WASHINGTON (AP) — The number of terrorist incidents around the world dropped to a 25-year low in 1996, but casualties rose sharply in line with a trend toward more ruthless attacks on civilian targets, a State Department report released Wednesday said.

The study said Iran “remained the premier state sponsor of terrorism,” conducting at least eight dissident assassinations outside Iran in 1996.

There were 296 acts of international terrorism last year, 144 fewer than in 1995, the report said, and the number of casualties reached a near-record 311 dead and 2,652 wounded.

The worst incident was a bombing in Sri Lanka that killed 90 and wounded more than 1,400.

Among the year’s other significant attacks was the truck bombing at a U.S. military housing facility near Dharan, Saudi Arabia, that killed 19 U.S. citizens and wounded some 500 people.

The attack was the highest number of U.S. citizens killed in a single act of international terrorism since the 1988 bombing of Pan Am flight 103 in which 189 U.S. citizens were among the 270 dead.

According to the report, a total of 24 Americans died in terrorist incidents last year — the 19 in Saudi Arabia and five in bus bombings and drive-by shootings in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem.

The number of Americans wounded in terrorist incidents rose to 250, five times the figure for 1995.

Terrorism peaked 10 years ago

Titled “Patterns of Global Terrorism,” the annual report said the number of incidents reached a peak of 665 in 1987. Of the 296 last year, two-thirds were minor acts of politically motivated violence against commercial targets, which caused no deaths and few casualties, it said.

The report said also that terrorists proved again last year they can “command a worldwide audience for their crimes and cause great disruption, fear and economic damage.”

It cited in particular the June bombing in Saudi Arabia and suicide bombings in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem by extremist groups aiming to destroy the Middle East peace process. The death toll from the attacks against Israeli targets was 60.

Sponsors of terrorism

The list of countries designated by the United States as sponsors of terrorism remained unchanged from 1995: Cuba, Iran, Iraq, Libya, North Korea, Sudan and Syria.

It gave the following account on each country:

Cuba — Cuba no longer actively supports armed struggle in Latin America and other parts of the world but remains a haven for international terrorists and maintains close ties with other state sponsors of terrorism.

Iran — Tehran continues involvement in the planning and execution of terrorist acts by its own agents and by surrogates such as Hezbollah in Lebanon. It continues to encourage violent rejection of the Middle East peace process.

Iraq — A variety of Palestinian groups opposed to the Middle East peace process, including Abu Nidal’s Fatah-Revolutionary Council, receive havens in Iraq.

Libya — Palestinian terrorist groups operate freely in Libya. Also, Col. Moammar Gadhafi’s government has refused to turn over two suspects wanted in the 1988 bombing of Pan Am flight 103.

North Korea — A small group of Red Army members wanted for an airplane hijacking in 1970 enjoy asylum in North Korea. Sudan — A number of international terrorist organizations, primarily of Middle East origin, used Sudan last year as a “refuge, nexus and training hub.” Sudan also condoned many of the “objectionable activities” of Iran such as funneling assistance to terrorist and radical Islamic groups operating and transiting Sudan.

Syria — Several radical terrorist groups maintain training camps or other facilities on Syrian territory. In addition, Damascus grants basing privileges to a variety of groups engaged in terrorism in areas of Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley under Syrian control.

======================================

Al Qaeda’s Alibi Armory Using The Word to bolster evil (National Review Online, 020509)

[KH: Mainline Protestant churches doing PR for terrorism]

By Kenneth Lloyd Billingsley

If the statements of Protestant clerics and denominational bureaucrats are any indication, the current sex scandal in the Catholic Church is far from the only church story that needs further investigation. Indeed, terrorism finds in these quarters a kind of theological public-relations agency.

In late October of last year, while the ruins from the World Trade Center still smoldered, the Justice and Ministries Board of the United Church of Christ charged that the “war on terrorism,” revealing placed in dismissive quotes, was being used “to justify a rushed legislative agenda in Congress, some of which is irrelevant to the crisis and which includes, for example, fast-track authority on trade treaties, authorization for oil drilling in the Arctic. National Wilderness Area, expansion of Plan Colombia and other foreign military investments, promotion of the National Missile Defense System, and tax cuts which ignore the needs of the poor.”

Further, “unrestrained federal spending since September 11, focused on military retaliation and antiterrorism measures, threatens to further weaken economic protection for the poor and elderly, including prescription drug relief for the elderly, Temporary Assistance to Needy Families, Social Security benefits, health care and other programs.” In addition, “Low wage workers, especially immigrants, are losing their jobs by the thousands everyday in industries impacted by the war and the global economic recession.”

Like other major American denominations, the United Methodists avoided direct condemnation of those responsible for the September 11 attacks. Barely a month had passed before the Methodist General Board of Church and Society rejected the use of military force to fight “criminal” acts of terror.

Konrad Raiser, General Secretary of the World Council of Churches (WCC), to which more than 30 American denominations belong, condemned the U.S. war on terrorism. This should come as no surprise since, in its heyday the WCC functioned as Soviet lobby and anti-American echo chamber. But consider Vernon Broyles III, associate director for Social Justice and Associate for Corporate Witness in the National Ministries Division of the Presbyterian Church USA, the man responsible for theologically framing national and social issues for his denomination.

Four days after Sept. 11, the Rev. Broyles found a moral equivalence between those who attacked the World Trade Center and those they attacked. He questioned whether it was even appropriate to ask whether the incineration of several thousand innocent civilians from dozens of nations was an act of terrorism, a term he puts in dismissive quotes, when the United States once bombed cities in Japan.

The Sept. 11 perpetrators, in fact, were not “terrorists” at all, the Presbyterian official wrote, but “part of a guerrilla fighting force that uses the methods typical of every guerrilla army in history that is fighting against a force far superior to their own.”

These guerrillas were motivated by grievances that the Rev. Broyles thought were legitimate. The problem was that “we have ignored many people suffering injustice at the hands of those we support.”

Veterans of the Maquis, other Resistance fighters, indeed, “every guerrilla army in history” would be surprised to discover that they shared tactics with the Sept. 11 bombers. But Rev. Broyles’s loathsome nonsense, which his type likes to call “speaking prophetically,” is perfectly consistent with his working environment. Protestant bureaucracies remain a kind of interlocking directorate of the religious Left, for whom anti-Americanism is more theological than political. In these quarters, America really is the Great Satan. Therefore the sins of America will always receive more attention than those of terrorists, be they the Baader Meinhof gang, Red Brigades, or genocidal Islamic fascists.

Truly, anti-Americanism covers a multitude of sins. Perhaps St. Paul said it best. “If any man among you be ignorant, let him be ignorant.” But there is more in play here.

In their pastoral letters, resolutions, and appearances before government committees, the religious Left curia gives the impression that they represent millions of rank-and-file church members. They don’t, and never have. Church members ought to publicly disown and defund the fevered apologists for terrorism. Relatives of the Sept. 11 victims might want to show up with protest signs. National leaders should of course pay them no need whatsoever, though perhaps they should consider a law requiring terrorism’s alibi armory to register as a lobby.

— Kenneth Lloyd Billingsley, a journalist based in Sacramento, is author of From Mainline to Sideline, the Social Witness of the National Council of Churches.

==============================

The Weakness of the West: Stopping al Qaeda (National Review Online, 020917)

By Rita Katz and Josh Devon

Despite recent international successes against the group, we are not treating al Qaeda as a global entity. Borderless and stateless, the terrorist organization has cells all over the world, but we are failing to make our effort against the group a global one. With abetting cells in Germany, Italy, Malaysia, the Philippines, and several others, including, of course, the United States, September 11 proved that al Qaeda functions globally. Focusing on a global effort, the cells operated in a transnational web — all cohesively coordinating plans, personnel, financing, and other material support. Without the cells’ seamless support for each other, September 11 could not have happened.

Reeling off the success of the uncovery of al Qaeda cells in New York, Michigan, and Oregon, the United States has put the emboldening Patriot Act to excellent use. But domestic success will not prove effective in the long run, given al Qaeda’s global nature. Though the U.S. has enacted new laws such as the Patriot Act to combat terrorism, the other nations of the West have not followed our necessary lead.

International counterterrorism cooperation has so far been moderate at best. Limited cooperation between Western countries has been effective — our success in Afghanistan is an example, and the reserved willingness to share information between countries has led to several arrests and prosecutions, including the recent capture by Pakistani authorities of September 11 ringleader Ramzi bin al-Shibh. There remain, however, several inexplicable gaps in the coordinated effort against terrorism, stemming from the inherent values upon which Western culture is based. Al Qaeda recognizes these gaps and exploits them at every possibility.

Al Qaeda has adapted to Western culture. They understand the way by which Western countries cooperate. The group knows our laws, our judicial system, and our way of life. Cells blend in extremely easily all over the Americas and Europe. Al Qaeda training manuals teach what to do in case of capture and indictment — to lie and exploit the pathos the West has for mistreated prisoners. One manual seized in Britain notes, “If an indictment is issued and the trial begins, the brother has to pay attention to the following...the brothers must insist on proving that torture was inflicted on them by State Security.”

Western countries have failed to recognize al Qaeda’s abuse and exploitation of civil liberties and the Western justice system. Nowhere is this more apparent right now than in England, which is openly harboring several militant supporters and leaders of al Qaeda, some of whom the U.S. has indicted and requested their extradition. Thus far, England has not allowed the extradition of any of these al Qaeda members or supporters to the United States.

Khalid al-Fawwaz, indicted by the U.S. for his direct role in the 1998 East Africa U.S. Embassy bombings, helped bin Laden plan those attacks from his base in London. Though al-Fawwaz was bin Laden’s point man in England, British authorities have not permitted his extradition to the United States, which was requested in September 1998.

Fawwaz is a man with unparalleled knowledge of al Qaeda’s inner workings. Serving as a top leader in al Qaeda, the United States could extract crucial information from his intimacy with al Qaeda. The U.S. has also indicted two of al-Fawwaz’s assistants, Ibrahim Eidarous and Adel Abdelbari, and asked for their extradition. Though Britain has in fact granted extradition rights to the U.S. to al-Fawwaz and his accomplices, they remain in jail in England exploring legal avenues by which to challenge the ruling.

Abu Doha, indicted by the U.S. for his direct role in the plot to blow up the Los Angeles Airport in 2000, remains in British jail. Providing material and financial support to Ahmed Ressam and the others involved in the plot, Abu Doha was the mastermind behind the planned bombing. The U.S. requested his extradition over a year ago, but Britain has not complied.

These men, thankfully, are at the very least in jail, where they harm they would do can be regulated. While the information they contain might prove extraordinarily valuable to the United States in preventing future attacks, Britain has been uncooperative. Far more dangerous, however, is Britain’s inexplicable tolerance for so-called “activists,” who do nothing more than vituperate the United States and its allies and incite hatred and violence. These men push the Western notion of “Freedom of Speech” to new limits. Some openly recruit for Osama bin Laden, yet the British government does nothing to stop them.

Yassir al-Sirri, a supporter of al Qaeda indicted by the U.S. for functioning “as a facilitator of communications” between terrorist groups, walks the streets of England a free man, under the guise of a bookseller. Though the U.S. has requested his extradition, Britain has not cooperated. Sentenced to death in Egypt for plotting to kill the prime minister, al-Sirri has repeatedly denied any connections to al Qaeda or any other terrorist group. England believes him, where a British judge at his most recent trial ruled that al-Sirri was nothing more than “an innocent fall guy.”

Another al Qaeda supporter based in Britain and who fought in Afghanistan alongside bin Laden in the 1980s is Abu Hamza al-Masri, whom the U.S. has designated a terrorist entity and has frozen his assets. Abu Hamza currently resides in London, claiming disability from the British government. He is the Sheikh of the Finsbury Park Mosque, the same mosque where shoe-bomber Richard Reid prayed, as well as Zacarias Moussaoui, charged in the September 11 catastrophe. Abu Hamza was also named as an unindicted coconspirator in the charges against James Earnest Ujaama, who was indicted for attempting to set up a militant training camp in Oregon. For several years, Abu Hamza has been spitting anti-Western rhetoric and inciting violence, always remaining distanced enough from any terrorist activity to avoid direct prosecution. The U.S. has requested Abu Hamza’s extradition, but he is currently free.

A braggart who boasts about his recruitment efforts for jihad, Omar Bakri is the head of the fundamentalist al-Muhajiroon group based in London. Bakri reportedly has called for the assassination of Tony Blair, while claiming disability from the British government. In 1999, Bakri submitted an open letter to Osama bin Laden that he posted on his website and read aloud in several mosques around the country, offering his full support to bin Laden. Bakri, of course, vehemently denies being in contact with Osama bin Laden, despite having received a fax from bin Laden in 1998 that enumerated how to wage jihad against the United States, urging to “bring down airliners.” Britain has declared al-Muhajiroon to be a designated terrorist supporter, but it has done very little to deter Bakri’s fanaticisms and incitement. Omar Bakri remains free, proclaiming at a rally in Trafalgar Square two weeks ago, “We believe in the same philosophy as bin Laden.”

These al Qaeda supporters are shrewd enough to place themselves on the thin line between terrorist and innocent fall guy, just as the famed Italian mafia in the United States once did. Al Qaeda members do not leave an easy trail of evidence to follow and when questioned under oath either in court or interrogated by police, they have an easy way out — they lie.

They proclaim their innocence, knowing full well that any Western government must prove their guilt, as their innocence is assumed. These men care little for our “Western” rules and laws. Lying has little effect on their consciences — they are taught to lie. Should we be surprised? Do we expect them to proclaim their affiliation and support of al Qaeda?

We try them by a standard in which they do not believe. They cannot be tried by a “jury of their peers” because they are peerless. These men can stare at a judge, a lawyer, or a jury member and lie indefinitely, and we have no choice but to believe them because we have values and scruples and morals. They are terrorists. They manipulate those handcuffs which we should place on them, and instead put those handcuffs on us.

We are playing a deadly game with these terrorists. We have defined the rules, but they do not play by them. We must figure out a different game to play, starting with unanimous cooperation in the war on terror. Countries must aid one another by making arrests, providing information, and extraditing criminals.

We must also recognize that our laws and culture have become a shield for al Qaeda activists. Understanding the limitations of our laws in the war on terror, the United States passed the Patriot Act, which broadened the powers of law enforcement, enabling us to stop terrorist attacks before they happen. The terrorist cell uncovered in Buffalo has hopefully precluded a dangerous situation. No longer must we wait until after an attack to arrest and indict terrorists. Other countries must take the same initiative. Al Qaeda has made a global effort to destroy the West. We must make a global effort to stop them.

— Rita Katz is the director of the SITE Institute, based in Washington, D.C. Josh Devon is an analyst at the SITE Institute.

==============================

Timeline: Recent Terrorist Attacks in 2002 (Foxnews, 021029)

• Mon., Oct. 28 — U.S. Agency for International Development worker Laurence Foley is shot dead outside his house in Amman, Jordan, by unknown gunmen. The assassin pumps eight shots into Foley’s head, chest and abdomen.

• Thurs., Oct. 24 — At least 40 Chechen rebels take 800 hostages in a Moscow theater, threatening to kill them unless Russian troops pull out of Chechnya. On Saturday, Oct. 26, Russian special forces storm the theater, capturing or killing all the rebel captors. However, Moscow’s chief doctor says all but one of the 117 hostages killed in the 58-hour siege died from the knockout gas Russian special forces used during the rescue.

• Mon., Oct. 21 — A Bus is attacked in Tel Aviv, killing 14 and wounding almost 50.

• Sun., Oct. 20 — A homemade bomb explodes near a Roman Catholic church in Zamboanga, killing one person and injuring 18. Abu Sayyaf, a group of Muslim militants that has been linked to Al Qaeda, is believed to be responsible.

• Fri., Oct. 18 — A bomb rips through a bus in suburban Manila, killing at least three people and injuring 23 others. The attack comes hours after a grenade blast in Philippine capital’s financial district in which no one is killed.

• Thurs., Oct. 17 — Seven people are killed and 52 wounded in bombings at two department stores in the Christian city of Zamboanga in the Philippines. Abu Sayyaf may be responsible for the attack.

• Mon., Oct. 14 — U.S. forces come under fire from two civilian vehicles near a training area in northern Kuwait. No one is hurt

• Sat., Oct. 12 — More than 180 people are killed in a double terrorist bombing in Bali, Indonesia. Over 300 people — many of whom were foreign tourists — are injured in the attack on a nightclub on the resort island. Jemaah Islamiyah, an Islamic extremist group allied with Al Qaeda, is believed to be behind the blasts.

• Sat., Oct. 12 — A bomb blast damages the 2-story U.S. consulate in Manado, on north Sulawesi island in Indonesia, just a few hours before the Bali nightclub bombing.

• Thurs., Oct. 10 — An attack on a bus terminal in Kidapawan City, Philippines, kills eight people and injures 19 others.

• Tues., Oct. 8 — Two gunmen in a pickup truck open fire on Marines engaged in urban assault training in Kuwait. One Marine is killed and a second is wounded. The attackers then drive to a second location and attack again before being killed by Marines. Although there is no clear evidence linking the attackers to Al Qaeda, the leader of the cell and one of the assailants have pledged allegiance to Usama bin Laden.

• Sun., Oct. 6 — An explosives-laden boat rams a French oil tanker off the coast of Yemen. A Bulgarian member of the crew is killed, a gaping hole is torn into the vessel and some 90,000 barrels of oil are released into the water. Yemeni Interior Minister Rashad al-Eleimi calls the attack “a deliberate act of terror.”

• Wed., Oct. 2 — A Nail bomb explodes in a restaurant frequented by U.S. troops in Zamboanga, Philippines, killing four, including an American Green Beret. The attack is blamed on Abu Sayyaf.

==============================

Terrorism & Trust: At the gates, again (Part II) (National Review Online, 021120)

By Brink Lindsey

The civilized world’s exposure to barbarian assault arises today, as it did in the past, out of the very sources of our prosperity and power. Most obviously, Western technological prowess can now be turned and used against us. The logic of technological progress is that it democratizes power over the elements. As we continue to innovate and grow richer, more and more people have ever-greater access to increasingly potent capabilities. Since the capabilities themselves are morally neutral, the consequence is this dark irony: The more technological dynamism unleashes the creative energies of the best among us, the more widely available are destructive energies to the worst among us.

We now know the horrific purposes to which commercial aircraft can be put. Many other humdrum, taken-for-granted aspects of our technology-intensive lives can likewise be used to stock the armory of terror. Remember, after all, what Timothy McVeigh did with fertilizer, fuel oil, and a van. And more exotic technologies raise even more terrifying possibilities. Tons upon tons of enriched uranium and weapons-grade plutonium have been produced and stockpiled; if only a few pounds of this vast amount were to fall into the wrong hands, millions could die. Large and growing stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons pose similar threats. And terrorists need not restrict themselves to scavenging military production: Many commercial labs have the capacity to weaponize chemical and biological agents.

Our vulnerability goes deeper than the physical damage that can be inflicted. The root of our vulnerability is the same as the root of our technological virtuosity: our fantastically elaborate social organization and the institutions that make it possible. To put the matter as simply as possible, all the wonderful material blessings that we in the West enjoy rest ultimately on the amazing extent to which we are able to trust each other. Terrorism strives to shatter that trust.

The West is rich because its people participate in a globe-spanning, mind-bogglingly complex division of labor. Every moment of our lives is supported and enhanced by the anonymous creativity and hard work of untold millions of people. In the words of F. A. Hayek, the 20th century’s greatest theorist of this “extended order”:

The more civilized we become, the more relatively ignorant must each individual be of the facts on which the working of his civilization depends. The very division of knowledge increases the necessary ignorance of the individual of most of this knowledge.

Which raises the question: How is this possible? How do we come to trust each other so implicitly that we are able to put our lives routinely into the hands of strangers? To bring the matter down to concrete detail, how is it possible to fly to another city, or even another country, hand a complete stranger a piece of plastic, and get a $20,000 car, which you then promise to return to another stranger in another city?

The answer, in a word, is institutions. First of all, formal legal and political institutions define and enforce property and contract rights, thereby facilitating the ability of people without personal connections to do business with each other. In the parlance of economists, those institutions reduce the “transaction costs” associated with potential market exchanges. In other words, they make it possible for strangers to trust each other — which in turn makes possible the highly evolved division of labor on which our affluence depends.

But formal institutions are not enough. They must be buttressed by intangible cultural institutions — invisible bonds of reciprocity that restrain members of society from taking advantage of each other to the maximum extent the law allows. If the terms of every economic transaction had to be reduced to writing, and every ambiguity in that writing then led to litigation, the transaction costs of dealing with strangers would be staggering. Consequently, the potential for open-ended specialization, and for the kind of large-scale, long-term investments that produce Western-style prosperity, would be fatally compromised. Large-scale divisions of labor thus require that participants in that order share, to some minimum extent, a kind of Golden Rule ethos that inhibits opportunistic behavior.

“How effectively agreements are enforced is the single most important determinant of economic informance,” states Douglass North, a pioneer in the fast-growing field of institutional economics. The rich countries of the West thrive because their institutions — both the “hard” institutions of police, courts, and bureaucracies, and the “soft” institutions of cultural values — allow agreements to be enforced between total strangers across the span of years and continents.

Terrorism strikes at the foundation of the distinctive, Western form of civilization — namely, our unprecedented ability to trust one another. Just as the new barbarians turn our technology against us, so do they “weaponize” the institutions that make advanced technology possible.

Terrorism’s random acts of destruction, because they are targeted at nobody in particular, make everybody feel unsafe. Consequently, they make us apprehensive, wary — distrustful. Every Arab-looking passenger on your flight sets off personal alarm bells. So did every piece of mail from a stranger during the anthrax attacks. So did every white van in the D.C. area just recently.

Terrorism thus leverages its acts of physical destruction into larger contagions of economic and social disruption. Air travel plunged after September 11, and has yet to recover. Not just the airlines but the tourism industries as well have been dealt a heavy blow. Mail delivery more or less ground to a halt in the cities affected by the anthrax scare. All outdoor activities, including trips to shopping centers, were victims of the Washington-area sniper attacks.

The disruptions we have suffered to date, however burdensome they were or are, pale into insignificance when compared to what is possible. Imagine that a “suitcase nuke” is detonated in downtown Seattle or Atlanta — and that the group claiming responsibility announces that a second device has already been planted in another city. The massive casualties, the economic devastation that would befall the shattered, contaminated target city — those would be only the first dominoes to fall. What would happen in the rest of the country? What would be the consequences — economic, political, and cultural — of the mass evacuation from cities that followed the first blast?

Here is the grim truth: We are only one act of madness away from a social cataclysm unlike anything our country has ever known. After a handful of such acts, who knows what kind of civilizational breakdown might be in store?

Terrorism, of course, is nothing new: Its modern history dates back at least to 19th-century Russia. But the march of economic development and technological progress has, perversely, led to a qualitative increase in terrorism’s virulence. The power to inflict physical damage has grown by orders of magnitude, while the escalating intricacy of the division of labor means a similar, exponential increase in the economic and social costs associated with any particular act of physical destruction. As a result, the leading edges of civilization are now prone to outside attack for the first time in half a millennium. If we do not now take the full measure of this threat, and bend our considerable energies towards countering and neutralizing it, we are likely to pay a grievous price for our complacency.

— Brink Lindsey is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute and author of Against the Dead Hand: The Uncertain Struggle for Global Capitalism. He also publishes www.brinklindsey.com.

==============================

This War We’re In: Taking extremist Islam seriously (National Review Online, 021126)

By Paul Marshall

Osama bin Laden’s November 12 audiotape claimed that one reason for the brutal bombings in Bali last month was Australia’s role in protecting East Timor and allowing it to separate from Indonesia’s clutches. Typically, most analysts ignored this. The Washington Post even printed the relevant paragraph with this section missing, and with no ellipses to indicate its absence.

This continues a pattern in which our media and political leaders ignore the forthright and articulate religious motives and ideology that drive al Qaeda and its allies. We are engaged in a war in which we resolutely ignore our enemies’ stated goals.

On September 11, we were attacked by explicitly religious terrorists who said their prayers before going out to slaughter infidels. The movement they represent consistently outlines its goals through a plethora of books, websites, and videos, and gives a clear and articulate theology and view of history to justify and explain its actions.

Bin Laden’s 1998 al Jazeera interview stressed this point: “There are two parties to the conflict: World Christianity, which is allied with Jews and Zionism, led by the United States, Britain, and Israel. The second party is the Islamic world.” His 1998 merger with Egypt’s Islamic Jihad formed the “World Islamic Front for Holy war against Jews and Crusaders,” al Qaeda’s real name, and he has described President Bush as fighting under the “sign of the cross.”

Al Qaeda’s manual begins by recalling “the fall of our orthodox Caliphates on March 3, 1924.” Bin Laden’s November 3, 2001, videotape proclaims, “Following World War I, which ended more than 83 years ago, the whole Islamic world fell under the Crusader banner….” Their grievance, continually expressed, is the collapse of the Islamic world in the face of “Christendom,” a collapse that can only be explained by Muslims’ apostasy from Islam and only be reversed by returning to their version of Islam.

Hence al Qaeda and a network of extremist groups from Algeria to the Philippines consistently fight to impose their version of Islam on Muslims and, then, the rest of the world. They want a restored caliphate in which each country will submit to their version of Islamic sharia law. The Taliban wanted a Caliphate in Afghanistan, Uzbekistan’s IMU in Central Asia, the Philippines’ Abu Sayyaf and Indonesia’s Jamaah Islamiya and Laskar Jihad in southeast Asia. Al Qaeda wants one for the whole world.

Yet in fighting these enemies we ignore these clear goals and filter their acts through a grid of western nostrums about alienation, economics, and the Middle East. We are told that al Qaeda’s primary grievance is America, “the West,” or freedom, or the plight of the Palestinians.

But though al Qaeda has made it crystal clear that, in its own view, it is attacking, inter alia, Christians, whom it calls “crusaders,” as well as Jews (and Hindus and Buddhists), American analysts, inside and outside the government, insist that its agenda is not religiously based but is simply anti-American.

Thus when, in August, newly acquired bin Laden videotapes explicitly denounced “crusaders and Jews,” CNN claimed that he was really targeting “the United States and the West,” while CBS described his foes as “Americans,” and the Associated Press asserted, without argument, that “Bin Laden has used the term ‘crusaders’ to refer to Westerners.”

In September, after the latest massacre of Pakistani Christians, in Taxila, Pakistan’s center of Christianity since the second century, the New York Times called it an assault on “western targets,” and Reuters headlined “Pakistan attack seen aimed at West, not Christians.” Meanwhile, the attackers themselves said, they “planned to kill Christians” and that they “killed the nonbelievers.”

In October, the statement claiming credit for attacking an oil tanker off Yemen referred to a “crusader oil tanker.” Despite this explicit religious reference to al Qaeda’s purported Christian enemies, the Washington Post declared that they were opposed to the U.S. and have “often referred to the United States as ‘crusaders.’” This attempt to equate crusaders with the United States is especially confusing since the tanker in question was French.

The Oct 12 bombing in Bali was also described by the media as directed at “the West,” though it took place in Indonesia’s only Hindu majority territory and coincided exactly with bombings on the Philippine consulate in Manado, a Christian area hundreds of miles away. Al Qaeda affiliates in Indonesia had already orchestrated the bombing of 36 Christian schools and churches in Indonesia during Christmas 2000, while its allies have massacred thousands of Christians in eastern Indonesia, the latest assault being the August 12 destruction of the Christian village of Sepe.

The November 12 bin Laden audiotape says that Australian victims were picked partly because of Australia’s “despicable effort to separate [Catholic] East Timor” from Indonesia, thus undermining the hoped-for Southeast Asian Islamic state. Meanwhile, in the Philippines itself, Abu Sayyaf continues to massacre local Christians.

Similar tales can be told of the world’s bloodiest conflict, in Sudan; of the slaughter of over 100,000 moderate Muslims by extremists in Algeria; of attacks on Hindus in Bangladesh, on Buddhists in Thailand, and on Hindus and Buddhists in Afghanistan; of the over six thousand dead in the conflict over the introduction of Islamic sharia law in Nigeria; of the Chechens’ release of the Muslims amongst their Russian hostages in Moscow; and of attacks on Jews throughout the world. The largest death tolls from Islamist extremism do not occur in America or the West or Israel, but in Sudan, Algeria, and Indonesia.

America has become a focus of Islamist rage because, when the terrorists seek to wreak their havoc around the world, whether in Israel, Pakistan, Malaysia, Indonesia, or Afghanistan, we stand in their way, thwart their intentions, and defeat their fighters. We also undercut their beliefs by urging the equality of women and individual and religious freedom. They are rendered impotent in all but death as long as American military might and American cultural power stands in their way.

Now, as Islamist terrorists repeat endlessly, their strategic goal must now be to make the United States retreat so that they can achieve Islamist rule elsewhere. Thus the chief demand of the November letter, ostensibly from al Qaeda, is that America end its support of those throughout the world who fight radical Islam: “Leave us alone or expect us in Washington and New York.”

What does this mean for our current war against extremist Islam? First, that we are not fighting merely “terrorist” groups but a worldwide Islamist insurgency. Second, that our enemies are not driven simply by opposition to U.S. policy on Israel or the Middle East. They must be faced as an aggressive, expansionist, global ideological movement with its sights set also on Africa and Asia.

Third, the attacks on America are explicitly designed to strike fear in us in order to keep us from interfering with Islamist attempts to impose their will throughout the world. Hence any American withdrawal from conflict with extremist Islam, whether in the Middle East or Asia, will not guarantee peace and harmony. It will be a victory for Islamist terrorism, the fulfillment of their first strategic goal, and a prelude to expanded attacks elsewhere.

— Paul Marshall is senior fellow at Freedom House’s Center for Religious Freedom. His latest books, Islam at the Crossroads and God and the Constitution: Christianity and American Politics have just been released.

==============================

Terrorism in the Classroom: The truth about international-relations textbooks (National Review Online, 021127)

By Stanley Michalak

Terrorism is a strategy to weaken a hated political authority. It is a security threat, but almost the opposite of the nuclear one: little pinpricks instead of a huge bang.”

Last winter, when the shock of 9/11 was drawing down, I decided to peruse the international-relations textbooks on my home and office shelves. “What would students learn,” I wondered, “if they consulted any of these texts in order to make sense of the events that had so shocked the nation?” What I found in reading these works was in most cases simply appalling — and I consulted not one or two, but ten textbooks in all — published by such major houses as Addison-Wesley, McGraw-Hill/Dushkin, Harcourt Brace, Longman, McGraw-Hill, Prentice Hall, Simon and Schuster, and W. W. Norton (they’re listed at the end of this essay).

What I found were sloppy definitions, specious moral equivalencies, the uncritical perpetuation of myths about terrorism, descriptive and unanalytical filler, superficiality, and banality.

WHAT IS TERRORISM?

On this rather simple question, no consensus exists among these texts. Some define terrorism so broadly as to make it indistinguishable from any use of force. For example, does it serve any purpose to define terrorism as “seeking to further political objectives through the threat or use of violence, usually in opposition to state governments?” (Kegley and Wittkopf, p. 222) or as “the use of violence to achieve a political objective” (Papp, p. 127)? What would not be considered terrorism under these definitions? Does it make sense to throw coercive diplomacy and conventional war into the same bucket as terrorism?

Sure it does, if one is seeking to establish moral equivalence between terrorists and their victims. As one author writes, “[D]efining terrorism is a difficult task [. . .] Indeed, several countries throughout the world consider the United States, several Western European states, and Israel as undertaking terrorist actions” (Papp, p. 14).

MORAL EQUIVALENCE

While all of the texts take a stab at a definition, we quickly learn from the vast majority of them that terrorism is largely in the eyes of the beholder. Almost all, in fact, trot out uncritically the cliché that one person’s terrorist is another person’s freedom fighter. One text makes this point four times in about eight pages. Even a six-line description of the Terrorism Research Center’s website contains a warning to students: in looking at “terrorist profiles and the Definition of Terrorism controversy, [k]eep in mind that one group’s ‘freedom fighters’ may be another group’s ‘terrorists’” (Kegley and Wittkopf, p. 241). Four warnings in eight pages.

If students learn only one thing from most of these texts it is this: While no one really knows what terrorism is, whatever it is, we’re guilty of it too. Consider the following examples:

To a great extent, whether an organization is defined as a terrorist group or not depends on one’s perspective. When seen from an American perspective, the “Indians” of the Boston Tea Party were American nationalists making a political point: when seen from a British perspective, they were terrorists destroying property and endangering life (Papp, p. 127).

Pressure to respond to [random acts of terrorism] is very strong because people worry disproportionately about terrorism, even though it kills a relatively small number of people. Despite better devices for protection, committed individuals or groups of terrorists are difficult to deter. As the well-known phrase puts it, one person’s terrorist is another person’s freedom fighter (Mingst, p. 179).

It is easy to condemn such [terrorist] activities when they are conducted by countries or groups of which you disapprove. What about assassination and other such actions by a country with which you may have sympathy? . . . Those who question the legitimacy of such acts [Reagan’s strike against Qaddafi and Clinton’s strikes in Somalia and Afghanistan] argue that what constitutes terrorism is often in the eye of the beholder and, in this case, killing civilians with a bomb dropped on a building by a warplane is no different than killing civilians by planting a bomb in a building (Rourke, pp. 346-47).

As the last quotation indicates, some authors hide their moral equivalence behind a veil of specious objectivity by referring to an often unnamed “some” or “observers.” Consider the following from the author last quoted: “It should be noted that in the view of some, the way that the United States and some other militarily powerful countries define terrorism is self-serving” (Rourke, p. 347).

And who are the “some?” Well, in this case, one of the “somes” is none other than Osama bin Laden. According to the author,

Osama bin Laden, who allegedly masterminded the attacks on the U.S. embassy in Kenya and Tanzania in 1988, charges that, “American history does not distinguish between civilians and military, and not even women and children. [Americans] are the ones who used the [atomic] bombs against the Japanese” (Rourke, p. 347).

While it’s one thing to point out that people use the term terrorist in self-serving and indiscriminate ways, it’s quite another to throw up one’s hands at defining what terrorism is. Clearly, we know what contemporary terrorism is: it is a strategy that explicitly targets innocent civilians. Thus, America’s retaliation against Qaddafi for the Berlin disco bombing was not an act of terrorism, as terrifying as that response may have been and as tragic as the civilian deaths may have been. The target in those attacks was not innocent civilians but the perpetuator and root of the terrorist campaign.

Labeling as “terrorist” any violent action that results in civilian deaths makes any effort to classify the uses of force impossible. Not ends or consequences, but means, defines terrorism. Moreover, terrorism used in a good cause is terrorism nonetheless, and even the best of good causes can never make terrorism good or moral, as Michael Walzer pointed out his book Just and Unjust Wars over 20 years ago. Using random and horrific acts of violence against unsuspecting and innocent non-combatants is terrorism, and moral people will condemn such acts no matter who undertakes them.

THE PERPETUATION OF MYTH

Rather than engaging in what Charles Hyneman once termed “the rigorous examination of ideas,” too many of these political scientists merely pass on and legitimize egregiously shallow and uncritical thinking. For example, one of the most simplistic myths perpetuated by almost all of these texts is the portrayal of terrorists as powerless, despair-driven people — “the international homeless,” as one set of authors put it. Terrorism, we are told, is “usually used by the powerless against the powerful” (Mingst, p. 178); it is “the strategy of the weak for weakening the strong” (Roskin and Berry, p. 4). “Terrorist groups,” according to another text, “seek the political freedom, privilege, and property they think persecution has denied them” (Kegley and Wittkopf, p. 222). Somewhat strangely, the authors of this last assertion devote their first case study to “international organized crime,” which they claim is “one increasingly active category of terrorist groups” (p. 222).

Obviously, most terrorists do not have the military capabilities of the parties against whom they wage war; however, military asymmetry does not in itself mean that terrorist groups are necessarily powerless, weak, or even poor. Hezbollah, Hamas, and al Qaeda — even when these books were written — could not have been considered groups comprised of the uneducated, “great unwashed.” Al Qaeda is as well-financed as any terrorist organization can be, and its leaders and many of its minions are or have been well-educated. Moreover, to describe members of terrorist organizations are powerless implicitly accepts and legitimizes their rejection of normal and peaceful measures for settling differences. Hamas and Hezbollah do not want a settlement with Israel; they want Israelis expunged from the Middle East. Timothy McVeigh was not seeking to argue his case in the American political arena; he wanted to destroy that very arena.

But the more important myth lies on the other side of the equation — in the claim that the targets of terrorism are “the powerful.” As Walter Laqueur pointed out almost 30 years ago, terrorism is rare in truly powerful countries such as Iraq, Syria, North Korea, the Soviet Union, Mao’s China, Iran, Saudi Arabia, or even in Afghanistan during the reign of the Taliban. Rather, since the end of the Second World War, the targets of terrorism have been concentrated in permissive democracies such as the United States, Great Britain, and the Western European social democracies, or in soft authoritarian regimes such as Egypt and Algeria. Truly powerful and totalitarian regimes never have a problem with terrorists.

TERRORISM AS A STRATEGY: EFFECTIVE OR NOT?

Assessments of whether terrorism is a successful strategy for groups seeking change are seldom attempted in these texts, and when they are, the efforts are usually superficial. Moreover, among the texts, the conclusions are contradictory — reflecting, perhaps, the state of the discipline. Consider the following three assessments:

In the end, terrorism, like most forms of violence, exists because terror tactics sometimes do accomplish their goals. However much one may condemn the acts themselves, it is also accurate to say that over the years Palestinian terrorists almost certainly played a role in increasing the willingness of Israel to deal with them, in enhancing the global awareness of and concern with the Palestinian cause, and in bringing pressure on Israel by the international community to reach an agreement with them (Rorke, p. 350).

Does terrorism work? Rarely and seldom alone . . . In most cases, however, and especially after innocent civilians have been killed by terrorists bombs, it just stiffens the resolve of the target country. No amount of Palestinian terrorism, for example, can persuade Israel to go out of business (Roskin and Berry, No. 5, p. 199).

[I]t is safe to conclude that the activity of most terrorist nonstate actors is undermining the authority and sovereignty of legitimate existing states (Kegley and Wittkopf, p. 225).

While terrorists have wrought havoc, they also have seldom succeeded in gaining major goals except when their activities were part of a larger military or political strategy. North Vietnam engaged in the systematic assassination of over 9,000 South Vietnamese village officials in the early 1960s, but even though this terrorist campaign was enveloped in a large-scale guerrilla war, the North Vietnamese were still unable to defeat the South Vietnamese — in the end, it took a conventional military invasion of South Vietnam to do that. Had the U.S. Congress not refused to re-supply South Vietnamese forces and permitted the use of American air power to resist that invasion, South Vietnam might have endured.

As for the Palestinian terrorists, the success of Yasser Arafat has had much more to do with western dependence on Arab oil than upon the terrorist tactics of the PLO, Hamas, or Hezbollah. Were Israel located elsewhere, American news channels and newspapers would be giving about as much attention to the PLO as they now give to the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka or the terrorist violence in Indian-controlled portions of Kashmir.

THE ABSENCE OF CRITICAL ASSESSMENTS

Most of the texts have little to say about strategies to combat terrorism, and few make critical assessments of the various countermeasures. Equally rare are attempts to classify different kinds of terrorists, undertake a comparative analysis of strategies and tactics, assess unilateral and multilateral countermeasures, or discuss success rates. For example, one text’s conclusion consisted of the following:

In the aftermath of a number of such high-profile cases, the international community responded by signing a series of international agreements designed to tighten airport security, sanction states that accepted hijackers, and condemn state- supported terrorism. The International Convention against the Taking of Hostages is a prominent example of such an agreement (Mingst, p. 178).

That’s it. No assessment. No critical discussion.

TERRORISM AND THE FUTURE?

Reading these texts, it is not even clear whether terrorism is a significant problem, though most do predict its persistence and, in several cases, authors dangle truly apocalyptic scenarios in which we, in the democracies, stand helpless and (presumably) hopeless. However, consider the following two assessments — drawn from the same database and scholarly literature:

Given the nature of the problem and the draconian methods that would probably be required to eliminate it, it is likely that terrorism will be with the international community for the foreseeable future (Papp, p. 129).

Terrorism, despite occasional outbursts, is in decline. The same forces that are reshaping international relations in other areas are also reducing terrorist violence. The end of the Cold War brought about major power cooperation. This removed the target for many ideological terrorists groups . . . In addition, the worldwide rise of democracy has reduced domestic terrorism directed against repressive regimes (Roskin and Berry, 1999 ed., p. 252).

BANALITIES

What do I mean by banalities? Consider:

Terrorists are non-state actors (Mingst, p. 178).

Terrorism is group activity (Roskin and Berry, 1999 ed., p. 253).

Terrorism has come of age (Papp, p. 443).

“Targets, too, have become diverse; today they include buses, large buildings (New York’s World Trade Center) and tenements (in India and Germany)” (Mingst, p. 179). “Terrorists are not crazy ‘Dr. Evils.’ They pursue their political goals by deplorable means because that is often the only way open to them” (Roskin and Berry, 2002 ed., p. 199).

“Ordinarily, the death and destruction caused by terrorism are limited, at least in comparison with the death and destruction caused by war” (Papp, p. 128).

From a section entitled “Who Are the Actors in World Politics”:

In recent years another type of individual has had a significant impact on world politics: terrorists. Examples of such are Abu Nidal and Osama bin Laden who have become commonly known because of their sponsorship and involvement in terrorism (Caldwell, p. 56).

But the prize for banality must surely go to the authors who presented students with the following list of “Five ways to reduce international terrorism”:

“(1) Avoid wars. Avoid making enemies by avoiding threats and child-killing economic sanctions in foreign policy. Stabilize deterrence through arms control and confidence building agreements. Use diplomacy vigorously.

(2) Free colonies, whether the colony is called the West Bank or Ulster.

(3) Avoid oppressing one’s own people or occupying other nations.

(4) Avoid making or propping up hated governments or unarming popular ones.

(5) Try to avoid extreme measures in dealing with an extremist domestic opposition; too tough countermeasures only make things worse” (Roskin and Berry, 1999 ed., p. 269).

To be fair, this list, which appeared in the 1999 edition of this text, was gone by the 2002 edition: The entire subject of terrorism had been condensed from one chapter to a box because, presumably, the authors believed terrorism would disappear in an evolving post-Cold War and increasingly democratic age.

NOT ALL IS BLEAK

Two of the ten books stand out as models of scholarly treatment. In five and a half pages, David Ziegler does a superb job in eviscerating cant and politically correct clichés, and making the scholarly literature accessible to students in a well-organized fashion. His presentation in War, Peace, and International Politics presents meaningful distinctions and categories and contains a balanced discussion about dealing with terrorism. He even considers the difficulties in devising measures for countering terrorist events.

Similarly, one can find an excellent discussion of terrorism in Frederic S. Pearson and J. Martin Rochester’s International Relations: The Global Condition in the Twenty-First Century. Pearson and Rochester present a wealth of relevant information and draw well on the scholarly literature. In addition, they also eviscerate many of the clichés that pass as profundity in other texts. To the cliché that “one person’s terrorist is another person’s freedom fighter,” they reply, “[If that is to be accepted], then any act of violence can be excused and legitimized so long as someone invents a justification” (p. 448). They also write that “although some have called the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima in 1945 an act of terrorism — because it represents to them seemingly indiscriminate violence against innocent civilians — this is more accurately designated an act of interstate warfare” (p. 450). Finally, their critical discussion of the strategies for dealing with terrorists is about as well done as one could find without delving into the body of scholarly literature itself.

THIS IS HIGHER ED?

Still, these two texts are the exceptions rather than the rule. While most of the works surveyed do cite solid scholarly works on terrorism in their bibliographies, somehow very little of the knowledge in those books actually makes its way into their discussions of the subject! Many of the myths about terrorism that Walter Laqueur debunked over 25 years ago in his groundbreaking book, Terrorism, continue to appear in far too many of these texts.

Sadly, discussions of terrorism in most of today’s IR textbooks amount to melodramatic or sensational introductions, portraits of different kinds of terrorists, descriptive case studies, and superficial assessments about the future — all low-level, unanalytical, and simplistic. But what may be most dismaying of all about these texts is what they reveal about the overall state of the discipline.

Texts Reviewed

Dan Caldwell, World Politics and You (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2000). Subject not covered.

W. Raymond Duncan, Barbara Jancar-Webster, and Bob Switky, World Politics in the 21st Century (New York: Addison-Wesley/Longman Inc., 2002).

Charles Kegley Jr. and Eugene R. Wittkopf, World Politics: Trends and Transformation (Bedford: St. Martins, 2001).

Karen Mingst, Essentials of International Relations (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2001, 2nd ed.).

Daniel S. Papp, Contemporary International Relations: Frameworks for Understanding (New York: Longman, 2002, 6th ed.).

Fredric S. Pearson and J. Martin Rochester, International Relations: The Global Condition in the Twenty-First Century (New York: McGraw Hill, 1997, 4th ed.).

Michael G. Roskin and Nicholas O. Berry, IR: The New World of International Relations (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1999, 4th ed.).

John T. Rourke, International Politics on the World Stage (Dushkin/McGraw-Hill, 1999, 7th ed.).

David Ziegler, War, Peace, and International Politics (New York: Addison, Wesley, Longman, 2000).

— Stanley Michalak is the John C. Kunkel Professor of Government at Franklin and Marshall College. His latest book is Primer in Power Politics. This was written for the Foreign Policy Research Institute and is reprinted with permission.

==============================

Terrorists brandish their global reach: Israeli hotel, plane attacked in Kenya (National Post, 021129)

Stewart Bell

‘GOD SAVED US TWICE,’ TERROR SURVIVOR SAYS: Passengers embrace upon their safe arrival at Ben Gurion International Airport at Tel Aviv yesterday. At least two missiles were fired at the jetliner they were aboard as it was leaving Kenya, and the resort many of the passengers had been staying at was simultaneously bombed.

A brazen attack on Israeli tourists in Kenya that destroyed a beach hotel and nearly blew a jetliner out of the sky has underscored the worldwide nature of the threat posed by terrorists driven by ancient religious hatreds and armed with modern weapons.

Security agencies have been bracing for an escalation in terrorist violence since the Arabic-language television station Al-Jazeera broadcast a statement, allegedly recorded by Osama bin Laden, warning the Western allies that “as you kill, you will be killed.”

The call was apparently heeded by an obscure group calling itself the Army of Palestine, which yesterday drove a car bomb into the Paradise Hotel near Mombasa and fired two surface-to-air missiles at a Tel Aviv-bound Boeing 757 carrying 261 passengers and 10 crew members.

At about the same time, two Palestinian gunmen opened fire on a bus station and a Likud party polling station in Israel, killing five. At least 36 were wounded in the attack, which took place as Likud held a leadership vote. The al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, an offshoot of Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat’s Fatah movement, claimed responsibility.

The Kenyan blast, which some authorities said had all the hallmarks of an al-Qaeda operation, followed recent attacks in South Asia, Europe, the Persian Gulf, the Mideast and North Africa.

Yesterday’s bombing is evidence that terrorists have declared open season on civilians.

“What it shows is they can hit you anywhere, anytime,” said Michel Juneau-Katsuya, a former Canadian Security Intelligence Service agent. “It is the true nature of terrorism, which is to inflict terror. What they are going after is hurting the population on the other side.”

Indonesian al-Qaeda operatives blew up a crowded tourist bar in Bali on Oct. 12, and other affiliated radical Islamic groups have staged deadly attacks at a Tunisian synagogue, killing German tourists, a Christian church in Pakistan, a French tanker in Yemen and a U.S. aid worker in Jordan.

What the attacks have in common is that they were motivated by rage against the U.S., Israel and their allies, made use of powerful weapons such as C-4 explosives and have deliberately targeted innocent non-Muslim civilians travelling or living abroad.

Muslim terrorist leaders claim such attacks are justified because Western and Israeli civilians pay the taxes that finance their militaries, making them legitimate targets. But the attacks also appear to be part of a new strategy to hit soft Western targets wherever they can be found.

If al-Qaeda truly wanted to damage Western military interests in Africa, it could have tried to bomb the U.S. army training base in Djibouti. Instead it chose to assault an undefended tourist hotel in Kenya and a passenger plane bound for Israel.

The attack is consistent with al-Qaeda’s historic opportunism. Aside from its Sept. 11 attack on the Pentagon, al-Qaeda has tended to strike areas of weakness in Western defences, such as embassies, tourist hotels and churches.

“If it shows anything, its our vulnerability, our inability from a law enforcement point of view to come around with a 100% safety blanket,” said Mr. Juneau-Katsuya.

“Here we are talking about Israel, the nation that probably per capita is spending the highest amount of money next to the U.S. on security matters and they are still being targeted and hit on a regular basis.”

The attacks appear to be achieving their intended consequences. Western countries such as Canada are closing their foreign embassies, tourists are growing nervous and financial markets are reacting — exactly the kinds of unease that terrorists want to foment in order to push their agendas.

The list of the countries that Canadians are advised not to visit due to terrorism concerns was expanded yet again this week, when the Department of Foreign Affairs warned against travel to the Philippines and closed the Canadian embassy in Manila due to a “credible threat.”

Yesterday, the Foreign Affairs department warned about “a dangerous deterioration in the security problems in Kenya. This along with the heightened tensions as a result of the Iraq situation, and increased threats globally from terrorism, put Canadians at greater risk.”

The Mombasa attack shows that despite the international crackdown that has followed the Sept. 11 hijackings, the dozens of like-minded terrorist groups that emanate from Muslim countries remain capable of mounting sophisticated operations throughout the world.

Tourism industry officials portrayed the Mombasa attack as an escalation of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict but not a general cause for alarm among Western travellers. If al-Qaeda was behind the operation, it was the group’s first direct attack against Israelis.

But it also appeared to mark an escalation in the larger Islamist terror campaign whose leader, Osama bin Laden, signed a declaration in 1998 calling for the death of non-Muslims wherever they can be found.

First, the attack signals the return of Islamic terrorism to East Africa, where two American embassies were bombed by al-Qaeda in 1998. It also shows that terrorists possess powerful weapons and are willing to use them to maximum effect against civilians.

The “alarming fact,” said Richard Bennett, a British terrorism expert, is that “the ordinary man and woman in the street, on a charter flight or in a holiday hotel” is now at the frontline of the terrorist war.

“Al-Qaeda has survived a massive onslaught from the West and has shown a disturbing ability to escape the attentions of the intelligence community and secure its communications,” Mr. Bennett said.

“It would still appear that the true nature and range of the terrorist threat has not been fully appreciated by many Western governments or perhaps worst still that the sheer magnitude of the problem has paralyzed the decision-making process.”

The SA-7 missiles fired at the flight skimmed over the wing. Passengers said they had first been “full of trembling and fear,” but as the plane touched down they burst into applause, cheered and then sang popular Israeli songs.

“Thank God we are here,” said one passenger as he emerged from the plane.

Another passenger said: “Until three in the morning, I felt secure. It [their hotel] was an Israeli holiday village — a nice place. It’s very scary now, because we had a feeling that God had saved us twice, once here and once there.”

==============================

Al-Qaeda roots run deep in Africa: Terror breeding ground (National Post, 021129)

Peter Goodspeed

If Osama Bin Laden’s al-Qaeda organization was behind yesterday’s simultaneous attacks on a hotel full of Israeli tourists and an Israeli charter jet in Kenya, it will be something of a homecoming for the stateless terror network.

Africa is familiar ground for al-Qaeda. While bin Laden was fighting the former Soviet Union in Afghanistan when he created al-Qaeda (The Base) in 1988, he transformed his guerrilla network into a terrorist group in Sudan in 1992 — just after he was expelled from Saudi Arabia for declaring jihad against the United States.

It was from his African base that bin Laden initially dispatched Muslim guerrillas to fight in Somalia, Chechnya, Algeria, Egypt and the Balkans, and it was there that he plotted the Feb. 26, 1993, terrorist car bomb attack on New York’s World Trade Center.

In the aftermath of last year’s second attack on the World Trade Center and the subsequent expulsion of al-Qaeda and its Taliban allies from Afghanistan, it was in Africa that the terror group first began to reform and reassert itself.

In Tunisia, Nizar Nawar, a 24-year-old al-Qaeda veteran from Afghanistan, carried out the first post-Sept. 11 al-Qaeda attack when he blew up a gas truck outside the oldest synagogue in Africa, killing 21 German tourists.

Last May, another three Saudi Arabian men with al-Qaeda links were arrested in Casablanca, Morocco, while they were planning to attack British and U.S. navy vessels in the Strait of Gibraltar.

Then in September, Kenyan police arrested an al-Qaeda suspect from Yemen, Hassan Omar Hussein, as he tried to enter the country with false Kenyan identity papers.

“There has been information circulating in Western anti-terrorist circles for the past three weeks that the Yemeni head for East Africa and the Horn of Africa ... was looking to pull off an attack,” said Roland Jacquard, head of the International Observatory on Terrorism in Paris.

Africa is a natural breeding ground for terrorism. Ravaged by poverty, torn by unrest and riddled with failed states and weak governments, it is highly likely the troubled continent drew al-Qaeda members like flies when their bases were destroyed in Afghanistan and they were forced to flee U.S. retaliation for the Sept. 11 terror attacks.

Kenya and its port city of Mombasa would have been natural shelters for fleeing al-Qaeda members because of the large population of western tourist targets and a large Muslim population that provides a natural cover for the fugitives.

In the immediate aftermath of Sept. 11, Kenyan intelligence officials were quoted as saying pro-bin Laden graffiti sprouted on some Mombasa walls and one of the city’s streets was unofficially named after the Saudi terrorism mastermind.

Kenya is also a country of wild borders and weak police. Abutting Tanzania, Uganda, Sudan, Somalia and Ethiopia, it provides any terrorist group with easy access to all of Africa in an atmosphere of almost permanent lawlessness.

The Kenyan border with Somalia is particularly troublesome and for decades has been a preferred route for African arms smugglers. A recent U.S. survey of Kenya warns: “There are indications of ties between Muslim extremist groups, including Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda organization and these roving groups of Somali gunmen.”

Still other U.S. State Department reports designate Kenya’s neighbour Sudan as one of seven state sponsors of terrorism and name Somalia as “a potential breeding ground, as well as safe haven, for terrorist networks.”

“International terrorist organizations with Islamic ties, including al-Qaeda and the Lebanese Hezbollah, have a presence in Africa and continue to exploit Africa’s permissive operating environment — porous borders, conflict, lax financial systems and the wide availability of weapons — to expand their networks,” a recent U.S. State Department report said.

“All along East Africa, from Somalia down to Kenya, Tanzania — even extending down to South Africa — there is an al-Qaeda presence,” warned Magnus Ranstorp, deputy director of the Centre for the Study of Terrorism at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. “It’s a blind spot in the ‘war against terrorism.’ “

In 1998, when the U.S. embassy in Kenya’s capital, Nairobi, was attacked with a car bomb that killed 219 people and injured another 5,000, al-Qaeda claimed the attack in the name of “the Islamic Army against the Jews and the Crusaders.”

Yesterday’s attacks were claimed by a previously unknown group called “The Government of Universal Palestine in Exile, the Army of Palestine.”

But the highly co-ordinated, synchronized attacks have all the hallmarks of an al-Qaeda operation.

During the last six months, Kenyan intelligence officials have been picking up reports their country might be targeted by terrorists, Musalia Mudavadi, Kenya’s Vice-President, said yesterday.

“We can’t rule out the group that struck at us in 1998,” he said.

Al-Qaeda cells and their allies appear to be an increasing rather than a receding threat. Lately, there have been Islamist attacks on U.S., Australian and European targets in Tunisia, Pakistan, Kuwait, Russia, Jordan, Yemen, the United States, the Philippines and Indonesia.

Last month, U.S. Central Intelligence Agency director George Tenet told a U.S. Senate hearing al-Qaeda is now stronger than it was just after Sept. 11, 2001.

“They’ve reconstituted, they are coming after us,” he said.

==============================

Hezbollah calls for global attacks (Washington Times, 021204)

LONDON — The leader of the Lebanese Muslim group Hezbollah is urging a global suicide bombing campaign, increasing the prospect that the regional conflict between Arabs and Israelis will expand to mimic or even merge with al Qaeda’s war against the West.

Two recent speeches by the Lebanon-based Hezbollah leader, Sheik Hassan Nasrallah, have raised the specter of attacks outside the region by a powerful and well-organized military force — a force that successfully pushed the Israeli army out of southern Lebanon two years ago.

“By Allah, if they touch Al Aqsa we will act everywhere around the world,” Sheik Nasrallah told an estimated 10,000 gun-toting, bearded fighters in southern Lebanon on Friday. Several hundred “suicide commandos” also took part.

Al Aqsa refers to a sacred Muslim site in Jerusalem that, although under Israeli military control, is in practice administered by Palestinian Muslim authorities.

The site, holy to both Jews and Muslims, is a flash point for tension and outbreaks of violence.

Taken alone, Sheik Nasrallah’s remarks might be interpreted as no more than a warning to Israel not to alter the status quo.

But earlier in the week, at a rally in Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley, Sheik Nasrallah issued a far more ominous threat.

“Martyrdom operations — suicide bombings — should be exported outside Palestine,” he said.

“I encourage Palestinians to take suicide bombings worldwide. Don’t be shy about it,” he added.

Both speeches were broadcast by a Hezbollah-owned TV station in Lebanon.

The sheik has made no direct comment on Thursday’s twin attacks in Kenya, in which missiles were fired at an Israeli passenger jet and suicide bombers attacked an oceanfront hotel.

However, a previously unknown group calling itself the Army of Palestine claimed responsibility for the attacks in a press statement sent from Beirut.

“The rapid statement, and the peculiarity of Lebanese fundamentalist terminology used in that statement, leads me to believe that this was the hand of Hezbollah,” said Walid Phares, a professor of Middle Eastern studies and religious conflict at Florida Atlantic University.

The Palestinian militant groups in Gaza and the West Bank insist they have no intention to take their battle with Israel outside the region.

Islamic Jihad spokesman Nafez Azaam said yesterday his group’s “ideology and strategy is based on fighting the occupation and liberating the Palestinian lands.”

“We have no interest in transferring the battle to any field outside Palestine,” he told the Associated Press by phone from Gaza.

Hamas spokesman Ismail Abu Shanab also told AP his group had “no interest in engaging in battle with anyone else outside the land of Palestine.”

But Mr. Phares warned that Hezbollah had been establishing closer ties with Palestinian radical groups, holding meetings in Lebanon with representatives of Hamas and Islamic Jihad every couple of weeks and issuing joint press statements.

Although Palestinian groups in exile actively attacked Western targets in the 1980s with high-profile hijackings and bombings outside the region, the focus shifted with the onset of the first Palestinian uprising against Israel in 1988.

Throughout the 1990s, Hezbollah and Palestinian groups operating from the West Bank and Gaza Strip pursued a strictly national agenda.

Since Israel withdrew from southern Lebanon in May 2000, Hezbollah has sought a new and expanded role, and had strengthened its contacts with radical Muslims including al Qaeda, Mr. Phares said.

In that context, Mr. Phares described Sheik Nasrallah’s comments as a “benchmark.”

Hezbollah enjoys strong financial backing from its mentor Iran, and has been permitted and encouraged to operate, within certain confines, by Syria, which controls Lebanon.

Its military prowess has been seen as a model by Palestinian leaders, who had hoped that by initiating a second uprising against Israel in September 2000, they too could force a similar withdrawal by Israeli forces from the West Bank and Gaza.

Hezbollah would never openly declare an alliance or relationship with al Qaeda, according to analysts, because that would embarrass Syria.

Syria is actively being courted by the United States because of Syria’s longtime animosity toward its neighbor Iraq.

Hezbollah has already made some inroads into Palestinian insurgency: Its yellow flag, with the words “Allah is Great” inscribed in green, appears at many radical Palestinian demonstrations.

The flag can even be seen in some Arab villages in Israel.

Israel’s defense force chief, Lt. Gen. Moshe Yaalon, on Monday said al Qaeda was already operating against Israeli targets.

He said his forces had already foiled many al Qaeda attacks in Israel, adding that the organization made use of Palestinian operatives in the West Bank and Gaza.

In some ways a tacit alliance between the two is surprising, in that al Qaeda along with Hamas and Islamic Jihad are strong adherents of Sunni Islam, while Hezbollah’s followers are Shi’ites.

The two branches of Islam reflect a schism that occurred in one generation after the founder Muhammad.

However, the branches’ common hatred of the West appears to have muted social and doctrinal differences. Hezbollah has close Sunni allies in two key Lebanese cities, Tripoli and Sidon.

Imad Mughnieh, the Hezbollah official who masterminded the attacks against the U.S. Marine barracks, French Marines and the U.S. Embassy in 1983, fled to Iran. Intelligence sources report he met with al Qaeda operatives in the late 1990s.

Of concern for anti-terror agencies is the stronghold Hezbollah has established in Canada, which is seen as a springboard for future actions and influence inside the United States.

Canada’s government has been under fire from the opposition, lobbies and some parliamentary members of the ruling Liberal Party to ban the organization. Canada’s only action so far has been to order banks to freeze the assets of the group’s “External Security Force,” the National Post newspaper reported.

The newspaper also reported that Bill Graham, the minister of foreign affairs, had decided not to outlaw Hezbollah in its entirety because the group is also involved in social and political work in Lebanon.

The group has been using Canada as a source of money, forged documents, stolen cars, recruits and military-use equipment, the Post reported Saturday, citing unnamed police and intelligence officials.

One of Sheik Nasrallah’s top men, Ayub Fawzi, 38, operated from Canada for several years. He was on the list of 22 wanted terrorists published by the United States after the September 11 attacks.

At some point, he moved back to the Palestinian territories and was captured by Israeli security forces in June.

==============================

Terror Tools: Saudi-funded front in Michigan (National Review Online, 030311)

By Rita Katz and Josh Devon

The Saudi-funded, al Qaeda propaganda machine is in full effect behind the Islamic Assembly of North America (IANA), an ostensibly mainstream organization that had five of its members arrested and indicted at the end of February. Four of the men were running an IANA spin-off charity, Help the Needy, and funneling money illegally through it to Iraq. The fifth, Samih Al-Hussayen, a student at the University Idaho, was arrested for knowingly neglecting to list his affiliation with IANA on his visa application when he entered the country. Al-Hussayen’s employment and activities at IANA should immediately be worrisome — one federal source stated to the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, “He’s in touch with people who could pick up the phone, call UBL, and he would take the call.”

IANA receives half its funding from the Saudi government and the other half from mostly Saudi private donors, according to a New York Times interview with IANA’s director, Mohammed al-Ahmari. Al-Hussayen’s indictment notes that IANA’s proselytization activities included the “dissemination of radical Islamic ideology the purpose of which was indoctrination, recruitment of members, and the instigation of acts of violence and terrorism.” Backed by the Saudis, IANA has become a glorified al Qaeda recruitment center.

Two of the most radical sheiks in Saudi Arabia who provide religious justification for al-Qaeda, Salman Al-Awdah and Safar al-Hawali, have several fatwas (religious rulings) and statements plastered all over IANA’s websites. These fatwas legitimize suicide bombings, terrorist attacks, and spit hatred towards the West. Both Al-Awdah and al-Hawali received phone calls from Mounir Motassadeq, a member of the Hamburg-based September 11 cell who was recently convicted in Germany of aiding the hijackers and being an accessory to over 3,000 murders. U.S. officials maintain al-Hawali is linked to the al Qaeda cell that bombed the U.S. embassy in Kenya in 1998. In bin Laden’s 1996 declaration of war against the West, the terrorist commander “bemoaned” the arrests of the two sheikhs, who are frequently incarcerated in Saudi Arabia for their support of terrorism and for criticizing and condemning the royal family.

Paradoxically, however, it was Saudi Prince Nayef bin Abdelaziz who in 1999 released the two “religious scholars” from one of their stints in jail, and according to the Mideast Mirror, “warmly received” them and promised “there would be no official curbs on their activities.” Despite the two sheikhs hatred for the Saudi royal family and their radical fatwas, the Saudi government continues to fund their fanatical propaganda on IANA’s websites, but why? Any Arabic speaker familiar with the Arab world (which presumably those in the Saudi government are) can immediately recognize IANA’s lineup of radical “scholars” who support and legitimize al Qaeda’s activities.

The only conclusion is that elements within the Saudi government knowingly support IANA as a jihadist recruitment center — but the recruitment is clandestine to most Americans, including law enforcement. For the most part, IANA has attempted to mask its vitriolic propaganda, publishing its most radical content solely in Arabic. IANA’s English products and publications are conspicuously absent of the harshest al Qaeda and terrorist propaganda. Only in Arabic, on IANA’s several websites, can an individual read about the glory of suicide missions or navigate to audio clips religiously justifying terrorist attacks and calling for jihad.

One fatwa in particular appears to have given the justification to the hijackers to carry out the September 11 attacks. A government translation of a fatwa by a “radical Saudi sheikh” ominously published on one of IANA’s websites, Alasr.ws, in May 2001, stated, “[T]he mujahid must kill himself if he knows that this will lead to killing a great number of enemies…this can be accomplished with the modern means of bombing or bringing down an airplane on an important location that will cause the enemy great losses.”

Radical proselytization, both written and spoken by other prominent radical sheikhs, like bin Laden’s mentor and founder of al Qaeda, Abdullah Azzam, populates IANA’s websites. IANA also hosts recruitment videos for jihad, with clips displaying the dead bodies of mujahedeen from terrorist operations and glorifying them. To see one such video, one can visit (if it is taken down after this piece is published, please contact the SITE Institute for a copy). This clip is of martyrs from Chechnya, funded by al Qaeda, who have been killed in operations and are now being honored. (It is a very graphic clip, and only individuals who are strong of mind and stomach should view it.)

Backed with copious Saudi funding, IANA has created a series of websites respected by al Qaeda members from around the world. Azzam Publications, the English mouthpiece of al Qaeda named for Abdullah Azzam that was shut down by the FBI, had a direct link from its former website, Azzam.com, to IANA’s main website, Iananet.org. Another of IANA’s websites, Islamway.com, advertised for the Saudi charity, Al-Haramain, which had two of its branches raided in Bosnia and Somalia for supporting al Qaeda and is an entity being sued by the 9/11 Families United to Bankrupt Terrorism. The link to al-Haramain, taken off the website only very recently, always remained conspicuously absent from the English-language version of the website.

Once again, we see the Saudi government maintaining to be an ally of the United States, while at the same funding a rampant systematic radicalization of the worldwide Muslim population. Like IANA’s websites, the Saudis maintain one thing to the United States in English, while snickering behind America’s back in Arabic. With incredible hubris, Saudi Arabia utilizes North America as a base of global indoctrination. IANA is just one example, that even pervades into the U.S. prison system. According to IANA’s website, last year, the organization sent 106 packages of Islamic propaganda materials to prisons nationwide, at a cost of $100 a package. This year, the website maintains, IANA hopes to send 250 additional packages to prisons. Their goal, they say, is to reach 1,000 prisons.

If propaganda tools like IANA are legitimized and allowed to operate in the United States, we can expect the hatred towards the U.S. to balloon. Saudi Arabia succors the hatred of the West, and so long as the Kingdom continues to fund jihadists and their propaganda, our war on terror will have to overcome increasing burdens. The U.S. government is to be commended for its job in arresting several of the individuals behind IANA’s activities, but the victory is a hollow one. IANA and several other organizations like it are still active in the United States and will no doubt continue their propaganda programs and their incitement to drive individuals to commit terrorist attacks, unless concerned citizens refuse to legitimize these organizations and expose them.

— Rita Katz is the director of the SITE Institute, based in Washington, D.C. Josh Devon is an analyst at the SITE Institute. The SITE Institute is one of the investigation teams for the 9/11 Families United to Bankrupt Terrorism.

==============================

Baghdad and Beyond: Another Victory for the Bush Doctrine (National Review Online, 030410)

By Alan W. Dowd

The Bush Doctrine of coercive diplomacy, preemptive action, and regime termination has passed another important test. First, in Afghanistan, it destroyed the terrorist regime run by the Taliban and bankrolled by al Qaeda. Now, in Iraq, it has dismantled one of the centerpieces of global terrorism and preempted the use or transfer of weapons of mass murder onto the American homeland. But there’s more to come — and also more happening than meets the eye.

As the U.S.-led Coalition swept through Iraq, the Pentagon quietly continued its ongoing operations throughout the eastern hemisphere — a fact underscored by the large-scale raids in eastern Afghanistan timed to coincide with the initial assault on Saddam’s regime. In Pakistan, the Bush Doctrine’s coercive diplomacy has converted President Pervez Musharraf from the Taliban’s only friend into a dependable ally in the war on terror. U.S. special forces now roam freely along the Pakistan-Afghanistan frontier, conducting search-and-destroy missions on both sides of the border — sometimes deep inside Pakistani territory, and often with the assistance of Pakistani troops.

In the Philippines, teams of U.S. troops are conducting what the diplomats call “counterterrorism training missions” with the Philippine army. But if this is training, it’s on-the-job training. As in Afghanistan, the U.S.-led force has smashed and scattered the enemy. Likewise, in Georgia and other former Soviet republics, U.S. troops are training and equipping local forces to clean out al Qaeda and its kindred movements.

From their perch in Djibouti, U.S. intelligence agents and military task forces are conducting operations in and around Yemen (recall the Predator strike on al Qaeda commanders in November 2002), monitoring terrorist activity in the lawless lands of eastern Africa, reminding the Sudanese and Libyans that there’s a new sheriff in town, and intercepting suspicious ships in the vital waterways around the Horn of Africa. One of those ships was a North Korean vessel loaded with SCUD missiles and bound for Yemen. Although the ship was allowed to continue to its destination, the episode sent an unmistakable message to North Korea and its ilk: America is watching and can strike at will.

Yet all of this made for little more than background noise as the United States waged and won two major military campaigns in the span of 18 months. Like some 21st-century posse, U.S. special forces rode into Afghanistan on horseback, the Marines joining them by helicopter. The warplanes came from the Arabian Sea, the Indian Ocean, the former Soviet Union, and the continental United States. The Taliban promised another Vietnam, a replay of Mogadishu. But what the world witnessed was liberation in its fullest sense, as this improbable task force rewrote military history and helped Afghanis take their first steps toward freedom in a generation.

