42% of Americans Think 58% of Americans Need to Pay More Attention

Have you been noticing lately you hear fewer and fewer media accusations about America’s widespread Islamophobia? I think that must be part of the reason CAIR-MI is reduced to junk hijab lawsuits to help create some ruckus.

Today’s Detroit News had an article reporting a Pew survey that shows “Americans” having “more favorable views about Muslims” since 9/11, while at the same time we also “believe Muslims in the United States face more discrimination than any other major religious group.” (“Poll: 58% believe Muslims face discrimination”).

The only group that gets treatedworse, in the opinions of those surveyed, are homosexuals, “with almost two-thirds of Americans saying homosexuals are discriminated against a lot.”

I’d say CAIR has some work to do if they want Muslims to be Number One Victim. Here’s a brainstorm. How about a Triangle-CAIR coalition? Man, those guys would be the Victims from Hell.

This Pew survey doesn’t measure objective facts, just what Americans perceive. And what many Americans perceive, especially Americans who rely on sound bites and/or reports of sound bites from friends and family, is what the media repeats most often.

For instance, for five straight years the media, led by the New York Times, repeated day in and day out that the detention camp at Gitmo was a combination Stalinist gulag and Hitler death camp. Then after five years surveys showed the American people had a negative perception of Gitmo. Now where do you suppose they got that idea?

Then there’s the Duke “rape” case. Valerie Plame. Katrina. Millions of my fellow Americans, God bless their souls, still think that the Democrats freed the slaves and America fought a war in the 1940s to free the world from the Republican Party.

This blog has had to respond to repeated news articles that led off with unsubstantiated declarations, reported as historical truth, that there was a post-9/11 “surge of hate crimes”, violence, discrimination and “profiling” against American Muslims, who as likely as not would be kidnapped and renditioned into the Bush gulag as make it to work on any given morning.

Dawud Walid, leader of Michigan CAIR, stated simply, repeatedly, and falsely: “Our community has been under siege since 9/11.”

In January 2008, I wrote:

How prosaic and ineffective it feels to write, simply, that there is no “siege” against the Arab community in Dearborn, not since 9/11, nor ever. The very suggestion is an insult to every resident of the area, Arab, Muslim, or non-Muslim.

If you don’t agree, don’t bother calling me names if you aren’t going to show up with facts to the contrary.

Since 9/11 Americans have been told two things about Islam more or less without letup in the news, in popular shows, and by their lesser informed spiritual leaders: 1) that Islam is a religion of peace being “hijacked” by a teeny-tiny, itsy-bitsy few hundred guys called “terrorists” and 2) that Muslims face a hailstorm of hate crimes every time they leave their houses.

Then we get a guy elected to be President who was saying during his campaign speeches things like, "If there is an Arab American family being rounded up without benefit of an attorney, it threatens my civil liberties."

So why would it be surprising that after eight years of hearing this Americans have a more favorable view of Muslims (they’re peaceful!), and believe they face a lot of discrimination (they’re under siege)? And on top of which, thanks to George W. Bush, we haven’t had a repeat of 9/11, and have been allowed to forget about Mohamed Atta and Osama bin Ladin, and all that unpleasant stuff about jihad?

Not surprising, the media has been reporting since as far back as the early 1980s that homosexuals, (statistically among the highest-paid, best-educated, and best-postured (males, anyway) people in the country), have been suffering unceasing discrimination, hate, and “intolerance.”

Hollywood has been forcing harmless gay characters on us since Billy Crystal was in “Soap,” all the while telling us that the only thing Bubba and his NRA buddies would rather be doing than shooting Bambi is beating the brains out of some guy in a turtleneck with a ball bat. Is it any wonder Americans “perceive” that homosexuals are even worse sufferers of discrimination than Muslims? Look at the head start they've had! (Oh, it makes me so mad I could just spit!)

Dawud Walid’s response to the survey, (or maybe it's just his automatic response to being approached by a reporter), was to say, “Discrimination towards Muslims has steadily increased according to our own study. It seems Islam-phobia has drastically increased.”

