Voices From the Long War

Quote for the day

2006-11-13T08:01:00.000-08:00

"If you stay in Iraq or leave Iraq, and Iran acquires nuclear weapons, you lose Iraq, you lose Jordan and Saudi Arabia. The Persian Gulf will become just that, a Persian gulf."

Benjamin Netanyahu

Standing up in Turkey

2006-11-04T10:28:00.000-08:00

Thousands of nationalist Turks marched in the capital Saturday, vowing to defend the secular regime against radical Islamic influences and urging the government not to make too many concessions in order to gain European Union membership.
Some 12,000 people from more than 100 pro-secular associations waved Turkish flags as they marched to the mausoleum of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the founder of modern Turkey. "Turkey is secular and it will remain secular," they chanted during a march broadcast live on some TV channels. (source)

Perhaps there's the fact that in Turkey, Islam isn't wrapped up in Arab nationalism, but even amid the rising tide of Islamicist-Jihadi rhetoric, there are people there still willing to stand up for a different vision of what the government should be.

Voices from the Resistance

2006-10-31T10:50:00.000-08:00

Apparently, as long as the nightly burning of Citroens and Peugeots by local "youths" remains at 200 cars or less, and only one woman receives burns covering 60 percent of her body when the bus she's traveling in is torched by a Molotov cocktail, France can be said to be “relatively calm"--at least by her interior minister. -- Ed Driscoll

Who would have thought centuries after the Enlightenment that sophisticated Europeans — in fear of radical Islamists — would be afraid to write a novel, put on an opera, draw a cartoon, film a documentary or have their pope discuss comparative theology? Victor Hanson

Multiculturialism's Achilles' Heel

2006-10-31T10:12:00.000-08:00

Multiculturalism grew up in a time where people, unhappy with the behaviors of their forefathers, sought to find alternative role models in the cultures of other parts of the world, and used them, somewhat like a smorgasbord, to pick and choose things they would like to be part of their world view. It goes hand in hand with the repudiation of the older cultural norms and the longing to make something that seemed more fair, clean and perhaps holy in the eyes of the beholder. But an end result was something that could be easily exploited by those who had other agendas besides the merging of all that was good in a culture into a matrix that everybody would enjoy. Besides the destruction of the "old truths and verities," as William Faulkner used to say, contemplate this:

Resistance to integration and assimilation into the mainstream culture is the cornerstone of the Islamist agenda as it helps in the development of closed societies within the host societies. There is no doubt that a community that allows a number of closed communities to develop in its midst loses its social cohesiveness and becomes dysfunctional. It becomes a source of discontent and dissatisfaction, breeds conflicts and lives in a perpetual state of tension.

Knowing that a marginalized and disenfranchised youth serves as a never-exhausting source for terrorism and a divided society breeds such young men, the Islamist establishment has worked diligently and scientifically to sabotage social harmony in Europe. As a first step toward achieving this objective, Muslims are convinced that they will have to insist on maintaining their “Islamic” identity, as their culture is better than the host culture. To further divide the host societies along the religious lines, Muslims are encouraged to refuse to evolve in the culture in which they live. They are being forced to recede into closed societies by refusing to integrate into the mainstream culture. (source)

At best, this "celebration of diversity" has brought cultural weakness and social disruption everywhere where it's brand of intolerant "toleration" has become the norm, destroying the old fall back positions that gave people under pressure a way to bond together in strength until the danger has passed. And now, it is playing into the hands of those who wish to bring the entire ediface of Western civilization down.

Is it too late to stem the tide?
.

Voices of the Submitted

2006-10-31T06:23:00.000-08:00

"I have never learned to fight for my freedom. I was only good at enjoying it.” Oscar Van den Boogaard

"The dominant ethos,is perfectly voiced by the stupid blonde woman author with whom I recently debated. She said that it is sometimes better to let yourself be raped than to risk serious injuries while resisting. She said it is sometimes better to avoid fighting than run the risk of death. " Henryk M. Broder

Not His Fault

2006-10-31T05:32:00.000-08:00

Many as seventy-five percent of the women in prison in Pakistan are behind bars for the crime of being a victim of rape (source). How could this unjust reality be true?

Under Islamic concepts, rape is the woman's fault, almost exclusively. The fact that the culture demands women to swath themselves in long shape destroying fabric is because Islamic culture views sexual stimulation as something that does not have to be controlled by men. If they are stimulated, it is the woman's fault. In Saudi it's reached the situation of virtual sexual apartheid. Single men cannot go to many shopping malls. One artist group in that nation wants the 1/3 of the members who are women banned, so they don't have to deal with them standing by their art displays explaining them in public.

The Mufti of Australia, Sheikh Taj al-Din al-Hilali, has gained international attention this week by saying that women are generally at fault if they are raped. Speaking to a Muslim audience in Sydney, he explained that rape (specifically, zina, sexual activity forbidden under Islamic law -- a word mistranslated in published accounts of the Sheikh’s words as “adultery”) is “90 percent the woman’s responsibility. Why? Because a woman owns the weapon of seduction. It’s she who takes off her clothes, shortens them, flirts, puts on make-up and powder and takes to the streets, God protect us, dallying. It’s she who shortens, raises and lowers. Then, it’s a look, a smile, a conversation, a greeting, a talk, a date, a meeting, a crime, then Long Bay jail. Then you get a judge, who has no mercy, and he gives you 65 years.”
Al-Hilali invoked another Islamic scholar in support of his views: “But when it comes to this disaster, who started it? In his literature, writer al-Rafee says, if I came across a rape crime, I would discipline the man and order that the woman be jailed for life. Why would you do this, Rafee? He said because if she had not left the meat uncovered, the cat wouldn’t have snatched it. If you get a kilo of meat, and you don’t put it in the fridge or in the pot or in the kitchen but you leave it on a plate in the backyard, and then you have a fight with the neighbour because his cats eat the meat, you’re crazy. Isn’t this true? If you take uncovered meat and put it on the street, on the pavement, in a garden, in a park, or in the backyard, without a cover and the cats eat it, then whose fault will it be, the cats, or the uncovered meat’s? The uncovered meat is the disaster. If the meat was covered the cats wouldn’t roam around it. If the meat is inside the fridge, they won’t get it. If the woman is in her boudoir, in her house and if she’s wearing the veil and if she shows modesty, disasters don’t happen.” (source)

Since to prosecute a man for rape, a woman needs four male witnesses, or else she is admitting to fornication and thus guilty of a crime in a number of Islamic countries, such as Pakistan, she is in a situation where if a man decides to violate her, she has no redress, becasue the legal system is designed in a way that has nothing to do with how sexual crime is committed, and denies the reality of male responsibility.

And this is the type of justice they would like to impose on the West.

(check out this blog for an example of this type of behavior in Cairo: Forsoothsayer.blogspot)

POVs

2006-10-30T05:30:00.000-08:00

A Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research (PCPSR) poll (September 14-16) showed that more than two-thirds of Palestinian Arabs (67%) oppose Hamas recognizing Israel.
Another poll, conducted by the Harry S. Truman Research Institute for the Advancement of Peace at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the PCPSR found that 57% of Palestinian Arabs support terrorist attacks upon Israeli civilians, three-quarters of Palestinian Arabs support the kidnapping of Israeli soldiers in a bid to obtain the release of jailed Palestinians terrorists and 63% are inspired by the Lebanese Islamist terror group Hizballah and seek to emulate it ( Jerusalem Post, September 26).
A poll produced by the Jerusalem Media and Communications Center (JMCC) (September 19-22) showed that nearly half of all Palestinian Arabs (48%) support suicide bombings against Israeli civilians and 59.3% support copying Hizballah’s tactics.
Yet a further poll, conducted by Center for Opinion Polls and Survey Studies at An-Najah University (September 7-9), found that 61.3% of Palestinian Arab s support terrorist attacks upon Israeli civilians and 52.5% support rocket attacks upon Israeli population centers. (source)

Kind of hard to work out any permanent peace with points of view like this. Peace requires a desire to move beyond the conflict. The best one could hope for with these attitudes is truce, which is a far different critter

Witness

2006-10-30T05:24:00.000-08:00

(AINA) -- According to the Assyrian website ankawa.com, a 14 year old Christian Assyrian boy, Ayad Tariq, from Baqouba, Iraq was decapitated at his work place on October 21.

Ayad Tariq was working his 12 hour shift, maintaining an electric generator, when a group of disguised Muslim insurgents walked in at the beginning of his shift shortly after 6 a.m. and asked him for his ID.

According to another employee who witnessed the events, and who hid when he saw the insurgents approach, the insurgents questioned Ayad after seeing that his ID stated "Christian", asking if he was truly a "Christian sinner." Ayad replied "yes, I am Christian but I am not a sinner." The insurgents quickly said this is a "dirty Christian sinner!" Then they proceeded to each hold one limb, shouting "Allahu akbar! Allahu akbar!" while beheading the boy.

Translated from Arabic by AINA

Christian martyrdom - giving your all not to take out others in a war of hate that uses religion as an excuse, but to stand up and say "I follow Jesus." There is a world of difference between the two.

1984 Inshallah

2006-10-21T08:57:00.000-07:00

George Orwell painted a nightmare image of a secular communistic world in his novel 1984, where all actions of the citizens were controlled in minute detail.

The truth is, around the world right now, the countries most guilty of this are not secular socialist regimes, but Islamic nations where the minutae of day to day life is controlled by religious authorities.

A recent example of this has taken place in Somalia:

MOGADISHU, Somalia An Islamic court says women are no longer permitted to swim at a beach in Somalia's capital.
The court's chair says allowing women to socialize with men contradicts Islamic teaching, especially when it comes to swimming.
The ban is the latest in a string of religious regulations that have sparked fears of a Taliban-style regime in Somalia. Islamists have gained power since June. The group has introduced public executions and has publicly lashed drug users. It has also banned movie viewing. (source)

In areas where this takes place, people's freedom to choose grows increasingly curtailed by the rulings of the religious establishment. Women were beaten in Afghanistan because religious police thought they were walking too loudly. Much is done to dehumanize them and create enclaves where those in control can live the life they want to without being reminded of the existance of those they don't want to be interfered with, whether it's women or non-Arabs or whatever the local predjudice is. And it's all done in the name of God.

Behavior like this, based on fear of insulting a capricious and constrictive image of God seems to reflect the image of Man who wants to control his fellow man and excuse the behavior he prefers more than Heaven. 1984 has arrived, Inshallah.

Walking Freedom's Tightrope, and Falling Off A Lot

2006-10-16T17:09:00.000-07:00

IT is smaller than a 10 pence piece and all but invisible to people standing just inches away.

Yet Nadia Eweida's tiny white gold cross is at the centre of a huge legal row that has engulfed Britain's biggest airline and infuriated religious groups.

Check-in worker Nadia, 55, was forced to take unpaid leave by British Airways after refusing to remove the Christian emblem. But she claims it is a clear display of double standards as Muslims can wear head scarves and Sikh males their turbans.

"It seems that only Christians are forbidden to express their faith," she told the Mirror. "I am not ashamed to be Christian and shouldn't be made to feel that way. " (source)

There is a fine line in this debate. At what point is religion acceptable? Why should one faith's symbols be ok, while another's aren't? How far does one allow things before drawing the line?

There are multiple trends going on here. One is secular post-Christian society which wants to eliminate all outward marks of religion, but ESPECIALLY Christian markers. Sometimes it seems that there is favoritism at times towards anything not Judeo-Christian in the West - Islam, neo-paganism, and other spiritual walks. Islam demands standards that create news stories when denied, and is pretty aggressive at being taken seriously, to the point that in some places there are two standards - Post Christian secular multiculturalism and Islam. This situation has to be worked out. The rising tide of both anti-Christian/anti-Semitic attacks and the growth of anti-Islamic attacks are both symptoms of a society not perceived to be providing justice on this issue. One cannot have a state that is both secular and Islamic at the same time. The balance must be established, and trying to do it by denying all expressions of faith will not work either.

Interesting times.

Effects

2006-10-15T16:06:00.000-07:00

Youssef Ibrahim noticed about Europe's Islamic communities:

...the OIC and its Saudi patrons train, fund, and influence to promote barricaded communities inside cultural ghettos, waging war against the societies that embrace them.

For decades, these interconnected webs of mosques, Islamic schools, and imported OIC imams have used the same freedom of speech they deny others to introduce the favored OIC concept of repressed societies to the heart of liberal Europe.

Their quest has not been limited to insulating their communities from a sea of democracy. They also have sought to reverse freedoms for Western citizens who want to publish, write, make films, and read. Witness the hounding of the British author Salman Rushdie and his books, the mayhem over the Danish cartoons of Prophet Muhammad, the upheaval over Pope Benedict's critical comments on Islam, and the far too numerous attempts to ban creative works on Islam.

Until recently, Muslims were close to achieving a separate status for Islam, contravening the very essence of the secular state that is Europe's foundation.

It has reached the point that it has become impossible not to be affected by it if you live in Europe. In the desire for diversity, Europe has created a land of cultural enclaves with very little room for mutuality, and the reactions are causing a variety of shockwaves across the continent.

In the UK, we find a tidal wave of reaction about the suggestion that there is a time and a place to wear the veil (not the hajib, mind you, but a face concealing veil), and some places are inappropriate.

First Jack Straw and now David Davis have made news by the sudden realization that not all is happy in multicultural land:

David Davis, the shadow home secretary, says that Britain risks social and religious divisions so profound that society's very foundations, such as the freedom of speech, will become "corroded" and that the perfect conditions for home-grown terrorism will be created.

His stark intervention, in an article for The Sunday Telegraph, represents a toughening of the Tory stance on the dangers of Islamic radicalism and follows calls from some leading ministers for Muslim women to remove their veils. It is also a departure from the "caring Conservatism" message laid out by David Cameron.

Mr Davis says he supports the stance on veils adopted by Jack Straw, the Commons Leader, but believes the wider issue is one of the "very unity of our nation".

"What Jack touched on was the fundamental issue of whether, in Britain, we are developing a divided society. Whether we are creating a series of closed societies within our open society. Whether we are inadvertently encouraging a kind of voluntary apartheid.

"At the starkest level, we may be creating conditions in the recesses of our society that foster home-grown terrorism."

Mr Davis's comments follow a series of events that highlight the reluctance among some Muslims to integrate fully into British society. Aishah Azmi, a 24-year-old teaching assistant, is taking legal action because her school in Dewsbury, West Yorkshire, asked her to remove her veil in front of children. Madani High School, an Islamic school in Leicester, is ordering its non-Muslim girls to wear headscarves.

An ICM poll this weekend showed 57 per cent of voters want Muslims to do more to fit in and 53 per cent agree with Mr Straw that the full veil creates a barrier between Muslim women and other people. (source)

The recent cancelling of an opera in Germany has gotten a number of people thinking in that country, with a lot of unhappiness at the compromises the infliction of tiptoeing around Islamic values is causing in everyday life. Incidents against Moslems are on the rise, no doubt a symptom of public displeasure at the behavior of people who won't fit in. In the UK, there has been at least one Imam beaten up just for being an Imam, not something I condone, but it is a symptom of displeasure. Jack Straw's popularity has shot up since he made the comments about the veil.

Robert Putnam, Harvard professor and author of Bowling Alone, a book on the disintegrating social fabric in the US, told The Financial Times (“Harvard study paints bleak picture of ethnic diversity”) that “the more diverse a community is, the less likely its inhabitants are to trust anyone – from their next-door neighbour to the mayor.” The FT adds that “when the data were adjusted for class, income and other factors, they showed that the more people of different races lived in the same community, the greater the loss of trust.” (source)

This is happening in Europe, and more unrest and disastisfaction, and most likely violence will be the result. The change in tone is being noticed.

This week, the 57-nation Organization of the Islamic Conference decried what it called the "shrinking space" for tolerance toward Muslims in Europe.

"Muslims have noted with concern that the values of tolerance are eroding and there is now shrinking space for others' religious, social and cultural values in the West," the Saudi-based OIC, the world's largest Islamic association, said a statement sent to Reuters. (source)

Don't know where this will end, but awareness of the reality of self-censorship, accomodation, the reality of what multiculturalism leads to and the truth of the way things are is dawning. It may lead to interesting times.

Pakistani Ways for Sexual Abuse in the Name of God

2006-10-14T08:41:00.000-07:00

From Western Resistance:

The Hudood Ordinances, which are a part of the Pakistan Penal Code which are derived from sharia, were introduced on February 10,1979, by the dictator General Zia ul-Haq. What is so controversial about these laws, apart from their breaking Article 25 of the constitution which outlaws discrimination on the grounds of gender or religion, is their blurring of the distinction between rape and adultery.
In article 8 of the Hudood laws, proof of zina (illegal intercourse, i.e. adultery or fornication) or zina-bil-jabr (rape) requires that either a) "the accused makes before a Court of competent jurisdiction a confession of the commission of the offence" or b): "at least four Muslim adult male witnesses, about whom the Court is satisfied, having regard to the requirements of tazkiyah al-shuhood, that they are truthful persons and abstain from major sins (kabair), give evidence as eye-widnesses of the act of penetration necessary to the offence: Provided that, if the accused is a non-Muslim, the eye-witnesses may be non-Muslims."

Firstly, the law means that non-Muslims cannot testify against Muslims, contravening Article 25 of the constitution. They also have to be male, against Article 25. If there are only Muslim women as witnesses, there must be eight ready to testify, as a woman's testimony in Islamic law is worth half that of a man.

Secondly, the law means that for a rape or act of adultery to be prosecuted, the same rules apply. Four Muslims must have witnessed such an act, which in practice rarely happens in cases of rape or adultery.

But most importantly, adultery (zina) is proven if a person admits to the act. Therefore, a woman who has been raped and takes the matter to court or reports it to the police is then accused of adultery, unless she can muster four male Muslim witnesses to the event. The maximum penalty for zina or zina-al-jabr is stoning to death.

This basically insures the right for women to be abused by men. If they tell, they can be prosecuted. If they demand justice, they can be stoned. No protection for the innocent under this code of law.

Where is the outrage in the West, especially in feminist circles?

Justice for Women under Sharia?

2006-10-05T07:25:00.000-07:00

If you listen to the talk from some people, the rules in Islam are there to protect women, but when you look at Sharia-based penal codes, you find things like this in Iran (and there are similar rules about what is considered valid evidence in countries like Pakistan and other nations):

Article 74: Adultery, whether punishable by flogging or stoning, may be proven by the testimony of four just men or that of three just men and two just women.

Article 75: If adultery is punishable only by flogging it can be proven by the testimony of two just men and four just women.

Article 76: The testimony of women alone or in conjunction with the testimony of only one just man shall not prove adultery but it shall constitute false accusation which is a punishable act.

That last one is a real kicker, because if you are a woman who has been attacked by a man, and there aren't enough witnesses, then if you bring charges, you in turn will be punished - a clause that seems perfectly designed to let men get away with rape.

Western Resistance has the following information about women in Iran under threat of the death penalty:

Parisa Akbari currently resides in Adelabad prison in Shiraz, southern Iran. She was arrested in April 2004, while working as a prostitute. She confessed to the charge of adultery during interrogation. She claimed that had been forced into prostitution by her husband due to the family's poverty. During her trial in June 2004, she retracted her confession. On 21 June 2004, Branch 5 of the Fars province Criminal Court sentenced her to be stoned to death for adultery.
On 15 November, 2005, the sentence was upheld by Branch 32 of the Supreme Court. Currently her case is being reviewed by the Supreme Court.

Iran Eskandari, an Ahwazi Arab from the Bakhtiari clan, was reportedly talking to the son of a neighbor in the courtyard of her house, when her husband attacked her with a knife. She was badly beaten and left bleeding and unconscious on the floor. While she was unconscious, it is alleged that the man killed her husband with his own knife. While police were interrogating her about the killing, Iran Eskandari reportedly confessed to adultery with the son of her neighbor. However she later retracted her confession. A court in the city of Khuzestan sentenced her to five years' imprisonment for being an accomplice in the murder of her husband, and to execution by stoning for adultery. The verdict was upheld by the Supreme Court in April 2006. Her lawyer has appealed against the sentence. She is detained in Sepidar prison, in Ahwaz city.

Khayrieh Valania, an Ahwazi Arab, was reportedly subjected to domestic violence by her husband. She allegedly began an affair with a relative of her husband, who then murdered him. She was sentenced to death by Branch 3 of Behbahan Court, in Khuzestan in southwestern Iran, for being an accomplice in the murder of her husband, and death by stoning for adultery. Khayrieh Valania has denied any involvement in her husband's murder, but confessed to adultery. The sentence was upheld, and the case has reportedly been sent to the Head of the Judiciary for permission to be implemented. Talking about her fate, Khayrieh Valania said "I am ready to be hanged, but they should not stone me. They could strangle you and you would die, but it is very difficult to have stones hitting you in the head".

Soghra Mola'iwas sentenced to 15 years' imprisonment for being an accomplice to the murder in January 2004 of her husband Abdollah, and to execution by stoning for adultery. During interrogation she said "My husband usually tormented me. Nevertheless, I did not intend to kill him. On the night of the incident.... after Alireza killed my husband, I ran away with him because I was scared to stay at home, thinking that my brothers-in-law would kill me." Alireza was sentenced to death for the murder of Soghra Mola'i's husband, and to 100 lashes for "illicit relations". The sentences are pending examination by the Supreme Court.

Fatemeh (surname unknown), was sentenced in May 2005 by Branch 71 of the Tehran Province Criminal Court to retribution (qesas) for being an accomplice to murder, and execution by stoning for having an 'illicit relationship' with a man named Mahmoud. Her husband was sentenced to 16 years' imprisonment for being an accomplice to the murder of Mahmoud. The case is currently being examined in the Supreme Court. According to a May 2005 report in the newspaper Etemad, an altercation occurred between Mahmoud, and Fatemeh's husband. Fatemeh confessed to tying a rope around Mahmoud's throat, which resulted in his strangulation. She has claimed that she intended merely to tie his hands and feet after he was unconscious and hand him over to the police.

Malek Shamameh Ghorbany (see our link on sidebar) was arrested in June 2005, was sentenced to execution by stoning for adultery by a court in Orumieh in June 2006. She is reportedly held in Orumieh prison. Her brother and husband reportedly murdered a man that they found in her house, and she too was nearly killed after they stabbed her with a knife. Malak Ghorbany's case is being reviewed.
She said to her lawyer at a recent meeting: "For a while, I was receiving harassing phone calls from a man I did not know. He claimed that his name was Morad, and that he was infatuated with me. I have no idea how he had obtained my phone number or address.

One day, I was at home when this man called me again from his cell phone. As I was talking to him on the phone, the door bell rang. Still on the phone, I opened the door, and there he was! I tried to close the door, but he placed his leg inside and pushed his way in, despite my desperate struggle to keep him out. He turned off the lights and raped me. My brother came in and witnessed the attack. He contacted my husband, and when "Morad" tried to flee from the house, my husband and brother caught him and stabbed him to death. They also stabbed me, and when I opened my eyes next, I was in a hospital.

Her husband, Mohammad Daneshar and her brother Abu Bakr Ghorbai were sentenced in the same court which convicted her to adultery to six years' jail each.

Kobra Najjar is detained in Tabriz prison in northwestern Iran. She is at imminent risk of execution. She was sentenced to eight years' imprisonment for being an accomplice to the murder of her husband, and execution by stoning for adultery. She was scheduled to be executed after serving her prison sentence, which was finished two years ago. She has reportedly written to the Judicial Commission for Amnesty to ask for her sentence of execution by stoning to be commuted, and is awaiting a reply.
Kobra Najjar was allegedly forced into prostitution by her husband, a heroin addict who was violent towards her. In 1995, after a severe beating by her husband, she told one of her regular customers that she wanted to kill her husband. The customer allegedly murdered her husband after Kobra Najjar took him to an arranged meeting place. He was sentenced to death, but he was pardoned by the victim's family, to whom he paid diyeh (blood money).

Most of the information above has been circulated through various outlets, with details coming from Amnesty International. Spipou has sent me links to information on another case.

Kobra Rahmanpour, now aged about 25, was arrested on November 5, 2000. She was sentenced to death for the premeditated murder of her mother-in-law in 2000, and her husband, the victim's son, has demanded that the death sentence be carried out.
Around 10 November, 2003, Kobra Rahmanpour's husband reportedly presented documents establishing him as the legitimate representative of his mother's heirs. He is therefore entitled to request that the death sentence be carried out, as 'retribution in-kind' (qisas-e nafs). According to Iran's Penal Code, the decision to inflict retribution (qisas-e nafs) rests with the heirs of the victims.

After being confirmed by the Supreme Court, death sentences imposed for murder can only be commuted if the victim's heirs forgo their right to retribution and ask instead for the payment of blood money (diyeh), or if the Head of the Judiciary invokes his power to revoke a finalized verdict if it is flawed, and refer the case to another court. It is reported that Kobra Rahmanpour's lawyer will ask for clemency from the victim's family.

Kobra allegedly acted in self-defence after her mother-in-law tried to attack her with a kitchen knife. At an unknown date, she was tried by Branch 1608 of Tehran's Criminal Court, where she was sentenced to death. Her lawyer has reportedly complained that the court did not consider, nor conduct any investigation into, her claim that the murder was in self-defence. Her lawyer is believed to have alleged that wounds on Kobra Rahmanpour's right hand had been sustained due to pulling the knife from the hands of her mother-in-law. In January 2003 her death sentence was upheld by the Supreme Court. Kobra Rahmanpour has been held in prison, possibly in Tehran, since her arrest in 2000.

It is alleged that Kobra Rahmanpour was forced into marriage against her will by her parents, and had been the victim of domestic violence since her marriage.

A PETITION exists to help save her life.

A letter from her father Abolfazl Rahmanpour describes the plight of his daughter:

"...Kobra, my young daughter, was forced to marry a man, 43 years older than herself. Kobra was a good student in her school and her wish was to study in the university but she was forced to forget all of her wishes because of the extreme poverty of the family.

Kobra had a hard life before marriage and after marriage her life became even worse. The extremeness of problems and sufferings that she had to take in a family that look at her first a servant and then a daughter-in-law, was so much that made a kind girl like her to commit a murder in an accident and while defending herself.

Kobra spent the best years of her youth in the prison and with the threat of death She has suffered so much and has completely fall. It is so many years that she can feel the execution rope on her neck and her life goes on with sensing death, she shouldn't suffer more tortures. When look at her colorless eyes, fallen teeth, and senseless body I always ask myself what did I do wrong? What shouldn't I have done?....

Kobra herself has written an open letter, which includes the following:

My dear father and mother and my disabled brother who are so much worried for me, have always looked for your support. So many times I think with myself - wishing my life would follow a different path. Wishing I could finish my pre university course. Wishing I wouldn't be forced to work and to serve my husband's family. Wishing I wouldn't reach the borders of madness. But I have suffered so much. I am really a victim. And it is this victim who they are going to hang to .death. This is not a destiny that I deserve.

In these days of scare and horror, I come to you again. I thank all the media papers and people who supported me and said that "Kobra shouldn't be executed". This time, maybe for the last time, I want to ask you to do your last tries for me to not to be executed and to have a chance to be free. In my dreams I always think of freedom and a good life after that.

