutsche Zeitung, he added that using the Islamic moral code "is certainly conceivable when it comes to questions pertaining to civil law."

Hartloff, a politician from the center-left Social Democrats, made clear that he was referring specifically to family law issues such as divorce settlements and alimony, but also certain instances of contract law in which devout Muslims seek to avoid paying interest. Applying Sharia rules, he said, could help avoid hostility in such cases. ....

He was seconded by Stephan Mayer, a parliamentarian for the Christian Social Union, the Bavarian sister party to Chancellor Angela Merkel's Christian Democrats. Mayer, a legal expert, demanded Hartloff's resignation. "It is inconceivable that a justice minister fosters such ideas," he told Bild. "There is no room in Germany for Islamic law. The Sharia is barbarous and inhuman in all its forms." ...

Michael Frieser, expert on integration issues for conservatives in German parliament, said that Muslim justices of the peace could perhaps be used to prepare the groundwork for a civil law judgement. He told the Süddeutsche Zeitung that he has nothing against immigrants seeking judgements according to the legal systems they are used to. "That can ultimately serve the cause of integration," he said.

Priorities: this is actually the substance of discussions in the halls of government within Iran. The reasoning is that Superman and Spiderman help free people from "oppression." The Simpsons join Barbie on the list in the latest crackdown. Duff-Man is heartbroken.

"Report: Simpson Dolls Join Barbie on Iran Ban List," by Nasser Karimi for the Associated Press, February 6:

An Iranian government-affiliated agency has banned dolls of the Simpsons cartoon characters, who join Barbie and others on a toy blacklist, an independent newspaper reported on Monday.

The report said that the Simpsons were banned to avoid the promotion of Western culture. But Superman and Spiderman were allowed, because they helped the "oppressed."

"We do not want to promote this cartoon by importing the toys," Shargh daily quoted Mohammad Hossein Farjoo, secretary of policymaking at the Institute for the Intellectual Development of Children and Young Adults, as saying.

He did not elaborate on what was wrong with the Simpsons specifically. But he noted that any doll on which genitals are distinguishable, as well as dolls of adults, are banned. So were toys with speakers that blare out the voices of Western singers, or toy kitchen sets that include glasses for drinking alcoholic beverages.

Farjoo said however that dolls of Spiderman and Superman were authorized for sale. "They help oppressed people and they have a positive stance," he said. The agency is the same that called Barbie dolls a "Trojan horse" in 1996. In January, police said they closed down dozens of toy shops for selling Barbies....

The release date is described as an unfortunate coincidence, but it underscores massive task ahead of authorities to secure the London Olympics from Islamic supremacist disruption in any number of forms. "'Shoe-bomb' terrorist to be released from jail on opening day of the Olympic Games," by Emma Reynolds for the Daily Mail, February 6:

The notorious terrorist who plotted a shoe-bomb attack on a plane is to be freed from jail just hours before the Olympic Games begin.

Saajid Badat's release will only add to security fears at the high-profile event in London, which opens on July 27.

The 32-year-old was jailed for 13 years in 2005 after conspiring with two other radical Muslims to blow up a passenger jet - but he will be released after serving just eight years and eight months.

The religious teacher from Gloucester admitted to conspiring with Brit Richard Reid and Belgian terrorist Nizar Trabelsi to blow up flights to the U.S. in 2001.

But now he is due to be freed two-thirds of the way through his sentence on the official opening day of the biggest sporting event in the world, according to the Daily Mirror.

'People are furious this guy is being released on that day but it’s just a quirk of fate,' said a security source.

'You can be sure people will be watching him very carefully and taking note of who he associated with in prison.'

Badat is believed to have been trained for the plot by al-Qaeda in Pakistan and Afghanistan.

He was arrested when he was found with a bomb designed to be placed in his shoes in order to evade airport security.

He had even booked a ticket for a flight from Amsterdam to the U.S., but he had a last-minute change of heart and never boarded the plane.

His fellow plotter Reid was overpowered by fellow passengers on a flight from Paris to Miami while trying to detonate the bomb in his shoes, and is now serving a life sentence in America.

The extremists were linked through phone cards found on Reid used to contact Trabelsi, who is serving time in Belgium.

Once again, one may note the striking uniformity of Islamic antisemitism in places far removed from one another. So, did these guys call each other? "Ayatollah: Kill all Jews, annihilate Israel," by Reza Khalili for World Net Daily February 5:

The Iranian government, through a website proxy, has laid out the legal and religious justification for the destruction of Israel and the slaughter of its people.

The doctrine includes wiping out Israeli assets and Jewish people worldwide.

Calling Israel a danger to Islam, the conservative website Alef, with ties to Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, said the opportunity must not be lost to remove “this corrupting material. It is a ‘jurisprudential justification” to kill all the Jews and annihilate Israel, and in that, the Islamic government of Iran must take the helm.”

The article, written by Alireza Forghani, a conservative analyst and a strategy specialist in Khamenei’s camp, now is being run on most state-owned conservative sites, including the Revolutionary Guards’ Fars News Agency, showing that the regime endorses this doctrine.

Because Israel is going to attack Iran’s nuclear facilities, Iran is justified in launching a pre-emptive, cataclysmic attack against the Jewish state, the doctrine argues. [...]

On Friday, in a major speech at prayers, Khamenei announced that Iran will support any nation or group that attacks the “cancerous tumor” of Israel. Though his statement was seen by some in the West as fluff, there is substance behind it. [...]

The commander of the Revolutionary Guards, Brig. Gen. Seyyed Mehdi Farahi, stated in August that the Safir missile, which is capable of transporting a satellite into space, can easily be launched parallel to the earth’s orbit, which will transform it into an intercontinental ballistic missile. Western analysts didn’t believe this would happen until 2015. Historically, orbiting a satellite is the criterion for crediting a nation with ICBM capability.

Forghani details the Islamic duty of jihad as laid out in the Quran for the sake of Allah and states that “primary jihad,” according to some Shiite jurists, can only occur when the Hidden Imam, the Shiites’ 12th Imam Mahdi, returns. Shiites believe Mahdi’’s return will usher in Armageddon.

In the absence of the hidden Imam, Forghani says, “defensive jihad” could certainly take place when Islam is threatened, and Muslims must defend Islam and kill their enemies. To justify such action, Alef quotes the Shiites’ first imam, Ali, who stated “Waging war against the enemies with whom war is inevitable and there is a strong possibility that in near future they will attack Muslims is a must and the duty of Muslims.”

The article then quotes the Quran (Albaghara 2:191-193): “And slay them wherever ye find them, and drive them out of the places whence they drove you out, for persecution [of Muslims] is worse than slaughter [of non-believers] … and fight them until persecution is no more, and religion is for Allah.”

It is the duty for all Muslims to participate in this defensive jihad, Forghani says. A fatwa by the late Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini made it clear that any political domination by infidels over Muslims authorizes Muslims to defend Islam by all means. Iran now has the ICBM means to deliver destruction on Israel and soon will have nuclear warheads for those missiles. [...]

Under this pre-emptive defensive doctrine, several Ground Zero points of Israel must be destroyed and its people annihilated. Forghani cites the last census by the Israel Central Bureau of Statistics that shows Israel has a population of 7.5 million citizens of which a majority of 5.7 million are Jewish. Then it breaks down the districts with the highest concentration of Jewish people, indicating that three cities, Tel Aviv, Jerusalem and Haifa, contain over 60 percent of the Jewish population that Iran could target with its Shahab 3 ballistic missiles, killing all its inhabitants....

Now you know. And knowing is half the jihad. "Egyptian TV Debate on the 'Invasion' of Israeli Products into Sinai: Jeans from Israel Contained Secret Magnets Causing Infertility," from MEMRI, February 1:

Muhammad Al-Mane'i, Sinai Bedouin: There was a time when they would bring us jeans. These pants used to have belts. If you looked at these belts from the front, you'd find a secret compartment, and when you opened it, you would find a magnet inside. When we asked what these magnets were, we were told that they cause sterility.

Interviewer: In other words, it causes infertility.

Muhammad Al-Mane'i: Exactly.

Interviewer: There was a time when these jeans with belts would invade us from Israel, and we used to take the magnets out and chuck them away.

[…]

Interviewer: Israeli products contain lethal poison. You might not feel this poison now, but you will in the future. Israel will remain an enemy lying in wait for Egypt, no matter what happens and regardless of the agreements, because Israel has its eye set on Egypt.

