MAS, CAIR & Minnesota - the Epicenter of Radical Islamic Activism?

Compliments of Powerline, this is from the Wall Street Journal looking at the unusual confluence of Islamic activisim in Minnesota:

What's going on? It appears that both local circumstances and activists with a big-picture agenda play a role. Take the taxi drivers. Minnesota is home to tens of thousands of Somalis, most recent immigrants. Behind the scenes, moderate local Somali leaders are engaged in a power struggle with national Muslim organizations that seek to exploit this vulnerable population. Islam prohibits the consumption of alcohol but not its transportation, say Somalis who reject the taxi drivers' stance. Yet in June 2006, the Muslim American Society's (MAS) Minnesota chapter issued a "fatwa" forbidding drivers here from carrying alcohol to avoid "cooperating in sin."

Hassan Mohamud, one of the fatwa signers, praised the two top-light proposal as a national model for accommodating Islam in areas ranging from housing to the workplace. But according to Omar Jamal of the Somali Justice Advocacy Center in St. Paul, MAS is "trying to hijack and radicalize the Somali community for their Middle East agenda."

Ahmed Samatar, a recognized expert on Somali society at Macalester College in St. Paul notes that "There is a general Islamic prohibition against drinking, but carrying alcohol for people in commercial enterprise has never been forbidden." Similarly, Islam prohibits consuming pork, but not touching or scanning it, according to Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf of the American Society for Muslim Advancement in New York. It is, or should be, "a nonissue."

In Washington, the Democratic leadership is likely to seek passage of the End Racial Profiling Act, of which House Speaker Nancy Pelosi called herself, in 2004, a "proud" cosponsor. Both MAS and CAIR are stumping for the bill, which would bar airport security personnel from disproportionately questioning Muslims or people of Middle Eastern descent. Minnesota's Keith Ellison, the nation's first Muslim Congressman, told me that the imams' situation reflects a misunderstanding of Muslim prayer and will be sorted out in court, while the other matters stem from the normal process of immigrant adjustment.

The events here suggest a larger strategy: By piggy-backing on our civil rights laws, Islamist activists aim to equate airport security with racial bigotry and to move slowly toward a two-tier legal system. Intimidation is a crucial tool. The "flying imams" lawsuit ups the ante by indicating that passengers who alerted airport authorities will be included as defendants. Activists are also perfecting their skills at manipulating the media. After a "pray-in" at Reagan National Airport in Washington, D.C., one credulous MSNBC anchor likened the flying imams to civil rights icon Rosa Parks.

The comparison is misplaced: Omar Shahin, leader of the detained imams, has helped raise money for at least two charities later shut down for supporting terrorism. From 2000 to 2003, he headed the Islamic Center of Tucson, which terrorism expert Rita Katz described in the Washington Post as holding "basically the first cell of al Qaeda in the United States." CAIR has long been controversial for alleged terrorist ties, while the Chicago Tribune has described MAS as the American arm of the fundamentalist Muslim Brotherhood, which "preaches that religion and politics cannot be separated and that governments eventually should be Islamic."

For background on the Muslim Brotherhood and its arm in America, the Muslim American Society, please see here, here, here and here. They need to be watched and challenged every bit as much as CAIR. You might want to also check out their website here.

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Let The CAIR-Flying Imam P.R. Campaign Begin

CAIR’s national legal director, Arsalan Iftikhar, is busy writing opinion pieces about the Flying Imams and racial profiling from the radical Wahhabists point of view, and at least one "useful idiot" newspaper has seen fit to give him a podium.

Many watching the Flying Imams case strongly suspect that this whole farce was stage managed by CAIR to provide grist to justify the passage of a truly atrocious piece of legislation that CAIR has been promoting for years – The End Racial Profiling Act. Iftikhar’s opinion piece does nothing to dispel that belief. The entire piece is devoted to playing up the Flying Imams and discussing how evil law enforcement are engaging in unlawful racial profiling against muslims in the wake of 9-11.

You have to love this guy’s arguments. One, all of the evidence about what the Flying Imams did to get tossed from the plane are all lies. As Iftikhar puts it:

. . . [F]alse media reports after the incident stated some of the following false claims: The imams were praying inside the plane, they were chanting pro-Saddam statements, and other silly accusations.

Lies- all lies I say. Hmmm, you can review the lies here and decide for yourself.

Two, paying attention to Muslims acting strange on a flight has no reasonable basis:

. . . The case of the imams’ ejection from an airliner highlights the growing politics of fear and how this hysteria is manifesting itself in our American social fabric.

Its that damned Islamaphobia again. We should be paying attention to fundamentalist Christians and those radical Jews. Let's leave the peace loving Wahhabists alone. By the way, to see Wahhabi Islam in its true form, check out here.

This is nothing more then CAIR trying to change the fabric of America to make it safe for Wahhabi Islam. The remainder of Iftikhar’s arguments go to the evils of racial profiling and playing up the End Racial Profiling Act.

Just so you know, the End Racial Profiling Act would drastically change how our law enforcement would do its work. It would let Muslims sue individual security personnel for racial profiling based on a pure numbers game. If, out of every 100 people searched by a guard, four are Muslim, that guard is deemed to have committed unlawful racial profiling if the population density of Muslims in the local area is less then 4 per 100. The burden of proof shifts to the guard to prove that he did not racially profile. And who could not imagine that the day after this legislation is enacted, CAIR starts filing class action suits against the FBI, etc. If this ever gets put into law, America as a nation can hang it up.

I truly hope that the Airways – or the John Does sued in the Flying Imam lawsuit – fashion their discovery to expose CAIR’s involvement in stage managing the Flying Imam incident. And that they then sue CAIR for every Wahhabi penny supplied by CAIR’s Saudi benefactors. The bottom line, CAIR needs to watched and challenged at every turn.

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A Response to America on HR 1591, the Emergency Supplemental Appropriations Bill

I made the mistake of listening to the House debate on HR 1591 the Emergency Supplemental Appropriations Bill. I was horrified listening to both the arguments of Murtha and Pelosi, as well as the largely ineffectual response of Republicans, who largely responded with no emotion or animation, and who failed to attack Murtha and Peleosi on any of the reasonable grounds afforded by this horrendous legislation. What follows is the Republican Response to Murtha and Pelosi that I wish I had heard.


To Congressman Murtha and Speaker Pelosi, let me begin by saying I question your patriotism. This unconscionable charade in which you have engaged to buy votes and to twist arms establishes two facts. One, you have no interest in an open debate about Iraq focused upon what is best for America. Two, your motivation is to achieve a partisan political victory over George Bush now and over the Republicans in 2008. You are not patriots, Congressman Mutha and Speaker Pelosi, you are craven, partisan political animals of the most vile stripe.

You both have presented many arguments on the floor today, and I will look at them one by one. But let me ask you a critical question first. General David Petraeus was sent to Iraq with a mandate to engage in a new strategy – the surge. Prior to General Petraeus, our commanders in the field sought to “minimize our footprint” in Iraq. We can all agree that strategy was unsuccessful. That strategy resulted in a rise in violence, and the animation of Shia violence in response to the horrid attacks by Al Qaeda in Iraq and others.

But General Petraeus’s strategy of the surge is a 180 degree change from our prior strategy. Now, our soldiers are being sent into small posts throughout Baghdad, supporting or supported by Iraqi troops in each instance. That strategy began over a month ago, and without even half the U.S. troops yet in place, by every measure, it is having a significant impact in quelling the violence.

Why then would you refuse to allow General Petraeus to give testimony to the House prior to this vote? I do not understand why we were denied his critical inuput – unless of course it is that you do not wish to confuse the ground truth in Iraq with your own lies - and I choose that word with great care - to the American people on the floor of this House about the effects of the surge on violence in Iraq.

The same can be said of a briefing on the political situation in Iraq at this point in time. Prime Minister Maliki’s nascent government, only near one year old today, is making incredibly significant strides while under tremendous pressure. You would not allow the State Department to brief the House on advances by the Maliki government in the days leading up to this vote. Again, there can be only one reason. You do not wish to allow reality to throw its light upon your own lies to the American people on the floor of this House.

And one last over-arching question. General Petraeus has said, time and again, that we will know by the end of the summer the effect of his strategy, the surge. Why are you in such a rush to place constraints on our Commander in Chief that will insure that troops are not reinforced and the full effect of the surge will not be felt? The truth of course is that you do not want it to succeed. If it did, your entire partisan political future would be destroyed. You have gone beyond rooting for defeat, and now seek to legislate it. I will say again, Congressman Murtha and Speaker Pelosi, you are not patriots, you are partisan political vermin.

Congress of course has the absolute right to propose legislation to remove the authorization for the use of force in Iraq. You also have the right to cut off all funding for the war in Iraq. That is where the powers of Congress end. But you lack the political courage of any convictions to take those acts. Indeed, I think it clear you have no convictions, only naked ambition. You play games that can only endanger our troops in combat and give aid and comfort to radical Islamists world wide.

And in that regard, Congressman Murtha, you sir are a disingenuous son of a bitch. Rarely have I seen an act so cynical in its inception as your plan to prevent units inside the USA from deploying to Iraq or Afghanistan unless they are rated as fully mission capable.

Sir, while that certainly sounds reasonable on its face, please tell the American people the truth about how the military readiness rating system works. Please tell the American people, sir that your constraints have absolutely nothing to do with the reality of whether our soldiers are actually sent into Iraq or Afghanistan fully combat ready, but everything to do with your gaming the system.

Sir, please tell the American people that the readiness system is based on three factors, people, training and equipment, and that to be C-1 ready, units have to be at 90% or above in all three areas. Please tell the American people that our troops will almost never be C-1 on the date of deployment overseas because they do not take their heavy equipment, but rather fall in on that equipment when they arrive in Kuwait. And further, once in Kuwait, our troops not only pick up their equipment, but are given a few weeks to acclimate and conduct all necessary training not otherwise conducted in the U.S. Most importantly, Sir, as you explain this to the American people, please identify for them the number of units that, in the past four years, we have sent from Kuwait into combat areas in Iraq or Afghanistan that have been rated less then C-1, fully mission capable. Do be honest sir. That number is precisely 0. You truly are one disingenuous son of a bitch, sir.

Congressman Murtha and Speaker Pelosi, I heard you argue today that we have to bring our forces home because they are stretched too thin to be able to respond to other wholly theoretical threats – ones that you do not name - at places in the world likewise unnamed. To take that argument to its logical conclusion, we should never commit troops anywhere in the world because, in such an event, they might be needed elsewhere at some time during the deployment. Two, tell me anywhere in the world where Democrats, at least those led by you, Congressman Murtha and Speaker Pelosi, will ever engage a threat. Do we need to pull out of Iraq to be ready to wage war on Iran? What horse manure. The only logical answer to this straw man of an arugment you posit is to expand the size of our Armed Forces. And surprise, an expansion of our Armed Forces has already been approved by Congress. Why is it that you fail to mention that in your argument.

You also complain loudly of a supposed inability of our troops to train on their equipment because of shortfalls inside the United States. That is an easy one to solve. I know where, today, there is an extra 21 billion dollars just waiting to be spent on solving military equipment shortfalls. That would certainly be patriotic. Hmmm, sorry, I forgot for a moment, those funds are earmarked by you for combat peanut storage and the stategic spinach reserve.

Mr. Murtha, you wish to take from the Commander and Chief, as well as the generals on the ground, the decision to leave troops in combat areas beyond one year, or to deploy them without a year of rest in the United States. Those sir, are command decisions to be made by our military and our Commander in Chief based on multiple factors. You sir, would restrict the ability of our commanders to make those decisions simply to insure that we are unable to reinforce our forces in Iraq, and further that our troops are continuously drawn down, regardless of the ground truth or necessity. I would ask, Sir, who died and left you Commander in Chief, since those powers you are legislating seem clearly to be plenary powers of the President as Commander and Chief under Article 2 of the Constitution. If you are unfamiliar with that document, we can provide you a copy.

Speaker Pelosi, you and Congressman Murtha claim that the real fight against terrorism is in Agfhanistan. I believe, Speaker Pelosi, you said today, and I quote, “The War in Iraq is separate from the war on terror.” Just how incredibly stupid do you think we are. Whatever validity that argument had in 2003, it stands every piece of intelligence we have had since directly on its head. How many times do bin Laden and al Zawahiri have to say explicitly that the fight in Iraq is the most important fight for al Qaeda and radical Islam world wide before you credit them with honesty. Your denial of this fact clearly shows that you are willing to say anything, no matter how outrageous, in order to achieve your partisan political victory at whatever the cost to the country.

And Speaker Pelosi and Congressman Murtha, the one point I did not here from you today was any discussion of the ramifications of our retreat you our legislating from Iraq. What effect will that have on our national security? What effect will that have on the world wide growth of radical Islam and there already preexisting belief that America has no resolve? What effect will that have far into the future for countries who consider whether to ally with us? And, more immediately, what will be the effect in Iraq, where the CIA recently stated in a brief that, following a retreat, the situation in Iraq would degenerate into true chaos? Please note that when I say true chaos, I am not referring your partisan description of Iraq today as being in chaos, but the real thing, with al Qaeda, Iran, and a host of others vying for control. Those are by far the most important questions that need to be asked and answered for the benefit of our country. But then again, the benefit of our country is not your most important concern, is it?

I could go on and on with each specific point that you raised, but it would be simply more of the same. In the end, I watched you, Speaker Pelosi, appear in a press briefing after the vote, all smiles, and claiming with pride that you have taken a giant leap towards ending the war. Yes you have. And the manner in which you have done so says everything we as Americans need to know about you and your compatriot, Jack Murtha. You are not patriotic Americans. You are cynical, disingenuous political vermin, no more.

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In the Netherlands, a Professor Calls for a Violent Counter-response to Islam

Professor Jansen, a tutor of Theo Van Gogh on the subject of Islam, has strong words of advice for his fellow countrymen:

Dutch politicians and media are downplaying excesses of multicultural society and thereby increasing these, in the view of Islam expert Hans Janssen. "The Netherlands should resist, using non-peaceful means", he argues in weekly magazine Opinio.

Jansen, Professor of Modern Islamic Ideology at Utrecht University, characterizes the Dutch as inhabitants of "a peaceful enclave" who have, however, "forgotten that peace sometimes needs to be defended through violence". A peaceful society that wishes to remain existent and stay peaceful "will have to find a way to defend itself through non-peaceful means from people who are not peaceful", as the Arabist writes. "It will be hard to explaining this convincingly to all those respectable and friendly people in the (Christian coalition parties) CDA and ChristenUnie. And to the rest."

As Jansen sees it, the Netherlands is too indulgent to violence of fundamentalist Muslims. But he also suggests that moderate Muslims, too, strive after an Islamic society in the Netherlands. They intentionally make use of the radicals to enforce their wishes, according to the Arabist.

Read the rest of the article here.

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A Day of National Shame - the Passage of H.R. 1591

The House of Representatives, led by Nancy Pelosi, has succeeded in passing House Resolution 1591, the Emergency Supplemental Appropriations Bill for Iraq, and for peanut farmers, and for spinach growers, and for a power plant in D.C., etc., and, most importantly, to insure failure in Iraq. The Resolution required 218 votes to pass. The Resolution received precisely the 218 votes necessary, with the help of two Republicans who voted for it, Congressman Gilchrest, 1st District, Maryland, and Congressman Jones, 3rd District, North Carolina.

