International Affairs: 2008 Archives

Occasionally, a good idea surfaces in the press. Today Bret Stephens of the Wall Street Journal -- and former editor of the Jerusalem Post -- suggests how we can help Pakistan, which is in desperate need of $100 billion. Europeans have come up with $15 billion and the only place to turn for the $85 billion is the U.S. (The Saudis don't help anybody, even fellow Muslims, unless it involves spreading Mohammad-era Koranic training on how to take over the world through jihad.)

The quid pro quo for the money would be Pakistan's elimination of its nuclear weapons and its weapons infrastructure. The U.S. would provide safeguards for Pakistan's security against nuclear attack in return. One can be sure that Pakistan's home-grown terrorists would dearly love to get their hands on those weapons. Using conventional weapons, Pakistani terrorists killed 1500 of their felllow civilians in 2007. With nuclear weapons and the opportunity to take over the country, who's to say they would hesitate to use them against the capital city Islamabad? And the U.S. should insist that the Saudi-funded madrassas teaching jihad be shut down as well.

Pakistan is the world's largest exporter of terrorists in the world today and many of them do their work without leaving home. Getting rid of the principal Pakistani threat to the rest of the world -- and Pakistan itself -- would be an excellent accomplishment for the Obama administration.

Just ten Islamic terrorists did it all.

Just ten men paralyzed Mumbai for three days, killing at least 174. Only one survived and he's from Pakistan.

This gripping account by the Wall Street Journal is a tale of horror and sheer incompetence on the part of the Indian police and much of the military.

DECEMBER 1, 2008

India Under Fire for Security in Wake of Attacks

At Tourist Haunts and Train Station, Swiftly Launched Assault Overwhelmed Police; Home Affairs Minister Steps Down

By YAROSLAV TROFIMOV, GEETA ANAND, PETER WONACOTT and MATTHEW ROSENBERG

MUMBAI -- As waiters started setting dinner buffets in Mumbai's luxurious hotels, the killings that would ravage this Indian metropolis began out of sight, in the muddy waters of the Arabian Sea.

In the dusk hours of Wednesday, fisherman Chandrakant Tare was sailing his boat about 100 yards from a fishing trawler when he spotted young men killing a sailor on board. He says he saw them toss the body into the engine room. Assuming he had stumbled upon pirates, Mr. Tare says, he sped away.

Hours later, at least 10 terrorists, having arrived by small craft on the shores of Mumbai, began to sow death and destruction at will across India's financial capital.

Pieced together from interviews with dozens of witnesses and officials, this account of the three days of the battle for Mumbai shows just how a small but ruthless group of skilled militants, attacking multiple targets in quick succession, managed to bring one of the world's largest cities to its knees. The human toll -- currently at 174 fatalities, including nine terrorists -- was exacerbated by the Indian authorities' lack of preparedness for such a major attack. But the chain of events also points to just how vulnerable any major city can be to this type of urban warfare.

Geert Wilders, the outspoken Dutch parliamentarian, sat down with the Wall Street Journal to discuss the invasion of Europe by Muslims and the danger presented by European multiculturists who claim all cultures are equal and denigrate their own civilization. We posted Wilders' plea to the Dutch parliament to act and his must-see short film Fitna earlier.

As he sees it, the West suffers from an excess of toleration for those who do not share its tradition of tolerance. "We believe that -- 'we' means the political elite -- that all cultures are equal," he says. "I believe this is the biggest disease today facing Europe. . . . We should wake up and tell ourselves: You're not a xenophobe, you're not a racist, you're not a crazy guy if you say, 'My culture is better than yours.' A culture based on Christianity, Judaism, humanism is better. Look at how we treat women, look at how we treat apostates, look at how we go with the separation of church and state. I can give you 500 examples why our culture is better."

Already Muslims in the Netherlands are 6% of the population and a tipping point is close,he believes.

He acknowledges that "the majority of Muslims in Europe and America are not terrorists or violent people." But he says "it really doesn't matter that much, because if you don't define your own culture as the best, dominant one, and you allow through immigration people from those countries to come in, at the end of the day you will lose your own identity and your own culture, and your society will change. And our freedom will change -- all the freedoms we have will change

We have just seen what ten determined Islamic terrorists can do to a city of 15 million in India.

