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Law enforcement officials and security experts are warning against the threat of homegrown terrorism as several cases involving alleged American jihadists enter the courts.

“The public is getting complacent,” New York City Police Commissioner Ray Kelly tells FOX News. Kelly, who was the police commissioner during the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993, has developed a task force of counterterrorism officers trained to spot jihadists.

Although there has not been a major terrorist strike in the U.S. since Sept. 11, 2001, Kelley says the country cannot let down its guard.

“We can’t afford to be complacent in law enforcement, and I don’t think we are,” Kelly says in the new FOX News documentary, “Jihad, USA,” which will air at 9 p.m. ET on March 29.

Several terror-related cases now in the courts highlight this need for continued vigilance, experts say.

• In Florida, the retrial of six of the “Liberty City Seven” is coming to a close. The group members, who allegedly plotted to destroy the Sears Tower in Chicago and swore allegiance to Al Qaeda on a secret FBI surveillance tape, were arrested in June 2006. Their first trial ended in a not-guilty verdict for one defendant and a mistrial for the other six.
• In Washington state, the murder trial has begun for Pakistani-American Naveed Haq, who is accused of opening fire in Seattle’s Jewish Federation Building in July 2006, killing one woman and wounding five others. Haq allegedly said he was mad at the Jews and how they are running the country.

Two other cases are to enter court next month.

• In Michigan, a preliminary hearing is scheduled for Houssein Zorkot, a Lebanese-born medical student at Wayne State University in Detroit who posted on his Web site in September 2007 that he was launching a personal jihad. He was arrested that same day in a nearby park, wearing camouflage paint and holding a loaded AK-47.
• In South Carolina a trial is set for Youssef Megahed and Ahmed Mohamed, two University of South Florida students who officials say had pipe bombs in their car when they were caught speeding near the Goose Creek weapons base.

Terror experts say these and other cases since Sept. 11 illustrate an emerging threat from homegrown terrorists, people who have been radicalized by extreme Muslim doctrine within the U.S.

“Al Qaeda is depending today upon the spontaneous emergence of these jihadist cells that are not tethered to the leadership of Al Qaeda by either telephone or e-mail,” terror investigator and author Steve Emerson told FOX News.

But others say the threat of homegrown Islamic terrorism is overstated.

In “none of these cases brought in the United States did the government ever produce any evidence suggesting that someone had prepared a bomb,” says Jim Wedick, a former FBI agent. “Someone’s actual ability to do harm needs to be taken into the equation.”

Wedick consulted with the defense on the Liberty City Seven case.

“The solution is not to treat the whole Muslim community as a suspect community,” says Hussam Ayloush, a spokesman for the Council on American-Islamic Relations. “This is not about ignoring a threat, but this … should not be about exaggerating any threat in a way that promotes certain political agendas.”

Kelly says the threat is real and the only way to combat it is through prevention.

“Just imagine if the 19 hijackers on Sept. 11 were arrested on Sept. 10,” he says. “How would that have been characterized?”

By Dennis Prager
www.JewishWorldReview.com

The long-suffering Tibetans have been in the news. This happens perhaps once or twice a decade. In a more moral world, however, public opinion would be far more preoccupied with Tibetans than with Palestinians, would be as harsh on China as it is on Israel, and would be as fawning on Israel as it now is on China.

But, alas, the world is, as it has always been, a largely mean-spirited and morally insensitive place, where might is far more highly regarded than right.

Consider the facts: Tibet, at least 1,400 years old, is one of the world’s oldest nations, has its own language, its own religion and even its own ethnicity. Over 1 million of its people have been killed by the Chinese, its culture has been systematically obliterated, 6,000 of its 6,200 monasteries have been looted and destroyed, and most of its monks have been tortured, murdered or exiled.

Palestinians have none of these characteristics. There has never been a Palestinian country, never been a Palestinian language, never been a Palestinian ethnicity, never been a Palestinian religion in any way distinct from Islam elsewhere. Indeed, “Palestinian” had always meant any individual living in the geographic area called Palestine. For most of the first half of the 20th century, “Palestinian” and “Palestine” almost always referred to the Jews of Palestine. The United Jewish Appeal, the worldwide Jewish charity that provided the nascent Jewish state with much of its money, was actually known as the United Palestine Appeal. Compared to Tibetans, few Palestinians have been killed, its culture has not been destroyed nor its mosques looted or plundered, and Palestinians have received billions of dollars from the international community. Unlike the dying Tibetan nation, there are far more Palestinians today than when Israel was created.

None of this means that a distinct Palestinian national identity does not now exist. Since Israel’s creation such an identity has arisen and does indeed exist. Nor does any of this deny that many Palestinians suffered as a result of the creation of the third Jewish state in the area, known — since the Romans renamed Judea — as “Palestine.”

But it does mean that of all the causes the world could have adopted, the Palestinians’ deserved to be near the bottom and the Tibetans’ near the top. This is especially so since the Palestinians could have had a state of their own from 1947 on, and they have caused great suffering in the world, while the far more persecuted Tibetans have been characterized by a morally rigorous doctrine of nonviolence.

So, the question is, why? Why have the Palestinians received such undeserved attention and support, and the far more aggrieved and persecuted and moral Tibetans given virtually no support or attention?

