Levitt Letter Extra News

By Jesse Petrilla, www.FrontPageMagazine.com

I recently returned to the United States from Egypt where I was on a fact-finding mission to see what life is like for non-Muslims who live under Islam. What I saw was a dire situation of oppression and discrimination that many in America and the West have all but ignored.

I went to Egypt because I wanted to learn what life would be like if our enemies and their allies succeeded in getting their way. What I saw was an example of the harsh life in store for future American generations in Islamic-dominated regions of the U.S. if we do not work to bring attention to Islamic oppression now at this critical time in history.

My journey began on an EgyptAir flight out of JFK. I was a bit surprised, to say the least, when the in-flight video came on prior to departure and instead of the usual safety video, a picture of a mosque flickered on and a deep-toned recorded voice came on reciting Islamic prayers out of the Koran. I’ve flown on Israeli airline El Al a number of times as well as hundreds of other global and U.S. airline companies, and I have never experienced a Christian prayer or a Jewish prayer on a flight, and could only imagine the reaction of Americans if an airline carrier were to try. Regardless of the policies and logic of other airlines, apparently a Muslim-owned airline feels it fit to assume that all its passengers desire to hear a Muslim prayer, regardless of their faith. The safety video followed and my journey had begun. I was on my way to Cairo and Alexandria to get a feeling of what life was like there for non-Muslims.

The first day, I visited old Cairo. Walking through the alleyways, I visited the many ancient churches there. As I rounded a corner I came upon an old synagogue. Excited to find and learn the experiences of Jews who live there, I entered only to be greatly disappointed and utterly disgusted when I saw the synagogue was filled with hijab-clad Muslim women selling trinkets and postcards inside. It’s a museum that I can only assume the government uses to show its “tolerance.” I overheard the tour guides speaking of how there “were once Jews here,” and I was told that there is only one other synagogue in the city. It makes you wonder if someday there will be regions of America with a museum of the last or second to last synagogue or church. Irritatingly, the Egyptian police refuse to allow anyone to take any photos or video at all of the synagogue either inside or out, and they threatened to take my camera if I questioned their rule.

As I continued through the streets, the afternoon call to prayer began to broadcast from a local mosque, then another mosque, then a third, until the deafening sound of thousands of loudspeakers from mosques all over the city pierced through the air with the call of Allah akbar followed by Koranic verses.

I recalled how in several American cities including Dearborn, Michigan, sound ordinances have begun to be overturned to allow this to occur in America. I made my way to meet with a friend who is an activist for human rights in Egypt. He showed me the Egyptian constitution which in article II states that sharia (Islamic) law shall be “the principal source of legislation.” This clause goes for everyone in the nation regardless of faith. My friend told me the stories and showed me photos of young Christian girls who had been kidnapped and forced to convert to Islam, and threatened with death, and their families threatened if they ever convert back. After several days in Cairo, my journey continued to Alexandria where I would visit several churches which had been attacked in recent years.

On the train to Alexandria, we passed through rural villages where I noticed vast amounts of hay on the roofs of many village homes. Our guide told us that the livestock sleep in the house with the people at night. Jokingly I asked if the women sleep out in the stable, but I didn’t receive a definitive answer on that one. It was about this time that I realized the majority of the men everywhere I went had a small round bruise on their forehead reminiscent of something out of the book of Revelation. My guide told me that it was from hitting their head on the floor when praying. He also told me that in Egypt specifically, and perhaps elsewhere, some men heat up a metal spoon in a fire and stick it on their forehead to accentuate the bruise. It seems you aren’t cool unless you have the mark.

As we stepped off the train in Alexandria, a police officer approached and told my Egyptian Coptic friend that he did not have a license to be my guide, desiring a bribe before he would leave us alone. This had not been the first time in the trip that a cop came up looking for money. It seemed every time I took out my camera, a police officer would show up to tell me I couldn’t take any pictures and I would have to pay him a nominal fine. Usually the officer would not be looking for a bribe of more than ten or twenty dollars, and thankfully our guide was able to talk officers out of it the majority of the time.

We went to a local hotel where I turned on the television to see the Statue of Liberty in flames. I changed the channel only to see a video clip of a small child crying with her arms in the air, spliced in with images of U.S. soldiers. The video cut to a bleeding boy lying on the ground — an obvious piece of anti-American propaganda. Interestingly enough, to the right of the boy in the video you could see a U.S. medic helping the injured child, no doubt hurt by Jihadist terrorists, but you certainly wouldn’t know that from the theme of the video.

Our first stop in Alexandria was the Church of St. George, the site of a brutal attack in 2005 where a Muslim in his early 20s entered as a prayer service was finishing. He shouted Allah akbar and stabbed a nun in the chest with a knife. Several days after the stabbing, an angry Muslim mob also attacked the church, brandishing sticks and throwing rocks at the Christians. Numerous cars and Christian-owned businesses in the area were torched, and in the end, three people were dead from the violence, all of it being sparked by unsubstantiated reports about a theatrical production that occurred at the church which was rumored to have offended Islam.

I attended a prayer service there, and every 15 seconds over loudspeakers aimed at the church from the mosque next door, the Muslims were yelling at the Christians. Allah akbar! Allah akbar! they would yell among other things in an attempt to disrupt the prayer. This was entirely outside of the five daily calls to prayer which come over the same loudspeaker. It was intimidation designed entirely to disrupt Christian prayer, and stopped as soon as everyone left after the service was over. I took a short video of the incident, and posted it on YouTube.

My next stop was the Church of All Saints. When I arrived, I saw a large mosque directly across the street and another on the other block. This was the same case with the previous church I had visited, and my guide explained that as soon as they built the church, mosques went up all around it. Yet today it has become nearly impossible to get a permit in the country to construct a new church anywhere. The Church of All Saints was another site of an attack which occurred in 2006 where a Jihadist entered and began stabbing churchgoers while yelling the familiar phrase Allah akbar. In all, he attacked three churches that day, critically wounding many and killing a 78-year-old man. Yet the government dismissed him as only an isolated mentally ill madman.

I met with many people during my trip, and I learned a great deal about what it is like to live as a minority under Islam. I spoke with a priest who told me how he can see the younger generation of Christians there becoming more and more Islamized. I spoke with a man who told me how his young Christian children are taught in public schools there that they are going to hell if they do not become Muslims. I saw brutal intimidation and oppression, and a life dictated by Islamic law that many Americans don’t realize but are slowly beginning to see. Before we left, our guide showed us his ID card which had a glaring number 2 in the corner. He told me that Christians are required to have that number on their IDs. I asked if Muslims were required to have a number as well. “Yes,” he responded. “Number 1.”

In my visit to Egypt I saw a place rampant with police brutality and corruption, where non-Muslims are second-class citizens at best, who are brutally victimized on a daily basis. All this in a nation which is a popular U.S. tourist spot, and has been the recipient of American aid in excess of $28 billion in the last three decades.

Jesse Petrilla is the founder of The United American Committee (UAC), a federation of concerned Americans promoting awareness of threats to Homeland Security, primarily focusing on Islamic extremism in America.

The following two articles address the question “Is Islam Compatible with Democracy?” from two different perspectives. The authors reach the same conclusion, though their attitudes about the meaning of that conclusion vary greatly.

By Daniel Pipes, www.FrontPageMagazine.com

There’s an impression that Muslims suffer disproportionately from the rule of dictators, tyrants, unelected presidents, kings, emirs, and various other strongmen – and it’s accurate. A careful analysis by Frederic L. Pryor of Swarthmore College in the Middle East Quarterly (”Are Muslim Countries Less Democratic?”) concludes that “In all but the poorest countries, Islam is associated with fewer political rights.”