Then, before a new government had even been installed in Kabul, the United States swung its sights to Iraq and began assembling an invasion force like no other. Once called into action, it moved across the sands and skies of Iraq like lightning across the heavens. Saddam wanted a Stalingrad, a Dresden, a Grozny. He wanted oil fires and mass casualties, to show the world that the allies were no different than his thugs. But what the world has witnessed instead is the power of restraint, the shock and awe of a military juggernaut limited only by the conscience of a moral people. From the airmen and sailors using their missilery like a sniper’s rifle to the Marines and soldiers sharing food with Saddam’s victims after destroying his armies, America’s finest have risked their own lives to limit the bloodshed.

Saddam’s Baathists have done the very opposite. Cribbing their battle plan from bin Laden’s al Qaeda and Arafat’s al-Aqsa Martyrs, they march noncombatants in front of tanks, use school buses and pregnant women as time bombs, and convert holy sites into missile sites. Yet none of this deterred the liberators of Iraq. Instead, they fought harder and plunged deeper. Could it be that every fake surrender, every suicide attack, every atrocity, reminded the Americans of the men who had planned and executed September 11?

In all of this, one recalls what an awestruck Churchill observed in the middle of World War II: “With her left hand,” he marveled, “America was leading the advance of the conquering Allied armies into the heart of Germany, and with her right, on the other side of the globe, she was irresistibly and swiftly breaking up the power of Japan.” Such is the reach of a wounded America.

But to paraphrase Churchill after North Africa , Iraq marks not the beginning of the end, but only the end of the beginning. The next test for the Bush Doctrine is literally as close as next door.

Just west of Iraq, the Syrian government grants office space in downtown Damascus to Hamas. Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley, controlled by Syria, is a training ground for Hezbollah, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, and Palestinian Islamic Jihad. The State Department concludes that Syria serves “as the primary transit point for the transfer of Iranian-supplied weapons to Hizballah.” And as the Iraq war intensified, Syria sent military supplies and volunteers to rescue Saddam’s dying regime. Damascus could send far worse in the months ahead — guerillas, suicide bombers, poisons.

A recent State Department report called Iran “the most active state sponsor of terrorism” on earth. Tehran provides Hezbollah, Hamas, Palestine Islamic Jihad, and others with funding, training, and weapons. Contrary to the critics’ claims, these organizations aren’t just “Israel’s problem.” Hezbollah does advocate the elimination of Israel, a strong U.S. ally, but it’s worth noting that until September 11, Hezbollah had also killed more Americans than any other terrorist group on earth. In fact, a full year before the attacks on Manhattan and Washington, the FBI arrested 23 members and supporters of Hezbollah — in suburban North Carolina. And in February of 2003, eight people with ties to Palestinian Islamic Jihad were arrested in Florida.

Simply put, al Qaeda is just one branch of a global terror network with roots and branches virtually everywhere. And the Iranian and al Qaeda branches in particular have grown closer since 2001. Western officials have evidence that Tehran has provided safe haven and safe passage to al Qaeda. And during the war in Iraq, Tehran slipped hundreds of members of its Badr Brigade across the border. We can’t be sure what they will do inside Iraq, but we can be sure of what they won’t do — help the United States and the United Kingdom to build a democratic, pluralist Iraq.

Inside Iran, the mullahs are racing to build a nuclear bomb. A year ago, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld concluded, ominously, “The nexus between weapons of mass destruction and the terrorist states that have those weapons — and that have relationships with terrorist networks — is a particularly dangerous circumstance for the world.” We may soon see just how dangerous.

Of the 19 men who attacked the Pentagon and World Trade Center on September 11, 15 had been born and raised in the cloistered wealth of Saudi Arabia. It was a Saudi millionaire who trained and indoctrinated them, and many of them had their first taste of his poisoned brand of Islam in Saudi-supported schools. These schools dot the Muslim world; they are producing tomorrow’s bin Ladens by the thousands; and they are graphic evidence that the current Saudi regime is no friend to America. Like Pakistan’s government in 2001, Saudi Arabia’s leaders must be called to task and given a simple choice: Either change the behavior of your regime or face the consequences.

Of course, those consequences don’t necessarily translate into full-blown warfare. Already the terror masters have watched the U.S. military destroy in five weeks the nightmare regime that the Taliban took five years to build. They have watched intelligence agencies, special forces, and pilotless planes systematically dismantle a global terror network spanning 60 countries and six continents. They have watched U.S. bombers drop JDAMs, while U.S. cargo planes drop MREs. They have watched America reward its friends and warn its enemies. They have watched Washington shrug off the diplomatic doublespeak and doomsaying. They have watched a divided, ambivalent America coalesce behind a mission and burden that other nations and prior administrations had refused to accept. They have witnessed the flexibility and fury of preventive war. And, soon, they will witness yet another expression of American might: When the last of Saddam’s regime is defeated, thousands of Americans will quietly withdraw from the land of Mecca and Medina. They will join the quarter-million U.S. troops already in Iraq, and take up long-term residence on the borders of Syria, Saudi Arabia, and Iran. And so will begin the next phase in the war on terror. Blending the surprise and deadliness of traditional warfare with the tension and stalemate of the Cold War, what lies ahead is something altogether different — a colder, harsher strain of conflict.

America is well suited and well rehearsed for this “colder war.” In fact, we have been practicing it for months, if not years. Since September 12, 2001, the United States has been on guard, alternately showing restraint and resolve, the clenched fist of war and the open hand of friendship. Of course, this is not the first time America has called on its political and military leaders to be ambidextrous: Recall the long test of will with Moscow that began with a humanitarian airlift into a divided Berlin, spawned a war in Korea that still hasn’t ended, threw open the door to Doomsday in Cuba, and ended with celebrations in a united Berlin.

As before, the United States will menace the enemy, even while rebuilding the cities and society of a liberated Iraq. America’s very presence will change the behavior of Iraq’s neighbors. And, one way or another, the United States will replace these enemy regimes with something better. If you doubt this, just take a look at what’s happening in Kabul and Baghdad — or try to find a Soviet armored division in Berlin or Budapest. For that matter, try to find the Soviet Union on a map.

Simply put, just as regimes come in many forms, so too do the tools of regime change — from coercion and Cold War to combat and colder war. The enemy is learning that the Bush Doctrine, like its author, is flexible and audacious enough to employ any of these tools.

==============================

Hamas accused of Canadian plot (National Post, 031205)

Israel says Ontario man was trained to kill in North America: Lawyer says client admits group recruited him, but argues confession was under duress

The terrorist group Hamas recruited and trained a Palestinian-Canadian to carry out attacks against Jewish and Israeli targets in Canada and the United States, an Israeli embassy official said yesterday.

In what is being described as a new direction for the radical Palestinian group, Hamas allegedly gave weapons and explosives training to the 23-year-old Canadian in an attempt to expand its war against Israel to North America.

The embassy official said that Jamal Akkal of Windsor has confessed he was assigned to assassinate visiting Israeli dignitaries, booby-trap the cars of Jews and Israeli diplomats, and murder Jews whenever the opportunity arose.

“He is a member of Hamas,” said Ofir Gendelman, second secretary at the Israeli embassy in Ottawa. “Basically, he is part of a new cell that planned terrorist attacks in North America against Israeli and Jewish targets.

“This is very, very dangerous, a novelty so to speak in terrorist activities done by Hamas,” the embassy spokesman added. “Hamas has always, or most of the time, concentrated on Israel and the territories. In some cases they plan to execute terrorist attacks in Jordan, but this is the first time that we are getting information about terrorist attacks in North America by Hamas.”

Jamil al-Qhateb, the lawyer representing Mr. Akkal, said the Canadian admits he was approached by Hamas to carry out attacks in North America but said he never agreed to do so, and that his confession was extracted under duress.

“You know how they take all this information. For 20 days they interrogated him without sleep. He was all the time sitting in the chair ... and what he has said, I think that [was] because he was tired or because he didn’t sleep at all.”

He said he asked Mr. Akkal if he planned to conduct attacks in North America and he said he did not. He also said allegations that Mr. Akkal underwent Hamas military training were overblown. “It’s just eight bullets he was shooting, that’s it, and they tell him it’s military training.”

Mr. Akkal appeared at a brief court hearing in Israel yesterday, where his case was transferred to the military for prosecution. His lawyer said he faces charges of conspiracy and military training.

Mr. Akkal, also known as Jammal Zakariya Hadi Abed El Aqel, was born in a Palestinian refugee camp in the Gaza Strip but moved to Canada four years ago and is a former student at the University of Windsor.

He returned to Gaza for a visit in October. His family said he went to find a wife. But he was arrested on Nov. 1 as he was leaving for Egypt, where he planned to catch a flight home to Canada. He has since been held by the Israeli Shin Beit security service.

“He admitted during his investigation that during his stay in the Gaza Strip ... he was drafted into the military wing of Hamas and had a series of military trainings that included the use of small arms and preparation of explosive devices,” Mr. Gendelman said.

“The aim of this training was committing a series of terrorist attacks against Israeli and Jewish interests in North America. One of the plans was shooting at an Israeli VIP, a minister that would come to visit North America. He was supposed to tail that minister, get close to him and shoot him.

“Another scenario was booby-trapping cars of Israelis and Jews.... And he also wanted to kill a Jew wherever he meets him, like in the street if he would see an Orthodox Jew, he had orders to kill him on the spot.

“He admitted to all those. He said in the investigation that he was planning to do all those things. So we are not talking about allegations but about facts.”

The Department of Foreign Affairs said it had no information about the confession but was seeking details from the Canadian embassy in Tel Aviv. “We are not aware of the elements quoted by the National Post,” said spokesman Reynald Doiron.

Wayne Easter, the Solicitor-General, said in a speech in Ottawa yesterday that Americans unjustly view Canada as a “staging base for terrorist acts in the U.S. and other forms of unlawful activity. That is a perception, but keep in mind it is not a correct one.”

Israeli officials said Mr. Akkal appears to have been recruited for just such a mission, and he was selected largely because of his ability as a Canadian citizen and passport holder to move freely within North America.

“He wouldn’t arouse any suspicion because he is a Canadian,” Mr. Gendelman said. “We think that because he was Canadian and they knew he was Canadian, they didn’t see him as just another Palestinian coming from abroad. They wanted to use his documents, his citizenship, as a tool to carry out terrorist attacks.”

This week, another Canadian, Abdurahman Khadr, admitted at a news conference in Toronto that he had trained at a notorious al-Qaeda terrorist camp in Afghanistan. He returned to Canada on Sunday following his release from Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

Hamas, an acronym for the Islamic Resistance Movement, is a Palestinian terrorist group based in Gaza that is committed to the destruction of Israel. It carried out many of the suicide bombings that have killed hundreds of Israelis over the past three years.

The group was outlawed under Canada’s Anti-Terrorism Act on Nov. 27, 2002. While Hamas has used Canada in the past for fundraising, propaganda and sanctuary, this is the first suggestion it has tried to use Canada as a launching pad for attacks.

Mr. al-Qhateb said he had not seen what other evidence the Israelis had, but he said he doubted the strength of Mr. Akkal’s confession.

“What he had already admitted, it seems to me, it is not all the truth.”

He said Mr. Akkal does not speak Hebrew and would not know what the Israeli interrogators were saying or writing down. “They can write whatever they want and, really, I ask him if he had an intention to do attacks in Canada or in America or somewhere else, and he said to me that, ‘no, I didn’t have any intention to do it. Just it was someone who asked me if I agree. I didn’t decide it.’ That’s what happened.”

==============================

Europe’s Non-Strategy: The E.U. isn’t taking terror seriously (Weekly Standard, 040510)

IN THE WAKE of the March 11 Madrid train bombing, Romano Prodi, president of the European Commission, said, “It is clear that force alone cannot win the fight against terrorism.” Prodi was hardly the first continental leader to implicitly criticize U.S. policy as short-sighted and to suggest that there are clear and compelling alternatives to America’s strategy in the war on terror.

Soon after 9/11 itself, French prime minister Lionel Jospin traced terrorist acts to “tension, frustration, and radicalism,” which in turn “are linked to inequality,” which would have to be addressed. In 2002, France’s foreign minister famously termed U.S. policy toward terrorism “simplistic” precisely because it did not look to “root causes, the situations, poverty, injustice.” Norway’s prime minister, Kjell Bondevik, insists that “fighting terrorism should be about more than using your military and freezing finances,” and convened two international conferences on the root causes of terrorism in 2003. And after Madrid, German chancellor Gerhard Schröder said that “terrorism cannot be fought only with arms and police. We must also combat the roots of terrorism.”

This view isn’t restricted to the other side of the Atlantic. John Kerry said in January 2003 that President Bush “has a plan for waging war [on terror] but no plan for winning the peace” over the long haul. “We need more than a one-dimensional war on terror,” he went on, requiring us to “recognize the conditions that are breeding this virulent new form of anti-American terrorism.”

There are only two things wrong with this line of

criticism. The United States is mounting a long-term strategy against terrorism. And Europe isn’t offering any alternative.

American conservatives may not be famous for their “root causes” explanations of terrorism, any more than of crime. But in several major speeches that echo neoconservative thinking on the subject, President Bush has articulated what amounts to a root-causes theory of terrorism. “As long as the Middle East remains a place of tyranny and despair and anger,” he says, “it will continue to produce men and movements that threaten the safety of America and our friends,” because dictatorships incubate “stagnation, resentment, and violence ready for export.” And his administration has begun to implement a strategy based on this theory. It has outlined a far-reaching “greater Middle East initiative” aimed at offering incentives for political reform and democratization in the region. More pointedly, the United States invaded Iraq in no small part to create a new democracy which the administration thinks might catalyze liberalization throughout the Middle East.

The United States doesn’t exactly have the strongest track record when it comes to transformational policies in the Middle East. And there are grounds to be skeptical of the “tyranny” theory of the origins of anti-Western extremism. But it cannot be denied that this administration is trying something bold and serious, something expensive and risky, to solve the terrorism problem from the roots up. Britain, Poland, and several other European countries have of course joined in the Iraq initiative.

By comparison, what are European critics offering as an alternative? All European countries have mounted assertive intelligence-gathering and law enforcement policies against terrorists and plotters in their midst. And several have military forces in Afghanistan. But both those measures are parts of the bombs-and-bullets strategy they insist is not enough. So what major initiative have they—say, the governments of France, Germany, Belgium, and Scandinavia—launched to address what they consider terrorism’s root causes, whether alone, jointly, or through the European Union? No such initiative is anywhere in sight.

Is it too early to expect more? It’s only a little over a month since Islamist terrorists attacked a major E.U. capital, killing 191 people and wounding 1,500. But Europeans have had two and a half years since al Qaeda put terrorism on everyone’s agenda. Moreover, they have had major domestic terrorist problems for decades, unlike the United States. So there has been ample time to formulate what French president Jacques Chirac has called for: a “European plan against terrorism.” And Europe has the means. The E.U. countries have a total GDP of around $8 trillion, and they stand at the crossroads of both international diplomacy and the global economy.

What are the leading candidates for a European “root causes” initiative? Sweden’s Social Democratic Olof Palme Center declares that “world poverty, exclusion, and class divisions” are key root causes of extremism. As is well known, the link between poverty and terrorism is suspiciously difficult to establish. But let’s assume many Europeans believe that poverty is generating a major threat to the security of the West. Several E.U. governments famously give foreign aid at higher rates than the United States, especially the Scandinavians. But they have been giving at these rates for decades, the same decades in which anti-Western extremism was growing. In answer to post-9/11 calls for changes in policy, these leaders might have launched—or at least proposed—a major shift in which countries receive their aid or in how they monitor its effectiveness. Or they could have proposed to dramatically increase the amount

of aid—the recipients of the Marshall Plan now “giving back” to the international community. But they haven’t done any of these things. For example, European official development assistance levels and practices generally remain steady.

Other Europeans argue that global economic inequality is a source of resentment. If so, France, Germany, and other E.U. countries could try to revise the rules of the global economic game to promote growth in developing countries. They might have started by opening their own markets to textiles and especially agricultural products from developing countries. But instead they’ve chosen to maintain import barriers and extensive subsidies to their own producers. By depressing the prices of goods made in Europe, these measures decrease incomes in the developing world, at levels almost certainly outweighing the value of Europe’s foreign aid. If anything, Europe (and especially France) has been playing a regressive role on agriculture in world trade talks in recent years.

Other European commentators highlight political root causes, such as the lack of political and human rights in many developing countries. Decades of experience suggest that mild pressure on developing countries to reform has little effect. So have these Europeans outlined a transformational strategy aimed at political reform in, say, the Middle East? So far they haven’t. Indeed, nothing has attracted their criticism as much as America’s pursuit of a democracy-seeking transformational agenda in the region.

Finally, Jacques Chirac and former French prime minister Alain Juppé are among many who trace Islamist anger to “conflicts,” often a code word for the Arab-Israeli conflict. The evidence for this thesis, too, is not persuasive, to say the least. But have Europeans launched a major initiative aimed at resolving or even substantially mitigating this dispute? Here is the one candidate on this list on which Europe’s leaders have expended effort and (some) treasure trying to encourage progress and increase their leverage over events, mostly by funding Yasser Arafat’s Palestinian Authority with over $100 million a year. This has not solved the problem (and may well have made it worse), but it’s a rare attempt to follow through, however partially, on one root-causes theory of terrorism.

So where have continental European leaders been focusing the bulk of their counterterrorism efforts? Since 9/11, and again since “3/11” in Madrid, they have dramatically intensified surveillance, gathered intelligence, revealed wide-ranging plots and recruiting networks, and made a pleasing number of arrests of known and suspected terrorists in their midst. Pleasing, but not satisfying, because arresting on-site conspirators deals only with the tail end of an enemy’s overall assault. Dick Cheney points out that such a law-enforcement strategy “leaves the network behind the attacks virtually untouched,” able to continue recruiting, training, and dispatching new teams of bombers whenever it wishes. This is the furthest thing from a root-causes strategy.

The result is that there is a real difference between European and American strategies in the war on terror, but not the one you might think. It’s not that Europeans are thinking long-term while the United States is thinking short-term, or even that their theories of root causes are distinct (though they are). The real difference is that only the United States has translated a theory of root causes into a strategy and started to implement it.

What might explain this? One disturbing possibility is that the real long-term strategy of many Europeans might be to lie low while the United States takes the heat: in other words, to take Osama bin Laden up on his “separate peace” proposal even while denouncing it. This might have made sense to some people immediately after 9/11, when violent Islamists seemed to be treating Europe only as a staging area for attacks on America. But in the succeeding months, al Qaeda affiliates and sympathizers repeatedly targeted E.U. citizens and assets—in Pakistan, Tunisia, Turkey, and on the open seas. The Madrid train bombing brought the war to an E.U. capital. And even since Spain’s elections, ongoing plots have been uncovered in Spain, France, and Britain. In the wake of Madrid, there is little evidence that many Europeans believe they can deflect the threat.

Another possibility is that Europe’s multinational nature makes coordination and implementation complicated. That’s no doubt true. But it does not explain the lack even of well-developed proposals for addressing the root causes of terrorism.

A more plausible explanation is that many Europeans aren’t as convinced of their root-causes theories as their talk would suggest. Their skittishness over the Iraq operation in particular and the “greater Middle East initiative” in general leaves the distinct impression that it is Europeans who are averse to transformational agendas and more comfortable with the muddling-through approach that the Bush administration now criticizes. The E.U.’s December 2003 “European Security Strategy” traces “violent religious extremism” to “the pressures of modernization, cultural, social, and political crises, and the alienation of young people living in foreign societies,” including in Europe. In which case, they should be the first to mount a bold initiative aimed at alleviating those very pressures and crises. Yet what has angered Europeans most is not America’s failure to pursue an ambitious strategy but its insistence on doing so—starting in Iraq.

Gerard Alexander is associate professor of politics at the University of Virginia and author of The Sources of Democratic Consolidation (Cornell University Press).

==============================

Good manners is no way to win a war on terrorism (Washington Times, 040622)

By Diana West

Why have the media continued to report, obsess and revel in the same old humiliation photos from U.S.-controlled Abu Ghraib even as they ignore never-before-aired videotape that documents the hacking, maiming, bloody torture that took place at Abu Ghraib under Saddam Hussein?

Terror expert Michael Ledeen told the New York Post’s Deborah Orin, who posed this excellent question, that “most journalists want Bush to lose.” Former Defense Department official Richard Perle also blames “faint hearts in the administration” who believe it’s “politically incorrect” to showcase the savage reality of Saddam’s regime. Ms. Orin offers another explanation: “We highlightU.S.prisoner abuse because the photos aren’t too offensive to show. We downplay Saddam’s abuse precisely because it’s far worse — so we can’t use the photos.”

Or don’t want to. That might burst the bubble. The beautiful, shining sanctimony that lines the stormy denunciations of abuse, such as it was, at Abu Ghraib (and by extension at prisons for suspected Islamist terrorists the world over) would lose some of its feel-good luster. This goes a long way to explain why, as Ms. Orin noted, “the world sees photos of U.S. interrogators using dogs to scare prisoners at Abu Ghraib, but not the footage of Saddam’s prisoners getting fed — alive — to Doberman pinschers.”

More than anything else, the emanations of Abu Ghraib — which quickly spread to jihad prisons in Guantanamo Bay, Afghanistan, even Israel — have enveloped opponents of the Iraqi war policy in a vacuum-packed morality, a cocoon of virtuousness from which they judge the world as it should be, not the world as it is. In their never-never land, there is never, never cause for mistreatment of any kind. This condition may feel good, particularly as it eliminates the need to weigh the well-being of suspected terrorists against the well-being of unsuspecting victims, and act accordingly. Indeed, there is no need to act, period — except, that is, on the urge to “feel good about yourself.” In pursuit of this essentially selfish experience, terrorism and defeat become interchangeable with security and victory.

Seeing the world as it should be (something resembling a croquet lawn) rather than the world as it is (consumed in a global struggle against Islamist jihad to reclaim national and international security) is not unique to Abu Ghraibists basking in a rosy glow.

The Bush administration, for example, pledges to Arab American leaders to eliminate security checks for men entering the country from mainly Muslim countries. Is such a pledge appropriate to this precarious stage in the war? I’d rather see the Bush administration pledge to Arab-American leaders to eliminate security risks entering the country from mainly Muslim countries. But maybe that’s not good manners. “Our long-term goal,” said Homeland Security’s Asa Hutchinson, “is to treat [all visitors] the same way, and not based on where you come from.” This may sound polite — an Equal Rights for Aliens Amendment in the making — but it is wholly incompatible with national security.

In Ohio, a federal judge tells prosecutors not to mention Osama bin Laden or al Qaeda during the trial of Fawaz Damra, an imam charged with lying to immigration authorities about his terror-network connections. Despite evidence linking both Mr. Damra and bin Laden to a Muslim aid group in Brooklyn that the government says later evolved into al Qaeda, mum’s the legal word. Huh? According to U.S. District Judge James S. Gwin, “the risk of inflaming the jury is too great.” Prosecutors can’t even call Mr. Damra, an unindicted co-conspirator in the 1993 World Trade Center attack (and they can’t mention that, either), a “radical Islamic militant.” Clearly, the spectre of saying the wrong thing looms larger than the importance of seeking the right verdict. Which begs the question: Is this a terrorism trial or a tea party?

Maybe it is this fear of the faux pas that prevented the media — with the notable exception of frontpagemag.com’s Ben Johnson — from pointing out that Mohammad Magid, the imam invited to Ronald Reagan’s funeral at the National Cathedral, has “disturbing ties to suspected terrorists.” Across the pond, a similar reticence characterized the BBC’s reporting on Sheikh Abdur-Rahman al Sudais, the Saudi-appointed imam of Mecca’s Grand Mosque, who recently visited London to open a massive new Islamic center. Describing the sheikh as “one of Islam’s most renowned imams,” the BBC failed to mention his well-documented (renowned?) record of poisonous invective toward Jews, Christians and Hindus.

External threats aside, Western civilization appears to be threatened from within by a paralyzing attack of terminally good manners: see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil (except Abu Ghraib). This may be one way to ride out the war on Islamist terrorism. It’s no way to win it.

==============================

Terrorists testing jets, crews say (Washington Times, 040721)

Flight crews and air marshals say Middle Eastern men are staking out airports, probing security measures and conducting test runs aboard airplanes for a terrorist attack.

At least two midflight incidents have involved numerous men of Middle Eastern descent behaving in what one pilot called “stereotypical” behavior of an organized attempt to attack a plane.

“No doubt these are dry runs for a terrorist attack,” an air marshal said.

Pilots and air marshals who asked to remain anonymous told The Washington Times that surveillance by terrorists is rampant, using different probing methods.

“It’s happening, and it’s a sad state of affairs,” a pilot said.

A June 29 incident aboard Northwest Airlines Flight 327 from Detroit to Los Angeles is similar to a Feb. 15 incident on American Airlines Flight 1732 from San Juan, Puerto Rico, to New York’s John F. Kennedy Airport.

The Northwest flight involved 14 Syrian men and the American Airlines flight involved six men of Middle Eastern descent.

“I’ve never been in a situation where I have felt that afraid,” said Annie Jacobsen, a business and finance feature writer for the online magazine Women’s Wall Street who was aboard the Northwest flight.

The men were seated throughout the plane pretending to be strangers. Once airborne, they began congregating in groups of two or three, stood nearly the entire flight, and consecutively filed in and out of bathrooms at different intervals, raising concern among passengers and flight attendants, Mrs. Jacobsen said.

One man took a McDonald’s bag into the bathroom, then passed it off to another passenger upon returning to his seat. When the pilot announced the plane was cleared for landing and to fasten seat belts, seven men jumped up in unison and went to different bathrooms.

Her account was confirmed by David Adams, spokesman for the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s Federal Air Marshal Service (FAMS), who said officers were on board and checked the bathrooms several times during the flight, but nothing was found.

“The FAMS never broke their cover, but monitored” the activity, Mr. Adams said. “Given the facts, they had no legal basis to take an enforcement action. But there was enough of a suspicious nature for the FAMS, passengers and crew to take notice.”

A January FBI memo says suicide terrorists are plotting to hijack trans-Atlantic planes by smuggling “ready-to-build” bomb kits past airport security, and later assembling the explosives in aircraft bathrooms.

On many overseas flights, airlines have issued rules prohibiting loitering near the lavatory.

“After seeing 14 Middle Eastern men board separately (six together and eight individually) and then act as a group, watching their unusual glances, observing their bizarre bathroom activities, watching them congregate in small groups, knowing that the flight attendants and the pilots were seriously concerned and now knowing that federal air marshals were on board, I was officially terrified,” Mrs. Jacobsen said.

“One by one, they went into the two lavatories, each spending about four minutes inside. Right in front of us, two men stood up against the emergency exit door, waiting for the lavatory to become available. The men spoke in Arabic among themselves ... one of the men took his camera into the lavatory. Another took his cell phone. Again, no one approached the men. Not one of the flight attendants asked them to sit down.”

In an interview yesterday with The Washington Times, Mrs. Jacobsen said she was surprised to learn afterward that flight attendants are not trained to handle terrorist attacks or the situation that happened on her flight.

“I absolutely empathize with the flight attendants. They are acting with no clear protocol,” she said.

Other passengers were distraught and one woman was even crying as the events unfolded.

The plane was met by officials from the FBI, Los Angeles Police Department, Federal Air Marshal Service and Transportation Security Administration. The Syrians, who were traveling on one-way tickets, were taken into custody.

The men, who were not on terrorist watch lists, were released, although their information and fingerprints were added to a database. The group had been hired as musicians to play at a casino, and the booking, hotel accommodations and return flight to New York from Long Beach, Calif., also checked out, Mr. Adams said.

“We don’t know if it was a dry run, that’s why we are working together with intelligence and investigative agencies to help protect the homeland,” he said.

Mrs. Jacobsen, however, is skeptical the 14 passengers were innocent musicians.

“If 19 terrorists can learn to fly airplanes into buildings, couldn’t 14 terrorists learn to play instruments?” she asked in the article.

The pilot confirmed Mrs. Jacobsen’s experience was “terribly alike” what flight attendants reported on the San Juan flight.

He said there is “widespread knowledge” among crew members these probes are taking place.

A Middle Eastern passenger attempted to videotape out the window as the plane taxied on takeoff and, when told by a flight attendant it was not permitted, “gave her a mean look and stopped taping,” said a written report of the San Juan incident by a flight attendant.

The group of six men sat near one another, pretended to be strangers, but after careful observation from flight attendants, it was apparent “all six knew each other,” the report said.

“They were very careful when we were in their area to seem separate and pretended to be sleeping, but when we were out of the twilight area, they were watching and communicating,” the report said.

The men made several trips to the bathroom and congregated in that area, and were told at least twice by a flight attendant to return to their seats. The suspicious behavior was relayed to airline officials in midflight and additional background checks were conducted.

A second pilot said that, on one of his recent flights, an air marshal forced his way into the lavatory at the front of his plane after a man of Middle Eastern descent locked himself in for a long period.

The marshal found the mirror had been removed and the man was attempting to break through the wall. The cockpit was on the other side.

The second pilot said terrorists are “absolutely” testing security.

“There is a great degree of concern in the airline industry that not only are these dry runs for a terrorist attack, but that there is absolutely no defense capabilities on a vast majority of airlines,” the second pilot said.

Dawn Deeks, spokeswoman for the Association of Flight Attendants, said there is no “central clearinghouse” for them to learn of suspicious incidents, and flight crews are not told how issues are resolved.

She said a flight attendant reported that a passenger was using a telephoto lens to take sequential photos of the cockpit door.

The passenger was stopped, and the incident, which happened two months ago, was reported to officials. But when the attendant checked back last week on the outcome, she was told her report had been lost.

Recent incidents at the Minneapolis-St. Paul international airport have also alarmed flight crews. Earlier this month, a passenger from Syria was taken into custody while carrying anti-American materials and a note suggesting he intended to commit a public suicide.

A third pilot reported watching a man of Middle Eastern descent at the same airport using binoculars to get airplane tail numbers and writing the numbers in a notebook to correspond with flight numbers.

“It’s a probe. They are probing us,” said a second air marshal, who confirmed that Middle Eastern men try to flush out marshals by rushing the cockpit and stopping suddenly.

==============================

Post-Saddam militants fund Palestinian terror? (WorldNetDaily, 040929)

Captured document reveals continued support to intifada

Remnants of deposed Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein’s regime may be seeking to fund terrorism against Israel by continuing the payments to families of Palestinian suicide bombers that Hussein previously provided, a document recently seized in Iraq and obtained by WorldNetDaily indicates.

The document, discovered by a U.S. military unit on the body of an Iraqi combatant in Northern Iraq, is a general “Certificate of Martyrdom” honoring a family member who carries out a suicide attack against Israelis. It was provided to WorldNetDaily by an American military source in Iraq.

Certificate of Martyrdom

Unlike documents Hussein issued while in power, the new certificate refers to the former Iraqi leader as a “Freedom Fighter,” and is not signed by Hussein himself, but by the “Iraq Sector Command,” a reference not previously used in such certificates, indicating that post-Hussein militants may be seeking to fund Palestinian terrorism.

Military analysts experienced in Iraqi affairs told WorldNetDaily the document appears indeed to be post-Hussein, although it is unclear whether it was printed while Hussein went into hiding or after he was captured in December 2003.

While in power, Hussein paid the families of Palestinian suicide bombers as much as $25,000 a piece. The checks were thought to provide major financial motivation to underprivileged teenagers who could help their cash-strapped families with the payments that would be issued upon completion of a suicide mission.

According to documents captured in 2002 by Israel’s Operation Defensive Shield, Hussein set up an “Arab Liberation Front” – a Ba’ath party department in the Palestinian areas used to encourage terrorism and issue checks, usually through the Palestine Investment Bank, to the families of suicide bombers.

The payments were $15,000 at the start of the intifada, and were later raised to $25,000.

Hussein would also issue checks of $10,000 to the families of “ordinary” Palestinians killed in the intifada by other means, such as “through the aggression of the Zionist army.”

Along with the checks came the martyrdom certificates, signed by Hussein, that read: “A gift from President Saddam Hussein to the family of a martyr in the al-Aqsa intifada. To those who irrigate the land with their blood. You deserve the honor you will receive from Allah and you will defeat all who bow before your will.”

A $25,000 check and martyrdom certificate, for example, was transferred on June 23, 2002, to Khaldiya Isma’il Abd Al-Aziz Al-Hurani, mother of the Hamas terrorist Fuad Isma’il Ahmad Al-Hurani, who carried out a suicide attack on March 19 of that year in Jerusalem’s Moment Cafe. Eleven Israelis were killed and 16 wounded in the attack.

Checks for $15,000 each were given along with the martyrdom certificates to the families of Hamas suicide terrorists who blew themselves up in Zion Square in Jerusalem on Dec. 1, 2001. Receipts were attached to the checks, in which the family confirmed they received the “President Saddam Hussein’s Grant” from the “Arab Liberation Front.”

Photo of a 2002 ceremony in which a check and certificate of merit were granted to the family of a killed terrorist from Khan Yunis.

Fatah and the Iraqi Ba’ath Party held a public ceremony Feb. 8, 2001, in which checks and certificates of merit were granted to families of those killed and wounded in the intifada.

And CNN recorded a ceremony in Gaza on July 18, 2002, in which a check and martyrdom certificate were granted to the family of a killed terrorist from Khan Yunis.

The mother proudly showed off the certificate to the cameras. But the document in view, which is signed by “President Saddam Hussein” and identical to those issued while Hussein was in power, is different from the certificate recently captured in Iraq. The new certificate calls Hussein “Mr. President Commander Freedom Fighter Saddam Hussein,” lacks any official Iraqi state affirmation, and is signed by the “Iraqi Sector Command,” a reference that has been used to refer to Iraqi insurgents.

The captured certificate, titled “Certificate of Voluntary Martyrdom for the Liberation of Palestine,” reads: “For responding to the summons of Supreme President Freedom Fighter Saddam Hussein to serve Allah and his subjects, (fill in name of Martyr) is recognized for the high honor of his voluntary service for the liberation of Palestine and Jerusalem from the treacherous cheating Zionists and for this high achievement this certificate of Martyrdom is conferred.”

It is unclear whether any of the new certificates have been issued, or whether Baathist money has been transferred to Palestinians since Hussein’s downfall and capture. Palestinian terrorism has sharply declined since America occupied Iraq and Israel began construction of its security fence.

Daniel Pipes, director of the Middle East Forum, told WorldNetDaily: “Iraqi money for Palestinian suicide bombers for years helped to legitimize atrocities. Should that money have continued after the end of Saddam Hussein’s rule, it points to the deep and abiding connection between his horrific regime and the horrific Palestinian killers.”

An Israeli security source said, “the continuation of funding for Palestinian terrorism could serve Iraqi insurgent interests because it continues to stress their connection to the Palestinian and Arab causes, and helps them to recruit Palestinians to fight in Iraq.”

Aaron Klein is WorldNetDaily’s special Middle East correspondent, whose past interview subjects have included Yasser Arafat, Ehud Barak, Shlomo Ben Ami and leaders of the Taliban.

==============================

Tensions Rise in Netherlands as Fears of Terrorism Increase (Christian News, 041113)

Tensions are continuing to rise as fears of Islamic extremism permeate through the country.

Flames engulfed a mosque in southeastern Netherlands early Saturday, in the latest series attacks following the murder of a controversial Dutch filmmaker. Meanwhile, tensions are continuing to rise as fears of Islamic extremism permeate through the country.

Since the Nov. 2 killing of filmmaker Theo van Gogh by a suspected Muslim radical, there have been more than 20 incidents of fires and vandalism at Muslim buildings—and a handful of retaliatory attacks on Christian churches, reported by the Associated Press.

In the latest incident on Saturday, which occurred in the village of Helden near the German border, a Muslim mosque was largely destroyed.

There was no immediate word on the cause.

Van Gogh’s murder last Tuesday, which has been linked to Islamic extremists, has brought calls for a crackdown on fundamentalists and renegade preachers, the UK-based Scotsman reported on Nov. 7.

Van Gogh, who had made a controversial film about Islamic culture, was shot and stabbed to death in Amsterdam as he cycled to work. A note pinned to his chest with a knife threatened Islamic holy war, or Jihad, against non-Muslims.

Since then, racial tension and hostility towards foreigners has been on the rise leading to calls from the white Dutch community for Muslims either to accept “Western ways” or leave the country. Even once liberal commentators now want Muslim hardliners to be thrown out of the country, the Scotsman reports, even if they have Dutch passports, and greater surveillance of the wider Islamic community.

“If this is what has happened to this man, who did nothing but express his opinion, then one can no longer live decently in this land,” said Justice minister Piet Hein Donner, regarded as a stern Calvinist with little in common with the ultra-permissive outlook personified by van Gogh.

The Netherlands-based Volkskrant newspaper declared that while Muslims might be infuriated by Van Gogh’s film, they should have taken the filmmaker to court rather than engaging in acts of violence.

It said, “Muslims will have to learn that, in a democracy, religion, too, is open to criticism—this applies to Islam no less than to Christianity. Theo van Gogh, in this respect, always purposefully went to the limits of decency.

“Many have regularly had reason to feel hurt or offended by him. In a democracy, those who want to defend themselves against this can go to court. Any other curtailment of free speech is inadmissible.”

The Dutch cabinet, meanwhile, has made it clear that it is considering new ways to tackle Muslim extremists, including stripping criminals with dual citizenship of their Dutch nationality, increasing police powers and boosting the budget of the security service.

Van Gogh, whose great-great-grandfather was the brother of artist Vincent van Gogh, has been described as the Netherlands’ Michael Moore.

His ten-minute film, “Submission,” which criticized the treatment of women under Islam, caused uproar in the country when it was broadcast at the end of August.

Van Gogh claimed that he had been deliberately cautious, and would have made the film differently if he really had wanted to shock.

Nevertheless, death threats were soon received up until the time of his death.

The 26-year-old Dutch-Moroccan accused of van Gogh’s murder, identified by Dutch media as “Mohammed B,” is said to have been a peripheral member of a Netherlands-based international network of Islamic radicals called the “Hofstadnetwerk” which Dutch security services have been trailing since the summer of 2002, according to a Financial Times correspondent in Amsterdam.

Subsequent arrests have given European security officials important new insights into the fragmented and localized character of the terrorist threat.

According to the correspondent, experts fear they are witnessing the start of a new phase of the threat that bears little resemblance to the original al-Qaeda network.

Most recently, Dutch police raided sites across the Netherlands and arrested 37 people suspected of training to become paramilitary members of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, a group labeled a terrorist movement in the European Union.

==============================

Churches Attacked as Religious Tensions Mount in Netherlands (Christian News, 041111)

Two churches in the Netherlands were nearly burned down in the latest series attacks following the murder of a controversial Dutch filmmaker, police said Thursday

Two churches in the Netherlands were nearly burned down in the latest series attacks following the murder of a controversial Dutch filmmaker, police said Thursday. Since filmmaker Theo Van Gogh was shot and stabbed to death by an Islamic extremist on Nov. 2, a total of 18 religiously linked sites have been attacked.

According to the Associated Press, two Molotov cocktails were thrown at a Protestant church in the port city of Rotterdam. While one was apparently thrown through a smashed window, the second hit the sidewalk, police said.

Shortly after, police in the central city of Utrecht were called after a fire broke out at a small church. A window had been smashed, a police statement said. The blaze was easily extinguished.

Meanwhile, in Eindhoven, the same city where a bomb exploded at a Muslim school on Monday, a school classroom was seriously damaged in an overnight fire, police spokesman Pieter van Hoof told AP. Though the school is predominantly Catholic, it is attended by students various religious backgrounds.

In all three attacks, no injuries were reported.

Dutch authorities say the arsonists’ attempts to burn down the Protestant churches are in retaliation to the half-dozen recent attacks on Muslim sites in what they fear are part of reprisals after van Gogh’s killing a week ago.

According to the New York Times, anger toward the Netherlands’ Muslim community percolated among the crowd that gathered outside van Gogh’s funeral on Tuesday.

Van Gogh, one of the most outspoken critics of fundamentalist Muslims, had publicly and repeatedly used epithets against Muslims, the Times reported. His last film, Submission, criticized the treatment of women under Islam.

For many years, such criticism of Islam and Islamic customs, even among Dutch extremists, was considered taboo, despite deep frustrations that had built up against conservative Islam in the country.

That began to change, however, after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks in the United States, when the Netherlands, like many other countries, began to consider the dangers of political Islam seriously.

Since then an intensified anti-immigration debate has alienated Netherlands’ Moroccan community—to which a majority of the nation’s Muslims belong to—from Dutch society and, many people argue, has also helped fragment the Muslim community.

While only about 20% of the Netherlands’ estimated 900,000 Muslims practice their religion, according to one government study, officials say as many as 5% of Muslims in the country follow a conservative form of Islam.

The Amsterdam Council of Churches published paid notices in some Dutch newspapers pledging solidarity with the Muslim community. But the government’s response has been to promise more money for fighting terrorism and stronger immigration laws.

==============================

Terrorism is Terrorism, UN Reform Panel Says (CNS, 041130)

(CNSNews.com) - An international panel of experts studying ways to reform the United Nations apparently has taken a stance on terrorism that has long been resisted by the Arab-Muslim world.

A report written by the panel reportedly states that terrorism against civilians “is never an acceptable tactic, even for the most defensible of causes.”

The 60-page document was drawn up by the 16-member High-Level Panel for Threats, Challenges and Change — a panel appointed by U.N. secretary-general Kofi Annan. The report is due for release on Thursday, but leaks have started to appear in some Western media.

Those leaks include the bid to define terrorism as well as a recommendation that pre-emptive military strikes are legitimate for self-defense, as long as the decision is approved by the Security Council.

The panel also grappled with the tricky issue of Security Council reform, and reportedly offers two possible models to expand the body but without extending the power of veto beyond the current Big Five - the U.S., Britain, Russia, China and France.

Attempts over many years to define terrorism have been elusive — stymied by the Arab-Muslim bloc and non-aligned governments, which say that exceptions should be made in the case of those who are fighting “occupation,” usually a reference to the Palestinians.

According to published reports, the U.N. panel’s report tackles that argument head-on, saying “there is nothing in the fact of occupation that justifies the targeting and killing of civilians.”

It reportedly proposes a definition of terrorism as “any action that is intended to cause death or serious bodily harm to civilians or non-combatants, when the purpose of such act, by its nature or context, is to intimidate a population, or compel a government or an international organization to do or to abstain from doing any act.”

One of the panel’s members is Amr Moussa, the Egyptian chairman of the Arab League.

In 2002, Organization of Islamic Conference (OIC) foreign ministers met in Malaysia for the stated purpose of defining terrorism and dissociating it from Islam in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks seven months earlier.

But despite a call from the chair in an opening speech for the meeting to include Palestinian suicide bombings in its definition of terrorism, the representatives of the world’s Islamic states disagreed.

Iranian foreign minister Kamal Kharrazi declared that “fighting foreign occupation should not be condemned as terrorism,” while OIC’s secretary-general Abdelouahed Belkeziz in his address decried “disturbing statements portraying the liberation struggle in Palestine as terrorist action.”

“We must take extreme caution in international forums to ward off this threat to our brotherly Muslim fighters who are giving the most magnificent example of altruism and self-sacrifice,” Belkeziz added.

In the end, the meeting ended with a statement that said, in part: “We reject any attempt to link terrorism to the struggle of the Palestinian people in the exercise of their inalienable right to establish their independent state with Al-Quds Al-Sharif [Jerusalem] as its capital.”

There has been similar equivocation from some governments with regard to campaigns by other violent groups, for example the Islamic extremists fighting to end Indian rule over part of disputed Kashmir.

Some media organizations, notably the Reuters wire agency, avoid using the term “terrorism” outside of quotation marks.

Some UK media are prepared to use the word with reference to bombings by Irish extremists fighting British rule in Northern Ireland, but not in the context of Palestinian suicide bombings in Israeli cities.

==============================

Iraq Inspiring Copycat Beheadings (Foxnews, 041106)

ANKARA, Turkey — It was called “Operation Baghdad” and, to be sure, the headless bodies of the three police officers recalled the violence in that city. But these attacks happened in Haiti, not in Iraq.

The brutal beheadings in Iraq appear to have inspired militants in other parts of the world who are drawn to the shock value of the horrifying attacks and the intense publicity they attract.

Thailand and the Netherlands are two other countries where suspected extremists recently beheaded or slit the throats of their victims in what appear to be copycat attacks.

Rime Allaf, associate fellow at the Royal Institute of International Affairs, said beheadings are spreading because the practice “has so horrified us in the West.”

“It achieves results and it makes the headlines,” Allaf added. “People are talking about groups that we’ve never heard about before.”

The horrifying tactic has spread as far as the Caribbean island nation of Haiti, where loyalists of ousted President Jean-Bertrand Aristide seized on the Iraqi beheadings as a symbol of strength and intimidation.

The headless bodies of three police officers were found in Port-au-Prince early last month, and authorities said the militants had launched a terror campaign called “Operation Baghdad.”

Nobody claimed responsibility for the decapitations, but Aristide supporters echoed that thought.

“We’ll be in the streets until death or Aristide comes back,” protester Milo Fenelon said a few days later. “We won’t stop. If they come in here, we’re going to cut off their heads. It’s going to be just like Baghdad.”

In Thailand this week, a Buddhist village leader was beheaded after being shot in the chest. A note was left on his body saying his slaying was to avenge the killing of Muslim rioters by government forces.

And in Amsterdam, a suspected Islamic extremist shot and killed Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh, then slit his throat. A note was left impaled by a knife on his body quoting from the Quran and threatening more killings.

“It’s an ideal terrorist tool,” said Jonathan Stevenson, senior fellow for counterterrorism at the International Institute for Strategic Studies in Washington. “It is a horrifying image and I would say it is disproportionately frightening.”

The first beheading by Islamic militants in Iraq was the slaying in May of American civilian Nicholas Berg. The killers posted a video on the Internet showing them pushing a bound Berg to his side, putting a large knife to his neck and cutting off his head as a scream sounded and the killers shouted “Allahu akbar!” — “God is great!”

A month later, an Al Qaeda-linked Saudi group beheaded an American engineer in Saudi Arabia. The group did not mention Iraq but the executioners called themselves the “Fallujah Brigade” after the city in Iraq that U.S. forces had been besieging.

Since then, at least 12 foreigners, including three other Americans, have been beheaded in Iraq as part of a wave of kidnappings. Videos and the Internet were used to distribute the horrifying images across the world, compounding the shock value.

“I think the initial reason for the beheadings was true shock and awe,” Allaf said. “These people are extremely media savvy.”

The first beheading of a foreigner touted by Islamic militants was that of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, slain in Pakistan in 2002.

Decapitations had previously occurred in Algeria, Kashmir, Chechnya and the Muslim-dominated southern Philippines but had rarely been used in past militant attacks in the Middle East.

The high-profile killings have inspired some revulsion from Muslims and in recent days there has been a heated debate on Web sites as to whether Islam endorses beheadings.

Mainstream scholars and intellectuals also have spoken out against beheadings, with some saying that the bloody practice is tarnishing the name of Muslims across the world.

“Beheadings and the mutilation of bodies stand against Islam,” said Egypt’s foremost religious leader, Mohammed Sayed Tantawi.

The shock value also has been decreasing with so many beheadings in Iraq, experts say, and newspapers and television stations are devoting less time and space to the killings.

“The benefit of these spectacular kidnappings and beheadings is going down and down,” said Michael Radu, a terrorism analyst at the Foreign Policy Research Institute in Philadelphia.

“Sooner rather than later terrorists will have a problem in that killing innocents is not bringing them what they want and what they want is spectacular media coverage,” he said. “Terrorism is part theater. When the theater part of it is cut off, then it doesn’t make sense to kill or kidnap people.”

==============================

Saudi Scholars Urge Iraqis to Back Militants (Foxnews, 041106)

BEIRUT, Lebanon — Prominent Saudi religious scholars urged Iraqis to support militants waging holy war against the U.S.-led coalition forces as American troops prepared Saturday for a major assault on the insurgent hotbed of Fallujah.

The 26 Saudi scholars and preachers said in an open letter to the Iraqi people that their appeal was prompted by “the extraordinary situation through which the Iraqis are passing which calls for unity and exchange of views.” The letter was posted on the Internet.

“At no time in history has a whole people been violated ... by propaganda that’s been proved false,” Sheik Awad al-Qarni, one of the scholars, told Al-Arabiya TV.

“The U.S. forces are still destroying towns on the heads of their people and killing women and children. What’s going on in Iraq is a result of the big crime of America’s occupation of Iraq.”

In their letter, the scholars stressed that armed attacks by militant Iraqi groups on U.S. troops and their allies in Iraq represent “legitimate” resistance.

The scholars were careful to direct their appeal to Iraqis only and stayed away from issuing a general, Muslim-wide call for holy war. They also identified the military as the target, one that is considered legitimate by many Arabs who view U.S. troops and their allies as occupiers.

The independent scholars — some of whom have been criticized in the past for their extremist views — apparently did not want to antagonize the Saudi government, a U.S. ally, or appear to be flouting its efforts to fight terrorism.

Saudi Arabia has sealed off its long border with Iraq and bars people from crossing into that country. Its most senior clerics issued a statement last year saying the call for jihad — or holy war — should only come from the ruler and should not be based on edicts issued by individual clergymen.

Saudi officials did not comment on the latest statement.

The clerics’ appeal came as U.S. troops, backed by air and artillery power and Iraqi security forces, were gearing up for a major assault on Fallujah.

The clerics issued a fatwa, or religious edict, prohibiting Iraqis from offering any support for military operations carried out by U.S. forces against insurgent strongholds.

“Fighting the occupiers is a duty for all those who are able,” the letter said. “It is a jihad to push back the assailants. Resistance is a legitimate right. A Muslim must not inflict harm on any resistance man or inform on them. Instead, they should be supported and protected.”

Besides al-Qarni, the prominent scholars signing the letter included Sheik Safar al-Hawali, Sheik Nasser al-Omar, Sheik Salman al-Awdah and Sheik Sharif Hatem al-Aouni.

Al-Hawali, who was jailed in the 1990s for five years without trial because he criticized U.S. involvement in the 1991 Gulf War against Iraq, once was close to Saudi-born al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden. He opposed the presence of U.S. troops in the kingdom.

His name appeared this month on a list issued by a group of Arab intellectuals seeking to prosecute prominent clerics for encouraging terrorism.

The scholars said inter-Iraqi fighting would cause “great damage to the Iraqis and give a free service to the Jews who are infiltrating into Iraq and to the coalition forces which exploit differences to consolidate their domination.”

Saudi Arabia, the birthplace of Islam and home to its two holiest cities, has launched a campaign against militants. The crackdown began after al-Qaida-affiliated operatives attacked three residential compounds in Riyadh in May 2003 and killed dozens of people, bringing terrorism to the kingdom for the first time since the Sept. 11 attacks.

==============================

Holland’s Deadly Tolerance (Weekly Standard, 041122)

Another political assassination and its aftermath.

by Christopher Caldwell

THE AFTERNOON of Election Day in Washington, one of the Dutch journalists in town to cover the vote mentioned to me that there had been a spectacular killing in Amsterdam that morning, which would be international news as soon as the dust cleared from the Bush-Kerry contest. True enough. Most of the world now knows that a Muslim assailant intercepted the controversialist filmmaker Theo van Gogh as he rode his bike through Amsterdam, and shot him several times. As van Gogh pled for his life, the murderer slit his throat. He then used the corpse as a sort of human bulletin board, pinning a letter to the torso with a dagger.

What was curious was the journalist’s explanation of why the ordinarily open and liberal Dutch government had not released the contents of that letter. He speculated that it contained radical Islamic pronouncements and further threats against politicians, and that the reaction of the public to it would be violent. The letter, published early this week, did indeed contain death threats against two members of parliament: Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a Somalian-born immigrant who has repudiated Islam and blames it for violence against women; and Geert Wilders, a longtime liberal politician who has turned to anti-Muslim demagoguery and heads an embryonic populist movement. Both are now in hiding.

Both rose to prominence in the wake of the killing in 2002 of Pim Fortuyn, the charismatic gay politician who won a massive overnight following by warning that high Muslim immigration was overburdening the country’s institutions and threatening its ethos of easy come, easy go. It took him only weeks to turn his new party into the country’s second largest, but he was soon shot dead by a deranged environmentalist. It was the first political killing in Holland since the sixteenth century.

Van Gogh, on the other hand, had been a loud—one could even say obnoxious—critic of Islam. He had referred to Muslims as “goatf—ers” and, with Hirsi Ali, had made a 10-minute agitprop film that mixed pornography, violence, and Muslim prayer. But even if the van Gogh killing was different in its particulars, it looked to certain Dutch observers like a second salvo in a revolution. The past 10 days have seen almost continuous protest. At least a dozen mosques and Muslim schools were set on fire. The subsequent firebombing of several churches fanned the fury. There were raids across the country on Moroccan, Kurdish, and Pakistani terrorist cells. At one pre-dawn arrest of two suspects in the Hague, police were met with a grenade attack, and a siege that lasted 15 hours, while the cornered suspects hollered, “We will behead you!” There were dozens of arrests. Most of the suspects were Arab immigrants. But, quite disturbingly, some, like Mohammed Bouyeri, van Gogh’s alleged killer, were Dutch-born Dutch citizens. Two of those arrested—known only as Jason W. and Jermaine W.—were Dutch-American converts to Islam.

After decades of trying to fight social problems with ever more tolerance, the Dutch are at a loss before terrorism. Queen Beatrix limited her involvement to visiting immigrant kids at a Moroccan “youth center.” This was hardly what public opinion was clamoring for. At this point, the Dutch seem more inclined to move from Live and Let Live to its opposite, and are calling for laws that make the Patriot Act look like Kumbayah. Strict laws against government surveillance over religious establishments, a centuries-old inheritance from the United Provinces’ battle against Spanish occupation, appear set to go by the boards. On Friday, the Dutch parliament requested a new law that would forbid mosques to employ imams who had been educated elsewhere. One member of parliament was quoted in a wire report as saying: “It’s better to have 10 possibly innocent people temporarily in jail than one with a bomb on the street.”

Complicating matters further is the big story from neighboring Belgium, where authorities last week banned the Vlaams Blok, the most popular party in the Flemish (Dutch-speaking) part of the country. In recent years, the party has argued with increasing stridency for dissolving Belgium and building links with the Netherlands. There are not that many Dutch-speakers in the world. The unhappy result is that stories about Holland’s immigrant menace and the Belgian government’s banning of one of Europe’s most popular right-wing parties have been mixed together in the same media pressure cooker.

There was naturally a lot of solipsistic hand-wringing in the Dutch press, warning the country against reacting like the United States or Israel, since “violence only begets violence.” But for a change, that was not the only response.

Alternatives to rightism and pacifism are not lacking. The most hopeful sign of the week may have been the U.S. visit of the pro-American NATO chief Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, who as Dutch foreign minister was one of the architects of the Netherlands’ pragmatic engagement in the Iraq coalition. De Hoop Scheffer met President Bush on Wednesday; the following day, in an interview in New York, he warned that there is a gap between the United States and Europe in their perceptions of the terrorist threat. “If the gap is to be bridged,” he added, “it has to be done from the European side.” Events, alas, are seeing to that.

Christopher Caldwell is a senior editor at The Weekly Standard.

==============================

Dutch counterterrorism (Washington Times, 041115)

In the wake of Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh’s murder by an Islamist extremist, the famously tolerant Netherlands exploded in violence last week with a rash of attacks on mosques and the firebombing of a Muslim school. In all, the Dutch sustained just one victim of Islamist terrorism — not the nearly 3,000 murders Americans sustained on September 11 — but that one death pushed the country from an extreme of nonchalance to a reaction unknown in the United States.

The good news is that the experience seems to be forcing some clear-headed thinking among Dutch elites. Over the weekend, dozens of suspected militants were arrested in a sign the government is finally taking the threat of Islamist terrorism seriously. We hope the rest of Europe is watching.

Dutch politicians previously known for their dovishness as well as the liberal media are calling for a tightening of the country’s laws on security and immigration. The cabinet is considering stripping dual citizens of their Dutch citizenship if they have criminal records. There is talk of bolstering budgets for the security services, too. But most telling is the about-face the murder caused in the country’s newspapers and overwhelmingly liberal commentariat. The country’s leading newspaper, the Telegraaf, last week made a call for action inconceivable in a pre-van Gogh Netherlands.

The Telegraaf argued for “a very public crackdown on extremist Muslim fanatics in order to assuage the fear of citizens and to warn the fanatics that they must not cross over the boundaries.” The editorial continued: “International cash transfers must be more tightly controlled; magazines and papers which include incitement should be suppressed; unsuitable mosques should be shut down and imams who encourage illegal acts should be thrown out of the country.” Extremists with dual nationality “have no business here,” the paper argued. “The range of extremists to be kept under surveillance needs to be expanded. If more money is required for all this, then that money must be made available. It is more than worth it for the sake of the citizens’ safety.”

The irony of all this is that the United States has been urging the Europeans to take many of those steps for years. For one, the Treasury Department and the CIA have long been urging movement on the international cash transfers question. As terror-financing expert Lee Wolosky told the September 11 commission last year, although cooperation had been improving, “America’s closest allies in Europe ... [were] refusing to block bank accounts in some cases.” As an example of the prevailing attitude, he pointed to the EU’s policy of allowing fund-raising for Hamas’ “humanitarian” branches despite common knowledge that such funds were being used to support terrorist activities. That has to stop.

The attitude of blithe disregard for common sense should change. The Dutch government appears to be moving in the right direction in dealing with this problem. While it does so, it will also need to be be prepared to act forcefully against thugs and vigilantes who target innocent Muslims. Let’s hope the rest of Europe is watching, because the Dutch case shows that Islamist terrorism spares not even the most tolerant of countries.

==============================

Militant recruiters out in open in Tehran (Washington Times, 041216)

TEHRAN — The 300 men filling out forms in the offices of an Iranian aid group were offered three choices: Train for suicide attacks against U.S. troops in Iraq, for suicide attacks against Israelis or to assassinate British author Salman Rushdie.

It looked at first glance like a gathering on the fringes of a society divided between moderates, who want better relations with the world, and hard-line Muslim militants hostile toward the United States and Israel.

But the presence of two key figures — a prominent Iranian lawmaker and a member of the country’s elite Revolutionary Guards — lent the meeting more legitimacy and was a clear indication of at least tacit support from some within Iran’s government.

Since that inaugural June meeting in a room decorated with photos of Israeli soldiers’ funerals, the registration forms for volunteer suicide commandos have appeared on Tehran’s streets and university campuses, and there is no sign that Iran’s government is trying to stop the shadowy movement.

On Nov. 12, the day that Iranians traditionally hold pro-Palestinian protests, a spokesman for the Headquarters for Commemorating Martyrs of the Global Islamic Movement said the movement signed up at least 4,000 new volunteers.

Spokesman Mohammad Ali Samadi told the Associated Press that the group had no ties to the government.

And Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Hamid Reza Asefi told reporters recently that the group’s campaign to sign up volunteers for suicide attacks had “nothing to do with the ruling Islamic establishment.”

“That some people do such a thing is the result of their sentiments. It has nothing to do with the government and the system,” Mr. Asefi said.

Despite the government’s disavowal of the group and some of its programs, there are indications that the suicide attack campaign has some legitimacy within the government.

The first meeting was held in the offices of the Martyrs Foundation, a semiofficial organization that helps the families of those killed in the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war or those killed fighting for the government on other fronts. It drew hard-line lawmaker Mahdi Kouchakzadeh and Gen. Hossein Salami of the elite Revolutionary Guards.

“This group spreads valuable ideas,” Mr. Kouchakzadeh said.

“At a time when the U.S. is committing the crimes we see now, deprived nations have no weapon other than martyrdom. It’s evident that Iran’s foreign policy-makers have to take the dignified opinions of this group into consideration,” said Mr. Kouchakzadeh, who also is a former member of the Revolutionary Guards.

Iranian security officials did not return calls seeking comment about whether they had tried to crack down on the group’s training programs or whether they thought any of Mr. Samadi’s volunteers had crossed into Iraq or into Israel.

In general, Iran portrays Israel as its main nemesis and backs anti-Israeli groups such as Lebanon’s Hezbollah. It says that it has no interest in fomenting instability in Iraq and that it tries to block any infiltration into Iraq by insurgents — while pleading that its porous borders are hard to police.

In 1998, the Iranian government declared that it would not support a 1989 fatwa against Mr. Rushdie issued by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, founder of the 1979 Islamic Revolution. But the government also said only the person who issued the edict could rescind it. Ayatollah Khomeini, angered at Mr. Rushdie’s portrayal of the Islamic prophet Muhammad in “The Satanic Verses,” died in June 1989.

Mr. Samadi described the movement as independent, with no ties to groups such as al Qaeda.

Despite its very public canvassing for volunteers, the group can be secretive. Mr. Samadi agreed only reluctantly to an interview and insisted that it be held in the basement of an unmarked building in central Tehran — not the Martyrs Foundation offices.

Mr. Samadi refused to identify any of his volunteers or the wealthy sympathizers who he says underwrote their efforts. Asked to describe the training programs, he would say only that classes were sometimes held in open spaces outside cities but more often inside, away from prying eyes.

Mr. Samadi said that 30,000 volunteers have signed up and that 20,000 of them have been chosen for training. Volunteers already had carried out suicide operations against military targets inside Israel, he said.

But he said discussing attacks against U.S. troops in Iraq “will cause problems for the country’s foreign policy. It will have grave consequences for our country and our group. It’s confidential.”

As devoted Muslims, members of his group were simply fulfilling their religious obligations as laid out by Ayatollah Khomeini, he said.

In his widely published book of religious directives, the ayatollah said, “If an enemy invades Muslim countries and borders, it’s an obligation for all Muslims to defend through any possible means: sacrificing life and properties.”

Mr. Samadi said: “With this religious verdict, we don’t need anybody’s permission to fight an enemy that has occupied Muslim lands.”

==============================

Holland Daze (Weekly Standard, 041227)

The Dutch rethink multiculturalism.

Amsterdam

THE SMALL CITY of Schiedam, on the Nieuwe Maas river near Rotterdam, has played a big role in the Dutch imagination of late. Five years ago, the historian/journalist Geert Mak entranced the country with a long narrative called My Father’s Century. It is still in bookshop windows and is now in its 27th printing. It begins in Mak’s great-grandparents’ sail-making business in Schiedam, and follows the lives of his family members as they collide with Dutch history in the twentieth century: the Dutch Reformed faith they drifted in and out of, the herring they ate, how much money they made, what it felt like to live under Nazi occupation, their shyness (or boldness) about sex, the jokes they told, and how they faced the 1960s. The book consoled Dutch people that however tumultuous the changes the 20th century had wrought, there was an ineffable “Dutchness” that somehow perdured. Schiedam played the role in the Dutch imagination that Macomb County, Michigan, or Luckenbach, Texas, did in the American imagination in the mid-1980s: You could look there to see how the “real” people in the country lived.

Early this month, another Schiedam native, a 30-year-old man known in his police dossier as Farid A., was found guilty of issuing death threats over the Internet. When the conservative Dutch politician Geert Wilders described Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat last year as a “terrorist leader,” Farid A. posted a picture of him on an Islamist website urging: “Wilders must be punished with death for his fascistic comments about Islam, Muslims, and the Palestinian cause.” That was a year ago, and since then, Wilders has done even more to tick off Muslim radicals. He left the conservative Freedom and Democracy People’s party (VVD) after a personal spat with the party leadership, promising to launch his own “Geert Wilders List,” along the lines of the one-person movement that turned the gay populist Pim Fortuyn into the most popular politician in the Netherlands in early 2002. Wilders has focused on Turkey, crime, and the unsustainability of high immigration. He has warned that many of the more than 1 million Muslims who live in the Netherlands “have already opted for radical Islam,” and has urged closing extremist mosques.

There is a market for his forthrightness. In early November, a poll in the left-leaning daily de Volkskrant showed that Wilders could win several hundred thousand votes, which would translate into nine seats in the Tweede Kamer, the lower house of the national legislature. When the gadfly filmmaker Theo van Gogh was shot and knifed in southeastern Amsterdam on November 2, the letter that his killer pinned with a knife to his corpse contained a promise to do the same to the Somali-born feminist VVD member of parliament Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Wilders got similar threats shortly thereafter. There were two results for Wilders. First, his popularity shot through the roof: A second poll in de Volkskrant showed Wilders would now win almost 2 million voters, taking 28 seats, or a fifth of the parliament, and that he was drawing support across party lines and in every single sector of Dutch society, despite—or perhaps because of—perceptions that he is a single-issue candidate.

But Wilders also had to go into hiding. He now appears in public only for legislative sessions in the Hague, where he travels under armed guard. He complained in mid-December that the death threats had hampered his ability to build his party. The head of a conservative think tank told newspapers he had been advised by security personnel to stay away from Wilders. Anyone who declared himself for one of those 28 seats that looked ripe for the plucking would thereby place himself on a death list, too. One strange but highly professional video that can be downloaded off the Internet shows drawings of machine guns, then photographs of Wilders with Ayaan Hirsi Ali, and then captioned panels reading:

name: geert wilders

occupation: idolator

sin: mocking Islam

punishment: beheading

reward: Paradise, in sha Allah

In early December, an appeals court in the Hague confirmed the punishment of Farid A. of Schiedam. He was sentenced to 120 hours of community service.

Only the beginning

This is why the murder of one Dutch filmmaker 911 days after 9/11 is described by people in Holland as having had the same effect on their country as the attacks that killed nearly 3,000 in the World Trade Center towers. Dutch people have the sense that, for the first time in centuries, the thread that connects them to the world of Geert Mak’s father, and that world to the world of Erasmus and Spinoza and Rembrandt and William the Silent, is in danger of being snipped. Part of it is the size and the speed of the recent non-European immigration. The Netherlands, with a population of 16 million, has about 2 million foreign-born. By some estimates, a quarter of them do not speak Dutch.

What’s more, the public has been told for two decades now that they ain’t seen nothing yet, that this is only the first wave of a long era of immigration, which they’d better learn to love. The immigrants the country now hosts have been difficult to manage. Part of the problem is the interaction of high immigration and what was for years a generous, no-questions-asked welfare state: As many as 60% of Moroccans and Turks above the age of 40—obviously first-generation immigrants—are unemployed, in the only major economy in Europe that has consistently had unemployment at or below American rates.

Most of these immigrants are Muslims. Muslim immigrants had begun to scare people long before Pim Fortuyn, the charismatic populist, turned himself into the country’s most popular politician in the space of a few weeks in 2002, by arguing that the country was already overloaded with newcomers. (Fortuyn was assassinated by an animal-rights activist in May of that year.) Already in the 1990s, there were reports of American-style shootouts in schools, one involving two Turkish students in the town of Veghel. This past October, newspaper readers were riveted by the running saga of a quiet married couple who had been hounded out of the previously livable Amsterdam neighborhood of Diamantbuurt by gangs of Muslim youths. There were incidents of wild rejoicing across Holland in the wake of the September 11 attacks, notably in the eastern city of Ede. The weekly magazine Contrast took a poll showing that just under half the Muslims in the Netherlands were in “complete sympathy” with the September 11 attacks. At least some wish to turn to terrorism. In the wake of the van Gogh murder, Pakistani, Kurdish, and Moroccan terrorist cells were discovered. The Hague-based “Capital Network,” out of which van Gogh’s killer Mohammed Bouyeri came, had contact with terrorists who carried out bombings in Casablanca in 2003. Perhaps the most alarming revelation was that an Islamist mole was working as a translator in the AIVD, the national investigative service, and tipping off local radicals to impending operations.

The question naturally arises: If immigrants behave this way now, what will happen when they are far more numerous, as all authorities have long promised they will be? It has been estimated that the country’s two largest cities, Amsterdam and Rotterdam, will be “majority minority” very soon (Rotterdam is today at 47%), and already 65% of primary and secondary students in both cities are of non-Dutch parentage. London’s Daily Telegraph, citing immigration experts and government statistics, reported a net outflow of 13,000 people from Holland in the first six months of 2004, the first such deficit in half a century. One must treat this statistic carefully—it could be an artifact of an aging population in which many are retiring to warmer places. But it could also be the beginning of something resembling the American suburban phenomenon of “white flight,” occurring at the level of an entire country.

The pillars fall

Perhaps the Dutch did with immigration what most countries do with most things: They thought too much about their own history, and then misapplied it. The concept that Dutch political scientists use more than any other to describe their society is “pillarization.” For all that it is thought of as a Protestant society, the Netherlands is a quarter Catholic. Over the centuries a system of separate institutions developed. In the world of Geert Mak’s father, Catholics not only went to their own churches but also had their own schools, newspapers, trade unions, social clubs, and the like. Protestants lived in a similarly separate world. There was a secular pillar as well. Elites from these different walks of life met to carve out a modus vivendi among different confessional groups.

The Netherlands was a society with a high level of religious affiliation and intensity—as it still is in its own “Bible Belt,” which stretches in a rough southwest-to-northeast diagonal across the country. A political system that empowered church-affiliated organizations to perform temporal tasks created a mighty role for religion. That is why the world revolution of the 1960s—which was seen as a revolution against class in Britain, against de Gaulle in France, against the World War II generation in Germany, and against Vietnam in the United States—was seen in Holland as a rebellion against church authority.

The natural result was the libertine public square that will be recognized by any American who visited the Netherlands with a Eurail Pass at age 18—the Milky Way, the legalized prostitution, hashish in the “coffee shops,” the laissez-faire immigration policy, a law enforcement system whereunder you get 120 hours of community service for threatening to kill someone. The essential fact about this dispensation, at the political level, is that most Dutch people don’t like it. 80% of Netherlanders tell pollsters their country is “too tolerant.” But the post-sixties tolerance seemed to have antecedents in the national mythology: Apostles of the new ethic claimed—without much justification—the mantle of the pre-Enlightenment tolerance that once led the Netherlands to welcome persecuted dissenters from across Europe: Huguenots from France, Jews from Spain, the Mayflower pilgrims from England.

This conflation of two regimes had its appeal even to conservatives who were unhappy with the new world of hashish, gay marriage, and euthanasia. Better to claim to be pursuing a difficult but very Dutch social arrangement than to admit to having been wiped out in a political struggle. The Dutch talked themselves into believing that this valueslessness was a perennial feature of their society. When immigrants began to arrive, authorities fantasized that they’d seen it all before—after all, they’d welcomed John Locke and René Descartes. So they could build up an “immigrant” or a “Muslim” pillar and then let it collapse into postmodern individualism, following the same historic route that Protestantism and Catholicism had taken, as if that route were the product of an iron historical law. In came an ultra-neutral, respect-centered vocabulary: Foreigners became “allochthonous,” as opposed to natives, who were henceforth “autochthonous.” In the 1980s, the government started creating Muslim schools. It poured public money into the construction of mosques.