The first reason is terror. Some time ago, the Palestinian leadership decided, with the overwhelming support of the Palestinian people, that murdering as many innocent people — first Jews, and then anyone else — was the fastest way to garner world attention. They were right. On the other hand, as The Economist notes in its March 28, 2008 issue, “Tibetan nationalists have hardly ever resorted to terrorist tactics…” It is interesting to speculate how the world would have reacted had Tibetans hijacked international flights, slaughtered Chinese citizens in Chinese restaurants and temples, on Chinese buses and trains, and massacred Chinese schoolchildren.

The second reason is oil and support from powerful fellow Arabs. The Palestinians have rich friends who control the world’s most needed commodity, oil. The Palestinians have the unqualified support of all Middle Eastern oil-producing nations and the support of the Muslim world beyond the Middle East. The Tibetans are poor and have the support of no nations, let alone oil-producing ones.

The third reason is Israel. To deny that pro-Palestinian activism in the world is sometimes related to hostility toward Jews is to deny the obvious. It is not possible that the unearned preoccupation with the Palestinians is unrelated to the fact that their enemy is the one Jewish state in the world. Israel’s Jewishness is a major part of the Muslim world’s hatred of Israel. It is also part of Europe’s hostility toward Israel: Portraying Israel as oppressors assuages some of Europe’s guilt about the Holocaust — “see, the Jews act no better than we did.” Hence the ubiquitous comparisons of Israel to Nazis.

A fourth reason is China. If Tibet had been crushed by a white European nation, the Tibetans would have elicited far more sympathy. But, alas, their near-genocidal oppressor is not white. And the world does not take mass murder committed by non-whites nearly as seriously as it takes anything done by Westerners against non-Westerners. Furthermore, China is far more powerful and frightening than Israel. Israel has a great army and nuclear weapons, but it is pro-West, it is a free and democratic society, and it has seven million people in a piece of land as small as Belize. China has nuclear weapons, has a trillion U.S. dollars, an increasingly mighty army and navy, is neither free nor democratic, is anti-Western, and has 1.2 billion people in a country that dominates the Asian continent.

A fifth reason is the world’s Left. As a general rule, the Left demonizes Israel and has loved China since it became Communist in 1948. And given the power of the Left in the world’s media, in the political life of so many nations, and in the universities and the arts, it is no wonder vicious China has been idolized and humane Israel demonized.

The sixth reason is the United Nations, where Israel has been condemned in more General Assembly and Security Council resolutions than any other country in the world. At the same time, the UN has voted China onto its Security Council and has never condemned it. China’s sponsoring of Sudan and its genocidal acts against its non-Arab black population, as in Darfur, goes largely unremarked on at the UN, let alone condemned, just as is the case with its cultural genocide, ethnic cleansing and military occupation of Tibet.

The seventh reason is television news, the primary source of news for much of mankind. Aside from its leftist tilt, television news reports only what it can video. And almost no country is televised as much as Israel, while video reports in Tibet are forbidden, as they are almost anywhere in China except where strictly monitored by the Chinese authorities. No video, no TV news. And no TV, no concern. So while grieving Palestinians and the accidental killings of Palestinians during morally necessary Israeli retaliations against terrorists are routinely televised, the slaughter of over a million Tibetans and the extinguishing of Tibetan Buddhism and culture are non-events as far as television news is concerned.

The world is unfair, unjust and morally twisted. And rarely more so than in its support for the Palestinians — no matter how many innocents they target for murder and no matter how much Nazi-like anti-Semitism permeates their media — and its neglect of the cruelly treated, humane Tibetans

By Cal Thomas
www.JewishWorldReview.com

BOSTON — Following Sept. 11, 2001, a day of infamy on which nearly 3,000 died at the hands of terrorists, The New York Times began publishing the names and pictures of the dead. I made a deliberate effort to look at those pictures and to read the names and hometowns of each victim. I wanted to identify with them as much as possible.

Now the Times has published more pictures, names and ages, this time of American war dead. They are part of the 4,000 casualties to have fallen in Iraq and Afghanistan since those wars began. They — and their families — deserve our gratitude.

Some politicians who oppose the war — mostly Democrats, but a few Republicans — offer obligatory and oblique references to “the troops” and their bravery, while undermining their sacrifice and objectives by calling for their immediate withdrawal. That is not a policy, unless one regards surrender and retreat only to fight a bloodier war another day policy.

What is remarkable is that America continues to produce the kind of young men and women who are willing to lay down their lives for a principle: the principle of freedom — for others and for us.

This is a characteristic that may not be uniquely American, but it is one this country has fully embraced, as time and time again it fights wars to liberate others and protect itself. As the excellent HBO series on the life of John Adams portrays, the notion of freedom was conceived in the hearts of our countrymen even before America became a nation. It is a story about sacrifice, separation from loved ones and the forsaking of familiar and comfortable surroundings in favor of misery and hardship. The fight for independence involved emotional and physical pain and unenviable loss. But it also produced gain for those willing to pay the price. “John Adams” tells another truth: freedom isn’t free. It must be bought and paid for by every generation and sometimes more than once within a generation.

Freedom is not a natural state — otherwise more people would be free. Tyranny, oppression, dictatorship and the denial of human rights are the norm for much of the planet. Mankind’s lower nature dictates that far too many seek to reduce others to servitude in order to elevate themselves. President Bush has repeatedly said that freedom is a G-d-given right that resides in the heart of every human. Maybe, but sometimes one must fight to extract it from the hardened hearts of others who want it exclusively for themselves.