That really isn't what the survey said, but then, Dawud's always saying shit like that.

It’s a living, I guess.

Another Democrat Defends Bush

Speaking of malign comments about the Bush administration, one Democrat, and former Gore 2000, Kerry 2004 supporter, Jeffrey Scott Shapiro, wrote a powerful piece that ran Election Day in the Wall Street Journal about the disgraceful mistreatment of the man who is, still, our President. Shapiro was in New York City on 9/11, and though he disliked Bush until then, found himself “inspired” by the President’s actions that day and thereafter.

The treatment President Bush has received from this country is nothing less than a disgrace. The attacks launched against him have been cruel and slanderous, proving to the world what little character and resolve we have. The president is not to blame for all these problems. He never lost faith in America or her people, and has tried his hardest to continue leading our nation during a very difficult time.

Our failure to stand by the one person who continued to stand by us has not gone unnoticed by our enemies. It has shown to the world how disloyal we can be when our president needed loyalty -- a shameful display of arrogance and weakness that will haunt this nation long after Mr. Bush has left the White House.

Read the rest of Shapiro’s article here.

'Bush 7, Terrorists 0'

Bush 7, Terrorists 0

Ann Coulter
Wednesday, September 10, 2008

Morose that there hasn't been another terrorist attack on American soil for seven long years, liberals were ecstatic when Hurricane Gustav was headed toward New Orleans during the Republican National Convention last week. The networks gave the hurricane plenty of breaking-news coverage -- but unfortunately it was Hurricane Katrina from 2005 they were covering.
On Keith Olbermann's Aug. 29 show on MSNBC, Michael Moore said the possibility of a Category 3 hurricane hitting the United States "is proof that there is a God in heaven." Olbermann responded: "A supremely good point."

Actually, Olbermann said that a few minutes later to some other idiotic point Moore had made, but that's how Moore would have edited the interview for one of his "documentaries," so I will, too. I would only add that Michael Moore's morbid obesity is proof that there is a Buddha.
Hurricane Gustav came and went without a hitch. What a difference a Republican governor makes!

As many have pointed out, the reason elected officials tend to neglect infrastructure projects, like reinforcing levees in New Orleans and bridges in Minneapolis, is that there's no glory when a bridge doesn't collapse. There are no round-the-clock news specials when the levees hold. You can't even name an overpass retrofitting project after yourself -- it just looks too silly. But everyone's taxes go up to pay for the reinforcements.

Preventing another terrorist attack is like that. There is no media coverage when another 9/11 doesn't happen. We can thank God that President George Bush didn't care about doing the safe thing for himself; he cared about keeping Americans safe. And he has, for seven years.

If Bush's only concern were about his approval ratings, like a certain impeached president I could name, he would not have fought for the Patriot Act and the war in Iraq. He would not have resisted the howling ninnies demanding that we withdraw from Iraq, year after year. By liberals' own standard, Bush's war on terrorism has been a smashing, unimaginable success.

A year after the 9/11 attack, The New York Times' Frank Rich was carping about Bush's national security plans, saying we could judge Bush's war on terror by whether there was a major al-Qaida attack in 2003, which -- according to Rich -- would have been on al-Qaida's normal schedule.

Rich wrote: "Since major al-Qaida attacks are planned well in advance and have historically been separated by intervals of 12 to 24 months, we will find out how much we've been distracted soon enough." ("Never Forget What?" New York Times, Sept. 14, 2002.)

There wasn't a major al-Qaida attack in 2003. Nor in 2004, 2005, 2006 or 2007. Manifestly, liberals thought there would be: They announced a standard of success that they expected Bush to fail.

As Bush has said, we have to be right 100 percent of the time, the terrorists only have to be right one time. Bush has been right 100 percent of the time for seven years -- so much so that Americans have completely forgotten about the threat of Islamic terrorism.

For his thanks, President Bush has been the target of almost unimaginable calumnies -- the sort of invective liberals usually reserve for seniors who don't separate their recyclables properly. Compared to liberals' anger at Bush, there has always been something vaguely impersonal about their "anger" toward the terrorists.