I watched the speeches in the lead up to the vote - though the speeches were mere political theater. The buying of votes and the threats for voting against the bill all went on in private. Nonetheless, the speeches were illuminating for what they told of the motivations of the two crafters of this legislation, Nancy Pelosi and Jack Murtha. I will post the points of their speeches and a response as time permits this day. For the Republicans, Jerry Lewis was horrid, and only two of the other speakers were reasonably effective. Rep. Johnson of Texas was by far the most moving and eloquent of all the speakers, and I will post his speech later.

The roll call for the vote is here.

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Iranian Navy Kidnaps 15 British Sailors

MSNBC is reporting that Iranians are playing some very dangerous games in the waters near the Iran-Iraq border:

Iranian naval vessels seized 15 British Navy personnel in Iraqi waters on Friday, the Ministry of Defense said.

The British personnel were "engaged in routine boarding operations of merchant shipping in Iraqi territorial waters," and had completed their inspection of a merchant ship when they were accosted by Iranian vessels, the ministry said in a statement.

"We are urgently pursuing this matter with the Iranian authorities at the highest level and ... the Iranian ambassador has been summoned to the Foreign Office," the ministry said.

"The British government is demanding the immediate and safe return of our people and equipment."

Read the story here.

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Ask But Don't Sway?

I am reminded of the scene from The Birdcage where Robin Williams attempts to teach Nathan Lane to pass for straight.

Gay police officers in the Philippines have been warned not to sway their hips while on duty – or risk losing their jobs.

Chief Supt Samuel Pagdilao said the force did not discriminate against homosexuals but would fire those who misbehaved.

'If they sway their hips while marching, or if they engage in lustful conduct, I think that will be a ground for separation. If they behave within the norm, I don't think we'll have a problem,' he added.

See the story here.

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Multiculturalism & the Crime of Religious Harassment

The far left have had the UK firmly in their control for years - and they have been busy turning out legislation to make their leftist philosophy of multiculturalism the law of the land. So, to ask a Muslim woman simply to remove her veil is considered an act of religious harassment. And for such an act of religious harassment, a native of Britain, the father of a child, was ordered to jail today for a nine month sentence.

A DRUNK who asked a Muslim woman to raise her veil in public has been jailed for nine months for his troubles.

John Gallacher was the worst for drink, but did not touch Kadiza Begum.

Yet she insisted he was charged with religious harassment after the incident at a bus-stop in London's East End.

. . . Gallacher told the court he had recently been beaten up by Asians and was speaking to the woman at the bus stop and just wanted to know who he was talking to. He admitted religiously aggravated harassment.

His lawyer Edward Ferner said: "There was, of course, no physical contact."

But Judge Martin Reynolds said Parliament has made it clear any form of racial or religious insult is "not to be tolerated."

He told Gallacher: "I accept there was no physical touching. Nevertheless, it is a serious matter."

Read the whole story here. The only reason he is being punished is for asking a Muslim woman to remove, specifically, her veil.

Wahhabi islamists in Britain, rather then integrate into British society and culture, have made a successful effort to convince the U.K.'s multiculturalists to grant Islam special status - even criminal protection from criticism of Islam, in fact. And CAIR is seeking to see the same special treatment in the U.S. One small step for radical islam, one giant leap for the West towards dhimmitude.

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Bob Baer on the Defection of General Asgari

Former CIA agent Bob Baer weighs in on the importance of the defection of Iran's IRGC General Asgari. Baer highlights the importance and breadth of the information Asgari knows, and suggests that Asgari alone could become a PR tool to justify open war with Iran.

Normally, vanished intelligence officers barely merit one short paragraph on page eight. Asgari is different, though. As the IRGC commander in Lebanon in the late '80s and early '90s, he knows dirty secrets, secrets that could be used to justify going to war with Iran. Asgari was in the IRGC's chain of command when it was kidnapping and assassinating Westerners in Lebanon in the '80s. Asgari knows a lot about other IRGC-ordered, Lebanon-based terrorist attacks, including the October 1983 Marine barracks bombing in Beirut and the 1996 bombing of Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia.

As IRGC commander in Lebanon, Asgari was also one of Hizballah's stepfathers. In the late '80s and early '90s, he was Hizballah Secretary General's Hasan Nasrallah's primary Iranian contact, and certainly in a position now to provide evidence of Nasrallah's involvement in terrorism. Asgari was the primary Iranian contact for one of the world's most lethal and capable terrorists, 'Imad Fa'iz Mughniyah. Mughniyah is indicted in the U.S. for the 1985 hijacking of TWA Flight 847 and the murder of a Navy diver.

The bad news for Hizballah and Iran doesn't end there. Asgari would be able to tell us about Hizballah's secret military commanders, its overseas networks, and possibly its cells in the U.S. A friend close to Hizballah's leadership tells me Hizballah has gone to battle quarters, concluding Asgari's "kidnapping" is a prelude for its next round with Israel.

The more important question is what Asgari's possible defection would mean for this Administration's plans for Iran. Nothing is certain when it comes to Iran, but here's what I think we should look for: If Asgari resurfaces in the next couple months with a detailed, convincing bill of indictment against Iran and Hizballah (unlike Khalid Sheikh Mohammed's supposed confession), we should expect a confrontation. For instance, in the late '80s Hizballah, under IRGC orders, sent plastic explosives to secret cells around the world. Only one shipment was intercepted. The others are presumably still in place. If Asgari helps us dig one up, the Administration has a propaganda weapon it never had going into the Iraq war.

Read the entire post here. I do not agree with Baer that trotting out Asgari for pr at some point necessarilly presages open war with Iran. I would thing that the U.S. would use Asgari's informaton for as long as possible to direct and expand its covert operations to neuter Iran. Following that, I would see the U.S. using Asgari as a p.r. tool for any number of reasons short of open war, such as to justify why Europe needs to stop dealing with Iran and join in harsher sanctions. At any rate, it is clear that Iran is in a very uncomfortable spot at the moment.

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Al Qaeda's Shrinking Base In Iraq

This from Omar at Iraq the Model:

The "Islamic State in Iraq" a branch of al-Qaeda has been dealt several good blows recently in the same city they were planning to announce as the first capital of their state.

For four years since the liberation of Iraq Anbar remained distant from the rest of the country, defiant to the central government and a dangerous place for everyone including its own sons…this is slowly, yet clearly, changing now.

For a few months after more than two dozens of tribes formed the "Anbar Awakening Council" not much success was reported but recently there's been a constant stream of reports on battles between the tribes and al-Qaeda in several towns and villages across the vast western province; in most cases the tribes came out triumphant but sacrifices were also made.

The restive province is finally coming back into the arms of the state.

While I wouldn't take any poll results to be accurate assessment of the public attitude, they are useful in determining the general direction of changes in attitude among the population.

Recently there were two separately conducted polls in the news, and the results were contradictory to each other in more than one point which is not surprising at all but one item of the poll conducted for the BBC and ABC that caught my attention.
The poll shows that only about 4% of the Sunni are in favor of an Islamic rule. This is interesting and worth noting even if the error margin for this one was three times what the pollsters claimed, which is somewhat unlikely for an error margin. This extremely low approval rate is understandable given all what the Sunni had suffered under the extremists who touted the idea of Islamic rule in the Sunni areas for four years.

The city that at some point was about to become the new Talibanistan is now working hand in hand with the government in Baghdad and the coalition forces to defeat al-Qaeda. Maliki's and Petraeus's visit to the province were not only of symbolic value. The visit and the meeting with the heads of tribes marked the beginning of the return of the once stray province to where it belongs.

The clash between the tribe and the mosque was inevitable. For centuries and since the early days of Islam the two institutions squabbled for power and dominance and while tribe sheiks are diplomats by nature and always seek to resole conflicts and find compromises between the two sides of a conflict, clerics, especially extreme ones, do not recognize the idea of compromise; to them there is halal and haram (or allowed and forbidden) with absolutely no gray area in between whatsoever.
Iraq and the western part in particular is a very tribal community and so the increased influence and interference of clerics became a serious threat to the position of sheiks.
Sheiks are more businessmen than ideological leaders, like my tribe's sheik put it once "the hell with them [clerics] we want to live like normal people and all they care about is death".

By no means I'm trying to say that al-Qaeda is defeated. This is still far away but we can say that the in order for al-Qaeda to continue its plan to establish a safe haven in Iraq it will have to search for alternatives to Anbar. Their primary alternative is Diyala where demographics are already not as favorable for al-Qaeda as Anbar was.

There are signs that the tribes in Diyala too are changing their attitude and there are signs that they are slowly following the steps of their peers in Anbar. If this change is encouraged and supported al-Qaeda will not have many, if any, good alternative plans.

Read the entire post here.

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Prof. Lewis Speaks on Islam, the Mid East, & Conflict with the West, Part 1

Professor Benard Lewis, now ninety years old, is the West's preeminent scholar on Middle East. His writings foretold 9-11, and he is able to put the myriad of nuances regarding Islam, the Middle East, and Muslim interactions with the West into understandable framework. In this text of his most recent speech, Professor Lewis touches upon almost all of the major issues surrounding the Middle East and its relations with the West. I include his speech here in its entirety.

Thank you, Vice President and Mrs. Cheney, ladies and gentlemen. As you have been told, I have studied a number of languages, but I cannot find words in any of them adequate to express my feeling of gratitude for the honor and appreciation which I have been shown this evening. All I can say is thank you.

My topic this evening is Europe and Islam. But let me begin with a word of personal explanation. You are accustomed for the most part to hearing from people with direct practical involvement in military and intelligence matters. I cannot offer you that. My direct involvement with military and intelligence matters ended quite a long time ago--to be precise, on 31 August 1945, when I left His Majesty's Service and returned to the university to join with colleagues in trying to cope with a six-year backlog of battle-scarred undergraduates.

What I would like to try and offer you this evening is something of the lessons of history. Here I must begin with a second disavowal. It is sometimes forgotten that the content of history, the business of the historian, is the past, not the future. I remember being at an international meeting of historians in Rome during which a group of us were sitting and discussing the question: should historians attempt to predict the future? We batted this back and forth. This was in the days when the Soviet Union was still alive and well. One of our Soviet colleagues finally intervened and said, "In the Soviet Union, the most difficult task of the historian is to predict the past."

I do not intend to offer any predictions of the future in Europe or the Middle East, but one thing can legitimately be expected of the historian, and that is to identify trends and processes - to look at the trends in the past, at what is continuing in the present, and therefore to see the possibilities and choices which will face us in the future.

One other introductory word. A favorite theme of the historian, as I am sure you know, is periodization--dividing history into periods. Periodization is mostly a convenience of the historian for purposes of writing or teaching. Nevertheless, there are times in the long history of the human adventure when we have a real turning point, a major change--the end of an era, the beginning of a new era. I am becoming more and more convinced that we are in such an age at the present time--a change in history comparable with such events as the fall of Rome, the discovery of America, and the like. I will try to explain that.

Conventionally, the modern history of the Middle East begins at the end of the 18th century, when a small French expeditionary force commanded by a young general called Napoleon Bonaparte was able to conquer Egypt and rule it with impunity. It was a terrible shock that one of the heartlands of Islam could be invaded, occupied, and ruled with virtually no effective resistance.

The second shock came a few years later with the departure of the French, which was brought about not by the Egyptians nor by their suzerains, the Turks, but by a small squadron of the Royal Navy commanded by a young admiral called Horatio Nelson, who drove the French out and back to France.

This is of symbolic importance. That was, as I said, at the end of the 18th and the beginning of the 19th century. From then onward, the heartlands of Islam were no longer wholly controlled by the rulers of Islam. They were under direct or indirect influence or control from outside.

The dominating forces in the Islamic world were now outside forces. What shaped their lives was Western influence. What gave them choices was Western rivalries. The political game that they could play--the only one that was open to them--was to try and profit from the rivalries between the outside powers, to try to use them against one another. We see that again and again in the course of the 19th and 20th and even into the beginning of the 21st century. We see, for example, in the First World War, the Second World War, and the Cold War, how Middle Eastern governments or leaders tried to play this game with varying degrees of success.

That game is now over. The era that was inaugurated by Napoleon and Nelson was terminated by Reagan and Gorbachev. The Middle East is no longer ruled or dominated by outside powers. These nations are having some difficulty adjusting to this new situation, to taking responsibility for their own actions and their consequences, and so on. But they are beginning to do so, and this change has been expressed with his usual clarity and eloquence by Osama bin Laden.

We see with the ending of the era of outside domination, the reemergence of certain older trends and deeper currents in Middle Eastern history, which had been submerged or at least obscured during the centuries of Western domination. Now they are coming back again. One of them I would call the internal struggles--ethnic, sectarian, regional--between different forces within the Middle East. These have of course continued, but were of less importance in the imperialist era. They are coming out again now and gaining force, as we see for example from the current clash between Sunni and Shia Islam--something without precedent for centuries.

The other thing more directly relevant to my theme this evening is the signs of a return among Muslims to what they perceive as the cosmic struggle for world domination between the two main faiths--Christianity and Islam. There are many religions in the world, but as far as I know there are only two that have claimed that their truths are not only universal--all religions claim that--but also exclusive; that they--the Christians in the one case, the Muslims in the other--are the fortunate recipients of God's final message to humanity, which it is their duty not to keep selfishly to themselves--like the Jews or the Hindus--but to bring to the rest of humanity, removing whatever obstacles there may be on the way. This self-perception, shared between Christendom and Islam, led to the long struggle that has been going on for more than fourteen centuries and which is now entering a new phase.

In the Christian world, now at the beginning of the 21st century of its era, this triumphalist attitude no longer prevails, and is confined to a few minority groups. In the world of Islam, now in its early 15th century, triumphalism is still a significant force, and has found expression in new militant movements.

It is interesting that both sides for quite a long time refused to recognize this struggle. For example, both sides named each other by non-religious terms. The Christian world called the Muslims Moors, Saracens, Tartars, and Turks. Even a convert was said to have turned Turk. The Muslims for their part called the Christian world Romans, Franks, Slavs, and the like. It was only slowly and reluctantly that they began to give each other religious designations and then these were for the most part demeaning and inaccurate. In the West, it was customary to call Muslims Mohammadans, which they never called themselves, based on the totally false assumption that Muslims worship Muhammad in the way that Christians worship Christ. The Muslim term for Christians was Nazarene--nasrani--implying the local cult of a place called Nazareth.

The declaration of war begins at the very beginning of Islam. There are certain letters purported to have been written by the Prophet Muhammad to the Christian Byzantine emperor, the emperor of Persia, and various other rulers, saying, "I have now brought God's final message. Your time has passed. Your beliefs are superseded. Accept my mission and my faith or resign or submit--you are finished." The authenticity of these prophetic letters is doubted, but the message is clear and authentic in the sense that it does represent the long dominant view of the Islamic world.

A little later we have hard evidence--and I mean hard in the most literal sense--inscriptions. Many of you, I should think, have been to Jerusalem. You have probably visited that remarkable building, the Dome of the Rock. It is very significant. It is built on a place sacred to the Judeo-Christian tradition. Its architectural style is that of the earliest Christian churches. It dates from the end of the 7th century and was built by one of the early caliphs, the oldest Muslim religious building outside Arabia. What is significant is the message in the inscriptions inside the Dome: "He is God, He is one, He has no companion, He does not beget, He is not begotten." (cf. Qur'an, IX, 31-3; CXII, 1-3) This is clearly a direct challenge to certain central principles of the Christian faith.

