The NAACP is having their convention in Detroit right now, and on Monday they’re planning to hold a funeral for the N-word. (“NAACP convention: Can 'N-word' funeral bury hatred?”)
For those of who you aren’t sure what the N-word denotes nowadays, (and why would you, as the F-word went from meaning a profanity to now meaning,“fag”?), the N-word still rhymes with “wigger”.
And speaking of rhymes, the point of this interment is to symbolically urge hip-hop artists to stop using the word. One of the article's quoted experts explains that "the word's usage is down considerably among whites, [but] it's 'as out of control as it has ever been' among African-Americans."
Targeting other African Americans is a significant departure for the NAACP, which the last few years has focused most of its attention on blaming everything on white racism. That, and maintaining their working relationship with Louis Farrakhan, to whom NAACP officals publicly gave an enthusiastic ovation in 2005 when he explained "that New Orleans levees were intentionally blown up after Hurricane Katrina in order to flood the section of the city housing poor blacks."
Back to the N-word funeral. According to the Detroit News, "culture watchers and members of the hip-hop generation are doubtful the ceremony will have any effect at all.” But I’m not so sure.
The last time the NAACP buried a racial term it went away forever, at least from the lips of white Americans. I’m referring to the expression “colored people,” which is resting peacefully inside the acronym of the organization itself. At one time, the official name was used interchangeably with the acronym, and people used to proudly refer to the “National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.” Now all news outlets exclusively use "NAACP." Partly it's to save precious space in newspapers. But really it's from unadulterated terror of violating PC guidelines.
In fairness, the full name still appears on the NAACP website.
(By contrast, the term “abortion” has been terminated by the former "National Abortion Rights Action League,” which has re-named itself NARAL Pro-Choice America, and pretends it was always called that on its website, carefully avoiding mention of the hallowed procedure it is dedicated to preserving. As everyone knows, "choice" and "abortion" are perfect synonyms, which is why waitresses are always saying, "With the pasta you get your choice of soup, salad, or an abortion!").
Back to the N-word funeral. I only mention all this about the NAACP because I find it odd that, next to only the N-word, nothing can get white people in racial hot water faster than referring to African-Americans as “colored people.”
I’ve always thought this strange, because while the N-word has always been an epithet intended to hurt and insult, the phrase “colored people” is at best a euphemism, and was intended to be polite.
Just as strange, during the 1980s the racial authorities dictated that the phrases “people of color” or “person of color” were more correct even than calling someone an African-American. That's hardly much of a distinction from “colored people.” (Nor has DU been able to confirm rumors the organization is planning to change its name to the "NAAPC").
And on that point, though I never liked the comic strip Bloom County, I do find this one exchange from that strip circa 1988 illustrates where I'm coming from:
Mom: That's the most adorable little colored girl playing outside.
Steve: "Colored"? You're saying "colored people" in 1988? You know better, Ma.
Mom: Then why the "National Association for Colored People? I don't think Negroes mind at all.
Steve: Don't say "Negroes," Ma! You can't say "Negroes"!
Mom: Can I say "United Negro College Fund"?
Steve: You are baiting me, Ma!
Dad: That's it. We're leaving.
Mom: Stay put, Reginald. "Mister Socially Sensitive" isn't finished shaming his parents into enlightenment.
Steve: Everybody just calm down. Let's agree to use the New-Age term "People of Color."
Mom: People of Color.
Steve: People of Color.
Mom: Colored people.
Steve: NO!!
Dad: We're leaving.
Sunday, July 08, 2007
People of the Book, Beware
"The fact remains that not a single Christian or Jew lives in peace in the Muslim world, and if it is truly our nation's foreign policy to spread democracy around the world, this issue is the perfect topic for us to press. Back at home, raising Islam's global war on Christianity should be the immediate response to the seemingly endless media grievance machine of radical Islam's Western apologists. Until they begin to address the new Holocaust perpetrated in the name of Islam, their complaints and denials are nothing but bald hypocrisy."
The above is an excerpt from Patrick Poole's, of American Thinker, chilling but thorough glimpse of the targeting of Christians in Muslim-controlled parts of the world.
Islam's Global War against Christianity
By Patrick Poole
From Nigeria to Indonesia, Christians are under siege in virtually every single country in the Muslim world, the victims of countless acts of discrimination, depredation, brutality, and murder that are so widespread and systematic that it can rightfully be called the new Holocaust. This time, however, the perpetrators of this Holocaust aren't wearing swastikas, but kufi skull caps and hijabs.
Some of the oldest Christian communities in the world are subject to relentless attack and teeter on the brink of extinction at the hands of the "Religion of Peace": Palestinian Christians in Gaza and the West Bank; Assyrian, Syriac and Chaldean Christians in Iraq; Coptic Christians in Egypt; Evangelical and Orthodox Christians in Eastern Ethiopia and Eritrea; Armenian Orthodox Christians in Turkey; and Maronite Christians in Lebanon.
Several of these communities date back to the beginning decades of Christianity and all have weathered wave after wave of Islamic persecution for centuries and more, but in the very near future some will simply cease to exist. In our lifetime, the only trace of their past existence will be in footnotes in history books (and probably only Western history books at that).
Meanwhile, we in the West hear much from radical Islam's apologists how the US is engaged in a war against Islam citing of our military actions in Afghanistan and Iraq. We are lectured on the inviolability of the Muslim ummah and justifications of defensive jihad.
But an extensive search this past weekend of the websites of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, the Islamic Society of North America, the Islamic Circle of North America, the Muslim American Society, the Muslim Student Association, the Fiqh Council of North America, and the Muslim Public Affairs Committee - the most visible institutional representatives of Islam in America - found not a single mention or reference of the religious persecution of Christians by their Islamic co-religionists, thereby making them tacit co-conspirators in the Final Solution to the Christian problem in the Muslim world.
The global war on Christianity by Islam is so massive in size and scope that it is virtually impossible to describe without trivializing it. Inspired by Muslim Brotherhood ideology and fueled by billions of Wahhabi petrodollars, the religious cleansing of Christians from the Muslim world is continuing at a break-neck pace, as the following recent examples demonstrate.
Iraq: In the current issue of the American Spectator, Doug Bandow observes that centuries of dhimmitude have left Christians in the war-torn country without any means of self-defense. Washington policymakers have refused to lend assistance for fear of showing partiality, despite the murder of hundreds of Iraqi Christians, the kidnapping and torture of Christian clerics, the repeated bombings of Christian churches, the torching of Christian businesses, and the flight of close to half of the entire Iraqi Christian population since April 2003. Those who remain have been subject to the imposition of shari'a by the Shi'ite Mahdi Army and Sunni militias (al-Qaeda doesn't bother with such niceties, preferring to murder them immediately instead), including the recent published threat in Mosul of killing one member of every Christian family in that city for Christian women not wearing the hijab and continuing to attend school. (Be sure to remember that the next time an Islamist apologist claims that the hijab is a symbol of women's liberation.)
Egypt: Journalist Magdi Khalil chronicles in a new report ("Another Black Friday for the Coptic Christians of Egypt") the campaign of violence directed against Christian Copts almost weekly immediately following Friday afternoon Muslim prayers. Inspired by Islamist imams preaching religious hatred in mosques all over the country and protected by government officials willing to look the other way, rampaging mobs of Muslims set upon Christians churches, businesses and individuals, from Alexandria to cities all the way up the Nile. Coptic holy days are also favorite times for Muslim violence, which the Egyptian media likes to describe as "sectarian strife" - as if it were actually a two-sided affair.
Please read the rest of this gripping article here.
The above is an excerpt from Patrick Poole's, of American Thinker, chilling but thorough glimpse of the targeting of Christians in Muslim-controlled parts of the world.
Islam's Global War against Christianity
By Patrick Poole
From Nigeria to Indonesia, Christians are under siege in virtually every single country in the Muslim world, the victims of countless acts of discrimination, depredation, brutality, and murder that are so widespread and systematic that it can rightfully be called the new Holocaust. This time, however, the perpetrators of this Holocaust aren't wearing swastikas, but kufi skull caps and hijabs.
Some of the oldest Christian communities in the world are subject to relentless attack and teeter on the brink of extinction at the hands of the "Religion of Peace": Palestinian Christians in Gaza and the West Bank; Assyrian, Syriac and Chaldean Christians in Iraq; Coptic Christians in Egypt; Evangelical and Orthodox Christians in Eastern Ethiopia and Eritrea; Armenian Orthodox Christians in Turkey; and Maronite Christians in Lebanon.
Several of these communities date back to the beginning decades of Christianity and all have weathered wave after wave of Islamic persecution for centuries and more, but in the very near future some will simply cease to exist. In our lifetime, the only trace of their past existence will be in footnotes in history books (and probably only Western history books at that).
Meanwhile, we in the West hear much from radical Islam's apologists how the US is engaged in a war against Islam citing of our military actions in Afghanistan and Iraq. We are lectured on the inviolability of the Muslim ummah and justifications of defensive jihad.
But an extensive search this past weekend of the websites of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, the Islamic Society of North America, the Islamic Circle of North America, the Muslim American Society, the Muslim Student Association, the Fiqh Council of North America, and the Muslim Public Affairs Committee - the most visible institutional representatives of Islam in America - found not a single mention or reference of the religious persecution of Christians by their Islamic co-religionists, thereby making them tacit co-conspirators in the Final Solution to the Christian problem in the Muslim world.
The global war on Christianity by Islam is so massive in size and scope that it is virtually impossible to describe without trivializing it. Inspired by Muslim Brotherhood ideology and fueled by billions of Wahhabi petrodollars, the religious cleansing of Christians from the Muslim world is continuing at a break-neck pace, as the following recent examples demonstrate.
Iraq: In the current issue of the American Spectator, Doug Bandow observes that centuries of dhimmitude have left Christians in the war-torn country without any means of self-defense. Washington policymakers have refused to lend assistance for fear of showing partiality, despite the murder of hundreds of Iraqi Christians, the kidnapping and torture of Christian clerics, the repeated bombings of Christian churches, the torching of Christian businesses, and the flight of close to half of the entire Iraqi Christian population since April 2003. Those who remain have been subject to the imposition of shari'a by the Shi'ite Mahdi Army and Sunni militias (al-Qaeda doesn't bother with such niceties, preferring to murder them immediately instead), including the recent published threat in Mosul of killing one member of every Christian family in that city for Christian women not wearing the hijab and continuing to attend school. (Be sure to remember that the next time an Islamist apologist claims that the hijab is a symbol of women's liberation.)
Egypt: Journalist Magdi Khalil chronicles in a new report ("Another Black Friday for the Coptic Christians of Egypt") the campaign of violence directed against Christian Copts almost weekly immediately following Friday afternoon Muslim prayers. Inspired by Islamist imams preaching religious hatred in mosques all over the country and protected by government officials willing to look the other way, rampaging mobs of Muslims set upon Christians churches, businesses and individuals, from Alexandria to cities all the way up the Nile. Coptic holy days are also favorite times for Muslim violence, which the Egyptian media likes to describe as "sectarian strife" - as if it were actually a two-sided affair.
Please read the rest of this gripping article here.
Saturday, July 07, 2007
Media's Domestic Lying Program Still Going Strong
Lately I keep having a recurring dream in which I pick up my local newspaper and read a headline like: “Americans Fear Lack of Government Snooping on Terrorists Will Lead to Some of Us Getting Blown Up”. Then beneath this lengthy headline I am treated to an incisive and well-written analysis of how many Americans find “troubling” or “disturbing” that their government is carelessly neglecting, or even resisting, making an effort needed to hunt down, infiltrate, and intercept, some very determined bad guys who want us all dead.
The article goes on to describe how, in response to this trend of citizen anger, the government begins to wake up and get serious about hunting down the bad guys, aggressively, without putting theoretical worries about terrorists' civil rights above the rights and lives of our own citizens.
Then I always wake up laughing at such a ridiciuous a dream. Even if such a thing ever happened, (it just might after our next 9/11), the papers wouldn't report it.
What I find in the real, waking world are articles like today’s “Court ruling stirs fear of secret spying”, on the front page of the Detroit News.
The article, by the News's Muslim Affairs correspondent Gregg Krupa, reports dismayed reactions to yesterday’s ruling from the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals, the one that reversed the awful decision of US District Judge Anna Diggs Taylor that ordered an injunction against the NSA’s Terrorist Surveillance Program (TSP). According to the article no one was happy about the ruling except some joker from the Department of Justice. No one from the News asked me if I liked it. I did like it. I liked it a lot.
Anyhow, instead of waking up to my dream article where everybody is worried that we aren't connecting the dots, I see just another story about how our civil rights are more threatened by Dick Cheney than by those guys with their suicide belts and their Korans. And the dots just go unconnected.