Not "Zionist," but "Jew." Funny how this keeps happening: that striking uniformity with which Islamic hatred of Jews is expressed in places far removed from one another. Did all those guys call each other? "Sheik Bassam Al-Kayed, Head of the Palestinian Islamic Scholars Association in Lebanon: The Jew Is a Satan in Human Form, Who Violates All International Laws, All Human Norms, and All Values," from MEMRI, February 1:

Bassam Al-Kayed: The Jew is a satan in human form. Allah inflicted the Jews upon humanity in its entirety, and especially upon the nation of Islam, including the early prophets and the Prophet Muhammad. The Jew is a satan in human form. We could almost say that the satanic jinn take lessons from them. What they do is very peculiar. It transgresses all boundaries. They attribute no sanctity to anything that is scared, to any treaty or agreement. They violate all the international laws, all the human norms, and all the Islamic and man-made laws. They violate all values. They are deterred by nothing but force.

It's one thing to advise against it on religious grounds, but this missive comes from Aceh, where the imposition of Sharia has only gotten more intensive, and morality policing is already well off the rails. It is quite another matter when such a prohibition becomes grounds for harassment and intervention by law enforcement of one form or another, as is also frequently the case in Saudi Arabia. "Indonesia/Islam: Aceh Ulema Warns Muslims Against Observing Valentine’s Day," from the International Islamic News Agency, February 6:

BANDA ACEH (Indonesia),14 Rabi al-Awwal/6 Feb (IINA)-Ulema in Aceh have warned Muslims, the younger generation in particular, that observing Valentine’s Day is not allowed in Islam and against Sharia law that is in force in all of Aceh province.

“It is haram for Muslims to observe Valentine’s Day because it does not accord with Islamic Sharia” Tgk Feisal, general secretary of the Aceh Ulema Association (HUDA), said on Monday.

In Islam, he said, love should not be expressed or shown on a certain day only but every day. “Therefore, Islam’s younger generation should not participate in the celebration of a foreign festivity,” he said.

Faisal Ali who is also chairman of the Aceh branch of Nahdlatul Ulama called on Muslim parents, especially those in Aceh, to instruct and supervise their children in the matter.

“We must prevent the Muslim younger generation in Aceh from being poisoned by a culture that contradicts our Muslim values. Therefore, everybody, parents in particular, should give our youth the proper guidance,” he said.

He also called on the government to uphold and implement Islamic Sharia in “serious and sincere ways and not just out of political expediency or momentarily.”

“Islamic Sharia cannot prevail in Aceh as expected if it is not supported fully by the government and other parties in authority,” he said.

The government must also watch out for youths participating in Valentine’s Day activities in Aceh, he said.

My Crisis column this week, "The Church That Converted Khans," gives a capsule history of the Assyrian Church of the East and its sister Church, the Chaldean Catholic Church, both of which are now facing ferocious persecution in Iraq:

...Christians who remain in Iraq live increasingly in an atmosphere of terror. Christian women have been threatened with kidnapping or death if they do not wear a headscarf. Muslim gangs have even terrorized Christian neighborhoods in Baghdad, knocking on doors and demanding payment of the jizya, the religion-based tax assessed by Islamic law against Christians, Jews, and some other groups of non-Muslims who live in Muslim lands. Iraqi Christians today are streaming into Syria, or, if they can, out of the Middle East altogether. An Iraqi businessman now living in Syria lamented that “now at least 75% of my Christian friends have fled. There is no future for us in Iraq.”

That is bitterly ironic, since at one time one of the only places that held any future at all for what are now known as Assyrian Christians and Chaldean Catholics was Iraq. Late in the fourteenth century, the fabled and notorious Timur the Lame, or Tamerlane, a self-styled ghazi (warrior of Islam) who saw himself as the son and heir of Genghis Khan (who had an Assyrian Christian teacher), unleashed a persecution of the Assyrian Church so ferocious that northern Iraq was one of the few places where it survived....

So Eastern was the Church of the East that it considered all Christians of the Roman Empire, even those otherwise universally classified as “Eastern,” such as the Patriarchates of Constantinople, Alexandria, and Antioch, as “Western.” And indeed, its orientation was decidedly Eastern, as is seen most spectacularly in its remarkable expansion into China. The Persian Nestorian missionary priest Alopen arrived in China in 635 and so impressed the Tang Emperor Taizong that just three years later, Taizong issued a decree protecting the Church of the East in China. After that the Church grew rapidly in China, but was banned again and persecuted in the ninth and tenth centuries, such that by 986 a monk of the Church of the East reported back to the Patriarch Abdisho: “Christianity is extinct in China.”

Yet even after this, the Church of the East returned there, and doesn’t seem to have disappeared altogether from the Middle Kingdom until the fifteenth century. It maintained a considerable presence in Central Asia, even among the Mongols, such that in 1287 the Mongol ruler Arghun Khan sent a Nestorian Christian official in his court, Rabban Sauma, as an emissary to Europe to try to conclude an alliance between the Mongols and European Christians to fight their common enemy, the Islamic jihadists. Rabban Sauma met with, among others, the Byzantine Emperor, the Pope, and the King of England, but ultimately no alliances were concluded. Rabban Sauma’s meeting with a group of cardinals in Rome (the pope had recently died) is revealing of the theological knowledge and controversies of Rome in those days: faced with the specter of a Mongol Christian, the cardinals quizzed him about his faith. They had never heard of Nestorius or of the by-then ancient controversy over his Christology, but they did get irritated when Rabban Sauma recited the Creed and left out the Filioque. Rabban Sauma, however, would have none of the controversy. “I didn’t come here to argue with you,” he explained. “I came to venerate the Lord Pope (Mar Papa).”

The fact that nothing came of Rabban Sauma’s fascinating journey is one of the great missed opportunities of history, for in the next century Tamerlane destroyed most of the dioceses of the Church of the East between Iraq and China, and the Church of the East would never again recapture its former numbers, power, or presence in the expanses of central Asia. A remnant remained in India, a portion of which later became the Syro-Malabar Church in communion with Rome. The Patriarch of the East relocated to Alqosh, near Mosul, where he oversaw his own remnant — among whom fresh controversy arose when the Patriarch Shimon IV Basidi, whose lengthy reign lasted over fifty years (1437-1493), declared the patriarchate the hereditary property of his family alone. Henceforth only the nephews or other blood relatives of the Patriarch, who was himself celibate in accord with universal Eastern discipline for bishops, could become Patriarch of the East.

Assyrians defended the hereditary succession as a way to protect the Church from interference from Muslim officials, who would often appoint prelates they could control. The hereditary succession, Assyrians maintained, kept the patriarchate from falling into the hands of forces that did not have the best interests of the Church at heart. Nonetheless, discontent over this practice brewed for the next half-century, until finally in 1552 a group of bishops who were presumably all unrelated to Shimon IV Basidi chose a new Patriarch, Yohannan Sulaqa, in preference to the hereditary standard-bearer, Shimon VII Ishoyahb. Sulaqa then made his way to Rome, where he appealed to Pope Julius III for help and made a profession of the Catholic Faith. Julius named him Patriarch of Mosul and Athur, a title he quickly changed to Patriarch of the Chaldeans. Sulaqa returned to Mosul and reigned there as Shimon VIII until 1555, when the local Muslim ruler had him jailed, tortured, and ultimately executed, apparently at the instigation of Shimon VII or his followers....

On December 2, 2011, I received this chilling email from an Assyrian Christian in Iraqi Kurdistan: “Today after Friday prayers, Muslim Kurds in Zakho (near Dohuk) attacked and besieged liquor shops, salons, hotels, massages that are owned by Christians. The security didn’t do anything and the rampage has continued till now!”

Several hours later he wrote again: “The attacks haven’t stopped, and I just got the word that they are attacking a Catholic Diocesan office. The security is standing still and watching as I am writing this to you. Christian homes are being fired upon as well.”

As captured on video, the Muslim mob shouted “Allahu akbar,” “jihad” and anti-Christian slogans as it rampaged. One Christian liquor storeowner reported that the mob did half a million U.S. dollars’ worth of damage to his businesses—and stole $300,000 from his safe. Another Christian sent me pictures of a small club, destroyed in a fire the mob set, and explained: “This was a small social club for us Christians that we spend our nights. As you see, we live very poorly and humbly. They had no reason to attack us. All we want is to enjoy a beer after a hard day of work. Is that too much to ask? Are Muslim minorities in the West treated like this?”