There were two voices warning that history was not following this multicultural script. In 1991, Frits Bolkestein, the conservative statesman who occupies a position in Dutch political life that is an odd mix of Ronald Reagan and Daniel Patrick Moynihan, wrote a long article in de Volkskrant in which he warned that there was nothing inevitable about assimilation. Noting the threat of Muslim separatism to freedom of religion and freedom of expression, he warned, “Everyone in the Netherlands, Muslim and non-Muslim alike, is expected to obey the laws that stem from these principles.” He was dismissed as a reactionary, and worse.

The multicultural drama

In 2000, the journalist and literary critic Paul Scheffer wrote an article called “The Multicultural Drama,” which was the first attack from the left on this system of postmodern pillarization. For Scheffer, the system was a means of excluding Muslims, creating a kind of segregation by which people could “coexist without interacting.” Real pillarization of the sort that worked in the past rested on shared and nonnegotiable understandings of three things: language, history, and law. But Dutch society had become too self-loathing to insist on any of them. Now people weren’t even expected to learn Dutch. Scheffer complained that the Labor party (PvdA), to which he belonged, “wanted to cut the subsidies of cultural organizations that were not sufficiently concerned with ethnicity.” He threw up his hands at one educator who had questioned the relevance, in a world of high immigration, of teaching Holland’s history (“We’re not going to bother Turkish children with the Occupation, are we?”).

Dutch multiculturalism, when Bolkestein and Scheffer began to question it, was an unassailable certitude. Now it lacks a single full-throated defender. Wouter Bos, the new leader of the PvdA, many of whose members privately think the country has overreacted to the van Gogh murder, insists that “Islam is part of our country,” and faults those who, “under the pretext of women’s rights, try to claim that Islam doesn’t belong here.” He seems to want to punt the Netherlands’ problems away to blue-ribbon committees and international bodies when he warns that we “underestimate the international character of the threat we’re dealing with: radical political Islam.”

Nonetheless, Bos, too, has been stung by recent history, particularly his party’s great blunder of treating Pim Fortuyn (a former PvdA intellectual himself) as some kind of sociopath or prankster. Bos admits that in recent years, “tolerance became a pretext for not addressing problems.” When asked whether his party would enter a coalition with Wilders, he does not rule it out.

The man who has been the most ardent defender of the old multiculturalist model has himself received threats from Islamists, and travels with bodyguards. Amsterdam’s PvdA mayor Job Cohen was always so keen to embrace foreign cultures that Theo van Gogh (who was not above Jew-baiting) once wrote of him: “Of all the swindlers who have tried to pass off the fifth-column of goat-f—ers as some kind of an enrichment of our oh-so-marvelous multicultural society, Job Cohen is the most cunning.” Questions within the Muslim community about whether they ought to be happy living under a Jewish mayor first arose under the mayoralty of Cohen’s predecessor, Ed van Thijn, also Jewish, who ran the city in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Threats have been made, too, against Cohen’s deputy, the Moroccan-born alderman Ahmed Aboutaleb, who has his own security detail.

Many discussions of the Netherlands suggest that the country’s multicultural model is “under threat.” Maybe that was true a year ago. Now it would be more accurate to say there is a society-wide consensus that it has failed. Even before he left office in 2002, PvdA premier Wim Kok had begun tightening the country’s asylum laws, and under the conservative premiership of Jan Peter Balkenende, the reforms have picked up pace. One of the top priorities has been marriage laws. Several immigrant groups have an endogamy rate approaching 100%: Young, marriageable people return to their homelands to find a bride or groom and bring them back to Holland. Many Dutch believe the marriage laws are being abused simply to confer automatic citizenship and the right to welfare payments on as large a number of foreigners as possible. As a result, foreign spouses marrying Dutch citizens must now be 21 and speak Dutch, and their eligibility for welfare is not immediate. Education in foreign languages has been phased out, so the Dutch can concentrate on teaching their own endangered language.

Muslim Voltaires

But with the killing of van Gogh, the Dutch immigration crisis—which, as elsewhere in Europe, is a polite way of saying its Islam crisis—has moved to a higher pitch than in any other country in the West. Naturally, security concerns are also driving reform. Justice minister Piet Hein Donner wants tougher laws to permit holding terrorist suspects without trial. Most everyone in the Netherlands, whether they support or oppose it, believes something like the Patriot Act is coming to their country, too.

But on top of that, the Dutch public is being presented with an interpretation of their crisis that other publics in Europe are not. Namely, the view that the problem is not “radicalism” or “marginalization” or “fundamentalism” but Islam—that Islam and democracy don’t coexist well. There are several reasons that the debate has taken a different turn in the Netherlands, but primary among them is the presence of outspoken Muslims. Afshin Ellian is an Iranian-born legal scholar in his late 30s who is seeking to modernize Islam. He takes heart that scholars in Iran, particularly the imprisoned theorist of democracy Akbar Ghanji, are doing the same. Ellian himself is living under police protection.

When Ellian writes provocative op-eds in the country’s major journals, he gets dismissed by Muslims as a “fundamentalist of the Enlightenment.” They are not necessarily wrong. Ellian has a view of Western intellectual history that casts tolerance as the fruit of attacks on Christianity rather than of Christianity itself. He thus thinks that what Islam needs is its own Nietzsche, Voltaire, and the Marquis de Sade. Four days after the van Gogh murder, he wrote an article entitled “Make Jokes About Islam!”

The most outspoken of these foreign-born Dutch, though, is the feminist member of parliament Ayaan Hirsi Ali. The daughter of prominent Somalians, she fled the country with her family when war broke out. When she arrived in the Netherlands in the early 1990s, via Saudi Arabia, she was still wearing a veil. She soon dropped it and began proclaiming the superiority of Western values to Islamic ones. She has spoken out against female circumcision, which is clandestinely practiced in the Netherlands and Belgium. She was elected to parliament in 2003 in the wake of the killing of Pim Fortuyn. Hirsi Ali has been under constant police protection since she described the prophet Mohammed as a “perverted tyrant” in the newspaper de Trouw two years ago and said she no longer believed in God. She wrote the screenplay for Submission, the violent and semi-pornographic movie about repression of women in Islam for which Theo van Gogh was murdered. Many of Hirsi Ali’s associates believe that she was the preferred target of the murderers, and that van Gogh was chosen only because they could not penetrate her security arrangements. They are probably right. She is in hiding and has not been seen in public since the killing.

Hirsi Ali, like Ellian, belongs to what one could call the écrasez-l’infâme school of reformers of Islam. She and Wilders recently cowrote a column in the NRC Handelsblad calling for a “liberal jihad.” Like Pim Fortuyn (who once said, “I have nothing against Moroccans; I have them in my bed all the time”), she has a tendency to taunt her political foes. And like Fortuyn, who could play up his gayness to an almost preposterous level of camp, she is aware that her outsider status makes her a natural leader for a society that fears it will die if it does not change, but would rather die than be accused of racism, gay-bashing, or Islamophobia.

So Hirsi Ali appears to many Muslims as the country’s premier moral monster, and to many Dutch people as something like Joan of Arc. It is her position on women’s issues that is potentially most explosive. Many European countries, notably France, are trying to recast arguments about the wearing of the Muslim headscarf as a matter of women’s rights, as if that will somehow mollify fundamentalists by moving the discussion from a religious plane to a political one. But it risks doing something different: moving the discussion from an interpersonal level to a psychosexual one. It conveys that the West hopes to assimilate Islam by stealing its women out of the seraglio.

The Dutch minister for immigration and integration is Rita Verdonk, a woman, as it happens. In late November she went to the town of Soesterberg to speak about “Dutch values.” There she was introduced to an imam named Ahmad Salam. He refused to shake her hand.

In the hours after van Gogh’s death, Verdonk had given a speech that had drawn fire from a representative of the radical, Antwerp-based Arab-European League, who likened her to Hitler. (“All she was missing,” he said, “was the little moustache.”) But that wasn’t what bothered Salam.

“I cannot shake hands with a woman,” the imam explained. “Well, then,” Verdonk replied, “we have plenty to talk about.”

Christopher Caldwell is a senior editor at The Weekly Standard.

==============================

Tolerance tested in Holland (Washington Times, 041220)

First of three parts

AMSTERDAM - Parliamentarian Geert Wilders sees himself as the legendary Dutch boy, finger in the dike, holding back a rising tide of immigrants that threatens to swamp the Netherlands and all of Europe.

“Immigration is the biggest problem that Dutch society is facing today,” said Mr. Wilders, in his office in The Hague.

“We have been so tolerant of others’ culture and religion, we are losing our own. ... Europe is losing itself. ... One day we will wake up, and it will be too late. [Immigration] will have killed our country and our democracy.”

The intense politician spoke under the watchful eye of bodyguards, as his picture has been posted on Muslim Web sites calling for his beheading.

Mr. Wilders’ passion reflects a problem confronting much of Europe.

Old, cold and settled in its ways, the Continent struggles to absorb waves of immigrants, to protect itself from the growing hatred of Muslim militants in their midst and to live with the dark fear of a world spinning out of control.

“If Europe does not take the full and effective integration of its immigrants to heart and change its message from ‘You are not welcome. You don’t belong,’ to ‘We are in this together,’ Europe is going to have a very hard time,” said Demetrios Papademetriou, president of the Migration Policy Institute in Washington.

Said Mr. Wilders: “In the last 30 years, the Netherlands population has grown from 13 million to 16 million, about 25%, but the immigrant population has grown from 160,000 to 1.6 million — 1,000%. 90% of our prison population is immigrants.”

“[Immigrants] are the most dependent on our [welfare] schemes. They are non-Westerners and not speaking our language,” he said.

“In the next [few] years, 75% of our population growth will be non-Western immigrants; only 8% will be native Dutch. This is fact, not opinion,” he said, dismissing a somewhat different picture that emerges from official statistics posted on government Web sites.

For example, Netherlands’ Central Statistical Office shows that about 50%, not 90%, of the prison population is foreign.

And Mr. Wilders’ 1.6 million figure can only be reached by including second- and third-generation children of immigrants, who were born in Holland and are citizens — individuals who would never be considered foreign in the United States.

Nevertheless, the thrust of his argument is gospel for Dutch immigration reformers.

Moratorium sought

Mr. Wilders demands, and many support, a five-year moratorium on all non-Western immigration, even to unite a legally working husband with his family.

He wants illegal immigrants and failed asylum seekers deported, and all immigrants to have a working knowledge of the Dutch language before they arrive.

To remain in the Netherlands, a newcomer should pass a basic civics exam, one that few Dutch could pass.

Mr. Wilders calls mosques “houses of terror and recruitment” for jihad. He describes Islam as “dangerous” and “fascist,” articulating the fears of many.

He says that Muslims beat their wives and children, and occasionally kill a daughter who wishes to marry outside the faith. He says that imams preach that homosexuals — even in a society where same-sex “marriage” is legal — should be executed.

“I am talking about non-Western immigration to the Netherlands,” Mr. Wilders said in a recent interview.

“The lessons of Pim Fortuyn have not been learned.”

Mr. Fortuyn, a charismatic homosexual anti-immigration activist, was gunned down while running for prime minister in 2002 on an anti-immigration platform.

After the assassination — by a deranged animal-rights activist — his party went on to capture 26 of 150 seats in the Dutch parliament.

Earlier this year, the conservative People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy (VVD) expelled Mr. Wilders because of his extreme views on immigration and his opposition to Turkey’s bid to enter the European Union.

That made the bottle-blond politician leader of his own one-man party, a figure easily dismissed by mainstream pundits as a political sideshow, a racist and in some Dutch newspapers, a Nazi.

But that changed with the Nov. 2 slaying of Theo van Gogh, the anti-Islamist crusader and social provocateur, gunned down and then slashed with a knife by a Dutch citizen of Moroccan descent in broad daylight on an Amsterdam street.

Within days, at least 19 other members of the Netherlands parliament were supporting Mr. Wilders — at least on immigration issues.

The Netherlands has 16 million people, including 1 million Muslims.

Its Muslims include about 300,000 Moroccans and another 300,000 Turks, who came as “guest workers” during Holland’s economic boom years.

Holland is now their home and their children are full Dutch citizens who have never felt welcome in Europe’s most permissive society, where marijuana consumption, prostitution and same-sex “marriage” are either tolerated or legal.

Dutch intelligence says that an estimated 50,000 Muslims are devout and may be sympathetic to extremist goals and perhaps 150 might actually engage in criminal or terrorist acts.

Fear of terrorism

The September 11, 2001, attacks on the United States and March 11, 2004, terrorist bombings in Madrid amplified the fear and estrangement between the native Dutch and the Muslim communities.

Polls consistently show that about 50% of voters support tighter restrictions on immigration and asylum, even though the largest immigrant populations in the Netherlands today are Germans and Indonesians from the former Dutch colony.

Exacerbating the gnawing unease over swarthy men and women in head scarves on the streets of The Hague, Rotterdam, Utrecht and Amsterdam, there is the fear of foreigners taking jobs away from native Dutch.

The Netherlands, like all of Western Europe, is facing what demographers call a “birth dearth.”

The native Dutch are having fewer children — about 1.7 per woman — which is lower than replacement rate. People are living longer, retiring and drawing government pensions longer.

Economists predict the Netherlands’ extensive social-welfare network will go broke if there are not enough younger workers to pay taxes.

“If Europe doesn’t employ immigrants, who will empty the bedpans ... who will pay the taxes needed to fund the retirement programs,” said Ben Wattenberg of the American Enterprise Institute and the author of “Fewer,” which details the demographic crisis in Europe.

Meanwhile, the population of immigrants, their children and grandchildren is becoming politically active.

“I am not a guest in the Netherlands, and I will not act like a guest, asking permission in someone else’s home to sit here or move the furniture there. I was born here. I am a citizen,” said Nabil Marmouch, the Dutch-Moroccan head of the Netherlands’ Arab-European League, a political action group that plans to field candidates in upcoming elections.

“[Muslims] have nothing to be ashamed of. We can be proud of our religion, our culture, our traditions. We do not have to assimilate or integrate. ... We do have to act like responsible citizens, obey the laws and get involved in the political process,” Mr. Marmouch said.

Like other Muslim organizations, he condemned the killing of Mr. van Gogh, but dismissed Mr. Wilders’ bodyguards as a “fashion statement” designed to create fear of Muslims and draw attention to his anti-immigration politics.

Some say that the real lesson of Mr. Fortuyn was “kill the heretic, adopt the heresy” as the mainstream parties, including the VVD, scrambled to adopt the Fortuyn prescriptions.

In the days after the van Gogh killing, Mr. Fortuyn was named one of the most important persons in Dutch history, outpolling Vincent van Gogh (of whose brother the slain filmmaker was the great-grandson) and Rembrandt, philosopher Desiderius Erasmus and Anne Frank, who was not Dutch, but a German asylum seeker.

“The VVD understood that you can win an enormous amount of votes playing the migration and integration card,” said Rinus Penninx of the University of Amsterdam’s Institute of Migration and Ethnic Studies.

Mixed emotions

But in a typical Dutch paradox, the local politicians are refusing to cooperate with national law enforcement charged with rounding up illegals.

“People are saying, ‘Illegal immigrants and failed asylum seekers should leave, but not ours. Ours are fine.’ They are protesting the closing of local asylum centers. The mayor of Amsterdam told the government he won’t help unless the individuals are causing a nuisance,” Mr. Penninx said.

Eduard Nazarski, head of the Dutch Refugee Council, said that the myth of Dutch tolerance is overstated.

“Anne Frank is a symbol, an example of Dutch intolerance,” said Mr. Nazarski, who says anti-immigrant hysteria has made the Netherlands the most restrictive nation in Europe for immigrants and asylum seekers.

“Asylum seekers, illegal immigrants, legal immigrants, the politicians don’t make a distinction. They are all foreigners. ...

“About 50% of the Dutch people are fed up with too many foreigners being here. Thirty [percent] to 40% think that we have 100,000 asylum seekers a year, when it is really 20,000 to 30,000 a year.

“It is all emotion. The government is not interested in the facts,” Mr. Nazarski said.

Jan Rath, who also teaches ethnic and immigration studies at the University of Amsterdam, said that Holland’s historic acceptance of religious minorities such as the Mayflower Pilgrims masks a different reality.

When Reform Protestants took power in Holland in the 16th century, Catholics were allowed to stay and worship, but only if they did so in “hidden” churches. He said the Muslims would be facing less resistance today if they were not so obvious.

“I understand the emotional difficulty of seeing your society change before your eyes. My mother is an older Catholic, and the people in her neighborhood and church are very upset that they are building a mosque in her neighborhood.

“The priest had to remind them that not so long ago there were restrictions on Catholics, like her, from building churches” in Protestant Holland, Mr. Rath said.

While Dutch churches are all but empty today, the minarets of the largest mosque in Europe tower over Rotterdam.

Foreigners unwelcome

At a flower market along the Singel Canal, Donald van Achthoven, a tulip seller, says aloud what was once whispered:

“My opinion is they have to be like the Dutch, if they come here. Leave their religion in their own country.

“Live here with the rules of the Dutch. We are a tiny country, with too many people, too many for such a small place. ... I won’t hire them. If they come here, they should speak our language and follow our rules.”

Mr. Papademetriou of the Migration Policy Institute said it is natural for immigrants who feel unwelcome in Europe to turn inward.

“Naturally, they close in and look to themselves for comfort. ... It is like the immigrants to New York City in the early 1900s. Someone can be here 50 years and still only speak Greek or Italian,” he said.

Historically, the second generation generally learns the language, moves out of the ethnic neighborhood and assimilates. “This will happen in the Netherlands, too,” Mr. Papademetriou said.

Ask anyone in Amsterdam to identify a “bad” neighborhood, or a Muslim “ghetto,” and a visitor is pointed, with a shudder and a warning, to Mercator Plein.

It is a working-class district in Amsterdam West that is about 50% “foreign,” mostly Turks and Moroccans, and 50% native Dutch.

Far less “ethnic” than Maryland’s University Park or the District’s Adams Morgan, the streets are clean and feel safe.

Women in head scarves shop at the outdoor market alongside Dutch mothers pushing strollers. People of various races eat Turkish pita and meat sandwiches, while others duck in and out of cell-phone, appliance and grocery stores.

Rachid ben Larbi, a Moroccan from Tangiers, in Holland only 18 months, already speaks Dutch, to go along with his Arabic, Spanish, French and English.

“The problem is not with the new generation, but with the old generation,” he said while helping customers with new cell phones, easily switching among English, Dutch and Arabic.

“How can you ask a 45-year-old woman, from the Moroccan countryside with three or four children, to integrate? The government should give her time,” he said.

Multicultural neighborhoods

Elske Wouters, a white Dutch secretary who has lived in Mercator Plein for 10 years, calls it a perfect neighborhood.

“The idea that it is a bad area is nonsense. There is very little crime, especially compared to the United States. ... Everyone gets along. I go to that Turkish coffee shop often and sit for hours. ... Everyone speaks Dutch.”

In de Pijp, another working-class foreign enclave near the Albert-Cyup Market, Tom Vossenberg has been principal of Dalton public elementary school for 30 years. He has 400 students, about 40% foreign, representing some 20 nationalities.

“We’ve never had any trouble at the school. Sometimes [in the neighborhood] there are people who cause trouble, but on the whole, people are living together in a harmonious way,” Mr. Vossenberg said.

“I understand the emotional problem people have with immigration, but, with Pim Fortuyn and Geert Wilders, I think we are taking steps backward,” he said.

Sylvia Blom, a history teacher from Hoofddorp, had her middle-school students line up along the canal in front of the Anne Frank House to see an exhibit on Pim Fortuyn’s right to speak against Muslims compared with an imam’s religious right to condemn homosexual relations.

The day before, Mrs. Blom had taken her students to Leiden, where the Mayflower Pilgrims lived for 11 years, to a museum dedicated to the 16th-century Dutch overthrow of Spanish rule.

“I want these children to know that most of the industry developed in Holland in the 16th and 17th centuries was developed by immigrants, from Germany, Belgium, Spain, Portugal,” she said. “Nothing has changed. The Netherlands was as multicultural 400 years ago as it is today.”

“Time solves a lot of things,” said Mr. Rath, of the University of Amsterdam. “It is a process of the Netherlands, of Germany, of France redefining who and what we are. Right now, we don’t know who we want to be. All we know is that we don’t want it to be Muslim.”

==============================

The Italian dilemma (Washington Times, 041221)

By Tom Carter

Second of three parts

VERONA, Italy - A towering statue of Daniele Comboni, the first bishop to Africa, embracing two black children marks the entrance to the Veronetta neighborhood.

In the shadow of the monument inscribed with the words, “Either Blackness or Death,” Marco Corini serves espresso and cappuccino to locals he has known his entire life.

“Veronetta has always been a poor neighborhood. I was born here. I grew up on these streets. I moved away 10 years ago. It has changed an awful lot in the last 20, 30 years,” he said, looking out his cafe window.

“There is crime, vandalism. ... They killed someone here a month ago. The area is not nice anymore.”

Just across the Adige River lies Verona’s 1,900-year-old Roman Arena, where early Christians were devoured by lions and Maria Callas once sang her arias. Nearby stands a balcony said to be the one where Romeo and Juliet fell in love.

Veronetta has been invaded by Africans from Ghana, Nigeria and Sudan — and more recently outsiders from Eastern Europe, Mr. Corini says.

“The Italian people have all gone. The authorities don’t look after us. Veronetta is filled with extracomunitario,” he said, using the Italian word for immigrants from outside the European Union.

Mr. Corini and Italy, like the rest of Europe, are struggling to deal with immigrants, black and brown faces on streets that were once all white, smells and music emanating from ethnic grocery stores, high unemployment, crowded mosques next to empty churches, crime, depleted pension funds and, most of all, the gnawing anxiety of what the future may bring.

While such concerns are not new, the recent advent of Islamist terrorism on a global scale has added a frightening new dimension to bread-and-butter issues such as fears of immigrants taking jobs and altering the cultural face of Europe — especially in nations such as Italy with large Muslim immigrant communities.

A 2000 United Nations report sounded an alarm in Rome when it found that with Italy’s low birth rate, the population could shrink from 57 million to 41 million over the next 50 years.

That would force Italy’s retirement age to 77, in order to keep the required ratio of four workers to one pensioner.

Verona — whose most beloved bishop was St. Zeno, a black African who converted Verona to Christianity in the fourth century — has a long history of missionary work both to and from Africa.

But the familial ties have become strained. Verona is also a center of Italy’s Lega Nord, the Northern League (NL), one of the most virulent anti-immigrant political parties in Europe.

Matteo Bragantini, the Northern League’s provincial secretary, said that it is his party’s dream for the region to secede from Italy and create its own nation, Padania, free, independent and hostile to outsiders.

He, and posters around the NL headquarters in the industrial quarter of Verona, describe Italy’s national government in Rome as “the thief.”

Simple rules

The NL, which has 5% support nationally and about 14% in the north, is not racist, Mr. Bragantini says. Its position on immigration is simple:

“You can come only if you have a job and somewhere to stay,” he said. “If immigrants don’t have a legal job, then you are surviving illegally, on drugs, or crime or something else,” he said.

He said unemployment in his Veneto region was high, at about 5%, “there is not that much work,” but local businesses were happy to welcome immigrants, because it lowers costs.

“Then they unload the social problems onto the state,” he said, sitting beneath a poster proclaiming “Padania: Land of Christians. Never the land of Muslims.”

He said Italian amnesties for immigrants, like similar programs in the United States, only made matters worse.

“Word got out [about the amnesty] and many Muslims came. They do not respect our rules and regulations.

“They are demanding that crucifixes be removed from our schools and demanding that pork be taken off school lunch menus, not just for Muslims, but for Christian children as well.

“Christmas holidays can no longer be called Christmas. They are winter festivities,” he said in disgust, laying out newspaper clippings on each outrage.

“It is natural for Muslims to beat their wives. For us, it is unthinkable and illegal. The mosques are not mosques. They are political centers. Imams are inciting the young to hate Christians,” Mr. Bragantini said. “There is a minaret in Rome that is higher than St. Peter’s. You could not build a church like that in Saudi Arabia.”

Lorena Gardini, spokesman for Antolini Luigi & Co., Verona’s largest marble and granite cutting and polishing factory, one of some 350 firms located in the area, said that about 20% of the work force was immigrant labor, mostly from Ghana.

“They are good workers. Very good people. We need them,” said Luca Girardi, an Antolini foreman of a 20-man crew. “Their families are here. Their kids go to school. These lads from Ghana run the whole cutting process.”

Asked if his workers came as illegal immigrants, Mr. Girardi replied:

“Sometimes we help them get their documents sorted out,” he said, with a shrug.

“At the beginning of the century, Italians came to America and you gave us jobs. We opened restaurants and respected the laws and you respected us. It is like that here. We are selective. If they are good, we keep them,” he said.

Workers welcome

Down a small road, white with marble dust, Fernando Leardini, the third-generation owner of Intermarmi marble, a much smaller family operation, said 80% of the area’s economy was based on marble, and it would collapse without immigrant labor. He said of his 12 workers, three are from Africa.

“The guys from Ghana have been with me for 12 years. I don’t know how I’m going to replace them. They are correct people and work seriously,” he said. Two workers plan to return to Ghana soon, one to open a bicycle shop and the other to make furniture.

“I have more problems with my Italians. ... The Italian work force isn’t really available for this work,” Mr. Leardini said.

Anyone ordering the fresh pasta, with mussels, clams and cherry tomatoes, seasoned with olive oil and basil at the Alla Torre, a traditional Veronese restaurant in the heart of the 800-year-old historic Piazza Erbe, might be surprised to find that it was cooked by Himas Rajakaruna, a chef who arrived from Sri Lanka seven years ago.

“I don’t care about a person’s race or country of origin. It is the person who is important. A professional is hard to find. I try them for five months. If they work out, I keep them,” said Guglielmo Rossi, who has owned the Alla Torre for nearly 30 years. He said he serves 25,000 customers a year and “always” hires immigrants.

“I have a waitress from Brazil and another one from Sri Lanka. In the restaurant business in Verona, Rome, Florence, Venice, you have to have foreign workers,” he said.

But Mr. Rossi says he avoids hiring Arabs. “They have no history for doing this kind of work. It is not in their culture,” he said.

Soup kitchens

Meanwhile, at the Cloister of San Bernardino, where figs and olives grow in the 600-year-old courtyard, Franciscan Brother Ezio is preparing to feed the dozens of homeless who line up outside his “poor man’s refractory” every lunch hour.

“They could be illegal immigrants or locals. We don’t ask. We are Franciscans. We open the door. Whoever comes in, any race, creed or color, is our brother,” said Brother Ezio.

The homeless are given a meal, can shower and hand-wash their laundry in the outdoor sinks. The volunteers helping the brothers include a neighborhood woman who is not Catholic, but sympathetic to the plight of the illegals, and a medical doctor who works in the kitchen on his lunch hour.

Brother Ezio said that 10 years ago, those coming through his door were out-of-work Veronese.

Five years ago, his clients were North Africans from Tunisia, Morocco and Algeria. Today, 90% are Eastern Europeans from Ukraine, Moldova and Romania.

The tonsured Franciscan said the homeless sleep in parks, under bridges or in railroad boxcars, eat at San Bernardino and get by with occasional day work in construction and agriculture.

He said the police know they are here, but never intrude into the sanctuary, unless they are looking for someone specific, wanted for a crime.

Around the corner, the Basilica of San Zeno is built on top of a Roman cemetery, where Zeno, the “laughing bishop” who converted all of Verona to Christianity, was buried 1,600 years ago.

His relics now rest in the church. Brother Ezio said that Christianity came to Italy and Verona from Africa, recalling St. Augustine, Zeno and other African missionaries.

“Not all our parishioners are comfortable with the changes. The local council has beds to offer and free meals, but for that you need documents that recognize your being here legally. ... Almost all here are illegal,” he said.

He said he tries to comfort the elderly parishioners with the changes they see and fear by explaining church history.

“St. Zeno and St. Augustine were both Africans. Christianity came to Italy from Africa. Nothing strange about a black man or foreigners in this neighborhood,” he said.

Back in Veronetta, a young couple, students from the nearby University of Verona, were searching for an affordable apartment among the African shops playing shaba music, the Nigerian Internet and “call shops,” the Indian grocery stores and struggling Italian osterias.

“We are looking for a home here,” said Mirco Galie, 29, who is completing his doctorate in biology. “It is not dangerous here. That is the stereotype, but not true. We like the ethnic mix.”

Elenora, 22, a philosophy major who declined to give her last name, said her parents might object to this neighborhood, but she and Mirco liked it.

“I don’t see any problem with immigrants. It depends on the individual. ... There is a correct equilibrium here,” she said.

==============================

Love-hate affair in Switzerland (Washington Times, 041222)

By Tom Carter

Third of three parts

ZURICH - Jean-Marc Buhler, manager of the Hotel Zurcherhof, says that 55% of his hotel, kitchen and dining-room staff are foreigners — from the Philippines, Eastern Europe and Germany.

“Absolutely, they are good workers. I couldn’t stay open without foreign workers,” Mr. Buhler said.

A good waiter can make $45,000 a year, he said.

“But the Swiss won’t do this work. They want to work in a bank, sit behind a desk or work on a computer.”

His restaurant is a well-regarded traditional Swiss stube, catering to both locals and tourists, where world-class wines from Valais accompany the cheese fondue, raclette and other Swiss specialties.

Mr. Buhler said that in Zurich almost 30% of the population is foreign-born, compared with about 20% in the rest of Switzerland and about 12% in Europe as a whole and in the United States.

“The older Swiss are not feeling so well about this, but for business, it is a good feeling, not bad,” he said. “They speak German. They know the system. Most have been here for a long time.”

Suspicion of newcomers by old-timers is to be expected in Switzerland, Europe and anywhere else. But the threat of Islamic terrorism readily turns that suspicion to fear, especially in European nations such as Switzerland, that have large Muslim immigrant populations.

That fear notwithstanding, European nations also need to keep importing workers from elsewhere because the European birthrate has dropped.

Eduard Gnesa, director of Switzerland’s Office of Immigration, Integration and Emigration, said 9% of the Swiss economy is tourism, hotels and restaurants.

“The Swiss economy would collapse without foreign workers. In tourism, 50% are foreigners. Many are also in the construction business,” Mr. Gnesa said in an interview in his Bern office.

“And the Swiss are only having 1.4 children per couple. That is enough reason already that we need immigration. The question is who, who in the interests of the economy and humanitarian reasons?” he asked.

Fiercely independent, Switzerland is a confederation of cantons, or states. And each canton has an enormous say over its governing.

Switzerland is not a member of the European Union and still uses the Swiss franc as its currency, even as the nations around it have converted to the euro.

The tiny mountainous nation has a population of 7.2 million, including 1.5 million foreigners. An estimated 50,000 to 300,000 are illegal.

A multicultural and diverse society by definition, Switzerland has four official languages — French, Italian, German and Romansch.

Like other European nations after World War II , Switzerland imported guest workers to build its roads, housing and an extensive tunnel system. Young men from Spain, Portugal and Italy, and later Turkey, came and worked. Many never went home.

The next wave began more than a decade ago, as tens of thousands of refugees began pouring into Switzerland from the Balkans, escaping the war and ethnic strife in the former Yugoslavia.

Today, Switzerland is the destination of thousands of Eastern Europeans looking for jobs and a better life.

“The Swiss accepted 30,000 Bosnians officially, and 60,000 unofficially, 1% of their total population,” said Rustem Simitovic, a Bosnian academic who came to Switzerland in 1968 and is now a Swiss citizen.

“The Swiss treat those who are ready to integrate well. If you accept the Swiss way of life, you can be comfortable here,” Mr. Simitovic said.

Many of Switzerland’s immigrants have been there for 10, 20 or 30 years. Everything except their passport is Swiss.

For their children, Switzerland is the only place they know.

“You cannot see the difference between them and our children. They go to school and speak our [Swiss-German dialect], but it is difficult for them to become citizens,” Mr. Gnesa said, because approval is required at the city, canton and federal level.

This year, measures were put on the ballot to clarify and streamline the Swiss citizenship process.

Along with a large majority in the Swiss parliament, Mr. Gnesa’s office was one of the many government agencies that backed it.

But on Sept. 26, the measures were soundly rejected by the Swiss electorate, 58% to 42%, with voters lining up along what is known in Swiss politics as the “Rosti Grabben” or potato ditch, with the French cantons voting in favor of the measure and the potato, or rosti,-eating German cantons against.

There also was a stark divide between the cities, which voted for the measure, and the rural areas, which voted against. The mayor of Zurich, who supported the measure, said the results made him feel ashamed.

The anti-referendum campaign was led by Christopher Blocher’s anti-immigration Swiss People’s Party, which has come to prominence in Switzerland by campaigning against foreign entanglements, the European Union, the United Nations and immigration, specifically blaming immigrant Africans and Albanians for Switzerland’s crime rate.

Ironically, because Mr. Blocher is a member of the government, holding the position of Swiss justice minister (making him Mr. Gnesa’s boss), he was forced to show reluctant public support for the citizenship referendum, despite his personal and his party’s opposition.

During a walk in the Claraplatz neighborhood of Basel, an area that has become home to large number of Indian, Moroccan and Albanian immigrants, elderly Swiss-German women walking miniature dachshunds and gray-haired couples walking along the Rhein refused to give their names, but were nearly unanimous in the way they had voted — “nein.”

Their reasons varied: “There are too many of them.” “They make too much noise.” “I’ve lived here my whole life. Now, I’m afraid.” “Be careful if you go over there.”

Tapping this Swiss anxiety, Mr. Blocher’s “Vote ‘No’ 2 X [times]” featured political advertisements that the Swiss newspapers regularly compared with Nazi propaganda posters and charts of the 1930s and 1940s.

One featured black and brown hands, in the old socialist painting style, each grabbing a Swiss passport from a basket.

Another showed a graph projecting the growing foreign population in Switzerland at intervals 40 years out until there are no Swiss left in Switzerland — a near replica of Nazi anti-Slav posters on display at the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington.

“I feel very comfortable here and have never experienced anything remotely racist; but during the campaign, I’ve never seen more racist political advertising in my life. It was shocking,” said Brian McAdoo, a black geology professor on leave from Vassar College doing research and teaching at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich.

“The cities said ‘yes,’ and the farm areas said ‘no,’ “ said Mr. Gnesa, the immigration minister. “Where people live together and see [foreign] people every day, there is less fear.”

Urs Gruber, 32, is chief engineer, bottle washer and winemaker at the Schinznach wine cooperative in Aargau, a farming region known for its thermal baths. People here voted about 65% against the citizenship initiative.

Mr. Gruber, who makes about 350,000 liters of wine each year for his cooperative’s 91-member vineyards, said that although local farmers occasionally hire seasonal workers for the harvest, most of the work on each of the small holdings is done by family members.

Over a glass of his pinot noir — to go with a local veal dish and the ever-present Swiss-German hash browns, or rosti — he said that although most residents in the area could be categorized as anti-immigrant, there are very few immigrants living in the area.

“When the Swiss people see an immigrant works hard and is quiet, we are fine with that,” said Mr. Gruber, who is engaged to marry a Thai immigrant.

“The only time it is acceptable to be loud is when Swiss men sit together at a round table, drinking wine and beer and are discussing politics. ... We can be a little closed, we say ‘farmer’ headed. It is always about the land. There is a fear that there are too many people here.”

Elizabet Ghilardi, a smartly dressed teacher in high heels, designer jeans and dangling earrings who has been teaching preteens in Zurich’s public-housing neighborhood of Grunau for 30 years, was given a small gift recently.

A young Albanian girl in her French class gave her a small book of poetry, in French and Albanian.

As she was showing it to a visitor, tears welled up.

“As far as the class being multicultural, there is no problem. It is an enrichment to be educated in this environment. But as a teacher, I need a great variety of professional skills, great tolerance and more engagement [than if they were all Swiss]. These are great kids; they come to school early, eager to learn,” she said.

She said, for example, the stress of the war in Yugoslavia was very difficult on the children from that region, requiring professional care and skills not needed when educating Swiss children of Swiss parents.

Barbara Strauli, who is one of a nine-member team that oversees Grunau and designs and implements Zurich’s school-integration program, said 100,000 students — 27% of the canton’s students — are from immigrant families, most born in Switzerland, but unlike children of immigrant parents born in the United States, they are not citizens.

“Society asked these workers to come. We have 30 years’ experience in integrating them. I think we’ve managed very well,” said Mrs. Strauli, who specializes in working with Kurdish and Turkish students.

“When the parents are educated, the children get it. The immigrant children from middle-class families don’t have any problem.

“The problem we face is not language or culture, but social structure, the poor, uneducated. The parents, although they want to very much, cannot help their children very much.”

Of the 17 children in Mrs. Ghilardi’s class, all have either the name of U.S. hip-hop star Usher or the U.S. television show “Charmed” written in marking pen, like a temporary tattoo, on their arms.

Only three of her students are native-born Swiss, with Swiss parents. The rest, although born in Switzerland, have parents who are from Spain, Italy, Albania, Ghana, Sri Lanka, Hungary, Romania and other countries, and are not citizens.

She said her best student was from Pakistan and next year probably would go to the elite academic high school for students going to college.

“I feel comfortable here,” said Thomas Lanier, a black from Huntsville, Ala., who played football for Auburn University and has lived in Switzerland for 11 years. “There is an underlying sense of fairness here. If you respect their culture, there are opportunities. The Swiss want to be Swiss. They want anyone who comes here to respect their culture.”

Asked about the anti-immigration campaign and racism, he said: “There are dumb people everywhere, and Switzerland is no exception.”

==============================

Tackling a root cause of terrorism (Washington Times, 041221)

The United States should criminalize a root cause of terrorism: hate speech teaching that indiscriminate murders are morally justified to further a crazed religious, racial, ethnic or political cause. Europe has been more perspicacious than the United States on that score. The splenetic epithets heard in many madrassas or mosques or taught in many Islamic textbooks are exemplary of the evil. The grisly carnage and generations of conflict born of such appeals to madness justifies the prohibition. Freedom of speech does not include expression that hopes to provoke violence in order to destroy democracy, the rule of law or human rights. As Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson warned in Terminiello vs. Chicago (1949), the Bill of Rights is not a suicide pact.

The Intelligence Reform Act initialed last week by President Bush featured commendable anti-terrorism provisions. Terrorist offenses were added to the category of crimes carrying a presumption of no bail. The definition of “material support” for a terrorist organization was clarified and expanded. So-called lone-wolf terrorist suspects were made subject to foreign intelligence surveillance warrants. Receipt of military-type training at a terrorist camp was made a federal crime. But attacking terrorism closer to the source was neglected.

It is born of psychologically warped minds. As John Locke observed, the mind begins like a blank slate. There is no predisposition towards terrorism. But neither is mankind born with natural virtue. Moral acuity and decency must be cultivated to prevent civilization from degenerating into anarchy and a war of all against all. As Hamlet observed, “There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.”

The causes of human behavior are too complex to know with absolute certainty the constellation of motivations and circumstances that culminate in terrorism. Osama bin Laden and Timothy McVeigh defy a common explanation. But the overwhelming majority of Islamic terrorism — which dwarfs all other terror in magnitude and gruesomeness — is sparked by indoctrinating Muslims to despise Christians and Jews as infidels, and the United States and Israel as enemy states. Imams in madrassas and mosques around the world regularly instruct their followers in the necessity of jihad. Islamic textbooks frequently teach scorn or contempt for Christianity or Judaism.

These Islamic fulminations do not ordinarily provoke instant violence. They aim to plant seeds of fanatical hatred in the expectation that time will ripen those vile thoughts into terrorism against the alleged infidels. And the mullah success rate in breeding Islamic terrorists is too great for the law to ignore. Think of the September 11 wretches, Richard Reid or Zacarias Moussaoui.

The United States should thus make criminal the advocacy of jihad or sister terrorist activity against any nation or racial, ethnic, religious, or political group with the specific intent of provoking such terrorism. To borrow from the Supreme Court in Chaplinsky vs. New Hampshire (1942), like obscenity and fighting words, “Such utterances are no essential part of expression of ideas, and are of such slight social value as a step to truth that any benefit derived from them is clearly outweighed by the social interest in order and morality.”

When terrorism is the goal, the argument made by Justice Louis Brandeis in Whitney vs. California (1927) that “the fitting remedy for evil counsels is good ones” is unpersuasive. Those indoctrinated in jihad live in a demented intellectual universe. They characteristically insist that September 11 was perpetrated by the CIA and Jews to provide an excuse for the United States to steal Arab oil. They are beyond reason. Osama bin Laden cannot be talked into civilized behavior.

Justice Brandeis also trips in declaring that advocacy is shielded from punishment under the First Amendment unless it aims at immediate or imminent serious violence. The Supreme Court later embraced that maxim in Brandenburg vs. Ohio (1969). It declared that “the constitutional guarantees of free speech and free press do not permit a State to forbid or proscribe advocacy of the use of force or law violation except where such advocacy is directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is likely to incite or produce such action.” No explanation is forthcoming, however, as to why a democratic State should be arrested in fighting those who would destroy democracy, free speech, and every other earmark of civilized life by banning the punishment of advocacy with a delayed time fuse. Although the wildest ravings of Adolf Hitler did not invariably produce immediate violence against Jews, they set the stage for Kristallnacht. Weimar Germany was destroyed by speech celebrating violence and terror.

Freedom of speech is cherished because it facilitates the search for political truths and peaceful changes in the law in accord with majority sentiments. It should not protect advocacy that champions change through terrorism.

Bruce Fein is a constitutional lawyer and international consultant at Bruce Fein & Associates and the Lichfield Group.

==============================

Terrorist Television: Hezbollah has a worldwide reach (National Review Online, 041222)

Late last week, the State Department added al-Manar, the official television station of Hezbollah, to the Terrorism Exclusion List (TEL), effectively prohibiting it from broadcasting in the United States. While this action is welcome, it must be the beginning, not the end, of the effort to combat propaganda of a new and much more ominous sort.

Al-Manar is viewed by an estimated 10-15 million people a day across the world. Its mission was explained to me with chilling clarity by one al-Manar official: It is meant to “help people on the way to committing what you call in the West a suicide mission. [Its videos] are meant to be the first step in the process of a freedom fighter operation.”

The State Department officially categorized Hezbollah as a terrorist organization in 1997. One wonders why it took so long. In Beirut in 1983, Hezbollah suicide bombers killed more than 250 American Marines and diplomats. Until 9/11, no terrorist organization had murdered so many U.S. citizens. Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage has called Hezbollah “the A Team” of terrorism.

Hezbollah launched al-Manar in 1991. Much of its programming is intended to spread hatred of America and Israel, and to induce viewers to express that hatred in meaningful ways. Appearing on al-Manar, Hezbollah Secretary General Hassan Nasrallah frequently calls for “Death to America.”

Among al-Manar’s specialties are videos, inspired by MTV but with a difference. For example, one shows the Statue of Liberty as a ghoul, her gown dripping blood, a knife instead of a torch in her raised hand. In Arabic the video enumerates America’s involvements around the world — e.g. Vietnam, Chile, Iraq — and concludes with the words: “America owes blood to all of humanity.”

Another video, set to martial music, calls for suicide bombers to kill U.S. soldiers in Iraq. It ends with the image of an exploding suicide belt.

In other al-Manar videos, Koranic verses are sung, the words scrolled across the screen while footage in the background shows American and Israeli flags being burned, demonstrators waving a “Down with U.S.A.” sign, a suicide bomber recording his valediction.

Many of the videos unabashedly aim to recruit terrorists. Viewers are told that “the path to becoming a priest in Islam is through jihad” and implored to focus on the rewards of martyrdom — in the afterlife and on judgment day. Mothers are encouraged to give up their sons, to prepare them “for battle knowing that their blood will mix with the soil.”

Also of concern is the possibility that al-Manar broadcasts may contain coded communications — a way for Hezbollah’s terrorist “generals” to command their “troops” in the field, for example sleeper cells in the United States and elsewhere.

Until last weekend, al-Manar was broadcast to America through Intelsat, a Barbados-owned company with offices in Washington, D.C., and GlobeCast, a French-owned satellite provider. Both reportedly removed al-Manar immediately following the State Department’s designation.

These quick results show that government action — even one as simple as calling a terrorist organization a terrorist organization — can be effective. As a next step, the U.S. Department of the Treasury should designate the station a Specially Designated Global Terrorist (SDGT) entity. This would enable the government to freeze financial assets tied to the station or to individuals or organizations that associate with it. It also would permit the sanctioning of foreign banks that provide services to the station, which would significantly limit its operations.

Further steps include investigating those employed by al-Manar’s Washington bureau for violating executive orders and taking money from a terrorist organization. Public pressure should be brought to bear against companies that advertise on al-Manar or do other business with al-Manar. For example, the BBC continues to buy al-Manar footage from Iraq.

Consider the irony: Al-Manar recruits for Hezbollah; Hezbollah recruits carry out attacks against Americans; al-Manar photographers film the attacks and then sell the footage to Western media for broadcast on the evening news. With the profits earned, al-Manar can begin the cycle all over again.

Finally, diplomatic pressure should be put on the Saudis and the French, who own Arabsat and GlobeCast respectively, to end their relationships with al-Manar.

Stopping al-Manar from broadcasting in the United States is a crucial first step, but al-Manar’s audiences in the Middle East, Europe, Africa, Asia, and South America are still being fed a caustic diet of radicalism, hatred, and incitement to terrorist violence. Al-Manar is recruiting soldiers — and those soldiers may one day receive their orders to attack from the same source.

Film at 11.

— Avi Jorisch is a senior fellow at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies (FDD) and author of Beacon of Hatred: Inside Hizballah’s Al-Manar Television. He is the executive director of the Coalition of Terrorist Media, a project of FDD, which includes Muslim, Christian, Jewish, and secular organizations urging action against al-Manar.

==============================

Hate TV vs. peace on Earth (Washington Times, 041222)

While the West is basking in the tunes of Christmas carols, a different tune is being played by the two leading jihadi TV channels, al-Jazeera and al-Manar. The radical Sunni al-Jazeera, broadcasting from Qatar, the flagship of anti-Western Islamist propaganda, is funded and tolerated by the Qatari royal family, reportedly to the tune of $30 million a year. It has become the main conduit of al Qaeda tapes to the Arab and Muslim world, suggesting an exclusive arrangement with the elusive jihadi leaders Osama bin Laden and Ayman al Zawahiri.

Al-Manar, a Shi’ite satellite and cable operation out of Lebanon, belongs to Hezbollah and funded by the Islamic Republic of Iran to the tune of $15 million a year, and is even more anti-American in its pitch. Both channels are available worldwide, including the United States, via satellite. Canadian cable operators are now offering al-Jazeera and al-Manar via easily obtained and cheap subscriptions.

Robert Spencer, director of Jihad Watch, says that al-Jazeera provides foreign-based terrorists with a source of news, encouragement and instruction. It serves radical Muslims as a useful recruiting tool. For jihadist recruiters, al-Jazeera is like an electronic madrassa beaming the teachings and perspective of radical Islam into the living rooms of Muslims around the world 24 hours a day, Mr. Spencer says.

Since September 11, the U.S. government has expressed its concerns about al-Jazeera’s biased coverage to the emir of Qatar. A State Department official told CNN that Secretary of State Colin Powell and the emir “had a frank exchange” on the issue, and “there should have been no mistake of where we are coming from.” Condoleezza Rice has also criticized the channel.

No wonder. A typical coverage would include the following pictures shown in quick succession: tiny bodies of Iraqi children supposedly killed by American bombs, a woman in a chador sobbing, a giant U.S. B-52 bomber and fireballs lighting up the Baghdad night sky. One American observer in the Middle East calls al-Jazeera “All intifada, all the time.”

Al-Manar, however, makes al-Jazeera look like PBS. A new study by Avi Jorisch, a former Pentagon Arab media and terrorism expert, published by the Washington Institute for Near East Studies, exposes this deadly media weapon wielded by Hezbollah. “The United States is one of al-Manar’s main targets. Hezbollah views America as a terrorist state.... Al-Manar is used to further that perception, attempting to win the hearts and minds of Arab and Muslim viewers by waging a powerful public relations campaign against the ‘Great Satan,’ “ writes Mr. Jorisch.

He quotes Sheik Nasrallah, Hezbollah’s secretary general in a March 2002 speech:

“Today the main source of evil in this world, the main source of terrorism... the central threat to international peace and to the economic development... the main threat to the environment, the main source of... killing and turmoil, and civil wars, and regional wars is the United States of America. The American political discourse is to terrorize the countries of the world. America is a beast in all meanings of the world. A beast that is hungry for power and blood.”

Al-Manar focuses much of its broadcasts on alleged American atrocities toward native Americans and blacks, and cites the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, while stating that U.S. “oppression” continues unabated. Al-Manar brainwashes its audience, including its viewers in the United States, that U.S. foreign policy is designed to “enslave the governments and people of the Middle East and their resources.”

Ayatollah Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah, Hezbollah’s spiritual leader, as well as Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and the late Ayatollah Khomeini are often quoted on al-Manar vilifying the United States, its leaders and its policies.

Al-Manar constantly calls upon the “Arab masses” to “mobilize” and “resist” the U.S. presence in Iraq and elsewhere, while it glorifies murder-suicide bombings against civilians in Israel. While al-Manar and Hezbollah officials profess their neutrality toward the American people in interviews in English, Mr. Jorisch writes, the channel often quotes its leader Ayatollah Fadlallah’s vitriol, “The instincts of American people are filled with hatred for Arabs and Muslims.”

In fact, according to Hezbollah, it is the United States and Israel that are “terrorist states” whereas “jihad, resistance, martyrdom ... is actually removing terrorism. Humanity will not be blessed without removing America’s type of terrorism.... We have to continue our jihad in all different types in order to save humanity from the [American] terrorist thinking.”

Little response has come to date from Washington to this global brainwashing. Today, al-Jazeera is launching its English language global satellite channel. Al-Manar is broadcasting unabated, and its popularity is growing. Al Qaeda is recruiting hundreds, if not thousands, through chat rooms around the world. Jihadi Web sites are proliferating like poisonous mushrooms in Arabic, English, French, Farsi, Urdu, Uzbek and in the languages of the Indian subcontinent and East Asia. After September 11, the CIA experienced an acute shortage of funds and lacked the qualified linguists who would be needed just to keep track of these spewing Niagaras of hatred. The battle of ideas has thus far been an American weak spot in the war on terror.

In the second Bush administration it is imperative to go beyond the Radio Sawa and Al Hurra TV channel funded by the U.S. government to answer the jihadi propaganda. It was inconceivable that Der Sturmer, the propaganda sheet put out by Hitler’s propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, would have been allowed to circulate unchallenged in the Allied countries during World War II. Today, it is simply self-defeating for the West to permit American, French and other Western satellites and cable systems to carry al-Jazeera and al-Manar.

The intelligence community has yet to develop a capable covert political action arm, which would launch or support liberal and pro-Western TV channels, radio stations and Web sites to counter the media promoting radical Islamist hatred of either the Sunni and Shi’ite brands.

The State Department has yet to develop a comprehensive strategy, which would demand U.S.-friendly Muslim regimes to bring government-funded mosques, school curricula and university education into harmony with the rest of the planet — multicultural and theologically messy.

As time is running out before the next terror attack, on al-Jazeera and al-Manar, preachers and propagandists are still calling for death to the infidels. Somewhere, another ignorant 16-year-old is being recruited by an al Qaeda operative in an on-line chat room, another “mother of shahid” is being given her 30 seconds of global glory in return for the willful death of her child and the murder of many others. It is time to stop the bloody charade of the global electronic jihad.

Ariel Cohen is a research fellow at the Heritage Foundation.

==============================

QDR Time (Weekly Standard, 050106)

The next Quadrennial Defense Review will reveal what lessons we’ve learned in the fight against terrorism.

ONE OF THE OLD STANDBYS of Pentagon defense planning—particularly in the age of PowerPoint—is the notion of the “spectrum of conflict.” The concept attempts to plot the gamut of military operations—from Kantian peace to Hobbesian Armageddon—along one axis, with the proper allocation of resources along the other. In practice, the embedded conclusion of these exercises invariably finds that the kind of war that deserves the most attention and the most money is also—coincidentally enough—the kind of war most preferred by America’s professional military: decisive, swift, high-tech, and conventional.

Thus it comes as both a surprise and pleasure to discover that defense guidance and official briefing-chart policy for the upcoming Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR) finds the “conventional-conflict camel’s hump” inverted. Now, “guerilla fighting” and “peacekeeping operations” on the low end of the spectrum and “emerging rival power” conflict and “catastrophic terrorist attack” on the high end are deemed to be “moderately” more deserving of resource allocation than aerial dog fighting, fleet operations, and open armored warfare—the old major regional conflict scenarios. It’s a cryptic but undeniable indication of progress at the Pentagon.

It’s also a sure sign that the reality of the post-Cold-War, post-Iraq world has begun to penetrate even the deepest reaches of the Defense Department bureaucracy—and given the stress on U.S. ground forces in Iraq, it’s not a moment too soon. As one military official told the New York Times last week, “It doesn’t matter if you can win a war 20 years from now if we lose the global war on terror next year.”

Equally encouraging, the QDR will also grapple with some of the nightmare scenarios that, previously, were considered too diplomatically dicey or militarily difficult to garner serious consideration. While past defense reports focused on conventional combat against North Korea or Iraq, QDR planners are at last considering what we would do if, say, Pakistan’s nuclear program slipped from Pervez Musharraf’s grasp. “The more the scenarios hit a nerve . . . the more I know I am onto something,” a shrewd Pentagon official confided to the Wall Street Journal’s Greg Jaffe.

To be sure, there’s a long way to go before the QDR is complete and plenty of mischief will be made before that happens. Moreover, the Office of Management and Budget has already hamstrung the defense review by mandating overall defense spending cuts. As at the beginning of President Bush’s first term, the White House’s domestic political priorities, and in particular its tax policy agenda, are at odds with the military’s real needs. Despite the “unexpected” difficulties in Iraq, the White House has not only resisted the requirement to increase regular defense spending but actually proceeded to make deeper cuts than anticipated in previous projections. The Bush administration continues to fund its “generational commitment” to transforming the greater Middle East by one-year “emergency” supplemental appropriations.

This borderline contradictory approach goes a long way to explaining the recent spate of press reports about the Pentagon’s decision to curtail major weapons programs. Look in the months ahead for even more stories about reductions in major aircraft and shipbuilding programs and the resulting complaints from contractors. The Lexington Institute, often a leading-edge indicator of industry opinion, has put out a spate of “issue briefs” in recent weeks complaining that the administration is in danger of frittering away the U.S. lead in conventional capabilities. “The Air Force and the Navy are paying the bills to fix the Army’s shortfall in resources,” Lexington chief Loren Thompson told the Post on Wednesday. On the other hand, the Army and Marine Corps are paying the bills in casualties in Iraq.

Under such circumstances, it’s hard to get sentimental about the defense industry, but since they are entirely subject to the whims of the government, they do have a point: it will be almost impossible, for example, to maintain two separate shipyards capable of building nuclear submarines if the Navy is only going to buy one boat per year. It certainly makes no financial or budgetary sense. Ironically, it appears as though President Bush is about to fulfill his 2000 campaign pledge to “skip a generation” of weaponry—just not in the way originally planned.

DESPITE THE INCREASES in actual defense spending of the first Bush term—both the “normal” defense budget and the “emergency” supplementals that have grown exponentially since 9/11—the Pentagon finds itself facing the same dilemma as when the president took office four years ago. The gap between U.S. strategic ends and military means is as larger, if not larger, than the gap left by the Clinton administration.

Almost as important as the sheer size of this gap is the need to allocate defense dollars more wisely—and it’s here that the QDR rumors provide a glimmer of hope. For years, we have been telling ourselves that the only thing that mattered was our own unsurpassed capabilities, allowing us to fight in a manner of our own choosing. Our enemies, by contrast, chose to attack us at those points along the “spectrum of conflict” where we were least prepared and had allocated the fewest resources.

It’s time for the Pentagon to develop forces that can display the same kind of primacy in unconventional combat as already achieved in its conventional capabilities. Given that, just a few months ago, the National Military Strategy all but ignored the problem of counterinsurgency warfare, the willingness of QDR planners to put the sledgehammer of the old “spectrum of conflict” is an encouraging sign, indeed. Put another way: resource allocation is just strategy by another name.

Tom Donnelly is a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and a contributing writer to The Daily Standard.

==============================

Zarqawi vows war on democracy (Washington Times, 050124)

BAGHDAD — Terrorist leader Abu Musab Zarqawi yesterday declared war on democracy in Iraq “and all those who seek to enact it,” in what was seen as an attempt to intimidate voters from participating in nationwide elections on Sunday.

Polls have shown that most Iraqis plan to vote despite such threats and unremitting violence, but the fear is palpable in conversations with Iraqis, many of whom refuse to be photographed or even to talk to Westerners.

“Please, please, you cannot come here, it is too dangerous for us, you must understand,” pleaded the wife of an Iraqi who previously had agreed to be interviewed by The Washington Times. “Please, my husband cannot go to meet with you. Please, I am afraid.”

It is commonly assumed that insurgents have placed spies in all hotels and other places where Westerners gather. Any Iraqi seen talking to or working with foreigners risks being kidnapped and forced to give information, held for ransom or killed. The capture of a Westerner can earn an Iraqi up to $5,000 and twice that for an American.

In an apparent bid to elevate the fear level, an audiotape attributed to Zarqawi appeared on two Islamist Web sites yesterday, threatening anyone who dares to vote.

“We have declared a bitter war against the principle of democracy and all those who seek to enact it,” said the speaker, whose identity was not confirmed.

“Those who vote ... are infidels. And with God as my witness, I have informed them [of our intentions],” he said.

It was not clear whether the threat would deter Iraqis from taking part in the election, which is expected to hand power to the nation’s Shi’ite majority after decades of rule by a Sunni elite led by ousted dictator Saddam Hussein.

Recent polling by the International Republican Institute found that more than 80% of potential voters are planning to turn out, including more than half of those in the insurgency-troubled Sunni heartland.

Prime Minister Iyad Allawi said yesterday that his government would do everything in its power to secure about 5,000 polling places, one of which was blown up yesterday by terrorists in Hilla, south of Baghdad.

U.S. Ambassador John D. Negroponte also promised a massive effort to protect voters when he appeared on U.S. television networks yesterday, although he acknowledged that there were serious security problems.

“There will be some problematic areas,” he told “Fox News Sunday.” “But even there, great efforts are being made to enable every Iraqi eligible to do so to be able to vote.”

But such promises have done little to reassure families like that of the man who begged off an interview with The Washington Times, a former victim of Saddam’s repression who asked that his name not be used.

His 8-year-old daughter has begun writing poems wondering when the violence will end: “... and the happiness is gone. Why did it have to go and fly from our land like a plane? The happiness is gone from our hearts. Hey! Happiness, please come back to us and make our days happy.”

Others who deal regularly with Westerners also live in fear. One hotel worker said he had left his home completely and began living in the hotel for fear of being killed. First, his family was threatened. Then, several months ago, a note was left at his house saying he would be killed. He has not been back since.

U.S. officials estimate that the insurgents and their sympathizers now number as many as 200,000. Informants are everywhere, according to both Iraqis and U.S. intelligence reports.

The atmosphere can be deceiving at times. Inside homes and hotels, people watch sensuous music videos from Egypt and international news broadcasts. Traffic still fills the streets, and shops are open.

Yesterday, children filled one amusement park, happily riding on a Ferris wheel as adults strolled around, some of them dipping into large bags of potato chips.

Feelings among Iraqis range from rampant fear to resignation to a certain pride at being able to survive in spite of horrendous conditions.

“I spent seven months in Lebanon. It is beautiful, but I could not stay there. The women talk about such small things,” said one young woman who spends her days working for a Western company in Baghdad and at night tries to bathe in a small bucket of water.

“Yes, of course, I will go voting,” said another woman who has taken part in the electoral process. But, she conceded, “We are afraid a little.”

U.S. officials have warned that lethal attacks are likely to spike this week, and security officials describe the polling stations as a “target-rich environment.”

U.S. security reports have estimated that there are about 150 car bombs parked and ready to explode around Baghdad and that snipers will be targeting Iraqis who walk into polling stations.

Some foreign reporters have hired armed security teams to escort them when they leave their hotels. Others are opting for no security at all, so as not to attract attention. Conversations focus on road closures, security decisions and the establishment of buddy systems in case of emergencies.

Most Western contractors living in Baghdad are in a state of siege. They have stockpiled water and food and have weapons cocked and ready whenever they go into the streets. Many have simply left the country until after the election.

==============================

Renewed Call to Boycott France (Foxnews, 050218)

By Bill O’Reilly

When are we Americans going to wise up? How many times does the French government, led by Jacques Chirac, have to put all of us in danger before we get the picture? France is helping worldwide terrorism.

Here’s the latest. France has said no to Secretary of State Rice, who asked the Chirac government to designate Hezbollah as a terrorist group. If France would do that, Hezbollah could not raise money in Europe, which it is now doing through various charitable fronts.

There is no question Hezbollah is a terrorist group. It was responsible for killing more than 200 U.S. Marines in Lebanon back in 1983. And since then has murdered thousands of civilians primarily in and around Israel.

The secretary general of Hezbollah, a guy named Hassan Nasrallah, has openly stated that the group’s slogan is “death to America.” Hezbollah’s head of security, a guy named Imad Mugniyah, met at least once with bin Laden and has a $5 million price tag on his head put there by the U.S. government.

Hezbollah is funded and harbored by Iran and Syria. And even the new Palestinian leadership wants them branded a terrorist group because they oppose any peaceful solution vis-a-vis Israel.

Jacques Chirac won’t call Hezbollah terrorists. When is enough enough, ladies and gentlemen? When will the American people realize that Chirac and his minions are putting this country and millions of other of people in danger?

So I am again calling for all responsible people not to buy French products, not to travel to France, and to contact the French embassy in Washington, and let them know Chirac’s conduct is unacceptable.

Now President Bush travels to Europe on Sunday. He’ll meet with Chirac in Brussels. The administration continues to tell us things are improving regarding France. Don’t believe it. Until we see the French government do something to help in the war on terror, we should consider that country hostile to our safety.

And so, the boycott of France is on. Bumper stickers are available on www.billoreilly.com. Get a bunch of them. Spread the word. France is helping Hezbollah and other terrorists. Until that stops, we’re not buying their stuff. No spin, no whine.

==============================

Terrorism’s victims: Actually, they’re mostly Muslims (townhall.com, 050218)

Clifford D. May

It is a common misperception that most terrorism is directed against Jews and Christians. The fact is no group has suffered more than Muslims from radical Islamist violence. Especially at risk are those bold enough to speak out for such values as freedom, human rights and democracy.

In Beirut this week, former Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri was killed by a powerful car bomb – apparently in reprisal for his opposition to Syria’s continuing occupation of Lebanon.

In Iraq, scarcely a day goes by when innocent men, women and children are not murdered for such “crimes” as following the Shi’a tradition of Islam, joining the police force, exercising their right to vote or simply going to the marketplace when supporters of Saddam Hussein or Osama bin Laden are in the mood to create carnage for the evening news.

Tunis, Casablanca and Istanbul are among the Muslim-majority cities that have been attacked. Terrorist groups have turned Palestinian communities into ghettoes where every mother must worry that one day a “militant leader” will fit her child for a suicide bomb vest.

But it is in Algeria, with relatively little international attention, that the slaughter has been most extensive: Over the years, more than 100,000 Algerians have been murdered by Islamist terrorists.

Once a French colonial possession, Algeria fought a brutal, 8-year war for its independence. John F. Kennedy was among the many Americans who idealistically and publicly supported the Algerian struggle against France.

But independence in 1962 did not bring freedom. Instead, Algeria’s post-colonial leadership came to be dominated by authoritarian military officers who rotated not as a result not of ballots cast but of coups waged. Those who held liberal democratic views were either marginalized or maneuvered from positions of real power to the diplomatic service where their sophistication was useful to the regime.

The only place opposition could be organized was in the mosques where — with assistance from abroad — radicals soon seized control. As Yale Professor William J. Foltz has written, the extremist clerics “stirred up and armed gangs of young thugs, whose murderous violence” was often directed “against the small, internationally-minded intellectual elite, hated by the Islamic fundamentalists…”

Among those targeted was Ambassador Salah Fellah who on Dec. 7, 1993 was gunned down in front of his home in Algiers. Fellah, Prof. Foltz has pointed out, was despised by the Islamists “both for who he was” – an advocate of freedom, human rights and democracy – and for “what he did”: He was the diplomat who broke relations with Iran because of the ayatollahs’ support for Algerian radical Islamists. Were the ayatollahs behind Ambassador’s Fellah’s assassination? His son, Zakaria Fellah, is convinced they were, and he is hardly alone. The Iranians, he said, have even placed their allies and “henchmen” in Algeria’s political system. Algeria’s current Minister of Foreign Minister, he points out, has been among the Iranian regime’s most fervent supporters.

Not long after his father’s murder, Zakaria applied for political asylum in the United States. Had he returned to Algeria and espoused political views similar to his father’s, he too would have found himself in the cross hairs.

“Islamism is a form of Fascism,” he told me. “The mission of the Islamic fundamentalist terrorists is to eliminate all persons with differing opinions who may threaten their political and religious aspirations. They are the No.1 threat to democracy and civilization today. But too many Europeans, and too many Americans, do not realize the danger threatening their societies.”

Two lessons to take away from all this: The Iranian ayatollahs are Shi’a Muslims, while the Algerian radicals are Sunni Muslims. For years, many in the U.S. diplomatic and intelligence communities have insisted that such collaboration was a “theoretical” impossibility and therefore not to be seriously considered, much less combated. (They have said the same about alliances between “secular” Baathists and Islamists.)

Second: One expression of the pathology of the broader Middle East is that often the choice is between ruthless authoritarianism on one side, and religious totalitarianism on the other. Paradoxically, it is in the interest of despots of both stripes to suppress advocates of liberal democracy, to make certain there is no third way.

In the past, this strategy has succeeded – which is why today the Middle East is dominated by dictators, dynasties and terror masters of various political and religious stripes. The changes occurring in Afghanistan, Iraq and the Palestinian territories — coupled with increasing American support for the dissidents and freedom fighters of the Muslim world – might change that. It’s hard to imagine what else could.

Clifford D. May is the president of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, a policy institute focusing on terrorism and a Townhall.com member group.

==============================

Terrorist claims Syrian training (Washington Times, 050224)

BAGHDAD — Iraqi state television aired a video yesterday showing what the U.S.-funded channel said was the confession of a captured Syrian officer, who said he trained Iraqi terrorists to behead people and build car bombs to attack American and Iraqi troops.

He also said the terrorists practiced beheading animals to train for decapitating hostages.

Later, Al Iraqiya aired another round of interviews with men it said were Sudanese and Egyptians who also trained in Syria to carry out attacks in Iraq.

Syrian officials could not be reached for comment on the claims.

The videos come as the Bush administration is stepping up pressure on Syria to stop meddling in Iraqi affairs by allowing rebels to cross into the country to fight coalition troops and by harboring former Iraqi regime members. Syria has denied the charges.

In the first video, the man, identified as Lt. Anas Ahmed al-Essa of the Syrian intelligence service, said his group had been recruited to “cause chaos in Iraq ... to bar America from reaching Syria.”

“We received all the instructions from Syrian intelligence,” Lt. al-Essa, 30, said on a video broadcast by state-run Al Iraqiya, which can be seen nationwide.

The first tape apparently was made in the northern city of Mosul, but no date was provided. It was not possible to authenticate the claims.

The State Department said they were looking into the report, but as of late yesterday, they could neither confirm nor deny the veracity of the broadcast or that a Syrian intelligence officer had been captured.

The Al Iraqiya channel is thought to be widely watched by Iraqis — mainly those who cannot afford satellite dishes offering the Gulf-based Al Jazeera and Al Arabiya stations.

But the station, which went on the air in May 2003 with help from the Pentagon, is viewed by many Iraqis as an American propaganda tool.

Top officials in Iraq’s interim government have called on Syria to hand over former Iraqi Ba’athists who fled there after the 2003 U.S.-led invasion, which Syria opposed.

In the video, the bearded Lt. al-Essa, dressed in a gray jacket and shirt, claimed to be leader of the al-Fateh Army, which has not been heard of before.

He was one of 11 men on camera who said they were recruited by Syrian intelligence officers. The other 10 were identified as Iraqis.

Lt. al-Essa said his need for money was the motive for accepting an offer by a Syrian intelligence colonel whom he identified as Fady Abdullah to carry out attacks inside Iraq.

“I was trained on explosives, killing, spying, kidnapping ... and after one year, I went to Iraq with Fady Abdullah,” Lt. al-Essa said.

He said he infiltrated Iraq in 2001, about two years before the U.S. invasion, because Syrian intelligence was convinced American military action loomed.

Another man, Shawan al-Sabaawi, was identified as a former lieutenant colonel in Saddam Hussein’s army. He said he received training from Syrian intelligence on how to behead hostages.

Lt. al-Essa said the group used animals for training in beheadings. He said it required “at least 10 beheadings” for a member to be promoted to a group leader.

“I had to send a report to Syria about how the operations are going,” he said.

Weapons, explosives and equipment were all provided by Syrian intelligence, Lt. al-Essa said. He added that the group members received $1,500 a month.

International pressure on Syria has grown since the Feb. 14 assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri, who died along with 16 others in a massive explosion in Beirut.

The Lebanese opposition blames the killing on the Damascus government and its Syrian backers. Syria has 15,000 soldiers in Lebanon and is under growing international pressure to withdraw.

In Iraq yesterday, terrorists continued attacking civilians.

A car bomb killed two persons and wounded 14 in the northern city of Mosul. Its target was not clear. Witnesses said no U.S. or Iraqi forces were in the area.

A soldier from the U.S. Task Force Liberty was killed when assailants set off the bomb near Tuz, 105 miles north of Baghdad, the military said.

Near the northern oil city of Kirkuk, two Iraqi civilians were killed and another seriously wounded when a rocket-propelled grenade hit the car in which they were traveling, police said.

Back in Mosul, U.S. soldiers fatally shot a civilian in a pickup truck who approached their convoy too closely to pass it, policeman Ahmed Rashid said.

