Press & Guide, ADC Merger in the Works

Hello, Dearborn.

Your hometown newspaper, the Dearborn Press & Guide, is continuing its policy of publishing as “news” stories unedited articles written by Muslim advocacy organizations, such as the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC).

One such story, “DHS incident management team discusses UK terror incidents,” ran in Sunday’s online edition of the Press & Guide. Go to the ADC website and you'll see it is all but identical to the “ADC News” piece posted over there.

The article discusses a July 1 conference call between the ADC and the Departments of Homeland Security, State, Treasury, and Health and Human Services officials, initiated in response to the London and Glasgow bombing attempts of just 2 days earlier. The article says that ADC is an active member of the DHS’s “Incident Management Team,” created after 9/11 to develop “best practices that will combat extremism and radicalization while protecting civil rights and civil liberties.”

But the purpose of the call was not to offer community assistance to DHS in combating extremism and Islamic radiclaization here in the US. Instead, the ADC wanted to mau-mau the feds and the press into self-censoring the blazingly obvious fact that the failed UK suicide attacks were perpetrated by Muslim extremists engaging in a religiously motivated act of jihad. According to the piece:

“ADC emphasized the need for continued dialog and cooperation with law enforcement and other government agencies in order to combat negative misconceptions and the stereotyping of entire communities based on the actions of a few individuals.”

The ADC also “issued a reminder to members of the media to be mindful of using terminology that would associate these terrorist incidents with any specific religion as a whole or any particular ethnic or racial communities. Rather, as the officials clearly indicated, these are the deplorable actions of extremist individuals.”

You can see for yourself the Press & Guide didn't need any reminder. They've been on board for ever so long.

And tragically, the feds at least say they're willing to go along with denying that black is black. “The federal officials assured ADC and the other organizations that there is no evidence suggesting the terrorist incidents in the UK have any relation to the United States. The officials also stated that these incidents are not and should not be reflective of any specific religion or communities and should not be taken as such by members of the media or the general population.”

The UK’s willingness to deny that Muslim religious extremism, violence, and plots in that country were associated with Islam helped create the very environment that incubated the London and Glasgow bombers, and hundreds, if not thousands more, like them. This will not be the last such attack against Britain.

The ADC is clearly pressing for the same insane policy here. Obviously, the purpose of the Incident Management Team is not to be a "bridge" between the Arab American community and DHS to more effectively head off jihadist attacks in America. Its only mission is to enforce against US media and law enforcement the same policies of censorship and denial of connections between terrorist activity and Islam that have once again proved so disastrous in the UK.

Nowhere does this article describe even one example of practical cooperation the ADC plans to offer the government in actually combating radical Muslim extremism in the American Arab community.

Rather, even while the debris from the UK plots is still being swept up--and the FBI itself has reported that “two of the people detained for the bungled car bombings had sought work in the United States,” (“U.K. readies charges against bomb suspect’)--the "Incident Management Team" is reviewing with the Muslim community a laundry list of social service initiatives and promises not to imperil “civil liberties.” The bullet points include proposed conferences with “community leaders to understand the thoughts and hopes of young people from these communities,” and describe extorted pledges from the feds to “continue to be active in prosecuting hate crimes, acts of employment discrimination, and upholding the free exercise of religion by all communities.”

I remind local Dearborn readers that actionable cases of local hate crimes against Muslims are almost non-existent, (and usually involve nothing more menacing than graffiti or vandalism), and instances of denials of free exercise of religion to Muslims pending in local courts are still stuck at 0. The myth of anti-Muslim hate crimes is one of the most often referenced, and seldom concretized, social problems faced in the metro area.

The problem we're all facing is not that mosques are being shut down by government officials. It's that radical Muslims are being nurtured, funded, and sent out from within Muslim communities to do harm, and the larger community is not allowed to talk about it out loud.

So how has an attempt at mass murder by Muslims against women and kids in the UK turned into a Department of Homeland Security initiative to accept blame for phantom civil rights violations against American Arabs?

Are dirty looks at veiled women the only kinds of incidents the DHS "Incident Management Team" was created to fight?

Wasn't the DHS's mission to protect all Americans from terrorism?

And Dearborn, aren't you just so proud of your hometown newspaper?

Brown Starts Off on the Wrong Foot--Or Is That the Right Knee?

I'm missing Tony Blair already.

In what has to be the absolute worst way to deal with the terrorist attacks in London and Glasgow, Britan’s brand-new Prime Minister Gordon Brown “has banned ministers from using the word “Muslim” in ­connection with the terrorism crisis.”

According to the Daily Express, (“BROWN: DON'T SAY TERRORISTS ARE MUSLIMS”),

“The Prime Minister has also instructed his team – including new Home Secretary Jacqui Smith – that the phrase 'war on ­terror' is to be dropped.

“The shake-up is part of a fresh attempt to improve community relations and avoid offending Muslims, adopting a more 'consensual' tone than existed under Tony Blair…..Mr Brown’s spokesman acknowledged yesterday that ministers had been given specific guidelines to avoid inflammatory language.

“'There is clearly a need to strike a consensual tone in relation to all communities across the UK,' the spokesman said. 'It is important that the country remains united.'"