The people who control the American press, who are primarily liberals, and either ideologically committed to resisting anti-jihadist activities, or else just terrified of being called Islamophobic, are never going to report on this story fairly. They did not approve of the TSP from the outset, they consistently misreported the facts about it, and they always refer to the program, falsely, as a “domestic spying program.” And even though they knew Judge Taylor’s opinion was bad law, badly written, and certainly doomed to be overturned on appeal, (as it was yesterday), they felt they had to sign on to it as a blow for freedom and the First Amendment.
And now that it's been reversed by grown-up judges, the reporters have to defend it.
The truth is that the TSP, besides being a great idea, only ever monitored international communications, that is, communications to people outside the US, or calling or emailing into the US from foreign soil. There is nothing “domestic” about the program. Even all those critics unwittingly admitted as much when they kept insisting the TSP needed to be brought under the control of Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act: FISA deals exclusively with the gathering of foreign intelligence.
But has this ever stopped journalists from referring to the TSP as a “domestic spying program”? Or one that is targeted at “secret spying on citizens”? No, because such statements are inflammatory, and help create more enemies for George W. Bush.
Now Mr. Krupa shows he’s willing to get it all wrong, too, when he writes, (wrongly), that even the administration itself has come clean about all its unlawful domestic spying. Writes Krupa, “In several public statements, administration officials have said that the president has the right to order secret spying on citizens.”
Strangely, Mr. Krupa nowhere cites even one of the occasions of these alleged statements, nor who exactly was supposed to have made them.
I’ve followed this issue more closely that the average person, and I haven't heard about any such public statements by the administration--any statements that parrot, as Mr. Krupa parrots here, the left’s caricature of the TSP as the President having an unlimited “right to order secret spying on citizens.”
Rather, the administration’s statements on the TSP have been many, and are consistent.
For instance, on January 12, 2005 Alberto Gonzales said the following at a press conference:
"The President has authorized a program to engage in electronic surveillance of a particular kind, and this would be the intercepts of contents of communications where one of the -- one party to the communication is outside the United States. And this is a very important point -- people are running around saying that the United States is somehow spying on American citizens calling their neighbors. Very, very important to understand that one party to the communication has to be outside the United States.
"Another very important point to remember is that we have to have a reasonable basis to conclude that one party to the communication is a member of al Qaeda, affiliated with al Qaeda, or a member of an organization affiliated with al Qaeda, or working in support of al Qaeda."
Almost two year laters, on January 17th of this year, Gonzales’s letter to the Senate Judiciary Committee explained that the TSP was now being conducted under an authorization from the FISA court, re-iterating that the court order authorizes “the Government to target for collection international communications into or out of the United States where there is probable cause to believe that one of the communicants is a member of agent of al Qaeda or an associated terrorist organization.”
The article goes on to describe how, in response to this trend of citizen anger, the government begins to wake up and get serious about hunting down the bad guys, aggressively, without putting theoretical worries about terrorists' civil rights above the rights and lives of our own citizens.
Then I always wake up laughing at such a ridiciuous a dream. Even if such a thing ever happened, (it just might after our next 9/11), the papers wouldn't report it.
What I find in the real, waking world are articles like today’s “Court ruling stirs fear of secret spying”, on the front page of the Detroit News.
The article, by the News's Muslim Affairs correspondent Gregg Krupa, reports dismayed reactions to yesterday’s ruling from the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals, the one that reversed the awful decision of US District Judge Anna Diggs Taylor that ordered an injunction against the NSA’s Terrorist Surveillance Program (TSP). According to the article no one was happy about the ruling except some joker from the Department of Justice. No one from the News asked me if I liked it. I did like it. I liked it a lot.
Anyhow, instead of waking up to my dream article where everybody is worried that we aren't connecting the dots, I see just another story about how our civil rights are more threatened by Dick Cheney than by those guys with their suicide belts and their Korans. And the dots just go unconnected.
The people who control the American press, who are primarily liberals, and either ideologically committed to resisting anti-jihadist activities, or else just terrified of being called Islamophobic, are never going to report on this story fairly. They did not approve of the TSP from the outset, they consistently misreported the facts about it, and they always refer to the program, falsely, as a “domestic spying program.” And even though they knew Judge Taylor’s opinion was bad law, badly written, and certainly doomed to be overturned on appeal, (as it was yesterday), they felt they had to sign on to it as a blow for freedom and the First Amendment.
And now that it's been reversed by grown-up judges, the reporters have to defend it.
The truth is that the TSP, besides being a great idea, only ever monitored international communications, that is, communications to people outside the US, or calling or emailing into the US from foreign soil. There is nothing “domestic” about the program. Even all those critics unwittingly admitted as much when they kept insisting the TSP needed to be brought under the control of Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act: FISA deals exclusively with the gathering of foreign intelligence.
But has this ever stopped journalists from referring to the TSP as a “domestic spying program”? Or one that is targeted at “secret spying on citizens”? No, because such statements are inflammatory, and help create more enemies for George W. Bush.
Now Mr. Krupa shows he’s willing to get it all wrong, too, when he writes, (wrongly), that even the administration itself has come clean about all its unlawful domestic spying. Writes Krupa, “In several public statements, administration officials have said that the president has the right to order secret spying on citizens.”
Strangely, Mr. Krupa nowhere cites even one of the occasions of these alleged statements, nor who exactly was supposed to have made them.
I’ve followed this issue more closely that the average person, and I haven't heard about any such public statements by the administration--any statements that parrot, as Mr. Krupa parrots here, the left’s caricature of the TSP as the President having an unlimited “right to order secret spying on citizens.”
Rather, the administration’s statements on the TSP have been many, and are consistent.
For instance, on January 12, 2005 Alberto Gonzales said the following at a press conference:
"The President has authorized a program to engage in electronic surveillance of a particular kind, and this would be the intercepts of contents of communications where one of the -- one party to the communication is outside the United States. And this is a very important point -- people are running around saying that the United States is somehow spying on American citizens calling their neighbors. Very, very important to understand that one party to the communication has to be outside the United States.
"Another very important point to remember is that we have to have a reasonable basis to conclude that one party to the communication is a member of al Qaeda, affiliated with al Qaeda, or a member of an organization affiliated with al Qaeda, or working in support of al Qaeda."
Almost two year laters, on January 17th of this year, Gonzales’s letter to the Senate Judiciary Committee explained that the TSP was now being conducted under an authorization from the FISA court, re-iterating that the court order authorizes “the Government to target for collection international communications into or out of the United States where there is probable cause to believe that one of the communicants is a member of agent of al Qaeda or an associated terrorist organization.”
Does that sound like an administration official claiming the "president has the right to order secret spying on citizens"?
The media’s repeated insinuation, including Mr. Krupa’s here, that the targets of the TSP surveillance are innocent US citizens, can only be intended to mislead the lazy readers, or the busy readers--that is, the average readers who make no effort to look beyond what they see in the paper--to believe that Gonzales, or other high administration officials, have on several occasions gone on record saying, “Shucks, now that you mention it, we are spying on innocent US citizens! And you know what else? We don’t care who knows it! Hissss!”
I can't believe any more that this kind of misleading writing is the result of journalistic accident or laziness. It is too much of a pattern. It is meant to disinform.
Another example is Mr. Krupa’s mischaracterization in today's article of why the plaintiffs lacked supporting evidence, in the form of information gathered by NSA surveillance, a lack of evidence which helped lead to dismissal of the ACLU case.
According to Mr. Krupa, “The administration's refusal to reveal information about the program was one reason the plaintiffs could not proceed, both judges said.”
Bunk. It isn’t true; not even close.
Neither judge said anything of the kind. What the judges stated, and explained in their opinions, was that any information obtained through TSP surveillance was privileged under the State Secrets Doctrine, which was invoked at the very beginning of the case by the NSA. The opinion makes clear that the ACLU and their co-plaintiffs did not even raise the issue of the NSA’s invocation of the State Secrets Doctrine in their appeal: even the ACLU wasn’t stupid enough to demand public release of secret NSA information on terrorists obtained through surveillance.
Yet Mr. Krupa writes as if to suggest that the Bush administration was asked for the information, and then stonewalled the court by “refusing” to turn it over.
This kind of thing is meant to create the impression that the ACLU case was dismissed unfairly as a result of the the White House's somehow cheating the plaintiffs and the judicial process by holding back information.
That, and Mr. Krupa, I'm afraid, is hoping to suggest a parallel with the collateral mythology of the President "defying" the US Congress in their endless demands for White House documents and testimony so Schumer and Conyers can "get to the bottom of" the Iraq war, or the firing of the US Attorneys, or the "illegal" domestic spying program of the NSA, etc,. etc., etc.
The First Amendment guarantee of a free press provides that newspapers have the right to engage in a certain amount of lying, especially if the lies are about public figures.
I'm not planning to sue anyone over it.
But I don't have to like it.
And I don't like it. I don't like it a lot.
Conyers and the NSA Lawsuit: Just Who's Politicizing Whom?
Congressman John Conyers of Michigan, when he commented yesterday on the US Sixth Circuit decision reversing Judge Anna Diggs Taylor’s ruling on the NSA surveillance program, admitted that the underlying lawsuit was still a success, because its entire purpose was political.
“The chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, U.S. Rep. John Conyers, D-Michigan, said, ‘the suit served its purpose.’
“’"Not only did it force the administration to now use some form of FISA court orders, but also it has strengthened our committee's claim to learn about the illegal program,’ Conyers said.” (“Court ruling stirs fear of secret spying”).
The only legitimate purpose of a federal lawsuit is to redress an actual violation of federal law that has injured an actual plaintiff.
Judge Anna Digg's Taylor's opinion was widely criticized, even by liberal law professors, as a poorly-reasoned hack job. I don't think anyone on the left was surpised when her decision was reversed. The Sixth Circuit handily determined that the plaintiffs lacked standing to sue, since they could not show any way in which they had actually been damaged by the NSA activities. In other words, as much as they may have disapproved of the NSA program, they weren't entitled to sue the United States over it.
So when Conyers says the ACLA lawsuit served its purpose in spite of being thrown out, it indicates the suit was never meant to serve a legitimate purpose in the federal court. It's clear now that the whole idea of the lawsuit, its actual purpose, was not to redress a valid legal wrong to actual plaintiffs, but to provide a political weapon to be used by Conyers and his congressional colleagues in their punitive investigations of the White House.
The lawsuit was a craven attempt by the Democratic Party to politicize the federal judiciary.
It may be remembered that the many-sided witch-hunt against Alberto Gonzales over the firing of the 8 US Attorneys is premised not on any violations of law. Instead, they are tenuosly premised on the White House having “politicized” the Department of Justice when it took into account political goals and factors when making employment decisions about political appointees.
Though you might not know it from hearing some of these distressed Democratic Congressmen, the Department of Justice is not a constitutionally separate branch of government, intended to be "independent" The DOJ doesn't, unlike the legislative or the judicial branches, enjoy freedom from interference from the executive branch. At the risk of repeating what should be obvious, the DOJ is a department of the executive branch, and its highest appointees are political presidential appointees, most especially the Attorney General, who sits on the President’s cabinet. That both the AG and the US Attorneys serve at the President’s will only makes sense.
Still, the only thing stopping Leahy, Schumer, and Conyers from accusing the President outright of violating the separation of powers by firing his own US Attorneys is how utterly stupid they all will look when media commentators, as they set to work unpacking such remarks, start asking the unavoidable questions about which branch of government the DOJ actually does belong to?
Since Democrats can't seriously accuse the President of overreaching outside his own branch of government, the next best thing is to repeatedly accusing him of exercising his executive prerogatives in an “inappropriate” way, for instance, by “politicizing” the Department of Justice.
They are doing the same thing now in complaining about the commutation of Scooter Libby's sentence, another lawful exercise of an absolute privilege that is established in the Constitution, and that Congress can never legitimately interfere with.
Chief Justice of the United States Salmon P. Chase held long ago that, "It is the intention of the Constitution that each of the great co- ordinate departments of the government-the Legislative, the Executive, and the Judicial-shall be, in its sphere, independent of the others. To the executive alone is intrusted the power of pardon; and it is granted without limit."
So the next best thing for the President's enemies is to criticize this particular decision as having "inappropriate" political motives--though whether it does or doesn't is utterly immaterial to the President's pardoning power. And thus Conyers himself wanted to be first out of the gate promising an investigation of whether the President has gone beyond the limits of his pardoning power--limits the Supreme Court has already said don't exist:
"House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers of Michigan announced he will be holding a full committee hearing next Wednesday examining the use of presidential clemency. 'In light of yesterday's announcement by the President that he was commuting the prison sentence for Scooter Libby, it is imperative that Congress look into how such power may be abused,' Conyers said. " ("Conyers eyes probe").
