"History is a vast early warning system. " Norman Cousins

Barbaro's heart.

2006-07-21T01:48:21Z

So why do we need to learn to spell?

2006-07-10T06:07:01Z

i cdnuolt blveiee taht I cluod aulaclty uesdnatnrd waht I wuas rdanieg. The phaonmneal pweor of the hmuan mnid, aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it dseno't mtaetr in waht oerdr the ltteres in a wrod are, the olny iproamtnt tihng is taht the frsit and lsat ltteer be in the rghit pclae.

Thhe rset can be a taotl mses and yhou can sitll raed it whotuit a pboerlm. Tihs is bcuseae the huuamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe. Azanmig huh?
yaeh and I awlyas tghuuhot slpeling was ipmorantt! if you can raed tihs rpsoet it.

ONLY REPOST IF YOU CAN READ THIS

You've come such a long way, baby!

2006-04-17T04:47:26Z

Frightening 80's Finnish music video attempt.

LOL

An Islamic expert on female genital mutilation

2006-04-04T05:10:12Z

Not for children! Disturbing!

His reality is a little different from their reality .

Jill Carroll on safe ground

2006-04-04T04:16:09Z

The Officers' Club predicts that Jill Carroll won't be the last Western hostage, but she will be the last to be released.

No comment

2006-04-04T04:05:33Z

Charlene Downes murder - still a deafening silence

Britain's heavy controlled Politically Correct mass media continue to ignore one of the most unpleasant cases of suspected racist murder - which probably involved gang rape as well.

14-year-old Charlene Downes is believed by Blackpool police to have been turned into kebabs and tile grout after her disappearance in November 2003. Two Muslim men - one a former social worker - have been charged with her murder or with assisting in the disposal of her body.

The combination of murder, the appalling likelihood that scores of unwitting customers actually ate Charlene, and the unasked question as to whether this was another case involving the grooming for sex and drugs of a young white girl by a Muslim sex predator gang should have made this killing national front page news.

But, with the sole exception of the Metro (Manchester version) Friday 10th March 2006 (report reproduced here) not one significant newspaper has even mentioned Charlene and her terrible fate.

Perhaps this will change when her alleged killer and his accomplice come to full trial. But the media bias is already all too clear. Cases such as the murder of Anthony Walker became national news within hours of their murder, running with ever-increasing media frenzy until - and beyond - the actual trial of his moronic drug-using killers.

Experienced BNP website watchers will already be all too well aware of the way in which Britain's mainstream media and Powers that Be treat 'ethnic' victims as far more important than white ones. But newcomers may be shocked to learn the truth. The case of Charlene Downes is, in terms of its media treatment, entirely typical - white victims don't count.

[...]

Metro report (retyped as it has not appeared online):

The body of a missing schoolgirl may have been turned into burgers and kebabs and served up at a seaside fast food outlet.

Police fear the remains of 14 year old Charlene Downes, who went missing in November 2003, may also have been ground up into tile grout.

Iyad Albattikhi, 28, who ran the Funny Boyz takeaway in Blackpool, is charged with her murder.

The co-owner of the business Mohammed Raveshi, a 49 year old former social services worker and foster father, is charged with assisting in the disposal of her body.

The men appeared at a hearing at Blackpool maistrates court yesterday.

The teenager whose body has never been found left home on Halloween saying she was meeting friends on Blackpool's North Pier.

It was initially thought Charlene, a pupil at St George's Church of England High School, had run away.

Appeals for her to come forward were subsequently posted in missing persons' columns.

However six months after her disappearance police searched freezers at three Blackpool curry houses looking for her remains.

During the investigation some 3000 men were DNA tested and a TV appeal for information was broadcast on the BBC's Crimewatch show.

Darren Day, Charlene's favourite West End performer, even made a plea for help in finding her.

During the ten minute hearing yesterday the two accused, who were flanked in the secure dock by four security officers, spoke only to confirm their names and ages and to state that they understood the charges against them. Neither of the defendant's lawyers applied for bail.

Heating up the stew

2006-04-04T03:44:41Z

It's real. It's happening. No matter what we do on a personal level, it won't matter. Regardless of the propaganda.

Scientists Focus on Warming Disasters

By SETH BORENSTEIN, AP Science Writer

WASHINGTON - A man stands on a railroad track as a train rumbles closer.

"Global warming?" he says. "Some say irreversible consequences are 30 years away. Thirty years. That won't affect me." He steps off the tracks — just in time. But behind him is a little blonde-haired girl left in front of the roaring train.

The screen goes black. A message appears: "There's still time."

It's just an ad, part of a campaign from the advocacy group Environmental Defense, which hopes to convince Americans they can do something about global warming, that there's still time.

But many scientists are not so sure that the oncoming train of global warming can be avoided. Temperatures are going to rise for decades to come because the chief gas that causes global warming lingers in the atmosphere for about a century.

"We certainly aren't going to stop that 18-wheeler that's rolling down the hill. In the short-term, I'm not sure that anyone can stop it," said John Walsh, director of the Center for Global Change and Arctic System Research at the University of Alaska in Fairbanks.

There are limits, experts say, to how much individuals can do. The best we can hope for is to prevent the worst — world-altering disasters like catastrophic climate change and a drastic rise in sea levels, say 10 leading climate scientists interviewed by The Associated Press. They pull out ominous phrases like "point of no return."

The big disasters are believed to be just decades away. Stopping or delaying them would require bold changes by both individuals and government.

"The big payoff is going to be for our children," said Tim Barnett, a senior scientist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in California. "Together, if we take a concentrated action as a people, we might be able to slow it down enough to avoid these surprises."

But he and other scientists say it's too late to stop people from feeling the heat. Nearly two dozen computer models now agree that by 2100, the average yearly global temperature will be 3 to 6 degrees Fahrenheit higher than now, according to Gerald Meehl, a senior scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research.

Even if today the world suddenly stops producing greenhouse gases, temperatures will rise 1 degree by 2050, according to NCAR.

A British conference on "avoiding dangerous climate change" last year concluded that a rise of just 3 degrees would likely lead to some catastrophic events, especially the melting of the Greenland's polar ice. A study in the journal Science last month said the melting, which is happening faster than originally thought, could trigger a 1- to 3-foot rise in global ocean levels.

Stephen Schneider of Stanford University put the odds of a massive Greenland melt at 50-50.

But Environmental Defense chief scientist Bill Chameides is more hopeful: "There's a certain amount of warming that's inevitable, but that doesn't mean that we can't avoid the really dangerous things that are happening."

Those dangerous things include: multi-century melts of polar ice sheets and an accompanying major sea level rise, abrupt climate change from a dramatic slowing of the ocean current systems, and the permanent loss of glacier-fed ancient water supplies for China, India and parts of South America.

Despite what scientists say, 70 percent of Americans believe it's possible to reduce the effects of global warming and 59 percent think their individual actions can help, according to a poll commissioned by Environmental Defense as part of its public service campaign.

Climate scientists find themselves in the delicate position of trying to balance calculations that lead to scientific despair with an optimistic public's hope.

"You don't give up," said Schneider, co-director of Stanford's Center for Environmental Science Policy. "If you have high blood pressure, do you sit there till you die or do you take Lasix (blood pressure medicine)?"

It takes decades to stabilize emissions of greenhouse gases — which are spewed by power plants, cars and factories — and another half-century after that to slow revved-up ocean warming, so "you're stuck with say 100 years of warming," said Barnett.

"I believe we are past the point of no return," he said. "What does the point of no return mean? To me, it means we've reached a point where we are seeing the impacts of global warming ... The question is: How much worse is it going to get? That is a case in which we can control our destiny — if we act now."

Both Barnett and Walsh said the question they get most from the public is: What can I do personally about global warming? They tell people to drive less and drive fuel-miserly cars, be more efficient about heating their homes.

But those efforts "are not going to change us from an irreversible course to a reversible one," said Walsh. "What you really want to say is: 'You can't go on like this. We can't go on like this.'"

Robert Correll, a top scientist in charge of an eight-country research program into Arctic problems caused by global warming, recognizes the contradictions, especially since developing nations such as China, India and those in Africa will play bigger roles in greenhouse gas pollution in the future.

The individual effort, Correll said, "is damn important, but you're not going to make much difference." That requires group or governmental action, he said.

Individual action, while crucial, "gets you 10, 20, 50 percent of the way," Schneider said.

Many of the scientists who have long been vocal skeptics of global warming now acknowledge that the Earth is getting hotter and that some of it is caused by people. Even so, this minority of scientists, such as John Christy of the University of Alabama at Huntsville, contend that the warming is "not on this dangerous trajectory."

But Environmental Defense is spending about $1.5 million over three years on the public service ads, including the child in front of the train, to drive home to the public that warming is on a dangerous track and that individuals can and should do something about it. The ads, released in late March and arranged with the Ad Council, which produced iconic anti-littering and anti-drunk driving campaigns, are being run for free nationwide, said Fred Krupp, Environmental Defense's executive director.

"We expect at least $100 million worth of time and space over the next two years, so it is a big deal," Krupp said. "When we are successful in making an issue that every American feels responsible to act on, that in itself can reduce emissions."

Krupp said scientists don't take into account the American will: "Don't underestimate the willpower of Americans when they take on a problem."

But computer model runs at the atmospheric center's Boulder, Colo., campus show Environmental Defense's train image might be too close to the truth.

"It's a train that's going downhill; that is something that people don't understand," Meehl said. "For anything to happen, it's going to have to take the public really being concerned about this problem."

Another war on the homefront

2006-04-04T03:20:08Z

Didn't you just love the "in your face" action of our hispanic neighbors? Not really? Oh my goodness.

Civil rights? How about lawlessness?
The protesters seem intent on ending border restraints, not improving immigrants' lives.
By Joe R. Hicks, JOE R. HICKS is vice president of the L.A.-based human relations organization Community Advocates, Inc.
April 1, 2006

THE DEBATE over illegal immigration has reached a vigorous boil, with contrasting bills in the House and Senate and hundreds of thousands of protesters demonstrating nationwide. The complexities of this debate seem lost on many of the protesters. Many claim that what lies beneath reform efforts is raw racism, leading to the view that the recent protests signal a new civil rights movement.

It's simply not true. This nation's civil rights movement of the 1960s broke the back of white supremacy that prevented black Americans (who were citizens) from enjoying the rights guaranteed to them under the Constitution. Undeniably, the freedoms codified by civil rights-era legislation have made life better for all Americans — regardless of skin color, gender or national origin.

Now, many Latino immigrant-rights organizers and their sympathizers seem to be saying that there is some inherent right being expressed when people sneak into the country, thumb their noses at the law and make fools out of those who wait patiently in foreign lands for visas to come to the United States.

It is quite clear that many of those participating in the demonstrations have adopted the stance of the beleaguered victim, perceiving frustration about illegal immigration as racism. Some comments have been painfully ignorant. One protester said: "I'm here to make sure that Mexicans get their freedom, their rights."

During the student protests, the American flag was only occasionally on display, while the Mexican flag was omnipresent. A student said he was waving the latter in support of La Raza (the race), while another asked why illegal immigrants were "treated like criminals." Perhaps he wasn't aware that crossing the U.S. border without the required visa is now, and always has been, against the law.

The participation of students, some as young as 13 and 14, is especially troubling given that all too many seemed clueless about the issues. Perhaps more puzzling is that some of the student walkouts took place on a day honoring the memory of Cesar Chavez. The great Chicano labor organizer held a march in 1969 from the Coachella and Imperial valleys to the Mexican border. Chavez and the United Farm Workers were protesting the use of illegal immigrants as strikebreakers. Further, Chavez believed that illegal immigration was antithetical to the wage interests of the migrant workers he represented.

What immigrant-rights groups refuse to acknowledge is that an unchecked flow of unskilled labor drives down wages for entry-level jobs, rendering all poor Americans, including millions of teenage workers, less than competitive.

Are illegal workers doing jobs that Americans won't do? This often-heard argument is specious. The reality is that most Americans won't do entry-level labor for the meager wages often offered to undocumented workers.

Activists seem focused on a political agenda that is fiercely anti-capitalist and intent on removing all border constraints. Nevertheless, protesters in Los Angeles were welcomed uncritically by the city's leaders. Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa told the crowd of 500,000 last Saturday, "There are no illegal people here today." He added: "America was built on the backs of immigrants."

This is an obvious truism, but it obliterates the distinction between legal and illegal and mocks the rule of law. The immigration process continues to bring people from all parts of the world to these shores, but it has to be an orderly and lawful one.

Lawful or not, the United States cannot absorb all of the people who aspire to come here. A 2005 Pew Hispanic Center survey on attitudes toward immigration, conducted in part in Mexico, found that an estimated 70 million adults in Mexico would come to the U.S. if they had the means and the opportunity. About half of those said they would be willing to move to and work in this country illegally. The study also found that 35% of Mexican college graduates want to come to the U.S., even if that means they would have to work at a job below their qualifications — and many also said they'd be willing to come illegally.

What we are witnessing is not the birth of a new civil rights movement but the attempt to render meaningless the concept of border controls. Any march that can mobilize 500,000 people will get the attention of Washington's politicians, but this nation must not be deterred from securing its borders, enforcing the law and finding a way to humanely deal with the more than 11 million illegal residents already here.

Just what...

2006-04-04T02:51:11Z

...we wanted to hear. Not.

Defeating Jihad
By Jamie Glazov
FrontPageMagazine.com | March 31, 2006

Frontpage Interview’s guest today is Serge Trifkovic, a former BBC commentator and US NEWS and World Report reporter. His last book was The Sword of the Prophet. The sequel, Defeating Jihad, will be published by Regina Orthodox Press in April. Read his commentaries on ChroniclesMagazine.org.

Glazov: Mr. Trifkovic, welcome to Frontpage Magazine.

Trifkovic: Thank you.

Glazov: Before we get to your book, let's talk about the Abdul Rahman case for a moment. He has just been released and is now in Italy. What do you think the key significance of this case is?

Trifkovic: This became a cause célèbre only because of the presence of American troops in Afghanistan: having Rahman killed for apostasy under their noses would have made too explicit a debacle of the already farcical neocon phantasy known as "democratizing the greater Middle East."

No, when Christians are routinely mistreated and killed by our other trusted friends and allies of the United States in the region - notably Pakistan, Egypt, and even the "secular" Turkey - you don't hear about it, there are no vigils, no protests, no offers of asylum. In Pakistan, murders, endemic discrimination, and constant harassment of Christians - who are mainly poor and account for a mere one percent of the population - is persistent. Any dispute with a Muslim - most commonly over land - can become a religious issue. Christians are routinely accused of "blasphemy against Islam," an offense that carries the death penalty as Pakistan has some of the strictest blasphemy laws in the Muslim world. Charges of blasphemy can be made on the flimsiest of evidence - even one man's word against another - and since it is invariably a Muslim's word against that of a Christian, the outcome is preordained.

In Egypt, supposedly a friend of the United States and the second largest recipient of the U.S. taxpayers' largesse, not a single murderer was convicted following the January 2000 massacre of 21 Coptic Christians in the village of Al-Kosheh, and smaller-scale massacres continue unabated.

The murder of a Catholic priest in Trabzon, on Turkey's Black Sea coast, last February was a classic case of jihadism. Father Andrea Santoro was shot twice at point-blank range in his church by a youth who shouted Allahu akbar (Allah is great!) before quitting the scene.

This event should remind us that Turkey is a profoundly un-European country, steeped in an ethos deeply hostile to Western ways. As late as 1955, Istanbul's Christians suffered the worst race riot in Europe since Kristallnacht. And just look at the phenomenal success last year of the Valley of the Wolves, Iraq - the most expensive Turkish film ever made. It opens with a real life event: in July 2003 U.S. Marines raided Turkish Special Forces headquarters in the Iraqi city of Sulimaniyah, mistaking them for guerrillas. Washington later apologized but the movie makes the incident look like a deliberate American ploy. The subsequent fictional plot has Americans attacking a mosque during evening prayers. They murder dozens of innocents at a wedding (including a little boy), and allow a Jewish doctor to remove vital organs from Abu Ghraib inmates, so that they can be sold in New York - and Tel Aviv!

But back to your question. An excellent source is "The New Persecuted: Inquiries into Anti-Christian Intolerance in the New Century of Martyrs" by Antonio Socci. Socci provides evidence that in the past century some 50 million Christians have been killed primarily or exclusively for the reason of their faith; an average of 160,000 Christians have been killed every year since 1990, the vast majority by Muslims in the Third World: East Timor, Sudan, Mauritania, Nigeria.. Socci laments the fact that "this global persecution of Christianity is still in progress but in most cases is ignored by the mass media and Christians in the West."

There are two parallel processes overlooked in the current Middle Eastern crisis: the apparently terminal decline of the Christian remnant in the Middle East after 14 centuries of precarious dhimmitude, and the remarkable indifference of the post-Christian, latently Christophobic Western elite class to its impending demise.

Under the British Mandate, Palestine officially was a Christian country, with Bethlehem having a population that was 90 percent Christian. Today they are literally disappearing. Among over three million Palestinians in the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem, under 50,000 Christians remain. By the year 2020 there will be no living church in the land of Christ. Perhaps Mr. Rahman's case should throw some light on that melancholy fact.

Glazov: Ok, let’s move on to your book. You make the point that the Islamist threat to the West is greater than ever. Can you explain? And this means we are losing the terror war, no?

