When A=A, You've Solved It

In logic, and I believe algebra, which I had to take over, they call this the principle of identity. A being is what it is. A = A.

A committed jihadist, whatever else he may be, is not a moderate.

Twice in only a few weeks two of America’s bitterest Islamic enemies have rebuffed President Barack Obama’s highly illogical offers to sit down and treat with the "moderate" members of our enemies’ camp.

First there was Obama's offer to make friends with Iran. Ahmadinejad responded with a "not so fast," outlining a few conditions:

Other than "apologizing for the U.S. crimes" against his country "in the past 60 years," Ahmadinejad said the United States should withdraw all its troops from around the world and put them back inside the U.S. borders "to serve their own people."

He insisted the United States should also "stop interfering in other people's affairs," accusing it of having caused wars due to its military presence. He also suggested that advocates of change "must stop supporting the Zionists, outlaws and criminals."

For what it's worth, Democrat "moderates" Jack Murtha, Chas Freeman, and Jimmy Carter all thought these Iranian terms were very balanced and reasonable.

Then President Obama said he would reach out to the Taliban "moderates." That's when the Taliban had to get all Mr. Spock on the President and explain that the word "Taliban" translates into English as "incapable of being moderate":

Taliban say Obama's call on moderates "illogical"
Tue Mar 10,
7:17 am ET

KABUL (Reuters) – Afghanistan's Taliban on Tuesday turned down as illogical U.S. President Barack Obama's bid to reach out to moderate elements of the insurgents, saying the exit of foreign troops was the only solution for ending the war.

Obama, in an interview with the New York Times, expressed an openness to adapting tactics in Afghanistan that had been used in Iraq to reach out to moderate elements there.

"This does not require any response or reaction for this is illogical," Qari Mohammad Yousuf, a purported spokesman for the insurgent group, told Reuters when asked if its top leader Mullah Mohammad Omar would make any comment about Obama's proposal.

"The Taliban are united, have one leader, one aim, one policy...I do not know why they are talking about moderate Taliban and what it means?"

"If it means those who are not fighting and are sitting in their homes, then talking to them is meaningless. This really is surprising the Taliban."

It's not surprising to us. We've been saying this for years. We agree it's illogical. The idea of a moderate Taliban is about as illogical as, well, the idea of a moderate Barack Obama. The idea of negotiating with an opponent whose sine qua non is your subjection or, failing that, your destruction, is not rational.

Mr. President, how about restoring some of that "scientific integrity to government decision making" when it comes to real issues, like defending the nation from her enemies?

No More 'Enemy Combatants'

This decision by the Department of Justice released today outlining a new standard for terrorist detainees is disappointing:

The definition does not rely on the President’s authority as Commander-in-Chief independent of Congress’s specific authorization. It draws on the international laws of war to inform the statutory authority conferred by Congress. It provides that individuals who supported al Qaeda or the Taliban are detainable only if the support was substantial. And it does not employ the phrase “enemy combatant.”

Aside from the needless announcement (in my opinion, as it has nothing to do with the submission to the court) that the phrase “enemy combatant” is a thing of the past, the new definition is more ominous because it marks a President ceding to the Congress, and to the timorous authorities that codify the international laws of war, the independent authority as Commander-in-Chief to decide what to do with captured fighters that every American president has enjoyed since George Washington.

It isn’t in the nature of executives to surrender constitutional power. No matter how benevolent a game they talk prior to election, every president ends up jealously guarding, and expanding where he can, the prerogatives of the executive branch. There’s nothing wrong with it: it was meant by the Founders to be that way. They understood the president would always test the limits of his power and may need to be checked, and they knew that the legislative branch in wartime would dither as usual, just when quick command decisions are imperative.

Our system of government hates a vacuum just as much as nature does. The authority that Obama is surrendering as Commander-in-Chief will immediately be absorbed and expanded upon, somehow, by Congress--which is now under the control of a majority of people who never took the jihadist war we’re defending against seriously. Now that he’s surrendered it in the first few weeks of his first year in the White House, he will never get it back without a horrendous fight.

