Islamic supremacism: 2008 Archives

Boston attorney par excellence Jeff Robbins wrote an op-ed piece for the Boston Globe yesterday pointing out how Hamas was causing as much if not more anguish and pain to the Palestinian population as to the Jews of Israel. As he notes in his article, Hamas is perfectly content to have Palestinians become victims in its war of destruction against Israel because it gives them photo-ops that the press in the West will use to mischaracterize what is happening.

How ironic that as Jeff Robbins is making that point on the op-ed page, the Globe in a supersize picture on the front page is doing exactly that favor for Hamas.

That's our Globe, as smart and accurate as its parent the New York Times.

The suffering that Hamas causes
By Jeff Robbins | December 30, 2008

LAST MONTH'S commemoration of the 60th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights provided the occasion to ask difficult questions about societies whose political leadership serially violates them. What, for instance, is to be done about places like Darfur or Zimbabwe, or any one of a multitude of places governed by leaders whose consciences appear untouched by the suffering they are causing? To the list of grotesque human rights violators must be added Hamas, whose disdain for the suffering its policies cause the Palestinian residents of the Gaza Strip is exceeded only by its open, and even proud, infliction of atrocities on Israeli civilians.

This year alone, Hamas, which expressly calls for the obliteration of Israel, has launched approximately 3,000 rockets and mortar bombs into Israeli civilian centers, always for the purpose of killing and maiming Israelis if possible, and terrifying those who are not actually hit. In the last week or so, Hamas has fired some 200 rockets and bombs into Israeli communities.

Under these circumstances - circumstances which would have continued without end had the Israelis failed to act - it seems clear that the Israeli military response was not merely a necessary one. It was, regrettably, the only one left.

Israeli author Amos Oz, whose call for peace with the Palestinians is shared by a majority of Israelis, succinctly described the brutalization of Israeli civilians in terms that cannot fairly be disputed. In a recent piece entitled "Israel Must Defend Its Citizens," the longtime advocate for reconciliation between Palestinians and Israelis wrote: "The systematic bombing of the citizens in Israel's towns and cities is a war crime and a crime against humanity."

Oz is correct. But it isn't only Israelis whose fundamental human rights Hamas is violating. It is those of the Palestinian population about whose welfare Hamas professes to care.

In direct contravention of international law, Hamas uses Palestinian civilians as human shields, utilizing homes, schools and community centers as launching pads, content in the knowledge that if innocent Palestinian civilians are caught in the cross-fire, it will be Israel that is criticized. This amounts to a sort of Daily Double of human rights violations: the use of innocent Palestinians as human shields for the infliction of violence upon innocent Israelis.

It is Hamas that perfected the use of the suicide bomb, by which young Palestinians were induced to kill themselves so that Israelis could also be killed. It is somehow apt that Hamas should be forever associated with the suicide bomb, for in a larger sense Hamas has proved to be an instrument of the demise of Palestinians in Gaza.

Hamas's persistent call for the annihilation of Israel through jihad, its unequivocal rejection of any peace with Israel under any circumstances, its seizure of Gaza through a coup d'etat, its repression of women and freedom of expression, and its embrace of Iran have all disgusted the international community, which will have little to do with it. Hamas has likewise repelled numerous Arab governments, which might otherwise have been expected to dip into their ample reserves of petrodollars to provide much-needed aid and foreign investment to Gaza, but which have steered clear of it.

Thus Hamas leads the Gazan population on a kamikaze course. The suffering of Gazans cannot conceivably be a genuine concern of the leadership, given the perpetuation of that suffering for which Hamas is responsible. And the suffering of Israelis is its avowed goal.

Whether it was South Africa or Sudan, the international community has understood that the way to deal with truly egregious human rights violators is not to placate them, but to speak the truth about them, and to them. If the truth is spoken plainly enough, and forcefully enough, to a Hamas leadership whose cruelty and callousness have reached alarming levels, it may be that the Palestinians and Israelis alike may be spared further suffering of the kind to which they have been relegated in the past.

Jeff Robbins, an attorney, was a US delegate to the United Nations Human Rights Commission during the Clinton administration.

Indian-born Muslim author Salman Rushdie appeared on a panel in New York City on December 19th at the Asia Society. In this video he is making devastatingly critical remarks about the motives of the Muslims who carried out the Mumbai massacre.

The text of his key point is below the video.

"Ask yourself the question that if the Kashmir problem were resolved tomorrow, if Israel-Palestine reached a lasting peace, do we believe that al-Qaeda would disband? Do we believe that Lashkar-e-Toiba and Jaish-e-Mohammad would put their guns down and beat them into plough-shears and say we would now be farmers because our job is done. I mean the point about is that is laughable, right? And the point about that is that that is not their project. Their project is power. This is a power grab by the most obscurantist, revanchist, old-fashioned, medievalist idea of modern culture that attempts to drag the world back into the middle ages at the point of modern weaponry ..." Salman Rushdie.

The full panel video may be seen at the website of the Asia Society.

Political correctness, fear of being charged with racism or "Islamophobia" keep those in civilized nations under threat from Islamic suremacist barbarism from defending themselves. Columnist Cinnamon Stillwell of the Middle East Forum asks,

Should not this grave threat to human rights be called what it is? Should not the world rally against this cancer within its midst and spare no expense or effort to stop it from metastasizing? Should not human rights groups make defeating this ideology its chief priority? Should not women's groups make the oppression of Muslim women, both within and without the Muslim world, its first priority? Should not gay rights groups turn their attention to the hangings of young men across the Muslim world? Should not Jewish groups condemn the hateful, anti-Semitic propaganda that is brainwashing Muslim youth? Should not those who believe in religious freedom denounce the persecution of religious minorities, apostates, and atheists in the Muslim world? Should not those who advocate free speech condemn the campaign to silence journalists and activists in the Muslim world, as well as attempts to do the same in the West? Should not the international community do everything in its power to prevent fanatical Islamist regimes from acquiring nuclear weapons and wreaking unprecedented havoc on the planet?