Trifkovic: Losing, absolutely, without a doubt. After Stalingrad Germany was doomed, after Moscow Napoleon was finished, and after Gettysburg the Confederacy could no longer hope to turn the tide. No such turning point has been reached in the misnamed Global War on Terrorism (GWOT). We need a comprehensive strategy of defense not merely against a small jihadist elite but against an inherently aggressive, demographically vibrant, and ideologically rigid Islamic movement - and please, no more "Islamist" red herrings! - a movement that has global proportions and world-historical significance. As an ideology and a blueprint for radical political action, it is a phenomenon that cannot be compared in dynamism, energy, and potential consequences with any other creed or idea in today's world. It demands a sustained, bold response that has failed to materialize so far. We are losing the war because our elite class does not allow the enemy to be defined. The squeamishness of European and American bien-pensants alike in naming the enemy is but one sign of a shared malaise that hampers a coherent effort.

Bin Laden's network may have been damaged and disrupted since 2001 and his cause may in many places be in the hands of self-starters and amateurs, but he could never have dreamed that the world, almost five years after 9-11, would look so favorable to his objectives. A new strategy is needed to make it less so. It can never be "won" in the sense of eliminating the phenomenon of terrorism altogether, but it can be successfully pursued to the point where the Western world can be made significantly safer by adopting measures - predominantly defensive measures - that would reduce the danger to as near zero as possible. The victory will come not by conquering Mecca for America, but by disengaging America from Mecca (energy independence is a must!) and by excluding Mecca from America with a new immigration policy, soberly defined and rigorously enforced. The risk can, and must, be managed wisely, resolutely, and permanently.

Glazov: You show that there is simply no other way around it: Muslim immigration and a Muslim presence in a country is directly connected to that country being the target of terror. Can you talk about this a bit? And what is the solution?

Trifkovic: "If you know the enemy and know yourself you need not fear the results of a hundred battles," says Sun Tzu. Once we get to know the jihadist enemy, his core beliefs, his role models, his track-record, his mindset, his modus operandi, and his intentions, we'll also know his weaknesses, which are many, above all his inability to develop a prosperous economy, or a functional family, or a harmonious society. But the main problem is with those among us who have the power to make policy and shape opinions, and who will reject our diagnosis. Having absorbed postmodernist assumptions, certain only of uncertainty, devoid of any serious faith except that in their own infallibility, members of our own elite class treat the jihadist mindset as a pathology that can and should be treated by treating causes external to Islam itself.

The result is a plethora of proposed "cures" that are as likely to succeed in making us safe from terrorism as snake oil is likely to cure leukemia. Abroad, we are told, we need to address political and economic grievances of the impoverished masses, we need to spread democracy and free markets in the Muslim world, we need to invest more in public diplomacy. At home we need more tolerance, greater inclusiveness, less profiling, and a more determined outreach to the minorities that feel marginalized and threatened by the war on terror. The predictable failure of such cures leads to ever more pathological self-scrutiny and morbid self-doubt. This vicious circle is untenable and must be broken.

Let me start with the emotionally charged issue of constitutional rights versus national security. Last December the controversy on phone tapping was presented by the mass media to the nation through the inflammatory headline, "Bush authorized spying on Americans." The unwillingness of the mainstream media to disclose the exact identity of the NSA eavesdropping subjects was reminiscent of its refusal to disclose the religious identity of tens of thousands of rioters who wreaked havoc in dozens of French suburbs last November. In both cases the mainstream media were guilty of misconstruing reality for reasons rooted in their ideological prejudices and political preferences.

Within America, glossing over the surveillance targets' identity has two objectives. First of all, it presented President Bush as an out-of-control autocrat-in-the-making whose hoods may be eavesdropping on any one of us at any time. Secondly, it also implied that a Muslim who has become a naturalized American citizen is so thoroughly and irrevocably "American," that no hyphenated designation or qualifier is called for.

Abroad, concealing the rioters' identity fits in with the liberal world view that reject the notion that importing Muslim immigrants may be in any way disadvantageous for the host country. Having reduced religion, politics and art to "narratives" and "metaphors" which merely reflect prejudices based on the distribution of power, the elite class saw the rioters' shout of "Allahu akbar!" as a mere idiosyncrasy that would be cured if the French state gave those "youths" more jobs, more dark-skinned TV anchors, and, of course, lots of "affirmative action" in employment and education.

The legal and constitutional dilemma, such as whether it should spy on "Americans" at home or not and whether a court warrant is needed or not, is worthy of debate in principle. It is both false and unnecessary under the circumstances. Radical solutions are needed for radical challenges, and they do exist. If and when all persons engaged in Islamic activism are excluded from America, there will be no need for such intrusive domestic surveillance. We don't need any legislation to protect CAIR's clients' privacy, we need the law that will treat any naturalized citizen's or resident alien's known or suspected adherence to an Islamic world outlook as excludable - on political, rather than "religious" grounds.

All Americans - real Americans, that is, and not those who falsely take the oath of citizenship but continue to preach jihad and Sharia - will be spared the worry about Mr. Bush listening in to their phone conversations if Islamic activism is treated as grounds for the loss of acquired U.S. citizenship and deportation. The citizenship of any naturalized American who preaches jihad, inequality of "infidels" and women, the establishment of the Shari'a law etc., should be revoked, and that person promptly deported to the country of origin.

A foreigner who becomes naturalized has to declare, on oath, "that I absolutely and entirely renounce and abjure all allegiance and fidelity to any foreign prince, potentate, state, or sovereignty of whom or which I have heretofore been a subject or citizen; that I will support and defend the Constitution and laws of the United States of America against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I will bear arms on behalf of the United States when required by law. and that I take this obligation freely without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; so help me God." But for a Muslim to declare all of the above in good faith, and especially that he accepts the US Constitution as the source of his highest loyalty, is an act of apostasy par excellence, punishable by death under the Islamic law. The sharia, to a Muslim, is not an addition to the "secular" legal code with which it coexists with "the Constitution and laws of the United States of America"; it is the only true code, the only basis of obligation. To be legitimate, all political power therefore must rest exclusively with those who enjoy Allah's authority on the basis of his revealed will. America is illegitimate.

So how can a self-avowedly devout Muslim take the oath, and expect the rest of us to believe that it was done in good faith? Because he is practicing taqiyya, the art of dissimulation that was inaugurated by Muhammad to help destabilize and undermine non-Muslim communities almost ripe for a touch of Jihad. Or else because he is not devout enough and confused, but in that case there is the ever-present danger that at some point he will rediscover his roots, with many predictably unpleasant consequences for the rest of us.

Let me add that the aversion to "profiling" is a symptom, minor but telling, of the elite class pathology. Law-enforcers in other parts of the world pay no heed to the dictates of "sensitivity" and anti-discriminationism. Arabs profile other Arabs, Indians profile Pakistanis, Japanese profile Chinese, and everyone profiles Africans. Israel profiles everyone entering and exiting all the time, and makes no qualms about it. One percent of Muslims living in the United States were responsible for over 90 percent of terrorist offences and serious threats in the country since 9-11. A young Muslim man is literally millions of times more likely to carry out a terrorist attack in the United States than an Episcopalian, Roman Catholic, or Orthodox Christian, a Jew, a Hindu, or a Buddhist. Or for that matter a Lebanese Christian. Membership of a group is a valid pointer in assuming and judging unobserved behavioral characteristics of an individual, especially in the absence of specific information about that individual's background. To suggest otherwise is neither moral nor sane.

And finally, a person's Islamic faith and outlook is incompatible with the requirements of personal commitment, patriotic loyalty and unquestionable reliability that are essential in the military, law enforcement, intelligence services, and other related branches of government. For as long as practicing Muslims are able to get security clearances, terrorist organizations will continue trying to insinuate their supporters into the hiring pools of American security agencies. Any presence of practicing Muslims in any such institution presents an inherent risk to its integrity and undermines its morale.

New immigration legislation is badly needed. Islamic activism should be treated as the grounds for the exclusion or deportation of any alien, regardless of his status or ties in the United States. Useful precedents exist. Keeping out and facilitating the expulsion of politically undesirable foreigners has been at the heart of this country's immigration legislation since 1903 when Congress barred the admission of anarchists in response to President McKinley's assassination. "Ideological" grounds for deportation were on the statute books until 1990, when they were unwisely repealed by Congress. After the Russian revolution foreign communists were singled out for deportation. One night alone in January of 1920, more than 2,500 "alien radicals" were seized in thirty-three cities across the country and deported to their countries of origin. Those who preach Jihad and Sharia can and should be treated in exactly the same manner.

Glazov: Give us a little more of your blueprint for victory.

Trifkovic: It is essential, let me repeat, to define and understand the enemy. Are Muslim terrorists - the only variety that seriously threatens the United States and the Western world - true or false to the tenets of their faith? The answer has to be based on Islam's history and dogma, not on any a priori judgment by those who presume to know the answer or, worse still, have ulterior motives for lying about Islam - e.g. Western converts to Islam who conceal their new names and their true loyalties. That straightjacket has to be discarded, and the public educated about the sacred texts of Islam, its record of interaction with other societies, and the personality of its founder, Muhammad. Such education will open the way to understanding the motives, ambitions and methods of terrorists. We need to know if terrorism is an aberration of Islam's alleged peace and tolerance, or a predictable consequence of the ideology of Jihad.

The second task is to survey the defenses. Both in America and in Europe the elite class deems such questions about the nature of Islam - illegitimate. On both sides of the ocean there also exists an elite consensus that de facto open immigration, multiculturalism, and the existence of a large Muslim diaspora within the Western world are to be treated as a fixed given and should not be scrutinized in any anti-terrorist debate. That imposed elite consensus, in my view, is morbid, ideological in nature, flawed in logic, dogmatic in application, and disastrous in results. It needs to be tested against evidence, not against the alleged norms of acceptable public discourse imposed by those who either do not know Islam, or else do not want us to know the truth about it.

An effective defense against terrorism demands a re-think of our foreign and military policies. Would American soldiers make America safer by patrolling the border with Mexico rather than the streets of Falluja? What are the costs and benefits of supporting the jihadist side in the Caucasus and the Balkans? Even more important is the issue of grand strategy. Pursuing the path of "benevolent global hegemony" is certain to take America the same way as Athens after Pericles and the USSR after Brzhnev. Above all, operational effectiveness must no longer be confused with strategy itself.

Last but by no means least, the impact of ongoing Muslim migratory influx onto the developed world, and the consequences of the existence of a multi-million Muslim diaspora in Western Europe and North America, are inseparable from the coherent long-term defense strategy. That strategy must entail denying actual and potential terrorists the foothold inside the Dar al-Harb! Controlling the borders is only the first step. The application of clearly defined criteria related to terrorism in deciding who will be admitted into the country, and in determining who should be allowed to stay from among those who are already here, is essential. Carefully evaluating the ideological profile of all prospective visitors to America, and systematically re-examining the behavior of all resident aliens and checking the bona-fides of naturalized citizens, is an essential ingredient of a serious anti-terrorist strategy. To that end, Islamic activism needs to be treated as an excludable, eminently political, rather than "religious" activity.

The victory in the war on terrorism ultimately has to be won in the domain of morals and culture. It can be won only by an America - and Britain, and France, and Italy. - that has regained its awareness of its moral, spiritual, and civilizational roots. If that happens, the renewed impulse to defend those lands and to procreate will come, too. While the likelihood of such belated recovery remains in doubt, it it is not impossible. Miracles do happen, and therefore they will happen.

Glazov: Many Muslims I talk to often tell me that their Prophet was a man of "peace." As you demonstrate once again in your new book, he so clearly was not. Tell us briefly how he wasn't. And do the Muslims that I speak with not read the Koran? Or do they have a different concept of "peace"?

Trifkovic: Those Muslims you talk to seem to have adopted the dialectical forma mentis of Stalin's apologists who'd have told you that his winter war against Finland was "defensive" and the Gulag was justified, or exaggerated, or both. Yes, the problem is that Muhammad remains, to all true Muslims, the inviolable paragon of goodness, and imitatio Muhammadi is reflected in the prevalence of his name throughout the Muslim world. Understanding him is the key to the Muslim world outlook.

The truth is grim, and for that reason the entire debate about those Danish cartoons last winter was flawed. The real problem is this: a figure as disturbing as the founder of Islam should not be gently made fun of - the cartoons were quite innocuous - at least not until his remarkable career has been given a vigorous public treatment in the Western world. The trouble with those cartoons was not that they offended fervent Muslims - that sort are offended by our very existence - but that by their placid humor they humanized a man with a hugely problematic legacy, and thereby offended the memory of untold millions of victims of Jihad through the ages.

Ahmed Akkari, spokesman of the Muslim organizations in Denmark, said that Muslims all over the world want the "truth" about their prophet known to the rest of the world. OK, fine: let us look at Muhammad as "he really was in history," relying solely on orthodox Islamic sources, the Kuran and the hadith. Those sources provide an account of uncertain historical accuracy, but that account is regarded as true by all true Muslims and it provides the scriptural basis for the Muslim faith and the Islamic law. It tells us that he violated the sacred pagan month of Rajab, when no Arab was permitted to raise arms in battle by staging pirate raids on caravans from Mecca. In 624, at Badr, he killed forty Meccans in battle and executed prisoners, with Allah's approval: "instill terror into the hearts of the unbelievers, Smite ye above their necks and smite all their finger tips of them." (8:12) After Badr, to quote Ayatollah Khomeini, "Islam grew with blood."

Muhammad used the prospect of booty and ransom to recruit followers. This motive was so important that it merited a whole sura in the Kuran; but one fifth of everything was Muhammad's! Once the loot was divided it was time to relax: "Now enjoy what ye have won. as lawful and good." As for the fallen, a tangible, X-rated paradise filled with virgins "untouched by man" and "fresh" pre-pubescent boys awaited the "martyrs" immediately. The simple preacher eventually morphed into a vengeful warlord, who jubilantly exclaimed that the spectacle of severed enemy heads pleased him better than "the choicest camel in Arabia." Killing prisoners was divinely condoned by Allah. (8:68) Fresh revelations described the unbelievers as "the worst animals" (8:55) and "the vilest of creatures" (98:6) undeserving of mercy. The enemies' heads were to be cut off. (47:4) Killing, enslaving and robbing them was divinely sanctioned and mandated.

When Muhammad returned from Badr to Medina in triumph, he proceeded to settle scores with his detractors - and resorted to murder. He killed Abu Afak, an elderly Jew who dared question Muhammad's methods, and Asma bint Marwan, a poetess who had mocked him in verse, followed by another poet, Kab Ashraf. They were guilty of verbal insults, providing the Islamic view of the freedom of speech that is valid to this day.

Muhammad next told his followers to "kill any Jew you can lay your hands on." When six of his henchmen murdered an elderly Jew by the name of Abu Rafi in his sleep, they argued whose weapon had actually ended the victim's life. The prophet decided that the owner of the sword that still had traces of food on it was entitled to the credit: Abu Rafi had just eaten his dinner before falling asleep, and the fatal slash went through his stomach. The "Prophet's" attack against the Jewish tribe of Banu-'l-Mustaliq came next. His followers kidnapped 500 of their women, and the night after the battle they staged an orgy of rape. His pogroms culminated in the attack the last Jewish tribe in Medina, Banu Qurayzah. Up to 900 men were decapitated in a ditch, in front of their women and children. Allah praised Muhammad for the way "he struck terror into their hearts." (33:25) The women were subsequently raped. Muhammad chose as his concubine one Raihana Bint Amr, whose father and husband were both slaughtered before her eyes only hours earlier.

Allah's messages concerning "the infidel" subsequently grew ever harsher: "Take him and fetter him and expose him to hell fire." (69:30-37) They "will be killed or crucified, or have their hands and feet on alternate sides cut off." (5:33-34) In this world, for the captured infidel "We have prepared chains, yokes and a blazing fire." (76:4) In the hereafter things get even worse: "garments of fire will be cut out for them, boiling fluid will be poured down their heads. Whereby that which is in their bellies, and their skins too, will be melted. And for them are hooked rods of iron." (22:19-22) One single Kuranic verse, "the Verse of the Sword," (9:5) Islamic scholars agree, abrogates 124 earlier verses - the ones that are quoted most regularly by Islam's apologists to prove its tolerance and benevolence.

Muhammad's progression from a marginalized outsider to a master of life and death produced a transformation of his personality in the decade preceding his death in 633 AD. Allah was invoked as the authority supporting the prophet's daily political objectives and his personal needs. Nowhere was this more obvious than when it came to his exaggerated sensuality. He came up with a Kuranic verse approving his nightly trysts with an Egyptian slave girl and admonishing his jealous wives for their objections to the practice. (66:1-3) Allah's revelation also enabled Muhammad to take his daughter-in-law Zainab as a wife when he lusted after her. (36:37)

Glazov: You discuss how Muhammad married Aisha when she was seven and still playing with dolls and that he had sex with her when she was nine. Can you kindly explain to me what Muslims think about this in their thinking of their Prophet? Every time I try to raise this issue with devout Muslims there is a lot of double-talk and a lot of anger directed at me. I never get anywhere on this issue. Can you give us your wisdom on this?

Trifkovic: There is no "wisdom," there is common decency and natural morality. Yes, Muslims need to be pressed on the rape of Aisha, and on the murders, ethnic cleansing, and genocide. On the whole, many commands of the Kuran and Muhammad's actions and words recorded in the Traditions are morally abhorrent and criminal not only by the standards of our time, but even in the context of 7th century Arabia! They were often considered repugnant by Muhammad's contemporaries. He had to resort to "revelations" as a means of justifying his actions and suppressing the prevalent moral code of his own society. Attacking caravans in the holy month, taking up arms against one's kinsmen, slaughtering prisoners, reserving a lion's share of the booty, murdering people without provocation, violating treaties, and indulging one's sensual passions, was also at odds with the moral standards of his Arab contemporaries. Only the ultimate authority could sanction it, and Allah duly obliged him.