The fact that majority-Muslim countries are less democratic makes it tempting to conclude that the religion of Islam, their common factor, is itself incompatible with democracy.

I disagree with that conclusion. Today’s Muslim predicament, rather, reflects historical circumstances more than innate features of Islam. Put differently, Islam, like all pre-modern religions is undemocratic in spirit. No less than the others, however, it has the potential to evolve in a democratic direction.

Such evolution is not easy for any religion. In the Christian case, the battle to limit the Catholic Church’s political role lasted painfully long. If the transition began when Marsiglio of Padua published Defensor pacis in the year 1324, it took another six centuries for the Church fully to reconcile itself to democracy. Why should Islam’s transition be smoother or easier?

To render Islam consistent with democratic ways will require profound changes in its interpretation. For example, the anti-democratic law of Islam, the Shari‘a, lies at the core of the problem. Developed over a millennium ago, it presumes autocratic rulers and submissive subjects, emphasizes God’s will over popular sovereignty, and encourages violent jihad to expand Islam’s borders. Further, it anti-democratically privileges Muslims over non-Muslims, males over females, and free persons over slaves.

For Muslims to build fully functioning democracies, they basically must reject the Shari‘a’s public aspects. Atatürk frontally did just that in Turkey, but others have offered more subtle approaches. Mahmud Muhammad Taha, a Sudanese thinker, dispatched the public Islamic laws by fundamentally reinterpreting the Koran.

Atatürk’s efforts and Taha’s ideas imply that Islam is ever-evolving, and that to see it as unchanging is a grave mistake. Or, in the lively metaphor of Hassan Hanafi, professor of philosophy at the University of Cairo, the Koran “is a supermarket, where one takes what one wants and leaves what one doesn’t want.”

Islam’s problem is less its being anti-modern than that its process of modernization has hardly begun. Muslims can modernize their religion, but that requires major changes: Out go waging jihad to impose Muslim rule, second-class citizenship for non-Muslims, and death sentences for blasphemy or apostasy. In come individual freedoms, civil rights, political participation, popular sovereignty, equality before the law, and representative elections.

Two obstacles stand in the way of these changes, however. In the Middle East especially, tribal affiliations remain of paramount importance. As explained by Philip Carl Salzman in his recent book, Culture and Conflict in the Middle East, these ties create a complex pattern of tribal autonomy and tyrannical centralism that obstructs the development of constitutionalism, the rule of law, citizenship, gender equality, and the other prerequisites of a democratic state. Not until this archaic social system based on the family is dispatched can democracy make real headway in the Middle East.

Globally, the compelling and powerful Islamist movement obstructs democracy. It seeks the opposite of reform and modernization – namely, the reassertion of the Shari‘a in its entirety. A jihadist like Osama bin Laden may spell out this goal more explicitly than an establishment politician like Turkey’s Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, but both seek to create a thoroughly anti-democratic, if not totalitarian, order.

Islamists respond two ways to democracy. First, they denounce it as un-Islamic. Muslim Brotherhood founder Hasan al-Banna considered democracy a betrayal of Islamic values. Brotherhood theoretician Sayyid Qutb rejected popular sovereignty, as did Abu al-A‘la al-Mawdudi, founder of Pakistan’s Jamaat-e-Islami political party. Yusuf al-Qaradawi, Al-Jazeera television’s imam, argues that elections are heretical.

Despite this scorn, Islamists are eager to use elections to attain power, and have proven themselves to be agile vote-getters; even a terrorist organization (Hamas) has won an election. This record does not render the Islamists democratic but indicates their tactical flexibility and their determination to gain power. As Erdogan has revealingly explained, “Democracy is like a streetcar. When you come to your stop, you get off.”

Hard work can one day make Islam democratic. In the meanwhile, Islamism represents the world’s leading anti-democratic force.

And for a different perspective on the same question…

By Amir Taheri
www.BenadorAssociates.com

I am glad that this debate takes place in English.

Because, were it to be conducted in any of the languages of our part of the world, we would not have possessed the vocabulary needed.

To understand a civilization it is important to understand its vocabulary.

If it was not on their tongues it is likely that it was not on their minds either.

There was no word in any of the Muslim languages for democracy until the 1890s. Even then the Greek word democracy entered Muslim languages with little change: democrasi in Persian, dimokraytiyah in Arabic, demokratio in Turkish.

Democracy as the proverbial schoolboy would know is based on one fundamental principle: equality.

The Greek word for equal isos is used in more than 200 compound nouns; including isoteos (equality) and Isologia (equal or free speech) and isonomia (equal treatment).

But again we find no equivalent in any of the Muslim languages. The words we have such as barabari in Persian and sawiyah in Arabic mean juxtaposition or leveling.

Nor do we have a word for politics.

The word siassah, now used as a synonym for politics, initially meant whipping stray camels into line. (Sa’es al-kheil is a person who brings back lost camels to the caravan.) The closest translation may be: regimentation.

Nor is there mention of such words as government and the state in the Koran.

It is no accident that early Muslims translated numerous ancient Greek texts but never those related to political matters. The great Avicenna himself translated Aristotle’s Poetics. But there was no translation of Aristotle’s Politics in Persian until 1963.

Lest us return to the issue of equality.

The idea is unacceptable to Islam.

For the non-believer cannot be the equal of the believer.

Even among the believers only those who subscribe to the three so-called Abrahamic religions: Judaism, Christianity and Islam (Ahl el-Kitab) are regarded as fully human.

Here is the hierarchy of human worth in Islam:

At the summit are free male Muslims

Next come Muslim male slaves

Then come free Muslim women

Next come Muslim slave women.

Then come free Jewish and /or Christian men

Then come slave Jewish and/or Christian men

Then come slave Jewish and/or Christian women.

Each category has rights that must be respected.

The People of the Book have always been protected and relatively well treated by Muslim rulers, but often in the context of a form of apartheid known as dhimmitude.

The status of the rest of humanity, those whose faiths are not recognized by Islam or who have no faith at all, has never been spelled out although wherever Muslim rulers faced such communities they often treated them with a certain measure of tolerance and respect ( As in the case of Hindus under the Muslim dynasties of India.)

Non-Muslims can be, and have often been, treated with decency, but never as equals.

(There is a hierarchy even for animals and plants. Seven animals and seven plants will assuredly go to heaven while seven others of each will end up in Hell.)

Democracy means the rule of the demos, the common people, or what is now known as popular or national sovereignty.

In Islam, however, power belongs only to God: al-hukm l’illah. The man who exercises that power on earth is known as Khalifat al-Allah, the regent of God.

But even then the Khalifah or Caliph cannot act as legislator. The law has already been spelled out and fixed forever by God.

The only task that remains is its discovery, interpretation and application.

That, of course, allows for a substantial space in which different styles of rule could develop.

But the bottom line is that no Islamic government can be democratic in the sense of allowing the common people equal shares in legislation.

Islam divides human activities into five categories from the permitted to the sinful, leaving little room for human interpretation, let alone ethical innovations.

What we must understand is that Islam has its own vision of the world and man’s place in it.

To say that Islam is incompatible with democracy should not be seen as a disparagement of Islam.

On the contrary, many Muslims would see it as a compliment because they sincerely believe that their idea of rule by God is superior to that of rule by men which is democracy.

In Muslim literature and philosophy being forsaken by God is the worst that can happen to man.