What I’ve seen of President Obama doesn’t make me believe he’s any less hungry for power than any other President--far from it. Is it possible that he has just shot off one of his own presidential appendages (I won’t speculate which one) out of sheer ideological obtuseness our being in a desperate global war, and not just a persistent cycle of international crime?

It's September 10 for the Taliban in Swat Valley

Reported Friday:

Artists flee Pakistan's Swat valley to escape fanatics' threats

KARACHI (AFP) — Mohammad Shahid scrapes together a living in a city slum by painting birds, flowers, animals and celebrity portraits onto minibuses -- and vows never to return to the horrors of Swat valley.

After pro-Taliban vigilantes beat and threatened him at gunpoint, he swapped the green pastures and sweeping mountains of his birthplace for the concrete jungle of Pakistan's smoggy metropolis of Karachi on the Gulf.

It was heart-breaking to leave the idyll of his youth, he said, but there was no choice.

"I had to come here because there was no other chance for me or my family to survive," said 45-year-old Shahid.

The memories of the terrifying campaign waged by Islamist hardliners to enforce sharia law are still fresh for Shahid, and no fledgling truce between the government and those who chased him out will persuade him to return.

"I'm a painter, an artist. I can't do anything else to earn a living. The Taliban won't allow people like us to do our work, which saw my family suffer.

"What would I do if I return in these conditions? They will remain in control of the region and no one will have freedom to work at will."

The one-time ski resort became a battlefield. Rotar blades from helicopter gunships sliced through the once-clear skies. Warplanes roared overhead.

Anything deemed "un-Islamic" was banned. Opponents were beheaded, more than 120 girls' schools were bombed, entertainment was outlawed.

Shahid said he used to make a good living painting landscapes, birds, Pakistani and Indian film stars, pavement caricatures and portraits, which were popular with tourists who flocked to the once-friendly and tolerant valley.

But then the fanatics came, the tourists left and life changed for those who made a living from the arts.

Suspected Taliban militants kidnapped and murdered a dancer, Shabana, who ignored warnings to quit her profession. Her bullet-riddled body was dumped on the main roundabout of Green Chowk in the main town of Mingora last December.

One after another, artists, dancers and singers renounced their profession or fled to more liberal cities such as Karachi, Lahore or Islamabad.

One day, Shahid said, gun-toting vigilantes walked into his studio.

"They beat and insulted me for doing something that they said was forbidden by religion," Shahid said.

"'From now on, don't paint creatures'," Shahid quoted one of them as saying, "'otherwise you'll suffer an unprecedented punishment'."

Shahid rang his brother, a construction worker in Karachi.

"He asked me to leave immediately. I took my wife and four children, caught a bus from Mingora and came here."

He rented a place in Karachi's western Baldia Colony slum, found a job painting trucks and buses, and put his children in school.

Shahid said the humidity and pollution of Karachi frequently make his children ill, but he insists he will never again put himself at the mercy of the "unpredictable" Islamists in Swat -- where the government has agreed to enforce sharia, or religious, law.

"One's life will still be in danger no matter what guarantee they give," Shahid said. "I don't want to disturb my daughter's studies. She's in school here. The militants could reverse their pledge any moment."

The United States, which puts South Asia on the frontline of the "war on terror," has branded extremists who make their base in northwest Pakistan a direct threat to the country, to neighbouring Afghanistan, and to the security of the US and other nations.

Yet the net of Islamist extremism is spreading across the northwest, where Taliban and Al-Qaeda extremists have infiltrated the border with Afghanistan to create de facto fiefdoms in semi-autonomous tribal areas.

US drones have rained dozens of missiles on areas they believe to be extremist strongholds, and Pakistan's military has spent months fighting the Taliban.

Even in Peshawar, the bustling northwestern trading city close to the Afghan border, artists have come under threat from the extremists.

Nishtar Hall, the only theatre in Peshawar, has been closed for six years.

Militants kidnapped Alam Zeb Mujahid, a famous Pashto comedian, from the upscale Hayatabad neighbourhood in January, held him for five days and let him go only after he renounced all drama and film work.