By my count, roughly one in four books in print in the world at this very moment have the words "Bush" and "Lie" in their title. Barnes & Noble has been forced to add an "I Hate Bush" section. I don't believe there are as many anti-Hitler books.

Despite the fact that Hitler brought "change," promoted clean, energy-efficient mass transit by making the trains run on time, supported abortion for the non-master races, vastly expanded the power of the national government and was uniformly adored by college students and their professors, I gather that liberals don't like Hitler because they're constantly comparing him to Bush.

The ferocity of the left's attacks on Bush even scared many of his conservative allies into turning on him over the war in Iraq.

George Bush is Gary Cooper in the classic western "High Noon." The sheriff is about to leave office when a marauding gang is coming to town. He could leave, but he waits to face the killers as all his friends and all the townspeople, who supported him during his years of keeping them safe, slowly abandon him. In the end, he walks alone to meet the killers, because someone has to.
That's Bush. Name one other person in Washington who would be willing to stand alone if he had to, because someone had to.

OK, there is one, but she's not in Washington yet. Appropriately, at the end of "High Noon," Cooper is surrounded by the last two highwaymen when, suddenly, his wife (Grace Kelly) appears out of nowhere and blows away one of the killers! The aging sheriff is saved by a beautiful, gun-toting woman.

There Is a War

There is a war between the ones who say there is a war
and the ones who say there isn't.
Why don't you come on back to the war?

--Leonard Cohen, “There Is a War”

As I see it, the greatest danger we face is not from the jihadists at all.

It’s not from the Iranian nuclear program, the al Qaeda cells festering here and abroad, the madrassas, the Arab language programs disseminating Wahhabism, the weak press, the appeasing politicians, the treacherous foreign ministries, the insane imams, the hobbled intelligence agencies, and most certainly not the thoughtless, feckless anti-Americanism of the radical Left.

The danger is all those millions of us who don’t believe there even is a war.

I say again, I’m not talking about the danger of CAIR or the other open apologists for jihad, nor the bitterly anti-American leftists, nor about the silly, spoiled, self-hating anarchists who’ve been the public face--and most useful idiots--of our jihadist enemies. We know they long for this country’s defeat, for whatever reasons, or lack of reasons, and in that war they've willingly chosen to side with our enemies.

But the real struggle we’re in right now is to wake up to the reality that we are in a war. As certain as most of our readers and I believe that we’re in a war, many of our countrymen are convinced that we are not.

And if we aren’t in a war, then doesn’t that make so much of what we’re trying to do in Iraq and in Afghanistan, with Iran and Syria, in the NSA and with the Patriot Act and Guantanamo Bay seem like so much unnecessary loss of life and cruelty?

Recently, Herbert E. Meyer at American Thinker had this to say about what’s been going on:

The 9-11 attacks did more than start a war; they started a war about the war. No sooner had the World Trade towers collapsed and the Pentagon burst into flames than two perceptions of the threat began competing for the public's support:

What he calls “Perception One,” that “we’re at war,” and “Perception Two,” that “we’re reaping what we’ve sowed” through our own unjust policies, which provoke occasional acts of violence against us by our many frustrated victims around the world. (“The War About the War”).

The problem with the two perceptions is that they can’t communicate with each other.

As Meyer explains:

There is no middle ground between these two perceptions….Either we're at war, or we've entered a period of history in which the level of violence has risen to an unacceptable level. If we're at war, we're in a military conflict that will end with either our victory or our defeat. If we're in an era of unacceptable violence stemming from our values and our policies, we are faced with a difficult but manageable political problem.