Wilders says all the circumlocution about the Global War on Terror is missing the point.

Since 9/11, American political leaders have struggled with the question of how to describe the ideology of the enemy without making enemies of the world's billion or so Muslims. The various terms they have tried -- "Islamic extremism," "Islamism," "Islamofascism" -- have fallen short of both clarity and melioration. Melioration is not Mr. Wilders's highest priority, and to him the truth couldn't be clearer: The problem is Islam itself. "I see Islam more as an ideology than as a religion," he explains.(emphasis added)

What would he do?

He says he would end Muslim immigration to the Netherlands but work to assimilate those already there.

A key requirement of Wilders' would be to give up the Koran, from which the problem that is Islam springs. Islam, he believes, is an ideology, much as HItler's National Socialism was..Since the Koran is the ideology's handbook inciting hatred and violence it should be outlawed.

A proposal to halt Muslim immigration into the United States and to work to assimilate those already here has been made as well by an American scholar of Islam Hugh Fitzgerald.

Read all of the Wilders interview.

From NRO's The Corner yesterday, November 28th:

Both of the above [Mark Steyn]

Andy [McCarty] wrote yesterday about our confused thinking re events in Bombay:

The obsession over whether al Qaeda or its endless jumble of affiliates pulled off the operation is a misguided attempt to mimimize the challenge. The bin Laden network is not unimportant, but it is tapping into something that is much bigger than itself.

We're reluctant to address that "bigger than itself" elephant. All jihad is local: If rockets are fired at Israel, it's a failure to settle the Palestinian question. If an NHS doctor drives a flaming Cherokee into the check-in desk at Glasgow Airport, it must be Tony Blair's foreign policy. The Jerusalem Post's headline writer poses the question:

Homegrown Terror Or International Jihad?

False choice. The answer is: Homegrown terror in the service of international jihad. Clearly, India has had a Muslim problem to one degree or another in the 60 years since partition, but increasingly those locally driven grievances have been absorbed within the global pan-Islamic ideology. What strikes you, as the dust clears in Bombay, is that one assault provided an umbrella for manifestations of almost every strain of Muslim grievance.

There's the local element - the fatal shooting of the city's anti-terror squad, and other prominent officials. There's the crusader element - the targeting of British and American passport holders. There's the Jew-hating element - the Munich massacre nesting within the more general carnage.

And there are the more ironic nuances of jihad: British subjects were to be found not just among the victims but among the perpetrators.

To pose the question as that Jerusalem Post headline is to miss the point. Moreover, the global ideologues correctly see our determination to attribute every attack to purely local phenomena unconnected to any bigger picture as a sign of weakness.

This can't be said often enough:

In so many of the reports about Islamic terrorist attacks the media wonders what the connection to Osama Bin Laden might be. The answer is simple: In all cases the connection is the Koran. All Islamic true believers are doing what the Koran says and Mohammad commanded: Wage unrelenting war against the infidels untiil Islam rules supreme over the world.

Islamic supremacism is mandated by the Koran and Mohammad, the "perfect man" as Muslims call him, whose example provides all the latitude for violence one can imagine. As Muslims learn more about their core ideology, more true believers who become a danger to the world are born. At heart, Islam is a political ideology carrying a religious banner to justify its expansionism by whatever means work, including murder. Conquering the world today requires such things as instilling fear to force submission, damaging if not destroying economies, assassinating leaders and undermining the values of targeted civilizations, be it Europe's or that of the United States.

Among the 1.3 billion Muslims in the world are many good people who simply believe in one god and live good lives. They probably have never read the Koran or the Hadith (the sayings and doings of Mohammad). It's when they do that problems can arise. Saudi Arabia has spent and is spending tens of billions around the world to "educate" those who are in ignorance.

For some reason the Minneapolis-St.Paul area has become the number one gathering point for legal and illegal Somalis to settle in the United States. Virtually all are Muslims. Somali taxi drivers have been in the news recently for refusing to pick up passengers at the international airport who were carrying alcoholic beverages. They also wanted to refuse passengers with dogs (even seeing-eye dogs). Such actions are part of the Stealth Jihad underway in this country to gradually change our culture to an Islamic one. Such a transformation is quite far advanced in Europe. Other examples in the U.S. are Wal-Mart cashiers not being required to ring up sales of pork products and Harvard having women-only gym hours for Muslim students. There are many more.

