Register for free to join our community of investors and share your ideas. You will also get access to streaming quotes, interactive charts, trades, portfolio, live options flow and more tools.
Register for free to join our community of investors and share your ideas. You will also get access to streaming quotes, interactive charts, trades, portfolio, live options flow and more tools.
“It's interesting how someone who is critically wounded gets up on his legs and laughs with his friends and gets interviewed while he's critically wounded,” she added.
Ask them who the heads of this so-called "country" of Palestine were. ---The "country" that the Jew-Haters say was "taken away" from their beloved "Palestinians.")
I think it is dispicable of Emerson to say things like that.
What does he know, anyway.
By the way, you will NEVER hear anything about this in the Washington Post, NY Times, or on Dan Blather, Tom Brokejaw, or Howdy Doody's son (Koppel)--not to mention the hate-America Canadian, prissy Peter Jennings.
2-FACED 'FRIENDS' OF FBI
By NILES LATHEM
NY POST
July 4, 2005 -- WASHINGTON — A nationwide FBI project designed to improve ties between the Islamic and law-enforcement communities went horribly wrong when it was revealed the organizations have issued incendiary statements against the United States, The Post has learned.
Questions are being raised by counterterrorism officials — including FBI field agents — over the bureau's high-profile involvement in a program called Partnering for Prevention and Community Safety Initiative, which is being run out of Northeastern University.
Among the groups participating in the project is the Muslim Public Affairs Council — an organization whose members have claimed Israel was to blame for 9/11, have opposed freezing the assets of Islamic charities linked to terrorism and have denounced several FBI arrests of suspected terrorists in the United States.
Steven Emerson, whose Investigative Project think tank studies Islamic extremism in the United States, released a tape of a speech MPAC National Director Ahmed Younis gave in Irvine, Calif., on July 14, 2002, in which he directed incendiary comments at then-Attorney General John Ashcroft.
"I am a person who believes that if Thomas Jefferson or Madison or the like were alive today, they would go to John Ashcroft's house and just shoot him," Younis said, according to the tape.
Emerson called the FBI's partnership with these groups "a slap in the face of FBI agents and victims of terrorism."
"Getting together in campfire, roast-marshmallow sessions with these bad groups only empowers them and legitimizes them," he said.
The project, which started in 2002, stated its goal was to create a "basic curriculum for future law-enforcement training activities."
Michael Rollins, the FBI special agent in charge of counterterrorism in the Washington Field Office and the bureau's point man on the project, admitted that some groups involved are potentially objectionable, but added that if the program gets off the ground, "the FBI will have veto power over who participates."
"If you say one thing to us and then go back to your group and make anti-American statements, you will not be at the table," he said.
Directors of the project at Northeastern University referred calls about the project to the FBI.
Younis did not return calls to his D.C. office.
Always good to hear from you, Bastardan.
Excellent thinking.
Remember a French HONOR GUARD carried the AID'S infected carcass of Yasser Arafart.
Symposium: Muslims in France: A Ticking Time Bomb?
By Jamie Glazov
FrontPageMagazine.com / July 4, 2005
France’s Muslim population is exploding and fundamentalist Islam is gaining control over it. French society remains almost completely oblivious. Does this phenomenon entail a ticking time bomb? What consequences does it pose to the West? What lessons is it teaching? To discuss these issues with Frontpage Symposium today, we are joined by a distinguished panel. Our guests:
Mohamed Ibn Guadi, an Islamologist at Strasbourg University and a researcher in Semitic Philology. He is a contributor to Figaro, Le Point and other journals. He has lectured at the Theological Seminary of Montpellier (France) in Islamic Law and Islamic Warfare during the Abbasside empire at Fez (Morocco) and has taught Persian, Arabic, Sumerian and other Semitic languages in Switzerland;
Dr. Soner Cagaptay, an adjunct assistant professor at Georgetown University and a senior fellow and director of The Washington Institute's Turkish Research Program.
Laurent Murawiec, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute. His book Princes of Darkness: The Saudi Assault on the West will appear in August:
and
Reza Bayegan, a Paris-based university lecturer, political analyst and human rights activist. He writes regularly about Iran and the Middle East and is a political commentator for Iranian radios in exile.
FP: Mohamed Ibn Guadi, Soner Cagaptay, Laurent Murawiec and Reza Bayegan, welcome to Frontpage Symposium.
Mr. Cagaptay, let’s start with a brief overview of the phenomenon of Muslims in France. Tell us about the situation there. Is there a ticking time bomb? If there is, what is it? Does it pose a threat to the rest of the West?
Cagaptay: Here is the picture: percentage-wise as well as in cumulative terms, France has the largest Muslim community in the EU. There are no official figures, since France does not collect numbers on religious affiliation, but according to official estimates, there are 6 million Muslims in France, that is 10 percent of the population. Unofficial estimates point at an even higher figure, suggesting as many as 8-9 million Muslims. What is more, given the low birth rate in the general French society, and the continuing immigration of Muslims from North Africa, this number is bound to increase.
The issue I would like to raise in this context is not that we should be concerned that there are so many Muslims in France, rather it is that the Muslims in France see themselves at the margins of the society and resent that fact. The Muslims in France are the worst integrated Muslim community in any EU country. Mass Muslim immigration to France is a post-WWII development. Many came from North Africa, especially Algeria, to look for jobs. However, France has done a terrible job in integrating them. The benign founding myth of the French state, that there are no differences between the citizens, has worked against the integration of the Muslims. On the one hand, from the very beginning, Muslims in France, already from a background of conservative--rural Islam, had few avenues towards assimilation into the metropolitan French society, and on the other, the society has acted as if these barriers do no exist.
The end result is that vast segments of the Muslim population in France have little to do with the rest of the society. There are for instance no Muslims in the French parliament, and when is the last time anyone met a Muslim diplomat representing France? The banlieus of Paris, Marseilles, and other major French cities are full of disgruntled and poor North African Muslims today, who feel discriminated in the school system, in the public sector and in access to government services. The bottom line is that elite institutions, means of upward mobility, as well as quality government services are in accessible to most Muslims in France. What is more, with the rise of radicalism in the 1990s, these neighborhoods are now under the effective control of fundamentalist Muslims. If I were French, I would be very worried.
FP: Fair enough, but wait a second here. Can you completely blame France and the French government itself for Muslims not “integrating” into French society? It’s many of the Muslims themselves that despise their host society and isolate themselves into their own communities and cultures, no?
Mr. Bayegan?
Bayegan: I don't think it is the issue of whether it is the fault of the French government and people, or whether it is the Muslim community here that is to be blamed. The issue is very complex. The French colonization of North Africa created a new relationship that the French could not pick up and drop down at will. The French language and culture had a greater and more permanent impact in Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia and Lebanon than anything that could ever be accomplished by military might. It is very significant that Albert Camus, one of the greatest twentieth century French novelists, was born in Algeria. During its colonization of Algeria for one hundred and thirty years France transformed Algeria to a French département. Small villages were turned into French villages and the whole Algerian economy was geared towards serving France's needs. Algeria became so Frenchified that one could go to a village restaurant there and order croissants and cafe au lait for breakfast.
Many Arabs have come to live in France not merely for economic reasons, but also because they felt France is their cultural homeland. There is no resemblance between these people and say Turks in Germany who have no historical or cultural ties with their adopted country. As Dr. Cagaptay pointed out, a large number have also come to France from rural, uneducated backgrounds. What ails these people and makes them stick out like sore thumbs in French society is not so much Islam and Islamic teaching but backward traditions they have brought with them from home. One of most problematic of these cultural baggages is the status of women within these communities. Second or third generation North African women in France still live under tremendous pressures to uphold the retrograde practices of their paternalistic communities. Women are treated as inferior to men and are bossed around by their husbands, brothers and fathers.
Here in France, French art and especially French cinema is playing a role in dramatizing this predicament and educating the public. A recent movie 'Chaos' directed by Coline Serreau was about the plight of an Algerian prostitute who was led to a life of crime and violence through a forced marriage.
There is also an attempt within the Muslim community to modernize Islam and bring it into line with the realities of the twenty-first century. Soheib Bencheikh, mufti of Marseilles and his preaching of a progressive Islam that rejects backwardness and fundamentalism, can be cited as a good example.
The French government has also tried to defuse Islamic fundamentalism. In December 2002, the then Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy persuaded the country's three main Islamic organizations to settle their differences and form a body called the French Council for the Muslim Religion. The jury is still out about the long term consequences of this move. In a country where only a small percentage of Muslims attend mosque regularly, this religious council can hardly be representative of the secularized Muslims.
What is certain is that there are no short cuts, easy answers or quick fixes here. The presence of six million Muslims in France is a reality as strong as the presence of Basque, Breton, and Corsicans in the multicultural French mosaic. This reality is not going to go away. The more the French Muslims are antagonized and alienated the better it would be for the spreading of fanaticism and the growth of a violent version of Islam. Efforts should be made in further enhancing a culture of tolerance and mutual understanding between Muslims, Christians and Jews within the French society.
FP: Dr. Ibn Guadi?
Ibn Guadi: I agree with Dr. Cagaptay. I think the French state could be blamed and in particular for the French model. In this model, individuals do not exist -- only French citizens. The general interest takes precedence over the particular interests. As a community, the Muslims see themselves with difficulty recognizing the right to the difference. The French state succeeded in imposing the ideology of its model on a society which is not it. That's why, as Dr. Cagaptay pointed out, they are the worst integrated Muslim community in any EU country. France wants to build a French Islam but without Islamic institutions. It is impossible. The dilemma is that the French law is disconnected from the religious questions.
Is there a ticking bomb? Probably. But not necessairement because of Islam. For several years the French have been also very confused concerning their own values. For a long time, they believed that they could manage to set up an exemplary society by eliminating the religious sphere, and in particular Christianity. The religious feeling is almost non-existent in France. It is normal that Islam, a young religion in France, occupies the essence of spiritual space here in this country. And in particular today, Islam generates fear, fascination and questioning. The place of the Muslims and Islam in France will in the future present new anthropologic and sociological challenges for the French people.
Reza Bayegan mentioned Soheib Bencheikh, the mufti of Marseille. Unfortunately, the Mufti Bencheikh is not really representative of the majority of Muslims in France. Actually, most of the Muslims in France wish to be represented by the leaders of the UOIF (Union of Islamic Organizations of France). It is a normal reaction since the UOIF means an Islam expurgate of artifices regarded as specifically Western - reform, secularism, integration, etc. - It is illusory to think that the Muslims "moderates" are or form the majority in France.
As far as foreign policy is concerned, France - and Europe - is not the center of the history anymore. France does not have the means to follow an international politic distinct from the United States. In the Arab world, France is seen especially as an undecided and ambiguous country vis-à-vis of Islam and Muslims. France believes that it has weight on the international chess-board against the United States only because it calls upon the relations with its old colonies. France is not the model anymore for Arabs. Public opinion remains still very badly informed on these fields.
FP: So Soheib Bencheikh, the mufti of Marseille, doesn’t represent the majority of Muslims in France. In other words, if this is true, the majority of Muslims in France are not interested in reforming Islam to make it a religion compatible with modernity and democracy. What danger does this spell for the future of France and Europe?
Murawiec: I fail to distinguish an Islamic community that is "well integrated" anywhere in Europe. Turks in Germany were not allowed to become German until a few years ago. British Muslims are dominated by radical rabble-rousers. Dutch Muslims, I'm afraid, have not distinguished themselves.
The large-scale Muslim presence in Europe is the unanticipated consequence of scores of State and individual decisions. Nobody imagined thirty years ago that a permanent Muslim community of 6-plus million would live in France. For instance, president Giscard d'Estaing in 1975, in order to display his compassion, took the decision that legal immigrants could bring in their families. As a result, such problems as polygamy arose on French soil.
A second set of problems: all earlier waves of immigration into France, from Italians in the 1880s onward, Jews, Poles, Spaniards, Portuguese - when I was in the military, I checked the rostrum of my regiment: close to twenty per cent had foreign surnames - all passionately wanted to become French, and did. This was not and is not the case with the preponderance of Muslim immigrants, North Africans and West Africans in the first place. The price of the entry ticket was higher for the Muslims than for Christians, or Ashkenazi Jews, from other parts of Europe.
Thirdly, France used to be an effective melting pot. After 1968, the culture in general collapsed, the moral fibre of society, which stopped believing in its own values, that traditionally were Christian. France's intelligentsia deconstructed the nation - this is no incentive for integration. I agree with Mohamed - there is no competition between a lame, self-loathing ex-Christian and a young Muslim who is all the more intent on his belief than he knows very little about the religion, and the Arabic language. The current of conversions through marriages is one-sided.
The French elite, and that benighted president Chirac, have been sucking up to the Muslim world in the imperial hope of taking the lead in a world-wide We Hate America alliance. Arab leaders in particular have used that conceit to their advantage. Chirac was a prime supporter of Arafat, fought against any measures to curb Hezbollah and Hamas, and so did Villepin. France has mostly reaped a great deal of the contempt reserved for the dhimmi-s. To me, the ticking bomb is the European drift toward dhimmitude, as Bat Ye'or has shown. It empowers Muslim radicals. The Union of Islamic Organizations in France is dominated and run by the Muslim Brotherhood. The textbooks are Wahhabi. A large number of the imams are Wahhabi-trained.
I do not think that the assassination of Theo van Gogh has had the same impact in France as it has in the Netherlands, but also in Germany. I think that some fundamental reorientations are afoot, concerning immigration, Islam, and definitions of nationhood. Look at the results of the referendum on the European Constitution.
FP: In other words, for the sake of worshipping at the altar of anti-Americanism, France has committed national suicide.
So gentlemen, paint me the worst case scenario in terms of this ticking time bomb. And what can we do to take the edge off of the explosion when it comes?
Cagaptay: First, I agree with Laurent that there are no well-integrated Muslim communities on the continent. Yet, it is the case that some Muslims have assimilated better the others. One case is the Turks in Germany, which gives me a chance to look at where the problem is with regard to the Muslim communities on the continent. Even if for a long time the German state made it difficult for Turks to assimilate, until 2001, for instance, the Turks could not even take German citizenship, the Turks, nevertheless, persisted. They moved into middle-class German society faster and in bigger numbers than Muslims in other countries, such as the North Africans in France. Why? Because the Turks are "Western leaning" Muslims. Even if they may be of the poorest and least educated segments of Turkey, Turks have come to Germany from Ataturk's Turkey, having been exposed to Western values and institutions. Accordingly, even if there are Turkish working class neighborhoods in Germany, you do not see the problem of Islamist-run, and, due to the ineffectiveness of past French governments, often criminal ghettos there as you do in France.
Next, the worst case scenario. But, first let's deal with a cliché. Europe is not a continent with religious tolerance. Look at 1492, the expulsion of Jews and Muslims from Spain and then Portugal, St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre of French Protestants in 1572, Thirty Years War, incessant pogroms against Jews in Eastern Europe from the 17th century until the 20th, the Holocaust, and last but not least, expulsion and annihilation of European Muslims in Central Europe, Balkans and Russia ever since the seventeenth century.
Why am I making this point? Even under the veneer of post 1968-multiculturalism, which Laurent skilfully mentions, there persists a Europe that is intolerant towards religions other than Christianity. What is interesting is that in this day and age, when a majority of Europeans are either non-believers or lapsed Christians, and Europe is arguably the most secular,
Europeans view Muslims through their religious identity and their European credentials, or the lack thereof. Given this dynamic and the historically combustive mix of religious hatred on the continent, here is my prediction for a worst case scenario, which I should add I would never want to see: imagine for a minute that there were 9/11 style attacks in France, what would the French response be?
We have a small scale test case to answer this question. Remember what happened after the murder of Van Gogh in the Netherlands. This was a gruesome and appalling murder. Yet, the response to it, acts of violence against Muslims and mosques collectively in the old --but apparently still alive-- European fashion showed that even in the very liberal Dutch society, the old European mind set still persists. Hence, to go back to my worst case scenario, if there were a 9/11 type of attack in France, I shudder to think in which ways the majority French people will take on the Muslims in the country.
FP: Sorry if I am misunderstanding you here, but this interpretation implies a theme that gets my blood boiling. It reminds me of the lefties here in America who, after the 9/11 attacks, instead of being sympathetic to the victims and their families and angry at the perpetrators, and supporting revenge against those who committed the crimes and those who harboured them, instead were agonizing about how Arab and Muslim rights were now going to be violated.
I am a Russian. If tomorrow, hypothetically, some Russians massacred 3,000 innocent people, my heart would go out to thee victims and to their families, and I would want to see retaliation against those who committed the crime. My greatest concern would not be sitting around thinking: “Oh and now they will discriminate against people like me, people with the ending ‘ov’ at the end of their name.”
I think that this emphasis reveals a certain ideological bent.
Sorry, but when I think of the problem of the growing presence of Muslims in France, the first thing that comes to my mind is the heart-breaking reality of forced marriages and honor killings being perpetrated on Arab-Muslim girls on French territory. I think of forced veiling. I think of the gang-rapes of Muslim and non-Muslim girls who are not veiled in Arab-Muslim ghettoes. I think of female genital mutilations. I think of the growing radical element that might perpetrate another 9/11 over there. I think about all we can possibly and hopefully do to crush these forces. Needless to say, that is what is on my mind, not sitting around worrying what will happen to someone else afterwards, someone that is not even a victim of the huge crime that is perpetrated and should be thought about and condemned.