I have suffered enough. Help me so this horrible nightmare that has so many times chased me in the sleep and has made me waking up and scream, won't come true. Help me to be away from death. Do whatever you can, there is little time. These days would be gone too and for me, every click of a clock is a sign that death is near. Please help me! I am scared from death and execution. I hate the execution rope and the crane. I want to live. All other ways are closed to me. Nobody is here for me. My only hope lies in people and my fellow humans. I want to hug my father and mother."

And lest we forget, there is another case, which we described on August 7, 2006.

Delara Darabi has been sentenced to death for a second time, with this judgement upheld by the Iranian Supreme Court. She has been found guilty of committing a murder when she was 17 years old. However, there are elements in the Iranian prosecutor's case that do not ring true. She was first charged last year and found guilty in a lower court in Rasht, in northern Iran. The Supreme Court initially upheld the sentence of the Rasht court. However, in January this year, the Supreme Court rejected the death sentence and ordered a retrial.
Following two trial sessions from January and on 15 June, Delara Darabi was once again sentenced to death, and she is now at imminent risk of execution, even though the offense was committed when she was only 17, and still a minor. As a signatory to the International Convention on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) and the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC), Iran has stated that it will not execute people for offenses committed when under the age of 18. However, since 1990, Iran has executed 18 people for crimes committed as minors.

The guilt of Delara Darabi is questionable. She did take part in a burglary, with a man, 19-year old Amir Hossein, though she says she was under the influence of sedatives at the time. The two had entered a woman's house, with the intention of burglary, but the woman was killed. Amir Hossein had apparently been the person to kill the woman. Unwisely, Delara Darabi at first confessed to the crime. She retracted the statement later, claiming that Amir Hossein had asked her to take responsibility for the killing, as he was over 18 and would have faced the death penalty. Delara assumed that, being under 18, she would not be executed if found guilty, so she confessed to the killing.

Another woman facing possible death by hanging for killing a man who tried to rape her in a public park is Nazanin Mahabad Fatehi.

And on July 28, we related that another woman, a mother of four children, 37-year old Ashraf Kalahri, was in imminent danger of being stoned to death. According to Lily Mazahery and Payvand, on August 13, Ashraf's death sentence was stopped. But whether she will be stoned to death, or sentenced to another capital punishment is not known. At present, her life hangs in limbo.

Something worth watching

2006-10-05T07:10:00.000-07:00

Lots of images here of what is being carried in anti-western protests. Makes one think.

By Pim's Ghost

Hattip to Gates of Vienna

Invitation to a Slaughter

2006-10-04T14:04:00.000-07:00

The UN, in its wisdom, has decided that the displaced people in Darfur, at high threat of being slaughtered by the factions in Sudan that want to be all Arab, and not black, should feel free to do what they want, even though it is clear that what they want is to purge Darfur of its darkness:

The top UN Peacekeeping official on Wednesday rejected the notion that the United Nations could deploy troops to Sudan's war-wracked Darfur region without a firm political agreement between rebels and Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir's government. (AP) (source)

This basically guarantees that there will be no one around to rescue those when the slaughter begins in the refugee camps, and then the world can sit around and wring its collective hands about how some people are just so bad, pretty much like what happened in Rwanda.

Some background:

The Darfur conflict or the Darfur genocide is an ongoing armed conflict in the Darfur region of western Sudan, mainly between the Janjaweed, a militia group recruited from local Baggara tribes, and the non-Baggara peoples (mostly land-tilling tribes) of the region. The Sudanese government, while publicly denying that it supports the Janjaweed, has provided arms and assistance and has participated in joint attacks with the group, systematically targeting the Fur, Zaghawa, and Massaleit ethnic groups in Darfur. The conflict began in February 2003.

Estimates of deaths in the conflict have ranged from 50,000 (World Health Organization, September 2004) to 450,000 (Dr. Eric Reeves, 28 April 2006). Most NGOs use 400,000, a figure from the Coalition for International Justice. The mass media has described the conflict as both "ethnic cleansing" and "genocide." The U.S. Government has described it as genocide, although the United Nations has declined to do so. (See also: List of declarations of genocide in Darfur)

After fighting worsened in July and August 2006, on August 31, 2006, the United Nations Security Council approved Resolution 1706 which called for a new 20,000 UN peacekeeping force to supplant or supplement the 7,000-troop African Union force. Sudan strongly objected to the resolution and said that it would see the UN forces in the region as foreign invaders. The next day, the Sudanese military launched a major offensive in the region. (See also: New Darfur peacekeeping force)

Unlike in the Second Sudanese Civil War, which was fought between the primarily Muslim north and Christian and animist south, in Darfur most of the residents are Muslim, as are the Janjaweed (source)

From ReliefWeb:

The current situation (October 1st 2006)

It is now three years since the escalation of the conflict in Darfur into a major humanitarian crisis. Today the situation is as desperate as ever. The sheer scale of the crisis is incredible:

- 2 million people - nearly one in three people in Darfur - have had to flee their homes and are sheltering in camps for Internally Displaced People (IDPs)

- A further 200,000 refugees from Darfur are in camps over the border in neighbouring Chad

- More than 3 million people - that's half Darfur's entire population - are now reliant on humanitarian aid

Such a catastrophic humanitarian situation will not improve without an end to the ongoing and brutally violent conflict. In May this year, the government and one of the main rebel groups signed the Darfur Peace Agreement. But far from bringing peace, since then the situation has deteriorated significantly and Darfur has again become more violent and volatile.

Oxfam is working to provide people in Darfur with clean water and sanitation systems, and to promote good hygiene practice in the overcrowded camps. Our programmes within Darfur itself currently reach 415,000 people, with a further 40,000 beneficiaries in refugee camps across the border in Chad.

Getting worse

Throughout 2006, the situation in Darfur has been deteriorating further with every passing week. Civilians continue to face daily threats of violence and there are frequent displacements of entire communities. Humanitarian workers are finding it increasingly dangerous to carry out vital work. The peace deal signed earlier this year included just two of the parties to the conflict. Since then, the rebel movements have splintered into numerous different armed groups and Darfur has become increasingly fractured and lawless. Major clashes have occurred between those who have signed the agreement and those who have not. As always, civilians have been caught in the middle.

Even the people who have fled to the camps are still not safe. Venturing just a short way outside to collect essential firewood or go to the market risks harassment, sexual assault or death. The people of Darfur urgently need protection from violence. There is a 7,000-strong African Union force deployed to monitor the region, but it is under-funded and short of both the resources and troops it needs to cover such a vast area that is the size of France. It needs much more support from the international community and a clearer and more proactive mandate if it is to make the region safe and secure for civilians.

Aid cannot get through

The increasing violence throughout Darfur is restricting the ability of Oxfam and other humanitarian organisations to do our work, and hundreds of thousands of people are going without desperately needed assistance as a result. Roads are frequently too dangerous to travel on; aid vehicles are increasingly being hijacked or attacked, and staff placed in growing danger. 12 humanitarian workers were killed in Darfur between July and September. In July, Oxfam was forced to close two of our North Darfur offices because of regular carjackings and the death of one of our staff

The UN estimates that four out of ten people in Darfur who need assistance are not receiving it because they cannot be reached. Large parts of rural Darfur are completely inaccessible for aid agencies. Many of Oxfam's programmes are now reached by helicopter because roads are too insecure, but helicopters only go the larger towns. In villages and rural areas, where there are no helicopter services, we are often simply unable to get there.

People want to return home

Many of the people in the IDP and refugee camps have now been there for nearly three years. They want nothing more than to be able to go back to the homes, villages and fields where they and their families have lived for generations. But they are effectively trapped. The ongoing insecurity means that safely returning home is impossible. Humanitarian organisations such as Oxfam are working to make life in the camps as bearable as possible, but greater protection and security is needed throughout the region.

Life in the camps

Most people arrived in the camps with virtually nothing. Some people were able to bring animals or a few pots or blankets (if they were not killed or stolen in attacks), but many came with just the clothes they were wearing. Even for those lucky enough to bring animals such as donkeys and cows it is difficult to find food with which to feed them, and taking them out to graze puts the owners at serious risk of attack.

In most camps, the makeshift huts in which many of the families shelter are made of little more than sticks and plastic sheeting. Some camps, such as Abu Shouk on the outskirts of El Fasher, have been running for three years and have taken on an air of permanence, with stone buildings replacing the tents. Others are newer and continue to grow, such as Gereida in South Darfur, which has tripled in size since the start of 2006. Gereida is now home to 130,000 people and many of the camps are the size of cities, with tens of thousands packed tightly together with only the most basic facilities. Such overcrowded conditions are a breeding ground for diseases. The enormous humanitarian response to the crisis has brought most levels of disease in the camps to manageable levels - although this progress now risks being reversed as insecurity prevents us accessing many people.

The main feeling in many of the camps is one of helplessness and frustration - people are trapped here, unable to return home, with limited access to education or any kind of economic activity. The majority of people in the camps are women and children, and many of the young children have now spent a large part of their lives living there. (source)

Rape is rampant, and the only thing standing between the people in threat is a 7,000 man group of African Union troops who are too few to do the job, and running out of funds. When they go, there will be absolutely no one to stand between the women and childen in threat, and the militias and rebels whol will do them in.

And for the most part, it is Muslim on Muslim crime, too...the main difference is the attackers are ethnically Arab and the victims are not.

Another Fine Example of Women in Islamic Society

2006-10-03T06:53:00.000-07:00

For some reason, Islamic men in the Salafi POV talk a lot about the restriction of women as a way to protect women, but in reality it often seems that it is a way for men to separate themselves from women in a strange attempt to create a world they can pretend is all masculine, except for the barest areas where they need women (sexual, caretaking, childrearing). Outside of that, women should not impinge upon male comfort zones.

A good case in point of that is the recent talk about restricting women from men during the haj, in a ritual that was always open to women's participation. It was rationalized as putting them in a location where they could have a better and safer view, but it really was a way to avoid contact.

Here is another example:

In the House of Artists in Jeddah, artists exhibit their paintings and hold exhibitions. There has now been a call to remove women artists and their works from the House of Artists to other premises. There is a reason for this and it is not difficult to find it — there were complaints that women artists were standing beside their work and explaining it to visitors. That, we are told as we are told, is against our traditions.

The matter was brought up by the head of the Fine Art Department in the Jeddah Culture and Art Society. The esteemed “head” told a local paper that the founding members of the society were requesting that only male members should be allowed to participate in activities in the House of Artists. He added: “We have to note that we are in a Muslim country where segregation of the sexes is the norm. Also 70 percent of the activities and functions of the house are dedicated to male artists and only 30 percent to women. The original purpose for opening the house was to serve male artists.”

Even in the world of art, men want women to step aside! What does this say about us and the so-called intellectuals in our country? I am simply lost for words. So male artists are not happy with having women around. What is to be done? The answer is to do it the Saudi way and kick the women out. They are uncomfortable that a woman artist stands before her work and explains it to people who came to see it and are happy to meet the artist. This, however, is considered offensive. By whom, we need not say. Some of the women artists interviewed were, needless to say, furious at the insinuations and innuendoes of indecency.

In the Kingdom, there are places which allow men and women to work together — and these have been successful. Some of the places are in hospitals and in television and radio. In the latest move by the government, women are to hold jobs in the Foreign Ministry and also as diplomats. Are these women who have been appointed to their respective jobs by the government, and who have official blessing, violating the traditions of our country?

One expects artists to be an example of collaboration, especially since their work should free their minds of prejudice, but I have forgotten that our society does not believe in cooperation; it usually wants women to be put into specified areas where they are not in direct contact with other people. Can’t we just for one minute treat each other with respect and good will?

Yes, we are a conservative society and yes, some of us like to maintain family privacy and in some circles, people opt for the women only/men only policy. But there are also other areas in our society that allow the mingling of sexes, so what do we do? Obviously some of us do not understand that and that is why some people constantly complain of the presence of women. Maybe the solution is to create cities for women only or, as one friend suggested, “Build underground cities for women.”

With such people as the head of the Fine Art Department, who asked for women to be excluded, I think we might find ourselves one day contemplating the idea of moving women outside the cities and maybe allowing families visiting times. (source)

Western feminists (who sometimes seem to be trying to create the opposite, a world where they don't have to have contact with men in meaningful ways) need to pay attention, and take off any cultural blinders the multicultural pov is giving them. In Europe, Sweden has a feminist party that is truly radically down on men, and also Islamic communities where honor killing in the name of purity (but which is also highly driven, I suspect, by a cultural misogyny that wants not to have to deal with the impact women have on men's lives). The Feminist party is not quoted in the press much about how awful honor killings are, as far as I have seen, but are quoted about how bestial Swedish men are, when they have the most egalitarian society on earth on the law books. As long as you don't live in an Islamic community where Sharia functions as the real law.

I don't understand this double standard. How can they ignore their sisters like that?

Preventive Surrender

2006-10-01T06:24:00.000-07:00

I saw this term in an editorial by Henryk M. Broder. It describes a reaction many people take in the face of threat. We saw it in Europe in the lead up to WWII, and we see it many places now in the face of aggressive militant Islamic protest.

He notes:

If we didn't already know it by the time of the recent scandal surrounding cartoons of Muhammad were published in a Dutch newspaper, that event confirmed to us that Muslims are especially sensitive when it comes to their prophet. We learned that their anger threshold is very low and that it's best not to overstep it. We also learned that they interpret the suggestion that they incline towards violence as a form of defamation -- one they like to respond to by burning flags and effigies, and by chanting "Kill Those Who Insult Islam!"

And how have we responded to this attack on Western sensibilities? In London, they are setting up teams to inform Islamic leaders when it's time to do a police raid. A political leader in the Netherlands says if enough people vote for it, there's nothing wrong with estabilishing Sharia law there. And everywhere, people are walking on eggs and making allowances lest they do something to rouse the ire of those who would protest in the name of their faith, even if it means curtailing freedom of speech guaranteed by local law.

Broder goes on to note:

During this year's Carnival festivities -- a time when, traditionally, no taboo is respected as long as overstepping it raises a laugh - Cologne's famed carnival societies decided to take no risks and do without jokes about Islam and Muslims. And so the festivities remained untainted by violence.
It was no great loss for the freedom of opinion, but it was another step in the direction of preventive surrender. When it comes to cultural events -- as opposed to politics -- fear is a potent weapon. At this point, no specific threat of violence seems even to have been needed. One "risk analysis" was enough, and the citation of concrete facts wasn't necessary either. Fear takes care of the rest.

The case of the Deutsche Oper is spectacular. When something like this happens in some small town, no one gets upset, because it happens there every day. Cabaret artist Hans Scheibner writes regular features for the daily Schweriner Zeitung. The paper is owned by the Flensburg-based media group sh:z, which publishes 14 dailies in Germany's Schleswig-Holstein region. When the Muhammad caricatures published by various Western newspapers caused such a stir this spring, Scheibner wrote a feature that began: "No, really, my dear Muslims, I'm sorry to have to tell you this, but our God here in the Christian West is much stronger than yours..." That was more than the Schweriner Zeitung thought its readers could take. The feature was never published.

When the Pope visited his hometown in Bavaria, Scheibner wrote a feature that was just as harmless. "In Bavaria, the Bavarians have rendered homage to their very own guru, who's always walking around in those funny clothes and with a smoking lantern in his hand." This feature wasn't published either: The editors decided it constituted an "insult to religious sentiment" before even a single Catholic had a chance to complain.

What's next? Hamburg Bishop Hans-Jochen Jaschke, a liberal Catholic, isn't the only one who believes religious feelings shouldn't be hurt. If this attitude prevails, drama, art and literature will have a hard time in the future. Voltaire, Spinoza and Heine will be banned from the libraries. Even a drama as harmless as Lessing's "Nathan the Wise" could cause outrage. The play features a dialogue between a Christian, a Jewish and a Muslim character. But it doesn't present them as absolute equals. (source)

This preventative surrender, which is how people who don't want conflict deal with bullies, mafia types demanding protection money, tyrants, and all the other people who would compromise people's freedom, is a dangerous thing, because it will strip people of things, step by step, bit by bit, until they wake up one day and find themselves in a place they really didn't want to be.

One does not retain freedom by letting the freedoms one has fall through the fingers because it's just easier that way. It takes work and effort and the belief that it is worthwhile. I am reminded of the easy way the Nazis controlled the people in the Warsaw Ghetto, who let themselves be shipped off to the death camps with little struggle. By the time of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, it was too late, and although they were able to cause the Nazis great difficulty in shutting the ghetto down, the fact was they had lost when they gave in to the idea of surrender years before.

It is the small steps at the beginning where the attack on freedom is easiest to stop. Later, it may indeed be costly, or even impossible to even begin.

The Cost of Being Christian in an Islamic Dominated Country

2006-10-01T06:12:00.000-07:00

Another example:

Muslim mob stabs Christian on Indonesia's Sulawesi as tensions rise

Muslims dragged a Christian man from a bus on Indonesia's Sulawesi island on Sunday and then stabbed him, as religious tensions in the region continued to escalate, a witness and a nurse said.

The attackers fled soon after police arrived at the scene in downtown Poso in central Sulawesi, said a witness named Arman. (source)

Comparing Differences

2006-10-01T05:45:00.000-07:00

Ed Koch noted something worth thinking about, in the reaction to Chavez' behavior at the UN:

No one stood up and told Chavez that he was out of order and demanded that he stop or sit down. They should have told him he was a disgrace to the U.N. Instead they are reported to have applauded this monster and laughed with him, instead of at him. The Times reported: "So while there was official outrage over Mr. Chavez calling Mr. Bush 'the devil,' there was also a lot of applause and giggling, from dignitaries including the president of the General Assembly herself, Haya Rashed al-Khalifa of Bahrain, who was caught chuckling from her seat on the dais behind Mr. Chavez."
Where was the official outrage, and why was Chavez not rebuked while he held the platform? Many of the countries whose delegates were amused by his vitriol receive their sustenance from the U.S. We feed their people and provide much of their medical care. Many expect the U.S. to protect them from attacks from other countries, and some of them are even formal allies. Yet none of them walked out to show solidarity with us. The two nations not in the chamber when Chavez took the dais were the U.S. and Israel. We should forever remember the craven behavior of those who stayed and cheered.

Imagine if the United Nations meeting had taken place in Caracas, Venezuela, and President Bush in his address had viciously attacked President Chavez. What do you think would have happened? There would have been riots in the streets and Americans in Venezuela might have been assaulted and possibly murdered.

What was the reaction in the U.S. to Chavez's speech? While I am certain that most Americans were affronted, others invited Chavez to the Mount Olive Baptist Church in Harlem. He was applauded when he referred to George W. Bush as an "alcoholic," a "tyrant," and a "sick man." To his credit the district congressman Charlie Rangel denounced those who applauded Chavez and his attacks on the United States. Source

There are groups in the US that see nothing untoward with having enemies of their country come and talk with them, evidently under the belief that the enemies of the country are the enemies of the US administration, and not enemies of the US. That is a very short-sighted viewpoint, because these people are not an enemy of George Bush, but an enemy of what the US stands for - its freedom, its way of life, and its success. When the adminstration changes, these people will still be the enemies of the US. In fact, our way of life, and often the way of life of the very people who invite them, like the group who invited the Iranian president to speak, are totally anathema to the people they are dealing with. The majority of American feminists, for example, if they tried to live that way in Iran, would find themselves candidates for stoning.

One of the ironies of our era.

Further Attacks Against Christians in Mosul

2006-09-27T07:31:00.000-07:00

Second attack in three days against a Chaldean church

Mosul (AsiaNews) – Second attack in three days against a Chaldean church in Mosul. Once again the Church of the Holy Spirit is the target. This morning a group of men fired rockets against the building, whilst an explosive devise was detonated outside a usually unused entrance door, this according to local sources who also told AsiaNews that no one was killed or hurt in the incident. They also suggested that the attackers might be the same people who on Sunday fired some 80 shots against the church breaking some windows and causing minor damage.

For months, tensions have been rising in Mosul, a Sunni stronghold...It is likely that in this as in previous cases, religion is being used for political purposes. In fact Iraqi Muslim leaders, including grand ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, have expressed solidarity and understanding towards the Vatican. A representative of al-Sistani, who is Shia Islam’s highest authority in Iraq, has said that he wants to visit the Pope.

In August 2004, the Church of the Holy Spirit was the target of another attack that injured the younger sister of its young parish priest, Fr Ragheed Gani. (source)

It is tough trying to live out one's faith in these conditions. But Christians in many Islamic lands face things like this more often than one here in the West, where our religious commitment is often soft and comfortable, would imagine. It takes determination to remain Christian in places like this - but in many of these areas, they have been Christian since the earliest days of the Church...which is a testimony of the strength of the Gospel message.

Freedom of Expression or Dhimmitude Rules?

2006-09-27T06:01:00.000-07:00

In Germany today they are learning something: When you don't make Islamic groups live by the same rules as the rest of society, when they are not integrated into the culture, but allowed to form subcultures within the larger, then the rest of society will be effected by the special treatment.

In the West, religion has long been fair game for negative artistic expression. But, as we saw with the death of Theo Van Gogh, and again with the Danish cartoons about Muhammed, when local authorities don't forcefully come out to protect freedom of expression, and back down, it becomes a door opened a crack to let more happen. Thus the pope merely quoting an obscure medieval source, triggered a world-wide outcry, with far too few Western voices coming to his defence.

And now in Germany, an opera was closed, lest radical Islamic sensibilities would lead to violence "Berlin's Deutsche Oper said on Monday because of police warnings that it could cause "incalculable security risks."

It is actually pretty typical antireligious Western art, intended to attack all religious beliefs:

In the opera house's production of the Mozart work that was first shown in 1871, the Cretan King, Idomeneo holds up the severed heads of the Greek mythological figure Poseidon, Jesus, Buddha and Mohammed and places them on four chairs.

The production, by the director Hans Neuenfels, deals with man's reluctance to make sacrifices to the gods.

When his interpretation was first shown in 2003, it caused uproar among opera goers attending the performance.

Several religious groups said they were offended.

Critics described the work as a radical condemnation of religion and religious wars. (source)

But this time, the response has lead to a loud outcry in German political circles. German Chancellor Merkel said: "We must take care that we do not retreat out of a fear of potentially violent radicals," in Hanover's Neue Presse newspaper. "Self-censorship out of fear is not tolerable."

The German government's Integration Commisioner Maria Boehmer said "We must together stand up against intolerance and violence."

Bernd Neumann, the government's culture minister: "If fears about possible protests result in self-censorship, then the democratic principles of free speech are in danger."

The outcry about the opera comes on the wake of the controversy about the Pope's quote, and as a conference to open dialogue with the country's 3.2 million Muslims, mostly of Turkish background begins today.

The meeting aims to tackle issues such as equal rights, the building of mosques, Islam lessons and imam training.

Integration has become a priority for the government as concern grows about the emergence of an underclass of disillusioned young Muslims, mainly Turks, in Germany and about fears of Islamic radicalization across Europe.

A recent outbreak of violence at a Berlin school where the bulk of pupils are immigrant children and last year's "honor killing" of a Turkish woman have highlighted the challenges faced by the government and Muslim communities. (source)

But reacting to the news about the opera being pulled from the performance schedule, Wolfgang Schaeuble, the German Interior Minister who has invited Muslim leaders to attend the conference in Berlin said "This is mad. Taking such measures is ridiculous and totally unacceptable."

Perhaps, then, Germany is ready to see if Western political rights will trump the increasingly strident calls for everybody, West and East, to live by the Islamic rules of how to refer to Muhammed. Will the free speech tradition in the West be forced into dhimmitude, or will we bow, from threat and intimidation, into something less for sake of expediency? There's a lot hanging on the outcome of such actions.

Faq on Women in Afghanistan

2006-09-26T17:37:00.000-07:00

This set of facts was compiled from information from AIHRC, UNICEF, HRW

Violence

* 50 per cent of Afghan women say they have been beaten, while 200 women in Kandahar ran away from domestic violence this year.

* In the past year, 150 cases of women resorting to self-immolation have been reported in western Afghanistan, 34 cases in the south-east.

* 197 women in Herat were reported to have attempted suicide last year, 69 successfully.

* 57 per cent of girls are married before the legal age of 16.

Education

* 85 per cent of women in Afghanistan are illiterate.

* The number of girls going to school in Afghanistan is half that of boys.

* 300 schools were set on fire across the country this year.

Health

* 70 per cent of tuberculosis deaths are among women.

* Death rate of mothers in labour is 60 in 1000 - (60 per cent higher than developed world).

* Only 5-7 per cent of women in Zabul and Helmand province have access to health care.

Voting

* 41 per cent of the 10.5 million registered voters are women. Women's registration rates in southern provinces were much lower than the national average: Zabul (9 per cent), Uruzgan (10 per cent) Helmand (16 per cent), and Kandahar (27 per cent)
(source)

In areas where the Taliban have been active, many schools for girls have been burned down and women leaders have been killed. Entire provinces have no schools for girls. Women's suicide rates are going up.

But like the fate of women in Darfur, their lot has been underreported and mostly goes unheralded. Before we listen to anybody tell us how Islamic rules about women are designed to protect them, we also need to see how those rules are used, and make our decisions after weighing all the facts.

Price of Being Christian in an Islamic Nation

2006-09-25T20:20:00.000-07:00

It can be hard being a Christian in this day and age in an Islamic dominant country:

Yesterday morning at 11.15am local time, armed men attacked the Chaldean Church of the Holy Spirit in Mosul, firing at least 80 shots on the building. “Thank God there was no Mass at the time,” one member of the community told AsiaNews, “so no one was killed or injured, there was just some damage done to the eastern part of the building and a few broken windows.”

The atmosphere in the city is very tense. Recently, Muslim militias threatened the Catholic bishop and priests that unless they publicly condemned the address of the pope at the University of Regensburg within 72 hours, Christians would be killed and churches burned down. In recent years, some churches, shrines and even the bishop’s house were the target of terrorist attacks. For fear of further attacks, the bishop had posters put up to say that “neither Iraqi Christians nor the pope want to destroy ties with Muslims”.

Defying the prevailing atmosphere of terror, last night, Chaldean Catholics left their homes to participate in Vespers Mass in the very church that had been attacked. “Our faith is a challenge to violence. The militias fear us because our faith is stronger than their bullets,” a Christian told AsiaNews.

Yesterday morning in Baghdad, two bombs went off outside the Assyrian Orthodox Church of St Mary in the central neighbourhood of Karrada. The attackers put a bomb under the parish priest’s car. The blast, that took place at 9.30am, drew many people, including some from the parish. Immediately afterwards another bomb went off close by, injuring many people and killing a watchman of the church.

Some think these bombs targeted Christians in the wake of the controversy surrounding the pope’s speech in Regensburg. But in recent days, Orthodox communities distanced themselves from the words of the pope, putting up posters outside their churches expressing their disagreement with him. Some Catholic figures said the attack on St Mary’s Church was much more likely a vendetta based on ethnic-religious motives: the Assyrian Orthodox Patriarch recently visited communities in Kurdistan and probably the bombs were meant to be a threat by Sunni or Shiite militias against such ties with Kurds. (source)

Feministic Ironies

2006-09-25T19:11:00.001-07:00

Some of the more disturbing stories coming out of Afghanistan and Pakistan have dealt with the treatment of women in these countries, particularly in their treatment in judicial situations.