On the whole, Muhammad's practice and constant encouragement of bloodshed are unique in the history of religions. Allah's order to "kill the unbelievers wherever you find them" is an injunction both unambiguous and powerful. The word "genocide" was not even coined when Muhammad conveyed Allah's alleged dictum, "When we decide to destroy a population. then we destroy them utterly." (17:16-17) Disobedient people "we utterly destroyed." (21:11) That Islam sees the world as an open-ended conflict between the Land of Peace (Dar al-Islam) and the Land of War (Dar al-Harb), which must be conquered by jihad, is the most important bequest of Muhammad to history. The end of Jihad is possible only when "there prevail justice and faith in Allah" everywhere. (2:193) Muhammad thus postulated the fundamental illegitimacy of the existence of a non-Muslim world. Muslims could contemplate tactical ceasefires, but never jihad's complete abandonment short of the unbelievers' abject submission.

On its own admission Islam stands or falls with the person of Muhammad, a deeply flawed man by the standards of his own society, as well as those of the Old and New Testaments, both of which he acknowledged as divine revelation; and even by the new law, of which he claimed to be the divinely appointed medium and custodian. The problem of Islam, and the problem of the rest of the world with Islam, is not the remarkable career of Muhammad per se, undoubtedly a "great man" in terms of his impact on human history. It is the religion's claim that the words and acts of its prophet provide the universally valid standard of morality as such, for all time and all men. Our judgment on Muhammad rests on evidence of his followers and faithful admirers. Even on such evidence, the verdict of the civilized world goes against the "prophet." That verdict, once it is passed - and it will be passed - will make the gentle mockery of Muhammad in those cartoons appear as inappropriate as it would be inappropriate today to lampoon Hitler for his out-of-wedlock liaison with Ewa Braun, or for his inability to control flatulence.

FP: Mr. Trifkovic, thank you for joining us today.

Trifkovic: Thank you Jamie.

Sharia in the US?

2006-04-04T02:31:56Z

Will US muslim enclaves appear here? Toss up. Time was, I would have said no way. Now I'm not so sure anymore.

The Islamist Challenge to the U.S. Constitution

by David Kennedy Houck

First in Europe and now in the United States, Muslim groups have petitioned to establish enclaves in which they can uphold and enforce greater compliance to Islamic law. While the U.S. Constitution enshrines the right to religious freedom and the prohibition against a state religion, when it comes to the rights of religious enclaves to impose communal rules, the dividing line is more nebulous. Can U.S. enclaves, homeowner associations, and other groups enforce Islamic law?

Such questions are no longer theoretical. While Muslim organizations first established enclaves in Europe,[1] the trend is now crossing the Atlantic. Some Islamist community leaders in the United States are challenging the principles of assimilation and equality once central to the civil rights movement, seeking instead to live according to a separate but equal philosophy. The Gwynnoaks Muslim Residential Development group, for example, has established an informal enclave in Baltimore because, according to John Yahya Cason, director of the Islamic Education and Community Development Initiative, a Baltimore-based Muslim advocacy group, "there was no community in the U.S. that showed the totality of the essential components of Muslim social, economic, and political structure."[2]

Baltimore is not alone. In August 2004, a local planning commission in Little Rock, Arkansas, granted The Islamic Center for Human Excellence authorization to build an internal Islamic enclave to include a mosque, a school, and twenty-two homes.[3] While the imam, Aquil Hamidullah, says his goal is to create "a clean community, free of alcohol, drugs, and free of gangs,"[4] the implications for U.S. jurisprudence of this and other internal enclaves are greater: while the Little Rock enclave might prevent the sale of alcohol, can it punish possession and in what manner? Can it force all women, be they residents or visitors, to don Islamic hijab (headscarf)? Such enclaves raise the fundamental questions of when, how, and to what extent religious practice may supersede the U.S. Constitution.

The Internal Muslim Enclave

The internal Muslim enclave proposed by the Islamic Center for Human Excellence in Arkansas represents a new direction for Islam in the United States. The group seeks to transform a loosely organized Muslim population into a tangible community presence. The group has foreign financial support: it falls under the umbrella of a much larger Islamic group, "Islam 4 the World," an organization sponsored by Sharjah, one of the constituent emirates of the United Arab Emirates.[5] While the Islamic Center for Human Excellence has yet to articulate detailed plans for its Little Rock enclave, the group's reliance on foreign funding is troublesome. Past investments by the United Arab Emirates' rulers and institutions have promoted radical interpretations of Islam. [6]

The Islamic Center for Human Excellence may seek to segregate schools and offices by gender. The enclave might also exercise broad control upon commerce within its boundaries—provided the economic restrictions did not discriminate against out-of-state interests or create an undue burden upon interstate commerce. But most critically, the enclave could promulgate every internal law—from enforcing strict religious dress codes to banning alcohol possession and music; it could even enforce limits upon religious and political tolerance. Although such concepts are antithetical to a free society, U.S. democracy allows the internal enclave to function beyond the established boundaries of our constitutional framework. At the very least, the permissible parameters of an Islamist enclave are ill defined.

The greater American Muslim community's unapologetic and public manifestation of belief in a separate but equal ideology does not bode well. In September 2004, the New Jersey branch of the Islamic Circle of North America rented Six Flags Adventure Park in New Jersey for "The Great Muslim Adventure Day." The advertisement announcing the event stated: "The entire park for Muslims only." While legal—and perhaps analogous to corporate or other non-religious groups renting facilities, the advertisement expressly implied a mindset that a proof of faith was required for admission to the park. In his weblog, commentator Daniel Pipes raises a relevant and troubling question about the event: because it is designated for Muslims only, "Need one recite the shahada to enter the fairgrounds?"[7]

While U.S. law might give such Muslims-only events the benefit of the doubt, flexibility may not go both ways. There is precedent of Islamists taking advantage of liberal flexibility to more extreme ends. Canada provides a useful example into how Islamist groups can exploit liberal legal tolerance. In 1991, Ontario, Canada, passed a seemingly innocuous law called the "Arbitration Act."[8] This act permitted commercial, religious, or such other designated arbitrators to settle civil disputes outside the Canadian justice system so long as the result did not contradict Canadian law. Like U.S. authorities are beginning to do now, Canadian legislators decided to give religious groups the benefit of the doubt, assuming that they would still hold national law to be paramount.

In October 2003, under the auspices of the Ontario legislation, the Islamic Institute of Civil Justice created Muslim arbitration boards and stated its intent to arbitrate on the basis of Islamic law.[9] A national furor erupted, particularly among Canadian Muslim women's groups that opposed the application of traditional Islamic (Shari‘a) laws that would supersede their far more liberal and egalitarian democratic rights. After nearly two years of legal wrangling, the premier of Ontario, Dalton McGuinty, held that religious-based arbitrations "threaten our common ground," and announced, "There will be no Shari‘a law in Ontario. There will be no religious arbitration in Ontario. There will be one law for all Ontarians."[10] On November 15, 2005, McGuinty's provincial government submitted legislation to amend the arbitration act to abrogate, in effect, all religious arbitration.[11] Requests for Muslim enclaves within larger U.S. communities may signal that U.S. jurisprudence will soon be faced with a similar conundrum. Islamist exceptionalism can abuse the tolerance liberal societies have traditionally extended to interface between religious and secular law.

Prior to the Islamic Institute of Civil Justice demands to impose Shari‘a, the Arbitration Act worked well. Unfortunately for Canadian Jews, the repeal ended state-enforcement of agreements reached by the use of a millennia-old rabbinical court system called beit din (house of law) that had for decades quietly settled marriage, custody, and business disputes. Joel Richler, Ontario region chairman of the Canadian Jewish Congress, expressed his lament: "If there have been any problems flowing from any rabbinical court decisions, I'm not aware of them."[12] Canadian Catholics likewise were stopped from being able to annul marriages according to Canon Law and avoid undue entanglement in civil courts. Abuse of the spirit of the law, though, ended up curtailing local liberty. Rather than soften the edge between religion and state, the Islamic Institute of Civil Justice threatened to eliminate it with the imposition of Shari‘a. The Canadian experience demonstrates how flexibility can backfire when all parties do not seek to uphold basic precepts of tolerance. The Little Rock application raises the specter of a parallel situation. While The Islamic Center for Human Excellence may state it wants to create a clean-living community, might the community's extreme interpretation of Shari‘a force a reconsideration of just how much leeway the U.S. government gives religious communities?

As the Muslim community in the United States grows, an increasingly active Islamist lobby has submitted numerous white papers and amicus briefs to legislators and courts arguing for the religious right of Muslims to apply Shari‘a law, particularly in relation to family law disputes.[13] This looming jurisprudential conflict is significant for it raises issues about the rights of community members to marry outside the community, forced marriages, and the minimum age of brides, and whether wives and daughters may enjoy equal inheritance. In cases of non-family law, it raises the question about whether the testimony of women will be considered on par with that of men.

No previous enclave in U.S. history has ever been so vigorously protected by agents of group identity politics or so adamantly defended by legal watchdogs; nor has any previous religious enclave possessed the potency of more than one billion believers around the world. Islamic-only communities may also benefit from the largess provided by billions of petrol dollars to finance growth. The track record of Saudi and other wealthy Persian Gulf donations and charitable efforts are worrisome. There is a direct correlation between Saudi money received and the spread of intolerant practices. In 2004, for example, the U.S. Treasury Department froze the assets of Al-Haramein Foundation, one of Saudi Arabia's largest nongovernmental organizations, because of its financial links to Al-Qaeda.[14] Additionally, American graduates of Saudi academies advance Wahhabist interpretations of Islam inside the U.S. prison system,[15] and Saudi-subsidized publications promote intolerance inside U.S. mosques.[16]

A Muslim enclave is uniquely perilous because there are few if any internal enclaves that adhere to a polity dedicated to the active abrogation of secular law and the imposition of a supreme religious law. The concept of Shari‘a is so fundamental to Islam, that even today, prominent Muslim jurists argue over whether a Muslim can fully discharge Shari‘a obligations while residing in a non-Muslim territory.[17] Yet, in spite of this apparent conundrum, Muslims have resided peacefully in non-Muslim lands since the seventh century. In the greater context, there may be a breach in the dike for Islamist groups residing in the United States because the Baltimore and Little Rock enclaves must acknowledge the U.S. Constitution as the paramount basis of civil law.

A dissident Islamic sub-community is filled with dichotomous propositions: from the presumed supremacy of Shari‘a-based law over secular law; the melding of religion and polity versus the constitutionally mandated separation of same; to the politics of group and factionalism, versus assimilation and pluralism. To deny the settlement of a Muslim-only community based solely upon prejudices formed after September 11 would be illiberal. But the alternative, opening the door to Islamic enclaves without scrutiny, is as dubious.

The Enclave under U.S. Law

Existing U.S. legal precedent, though, may provide some grounds for handling expansive demands for Islamic enclaves. U.S. legal views of internal enclaves derive from the famous 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision, in which the Supreme Court ruled the concept of separate but equal to be unconstitutional.[18] While the case revolved around the right of black children to attend white schools, it promulgated a concept that is anathema in today's world of multiculturalism: neither the state nor any constituent group could claim equality through separation.

Enclaves can exist, though. As courts have ruled on issues relating to equality under the law and upon the autonomy of religious practice, two distinctive features of internal U.S. enclaves have taken shape: first, the boundaries of the enclave should be recognized by local inhabitants. Second, the enclave cannot supersede the constitutionally protected rights of the citizens of a state.

Because most rights secured by the constitution are protected only against infringement by government action, the Supreme Court has avoided establishing a bright-line test as to the limits of religious liberty. Any religious group or individual seeking to establish an internal enclave has the right to limit residency, promulgate local rules, and perhaps even collect fees or taxes to support nominal community services.

Such enclaves do not hold final sway over the rights of non-residents, however. In Jackson v. Metropolitan Edison Company[19] and Flagg Brothers v. Brooks,[20] the court outlined constitutional protections for private citizens in which any entity, religious or otherwise, exercising governmental authority over private citizens remains subject to the provisions of the First and Fourteenth amendments. In both cases, the court affirmed that citizens of a state retain their right to "due process of law" under the Fourteenth Amendment, even when inside an enclave. These holdings, however, do not prevent enclaves from restricting the individual freedoms of their inhabitants.

The Supreme Court has ruled upon the limits of religious liberty. In Cantwell v. Connecticut, the court outlined the circumstances in which the government could act to restrict religious independence. The court held that the free exercise clause "embraces two concepts—freedom to believe and freedom to act. The first is absolute, but in the nature of things, the second cannot be. Conduct remains subject to regulation for the protection of society."[21]

Christopher L. Eisgruber, professor of law at New York University, explained. He argued that, "the Constitution permits government to nurture ideological sub-communities founded upon premises inconsistent with the constitution's own commitments."[22] He maintained that such dissident sub-communities can provide important "sources of dissent"[23] and asserted that even if an enclave embraced ideals contrary to constitutional ideals, it should still be granted the right to pursue its own vision of good. For example, he wrote:

[Though] it is regrettable that young women in Kiryas Joel [a Satmar Hasidic enclave] will grow up in a starkly sexist culture, and it is regrettable that the Amish children of Yoder will find it very hard to become astronomers or lawyers … it would also be regrettable if the United States were not home to any sub-communities which, like the Satmars or the Amish, rejected principles of justice fundamental to the American regime.[24]

According to Eisgruber, tolerance of the intolerant is fundamental to the freedoms espoused by Western liberal democracy. While Islamists might use such logic to argue for the permissibility of Shari‘a communities, such tolerance has limits. Enclaves do not have carte blanche to act. Both the state and national legislatures must retain control over the extent of accommodation, and there should be no subsidization of the enclave by the government.[25] Such limits ensure that the government can constrain those sub-communities that might espouse more radical, violent, or racist views.[26]

It is usually when the U.S. government moves to uphold the rule of law that most Americans first learn of an internal enclave. Few Americans knew of the philosophy espoused by anti-government activist Randy Weaver until 1992 when the FBI and the Bureau of Alcohol and Firearms raided his compound at Ruby Ridge, Idaho, killing Vicki Weaver, their infant son, Sam, and the family dog.[27] Nor did many Americans know about David Koresh and his religious views until a raid the following year on the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas, in which a resulting fire killed fifty adults and twenty-five children under the age of fifteen.[28] While tragic, such events involved cults or political splinter groups. The growth of Muslim enclaves raises the specter of such conflicts occurring on a much larger scale.

While the court has interpreted the establishment clause to empower the government to constrain dissident sub-communities when necessary to protect public safety, it has been wary of addressing legal issues requiring intrusion upon the religious polity. Because the First Amendment provides for religious freedom, the court has confined itself to ruling upon three basic issues: property disputes between national religious hierarchical organizations with affiliated breakaway entities; accommodations under the free exercise clause; and the prohibition against the establishment of a state religion. New challenges, though, may lead to new interpretations.
The Antithesis to Democracy

Is concern over internal Muslim enclaves justified? On their face, the fundamental principles of the internal Muslim enclave are no more invidious than any other religious enclave. But ideology matters. Many proponents of an Islamic polity promote an ideology at odds with U.S. constitutional jurisprudence and the prohibition against the establishment of a state-sponsored religion. The refusal to recognize federal law makes Islamist enclaves more akin to Ruby Ridge than to the Hasidic and Amish cases cited by Eisgruber.

Muslim theologians describe Islam not only as a religion but also as a system of state. The Qur'an—viewed by Muslims as the word of God—is replete with instructions about governance. An enclave promoting Islamic mores does not necessarily restrict itself to a social atmosphere but also one of governance. Traditional Islamic law controls the most basic aspects of everyday life and may make any Islamic enclave irreconcilable with the basic presumptions of Western liberal democracy and secular law.

While many American Muslims practice Islam and embrace the fundamental principles of the U.S. Constitution, others do not. There are consistent attempts by Islamist elements overseas to strengthen their own radical interpretation of Islam at the expense of moderation and tolerance. Saudi donors, for example, have propagated the ideology of Islamism, which seeks to interweave a narrow and often intolerant interpretation of religion into an all-encompassing political ideology. The number of imams and jihadists who have been outspoken in identifying the supremacy of Shari‘a to democracy underlines the incompatibility of Islamism and democracy. The late Saudi theologian, Sheikh Muhammad bin Ibrahim al-Jubair, for example, stated,

Only one ambition is worthy of Islam, to save the world from the curse of democracy: to teach men that they cannot rule themselves on the basis of man-made laws. Mankind has strayed from the path of God, we must return to that path or face certain annihilation.[29]

Prior to Iraq's January 30, 2005 elections, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, leader of Al-Qaeda in Iraq, released an audiotape in which he declared war upon democracy and denounced its tenets as "the very essence of heresy, polytheism, and error."[30] Nor is Islamist antipathy for democracy limited to popular elections. According to a Saudi publication distributed at a San Diego mosque, "[Democracy is] responsible for all the horrible wars … more than 130 wars with more than 120 million people dead [in the twentieth century alone]; not counting victims of poverty, hunger and disease."[31] Such sentiments reflect a common theme among Islamists: democracy is the antithesis to everything pious and pure in Islam; and, in truth, democracy is the direct and substantial causal effect of Muslim suffering and injustice in the world today.