How do you think that one's going to turn out? Of course there can be no abuse of executive power if it is exercised lawfully within the Constitutional bounds of the executive branch, as happened here, as well as in the matter of the fired US Attorneys.
And that doesn't mean Congress can't abuse their investigative powers by holding hearing after hearing after hearing attacking the executive for alleged illegal activity--activity that the Congressmen can neither identify nor produce a shred of evidence for. For an idea of how far this abuse has gone, consider, what Kimberley S. Strassel at WSJ Opinion Journal writes about it in"Anger Mismanagement":
"This crowd isn't nearly as interested in passing legislation as it is flooding the Beltway with subpoenas. By one count, the new Democratic Congress has held over 600 oversight hearings since assuming power. Given the Senate has only been in session 100 days (the House, 92 days), that works out to six hearings per day, or one every 1.5 hours. The bashing covers everything from wiretapping to President Bush's global warming science."
On the other hand, Congressman Conyers and his cohorts really are violating the separation of powers when they use the judicial branch--the one branch of the three that is supposed to remain strictly non-political--as nothing more than a means to force the executive branch to do Congress's bidding. They've done it by participating in a lawsuit that was frivolous by nature, and, as Conyers himself says, had the ulterior “purpose” of forcing the White House to confine its surveillance powers to within FISA-court limits, and to strengthen his own committee's leverage in prising documents out of the executive branch.
Both of these objects are nakedly, incontrovertibly, political. In fact, they are more political, and more overreaching, (because they explicitly reach another branch of government), than even the worse things Conyers and all his co-inquisitors have managed to dig up after all these months of nonstop investigations of the White House.
Nor do I think it wrong to infer there was prior cooperation between Conyers and the ACLU. Based on what he himself has said, he betrays a guilty knowledge of the true purpose of the ACLU suit, a purpose that had nothing to do with righting a legal wrong.
Conyers sounds satisfied with the dismissal, as if he expected it. I can believe he never believed this lawsuit would succeed serious legal review anyway is, (Judge Taylor's opinion was not serious)--a standard which is the very definition of a frivolous lawsuit. Frivolous or not, it had “served its purpose,” a purpose it can be reasonably concluded Conyers developed with the parties beforehand.
Had a Republican official in similar circumstances ever admitted that a federal lawsuit had been initiated with a bald political object like this, Conyers and Schumer would be baying for Congressional investigations. They'd demand to know how many communications that official had had with the parties in that lawsuit, what and how much they had discussed, and how far up and how far wide the network of political officials or operatives spread--intending to call each and every one of them to testify under oath--over and over again if necessary--and all beneath a Damocles sword of threats about perjury and contempt of Congress. And it would all happen in a context of press conferences and Sunday-morning appearances by Democrats crying “unlawful,” “misleading,” and “abuse of separation of powers.”
Of course nothing like this is going to happen, because of the whole double standard thing.
But the next time you see a sound bite from Schumer, Leahy, Conyers, or Pelosi complaining about presidential abuse of power and disrespect for the rule of law, remember who it is that thinks nothing of perverting the federal courts to gain political advantage over their enemies.
“The chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, U.S. Rep. John Conyers, D-Michigan, said, ‘the suit served its purpose.’
“’"Not only did it force the administration to now use some form of FISA court orders, but also it has strengthened our committee's claim to learn about the illegal program,’ Conyers said.” (“Court ruling stirs fear of secret spying”).
The only legitimate purpose of a federal lawsuit is to redress an actual violation of federal law that has injured an actual plaintiff.
Judge Anna Digg's Taylor's opinion was widely criticized, even by liberal law professors, as a poorly-reasoned hack job. I don't think anyone on the left was surpised when her decision was reversed. The Sixth Circuit handily determined that the plaintiffs lacked standing to sue, since they could not show any way in which they had actually been damaged by the NSA activities. In other words, as much as they may have disapproved of the NSA program, they weren't entitled to sue the United States over it.
So when Conyers says the ACLA lawsuit served its purpose in spite of being thrown out, it indicates the suit was never meant to serve a legitimate purpose in the federal court. It's clear now that the whole idea of the lawsuit, its actual purpose, was not to redress a valid legal wrong to actual plaintiffs, but to provide a political weapon to be used by Conyers and his congressional colleagues in their punitive investigations of the White House.
The lawsuit was a craven attempt by the Democratic Party to politicize the federal judiciary.
It may be remembered that the many-sided witch-hunt against Alberto Gonzales over the firing of the 8 US Attorneys is premised not on any violations of law. Instead, they are tenuosly premised on the White House having “politicized” the Department of Justice when it took into account political goals and factors when making employment decisions about political appointees.
Though you might not know it from hearing some of these distressed Democratic Congressmen, the Department of Justice is not a constitutionally separate branch of government, intended to be "independent" The DOJ doesn't, unlike the legislative or the judicial branches, enjoy freedom from interference from the executive branch. At the risk of repeating what should be obvious, the DOJ is a department of the executive branch, and its highest appointees are political presidential appointees, most especially the Attorney General, who sits on the President’s cabinet. That both the AG and the US Attorneys serve at the President’s will only makes sense.
Still, the only thing stopping Leahy, Schumer, and Conyers from accusing the President outright of violating the separation of powers by firing his own US Attorneys is how utterly stupid they all will look when media commentators, as they set to work unpacking such remarks, start asking the unavoidable questions about which branch of government the DOJ actually does belong to?
Since Democrats can't seriously accuse the President of overreaching outside his own branch of government, the next best thing is to repeatedly accusing him of exercising his executive prerogatives in an “inappropriate” way, for instance, by “politicizing” the Department of Justice.
They are doing the same thing now in complaining about the commutation of Scooter Libby's sentence, another lawful exercise of an absolute privilege that is established in the Constitution, and that Congress can never legitimately interfere with.
Chief Justice of the United States Salmon P. Chase held long ago that, "It is the intention of the Constitution that each of the great co- ordinate departments of the government-the Legislative, the Executive, and the Judicial-shall be, in its sphere, independent of the others. To the executive alone is intrusted the power of pardon; and it is granted without limit."
So the next best thing for the President's enemies is to criticize this particular decision as having "inappropriate" political motives--though whether it does or doesn't is utterly immaterial to the President's pardoning power. And thus Conyers himself wanted to be first out of the gate promising an investigation of whether the President has gone beyond the limits of his pardoning power--limits the Supreme Court has already said don't exist:
"House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers of Michigan announced he will be holding a full committee hearing next Wednesday examining the use of presidential clemency. 'In light of yesterday's announcement by the President that he was commuting the prison sentence for Scooter Libby, it is imperative that Congress look into how such power may be abused,' Conyers said. " ("Conyers eyes probe").
How do you think that one's going to turn out? Of course there can be no abuse of executive power if it is exercised lawfully within the Constitutional bounds of the executive branch, as happened here, as well as in the matter of the fired US Attorneys.
And that doesn't mean Congress can't abuse their investigative powers by holding hearing after hearing after hearing attacking the executive for alleged illegal activity--activity that the Congressmen can neither identify nor produce a shred of evidence for. For an idea of how far this abuse has gone, consider, what Kimberley S. Strassel at WSJ Opinion Journal writes about it in"Anger Mismanagement":
"This crowd isn't nearly as interested in passing legislation as it is flooding the Beltway with subpoenas. By one count, the new Democratic Congress has held over 600 oversight hearings since assuming power. Given the Senate has only been in session 100 days (the House, 92 days), that works out to six hearings per day, or one every 1.5 hours. The bashing covers everything from wiretapping to President Bush's global warming science."
On the other hand, Congressman Conyers and his cohorts really are violating the separation of powers when they use the judicial branch--the one branch of the three that is supposed to remain strictly non-political--as nothing more than a means to force the executive branch to do Congress's bidding. They've done it by participating in a lawsuit that was frivolous by nature, and, as Conyers himself says, had the ulterior “purpose” of forcing the White House to confine its surveillance powers to within FISA-court limits, and to strengthen his own committee's leverage in prising documents out of the executive branch.
Both of these objects are nakedly, incontrovertibly, political. In fact, they are more political, and more overreaching, (because they explicitly reach another branch of government), than even the worse things Conyers and all his co-inquisitors have managed to dig up after all these months of nonstop investigations of the White House.
Nor do I think it wrong to infer there was prior cooperation between Conyers and the ACLU. Based on what he himself has said, he betrays a guilty knowledge of the true purpose of the ACLU suit, a purpose that had nothing to do with righting a legal wrong.
Conyers sounds satisfied with the dismissal, as if he expected it. I can believe he never believed this lawsuit would succeed serious legal review anyway is, (Judge Taylor's opinion was not serious)--a standard which is the very definition of a frivolous lawsuit. Frivolous or not, it had “served its purpose,” a purpose it can be reasonably concluded Conyers developed with the parties beforehand.
Had a Republican official in similar circumstances ever admitted that a federal lawsuit had been initiated with a bald political object like this, Conyers and Schumer would be baying for Congressional investigations. They'd demand to know how many communications that official had had with the parties in that lawsuit, what and how much they had discussed, and how far up and how far wide the network of political officials or operatives spread--intending to call each and every one of them to testify under oath--over and over again if necessary--and all beneath a Damocles sword of threats about perjury and contempt of Congress. And it would all happen in a context of press conferences and Sunday-morning appearances by Democrats crying “unlawful,” “misleading,” and “abuse of separation of powers.”
Of course nothing like this is going to happen, because of the whole double standard thing.
But the next time you see a sound bite from Schumer, Leahy, Conyers, or Pelosi complaining about presidential abuse of power and disrespect for the rule of law, remember who it is that thinks nothing of perverting the federal courts to gain political advantage over their enemies.
Wednesday, July 04, 2007
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.
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.
Tuesday, July 03, 2007
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.
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.
Monday, July 02, 2007
Religious Bridge-Building, Gaza Style
From the Jerusalem Post:
Gaza's Christians
ELWOOD MCQUAID , THE JERUSALEM POST
Jun. 30, 2007
For years realists on Middle East affairs said a Palestinian state would become a platform for radical Islamist terror and that the most dangerous merchants of death would populate the ministate created by the disastrous decisions finalized in Oslo, Norway, on August 20, 1993.
Fourteen years after Oslo, we are reaping the whirlwind of that awful agreement. Citizens of the Gaza Strip now know the force of diplomatic improprieties that crush lives and destroy future serenity.
In a recent, vicious coup, the Hamas terror organization seized control of Gaza and almost immediately announced its game plan for the new "Hamastan." Israel had already assured a Jewless ministate when it dismembered the Jewish communities there in August and September 2005, forcing 8,000 Israelis out of Gaza. Now Hamas is dealing with the next class of infidels: Christian Arabs.
In a June 19 WorldNetDaily (WND) article titled "Christians warned: Accept Islamic law," Aaron Klein reported what the future holds for Christians gullible enough to believe they could live in Gaza with the same freedoms they had under Israeli governance.
A Hamas leader told WND that Christians can only live safely in Gaza if they accept Islamic law. The speaker was Sheik Abu Saqer, leader of Jihadia Salafiya, an Islamic movement that recently opened a "military wing" to enforce Muslim law there.
Christians in Gaza, Saqer declared, who dare to engage in "missionary activity" will be "dealt with harshly," WND reported. Of course, women will be expected to follow the rules of Islamic dress and will not be allowed in the streets without acceptable garments. His threats came two days after a church and Christian school were attacked following Hamas's seizure of power in the territory.
"I expect," the sheik declared, "our Christian neighbors to understand the new Hamas rule means real changes. They must be ready for Islamic rule if they want to live in peace in Gaza... The situation has now changed 180 degrees."
Klein reported that Saqer accused leaders of the Gaza Christian community of "proselytizing and trying to convert Muslims with funding from American evangelicals."
Jihadia Salafiya is suspected of attacking a UN-run school in Gaza in May that allowed boys and girls to participate in the same sporting event. One person was killed in that attack.
Wrote Klein: "Abu Saqer claimed there was 'no need' for the thousands of Christians in Gaza to maintain a large number of institutions in the territory."
Furthermore, he plans to monitor them to be sure "they are not carrying out missionary activity."
About 2,000 Christians remain in the Gaza Strip. But those numbers will soon diminish significantly.
Any assessment of Islamic extremism will reveal a pattern of oppression and exclusion of any who differ from Islam's religiously intractable position. Therefore, any who operate under the delusion that Islamists will promote or even tolerate other faiths are badly mistaken.
To propose that organizations like Hamas be recognized as peace partners and responsible caretakers of the people over whom they rule is an embarrassment to freedom-loving people and sends a clear message to our enemies. The message is that it is okay to tell Christians and other minorities that they can kiss freedom goodbye, pack up, and get out - all with the blessing of liberal Western religionists and politicians who blindly countenance jihadist imperialism.