Bayegan: The worst case scenario will emerge out of our failure to discriminate between Muslims and Islamism. By Islamism, I mean the fundamentalist, extremist doctrine that is based on a violent and intolerant interpretation of Islam. The worst case scenario will show its ugly and violent face when in our rage against fanaticism we subscribe to another form of fanaticism ourselves. In other words, as Amos Oz the Israeli novelist has said, 'In our anti-fanaticism we can turn into the worst kind of fanatics'.
Remember that the person who assassinated Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin was not a female-genital mutilating, honor killing Muslim, but a fanatical Jew. The worst case scenario would develop out of blind ignorance in all its various shapes and forms. Blind ignorance is not the monopoly of Muslims, it has a fertile breeding ground wherever reason and sound judgment give way to hatred and bigotry. Do not forget that The Holocaust was perpetrated by refined Christians who enjoyed listening to Wagner and perused the works of Heidegger and Celine, and not gang-raping Arabs. What the fundamentalists want, and as an Iranian I can testify to, is to polarize and radicalize the conflict between Islam and the West as much as possible. They want to push the West over the Rubicon of waging a wholesale war against all Muslims. Achieving this task they can turn around and tell their fellow Muslims that the argument of moderate, tolerant Muslims is ineffective and irrelevant. They want to make all Muslims believe that anyone who argues that peaceful coexistence with the West is possible is a traitor to Islam and acts as a fifth column.
The West should concentrate its efforts in defeating Islamism, and not in the alienation of Muslims.
As a child growing up in pre-revolutionary Iran, I remember that my Muslim parents had their best friends amongst the Jews. One of these Jewish friends helped me to leave Iran for Canada after the Revolution and his family provided me with all the love and assistance they could offer at a time when I needed it most: early difficult years of separation from my parents and country. During the time of the Shah, religion did not create division and hatred amongst the Iranian people, but it was a force for gaining spiritual strength and provided the ability to empathize with other human beings irrespective of their race, religion or color. If the fundamentalists eventually prevailed, it was to a large extent due to the unfortunate fact that forces of moderation failed to develop a discourse for safeguarding the spirit of peace, tolerance and political evolution. They took for granted that political stability will last for ever without thinking it necessary to intellectually nourish and defend it. Accordingly the challenge of the writers and orators who were preaching sabotage and violence went unanswered. Fanaticism won by going unchallenged and in absence of a cogent counter-argument.
Dr. Ibn Guadi remarks that it is illusory to think that Muslim moderates form a majority in France, and the moderate Soheib Bencheikh the Mufti of Marseilles does not represent a wide section of the Islamic population in France. The corollary is that the bulk of the Muslim population in France supports groups affiliated with Islamic extremism. This is not an inference reached on the basis of evidence and reasoning. In a country like France where the public opinion shifts from socialism to the far right in a matter of months, it is not fair or consistent to assert that Muslim public opinion is exempt from the same vagaries and is locked in a certain inflexible mode. Muslims, like every member of the human species respond to changes in political, societal and economic circumstances. It would be as ridiculous to suggest that white French Christians are represented by the National Front and Jean-Marie Le Pen because they agreed with him in rejecting the proposed European Constitution; or to say that the protest vote against the Socialists in 2002 was a vote of popularity for Jean-Marie Le Pen and his fascistic views.
Adam Lebor, the author of 'A Heart Turned East' is very illuminating when he says : "In most (French) people's minds to be an Arab is to be a Muslim, and to be a Muslim or a fundamentalist is the same thing. Everywhere young Muslims are told that they ae fundamentalists... So it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy". (p. 174). The worst case scenario can also become a self-fulfilling prophecy. It will happen if people are deprived of their hope to live with dignity and are driven to desperate mindless acts. I believe the very fact that moderate Islamic discourse such as the one propounded by Soheib Bencheikh exists is a cause for hope. I am not here calling for appeasement or promoting wishful thinking, but am suggesting that since there are rational elements within the Islamic community in France, one should do one's best to encourage and disseminate its message. In medieval Spain for more than seven centuries Muslims, Jews, and Christians lived together in an atmosphere of tolerance, where literature, Science, and arts flourished. If such a co-existence was possible in the so called Dark Ages it cannot be impossible in the twenty-first century.
There has been also some change in French attitudes in the past seven years towards Arabs which seems hopeful. When in 1998 Zinedine Zidane, the French soccer player of Algerian origin scored two goals for France in the World Cup helping France defeat Brazil and claim its first World Cup, everyone in France celebrated; Jews, Muslims and Christians.
Jingoism and casus belli are the attitude of the of Eastern and Western fanatics. A creative solution on the other hand requires a search for a way of peaceful coexistence of diverse and seemingly incompatible elements. The worst case scenario will only come about as a result of victory of ignorance over common sense. Unfortunately there have been many historical precedents for such a victory. It is also possible to change the ticking time bomb into a mellifluous instrument of peace and harmony there have been precedents for that also.
FP: Sorry gentlemen, my eyes are starting to glaze over.
When organizing this symposium, I thought about the term “ticking time bomb” and thought it was a given that it referred to the growth of the Muslim population in France and the dangers it poses. There is an obvious Islamist component here. Within this whole phenomenon lies a clear threat to democracy, freedom, individual rights (of Muslims and non-Muslims) in France, not to mention the rise of extremism and terror etc. As this discussion proceeds, it appears that several members on this panel believe that the ticking time bomb is the potential response that some French citizens might engage in to Islamist terror and extremism. In other words, Islamist terror and extremism is not the problem, but the response that might be made to it.
Obviously we need to avoid alienating Muslims. It is clear we need to try to nurture a moderate Islam and to ally ourselves with Muslims who seek to modernize and democratize Islam. But to pretend that the threat to France posed by Islamism has nothing to do with the growth of the Muslim presence in France is mind-boggling.
The reminder to us that a fanatical Jew killed Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin is an absurd distraction to this conversation. Sorry, I think the last thing the victims of Islam’s gender apartheid, and all the victims of Islamist terror, worry about at night are fanatical Jews. The homosexual Palestinians that flee to Israel to avoid their death sentences under PA culture for being gay, I assure you, do not live their lives in dread worrying about fanatical Jews. And trust me, when I go to sleep at night and worry about the world’s safety and future, I think about things like 9/11, about Tehran’s Mullahs having nuclear weapons, about Zarqawi and Bin Laden getting their hands on WMDs. The threat of fanatical Jews, I am afraid, does not loom large in my fears at night.
The point about the Holocaust being “perpetrated by refined Christians” is a crock and the people who utter it know it is a crock. The Holocaust was not perpetrated for a Christian reason. It was not perpetrated by Christians acting out of loyalty to their faith and following their religious texts. The Holocaust’s evil was not perpetrated and legitimized, step by step, by references to verses from the New Testament. The Holocaust was the ultimate anti-Christian act that might have been committed by some people who happened to be Christian but who were violating the basic tenets of their religion. You cannot find anything in the New Testament that serves as a foundation for the legitimacy of the Holocaust nor can you find a reference to anything even close to justifying the acts used in carrying it out. And I am not going to waste my time here going over how Islamist terror finds its roots in Muslim texts. Go read Robert Spencer’s Onward Muslim Soldiers: How Jihad Still Threatens America and the West.
Do we support Muslims who want to reform Islam and democratize it and make it a religion of peace? Yes. Can we deny that when Osama and al Zarqawi refer to Surahs in the Koran to justify their violent acts that they are referring to real Surahs? No.
The Muslim community is as diverse as any other group, culture and community? Please. When there are Muslim women from the Muslim world freely competing in sports and in the Olympics, get in touch with me. When they are free to become prominent intellectuals and critics in their own society and receive material and cultural rewards for being prominent dissidents, get in touch with me. When they are free, if they so choose, to engage in Muslim beauty pageants, get in touch with me. When Muslims throughout the Arab world start creating the most hilarious self-critical stand-up comedy routines, get in touch with me. When Muslims create heated and controversial talk shows, books and films, where free opinions startle and provoke thought on all limits, and the creators are not hiding in desperate fear of their lives, get in touch with me.
Again, is there a fight happening for the soul of Islam? Yes. Must we support Muslims, like groups such as The Free Muslims Against Terrorism? Yes. But please spare me the absurdity of the Muslim community being as "diverse" as any other community. When Jews and Christians rise in its ranks and become members of it on many levels and realms, like Muslims have done in the West, get in touch with me. In the old Islamic empires, Jews and Christians who attained political influence were often the target of violence and resentment by Muslims. Today, Christians like Tariq Aziz, the former Iraqi Deputy Prime Minister, have risen in power only in states where Islamic law has been set aside.
When you can name me ten fatawa, off the top of your head, made by ten famous Muslim clerics against bin Laden within this “diverse” community, get in touch with me. Yes, of course these fatwas exist, but why are they so few in number and what effect have they had on widespread support for Islamic terrorists within the Islamic community worldwide? Does this not say something about "diversity" in the Muslim community?
Kindly also spare us the nonsense about the Islamic “tolerance” that was practised in medieval Spain. Newsflash: it never happened. Robert Spencer has meticulously delegitimized this myth in his Ch. 7, “The Modern Myth of Islamic Tolerance,” in Onward Muslim Soldiers.
In any case, Dr. Ibn Guadi? Sorry, it’s getting a bit hot in here.
Ibn Guadi: I see.
I share the concerns of Reza Bayegan on the fact that no one should favor excess pressure against Muslims. We need, on the contrary, to nourish relations with Muslims who wish to democratize the institutions in the Arab countries. But the error would be to believe that the Islamic religion is accessible to the reform. What I mean to say is that those who wish to change the political institutions don’t want to necessarily change the Muslim institutions. They are two different things. As faith and policy are inseparable to Muslims, the subtraction is difficult. The change is more difficult because it requires the re-examining of several centuries of traditions and Islamic jurisdictions. The authority in Muslim theology rests on Bukhari, Muslim, Shafi'i, Ibn Hanbal and other schools. To be able to "reform" some religious elements, it has to be justified by a person of a higher authority. Which is impossible, given the doctrine they follow.
On the theological level, no one can avoid or draw aside the Hadiths. Several Islamic regulations do not come from the Koran but primarily from the Hadiths. The Canonical circumcision or the five canonical prayers do not appear in the Koran but in the collections of Sahih Bukhari, one of the greatest authorities in the chain of the traditions. Other regulations which do not find their source in the Koran but in the Hadiths are the subject of a religious decree (fatwa) to abolish these precepts as the death penalty for apostasy (Bukhari Jihad 149: II, 56, p. 352, 2), the punishment relating to adultery (Muslim, Hudud 12) or the night voyage of Muhammad to the sky (Bukhari, Manaqib Al-ansar, 42: III, 63, 42, p. 37, 1) which is important to negotiations related to the statute of Jerusalem. But even as great authority as the Mufti of Al-Azhar was, even he could not abolish these precepts. Because to some, when you discuss these points you call into question the legitimacy of the Muslei faith. It is precisely for this reason that the leaders of the UOIF (Union of Islamic Organizations of France) have had disputes with the French government. For the Moslems in France and elsewhere, to discuss these points is to reduce their faith.
It should be realized that in the eyes of some Muslims, the religion of Islam is itself the reform the world needs. According to the Islamic doctrines, Judaism and Christianity are good religions but not sufficiently reliable to claim the authority on the questions of faith. For the Muslims, the Christians and the Jews were misled in their writings. In the spirit of Islam, the religion was reformed because the Koran corrected the preceding revelations.
Even if it is difficult to admit, I must recognize that Jamie is right when he says that no one can be unaware of the various texts in which Osama bin Laden or others are using. In February 1998, in a text of six pages, bin Laden declared the war on the Jews and the Christians through a fatwa. No Muslim religious authority produced a fatwa to refute the remarks of Osama. Few Muslims would be in disagreement with what bin Laden said on November 3, 2001 on chain Al-Jazira: "It is impossible to forget the hostility which exists between the inaccurate ones and us. It is a question of religion and creed". From a purely objective point of view, he was right.
Some Muslims are better assimilated than others. Yes, but if they are better assimilated it’s because they are "less" Islamic. The more spiritual questions that face the Muslims in France, the less they feel related to the country which they live.
Moreover, contrary to the Turks in Germany, the Muslims in France did not need to insist to get their citizenship because a residence permit can be sufficient. The residence permit is delivered to aliens for a 10 years period. Several immigrants whom I know have had this card for 40 years and don’t know the French language at all.
Moreover, they do not wish to acquire French nationality and speak about it rather with contempt.
About the worst case scenario in France. On the one hand, France could implode. But on the other hand, I don’t think that this implosion would have a huge impact in French society. I agree with Laurent about the Theo van Gogh impact among the French people.
Bayegan talks about Jean-Marie Le Pen. But most of Muslims in France have been like (even admire) him since the end of 80’s. This field is taboo in France, but when Jean-Marie Le Pen says in some interviews that most of aliens agree with him, he is right.
Murawiec: The sad truth, I think, is that little indigenous to Europe will seriously contribute to defusing the “time bomb.” There is a bomb ticking because the world of Islam has proven itself incapable of facing modernity, because of the stubborn adherence of its rent-seeking and rent-owning elites to a mythical view of the world, because Muslims have been left with the delusional world-view of a Golden Age of Islam to which one should aspire to return, because a self-image of the Muslim-as-victim (of “imperialism,” of “colonialism,” of “Zionism” and whatever else) has been systematically propagated by those elites, and accepted by large numbers. So we have large numbers of alienated Muslims throughout Europe.
Soner is right about the Turks: since they come from a more structured society with strong historical traditions and a sense of self-respect born of a millennial domination of the region south and east, their self-identity tends to be less based on self-aggrieved victimhood than that of Arabs. However, even the Turkish model, which has much to be admired, today faces the rising tide of an Islamic regime which is drowning the secular modernizers. The limits of the Ataturkian model have been reached: Mein Kampf is the #1 bestseller in Turkey today, it is sold at train stations, museums, newsstands, etc. Once again, it is perfectly true that Turkish areas in German towns are no ghettoes. So both Turks and Germans are better off. Still, it does not dispense us from dealing with the problem that Islamism in general poses.
We’ve got to deal with Islam – I’ll agree with Mohamed. Now, being alienated does not mean being right. “Suffering bestows no right,” said Albert Camus. The problem is that today’s world of Islam considers it licit and even recommended to kill Infidels as a way of “solving” problems. Al-Azhar says that. Qaradhawi says it. The Saudi shaykhs repeat it endlessly. Arafat built a career on it, as well as Saddam, Assad, etc.The ideology of terror has been promoted, extolled, lionized, and adopted, in the world of Islam as in no other part of the world. It is symptomatic of the generalized blindness that prevails in the world of Islam: a love of destruction, a desire for annihilation: Nihilism has become a principal intellectual force. Blame Khomeini and Shariati, al-Banna and Qutb, as well as Michel Aflaq and the ideologues of “secular” nationalism. This is what powers the time bomb.
Now, Europe’s attitude has been to pretend that this does not exist, and look the other way. In the UK, the Labour Party is so craven toward the radicals in the Muslim population, there is little that it will not do to gain its favors. While France was watching existentialist movies and dreaming of imperial glory, huge swaths of surburban (banlieue) territory have become “lawless areas” (zones de non-droit). So it’s not just a French problem, though the problem there is acute. Bat Ye’or has a very strong point when she analyzes Europe’s evolution as moving toward what she called “Eurabia.” To deal with a problem, you would need to recognize it to start with. I’m alright, Jack, says the French elite. Europe, I predict, will do nothing. It will wait, like the proverbial Roman patricians, waiting for the Barbarians at gates to enter and slaughter them.
Now, dealing with Islam. It seems to me that we have to escape the fatal dilemma: “it’s their religion, we can’t touch it.” The problem is that Islam has been captured by Islamism; we can live with Islam in general, we cannot live with Islamism. Islam has failed to cope with Islamism. We have to do so, because it will not let us live, but make us die.
In part, slowly, haphazardly, awkwardly, the U.S. has started facing the problem. See Condi Rice’s superb speech in Cairo – challenging our pseudo-friends and revoking the disastrous Eisenhower Doctrine in the Middle East, which, as she emphasized, put stability ahead of democracy to the point of forgetting the latter altogether. So we’re moving ahead. This in turn encourages those in Europe who are unhappy with continental suicide, and, even more importantly, those in and around the world of Islam, who want it to change: Irshad Manji, Nasser Abu Zaid, Ibn Warraq, Yousef Seddik, Abdelwahab Medeb, Kanan Makiya, etc. Dissidents all, each in their own way. They are the seeds. We must help them, because their societies are too despotic and frightened to give them much help. We’ve started with Iraq – we’re doing the right thing, through our innumerable stupidities and mistakes. Let’s go on. The idea is that it is at the root – Iran, Saudi Arabia, Syria, etc. – that terror as the preferred and extolled solution to the crisis of Islam must be tackled.
