Terrorists & The Attack On The West

A bit of late blogging on this one. It is without doubt al Qaeda's most insidious plot to date. Apparently the next itteration of suicide bombs in the sky will not be exploding underwear. In order to defeat full body scans rapidly being put in place after the Undiebomber, al Qaeda is planning to implant PETN into . . . breast implants. The implants would be detonated when the bomber uses "a hypodermic syringe to inject TATP (Triacetone Triperoxide) through their skin into the explosives sachet."

It is one thing for these most amoral of al Qaeda terrorists to seek to use our Western freedoms against us. It is an order of magnitude greater when al Qaeda seeks to corrupt one of the most benign, trusted and beloved symbols of our society - a really primo rack. Anyone who thinks our service men - and at least a few of the service women - are out on freedom's fronteir fighting for just mom and apple pie is missing two of the prime motivators. Oh the humanity . . .

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Interesting New From Around The Web

The NYT tells us today, in its lead article, that most of the foreign fighters in Iraq have been coming from Saudi Arabia and that these foreign fighter constitute 90% of the suicide bombers. I am not sure how any of that is news – we’ve known it for years. And than the NYT tells us that the bulk of the Sunni insurgents were Iraqi. Well, yes, we’ve known that too, just as we also know that, for a lot of the Sunni “insurgents,” their motive has been bin Franklin, not bin Laden, and that most of the bin Franklins have been flowing out of Saudi Arabia. How these facts justify a lead article has me a bit stumped. Am I missing something?

One of the world’s youngest democracies, Mongolia, has a new PM, Sanj Bayar.

In some really good news, that treacherous former French President, Jackques Chirac was placed under formal investigation Wednesday for allegedly embezzling public funds while he was mayor of Paris.

Iran is acting to push up the price of oil. Bomb them. Bomb them now.

“The situation in Iraq has improved so rapidly that Democrats now shun the topic as thoroughly as they shun our troops when the cameras aren't around.” Ralph Peters tells us the 5 reasons Iraq is now such a success.

Instapundit weighs in on the Supreme Court’s options in deciding the Heller 2nd Amendment case. None of the options seem palatable but for finding an individual right to own guns.

Rich Lowrey reviews "A Farewell to Alms: A Brief Economic History of the World," a book by Gregory Clark that covers just how important capitalism has been to the world’s development. Some of the observations are breathtaking.

Don Surber names names as he documents how the Dems passed judgement on the surge in days gone by.

The anti-gun crowd is spiraling up . . . but their claims are lacking more than a little in the veracity department. This from Volokh Conspiracy on some wild claims in the LA Times

The secret collaboration between CAIR and Representative John Conyers raises concerns over the lawmaker's support for "a group unambiguously proven to be part of the Muslim Brotherhood-Hamas infrastructure."

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Why The Iranian Theocracy's Nuclear Program Must Be Stopped

Why do we need to stop Iran from continuing its inexorable march towards acquisition of nuclear weapons?:

1. The Khomeneist theocracy has a history of terrorism in the Middle East and throughout the world that has not ameliorated in their near 30 years of theocractic rule. Indeed, before 9-11, Iranian funded and directed Hezbollah was responsible for more American deaths to terrorism than any other organization. And it was the Ayatollah Khomenei himself who gifted to the Middle East the suicide bomber. This is an incredibly dangerous, brutal and amoral regime for whom the end justifies any means.

Update: As Sec. of Defense Robert Gates recently said:

"Everywhere you turn, it is the policy of Iran to foment instability and chaos, no matter the strategic value or cost in the blood of innocents - Christians, Jews and Muslims alike," Gates said in his address at the event organized by the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies.

"There can be little doubt that their destabilizing foreign policies are a threat to the interests of the United States, to the interests of every country in the Middle East, and to the interests of all countries within the range of the ballistic missiles Iran is developing," he said.

2. Khomeniesm is an expansionist, triumphalist and apolcoyptic ideology that does not operate according to the rules of western logic. As the world’s premier Orientalist, Bernard Lewis, has warned:

There is a radical difference between the Islamic Republic of Iran and other governments with nuclear weapons. This difference is expressed in what can only be described as the apocalyptic worldview of Iran's present rulers. This worldview and expectation, vividly expressed in speeches, articles and even schoolbooks, clearly shape the perception and therefore the policies of Ahmadinejad and his disciples. . . .

A passage from the Ayatollah Khomeini, quoted in an 11th-grade Iranian schoolbook, is revealing.