This is a land, where it is said, fathers don't always bother to learn the names of their daughters, and yet, behind the headcoverings and burkas, a heavy burden is laid on women in that they are the living symbol of their fathers' and brothers' honor.

At times, horrendous things can happen to them because of that value. Stories of honor killings filter through the news with a dismal regularity lately, but one of the nastiest tendencies in that part of the world is the use of judicial rape. Yet another case of this has surfaced lately:

A YOUNG Pakistani woman has been kidnapped, raped and beaten by a gang of high-caste villagers because her uncle eloped with one of their relatives. She was chosen for punishment because she had recently gained a degree and was the pride of her low-caste family.
Ghazala Shaheen, 24, and her mother Mumtaz were abducted last month by men dressed in police uniforms from their home near Multan in southern Punjab.

Her shocking ordeal mirrors that of Mukhtaran Mai, 29, who became a symbol in the campaign for women’s rights in Pakistan after she was gang-raped because her 12-year-old brother had been seen with a higher-caste woman. Six men were found guilty but five later had their convictions overturned.

That case provoked an international outcry and led to moves to reform Pakistan’s Islamic rape and adultery laws which effectively criminalise rape victims.

Last week human rights campaigners said Shaheen was unlikely to see her attackers brought to justice because President Pervez Musharraf had failed in an attempt to repeal the Hudood Ordinance, which requires four male Muslim witnesses to support a rape charge. If the accused is acquitted, the victim becomes liable to prosecution for adultery. (s0urce)

The old expectation was for women so abused was that they should commit suicide, and thus remove the stigma from their family, but in this day and age, some women are refusing to to this, and attention has been drawn to their plight.

There have been other incidents, such as the threatening of aid agencies who wanted to hire local women to work for them, or threatening the women who were hired with death.

Abuse of women was a trademark of the Taliban, and there were many horror stories that seeped out of Afghanistan, including the forbidding of women to receive an education, and women who were beaten because the religious police thought they walked too loudly And women were also stoned.

The desire to keep women in their place is still a factor. A recent murder of a woman in Afghanistan is a case in point:

KANDAHAR, Afghanistan (Reuters) - Gunmen riding motorcycles shot dead the head of a women's department in the southern Afghan province of Kandahar on Monday, a security official and a relative said.

There was no immediate claim of responsibility for the shooting of Safia Ama January Taliban insurgents have killed numerous government officials as part of their war against the government and foreign forces supporting it.

Ama Jan was on her way to work, getting into a car outside her house, when the gunmen struck, said her nephew, who identified himself as just Farhad.

"She died on the spot," he told reporters.

Farhad declined to speculate on the identity or motive of the gunmen, except to say: "We had no personal enmity with anyone."

Ama Jan had served as the head of the province's women's affairs department since shortly after U.S.-led troops overthrew the Taliban in 2001.

A security official said no arrests had been made and an investigation had been launched.

The United Nations condemned the killing.
"UNAMA is appalled by this senseless murder of a woman who was simply working to ensure that all Afghan women play a full and equal part in the future of Afghanistan," said U.N. Assistance Mission in Afghanistan spokesman Aleem Siddique. (source)

Pakistan, Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Sudan and Somalia are all places where women's activities, rights, and protections under the law are all highly restricted, yet surprisingly there is little outcry about this in the West. It is one of the mysteries how on one hand feminists can seek out people like the president of Iran to come and give political talks, and on the other hand, not rally at the plight of the women under his rule, when they bristle at the very suggestion that men might be more gifted in certain endeavors here in this country, to the point of forcing people out of jobs for dare speaking it.

Some ironies are bitter, like the taste of blood in the mouth.

Nothing Isn't Something to Die for....

2006-09-24T14:01:00.000-07:00

Thomas More, not long before he was executed for refusing to approve King Henry's divorce and remarriage, said in a letter to his daughter, “My case was such in this matter through the clearness of my own conscience that thought I might have pain I could not have harm, for a man may in such a case lose his head and not have harm.”

He had something he was willing to die for, that made his life worth living. To be willing to take a stand, one must have something worth dying for. If it's not worth dying for, it's not really worth living for, or striving for or making a stand over.

Today in the West finding that something can be difficult.

The trouble, of course, is that the comrades, long since disillusioned with Lenin, have adopted Lennon instead. Whereas the old Marxists believed in something, albeit something absurd and dangerous, New Labour believes in nothing; “nothing” as defined by John Lennon in his sentimentally pernicious imagination: “No heaven … no hell … no countries … nothing to kill or die for and no religion too.” This is the new hedonism with which the secularists want to unite British society; the new uniculturalism to replace the old multiculturalism. It is perhaps not surprising that many Muslims are unconvinced by this self-centered hedonism in which, to return to Lennon, “all the people” are “living for today.” If this is all we have to offer, to hell with it.

Joseph Pierce

One of the things, of course, that have attracted young persons to the Salafi viewpoint, even Americans of non-Islamic backgrounds, is it gives them something to fulfill that need to have something worth dying for. If there is nothing more than hedonism, egoism, and relativism offered, young idealistic people will find something else, somewhere.

Something to think about. What do we have to offer that is worth dying for? (A lot, I believe, but this is a question everyone must answer for themselves. Without it, why bother?)

Something to Contemplate: Hate and its costs

2006-09-24T13:37:00.000-07:00

Hate is too great a burden to bear. It injures the hater more than it injures the hated.” Coretta Scott King

It is easy to hate and it is difficult to love. This is how the whole scheme of things works. All good things are difficult to achieve; and bad things are very easy to get." Rene Descartes

“...Monsters are real, and ghosts are real too. They live inside us, and sometimes, they win.” Stephen King

Love blinds us to faults, hatred to virtues.

A recent Fox News poll gets at the disturbing truth: A majority of Democrats say they want to see the president fail. Such deep hatred is bad news for the country at a time when America needs to bridge the partisan divide. It's also bad news for the Democrats, who risk repeating the Republicans' mistakes of a decade ago, driving away the centrists they need to regain power or going too far if they do manage to win.

Fox's question was revealing: "Regardless of how you voted in the presidential election, would you say you want President Bush to succeed or not?" Democrats said "not," 51 percent to 40 percent - where the public at large wanted success by almost two to one.
In other words, the rage extends way beyond the lip-pierced Deaniacs, aging hippies and other fringes of the Democratic Party. Lots of otherwise sensible people - suburban moms, hospital orderlies, schoolteachers, big-hatted church ladies - detest George W. Bush.
When these Democrats say they want Bush to fail, might this mean that they simply reject what they see as his far-right religious and corporate agenda? If so, it's hard to see why independents - hardly right-wing zealots - hope he succeeds by 63 percent to 34 percent. Sadly, much of the Democratic Party wants to see this president crash and burn.
In fact, the fury against to Bush has reached unprecedented levels, even compared to the animosity among Republicans to his predecessor. Not long ago, a Washington Post-ABC News poll found that "strong disapproval" of Bush was 10 points higher than that recorded for Bill Clinton at any point during his presidency, including his impeachment. (That wasn't during a war, either.)
Of course, Bush and the Republicans have helped stoke the anger with their own hardball partisanship under Clinton and during this presidency. And there is plenty in Bush's record that a loyal opposition can legitimately criticize.
Yet if Bush does fail - for instance, if Iraq spirals into civil war or the economy slides into recession - then America is in trouble. Making progress on these key issues, like others facing the country, will require bipartisan solutions, not political finger-pointing. (source) Craig Charney

It is possible that between the hate outside focused in on us, and the hate inside focused at our national heart, we will fall. And that, from my POV, will be a sad day, for it means a great experiment that tried to balance the forces will pull groups apart with that which pull groups together failed. And in its failure, much hope about how humans can live together in freedom will go down the drain.

Adding Fat to the Fire

2006-09-24T10:09:00.000-07:00

I do point out a lot in this blog what is really being talked about in circles of those who do not wish the West well, and point out how those with the Salafi Jihadiya viewpoint manipulate their own fellow believers, and that there are serious problems between the two cultures that have to be bridged, otherwise we are fooling ourselves. I do not stand with those who want to condemn either Israel for existing or Islam for existing. Peace comes from not deluding oneself to what is actually happening, finding commonality to truly resolve problems, and creating win-win situations for all parties involved - anything else is just a temporary pause in an ongoing struggle that creates more real problems.

This story I found below, I believe, is NOT a way to respond:

...Keith Dennis of Dennis Mitsubishi talks about "launching a jihad on the automotive market."
Sales representatives "will be wearing burqas all weekend long," the ad says. One of the vehicles on sale "can comfortably seat up to 12 jihadists in the back."

"Our prices are lower than the evildoers’ every day. Just ask the pope! " the ad says. "Friday is fatwa Friday, with free rubber swords for the kiddies." (source)

The spokesperson from CAIR notes:

"Using that as a promotional pitch when so many are dying from the criminal activity of suicide bombers, that’s not funny," Mobin-Uddin said. "I don’t think it’s appropriate when it causes real pain. It exploits or promotes misunderstanding in terms already misunderstood or misused. That type of ad does nothing but promote discord in a very difficult time.

This is one time I do agree.

Your Three Choices:

2006-09-23T07:12:00.000-07:00

Consider the following:

No less a figure than the Grand Mufti of Saudi Arabia, Sheikh Abdel Aziz al-Sheikh, issued a statement on the official Saudi news service, defending Muslims' divine right to resort to violence: "The spread of Islam has gone through several phases, secret and then public, in Mecca and Medina. God then authorised the faithful to defend themselves and to fight against those fighting them, which amounts to a right legitimised by God. This ... is quite reasonable, and God will not hate it."
Saudi Arabia's most senior cleric also explained that war was never Islam's ancient founder, the prophet Mohammed's, first choice: "He gave three options: either accept Islam, or surrender and pay tax, and they will be allowed to remain in their land, observing their religion under the protection of Muslims." Thus, according to the Grand Mufti, the third option of violence against non-Muslims was only a last resort, if they refused to convert or surrender peacefully to the armies of Islam. (source)

And these three choices are only offered if you are a Christian or a Jew. Polytheists and others not of the Book have two choices: Convert or die.

If the time comes, which choice would be yours?

Modern examples should make you think: In Saudi, if you choose to be a Christian, you are not allowed any public worship, and getting Bibles in, is as hard as finding hen's teeth. In Pakistan, you are constantly at threat of being accused of doing things like desecrating a Koran which can be used (and often is) for dragging you into court, causing a riot, or having your church firebombed. The Copts in Egypt are often victims of riot caused because of some perceived wrong done to Islam. Being under Islamic protection, even if they don't make you pay the tax any more, is a hard path.

There is not a lot of tolerance for toleration in a lot of these places.

HT to Jihad Watch

Voices from the Resistance

2006-09-22T21:01:00.000-07:00

If the Pope, in an academic lecture at a university, cannot cite a medieval text without being burned in effigy, and his home threatened, there isn't much hope for dialogue. The violence of the fundamentalists just seems to prove the Byzantine emperor Manuel II right. -Elizabeth Lev

The oldest hatred didn't get that way without the ability to adapt. Jews are hated for what they are — so, at any moment in history, whatever they are is what they're hated for. For centuries in Europe, they were hated for being rootless-cosmopolitan types. Now there are no rootless European Jews to hate, so they're hated for being an illegitimate Middle Eastern nation-state. If the Zionist Entity were destroyed and the survivors forced to become perpetual cruise-line stewards plying the Caribbean, they'd be hated for that, too. Mark Steyn (quoted by Caoline Glick)

Finally, it is revealing how apathetic these so-called compassionate liberals--so many of whom will fight to the death to keep a Tookie Williams or Mumia Abu Jamal from being executed--are toward the shariah court system. If their only response to news of shariah-approved executions is "Michelle Malkin is a hypocrite," it is a damning indictment of how shallow their commitment to "social justice" really is. Michelle Malkin

Is It the BBC's Fault?

2006-09-22T20:32:00.000-07:00

Lifesite News is reporting:

Tracing the media coverage from the day of the Pope’s speech in Regensburg, Germany, a distinct shift in approach, what media analysts call a “meme,” of “Islamic outrage”, is clearly traceable starting with the BBC’s coverage three days later.

The day after the speech, Wednesday the 13th, the Pope’s lecture elicited little response from apparently bored secular journalists who had little interest in what was considered his “obscure” and “academic” points on the relationship between religious belief and the secular world.

Catholic news sources who reported the day after the lecture were also quiet. “Pope spends quiet afternoon at home with brother,” was the leading headline at Catholic World Report.

On Thursday the 14th, however, under the headline “Pope's speech stirs Muslim anger,” the BBC began with a report that police in Kashmir had seized newspapers carrying coverage of the pope’s speech in order “to prevent tension.” The BBC’s coverage did not include any quote from the Indian-administered Kashmiri police force.

It goes on to report:

Immediately after the appearance of the first BBC coverage, the Pakistani parliament issued a declaration condemning Benedict’s speech and demanding an apology.

Later the same day, the BBC published, under the headline, “Muslim anger grows at Pope speech” a report on the Pakistan government’s reaction. It quoted the head of the Islamic extremist group, the Muslim Brotherhood, saying “the Pope's remarks ‘aroused the anger of the whole Islamic world’.

The same day, the Guardian, following the BBC’s lead, ran the headline, “Muslim anger builds over Pope's speech.” From that moment, the internet was flooded with reportage from around the world on the Pope’s alleged “attack” on Islam and the predicted response from Islamic groups began.

If the BBC created this furore by creating a news story because of their dislike of Pope Benedict, or for whatever reason, upon their heads and hands lies the blood of at least two, maybe more people, a number of burned churches, people terrorized, a world more tense, a Islamic world where they are convinced ever more that the West is out to get them.

Read the whole piece here. And contemplate the evil that even the supposed "good guys" can do. Even if they weren't trying to.

Voices from the Jihadiya

2006-09-22T17:44:00.000-07:00

"If the pope comes here we will hang him on the Cross," Hafiz Hussain Ahmed.

"The day will soon come when the green flag of La Illah Illah Allah (There is no god but Allah) and Muhammad Rasul Allah (Muhammad is the Prophet of Allah) will be raised upon the Vatican and all around the world and on the fortresses of those who want to destroy Islam, because they know that this religion obliges them to face the truth that Islam is Allah's favorite religion. And until they join Islam, hell is their last station," Abu Saqer

Is a Bridge Possible?

2006-09-22T17:19:00.000-07:00

Ken Connor asks a very important question:

"Over and over we see a vocal segment of the Muslim population attempting to limit speech and impose religion. Indeed, Islamic religious leaders commonly issue a fatwa, or a legal decree, when someone says something they consider blasphemous. A fatwa has been issued in Iran for the deaths of Salman Rushdie and Jerry Falwell, for example. When religious leaders have the power to condemn men and women to death for statements deemed to be blasphemous, what hope is there for freedom of religion or freedom of speech?"

Is there a way to bridge the vast gap?

Our society is based on equalness before the law, putting all religions and beliefs on an equal setting before the law, and giving an openness that allows free criticism. But this year we have seen an Islamic willingness to follow the rules even within Western nations, where there were calls for the Pope's death.

Andrew G. Boston notes:

The ultimate source of the convulsive reaction to the Pope’s speech is the Islamic belief that spiritually and physically debauched infidels have no right to express opinions—least of all negative opinions—regarding Islam’s sacred text, the Koran, the Muslim prophet, Muhammad (Ecce Homo Arabicus), or the sacred Islamic Law (Shari’a).

And in the doing, threat, protest, riot, kill and burn. Today there are threats to assassinate the pope, one Pakistani saying that the pope should be crucified, that the green Islamic flag will fly over the Vatican, that England will become an Islamic nation, that all Christians will be given the chance to convert or die, that Christian throats will be slashed. Two deaths so far are probably attributable to the unrest. Churches in multiple countries have been burned. All this for a QUOTE of someone buried in an academic lecture.

What this looks like is that someone was watching and scanning data for something to protest about. And the pope kindly provided it.

There is a very vocal segment of the Islamic world that wants to bully the West into accepting the world as they want it.

The Islamic world has to decide which it will be: freedom or rule by religious leader. Until they decide, it will be hard to know if we can find a mutual bridge on which to build.

Stoning

2006-09-22T12:52:00.000-07:00

...the stones should not be too large so that the person dies on being hit by one or two of them; they should not be so small either that they could not be defined as stones...
Article 104 of the Iranian Penal Code

Sharia law, which those in the jihadya are calling to become law of the land wherever they reside in numbers can be extremely harsh by modern standards of punishment. One of the harshest, cruelist punishments is that of stoning.

In Iran, the convicted person to be killed is wrapped in a sheet and buried; male convicts are buried from the waist down, female convicts are buried deeper to prevent the breasts from becoming exposed. The crowd then pelts the victim with stones small enough so that one cannot cause death by itself. Often, family members are required to watch the execution as well.

There was a video made secretly at an execution in Iran that shows how barbaric such executions can be. During this execution one person is flogged, and four people are stoned to death. It is not for the squeamish: (source).

Stoning is a punishment meted out for adultery. Male or female married people who commit adultery can have this sentence passed on them, but single women are also subjected to this punishment as well.

Lily Mazahery, president of the Legal Rights Institute, notes that almost none of the women accused of adultery and facing death by stoning have legal representation.

"And, because under the Sharia legal system their testimony is at best worth only half the value of the testimony of men, their so-called 'trials' last only a few minutes," she told WorldNetDaily, "after which they are immediately sentenced."
(source)

Here is a list of a number of executions by stoning that have taken place in Iran:

On August 10, 1994, in the city of Arak, a woman was sentenced to death by stoning. According to the ruling of the religious judge, her husband and two children were forced to attend the execution. The woman urged her husband to take the children away, but to no avail. A truck full of stones was brought in to be used during the stoning. In the middle of the stoning, although her eyes had been gouged out, the victim was able to escape from the ditch and started running away, but the regime's guards recaptured her and shot her to death.

In October 1989 in the city of Qom, a woman who was being stoned managed to pull herself out of the hole, only to be forced back into it and stoned to death. In justifying the murder, Qom's Chief Religious Judge, Mullah Karimi, elaborated to Ressalat newspaper on October 30, 1989: "Generally speaking, legal and religious decrees on someone condemned to stoning call for her stoning if her guilt was proven on the basis of witnesses' testimonies. Even if she were to escape in the middle of the administration of the sentence, she must be returned and stoned to death."

On July 13, 1997, Kayhan reported that Changiz Rahimi was sentenced to death, stoning and payment of fine for committing murder and adultery.

On October 26, 1997, six individuals were stoned in Sari, the provincial capital of Mazandaran. This was reported by Salaam daily and international news agencies. The names of the victims were given as Fatemeh Danesh, Masoumeh Eini, Marzieh Fallah, Ali Mokhtarpour, Parviz Hasanzadeh and Kheirollah Javanmard.

AFP, December 7, 1994:

Hamshahri reported that a woman and a man were recently stoned to death in Ramhormouz on murder and adultery charges.

AFP, November 16, 1994

Abrar reported on Wednesday that three Iranians including a woman were stoned in the city of Sari (northern Iran), after being found guilty of adultery and rape by the Islamic court.

AFP, 11 November 1995, quoting Jomhouri Islami reported that a man was stoned in the city of Hamedan.

AFP, June 8, 1996

Hamshahri reported on Saturday that a man and a women were stoned in the city of Oroumieh on murder and adultery charges. Shahin Soltan-Moradi had murdered her husband with the help of her lover, Mohammad Ali Hemmati in November 1994.

On July 14, 1995, Amnesty International reported that two women by the names of Saba Abdali, 30, and Zeinab Heidary, 38, were faced with stoning in the city of Ilam Gharb.

On December 7, 1994, Reuters quoted a state-controlled newspaper report by Hamshahri, on a married woman who was stoned to death in the city of Ramhormouz, southwestern Iran.

Ressalat, March 1, 1994, read: "A woman was stoned to death in the city of Qom."

Kayhan of February 1, 1994, reported that a woman named Mina Kolvat was stoned to death in Tehran for having immoral relations with her cousin.

The U.N. Special Representative on the human rights situation in Iran reported to the U.N. General Assembly in 1993: "On November 1, 1992, a woman named Fatima Bani was stoned to death in Isfahan."

Abrar reported on November 5, 1991 that a woman charged with immoral relations was stoned in the city of Qom.

According to Kayhan, August 21, 1991, a woman charged with adultery by the name of Kobra was sentenced to 70 lashes and stoning. The verdict was carried out in the presence of local people and district officials.

Jomhouri Islami wrote on March 11, 1991, that in Rasht (northern Iran), "Bamani Fekri, child of Mohammad-Issa, guilty of complicity in first-degree murder, adultery and incineration of the victim's body; was sentenced to stoning, retribution, blinding of both eyes and payment of 100 gold dinars. After the announcement of the verdict, she committed suicide in prison."

Ressalat reported on January 16, 1990, that a woman was stoned to death in the city of Bandar Anzali (northern Iran).

Ettela'at reported on January 5, 1990: "Two women were stoned publicly on Wednesday in the northern city of Lahijan."

Jomhouri Islami, January 2, 1990: "Two women were stoned in the city of Langrood (northern Iran)."

Kayhan wrote on July 31, 1989: "Six women were stoned to death publicly in Kermanshah on charges of adultery and moral corruption."

Kayhan, April 17, 1989, quoted the Religious judge and head of the Fars and Bushehr Justice Department as sentencing 10 women to stoning to death on prostitution charges which were immediately carried out.

Tehran radio, reported on March 6, 1989 that a women was stoned in Karaj for committing adultery."

Kayhan, October 4, 1986, reported that a 25-year-old woman named Nosrat was stoned to death in the city of Qom. She died after an hour of continuos stoning.

On April 17, 1986 a woman was stoned to death in the city of Qom. Prior to being stoned, she was whipped in public.

In July 1980, four women were simultaneously stoned to death in the city of Kerman.

It must be noted that the cases of stoning in small towns and cities were not included here. (source)

There is currently a woman under threat of execution for stoning.

Once again, another Iranian woman has been sentenced to death by the barbaric practice of public stoning. On June 28, 2006, a court in the northwestern Iranian city of Urmia sentenced Malak Ghorbany to death for committing "adultery." Under Iran's Penal Code, the term "adultery" is used to describe any intimate or sexual act between a man and a girl/woman who are not married. The crime of adultery is also used in cases where a girl is deemed to have committed "acts incompatible with chastity," which includes instances of rape. The punishment for "adultery" is death.

Help us spread the news about Malak Ghorbany! Tell your family, friends and others who might be interested. Direct them to this web page and ask them to take the actions listed here. (source)

This is life under Sharia. This is the sorts of things that was estabilished in Iran, was practiced for a time in Afghanistan, and is the sorts of law that the Jihadiya thinks of as the correct and appropriate way of justice.

Why aren't we speaking out more and more on this?

More info:

http://www.ishr.org/ page on stoning

Muslims against Stoning

Taliban Stone Woman for Adultery

Voices from the Resistance

2006-09-21T13:38:00.000-07:00

"You can't just hope for the best," he said. "You've got to assume that the leader, when he says that he would like to destroy Israel, means what he says. If you say, 'Well, gosh, maybe he doesn't mean it,' and you turn out to be wrong, you have not done your duty as a world leader."

George W. Bush

The kinder we are to terrorists, the harsher we are to their potential victims. Richard Miniter

"Either we bring them freedom, or they destroy us." Bernard Lewis

Baiting and destruction in the name of God.

2006-09-21T11:02:00.000-07:00

Amid calls for people to stop defaming Islam, we often see Islam attacking Christianity with impunity.

Another example recently happened in Dutse, Nigeria. It started between a Moslem youth and a Christian woman. "The Moslem youth then blasphemed Jesus Christ following a heated argument between them in which the female Christian retaliated, [by saying something bad about Muhammed] thus sparked off the protest."

As a result, the young Moslem men went on a rampage, looting and burning 10 churches of different denominations, and the local Christians took refuge at the police barracks to save their lives (source).

It is behavior like this that is part of what the West will be up against, if we don't take a firm stand against the imposition of Dhimmitude attitudes about talking about Islam.

Political Apologetics and the American Way of Guilt

2006-09-21T10:35:00.000-07:00

"We're fighting a war for civilization against an enemy bent on destroying it and creating an Islamic world based on a warped view of what true Islam is." Mary Laney

Will our openness to outsiders, our democratic system and our Christian compassion, precisely the values that we cherish the most, render the West incapable of withstanding Jihad? Fjordman

“Multiculturalism has seemed to imply...let other cultures be allowed to express themselves but do not let the majority culture at all tell us its glories, its struggles, its joys, its pains,” John Sentamu, Archbishop of York.

Beginning in the 1960s, in part because of our longstanding alliance with Israel, the US was dragged into the growing Salafi Jihadist and Shia conflict against the West. We have undergone multiple attacks, both on our territory and on our embassies and on our nationals in other countries, acts committed by shadowy groups not officially sponsored by any one government, but given aid and support by multiple governments, a media that chooses to portray us as the villain.

In return, we have poured billions of dollars out in foreign aid, protected the rights of Moslems in the former Yugoslavia, helped to rescue Kuwait after it was overrun by a fellow Moslem country, seen our personnel butchered in Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, heard ourselves blamed for everything that could possibly go wrong in the Moslem sphere, including being accused of causing the tsunami, yet were there with open hands at times of disaster and need.

Yet still, even after 9/11 should have driven home the realization that the Jihadiya was not just talking, that they actually wanted to do just what they said, bring down our country, our economy, our way of life, and spread their vision of Islam over a world that did not ask for it, what do we find ourselves doing? Apologizing. Compromising our safety. Backing down when people say mean things about us, as if WE were the aggressor, as if WE started this conflict.

We are not the aggressor. Even if they wear their victimhood like a scarlet robe, flaunting it in their faces, WE DID NOT CREATE THE PROBLEM. We did not go out of our way to be morally reprehensible. We have worked for policies and strategies that are in our best interest, but this is a universal. We have often foregone acting in our own defense, because we wanted to do the morally upright thing. It was they who brought the conflict home to us. It was Islamic countries that kept those who fled their homeland in what is now Israel in refugee camps, refusing to let them be integrated into the countries they fled to, so that they could be a tool against Israel, a country that was created by the UN, not by England, not by the US, but by UN vote. Yet too many of us act guilty as if we did it.

Look at the outrage that goes on about Gitmo. This is a place where people who have fought against us are taken. People who have done atrocities, or who have chosen to fight in open battle, not criminals picked up off of the street. Mary Laney reminds us:

We are at war. Our soldiers are following the rules of war -- but their opposition is not.

CIA counterterrorism officers are buying private insurance to cover legal costs in case they are charged with a crime, as is being hinted at by some members of Congress who feel their interrogation techniques might be too "tough."

In Iraq, Americans have been kidnapped, tortured, beheaded, burned, hanged from bridges, dragged through streets. But the CIA's method of questioning a terrorist in a cold room while playing loud music is too "tough"? (source)

These are our ENEMIES who have tried to kill us, who have organized to attack us, who spread the gospel of Jihad against us. They are not innocents, or street gangsters, or kids who light fireworks. The rules are different for them, and we do have a right to question them. Yet the PC fingers have poked their way here, making the job hard.