Am I far from France? Oui et non. There is indeed a ticking time bomb. The growing self-assertiveness of a radical and violent minority has already started to spill over into the hip and posh areas – a recent street demonstration of high-school students in Paris was violently attacked by Arab thugs from the suburbs who proceeded to beat up and loot the ‘rich French kids,’ with abundant displays of racial hatred. Not that I think that the multiculturalist elites will take heed. When you're bent on self-annihilation, you don't "notice" the Barbarians. There we are.
Cagaptay: Let's put things straight. First, no need to compare Europe to the US when we discuss the issue of and how and if Muslims fit into these societies, etc. The US is light years ahead of Europe in terms of religious coexistence and also its ability to frankly discuss such issues. (I am not even going into why we should not compare Russian cases to America: just remember the "rescue" effort when Chechen terrorists took hostages at the Moscow theater: Russian security forces stormed the building and killed over a hundred of their own citizens instead of saving them). Anyhow, the point I am making, which I should repeat so it does not get blurred behind the moderator's comments, is that we face two gruesome problems: a large, growing, unintegrated, poor, and increasingly radical Muslim population, which because it has been left in the hands of fundamentalists is becoming monochromic and is segregated from the rest of France, and a larger French society that will not even admit that these problems, is at a loss as to how to deal with it. This society, I am afraid, will be rudely awakened and will react harshly as deserved but not wisely as needed for victory -because of its lack of religious tolerance when the fundamentalist Muslims show the first signs if serious unrest or conduct terrorist attacks in France. Now, is that a time bomb and a half or what?
Make Comment View Comments Printable Article Email Article
Font 6pt 7pt 8pt 9pt 10pt 11pt 12pt 13pt 14pt 15pt 16pt 17pt 18pt 19pt 20pt
Symposium: Muslims in France: A Ticking Time Bomb?: Part II
By Jamie Glazov
FrontPageMagazine.com / July 4, 2005
FP: Fair enough, thank you. Sometimes I get a little aggressive just to get all the cards on the table and have things crystallized. You are right Dr. Cagaptay, this is a time bomb and half indeed. Mr. Bayegan?
Bayegan: Going back to the subject of encountering fanaticism, I should say that my own greatest authority on this topic is Amos Oz. whom I have mentioned before and who deals with this issue even-handedly and with great intelligence. In one of his addresses to Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, he said that "fanaticism is ancient and comprehensive. It is older than Islam, older than Christianity and older than Judaism. It might be a potential presence in every human being. It might be a bad gene. It is everywhere." He suggests that in different countries schools, colleges and universities should offer courses in what he calls "comparative fanaticism", contrasting the moral disease of fanaticism in various cultures and searching for a creative remedy.
Murawiec quotes Albert Camus that "Suffering bestows no right". Camus here speaks about right in order to show its moral limitations. Furthermore, Camus exalts human responsibility over a mere right. In both his fiction and nonfiction writing, Camus' existentialism consists of human responsibility for ourselves and each other. Camus also has another famous saying which might be useful for the purpose of our discussion. He says: "We are all special cases. We all want to appeal against something! Everyone insists on his innocence, at all costs, even if it means accusing the rest of human race and heaven". (The Fall, 1956)
Keeping in mind Camus' statement, let us also not forget that an 'eye for an eye' was not invented by Muslims. Let us not forget that the violence and mayhem in Mosaic books such as Leviticus and others of the Old Testament like the book of Joshua make the Koran sound like a book of nursery rhymes. The point is that the moment we insist on our own innocence and accusingly point a finger at other people's guilt, we should remember the wisdom of Christ's words that "He who is without sin among you, let him cast the first stone". The problem of fanaticism is a curse for all humanity and its eradication requires universal effort and solidarity. Dr. Luther King was right when he said that "we must learn to live together as brothers or perish together as fools".
Jamie mentioned that Osama and al Zarqawi refer to Surahs in the Koran to justify their violent acts and that they are referring to real Surahs. Osama and Zarvagi will see in the Koran what they want to see in the Koran, like David Koresh saw in the Bible what he wanted to see in the Bible and the fanatical puritans of the Massachusetts when they were burning 'witches' at the stake in Salem interpreted the Bible to suit their fanaticism. No, Islam is not intrinsically incompatible with peace and humanity. Interestingly enough, every Surah that Mr. Zarvagi reads like all other Surehs in the Koran start, with the words: "In the name of God, the compassionate, the merciful."
Fundamentalists however, are unable to see any message of peace and human solidarity in it because their religion is not in the service of humanity, but is in the service of an ideology. If in our fight against fundamentalism we fall into the trap of an ideology ourselves and supplant sound judgment with knee jerk reactions, we too become infected with the virulent virus of fanaticism.
What we have to recognize is that Islam is in need of reformation. The Enlightenment that helped to evolve Christianity and Judaism and brought them up to date with the needs of the modern world, for historical and geographic reasons did not occur in Islam. Years of foreign domination, mass poverty and illiteracy rampant in Islamic states have not helped the burgeoning of this process either. What is hopeful, however, is that Moslems have started looking critically at themselves and a sense of humor that Amos Oz singles out as an important element which fanatics are deprived of, is developing within the Islamic community regarding matters that were untouchable until quite recently. Maybe Moslem "beauty pageants and hilarious self-critical stand-up comedy routines" that Jamie refers to - presumably as signs of progress - are rare or non-existent in Islamic world, but I can tell you that as far as Iran is concerned, Iranian cinema today deals with topics that were taboo not very long ego. A recent movie called 'The Lizard' lampoons mullahs and criticizes their greed and detachment from society. Malaysian born Saudi woman poet, Nimah Ismail Nawwab in her marvelous verse criticizes gender inequality, human rights abuses and fanaticism in Saudi Arabia without for one moment attributing those problems to Islam. Moreover, she sees them as symptoms of a retrograde society that does not live up to Islam's moral and humanitarian message:
Fanaticism rearing brazenly flouting
The very principle Islam espouses
Of the equality in the eyes of one God
This kind of reading of Koran is possible as it was also possible to adjust the Bible with the realities of the modern world and not take literally those verses in it which exalt men over women .
On Sunday June 19 the results of elections to France's Muslim Council were a positive step in the direction of strengthening moderate forces and integration of Muslims into France's secular society. Reuters reported that the voting brought gains for a "moderate mosque network and rebuffed an activist group that had flirted with defiant Islamic stands".
In France, as elsewhere, an agenda for hope and peaceful coexistence needs to be espoused by all major religions. Muslims want to keep and protect their religious heritage. They know that it is a sine qua non to their identity. They need all the help they can get to realize that the greatest dangers to their collective soul and their spiritual heritage are backwardness and fanaticism.
FP: Mr. Bayegan, even though it was your last turn, I will return to you now, as I really need to see your evidence for your arguments.
You made an analogy between Islamic violence and violence that was perpetrated by someone that you alleged was a Christian and that you argued engaged in violence for Christian reasons. I emphasized that Osama’s violence can be legitimized by Islamic texts and that is why Osama refers to them when justifying his violent jihad. Again: nowhere can an Adolf Hitler refer to anything in the New Testament to legitimize what he did – and that is why he didn’t, because he wasn’t a Christian and he wasn’t acting for Christianity. Hitler was the ultimate anti-Christian and the Holocaust was the greatest of anti-Christian acts.
Instead of responding to this crucial distinction, you simply start throwing more dust into the eyes. You move on to new accusations, this time comparing violent Islamic jihad with David Koresh and Christian “witch” burners. Since you hide from showing the verses that Hitler could point to in the New Testament to justify the Holocaust, do tell what it was that Koresh did that you compare to Islamic jihad and what verses in the New Testament he would have used to legitimize it. Also please give me verses in the New Testament that fanatical puritans of Massachusetts would have used to justify burning “witches.” The verses, of course, need to be as specific as Surah 9:5 (the famous Verse of the Sword) in the Koran in terms of a specific instruction.
Mr. Bayegan, instead of substantiating your charges, you make an implied accusation against an argument I never made, saying: “No, Islam is not intrinsically incompatible with peace and humanity.”
Where did I say this? Who are you arguing with? I specifically stressed that we need to work with Muslim forces that seek to reform Islam, to make it pluralistic and tolerant, and to bring it into the modern world. That is why I mentioned The Free Muslims Against Terrorism. Why would I promote this organization and stress that we need to work with it if I believe the whole enterprise is pointless?
Your point that the Old Testament makes the Koran sound like a book of nursery rhymes is so absurd that I cannot even dignify it with a response.
In the previous round, you brought up the absurd and utterly false contention that the Muslim community is just as diverse as any other community. I delegitimized this blatant falsehood by naming just a few (out of an infinite number) of obvious realities that do not exist in the Muslim world – realities that would (and must) exist in a world that can be described as being “diverse.” Instead of defending your contention, you again shift to an unconnected and illegitimate theme.
I asked you to name me ten fatwas that have been issued by Muslim clerics against Osama. I asked you to name me beauty pageants and stand-up comedy routines in the Muslim world. I did not ask you these things looking for your moral approval for the existence of these realities. I asked you them because the non-existence of these phenomena demonstrates the non-existence of diversity in the Muslim world.
Instead of trying to prove your argument that there is diversity in the Muslim world, you dismiss beauty pageants and stand-up comedy routines, quipping that I mention them “presumably as signs of progress.” I am shocked that an individual who is supposedly fighting for freedom in a certain part of the world would make a snide remark about this phenomenon, especially in the context of the millions of human beings who have been tortured and killed because of the demonization of the female body and humor.
So let’s narrow in on these themes in case you do not understand their importance. Women’s right to be seen, and their freedom to have the right to personal self-determination, which includes the right to sexual self-determination, is a crucial right for a free and democratic society. A society cannot be free and democratic if it does not allow this type of freedom to its female gender, just like free speech is instrumental for a free society. I am not asking you what you think of beauty pageants. I don't care what you think of them. I raise them as an example to show that their non-existence reveals the lack of diversity and freedom in a culture. The key here is that if an attempt was made by humans to hold a beauty pageant, it would be forbidden and there would be punishment for those involved. If you do not understand that this is a reflection of totalitarianism, I do not know what to tell you.
I also make the same point about humor and laughter by using the example of stand-up comedy. Any serious person that studies totalitarianism understands the crucial nature of the phenomenon of laughter and the threat it poses to a despotic society. Anyone who is cognizant of what is fundamental for a society to be truly free and diverse will understand the example I raised in connection to the freedom of laughter and self-critical comedy.
I would suggest rethinking what wisdom or nobility exists in dismissing the crucial role of comedy in society. When you watch Chris Rock in his stand-up performances and try to picture if a Muslim Chris Rock-type of comedian could do the same thing in front of Muslim audiences throughout the Islamic world – it means everything. It crystallizes what freedom is. There cannot be freedom if there is no Chris Rock allowed to do what he does in a society. Mr. Bayegan, it doesn’t matter what you think of Chris Rock. The point is that society can only be free if it allows an individual to engage in that form of entertainment, and allows people who like it to be an audience, and for all the participants involved not to fear punishment for being involved. If a society cannot allow the freedom for that possibility and for the incarnation of that form of comedy, than it is by necessity a totalitarian society.
It is depressing that I have to take the time here to explain these things, which one would think were simple givens.
It is shocking that my examples of female freedom and the right to engage in self-critical comedy, and these phenomena being directly connected to freedom, is mocked by a person that is supposedly fighting for freedom in a part of the Middle East.
If anyone, a person connected to the Middle East would understand these things, since the connection of women and laughter is the key phenomenon that represents the struggle between freedom and totalitarianism in the Middle East. I had a fascinating discussion with journalist Steven Vincent, the author of The Red Zone, who, fortunately, unlike you Mr. Bayegan, takes these issues to heart. He gave some fascinating insights into why militant Islam regards female laughter as such an evil threat and why it forbids it – especially in young girls. His analysis of what laughter, especially a woman’s laughter, represents, and why it is such a threat to totalitarian structures in militant Islam, is fascinating. I encourage everyone to read his insights.
In any case Mr. Bayegan, I am listening and waiting for answers to my questions. Please do not throw more dust into the eyes or start new arguments. Give me specific verses out of the New Testament that would legitimize your analogies.
Bayegan: Thank you Jamie,
When at your insistence I accepted to participate in this symposium, I thought it would be a civilized exercise with you as a moderator. A moderator's job first and foremost is to listen. With all due respect I don't think you have even bothered to comprehend my interventions. This is what scares me most: if we cannot hear each other out intelligently and impartially here in a democratic forum such as this, then where? Cant and rant are two deadly enemies of ratiocination and enlightened arguments which will hinder us from arriving at a meaningful solution.
You say if I talk the way I do, how can I be a human rights activist? You say my argument is a crock. You say your dignity is beyond replying to my points. You ask for my reply by saying: can you answer "without throwing more dust into the eyes." I am your guest here remember? I was invited because you deemed my views important. The least you can do is to treat your guests with courtesy and reply to them without discrediting them or resorting to personal attacks. For me human rights activism consist above all in doing my best to think justly and argue objectively.
If you had read my last intervention carefully you could have seen that you and I are saying exactly the same thing as far as the need for sense of humour, self-criticism and laughter are concerned. I even quoted Amos Oz and his views that a sense of humour is one of the best remedies against fanaticism. So why are you making out as if I am saying something different?
Yes, you do say that one should support moderate Islamic groups, but you also say that you are not going to waste your time here going over how Islamist terror finds its roots in Muslim texts and you also mention that Osama and al Zarqawi refer to real Surahs in The Koran. By the way, I do agree with you on this. But saying that and at the same time failing to mention that there are also many Surahs in The Koran (the learned members of this symposium can testify to that) that are invitation to peace, kindness and compassion is to imply that Islam has no room for tolerance and peaceful coexistence. I was simply trying to say that the Islam that came to existence in the context of 6th century tribal Arabia has the capacity to recreate itself as a spiritual force for the modern world of the 21st century. The challenge is to turn The Koran into a spiritual source against political corruption and social decay instead of a manual for running the political life of the country, as for instance is happening in Iran today.
You challenged me to cite verses from the Bible that could be used as justification for violence. If you would have read my intervention carefully you would have found out that I said that fanatics see in the Bible (that is they misread) what they want to see in the Bible, the same way that Islamist fanatics interpret The Koran to suit their deadly agenda. For an example of using the Bible to suit a deadly agenda please read "A People's History of The United States" by Howard Zinn, HarperCollins, p.14 where he discusses the Puritans' carnage of Indians and confiscation of their land. He writes:
"The Puritans also appealed to the Bible, Psalms 2:8: "Ask of me, and I shall give thee, the heathen for thine inheritance, and the uttermost parts of the earth for thy possession." And to justify their use of force to take the land, they cited Romans 13:2: "Whosoever therefore resisteth the power, resisteth the ordinance of God: and they that resist shall receive to themselves damnation."
FP: Mr. Bayegan, I apologize to you if I am not being a very gracious host. I have lost all sense of manners I suppose.
The problem, sir, is not that I am not listening to you, but that perhaps I am listening a little too much. When you make allegations (i.e. the Muslim community is as diverse as any other, Islamic violent jihad has equivalent parallels in Christian texts, etc.) and then do not substantiate them when asked to, but simply move on to make other dubious charges, these are very serious things. And I am sorry, but the suggestion that Adolf Hitler could have found some kind of inspiration or legitimacy for the Holocaust in Christianity, as Osama and al Zarqawi find the inspiration for violent jihad in Qur’anic texts, is an allegation that does not instil tremendous cheer and a spirit of camaraderie in me, especially when I keep asking for substantiation and do not receive it.
Incidentally, I don’t need the learned members of this symposium to testify to the fact that there are Surahs in the Qur’an that are an invitation to peace, kindness and compassion. I have read the Qur’an. I study it everyday. I know those parts exist. When did I ever say they did not? And how is this a substantiation for the points you have made and I am pressing you on?
Again, no one here is saying that Islam has no room for reform and that it does not have the capacity for it. That is why we all agree that we must support moderate forces that seek to bring the best out of Islam and to let it subordinate the parts that militant Islamists use to inhale their jihadist oxygen.
While you might want to rethink referring to Howard Zinn’s interpretations as back-up for your arguments, I am still to get the evidence backing up your arguments about diversity in the Muslim community and about Hitler, Koresh and “witch” burners and what it was specifically that they found in the New Testament that inspired them to do what they did. But I give up.
As for your reference to Psalms 2:8 and Romans 13:2, I really don’t know what your point is in connection to our discussion. I am at a complete loss at how these verses serve as an analogy to the Surahs in the Koran that command violent jihad against unbelievers until the whole world is submitted to Islam. Incidentally, the “damnation” in Romans 13:2 refers to damnation in the afterlife; it is not an instruction, as the many Surahs in the Qur’an instruct, for believers to become God’s executioners and to smite the unbelievers on this earth.
In any case, Mr. Bayegan, we share the same aspiration to bring Islam into the modern world and to separate it from the political sphere. The question, of course, is how this can be done – especially in the context of Islam not recognizing the separation of church and state.
I apologize to our guests here for this sideline debate and am grateful to them for waiting patiently. But these questions regarding diversity within Islam and the roots of Islamic jihad are, as we all know, all crucial to the terror war and, of course, to the precarious situation in France.
Dr. Ibn Guadi, I hope you are still with us my friend. Feel free to say whatever you wish in your final comment and kindly include a last word on the ticking time bomb in France.
Ibn Guadi: Thank you, Jamie.