Interestingly, they put the same thing on a new gold coinage. Until then, striking gold coins had been an exclusive Roman privilege. The Islamic caliph for the first time struck gold coins, breaching the immemorial privilege of Rome, and putting the same inscription on them. As I said, a challenge.

The Muslim attack on Christendom and the resulting conflict, which arose more from their resemblances than from their differences, has gone through three phases. The first dates from the very beginning of Islam, when the new faith spilled out of the Arabian Peninsula, where it was born, into the Middle East and beyond. It was then that they conquered Syria, Palestine, Egypt, and North Africa--all at that time part of the Christian world--and went beyond into Europe, conquering a sizable part of southwestern Europe, including Spain, Portugal, and southern Italy, all of which became part of the Islamic world, and even crossing the Pyrenees into France and occupying for a while parts of France.

After a long and bitter struggle, the Christians managed to retake part but not all of the territory they had lost. They succeeded in Europe, and in a sense Europe was defined by the limits of that success. They failed to retake North Africa or the Middle East, which were lost to Christendom. Notably, they failed to recapture the Holy Land, in the series of campaigns known as the Crusades.

That was not the end of the matter. In the meantime the Islamic world, having failed the first time, was bracing for the second attack, this time conducted not by Arabs and Moors but by Turks and Tartars. In the mid-thirteenth century the Mongol conquerors of Russia were converted to Islam. The Turks, who had already conquered Anatolia, advanced into Europe and in 1453 they captured the ancient Christian citadel of Constantinople. They conquered a large part of the Balkans, and for a while ruled half of Hungary. Twice they reached as far as Vienna, to which they laid siege in 1529 and again in 1683. Barbary corsairs from North Africa--well-known to historians of the United States--were raiding Western Europe. They went to Iceland--the uttermost limit--and to several places in Western Europe, including notably a raid on Baltimore (the original one, in Ireland) in 1631. In a contemporary document, we have a list of 107 captives who were taken from Baltimore to Algiers, including a man called Cheney.

Again, Europe counterattacked, this time more successfully and more rapidly. They succeeded in recovering Russia and the Balkan Peninsula, and in advancing further into the Islamic lands, chasing their former rulers whence they had come. For this phase of European counterattack, a new term was invented: imperialism. When the peoples of Asia and Africa invaded Europe, this was not imperialism. When Europe attacked Asia and Africa, it was.

This European counterattack began a new phase which brought the European attack into the very heart of the Middle East. In our own time, we have seen the end of the resulting domination.

Osama bin Laden, in some very interesting proclamations and declarations, has this to say about the war in Afghanistan which, you will remember, led to the defeat and retreat of the Red Army and the collapse of the Soviet Union. We tend to see that as a Western victory, more specifically an American victory, in the Cold War against the Soviets. For Osama bin Laden, it was nothing of the kind. It is a Muslim victory in a jihad. If one looks at what happened in Afghanistan and what followed, this is, I think one must say, a not implausible interpretation.

As Osama bin Laden saw it, Islam had reached the ultimate humiliation in this long struggle after World War I, when the last of the great Muslim empires--the Ottoman Empire--was broken up and most of its territories divided between the victorious allies; when the caliphate was suppressed and abolished, and the last caliph driven into exile. This seemed to be the lowest point in Muslim history. From there they went upwards.

In his perception, the millennial struggle between the true believers and the unbelievers had gone through successive phases, in which the latter were led by the various imperial European powers that had succeeded the Romans in the leadership of the world of the infidels--the Christian Byzantine Empire, the Holy Roman Empire, the British and French and Russian empires. In this final phase, he says, the world of the infidels was divided and disputed between two rival superpowers, the United States and the Soviet Union. In his perception, the Muslims have met, defeated, and destroyed the more dangerous and the more deadly of the two infidel superpowers. Dealing with the soft, pampered and effeminate Americans would be an easy matter.

This belief was confirmed in the 1990s when we saw one attack after another on American bases and installations with virtually no effective response of any kind--only angry words and expensive missiles dispatched to remote and uninhabited places.

The lessons of Vietnam and Beirut were confirmed by Mogadishu. "Hit them, and they'll run." This was the perceived sequence leading up to 9/11. That attack was clearly intended to be the completion of the first sequence and the beginning of the new one, taking the war into the heart of the enemy camp.

In the eyes of a fanatical and resolute minority of Muslims, the third wave of attack on Europe has clearly begun. We should not delude ourselves as to what it is and what it means. This time it is taking different forms and two in particular: terror and migration.

The subject of terror has been frequently discussed and in great detail, and I do not need to say very much about that now. What I do want to talk about is the other aspect of more particular relevance to Europe, and that is the question of migration.
In earlier times, it was inconceivable that a Muslim would voluntarily move to a non-Muslim country. The jurists discuss this subject at great length in the textbooks and manuals of shari`a, but in a different form: is it permissible for a Muslim to live in or even visit a non-Muslim country? And if so, if he does, what must he do?

Generally speaking, this was considered under certain specific headings. A captive or a prisoner of war obviously has no choice, but he must preserve his faith and get home as soon as possible.

The second case is that of an unbeliever in the land of the unbelievers who sees the light and embraces the true faith--in other words, becomes a Muslim. He must leave as soon as possible and go to a Muslim country.

The third case is that of a visitor. For long, the only purpose that was considered legitimate was to ransom captives. This was later expanded into diplomatic and commercial missions. With the advance of the European counterattack, there was a new issue in this ongoing debate. What is the position of a Muslim if his country is conquered by infidels? May he stay or must he leave?

We have some interesting documents from the late 15th century, when the reconquest of Spain was completed and Moroccan jurists were discussing this question. They asked if Muslims could stay. The general answer was no, it is not permissible. The question was asked: May they stay if the Christian government that takes over is tolerant? This proved to be a purely hypothetical question, of course. The answer was no; even then they may not stay, because the temptation to apostasy would be even greater. They must leave and hope that in God's good time they will be able to reconquer their homelands and restore the true faith.

The speech is continued here at Part 2.

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Prof. Lewis Speaks on Islam, the Mid East, & Conflict with the West - Part II

Part 1 of Professor Lewis's speech is here. His speech is continued in the following:

This was the line taken by most jurists. There were some, at first a minority, later a more important group, who said it is permissible for Muslims to stay provided that certain conditions are met, mainly that they are allowed to practice their faith. This raises another question which I will come back to in a moment: what is meant by practicing their faith? Here I would remind you that we are dealing not only with a different religion but also with a different concept of what religion is about, referring especially to what Muslims call the shari`a, the holy law of Islam, covering a wide range of matters regarded as secular in the Christian world even during the medieval period, but certainly in what some call the post-Christian era of the Western world.

There are obviously now many attractions which draw Muslims to Europe including the opportunities offered, particularly in view of the growing economic impoverishment of much of the Muslim world, and the attractions of European welfare as well as employment. They also have freedom of expression and education which they lack at home. This is a great incentive to the terrorists who migrate. Terrorists have far greater freedom of preparation and operation in Europe--and to a degree also in America--than they do in most Islamic lands.

I would like to draw your attention to some other factors of importance in the situation at this moment. One is the new radicalism in the Islamic world, which comes in several kinds: Sunni, especially Wahhabi, and Iranian Shiite, dating from the Iranian revolution. Both of these are becoming enormously important factors. We have the strange paradox that the danger of Islamic radicalism or of radical terrorism is far greater in Europe and America than it is in the Middle East and North Africa, where they are much better at controlling their extremists than we are.

The Sunni kind is mainly Wahhabi and has benefited from the prestige and influence and power of the House of Saud as controllers of the holy places of Islam and of the annual pilgrimage, and the enormous oil wealth at their disposal. The Iranian revolution is something different. The term revolution is much used in the Middle East. It is virtually the only generally accepted title of legitimacy. But the Iranian revolution is a real revolution in the sense in which we use that term of the French or Russian revolutions. Like the French and Russian revolutions in their day, it has had an enormous impact in the whole area with which the Iranians share a common universe of discourse--that is to say, the Islamic world.

Let me turn to the question of assimilation, which is much discussed nowadays. How far is it possible for Muslim migrants who have settled in Europe, in North America, and elsewhere, to become part of those countries in which they settle, in the way that so many other waves of immigrants have done? I think there are several points which need to be made.

One of them is the basic differences in what precisely is meant by assimilation and acceptance. Here there is an immediate and obvious difference between the European and the American situations. For an immigrant to become an American means a change of political allegiance. For an immigrant to become a Frenchman or a German means a change of ethnic identity. Changing political allegiance is certainly very much easier and more practical than changing ethnic identity, either in one's own feelings or in one's measure of acceptance. England had it both ways. If you were naturalized, you became British but you did not become English.

I mentioned earlier the important difference in what one means by religion. For Muslims, it covers a whole range of different things--marriage, divorce, and inheritance are the most obvious examples. Since antiquity in the Western world, the Christian world, these have been secular matters. The distinction of church and state, spiritual and temporal, lay and ecclesiastical is a Christian distinction which has no place in Islamic history and therefore is difficult to explain to Muslims, even in the present day. Until very recently they did not even have a vocabulary to express it. They have one now.

What are the European responses to this situation? In Europe, as in the United States, a frequent response is what is variously known as multiculturalism and political correctness. In the Muslim world there are no such inhibitions. They are very conscious of their identity. They know who they are and what they are and what they want, a quality which we seem to have lost to a very large extent. This is a source of strength in the one, of weakness in the other.

A term sometimes used is constructive engagement. Let's talk to them, let's get together and see what we can do. Constructive engagement has a long tradition. When Saladin re-conquered Jerusalem and other places in the holy land, he allowed the Christian merchants from Europe to stay in the seaports. He apparently felt the need to justify this, and he wrote a letter to the caliph in Baghdad explaining his action. I would like to quote it to you. The merchants were useful since "there is not one among them that does not bring and sell us weapons of war, to their detriment and to our advantage." This continued during the Crusades. It continued after. It continued during the Ottoman advance into Europe, when they could always find European merchants willing to sell them weapons they needed and European bankers willing to finance their purchases. Constructive engagement has a long history.

One also finds a rather startling modern version of it. We have seen in our own day the extraordinary spectacle of a pope apologizing to the Muslims for the Crusades. I would not wish to defend the behavior of the Crusaders, which was in many respects atrocious. But let us have a little sense of proportion. We are now expected to believe that the Crusades were an unwarranted act of aggression against a peaceful Muslim world. Hardly. The first papal call for a crusade occurred in 846 C.E., when an Arab expedition from Sicily sailed up the Tiber and sacked St. Peter's Rome. A synod in France issued an appeal to Christian sovereigns to rally against "the enemies of Christ," and the Pope, Leo IV, offered a heavenly reward to those who died fighting the Muslims. A century and a half and many battles later, in 1096, the Crusaders actually arrived in the Middle East. The Crusades were a late, limited, and unsuccessful imitation of the jihad--an attempt to recover by holy war what had been lost by holy war. It failed, and it was not followed up.

Here is another more recent example of multiculturalism. On October 8, 2002--I insist on giving the date because you may want to look it up--the then French prime minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin, who I am told is a staunch Roman Catholic, was making a speech in the French National Assembly and talking about the situation in Iraq. Speaking of Saddam Hussein, he remarked that one of Saddam Hussein's heroes was his compatriot Saladin, who came from the same Iraqi town of Tikrit. In case the members of the Assembly were not aware of Saladin's identity, M. Raffarin explained to them that it was he who was able "to defeat the Crusaders and liberate Jerusalem." Yes. When a French prime minister describes Saladin's capture of Jerusalem from the largely French Crusaders as an act of liberation, this would seem to indicate a rather extreme case of realignment of loyalties.

I was told this, and I didn't believe it. So I checked it in the parliamentary record. When M. Raffarin used the word "liberate," a member--the name was not given--called out, "Libérer?" He just went straight on. That was the only interruption, and as far as I was aware there was no comment afterwards.

The Islamic radicals have even been able to find some allies in Europe. In describing them I shall have to use the terms left and right, terms which are becoming increasingly misleading. The seating arrangements in the first French National Assembly after the revolution are not the laws of nature, but we have become accustomed to using them. They are difficult when applied to the West nowadays. They are utter nonsense when applied to different brands of Islam. But as I say, they are what people use, so let us put it this way.

They have a left-wing appeal to the anti-U.S. elements in Europe, for whom they have so-to-speak replaced the Soviets. They have a right-wing appeal to the anti-Jewish elements in Europe, replacing the Axis. They have been able to win considerable support under both headings. For some in Europe, their hatreds apparently outweigh their loyalties.

There is an interesting exception to that in Germany, where the Muslims are mostly Turkish. There they have often tended to equate themselves with the Jews, to see themselves as having succeeded the Jews as the victims of German racism and persecution. I remember a meeting in Berlin convened to discuss the new Muslim minorities in Europe. In the evening I was asked by a Muslim group of Turks to join them and hear what they had to say about it, which was very interesting. The phrase which sticks most vividly in my mind from one of them was, "In a thousand years they (the Germans) were unable to accept 400,000 Jews. What hope is there that they will accept two million Turks?" They used this very skillfully in playing on German feelings of guilt in order to inhibit any effective German measures to protect German identity, which I would say like others in Europe is becoming endangered.
My time is running out so I think I'll leave other points that I wanted to make.

[Shouts to go on.] You don't mind a bit more?

I want to say something about the question of tolerance. You will recall that at the end of the first phase of the Christian reconquest, after Spain and Portugal and Sicily, Muslims--who by that time were very numerous in the reconquered lands--were given a choice: baptism, exile, or death. In the former Ottoman lands in southeastern Europe, the leaders of what you might call the reconquest were somewhat more tolerant but not a great deal more. Some Muslim minorities remained in some Balkan countries, with troubles still going on at the present day. If I say names like Kosovo or Bosnia, you will know what I am talking about.

Nevertheless, I mention this point because of the very sharp contrast with the treatment of Christians and other non-Muslims in the Islamic lands at that time. When Muslims came to Europe they had a certain expectation of tolerance, feeling that they were entitled to at least the degree of tolerance which they had accorded to non-Muslims in the great Muslim empires of the past. Both their expectations and their experience were very different.

Coming to European countries, they got both more and less than they had expected: More in the sense that they got in theory and often in practice equal political rights, equal access to the professions, all the benefits of the welfare state, freedom of expression, and so on and so forth.

But they also got significantly less than they had given in traditional Islamic states. In the Ottoman Empire and other states before that--I mention the Ottoman Empire as the most recent--the non-Muslim communities had separate organizations and ran their own affairs. They collected their own taxes and enforced their own laws. There were several Christian communities, each living under its own leadership, recognized by the state. These communities were running their own schools, their own education systems, administering their own laws in such matters as marriage, divorce, inheritance, and the like. The Jews did the same.

So you had a situation in which three men living in the same street could die and their estates would be distributed under three different legal systems if one happened to be Jewish, one Christian, and one Muslim. A Jew could be punished by a rabbinical court and jailed for violating the Sabbath or eating on Yom Kippur. A Christian could be arrested and imprisoned for taking a second wife. Bigamy is a Christian offense; it was not an Islamic or an Ottoman offense.