I am decisively announcing to the whole world that if the world-devourers [i.e., the infidel powers] wish to stand against our religion, we will stand against their whole world and will not cease until the annihilation of all them. Either we all become free, or we will go to the greater freedom which is martyrdom. Either we shake one another's hands in joy at the victory of Islam in the world, or all of us will turn to eternal life and martyrdom. In both cases, victory and success are ours.

In this context, mutual assured destruction, the deterrent that worked so well during the Cold War, would have no meaning. At the end of time, there will be general destruction anyway. What will matter will be the final destination of the dead--hell for the infidels, and heaven for the believers. For people with this mindset, MAD is not a constraint; it is an inducement.

3. The West's refusal to deal with the nuclear problem presented by the Iranian theocracy is set to kick off a true nightmare scenario. Iranian pursuit of a nuclear arsenal coupled with the lack of response by the West has already motivatd a similar pursuit by many other Middle East countries, ratcheting up the threat of a nuclear attack, a nuclear exchange, and/or a terrorist strike using nuclear materials exponentially. Indeed, just last week, Egypt announced that it would commence a nuclear program.

4. Nuclear terrorism is not merely a fantasy. The Dircetor of the FBI has stated that it is only a matter of time before terrorists acquire nuclear weapons. Allowing Iran to continue its nuclear program will likely make nuclear terrorism an occurrence sooner rather then later.

The 9-11 Commission listed the first failure of America's security apparatus' failure to protect us from al Qaeda as a failure of imagination. To put this in perspective, it is not difficult at all to imagine the Iranian theocracy providing materials to terrorists for an attack on the West. We know that Iran has supported al Qaeda in Iraq. Is there any reason to think that Iran might not choose to distribute nuclear material to al Qaeda or to its own world-wide terrorist organization, Hezbollah, for an attack on the West if they thought that they could do so plausible deniabiity?

Indeed, it need not be an atomic bomb that Iran provides. In an al Qaeda camp in Afghanistan, we recovered sophisticated plans for the most "dangerous form of dirty bomb" that can be made. And dirty bombs are not difficult to make. Cesium chloride is a by-product of the nuclear process. It is highly radioactive, has a half life of over 30 years, and it is in a powdered form, like talc, thus making it a perfect component for a dirty bomb. A handful of cesium chloride and ten pounds of plastic explosive would make a "dirty bomb" sufficient to render an area of several square blocks a no-go area with the costs of cleanup and the economic losses running from the billions to the hundreds of billions. And that is one bomb. Imagine a scenario where terrorists plant multiple such bombs around the world to attack strategic infrastructure. Imagine major ports being shut down or Wall Street rendered uninhabitable. While America and the West cannot be defeated by terrorism initially, even nuclear terrorism, our economy can be wounded, perhaps permanently so.

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Responding to the Muslim Council of Britain

The insanity doesn’t end across the pond. The UK’s Labour government has tried to make nice with its Muslim population for years, even to the extent of making any reasoned criticism or satire of Islam a potential crime of Hate Speech - a law adopted at the urging of the Muslim Council of Britain (MCB). But one wonders just how things like today's outrageous statements of MCB President, Dr. Muhammed Bari, reprinted in UK newspaper, The Telegraph, will go down with the British rank and file who do not share their Labour’s unquestioning devotion to the doctrine of multiculturalism. Among other things, Dr. Bari claims that there is no such thing as terrorism associated with Islam, that the mere identification of Islam with terrorism is at least partly responsible for radicalizing Britain's young Mulsims, that Britain should ban the public sale of alcohol and adopt stoning for adulterers.

Demographic numbers and polls provide the context for Dr. Bari's remarks. Britain’s Muslims comprise about 1,650,000 of Britain’s population of 61,000,000. Britain, with their exceptionally lax immigration policies over the past twenty years, allowed radical Islamists and imams trained in Saudi Arabia’s Wahhabi / Salafi Islam to flock into the country as part of that number.

Assuming that a poll taken in the wake of the 7/7 terrorist bombing by homegrown Islamists was accurate, approximately 100,000 UK Muslims feel the slaughter of 7/7 was justified, and over 200,000 UK Muslims sympathize with the perpetrators. Less then half of UK's Muslims indicate feeling very loyal to Britain, over 500,000 feel that the Western culture of Britain should be overturned and Islamic rule put in its place, and about 16,000 British Muslims are willing to take part in overt violence against their fellow Brits in the service of Islam.