I just would like to reconsider the references of Reza Bayegan to Psalms 2:8 and Romans 13:2. The passage of the Psalms does not start with verse 8 but with verse 7 until verse 9. Actually, for the Christians, this chapter talks about the Messiah and not the israeli people. Thus, the Christians see the fulfillment of this verse in the book of Revelation 2: 27 where it is written: He shall rule them with A grinds of iron ; They shall Be dashed to parts like the potter's vessels. That’s exactly the same verse of Psalms that Reza Bayegan quoted.
In the same way, it’s not sufficient to quote Romains 13: 2 in order to understand. This verse is famous among Christians to be the guide of the respect of the political authority and not a justification to break the law. The majority of the Arab Christians in the Muslims countries apply this text to respect the laws of the Muslim country where they live. In this chapter it required to Christians to respect the country in which they reside. According to Christians, the believers should not rebel against the human authority because this authority was instituted by God. For this reason Paul asks Timothy (1 Timothy 2.1-2) to pray for the authorities, the kings, the governors, etc...
So, the roots of the separation of the religion and state are anchored in the Bible even if in the history that were not always the case. But, for the Christians, there were sufficient data in their texts to re-examine the question. Unfortunately, the similar process was not the same one in Islam. That’s why I said that Muslims community present some new sociological challenges for the French people.
As Bayegan says, it true that some Christians can want to read what they want. We have many examples of it. Nevertheless, the problem really does not come from there. No matter what our discussions on the contents of the Bible might be, France is a completely Dechristianized country. The ticking time bomb is already here. I' m afraid, as Laurent and Soner pointed out, the French society won't react or won’t admit these problems, as today. And some French Muslims have understood it.
FP: Final word goes to you Mr. Murawiec.
Murawiec: Well I guess we have strayed from our explicit subject, but being led astray may be very useful: some of the issues tackled in the detour are crucial to our debate about Muslims in France, and elsewhere. We have two terms: the French (country, state, nation, culture, society, etc.) and the Muslims. We already discussed a number of the problems of the host country. If France "felt" better about itself - if it were in better shape - it would be better able to help the guests. It is not the case, though. France is sick, and it is receiving a steady inflow of people from a very sick culture. Islam is the Sick Man of the world. And while France's diseased state is a noxious and oftentimes aggravating problem, we can live with it. With the disease in Islam, we can die. This dictates some priorities.
Mr. Bayegan states, and, undoutebtedly, believes, that "Islam has the capacity to recreate itself as a spiritual force for the Muslim world for the 21st century." I welcome his proclamation, but unfortunately, it is only that, a proclamation. It may have the "potential," but it is not implementing or using it. Far from that, what Islam, or to be more precise, the world of Islam, has produced since, say, 1945, is sadly at odds with the proclamation. Not only has it not exerted that "capacity to recreate itself," it has in fact done exactly the contrary. Al Azhar, for the Sunni world, and Qom, have been dominated by nihilism, by a self-destructive adhesion to a mythical (delusional) self-image based on a nonsensical image of the past. Islam is mired in its own dream of itself, and gets very angry when awakened by reality. Hence violent reactions when reality intrudes.
If "Islam ha[d] the capacity to recreate itself as a spiritual force for the Muslim world for the 21st century," it would be abuzz with scholars' debates and popular interest in such debates:
- the confusion, rampant in Koran, hadith and sharia, between the tribal code of honor, and morality, must be dissipated
- quranic and shariatic law concerning apostasy need to be abolished wholesale
- the very concept of dhimmi needs to be abolished
- the idea that the world is divided between a dar al-Islam and a dar al-Harb must be thoroughly reexamined
- quranic and shariatic prescriptions concerning jihad must be revised entirely
- the untying of things legal, things religious and things political is urgent and fundamental
How fundamental these points are barely needs to be stressed. In turn, this would demand a serious debate on the spurious and deadly concept of the Koran's "uncreation," one of the strongest possible impediments to sustained progress in both Islam-religion and the world of Islam. Ditto with the conception of change: as long as the Koranic equation of bida, heresy, with innovation, remains, it wil stand in the way of any progress.
When Mr. Bayegan states "What we have to recognize is that Islam is in need of reformation. The Enlightenment that helped to evolve Christianity and Judaism and brought them up to date with the needs of the modern world, for historical and geographic reasons did not occur in Islam. Years of foreign domination, mass poverty and illiteracy rampant in Islamic states have not helped the burgeoning of this process either " his faulty diagnosis exemplifies at least in part what the problem is: The Enlightenment was not a meteor that fell upon Christian heads - it was the product of Christian, or Judeo-Christian, civilization and culture, and history. It was a self-generated movement. Islam's failure to generate from within anything remotely comparable is the problem. There are figures in the world of Islam that exemplify the existence of a potential: Sir Syed Ahmad Khan [1817-1898], the great Muslim reformer in India, was a case in point. And today, we have the magnificent figures of Kanan Makiya, Fouad Ajami, Irshad Manji, we have the cases of Nasr Abou Zeid, of Abdelwahhab Medeb, of Youssef Seddik: there are seeds for a renaissance, just as, in other contexts, Havel and Walesa, or Sakharov, were. But let us not forget that sometimes the critical mass is reached, and reform occurs, while in other cases, as in Russia, it fails.
The first precondition for success is to be ruthlessly truthful with oneself, one's own culture, one's own past history. "Attempting to live in the truth," Havel wrote. Seeing the seeds of today's problem with Islam in "years of foreign domination, mass poverty and rampant illiteracy" is a sure recipe for failure. Why do I never hear those words from Indians? Unless Muslims once and for all give up a self-conception as aggrieved victims of others, and thereby acknowledge the reasons for the decadence and decline that befell that part of the world that was ruled by Islam, they will go nowhere. And going nowhere, many of them will seek to blame others for their own folly. And whenever and wherever they are able to do so, they will express their angst in aggressive forms. The kind of thrust for modernization that U.S. guns have spearheaded has become necessary and irreplaceable. But it does not replace the critical self-examination of Islam. It is not for vague "historical and georgraphical reasons" that Islam failed to renew itself: the reasons were (and are) religious, theological, cultural, psychological, societal.
In my mind, it is difficult to disentangle the ticking time-bomb of Muslims in France from the global problems of Islam. Muslims in France carry the decline and decadence of their culture of origin with them. They arrive in a sick culture. There is a frightening risk of explosive developments in France, because France seems to cumulate the problems of both worlds.
FP: Mohamed Ibn Guadi, Soner Cagaptay, Laurent Murawiec and Reza Bayegan, thank you, we are out of time. It was a pleasure to have you here on Frontpage Symposium.
---------------------------------------------------------------
Jamie Glazov is Frontpage Magazine's managing editor. He holds a Ph.D. in History with a specialty in Soviet Studies. He edited and wrote the introduction to David Horowitz’s new book Left Illusions. He is also the co-editor (with David Horowitz) of the new book The Hate America Left and the author of Canadian Policy Toward Khrushchev’s Soviet Union (McGill-Queens University Press, 2002) and 15 Tips on How to be a Good Leftist. To see his previous symposiums, interviews and articles Click Here. Email him at jglazov@rogers.com.
There isn't. Ask :
Ted Kennedy.
John Kerry.
Bill Clinton.
or especially, Sandy Burglar (once he stuffed the Archive papers down his underpants--and took them home and INADVERTENTLY destroyed them).
Organized theft by any name
Sustainable Development, Smart Growth and Kelo:
Tom Deweese, American Policy Center Monday, July 4, 2005
Put yourself in the homeowner’s shoes. You buy a home for your family. Perhaps it’s even handed down from your father or grandfather. It’s a place you can afford in a neighborhood you like. The children have made friends. You intend to stay for the rest of your life.
As you plant your garden, landscape the yard, put up a swing set for the kids, and mold your land into a home, unknown to you, certain city officials are meeting around a table with developers. In front of them are maps, plats and photographs — of your home. They talk of dollars — big dollars. Tax revenues for the city, huge profits for the developer. A shopping center with all the trimmings begins to take shape. You’re not asked for input or permission. You’re not even notified until the whole project is finalized and the only minor detail is to get rid of you.
Then the pressure begins. A notice comes in the mail telling you that the city intends to take your land. An offer of compensation is made, usually below the market price you could get if you sold it yourself. The explanation given is that, since the government is going to take the land, it’s not worth the old market price. Some neighbors begin to sell and move away. With the loss of each one, the pressure mounts on you to sell. Visits from government agents become routine. Newspaper articles depict you as unreasonably holding up community progress. They call you greedy. Finally, the bulldozers move in on the properties already sold. The neighborhood becomes unlivable. It looks like a war zone.
Like being attacked by a conquering army, you are finally surrounded, with no place to run, but the courts. However, you’re certain of victory. The United States was built on the very premise of the protection of private property rights. How can a government possibly be allowed to take anyone’s home for private gain?
Under any circumstances this should be considered criminal behavior. It used to be. If city officials were caught padding their own pockets or those of their friends it was considered graft. That’s why RICO laws were created.
Finally, five black robes named Stevens, Souter, Ginsburg, Kennedy, and Breyer shock the nation by ruling that officials who have behaved like Tony Soprano are in the right and you have to vacate your property.
These four men and one woman have ruled that the United States Constitution is truly meaningless. Their ruling in the Kelo case declared that Americans own nothing. After declaring that all property is subject to the whim of a government official, it’s just a short trip to declaring that government can now confiscate anything we own; anything we create; anything we believe.
Astonishing. The members of the Supreme Court have nothing to do but defend the Constitution and keep it the pure document the Founding Fathers created to recognize and protect the rights with which we were born. They sit in their lofty ivory tower, never worrying about job security with their life-time appointments. And yet, they have obviously missed finding a copy of the Federalist Papers, which were written by many of the Founders to explain to the American people how they envisioned the new government would work. They have missed the collected writings of James Madison, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams and George Washington, just to mention a very few. It’s obvious because otherwise, there is simply no way they could have reached this decision — unless implementing another agenda was their purpose.
I don’t have the benefit of the Justices’ grand staffs or unending salaries. But just a little research has turned up pretty much everything Stevens, Souter, Ginsburg, Kennedy, and Breyer would have needed to reach a logical conclusion that protection of private property rights are the most important rights, vital to the very foundation of a free society.
Our Founding Fathers left no doubt in their writings, their deeds, or their governing documents as to where they stood on the vital importance of private property. John Locke, the man whom the Founders followed as they created this nation said, "Government has no other end than the preservation of property." John Adams said, "The moment the idea is admitted into society that property is not as sacred as the laws of God; and there is not a force of law and public justice to protect it, anarchy and tyranny commence."
One would be hard pressed to find a single word in the writings of the Founding Fathers to support the premise that it’s okay to take private property for economic development. To the contrary, they believed that the root of economic prosperity is the protection of private property.
So how did Stevens, Souter, Ginsburg, Kennedy, and Breyer miss such a rock solid foundation of American law? Perhaps they didn’t. Perhaps they chose to ignore it in favor of another agenda. Specifically, Agenda 21.
For several years, certain members of the Supreme Court have been discussing the need to review international law and foreign court decisions to determine U.S. Supreme Court rulings. Justice Breyer has been the most outspoken for this policy, saying, "We face an increasing number of domestic legal questions that directly implicate foreign or international law."
What international laws are these? In general, the most pervasive are a series of UN international treaties, including several that address issues of climate, resource use, biological diversity, and community development. Specifically, Agenda 21, signed by the United States at the UN’s Earth Summit in 1992, calls for implementing what former Vice President Al Gore called a "wrenching transformation" of our nation, through a policy called Sustainable Development. Sustainable Development is the official policy of the United States and almost every single city and small burg in the nation.
Sustainable Development is top-down control, a ruling principle that affects nearly every aspect of our lives, including; the kind of homes we may live in; water policy that dictates the amount each American may use in a day; drastic reductions of energy use; the imposition of public transportation; even the number of inhabitants that may be allowed inside city borders. Most Americans have heard of a small part of this policy operating under the name Smart Growth. Agenda 21 outlines specific goals and a tight timetable for implementation. In June, 2005, the UN held a major gathering in San Francisco where the mayors of cities from across the nation and around the world gathered to pledge to impose Sustainable polices.
In order to meet such goals, federal, state and local governments are scrambling to impose strict policies on development and land use. The use of Eminent Domain has become a favorite tool. Sustainable Development calls for partnerships between the public sector (your local government) and private businesses.
Now, as the public/private partnerships move to enforce Sustainable Development in local communities, an unholy alliance is also forming, allowing corrupt politicians to line their pockets and gain power as they partner with select businesses and developers to build personal wealth and power. They plot to take land that isn’t theirs for personal gain, while claiming it’s for the "public good." That’s all the excuse they’ve needed to hide their true intent.
However, things have been changing as such brutal, organized theft has spread across the nation in the name of community development and environmental protections. American have started to fight back to protect their property. In Oregon, people went to the ballot box and shocked lawmakers by passing Measure 37, which says the government must either pay full price for any land taken, or waive the regulation and leave the property owner alone. In Wisconsin, the state legislature passed a bill to stop Smart Growth policies that are destroying property owners. In Michigan, the state Supreme Court overturned the precedent-setting ruling it made more than 20 years ago that allowed the use of Eminent Domain in taking property for private use. In fact, it was that original ruling that had been used by communities across the nation to justify their own Eminent Domain takings.
Clearly, the nation has started to rise up to stop this assault on private property. Without the power to grab property at will, the ability for communities to implement Sustainable Development has come into question.
Those who support Sustainable Development and Agenda 21 needed something big to put things back on track. The Supreme Court, which has already stated that it must look to international laws and treaties to decide American law, provided the answer. Stevens, Souter, Ginsburg, Kennedy, and Breyer chose Sustainable Development and Agenda 21 over the Constitution of the United States.
However, the effort may well be backfiring on the Sustainablists as the nation is reacted in force to protect property rights. Now, state legislatures and the U.S. Congress are rushing to produce legislation to restore property rights protections. Even Americans who have rarely uttered a political thought are suddenly becoming feverish with zeal for the Fifth Amendment. Americans may be learning all over again what the Founding Fathers knew — that the right to own and control private property is the most important right
That is all well and good, of course, but Americans must do much more than just get upset. They need to get behind those legislative efforts at every level of government to assure passage. They must dig in at the local level to foil efforts by their mayors and city councils to impose Eminent Domain against their neighbors. We must run this organized theft (now masquerading as the "common good") out of town on a rail. And don’t forget to leave room on that rail for Stevens, Souter, Ginsburg, Kennedy, and Breyer.
Tom DeWeese is the publisher/editor of The DeWeese Report and president of the American Policy Center, a grassroots, activist think tank headquartered in Warrenton, Virginia. Its Internet site is www.americanpolicy.org.
© Tom DeWeese 2005
Europe's Angry Muslims
By Robert S. Leiken
From the July/August 2005 issue of Foreign Affairs
AN AMERICAN CONCERN
Fox News and CNN's Lou Dobbs worry about terrorists stealing across the United States' border with Mexico concealed among illegal immigrants. The Pentagon wages war in the Middle East to stop terrorist attacks on the United States. But the growing nightmare of officials at the Department of Homeland Security is passport-carrying, visa-exempt mujahideen coming from the United States' western European allies.
Jihadist networks span Europe from Poland to Portugal, thanks to the spread of radical Islam among the descendants of guest workers once recruited to shore up Europe's postwar economic miracle. In smoky coffeehouses in Rotterdam and Copenhagen, makeshift prayer halls in Hamburg and Brussels, Islamic bookstalls in Birmingham and "Londonistan," and the prisons of Madrid, Milan, and Marseilles, immigrants or their descendants are volunteering for jihad against the West. It was a Dutch Muslim of Moroccan descent, born and socialized in Europe, who murdered the filmmaker Theo van Gogh in Amsterdam last November. A Nixon Center study of 373 mujahideen in western Europe and North America between 1993 and 2004 found more than twice as many Frenchmen as Saudis and more Britons than Sudanese, Yemenites, Emiratis, Lebanese, or Libyans. Fully a quarter of the jihadists it listed were western European nationals -- eligible to travel visa-free to the United States.
The emergence of homegrown mujahideen in Europe threatens the United States as well as Europe. Yet it was the dog that never barked at last winter's Euro-American rapprochement meeting. Neither President George W. Bush nor Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice drew attention to this mutual peril, even though it should focus minds and could buttress solidarity in the West.
YOUR LAND IS MY LAND
The mass immigration of Muslims to Europe was an unintended consequence of post-World War II guest-worker programs. Backed by friendly politicians and sympathetic judges, foreign workers, who were supposed to stay temporarily, benefited from family reunification programs and became permanent. Successive waves of immigrants formed a sea of descendants. Today, Muslims constitute the majority of immigrants in most western European countries, including Belgium, France, Germany, and the Netherlands, and the largest single component of the immigrant population in the United Kingdom. Exact numbers are hard to come by because Western censuses rarely ask respondents about their faith. But it is estimated that between 15 and 20 million Muslims now call Europe home and make up four to five percent of its total population. (Muslims in the United States probably do not exceed 3 million, accounting for less than two percent of the total population.) France has the largest proportion of Muslims (seven to ten percent of its total population), followed by the Netherlands, Germany, Denmark, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and Italy. Given continued immigration and high Muslim fertility rates, the National Intelligence Council projects that Europe's Muslim population will double by 2025.