Gaza: a case in point.
Gaza's Christians
ELWOOD MCQUAID , THE JERUSALEM POST
Jun. 30, 2007
For years realists on Middle East affairs said a Palestinian state would become a platform for radical Islamist terror and that the most dangerous merchants of death would populate the ministate created by the disastrous decisions finalized in Oslo, Norway, on August 20, 1993.
Fourteen years after Oslo, we are reaping the whirlwind of that awful agreement. Citizens of the Gaza Strip now know the force of diplomatic improprieties that crush lives and destroy future serenity.
In a recent, vicious coup, the Hamas terror organization seized control of Gaza and almost immediately announced its game plan for the new "Hamastan." Israel had already assured a Jewless ministate when it dismembered the Jewish communities there in August and September 2005, forcing 8,000 Israelis out of Gaza. Now Hamas is dealing with the next class of infidels: Christian Arabs.
In a June 19 WorldNetDaily (WND) article titled "Christians warned: Accept Islamic law," Aaron Klein reported what the future holds for Christians gullible enough to believe they could live in Gaza with the same freedoms they had under Israeli governance.
A Hamas leader told WND that Christians can only live safely in Gaza if they accept Islamic law. The speaker was Sheik Abu Saqer, leader of Jihadia Salafiya, an Islamic movement that recently opened a "military wing" to enforce Muslim law there.
Christians in Gaza, Saqer declared, who dare to engage in "missionary activity" will be "dealt with harshly," WND reported. Of course, women will be expected to follow the rules of Islamic dress and will not be allowed in the streets without acceptable garments. His threats came two days after a church and Christian school were attacked following Hamas's seizure of power in the territory.
"I expect," the sheik declared, "our Christian neighbors to understand the new Hamas rule means real changes. They must be ready for Islamic rule if they want to live in peace in Gaza... The situation has now changed 180 degrees."
Klein reported that Saqer accused leaders of the Gaza Christian community of "proselytizing and trying to convert Muslims with funding from American evangelicals."
Jihadia Salafiya is suspected of attacking a UN-run school in Gaza in May that allowed boys and girls to participate in the same sporting event. One person was killed in that attack.
Wrote Klein: "Abu Saqer claimed there was 'no need' for the thousands of Christians in Gaza to maintain a large number of institutions in the territory."
Furthermore, he plans to monitor them to be sure "they are not carrying out missionary activity."
About 2,000 Christians remain in the Gaza Strip. But those numbers will soon diminish significantly.
Any assessment of Islamic extremism will reveal a pattern of oppression and exclusion of any who differ from Islam's religiously intractable position. Therefore, any who operate under the delusion that Islamists will promote or even tolerate other faiths are badly mistaken.
To propose that organizations like Hamas be recognized as peace partners and responsible caretakers of the people over whom they rule is an embarrassment to freedom-loving people and sends a clear message to our enemies. The message is that it is okay to tell Christians and other minorities that they can kiss freedom goodbye, pack up, and get out - all with the blessing of liberal Western religionists and politicians who blindly countenance jihadist imperialism.
Gaza: a case in point.
Zionism's Latest Atrocity--Farfour Is Martyred!
No more squeaking truth to power. Witness the horror for yourself.
So Much for Poor, Uneducated Terrorists
From today's NRO’s Media Blog:
Middle-Class Terrorists [Tom Gross]
After the revelation that two of the terror suspects arrested in Britain over the weekend are doctors, much nonsense is being sprouted by “experts” on British television saying that for terrorists to be educated and middle class is “virtually unprecedented” and that the average terrorist is motivated by such things as “poverty,” “opposition to Zionism,” and so on.
In fact many, possibly most, terrorists and suicide bombers have been educated and middle class – just like many leading communists and Nazis were.
Among several of the more prominent terrorist doctors of recent years:
* Dr Abdel al-Rantissi (who succeed Sheikh Yassin as leader of Hamas): He studied pediatric medicine and genetics at Egypt's Alexandria University, graduating first in his class and was a certified physician.
* Dr Ayman al-Zawahiri (the No. 2 in Al Qaeda). He studied behavior, psychology and pharmacology at Cairo University, graduating in 1974, and earning a Masters degree in surgery in 1978.
Middle-Class Terrorists [Tom Gross]
After the revelation that two of the terror suspects arrested in Britain over the weekend are doctors, much nonsense is being sprouted by “experts” on British television saying that for terrorists to be educated and middle class is “virtually unprecedented” and that the average terrorist is motivated by such things as “poverty,” “opposition to Zionism,” and so on.
In fact many, possibly most, terrorists and suicide bombers have been educated and middle class – just like many leading communists and Nazis were.
Among several of the more prominent terrorist doctors of recent years:
* Dr Abdel al-Rantissi (who succeed Sheikh Yassin as leader of Hamas): He studied pediatric medicine and genetics at Egypt's Alexandria University, graduating first in his class and was a certified physician.
* Dr Ayman al-Zawahiri (the No. 2 in Al Qaeda). He studied behavior, psychology and pharmacology at Cairo University, graduating in 1974, and earning a Masters degree in surgery in 1978.
'I was a fanatic...I know their thinking, says former radical Islamist'
This column ran today in the UK's Daily Mail.
I was a fanatic...I know their thinking, says former radical Islamist
By HASSAN BUTT - More by this author » Last updated at 07:38am on 2nd July 2007
When I was still a member of what is probably best termed the British Jihadi Network - a series of British Muslim terrorist groups linked by a single ideology - I remember how we used to laugh in celebration whenever people on TV proclaimed that the sole cause for Islamic acts of terror like 9/11, the Madrid bombings and 7/7 was Western foreign policy.
By blaming the Government for our actions, those who pushed this "Blair's bombs" line did our propaganda work for us.
More important, they also helped to draw away any critical examination from the real engine of our violence: Islamic theology.
The attempts to cause mass destruction in London and Glasgow are so reminiscent of other recent British Islamic extremist plots that they are likely to have been carried out by my former peers.
And as with previous terror attacks, people are again saying that violence carried out by Muslims is all to do with foreign policy.
For example, on Saturday on Radio 4's Today programme, the Mayor of London, Ken Livingstone, said: "What all our intelligence shows about the opinions of disaffected young Muslims is the main driving force is not Afghanistan, it is mainly Iraq."
I left the British Jihadi Network in February 2006 because I realised that its members had simply become mindless killers. But if I were still fighting for their cause, I'd be laughing once again.
Mohammed Sidique Khan met with the author on two separate occasions
Mohammad Sidique Khan, the leader of the July 7 bombings, and I were both part of the network - I met him on two occasions.
And though many British extremists are angered by the deaths of fellow Muslim across the world, what drove me and many others to plot acts of extreme terror within Britain and abroad was a sense that we were fighting for the creation of a revolutionary worldwide Islamic state that would dispense Islamic justice.
If we were interested in justice, you may ask, how did this continuing violence come to be the means of promoting such a (flawed) Utopian goal?
How do Islamic radicals justify such terror in the name of their religion?
There isn't enough room to outline everything here, but the foundation of extremist reasoning rests upon a model of the world in which you are either a believer or an infidel.
Formal Islamic theology, unlike Christian theology, does not allow for the separation of state and religion: they are considered to be one and the same.
For centuries, the reasoning of Islamic jurists has set down rules of interaction between Dar ul-Islam (the Land of Islam) and Dar ul-Kufr (the Land of Unbelief) to cover almost every matter of trade, peace and war.
But what radicals and extremists do is to take this two steps further. Their first step has been to argue that, since there is no pure Islamic state, the whole world must be Dar ul-Kufr (The Land of Unbelief).
Step two: since Islam must declare war on unbelief, they have declared war upon the whole world.
Along with many of my former peers, I was taught by Pakistani and British radical preachers that this reclassification of the globe as a Land of War (Dar ul-Harb) allows any Muslim to destroy the sanctity of the five rights that every human is granted under Islam: life, wealth, land, mind and belief.
In Dar ul-Harb, anything goes, including the treachery and cowardice of attacking civilians.
The notion of a global battlefield has been a source of friction for Muslims living in Britain.
For decades, radicals have been exploiting the tensions between Islamic theology and the modern secular state - typically by starting debate with the question: "Are you British or Muslim?"
But the main reason why radicals have managed to increase their following is because most Muslim institutions in Britain just don't want to talk about theology.
They refuse to broach the difficult and often complex truth that Islam can be interpreted as condoning violence against the unbeliever - and instead repeat the mantra that Islam is peace and hope that all of this debate will go away.
This has left the territory open for radicals to claim as their own. I should know because, as a former extremist recruiter, I repeatedly came across those who had tried to raise these issues with mosque authorities only to be banned from their grounds.
Every time this happened it felt like a moral and religious victory for us because it served as a recruiting sergeant for extremism.
Outside Britain, there are those who try to reverse this two-step revisionism.
A handful of scholars from the Middle East have tried to put radicalism back in the box by saying that the rules of war devised so long ago by Islamic jurists were always conceived with the existence of an Islamic state in mind, a state which would supposedly regulate jihad in a responsible Islamic fashion.
In other words, individual Muslims don't have the authority to go around declaring global war in the name of Islam.
But there is a more fundamental reasoning that has struck me as a far more potent argument because it involves recognising the reality of the world: Muslims don't actually live in the bipolar world of the Middle Ages any more.
The fact is that Muslims in Britain are citizens of this country. We are no longer migrants in a Land of Unbelief.
For my generation, we were born here, raised here, schooled here, we work here and we'll stay here.
But more than that, on a historically unprecedented scale, Muslims in Britain have been allowed to assert their religious identity through clothing, the construction of mosques, the building of cemeteries and equal rights in law.
However, it isn't enough for responsible Muslims to say that, because they feel at home in Britain, they can simply ignore those passages of the Koran which instruct on killing unbelievers.
Because so many in the Muslim community refuse to challenge centuries-old theological arguments, the tensions between Islamic theology and the modern world grow larger every day.
I believe that the issue of terrorism can be easily demystified if Muslims and non-Muslims start openly to discuss the ideas that fuel terrorism.
Crucially, the Muslim community in Britain must slap itself awake from its state of denial and realise there is no shame in admitting the extremism within our families, communities and worldwide co-religionists.
If our country is going to take on radicals and violent extremists, Muslim scholars must go back to the books and come forward with a refashioned set of rules and a revised understanding of the rights and responsibilities of Muslims whose homes and souls are firmly planted in what I'd like to term the Land of Co-existence.
And when this new theological territory is opened up, Western Muslims will be able to liberate themselves from defunct models of the world, rewrite the rules of interaction and perhaps we will discover that the concept of killing in the name of Islam is no more than an anachronism.
I was a fanatic...I know their thinking, says former radical Islamist
By HASSAN BUTT - More by this author » Last updated at 07:38am on 2nd July 2007
When I was still a member of what is probably best termed the British Jihadi Network - a series of British Muslim terrorist groups linked by a single ideology - I remember how we used to laugh in celebration whenever people on TV proclaimed that the sole cause for Islamic acts of terror like 9/11, the Madrid bombings and 7/7 was Western foreign policy.
By blaming the Government for our actions, those who pushed this "Blair's bombs" line did our propaganda work for us.
More important, they also helped to draw away any critical examination from the real engine of our violence: Islamic theology.
The attempts to cause mass destruction in London and Glasgow are so reminiscent of other recent British Islamic extremist plots that they are likely to have been carried out by my former peers.
And as with previous terror attacks, people are again saying that violence carried out by Muslims is all to do with foreign policy.
For example, on Saturday on Radio 4's Today programme, the Mayor of London, Ken Livingstone, said: "What all our intelligence shows about the opinions of disaffected young Muslims is the main driving force is not Afghanistan, it is mainly Iraq."
I left the British Jihadi Network in February 2006 because I realised that its members had simply become mindless killers. But if I were still fighting for their cause, I'd be laughing once again.
Mohammed Sidique Khan met with the author on two separate occasions
Mohammad Sidique Khan, the leader of the July 7 bombings, and I were both part of the network - I met him on two occasions.
And though many British extremists are angered by the deaths of fellow Muslim across the world, what drove me and many others to plot acts of extreme terror within Britain and abroad was a sense that we were fighting for the creation of a revolutionary worldwide Islamic state that would dispense Islamic justice.
If we were interested in justice, you may ask, how did this continuing violence come to be the means of promoting such a (flawed) Utopian goal?
How do Islamic radicals justify such terror in the name of their religion?
There isn't enough room to outline everything here, but the foundation of extremist reasoning rests upon a model of the world in which you are either a believer or an infidel.