Meyer goes on to explain what many of us already know: in the war about the war, the holders of “Perception Two are pulling ahead”:

Here in the US, virtually every poll shows that a majority of Americans want us ‘out of Iraq’ sooner rather than later, and regardless of what's actually happening on the ground in that country. Support for taking on Iran - that is, for separating the Mullahs from the nukes through either a military strike or by helping Iranians to overthrow them from within - is too low even to measure. There isn't one candidate for president in either party who's campaigning on a theme of ‘let's fight harder and win this thing whatever it takes.’ Indeed, the most hawkish position is merely to stay the course a while longer to give the current ‘surge’ in Iraq a fair chance. Moreover, just chat with friends and neighbors - at barbeques, at the barbershop, over a cup of coffee - and you'll be hard-pressed to find a solid minority, let alone a majority, in favor of fighting-to-win.

However it's phrased, just about everyone is looking for a way out short of victory.

That’s what makes this such a dangerous time. The jihadists who are making war on us have absolutely no doubts that they’re in a war. And they’re fighting their war to win.

So when they begin to lose battles they shore up their defenses and call for more soldiers, money, and bombs. I doubt you’ll find an editorial anywhere in the Islamic press calling for al Qaeda to get out of Iraq because of their failed strategy.

I myself can’t credit the average American who discounts the war on terror as just a “so-called” thing with bad faith: look at what he’s been told by the popular press, and for how long he’s been told it. Our national ADD works against us here, too. 9/11 got our attention--but immediately the clock on that started ticking, and within 3 months the Democrats were right back to challenging the legitimacy of the 2000 election, and saying we deserved the hatred of the terrorists.

So are the Left and the Democrats all acting in bad faith, or are they just stupid?

I don’t know, but I’m inclined to believe the latter. To me it’s telling that since 9/11, with the exception of Senator Lieberman, the Democrats have consistently been incapable of identifying the focus of this war, or the scope of radical Islam, always reducing their idea of the “real” war on terror to catching bin Laden, or only fighting al Qaeda (just not al Qaeda in Iraq), or only fighting the “root causes” that force desperate, impoverished Arab males who can find no other meaning in a world than to become suicide bombers. They really just do not get this.

But our enemies are well aware of the war we’re having about whether there is a war, and they’re doing their best to keep those who don’t know there’s a war firmly stuck in that delusion.

The primary goal of CAIR, the ADC, and the other Islamic public advocacy groups defending jihad is not to plant IEDs in Peoria or Minneapolis, or to fire Kassam rockets into West Dearborn. It's to rush out after every media report of jihadist conspiracy or violence denying vehemently that the perpetrators’ actions had anything to do with Islam. There is no war! Islam is peace! Anyone who tells you that Islamic radicals are more than a tiny marginal group of hijackers of our religion is an Islamophobic bigot and a right-wing warmonger!

Now, Americans under the age of 67 happen to be hard-wired to no tolerance for being called any name ending in either -phobe or -ist. And where people believe it’s discretionary whether or not to see themselves as living in a time of war, or not, it’s only natural that so many opt out of war-thinking, especially if it’s a long and discouraging war. What was psychologically inescapable on 9/11 had become, by 11/11 or 12/11/2001, (like so many other American things), merely a matter of personal choice.

When Leonard Cohen wrote his song, “There Is a War,” he was exploring, I have always believed, the fundamental and pretty much unavoidable conflicts of fallen mankind: the wars between the man and the woman, the black and white, the left and right, the odds and the evens.

But it’s no peace song, it’s no antiwar anthem, which is why I love it. He gets his share of peaceniks applauding at all the wrong places when he performs, but I think Leonard sees farther than that. There is a war, he says. And so the only way forward is to fight it, not flee it, and not to pretend it isn't there. So why don’t you come on back to this war?

Running deep within the Christian imagery upon which Leonard Cohen heavily relies is the Pauline concept of spiritual warfare, of a soul battle in which every believer is engaged, not against flesh and blood, but against principalities and powers and the world rulers of this present darkness. The irreducible strategy of prevailing in this war is not necessarily to win it, but often just "to stand," and never, ever to be lulled into the foggy delusion that there is no war.

As Cohen understands, ignorance of the war means subjection to the enemy, to weakness, to losing the war:

You cannot stand what I’ve become,
you much prefer the gentleman I was before.
I was so easy to defeat,
I was so easy to control,
I didn’t even know there was a war.