Separately, CBS News reported last night that investigators have decided not to charge a U.S. Marine who was filmed killing a wounded Iraqi during the November assault on Fallujah, citing a lack of evidence.

But a Marine spokesman last night said the case “is still very much open.”

The shooting occurred during a search of a mosque and was condemned by human rights groups, but investigators said the Marines thought the wounded Iraqi might have been reaching for a weapon.

==============================

Close Mexican border to terrorists (Washington Times, 050301)

CIA Director Porter Goss’ warning that al Qaeda might try to use “chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear weapons” in his Feb. 17 testimony to the Senate Intelligence Committee overshadowed a more urgent intelligence warning. At the same hearing, Vice Admiral James Loy, deputy secretary of Homeland Security, testified that al Qaeda has changed tactics for inserting terrorist teams into the United States.

According to Adm. Loy, al Qaeda plans to use Mexico’s professional people smugglers — known as coyotes — to infiltrate terrorists across our southern border. Adm. Loy’s information is based on recent interrogations and has been confirmed by ongoing counterterrorist operations.

This story ought to have led the news on every network. But Adm. Loy’s Mexican bombshell didn’t generate widespread media coverage because it was buried in written testimony instead of being delivered in telegenic soundbites. Al Qaeda’s departure from its previous modus operandi of using terrorists with valid documents (the majority of September 11 hijackers fit into this category) means the organization intends to attack us using new methods for which we are unprepared.

Adm. Loy attributes al Qaeda’s interest in using Mexico as a springboard to the conclusion by al Qaeda’s leaders that their “operational security” will be enhanced. They are right. Under current conditions, terrorists can easily enter the United States undetected in the stream of hundreds of thousands of illegal aliens who cross from Mexico annually.

At present, the United States has no defense against this contingency. Washington’s decades-long policy of benign neglect of illegal immigration has spawned a global infrastructure of underworld industries to facilitate the flow of undocumented aliens.

This underground pipeline originates in countries as far away as China, Brazil and Nigeria, where professional smugglers charge thousands of dollars to transport aliens to the United States. Many of these smuggling networks converge in Mexico, where coyotes intimately familiar with the gaps in our security take over the task of transporting aliens beyond the border into our cities. Aliens who prefer can travel to Mexico’s border towns and hire their own coyotes as guides for the final passage. To assist them, the Mexican Foreign Ministry has prepared a handbook for illegal aliens.

Once inside the United States, newly arrived migrants are directed to forgers who create phony documentation, including Social Security cards and birth certificates. These documents satisfy employer requirements and, in most states, are more than sufficient to obtain a driver’s license. Some states will knowingly license undocumented aliens. Illegal aliens can also obtain credit cards from sub-prime lenders. With a driver’s license and a credit card, an alien can open a bank account, lease a safehouse, rent a car, buy weapons, or purchase an airline ticket for use in a suicide mission.

Three-and-a-half years after September 11, we have not begun to address the security issues posed by an internal community of illegal aliens believed to number between 8 and 10 million. Last month, the House of Representatives made a start by passing H.R. 418, Rep. F. James Sensenbrenner’s bill to tighten standards for driver’s licenses and improve physical security on the border.

H.R. 418 limits the issuance of licenses to those legally in the country or with pending visa and asylum applications. Licenses cannot remain valid for periods of time that exceed the applicant’s legal stay in the United States. Citizens, residents, and legal aliens will have to submit documentation before being licensed. Visa status will be verified through federal databases, and those who make or issue licenses will have to get security clearances. After a three-year phase-in, identification from states that don’t meet the federal standards will no longer be valid ID for federal transactions. Residents of laggard states won’t be able to board aircraft or pass an instant background check for gun purchases using their driver’s license.

These are reasonable precautions, given Adm. Loy’s warning about al Qaeda’s change of tactics. But they won’t take effect unless the Senate acts, and even then it will be years before the measures are implemented. If Mr. Goss’ warnings about al Qaeda attacks using weapons of mass destruction are right, we can’t afford to lose time getting control over the illegal immigration pipeline into and inside our country and if Mr. Goss believes what he told the Senate Intelligence Committee, perhaps the CIA should take covert action to disrupt alien smuggling networks and corral the coyotes before they deliver the next band of al Qaeda killers to our doorsteps.

John B. Roberts II served in the Reagan White House. He writes frequently on terrorism and national security.

==============================

Hezbollah: We’ll be ‘destroyed’ if added to terror list (WorldNetDaily, 050303)

Violent Lebanese group fears request for EU sanctions

If the European Union follows Israeli recommendations this week and places Hezbollah on a list of official terror organizations, the economic consequences of sanctions would “destroy” the Lebanese terror group, Hezbollah’s leader told Arabic language television.

Israeli Foreign Minister Silvan Shalom Monday called on the European Union to add Hezbollah to its list of terrorist groups – a step Europe so far has been reluctant to take. The request follows a suicide bombing Friday in Tel Aviv that Israel says was directed by Hezbollah and Islamic Jihad with funding and assistance from Syria.

Shalom said he reiterated the long-standing Israeli request regarding Hezbollah during a meeting this week with his Belgian counterpart, Karel De Gucht, and will express the Jewish state’s concerns to other EU members.

Shalom told reporters Hezbollah operates dozens of terror cells, directs a group of Palestinian terrorists and offers millions of dollars in assistance to West Bank militants.

“We see they make every effort to sabotage progress in the peace process,” Shalom said.

The United States also has attempted to persuade the EU to list Hezbollah as a terrorist group.

Meanwhile, Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah said European blacklisting would “destroy” his group.

Designating Hezbollah a terror group in Europe will mean “the sources of [our] funding will dry up and the sources of moral, political and material support will be destroyed,” Nasrallah told Al Manar, Hezbollah’s satellite television station.

“The political option [used by the Israelis], which is more important and dangerous, is manifested by the Israeli-Zionist unceasing efforts to lay siege to [Hezbollah] in Lebanon and in the future in Palestine and globally, internationally, regionally and even locally in Lebanon. That is the most dangerous challenge we have had to face during the past few years, and we stand firm today and will stand firm in the future,” said Nasrallah.

France has already responded to Israel’s Hezbollah request, with French President Jacques Chirac claiming the timing was not right for such a move.

Israeli officials told reporters the French are aware of the information linking Hezbollah to terrorism, but they are now allegedly focusing their efforts on the civil uprising in Lebanon and say they don’t want to risk harming relations with the group.

France’s objections are considered the main obstacle to the EU approving the move to add Hezbollah to the terror list.

Israel this week also launched a major diplomatic offensive lobbying for increased international isolation of Syria. Military intelligence chiefs in Jerusalem met several foreign ambassadors, mostly from European countries, to present information linking Syria to the Tel Aviv bombing. Presentations are also scheduled for Washington, London and Paris.

“What we are doing is trying in every capital of the world ... to show them the direct links from Syria to Islamic Jihad, which has a direct connection to what we saw on Friday evening in Tel Aviv,” said Ron Prosor, a spokesman for Israel’s Foreign Ministry.

==============================

The ransom of the red reporter (townhall.com, 050309)

Michelle Malkin

International furor over Giuliana Sgrena, an Italian communist writer who claims American troops in Iraq may have deliberately shot at her car after she was released by kidnappers, misses the bigger scandal.

The scandal is not that an anti-war propagandist has accused the U.S. of targeting journalists. That’s par for the course. (Yes, hello again, Eason Jordan.)

The scandal is not that mainstream media sympathizers are blaming our military and dredging up every last shooting accident along the treacherous routes to Baghdad Airport. Again, no surprise here.

The scandal is that Italy — our reputed ally in the global War on Terror — negotiated with Sgrena’s Islamist kidnappers and may have forked over a massive ransom to cutthroats for Sgrena’s release.

Where is the uproar over this Islamist insurgency subsidy plan?

Iraqi politician Younadem Kana told Belgian state TV that he had “non-official” information that Italy paid the terrorists $1 million in tribute. The Washington Times, citing the Italian newspaper La Stampa, pinned the ransom figure at $6 million. Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera reported that the Italian government forked over between $10 million and $13.4 million to free Sgrena.

Whatever the final tally, it’s a whopping bounty that will undoubtedly come in handy for cash-hungry killers in need of spiffy new rocket-propelled grenade launchers, AK-47s, mortars, landmines, components for vehicle-borne improvised explosive devices, and recruitment fees. (To put this windfall in perspective, bear in mind that the 9/11 plot was a half-million dollar drop in the bucket for Osama bin Laden.)

Or maybe Italian advocates of this terrorist get-rich-quick scheme think the thugs will spend their money on Prada handbags and Versace couture.

Both the Italian government and members of the Iraq Islamic Army who abducted Sgrena vehemently deny that money was exchanged. Yet, even as his government officially rebuffed reports of a ransom arrangement in the Sgrena affair, Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi was quoted by the newspaper Il Messaggero conceding: “We have to rethink our strategy in dealing with kidnappings.”

A little late for a do-over, don’t you think?

According to the New York Post, Lucia Annunziata, former president of Italian state television RAI, said government sources estimate Italy has paid kidnappers nearly $15 million for hostages in the past year alone. Indeed, last September, Gustavo Selva, chairman of parliament’s foreign affairs committee, confirmed that two Italian aid workers — who praised their kidnappers as “resisters” — were freed after the government paid at least $1 million in cash to their Iraqi captors.

The admission came after heated denials by top government officials. Selva, auditioning Italy for a spot in the Axis of Weasels pantheon, mused at the time: “In principle, we shouldn’t give in to blackmail, but this time we had to, although it’s a dangerous path to take because, obviously, it could encourage others to take hostages, either for political reasons or for criminal reasons.”

How do you say “No duh” in Italian?

To be fair to Italy, which continues to maintain a 3,000-troop presence in Iraq despite enormous anti-war pressure, its reported payoffs to terrorists are dwarfed by the mollycoddlers in Manila and Malaysia, who have fed Abu Sayyaf’s head-chopping kidnappers tens of millions in tribute over the past several years — money that is now reportedly being channeled to worldwide al Qaeda operations.

Still, you would expect a country that once embraced the defiant spirit of Fabrizio Quattrochi — the murdered Italian security guard taken hostage in Iraq last year who stoically told his assassins, “I’m going to show you how an Italian dies” — to resist the Quisling impulse with every fiber of its collective being.

The consequences of capitulation are bloody obvious. When you allow your people to be used as terrorist collection plates, the thugs will keep coming back for more. Might as well hang a sign around the neck of every Italian citizen left in Iraq: Buon appetito.

==============================

Danger Up North: Canada’s welcome mat for terrorists (National Review Online, 050321)

Let’s hope Honduras is awash in American agents. Al Qaeda’s Abu Musab al-Zarqawi reportedly has dispatched Islamo-fascist murderers to penetrate the U.S. via Tegucigalpa, where bribe-hungry authorities allegedly sell passports to smooth passage through Mexico to the human highway known as the U.S.-Mexican border.

But American officials better eye the northern frontier, too. Canadians seem rather relaxed about some who inhabit the land nestled between Alaska and the Lower 48. While most Canadians are as friendly as Labrador retrievers, that attitude is not universal.

“I’m not afraid of dying, and killing doesn’t frighten me,” Algerian-born Canadian Fateh Kamel said on an Italian counterterrorism intercept. “If I have to press the remote control, vive the jihad!”

Kamel, who jet-setted among Afghanistan, Bosnia, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey, was arrested in Jordan on December 15, 1999, and extradited to France. He was convicted of distributing bogus passports and conspiring to blow up Paris Metro stations. He was sentenced April 6, 2001, to eight years in prison.

But after fewer than four years, France sprang Kamel for “good behavior.” (What is it about iron bars and German shepherds that mellows people so?) Kamel flew home to Canada January 29.

“When Kamel arrived in Montreal, the RCMP [Royal Canadian Mounted Police] was not even at the airport to greet him,” Canada’s National Post reported last month. “As far as they’re concerned, he is an ex-convict who has done his time and has committed no crimes in Canada.”

Kamel now freely strolls Canada’s streets. That’s just fine, so long as he limits his violence to moose hunting and such. But what if he has humans — Americans, even — in his crosshairs?

“We should be looking at him and possibly sending him back to Algeria,” Conservative-party deputy leader Peter MacKay said in the February 27 Toronto Star. “There is a strong circumstantial case right now to suggest this guy isn’t deserving of Canadian citizenship.” MacKay sees Kamel as emblematic of Ottawa’s peaceful, easy feeling toward terrorist killers. “What crossed my mind was that the French authorities wanted him out of the country, and we were all too willing to take him in.”

Kamel is not alone. Canada crawls with terrorists, suspected violent extremists, and folks worthy of 24-hour surveillance.

“There have been a number of instances where Canadians or individuals based here have been implicated in terrorist attacks or plans in other countries, at least a half dozen or more in the last several years,” Canadian Security and Intelligence Director Jim Judd told a Canadian Senate panel in Ottawa March 7. “There are several graduates of terrorist training camps, many of whom are battle-hardened veterans of campaigns in Afghanistan, Bosnia, Chechnya and elsewhere who reside here...Often these individuals remain in contact with one another while in Canada or with colleagues outside of the country, and continue to show signs of ongoing clandestine activities, including the use of counter-surveillance techniques, secretive meetings, and encrypted communications.” Among other things, Canadian-based terrorists have aspired to whack a visiting Israeli official, bomb a Jewish district in Montreal, and sabotage an El Al jet over Canada.

On March 16, British Columbian Supreme Court Justice Ian Bruce Josephson found Sikh separatists Ripudaman Singh Malik and Ajaib Singh Bagri not guilty of planting a bomb that destroyed Air India Flight 182 off the Irish coast on June 23, 1985, killing 329 people. Two baggage handlers also were killed in a subsequent explosion at Tokyo’s Narita Airport.

An acquittal is an acquittal. Just ask Robert Blake. Still, the testimony against Malik remains fascinating. One witness quoted him as saying: “We had Air India crash. Nobody, nobody can do anything. It is all for Sikhism.”

For his part, Bagri reportedly told the founding conference of the World Sikh Organization: “Yes, there must be our handshake with the Hindus. We will shake hands. Where? On the battlefield.”

“This verdict sends a message to terrorists around the world that you can get away with these kinds of acts in Canada,” Liberal-party legislator Dave Hayer told the Vancouver Sun. His publisher father was assassinated after agreeing to testify in the trial.

Egyptian refugee Mohammad Majoub remains in a Toronto jail — for now. Federal court justice Elinor Dawson has blocked efforts to deport him to Egypt for fear he may be tortured there. Majoub admits to working on Osama bin Laden’s Sudanese farm in the 1990s and meeting with members of Canada’s terror-tied Khadr family. Judge Dawson’s thoughts on the “security certificate,” which has permitted his detention without bail or charge since June 2000, highlight the logic that eventually could free someone like Majoub. “When reviewing the reasonableness of a security certificate,” Dawson ruled, “at issue is whether there are ‘reasonable grounds to believe’ certain facts. The issue is not whether those facts are true.”

Meanwhile, Adil Charkaoui was released February 18 on bail of $50,000 Canadian (about $41,500 in U.S. dollars). Charkaoui claims no terrorist ties, but al-Qaeda honcho Abu Zubaida and convicted terrorist Ahmed Ressam say they met him in 1998 at an Afghan terror training camp.

Algerian-born Ressam, a failed Montreal refugee applicant and suspected Fateh Kamel protégé, was caught by U.S. Border Patrol on December 14, 1999, at Port Angeles, Washington after crossing the Canadian frontier in an explosive-laden car. He dreamed of ringing in the millennium by blowing up Los Angeles International Airport.

“CSIS was aware of him since 1995 and was surveilling him, but they never put him out of business,” the National Post’s Stewart Bell, author of last year’s Cold Terror: How Canada Nurtures and Exports Terrorism to the World, told journalist Bill Gladstone. “On the other hand, the second he entered the United States, he was stopped, arrested, and turned into a very good government informant.” In his book, Bell writes: “Canada has tried to smother terrorism with kindness...Its most valuable contribution to the war on terrorism may well be its terrorists.”

Canadian Zaynab Khadr flew from Islamabad, Pakistan to Toronto February 17 with her daughter, age 4 1/2, and teenage sister. She joined her mother and brother, Karim, who returned to Canada last April. Karim was wounded when Pakistani forces raided a suspected al-Qaeda hideaway. Her Egyptian-born father, who was killed in that attack, previously had been arrested in Islamabad after a 1995 Egyptian embassy truck bombing. Another brother, Abdurahman, returned to Canada in December 2003. He told Canadian Broadcasting that he grew up in an “al-Qaeda family.” (To be fair, he briefly worked for the CIA.)

“No one likes killing people,” the burka-clad Ms. Khadr to the Toronto Star, referring to September 11. “But sometimes killing people can solve a problem, a bigger problem.” She added: “A man doesn’t just get on the plane and put himself in a building unless he really believes in something.”

The Washington Times reported last September 24 that Adnan G. El Shukrijumah, an al-Qaeda cell leader with a $5 million U.S. bounty on his head, visited Canada in 2003 seeking nuclear materials for a dirty bomb.

Paul Martin, Canada’s Liberal premier, attended a May 2000 dinner while finance minister. Its hosts: The Federation of Association of Canadian Tamils, a front for the Tamil Tigers, a Sri Lankan terrorist group. It has killed at least 60 people, including two Americans, and injured more than 1,400 others, the State Department reports. Martin, and international cooperation minister Maria Minna, ignored security officials who urged them to stay away. Wooing Canada’s sizable Tamil minority apparently was irresistible.

Canadian immigration agents admitted Mahmoud Mohammed Issa Mohammad in 1987, despite his role in attacking an El Al aircraft in Athens in 1968. The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine alumnus has foiled deportation through relentless legal tricks.

“There are known al-Qaeda cells in Montreal and Toronto,” one congressional expert tells me. She nonetheless detects progress among Canadian counterterrorists. “They are very sensitive about being called a conduit for terrorism. Since September 11, Canada has been on the offense. The RCMP has some joint intelligence centers where both Americans and Canadians operate.” Still, this aide sees areas of danger, from porous borders to vulnerable infrastructure. Detonating the Canadian side of the Ambassador Bridge between Detroit and Windsor, Ontario, for example, could cripple the most economically valuable trade route linking our two countries.

The Capitol Hill staffer, who spoke anonymously, added: “Canada has stepped up their visa application procedures, but there are huge populations of people they have let in under refugee and asylum status and as immigrants who may be of concern. They are changing their laws to allow them to deport those people. But increasing that effort and deporting those people is something the United States would encourage.”

Harvey Kushner, author of the hair-raising counterterrorism best-seller Holy War on the Home Front, is less sanguine. “It’s quite disturbing that Canada’s immigration policies have let this situation fester and grow,” he says. “We do not have an electrified fence. When you have a neighbor who is not on the same page, it’s indeed troublesome.”

What can America do about all this? Pressing the Canadians to tighten up may require constant engagement. Amplifying the calls of Canada’s Tories for stricter immigration and easier deportation would help. For starters, President Bush should broach border security when he meets his North American counterparts in Mexico on March 23.

The warm U.S.-Canadian relationship, illustrated by our 3,145-mile unprotected boundary, cooled somewhat when Ottawa recently refused to help Washington develop defenses against incoming nuclear-tipped missiles. But that modest dispute will pale beside the northward-flowing rancor that will erupt if a terrorist attack kills innocent Americans, and U.S. officials discover that the butchers slipped past complacent Canadians.

— Deroy Murdock is a New York-based columnist with the Scripps Howard News Service and a senior fellow with the Atlas Economic Research Foundation in Fairfax, Va.

==============================

Confessions of a Premature Anti-Terrorist: The McCartney sisters and reality (National Review Online, 050324)

The McCartney sisters seem to have won American hearts. These, you may recall, are the sisters of Robert McCartney, who was murdered outside a Belfast bar January 30. The occasion of McCartney’s murder was, that he had got into an argument about something or other with an IRA capo at the bar. Irritated, the IRA man had ordered his associates to deal with the offender in appropriate style. The IRA soldiers obediently took Mr. McCartney outside and stomped, clubbed, and hacked him to death.

In spite of the fact that the pub was crowded at the time — the patrons included two candidates for political office from the Sinn Fein political party, the IRA’s front organization — Belfast police have not been able to find any witnesses to the attack. Nobody, including the two prospective legislators, saw or heard a thing.

President Bush invited McCartney’s sisters (and Bridgeen Hagans, mother of his children) to the White House St. Patrick’s Day bash, in lieu of IRA boss-of-bosses Gerry Adams. Poor Gerry has been removed from the President’s Rolodex, Yasser Arafat-style, for being a liar, a terrorist murderer, and the accomplice of bank robbers. The presidential “divorce” comes many years too late, in the opinion of those of us who have been watching Northern Ireland affairs a while, since Adams has been those things all his adult life. It is, nonetheless, very welcome. The fact that the McCartney sisters, along with their deceased brother, seem to have been loyal Sinn Fein (which is to say, IRA) voters all their adult lives, does not seem to have been held against them by official Washington.

As you might be guessing by this point, whoever else’s hearts the McCartney sisters won, they didn’t lay a finger on mine. Let me try to explain why.

Following their meeting with the president on St. Patrick’s Day, the McCartney sisters (and Ms. Hagans) wrote a column for the U.S. press, in which they pleaded eloquently for Robert McCartney’s killers to be brought to justice. So far, so good; but then my reading was brought to a dead stop by the following:

What Americans need to understand is that ten years ago the IRA were freedom-fighters — but today it is a different story. We are no longer in a conflict, yet atrocities are still being performed — this time by elements of criminality.

What has happened to Robert at the hands of individual IRA members goes against everything Republicanism stands for. Republicanism is about justice, it’s about equality and it’s about freedom. That’s what the past 30 years of the struggle is all about. That’s why ten hunger strikers starved themselves to death.

Let’s just parse that. “Ten years ago the IRA were freedom fighters.” Really? Ten years ago would put us in early 1995.

I have just pulled down the most detailed chronicle of the Northern Ireland “Troubles” that I possess, Lost Lives, by David McKittrick, Seamus Kelters, Brian Feeney, and Chris Thornton. Let’s see what is recorded for 1995, shall we?

That was in fact an exceptionally quiet year, with only nine Troubles-related deaths. (The yearly numbers for the 1990s as a whole were: 84, 102, 91, 90, 69, 9, 22, 21, 57, and 6.) Most were Catholic civilians killed by the IRA under suspicion — in one case hotly denied by relatives of the deceased — of being involved in drug trafficking. The IRA called this their DAAD program — Direct Action Against Drugs. You don’t have to be a fan of drug dealing to notice that due process played no part whatsoever in these IRA actions on behalf of “justice, equality, and freedom,” and that the opportunity to work off personal grudges in an operation of this kind are legion.

Here is the actual tally for 1995 in detail:

March 2: James Seymour, civilian, Protestant, 55, married, 2 children. Seymour had been shot in the head by an IRA gunman 22 years previously while helping guard a police station. Suffering massive brain damage, he seems to have been conscious for those 22 years, but could not communicate.

April 29: Mickey Mooney, civilian, Catholic, 34, married, 4 children. DAAD killing.

September 5: Anthony Martin Kane, civilian, Catholic, 29, married. DAAD killing.

September 28: Billy Elliott, terrorist, Protestant, 32, married, 2 children. Killed by a fellow member of his gang, the Red Hand of Ulster Commando (Loyalist terrorists).

November 27: Norman Harley, civilian, Catholic, 45, single. Apparently a purely sectarian murder of opportunity. Two Protestant men were convicted.

December 8: Paul Edward Devine, civilian, Catholic, 35, married, one child. DAAD killing. Devine was a known associate of Mickey Mooney.

December 18: Francis Collins, civilian, Catholic, 40, married, five children. DAAD killing; though Collins’s family deny he had anything to do with the drug trade, and the authorities agreed. Collins did, however, have a long rap sheet, both for terrorist and “ordinary” crimes. The terrorist (both sides) and criminal classes in Northern Ireland overlap a lot.

December 19: Christopher Johnston, civilian, Catholic, 38, married, five children. DAAD killing. Johnston was on bail on a cannabis-possession charge at the time.

December 27: Martin McCrory, civilian, Catholic, 30, married, two children. DAAD killing. McCrory was a known petty thief, joyrider, and small-time drug dealer.

This is, as I said, not a representative sample of IRA “freedom fighting.” In other years, they were much more active at murdering London newsvendors (2/9/96: Inan Ul-haq Bashir, who was selling newspapers from a family kiosk when the Canary Wharf bomb went off), Christmas shoppers (12/18/83: Caroline Kennedy, 25, mother of 1, killed by the Harrods bomb), elderly royals (8/27/79: Louis Mountbatten, 79), census takers (4/7/81: Joanne Mathers, 25, married, 1 child — NB: census takers are “legitimate targets” to the IRA, along with all ofther U.K. government employees), infants in car seats (10/26/89: Nivruti Mahesh Islania, age 6 months, daughter of an RAF corporal, shot in the head at point-blank range by brave IRA warrior Desmond Grew, whose career was later terminated with extreme prejudice by Britain’s SAS), citizens gathered to pay respects to the dead of the World Wars (11/8/87: Eleven dead when an IRA bomb planted in the Enniskillen war memorial went off — NB: the IRA describe the World Wars scornfully as “England’s wars”), and thousands of others, including a steady cull of farmers and their sons in border areas of Northern Ireland as part of the IRA’s Zimbabwe-style “land redistribution” program.

I should like to ask the McCartney women a few questions: DO YOU REALLY THINK THAT IRA ACTIVITIES THROUGH THE 1960S, 1970S, AND 1980S HAD ANYTHING TO DO WITH “FREEDOM FIGHTING”? DO YOU REALLY THINK YOUR BROTHER WAS THE FIRST PERSON KILLED BY THE IRA FOR NO GOOD REASON?

The Northern Ireland story is a long and tangled one, with plenty of blame to go around. There are certain things, however, that cannot be reasonably doubted. One of those things is, that the IRA is a perfectly amoral terrorist organization, whose members believe that absolutely any act is justified if it advances the cause — the cause, that is, of driving from Ireland anyone who, in the IRA’s opinion, is insufficiently Irish. Another is, that anyone with a pair of eyes and a grain of sense who did not know that fact by 1995, or for that matter by 1975, was practicing willful self-delusion to a degree that beggars the imagination.

Looking back across Ireland’s history through the 20th century, I should like some IRA apologist to tell me anything, anything, that was won by what Gerry Adams so winsomely calls “the physical force tradition in Irish nationalism.” A united Ireland? The entire effect of the IRA and its “freedom fighting” has been to drive the Irish apart further than ever. Ireland would have been united long since but for the IRA. The independence of the 26 counties? At the opening of the 20th century, everyone in Britain knew that some variety of Home Rule was inevitable. Large swathes of the British political classes supported it. The constitutional changes in Britain prior to WW1 made it only a matter of time, whatever happened in Ireland herself. International sympathy? If sympathy is measured by actual physical assistance, the IRA’s main 20th-century sympathizers were Yasser Arafat, Muammar Khadaffi, Leonid Brezhnev, Adolf Hitler, and Kaiser Bill.

Sinn Fein voters in both Northern Ireland and the republic, their sympathizers in the United States, and dimwitted dupes like the McCartney sisters, should all face the fact that the “physical force tradition in Irish nationalism” has, quite aside from matters of morality, been a total bust, bringing to Ireland misery, destruction, gangsterism, and hate, and that its positive achievements can be counted on the fingers of no hands at all. Time for the IRA to close up shop? I would say so, Paula, Catherine, Gemma, Donna, Claire, and Bridgeen. I would say so indeed. But then, I would have said so 30 years ago, when your “community” was handing out posies to the boys in the ski masks. Call me a “premature antiterrorist.”

==============================

Responding to terrorism (Washington Times, 050329)

Responding to the threat of terrorism today above all requires knowing the full spectrum of challenges posed by those who would do harm. In this light, few books are as insightful or as comprehensive as Boaz Ganor’s “The Counter-Terrorism Puzzle.”

In this compelling discussion of terrorism, Mr. Ganor, who is considered one of the world’s most prominent experts on terrorism and counterterrorism, identifies terrorist threats and delineates ways in which governments could most successfully proceed to address them.

The “puzzle” of the book’s title hints at the myriad ways a response to a terrorist threat can take shape. Mr. Ganor’s approach is an analytic one, and examines with precision the magnitude of the terrorist threat and counteraction in the form of policy making, intelligence collection and analysis, deterrence, and offensive and defensive countermeasures (and how to avoid the “boomerang effect”).

Mr. Ganor also includes a discussion of how democratic (as opposed to authoritarian) governments counter terrorism. Of note is his chapter on punitive legislative and judicial laws (anti-terrorism emergency laws, such as the Patriot Act). He also weighs in on the role of print and electronic media in covering attacks and the distinction between responsible and irresponsible reporting. The psychological impact of terrorism on society and the role of international cooperation and international treaties in defeating terrorism are also considered.

This is a broad and ambitious book covering the most wide ranging topics in counterterrorism analysis. Fortunately, Mr. Ganor is able to weave his observations into a coherent and powerful overview. A former officer in Israeli military intelligence, Mr. Ganor (whom, for the sake of full disclosure, I know in a professional capacity) was the founder and executive director of the International Policy Institute for Counterterrorism (ICT) at the Interdisciplinary Center, in Herzliya, Israel.

“The Counter-Terrorism Puzzle” is actually two interwoven books. It originated as a doctoral dissertation on dilemmas in Israeli counterterrorism, so about half of the book focuses on how Israel has addressed counterterrorism dilemmas in its response to the Palestinian terrorist threat. The other half of the book suggests how governments such as the United States can effectively counter the threats posed by the insurgency being mounted by al Qaeda and its allies.

Mr. Ganor makes the important point that in order to facilitate appropriate legal and operational response measures, including international cooperation, a terrorist threat must first be defined. Mr. Ganor writes that “Terrorism is a form of violent struggle in which violence is deliberately used against civilians in order to achieve political goals (nationalistic, socioeconomic, ideological, religious, etc.).” He asserts that the use of “deliberate” targeting of civilians in order to achieve political objectives is what distinguishes a terrorist act from guerrilla warfare, where military units are targeted.

Such a formulation is important because it facilitates the outlawing of terrorism by the international community since all nations can agree that the deliberate targeting of civilians is illegitimate and should be universally legislated as a crime, whereas attacks against military personnel would be considered as part of regular warfare, including the right to retaliate by a country’s armed forces against those perpetrators. Mr. Ganor concludes that if acts of terrorism were universally outlawed as a form of warfare by the international community, then terrorist groups would have no choice but to “abandon terrorism and focus on guerrilla activity to achieve their political aims.”

Mr. Ganor is also at his best when he discusses the psychological toll of terrorism. He writes that terrorism is a form of warfare in which a localized violent incident is intended to spread a “paralyzing sense of fear within each individual in the targeted community that he or she could be the victim in the next attack.” By instilling a state of insecurity, terrorism aims to undermine the targeted country’s “ability to function” in order to “drive public opinion to pressure decision makers to surrender to the terrorists’ demands, thereby restoring the sense of personal safety they feel has been lost. In this way the target population becomes a tool in the hands of the terrorists to promote their political interests.”

Mr. Ganor then offers a detailed way in which governments might help strengthen the population’s psychological resilience to what he calls “psychological and morale-related warfare.”

The book’s greatest strength is its systematic approach to dealing with ways we know that terrorists have acted and will act in the future. The book’s analysis thus provides an important guide not only to decision makers but also to all those who are involved in trying to understand how to formulate effective counterterrorism policies and programs.

Joshua Sinai is an analyst on terrorism issues at ANSER in Arlington.

==============================

French appease Hizballah, undermine international peace and security (townhall.com, 050502)

Armstrong Williams

Two decades ago Hizballah pioneered suicide bombings. In the time since, Hizballah has become the main sponsor of terrorism in the Palestinian territories. According to Israeli intelligence, Hizballah backs at least 51 terrorist cells in the territories - 36 in the West Bank and 15 in the Gaza. Last year, they transferred around 9 million dollars to the West Bank and Gaza for the purpose of encouraging and organizing terrorist attacks, procuring military equipment, and paying terrorists & families of suicide bombers.

Right now Members of Hizballah are spending their day figuring out ways to kill people. The world knows this. Yet the European Union refuses to clamp down on terrorist groups and freeze their assets. Why? Because France, which holds a veto power over any European Union action, won’t let them.

In the French view, the European Union should continue to appease and nurture Hizballah as a power broker in Lebanon, so as not to disturb the already delicate domestic situation in that country. So France pretends that Hizballah is just another political group, as deserving as any of political contributions. France pretends that Hizballah doesn’t use this money to convince children to strap bombs onto their chests and detonate themselves in public.

But some things cannot be ignored. Like the fact that Hizballah plots 9-11 style terrorist attacks. Or that they spend their days training and funding terrorist cells. Or that they dedicate their lives to perpetuating destructive historic myths which have been a source of anti-Semitism for centuries. They use Israel as an excuse for attacks against freedom and democracy everywhere. These are the same people who prevent the Middle East from becoming anything other than an incubator of hate. And their influence is spreading disease throughout Europe.

A recent European Commission poll revealed that 59% of European citizens consider Israel to be the top threat to world peace, greater even than Iran and North Korea. “An even stronger Muslim presence in Europe is certainly endangering the life of Jewish people,” Prime Minister Ariel Sharon said during a recent interview. England, France, Germany, and the Scandinavian countries have all witnessed a spike in violent Anti-Semitic attacks. Almost daily, Jewish schools and synagogues in Paris are vandalized.

After World War II we swore never again. But such sentiments mean nothing if they are not animated with action. We need to stop groups like Hizballah from spreading their anti-human agenda. A good first step would be for the European Union to freeze their funds. Hizballah leader, Hassan Nasrallah, has admitted that a European Union ban would effectively destroy his organization: “The sources of funding will dry up and the sources of moral, political and material support will be destroyed.”

Clamping down on Hizballah would send a message throughout the world that the Europeans are sincere in their opposition to terrorism. It would reaffirm the shared goals of global peace and security. It would remove, surgeon like, a constant threat to the Israeli-Palestinian cease-fire. And it would effectively end much of the terrorist recruiting in Europe.

Sadly, France quivers at taking action, and so the European Union is paralyzed. And Hizballah continues to raise money as a “political party,” and to spend their days figuring out ways to kill people. Just as they’ve done for the past twenty-two years.

==============================

Terrorists Strike London With Series of Blasts (Foxnews, 050707)

LONDON — A series of explosions struck London’s public transportation system Thursday in what Prime Minister Tony Blair called a coordinated series of “barbaric” terrorist attacks, most likely to coincide with the opening of the G-8 summit in nearby Scotland.

After several hours where public officials cautioned against reaching conclusions about what caused at least six blasts on subways and buses, Blair gave a brief televised address where he concluded it was a terrorist action.

“It’s important, however, that those engaged in terrorism realize that our determination to defend our values and our way of life is greater than their determination to cause death and destruction to innocent people and a desire to impose extremism on the world,” an emotional Blair told the world.

“Whatever they do, it is our determination that they will never succeed destroying what we hold dear in this country and in other civilizations in the world.”

At least two people were killed and nine injured in the nearly simultaneous blasts, and officials shut down the entire underground transport network. Media reports said the number of casualties was about 90 people. Police said they believe there may be a “number of” fatalities.

“There have been a number of dreadful incidents across London today,” said Home Secretary Charles Clarke, Britain’s top law enforcement officer. He said there were “terrible injuries.”

“At the present time, we’re still trying to establish what exactly has happened,” said Blair. “Our thoughts and prayers go out to the families” of the victims.

The near simultaneous explosions came a day after London was awarded the 2012 Olympics and as the G-8 summit was getting underway in Scotland.

A previously unknown group, “Secret Group of al Qaeda’s Jihad in Europe,” claimed responsibility in the name of Al Qaeda for the blasts, according to the Italian news agency ANSA. The group claimed the attack in a Web site posting and warned Italy and Denmark to withdraw their troops from Iraq and Afghanistan, ANSA said.

The claim could not be verified and did not appear on any of the Web sites normally used by Al Qaeda.

An explosion destroyed a double-decker bus near Russell Square not long after several blasts were reported on London subways, police said. A witness said the entire top deck of the bus was destroyed.

“I was on the bus in front and heard an incredible bang, I turned round and half the double decker bus was in the air,” Belinda Seabrook told Press Association, the British news agency.

She said the bus was packed with people.

“It was a massive explosion and there were papers and half a bus flying through the air,” she said.

One Sky News reporter in Russell Square reported that “body after body” is being pulled from the Russell Square tube station as ambulances show up. Doctors apparently are wandering around in orange suits going down into the tube tunnels. Some of the wounded are exiting the station covered in silver blankets; many stretchers are being carried out.

One witness, Darren Hall, said some passengers emerging from an evacuated subway station and that some passengers had soot and blood on their faces. He told BBC TV that he was evacuated along with others near the major King’s Cross station and only afterward heard a blast.

One Sky News reporter covering Scotland Yard said sources told him there are indications that one bus explosion was caused by a homicide bomber.

Officials shut down the entire underground network after the explosions. Initial reports blamed a power surge, but officials were not ruling out an intentional attack.

The attacks came a day after London was awarded the 2012 Olympics and as the G-8 summit was getting underway in Scotland.

A spokesman for the Olympic committee says it still has full “full confidence” in London as the host of the 2012 Games.

Blair, who was hosting the world’s most powerful leaders at Gleneagles, Scotland, said he would leave the G-8 meeting for awhile to meet with police and other officials but said the rest of the leaders would remain. The G-8 gathering is focusing on climate change and aid for Africa — but from which Iraq has largely been left off the agenda.

“Each of the countries around that [G-8] table have experience with the effects of terrorism and all of the leaders ... share our complete resolution to defeat this terrorism,” Blair said in his address Thursday. “It’s particularly barbaric this has happened on a day when people are meeting to try to help the problems of poverty in Africa, the long-term problems of climate change and the environment.”

The G-8 leaders are expected to issue a statement of their own regarding the attacks.

Police said incidents were reported at the Aldgate station near the Liverpool Street railway terminal, Edgware Road and King’s Cross in north London, Old Street in the financial district, Russell Square in central London, near the British Museum, Aldgate Station and Leicester Square, which is the equivalent of New York City’s Time Square. A police official also told reporters there was an incident on a bus in Tavistock Place.

London Ambulance Service said several vehicles had been dispatched to the area near Liverpool Street station.

Bradley Anderson, a subway passenger, told Sky News that “there was some kind of explosion or something” as his train reached the Edgware Road station in northeast London.

“Everything went black and we collided into some kind of oncoming train,” Anderson said.

Simon Corvett, 26, who was on an eastbound train from Edgware Road station, said: “All of sudden there was this massive huge bang.”

“It was absolutely deafening and all the windows shattered,” he said. “There were just loads of people screaming and the carriages filled with smoke.

“You could see the carriage opposite was completely gutted,” he said. “There were some people in real trouble.”

White House spokesman Scott McClellan said Bush had been briefed, but offered no other details. Secret Service spokesman Tom Mazur said that Bush’s presence had agents monitoring the situation in London, but that the investigation was being left to British authorities.

U.S. officials said they had no intelligence that suggests similar attacks are planned for the United States; there are no plans currently to raise the terror alert system.

Bomb-sniffing dogs and armed police officers were sent to patrol Washington’s subways and buses Thursday. About 1.2 million people a day ride Washington’s buses and trains. A senior U.S. counterterrorism official said recent intelligence indicated that London was considered a prime target for Islamic extremists, in part because Al Qaeda was having difficulty getting people into the United States.

Candace Smith, spokeswoman for the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority, said security in Washington’s transit systems was stepped up “immediately” in response to the rush-hour explosions in London.

Liz Kirkham, spokeswoman for Tayside Police Force, which covers the Gleneagles area, said no additional security precautions were being taken at the summit as a result of the blasts, as substantial measures had already been put in place.

Despite early reports that British police warned the Israeli Embassy in London of such possible attacks just before the first explosion, Israeli Foreign Minister Silvan Shalom said Israel was not warned about possible terror attacks in London.

“There was no early information about terrorist attacks,” Shalom told Israel Army Radio later. “After the first explosion an order was given that no one move until things become clear. “

Israel was holding an economic conference in a hotel over the London subway stop where one of the blasts occurred. Israeli Finance Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was supposed to attend the conference, but “after the first explosion our finance minister received a request not to go anywhere,” Shalom said.

==============================

London Calling: We can’t forget. (National Review Online, 050708)

It’s a war. Whenever we begin to forget that, we get a horrific reminder.

This summer the air palpably began to leave the war on terror. In the U.S., media coverage gravitated to shark attacks and missing girls — just as it had prior to Sept. 11. The world, at least that portion of it represented by the G-8 summit, had focused its attention on self-flagellating debates about who is and who is not providing enough humanitarian aid to Africa.

We had “moved on,” or at least were trying to. But just as President Bush had hoped to move on from Iraq to domestic issues after the successful Jan. 30 elections, only to learn that a live shooting war cannot be ignored, so it is that the larger struggle with al Qaeda and its affiliates cannot be ignored either, because it too is a live shooting war. British Prime Minister Tony Blair’s efforts to placate Bono and friends on global poverty look faintly ridiculous now that the London attacks have laid bare what should be his chief duty and that of other Western leaders — protecting the public from slaughter.

We are facing a global insurgency of Islamic militants who will hit anywhere, from Mosul to London. Their goal is totalist. They want, first, to drive us from the Middle East, then, to establish a caliphate there, and finally, to absorb the West into their theocracy. If this seems absurd, well, fanatical murderers are not usually known for their finely modulated objectives.

Critics of Bush and Blair argue that the Iraq war has nothing to do with the war on terror. But the terrorists have always known better. They realize that Arab radicalism’s loss of Iraq and the establishment in Baghdad of a decent, stable, antiterrorist state would be a grave ideological blow. So it is probably no accident that two of the most high-profile terror attacks since 9/11 have been directed at Spain and Britain, whose leaders stood with Bush in a key meeting at the Azores islands in Portugal in March 2003 to give Saddam Hussein one of his last ultimatums.

The Spanish cut and ran from Iraq after the Madrid train bombings in 2004, hoping to take the target off their back, but painting one all the larger on the backs of any countries supporting the fight against extremism in Iraq. The Brits, having suffered much worse during the Blitz and the height of the IRA bombing campaign in the 1970s, won’t surrender so easily.

In this war someone can be on the front lines whether he is on a bus in Tavistock Square or on a U.S. Army helicopter in Jalalabad. Unfortunately, there are limits to how much can be done to protect the home front, which is why it is preferable to try to kill terrorists and sap them of their ideological energy overseas. Commercial aviation appears pretty well locked down in the West — or so one hopes — but mass transit, with its multitude of access points and its countless fast-moving passengers, is impossible to secure in a similar fashion.

Americans can take some cold comfort in the fact that al Qaeda surely would prefer to hit here in the States, but seemingly can’t manage it. Such an attack, of course, could take place tomorrow. But that it hasn’t yet is probably some testament to the efficacy of the Patriot Act, the immediate detention of hundreds of Muslim immigration violators after 9/11 (most, no doubt, innocent of any evil intention, but perhaps a crucial handful not), and tighter border control in general. Britain passed a new Prevention of Terrorism Bill only in March and, like most European countries, has relatively lax immigration and asylum policies.

Of course, all of these antiterror initiatives in the U.S. have been criticized by the ACLU and the usual suspects on the left. What they don’t acknowledge is what we’ve been reminded of yet again — it’s a war.

— Rich Lowry is author of Legacy: Paying the Price for the Clinton Years.

==============================

London Bombers Believed to Be Homegrown (Foxnews, 050713)

LONDON — At least three of the four suspected homicide bombers who carried out the deadly attacks on London’s transit system last week were born in England, and all four men came from Leeds in the English Midlands, according to British media.

British media also reported Wednesday that authorities were hunting a fifth man as a suspect in connection with the blasts last Thursday, which claimed at least 52 lives on three subway trains and on a bus in central London.

Scotland Yard was unable to confirm the report.

According to British media reports, three of the four are described as British nationals of Pakistani origin, all of whom lived in and around Leeds, which is heavily populated with lower- and lower-middle-class blue-collar workers.

News reports have identified three of the four as Shahzad Tanweer, a 22-year-old cricket-loving sports science graduate; Hasib Hussain, 19; and Mohammed Sidique Khan, the 30-year-old father of an 8-month-old baby. Press Association, citing police sources, said police had identified the fourth suspect, but no name was reported.

Police have not publicly confirmed any of the identities. Investigators will now have to determine whether the men acted alone — or had help in planning the bombings.

Tanweer’s uncle, Bashir Ahmed, said his nephew had gone to Pakistan earlier this year to study religion, and that the family believed he was attending “some religious function” on the day of the bombings.

“It was total shock, I mean, it’s unbelievable,” Ahmed told reporters.

“Our lives have been shattered. It’s impossible to describe it. We have had a very pleasant time here. I don’t think we can continue here.”

Many Pakistanis immigrated to the area several decades ago to work in textile mills, many of which have since shut down. The area is rife with ethnic tension and was the site of notorious race riots in 2001.

In London, Prime Minister Tony Blair met with British Muslim lawmakers and pledged to open dialogue to tackle a “perverted and poisonous misinterpretation” of Islam. He also said his government would begin consultations on new anti-terrorism legislation.

Addressing the House of Commons, Blair said the government also would look urgently at how to strengthen the process for excluding from the United Kingdom those who incite hatred and make it easier to deport such people.

Christina Corbett, a London intelligence analyst, told FOX News that if the attacks were the work of Al Qaeda, the terror network would most likely have sent an expert to train the cell and extracted this person before the attack was carried out.

“It’s highly likely that these four men were not working alone,” Corbett said. “One of these men reportedly was 19, which is way too young to be training in a [terrorist] camp in Afghanistan.”

Corbett said the developments in the case could help uncover other terror cells operating in the United Kingdom.

“I don’t think that further attacks have been ruled out; they were certainly expected after the [bombings in London],” Corbett said. “But as the criminal investigation proceeds, it will certainly become more difficult for the terrorists to carry out their activities.”

Cops Search for Explosives, Evidence

Police raided six homes in Leeds Tuesday searching for explosives and computer files. They arrested a man, identified by the British news agency Press Association as a relative of one of the suspected bombers.

Acting on six warrants, British soldiers blasted their way into an unoccupied Leeds row house. Streets were cordoned off and about 500 people were evacuated. Hours earlier, police searched five homes elsewhere in the city. Police still weren’t letting the evacuees return to their homes early Wednesday.

Authorities removed a silver Honda Accord from outside of Khan’s home yesterday. The property remained clad in scaffolding and white plastic sheeting today. Documents belonging to Khan were found in the debris of the Edgware Road blast.

Neighbors of Tanweer in Leeds’ garbage-strewn rows of Victorian-era red brick houses were apprehensive and hostile, walking fast past reporters gathered at the cordons. One warehouse worker, who would only give his first name, Saj, said Tanweer was a “good lad” and an athlete.

“He was quiet,” he said. “He was religious. He went to every mosque here. There are loads of mosques here.”

Mohammed Iqbal, a town councilor who represents the City-on-Hunslet section of Leeds, told AP that all of the homes raided belong to “British citizens of Pakistani origin.”

Three of the homes were in the neighborhood he represents, Iqbal said in a phone call with AP’s office in Islamabad, the Pakistani capital. He said he had just met with police about the investigation.

“This is not good for Muslims,” Iqbal said. “We have businesses here. There will be a backlash.”

Did Bomber Blunder?

One of the suspects had been reported missing by his family at 10 p.m. Thursday, and some of his property was found on the double-decker bus in which 13 died, said Peter Clarke, head of the Metropolitan Police anti-terrorist branch.

Some witness accounts suggested the bus bomber may have blundered, blowing up the wrong target and accidentally killing himself. A witness who got off the crowded bus just before it exploded told AP he saw an agitated man in his 20s fiddling anxiously with something in his bag.

“This young guy kept diving into this bag or whatever he had in front of his feet, and it was like he was taking a couple of grapes off a bunch of grapes, both hands were in the bag,” said Richard Jones, 61, of Bracknell, west of London. “He must have done that at least every minute if not every 30 seconds.”

One theory suggested the attacker may have intended to leave his bomb on the subway but was unable to board because his coconspirators had already shut the system down.

Investigators also found personal documents bearing the names of two of the other men near seats on the Aldgate and Edgware lines. Police did not identify the men.

Clarke said police had strong evidence that the man believed to have carried a bomb onto the subway train that exploded between the Aldgate and Liverpool Street stations died in the blast, and they were awaiting confirmation from the coroner.

“We have now been able to establish that he was joined on his journey to London by three other men,” he said.

Leeds, about 185 miles north of London, has a population of about 715,000. About 15% of the residents are Muslim, and many come from a tight-knit Pakistani community, mostly from Mirpur, south of Islamabad in Pakistani-controlled Kashmir. Other pockets of the community are mostly Arab.

Khalid Muneer, 28, a spokesman for the Hyde Park Mosque in Leeds, said the community was surprised by the raids and police claims that the bombers may have come from there.

“That connection would surprise us all, even shock the whole community. We still think it’s too early to say,” he told AP, adding that Muslims in the area were not opposed to Britain.

“I’ve seen no calls in this area for jihad against British or American forces. You will not get that sentiment expressed around this mosque.”

Profiles of the Suspects

Closed-circuit TV video showed all four men arriving at King’s Cross by 8:30 a.m. on Thursday, about 20 minutes before the blasts began, said Clarke.

U.S. intelligence agencies are checking the names of the London bombers against their databases looking for any U.S. connection, President Bush told chief executives at a private White House meeting Tuesday.

The three suspects appear to have come from a moderately affluent sect of British society. They reportedly rode in a rental car to London, toting military style backpacks. The fourth bomber remains unidentified, but is believed to be from the Luton area northwest of London.

Several officials, including Foreign Minister Jack Straw, have said the attacks bore the “hallmark” of Al Qaeda, and one of the questions investigators presumably are trying to answer is whether the four had outside help in planning the attacks.

Jeremy Shapiro, director of research at the center on the United States and Europe at the Brookings Institution, said Europeans had been involved in suicide attacks in the Middle East, but he knew of no previous such bombings in Western Europe.

Britain has produced a handful of would-be bombers over the last five years but, until last Thursday, only one successfully completed a mission. That bomber was Asif Hanif, 21, from London, who walked into Mike’s Bar, a blues joint on the seafront at Tel Aviv, in 2003 and blew himself up, killing two musicians and a waitress and injuring more than 40 others.

His British accomplice, Omar Khan Sharif, 27, was a father of two from Derby. He went into the bar but failed to detonate his bomb and, after a scuffle, escaped. His decomposed body was found a week later floating in the sea near the bar.

==============================

London: The Pakistani Connection (Weekly Standard, 050714)

Those paying attention to Britain’s Jamaati culture shouldn’t be surprised by London’s home-grown terrorists.

IN THE FIRST FEW DAYS after the horror in London on July 7, media in Britain and abroad focused considerable attention on “Londonistan”—the local zoo of Islamist agitators, almost entirely Arab, who have made headlines for years with their extremist preaching. Analytical lines, many of them useful, were drawn to al Qaeda and Iraq, but almost nobody looked at domestic Muslim extremism in the United Kingdom.

Close observers of the British Islamic community, however, few of whom seem to have been consulted by reporters or the government, had been discussing for months a dramatic increase in radical agitation by Pakistani Muslim immigrants in Britain, as well as among their children.

According to the authoritative Muslim Council of Britain, the British Islamic population, totaling 1.5 million, has a plurality of 610,000 Pakistanis, with an additional 360,000 from Bangladesh and India, and 350,000 Arab and African. Unfortunately, Pakistan is the world’s second most significant front-line state (after Iraq) in the global war on terror. Pakistan produced the Jama’at-i-Islami (Community of Islam) movement, founded by Abu’l Ala Mawdudi, a theologian who died in 1979, strangely enough, in Buffalo, New York, at age 76. Known as Jamaatis, the followers of Mawdudi have attained exceptional influence in the Pakistani army and intelligence services, and were a key element in the Pakistani-Saudi alliance to support the Taliban regime in Afghanistan.

Western academics and journalists are often at pains to distinguish between the Jamaatis and Wahhabism, which is the state religion in Saudi Arabia. But differences in theological details,

although they do exist, are secondary; mainly, the Saudi Wahhabis hold to a deceptive alliance with the Western powers, while the Jamaatis were always frontally anti-Western. The Jamaatis study in Saudi Arabia and share with the Wahhabis a murderous hatred of Muslims who do not conform to their ideology, considering those who reject their teachings to be apostates from Islam. They regularly massacre Shia Muslims, in particular, in Pakistani cities. They also completely reject participation by Muslim immigrants in the political and social institutions of Western countries in which they live, and they consider suicide terror legitimate. Pakistan has very few energy resources, and the Saudis have used cheap oil to support Wahhabi infiltration. In the system of radical Islam, if Saudi Arabia may be compared with the former Soviet state, Pakistan could be a parallel to the former East Germany.

For these reasons, the identification of four British-born Muslims of Pakistani origin as the perpetrators of the London atrocity comes as no surprise to those who have been paying attention to these matters. The seething, ferocious rhetoric heard in Pakistani Sunni mosques, at Friday services every week in outlying cities such as Leeds, is far more insidious, as the London events may show, than the antics engaged in by Arab loudmouths like the Syrian Omar Bakri Muhammad, the hook-handed Egyptian Abu Hamza al-Masri, or the bogus Saudi dissident Saad al-Faqih, all of who mainly perform for non-Muslim media attention.

Social marginalization and underemployment of second generation ethnic Pakistani youth in Britain may be cited as a cause for the extremist appeal among them; but the constant drumming of the Jamaati message from the pulpit is much more significant. It is interesting to hear first-generation Pakistani Sunnis in Britain claim shock and surprise at the presence of terrorists among them. Pakistani Islamist radicalism dominates British Islam much as the “Wahhabi Lobby” in America monopolizes the voice of the Muslim community on our shores.

Stephen Schwartz is a frequent contributor to The Weekly Standard.

==============================

The Post-Attack Disaster: Britain’s Muslims must turn on terrorists in their midst. (National Review Online, 050715)

Jonah Goldberg

London — I arrived in this city the morning after the bombings. I didn’t come here to do any reporting, but when a city is attacked in such a way, every stroll amounts to newsgathering. All in all, the city was pleasantly empty and the people didn’t seem particularly terrorized. Then again, the fact that the city was pleasantly empty was perhaps the best proof that the “7/7” murderers had some of their intended effect. This was a Friday in a normally bustling city, and many Londoners simply opted to wait until Monday before trying the bus or subway again.

Obviously, modern terrorism is a psychological weapon more than an overtly military one. Its aim is to persuade civilian populations to surrender where military forces never would.

And, alas, it often works. Europe has become steadily more pro-Palestinian in no small part because of Palestinian terrorism. The French abandoned Algeria because of terrorism. The IRA has had mixed success from terrorism. And of course the most strikingly successful terrorist attack in recent years was the Madrid bombing, which — with the help of some political incompetence — resulted in the Spanish withdrawal from Iraq.

And here in the United Kingdom, there are those who believe Tony Blair should have followed Spain’s lead into similar retreat. George Galloway, the British MP who has been embroiled in the U.N. Oil-for-Food scandal, immediately called on the British to follow Spain’s example and respond to the bombings by immediately pulling all of its troops out of “harm’s way” in Iraq. It was unclear whether he thought Tony Blair should bend over and let Osama bin Laden smack him with a paddle while the prime minister shouted, “Thank you, sir! May I have another?”

The peculiar irony of the British left’s position is that they are so keen to “blame the victim” — normally a major left-wing no-no. Gary Younge, a writer for the execrably anti-American newspaper the Guardian, proclaimed that the attacks were a direct result of the war in Iraq and that they never would have happened otherwise. The war, Younge writes, “diverted our attention and resources from the very people we should have been fighting — al-Qaida.”

Of course, the same Mr. Younge believed that the invasion of Afghanistan was unjustified, and after the 9/11 attacks he wrote eloquently about why so many Arabs, Muslims and anti-American Europeans had legitimate reasons to cheer.

In their caricatured asininity, Young and Galloway are extreme examples of a more widespread mindset that assumes that America (along with its British and other allies) is the problem. And if we would just stop bothering the beehive, the bees would just stop stinging us.

This is nonsense. Everything we’ve learned about the jihadis in recent years points to the fact that they are more like killer bees than conventional ones. They spread. They’re aggressive. And they seek to replace the traditional population wherever they appear.

Regardless, the real danger isn’t from a tiny rabble of jihadi useful idiots, but from the great mass of the British public. In the immediate aftermath of the attacks, The Independent ran a splashy front page story on the “backlash” against Muslims. The worst assaults on London since the Blitz, and the “backlash” amounted to little more than a broken window and a man getting roughed up in a pub. One has to wonder how many more pub beatings took place that same weekend because some idiot said something unkind about Manchester United.

The scandal wasn’t that there was a “backlash” against the Muslim community. It is that there wasn’t more of a backlash within the Muslim community. We now know that the attackers were British born and raised Muslims. Yet there’s precious little evidence that the Muslim community is eager to turn on the enemy within with any admirable enthusiasm. And there are even fewer signs that the British media has any interest in contributing to a “climate” that would encourage such a development.

This is a recipe for unmitigated disaster. Obviously, it makes terrorism more likely. And it also makes precisely the sort of climate the press and moderate Muslims fear most. If normal Muslims can’t be counted on to turn on terrorists in their midst, how can a nation avoid taking measures that will seem unfair to normal Muslims? Already nine out of ten Brits support sweeping new powers for the police. If jihadis can hide among the larger Muslim population, it’s obvious that the larger Muslim population will come under greater scrutiny. The logic of the cancer cell kicks in, and even more young Muslims feel “oppressed” and the number of jihadis will grow.

But even if the number doesn’t grow, the danger is already enormous. The official number of British Muslims is 1.6 million, though most observers say it’s closer to two million or so. The “official” guess at how many of these Muslims are jihadis is 16,000, based on the assumption that no more than 1% could be extremists.

This, of course, could be wishful thinking. And wishful thinking is the enemy’s greatest asset.

==============================

Al Qaeda’s information war (Washington Times, 050715)

Terrorism as practiced by al Qaeda — and, for that matter Saddamist killers in Iraq — is 21st-century information warfare. Terrorists don’t simply target London and Baghdad, they target the news media.

Al Qaeda understands our media crave the spectacular. But don’t place all the blame on headline writers and TV producers. Like sex, violence sells, and al Qaeda has suckered audiences by providing hideous violence.

At present, the truly biggest story on the planet is democratic political change in the Middle East, beginning with Iraq. It’s huge history, and a looming political disaster for tyrants and terrorists. When Western audiences decide this is the real news of our era, and it is, al Qaeda will be dealt a death blow.

German strategic theorist Carl von Clausewitz called war “politics by other means.” Physical intimidation and physical threat are implicit in that analysis. Al Qaeda’s terror campaigns certainly rely on intimidation and threat, but al Qaeda is an extremely limited organization. Its military limitations are obvious. As U.S. Central Command’s Gen. John Abizaid recently noted, al Qaeda has yet to win a military engagement with U.S. forces at or above the platoon level (about 30 troops).

This also holds true for Taliban guerrillas in Afghanistan and what military analysts call the “former regime elements” (FRE — i.e., pro-Saddam forces) in Iraq.

Al Qaeda doesn’t have much education policy, beyond bankrolling Islamist schools. Al Qaeda says it will redistribute the wealth of corrupt Middle Eastern petro-sheiks. Though that is an economic promise, it isn’t a long-term economic plan.

Al Qaeda, however, understands the power of perceived grievance and the appeal of Utopia. In the late 1990s, Osama bin Laden said al Qaeda’s strategic goal was restoring the Islamic caliphate. Bin Laden expressed a special hatred for Turkey’s Kemal Ataturk, who ended the caliphate in 1924.

History, going wrong for Islamist supremacists at least since the 16th century, really failed when the caliphate dissolved.

Though al Qaeda’s timeline to Utopia remains hazy, once the caliphate returns, the decadent modern world will fade, as Western power collapses — and presumably Eastern power, as well. (Islamists are active in China’s Sinkiang Province.)

At some point, bin Laden-interpreted Islamic law will bring strict bliss to the entire world. If this sounds vaguely like a Marxist “Workers Paradise,” that’s no accident — the communists also justified the murder of millions pursuing their atheist Utopia.

The appeal to perceived grievance and promise of an Islamist utopia, however, made al Qaeda a regional information power in a Middle East where political options were denied by tyrants. The September 11, 2001, attacks on America made al Qaeda a global information power — they were an international advertising campaign. Four years later, al Qaeda remains a strategic information power, but little else. In ever other measure of power and success, al Qaeda is very weak.

Maj. Gen. Doug Lute, operations officer for CENTCOM, argues that IEDs (improvised explosive devices, bombs like those used in London) are “perfect asymmetric warfare weapons” for 21st century terrorists. (“Asymmetric warfare” pits mismatched enemies. The weak side tries to avoid its own destruction, while targeting the strong side’s political or military vulnerabilities.)

“IEDs are relatively effective,” Gen. Lute says — meaning when they go off, they usually kill and wound. “IEDs are cheap to make. They are available (i.e., explosives and triggers, as well as skills required to assemble them).” Moreover, “IEDs are anonymous. This makes them the enemy’s most effective weapon because they are really an IO (information operations) weapon. They intimidate, sow fear, but do so without certain identification.”Anonymity means “the terrorists can be a very small group” of people or politically weak organization, he adds.

What makes the small and anonymous appear powerful and strong? In the 21st century, intense media coverage magnifies the terrorists’ capabilities. This suggests winning the global war against Islamist terror ultimately requires denying terrorists weapons of mass destruction and curbing what is now al Qaeda’s greatest strategic capability: media magnification and enhancement of its bombing campaigns and political theatrics.

Austin Bay is a nationally syndicated columnist.

==============================

Net widens as al-Qaeda bomb link is confirmed (Times Online, 050715)

THE British-born mastermind of the London attacks had direct links with al-Qaeda, police sources confirmed yesterday.

He is believed to be connected to a senior figure who took part in an al-Qaeda terror summit in Pakistan 16 months ago where a list of future targets was reportedly finalised.

While the police priority is to trace any bombers still at large, intelligence agencies are trying to confirm that al-Qaeda had a hand in the London attack.

Forensic scientists said last night that the explosives used by the London bombers was the same type used by the convicted British shoe-bombers Richard Reid and Saajid Badat. Scientists hope to establish today whether it originated from the same batch.

It was made from ingredients known to be taught to al-Qaeda recruits in Afghanistan training camps and elsewhere, confirming suspicions that the London bombings were the work of al-Qaeda.

It was first suspected that it was the work of a UK radical group that sympathised with Osama bin Laden’s ideas, and the operation had been planned and executed in Europe. That view may now have to refined.

The mastermind, who is of Pakistani origin, is thought to have been trained in an alQaeda camp in Afghanistan and has been linked to previous terror operations.

The authorities were more interested last night in tracking down this alleged mastermind, rather than hold an inquest into how someone on MI5’s watchlist was able to slip in and out of Britain. They also need to know whether he recruited another cell of suicide bombers who are awaiting orders elsewhere in Britain. Whatever his legacy, he followed al-Qaeda’s standard procedure of ensuring that he left Britain before the attacks. He is understood to have flown out of a London airport the night before.

Organisers of the Madrid and Istanbul bombings are believed to be in Iraq, well beyond the reach of Western security services.

As police piece together how this man had spent the past weeks in Britain they are investigating how he first made contact with the men from West Yorkshire. The conjecture is that he could have met at least one of them in Pakistan when they were on religious study in the past year.

Experts say that it is unlikely that the three Leeds men would have known initially that this was a suicide operation.

Investigators are also tracing the mastermind’s alleged links to three major al-Qaeda figures. One of these is said to be in US custody.

Intelligence is being re-examined from the summit held last year in a mountain village in the northwestern province of Waziristan.

A month after he took part in that summit, Mohammed Barbar, a New York computer executive, was arrested near his home in Queens. He admitted to being an “al-Qaeda sleeper”. He had arrived at the summit carrying cash and supplies for jihadis fighting in Afghanistan.

Babar, 29, has betrayed a number of fellow sleepers during his interrogation and the information led to the arrest of 13 people in Britain. The US authorities have charged him with trying to buy materials to make bombs for attacks in the UK. Britain has asked the FBI to question him about the London operation. Another key suspect in US custody, Abu Faraj al-Libbi, was handed over by Pakistan last month. He was described as al-Qaeda’s operational commander, so is expected to know what was discussed at the summit last year. So far he has been unco-operative.

==============================

Two-thirds of Muslims consider leaving UK (WorldNetDaily, 050726)

Hundreds of thousands of Muslims have thought about leaving Britain after the London bombings, according to a new Guardian/ICM poll.

The figure illustrates how widespread fears are of an anti-Muslim backlash following the July 7 bombings which were carried out by British born suicide bombers.

The poll also shows that tens of thousands of Muslims have suffered from increased Islamophobia, with one in five saying they or a family member have faced abuse or hostility since the attacks.

Police have recorded more than 1,200 suspected Islamophobic incidents across the country ranging from verbal abuse to one murder in the past three weeks. The poll suggests the headline figure is a large underestimate.

The poll came as British Islamic leaders and police met to try to boost recruitment of Muslim officers, improve efforts to protect Muslims from a backlash, and improve the flow of information from Muslims to the police about suspected terrorist activity.

Nearly two-thirds of Muslims told pollsters that they had thought about their future in Britain after the attacks, with 63% saying they had considered whether they wanted to remain in the UK. Older Muslims were more uneasy about their future, with 67% of those 35 or over having contemplated their future home country compared to 61% among those 34 or under.

Britain’s Muslim population is estimated at 1.6million, with 1.1million over 18, meaning more than half a million may have considered the possibility of leaving.

Three in 10 are pessimistic about their children’s future in Britain, while 56% said they were optimistic.

Nearly eight in 10 Muslims believe Britain’s participation in invading Iraq was a factor leading to the bombings, compared to nearly two-thirds of all Britons surveyed for the Guardian earlier this month. Tony Blair has repeatedly denied such a link.

Muslim clerics’ and leaders’ failure to root out extremists is a factor behind the attacks identified by 57% of Muslims, compared to 68% of all Britons, and nearly two-thirds of Muslims identify racist and Islamophobic behaviour as a cause compared to 57% of all Britons.

The general population and Muslims apportion virtually the same amount of blame to the bombers and their handlers, with eight in 10 or more citing these as factors.

The poll finds a huge rejection of violence by Muslims with nine in 10 believing it has no place in a political struggle. Nearly nine out of 10 said they should help the police tackle extremists in the Islamic communities in Britain.

A small rump, potentially running into thousands, told ICM of their support for the attacks on July 7 which killed 56 and left hundreds wounded - and 5% said that more attacks would be justified. Those findings are troubling for those urgently trying to assess the pool of potential suicide bombers.

One in five polled said Muslim communities had integrated with society too much already, while 40% said more was needed and a third said the level was about right.

More than half wanted foreign Muslim clerics barred or thrown out of Britain, but a very sizeable minority, 38%, opposed that.

Half of Muslims thought that they needed to do more to prevent extremists infiltrating their community.

· ICM interviewed a random sample of 1,005 adults aged 18+ by telephone on July 15-17 2005. Interviews were conducted across the country and the results have been weighted to the profile of all adults. ICM is a member of the British Polling Council and abides by its rules.

==============================

The red foam of the River Thames (Townhall.com, 050720)

Jonah Goldberg

I’ve come to have a strange new pride in the American left’s practice of flag-burning. This is not to say I like the practice. In fact, I think I’m with many Americans when I say that burning the American flag should amount to “fighting words” under the First Amendment. But, rather, the fact that burning the flag is considered fighting words by so many is a sign that the Stars and Stripes still arouses passion and meaning for all Americans. In other words, one could say flag-burning is a sign of cultural health. It’s only when the people don’t care about the flag at all that a country really gets into trouble.

That’s what I’ve concluded after traveling around the United Kingdom recently. Large swaths of Britain - and certainly most of its elite - doesn’t care much one way or the other about their flag. To listen to them talk about it, you’d think the Union Jack was little more than a bit of kitsch, the stuff of sno-globes and souvenir letter-openers.

I’m reminded of the line from Virgil’s “Aeneid”: “Like the Roman, I seem to see the River Tiber foaming with much blood.”

OK, I’m not really reminded of the poem itself so much as the now largely forgotten speech by the British scholar and - briefly - politician Enoch Powell, who, in 1968, recited the verse to suggest that Britain was heading down a path that could only lead to social division and multicultural chaos. Powell lamented the usual rogue’s gallery of villains: runaway immigration, secularism, feminism, et al. His worry was that the new barbarians were tearing apart the institutions, values and norms that tend to hold a nation together.

Powell was denounced as a racist and something of a fool for his “Rivers of Blood” speech. But in 2005, as George Jonas notes in Canada’s National Post, Enoch Powell is enjoying something of a revival.

From this American’s perspective, the debate in Britain in the wake of the bombings - over Powell, immigration, Islam, “Britishness” and the rest - reveals the extent of this proud nation’s problems, and to a certain extent, the profound decline of Britain.

Here, the only real debate about the British flag is whether it is in some way analogous to our own Confederate flag. Immigrants, schooled in the jargon of multiculturalism, complain that being “subjected” to the Union Jack in the workplace is a form of oppression and discrimination because it reminds them of colonialism or whatnot.

Meanwhile, the denizens of the new, “cool Britannia” have sullied one of the great “brands” in global culture. A few years back, the CEO of British Airways scrubbed the Union Jack from the entire fleet in favor of a hodgepodge of world-ethnic goo.

Britishness, for all its faults, was once seen around the world as a distinctly valuable and admirable quality. Decency, respect for law, intelligence without so much bloody abstraction, propriety, manners: These were the attributes invariably attributed to the Brits. Since Powell’s speech, however, the British have turned their backs on all of that. Their popular culture is vastly more coarse than America’s. Worse, they have seized the kingdom’s leading institutions and scraped out the best traditions and customs like so many tumors.

“We allowed our patriotism to be turned into a joke, wise sexual restraint to be mocked as prudery, our families to be defamed as nests of violence, loathing, and abuse, our literature to be tossed aside as so much garbage, and our church turned into a department of the Social Security system,” writes Peter Hitchens in his wonderful book, “The Abolition of Britain.”