The great Persian poet Rumi pleads thus:

Oh, God, do not leave our affairs to us

For, if You do, woe be to us.

Rumi mocks those who claim that men can rule themselves.

He says:

You are not reign even over your beard,

That grows without your permission.

How can you pretend, therefore,

To rule about right and wrong?

The expression “abandoned by God” sends shivers down Muslim spines. For it spells the doom not only of individuals but of entire civilizations.

The Koran tells the stories of tribes, nations and civilizations that perished when God left them to their devices.

The great Persian poet Attar says:

I have learned of Divine Rule in Yathirb (i.e. Medinah, the city of the Prophet)

What need do I have of the wisdom of the Greeks?

Hafez, another great Persian poet, blamed man’s “hobut” or fall on the use of his own judgment against that of God:

I was an angel and my abode was the eternal paradise

Adam (i.e. man) brought me to this place of desolation

Islamic tradition holds that God has always intervened in the affairs of men, notably by dispatching 124,000 prophets or emissaries to inform the mortals of His wishes and warnings.

Many Islamist thinkers regard democracy with horror.

The late Ayatollah Khomeini called democracy “a form of prostitution” because he who gets the most votes wins the power that belongs only to God.

Sayyed Qutub, the Egyptian who has emerged as the ideological mentor of Safalists, spent a year in the United States in the 1950s.

He found “a nation that has forgotten God and been forsaken by Him; an arrogant nation that wants to rule itself.”

Last year Yussuf al-Ayyeri, one of the leading theoreticians of today’s Islamist movement, published a book (available on the Internet) in which he warned that the real danger to Islam did not come from American tanks and helicopter gunships in Iraq but from the idea of democracy and rule by the people.

Maudoodi, another of the Islamist theoreticians now fashionable, dreamed of a political system in which human beings would act as automatons in accordance with rules set by God.

He said that God has arranged man’s biological functions in such a way that their operation is beyond human control. For our non-biological functions, notably our politics, God has set rules that we have to discover and apply once and for all so that our societies can be on autopilot so to speak.

The late Saudi theologian, Sheikh Muhammad bin Ibrahim al-Jubair, a man I respected though seldom agreed with, sincerely believed that the root cause of all of our contemporary ills was the spread of democracy.

“Only one ambition is worthy of Islam,” he liked to say,” the ambition to save the world from the curse of democracy: to teach men that they cannot rule themselves on the basis of manmade laws. Mankind has strayed from the path of God; we must return to that path or face certain annihilation.”

Thus those who claim that Islam is compatible with democracy should know that they are not flattering Muslims.

In fact, most Muslims would feel insulted by such assertions.

How could a manmade form of government, invented by the heathen Greeks, be compared with Islam which is God’s final word to man, the only true faith, they would ask.

In the past 14 centuries Muslims have, on occasions, succeeded in creating successful societies without democracy.

And there is no guarantee that democracy never produces disastrous results. (After all Hitler was democratically elected.)

The fact that almost all Muslim states today can be rated as failures or, at least, underachievers, is not because they are Islamic but because they are ruled by corrupt and despotic elites that, even when they proclaim an Islamist ideology, are, in fact, secular dictators.

Let us recall the founding myth of democracy as related by Protagoras in Plato.

Protagoras’s claim that the rule of the people, democracy, is the best, is ridiculed by Socrates who points out that men always call on experts to deal with specific tasks but when it comes to the more important matters concerning the city, i.e. the community, they allow every Tom , Dick and Harry an equal say.

Protagoras says that when man was created he lived a solitary existence and was unable to protect himself and his kin against more powerful beasts.

Consequently men came together to secure their lives by founding cities. But the cities were torn by strife because inhabitants did wrong to one another.

Zeus, watching the proceedings, realized that the reason that things were going badly was that men did not have the art of managing the city (politike techne).

Without that art man was heading for destruction.

So, Zeus called in his messenger, Hermes and asked him to deliver two gifts to mankind: aidos and dike.

Aidos is a sense of shame and a concern for the good opinion of others.

Dike here means respect for the right of others and implies a sense of justice that seeks civil peace through adjudication.

Before setting off Hermes asks a decisive question: Should I deliver this new art to a select few, as was the case in all other arts, or to all?

Zeus replies with no hesitation: To all. Let all have their share.

Protagoras concludes his reply to Socrates’ criticism of democracy thus:” Hence it comes about, Socrates, that people in the cities, and especially in Athens, listen only to experts in matters of expertise but when they meet for consultation on the political art, i.e. of the general question of government, everybody participates.”

Traditional Islamic political thought is closer to Socrates than to Protagoras.

The common folk, al-awwam, are regarded as “animals” (al-awwam kal anaam!)

The interpretation of the Divine Law is reserved only for the experts.

In Iran there is even a body called The Assembly of Experts.

Political power, like many other domains, including philosophy, is reserved for the khawas who, in some Sufi traditions, are even exempt from the ritual rules of the faith.

The “common folk”, however, must do as they are told either by the text and tradition or by fatwas issued by the experts. Khomeini coined the word mustazafeen” (the feeble ones) to describe the common folk.

In the Greek tradition once Zeus has taught men the art of politics he does not try to rule them.

To be sure he and other Gods do intervene in earthly matters but always episodically and mostly in pursuit of their illicit pleasures.

Polytheism is by its pluralistic nature is tolerant, open to new gods, and new views of old gods. Its mythology personifies natural forces that could be adapted, by allegory, to metaphysical concepts.

One could in the same city and at the same time mock Zeus as a promiscuous old rake, henpecked and cuckolded by Juno, or worship him as justice defied.

This is not possible in monotheism especially Islam, the only truly monotheistic of the three Abrahamic faiths.

In monotheism for the One to be stable in its One-ness it is imperative that the many be stabilized in their many-ness.

The God of monotheism does not discuss or negotiate matters with mortals.

He dictates, be it the 10 Commandments or the Koran which was already composed and completed before Allah sent his Hermes, Archangel Gabriel, to dictate it to Muhammad:

Read, the Koran starts with the command; In the name of Thy God The Most High!

Islam’s incompatibility with democracy is not unique. It is shared by other religions. For faith is about certainty while democracy is about doubt. There is no changing of one’s mind in faith, while democracy is about changing minds and sides.

If we were to use a more technical terminology faith creates a nexus and democracy a series.

Democracy is like people waiting for a bus.

They are of different backgrounds and have different interests. We don’t care what their religion is or how they vote. All they have in common is their desire to get on that bus. And they get off at whatever stop they wish.

Faith, however, is internalized. Turned into a nexus it controls man’s every thought and move even in his deepest privacy.

Democracy, of course, is compatible with Islam because democracy is serial and polytheistic. People are free to believe whatever they like to believe and perform whatever religious rituals they wish, provided they do not infringe on other’s freedoms in the public domain.

The other way round, however, it does not work.

Islam cannot allow people to do as they please, even in the privacy of their bedrooms, because God is always present, everywhere, all-hearing and all-seeing.

There is consultation in Islam: Wa shawerhum fil amr. (And consult them in matters)

But the consultation thus recommended is about specifics only, never about the overall design of society.

In democracy there is a constitution that can be changed or at least amended.

The Koran, however, is the immutable word of God, beyond change or amendment.

This debate is not easy.

For Islam has become an issue of political controversy in the West.

On the one hand we have Islamophobia, a particular affliction of those who blame Islam for all the ills of our world.

The more thin-skinned Muslims have ended up on regarding every criticism of Islam as Islamophobia.