In a richly-linked article Stillwell explains why and how we are endangering ourselves.

Britain's Channel 4 TV network created some controversy by inviting Iran's president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to deliver a message for Christmas Day. It contended that European viewers really didn't know Ahmadinejad and his positions and it was a public service to have him, in a sense, respond to Queen Elizabeth's Christmas message as head of the Church of England.

Caroline Glick, the most perceptive of all Middle East political analysts, believes Channel 4 did the right thing.

THE FACT of the matter is that Channel 4 is right. There is a great deal of ignorance in the West about what the likes of Ahmadinejad and his colleagues in Iran, Syria, Hizbullah and Hamas stand for. But this isn't their fault. They tell us every day that they seek the destruction of the Jews and the domination of the West in the name of Islam. And every day they take actions that they believe advance their goals.

The reason that the West remains ignorant of the views and goals of the likes of Hamas and Iran is not that the latter have hidden their views and goals. It is because the leading political leaders and foreign policy practitioners in the West refuse to listen to them and deny the significance of their actions.

As far as the West's leaders are concerned, Iran and its allies are unimportant. They are not actors, but objects. As far as the West's leading foreign policy "experts" and decision-makers are concerned, the only true actors on the global stage are Western powers. They alone have the power to shape reality and the world. Oddly enough, this dominant political philosophy, which is based on denying the existence of non-Western actors on the world stage, is referred to as political "realism."

Glick rightly denounces this "realism" as fantasy, whether it involves dealing with Iran, Syria, the Hezbollah-dominated Lebanese government, Hamas or North Korea.

These foreign policy realists maintain that talking and appeasement are the way to bend these actors to the will of the West, even though years doing that have not produced the desired Western results. The age-old definition of a madman applies: Doing the same thing that failed over and over again expecting a different result.

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.

President-to-be Obama wants to "reboot" America's relationship with the Muslim world and muses about making a speech in the capital of a major Muslim country.

Amir Tahiri, an Iranian journalist in exile since the Islamic state emerged in Iran, is skeptical. He urges Obama to think carefully about what he has said he wants to do and the implications of whatever move he makes. He doesn't quite call Obama "naive," but he comes close.

Obama talks of "a unique opportunity to reboot America's image," as if his nation's problems with terrorism were due to poor public relations on Washington's part. Does he think so highly of his own talent for seducing people with words that he believes that he can do with a single speech what his five predecessors have failed to do since 1979 - namely, remove the threat of Islamic terror?

Hubris has marked Obama all his life and he won't change now. He probably believes he can do it.

An Interesting read.

The momentous Israeli election set for February 10th seems likely to put the future of Israel in the hands of Benjamin Netanyahu and the Likud Party.

The anti-Israel forces surrounding Obama have been licking their chops, looking forward to the opportunity to sell out Israel to the Muslims clamoring for its destruction. It was very clear before the U.S. presidential election that Obama bore little sympathy for Israel. Too many of the people he is appointing to foreign poicy positions and consulting with are well-known for their antipathy for Israel: National Security Advisor Jim Jones, UN Ambassador Susan Rice, loose cannon advisor Samantha Rice, Warren Christopher and Jim Baker, just to name a few. (Also, 20 years of Jew-hatred from Jeremiah Wright has had to have some effect.) And Obama has promised to "reboot" U.S. relations with the Muslim world and has stated his intention to give a major address in a Muslim state.

People who have been in close contact with Obama's foreign policy transition team have privately acknowledged that the widespread belief that Obama will move swiftly to put the screws on Israel is fully justified. According to one source who has spent a great deal of time with the transition team since last month's US elections, Obama's people are "scope-locked" on Israel.

Even left and center Israelis realize they need a strong leader to stand up for Israel in the face of the expected onslaught from the Obama Administration. The Muslim definition of "peace" is the calm resulting from a complete conquest of the people and land Muslims have targeted. Israel is the target of Saudi Arabia, Iran, Egypt and Syria. If it is wiped out, there will be peace.

It could be that Obama's negative disposition towards Jews and Israel was planted during his early years in Indonesia attending mosque with his step-father. Though Obama has blocked access to much of his history, it has become known that a prominent Muslim hater of Israel actively worked to get him admitted to Harvard Law School (and may have helped finance him while there) and that he found compatibility with the Nation of Islam's Louis Farrakhan, whose Million Man March he helped organize and attended. At a going away party in Chicago, Obama toasted the honoree, a former spokeman for Yasser Arafat, for his many insights delivered over more than a few familly dinners in his Hyde Park neighborhood. Even his Jewish chief of staff Rham Emanuel was a principal aide to President Clinton in the last days of his administration as he sought to win a Nobel Peace Prize by forcing Israel to surrender almost all of the West Bank and East Jerusalem to Palestinian terrorists, leaving itself defenseless. Fortunately for the future of Israel, Arafat said "no" to Clinton and Emanuel. One could not get better evidence that Palestinians didn't want to share land with Israel, they wanted to eliminate it.

The Middle East's leading political analyst Caroline Glick describes the battle that will erupt between the Obama Administration and the people of Israel, who want to continue to live in freedom. They know they will have to defend themselves and need a leader strong enought to withstand the pressure to capitulate that will be brought to bear by Obama and his circle of Israel haters.

Israel will be be mostly alone. Though strongly supported by American Evangelicals and many other Americans, its core constituency, American Jews, sold Israel out, voting 78% for Obama, fully knowing his presidency could spell the demise of Israel. Israel has defended itself through wars and terrrorism for more than 60 years and now needs to ready itself to fend off its greatest threat in history, this time coming from its long-time supporter the United States led by a President Obama. They will vote for Benjamin Netanyahu.

The stakes could not be higher for democracy in the Middle East and the fate of half the world's Jews, as Caroline Glick explains.

Column One: Netanyahu's grand coalition

Dec. 11, 2008
Caroline Glick , THE JERUSALEM POST
The "international community" is eagerly anticipating the incoming Obama administration's policy toward Israel. It is widely assumed that as soon as he comes into office, US President-elect Barack Obama will move quickly to place massive pressure on the next Israeli government to withdraw from Judea, Samaria, Jerusalem and the Golan Heights in the interests of advancing a "peace process" with the Palestinians and the Syrians.