Remain united? Doesn't that assume the country's Muslim and nonMuslim populations are already united, are integrating well, which is in serious doubt.

Brown’s spokesman also “confirmed that the phrase ‘war on terror’ – strongly associated with Mr Blair and US President George Bush – has been dropped.

"Officials insist that no direct links with Muslim extremists have been publicly confirmed by police investigating the latest attempted terror attacks. Mr Brown himself did not refer to Muslims or Islam once in a BBC TV interview on Sunday.”

Maybe not, but Brown already said elsewhere on Sunday that “the nature of the threat that we are dealing with is Al Qaeda and people who are related to Al Qaeda.” (“Doctor Arrested in Australia in Failed Car Bombings”).

We can still say that Al Qaeda is an Islamic terror organization, right?

Then there are the names of the arrested individuals known so far: Bilal Abdullah, Khalid Ahmed, Sabeel Ahmed, Muhammad Haneef, Mohammed Jamil Abdelqader Asha, and Asha’s wife, (whom the Daily Mail describes as “burka-wearing”).

Khalil Ahmed, one of the men in the Glasgow attack, set himself on fire after the crash, and was shouting “Allah, Allah,” as he was being detained.

A former member of a radical Islamic group who knew another of the suspects from there, Bilal Abdullah, said Abdullah had once “berated a Muslim roommate for not being devout enough, showing him a beheading video and warning this could happen to him. He also said he had a number of videos of al-Qaida's former leader in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who was killed by a U.S. airstrike last year.”

In an incomprehensible contradiction Brown vowed the British people will never yield to terrorism, and he “used an interview with the BBC's Sunday AM to tell Al Qaeda: 'The message that's got to come from the British people is that as one we will not yield, we will not be intimidated.

"And we will not allow anyone to undermine our British way of life."

Well, Mr. Brown, is it Al Qaeda and Islamic terrorism you are defying, or some other terrorist movement unrelated to Muslims?

This just isn't making sense. Amir Taheri comments in the New York Post (“’Islamophobia’ Idiocy”):

“Prime Minister Gordon Brown keeps repeating that the attacks have nothing to do with Islam - but, at the same time, keeps inviting ‘Muslim community leaders’ to Downing Street to discuss how to prevent attacks. If the attacks have nothing to do with Islam, why invite Muslim ‘leaders’ rather than Buddhist monks?”

Had the perpetrators of these bombings remained even temporarily unknown to investigators, it might have been at least imaginable for Brown and his government to take a position that prematurely blaming it on Muslims would be unfair.

But given that Brown himself immediately described this as an Al Qaeda attack, that two of the key suspects are named after Mohammed, that one was arrested in her burka, that one attempted self-immolation while calling on Allah, and that British security has all but admitted the suspects were known from terror watch lists tracking Muslim radicals, then the only possible reason for Brown banning references to Muslim terrorism is naked appeasement.

Which never works.

Watch and see if the pattern that emerged after the first London Tube bombings two years ago, as described by Melanie Phillips in her book, Londonistan, repeats itself:

"Instead of gaining a clear-eyed understanding of the ideology that so threatens it, Britain has thus been subverted by it. Instead of fighting this ideology with all the power at its command, Britain makes excuses for it, seeks to appease it--and even turns the blame that should be heaped on it on itself instead. After the [July 2005] London bombings, the main concern of the media and intelligentsia was to avoid ‘Islamophobia,’ the thought-crime that seeks to surpass legitimate criticism of Islam and demonize those who would tell the truth about Islamist aggression. Consequently, Muslim denial of any religious responsibility for the bombings was echoed and reinforced by government ministers and commentators, who sought to explain the Islamist terror in their midst by blaming, on the one hand, a few ‘unrepresentative’ extremists preachers and, on the other, Muslim poverty and discrimination--even though the bombers came from middle-class homes and had been to university."

In this case, because it is impossible to hide that the London and Glasgow terrorists were medical doctors and, undeniably, not impoverished victims of oppression or war, offical denial must come by way of an all-encompassing blanket form. No connection with Muslims here!

This is a very bad sign for the war against jihad in the UK.

No Surprises Here

Raise your hand if, when you first heard about the abortive car bombing in London, or the follow-up attack near Glasgow, you immediately assumed the attackers were IRA terrorists.

Anyone? Me, neither. None of us thinks that way any more.

Which is strange, because just a few short years ago every bomb that went off in the UK had an Irishman’s fingerprints on it.

Not any more.

Nor are we the least bit surprised at reports that the attacks were almost certainly conducted by Al Qaeda in Great Britain. (“Britain Arrests Two More in Car Bomb Plot”).

We may not know which particular Islamist group is behind a given attack like these in the UK, or in Baghdad, Beirut, Turkey, Indonesia, Somalia, Thailand, Israel, or any of the other dozens of places identified in the 24/7 crawl on whatever news channel you watch. But we know that angry Muslims are behind them. We don’t even think about it any more.

Now raise your hand if you think increased scrutiny of Islamic organizations in the United States is unreasonable.

I say unreasonable, because reasonableness is the limit beyond which searches and seizures must not go under the Fourth Amendment. But if they are reasonable, they are Constitutional, or at least constitutionally defensible.

Or are we still forbidden to connect the dots?