On the other hand we have Islamoflattery that claims that everything good under the sun came from Islam. (According to a recent PBS serial on Islam, even cinema was invented by a lens-maker in Baghdad, named Abu-Hufus!)

This is often practiced by a new generation of the Turques de profession, Westerners who are prepared to apply the rules of critical analysis to everything under the sun except Islam.

They think they are doing Islam a favor.

The opposite is true.

Depriving Islam of critical scrutiny is bad for Islam and Muslims, and ultimately dangerous for the whole world.

The debate is about how to organize the global public space that is shared by the whole humanity. That space must be religion-neutral and free of ideology, which means organized on the basis of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

There are 57 nations in the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC).

Not one is yet a democracy.

The more Islamic the regime in place the less democratic it is.

Democracy is the rule of mortal common men.

Islam is the rule of immortal God.

Politics is the art of the possible and democracy a method of dealing with the problems of real life.

Islam, on the other hand, is about the unattainable ideal.

We should not allow the everything-is-equal-to-everything-else fashion of postmodernist multiculturalism and political correctness to prevent us from acknowledging differences and, yes, incompatibilities, in the name of a soggy consensus.

If we are all the same how can we have a dialogue of civilizations, unless we elevate cultural schizophrenia into an existential imperative?

Muslims should not be duped into believing that they can have their cake and eat it. Muslims can build democratic society provided they treat Islam as a matter of personal, private belief and not as a political ideology that seeks to monopolize the public space and regulate every aspect of individual and community life.

Ladies and gentlemen: Islam is incompatible with democracy.

I commend the motion.

By Stephen Brown, www.FrontPageMagazine.com

Some countries protect their children and others exploit theirs.

While America was watching authorities do their duty and seize children from a Mormon compound in Texas in order to protect them from potential underage marriage and sexual abuse, a single-minded girl with no police or legal protection bravely defied sharia law and her country’s male-dominated culture to divorce her husband. And, she is just eight years old.

Born in the year 2000, Nujood Ali was married two-and-a-half months ago to a man twenty years her senior after she was made to sign a marriage contract, arranged between her father and her “suitor.” The contract, a strictly commercial transaction which usually involves the groom paying a “bride price,” was supposed to allow Nujood to reside with her parents until she was 18. However, only a few days later, those same parents forced their daughter to move in with her new “husband,” who then brutally tormented her.

“Always, when I wanted to play in the garden, he hit me and said I should go with him into the bedroom,” Ali told the Yemen Times, adding that she would then run from room to room to escape him, but in vain. “In the end, he always got me.”

Finally, after two months of horrendous sexual abuse, in which Nujoud said her husband did “bad things with me,” the unwilling child bride turned to her father and an aunt for help. The aunt did nothing while the father, who had also been physically abusive towards her, told his daughter in response to her plea for assistance in getting a divorce: “I can’t do anything for you. If you want, go to the court alone.”

And that is exactly what the eight-year-old did. Facing what appeared to be a hopeless situation in such a male-dominated society and armed with nothing but her courage, Ali ran away to a maternal uncle and then bravely appeared before a court in the Yemen’s capital, Sanaa, to file cases against both her father and husband, demanding the dissolution of her marriage.

In her overwhelming desire to escape her marital hell, Nujood gave as grounds for her divorce: “My husband was very harsh with me and when I implored him to have pity, he would hit me, box my ears and abuse me. I want a decent life and the divorce.”

The judge took pity on what a reporter described as a “sweet but sad” child, who “knows and comprehends so many things,” and had both her father and husband taken into custody. The judge also allowed the little girl to reside in his house for several days before turning her over to the sympathetic uncle.

The husband was furious that his “wife” had the audacity to seek a divorce. However, this is an attitude all too common in countries where wives are bought as slaves and thus regarded as a husband’s commercial property.

“I will not divorce her, and it is my right to keep her,” said the outraged spouse to the Yemen Times. “It is not a matter of loving her; I don’t. But it is just a challenge to her and her uncle who think that they can keep me in jail and also the judge has no right to put me here. How did she dare to complain about me?”

Nujood is not Yemen’s first famous child bride. Zana Muhsen was a 15-year-old English schoolgirl of Arab-British descent when her Yemenite father sold her in England in 1983 for $3000 dollars to a countryman as a wife for his 14-year-old son. Her sister, Nadia, also 14, was sold for the same purpose and bride price to another Yemenite, whose son was 13.

The two sisters were detained against their will in Yemen for eight years with husbands they did not want, having babies they did not want, before diplomatic pressure and assistance from the international media finally freed Zana. Nadia stayed behind because of her children, who, due to the bride price, always remain with the father in case of a divorce.

In her best-selling book, Sold: A Story of Modern-Day Slavery, Zana outlined the two British sisters’ years of suffering, physical abuse and primitive living and working conditions in Yemen, during which time the authoress met child brides as young as ten.

The 2007 UNICEF photo of the year also made the world aware of the millions of girls sold as child brides every year, denied forever the opportunity to determine their own lives. In it, a forty-year-old man is seen sitting beside 11-year-old fiancée, named Ghulam, who appears to be giving him a contemptuous look on the day of their engagement.

When asked by American photographer, Stephanie Sinclair, what she felt that day, the slightly confused girl, whose answer Nujood would probably have matched word for word (had she been asked) upon meeting her husband, responded: “Nothing. I don’t know this man. What should I feel?”

According to UNICEF, there are more than 60 million underage brides worldwide with half of these living in South Asia. The parents, like Ghulam’s and Nujood’s, are most often poor and marry their daughters off, sometimes while still children, for the bride price. Once married, the task of these infants, almost as soon as they reach puberty, is to bear their husband children.

Nujood’s divorce became final two weeks ago. The spurned husband, who at first rejected her divorce demand, accepted a pay-off from an anonymous donor to agree to the end of the “marriage.” Incredibly, neither he nor Nujood’s father will face any charges over their cruel treatment of the innocent girl, since there is no law in Yemen against child marriages. They have legally committed no crime.

According to the International Center For Research On Women, Yemen ranks thirteenth on a list of twenty countries where marriages of female minors (girls under 18) are common. In one area of the Middle Eastern country, according to the Yemen Times, new brides average ten years of age while in another girls usually marry at age eight. The ICRW states that about 50 percent of the Yemen’s marriages involve underage girls. Niger tops the list with 76 percent.

But Nujood’s courage may change things for hundreds of other girls in Yemen facing the horrific fate of a child marriage. Her brave act in coming forward against tradition, family and the will of her husband to seek a divorce, probably the youngest girl, it is noted, ever to have asked for one in that country, is viewed by women’s groups and sympathetic politicians as a good opportunity to enact legislation designating 18 as a minimum age for marriage for all.

However, the Yemeni Parliament’s Jurisprudence Committee says “there are no legislative grounds to impose such a law based on its understanding of Islam.” Well, there you have it. Forget the barbarity of rape and thirteen-year-olds having babies, plus all the subsequent psychological and emotional damage; banning such practices is just not religiously correct for some.

“Those who approve of girls marrying at 13, 14, or even below 18 are barbaric men who abuse childhood and are irresponsible,” correctly noted Yahiya Al-Najar, a former Yemeni government minister and religious scholar in the Times of those who oppose a minimum age.

Nujood is still concerned about her younger sisters suffering her cruel fate, as her two older sisters did before her. Nevertheless, the resolute youngster, who used to “hate the nights” because of the unwanted sexual encounters, is looking forward to the bright days of a husband-less future.