This attack came about because a local imam, Mullah Mala Ismail Osman Sindi, had preached a Friday sermon that day railing against moral corruption, after which a man in the congregation, roused to a pitch of moral indignation, stood up and started calling out the names of local businesses that Christians owned. An archdeacon of the Assyrian Church of the East, Emanuel Youkhana, noted: “The interesting thing with this incident is the place where it happened. [The Kurdish Regional Government] is, for the most part, safe and secure, and all inhabitants enjoy prosperity and security, until now at least. The future is, by all means, bleak for Christians and other minorities living there.”

Indeed, and it has been for quite some time. Since the fall of Saddam Hussein in 2003, escalating Muslim persecution has caused over half of the prewar population of around a million Christians to flee the country. Jihadis have particularly targeted clergy: on April 5, 2008, Youssef Adel, a Syriac Orthodox priest in Baghdad, was killed in a drive-by shooting as he was opening the gate of his house. Just weeks before that, Archbishop Paulos Faraj Rahho of the Chaldean Catholic Church was kidnapped and murdered in the Iraqi city of Mosul.

There is more.

A key Islamic supremacist mantra is "Islam will dominate" (see pictures here, here and here), and therefore the analysis by Steen Raaschou, editor of snaphanen.dk, is very precise. Translated from Snaphanen.dk, February 1, 2012: "A new term: Dominance crime":

The perpetrators take the victim's cell phone or a little cash, but many of these robberies are completely ridiculous when considered as property crimes. The victims are often beaten, in spite of their willingness to give their belongings to the robber. These robberies are actually harassment. There are also no traditional explanations for the many cases of stone-throwings against cars from bridges, 'meaningless' violence, vandalism and arson or the attacks on fire service and police.

We must understand the phenomena properly: this kind of crime is mainly designed to establish or demonstrate superiority. And it is stemming from a culture whose primary concept of 'power' is identical with 'violence,' and whose only hope of being able to dominate in the West is to use violence. It's guerrilla warfare.

Part of the problem is that the phenomenon has not had a name, and therefore I propose that all these types of crimes, whose main purpose is other than the superficial (robbery, arson, violence), must be called: dominance crime.

I have reported about the Muslim ghetto Vollsmose several times: Denmark: No comprehensive car insurance in Muslim area -- too many burned cars; Denmark: More Muslim violence against non-Muslims; Danish police: Immigrant criminals target Danes to make them move out of the (Muslim) area; and Denmark: Iranian-born leader of small Christian church attacked for displaying cross.

The Danish newspaper BT has scrutinized the budget for integration in Vollsmose. Since 2008, 58,482,279 kr. (10.3 million USD / 7,9 million Euros) has been spent on the following. Translated from BT, February 5, 2012: "Vollsmose gilded with millions of kroner. - But the problems continue...":

Free buses and concerts - 2,844,402 kr. (500,000 USD) An extra pool of money was created to support new ideas. The funds has been spent on free bus service in the area, job counseling, a choir, celebrations and concerts.

Coaching - 280,250 kr (50,000 USD)
The so-called ABCD project seeks to get residents to become aware of their own qualifications, a kind of coaching.

Consultants - 6,040,692 kr (1,000,000 USD)
Three resident advisers, including former parliamentary politician Asmaa Abdol Hamid (who says that the Quran guides her in every aspect of life and who rejects equality between the sexes), have been hired to keep track of the many projects that are started in the district.

Project management - 1,213,758 kr (210,000 USD)
There are so many associations and networks in Vollsmose that a global network is needed to keep track of them.

Improved image - 11,421,411 kr (2,000,000 USD)
Establishment of Media House Vollsmose that publishes its own weekly newspaper in order to create a more positive image of Vollsmose. The articles is concentrating on positive stories from the area, says the Media House.

Multicultural offer - 3,339,673 kr (585,000 USD)
In 2007 it was estimated that young people with multicultural background lacked cultural offerings. This is why a cultural center has been created in the area.

Internship - 2,000,000 kr (350,000 USD)
To get more people to work, unemployed people have been given internships at a local caretaker. One resident has subsequently gotten a permanent job as a result of this project.

Marketing - 4,385,000 kr (770,000 USD)
A marketing project has been launched to attract educational institutions and businesses to the district.

Special expenses - 9,596,542 kr (1,700,000 USD)
This money goes to the operation of the area's nine housing associations and three housing organizations. The money goes to short courses, machine procurement, combating vandalism and longer opening hours at recycling centers.

Administration - 3,821,641 kr (670,000 USD)
Launching the many projects costs money in itself. This is because a consultant company was hired to do it, and because it costs money to track how the money is spent.

Cleanup - 2,500,000 kr (440,000 USD)
Money to the Project Youth Team primarily goes to paying the young people who are hired to remove garbage and waste lying around in the district.

Environmental awareness - 1,415,866 kr (250,000 USD)
This project aims to educate residents to understand how to handle waste, how to save water, heat and electricity. 35 immigrant women have received this education.

Waking up in the morning 1,593,969 kr (280,000 USD)
To reduce absenteeism in schools in the area, Project Alarm Clock was created. Now school teachers call students who have not appeared in school.

Role models - 1,860,853 kr. (325,000 USD)
Young2Young is a project that aims to get the well-functioning youth to help other young people to get part-time jobs.

Festival - 1,630,963 kr. (285,000 USD)
This money is allocated to the annual festival in the area. In 2011, Julie Berthelsen, Johnson and the rapper U$0 gave a concert, and the hosts were the famous Danish actors Robert Hansen and Camilla Ottesen.

Coordination - 2,435,111 kr (425,000 USD)
To ensure maximum cooperation between the many projects, a separate consultant was hired to coordinate them.

Street work - 1,491,500 kr (260,000 USD)
To reach the young people who hang out on the street, people have been hired to walk around in the area and tell them about the district's various offerings.

Evaluation - 610,645 kr (105,000 USD)
As part of the master plan, just over half a million kroner has been allocated to evaluate the results.

Total bill: 58,482,279 kr. (10,280,979.78 USD)

Appeasement. The author's name is Islamic, which may explain why CNN starts by praising his academic titles. Not only does CNN promote his views -- they praise the guy. Titles or not, this is the kind of logic that will lead you straight to hell.

Better buy some Iranian oil and forget about those Armenians -- we do not want to set up a clash with those innocent peaceful Muslims. The Clash of Civilisations was started by us, according to this distinguished professor:

"Is Europe setting up clash between Muslims and the West?," by Mohammed Ayoob for CNN, February 3:

Editor's note: Mohammed Ayoob is University Distinguished Professor of International Relations at Michigan State University and adjunct scholar at the Institute for Social Policy and Understanding

(CNN) -- Europe and the Muslim world seem to be on a collision course that could have major political, economic and ideological ramifications. January 23, 2012, may well come to be remembered as the crucial date when Samuel Huntington's "clash of civilizations" thesis, which many of us believed discredited beyond repair, was reaffirmed.
Political scientist Huntington wrote in 1993 that cultural divisions preclude a defining global civilization, and the West and the Muslim world would never share the same values.

Last month, Europe took two different actions that nonetheless sent the same message to the Muslim world: You are not our equals and are doomed to be judged by standards different from those by which we judge ourselves. Future historians might call January 23 the day when Europe irreversibly alienated not one, but both, pivotal powers -- Iran and Turkey -- that in all probability will dominate the political landscape of the Middle East for several decades.

One action was the European Union's decision to ban oil purchases from Iran ...

At the same time, the French Senate passed a law making it a crime to deny genocides that are officially recognized by France. The two genocides in this category are the Holocaust and the killing of 1.5 million Armenians in Anatolia during the last years of the Ottoman Empire. Because the denial of the Holocaust is already a crime under French law, the obvious objective of the bill is to criminalize the denial of the 1915 Armenian genocide.

The Swedish Free Press Society, Tryckfrihetssällskapet, was launched on January 31, 2012. The Swedish press is known for notoriously hiding facts and consequences concerning Islam, immigration and Muslim criminals (example: Swedish specialty: Pink pixellation of dark-skinned criminals and pixellated anonymization of wanted criminals).