"The politically correct regulations are unbelievable. Detainees are entitled to a full eight hours sleep and can't be woken up for interrogations. They enjoy three meals and five prayers per day, without interruption. They are entitled to a minimum of two hours of outdoor recreation per day. Interrogations are limited to four hours, usually running two - and (of course) are interrupted for prayers. One interrogator actually bakes cookies for detainees, while another serves them Subway or McDonald's sandwiches. Both are available on base. (Filet o' Fish is an al Qaeda favorite.) " (source)

Yet the word on the street has it in people's minds that it is as harsh and unbearable as the Nazi camps. Why do we accept this guilt? Is there something about us that deserves punishment? Are our lives and culture not worth preserving?

The interrogation techniques that the CIA uses should not come near to bringing up mental images of electric shock torture or beatings:

The techniques sought by the CIA are: induced hypothermia; forcing suspects to stand for prolonged periods; sleep deprivation; a technique called “the attention grab” where a suspect’s shirt is forcefully seized; the “attention slap” or open hand slapping that hurts but does not lead to physical damage; the “belly slap”; and sound and light manipulation. (source)

Compare this to the experience of Amnon Sharon, a retired IDF major, who was a prisoner of war in Syria:

...during his eight months in prison, he underwent extreme physical and mental torture. He describes his five months in solitary confinement, first in a detention center and later in Al-Mazeh prison near Damascus. He describes the unbearable torture, which included random beatings in his tiny cell and daily interrogations in which he would simply pass out from the pain.

"Each time the door opened, my body shook in fear, for I did not know in what condition I would return to my cell," writes Sharon, as he recalls being whipped on the soles of his feet because that is where many nerve endings are located, electric shocks and spinnings, where he was put in a tire and beaten from all angles by the prison guards.

"The beating continued, and I felt as if my body were dripping downwards. It boiled from the blows while the contact with the cold floor gave me chills," he describes in the book. "They cut me like a steak before it goes on the grill, and I felt my body ripping."

The Syrian interrogators also tried to break his spirit mentally, by telling him that Israel had been captured or that his mother, Esther, had died. (source)

Jimmy Carter claims because of the CIA techniques, “We’ve lost the support and trust and confidence and admiration that we’ve had for generations,” Carter said, adding the administration “has stonewalled so they can continue to perpetrate this illegal punishment.” (source) If we have, it's because we were willing to apologize for it, and seeing a weakness in our armour, our enemies attacked.

And now, because of the PC attitude that we are bad, and have to be constrained, lest someone think we are monsterous, we are having a bill in the Senate that, if it passes, will make it virtually impossible to do interrogation, for national security reasons and the fact that interrogators will be at too high a liability to do their job, and thus, the squeamish who have pushed us into reaching this place by acting in a self destructive mode, put us all at risk.

Why are we apologizing? Do we really want to lose?

Voices from the Resistance

2006-09-20T16:07:00.000-07:00

"The Muslim uproar has a goal — to prohibit criticism of Islam by Christians and thereby to impose Shariah norms on the West. Should Westerners accept this central tenet of Islamic law, others will surely follow. Retaining free speech about Islam, therefore, represents a critical defense against the imposition of an Islamic order." Daniel Pipes

At what point does a society become simply too genteel to wage war? We’re like those apocryphal Victorian matrons who covered the legs of their pianos. Acts of war against America have to be draped in bathetic music and uncomprehending reflections and crescents of embrace.

We fight tastefully, too. Last week one of America’s unmanned drones could have killed 200 Taliban bigshots but they were attending a funeral and we apparently have a policy of not killing anybody near cemeteries out of sensitivity.

So even our unmanned drones are obliged to behave with sensitivity. But then these days the very soundtrack to our society is, so to speak, an unmanned drone. -- Mark Steyn

It blows the mind that those who tremble at the slightest perception of a crack in their imagined wall between church and state, should continuously alibi for the bloody supporters of Sharia, which advocates death for those who choose to follow man-made law. --Lisa Fabrizio

Defamation and Discrimination

2006-09-20T11:45:00.000-07:00

"We also need to bridge, through dialogue and understanding, the growing divide between the Islamic and Western worlds," Musharraf told the 192-member assembly. "It is imperative to end racial and religious discrimination against Muslims and to prohibit the defamation of Islam."

Pervez Musharraf

So what about defamation and discrimination when it comes to Christianity? Or Buddhism? Or Hinduism?

In a recent speech, Muammar Qaddafi, president of Libya, insulted Christians by saying that "Christians should put photos of naked women next to Jesus". There were no Christian demonstrations in Europe or the United States or elsewhere in the world to protest his statement. The Libyan Embassies were not attacked anywhere in the world. Yet not a single Muslim leader or religious authority voiced an objection to Qaddafi's statement. (source)

"We tell the worshipper of the cross (the Pope) that you and the West will be defeated, as is the case in Iraq, Afghanistan, Chechnya," said a web statement by the Mujahideen Shura Council. "We shall break the cross and spill the wine ... God will (help) Muslims to conquer Rome ... (May) God enable us to slit their throats, and make their money and descendants the bounty of the mujahideen," said the statement, posted on Sunday on an Internet site often used by al-Qaida and other militant groups. (source)

"We began to comb the site looking for infidels. We found Filipino Christians. We cut their throats and dedicated them to our brothers the Mujahideen in the Philippines. [Likewise], we found Hindu engineers and we cut their throats too, Allah be praised. That same day, we purged Muhammad's land of many Christians and polytheists. -Fawwaz bin Muhammad Al-Nashami, commander of the Al-Quds Brigade that took responsibility for the May 29 attack at Khobar, Saudi Arabia (source)

The Uses of "Islamophobia"

2006-09-20T08:08:00.000-07:00

We kill in the name of Allah, blow up cars in the name of Allah, and slit throats in the name of Allah and Islam, and then we protest when others depict the Muslims as terrorists. We indiscriminately kill doctors who went to provide medical care to Afghans, and then we protest when the world describes these acts as acts of terror. We blow up embassies and trains [and consequently] children, women, and citizens with no connection to our cause are killed, and then we protest when the world describes these extremists, who view themselves as Muslims, as terrorists.

--Amr Isma'il

Two things have been happening a lot lately. There has been a lot of activity by the Jihadists and fellow-sympathizers world-wide, and there has been a growing cry about the spread of "Islamophobia."

I will not downplay the fact that it is wrong to brand everyone who practices Islam as a terrorist and a threat, because it is not true. And there really is a growing tendency among some who, in the human way we simplify the "us vs. them" grouping, want to do just that.

Yet in the West we are tiptoeing and sometimes compromising our values to avoid the lable "Islamophobia," and there are those with agendas happy to make political points with our reluctance to be seen non-tolerant. In the east, it is used to bolster the meme of western persecution as the reason for the ills in Islamic lands. "Iran's former president has decried a wave of "Islamophobia" being spread in the United States by fear and hatred of Islam in response to terror carried out by Muslims. (source)" is a typical statement, one which the tolerance police are happy to run with.

Tony Blair was told he was fueling racial stereotyping after the 7/7 bombings. "He called upon moderate Muslims to challenge the ideological beliefs that were fuelling extremists. "You cannot defeat this extremism through what the government does. You can only defeat it within a community," he said." (source) This was seen as singling out the Muslim community and therefore opening them up to more prejudice. The fact that almost all terrorism nowadays comes from Islamic communities is beyond consideration.

The reality is, it is Muslim extremist who are doing the action, and they are doing it in the name of their religion, and they are doing it with the aid and encouragement of Islamic religious leaders. And they are hiding behind calls of Islamophobia to do it, and they are using those calls to further their claims that we are out to get them. It has been noticed that:

Every time Islamists somewhere in the world blow up civilians, kill innocent babies or church goers, behead people, or organize threatening protest mobs -- which is now every day -- Islamic groups in America warn about and scold us for any backlashes that might occur against Muslims or mosques. They forewarn us against criticizing Islam. They even indict us when we wonder why there is no public outcry by Islamic "civil rights" groups or imams against what is being done in the name of Islam as well as the selected teachings in the Koran that justify all this violence. Any criticism is labeled Islamophobia and racist. (source)

Jonah Goldberg explains how this is being used this way:

The best book for illuminating what's going on in the Muslim "street" isn't some weighty treatise on Islam; it's a short little tract called "White Guilt" by Shelby Steele. The book isn't even about Islam. Steele focuses on white liberals and the black radicals who've been gaming them ever since the 1960s. Whites, he argues, have internalized their own demonization. Deep down they fear that maybe they are imperialistic, racist bastards, and they are desperate to prove otherwise. In America, black radicals figured this out a while ago and have been dunning liberal whites ever since.

The West is caught in a similarly dysfunctional cycle of extortion and intimidation with Islam, but on a grander and far more violent scale. Whether it's the pope's comments or some Danish cartoons, self-appointed spokesmen for the Islamic street say, "You have offended a billion Muslims," which really means, "There are so many of us, you should watch out." And if you didn't get the message, just look around for the burning embassies and murdered infidels. They're not hard to find.

In response, the West apologizes and apologizes. Radical Muslims, who are not stupid, take note and become emboldened by these displays of weakness and capitulation. And the next time, they demand two pounds of flesh. Meanwhile, the entire global conversation starts from the assumption that the West is doing something wrong by tolerating freedom of speech, among other things. (source)

One way out of the trap is to call those who are dong the actions by names that don't lump the entire Islamic community with the same brush. The Archbishop of York, Dr. John Sentamu, himself of a Ugandan background says this:

He said it was unhelpful to call Muslim terrorists Islamic fundamentalists or fascists as these were Christian and political terms that "further alienate those who commit these crimes".

He said they should be called Salafi Jihadists, after the Islamic concept of struggle, which has been bent into the pursuit of murder and mass destruction by members of the Salafi movement.

The Salafi - or Wahabi - branch of Islam, which is dominant in Saudi Arabia, has many peaceful followers who aim to return to the purity of early Islam.

Dr Sentamu said: "For the modern day Salafi Jihadist who defines themselves through acts of mass destruction and terror, Jihad has taken on a whole new meaning.

"There is always a danger when making comments about Jihadists that the charge of Islamophobia follows close behind.

"So let me be clear. I am not by any means talking about all of Islam or all Muslims here." (source)

Breaking the label of calling people Islamofascists buys a space that could be used to help change the "us vs. them" balance, he hopes because it is, for the most part, the Salafi Jihadiya who are fighting the West. Would it work?

We won't know unless it become adopted. But it is something to think about.

Remembering

2006-09-19T17:24:00.000-07:00

Terror bombing in Bali

Voices from the Resistance

2006-09-19T16:29:00.000-07:00

Nothing the pope has ever said comes even close to matching the vitriol, extremism and hatred that pour out of the mouths of radical imams and fanatical clerics every day, all across Europe and the Muslim world, almost none of which ever provokes any Western response at all. And maybe it's time that it should: When Saudi Arabia publishes textbooks commanding good Wahhabi Muslims to "hate" Christians, Jews and non-Wahhabi Muslims, for example, why shouldn't the Vatican, the Southern Baptists, Britain's chief rabbi and the Council on American-Islamic Relations all condemn them -- simultaneously?

Anne Applebaum

The ensuing controversy demonstrates the spread of what could be called "Clash of Civilizations" thinking that serves the interests of violent extremists, experts say, as it provides an opportunity to advocate for their worldview. Central to the thinking of Al Qaeda is their claim that jihad is a response to what they consider 1,000 years of Christian persecution that poses an existential threat to all Muslims.

With extremists successfully exploiting popular anger over comments like the pope's or at cartoons critical of Islam, this fringe view has moved closer to the center, often undermining more-moderate views, analysts say.

Dan Murphy

We are at war. Our soldiers are following the rules of war -- but their opposition is not.

CIA counterterrorism officers are buying private insurance to cover legal costs in case they are charged with a crime, as is being hinted at by some members of Congress who feel their interrogation techniques might be too "tough."

In Iraq, Americans have been kidnapped, tortured, beheaded, burned, hanged from bridges, dragged through streets. But the CIA's method of questioning a terrorist in a cold room while playing loud music is too "tough"?

We're fighting a war for civilization against an enemy bent on destroying it and creating an Islamic world based on a warped view of what true Islam is -- yet where are the voices of American Muslims condemning this enemy?

Something's wrong.

Mary Laney

A Bedrock Issue

2006-09-19T14:15:00.000-07:00

"Whoever insults the message of Mohammed is going to be subject to capital punishment." - Anjem Choudary (source)

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances. (1st Amendment)

"Freedom of speech is a cornerstone of the EU's values, as is respect for all religions, Christianity, Islam, Judaism or laicism," said commission spokesman Johannes Laitenberger in a press conference today. (source)

The last few days as the Islamic world has tried to shout down the mere quoting of a 14th century author quoted by the Pope, and in doing so, proved the point the long dead writer had tried to make, that Islam uses violence and coercion to get its point across, and we see they also use it to keep people in line.

Over the last few years we have seen Islam used as a blungeon by those who follow various Salafist groups: rage unleased over a group of cartoons, made worse by an Islamist preacher sneaking in a particuarly vile one in the messages that swept around the world at the spead of the internet to make his case louder. We've seen people gunned down, like Theo Van Gogh, because they've been outspoken.

In the last few days, we've seen plenty of rage stirred up by the pope's quoted words:

• In Britain, while leading a rally outside Westminster Cathedral, Anjem Choudary of Al-Ghurabaa called for the pope "to be subject to capital punishment," the Daily Mail reported.

• In Iraq, the Mujahideen's Army threatened to "smash the crosses in the house of the dog from Rome," the Jerusalem Post reported, and other groups made blood-curdling threats.

• In Kuwait, an important Web site called for violent retribution against Catholics.

• In Somalia, the religious leader Abubukar Hassan Malin urged Muslims to "hunt down" the pope and kill him "on the spot," the Age reported.

• In India, a leading imam, Syed Ahmed Bukhari, called on Muslims to "respond in a manner which forces the pope to apologise," according to the Daily Telegraph.

• A top Al Qaeda figure announced that "the infidelity and tyranny of the pope will only be stopped by a major attack," the Times of London reported. (source)

A nun was killed, churches bombed, the pope hung in effigy and the cross burned in various protests. Evidently for some, the only way they know how to refute the accusation that Islam is violent is to act violently.

But the real aim of this is to inflict their values upon the West, a region that has long had a history of freedom of speech, religion, expression, and the press. As one writer notes in the WSJ Opinion Journal article today, "As with Salman Rushdie's "Satanic Verses," which millions of outraged Muslims didn't bother to read (including Ayatollah Khomeini, who put the bounty on the novelist's life), what Benedict XVI meant or even said isn't the issue. Once again, many Muslim leaders are inciting their faithful against perceived slights and trying to proscribe how free societies discuss one of the world's major religions."

We have here an attempt, through threat, violence, temper tantrum, and intimidation to inflict Salafy style Sharia rules about how you can talk about Islam on the West. If we give into this, an attack on some of our most bedrock ideas, freedom of expression and freedom of belief, we will be opening a pandora's box, because there will be more to follow.

This is an issue that affects both the right and the left - the right to discourse, to analyze, to disagree, in that give and take that marks our culture. This is an attack by people who want to bully us into silence. If this is truly who we are, what we believe in, it's time to speak up for it. We need more of us to say, "This attack on our right to speech will not pass," and we need to mean it. We will pay the consequences if we don't.

Faces of Love and Hate

2006-09-19T08:49:00.000-07:00

Sister Leonella who spent her time helping Moslems,
and was killed because she was a Christian doing that,
and who died saying "I forgive him."

Protesters who see nothing ironic about using violence and defaming another religion
to say their faith is not violent and it is wrong to defame it.

Voices from the Resistance

2006-09-18T17:24:00.000-07:00

Our enemies include all the Muslims who dream of knocking Western Civilization off its perch atop humanity’s dung heap. Islam is fractured into any number of sects, tribes and ethnic groups, but the dream of destroying us cuts across all the fault lines. Islamic terrorists are merely the tip of a very large spear.

J. Peter Mulhern, the American Thinker, September 18

For pointing out that Christianity is based on reason, while the persuasive power of Islam can be found only at the point of a sword, the Pope signed his own death warrant -- and it's quite certain he knew it too.

GWOYKW

Aside from the obvious irony, it seems that no one is surprised that a Muslim would gun down an elderly woman who dedicated her life to helping poor Muslims, merely because she is a Christian.

TROP

The Witness and the Sword

2006-09-18T15:51:00.000-07:00

As for the murdered Nun, it shows that Christian martyrs die defending and caring for the innocent...while muslim martyrs die killing the innocent. (anonymous commenter on Joee Blogs)

In the Christian tradition, martyrs are witnesses, those who take their witness of following the way of Christ to its final destination, a life given up out of love, to stand to the last moment saying, "Jesus is Lord," because someone else has decided that they were worthy of death because they were Christian. They were respected because they thought love of the Lord was worth more than mere life.

My favorite modern martyr has been St. Maximillian Kolbe.

After a very busy life of work as a catholic priest, missionary, writer and publisher, his friary was closed and he was arrested in 1941 for aiding and sheltering Jews and other offensives, and eventually ended in Auschwitz. And then came his martyrdom:

In July 1941 a man from Kolbe's bunker escaped. The dreadful irony of the story is that the escaped prisoner was later found drowned in a camp latrine, so the terrible reprisals had been exercised without cause. But the remaining men of the bunker were led out.
'The fugitive has not been found!' the commandant Karl Fritsch screamed. 'You will all pay for this. Ten of you will be locked in the starvation bunker without food or water until they die.' The prisoners trembled in terror. A few days in this bunker without food and water, and a man's intestines dried up and his brain turned to fire.

The ten were selected, including Franciszek Gajowniczek, imprisoned for helping the Polish Resistance. He couldn't help a cry of anguish. 'My poor wife!' he sobbed. 'My poor children! What will they do?' When he uttered this cry of dismay, Maximilian stepped silently forward, took off his cap, and stood before the commandant and said, 'I am a Catholic priest. Let me take his place. I am old. He has a wife and children.'

Astounded, the icy-faced Nazi commandant asked, 'What does this Polish pig want?'

Father Kolbe pointed with his hand to the condemned Franciszek Gajowniczek and repeated 'I am a Catholic priest from Poland; I would like to take his place, because he has a wife and children.'
'I could only thank him with my eyes. I was stunned and could hardly grasp what was going on. The immensity of it: I, the condemned, am to live and someone else willingly and voluntarily offers his life for me - a stranger. Is this some dream?

I was put back into my place without having had time to say anything to Maximilian Kolbe. I was saved. And I owe to him the fact that I could tell you all this. The news quickly spread all round the camp. It was the first and the last time that such an incident happened in the whole history of Auschwitz.

For a long time I felt remorse when I thought of Maximilian. By allowing myself to be saved, I had signed his death warrant. But now, on reflection, I understood that a man like him could not have done otherwise. Perhaps he thought that as a priest his place was beside the condemned men to help them keep hope. In fact he was with them to the last.'‘

Father Kolbe was thrown down the stairs of Building 13 along with the other victims and simply left there to starve. Hunger and thirst soon gnawed at the men. Some drank their own urine, others licked moisture on the dank walls. Maximilian Kolbe encouraged the others with prayers, psalms, and meditations on the Passion of Christ. After two weeks, only four were alive. The cell was needed for more victims, and the camp executioner, a common criminal called Bock, came in and injected a lethal dose of cabolic acid into the left arm of each of the four dying men. Kolbe was the only one still fully conscious and with a prayer on his lips, the last prisoner raised his arm for the executioner. His wait was over ...

A personal testimony about the way Maximilian Kolbe met death is given by Bruno Borgowiec, one of the few Poles who were assigned to render service to the starvation bunker. He told it to his parish priest before he died in 1947:

'The ten condemned to death went through terrible days. From the underground cell in which they were shut up there continually arose the echo of prayers and canticles. The man in-charge of emptying the buckets of urine found them always empty. Thirst drove the prisoners to drink the contents. Since they had grown very weak, prayers were now only whispered. At every inspection, when almost all the others were now lying on the floor, Father Kolbe was seen kneeling or standing in the centre as he looked cheerfully in the face of the SS men.

Father Kolbe never asked for anything and did not complain, rather he encouraged the others, saying that the fugitive might be found and then they would all be freed. One of the SS guards remarked: this priest is really a great man. We have never seen anyone like him ..

Two weeks passed in this way. Meanwhile one after another they died, until only Father Kolbe was left. This the authorities felt was too long. The cell was needed for new victims. So one day they brought in the head of the sick-quarters, a German named Bock, who gave Father Kolbe an injection of carbolic acid in the vein of his left arm. Father Kolbe, with a prayer on his lips, himself gave his arm to the executioner. Unable to watch this I left under the pretext of work to be done. Immediately after the SS men had left I returned to the cell, where I found Father Kolbe leaning in a sitting position against the back wall with his eyes open and his head drooping sideways. His face was calm and radiant ..'

So it was that Father Maximilian Kolbe was executed on 14 August, 1941 at the age of forty-seven years, a martyr of charity. The death certificate, as always made out with German precision, indicated the hour of death 12.30. (Source)

In comparison, martyrdom is Islam is different, much more proactive.

"In the Koran… it is written that anyone who dies for the sake of Allah is a martyr. When the Prophet Muhammad was asked about the meaning of 'for the sake of Allah,' he said, 'Anyone who fights so that the words of Allah will be supreme.' " Saudi Ambassador to London Ghazi Al-Qusaibi. (source)

There is a lot of honor involved in this. One martyr's mother expressed it this way, ""If I'm in the company of others, I can sense the respect and the pride. They say, 'She's a martyr's mother.' What does this name mean? For me, it's very meaningful. I walk about with my head high. Allah be praised, Allah be praised, every hour and every minute." (source)

In some circles, particularly in the Palestinian areas it is highly encouraged from a young age: The concept of educating children to become martyrs occurs regularly in PA sermons. Sheikh Ibrahim Madhi, one of the most popular Imams, is especially vocal on this issue. During one sermon, he repeats the following discussion he had with a child who approached him about becoming a suicide bomber: " A young man said to me: 'I am 14 years old, and I have four years left before I blow myself up'… We, the Muslims on this good and blessed land, are all - each one of us - seekers of Martyrdom… The Koran is very clear on this: The greatest enemies of the Islamic nation are the Jews, may Allah fight them… Blessings for whoever assaulted a soldier… Blessings for whoever has raised his sons on the education of Jihad and Martyrdom; blessings for whoever has saved a bullet in order to stick it in a Jew's head…"On another occasion, Madhi stated, " Shame and remorse on whoever refrained from raising his children on Jihad… Blessings to whoever waged Jihad for the sake of Allah; blessings to whoever raided for the sake of Allah; blessings to whoever put a belt of explosives on his body or on his sons' and plunged into the midst of the Jews, crying 'Allahu Akbar, praise to Allah, There is no God but Allah and Muhammad is His messenger'… Allah, show us a black day for the Jews, like the day of 'Aad and Thamud. Allah, turn them into pillage for us. Allah, we strive for martyrdom for your sake..." (source)

Muslim martyrs are tools. Islamic martyrdom is pro-active, not as a sign of a witness of the glory of God, for Christianity is much about one's own relationship with God, but as a religious/political device, like an ied or sword or rocket.

Christian martyrdom is about love, Islamic martyrdom is about conquest. And in this, is the great divide that Pope Benedict pointed out.

Witnessing

2006-09-18T14:51:00.000-07:00

In yet another furore to grip the Christian community, the head of the Orthodox Church of Greece has joined the Pope controversy by attacking what he calls Islamic fanaticism in Africa.

In a scathing attack, barely 48 hours after a Somali Islamic cleric called for Muslims to kill the Pope for his Tuesday utterances, Archbishop Christodoulos told a sermon in Athens that Christians in Africa were suffering at the hands of ‘fanatic Islamists'.

"Many Christians on the Black Continent (Africa) suffer from fanatic Islamists. The example of Roman Catholic monks who were slaughtered last year... because they wore the cross and believed in our crucified Lord is still recent,” said Christodoulos.

(source)

Cardinal George Pell says "the violent reactions in many parts of the Islamic world" to a speech by Pope Benedict justified one of the very fears expressed in that address. "They showed the link for many Islamists between religion and violence, their refusal to respond to criticism with rational arguments, but only with demonstrations, threats and actual violence," Cardinal Pell said in a statement yesterday.

(source)

NAIROBI, Kenya An elderly nun shot four times at the Somali hospital where she worked forgave her killers as she lay dying, colleagues said Monday in the wake of a murder that has focused attention on Islamic radicalism in the Horn of Africa country.

Sister Leonella, 65, muttered the words 'I forgive, I forgive' in Italian after being shot three times in the back by gunmen in an apparent execution-style killing, father Maloba Wesonga told The Associated Press at the nun's memorial mass in the Kenyan capital, Nairobi, on Monday.

(source)

The death of Roland

2006-09-18T12:46:00.000-07:00

Long ago, as the poets tell it, the emperor Charlemange had a nephew named Roland. In an evil deal cooked up between Ganelon, Roland's evil stepfather, and the moslem king of Sargossa, the king would fake a false surrender, and head north with Roland and his party to return to France.

Ganelon made sure that Roland and his other brave companions would bring up the reargard. The reargard was attacked by an overwhelming force in the pass of Roncevaux, and wiped out.

Roland and his companions did not lose because they were less capable fighters - they lost because of treachery within their own ranks, because people who ought to have been trustworthy made common cause with the enemy.

Today, for some reason, we find many people in our culture making common cause with an enemy who has declared war on the West, and on America, right and left. We see this with the New York times gleefully outing state secrets that may have critical repercusions in the not too distant future. We see it when a movie about the (fantasied) death of a sitting president makes big news and wins awards. We see it when senators call the US military terrorists.

Will we hear the forlorn sounds of our own horn Olifant winding through the hills, sounded too late to save us because the treachery is done?

The Problem

2006-09-18T11:31:00.000-07:00

Worshippers were coming out of church. A protest was going on.

People were holding up anti-Catholic and anti-Christian signs with slogans, saying things like "Pope go to Hell" and "Jesus is a Slave of Allah." Speakers were saying things like "Those that insult Islam would be subject to capital punishment."

A Scotland Yard spokesman said of his comments: "We have had no complaints about this. "

Here lies the problem: the world is aflame with protests because an elderly scholar quoted a 14th century man who said some things about Islam that were harsh. He wasn't even saying "I beieve what this man believed," he was merely using it as a contrast.

And yet, Islam protesters can say the rudest things about the Christian faith and leaders and holy people, and there is no problem. Don't make a fuss, go on about your business. Even if they attack things you hold dear, like freedom of religion and expression, it's OK, long as you don't do it to.

This is truly a sorry point in the world's history, that the West is letting itself be rolled over by bully boys, as if it doesn't matter.

(Newstory)

Terror on the Cheap

2006-09-17T19:08:00.000-07:00

According to sources in the UK, the British Airplane bomb plot would have cost something in the neighborhood of $13,000 (£7000) to carry out, instead of the expensive plot that earlier news stories talked about. The explosive mixture evidently is inexpensive to buy, the "martyrdom videos" would have cost about $28 (£15) to produce, the computers and related supplies would have been worth less than $1000 (£500), two members of the group who needed passports could have gotten them for around $375 (£200). Beyond that they needed a small supply of equipment: scales, batteries, buckets, drink bottles, etc.