“I am so happy to be free and I will go back to school and never think of getting married again,” she told the Times. “It is a good feeling to be rid of my husband and his bad treatment.”

To which one can only add: it is heartening to see that even within the horrifying and obscene structures of Islamic gender apartheid, women, even as young as eight, can sometimes triumph over injustice.

By Hillel Fendel, www.israelnationalnews.com

The CIA — the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency — is set to confirm that the Syrian installation destroyed by Israel on September 6, 2007 was a nuclear reactor. CIA representatives will brief members of a Congressional intelligence subcommittee.

The Los Angeles Times reported that the installation was meant to produce plutonium, and was partially funded by North Korea. Israel bombed the reactor before it attained its planned capacity to manufacture plutonium for nuclear weapons, the CIA says.

The Congressional subcommittee session is to deal with Syrian-North Korean relations, amidst reports that a possible deal is in the works to remove North Korea from the American list of state sponsors of terrorism.

At the presentation at Congress, which will be repeated afterwards to reporters, the intelligence officials will show video images showing Korean faces among the workers at the Syrian plant. Other pictures show what appears to be the construction of a reactor vessel inside the building.

Shortly after the Israel attack, Syria bulldozed the area and constructed a new building there, which it has not allowed foreign visitors to enter.

Israel, the U.S. and Syria have never divulged details about the attack, and today’s presentation is a major departure from this policy. Israel is reportedly not happy with the change, fearing that it will revive the tensions between Syria and Israel.

Syrian media reported that Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has agreed in principle to hand over the entire Golan Heights to Syria. Syrian Immigration Minister Boutina Sha’ban confirmed the reports, while Olmert’s office was silent.

Two years ago, Olmert said, “As long as I serve as prime minister, the Golan Heights will remain in our hands because it is an integral part of the State of Israel.” He was quoted in Israeli newspapers as reported by the French news agency AFP.

Nationalist Knesset Members said Olmert was recklessly endangering Israel with his consent to give away the strategic heights.

By Gary Bauer, www.humanevents.com

Looking to take in a movie this weekend? Here’s one that’s not for the faint of heart.

The film “Fitna”–“ordeal” in Arabic — was released recently on the Internet by Dutch parliamentarian Geert Wilders. “Fitna” juxtaposes scenes of violence and terrorism committed by devout Muslims with some of the Quran’s many verses that have been interpreted as justifying such violence and terrorism. The 17-minute movie makes the straightforward case that the jihadists who attack free societies are not distorting Islamic teachings but following them.

Muslims are less than pleased with the film. Islamic websites called for Wilders to be killed, as did a group of about 40 demonstrators in front of the Dutch Embassy in Indonesia. Many Islamic governments condemned the film, and demonstrators in a number of countries have demanded that western nations pass laws forbidding such criticism of Islam.

Why all the fuss? After all, the film’s main point — that Islam incites violence — is precisely the message many Muslim clerics spend much of their time trying to convince their followers to believe. A recent study sponsored by the Center for Security Policy found that of 100 American mosques and Islamic centers and schools it examined across the country, “75 should be on the watch list” for inciting insurrection and jihad through sermons and anti-western literature.

Evidence abounds that Muslim terrorism is very often a “faith-based initiative.” In one recent example, a report posted on Islam Watch, a site run by Muslims who oppose intolerant teachings and hatred of non-Muslims, exposes a prominent Islamic cleric and lawyer who supports extreme punishment for non-Muslims — including rape and murder. A question-and-answer session with Imam Abdul Makin in an East London mosque asks why Allah would tell Muslims to kill and rape innocent non-Muslims, including their wives and daughters. “Because non-Muslims are never innocent, they are guilty of denying Allah and his prophet,” the Imam says.

Western politicians and pundits often misidentify the source of Muslim outrage. Radicals calling for Wilders’ head don’t take issue with Fitna’s claim that Islam calls followers to murder millions of innocent people for the sake of Allah. The protesters’ outrage stems instead from the implied criticisms of such acts. Protestors are calling for Wilders’ death not because he misquoted the Quran’s incitements to violence but because he argues that the book should be outlawed.

There is a pattern here. In 2004, another Dutch filmmaker, Theo van Gough, was murdered by a jihadist in Amsterdam for releasing a film about the mistreatment of women in Islamic societies. Van Gough was killed not because his film highlighted passages of the Quran that have been used to justify abuse and rape of women, but rather because the film criticized the abuse and rape. The same pattern has been seen in many of the violent reactions to even slight critiques of Islam, such as in the deadly riots that followed Pope Benedict’s remarks on faith and violence in Regensburg, Germany.

Predictably, many western leaders were quick to condemn Fitna. Australia’s foreign minister called the film “highly offensive.” Dutch Prime Minister Jan Peter Balkenende distanced himself from the movie, and on Monday, Dutch Foreign minister Maxime Verhagen met with ambassadors from Islamic countries to assure them the film “in no way reflects the opinion of the Dutch government.” United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon condemned the film, insisting that “incitement” against a religious faith should never be allowed.

It is difficult to take the secretary general seriously. Everyday in the Palestinian territories — on T.V., in movies and in music — there is a steady diet of incitements against Jews, who are routinely compared to apes and monkeys. Palestinian students are taught that Jews use the blood of kidnapped Muslim children in Jewish religious ceremonies. Where are the condemnations from Europe or the U.N. for this incitement? The reaction of European politicians to Wilders’ film is proof that radical Islam has already cowed too many Western leaders into silence.

But even some who acknowledge a causal relationship between Islam and violence are often quick to contend that faith-based violence is confined to a few extremists and is opposed by the vast majority of Muslims. But a recent survey estimates that a quarter of America’s 2.4 million Muslims consider suicide bombing in the name of Islam acceptable in some circumstances. And various polls have found that a majority of Muslims in the Middle East and over one-third of Muslims in Europe are sympathetic to jihad and terrorism against the west.

Which is cause for concern given the Vatican’s announcement this week that Islam has surpassed Roman Catholicism as the world’s single largest religious denomination. According to the Vatican, Muslims have soared to nearly 20 percent of the world’s population, while Catholics comprise 17.4 percent. Although Christianity — with 2 billion adherents, 33 percent of the population — is still the world’s most popular religion, Islam is arguably its fastest growing, and it is certainly the fastest growing in Europe.

As the number of Muslims increases, and as evidence mounts that a significant minority supports violence, the threat to western democracies built on free inquiry and debate is real.

To watch the Fitna movie, google the word Fitna.
Or, cut and paste the following address to watch the Fitna movie:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Kx9mZBODZg

By Daniel Pipes, www.FrontPageMagazine.com

Some analysts of Islam in Western Europe argue that the continent cannot escape its Eurabian fate; that the trend lines of the past half-century will continue until Muslims become a majority population and Islamic law (the Shari‘a) reigns.

I disagree, arguing that there is another route the continent might take, one of resistance to Islamification and a reassertion of traditional ways. Indigenous Europeans – who make up 95 percent of the population – can insist on their historic customs and mores. Were they to do so, nothing would be in their way and no one could stop them.

Indeed, Europeans are visibly showing signs of impatience with creeping Shari‘a. The legislation in France that prohibits hijabs from public school classrooms signals the reluctance to accept Islamic ways, as are related efforts to ban burqas, mosques, and minarets. Throughout Western Europe, anti-immigrant parties are generally increasing in popularity.

