THE STEALTH INVASION CONTINUES

WE KNOW THAT BRITISH AGENTS are operating in the United States to trace links with Islamic extremists from England who recruit Muslims to fight for terrorist groups abroad.

So first this...

The British-led investigation has played a part in identifying a number of US-based terrorists and helped the authorities in Washington to break up an al-Qaeda cell operating in Falls Church, Virginia.

The agents are particularly keen to discover if the visitors included Mohammad Sidique Khan, leader of the July 7 suicide bombers, who is alleged to have travelled to America’s East Coast to meet fellow militants and stage a series of attacks on synagogues. Khan was considered such a threat that he was banned from returning to America two years before the attack on London, according to a book written by a US intelligence specialist.

The disclosure, made by the award-winning author Ron Suskind in an extract from The One Percent Doctrine in The New York Times in 2006, led to calls for a full public inquiry into intelligence lapses before the attacks on July 7 which killed 52 people in London.

Now this...

An anonymous note has been left at the base of The Dust Cries Out, a statue done by artist Karen Swenholt commemorating the victims of the terrorist attacks on 9/11, which calls for the removal of the recently erected public art.
Or else.

The statue was placed a few weeks ago on Great Falls Street in Falls Church as part of the City's honoring the seventh anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. Falls Church City is just four miles from the Pentagon and its fire department was among the first responders at the Pentagon attack. The unsigned note appears to have been produced on a word processor, is typed in blocked letters, and is written in broken English syntax. There is no information on who may have authored the note or why it was left at the site, although we have a strong guess that would require some minor "culture" profiling.

Here is the text of the note:

HELLO,
WE BELIEVE THAT THIS MUST BE TAKEN DOWN. TO AWAKE
EVERY MORNING TO SEE THIS REMINDER OF WHAT USA
SEES AS PAIN SUFFERED ON, SEPTEMBER 11. IS JUST A
REMEMBERENCE OF THE DAILY INJUSTICE INFLICTED TO
EVERY FOLLOWER OVER THE SEES MURDERED BY THE
UNITED STATES EVERY DAY. IF WE WAS TO PUT A STATUE
OF ALLAH WITH HIS TEARS BECAUSE OF YOUR WARS IN OUR
FRONT YARD. YOU WOULD BURN IT TO THE GROUND. YOU
WILL TAKE THIS DOWN TODAY. YOU WILL TAKE THIS AWAY
NOW OR WE WILL DO THIS.

BRITISH POLICE PRACTICE DHIMMITUDE

The absurdity of Western dhimmitude continues to wash in from the Isles. A British citizen who converted to Christianity from Islam and then complained to police when locals threatened to burn his house down was told by officers to “stop being a crusader” according to a new report.

Nissar Hussein, 43, from Bradford, West Yorkshire, who was born and raised in Britain, converted from Islam to Christianity with his wife, Qubra, in 1996. The report says that he was subjected to a number of attacks and, after being told that his house would be burnt down if he did not repent and return to Islam, reported the threat to the police. It says he was told that such threats were rarely carried out and the police officer told him to “stop being a crusader and move to another place”.

A few days later the unoccupied house next door was set on fire. Christian Solidarity Worldwide, a British human rights organization whose president is the former Cabinet minister Jonathan Aitken, is calling on the UN and the international community to take action against nations and communities that punish apostasy.

Its report,No Place to Call Home, claims that apostates from Islam are subject to “gross and wideranging human rights abuses”. It adds that in countries such as Britain, with large Muslim populations in a Westernized culture, the demand to maintain a Muslim identity is intense. “When identities are precarious, their enforcement will take an aggressive form.”

SUDDEN JIHAD SYNDROME STRIKES DENTIST

Four years, perhaps out in little more than one year. That's the prognosis for the Paki-bred UK dentist who decided to take up arms against the British to avenge his Muslim brothers of the Taliban.