People who want to meet to talk about such topics need severe police protection (Sweden: Launching the Swedish Free Press Society under police protection).

I have interviewed Lars Hedegaard, initiator and chairman of both the Free Press Society in Denmark and the International Free Press Society, and Ingrid Carlqvist, initiator of the new Swedish branch.

From left to right: Hans Rustad (chief editor, document.no), Gunnar Sandelin (Sweden, fired as a journalist for writing critically about immigration policies), Ingrid Carlqvist (Sweden), Lars Hedegaard (Denmark), Mikael Jalving (Denmark, Conservative author)

Lars Hedegaard, please introduce The Free Press Society to our readers. How do you start a thing like that, what impact did it have in society and did it spread to other countries as well?

Hedegaard: In 2003-2004 it became evident that free speech was seriously threatened in Denmark and that we had no organised force to resist this encroachment on our liberties. Islam and its acolytes were riding high. The official press, the political class, academia, the experts, our courts and the clerics of our Lutheran Church kept hammering the people with the message that islam is an enrichment of our society and that anyone that thought otherwise was a fascist and racist and ought to be prevented from expressing his opinions. Anyone who dared to stand up for the freedom of expression guaranteed in our constitution was vilified. Their careers were ruined. Many were convicted in our courts, fired from their jobs or driven to despair.

Public opinion – which is not what the public think but what one may express in public without fear of dire consequences – went underground. We were approaching a dual discourse: A surface discourse extolling the virtues of multiculturalism and cultural relativism and a real discourse taking place among women and men when the thought police wasn't listening.

Much to my surprise I was approached by two supposedly far-right members of parliament. They were well aware that I had a past on the extreme left but asked if I would be the front man of a new organisation to defend free speech. I thought hard about it and eventually agreed to step up to the plate. It turned out that many others shared our worries and were willing to join.

That's how we got started in Denmark back in 2004.

Ingrid Carlqvist and Hedegaard, how is suppression of free speech possible in democratic countries with a free press? Please also give some specific examples from Sweden.

Carlqvist: Sadly, the answer is that the Swedish journalists have totally misunderstood their own role. Let me quote my namesake Knut Carlqvist, an author and journalist that died 2010. He once said: ”Swedish journalists have never realized that their duty is to keep an eye on the state and the power. They believe their duty is to monitor the people.”

I have worked at many different newspapers and I know that there is consensus regarding how to report about all things concerning the huge immigration to Sweden, where we the last 30 years or so, have seen hundreds of thousands coming from countries that are essentially different from Sweden. The journalists all agree to write nice articles about ramadan, muslim festivities and mosques but to never write anything negative about immigration or immigrants. That has lead to the remarkable situation that people can see that there are huge problems with analfabetic immigrants from countries like Somalia and Afghanistan, but the newspapers pretend everything is fine.

A flagrant example is the enormous number of rapes. Last year 6 509 rapes were reported to the police in Sweden – the corresponding figure in Denmark was 392. The population in Denmark is a bit more than half of Sweden's, so if everything was normal in Sweden we would have 650 rapes, not 6 500.

But the media is quiet. Nobody digs into these figures to try to find out what’s causing it. Is it the fact that Sweden changed the law so that rape is now a lot of things, not only penetration? Or is it a huge number of false allegations? Or is it something to do with the mass immigration to Sweden, especially from the MENA-countries? Nobody knows, because nobody investigates.

I had just signed a contract on writing columns for the local newspaper Barometern and they were really pleased with my first column (about a father fighting the authorities for taking his daughters from him). After someone phoned the paper saying I was a racist and an islamophobe, they fired me. The paper told me they couldn't publish someone who is openly critical of Swedish immigration policies.

Hedegaard: Our political classes and academic and media elites are scared. They know in their hearts that they have been promulgating a lie in the shape of a crazy vision of a multicultural utopia intended to keep them in power but which is now failing spectacularly. They can no longer solve the problems they themselves have created – mass immigration, parallel societies, sharia zones, exploding crime and a general erosion of everything the West used to stand for.

But they can at least try to prevent people from openly discussing this state of affairs. They do that with a vengeance and with the tender aid of the public prosecutor and the courts and their fellow travellers in academia and the surface media.

It won't help them in the long run. For a while they have managed to install terror in civil society to the extent that people have been scared to tell even their neighbours and spouses what they really think. They have been successful in hounding people out of their jobs and much more. Yet they have failed in eradicating people's conscience and that is what will matter over the long haul.

Ingrid Carlqvist, in January 2012 Sweden got its own Free Press Society, Tryckfrihetssällskapet. How has it been received in Sweden? How did your first public meeting go? What did the Swedish press write about you?

Carlqvist: First of all, the Swedish press didn’t want to write about us at all. But when they saw on the internet that more than 100 people were coming to the first meeting, they decided to come. So far we had one news article and two culture articles. All are negative. They try to portray us as racists and islamophobes. But the success is huge. Many people have e-mailed saying they want to become members of the Free Press Society and donate to the cause.

It seems that The FPS is mainly concerned about Islam and Muslim immigration. What does that have to do with free speech, and are you actually Islam critics in sheep's clothing?

Carlqvist: I think we must all realize that islam is one of the greatest threats to free speech in the world today. In Sweden we have the artist Lars Vilks who has to live with bodyguards round the clock because he drew a picture of Mohammed as a dog. We have a long tradition of free speech in Sweden, but now everybody’s scared. Not one fellow artist has drawn his own picture of Mohammed as a dog, to help Vilks. Everyone is silent and there have been several attempts to kill Lars Vilks - from muslims in Sweden.

Hedegaard: Of course we have concentrated most of our energy on opposing an ideology – islam – whose spokesmen have made no bones about their intention to do away with our freedom and install a totalitarian and barbarian theocracy the like of which we haven't seen in this part of the world for as long as we can look back. If we hadn't done that, people would have no reason take us seriously.

We are well aware that there are several other threats to free speech that deserve our attention and we try to address them to the best of our ability.

This year's freedom prize, which we have been awarding every year since we got started, will go to one of the courageous fighters for democracy in Russia. I won't tell you who we have in mind but I can promise you that it will be a spectacular event and one that we hope will give the Kremlin pause for thought.

Talking about free speech and the threat of Islam. Do you think that the Quran should be banned in our countries?

Carlqvist: No, of course not! Free speech means that nothing is forbidden or banned, it is with words and good arguments we will vanquish bad ideas.

Hedegaard: I agree with Ingrid. We will never advocate the banning of books however bad and pernicious. Bad books should be met with good ones and bad thoughts with good thoughts – openly, in the light of day. That's the Western way.

Ingrid Carlqvist, do you see a growing openness in Sweden concerning breaking taboos? What wishes and future plans do you have for the Swedish FPS?

Carlqvist: Well, I hope that FPS will open up the debate in Sweden, but I’m not at all sure. We have a long tradition of silence and a great belief in authorities in our country, so I think we will have to be patient. But I do believe that many people are frustrated with the situation and ready to start questioning what is going on.

How can private persons help to protect and support free speech?

Carlqvist: By becoming members of the Free Press Society, of course!

Hedegaard: Yes, and please try to muster the courage to talk to your friends, neighbours, colleagues and family about what you really think. Defend those whose lives are being ruined by our merciless elites. If you cannot do so openly, you can do it in private. Let the persecuted know that you are a friend. Give them hope. Many a dictatorship has been brought down in this way.

The Free Press Society was started in Denmark in 2004 by Lars Hedegaard, who is still chairman. Hedegaard is now 69 and last I saw him -= at a Christmas dinner in December 2011 -= he was as energetic, sharp and humorous as ever, a gun powder owl, as we say in Danish. On January 31, 2012, the Swedish branch was launched -- read about it here: "Sweden: Launching the Swedish Free Press Society under police protection".

On February 2, the Swedish newspaper The South Swedish printed an essay "In good company", in which the writer states that the Swedish Free Press Society "with good conscience can dissolve itself at the next meeting" -- since free speech is unchallenged.

On the same day, the famous Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten (the one with the Muhammad drawings) reported about the Swedish launch in the article "Free words in safe surroundings" (not online). The fact that the Swedish police knew about the venue even though it was not announced anywhere shows that the police are very aware of the problems:

In Malmö the Free Press Society's newborn Swedish sister organization was launched -- under massive police protection. The goal is to have a critical public debate on immigration, feminism and other controversial topics that are covered with politically correct consensus and pressure against freedom of expression.