That resistance took a new turn last week, with two dramatic events. First, on March 22, Pope Benedict XVI himself baptized, confirmed, and gave the Eucharist to Magdi Allam, 56, a prominent Egyptian-born Muslim long living in Italy, where he is a top editor at the Corriere della Sera newspaper and a well-known author. Allam took the middle name Cristiano. The ceremony converting him to the Catholic religion could not have been higher profile, occurring at a nighttime service at St. Peter’s Basilica on the eve of Easter Sunday, with exhaustive coverage from the Vatican and many other television stations.

Allam followed up his conversion with a stinging statement in which he argued that beyond “the phenomenon of Islamic extremism and terrorism that has appeared on a global level, the root of evil is inherent in an Islam that is physiologically violent and historically conflictive.” In other words, the problem is not just Islamism but Islam itself. One commentator, “Spengler” of Asia Times, goes so far as to say that Allam “presents an existential threat to Muslim life” because he “agrees with his former co-religionists in repudiating the degraded culture of the modern West, and offers them something quite different: a religion founded upon love.”

Second, on March 27, Geert Wilders, 44, released his long-awaited, 15-minute film, Fitna, which consists of some of the most bellicose verses of the Koran, followed by actions in accord with those verses carried out by Islamists in recent years. The obvious implication is that Islamists are simply acting in accord with their scriptures. In Allam’s words, Wilders also argues that “the root of evil is inherent” in Islam.

Unlike Allam and Wilders, I do distinguish between Islam and Islamism, but I believe it imperative that their ideas get a fair hearing, without vituperation or punishment. An honest debate over Islam must take place.

If Allam’s conversion was a surprise and Wilders’ film had a three-month run-up, in both cases, the aggressive, violent reactions that met prior criticisms of Islam did not take place. According to the Los Angeles Times, the Dutch police contacted imams to gauge reactions at the city’s mosques and found, according to police spokesman Arnold Aben, “it’s quieter than usual here today. Sort of like a holiday.” In Pakistan, a rally against the film attracted only some dozens of protestors.

This relatively constrained reaction points to the fact that Muslim threats sufficed to enforce censorship. Dutch Prime Minister Jan Peter Balkenende denounced Fitna and, after 3.6 million visitors had viewed it on the British website LiveLeak.com, the company announced that “Following threats to our staff of a very serious nature, … Liveleak has been left with no other choice but to remove Fitna from our servers.” (Two days later, however, LiveLeak again posted the film.)

Three similarities bear noting: both Allam (author of a book titled Viva Israele) and Wilders (whose film emphasizes Muslim violence against Jews) stand up for Israel and the Jews; Muslim threats against their lives have forced both for years to live under state-provided round-the-clock police protection; and, more profoundly, the two share a passion for European civilization.

Indeed, Allam and Wilders may represent the vanguard of a Christian/liberal reassertion of European values. It is too soon to predict, but these staunch individuals could provide a crucial boost for those intent on maintaining the continent’s historic identity.

By Jonathan Tobin, www.JewishWorldReview.com

Recently, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency reported that American officials are again pressing Congress to open up the U.S. aid pipeline to the Palestinian Authority.

If the plea sounds familiar, it ought to. Since the 1993 Oslo Accords, Americans have been subsidizing the activities of the P.A. to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars per year.

Today, as in the past, the arguments in favor of this policy are urgent. We are told by both administration officials who are friends of Israel and by some Israelis that unless we help fund the training and the payment of Palestinian security forces, the P.A. will have no way to cope with terrorists who want to sink any chance of a two-state solution which would enable Israel to live side-by-side with a peaceful Palestinian partner.

With Hamas in control of Gaza, the P.A., under the current leadership of Mahmoud Abbas, is, we are informed, the only address for creating a moderate force that will work for peace. Given the alternative of the Iranian-backed Hamas or the equally unpalatable choices of either Israel reoccupying the territories or an international peacekeeping force doing so, reinforcing the P.A. seems to make sense.

But does it really?

Doubts about the wisdom of the policy have led Rep. Nita Lowey (D-N.Y.) and Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-N.Y.) — respectively, the chair and the ranking minority member of the House Foreign Operations Subcommittee — to place a hold on a request of another $150 million in direct assistance to the P.A. Thwarted on that front, the administration now wants the committee to okay an additional $25 million in indirect funding for the military training program.

Both Lowey and Ros-Lehtinen rightly worry about the commitment of Abbas and his Fatah Party to peace. They cite recent statements by Abbas in which he would not rule out a return to “armed resistance” against Israel. The support by the P.A. media for attacks against Israelis, such as the recent slaughter of eight students at a Jerusalem yeshiva, as well as the ongoing blitz of southern Israel by Hamas missiles, is also reason to doubt the P.A.’s sincerity.

The P.A. also continues to honor the memory of slain terrorists as “martyrs” and, as The Jerusalem Post reported this week, plans to celebrate Israel’s 60th birthday by having Arab refugees to rush Israel’s borders to promote a “right of return,” which is synonymous with the destruction of the Jewish State.

Supporters of aid respond that these statements do not reflect Abbas’ real goals. Yet, they ignore the fact that what the P.A. has done for the past 15 years is to legitimize a Palestinian culture in which political plaudits are won only by killing Jews. Indeed, via its control of broadcast outlets, newspapers and the schools, the P.A. has solidified a mindset of hate.

Just as bad is the history of attempts to create a P.A. security force. The Oslo agreements called for the creation of a Palestinian police force that would combat terrorists. But Arafat had other ideas.

While most of the billions that came his way via aid from the European Union and the United States went into the pockets or Swiss bank accounts of Fatah officials, some of it was used to create a byzantine web of Palestinian “security” agencies whose purposes were anything but peaceful. When push came to shove as Arafat blew up the peace after the Camp David summit in 2000, it was these P.A. forces (including some who’d been trained by the Philadelphia Police Department) who committed terrorist acts against Israelis.

Adding to that sorry tale was the fiasco in Gaza in 2006 when Fatah thugs, aided and equipped by foreign sources at the specific instigation of Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, sought to maintain Abbas’ control of the area, even after the Hamas election victory.

As detailed in an investigative report published in the April issue of Vanity Fair magazine, the concerns voiced by some Israelis and skeptical members of Congress over that particular venture in bolstering Abbas were prophetic.

While Fatah goons tortured and kidnapped some of their rivals, neither they nor their leader Abbas had the stomach to face down Hamas, despite promises to do so. In the end, Abbas’ men wouldn’t fight, and the more popular Hamas seized control of Gaza. As David Rose wrote in Vanity Fair, “The exact thing both Israel and the U.S. Congress warned against came to pass when Hamas captured most of Fatah’s arms and ammunition — including the Egyptian guns supplied under the covert U.S.-Arab aid program.”

For 15 years, critics of such expenditures have been labeled as “anti-peace,” but that tag just served as an excuse for whitewashes of misbehavior by first Arafat and now Abbas.

An anonymous U.S. official told JTA that the 1,100 P.A. gunmen currently in Jordan, at American expense as well as with Israeli permission, are being schooled in such things as “training in riot control, human rights, and effective arrests and defensive shooting.” But so were their predecessors. Left unanswered in this account is why reasonable people should think this group will behave any differently.

Painted Into A Corner
The alternatives to Abbas are frightful. He is both weak and probably not much less ill-intentioned than Hamas, but he and his loyalists are seen as a counterforce to Iran’s allies.

Should American supporters of Israel therefore feel obligated to support the continued flow of funds to P.A. sources?