According to MI5, there are 2,000 “people,” actively involved in terrorist activity in Britain today and “children as young as 15" are being "groomed to be suicide bombers.” Besides 7/7, Britain has broken up several notable terrorist plots, with the most prominent being the plot of last year to blow up several airlines in flight from Heathrow. To top it off, Britain is having significant trouble reconciling its legal approach to terrorism, with the very liberal EU laws on immigration and extradition.

And into this mix comes the Muslim Council of Britain and Dr. Bari who, in the Telegraph, takes exception to the totality of Britain’s response to terrorism.

Dr Muhammad Abdul Bari, the leader of the Muslim Council of Britain (MCB), thinks the Government is stoking the tension.

"There is a disproportionate amount of discussion surrounding us," he says. "The air is thick with suspicion and unease. It is not good for the Muslim community, it is not good for society."

Dr. Bari is telling us that if we only ignore the problems of violence associated with Islam and the odd slaughter of innocents in the name of Allah in our backyards, the problems will all go away. I don't know. That particular technique didn’t work so well for Chamberlin in 1938 when he was trying to stop Nazi aggression, but who knows, it’s a different era now. Nothing to see here, just move along.

. . . Britain must,[Dr. Bari] warns, beware of becoming like Nazi Germany.

That is an incredibly outrageous assertion and deserves a response in kind. It of course would be horrendous if Britain were to succumb to an autocratic, racist, and triumphalist ideology that promotes violence and has been responsible for countless deaths of innocents in just the past century. And it would be equally bad if Britain were to succumb to Naziism.

There is, in [Dr. Bari’s] view, no such thing as Islamic terrorism.

There are a lot of widows, widowers, orphans and wounded alive today who would take issue with that bald assertion. Having said that, Dr. Bari does have some support for his argument. His view comports with the findings of the Muslim dominated UN Human Rights Counsel. The only terrorism they have been able to find for the past few years has been in acts committed by Israel. And the OIC, the Organization of the Islamic Conference involving the governments of all Muslim states, likewise provides support for Bari's assertion. The OIC issued a very strongly worded condemnation of terrorism several months ago. That certainly sounded promising, until one also learned that days before issuing the condemnation, the OIC, in what can only be described as an exercise in Orwellian doublespeak, issued a statement defining "terrorism" as “Islamaphobia.”

"Terrorists are terrorists, they may use religion but we shouldn't say Muslim terrorists, it stigmatises the whole community. We never called the IRA Catholic terrorists." Dr Bari thinks Jonathan Evans, the head of MI5, made the extremists' job easier by giving a bleak picture of the threat on the eve of the Queen's Speech.

Taking note of the religion of the majority of terrorists today might lead one to, apparently erroneously, suspect that they were motivated to slaughter by something in their religion. I guess the best way to handle this is to willfully ignore the single unifying characteristic of the terrorists – as oftens happens in the BBC coverage of terrorism. Dr. Bari and the multiculturalists at the BBC evidently do not want us to confuse the issue of terrorism with too many salient facts.

As to the Irish Catholics in Northern Ireland. Dr. Bari's analogy does not survive even a cursory examination. While IRA violence was identified with their religious group, it was isolated to that band of Catholics in that geographical location. That is obviously not the case with Islam, where acts of terror have been both constant and world wide.

[Referring to associating the terrorist acts committed by Muslims as Islamic terrorism, Dr. Bari said]"I think it is creating a scare in the community and wider society. It probably helps some people who try to recruit the young to terrorism. Muslim young people are as vulnerable as any others. Under this climate of fear they will begin to feel victimised."

I did not realize simply publicly acknowledging the common trait among the terrorists as being their religion could itself be a primary cause of radicalization. Let’s work this through. If a young Muslim hears that terrorists come from the Muslim community, he becomes afraid - apparently that the mean British Anglo-Saxons might think that he is a terrorist by association. Then to relieve his fear, the young Muslims chooses to kill a few of the natives and martyr himself. What could be more logical and foreseeable? If we only stopped victimizing these people in the first place . . .

The Prime Minister's plan to increase the length of time terrorist suspects can be detained without trial is also, [Dr. Bari] believes, misguided.

"Even the police haven't asked for more than 28 days. As far as we know there is no clear evidence of the need for more time."

Control orders and stop and search powers are further increasing the sense of alienation among Muslims, Dr Bari says, and the Metropolitan Police are not helping matters either.