Doctor Thomas Sowell wonders if the reality of Mumbai has clicked into the heads of those who have fought so bitterly to weaken our national security. He wonders if President Obama understands the hatred that seeks to kill us and is immune to offers of concessions. And the American people who "want it all," do they realize that "benefits have costs"? Are we ready to fight to defend what we have -- country, homes, families?

A self-identified Dutch homosexual "humanist," feeling the noose of Islamic supression tightening around him which will change his life forever, says

coping with the islamization of Europe is like “a process of mourning.” He is overwhelmed by a “feeling of sadness.” “I am not a warrior,” he says, “but who is? I have never learned to fight for my freedom. I was only good at enjoying it.”

Professor Sowell fears we have not awakened from our complacent slumber and that we have fallen prey to the false hope of "Can't we all get along?" Are we ready to fight for what we hold dear?

Will the horrors unleashed by Islamic terrorists in Mumbai cause any second thoughts by those who are so anxious to start weakening the American security systems currently in place, including government interceptions of international phone calls and the holding of terrorists at Guantanamo?

Maybe. But never underestimate partisan blindness in Washington or in the mainstream media where, if the Bush administration did it, then it must be wrong. . ..

[The Islamic terrorists] didn't strike again here, even though they have struck in Spain, Indonesia, England and India, among other places. Does anyone imagine that this was because they didn't want to hit America again?

Could this have had anything to do with all the security precautions that liberals have been complaining about so bitterly, from the interception of international phone calls to forcing information out of captured terrorists?

Dr. Sowell identifies the fatal ignorance:

Too many people refuse to acknowledge that benefits have costs. . . . There are people who refuse to give up anything, even to save their own lives.

He asks:

How many Americans are willing to see New York, Chicago and Los Angeles all disappear in nuclear mushroom clouds, rather than surrender to whatever outrageous demands the terrorists make?

Neither Barack Obama nor those with whom he will be surrounded in Washington show any signs of being serious about forestalling such a terrible choice by taking any action with any realistic chance of preventing a nuclear Iran. . . .

The people who flew those planes into the World Trade Center buildings could not have been bought off by any concessions, not even the hundreds of billions of dollars we are spending in bailout money today.

They want our soul-- and if they are willing to die and we are not, they will get it.

The Meaning of Mumbai
Thomas Sowell
Tuesday, December 09, 2008

Will the horrors unleashed by Islamic terrorists in Mumbai cause any second thoughts by those who are so anxious to start weakening the American security systems currently in place, including government interceptions of international phone calls and the holding of terrorists at Guantanamo?

Maybe. But never underestimate partisan blindness in Washington or in the mainstream media where, if the Bush administration did it, then it must be wrong.

Contrary to some of the more mawkish notions of what a government is supposed to be, its top job is the protection of the people. Nobody on 9/11 would have thought that we would see nothing comparable again in this country for seven long years.

Many people seem to have forgotten how, in the wake of 9/11, every great national event-- the World Series, Christmas, New Year's, the Super Bowl-- was under the shadow of a fear that this was when the terrorists would strike again.

They didn't strike again here, even though they have struck in Spain, Indonesia, England and India, among other places. Does anyone imagine that this was because they didn't want to hit America again?

more...

British writer Melanie Phillips shouts to her countrymen "Wake Up!" But the snoring goes on as Islam's War of Conquest steadily advances everywhere.

What Mumbai shows:

a war is being waged against civilization.

at the core of the Islamists' hatred of Israel festers their hatred of the Jews.

With these atrocities, moreover, Islamist attacks have moved much closer to war than conventional terrorism.

The Mumbai atrocity is a wake-up call for a frighteningly unprepared world

By Melanie Phillips
December 2, 2008

Western commentators still don't grasp what the free world is facing. This was not merely a distant horror.

Around the world, people have reacted with horror to the vile atrocities in Mumbai.

For three days, our TV screens transmitted images of carnage and chaos as the toll of murder victims climbed to upwards of 190 people, with many hundreds more injured.

Despite the fact that Western citizens were caught up in the attacks, there is nevertheless a sense that this was nothing to do with us — a horrible event happening in a faraway place.

Among commentators, moreover, there has been no small amount of confusion.

Were these terrorists motivated by the grievance between Muslims and Hindus over Kashmir, or was this a broader attack by Al Qaeda?

If British and American tourists were singled out over Iraq — which many assume is the motive for such attacks — why were Indians targeted in the Victoria railway station?

And why was an obscure outreach centre geared to Jews marked for slaughter?

Such perceptions and questions suggest that, even now, Western commentators still don't grasp what the free world is facing. This was not merely a distant horror.

We should pay the closest possible attention to what happened in Mumbai because something on this scale could well happen here.

But because we don't understand what we are actually up against, we are not doing nearly enough to prevent this — or something even worse — occurring; and if it were to happen here, we would be unable to cope.

The Mumbai atrocities show very clearly what too many obdurately deny — that a war is being waged against civilization.

It is both global and local. It is not 'our' fault; it has nothing to do with Muslim poverty, oppression or discrimination.

The Islamic fundamentalist fanatics use specific grievances — Kashmir, Iraq, Palestine, Chechnya — merely as recruiting sergeants for their worldwide holy war against all 'unbelievers'.

The Mumbai attackers targeted British, American and Indian citizens simply because they wanted to kill as many British, American and Indian 'unbelievers' as possible.

Where they found Muslims, they spared them.

They also singled out for slaughter the occupants of an outreach organization geared to Jews with no Israeli or political agenda — underscoring the point that at the core of the Islamists' hatred of Israel festers their hatred of the Jews.

This was not, as is so often described, 'mindless violence'.

On the contrary, the terrorists precisely calibrated both their choice of targets and the way in which they attacked them. This tells us many things.

India was chosen in order to further two aims. First was to foment greater tension between India and Pakistan.