And when you don’t know there's a war on, your enemy going to gain a lot of ground before you know what's hit you.

Years later, when Leonard Cohen wrote about the 9/11 attacks in “On That Day,” he wasn’t buying the lazy self-blame and weak excuses, finding himself instead reacting with a sense of an almost martial loyalty, and duty:

Some people say
It's what we deserve
For sins against g-d
For crimes in the world
I wouldn't know
I’m just holding the fort.
Since that day
They wounded New York.

And later still others try to explain the attack in that: “They hate us of old/Our women unveiled/Our slaves and our gold.” But still he disclaims knowing that for the truth, and continues “just holding the fort.”

Still he won't leave it there. Because there’s a war, and where there’s a war, there are sides, and 9/11 means no one can be neutral any more.

But answer me this
I won’t take you to court
Did you go crazy
Or did you report
On that day
On that day
They wounded New York?

Go crazy, or report? Those are awfully stark choices for a Buddhist poet from Montreal.

A few years back leftist intellectuals were entertaining each other with books and articles explaining conservative opinions they disapproved of as symptoms of mental illness. I don’t feel right about returning the insult. I really don’t believe that everyone (but yes, some, definitely), who refused to “report” after 9/11 had gone crazy.

But I do believe that many people, naturally aroused after 9/11, scared themselves with their own anger, or maybe got scared for their, or their children’s, well-planned futures, and simply couldn’t face the reality of this particular enemy, fleeing for refuge right back into their own heads again.

Which isn’t exactly an example of complete mental health, either. It was tried before by many a war-weary Frenchman and Briton in the 1930s, leading inexorably to the deaths of many French and British during the 1940s. The mistake they made was believing they could simply will themselves at peace after a determined, armed, and ruthless Reich long since made its blood oath for total war.

This is Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week. On campuses and in media all across the USA people are being told that Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week is being organized by racists, and that its purpose is to foment hatred of Arabs and Muslims. Both statements are lies. The lies are intended to discount the reality that we are at war.

The purpose of Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week is to bring to people’s minds the fact that there is a war, that we have an enemy, and who our enemy is. The particular emphasis of the organizers is the brutality and injustice visited by Islamo-Fascist regimes upon women. As such, it is laying a heavy challenge of hypocrisy on the allegedly feminist and peace-loving pretenders of the American universities. Naturally, they aren't responding well.

Yeah, and if you didn’t know it already, the news that we're at war isn’t good news. But this is one of those times when what we don’t know might kill us.

As Mark Steyn wrote just before this year’s anniversary of 9/11, “Where’s the War?”:

In his pugnacious new book, Norman Podhoretz calls for redesignating this conflict as World War IV. Certainly, it would have been easier politically to frame the Iraq campaign as being a front in a fourth world war than as a necessary measure in an anti-terrorist campaign. Yet who knows? Perhaps we would still have mired ourselves in legalisms and conspiracies and the dismal curdled relativism of the Flight 93 memorial’s “crescent of embrace.” In the end, as Podhoretz says, if the war is to be fought at all, it will “have to be fought by the kind of people Americans now are.” On this sixth anniversary, as 9/11 retreats into history, many Americans see no war at all.

What do you see?

Alleged Newspaper Questions Reality of Global Jihad

In today’s Detroit News, the important wire story about the arrest of three jihadists in Germany caught assembling bombs to blow up Americans was run under the large headline, “Alleged attack plot foiled.”

There’s nothing in the story itself to call into question the truth of what German authorities described of the jihadist plan, nor any other reason to question the reality of the attack plot itself--described by many accounts as “massive.” It was not merely an “alleged attack plot.”