How the Swedish police got to know about the evening's event is not known. For it was not advertised anywhere. Not even on the Internet. So there are no obstructive troublemakers on this cold January evening. But about 120 interested men and women of all ages have found their way to the inaugural meeting of the Swedish Tryckfrihetssällskap in Malmo on Tuesday evening, and they seemed safe, considering the 10-15 policemen. ...

At both ends of the foreseeable side street Skolgatan police cars patrol at night long. And on all floors in the municipal building where the venue takes place, several uniformed policemen are protecting the meeting and the participants.

Adviser to the British State

Predictably, Abu Hamza told these witless dhimmis that "radicalization" is caused by various alleged enormities that the kuffar have committed -- such that if they take his advice, they will curtail the freedom of speech and bring British foreign policy into conformity with the Islamic agenda. The MP's, for their part, decided that tacking "Islamophobia" would prevent "radicalization" -- so in essence, if they show the Islamic supremacists that they're doing nothing to resist the jihad or even identify it as such, that in itself will stop the jihad in its tracks.

Meanwhile, focusing on the "Internet" as a cause of "radicalization" is like focusing on magazines as a cause of pornography.

One wonders how these MP's successfully feed themselves.

"Internet biggest breeding ground for violent extremism, ministers warn," by Alan Travis for The Guardian, February 5 (thanks to Warren):

The internet now plays a part in most, if not all, cases of violent radicalisation and is a more significant recruiting ground than prisons, universities or places of worship, according to report by a cross-party group of MPs published today.

The Commons home affairs committee says internet service providers need to be as effective at removing material that promotes violent extremism as they are in removing content that is sexual or breaches copyright....

The report stresses, however, that no single pathway leads to radicalisation and emphasises that direct, personal contact is also significant. It adds that although convicted terrorists have attended British universities and prisons there is seldom evidence that they were radicalised there. The report says recruitment activities have retreated to private homes as the authorities have targeted public arenas.

The MPs, however, heard in private an assessment from Charles Farr, the Home Office's head of the Office of Security and Counter-terrorism, that "sympathy for violent extremism is declining rather than increasing". The MPs contrast this with the situation in 2007 when MI5 said there were "at least 2,000 people" in the UK who posed a threat because they supported terrorism – a figure that had increased by 400 the previous year.

The MPs do conclude that there may be growing support for nonviolent extremism within the Muslim community, fed by feelings of alienation and a sense of grievance, and this is a challenge for society and the police.

They are not allowed (by the strictures of political correctness) to consider the possibility that there might be growing support for "nonviolent extremism" for reasons arising from core Muslim beliefs.

They recommend that tackling Islamophobia and demonstrating that the British state is not antithetical to Islam should constitute a big part of the official Prevent strategy designed to counter the ideology that feeds violent radicalisation.

The MPs talked to the radical preacher Abu Hamza in the maximum security unit at Belmarsh prison in London, who told them the main drivers of radicalisation were grievances, especially concerning Palestine and Afghanistan, a sense that the prophet was being mocked, guilt and capability.

He said unemployment was not a source of grievance.

Keith Vaz MP, the committee's Labour chairman, said: "The conviction last week of four men from London and Cardiff radicalised over the internet, for a plot to bomb the London stock exchange and launch a Mumbai-style atrocity on the streets of London, shows that we cannot let our vigilance slip. More resources need to be directed to these threats and to preventing radicalisation through the internet and in private spaces. These are the fertile breeding grounds for terrorism."

The message to the West is, "there's more where this came from." It could backfire to some extent, however, as al-Qaeda is certainly no friend of Assad's Alawite establishment, and would like nothing better than to see it replaced by a Sunni-controlled Islamic regime. "Syria releases the 7/7 'mastermind’," by Jason Lewis for the Telegraph, February 5:

Abu Musab al-Suri had been held in Syria for six years after being captured by the CIA in 2005 and transported to the country of his birth under its controversial extraordinary rendition programme.

But he is now said to have been released as a warning to the US and Britain about the consequences of turning their backs on President al-Assad’s regime as it tries to contain the uprising in the country.

Al-Suri, also known as Mustafa Setmariam Nasar, was al-Qaeda’s operations chief in Europe and has been accused of planning the London bombings, in which four British-born terrorists detonated three bombs on the Underground and another on a bus, killing 52 people and injuring more than 700 others in 2005.

In a statement released after the attacks, al-Suri said: “[In my teachings] I have mentioned vital and legitimate targets to be hit in the enemy’s countries … Among those targets that I specifically mentioned as examples was the London Underground. [Targeting this] was and still is the aim.”

A mechanical engineer, he is also wanted in Spain in connection with the Madrid train bombings in 2004, which left 191 dead, and for links to an attack on the Paris Metro in 1995.

A judge has also ordered his arrest with other members of a Spanish terror cell that helped prepare the way for the September 11 attacks in 2001 on New York and Washington.

With his red hair, green eyes, pale features and trimmed beard, Syrian-born al-Suri was able to easily pass as a European and plot some of al-Qaeda’s worse atrocities.

Married to a Spanish woman, he spent three years in London in the 1990s, before moving to Afghanistan to run two of Osama Bin Laden’s terrorist training camps where he began experimenting with chemical weapons and set up sleeper cells in Europe.

While in this role, he conceived the plan to attack the London transport system and may have met some of the British-born suicide bombers led by Mohammad Sidique Khan when they are believed to have visited terrorist train camps in Pakistan. [...]

With the uprising continuing and heavy fighting on the streets of the capital Damascus, European and Arab countries last week drafted a UN resolution calling for the president to stand down, only for it to be blocked by the Russians who said they would veto the strong wording.

But if al-Suri is now a free man, it will be a blow to the attempts to dismantle al-Qaeda’s leadership and undermine its ability to launch terrorist attacks following the death of Osama Bin Laden last May and the death of Anwar al-Awlaki in a US drone attack in Yemen last September.

Before al-Suri’s capture, he was seen as a possible successor to Bin Laden, though the pair had been bitter rivals.

Below is a credulous article summarizing the group's "findings." Western support of the "Arab Spring" has depended a great deal on wishful thinking, and continues the previous administration's pattern of repeated attempts to prop up a "moderate" Islamic regime to serve as a model for the Muslim world. It keeps not working, because policymakers keep underestimating or denying the actual substance of Sharia law is it is practiced in Muslim societies, and not what it could, would, or should be according to apologists or academic exercises.

Another common tactic is to credit developments that happen in spite of Islamic law as occuring because of it. A prominent example is the existence of Turkey for some time as a modern, secular state, which was possible because a competing ideology kept Sharia in check, as was the case to some extent via Indonesia's Pancasila principles. In both cases, the resurgence of interest in Islamic rule has led to the erosion of tolerance and free speech by increasingly aggressive Islamic groups.

Turkey's "moderate Islamist democracy," as it is described below, is not a static entity, but has been undergoing a slow-motion revolution of its own, and that process is not leading toward "moderation." Nor will it in Egypt, Libya, or Tunisia. "Turkey 'a useful model for new Arab regimes'," by Michel Sailhan for Agence France-Presse, February 5:

For many in the Arab world, Turkey embodies something of an elusive ideal: an Islamist-based democracy with a strong economy.

A survey published Thursday by the Turkish Economic and Social Studies Foundation, a non-governmental think-tank, found almost 80 percent of respondents in the Middle East had a favourable view of Turkey, and three out of five considered the country a model for a modern Islamic state.

Following last year's Arab Spring uprisings, an unprecedented wave of popular revolt that swept the Arab world and led to the ouster of a string of dictators, many analysts are wondering if Turkey serves as a useful example of what a moderate Islamist democracy looks like.

The country is seen as having "reconciled two dynamics: economic growth and a democratic system put in place by an Islamist-derived party," Turkish foreign policy expert Sinan Ulgan said.

Turkey, a secular Muslim-majority country that straddles Europe and Asia, is viewed especially favourably by many in Libya, Tunisia and Egypt, countries in which Ankara backed the sprawling Arab Spring protest movements which led to the toppling of their dictators.

Turkey's economy has staged a strong recovery after a severe recession, with gross domestic product (GDP) growing 8.9 percent in 2010 following a contraction of 4.7 percent the previous year.

GDP rose by a record 9.6 percent during the first nice months of 2011.

Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan's AKP party, the Islamist-based party that has been in power since 2002, won a broad victory in June parliamentary elections, gaining 50 percent of the votes.

But some analysts temper the notion of Turkey as a model democracy, pointing to clampdowns on journalists and ongoing problems with the country's sizable Kurdish population.

About 15 million Kurds live in Turkey, which has a total population of 73 million. The Kurdish population has for decades been trying to establish an independent state in Turkey.

Since 1984, the outlawed Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) has led an armed rebellion in the Kurdish-majority southeast that has claimed some 45,000 lives.

A 2009 attempt to grant more rights to Kurds and sap support for the PKK went nowhere, and fighting has resumed along with mass arrests.

Critics also point to what they call the "Putinisation" of Erdogan, referring to the Russian prime minister's at-times hardline stance against opponents.

"The number of those who are filling jails because of their opposing views and actions and those who are agonized by legal proceedings is increasing," wrote university professor Ahmet Insel in the daily Radikal newspaper. "(The) number of arrested university students is increasing and except a few weak voices, academia is silent." [...]

For Tunisian academic Amor Boubakri, Turkey's successes would not be easily replicated in Tunisia, which last year saw the overthrow of its president Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, because the country has an increasingly vocal radical Islamist sector.

Naturally, this report did not address religious persecution in Turkey at all; nor did it mention Turkey's fits over acknowledgement of the Armenian Genocide.

A growing export sector in Turkey is disproportionate responses to not getting its way. "Turkey Bans France From Using Its Airspace and Territorial Waters," from PanArmenian, February 3:

French state aircraft and warships are no longer using Turkish airspace and territorial waters after permission requests in three different cases were rejected by the Turkish government, France's top diplomat in Ankara said, amid the ongoing spat over the French bill penalizing the Armenian Genocide denial.

"Our requests [for an aircraft and two warships] have been rejected, so we are no longer issuing such requests. We are using alternative routes," ambassador of France to TurkeyLaurent Bili said.

Bili said the first rejection was to a request for a French military aircraft that wanted to use Turkish airspace on its way toFrancefrom Afghanistan. Similarly, two French warships were not allowed to enter Turkish territorial waters recently. Turkey's move against the French military was part of sanctions imposed againstFranceafter the French Parliament's adoption of the Genocide draft law late December last year.

"There was such an atmosphere [in Ankara] that necessitated my return to France," Bili said, adding that the Turkish reaction against the move was a surprise for many French people but did not affect Turkey's image in the country. "France attaches great importance to its ties with Turkey. We need to be calm. The law is not aimed againstTurkey[…] The number of Armenians living inFranceis 10 times more than the number of Armenians in Turkey. They have become a part of French history. I understand how sensitive issues are, but cutting off ties is not a good idea."Hürriyet Daily News quoted ambassador as saying.

On January 23, the French Senate passed the bill criminalizing the Armenian Genocide denial with 127 votes for and 86 against. Expected to be signed into law by President within 14 days, the bill will impose a 45,000 euro fine and a year in prison for anyone in France who denies this crime against humanity committed by the Ottoman Empire.

Two separate groups of French politicians who oppose the legislation - from both the Senate and the lower house - said they had formally requested the constitutional council examine the law. The groups said they each had gathered more than the minimum 60 signatures required to ask the council to test the law's constitutionality. The council is obliged to deliver its judgment within a month, but this can be reduced to eight days if the government deems the matter urgent.

Does anyone really still believe this is about the peaceful generation of electricity? There are not only the secrecy and subterfuge to consider, but Iran's willingness to commit economic suicide to stay the course in its nuclear program, ultimately indifferent to the suffering of its people. The ends justify the means, and the goal is not about powering toaster ovens in Kermanshah. "Iran says will attack any country used to strike its soil," from Reuters, February 5:

TEHRAN (Reuters) - Iran will attack any country whose territory is used by "enemies" of the Islamic state to launch a military strike against its soil, the deputy head of Iran's elite Revolutionary Guards told the semi-official Fars news agency on Sunday.

"Any spot used by the enemy for hostile operations against Iran, will be subjected to retaliatory aggression by our armed forces," Hossein Salami said, during military maneuvers.

The Revolutionary Guards began the two-day ground exercises on Saturday as a show of military might as tension rises between Tehran and the West over Iran's disputed nuclear program.

Iranian media said it was a small-scale exercise in southern Iran.

The United States and Israel, Iran's arch enemies, have not ruled out a military strike against the country if diplomacy fails to resolve the standoff. Iran says its nuclear program is purely peaceful, rather than aimed at developing weapons.

Iran has warned that its response to any such strike will be "painful," threatening to target Israel, and U.S. bases in the Gulf, along with closing the vital oil shipping route of the Strait of Hormuz.

The perpetrators' sense of entitlement to control in the name of Islam's strict separation of the sexes had been somehow challenged. The men's attitudes were surely informed by Qur'an 4:34's endorsement of the idea of violence (yes, violence) to control disobedient women, as they were also already beating their wives.

When violence doesn't "work" to the satisfaction of the one throwing the punches, it tends to escalate. The final result was a triple homicide. "‘Honour’ crime: Three women killed ‘for loose morals’," by Owais Jaffery and Tariq Ismaeel for the Express Tribune, February 5:

Kot Chuttha police have arrested a man who has admitted to killing his wife, Samina, her sister (his brother’s wife) and their mother in collusion with his brother in a Dera Ghazi Khan village.

Talking to The Express Tribune at the police station, Ismaeel said he did not believe he had committed a crime. “My wife and her sister (his brother’s wife) had loose morals. They deserved death. I can’t let my wife talk to other men,” he said. He said he had caught Samina (his wife) talking to a man over cell phone.

The suspect said he and his brother, Imran, had shot and killed Samina and Zarmina, their wives, and their mother, Kulsoom, on Friday night. “Their mother was to blame for it.

She had failed to raise her daughters in accordance with our traditions. I had warned her (mother-in-law) several times to control her daughters,” he said.

According to the FIR registered on a complaint filed by the father of the deceased sisters, Mukhtar, the suspects had came to his house on Friday night to ask their wives to return home with them.

Mukhtar said Samina and Zarmina had left their husbands’ home a week ago and had been living at their parents’ house in Basti Damraywala. He said his daughters had married the suspects about six months ago. He said whenever the deceased visited him they complained about their husbands’ behaviour. “They would always complain about their husbands beating them and quarreling with them,” he said.

During Friday’s visit, Mukhtar said, the suspects had started quarrelling with his daughters and their mother over their refusal to accompany them back home. “I was in a room next door and could hear the arguments,” he said.

Suddenly, he said, he heard gunshots and the women’s cries. “They had killed my daughters and wife. There was no way I could defend myself against them so I thought the best course was to escape and report the matter to the police,” he said. “I rushed out of the house by jumping over the back wall to escape,” he said.

Talking to the Tribune, several residents of Basti Damraywala said whenever the suspects came to visit their in-laws they would complain about their wives’ conduct.

SHO Malik Ramazan said a police team had caught Ismael on Saturday while he was trying to escape to the Tribal Area adjacent to Dera Ghazi Khan.

He said two police teams were raiding the nearby villages to arrest his brother.

An all too unsurprising update on this story. "Christian women report being assaulted after arrests," by Michael Carl for World Net Daily, February 4:

BOSTON – Saudi Arabian authorities are adding sexual assault to their routine for processing prisoners when they are Christian women, according to a new report that is imploring the international community to pressure the restrictive Islamic nation on basic human rights.

International Christian Concern’s Jonathan Racho says the 35 women prisoners were arrested for meeting for a prayer time, and they are reporting that they were molested.

“The female prisoners have told us about how they were sexually harassed. When the Saudis arrested them, they knew the Ethiopians were Christians,” Racho said.

“They took off the women’s clothes and touched them. When the strip searching was going on, the officers were touching the women,” Racho said.

Racho adds that some of the details are graphic.

“They were using gloves to strip search and they were putting their fingers into their genitals,” Racho said.

“This is a very, very serious accusation of harassment and we want the international community to look into this,” Racho said. “The Saudis have to stop harassing these Christians.”

Racho adds that the treatment of the Christians is the opposite of Saudi public statements.

“The Saudis in the past have publicly said that they want religious tolerance and dialogue between the people of faith,” Racho said. “The Saudi king and the Saudi government have been very active in promoting peaceful existence and religious freedom.”...