This does not mean that Islamists are unwilling to use democracy for their ends. But while they accept the trappings of democracy, they continue to reject its principles because the Shari‘a, to them the perfect rule of law, cannot be abrogated or altered by the shifting moods of a secular electorate. Mohamed Elhachmi Hamdi, editor-in-chief of the pan-Arab weekly Al-Mustakillah, explained,

The heart of the matter is that no Islamic state can be legitimate in the eyes of its subjects without obeying the main teachings of the Shari‘a. A secular government might coerce obedience, but Muslims will not abandon their belief that state affairs should be supervised by the just teachings of the holy law.[32]

He could draw from plenty of examples. In 1992, for example, Ali Balhadj, a leader of the Islamic Salvation Front in Algeria, declared, "When we are in power, there will be no more elections because God will be ruling."[33] While mayor of Istanbul, Islamist Turkish politician Recep Tayyip Erdoğan quipped, "For us, democracy is a streetcar. We would go as far as we could, and then get off."[34] As he eviscerates the judiciary, many Turks wonder about his sincerity.[35]

Experience abroad is relevant, as it goes to the heart of the sincerity of proponents of the Little Rock and Baltimore enclaves, an issue compounded by the willingness to accept donations from Persian Gulf financiers.

Conclusion

How Muslims reconcile Islamic polity within the confines of Western liberal democracy is an unresolved issue. This process will take years to evolve and is likely to convulse in further violent episodes. Presently, many Muslims reject wholesale the notion of a dominant secular law and instead seek the imposition of a pan-Islamist state under the guidance of Shari‘a. These Islamists view secular modernity and the democratic practices of radical egalitarianism, individual rights, and free exercise of religion as a direct and substantial threat to their belief system, and they are intent on employing violence against the West for the foreseeable future. The remainder and majority of the Muslim world must reject nihilism and engage in widespread debate regarding Islam's role within the world community.

The local planning commission in Little Rock, Arkansas, might proceed with the proposed Muslim enclave, but the Arkansas courts and its legislature should not abdicate its responsibilities to ensure that Western liberal rights and protections remain supreme. The government should monitor both the rhetoric and behavior of these communities. As the Supreme Court stated in Cantwell: the freedom to believe is absolute, but the freedom to act, in the nature of things, cannot be, especially as to the safety and preservation of the American democracy.[36]

David Kennedy Houck is an attorney at Houck O'Brien LLC, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

[1] See, for example, discussion of the Sonali Gardens project in London, The Evening Standard (London), Apr. 27, 2004.
[2] Marya Morris, "Muslim Community Development Initiatives," American Planning Association, Apr. 25, 2004.
[3] "Muslim Community Development Plans," Fox 16 News, Aug. 26, 2004.
[4] Ibid.
[5] Information on the Arkansas Islamic Center for Human Excellence website, accessed on Nov. 2, 2005, linked visitors to the "Islam 4 the World" website.
[6] U.S. Department of State, news release, Feb. 19, 2004.
[7] Daniel Pipes, "Muslims Only!" at Six Flags Adventure Park," www.DanielPipes.org, Sept. 10, 2004.
[8] "Arbitration Act," S.O. 1991, "Ontario Statutes and Regulations," e-Laws News, c. 17.
[9] Daniel Pipes, "Enforce Islamic Law in Canada?" The New York Sun, Sept. 27, 2005.
[10] Canadian Press News Agency, Sept. 11, 2005.
[11] Ontario Ministry of the Attorney General, news release, Nov. 15, 2005.
[12] Canadian Press News Agency, Sept. 11, 2005.
[13] See, Asifa Quaraishi and Najeeba Syeed-Miller, "No Altars: A Survey of Islamic Family Law in the United States," Islamic Family Law project, Law and Religion Program, Emory University, Atlanta, Ga.; American Muslims Intent on Learning and Activism (AMILA) in partnership with the American Civil Liberties Union submitted an amicus brief to the Supreme Court on the juvenile aspect of the death penalty that included citations to Shari'a law.
[14] U.S. Department of State, news release, Feb. 19, 2004.
[15] The Wall Street Journal, Feb. 5, 2003.
[16] Khaleel Mohammed, "Assessing English Translations of the Qu'ran," Middle East Quarterly, Spring 2005, pp. 59-71.
[17] Khaled Abou El Fadl, "Islamic Law and Muslim Minorities: The Juristic Discourse on Muslim Minorities from the Second/Eighth to the Eleventh/Seventeenth Centuries," Islamic Law and Society, 1:2(1994): 141-4.
[18] Brown et al. v. Board of Education of Topeka, 347 U.S. 483 (1954).
[19] Jackson v. Metropolitan Edison Company, 419 U.S. 345 (1974).
[20] Flagg Brothers v. Brooks, 436 U.S. 149 (1978).
[21] Cantwell v. Connecticut, 310 U.S 296 (1940), pp. 303-4.
[22] Christopher L. Eisgruber, "The Constitutional Value of Assimilation," The Columbia Law Review, Jan. 1996, pp. 87-8.
[23] Ibid., p. 91.
[24] Ibid.
[25] Ibid., pp. 89, 91.
[26] Ibid., pp. 87, 92.
[27] CNN News, Aug. 21, 1997.
[28] "The Aftermath of the April 19 Fire," Report to the Deputy Attorney General on the Events at Waco, Texas (redacted version: Oct. 8, 1993), U.S. Department of Justice, chap. XIII.
[29] Amir Taheri, "Islam and Democracy: The Impossible Union," The Sunday Times (London), May 23, 2004.
[30] Nimrod Raphaeli, "The Sheikh of the Slaughterers": Abu Mus'ab Al-Zarqawi and the Al-Qa'ida Connection," Middle East Research Media Institute (MEMRI), Inquiry and Analysis Series, no. 231, July 1, 2005.
[31] "Anti-American," Saudi Publications on Hate Ideology Invade American Mosques, Center for Religious Freedom, Freedom House, chap. 4, p. 4.
[32] Mohamed Elhachmi Hamdi, "Islam and Liberal Democracy: The Limits of the Western Model," Journal of Democracy, Apr. 1996, pp. 81-5.
[33] Michael Rubin, "Islamists Are Intrinsically Anti-democratic," www.bitterlemons-international.org, June 2, 2005.
[34] Hürriyet (Istanbul), Apr. 23, 1998.
[35] Milliyet (Istanbul), June 6, 2005.
[36] Cantwell, pp. 303-4.

I have it.

2006-04-04T02:19:58Z

Perhaps these peaceful muslims can save our planet from global warming by getting rid of everything modern - kind of like getting back to basics. So, invasion by these death-loving islamobot barbarians could be a good thing.

Riiight.

Islam’s Imperial Dreams

Efraim Karsh

When satirical depictions of the prophet Muhammad in a Danish newspaper sparked a worldwide wave of Muslim violence early this year, observers naturally focused on the wanton destruction of Western embassies, businesses, and other institutions. Less attention was paid to the words that often accompanied the riots—words with ominous historical echoes. “Hurry up and apologize to our nation, because if you do not, you will regret it,” declared Khaled Mash’al, the leader of Hamas, fresh from the Islamist group’s sweeping victory in the Palestinian elections:

This is because our nation is progressing and is victorious. . . . By Allah, you will be defeated. . . . Tomorrow, our nation will sit on the throne of the world. This is not a figment of the imagination but a fact. Tomorrow we will lead the world, Allah willing. Apologize today, before remorse will do you no good.

Among Islamic radicals, such gloating about the prowess and imminent triumph of their “nation” is as commonplace as recitals of the long and bitter catalog of grievances related to the loss of historical Muslim dominion. Osama bin Laden has repeatedly alluded to the collapse of Ottoman power at the end of World War I and, with it, the abolition of the Ottoman caliphate. “What America is tasting now,” he declared in the immediate wake of 9/11, “is only a copy of what we have tasted. Our Islamic nation has been tasting the same for more than 80 years, of humiliation and disgrace, its sons killed and their blood spilled, its sanctities desecrated.” Ayman al-Zawahiri, bin Laden’s top deputy, has pointed still farther into the past, lamenting “the tragedy of al-Andalus”—that is, the end of Islamic rule in Spain in 1492.

These historical claims are in turn frequently dismissed by Westerners as delusional, a species of mere self-aggrandizement or propaganda. But the Islamists are perfectly serious, and know what they are doing. Their rhetoric has a millennial warrant, both in doctrine and in fact, and taps into a deep undercurrent that has characterized the political culture of Islam from the beginning. Though tempered and qualified in different places and at different times, the Islamic longing for unfettered suzerainty has never disappeared, and has resurfaced in our own day with a vengeance. It goes by the name of empire.

“I was ordered to fight all men until they say, ‘There is no god but Allah.’” With these farewell words, the prophet Muhammad summed up the international vision of the faith he brought to the world. As a universal religion, Islam envisages a global political order in which all humankind will live under Muslim rule as either believers or subject communities. In order to achieve this goal, it is incumbent on all free, male, adult Muslims to carry out an uncompromising “struggle in the path of Allah,” or jihad. As the 14th-century historian and philosopher Abdel Rahman ibn Khaldun wrote, “In the Muslim community, the jihad is a religious duty because of the universalism of the Islamic mission and the obligation [to convert] everybody to Islam either by persuasion or by force.”

As a historical matter, the birth of Islam was inextricably linked with empire. Unlike Christianity and the Christian kingdoms that once existed under or alongside it, Islam has never distinguished between temporal and religious powers, which were combined in the person of Muhammad. Having fled from his hometown of Mecca to Medina in 622 c.e. to become a political and military leader rather than a private preacher, Muhammad spent the last ten years of his life fighting to unify Arabia under his rule. Indeed, he devised the concept of jihad shortly after his migration to Medina as a means of enticing his local followers to raid Meccan caravans. Had it not been for his sudden death, he probably would have expanded his reign well beyond the peninsula.

The Qur’anic revelations during Muhammad’s Medina years abound with verses extolling the virtues of jihad, as do the countless sayings and traditions (hadith) attributed to the prophet. Those who participate in this holy pursuit are to be generously rewarded, both in this life and in the afterworld, where they will reside in shaded and ever-green gardens, indulged by pure women. Accordingly, those killed while waging jihad should not be mourned: “Allah has bought from the believers their soul and their possessions against the gift of Paradise; they fight in the path of Allah; they kill and are killed. . . . So rejoice in the bargain you have made with Him; that is the mighty triumph.”

But the doctrine’s appeal was not just otherworldly. By forbidding fighting and raiding within the community of believers (the umma), Muhammad had deprived the Arabian tribes of a traditional source of livelihood. For a time, the prophet could rely on booty from non-Muslims as a substitute for the lost war spoils, which is why he never went out of his way to convert all of the tribes seeking a place in his Pax Islamica. Yet given his belief in the supremacy of Islam and his relentless commitment to its widest possible dissemination, he could hardly deny conversion to those wishing to undertake it. Once the whole of Arabia had become Muslim, a new source of wealth and an alternative outlet would have to be found for the aggressive energies of the Arabian tribes, and it was, in the Fertile Crescent and the Levant.

Within twelve years of Muhammad’s death, a Middle Eastern empire, stretching from Iran to Egypt and from Yemen to northern Syria, had come into being under the banner of Islam. By the early 8th century, the Muslims had hugely extended their grip to Central Asia and much of the Indian subcontinent, had laid siege to the Byzantine capital of Constantinople, and had overrun North Africa and Spain. Had they not been contained in 732 at the famous battle of Poitiers in west central France, they might well have swept deep into northern Europe.

Though sectarianism and civil war divided the Muslim world in the generations after Muhammad, the basic dynamic of Islam remained expansionist. The short-lived Umayyad dynasty (661-750) gave way to the ostensibly more pious Abbasid caliphs, whose readiness to accept non-Arabs solidified Islam’s hold on its far-flung possessions. From their imperial capital of Baghdad, the Abbasids ruled, with waning authority, until the Mongol invasion of 1258. The most powerful of their successors would emerge in Anatolia, among the Ottoman Turks who invaded Europe in the mid-14th century and would conquer Constantinople in 1453, destroying the Byzantine empire and laying claim to virtually all of the Balkan peninsula and the eastern Mediterranean.

Like their Arab predecessors, the Ottomans were energetic empire-builders in the name of jihad. By the early 16th century, they had conquered Syria and Egypt from the Mamluks, the formidable slave soldiers who had contained the Mongols and destroyed the Crusader kingdoms. Under Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent, they soon turned northward. By the middle of the 17th century they seemed poised to overrun Christian Europe, only to be turned back in fierce fighting at the gates of Vienna in 1683—on September 11, of all dates. Though already on the defensive by the early 18th century, the Ottoman empire—the proverbial “sick man of Europe”—would endure another 200 years. Its demise at the hands of the victorious European powers of World War I, to say nothing of the work of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the father of modern Turkish nationalism, finally brought an end both to the Ottoman caliphate itself and to Islam’s centuries-long imperial reach.

To Islamic historians, the chronicles of Muslim empire represent a model of shining religious zeal and selfless exertion in the cause of Allah. Many Western historians, for their part, have been inclined to marvel at the perceived sophistication and tolerance of Islamic rule, praising the caliphs’ cultivation of the arts and sciences and their apparent willingness to accommodate ethnic and religious minorities. There is some truth in both views, but neither captures the deeper and often more callous impulses at work in the expanding umma set in motion by Muhammad. For successive generations of Islamic rulers, imperial dominion was dictated not by universalistic religious principles but by their prophet’s vision of conquest and his summons to fight and subjugate unbelievers.

That the worldly aims of Islam might conflict with its moral and spiritual demands was evident from the start of the caliphate. Though the Umayyad monarchs portrayed their constant wars of expansion as “jihad in the path of Allah,” this was largely a façade, concealing an increasingly secular and absolutist rule. Lax in their attitude toward Islamic practices and mores, they were said to have set aside special days for drinking alcohol—specifically forbidden by the prophet—and showed little inhibition about appearing nude before their boon companions and female singers.

The coup staged by the Abbasids in 747-49 was intended to restore Islam’s true ways and undo the godless practices of their predecessors; but they too, like the Umayyads, were first and foremost imperial monarchs. For the Abbasids, Islam was a means to consolidating their jurisdiction and enjoying the fruits of conquest. They complied with the stipulations of the nascent religious law (shari’a) only to the extent that it served their needs, and indulged in the same vices—wine, singing girls, and sexual license—that had ruined the reputation of the Umayyads.

Of particular importance to the Abbasids was material splendor. On the occasion of his nephew’s coronation as the first Abbasid caliph, Dawud ibn Ali had proclaimed, “We did not rebel in order to grow rich in silver and in gold.” Yet it was precisely the ever-increasing pomp of the royal court that would underpin Abbasid prestige. The gem-studded dishes of the caliph’s table, the gilded curtains of the palace, the golden tree and ruby-eyed golden elephant that adorned the royal courtyard were a few of the opulent possessions that bore witness to this extravagance.

The riches of the empire, moreover, were concentrated in the hands of the few at the expense of the many. While the caliph might bestow thousands of dirhams on a favorite poet for reciting a few lines, ordinary laborers in Baghdad carried home a dirham or two a month. As for the empire’s more distant subjects, the caliphs showed little interest in their conversion to the faith, preferring instead to colonize their lands and expropriate their wealth and labor. Not until the third Islamic century did the bulk of these populations embrace the religion of their imperial masters, and this was a process emanating from below—an effort by non-Arabs to escape paying tribute and to remove social barriers to their advancement. To make matters worse, the metropolis plundered the resources of the provinces, a practice inaugurated at the time of Muhammad and reaching its apogee under the Abbasids. Combined with the government’s weakening control of the periphery, this shameless exploitation triggered numerous rebellions throughout the empire.

Tension between the center and the periphery was, indeed, to become the hallmark of Islam’s imperial experience. Even in its early days, under the Umayyads, the empire was hopelessly overextended, largely because of inadequate means of communication and control. Under the Abbasids, a growing number of provinces fell under the sway of local dynasties. With no effective metropolis, the empire was reduced to an agglomeration of entities united only by the overarching factors of language and religion. Though the Ottomans temporarily reversed the trend, their own imperial ambitions were likewise eventually thwarted by internal fragmentation.

In the long history of Islamic empire, the wide gap between delusions of grandeur and the centrifugal forces of localism would be bridged time and again by force of arms, making violence a key element of Islamic political culture. No sooner had Muhammad died than his successor, Abu Bakr, had to suppress a widespread revolt among the Arabian tribes. Twenty-three years later, the head of the umma, the caliph Uthman ibn Affan, was murdered by disgruntled rebels; his successor, Ali ibn Abi Talib, was confronted for most of his reign with armed insurrections, most notably by the governor of Syria, Mu’awiya ibn Abi Sufian, who went on to establish the Umayyad dynasty after Ali’s assassination. Mu’awiya’s successors managed to hang on to power mainly by relying on physical force, and were consumed for most of their reign with preventing or quelling revolts in the diverse corners of their empire. The same was true for the Abbasids during the long centuries of their sovereignty.

Western academics often hold up the Ottoman empire as an exception to this earlier pattern. In fact the caliphate did deal relatively gently with its vast non-Muslim subject populations—provided that they acquiesced in their legal and institutional inferiority in the Islamic order of things. When these groups dared to question their subordinate status, however, let alone attempt to break free from the Ottoman yoke, they were viciously put down. In the century or so between Napoleon’s conquests in the Middle East and World War I, the Ottomans embarked on an orgy of bloodletting in response to the nationalist aspirations of their European subjects. The Greek war of independence of the 1820’s, the Danubian uprisings of 1848 and the attendant Crimean war, the Balkan explosion of the 1870’s, the Greco-Ottoman war of 1897—all were painful reminders of the costs of resisting Islamic imperial rule.

Nor was such violence confined to Ottoman Europe. Turkey’s Afro-Asiatic provinces, though far less infected with the nationalist virus, were also scenes of mayhem and destruction. The Ottoman army or its surrogates brought force to bear against Wahhabi uprisings in Mesopotamia and the Levant in the early 19th century, against civil strife in Lebanon in the 1840’s (culminating in the 1860 massacres in Mount Lebanon and Damascus), and against a string of Kurdish rebellions. In response to the national awakening of the Armenians in the 1890’s, Constantinople killed tens of thousands—a taste of the horrors that lay ahead for the Armenians during World War I.