All of this came about because the British lost confidence in themselves. Confidence in the greatness of your nation is a wonderful bulwark against those who’d like to turn it into something else. When William of Wykeham founded New College at Oxford in 1379, he planted a grove of oak trees on the assumption that the school’s beams might need to be replaced in about 500 years. That’s a sign of cultural confidence. The founder of the Guinness beer dynasty signed a 9,000-year lease for his brewery.

Now a person can move to this country and complain that the British flag is oppressive, and the Brits don’t have the national spine to laugh the complaint away. Britain has given in to the “besetting temptation of all politics to concern itself with the immediate present at the expense of the future.”

Now the future is here. Islamism is filling the yawning vacuum created by multiculturalism. England is producing homegrown suicide bombers who are supremely confident in a very non-British future for Britain. For years, the police here have looked the other way as citizens have slaughtered their wives and daughters in “honor killings.” To clamp down would be “insensitive” to cultural differences. They’ve looked the other way, as jihadi ideologues have turned London into the Comintern of Muslim extremism. In other words, they opened their minds so wide, their brains fell out. And now the Thames, like the Tiber, is foaming with much blood.

==============================

Out for a pillion ride (Townhall.com, 050720)

Tony Blankley

Britain’s highly respected (until now) Chatham House, formerly known as the Royal Institute of International Affairs, announced their considered judgment last week that Britain’s alliance with the United States in Iraq contributed to the cause of the terrorist strike on London a fortnight ago. The report then went on to pronounce that the key problem in Britain for preventing terrorism is that the country is “riding as a pillion passenger with the United States in the war on terror.”

What a vile, lying, contemptuous assertion. For those unfamiliar with the term, a pillion is a padded, woman’s passenger seat on a motorcycle driven traditionally by a man. The British are riding as a “pillion passenger”?

Tell that to the Royal Scots Dragoons, The Black Watch Regiment, The Irish Guard, the 7th Armoured Brigade, the Royal Highland Fusiliers, the 33rd Engineers Explosive Ordinance Disposal Regiment, the Royal Marines, The Special Air Service (special forces), the Staffordshire Regiment, The Royal Air Force, The Princess of Wales’s Royal Regiment, and the many other British military units fighting and dying in Iraq and Afghanistan. Pillion passengers? My horse’s backside! (and it’s even wider than my own).

According to the British newspaper The Guardian, Chatham House is staffed by “leading academics and former civil servants. “ For such as these to disparage the flower of British manhood, which may yet again be the savior of the nation — as it has countless times through her history — is shameful.

These unworthy heirs to an England that “Never did, nor never shall, Lie at the proud foot of a conqueror,” to an England that is “this royal throne of kings, this sceptred isle, this earthly majesty, this seat of Mars,” these unworthies, by their analysis and conclusions prove they have as little between their ears as they presumedly do between their legs.

These hapless, hopeless “thinkers” are following in the foolish, timorous tradition of the European “neutrals” who were the object of Winston Churchill’s wise but unheeded guidance back in January 1940.

The Nazis had conquered Poland in the winter of 1939, and then paused to digest their meal. The French army and the British Expeditionary Force sat warily watching toward the East and waiting. It was the season of the Phony War, the Sitzkreig.

Churchill, then only First Lord of the Admiralty (he became prime minister in May) gave a speech on Jan. 20 in which he impleaded to the neutral states (Norway, Holland, Belgium, Romania among others): “What would happen if all these neutral nations I have mentioned — and some I have not mentioned — were with one spontaneous impulse to do their duty in accordance with the Covenant of the League, and were to stand together with the British and French Empires against aggression and wrong? At present their plight is lamentable; and it will become much worse. They bow humbly and in fear to German threats of violence. 

“Each one hopes that if he feeds the crocodile enough, the crocodile will eat him last. All of them hope that the storm will pass before their turn comes to be devoured. But I fear — I fear greatly — the storm will not pass. It will rage and it will roar, ever more loudly, ever more widely. It will spread to the South; it will spread to the North. There is no chance of a speedy end except through united action.”

For the Chatham House experts — and their legion of similarly mentally impaired co-thinkers in America and Europe — they deduce from events that Britain would be safer waiting for the Americans to successfully suppress the Islamist insurgency worldwide. (Or, if the Americans fail, appeasing the insurgent passions).

Of course it is true in any fight, those who first step up to confront the enemy are certain of being bloodied. That is the commonplace that the Chatham House worthies have brilliantly discovered.

But the coward’s calculation is also extremely risky. If he added his arms to the fight early, he risks being hurt, but he increases the chance that his side will survive the lethal enemy attack. By holding back his share of the common defense, he risks the enemy defeating each of its targets, in seriatim.

In World War II, Holland and Belgium bet wrong. Had they joined the alliance in January, their stout defense — backed up by properly positioned British and French troops might have held the line against the Germans in May 1940. That was certainly Churchill’s hope.

But does all this misty recollection of WWII have any relevance to today’s danger? Of course, the operations of this war are as different from WWII’s operations as one can conceive. And yet the principals are the same. Each European country that is not ferociously aggressive against the nests of Islamists in their midsts not only endanger themselves but provide another close base of operations from which their neighbors may be attacked.

The danger is like an insinuating virus. The larger the contagion-free zone, the safer for every body.

==============================

Explosions Hit Three Tube Stations, One Bus (Foxnews, 050721)

Two weeks to the day when terrorist attacks in London killed a total of 56 people, explosions struck three Underground stations and a bus Thursday afternoon.

The London police commissioner confirmed that four explosions occurred in the subway and on a bus in the Hackney neighborhood of East London. None of the explosions appear to have detonated properly. Officials are hoping that the left-over explosives will provide a wealth of forensic evidence to help investigators hunt down the bombers.

Police said there was one report of an injury.

One Sky News reporter on the ground said officials said the explosive device on the bus appears to be the same type used in the July 7 bombings in London. The material is highly explosive, which is why such a large area around the bus has been cordoned off.

Police also said an armed police unit had entered University College hospital. Press Association, the British news agency, said they arrived shortly after an injured person was carried in.

Sky News TV reported that police were searching for a man with a blue shirt with wires protruding. Officers asked employees to look for a black or Asian male, 6 feet 2 inches tall, wearing a blue top with a hole in the back and wires protruding.

Scotland Yard said there have been two arrests, one at Downing Street and one at greater Scotland Yard, but officials are stressing the arrests may not be related. There will be a police briefing at 12:30 p.m. EDT.

Prime Minister Tony Blair said Thursday that officials hoped that London would return to normal “as soon as possible.”

“We can’t minimize incidents such as this,” Blair said during a news conference with visiting Australian Prime Minister John Howard, adding that such attacks are attempted “to make people worried and frightened and taking responsibility off the shoulders of people who engage in these acts.”

Blair said the police and security services were “fairly clear” on what happened and what the next steps were, and it was “important to respond by keeping to our normal lives.”

“People have seen our country react to terrorist attacks that are meant to make people worried and scared and react, and people have reacted with great dignity ... it’s not going to change us … our reaction’s got to be the same” as it was after the July 7 attacks, Blair added.

He said it was too early to speculate on who might be responsible for the attacks.

Howard told Blair that Australia would remain a “steadfast partner” with Britain in the fight against terrorism.

“Terrorism is an enemy to all free people,” Howard said. “Terrorism is not just about individual circumstances and individual events.”

‘People Were Panicking’

Metropolitan Police Commissioner Ian Blair described the incidents as “serious.”

“We’ve had four explosions — four attempts at explosions,” Blair said outside police headquarters at Scotland Yard. “At the moment the casualty numbers appear to be very low ... the bombs appear to be smaller” than those detonated July 7.

The Warren Street, Shepherd’s Bush and Oval stations were evacuated. Emergency services personnel were called to the stations, police said. There were reports of a nail bomb that exploded and/or a backpack that exploded at Warren Street but those reports have not yet been confirmed.

Police in chemical protection suits were seen preparing to enter the Warren Street station but no chemical agents were involved in the explosions.

There was also an incident at 10 Downing Street, where the British prime minister’s offices are located. Two police officers trained their guns on a man before leading him off the premises; his shirt was unbuttoned in the front.

The head of Scotland Yard said in a brief press conference Thursday that commuters and other Londoners should stay exactly where they are; he said it’s possible more portions of the transit system will be shut down.

Some witnesses said they heard gunshots at the Warren Street stop but according to Sky News, police believe those noises were actually detonators going off for bombs that didn’t explode.

“People were panicking. But very fortunately the train was only 15 seconds from the station,” witness Ivan McCracken told Sky News.

McCracken said he smelled smoke, and people were panicking and coming into his carriage. He said he spoke to an Italian man who was comforting a woman after the evacuation.

“He said that a man was carrying a rucksack and the rucksack suddenly exploded. It was a minor explosion but enough to blow open the rucksack,” McCracken said. “The man then made an exclamation as if something had gone wrong. At that point everyone rushed from the carriage.”

Services on the Victoria, Hammersmith and Northern lines were suspended, the London Underground said.

“I was in the carriage and we smelled smoke — it was like something was burning,” said Losiane Mohellavi, 35, who was evacuated at Warren Street. “Everyone was panicked and people were screaming. We had to pull the alarm. I am still shaking.”

Stagecoach, the company which operates the stricken No. 26 bus, said the driver heard a bang and went upstairs, where he found the windows blown out. The company said the bus was structurally intact and there were no reports of injuries.

Closed-circuit TV cameras on Hackney Road showed the No. 26 bus immobilized at a stop with its indicator lights flashing. The area around the bus had been cordoned off.

Keith Roberts, a shopkeeper near where the bus was sitting empty, said the bus driver was speaking to police and not only the bus but nearby houses were also evacuated. Roberts and another witness from the Shepherd’s Bush station who called in to Sky News said they were told by police to get off their cell phones.

The concern is that authorities believe that at least two bombs have not gone off, one of which could be on the bus. Cell phones work on radio frequencies, which could set off the potential bombs.

The reports came exactly two weeks to the day that four homicide bombers attacked three subway stations and a double-decker bus in London, killing 52 others.

Although not as serious, Thursday’s incidents were hauntingly similar to the blasts two weeks ago, which involved explosions at three Underground stations simultaneously — quickly followed by a blast on a bus. Those bombings, during the morning rush hour, also occurred in the center of London, hitting the Underground railway from various directions.

Thursday’s incidents, however, were more geographically spread out.

London Ambulance said it was called to the Oval station at 12:38 p.m. and Warren Street at 12:45 p.m. The July 7 attacks began at 8:51 a.m.

Prime Minister Blair was scheduled to meet with various British intelligence agencies Thursday. He canceled a visit to a school in East London, which was in the same general area as the potential bus bomb.

President Bush was briefed on the London incidents, according to White House spokesman Scott McClellan, who said U.S. officials are “monitoring the situation closely.’”

Washington, D.C., Metro officials said the city’s subways, which have been on a higher alert since the July 7 London bombings, will see an increase in security and bomb-sniffing dogs.

Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff has also been advised and is monitoring the situation. There is no plan to change the terror threat level at this time; the Department of Homeland Security is still gathering information.

The concern among U.S. officials in these situations is whether there would be legitimate follow-up attacks by the same group responsible for the July 7 bombings, or “copy cat” incidents, of lesser severity and effectiveness.

The explosions came as Pakistani intelligence officials said authorities are seeking the former aide of a radical cleric in Britain in connection with the July 7 bombings.

The officials said British investigators asked Pakistani authorities to search for Haroon Rashid Aswat, who reportedly had been in close contact with the suicide bombers just before the July 7 attacks. Aswat, 31, was of Indian origin and may not be in Pakistan, according to two intelligence officials in Islamabad and one in Lahore.

==============================

The beginning of the reckoning (Townhall.com, 050717)

Caroline B. Glick

Reacting to Neville Chamberlain’s Munich Pact with Adolf Hitler in the British Parliament in October 1938, Winston Churchill warned, “You have to consider the character of the Nazi movement and the rule which it implies....There can never be friendship between the British democracy and the Nazi power, that power which spurns Christian ethics, which cheers its onward course by a barbarous paganism, which vaunts the spirit of aggression and conquest, which derives strength and perverted pleasure from persecution, and uses, as we have seen, with pitiless brutality the threat of murderous force. That power can never be a trusted friend of British democracy.”

With the outbreak of World War II one year later, Churchill’s warning that Munich was “the beginning of the reckoning” with an implacable foe was of course proved correct.

In the week since last Thursday’s attacks in London we have repeatedly heard the analogy between those bombings and the Nazi bombing war against Britain. Most of these analogies have to do with the famous British stiff upper lip in the face of terror and carnage. Some of these parallels relate to the determination enunciated by Queen Elizabeth and Prime Minister Tony Blair never to surrender to the forces behind the bombings. Indeed, in most cases, the analogies drawn between the two circumstances have to do with the British response to the attacks and not to the parallel nature of the perpetrators.

In truth though, just as the British stoicism recalls the same from 65 years ago, so too, there is a deep and instructive similarity between the Nazis and the Islamic-fascist forces that attacked then and attack today. The fact of the matter is that even more important than invoking the famous British “stiff upper lip,” to fight this current war to victory requires understanding and accepting the similarities between the Nazis and the Arab-Islamic terrorist armies.

On Tuesday The Wall Street Journal published an investigative report into the establishment and growth of the Islamic Center in Munich. As Stefan Meining, a German historian who studies the mosque, told the paper, “If you want to understand the structure of political Islam, you have to look at what happened in Munich.”

According to the report, the Munich mosque was founded by Muslim Nazis who had settled in West Germany after the war. These men, who were among more than one million citizens of the Soviet republics who joined the Nazis while they were under German occupation, were transferred by their Nazi commander to the Western front in the closing stages of the war to protect them from the advancing Red Army.

The Journal report explains that the first leader of the mosque was a native of Uzbekistan named Nurredin Nakibhidscha Namangani. Namangani served as an imam in the SS and participated in the liquidation of the Warsaw ghetto and the putting down of the Jewish uprising in 1943.

According to the article, the exiled head of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, Said Ramadan, participated in a 1958 conference organized by Namangani and his fellow Muslim Nazis to raise money to build the mosque.

The article then outlines the subsequent takeover of the mosque by the Muslim Brotherhood in the 1960s and its transformation, with Saudi and Syrian funding, into a nexus for the spread of Islamic-fascist ideology and its call for jihad and world domination.

Ignored by the report is that there was no particular reason, other than perhaps turf warfare, for the Nazis to have had a problem with the Muslim Brotherhood. As German political scientist Matthias Kuentzel chronicled in his work “Islamic anti-Semitism and its Nazi Roots,” the Muslim Brotherhood, which spawned the PLO’s Fatah as well as al-Qaida, Hamas and the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, owes much of its ideological success and pseudo-philosophical roots to Nazism.

In the 1930s, the mufti of Jerusalem, Amin el-Husseini, rigorously courted the Nazis. When, in 1936, he launched his terror war against the Jewish Yishuv in the British controlled Palestine Mandate, he repeatedly asked the Nazis for financial backing, which began arriving in 1937.

From 1936-39 Husseini’s terror army murdered 415 Jews. In later years, Husseini noted that were it not for Nazi money, his onslaught would have been defeated in 1937. His movement was imbued with Nazism. His men saluted one another with Nazi salutes and members of his youth movement sported Hitler Youth uniforms.

Husseini was allied with the new Muslim Brotherhood movement that was founded by Ramadan’s father-in-law, Hassan al-Banna, in the 1920s. The impact of his terror war on the movement was profound. From a 1936 membership roster of 800, by 1939 the ranks of the Brotherhood had risen to 200,000 official members backed by perhaps an equal number of active sympathizers.

As Kuentzel argues, the notion of a violent holy war or jihad against non-Muslims was not a part of any active Islamic doctrine until the 1930s and, as he notes, “its concurrence with the arrival of a newly virulent anti-Semitism is verified in no uncertain terms.” Husseini’s gangs in the Palestine Mandate were joyously praised by the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, which held mass demonstrations with slogans like “Jews get out of Egypt and Palestine,” and “Down with the Jews!”

For the Nazis, the Jews were seen as the principal force preventing them from achieving their goal of world domination. As Hitler put it, “You will see how little time we shall need in order to upset the ideas and the criteria for the whole world, simply and purely by attacking Judaism.” In his view, once he destroyed the Jews, the rest of the world would lay before him for the taking. “The struggle for world domination will be fought entirely between Germans and Jews. All else is facade and illusion,” he said.

Husseini, who became an active Nazi agent  fomenting a pro-Nazi coup in Baghdad in 1942 and then fleeing to Germany where he spent the rest of the war training a jihad army of Bosnian Muslims; exhorting the Arab world to rise up against the Allies; participating in the Holocaust and planning an Auschwitz-like death camp to be built in Nablus after the German victory  escaped with French assistance to Cairo after the war. There he was embraced as a war hero.

Hitler’s obsession with the Jews as the source of all the evils in the world became so ingrained in both the Arab nationalist and Islamic psyche that it has become second nature.

At the 2002 trial in Germany of Mounir el-Moutassadeq, who was accused of collaborating with the September 11 hijackers, witnesses described the world view of Muhammad Atta who led the attackers. One witness claimed, “Atta’s [world view] was based on a National Socialist way of thinking. He was convinced that ‘the Jews’ are determined to achieve world domination. He considered New York City to be the center of world Jewry, which was, in his opinion, Enemy Number One.”

In light of the wealth of historical documentation of the Nazi roots of Islamic fascism, it is absolutely apparent that the collaboration between Nazis and the Muslim Brotherhood in the building and developing of the Islamic Center in Munich was anything but coincidental or unique.

It is also hardly surprising that PA chieftain Mahmoud Abbas, whose predecessor, Yasser Arafat, was Husseini’s follower, devoted his doctoral dissertation to a denial of the Holocaust and a justification of Nazism.

The thing of it is, just as with the Nazis, it is impossible to separate the Islamist ideological and military quest for world domination from its genocidal anti-Semitism. As with the Nazis, they are two sides of the same coin. And, just as was the case from the Nazi ascent to power in 1933 through the end of World War II, the British and, to a lesser though increasing degree, the Americans refuse to acknowledge that the war against the Jews and Israel is the same as the war against them.

There are reasons for the attempts to separate the inseparable. The discovery that the London bombers were flowers of British immigrant youth  like the British-Pakistani al-Qaida-Hamas terrorists who committed the suicide bombing at Mike’s Place in Tel-Aviv in April 2003, and Omar Sheikh, the British-Pakistani al-Qaida terrorist who kidnapped and murdered Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl in a Nazi-style execution in January 2002  shows that the enemy today is largely homegrown.

One of the most difficult challenges for a democratic society is facing up to the presence of an enemy fifth column in its midst. Aside from this, the fact of the matter is that the global economy is fueled by oil, which is controlled by the same forces that stand at the foundations of the current war against the Jews and Western civilization.

Much easier than contending with these realities is to engage in the politics of denial. As the British and French blamed German anti-Semitism and warmongering in the 1930s on their impoverishment and humiliation by the Treaty of Versailles, so too, the British, like their European allies and large swathes of American society, today blame Arab and Islamic anti-Semitism and aspirations for global domination on poverty and perceived humiliation at the hands of Western imperialists and by the establishment and continued viability of the State of Israel.

It is the duty of the State of Israel (much ignored by its own leadership today) to point out this inconvenient reality to the rest of the world. And it is the duty and responsibility of all who treasure freedom and the right to live without fear to accept this reality in spite of its inconvenience. Refusing to do so is not simply a matter of cowardice. It is a recipe for suicide.

Caroline B. Glick is the senior Middle East fellow at the Center for Security Policy in Washington, D.C., and the deputy managing editor of The Jerusalem Post, where this article first appeared.

==============================

Row over tougher rules on preachers of hate (Times Online, 050805)

THE most sweeping anti-terrorism proposals since the Second World War were announced yesterday as Tony Blair started a crackdown on preachers of hate.

Dozens of Islamic extremists face deportation this autumn in a surprisingly draconian clampdown which has shattered the cross-party consensus after the London bombings.

As the measures were unveiled, the Bank of England said that it had frozen the bank accounts of the four men held on suspicion of being the July 21 bombers, amid allegations that they had collected more than £500,000 in benefits.

“Let no one be in any doubt, the rules of the game are changing,” the Prime Minister said.

Many of his tough new proposals took the Home Office by surprise, with officials learning of them only at a press conference in Downing Street.

Making clear that public anger over the extremists had prompted urgent action, Mr Blair said: “Coming to Britain is not a right and, even when people have come here, staying here carries with it a duty.

“That duty is to share and support the values that sustain the British way of life. Those who break that duty and try and incite or engage in violence against our country or our people have no place here.”

His proposals will trigger fresh battles with the courts, which have ruled previous anti-terrorism laws illegal and have stopped deportations to countries where people could face inhumane treatment.

Mr Blair is seeking assurance from North African and Middle Eastern countries that deportees would not be tortured if they are made to leave Britain.

He warned judges that if they continued to prevent the deportation of extremists, he would amend the Human Rights Act. Most of the proposals, including new grounds for deportation, can be implemented without legislation.

Senior police officers said that the proposals provided scope for firm action to tackle the small number of people involved, but civil liberties groups condemned them as harsh.

Shami Chakrabati, director of Liberty, said that anyone in Britain believed to have incited terrorism should be dealt with in the British courts.

Charles Kennedy, the Liberal Democrat leader, who was informed of the measures only 30 minutes before they were announced, told the Prime Minister not to count on his party’s support. He said that they risked “inflaming tensions and alienating Muslims” when the country needed all communities to pull together.

But the tough stance on deportation was welcomed by David Davis, the Shadow Home Secretary, who urged the Government to press ahead with them as soon as possible.

The most significant changes on deportation and will come into force early next month, after a brief consultation.

Grounds for deportation have been extended to take in “fostering hatred, advocating violence to further a person’s beliefs or justifying such violence”. The measures will be implemented retrospectively, so any radicals known to have publicly supported suicide bombers in Britain or abroad can be thrown out.

Mr Blair emphasised that the measures were aimed at extremists and not at “decent, law-abiding” Muslims. “Most people recognise the climate in which these measures are being taken is somewhat different,” he said. “People can’t come here and abuse our good nature and our tolerance, come here and start inciting our young people into violence.”

Mr Blair’s wife Cherie, a leading human rights lawyer, recently warned the Government not to interfere with the independence of the courts.

The Prime Minister insisted that freedom from terrorism was a human right. “I have never accepted this idea that there is a choice between the concept of human rights and the concept of protecting the country from terrorism,” he said.

The Prime Minister, who leaves for his summer holiday this weekend, gave a clear hint that MPs will be recalled in September to debate the measures.

==============================

Britain Bars Return of Radical Cleric (Foxnews, 050812)

LONDON — Britain on Friday barred radical Muslim cleric Omar Bakri from returning to the country that was his home for the past 20 years, saying his presence was no longer “conducive to the public good.”

The decision came as the country’s top legal official defended plans to deport another radical Muslim cleric and nine other foreigners suspected of posing a threat to national security.

Lebanese authorities, who had detained Bakri Thursday, released him Friday after determining he had committed no crime, the prosecutor general said.

Judge Said Mirza told The Associated Press that he ordered Bakri’s release after it appeared “that he has not committed any crime and there are no criminal records against him.” Mirza added Bakri was a free man.

It was not immediately clear where Bakri was headed after his release.

Bakri, 45, left Britain on Saturday, one day after Prime Minister Tony Blair proposed tough new anti-terrorism measures including the deportation of extremist Islamic clerics who preach hate.

Bakri, who has dual Syrian and Lebanese citizenship, had come under increasing pressure from the British government for his hardline rhetoric after last month’s transit bombings. He had insisted that he planned to return to north London, where his wife and children live.

Lebanon’s General Security department said in a statement that Bakri was being interrogated about the circumstances of his entry to Lebanon.

Lebanese newspapers reported that Syria would like Lebanon to hand over Bakri, but this could not be confirmed with the Syrian authorities on Friday — the Muslim sabbath.

He caught British public attention recently when he said he would not inform the police if he had known Muslims were planning attacks such as the July 7 bombings in London, in which four suicide bombers killed 52 people.

He claimed Islam prohibited him from reporting Muslims to the British police.

Home Secretary Charles Clarke had written to Bakri to inform him he would not be allowed back into Britain. The cleric has 14 days to appeal.

“The Home Secretary has issued an order revoking Omar Bakri Mohammed’s indefinite leave to remain and to exclude him from the U.K. and the grounds that his presence is not conducive to the public good,” the Home Office said in a statement.

Bakri founded the now-disbanded radical Islamic group al-Muhajiroun, which came under scrutiny in Britain, particularly after some of its members praised the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the United States.

A spokesman for Britain’s Crown Prosecution Service said Thursday prosecutors were looking at Bakri’s recent remarks to assess whether he could be charged with solicitation of murder or incitement to withhold information known to be of use to police.

Meanwhile, Jordan said Friday it would ask Britain next week to extradite one of the 10 detained, cleric Omar Mahmoud Othman Abu Omar, also known as Abu Qatada. Spanish officials have described him as Usama bin Laden’s “spiritual ambassador in Europe.”

Britain’s plans to deport the 10 foreigners have sparked fears for their safety in their destination countries.

The Home Office did not identify the detainees. But a government official, speaking on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue, confirmed that Abu Qatada, a Palestinian cleric who carries a Jordanian passport, was among them.

A statement from Abu Qatada’s lawyer said the detainees were “primarily Algerians.”

Lord Chancellor Charles Falconer said it was necessary to balance the risk of a deportee being mistreated against the threat they pose to Britain. He added that the government may seek new human rights legislation to make the deportations easier. The measure would be among a raft of tough new anti-terrorism laws announced in the wake of the July bombings.

“The deportee has got rights, but so have the people of this country,” Falconer told British Broadcasting Corp. radio. “If they are threatened in terms of national security, that is something that the government has got to protect them against as much as possible.”

As a signatory to the European Convention on Human Rights, Britain is not allowed to deport people to countries where they may face torture of mistreatment. The government has been trying to sign agreements guaranteeing humane treatment of deportees with 10 countries, including Algeria, Lebanon, Egypt and Tunisia. The first such memorandum of understanding was signed with Jordan on Wednesday.

The detentions and are another indication of the dramatic impact of last month’s bombings in a country until recently regarded as something of a safe haven for radicals.

“The circumstances of our national security have changed, it is vital that we act against those who threaten it,” Home Secretary Clarke said.

Abu Qatada was granted political asylum in Britain in 1993. He has been in jail or under close supervision here since 2002, but now faces deportation to Jordan where authorities convicted him in absentia in 1998 and again in 2000 for involvement in a series of explosions and terror plots.

British authorities believe Abu Qatada inspired the lead Sept. 11 hijacker Mohamed Atta and he is suspected of having links with radical groups across Europe.

Jordanian Interior Minister Awni Yirfas said his country would request Abu Qatada’s extradition next week. A spokesman for Britain’s Home Office had no immediate reaction.

The cleric’s lawyer, Gareth Peirce, condemned the detentions. Her firm said in a statement that the detainees had not been allowed to see their lawyers.

Like Abu Qatada, some of the foreigners detained Thursday had spent up to three years in jail without trial under sweeping anti-terror legislation until their release in March after Britain’s highest court ruled the detentions unlawful. Since then, they have been supervised under so-called control orders, such as curfew or house arrest, and banned from using the telephone or Internet.

The Home Office said the detainees had five working days to appeal deportation — a process that could drag on for months. A spokeswoman insisted they would not be deported until the British government gained assurances from the destination countries that they will not be treated inhumanely.

Civil rights campaigners and the U.N. special envoy on torture, Manfred Nowak, have warned, however, that such assurances carry no weight in international law and would not sufficiently protect the deportees.

“The assurances of known torturers, many of whom deny the use of torture even when it is widely documented, are not worth the paper they are written on,” said Mike Blakemore, a spokesman for Amnesty International.

==============================

The Overlooked Case Of Mohammed Afroze: Al Qaeda’s terrorism isn’t really motivated by the Iraq War and Israel. (Weekly Standard, 050811)

AFTER A STRING OF BOMBINGS in London, the British media began peppering Tony Blair and John Howard with questions about the effects of Britain’s presence in Iraq on suicide-bomber recruitment. During the hastily-arranged press conference the day of the second series of attempted bombings, journalist Paul Bongiorno noted that one Australian injured in the July 7 blasts had blamed the Iraq War for the attacks, prompting a tough response from the Australian prime minister. The unnamed victim is not alone; an ICM poll for the Guardian showed that two-thirds of Brits believe that the bombings have some linkage to military action in Iraq.

Today the political situation remains unchanged for Blair and the British. George Galloway, the Scots MP who recently declared his sympathy with the Iraqi “insurgents,” told Syrians on July 31 that the British, Americans, and the West needed a cure for their imperialism, not the Arabs for their radicalism and oppression. In fact, Galloway told Syrians that the Arabs appeared to be doing nothing but standing by while the West raped their “daughters”:

Two of your beautiful daughters are in the hands of foreigners—Jerusalem and Baghdad. The foreigners are doing to your daughters as they will. The daughters are crying for help, and the Arab world is silent. And some of them are collaborating with the rape of these two beautiful Arab daughters. Why? Because they are too weak and too corrupt to do anything about it.

Galloway this week referred to Iraqi terrorists

conducting suicide attacks as “martyrs” and told the BBC that Tony Blair and George Bush were the real terrorists. Even though pundits consider Galloway a voice from the fringe, when he says that Islamist terror arose from the first Iraq War and the occupation of Jerusalem, he speaks for a not-insignificant number of Brits, and Yanks as well.

All of which makes the forgotten case of Mohammed Afroze all the more significant.

On the day after the failed July 21 bombings in London, an Indian court in Delhi sentenced Mohammed Afroze to seven years in prison for his participation in a wider plot which had been planned for September 11, 2001. Afroze led another al Qaeda cell which planned to use commercial airlines as missiles to destroy several international targets. The Islamist terrorists intended to send a global message through coordination with the attacks on America. Their plan failed when the terrorists lost their nerve and fled Heathrow.

Afroze and his compatriots from Bangladesh, Afghanistan, and Pakistan had planned on flying their Manchester-bound flights into the House of Commons and the Tower Bridge in London. Attacking Parliament would have sent a message to the British government about the continued sanctions on Iraq. Blowing up the Tower Bridge would kill a slew of British civilians, with the intent of terrorizing them into demanding a withdrawal of British troops from the Middle East and a halt to support of American actions in the region.

But Afroze had other targets as part of his plan—and these reveal something much deeper and broader than Galloway and the media wish to contemplate.

AFROZE HAS ALSO ADMITTED to targeting the Rialto Towers in Melbourne, Australia. Australia has a long history of courageous alliance with Britain and the United States, of course, but Australia never set foot in Iraq before the 2003 invasion. They had provided a naval support contingent of three ships with 600 sailors and their own air defense squad. Their mission consisted of interdiction on shipping in the Persian Gulf to ensure no arms made their way into Saddam Hussein’s hands during the blockade that preceded the war.

Australia had helped free East Timor from a military occupation by Indonesian paramilitary forces two years earlier. The Portuguese pulled out of Timor in 1976, and the Indonesian military invaded the island nine days later, annexing the territory and imposing an increasingly brutal regime on the Catholic Timorese. In 1999, Indonesia president B.J. Habibie unexpectedly offered a referendum to East Timor, and an overwhelming majority backed independence. This touched off a revolting nightmare of murder and terror by Indonesian paramilitary forces which only ended when an Australian-led U.N. force took control of East Timor and effectively liberated it from the Indonesians.

Clearly the notion that an attack on Melbourne would send a message about Iraq and Jerusalem, therefore, hinges on shaky ground. It seems much more likely that al Qaeda harbored a grudge against the Aussies for their efforts to free East Timor (now Timor Leste) from primarily Muslim Indonesia. However, that doesn’t square with the critics who insist that Western policies about Iraq

and Jerusalem lie at the heart of Islamofascist terror, especially when some of those same critics—such as Noam Chomsky, Mother Jones, and organizations like Common Dreams—insisted on Western nations intervening in East Timor to free the Timorese from Indonesian tyranny.

In fact, Chomsky sounded themes in his essay demanding military action remarkably similar to those George W. Bush would use five years later while demanding action to free the Iraqi people from the grip of Saddam Hussein:

Not long before, the Clinton administration welcomed Suharto as “our kind of guy,” following the precedent established in 1965 when the general took power, presiding over army-led massacres that wiped out the country’s only mass-based political party (the PKI, a popularly supported communist party) and devastated its popular base in “one of the worst mass murders of the 20th century.” According to a CIA report, these massacres were comparable to those of Hitler, Stalin, and Mao; hundreds of thousands were killed, most of them landless peasants. The achievement was greeted with unrestrained euphoria in the West. The “staggering mass slaughter” was “a gleam of light in Asia,” according to two commentaries in the New York Times, both typical of the general western media reaction. Corporations flocked to what many called Suharto’s “paradise for investors,” impeded only by the rapacity of the ruling family. For more than 20 years, Suharto was hailed in the media as a “moderate” who is “at heart benign,” even as he compiled a record of murder, terror, and corruption that has few counterparts in postwar history. . . .

The picture in the past few months is particularly ugly against the background of the self-righteous posturing in the “enlightened states.” But it simply illustrates, once again, what should be obvious: Nothing substantial has changed, either in the actions of the powerful or the performance of their flatterers. The Timorese are “unworthy victims.” No power interest is served by attending to their suffering or taking even simple steps to end it. Without a significant popular reaction, the long-familiar story will continue, in East Timor and throughout the world.

Somehow Chomsky’s—and much of the left’s—concern for “unworthy victims” would disappear when the Iraqis, afflicted with a similarly genocidal tyrant, received the same round—or more accurately, sixteen rounds—of indifference from the United Nations.

BUT AFROZE HAD ONE MORE TARGET in mind for his suicide attacks: the Indian Parliament. Again, anyone with a sense of history understands the long antagonism between Muslims and Hindus on the Asian subcontinent. The division of India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh after the British withdrawal in 1947 touched off a religious and political conflict that persists to this day. Any aggression against India by al Qaeda would hardly seem surprising given this well-known dynamic.

What would seem surprising is the notion that an al Qaeda attack on India’s Parliament would have anything to do with Iraq or Jerusalem. India followed its historical precedents in the month before the March 2003 invasion, in a letter to the United Nations. India argued that they wanted more time before the Security Council authorized military action and that they opposed the invasion of Iraq. More to the point, India had a long history of trade with Saddam’s Iraq, right up to the first Gulf War. The Indian government restarted trade with Iraq in June 1991 (almost immediately after the war), working within the sanctions but clearly supportive of trade with Saddam Hussein.

Nor has India expressed any solidarity with Israel. India joined the Non-Aligned Movement, which has repeatedly and publicly sided with the Palestinians. India’s U.N. voting record shows that it remains essentially sympathetic to the Palestinian claims over the occupied territories, and its rhetoric shows that it considers the plight of the Palestinians analogous to the struggle of India against the British Empire.

THE CASE OF MOHAMMED AFROZE puts all claims that Western opposition to reasonable goals of Muslims caused September 11, the London bombings, or any of al Qaeda’s other attacks going back into the early 1990s. The goal all along has been for Osama bin Laden and his Islamofascist terrorists to seize control of the region that produces the world’s energy in order to bring the infidels under their heel—and to be sure we stay there, regardless of our previous sympathies.

Edward Morrissey is a contributing writer to The Daily Standard and a contributor to the blog Captain’s Quarters.

==============================

On condemning terrorism (townhall.com, 050812)

Jeff Jacoby

When Muslim extremists murder innocents in cold blood, there is often a politically-correct reluctance to call the killers terrorists, or to denounce them unequivocally. But there was no such reluctance last week when an Israeli Jew, Eden Natan Zada, opened fire inside the bus he was riding through the Arab town of Shfaram in northern Israel. Zada, 19, was active in the outlawed extremist Kach movement, and had deserted his army unit to protest Israel’s withdrawal from the Gaza Strip. His rampage left four Arabs dead — Michel Bahus, 56; Nader Hayak, 55; Hazar Turki, 23, and her sister Dina, 21 — and another 12 wounded.

Zada was immediately labeled a terrorist and widely condemned. “A reprehensible act by a bloodthirsty Jewish terrorist,” one Middle Eastern leader called the massacre. Another said he was “deeply shocked and distressed by the murder of innocent people.” From a senior cleric came a statement expressing “disgust and severe condemnation at the despicable act . . . . a murder that is impossible to forgive.”

Israel and its supporters complain with reason that Arab terrorism against Jews is too often shrugged off or excused by Arab and Muslim leaders, or that a murderous attack will be condemned in English for international consumption, while the government-run local media extols the killers in Arabic. But when the terrorists themselves are Jews — admittedly a rare event — do Israel’s defenders live up to the standard they expect of others? How many of the statements quoted above, for example, would leading Israelis have been willing to make?

All of them.

It was Prime Minister Ariel Sharon who described Zada as a “bloodthirsty Jewish terrorist” and Shimon Peres, the vice prime minister, who referred to the attack as “the murder of innocent people.” The cleric who pronounced Zada’s “despicable act . . . impossible to forgive” was Rabbi Shlomo Amar, the Sephardic chief rabbi of Israel. And headlines in all the country’s major newspapers bluntly labeled Zada a terrorist.

Equally harsh was the judgment of the Yesha Council, the organization of Jewish settlements in Gaza and the West Bank. Though passionately opposed to the Gaza evacuation, it denounced Zada as “a terrorist, a lunatic, and immoral.” The chairman of the council added: “Murder is murder is murder, and there can be no other response but to denounce it completely and express revulsion.” Especially noteworthy were the words of Rabbi Menachem Froman of the West Bank settlement of Tekoa, who spoke at the funeral of two of the Arab victims. “We the Jewish people in the land of Israel share in the pain and suffering” of the mourners, he declared. “All people who believe in God . . . express their outrage at such an act.”

Indeed, so horrified were Israelis by Zada’s bloody crime that, as the newspaper Ha’aretz reported on Sunday, “No cemetery will accept Jewish terrorist’s body.” (Zada was lynched by Shfaram residents in the wake of his attack.) The defense minister banned an interment in any military cemetery, saying Zada was “not worthy of being buried next to fallen soldiers.” Neither his hometown of Rishon Letzion nor Tapuah, the settlement to which he had recently moved, wanted his grave to be within their borders.

The denunciations weren’t limited to Israel. Among American Jews, too, the repudiation of the Israeli terrorist was swift and unsparing.

The Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations issued a statement almost as soon as the news broke: “We unequivocally condemn today’s attack. . . . Such acts must be denounced by all responsible leaders.”

The American Jewish Committee “condemned in the harshest language” the slaughter in Shfaram, while the Zionist Organization of America called it “a terrorist act which we condemn unreservedly.” The Anti-Defamation League said it was “horrified” by Zada’s “unspeakable act,” and the Simon Wiesenthal Center pronounced it “nothing less than a shameful act of terror that should be universally condemned.”

Speaking for more than 900 Reform Jewish congregations nationwide, Rabbi David Sapirstein of the Religious Action Center in Washington deplored the massacre, calling it “a betrayal of the dream of Israel as a pluralistic nation and an attack” on its fundamental values. In Boston, the Rabbinical Assembly of Conservative Judaism assailed the killings as “a desecration of God’s Name” and prayed that “never again will a Jew so wantonly spill blood.”

The reaction of the Orthodox leadership was equally fervent. Agudath Israel of America said it was “tragic” that any Jew could adopt “the methods and madness of the enemies of the Jews.” The Orthodox Union declared: “Acts of violence in the name of Zionism and/or Judaism must be eradicated from the midst of the Jewish people.”

All of these statements — and this is far from a complete listing — were made within a day or two of the atrocity in Shfaram. Without having to be prompted, without making excuses, Jewish communities instinctively reacted to Zada’s monstrous deed with disgust and outrage, all the more angrily because the perpetrator was a fellow Jew. When that is the way *every* community responds to terrorism, terrorism will come to an end.

==============================

Hamas: Armed struggle is sole strategy (Jerusalem Post, 050817)

Hamas leader Khaled Mashaal declared on Wednesday that the Israeli withdrawal from the Gaza Strip and northern West Bank marked the beginning of the end of the Zionist dream in Palestine.

Mashaal was speaking to reporters in Beirut and his remarks were broadcast live by a number of major Arab TV satellite stations.

Dubbing the pullout a “defeat in the face of Palestinian resistance and a significant step with historic dimensions,” Mashaal said that as far as Hamas was concerned, the disengagement marked the beginning of the death of the Zionist dream.

“The resistance and the steadfastness of or people forced the Zionists to withdraw,” he boasted. “The resistance is capable of ending the Israeli occupation and achieving all our rights. The armed struggle is the only strategy that Hamas possesses.”

Mashaal reiterated his movement’s refusal to lay down its weapons, saying Hamas’s duty was to defend the Palestinians and help them restore their rights. “As long as Palestinian lands remain under occupation, Hamas won’t law down its weapons,” he stressed.

He said, however, that Hamas was not interested in a confrontation with the Palestinian Authority. “Hamas is not competing with the Palestinian Authority, but we reject attempts to monopolize power,” he explained.

Mahmoud Zahar, Hamas’s overall leader in the Gaza Strip, said in an interview published on Wednesday that his movement will move its activities to the West Bank after the disengagement.

“Now, after the victory in the Gaza Strip, we will transfer the struggle first to the West Bank and later to Jerusalem,” Zahar told the London-based pan-Arab daily Asharq Al-Awsat. “We will continue the struggle until we liberate all our lands. This is an important day for the Palestinians and proof that the armed struggle has born fruit.”

Asked about Hamas’s future plans, Zahar said: “Neither the liberation of the Gaza Strip, nor the liberation of the West Bank or even Jerusalem will suffice us. Hamas will pursue the armed struggle until the liberation of all our lands. We don’t recognize the state of Israel or its right to hold onto one inch of Palestine. Palestine is an Islamic land belonging to all the Muslims.”

Zahar said the disengagement would boost morale in the Arab and Muslim world and positively influence the [anti-US] campaign in Afghanistan and Iraq. “We are part of a large global movement called the International Islamic Movement,” he explained.

Ismail Haniyeh, another Hamas official in the Gaza Strip, expressed his fear that Israel would target Hamas after the disengagement. He also warned the PA against cracking down on Hamas supporters as it did in 1996.

Meanwhile, the Popular Resistance Committees, an alliance of various Palestinian militias operating in the Gaza Strip, said it was planning to transfer the technology of rocket manufacturing to the West Bank after the disengagement.

Muhammed Abdel Al, one of the leaders of the committees, said his group would move the battle against Israel to the West Bank. “We will make every effort to transfer all forms of resistance [to the West Bank] because [Prime Minister Ariel] Sharon intends to move his defeated soldiers to the West Bank,” he told reporters.

Abdel Al, who is better known by his nickname Abu Abeer, said his group had already begun transferring the technology of rockets and other military expertise to the West Bank. “We will transfer two-thirds of our budget to the West Bank,” he said. “Our rockets have a range of 18 kilometers. This means that is we fire them from Kalkilya, they will hit the occupied city of

Tal al-Rabi [Tel-Aviv].”

==============================

Strategic thinking (townhall.com, 050901)

Clifford D. May

If American forces were not in Iraq, they’d have to be sent there.

At least that would be the case if Americans were serious about waging a war against militant Islamism. The fact is that al-Qaeda in Iraq is the most active and efficiently lethal branch of that transnational movement. Month after bloody month, its commander, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, deploys suicide bombers, takes hostages and cuts off heads.

It does not appear that Osama bin Laden is nearly so industrious.

Zarqawi is evil but not foolish. If his aim were merely to get Americans to leave Iraq there is a simple means to that end: Stop fighting. Were he and his followers to lie low for, say, six months, American military commanders would probably conclude – with relief — that their primary mission had been accomplished.

Under pressure from Republican members of Congress looking toward the 2006 elections, the White House would substantially reduce troop levels. It would be postulated that, with al-Qaeda no longer in the equation, Iraqi units should be able to handle a few thousand Baathist insurgents.

Once Americans were out the door, Zarqawi could re-start his offensive, weakening the government through resumed bombings and assassinations and then staging a coup.

Zarqawi doesn’t do that, one must suppose, because his goal is not to get Americans out of Iraq but to be seen on television screens around the world fighting Americans; and, he believes, eventually to claim credit for forcing Americans to turn tail and run. That would establish his legend. That would prove that bin Laden was right along: America is like the World Trade Towers – it looks big and strong but once hit, it quickly collapses.

That the U.S. cannot afford to lose to al-Qaeda in Iraq should be obvious. That the U.S. is fighting al-Qaeda in Iraq in the best possible way is debatable. Andrew F. Krepinevich, Jr., a retired army lieutenant colonel and the author of a well-regarded book on Vietnam, argues in the September/October issue of Foreign Affairs that while the Bush administration has the right goals, it lacks a coherent strategy to reach them. “The United States and its coalition partners have never settled on a strategy for defeating the insurgency,” he insists.

The administration’s critics, he adds, also have done no strategic thinking. They have merely proposed “an accelerated timetable for withdrawal” with vague hopes about what might happen after.

Krepinevich makes the case for an “oil-spot strategy.” He would have American and Iraqi military forces provide intensive security to key areas, then gradually expand control over additional sections of the country — “hence the image of an expanding oil spot.”

Reconstruction and development would be confined to the secured areas for safety’s sake, because resources are limited, and to provide further incentives for Iraqi populations to assist with their defense. U.S. commanders who show an aptitude for this sort of unconventional warfare – not the kind of war Pentagon planners prepared for in recent decades – would be promoted and retained in the field rather than rotated in and out.

Other strategies can be devised and should be considered. For example, a strong argument can be made for taking the war, sooner rather than later, to regimes such as those in Syria and Iran that are providing material support to forces targeting Americans.

A little over two years ago, when the US went into Iraq, the belief was wide-spread that America’s smart bombs and sophisticated technology would “shock and awe” the enemy, destroying his will to fight. Not for the first, this enemy was underestimated. The pyrotechnics did not faze him.

Instead, he has found a way to use vivid televised images of bloodshed to “shock and awe” us. An increasing number of Americans at home – though few on the battlefield — have lost their will to fight and now argue that the U.S. should accept defeat. To some – Cindy Sheehan and her friends, for example – defeat is what the United States deserves.

In other words, America’s primary enemy has a serious strategy. The job of the White House and the Pentagon is to be absolutely certain that America has a strategy that is better.

==============================

Bush Says 10 Plots by Al Qaeda Were Foiled: Speech Aims to Rally U.S. Support for War (Washington Post, 051007)

The United States and its allies have thwarted at least 10 serious al Qaeda terrorist plots since Sept. 11, 2001, including never-before-disclosed plans to use hijacked commercial airliners to attack the East and West coasts in 2002 and 2003, President Bush and his aides said yesterday.

The reported plots aimed to strike a wide variety of targets, including the Library Tower in Los Angeles, ships in international waters and a tourist site overseas, the White House said last night. Three of the 10 were directed at U.S. soil, officials said. The government, they added, also stopped five al Qaeda efforts to case possible targets or infiltrate operatives into the country.

Most of the plots were previously reported in some form; a few were revealed yesterday. The White House had never before placed a number or compiled a public list of the foiled attempts to follow up the Sept. 11 attacks, but it offered scant information beyond the location and general date of each reported plot — making it difficult to assess last night how serious or advanced they were or what role the government played in preventing them.

Bush cited the disrupted plans in a speech yesterday intended to shore up sagging public support for the war in Iraq and address more extensively than ever before the philosophical framework undergirding Islamic extremism. The radical movement, he said, goes beyond “isolated acts of madness,” animated by a coherent philosophy akin to Soviet Communism and Nazi fascism with the goal to “establish a radical Islamic empire that spans from Spain to Indonesia.”

“While the killers choose their victims indiscriminately, their attacks serve a clear and focused ideology, a set of beliefs and goals that are evil but not insane,” the president said. The disruption of some plots, he said, means that “the enemy is wounded but the enemy is still capable of global operations.”

Bush singled out Syria and Iran for condemnation, calling them “allies of convenience” of Islamic radicals “with a long history of collaboration with terrorists” and saying they “deserve no patience from the victims of terror.” He rebuffed calls to withdraw from Iraq, dismissing the “dangerous illusion” that pulling out would make the United States safer. And he rejected the argument that the Iraq war has only fostered terrorism, a position taken even by some in government.

The 40-minute address to the National Endowment for Democracy outlined no new strategy for the nation’s four-year-old battle with al Qaeda but inserted Bush directly into the underlying war of ideas, as many security specialists have been urging for some time. In the past few years he has avoided personalizing the conflict for fear of building up terrorist leaders, but yesterday he talked repeatedly and in unusually personal terms about Osama bin Laden and Abu Musab Zarqawi, the leader of the insurgency in Iraq.

Bin Laden, Bush said, deludes his followers into becoming suicide bombers. “He assures them that . . . this is the road to paradise — though he never offers to go along for the ride,” Bush said.

The president likewise quoted Zarqawi calling Americans “the most cowardly of God’s creatures” and offered a direct rebuttal. “Let’s be clear,” he said. “It is cowardice that seeks to kill children and the elderly with car bombs and cuts the throat of a bound captive and targets worshipers leaving a mosque.”

In the speech, Bush cited the numbers of disrupted plots and casings without giving details, and at first White House spokesmen were unable to document them. After scrambling all day and debating how much could be disclosed in response to media inquiries, the White House produced a list last night.

The three plots targeting U.S. territory included the well-known case of Jose Padilla, who was arrested after he allegedly explored a possible radiological “dirty bomb” attack, and two plans to use hijacked planes to attack the West Coast in mid-2002 and the East Coast in mid-2003. The White House document gave no further details about the timing or targets of the latter two.

Two sources familiar with intelligence information said the West Coast plot targeted the tallest building in Los Angeles, since renamed the US Bank Tower, and involved Malaysian militants and Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks, who was captured in 2003. Previous reports on Mohammed’s interrogations in custody said that before Sept. 11 he mapped out an attack on the tower that was later aborted.

The seven foreign plots said to be disrupted by the United States and its partners included plans to strike London’s Heathrow Airport using hijacked planes, to hit ships in the Persian Gulf region and the Straits of Hormuz, to attack Westerners in Karachi, Pakistan, and to set off multi-target explosions in Britain.

The five “casings and infiltrations” in the United States involve better-known cases, such as the capture of Iyman Faris, who was accused of exploring the destruction of the Brooklyn Bridge and ultimately pleaded guilty to providing material support to al Qaeda. Another involved a man sent to scout gas stations in the United States, an apparent reference to Majid Khan, who was reportedly assigned by Mohammed to explore simultaneous bombings of gas stations.

Many of the thwarted attacks on the White House list seem tied to Mohammed. “Disruption of these plots in particular demonstrates how even a single arrest involving a lone individual can have a seismic effect on a terrorist group’s capabilities,” said Bruce Hoffman, a Rand Corp. terrorism analyst.

In his speech, originally scheduled to mark the four-year anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks but postponed after Hurricane Katrina, Bush had many terms for his enemy, calling it variously “Islamic radicalism,” “militant Jihadism” and even “Islamofascism.” He did not declare an end to his “global war on terror,” a phrase that some advisers had pushed to abandon in favor of “strategy against violent extremism.”

But he did offer what Hoffman called a “far more nuanced” portrait of his enemies, essentially adopting the view of experts that al Qaeda has morphed into a global enemy — as Bush said, “more like a loose network with many branches than an army under a single command,” with operatives united by ideology but not “centrally directed.”

Bush, however, rejected the idea that “extremism” had been “strengthened” by the ongoing U.S. war in Iraq, taking strong issue with analysts who believe that Iraq has become a “melting pot for jihadists from around the world, a training group and an indoctrination center” for a new generation of terrorists, as the State Department’s annual report on terrorism put it this year.

“To say Iraq has not contributed to the rise of global Sunni extremism movement is delusional,” said Roger W. Cressey, a former White House counterterrorism adviser under Bush and President Bill Clinton. “We should have an honest discussion about what these unintended consequences of the Iraq war are and what do we do to counter them.”

Some experts have been pushing for Bush to characterize the enemy as an ideology with specific political objectives, such as re-creating an Islamic caliphate to unite all Muslim countries. They argue that in the past Bush handed foes in the Middle East an easy weapon by not making such a distinction, leaving him open to the charge that the United States is waging war on Islam.

“The explanation of who we’re facing should have been done in the first year after the 9/11 attacks,” said Walid Phares, a scholar at the conservative Foundation for the Defense of Democracies. Bush has finally “moved from a war on terror to a war with an evil ideology.”

==============================

Bali’s terror barometer (Washington Times, 051007)

On Oct. 12, 2002, terror bombers murdered 202 people on the Indonesian island of Bali. The terrorists belonged to Jemaah Islamiya (JI), al Qaeda’s nom de guerre in Southeast Asia. Eighty-eight Australians died in that attack.

Two months later, in Singapore, I interviewed a U.S. law enforcement official who had been advising Southeast Asian nations on security operations and investigation techniques.

“Bali’s a Hindu island with Australian tourists,” the officer told me. “Australia is an active U.S. ally [in the War on Terror]. That blast was an economic shot at Indonesia. New York Times Sunday travel section readers know where Bali is.”

He also added: “The religious dimension [Hindu Bali in Muslim Indonesia] is there, and the tourists. But JI wants to shake up Indonesia, test its response.”

He meant, strategically, the October 2002 attack would test Indonesia and other Southeast Asian nations’ ability to respond with judicial and governmental action, as well as police security.

This Oct. 1, suicide terrorists struck Bali, leaving 26 dead. No one missed the attack’s economic dimension — Bali’s tourist industry had begun recovering from the 2002 massacre.

Stopping a self-immolating fanatic as he walks from the beach into a restaurant is a tough challenge, particularly on a resort island with a laissez-faire ambience. Suicide bombers still penetrate Israel, which arguably has the planet’s best counterterror police policy.

Nevertheless, the attack embarrassed Indonesian officials who claim security on Bali has improved since 2002. After the attack, hotels emptied, as tourists returned home.

However, based on the public outrage in Indonesia, in Southeast Asia and internationally, JI’s latest murder binge is anything but a victory for jihadist terror. These reactions suggest that, since 2002, “something has changed” — and not in al Qaeda’s strategic favor.

For one thing, the death toll is far smaller. The Indonesian government has also tried to co-opt JI. Jakarta convicted JI’s “spiritual leader,” Abu Bakar Bashir, for conspiracy in the 2002 bombings, but has since treated him with deference. This has led to a diplomatic contretemps with Australia. However, the jailed Bashir said he disagreed with the latest attack, since it “sacrificed innocent people.”

But something larger seems at work. One indication is the overall tone of news coverage and public reaction — call it anger with a shrug. While terrorist apologist and British Member of Parliament George Galloway may yet sally forth with “root causes” rhetoric and anti-American agitprop, at the moment, the latest Bali blast has not produced demands that the world “understand what the terrorists want.” Everyone knows the jihadists want to sow fear.

Fear, however, doesn’t seem to sell as easily as it did.

In retrospect, the Madrid strike in March 2004 may prove the high point of terror’s offensive. Spain left the Iraq coalition. The jihadists since have had many headlines but no victories.

London’s bulldog response to this July’s attacks was a distinct rejection of fear, but it is one of many. Arguably, Afghanistan began the trend with its successful October 2004 presidential election, in the face of al Qaeda’s vow to stop it. Arab media have noticed the Iraqi people’s grit and guts. The Iraqis have not buckled despite daily massacres by “al Qaeda in Mesopotamia.” These are massacres in a Muslim land launched by jihadist extremists — a point no one misses.

Al Qaeda also is dogged by an extraordinary “policy failure.” In the wake of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the United States, al Qaeda proclaimed a new “global caliphate.” Jemaah Islamiya’s sole policy goal remains creation of a grand “Islamic state” stretching from southern Thailand through Malaysia and the Philippine and Indonesian archipelagoes.

Three years after Bali, four years after September 11, the jihadists “God-ordained empire” hasn’t materialized.

We might also consider the possibility of “media saturation.” Terrorists don’t simply target Bali and Baghdad, they target the news media. A bomb produces searing, gripping TV footage. But over time, sensational violence becomes, well, less sensational. The latest Bali attack is treated as a heinous echo of 2002, not a harbinger of jihadist revolution. When al Qaeda’s explosions lose media sizzle, al Qaeda will have lost completely.

Austin Bay is a nationally syndicated columnist.

==============================

Why Bali? (Townhall.com, 051006)

by Clifford D. May

The latest suicide-bombings in Bali should make us stop and think: What did the people of Bali do to so anger Militant Islamists?

Balinese troops are not battling Baathist insurgents and al-Qaeda terrorists in Iraq. Bali was not involved in toppling the Taliban in Afghanistan. Bali hasn’t sided with India over disputed Kashmir or with Israel over the disputed West Bank.

Indeed, Bali’s foreign policy can hardly be regarded as objectionable by anyone – because Bali has no foreign policy. The predominately Hindu island is not independent. It is part of Indonesia which happens to be the largest Muslim nation in the world.

Yet Bali has now been struck twice by terrorists, the first time three years ago. There also have been two attacks in the Indonesian capital of Jakarta, one outside the Australian Embassy last year, the other at a hotel in 2003.

What do the Islamists want? The purpose of terrorism is to terrorize – to frighten, to intimidate. The Islamists want relatively liberal democratic Indonesia to knuckle under.

Like the Nazis and Communists, Militant Islamists are totalitarians – they despise democratic societies. The difference is that where Nazis saw democracy as decadent, and Communists viewed democracy as bourgeois, Militant Islamists regard democracy as blasphemous: It awards to citizens powers that belong to God — as interpreted by them, of course.

Islamists also are offended by Indonesia’s traditional tolerance of its religious minorities. In the militants’ view, Hindus, Christians, Jews and other groups living in “Muslim lands” can aspire only to be dhimmis — second-class citizens who are grudgingly endured and whose faiths are aggressively discouraged.

And, of course, Bali hosts Australians, Americans and other infidels who sit on beaches wearing skimpy clothing, drinking alcohol and engaging in additional behaviors of which Islamists disapprove. The Indonesian journalist Sadanand Dhume wrote last week that “Saudi and Gulf petrodollars” have been used in recent years to undermine the country’s “easy-going” Islamic traditions while indoctrinating young Muslim men to react with violence to “the sight of a beer bottle, a church steeple or a woman’s bare head.”

Indonesia is not the only Muslim country the Islamists are targeting. In August, scores of bombs rocked Bangladesh. Only a few people were killed and the international community shrugged. But Bangladeshis got the message loud and clear: “Become more like us, more Muslim – as we define the term — or we will make you suffer. No one can protect you. No one will even try.”

Similarly, and again with little attention from the U.N., the media or just about anyone else, southern Thailand has become the bloodiest killing ground for Muslims after Iraq. Although most Thais are Buddhists, Muslims predominate in three southern provinces. There, bombings, beheadings and drive-by shootings have killed more than 1,000 people, including moderate Muslims and Buddhist monks and teachers.

One conclusion should be obvious: If nations such as Indonesia, Bangladesh and Thailand can not make themselves inoffensive to Militant Islamism there is no way that the United States could perform such a feat, no matter which policies we changed or how much our public diplomacy improved.

Americans received no credit in the eyes of Islamists for their assistance to Muslims rebelling against Soviet domination of Afghanistan, their rescue of Kuwait from Saddam Hussein’s clutches, their intervention on behalf of Muslim communities in Kosovo and Bosnia.

But, as Vice President Cheney pointed out in a speech to Marines in North Carolina this week, the militants did take note when Hezbollah suicide bombers chased American forces out of Lebanon in 1983, and when terrorists caused U.S. forces to flee Somalia ten years later. In these and many other instances, Cheney said, “the terrorists hit America and America did not hit back hard enough.”

The Islamists believe they now have a real chance to drive America out of Iraq, thereby demonstrating that Lebanon and Somalia were not isolated events but the unfolding of a historical pattern of American defeat and retreat under fire.

Combine that with the pressure the Islamists are exerting in such places as Indonesia, Bangladesh and Thailand and you begin to see how a new geo-political reality could take shape.

In time, Islamists believe, they will become the dominant force throughout Southeast Asia, across the Middle East, into Africa and beyond. They intend to create – they would say re-create – an empire, a caliphate, that will challenge the Great Satan, the “Crusaders,” the “unbelievers,” the Zionists, and the Muslim “apostates” as well.

The Islamists are convinced that the stronger they become, the less they will be resisted and the more they will be appeased. Who can say for certain that they are wrong?

==============================

The Light and Dark Sides of the War on Terrorism: What we’re dealing with. (National Review Online, 051019)

Let’s start with al-Reuters’ thoughtful contribution to the well-being of the Western world. One of their star reporters finds a new way to bash the United States: We’re not paying off the crystal-ball operators.

RIO DE JANEIRO, Brazil, Oct 6 (Reuters) — A Brazilian court will consider a psychic’s claim that the U.S. government owes him a $25 million reward for information he says he provided on the hiding place of ousted Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein.

Brazil’s second-highest court, the Superior Court of Justice, decided on Thursday the Brazilian justice system could rule on the matter and told a court in the psychic’s home state of Minas Gerais to judge the case. The lower court had earlier told Jucelino Nobrega da Luz it could not take up his claim and it would have to be judged in the United States, but the higher tribunal ruled otherwise.

“The Minas Gerais court will work with the claim,” said a spokesman for the Superior Court of Justice. “Jucelino da Luz alleges that the U.S. armed forces only found Saddam based on his letters that provided his exact location, the very hole where he was hiding in Iraq. So he filed a court case to claim the reward.”

The U.S. government offered the award for Saddam in July 2003 after the U.S.-led forces occupied the country. He was captured in December of the same year. The court said Da Luz sent letters to the U.S. government from September 2001, describing Saddam’s future hiding place — a tiny cellar at a farmhouse near Tikrit. He never received a reply.

“His lawyers attest that the author has an uncommon gift of having visions of things that will come to pass. ... Via dreams, he sees situations, facts that will happen in the future,” a court statement said.

In case the court upholds the claim, it will be sent via diplomatic channels to the U.S. State Department.

Anybody wanna bet what the Minas Gerais court is going to rule? Could any self-respecting Brazilian court resist this glorious opportunity to stick its fingers in the teary eyes of the USG? I don’t think so.

The real question is how Condi will respond...maybe she’ll ask Harriett for a legal opinion...

Then, inevitably, to Iran, that happy country where people celebrate all the time. From the indispensable Dr. Zin’s website, aptly named www.regimechangeiran.com, comes this summary of recent festivals:

Iran Press News reported on the protest and conflict at Najafabad University. A first hand account.

Iran Press News reported that students from the Abbasspour University for Water and Power Industry protested against the regime’s guards in their university.

Iran Press News reported that an angry mob, protesting the violent and oppressive actions of the disciplinary forces of the regime, attacked governmental bureaus in the Province of Qeshm.

SMCCDI reported that drivers of many Iranian Collective Buses refused to validate passenger’s tickets, today, in order to protest against their poor conditions.

SMCCDI reported that dozens of Iranian women gathered at the “Enghelab” square in order to protest peacefully against the social and poor economic conditions in Iran.

SMCCDI reported that hundreds of students of Beheshti University of Tehran protested, yesterday night, against the repressive measures and poor conditions.

Iran Press News added that the Beheshti University students then set their dorm on fire. ISNA published photos.

SMCCDI reported that another young man was killed by the Islamic regime’s security forces in the Greater Tehran area, Friday.

SMCCDI reported that a riot took place, on Saturday, in the Island of Gheshm located in the Persian Gulf.

Agence France Presse reported that witnesses claim, Iranian police shot and killed a motorist after he failed to stop when spotted eating during holy month of Ramadan. Winston, The Spirit of Man reported on the IRGC units nightly live fire exercises in the mountains of eastern Tehran.

So the country is in turmoil. And what is the regime doing about it? The answer comes from the folks at Roozonline.com. A bit of background is necessary in order to get the full significance of the news. According to the Shiite faith, the 12th imam (the authoritative successors to the Prophet Mohammed) disappeared from this earth, and at the end of mortal time he will reappear, to usher in the Kingdom of Allah. The Iranian Shiites believe that the imam is hiding at the bottom of a well in Ifahan, known as the Jamkaran well, around which a magnificent mosque has been constructed. Okay? Now you can understand the story:

In a formal cabinet meeting chaired by Iran’s new president’s first deputy, the ministers printed and ratified an agreement with the Shiites’ 12th Imam. In his opening remarks, Parviz Davoudi, Ahmadinejad’ first deputy suggested that the cabinet ministers should sign an agreement with 12th Imam, the same way they signed a pact with the new president. The ministers collectively agreed and so there is now an agreement between the two! The ministers then questioned how the 12th hidden Imam will sign the agreement!

The solution was resolved when the government’s cabinet ministers agreed to ask Saffar Harandi, Minister of Culture and Islamic Guidance how president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad planned to take the letter to the holy Imam. Next Thursday night, Saffar Harandi dropped the signed agreement to the Jamkaran well, a spot that Moslem religious groups believe is where the Shiite 12th Imam is hidden. This well is also the resting place for tons of letters and requests from Muslim pilgrims.

A short while after the cabinet ministers’ collective agreement, the government spent 70 billion rials to feed the needy pilgrims of Jamkaran Mosque. At the Transportation Minister’s suggestion, this money would be spent to reconstruct the roads leading to Jamkaran and to allocate large amount of money for other similar projects. There was strong criticism on this from all fronts and even Ahmadinejad seemed very offended. He said that this government was not in power to build roads and that it should be thankful to 12th Imam’s blessing for being in power.

We are talking about some of the highest-ranking officials in the Islamic republic. So far as I know, this is not political satire, it’s reportage. And the point is obvious, isn’t it? We are not dealing with people like us (although a couple of the more hyper columnists at, say, the New York Times might well suspect that there are lots of evangelicals who secretly aspire to this sort of behavior). The Iranian people are suffering enormously at the hands of this regime, whose president “was not in power to build roads” and owes its legitimacy to a vanished religious figure at the bottom of a well in one of the most beautiful cities in the world.

And for those who thought that Iranian “elections” somehow gave a form of democratic legitimacy to the president and his cabinet, read it again. It’s the 12th imam, not the people of Iran, who bestows power.

There are two groups of people who ought to be made to read this account several times: those European pseudo-diplomats who think that you can reach a rational modus vivendi with the mullahs; and the innumerable failed diplomats and elected officials (I am thinking, as I so often do, of Senator Richard Lugar and his buddies on the Foreign Relations Committee, who do not deign to take testimony from critics of the Iranian regime) in this country who keep on calling for normalization with Iran.

We’re talking about real fanatics here. Fun reading, yes, but they kill a lot.

— Michael Ledeen, an NRO contributing editor, is most recently the author of The War Against the Terror Masters. He is resident scholar in the Freedom Chair at the American Enterprise Institute.

==============================

Democracy as a weapon (Washington Times, 051020)

Over the weekend, Iraqis struck back with a crucial blow to the terrorist insurgents as voters went to the polls for the second time this year and voted in support of a constitution. The election comes on the heels of an important announcement. Last week, U.S. intelligence officials released the 6,300-word al Qaeda playbook for what they hope is the gradual defeat of coalition forces and an emerging democracy in Iraq.

Just four days prior to the referendum vote, U.S. intelligence officials released a letter from Ayman al-Zawahri, al Qaeda’s No. 2 operative, to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a leader of the insurgency in Iraq. In the letter, al-Zawahri predicted that American forces “will exit soon” and he acknowledges that the war in Iraq will be won “in the battlefield of the media.” Al-Zawahri’s belief that the insurgency must improve its efforts in engaging in geo-political warfare proves that the battle for the hearts and minds of Iraqi’s still goes on. It should come as no surprise that al Qaeda members in Iraq are now attempting to denounce the letter as a fake.

The letter proves that the media war is a key aspect to their overall effort to thwart democracy in the Middle East. The 6,300-word document outlined the terrorist political campaign to defeat coalition troops in Iraq, not by traditional military victory, but by carefully plotting an offensive on American public opinion.

Their short-term objective is clear: The insurgency must succeed in defeating an emerging democratic Iraq by eliminating its current military protectors. The insurgents’ plan is simple: Drag the fight on by continuing to murder innocent Americans and Iraqis until American public opinion has waned.

More importantly, al-Zawahri’s letter outlines long-term goals for the terrorist network in Iraq. These goals include: 1) the expulsion of U.S. forces, 2) the establishment of an Islamic authority in Iraq, 3) expanding the fight to other secular countries in the Middle East, 4) taking the fight to Israel.

The goals of the al Qaeda network constitute the means to a desired ending that the United States simply cannot allow.

Withdrawal from Iraq or setting a timetable for retreat would give way to the terrorists’ goal of transforming Iraq into a fascist regime based on religious fanaticism.

If al-Zawahri’s letter proves one thing, it proves that a time-table or so-called exit strategy is irresponsible at best and deadly at worst. Understanding al Qaeda’s goals leads us to the certain fact that Muslim extremists have planned to export their terrorist ideology long before the invasion of Iraq. It is important to remember that coalition soldiers were not in Iraq on September 11; in fact, we have been a longtime target of their hate.

The offensive in Iraq is a response to the growing disease of Islamic extremism, not a symptom. The ultimate solution, however, cannot be attained with soldiers and guns; it can only be won through the democratic process, which is a vehicle for freedom and hope.

The will of a people seeking freedom from fear cannot be deterred by violent attacks; it can only be defeated with oppression, violence and hatred, which al Qaeda can adequately supply. The road to democracy is one that requires time and patience. Yes, the costs have been high, and with every life lost they get higher. However, the rewards of a free Iraq will be much greater and will save even more lives in the end.

The constitution vote signifies a huge victory in the “media battlefield” in the war for Iraqi freedom. As an Iraqi official said recently, “they [the terrorists] are frightened by democracy in Iraq.” Now, more than ever we must remain steadfast as Iraqis continue to move toward an independent democratic society.

Surely, democracy is the biggest and most effective weapon in America’s arsenal. The war on terror cannot be won without it.

Rep. K. Michael Conaway, Texas Republican, is a member of the House Armed Services Committee.

==============================

More Danish Terror Arrests (Foxnews, 051029)

COPENHAGEN, Denmark — Two more men suspected of belonging to a terrorist network planning a homicide attack in Europe were arrested in Denmark, police said Saturday.

The two men, who were not identified, are suspected of assisting four young Muslims arrested in Copenhagen Thursday on charges they were planning an “imminent” terror attack.

The two suspects, described only as young men, were to face a preliminary court hearing later Saturday, police officer Ole Schultz said.