"There was institutional racism and institutions as massive as the Met find it hard to change. They need more Muslim police officers. I'm not going to use the term trigger happy - sometimes the police can make mistakes - but they need to do their job in a better way."

It might seem on the surface that Dr. Bari is confused. Islam is a religion, not a race and thus, by definition, cannot engender racism. Apparently though, to follow Dr. Bari's logic, taking actions to detain terrorist suspects and address the threat of terrorism is “racism.” But by his definition, terrorists are not even Islamic. Are you as confused as I am?

One of her Majesty’s more beautiful subjects told me a few weeks ago that charging “racism” in the UK, under the presiding doctrine of multiculturalism, is to charge one with a sin “worse then paedophilia.” It seems that Dr. Bari is concerned less with intellectual honest than he is pushing those multicultural buttons.

Sir Salman Rushdie should never have been knighted, [Dr. Bari] says. "He caused a huge amount of distress and discordance with his book, it should have been pulped."

Is Dr. Bari saying that challenging religious dogma should not be tolerated in Britain? Hmmmm, seems to me that the West moved beyond that during the Renaissance and Enlightenment periods several centuries ago. Obviously, the same cannot be said for Islam. Well, prepare for a return to the good old days. If we adopt Sharia, we may end up with far fewer books, but perhaps our science will improve. Oh, and if we follow Wahhabi / Salafi Islam of Saudi Arabia, at least we get to revive the Medieval pasttimes of witch trials and executions for sorcery. And then there are the public floggings for such offenses as being the victim of a gang rape - always a crowd pleaser.

Critics say the MCB - an umbrella organisation with 500 affiliates - has itself contributed to the growing sense of unease in Britain. The Government has cut funding to the council following claims that it had links with extremists. A Tory report this year accused it of promoting segregation.

Dr Bari insists he is simply trying to unite disparate communities. "On the one hand we are accused of not engaging, being insular, and on the other hand of being too political. We can't win."

Dr. Bari’s point is well taken. The MCB certainly has shown no desire to split the community and isolate the Muslims from British society by demanding unique and differential treatment, such as special rules for Muslim school students.

According to a recent report by the Policy Exchange think-tank, the bookshop at the east London Mosque, which Dr Bari chairs, stocks extremist literature.

"The bookshops are independent businesses," he says. "We can't just go in and tell them what to sell … I will see what books they keep, if they have one book which looks like it is inciting hatred, do they have counter books on the same shelf?"

Any bets on how soon Dr. Bari would have the bookstore closed if they decided to stock “The Satanic Verses” rather then “Women Who Deserve To Go To Hell” or “Four Essays On The Obligation of Veiling,” among many others? You can find the Policy Exchange report on Islamic hate literature in British mosques here and an article from the Telegraph on it here.

“He is more careful about who is allowed to preach in the mosque. "If I hear of a specific preacher who is inciting hatred I will ban him from preaching but I cannot disallow him from praying."

The interviewer should have asked Dr. Bari some follow up questions on BBC4’s exceptional documentary, Undercover Mosque. It seems there were more then a few preachers teaching hate and triumphalism at the Dr.'s London mosque.

In Dr. Bari's view, suicide bombers are victims as well as aggressors. "I deal with emotionally damaged children," he explains. "Children come to hate when they don't get enough care and love. They are probably bullied, it makes a young person angry and vulnerable.

"The extreme case could be suicide bombers, it is all they have … The people who become suicide bombers are really vulnerable."

As to what goes into the making of a suicide bomber, it is not Western society that is in any way victimizing the child suicide bomber or adult jihadist. Muslims accomplish that all on their own between home and the Mosque. The eminent psychologist Pat Santy has examined this issue in some detail, particularly as regards to children and suicide bombers, and what she writes is more then a little troubling. See here and here. And do not overlook Hamas’s children’s programming.

Although he stresses there is no justification for suicide bombing - "killing innocent people is completely forbidden, Islam is very emphatic on that."