Nor did the rest of the liberal press seem to feel the need to question the reality of the plot, judging from only this sampling of headlines:

“German Police Arrest 3 in Terrorist Plot” -- The New York Times
“German shock at bomb plot arrests” -- BBC News
“German police hunt for terror plot 'back-up team'” -- Guardian Unlimited
“3 planned 'massive airport bombs'” -- CNN International
“Germany arrests three in 'massive' terror plot” -- CTV Canada

As of yesterday there were three suspects in custody, “two German converts to Islam and a Turkish citizen who prosecutors said shared a ‘profound hatred of U.S. citizens.’” German police have launched an international manhunt for as many as 10 more. (“10 More Sought in German Terror Plot”).

There was a very real cottage used to store explosives that was surveilled by as many as 300 law enforcement officials for months; and the jihadists had “obtained military-style detonators and enough chemicals to make bombs more powerful than those that killed 191 commuters in Madrid in 2004 and 52 in London in 2005.”

We understand that the high scrupulosity of professional newspaper editors--not to mention fear of libel lawsuits--require that media descriptions of persons accused of crimes but as yet not convicted of any charge be called “alleged” murderers, rapists, perjurers, etc. This signals that the accused may in fact be innocent and pure as the driven snow.

Like anything, the media is sometimes recklessly inconsistent about this rule about alleged wrongdoers or wrongdoing "alleged"--see for example, the thousands of references to the “Duke rape supects,” the "NSA domestic spying program,” and almost every word printed about the “outing of undercover CIA agent Valerie Plame in retaliation for Joe Wilson’s exposure of Bush administration lies about Saddam’s attempts to buy yellowcake from Africa”--not a single word of which was ever true, nor ever was granted the benefit of a single “alleged” in the major media.

Obviously, the story about the German terror plot against US and Western interests is not just a crime story in which suspects (and even the crime itself) must be given the editorial kid-glove treatment (“alleged attack plot”). In fact, it's not a crime story at all, because it's a war story. The story is as big as the war on terror. Or, by the same token, and depending on your political point of view, it may be as small, or as questionable, as the ("so-called") "war on terror."

Am I being too persnickety about the Detroit News’s poor choice of words? More than likely, knowing me. But then again, the devil is in the details, and details add up.

By means of incessant use in mass media of sneer quotes, references to merely “alleged” terrorist links and plots, and endless jabs at “Bush’s war in Iraq” and the “so-called war on terror,” the left manages to feed at least some Americans' desperate fantasy that we are still in a September 10, Islamist-radical free world.

If you don’t think this incessant drip-drip-drip of skepticism has its effect, then consider this.

In late September 2001, the American public was crystal clear that Al Qaida and Islamic terrorists had struck us on 9/11, and would strike again if we didn’t strike back.

Since then, there have been literally thousands of reports daily and hourly from all over the globe of terror attacks, kidnappings, bombings, beheadings, radical threats, fatwas, exposures of plots in mosques, of terror cells, cries of Death to America!, threats of nuclear jihad, foundings of radical Islamic republics, murders of journalists, murders of missionaries, murders of women and children--all of which were matter-of-factly reported and news-crawled (sans the adjective “alleged”) beneath our very eyes. And in every instance these brutal attacks and murders manifestly were rising directly up out of the increasingly violent pathology that is the Islamic world. The average American today knows exponentially more about the extent and virulence of global jihadism than he ever did before 9/11, and that's even if he only halfway pays attention.

And yet now, in September 2007, tens of millions of Americans who once knew better on 9/11, now question not only the reality of the “so-called war on terror,” but even whether it was Islamic terrorists--and not conniving Americans--who knocked down the World Trade Center in the first place.

Such are the power and importance of words.

The Price of Being Nice

While looking into this recent cheese-bomb business I ran across references to a key decision by an airport screener, Michael Tuohey, on 9/11. It supports my theory that the fear of being called phobic about suspicious-acting Muslims poses a greater danger to the nation than any risk we’re facing from the misleading bugaboo of “Islamaphobia.”

“Michael Tuohey saw two of the hijackers on the morning of 9/11 and had the same instinct [to look at them more closely]. Tuohey worked the ticket counter at the airport in Portland, Maine for US Airways. He'll never forget that particular day amongst his 34 years of employment. At 5:43 a.m. on a bright Tuesday morning, two men wearing sport coats and ties approached his ticket counter with just 17-minutes to spare before their flight to Boston. He thought this pair was unusual. ‘It was just the look on the one man's face, his eyes,’ Tuohey told me. In front of him were Mohamed Atta and Abdul Aziz al Omari.