No less important was the wish to destroy the ever more vital strategic alliance between India and the West in common defense against the Islamist onslaught.

That was why British and American visitors in those two grand hotels were singled out.

And that was why Mumbai itself was chosen — as the symbol of India's burgeoning commerce and prosperity and its links with the West.

The manner of these attacks also carried a message.

Many hostages were taken, but no attempt was made to use them to demand redress of any grievances. They were simply killed.

That made a statement that the terrorists' agenda is non-negotiable.

The attacks demonstrated, above all, the reach of the perpetrators and the impotence of their designated victims.

Those who believe that Islamist terror can be halted by addressing grievances around the world are profoundly mistaken.

With these atrocities, moreover, Islamist attacks have moved much closer to war than conventional terrorism.

The Iranian-born foreign affairs specialist Amir Taheri has pointed out that the Mumbai attacks embody the plan outlined by a senior Al Qaeda strategist after the U.S. decided to fight back following 9/11 — a decision that the Islamists had not expected.

This new strategy entails targeting countries with a substantial Muslim presence for 'low-intensity warfare' comprising bombings, kidnappings, the taking of hostages, the use of women and children as human shields, beheadings and other attacks that make normal life impossible.

Such a simultaneous, multi-faceted onslaught quickly reduces a city and a country to chaos. It can be repeated anywhere — and our cities must be among the most vulnerable.

Mark Steyn worries about the all-too-obvious silence of Muslims about Islamic atrocities and their loud complaints about being put "on the defensive once again about bloodshed linked to their religion.” Mumbai is just another sorry example.

And the press in its multicultural political correctness wonders just who are these youths running amok and what if anything is the purpose of this "random violence." Random?

The discovery that, for the first time in an Indian terrorist atrocity, Jews had been attacked, tortured, and killed produced from the New York Times a serene befuddlement: “It is not known if the Jewish center was strategically chosen, or if it was an accidental hostage scene.”

Hmm. Greater Bombay forms one of the world’s five biggest cities. It has a population of nearly 20 million. But only one Jewish center, located in a building that gives no external clue as to the bounty waiting therein. An “accidental hostage scene” that one of the “practitioners” just happened to stumble upon? “I must be the luckiest jihadist in town. What are the odds?”

While the media is scratching its collective head, what are the "moderate" Muslims doing, Stey wonders?

“[R]eforming” Islam is something only Muslims can do. But they show very little sign of being interested in doing it, and the rest of us are inclined to accept that. Spread a rumor that a Koran got flushed down the can at Gitmo, and there’ll be rioting throughout the Muslim world. Publish some dull cartoons in a minor Danish newspaper, and there’ll be protests around the planet. But slaughter the young pregnant wife of a rabbi in Bombay in the name of Allah, and that’s just business as usual. And, if it is somehow “understandable” that for the first time in history it’s no longer safe for a Jew to live in India, then we are greasing the skids for a very slippery slope. Muslims, the AP headline informs us, “worry about image.” Not enough.

Islamic apologists insist on referring to Islam as a "religion" when it clearly is a totalitarian ideology waving the banner of religion in its war of world conquest. ("It isn't the devil who made me do it; it's Allah.") Why not confuse non-Muslims into thinking that Islam is just another "peaceful religion"? The Irony about the Religion of Peace is that in the view of its adherents there will only be Peace when Islam rules all the world.

By their adoption of multiculturalism -- that is, the belief that all cultures are equally good, except Western civilization, which is universally bad and responsible for the world's ills -- as their religion, Western elites (which include the elites in India) are putting millions in extreme danger.

The Middle East's leading political analyst Caroline Glick finds the post-Mumbai reporting, analyses and governmental commentary unreal if not insane. The mulitculturists immediately began blaming the victims because of the grievances the jihadists had supposedly suffered at the hands of India (ignoring the history of Islamic murder of 80 million Hindus in their centuries of assault). Newspapers such as the New York Times were at pains not to identify that all the attackers were Muslims (instead they were called Pakistanis and one Indian!) and to overlook the fact that the small, out-of-the-way Jewish center had been deliberately targeted.

The jihadists in Mumbai, like their counterparts from Gaza to Baghdad to Guantanamo Bay, have been defended, and their acts and motivations have been explained away, by their allies and loyal apologists: Western multiculturalists. Multiculturalism is a quasi-religion predicated on both moral relativism and a basic belief in the inherent avarice of the West - particularly of the US and Israel. Multiculturalists assert that Westerners - or, in the case of India, Hindus - are to blame for all acts of violence carried out against them by non-Westerners.

What the Mubai attack and its aftermath shows:

THE ATTACKS in Mumbai and the multiculturalists' rush to minimize their significance exposed two disturbing truths about the global jihad. First, they showed that the jihadists are quick studies. With each passing day, their capacity to attack grows larger. . . .

THE SECOND truth about the global jihad that the Mumbai attacks exposed is that there is nothing that jihadists can do to make the multiculturalists stop defending them. And there is nothing effective that democratic governments can do to defend against the jihadists that multiculturalists will deem acceptable. This is the case because multiculturalists cannot accept the fact that the jihadists are waging war against the West without disavowing multiculturalism itself. And since they will not disavow what has become their religion, they will never be convinced that they must stop defending jihadists.

This frightening] "refusal to acknowledge the fact of the global jihad [is shared by] many of the governments principally targeted by jihadist regimes and terror armies. Take the incoming Obama administration for example.

Iran daily threatens to destroy the US, annihilate Israel, close the Straits of Hormuz, use nuclear weapons and proliferate nuclear weapons to other states. It controls Syria, Lebanon and Gaza. It is the primary sponsor of the insurgency in Iraq and, with Pakistan, the major sponsor of the insurgency in Afghanistan. It has cultivated strategic ties with US foes in the Western Hemisphere like Venezuela, Nicaragua and Ecuador.

Yet one of the first foreign policy initiatives promised by the incoming Obama administration is to attempt to diplomatically engage Iran with the aim of striking a grand bargain with the mullahs. . . .