They do not have that degree of independence in their own social and legal life in the modern state. It is quite unrealistic for them to expect it, given the nature of the modern state, but that is not how they see it. They feel that they are entitled to receive what they gave. As one Muslim friend of mine in Europe put it, "We allowed you to practice monogamy, why should you not allow us to practice polygamy?"
Such questions--polygamy, in particular--raise important issues of a more practical nature. Isn't an immigrant who is permitted to come to France or Germany entitled to bring his family with him? But what exactly does his family consist of? They are increasingly demanding and getting permission to bring plural wives. The same is also applying more and more to welfare payments and so on. On the other hand, the enforcement of shari`a is a little more difficult. This has become an extremely sensitive issue.

Another extremely sensitive issue, closely related to this, is the position of women, which is of course very different between Christendom and Islam. This has indeed been one of the major differences between the two societies.

Where do we stand now? Is it third time lucky? It is not impossible. They have certain clear advantages. They have fervor and conviction, which in most Western countries are either weak or lacking. They are self-assured of the rightness of their cause, whereas we spend most of our time in self-denigration and self-abasement. They have loyalty and discipline, and perhaps most important of all, they have demography, the combination of natural increase and migration producing major population changes, which could lead within the foreseeable future to significant majorities in at least some European cities or even countries.

But we also have some advantages, the most important of which are knowledge and freedom. The appeal of genuine modern knowledge in a society which, in the more distant past, had a long record of scientific and scholarly achievement is obvious. They are keenly and painfully aware of their relative backwardness and welcome the opportunity to rectify it.

Less obvious but also powerful is the appeal of freedom. In the past, in the Islamic world the word freedom was not used in a political sense. Freedom was a legal concept. You were free if you were not a slave. The institution of slavery existed. Free meant not slave. Unlike the West, they did not use freedom and slavery as a metaphor for good and bad government, as we have done for a long time in the Western world. The terms they used to denote good and bad government are justice and injustice. A good government is a just government, one in which the Holy Law, including its limitations on sovereign authority, is strictly enforced. The Islamic tradition, in theory and, until the onset of modernization, to a large degree in practice, emphatically rejects despotic and arbitrary government. Living under justice is the nearest approach to what we would call freedom.

But the idea of freedom in its Western interpretation is making headway. It is becoming more and more understood, more and more appreciated and more and more desired. It is perhaps in the long run our best hope, perhaps even our only hope, of surviving this developing struggle. Thank you.

I thank AEI for providing the full text of this speech. Below is a list of books authored by Professor Lewis, spanning a period of 67 years. After 9-11, I turned to those books authored by Professor Lewis since 1993 to learn as much as possible about the Middle East. It turned out to be the best possible choice I could have made. I recommend his works:

The Origins of Ismailism (1940)
The Arabs in History (1950)
The Emergence of Modern Turkey (1961)
Istanbul and the Civilizations of the Ottoman Empire (1963)
The Assassins: A Radical Sect in Islam (1967)
The Cambridge History of Islam (2 vols. 1970, revised 4 vols. 1978, editor with Peter Malcolm Holt and Ann K.S. Lambton)
Islam: From the Prophet Muhammad to the capture of Constantinople (1974, editor)
Race and Color in Islam (1979)
Christians and Jews in the Ottoman Empire: The Functioning of a Plural Society (1982, editor with Benjamin Braude)
The Muslim Discovery of Europe (1982)
The Jews of Islam (1984)
Semites and Anti-Semites (1986)
History — Remembered, Recovered, Invented (1987)
Islam from the Prophet Muhammad to the Capture of Constantinople (1987)
The Political Language of Islam (1988)
Race and Slavery in the Middle East: an Historical Enquiry (1990)
Islam and the West (1993)
Islam in History (1993)
The Shaping of the Modern Middle East (1994)
Cultures in Conflict (1994)
The Middle East: A Brief History of the Last 2,000 Years (1995)
The Future of the Middle East (1997)
The Multiple Identities of the Middle East (1998)
A Middle East Mosaic: Fragments of Life, Letters and History (2000)
Music of a Distant Drum: Classical Arabic, Persian, Turkish, and Hebrew Poems (2001)
The Muslim Discovery of Europe (2001)
What Went Wrong?: The Clash Between Islam and Modernity in the Middle East (2002)
The Crisis of Islam: Holy War and Unholy Terror (2003)
From Babel to Dragomans: Interpreting the Middle East (2004)

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Red Ken Goes Mutlicultural on Slavery

Ken Livingstone, or as he is more commonly known, Red Ken, the Mayor of London, has authored a commentary in today’s Guardian wherein he, in his capacity as Mayor, has apologized for “London’s role in [the] monstrous crime” of slavery – and more specifically - transatlantic slavery. The tranatlantic slavery that Britain ended 200 years ago. It is just Britain’s most visible far left multiculturalist doing what comes natural. No need to applaud. Its all in a days work for a good leftist like Red Ken.

There are obvious disconnects in what Red Ken is doing in his apology. The most glaringly obvious of which is that there is no one alive in Britain today who took part in the transatlantic slave trade. So why is Red Ken apologizing?

To understand the answer is to understand the guiding philosophy of the left in Britain today – multiculturalism. (see my post here). The dogma of that philosophy is that Britain’s past is sinful – indeed, it is stained with an original sin that cannot be wiped clean. But by acknowledging the sinful past, and never forgiving his country – or western civilization as a whole, depending on the particular sin - the multiculturalist is at least able to absolve him or herself personally of the sin and assume the moral high ground. Ahhhh, it must be such a wonderful holier then thou feeling for Red Ken.

The next question is, to whom is Red Ken apologizing. He does not even name the recipients of the apology in his piece – which I think is quite telling. While superficially, one might assume that this apology for the slave trade is aimed at the slaves so transported (or at least their progeny), I think the failure to direct the apology is likely much more Freudian in aspect. The apology, to the extent ostensibly directed to the deceased slaves and their progeny is equally directed to the evil occidentals of London and the U.K., It is to remind them that their culture is inherently evil and stained with sin.

The third question if one of historical interpretation. Red Ken argues that the British involvement in slavery was ended by “black resistance and economic development . . ., not white philanthropy.” That is more then just a bit of revisionist history - it is actually the prototypical multiculturalist approach to history. All history is taken out of context and then viewed through a modern moral prism, ultimately to be redefined to either fit the belief system of the multiculturalist, or to be demonized. In this instance, it is clear that Red Ken simply does not wish to interpret any event by the British in abolishing slavery as being an act that would remove their sin. As an aside, I would add that, as to slavery in America, which Red Ken also touches on, the number of American’s who died to see slavery’s end in the States constitutes a bit more then mere philanthropy on the part of occidentals.

And lastly is the question most flummoxing. I do not know why Red Ken does not take this golden opportunity, two centuries after Britain succumbed to slave revolts and were forced thereby to stop engaging in slavery, ahem, to denounce slavery throughout the world today. That would be much more meaningful then this ridiculous act of meaningless self-castigation.

There are many countries today - several of them championed by Red Ken in running his own foreign policy - who still practice both sexual and economic slavery. Both forms are not uncommon in the Middle East, portions of Pakistan and India. And in Africa, UNICEF estimates that 200,000 children are sold into slavery each year.
"Many of these children are from Benin and Togo, and are sold into the domestic, agricultural, and sex industries of wealthier, neighboring countries such as Nigeria and Gabon" And human trafficking in children for the sex trade is a problem in several Asian countries today. See here.

Ahhh, but therein lies the rub. That would mean making a value judgment about other cultures - an act abhorrent to a multiculturalist such as Red Ken. To Red Ken, it is capitalism, democracy, and western culture that are the evils in this world. All other cultures are given a non-judgmental free pass. And you wonder why Britain has such a problem with radical Islamists in their midst? You need look no further then the poster boy for the suicidal philosophy of multiculturalism, Red Ken.

To the Londoner alive to day, you owe no apology to anyone for acts that you had no part in two centuries ago, and I would urge you to view them in the true historical context of the time. And also to the Londoners alive today, you do own an apology to the world for voting Ken Livingstone to be Mayor of your great city. Are you completely insane?

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The 301

Victor David Hansen engages with revisionist historians attacking the 300. As Mr. Hansen reminds us:

True, 2,500 years ago, almost every society in the ancient Mediterranean world had slaves. And all relegated women to a relatively inferior position. Sparta turned the entire region of Messenia into a dependent serf state.

But in the Greek polis alone, there were elected governments, ranging from the constitutional oligarchy at Sparta to much broader-based voting in states like Athens and Thespiae.

Most importantly, only in Greece was there a constant tradition of unfettered expression and self-criticism. Aristophanes, Sophocles and Plato questioned the subordinate position of women. Alcidamas lamented the notion of slavery.

Such openness was found nowhere else in the ancient Mediterranean world. That freedom of expression explains why we rightly consider the ancient Greeks as the founders of our present Western civilization - and, as millions of moviegoers seem to sense, far more like us than the enemy who ultimately failed to conquer them.

It is always good to read an eloquent defense of Western Civilization made against the bleatings of the multicultural avant garde among us who have no sense of their own history. Read Mr. Hansen's article here.

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Iran's Theocracy Driving Younger Generation to Secularism

Given time, many expect the Iranian theocracy to crumble. There are too many faultlines in the society - the economy, jobs, and indeed, there is a signficant waning in religiosity as Iranians, particularly younger Iranians, become cynical of their government. Indeed, it is the faultlines in Iranian society that augur most against attakcing Iran over the nuclear issue unless there is no other choice.

This is from an article today in the Boston Review:

Modern Iran has consistently wobbled between the dual and sometimes conflicting pillars that define it: Islam, and what is now euphemistically called Iran’s “pre-Islamic heritage.” As Iran struggles to emerge from the oppressive failures of its Islamic revolution, it has grown increasingly conscious of its roots.

Despite Iran’s reputation as the harbinger of Islamic revolution, the simple fact is that Iranians never wanted an Islamic state in the way Ayatollahs Ruhollah Khomeini and Ali Khamenei have forged it. Many Iranians welcomed the re-emergence of religion in Iran after the Shah’s relentless modernism, but few wanted or expected the clerics to grab control over people’s daily lives and government.

While in most Sunni Arab countries matters of religion and state have always been inextricable, Iran’s Shi‘ite society sought to separate them. Shi‘ite clerics traditionally belonged to three schools of political thought—“loyalists” who believed in cooperation with the state, “opposers” who exercised moral suasion on the political process from the outside, and “quietists” who advocated outright withdrawal from politics. Before Khomeini, the latter were the largest group.

Khomeini introduced a radically new principle into Shi‘ite Islam: velayat-e faqih (or direct rule by the most senior cleric, i.e., himself). This novel doctrine progressively alienated Iranians and created deep divisions within the clergy, as in the current rift between the hard-line clerics led by Iran’s current Supreme Leader Khamenei (the new beneficiary of velayat-e faqih) and the reformers led by President Hojjatoleslam (the rank just below Ayatollah) Mohammad Khatami.

It is this Shi‘ite tradition of interpretive Islam and political freedom that is causing Iranians to chafe under Khamenei’s velayat-e faqih and giving rise to political changes that could produce the first and most sustainable democracy in the Middle East.

“A loss of faith with the mullahs [in government] has led to a loss of faith in the religion,” says Azar Bharami, a lawyer and women’s rights activist in Tehran. “When the government does not respect the [line] between religion and state how can people?” Numerous surveys, including one by the magazine Asr-e Ma (“Our Era”), have shown that most Iranians under the age of 25—who make up 50 percent of the overall population—consider themselves agnostic. Many young Iranians are cynical, even derisive, about their religion. Epithets like “mad mullahs” and “this thing Islam” are not uncommon.

I do truly hope that the "mad mullahs" do not force the hand of the West before Iran's experiment in theocracy can crash of its own corrupt weight.

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But Will It Get Out All The Wrinkles?

No further comment. See here.

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Islam Threatens in Australia

There is a clear divide between those who would see Islam integrate into western society, and those who would see it conquer. Unfortunately for the world, while the latter category may be fewer in number, they more then make up for it with a willingness to use or threaten to use brutal force to advance their cause and silence any opposition, be it internal or external.

We are seeing this latter scenario play out today in this story from Australia.

One of Australia's most important Muslim leaders has sought police protection after criticising controversial cleric Sheikh Taj al-Din al-Hilali.

Tom Zreika, president of the Lebanese Muslim Association - and Sheikh Hilali's employer - said he received non-stop phone threats yesterday after he released a document urging greater integration and for Muslims to "mend their ways".

The report, prepared for a national meeting of imams in Sydney this weekend, says some Muslims are "ruining it" for all and that Australians have "had enough" of Muslims. His report also recommends that imams become involved in community activities such as voluntary firefighting and surf lifesaving.

Mr Zreika said he was threatened recently after saying, "I can't tolerate this freak show", following recent remarks by Sheikh Hilali.

But yesterday, after the contents of his paper were publicised, the threats, from Muslims, came non-stop.

"They just say, 'Mate if you don't shut your mouth we are going to come and fix you up'," Mr Zreika said. "I know they are Muslims because they quote Muslim prayers."

In his paper, Mr Zreika, a barrister, says the vast majority of non-Muslims understood and empathised with Islamic issues in Australia, but a small group of Muslims were inciting anti-Islamic feelings.

"Only when we mend our ways and we respect our fellow country people can we demand tolerance and forbearance."

Among Mr Zreika's suggestions for the new board of imams, which will be responsible for accrediting prospective clerics, are that imams should be citizens or permanent residents and not have been members of suspicious groups. He says they must do everything possible to prevent radicalism or fanaticism.

I wish Mr. Zreika the best in his efforts.

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The March of Islamaphobia in Canada

In the West, our motto has long been, when in Rome, do as the Romans. So why is it that Muslims who come to the West expect a host of special accomodations? And, apparently, at least one useful occidental idiot seems to feel that a failure to accomodate constitutes the dreaded "Islamaphobia."

Based on interviews with nearly 1,000 Muslim students at 17 on-campus hearings across Ontario, [a] report concludes that universities and colleges are not doing enough to accommodate Muslim students.

"It's clear that every day Muslim students face both overt and subtle forms of Islamophobic discrimination on Ontario campuses," said Jesse Greener, Ontario Chairperson of the Canadian Federation of Students, which released the report of its Task Force on the Needs of Muslim Students today.

The most frequent problem identified by Muslim students was a failure to accommodate. These include a lack of appropriate food choices, inadequate prayer space and academic policies that often run counter to religious obligations such as exams on key days and classes unwilling to accept students' beliefs.

Another problem cited was the loan-based student financial aid system, which is particularly problematic for Muslim students because Islam forbids interest-bearing loans.

"Ontario's Muslim students often face a fundamentally different learning environment that other students," said Ausma Malik, a task force member and student at the University of Toronto.

Actually, it sounds as if the problem is not that Muslim students are being treated differently, its that they are being treated the same. You can read the entire story here.