Looking at the faces of those who have fallen and driving by Arlington National Cemetery, I am reminded of the cost of freedom. Those who died allow me to travel freely. Those who sacrificed everything invested in freedom for my family and yours so that we can all live our lives where we choose to live them and worship where, and however, we please. These are freedoms most of the world can only dream about.

It has been said that most of us no longer know anyone who is serving in the military and that’s too bad. Some college campuses (like Harvard) continue to ban the ROTC without acknowledging that Harvard might not exist were it not for soldiers willing to fight to preserve academic freedom.

“Freedom’s just another word for nothin’ left to lose,” goes the Kris Kristofferson lyric. But that is a cynical view of freedom. In a city and a state that helped give freedom birth, there are constant reminders of those who were freedom’s midwives. If John Adams, his cousin Sam, Paul Revere and so many others from our past could speak today, they would remind us that freedom is never fully paid for and that its loss would exact a greater cost.

Folk singer Joan Baez plans to return to Cambridge this week to mark the 50th anniversary of Club Passim, where her career of singing mostly protest songs began. That she still has the freedom to sing those songs results from the sacrifices of the patriots who died for her right to protest. It would be nice if she sang a song honoring them, but that’s probably “just blowin’ in the wind.”

JERUSALEM (Reuters) - The Renault-Nissan ( RENA.PA) (7201.T) alliance on Monday signed a deal to begin mass producing electric cars as part of an Israeli-led project to develop alternative energy sources and slash oil dependency.

Renault-Nissan Chief Executive Carlos Ghosn said the cars, with a range of about 100 km in city driving and up to 160 km on the highway, will accelerate from zero to 100 kph in 13 seconds and have a top speed of 110 kph — similar to many gasoline-powered cars.

Ghosn said a key reason why the company chose Israel to launch the project is because 90 percent of Israelis drive less than 70 km a day and all major urban centers are within 150 km of each other. For Israel the cars would mean less dependency on oil imports, mostly coming from Russia.

The cars, to be made in Europe, will run on a battery developed by Nissan and Japan’s NEC (6701.T) and will be available in 2011. A prototype is already on the road in Israel and various models will be sold by Renault and Nissan.

“It will be the most environmentally friendly mass-produced car on the market,” Ghosn said at a Fuel Free Transportation ceremony at the office of Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, adding the main appeal of the cars is that they were as “normal as possible” while operating quietly.

He said the car would cost the same or less than comparable gasoline engine autos and would have a lifetime warranty.

Ghosn said Renault-Nissan will also market the cars in yet to be determined European countries and Asia and later to the United States.

“We expect this car to be successful,” Ghosn told reporters. “We want to make sure we mass market 10,000 to 20,000 cars a year in Israel … We are determined to make it a success.”

ENERGY SUBSCRIPTIONS

Israel’s government will offer tax incentives on the cars and Project Better Place, a venture-backed company, will set up a recharging grid using electricity from renewable sources.

“The state of Israel has set itself the goal of making our lives here better and cleaner, with less dependence on gasoline and petroleum,” Olmert said. “By the end of the next decade, we will be completely free of petroleum and its by-products as the fuel which powers transportation in Israel.”

Project Better Place is headed by former SAP ( SAPG.DE) executive Shai Agassi, who said Israel’s grid would be powered by 200 megawatts generated by wind and solar power sources.

“For the first time in history, all the conditions necessary for electric vehicles to be successfully mass-marketed will be brought together in a partnership between the Renault-Nissan Alliance and Project Better Place in Israel,” the two sides said in a statement.

Consumers will buy their car and subscribe to an energy supply, including the use of the battery, on the basis of kilometers driven, similar to the way mobile phones are sold.

Israeli President Shimon Peres said he wanted Israel to push forward with the electric car plan because oil has become the “greatest polluter of our age and the greatest financier of terrorism.”

California-based Project Better Place said it will set up a network of 500,000 charging points in Israel. The car’s computer will indicate when recharging is needed and the nearest charging point.

The initial $200 million investment in Project Better Place is led by holding company Israel Corp (ILCO.TA) and includes investment bank Morgan Stanley (MS.N), venture capital firm Vantage Point and a group of private investors.

Israel Corp, which will invest $100 million, said it had signed agreements with the other investors. The Ofer family, which controls Israel Corp, will invest $30 million through a private firm while the other investors will put in $70 million.

Giant solar plants in Negev could power Israel’s future
By John Lettice The Register-Technology News

A series of solar energy power stations in the Negev could supply all of Israel’s power needs - or, if you wanted to be really ambitious, you could supply all of the world’s electricity needs with the aid of slightly under 10 per cent of the Sahara. So says Professor David Faiman of Israel’s Ben-Gurion University, man with a plan and current proprietor of the largest solar energy dish in the world.

The Negev Desert dish is operated by Ben-Gurion’s National Solar Energy Center in the Negev, and speaking at the DLD (Digital Life, Design) conference in Munich earlier this week, Center director Faiman tallied off the economics of solar power generation. Conventional solar panels are expensive, because photovoltaic cells, which combine the capability to collect energy and to convert it to electricity, are themselves expensive.