Haroon Bacha, a renowned Pashto singer, left the northwestern town of Swabi for the United States when militants demanded he stop singing.

"I started getting threats from the Taliban about a year ago. I was told to stop singing. There were letters, there were phone calls and there were text messages," he wrote to AFP in an email message from Washington.

"They used to come to my home very frequently, telling me to stop music or I would be killed."

CD and music shops, Internet cafes and barbers who shave beards -- all have been targeted and many shut down. Some of those brave enough to stay open have hired private security.

And for many of those who have left, the bombings and beheadings stay with them.

"My little children still scream when they see planes flying. Children run for shelter in Swat when they see planes or helicopters," says Hashim Khan, a 37-year-old labourer who lives near Karachi airport.

"They saw planes bombing in Swat. It still haunts their dreams. I saw bodies lying near Green Chowk, the roundabout where Shabana was dumped.

"The area once symbolised our city's beauty but now it has become 'khooni' (bloody) Chowk," he said.

Bush Doctrine Shows Up in Pakistan

Here is a hopeful piece of news from Pakistan, where things haven’t been going so well for the good guys lately.

It seems that Al Qaeda, (though the McLatchy article refuses to call them by that name), and their Taliban pals, have been making new enemies among the Pakistani tribes who’ve been providing them safe haven in their region since 2001. The situation sounds very similar to the situation in Iraq when Al Qaeda brutalityconvinced local Sunni leaders in Anbar that AQI had to be driven out.

In northwest Pakistan, the elders of tribal elders got together and decided to raise their own armed defense force. Of note: “Among the decisions was that anyone sheltering Taliban in the area would be severely punished.”

You’d almost think they’d been studying up on the “Bush doctrine” circa 2001.

Pakistani tribes take on militants

With little faith in government, they defend themselves

BY SAEED SHAHMCCLATCHY NEWSPAPERS

WARI, Pakistan -- A popular resistance movement is emerging in Pakistan's North West Frontier Province to challenge Islamic extremists, who exercise control over whole districts and maintain a stranglehold over the local population.

The movement in both the province and the lawless tribal territory bordering Afghanistan relies on fierce tribal customs and widespread ownership of guns in the northwest of the country to raise traditional private armies, known as a lashkar, each with the strength of hundreds or several thousand volunteers.

The movement arose after local tribal leaders decided that the government can't or won't come to their aid as a radical, outside form of Islam seeks to impose itself on them down the barrel of an assault rifle.

There are parallels with the so-called Sunni Awakening in Iraq, in which tribesmen took on Al Qaeda militants in Anbar province and elsewhere. While the movement is in only a few pockets so far in northwest Pakistan, its existence could mark a turning point in Pakistan's battle with violent extremism.

'The people versus the Taliban'

"There's going to be a civil war. These lashkars are spreading," said Asfandyar Wali Khan, leader of the Awami National Party, which controls the provincial government in NWFP. "It will be the people versus the Taliban."

Dir -- a long, narrow valley in the province -- is sandwiched between Taliban strongholds in Bajaur and Afghanistan to the west and more militants in the valley of Swat to its east.

This month, about 200 elders from the Payandakhel tribe met in Wari, a small town in the north of the region. In the dusty front yard of a high school, they held a traditional tribal meeting, or jirga, and made rousing speeches that resulted in a resolution to assemble their own lashkar. Among the decisions was that anyone sheltering Taliban in the area would be severely punished.

"The government forces cannot even save themselves -- what good will they be to us? They are just silent spectators," Malik Zarene, a tribal elder, told the crowd. "We will rise for our own defense."

Many of the men at the jirga arrived with machine guns, some dating to the 1980s Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. The meeting was called in response to a scare a few days earlier, when members of the Taliban tried to seize a local school and take 300 children hostage. Without waiting for the authorities to act, tribesmen successfully tackled the assailants.

In Dir, the local tribes have demanded that the federal army not deploy, to which it has agreed.

"Once the army comes in, these Taliban fire at the army, and the whole thing escalates," said a senior security official in Dir who spoke on condition of anonymity because he isn't authorized to speak to the media. "It is best this is tackled in the traditional way."
###

The Wrong War?