The problem is, the peace processors have painted themselves into a corner. Having crowned first Arafat and now Abbas, they are forced to ignore or suppress the truth about them in order to maintain American support for a two-state solution.

At the same time, Israel’s government takes the position that it needs a Palestinian partner who at least pays lip service to peace, as Abbas does. And no one here wants to do anything that would help create a greater “Hamasistan.”

Yet experience shows that the realpolitik strategy of propping up Fatah has not undermined Hamas, nor promoted peace. Perhaps the beginning of wisdom is the recognition that it’s time to stop reinforcing failure.

America’s attempts to create a Palestinian peace partner have failed. No amount of money will buy us a moderate state that will accept peace with Israel if the Palestinians don’t want one. If the president and the secretary of state aren’t honest enough to admit this, then perhaps it’s appropriate to ask Congress to turn off the spigot that sends more of our tax dollars down a Palestinian drain.

By Frank J. Gaffney, Jr., www.JewishWorldReview.com

Imagine trying to fight a war without a clue as to what motivates your enemy or governs his strategy for your destruction. Actually, you don’t have to work too hard to get your head around such an insane idea; it is the current practice of the United States government.

This is not, of course, the way it is supposed to be. According, for example, to the Pentagon’s own guidelines as reflected in the Army’s Field Manual 34-130 dealing with Intelligence Preparation of the Battlefield (IPB), one of the first tasks in any conflict is to “Evaluate the threat.” This job requires military personnel to “update or create threat models: convert threat doctrine or patterns of operation to graphics (doctrinal templates); describe in words the threat’s tactics and options; [and] identify high value targets.”

Such guidance is eminently sensible and needed, not only at the tactical or battlefield level, but also at the strategic level. In fact, most national security practitioners would find it, well, unimaginable to try to do otherwise.

Yet, Stephen Coughlin, one of the very few people working for the U.S. government who has rigorously studied the current “threat doctrine” - the wellspring in the traditions, practices and Shariah Law of today’s totalitarian ideology known as Islamofascism - is, as of this writing, still being cashiered at the end of the month.

Worse yet, the individual who seems to be most responsible for shutting down Mr. Coughlin’s essential doctrinal analysis and training by driving him out of the Pentagon - one Hesham Islam - seems to be staying in a sensitive position working for the Defense Department’s Deputy Secretary, Gordon England. This notwithstanding serious questions raised about Mr. Islam’s public biography, conduct in relation to Muslim outreach, the Coughlin affair and his top secret security clearance.

To recap: Coughlin is the author of an impressive 330-page master’s thesis on the subject which was recently accepted by the Defense Intelligence University. He currently works under contract to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, a job for which he is well suited as an Army Reserve Major, trained strategic intelligence analyst and attorney. His thesis brilliantly argues that jihad, or Islamic warfare, is rooted in the Islamists’ Shariah Law. According to the Army doctrine, it is the enemy’s conception of his doctrine that is the basis for developing threat templates and the threat model - not our uncritical assumptions about what “root causes” inspires him. As Maj. Coughlin observes, we are not at war with a “theory of terrorism.”

Maj. Coughlin has developed an intimate understanding not only of the “enemy threat doctrine.” He has also analyzed its “order of battle” including, notably, the various front organizations operated in America by the Muslim Brotherhood. Documents entered into evidence last year by the Department of Justice in the course of the Holy Land Foundation terrorism conspiracy trial offered insights into the stated objective of the Brotherhood - namely, the destruction of the United States from within. The Justice Department has also named names, identifying among many others, the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA) as a Muslim Brotherhood front.

Unfortunately, thanks to Hesham Islam, ISNA has been of late the preeminent vehicle for Pentagon “outreach” efforts to the American Muslim community. When Mr. Coughlin warned the Pentagon leadership of the error of such contacts, he was pressed by Mr. Islam to desist. Shortly after the former refused to do so, his contract with the Joint Chiefs of Staff was not renewed because, as one unnamed officer told the Washington Times’ Bill Gertz, it had “gotten too hot” to keep Mr. Coughlin on the job.

Some in Congress who have taken an interest in the Coughlin affair have been led to believe that Mr. Coughlin’s contract was not re-upped for reasons having nothing to do with his altercation with Mr. Islam, that he was getting a job in the Office of the Secretary of Defense and that Mr. Islam was going to be leaving the Pentagon. It appears they have been misled.

As of now, the Defense Department’s best hope for understanding - and drawing the appropriate insights from - the Islamofascist threat doctrine will be separated from the government at the end of March. An appointment that would allow Maj. Coughlin to continue his vital work in a position within the Office of the Secretary of Defense is reportedly being blocked by Under Secretary of Defense Eric Edelman or one of his subordinates.

Meanwhile, serious questions about not only Mr. Islam’s possible ties to the Muslim Brotherhood organization but his truthfulness in describing his personal history seem to have gone unanswered. One of America’s most accomplished investigative reporters, Claudia Rosett, was unable to confirm various colorful claims made by this Egyptian expatriate on a Pentagon website. The Department’s response to date has been to remove the page from that site. Mr. Islam evidently remains what Deputy Secretary England has called him: “a close personal confidante.” In the counter-intelligence heyday of the Cold War, would outreach to suspected Soviet front organizations have been so blithely dismissed?

In the current War for the Free World, it is nothing less than a scandal that America is still trying to win it with so much confusion about the doctrine of our enemies, to say nothing of having some fact-based hypothesis and understanding of those who may seek to replace our constitutional order with a Shariah Law-based one. As Maj. Coughlin argues, “If we fail to align the enemy to his doctrine,” then our strategies and comprehension of the threat will likewise be “misaligned.”

Steve Coughlin’s insights and capabilities are needed today more than ever. Effective congressional intervention, including hearings, may be required to ensure that the services of those who understand the threat posed by the Muslim Brotherhood and its ilk are retained. No less importantly, individuals who express sympathy for or otherwise abet the purposes of one of our enemies’ most insidious and successful instruments, the Muslim Brotherhood, have no place in the United States government.

By David Stringer, Associated Press

LONDON (AP) — Clad in mud-smeared combat fatigues, the young Muslims trained on picturesque British farmland, hurling imaginary grenades, wielding sticks as mock rifles and chopping watermelons in simulated beheadings.

A four-year inquiry, which came to a close with guilty pleas from the last two of seven gang members, has exposed a network of alleged British terrorism training camps meant to prepare recruits for mass murder.

Security officials believe hundreds of men — including a gang that made a failed attempt to bomb London’s transit network — passed through camps set up across the English countryside.

Investigators say it was a worrying discovery at the heart of Britain’s homegrown terrorism: training camps once thought to be exclusive to northern Pakistan or Afghanistan are being held in sleepy rural England.

“The exposure to that ideology — that radicalism, that extremism, that ‘them-and-us’ mind set — starts here on our streets in Britain,” a former extremist, Ed Husain, told Britain’s first police counterterrorism conference in Brighton.

Husain said British officials had been too tolerant of Islamic radicalism taught in universities and mosques during the 1980s and ’90s.

The two training camp ringleaders — one who claimed to be the “No. 1 al-Qaeda in Europe” and the other who nicknamed himself “Osama bin London — will be sentenced next month on charges of running the camps and inciting participants to murder. Five others were each sentenced to at least 3-1/2 years in prison on charges of attending terrorism training.

Their convictions — one last year and the rest last week following a four-month trial — could be reported for the first time when a judge lifted restrictions banning publication of details of the case after the final sentencing.

Prosecutors told a court hearing that the men set up camps in idyllic spots across England to train in military skills.