He claimed he was going to visit his family for the Islamic festival of Eid. Qureshi is the first to be convicted under new legislation targeting the preparation of terrorist acts. He was held after a joint operation involving Scotland Yard's Counter Terrorism Command and the Security Services. Investigations revealed Qureshi offered to help the war effort in Pakistan and Afghanistan. An intercept communication revealed him telling one of his contacts: "All I know is it's a two- to three-week operation. Pray that I kill many."

Qureshi pleaded guilty to preparing for the commission of terrorist acts, possession of articles for terrorist purposes and possession of articles likely to be useful to terrorists...

The biggest joke of the new year is that you can now, in Britain, be sentenced to seven years for "religious hatred". One doesn't actually have to do anything overtly (or even covertly), one just has to show hatred towards a religion (Islam mainly). And the US Congress is considering similar legislation on their docket. So basically a flag waving native son can receive a longer sentence for a thought crime against Islam than an Islamist continues to receive for attempting to go and murder the citizens of your host nation.

A fast-tracked congressional plan to add special protections for homosexuals to federal law would turn "thoughts, feelings, and beliefs" into criminal offenses and put Christians in the bull's-eye, according to opponents.

"H.R. 1592 is a discriminatory measure that criminalizes thoughts, feelings, and beliefs [and] has the potential of interfering with religious liberty and freedom of speech," according to a white paper submitted by Glen Lavy, of the Alliance Defense Fund.

"As James Jacobs and Kimberly Potter observed in Hate Crimes, Criminal Law, and Identity Politics, 'It would appear that the only additional purpose [for enhancing punishment of bias crimes] is to provide extra punishment based on the offender's politically incorrect opinions and viewpoints,'" said Lavy. The proposal has been endorsed by majority Democrats on the committee, and already has 137 sponsors in the full House, making it possible it could be voted on in a matter of days or weeks.

Get out the little red book, the Communists are truly in power.

BUTT SPEAKS OUT AGAIN

As the bombers return to Britain, Hassan Butt, who was once a member of radical group Al-Muhajiroun, raising funds for extremists and calling for attacks on British citizens, explains why he was wrong in the Observer which is owned by the notoriously far-left media organ, theUK Guardian:

When I was still a member of what is probably best termed the British Jihadi Network, a series of semi-autonomous British Muslim terrorist groups linked by a single ideology, I remember how we used to laugh in celebration whenever people on TV proclaimed that the sole cause for Islamic acts of terror like 9/11, the Madrid bombings and 7/7 was Western foreign policy.

By blaming the government for our actions, those who pushed the 'Blair's bombs' line did our propaganda work for us. More important, they also helped to draw away any critical examination from the real engine of our violence: Islamic theology.

Friday's attempt to cause mass destruction in London with strategically placed car bombs is so reminiscent of other recent British Islamic extremist plots that it is likely to have been carried out by my former peers.

And as with previous terror attacks, people are again articulating the line that violence carried out by Muslims is all to do with foreign policy. For example, yesterday on Radio 4's Today programme, the mayor of London, Ken Livingstone, said: 'What all our intelligence shows about the opinions of disaffected young Muslims is the main driving force is not Afghanistan, it is mainly Iraq.'

He then refused to acknowledge the role of Islamist ideology in terrorism and said that the Muslim Brotherhood and those who give a religious mandate to suicide bombings in Palestine were genuinely representative of Islam.

I left the BJN in February 2006, but if I were still fighting for their cause, I'd be laughing once again. Mohammad Sidique Khan, the leader of the 7 July bombings, and I were both part of the BJN—I met him on two occasions—and though many British extremists are angered by the deaths of fellow Muslim across the world, what drove me and many of my peers to plot acts of extreme terror within Britain, our own homeland and abroad, was a sense that we were fighting for the creation of a revolutionary state that would eventually bring Islamic justice to the world.