Formal Islamic theology, unlike Christian theology, does not allow for the separation of state and religion: they are considered to be one and the same.
For centuries, the reasoning of Islamic jurists has set down rules of interaction between Dar ul-Islam (the Land of Islam) and Dar ul-Kufr (the Land of Unbelief) to cover almost every matter of trade, peace and war.
But what radicals and extremists do is to take this two steps further. Their first step has been to argue that, since there is no pure Islamic state, the whole world must be Dar ul-Kufr (The Land of Unbelief).
Step two: since Islam must declare war on unbelief, they have declared war upon the whole world.
Along with many of my former peers, I was taught by Pakistani and British radical preachers that this reclassification of the globe as a Land of War (Dar ul-Harb) allows any Muslim to destroy the sanctity of the five rights that every human is granted under Islam: life, wealth, land, mind and belief.
In Dar ul-Harb, anything goes, including the treachery and cowardice of attacking civilians.
The notion of a global battlefield has been a source of friction for Muslims living in Britain.
For decades, radicals have been exploiting the tensions between Islamic theology and the modern secular state - typically by starting debate with the question: "Are you British or Muslim?"
But the main reason why radicals have managed to increase their following is because most Muslim institutions in Britain just don't want to talk about theology.
They refuse to broach the difficult and often complex truth that Islam can be interpreted as condoning violence against the unbeliever - and instead repeat the mantra that Islam is peace and hope that all of this debate will go away.
This has left the territory open for radicals to claim as their own. I should know because, as a former extremist recruiter, I repeatedly came across those who had tried to raise these issues with mosque authorities only to be banned from their grounds.
Every time this happened it felt like a moral and religious victory for us because it served as a recruiting sergeant for extremism.
Outside Britain, there are those who try to reverse this two-step revisionism.
A handful of scholars from the Middle East have tried to put radicalism back in the box by saying that the rules of war devised so long ago by Islamic jurists were always conceived with the existence of an Islamic state in mind, a state which would supposedly regulate jihad in a responsible Islamic fashion.
In other words, individual Muslims don't have the authority to go around declaring global war in the name of Islam.
But there is a more fundamental reasoning that has struck me as a far more potent argument because it involves recognising the reality of the world: Muslims don't actually live in the bipolar world of the Middle Ages any more.
The fact is that Muslims in Britain are citizens of this country. We are no longer migrants in a Land of Unbelief.
For my generation, we were born here, raised here, schooled here, we work here and we'll stay here.
But more than that, on a historically unprecedented scale, Muslims in Britain have been allowed to assert their religious identity through clothing, the construction of mosques, the building of cemeteries and equal rights in law.
However, it isn't enough for responsible Muslims to say that, because they feel at home in Britain, they can simply ignore those passages of the Koran which instruct on killing unbelievers.
Because so many in the Muslim community refuse to challenge centuries-old theological arguments, the tensions between Islamic theology and the modern world grow larger every day.
I believe that the issue of terrorism can be easily demystified if Muslims and non-Muslims start openly to discuss the ideas that fuel terrorism.
Crucially, the Muslim community in Britain must slap itself awake from its state of denial and realise there is no shame in admitting the extremism within our families, communities and worldwide co-religionists.
If our country is going to take on radicals and violent extremists, Muslim scholars must go back to the books and come forward with a refashioned set of rules and a revised understanding of the rights and responsibilities of Muslims whose homes and souls are firmly planted in what I'd like to term the Land of Co-existence.
And when this new theological territory is opened up, Western Muslims will be able to liberate themselves from defunct models of the world, rewrite the rules of interaction and perhaps we will discover that the concept of killing in the name of Islam is no more than an anachronism.
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?
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?
Blair to Islamists: 'You Are the Oppressors'
As former PM Tony Blair rides off into the sunset--or worse, into the truly exitless twilight of the Arab-Israeli “peace process”--we’re gratified to see him making one last charge for common sense against the apologists for Islamists as perpetual victims of the Western countries in which they have freely chosen to live. From the Guardian:
Blair launches stinging attack on 'absurd' British Islamists
Nicholas Watt, political editor
Sunday July 1, 2007
Observer
Tony Blair has launched a powerful attack on 'absurd' British Islamists who have nurtured a false 'sense of grievance' that they are being oppressed by Britain and the United States.
In his most outspoken remarks on Islamists, the former Prime Minister warns that Britain is in danger of losing the battle against terrorists unless mainstream society confronts the threat.
Blair's remarks, in which he also attacks some civil liberty campaigners as 'loopy loo', were made in a Channel 4 documentary recorded last Tuesday on the eve of his departure from Downing Street.
'The idea that as a Muslim in this country that you don't have the freedom to express your religion or your views, I mean you've got far more freedom in this country than you do in most Muslim countries,' Blair told Observer columnist Will Hutton, who presents the documentary.
'The reason we are finding it hard to win this battle is that we're not actually fighting it properly. We're not actually standing up to these people and saying, "It's not just your methods that are wrong, your ideas are absurd. Nobody is oppressing you. Your sense of grievance isn't justified."'
Blair held out the example of the overthrow of the Taliban in Afghanistan - criticised by Islamists as an example of the heavy-handed imperial West oppressing Muslims - to highlight unfounded claims of grievance.
He asked how it is possible to claim that Afghanistan's Muslims are being oppressed when the Taliban 'used to execute teachers for teaching girls in schools'.
Blair added: 'How are [we] oppressing them? You're oppressing them when you support the people who are trying to blow them up.'
Blair, who normally chooses his language carefully when he talks about Islamists, also takes a swipe at critics who accused him of undermining civil liberties. 'When I'm trying to change the law in order to make it easier to deport people who engage in terrorism - the idea that that's an assault on hundreds of years of British civil liberties is completely absurd. Some of what is written on this is loopy-loo in its extremism.'
The Guardian’s political editor Nicholas Watt obviously regrets Blair’s calling the charge of critics that he’s been assaulting British civil liberties “absurd,” as Watt inserts the aside that Blair “normally chooses his language carefully when he talks about Islamists.” But there’s no reason to doubt Blair chose his words carefully in this case as well. As Ann Althouse remarks at her blog, “’absurd' is sometimes the right word.”
Although I might have recommended a term with a little more bite than “loopy-loo” to describe the logic of thepro-Islamist critics, the expression reveals just a sliver of the frustration that Mr. Blair has felt after so many years of having to hold back.
Blair launches stinging attack on 'absurd' British Islamists
Nicholas Watt, political editor
Sunday July 1, 2007
Observer
Tony Blair has launched a powerful attack on 'absurd' British Islamists who have nurtured a false 'sense of grievance' that they are being oppressed by Britain and the United States.
In his most outspoken remarks on Islamists, the former Prime Minister warns that Britain is in danger of losing the battle against terrorists unless mainstream society confronts the threat.
Blair's remarks, in which he also attacks some civil liberty campaigners as 'loopy loo', were made in a Channel 4 documentary recorded last Tuesday on the eve of his departure from Downing Street.
'The idea that as a Muslim in this country that you don't have the freedom to express your religion or your views, I mean you've got far more freedom in this country than you do in most Muslim countries,' Blair told Observer columnist Will Hutton, who presents the documentary.
'The reason we are finding it hard to win this battle is that we're not actually fighting it properly. We're not actually standing up to these people and saying, "It's not just your methods that are wrong, your ideas are absurd. Nobody is oppressing you. Your sense of grievance isn't justified."'
Blair held out the example of the overthrow of the Taliban in Afghanistan - criticised by Islamists as an example of the heavy-handed imperial West oppressing Muslims - to highlight unfounded claims of grievance.
He asked how it is possible to claim that Afghanistan's Muslims are being oppressed when the Taliban 'used to execute teachers for teaching girls in schools'.
Blair added: 'How are [we] oppressing them? You're oppressing them when you support the people who are trying to blow them up.'
Blair, who normally chooses his language carefully when he talks about Islamists, also takes a swipe at critics who accused him of undermining civil liberties. 'When I'm trying to change the law in order to make it easier to deport people who engage in terrorism - the idea that that's an assault on hundreds of years of British civil liberties is completely absurd. Some of what is written on this is loopy-loo in its extremism.'
The Guardian’s political editor Nicholas Watt obviously regrets Blair’s calling the charge of critics that he’s been assaulting British civil liberties “absurd,” as Watt inserts the aside that Blair “normally chooses his language carefully when he talks about Islamists.” But there’s no reason to doubt Blair chose his words carefully in this case as well. As Ann Althouse remarks at her blog, “’absurd' is sometimes the right word.”
Although I might have recommended a term with a little more bite than “loopy-loo” to describe the logic of thepro-Islamist critics, the expression reveals just a sliver of the frustration that Mr. Blair has felt after so many years of having to hold back.
Thursday, June 28, 2007
Vatican on Islam: 'We're Really Just Friends'
It’s often said that God is in the details.
With that in mind I draw some encouragement from Pope Benedict XVI’s new appointment of Cardinal Jean-Louis Tauran to head the Vatican office, the Pontifical Council for Interreligious Dialogue (PCID), specializing in relations with Muslims. (“Vatican to back moderate Muslims”).
The reason I’m encouraged is that Cardinal Tauran’s first remarks, as reported by the AP, point to a badly needed dose of realism in the Church’s approach to Islam:
"We must help our Muslim friends rediscover the roots of their religion and therefore favor these moderate Muslims achieve a dialogue that will bring a civil and harmonious cohabitation," Cardinal Jean-Louis Tauran said.
Okay, it comes across a lot like the same old skim-milk at first. But for a Church that has raised the bond of husband and wife from a mere human contract to the status of a sacrament, the purely earthbound, provisional, and civil arrangements captured by the expression “cohabitation” couldn’t be more clear. This is not a relationship made in heaven.
More important still, Cardinal Tauran refers to “our Muslim friends,” a sea-change from the way Church leaders until recently, and for far too long, have blithely referred to Muslims as our “brothers.” No more pretense of a spiritual bond here. Mohammed is not Christ’s brother, nor ours. Instead, let’s see if we can just manage to co-exist on the same planet without too much bloodshed.
The PCID was formerly headed by Archbishop Michael Fitzgerald, whom lots of credential-happy experts praised as “terrific” (“From red Guccis to flip-flops”). The most prominent, Jesuit Fr. Thomas Reese, called the decision to reassign Fitzgerald as “The Pope's worst decision so far.” The leftist press loves to call Fr. Reese “an expert on the Vatican,” (“Quiet pope confounds expectations”). But that’s like calling Chuck Schumer an expert on George Bush’s Justice Department. Virulent hatred hardly qualifies as expertise.
The truth is that Fr. Reese, and critics like him, subscribe to the view that the Church would be much better off in the hands of real experts, and kept out of the hands of amateurs, presumably to help correct Christ’s culturally-conditioned shortsightedness two thousand years ago when he turned things over to an unschooled fisherman and a tentmaking Pharisee with anti-intellectual tendencies.
This kind of snobbery is why Fr. Reese could see nothing more in Pope Benedict’s brilliant speech in Regensburg last year than the Vatican saying “something dumb about Muslims.” Fr. Reese thinks "It would be better for Pope Benedict to have Fitzgerald close to him," (“Pope remarks reveal harder stance”), Benedict preferably wearing a leash the Archbishop could yank whenever the Vicar of Christ was about to say something wrong.
Yet I wonder where Fr. Reese and those who covet so deeply the valuable Islamic-Christian dialogue can point to any progress, anywhere, that has resulted from it?
Pope Benedict reassigned Archbishop Fitzgerald as papal nuncio to Egypt in February 2006, I'm figuring as a polite way of deposing him as head of the PCID, which the Vatican then said it was re-organizing. After a respectful pause, the Pope then installed the Cardinal.
I’m not a follower of Vatican intrigues, generally. I do know that, just as an American President, in spite of his best intentions, is constantly being foiled by the obstruction and disobedience of lifers at the State Department, so too do Popes find themselves swimming against the tide of the traditions, obstructions, and intrigues of the world’s oldest bureaucracy in Rome. Getting something big accomplished in Rome isn't always easy, and usually is a sign of supernatural intervention. (And supernatural intervention is invariably accompanied by yowls of pain from all the Reese-types declaring that the bold action was not approved by the scholars and the experts).
So I view this change in the Vatican's attitude towards Islam as a long-awaited victory of common sense, (not to mention sound theology), over the experts. If possible, the ecumencial experts on Islam have been even more wrong about Islamic brotherhood with infidels than the climate experts have been on global warming.
I'm wondering, too, if, along with wanting just to reform the PDIC on a more rational basis, the Pope’s reassignment of the Archbishop also had a pastoral end in mind.