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Muslim Pupils Lynch Christian Teacher

The West is very non-reactive. Iran has been in a state of low-intensity war against the United States since 1979 - and it was not until very recently that we finally decided to join the event. Likewise, radical Islam is at war with the secular West, as well as anyone of a religion other then Wahhabi Islam. It will be long in coming, I am sure, but we are on a course where the religion of intolerance that is Wahhabi Islam will, itself, not be tolerated by the rest of the world. At any rate, todays latest atrocity from the world of Wahhabi Islam, courtesy of Reuters:

Muslim pupils at a secondary school in northeastern Nigeria beat a teacher to death on Wednesday after accusing her of desecrating the Koran, police and witnesses said.

Oluwatoyin Olusase, a Christian, was invigilating an Islamic Religious Knowledge exam at the school in Gombe state when the incident occurred. The students attacked her outside the school compound after the exam and killed her, witnesses said.

It was not clear exactly what Olusase had done that angered the students.

Police confirmed the killing and said their intervention had prevented the incident from turning into a riot.

"We have received information that a female teacher has been lynched by her students. We are investigating the report," Gombe state police commissioner Joseph Ibi said.

At least five people were killed and several churches burned down in February 2006 in the neighbouring state of Bauchi by Muslims infuriated that a Christian teacher in a secondary school had tried to confiscate a Koran from a student who was reading it during class.

Word got out into the streets that the teacher had desecrated the Koran, infuriating Muslims who went on the rampage.

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More Sharia Law - Stonings of Women Ordered in the Sudan

And more Islamic justice, this one not from Germany, but from the Sudan, where the Islamic government imposes Sharia law upon all. In this particular instance, two women, non-Arabs, non-Arabic speaking, not provided with an interpreter, and not represented by a lawyer, where sentenced to death by stoning following a trial conducted in Arabic by a Sharia Court for the crime of adultery. If that were not appalling enough, in one of the cases, the male also accused of adultery was released for lack of evidence. Read the story from Gulf news here.

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German Court Cites Koran to Allow Domestic Violence in Muslim Marriages

A German court, in adjudicating a divorce case between a young muslim couple, applied the concepts of Sharia law that allow for a husband to strike his wife in deciding that the woman's basis for seeking a divorce, that her husband had battered her and made repeated threats to kill her, was not justified. Citing to the Koran, the judge wrote in his decision denying a speedy divorce:

"The exercise of the right to castigate does not fulfill the hardship criteria as defined by Paragraph 1565 (of German federal law)," the daily Frankfurter Rundschau quoted the judge's letter as saying. It must be taken into account, the judge argued, that both man and wife have Moroccan backgrounds.

"The right to castigate means for me: the husband can beat his wife," Becker-Rojczyk said, interpreting the judge's verdict.

Read the story here. I am near speechless. While my knee-jerk reaction is to be hyper-critical of the Germans, accusing them of quickening the pace of their march towards dhimmi status, I have to be fair and note that most Germans seem appalled by this decision and are seeking discipline of the judge.

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George Orwell & The Employee Free Choice Act

George Orwell, in his novel 1984, gave to us the cynical concept of doublespeak, where things were named and attributed with properties the opposite of their true nature. Since he penned the novel almost 60 years ago, his forsight has proved prescient indeed. Doublespeak is practiced by many regimes the world over. For but one example, The People's Democratic Republic of North Korea is the official name for the most anti-democratic regime on this earth.

And Orwellian doublespeak is alive and well in the U.S.A., where the concept is oft put to use by members of our own Congress in the naming of their bills. The most glaring example of late is the Employee Free Choice Act, penned by the Democrats in Congress as pure political payback for supportive Labor Unions. And in the best traditions of doublespeak, the Free Choice Act would have an effect diametrically opposed to what its name suggests. The Act would take away that most basic of free and democratic concepts - an employee's right to cast a secret ballot on whether to unionize. The Employee Free Choice Act would make the decision whether to unionize subject to overt coercion and intimidation. It is truly an atrocious and incredibly cynical piece of legislation that I have previously posted upon here.

I raise it again today because the bill, passed by Democrats in the House, is now winding its way towards the Senate, championed by no less then Ted Kennedy and Barack Obama. The Union Free Employer has posted a short primer on the bill, which I would urge you to read. And as always, let your voice be heard.

Your Senator

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The Coalition of the Bribed - And Beaten

Nancy Pelosi, unable to win an up or down vote for the craven schemes she has dreamed up with Jack Murtha to scuttle the American mission in Iraq, and refusing to acknowledge the success of the surge to this point, has, as pointed out in earlier posts, loaded up the supplemental appropriations bill with an obscene amount of pork in order to buy votes. But even that is not assured of working, so Ms. Pelosi has now taken to threats of loss of committee seats and loss of funding for projects in order to put the finishing touches on her coalition. Evidently, nothing is beyond this women in her goal to insure that the surge is stopped in its tracks and then, forced into that ever euphamistic, "new direction." What is almost more disgusting then the acts of Ms. Pelosi are that her bribes and threats may actually sway members of the House. Read the story here.

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The Surge, Al Qaeda, & The Dems Disconnect

Rich Lowry has an insightful opinion piece in today's New York Sun pointing out the obvious (which, as often happens, had completely bypassed me). The Democratic talk of civil war in Iraq is kind of tough to sustain as this point, since only one side seems to be showing up for it. The Shia are gone to ground. Al Qaeda in Iraq, according to captured documents, intends to contest security operations in Baghdad. Most of the Democrats who decry the surge nonetheless still say that we should be fighting against Al Qaeda in counterinsurgency operations. Hmmm, are you starting to see the disconnect between what the Dems say they want, what is happening on the ground, and their current effort to pull the rug out from under everything with their coalition of the bribed. Read the article here.

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Embargo Me, Please

And no, I am not referring to my few readers - I am referring the US and EU embargo of Palestine. It would seem that an embargo by the US and EU can be incredibly lucrative.

If you will recall, the embargo of the Palestinian government went into effect after Hamas, a terrorist organization whose charter calls for the destruction of Israel, was elected. In the year after the embargo went into effect, aid from all sources actually rose by 20% from 1 billion dollars to 1.2 billion. Read the whole story here and here. We lift the embargo and start sending aid to them officially again - to cut down the bill. This is insanity.

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CAIR's Flying Imams - Update 1 - A Muslim Organization Takes A Stand

The American Islamic Forum for Democracy, a group headed by Phoenix physician Dr. M. Zuhdi Jasser, bills itself as:

a think-tank based in Phoenix, Arizona founded on the compatibility of American Constitutional democracy and our citizenship pledge with our personal and spiritual faith of Islam. Our mission is to separate religion and politics in the practice of Islam.

AIFD has come out strongly against the CAIR managed lawsuit by the Flying Imams and, indeed, is putting their money where their mouth is. Today, AIFD told the Washington Times that their organization will raise the funds to pay for the defense of the individuals named as "John Does" in the lawsuit.

It is good to see a Muslim organization take a stand both against CAIR and against this atrocity of a lawsuit. In truth though, it is likely only to be symbolic - not because of any lack of sincerity on the part of the AIFD, but rather because it appears that lawyers are lining up to offer their services pro bono in defense of this lawsuit.

You can read the whole story here. I think that CAIR has made a real error with this lawsuit. The actions of the Imams were too contrived and pushed too many hot buttons for anyone to believe that this was anything other then a stage managed event. And if CAIR can be shown responsible, it will greatly undermine their organization. Or so I hope, but perhaps I am being overly optimistic.

At any rate, I found this on AFID's website, issued the same day as the law-suit was filed by the Flying Imams. It is well worth a read. AFID, an organization that I was not aware of until today, sounds deserving of our support:

March 13, 2007
AIFD Press Release
PRESS RELEASE

MARCH 13, 2007

NOT ALL MUSLIMS SUPPORT CAIR PLAN TO SUE US AIRWAYS on BEHALF of SIX IMAMS

Muslim organization believes that lawsuit filed by CAIR on behalf of local Phoenix imams is wrong for American Muslims and wrong for America.


[PHOENIX, AZ: March 13, 2007]: Wide media attention is being given today to the lawsuit filed by CAIR on behalf of six imams against U.S. Airways for their claims of discrimination against race and religion. Most of the imams are from local mosques here in Phoenix and were removed from a U.S. Airways flight on November 21, 2006 en route to Phoenix from Minneapolis.

AIFD would like the American public to be aware of our following positions representing an alternative voice from the American Muslim community.

1. We will not accept the victimization agenda of organizations like CAIR. Lawsuits like the one announced today exploit the climate of political correctness and at the end of the day are harmful to the Muslim minority in America.

2. Make no mistake, this type of agenda and policy direction of organizations like CAIR only represents its own membership and its own donors. A relatively small percentage of the 5-6 million American Muslims are enrolled as members of CAIR. Recent considerable donations to CAIR upwards of a combined $100 million from foreign nations like Dubai and Saudi Arabia make these types of costly, distractive actions against domestic airlines such as US Airways very concerning in its manifestation of foreign interference.

3. One of the frontlines in the war on terror is at the airports and at the gates. While the imams were clearly removed for their behavior after entering the plane, it should be made clear that many less rigid but equally pious Muslims believe (including 3 out of 6 of the imams for that matter) that the prayer they performed could have been performed upon landing in Phoenix due to travel dispensations in Islam or privately on time while seated on the flight. Muslims believe that God is forgiving and does not expect religion to be "too difficult".

4. While the six imams' handlers, CAIR, and their lawyers may have some kind of obscure basis for their lawsuit, it is our belief that the fallout and publicity from such litigation is wrong for American Muslims, wrong for American security, and wrong for American freedoms. The greatest guarantor of our rights as American Muslims is the tenor of our relationship with the greater majority of American society. This type of litigiousness is divisive and achieves nothing but resentment and actually causes far more harm than good to the overall image of the Muslim community in the eyes of non-Muslim America.

4. It is our hope as Americans and as Muslims that U.S. Airways stand firm in its defense of its actions to have the gentleman removed for concerns regarding their behavior after entering the plane. This is not about race or religion. It is about the privilege to fly securely.

5. The constant exploitation of America's culture of political correctness especially in this setting of what is the most dangerous environment of air travel is out of touch with America's priorities. Such misguided priorities by Muslim activist organizations like CAIR will make the legitimate defense of our civil rights far more difficult when more serious complaints of racism and discrimination are involved. America is quickly becoming numb to their constant refrains and the polls demonstrate the profound ineffectiveness of their tiring campaigns.

6. The organized Muslim community should instead be working on developing a strategic plan to counter militant Islamism within the Muslim community. That would do a lot more to change public opinion than suing the airlines who are trying to keep Americans who travel safe.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------


CONTACT: AIFD Chairman, Board of Directors: M. Zuhdi Jasser. 602-254-1840, info@aifdemocracy.org . Website: www.aifdemocracy.org

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Al Qaeda's Changing Tactics - Using Children

Al Qaeda in Iraq is changing their tactics in response to the surge. It has been commonplace for al Qaeda to use women and children as human shields (see here). Now they are taking the concept to the next level. The latest atrocity - placing two children in the back seat of a vehicle filled with explosives, passing through a checkpoint, then escaping from the vehicle and detonating it remotely, the children still inside.

The vehicle was stopped at the checkpoint but was allowed through when soldiers saw the children in the back, said Major General Michael Barbero of the Pentagon's Joint Staff.

"Children in the back seat lowered suspicion. We let it move through. They parked the vehicle, and the adults ran out and detonated it with the children in the back," Barbero said.

The general said it was the first time he had seen a report of insurgents using children in suicide bombings. But he said Al-Qaeda in Iraq is changing tactics in response to the tighter controls around the city.

A US defense official said the incident occurred on Sunday in Baghdad's Adhamiyah district, a mixed neighborhood adjacent to Sadr City, which is predominantly Shiite.

After going through the checkpoint, the vehicle parked next to a market across the street from a school, said the official, who asked not to be identified.

"And the two adults were seen to get out of the vehicle, and run from the vehicle, and then followed by the detonation of the vehicle," the official said.

"It killed the two children inside as well as three other civilians in the vicinity. So, a total of five killed, seven injured," the official said.
. . . .
Attacks on Iraqi civilians are down by a third and sectarian murders have fallen by 50 percent since mid-February when US and Iraqi forces began moving into Baghdad as part of a new security crackdown, the general said.

The general went on to report that the number of attempted car bombings has actually increased, but the significant decrease in casualties since the start of the surge is due to the effectiveness of the checkpoints and, one would assume, the Operation Safe Markets discussed here.

Also in the briefing, the General talked about Sadr and his militia - and what he had to say was quite interesting, implying that the U.S. is in talks with individual commanders of he Mehdi Army, attempting to seperate from Sadr.

He said US commanders remain concerned about the Shiite militias led by radical cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, even though US forces are now operating freely in Sadr City and his Mahdi army militia is quiet.

Sadr is still in Iran but in communication with leaders of his movement in Iraq, he said.

"Where we are with the leaders of his movement is at a pretty delicate point, and I probably don't want to talk any more about his followers, and where we are in our relationship with them," he said.

Read the entire article here.

Hattip: Powerline

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The Surge: Cause & Effect

This based on an interview by author and retired soldier, Gordon Cucullu, of General Petraeus in Iraq:

Cause – U.S. and Iraqi soldiers permanently manning small unit positions throughout Baghdad and then going through each house in the neighborhood using the "soft knock" – not breaking down doors or forcing entry; but asking to be let in.

Effect – There has been a significant change in trust and attitudes towards the U.S. and Iraqi forces. "Once the people know we are going to be around," – intelligence tips have gone from trickle to fire hose. The forces in Baghdad are now in "information overload."

Effect – According to General Petraeus,"Less than half the al Qaeda leaders who were in Baghdad when this [surge] campaign began are still in the city. They have fled or are being killed or captured. We are attriting them at a fearsome rate." I do not know precisely what a "fearsome rate" translates into in actual numbers – but it sounds absolutely great, doesn’t it.


Cause – From their local bases, the U.S. and Iraqi soldiers have conducted "Operation Safe Markets" to secure gathering places like mosques and marketplaces, including through the use of concrete highway barriers around the vulnerable targets."

Effect – According to General Petraeus, "Car bombings have dropped precipitately - the limited access thwarts them." What is precipitately? I do not know, we will wait for the numbers to come out shortly. The one thing I am sure of, the numbers are not going to support the New York Times thesis of the other day that car bombings are actually thwarting the surge.

Effect: "The marketplaces, including the book market that was targeted for an especially vicious attack, are rebuilding and doing great business. It is helping the local economy enormously to have this kind of protection in place." With jobs plentiful and demand growing, the appeal of militia armies declines proportionally.


Cause: The Rules of Engagement (ROE) that tell our soldiers in what circumstances they can engage the enemy, and in what circumstances they must withhold fire, have been changed and made simpler by General Petraeus.

Rules of engagement (ROE), highly criticized as being too restrictive and sometimes endangering our troops, have been "clarified." "There were unintended consequences with ROE for too long," Petraeus acknowledged. Because of what junior leaders perceived as too harsh punishment meted out to troops acting in the heat of battle, the ROE issued from the top commanders were second-guessed and made more restrictive by some on the ground. The end result was unnecessary - even harmful - restrictions placed on the troops in contact with the enemy.

"I've made two things clear," Petraeus emphasized: "My ROE may not be modified with supplemental guidance lower down. And I've written a letter to all Coalition forces saying 'your chain-of-command will stay with you.' I think that solved the issue."