“They will then be charged with assisting terror attempts,” Schultz said without elaborating.

The arrests were made Friday.

Danish police have said the four men arrested on Thursday are linked to the arrests of a Turkish, Swedish and Bosnian national in Sarajevo on Oct. 19-20 on suspicion of preparing a terrorist attack.

Police said they found explosives, firearms and other military equipment in connection with those arrests. The Bosnian national has since been released.

No weapons or explosives have been found in connection with the Danish arrests, police said.

Danish police are working with Bosnian investigators on the case but said it is still unclear where the alleged terror attack was intended to take place.

According to Sarajevo’s Dnevni Avaz daily newspaper, one of the three suspects arrested in Bosnia was an 18-year-old preparing a suicide attack on the Sarajevo embassy of a European Union country. Police have not confirmed the report.

Terrorists have not hit Denmark in 20 years, but the London bombings in July stirred fears that the Scandinavian country could be targeted for its participation in the U.S.-led coalition in Iraq, where Denmark has about 500 troops.

In 1985, a bomb detonated outside the offices of North West Orient airlines in Copenhagen, killing one person and wounding 16. Three Palestinians living in Sweden were convicted of planting the bombs and sentenced to life in prison in 1989.

==============================

Australian police foil ‘catastrophic’ attack and seize 17 (Times Online, 051109)

ANTI-TERRORISM laws rushed through the Australian Parliament last week have prevented a “catastrophic” attack by Islamic extremists, the Australian authorities claimed yesterday.

The legislation, approved despite opposition from civil liberties groups, enabled the police to seize 17 suspects in raids by 500 officers on 24 homes in Sydney and Melbourne yesterday.

One man, shot in the neck after allegedly opening fire on the police, was later identified as a former actor on the television soap Home and Away. Omar Baladjam, 28, played the part of a graffiti artist in the programme. On another occasion he appeared in the ABC crime drama Wildside, portraying a criminal who kills two policemen.

Police said that chemicals that could have been used in bombs were found in some of the houses raided. Ken Moroney, the New South Wales police commissioner, said: “I’m satisfied that we have disrupted what I would regard as the final stages of a terrorist attack or the launch of a terrorist attack.”

The chemicals were similar to those used in the London Underground attacks of July 7. The police would not identify the likely targets, but the suspects alluded to the transport system and the stock exchange in conversations monitored during months of surveillance.

Last night the Australian Government trumpeted the arrest of 16 Muslims in night time raids on homes in Sydney and Melbourne as vindication for its decision to introduce an urgent amendment to its controversial anti-terrorism Bill.

The key amendment to the Bill allowed the police to arrest the suspects on charges of intent to commit a terrorist attack, even if they could not specify the target. Carl Scully, the New South Wales Police Minister, said that that change had allowed his officers to prevent a “catastrophic act of terrorism”.

John Howard, the Prime Minister, who was accused of exaggerating the terrorist threat to ensure the Bill’s passage last week, claimed vindication. He said: “We were advised that the change would strengthen the capacity of the authorities to respond to the situation that had been identified, and it is the view of two police commissioners and the Victoria Premier that that is precisely what happened.”

Steve Bracks, the Victoria Premier, said the police had disrupted “probably the most serious preparation for a terrorist attack that we have seen in Australia”. Peter Costello, the Treasurer and Liberal Party deputy leader, said the raids proved that “the threat of terrorism is real, that we cannot be complacent about it . . . It is no consolation to wait until after an event and then try to pick up the suspects.”

The Bill is one of the most draconian pieces of legislation to have gone before parliament. It allows the detention of people for up to 14 days without charge and seven-year prison sentences for those found guilty of sedition.

The suspects detained in the raids were mainly Australian Muslims of Lebanese extraction. Their alleged leader was an outspoken cleric named Abdul Nacer Benbrika, also known as Abu Bakr, who was among those arrested in Melbourne. He came to prominence in August when he voiced his support for Osama bin Laden. Police and intelligence officers are believed to have identified him as a security risk earlier , but lacked the power to arrest him.

The suspects appeared before courts in Sydney and Melbourne yesterday on charges that included conspiring to plan a bomb attack and belonging to a banned organisation.

Melbourne magistrates were told that those arrested had formed a terrorist group designed to kill innocent men and women. The court was told that the group had been recorded discussing bombmaking and martyrdom. Several had allegedly undergone military-style training.

Police and security services refused to give details of the surveillance methods employed against those arrested, but sources indicated that telephones had been tapped and conversations monitored over many months.

Outside the Central Local Court in Sydney, Adam Houda, for the defence, said that the police had no evidence that a terrorist attack was being planned. “These matters are scandalous, political prosecutions that shame this nation,” he said. Families caught up in the raids accused the police of failing to respect their religious traditions by not allowing female members of households time to dress properly.

Fighting erupted outside the Melbourne court, where supporters of the accused men clashed with television cameramen and threw chairs at reporters.

The police said that more arrests could be expected as the anti-terrorism operation crackdown continued.

==============================

Zarqawi’s Big Mistake: The Jordan attacks may hurt. (National Review Online, 051114)

You know that a terrorist attack has backfired when the bad guys start blaming it on us. Rumors are spreading on the insurgent websites and chatrooms that last week’s hotel bombings in Amman, Jordan, were part of a CIA plot, a Mossad intrigue, or a take-your-pick conspiracy. Since al Qaeda has already admitted the attack was theirs, this line will have a hard time playing, but it shows that at some level the terrorist sympathizers know that this was a bad move.

As angry Jordanians poured into the streets to denounce hometown zero Zarqawi, he rushed out a second statement seeking to justify the attacks. He explained that these hotels had been under observation for some time, and that they “had become favorite spots for intelligence activities, especially for the Americans, the Israelis, and some West European countries, where the hidden battle is fought in the so-called war against terrorism.” In other words, they were not seeking to kill civilians, but aiming at a legitimate military target. I doubt this argument will sway the masses, since many of the victims were attending a wedding at the time. In p.r. terms it is probably the worst event a terrorist can bomb. Only the hard-core psychopaths will get a warm feeling from blowing up someone’s nuptials.

Attacks like this are not only criminal, they are foolhardy. They rarely benefit the terrorists, and often harm their cause. Recent history makes the case. The 9/11 attacks unified and motivated our country to unleash incalculable harm on al Qaeda. The 2002 Bali bombing had the principle strategic effect of making the Australians their implacable foes. The 2005 London bombings rallied British public opinion against the continuing threat. The 3/11 bombings in Madrid may have helped influence the Spanish elections to bring in a government with a less cooperative Iraq policy, but in other areas of the War on Terrorism Spanish policies have if anything gotten tougher. In Jordan, a researcher found that since the bombing, nine of ten people he surveyed who had previously held a favorable view of al Qaeda had changed their minds. This is no way to run a revolution.

King Abdullah has rightfully taken umbrage at statements, particularly from myopic Western pundits, that Jordan was attacked primarily because of its relationship with the United States. Al Qaeda has plenty of reasons to attack Jordan that have nothing to do with the U.S. or the war in Iraq. Those rushing to link everything to Iraq (and, by implication, U.S. policies) should remember that Zarqawi was jailed in Jordan from 1993-1999, and there is no love lost between him and the Jordanian government. Furthermore, Jordan sentenced him to death in absentia for complicity in the murder of American diplomat Laurence Foley in Amman in 2002. Zarqawi would be killing people whether Coalition forces were in Iraq or not. It’s his job, and he likes it.

Noteworthy in Zarqawi’s second announcement was his list of intelligence services working with the U.S., which includes those from Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and the Palestinian Authority. The last is significant because lately al Qaeda has been seeking to raise its profile in the Palestinian community. Al Qaeda has never had a high opinion of the Fatah faction (Yasser Arafat’s security forces opened fire on Palestinian demonstrators carrying pictures of bin Laden in October 2001) and as the government of the Palestinian Authority seeks to move towards a measure of respectability, al Qaeda is moving in to take over the market in violent resistance. They announced the formation of a franchise in Gaza and won praise from a local imam. Members of Hamas, frustrated at their organization’s drift away from violence, are already starting to defect to the more motivated al Qaeda. This is a development well worth watching.

Another lesson learned for the terrorists is that multiple suicide attacks do not always go off as planned, and when they fail they leave behind living bombers who make excellent intelligence sources. For example: In the May 2003 Casablanca bombings (which Zarqawi was allegedly involved in as well), one of the cell leaders chose at the last minute not to detonate his bomb and collect a trip to paradise. Instead, he was arrested and helped bring down what was left of the organization in Morocco.

So too with the Amman bombing; 35-year-old Sajida Mubarak Atrous al Rishawi suffered a wardrobe malfunction and now has become an invaluable asset in understanding the means, motives and methods of the suicide cell. Al Qaeda actually helped investigators by rushing out information on the bombers not knowing that Sajida was still alive and trying to go to ground. Zarqawi’s statement tipped off police that there was a woman involved, and she was the wife of one of the bombers. After quickly connecting some dots, she was in custody.

Early reports have it that Sajida is the sister of Mubarak Atrous al-Rishawi, said to be a Zarqawi lieutenant killed fighting Coalition forces in Fallujah. Her pseudonym for the operation was “Sajida Abdel Qader Latif,” which could be an homage to Latif al-Rishawi, head of the Abu Risha (or Al Burayshah) tribe of al Anbar, who was killed in Ramadi in a clash with U.S. troops in February 2005. The previous tribal leader, Sheikh Khamis Futaikhan, was gunned down in November 2004 in Ramadi by unknown assailants. It’s a tough gig. But if Zarqawi is sending members of the inner circle on suicide missions, you have to wonder how many people he has left.

Less is being reported about Sajida’s husband, Ali al-Shamari, though someone by that name helped lead a mutiny of 200 Iraqi soldiers in April, 2004, when they were ordered into action against insurgents in Fallujah. This could be a coincidence of names, but if not it adds to the picture; it illustrates the insurgent technique of penetrating the Iraqi security forces in order to sow various forms of chaos. I guess he ran out of missions and wanted to go out with a big one.

Incidentally: Back on September 14, 2000, an Iraqi national named Adil al-Rishawi hijacked Qatar Airways flight 404 as it was heading for Amman, Jordan. He surrendered to Saudi authorities after the plane made a forced landing in Hail. At his trial in Doha, Qatar, he said he was trying to draw attention to the plight of Iraqis under U.N. sanctions. One report stated that al-Rishawi took over the plane armed with “a sharp tool.” Sounds familiar. No word whether he ever visited Saddam’s terrorist training camp at Salman Pak, but if he is still being held in Qatar maybe someone should go talk to him.

It will be interesting in coming days to see if Zarqawi keeps trying to explain the Jordan bombings, and how al Qaeda’s limitless appetite for violence will affect public opinion in the Muslim world. People who think this attack is evidence of al Qaeda’s strength or momentum have it backwards. This is a sign of weakness, of rashness, of desperation. It has hurt their legitimacy and damage their movement. As the old saying goes: In politics if you are explaining, you are losing, and Zarqawi has a lot more explaining to do.

— James S. Robbins is senior fellow in national-security affairs at the American Foreign Policy Council, a trustee for the Leaders for Liberty Foundation, and an NRO contributor.

==============================

The Cicero Article: A German magazine offers insight into Iran’s ongoing support for terrorism. (Weekly Standard, 051110)

WHILE IRANIAN PRESIDENT Mahmood Ahmadinejad’s recent call to wipe Israel off the map has elicited a great deal of much-needed international condemnation, relatively little focus has been paid since to Iran’s long-standing support for international terrorism. Thankfully, a recent article published in the German political magazine Cicero, titled “How Dangerous is Iran?” serves as a welcome supplement to the Iranian president’s remarks that, among other things, argues that Iran is currently harboring the surviving al Qaeda leadership.

This information is by no means new. In September 2003 for example, the Washington Post reported that “after the fall of the Taliban in Afghanistan, the locus of al Qaeda’s degraded leadership moved to Iran. The Iranian security services, which answer to the country’s powerful Islamic clerics, protected the leadership.” But the same article also claimed that after the May 2003 Riyadh bombings “the Iranians, under pressure from the Saudis, detained the al Qaeda group.” Most news reports on Iranian support for terrorism since then have claimed that the al Qaeda leaders are being held in some form of light detention or perhaps loose house arrest.

According to the new information in Cicero, however, whatever the situation might have been in May 2003, it is no longer the case.

After spending some time addressing the disillusionment of the Iranian reformist movement in the wake of the triumph of Ahmadinejad and his hardline backers as well as the threat posed by the Iranian nuclear program, the Cicero article shifts its focus to the issue of Iranian support for terrorism, leaving little doubt that the Iranian regime views terrorism as a legitimate means of achieving its policy objectives. A member of the Jordanian intelligence agency GID is quoted as saying, “Ahmadinezhad [sic] can and will use the terrorist card every time as extortion against the West . . . If Europe does not accommodate Iran in the dispute over the Mullahs’ nuclear program, they will threaten terrorism against British soldiers in Iraq and French interests in Lebanon.” If British accusations of explosives being shipped into Iraq from Iran for use against Coalition troops are any indication, this card is already being played.

The article’s revelations, however, go far beyond that:

The author of this article was able to look at a list of the holy killers who have found safe refuge in Iran. The list reads like the Who’s Who of global jihad, with close to 25 high-ranking leadership cadres of Al-Qa’ida—planners, organizers, and ideologues of the jihad from Egypt, Uzbekistan, Saudi Arabia, North Africa, and Europe. Right at the top in the Al-Qa’ida hierarchy: three of Usama Bin Ladin’s sons, Saad, Mohammad, and Othman.

Al-Qa’ida spokesman Abu Ghaib enjoys Iranian protection, as does Abu Dagana al-Alemani (known as the German), who coordinates cooperation of the various jihadist networks throughout the world from Iran. They live in secure housing of the Revolutionary Guard in and around Tehran. “This is not prison or house arrest,” is the conclusion of a high-ranking intelligence officer. “They are free to do as they please.”

Saif al-Adel, military chief and number three in Al-Qa’ida, also had a free hand. In early May 2003, Saudi intelligence recorded a telephone conversation with the organizer of the series of attacks in the Saudi capital Riyadh that claimed over 30 victims, including seven foreigners, in May 2003. Saif al-Adel gives orders for the attacks from Iran, where he operated under the wing of the Iranian intelligence service.

For years, according to the findings of Middle Eastern and Western intelligence services, Iranian intelligence services have already worked together repeatedly with Sunni jihad organizations of Al-Qa’ida. “As an Islamist, I go to the Saudis to get money,” the Jordanian GID man outlines the current practice of Islamist holy warriors. “When I need weapons, logistical support, or military terrorist training and equipment, I go to the Iranians.”

The journalist who authored the article, Bruno Schirra, is no lightweight. In the spring of 2005, he wrote another piece for Cicero, titled “The World’s Most Dangerous Man.” An exposé of Iraqi insurgent leader Abu Musab Zarqawi, Schirra quoted extensively from German Federal Office of Criminal Investigation (BKA) documents that collated data from German, American, French, and Israeli intelligence sources. These documents, some of which were classified, listed the Zarqawi’s activities, passports, phone numbers, mosques used or controlled by his followers in Germany, and his benefactors. In addition to confirming much of the evidence presented by Collin Powell to the United Nations Security Council on the activities of Zarqawi’s network in Europe, the documents also stated point-blank that Iran “provided Al-Zarqawi with logistical support on the part of the state.” Schirra’s ample use of classified documents in making his claims appear to have alarmed the German government—in September 2005, German authorities raided Cicero’s Potsdam offices as well as Schirra’s home at the order of then-Interior Minister Otto Schily. These efforts to learn the identity of Schirra’s source prompted widespread outrage from the German parliament and, ironically, seem to have verified the truth of Schirra’s original article.

As the United States continues to debate both internally and with its European allies over how to deal with Iran and its new president, it would seem that this new information, coming from a country that strongly opposed the Iraq war, would be a welcome contribution to the discussion.

Dan Darling is a counter-terrorism consultant for the Manhattan Institute’s Center for Policing Terrorism.

==============================

Zarqawi Calls for Jordan King’s Head (Foxnews, 051118)

AMMAN, Jordan — The Mideast’s most feared terrorist sought Friday to justify a triple suicide bombing on Amman hotels that killed 59 civilians, insisting he did not deliberately target a wedding party and appealing to Muslims to believe that he was not attacking them.

Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of Al Qaeda in Iraq, took an unusually defensive tone in an audiotape posted on the Internet, seeking to shore up support after widespread anger over the civilian deaths, even among sympathizers.

Still, the Jordanian-born al-Zarqawi made clear he was not about to stop the bloodshed, warning he will attack more tourist sites in Jordan and threatening to behead King Abdullah II. He said he was targeting Jordan because it is serving as a “protector” for Israel, helps the U.S. military in Iraq and has become a “swamp of obscenity,” with alcohol and prostitution in its tourist sites.

“Your star is fading. You will not escape your fate, you descendant of traitors. We will be able to reach your head and chop it off,” al-Zarqawi said, referring to the king.

Al-Zarqawi, who has a $25 million bounty on his head from the U.S., told Jordanians to stay away from bases used by U.S. forces, hotels and tourist sites in Amman, the Dead Sea and the southern resort of Aqaba and embassies of governments participating in the war in Iraq, saying they would be targeted.

“People of Islam in Jordan, we want to assure you that we are extremely careful over your lives ... you are more beloved to us than ourselves,” he said.

The authenticity of the audiotape, posted on an Islamic militant Web forum, could not be confirmed independently, but the voice resembled that of al-Zarqawi on previous tapes.

The tape was posted following widespread outrage over the Nov. 9 bombings against three Amman hotels that killed 59 people, 30 of them in a Jordanian-Palestinian wedding party held in a ballroom.

Jordan has seen a series of large demonstrations denouncing the attack, including one on Friday. Thousands marched through downtown Amman, chanting “Al-Zarqawi, you coward,” and carrying banners that read “Al-Zarqawi, you are the enemy of God.”

Contributors to militant Web forums — who generally lionize al-Zarqawi and praise his attacks — criticized the bombings. In the militant leader’s hometown of Zarqa, east of Amman, many residents denounced him, saying he has lost any sympathy he had there.

In the past, al-Zarqawi has defended Muslim civilian casualties in attacks by his suicide bombers in Iraq, saying they were justified because the attacks are part of a “jihad” against U.S. occupiers and their Iraqi allies. “God ordered us to attack the infidels by all means ... even if armed infidels and unintended victims — women and children — are killed together,” he said in an audiotape released in May.

But he sounded more penitent in Friday’s audio.

“People of Jordan, we did not undertake to blow up any wedding parties,” he said. “For those Muslims who were killed, we ask God to show them mercy, for they were not targets. We did not and will not think for one moment to target them even if they were people of immorality and debauchery.”

In the deadliest of the triple attacks, a bomber set off his explosives belt in the Radisson hotel, killing 30 people at a Jordanian-Palestinian wedding party in a ballroom. Both the bride’s parents were among the dead, as was the father of the groom.

But al-Zarqawi insisted that Jordanian officials’ accounts that the bomber specifically targeted the wedding were a “lie.”

Al-Zarqawi claimed the bomber struck a hall where Israeli and American intelligence officials were meeting at the time. Part of the roof fell in on the wedding hall, either from the blast or even — he said — from a separate bomb placed in the roof, though not by Al Qaeda.

“Our brothers knew their targets with great precision,” he said. “God knows we chose these hotels only after more than two months of close observation (that proved) that these hotels had become headquarters for the Israeli and American intelligence,” he said.

Al-Zarqawi accused the Jordanian government of hiding casualties among Israeli and American agents.

The Radisson attack involved two bombers — an Iraqi husband and wife. Witnesses told Jordanian security officials that the couple talked their way into the wedding, telling hotel employees they wanted to watch, then went to different sides of the hall. When the woman’s explosives belt failed to go off, her husband told her to leave, then he jumped on a table in the ballroom and set off his blast, Jordanian officials have said.

Al Qaeda in Iraq issued a claim of responsibility soon after the blasts, saying a husband and wife carried out one of the attacks — a statement that appears to have backfired, alerting Jordanian authorities that a woman was involved and leading to her capture four days later.

The woman, Sajida al-Rishawi, later made a televised confession, saying she and her husband entered the wedding party ballroom.

Bassam al-Bana, the spokesman for the Radisson, denied al-Zarqawi’s claims about an intelligence meeting. “There were no meetings of Israelis there,” he told The Associated Press.

Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesman Mark Regev refused to comment when asked whether Israeli intelligence officers were meeting at the hotel. “This man has the blood of many innocents on his hands, most of them Muslims. To claim that those innocent victims in Jordan were working for Israel is simply ludicrous and deserves ridicule,” he said.

The only Israeli killed in the blasts was an Israeli Arab who was attending the wedding. Four Americans were killed in the triple bombings — including the Syrian-born moviemaker Mustafa Akkad and his daughter, who were guests at the Radisson wedding reception.

==============================

Jordan King Calls for All-Out War on Islamic Militancy (Foxnews, 051124)

AMMAN, Jordan — Jordan’s King Abdullah II urged his new prime minister Thursday to launch an all-out war against Islamic militancy in the wake of the triple hotel bombings earlier this month that killed 63 people.

In a letter to newly appointed Prime Minister Marouf al-Bakhit, Abdullah said the Nov. 9 bombings “increase our determination to stick to our reform and democratization process, which is irreversible.”

“At the same time, it reaffirms our need to adopt a comprehensive strategy to confront the Takfiri culture,” Abdullah said, referring to the ideology adopted by Al Qaeda and other militants who condone the killing of those they consider infidels.

Abdullah said the strategy should “not only deal with the security dimension, but also the ideological, cultural and political spheres to confront those who choose the path of destruction and sabotage to reach their goals.”

Al-Bakhit was Jordan’s ambassador to Israel until appointed to head the national security council six days after the bombings.

Prime Minister Adnan Badran resigned earlier Thursday, the official told The Associated Press, speaking on condition of anonymity because he is not allowed to speak to the press.

The official Petra news agency confirmed Badran’s resignation, saying the prime minister, had tendered his Cabinet’s resignation to the king and the monarch accepted it. Badran took office in April.

The change of government is part of general shake-up following the suicide bombings, which hurt Jordan’s reputation as one of the most stable countries in the Middle East.

Al-Bakhit was appointed Nov. 15 to head the national security council.

Government officials said the king may have chosen al-Bakhit because of his reputation as a tough former general who ran a southern Jordanian university that trains army and police recruits.

==============================

Children and patients die in hospital suicide blast (London Telegraph, 051125)

A suicide car bomber killed dozens of people in an Iraqi town yesterday when he rammed his vehicle into American and Iraqi soldiers as they handed out toys and sweets to children outside a hospital.

But instead of inflicting mass casualties among the soldiers, the bomber’s victims were mostly children, medics and patients, killed when the brunt of the blast was taken by the hospital’s emergency room, which was wrecked by the explosion.

The attack in Mahmoudiyah, south of Baghdad, claimed at least 30 lives and was followed by a second blast last night in a shopping district in Hilla, also south of the Iraqi capital, where up to 11 people were reported to have died.

Six American soldiers were also reported to have been killed in attacks elsewhere in Iraq since Wednesday.

The American military said that four of its servicemen were lightly injured in the Mahmoudiyah attack. Hospital officials said that seven Iraqi policemen and three soldiers were among the dead.

But the bulk of the casualties were children at the gates of the hospital and civilians inside the emergency room.

“The bomber was parked in a nearby garage, and drove at the Americans when he saw them going into the hospital,” said a hospital security guard. “But he missed them, and hit children, women, men and old people.”

A doctor and five other medical staff were among the civilian dead. Many of the dozens of wounded were transferred to Baghdad for treatment.

Mahmoudiyah is one of a belt of towns with mixed Sunni and Shia Muslim populations around the southern periphery of Baghdad that have been riven by sectarian tensions in recent months.

In the nearby town of Yusufieh the bodies of two young men and two young women were found yesterday morning. They had apparently been tortured and strangled in killings that appeared to have sectarian overtones.

Further south, another car bomb exploded at dusk in Hilla, a city that came to prominence because it was the scene of a massive suicide bombing that killed 125 people.

Laith Kubba, an Iraqi government spokesman, predicted that the violence would escalate as the Dec 15 elections approached. He also said that Iraqi troops had discovered a car packed with booby-trapped toys to the west of Baghdad.

An American military statement later clarified that a man had been arrested after a single grenade had been found hidden inside a teddy bear.

In a development that offered a glimmer of hope, four insurgent groups were reported to be considering entering talks with the Iraqi government.

American and Iraqi officials are reported to believe that their best chance for a negotiated - settlement of the insurgency involves driving a wedge between religious extremists and groups led by former members of Saddam Hussein’s Ba’ath Party, who are ultimately more interested in power than in fighting.

==============================

Defining terrorism (Washington Times, 051202)

By Diana West

Two international conferences last month wrangled over definitions of terrorism. The conference in Europe, the Barcelona Euro-Mediterranean Summit, promised to fight terrorism but couldn’t agree on what “terrorism” was. This somehow added up to “an unprecedented feat,” according to summit organizer and Spanish prime minister Jose Zapatero, who fatuously ballyhooed the “unmitigated, energetic,” but literally meaningless condemnation of terrorism offered by European and Middle Eastern nations. Hooey is right.

The other conference was in the Middle East. The Iraqi reconciliation talks, sponsored by the Arab League in Cairo, agreed on a definition of terrorism all right, but it was one that seemed to legitimize the blowing up of American soldiers, even as they fight terrorism.

For starters, this Iraqi communique — hammered out by some 200 Shi’ite, Sunni and Kurdish leaders — called “resistance” a “legitimate right.” You know, “resistance”: the killers who blast soldiers on patrol, or kids getting candy or worshippers inside rival mosques to bits. This line was already a poisonous sop to Sunni proponents of “resistance” (read: death squads).

The communique went on to note that “terrorism does not represent resistance,” which sounded a little more promising. Then it said: “Therefore, we condemn terrorism and acts of violence, killing and kidnapping and targeting Iraqi citizens and humanitarian, civil, government institutions, national resources and houses of worship.” Notice who and what is missing from the Iraqi convention’s protection list: our own fantastic soldiers of the US military.

What did Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice have to say about this unacceptable omission? “I think what they were trying to do was to get a sense of political inclusion while recognizing that violence and terrorism should not be part of resistance,” she told CNN.

Trying to get a sense of “political inclusion” — by signaling open “resistance” season on U.S. soldiers? This is happy, Oprah spin, the doctrine of Feelpolitik — not superpower strategy. She continued: “After all, do Iraqis really want to — any Iraqi, sitting around that table — want to suggest that killing an innocent Iraqi child standing at a bus stop is legitimate? Or that killing Iraqi soldiers who are lining up at recruitment centers is legitimate? Or even that multinational forces” (that’s us) “who are, by the way, there under a U.N. mandate” (I feel better?) “are somehow legitimate targets?”

Well, no and yes, Madame Secretary. It’s no good to appeal reflexively to a Western framework of fair play without considering what the Iraqi document actually says. Yes, the document specifically protects the Iraqi child standing at the bus stop, and maybe even the Iraqi recruits. It’s the Americans risking their lives 24-7 to protect that child and those recruits who seem to have become “legitimate” targets, according to this declaration by leaders across the Iraqi political spectrum. Shouldn’t that set off, not soothing psychobabble, but angry sirens in Washington? Funny how some stories never build a head of steam. Running smack into Thanksgiving weekend didn’t help, but no holiday hiatus should have put this one on ice. It feels as if it hasn’t played out at home, although I wonder if it registered overseas.

Days later, at the Barcelona conference, the attempt to reach a Euro-Arab consensus on terrorism practically blew up the conference — metaphorically speaking, of course. That’s because European Union leaders refused to sign onto an Arab-Muslim definition of terrorism similar to the one in the Iraqi communique, one that would have legitimized the Arab-Muslim notion of “resistance” to “occupation” — as in “resistance” (suicide bombing) to “occupation” (Israeli buses and supermarkets, not to mention coalition troops in Iraq). Perhaps having lately suffered enough “resistance” in their own backyards, the EU countries — miracle of miracles — felt spinally enhanced enough to stick to their stated conviction that terrorism is never justified. Conversely, this was a moral statement the Arab-Muslim countries refused to endorse.

But it was the Europeans who were characteristically apologetic about the failure to reach a Euro-Arab consensus. “It’s been difficult to find that perfect word to explain that concept which is shared by everybody,” said EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana in one news account, sounding a little absurd. “We all know what we mean by terrorism,” he said in another, sounding a little desperate. “In reality, there is total cooperation between the countries north and south of the Mediterranean against terrorism.” Come on. One place there is not total cooperation is in reality. More than a language barrier separates the Western and Islamic definitions of terrorism, and no amount of happy talk about “inclusion” or conferences about “cooperation” changes that.

==============================

Why We Don’t Trust Democrats With National Security (Townhall.com, 060104)

by Ann Coulter

It seems the Bush administration — being a group of sane, informed adults — has been secretly tapping Arab terrorists without warrants.

During the CIA raids in Afghanistan in early 2002 that captured Abu Zubaydah and his associates, the government seized computers, cell phones and personal phone books. Soon after the raids, the National Security Agency began trying to listen to calls placed to the phone numbers found in al Qaeda Rolodexes.

That was true even if you were “an American citizen” making the call from U.S. territory — like convicted al Qaeda associate Iyman Faris who, after being arrested, confessed to plotting to bring down the Brooklyn Bridge. If you think the government should not be spying on people like Faris, I’ve got a bridge in Brooklyn to sell you.

By intercepting phone calls to people on Zubaydah’s speed-dial, the NSA arrested not only “American citizen” Faris, but other Arab terrorists, including al Qaeda members plotting to bomb British pubs and train stations.

The most innocent-sounding target of the NSA’s spying cited by the Treason Times was “an Iranian-American doctor in the South who came under suspicion because of what one official described as dubious ties to Osama bin Laden.” Whatever softening adjectives the Times wants to put in front of the words “ties to Osama bin Laden,” we’re still left with those words — “ties to Osama bin Laden.” The government better be watching that person.

The Democratic Party has decided to express indignation at the idea that an American citizen who happens to be a member of al Qaeda is not allowed to have a private conversation with Osama bin Laden. If they run on that in 2008, it could be the first time in history a Republican president takes even the District of Columbia.

On this one, I’m pretty sure Americans are going with the president.

If the Democrats had any brains, they’d distance themselves from the cranks demanding Bush’s impeachment for listening in on terrorists’ phone calls to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. (Then again, if they had any brains, they’d be Republicans.)

To the contrary! It is Democrats like Sen. Barbara Boxer who are leading the charge to have Bush impeached for spying on people with Osama’s cell phone number.

That’s all you need to know about the Democrats to remember that they can’t be trusted with national security. (That and Jimmy Carter.)

Thanks to the Treason Times’ exposure of this highly classified government program, admitted terrorists like Iyman Faris are going to be appealing their convictions. Perhaps they can call Democratic senators as expert witnesses to testify that it was illegal for the Bush administration to eavesdrop on their completely private calls to al-Zarqawi.

Democrats and other traitors have tried to couch their opposition to the NSA program in civil libertarian terms, claiming Bush could have gone to the court created by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and gotten warrants for the interceptions.

The Treason Times reported FISA virtually rubber-stamps warrant requests all the time. As proof, the Times added this irrelevant statistic: In 2004, “1,754 warrants were approved.” No one thought to ask how many requests were rejected.

Over and over we heard how the FISA court never turns down an application for a warrant. USA Today quoted liberal darling and author James Bamford saying: “The FISA court is as big a rubber stamp as you can possibly get within the federal judiciary.” He “wondered why Bush sought the warrantless searches, since the FISA court rarely rejects search requests,” said USA Today.

Put aside the question of why it’s so vitally important to get a warrant from a rubber-stamp court if it’s nothing but an empty formality anyway. After all the ballyhoo about how it was duck soup to get a warrant from FISA, I thought it was pretty big news when it later turned out that the FISA court had been denying warrant requests from the Bush administration like never before. According to the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, the FISA court “modified more wiretap requests from the Bush administration than from the four previous presidential administrations combined.”

In the 20 years preceding the attack of 9/11, the FISA court did not modify — much less reject — one single warrant request. But starting in 2001, the judges “modified 179 of the 5,645 requests for court-ordered surveillance by the Bush administration.” In the years 2003 and 2004, the court issued 173 “substantive modifications” to warrant requests and rejected or “deferred” six warrant requests outright.

What would a Democrat president have done at that point? Apparently, the answer is: Sit back and wait for the next terrorist attack. Also, perhaps as a gesture of inclusion and tolerance, hold an Oval Office reception for the suspected al Qaeda operatives. After another terrorist attack, I’m sure a New York Times reporter could explain to the victims’ families that, after all, the killer’s ties to al Qaeda were merely “dubious” and the FISA court had a very good reason for denying the warrant request.

Every once in a while the nation needs little reminder of why the Democrats can’t be trusted with national security. This is today’s lesson.

==============================

Lest we forget (Washington Times, 060120)

Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf continues walking on eggshells. He has survived eight assassination plots since seizing power in 1999. The nationwide outcry over the U.S. bombing of a small village, which killed at least three al Qaeda operatives, is a timely reminder that more than half the country sympathizes with Osama bin Laden, still the most wanted terrorist leader in the world.

The tribal areas that straddle an unmarked, more than 1,000-mile long frontier of jagged mountains and desert flats are populated by several million people who see bin Laden as a “freedom fighter.” The Northwest Frontier Province (NWFP), one of Pakistan’s four provinces, is actually governed by a pro-Taliban politico-religious alliance known as Muttahida Majlis-e-Amal (MMA). One of MMA’s co-chairs is Sami ul-Haq, a long-time personal friend of bin Laden and Mullah Omar, the former Taliban chief who is still in hiding.

Baluchistan, the other province that shares a long common border with Afghanistan, is also governed by a coalition of MMA and other anti-U.S. parties. Military operations to put down Baluchistan’s fourth insurgency since the eve of World War II seldom get reported as the entire province is banned to foreign reporters. Quetta, the provincial capital, is home to many former Taliban officials. The government doesn’t even try to arrest them, but claims it is actively pursuing al Qaeda terrorists. Mr. Musharraf may believe this to be the case but on-the-scene verification by UPI showed a different picture.

In an unauthorized trip to the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) on the Afghan border last September, this reporter, accompanied by a UPI team of Pakistani nationals, heard from villagers that several thousand al Qaeda fighters had been living in their midst since they escaped from the battle of Tora Bora in December 2001. Many had married local girls. Uzbeks, Tajiks, Chechens, Yemenis and other Middle Easterners were mentioned.

These were some of the fighters who took on the Pakistani army as it swept through FATA in 2004, sustaining heavy casualties. The army had been banned from FATA by treaty with tribal leaders ever since independence in 1947. U.S. pressure to seal off the escape routes into Pakistan from Tora Bora forced Mr. Musharraf’s hand. The army captured several dozen al Qaeda fighters on their way out of Afghanistan, but several thousand simply faded into friendly tribal villages and welcoming mosques. The army was not authorized to search the thousands of mudbaked dwellings or places of worship.

These were the villagers who told this reporter’s UPI team four years ago that Osama bin Laden and his party of about 50 escaped through Pakistan’s Tirah valley on Dec. 9, 2001.

Last September, FATA locals also said bin Laden had a mobile dialysis machine that worked with a small generator.

Mr. Musharraf knows the CIA uses Predator pilotless planes, controlled from Washington by satellite, to drop the occasional guided missile on suspected al Qaeda targets on the Pakistani side of the border. Known as the Durand Line, the border legally ceased to exist in 1993. The treaty that established it was signed in 1893 by the king of Afghanistan and a British colonial official for 100 years. But Mr. Musharraf’s wink and nod to the Bush administration for CIA missions is very unpopular among some of his fellow generals and ISI, the Interservices Intelligence agency.

Because he has hung on to the all-powerful Army Chief of Staff position for the last six years, several candidates for the post had to retire before they could be considered, which has not enhanced his popularity among senior officers.

The gigantic Oct. 7 earthquake that killed almost 100,000 and left more than 3 million homeless also dealt Mr. Musharraf’s presidency a major political blow. MMA moved in faster with relief supplies than the slow-moving military machine. The U.S. army, as well as British and German units, with helicopters reassigned from Afghanistan, are still working round-the-clock, high-altitude relief operations.

TV footage still shows men, women and children, barefoot on ice and snow, making their way down to tent cities where they huddle in subfreezing temperatures. Hundreds still die from the cold every day.

The “Death to America” demonstrations from Peshawar to Karachi were also directed against “Busharraf,” as some editorial cartoonists refer to President Musharraf.

Arnaud de Borchgrave is editor at large of The Washington Times and of United Press International.

==============================

Palestine’s willing executioners (townhall.com, 060201)

by Jonah Goldberg

Three of Maryam Farahat’s children died in the process of murdering Israelis. In a recently released video she exhorted her youngest living son, Mohammed, 17, not to come back alive from a mission against the Jews. Indeed, she hopes all three of her remaining sons will die in the process of slaughtering Jews.

Farahat isn’t merely an unconventional stay-at-home mom. She has a day job. She’s one of the Hamas delegates swept into power by an electoral landslide in the Palestinian territories.

I bring this up not to repeat the already-conventional wisdom that this was a victory for terrorism or that Hamas’ surprise win offers some sorely missed “clarity” to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Rather, the Hamas landslide clarifies another issue. In 1996, Daniel Jonah Goldhagen wrote a hugely controversial book, “Hitler’s Willing Executioners.” The thesis was straightforward: The German people were in on the Holocaust; German culture and history harbored and nurtured an “exterminationist” version of anti-Semitism that simply awaited ignition from Nazism’s torch.

Goldhagen’s thesis was overstated but fundamentally accurate. There was something unique to Germany that made fascism genocidal. Around the globe there have been dozens of self-declared fascist movements (and a good deal more that go by different labels), and few of them embraced Nazi-style genocide. Indeed, fascist Spain was a haven for Jews during the Holocaust.

Goldhagen’s book was immensely controversial in Germany, where an odd cult of victimhood had settled in. According to this view, Germany was in effect “occupied” by the Nazis, and the German people were victims, too. Obviously, this is a very convenient interpretation for a country understandably desperate to distance itself from the Holocaust and various brutal military adventures.

But variations of the don’t-blame-the-people thesis have been around for a long time far outside of Germany. Democracy can be wonderful, but some of its boosters across the ideological spectrum assume that all democratic outcomes are good outcomes, and that’s nonsense. Also, the left historically has located political morality in the interests and desires of the masses, therefore it is heretical to blame “the people” for evil deeds. Causes must be “hijacked” by small cabals of bad guys.

The classic Marxist definition of fascism, put forward in 1935 by Georgi Dimitroff, holds that fascism is “the open terroristic dictatorship of the most reactionary, most chauvinistic and most imperialist elements of finance capital.” This notion that the Nazis were the fighting brigade of the rich and powerful has had a remarkable shelf life. The only problem, as countless scholars have demonstrated over the years, is that this isn’t true. Nazism was a popular movement that crossed all class and regional lines in Germany. Hitler was hardly a tool of the rich, and to the extent he was helped by a few wealthy individuals, the fact remains that the Nazis achieved their electoral success by portraying themselves as defenders of the little guy and of national pride.

Today, various pragmatists, optimists and apologists for the Palestinians say they weren’t voting for mass murder and terror, but for honest government and efficient social services. Fatah, the “party” of that terrorist carbuncle Yasser Arafat, was corrupt and incompetent while Hamas has successfully delivered much-needed social services. Hamas ran on “change and reform,” proclaim the apologists, not terrorism. Fine, but that was equally true of the Nazis, who traded soup kitchens for indoctrination. Fascist movements have always gained popularity by delivering for the needy, the forgotten and the left out. They have always captured the imagination of the middle class by promising to reform the government, root out corruption, make the trains run on time. And fascist movements have always promised, as Hamas has, to bring about a moral and national restoration.

The overnight nostalgia for Fatah is, of course, laughable. It hardly governed as a party of peace, democracy and secularism. But looked at through the eyes of many Palestinians, it probably looked a lot like the Weimar government did to many Germans: institutionally corrupt, ineffective and tainted by humiliating concessions to foreign powers and occupiers. (People forget how much the League of Nations carved up Germany - and how much it rankled Germans).

There are serious differences between German or Italian fascism and Hamas’ Islamism. But these are largely intellectual and academic distinctions. As a social phenomenon, the Palestinians voted for politicians such as Mrs. Farahat. She belongs to a brutal, terroristic, irredentist, militant organization dedicated to restoring national pride at the expense of exterminating millions of people, who just happen to be Jews. This was no secret, and it is a form of condescension bordering on infantilism to assert that the Palestinians didn’t know what they were voting for. If the new government had the means, it would be Palestine’s willing executioners.

Recognizing this fact doesn’t automatically mean we should treat the Palestinians like cartoon villains who can never change. That’s as foolish as assuming they didn’t know what they were getting when they cast a ballot for Mrs. Farahat.

==============================

Jordan Sentences Al-Zarqawi to Death in Absentia (Foxnews, 060215)

AMMAN, Jordan — A Jordanian military court on Wednesday sentenced to death nine men, including Al Qaeda in Iraq leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, for a plot to carry out a chemical attack against the kingdom.

Al-Zarqawi and three others received the death penalty in absentia. But the plot’s alleged mastermind, Azmi al-Jayousi, and four co-defendants were in the courtroom when the judge handed down the sentence for the 2004 plot, which security officials foiled before it could be carried out.

“Bin Laden’s organization is rising and we will be back!” the defendants shouted after the sentencing, referring to the Al Qaeda terror network led by Usama bin Laden.

The court sentenced two of the 13 defendants to prison terms of between one and three years, and acquitted another two defendants.

After the sentencing, the convicted men turned on one of the acquitted, a Syrian, and accused him of being an informer. They threatened to kill him, but they did not attack him in the dock.

The 13 men — Jordanian, Syrian and Palestinians — were charged with conspiring to attack various sites in Jordan by setting off a cloud of toxic chemicals that would have killed thousands of people, according to prosecution estimates.

The prosecution told the court that al-Zarqawi sent more than $118,000 to buy two vehicles which the plotters were to use in the attack. Suicide bombers were to drive the vehicles, loaded with explosives and chemicals, into the grounds of the General Intelligence Department in Amman and detonate them, prosecutors said.

The plot also planned to attack the U.S. Embassy, the prime minister’s office, and various intelligence and military court officials, the indictment said.

The indictment said that when investigators conducted an experiment with small amounts of the chemicals found with the defendants, it produced “a strong explosion and a poison cloud that spread over an area of 500 square meters (yards).”

From the geographical data that mastermind al-Jayousi had collected, it appeared he aimed to kill thousands of people in the chemical attack, the indictment said.

Eight of the defendants were accused of belonging to a previously unknown group, “Kata’eb al-Tawhid” or Battalions of Monotheism, which security officials say is headed by al-Zarqawi and linked to Al Qaeda.

The eight were also charged with conspiring to commit acts of terrorism and possession and manufacture of explosives.

Previously, Jordan’s military courts have condemned al-Zarqawi to death in absentia for the 2002 assassination of U.S. diplomat Lawrence Foley in Amman and for a failed suicide attack on the Jordanian-Iraqi border in 2004.

==============================

Send Us Your Terrorists: The U.S. should be eager to keep terrorists in Guantanamo Bay. (National Review Online, 060215)

Given the February 5 escape of 23 convicted Islamic extremists from a Yemeni prison, how can America and its allies in the war on terror keep Muslim murderers incarcerated? The answer, ironically, lies on Liberty Street. Five stories below Manhattan’s financial district, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York stores some $90 billion worth of gold belonging to 60 foreign governments and central banks. These clients believe their bullion is safer under American stewardship than on their own soil.

Similarly, America should turn the U.S. Naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, into an international terrorist depository. Any nation that decides its own Islamo-fascists would be more secure under Navy supervision should be invited to leave them at Gitmo. Since America is terrorist Enemy No. 1, it would be wise for the U.S. to house these killers at no expense to depositing countries. Indeed, Washington even might pay each arriving terrorist’s home country a cash reward for letting the Navy isolate these anti-American butchers someplace where they can do no harm.

This reverse-rendition policy should begin at once. The problem of terrorist jailbreaks is even worse than it appears. The Center for Security Policy (CSP) helped me document a dozen instances since September 11, 2001, when at least 138 suspected or convicted Muslim terrorists have fled from behind bars in Afghanistan, Russia, Pakistan, the Philippines, and Yemen. Collectively, these killers have murdered at least 328 individuals and injured 518 others.

“This number is probably far too low, as there undoubtedly have been cases that were not made public,” says Robert T. McLean, a CSP research associate.

These 12 breakouts alone paint a frightening portrait of Islamic killers who have outwitted their jailers and, in some cases, slipped loose with the active assistance of their guards.

1) February 5, 2006: 23 convicted terrorists escaped from the high-security headquarters of Yemen’s military intelligence agency in the capitol of Sanaa. They traversed a 460-foot tunnel that exited through the quieter women’s section of a nearby mosque. At least 13 of these convicts are al Qaeda members, including American Jaber Elbaneh, 39, charged in 2002 for belonging to an al Qaeda cell in Lackawanna, New York.

Fawaz Yahya al-Rabeei also is on the lam. Interpol believes he helped blow up the French tanker Limburg on October 6, 2002. That explosion killed a Bulgarian sailor and poured 90,000 barrels of petroleum into the Gulf of Aden. He was convicted of firing at a helicopter owned by a Texas-based oil company on November 3, 2002, slightly injuring two Hunt Corp. employees as they flew over Yemen. He also triggered a car bomb at the headquarters of Yemen’s Civil Aviation & Meteorology Authority.

Yet another top al Qaeda operative who disappeared is Jamal Ahmed Mohammed Ali al-Badawi, mastermind of the October 12, 2000, attack on the U.S.S. Cole in Yemen’s port of Aden. That assault on a Navy destroyer killed 17 American sailors and injured at least 40 others. This was Badawi’s second escape from Yemeni custody; he also participated in an April 11, 2003, group departure from an Aden detention facility, also run by Yemeni military intelligence.

“This man has escaped twice, and that means he has a strong network of supporters outside prison,” an anonymous Arab security official said in the February 7 Newsday. “It could also mean that he has received assistance from within the security agencies.”

Interpol secretary-general Ronald Noble warned of these fugitives: “Unless the world community commits itself to tracking them down, they will be able to travel internationally, to elude detection, and to engage in future terrorist activity.”

2) January 22, 2006: Seven Taliban members escaped from the Policharki Prison outside Kabul, Afghanistan. According to the Associated Press’ Amir Shah, these convicts used fake hand stamps like those used to distinguish visitors from inmates.

“There were so many visitors at the jail on the Sunday that the prisoners exploited the guards’ confusion and sneaked out,” said Deputy Justice Minister Mohammad Qasim Hashimzai.

Afghan authorities arrested 10 guards for colluding in the Taliban fighters’ escape from their 16- and 17-year prison sentences.

3) January 2006: Two followers of slain Islamic rebel leader Badreddine al-Houthy escaped from a Yemeni prison, according to United Press International. Last December 3, a Yemeni court convicted al-Houthy adherents Yehya Dalimi and Mohammad Moftah of armed insurrection and working with Iranian agents in hopes of “undermining state security and inciting sectarian strife.”

4) July 11, 2005: Four al Qaeda operatives escaped the highly fortified U.S. airbase at Bagram, Afghanistan. They are: Syrian Abdullah Hashimi, Kuwaiti Omar al Faruq (AKA Mahmoud Ahmad Mohammed), Saudi Mahmoud Fathami, and Libyan Mohammed Hassan. These four men appeared on videotape last October 18 on Al Arabiya television. Claiming to be at a Taliban camp in the Afghan outback, these terrorists bragged about picking the locks in their cells, hiding on the base for several days, then fleeing with the help of Taliban colleagues.

Hassan, the Libyan escapee, appeared in an online video posted just last Thursday. As Agence France Press reported, he seemingly led a successful attack on Afghan soldiers. Then, on the battlefield, he pointed his rifle at the cadavers of these American allies.

“Several apostates were killed while the others were taken captive or ran away,” after the January 7 confrontation, Hassan said. “They have died like dogs and [Afghan President Hamid] Karzai will not be of any help for them,” he continued. Hassan also threatened to “leave America in the mud.”

Hassan and his comrades’ getaway from the well-guarded American facility mystified rank-and-file Afghans. “As far as I know, a mosquito cannot get out of the Bagram base,” pharmacist Imran Mujahid told the Los Angeles Times’ Paul Watson. “Then how could these people get out and escape?”

Escapee Omar al-Faruq is considered the highest-ranking al Qaeda member ever caught in Southeast Asia. He collaborated with Jemaah Islamiyah, al Qaeda’s Indonesian franchise, which staged the October 12, 2002, Bali nightclub bombing that killed 202 and injured some 300 people. JI also bombed dozens of Christian churches across Indonesia. Al-Faruq plotted attacks against American embassies in Asia and tried to take flight lessons in the Philippines so he could commandeer an airplane for a suicide mission.

“He’s a very committed, very intelligent man,” Rohan Gunaratna of Singapore’s Institute for Defense and Strategic Studies told the Christian Science Monitor’s Dan Murphy last November 7. “I expect him to be deeply involved with Al Qaeda again, now that he’s free.”

5) November 2004: Mushtaq Ahmad fled a Pakistani jail, according to officials the Associated Press cited in a January 12, 2005, dispatch. Ahmad had been arrested for plotting two assassination attempts on Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf. While no one was hurt in the December 14, 2003 attack, an assault that Christmas Day spared Musharraf but killed as many as 13 others.

6) April 10, 2004: 53 inmates escaped the Philippines Basilan Provincial Jail. A sizeable but undetermined number of them are considered Abu Sayyaf members. Eleven were recaptured, and eight were killed, while the violence injured three guards. The fugitives fled with two rifles and a shotgun.

7) July 14, 2003: Three terrorists broke out of Philippine National Police headquarters in Quezon City. They included Abu Sayyaf extremist Merang Abante. He allegedly participated in the kidnapping of Jeffrey Schilling of Oakland, California, who later was freed.

Abdulmukim Ong Edris, another Abu Sayyaf agent, is thought to have helped kidnap 20 victims, including three Americans, on the resort island of Palawan. As Richard C. Paddock explained in the August 9, 2003 Los Angeles Times, “Guillermo Sobero, a tourist from Corona, California, was beheaded, and missionary Martin Burnham of Wichita, Kansas, was killed during a rescue raid.” Edris’ other alleged bombings injured at least 24 and killed 12 people, including a fatal October 2, 2002, attack on U.S. Special Forces Sergeant First Class Mark Wayne Jackson, age 40.

Jemaah Islamiyah bombsmith Fathur Rohman al-Ghozi also ran. “Mike the Bombmaker,” as he was nicknamed, had been sentenced to a 10-to-12-year prison term for acquiring more than a ton of explosives he hoped to detonate at embassies in Singapore. He confessed to the nearly simultaneous bombings in December 2000 of a Manila transit station and four other civilian targets. Those explosions killed 22 and injured 100. Police eventually found al-Ghozi, an Indonesian, and killed him.

8) April 11, 2003: 10 al Qaeda agents suspected in the U.S.S. Cole bombing left a military intelligence lockup in Aden, Yemen, reportedly through a hole in a bathroom wall. All of these terrorists were recaptured within the next 11 months. Perhaps they spent that time at home reading the Koran. Of course, they could have spent almost a year raising money, recruiting new terrorists, training inductees, or even committing mayhem for which they never were caught. As was mentioned above, the U.S.S Cole attack’s ringleader, Jamal al-Badawi, joined this breakout; he, too, was caught, only to escape a second time.

9) September 2, 2002: Chechen terrorist Ahkmed Magomedov slipped from his handcuffs and vanished from the prosecutor’s office in Makhachkala, capitol of the predominantly Muslim Russian Republic of Dagestan. He is tied to seven terrorist incidents including a January 2000 bombing that killed seven Russian soldiers and injured four more, and a May 9, 2002, explosion in Kaspiysk that wiped out 43 people.

10) August 7, 2002: 12 Pakistanis and a Kyrgyzstani, all suspected Taliban or al Qaeda thugs, escaped a Kabul detention facility. According to Pamela Constable’s account in the August 21, 2002, Washington Post, “The fugitives hijacked three trucks, beat a farmer who tried to stop them with his bird-hunting rifle, killed three soldiers with the soldiers’ own weapons, and took a local policeman hostage.” As they retreated to a rock quarry, they pounded the kidnapped cop for wearing pants and not wearing a beard. The escapees used three stolen Kalashnikov rifles to fight about 100 Afghan soldiers who found them and killed them.

11) June 29, 2002: Al Qaeda operative Walid Abdullah Habib escaped a prison in Aden, Yemen. Officials there believe Habib, a Yemeni, fought U.S. forces in Tora Bora, Afghanistan, in December 2001, before he was captured trying to sneak back into Yemen along its border with Oman.

12) December 19, 2001: 20 al Qaeda members scattered after a violent uprising on a bus carrying 48 prisoners from Parachinar, Pakistan, to a hoosegow in Kohat. The one-hour gun battle in and around the bus — one of four vehicles in a convoy transporting 156 detainees — killed six terrorists and seven Pakistani soldiers and injured at least a dozen on both sides, Paul Salopek and Lisa Anderson reported in the next day’s Chicago Tribune.

Beyond these escapes, several attempts have failed, but not before killing and wounding many inmates and guards. Philippine officials, for instance, thwarted a March 15, 2005, jailbreak bid in Manila, but not before its two Abu Sayyaf leaders and 15 others were killed.

U.S. officials could prevent more such chaos by canceling plans to shrink Guantanamo’s current terrorist population 68% — from 510 to 164 — by repatriating 110 Afghans, 129 Saudis, and 107 Yemenis, as Josh White and Robin Wright revealed in the August 5, 2005, Washington Post. In fact, the Pentagon plans to ship these Afghan Guantanamites to Policharki Prison — the very same facility from which seven Taliban operatives escaped last January 22!

“We, the U.S., don’t want to be the world’s jailer,” Matthew Waxman, a Pentagon detainee-affairs official, told the Post. “We think a more prudent course is to shift that burden onto our coalition partners.”

Nonsense.

The stakes are too high — and too many people could be killed — to risk more overseas terrorist escapes, just to save a few million dollars in Koranically correct meals and laundered uniforms. There is ample room in the $2.77 trillion 2007 federal budget to offset the expense of indefinitely detaining as many bloodthirsty terrorists as can be shoehorned into Guantanamo.

More than Sing Sing, Leavenworth, or even a re-opened Alcatraz, Guantanamo is a dream location for harboring terrorists. Detainees are guarded by well-armed, patriotic American GIs unencumbered by bottomless anti-Americanism. Any combatant who tried to walk out would face hundreds of unsympathetic sailors with machine guns at the ready. If he eluded them, he would have to evade snipers in watchtowers, leap twin rows of barbed-wire fences, then tiptoe through the landmines installed by Cuban dictator Fidel Castro. If he reached the beach, Haiti is only 110 miles southeast. Happy swimming, Hafez!

Of course, craftier enemy combatants could avoid these hazards by tunneling out. If they actually burrowed into the Caribbean, they are more than welcome to terrorize the sharks. As the CSP’s Robert McLean says, “If there is a more secure location to detain these terrorists than Guantanamo, I would like to know.”

Naturally, turning Guantanamo into a Yucca Mountain for terrorists will make Leftists wail. Let them. It’s hard to believe, but the shrieks of liberals are easier on the ears than the blasts of bombs.

— Deroy Murdock is a New York-based columnist with the Scripps Howard News Service and a senior fellow with the Atlas Economic Research Foundation in Arlington, Va.

==============================

All praise Prof. Alan Dershowitz (townhall.com, 060222)

by Tony Blankley

Next week a vastly important book will be published: “Preemption: A Knife That Cuts Both Ways” by Alan Dershowitz. Yes, that Alan Dershowitz: the very liberal civil libertarian, anti-capital punishment Harvard Law School professor. And but for my lack of his legal scholarship, there is nary a sentence in the book that I — a very conservative editor of the Washington Times, and former press secretary to Newt Gingrich — couldn’t have written.

The premise of his book is that in this age of terror, there is a potential need for such devices as profiling, preventive detention, anticipatory mass inoculation, prior restraint of dangerous speech, targeted extrajudicial executions of terrorists and preemptive military action including full-scale preventive war.

In his own words, from his Introduction: “The shift from responding to past events to preventing future harms is part of one of the most significant but unnoticed trends in the world today. It challenges our traditional reliance on a model of human behavior that presupposes a rational person capable of being deterred by the threat of punishment. The classic theory of deterrence postulates a calculating evildoer who can evaluate the cost-benefits of proposed actions and will act — and forbear from acting — on the basis of these calculations. It also presupposes society’s ability (and willingness) to withstand the blows we seek to deter and to use the visible punishment of those blows as threats capable of deterring future harms. These assumptions are now being widely questioned as the threat of weapons of mass destruction in the hands of suicide terrorists becomes more realistic and as our ability to deter such harms by classic rational cost-benefit threats and promises becomes less realistic.”

Yet, such policies conflict with traditional concepts of civil liberties, human rights, criminal justice, national security, foreign policy and international law He shrewdly observes that historically, nations — including democracies — have resorted to such deviations from law and custom out of necessity. But that it has all been ad hoc, secret or deceptive. Prof. Dershowitz argues that now, rather, we need to begin to develop an honest jurisprudence of prevention to legally regulate such mechanisms. It is better, he argues, to democratically decide now, before the next disaster, this new jurisprudence — the rules by which we will take these necessary actions.

To see the difference between traditional Anglo-American criminal jurisprudence and his proposed jurisprudence of prevention, he raises the great maxim of criminal law: better that ten guilty go free, than one innocent be wrongly convicted. That principle led our law to require proof beyond a reasonable doubt before conviction in criminal trials. Most of us agree with that standard.

But then Prof. Dershowitz updates the maxim thusly: “Is it better for ten possibly preventable terrorist attacks to occur than for one possibly innocent suspect to be preventively detained?” I would hunch that most people would not be willing to accept ten September 11th attacks (30,000 dead) in order to protect one innocent suspect from being locked up and questioned for a while.

Is it possible to go beyond such gut instincts and ad hoc decision making during a crises, and begin to develop a thoughtful set of standards for conduct in this dangerous new world? I don’t know.

As Prof. Dershowitz observes, a jurisprudence develops slowly in response to generations, centuries of adjudicated events. But to the extent we recognize the need for it and start thinking systematically, to that extent we won’t be completely hostage to the whim and discretion of a few men at moments of extreme stress.

At the minimum, an early effort at a jurisprudence of prevention would at least help in defining events. Consider the long and fruitless recent debate about the imminence of the danger from Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, or the current debate on Iran’s possible nuclear weapons. Under traditional international law standards they are both classic non-imminent threat situations: “early stage acquisition of weapons of mass destruction by a state presumed to be hostile.”

But as Dershowitz points out, while the threat itself is not imminent, “the opportunity to prevent the threat will soon pass.” Once they have the weapons it is too late.

Or, a low price in innocent casualties might soon pass. For instance, in 1981 when Israel bombed Iraq’s nuclear site at Osirak, if they had waited much longer the site would have been “radioactively hot” and massive innocent civilian casualties would have been incurred from radioactive releases. It is simply not enough anymore to say a country violates the norm by acting in its ultimate, but not imminent, self-defense. We need new standards for a new age.

The new realities of unacceptable risk require new — and lower— standards of certainty before defensive action is permitted.

As we develop a jurisprudence of prevention, we increase the chance of justice and rationality being a bigger part of such crisis decisions that our presidents will be facing for the foreseeable future.

Dershowitz’s sound, practical scholarship is commendable. But what I find heartening is the political fact that a prominent scholar of the left has finally entered into a constructive conversation about how to manage our inevitably dangerous WMD/terrorist infested future.

If such as Dershowitz and I can find common ground, there should be space there for a multitude. And from that common ground can grow a common plan for a common victory.

==============================

And the losers are: the Jews (Townhall.com, 060302)

by Cal Thomas

Jews run Hollywood, some say. If they do, one might expect them to produce films that better reflect their heritage and values, rather than serve as apologists for those who wish to exterminate the Jewish people.

This Sunday’s Academy Awards ceremony will not only be about the gay-friendly flick “Brokeback Mountain,” but also about whether the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences will award an Oscar to a film called “Paradise Now,” which in January won the Golden Globe for Best Foreign Film. The Golden Globes often foretell which movies are likely to win Oscars.

“Paradise Now” is well-produced propaganda for the Arab-Muslim-Palestinian side and a justification for people who blow themselves up and take innocent children, women and men with them. The film is about two young Palestinian males and their decision to become homicide bombers (I deliberately use the word “homicide,” because it better reflects the true intentions of the killers, rather than “suicide,” a word used to describe people who take only their own lives).

Click to learn more...

The film recalls a real event when a homicide bomber boarded a bus in Haifa, Israel, on March 5, 2003. Ironically (or maybe deliberately), this Sunday, March 5, is the date of the Oscar presentations. The killer dispatched 17 people from there to eternity. Nine of the dead were schoolchildren, ages 18 or younger. Most people would find such a horrific act beyond the pale of any religion or politics, much less entertainment, but apparently Hollywood thinks it good movie material.

Yossi Zur, the father of one of the dead children, inspired a petition drive that at last count had collected more than 30,000 signatures. The petition asks the Academy to revoke the “Paradise Now” Oscar nomination. In an article written for The Israel Project, Zur expresses his grief for his then-16-year-old son, Asaf, adding, “‘Paradise Now’ is a very professional production, created with great care for detail. It is also an extremely dangerous piece of work, not only for Israel and the Middle East, but the whole world.”

Zur went to see the film and wonders, “What exactly makes (it) worthy of such a prestigious (Golden Globe) award?” He asks if Hollywood might also think a film sympathetic to the objectives of the 9/11 hijackers could someday be made. Why not? Didn’t those men believe their act was righteous and in their “desperation” thought it the only way to get America’s attention for their “plight”? Zur wonders if the terrorists get their hands on a nuclear, biological or chemical device that they use to kill 100,000 or more people whether the film industry will think that worthy of cinematic and sympathetic treatment.

Some critics of Steven Spielberg’s “Munich” think that film crossed the line in portraying the Palestinian murderers of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Olympics sympathetically and the Jewish avengers who hunted down the perpetrators as responsible for the continuing “cycle of violence.” Jewish guilt can be hazardous to Jewish health.

What is especially troubling is that Hollywood’s reservoir of sympathy is shallow and extends only to certain “favored” subjects. Would the film industry do a movie about Joseph Stalin and how the forced famine he instigated in the 1930s in which an estimated 7 million people died was really about putting overweight Russians on a needed diet? How about a film on the life of China’s Chairman Mao, considered the top killer of the last century? A talented scriptwriter might portray Mao’s genocidal acts as a commitment to population control.

It’s probably too late to influence the Academy, but as Zur wrote after the Golden Globes ceremony, “Awarding a movie such as ‘Paradise Now’ only implicates the Hollywood Foreign Press Association in the evil chain of terror that attempts to justify these horrific acts, whether the number of victims is 17 (as on that Haifa bus) or 17,000.”

The same might be said of the Academy on Sunday night, depending on who “the winner is.”

==============================

Putin Vindicated? In 2004 the Russian president said that Saddam had planned terrorist attacks on America. New Iraqi documents suggest he may have been right. (Weekly Standard, 060407)

IN JULY 2004, DURING THE COURSE of a little-publicized event while on a visit to Kazakhstan, Russian President Vladimir Putin made some unusual remarks:

I can confirm that after the events of September 11, 2001, and up to the military operation in Iraq, Russian special services and Russian intelligence several times received . . . information that official organs of Saddam’s regime were preparing terrorist acts on the territory of the United States and beyond its borders, at U.S. military and civilian locations.

Putin’s remarks were little noticed by the American press, coming as they did so soon after the release of the 9/11 Commission’s report. Moreover, despite his strong opposition to the war in Iraq, Putin was unabashedly in favor of Bush’s reelection, having earlier criticized Senator Kerry for supporting unilateral action against Serbia while opposing it with regard to Iraq. Putin went so far as to claim in October 2004 that “The goal of international terrorism is to prevent the election of President Bush to a second term.”

And one of the newly-released Iraqi documents, BIAP 2003-000654, indicates that Putin may have been on to something. On page 6 of the document it is revealed that:

The top secret letter 2205 of the Military Branch of Al Qadisya on 4/3/2001 announced by the top secret letter 246 from the Command of the military sector of Zi Kar on 8/3/2001 announced to us by the top secret letter 154 from the Command of Ali Military Division on 10/3/2001 we ask to provide that Division with the names of those who desire to volunteer for Suicide Mission to liberate Palestine and to strike American Interests and according what is shown below to please review and inform us.

Written by the commander of Iraq’s Ali Bin Abi Taleb Air Base, this document, if authentic, indicates that Iraq was actively recruiting suicide bombers with the intention of targeting U.S. interests at least as far back as early 2001. Nor is this the only document released with the intention of making it clear that Saddam’s intentions for carrying out terrorist attacks against other nations—the plans for Blessed July appear to lay out a similar agenda focusing on using the Saddam Fedayeen to carry out a bombing and assassination campaign in London, Iran, and the “self ruled” areas of Iraq, a likely reference to Iraqi Kurdistan. While these documents do not by themselves prove the veracity of Putin’s remarks, if they are deemed to be authentic they would appear to indicate that his claims did not occur in a vacuum.

IF EITHER DOCUMENT can be verified as accurate, it would seem to refute a long-standing contention among members of the U.S. intelligence community that Iraq ceased its involvement in international terrorism after its failed 1993 plot to assassinate former President George H.W. Bush. Indeed, the following exchange is reported in former counterterrorism chief Dick Clarke’s book Against All Enemies:

[Anti-terror czar Dick Clarke said], “I am unaware of any Iraqi-sponsored terrorism directed at the US since 1993, and I think FBI and CIA concur in that judgment?” CIA Deputy Director John McLaughlin replied, “Yes, that is right. We have no evidence of any active Iraqi terrorist threat against the US.”

It would be sad to learn that the Russian Federation’s intelligence service was better informed as to Iraq’s terrorist capabilities than were their American counterparts.

Dan Darling is a counterterrorism consultant.

==============================

Terror in Egypt: It isn’t going to stop any time soon. (Weekly Standard, 060428)

IN THE WAKE of two terrorist attacks in Sinai this week, first against the tourist sector in Dahab, then against the Multi-National Peacekeeping Force, some observers have related Mubarak’s situation to that of President Anwar al-Sadat in 1981. It’s a useful comparison because, like Sadat at the time, Mubarak seems hapless at present. Before Sadat’s assassination in October of 1981, he arrested scores of critics, intellectuals, and journalists (such as former Nasser confidante and current al Jazeera retread Mohammed Hassanein Heikal) none of whom actually wanted to kill him, as the Islamists eventually did. Thus, because he went after marginal figures rather than the most serious threat to his rule, those arrests indicated Sadat’s weakness not his strength.

Similarly, every time Mubarak’s security services arrests a Bedouin, the regime is telling us it is weak because it is not catching the real culprits. When they arrested over 2,000 Bedouin after the first Sinai attack in Taba in October 2004, they announced that they were floundering, and that if the regime wants to preserve its existence, Mubarak’s son Gamal or military intelligence chief Omar Suleiman, or more likely both, should take the helm ASAP. The old man can’t cut it any more.

It appears that the Bedouin are responsible for operational assistance, but it is extremely unlikely that they are the “big idea” men behind the Sinai bombings. The Bedouin are involved in many illegal enterprises, like smuggling weapons and drugs, but they are largely apolitical. Some Egyptians joke that the Bedu liked it better when the Israelis occupied the Sinai because they turned it into a tourist paradise and thus made the Bedouin money as the Egyptians never did, could or will. Assuming the Bedouin are helping, it is most likely because they are getting paid, and that they are angry because they feel the regime abandoned them—and that was before the security services embarked on a campaign of mass arrests and collective punishment.

SO WHO IS REALLY BEHIND the three large attacks on Sinai resorts since October 2004? The target itself is significant. The second attack was against Sharm al-Sheikh, Mubarak’s favorite place in the world and the destination he usually chooses (over Cairo) to entertain his most important foreign visitors. Which means that it’s not about Israeli tourists; it’s about Mubarak himself.

The smart money is on al Qaeda, or more precisely, Qaedat al-Jihad, as some Egyptian analysts designate the bin Laden-Zawahiri organization to indicate its Egyptian origins. Zawahiri’s Islamic Jihad had its greatest local success when it worked with al-Gama’a al-Islameya to kill Sadat. Of all the possible reasons for the latest attacks—bin Laden’s new address, the defunding of Hamas—perhaps the most compelling link is that the Mubarak government recently released 900 middle-aged al-Gama’a al-Islameya militants, whose war against the regime ended a decade ago in a 1997 truce. Perhaps someone else is saying that the war has just begun in earnest.

ACTUALLY, it began in 1952 when Nasser cut the Muslim Brotherhood out of the regime. Which is to say that this decades-long fight is not ideological so much as it is about shares of power and who gets to rule Egypt. The rhetoric and agenda of the regime and its Islamist opponents are virtually identical; the principle difference between the two is that the latter would like a lot more sharia law in the Egyptian constitution and are willing to kill ordinary Egyptians to make that happen.

Why would Islamist extremists be striking now after Mubarak ostensibly put them down in 1997? Maybe because the far enemy, the United States, has proved more difficult to attack at home than the near enemy, Egypt. Or perhaps it is because the Mubarak regime is an aging one that, for instance, was surprised when the Muslim Brotherhood won 88 seats in the November-December parliamentary elections.

It seems that Mubarak has reached the point in his career when underlings are afraid to bring him bad news and his exhausted regime’s hands are already full fighting the U.S. agenda in the region. Perhaps someone, surmising that Mubarak can’t manage warring on two fronts, smells blood.

The Islamists will continue to attack Egypt, which makes an overt alliance between the regime and the more moderate Muslim Brotherhood, like the one suggested in an al-Hayat column by Islamist lawyer Montasser Al-Zayat, more plausible. Among other things, that will ensure Gamal’s accession, which is the regime’s top priority and why it is fighting the U.S. democratization agenda. Then it will be Gamal’s task to war against the extremists and leverage the Muslim Brotherhood as he pleases, variously counting on their support and then keeping them in their place, as his father did. Though it is unclear that a novice with no military credentials is a hard enough strongman to pull it off. He’ll get no help from the United States since the regime already played its Islamist card in those parliamentary elections and Washington is trying to cope with the fallout of “regional transformation.”