The legacy of this imperial experience is not difficult to discern in today’s Islamic world. Physical force has remained the main if not the sole instrument of political discourse in the Middle East. Throughout the region, absolute leaders still supersede political institutions, and citizenship is largely synonymous with submission; power is often concentrated in the hands of small, oppressive minorities; religious, ethnic, and tribal conflicts abound; and the overriding preoccupation of sovereigns is with their own survival.

At the domestic level, these circumstances have resulted in the world’s most illiberal polities. Political dissent is dealt with by repression, and ethnic and religious differences are settled by internecine strife and murder. One need only mention, among many instances, Syria’s massacre of 20,000 of its Muslim activists in the early 1980’s, or the brutal treatment of Iraq’s Shiite and Kurdish communities until the 2003 war, or the genocidal campaign now being conducted in Darfur by the government of Sudan and its allied militias. As for foreign policy in the Middle East, it too has been pursued by means of crude force, ranging from terrorism and subversion to outright aggression, with examples too numerous and familiar to cite.

Reinforcing these habits is the fact that, to this day, Islam has retained its imperial ambitions. The last great Muslim empire may have been destroyed and the caliphate left vacant, but the dream of regional and world domination has remained very much alive. Even the ostensibly secular doctrine of pan-Arabism has been effectively Islamic in its ethos, worldview, and imperialist vision. In the words of Nuri Said, longtime prime minister of Iraq and a prominent early champion of this doctrine: “Although Arabs are naturally attached to their native land, their nationalism is not confined by boundaries. It is an aspiration to restore the great tolerant civilization of the early caliphate.”

That this “great tolerant civilization” reached well beyond today’s Middle East is not lost on those who hope for its restoration. Like the leaders of al Qaeda, many Muslims and Arabs unabashedly pine for the reconquest of Spain and consider their 1492 expulsion from the country a grave historical injustice waiting to be undone. Indeed, as immigration and higher rates of childbirth have greatly increased the number of Muslims within Europe itself over the past several decades, countries that were never ruled by the caliphate have become targets of Muslim imperial ambition. Since the late 1980’s, Islamists have looked upon the growing population of French Muslims as proof that France, too, has become a part of the House of Islam. In Britain, even the more moderate elements of the Muslim community are candid in setting out their aims. As the late Zaki Badawi, a doyen of interfaith dialogue in the UK, put it, “Islam is a universal religion. It aims to bring its message to all corners of the earth. It hopes that one day the whole of humanity will be one Muslim community.”

Whether in its militant or its more benign version, this world-conquering agenda continues to meet with condescension and denial on the part of many educated Westerners. To intellectuals, foreign-policy experts, and politicians alike, “empire” and “imperialism” are categories that apply exclusively to the European powers and, more recently, to the United States. In this view of things, Muslims, whether in the Middle East or elsewhere, are merely objects—the long-suffering victims of the aggressive encroachments of others. Lacking an internal, autonomous dynamic of its own, their history is rather a function of their unhappy interaction with the West, whose obligation it is to make amends. This perspective dominated the widespread explanation of the 9/11 attacks as only a response to America’s (allegedly) arrogant and self-serving foreign policy, particularly with respect to the Arab-Israeli conflict.

As we have seen, however, Islamic history has been anything but reactive. From Muhammad to the Ottomans, the story of Islam has been the story of the rise and fall of an often astonishing imperial aggressiveness and, no less important, of never quiescent imperial dreams. Even as these dreams have repeatedly frustrated any possibility for the peaceful social and political development of the Arab-Muslim world, they have given rise to no less repeated fantasies of revenge and restoration and to murderous efforts to transform fantasy into fact. If, today, America is reviled in the Muslim world, it is not because of its specific policies but because, as the preeminent world power, it blocks the final realization of this same age-old dream of regaining, in Zawahiri’s words, the “lost glory” of the caliphate.

Nor is the vision confined to a tiny extremist fringe. This we saw in the overwhelming support for the 9/11 attacks throughout the Arab and Islamic worlds, in the admiring evocations of bin Laden’s murderous acts during the crisis over the Danish cartoons, and in such recent findings as the poll indicating significant reservoirs of sympathy among Muslims in Britain for the “feelings and motives” of the suicide bombers who attacked London last July. In the historical imagination of many Muslims and Arabs, bin Laden represents nothing short of the new incarnation of Saladin, defeater of the Crusaders and conqueror of Jerusalem. In this sense, the House of Islam’s war for world mastery is a traditional, indeed venerable, quest that is far from over.

To the contrary, now that this war has itself met with a so far determined counterattack by the United States and others, and with a Western intervention in the heart of the House of Islam, it has escalated to a new stage of virulence. In many Middle Eastern countries, Islamist movements, and movements appealing to traditionalist Muslims, are now jockeying fiercely for positions of power, both against the Americans and against secular parties. For the Islamists, the stakes are very high indeed, for if the political elites of the Middle East and elsewhere were ever to reconcile themselves to the reality that there is no Arab or Islamic “nation,” but only modern Muslim states with destinies and domestic responsibilities of their own, the imperialist dream would die.

It is in recognition of this state of affairs that Zawahiri wrote his now famous letter to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the head of al Qaeda in Iraq, in July 2005. If, Zawahiri instructed his lieutenant, al Qaeda’s strategy for Iraq and elsewhere were to succeed, it would have to take into account the growing thirst among many Arabs for democracy and a normal life, and strive not to alienate popular opinion through such polarizing deeds as suicide attacks on fellow Muslims. Only by harnessing popular support, Zawahiri concluded, would it be possible to come to power by means of democracy itself, thereby to establish jihadist rule in Iraq, and then to move onward to conquer still larger and more distant realms and impose the writ of Islam far and wide.

Something of the same logic clearly underlies the carefully plotted rise of Hamas in the Palestinian Authority, the (temporarily thwarted) attempt by the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt to exploit the demand for free elections there, and the accession of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in Iran. Indeed, as reported by Mark MacKinnon in the Toronto Globe & Mail, some analysts now see a new “axis of Islam” arising in the Middle East, uniting Hizballah, Hamas, Iran, Syria, the Muslim Brotherhood, elements of Iraq’s Shiites, and others in an anti-American, anti-Israel alliance backed by Russia.

Whether or not any such structure exists or can be forged, the fact is that the fuel of Islamic imperialism remains as volatile as ever, and is very far from having burned itself out. To deny its force is the height of folly, and to imagine that it can be appeased or deflected is to play into its hands. Only when it is defeated, and when the faith of Islam is no longer a tool of Islamic political ambition, will the inhabitants of Muslim lands, and the rest of the world, be able to look forward to a future less burdened by Saladins and their gory dreams.

Efraim Karsh is head of Mediterranean Studies at King’s College, University of London, and the author of, among other works, Arafat’s War, Saddam Hussein: A Political Biography, and Empires of the Sand: The Struggle for Mastery in the Middle East. His new book, Islamic Imperialism: A History, on which this article is based, is about to be published by Yale.

Central Park Coyote Dead

2006-04-01T05:10:32Z

On Fox News, they said that the Central Park coyote had been killed during a "routine tagging accident".

WTF!!??

He was captured 3/22 and died on 3/31. What were you guys doing with this coyote for 9 DAYS!??!!!

You had him bagged, why couldn't you take him upstate like you said you were going to do and let him go?

Why did you mess around with him until you killed him?

He made you all look incompetent. You don't look incompetent anymore.

"A coyote that roamed Central Park for several days, delighting New Yorkers and making fools out of New York cops and wildlife officials, has been caught."

"The coyote first appeared on Sunday and has been feasting on ducks and other birds ever since. Local news stations have shown comical footage of police and park rangers running Elmer Fudd-like through Central Park in hot pursuit of the animal."

"Unlike other large cities like Chicago or Los Angeles, New York doesn't have much of a coyote problem. That's because you can only get to Manhattan by bridge, tunnel, or a very expensive cab from La Guardia."

"He's a very adventurous coyote to travel to midtown Manhattan," said Parks Commissioner Adrian Benepe.

"The coyote eluded Parks officials and police officers at every turn, jumping fences, swimming across ponds, and scampering around skating rinks to avoid capture. But then its luck ran out."

"It was tranquilized near the 79th Street traverse, and will be shipped to a wildlife preserve upstate."

Liking Harper more and more.

2006-04-01T00:08:14Z

Perhaps Canadian PM Harper's huge cajones will make Bush jealous. Or not.

What next?

2006-03-31T22:38:28Z

More insanity in an insane world.

ELECTRONIC VOTING
Forget Dubai -- worry about Smartmatic instead
BY RICHARD BRAND

The greater threat to our nation's security comes not from Dubai and its pro-Western government, but from Venezuela, where software engineers with links to the leftist, anti-American regime of Hugo Chávez are programming electronic voting machines that will soon power U.S. elections.

Congress spent two weeks overreacting to news that Dubai Ports World would operate several American ports, including Miami's, but a better target for their hysteria would be the acquisition by Smartmatic International of California-based Sequoia Voting Systems, whose machines serve millions of U.S. voters. That Smartmatic -- which has been accused by Venezuela's opposition of helping Chávez rig elections in his favor -- now controls a major U.S. e-voting firm should give pause to anybody who thinks that replacing our antiquated butterfly ballots and hanging chads will restore Americans' faith in our electoral process.

Consider the lack of confidence Venezuelans have in their voting system. Anti-Chávez groups have such little faith in Smartmatic's machines that they refuse to run candidates in elections anymore as reports surface of fraud and irregularities from Chávez's 2004 victory in a recall referendum. Yet somehow Smartmatic International and its Venezuelan owners were able to purchase Sequoia last year without the deal receiving any scrutiny from federal regulators -- including the Treasury Department's Committee on Foreign Investments in the United States (CFIUS), which is tasked with determining whether foreign takeovers pose security risks.

CFIUS generally investigates such transactions only when the parties voluntarily submit themselves to review -- which Smartmatic did not do. But it retains the authority to initiate an investigation when it suspects a takeover compromises national security.

Smartmatic has a brief but controversial history. The company was started in Caracas during the late 1990s by engineers Antonio Mugica and Alfredo Anzola. They worked out of downtown Caracas providing small-scale technology services to Latin American banks. Despite having no election experience, the tiny company rocketed from obscurity in 2004 after it was awarded a $100 million contract by the Chávez-dominated National Electoral Council to replace Venezuela's electronic voting machines for the recall vote.

When the council announced the deal, it disingenuously described Smartmatic as a Florida company, though Smartmatic's main operations were in Caracas and the firm had incorporated only a small office in Boca Raton. It then emerged that Smartmatic's ''partner'' in the deal, Bizta Corp., also directed by Anzola and Mugica, was partly owned by the Venezuelan government through a series of intermediary shell corporations. Venezuela initially denied its investment but eventually sold its stake.

When the vote finally came, exit polls by New York's Penn, Schoen & Berland Associates showed Chávez had been defeated 59 to 41 percent; however, when official tallies were announced, the numbers flipped to 58-42 in favor of Chávez. Venezuela's electoral council briefly posted machine-by-machine tallies on the Internet but removed them as mathematicians from MIT, Harvard and other universities began questioning suspicious patterns in the results.

Flush with cash from its Venezuelan adventures, Smartmatic International incorporated in Delaware last year and purchased Sequoia, announcing the deal as a merger between two U.S. companies.

Smartmatic says the recall vote was clean and that it is independent of the Chávez government. Responding to my inquiries, Smartmatic-Sequoias sent a written statement: ``Sequoia's products consist only of voting devices and systems, all of which must be federally and state tested and certified prior to use in an election. As Sequoia's products do not have military, defense or national security applications, they do not fall within the parameters of the matters governed by CFIUS.''

In fact, Smartmatic International is owned by a Netherlands corporation, which is in turn owned by a Curacao corporation, which is in turn held by a number of Curacao trusts controlled by proxy holders who represent unnamed investors, almost certainly among them Venezuelans Mugica and Anzola and possibly others.

Why Smartmatic has chosen yet again to abuse the corporate form apparently to conceal the nationality and identity of its true owners is a question that should worry anyone who votes using one of its machines. Congress panicked upon hearing that our ports would be run by an American ally, Dubai, but never asked whether America's actual enemies in Venezuela have been able to acquire influence in our electoral process.

Richard Brand is a second-year law student at New York University and a former staff writer for The Miami Herald.

SSDD

2006-03-31T22:01:59Z

Iran has developed a new method of delivering their "peaceful nuclear power", the Fajr-3, which is good for 1,250 miles. Not to be outdone, the head of the Arab League called on Arab states to develop nuclear power.

Tuesday, the PA gifted the Israelis with a Katyusha rocket which landed in an open field south of Ashkelon. The PA has many more such presents in store, possibly even better aimed.

France is having oh so peaceful riots again.

Bush is in Cancun with Fox and Harper. Hopefully, Stephen Harper will not be contaminated. Why is Chevron CEO David O'Reilly at these meetings? Who else is there? Looks as though this is just a case of big money yukking it up in paradise with their hich-price puppets. If Bush is happy, which by the pics he is, the American people are being screwed again. I can't wait to find out which right or liberty of ours Bush has given away now.

Hostage Jill Carroll has only glowing things to say about her kidnappers, but with Stockholm Syndrome and threats against her life, her real story may not emerge for quite some time.

It's too bad Afghanistan's Christian, Abdul Rahman was whisked away to freedom in ITALY. It speaks volumes to me that America did not speak out forcefully to save him, rescue him, and bring him to America. At least he is free. Now what about the other Christians imprisioned for their faith in that hellhole of a country that we "rescued" from the Taliban?

Cuimhnich

2006-03-31T05:23:41Z

Remembered now only in history.

400 years of glory and valour are consigned to history
The Scotsman Wednesday March 29, 03:00 AM

IN BASRA, the sun beat down on the soldiers gathered in the dust of Shaibah camp. In Edinburgh, a light drizzle fell on the men and women lined up on parade at the top of the castle. In Glasgow, Baghdad, Omagh, Belfast, Cyprus and Canterbury, similar ceremonies were taking place. As midday struck in Scotland, the country's old regiments slipped into history.

Gone were the Royal Scots - almost 400 years old - the Black Watch, the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders, the Royal Highland Fusiliers, the King's Own Scottish Borderers and the Highlanders. In their place, to a flurry of pipes and drums, was the new Royal Regiment of Scotland.

It was certainly not the first merger imposed on Scotland's soldiery, but it has proved to be one of the most controversial. Yesterday, however, the army was putting a brave face on it.

As the moment drew near, a large crowd had gathered around the edges of Edinburgh Castle's Crown Square. Kenny Mackenzie, the Royal Scots' Regimental Sergeant Major, marched smartly into the square and snapped to attention.

"By the right, quick march," the order came, and from around the corner came the new regimental band, belting out the tunes of the Athol Highlander and Glendaruel Highlander. Behind them, a carefully chosen cross-section of the new regiment marched into the Crown Square, wheeled right and came to a halt.

They had been practising hard, apparently, but perhaps in keeping with the furore surrounding the merger, not all were in step. Their boots hit the cobbles like a burst of machine gun fire, rather than the single sharp report that the sergeant major was hoping for. He made them suffer by shuffling them backwards and forwards for a couple of minutes, barking out instructions until he was happy.

Still, as Major-General Euan Loudon, the new regiment's most senior officer was to say, change may be painful.

"Parade will remove head dress", RSM Mackenzie yelled, and they whipped off the old caps. Two more soldiers appeared, bearing between them a tray draped in the new regimental tartan and worked their way among the ranks, collecting the last vestiges of the old regiments. They marched out smartly, covering the abandoned hats discreetly with the tartan.

Those remaining in the square waited. The drizzle continued. The crowd, mainly tourists interspersed with press and some military types, craned their necks to see what was going on. Nothing happened. "Where's the general?" one soldier whispered. More drizzle fell. The onlookers began to talk among themselves.

In Basra, the soldiers of the Royal Scots were baking in the heat. The regiment, the oldest in the British Army, is not due back until May; they had the curious experience of being consigned to history while still being called on to serve in action.

As if there was not enough historical baggage hanging around, the Ministry of Defence had chosen the 373rd anniversary of the formation of the regiment to disband it. About 200 soldiers who were not required for patrolling stood and watched as the standard of the Royal Scots was lowered for the last time, while a lone piper played a lament.

Their commanding officer, Lieutenant-Colonel Robert Bruce, addressed them. They were, he said, part of history, the history of the Royal Scots, the Royal Regiment of Scotland and the history of Scotland itself. "From this moment forward," he told them, "the very best way to cherish and respect the memory of the Royal Scots will be to carry this honour forward with pride into the regiment." Then they slipped on Glengarry caps bearing the new regimental badge and got back to dodging roadside bombs.

Back in Edinburgh, the general finally appeared, striding into the square, sleeves rolled up. The others had apparently been a little too quick off the mark.

"Parade, general salute," barked RSM Mackenzie and the band broke into a stirring burst of regimental music. And stopped again, just as quickly.

The general strode up and down the lines, dishing out new caps, each bearing the hackle appropriate to what were once individual regiments, but are now mere battalions: black for the 1st Battalion (Royal Scots Borderers - the old Royal Scots and King's Own Scottish Borderers); white for 2nd Battalion (Royal Highland Fusiliers); the famous red for the 3rd Battalion (Black Watch); blue for the 4th Battalion (Highlanders); and green for the 5th Battalion (Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders).