Unlike their U.S. counterparts, who entered a gigantic country built on immigration, most Muslim newcomers to western Europe started arriving only after World War II, crowding into small, culturally homogenous nations. Their influx was a new phenomenon for many host states and often unwelcome. Meanwhile, North African immigrants retained powerful attachments to their native cultures. So unlike American Muslims, who are geographically diffuse, ethnically fragmented, and generally well off, Europe's Muslims gather in bleak enclaves with their compatriots: Algerians in France, Moroccans in Spain, Turks in Germany, and Pakistanis in the United Kingdom.
The footprint of Muslim immigrants in Europe is already more visible than that of the Hispanic population in the United States. Unlike the jumble of nationalities that make up the American Latino community, the Muslims of western Europe are likely to be distinct, cohesive, and bitter. In Europe, host countries that never learned to integrate newcomers collide with immigrants exceptionally retentive of their ways, producing a variant of what the French scholar Olivier Roy calls "globalized Islam": militant Islamic resentment at Western dominance, anti-imperialism exalted by revivalism.
As the French academic Gilles Kepel acknowledges, "neither the blood spilled by Muslims from North Africa fighting in French uniforms during both world wars nor the sweat of migrant laborers, living under deplorable living conditions, who rebuilt France (and Europe) for a pittance after 1945, has made their children ... full fellow citizens." Small wonder, then, that a radical leader of the Union of Islamic Organizations of France, a group associated with the Muslim Brotherhood, curses his new homeland: "Oh sweet France! Are you astonished that so many of your children commune in a stinging naal bou la France [fuck France], and damn your Fathers?"
As a consequence of demography, history, ideology, and policy, western Europe now plays host to often disconsolate Muslim offspring, who are its citizens in name but not culturally or socially. In a fit of absentmindedness, during which its academics discoursed on the obsolescence of the nation-state, western Europe acquired not a colonial empire but something of an internal colony, whose numbers are roughly equivalent to the population of Syria. Many of its members are willing to integrate and try to climb Europe's steep social ladder. But many younger Muslims reject the minority status to which their parents acquiesced. A volatile mix of European nativism and immigrant dissidence challenges what the Danish sociologist Ole Waever calls "societal security," or national cohesion. To make matters worse, the very isolation of these diaspora communities obscures their inner workings, allowing mujahideen to fundraise, prepare, and recruit for jihad with a freedom available in few Muslim countries.
As these conditions developed in the late 1990s, even liberal segments of the European public began to have second thoughts about immigration. Many were galled by their governments' failure to reduce or even identify the sources of ins?curit? (a French code word for the combination of vandalism, delinquency, and hate crimes stemming from Muslim immigrant enclaves). The state appeared unable to regulate the entry of immigrants, and society seemed unwilling to integrate them. In some cases, the backlash was xenophobic and racist; in others, it was a reaction against policymakers captivated by a multiculturalist dream of diverse communities living in harmony, offering oppressed nationalities marked compassion and remedial benefits. By 2002, electoral rebellion over the issue of immigration was threatening the party systems of Austria, Belgium, Denmark, France, and the Netherlands. The Dutch were so incensed by the 2002 assassination of Pim Fortuyn, a gay anti-immigration politician, that mainstream parties adopted much of the victim's program. In the United Kingdom this spring, the Tories not only joined the ruling Labour Party in embracing sweeping immigration restrictions, such as tightened procedures for asylum and family reunification (both regularly abused throughout Europe) and a computerized exit-entry system like the new U.S. Visitor and Immigration Status Indicator Technology program; they also campaigned for numerical caps on immigrants. With the Muslim headscarf controversy raging in France, talk about the connection between asylum abuse and terrorism rising in the United Kingdom, an immigration dispute threatening to tear Belgium apart, and the Dutch outrage over the van Gogh killing, western Europe may now be reaching a tipping point.
GOING DUTCH
The uncomfortable truth is that disenfranchisement and radicalization are happening even in countries, such as the Netherlands, that have done much to accommodate Muslim immigrants. Proud of a legendary tolerance of minorities, the Netherlands welcomed tens of thousands of Muslim asylum seekers allegedly escaping persecution. Immigrants availed themselves of generous welfare and housing benefits, an affirmative-action hiring policy, and free language courses. Dutch taxpayers funded Muslim religious schools and mosques, and public television broadcast programs in Moroccan Arabic. Mohammed Bouyeri was collecting unemployment benefits when he murdered van Gogh.
The van Gogh slaying rocked the Netherlands and neighboring countries not only because the victim, a provocative filmmaker, was a descendant of the painter Vincent, the Dutch's most cherished icon, but also because Bouyeri was "an average second-generation immigrant," according to Stef Blok, the chairman of the parliamentary commission reviewing Bouyeri's immigration record. European counterterrorism authorities saw the killing as a new phase in the terrorist threat. It raised the specter of Middle East-style political assassinations as part of the European jihadist arsenal and it disclosed a new source of danger: unknown individuals among Europe's own Muslims. The cell in Hamburg that was connected to the attacks of September 11, 2001, was composed of student visitors, and the Madrid train bombings of March 2004 were committed by Moroccan immigrants. But van Gogh's killer and his associates were born and raised in Europe.
Bouyeri was the child of Moroccan immigrant workers. He grew up in a proletarian area of Amsterdam sometimes known as Satellite City because of the many reception dishes that sit on its balconies, tuned to al Jazeera and Moroccan television. Bouyeri's parents arrived in a wave of immigration in the 1970s and never learned Dutch. But Bouyeri graduated from the area's best high school. His transformation from promising student to jihadist follows a pattern in which groups of thriving, young European Muslims enlist in jihad to slaughter Westerners.
After graduating from a local college and then taking advanced courses in accounting and information technology, Bouyeri, who had an unruly temper, was jailed for seven months on a violence-related crime. He emerged from jail an Islamist, angry over Palestine and sympathetic to Hamas. He studied social work and became a community organizer. He wrote in a community newsletter that "the Netherlands is now our enemy because they participate in the occupation of Iraq." After he failed to get funding for a youth center in Satellite City and was unable to ban the sale of beer or the presence of women at the events he organized, he moved to downtown Amsterdam. There, he was recruited into the Hofstad Group, a cell of second-generation Islamic militants.
The cell started meeting every two weeks in Bouyeri's apartment to hear the sermons of a Syrian preacher known as Abu Khatib. Hofstad was connected to networks in Spain, Morocco, Italy, and Belgium, and it was planning a string of assassinations of Dutch politicians, an attack on the Netherlands' sole nuclear reactor, and other actions around Europe. European intelligence services have linked the cell to the Moroccan Islamic Combat Group, which is associated with the Madrid bombings and a series of attacks in Casablanca in 2003. Its Syrian imam was involved with mujahideen in Iraq and with an operational chief of al Qaeda. "Judging by Bouyeri's and the Hofstad network's international contacts," an analyst for the Norwegian government says, "it seems safe to conclude that they were part of the numerous terrorist plots that have been unraveled over the past years in western Europe."
The Hofstad Group should not be compared with marginal European terrorist groups of the past, such as the Baader-Meinhof Gang in Germany, Action Directe in France, or the Red Brigades in Italy. Like other jihadist groups today, it enjoys what Marxist terrorists long sought but always lacked: a social base. And its base is growing rapidly, thanks in part to the war in Iraq.
The Dutch General Intelligence and Security Service (AIVD) says that radical Islam in the Netherlands encompasses "a multitude of movements, organizations and groups." Some are nonviolent and share only religious dogma and a loathing for the West. But aivd stresses that others, including al Qaeda, are also "stealthily taking root in Dutch society" by recruiting estranged Dutch-born Muslim youths. An aivd report portrays such recruits watching jihadist videos, discussing martyrdom in Internet chat rooms, and attending Islamist readings, congresses, and summer camps. Radical Islam has become "an autonomous phenomenon," the aivd affirms, so that even without direct influence from abroad, Dutch youth are now embracing the fundamentalist line. Much the same can be said about angry young Muslims in Brussels, London, Paris, Madrid, and Milan.
THE RANK AND FILE
Broadly speaking, there are two types of jihadists in western Europe: call them "outsiders" and "insiders." The outsiders are aliens, typically asylum seekers or students, who gained refuge in liberal Europe from crackdowns against Islamists in the Middle East. Among them are radical imams, often on stipends from Saudi Arabia, who open their mosques to terrorist recruiters and serve as messengers for or spiritual fathers to jihadist networks. Once these aliens secure entry into one EU country, they have the run of them all. They may be assisted by legal or illegal residents, such as the storekeepers, merchants, and petty criminals who carried out the Madrid bombings.
Many of these first-generation outsiders have migrated to Europe expressly to carry out jihad. In Islamist mythology, migration is archetypically linked to conquest. Facing persecution in idolatrous Mecca, in AD 622 the Prophet Muhammad pronounced an anathema on the city's leaders and took his followers to Medina. From there, he built an army that conquered Mecca in AD 630, establishing Muslim rule. Today, in the minds of mujahideen in Europe, it is the Middle East at large that figures as an idolatrous Mecca because several governments in the region suppressed Islamist takeovers in the 1990s. Europe could even be viewed as a kind of Medina, where troops are recruited for the reconquest of the holy land, starting with Iraq.
The insiders, on the other hand, are a group of alienated citizens, second- or third-generation children of immigrants, like Bouyeri, who were born and bred under European liberalism. Some are unemployed youth from hardscrabble suburbs of Marseilles, Lyon, and Paris or former mill towns such as Bradford and Leicester. They are the latest, most dangerous incarnation of that staple of immigration literature, the revolt of the second generation. They are also dramatic instances of what could be called adversarial assimilation -- integration into the host country's adversarial culture. But this sort of anti-West westernization is illustrated more typically by another paradigmatic second-generation recruit: the upwardly mobile young adult, such as the university-educated Zacarias Moussaoui, the so-called 20th hijacker, or Omar Khyam, the computer student and soccer captain from Sussex, England, who dreamed of playing for his country but was detained in April 2004 for holding, with eight accomplices, half a ton of explosives aimed at London.
These downwardly mobile slum dwellers and upwardly mobile achievers replicate in western Europe the two social types that formed the base of Islamist movements in developing countries such as Algeria, Egypt, and Malaysia: the residents of shantytowns and the devout bourgeoisie. As in the September 11 attacks, the educated tend to form the leadership cadre, with the plebeians providing the muscle. No Chinese wall separates first-generation outsiders from second-generation insiders; indeed, the former typically find their recruits among the latter. Hofstad's Syrian imam mentored Bouyeri; the notorious one-eyed imam Abu Hamza al-Masri coached Moussaoui in London. A decade ago in France, the Algerian Armed Islamic Group proselytized beurs (the French-born children of North African immigrants) and turned them into the jihadists who terrorized train passengers during the 1990s. But post-September 11 recruitment appears more systematic and strategic. Al Qaeda's drives focus on the second generation. And if jihad recruiters sometimes find sympathetic ears underground, among gangs or in jails, today they are more likely to score at university campuses, prep schools, and even junior high schools.
THE IRAQ EFFECT
According to senior counterintelligence officials, classified intelligence briefings, and wiretaps, jihadists extended their European operations after the roundups that followed September 11 and then again, with fresh energy, after the invasion of Iraq. Osama bin Laden now provides encouragement and strategic orientation to scores of relatively autonomous European jihadist networks that assemble for specific missions, draw operatives from a pool of professionals and apprentices, strike, and then dissolve, only to regroup later.
Typically these groups target European countries allied with the United States in Iraq, as was proved by the Madrid bombings, the November 2003 attacks on British targets in Istanbul, as well as the lion's share of some 30 spectacular terrorist plots that have failed since September 11. In March 2004, within days of the London police chief's pronouncement that a local terrorist attack was "inevitable," his officers uncovered a plot involving nine British nationals of Pakistani origin and seized the largest cache of potential bomb-making material since the heyday of the Irish Republican Army. A few months later, Scotland Yard charged eight second-generation South Asian immigrants, reportedly trained in al Qaeda camps, with assembling a dirty bomb. Three of them had reconnaissance plans showing the layout of financial institutions in three U.S. cities.
Several hundred European militants -- including dozens of second-generation Dutch immigrants "wrestling with their identity," according to the Dutch intelligence service -- have also struck out for Iraq's Sunni Triangle. In turn, western Europe serves as a way station for mujahideen wounded in Iraq. The Iraq network belongs to an extensive structure developed by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, now formally bin Laden's sworn ally and the "emir" of al Qaeda in Iraq. Recently unsealed Spanish court documents suggest that at a meeting in Istanbul in February 2002, Zarqawi, anticipating a protracted war in Iraq, began to lay plans for a two-way underground railway to send European recruits to Iraq and Middle Eastern recruiters, as well as illegal aliens, to Europe. Zarqawi also activated sleeper cells established in European cities during the Bosnian conflict.
A chief terrorism investigator in Milan, Armando Spataro, says that "almost all European countries have been touched by [Iraq] recruiting," including, improbably, Norway, Switzerland, Poland, Bulgaria, and the Czech Republic. The recruitment methods of the Iraq network, which procures weapons in Germany from Balkan gangs, parallels those for the conflicts in Chechnya and Kashmir. Thanks to its state-of-the-art document-forging industry, Italy has become a base for dispatching volunteers. And Spain forms a trunk line with North Africa as well as a staging area for attacks in "al Andalus," the erstwhile Muslim Spanish caliphate.
LAX POPULI
Although for some Europeans the Madrid bombings were a watershed event comparable to the September 11 attacks in the United States, these Europeans form a minority, especially among politicians. Yet what Americans perceive as European complacency is easy to fathom. The September 11 attacks did not happen in Europe, and for a long time the continent's experience with terrorism mainly took the form of car bombs and booby-trapped trash cans. Terrorism is still seen as a crime problem, not an occasion for war. Moreover, some European officials believe that acquiescent policies toward the Middle East can offer protection. In fact, while bin Laden has selectively attacked the United States' allies in the Iraq war, he has offered a truce to those European states that have stayed out of the conflict.
With a few exceptions, European authorities shrink from the relatively stout legislative and security measures adopted in the United States. They prefer criminal surveillance and traditional prosecutions to launching a U.S.-style "war on terrorism" and mobilizing the military, establishing detention centers, enhancing border security, requiring machine-readable passports, expelling hate preachers, and lengthening notoriously light sentences for convicted terrorists. Germany's failure to convict conspirators in the September 11 attacks suggests that the European public, outside of France and now perhaps the Netherlands, is not ready for a war on terrorism.
Contrary to what many Americans concluded during Washington's dispute with Paris in the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq, France is the exception to general European complacency. Well before September 11, France had deployed the most robust counterterrorism regime of any Western country. Irish terrorism may have diverted British attention from jihad, as has Basque terrorism in Spain, but Algerian terrorism worked the opposite effect in France.
To prevent proselytizing among its mostly North African Muslim community, during the 1990s the energetic French state denied asylum to radical Islamists even while they were being welcomed by its neighbors. Fearing, as Kepel puts it, that contagion would turn "the social malaise felt by Muslims in the suburbs of major cities" into extremism and terrorism, the French government cracked down on jihadists, detaining suspects for as long as four days without charging them or allowing them access to a lawyer. Today no place of worship is off limits to the police in secular France. Hate speech is rewarded with a visit from the police, blacklisting, and the prospect of deportation. These practices are consistent with the strict Gallic assimilationist model that bars religion from the public sphere (hence the headscarf dispute).
Contrast the French approach to the United Kingdom's separatist form of multiculturalism, which offered radical Arab Islamists refuge and the opportunity to preach openly, while stepping up surveillance of them. French youth could still tune into jihadist messages on satellite television and the Internet, but in the United Kingdom open radical preaching spawned terrorist cells. Most of the rest of Europe adopted the relaxed British approach, but with less surveillance.
Now, the Madrid bombings and the van Gogh killing have strengthened the hand of engaged politicians, such as Germany's Social Democratic interior minister, Otto Schily, and the former French interior minister, Nicolas Sarkozy, who leads the governing Union for a Popular Movement. They have also prompted Brussels, London, Madrid, Paris, and The Hague to increase resources and personnel devoted to terrorism.
In general, European politicians with security responsibilities, not to mention intelligence and security officials who get daily intelligence reports, take the harder U.S. line. Schily has called for Europe-wide "computer-aided profiling" to identify mujahideen. The emergence of holy warriors in Europe and the meiosis of radical groups once connected to al Qaeda have prompted several European capitals to increase cooperation on counterterrorism as well as their counterterrorism resources and personnel.
Yet a jihadist can cross Europe with little scrutiny. Even if noticed, he can change his name or glide across a border, relying on long-standing bureaucratic and legal stovepipes. After the Madrid bombings, a midlevel European official was appointed to coordinate European counterterrorist statutes and harmonize eu security arrangements. But he often serves simply as a broker amid the gallimaufry of the 25 member states' legal codes.
Since the Madrid bombings, the Spanish Interior Ministry has tripled to 450 the number of full-time antiterrorism operatives, and the Spanish national police are assigning a similar number of additional agents to mujahideen intelligence. Spanish law enforcement established a task force combining police and intelligence specialists to keep tabs on Muslim neighborhoods and prison mosques. Similarly, special police cells are being organized in each of France's 22 regions, stepping up the surveillance of mosques, Islamic bookshops, long-distance phone facilities, and halal butchers and restaurants.