Unless something changes soon, the consequences of the jihadist-multicultural alliance will be suffered by millions and millions of people.

To read Glick's full analysis, click here.

Note: A Power Line reader notes just how assiduously the opinion-setters in the media are going through these multicultural hoops to avoid linking Islam with terror.

Update: Mark Steyn in his weekly column also points out the way in which the cowering media avoids linking "Islam" to "terrorism" in their reports, instead referring to "gunmen," "militants," "youths" and "teenage gunmen."

Columnist Charles Krauthammer points out tha the American and Iraqi success in hammering out an agreement on military and strategic cooperation is an extraordinary achievement. "It constitutes our best hope for the kind of fundamental political-cultural change in the Arab sphere that alone will bring about the defeat of Islamic extremism." He explains why this is so:

A self-sustaining, democratic and pro-American Iraq is within our reach. It would have two hugely important effects in the region.

First, it would constitute a major defeat for Tehran, the putative winner of the Iraq war, according to the smart set. Iran's client, Moqtada al-Sadr, still hiding in Iran, was visibly marginalized in parliament -- after being militarily humiliated in Basra and Baghdad by the new Iraqi security forces. Moreover, the major religious Shiite parties were the ones that negotiated, promoted and assured passage of the strategic alliance with the United States, against the most determined Iranian opposition.

Second is the regional effect of the new political entity on display in Baghdad -- a flawed yet functioning democratic polity with unprecedented free speech, free elections and freely competing parliamentary factions. For this to happen in the most important Arab country besides Egypt can, over time (over generational time, the time scale of the war on terror), alter the evolution of Arab society. It constitutes our best hope for the kind of fundamental political-cultural change in the Arab sphere that alone will bring about the defeat of Islamic extremism. After all, newly sovereign Iraq is today more engaged in the fight against Arab radicalism than any country on earth, save the United States -- with which, mirabile dictu, it has now thrown in its lot.

Read it all.

Not only has President Bush kept the nation safe for eight years, which Mumbai reminds us is no easy task, he has planted the tree of liberty in the heart of the Islamic world. May it grow in numbers.

Barbarians.

In Mumbai, Islamic killers murdered 172 or more. Random killings in restaurants, hotel corridors, shopping malls, aiming at foreigners and rich Indians to strike terror, hurt commerce and destroy terrorism. Ramdom, except for Mohammad's favorite target, Jews, whom they sought out in a small Orthodox synagogue serving Jews passing through Mumbai. Those there were all tortured and killed, except for a 2-year old left crying hysterically over the twisted bodies of his mother, six-month pregnant, and rabbi father.

Not that far away Muslim pirates terrorize shipping lanes for hostages and ransom, much as Muslim pirates did in the Mediterranean for centuries till President Jefferson put an end to it.

There is no right or wrong as the West knows it in Islam. The model is the perfect man Mohammad. If he raped, pillaged, raided caravans and killed Jews, why, then, true believers in Islam can do what their founder did. And they do.

As Mohammad did it for wealth and power, so too do his modern day followers.

A personal note: This summer a wonderful cruise took place on the Regatta, an identical sister ship of the Nautica, both owned by the cruise line Oceania. So the Nautica's brush with Muslim pirates has special meaning.

Allowing this alien ideology into the West is a serious mistake that hopefully will be corrected before it is too late. It is late already for Europe.

Cruise passengers describe "cheeky" pirate attack
By SEBASTIAN ABBOT, Associated Press Writer Sebastian Abbot, Associated Press Writer
Wed Dec 3, 5:12 pm ET

MUSCAT, Oman – Ordered to get inside and stay down, Oregon tourist Clyde Thornburg heard the pirates' rifle shots hit the side of the luxury cruise liner — "Pop! Pop! Pop!" — then felt the ship speed up to escape.

At this port north of the pirate-infested Gulf of Aden, passengers told The Associated Press on Wednesday they had been warned of the danger even before they embarked, and the crew used a device that blasted painful high-decibel sound waves to keep the marauders at bay.

The attack on the nearly 600-foot-long cruise ship in the dangerous waters between Yemen and Somalia was the latest evidence pirates have grown more brazen, viewing almost any vessel as a potential target — even a large luxury liner with hundreds of tourists on board.

But the assault on the M/S Nautica lasted only five minutes Sunday, and the ship with about 650 passengers and 400 crew members sped away quickly and was not seized.

"We didn't think they would be cheeky enough to attack a cruise ship," said Wendy Armitage, of Wellington, New Zealand, shortly after disembarking for a daylong port stop in the Omani capital of Muscat.

During the assault, pirates on one of two skiffs fired eight rifle shots at the ship, according to its American operator, Oceania Cruises, Inc. The captain ordered the passengers inside and accelerated the cruise liner quickly, leaving the pirates far behind in their 20- to 30-foot wooden speedboats, powered with twin outboard motors.

"I couldn't see them shooting, but I heard them hitting the ship, 'Pop! Pop! Pop!'" said Thornburg, of Bend, Ore. "It wasn't really scary because the captain announced for the safety of everybody to get inside and get down, and by that time he was pouring on the coals to the ship and was outrunning them."

Lynne Pincini of Australia said she was heading to a friend's cabin when the order came to keep their heads down and stay inside.

"We heard the announcement, and of course we went straight out on the balcony to have a look," she said. "It was like a very large speedboat. It was running alongside the boat."

The passengers were on a monthlong cruise from Rome to Singapore, a route that took them through the Gulf of Aden between Somalia and Yemen, where pirates have hijacked dozens of vessels this year.

Cargo ships, cruise liners and other vessels use the route — the only access to the Suez Canal shortcut between East and West — unless they are willing to add weeks to the trip by traveling around the southern tip of Africa.

At the beginning of the journey, the Nautica's captain briefed the passengers on what the vessel could do to ward off pirates.

Alicia Moorehead said they were told the Nautica could outrun pirates and was equipped with high-pressure water hoses and a device that blasts painful sound waves at any bandits. Such devices can emit sounds up to 150 decibels — well above the normal pain threshold of 120 decibels — focused on targets several hundred yards away.