Effect: There is no way to quantify this. But, as a former infantry company commander, I can promise you that this will improve the morale of all soldiers from private on up and that it will translate into more aggressive and effective action by our soldiers.


As to Anbar Province, the situation is clarifying. The Sunnis in Anbar, who have been since the start of the Iraq war, provided a home base for al Qaeda and Baathist militants, appear to "have had enough."

Not only are the al Qaeda fighters causing civil disruption by fomenting sectarian violence and killing civilians, but on a more prosaic but practical side, al Qaeda is bad for business. "All of the sheiks up there are businessmen," Petraeus said. "They are entrepreneurial and involved in scores of different businesses. The presence of the foreign fighters is hitting them hard in the pocketbook and they are tired of it."

A large hospital project - meant to be one of the largest in the Sunni Triangle - had been put on hold by terrorist attacks when al Qaeda had control of the area. Now it's back on track. So are similar infrastructure projects.

The sheiks have seen that the al Qaeda delivers only violence and misery. They are throwing their lot in with the new government - for example, encouraging their young men to join the Iraqi police force and army. (They are responding in droves.) Petraeus has his troops applying a similar formula in Baghdad's Sadr City.

Read the entire article here. All of this is wonderful news. Given time and the resources necessary to do his job, it may well be that General Petraeus is to the Iraq War what Grant was to the Union Army during the Civil War – the right general, applying the right strategy, at precisely the right moment in history. We can only hope.

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FBI's National Security Letters Under Fire

We are watching the other shoe drop now following DoJ's OIG report documenting numerous problems, though no criminal malfeasence, in the FBI's administration of their NSL authority. For background on this issue, please see here and here.

Hearings have begun in the House Committee on the Judiciary as to what actions to take. The FBI's General Counsel Valerie Caproni gave testimony today, and a copy of her prepared statement outlining the FBI's response to the problem is here.

Not surprisingly, there are calls from the Democratic side of the Committee to simply take away NSL authority from the FBI as a part of reducing the scope of the Patriot Act - long a favored cause of the far left. As reported by Fox:

"This was a serious breach of trust," said Rep. John Conyers, D-Mich., the Judiciary chairman. "The department had converted this tool into a handy shortcut to illegally gather vast amounts of private information while at the same time significantly underreporting its activities to Congress."

Rep. Jerrold Nadler, D-N.Y., said Congress should revise the USA Patriot Act, which substantially loosened controls over the letters.

"We do not trust government always to be run by angels, especially not this administration," Nadler said. "It is not enough to mandate that the FBI fix internal management problems and recordkeeping, because the statute itself authorizes the unchecked collection of information on innocent Americans."

Hopefully, Republican's will be able to run enough interference to buy the FBI the time it needs to fix the administrative and bureaucratic problems that were highlighted in the OIG report. And the FBI does need to solve the NSL administrative problems immediately. That said, the NSL's have been an invaluable tool to fight against terrorism, but an easy target for the left wing because, without a full understanding of the limited information that can be sought under the NSL's, it has been easy for the left to effectively label the NSL's as a vast and near inherent breach of Americans' privacy. Watch for this to become a major partisan political battle splashed across the papers in the coming days as the Democrats seek to cut off the FBI's NSL authority for partisan political gain.

Type rest of the post here

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The Dark Side of Democracy

The single greatest issue of our time is our national security as it is threatened, from within and without our borders, by a diffuse and amorphous radical Islam. No honest person could claim that the war in Iraq is unrelated to that threat today, irregardless of where they may have stood on the war at the outset or what they believed to the contrary in 2003. If you think that a broad brush overstatement, please do an internet search for the statements of al Qaeda's al-Zawahiri over the past two years and re-read them. In that light, what to do about Iraq deserves, more then any single issue this day, to be addressed directly.

But the far left of the Democratic Party, led in the House by Nancy Pelosi and Jack Murtha, know that they cannot convince a majority of our elected representatives to abandon Iraq in light of our national security interests. Very few Democrats, while they might want to abandon Iraq, some for reasons of true belief, many with dreams of partisan political gain, are willing to accept the responsibility for what might transpire in the aftermath of such a retreat - and not just transpire in Iraq, or even throughout the entire Middle East. A failure of resolve to complete what we have started in Iraq would have implications for the totality of our national security and, beyond our own borders, for the security of Europe, who are already facing enormous problems with the influx of Wahhabi Islamists into their countries.

But it is the far left liberal wing of the Democratic Party that forms the leadership in Congress - and they wish to see us out of Iraq at any cost. Thus we have this abortion of a Supplemental Appropriations Bill crafted by Pelosi and Murtha, likely unconstitutional in many respects, to tie the President's hands in his ability to deploy troops to Iraq, and to set a timetable for withdrawal before the next Presidential election. It is clear that such a plan simply cannot pass on its own, even with a Democratic majority in both the Senate and the House. Thus, Pelosi and Murtha are attempting to buy the votes by attaching 21 billion dollars in pork barrel projects. That they have done that is both the height of cynicism and, as the White House has accurately described it, "unconscionable." That it might work - as reported this day in the Washington Post - is the dark side of Democracy.

As always, do let your voice be heard.

Your Senators

Your Representative

Update: Peter Wehner, the deputy assistant to the President and director of the White House's Office of Strategic Initiatives, has authored an article that expounds upon all of the same points made in this post and more. It is an excellent read.

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Russia Turning?

According to the NYT:

Russia has informed Iran that it will withhold nuclear fuel for Iran’s nearly completed Bushehr power plant unless Iran suspends its uranium enrichment as demanded by the United Nations Security Council, European, American and Iranian officials say.

This is a fortunate turn of events. The only question is why?

It is tought to discern much with clarity about Russia these days, as it has returned to a vestige of its autocratic past. Putin has gone a long way to dismantling the nascent democracy in Russia and, in its place, inserting a thuggish regime where serious dissenters are engaged by bullets rather then debate and the ballot box. Russia has taken the place of the old Soviet Union as the premier arms dealer for all rouge regimes. And Russia has been involved in the very lucrative deal to build nuclear reactors in Iran.

Given Russia's own problems with radical Islamists in Chechneya and the growth of Islamist regimes on its borders, it has always appeared that Russia's relationship of conveinance with Islamic countries was near insanity.

So is Russia reassessing its long-term strategic intersts and placing those interests over short term economic gain? Or are Putin and friends upset because Iran because its checks are bouncing? Or are there yet other motivations?

“We’re not sure what mix of commercial and political motives are at play here,” one senior Bush administration official said in Washington. “But clearly the Russians and the Iranians are getting on each other’s nerves — and that’s not all bad.”

A senior European official said: “We consider this a very important decision by the Russians. It shows that our disagreements with the Russians about the dangers of Iran’s nuclear program are tactical. Fundamentally, the Russians don’t want a nuclear Iran.”
. . . .
The Russian Atomic Energy Agency, or Rosatom, is eager to become a major player in the global nuclear energy market. As Security Council action against Iran has gained momentum and Iran’s isolation increases, involvement with the Bushehr project may detract from Rosatom’s reputation.

In a flurry of public comments in the past month, Russian officials acknowledged that Russia was delaying the delivery of fuel to the reactor in the Iranian port city of Bushehr. It blamed the decision on the failure of Iran to pay what it owes on the project, not on concerns about nuclear proliferation.

But last month, Foreign Minister Sergey V. Lavrov informed some European officials that Russia had made a political decision not to deliver the fuel, adding that Russia would state publicly that the sole reason was financial, European officials said.

Read the article here. Whatever the true motivation or mix of motivations, this is welcome news. The pressure on Iran just got ratcheted up - and we have just taken a small step back from war with Iran.

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Whom Will Hamas-Fatah Fool?

The ink was just barely dry on the Hamas-Fatah unity agreement when Hamas announced that they still do not accept Israel's right to exist and further, that "the so-called 'right of return,' or unlimited immigration of millions of foreign Arabs to the State of Israel - which would lead to the destruction of Israel . . ." is "non-negotiable." The Hamas-Fatah unity government is not off to a promising start - or at least, not if the goal was peace with Israel and a functioning government and economy for the Palestinians.

So one would think that none of the countries that had shut off aid to the Hamas government as a terror supporting entity would embrace this Palestinian unity government made over in name only.

But, then again, one would be wrong.

Caroline Glick explains it all in her article here. And Hamas has already taken credit since the signing of the agreement for terror attacks inside Israel. See here. It would seem that the only effects of this new government will be to lessen the internecine warfare between Hamas and Fatah while allowing the ever increasingly anti-semetic Europe the bare patina of cover it needs to restart support for the terrorists in Palestine. The Euro-lemmings continue their erstwhile march towards the status of dhimmi.

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A Tale of Two Poll(ar Opposites)

There are Lies, There are Damned Lies, and Then There Are . . . well, polls in this case. As one person recently commented, had polls been extant in thirteenth century Italy, "I’m sure Dante would have added a circle in hell reserved for those who gauge truth and rightness by taking a poll." At any rate, something is amiss. Someone is manipulating our poll data. Two polls, released within a day of each other, are producing some diametrically opposed pictures of Iraqi opinion. Now, how could that be when both claim a margin of error of less then 3%.

Compare this snippet on a Times UK "ORB" Poll - a poll that got no play in American MSM's:

[A]n opinion poll conducted on the eve of the fourth anniversary of the US-led invasion of Iraq has found a striking resilience and optimism among the inhabitants.

The poll, the biggest since coalition troops entered Iraq on March 20, 2003, shows that by a majority of two to one, Iraqis prefer the current leadership to Saddam Hussein’s regime, regardless of the security crisis and a lack of public services.

The survey, published today, also reveals that contrary to the views of many western analysts, most Iraqis do not believe they are embroiled in a civil war.

Officials in Washington and London are likely to be buoyed by the poll conducted by Opinion Research Business (ORB), a respected British market research company that funded its own survey of 5,019 Iraqis over the age of 18.

Compare that with these snippet about an "ABC BBC Poll" - that is getting play from the BBC and all US MSM's or, in other words, all who are cheerleading for the US to leave Iraq:

From the BBC

Iraqis are becoming increasingly pessimistic about the future of their country and unhappy about their lives, a survey suggests.

Less than 40% of those polled said things were good in their lives, compared to 71% two years ago.

However, a majority of those questioned said that, despite daily violence, they did not believe Iraq was in a state of civil war.

More than 2,000 people took part in the BBC/ABC News poll

From the USA Today:

Iraqis see hope drain away
After 4 years of war, survey finds a nation fragmented by fear

Jobs gone and schools closed. Marriages delayed and children mourned. Markets bombed and clean water in short supply. Speaking freely now a dangerous act.
And hope lost.

Four years after the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, Iraqis describe daily lives that have been torn apart by spiraling violence and a faltering economy. The bursts of optimism reported in a 2004 public-opinion survey taken a year after the invasion and another in 2005 before landmark legislative elections have nearly vanished.

Face-to-face interviews with 2,212 Iraqis — a survey sponsored jointly by USA TODAY, ABC News, the British Broadcasting Corp. and ARD, a German TV network — find a nation that in large measure has fragmented into fear. Six in 10 Iraqis say their lives are going badly. Only one-third expect things to improve in the next year.

From the Washington Post:

More than six in 10 Iraqis now say that their lives are going badly -- double the percentage who said so in late 2005 -- and about half say that increasing U.S. forces in the country will make the security situation worse, according to a poll of more than 2,200 Iraqis conducted by ABC News and other media organizations.

The survey, released Monday, shows that Iraqi assessments of the quality of their lives and the future of the country have plunged in comparison with similar polling done in November 2005 and February 2004.

The Washington Post acknowledges the UK Times ORB poll, but addresses the glaring contradictions by calling the ABC-BBC Poll "more comprehensive." Hmmm, the ORB pole interviewed 3,000 more people, yet is less "comprehensive." Somehow, I have my doubts.

Obviously, there is something more then questionable going on - either questions are being manipulated or there is oversampling. Unfortunately, I do not yet know which. My intent is to get as much of the raw data that I can and see if I can identify it. I will post my findings.

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Hugo and Barbara, Sitting in a Tree . . .

In applying the journalistic version of the Marquiss of Quennsbury rules (no below the belt references), I would tactfully describe Barbara Walters interview of Hugo Chavez as merely a romantic kiss. But Fausta, with perhaps greater accuracy, refers to the interview as "fellational." In either event, this interview is all the rage on Venezuela t.v., and could not come at a more opportune time for Mr. Chavez as he tries to regain credility after Bush's Latin American visit. I recommend you both watch the interview and read Fausta's insightful post. Then do let us know if you felt the need to light up a smoke afterwards.

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Giving Aid, Comfort - And Motivation - to Muslim Extremists

I, like many others, have long suspected that the extremist tenor of the anti-war crowd's rhetoric - screaming near incoherently about how they were deliberately misled into the Iraq war and that the war is immoral - was going to have consequences in motivating radical muslims everwhere. I just never thought it would be possible to quantify it.

As it turns out, I was wrong.

In Britain, the muslims that attempted to carry out the July 21 terrorist bombings - just two weeks after 7/7 - have testified in court as to their motivation.

" . . . because more people were dying and suffering and the lies from the politicians as to why they went to war started to come out. . . Seeing non-Muslims protesting and speaking out about the war made me feel as a Muslim that I should do something stronger."

Read the whole story here.

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Media Jihad: "Influencing the Views of the Weak-Minded American"

Memri.org has translated this blueprint posted on a jihadist website to "infiltrate popular American forums and to use them to distribute jihad films and spread disinformation about the war."

Raiding American Forums is Among the Most Important Means of Obtaining Victory in the Fierce Media War… and of Influencing the Views of the Weak-Minded American

There is no doubt, my brothers, that raiding American forums is among the most important means of obtaining victory in the fierce media war... and of influencing the views of the weak-minded American who pays his taxes so they will go to the infidel American army. This American is an idiot and does not [even] know where Iraq is... [It is therefore] mandatory for every electronic mujahid [to engage in this raiding].

It is better that you raid non-political forums such as music forums and trivia forums... which American people... favor... Define your target[ed forum]... and get to know it well... Post your contribution . . .
. . . .
Obviously, you have to register yourself using a purely American name...
. . . .
You should post your contribution . . . as an American. . . You should correspond with visitors to this forum, [bringing to their attention] the frustrating situation of their troops in Iraq... You should invent stories about American soldiers you have [allegedly] personally known (as classmates) . . . [Use any story] which will break their spirits, oh brave fighter for the sake of God.

. . . .
. . . Your concern should [only] be introducing topics which . . . will cause [them to feel] frustration and anger towards their government . . ., which will . . . render them hostile to Bush . . . and his Republican Party and make them feel they must vote ton bring the troops back from Iraq as soon as possible."

Do not . . . discuss issues pertaining to Arabs or Muslims at all, whether negatively or positively . . . because this could be a trap for you. . . In addition, do not ask people to circulate the material [you have posted] in other forums . . . as these types of requests will expose you. . . .

Read the whole story here. Actually, this sounds very similar to the blueprint the New York Times is following.

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The AP Does Its Part to Cheerlead for Defeat

Time for the AP to get in on the "spin the surge" game - don't want to let the NTY and the BBC get too far ahead, of course. Today's AP entry is subject to analysis by Jules Crittenden:

The AP’s Stephen R. Hurst proclaims the resilience of Sunni insurgents!