The 25 eu members have also put into effect a European arrest warrant allowing police to avoid lengthy extradition procedures. Despite widespread concerns about possible privacy abuses, several EU countries have lowered barriers between intelligence and police agencies since the van Gogh murder. Germany aims to place its 16 police forces under one umbrella. In France, Germany, Spain, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom, intelligence and police officers meet with officials in state-of-the-art communications centers, or "war rooms," to share information about interrogations, informant reports, live wiretaps, and video or satellite pictures.
Still, counterterrorism agencies remain reluctant to share sensitive information or cooperate on prosecutions. Measures proposed in the wake of the Madrid attacks, such as a Europe-wide fingerprint and DNA database and biometric passports, remain only that -- proposals. Fragmentation and rivalry among Europe's security systems and other institutions continue to hamper counterterrorism efforts. For nearly a decade, France has sought the extradition of the organizer of several bombings in the Paris metro in the 1990s, but his case languishes in the British courts to the anguish of the Home Office as well as Paris.
The new mujahideen are not only testing traditional counterterrorist practices; their emergence is also challenging the mentality prevailing in western Europe since the end of World War II. Revulsion against Nazism and colonialism translated into compassion toward religious minorities, of whatever stripe. At first, Muslim guest workers were welcomed in Europe by a liberal orthodoxy that generally regarded them as victims lacking rights. In some countries, such as the Netherlands and the United Kingdom, that perspective spawned a comprehensive form of multiculturalism. London's version verged on separatism. While stepping up surveillance, the British authorities allowed Islamists refuge and an opportunity to preach openly and disseminate rabid propaganda. Multiculturalism had a dual appeal: it allowed these states to seem tolerant by showering minorities with rights while segregating them from, rather than absorbing them into, the rest of society. Multiculturalism dovetailed with a diminished Western ethos that suited libertarians as well as liberals.
But now many Europeans have come to see that permissiveness as excessive, even dangerous. A version of religious tolerance allowed the Hamburg cell to flourish and rendered German universities hospitable to radical Islam. Now Europeans are asking Muslims to practice religious tolerance themselves and adjust to the values of their host countries. Tony Blair's government requires that would-be citizens master "Britishness." Likewise, "Dutch values" are central to The Hague's new approach, and similar proposals are being put forward in Berlin, Brussels, and Copenhagen. Patrick Weil, the immigration guru of the French Socialist Party, sees a continental trend in which immigrant "responsibilities" balance immigrant "rights."
The Dutch reaction to van Gogh's assassination, the British reaction to jihadist abuse of political asylum, and the French reaction to the wearing of the headscarf suggest that Europe's multiculturalism has begun to collide with its liberalism, privacy rights with national security. Multiculturalism was once a hallmark of Europe's cultural liberalism, which the British columnist John O'Sullivan defined as "free[dom] from irksome traditional moral customs and cultural restraints." But when multiculturalism is perceived to coddle terrorism, liberalism parts company. The gap between the two is opening in France, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, and to some extent even in Germany, where liberalism stretched a form of religious tolerance so much so that it allowed the Hamburg cell to turn prayer rooms into war rooms with cocky immunity from the German police.
Yet it is far from clear whether top-down policies will work without bottom-up adjustments in social attitudes. Can Muslims become Europeans without Europe opening its social and political circles to them? So far, it appears that absolute assimilationism has failed in France, but so has segregation in Germany and multiculturalism in the Netherlands and the United Kingdom. Could there be another way? The French ban the headscarf in public schools; the Germans ban it among public employees. The British celebrate it. The Americans tolerate it. Given the United States' comparatively happier record of integrating immigrants, one may wonder whether the mixed U.S. approach -- separating religion from politics without placing a wall between them, helping immigrants slowly adapt but allowing them relative cultural autonomy -- could inspire Europeans to chart a new course between an increasingly hazardous multiculturalism and a naked secularism that estranges Muslims and other believers. One thing is certain: if only for the sake of counterterrorism, Europe needs to develop an integration policy that works. But that will not happen overnight.
Indeed, the fissure between liberalism and multiculturalism is opening just as the continent undergoes its most momentous population shift since Asian tribes pushed westward in the first Christian millennium. Immigration obviously hits a national security nerve, but it also raises economic and demographic questions: how to cope with a demonstrably aging population; how to maintain social cohesion as Christianity declines and both secularism and Islam climb; whether the eu should exercise sovereignty over borders and citizenship; and what the accession of Turkey, with its 70 million Muslims, would mean for the eu. Moreover, European mujahideen do not threaten only the Old World; they also pose an immediate danger to the United States.
A FINER SIEVE
The United States' relative success in assimilating its own Muslim immigrants means that its border security must be more vigilant. To strike at the United States, al Qaeda counts less on domestic sleeper cells than on foreign infiltration. As a 9/11 Commission staff report put it, al Qaeda faces "a travel problem": How can it move its mujahideen from hatchery to target? Europe's mujahideen may represent a solution.
The New York Times has reported that bin Laden has outsourced planning for the next spectacular attack on the United States to an "external planning node." Chances are it is based in Europe and will deploy European citizens. European countries generally accord citizenship to immigrants born on their soil, and so potential European jihadists are entitled to European passports, allowing them visa-free travel to the United States and entry without an interview. The members of the Hamburg cell that captained the September 11 attacks came by air from Europe and were treated by the State Department as travelers on the Visa Waiver Program (VWP), just like Moussaoui and Richard Reid, the shoe bomber.
Does that mean the VWP should be scrapped altogether, as some members of Congress are asking? By no means. The State Department is already straining to enforce stricter post-September 11 visa-screening measures, which involve longer interviews, more staff, and more delays. Terminating the VWP would exact steep bureaucratic and diplomatic costs, and rile the United States' remaining European friends. Instead, the United States should update the criteria used in the periodic reviews of VWP countries, taking into account terrorist recruiting and evaluating passport procedures. These reviews could utilize task forces set up in collaboration with the Europeans. Together, U.S. and European authorities should insist that the airlines require U.S.-bound transatlantic travelers to submit passport information when purchasing tickets. Such a measure would give the new U.S. National Targeting Center time to check potential entrants without delaying flight departures. And officers should be stationed at check-in counters to weed out suspects.
Europe's emerging mujahideen endanger the entire Western world. Collaboration in taming Muslim rancor or at least in keeping European jihadists off U.S.-bound airplanes could help reconcile estranged allies. A shared threat and a mutual interest should engage media, policymakers, and the public on both sides of the Atlantic. To concentrate their minds on common dangers and solutions might come as a bittersweet relief to Europeans and Americans after their recent disagreements.
Robert S. Leiken is Director of the Immigration and National Security Program at the Nixon Center and a nonresident Fellow at the Brookings Institution. He is the author of Bearers of Jihad? Immigration and National Security After 9/11.
Interesating. Sickening. Wish it was limiited to shootings.
And wish it told how many of the kid shooters were on Ritalin, prozac, etc etc etc.
http://www.svrc.net/ShootingsMap.htm
Supreme Folly
By RICHARD A. EPSTEIN
WSJ June 27, 2005
Last week's regrettable 5-4 decision in Kelo v. City of New London marks a new low point in the Supreme Court's takings jurisprudence. The Constitution allows private property to be taken for public use only on payment of just compensation. But what counts as public use? In Kelo, Justice John Paul Stevens held that courts, especially federal courts, should be hugely deferential to a government decision, done after comprehensive hearings, to displace one private property owner in favor of a second private party in the name of overall economic development.
To understand why Kelo is truly horrible, it is necessary to look both at Kelo and the constitutional logic of public use requirement. On the former, the declining economic fortunes of New London spurred the city elders to embark on a general urban development plan, underwritten by $73 million in state money devoted to general planning, physical infrastructure and environmental cleanup. The plan lacked only one ingredient -- some real live developer prepared to risk his own capital to build any office or hotel on part of the 90 or so acres the City already had.
Not content with its overheated vision, New London's plan envisioned taking down about 15 old homes overlooking Long Island Sound, to be used for some unidentified form of "park support." Fancy new private homes were not listed on the plan. None of the endless frustration and delays in implementing its grand plan were attributable to the decision of some landowners to fight New London. Quite simply, the slow rate of development made obsolete some of the original projects, such as a luxury hotel to support a new nearby Pfizer facility. Pfizer [billion dollar DRUG company] could not wait 10 years to house its visiting dignitaries. One obvious compromise position, therefore, should have appealed even to the five member majority on the Supreme Court: to force the City to postpone the condemnation of these private homes until the City revealed its hand.
No such luck with Justice Stevens, for in his view New London had made its case when it asserted, without evidence, that the new projects would both increase tax revenues and create new jobs. It hardly mattered that its projections had been pulled out of thin air and were already hopelessly out of date when the case reached the Supreme Court. All that need be shown to Justice Stevens was procedural regularity and some claim that the proposed project served some "public benefit."
Astute readers will quickly note that the phrase "public benefit" is far broader than the constitutional words "public use." That last phrase clearly covers only two situations. The first arises when land is taken to build government facilities, such as forts, or to construct infrastructure, such as highways, open to all. The second covers those cases where property is taken by, or conveyed to, private parties who are duty bound to keep it open to all users. Private railroads and private grist mills, both of which are subject to the common carrier obligation of universal service, are two obvious examples. Note too that once a given use is properly identified as public, it does not matter for constitutional purposes whether the project is wise or is as foolish as New London's redevelopment program. The constitutional inquiry is over once it is proved that the project falls into these categories. Factually, the standard of review hardly matters, for it takes little genius to prove that a given structure is a fort or a highway.
There are, however, good reasons why the public use language has long been extended to cover some cases of takings for private purposes with indirect public benefits. One recurrent problem of social coordination arises when one party is in a position to blockade the productive ventures of another. To take a real historical example, assume that the owner of a mine (who has no choice on where to dig) can only get his ore to market by ferrying it over scrub lands owned by another individual. That second landowner can demand a huge chunk of the mining profits for his trivial contribution to the overall venture. For over 100 years, the Supreme Court has allowed the state to condemn the obstructing property for the mine owner upon payment of just compensation, here measured by the trivial losses sustained by the obstructing landowner. The net gains from blocking the holdout are huge.
The great intellectual blunder of the public use law over the past 50 or so years is that it has wrenched the public benefit language out of this narrow holdout context. In the mid-1950s, the Supreme Court held that takings were for public use when they were intended to relieve various forms of urban "blight" -- a slippery term with no clear constitutional pedigree. Thirty years later, the Court went a step further by allowing Hawaii to force landlords to sell their interests to sitting tenants, as a means to counteracting ostensible "oligopolistic" market conditions. Now any "conceivable" indirect social benefit would do, without regard to the attendant costs.
Given this past legacy, Justice Stevens found it easy to take New London at its word. Any comprehensive public project will produce some benefit for someone, so that -- as Justices O'Connor and Thomas stressed in dissent -- his test always allows the legislature to gin up some rationale for taking public property for just compensation (which alas falls far short of making the individual landowner whole: legal, appraisal and moving costs, for example, are systematically ignored). But the slightest bit of reflection should have shown just how the new public use cases have migrated from the old mining cases, or even under the Hawaii statute, which did not displace sitting tenants.
In the present case, Susette Kelo and her fellow plaintiffs have not tried to extract some unconscionable gain out of some sensible business venture. They have no desire to sell their homes at all. At the same time their subjective losses have been enormous. It was a perfectly sensible line for the Court to say when subjective values are high, and holdout problems are nonexistent, the requisite public use is not present.
The Court could only arrive at its shameful Kelo ruling by refusing to look closely at past precedent and constitutional logic. Courts that refuse to see no evil and hear no evil are blind to the endemic risk of factional politics at all levels of government. And being blind, this bare Supreme Court majority has sustained a scandalous and cruel act for no public purpose at all.
Mr. Epstein is a professor of law at the University of Chicago and a senior fellow of the Hoover Institution.
Your post amply demonstrates that you aren't bright enough to understand the meaning of the words "NO POLITICS."
I thought Mickey Rooney was retired.
Good stuff.
GITMO COMPLAINTS
Prison uniforms not fitting properly.
And the baked chicken maliciously and deliberately over salted.
AL Jazeera on Anti-Semitism. That's rich. LOL
Austrian links Iran leader to Kurd killing
AFP via Kurdish Media ^ / 2005 Jul 2
Vienna, July 2 (Reuters): An outspoken Austrian politician has accused Iran’s newly elected President of aiding the 1989 assassination of a Kurdish opposition leader in Vienna, the interior ministry said today.
But the ministry said it was not investigating the charge.
Austrian Green Party politician Peter Pilz said he had information implicating Iranian President-elect Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in the 1989 assassination of Iranian exile Kurdish leader Abdul Rahman Ghassemlou and two other Kurdish opposition politicians in the Austrian capital.
Several weeks ago Pilz, the Greens’ security spokesman, gave Austria’s interior ministry documents that he says support the allegation, said ministry spokesman Major Rudolf Gollia.
“These documents were then forwarded to the state prosecutor’s office, and the matter is in their hands,” Gollia said, adding the ministry was not investigating the matter. “Until now we have not received a request from the prosecutor’s office to begin a formal investigation,” he said. “But that doesn’t mean there couldn’t be one in the future.”
A senior aide to Ahmadinejad in Tehran said: “This is not even worth commenting on. It is like the other accusations and there will be more accusations.”
In an interview with the Austrian newspaper Der Standard, Pilz said his accusation was based on information he received from an “extraordinarily credible” informer, an Iranian journalist living in France who Pilz calls only “witness D”.
(Excerpt) Read more at kurdishmedia.com ...
Buddhist beheaded in Muslim south Thailand
Reuters ^
The militants, speaking in the Malay dialect which most Muslims in the region use, told the group to run away, but the Thai-speaking Buddhist did not move because he didn't understand the warning, the officer told Reuters by telephone.
He was shot three times in the head, which was then decapitated and taken to a nearby village, the officer said.
More than 700 people have been killed in the unrest in the Muslim-majority southern provinces of Yala, Narathiwat and Pattani, scene of a low-key separatist insurgency in the 1970s and 1980s.
(Excerpt) Read more at alertnet.org ...
Karl Rove nails the anti-victory neurosis of the Left....................
The Star [South Chicago] ^ / 7/3/5 / Michael Bowers
Col. Charles Beckwith, founder of the Delta Force, tells a story about White House planning in April 1980 for the mission to rescue our 53 hostages in Tehran. Beckwith had visited the White House Situation Room to brief President Carter.
In the meeting, according to one writer, "Charlie mentioned that his Delta shooters would 'take out' the hostage guards.
"Deputy Secretary of State Warren Christopher looked over at Charlie, eyebrows raised. 'Take them out,' Colonel?"
Beckwith replied: "Yes, Mister Deputy Secretary. We're going to double-tap 'em. Shoot 'em each in the head — twice."
Christopher protested: "Couldn't you just shoot them in the shoulder or something?"
And liberals wonder why conservatives consider them weak.
Now, before you accuse me of painting with a broad brush, let me say many Democrats do not seek a weak America. For example, Joe Lieberman does not. Zell Miller does not. Sam Nunn does not. John F. Kennedy did not. Alive today, he'd be a hawk.
However, it is eminently fair to say that virtually all those bound to a weak America also are bound to the Democratic Party.
Karl Rove was 100 percent accurate with his June 22 comments: "Conservatives saw the savagery of 9-11 in the attacks and prepared for war; liberals saw the savagery of the 9-11 attacks and wanted to prepare indictments and offer therapy and understanding for our attackers."
Liberals are livid, mainly because, secretly, they know Rove has them nailed. Their party in the past 60 years has a rich history of appeasement, defeatism, naivete, fear and weakness.
Liberals simply have not got the will to kill our mortal enemies. They just want to shoot them in the shoulder.
Consider two moments from the century that was: Yalta 1945 and Vietnam 1968-74.
At Yalta, President Roosevelt gave away Eastern Europe to Stalin. At the time, our side had had nearly three decades to size up the evil of the Soviet Union. It was, after all, the nation that murdered 5,000 officers — the cream of Poland's military — at Katyn Forest in 1940.
And yet, as Roosevelt told a confidante: "I think that if I give (Stalin) everything I possibly can without demanding anything in return, then, noblesse oblige, he will not attempt to annex anything and will work to build a peaceful and democratic world."
FDR was wrong. For millions of Eastern Europeans, his assessment meant oppression. For thousands, it meant death. For example, ask Peter Fechter, the young German who tried to escape East Berlin in August 1962.
Ah, but wait — you cannot ask poor Mr. Fechter. Shot by East German border guards, he slowly bled to death in no man's land at the Berlin Wall.
American troops heard his cries but dared not rescue him lest they be shot themselves. Fechter was 18. Today, he would be 61. His corpse is Roosevelt's legacy. His corpse, plus the corpses of 1,064 others — and all these at the Berlin Wall alone.
Now, Vietnam. In a book on the war, Col. Harry Summers recounts an incident from the 1974 Paris peace talks. Summers told Col. Tu of the North Vietnamese army, "You know, you never beat us on the battlefield."