This is something I could have said any time, but I think I’ll say it now after being reminded yet again how the Left repeats that we shouldn’t have fought against Saddam, but only against "the guys who hit us on 9/11."

Taken to its most literal extreme, the guys who hit us on 9/11:

1. All died in the crash, except one, who was arrested and is at Gitmo, where the Left today battles for his release. Ergo, there’s nothing more we can do about guys who hit us on 9/11 except remember 9/11 as a “tragedy” and go back to ignoring Islamic fascism. Except, naturally, for the surviving 20th hijacker, Mohammad al-Qahtani, who should be granted all the due process rights for which our forefathers died, and then released with an apology and US citizenship, and a chair in Middle Eastern Studies at a prestigious American university as reparations for keeping him all this time at Gitmo.

2. 15 of the 19 were Saudis, and none of them Afghanis. The leader, Muhamad Atta, was Egyptian, and the remaining non-Saudis were from UAE and Lebanon. Ergo, we should not have invaded Afghanistan, who, even taking into account their criminal government the Taliban, were not technically “the guys who attacked us on 9/11.” They were only sympathizers, providers of material support, and enablers of terrorists. In other words, they’re no worse than the New York Times, CAIR, or the administrators of Columbia University. Ergo, we should never have attacked Afghanistan. Instead, we should have attacked and deposed the governments of Saudi Arabia, Egypt, UAE, and Lebanon.

Oh, and of Columbia University.

The way I see it, there either were only 20 guys who hit us on 9/11 or, as I sincerely believe is closer to the truth, 20 million guys, or 30 million, or more, scattered across the Islamic world and in the West and praying and plotting daily for a chance to hit us again, and again, and again: Iranians, Afghanis, Saudi, Egyptians, Syrians, Palestinians, Lebanese, and Americans--with names like Hezbollah, Al-Qaeda, Muslim Brotherhood, Islamic Jihad, Hamas, Baathists, and on and on and on.

The attack on America on 9/11 entitled us to establish the best defensive perimeter we could--a line inside which the enemy could not operate--and outside of which we can monitor and respond to the enemy's moves.

Al Qaeda proved to us that that perimeter did not end at our shores. Nor, even as we have seen in Afghanistan, is it limited to the borders of that country. How big should it be? As big as it needs to be. It certainly encompassed Saddam's Iraq.

This thing is still big folks. George W. Bush saw it was big on the first day, though he faced huge political hurdles that kept him from flinging out America's defensive boundaries as far as we needed them to be. And now after 7 years America is tired and wants to wake up again on 9/10/2001, a dangerous situation threatening to shrink our perimeter even more.

But when our perimeter gets smaller, the enemy's perimeter gets bigger.

I want somebody in charge who understands all this.

AP Writer Bullish on Al Qaeda

The Associated Press’s Kathy Gannon has written a rave review of Al Qaeda’s efforts to “go modern” in its recruitment and technology campaign. (“Al Qaeda courting tech-savvy geeks/Flashy productions help in recruiting”):

In the Internet age, Al Qaeda prizes geeks committed to jihad as much as would-be suicide bombers and gunmen.

The terrorist network is recruiting computer-savvy technicians to produce sophisticated Web documentaries and multimedia products aimed at Muslim audiences in the United States, Britain and other Western countries.

Ms. Gannon has been covering Pakistan and Afghanistan since 1988, and presently lives in Pakistan with her husband and daughter. According to her bio, she “was in Kabul when the Taliban regime took power in 1996 and was the only western journalist allowed to return to Kabul by the Taliban, three weeks before their collapse in November 2001.”

Being married to a Pakistani and pals with the Taliban doesn’t make her biased. But in an excerpt from her 2005 book, “I Is for Infidel,” she had this to say:

The West has to own up to the mistakes it has made such as with Abu Ghraib and the torture in Afghan prisons, in the errant attacks on civilians and in its disregard for the basic precept of a civilized legal system, which maintains that an accused person is innocent until proven guilty.