Lee Smith is a visiting fellow at the Hudson Institute and based in Beirut.

==============================

North Korea trying to weaponize bird flu: Bio-warfare experts call it potentially ‘greatest threat al-Qaida could unleash’ (WorldNetDaily, 060508)

LONDON – The pariah state of North Korea is trying to weaponize the bird flu virus, making it the ideal threat for al-Qaida, the British intelligence agency MI6 has learned.

The Bush administration has given briefings classified “Top Secret/Sensitive Compartmented Information” to members of Congress and the Senate on the threat.

In aerosol form it would be undetectable at all border crossings and virologists at Porton Down – Britain’s research center responsible for developing antidotes against biological attacks – fear that a genetically engineered version of the virus would be far more lethal than any current threat from the virus.

World ranking experts have said that it would be “the greatest threat al-Qaida could unleash.”

In an exclusive interview, Dr. Ken Allibek, the former director of the Soviet Union’s biowarfare program, Biopreperat, who is now a senior adviser to the Bush administration on bio-defense, said: “The threat of a weaponized bird flu virus cannot be over emphasised. It would be the most terrible weapon in the hands of a terrorist. The advantage for al-Qaida is that an aerosolized weapon would be impossible to detect from one spread naturally by birds. But a lab-produced virus would be far more lethal.”

Professor Peter Openshaw, a leading virologist at Imperial College, London, called it: “more terrifying than engineered smallpox. That would be relatively easy to contain because there is a vaccine. But with improvements in laboratory technology, it’s becoming much easier to engineer these viruses. It’s becoming a terrible concern.”

A CIA document presented by Goss showed that the World Health Organization has warned the virus would affect one-fifth of the world’s population “with 30 million requiring hospitalisation and at least 2 million people could die.”

The decision to keep the briefing secret has led to fierce criticism from public health officials in the United States.

Dr. Irwin Redlener, a director of the National Center for Disaster Preparedness in Washington, said: “This is Cold War secrecy being applied to a public health issue. The truth is that the United States is seriously unprepared to cope with an avian flu outbreak – the more so if it is terrorist inspired.”

Professor Hugh Pennington, a leading microbiologist at Aberdeen University, Scotland, said: “A clever molecular biologist could also try to mix the virus with other viruses so that it could spread person to person, which would be the greatest threat.”

Scientists in America have recently recreated the Spanish flu virus that killed 50 million people in 1918. The full genetic sequence was published in specialist magazines earlier this year and is available via the Internet.

Openshaw said: “The sequence of the 1918 strain has just been published and there are obvious security concerns. There are many labs around the world that would be capable of recreating the same virus.”

North Korea’s biological warfare program is now the largest in the world. Among its 300,000 scientists, technicians and laboratory assistants are some 800 scientists who worked on the Russian bio-warfare program, Biopreperat. Some of them had been trying to exploit the 1918 Spanish flu virus as a potential weapon.

When Biopreperat collapsed with the end of the Soviet Union, a number of its staff were recruited by North Korea. In return for huge salaries they were given a comfortable lifestyle and unlimited research facilities to continue their work.

A high-ranking defector from North Korea’s Academy of Sciences has told intelligence officers that the research to weaponize the virus is now a priority. The project is under the control of the country’s top geneticist and head of its biological warfare program.

Dr. Yi Yong Su, 54, is known to have a close relationship with Kim Jong II, the country’s supreme leader. A CIA profile describes her as conducting terminal experiments with anthrax on prisoners.

She has assigned eight research centers to work on various aspects of successfully weaponizing the bird flu virus.

One center is concerned with researching cereal rust spores, a disease which attacks crops. The spores are dusted on to the feathers of homing pigeons. When they return to their coops, they are checked to see how long the spores remain on their feathers.

But the sophisticated research on bird flu is being conducted at Institute 398 at Singam-Ri, south of the capital Pyongyang.

U.S. satellite images show the area is ring-fenced by three battalions of soldiers. Only visible above ground are a cluster of concrete-block buildings and fuel storage tanks.

The defector has said the laboratories, including two dealing with the latest molecular biological technology, are hidden far below ground.

==============================

Florida teen’s massacre called ‘gift from Allah’: Terror leaders threaten Americans, hope boy, 16, ‘goes directly to hell’ (WorldNetDaily, 060515)

TEL AVIV – The death yesterday of Daniel Wultz, a Florida teenager critically injured last month in a suicide bombing at an Israeli restaurant, is a “gift from Allah” and revenge against American Jewish support for Israel, Abu Nasser, a leader of the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, one of the groups responsible for the deadly blast, told WorldNetDaily.

Abu Amin, a leader of the Islamic Jihad, which also took responsibility for the April 17 bombing in which Wultz was injured, told WND last night his terror group may target Americans in the near future.

Wultz, 16, was one of over 60 people injured in the attack in which a Palestinian suicide bomber blew himself up in a crowded section of Tel Aviv as Israelis celebrated the fifth day of the Passover holiday. The blast ripped through a falafel restaurant just outside the city’s old central bus station, killing nine. The same restaurant was hit by a suicide attack in January, wounding 20. A tenth Israeli victim passed away this weekend. Wultz’s demise yesterday brought to 11 the total number of deaths from the suicide blast so far.

Wultz was a resident of Weston, Fla. He was on Passover vacation in Israel along with his family. The teenager was seated with his father, Yekutiel, at an outside table of the targeted restaurant when the bomb was detonated.

Described as an avid basketball player, Wultz lost his spleen, a leg and a kidney in the attack. Doctors at Tel Aviv’s Ichilov Hospital had reportedly been fighting to save his other leg, which was suffering from severely reduced blood flow. Wultz’s father suffered a fractured leg in the attack.

Wultz had been lying in a coma in the intensive care unit since the bombing, though he briefly was aroused last month.

His story had generated extensive international media coverage and had prompted a flurry of e-mails across the Internet asking people worldwide to pray for the young terror victim.

Islamic Jihad and the Al Aqsa Brigades, the declared military wing of Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas’ Fatah Party, claimed responsibility for the bombing.

In a WND exclusive interview yesterday, Abu Nasser, a senior leader of the Al Aqsa Brigades in the West Bank, rejoiced in Wultz’s death. Abu Nasser is part of the Brigades leadership in the Balata refugee camp suspected of plotting the attack.

“This is a gift from Allah. We wish this young dog will go directly with no transit to hell,” Abu Nasser said.

“[Wultz] was part of the American support machine that helps our enemy. All these young American Jews come here to support the occupation, they build and live in the settlements ... . I imagine him as one of these Nazis who live here [in the settlements.] There is no difference between him and them.”

Regarding U.S. policy in the Middle East, Abu Nasser commented, “I say to the Americans if you will not change than we wish you more Daniel Wultzes and more pain and sorrow because it seems that this is the only thing you deserve.”

Abu Nasser went on to pledge more suicide bombings inside Israel.

“We will hit whenever we will think it is suitable and do not expect that I give details but we can hit everywhere,” he said.

Also speaking to WND, Islamic Jihad senior leader in the northern West Bank Abu Amin called Wultz’s death a “message from Allah to the unbelievers that he will always be at the side of those who believe and fight for him.”

Comparing Wultz to the suicide bomber who killed the Florida teenager, Abu Amin said, “Our hero believed in Allah and died while fighting for Allah but your pig was killed in a restaurant in an area full of prostitution.”

He said Wultz’s death should demonstrate to Americans “that even if you live in the U.S. the hand of Allah and the sword of the Jihad fighters will reach you and you will find the same end [as Wultz].”

Asked if his group would specifically target Americans in Israel, Abu Amin replied, “Concerning the Americans we do not target them but I will not be surprise if the resistance organizations would reconsider this matter. America is a full partner of the enemy in the siege against our people.

“If we know there are Americans in a place we plan to attack, we will not cancel the operation. On the contrary this would be a sign from Allah that this is a more blessed operation. Killing Americans and Jews in one operation – it can be great.”

==============================

Report: Complex Sting Used in Canada Terror Arrests (Foxnews, 060605)

MISSISSAUGA, Ontario — The Royal Canadian Mounted Police itself delivered three tons of potential bomb-making material to a group that authorities said wanted to launch a string of attacks inspired by Al Qaeda, according to a news report Sunday.

The Toronto Star said the sting unfolded when investigators delivered the ammonium nitrate to the group of Muslim Canadians, then moved in quickly on what officials called a homegrown terror ring.

The newspaper said that investigators learned of the group’s alleged plan to bomb targets around Ontario, then controlled the sale and transport of the fertilizer.

Authorities refused to discuss the Star’s story and have revealed few details of the purported plot, or how the sting developed.

Police arrested 12 adults, ages 19 to 43, and five suspects younger than 18 Friday and Saturday on charges including plotting attacks with explosives on Canadian targets.

The oldest, Qayyum Abdul Jamal, led prayers at a storefront mosque attended by some 40 to 50 families down the street from his home in a middle-class neighborhood of Mississauga, west of Toronto.

Imam Qamrul Khanson said the language of Jamal’s Friday night prayers had a more strident tone than other prayer leaders’, but there was never any talk of terrorism or violence.

Khanson said at least three of the suspects regularly prayed at the Al-Rahman Islamic Center for Islamic Education.

“Here we always preach peace and moderation,” Khanson said at the one-room mosque.

“I have faith that they have done a thorough investigation,” Khanson said of authorities. “But just the possession of ammonium nitrate doesn’t prove that they have done anything wrong.”

Officials said the operation involved some 400 intelligence and law-enforcement officers and was the largest counterterrorism operation in Canada since the adoption of Canada’s Anti-Terrorism Act following the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks on the United States.

Citing an unnamed Canadian federal official, The Canadian Press reported that Web surfing and e-mail among the suspects led to the start of the probe in 2004.

“The Internet was, according to the police, was a very important part of their activities,” Canada’s ambassador to Washington, Michael Wilson, said in a TV interview.

U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said the operation was “obviously a great success for the Canadians.”

The 17 suspects represent a spectrum of Canadian society, from the unemployed to the college-educated. The 12 adults live in Toronto, Mississauga and Kingston, Ontario.

Police said the suspects, all citizens or residents of Canada, had trained together.

Cpl. Michele Paradis, a spokeswoman for the Mounties, said no more arrests were expected in coming days.

“Once we once analyze and sort through everything that was seized as a result there may be (more arrests),” she said. “At this point we are confident that we have the majority of people.”

Rocco Galati, a lawyer for two of the men from Mississauga, said: “Both of their families are very well-established professionals, well-established families, no criminal pasts whatsoever.

He described Ahmad Ghany, 21, as a Canada-born health sciences graduate of McMaster University whose father, a physician, emigrated from Trinidad and Tobago in 1955.

His other client, Shareef Abdelhaleen, 30, is an unmarried computer programmer who emigrated from Egypt at age 10 with his father, Galati said.

Two suspects, Mohammed Dirie, 22, and Yasim Abdi Mohamed, 24, already are in an Ontario prison serving two-year terms for possession of illegal weapons.

Neighbors said the oldest suspect, Jamal, was often home and did not seem to work regularly, although his wife drove a schoolbus. The couple has three small children, neighbors said.

Brazilian immigrant Jerry Tavares said Jamal was unfriendly and rarely spoke with neighbors.

Lawyers and relatives of other suspects could not be reached for comment Sunday.

Mike McDonnell, an assistant commissioner with the Mounties, said Saturday that the amount of ammonium nitrate acquired by the alleged terror cell was three times that used to blow up the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City in 1995, killing 168 people and injuring more than 800.

The fertilizer is safe by itself, but when mixed with fuel oil or other ingredients, it makes a powerful explosive.

There was no indication that Canadian police altered the fertilizer to make it unusable in a bomb.

The FBI said the Canadian suspects might have had “limited contact” with two men recently arrested on terrorism charges in Georgia. There was no indication Sunday, however, that the 17 detainees were trying to plan an attack in the United States.

Another imam, Aly Hindy, said he knew nine of the suspects and complained that Canada’s spy agency, CSIS, has unfairly targeted his mosque and congregants for years.

“They have been harassed by CSIS agents and this is what they come up with?” Hindy said. “I’m almost sure that most of these people will be freed.”

Engineer Mohammed Abdelhaleen said he feared his son, Shareef, had already been convicted in the court of public opinion.

“He just goes and prays in a mosque,” the father said. “That’s all he does.”

Muslim leaders voiced worries about a backlash.

A mosque in northwest Toronto was vandalized, with 25 windows and three doors smashed, police said.

Mohamed Elmasry, president of the Canadian Islamic Congress, said that he and other Muslim leaders were getting threatening e-mails.

==============================

Muslim leaders divided over existence of extremism in their communities (National Post, 060605)

TORONTO — While Muslim leaders distanced themselves from the extremist ideology said to be behind the sweeping terrorism charges laid on the weekend, some community members say they are seeing more young men attracted to a radical influence.

“So many people in our community think it is not here, that it is nothing to worry about,” said Ahmed Amiruddan, chairman of the Ahlus Sunnah Foundation of Canada. “I keep saying, you have to be careful of extremist ideology. It is in our community. More than 80 per cent of our mosques are being penetrated by these guys,” he said.

Salman Hasan, director of the Islamic Foundation of Toronto, a large Islamic centre, said he has recently found some members of his mosque exhibiting signs of extremism, but dismisses them as misguided young men.

“They were just like other confused young minds that needed love and guidance,” he said Sunday.

Other Muslim community members, however, said the notion of extremist Islamic ideology in Canadian mosques is largely a media concoction.

“We don’t see what you hear (about us) in the media,” said Haroon Salamat, head of the TARIC Islamic Centre of Toronto. Salamat was one of several leaders of the city’s Muslim community at a press conference Sunday, with Toronto police Chief Bill Blair, to condemn the alleged terrorist plans.

When the leaders were asked if they had witnessed talk of extremism in their mosques, Imam Hamid Slimi, leader of the Rexdale mosque that had its front windows smashed in early Sunday morning, said: “Absolutely not.”

“And if any of us ever hear, or have heard, of any of our members speaking about acts of violence or death, we would obviously call the police,” he said.

“Canadian Muslims absolutely condemn any acts of violence, or threats of violence, including terrorism,” said Mohammad Alam, president of the Islamic Foundation of Toronto. “We, as all Canadians, are shocked by the recent arrests of young Muslim men and teenagers and the very serious allegations against them.”

The actions of these men “do not reflect the ideology of the Muslim faith,” said Abdul Patel, co-chair of Blair’s Muslim consultative committee.

“We should not (all) be brush-painted with such a broad brush.”

Blair said he has instructed his divisional commanders to reach out to Muslim community leaders and “increase their patrols in and around mosques and Muslim community centres.”

Aly Hindy, Imam at the Salaheddin Islamic Centre in suburban Scarborough, Ont., said the charges are politically motivated and anti-Muslim.

“This is an attack on the Muslim community. Canada has the best Muslim community we are very safe and peaceful,” said Hindy on the weekend when attending the court appearances for the accused men.

“We are abusing our boys for the sake of pleasing George Bush,” he said outside the courtroom. “The CSIS and RCMP are feeling threatened not of terrorism, but of losing their jobs. They need to create an atmosphere of fear in the country to keep their jobs.”

==============================

Frightened rural Ontario residents describe ‘terror-training camp’ (National Post, 060605)

WASHAGO, Ont. — It was the bursts of automatic gunfire that made the farmer in this tiny central Ontario tourist community think something was amiss as he fed his animals after dark.

“I feed my animals at night,” the farmer said Sunday. “So I’d be outside late at night and I’d heard the gunfire from over there, automatic gunfire. I’d hear rat-a-tat-a-tat-a-tat.

“I just knew there was something wrong about them. It was obvious they were doing some kind of military training.”

The sounds of war were coming from what police now describe as a terrorist training camp on an isolated property just outside Washago, about 150 kilometres north of Toronto.

Late last year, residents began noticing groups of as many as a dozen men, dressed in camouflage clothing, drifting into town. The strangers drove up from Toronto in three or four vehicles at a time. They would converge at the property, staying for a week at a time, sometimes longer.

“They were out there almost every other week,” said one neighbour, who like all of the local residents willing to speak with the National Post Sunday, was too frightened to give their names. “I would see like eight of them at a time usually, sometimes as many as a dozen.

“They were all wearing camouflage gear and carrying big bags of equipment coming and going at all times of the day or night.”

The newcomers quickly drew suspicious stares in this small, closely knit rural community on the edge of Ontario’s cottage country.

“You weren’t going to tell me these guys were cottagers or even hunters for goodness sake,” said one woman who lived down a quiet country lane from the group’s makeshift training camp.

“It was kind of hard to miss them,” she added.

The men were using property that belonged to a local described as “a bit of a hermit,” a rocky section of land covered with stands of poplar and red pine, overgrown pasture and swamp.

They would drive down a long dirt lane, through a gate marked No Hunting Or Trespassing and set up tents, obstacle courses and firing ranges throughout the sprawling property.

There is little sign now of what police allege was a training camp for a group of Toronto-area men charged on the weekend with plotting terrorist attacks in Southern Ontario.

All that remains is a derelict building with its roof partially collapsed and a missing front door, which may have been the door shown by police at a Saturday RCMP news conference to announce the arrests. Police believe the door, riddled with bullet holes, may have been used for target practice.

It is believed the building was used as a makeshift headquarters for the training, which began late last fall and continued until last weekend.

Local residents said there were increasingly alarming signs that something illegal was happening at the property.

Finally, late last December, one neighbour decided he had had enough and called police.

“You can tell when someone’s suspicious,” the man said. “They were up to no good, that’s for sure.”

Police quickly honed in on the camp, setting up surveillance cameras in nearby rural mailboxes and in barns overlooking the entrance to the property.

“The police were all over these guys,” said the farmer. “They had cameras all over the place, taking pictures of everyone coming and going from there and helicopters flying over almost every day.”

One resident said the men gave a thin cover story to explain their activities.

“They told (the property owner), they were doing extreme camping, whatever that’s supposed to mean,” the man said. “Pretty extreme camping if you ask me.”

Everyone in the area said they were shocked and worried by revelations of what was happening in their midst.

“This is not small time - these guys were into some big-time stuff,” said one neighbour. “It’s scary to think they were just down the road.”

Bill Duffy, the mayor of Ramara Township, which includes the community of Washago, said he didn’t know about the activities at the camp, but added that he was not surprised given the area’s remoteness and rugged terrain.

In fact, marijuana-grow operations have been springing up in the areas during recent years.

“I had no inkling that was going on in my township,” Duffy said. “But it doesn’t really surprise me.”

“There’s a lot of rural area, a lot of back roads and a lot of isolated properties. This is kind of the perfect spot for something like this.

“We have a lot of problems with people growing marijuana out in the back concessions,” he added. “It’s a rugged, back-hills area. It’s easy to hide a grow-op. But terrorism is something new around here.”

==============================

It’s the Jihad, stupid (townhall.com, 060607)

by Michelle Malkin

Canadian law enforcement officials should be proud of busting a reputed Islamic terrorist network that may span seven nations. Instead, our northern neighbors are trying their damnedest to whitewash the jihadi ties that bind the accused plotters and their murder-minded peers around the world.

We live on a doomed continent of ostriches.

A Royal Canadian Mounted Police official coined the baneful phrase “broad strata” to describe the segment of Canadian society from whence Qayyum Abdul Jamal and his fellow adult suspects Fahim Ahmad, Zakaria Amara, Asad Ansari, Shareef Abdelhaleen, Mohammed Dirie, Yasim Abdi Mohamed, Jahmaal James, Amin Mohamed Durrani, Abdul Shakur, Ahmad Mustafa Ghany and Saad Khalid came.

“Broad”? I suppose it is so if one defines “broad” to mean more than one spelling variation of Mohammed or Jamal. Or perhaps, as Internet humorist Jim Treacher (jimtreacher.com) suggests, “broad” refers to the “strata” of the suspects’ beard lengths.

Undeterred by the obvious, Toronto police chief Bill Blair assured the public that the Muslim suspects “were motivated by an ideology based on politics, hatred and terrorism, and not on faith. . . . I am not aware of any mosques that these individuals were influenced by.” Well, Chief Blindspot, try the Al-Rahman Islamic Center for Islamic Education. That’s the Canadian storefront mosque where eldest jihadi suspect Qayyum Abdul Jamal is, according to his own lawyer, a prayer leader and active member — along with many of the other Muslim males arrested in the sweep.

Many clueless North Americans remain shocked, shocked, that jihadis live among them — despite the open secret of our northern neighbor’s reputation as an Islamic terrorist safe haven. A cloud of befuddlement looms. The Toronto Star reports, with jaw-dropping dim-wittedness, that “it is difficult to find a common denominator” among those who would kill us.

Pass me a clue-by-four: It’s the jihad, stupid. It’s been going on since before the Crusades. And it continues under our noses.

The Canadian plot has been tied to the arrests of two young Georgia Muslim men earlier this year. One is Ehsanul Islam Sadequee. Note to editors: please do not substitute “Islam” with the word “Peace.”

Sadequee and Syed Haris Ahmed traveled to Toronto last March and met with several other targets of a Joint Terrorism Task Force probe. They discussed terrorist strikes on oil refineries and military bases, and “plotted how to disable the Global Positioning System.” Ahmed went on to Pakistan in an effort to obtain “Islamic schooling” at a terrorist training camp, according to an FBI affidavit.

The ranks of the infidel-annihilating plotters among us are legion.

In May, Shahawar Matin Siraj was convicted of plotting to blow up the Herald Square subway station in New York City. He caught the attention of law enforcement after ranting against the United States at a local Islamic bookstore.

Also last month, Virginia Death Row inmate and Nation of Islam convert John Allen Mohammed was convicted of six Maryland murders from his fall 2002 Beltway-area criminal spree. His brainwashed Muslim protege, Lee Malvo, testified that the duo plotted to kill children, cops and pregnant women — and to recruit and train 140 homeless men at a Canadian compound who would commit mass terror in cities across America.

In April, a federal jury convicted 23-year-old Hamid Hayat, a Lodi, Calif., man, of attending a terrorist training camp in Pakistan and returning to the U.S. to commit violent jihad against his fellow citizens.

In March, Iranian-born U.S. citizen Mohammed Reza Taheri-azar drove a rented Jeep Cherokee into a mass of students on the campus of the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill to avenge U.S. actions against Muslims around the world. “I live with the holy Koran as my constitution for right and wrong and definition of injustice,” the UNC engineering grad wrote.

Last summer, officials busted a terrorist plot to attack infidels at military and Jewish sites in Los Angeles on the fourth anniversary of 9/11 or the Jewish holy days. It was devised by militant Muslim converts of Jam’iyyat Ul-Islam Is-Saheeh (Arabic for “Assembly of Authentic Islam”) who had sworn allegiance to violent jihad at California’s New Folsom State Prison.

No common denominator? Please extract your infidel heads from the blinding sands before you lose them.

==============================

Monitor the mosques (townhall.com, 060607)

by Ben Shapiro

On June 2 and 3, Canadian law enforcement in Toronto arrested 17 Muslim men for planning terrorist attacks on Canadian targets. The leader of the group, Qayyum Abdul Jamal, 43, recruited young Muslim males by speaking at Al-Rahman Islamic Center for Islamic Education, a storefront mosque in Mississauga. Law enforcement officials across the globe are searching for suspects connected to the Toronto 17; American law enforcement has already discovered at least two terrorism suspects who spoke with members of the Canadian terrorist cell.

In May 2004, London authorities arrested hook-handed, one-eyed imam Abu Hamza al-Masri. The United States immediately filed charges against al-Masri and asked that Britain expedite him for trial. Among other terrorist acts, the indictment charged al-Masri with attempting to set up a terrorist cell in Oregon. Al-Masri was also linked to terrorists Zacarias Moussaoui, who was involved in the Sept. 11 plot, and Richard Reid (a.k.a. Tariq Raja and Abdul Rahim), the shoebomber. Al-Masri was the imam of the Finsbury Park Mosque in London, where he used his pulpit to recruit terrorists and preach hate.

In September 2002, American law enforcement arrested six members of a larger terrorist cell in Buffalo, New York. All six were young Muslim men, and all six had attended terrorist training in Afghanistan. The leader of the group, Kamal Derwish, had recruited all six arrested members by speaking at his local mosque in Lackawanna. All six men pled guilty to terrorism charges.

Mohammed Atta, one of the Sept. 11 hijackers, used a mosque in Hamburg, Germany to network with potential recruits, including Ramzi Binalshibh, who would act as a coordinator for the attacks. Two of the potential Sept. 11 terrorists, Nawaf al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Mihdhar, hooked up with an imam at Rabat Mosque, Anwar Aulaqi; Aulaqi would later aid al-Hazmi and Mihdhar’s replacement, Hani Hanjour, in relocating east as Sept. 11 approached.

Mosques across the globe have provided material aid to terrorist groups ranging from al-Qaeda to Islamic Jihad to Hezbollah to Hamas. Muslim terrorists use mosques as networking sites and often as recruitment centers for future terrorist comrades. There is no doubt that law enforcement should be heavily scrutinizing the membership and administration of mosques. Doing so before Sept. 11 could have prevented that catastrophe, just as scrutiny of a small, seemingly insignificant storefront mosque may have prevented major terrorist attacks in Canada. Muslim terrorists are, above all, religious. They will attend mosques, even if only to pray. Forget racial profiling—monitoring mosques is simple common sense.

Leaders in the Muslim community don’t seem to get it. “People are suspicious and there’s anger,” complains Aly Hindy, imam at the Toronto-based Salaheddin Islamic Center in Scarborough. “We are being targeted not because of what we’ve done but because of who we are and what we believe in.”

No doubt this is true to some extent. But that is the difference between prevention of crime and after-the-fact investigation of crime. For attempts to remain attempts, suspects must be stopped in the inchoate processes leading up to attacks. Prevention is undoubtedly the only option if civilized nations wish to preserve their citizenries from the sadistic barbarism of our enemies. Monitoring mosques is the simplest and most effective way of preventing terrorist attacks. Many imams are trustworthy; many mosques are clean. Nonetheless, law enforcement must pursue a strategy of “trust, but verify.” Lives depend on it.

==============================

What did Canadians do to deserve this? (townhall.com, 060608)

by Clifford D. May

Are you surprised that terrorists appear to have set their sights on such unlikely targets as the Parliament building in Ottawa and the Canadian Broadcasting Corp. in Toronto? Astonished that anyone would even consider sawing off the head of a Canadian Prime Minister? Are you thinking: What could anyone have against free, democratic, liberal, multicultural, diverse and tolerant Canada?

The question answers itself. Freedom, democracy, liberalism, multiculturalism, diversity and tolerance – these are precisely the attributes that Militant Islamists find most offensive.

This reality is difficult for some people to fathom. It shouldn’t be. The Nazis disdained liberal societies as decadent. The Communists rejected democratic values as bourgeois. Now Militant Islamists regard Western nations as blasphemous. This is old totalitarian wine in new bottles.

Sayed Qutb, the Marx of Militant Islamism, stated unequivocally: “Truth and falsehood cannot coexist on earth...the liberating struggle of jihad does not cease until all religion belongs to God.” Looking at the world through such eyes, freedom, tolerance and democratic values are not virtues – they are symptoms of weakness and moral decline.

In the Islamist perception, Canadians have failed to distinguish between right and wrong, have refused to discriminate between monotheists on the one hand, and infidels, idolaters and polytheists on the other. And Canada awards to its citizens rights and powers that belong exclusively to God.

Those who know God’s will have an obligation to spread His message to the benighted masses. That can be accomplished with sermons; or with bombs. History suggests the latter can vastly increase the persuasiveness of the former.

No doubt, Canada’s Militant Islamists have other grievances as well. It has been reported that those arrested last week planned to take hostages and demand the withdrawal of Canadian troops in Afghanistan.

Militant Islamists do not subscribe to the fashionable view that the smashing of the Taliban was justifiable in a way that toppling Saddam Hussein was not. On the contrary, they believe the Taliban provided just the sort of leadership nations such as Canada ought to be enjoying.

Those arrested last week were acting locally but linking globally. According to Canada’s National Post, “before police tactical teams began their sweeps around Toronto on Friday, at least 18 related arrests had already taken place in Canada, the United States, Britain, Bosnia, Denmark, Sweden, and Bangladesh.” That doesn’t mean those arrested are part of a global organization. It does suggest they are part of a global movement. You don’t defeat such movements by forfeiting battlefields or attempting appeasement. How you do defeat such movements we are only beginning to figure out – one must hope.

The suspects arrested in Canada are all Canadian citizens or legal residents. Early reports insisted they “represent the broad strata of our society” but that description did not withstand scrutiny.

It should be obvious that most Canadian Muslims are not terrorists. It should be equally obvious that Canada’s Muslim community has a serious problem to address. What were these young men taught by the religious leaders in their mosques? Did their neighbors not see where they were heading? Was it sympathy or fear that prevented them from speaking up? If it was fear – fear of whom?

Americans generally expect immigrants to adopt not just American citizenship but also American nationality: to embrace American values, to revere the U.S. Constitution and to learn to speak English. Our more multicultural neighbors to the north have demanded less of those who apply for their passports. Canadians have asked immigrants few questions about their religious and political convictions. Recently, the Canadian government has even been considering allowing Muslims to substitute Islamic Sharia law for civil law. It will be instructive to see if this episode prompts any changes in Canadian thinking.

That is not to suggest that every immigrant to Canada must attempt to become a Molson-drinking, hockey-playing, Dudley Do-Right, proudly pronouncing “z” as zed. But would it be too demanding for Canadians to insist that those who want to make their homes in the Great White North not aspire to be suicide bombers and decapitators of infidels?

Free peoples, if they are to stay free, need to exercise control over their borders. They also need to exercise discretion about who they welcome as neighbors and compatriots.

==============================

North of the border (Washington Times, 060608)

There are important lessons to be learned from the arrests of 17 Canadian Muslims in the plot to attack Ontario landmarks. Canadian prosecutors claim the men plotted to storm the Canadian parliament building in Ottawa, take hostages and behead Prime Minister Stephen Harper if the Canadian government refused to withdraw its 2,300 troops from Afghanistan. The group also considered bombing a nuclear power plant, taking over Canadian Broadcasting Corporation studios in Toronto, targeting the CN Tower and the Toronto Stock Exchange and attacking Canadian Security Intelligence Service facilitiles in Toronto or Ottawa.

As was the case with last July’s London subway bombings, the Canadian arrests remind us that the terrorist threat comes not only from foreign nationals who obtain visas to travel to the West, but from Muslim residents of Western societies who become inculcated with hatred and resentment toward their “home” countries. The latest arrests further undermine the dubious premise that killing or capturing senior al Qaeda terrorists like Osama bin Laden or Abu Musab Zarqawi (desirable as that would be) constitutes some kind of magic bullet that will defeat the Islamofascists.

The best news to come out of this case is that there is extensive U.S.-Canadian cooperation in combatting terrorism — cooperation that will be essential to preventing future attacks on North America. Canadian authorities learned of the existence of this alleged jihadist cell through monitoring radical Islamist Web sites through a surveillance program similar to the National Security Agency’s much-maligned system of monitoring foreign phone calls to the United States placed by persons with al Qaeda links. In the fall of 2004, Canadian agents noticed that some youths were spewing stridently anti-Western rhetoric in a chat room, and that some teens were posting to radical Muslim Web sites. By November, the investigators, believing they had obtained enough information to launch a criminal probe, brought in the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. In March, two Americans living in Georgia who had been communicating with the Ontario jihadists, took a bus to Toronto where they discussed possible strategic targets to attack on American soil. Those Americans are in federal custody.

As Canadian forces stepped up operations in Afghanistan, the group of jihadists discussed hitting a Canadian military base. Police decided to arrest cell members June 2, when they attempted to purchase three times the amount of ammonium nitrate that was used in the April 1995 terrorist bombing in Oklahoma City.

While the Canadians are to be commended for their vigilance in breaking up what appears to have been a major terrorist plot, there are storm clouds on the horizon: The most serious ones are that Canada is becoming a refuge for jihadists and that it has been making cuts to CSIS operations. Last month, for example, Deputy CSIS Director Jack Hooper told Canadian senators that about 90% of immigration applicants from Pakistan and Afghanistan have not been adequately screened. Janice Kephart, who led the team that investigated border security for the September 11 commission, says there are at least 350 known jihadists and more than 50 terrorist groups in Canada, and their members could cross the porously defended border with the United States at any time — moreover these jihadists speak perfect English and have no difficulty fitting into Canadian society.

The No. 1 lesson is clear: Despite the Canadian arrests, a huge security threat remains on our northern border.

==============================

Zarqawi and His Role Model: The lessons of two parallel jihadist lives. (Weekly Standard, 060609)

HISTORY NEVER REPEATS ITSELF precisely, but it often rhymes. Coalition forces killed Abu Musab al-Zarqawi in a safe house just outside Baghdad. More than 800 years earlier, the life of Zarqawi’s role model, Nur ad-Din Zanki (1118-1174), came to an end in Damascus, another power center of the ancient Islamic world. The long overlooked connection between the two men should provide a note of instruction for the future in dealing with the Iraq insurgency.

Most tyrants and terrorists are inspired by a charismatic figure who triumphed in a heroic past. Hitler looked back to Napoleon and Frederick the Great. Lenin measured his achievements against the record of the Paris Commune of 1870.

Zarqawi’s role model was twelfth century Arab fighting king Nur ad-Din Zanki. Zanki had two missions in life: to drive the Crusaders from Arab lands and to crush Shiite rulers. Few understood the importance that Zarqawi placed on him. In interviews with Iraq and Zarqawi specialists at the State Department, Defense Department and West Point’s Combating Terrorism Center, we found no one who understood the importance that Zarqawi placed on Zanki.

A survey of the available literature on Zarqawi in English shows virtually no reference to Zarqawi’s relationship to Zanki. In the Arab world, though, there has been a fair amount of discussion about the two men.

We recently acquired a new, never-before-translated Arabic-language book on Zarqawi, Al Qaeda’s Second Generation, by Jordanian journalist Fouad Hussein, who has been linked to Hezbollah’s al-Manar television network. An independent translation that we commissioned reveals that

Zanki was in fact Zarqawi’s ideological guiding star. Hussein’s book reprints a long personal communication from Saif al-Adel, who heads the military wing of al Qaeda, about Zarqawi. Hussein and al-Adel put great emphasis on the fact that Zanki is Zarqawi’s role model.

“One cannot understand Zarqawi and cannot attempt to predict the future of his organization and the next steps that it will take without being familiar with Nur ad-Din Zanki. Zarqawi was simply fascinated by Nur ad-Din,” al-Adel told Hussein. “Regardless of where he was, Zarqawi would always look for books about Nur ad-Din. The best presents he ever got from his acquaintances were history books that would lengthily describe the jihad that Nur ad-Din Zanki waged against the crusaders and the triumphs that he led his followers to.”

Hussein, who is well-acquainted with al Qaeda leaders, contends that Zarqawi made strategic decisions based on his devotion to Zanki: “This fact enables us to answer the proverbial question of why Zarqawi, of al Qaeda leaders, specifically chose to settle in Iraq after the American military occupied Afghanistan. Perhaps he wants to begin liberating Iraq from Mosul and to spread the tawheed [Islamic monotheism] in Syria, Northern Iraq and Egypt as a preliminary step before liberating Jerusalem. Perhaps it is possible for us to adopt the theory that says that those who closely study history sometimes take on their heroes’ roles and follow their footsteps in order to reshape the course of history.”

“By reading Nur ad-Din [Zanki]’s biography we can understand why Zarqawi chose to trust Syrians from Humaa, Allazeekia, Halab and the Jazeera area of northern Syria first. After reading Nur ad-Din’s story we finally realize why he chose northern Iraq that lies on the banks of the Euphrates as a first stronghold from which to attack the American occupiers of Iraq,” Hussein writes.

Saif al-Adel told Hussein, “I believe that what Abu Musab [Zarqawi] had read about Nur ad-Din [Zanki] and the fact that he started off in Mosul, Iraq greatly influenced his decision to move to Iraq after the Islamic regime in Afghanistan had collapsed.”

ZANKI’S FATHER governed both Aleppo and Mosul. Zanki himself ranged over northern Iraq and Syria (as did Zarqawi). Shortly after his father was assassinated, Zanki devoted himself to vanquishing the Crusaders, a bloody goal he accomplished in Syria through a series of daring raids. After a few reverses in battle, Zanki became reflective and more religious. He was soon noted for his piety and those who praised him received large sums to build new mosques and schools.

Zanki’s newfound religiosity also led him to a new enemy—the Shiites. Zanki’s wars against the Shiites are legendary, culminating in the toppling of the Fatimid caliphate.

When Zanki captured Egypt, he found an extensive bureaucratic state run by Shiites. He took little time destroying it. He began systematically replacing Shiite officials with Sunni appointees. The Shiite form of the call to prayer and Isma’ili lectures at al-Azhar University and elsewhere were eliminated. Sunni jurists replaced Shiite ones throughout the country. When, two years later, Zanki’s viceroy had the sermon read in Cairo in the name of the Sunni caliph, denouncing the Fatimids as infidels, two centuries of Shiite rule officially ended.

Zanki’s belief, summed up by British Arab historians David Luscombe and Jonathan Riley-Smith, that “the jihad against heresy must be pursued as vigorously as the

jihad against the crusaders,” has an obvious resonance with the language of heresy that was mobilized by Zarqawi against the Shiites in Iraq.

To be sure, Zarqawi, like most jihadists, also derived inspiration from Saladin, who battled Richard the Lionhearted and recaptured Jerusalem for the Muslims. But this was likely complicated for Zarqawi, given Zanki’s relationship with Saladin.

Saladin served as Zanki’s general in his military campaigns against the Fatimids, before robbing Zanki of his opportunity to be remembered as the man who reconquered Jerusalem—an honor that Saladin wanted for himself. When Zanki tried to organize a campaign against Jerusalem, Saladin offered a camel train of excuses, waiting until Zanki eventually died. Then Saladin struck.

Zanki’s death, and the subsequent defection of many of his allies to Saladin’s side, helped paper over the differences between Zanki and his more illustrious successor, giving the anti-Crusader struggle an exaggerated sense of continuity.

LIKE ZANKI, Zarqawi was a fighter first, and became religious only after personal reversals. In his Jordanian hometown of Zarqa, Zarqawi was known as a thug, a brawler, a gang enforcer. He was frequently arrested for petty crimes. He was fired from the only job he ever had after a few weeks, leaving him destitute and unmarriageable. The post-Soviet feuds in Afghanistan drew him there in 1993, where he immersed himself in radical Islam.

THE CONNECTION BETWEEN Zanki and Zarqawi should have been viewed as more than a historical footnote: It could have opened a new window into our fight in Iraq.

One aspect of Zarqawi’s jihad that would have been illuminated was his selection of northern Iraq as a central stage for his fight against the Americans. Zanki’s prominence in Zarqawi’s imagination may also have provided clues about where he intended to strike next—such as trying to emulate his idol’s expansion into Syria and Egypt.

And realizing this connection could have opened further opportunities for the United States. Since Zarqawi was doubtless aware of why his role model failed in retaking Jerusalem, the U.S. military and intelligence community might have embarked on a “Project Saladin” psy-ops mission to make Zarqawi suspect that his closest lieutenants’ ambitions would produce similar betrayal. Zanki’s legendary hatred of the Shiites and eradication of that sect’s influence from the Fatimid caliphate might also have been used to drive a wedge between Zarqawi and his Iranian Shiite allies.

Killing Zarqawi does not end the war against al Qaeda in Iraq. A successor will emerge, even if he is not of Zarqawi’s caliber. Hopefully, American intelligence will learn about the historical role models of his successor, and use it to their advantage.

Richard Miniter is the author of two New York Times bestsellers, Losing bin Laden and Shadow War. Daveed Gartenstein-Ross is a Washington, D.C.-based counterterrorism consultant whose first book, My Year Inside Radical Islam, will be published in Winter 2007 by Tarcher/Penguin.

==============================

A Shattering of Memes: The career of Zarqawi’s likely successor highlights Iraqi ties to al Qaeda. (Weekly Standard, 060611)

WITH THE DEATH of Abu Musab Zarqawi, a great deal of attention has focused on Abu Ayyub al-Masri, the Egyptian-born terrorist that Major General William Caldwell singled out as the “most logical” choice by al Qaeda in Iraq to replace Zarqawi. What all of this attention has missed, however, is what it means concerning U.S. pre-war claims about Iraqi collaboration with al Qaeda.

According to the information provided by the U.S. military, al-Masri traveled to Iraq in 2002 before Zarqawi and established the first al Qaeda cell in the Baghdad area. From both his nationality and connections with al Qaeda second-in-command Ayman al-Zawahiri, it can be reasonably concluded that al-Masri was a member of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, the group that al-Zawahiri headed prior to his merger with bin Laden’s organization. This is significant, given the 9/11 Commission report’s cryptic note that al-Zawahiri had “ties of his own” to the former Iraqi regime and al-Masri’s presence in Saddam’s Baghdad.

With the advantage of hindsight, it appears that al-Masri was one of two “senior Egyptian Islamic Jihad associates” that then-CIA Director George Tenet referenced to Senator Jack Reed before the Senate Armed Services Committee:

SEN. REED: I—I—the issue is—and I want to be clear. I understand your response. This issue is his relationship to Saddam Hussein, to Baghdad, to—if he is operating in concert explicitly with Saddam Hussein, or is there for the—his own convenience and safety—can you comment on that?

TENET: The argument—the specific line of evidence and argument we have made is they’re providing safe haven to him. And we know this because a foreign government approached the Iraqis twice about Zarqawi’s presence in Baghdad, and he disappeared. The second troubling piece of this, sir, is, as I mentioned yesterday, the two dozen other associates and two senior Egyptian Islamic Jihad associates that’s indistinguishable from al Qaeda because they merged there. And the third piece I’d say to you is Baghdad’s not Geneva. It is inconceivable that these people are sitting there without the Iraqi intelligence services knowledge of the fact that there is a safe haven being provided by people to people who believe it’s fairly comfortable to operate there. That’s as far as I can take the story today.

SEN. REED: All right. Following up, the presence—all of these individuals you’ve cited are in Baghdad, based on your information?

TENET: Yes.

SEN. REED: Do you have any information that, beyond providing the safe haven, as you seem to have clear evidence, that the Iraqi regime is facilitating their operations?

TENET: That’s what we’re trying to understand more of, sir.

It should be noted in the exchange cited above that Sen. Reed acknowledged to Director Tenet that there appeared to be “clear evidence” that the Iraqi regime was providing safe haven to Zarqawi and two senior Egyptian Islamic Jihad associates (one of whom was al-Masri). Secretary Powell later described these same individuals before the U.N. Security Council as having “established a base of operations” in Baghdad where they could “coordinate the movement of people, money and supplies into and throughout Iraq . . . they’ve now been operating freely in the capital for more than eight months.”

Powell also alleged that “We know these affiliates are connected to Zarqawi because they remain even today in regular contact with his direct subordinates, including the poison cell plotters, and they are involved in moving more than money and materiel.” This is perhaps the most alarming accusation. The State Department’s 2002 Patterns of Global Terrorism report notes that, “In the past year, al-Qaida operatives in northern Iraq concocted suspect chemicals under the direction of senior al-Qaida associate Abu Mus’ab al-Zarqawi and tried to smuggle them into Russia, Western Europe, and the United States for terrorist operations.”

CRITICS OF THE ADMINISTRATION claim that the presence of Zarqawi and his associates in Baghdad, like the body of administration claims of Iraqi collaboration with Zarqawi, were the result of “cherry-picked” or manipulated intelligence. The bipartisan Senate Select Intelligence Committee, whose members include several of the administration’s most strident critics, found otherwise, concluding that “the information provided by the Central Intelligence Agency for the terrorism portion of Secretary Powell’s speech was carefully vetted by both terrorism and region analysts” and that “none of the portrayals of the intelligence reporting included in Secretary Powell’s speech differed in any significant way from earlier assessments published by the Central Intelligence Agency.”

TWO FURTHER ASPECTS of al-Masri’s career cut deeply into critics’ understanding of Zarqawi and his organization. While some have alleged that bin Laden and Zarqawi existed as rivals prior to the invasion of Iraq, this interpretation is belied by General Caldwell’s statement that Zarqawi first met al-Masri at

al-Farouk, an al Qaeda training camp in Afghanistan, and has had a “very close relationship” with him since arriving in Iraq.

The acknowledgement by Caldwell that al-Masri was in contact with al-Zawahiri likewise belies critics’ charges that no real connection exists between al Qaeda in Iraq and its parent organization headed up by Osama bin Laden. See the calls among Zarqawi’s online followers for bin Laden to appoint a new emir of al Qaeda in Iraq so that their jihad can continue. Clearly, whatever the differences between Zarqawi and bin Laden, they were more than willing to cooperate when it came to killing Americans.

The potential rise of Abu Ayyub al-Masri in al Qaeda in Iraq provides a welcome opportunity for the administration to both clarify misperceptions concerning the nature and identity of our enemies and rebut critics who falsely accuse the administration of having brought terrorism to Iraq. Whether or not the administration chooses to seize this opportunity will be another matter altogether.

Dan Darling is a counterterrorism consultant.

==============================

Now for the Bad News: Zarqawi is dead, but the damage he did remains. (Weekly Standard, 060613)

ABU MUSAB AL ZARQAWI is among the least interesting Islamic terrorists since modern Islamic terrorism took shape in Iran and Egypt in the 1950s and ‘60s. Compared with Osama bin Laden, with his elegant prose, his appreciation for redolent historical Muslim narrative, his seemingly conscious imitation of the Prophet Muhammad, and his refined, almost feminine movements, Zarqawi was Islamist trailer trash, a crude man whose love of violence was unvarnished, organic, perhaps perversely sexual. But Zarqawi was a man of his age: He is a big red dot on the graph charting the Islamic world’s moral free fall since modernity began battering traditional Muslim ethics, with ever-increasing effectiveness after World War One.

It is by no means clear that Zarqawi is near the bottom of this plunge. His joy in massacring infidels—along with all the Muslims the extremists deem apostates—could even become the defining feature of bin Ladenism in the future. Zarqawi’s death is a cause for jubilation, especially among Iraq’s Shiites, whom he zealously slaughtered. No single man did more to bring on the sectarian strife that is crippling Iraq. If the Shiites give up on the idea of Iraqi brotherhood—which grows ever more likely as half-hearted, undermanned American counterinsurgency strategies continue to fail—and grind the Sunni Arab community into dust, possibly provoking a vicious duel among Sunnis and Shiites across the region, Zarqawi can posthumously and proudly take credit.

Zarqawi was tailor-made for post-Saddam Iraq: a barbaric, very modern Sunni fundamentalist in a society pulverized and militarized by Saddam Hussein. Through

oppression and support, Saddam had energized Sunni militancy. Starting in the late 1980s, the Butcher of Baghdad became one of the great mosque builders of Islamic history, and under his domes, Islamic fundamentalists increasingly gathered. Long before Saddam fell, a reinvigorated Sunni Islamic identity was replacing the desiccated, secular Baath party as a, if not the, lodestone of the Sunni community. Always looking outward toward the larger Sunni Arab world (and away from the Shiite Arabs and Sunni Kurds, who comprise about 80% of Iraq’s population), Iraq’s Sunni Arabs were playing catch-up with their foreign brethren, who had already downgraded, if not buried, secular Arab nationalism as an inspiring ideology and given birth to bin Ladenism.

Zarqawi lasted as long as he did in Iraq because he had many sympathizers, probably even among those who were revolted by his gruesome tactics, often aimed at Shiite women and children. Zarqawi and his men were regularly, so it is said, obliged to move their headquarters and areas of operation because of Iraqi Sunni resistance to his methods and his overbearing ways. This may well be true. But Iraq’s Sunni insurgents could have easily killed him and his foreign and Iraqi jihadist allies. Their numbers and means dwarfed his. They could have betrayed him long ago, to either his American or his Iraqi enemies. Sunni Arab Iraq is a region of villages, towns, and cities surrounded by great swaths of desert where city kids, like Zarqawi and his foreign holy warriors, cannot sustain themselves. (Important rule about modern Islamic holy warriors: They are urbanites who know not camels.)

The Sunni will to power is deep-rooted and ferociously strong in Iraq. Underestimating this force and failing to confront it head on early in the occupation remains perhaps the single greatest analytical error of the U.S. military, the Central Intelligence Agency, and the Coalition Provisional Authority under Ambassador L. Paul Bremer. It distorts and has so far defined the ethics of the Iraqi Sunnis as a community.

Their belief in Sunni supremacy has made mincemeat of those Americans and secularized Iraqis who were certain that Iraqis thought of themselves as Iraqis first, without reference to sectarian loyalties. Sunni hubris has made compromises with the Kurdish and especially the Arab Shiite communities extraordinarily difficult. Whether it be dividing oil wealth, assigning senior positions in government, or striking the balance between purging and tolerating the former Baathists, Iraq’s Sunnis could surely have cut a better deal without the Sunni insurgency. More than any other factor, the insurgency has converted Iraq’s traditional Shiite clergy from hostility to federalism in Iraq to neutrality or even sympathy. Zarqawi understood the dynamic here and did all that he could to ensure that sectarian sensitivities were inflamed after Saddam’s fall.

It would be comforting to believe that Zarqawi’s atrocities have made the Iraqi Sunnis more reflective. The Jordanian holy warrior forced them to look into the abyss. Certainly, killing Zarqawi is both a tactical and philosophical triumph. Contrary to much left-wing mythology, there is not an endless supply of operational talent in third-world “liberation” movements, be they religiously or secularly based. Chop the head off military organizations, even when they are fairly rag-tag, and you can damage them severely, perhaps mortally. The ongoing political process in Iraq, which is drawing in more Sunnis, may have had something to do with Zarqawi’s death.

His demise will give Iraqi Sunnis a moment to pause, reflect, and perhaps helpfully rewrite their own history. It would be too much to ask for the leaders of this community to confess the extent to which they contributed to the Zarqawi phenomenon in Iraq; certainly the surrounding Arab Sunni world seems quite willing to accept that decent men and women should experience frissons whenever bin Laden launches lethal attacks on the United States.

Few Sunni Arab intellectuals have responded with joy to the news of Zarqawi’s death. Many seem uncomfortable with the tactics Zarqawi used (so, too, it appears, were bin Laden and his Egyptian second, Ayman al-Zawahiri, the tactically sensitive moral conscience of al Qaeda). Far fewer appear to be uncomfortable with Zarqawi’s overall objective—humbling the Americans, the Shiites, and the Kurds. We will see in the coming weeks whether a serious, critical discussion of Zarqawi’s barbaric treatment of the Shiites develops and who abstains from calling him a martyr.

If the Iraqi Arab Sunnis can stop speaking sympathetically of foreign jihadists, then they might be able to begin to question the ethic of martyrdom that fuels their insurgency against the new order in Iraq. If they can stop using the specter of violence as a negotiating strategy, then they might even be able to abort the growing Shiite violence against them before it consumes the country, destroying the clerically backed effort to create a functioning democracy. This may already be impossible, now that Shiite militias are terrifying the Sunni community. Again, Zarqawi knew what he was doing: Reconciliation would be brutally difficult once the Shiites started doing to Sunnis what the Baathists and the Sunni insurgents and holy warriors had been doing to the Shiites for years.

The dimensions of Zarqawi’s possible success are thus enormous—greater than what bin Laden accomplished on September 11. Zarqawi was the right man, with the right tactics, at the right moment. In all probability, he would not have mattered if the United States had actually occupied the Sunni Triangle after the deposing of Saddam Hussein, thereby giving the fallen Sunni Arab community a chance to breathe before they became sentimentally and physically enmeshed by the homegrown insurgency and imported holy war.

But Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld chose not to send more troops to Iraq after the fall of Saddam, even after it became blindingly obvious that the insurgents, not the Americans, controlled the roads throughout the Sunni Triangle. General John Abizaid, the commander of American forces in the Middle East, married Rumsfeld’s mania for new-age warfare and his lack of interest in post-Saddam Iraqi society with a very new-age, “light footprint” approach to counterinsurgency.

As this thinking has it, American forces, if deployed in large numbers, are more likely to provoke trouble than secure the peace. We are, as General Abizaid likes to say, “antibodies” in the Muslim Middle East. This is an odd position to hold after three years of ever-worsening insurgency—especially when violence has dropped in Iraq every time the Bush administration has increased U.S. troop levels for a national election. It’s an odd position to hold after the victory in Tal Afar, where the American command saturated the town with U.S. troops, and the freed Sunni Arab residents were thankful.

It may well be that the manner of Zarqawi’s death will send the wrong signal to the U.S. military, which seems determined to continue its “intelligence-driven” counterinsurgency. Good intelligence was followed by laser-guided munitions—just the kind of action that warms Secretary Rumsfeld’s heart. But neither we nor the Iraqis are going to find salvation through good intelligence and smart bombs.

If we continue on this “easy” path, we will only guarantee that Abu Musab al Zarqawi’s name will endure. Odds are decent that a historian looking back on our sojourn in Mesopotamia and the Iraqis’ valiant effort to create a democracy on the ruins of Saddam’s totalitarianism will find on our epitaph some tribute to Zarqawi, our monument no doubt safely inside the Green Zone, far from the carnage that this most savage of terrorists fathered.

Reuel Marc Gerecht is a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and a contributing editor to The Weekly Standard.

==============================

No Posthumous Victory: for Zarqawi (Weekly Standard, 060613)

ON WEDNESDAY, June 7, U.S. military forces, in President Bush’s words, “delivered justice to the most wanted terrorist in Iraq,” Abu Musab al Zarqawi.

Before considering the possible implications for the war in Iraq and the global struggle against terror, we should pause to celebrate so striking an instance of injustice avenged, and justice vindicated. The unjust—even the barbarically unjust—prevail all too often in this world. It is good for civilized people to see, as Marshall Wittmann put it, that “evil has suffered a setback.” In the blunt words of Paul Bigley of the United Kingdom, whose brother Ken was captured and beheaded by Zarqawi, the terrorist “deserved what he got and may he rot in hell.”

One might also pause to point out that if we had followed the advice of those who want to pull out from Iraq, Abu Musab al Zarqawi would today be alive and well, and triumphant.

What are the implications for the war in Iraq? That depends on some factors that we can’t yet know with any confidence—the resilience of al Qaeda’s leadership in Iraq, for one thing, and the true sentiment among the Sunnis of Iraq. But it also depends on what we do. Do we take advantage of this opportunity politically and militarily? Do we pursue the enemy aggressively now when it may be rattled and divided? Or do we do look on this as an excuse to begin to get out—as John Kerry and many others are already advocating? If we do the latter, we

will give Zarqawi a victory in death that he could not achieve in life.

What needs to be done now seems clear: a renewed offensive to wipe out what remains of Zarqawi’s organization and to defeat the insurgency. We highly recommend the strategy laid out three weeks ago in these pages by Frederick W. Kagan (see “A Plan for Victory in Iraq,” May 29) for a comprehensive execution of the clear/hold/build approach in the Euphrates Valley, to be accomplished by Iraqi and U.S. forces working together—something that cannot be accomplished if we draw down U.S. forces. Some counterinsurgency experts would put a priority on sending additional troops to establish order in Baghdad.

But whatever operational choices are made, now is the time to take our best shot at really improving the situation on the ground in Iraq. If this requires 90% of the president’s time, if it requires stressing the Pentagon and shaking up business as usual elsewhere in the administration—so be it. There is no other successful path forward for the Bush administration than victory in Iraq.

It is also the time to revisit the case for the war. Zarqawi is a perfect reminder of why we had to fight in Iraq. Would we be safer if he were living there, under Saddam’s protection, securely planning attacks around the world and working on his chemical and biological weapons projects? Zarqawi’s life and death remind us that we are engaged in a global struggle. When he died, Palestinian foreign minister Mahmoud al-Zahar, a leader of Hamas, linked the “resistance” in Iraq to that against Israel, deploring what he termed the “assassination” of Zarqawi. As Saul Singer noted in the Jerusalem Post, we are “witnessing the seamlessness of jihad. Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran, and al Qaeda come from different sides of the Sunni-Shiite divide, but they agree on the need to wage jihad against the West, particularly Israel and the United States. The death of Zarqawi saddens all of them, just as it causes encouragement for free peoples everywhere.”

Zarqawi was a cunning and effective leader of the forces of jihadist terror. His brutality against civilians—Shiites mostly, but also Sunnis who wanted to work to create a new Iraq—helped push Iraq dangerously close to a sectarian civil war and ethnic cleansing, and gravely endangered Iraq’s brave experiment in democratic federalism and freedom. But he did not succeed, though the threat he helped create is very much with us.

Al Qaeda’s top priority remains what it was in Ayman al-Zawahiri’s letter to Zarqawi last July: “Expel the Americans from Iraq.” To which, surely, Americans must respond: No posthumous victories for Zarqawi.

==============================

Zarqawi connections (Washington Times, 060613)

In the wake of Abu Musab Zarqawi’s death, mainstream media organs like the New York Times and Newsweek have run chronologies of the archterrorist’s life that omit mention of his stay in Baghdad in 2002, while others, including the Associated Press, have attempted to discredit the Bush administration’s claims that Zarqawi was a link between Iraq and al Qaeda. As Stephen Hayes shows in the Weekly Standard, the AP account is wrong. While the full extent of Zarqawi’s connections with Baghdad are still a matter of debate, it is false to assert, as AP and others have done since Zarqawi’s death, that talk about the connection is little more than “myth-making” on the part of the Bush administration.

According to AP reporter Patrick Quinn’s account, then-Secretary of State Colin Powell’s Feb. 5, 2003, presentation to the U.N. Security Council, in which he cited Zarqawi’s presence in northern Iraq as proof of Saddam Hussein’s links with al Qaeda, was “later debunked by U.S. intelligence officials.” Mr. Quinn was wrong, as Mr. Powell’s statement was actually confirmed by the bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee report. In his remarks before the Security Council, Mr. Powell, (who is not known for pro-war bombast) bluntly informed the council that there was a “sinister nexus between Iraq and the al Qaeda terrorist network, a nexus that combines classic terrorist organizations and modern methods of murder. Iraq today harbors a deadly terrorist network headed by Abu Musab al Zarqawi, an associate and collaborator of Osama bin Laden and his al Qaeda lieutenants.”

The secretary of state mentioned Zarqawi’s terrorist training in Afghanistan, and the fact that he had set up a chemical weapons facility in Kurdish-controlled northern Iraq. But in addition, Mr. Powell noted that in May 2002, Zarqawi traveled to Baghdad for medical treatment and spent two months recuperating there: “During this stay, nearly two dozen extremists converged on Baghdad and established a base of operations there. These al Qaeda affiliates, based in Baghdad, now coordinate the movement of people, money and supplies into and throughout Iraq for his network, and they’ve now been operating freely in the capital for more than eight months.” Saddam Hussein’s aides denied any link with al Qaeda, but this was demonstrably false, Mr. Powell said: “We know these affiliates are connected to Zarqawi because they remain even today in regular contact with his direct subordinates, including his poison cell plotters, and they are involved in moving more than money and material.”

According to the AP story, Mr. Powell’s statement was “debunked.” This is untrue. As noted by the intelligence committee’s July 9, 2004, report on prewar intelligence, the U.N. speech “was carefully vetted” by U.S. officials, and none of the information in the speech “differed in any significant way” from earlier CIA assessments. Indeed, a careful reading of the section of the report dealing with prewar intelligence (much of it blacked out for intelligence reasons) suggests that the Zarqawi connection was just one of many reports of links between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda that U.S. intelligence devoted considerable time to investigating in the years leading up to the war.

==============================

Jordan’s helping hand (Washington Times, 060613)

According to U.S. intelligence sources the Pentagon’s “Task Force 145” tracked the most wanted man in Iraq for a long time, but it was thanks to human intelligence, or HUMINT — more specifically to the work of a Jordanian special forces team operating inside Iraq — that helped nab a man who later led the American and Iraqi special forces to capture Abu Musab Zarqawi.

Earlier reports spoke of very limited Jordanian cooperation in helping track down the Jordanian-born terrorist. However, a Jordanian intelligence source told United Press International that Jordanian Special Forces had been operating inside Iraq for some time. “We had to learn to play the game,” the source told UPI.

In Washington, Jordanian Ambassador Karim Kawar told UPI, “Jordan and the United States have long cooperated in fighting terrorism.”

And as in all epic manhunts, despite the fancy electronic spy gadgetry, the multibillion-dollar satellites in space able to photograph the face of a person back on Earth, in the final analysis it all comes back to the work of a single informant able to provide that critical piece of information needed to crack the case. The informant usually has his own motive — be it revenge, monetary rewards, or for reasons only he knows, and with which he will have to live with the nightmare of having sold a man’s life for just 30 pieces of silver — or the modern equivalent.

In Zarqawi’s case, the U.S. had the Iraqi informant nabbed by the Jordanians, who agreed several months ago to finger Zarqawi’s spiritual adviser to the U.S.-led counterterrorism force. At this point, the United States made use of its TECHINT, or technical intelligence. They identified and were able to monitor the cell phone of the terrorist leader’s imam. Predator planes were brought in to track the spiritual adviser to the safe house where he met Zarqawi. Special teams of Task Force 145 and units of the Iraqi army were also called in to surround the house where the most notorious man in Iraq was hiding out, to ensure he could not escape.

At this point the United States called in an air strike on the house. Two 500-pound bombs were laser-guided to their targets, killing most of the people inside. According to some reports, Zarqawi survived the initial attack. He was picked up and placed on a stretcher by Iraqi troops and died shortly after from his wounds, but not before he was able to utter a few words to his captors as he lay in a stretcher.

Many in the know say it took two months to field the black special forces team that was to target Zarqawi’s Baqouba safe house, much as targeting is done in Afghanistan.

At least six serving U.S. intelligence sources confirmed to UPI that Zarqawi’s death was authentic. But many officials are still showing extreme caution, though U.S. and Iraqi authorities have confirmed the death on the basis of his physical appearance, scars on the body and comparison of fingerprints.

Until last April, no one quite knew what Zarqawi looked like. Not the United States, nor the Iraqis — not even the Israelis. There were no reliable pictures of him available. Like most guerrilla leaders who spend time in the shadows, Zarqawi never liked to be photographed. He was very security-conscious. But then surprisingly, on April 26, 2006, a Web site associated with al Qaeda disseminated a video-recorded message showing his face. Presuming the picture in this video was really that of Zarqawi and that the fingerprints used for comparison really belonged to him, the confirmation of his death should be treated as authentic.

Still, many say it’s too early to determine whether he was really killed by the Americans in an air strike as claimed or by the Iraqi resistance fighters, who had reportedly developed differences with him, and his body thrown away to be subsequently recovered by the American and Iraqi forces. The latter is being investigated as a possibility because since last year, there were indications the al Qaeda leadership in the Pakistan-Afghanistan border region and Iraqi resistance fighters were unhappy over some of the methods adopted by Zarqawi. His virulently anti-Shi’ite diatribe calling for an intersectarian jihad had made even Ayman al-Zawahri, the No. 2 to bin Laden in al Qaeda, very uncomfortable. He had expressed his misgivings in a letter to Zarqawi.

The Iraqi resistance fighters were, according to some, unhappy over Zarqawi’s expanding the Iraqi jihad to foreign territories, such as Jordan. Others disputed his desires to give the jihad a pan-Islamic dimension.

Although some were quick to label Zarqawi the “Arab Che,” Zarqawi lacked the charisma, the dogma and the leadership qualities of Che Guevara. And his anti-Shi’ite vendetta seemed to have caused more bad than good for his cause.

As for the immediate future, intelligence sources told UPI we would probably see in Iraq a denouement similar to what we have been seeing in Saudi Arabia, where every time a leader considered important is killed by the security forces, another person takes up the leadership and keeps the jihad going. The more leaders killed by the Saudi security forces, the more the new leaders who have come up and rallied the cadres and motivated them to keep the jihad going.

Meanwhile bin Laden and Zawahri must be worried about their own security. If they were killed, would their movement survive? And now that Zarqawi is out of the way, the U.S. will certainly renew efforts to find and kill the two top al Qaeda chiefs.

Claude Salhani is international editor for United Press International.

==============================

Why strike Canada? (townhall.com, 060614)

by Joel Mowbray

In the predictable stories reporting the “astonishment” of friends and neighbors about the Canadian terror suspects arrested last week, one tidbit serves as a cautionary tale for the threat of homegrown terrorism in the U.S.

One of the 17 arrested, Qayyum Abdul Jamal, was an imam at a small storefront mosque in suburban Toronto. Those who listened to his sermons have told reporters that they didn’t promote violent jihad or advocate killing non-Muslims. In a post-9/11 environment less hospitable to such rhetoric, these denials actually could be true.

But the arrested imam didn’t need to preach violence in order to prime the terror pump.

A local Muslim community center director explained to the Associated Press that Mr. Jamal had told his congregants “that the Canadian Forces were going to Afghanistan to rape women.” And this slander almost certainly was not uttered in isolation.

Click to learn more...

In many ways, such outrageous propaganda is more troubling than chants of “Jihad! Jihad!” or “Death to America.” Convincing impressionable youths that their fellow Muslims are under attack can have a profound impact, simultaneously dehumanizing non-Muslim neighbors while building the case that killing them is not just morally acceptable, but in fact, obligatory.

What makes propaganda so pernicious is that it doesn’t raise the same red flags. It appears no one reported Imam Jamal’s slanders, and even followers who don’t support violence probably wouldn’t have considered the vile lies particularly dangerous. But they are.

Just ask the former valedictorian of the Saudi Academ y.

After he was arrested for plotting to assassinate President George W. Bush, Abu Ali gave a videotaped confession in which he explained why he “immediately” accepted al Qaeda’s offer to join the Jihad. His reason? His “hatred of the U.S.”—the country where he was born and raised. He doesn’t appear ever to have suffered any oppression or been victimized because of his Muslim faith. But that didn’t matter. His hatred for his home country was fueled by “what I felt was [the U.S.’s] support of Israel against the Palestinian people.”

Abu Ali was an American kid, and his affiliations with Palestinians were at best loose. Yet he was willing to give his life—and wage holy war against his neighbors—for reasons having little to do with his personal experience.

Some would no doubt seek to blame Israel or the U.S. for his turn to terrorism, just as a disturbing number of apologists have taken at face value jihadists who point the finger at U.S. presence in Iraq or the Jewish one in “Palestine.”

But if the real motivation for Islamic terror is an aggressive U.S. foreign policy or Israel’s supposed oppression of the Palestinians, why did 17 young Muslim men allegedly plot to strike Canada?

Canada has no soldiers in Iraq. Few would consider it a good friend of Israel. Canada has offered its warm embrace for Muslims from around the globe. Canadian Muslims experience minimal discrimination, let alone anything even resembling oppression.

Why Canada?

Leaders of Islamic terrorist groups, from Osama bin Laden to Shiekh Yassin (the “handicapped” and “elderly” founder of Hamas), universally agree that no government is legitimate unless it is Islamic. Establishing an Islamic state is, in fact, what most unifies jihadists around the world.

So why Canada? Because it is not an Islamic state.

But the drive for an Islamic state is probably not enough of a salient motivator for foot soldiers, as it is still a somewhat intellectual ideal. Hence the slanders. Telling young Muslims that their non-Muslim neighbors are going halfway around the world to rape Muslim women strikes a raw nerve.

Believing that members of the Ummah (the world body of Muslims) need to be defended makes someone far more susceptible to messages that violence should be waged in the name of Islam.

How many Imam Jamals are there in the U.S.? How many imams are brainwashing their followers with vicious lies about their fellow Americans? How many American Muslims believe that their Jewish and Christians neighbors—and not jihadists—are the ones responsible for the mass murder of innocent Iraqis? How many believe that Israeli soldiers slaughter Palestinian women and children for sport—and that the U.S. openly supports it?

The answer to all of the above is: At least some. We know this from the public record, particularly information stemming from various terror arrests.

Here is the more pertinent question: Who is actually fighting the propaganda? Who is combating the spread of radical Islam?

Law enforcement can intervene to thwart planned violence, but what can it do about hate speech? Not much. Even fire-breathing imams enjoy Constitutional protections. They don’t, however, enjoy freedom from condemnation. Their followers are free to run them out of town for spewing venom and demonizing non-Muslims.

Thus the most important question of all is not how many Imam Jamals there are here in the U.S., but rather, how many American Muslims will take a stand against indoctrination that pushes kids in the direction—if not into the arms—of terrorists?

==============================

Spinning Zarqawi: What three al Qaeda terrorists had to say about Zarqawi’s and al Qaeda’s cooperation with Saddam. (Weekly Standard, 060615)

NOW THAT ABU MUSAB AL ZARQAWI IS DEAD, perhaps the American press can also lay to rest the biggest myth about the mass murderer: that he had nothing to do with Saddam’s regime prior to the war. It is not clear where this claim originated, but it is widely accepted. In the cover story for this month’s Atlantic Monthly, for example, Mary Anne Weaver writes, “In his address to the United Nations making the case for war in Iraq, Powell identified al-Zarqawi—mistakenly, as it turned out—as the crucial link between al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein’s regime.”

Similar statements can be found throughout the coverage of Zarqawi’s barbarous life. But this says more about the desire to keep Saddam’s reign separated from the rise of al Qaeda in Iraq’s terror network than it does about the actual facts.

There is abundant evidence that Saddam’s regime, at the very least, tolerated Zarqawi’s existence in regime-controlled areas of Iraq prior to the war. Moreover, at least three high-level al Qaeda associates have testified to Saddam’s warm welcome for Zarqawi and his associates.

Consider what a top al Qaeda operative, Abu Zubaydah, told his CIA interrogators after his capture in March 2002. According to the Senate Intelligence Report, Zubaydah said “he was not aware of a relationship between Iraq and al-Qaeda.” But, he added that “any relationship would be highly compartmented and went on to name al Qaeda members who he thought had good contacts with the Iraqis.” Zubaydah “indicated that he heard that an important al-Qaida associate, Abu Mus’ab al-Zarqawi, and others had good relationships with Iraqi intelligence.”

Zubaydah’s testimony has since been further corroborated by a known al Qaeda ideologue, Dr. Muhammad al-Masari. Al-Masari operated the Committee for the Defense of Legitimate Rights, a Saudi oppositionist group and al Qaeda front, out of London for more than decade. He told the editor-in-chief of Al-Quds Al-Arabi that Saddam “established contact with the ‘Afghan Arabs’ as early as 2001, believing he would be targeted by the US once the Taliban was routed.” Furthermore, “Saddam funded Al-Qaeda operatives to move into Iraq with the proviso that they would not undermine his regime.”