Now there is a report of a Minneapolis Somali, a naturalized American, who returned to Somali to join with the Islamist forces at war to install Islamic law throughout the country, who has killed himself in a suicide attack. Where did he become infused with Islamic supremacist zeal? At a mosque in Minneapolis? Here's the report:

11/25/2008 10:25:29 PM
KSTP Channel 5
By: Sam Zeff, Assistant News Director; Bob McNaney, Investigative Reporter; Nicole Muehlhausen, Web Producer

FEDS: Twin Cities man behind Somalia bombing

5 EYEWITNESS NEWS has learned that federal law enforcement sources believe that a Twin Cities man blew himself up in a suicide bombing in Northern Somalia last month.
The FBI and Homeland Security are investigating whether Shirwa Ahmed had developed a terrorist recruiting network in the area.

5 EYEWITNESS NEWS learned that Ahmed came to the Twin Cities in 1996 and graduated from Roosevelt High School in Minneapolis. He was a naturalized U.S. citizen.

More than a dozen young men of Somali descent, mostly in their 20s, from the Minneapolis area have recently disappeared, U.S. law enforcement officials tell 5 EYEWITNESS NEWS. All are thought to be associates of Ahmed. U.S. officials suspect most of the young men have departed for Somalia to fight in ongoing violence there or to train in terrorist camps. Family members of the young men are said to be distraught, trying to figure to out what happened to them, sources say.

So far, the investigation has not uncovered credible evidence of a plot targeting the U.S. but American officials want to track down all these young men before they can say for certain what this is or is not, according to ABC News. Sources say the situation is being closely monitored by senior law enforcement and intelligence officials in Washington.

CIA Director Michael Hayden recently voiced his concern about increased fighting in Somalia and the Horn of Africa and the desire of Al Qaeda to strengthen it's ties in Somalia.

"In East Africa, Al Qaeda's engaging Somali extremists to revitalize operations," said Hayden. "And while there clearly has not yet been an official merger, the leader of the al-Shabaab terrorist group is closely tied to al-Qa’ida. And the recent bombings in Somalia may have meant, at least in part, to strengthen the bona fides of this group with al-Qaeda's senior leaders. A merger between al-Shabaab and al-Qa’ida could give Somali extremists much needed funding while al-Qaeda could then claim to be re-establishing its operations based in East Africa. That's a base that was severely disrupted about two years ago when Ethiopia moved into Somalia."

Hugh Fitzgerald, the Vice President of the website Jihad Watch, had this to say:

What does it cost the FBI, the local police, the judicial system, to monitor sometimes around the clock, to hold enless meetings about, to investigate an actual plot or a completed crime, to prepare a criminal case, to hold a trial, to prosecute, to hold another trial if, given the ignorance and idiocy of so many juries, the first one goes awry, to defend an appeal, to lock someone up and support him for ten or twenty or fifty years, or life, to do all of these things, and many more, including fighting off every kind of lawsuit based on demands by Muslims for every kind of yielding and accommodation by non-Muslims whose political and legal institutions, whose way of life, those Muslims have nothing but contempt, and who do not share, who cannot possibly share, any sense of loyalty for the history of this nation, created as it was entirely by non-Muslims, and until the last few decades peopled entirely by non-Muslims, and based on principles and an idea of individual autonomy that are not merely foreign to Islam, but flatly contradicted by the principles of the Shari'a, the Holy Law of Islam which, Muslims are taught, should ultimately be imposed everywhere, for all obstacles to the spread, and then the dominance, of Islam -- which means the Shari'a -- must be removed, everywhere.

Why do we ask for more and more trouble? Can't we in the United States see what Muslims have done in Great Britain, in Germany, in the Netherlands, in Belgium, all over Western Europe? Is there a sane person in Western Europe who would not wish to turn the clock back, wish that the Pakistanis had never been allowed into Great Britain, the Moroccans and Turks into the Netherlands, the Algerians (and Moroccans and Tunisians) into France, the Somalis and Egyptians and Libyans into Italy, the Turks (and Moroccans) into Germany, and so on? Is there an honest Infidel who would dare to disagree with the statement that "the large-scale presence of Muslims in the countries of Western Europe has led to a situation, for both the indigenous non-Muslims, and for other, but non-Muslim, immigrants, that is much more unpleasant, expensive, and physically dangerous for them, than would be the case without that large-scale Muslim presence."