“’I looked up, and asked them the standard questions. The one guy was looking at me. It sent a chill through me. Something in my stomach churned. And subconsciously, I said to myself, “if they don't look like Arab terrorists, nothing does”. ‘Then I gave myself a mental slap. In over 34 years, I had checked in thousands of Arab travelers and I never thought this before. I said to myself, “that's not nice to think. They are just two Arab businessmen”.’ And with that, Tuohey handed them their boarding passes.” (“Profiling: Street Smarts by Any Other Name”).

Veils and the Cricket Test

Before the London and Glasgow car bombing attempts last week, the New York Times reported on how the tolerance of Britons for veiled Muslim women already was wearing thin. (“Muslims’ Veils Test Limits of Britain’s Tolerance”).

According to the Times, the increasing number of women seen on Britain’s streets “covered head to toe in flowing black gowns that allow only a slit for their eyes,” (the niqab), is seen by Britons as a sign that Muslims aren’t trying to fit into British culture. The reaction is increasing resistance by Britons, as described by the Times reporter:

"There have been numerous examples in the past year. A lawyer dressed in a niqab was told by an immigration judge that she could not represent a client because, he said, he could not hear her. A teacher wearing a niqab was dismissed from her school. A student who was barred from wearing a niqab took her case to the courts, and lost. In reaction, the British educational authorities are proposing a ban on the niqab in schools altogether.

"A leading Labor Party politician, Jack Straw, scolded women last year for coming to see him in his district office in the niqab. Prime Minister Tony Blair has called the niqab a 'mark of separation.'

"David Sexton, a columnist for The Evening Standard, wrote recently that the niqab was an affront and that Britain had been 'too deferential.'

“'It says that all men are such brutes that if exposed to any more normally clothed women, they cannot be trusted to behave — and that all women who dress any more scantily like that are indecent,' Mr. Sexton wrote. 'It’s abusive, a walking rejection of all our freedoms.'"

Nor do the Muslim women interviewed for the Times story do anythingto dispel the idea that the veil is a symbol of extremism, or even defiance:

"Some who wear the niqab, particularly younger women who have taken it up recently, concede that it is a frontal expression of Islamic identity, which they have embraced since Sept. 11, 2001, as a form of rebellion against the policies of the Blair government in Iraq, and at home.

“'For me it is not just a piece of clothing, it’s an act of faith, it’s solidarity,”'said a 24-year-old program scheduler at a broadcasting company in London, who would allow only her last name, al-Shaikh, to be printed, saying she wanted to protect her privacy. '9/11 was a wake-up call for young Muslims,' she said."

Ms. Shaikh’s remarks are a kind of shorthand way of saying, “This veil says I am for the Islamists, and against the Western nations trying to make a stand against terrorism.”

According to the Times, Ms. Saikh “started experimenting with the niqab at Brunel University in West London, a campus of intense Islamic activism. She hesitated at first because her mother saw it as a ‘form of extremism, which is understandable,’ she said, adding that her mother has since come around.”

In essence, Ms. Saikh, influenced by “intense Islamic activism,” acknowledges that her niqab is intended to be a sign of “extremism,” and that she overcame her own mother’s objections and got her to come around to jihadism, as well.

All of which justifies the concerns of those who fear the advance of Islamic triumphalism, refusing to be put off by the half-hearted protests that Muslims just want to fit in like everybody else. Although the Times reporter has to cast her articel in terms of fading "tolerance," the reactions of Britons are plain common sense.

Muslims like Ms. Saikh, and now, apparently, her mother, have taken their stand in solidarity with transnational Islam, with the ummah. Which means they see Britain, (or the United States, or any other inhabited Western country), even at best, as not their nation, but just somewhere they’re living. At worst, the countries where they live are targets for eventual jihad.