"We had been reassured that they had these ghetto blasters that could go through them. And we could outrun anything that they had," Pincini said.

Moorehead's husband, Pat, said the crew laid out the water hoses before the vessel entered the Gulf of Aden.

"They had laid out the fire hoses for a high pressure repellant. They never did fire them up, but they were ready for them," said Moorehead, a native of Long Beach, Calif.

"I will say the crew was very calm. They had prepared for this. Every staff member has an assignment in case of an emergency, and every one of them did it calmly and quickly," he added.

Some passengers said the crew used the long-range acoustic device to ward off the attack, and at least two passengers described hearing two booms after the pirates fired their rifles.

Oceania Cruises would not comment on specific details of the ship's security other than to say the ship's captain and crew used "evasive maneuvers and took all prescribed precautions."

Roger Middleton, author of a recent report on piracy for the London-based think tank Chatham House, said such non-lethal defenses are preferable to having armed guards on board — but their effectiveness is limited. Earplugs can foil the sound device, for example.

The ship's high speed and the difficulty of boarding such a large ship probably were the reasons the pirates were not successful, Middleton said.

"Lots of pirate attacks fail ... They will go for anything and keep trying until they get on board," he said. "I think they see these things as how much money they get out of them. And lots of Western tourists is very valuable."

International warships patrol the Gulf of Aden and have created a security corridor under a U.S.-led initiative, but attacks on shipping have not abated.

In about 100 attacks off the Somali coast this year, 40 vessels have been seized. Thirteen remain in the hands of pirates, including a Saudi supertanker filled with $100 million worth of crude and a Ukrainian ship loaded with 33 battle tanks.

Large ransoms are usually paid for the release of hijacked vessels, but a Somali official maintained Wednesday that a Yemeni cargo ship and its eight crew members were freed without a ransom after an appeal by local clan elders and regional officials.

The ship, released Tuesday, was seized last month in the Arabian Sea. A Yemeni security official had said the pirates were demanding a $2 million ransom

The ten Islamic terrorists sent from Pakistan to commit murder in Mumbai were specifically told to target the small Jewish center for Jews traveling through India. Five hostages were found tortured and murdered, so badly so that the pathologist said he had never seen such brutality. The 29-year old rabbi from New York and his six-month pregnant wife of 28 were murdered, their 2-year old son survived. What did they have to do with Kashmir, Iraq, Hindu violence? They were sought out and killed because they were Jews.

Orphan of New York Rabbi and Wife Killed in Mumbai Attacks Leaves India
Monday , December 01, 2008

The 2-year-old orphan found drenched in the blood of his parents at the besieged Jewish center in Mumbai left India on Monday on an Israeli Air Force jet, accompanied by the Indian woman who rescued him.

Moshe Holtzberg's parents, Rabbi Gavriel Noach Holtzberg and his wife, Rivka, ran the headquarters of the ultra-Orthodox Chabad Lubavitch movement in Mumbai — one of 10 targets besieged by gunman over the 60-hour rampage.

During the attack Thursday, Sandra Samuel, a nanny who worked there for years, had locked herself in a laundry room when she heard Rivkah screaming for her to help. Then the screaming stopped, and it was quiet, said Robert Katz, a New York-based fund-raiser for an Israeli orphanage founded by the boy's family.

Samuel cracked open the door of her hiding place and saw a deserted staircase. She ran up one flight and saw the rabbi and his wife, covered in blood and shot to death. The child was crying beside his parents' bodies, his pants drenched in blood.

She snatched the boy, bolted down the stairs and out of the building.

"She's been there with him throughout," Katz said.

Six civilians were killed in the center — all of them Jewish and four of them Israeli, Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesman Andy David said. In all, more than 170 died in attacks on 10 targets across the Indian city.

Moshe was accompanied on the trip to Israel by his maternal grandparents, Yehudit and Shimon Rosenberg, who were reunited with their grandson when they arrived in Mumbai on Friday.

"It was pure raw emotion, tears of joy, tears of sorrow, incredible emotion, understandably out of control," said Katz.

Asked about Moshe's condition, he said: "I don't know that he can comprehend or that he will remember seeing his parents shot in cold blood."

Before the child's departure, dozens gathered at a synagogue in Mumbai for a memorial service for the Jews slain at the Chabad center. During the service, Moshe burst into tears and called out "Ima," Hebrew for "mother."

Weeping, Shimon Rosenberg delivered a eulogy for his daughter and son-in-law, reciting the Hebrew phrases from the Book of Job: "The Lord giveth. The Lord taketh away. Blessed be the name of the Lord."

Moshe's father was a dual American-Israeli citizen and his mother was Israeli. The couple lived in Israel and Brooklyn before they moved to Mumbai in 2003.

Samuel, an Indian resident, will live with Moshe in Israel "so at least he has someone he knows and recognizes and loves," said Katz.

Though Samuel has no passport or papers, Moshe's grand-uncle, Rabbi Yitzchak David Grossman, helped arrange for her to get a visa to Israel. In a sad coincidence, Grossman is founder of the Migdal Ohr, which says it is Israel's largest facility for orphaned and disadvantaged children.

The Israeli jet that carried Moshe and Samuel also carried the remains of his parents and the others killed at the Chabad House, the Israeli Foreign Ministry said.

Government officials planned a small ceremony upon the plane's arrival.

"There are going to be thousands of people at this funeral," said Katz, executive vice president of Migdal Ohr's fundraising arm in New York. "This couple wasn't living in the West Bank. They weren't settlers. They weren't occupying anyone's land. They were killed because they were Jews, simple and plain."

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From the Hadith, the sayings and actions of Mohammad:

.“The Last Hour would not come unless the Muslims will fight against the Jews and the Muslims would kill them until the Jews would hide themselves behind a stone or a tree and a stone or a tree would say: `Muslim, or the servant of Allah, there is a Jew behind me; come and kill him’; but the tree Gharkad would not say, for it is the tree of the Jews.” (Sahih Muslim, Book 40, Number 6985).