One route to cutting the cost is being pursued by Nanosolar (Nanosolar director of products Roby Stancel was speaking at the same session as Faiman), which is printing the cells onto thin sheets. Taking a different approach, the Negev plant uses large curved glass mirrors to focus sunlight onto a 10cm x 10cm area of cells. Both routes have their advantages - if Nanosolar’s price promises are fulfilled, then solar sheets could be cheap enough and thin enough to put anywhere and everywhere, while the dish approach could be applied cost-effectively to large scale power plants, up to and including 10 per cent of the Sahara. “We’re effectively reducing the cost of photovoltaic by a factor of 1,000,” says Faiman.

Cost has been a major brake on the take-up of solar power, and Faiman points out that solar has only caught on in countries like Germany, where it is subsidised. There, electricity suppliers are obliged to buy in surplus power from domestic solar systems at more than the market rate, which makes solar an attractive option for German consumers, despite Germany being relatively unattractive from the point of view of available sunlight. According a Faiman a German rooftop would produce the equivalent of one barrel of oil over two years, whereas the same roof in the Negev would do it in one.

This favourable economic climate also means that one of Nanosolar’s first contracts is for a 1MW solar power station in Eastern Germany.

Faiman explains how solar could fix Israel’s power requirements in 1 Gigawatt units. A single 1GW solar plant would be comparable in output to a large conventional power station, and would cost €1 billion to build. One plant would produce 2 Terawatt Hours of electricity every year, which would be enough to cover annual growth in Israel’s power demand. With each plant producing the equivalent of €200 million, the first five plants pay for the sixth. Assuming a 30 year lifespan for each plant, in year 29 you have to start building two per year (unless, presumably, you think you’ve got enough electricity by then, or you’ve run out of customers and/or desert).

“This works after a fashion anywhere except Antarctica,” says Faiman.

The amount of space the plants take up will depend on the efficiency of the cells - Faiman sees cells of 60 per cent efficiency being feasible, and it ultimately being possible to build 1GW plants on 5 km. sq. apiece.

Gotchas? Solar doesn’t work at night, and Faiman concedes that storage of energy is therefore an issue. But if, say, you had a country that was switching over to electric cars, then much of the power for transportation would effectively be stored in batteries. Faiman also suggests that solar power could be used to split seawater into oxygen and hydrogen, giving you a supply of clean and portable fuel. This possibly presents a snag for anybody planning Sahara plant, but hey, Libya has a coastline and seawater, and Gaddafi’s on our side now, right?

By Mona Charen
http://www.JewishWorldReview.com

On December 1, 2007, two dozen heavily armed police staged a raid on a Jewish community center in Caracas where hundreds were celebrating a wedding. The police, the Venezuelan equivalent of the FBI, claimed to be seeking weapons and evidence of “subversive activity.”

They found no weapons. As for subversive activity, well, in a proto-authoritarian state like Hugo Chavez’s Venezuela, subversion is a very elastic concept. The mildest skepticism about Chavez’s regime might easily qualify.

This bit of harassment theater was only the latest in a series of worrying moves by the Chavez government against its Jewish citizens. The same community center had been raided in 2004, in the morning hours when children were being bussed to school. The regime — which boasts of cozy friendships with Ahmadinejad’s Iran and Castro’s Cuba — has also engaged in steady anti-Semitic and anti-Israel propaganda. A little more than a year ago, Chavez declared in a Christmas Eve speech that “the world has wealth for all, but some minorities, the descendants of the same people that crucified Christ, have taken over all the wealth of the world.”

During the 2006 war between Hezbollah and Israel, Chavez became increasingly shrill, accusing the Israelis of behaving like Nazis. On a recent visit to Washington D.C., Gustavo Aristegui, the shadow foreign minister in Spain’s opposition party, told a group at the Hudson Institute that Hamas and Hezbollah are now operating freely in Venezuela. Publications by the government’s ministry of culture have featured titles like “The Jewish Question” with cover art showing a Star of David superimposed over a swastika. Jews were accused of complicity in the murder of a prosecutor. An article in a leading newspaper, El Diario de Caracas, asked whether it would become necessary “to expel [the Jews] from the country.”

Most recently, as the Forward has reported, Chavez has used the government-run television channel to engage in “lengthy rants about the presence of Mossad agents allegedly in the country working to unseat the Chavez regime with the support of the United States and opposition forces in Venezuela.” The program’s host interrupted to ask about the loyalty of Jews to Venezuela.

At the start of Chavez’s rule, the Jewish community in Venezuela numbered about 30,000. Solid statistics are hard to come by but most estimates now put the number at between 8,000 and 15,000 today. About 50 percent of Venezuela’s Jewish community had fled to the country to escape the Nazis during World War II. Neither they nor their children would require much prodding to sense danger. The raids, the propaganda, the hostile press, might have been enough. But then consider this: The man Chavez placed in charge of internal security is one Tarek al Assaimi, son of Saddam Hussein’s envoy to Venezuela.

You might expect an outcry from other Jews around the world — and there has been some. But within the U.S., many of the leaders of large Jewish organizations are seeking to stifle those, like Rabbi Avi Weiss and Rabbi Shmuel Herzfeld of the Coalition for Jewish Concerns, who are urging members of Congress to hold hearings on the matter. Weiss reports that Rep. Elliott Engel (D., NY) was willing to call a hearing but was dissuaded by the Conference of Presidents of the Major American Jewish Organizations.