Al-Masari claimed that Saddam’s regime actively aided Zarqawi and his men prior to the war and fully included them in his plans for a terrorist insurgency. He said Saddam “saw that Islam would be key to a cohesive resistance in the event of invasion.” Iraqi officers bought “small plots of land from farmers in Sunni areas” and they buried “arms and money caches for later use by the resistance.”

Al-Masari also claimed that “Iraqi army commanders were ordered to become practicing Muslims and to adopt the language and spirit of the jihadis.”

Just as Saddam ordered, many of Iraq’s senior military and intelligence personnel joined or aided Zarqawi’s jihad. Many of the more prominent supporters and members of Zarqawi’s al Qaeda branch, in fact, came from the upper echelon of Saddam’s regime. Izzat Ibrahim al-Douri (aka the “King of Clubs”) and his sons allied with Zarqawi, as did members of Muhammad Hamza Zubaydi’s (aka the “Queen of Spades”) family. Zarqawi’s allies included Muhammed Hila Hammad Ubaydi, who was an aide to Saddam’s chief of staff of intelligence, and some of his more lethal operatives served as officers in Saddam’s military, including Abu Ali, “Al-Hajji” Thamer Mubarak (whose sister attempted a martyrdom operation in Jordan), Abu-Ubaidah, and Abdel Fatih Isa.

THESE BAATHISTS, and others, have spilled much blood in Zarqawi’s name. Their attacks were among “Zarqawi’s” most successful, including an assault on the Abu Ghraib prison and the first attack on the U.N.’s headquarters. The latter strike was among al Qaeda’s earliest, killing Sergio de Mello, the U.N.’s special representative in Baghdad, in August 2003.

In addition to Abu Zubaydah and Muhammad al-Masri, a third high-ranking al Qaeda associate has explained Saddam’s support for al Qaeda prior to the war. Hudayfa Azzam, who is the son of one of al Qaeda’s earliest and most influential leaders, Adullah Azzam, gave an interview with Agence France Presse in August 2004 in which he explained Saddam’s support for al Qaeda’s members as they relocated to Iraq:

“Saddam Hussein’s regime welcomed them with open arms,” Azzam explained, “and young al Qaeda members entered Iraq in large numbers, setting up an organization to confront the occupation.” Al Qaeda’s terrorists “infiltrated into Iraq with the help of Kurdish mujahideen from Afghanistan, across mountains in Iran.” Once in Iraq, Saddam “strictly and directly” controlled their activities, Azzam added.

Curiously, in all of the coverage of Zarqawi’s death there has been no mention of Abu Zubaydah’s, Muhammad al-Masri’s, or Hudayfa Azzam’s comments. This is not entirely surprising. Many of the basic facts surrounding Zarqawi’s early days in Iraq have been muddled by those vested in the notion that Saddam’s Iraq never supported al Qaeda.

Even when al Qaeda terrorists themselves admit that Saddam offered them safe haven

and support, their words fall on the mainstream media’s deaf ears.

Thomas Joscelyn is an economist and writer living in New York.

==============================

Dozens killed as at least 7 explosions rock commuter trains in Mumbai (National Post, 060711)

MUMBAI, India — Seven explosions rocked Bombay’s commuter rail network during Tuesday evening rush hour, ripping apart train compartments, a railway spokesman said. At least 20 people were killed, police said.

There was chaos throughout Mumbai’s crowded rail network following the explosions, and authorities struggled to determine how many people had been killed and injured.

Bombay Police Chief A.N. Roy said on Indian television that 20 bodies had been taken to hospitals and that the death toll could go higher.

Indian television reported the death toll could be in the dozens. News channels broadcast video of the wounded sprawled on train tracks and being carried through stations to ambulances, past twisted and torn train compartments.

Witnesses reported seeing bodies parts strewn about stations.

Pranay Prabhakar, the spokesman for the Western Railway, confirmed that seven blasts had taken place.

He said all trains had been suspended and appealed to the public to stay away from train stations in the city.

The blasts appeared to have come in quick succession - a common tactic employed by Kashmiri militants who have repeatedly targeted India’s cities.

The first explosion hit the train at a railway station in the northwestern suburb of Khar, said a police officer who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to talk to the news media.

India’s CNN-IBN television news, which had a reporter travelling on the train, said the blast took place in a first-class car as the train was moving, ripping through the compartment and killing more than a dozen people.

Another CNN-IBN reporter said he had seen more than 20 bodies at one Mumbai hospital.

All of India’s major cities were reportedly on high alert following the attacks, which came hours after a string of grenade attacks by Islamic separatists killed eight people in the main city of India’s part of Kashmir.

Kashmir was divided between India and Pakistan in war after they gained independence from Britain in 1947, and they fought another full-scale conflict over the region in 1965.

But even as the two nuclear rivals have talked peace in the last two years, New Delhi has continued to accuse Pakistan of training, arming and funding the militants. Islamabad insists it offers the rebels only diplomatic and moral support.

==============================

Ties that Bind: Terror returns to India. (National Review Online, 060712)

Bombay’s residents are an eclectic and colorful bunch. Strolling through the city’s neighborhoods, you’re likely to find Hindus, Buddhists, Muslims, Parsees, Sikhs, Christians, Jains — possibly others, too. It is simply not possible that the seven explosions on Bombay’s busy trains yesterday could have discriminated between and among these groups. It was an attack on them all.

Over the next few days and weeks, responsibility for Tuesday’s bombings will be assigned, possibly to Kashmir-based separatist groups, possibly to jihadists hiding among India’s mostly peaceful Muslim population. The attack may even be traced back to Pakistan’s notorious Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) or elsewhere in that country’s government.

Punishing those directly responsible is a necessary but short-term priority. The United States must also reevaluate its long-term, strategic approach to the Indian subcontinent, as well as its approach to terror-sponsoring states. Specifically, the Bush administration must do three things: First, it should forge closer strategic links with India, something it failed to do after the attacks on the Indian parliament in 2001. Second, it should abandon the unfortunate tendency to view our enemies in this war as a shadowy network of terrorists — les déchets de la mondialisation — with only a tenuous connection to actual states. This should lead, third, to the United States pursuing a more hard-line policy against Pakistan.

“Outside Tony Blair’s Britain,” Tom Donnelly, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies has written, “only India stands as a natural great-power partner in building the next American century.” Donnelly is absolutely right. India is a peaceful, liberal democratic country facing a militant Islamist threat from jihadists within its territory. India and the United States already cooperate with one another on nuclear technology and nonproliferation matters. The Bush administration should begin openly campaigning for India to join the Security Council, and increase joint military training operations and knowledge sharing — this could form the basis for an even closer partnership.

This is the right thing to do not only because of the shared values between the United States and India, but also because of the shared challenges. Over the long-term, just as the United States must confront the rise of a despotic China, so will India. Better India be allied firmly in our camp than pursue, as it did during the Cold War, a policy of nonalignment; already, China’s extensive military cooperation with Pakistan should be reason enough for deeper cooperation between the United States and India.

There is an unfortunate tendency to view our enemy in the war on terrorism as a loosely connected network of militant Islamists. This is only half the story. Hezbollah is completely dependent on Iran and Syria for support. Osama bin Laden’s al Qaeda network did not thrive off the failed state in Afghanistan, it prospered because of active support from the Taliban government in Afghanistan.

Likewise, most Kashmir-based separatist groups either received seed money from the Pakistani government or elements within it, or depend on them for logistical support and safe cover in the event of hot pursuit. The war against terrorism is not just against the terrorist networks, but against their support networks as well.

The United States must confront the tricky question of relations with Pakistan, which is, at best, an ally sui generis in the war on terrorism. When President Bush distilled the realities of the war on terrorism into a simple, terse statement — “Either you are with us or you are with the terrorists” — Pakistan’s President Pervez Musharraf, manfully, chose us.

President Musharraf has given the United States rhetorical support as well as valuable logistical and operational help. The Pakistani government was instrumental in the capture of terrorists like Khalid Sheik Mohammed, Ramzi Yousef, and Mir Aimal Kansi. Pakistan has undoubtedly assisted us in other areas, too.

There are, however, many areas where Pakistan has been less than helpful: It has been unable to control its borders, which has allowed jihadists to travel with impunity to Afghanistan and Kashmir. Pakistan’s sheltering of Abdul Qadeer Khan, the nuclear engineer responsible for selling nuclear-weapons technology to Libya, Iran, and North Korea, is a disgrace. A recent story in the London Times reported that the government is denying the United States access to Pakistan’s Dr. Strangelove, even though he would be a valuable source of information about Iran and North Korea’s nuclear program, he having sold them the plans. While acknowledging Pakistan’s shift in approach and tone after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the United States needs to stop coddling the Musharraf government, and needs to pressure it to provide us with more actual support.

India’s war on terror is the same as the one the United States is fighting. The same terrorists who happily slaughter innocent Indians wouldn’t blink an eye if given the opportunity to kill innocent Americans. Al Qaeda had been waging war on the United States since well before September 11, 2001. But it was the September 11 terrorist attacks that gave America the resolve to finally fight back. Likewise, the United States should use this barbaric attack on India’s most populous city as an opportunity to form a common front against the threats that both countries face.

— Alykhan Velshi is manager of research at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies. He is currently writing a book of poetry, “Temures the tyrant and Other Poems.”

==============================

Terror in Buenos Aires: A lesson in Hezbollah terror. (National Review Online, 060724)

Last Tuesday morning, a siren sounded in Buenos Aires to mark the 12th anniversary of the bombing of the AMIA building, the chief offices of Argentina’s Jewish community. The bombing killed 85 people and injured over 250. It was the largest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust. It was the work of Hezbollah, working closely under Iranian sponsorship, and it perfectly illustrates Hezbollah’s intentions, capabilities, and modus operandi. As the West hurtles into a confrontation with Iran, sparked by the current Israeli-Hezbollah conflagration, it is worth examining this deadly effective attack in Argentina over a decade ago.

The AMIA bombing was not Hezbollah’s first strike in Argentina. Two years earlier, a Hezbollah suicide bomber hit the Israeli embassy in Buenos Aires, killing 29 and wounding over 200. This attack was in retaliation for Israel’s assassination of Hezbollah’s Secretary-General Abbas Musawi. His replacement was Hezbollah’s current leader Hassan Nasrallah.

Two years later, Hezbollah, under orders from the Iranian leadership, struck again in Buenos Aires. Israel had just captured a senior Hezbollah leader, Mustafa Dirani, who had helped capture Israeli airman Ron Arad. At the same time, Israel had recently bombed a Hezbollah training base, killing over 20 Hezbollah fighters. Finally, Argentina’s President Carlos Menem, had, under U.S. pressure, reneged on deals to provide ballistic-missile and nuclear technology to Syria and Iran. Argentine intelligence believes that the orders for these attacks came from the very top of the Iranian regime. Both of the Buenos Aires terror attacks illustrate how Iran and Hezbollah play hardball with their opponents.

Terrorism requires organization and logistics. Hezbollah’s ability to carry out an attack in Buenos Aires, halfway across the world from their primary base in Lebanon, is impressive. One factor in the AMIA bombing’s success was, according to Argentine intelligence, the support from the Iranian embassy. Mohsen Rabbani, the “cultural attaché,” coordinated the operation. Reportedly he purchased the Renault van used in the bombing. This pattern of Iranian-Hezbollah cooperation is not unique to the Buenos Aires operations. Hezbollah carried out a series of bombings in Paris from December 1985 to September 1986. These bombings were linked to a translator at Iran’s embassy in Paris and led to a diplomatic standoff between France and Iran.

Another factor explaining Hezbollah’s long reach is the organizational genius of Hezbollah’s security chief, Imad Mughniyah. A former gunman with Yasser Arafat’s elite Force 17, Mughniyah is on the FBI’s most-wanted list for his role in the 1985 hijacking of TWA 847 in which a U.S. Navy diver was tortured and killed. Linked to numerous terrorist attacks, including suicide bombings and hostage taking in Lebanon, and the Buenos Aires attacks, Mughniyah is currently believed to be coordinating Iranian and Hezbollah support for Palestinian terrorists. He also met with Osama bin Laden in the early 1990s to forge an alliance between al Qaeda and Hezbollah. Wanted by several governments, Mughniyah keeps a low profile. However, he is believed to have appeared publicly, for the first time in over a decade, with Iran’s President Ahmadinejad at a meeting in Damascus in January.

Finally, the AMIA attack had consequences beyond the mayhem of the bombing itself. The AMIA bombing created an open wound in Argentine politics that has festered for a decade as the investigation has been mired in corruption, cover-ups, and incompetence. This aftermath is typical of Hezbollah terrorism. Time and again, Hezbollah terror attacks have had a profound strategic impact. Hezbollah’s first attack in April 1983 against the U.S. embassy in Beirut wiped out the Beirut CIA station — a blow from which the agency has yet to recover. The double bombing of the U.S. Marines barracks and the French barracks led to the withdrawal of the U.S. led multinational peacekeeping force from Lebanon, leaving Lebanon to the tender mercies of the Syrians and Iranians. Hezbollah’s hostage taking in the 1980s led to secret negotiations by the American and French governments with Iran. These negotiations triggered the Iran-Contra scandal in the U.S. and a similar scandal in France.

The AMIA bombing was the epitome of an Iranian-Hezbollah terror attack. It was a sophisticated act of mass murder that sent a brutal message to Iran’s enemies, while leaving deep political scars.

As the fighting increases, Hezbollah may again turn to international terror. Besides Latin America, Hezbollah has carried out attacks across the Middle East and Europe. Hezbollah cells have been found in the Far East, North America, and Central Asia. It is very likely that Hezbollah retains a formidable international network — and if pressured will use it. In a recent interview with al-Jazeera, Hezbollah Secretary-General Nasrallah stated that Hezbollah was going to take “the initiative” and “offer some surprises.” The AMIA bombing was one Hezbollah surprise and remembering it is a reminder of the danger Hezbollah poses, not only to Israel, but also to the world.

— Aaron Mannes, author of the TerrorBlog and Profiles in Terror: The Guide to Middle East Terrorist Organizations, and he researches terrorism at the Maryland Information and Network Dynamics Laboratory at the University of Maryland.

==============================

More Of John Kerry’s Retroactive Campaign Promises (Ann Coulter, 060726)

On Sunday, John Kerry said of Israel’s war against Hezbollah, “If I was president, this wouldn’t have happened,” adding, “we have to destroy Hezbollah.”

But wait a minute — Hezbollah didn’t attack us on 9/11! Wouldn’t fighting Hezbollah distract us from the urgent task of finding Osama bin Laden?

Democrats can’t come out and admit that they refuse to fight any war in defense of America, so they utter the “Where’s Osama?” incantation to pretend that they’d be doing something. To wit: dedicating the entire resources of the U.S. military to locating Osama bin Laden.

Thus, in the third presidential debate, Kerry complained about the cost of the war in Iraq, saying the war was “the result of this president taking his eye off of Osama bin Laden.”

After making the capture of Osama bin Laden their sole objective in the war on terrorism, now Democrats expect us to believe they would have been fighting every other Muslim jihadist on the planet like mad — just not one of the main sponsors of Islamic terrorism, Saddam Hussein. But they’d be merciless with every other mass-murdering, Islamic terror-sponsoring lunatic.

Israel’s recent tussle with Hezbollah reminds us how absurd the Democrats’ fixation on Osama is. America has been under attack from Muslim extremists for nearly 30 years. Not just al-Qaida and certainly not just Osama bin Laden.

Here’s the highlights reel for anyone still voting for the Democrats:

— November 1979: Muslim extremists (Iranian variety) seized the U.S. embassy in Iran and held 52 American hostages for 444 days, following Democrat Jimmy Carter’s masterful foreign policy granting Islamic fanaticism its first real foothold in the Middle East.

— 1982: Muslim extremists (mostly Hezbollah) began a nearly decade-long habit of taking Americans and Europeans hostage in Lebanon, killing William Buckley and holding Terry Anderson for 6 1/2 years.

— April 1983: Muslim extremists (Islamic Jihad or possibly Hezbollah) bombed the U.S. Embassy in Beirut, killing 16 Americans.

— October 1983: Muslim extremists (Hezbollah) blew up the U.S. Marine barracks at the Beirut airport, killing 241 Marines.

— December 1983: Muslim extremists (al-Dawa) blew up the U.S. Embassy in Kuwait, killing five and injuring 80.

— September 1984: Muslim extremists (Hezbollah) exploded a truck bomb at the U.S. Embassy annex in Beirut, killing 24 people, including two U.S. servicemen.

— December 1984: Muslim extremists (probably Hezbollah) hijacked a Kuwait Airways airplane, landed in Iran and demanded the release of the 17 members of al-Dawa who had been arrested for the bombing of the U.S. Embassy in Kuwait, killing two Americans before the siege was over.

— June 14, 1985: Muslim extremists (Hezbollah) hijacked TWA Flight 847 out of Athens, diverting it to Beirut, taking the passengers hostage in return for the release of the Kuwait 17 as well as another 700 prisoners held by Israel. When their demands were not met, the Muslims shot U.S. Navy diver Robert Dean Stethem and dumped his body on the tarmac.

— October 1985: Muslim extremists (Palestine Liberation Front backed by Libya) seized an Italian cruise ship, the Achille Lauro, killing 69-year-old American Leon Klinghoffer by shooting him and then tossing his body overboard.

— December 1985: Muslim extremists (backed by Libya) bombed airports in Rome and Vienna, killing 20 people, including five Americans.

— April 1986: Muslim extremists (backed by Libya) bombed a discotheque frequented by U.S. servicemen in West Berlin, injuring hundreds and killing two, including a U.S. soldier.

— December 1988: Muslim extremists (backed by Libya) bombed Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, killing all 259 on board and 11 on the ground.

(Then came an amazing, historic pause in Muslim extremists’ relentless war on America after Ronald Reagan won the Cold War by doing the opposite of everything recommended by Democrats, depriving Islamic terrorists of their Soviet sponsors. This confuses liberals because they don’t understand the concept of terror sponsors, whether it’s the Soviet Union or Iraq.)

— February 1993: Muslim extremists (al-Gama’a al-Islamiyya, possibly with involvement of friendly rival al-Qaida) set off a bomb in the basement of the World Trade Center, killing six and wounding more than 1,000.

— Spring 1993: Muslim extremists (al-Gama’a al-Islamiyya, the Sudanese Islamic Front and at least one member of Hamas) plot to blow up the Lincoln and Holland tunnels, the U.N. complex, and the FBI’s lower Manhattan headquarters.

— November 1995: Muslim extremists (possibly Iranian “Party of God”) explode a car bomb at U.S. military headquarters in Saudi Arabia, killing five U.S. military servicemen.

— June 1996: Muslim extremists (13 Saudis and a Lebanese member of Hezbollah, probably with involvement of al-Qaida) explode a truck bomb outside the Khobar Towers military complex, killing 19 American servicemen and injuring hundreds.

— August 1998: Muslim extremists (al-Qaida) explode truck bombs at U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, killing 224 and injuring thousands.

— October 2000: Muslim extremists (al-Qaida) blow up the U.S. Navy destroyer USS Cole, killing 17 U.S. sailors.

— Sept. 11, 2001: Muslim extremists (al-Qaida) hijack commercial aircraft and fly planes into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and a field in Pennsylvania, killing nearly 3,000 Americans.

America’s war with Islamic fanaticism didn’t start on 9/11, but it’s going to end with 9/11 — as long as Americans aren’t foolish enough ever to put a Democrat in the White House.

==============================

Where the Taliban Still Rule: Not in Afghanistan, but in Pakistan. (Weekly Standard, 060728)

RECENT EVENTS in Afghanistan, notably the temporary seizure of the Afghan towns of Garmser and Naway-i-Barakzayi, have once again provoked a wave of speculation concerning a renewed Taliban offensive. The ability of the Taliban and their allies in al Qaeda and Gulbuddin Hekmatyar’s Hizb-e-Islami to organize such attacks suggests that they have succeeded at establishing a new safe haven—in northern Pakistan.

Contrary to the optimistic pronouncements of the Pakistani military, the Taliban and their al Qaeda allies have been able to establish control of a broad swath of territory across northern Pakistan, particularly in the Waziristan region that was described to Newsday by American and Afghan officials in February 2006 as “the primary engine of the continued Taliban insurgency in Afghanistan.” Quoting Pakistani journalist Behroz Khan, Newsday reported that “The Taliban controls the roads, acts as the police force and judicial authority and openly runs offices to recruit fighters to their ranks.” These claims appear to be verified by Taliban propaganda distributed both online and via CD, which according the Italian news agency Adnkronos International, shows the following:

Thousands of young men wearing turbans are seen moving with their weapons. Their commanders select a squad among them to carry out a guerrilla mission to attack the US base in the south-eastern Afghan province of Khost. The men are seen wearing headbands bearing the slogan: “There is no God but one God, Mohammed is the messenger of God”.

The youths then emerge out from their bases in the night and attack a US base in Khost. After a 30-minute battle, the US base is in flames and the members of the squad return to their base.

Their animosity has not been limited to the United States. Taliban and al Qaeda propaganda outlets have begun distributing execution videos of individuals purported to be thieves, drug dealers, or American agents. Yet while other governments might be concerned by the establishment of a known terrorist sanctuary on their soil, the Pakistani response has been surprisingly lax, particularly in comparison to how they dealt with the ethnic-based insurrection in neighboring Baluchistan. Even while the Pakistani military has been actively fighting the Taliban in North Waziristan, the local newspaper Daily Times reports that “Local Taliban in South Waziristan have been allowed to establish an office in Wana to “help restore law and order” in the area” and that their leader Maulvi Abbas “was wanted by the government until he signed an agreement last year not to participate in or encourage attacks on security forces.” Yet despite this agreement, the problem remains to such an extent that in April 2006 Federal Interior Minister Aftab Khan Sherpao was reported as having stated that:

The local Taliban have killed as many as 150 pro-government tribal leaders [Maliks] in North and South Waziristan and openly challenging the writ of the federal government and engaging a number of security forces’ personnel in the area.

. . . So great has been the impact that the local “Maliks” and political administration have all been limited to their houses and offices, reports the Daily Times.

“The Taliban’s sphere of influence has expanded to DI Khan, Tank and the Khyber Agency, where clerks of the area have started to join them. There has been a sharp increase in attacks on heavily-defended military targets in these areas as well,” said Sherpao.

. . . The local Taliban have taken control of most of North and South Waziristan and enforced a strict Islamic code, including a ban on sale of music and films. They have also ordered the men to not shave off their beards.

While they have established an Islamic court in Wana, headquarters of South Waziristan, replacing the traditional jirga, in Miramshah, capital of North Waziristan, curfew has been imposed after bloody clashes between federal forces and alleged Al Qaeda militants.

THE TALIBAN CONTINUE to retain their alliance with al Qaeda. The Daily Times reported last month that Maulana Faqir Muhammad, the leader of the Tehrik-e-Nifaz Shariah Muhammad and a major figure within the Pakistani Taliban, narrowly escaped the American missile attack on Damadola, which targeted a number of al Qaeda leaders (including bin Laden’s second-in-command, Ayman al-Zawahiri). And while both al-Zawahiri and Muhammad survived the Damadola attack, Abu Khabab, the head of al Qaeda’s wmd program did not. The fact that Muhammad and other senior members of the Pakistani Taliban continue to openly associate with both their Afghan brethren and some of the most wanted terrorists on the planet is evidence enough that their rise to power inside Pakistan constitutes a threat. For instance, one of the senior Taliban commanders killed by the Pakistani military in March 2006 was the Chechen Emir Asad; other senior commanders of note within the group include Tahir Yuldashev of the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan and Sheikh Essa al-Masri of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, both of which are tied to al Qaeda’s international jihad.

It is time to acknowledge the continuing threat of al Qaeda’s rear bases and discuss how to deal them, whether or not it makes the Pakistani government uncomfortable.

Dan Darling is a counterterrorism consultant.

==============================

What fate for Islamofascism? (Washington Times, 060728)

By Austin Bay

Hezbollah and other Islamo-fascist terrorists concluded long ago that “if it bleeds it leads” doesn’t simply apply to the sensation-hungry media. Islamo-fascist mass murderers maintain public bloodletting (their enemy’s and their own) is a victory in itself.

We know “big bloodletting” means big headlines. But for Hezbollah’s philosophers, mass bloodletting serves another purpose: It is demonstrates terrorist commitment and moral will.

Islamo-fascist “death cult” terrorists are convinced their forceful willpower (when combined with actions demonstrating millenarian certitude) ultimately guarantees defeat of liberal Western couch potatoes and sheep.

The Islamo-fascists aren’t the first international mass murder movement to deserve the moniker of “death cult.” In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, transnational anarchists touted “politics of the bomb” and “propaganda by deed.”

The anarchists spilled blood — over a seven-year period (1894-1901) they killed a French president, a Spanish prime minister, an Italian king and a U.S. president (William McKinley). However, they failed to ignite a global revolution they claimed would produce an earthly paradise of justice once the ancien regimes disappeared in flames. The anarchists believed their own propaganda, and by doing so misjudged the enormous strengths of liberal capitalist democracies. They totally underestimated the United States.

Unfortunately, the anarchists’ agitprop techniques inform contemporary terrorists, and the dregs of its half-baked philosophies continue to deform a few lost corners of human culture. A romantic notion of anarchist violence energizes much of the radical-chic rhetoric emanating from American college campuses, providing pseudo-intellectual tropes for anti-Americanism and “anti-globalization.”

These are the rear-guard actions of a dead-end ideology posing as the avant-garde.

We will all be better off when Islamo-fascism follows anarchism’s path. Pray for the day when the proponents of Hezbollahism and bin Ladenism are mere academic crackpots. But defeating Islamo-fascism means men and women who love their own liberty enough to defend it (wherever they live on this often tortured planet of ours) must once again display more spine than the killers.

Defeating death cults entails persevering despite loss of life and heinous outrage. At the moment, the world’s most critical demonstration of the will to persevere and destroy terrorism is Israel’s confrontation with Hezbollah in northern Israel and southern Lebanon.

During the 1990s, Hezbollah (with Iranian and Syrian support) fought a grinding guerrilla war against Israel’s occupation of south Lebanon. Under international pressure to withdraw as a prelude to a peace deal, Israel pulled out. Hezbollah touted Israel’s withdrawal as a loss of Israeli will to fight.

But Hezbollah’s Iranian masters never thought the U.S. would be in both Afghanistan and Iraq. The Iraqi election of January 2005 ignited Lebanon’s “Beirut Spring” pro-democracy rallies. Those rallies shook even the most willful tyrants in Tehran and Syria. The appeal of liberal democracy brought couch potatoes and sheep into the streets — indicating they weren’t couch potatoes.

That is why I know this Israel-Hezbollah war is no accident. Tyrants and terrorists must dash the hopes of couch potatoes and sheep. The will of the tyrants and terrorists cannot be successfully mocked and challenged or it’s over for them. And, oh yes, Iran’s holy quest for a nuclear weapon cannot be thwarted, either.

But tyrants and terrorists’ willpower and warfare are being challenged. Over the last two weeks, criticism of Israel from the usual amen corners has been conspicuously circumspect. It appears U.S.-led diplomatic efforts designed to give Israel the time to defeat Hezbollah are working.

Let’s hope Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice can buy Israel a couple of months. Israel indicates it intends to destroy, bunker by bunker, Iran’s investment in Hezbollah. The Israelis are killing Hezbollah’s fighters — and letting the sensation-hungry media document their deaths.

Hezbollah can proclaim a victory-in-death, but like the claims of its global anarchist antecedents, the bloody tout will be desperately hollow.

==============================

Terror Plot Suspects Planned ‘Dry-Run’ of Attacks in Next 2 Days, Sources Say (Foxnews, 060810)

LONDON — Suspects arrested Thursday for planning to stage a massive mid-air terror attacked were in the final stages of planning and planned to run a dry-run of the plan within two days, U.S. intelligence officers said Thursday.

One official said the suicide attackers planned to use a peroxide-based solution that could ignite when sparked by a camera flash or another electronic device.

The test run was designed to see whether the plotters would be able to smuggle the needed materials aboard the planes, these officials said. They spoke only on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the subject matter.

The development came as British authorities said they were “urgently” seeking the arrests of up to 10 more suspects in the terrorist plot uncovered early Thursday morning to blow up U.S.-bound flights with liquid explosives carried onto planes via carry-on luggage, FOX News learned.

Police arrested 24 main suspects were arrested earlier Thursday, according to Scotland Yard, in what U.S. officials suspect was an Al Qaeda-planned attack.

French Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy said the suspects in an alleged plot to “appear to be of Pakistani origin,” and Pakistani intelligence officials say they assisted in the arrests.

Pakistani intelligence officials helped British security agencies crack a terror plot to blow up U.S.-bound aircraft from Britain and arrested two or three suspects in recent days, authorities said Thursday. (Full story)

The intelligence official said an Islamic militant arrested near the Afghan-Pakistan border several weeks ago provided a lead that played a role in “unearthing the plot,” that helped authorities arrest suspects in Britain.

President Bush called the plot a “stark reminder” of the continued threat to the United States from extremist Muslims. (Full story)

Britain disclosed no details about the plot or those arrested, although one police official indicated the people in custody were British residents. A French official in contact with British authorities described the arrested as originating from predominantly Muslim Pakistan.

Officials raised security to its highest level in Britain — suggesting a terrorist attack might be imminent — and banned carry-on luggage on all flights. Huge crowds backed up at security barriers at London’s Heathrow airport as officials searching for explosives barred nearly every form of liquid outside of baby formula.

U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff said the terrorists planned to use liquid explosives disguised as beverages and other common products and set them off with detonators disguised as electronic devices.

An American law enforcement official who was briefed on the investigation said it appeared the liquid to be used was a “peroxide-based solution” to be detonated by an electronic device that was not specified, but could be anything from a disposable camera to a portable digital music player. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because British authorities had asked that no information be released.

The extreme measures at a major international aviation hub sent ripples throughout the world. Heathrow was closed to most flights from Europe, and British Airways canceled all its flights between the airport and points in Britain, Europe and Libya. Numerous flights from U.S. cities to Britain were canceled.

Washington raised its threat alert to its highest level for commercial flights from Britain to the United States amid fears the plot had not been completely crushed. The alert for all flights coming or going from the United States was also raised slightly.

Two U.S. counterterrorism officials said the terrorists had targeted United, American and Continental airlines. They spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the case.

A U.S. intelligence official said the plotters had hoped to target flights to major airports in New York, Washington and California. A counterterrorism official said the plot involved 10 flights.

British authorities said 24 people were arrested in London, its suburbs and Birmingham following a lengthy investigation, including the alleged “main players” in the plot. Searches continued in a number of locations, and police cordoned off streets in several locations.

Bush said during a visit to Green Bay, Wis., that the foiled plot was a “stark reminder that this nation is at war with Islamic fascists.” Despite increased security since Sept. 11, he warned, “It is a mistake to believe there is no threat to the United States of America.”

While British officials declined to publicly identify the 24 suspects, French Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy said in Paris they “appear to be of Pakistani origin.” He did not give a source for his description, but said French officials had been in close contact with British authorities.

Pakistan’s government said later its intelligence agents helped Britain crack the plot and had arrested some suspects.

“Pakistan played a very important role in uncovering and breaking this international terrorist network,” Foreign Ministry spokesman Tasnim Aslam said, but she declined to give details.

The suspects arrested in Britain were “homegrown,” though it was not immediately clear if they were all British citizens, said a British police official who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the case. Police were working closely with the South Asian community, the official said.

The suicide bombing assault on London subway trains and a bus on July 7, 2005, was carried out by Muslim extremists who grew up in Britain.

The police official said the plotters intended to simultaneously target multiple planes bound for the United States.

“We think this was an extraordinarily serious plot and we are confident that we’ve prevented an attempt to commit mass murder on an unimaginable scale,” Deputy Police Commissioner Paul Stephenson said.

Prime Minister Tony Blair, vacationing in the Caribbean, briefed Bush on the situation Wednesday. Blair issued a statement praising the cooperation between the two countries, saying it “underlines the threat we face and our determination to counter it.”

White House spokesman Tony Snow said Bush also had been briefed by his aides while at his ranch in Crawford, Texas, where he has been on vacation.

“We do believe the plot involved flights from the U.K. to the U.S. and was a direct threat to the United States,” Snow said.

While Snow called the plot a serious threat, he assured Americans that “it is safe to travel.”

Chertoff, the homeland security chief, said the plot had the hallmarks of an operation planned by al-Qaida, the terrorist group behind the Sept. 11 attack on the United States.

“It was sophisticated, it had a lot of members and it was international in scope. It was in some respects suggestive of an al-Qaida plot,” Chertoff said, but he cautioned it was too early in the investigation to reach any conclusions.

It is the first time the red alert level in the Homeland Security warning system has been invoked, although there have been brief periods in the past when the orange level was applied. Homeland Security defines the red alert as designating a “severe risk of terrorist attacks.”

“We believe that these arrests (in London) have significantly disrupted the threat, but we cannot be sure that the threat has been entirely eliminated or the plot completely thwarted,” Chertoff said.

He added, however, there was no indication of current plots within the United States.

Chertoff said the plotters were in the final stages of planning. “We were really getting quite close to the execution phase,” he said, adding that it was unclear if the plot was linked to the upcoming fifth anniversary of the Sept. 11 terror attacks.

A senior U.S. counterterrorism official said authorities believe dozens of people — possibly as many as 50 — were involved in the plot. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the situation.

The plan involved airline passengers hiding masked explosives in carry-on luggage, the official said. “They were not yet sitting on an airplane,” but were very close to traveling, the official said, calling the plot “the real deal.”

Passengers in Britain faced delays as tighter security was hastily enforced at the country’s airports and additional measures were put in place for all flights. Laptop computers, mobile phones, digital music players, and remote controls were among the items banned from being carried on board.

Liquids, such as hair care products, were also barred on flights in both Britain and the U.S.

In the mid-1990s, officials foiled a plan by terrorist mastermind Ramzi Youssef to blow up 12 Western jetliners simultaneously over the Pacific. The alleged plot involved improvised bombs using liquid hidden in contact lens solution containers.

Huge lines formed at ticket counters and behind security barriers at Heathrow and other airports in Britain.

Ed Lappen, 55, a businessman from Boston, who was traveling with his wife and daughter to Russia, found himself unable to travel further. “We’re safe, we’re OK,” he said at Heathrow. “Now my daughter is going to get a shopping trip in London.”

Hannah Pillinger, 24, seemed less concerned by the announcement. “Eight hours without an iPod, that’s the most inconvenient thing,” she said, waiting at the Manchester airport.

Most European carriers canceled flights to Heathrow because of the massive delays created after authorities enforced strict new regulations banning most hand baggage.

Tony Douglas, Heathrow’s managing director, said the airport hoped to resume normal operations Friday, but passengers would still face delays and a ban on cabin baggage “for the foreseeable future.”

Security also was stepped up at train stations serving airports across Britain, said British Transport Police spokeswoman Jan O’Neill. At London’s Victoria Station, police patrolled platforms with bomb-sniffing dogs as passengers boarded trains carrying clear plastic bags.

Margaret Gavin, 67, waiting to board a train, said she wasn’t scared. “Why should I change my life because some idiots want to blow something up?” she said.

==============================

Why They Fight: Mary Habeck’s “Knowing the Enemy” provides a window into the jihadist worldview. (Weekly Standard, 060803)

AFTER 9/11 BROUGHT RADICAL ISLAM to the country’s attention, some Americans wondered, “Why do they hate us?” Since then, many answers have been offered. But the best way to understand what drives jihadists is an examination of their own words. To that end, Professor Mary Habeck’s book Knowing the Enemy: Jihadist Ideology and the War on Terror (Yale University Press 2006) makes a vital contribution. It is the most thorough and valuable explanation of jihadist ideology available in English to date.

Central to Habeck’s argument is the failure of most Western scholarship to comprehend religion as a sociopolitical factor. Most academics, journalists and policymakers in the increasingly secular West have never considered religion an important part of their lives, and have trouble understanding how it can be a prime motivating force in world affairs. Thus, they tend to look to factors such as poverty, colonization, and imperialism to explain jihadist grievances.

Such an analysis fails to provide us with deep insight into jihadist thought. As Habeck points out, U.S. support for Israel alone doesn’t explain the 9/11 attacks. Jihadist ideologue Sayyid Qutb’s anger was focused on the United States in the early 1950s, more than a decade before America became associated with Israel. Nor do colonialism and imperialism provide a convincing answer. Muhammad ibn Abdul Wahhab “developed his version of radical and violent Islam long before the West colonized Islamic lands, indeed at a time when Islam seemed triumphant.”

SO WHAT DOES EXPLAIN jihadist hatred of the West? It is true that factors such as the Israeli-Palestinian conflict can help drive people into the enemy’s camp. (Habeck refers to that conflict as the jihadists’ “single best recruiting tool.”) But Osama bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri, and their comrades aren’t simply reacting to U.S. policies. Their pronouncements reflect “their own most deeply held religio-political views of the world.”

While Habeck draws a sharp distinction between jihadist theology and traditional interpretations of Islam, she notes that jihadist ideas “did not spring from a void, nor are all of them the marginal opinions of a few fanatics.” For example, the scholar Ibn Taymiya (d. 1328), who is widely respected in Muslim circles, lived when the Mongols ruled over the Islamic world. Although they claimed to be Muslims, the Mongols’ system of laws was based on their native customs rather than Islamic law (sharia).

Disturbed by this situation, Ibn Taymiya argued that the Islamic faith requires state power because the Koran only says that Muslims are the “best community” when they “enjoined the good and forbade the evil.” In failing to base their legal system on Islamic law, the Mongols disregarded that Koranic injunction. Thus, Ibn Taymiya said that Muslims were required to take up arms against the Mongols.

Contemporary jihadists liken the modern rulers of the Muslim world to the Mongols. And there are scholars beside Ibn Taymiya to whom they can look for inspiration, including Abdul Wahhab and the three major jihadist thinkers of the twentieth century: Hassan al-Banna, Sayyid Abul A’la Maududi and Sayyid Qutb.

DRAWING UPON AN IMPRESSIVE ARRAY of primary-source material from these and like-minded Islamic radicals, Habeck makes her greatest contribution by illuminating the building blocks of the jihadist worldview.

It begins with the notion that only the Koran and ahadith (the sayings and traditions of Prophet Muhammad) are relevant to ordering the Muslim community. The views of more modern legal scholars, which may have a moderating effect on the faith, are given far less weight. With the Koran and ahadith as their only guides, jihadists believe that it is their duty to discover the “comprehensive ideology” contained in the Islamic faith.

For the jihadists, that comprehensive ideology begins with a concept known as tawhid. An Arabic term denoting the oneness of God, all Muslims have a shared belief in tawhid—but, as with so many theological concepts, the jihadists have a somewhat idiosyncratic interpretation of its implications. Echoing Ibn Taymiya, jihadist thinkers like Maududi and Qutb argue that if only God can be worshipped and obeyed, then only God’s laws can have any significance or legitimacy. This provides them with justification not only for violently overturning social systems that aren’t based on a “correct” understanding of Islam, but also for declaring fellow Muslims to be non-believers if they accept secular rule in place of the Islamic order that jihadists seek to impose.

The consequences of the view that only sharia law has legitimacy are far-reaching. For one thing, jihadists’ unwillingness to accept secular rule places them on an inevitable collision course with the West. The jihadist thinker Fathi Yakan, for example, wrote of the need for jihad in response to “attacks from every materialistic ideology and system that threatens the existence of Islam as

a global paradigm of thought and system of life.”

Not only do jihadists see this clash between Islam and the non-Muslim world as an integral part of God’s plan, but many also seek to portray Islam’s enemies as the aggressors. In this view, the “mother of all crimes” was Kemal Ataturk’s abolition of the caliphate in 1924. (Jihadists regard Ataturk as a tool of the Jews and colonialists.) Qutb went so far as to argue that no truly Islamic societies existed since the caliphate was abolished.

With that in mind, many jihadists contend that their warfare against insufficiently Islamic regimes is defensive. Qutb said that defense should be understood as “‘the defense of man’ against all those elements which limit his freedom.” Because true freedom can only be found through adherence to God’s law, fighting to impose sharia is defensive: It protects man from the secular rule that would otherwise abridge his freedom.

Just as jihadist theology informs the movement’s stance on warfare, so too does it determine their strategic vision. While the endgame differs from one jihadist group to another, all strategies attempt to emulate Muhammad’s life. As Muhammad and the early Muslims undertook the hijra (a migration from Mecca to Medina in response to severe persecution), Qutb argued that “true” Muslims should form a community requiring state power to carry out God’s commands. “At this point,” Habeck writes, “the group, however small it might be, had to follow Muhammad and migrate [to] set up the kernel of an Islamic state.” This would then become the new caliphate.

Despite a diversity of jihadist visions of how the caliphate would come about, there is a consensus that this is what they are fighting for. Some, such as Hizb ut-Tahrir, have even begun to envision what this caliphate might look like. (In Hizb ut-Tahrir’s vision, it would be a totalitarian society where the state even regulates secret thoughts.) And there is a unanimity that once the caliphate is reborn, Muslims can really get serious about the war with the infidels.

Daveed Gartenstein-Ross is a senior consultant for the Gerard Group International LLC. His book My Year Inside Radical Islam will be published in February 2007 by Tarcher/Penguin.

==============================

The One-Percent Problem: Dick Cheney is right. (National Review Online, 060811)

By Rich Lowry

Ron Suskind’s best-selling book The One Percent Doctrine refers to Vice President Dick Cheney’s axiom that if there is a one-percent chance of a nuclear bomb going off in an American city, the U.S. government has to respond with all the urgency as if there is a 100% chance of such an event. When Suskind’s book appeared, there was much clucking about Cheney’s thinking — so dire, so dark, so unmodulated.

But Cheney’s vision can only be considered unhinged if a fog of complacency descends about the terror threat facing us. Whenever that threat becomes clear again, as it has in the wake of the breakup of a plot in Britain to blow airliners from the sky, everyone begins to think like Dick Cheney, or maybe more so: If there is a mere .0001-percent chance of a terrorist smuggling liquid explosives on a flight from Denver to Green Bay, Wis., no one can carry on hair gel, and new mothers must present their baby formula for inspection.

The fact is that we live in a one-percent world. We face a shadowy enemy who represents a threat that is unspeakably awful when it is actualized, but is too easy to discount when it isn’t. Who even remembers that suspects were arrested in Miami two months ago in the very early stages of plotting perhaps to blow up the Sears Tower in Chicago? It’s always possible to let the mind wander, until thousands of innocent civilians are killed.

The British plot serves as a reminder that Islamic fanatics are intent on committing violent acts against the West, but really, how many reminders do we need? Since 9/11 there have been the Bali bombings (October 2002), the Madrid bombings (March 2004), and the British subway bombings (July 2005), among others. Terrorists are very good about reminding us of their threat at regular intervals — it’s just that there is a segment of Western opinion that willfully wants to forget.

Fresh from rallying around the Democratic Senate candidate in Connecticut who vanquished their party’s most prominent hawk, the Democrats reflexively condemned the Iraq War as a distraction from the war on terror in response to the British news. A case can be made that Iraq has indeed prevented us from taking tough measures elsewhere in the world. But Democrats simply oppose tough measures, in Iraq or anywhere else.

The same Democrats who oppose the war in Iraq tend to oppose the National Security Agency surveillance program, condemn aggressive interrogations, and complain about the Patriot Act. It is all part of a worldview that wishes away dangers when they demand philosophically uncongenial responses, defined as roughly anything that doesn’t involve shoveling federal money to localities.

We will learn more about how the Brits managed to unravel the airline plot in the coming days, but surely it involved extensive monitoring and the strictest secrecy, capped off by an act of preemption when Scotland Yard arrested the plotters. All of these have been in a bad odor among liberals lately. They will say they support them in this case, never mind that they look askance at them during our stretches of complacency.

We are engaged in a multifaceted war on terror. To fight it requires the military, law enforcement, international cooperation, and preventive domestic-security measures. The ultimate center of gravity is the hearts and minds of Muslims. We have to reach into the Middle East, because so long as the cradle of Islamic civilization is a cauldron of chaos and failure, it will spin off murderous fanatics. We also must engage in an ideological struggle within the West, where radicalism infects Muslims living among us. Britain is a study in how not to do the latter. It doesn’t insist on assimilation and routinely courts exactly the Islamic extremists who should be shunned.

All of this is the work of decades. In the meantime, get used to the 1% world.

==============================

Connecticut? This is London Calling. Al Qaeda reminds us to hang on to our patriots. (National Review Online, 060811)

By Andrew C. McCarthy

We are reading only about 24 arrests today. If we were already in the heralded antiwar world of Ned Lamont and the war-against-the-war crowd, it could be much different. We could just as easily be reading about ten jumbo jets exploded out of the sky. Or 3,000 murdered innocents — mostly American and British citizens.

Reality has once again inconveniently burst the antiwar, anti-security, anti-American balloon, just as the November victory ballrooms were being booked.

Just as central casting was whipping the articles of impeachment into shape. The high crimes and misdemeanors of George W. Bush include: hunting down terrorists, detaining them, interrogating them, penetrating their communications, and following their money.

These damn jihadists just won’t cooperate. Can’t they read the polls?

As British authorities continue trying to round up around 50 — fifty! — mostly homegrown Muslim militants who were attempting to execute over the Atlantic the very plan master terrorists Ramzi Yousef and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed nearly pulled off over the Pacific a dozen years ago, it’s worth reminding the triumphalist antiwar Left of an important point.

As much as they sometimes seem to have in common with jihadists when they speak about America, its government, its military, and its president, the two are drastically different in one crucial particular.

The antiwar Left wants to wield American power. The jihadists want to destroy it … and us. All of us.

The antiwar Left has a conveniently flexible moral compass. Consequently, the Clinton era Echelon program was fine, but Bush’s NSA Terrorist Surveillance Program is an impeachable offense.

Mishandling classified information by a Clinton CIA director was worthy of a pardon, and destroying classified information (and lying to investigators about it) by a former Clinton national-security adviser was worthy of a pass, but leaking the unremarkable fact that Valerie Plame worked for the CIA is the crime of the century.

Bombing Kosovo without U.N. approval was a moral imperative; invading Iraq after over a dozen U.N. resolutions is a violation of international law.

Renditions conducted between 1994 and 2000 were just good national-security sense; renditions conducted between 2001 and 2006 are war crimes.

Indicting Osama bin Laden in 1998 and then doing nothing to capture him while he bombed two American embassies and an American naval destroyer, killing hundreds, was aggressive yet intelligently modulated counterterrorism; allowing Osama bin Laden to evade capture in Tora Bora while killing and capturing hundreds of his operatives and decimating his hierarchy is irresponsibly incompetent.

Wet fingers firmly in the wind, the Left looks you in the eye and tells you that what is depends on what the definition of “is” is, then votes for it before voting against it. The object of the game is power, and they are willing to gamble, even with our lives, to get it or keep it.

Jihadists are very different. When it comes to our national security, they’re not partisan politicizers. They wanted to kill us when Reagan was in charge, when Clinton was in charge, now that Bush is in charge, and tomorrow no matter who is in charge. They want to kill us where Tony Blair is in charge, where Ehud Olmert is in charge, and — no matter how he contorts himself — even where Jacques Chirac is in charge.

They are not foul-weather fiends. Iraq, Lebanon, Israel, Shebaa Farms, Gitmo, flushed Korans, Salman Rushdie, the Crusades, etc., etc., etc…. These are not causes. They are excuses.

Jihadists believe passionately — many of them passionately enough to die for it — that they are commanded by their religion to kill us. They won’t be reasoned, cajoled, moderated, Westernized, modernized or democratized out of their views.

They have to be defeated. They have to be defeated in Iraq — whether or not one agrees that we should have gone there in the first place, and whatever one thinks of how competently the post-Saddam occupation has been managed. They still have to be defeated in Afghanistan. They have to be defeated in Lebanon — and ultimately Iran. They have to be stopped in Sudan. They can’t be allowed to set up new command-and-control beachheads in Pakistan, Somalia, and elsewhere. They have to be monitored throughout the West — including in our own country — because the operatives here are the ones who pose the greatest threat to our safety.

This is a daunting task. It’s a job for adults and patriots, not opportunists and power-mongers.

On Tuesday, Democrats in Connecticut showed the door to Senator Joe Lieberman, a patriotic adult who happens to be a liberal, and ushered in an antiwar Left opportunist who, until about five minutes ago, was a Lieberman supporter.

On Wednesday, al Qaeda reminded us that it will gladly kill opportunists of any political stripe.

The Democrats need to hold on to their patriots. The nation needs to hold on to the Democrats’ patriots.

This is going to be a very long haul.

==============================

Don’t LET Up: The transatlantic air plot and the problem of British Islam. (Weekly Standard, 060811)

by Stephen Schwartz

BRITISH AUTHORITIES have been slow to acknowledge openly the Pakistani-Muslim background of the suspects arrested in the mass terror conspiracy that brought chaos to British and American airports Thursday. At first, official sources in the United Kingdom would confirm only that they were working with “the South Asian community” on the case; then it was disclosed that the Pakistani government was involved in the investigation.

This reticence in naming the focus of so significant a terrorism inquiry is a symptom of the larger problems of Islam in Britain, and of “Euro-Islam” more generally. Put plainly, Pakistani Sunnis in Britain—more than a million strong—are the most radical Muslims in Europe. British Islam is dominated by Pakistan-born clerics. It is saturated with extremist preaching, media, and charity efforts which support the recruitment of terrorists.

News from Pakistan itself indicates the main trail from there to Heathrow. British and Pakistani sources linked the plan to the Pakistani government’s house arrest of Hafiz Muhammad Saeed, founder of the armed paramilitary movement Lashkar-e-Taiba (LET, or Army of the Righteous). LET, which is designated a terrorist organization by the State Department, is an ally of al Qaeda and is present wherever Pakistani Sunnis congregate and violence is hatched.

In America, LET was behind the Northern Virginia jihad network, whose members were jailed beginning in 2003 and sentenced to varying federal prison terms for terrorism-related acts. LET was also accused in the Bombay train bombings in India last month. It has significant resources in Pakistan, Britain, and elsewhere.

Yet notwithstanding the courage of Tony Blair, the British government appears paralyzed in dealing with this radical influence over British-Asian Muslims. Instead of confronting Pakistani-born extremist imams on British territory, the Brits organized a roadshow in their Muslim communities under the rubric of “the radical middle way”—an extraordinarily inept promotional conceit—in which young Muslims are called to renounce extremism.

The British and other media are referring to the arrested suspects in the airline conspiracy—as they did when bombs exploded in the London Underground last year—as “homegrown.” If history is any guide, politicians will soon wring their hands and ask why people brought up in the West turned so violently against it. Leftists and isolationists will blame the war against terror for terror.

But the force that drives mosque congregants and their children to build bombs in Britain does not originate in social conditions experienced by Muslims in Europe. Rather, it represents a doctrine brought from the Arab world, via Pakistan and well-funded groups like Lashkar-e-Taiba, to communities from Birmingham, England, to Fairfax, Virginia.

Britain must take off the blinders of political correctness when examining Islam in its Pakistani population and should insist on British training for Muslim clerics officiating on its soil.

Otherwise, London’s 7/7 bombs and the latest transatlantic travel conspiracy could mark the emergence of Britain as the main theater of jihadist violence in Western Europe.

==============================

Day of terror strikes was planned for August 16 (WorldNetDaily, 060811)

Terrorists were planning to unleash a series of deadly mid-air explosions on flights between London and America on August 16, it has been revealed today.

Members of the terror group, who were arrested in a series of raids by anti-terror police yesterday, were due to mount a dry run today to check if they could smuggle components for liquid explosives through Britain’s airports.

United Airline tickets dated next Wednesday were found by police at the home of one of the raided addresses.

One US intelligence official told today’s Evening Standard: “The bombers were a couple of days from a test, and a few days from doing it.”

The airlines targeted were United, American and Continental, which fly to New York, Washington and California.

Today the Bank of England named and froze the assets of 19 of the 24 air terror suspects arrested. The bank was acting under the instruction of Chancellor Gordon Brown and on the advice of the police and security services.

It acted under powers granted by the United Nations to tackle the financing of terrorism in the wake of the September 11 2001 attacks. Its action means it is a crime to make their money available without a licence from the Treasury.

The oldest of the named suspects is 35 and the youngest 17. Thirteen of them are from east London - nine from Walthamstow, one from Chingford, one from Leyton, one from the Limehouse and Poplar area and one from Clapton.

Four are from High Wycombe, Buckinghamshire, and the other two are from Birmingham and Stoke Newington, north London.

The imam of Walthamstow mosque, where many of the suspects live, urged the Muslim community to remain calm and assist the police in their inquries. The unnamed imam added: “We’d like to remind people that the suspects are innocent until proven guilty.”

Meanwhile, a senior Pakistani government official said today that two British nationals arrested in Pakistan provided information about the alleged UK air terror plot.

The UK remains on a “critical” level of alert against terrorism and air passengers at UK airports are expected to face widespread disruption again today following the introduction of new anti-terrorism measures yesterday including a ban on hand luggage.

The plot, which was described as an attempt to commit “mass murder on an unimaginable scale” by blowing up passenger jet, may have been thwarted just days before it was due to be carried out.

==============================

No more ambulances for terror (Townhall.com, 060830)

By Michelle Malkin

What kind of cold-blooded thugs use ambulances as killing aids or propaganda tools? Islamic terrorists, of course, have an unsurpassed history of using emergency vehicles as tools of their murderous trade. International charities and media dupes have gone along for the ride.

In March 2002, Israeli Defense Forces discovered a bomb in a Palestine Red Crescent Society ambulance near Jerusalem. The bomb, packed in a suicide belt, was hidden under a gurney carrying a Palestinian child. The driver confessed that it was not the first time ambulances had been used to ferry explosives.

Veteran U.S. civil rights leader Rev. Jesse Jackson, right, walks past an anti-U.S. banner placed among the rubble of a building that was destroyed following Israeli bombardment during the 34-day long Hezbollah-Israel war, in the southern suburb of Beirut, Lebanon, Tuesday, Aug. 29, 2006. Jackson, who said Tuesday that an Israeli soldier seized by Palestinian militants and two others held captive by Hezbollah are alive, also said Syria, a main backer of both Hamas and Hezbollah, wanted to be involved in a prisoner swap that included the three Israelis and Syrian nationals detained by Israel in the Golan Heights. (AP Photo/Mahmoud Tawil)

Female suicide bomber Wafa Idris, who blew herself up in a January 2002 attack in Jerusalem, was a medical secretary for the PRCS. Her recruiter was an ambulance driver for the same organization, which receives support from governments worldwide and the American and International Red Cross.

As I reported in May 2004, an Israeli television station aired footage of armed Arab terrorists in southern Gaza using an ambulance owned and operated by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) — which has received more than $2.5 billion in taxpayer subsidies. Palestinian gunmen used the UN emergency vehicle as getaway transportation after murdering six Israeli soldiers. Senior UNRWA employee Nahed Rashid Ahmed Attalah confessed to using his official UN vehicle to bypass security and smuggle arms, explosives and terrorists to and from attacks. Nidal ‘Abd al-Fataah ‘Abdallah Nizal, a Hamas activist, worked as an UNRWA ambulance driver and admitted he, too, had used an emergency vehicle to transport munitions to terrorists.

Peter Hansen, the head of the UNRWA, huffily denied that its vehicles were being exploited by terrorists. But a few months later, he told Canada’s CBC TV: “I am sure that there are Hamas members on the UNRWA payroll and I don’t see that as a crime.”

When they’re not being used to ferry weapons, ambulances serve as major stage props for Hizballah news productions. I remind you again of CNN anchor Anderson Cooper’s description last month of Hizballah’s ruse: “They had six ambulances lined up in a row and said, OK, you know, they brought reporters there, they said you can talk to the ambulance drivers. And then one by one, they told the ambulances to turn on their sirens and to zoom off, and people taking that picture would be reporting, I guess, the idea that these ambulances were zooming off to treat civilian casualties, when in fact, these ambulances were literally going back and forth down the street just for people to take pictures of them.”

Keep all this context in mind — and keep the summer’s bombshell blog revelations of Photoshopped war fauxtography by Reuters and staged photos by other media outlets in mind—as we move on to the events of July 23. According to the Lebanon Red Cross, two of its ambulances were deliberately struck by weapons in Qana, Lebanon, while performing rescue missions. The international press, which has stubbornly ignored the prolonged exploitation of emergency vehicles by terrorists, immediately accused Israel of committing “war crimes.”

Photos and accounts of the alleged ambulance targeting were disseminated widely by newswires, the BBC, ITV, The New York Times, the Boston Globe and countless others. It should be noted that Western journalists were not allowed onto the scene, but received video and pictures from locals. Bloggers have again raised pointed doubts about what those photos really show (see http://zombietime.com/fraud/ambulance/ and my Internet video report at http://hotair.com/archives/2006/08/29/ambulances-for-jihad/). The roof of one Red Cross ambulance said to have been hit by a missile had a neat hole punched dead center — in the same location that ventilation holes of other ambulances are positioned.

Massive rust and corrosion around the hole suggest the damage may have occurred before the alleged strike. Moreover, a missile explosion inside an ambulance would not leave the rest of the vehicle as intact as the supposedly targeted ambulance remained. A paramedic quoted by several media organizations claimed a “big fire” engulfed the inside of the vehicle. But photos of the ambulance allegedly consumed by the fire showed gurneys and seats intact and minimal damage to the interior.

What is the response from all of the media hypers of the alleged Red Cross ambulance missile strike last month? The same response they’ve had to the jihadists’ past ambulance hoaxes: Nothing.

Maybe your political representatives will have more to say. Many of the UN and Red Cross ambulances and ambulance drivers being exploited by the likes of Hamas and Hizballah are supported by American taxpayers and charitable groups. Isn’t it time to cut off the ambulances-for-terror lifeline?

==============================

Britain ‘is now biggest security threat to US’ (Telegraph, UK, 060829)

Britain now presents a greater security threat to the United States than Iran or Iraq, an American magazine said yesterday.

In an article on Islamists headlined “Kashmir on the Thames”, the New Republic painted Britain’s Muslim communities as a breeding ground for violent extremism.

Citing recent opinion poll evidence suggesting that one in four British Muslims believed that last year’s London Tube bombings were justified, the magazine said: “In the wake of this month’s high-profile arrests, it can now be argued that the biggest threat to US security emanates not from Iran or Iraq or Afghanistan, but rather from Great Britain, our closest ally.”

The magazine, with a circulation of 60,000-a-week, has its roots on the Democratic Left although in recent years it has backed much of President George W Bush’s foreign policy. The claim is the latest in a series of hostile reassessment of Britain by Americans in the wake of the alleged plot to bring down transatlantic airliners.

Many have been appalled both by the existence of enthusiastic jihadis in British cities and by the call from some of their leaders for a change in the country’s foreign policy.

Other publications and the think-tanks that shape public debate in America have also issued stern criticism both of Britain’s Muslims and of the Government. Nile Gardiner, of the Right-wing Heritage Foundation, told The Daily Telegraph yesterday that Americans were coming to view Britain as “a hornet’s nest of Islamic extremists” and thought it posed “a direct security threat to the US”.

He said that if British-based terrorism continues, America is likely to respond harshly.

“A major concern would be the tightening of travel restrictions unless the authorities start to crack down on Islamist militancy,” he said. More than four million Britons enter America annually using the visa waiver programme. Any change would force Britons wishing to visit the US into lengthy queues at American diplomatic missions.

Mr Gardiner said the issue had not yet acquired a head of steam in Congress, but that another plot, or a “successful” attack by British Muslims on an American target, would be likely to spur an immediate response.

Investor’s Business Daily has already demanded an end to the programme because it “allows Pakistani Britons to dodge security background checks”.

Much of the outraged American response this month was sparked by the call from Muslim leaders for a change in British foreign policy. The letter from six Muslim MPs and 38 community leaders said “current British Government policy risks putting civilians at increased risk both in the UK and abroad”.

The theme was taken up by the Wall Street Journal, which said: “It is typical of some of Britain’s so-called moderate Muslims, who seem less concerned with fighting extremists in their midst than in excusing them.”

The newspaper went on to attack Tony Blair’s government for “cultivating and promoting such pseudo-moderate Muslim organisations”. The BBC and the Foreign Office, described as “a preserve of Arabists”, were also lambasted both for quoting extremists and allowing them into Britain.

==============================

“Der Terror Ist Da”: Germany wakes up, sort of. (Weekly Standard, 060907)

Berlin

A COLLEAGUE TELLS ME of a friend who was at the Hamburg train station during a recent bomb scare. Passengers, evacuated from the suspect train, were quite upset—about the delay. No one took the threat seriously. I confess to my own mundane thoughts in a similar situation. I was at the Zurich airport last month departing for London when the news came that flights to Britain were cancelled because the Brits had thwarted a major terrorist plot. My first thought was, How in the world will I ever get my checked suitcase back?

This summer’s thwarted plot to blow up two trains in Germany has started a long overdue debate here about the nature of the terrorist threat. Until now the conventional wisdom has been that Germany was immune from Islamic terrorism because Gerhard Schröder kept the country out of the Iraq war. Britain was attacked because Tony Blair is a poodle of the Americans. Spain suffered attacks because José María Aznar helped remove Saddam Hussein from power. This is all nonsense, of course. The Canadians uncovered a plot this summer in which terrorists sought to attack the parliament and behead the prime minister. Canada was against the Iraq invasion. Al Qaeda has murdered innocents in Indonesia, the world’s largest Muslim country, which opposed the Iraq war.

Alexander Ritzmann, a talented young Free Democratic member of the Berlin senate, says it will still take some time for Germans to get the picture: “It’s not what we do, it’s who we are that

makes us a target.” Ritzmann calls this “the central reality Germany has been avoiding.” Last week, he gave his own plea on the floor of the Berlin senate for Germany to wake up. To be sure, Chancellor Angela Merkel has already had a sobering effect on the German foreign policy and security debate. Merkel is empirical, a scientist by training. Last February at the annual international security conference in Munich, an Iranian official stood up and informed her that Iran has a law requiring it to enrich uranium. “Then change the law,” she said.

The Schröder era was not a complete wasteland. Otto Schily, the dour interior minister—a Green turned Social Democrat—was tough as nails and proved a serious ally for the United States and others. But the debate about Islamic terrorism during those years was mostly silly and irresponsible. Mathias Döpfner, the chairman and CEO of the Springer publishing company, wrote a searing column a couple years ago in which he argued that the German debate had been reduced to the goofy and lazy formula “Bush is dumb and bad.”

The events of the summer have at least gotten Germans’ attention. The first of four arrested was a 21-year-old Lebanese student in Kiel named Youssef Mohammed E.H. On July 31, he had planted bombs aboard two commuter trains on their way to Koblenz and Dortmund. The bombs failed to explode. Nothing has been concluded, but it appears that there might have been an al Qaeda connection. Last week Stern magazine announced that “Der Terror ist da!” (“Terror is here”). Der Spiegel’s latest cover story is on the new German angst. But the debate “has still not really heated up,” says Ritzmann. “We still need a huge step,” he adds.

There are those who have been trying. The most important, perhaps, has been Hans Magnus Enzensberger, one of the country’s leading literary figures and social critics. Enzensberger debated the Iraq war with another of Germany’s leading intellectuals, Jürgen Habermas. Habermas insisted that Europe, with its superior humanistic values, go its separate way from America. Enzensberger vigorously dissented in the pages of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.

Earlier this year, Enzensberger published “Men of Terror,” an essay on “the Radical Loser.” Enzensberger blames neither poverty nor George W. Bush for the scourge of Islamic terror. He sees its roots in an intolerant vision of Islam, traceable to the Muslim Brotherhood’s founding in Egypt in the 1920s. The essay quotes generously from the U.N. Human Development Report and concludes that massive deficits in education and self-government in the Arab world have helped create an incubator for the dreadful complexes of inferiority and alienation that produce the “radical loser.” Enzensberger’s essay is a big step toward serious debate. But otherwise the state of discourse has been underwhelming. Germany’s most celebrated Middle East hand, an elderly eccentric author and journalist named Peter Scholl-Latour, has argued al Qaeda is a trumped-up rag-tag team mostly invented by the Americans.

The good news in all this? A majority of Germans now say they see a real threat. But then the Brits do, too. 80% say yes to the war on terror, but chiefly through more hawkish domestic policies and not in alliance with the United States. Just wait until Tony Blair’s exit to see how bad things can become. We can only hope Angela Merkel will step up. Europe needs a serious debate, and only serious leadership will bring it about.

Jeffrey Gedmin is director of the Aspen Institute Berlin and a columnist for Die Welt.

==============================

Five Years Safe: The government has kept us safe from another attack. (National Review Online, 060908)

By Rich Lowry

There has been one constant in the five years since the terror attacks of 9/11 — there has been no follow-up attack in the United States. It is the most blessed non-event in recent American history.

Of course, that could change in an awful instant. It is nonetheless the signal accomplishment in the war on terror. While the smoke was still clearing from downtown Manhattan, no one would have said that the fight against terror should be judged on whether the U.S. is popular abroad or able to spread democracy. The standard was avoiding another attack in the U.S., and by that standard, the war on terror is a tentative success.

There are rival explanations for this success. Critics of President Bush tend to chalk it up to luck or to discount it on grounds that the terror threat was always exaggerated. The first explanation is too fatalistic, implying that our initiative doesn’t matter; it is fate that keeps us safe (or not). The second is circular. Only because we have prevented another attack is it possible to downplay the threat. If terrorists had managed to blow a couple of airliners from the sky a few weeks ago, their threat would look as terrifying as it did immediately after 9/11.

The first important step in thwarting terror was the passage of the Patriot Act. It was a bipartisan accomplishment, although Democrats subsequently obscured this when they realized that smearing the act played well with the Bush-hating left. The Patriot Act tore down the wall that made it difficult for law enforcement and intelligence agents to communicate, and it updated the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act so that law enforcement no longer needed a new warrant every time a terror suspect switched phones. The Patriot Act — coupled with the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s new prevention-oriented rather than after-the-fact approach to terrorism prosecutions — tightened up the homeland security considerably.

Overseas, the war in Afghanistan — also a bipartisan initiative — destroyed al Qaeda’s base and its training camps. Those camps were so important to indoctrination, to testing a recruit’s commitment, and to forging relationships that, as Brian Michael Jenkins of the Rand Corporation points out, “Al-Qaida still relies heavily on these now-dispersed Afghan veterans.” If the Patriot Act and the Afghan War were obvious pieces of the war on terror, many of the others were submerged from view until the last year or so, when leaks to the press and statements from Bush officials revealed and fleshed them out.

The National Security Agency has been running a secret program to monitor terrorist communications; the Treasury Department has been secretly tapping a huge database of financial transactions to track terrorist money transfers; the CIA has been running secret prisons where top al Qaeda officials are held and aggressively interrogated for information to detain their co-conspirators. All of this is controversial, although one suspects that immediately after 9/11, Democrats would have signed onto it too. This is the secret war that has disrupted al Qaeda so badly that in the latest Atlantic Monthly, liberal writer James Fallows calls (prematurely) for declaring the war on terror won.

Fallows quotes Jenkins, “Because of increased intelligence efforts by the United States and its allies, transactions of any type — communications, travel, money transfers — have become dangerous for the jihadists.” Terrorism expert John Robb tells Fallows that in a large-scale attack: “the number of people involved is substantial, the lead time is long, the degree of coordination is great and the specific skills you need are considerable. It’s not realistic for al-Qaida anymore.”

This is the one area where government has recently proved effective. Yes, gobs of federal money have been wasted on homeland security, and the Transportation Security Agency’s blunderbuss approach at the airports is a parody of bureaucratic excess. But the government has done what is most needful — it has kept us safe. Much work remains to be done — especially in the ideological fight against Islamic extremism, the ultimate source of the terror threat. But this is an anniversary when we should be thankful for non-events.

==============================

The Real Jack Bauers: There are real reasons we haven’t been attacked again. (National Review Online, 060911)

The United States hasn’t been hit by a terrorist attack in five years — about five months longer than most had predicted immediately after 9/11.

Vice President Cheney often reminds that this record isn’t an accident. There are a number of reasons why we haven’t been hit. Some of the reasons we know about: the efforts of the military in Afghanistan and Iraq; the Patriot Act; generally heightened security; the SWIFT program; NSA surveillance; intelligence coordination with allies, etc. Other reasons are less discernable.

President Bush indicated that many of the victories against terrorists would be hidden from view; they will never be recorded in history. Many of these victories have been won by the military’s elite units — special-forces/counterterrorism units and others that the media knows little, if anything about. Indeed, Kiefer Sutherland got more coverage in five minutes at the Emmys than all of the Rangers, Green Berets, Marine Force Recon, SEALs / DevGru, and Delta operators combined.

And that’s as it should be. Very little public information is available about elite warriors so that terrorists are kept in the dark until it’s too late. Most of what the general public knows or suspects about elite forces comes from fictional accounts in movies, television shows or novels. Sure, lots of people know or have met Green Berets or SEALs, particularly people living near the southern Virginia and southern California coasts or in central North Carolina (it’s fairly certain, however, that every woman in the U.S. who’s ever set foot in a local watering hole has met a SEAL, who’s usually using the ingenious cover of a slightly overweight sales rep from Cleveland). Videos about SEAL and Green Beret physical training are a cottage industry. And there are several books by former Special Forces operators. But none of these accounts provides more than a non-classified peek into the training, techniques, and operations of elite warriors. Yet what the peeks reveal is astonishing nonetheless.

The superhuman physical conditioning of special-forces personnel is legendary. Anyone who’s worked out with elite athletes such as pro-football players or Olympians on the one hand and Rangers and SEALs on the other will tell you there’s no comparison — not even apples and oranges. Put your money on a SEAL breezing through a month of two-a-days at any pro football training camp versus a pro-football player surviving just a couple of days of SEAL training.

Interminable running, incessant push-ups, and spine-fusing overhead presses are standard features of special-forces PT. Each unit, however, has its own peculiar brand of hell. Stress fractures from Delta’s nonstop 40 mile marches with 50 pound rucksacks and hypothermia from the SEALs’ repeated nighttime immersions in frigid surf require team members to transcend ordinary limits of human pain and endurance. At the Delta, SEAL and Force Recon levels it’s less about physical invincibility than about extraordinary mental discipline

There are plenty of tough, brave, superbly conditioned sold