The Wall Street Journal continues its extraordinary reporting of the murders by Islamic supremacists in Mumbai. (For its earlier report, click here.) Evidence collected by American and Indian intelligence points to a Pakistani mastermind of the massacre. All ten of the terrorists were Pakistani. The one survivor has been confirming information that was intercepted by American communications monitoring.

Read the story that will appear in tomorrow's WSJ:

DECEMBER 3, 2008

India Names Mumbai Mastermind Article

By GEETA ANAND, MATTHEW ROSENBERG, YAROSLAV TROFIMOV and ZAHID HUSSAIN

MUMBAI -- India has accused a senior leader of the Pakistani militant group Lashkar-e-Taiba of orchestrating last week's terror attacks that killed at least 172 people here, and demanded the Pakistani government turn him over and take action against the group.
Just two days before hitting the city, the group of 10 terrorists who ravaged India's financial capital communicated with Yusuf Muzammil and four other Lashkar leaders via a satellite phone that they left behind on a fishing trawler they hijacked to get to Mumbai, a senior Mumbai police official told The Wall Street Journal. The entire group also underwent rigorous training in a Lashkar-e-Taiba camp in Pakistani-controlled Kashmir, the official said.

Mr. Muzammil had earlier been in touch with an Indian Muslim extremist who scoped out Mumbai locations for possible attack before he was arrested early this year, said another senior Indian police official. The Indian man, Faheem Ahmed Ansari, had in his possession layouts drawn up for the Taj Mahal Palace & Tower hotel and Mumbai's main railway station, both prime targets of last week's attack, the police official said.

Mr. Ansari, who also made sketches and maps of locations in southern Mumbai that weren't attacked, had met Mr. Muzammil and trained at the same Lashkar camp as the terrorists in last week's attack, an official said.

U.S. officials agreed that Mr. Muzammil was a focus of their attention in the attacks, though they stopped short of calling him the mastermind. "That is a name that is definitely on the radar screen," a U.S. counterterrorism official said.

Information gathered in the probe also continues to point to a connection to Lashkar-e-Taiba, that official said. Along with a confession from the one gunman captured in the attacks, officials cited phone calls intercepted by satellite during the attacks that connected the assailants to members of Lashkar-e-Taiba in Pakistan, and the recovered satellite phone from the boat.

It also emerged Tuesday that U.S. authorities had warned Indian officials of a pending attack by sea. Hasan Gafoor, Mumbai police commissioner, told reporters there was a general warning issued in September that hotels could be targeted as well, after the bombing of the Marriot Hotel in Islamabad.

Two militants arrested in early 2007 also told police officials then that they were part of a band of eight Lashkar members who slipped into India by boat from Karachi, Pakistan, and made their way to Mumbai, an Indian police official in Kashmir said in an interview Tuesday. The group broke into pairs -- just as last week's attackers did -- and made their way north using safehouses provided by local sympathizers, the police official said.

The evidence cited by investigators is giving fresh ammunition to the Indian government, which has long tried to pressure Pakistan into cracking down on Lashkar-e-Taiba. India claims the group enjoys support from elements of the Pakistani intelligence agency. Pakistan denies that and outlawed the organization in 2002, but has done little to curtail its operations.

Mr. Muzammil's name is on a list of people -- numbering about 20 in all -- that India gave Pakistan earlier this week, demanding their immediate extradition, a senior Pakistani official told the Journal. The official said Pakistan was examining India's list of suspects and has assured New Delhi that action would be taken against them if there is evidence of involvement in the attacks.

Any move by the shaky civilian government of Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari against Lashkar-e-Taiba could create a huge backlash, however, particularly from Islamic groups, said a senior official in Pakistan. On Tuesday, Pakistani Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani convened a meeting of all of the country's political parties in the capital to develop a joint response to Indian demands for extradition.

"The government of Pakistan has offered a joint investigation mechanism and we are ready to compose such a team which will help the investigation," Pakistan's Foreign Minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi said in a televised statement. Mr. Qureshi, however, declined to say whether Pakistan would hand over any of those sought by India.

The Mumbai attacks have ratcheted up tensions between the two nuclear-armed neighbors, who have been exchanging verbal fire for the past several days and sparking fears of a conflict. U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice is scheduled to arrive in India Wednesday, as is Mike Mullen, chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff.
Indian authorities say evidence highlights how Lashkar has broadened its operations to include recruitment of both Indian and Pakistani Muslim extremists.

Lashkar-e-Taiba -- literally Army of the Good -- has been implicated by Indian officials in several recent terrorist attacks on Indian soil. The group initially focused on fighting the Indian army in the disputed state of Kashmir. Over the years, it has expanded its cause into the rest of India and aims to establish Islamic rule.

India has told Pakistan that the latest attacks in Mumbai were masterminded by Mr. Muzammil, aided by others in Lashkar's senior ranks including an operative named Asrar Shah, according to a senior Pakistani official. Mr. Muzammil, a Pakistani in his mid-30s, became head of Lashkar-e-Taiba's anti-Indian planning cell some three months ago, according to Dipankar Banerjee, director of the Institute of Peace and Conflict Studies, an independent think tank in New Delhi. Indian authorities believe he is in Pakistan but officials there haven't acknowledged that.

India also claims the attacks were approved by Hafiz Muhammed Saeed, the Pakistani official said. Mr. Saeed is the head of Jamaat-ud-Dawa, the parent organization of the Lashkar group. Mr. Saeed, who is free in Pakistan, denied the accusations. "India has always accused me without any evidence," he told Pakistan's GEO News television channel.

Indian investigators -- helped in part by the testimony of the one terrorist they captured alive, Mohammed Ajmal Kasab -- say they now possess solid proof. "We have made substantial progress in the investigation," said A.N. Roy, director general of the State Police of Maharashtra, where Mumbai is located.

According to Mumbai police chief Hasan Gafoor, Mr. Kasab told interrogators that he and fellow gunmen spent between a year and 18 months in a Lashkar-e-Taiba camp.