Col. Tu replied, "That may be so, but it is also irrelevant."
Indeed it was. The communists did not have to win on the ground. They had to win on the TV screens of America's living rooms.
Doing so, they benefited immensely from the collaboration of America's reporters. The most egregious example is how our press magically transformed the Tet Offensive from a great defeat for the communists (which it was) into a great defeat for the Americans (which it was not).
Reporters were shocked that a handful of Viet Cong were able to take a cab to the U.S. Embassy in Saigon, blow their way into the compound and kill a few U.S. soldiers.
Indeed, this was disturbing. But in the big picture, it counted for virtually nothing. The Tet Offensive was a disaster for the North. The Viet Cong were wiped out: 50,000 dead. The communists were left to fight with only their uniformed troops.
But why would a reporter bother with such mundane analysis when he can embark on the sexy task of doomsaying? Walter Cronkite made his famous report declaring the war lost — and what do you know, overnight, the war was lost.
Nothing changes. Thirty-seven years later, we may lose the Iraq war because of the protests of America's victory-haters.
Again, my caveat: Many Democrats are not weak Americans. But nearly all weak Americans are Democrats.
Therefore, I think I am entitled to say that when it comes to national security, the Democrats are the party that harbors the timid and the self-handcuffed.
You could say they are the party of Atticus Finch, the heroic lawyer but misguided father in "To Kill a Mockingbird," who told his brave daughter Scout, "I forbid you to fight."
Likewise, Democrats forbid America to fight. For 70 years, they refused to take communism seriously. Now, they refuse to take terrorism seriously. They simply cannot believe our enemies mean us harm.
Thank God, George W. Bush knows better.
At the White House in 1980, a shocked Warren Christopher asked: "You mean you're really going to shoot to kill? You really are?"
Yes, we really are. And for some Americans, it's time to grow a spine.
Michael Bowers is a copy editor and page designer for The Star. Send e-mail to mbowers@starnewspapers.com.
Keep posting your incomprehensible lefty crap, putput.
July 2005 issue of O, The Oprah Magazine
http://www2.oprah.com/omagazine/200507/omag_200507_anita.jhtml
ANITA HILL'S AFTER LIFE
By Elizabeth Mitchell
In 1991 more than 20 million TV viewers watched as a well-regarded young law professor named Anita Hill accused her former boss, Clarence Thomas, of sexual harassment—and in return was smeared as a pathological liar, a would-be political assassin, and a prude. Thomas made it to the Supreme Court, and Hill vanished into academia—but not before changing the way we think about men and women in the workplace.
The Hearings
On October 11, 1991, the 35-year-old faced a grilling by 14 white male senators, many of them furious that she had delayed their march to confirm Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court. The topic was his alleged sexual harassment of her when she worked at the Department of Education and, later, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), but the tone of the hearings clearly implied that the Republican senators were out to prove her a liar. Carried by the networks and PBS over three days of near-continuous coverage, Hill's accounts of Thomas's describing the length of his penis and enjoying pornography involving animals reached more than 20 million American households. Beyond that, CNN carried the testimony worldwide to an audience so rapt, Hill has been recognized on the streets of South Africa and Bhutan.
Even today, for many people Anita Hill is a hero. If she didn't actively seek her place in front of the senate committee, once there she held her ground: outing not only Clarence Thomas for creating what she said was a hostile work environment but also, arguably, the gender bias of the United States Senate and every harasser in every workplace across America. Yet in coming forward, Anita Hill was also branded everything from a delusional, bitter prude to a sexual deviant. Her home phone rang incessantly with death threats. Despite Hill's courage, Clarence Thomas went on to the Supreme Court, while she spent half of the next decade in agony.
In so many instances, our heroes are alive for us in the moment of their daring and then fade from view. We never learn how they deal with their everyday lives after the historical record moves on to other climaxes. Does a whistle-blower sleep easy at night? What's the worst challenge he or she endures in coming forward? How does one construct a next step in life amid fame and infamy?
But i thought they all love their Palestinians so much.
Saudi Arabia - Conversion by a Muslim to another religion is punishable by death. Bibles are illegal.
Yemen - Bans proselytizing by non-Muslims and forbids conversions. The Government does not allow the building of new non-Muslim places of worship
Kuwait - Registration and licensing of religious groups. Members of religions not sanctioned in the Koran may not build places of worship. Prohibits organized religious education for religions other than Islam
Egypt -Islam is the official state religion and primary source of legislation. Accordingly, religious practices that conflict with Islamic law are prohibited. Muslims may face legal problems if they convert to another faith. Requires non-Muslims to obtain what is now a presidential decree to build a place of worship
Algeria - The law prohibits public assembly for purposes of practicing a faith other than Islam. Non-Islamic proselytizing is illegal, and the Government restricts the importation of non-Islamic literature for distribution.
(All information is from US State Department Human Rights Reports)
Fred-Who helped you post your post--Larry Flynt ?
Noam Chomsky?
Seymour Hersch?
Dick Durbin?
Howard Dean?
Helen Thomas?
Michael Issikoff?
Jason Blair?
Dan Blather?
I see your source is Jason Blair's New York TIMES. LOL
And of course, Walter Duranty's NEW YORK TIMES.
Kennedy Slams Unnamed Supreme Court Nominee .................
ScrappleFace ^ / July 2, 2005 / Scott Ott
(2005-07-02) -- Sen. Ted Kennedy, D-MA, today criticized President George Bush's as-yet-unnamed replacement for retiring Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor as a "brutal, Bible-thumping, right-wing ideologue who hates minorities, women and cocker spaniels."
"He or she is clearly outside the mainstream of American values," said Sen. Kennedy. "President Bush has again ignored the Senate's 'advice and consent' role, forcing Democrats to filibuster this outrageous nominee."
The Massachusetts Senator said his aides have already discovered "reams of memos" showing that the man or woman Mr. Bush will appoint has "a history of abusing subordinates, dodging military service, hiring undocumented workers, spanking his or her children and rolling back the clock on human rights to the days when the Pharaohs ruled Egypt with an iron fist."
The Senator's office issued a news release to the media documenting the allegations against the potential high court judge, with a convenient blank line allowing reporters to fill in the nominee's name as soon as that information is leaked.
Putt-putt--Anyone reading your leftwing drivel knows you are a low-grade imbecile leftwinger.
Well now you do:
Didn't know I was unamerican
Didn't know I was a communist
Didn't know I'd be labeled a terrorist
DIdn't know I hated my country
Extremely sorry to hear all that.
Do you agree with the following?
With respect to the women in her audience.
If Oprah came out the stage
and took a crap in the middle of the stage,
the women who make up her audience would cheer her wildly.
Burton J Lee III is a board member of the leftwing, America-hating Physicians for Human Rights.
Where is the liberal outcry that these thugs get better food than US children in the school lunch program?
Rice Pilaf Again?!
Richmond Times-Dispatch Jul 1, 2005
We have in hand, courtesy of the Senate Republican Caucus via the folks at powerlineblog.com, a menu for the meals fed to detainees at Guantnamo Bay -- that "gulag of our time," in the words of Amnesty International and others of that ilk.
Prisoners of the Soviets' Gulag Archipelago ate a few hundred calories a day, if they were lucky, mostly thin soup made of fishheads and the like. At Gitmo, detainees are given -- well, let's see . . . .
For breakfast: Pancakes, syrup, orange juice, fruit, milk, margarine, and coffee or tea. Or a whole-wheat bagel, oatmeal, juice, fruit, scrambled eggs, milk, margarine, and coffee or tea. Or whole-wheat bread, Raisin Bran, orange juice, fruit, milk, a "veggie patty," margarine, and coffee or tea.
For lunch: Whole-wheat pita, long-grain brown rice, canned peaches, steamed asparagus, northern beans, margarine, and tea or drink-ade. Or whole-wheat bread, tossed green rice, fresh fruit, wax beans, a seasoned beef patty, margarine, and tea or drink-ade. Or a whole-wheat bread slice, garlic mashed potatoes, canned pears, seasoned peas, kidney beans, margarine, and tea or drink-ade.
For dinner: Noodles Jefferson, a whole-wheat bread slice, fresh fruit, green beans, carrot sticks, baked chicken breast in broth, margarine, and tea or drink-ade. Or rice pilaf, whole-wheat pita, fresh fruit, steamed cauliflower, a veggie patty, margarine, and tea or drink-ade. Or whole-wheat bread, long-grain brown rice, fresh fruit, steamed carrots, broccoli or celery, lemon baked fish, margarine, and tea or drink-ade.
Other menu items include pineapple, okra, a beef patty with onions, succotash, black-eyed peas, Lyonnaise rice, spicy baked fish, bayou chicken breast, acorn squash, honey-glazed chicken, chickpeas, spinach, tandoori chicken, and mustard dill baked fish.
The daily caloric intake from the meals ranges from 2,500 to 2,900. Of course, the menus above represent just one 12-day cycle. Some detainees -- prisoners of the terror war -- have been held for years now, and even the most creative Army cooks can come up with only so many permutations of the available fare. Plus, all that margarine must be rough on the arteries.
So it's no wonder Senator Dick Durbin compared Gitmo with the gulag, Nazi death camps, and the killing fields of Cambodia. Rice pilaf again?
The horror.
http://www.timesdispatch.com/servlet/Satellite?pagename=RTD%2FMGArticle%2FRTD_BasicArticle&c=MGA...
"Lawrence O'Donnell, senior MSNBC political analyst," LOL
He's the rabid lefty who lost it completely while trying to attack the head of the Swift Boat group who opposed Kerry.
He's regarded as a cartoon of the rabid leftwinger.
The Genocidal Phantoms of the Oprah - (daytime TV talk show queen favors Palestinian cause)
CHRONWATCH.COM ^ / JUNE 10, 2005 / STEVEN PLAUT
You know things are really getting out of hand when TV hostess Oprah Winfrey decides to go jihad.
Yes, Oprah, the waddling guru of the bored middle-class at-home housewives, has repeatedly taken time off from teaching her followers about closet organization and thigh reduction, in order to promote the Palestinian cause. She has run one-sided articles about the Middle East conflict on her show and and in her O Magazine.
Whenever the subject of terrorism is broached on her show, Oprah studiously avoids allowing anyone to link it to Palestinians or the Hizbollah. She interviewed mothers of suicide bombers who were distraught because their houses were bulldozed. There was no mention of Israeli babies and their mothers being blown up in buses, pizza parlours blown to smithereens, nor Jewish teens murdered while at the disco inTel Aviv. Not even the Jews murdered when two guests of the International Solidarity Movement blew up Mike's Place in Tel Aviv. Debbie Schlussel has dubbed her the affable Joseph Goebbels of daytime talk TV. Columnist Naomi Ragen demolished Oprah for her politicized bias. The Anti-Defamation League has denounced her for bias, noting that 'Palestinian girls will be rescued when their leaders say "No" to the incitement, hate and violence that has permeated their political and cultural landscape for years now.'
In the June issue, a feature article tries to arouse sympathy for a an 18-year-old Palestinian terrorist, Yusra Abdu, who was tried, convicted and is currently serving time in an Israeli jail for conspiring to perform a suicide bombing. The article tries to make the Palestinian wannabe mass-murderer appear humane and likeable.
The propaganda article is written by one David France. He quotes enemies of Israel, leftists, and unidentified human rights activists, spouting false statistics. In the piece he asks, 'What would make a girl take such a radical and grisly step?' France "answers" himself when he quotes a moonbatish university professor, who asserts that: "religion is not the cause [of Palestinian suicide terror]... these are people who define their situation as hopeless. They feel that they have no way to respond against what they see as Israeli military aggression."
France forgot to add a detail to the story. The real reason the Oprah heroine set out to commit mass murder was that she was worried about getting punished for participating in a date! Because a date would have compromised Yusra honor and she might have found herself getting her throat slit by her brother or father. Is it any wonder that, as France himself writes, she confessed to Israeli security police that the real reason she wanted to blow herself up was "boredom?"
Now in fact, the reason 18 year old Palestinians try to commit mass murder is because they are driven by a genocidal neonazi Islamofascist ideology instilled in them over decades by the PLO and its affiliates, all with the blessing and cheerleading of the Western Left. Hard as it is for an Oprah fan to understand, Palestinians want to mass murder Jews because they hate Jews and want to annihilate Jews. Not because they are "occupied." (They were mass murdering Jews long before any land was "occupied" by Israel in 1967.) And no one with an atlas can seriously suggest that Arabs murder Jews because Jews have too much land and Arabs not enough.
Why would Oprah, who is not exactly hard up for cash, sell out and allow her magazine to be hijacked on behalf of Palestinian violence?
Maybe Doctor Phil can tell us?
the Writer: Dr. Plaut is a professor of business administration at the University of Haifa, and the author of "The Scout," available from Gefen Publishing House at: http://www.israelbooks.com/bookDetails.asp?book=43.
"The greatest genocide during WWII, in proportion to a nation's population, took place, not in Nazi Germany but in Nazi-created puppet state of Croatia. There in the years 1941-45 some 750,000 Serbs, 60,000 Jews and 26,000 Gypsies - men, women and children - perished in a GIGANTIC holocaust..." [1]
http://www.sxws.com/charis/history-12.htm
The embodied devils
Who was Who in NDH?
http://www.balkan-archive.org.yu/kosta/ndh/ndh-kojeko.html
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The Head of the Snake
The Sataniel personaly: Dr. Ante Pavelic'
Here he is visiting Adolf Hitler.
Pavelich is the one in the center of photo.
On the left is Andrija Artukovich, the minister of Interior of NDH.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Alojzije Stepinac;
The Head of Catholic Church of Croatia
The Catholic Church of Croatia approved and frequently inspired all the Ustashas deeds. Its Cardinal, Alojzije Stepinac was never put on trial or prosecuted for that (after the WW2), in order not to alienate relations with the Vatican.
Alojzije Stepinac visiting Ante Pavelich personaly, in another visit accompanied with the whole Croatian Episcopate, and with all them and with the Papal Legate Marcone.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
More to read:
PIUS XII: VATICAN AND USTASHE
HOLY SEE AND PAVELIC'S CROATIA
CROATIAN CARDINAL STEPINAC WAS PAVELIC'S HEAD MILITARY CHAPLAIN
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Ante Starchevich
The most important ideologist and inspirator of the hate towards Serbs. The author of the racial, national and religious superiority of Croats over the Serbs. He maintained that the Croatian people could not restore its national State without prior extermination of the Serbian people. With Eugen Kvaternik, he establish the Croatian Party of Right in 1861. Starcevic predicated his policy on the so-called Croatian State right and called for the creation of Greater Croatia from the Alps to the Prokletije Mountains. Denying the political indIviduality of the Serbs in Croatia, Slavonia and Dalmatia, he and his followers claimed that Serbs were "Orthodox" Croats. He also thought of Croats as a superior and of Serbs as an inferior race. The racial theory of Ante Starcevlc and his Frankovci successors resulted in the Ustasa aftempts to create a pure Croatian and Catholic independent State of Croatia in Worid War Two. Starcevic's statements that the Serbs were a race of slaves and that, for this reason, they should be axed was put into practice in the Independent State of Croatia from 1941 to 1945.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Slavko Kvaternik
Slavko Kvaternik (second from the left), Vojskovodja (marshal) of Pavelic's Independent State of Croatia (NDH) among high ranking German military officers. He declared the Independence of Croatia on April 10, 1941, under the protection of the German Army wich captured Zagreb on the same day. The Croatian paper, Danica, of Chicago, Illinois, defending Kvaternik, wrote as follows on May 7, 1958:
"Poor martyred Kvaternik! We must defend him for he gave his life for our fatherland. We must defend his stand as a Fifth Columnist and as a Collaborationist (Nazi). To attack him now is to follow the Parisan line. He was a great (Ustashi) fighter for Croatia and no strangers are now going to blacken his name."
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Mile Budak
Devout Catholic, Dr. Mile Budak, Minister of Education and Cults, said on July 22, 1941:
"The movement of the Ustashi is based on religion. For minorities-Serbs, Jews and Gypsies, we have three million bullets. We shall kill one part of the Serbs. We shall transport another, and the rest of them will be forced to embrace the Roman Catholic religion. Thus, our new Croatia will get rid of all Serbs in our midst in order to become one hundred percent Catholic within ten years."
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Andrija Artukovich
Andrija Artukovich was Minister of Interior of Fashist Croatia.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Back to USTASHAS
Al Qaeda in Kosovo
--------------------------------------------
04/17/2005 serbianna.com ^ / M. Bozinovich
"It's not true there were mujahideen in Kosovo. That is a figment of your imagination." Sabit Kadriu, Albanian ‘human rights’ activist in Kosovo while testifying against Milosevic at the Hague
At the April's international police conference held in Sofia, Bulgaria reiterated that Islamic terrorism is creeping up in the Balkans. Speaking at a regional police anti-crime conference, Bulgarian General Boiko Borisov urged for "joint efforts to fight the global terrorism network" calling on the participants from the likes of Germany, Albania and Turkey to join efforts in limiting militants' access to financing and to enhance security of transport and border control.
Earlier in March, the Bulgarian spy chief Kircho Kirov issued a more specific warning on presence of al Qaeda in the Balkans and bluntly stated that extremists with links to Osama Bin Laden's Al Qaeda network are present in the Balkans and are infiltrating other European countries. In a joint NATO-Bulgarian report published in March 2005, Kirov cites Kosovo as a direct source of regional instability and a hub for international terrorism.