How did this continuing violence come to be the means of promoting this (flawed) utopian goal? How do Islamic radicals justify such terror in the name of their religion? There isn't enough room to outline everything here, but the foundation of extremist reasoning rests upon a dualistic model of the world. Many Muslims may or may not agree with secularism but at the moment, formal Islamic theology, unlike Christian theology, does not allow for the separation of state and religion. There is no 'rendering unto Caesar' in Islamic theology because state and religion are considered to be one and the same. The centuries-old reasoning of Islamic jurists also extends to the world stage where the rules of interaction between Dar ul-Islam (the Land of Islam) and Dar ul-Kufr (the Land of Unbelief) have been set down to cover almost every matter of trade, peace and war.

What radicals and extremists do is to take these premises two steps further. Their first step has been to reason that since there is no Islamic state in existence, the whole world must be Dar ul-Kufr. Step two: since Islam must declare war on unbelief, they have declared war upon the whole world. Many of my former peers, myself included, were taught by Pakistani and British radical preachers that this reclassification of the globe as a Land of War (Dar ul-Harb) allows any Muslim to destroy the sanctity of the five rights that every human is granted under Islam: life, wealth, land, mind and belief. In Dar ul-Harb, anything goes, including the treachery and cowardice of attacking civilians.

This understanding of the global battlefield has been a source of friction for Muslims living in Britain. For decades, radicals have been exploiting these tensions between Islamic theology and the modern secular state for their benefit, typically by starting debate with the question: 'Are you British or Muslim?' But the main reason why radicals have managed to increase their following is because most Islamic institutions in Britain just don't want to talk about theology. They refuse to broach the difficult and often complex topic of violence within Islam and instead repeat the mantra that Islam is peace, focus on Islam as personal, and hope that all of this debate will go away.

This has left the territory of ideas open for radicals to claim as their own. I should know because, as a former extremist recruiter, every time mosque authorities banned us from their grounds, it felt like a moral and religious victory.

Outside Britain, there are those who try to reverse this two-step revisionism. A handful of scholars from the Middle East has tried to put radicalism back in the box by saying that the rules of war devised by Islamic jurists were always conceived with the existence of an Islamic state in mind, a state which would supposedly regulate jihad in a responsible Islamic fashion. In other words, individual Muslims don't have the authority to go around declaring global war in the name of Islam.

But there is a more fundamental reasoning that has struck me and a number of other people who have recently left radical Islamic networks as a far more potent argument because it involves stepping out of this dogmatic paradigm and recognising the reality of the world: Muslims don't actually live in the bipolar world of the Middle Ages any more.

The fact is that Muslims in Britain are citizens of this country. We are no longer migrants in a Land of Unbelief. For my generation, we were born here, raised here, schooled here, we work here and we'll stay here. But more than that, on a historically unprecedented scale, Muslims in Britain have been allowed to assert their religious identity through clothing, the construction of mosques, the building of cemeteries and equal rights in law.

However, it isn't enough for Muslims to say that because they feel at home in Britain they can simply ignore those passages of the Koran which instruct on killing unbelievers. By refusing to challenge centuries-old theological arguments, the tensions between Islamic theology and the modern world grow larger every day. It may be difficult to swallow but the reason why Abu Qatada - the Islamic scholar whom Palestinian militants recently called to be released in exchange for the kidnapped BBC journalist Alan Johnston - has a following is because he is extremely learned and his religious rulings are well argued. His opinions, though I now thoroughly disagree with them, have validity within the broad canon of Islam.

Since leaving the BJN, many Muslims have accused me of being a traitor. If I knew of any impending attack, then I would have no hesitation in going to the police, but I have not gone to the authorities, as some reports have suggested, and become an informer.

I believe that the issue of terrorism can be easily demystified if Muslims and non-Muslims start openly to discuss the ideas that fuel terrorism. (The Muslim community in Britain must slap itself awake from this state of denial and realise there is no shame in admitting the extremism within our families, communities and worldwide co-religionists.) However, demystification will not be achieved if the only bridges of engagement that are formed are between the BJN and the security services.