Perhaps the Pope sensed that one of the dangers of expertise in a foreign culture is over-identification with the other, and a loss of memory of one's own identity. Perhaps the Archbishop needed a break from discussing the finer points of Arabic and the hadiths over tea with the world’s imams and sheikhs, and a reminder of the people being ground unseen beneath their feet.
There’s no way for me to know for certain is this is what the Pope had in mind. Yet, (Fr. Reese’s endorsement of Archbishop Fitzgerald’s qualifications as the Church’s premiere expert on Islam aside), I have no reason to doubt that, as a simple cleric, the Archbishop has every intention of accepting his new assignment with joyful obedience, (not something Fr. Reese has much expertise in).
And the way the Archbishop describes his new assignment is very interesting:
“’My task is to gather information on the political and social situation in the region which is useful for the Holy See, and to present the position of the Holy See on issues like human rights, religious liberty and the question of peace to the government of Egypt and the Arab League.’”
(“Dialogue with Islam”).
It’s easy for me to imagine that, between his mission to gather, first-hand, the facts on religious liberty and human rights in Egypt, (where there are neither), and the mission to stand for the Church’s exalted view of religious liberty and human freedom, (to which Islam is diametrically opposed) he is not going to be able to avoid having some of his more sanguine opinions about Islam revised a bit.
And if you wanted to send someone on a tour of of dhimmitude, and Islamic social and political dysfunction, all in one spot, one could not pick better than Egypt.
Freedom House’s Nina Shea’s most recent briefing to the House of Representatives in May of this year, “Religious Freedom in Egypt: Recent Developments”, describes religious freedom conditions in Egypt as “poor,” where violations against religious minorities and even non-conforming Muslims are widespread, along with “societal intolerance of and violence against Coptic Orthodox and other Christian denominations by Muslim extremists,” and the continued prevalence of anti-Semitic materials. The government consistently fails to prosecute growing Muslim violence against Christians.
As for Islamic-Christian “dialogue” in Egypt, Muslim-Egyptian Mona Eltahawy describes the dialogue as needed, but still non-existent:
“When an Egyptian nun coming out of a prayer service at St. George's Church in Alexandria is stabbed by a Muslim man in his 20s shouting the requisite ‘God is great,’ we need to talk.
“When thousands of Muslims attack seven churches in two Alexandria neighborhoods after someone distributes a DVD of a play deemed offensive to Islam (a play that was staged two years ago), and when three Muslims die and dozens are injured after riot police fire tear gas and use batons to dispel 5,000 protestors outside St. George's, we need to talk.
“When Christians in Alexandria, once a cosmopolitan home to Muslims, Christians and Jews alike, are afraid to leave their homes and when women remove crucifixes out of fear of violence and insult, we need to talk.
“I could go on, but you get my drift.” (“Egypt's Christian-Muslim divide”)
And then a spokesman for an Egyptian organization called the Coptic News has said the following to WorldNetDaily:
“[B]ecause Egypt's constitution says that laws derive from the Quran, the persecution of Christians there is not only allowed, but endorsed, by government officials.
"’In the last 10 years, more than 5,000 Christians have been massacred in Egypt,’ he told WND. ‘Hundreds of businesses and homes first have been looted, then burned and destroyed. Churches have been burned and destroyed.
"’And you know what? Not one Muslim has been indicted, let alone convicted,’ he said.” ("Christian Fears Torture If Deported to Egypt”).
Nina Shea also describes the classic features of Egyptian Christians reduced to dhimmi status:
In addition to violence, Christians face official and societal discrimination. Christians are rarely found in high-level government and military posts, or in the upper ranks of the security services and armed forces. There are only a handful of Christians in the upper ranks of the security services and armed forces; one Christian governor out of 26; one elected Member of Parliament out of 444 seats; no known university presidents or deans; and very few legislators and judges. In addition, for all Christian groups, government permission must still be sought to build a new church or repair an existing church, and the approval process for church construction is time consuming and inflexible. Under Egyptian law, Muslim men can marry Christian women but Muslim women are prohibited from marrying Christian men. In February 2007, Muslim groups reportedly set fire to several Christian-owned shops in southern Egypt due to rumors of a relationship between a Muslim woman and a Coptic Christian man. Seven Muslims and one Coptic Christian were arrested on suspicion of taking part in these attacks. As in other case, it remains to be seen if justice will be served.
I don’t doubt that Archbishop Fitzgerald is now spending much of his time listening to the pleas of Egyptian Christians and other nonMuslims detailing for him the other side of the religion and the culture he has spent so many years loving, as only an expert and scholar can love.
But scholarship aside, the Archbishop started out long ago as a missionary to Africa, and if he’s in any way worthy of the title of bishop, he’ll take a lesson from the persecuted Egyptians he meets; maybe someday he’ll have something better to contribute to a genuine dialogue with Islam. Maybe he'll learn to look behind the deceitful smiles of the imams and the sheikhs.
Am I exaggerating the significance of the Vatican describing Muslims as friends instead of brothers? Would I be better off just crabbing that Islam has shown itself no more capable of friendship with the Christian west than it has of brotherhood, and that the idea of friendship is just as naïve as that of brotherhood?
I think the distinction is an important one. At least it's a small step in the right direction. And, I’m making a choice to be optimistic.
In a war that one side has been losing for a long time--losing from unawareness and ignorance of the enemy--to those trying to stave off final defeat any reversal of trend is a welcome step towards victory .
With that in mind I draw some encouragement from Pope Benedict XVI’s new appointment of Cardinal Jean-Louis Tauran to head the Vatican office, the Pontifical Council for Interreligious Dialogue (PCID), specializing in relations with Muslims. (“Vatican to back moderate Muslims”).
The reason I’m encouraged is that Cardinal Tauran’s first remarks, as reported by the AP, point to a badly needed dose of realism in the Church’s approach to Islam:
"We must help our Muslim friends rediscover the roots of their religion and therefore favor these moderate Muslims achieve a dialogue that will bring a civil and harmonious cohabitation," Cardinal Jean-Louis Tauran said.
Okay, it comes across a lot like the same old skim-milk at first. But for a Church that has raised the bond of husband and wife from a mere human contract to the status of a sacrament, the purely earthbound, provisional, and civil arrangements captured by the expression “cohabitation” couldn’t be more clear. This is not a relationship made in heaven.
More important still, Cardinal Tauran refers to “our Muslim friends,” a sea-change from the way Church leaders until recently, and for far too long, have blithely referred to Muslims as our “brothers.” No more pretense of a spiritual bond here. Mohammed is not Christ’s brother, nor ours. Instead, let’s see if we can just manage to co-exist on the same planet without too much bloodshed.
The PCID was formerly headed by Archbishop Michael Fitzgerald, whom lots of credential-happy experts praised as “terrific” (“From red Guccis to flip-flops”). The most prominent, Jesuit Fr. Thomas Reese, called the decision to reassign Fitzgerald as “The Pope's worst decision so far.” The leftist press loves to call Fr. Reese “an expert on the Vatican,” (“Quiet pope confounds expectations”). But that’s like calling Chuck Schumer an expert on George Bush’s Justice Department. Virulent hatred hardly qualifies as expertise.
The truth is that Fr. Reese, and critics like him, subscribe to the view that the Church would be much better off in the hands of real experts, and kept out of the hands of amateurs, presumably to help correct Christ’s culturally-conditioned shortsightedness two thousand years ago when he turned things over to an unschooled fisherman and a tentmaking Pharisee with anti-intellectual tendencies.
This kind of snobbery is why Fr. Reese could see nothing more in Pope Benedict’s brilliant speech in Regensburg last year than the Vatican saying “something dumb about Muslims.” Fr. Reese thinks "It would be better for Pope Benedict to have Fitzgerald close to him," (“Pope remarks reveal harder stance”), Benedict preferably wearing a leash the Archbishop could yank whenever the Vicar of Christ was about to say something wrong.
Yet I wonder where Fr. Reese and those who covet so deeply the valuable Islamic-Christian dialogue can point to any progress, anywhere, that has resulted from it?
Pope Benedict reassigned Archbishop Fitzgerald as papal nuncio to Egypt in February 2006, I'm figuring as a polite way of deposing him as head of the PCID, which the Vatican then said it was re-organizing. After a respectful pause, the Pope then installed the Cardinal.
I’m not a follower of Vatican intrigues, generally. I do know that, just as an American President, in spite of his best intentions, is constantly being foiled by the obstruction and disobedience of lifers at the State Department, so too do Popes find themselves swimming against the tide of the traditions, obstructions, and intrigues of the world’s oldest bureaucracy in Rome. Getting something big accomplished in Rome isn't always easy, and usually is a sign of supernatural intervention. (And supernatural intervention is invariably accompanied by yowls of pain from all the Reese-types declaring that the bold action was not approved by the scholars and the experts).
So I view this change in the Vatican's attitude towards Islam as a long-awaited victory of common sense, (not to mention sound theology), over the experts. If possible, the ecumencial experts on Islam have been even more wrong about Islamic brotherhood with infidels than the climate experts have been on global warming.
I'm wondering, too, if, along with wanting just to reform the PDIC on a more rational basis, the Pope’s reassignment of the Archbishop also had a pastoral end in mind.
Perhaps the Pope sensed that one of the dangers of expertise in a foreign culture is over-identification with the other, and a loss of memory of one's own identity. Perhaps the Archbishop needed a break from discussing the finer points of Arabic and the hadiths over tea with the world’s imams and sheikhs, and a reminder of the people being ground unseen beneath their feet.
There’s no way for me to know for certain is this is what the Pope had in mind. Yet, (Fr. Reese’s endorsement of Archbishop Fitzgerald’s qualifications as the Church’s premiere expert on Islam aside), I have no reason to doubt that, as a simple cleric, the Archbishop has every intention of accepting his new assignment with joyful obedience, (not something Fr. Reese has much expertise in).
And the way the Archbishop describes his new assignment is very interesting:
“’My task is to gather information on the political and social situation in the region which is useful for the Holy See, and to present the position of the Holy See on issues like human rights, religious liberty and the question of peace to the government of Egypt and the Arab League.’”
(“Dialogue with Islam”).
It’s easy for me to imagine that, between his mission to gather, first-hand, the facts on religious liberty and human rights in Egypt, (where there are neither), and the mission to stand for the Church’s exalted view of religious liberty and human freedom, (to which Islam is diametrically opposed) he is not going to be able to avoid having some of his more sanguine opinions about Islam revised a bit.
And if you wanted to send someone on a tour of of dhimmitude, and Islamic social and political dysfunction, all in one spot, one could not pick better than Egypt.
Freedom House’s Nina Shea’s most recent briefing to the House of Representatives in May of this year, “Religious Freedom in Egypt: Recent Developments”, describes religious freedom conditions in Egypt as “poor,” where violations against religious minorities and even non-conforming Muslims are widespread, along with “societal intolerance of and violence against Coptic Orthodox and other Christian denominations by Muslim extremists,” and the continued prevalence of anti-Semitic materials. The government consistently fails to prosecute growing Muslim violence against Christians.
As for Islamic-Christian “dialogue” in Egypt, Muslim-Egyptian Mona Eltahawy describes the dialogue as needed, but still non-existent:
“When an Egyptian nun coming out of a prayer service at St. George's Church in Alexandria is stabbed by a Muslim man in his 20s shouting the requisite ‘God is great,’ we need to talk.
“When thousands of Muslims attack seven churches in two Alexandria neighborhoods after someone distributes a DVD of a play deemed offensive to Islam (a play that was staged two years ago), and when three Muslims die and dozens are injured after riot police fire tear gas and use batons to dispel 5,000 protestors outside St. George's, we need to talk.
“When Christians in Alexandria, once a cosmopolitan home to Muslims, Christians and Jews alike, are afraid to leave their homes and when women remove crucifixes out of fear of violence and insult, we need to talk.
“I could go on, but you get my drift.” (“Egypt's Christian-Muslim divide”)
And then a spokesman for an Egyptian organization called the Coptic News has said the following to WorldNetDaily:
“[B]ecause Egypt's constitution says that laws derive from the Quran, the persecution of Christians there is not only allowed, but endorsed, by government officials.
"’In the last 10 years, more than 5,000 Christians have been massacred in Egypt,’ he told WND. ‘Hundreds of businesses and homes first have been looted, then burned and destroyed. Churches have been burned and destroyed.
"’And you know what? Not one Muslim has been indicted, let alone convicted,’ he said.” ("Christian Fears Torture If Deported to Egypt”).