Dina Siegel Vann, speaking of behalf of the American Jewish Congress, published an op-ed in the Miami Herald scolding those who want to make as public a protest as possible. “Shouting and screaming from the safety of the United States may feel good to some,” she wrote, “but the goal of the exercise is not to satisfy their needs; rather it’s to ensure the safety and well-being of thousands of Venezuelan Jews . . .” Her title: “Let’s use diplomacy, not public protests.”

Well, diplomacy has its place, but this isn’t it. When the Soviet Union was denying exit visas to Jews wishing to emigrate and persecuting those who sought to leave, only the loud and persistent protests of Jews in the United States and elsewhere (combined with congressional action) caused the Soviets to relent. Bill Buckley quipped at the time that he hoped the Soviets would release every Jew who wanted to emigrate except one — to keep alive the Jewish pressure that was so helpful in the larger Cold War. The Venezuelan Jews themselves have asked for such international pressure. They believe Chavez is very sensitive about international opinion. It would be naive to place faith in diplomacy alone.

by Robert Spencer
www.humanevents.com

Can you imagine a public school founded by two Christian ministers, and housed in the same building as a church? Add to that — in the same building — a prominent chapel. And let’s say the students are required to fast during Lent, and attend Bible studies right after school. All with your tax dollars.

Inconceivable? Sure. If such a place existed, the ACLU lawyers would descend on it like locusts. It would be shut down before you could say “separation of church and state,” to the accompaniment of New York Times and Washington Post editorials full of indignant foreboding, warning darkly about the growing influence of the Religious Right in America.

But such a school does exist in Minnesota, in a different religious context, and so far the ACLU has uttered nary a peep.

Tax dollars are currently at work funding the Tarek ibn Ziyad Academy, a popular, rapidly growing K-8 charter school with campuses in Inver Grove Heights and Blaine, Minnesota. According to the Minnesota Department of Education, as a Minnesota charter school implementing a statewide “performance and professional pay program” known as Q-Comp, Tarek ibn Ziyad Academy pocketed $65,260 in state money for the 2006-07 school year. The school’s website, meanwhile, boasts that it offers a “rigorous Arabic language program” and an “environment that fosters your cultural values and heritage.” Whose cultural values and heritage? According to the indefatigable investigative reporter Katherine Kersten of the Star Tribune, “there are strong indications that religion plays a central role” there.

Which religion? Do you need three guesses?

The Tarek ibn Ziyad Academy was co-founded by two imams; is housed in the same building as a mosque and the Minnesota chapter of the Muslim American Society (MAS); features a carpeted space for prayer; and serves halal food in the cafeteria. All students fast during Ramadan. They attend classes on the Qur’an and Sunnah, or Islamic tradition and law, after school. The school is closely tied to the MAS: Kersten observes that “at MAS-MN’s 2007 convention, for example, the program featured an advertisement for the ‘Muslim American Society of Minnesota,’ superimposed on a picture of a mosque. Under the motto ‘Establishing Islam in Minnesota,’ it asked: ‘Did you know that MAS-MN … houses a full-time elementary school’? On the adjacent page was an application for TIZA” — the Tarek ibn Ziyad Academy.

The existence of the Tarek ibn Ziyad Academy is, of course, yet another manifestation of the witless multiculturalism that grants protected victim status to Muslim groups in view of the “racism” and “Islamophobia” from which they supposedly suffer. Latitude that would never be granted to other faith groups, particularly Christians, is readily given here.

But it’s even worse than that. According to a 2004 Chicago Tribune exposé, the Muslim American Society is the name under which the Muslim Brotherhood operates in the United States. And according to a 1992 Brotherhood memorandum about its strategy in the U.S., it is embarked upon a “grand Jihad” aimed at “eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and ‘sabotaging’ its miserable house by their hands and the hands of the believers so that it is eliminated and Allah’s religion is made victorious over all other religions.”

Is Tarek ibn Ziyad Academy part of this “grand jihad”? A clue might come from the name of the school itself. Kersten notes that it was named after the eighth-century Muslim conqueror of Spain. Islam Online praised Tarek ibn Ziyad in a 2004 article as a “man of valor, a man of extraordinary courage and a true leader.” He is chiefly remembered for one incident in particular. Landing in Spain, he ordered the Muslim forces’ boats to be burned, and then told his soldiers: “Brothers in Islam! We now have the enemy in front of us and the deep sea behind us. We cannot return to our homes, because we have burnt our boats. We shall now either defeat the enemy and win or die a coward’s death by drowning in the sea. Who will follow me?” The soldiers, crying “Allahu akbar,” rushed ahead and defeated a vastly superior Spanish force.

Does the Tarek ibn Ziyad Academy represent the same idea for those who founded it and now operate it — the burning of the boats, representing the determination of Muslim immigrants to stay in the U.S., followed by conquest? In light of the Brotherhood memorandum and other evidence about the jihadist allegiances of the Muslim American Society, it is not an illegitimate question.

But what public official, in Minnesota or elsewhere, dares to ask it?

A familiar scene.