BAGHDAD (AP) - Sunni insurgents, resilient despite the five-week security crackdown in the capital, killed at least six more American troops over the weekend. A Sunni car bomber hit a largely Shiite district in the capital Sunday, killing at least eight people.

I’m getting a warm and fuzzy Pravda kind of feel off that, the ”resilience.” Stalwart insurgents resiliently marching forward! You have to troll the North Korean web to find that kind of thing these days!

The next three paragraphs are devoted to American death, spiced up with phrases like the one about Anbar being “controlled by the Sunni insurgency.” I’m concerned that might be somewhat overbroad, when you consider the significant influence of both the U.S. and Iraqi military and pro-government tribes have over what goes on in Anbar. But that’s what good propaganda is all about! Then we get to this:

While U.S. and Iraqi troops have flooded the Baghdad streets and a heavily armored American column was sent north to adjacent Diyala province, attacks on American and Iraqi forces have been robust.

The resilient enemy is also robust! Strangely, no mention of the “dozens” of resilient, robust insurgents who were granted martyrdom in that action in Diyala. But let’s not dawdle about the trivial details. We’ll get to those, the whole “violence down” thing later. We’re following AP’s game plan, and AP is playing gotcha! Any action or reaction by terrorists who have been severely set back is a sign of surge failure, and must be played high, resiliently and robustly. All American statements must be buried, carefully selected and couched to suggest futility. Like this one:

“The issue that we’re all trying to figure out is how best do you get the Iraqis to reconcile their differences - because after all, this is not going to be solved by the military. It has to involve political reconciliation in Iraq, among Iraqis,” Mr. Gates said on CBS’s “Face the Nation.”

“We’re basically buying them time,” he said.

Obligatory U.S. death count follows. The AP wisely avoids applying this standard to the enemy, despite the availability of dead insurgent/terrorist numbers. Counter-productive. Counter-revolutionary!

Do read the entire post.

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The Shadow War With Iran

It is fair to say that Iran has been at war with America since the 1979 revolution that brought Khomeini to power. But until recently, it was a wholly one sided war - the U.S. just was not engaging. There were the bombings of the Marine Baracks in Lebanon and then of Khobar Towers orchestrated by Iran - with no substantive response from the U.S. Iran also orchestrated the kidnapping, torture, and murder of several U.S. intelligence personnel in the Middle East. Again, there was no American response.

But word is filtering up from the shadows. Apparently the U.S. has decided to start playing in this ongoing shadow war, and the theocracy in Tehran is not happy.

According to Iranian sources, several officers have been abducted in the past three months and the United States has drawn up a list of other targets to be seized with the aim of destabilising Tehran’s military command.

In an article in Subhi Sadek, the Revolutionary Guard’s weekly paper, Reza Faker, a writer believed to have close links to President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, warned that Iran would strike back.

“We’ve got the ability to capture a nice bunch of blue-eyed blond-haired officers and feed them to our fighting cocks,” he said. “Iran has enough people who can reach the heart of Europe and kidnap Americans and Israelis.”

The first sign of a possible campaign against high-ranking Iranian officers emerged earlier this month with the discovery that Ali Reza Asgari, former commander of the Revolutionary Guard’s elite Quds Force in Lebanon and deputy defence minister, had vanished, apparently during a trip to Istanbul.

Asgari’s disappearance shocked the Iranian regime as he is believed to possess some of its most closely guarded secrets. The Quds Force is responsible for operations outside Iran.

Last week it was revealed that Colonel Amir Muhammed Shirazi, another high-ranking Revolutionary Guard officer, had disappeared, probably in Iraq.

A third Iranian general is also understood to be missing — the head of the Revolutionary Guard in the Persian Gulf. Sources named him as Brigadier General Muhammed Soltani, but his identity could not be confirmed.

“This is no longer a coincidence, but rather an orchestrated operation to shake the higher echelons of the Revolutionary Guard,” said an Israeli source.

Other members of the Quds Force are said to have been seized in Irbil, in the Kurdish area of northern Iraq, by US special forces.

“The capture of Quds members in Irbil was essential for our understanding of Iranian activity in Iraq,” said an American official with knowledge of the operation.

One theory circulating in Israel is that a US taskforce known as the Iran Syria Policy and Operations Group (ISOG) is coordinating the campaign to take Revolutionary Guard commanders.

The Iranians have also accused the United States of being behind an attack on Revolutionary Guards in Iran last month in which at least 17 were killed.

Military analysts believe that Iranian threats of retaliation are credible. Tehran is notorious for settling scores. When the Israelis killed Abbas Mussawi, Hezbollah’s general secretary, in 1992 the Quds Force blew up the Israeli embassy in Argentina in revenge.

Despite the Iranian threat to retaliate in Europe, Iraq is seen by some analysts as a more likely place in which to attempt abductions.

Read the whole article here.

That the U.S. has finally joined the game is good news. I do not think that the Iranians will publicly kidnap Americans in Europe - that would be an invitation to open warfare in the current climate. But watch for operations like the ambush of 5 soldiers in Karbala that occured two months ago. That was likely a retalitory attack by Iran. And as this shadow war heats up, watch for Iranian assets to start disappearing from Iraq wholesale.

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BBC's Grotesque Bias and the Surge in Iraq

How do you counter good news from the surge (see here and here) if you are rooting for an immediate American withdrawal of all forces from Iraq. If you are the New York Times, you simply ignore the good news and state minimal facts under an incredibly misleading headline (see here). If you are the BBC, you bury any mention of optimistic factual news under the weight of global assertions of deep pessimism among all Iraqis, then couple that with your own personal retrospective, painting Iraq in the bleakest of possible terms:

From hope to despair in Baghdad

By John Simpson
BBC World Affairs Editor

The most common sight, apart from police and army roadblocks, are the black banners on walls and fences announcing people's deaths.

And the most common feeling you come across is a kind of slow-burning, gloomy anger.

These things represent a major failure of the hopes and expectations which many Iraqis entertained four years ago.

The generators are there because the Americans and successive Iraqi governments have failed to sort out the power situation. And the deaths happen because they have not established peace here.

'They will help us'

It is easy to forget how high the expectations once were.

"I don't like the feeling that my country has been invaded," a shopkeeper in Haifa Street told me, a day or so after the fall of Baghdad.

"But thanks to God that it is the Americans who have done this. They are the richest country on earth. They will help us."

But they did not. They did not even protect the ministries and public buildings and museums from being looted.

We filmed as people shouted "Do something!" at an American soldier, while thieves were running out with valuable medical equipment from the hospital behind us. He just shrugged his shoulders and turned away.

Iraqis were infuriated by the gross mismanagement and open theft that American contractors and Iraqi politicians carried out in the first year after the invasion.

They had little but contempt for the feeble administration of Paul Bremer, the American proconsul whose only previous senior job had been as US ambassador to the Netherlands.

Then and now

When I went to see the shopkeeper in Haifa Street in May 2003, I walked there on my own.

There was the occasional rattle of small-arms fire, and groups of people sometimes looked at me angrily. But I did not feel my life was in any kind of danger.

A couple of days ago I went back to Haifa Street. It has recently been the scene of a series of battles, with Sunni gunmen being winkled out of their positions by the Americans and the Iraqi army.

It is difficult for an unarmed Westerner to go there now, and I had to travel in an unmarked van with dark curtains at the windows and two British security men to protect me.

The shopkeeper I had met four years before had long gone. There was no-one to ask: all the other shops in the row had closed down as well.

Early next day, I went to film at a big city hospital. During the hour I was there, six bodies, found in the streets that morning, were brought in. All had obviously been tortured, and one had had his feet sawn off. It was just a normal morning.

After Baghdad fell, I would satellite reports back to London about attacks in which one or two people were killed. It was big news in those days. Last Thursday, a bomb exploded near the end of the street in central Baghdad where the BBC has its office. Eight people were killed and 25 injured, and we had rather good pictures of it.

But I did not ring London to offer a report about it. To get on the news, or the front page of the newspapers nowadays, a lot of people have to die. I would say the current figure is 60 or 70; and it certainly wouldn't be the lead.

This is not because editors do not care; it is because it happens so often it scarcely seems like news.

After four years of occupation, this is a dangerous, callous, frightened, anxious city.

Its people are wearily sceptical about the current dip in violence which the current American troop "surge" seems to have brought. . . .

Do read the rest of this incredibly biased hit piece, and compare it to the articles linked in the first paragraph of this post, including the links found in the New York Times post. It would be hard to imagine a more stark contrast between the fact based reporting of those articles and posts in comparison to this dribble from the BBC, in essence cheerleading for defeat in Iraq.

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News From The Five Week Old Surge

Signs from the surge continue to be positive as the operation nears completion of its fifth week, and even though more then half the U.S. troops intended to take part in the operation have yet to arrive. But before looking at the good news, a cautionary note:

James Carafano, a defence expert at the conservative Heritage Foundation, cautioned that an increase in violence was likely during the spring and summer.

“The first thing you would expect the bad guys to do is to go to ground, map things out, do some reconnaissance and figure out how to screw things up,” he said. “You have to get through to next winter before you can say the surge has worked.”

Mr. Carafano is correct - even though the surge is progressing with surprising ease at this point. There seem to be three things leading to the surge's initial success, two of which portend a spike in future attacks.

One, the surge of Iraqi and US troops spreading throughout Baghdad is having its desired effect of empowering the residents. Even if we accept the highest possible estimate of the number of militants and their supporters, that is only a fraction of the Iraqi population. If the population feels secure and empowered, and if they are supported by functional military and police protection, the militants will no longer have an operational home. That, in a nutshell, is the purpose of - and what is happening - with the surge. You can see an analagous scenario being played out in Fallujah, as discussed here by a member of a Marine Corps civil affairs team

Two, the Sunni militants, and al Qaeda in Iraq, are suffering other problems at this critical time, and those problems are keeping them from really concentrating on Baghdad and challenging the U.S. and Iraqi forces when the nascent surge is at its most vulnerable. Al Qaeda's problem appears to be the shrinking of its friendly base in Anbar - the home of Sunni militancy since the start of the Iraq war. See Iraq the Models post on this here. This will be very significant in the long run.

Three, Sadr and his Madi army have made a strategic decision to go to ground. But before Iraq's military and police become truly functional, and before the surge starts to significantly achieve its objectives of empowering the populace, Sadr will have to make a move to reassert himself.

Interestingly, if the Sunni militants are not able to mount a real challenge to the surge in Baghdad, this will force Sadr's hand early. And I have little doubt both that Sadr's Iranian "friends" will be demanding that he make an attempt to reassert his militia before it is too late, and that they will underwrite that attempt with guns and money -- if not manpower and leadership.

In sum, my own assessment is that the good news from the surge will be tempered by spikes in violence in the future -- significant spikes when Sadr starts his end game, but the societal conditions that will allow for those spikes will become less and less with each passing day. Having said all of that, what is the news from the surge today:

KARADEH used to be an affluent shopping area of Baghdad. It boomed for a while after the American invasion as goods flooded into Iraq after years of sanctions. But as sectarian violence intensified, the store fronts became shuttered and shell-pocked.
In a vote of confidence in the surge by US troops, the shops were reopening last week. Hareth Salah, a 24-year-old student, said he had stopped attending courses at his technical college when the surge began last month.

“One of my friends was killed by the terrorists,” he said, “but now there are a lot more Iraqi army checkpoints and I’m feeling more secure. I feel better; I can go out and do my shopping. More people have opened their stores and the markets are open longer.”

As the fourth anniversary of the Iraq war approaches on Tuesday, progress remains uncertain but trends are hopeful.

“This is a bit of a rollercoaster ride,” said General David Petraeus, the US commander in Iraq. “You’re trying to do what is necessary to keep the rollercoaster generally going up, despite the ups and downs and the bumps.”

Murderous sectarian checkpoints have melted away as the Iraqi security forces and American troops extend their grip on the capital. Abu Mohammed, a 34-year-old taxi driver, who lives in the largely Shi’ite Sha’ab district in northern Baghdad, said: “Sometimes I would stop and wait for an hour or two rather than take a chance on passing a fake checkpoint with a customer.

“We were so scared; anybody could be followed and assassinated.”

Figures released last week by Brigadier Qassim al-Moussawi, an Iraqi military spokesman, showed civilian deaths down from 1,440 in the four weeks before the surge began on February 14 to 265 in the four weeks that followed, although there may have been some undercounting. According to the American military, assassination attempts were down by 50%.

The number of US deaths was also down, from 87 to 66, although the concentration of troops in Baghdad led to an increase of 12% in fatalities in the capital.

Frederick Kagan, a military historian and leading advocate of the surge, said: “It is very early days but I’m very encouraged by what is happening. America only has two brigades out of five there and we haven’t even started our major operations yet. I had not expected this little resistance.”

Residents of the Iraqi capital are holding their breath. For each hopeful piece of news there seems to be a car bombing or attempted assassination - such as one on the Shi’ite mayor of Sadr City last week - that threatens their security.

“At least I don’t see bodies thrown here and there on the road, as in the days before the security plan,” said Ramya Ahmed, 35, a Shi’ite living in Adamiya, a largely Sunni neighbourhood.

. . . .
An extra combat brigade and more than 2,200 military police are being dispatched to Iraq, which by the end of May or early June will bring the number of additional US troops involved in the surge to 30,000.

Read the entire article here. I note this good news from the surge today comes from the Times - Britain's Times, that is. Not the New York Times, whose reporting today is curiously devoid of fact and of a very different tint.

Update: See here. And the Washington Post is reporting on increased attacks by al Qaeda in Iraq against Iraqi police and sunnic civilians in Anbar Province. See here.

Update: From Iraq the Model: 39 Al-Qaeda insurgents are killed by Sunni tribesmen and police in Anbar province.

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Documenting Duplicity: Joe Wilson and Valerie Plame

Fausta, in her blog today, links to a post by Steve Gilbert entitled When and Why Joseph C Wilson Outed Valerie Plame. It is by far the best and most thorough compilation of facts surrounding the Wilson and Plame myths that I have seen. It is a point by point merciless attack upon the foundations of the Wilson Plame myths and truly is a must read.

The myths I am referring to are the that Joe Wilson proved that Bush was lying about Iraqi intentions to purchase uranium in Africa and the myth that there was a conspiracy at the highest levels of government to "out" Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame, to punish Wilson. Those myths are alive and well today. The Democratic party made a conscious decision years ago to embrace, protect and publicize the Wilson and Plame myths.

The 9-11 Commission was notable for fact checking Wilson's claims, finding them to be dishonest based upon undisputed facts in the record, but being unable to publish the Wilson related findings in the portion of the report upon which there was bipartisan agreement. Why? - Well, because the partisan Democrats brazenly refused to acknowledge the facts. The Democrats on the panel did not challenge any of the facts - they simply refused to agree to them.

It turns out, if you value partisan polemics above truth, then the Democrats certainly made the right decision. The myths relating to Wilson and Plame have been repeated ad infinitum since the 9-11 report, all to the benefit of the partisan Democrats. Never in any MSM piece on Joe Wilson does anyone raise the issue that Wilson was lying to the American public in his now infamous op-ed and in all his talks on the topic before and since. Rarely in any of the MSM pieces on Joe Wilson does anyone note that he worked for the Kerry and Gore presidential campaigns. He is invariably portrayed as honest in his criticisms and impartial in his approach. And his wife, Valerie Plame, is portrayed as the victim of Karl Rove and Vice President Cheney.