The most expensive part of the plot would have been the cost of airline tickets (I am guestimating in the range of $1000 (£500) each).

People hear of plots and think of the need for major Al Qaeda backing. But funds like this could be raised in an area that had enough sympathizers without a lot of trouble...This is why homegrown terrorism is something that is not out of the question. It really isn't that expensive, or that hard to do if people have a mind for it.

This is why security is important...it's really not that hard to do. There have been a couple of experiments with buying large amounts of ammonium nitrate and fuel oil in the news lately, and it is easy to do. Loners, as was the case of the Unibomber, and the bomb set off during the Atlanta Olympics can do it even easier than small groups.

But in an open society, we are also open to the possibility that if people want to, they can hurt us, and it really isn't that hard, or that expensive, doesn't need international connections, just the determination to harm.

(source for figures)

Voices of the Jihadiya

2006-09-17T17:58:00.000-07:00

How can Malaysia sign a free trade agreement with America and Japan? Are these not kafir countries? And America today is an enemy of Muslim states and the supporter of Israel. In Islam that makes America a kafirharbi (enemy) state, and we Muslims are obliged to cut off all ties, diplomatic and economic with such an enemy state.

Abu Bakar Bashir, August 21, 2006

If I were asked about destroying the facilities and interests of the enemies - America and Israel - in the various countries... Does the religious law allow us to do this? Yes, as long as innocent people are not killed in the process.

Muhammad Said Ramadhan Al-Bouti, August 6, 2006

"There can be neither an agreement nor a meeting point between the people of Islam and the Jewish and Christian People of the Book… How can we permit the Catholic Pope's talk of a need to find meeting points and agreement between Islam and Christianity, so that there will be peaceful coexistence between the two religions and harmony between the two communities? Is it conceivable that there should be agreement and a meeting point with those who fabricate terrible falsehoods about Allah … claiming that Jesus, peace be upon him, is his son?!…"

Sheikh Adnan Ahmad Siyami, May 11, 2001

Voices of the Resistance

2006-09-17T17:48:00.000-07:00

If you pay attention to the legacy media, the culture of the West seems almost suicidal in its determination to submit to the Great Islamic Jihad. The élites of the Anointed are secure in their bastions in Scarsdale or Ann Arbor or Hollywood, and don’t have to fear for their own skins any time soon. They watch the tide coming in and knocking down the sand castles in Europe, but their little castles are secure.

Or so they think. But there’s no place on earth that’s above the high tide line of Islam.

In 1918, the fall of the Ottomans was the low tide of Islam. The Greek castles were way down the shore near the ebb, and they were the first to go when the tide turned. The castles in Nigeria, Kosovo, Kashmir, and Indonesia are falling now, and those in Sweden, the Netherlands, and Britain will topple soon.

But none of our castles is safe. Ours may not fall in Dan Rather’s lifetime, or in mine. But some cohort of those alive today — people now in their 20s, or 30s, or 40s — will have to face this tide at its flood. It will be no use to emulate Canute and order it to turn back.

The only way the West will be victorious is for us to take back the culture.

We need to empower our heirs by driving pilings deep into the cultural foreshore so that our revered institutions will be strong enough to withstand the pounding of the coming tide.

Baron Bodissey, Gates of Vienna

I do not agree with Rabbi Shlomo Amar, who last week told an interfaith conference in Kazakhstan that these days the tendency is to tie events to religious matters. Israel's war mustn't be tied to the Jewish and Muslim religions, he said. I assume that his motives for saying that, as are the motives of most objectors, is the fear of fanning the flames and a desire to escape from the truth in the hopes it would not chase them.

And I, the little one, from where I sit at Gush Etzion, am standing up and yelling out, and to my regret I must rely on the words of the…Pope: The entire world is facing existential danger! We're in the midst of a one-sided religious war. As opposed to the days of the crusades, where Christianity and Islam fought for control of the Holy Land, this time around Islam's fundamentalist faction is resorting to murderous religious zeal in order to fight the West's hedonistic culture.

Any denial of this reality, even if its motives are clear, will lead to destruction and surrender.

Yisrael Rosen

“The Jews have come from that tragedy and forced the world to respect them, with their knowledge, not with their terror; with their work, not with their crying and yelling . . . We have not seen a single Jew blow himself up in a German restaurant. We have not seen a single Jew destroy a church. We have not seen a single Jew protest by killing people . . . Only the Muslims defend their beliefs by burning down churches, killing people and destroying embassies. This path will not yield any results. The Muslims must ask themselves what they can do for humankind, before they demand that humankind respect them.”

Wafa Sultan

It's a conspiracy!

2006-09-17T12:50:00.000-07:00

Evidently, all bad things in the world that happen to Moslem areas are the fault of a cabal between the Americans and the Zionists.

The Indonesian tsunami was caused by American, Israeli, and Indian nuclear testing, acording to the Egyptian weekly Al-Usbu'. On January 1, 2005, they reported that nuclear testing was destabilizing the tectonic plates, and and the earthquake followed after a series of recent Indian tests "The three most recent tests appeared to be genuine American and Israeli preparations to act together with India to test a way to liquidate humanity. In the[ir] most recent test, they began destroying entire cities over extensive areas. Although the nuclear explosions were carried out in desert lands, tens of thousands of kilometers away from populated areas, they had a direct effect on these areas." [1]

Bin Laden works for the Americans! Or so some conspiracy theorists in the Middle East believe.

Iraqi political analyst Kazem Al-Qurayshi spoke on the Iranian channel Sahar1 TV about September 11 and terrorism on July 18, 2004: " Al-Zarqawi, bin-Laden, and Mullah Omar, and all the leaders of the Salafi movement, are tools created by the British Freemason movement 200 years ago. With these tools they wanted to create a new religion for us, to confront Islam. They filled this new religion with Jewish poison, the Masonic poison. Their religion is manifested by a long beard, a short garment, and killing Muslims.

And it's not just the Shiites talking this way. On April 28, 2004, Lebanese Druze leader and Parliamentarian Walid Jumblatt gave an interview to Al-Arabiyya TV, and detailed how the U.S. was really behind September 11: "Who invented Osama bin Laden?! The Americans, the CIA invented him so they could fight the Soviets in Afghanistan together with some of the Arab regimes. I am of the opinion that somewhere, someplace, there is an intelligence agency profiting from Al-Qa'ida and Osama bin Laden. Osama bin Laden is like a ghost, popping up when needed. This is my opinion." [2]

Many believe that the only reason Saddam Hussein was captured without a fight is because he was drugged. [3] The terrorist attacks at Taba which were an Al Qaeda operation were said to have been carried out instead by the Mossad, the US, a combination of the two, or a terrorist Jewish group that wanted to do in non-religious Jews and blame it on the Arabs. [4]

And today, another conspiracy rises to the top: Now we learn that Pope Benedict is controlled the the Zionists, too!

The AFP is reporting: Iranian hardline newspapers said there were signs of an Israeli-US plot behind remarks by Pope Benedict XVI that linked Islam to violence and created a wave of anger across the Muslim world.

The daily Jomhuri Islami said Israel and the United States -- the Islamic republic's two arch-enemies -- could have dictated the comments to distract attention from the resistance of the Shiite militant group Hezbollah to Israel's offensive on Lebanon. [5]

Amazing how the Zionists and Americans control everything, even the Catholic Church.

Hat tip to Jihad Watch for the story about the Vatican conspiracy theory.

[1]MEMRI special dispatch 842
[2]MEMRI special report 33
[3]MEMRI inquiry and analysis 155
[4]MEMRI special dispatch 801
[5] AFP

Link to MEMRI

Pope's Statement

2006-09-17T09:12:00.000-07:00

'Dear Brothers and Sisters,

The Pastoral Visit which I recently made to Bavaria was a deep spiritual experience, bringing together personal memories linked to places well known to me and pastoral initiatives towards an effective proclamation of the Gospel for today. I thank God for the interior joy which he made possible, and I am also grateful to all those who worked hard for the success of this Pastoral Visit. As is the custom, I will speak more of this during next Wednesday’s General Audience. At this time, I wish also to add that I am deeply sorry for the reactions in some countries to a few passages of my address at the University of Regensburg, which were considered offensive to the sensibility of Muslims. These in fact were a quotation from a medieval text, which do not in any way express my personal thought. Yesterday, the Cardinal Secretary of State published a statement in this regard in which he explained the true meaning of my words. I hope that this serves to appease hearts and to clarify the true meaning of my address, which in its totality was and is an invitation to frank and sincere dialogue, with great mutual respect.

Violence in the name of God

2006-09-17T08:48:00.000-07:00

Somali Christian sources report Ali Mustaf Maka'il, a 22-year-old college student and cloth merchant who converted from Islam to Christianity 11 months ago, was shot and killed in the Manabolyo quarter of Mogadishu.

According to a report from the Barnabas Fund, quoting a Christian source inside Somalia, the gunman was loyal to the Union of Islamic Courts, the Islamist organization that took power in Mogadishu in early June and now controls much of southern Somalia.

The report states the gunman shot Ali in the back Sept. 7 after he refused to join a crowd chanting Quran verses in honor of the lunar eclipse. Solar and lunar eclipses are significant in Islam and are accompanied by special congregational prayers. The Union of Islamic Courts confiscated Ali's body for 24 hours before delivering it to the grieving family, the report said.
(source)

"Whoever offends our Prophet Mohammed should be killed on the spot by the nearest Muslim," Sheikh Abubukar Hassan Malin (source)

The killing of an Italian Catholic nun in Mogadishu on Sunday may well be linked to anger among Muslims about Pope Benedict's recent remarks on Islam, a senior source among Somalia's Islamists said. (source)

Notable Quotes

2006-09-16T20:19:00.000-07:00

But when the Pope suggests Islam is violent, Islam becomes...violent. Here a question for you Moral Equivalence fans: Have you noticed that "radical Christians," although just insulted by Rosie O'Donnell, are not rioting or threatening anyone's life?

Robert Spencer

Insulted by the suggestion that their religion was violent, thousands of young men took to the streets to threaten violence. - The UK Telegraph

What is also undeniable is that whereas the claims of Islam to be a religion of peace have been unceasingly made, almost all the Islamists have justified their terrorism in terms of religious obligation. - Swapan Dasgupta, The Pioneer

Should the Pope apologize for saying that Islam isn't a Religion of Peace, or should Muslims apologize for having let their religion become what it is? Let's look at the numbers:

Since we've been keeping track, at least six priests, 14 pastors and thousands of Christians have been murdered in the name of Islam in the last five years. This even includes 382 who were slain by Muslims in or on the grounds of a church in countries like Indonesia, Pakistan, Egypt, Iraq, Nigeria, the Philippines, Uzbekistan, Ethiopia, Turkey and Bangladesh.

By contrast, we can't find a single incident since 9/11 when a mosque leader or ordinary Muslim was murdered in the name of Catholicism. - TROP

"Honestly, the thin-skinnedness of many Muslims is getting awfully tiresome. How on earth are we ever supposed to be able to have a dialogue if the non-Muslim side has to walk on eggshells to avoid offending the wounded sensibilities of Muslim leaders, who seem very eager to take gross offense at anything critical?" Rod Dreher, Beliefnet

Dark Ironies

2006-09-16T13:28:00.000-07:00

A HARDLINE cleric linked to Somalia's powerful Islamist movement has called for Muslims to "hunt down" and kill Pope Benedict XVI for his controversial comments about Islam.

Sheikh Abubukar Hassan Malin urged Muslims to find the pontiff and punish him for insulting the Prophet Mohammed and Allah in a speech that he said was as offensive as author Salman Rushdie's novel The Satanic Verses.

"We urge you Muslims wherever you are to hunt down the Pope for his barbaric statements as you have pursued Salman Rushdie, the enemy of Allah who offended our religion," he said in Friday evening prayers.

"Whoever offends our Prophet Mohammed should be killed on the spot by the nearest Muslim," Malin, a prominent cleric in the Somali capital, told worshippers at a mosque in southern Mogadishu. (source)

(In other words, the cleric is calling for the Pope's death, because he quoted someone who said Islam was vile because it used violence instead of persuasion, and so the cleric calls for violence because the old Emperor pointed out something that Islam does and called it bad. It's not a matter if Islam IS vile in its willingness to use violence, but that once upon a time someone said that Islam was bad. And so, for the perceived sins of a long dead Greek emperor, the Pope should die for mentioning it in passing.)

Muhammad Abdul Bari, general-secretary of the Muslim Council of Britain, said the pontiff needed to repudiate the emperor's views he quoted to restore relations between Muslims and the Roman Catholic Church.

(In other words, the pope should lie about thinking violence in the name of God is bad?)

I truly suspect these people will not be satisfied with anything less than the pope saying Islam is superior to Christianity, and the Prophet is wonderous. And then they are acting out the emperor's behavior for all to see.

Reading the Tea Leaves

2006-09-16T09:08:00.000-07:00

I ran accross this passage that was a comment on an Al-Jazeera talk show July 10, 2001.

Amid a talk show only a few months before 9/11 that mostly was filled with how wicked America was, how corrupt Arab governments were, how wonderful Bin Laden was, everybody was sure that America would do nothing much of substance, that Bin Laden could destroy the American control in the Middle East, and maybe even the American regime, one man’s voice stood out amazingly foresighted.

“I think,” said ‘Adlan, “that the chances of Osama bin Laden’s toppling the American regime don’t even approach one in a million. These are extremely marginal matters. It’s a very serious issue, because it will make America treat bin Laden and groups like him as if they had declared war [on America], and handle them not through legal investigation inquiry, but with the American armed forces…”

Al-Hatem ‘Adlan, leader of the Al-Haq Democratic Forces Movement, knew how to read the tea leaves.

There have been miscalculations, and all of our efforts may be for naught, because the man on the street in the Middle East frequently really does believe America is bad, that Israel is evil, and that together we are the sources of all the woes in the Islamic world. Many of them don’t believe the evidence of other truth. And encouraging democracy on one hand is setting the region up to let those man on the street opinions bear fruit. And we may not like it. And even being there also reinforces that pov.

But what are our alternatives? To sit at home and wait for the next bomb to fall? Or to try to effect enough positive change (from their POV) that the opinion begins to shift?

It is a hard corner that the history leading up to this point painted us into.

Vatican Statement on the Pope's Comments

2006-09-16T08:39:00.000-07:00

Given the reaction in Muslim quarters to certain passages of the Holy Father's address at the University of Regensburg, and the clarifications and explanations already presented through the Director of the Holy See Press Office, I would like to add the following:

- The position of the Pope concerning Islam is unequivocally that expressed by the conciliar document Nostra Aetate: "The Church regards with esteem also the Muslims. They adore the one God, living and subsisting in Himself; merciful and all-powerful, the Creator of heaven and earth, Who has spoken to men; they take pains to submit wholeheartedly to even His inscrutable decrees, just as Abraham, with whom the faith of Islam takes pleasure in linking itself, submitted to God. Though they do not acknowledge Jesus as God, they revere Him as a prophet. They also honor Mary, His virgin Mother; at times they even call on her with devotion. In addition, they await the day of judgment when God will render their deserts to all those who have been raised up from the dead. Finally, they value the moral life and worship God especially through prayer, almsgiving and fasting" (no. 3).

- The Pope's option in favor of inter-religious and inter-cultural dialogue is equally unequivocal. In his meeting with representatives of Muslim communities in Cologne, Germany, on 20 August 2005, he said that such dialogue between Christians and Muslims "cannot be reduced to an optional extra," adding: "The lessons of the past must help us to avoid repeating the same mistakes. We must seek paths of reconciliation and learn to live with respect for each other's identity".

- As for the opinion of the Byzantine emperor Manuel II Paleologus which he quoted during his Regensburg talk, the Holy Father did not mean, nor does he mean, to make that opinion his own in any way. He simply used it as a means to undertake - in an academic context, and as is evident from a complete and attentive reading of the text - certain reflections on the theme of the relationship between religion and violence in general, and to conclude with a clear and radical rejection of the religious motivation for violence, from whatever side it may come. On this point, it is worth recalling what Benedict XVI himself recently affirmed in his commemorative Message for the 20th anniversary of the Inter-religious Meeting of Prayer for Peace, initiated by his predecessor John Paul II at Assisi in October 1986: " ... demonstrations of violence cannot be attributed to religion as such but to the cultural limitations with which it is lived and develops in time. ... In fact, attestations of the close bond that exists between the relationship with God and the ethics of love are recorded in all great religious traditions".

- The Holy Father thus sincerely regrets that certain passages of his address could have sounded offensive to the sensitivities of the Muslim faithful, and should have been interpreted in a manner that in no way corresponds to his intentions. Indeed it was he who, before the religious fervor of Muslim believers, warned secularized Western culture to guard against "the contempt for God and the cynicism that considers mockery of the sacred to be an exercise of freedom".

- In reiterating his respect and esteem for those who profess Islam, he hopes they will be helped to understand the correct meaning of his words so that, quickly surmounting this present uneasy moment, witness to the "Creator of heaven and earth, Who has spoken to men" may be reinforced, and collaboration may intensify "to promote together for the benefit of all mankind social justice and moral welfare, as well as peace and freedom" (Nostra Aetate no. 3).

Source
______________

Pretty much what I expected. Violence in the name of God is bad (a point Islam will probably take as an insult against Islam, anyway, IMHO), we respect you as people and as persons who love God, and did not mean to hurt your feelings - and, in a soft, polite way, "Can't you read? I was quoting someone!"

Nightmares in the West and Reality in the East

2006-09-16T07:54:00.000-07:00

Once upon a time, Margaret Atwood wrote a book called the Handmaid's Tale, about a nightmarish vision of America taken over by an extremist Christian group who denied women all rights, and in fact, refused to even let them learn to read, and kept them pretty much under thumb at home. The society described was horribly restrictive, with men and women being punished in public ways for infractions that would be considered trivial by the people of our culture.

It is interesting that she projected her fear about this on the American Christian right. In reality, this type of society has been created, and it's not by Christians of any flavor, but by people in the Islamic sphere. In the puritanical, purist movements within Islam, which tend to interpret the Islamic sacred writings through a world view that is strongly colored by tribal notions of what is proper, the followers are striving for what they see as a return to the ways of the first three generations of Islam. Yet in their strivings for righteousness as they see it, nightmare societies have been created, with huge amounts of repression, threat, and misery.

The Taliban experience in Afghanistan is an example of that, where women were beaten for walking too noisily and were forbidden learning, where men who wore soccer shorts were punished, where punishments of amputation and blinding were not uncommon, and the religious police made sure no one listened to music and that men had proper beards.

In many, many ways, the Taliban regime fulfills Margaret Atwood's nightmare world.

And now, in Somalia, that world is threatening to reform. Sharia courts are now ruling in areas controlled by the Islamist groups, radio stations are being forbidden to play music, and all the normal restrictions are women are now falling into place. It often works in small ways that seem trivial, but when added together paint a picture of life without freedom, morality of a type not native by force. Besides radio stations being forbidden to play music and movie houses being closed, recently, a woman's school for cooking had a graduation ceremony, but the photographers who covered the story were forbidden to take pictures of the women involved.

As they consolidate, the Islamist leaders are promising a Taliban type state, and some of the activists from Pakistan have come over to help.

This reality is creating a growing refugee crisis. "An average of 300 Somali refugees have arrived in Kenya daily over the past three days amid reports of an advance on the southern Somalia port city of Kismayo by fighters allied to the Islamic Courts Union," UNHCR said in a statement. "Most of the refugees now arriving in Kenya are women and children and many are in poor condition. They are tired and markedly emaciated after travelling on foot and aboard trucks over long distances and for many days." (source)

The numbers have gone up from about 100 a day a month ago to 300 now, and more are feared if violence takes over Kismayo.

Why are women and children fleeing? Because they know the consequences of staying behind will be worse. There are times the perils of the unknown are better than the certainties that await for those staying behind.

And someone tries to prove Emperor Manuel II Paleologus right.

2006-09-16T06:06:00.000-07:00

It was, according to the Pope's remark, the Emperor Manuel II Paleologus who made the statements about Islam being violent: ""Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached"."

In the dark irony of our day, beyond all the protests to say, "No, Islam isn't violent, " we are now seeing the Emperor's points being demonstrated by those who are mad that the Pope said that the emperor said that Islam does evil things:

"NABLUS, West Bank - Two churches in the West Bank were hit by firebombs early Saturday, witnesses and clergy said, and a group claiming responsiblity said the attacks were meant as a protest against comments by Pope Benedict XVI about Islam....In a phone call to The Associated Press, a group calling itself the "Lions of Monotheism" claimed responsibility. The caller said the attacks were carried out to protest the pope's remarks about Islam." (source)

Amazing. In the name of saying that the Pope was wrong, they go and do just the type of behavior that was being pointed out, and they can't even see how they are proving the point.

Voices of Al Jihadiya: They Declared War First

2006-09-15T19:54:00.000-07:00

World Islamic Front Statement

23 February 1998

Shaykh Usamah Bin-Muhammad Bin-Ladin
Ayman al-Zawahiri, amir of the Jihad Group in Egypt
Abu-Yasir Rifa'i Ahmad Taha, Egyptian Islamic Group
Shaykh Mir Hamzah, secretary of the Jamiat-ul-Ulema-e-Pakistan
Fazlur Rahman, amir of the Jihad Movement in Bangladesh

Praise be to Allah, who revealed the Book, controls the clouds, defeats factionalism, and says in His Book: "But when the forbidden months are past, then fight and slay the pagans wherever ye find them, seize them, beleaguer them, and lie in wait for them in every stratagem (of war)"; and peace be upon our Prophet, Muhammad Bin-'Abdallah, who said: I have been sent with the sword between my hands to ensure that no one but Allah is worshipped, Allah who put my livelihood under the shadow of my spear and who inflicts humiliation and scorn on those who disobey my orders.

The Arabian Peninsula has never -- since Allah made it flat, created its desert, and encircled it with seas -- been stormed by any forces like the crusader armies spreading in it like locusts, eating its riches and wiping out its plantations. All this is happening at a time in which nations are attacking Muslims like people fighting over a plate of food. In the light of the grave situation and the lack of support, we and you are obliged to discuss current events, and we should all agree on how to settle the matter.

No one argues today about three facts that are known to everyone; we will list them, in order to remind everyone:

First, for over seven years the United States has been occupying the lands of Islam in the holiest of places, the Arabian Peninsula, plundering its riches, dictating to its rulers, humiliating its people, terrorizing its neighbors, and turning its bases in the Peninsula into a spearhead through which to fight the neighboring Muslim peoples.

If some people have in the past argued about the fact of the occupation, all the people of the Peninsula have now acknowledged it. The best proof of this is the Americans' continuing aggression against the Iraqi people using the Peninsula as a staging post, even though all its rulers are against their territories being used to that end, but they are helpless.

Second, despite the great devastation inflicted on the Iraqi people by the crusader-Zionist alliance, and despite the huge number of those killed, which has exceeded 1 million... despite all this, the Americans are once against trying to repeat the horrific massacres, as though they are not content with the protracted blockade imposed after the ferocious war or the fragmentation and devastation.

So here they come to annihilate what is left of this people and to humiliate their Muslim neighbors.

Third, if the Americans' aims behind these wars are religious and economic, the aim is also to serve the Jews' petty state and divert attention from its occupation of Jerusalem and murder of Muslims there. The best proof of this is their eagerness to destroy Iraq, the strongest neighboring Arab state, and their endeavor to fragment all the states of the region such as Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Sudan into paper statelets and through their disunion and weakness to guarantee Israel's survival and the continuation of the brutal crusade occupation of the Peninsula.

All these crimes and sins committed by the Americans are a clear declaration of war on Allah, his messenger, and Muslims. And ulema have throughout Islamic history unanimously agreed that the jihad is an individual duty if the enemy destroys the Muslim countries. This was revealed by Imam Bin-Qadamah in "Al- Mughni," Imam al-Kisa'i in "Al-Bada'i," al-Qurtubi in his interpretation, and the shaykh of al-Islam in his books, where he said: "As for the fighting to repulse [an enemy], it is aimed at defending sanctity and religion, and it is a duty as agreed [by the ulema]. Nothing is more sacred than belief except repulsing an enemy who is attacking religion and life."

On that basis, and in compliance with Allah's order, we issue the following fatwa to all Muslims:

The ruling to kill the Americans and their allies -- civilians and military -- is an individual duty for every Muslim who can do it in any country in which it is possible to do it, in order to liberate the al-Aqsa Mosque and the holy mosque [Mecca] from their grip, and in order for their armies to move out of all the lands of Islam, defeated and unable to threaten any Muslim. This is in accordance with the words of Almighty Allah, "and fight the pagans all together as they fight you all together," and "fight them until there is no more tumult or oppression, and there prevail justice and faith in Allah."

This is in addition to the words of Almighty Allah: "And why should ye not fight in the cause of Allah and of those who, being weak, are ill-treated (and oppressed)? -- women and children, whose cry is: 'Our Lord, rescue us from this town, whose people are oppressors; and raise for us from thee one who will help!'"

We -- with Allah's help -- call on every Muslim who believes in Allah and wishes to be rewarded to comply with Allah's order to kill the Americans and plunder their money wherever and whenever they find it. We also call on Muslim ulema, leaders, youths, and soldiers to launch the raid on Satan's U.S. troops and the devil's supporters allying with them, and to displace those who are behind them so that they may learn a lesson.

Almighty Allah said: "O ye who believe, give your response to Allah and His Apostle, when He calleth you to that which will give you life. And know that Allah cometh between a man and his heart, and that it is He to whom ye shall all be gathered."

Almighty Allah also says: "O ye who believe, what is the matter with you, that when ye are asked to go forth in the cause of Allah, ye cling so heavily to the earth! Do ye prefer the life of this world to the hereafter? But little is the comfort of this life, as compared with the hereafter. Unless ye go forth, He will punish you with a grievous penalty, and put others in your place; but Him ye would not harm in the least. For Allah hath power over all things."

Almighty Allah also says: "So lose no heart, nor fall into despair. For ye must gain mastery if ye are true in faith.".

(source)

Remembering

2006-09-15T19:05:00.000-07:00

US Marine Barracks in Beruit

Somalia - next stop on the Jihadiya trail?

2006-09-15T18:12:00.000-07:00

"The Warlords Used Brute Force to Coerce People and the Islamists Use Religion to Dehumanize People"

"The warlords used brute force to coerce people and the Islamists use brute religion to dehumanize people. They ban music not because it is against religion but because it is beyond their realm of control. They close cinema houses and theatre not because they spread vice but because they want to keep the people in the dark. They hide women not because Islam orders their mummification but because Islamists suffer from a masculinity problem. They think he who is not a master of his wife cannot be a master of others. Power and tyranny is their ultimate goal and tyranny should first crush and subdue the weak so the strong could tremble. Anyone who wants to see where the Islamists would like to lead Somalia should only see how they treat women, music and ideas. These three elements constitute the beauty, spirit and future of any nation. In a story published by the Islamist Qaadisiya website on the graduation of 140 women who completed a course on cooking and handicrafts at a center called Asma Bint Omair Center, reflects a glimpse of what is in store for women. Only pictures of the Islamist officials who attended the ceremony and row after row of food was shown. It seems as if the photographer tried to accentuate his frustration by showing many food items, as he was not allowed to show the faces of women for whom the ceremony was held."