Nina Shea also describes the classic features of Egyptian Christians reduced to dhimmi status:
In addition to violence, Christians face official and societal discrimination. Christians are rarely found in high-level government and military posts, or in the upper ranks of the security services and armed forces. There are only a handful of Christians in the upper ranks of the security services and armed forces; one Christian governor out of 26; one elected Member of Parliament out of 444 seats; no known university presidents or deans; and very few legislators and judges. In addition, for all Christian groups, government permission must still be sought to build a new church or repair an existing church, and the approval process for church construction is time consuming and inflexible. Under Egyptian law, Muslim men can marry Christian women but Muslim women are prohibited from marrying Christian men. In February 2007, Muslim groups reportedly set fire to several Christian-owned shops in southern Egypt due to rumors of a relationship between a Muslim woman and a Coptic Christian man. Seven Muslims and one Coptic Christian were arrested on suspicion of taking part in these attacks. As in other case, it remains to be seen if justice will be served.
I don’t doubt that Archbishop Fitzgerald is now spending much of his time listening to the pleas of Egyptian Christians and other nonMuslims detailing for him the other side of the religion and the culture he has spent so many years loving, as only an expert and scholar can love.
But scholarship aside, the Archbishop started out long ago as a missionary to Africa, and if he’s in any way worthy of the title of bishop, he’ll take a lesson from the persecuted Egyptians he meets; maybe someday he’ll have something better to contribute to a genuine dialogue with Islam. Maybe he'll learn to look behind the deceitful smiles of the imams and the sheikhs.
Am I exaggerating the significance of the Vatican describing Muslims as friends instead of brothers? Would I be better off just crabbing that Islam has shown itself no more capable of friendship with the Christian west than it has of brotherhood, and that the idea of friendship is just as naïve as that of brotherhood?
I think the distinction is an important one. At least it's a small step in the right direction. And, I’m making a choice to be optimistic.
In a war that one side has been losing for a long time--losing from unawareness and ignorance of the enemy--to those trying to stave off final defeat any reversal of trend is a welcome step towards victory .
Monday, June 25, 2007
Deja Vu at the Beeb
The BBC has just conducted another study reaching a conclusion that its reporters are biased, displaying anti-Americanism, partiality towards Islam, and advocating on other pet issues. ("BBC report finds bias within corporation ")
Yes, we've been here before.
Previous slanderous statements against Tony Blair's government about "sexing up" intelligence to justify the decision to go to war in Iraq were thoroughly demolished by two independent inquires in the UK, first by Lord Hutton, ("Davies threatens to sue Campbell for libel"), and then by Lord Butler. ("Biters Bit").
The Lord Hutton report led to the resignation in disgrace of the chairman of the BBC. The Butler report settled once and for all that the infamous sixteen words about Iraq's effort to buy uranium from Africa were "well-founded," and not lies at all. "In the resulting furor, Gavyn Davies, the chairman of the BBC, and Greg Dyke, the BBC director general, along with the journalist responsible for the report, Andrew Gilligan, resigned."
The latest report finds that
"The BBC has failed to promote proper debate on major political issues because of the inherent liberal culture of its staff."
The report further states,
“There is a tendency to 'group think’ with too many staff inhabiting a shared space and comfort zone.
"A staff impartiality seminar held last year is also documented in the report, at which executives admitted they would broadcast images of the Bible being thrown away but not the Koran, in case Muslims were offended. "
In September 2005 Tony Blair attacked the BBC over its coverage of Hurricane Katrina, which he characterized as "'full of hatred of America' and 'gloating' at the country's plight." ("Blair attacks BBC for 'anti-US bias'"). Even Bill Clinton agreed, attacking the tone of the BBC's coverage of Katrina at a media seminar he was hosting, "He said it had been 'stacked up' to criticise the federal government's slow response."
(Which is nothing, really, to what the American press has done with Katrina, that is to turn it into a myth of racial genocide only slightly worse than Stalin's forced starvation of the Ukraine).
Yet it is the right that is forever being accused of being out of touch with reality, and it was George Bush whom Newseek portrayed on its cover inside a bubble, and called "the most isolated president in modern history." ("Newsweek’s Bush-In-The-Bubble Cover"). As we have been told for six years now, the President listens to no one (except in his worst moments, according to the more bilious and hysterical commentators, to Jesus), and consequently never hears a word that doesn't conform to his own hidebound policies.
On the other hand, we have also been told for six years that a large minority of the President's closest advisers, generals, intelligence chiefs, and foreign policy experts, (a minority that somehow is always "growing"), are soundly contradicting him all day long on every point of policy, but to no avail.
There's a minor historico-critical controversy over whether or not the famous New Yorker movie critic Pauline Kael ever actually said, of the 1972 landslide victory of Richard Nixon, that she was amazed by it, as she didn't know anyone who voted for Nixon. The revisionist version of this remark is that she didn't express amazement at Dick Nixon's election, but merely abstained from commenting on him, replying "I live in a rather special world. I only know one person who voted for Nixon. Where they are I don't know. They're outside my ken. But sometimes when I'm in a theater I can feel them."
I don't see how this version makes her look any better, as the latter comment is a frank admission that she lacked a single personal acquaintance amongst any of the 60% plus of the American electorate who voted for Nixon over George McGovern, (including New York state)--except she felt some kind of bad-vibe shudder when forced to occupy the same movie theater with one. This was the whole point of the jibe: liberals simply don't come outside their cliques to show any interest in the townies or the kitchen help--the great unwashed who are simply outside the ken of the progressives and the know-it-alls.
I really don't think even Bush's most vicious attackers could ever put words in his mouth to the effect that "I live in a rather special world. I only know one person who wants us to withdraw from Iraq, who frets over the US's popularity level abroad, or who thinks my tax cuts are a bad idea. I can just feel them out there."
Nor do the rest of us enjoy the protection of bubbles, as we are absolutely forced to confront, day in and day out, people who disagree, disrespect, and seem vowed to destroy everything that we hold valuable and worth saving.
But I digress. It is the liberal press, of which the BBC, CNN, and the New York Times, are only the most notorious examples, that once again find themselves on the hot seat for showing bias, sympathy for our enemies, and for letting themselves out cheap as spokesmen for our worst enemies. (E.g., Eason Jordan's refusal to report bad news from Saddam's Iraq, the New York Times and the Washington Post providing platforms for Hamas to justify their bloody coup in Gaza, and now the BBC, for the second time since 9/11, being caught out "sexing up" its news coverage of the war on terror to fit in with the personal biases of "too many staff inhabiting a shared space and comfort zone.")
It is a tried and true tactic of the Left to always accuse opponents of the very faults and failing with which the Left themselves are most beset, from bigotry to intolerance, and not least with refusal to consider other points of view.
Clearly they're the the ones in a bubble.
So anybody got a pin?
Yes, we've been here before.
Previous slanderous statements against Tony Blair's government about "sexing up" intelligence to justify the decision to go to war in Iraq were thoroughly demolished by two independent inquires in the UK, first by Lord Hutton, ("Davies threatens to sue Campbell for libel"), and then by Lord Butler. ("Biters Bit").
The Lord Hutton report led to the resignation in disgrace of the chairman of the BBC. The Butler report settled once and for all that the infamous sixteen words about Iraq's effort to buy uranium from Africa were "well-founded," and not lies at all. "In the resulting furor, Gavyn Davies, the chairman of the BBC, and Greg Dyke, the BBC director general, along with the journalist responsible for the report, Andrew Gilligan, resigned."
The latest report finds that
"The BBC has failed to promote proper debate on major political issues because of the inherent liberal culture of its staff."
The report further states,
“There is a tendency to 'group think’ with too many staff inhabiting a shared space and comfort zone.
"A staff impartiality seminar held last year is also documented in the report, at which executives admitted they would broadcast images of the Bible being thrown away but not the Koran, in case Muslims were offended. "
In September 2005 Tony Blair attacked the BBC over its coverage of Hurricane Katrina, which he characterized as "'full of hatred of America' and 'gloating' at the country's plight." ("Blair attacks BBC for 'anti-US bias'"). Even Bill Clinton agreed, attacking the tone of the BBC's coverage of Katrina at a media seminar he was hosting, "He said it had been 'stacked up' to criticise the federal government's slow response."
(Which is nothing, really, to what the American press has done with Katrina, that is to turn it into a myth of racial genocide only slightly worse than Stalin's forced starvation of the Ukraine).
Yet it is the right that is forever being accused of being out of touch with reality, and it was George Bush whom Newseek portrayed on its cover inside a bubble, and called "the most isolated president in modern history." ("Newsweek’s Bush-In-The-Bubble Cover"). As we have been told for six years now, the President listens to no one (except in his worst moments, according to the more bilious and hysterical commentators, to Jesus), and consequently never hears a word that doesn't conform to his own hidebound policies.
On the other hand, we have also been told for six years that a large minority of the President's closest advisers, generals, intelligence chiefs, and foreign policy experts, (a minority that somehow is always "growing"), are soundly contradicting him all day long on every point of policy, but to no avail.
There's a minor historico-critical controversy over whether or not the famous New Yorker movie critic Pauline Kael ever actually said, of the 1972 landslide victory of Richard Nixon, that she was amazed by it, as she didn't know anyone who voted for Nixon. The revisionist version of this remark is that she didn't express amazement at Dick Nixon's election, but merely abstained from commenting on him, replying "I live in a rather special world. I only know one person who voted for Nixon. Where they are I don't know. They're outside my ken. But sometimes when I'm in a theater I can feel them."
I don't see how this version makes her look any better, as the latter comment is a frank admission that she lacked a single personal acquaintance amongst any of the 60% plus of the American electorate who voted for Nixon over George McGovern, (including New York state)--except she felt some kind of bad-vibe shudder when forced to occupy the same movie theater with one. This was the whole point of the jibe: liberals simply don't come outside their cliques to show any interest in the townies or the kitchen help--the great unwashed who are simply outside the ken of the progressives and the know-it-alls.
I really don't think even Bush's most vicious attackers could ever put words in his mouth to the effect that "I live in a rather special world. I only know one person who wants us to withdraw from Iraq, who frets over the US's popularity level abroad, or who thinks my tax cuts are a bad idea. I can just feel them out there."
Nor do the rest of us enjoy the protection of bubbles, as we are absolutely forced to confront, day in and day out, people who disagree, disrespect, and seem vowed to destroy everything that we hold valuable and worth saving.
But I digress. It is the liberal press, of which the BBC, CNN, and the New York Times, are only the most notorious examples, that once again find themselves on the hot seat for showing bias, sympathy for our enemies, and for letting themselves out cheap as spokesmen for our worst enemies. (E.g., Eason Jordan's refusal to report bad news from Saddam's Iraq, the New York Times and the Washington Post providing platforms for Hamas to justify their bloody coup in Gaza, and now the BBC, for the second time since 9/11, being caught out "sexing up" its news coverage of the war on terror to fit in with the personal biases of "too many staff inhabiting a shared space and comfort zone.")
It is a tried and true tactic of the Left to always accuse opponents of the very faults and failing with which the Left themselves are most beset, from bigotry to intolerance, and not least with refusal to consider other points of view.
Clearly they're the the ones in a bubble.
So anybody got a pin?
Fred Thompson Has an Opinion About CAIR
This is refreshing. Not only does former Senator, and possible presidential candidate Fred Thompson have a welcome forthrightness when he speaks on the issues, he doesn't seem to be afraid to give specifics.
In his column on Townhall.com last week he got right into it about CAIR. He veen went to the length of asking the obvious question about who finances this extremely troublseome organization.
After all: how does an organization that's lost 90% of its membership in the past six years manage to open 25 new chapters in major American cities at the same time?
Good News about CAIR
By Fred Thompson
Wednesday, June 20, 2007
I've talked before about the Council on American-Islamic Relations -- most recently because it filed that lawsuit against Americans who reported suspicious behavior by Muslims on a U.S. Airways flight. Better known just as CAIR, the lobbying group has come under a lot of scrutiny lately for its connections to terror-supporting groups. This time, though, The Washington Times has uncovered some very good news about the group.
For years, CAIR has claimed to represent millions of American Muslims. In fact, they claim to represent more Muslim in American than ... there are in America. This has alarmed Americans in general as the group often seems to be more aligned with our enemies than us -- which isn't surprising as it spun off from a group funded by Hamas. As you know, Hamas has been waging a terrorist war against Israel and calls for its total destruction. It also promises to see America destroyed. Nowadays, Hamas is busy murdering its Palestinian political rivals.
Even with this history, and CAIR's conspicuous failure to condemn Hamas by name, it has been treated as if represents Muslim Americans by our own government. The good news is that the financial support CAIR claims to have among American Muslims is a myth. We know this because The Washington Times got hold of the group's IRS tax records.
CAIR's dues-paying membership has shrunk 90 percent since 9/11 -- from 29,000 in 2000 to only 1,700 last year. CAIR's annual income from dues plunged from $733,000 to $59,000. Clearly, America's Muslims are not supporting this group -- and I'm happy to hear about it.