The caps also bore the new insignia of the Royal Regiment, a lion rampant on a cross of St Andrew, or the crucified cat, as some wags have taken to calling it. It looked quite smart. The general stood in front of them and made his big pitch. It was, he said, a new chapter in the story of the Scottish soldier. "Change may be painful, but it has come to visit us in our day and generation," he said, but it followed on from a glorious past.

They had to fight to win the best roles they could and not forget their past - the golden thread of tradition which the opponents of merger declare cut and which the army insists is intact.

United by their past, confident in their future, excelling in their jobs and relying for success on their courage, good humour and selflessness. That was the ticket, he said. RSM Mackenzie demanded another general salute and the band piped up and piped down.

And with that they were off, disappearing to the sounds of the new regimental march, Scotland the Brave. Appropriately, this time they were in step.

• The Black Watch's name came from the dark tartan its soldiers wore and from its role to "watch" the Highlands after its formation in 1725, when six companies were formed to stop fighting among the clans. The regimental motto was Nemo Me Impune Lacessit (No-one Attacks Me With Impunity).

• The King's Own Scottish Borderers were the local infantry battalion for the Borders, Dumfries and Galloway, and Lanarkshire. They were founded 1689 to defend Edinburgh from Jacobites and fought in every major conflict of the last 300 years including, with distinction, the Gulf in 2003.

• The Royal Scots was the oldest Infantry Regiment of the Line in the army. It was formed in 1633 under a warrant granted by Charles I, raising a body of men for service in France. The regiment saw conflict in many theatres, both world wars and the Gulf war, and action in Northern Ireland.

• The Royal Highland Fusiliers were formed in 1959 by the controversial amalgamation of the Royal Scots Fusiliers and the Highland Light Infantry. The regiment was awarded more than 200 battle honours, a number unsurpassed by any other unit in the British Army.

• The Highlanders, a combat infantry regiment of about 550 men, was formed in 1994 with the amalgamation of the Queen's Own Highlanders (Seaforth and Camerons) and The Gordon Highlanders. It was the only one with a Gaelic motto - Cuidich 'n Righ (Aid the King).

• The Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders, nicknamed the "Thin Red Line" for their actions at Balaclava, were formed in 1881 by the amalgamation of the Princess Louise's Argyllshire Regiment and the Sutherland Highlanders. They had the army's largest cap badge and the Glengarry as headgear.

By: GETHIN CHAMBERLAIN -- 29-Mar-06

At least it's not jihadi porn. Yet.

2006-03-28T23:23:34Z

Are we steeling our psyches to what is coming?

In the 50's and early 60's, now Classic alien and horror movies kept the nation's fear of a nuclear war with the Soviet Union tempered. We may not be facing a war consciously, but apparently our subconscious sees it all too clearly. We believe it's gonna' be bloody hell on Earth, judging by these movies.

Horror Show

Scary movies are multiplying faster than ever, and getting increasingly sadistic. Why are audiences so hungry for blood? Pull up a chair. Just be careful which one.

By Devin Gordon
Newsweek

April 3, 2006 issue - Once the credits roll and the theater empties, movie marketers go to the same place as the rest of us: the bathroom. Only they go to eavesdrop. "That's where you hear the good s--t," says Tim Palen, co-president of marketing for Lions Gate Films. Four years ago, after a test screening of a nasty little horror movie called "Cabin Fever," Palen was lingering in the men's room when he heard two pals dissecting the film. "I liked it," one said. "I just wish it was bloodier." Palen made a mental note: gore is good. He played up the carnage in his ad campaign, and "Cabin Fever," about a flesh-eating virus that chews through a group of friends, earned 15 times its budget and put first-time director Eli Roth on the map. When Roth finished his next film, about a pair of sex-starved American backpackers in Europe who wind up in a torture chamber, Palen didn't blink. "Hostel," starring no one you've heard of and featuring some of the most brutal violence in any mainstream film, debuted atop the box office in January and made nearly $50 million. A sequel is planned for early 2007. "We're now a big believer in blood," says Palen.

In a risk-averse town like Hollywood, the high church of horror has become the one sure bet. Since last fall, seven horror movies have topped the box office. Lions Gate's "Saw" franchise, the genre's current kingpin, has rung up $250 million worldwide; a third film is planned for Halloween. Three more creepfests are scheduled for the next month, starting with Universal's "Slither" this Friday. Even Disney has gotten into the act with the PG-13 flick "Stay Alive," which, alas, is not about the systematic slaughter of disco fans. "In 1990, I had to pull my hair out just to find a movie to put on the cover," says Fangoria magazine editor Tony Timpone. "There were only three or four major horror releases a year. Now there's three or four a month. We're like pigs in slop."

Every decade or so, horror gets hot in Hollywood. This latest shockwave, though, is larger—and much more grotesque. You could sew together a whole new person from all the severed body parts in the "Saw" movies, "Hostel" and Fox Searchlight's remake of Wes Craven's "The Hills Have Eyes." It's not jokey violence, either. "Filmmakers now have the ability to put viewers directly into the shoes of the victims going through these horrible things, in an almost documentary way," says Bob Weinstein, whose "Scream" franchise for Dimension Films launched the last horror fad in 1996. Some critics—smart ones like New York Magazine's David Edelstein, not just nervous Nellies—argue that the trend verges on "torture porn." Even people within the industry are torn. "It's not the violence that bothers me so much as the tone. A George Romero movie was so political and funny and subversive," says Picturehouse Films president Bob Berney, who marketed "The Passion of the Christ." "To me, these newer movies are purely sadistic." Then again, he adds, "I remember my parents saying stuff like this, and I ignored it. They wouldn't let me see 'A Clockwork Orange,' and I went 25 times."

No one's stacking "Saw 2" alongside Stanley Kubrick, but it is true that such films tend to look smarter with the passage of time. It's practically a cliché that you can tease out a generation's subconscious fears just by watching its horror movies (Click here to see David Ansen's related story). Craven, the man who created Freddy Krueger, says horror movies are "boot camp for the young psyche." (Sixty-five percent of the audience for "Hostel" was younger than 25, which is par for the genre.) "I don't think it's an accident that it's always average kids who come to these movies," Craven says. "They're wondering, 'Just how violent is this adult world?' " Asked if he's got any theories about why sadism is in vogue, he laughs and says, "Because we're living in a horror show. The post-9/11 period, all politics aside, has been extremely difficult for the average American. We all know what's floating around out there. That's big stuff, and it comes out in a million ways, from people drinking a bit more to kids going to hard-core movies."

Maybe it's pure coincidence that "Hostel" became a hit after two years of headlines about Abu Ghraib and the rise of anti-Americanism in Europe. But here's the tip-off that the director, at least, knew exactly what he was doing: his two protagonists are jackasses of a specifically American, "what happens in Bratislava stays in Bratislava" variety. You'd want five minutes alone in a room with these knuckleheads, too. Craven's "The Hills Have Eyes" in 1977 was about atom-bomb testing in the Southwest; if you didn't know that the remake (directed by a Frenchman, natch) was a broader critique of U.S. aggression, the moment when the hero jams an American flag through a mutant's neck really spells it out.

Right now, no one has better fingertips for this material than the people at Lions Gate. The studio just won the top Oscar for "Crash," but its executives make no apologies for the bloodier side of their business. "Have I no shame? Is that what you're asking?" says president Tom Ortenberg. "When we see a void in the market, we do our best to fill it. And we didn't feel that there were enough, or really any, R-rated, balls-to-the-wall horror films out there." Without the yoke of a parent company, Lions Gate is free to unleash its inner provocateur, whether that means putting a pair of severed fingers on its "Saw 2" poster—which even Berney, a competitor, calls "a classic"—or playing up the fact that people passed out during previews of "Hostel." "I feel bad that some people had such an extreme reaction," says Palen, "but as a marketer, it was an opportunity to alert people who relish that kind of movie that we've got one for them."

There may not be many more. "The impulse to make these films gets less and less pure as the box office goes up. That's the pattern," says Craven. "A series of original films comes out, often quite furious in their energy, and they find a big audience. Then suddenly everyone wants to make one." And ingenuity takes a nosedive. Screen Gems' remake of "When a Stranger Calls" took in plenty of money last month, but horror-fan hangouts on the Web like Bloody-Disgusting.com gave it two severed thumbs down. "It was like a TV movie of the week," says Fangoria's Timpone. Upcoming titles like "Snakes on a Plane" don't inspire hope, though horror fans will appreciate New Line's decision to add more gore to the film after an early version received a measly PG-13. Palen has no delusions about the future. "Like anything else," he says, "this will run its course." If horror films have taught us anything, though, it's this: you can kill them, but they never stay dead.

Freak'n WHAT?

2006-03-28T23:02:48Z

Where was I? I don't remember any of this crap on the news.

Suspect in Colorado Bombings Being Sought in Federal Arrest Warrant
Monday March 27

Authorities Studying Similarities Between Colorado and Tennessee Bombings

GRAND JUNCTION, Colo., March 27 /PRNewswire/ -- A federal, state and local manhunt was under way today for Robert L. Burke as a suspect in Friday's string of bombings in Grand Junction.

A federal arrest warrant obtained by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) and Grand Junction police sought Burke, a 54- year-old white male also known as Robert L. Pope, for alleged violations of federal explosives laws.

Burke is a former employee of Serco Group, a Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) contractor that operates the tower at Walker Field Airport Authority in Grand Junction. He is suspected of having placed improvised explosive devices (IEDs) at five residences in and around Grand Junction on Friday. There were no injuries in the bombings.

Grand Junction Interim Police Chief Bill Gardner said that all local airport facilities have been searched and found safe, and that increased patrols were ongoing in Mesa County. "We are in an extensive manhunt and my department's resources are committed to this investigation and a successful conclusion," he said. Gardner also reiterated earlier warnings that the public not touch or move unfamiliar packages and to call 9-1-1 should such a package be found.

"ATF is committed to tracking down this suspect," said ATF Resident Agent in Charge Kenny Spann, who added that all the evidence will be sent to an ATF laboratory for analysis.

ATF, Grand Junction police, Mesa County Sheriff's Office, Colorado Bureau of Investigation, Colorado State Patrol and the FBI are actively assisting in the investigation and search for Burke. ATF and its partners were also looking into similarities between the five IEDs found here and a recent bombing that occurred at a Serco corporate office in Tennessee.

The bombing in Tennessee occurred Feb. 1 when an IED detonated on the roof of the Serco project management office in Murfreesboro. No one was injured in that explosion, from which ATF, Tennessee State Bomb and Arson, Tennessee Highway Patrol, and Murfreesboro Police and Fire departments collected evidence at the scene.

"There are similarities between the components and design of these devices in attacks on Serco employees in Grand Junction and Tennessee," Spann said.

Burke worked for Serco as an air traffic controller for 10 years until being dismissed in 2004.

Anyone having information that could lead authorities to Burke or his whereabouts should call 1-888-ATF-BOMB (283-2662) or the Grand Junction Police Department at (970) 242-6707.

Other partners in the Colorado investigation are the U.S. Department of Transportation's Office of Inspector General, U.S. Marshals Service, FAA, Department of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Bureau of Land Management and the Transportation Security Administration.

Worried about...

2006-03-28T22:52:17Z

herding those horses back to the barn. This is almost amusing.

'Dirty Bombs' Crossed U.S. Borders in Test
By LIZ SIDOTI

WASHINGTON - Undercover investigators slipped radioactive material — enough to make two small "dirty bombs" — across U.S. borders in Texas and Washington state in a test last year of security at American points of entry.

Radiation alarms at the unidentified sites detected the small amounts of cesium-137, a nuclear material used in industrial gauges. But U.S. customs agents permitted the investigators to enter the United States because they were tricked with counterfeit documents.

The Bush administration said Monday that within 45 days it will give U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents the tools they need to verify such documents in the future.

The Government Accountability Office's report, the subject of a Senate hearing Tuesday, said detection equipment used by U.S. customs agents to screen people, vehicles and cargo for radioactive substances appeared to work as designed.

But the investigation, carried out simultaneously at both border crossings in December 2005, also identified potential security holes terrorists might be able to exploit to sneak nuclear materials into the United States.

"This operation demonstrated that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission is stuck in a pre-9/11 mind-set in a post-9/11 world and must modernize its procedures," Sen. Norm Coleman (news, bio, voting record), R-Minn., said Monday in a statement.

The NRC, in charge of overseeing nuclear reactor and nuclear substance safety, challenged that notion.

"Security has been of prime importance for us on the materials front and the power plant front since 9/11," commission spokesman David McIntyre said in an interview.

The head of the Homeland Security Department's Domestic Nuclear Detection Office, Vayl Oxford, said the substance could have been used in a radiological weapon with limited effects.

A Senate Homeland Security subcommittee, which Coleman leads, released details of the investigation and two GAO reports on radiation detectors and port security before hearings on the issues this week.

The GAO, the investigative arm of Congress, also found that installation of radiation detectors is taking too long and costing more money than the U.S. expected. It said the Homeland Security Department's goal of installing 3,034 detectors by September 2009 across the United States — at border crossings, seaports, airports and mail facilities — was "unlikely" to be met and said the government probably will spend $342 million more than it expects.

Between October 2000 and October 2005, the GAO said, the government spent about $286 million installing radiation monitors inside the United States.

To test security at U.S. borders with Mexico and Canada, GAO investigators represented themselves as employees of a fake company. When stopped, they presented counterfeit shipping papers and NRC documents that allegedly permitted them to receive, acquire, possess and transfer radioactive substances.

Investigators found that customs agents weren't able to check whether a person caught with radioactive materials was permitted to possess the materials under a government-issued license.

"Unless nuclear smugglers in possession of faked license documents raised suspicions in some other way, CBP officers could follow agency guidelines yet unwittingly allow them to enter the country with their illegal nuclear cargo," a report said. It described this problem as "a significant gap" in the nation's safety procedures.

Jayson Ahern, the assistant customs commissioner for field operations, said a system for customs agents to confirm the authenticity of government licenses will be in place within 45 days. Ahern noted the radiation detectors had sounded alarms.

"We're pleased when a test like this is able to demonstrate the efficacy of our technology," Ahern said.

False radiation alarms are common — sometimes occurring more than 100 times a day — although the GAO said inspectors generally do a good job distinguishing nuisance alarms from actual ones. False alarms can be caused by ceramics, fertilizers, bananas and even patients who have recently undergone some types of medical procedures.

At one port — which investigators did not identify — a director frustrated over false alarms was worried that backed-up trains might block the entrance to a nearby military base until an alarm was checked out. The director's solution: simply turn off the radiation detector.

A DP World security guard stands in front of a U.S. military ship at the Dubai Port, February 27, 2006. The White House on Monday withdrew the nomination of a former Dubai Ports World executive to direct maritime affairs after his appointment was blocked in the Senate during a political storm over port security. REUTERS/ Ahmed Jadallah

Wretchard's

2006-03-28T22:38:29Z

"The Three Conjectures" from 2003. Unfortunately even a better read today.

Dear Mr. President:

2006-03-28T20:39:20Z

By your inaction on the behalf of the American people, we know which side of your sombrero gets buttered. Thank you so much for leaving us open to invasion.

Most Sincerely,

America

The globalists have been amazingly efficient. They have even convinced half of our population that we deserve the coming Balkanization. The next step will have to be getting rid of the Second Amendment. This is what I believe the jihadis are waiting for too.

According to Michelle Malkin, the anti-American propagandists (MSM) are being careful to portray the invaders as being peaceful. Read their signs. Listen to their slogans. They may be peaceful, but their threat is real.

The Second Mexican War
By Lawrence Auster
FrontPageMagazine.com | February 17, 2006

The Mexican invasion of the United States began decades ago as a spontaneous migration of ordinary Mexicans into the U.S. seeking economic opportunities. It has morphed into a campaign to occupy and gain power over our country—a project encouraged, abetted, and organized by the Mexican state and supported by the leading elements of Mexican society.

It is, in other words, war. War does not have to consist of armed conflict. War can consist of any hostile course of action undertaken by one country to weaken, harm, and dominate another country. Mexico is waging war on the U.S. through mass immigration illegal and legal, through the assertion of Mexican national claims over the U.S., and through the subversion of its laws and sovereignty, all having the common end of bringing the southwestern part of the U.S. under the control of the expanding Mexican nation, and of increasing Mexico’s political and cultural influence over the U.S. as a whole.

Cultural imperialism

We experience Mexico’s assault on our country incrementally—as a series of mini-crises, each of which calls forth ever-renewed debates and perhaps some tiny change of policy. Because it has been with us so long and has become part of the cultural and political air we breathe, it is hard for us to see the deep logic behind our “immigration problem.” Focused as we are on border incursions, border enforcement, illegal alien crime, guest worker proposals, changes of government in Mexico City, and other such transient problems and events—all of them framed by the media’s obfuscation of whether or not illegal immigration’s costs outweigh its benefits and by the maudlin script of “immigrant rights”—we don’t get the Big Picture: that the Mexican government is promoting and carrying out an attack on the United States.

Another reason we miss what’s happening is that our focus is on the immigrants as individuals. Thus our leaders talk about illegal immigrants as “good dads,” “hard working folks” seeking to better their lives and their family’s prospects. In fact, this is not about individual immigrants and their families, legal or illegal. It is about a great national migration, a nation of people moving into our nation’s land, in order to reproduce on it their own nation and people and push ours aside.

Thus, in orchestrating this war on America, the Mexican state is representing the desires of the Mexican people as a whole.

What are these desires?

(1) Political revanchism—to regain control of the territories Mexico lost to the U.S. in 1848, thus avenging themselves for the humiliations they feel they have suffered at our hands for the last century and a half;

(2) Cultural imperialism—to expand the Mexican culture and the Spanish language into North America; and especially

(3) Economic parasitism—to maintain and increase the flow of billions of dollars that Mexicans in the U.S. send back to their relatives at home every year, a major factor keeping the chronically troubled Mexican economy afloat and the corrupt Mexican political system cocooned in its status quo.