By Victor Davis Hanson
www.nationalreview.com

Gaza erupted in celebration recently to the news that a Palestinian had murdered Jewish religious students in Jerusalem. And almost daily terrorists send rockets from Gaza into nearby Israeli cities, hoping to kill civilians and provoke Israeli counter-responses — and perhaps start another Middle East war.

This is not the way some imagined Gaza two and half years after the Israelis withdrew both civilians and soldiers from the territory in September 2005. At the time, the Palestinian Authority controlled Gaza, but in early 2007, Hamas took over in a violent civil war, claiming legitimacy after once winning a popular election.

Gaza has plenty of natural advantages. It enjoys a picturesque coastline on the Mediterranean with sandy beaches and a rich classical history. There is a contiguous border with Egypt, the Arab world’s largest country and spiritual home of pan-Arabic solidarity.

The Palestinians are a favorite cause of the oil-rich Middle East, and would seem to be in store for at least a few billions that accrue from $100 a barrel oil. In short, an autonomous Gaza might have been a test case in which the Palestinians could have crafted their own Singapore, Hong Kong, or Dubai.

Instead, despite Palestinian rule of Gaza, Hamas has continued its civil war with the Palestinian Authority, and looters have ruined infrastructure that was left by the United Nations and the Israelis. Mobs crashed the border crossing with Egypt. Hamas-led terrorists have launched over 2,500 mortar rounds into Israel, as well as over 2,000 Qassam rockets.

We all now know the familiar Gaza two-step. The Israeli Defense Forces respond to Hamas rockets with targeted air strikes against terrorist leaders or small-rocket factories. Hamas makes certain both these targets are intermingled with civilians in the hopes of televised collateral damage.

Hamas counts on the usual sympathetic European and Middle Eastern media coverage and commentary. Terrorists deliberately trying to murder Israeli civilians are seen as the moral equivalents of Israeli soldiers trying to target combatants who use civilians as shields. To the extent that the IDF kills more of the terrorists than Hamas kills Israeli civilians, sympathy goes to the “refugees” of Gaza.

This tragic charade continues because Hamas wants it to continue. Its purpose is to make life so unsure and frightening for nearby affluent Israelis that they will grant continual concessions, hopefully leading to such wide-scale demoralization that the Jewish state itself will collapse and disappear. In that regard, the last thing Hamas wants is calm and prosperity in Gaza, which would turn the population’s attention toward living rather than killing and dying.

Hamas in Gaza also feels that the war is not static — and that it is already winning on all fronts. As Europeans, Middle Easterners, and the United Nations lecture Israel about “inordinate” or “disproportionate” responses, the terrorists’ smuggled missiles increase in range, payload and frequency of attack.

Hamas has gained powerful patrons in Iran and the Lebanese Hezbollah. Both provide terrorist training and weapons as long as Gaza serves as a useful proxy in their own existential struggles against Israel.

On the world front, we’ve reached a new threshold in which evoking the destruction of Israel and the killing of Jews has become commonplace and almost acceptable. Hezbollah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, publicly brags about hoarding the body parts of captured Israelis. Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad openly talks of Israelis in Hitlerian terms as “filthy bacteria” that should be wiped off the map.

Palestinians in Gaza can enshrine mass murderers and praise terrorist killers without much worry that the world will be appalled at their grotesque spectacles — much less cease its sympathy and subsidies.

And what a world it is that enables Gaza! The Russians have fought a dirty war against Muslim separatists in Chechnya. The Chinese have been hunting down Muslim separatist Uighurs who claim Xinjiang Province as their own. India wages bloody periodic wars against Muslim terrorists who claim Kashmir.

Imagine tomorrow that all of the above nations told the Gazans that their dispute is no more or less important to the world than similar land quarrels in Cyprus or Azerbaijan; that they are no more or less deserving of international money and sympathy than are the Chechnyans or Uighurs or the Muslims of Kashmir; or that the Israelis have as much right as the Chinese, Indians or Russians to retaliate and put down neighboring Islamist attacks. Then the crisis would shortly recede from the world’s attention.

And Hamas in Gaza would either begin negotiating and building Palestinians’ own civil society — or face the sort of typical Chinese, Russian, or Indian retaliation that Israel is quite able to unleash.

by Kenneth Timmerman
www.NewsMax.com

The firing of the Pentagon’s only resident expert on Islamic law, Maj. Stephen Coughlin, has begun to attract the attention of key members of Congress and the White House, which has launched a “fact-finding” mission into the case, Newsmax has learned.

Coughlin, of the U.S. Army Reserves, was on contract to the Joint Chiefs of Staff to brief U.S. commanders en route to Iraq, as well as officers at various staff colleges around the country, on the role of Islamic teachings in the mind of America’s enemies.

His contract was terminated after an encounter with a top aide to Deputy Defense Secretary Gordon England, who dismissed his findings and called him a “Christian zealot with a pen.”
The aide, Hesham Islam, is an Egyptian-born former U.S. Navy officer, who joined England’s staff while he was secretary of the Navy in 2001 and moved with him when England was promoted to the Pentagon’s No. 2 slot.

Heshem Islam encouraged England to address the annual conference of the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA) last fall, even though federal prosecutors had named the group as an unindicted co-conspirator in a major terrorism funding case last year.
Coughlin aroused the ire of Mr. Islam and others in September by authoring an analysis of a Muslim Brotherhood document entered into evidence in the Justice Department’s case against the Holy Land Foundation.