The nature of the torture at Abu Ghraib reflected the West's perception of Muslims, hence the women soldiers who seemed to take such delight in the outrages and the especially humiliating use of dogs - considered abhorrent to Muslims - and the practice of making prisoners perform demeaning sexual acts. The torture was based on a phobic perception of Islam. Had Saddam Hussein's soldiers carried out these abuses on American soldiers, the outrage would have been global and the retribution violent. But because it was American and British soldiers who committed the torture, the blame was attached only to a few, to soldiers we were told were an aberration.

So clearly no bias there.

Still, what really caught my attention in this small AP story in the Detroit Free Press was Ms. Gannon’s gee-whiz coverage of Al Qaeda’s modernizing strategy. Ms. Gannon writes about Al Qaeda’s high-tech call for suicide bombers like a Fortune editor going oogly-googly over a new hot startup with a green product and an uptrending youth share.

The terrorist network is recruiting computer-savvy technicians to produce sophisticated Web documentaries and multimedia products aimed at Muslim audiences in the United States, Britain and other Western countries.

Already, the movement's al-Sahab production company is turning out high-quality material. The documentaries appear regularly on Islamist Web sites, which Al Qaeda uses to recruit followers and rally supporters.

That requires people whose skills go beyond planting bombs and ambushing U.S. patrols in Iraq and Afghanistan.

"The Al Qaeda men who are coming today are not farmers, illiterate people," said Qari Mohammed Yusuf, an Afghan who claims to be an al-Sahab cameraman. "They are PhDs, professors who know about this technology. ... Al Qaeda has asked them to come."

Try an experiment and substitute the phrase, “the auto supplier” or the “software developer” every place Ms. Gannon mentions “Al Qaeda” or “the terrorist network” or “the movement.” She does everything but include quotes from Wall Street money managers geeked on the terrorist video market, or comments from IT grads from Lawrence seriously weighing AQ’s competetive health plan and onsite day-care. You won't see one syllable consciously critical of Al Qaeda’s determined purpose to kill more people than ever. Ms. Gannon's too impressed with how slick and savvy these murderers' production values are getting.

A speech by deputy Al Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahri issued to mark last year's 9/11 anniversary included U.S. television interviews with wounded soldiers, CIA analysts and talking-head journalists and experts, excerpts from a news conference with President George W. Bush, audiotape of Malcolm X and World War II footage -- all edited in to back al-Zawahri's case that the United States is losing the war on terrorism.

Internet use enables Al Qaeda to reach a broad audience within the worldwide Muslim community, rather than having to rely on Arabic-language satellite stations, whose audiences are limited to the Middle East and who exercise editorial control.

"What is really amazing to me is watching how would-be terrorists living in the West are drawn in and captivated by al-Sahab videos," said Evan Kohlmann, a terrorism consultant for Globalterroralert.com.

Gee! Golly! Western marketers can really learn a lesson from the way would-be terrorists are drawn in, captivated, and then launched out on an unsuspecting world to go Allah-BOOOM! Or, as the technicians term it, being de-captivated.

And I'll bet those stupid Americans will try everything in their corrupt national-security toolbox to compete. But Al Qaeda's shrewd managers even cover that.

Al Qaeda technicians have become skilled at evading U.S. detection techniques. Katz said they often use proxy servers to disguise the point of origin. Documentaries are sent in multiple files to improve security.

"The al-Sahab people know and study technology, the latest law enforcement techniques," Katz said.

Yusuf said Al Qaeda maintains its own cyberspace library, storing material in a secret server or servers so al-Sahab members do not have to keep incriminating material on laptops.

"There is a plan to make al-Sahab very big," Yusuf said. "It is part of the strategy. There are two parts. One is the fighting and the other part of the war is the media. We should carry out the media war because it inspires our people to come and fight."

Ms. Gannon’s is a member of the media. And she's doing her part.

Why We Need an Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week

I believe it was Oscar Wilde who said something like, “lots of people think a thing, without thinking it through."

And, by way of example, and just in time for Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week, Detroit’s most prominent columnist, sports writer, and author, Mitch Albom, has decided to raise alarms about the TSA’s failure to spot fake bombs or bomb parts during test screenings. (“This failure should sound the alarms”).