These motives are shared by the Mexican masses and the elites. According to a Zogby poll in 2002, 58 percent of the Mexican people believed the U.S. Southwest belongs to Mexico, and 57 percent believed that Mexicans have the right to enter the United States without U.S. permission. Only small minorities disagreed with these propositions.

Meanwhile, for Mexico’s opinion shapers, it is simply a truism that the great northern migration is a reconquista of lands belonging to Mexico, the righting of a great historic wrong. “A peaceful mass of people … carries out slowly and patiently an unstoppable invasion, the most important in human history” [emphasis added], wrote columnist Carlos Loret de Mola for Mexico City’s Excelsior newspaper in 1982.

You cannot give me a similar example of such a large migratory wave by an ant-like multitude, stubborn, unarmed, and carried on in the face of the most powerful and best-armed nation on earth.... [The migrant invasion] seems to be slowly returning [the southwestern United States] to the jurisdiction of Mexico without the firing of a single shot, nor requiring the least diplomatic action, by means of a steady, spontaneous, and uninterrupted occupation.

Similarly, the Mexican writer Elena Poniatowska told the Venezuelan journal El Imparcial on July 3rd, 2001:

The people of the poor, the lice-ridden and the cucarachas are advancing in the United States, a country that wants to speak Spanish because 33.4 million Hispanics impose their culture...Mexico is recovering the territories ceded to the United States with migratory tactics...[This phenomenon] fills me with jubilation, because the Hispanics can have a growing force between Patagonia and Alaska.

The Mexicans, as Poniatowska sees it, have changed from resentful losers—which was the way Octavio Paz saw them in his famous 1960 study, The Labyrinth of Solitude—into winners. What accounts for this change? Their expansion northward into the U.S., as the vanguard of a Hispanic conquest of all of North America—cultural imperialism and national vengeance combined in one great volkish movement.

Politicians echo the same aggressive sentiments. At an International Congress of the Spanish Language in Spain in October 2000, Vicente Fox, soon to become president of Mexico with the support of U.S. conservatives, spoke of the “millions of Mexicans in the United States, who in cities such as Chicago, New York, Los Angeles, Miami or San Francisco, inject the vitality of the Spanish language and of their cultural expression.... To continue speaking Spanish in the United States is to hacer patria”—to do one’s patriotic duty. Fox was thus describing Mexican immigrants in the U.S., not as people who had left Mexico and still had some sentimental connections there, as all immigrants do, but as carriers of the national mission of the Mexican nation into and inside the United States.

At the same conference, the Mexican novelist Carlos Fuentes said: “In the face of the silent reconquista of the United States [emphasis added], we confront a new linguistic phenomenon,” by which he meant that Spanish was conquering English just as it conquered the Aztec language centuries ago. According to El Siglo, Fuentes received “an intense ovation.”

Government statements and policies

The Mexican invasion thus represents the ultimate self-realization of the Mexican people as they move onto a larger part of the world stage—namely the United States—than they have ever occupied before. But the migration, and the imperialism that celebrates it, do not in themselves constitute war. What makes this great national movement war is the Mexican government’s statements and actions about it, particularly with regard to the extraterritorial nature of the Mexican nation and its claims on the U.S. For years, Mexican presidents have routinely spoken of a Mexican nation that extends beyond that country’s northern border into American territory. President Ernesto Zedillo told a 1994 convention of the radical-left Mexican-American lobbying group, the National Council of La Raza, “You are Mexicans too, you just live in the United States.” One of Fox’s cabinet officers, Juan Hernandez, has declared: “The Mexican population is 100 million in Mexico and 23 million who live in the United States.” These are not off-the-cuff statements, but formal state policy. As Heather Mac Donald writes in her important article in the Fall 2005 City Journal:

Mexico’s five-year development plan in 1995 announced that the “Mexican nation extends beyond ... its border”—into the United States. Accordingly, the government would “strengthen solidarity programs with the Mexican communities abroad by emphasizing their Mexican roots, and supporting literacy programs in Spanish and the teaching of the history, values, and traditions of our country.”

Such solidarity not only keeps Mexican-Americans sending remittances back to the home country, it makes them willing instruments of the Mexican government. Fox’s national security adviser proposed the mobilization of Mexican-Americans as a tool of Mexican foreign policy, as reported by Allan Wall. The head of the Presidential Office for Mexicans Abroad said: “We are betting that the Mexican American population in the United States ... will think Mexico first.”

The Fifth Column

Once the Mexican people have been defined as a nation that transcends the physical borders of the Republic of Mexico, and once Mexican-Americans are defined as “Mexicans” who are to be represented by the Mexican government, claims of “Mexican” sovereignty and rights can be made on their behalf against the country in which they reside.

One such claim is to deny the authority of American law over them. Thus President Zedillo in 1997 denounced attempts by the United States to enforce its immigration laws, insisting that “we will not tolerate foreign forces dictating laws to Mexicans.” [Italics added.] The “Mexicans” to whom he was referring were, of course, residents and citizens of the U.S., living under U.S. law. By saying that U.S. law does not apply to them, Zedillo was denying America’s sovereign power over its own territory. He was saying something that the Mexican elite as a whole believe: that wherever Mexicans live (particularly the U.S. Southwest, which many Mexicans see as rightfully theirs) the Mexican nation has legitimate national interests. From this it follows that the normal operation of U.S. law on Mexicans living in the U.S. constitutes an “intolerable” attack on Mexican rights, which in turn justifies further Mexican aggression against America in the form of illegal border crossings, interference in the enforcement of U.S. laws, and just plain government to government obnoxiousness.

Employing this irredentist logic, President Fox refuses to call undocumented Mexicans in the U.S. “illegals.” He told radio host Sean Hannity in March 2002: “They are not illegals. They are people that come there to work, to look for a better opportunity.” But if people who have entered the U.S. illegally are not doing something illegal, then U.S. law itself has no legitimacy, at least over Mexican-Americans, and any operation of U.S. law upon them is aggression against the Mexican people.

Once we understand the cultural and national expansiveness that drives the Mexicans, the rest of their behavior falls into place. Consider Mexican Foreign Minister Jorge Castañeda’s non-negotiable demands—“It’s the whole enchilada or nothing”—that he issued in a speech in Phoenix, Arizona in 2001. America, said Castañeda (as recounted by Allan Wall), “had to legalize all Mexican illegal aliens, loosen its already lax border enforcement, establish a guest worker program (during an economic downturn) and exempt Mexican immigrants from U.S. visa quotas!” He also demanded that Mexicans living in the U.S. receive health care and in-state college tuition. As Castañeda summed it up in Tijuana a few days later, “We must obtain the greatest number of rights for the greatest number of Mexicans [i.e. in the U.S.] in the shortest time possible.” What this adds up to, comments Wall, is basically “the complete surrender of U.S. sovereignty over immigration policy.” And why not? As Castañeda had written in The Atlantic in 1995: “Some Americans ... dislike immigration, but there is very little they can do about it.”

Hitler pursued Anschluss, the joining together of the Germans in Austria with the Germans in Germany leading to the official annexation of Austria to Germany. The softer Mexican equivalent of this concept is acercamiento. The word means closer or warmer relations, yet it is also used in the sense of getting Mexican-Americans to act as a unified bloc to advance Mexico’s political interests inside the U.S., particularly in increasing immigration and weakening U.S. immigration law. Thus the Mexican government is using the Mexican U.S. population, including its radical elements, as a fifth column.

As reported in the November 23, 2002 Houston Post:

Mexico’s foreign minister, Jorge Castañeda, said his country would begin a “bottom-up campaign” to win U.S. public support for a proposal to legalize 3.5 million undocumented Mexican workers in the United States. Castañeda said Mexican officials will begin rallying unions, churches, universities and Mexican communities.... [Castañeda said:] “We are already giving instructions to our consulates that they begin propagating militant activities—if you will—in their communities.”

La Voz de Aztlan, the radical Mexican-American group that seeks to end U.S. “occupation” of the Southwest and form a new Mexican nation there, writes at its website:

One great hope that came out of the Zapatista March was that generated by the “alliance” that was forged by some of us in the Chicano/Mexicano Delegation and our brothers and sisters in Mexico. The delegation met with officials of the Partido Revolucionario Democratico (PRD) in Mexico City and discussed strategies that will increase our influence in the United States and further our collective efforts of “acercamiento.”

Mexico’s violations of our laws and sovereignty

Let us now consider some of the specific actions by which the Mexican government is carrying out the strategy outlined above:

- The Mexican government publishes a comic book-style booklet, Guía del Migrante Mexicano (Guide for the Mexican Migrant), on how to transgress the U.S. border safely (“Crossing the river can be very risky, especially if you cross alone and at night ... Heavy clothing grows heavier when wet and this makes it difficult to swim or float”) and avoid detection once in the U.S.

- As Heather Mac Donald puts it, Mexico backs up these written instructions with real-world resources for the collective assault on the border. An elite law enforcement team called Grupo Beta protects illegal migrants as they sneak into the U.S. from corrupt Mexican officials and criminals—essentially pitting two types of Mexican lawlessness against each other. Grupo Beta currently maintains aid stations for Mexicans crossing the desert. In April 2005, it worked with Mexican federal and Sonoran state police to help steer illegal aliens away from Arizona border spots patrolled by Minutemen border enforcement volunteers—demagogically denounced by President Vicente Fox as “migrant-hunting groups.”

- While the Mexican government sends police to protect illegal border crossers against criminals, rogue Mexican soldiers protecting drug smugglers have threatened U.S. Border Patrol agents, and even engaged in shootouts, as reported in the Washington Times in January 2006. Rep. Tom Tancredo says the activities of these renegade Mexican troops in support of drug traffickers amount to a “war” along the U.S.-Mexico border, and he has urged President Bush to deploy troops there.

- Meanwhile, sheriffs from Hudspeth County, Texas testified before the House Homeland Security Subcommittee on Investigations this month at a hearing titled “Armed and Dangerous: Confronting the Problem of Border Incursions.” They spoke of a dramatic increase in alien and drug smuggling. “The U.S./Mexico border is the weakest link and our national security is only as good as our weakest link,” said one sheriff. “Our border is under siege.” We need to understand that whether the Mexican government is behind the border incursions or is merely unable (or unwilling) to stop them, it ultimately doesn’t matter. As I said at the beginning, the Mexican war on America is supported by all segments of the Mexican society, even, apparently, the criminals. The situation is thus analogous to Muslim razzias or raids—irregular attacks short of outright invasion—used to soften a target country in anticipation of full scale military conquest. The outlaws and smugglers and the renegade soldiers may not be official agents of the Mexican government, yet they are serving its purposes by sowing mayhem along our southern border and demoralizing our population.

- A major role in Mexico’s revanchist war against America is played by the Mexican consulates in the U.S., reports Mac Donald. Now numbering 47 and increasing rapidly, they serve as the focal point of Mexico’s fifth column. While Mexico’s foreign ministry distributes the Guía del Migrante Mexicano inside Mexico, Mexican consulates, unbelievably, distribute the guide to Mexican illegals inside the U.S.

- After the U.S. became more concerned about illegal immigration following the 9/11 attack, the Mexican consulates were ordered to promote the matricula consular—a card that simply identifies the holder as a Mexican—as a way for illegals to obtain privileges that the U.S. usually reserves for legal residents. The consulates started aggressively lobbying American governmental officials and banks to accept the matriculas as valid IDs for driver’s licenses, checking accounts, mortgage lending, and other benefits.

- The consulates freely hand out the matricula to anyone who asks, not demanding proof that the person is legally in the U.S. Here is Mac Donald’s summary of the wildly improper role played by the consulates:

Disseminating information about how to evade a host country’s laws is not typical consular activity. Consulates exist to promote the commercial interests of their nations abroad and to help nationals if they have lost passports, gotten robbed, or fallen ill. If a national gets arrested, consular officials may visit him in jail, to ensure that his treatment meets minimum human rights standards. Consuls aren’t supposed to connive in breaking a host country’s laws or intervene in its internal affairs.

- As an example of the latter, the Mexican consulates automatically denounce, as “biased,” virtually all law enforcement activities against Mexican illegals inside the U.S. The Mexican authorities tolerate deportations of illegals if U.S. officials arrest them at the border and promptly send them back to the other side—whence they can try again the next day. But once an illegal is inside the U.S. and away from the border, he gains untouchable status in the eyes of Mexican consuls, and any U.S. law enforcement activity against him is seen as an abuse of his rights.

- The Mexican consulates actively campaign in U.S. elections on matters affecting illegal aliens. In November 2004, Arizona voters passed Proposition 200, which reaffirmed existing state law that requires proof of citizenship in order to vote and to receive welfare benefits. The Mexican consul general in Phoenix sent out press releases urging Hispanics to vote against it. After the law passed, Mexico’s foreign minister threatened to bring suit in international tribunals for this supposedly egregious human rights violation, and the Phoenix consulate supported the Mexican-American Legal Defense and Education Fund’s federal lawsuit against the proposition.

- The consulates also help spread Mexican culture. We are not speaking here of the traditional activity of embassies and consulates in representing their country’s culture in a friendly and educational way to the host country; we are speaking of consulates acting as agents of the Mexican state’s imperialistic agenda. Each of Mexico’s consulates in the U.S. has a mandate to introduce Mexican textbooks (that’s Mexican textbooks) into U.S. schools with significant Hispanic populations. The Mexican consulate in Los Angeles bestowed nearly 100,000 textbooks on 1,500 schools in the Los Angeles Unified School District this year alone.

- It has also been proposed that Mexicans in the U.S. vote in Mexican elections in designated electoral districts in the United States. Under this proposal, California, for example, might have seats in the Mexican Congress, specifically representing Mexicans residing in that state. The governing PAN party of President Fox has opposed this idea, not out of respect for U.S. sovereignty, but out of fear that most Mexicans in the U.S. would vote against the PAN. Meanwhile, another of Mexico’s three major parties, the leftist PRD, urges the designation of the entire United States as the sixth Mexican electoral district.

The follies of the victors

Throughout this article, I have spoken of Mexico’s revanchist campaign against the U.S. as though the Mexicans were carrying it out completely against our will. But as we are bitterly aware, this is not at all the case. Something has happened in America over the last 40 years that has not only opened us to the Mexican invasion, but has even invited it. From the refusal of many American cities to cooperate with the INS, to President Bush’s celebration of Mexican illegal aliens as the carriers of family values, to the Democratic Party’s insistence that all Mexican illegals in the U.S. be given instant amnesty and U.S. citizenship, it seems that America itself wants the Mexicans to invade and gain power in our country. Since we (or rather, some of us) have invited the Mexican invasion, does this mean we (or rather the rest of us) have no right oppose it?

In the first chapter of his history of the Second World War, entitled “The Follies of the Victors,” Winston Churchill wrote that the triumphant Western allies after the First World War made two mistakes, which in combination were fatal. First, they gave the defeated Germans the motive for revenge, by imposing terribly harsh penalties on them, and second—insanely—they gave them the opportunity for revenge, by failing to enforce the surrender terms when Hitler began to violate them in the 1930s. Yet the fact that the victors’ inexcusable follies enabled Germany to initiate a devastating war against Europe did not change the fact that Germany had initiated the war and had to be beaten. In the same way, by wresting vast territories from Mexico in 1848 we gave the Mexicans the motive for revenge, and then, 120 years later, we insanely gave them the opportunity, by letting Mexicans immigrate en masse into the very lands that our ancestors had taken from theirs, and also by adopting a view of ourselves as a guilty nation deserving of being overrun by cultural aliens.

We gave them the opportunity, they took it, and now it is they who are dictating terms to us.

To quote again from Jorge Castañeda’s 1995 Atlantic article:

Some Americans—undoubtedly more than before—dislike immigration, but there is very little they can do about it, and the consequences of trying to stop immigration would also certainly be more pernicious than any conceivable advantage. The United States should count its blessings: it has dodged instability on its borders since the Mexican Revolution, now nearly a century ago. The warnings from Mexico are loud and clear; this time it might be a good idea to heed them.

Because the U.S. has been silent and passive, Castañeda, in the manner of all bullies and conquistadors, tells us to heed Mexico. The time is long since passed for us to reverse this drama, and make Mexico heed the United States. But for us to do this, we must recognize that the Mexicans are not coming here merely as individuals seeking economic opportunities, but as a nation, expressing their national identity and collective will. Even more important, we must revive our own largely forgotten and forbidden sense that we ourselves are a nation, not just a bunch of consumers and bearers of individual rights, and have the right to defend our nation as a nation.

Where is our OIF war song?

2006-03-28T19:14:37Z

There are Joseph Goebbels everywhere in this conflict, all seemingly on the other side and far too many in this country. Propaganda is a powerful weapon which we must use to our advantage. Unfortunately, this Administration has trouble stringing two sentences together in support of its efforts.

One reason we are losing the propaganda war is that this Administration will do anything to keep the economy going and the numbers up. If this country really thought it was fighting a war it had to win, things on the home front would change.

Wars are bad for business. I expect this Administration to verbally tip-toe around the war at every opportunity, leaving only the Goebbels in the crowd to shriek. Trying to protect the American people in this manner will only ensure draconian measures down the road.

Altering perceptions of Iraq

by W. Thomas Smith, Jr.

Perception is everything. And when applied to the war in Iraq, perception, public opinion, and a far-reaching press are all variables that could ultimately have a hand in any setback or defeat for U.S. and coalition forces in that country.

Don’t misunderstand me: I’m all for free speech. If anything, that is the single most important element of our free society. It is one of our essential individual freedoms, and it protects other freedoms.