Bashir Goth, August 26, 2006 in Awdalnews. Via MEMRI

Islamist authorities detained a journalist for two days and shut an independent radio station for a similar period in separate incidents this weekend, according to news reports and the National Union of Somali Journalists (NUSOJ).

In Beledweyne, a western town controlled by the Islamic Courts Union (ICU), authorities jailed journalist Osman Adan Areys of the private station Radio Simba on Friday, according to NUSOJ. He was released without charge on Sunday. Local journalists said they believed Areys' arrest was linked to interviews broadcast on Thursday, in which local residents criticized ICU-imposed restrictions, NUSOJ reported. A CPJ source said the restrictions include a curfew in Beledweyne, which lies near the border with Ethiopia.

ICU-backed authorities in Jowhar, some 56 miles (90 kilometers) north of the capital, Mogadishu, shut Radio Jowhar on Saturday and ordered that its electricity be cut, according to NUSOJ and international news reports. The Associated Press quoted an Islamic official, Sheik Mohamed Mohamoud Abdirahman, as saying that the station's programs were "un-Islamic" and that it was "useless to air music and love songs for the people."

The shutdown, though aimed at musical content, also silenced news programming on Radio Jowhar for two days. The station went back on the air today after agreeing to tight restrictions on musical content. (source)

More and more people are being smuggled across the Gulf of Aden from Somalia to Yemen, the United Nations refugee agency, which has repeatedly been warning of the dangers involved, said today.

"If the present trend continues, this month could set a new record for the number of arrivals," Ron Redmond, a spokesman for the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), told a press briefing in Geneva. Source

WASHINGTON, Sept. 13 (UPI) -- About 50 jihadist leaders have left Pakistan for Somalia since a pro-al-Qaida militia movement took control of the capital there, say Pakistani officials.

Alexis Debat, a terrorism analyst and former adviser on counter-terrorism to the French prime minister, told a Washington briefing Tuesday that the assessment came from a senior official in Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence, or ISI.

In June the Union of Islamic Courts, an Islamic extremist coalition which U.S. officials say supports al-Qaida, won control of the Somali capital Mogadishu after a four-month-long armed struggle with the Alliance for the Restoration of Peace and Counter-Terrorism. The organization is an umbrella group for several warlords supported, according to media reports, by CIA funding. (source)

How to Obstruct Justice and Win a Pulitzer While You're At It

2006-09-15T16:02:00.000-07:00

After parsing out national secrets in a way that if they were not journalists, might be considered espionage, the NY Times has decided that maybe they need to find ways to protect themselves and their sources from criminal investigation.

In the New York Observer, they have run a story documenting a series of legal seminars that the Times runs for its reporters.

“The main worry these days is not libel, or proving that you actually quoted something accurately,” said Craig Whitney, the paper’s standards editor. “It is being subpoenaed.”

In what one of my friends calls the "cold civil war," the NY Times has become the vangard of those who look like they are at war with the administration. When the newspaper seems to think that national security in a time of war doesn't matter, as long as they can run the story being ready to deal with supoenas might be a good call.

But being ready to defend oneself is not the end of the story here. They have been discussing ways to play cloak and daggar games with their sources, how to minimize their paper trail, destroy their notes and wipe out their electronic communication, just in case. Better to obstruct justice than to blow a chance at the Pulitzer...or let a critical national secret that they happen not to like remain unpublished, even if it means critical damage in our struggle against the people who would happily kill them as neatly as Daniel Pearl was killed.

Just another day in the "cold civil war."

Source here.

The Conservative Voice is covering this story.

Ironic Quote of the Day:

2006-09-15T14:04:00.000-07:00

“Anyone who describes Islam as a religion as intolerant encourages violence” -- Pakistani Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Tasnim Aslam

The Scholarly Discussion Heard Round the World

2006-09-15T11:21:00.000-07:00

This is what Pope Benedict actually said:

In the seventh conversation ( controversy) edited by Professor Khoury, the emperor touches on the theme of the holy war. The emperor must have known that surah 2, 256 reads: "There is no compulsion in religion". According to the experts, this is one of the suras of the early period, when Mohammed was still powerless and under threat. But naturally the emperor also knew the instructions, developed later and recorded in the Qur'an, concerning holy war. Without descending to details, such as the difference in treatment accorded to those who have the "Book" and the "infidels", he addresses his interlocutor with a startling brusqueness on the central question about the relationship between religion and violence in general, saying: "Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached". The emperor, after having expressed himself so forcefully, goes on to explain in detail the reasons why spreading the faith through violence is something unreasonable. Violence is incompatible with the nature of God and the nature of the soul. "God", he says, "is not pleased by blood - and not acting reasonably is contrary to God's nature. Faith is born of the soul, not the body. Whoever would lead someone to faith needs the ability to speak well and to reason properly, without violence and threats... To convince a reasonable soul, one does not need a strong arm, or weapons of any kind, or any other means of threatening a person with death...".

The decisive statement in this argument against violent conversion is this: not to act in accordance with reason is contrary to God's nature. The editor, Theodore Khoury, observes: For the emperor, as a Byzantine shaped by Greek philosophy, this statement is self-evident. But for Muslim teaching, God is absolutely transcendent. His will is not bound up with any of our categories, even that of rationality. Here Khoury quotes a work of the noted French Islamist R. Arnaldez, who points out that Ibn Hazn went so far as to state that God is not bound even by his own word, and that nothing would oblige him to reveal the truth to us. Were it God's will, we would even have to practise idolatry. (complete transcript)

It's hard to believe that one statement saying that once upon a time a Greek Byzantine emperor said something mean about Islam, and that that emperor believed that conversion by force was wrong could cause such an uproar.

There is more to it than that, of course. He might as well have stood on the mountain and said, " Islam, your understanding of the nature of God is flawed. "

Benedict is saying God IS reasonable, and Islam is wrong; violence in the name of God is something that God doesn't want, and Islam is wrong; and the hyperrationality of the West, with its denial of the metaphysical, the miraculous is also wrong

In the guise of talking about modern theological studies, which often want to focus on the provable certainties and deny the unexplainable, he manages to draw a line in the sand.

And the Islamic world, picking up on the nuance, is at arms, and is acting pretty much in character, with loud protests and potential violence around the globe, demonstrating what the Emperor described: violence in the name of God.

Of course, Islam believes it its the purest, most correct form of worshipping God, and is not afraid to tell everybody in the world about it. But, because of their worldview, it doesn't allow the tolerance of other faiths who disagree. There is no two way dialogue here. In their condemnation of the Pope, they are condemning him for doing pretty much what they do, which is to say "Christianity, your understanding of the nature of God is flawed."

And Islam has learned over the last number of years that if they scream loudly, people will often back off in fear of their indignation. If the Pope does much more than say, "I am sorry you took this as an attack, but I still believe violence in the name of God is wrong, and that God is reasonable," I will be very, very surprised. He has a long track record of actually believing what he says about Christ.

Of course, by drawing the line in the sand, it might turn the Jihadiya to look more closely at Christian targets. But it's a struggle that was due to come anyway. You either believe, or you don't. The age of cultural Christianity is dead, and the Pope, by this statement, may have just given it its eulogy.

The Ironic Hammer When What You Believe Conflicts with What Is

2006-09-14T12:16:00.000-07:00

Victor Davis Hanson noted this horridly sad piece of irony:

Saudi nationals Hamza al-Ghamdi (who helped crash Flight 175 into the South Tower of the World Trade Center) and Wail al-Shehri (who joined Mohammed Atta on Flight 11 to topple the North Tower) mostly voiced anger over Western violence against Muslims in Chechnya and Bosnia (as well as citing furor about Kashmir and the Philippines).

Never mind that the U.S., almost alone among Western countries, criticized Russian tactics in Grozny, and bombed a European Christian country for several weeks to save Muslims in Bosnia and Kosovo.

...There is no doubt who al-Ghamdi and al-Shehri were — or what they were planning to do. Yet polls since 9/11 consistently reveal that most Muslims in the Middle East do not believe that al-Qaida, much less any Arab Muslims at all, carried out the attacks. Instead, Israel or the CIA is blamed.

Like the young men who flew the planes, it's not the reality of the situation that matters. It's what they believed. Just like Americans who pass on untruths about 9/11, even when they saw all the evidence, because they believe the current adminstration, any minute now, is going to throw off its veneer of being good and civilized and speaking for the virtue of democratic freedom, and declare a dictatorship that would make Stalin look like Gandhi, and so would have been ruthless enough to do just that nightmare thing, sacrifice innocent people to be able to start a war of conquest.

Even with a very clear level of documentation available, with lots and lots of evidence, some realities are just too distant for some people's belief systems.

So 2000+ people die in America because some young man was mad at Russian policy in Chechnya?

So people are fighting at home tooth and nail in a way that will hurt the country's ability to keep secure?

Reality bites, no matter what one believes. 9/11 didn't do a thing to help the people of Chechnya's struggle.

Fighting in a way that emboldens one's enemies won't help on the home front either. IMHO.

Voices from the Resistance

2006-09-14T11:53:00.000-07:00

I sometimes wonder whether the West at the beginning of the 21st century is mired in an ideological civil war between Westerners and post-Westerners.

Fjordman, from What Is the Nature of Multiculturalism? the Gates of Vienna, 9/13/06

For the bottom line is simple: if we don’t cherish our liberties with the fervor that the jihadists treasure their faith, we’ll lose.

Bruce Bawer, from 9/11, Five Years Later: a View from Europe, Front Page magazine, 9/14/06

Because of the religious derivation of the ideology that confronts us, analysts are generally reluctant to identify it properly or fully. They think that to speak of its roots would be bigotry or racism. But the jihadists themselves are doing their best to make sure we don’t forget the religious roots of their actions.

Robert Spenser, quoted in Jihad Watch, 9/11/06

Beauty Contests

2006-09-14T10:07:00.000-07:00

In the striving for attention since the Lebanese-Israeli conflict, one thing is clear: Hizbullah's star has risen, and people from many Sunni areas are looking at these Shia warriors with admiration. There is a ""rising popularity of the Shiites as almost the only power standing in the face of US and Israeli threats in Lebanon, Iran, and even Iraq," according to columnist Salama Ahmed Salama. Between the propaganda stand of Hizbullah talking defiantly until the end of hostilities, and the leadership role of Ahmedinejad charismatic and willing to take on the West, it is not surprising that there are rumblings coming out of Al Qaeda.

Zawahiri has been very busy the last two weeks issuing warnings to the US, Israel, and the countries of the Persian gulf. Conflicts between Sunni and Shia extremists is in high pitch in Iraq. Fatwas are flying. Clerics are warning their followers about the threat of Shia theology sneaking in under various guises. Adam Gadahn has been paraded out once again to preach to the infidel Americans. France, who has been strongly against the Iraq war and worked hard to broker a cease fire in Lebanon has been threatened by Zawahiri, who called upon Algerian extremists to punish France.

If any of this is more than talk, once again, we will see the West be scapegoated and used as a proxy in their own wars...If the Shia star is shining, the Sunni cannot be far behind to prove its worth.

A step beyond the David vs. Goliath syndrome, which is as it should be

2006-09-14T09:34:00.000-07:00

AMNESTY INTERNATIONAL USA
PRESS RELEASE

Thursday, September 14, 2006

Hizbullah Attacks on Israeli Civilians Amount to War Crimes
Amnesty International Releases New Report Charging Hizbullah Deliberately Targeted Israeli Civilians

(Washington, DC) -- Amnesty International (AI) today charged in a new report that Hizbullah committed serious violations of international humanitarian law, amounting to war crimes, in its deliberate targeting of Israeli civilians during the recent conflict.

During the month-long conflict, Hizbullah fired nearly 4,000 rockets into northern Israel, killing 43 civilians, seriously injuring 33 others and forcing hundreds of thousands of civilians to take refuge in shelters or flee. Around a quarter of all rockets were fired directly into urban areas, including rockets packed with thousands of metal ball bearings. An estimated ten percent of the rockets carried war heads, packed with thousands of ball bearings. Once these indiscriminate rockets struck, the ball bearings sprayed out, inflicting death and injury for 300 meters or more.

"Actions speak louder than words," said Larry Cox, Amnesty International USA's Executive Director. "Though Hizbullah denies any policy of endangering and targeting Israeli civilians, it used Katyusha rockets packed with thousands of metal ball bearings to maximize harm to innocent civilians. Targeting civilians is a war crime -- there's no gray area."

In meetings with Amnesty International, Hizbullah argued that its rocket attacks on northern Israel were a reprisal for Israeli attacks on civilians in Lebanon and were aimed at stopping such attacks.

Amnesty International's briefing includes evidence of:

Hizbullah's firing of some 900 inherently inaccurate Katyusha rockets into urban areas in northern Israel in clear violation of the principle of distinction between civilian and military targets under international law;
Hizbullah's use of modified Katyusha rockets packed with metal ball bearings, designed to inflict maximum death and injury, with one such rocket killing eight railway workers;
Statements from Hasan Nasrallah and other senior Hizbullah leaders that the group intended to target civilians as a form of reprisal, violating the prohibition on direct attacks on civilians as well as the prohibition on reprisals against the civilian population;
The flight of civilians from northern Israel and the existence of shelters preventing a higher death toll than the 43 civilian fatalities recorded.

"These findings show that Hizbullah clearly committed war crimes and the perpetuators must be brought to justice," said Marty Rosenbluth, Amnesty International USA's Country Specialist for Israel and the Occupied Territories.

Rosenbluth recently returned from the region on an Amnesty International fact-finding mission. (Read his diaries from the mission.)

Amnesty International is calling for a comprehensive, independent and impartial inquiry to be urgently established by the United Nations into violations of international humanitarian law by both sides in the conflict. It should examine, in particular, the impact of this conflict on the civilian population and should be undertaken with a view to holding individuals responsible for crimes under international law and ensuring that full reparation is provided to the victims.

Further aspects of the war, including charges that Hizbullah used Lebanese civilians as a cover and attacks by Israeli forces that resulted in heavy civilian casualties, will be addressed in future publications.

Read the report, Under Fire -- Hizbullah's Attacks on Northern Israel.

Curt Goering, AIUSA's Senior Deputy Executive Director for Policy and Programs, who led an AI mission to Lebanon, and Rosenbluth are available for comments and interviews.

Contact: AIUSA Media Office, 202.544.0200 x302

A Pox on Both Their Heads

2006-09-14T06:27:00.000-07:00

Although Hizbullah's popularity in lands ourside of Lebanon is currently shining, capturing the imaginations of those who see them as the little David who stood up to the heavy handed Goliath of Israel, in southern Lebanon people are facing the reality of war's aftermath: homes that have been damaged beyond use, fields littered with unexploded munitions, and winter coming on.

And, as to be expected, there is a lot of unrest. "Hizbullah has given me nothing but grief," said one elderly man. "I've lost everything I own and my dignity because of this war." Another man echoed his feeling, saying: "May God rid us of the Jews and the enemies of the Jews.""Agriculture is our livelihood and we can't even work the fields any more because we risk being blown up," complained Abu Qasim, 37, a resident of Zawtar al-Gharbiyeh, where 70 percent of the 300 homes were destroyed or damaged. (source)

And there is cynicism about the aid coming in, that it will be used to further various politicians and political parties, either by making them the purveyors of goods, or by their profiteering on it, even as Hizbullah works on its public image by generous social aid ( Daily Star is carrying a story about this).

And political groups are beginning to voice their opinions. The March 14th Forces, an alliance of anti-Syrian political leaders has come out and criticized the inability of Hizbullah as a military force to protect Lebanon from Israel, which is a major part of Hizbullah's official reason for being. In their statement, the group said, "The first condition for any country to be able to perform its duties is to have complete and exclusive authority over national security and be the sole defender of its sovereignty," a clear slap at Hizbullah's militia status outside of the government. (source). The Maronite Bishops Council has released a statement highly critical of Hizbullah's role in things: "There are 18 sects in Lebanon with equal rights and duties," the statement said. "But in reality, we see that some groups are monopolizing the decision-making process and leading the country to unwanted situations." They criticize the president for his weakness, yet reiterate the need for national government and consensus. (source)

Sayeed Ali al-Amin, a Shiite moderate and mufti of the Tyre and Jabal 'Amel district, said this about Hizbullah and the people of South Lebanon:

"I don't think Hizbullah asked the Shi'ite community about the war. Perhaps the great emigration from the south is the best proof that the people of the south were against the war. The Shi'ite community authorized no one to declare war in its name or to drag it into a war that was far from its wishes and from the wishes of the other ethnic communities in Lebanon. What happened in the south does not represent the will of the Shi'ite community, and is not its responsibility, but was caused by the vacuum that the Lebanese state left for years in this region... What happened is the natural result of a state relinquishing its duty to defend a region and its citizens." (source)

Onis al-Haj in Al-Akhbar wrote "One month after the Israeli war, the onus is now on Hizbullah. The party has one of two options: either it turns its achievement into a source of threat and intimidation for the rest of Lebanese society, or utilises it to rebuild national unity." If they do not, then more may say, "a pox on both your (Hezbollah's and Israel's) heads." And that way, fraught with the possibility of civil war and foreign intervention, might be trickier yet.

Remembering

2006-09-13T19:22:00.000-07:00

Pan Am Flight 103

Forget about the Illuminati - to many, America is the Dark Master

2006-09-13T18:57:00.000-07:00

David Musa Pidcock, leader of the Islamic Party of Britain: "Pearl Harbor was similar to 9/11 in that they were both planned in advance. Twelve days before the attack on Pearl Harbor, [U.S. Secretary of War] Stimson, one of America's lords of war, went to the White House with several navy commanders, and talked about the war against Japan. The question was how they could trick the Japanese into firing the first shot, without any great danger being directed against the Americans. Therefore, the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941 was similar to what happened on 9/11. We know very well that it was planned with precision."

Retired Lebanese general and public relations expert Dr. Hisham Jaber

"I have some doubts about the September [2001] events – and some articles and books share my opinion. I believe the events of 9/11 were not planned, prepared, or perpetrated by Al-Qaeda alone. Absolutely not. A force greater than Al-Qaeda was behind these events. Whenever an ordinary crime takes place, the question is 'who benefits?' – let alone when the crime is of such huge proportions. What happened in Britain, and why Britain, of all places?

"The perpetrator [of these acts] believes that he carried out an operation in retaliation for the oppression afflicted upon the world's wretched people by Western policies, and especially by the U.S. and Britain. This is what he believes. In addition, I say that the actual perpetrator – the person who actually commits a suicide operation – is not a mercenary, but may have been tricked into it.

"So who is the planner? The planner who is behind him is the one who benefits from what happens. We all know that after 9/11 the persecution of Muslims began in the U.S. and Europe, but later subsided, to a certain extent. For three or four years, we have been concerned – in the wake of these painful events – about the possibility of some sort of annihilation, or perhaps an unbalanced civil war in Europe and the U.S. between Muslims and non-Muslims, or let's say, the Westerners.

In Egypt, Former Dean of Humanities at 'Ein Shams University, Mustafa Shak'a, was interviewed by Iqra TV on June 16, 2004. Shak'a attributed the September 11 attacks to the U.S. and the Jews: "To this day, we don't know who attacked the U.S. on September 11. Why is the attack attributed to bin Laden although it has not been proven that he was involved in the operation? It is way above his capabilities. Those who created him have made him a legend. The operation was 100% American, and this is not the place to elaborate, but what proves the operation was a Jewish one is that five Jews climbed up a high building and filmed the first attack of the first plane…"

Saudi Cleric Dr. Sa'd bin 'Abdallah Al-Breik spoke about Al-Qa'ida's role on Saudi Arabia's Channel 1 on August 16, 2004: " We must not inflate [the importance] of Al-Qa'ida, to the point of claiming that it is the main and only perpetrator of this large operation [September 11]. I'm not here to defend [Al-Qa'ida], but we must not overstate this matter… It is a mistake to ignore the possibility that the Zionist hands used some people who were planted into one of the stages of this plan, from this issue. I have read some books that were translated from English into Arabic in which the Americans themselves call 9/11 'The Great Deception' or the 'The Great Game,' so why do we use all sort of names to avoid this subject. No, we must be clear and not censor ourselves. These false accusations and the rush to accuse Saudi Arabia, the judging of others according to the guidance of the Zionists via the media which is owned by the Zionist... "

Via MEMRI

The End of the Turkish Caliphate: Crusader created, or given up by the Turks?

2006-09-13T16:35:00.000-07:00

Bin Ladin, on July 2, 2006 said: ""I say to the Islamic nation: we lost the Caliphate and it was dismantled. It fell under Crusader occupation approximately a century ago, and since that time the Crusaders have stood between us and the reconstitution of the Caliphate, or even the establishment of any Islamic nation. An example of this was their recent invasion of Afghanistan and the pressures they put on Sudan to make it give up on establishing an Islamic state."

Yet the truth is not exactly as he would have people believe.

The Turks turned out not to be good custodians of the Caliphate. Turkey basically decided, after the losses it suffered after WWI and its alliance to with Germany, to form a republic, and with the formation of this republic, willingly gave up the Caliphate. Wikipedia describes it this way:

The Turkish national movement, as the details explained in Turkish War of Independence forms a Turkish Grand National Assembly, secured formal recognition of the nation’s independence and new borders on July 23, 1923 through the Treaty of Lausanne, which revised the terms of the Treaty of Sèvres in Turkey’s favor. The National Assembly declared Turkey a republic on October 29 and proclaimed Ankara its new capital. After nearly 700 years, the Ottoman Empire had officially ceased to exist. However, under Allied direction, the Sultan pledged to suppress such movements and secured an official fatwa from the Sheikh ul-Islam declaring them to be un-Islamic. But the nationalists steadily gained momentum and began to enjoy widespread support. Many sensed that the nation was ripe for revolution. In an effort to neutralize this threat, the Sultan agreed to hold elections, with the hope of placating and co-opting the nationalists. To his dismay, nationalist groups swept the polls, prompting him to again dissolve parliament in April 1920.

Initially, the National Assembly seemed willing to allow a place for the Caliphate in the new regime, agreeing to the appointment of Mehmed’s cousin Abdul Mejid II as Caliph upon Mehmed’s departure. But the position had been stripped of any authority, and Abdul Mejid’s purely ceremonial reign would be short lived. Mustafa Kemal had been a vocal critic of the Ottoman House and its Islamic orientation. Now that he controlled Turkey and had the people’s overwhelming support, he could run the nation as he pleased. When Abdul Mejid was declared Caliph, Kemal refused to allow the traditional Ottoman ceremony to take place, bluntly declaring, "The Khalifa has no power or position except as a nominal figurehead." In response to Abdul Mejid's petition for an increase in his allowance, Kemal wrote, "Your office, the Khalifate, is no more than an historic relic. It has no justification for existence. It is a piece of impertinence that you should dare write to any of my secretaries!" Still, for all the power he had already wielded in Turkey, Kemal did not dare to abolish the Caliphate outright, as it still commanded a considerable degree of support from the common people.

Then an event happened which was to deal a fatal blow to the Caliphate. Two Indian brothers, Maulana Muhammad Ali and Shawkat, leaders of the Indian-based Khilafat Movement, distributed pamphlets calling upon the Turkish people to preserve the Ottoman Caliphate for the sake of Islam. Under Turkey's new nationalist government, however, this was construed as foreign intervention, and any form of foreign intervention was labelled an insult to Turkish sovereignty, and worse, a threat to State security. Kemal promptly seized his chance. On his initiative, the National Assembly abolished the Caliphate on March 3, 1924. Abdul Mejid was sent into exile along with the remaining members of the Ottoman House, marking the official end of the Ottoman Dynasty.

So in part because of outside interference, the caliphate ended. A long period of bad rule, bad foreign policy, intereference not by "crusaders," but by Muslims, signed its death warrant.

As for the West never allowing for the estabilishment of an Islamic country, that's not totally true, either...for instance, the UK played a role in the establishment of Saudi Arabia as it now exists, backing Ibn Saud over Ibn Rashid.

It is true that history become the thing people using it want to believe it is, but sometimes, the truth of what happened is far from what the heart would like it to be.

Question

2006-09-13T16:20:00.000-07:00

Are you a tenner or a twelver?

Do you cling to the world of 9/10?

Or do you accept the change that took place on 9/11, and know we live in different world, the world of 9/12?

Your answer will determine a lot.

Will the Real America Please Stand Up?

2006-09-13T08:16:00.000-07:00

"How can the U.S. claim itself to be the defender of justice, democracy and freedom and the staunch protector of human rights when it continues to mastermind hegemony, to perpetuate the law of the jungle, to back the forces of terrorism, occupation and aggressors and to validate Sharon's genocide against the Palestinians. Under current tragic and fatal circumstances as well as the flagrant and racist lexicon of Washington, no sane person is able to describe America's new democracy as human, passionate, good and progressive.

R. Zain, Syrian daily Teshreen October 28, 2003

America has never been an empire. We may be the only great power in history that had the chance, and refused – preferring greatness to power and justice to glory.
George W. Bush, 1999.

Right now in my Queens NY neighborhood there is what amounts to a Bund Rally going on ie: A 911 Memorial.Complete with marching band, Kate Smith's song you know the one and the whole damn obnoxious panoply of jingoistic uber shit. So no I have very little hope that its going to get any better anytime soon.

unnamed poster on a liberal forum quoted here.

America is the foremost enemy of the Palestinian people, the Islamic and Arab nations. America is the foremost enemy of this people. America is the foremost enemy of the Muslim nation, because it wages war against the Arab, Islamic nation. Iraq possesses far more oil than the oil reserves of Saudi Arabia, and [America] wants to control [the oil] so it created various methods, fabricated lies in order to wage war against Iraq. America is now behaving like Pharaoh. I see in America what we saw and heard from Pharaoh, the curse of Allah upon him. America is now behaving like Pharaoh. It is telling the whole world: “There is no God besides me.” [Koran]

Ibrahim Mudiras, Palestinian preacher , 2003

It's the great strength of America. It's an unbelievably great country we have, because the people are so strong, so resilient, so compassionate, and so decent. We believe values in our heart that we just won't change. We believe everybody has dignity, everybody has worth. We believe in freedom. We believe people yearn for freedom. We have an obligation to unleash freedom in the world. And we're not afraid to lead. This country stands strongly on the values that make us great. And we're not the least bit afraid of sharing those values in a world that needs peace and freedom.

George W. Bush, January 22, 2004

"In 50 years, the U.S. consumed the energy consumed by humanity in 150 years. Now, they are working to take control of the petroleum of the peoples, in order to consume it, just like Dracula. They are like Count Dracula - always in search of petrol and blood. Why? Because they want to preserve something transient - the American imperialistic way of life

Hugo Chavez, August 4, 2006

"America has always been the promised land for Muslims and non-Muslims," said Behzad Yaghmaian, an Iranian exile and author of "Embracing the Infidel: Stories of Muslim Migrants on the Journey West." "Despite Muslims' opposition to America's foreign policy, they still come here because the United States offers what they're missing at home." Andrea Elliot

What's right about America is that although we have a mess of problems, we have great capacity - intellect and resources - to do some thing about them.