To Western audiences, that is, as in the case of the Saudi-backed institute for religious "tolerance" based not in Mecca, not in Medina, but in Vienna: the King Abdullah Bin Abdulaziz International Centre for Interreligious and Intercultural Dialogue.

According to former Detroit Public Schools Superintendent Eddie Green, Kifah Jayyousi was “a great guy, one of the nicest people I’ve ever met.” While Green was superintendent, Jayyousi oversaw the Detroit school district’s capital improvement program.

Jayyousi was charged, according to the Detroit Free Press, with “conspiring to kidnap, maim and murder by providing money, recruits and equipment for Islamic struggles in Bosnia, Kosovo and Chechnya from 1993 to 2001.”

Christopher Paul, a martial arts instructor at a mosque in Columbus, Ohio, is also a terrific guy. Ahmad Al-Akhras, vice chairman of the Council on American-Islamic Relations chapter in Columbus, said: “From the things I know, he is a loving husband and he has a wife and parents in town. They are a good family together.”

Yet Paul, a Muslim, was charged, according to Associated Press, with “providing material support to terrorists, conspiracy to provide support to terrorists and conspiracy to use a weapon of mass destruction.” He was accused of training with Al-Qaeda in the early 1990s, training people for violent jihad attacks on targets in Europe and the United States, and more.

This kind of thing is nothing new. According to a Southern California friend of Raed Albanna, who killed 132 people in a suicide attack outside a medical clinic in Iraq in 2005, “He was into partying. We hit some pretty wild clubs in Hollywood.” Frank Lindh, the father of John Walker Lindh, a.k.a. Suleyman Al-Faris, the convert to Islam from Marin County who joined the Taliban and was captured in Afghanistan fighting against American troops, has said: “In simple terms, this is the story of a decent and honorable young man embarked on a spiritual quest.”

Great guys all. Some partied and some embarked on a spiritual search, but they all ended up in the same place, committing acts dedicated to furthering the cause of jihad, or facing charges of having done so.

But they may be genuinely decent fellows. It was the Nazi genocide mastermind Heinrich Himmler who told a group of SS leaders: “Most of you know what it means to see a hundred corpses lying together, five hundred, or a thousand. To have gone through this and yet -- apart from a few exceptions, examples of human weakness -- to have remained decent fellows, this is what has made us hard…”

Were these SS mass murderers really decent fellows? To their friends and family, they probably were. After all, they weren’t interested in undifferentiated mayhem. They were adherents of a totalitarian, genocidal ideology that convinced them that the murders they were committing were for a good purpose. As far as they were concerned, their goals were rational. It was a necessity for them to remain “decent fellows,” for they were busy trying to build what they saw as a decent society. That their vision of a decent society included genocide and torture did not trouble them, for it was all for -- in their view -- a goal that remained good.

Today’s jihad terrorists are likewise the adherents of a totalitarian, genocidal ideology that teaches them that murders committed under certain circumstances are a good thing. And those murders, here again, are not committed for their own sake, but for the sake of a societal vision hardly less draconian and evil than that of Adolf Hitler, but one also that portrays itself as the exponent of all that is good -- as the Taliban showed us. But the continued reference to such people as “terrorists” pure and simple, and the refusal of the media and most law enforcement officials to examine their ideology at all, only reinforces the idea that these people are raving maniacs, interested solely in chaos for its own sake. The society they want to build, and the means besides guns and bombs that they are using to build it, so far remain below the radar screen of most analysts. These people are just “terrorists,” interested only in “terror.” And so we’re continually surprised when they turn out to be nice guys after all. Decent fellows. Like the SS.

"Father: Beheading plot suspect a dedicated teacher," from the Associated Press, February 4 (thanks to Kenneth):

Nevine Aly Elshiekh is a dog lover who teaches children with developmental disabilities. She is college-educated, well-respected by her neighbors and has no criminal record, not even a speeding ticket.

Family members and friends find it impossible to reconcile that woman with the zealot federal prosecutors say paid a hit man to behead three government informants from a recent terrorism trial.

Elshiekh, 46, was arrested two weeks ago when FBI agents raided the tidy West Raleigh ranch house she shares with her elderly parents. Her father, an Egyptian who moved his family to the U.S. more than 40 years ago, told The Associated Press the charges don't add up.

"We don't believe it," said Aly Elshiekh, 80, a retired professor at North Carolina State University. "She loves special-ed kids and has dedicated her life to helping kids with disabilities."

Also arrested was Shkumbin Sherifi, 21. Prosecutors said they paid $5,000 for the first hit to an FBI informant posing as a fictional hit man's assistant, who later showed the pair a faked photo showing the intended victim's severed head.

Sherifi is the younger brother of Hysen Sherifi, 27, who was sentenced last month to 45 years in prison for conspiring to attack the U.S. Marine base at Quantico and targets overseas.

Elshiekh, a family friend of one of the defendants, frequently made the two-hour trip to New Bern to attend the monthlong trial, which began shortly after the 10th anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks. She scribbled careful notes during the testimony that led to Hysen Sherifi and two others being convicted of terrorism-related offenses. Three others pleaded guilty.

The case hinged largely on surveillance tapes made by confidential informants paid by the FBI.

Elshiekh was born in the United States, while Shkumbin Sherifi is a naturalized citizen. Like many from Raleigh's growing Muslim community, they insisted during trial that the defendants were innocent. There was no evidence presented that any of the accused men had agreed to participate in a specific plot.

Prosecutors say Hysen Sherifi exchanged letters with Elshiekh during trial and called her from jail. He also mailed her bracelets he made behind bars, according to the FBI.

Court records show Elshiekh divorced in 2010. Hysen Sherifi is married to a woman who lives in his native Kosovo.

The Sherifi family fled their homeland in 1999 during a brutal war between Serbs and ethnic Albanians. Shkumbin Sherifi lives at home with his parents and has taken classes at a nearby community college, though records show he was not enrolled at the time of his arrest.

State court records show his only prior brush with the law was in 2006, when he pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor charge for resisting a public officer.

He has said his brother was framed by federal agents.

"Muslims after the Sept. 11 attacks were targeted," Shkumbin Sherifi said in a video uploaded to YouTube the day of his arrest. "For Muslims, it's guilty until proven innocent."

Relatives have declined repeated interview requests. However, an older sister, Hylja Sherifi, testified at a Jan. 27 court hearing that Shkumbin is a primary caregiver to their father, who has end-stage lung cancer.

He also records rap songs in English and Albanian under the stage name Beme. His lyrics recount the sectarian violence in his homeland, which was eventually halted by an American-led bombing campaign against the Serbian military. Tens of thousands of Albanian Kosovars, including the Sherifis, ended up as refugees in the United States, Germany and other western nations.

"Bombs dropping 4 in the morning, tanks blowing, windows shaking, my momma's fainting," Shkumbin Sherifi raps to a heavy beat. "I was a kid. Hey, what could I do? ... Guerrilla warfare, yeah, we fight back. But NATO don't like that. We fight for each other. Y'all tried to murder my sisters and brothers. ... We're gonna to get revenge, before Judgment Day."...

For the past nine years, Elshiekh has worked at Sterling Montessori Academy, a state-supported charter school in Morrisville. School officials declined repeated requests for comment and said only that Elshiekh has been placed on leave.

The organization's tax returns, which are public records, list Elshiekh's title as director of exceptional children and indicate she is among the school's highest-paid employees.

She has also served as a teacher at a religious school that is part of the Islamic Association of Raleigh, the city's largest mosque.

Imran Aukhil, a spokesman for the mosque, did not respond to requests for comment. Members of the congregation were among about 30 people who attended court hearings in Wilmington to show support.

Farris Barakat, a 21-year-old college student, said Elshiekh was his second-grade teacher at the mosque's school.

"Sister Nevine is an amazing person," Barakat said. "Nothing bad has ever come out of her."

On the quiet Raleigh street where Elshiekh lives with her parents, neighbors expressed disbelief she could be involved in anything nefarious.

Alan Harris, who lives across the road from the Elshiekhs, said he frequently saw Nevine walking her chocolate lab. Also a dog owner, Harris said they often spoke.

He said she wore western clothes and never discussed religion.

"She's a kind, caring person, always polite," Harris said. "From what I know of her, she is of good character. I hope she turns out to be an innocent party in all this."