I do, however, have concerns about false and deliberatively inflammatory propaganda aimed at manipulating audiences. I am not suggesting that any press – good or bad – be quashed. What’s good or bad is open to interpretation anyway. But I think we should recognize the difference between news (including reported facts, analysis, and opinion) and propaganda.

PROPAGANDA 101

On February 22, a story published in the Italian-based Information from Occupied Iraq suggested that Fox News (specifically, The O’Reilly Factor) was advancing a "radical new conspiracy theory" as to why no weapons of mass destruction (WMD) have been found in Iraq. The theory is that Russian special operations units may have spirited the WMDs over the border into Syria in early 2003. In fact, this is neither a "radical" nor a "new" theory. Nor is it a "conspiracy theory." What makes the IFOI story propaganda is that it attacks the information with words like "radical" and "conspiracy." It pretends it is new information (numerous media companies – including CNN and The Washington Times - were discussing the possibility back in 2004), and it attacks Fox News, which both the political left and disinformation websites like IFOI regularly do.

Saturday, IFOI published a story referring to U.S. and British troops as "locusts stripping Iraq bare." IFOI’s website is often linked from other anti-Iraq-war websites, which only increases the size of its audience.

Granted, the difference between news and propaganda is not always as easy to discern as it is with IFOI stories, because one often strays into the realm of the other.

But propaganda has a number of identifying features, including the deliberate attempt to manipulate a person’s perception about something, which shapes that person’s thinking, then directs that person toward a specific behavior, which "furthers the desired intent of the propagandist," according to Garth S. Jowett and Victoria O’Donnell in Propaganda and Persuasion.

Propaganda also has the ability to take root as "fact" if repeated enough times, even when it is not fact. And according to Jowett and O’Donnell, it is used to discredit or "embarrass an enemy or competitor."

The latter is clearly evident in the incessant bashing of President Bush as, not only a "liar" and a "criminal," but "dull-witted" and "stupid."

Take the far-left San Francisco Gate as an example. It was not enough to criticize the president (as we Americans are blessed with the freedom to do), instead columnist Mark Morford wrote in 2004, "It has always been far too easy to smack BushCo around as being an aww-shucks dumb-guy AWOL simpleton daddy's boy with a low-C average and a painfully inarticulate approach to the world, coupled with an astounding, world-famous ability to mangle both the English language and every foreign policy ever implemented."

DANGEROUS PROPAGANDA

Though the word has gotten a bad rap over the centuries, propaganda (or propagating ideas or information for a purpose) is in many ways harmless. It is a step up from persuasion, because the propagandist has a goal, which is beyond simply informing, debating the issues, or sharing an opinion. Propaganda becomes harmful when it maliciously targets individuals or groups (as in the European Jewish population during the 1930s and 40s), or when it undermines a cause wherein the loss of that cause (the Global War on Terror, including our efforts in Iraq) would result in great peril to ourselves and others.

Most of the worst forms of the dangerous kinds of propaganda can be found in underground publications. What makes those publications truly dangerous is that by virtue of the Internet, there is no limit to the size of their audience.

One such publication, Jihad Unspun, published a piece on March 18, 2006, stating, "We will derive a very simple lesson from America’s Iraq jaunt that if a country wants to avoid a U.S. led invasion, they had better arm themselves to the gills and with nuclear weapons too if possible." The same piece was published in the alternative Baltimore Chronicle, the Pakistani Tribune, and numerous blogs.

Jihad Unspun (which the U.S. State Department has decried as playing a "major role in disinformation") also published, as one of its bylined features, a speech by former Vice President Al Gore. A portion of that feature reads, "So long as their big flamboyant lie remains an established fact in the public's mind, President Bush will be seen as justified in taking for himself the power to make war on his whim."

Does that mean Jihad Unspun's editors feel some ideological kinship with both Gore and some obscure writer who suggests nations should arm themselves with nuclear weapons? I cannot say for sure, but the observation is difficult to ignore.

Jihad Unspun is a radical e-rag, to be sure, but it is fairly widely referenced, and the publisher is not some cave-dwelling member of Osama bin Laden’s inner circle: She’s Canadian Bev Giesbrecht, a former mild-mannered marketing and communications professional who converted to Islam after 9/11.

SWARMER AND STEEL CURTAIN

The day after their call to arms, Jihad Unspun referred to Operation Swarmer, launched March 16, as "not only a needless escalation of aggressive war on a peaceful people but is ethnic cleansing, plain and simple."

Of course, this assertion is distorted over-dramatization, but it is a propagandized assertion that negatively impacts those who do not understand the dynamics of military operations in Iraq.

Let’s put Swarmer in perspective:

Operation Steel Curtain, which few reporters got worked-up about last November, was a 17-day operation conducted by some 2,500 Americans and 1,000 Iraqis in Iraq’s Al Anbar province. It was aimed at shutting down the ratlines along which foreign fighters were moving in their border-crossings from Syria. Ten U.S. Marines and 139 terrorists were killed, 256 bad guys were captured, and numerous weapons caches were uncovered.

Swarmer, in contrast, was a 1,500-man helicopter-borne operation with no casualties, little if any damage to property, yet U.S. and Iraqi forces nabbed over 100 suspected insurgents and seized 24 weapons caches chocked full of everything from machineguns to surface-to-air missiles.

As I wrote last week, some reporters around the country initially seemed to come unglued when they heard we had launched a large "air assault" north of Baghdad. A few suggested to me we were bombing the Iraqis back to the Stone Age.

Fact is, the operation was no different than any other cordon-and-search operation going on throughout Iraq, except, as Major Joseph Todd Breasseale with Multi-National Corps Iraq told me, "Helicopters made the story sexy."

Hardly a massive bombing raid or ethnic-cleansing or – as Time magazine suggested – a "fizzle." But those are the things that have been propagated with few if any, from what I can gather, published retractions.

CIVIL OR GUERRILLA WAR

Though it’s all semantics, those who would foment propaganda are almost insisting we call the insurgency in Iraq a "civil war." After all, in the sense of perception, a "civil war" smacks of something much larger, much more Oliver Cromwellian or Stonewall Jacksonian, where a country is divided into two, sometimes more, massive parts all of which are waging great battles against one another.

Of course, there is no single definition of "civil war" that stands in all corners, but you can bet the opponents of our efforts in Iraq hope that by labeling the Iraq war a civil war, it will be considered a lost cause and thus a failure of the Bush administration.

Then there are Iraq-war optimists like Charles Krauthammer who take a different tack. In his latest column, he concludes – and with sound logic (not propaganda) I might add – Iraq has been in a state of civil war since the beginning of the insurgency.

Moreover, winning that "civil war" is "doable," writes Krauthammer. "That is not to say it will be done. It is to say that those who have decided that because of 'civil war' it cannot be done have been unreasonably panicked by something that has been with us all along."

So what is an insurgency? I’ve always been taught an insurgency is a guerrilla war. After all, insurgents are guerrillas; and according to my Webster’s unabridged, "not recognized as having the status of a belligerent."

DISMISSING PROGRESS

But "there is no civil war in Iraq," Captain Bill Roberts, spokesman for Multi-National Force Iraq, told me Friday. "The targeting of innocent civilians by terrorists is being done to incite sectarian violence, create fear and is a vain attempt to derail democracy."

The Iraqi people know this, he says. They are fed up with insurgents who are killing women and children in order to influence perception and sway public opinion, worldwide. Consequently, the Iraqi people are increasingly providing solid information about the whereabouts and activities of terrorists throughout the country, even going so far as leading soldiers and police directly to hideouts and weapons caches. That was one of the primary reasons Swarmer, for instance, was so successful.

"Other progress in Iraq seems to be overlooked far too often and the expectations seem occasionally unrealistic," says Roberts. "Three years ago Iraqis had no voice in their government or their nation’s future."

Unfortunately, few in either the mainstream or the alternative press seem to want to talk about progress in Iraq. Instead, they prefer to be dismissive of progress or anything else that runs counter to their agenda – and that's propaganda in its own right.

Space Mountain is the most fun on a Friday night between 11pm and midnight. Nonstop hurl 'n whirl.

2006-03-28T03:43:11Z

Charles Krauthammer takes us for a spin on the Ferris Wheel of Fear, only on his wheel, the nightmare begins when the ride stops. Got those tickets ready?

Today Tehran, Tomorrow the World
What's at stake in the dispute over Iranian nukes? Ultimately, human survival
By CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER

Like many physicists who worked on the Manhattan Project, Richard Feynman could not get the Bomb out of his mind after the war. "I would see people building a bridge," he wrote. "And I thought, they're crazy, they just don't understand, they don't understand. Why are they making new things? It's so useless."

Feynman was convinced man had finally invented something that he could not control and that would ultimately destroy him. For six decades we have suppressed that thought and built enough history to believe Feynman's pessimism was unwarranted. After all, soon afterward, the most aggressive world power, Stalin's Soviet Union, acquired the Bomb, yet never used it. Seven more countries have acquired it since and never used it either. Even North Korea, which huffs and puffs and threatens every once in a while, dares not use it. Even Kim Jong Il is not suicidal.

But that's the point. We're now at the dawn of an era in which an extreme and fanatical religious ideology, undeterred by the usual calculations of prudence and self-preservation, is wielding state power and will soon be wielding nuclear power.

We have difficulty understanding the mentality of Iran's newest rulers. Then again, we don't understand the mentality of the men who flew into the World Trade Center or the mobs in Damascus and Tehran who chant "Death to America"--and Denmark(!)--and embrace the glory and romance of martyrdom.

This atavistic love of blood and death and, indeed, self-immolation in the name of God may not be new--medieval Europe had an abundance of millennial Christian sects--but until now it has never had the means to carry out its apocalyptic ends.

That is why Iran's arriving at the threshold of nuclear weaponry is such a signal historical moment. It is not just that its President says crazy things about the Holocaust. It is that he is a fervent believer in the imminent reappearance of the 12th Imam, Shi'ism's version of the Messiah. President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has been reported as saying in official meetings that the end of history is only two or three years away. He reportedly told an associate that on the podium of the General Assembly last September, he felt a halo around him and for "those 27 or 28 minutes, the leaders of the world did not blink ... as if a hand was holding them there and it opened their eyes to receive" his message. He believes that the Islamic revolution's raison d'Ãªtre is to prepare the way for the messianic redemption, which in his eschatology is preceded by worldwide upheaval and chaos. How better to light the fuse for eternal bliss than with a nuclear flame?

Depending on your own beliefs, Ahmadinejad is either mystical or deranged. In either case, he is exceedingly dangerous. And Iran is just the first. With infinitely accelerated exchanges of information helping develop whole new generations of scientists, extremist countries led by similarly extreme men will be in a position to acquire nuclear weaponry. If nothing is done, we face not proliferation but hyperproliferation. Not just one but many radical states will get weapons of mass extinction, and then so will the fanatical and suicidal terrorists who are their brothers and clients.

That will present the world with two futures. The first is Feynman's vision of human destruction on a scale never seen. The second, perhaps after one or two cities are lost with millions killed in a single day, is a radical abolition of liberal democracy as the species tries to maintain itself by reverting to strict authoritarianism--a self-imposed expulsion from the Eden of post-Enlightenment freedom.

Can there be a third future? That will depend on whether we succeed in holding proliferation at bay. Iran is the test case. It is the most dangerous political entity on the planet, and yet the world response has been catastrophically slow and reluctant. Years of knowingly useless negotiations, followed by hesitant international resolutions, have brought us to only the most tentative of steps--referral to a Security Council that lacks unity and resolve. Iran knows this and therefore defiantly and openly resumes its headlong march to nuclear status. If we fail to prevent an Iranian regime run by apocalyptic fanatics from going nuclear, we will have reached a point of no return. It is not just that Iran might be the source of a great conflagration but that we will have demonstrated to the world that for those similarly inclined there is no serious impediment.

Our planet is 4,500,000,000 years old, and we've had nukes for exactly 61. No one knows the precise prospects for human extinction, but Feynman was a mathematical genius who knew how to calculate odds. If he were to watch us today about to let loose the agents of extinction, he'd call a halt to all bridge building.

Inevitable?

2006-03-28T03:03:49Z

Did you know that all Thai restaurants serve Pad Thai, even if it's not on the menu? Just ask for it. Delicious.

This is a slam-dunk that's just a matter of time.

Al Qaeda's nuclear option
By Arnaud de Borchgrave

President Bush says frequently "we are fighting them over there so they won't come over here." "Them" are transnational terrorists and "over there" is Iraq.

The insurgency in Iraq has much to do with al Qaeda's plans for a weapons of mass destruction (WMD) act of terrorism in the United States, but not the way the White House believes. Assuming the Bush administration is successful in midwifing democracy out of a near-civil war situation in Iraq, the WMD threat level will remain unchanged. High, that is.

Paradoxical though this may seem to Washington's armchair strategists, the defeat of the al Qaeda-Sunni insurgency in Iraq would actually heighten, not lessen, the danger of a September 11 CBRN (chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear) attack. Defeated by the U.S. in Afghanistan and again in Iraq, al Qaeda would have to conclude its strategy of forcing the U.S. into a humiliating, Vietnamlike retreat has failed.

Arabic-speaker Professor Gilles Kepel, one of France's leading experts on al Qaeda, published last week "Al Qaeda dans le Texte," an analysis of the public and (intercepted) private utterances of the two Z's -- Ayman al-Zawahri (Osama bin Laden's No. 2) and Abu Musab Zarqawi, al Qaeda's insurgency honcho in Iraq. Stripped if its complexities, al Qaeda's strategy, Mr. Kepel explains, is to defeat the U.S. in Iraq, use this victory to roll over traditional oil-rich regimes in the Gulf that are security wards of the U.S., and then focus on Israel. But there is now an obstacle even greater than the U.S. -- Iran. Tehran, as seen through Zawahri's geopolitical viewfinder, is already calling the shots in large parts of Iraq. Whether the U.S. stays or leaves Iraq, concludes Zawahri, it's still Iran's ballgame. Which brings al Qaeda back to its WMD-in-America strategy.

"The Race Between Cooperation and Catastrophe," or why "the [nuclear] threat is outrunning our response" is how Sam Nunn, the former senator and co-chairman of the Nuclear Threat Initiative, describes an overarching terrorist construct. The starter's gun for this new race went off at the end of the Cold War. Congress has appropriated almost $12 billion under Nunn-Lugar legislation designed to enhance security in scores of former Soviet and now Russian nuclear weapons and nuclear materials storage sites. Another $20 billion was pledged for the same purpose at a G-8 summit of the major industrialized nations in Canada three years ago -- $1 billion by the U.S. and $1 billion by the other seven per year for 10 years.

There has been no cooperation from India in the nuclear security field, says Matthew Bunn, director of the Atom Project at Harvard. "China," he adds, "has secured one civilian facility."

With more than $30 billion in the button-down-the-nukes kitty, more than half the security work remains to be done. There are 43 countries with more than 100 research reactors or related facilities that store enough highly enriched uranium nuclear materials to make several bombs. Only 20 percent of these sites are properly secured, says Mr. Nunn, and less than a handful meet U.S. Energy Department security standards, says Mr. Bunn. Most countries consider the Energy Department security criteria too demanding.

Rather than try to steal or buy one of thousands of Russian tactical nukes, or nerve gas artillery shells, a WMD terrorist is far more likely to knock off the night watchman, lower the chain-link fence somewhere in Switzerland or Italy and drive off with sufficient materials for a nuclear device. Actually making a nuclear bomb after that is the easy part; the recipe is on the Internet.

Mr. Nunn, chairman of the board of trustees at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, says we appear to have forgotten the "devastating, world-changing impact of a nuclear [terrorist] attack. "If a 10-kiloton nuclear device goes off in Midtown Manhattan on a typical work day, it could kill more than half a million people," he explains. Ten kiloton is a plausible yield "for a crude terrorist bomb," according to Mr. Nunn.

Hauling that volume of explosives would require a freight train 100 cars long. As a nuclear bomb, it could easily fit on the back of a pickup truck.

Another Nunn scenario has a terrorist group with insider help acquiring a radiological source from an industrial or medical facility; say cesium-137 in the form of powdered cesium chloride. Conventional explosives are used to incorporate cesium into a "dirty bomb," then detonated in New York's financial district. A 60-square block area has to be evacuated. Millions flee the city in panic. Only two dozen are killed but billions of dollars of real estate is declared uninhabitable. Cleanup will take years -- and many more billions.

What interests bin Laden and Zawahri beyond casualty lists is collateral damage to civil liberties, privacy and the world economy. America, as they see it, would be knocked off its pinnacle. This would be the shot heard around the world and hundreds of millions of either frightened or jubilant Muslims would flock to the Muslim world's black Jolly Roger of white skull and crossbones.

In a routine exchange of information, Russia's chief intelligence officer in Washington notified his CIA liaison officer that al Qaeda operatives had been scouting nuclear storage sites in Russia. It would be a miracle if nothing had been stolen from Russia's long ill-guarded nuclear weapons storage depots during the collapse of the Soviet Union when anything and everything was for sale. We also know from sketches found in al Qaeda's safe houses in Kabul and Kandahar that bin Laden was interested in nuclear bomb design. Two Pakistani nuclear scientists from A.Q. Khan's stable were in Kandahar when this reporter was there three months before September 11, 2001.

The distance remaining to near-perfect security can be measured by how Mr. Nunn describes the adequacy of the U.S.-Russian response to the terrorist nuclear threat.

On a scale of 1 to 10," says Mr. Nunn, "I would give us about a 3, with the last summit between Presidents Bush and Putin moving us closer to a 4."

The Red Planet

2006-03-27T05:33:17Z