National parks in the Lake District of northern England, the New Forest in the south and quiet corners of the southern counties of Berkshire, Kent and East Sussex were all used for training, including a former school.

“This was not innocent activity taking place on a camping weekend,” said Peter Clarke, Britain’s most senior conterterrorism detective.

Officials fear the case shows that British Muslims can be radicalized, trained and funded to carry out terror attacks — without ever leaving the country.

The British camps also offer a glimpse of the training centers that British-based Islamic extremists allegedly hoped to open in Oregon before authorities upended the plot.

“People have got to be alert to the fact that right in the middle of our society these things are going on,” said Patrick Mercer, a former intelligence officer who is a member of Parliament with the opposition Conservative Party.

The camps may help explain why Jonathan Evans, head of the domestic intelligence agency MI5, has said Britain faces an ever growing threat from about 2,000 potential terrorists within its borders.

There were 37 terror-related cases prosecuted in Britain last year. This year, there have been 16 cases — five of which included guilty pleas because of overwhelming police evidence, Home Office minister Tony McNulty told the terrorism conference in Brighton.

Video secretly made at the camps showed recruits marching with backpacks — like those used by London’s transit network attackers to carry their deadly suicide bombs in 2005 — and conducting weapons drills used by insurgents in Iraq and the Taliban in Afghanistan.

An undercover police officer, code-named “Dawood,” infiltrated one group and captured cell phone video of the training. One clip showed trainees rehearsing a beheading with a watermelon.

The gang of North African men who made a failed attempt to bomb London’s transit network on July 21, 2005 — two weeks after the July 7 subway and bus strikes that killed 52 commuters — met and were trained at one of the camps, said a government security official, who agreed to discuss the inquiry only on condition of not being quoted by name.

Another recruit, Hussan Mutegombwa, was ordered jailed for 10 years in November over an alleged plan to carry out a suicide bombing in Somalia, police said.

Officials said the ringleaders of the camps were two London-based preachers — Atilla Ahmet, who once said in a CNN interview that he was “the No. 1 al-Qaeda in Europe,” and Mohammed Hamid, who gave himself the nickname “Osama bin London.”

This undated photo provided by London’s Metropolitan Police,
Feb. 26, 2008, shows Mohammed Hamid. Hamid who boasted of being “Osama bin London”,
has been found guilty of organising terrorist training camps and of encouraging others to
murder non-believers at the end of a four-month trial at London’s Woolwich Crown Court.
(AP Photo/Metropolitan Police/ho)

Ahmet is a longtime aide to radical cleric Abu Hamza al-Masri, an Egyptian the U.S. is attempting to extradite over the alleged plan to set up terrorist training camps in Oregon.

Hamid, originally from Tanzania, hand-picked recruits from mainstream mosques, inviting them for radical meetings at his home and then selecting a smaller number to attend the camps, police said.

Prosecutors said Hamid was candid about his hope that recruits could dwarf the scale of the 2005 London bombings. He hoped they would carry out six or seven major attacks before London hosted the 2012 Olympics, prosecutors said.

“Fifty-two. That’s not even breakfast for me,” Hamid said, referring to the number killed in the 2005 bombings, in a recording from a secret bug installed in his home which was played at his trial.

Dozens trained at Hamid’s camps were hoping to carry out attacks, said a senior police official, who insisted on anonymity to discuss counterterrorism work. “There was repeated talk of finding and killing nonbelievers,” he said.

On the Net:
Police videos: http://www.met.police.uk/pressbureau/opoveramp/training.htm

By Daniel Pipes, www.FrontPageMagazine.com

Westerners opposed to the application of the Islamic law (the sha’ria) watch with dismay as it goes from strength to strength in their countries – harems increasingly accepted, a church leader endorsing Islamic law, a judge referring to the Koran, clandestine Muslim courts meting out justice. What can be done to stop the progress of this medieval legal system so deeply at odds with modern life, one that oppresses women and turns non-Muslims into second-class citizens?

A first step is for Westerners to mount a united front against the sha’ria. Facing near-unanimous hostility, Islamists back down. For one example, note the retreat last week by the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) in a dispute concerning guide dogs used by the blind.

Muslims traditionally consider dogs impure animals to be avoided, creating an aversion that becomes problematic when Muslim store-owners or taxi drivers deny service to blind Westerners relying on service dogs. I have collected 15 such cases on my weblog, at “Muslim Taxi Drivers vs. Seeing-Eye Dogs”: five from the United States (New Orleans, Cincinnati, Milwaukee, Brooksville, Fl.; Everett, Wash.); four from Canada (Vancouver, twice in Edmonton, Fort McMurray, Alberta); three from the United Kingdom (Cambridge, twice in London); two from Australia (Melbourne, Sydney); and one from Norway (Oslo).

News accounts quote Muslim cabbies rudely rejecting blind would-be passengers, yelling at them, “No dog, No dog, Get out, get out”; “Get that dog out of here”; and “No dogs, no dogs.” The blind find themselves rejected, humiliated, abandoned, insulted, or even injured, left in the rain, dropped in the middle of nowhere, made late for an appointment, or caused to miss a flight.

Australian Human Rights Commissioner Graeme Innes and his guide dog. Innes is often denied service by taxi drivers.

Islamist organizations initially responded to this problem by supporting anti-canine cabbies. The Muslim Association of Canada pointed out how Muslims generally regard dog saliva as unclean. CAIR on one occasion echoed this assertion, claiming that “the saliva of dogs invalidates the ritual purity needed for prayer.” On another, the head of CAIR, Nihad Awad, declared that “People from the Middle East especially … have been indoctrinated with a kind of fear of dogs” and justified a driver rejecting a guide dog on the grounds that he “has a genuine fear and he acted in good faith. He acted in accordance with his religious beliefs.”

However, when the police and the courts are called in, the legal rights of the blind to their basic needs and their dignity almost always trump the Muslim dislike for dogs. The Muslim proprietor or driver invariably finds himself admonished, fined, re-educated, warned, or even jailed. The judge who found a cabby’s behavior to be “a total disgrace” spoke for many.

CAIR, realizing that its approach had failed in the courts of both law and of public opinion, suddenly and nimbly switched sides. In a cynical maneuver, for example, it organized 300 cabbies in Minneapolis to provide free rides for participants at a National Federation of the Blind conference. (Unconvinced by this obvious ploy, a federation official responded: “We really are uncomfortable … with the offer of getting free rides. We don’t think that solves anything. We believe the cabdrivers need to realize that the law says they will not turn down a blind person.”) And, finally, last week, the Canadian office of CAIR issued a statement urging Muslims to accommodate blind taxi passengers, quoting a board member that “Islam allows for dogs to be used by the visually impaired.”

CAIR’s capitulation contains an important lesson: When Westerners broadly agree on rejecting a specific Islamic law or tradition and unite against it, Western Islamists must adjust to the majority’s will. Guide dogs for the blind represent just one of many such consensus issues; others tend to involve women, such as husbands beating wives, the burqa head coverings, female genital mutilation, and “honor” killings. Western unity can also compel Islamists to denounce their preferred positions in areas such as slavery and sha’ria-compliant finances.

Other Islam-derived practices do not (yet) exist in the West but do prevail in the Muslim world. These include punishing a woman for being raped, exploiting children as suicide bombers, and executing offenders for such crimes as converting out of Islam, adultery, having a child out of wedlock, or witchcraft. Western solidarity can win concessions in these areas too.

If Westerners stick together, the sha’ria is doomed. If we do not, we are doomed.