Which is exactly what British people fear when they see growing numbers of women wearing the niqab. It only follows that the growing number of veiled women represents a growing number of Muslims who see themselves united in solidarity in a religious struggle against the majority nation--against its foreign policies, its culture, and its infidel status. Should it come as any surprise that Britons would respond with growing displeasure and mistrust?

As the Times explains:

At the East London Mosque, one of the largest mosques in the capital, the chief imam, Abdul Qayyum, studied in Saudi Arabia and is trained in the Wahhabi school of Islam. The community relations officer at the mosque, Ehsan Abdullah Hannan, said the imam’s daughter wore the niqab.

At Friday Prayer recently, the women were crowded into a small windowless room upstairs, away from the main hall for the men.

A handful of young women wore the niqab, and they spoke effusively about their reasons. “Wearing the niqab means you will get a good grade and go to paradise,” said Hodo Muse, 19, a Somali woman.

Yes, that is one of the advertised ways to get to paradise. Murdering the infidel is another. Which is why, as Bret Stephens at the Wall Street Journal writes, “the dots between the jihadis in the Jeep Cherokee and the women behind the veil” need to be connected. “The first are treated as a security issue; the second as a civil rights one. But they are opposite faces of the same totalitarian coin.” (“A Veiled Threat”).

As Stephens explains, conservative/liberal cogitating over whether or not distinctive religious garb should be embraced as a liberty issue, or discouraged as an illiberal separatist practice are both beside the point:

“…all this misses the fundamentally tactical element of niqab. ‘It's about enforcing separation,’ notes a former senior French Interior Ministry official who helped draft his country's 2004 ban on religious headgear in public schools and government buildings. ‘It is best understood as an intra-Muslim show of strength, a way to intimidate their own women, a way to intimidate the infidels, a way to make themselves more visible, a way to make sure no one strays from their world vision.’”

An anonymous correspondent has brought to our attention at DU the “cricket test,” proposed nearly twenty years ago in the UK by Conservative MP, Norman Tebbit. At the time, he was proposing it in regard to the UK’s huge population of Pakistanis,. Tebbit noticed how, even down to third- and fourth-generation Britons of Pakistani origin, they were always rooting for the Pakistan cricket team over the British.

Tebbit said: “‘A large proportion of Britain's Asian population fail to pass the cricket test. Which side do they cheer for? It's an interesting test. Are you still harking back to where you came from or where you are?’”

Simplistic, sure. And naturally Tebbit was attacked as a racist.

But the value of a cricket test is not in qualifying or disqualifying citizens for civil rights, but as a means of illustrating an urgent problem in Western countries with large social groups simply not assimilating, or even openly rejecting any notion of assimilation.

Our la-de-da Western assumption that every immigrant group eventually adapts to the national culture has been exploited by Islam for a generation or more. The strategy provides that, "by the time the Americans, (or the British or the French or the Italians), notice that we Muslims aren't fitting in, we’ll be so many and so strong we can demand they start fitting in with us."

So well has this strategy worked that even when Islamic leaders, preachers, and activists tell us they have no intention of fitting in--instead anouncing plans to outpopulate, dominate, subdue or destroy us--we still keep right on taking for granted they’re going to forsake those old country ways just the way the Irish, the Germans, the Italians, and the Poles did before them. Why, in no time their daughters will be dirty dancing with our sons, clothes-shopping, and taking up golf!

If you think that's the way it's going, you may want to give that cricket test a try.

The veil is a warning to anyone willing to pay attention that very large segments of the Muslim community aren’t blending in. Not only that, but they’re doing the opposite of blending in: going towards greater insulation, greater separation, greater radicalization. Recent polls have indicated that first-generation Muslim young people are more committed to jihad than their parents. That's not greater and greater blending in. It's greater and greater opting out. That means the rule about the melting-pot rule isn't at work, the exception is.

When veiled women tell us that 9/11 was a wake up call for Muslims, we need to be asking what that act of war was meant to awaken them for.