I’m hardly going to minimize the seriousness of the TSA’s failures. I think airport screening should be privatized, but that’s for another post, or someone else’s. Obviously, it’s not acceptable to have this kind of a failure rate.

But it's Albom’s utter failure to see any bigger picture that reveals his own failure—or unwillingness—to think the thing through. And to me his narrow point of view is just as scary as what's got his nose out of joint: that, "six years after the fact, we still have disinterested agents.”

Disinterested agents? How about disengaged commentators?

First off, when it comes to placing the blame for our current high level of national expense, worry, war-making, alerts, inconvenience, and so on, he writes "we can blame ourselves.”

Read for yourselves, and you will see that Albom nowhere places the blame for 9/11, or all the other related things he’s unhappy about, on Islamic terrorism.

Yet where he really goes wrong is when he equates the TSA’s failures to spot test bombs as:

a straight line to the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and that field in Pennsylvania six years ago.

Can you imagine how our lives would be different if those 19 hijackers had been stopped? Think about every security issue you now face in daily life, think about the economic drain on this nation, think about the war, the lives lost, the political hate, and all of it goes back to how those men got on those planes.

So you would think, before throwing hundreds of billions at a conflict in Iraq, the first, the biggest, the most obvious use of money and effort would be at the real ground zero of the Sept. 11 terrorism plan -- the airports.

Except Ground Zero of Islamo-Fascism is not America's airports. It is the Islamic world that has embraced radical jihad. If all of the nineteen hijackers had been caught, and all of 9/11’s victims spared, we would still be facing a hostile Islamic world.

9/11 wasn't hatched by these 19 in the airport, it was hatched by al Qaeda in Afghanistan. And al Qaeda, and its sister radical Islamic terror armies, were hatched in the heart of the umma. Don't blame this on boxcutters. They are only tools in the hands of thinking enemies.

Albom may as well say that if the U.S. Armed Forces had done a better job anticipating the signs of a Japanese surprise attack in December 1941, and thwarted it, all of the trouble of World War II would have been spared.

Of course, America's role in the World War wouldn’t have been over that easily even if we had stopped the attack on Pearl Harbor: there still would have been the menace of Imperial Japan’s expanding war, and Hitler’s depredations in Europe, and both Axis powers having already laid plans that included us--whether we willingly decided to go to war or not.

So sooner or later, with or without Pearl Harbor, we were going to be in it. Our islolation was an illusion. The Axis who started all the fuss weren’t going to stop until enough of us made up our minds to stop them.

Now Albom apparently believes that if 9/11 had been prevented, we could have drawn a big sigh of relief, and then gone right back to what we were doing before without all this bother and waste of time over a so-called war on terrorism. (As I recall, what Democrats were doing on 9/10/2001 was still re-breathing into brown paper bags over the 2000 election in Florida).

Yet I can't imagine how merely preventing 9/11 would have been the end of radical jihad's efforts to kill Americans. And I can't imagine that we would all be safer, more prosperous, and doing fine, if we had stopped this single attack.

Think about this.

Osama bin Ladin would still be running al Qaeda from Afghanistan, and the Taliban would still be ruling in Kabul and Kandahar; Saddam and his sons would still be tormenting Iraq, and revving up his nuclear program, (because there's no way sanctions would have lasted until 2007); the Saudis would have continued with their export of Wahhabism, without benefit of the closer, if imperfect, scrutiny there's been because of 9/11; Iran would still be run by crazy mullahs, and now in an arms race with Iraq; the Syrians would still be occupying Lebanon; the wall of separation between American domestic law enforcement and national security would still be up.

Last but not least, if it weren't for the magnificent response of the coalition since 2001 in Afghanistan and Iraq, and determination to roll up and interfere with terrorism around the world, the last American response to terrorism the Islamists would have had to go by to judge our resolve would have been the weak inaction we showed following the bombing of the USS Cole.

So why does a bright and otherwise thoughful writer like Mitch Albom get it so backwards, figuring that jihadist terrorism didn't bring us 9/11, but it was 9/11 that brought us jihadist terrorism?