The effort to butress these myths is being played out in the halls of congress even today, as Henry Waxman is holding hearings to "get to the bottom" of who is responsible for outing Valerie Plame. Waxman himself has proclaimed Wilson's honesty, and Valerie Plame has proclaimed her outing in Novack's column to have been the result of a Rovian conspiracy. Despite the facts, the myth is not only alive and well, it is gaining in strength and not being effectively challenged. At least not by the MSM or republican elected officials. The same cannot be said of Steve Gilbert, in his post linked in the first paragraph above.

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The Carnival of the Insanities Is Up

You will find the carnival here.

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The New York Times At Their Most Irresponsible and Disingenuous

Sunni Militants Disrupt Plan To Calm Baghdad.

That is today's lead headline in the New York Times. It is accompanied by an editorial claiming the Iraq war is lost and that we need to immediately leave Iraq.

Leaving the editorial aside for the moment, the clear message of the headline is that the surge is not succeeding.

Murders must be up in Baghdad. Casualties must be rising. Obviously, there must be significant facts for the NYT, the newspaper of record, to make the claim that the surge in Baghdad has been disrupted. But, in short - no, there are no such facts.

I had to read the article three times. The NYT’s only two factual underpinnings for their headline are that, one, a car bomb exploded Saturday in Baghdad killing two people, and two, in February, there were 44 car bombs exploded in Baghdad. That is the sum total of the NYT's evidence that Sunni militants have succeeded in derailing the surge. The NYT provides no other factual information about the surge. Indeed, the NYT does not even provide information about the damage caused by the 44 explosions in Baghdad during the entire month of February, nor does the NYT deliniate how many of those 44 explosions occurred in Baghdad after the surge began. And still on that same topic, the NYT does not address how many car bombs have occurred thus far in Baghdad during March.

The NYT, in the remainder of the lead article, discusses how al Qaeda in Iraq is switching tactics to emphasize car bombings. But the NYT does not document how car bombs in Baghdad have somehow derailed the surge. It gets yet more disingenuous, because the NYT does not even give the facts and circumstances surrounding the detonation of the one specific car bomb they cite in support of their headline, the car bomb that occurred in March and that killed the two people in Baghdad.

Car bombs are aimed at high density targets – the suicide bomber is shooting for a market or mosque packed with people. For there to have been only two people killed – and no mention of other casualties – one of two things had to have happened. Either there was an unplanned early detonation, OR . . . the bomber was stopped at a checkpoint in Baghdad and just went ahead and detonated. In other words, it could very well be that the two casualties count as a success in evaluating the surge. And given the prevarication in this article, I strongly suspect that to be the case.

In sum, given NYT's clear insinuation of failure of the surge in the headline, given NYT's lack of factual underpinning for the headline in the body, and given the NYT's omission of any of the wealth of salient facts available to assess the success of the surge to this point, it is fair to say that never before have I seen or read anything so disingenuous as this lead article in today's NYT.

Quite literally, every news report on the surge that looks to actual facts discusses how the violence in Baghdad is significantly down. No one is willing to claim the surge a success yet, but what you hear at every turn are the words "cautious optimism."

For example, this is a report from two days ago, a report by a U.S. Brigade in Baghdad:

Moving coalition forces out of big forward operating bases and into smaller community-based combat outposts as part of the Baghdad Security Plan has reduced violence and helped to stabilize northwestern Baghdad, a senior Army officer serving there said today.

Murders are down by more than half since January in the densely populated 93-square-kilometer area controlled by the 2nd Brigade Combat Team, 1st Infantry Division, said its commander, Army Col. J.B. Burton. His troops have found only 10 planted improvised explosive devices this month. That’s down from 36 in January, when 89 IEDs were detonated. So far this month, there have been only 21 IED detonations, Burton reported. . .

You can read the report here. It is typical of all the news coming out of Baghdad since the start of the surge. You can also look at here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here. That is actually only a partial list going back to 1 March.

What you will find in every one of those links are facts indicating that the surge has succeeded in lessening the level of violence throughout Baghdad. By any measure, deaths are down, security is up.

And what is going on outside Baghdad is equally as important – but of course also omitted by the NYT. For example, it is critical that al Qaeda in Iraq is now targeting not U.S. or Iraqi soldiers, but Sunni civilians in Anbar province. Within the last two days, al Qaeda has set off three suicide bombs in Anbar, each including chlorine gas, injuring over 350 Sunni civilians.

Why is that important? Because it means that al Qaeda in Iraq has or is about to find itself homeless and hunted by the locals of Anbar. I would say that is pretty critical in evaluating our success in Iraq at this point. Mohammed, from Iraq the Model, himself a Sunni resident of Baghdad, explains:

With this series of dirty chemical bombings a war between al-Qaeda and the tribes in Anbar is no longer a possibility. It just became a fact.

I've read at least two very optimistic reports from al-Almada in the last week about purported victories of the tribes and police over al-Qaeda in Ramadi and Fallujah. I was reluctant to trust the accuracy of the reports which sited unnamed sources but now seeing the reaction of al-Qaeda suggests that the action of the tribes was so painful that al-Qaeda retaliated in the way we see today.

Al-Qaeda's terrorists-whom AP insists on calling insurgents-expended three suicide bombers and precious resources against their supposedly sympathetic civilian Sunni hosts instead of American and Iraqi soldiers and Shia civilians; their usual enemies.

If this indicates anything it indicates that al-Qaeda's is reprioritizing the targets on the hit list. The reason: al-Qaeda is sensing a serious threat in the change of attitude of the tribes toward them and perhaps the apparently successful meeting of the sheiks with Maliki and the agreements that were made then was the point at which open war had to be declared.

The tribes in Anbar are stubborn and they have many ruthless warriors. That's a proven fact and it looks like Al-Qaeda had just made their gravest mistake—their once best friends are just about to become their worst enemy.

Read Iraq the Model here.

But wait, there is still more news applicable to the surge that the NYT is deliberately ignoring. You will find it nowhere in this lead article, nor gracing any other page of this sorry rag. The news is from a poll. I quote from the article below and leave it to you to decide whether any of the information therein is important to ascertaining whether Sunni Militants Disrupt the Plan to Calm Baghdad.

[A]n opinion poll conducted on the eve of the fourth anniversary of the US-led invasion of Iraq has found a striking resilience and optimism among the inhabitants.

The poll, the biggest since coalition troops entered Iraq on March 20, 2003, shows that by a majority of two to one, Iraqis prefer the current leadership to Saddam Hussein’s regime, regardless of the security crisis and a lack of public services.

The survey, published today, also reveals that contrary to the views of many western analysts, most Iraqis do not believe they are embroiled in a civil war.

Officials in Washington and London are likely to be buoyed by the poll conducted by Opinion Research Business (ORB), a respected British market research company that funded its own survey of 5,019 Iraqis over the age of 18.

The 400 interviewers who fanned out across Iraq last month found that the sense of security felt by Baghdad residents had significantly improved since polling carried out before the US announced in January that it was sending in a "surge" of more than 20,000 extra troops.

The poll highlights the impact the sectarian violence has had. Some 26% of Iraqis - 15% of Sunnis and 34% of Shi’ites - have suffered the murder of a family member. Kidnapping has also played a terrifying role: 14% have had a relative, friend or colleague abducted, rising to 33% in Baghdad. Yet 49% of those questioned preferred life under Nouri al-Maliki, the prime minister, to living under Saddam. Only 26% said things had been better in Saddam’s era, while 16% said the two leaders were as bad as each other and the rest did not know or refused to answer.

Not surprisingly, the divisions in Iraqi society were reflected in statistics — Sunnis were more likely to back the previous Ba’athist regime (51%) while the Shi’ites (66%) preferred the Maliki government.. . . .

The poll suggests a significant increase in support for Maliki. A survey conducted by ORB in September last year found that only 29% of Iraqis had a favourable opinion of the prime minister.

Another surprise was that only 27% believed they were caught up in a civil war. Again, that number divided along religious lines, with 41% of Sunnis believing Iraq was in a civil war, compared with only 15% of Shi’ites.

The survey is a rare snapshot of Iraqi opinion because of the difficulty of working in the country, with the exception of Kurdish areas which are run as an essentially autonomous province.
. . . .
This weekend comments from Baghdad residents reflected the poll’s findings. Many said they were starting to feel more secure on the streets, although horrific bombings have continued.

"The Americans have checkpoints and the most important thing is they don’t ask for ID, whether you are Sunni or Shi’ite," said one resident. "There are no more fake checkpoints so you don’t need to be scared.

"The inhabitants of a northern Baghdad district were heartened to see on the concrete blocks protecting an Iraqi army checkpoint the lettering: "Down, down with the militias, we are fighting for the sake of Iraq." It would have been unthinkable just a few weeks ago. Residents said they noted that armed militias were off the streets.

Read the entire article here. Too bad this receives no mention anywhere in today’s New York Times, including in their lead article on the surge.

Bottom line, the New York Times is lying to America. This lead article is beyond spin. It is a scandal redolent of Joe Wilson's omission of fact in his now infamous op-ed.

But, the NYT are not done. In their editorial, The "Army, After Iraq," the NYT makes this assertion:

Exiting Iraq with America’s forces, credibility and regional interests intact is now, understandably, the nation’s most immediate concern. But in the process, crucial lessons need to be absorbed from this unnecessary, horribly botched and now unwinnable war.

That paragraph is the main point for the editorial. The rest is of the editorial is not but window dressing for that paragraph.

Does anyone believe anything other then that the sole lessons the NYT wants us to learn from its reporting this day and its editorial are that the war is lost, the surge has failed, and that evil incompetent republicans should never be elected to office. These jokers are beyond unreal - they are dangerous.

What can we do?

1. Notify the New York Times of your displeasure with their lead article.
(Try not to use the word bulls**t, nor terms like "you sorry m*****f****** c***s******* left wing sh**eating political whores" when expressing your sense of outrage. In other words, do exercise something close to superhuman restraint. We do not want to come off sounding like one of the Kos Kids):

NEWS DEPARTMENT
To send comments and suggestions (about news coverage only) or to report errors that call for correction, e-mail nytnews@nytimes.com or leave a message at 1-888-NYT-NEWS.

The Editors
executive-editor@nytimes.com
managing-editor@nytimes.com


2. If you have a subscription to the New York Times or New York Times Select, cancel it.

3. Make absolutely sure that your elected representatives know what the New York Times has done and ask your representatives to publicly challenge the Times for this abomination. If you are represented by Democrats, tell them too - and make sure that you appeal to their (nonexistent) ethics. Perhaps some of even our elected Democrats might feel a sense of outrage at this latest NYT stunt. At any rate, I recommend contacting our representatives because the worst thing conservatives have done over the past few years is let things like this pass to the public with no shouts of outrage from our elected officials. This by the NYT today is scandalous. It needs to generate nationwide outrage.

Your Senators

Your Representative

Sorry for my rant, folks, but this is too much. The NYT has declared war on the truth. It cannot stand.

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The Democrats' Worst Nightmare

The Democrats are betting the farm on being the anti-war party and forcing a withdrawal from Iraq. Their mantra is that Iraq is in a state of "civil war," the surge has no chance of working, and that American's elected a Democratic majority with a mandate to march in that euphamistic "new direction" directly out of Iraq. In their portrayal of Iraq as being in civil war, they have been aided by an MSM that has painted a picture of civilian chaos and constant attacks by "insurgents."

But time is not on the Democrat's side. The worst nightmare of the Three Democrats - Pelosi, Murtha and Reid (nyuck, nyuck, nyuck) - has to be significant news from Iraq that directly attacks any part of the mantra. And so we have it today.

[A]n opinion poll conducted on the eve of the fourth anniversary of the US-led invasion of Iraq has found a striking resilience and optimism among the inhabitants.

The poll, the biggest since coalition troops entered Iraq on March 20, 2003, shows that by a majority of two to one, Iraqis prefer the current leadership to Saddam Hussein’s regime, regardless of the security crisis and a lack of public services.

The survey, published today, also reveals that contrary to the views of many western analysts, most Iraqis do not believe they are embroiled in a civil war.

Officials in Washington and London are likely to be buoyed by the poll conducted by Opinion Research Business (ORB), a respected British market research company that funded its own survey of 5,019 Iraqis over the age of 18.

Anyone want to bet the Three Democrats are choking on their cornflakes this morning. But I digress.

The 400 interviewers who fanned out across Iraq last month found that the sense of security felt by Baghdad residents had significantly improved since polling carried out before the US announced in January that it was sending in a “surge” of more than 20,000 extra troops.

The poll highlights the impact the sectarian violence has had. Some 26% of Iraqis - 15% of Sunnis and 34% of Shi’ites - have suffered the murder of a family member. Kidnapping has also played a terrifying role: 14% have had a relative, friend or colleague abducted, rising to 33% in Baghdad.

Yet 49% of those questioned preferred life under Nouri al-Maliki, the prime minister, to living under Saddam. Only 26% said things had been better in Saddam’s era, while 16% said the two leaders were as bad as each other and the rest did not know or refused to answer.

Not surprisingly, the divisions in Iraqi society were reflected in statistics — Sunnis were more likely to back the previous Ba’athist regime (51%) while the Shi’ites (66%) preferred the Maliki government.
. . . .
The poll suggests a significant increase in support for Maliki. A survey conducted by ORB in September last year found that only 29% of Iraqis had a favourable opinion of the prime minister.

Another surprise was that only 27% believed they were caught up in a civil war. Again, that number divided along religious lines, with 41% of Sunnis believing Iraq was in a civil war, compared with only 15% of Shi’ites.

The survey is a rare snapshot of Iraqi opinion because of the difficulty of working in the country, with the exception of Kurdish areas which are run as an essentially autonomous province.
Most international organisations have pulled out of Iraq and diplomats are mostly holed-up in the Green Zone. The unexpected degree of optimism may signal a groundswell of hope at signs the American “surge” is starting to take effect.

This weekend comments from Baghdad residents reflected the poll’s findings. Many said they were starting to feel more secure on the streets, although horrific bombings have continued. “The Americans have checkpoints and the most important thing is they don’t ask for ID, whether you are Sunni or Shi’ite,” said one resident. “There are no more fake checkpoints so you don’t need to be scared.”

The inhabitants of a northern Baghdad district were heartened to see on the concrete blocks protecting an Iraqi army checkpoint the lettering: “Down, down with the militias, we are fighting for the sake of Iraq.”

It would have been unthinkable just a few weeks ago. Residents said they noted that armed militias were off the streets.
. . . .
“We’ve been polling in Iraq since 2005 and the finding that most surprised us was how many Iraqis expressed support for the present government,” said Johnny Heald, managing director of ORB. “Given the level of violence in Iraq, it shows an unexpected level of optimism.”

Despite the sectarian divide, 64% of Iraqis still want to see a united Iraq under a central national government.

The Three Democrats best hurry, as it appears that their window of opportunity to snatch a defeat from the jaws of victory just became shorter (imagine your favorite Curly sound of surprised concern here).

Read the whole article.

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