Will the Qu'ran change? Will the Hadith change? Will the facts of Muhammad's life, as recounted in the Muslim biographies, the Sira, change? If they cannot, because the Qur'an is the immutable word of God, and the Hadith were winnowed and assigned ranks of "authenticity" more than a thousand years ago by the most respected muhaddithin, then why should one entertain the wan hope that somehow, in some way, simply because it has just got to be, doesn't it, that Islam will change, or as Tariq Ramadan, that snake, likes to put it, without ever explaining what he means, a "European Islam" can be created, without of course telling us what texts, what tenets, what attitudes, what atmospherics in this "European Islam" would differ from the Islam of North Africa, or the Middle East, or of Muslims in Pakistan or Bangladesh or Indonesia.

Are we not entitled to ask that those in the government take notice of reality, and cease to allow Muslims into our country, where they can only increase that unpleasantness, that skyrocketing expense, that ominous threat of physical insecurity? What does it take to get the government to respond to our most essential needs and desires? What?

The infiltration of an alien ideology incompatible with the U.S. Constituion is a serious and growing problem almost universally ignored by the federal government and the media. In some countries of Europe, such as the Netherlands and perhaps France, it may already too late. Popular resistance is growing in Europe, but it has not been joined by officialdom in any country as yet and certainly not by the bureaucrats in Brussels who run the European Union. In the U.S., the debate must begin. It is a matter of national security.

As we have reported again and again, the Islamic war of conquest is global and aimed at all non-Muslims. India has suffered from Islamic warfare for centuries; it is estimated that some 80 million Hindus were killed by Muslim invaders and occupiers before they were driven out.

Today's attacks in Mumbai (Bombay) are intended to bring down the government, deliver a body body to tourism and the economy, sow fear, discord, anger and chaos.

Muslims constitute 10 to 15% of India's population, which translates into some 110 to 160 million. How many of those are active terrorists or supportive of such terrorists is unknown.

n addition, suspicions about recent murderous Islamic attacks inside India have centered on Muslims from Pakistan. Pakistan itself has become a target of homegrown Islamic supremacists as well as of terrorists leaving Iraq. To this point, the Indian government has, incredibly from an American point of view, treated these attacks as business as usual, sort of a nuisance, a large nuisance to be sure, but a nuisance nonetheless.

The decades-long insurrection by Muslims in Indian-controlled Kashmir has resulted in thousands of deaths. Kashmiri terrorists have been arrested staging terrorist attacks outside Kashmir elsewhere in India.

What's difference about today's attacks is the level of sophistication and its magnitude. Will this shake the Indian government out of its torpor?

Will it also have the effect of making the U.S. government finally acknowledge that the terrorism and other attacks being fought worldwide are Islamic in nature, flowing from the core documents of Islam?

Rumors are surfacing that similar attacks are in preparation for New York City's subway system during the holidays. Hugh Hewitt reminds us:

When highly coordinated attacks like those in India unfold, the families of victims have to wonder whether the attacks might have been prevented but for the blows to surveillance of terrorism suspects brought about by leaks such as those involving the Swift program that tracked terrorist financing. The New York Times defended its actions and those of the Los Angeles Times at the time, but it is in the aftermath of deadly attacks that we should all revisit the recklessness of MSM in dealing with such matters.

No one will ever be able to prove whether an uncompromised Swift program might have penetrated such a big ring of terrorists, but at the time of the controversy, I did interview the Los Angeles Times' Doyle McManus, who admitted that the story might have helped terrorists elude capture. When hell breaks loose, we ought to remind ourselves that the media has in the past decided for itself when security could be breached.

The villains are the terrorists, of course, but their lives are made easier by every leak of a national security secret.

Citizen of the world Obama, not putting the needs of the United States first, could take some very damaging steps early in his Administration that will punch holes in our national security and endanger our troops (HT:Power Line).

[By] 63 percent to 16 percent Americans said they see the U.S. Constitution, not international law, as the highest legal authority for Americans. 83 percent think of themselves as U.S. citizens, rather than citizens of the world.

Obama doesn't think so.