I don't know. But if that's what he really thinks, then he needs to go back and think about it again. And this time he needs to think about it all the way through.

Taliban Murders a Victory for South Korea's Missionaries

Precious in the sight of the LORD is the death of his saints.
Psalm 116.15

Second Korean Hostage In Afghanistan Shot Dead
7/30/2007 3:11:39 PM

Taliban militants have killed a second South Korean from a group of 23 held hostage in south Afghanistan on Monday. A spokesman for the militants has said that they have shot dead the Christian missionary because the Afghan authorities did not listen to their demands. It is reported that the Taliban will kill more hostages if Kabul ignores their demand to release rebel prisoners, but the militants gave no new deadline.With this, the number of Koreans killed by the hijackers since they have captured 23 Koreans 12 days ago from a bus in Ghazni province to the southwest of Kabul has increased to two. The militants killed the leader of the group on Wednesday after an earlier deadline passed. The office of the governor of Ghazni and local police have confirmed the killing. The identity of the victim has not been disclosed, except that it is a male. The rebels had threatened to start killing the South Korean hostages if their demand for releasing militants from prison was not met within the deadline. The capturers have extended the deadline seven times since the Christian missionaries including women were abducted.Earlier on Monday, Afghan governor Waheedullah Mujadadi had pleaded with the militants to give more time for negotiations.

The quiet story of the South Korean Christian missionaries being murdered one by one by a Taliban gang in Pakistan is not attracting very much attention. It’s easy to miss the story among the growing pile of reports of battles large and small being fought by Islam against the rest of the world on cultural, political, and military fronts.

It needs to be kept in mind, though, that in spite of what our political leaders have to say, (out of deference, really, to the limits of our secular democracies to wage wars of religion), this struggle with Islam is first and foremost a religious war. The Taliban murdered the missionaries mainly because they are Christians, and secondarily to terrify South Korea into squelching its generous evangelistic impulse to keep sending missionaries to Taliban-land in Pakistan and Afghanistan.

This latter tactic seems to be having at least some success: in South Korea there have been angry outburst directed at the missionaries, for being foolish enough to “to go to Afghanistan and preach about the Christian God," (“South Koreans question Afghan aid mission”).

Not that all all South Koreans are critical. One Christian says that, in spite of the critics, “Some Korean Christians think it's a good thing to go to Afghanistan and die trying to proselytize on behalf of their religion."

That's die trying to proselytize, notice, not kill.

I understand that South Korea is second only to the USA in the number of missionaries they send abroad. Seeing Christian missionaries murdered this way, by the worst examples of the worst and most demonic perversion of monotheistic religion, is painful. But I can’t believe any Christian martyrdom is ever a tragedy, when each martyr's death is always a victory in the larger, and often unrecognized, spiritual battle that rages.

As the Korean Christian pointed out, some Christians think it’s a “good idea,” to die trying to proselytize. While I’ve never personally known a Christian martyr (now Christians with martyr complexes, that's another story), but I’m sure risking life never seems like a good idea to the martyrs’ survivors. Those left behind regret that more caution would have spared their loved one’s life. History records that the Judean Christians warned St. Paul that if he returned to Jerusalem it would surely lead to his death, and even St. Peter tried to prevent Jesus from his mission in Jerusalem, but to no avail.

Here's a thought: Do you remember Ann Coulter’s famous suggestion after 9/11 that our best response to Islamism would be to "invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity"? ("Journalism: Where even the men are women").

The model she had in mind, by the way, was not the made-up myth of the Crusades, but the much more recent American policy in the Far East after World War II and the Korean War:

“this is…what America [did] after World War II, after the Korean War. MacArthur put out a call for Christian missionaries to come, and missionaries poured into Japan. They poured into Korea. It didn't work as well, the conversion in Japan, but it certainly did in Korea."

Now, while the armies of civiliazation struggle against flesh-and-blood Islamic adversaries in Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere, South Koreans are alongside anxious to wagethe genuine spiritual warfare by sending Ambassadors for Christ into some of the most malevolently anti-Christian corners of the planet.

Ann Coulter made a great point, as usual. It seems to me McArthur's timing couldn't have been better.