In court Friday, Elshiekh wore a traditional scarf for Muslim women that covered her hair and neck. The shackles on her ankles clanked under a long, black dress....

Clearly he must have meant, "Allah’s promises will be delivered and the Misunderstanders of Islam, pushing a twisted, hijacked version of what is actually a beautiful and peaceful religion, will be victorious." At least that's what all the learned analysts and Islamic spokesmen in the West would have you believe.

"Iran warns world of coming great event," by Reza Kahlili for World Net Daily, February 3 (thanks to all who sent this in):

Amid crippling sanctions over its nuclear weapons program, Iran is continuing to prepare itself for war against the West, and now is warning of a coming great event.

“In light of the realization of the divine promise by almighty God, the Zionists and the Great Satan (America) will soon be defeated,” Ayatollah Khamenei, the Iranian supreme leader, is warning.

Khamenei, speaking to hundreds of youths from more than 70 countries attending a world conference on the Arab Spring just days ago, told a cheering crowd in Tehran that “Allah’s promises will be delivered and Islam will be victorious.”

The countries represented included Bahrain, Egypt, Libya, Palestine and Tunisia, all of which have been involved in the Arab Spring.

In his remarks, Khamenei advised the youths to remain vigilant, stating that the Islamic awakening in the region has delivered several blows to the enemies of Islam and that all Muslims, despite their own historical and social differences, remain united in opposing the “evil hegemony of the Zionists and the Americans.”

Khamenei then claimed the current century as the century of Islam and promised that human history is on the verge of a great event and that soon the world will realize the power of Allah.

Many clerics in Iran have stated that Khamenei is the deputy of the last Islamic messiah on earth and that obedience to him is necessary for the final glorification of Islam.

Khamenei has been heard to say that the coming of the last Islamic Messiah, the Shiites’ 12th Imam Mahdi, is near and that specific actions need to be taken to protect the Islamic regime for upcoming events.

Mahdi, according to Shiite belief, will reappear at the time of Armageddon. Selected forces within the Revolutionary Guards and Basij reportedly have been trained under a task force called “Soldiers of Imam Mahdi” and they will bear the responsibility of security and protecting the regime against uprisings. Many in the Guards and Basij have been told that the 12th Imam is on earth, facilitated the victory of Hezbollah over Israel in the 2006 war and soon will announce publicly his presence after the needed environment is created....

In "A Muslim Apostate Sings the West's Praises" at The American Thinker this morning, Pamela Geller reviews Ibn Warraq's important book Why the West is Best:

It's hard to describe a New Yorker's deep and passionate love for our great city. For me, it is like the love I have for a cherished family member. New York defines me. I have never wanted to be or live anywhere else. I have lived here all my life, and still it thrills me. It is everything possible in life, in love, in work, in play...full of endless possibilities. Ayn Rand summed it up when she wrote in The Fountainhead:

I would give the greatest sunset in the world for one sight of New York's skyline. Particularly when one can't see the details. Just the shapes. The shapes and the thought that made them. The sky over New York and the will of man made visible. What other religion do we need? And then people tell me about pilgrimages to some dank pesthole in a jungle where they go to do homage to a crumbling temple, to a leering stone monster with a pot belly, created by some leprous savage. Is it beauty and genius they want to see? Do they seek a sense of the sublime? Let them come to New York, stand on the shore of the Hudson, look and kneel. When I see the city from my window - no, I don't feel how small I am - but I feel that if a war came to threaten this, I would throw myself into space, over the city, and protect these buildings with my body.

Yes. Which is why I was taken in by the latest book from the world's foremost scholar of Islam: Why the West Is Best. He, too, sees the great human achievement in this city.

In Why the West Is Best, Ibn Warraq uses New York City as a microcosm for the Western civilization that is in every sense -- intellectually, technologically, morally -- superior to the Islamic civilization that is challenging the West every which way nowadays. [...]

Ibn Warraq shows in Why the West Is Best that the sins of the West are common to the whole world: plenty of other cultures have histories of conquest and colonialism, as well as slavery and exploitation. Only in the Western Judeo-Christian context, however, did the principles of free speech and free inquiry develop to the point that longstanding societal and cultural practices could be questioned and ultimately rejected. Muslims took plenty of slaves, but only in the Western world did there ever arise an abolitionist movement. Muslim countries have been home to plenty of tyrants, but only in the West did free speech become a valued and protected principle, as one of society's foremost protections against regimes that could do whatever they wanted, no matter how much it outraged the will of the people.

As we saw in the Muhammad cartoon controversy and its aftermath, the Muslim world responds to criticism not with reform, but with repression. Ibn Warraq details that controversy in this valuable book, and he shows that this inability to deal with criticism and questioning is one key reason why the Muslim world will always lag behind the West -- unless, that is, our clueless and compromised elites continue to give away the store. Why the West is Best shows how crucial it is for the West to stand up to the Organization of Islamic Cooperation's war against free speech. If we don't, this book will not be the call to defense of an imperiled civilization that Ibn Warraq clearly intended it to be. Instead, it will be the epitaph of a vanished culture, dead by its own hand.

Read it all.

They say there is no formal law on the books that forbids women from driving. Not that authorities will respond by saying "Oh, hey, you're right. Here are the keys. Sorry about that." It is, if nothing else, a signal to authorities that they are not going away quietly. "Saudi activists sue government over driving ban," from Agence France-Presse, February 4:

Two Saudi female activists have filed law suits against the government for refusing to issue them driver's licences and banning them from driving a car, they told AFP on Saturday.

Manal al-Sherif, the icon of an Internet campaign launched last year urging Saudi women to defy a ban on driving, and human rights activist Samar Badawi filed their suits against the interior ministry.

Sherif, who was arrested in May 2011 and detained for 10 days after posting on YouTube a video of herself driving, said she decided to file the lawsuit after having been denied a driver's licence.

"There is no actual law that states woman can't drive" in Saudi Arabia and therefore "no justification for preventing them from issuing a licence," said Sherif, one of the activists behind a "My Right, My Dignity" campaign aimed at ending discrimination against women in Saudi Arabia.

Badawi said the grievance board at the interior ministry had informed her to "follow-up in a week" to confirm a court appointment for her lawsuit.

Ultra-conservative Saudi Arabia is the only country where women are not allowed to drive. However, they sit behind the wheel in desert regions away from the capital.

Women in the kingdom who have the financial means hire drivers while others must depend on the goodwill of male relatives.

They also have to be veiled in public and cannot travel unless accompanied by their husbands or a close male relative.

Where's the outrage? Imagine if this effort and ingenuity had been put toward something constructive over the past 10 years. But you don't get 72 virgins for building roads and sewers. "Civilian deaths in Afghanistan at highest level in a decade," by Ben Farmer for the Telegraph, February 4:

The number of civilians killed in the conflict rose eight per cent last year to reach 3,021 – with more than three-quarters caused by attacks from the Taliban-led insurgency.

The findings that on average more than eight Afghans a day are being killed are at odds with Nato assessments that violence is falling.

Deaths from suicide attacks rose more than 80 per cent to 431 over the year.

The number of suicide attacks did not rise, but "the nature of these attacks changed, becoming more complex, sometimes involving multiple suicide bombers, and designed to yield greater numbers of dead and injured civilians" the report found.

The worst was an attack outside a Kabul shrine in December that killed at least 56 and wounded 195 when a bomber detonated in a crowd of Shia worshippers celebrating the Ashura holiday. That attack was claimed by Pakistan-based militants.

The biggest single killer of civilians was homemade landmines often dug into roads, tracks and paths to target Nato or Afghan troops, but detonating indiscriminately.

The United Nations said on average 23 such bombs were found or blew up each day, killing 967 civilians during the year.

Numbers of civilians killed by Nato troops or by Hamid Karzai's forces fell slightly to 410.

Taliban leaders last year repeatedly called on their fighters to do more to protect civilians and threatened punishment to those who failed.

Such pronouncements have had little effect on the bloodshed, however.

"The continued high rate of civilian casualties by anti-government elements suggests that statements and proclamations alone neither resulted in improved protection of civilians nor minimised civilian casualties," the UN report said.

Women and children were increasingly caught up in the violence, accounting for 30 per cent of deaths in the last half of the year....

Join us for the first annual AFDI/SIOA Jessica Mokdad Human Rights Conference on Honor Killings.

Video courtesy Pamela Geller.