Henry Ford II

"If the Nuremberg laws were applied today, then every Post-War American president would have to be hanged."

-- Noam Chomsky

America is the greatest, freest and most decent society in existence. It is an oasis of goodness in a desert of cynicism and barbarism. This country, once an experiment unique in the world, is now the last best hope for the world.

Dinesh D'Souza

In 21st century America the current government (the presidency and Congress of one party) has taken control not only of defense and military policy, but also military operations. No other administration, including that of Abraham Lincoln during the Civil War or Franklin Roosevelt in World War II, has ever done that. The unprecedented imposition of neoconservative ideology on military operations has led directly and inevitably to the debacle in Iraq.

Gary Hart

There's the country of America, which you have to defend, but there's also the idea of America. America is more than just a country, it's an idea. An idea that's supposed to be contagious.

Bono, 2002

America is so vast that almost everything said about it is likely to be true, and the opposite is probably equally true.

James T. Farrell

Remembering

2006-09-12T22:16:00.000-07:00

The assasination of Bobby Kennedy, the first major anti-US blow in the Long War, IMHO

Words to ponder

2006-09-12T19:25:00.000-07:00

"War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things. The decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks that nothing is worth war is much worse. The person who has nothing for which he is willing to fight, nothing which is more important than his own personal safety, is a miserable creature and has no chance of being free unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself."

John Stuart Mill (1806 - 1873)

"Never, never, never believe any war will be smooth and easy, or that anyone who embarks on the strange voyage can measure the tides and hurricanes he will encounter. The statesman who yields to war fever must realize that once the signal is given, he is no longer the master of policy but the slave of unforeseeable and uncontrollable events."

Sir Winston Churchill (1874 - 1965)

Reporter: "The martyrdom-seeking campaign by Hamas and Islamic Jihad may have come as a response to the Hebron massacre, but the ideological basis of this campaign is deeply rooted in Hamas' declaration of Jihad against Israel.

"These films were not intended to be broadcast. Hamas made them for internal use, and they provide a rare perspective on the movement's efforts to teach its principles to new recruits."

Children singing: "Rejoice, oh Bitah, cheer in merriment, oh Nujud, our occupied homeland will be restored through Jihad."

Crowd: "Allah Akbar. Allah Akbar. Allah Akbar."

Male voice on loudspeaker: "What is your goal?"

Crowd: "Allah."

Male voice on loudspeaker: "What is your constitution?"

Crowd: "The Koran."

Male voice on loudspeaker: "Who is your leader?"

Crowd: "The Prophet Muhammad."

Male voice on loudspeaker: "What is your path?"

Crowd: "Jihad."

Male voice on loudspeaker: "What is your greatest desire?"

Crowd: "Death for the sake of Allah."

Reporter: "If Jihad is the goal, the self-sacrifice operations against the Israelis were the weapon chosen in the mid-nineties. In a series of operations, Hamas and Islamic Jihad hit the major Israeli cities and caused the deaths of dozens. This was part of the strategy."

An excerpt from a show about the culture of martyrdom, which aired on Al-Arabiya TV on July 22, 2005. Via Memri

Hard (and sad) evidence on Flight 77 and Soul Sickness in the Body Politic

2006-09-12T09:15:00.001-07:00

P200029	Photograph of the Pentagon after Flight 77 crashed into the building
P200030	Photograph of airplane parts in the Pentagon after Flight 77 crashed into the building
P200031	Photograph of the Pentagon after Flight 77 crashed into the building
P200032	Photograph of the Pentagon after Flight 77 crashed into the building
P200033	Photograph of the Pentagon after Flight 77 crashed into the building
P200034	Photograph of the Pentagon after Flight 77 crashed into the building
P200035	Photograph of the Pentagon after Flight 77 crashed into the building
P200036	Photograph of the Pentagon after Flight 77 crashed into the building
P200037	Photograph of the Pentagon after Flight 77 crashed into the building
P200038	Photograph of the Pentagon after Flight 77 crashed into the building
P200039	Photograph of the Pentagon after Flight 77 crashed into the building
P200040	Photograph of the Pentagon after Flight 77 crashed into the building
P200041	Photograph of the Pentagon after Flight 77 crashed into the building
P200042	Photograph of a body part found inside the Pentagon after Flight 77 crashed into the building [Viewer discretion is advised]
P200045	Photograph of a body found inside the Pentagon after Flight 77 crashed into the building [Viewer discretion is advised]
P200047	Photograph of bodies found inside the Pentagon after Flight 77 crashed into the building [Viewer discretion is advised]
P200048	Photograph of a body found inside the Pentagon after Flight 77 crashed into the building [Viewer discretion is advised]

More info here

I ran across a comment by someone who claimed there were no airplane parts or bodies in the Pentagon attack. I am always amazed when I run across people willing to believe the most awful atrocities by the people they hate, instead of actually acknowledging the reality of what the people who hate them will do. These are trial evidence photos, and they do include photos in situ of people who had been horridly burned during the attack, and pictures of smashed airplane parts. Some of those pictures I saw in news reports at the very beginning of the story.

Some people like Dylan Avery, who is very young and very impassioned, would rather believe that the US government managed to do something with the people on Flight 93, and then used the flight as an excuse to do dastardly deeds.

Mary Katherine Hamm notes: "Among Avery’s tributes to those victims is the part of the film where he alleges that Mark Bingham, a Flight 93 passenger, never talked to his mother from the plane that day, despite the fact that there’s a recording of the call. He alleges that the phone calls that came from the plane that day were somehow created by voice simulators, possibly with the collusion of the Flight 93 passengers.

"He alleges that Flight 93 never crashed in Pennsylvania, but landed in Ohio. We are left to wonder just what the dastardly government did with the passengers on that plane if they were on the ground safely in Ohio on the morning of Sept. 11."

For some reason, for some people, it is easy to build on the fertile ground of previous anti-war and anti-government feeling and believe a huge conspiracy was made so we could get into Iraq, than believe the people who actually claimed they did it, to believe the clear and easy to follow paper trail of their actions. This fits in nicely with comments from people like Mubarak who also doubt that the young men actually could mastermind and do this thing on their own. In his case, it's a situation of not wanting to believe people would do such high level evil in the name of his religion. In the American case, it shows a great sickness of of the national soul to even begin to beleive Americans would do things like this to Americans, especially people who, although not perfect, and although might not do things the way others want them to, believe in goodness and act on it as they see fit.

There is so much demonization out there that many of us have trouble seeing through the smokescreens we find ourselves behind. If it fits our worldview, we believe it without examining it. And the fact that this fits some of our citizens' world views is a sad commentary on where the US is right now. And it is a sadder commentary on the soul sickness and anger and hate of those who keep feeding it.

Paradigms and Points of View

2006-09-12T06:18:00.000-07:00

Today the Western powers and media want to domesticate us like sheep, to keep us tame and domesticated. But why are animals domesticated? So that they can be slaughtered in the end!

Abu Bakar Bashir, August 21, 2006

"What we say is terrorists, terrorism, is evil, and America doesn't engage in it, and these guys do, yet, suddenly, our competition has discovered `fair and balanced,' but only when it's radical terrorism versus the United States. "

Roger Ailes, Fox News chairman

What do the people who call for coexistence with the West say? They call for the abolishment of the so-called 'clash of civilizations.' How can you call upon us to abolish the clash of civilizations, while America violently attacks Muslims in Iraq, in Afghanistan, and in all corners of the world?

Saudi Cleric Nasser bin Suleiman Al-'Omar, April 19, 2006

"Maybe the purpose of all this is to find out if America today is as strong as when we fought for our independence or when we fought for ourselves as a Union to end slavery or as strong as our fathers and grandfathers who fought to rid the world of Nazism and communism. The terrorists were counting on our cowardice. They've learned a lot about us since then. And so have we. "

Rudolph Giuliani, at a funeral for a friend

From a Muslim Brotherhood's website for children: Afghanistan is "currently under the oppressive American occupation that is now aspiring to control the Muslim world. [This occupation] began with Afghanistan, and then [moved on] to our beloved land Iraq; and lo, it now threatens Syria and so on. [U.S. President Bush] has declared a Crusade against the Muslim world, and our role is to prepare ourselves for jihad against the enemies of Allah."

http://awladnaa.net/madena.php?ID_subject=50&do=show&cat=7

"We're a peaceful nation. Yet, as we have learned, so suddenly and so tragically, there can be no peace in a world of sudden terror. In the face of today's new threat, the only way to pursue peace is to pursue those who threaten it."

President George W. Bush

"The spread of democracy is just an excuse. The same with the hunt for Osama bin Laden - it's just an excuse. It is Islam that the West can't stand... The attack on Islam is like a hand. One finger is the war in Iraq and Afghanistan. Another finger is the imprisonment of Muslims at Guantanamo Bay. The third finger is the publishing of the pictures of the Prophet Muhammad. We must see things as they are, and those pictures [of Muhammad] are one part of the military fight that the West is conducting against Islam..."

Mullah Krekar, Dagbladet (Norway), March 13, 2006.

"All attempts to destroy democracy by terrorism will fail. It must be business as usual."

Margaret Thatcher

Translations via MEMRI, http://memri.org
Other quotes from BellaOnline, http://www.bellaonline.com/articles/art12842.asp

OH, East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet,
Till Earth and Sky stand presently at God’s great Judgment Seat;
But there is neither East nor West, Border, nor Breed, nor Birth,
When two strong men stand face to face, tho’ they come from the ends of the earth! --Rudyard Kipling

A very clear component in the Long War is a strong clash between points of view, references by which each group judges the actions of another. Lately, there has been a rising tide of voices crying out how the West is growing in Islamophobia. In the east, there is much anti-West racism, that seems to brand everybody not of them as wicked and evil because they are not either Arab or Islamic. The impression that gets sent west is one that seems to say, "If a Muslim is attacked, it is an attack on all Islam. If the West is attacked, it is the holy Resistance, and therefore good."

It is easy to see how this is developing. A Saudi writer commented, "We kill in the name of Allah, blow up cars in the name of Allah, and slit throats in the name of Allah and Islam, and then we protest when others depict the Muslims as terrorists." But currently most of the world's publicized acts of terrorism, that is, attacking indiscrimantly in a way that is not aimed particuarly at military targets, has been done by Muslims.

Well, duh!

In the east, instead of pointing out a causal relationship, " The Taliban regime in Afghanistan was attacked because they supported people who had been attacking the West and would not extradite them because they were protecting them," they see the multinational attack against the regime as proof that the West is trying to put down Islam. It is conveniently forgotten that the Taliban was doing things to its populace that they don't even do in Saudi Arabia in harshness and cruelty, and that a large number of Afghanis were fighting them in a civil war, and that the assembled troops were in part welcomed as help by those people. No, it was a West vs. East attack, the evil, Satanic forces of the non-Islamic world attacking the righteous.

One group sees the other as evil and unrighteous, and the other returns the favor. One group kills in a terrorist mode, indiscriminately killing non-combatants, because it's hard to attack military targets and they want to generate fear, because that is one of their weapons. They feel like David attacking the evil and unrighteous Goliath who is keeping them suppressed. In retaliation, the other group goes after those who want to kill it, using more sophisticated weapons, trying to operate in a world where the rules of war were designed to fight against nation-states, not pan-national religiously inspired movements. Others, seeing the hand of an oppressor at work, fall in line in solidarity with the first group, insuring more of the behavior, and the other side closes ranks and goes after those who want to kill it. And the spiral continues.

The West scratches it's head, looking for a way out and says, "You say we are bad when you attack us for saying members of your group are bad, because they attacked us earlier and we struck back to protect ourselves. Even though we do not condemn your faith but the actions of your people, you wonder why we have the attitude we do, " and in the east, they say, "The fact that your governments retaliate when our people attack you shows your black heart.
An attack on one of us acting in the name of God is an attack on both our faith and our righteousness, and this proves that your way of life and all of you are bad. We will keep fighting until you convert and become one of the righteous, or die."

A perfect formula for a long, long war.

The only ways out are either victory by one side or the other, or a shifting of the paradigm. And that will be the hardest war of all.

Drinking from the same well? Or just convergent hates?

2006-09-11T20:23:00.000-07:00

US Source

"Patriotism threatens free speech with death. It is infuriated by thoughtful hesitation, constructive criticism of our leaders and pleas for peace. It despises people of foreign birth. It has specifically blamed homosexuals, feminists and the American Civil Liberties Union. In other words, the American flag stands for intimidation, censorship, violence, bigotry, sexism, homophobia and shoving the Constitution through a paper shredder. Whom are we calling terrorists here?" -- Barbara Kingsolver, novelist, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, September 27 [2001?]

Syrian Source

"How can the U.S. claim itself to be the defender of justice, democracy and freedom and the staunch protector of human rights when it continues to mastermind hegemony, to perpetuate the law of the jungle, to back the forces of terrorism, occupation and aggressors and to validate Sharon's genocide against the Palestinians. Under current tragic and fatal circumstances as well as the flagrant and racist lexicon of Washington, no sane person is able to describe America's new democracy as human, passionate, good and progressive." -- R. Zain, Syrian daily Teshreen October 28, 2003 via MEMRI

US Source

"No matter what the greatest tyrant in the world, the greatest terrorist in the world, George W. Bush says, we're here to tell you: Not hundreds, not thousands, but millions of the American people … support your revolution," Harry Belafonte to Hugo Chavez, January 8, 2006

Iranian Source

History abounds with examples of the unprincipled and the godless infidels and how they shed rivers of human blood in the insatiable greed to dominate other cultures and their rich natural resources.

It was only in the last Christian century that the world saw such blood-sucking megalomaniacs as Benito Mussolini, Adolf Hitler, and Joseph Stalin.

Obviously Bush Jr. would outdo all those villains of yesteryears.

Kayhan International (Iran), in IRNA, April 5, 2003 via MEMRI.

--------------
Which one is the enemy?

One of the interesting ironies of the current era is that even as the hatefilled self-loathing of the angry left speaks out and piles levels of rhetoric higher and higher, the values they believe in and represent are some of those which the people whose rhetoric they echo are some of the most reprehensible to those very same people. Sexism, homophobia, curtailment of personal freedom are some of the very things that Moslem conservatives are determined ought to be the standard of the day, and the West is a unmoral hedonistic wasteland. Ironically, the people who have moral values closest to the Jihadis are the ones most opposed to them for other reasons, while the ones most strident in their public echo of Muslim criticism of the US foreign policy and its relationship with Israel have a set of values most likely to be punished under Muslim legal codes.

The strange bedfellows of politics. If the Jihadis won, they would kick the American Left out of it's bed immediately, and after the words of divorce, would offer it the classic choice - convert or die...It really has no tolerance for political correctness, diversity as a moral virtue, freedom of choice on issues like moral behaviors, easy acceptance of other spiritualities, or the rights of women to be the unbridled people they are in America today.

Life can be stranger than fiction.

Hard Evidence

2006-09-11T11:39:00.000-07:00

Andrew Cochrane at Counterterrorism Blog has linked to exhibits submitted from the Moussaoui trial and now made public.

As he says, "The exhibits enable us to remember, for all time, the scale of the horror perpetrated upon us by Islamic terrorists under direct orders from Osama Bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri. On this fifth anniversary of the attacks, we should confront the reality of that horror. " See his piece, with a selection of links to the evidence, here.

Another piece of evidence is a forensic animated film showing the flight path and evidence behind how Flight 77 slammed into the Pentagon. Very clearly and carefully done, and worth a watch. At Youtube.

One of the most comprehensive sites I've found is at September 11.com All sorts of graphics, timelines, pictures, covers of newspapers and more.

Words from Zawahiri and some unusual echos

2006-09-11T09:24:00.000-07:00

Words of Ayman al-Zawahiri to the western peoples:

I tell them your leaders are hiding from you the true extent of the disaster which will shock you. And the days are pregnant and giving birth to new events with Allah's permission and guidance. And I tell them, you have provided us with all the legal and rational reasons to fight you and reataliate from you, you have committed ugly crimes and broaken the treaties which you used to impose on others. And for our part, we have repeatedly warned you and repeatedly offered a truce with you, and so we now have all legal and rational justifications to continue to fight you until your power is desroyed or you give in and surrender.

And I tell them you shouldn't bother yourselves with defending your forces in Iraq and Afghanistan because they are doomed ot defeat and are all but defeated fighting their last battles. Rather, you should reinforce your defenses in two regions. The first is the Gulf, from where you will be expelled, Allah willing, after your defeat in Iraq, at which point your economic ruin will be achieved. And the second is Israel because of the Jihadi reinforcements are getting closer to it, with Allah's help and power, and your defeat there will put an end to contemporary Zionist/Crusader superiority."

Sept. 11, 2006

"We will also aim to continue, by the permission of Allah, the destruction of the American economy."

Ayman al-Zawahiri, Sept 02

"With the grace of Allah, the clear declaration of their failure came one day after the blessed raid on London, when the American and English declared they were preparing to leave Iraq. Every day they leak to the press another item about leaving Iraq, in order to calm the terror that has taken hold of their peoples."

Ayman al-Zawahiri, December 7, 2005

"What happened to America is something natural, an expected event for a country that uses terror, arrogant policy, and suppression against the nations and the peoples, and imposes a single method, thought, and way of life, as if the people of the entire world are clerks in its government offices and employed by its commercial companies and institutions."

Ayman al-Zawahiri, 2002

"America is the reason for all oppression, injustice, licentiousness, or suppression that is the Muslims' lot. It stands behind all the disasters that were caused and are still being caused to the Muslims; it is immersed in the blood of Muslims and cannot hide this."

Ayman al-Zawahiri, 2002

And some echos:

"Patriotism threatens free speech with death. It is infuriated by thoughtful hesitation, constructive criticism of our leaders and pleas for peace. It despises people of foreign birth. It has specifically blamed homosexuals, feminists and the American Civil Liberties Union. In other words, the American flag stands for intimidation, censorship, violence, bigotry, sexism, homophobia and shoving the Constitution through a paper shredder. Whom are we calling terrorists here?" -- Barbara Kingsolver, novelist, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, September 27

"My daughter, who goes to Stuyvesant High School only blocks from the World Trade Center, thinks we should fly an American flag out our window. Definitely not, I say: The flag stands for jingoism and vengeance and war." -- Katha Pollitt, The Nation, October 8

"We've been treated to some astonishingly vile images over the last two weeks: Office workers hurling themselves into a 100-floor-high abyss. A gaping, smoldering hole in the financial center of our greatest city. George W. Bush passing himself off as a patriot, even as he disassembles the Constitution with the voracious glee of piranha skeletonizing a cow. ... It may have seemed meaningless at the time, but now we know why 7,000 people sacrificed their lives: So that we'd all forget how Bush stole a presidential election." -- Cartoonist Ted Rall, Philadelphia City Paper, September 27

"If the word 'cowardly' is to be used, it might be more aptly applied to those who kill from beyond the range of retaliation, high in the sky, than to those willing to die themselves in order to kill others." -- Susan Sontag in New Yorker magazine

"When I see an American flag flying, it's a joke." -- Robert Altman

The Birth of a Changed World - timeline

2006-09-11T07:34:00.000-07:00

8:45 a.m American Airlines Flight 11 out of Boston, Massachusetts crashes into the north tower of the World Trade Center.

9:03 a.m. United Airlines Flight 175 from Boston crashes into the south tower of the World Trade Center. Both buildings are burning.

9:17 a.m. The FAA shuts down all New York City area airports.

9:21 a.m. The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey orders all bridges and tunnels in the New York area closed.

9:30 a.m. President Bush, speaking in Sarasota, Florida, says the country has suffered an "apparent terrorist attack."

9:40 a.m. The FAA halts all flight operations at U.S. airports..

9:43 a.m. American Airlines Flight 77 crashes into the Pentagon, sending up a huge plume of smoke.

9:45 a.m.: The White House evacuates.

9:57 a.m.: Bush departs from Florida.

10:05 a.m. The south tower of the World Trade Center collapses.

10:10 a.m. A portion of the Pentagon collapses.

10:10 a.m. United Airlines Flight 93 crashes in Somerset County, Pennsylvania.

10:13 a.m. The United Nations building evacuates.

10:22 a.m.: In Washington, the State and Justice departments are evacuated, along with the World Bank.

10:24 a.m.: The FAA reports that all inbound transatlantic aircraft flying into the United States are being diverted to Canada.

10:28 a.m.: The World Trade Center's north tower collapses.

10:45 a.m.: All federal office buildings in Washington are evacuated.

10.48 a.m.: Police confirm the plane crash in Pennsylvania.

10:54 a.m.: Israel evacuates all diplomatic missions.

10:57 a.m.: New York Gov. George Pataki closes all state government buildings.

11:02 a.m.: New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani orders an evacuation of the area south of Canal Street.

11:18 a.m.: American Airlines reports it has lost two aircraft.

11:26 a.m.: United Airlines reports that United Flight 93, has crashed in Pennsylvania. The airline also says that it is "deeply concerned" about United Flight 175.

11:59 a.m.: United Airlines confirms that Flight 175, from Boston to Los Angeles, has crashed. It hit the World Trade Center's south tower.

12:04 p.m.: Los Angeles International Airport is evacuated.

12:15 p.m: San Francisco International Airport is evacuated and shut down.

12:15 p.m.: The Immigration and Naturalization Service says U.S. borders with Canada and Mexico are on the highest state of alert, but no decision has been made about closing borders.

12:30 p.m.: The FAA says 50 flights are in U.S. airspace, but none are reporting any problems.

1:04 p.m.: Bush speaks from Barksdale AFB:

THE PRESIDENT: I want to reassure the American people that the full resources of the federal government are working to assist local authorities to save lives and to help the victims of these attacks. Make no mistake: The United States will hunt down and punish those responsible for these cowardly acts.

I've been in regular contact with the Vice President, the Secretary of Defense, the national security team and my Cabinet. We have taken all appropriate security precautions to protect the American people. Our military at home and around the world is on high alert status, and we have taken the necessary security precautions to continue the functions of your government.

We have been in touch with the leaders of Congress and with world leaders to assure them that we will do whatever is necessary to protect America and Americans.

I ask the American people to join me in saying a thanks for all the folks who have been fighting hard to rescue our fellow citizens and to join me in saying a prayer for the victims and their families.

The resolve of our great nation is being tested. But make no mistake: We will show the world that we will pass this test. God bless.

1:27 p.m.: A state of emergency is declared by the city of Washington.

1:44 p.m.: The Pentagon says five warships and two aircraft carriers will leave the U.S. Naval Station in Norfolk, Virginia, to protect the East Coast from further attack and to reduce the number of ships in port. The two carriers, the USS George Washington and the USS John F. Kennedy, are headed for the New York coast. The other ships headed to sea are frigates and guided missile destroyers capable of shooting down aircraft.

1:48 p.m.: Bush leaves Barksdale Air Force Base aboard Air Force One and flies to an Air Force base in Nebraska.

2:30 p.m.: The FAA announces there will be no U.S. commercial air traffic until noon EDT Wednesday at the earliest.

2:49 p.m.: At a news conference, Giuliani says that subway and bus service are partially restored in New York City. Asked about the number of people killed, Giuliani says, "I don't think we want to speculate about that -- more than any of us can bear."

3:55 p.m.: Karen Hughes, a White House counselor makes a statement:

MS. HUGHES: Counselor to President Bush. And I'm here to update you all on the activities of the federal government in response to this morning's attacks on our country.

As you heard from President Bush a short time ago, the federal government is acting to help local communities with search and rescue and emergency management operations, to take all appropriate precautions to protect our citizens and to identify those responsible for these despicable attacks on the American people.

While some federal buildings have been evacuated for security reasons and to protect our workers, your federal government continues to function effectively. We have a federal emergency response plan, and at President Bush's direction, we are implementing it. We began to implement it immediately after the first attack in New York this morning.

We contacted American forces and embassies throughout the world and placed them on high alert. The United States Secret Service immediately secured the President, the Vice President and the Speaker of the House, and they are all safe. They have also secured members of the national security team, the President's Cabinet and senior staff.

As you know, President Bush was in Sarasota, Florida when the first attack occurred this morning. Air Force One has now landed at Offitt Air Force Base in Omaha, Nebraska, and the President is in a secure location. He is in continuous communication with the Vice President and key members of his Cabinet and national security team.

Vice President Cheney and our National Security Advisor, Condoleezza Rice, are in a secure facility at the White House. I have just come from there. The Secretary of Transportation and other members of our White House senior staff are gathered at a command center there, and we are coordinating with other branches of our federal government.

The Secretary of Defense remains at the Pentagon, and the Secretary of State is en route back to Washington from his trip to South America.

President Bush is conducting a meeting of the National Security Council as we speak. They are meeting President Bush from his location and other members from different locations in Washington and other locations.

As many of you have been reporting, the Federal Aviation Administration ordered all airports closed, and all planes which were in the air were directed to land at the nearest airport. International flights were diverted to alternate locations outside of the United States.

Transportation Secretary Mineta has directed the Federal Aviation Administration to suspend operations until at least 12:00 noon tomorrow. So, no airline flights will operate until at least then, and until the FAA announces that operations will be resumed.

Secretary Mineta has also issued orders controlling the movement of all vessels in United States navigable waters. The Federal Emergency Management Agency has activated eight urban search and rescue task forces in New York and four of these highly-trained teams are at work here in Washington at the Pentagon.

Every federal agency has implemented continuity of operations

and four of these highly trained teams are at work in Washington at the Pentagon. Every federal agency has implemented continuity of operations plans to make sure the government continues to function effectively.

While the market is closed today because of the situation in Manhattan, the United States financial system has continued to operate. Banks have been open all day. The Federal Reserve has operated regularly and continuously.

The Department of Health and Human Services has mobilized medical personnel and supplies to provide help to local authorities who are working so diligently to respond and try to help the victims of these terrible attacks.

President Bush has committed the full resources of our intelligence and law enforcement communities to identify and bring to swift justice those responsible for these despicable attacks. The Department of Justice is setting up a hotline for families who fear that their relatives may have been victims of one of these attacks, and we will be announcing that telephone number shortly.

Our fellow citizens and our freedom came under attack today. And no one should doubt America's resolve. President Bush and all our country's leaders thank the many Americans who are helping with rescue and relief efforts. We ask our fellow Americans for your prayers for the victims, for their families, for the rescue workers, and for our country.

Thank you all very much. And we will continue to update you as information is available and confirmed.

3:55 p.m.: Giuliani now says the number of critically injured in New York City is up to 200 with 2,100 total injuries reported.

4 p.m: U.S. officials say there are "good indications" that Saudi militant Osama bin Laden, suspected of coordinating the bombings of two U.S. embassies in 1998, is involved in the attacks, based on "new and specific" information developed since the attacks.

4:06 p.m.: California Gov. Gray Davis dispatches urban search-and-rescue teams to New York.

4:10 p.m.: Building 7 of the World Trade Center complex is reported on fire.

4:20 p.m.: U.S. Sen. Bob Graham, D-Florida, chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, says he was "not surprised there was an attack (but) was surprised at the specificity." He says he was "shocked at what actually happened -- the extent of it."