Indeed, speaking by proxy is nothing new, so these broad and sweeping statements by Bulgaria are significant because it is the US with its FBI offices in Sofia that ultimately stand behind these statements. What is not new is that Washington itself, as usual, has elected to remain mute on the specific al-Qaeda presence among Kosovo Albanians so one is left to search for the terrorist dots elsewhere in order to connect them.
For example, Reuven Paz, who teaches at Haifa University and is regarded as one of Israel's leading researchers of radical Islamic movements, says that the Islamic countries and particularly Saudi Arabia view the conflicts in Kosovo as that of Islam against Christianity. "All of the Sunni Muslim groups as well as Iran are making lots of propaganda for Kosovo and see it as a symbol," Paz said. The reason for the propaganda is to attract Muslim volunteers to go to Kosovo and fight. Al-Qaeda then is the only well established network that can provide such a trip for a young prospective Muslim eager to do his Islamic tour of duty and willingly die for Allah.
While reports abound that Bosnian Jihadists simply swerved upon Kosovo during the 1995-1999 period, Jane's International Defense Review reported that some fresh Jihadists were entering Kosovo via Albania as well. In February 1999 Jane's cites that documents found on the body of a KLA member showed that he had escorted several volunteers into Kosovo, including more than a dozen Saudi Arabians.
A more specific case is that of a Syrian-German businessman, Mamoun Darkazanli, who was arrested in Hamburg in October of 2004 on charges that he “helped fund the al-Qaeda terrorist network for years and who is seen in a video at a mosque with some of the Sept. 11 hijackers.” According to the Hamburg authorities, “Darkazanli is alleged to have been involved in the purchase of a ship for bin Laden, handling administrative details, and paying bills. He also allegedly traveled to Kosovo in late 2000 on an al-Qaeda mission”.
In 2003, NBC News acquired a videotaped statement of Muhammad Talal al-Jafar al Tallani Ackbar al-Walid, described as al-Qaeda's Deputy Under-Emir for Defensive Intelligence and Holy War Operations, denouncing US and calling for world Jihad against the West. The report then goes on to describe Muhammad Talal as one that was “involved in noteworthy military operations in the past, serving in covert operations alongside the CIA in Afghanistan and in Bosnia and Kosovo before joining al-Qaeda.” The report cites that American soldiers Lt. Gen. William Boykin and Will Dunham contributed to the report.
Yet, the most blunt admittance that al-Qaeda is in Kosovo comes from the big dogs themselves - Britain and the US.
Alarmed that al-Qaeda may hit Britain during the run-up to the May 5 general elections, UK says that "the main threat is posed by around 200 people based here who have been trained by al Qaeda in Afghan camps for conflict in places such as Chechnya, Bosnia and Kosovo."
Also stated as an inadvertent afterthought that al-Qaeda is in Kosovo came few weeks earlier by the FBI citing an arrest warrant for a certain Kifah Wael Jayyousi accused of "conspiring with two other men in the 1990s to finance, recruit and provide equipment to extremists fighting in Bosnia, Chechnya, Kosovo and Somalia."
The question then is no longer whether al-Qaeda is in Kosovo, but rather how could al-Qaeda have infiltrated Albanian inhabited areas of the Balkans precisely during the period when the US was blanketing it with its own troops.
The Albania Romance
Following the collapse of Stalinism in Albania, the newly elected President Sali Berisha quickly decided to leverage his strategic European location and Islamic heritage by placing his country on sale to the highest Muslim bidder and acquire money from that Islamic sponsor. According to the IWPR “The Islamic connection [in Albania] can be traced back to 1992, when the Tirana-based Economic Tribune published a letter from Berisha to his prime minister, Aleksander Meksi, in which he said was going to help accept aid from Muslim countries because the West had not lived up to promises of financial assistance.”
Islamic countries, and especially Saudi Arabia, were long interested in using Albania as a hub via which to infiltrate Europe and Islamize it. Albania quickly became a distinguished member of world Islamic institutions, including the Islamic Conference and The Islamic Development Bank.
Although there is no indication that the US was alarmed of the new Islamic sponsors at the time, Washington initiated a takeover of Albania and dully began supplying direct assistance following Berisha’s visit to the US in March 1991 while in 1992 Washington deployed a Military Liaison Team to the country and started outfitting the Albanian military. Albania was subsequently used by the US and Turkey to provide supplies to Bosnian Muslims in their war against Serbs.
While US was instituting a military takeover of Albania, Albanian-Jihadist nexus was maintained by Albania’s Chief of Security Baskim Gazidede. Israeli Mossad documented that the Security Chief Gazidede had extensive connections with the Jihadists and was the chief link between al-Qaeda, Albania and KLA. Says Albanian Gazeta Shqiptare: “'The Gazidede file', widely disputed of connections with the Islamics must have already been completed with data which 'Mossad' has gathered over the last years". Gazidede subsequently ran off to Syria, another terror sponsoring nation.
Before his departure to Syria, however, Gazidede established training camps across Albania and the often cited ones are in Tropoje and Bajram Curi. Given the influx of al-Qaeda into Albania it is then logical to conclude that these Jihadists had to have, at least, some form of an orientation meeting somewhere in Albania before let lose in Kosovo.
Indeed, reports abound that US, British SAS and German BND trained, equipped and used the Kosovo Liberation Army units, by now pregnant with al Qaeda Jihadists, to destabilize Serbia. In March of 2000, for example, London Times uncovered American agents that “admitted they helped to train the Kosovo Liberation Army [KLA] before Nato's bombing” of Serbia while in August of 2000 the KLA deputy chief of staff Colonel Dilaver Goxhaj gave an interview to UPI stating that senior Albanian commanders were trained in Albania since 1991.
French Le Monde, furthermore, states that by “1996 the BND intelligence service was building up its offices in Tirana and Rome to select and train prospective KLA cadres. Special forces in Berlin provided the operational training and supplied arms and transmission equipment from ex-East German Stasi stocks as well as black uniforms.”
During March-May 1999 when NATO bombed Serbia, NATOs General Wesley Clark’s cell phone number was found among the killed KLA commanders in Kosovo.
Seized KLA weapons such as American Barrett M82 .50 cal sniper rifles along with German models, as well as reports of American 'Stinger' SAMs used by KLA Albanians during their war with Macedonia also point to the US-Albanian collaboration.
Finally, in February 2005, German Network TV ZDF concluded that the Albanian “KLA has stronger ties with the CIA than the [German] BND. Commander Hoxha had ties with the CIA, the BND and with the Austrian military intelligence service which has devoted great attention to this region and has very good connections with the KLA."
Far from ignorant of al-Qaeda in Albania, the US appears to have had an uneasy relationship with them. Illustrates Tirana based Gazeta Shqiptare: “The arrests of Ahmed Ibrahim Al Naggar and Mohammed Hassan Mahmoud, and the extradition of the director of the Revival of Islamic Legacy foundation as a jihad collaborator in Tirana in June 1998, the arrest of Amoid Naji in Turin of Italy and his deposition before Italian investigators that he was in Albania to blow up the US embassy in Tirana, and other facts of this kind go to prove that the activity of terrorist jihad organizations is present and well-organized in Albania.”
Gazeta Shqiptare goes on to say that “Islamic terrorist organizations managed to set up Albania's first cell of the Islamic Jihad, which was headed by Aiman Al Zavahiri.” the famous Osama bin Laden No. 2.
Regarding Naggar, the New York Times says that he is “the Jihad member, [who] tied Mr. bin Laden directly to the network in Albania”. The Times then provides a vivid detail: “Albania cell's members, most employed at Islamic charities in Tirana, were forced to transfer 26 percent of their salaries to Islamic Jihad.” The chief of the Albanian al-Qaeda, the Egyptian Shawki Salama Mustafa, moved in there with his wife Jihan Hassan, who later testified that their business was to turn out passports and that she “saw a passport with my name on it and it said I was Albanian".
According to the Global Policy, in addition to the drug and human trafficking, Albanian criminal network in Brussells specializes in forging of documents and false passports. An al-Qaeda operative, Djamel Beghala, was arrested in Dubai after the customs agent recognized one of these Albanian type false passports.
What these reports suggest is that Clinton extended his "don't ask, don't tell" policy to Albania allowing it to assimilate al Qaeda within the Albanian KLA army and only then to provide the training, equipment and arms to them in order to wage war on Serbia. The "assimilation" part is what kept Clinton safe from being accused of being in bed with the al-Qaeda.
Since 9/11, the original madate of waging war on Serbia appears to have been appended with a danger sign: "Our presence in the Balkans has not only promoted peace in the region, it has also enhanced our ability to conduct counter-terrorism operations." said Gen. Richard Myers in 2003 following his trip to Camp Bondsteel in Kosovo.
Has the US established a firm enough infrastructure in the Balkans to combat the terrorist Islamic plague emanating out of the Albanian-dominated Kosovo?
The Bulgarian Romance
Denying Russia airspace in 1999 was historically unprecedented move by Bulgaria that initiated its gambit to be the Western spy proxy in the Balkans. During the bombing of Serbia that followed, moreover, Bulgarian intelligence agents were used to point sensitive targets in Serbia and later were inserted as a spy unit within the Dutch contingent of KFOR, the NATO army that runs Kosovo. The KFOR Commander Reinhardt was rather impressed by the Bulgarian spies so he extended their mission in order "to activate the collaboration with the Kosovo population in the spying and the collection of information".
To speed up the American intelligence approachment, Bulgaria made another gambit and removed Russia from the Bulgarian picture. Impressed by Bulgaria's removal of Russian spies out of their country, the director of the FBI, Louis Freeh, said, "Bulgaria is a key strategic partner for the U.S., not just in the security area," and announced in March 2001 that FBI may open an office in Bulgarian capital Sofia.
In 2002, General Borisov was summoned to the US and, to his delight, told that FBI will establish a permanent FBI office in Bulgaria.
In 2004, the US Embassy in Bulgaria announced that a permanent office is in place and the mission is "to protect and defend the United States against terrorist and foreign intelligence threats."
This year, FBI is undergoing an expansion that will open up 2,086 new spy jobs, 615 agent and 508 Intelligence Analyst positions, of which FBI plans to have permanent Legal Attachés in Bulgaria and Bosnia.
The NATO-Bulgaria spying agreement also indicates that NATO has decided to make Bulgaria the spymaster not only for the Muslim Kosovo Albanians but of Chechens with whom Bulgaria once shared a common Stalinist brotherhood. The conspicuous Bulgarian spying on Chechnya along with Kosovo indicates that the US may be alarmed at the already reported Kosovo-Chechen terror network. In February of 2000, Russian intelligence from the Federal Security Service (FSB) made a claim that "Chechen warlords started buying up real estate in Kosovo... through several real estate firms registered as a cover in Yugoslavia” and have extensive ties with the Albanian organized crime figures in Kosovo whose relatives are involved in Kosovo politics and are seeking independence from Serbia.
Therefore, Bulgarian blunt claims that al-Qaeda is in Kosovo are not some haphazard blabber but rather a carefully orchestrated plan where the burden of spying and intelligence discovery is shifted away from the West because it is a diplomatic burden in their dealings with Kosovo Albanians who were their proxy fighters and a manufactured, and a well processed, ready-to-use pretext against Serbia.
Sidelining of Serbia
Sensing the imminent decision to anoint Bulgaria as the Balkan spymaster, Serbian intelligence chief Momir Stojanovic gave an interview to the official government news agency Tanjug in February 2004 and said that Islamist militants - including al Qaeda - are actively operating in Kosovo, Albania and Macedonia.
While the official pretext for Stojanovic’s interview was to protest previous day's NATOs declaration that Kosovo operations are “a success and a benchmark for future NATO missions”, Stojanovic’s interview reads more like an invitation to the US rather then criticism.
Heavy on specifics, Stojanovic began touting that Serbia has "procured" loads of detail on al-Qaeda in the Balkans: “We have also procured evidence that Al Qaeda has its strongholds in Kosovo and northern Albania… and their activities have also been reported in western Macedonia", said Stojanovic then proceeded to make a direct sales pitch of Serbia to the US with the statement that Serbia has a well established spying infrastructure across the Balkans because the Serbian intelligence agents have been monitoring the Islamists for more than a year.
The then-Serbian Minister of Defense Boris Tadic, now President of Serbia, quickly denied Stojanovic’s claims although in September 2003 Tadic himself told a Macedonian newspaper that militant Islamic organizations are active in the region and are acting in concert. Tadic’s denunciation of Stojanovic’s statement was followed with a similar NATO statement that publicly trashed Stojanovic’s statement as another Serbian gibberish.
The trashing of Stojanovic effectively sidelined Serbia and sealed Bulgaria’s anointing as the Balkan spymaster.
That Stojanovic was not talking gibberish, however, was proved in December 2004 when an intelligence tip was made that al Qaeda operatives were planning to land in Kosovo capital, Pristina, and use the Albanian terror cells in Kosovo to attack US and the West but abruptly changed these plans and moved in to another Albanian stronghold in the village of Kondovo near Macedonia’s capital Skopje. The US took this intelligence tip seriously enough and shut the US embassy and all US government offices in Skopje.
Washington Mute
While American stubborn denial, and often a belittling public denouncing, especially of Serb sources, that al-Qaeda is in Kosovo may be politically motivated, it is, nevertheless, fueling delusional belief among Albanian public that al-Qaeda is not among them.
For example, Balkan Affairs Adviser for the Albanian lobby group in Washington, the AACL, claims that “Bogus reports have proliferated since the bombing of New York’s World Trade Center about Bin Laden’s forays into Albania and the existence of mujahedin training camps in Kosova” and that those reports have Serbian origin. The problem with this spin is not that the followers of this lobby group get indoctrinated in believing statements that are contrary to the facts, but that the policy-makers close with the AACL may compromise the security of the US in that region. For example, the most notable recepient of Albanian money and a great friend of AACL, Senator Joseph Biden sits on the powerful Foreign Relations Committe and is contempleting a presidential run in 2008.
Although reports on al-Qaeda's Kosovo presence by FBI, USA Today, New York Times or German papers hardly qualify as spin, the American silence on specifics of al-Qaeda in Kosovo also impacts the Serbian side. Infuriated by the silence, Serbian officials issue bellicose responses: “Belgrade should have done more and should have looked for partners in the fight against terrorism" laments Rada Trajkovic, a deputy of the President of the People council of the north Kosovo. Trajkovic is in effect, blaming Belgrade for its inability to translate presence of Islamic terrorists in Kosovo into a pro-Serb policy shift of the West on the issue of the Kosovo status.
Of course, having Milosevic give a presentation on al Qaeda in Kosovo is indeed the case where the messinger is killing the message, the case of the US Embassy shut down in Skopje indicates that the the likes of Stojanovic should be taken seriously. In fact, the January 2005 report of the Washington based Center For Strategic & International Studies indicates that what Stojanovic has "procured" is taken seriously: "Al Qaeda’s influence in the Balkans was established a few years ago... Islamist extremist groups in the Balkans such as 'Vehabija', 'Crvena Ruza' (Red Rose), and 'Teratikt', which remain closely linked with Al Qaeda, are active in Kosmet..., Montenegro, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Albania, and Macedonia."
Furthermore, in eastern Kosovo's city of Pec, Wahhabies have established an orientation camp where holy Muslim warriors congregate around a recently erected Wahhabi mosque. The Mosque is run by certain Mahmutovic from Sjenica, a Serbian city in area of Sadzak that is a brewing hotbed of Islamic hatred of the West and the Jews. Sandzak is also the center of the Islamic Community, an outfit that governs Balkan Muslim Imams including the Albanian ones in Kosovo.
Based on these reports then, the map of al-Qaeda centers in Kosovo indicates a satellite-type organizational structure: KLA controls the center of Kosovo with Drenica as the stronghold with strategic satellite to the west near Junik necessary for control of smuggling routes from Albania. Just across from Junik range is Tropoje and Bajram Cura, another reportedly al-Qaeda centers in Albania itself.
The control of Shar Mountain range to the southeast can be used by al-Qaeda to send groups into Macedonia to wage violence there as well as maintain logistical support for their criminal enterprise in other al-Qaeda centers in western Macedonia such as the cities of Tetovo, Gostivar and Kichevo.
The reported Al-Qaeda presence in the Pomoravlje region in the East Kosovo appears to be the staging area for fomenting violence into southern Serbia while the northern al-Qaeda satellites such as in Bajgora, north of Mitrovica, is there to foment fear among Serb communities in Mitorvica, most sizable in Kosovo, and thus give them an incentive to leave. The reports also indicate that a so-called Abu Baqr Sadiq mojahedin unit is operating in southern Mitrovica, indicating that the city is surrounded and ready to be cleansed of Serbs at the next outbreak of violence in Kosovo that may dwarf the one that occured in March 2004.
Could this be a deliberate set up that will be used as the pretext to allow the Serbian troops back into Kosovo according to the UN Resolution 1244? Or is a deliberate in the other direction: to finally exterminate all Serbs out of Kosovo?
One can interpret Washington's silence both ways.
Lefty ERIC ALTERMAN hates the US.