If our country is going to take on radicals and violent extremists, Muslim scholars must go back to the books and come forward with a refashioned set of rules and a revised understanding of the rights and responsibilities of Muslims whose homes and souls are firmly planted in what I'd like to term the Land of Co-existence. And when this new theological territory is opened up, Western Muslims will be able to liberate themselves from defunct models of the world, rewrite the rules of interaction and perhaps we will discover that the concept of killing in the name of Islam is no more than an anachronism.

HAWKS ON THE HORIZON

BRITISH POLITICIAN Enoch Powell, a member of Parliament for 37 years, died in Febrauary, 1998. Powell was a man of extraordinary ability, who had the courage to speak the truth on immigration. For this, he was driven from the Tory leadership and became known as the best prime minister Britain never had.

The son of teachers, Powell won a scholarship to Cambridge, was a professor of Greek at 25, enlisted in the British army as a private at the outset of World War II and rose to the rank of brigadier general. A Thatcherite before Thatcher, Powell was a forceful intellectual and an eloquent speaker.

On his death, Margaret Thatcher said: "There will never be anybody else so compelling as Enoch Powell. He had a rare combination of qualities all founded on an unfaltering belief in God, an unshakable loyalty to family and friends, and an unswerving devotion to our country."

But Powell is best remembered for a controversial 1968 address warning of the dangers to national unity from immigration, which came to be known as the "Rivers of Blood" speech.

Powell saw immigration from Britain's former colonies leading to an upsurge of crime and poverty and the fragmentation of British society. From his vantage point, the future looked bleak. "Like the Roman," Powell observed, "I seem to see the River Tiber foaming with much blood."

The Tory reaction was to brand him a racist. Powell was removed from Edward Heath's shadow cabinet and forever barred from the prime ministership.

Conservatives have a long and depressing tradition of bludgeoning immigration skeptics. In 1993, Winston Churchill, grandson of Britain's wartime prime minister, made similar observations. Churchill noted that while immigrants accounted for 6 percent of the nation, in some cities they constituted half the population.

Then-Prime Minister John Major, seeking to reassure the British, predicted that 50 years hence spinsters would still bicycle to communion on Sunday morning. "More likely the muezzin will be calling Allah's faithful to the High Main Street Mosque," Churchill countered. For integrity to match his namesake's, Churchill was excoriated by members of Major's cabinet.

Among the tributes delivered on Powell's passing, William Hague, the current Tory leader, said, "Powell spoke his mind without fear or favor." When Lord Norman Tebbit spoke his, at the Conservative Party Conference last year, Hague's gang rushed to disown him.

Tebbit didn't urge that immigration be curtailed, but merely warned of the dangers of multiculturalism. The children of immigrants "born here should be taught that British history is their history, or they will forever be foreigners holding British passports and this kingdom will become a Yugoslavia," Tebbit warned.

"Tebbit gives the impression of intolerance," Hague's office clucked. "William Hague wants to build a multicultural society." Well, good luck to him, and God save the Queen.

Still, Britain's immigration problems seem trifling next to our own. By the latest count, 9.2 percent of our population is foreign-born. In California, that figure rises to 25 percent.

Due largely to immigration (at the rate of about 1.5 million a year, 90 percent non-white), Americans of European stock will decline from 73.6 percent of the population today to 52.8 percent in 2050.

Augmenting the welfare rolls and crime statistics aren't the only contributions of newcomers. Like Enoch Powell, the more discerning among us see our national identity slipping through porous borders. In his monograph Huddled Cliches, Larry Auster warns: "In addition to the millions of people who see the United States as a candy store without a lock, a significant number of immigrants have a conscious animus against this country.

"A very bright Bengali-American college student told her college English class that the word 'American' is 'Orwellian' because it imposes an identity on her that she doesn't feel. 'I am not an American. I'm Bengali.'"

Those who dare to recognize reality get the Powell treatment. The American elite can't take the truth today any more than Britain's could 30 years ago. In surveying the ruins of a once promising career, Powell stoically commented: "All political careers end in failure. No regrets."

At least Enoch Powell won't have to witness the balkanization of his nation. Your children and grandchildren won't be nearly so fortunate.

Thanks to Don Feder of Jewish World Review.