Bari’s statement of the Koranic prohibition is not simply disingenuous, it is deceitful. One must be very careful to parse anything said by Wahhabi / Salafi public figures, since there is a well established history of dissimulation. One clear example of this is the use of a very flexible definition of the word “innocent” to justify the wanton slaughter of non-Muslim civilians as on 7/7. For example, you are not an innocent in the eye’s of radical Muslims if you are a member of a country that has somehow wronged Islam. There is no need for it to have been within the last half millenium - engaging in the Crusades during the 13th century will provide the religous justification. And bin Laden held in his writings that the American’s targeted on 9-11, and indeed, the entire population of America, were not innocents as contemplated by that verse in the Koran for a litany of reasons, not the least of which was because they paid taxes to the American government. And as to Israeli’s, they are all, of course, fair game, as shown in this BBC4 transcript:

Quinn: One senior theologian whose Fatwas have been used to provide justification for suicide bombings directed at Israeli civilians is Dr Yusuf Qaradawi - the man who the mayor of London, Ken Livingstone, welcomed to City Hall last year and described as "moderate".

Ware: Well, although Dr Qaradawi has condemned the London suicide bombings unequivocally here when it comes to Israel he says - and I'm quoting here an interview he gave: "We must all realise that the Israeli society is a military society - men and women. We cannot describe the society as civilian...they are not civilians or innocent". He's also supported the use of child suicide bombers. During a TV debate in the Gulf - according to BBC monitoring - he said: "The Israelis might have nuclear bombs but we have the children bomb and these human bombs must continue until liberation".

Quinn: What's the Muslim Council of Britain had to say about Dr Qaradawi?

Ware: Like the Hamas leader Sheikh Yassin, the Muslim Council of Britain has also described Dr Qaradawi in fairly flattering terms. They've said he's " a distinguished Muslim scholar...a voice of reason and understanding."

Read the entire transcript here. I doubt if you will ever find the Wahhabist's definition of "innocent" in Websters.

. . . - [Bari] says British foreign policy has driven Muslims into the arms of the extremists.

"Criminal people have used that as a weapon to encourage young people, those who don't have any anchor in themselves, [to become suicide bombers]. Iraq has been a disaster, the country has been destroyed for no reason, that had an impact on the Muslim psyche."

To Bari, Muslims are perpetual victims. Thus all of their actions, no matter how barbaric, are always portrayed as justified or at least reasonably explainable by some cause other then Islam itself. That is a total canard. The most effective response to Bari comes from a British former jihadi:

When I was still a member of what is probably best termed the British Jihadi Network, a series of semi-autonomous British Muslim terrorist groups linked by a single ideology, I remember how we used to laugh in celebration whenever people on TV proclaimed that the sole cause for Islamic acts of terror like 9/11, the Madrid bombings and 7/7 was Western foreign policy.

By blaming the government for our actions, those who pushed the 'Blair's bombs' line did our propaganda work for us. More important, they also helped to draw away any critical examination from the real engine of our violence: Islamic theology.

. . . And as with previous terror attacks, people are again articulating the line that violence carried out by Muslims is all to do with foreign policy. For example, yesterday on Radio 4's Today programme, the mayor of London, Ken Livingstone, said: 'What all our intelligence shows about the opinions of disaffected young Muslims is the main driving force is not Afghanistan, it is mainly Iraq.'

He then refused to acknowledge the role of Islamist ideology in terrorism and said that the Muslim Brotherhood and those who give a religious mandate to suicide bombings in Palestine were genuinely representative of Islam.

And see also see this exceptional essay from Tawfiq Hamid, a former jihadist and disciple of Ayman al-Zawahiri, wherein he states a very similar message.

[Bari's] passion is to integrate Muslim and British cultures - he says integration must go both ways.

You have to love that statement in light of what follows after - which is in essence a demand that the British accept Sharia law. Indeed, Bari does not explain how British Muslims can better integrate into British society. Instead, Bari asks that Britain:

1) adopt the practice of arranged marriages

2) ban alcohol at least in public places

3) establish dress codes for women

4) issue a declaration that homosexuality is unacceptable . . .

5) adopt stoning for adultery as set forth in the Koran.

And the list continues. You can read the entire article here.

My purpose in responding to Dr. Bari at some length is not to denigrate Islam in any way. But people like Dr. Bari and others who embrace the triumphalism and brutality of Wahhabi / Salafi / Deobandi Islam are incredibly dangerous to Western Society in their role as apologists for terrorism and to minimize Muslim integration into Western society, all the while chipping away at the laws and culture of the West from within.

As I have written previously and at some length, Islam desperately needs to go through a period of Enlightenment, and I believe the tools are there for it to happen. Set against that possibility are the contrarian forces of Wahhabi Islam largely funded and exported by Saudi Arabia, and the dominant Western culture that acquiesces to Wahabbi Islam under the philosophy of multiculturalism.

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