In addition to naming ISNA and other “mainstream” Muslim organizations as members of the Muslim Brotherhood’s network in the United States, the Muslim Brotherhood document stated that its members “must understand that their work in America is a kind of grand Jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within… It is a Muslim’s destiny to perform Jihad and work wherever he is and wherever he lands until the final hour comes.”
Coughlin also took issue with an effort underway by intelligence community analysts to declare al Qaeda terrorists and insurgents in Iraq as “false Muslims,” whose version of jihad conflicted with “true” Islamic teachings.

The White House has launched its own investigation into the Coughlin affair, and has conducted at least one interview with Coughlin himself, sources knowledgeable of the probe told Newsmax.

However, Coughlin would appear to hold out little hope of a White House “rescue.”
As he pointed out in his 333-page thesis, “To Our Great Detriment: Ignoring what Extremists say about Jihad,” President Bush’s statements downplaying the role of Islam in the terrorist attacks on America have “exerted a chilling effect on those tasked to define the enemy’s doctrine by effectively placing a policy bar” on examining the role of jihadist teachings.
Even Coughlin supporters such as Frank Gaffney Jr., president of the Center for Security Policy, doubt that the Army reservist lawyer and expert on Islamic law will get his contract reinstated by the Joint Chiefs.

But Gaffney has urged members of Congress in both parties and others who care about the war on terror to make Coughlin “a cause célèbre” in the coming months.
Rep. Sue Myrick, R-N.C., has taken that call seriously, and said that she was examining the possibility of holding congressional oversight hearings on Coughlin’s dismissal.
“We want to get to the bottom of this,” Myrick said. “This sounds like another example of someone protecting national security and being told to shut up,” she told Cybercast news service. “If we don’t get over being politically correct, we won’t be here as a country.”
Myrick co-chairs the bi-partisan House Anti-Terrorism Caucus with Rep. Jane Harmon, D-Calif., which she started last year out of frustration that no one was educating the American people about the threat from Islamo-fascism.

“President Bush does not talk to the American people about the long-term threat of radical islamofascism infiltration in America,” she said.
Washington Times reporter Bill Gertz first revealed Coughlin’s firing, as well as Hesham Islam’s confrontation with him, in his “Inside the Ring” column in January.
Pentagon higher-ups then planted stories that Coughlin was fired because he had had unauthorized contacts with reporters, a charge that Gertz denied.
Coughlin writes in the introduction to his 333-page thesis that his research into the legal underpinnings of jihadi doctrine was inspired in part by a Dec. 1, 2005, speech by Gen. Peter Pace to the National Defense University, when Pace was chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
“To talk about how we are going to proceed, we need to understand the nature of the enemy,… [which] is different than any we have faced in the past,” Pace said.
“Remember Hitler. Remember he wrote ‘Mein Kampf.’ He said in writing exactly what his plan was, and we collectively ignored that to our great detriment,” Pace argued.

“Now, our enemies have said publicly on film, on the Internet, their goal is to destroy our way of life. No equivocation on their part. They’re not saying if you stay home, we will not come after you. They are saying their goal is to rid the Middle East of all foreigners. Then, overthrow all governments that are not friendly to them, which means every single one of those governments,” Pace said.

Coughlin argues in his thesis that the U.S. intelligence community is making a similar mistake today as it made in the 1930s, by not reading what the enemy has said and written about their goals.

Officers who have listened to Coughlin’s presentation on the Islamic underpinnings of the jihadist movement have come to his aid.

“The termination of Stephen Coughlin on the Joint Staff is an act of intellectual cowardice,” Lt. Col. Joseph C. Myers, Army adviser to the Air Command and Staff College, wrote on Jan. 5 public letter of support.

“Coughlin has briefed senior Marine Corps leaders and staff and has presented his thesis in various military education venues,” Myers wrote.

“We have spent much intellectual capital revamping and analyzing our own doctrine as it relates to counterinsurgency. It’s time we do our homework on the threat,” he added.
Former Army intelligence officer Jerome Gordon, who has discussed Coughlin’s thesis with former colleagues who have attended his briefings, told Newsmax that Hesham Islam is not Coughlin’s only enemy.

“If there is a cabal that is opposing him, it’s in the military intelligence community,” Gordon said. “Clearly, they have been cowed by the significant entrée provided by the U.S. government to leaders of Muslim Brotherhood fronts here in America.”
In a 153-slide PowerPoint presentation he uses to brief U.S. military officers headed for the Middle East, Coughlin criticizes analysts such as Harlan Ullman, a Washington Times columnist who boasts of his ties to Condoleezza Rice.

“And unlike the Nazis, these extremists lack a central, unifying ideology, come from many diverse movements and so far have not been inclined to develop a political theory for seizing political power,” Ullman wrote in a November 2007 column.

Coughlin called that statement a “non-sequitor,” and said that U.S. military officers had a “duty” to base their assessment on an objective analysis of the facts, not on assumptions or desires.

“If the Enemy in the War on Terror (WOT) states that he fights jihad in furtherance of Islamic causes… and Islamic law on jihad exists and is available in English… then Professionals with WOT responsibilities have an affirmative, personal, professional duty to know the enemy that includes ALL the knowable facts associated with the law of jihad,” Coughlin argued.
Dr. Walid Phares, director of the Future Terrorism Project at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, believes that Coughlin’s firing lies “at a very serious fault line” in U.S. defense strategies.