An armed policeman guards the Victoria Terminus station on Tuesday in Mumbai.
The 10 militants left Pakistan's port city of Karachi on Nov. 23 aboard a ship called the Al Husseini, which also carried a crew of seven, another senior police official said. Investigators believe that all the 10 gunmen were Pakistani because they spoke Punjabi or Punjabi-accented Urdu.

When they entered Indian waters, the terrorists hijacked a fishing trawler called the Kuber and took its five crew members prisoner. The terrorists transferred four of them to the Al Husseini and they were subsequently killed, police believe. The terrorists kept the Kuber's lead crewman alive and sailed close to Mumbai.

The terrorists abandoned the Kuber in haste, fearing detection by an approaching vessel, the senior police official said. In the process, they forgot their satellite phone on the Kuber. Investigators found in the call log the numbers of five people, including Mr. Muzammil, two of his deputies and his personal aide, the senior police official said. Indian officials had already intercepted phone conversations made while the terrorists were traveling to Mumbai.

Indian Muslim leaders are skeptical of Lashkar's reach into India. But police say Lashkar has increasingly sought contacts and recruits among Indian extremists. In October, for instance, five Muslims from the southern state of Kerala were recruited into Lashkar-e-Taiba and traveled to the Indian part of Kashmir, according to T.K. Vinod Kumar, Kerala's deputy inspector-general of police. They tried to cross the line of control that runs between India and Pakistan and reach training camps on the Pakistani side.
Four among the group were killed in a firefight with the Indian military during that attempt. The fifth, construction worker Abdul Jabbar, was arrested two weeks ago, Mr. Kumar says.

Unlike other Pakistani-based jihadist organizations, Lashkar draws its recruits across a broad social spectrum, from universities as well as among unemployed youths. The majority come from Punjab; Mr. Kasab used to live in the Punjabi village of Faridkot, according to Indian investigators.

In March 2007 when two militants were arrested in the Indian-controlled section of Kashmir, the pair told police that Lashkar was looking to start slipping people into India from the sea to avoid heavily guarded land borders. The sea also provided a winter route to Kashmir for Lashkar members, when high mountain passes crossing to India's part of the state are often blanketed by deep snow.

—Siobhan Gorman, David Crawford, Tariq Engineer and Peter Wonacott contributed to this article.

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.

War is being waged by Islamic supremacists worldwide. Their goal is to conquer the world. Don't laugh. They've been at it for 1400 years, with much success over the centuries. With the Middle East awash with billions of petrodollars, a potential support base of 1.3 billion Muslims worldwide, of which an estimated 10-15% are supportive of the supremists' goal, the followers of Mohammad are in the best position to wage war they have been in since 1453.

While they don't currently have military might to attack the U.S. frontally, they can inflict damage through terrorist attacks, as happened on 9/11/2001. The attack of just ten Muslim terrorists in Mumbai is illustrative as well. Fortunately, since the Bush Administration quickly went on high alert immediately after 9/11 and strengthened national defenses, it has became much more difficult for Islamic forces to launch a major strike in this country. In fact, several significant plots have been thwarted and the nation has been able to protect itself successfully in the years since.

However, there is a quieter offensive underway to weaken our culture to advance the cause of Islamic supremacism that largely escapes notice. One of the foremost experts on Islamic supremacism who is very much focused on Islamic efforts to undermine society is Robert Spencer. He calls this under-the-radar, quiet offensive to establish Islam as the ruler in the U.S. "Stealth Jihad," which he describes in detail in his book of that name.

Jihad in common parlance means violent war against unbelievers, which, according to Mohammad, is to be unrelenting until victory is achieved. Stealth Jihad is part of that same war, but it is being being waged by non-violent means. Among other things, it involves raising money for "charity," which gets funneled to support terrorist organizations and Islamic fighters in other parts of the world -- as well as Stealth Jihad in the U.S., Europe and elsewhere..

A major victory was won last week in a Dallas courtroom when the Holy Land Foundation and several of its leaders were found guilty of knowingly funding the terrorist organization Hamas in Gaza. During the course of this trial and a prior one it was revealed that the Holy Land Foundation was but one of up to 70 Islamic organizations in a network established by the Muslim Brotherhood to undermine the United States from within with the ultimate goal of replacing the U.S. Constituton with Islamic law, Sharia. To be specific, the goal is to conduct in the United States

"a kind of grand jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and 'sabotaging' its miserable house by their hands and the hands of the believers so that it is eliminated and Allah's religion is made victorious over all other religions."

If President Obama (after January 20) closes Guantanomo, where is he going to put those guys?

As everyone but President-elect B. Hussein Obama's base knows, many of the Guantanamo detainees cannot be sent to their home countries, cannot be released and cannot be tried. They need to be held in some form of extra-legal limbo the rest of their lives, sort of like Phil Spector.

Will we send them all to Afghanistan where they can resume jihad? Does anyone -- except some nutty judge -- want them released in the United States if no one will take them?

One story illustrates the challenge.

TERRORISTS' RESTLESS LEG SYNDROME

Guantanamo detainees not exactly philanthropists
by Ann Coulter
November 26, 2008

I thought the rest of the world was going to love us if we elected B. Hussein Obama! Somebody better tell the Indian Muslims.

As everyone but President-elect B. Hussein Obama's base knows, many of the Guantanamo detainees cannot be sent to their home countries, cannot be released and cannot be tried. They need to be held in some form of extra-legal limbo the rest of their lives, sort of like Phil Spector.

And now they're Obama's problem.

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.

Among those killed by the Islamic terrorists were a young Jewish rabbi (29) and his wife (28). Both were Americans.

The bodies of Rabbi Gavriel Noach Holtzberg and his wife, Rivka were found after Indian commandos seized Nariman House from the militants today.

Their deaths were confirmed by Rabbi Zalman Schmotkin, a spokesman for Chabad Lubavitch, the ultra-Orthodox Jewish group that ran the centre.

The couple's two-year-old son, Moshe Holtzberg, managed to escape with the centre's cook, Sandra Samuel, yesterday morning. The toddler is now with his grandparents.

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.

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.