4:25 p.m.: The American Stock Exchange, the Nasdaq and the New York Stock Exchange say they will remain closed Wednesday.

4:30 p.m.: The president leaves Offutt Air Force Base in Nebraska aboard Air Force One to return to Washington.

5:20 p.m.: The 47-story Building 7 of the World Trade Center complex collapses.

6:10 p.m. Giuliani urges New Yorkers to stay home Wednesday if they can.

6:42 p.m.: Rumsfeld, the U.S. defense secretary, holds a news conference in the Pentagon.

Rumsfeld: This is a -- first of all, good evening. This is a tragic day for our country. Our hearts and prayers go to the injured, their families and friends.

We have taken a series of measures to prevent further attacks and to determine who is responsible. We're making every effort to take care of the injured and the casualties in the building. I'm deeply grateful for the many volunteers from the defense establishment and from the excellent units from all throughout this region. They have our deep appreciation.

We have been working closely throughout the day with President Bush, Vice President Cheney, CIA Director George Tenet, the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Dick Myers, who is currently participating in a meeting elsewhere in the building, and a great many other officials from throughout the government.

I should say we've received calls from across the world offering their sympathy and indeed their assistance in various ways.

I'm very pleased to be joined here by Chairman Carl Levin and Senator John Warner. Senator Warner called earlier today and offered his support and was kind enough to come down and has been with us. We've very recently had a discussion with the president of the United States. Chairman Hugh Shelton has just landed from Europe. Secretary of the Army Tom White, who has a responsibility for incidents like this as executive agent for the Department of Defense, is also joining me.

It's an indication that the United States government is functioning in the face of this terrible act against our country. I should add that the briefing here is taking place in the Pentagon. The Pentagon's functioning. It will be in business tomorrow.

6:54 p.m.: Bush arrives back at the White House aboard Marine One. The president earlier landed at Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland with a three-fighter jet escort.

7:17 p.m.: U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft says the FBI is setting up a Web site for tips on the attacks: www.ifccfbi.gov. He also says family and friends of possible victims can leave contact information at 800-331-0075.

7:45 p.m.: The New York Police Department says that at least 78 officers are missing. The city also says that as many as half of the first 400 firefighters on the scene were killed.

8:30 p.m.: President Bush addresses the nation.

THE PRESIDENT: Good evening. Today, our fellow citizens, our way of life, our very freedom came under attack in a series of deliberate and deadly terrorist acts. The victims were in airplanes, or in their offices; secretaries, businessmen and women, military and federal workers; moms and dads, friends and neighbors. Thousands of lives were suddenly ended by evil, despicable acts of terror.

The pictures of airplanes flying into buildings, fires burning, huge structures collapsing, have filled us with disbelief, terrible sadness, and a quiet, unyielding anger. These acts of mass murder were intended to frighten our nation into chaos and retreat. But they have failed; our country is strong.

A great people has been moved to defend a great nation. Terrorist attacks can shake the foundations of our biggest buildings, but they cannot touch the foundation of America. These acts shattered steel, but they cannot dent the steel of American resolve.

America was targeted for attack because we're the brightest beacon for freedom and opportunity in the world. And no one will keep that light from shining.

Today, our nation saw evil, the very worst of human nature. And we responded with the best of America -- with the daring of our rescue workers, with the caring for strangers and neighbors who came to give blood and help in any way they could.

Immediately following the first attack, I implemented our government's emergency response plans. Our military is powerful, and it's prepared. Our emergency teams are working in New York City and Washington, D.C. to help with local rescue efforts.

Our first priority is to get help to those who have been injured, and to take every precaution to protect our citizens at home and around the world from further attacks.

The functions of our government continue without interruption. Federal agencies in Washington which had to be evacuated today are reopening for essential personnel tonight, and will be open for business tomorrow. Our financial institutions remain strong, and the American economy will be open for business, as well.

The search is underway for those who are behind these evil acts. I've directed the full resources of our intelligence and law enforcement communities to find those responsible and to bring them to justice. We will make no distinction between the terrorists who committed these acts and those who harbor them.

I appreciate so very much the members of Congress who have joined me in strongly condemning these attacks. And on behalf of the American people, I thank the many world leaders who have called to offer their condolences and assistance.

America and our friends and allies join with all those who want peace and security in the world, and we stand together to win the war against terrorism. Tonight, I ask for your prayers for all those who grieve, for the children whose worlds have been shattered, for all whose sense of safety and security has been threatened. And I pray they will be comforted by a power greater than any of us, spoken through the ages in Psalm 23: "Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I fear no evil, for You are with me."

This is a day when all Americans from every walk of life unite in our resolve for justice and peace. America has stood down enemies before, and we will do so this time. None of us will ever forget this day. Yet, we go forward to defend freedom and all that is good and just in our world.

Thank you. Good night, and God bless America.

END 8:35 P.M. EDT

Remembering

2006-09-10T22:17:00.000-07:00

Compare and Contrast on 9-11

2006-09-10T21:10:00.000-07:00

America was targeted for attack because we're the brightest beacon for freedom and opportunity in the world. And no one will keep that light from shining.

George W. Bush, 9/11/01

"Bush Jr. will realize that he is squandering many American interests with his overt bias towards the Israeli aggressors… If the US thinks that with its policy, it is actualizing American interests within and without the US, it will very quickly discover that the price of this bias is extremely high… The US, including the American people and the Israeli people, has rightly become Enemy No. 1 of the nations."

Columnist Mahmoud Abd Al-Mun'im Murad of the Egyptian government-sponsored daily, Al-Akhbar, August 28, 2001

The people who committed these acts are clearly determined to try to force the United States of America and our values to withdraw from the world. Or to respond by curtailing our freedoms. If we do that, the terrorists will have won. And we have no intention of doing so.

Donald Rumsfeld, Defense Secretary

"The meaning of terror according to the American [dictionary] is known. [The term] refers to any resistance to the new colonialism. In contrast, the collective and racist annihilation of peoples constitutes (according to the American dictionary) a civilized action that should not be resisted."

University of Lebanon lecturer Mustafa Juzo, Al-Hayat (London), September 17, 2001

"Maybe the purpose of all this is to find out if America today is as strong as when we fought for our independence or when we fought for ourselves as a Union to end slavery or as strong as our fathers and grandfathers who fought to rid the world of Nazism and communism. The terrorists were counting on our cowardice. They've learned a lot about us since then. And so have we. "

Rudolph Giuliani

"When the twin towers collapsed and the New York skyline, which had been obstructed by them, was revealed to me – I felt deep within me like someone that was delivered from the grave; I [felt] that I was being carried in the air above the corpse of the mythological symbol of arrogant American imperialist power, whose administration had prevented the [American] people from knowing the crimes it was committing… My lungs filled with air and I breathed in relief, as I had never breathed before."

"A few minutes later, I again thought about the people under the ruins, and I began to say to myself: 'What sin had these innocents committed?' I was sorry that my humanity had been contaminated by Zionist America and by world Zionism… But, a few minutes later, the media informed me of new facts: 'Arabs and Muslims were blamed, and were even threatened by retaliation.'"

"This brought me back to the spiritual tomb, in which I am overwhelmed by the aggression, the arrogance, the racism, and the distortion of facts. Inner strength, that saves me from drowning, has helped me to again breathe above the surface of the grave: we will return, we will live, we will win, and we will realize justice for the world, because we are willing to sacrifice ourselves for rights, justice, and the humanity of the world…"

"The American people must awake and see the image of [its] policy… a filthy policy that dishonors its owners… That hour on September 11 should be significant for the American decision makers; it must lead to a reexamination of [American] ideas, policy, and strategy. It may be that [this event] will also reach the American mind, whose real humanity has been blocked by military and economic might…"

Syrian Arab Writers Association chairman 'Ali 'Uqleh 'Ursan, Al-Usbu' Al-Adabi (Damascus) September 15, 2001.

"The people who did this have underestimated them. They have looked upon the most affluent and overweight people in the world, seen softness and not understood that underneath, there is iron and resolve and unfathomable will. They have seen the startling diversity of race and religion and ethnicity and heard the cacophony of voices in that remarkable country, and failed to grasp that beneath the heart of every hyphenated American, there rages the heart of an American, period."--
Christie Blatchford {National Post - Canadian national newspaper, September 12, 2001}

There are times, reading statements from such diverse thinking groups, hearing a man call us racist for saying Arab muslims did something that they did, while calling the Israelis nazis in the same article, and not seeing how that is overt racism, seeing the blame piled on America reflexively, calling the US colonial, when it never has made it a point to plant colonies, although many of the European countries that do not get called out actually did and are part of the reason the Middle East looks the way it does today, all of this sometimes makes me wonder if we live on the same planet.

Voices of al Jihadya: Hamas after 9/11

2006-09-10T12:44:00.000-07:00

"The United States, which, since the turn of the last century, has believed that it is the strongest, used that strength and power not to actualize justice and equality for the oppressed, but to besiege the[se] peoples, murder them, and spill their blood. It did not follow any law, unless the law was passed to strengthen its hegemony and its power. The US, which supports the Zionist entity, supplying it with all types of lethal weapons, such as the Apache, napalm bombs, and the F-16, that have taken the lives of thousands of Palestinians; the US, which encouraged the Iranian Shah to massacre his people; the US, which stood by the blood-letter Haile Sellassie, the despot Idi Amin, and dozens of dictators and tyrants in South America, in Africa, and in Southeast Asia; the US, which sowed death at Hiroshima, anguish in Vietnam, bitterness in Iraq, famine and siege in the Sudan and in Libya – what did this US, with the ugly face, expect the repressed and the oppressed peoples to do?"

Dr. 'Atallah Abu Al-Subh
in Al-Risala, September 17, 2001

Remembering

2006-09-10T11:04:00.000-07:00

NY Skyline the afternoon of 9/11/2001

Why Now? Why This Way? al Jihadiya and the West

2006-09-10T06:16:00.000-07:00

"Secular Europe and radical Islam … represent two sides of the same coin: both have rejected the secular order, the latter through open battle, and the former through fatal resignation. … In the absence of religion human society sinks into depressive torpor. Secular society therefore is an oxymoron, for the death of religion leads quickly enough to the death of society itself." ("Death by secularism: Some statistical evidence," Asia Times, August 1, 2005)

The West itself is in a cultural war beyond anything coming in from the Islamists. The fight on many fronts is what shall be the face of Western society?

This is an important question. At a casual look, with plummetting birthrates, a sexual obsessiveness beyond our parents' imagining, where prenatal infanticide is considered a human right, where there seem few things worth dying for, and little worth living for, Western culture seems to some on a suicide watch. Self-destructive behaviors that undermine family stability, the sense that the West is worth saving, and a great deal of willingness to see the values and history of Western culture and American ways as something evil just because, this is a perfect time for the conflict with a culture that sees the West as the source of their woes to yell "It's your fault!" and to have it believed in angst and shame.

The West seems to be busy trying to escape itself. The great rallying cry has become diversity, followed by a particularly intolerant brand of acceptance called tolerance of what had largely been either foreign or considered negative or wicked in the past as good. "'Diversity' is, of course, the great mantra of contemporary American higher education. Indeed, it's probably the single most common term-of-art in American higher education today. When I googled the word ‘diversity' on Penn State's search engine, it came up with about 31,600 citations. This compares, by way of illustration, to only about 17,000 hits for the word ‘scholarship,' 4,800 hits for the word ‘truth,' 2,450 for ‘liberty,' and 1,550 for the word ‘civilization'." (Stephen H. Balch, president of the National Association of Scholars, "Political Commitments of American Higher Education: The Case of Pennsylvania," Academic Questions, Fall 2005, p. 27) This is seen everywhere, as groups that are considered in favor are excused bad behaviors while those who represent the old groups are demonized.

Alain Finkielkraut, a French intellectual, noted this double standard: "When an Arab torches a school, it's rebellion. When a white guy does it, it's fascism." (Lauren Elkin, "Comments by French Jewish thinker on recent Muslim riots stirring the pot," JTA, November 30, 2005). Then there were the forged pictures Reuters so happily accepted without checking on their truthfulness, because it fit their association that the old regime (especially the US and Israel) are evil, while the members of Hezbollah are not for putting their weapons systems and arms caches in centers of urban populations. And there's the BBC's usage of the words to describe terrorists and terrorist activities by putting them into quote marks, as if to imply that there is something not true with those terms.

There has been much talking about how Iran uses Lebanon and Hezbollah as a proxy to fight against Israel, but there is more proxy warring going on than that. The self-loathing of Western society makes it easy to accept the onus of being the bad guy by people who want you to be their proxy. "The Middle East is an area with great problems with good government, economic development and potential for growth. "The 22 member countries of the Arab league, from Mauritania to the Gulf States, have a total population of 300 millions, larger than the US and almost as large as the EU before its expansion. They have a land area larger than either the US or all of Europe. These 22 countries, with all their oil and natural resources, have a combined GDP smaller than that of Netherlands plus Belgium and equal to half of the GDP of California alone. Within this meager GDP, the gaps between rich and poor are beyond belief and too many of the rich made their money not by succeeding in business, but by being corrupt rulers" (Haim Harari, Undeclared WW III). There is great unrest there because of these factors, yet it is clear that the willingness to actually do something concrete about it is rare, and instead, scapegoats are found. The "Arab habit of blaming everything on the United States, or Israel, or the West in general... is also part of an unspoken ceasefire pact--a reminder among Arabs that they have agreed not to attack each other and will focus their energies on external enemies in order to keep the peace at home" (Lee Smith, "Sects and Death in the Middle East," The Weekly Standard, June 26, 2006).

So the West has become a battlefield for those who fight a proxy war against the corruption and longing for a righteous way of life, and in turn, the West behaves like it is deserving of just that blame.

And now, the battle is leaving the Middle East and coming into the western theatre directly, as those who grew up on the meme of the West being the oppressor begin to listen to the teachings of those who offer them what feels like a real reason to live and die. "Across Europe, and possibly in North America, the new Mohamed Attas are coming not from immigrant enclaves, not from people raised in Muslim countries where religious extremism is part of the political culture. They are native-born citizens of their host countries, fluent in its language and culture, usually from families that are neither impoverished nor religious. As the popularity of radical Islam has declined dramatically in Muslim countries—not a single international terrorist figure has emerged from Iraq, Afghanistan or Palestine in the past four years—it is becoming a fully European force in France, Britain, Spain, Germany and the Netherlands, forged in the bland concrete housing projects that ring the cities of Europe. ‘It's not the ones from religious families who are turning into jihadists,' said Rosa Tandjaoui, the daughter of Algerian and Tunisian parents who owns a bookstore here in the 19th district [of Paris] and whose children attend the same schools as the French suicide bombers. ‘It's people from families like mine—secular, patriotic French, educated. I worry about my son a lot—I hope he doesn't become religious, and I will never let him go to prayers by himself. I've seen what happens to them'." (Doug Saunders, "Radical Islam sows its seed in Europe's fertile soil," The Globe and Mail, September 10. 2005). Adam Gadahn aka Azzam the American whose recent video that both warned and invited America to accept Islam is another example. The people who bombed the UK on 7/7 were British raised, as were the people in the recent airliner bombing plot.

This is the natural reaction to the Western nihilistic secular cultural offering. People need things to live for, things worth dying for, and in the dying secular West, the offerings of sex and entertainment will never be enough. As an astute 19 year old British Muslim noted: "The evil programs on TV, the music, the literature, the magazines ... are all responsible for the terrorist attacks. … Until they get rid of Eminem and Marilyn Manson, they can't get rid of our preachers." (Scheherezade Faramarzi, "One Young Man's Concern on Extremism," The Associated Press, July 17, 2005).

The hedonistic "it's all about me" is of course, not all the West has to offer, although from the popular culture shone on film and passed off as music, it would be easy to come to that conclusion. There are facets of life in the West that represent our best and brightest: the willingness to stand up for good, and to know the end does not justify the means, the understanding of liberty and the awareness of its cost, the knowledge that freedom and justice, not just tolerance, matter.

In the words of Thomas Jefferson, we can find the core of the American dream, that although we often fail to live up to it, that dream still resonates with our founding truths, truths worth living for to bring to life, words worth dying for: We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.

Western culture is worth saving. America, with all of its flaws, is still the city on the hill, showing a way to a good life that allows freedom and hope to bloom. We still have time to perserve the dream. We must have the will to do it.

Voices of al Jihadiya

2006-09-09T22:45:00.000-07:00

"Jihad against America will continue, economically and militarily. By the grace of Allah, America is in retreat and its economy is developing cracks ever-increasingly. But more attacks are required. I advise the youth to find more of America's economic hubs. The enemy can be defeated by attacking its economic centers."

Osama bin Laden

"We will also aim to continue, by the permission of Allah, the destruction of the American economy."

Ayman al-Zawahiri

The Muslim masses-for many reasons, and this is not the place to discuss it-do not rally except against an outside occupying enemy, especially if the enemy is firstly Jewish, and secondly American.

Ayman al-Zawahiri

The Americans: These, as you know, are the most cowardly of God's creatures. They are an easy quarry, praise be to God. We ask God to enable us to kill and capture them to sow panic among those behind them and to trade them for our detained shaykhs and brothers.

Abu Mus'ab al-Zarqawi

Remembering

2006-09-09T21:31:00.000-07:00

The Choice

2006-09-09T20:42:00.000-07:00

God recognizes no separation between religion and state. And the concept of rendering unto Caesar that which be Caesar's and unto God that be God’s as understood and interpreted by the proponents of secularism is an atheistic concept of which God and his Prophets are innocent. And since the believer in God and his Prophets believes and lives his life according to the book and prophetic practice, he has no need for the legislatures and parliaments which you in the west have, to put it mildly, used to legislate yourselves into a prison of your own making.-- Adam Gadahn aka Azzam the American

The reaching out for freedom was a long and painful process in the West, and a large part of our cherished cultural heritage is wrapped up in that very event. Here in the US, we celebrate our founders and the struggle they underwent to throw off a colonial rule that they found oppressive. But this too did not happen in a vacuum. It is built on many small steps that defined liberty, the relationship between the governed and those who govern, and concepts of justice that even though they often fell short, strove for fairness and just outcome for all. This is a concept that has given those who follow the Prophet as much freedom to worship as the next man in all the countries of the West where he takes refuge. It has given people a way to work for righting wrongs that allow growth and building instead of the endless rounds of war you find in societies like Somalia. In the long run, it has given us a system that protects people from long rule by tyrants to attack their own people that allows all a chance to strive to improve one's lot in life in ways nearly impossible for those born to the wrong clan, or the wrong sect, or the wrong ethnic group in so many parts of the world.

Where sharia law, theocratic law has been the rule of the day, we see mentally handicapped children executed for crimes thrust upon them by their caretakers, women killed because their brothers were unhappy with their choice of husband, men punished for wearing standard athletic clothing while playing soccer. Everywhere there is the curtailment of personal freedom in the name of God: music is constrained or banned, freedom of the press eliminated, freedom of association attacked frequently by gangs of young men who demand people behave in ways they deem religiously acceptable. Everywhere in these societies half the population have what are considered normative rights that were won with enomous struggle vastly curtailed.through custom, tradition and religious interpretation.

Remember Afghanistan under the Taliban. This is the way of life, with its cruel punishments, its high level control by religious bully boys acting as police, and its misuse of women and children, and the forcible infliction of their version of righteous living on everybody in society that the extremists are dreaming of creating with their hope of the Caliphate.

The threat is not only from without. There are those, like Adam Gadhan, members here of our own country who have also fallen into that dream. And if we let them, they will sweep away every dream of our founding fathers, every shred of the social contract we hold sacred between the governed and the governing, every concept enshrined by the suffering and blood of so many Americans, and give us the choice offered to every infidel: Convert or Die.

Yes, the Long War began long before 911

2006-09-09T14:15:00.000-07:00

"Death is better than living on this earth with the unbelievers amongst us." -- Osama Bin Laden

Realities

2006-09-09T07:26:00.000-07:00

For those who are, in the words of John Hinderaker, "are trying to sell the American people on the absurd proposition that the terrorist threat we face today is mostly George Bush's fault, and that if we only abandon his tough approach to national security, everything will be fine," a quick look at the history of terrorism by groups with Islamic ideologies will find, even in the non-exhaustive list I posted earlier, that more than 2700 people world-wide who were killed in Islamic terrorist activities before GW Bush was president.

Those figures don'tt even begin to include people caught up in the Kashmir conflict or various attacks in the Philippines, or anything like comprehensive numbers of Islamic violence in the former Yugoslavian territories, or Islamic violence against non-Islamic people in Indonesia and undercounts the Chechnian violence and the GIA attacks in France. The real number is a good bit higher.

And all this happened before the current administration's policies and with the denial that there was a struggle against the west. Al Qada chose to tear the veil away, and the world we are in today is the result of that open declaration of war.

Remembering

2006-09-08T23:35:00.000-07:00

Some words to ponder

2006-09-08T22:42:00.000-07:00

Like Pearl Harbor, 9/11 was just a calling card, an invitation to engage in a much bigger (world) problem. Like Pearl Harbor, 9/11 was not our first invitation to engage in what was fast becoming a world-wide threat. Like Pearl Harbor, it was an invitation we couldn't afford to leave unanswered.

We received an invitation to the war on terror as far back as 1979 in Tehran. We received several more invitations throughout the 80's and 90's. We were invited in no uncertain terms in 1993, when Bin Laden first attempted to level the World Trade Towers. We were invited again in 1995 by Hezbollah in Saudi Arabia and yet again by Bin Laden in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998. We received yet another open invitation to join the war against international terrorism in October of 2000 with the bombing of the USS Cole, again, courtesy of Al Qaeda. Meanwhile, much of the free world was already engaged. We declined to answer any of these invitations...

We were not just patient in ignoring these invitations - we were cowardly and short sighted. Only when the invitation reached the massive intensity of 9/11, with nearly 3000 innocent American men, women and children dead, our financial center, defense center and government center under attack all at once, were we ready to accept these invitations.

JB Williams

And so here we are today, nearing the fifth anniversary of a morning when several men, aided by a globe spanning network of similarly minded people decided that every man, woman and child was a legitimate target of war, even if they didn't know that the war existed.

The determination behind that fight is real, the hatred is real, and the excuses for doing this are very real in the minds of those who have decided to walk that path. We can respond in two ways: Try to ignore or negotiate with people who do not want to negotiate in good faith, because what they want is our destruction, or to stand up against the darkness of those who see all of us, our way of life, our culture and our aspirations as something worth eliminating.

Either: "And God willing, with the force of God behind it, we shall soon experience a world without the United States and Zionism," Mahmoud Ahmadinejad

Or: "With vigilance, determination, courage, we will defeat the enemies of freedom, and we will leave behind a more peaceful world for our children and our grandchildren." GW Bush.

If we don't choose the second, the first is more and more likely to come to be.

Some Voices from the Long War

2006-09-08T07:08:00.000-07:00

"Oh followers of (Taliban leader) Mullah Mohammed Omar, oh sons of (Al-Qaeda leader) Osama bin Laden, oh disciples of (slain Al-Qaeda in Iraq leader) Abu Mussab al-Zarqawi ... I urge each of you to kill at least one American within a period not exceeding 15 days,
- Abu Hamza al-Muhajer, purported head of Al Qada in Iraq from an audio tape played by Al-Jazeera.

"And God willing, with the force of God behind it, we shall soon experience a world without the United States and Zionism,"
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad

"As you know, the enemy in this war appears to be Israel, but, as everyone knows, the fighting enemy is actually America. Israel is merely the claw of America in this war. People who cannot stand with their fighting brothers can still fight. They can carry out other actions." Muhammad Said Ramadhan Al-Bouti

"We are 100% committed to the cause of Islam. We love death the way you love life. I tell all you British citizens to stop your support to your lying British government, and to the so-called 'war on terror,' and ask yourselves, why would thousands of men be willing to give their lives for the cause of Muslims? Allah, in Surat Al-Nisa, says: 'What is wrong with you that you fight not in the cause of Allah, and for those weak, ill, cheated, and oppressed, among men, women, and children, whose cry is: 'Our Lord, rescue us from this town whose people are oppressors, and raise for us from among you one who will protect, and raise for us from you one who will help.'" Shehzad Tanweer

Remembering

2006-09-07T06:51:00.000-07:00

The touch of terror in the US

Will we pay the price?

2006-09-07T06:06:00.000-07:00

"Today we are engaged in conflicts that are again testing whether or not our country believes that the defense of liberty is worth the cost," Donald Rumsfeld, 8/39/06

Today, one of the big questions is do we really believe as a nation, a people, a culture, that the defense of liberty worth the cost? Between the press, popular cultural icons, and an attitude that picked up the viewpoint, "Blame America First," it seems hard to know if this is true any more.

I wonder how many of us would stand up and join Patrick Henry in agreement with "Give me liberty or give me death?" Or how many people really acknowledge that there are people out there, willing to kill us not for what we do, or what we as individuals believe, but because we are the infidel.

The forced "conversion" of the two Fox reporters should show us the writing on the wall.

The recent plot by British citizens of Pakistani ethnicity should show us that it has little to do with what you think about the fate of the Palestinians, where you stand about the war in Iraq, or how much you consider what Hezbollah does as justified. You are still the enemy, still counters on a checkerboard where every man, woman and child is fair game. The media may talk like America is the villian, but compared to what these people want to do, to make us chess pieces on their struggle for power and control makes one wonder just what the thinking behind the blame America game is.

The Long War is here, and you are a player whether you want to be or not.

The real question is: do you concede or think that the ideals of liberty are worth standing up for. Until we make up our minds about that, we are truly fair game for those who would exploit us. Patrick Henry once said, "Give me liberty or give death." In reality, we may not have a choice. Death as a culture, or liberty. We will end up with one or the other, even if by not choosing.

Fighting our father's ghosts

2006-09-07T05:56:00.000-07:00

Shelby Steel has written an essay that is something we should read and think about. A contemplation of the cultural dilemna facing us worth reading slowly and carefully. I think the article is in part rant, and I doubt if I totally agree with it, but there's meat in it that ought to be considered:

But the international left is in its own contest with American exceptionalism. It keeps charging Israel and America with oppression hoping to mute American power. And this works in today's world because the oppression script is so familiar and because American power cringes when labeled with sins of the white Western past. Yet whenever the left does this, it makes room for extremism by lending legitimacy to its claim of oppression. And Israel can never use its military fire power without being labeled an oppressor--which brings legitimacy to the enemies she fights. Israel roars; much of Europe supports Hezbollah. Over and over, white guilt turns the disparity in development between Israel and her neighbors into a case of Western bigotry. This despite the fact that Islamic extremism is the most explicit and dangerous expression of human bigotry since the Nazi era. Israel's historical contradiction, her torture, is to be a Western nation whose efforts to survive trap her in the moral mazes of white guilt. Its national defense will forever be white aggression. Can we truly deal with the global situation in a rational way if we are too busy fighting our grandfathers' ghosts to see what we are actually dealing with? Or will our collective guilt for Europe's bad behaviors of the past be the tool that the East uses to destroy what we have built? Will we crumble quickly, like the Roman Empire in the west did, or will we do what is needed to meet the challenge, and exorcise those ghosts who would hold our hands?