Of course, every silver lining seems to have a cloud; and this cloud is that CAIR's spending is running about $3 million a year. They’ve opened 25 new chapters in major cities across the country even as their dues shrank to a pittance. The question is; who’s funding CAIR?
CAIR's not saying. The New York Times earlier this year reported that the backing is from "wealthy Persian Gulf governments" including the UAE and Saudi Arabia. Obviously, we have a bigger problem here than the one with CAIR.
In his column on Townhall.com last week he got right into it about CAIR. He veen went to the length of asking the obvious question about who finances this extremely troublseome organization.
After all: how does an organization that's lost 90% of its membership in the past six years manage to open 25 new chapters in major American cities at the same time?
Good News about CAIR
By Fred Thompson
Wednesday, June 20, 2007
I've talked before about the Council on American-Islamic Relations -- most recently because it filed that lawsuit against Americans who reported suspicious behavior by Muslims on a U.S. Airways flight. Better known just as CAIR, the lobbying group has come under a lot of scrutiny lately for its connections to terror-supporting groups. This time, though, The Washington Times has uncovered some very good news about the group.
For years, CAIR has claimed to represent millions of American Muslims. In fact, they claim to represent more Muslim in American than ... there are in America. This has alarmed Americans in general as the group often seems to be more aligned with our enemies than us -- which isn't surprising as it spun off from a group funded by Hamas. As you know, Hamas has been waging a terrorist war against Israel and calls for its total destruction. It also promises to see America destroyed. Nowadays, Hamas is busy murdering its Palestinian political rivals.
Even with this history, and CAIR's conspicuous failure to condemn Hamas by name, it has been treated as if represents Muslim Americans by our own government. The good news is that the financial support CAIR claims to have among American Muslims is a myth. We know this because The Washington Times got hold of the group's IRS tax records.
CAIR's dues-paying membership has shrunk 90 percent since 9/11 -- from 29,000 in 2000 to only 1,700 last year. CAIR's annual income from dues plunged from $733,000 to $59,000. Clearly, America's Muslims are not supporting this group -- and I'm happy to hear about it.
Of course, every silver lining seems to have a cloud; and this cloud is that CAIR's spending is running about $3 million a year. They’ve opened 25 new chapters in major cities across the country even as their dues shrank to a pittance. The question is; who’s funding CAIR?
CAIR's not saying. The New York Times earlier this year reported that the backing is from "wealthy Persian Gulf governments" including the UAE and Saudi Arabia. Obviously, we have a bigger problem here than the one with CAIR.
Foot-Washing Facilities at Stony Brook U
Here’s an interesting, rather amusing video introducing the Muslim Student Association (MSA), at Stony Brook University, which is part of the public State University of New York system (SUNY). The guy who made the video has a sense of humor, as you can see when he plays the role of all the MSA members himself.
The MSA is the ostensible movement pushing for ritual foot-washing facilities in public universities and colleges across the country, though the actual driving force we suspect is CAIR, which has taken full ownership in defense of the foot baths here at UM-Dearborn. (“The ACLU’s Non-Agression Pact with CAIR”)
The video gives a look into the prayer room provided to the Muslims at Stony Brook, (including the dividing screen behind which the Muslim “sisters” remain unseen). It also shows the “special wudu stations provided by the university,” of which the narrator is particularly proud.
The MSA is the ostensible movement pushing for ritual foot-washing facilities in public universities and colleges across the country, though the actual driving force we suspect is CAIR, which has taken full ownership in defense of the foot baths here at UM-Dearborn. (“The ACLU’s Non-Agression Pact with CAIR”)
The video gives a look into the prayer room provided to the Muslims at Stony Brook, (including the dividing screen behind which the Muslim “sisters” remain unseen). It also shows the “special wudu stations provided by the university,” of which the narrator is particularly proud.
Hamas in Gaza: 'Bowling for Columbine Really Got Us Thinking'
After declaring an Islamic state in the hell-hole on the sea known as Gaza, triumphant Hamas fighters showed a more progressive, right-thinking side to themselves by immediately undertaking efforts to rid Gaza of illicit guns.
As American gun-control activists know, and now even suicidal terrorists are aware, the mere existence of firearms causes violence to erupt spontaneously.
Still mistrustful Gazans have not been going along with Hamas's gun roundup.
The following from the AP:
Hamas faces tough road in trying to collect guns, leaving plenty of weapons in Gaza Strip
SARAH EL DEEB Associated Press Writer
(AP) - GAZA CITY, Gaza Strip-Instead of great quantities of weapons, the only items dropped off at a Hamas collection point were a metal door, a window frame and a faucet.
That scene in Gaza City on Thursday, the Hamas deadline for turning in illicit weapons, showed that the Islamic militant group faces serious trouble in getting its hands on Gaza's estimated 400,000 firearms.
The three discarded items fell under the category of "looted government property" that Hamas also demanded be turned in, but it was arms the group really wanted.
Hamas leaders threatened harsh punishment for anyone caught with guns after the deadline.
But in chaotic Gaza, where defeated Fatah militants are hiding out and clan grudges can flare into open warfare at any moment, few believe Hamas will recover even a fraction of the territory's arsenal.
Some Fatah fighters said they hid their weapons away from their homes so Hamas gunmen would not find them in searches. Some buried their weapons, including one who said he put his gun under the family chicken coop.
Others said they threw their rifles into the sea rather than risk them falling into Hamas hands.
"I prefer to shoot myself rather than give them my gun. I don't trust them at all," said a 33-year-old Fatah-affiliated security officer. He gave his name only as Abu Subhi for fear of retaliation from Hamas.
The Islamic militants scored a major success last week by securing many of the weapons held by Gaza's security forces, most of which were loyal to Fatah, analysts said. Hamas fighters captured the arms stored at security headquarters and used lists of officers to collect weapons at their homes.
"It looks to us that Hamas has succeeded in collecting the majority of the registered weapons that belong to the Palestinian security forces," said Hazem Abu Shanab, a Gaza-based political analyst.
Jamal al-Jarrah, commander of the Hamas militia known as the Executive Force, said Hamas had collected 90 percent of the security force weapons.
But the security forces had only 15,000 firearms - a number that pales against the 400,000 weapons estimated to be inside the Gaza Strip, analysts and former security officials said.
A measure of the difficulty of disarming the myriad private gangs came over the weekend in the southern city of Khan Younis, where Hamas forces and a clan known for drug smuggling fought a five-hour battle with mortars and automatic weapons. Two people were killed, but Hamas came away with only a fifth of the family's arsenal, a Hamas official said.
As part of its weapons collection campaign, Hamas sent cars with loudspeakers into the streets and made announcements from mosques warning defeated security officers not to keep their weapons. It also phoned them at home demanding their weapons and asked tribal leaders to negotiate an arms handover.
The group set up seven sites around Gaza City for people to drop off their weapons, including the Shafei mosque in the eastern part of Gaza City.
In the mosque's courtyard, young boys eagerly waited at a reception table with scrap paper, a pencil and a Quran, ready to collect and list guns or looted government property. All they got was the metal door, window frame and faucet. Someone also turned in a pocket knife.
Elsewhere, the group got back a truck that had been stolen from the intelligence security post.
Hamas said it wants only to gather weapons that might be used against it, and has no interests in firearms used for fighting Israel.
"Only those with clean hands should carry weapons. All the organizations that are using these guns to defend themselves against the occupation will be welcomed and supported," Mahmoud Zahar, a top Hamas official, told The Associated Press.
"But if people use guns to cause strife between families or to attack the official and unofficial institutions, they will be collected."
Hamas' mission has been made far more difficult by the rampant smuggling that brought arms into Gaza through tunnels under the Egyptian border - the source of much of Hamas' own arsenal.
The inflow of arms allowed many clans to build up their own militias with firepower and training rivaling the official security forces, a situation that was evident in Hamas' battle in Khan Younis last weekend.
Militants found themselves fighting a bitter battle in narrow alleys when they besieged the clan compound of the drug-smuggling clan, which was known for supporting Fatah.
Hamas stopped the fight after a clan leader agreed to hand over his fighters' weapons, said a clan security officer, who gave his name only as Abu Mohammed to keep his identity hidden from the militants.
The clan eventually turned over five rifles and a handgun. When asked if that was the family's whole arsenal, Abu Mohammed only smiled.
Maybe Hamas should consider an American-style buy-back program, which Iran should be only to happy to pay for.
As American gun-control activists know, and now even suicidal terrorists are aware, the mere existence of firearms causes violence to erupt spontaneously.
Still mistrustful Gazans have not been going along with Hamas's gun roundup.
The following from the AP:
Hamas faces tough road in trying to collect guns, leaving plenty of weapons in Gaza Strip
SARAH EL DEEB Associated Press Writer
(AP) - GAZA CITY, Gaza Strip-Instead of great quantities of weapons, the only items dropped off at a Hamas collection point were a metal door, a window frame and a faucet.
That scene in Gaza City on Thursday, the Hamas deadline for turning in illicit weapons, showed that the Islamic militant group faces serious trouble in getting its hands on Gaza's estimated 400,000 firearms.
The three discarded items fell under the category of "looted government property" that Hamas also demanded be turned in, but it was arms the group really wanted.
Hamas leaders threatened harsh punishment for anyone caught with guns after the deadline.
But in chaotic Gaza, where defeated Fatah militants are hiding out and clan grudges can flare into open warfare at any moment, few believe Hamas will recover even a fraction of the territory's arsenal.
Some Fatah fighters said they hid their weapons away from their homes so Hamas gunmen would not find them in searches. Some buried their weapons, including one who said he put his gun under the family chicken coop.
Others said they threw their rifles into the sea rather than risk them falling into Hamas hands.
"I prefer to shoot myself rather than give them my gun. I don't trust them at all," said a 33-year-old Fatah-affiliated security officer. He gave his name only as Abu Subhi for fear of retaliation from Hamas.
The Islamic militants scored a major success last week by securing many of the weapons held by Gaza's security forces, most of which were loyal to Fatah, analysts said. Hamas fighters captured the arms stored at security headquarters and used lists of officers to collect weapons at their homes.
"It looks to us that Hamas has succeeded in collecting the majority of the registered weapons that belong to the Palestinian security forces," said Hazem Abu Shanab, a Gaza-based political analyst.
Jamal al-Jarrah, commander of the Hamas militia known as the Executive Force, said Hamas had collected 90 percent of the security force weapons.
But the security forces had only 15,000 firearms - a number that pales against the 400,000 weapons estimated to be inside the Gaza Strip, analysts and former security officials said.
A measure of the difficulty of disarming the myriad private gangs came over the weekend in the southern city of Khan Younis, where Hamas forces and a clan known for drug smuggling fought a five-hour battle with mortars and automatic weapons. Two people were killed, but Hamas came away with only a fifth of the family's arsenal, a Hamas official said.
As part of its weapons collection campaign, Hamas sent cars with loudspeakers into the streets and made announcements from mosques warning defeated security officers not to keep their weapons. It also phoned them at home demanding their weapons and asked tribal leaders to negotiate an arms handover.
The group set up seven sites around Gaza City for people to drop off their weapons, including the Shafei mosque in the eastern part of Gaza City.
In the mosque's courtyard, young boys eagerly waited at a reception table with scrap paper, a pencil and a Quran, ready to collect and list guns or looted government property. All they got was the metal door, window frame and faucet. Someone also turned in a pocket knife.
Elsewhere, the group got back a truck that had been stolen from the intelligence security post.
Hamas said it wants only to gather weapons that might be used against it, and has no interests in firearms used for fighting Israel.
"Only those with clean hands should carry weapons. All the organizations that are using these guns to defend themselves against the occupation will be welcomed and supported," Mahmoud Zahar, a top Hamas official, told The Associated Press.
"But if people use guns to cause strife between families or to attack the official and unofficial institutions, they will be collected."
Hamas' mission has been made far more difficult by the rampant smuggling that brought arms into Gaza through tunnels under the Egyptian border - the source of much of Hamas' own arsenal.
The inflow of arms allowed many clans to build up their own militias with firepower and training rivaling the official security forces, a situation that was evident in Hamas' battle in Khan Younis last weekend.
Militants found themselves fighting a bitter battle in narrow alleys when they besieged the clan compound of the drug-smuggling clan, which was known for supporting Fatah.
Hamas stopped the fight after a clan leader agreed to hand over his fighters' weapons, said a clan security officer, who gave his name only as Abu Mohammed to keep his identity hidden from the militants.
The clan eventually turned over five rifles and a handgun. When asked if that was the family's whole arsenal, Abu Mohammed only smiled.
Maybe Hamas should consider an American-style buy-back program, which Iran should be only to happy to pay for.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