“I don’t understand why is there so much intellectual commotion about this matter in the West and in the U.S.,” Dr. Phares told Newsmax. “Muslim scholars and historians agree that the theological texts have also a military dimension. In Islamic studies there is no debate about that. So why is there one in non-Muslim research and political circles, particularly in America? Major Coughlin was studying the texts used by the Jihadists to call for military action.”
While politicians might attempt to separate Islam from Jihad for their own purposes, Phares added, “the study of the theological roots of Jihad is something else, and that is an academic not a political issue.”

By Hal Lindsey
www.hallindsey.com

One of the popular topics of confrontation among this year’s crop of presidential hopefuls is what to “do” about the war in Iraq, as if “war” was merely one option among many.
It’s when pressed for alternative options that the candidates start stammering and seeking inventive ways to answer a different question instead.
There are two “options” being presented for consideration by the American electorate this year.
The first option is to remain on the battlefield until the other side is either killed, captured or has surrendered. That is generally the working plan on both sides when the war breaks out. (Neither side goes to war planning to lose.)
The second option, after the war has begun, is for one side to surrender and the other side to declare victory. It doesn’t much matter what euphemisms are used to describe it. When you get into a fight and the other side didn’t lose, it means that you did. Half a victory is equally half a defeat.
But for the sake of argument, let’s pretend there is a way to withdraw from Iraq that doesn’t involve decisively defeating the enemy. Call it “peace with honor” or “strategic redeployment” or whatever substitute for “surrender” suits you.
The problem with Option No. 3 is that it only counts if both sides agree to surrender at the same time. If the enemy isn’t defeated, he remains the enemy. Many of those we’ve released from Gitmo to go home to their families have turned up later either being killed or captured after they returned to the battlefield.
It isn’t like we should be surprised when the enemy doesn’t quit and go home. What will he do without the infidel enemy to fight? Go back home and resume civilian life?
Maybe go to school on the Jihadi Bill? Get a good-paying factory job? Start a small IED manufacturing business? Vocational rehab?
Or just seek out a new battlefield?
The Jerusalem Post reported this week that a Palestinian Authority security official said thousands of jihadis poured into Gaza after Hamas blew up the border wall between Gaza and Egypt.
Most of the foreign fighters who entered Gaza, the paper reported, were fighters who had previously fled the fighting in Iraq.
This is something the advocates of Option 3 should note carefully. The jihadis fled Iraq in defeat. But not in terror. They didn’t go back home to return to herding goats and chasing camels. They “fled” to the Gaza Strip, where they offered to join Hamas and Jihad Islami in the war against Israel.
“Hamas has turned the Gaza Strip into an international center for global jihad,” said one official quoted by the Post. “Most of the men who entered the Gaza Strip through the breached border are now being trained in Hamas’ camps and schools.”
Another official quoted by the Post said, “They brought with them tons of explosives and various types of weapons, including anti-tank and anti-aircraft missiles. … What’s happening in the Gaza Strip is very dangerous not only for Israel, but for many Palestinians as well.”
If the jihadis that America’s finest have defeated in Iraq simply packed up in search of a new, less defended battlefield, then where is the logic in assuming that they will go home and “tend goats” if we withdraw, albeit “honorably”?
If they run away from defeat simply to fight another day, why would they run away from victory, whether real or perceived?
If the jihadis think that we are on the run, both logic and the historic lessons about jihadist fighters teach that, rather than running “the other way,” he will take off in hot pursuit of the one who “withdraws with honor.”
And once we withdraw, the thousands of jihadist fighters, “with tons of explosives and various types of advanced missiles,” that didn’t “run” from Iraq to take advantage of the breach in Gaza’s border will run to America’s porous borders to fight us.
It is absolutely impossible to successfully protect ourselves from an enemy we don’t understand. Americans have never misunderstood an enemy as much as the one who is now determined to destroy us.
Our common enemy is unlike any enemy ever faced by the modern Western world. We don’t understand them because in the West our goals are primarily no longer religiously based.
Our goal is to die peacefully in our beds of old age with the least amount of personal sacrifice. Anything less than that is considered a tragedy. If one of our prominent congressmen stood up and said, “I know not what course others may take, but as for me, give me liberty or give me death,” we would send him out for psychological evaluation. We just don’t have any Patrick Henry’s around any more.
However, our enemy’s life-long goal, indeed his crowning achievement in this life, is to die in battle against the infidel. According to his religion, it is his only guarantee of Paradise. If we withdraw from Iraq and Afghanistan, he will rush to our soil “to guarantee his Paradise” by dying in battle here.
To us, war is an evil that many Americans today do not believe is ever necessary. Virtually nothing is worth dying for to most Americans today.
To our enemy, jihad is a rare opportunity and death by jihad is a rare blessing to be sought after. And don’t forget: His ultimate hope is spending eternity in Paradise with his own harem of 72 virgins. That’s a powerful motivator for sex-starved young men.
So there aren’t three options for the war in Iraq, no matter how hard the candidates try to convince the American public that there are.
The actual options are these: We can fight the enemy on his turf, or we can fight him on ours.
The perceived option of not fighting is an illusion. The jihadis aren’t going to go away. Even if we do – especially if we do!