ISLAM AND WAR

“Those who know nothing of Islam pretend that Islam counsels against war. Those [who say this] are witless. Islam says: Kill all the unbelievers just as they would kill you all! Does this mean that Muslims should sit back until they are devoured by [the unbelievers]? Islam says: Kill them, put them to the sword and scatter [their armies]. Islam says: Whatever good there is exists thanks to the sword and in the shadow of the sword! People cannot be made obedient except with the sword! The sword is the key to Paradise, which can be opened only for the Holy Warriors! There are hundreds of other [Qur'an] psalms and Hadiths urging Muslims to value war and to fight. Does all this mean that Islam is a religion that prevents men from waging war? I spit upon those foolish souls who make such a claim”

—Ayatollah Khomeini

JOY TO THE WORLD

BUT NOT TO HOLY ISLAM. Hadith Qudsi 19:5: "The Prophet said that Allah commanded him to destroy all the musical instruments, idols, crosses and all the trappings of ignorance."

The Hadith Qudsi, or holy Hadith, are those in which Muhammad transmits the words of Allah, although those words are not in the Qur'an.

Muhammad also said:

(1) “Allah Mighty and Majestic sent me as a guidance and mercy to believers and commanded me to do away with musical instruments, flutes, strings, crucifixes, and the affair of the pre-Islamic period of ignorance.”
(2) “On the Day of Resurrection, Allah will pour molten lead into the ears of whoever sits listening to a songstress.”

(3) “Song makes hypocrisy grow in the heart as water does herbage.”

(4) “This community will experience the swallowing up of some people by the earth, metamorphosis of some into animals, and being rained upon with stones.” Someone asked, “When will this be, O Messenger of Allah?” and he said, “When songstresses and musical instruments appear and wine is held to be lawful.”

(5) “There will be peoples of my Community who will hold fornication, silk, wine, and musical instruments to be lawful ….” -- 'Umdat al-Salik r40.0

"Allah did not create man so that he could have fun. The aim of creation was for mankind to be put to the test through hardship and prayer. An Islamic regime must be serious in every field. There are no jokes in Islam. There is no humor in Islam. There is no fun in Islam. There can be no fun and joy in whatever is serious."

—The Ayatollah Khomeini

WAKE UP LITTLE DARLINGS, WAKE UP

Here's an excellent article written by Bruce Bawer, author of the essential While Europe Slept. Published by City Journal, "An Anatomy of Surrender" is a comprehensive detail of the ongoing voluntary submission of the West to Islamist attitudes and laws which over time will effectively destroy us.

Islam divides the world into two parts. The part governed by sharia, or Islamic law, is called the Dar al-Islam, or House of Submission. Everything else is the Dar al-Harb, or House of War, so called because it will take war—holy war, jihad—to bring it into the House of Submission. Over the centuries, this jihad has taken a variety of forms. Two centuries ago, for instance, Muslim pirates from North Africa captured ships and enslaved their crews, leading the U.S. to fight the Barbary Wars of 1801–05 and 1815. In recent decades, the jihadists’ weapon of choice has usually been the terrorist’s bomb; the use of planes as missiles on 9/11 was a variant of this method.

What has not been widely recognized is that the Ayatollah Khomeini’s 1989 fatwa against Satanic Verses author Salman Rushdie introduced a new kind of jihad. Instead of assaulting Western ships or buildings, Kho meini took aim at a fundamental Western freedom: freedom of speech. In recent years, other Islamists have joined this crusade, seeking to undermine Western societies’ basic liberties and extend sharia within those societies.

The cultural jihadists have enjoyed disturbing success. Two events in particular—the 2004 assassination in Amsterdam of Theo van Gogh in retaliation for his film about Islam’s oppression of women, and the global wave of riots, murders, and vandalism that followed a Danish newspaper’s 2005 publication of cartoons satirizing Mohammed—have had a massive ripple effect throughout the West.

Motivated variously, and doubtless sometimes simultaneously, by fear, misguided sympathy, and multicultural ideology—which teaches us to belittle our freedoms and to genuflect to non-Western cultures, however repressive—people at every level of Western society, but especially elites, have allowed concerns about what fundamentalist Muslims will feel, think, or do to influence their actions and expressions. These Westerners have begun, in other words, to internalize the strictures of sharia, and thus implicitly to accept the deferential status of dhimmis—infidels living in Muslim societies.

Call it a cultural surrender. The House of War is slowly—or not so slowly, in Europe’s case—being absorbed into the House of Submission.

The Western media are in the driver’s seat on this road to sharia. Often their approach is to argue that we’re the bad guys. After the late Dutch sociologist-turned-politician Pim Fortuyn sounded the alarm about the danger that Europe’s Islamization posed to democracy, elite journalists labeled him a threat. A New York Times headline described him as marching the Dutch to the right. Dutch newspapers Het Parool and De Volkskrant compared him with Mussolini; Trouw likened him to Hitler. The man (a multiculturalist, not a Muslim) who murdered him in May 2002 seemed to echo such verdicts when explaining his motive: Fortuyn’s views on Islam, the killer insisted, were “dangerous.”

Perhaps no Western media outlet has exhibited this habit of moral inversion more regularly than the BBC. In 2006, to take a typical example, Manchester’s top imam told psychotherapist John Casson that he supported the death penalty for homosexuality. Casson expressed shock—and the BBC, in a dispatch headlined imam accused of “gay death” slur, spun the controversy as an effort by Casson to discredit Islam. The BBC concluded its story with comments from an Islamic Human Rights Commission spokesman, who equated Muslim attitudes toward homosexuality with those of “other orthodox religions, such as Catholicism” and complained that focusing on the issue was “part of demonizing Muslims.”

In June 2005, the BBC aired the documentary Don’t Panic, I’m Islamic, which sought to portray concerns about Islamic radicalism as overblown. This “stunning whitewash of radical Islam,” as Little Green Footballs blogger Charles Johnson put it, “helped keep the British public fast asleep, a few weeks before the bombs went off in London subways and buses” in July 2005. In December 2007, it emerged that five of the documentary’s subjects, served up on the show as examples of innocuous Muslims-next-door, had been charged in those terrorist attacks—and that BBC producers, though aware of their involvement after the attacks took place, had not reported important information about them to the police.

Press acquiescence to Muslim demands and threats is endemic. When the Mohammed cartoons—published in September 2005 by the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten to defy rising self-censorship after van Gogh’s murder—were answered by worldwide violence, only one major American newspaper, the Philadelphia Inquirer, joined such European dailies as Die Welt and El País in reprinting them as a gesture of free-speech solidarity. Editors who refused to run the images claimed that their motive was multicultural respect for Islam.

Critic Christopher Hitchens believed otherwise, writing that he “knew quite a number of the editors concerned and can say for a certainty that the chief motive for ‘restraint’ was simple fear.” Exemplifying the new dhimmitude, whatever its motivation, was Norway’s leading cartoonist, Finn Graff, who had often depicted Israelis as Nazis, but who now vowed not to draw anything that might provoke Muslim wrath. (On a positive note, this February, over a dozen Danish newspapers, joined by a number of other papers around the world, reprinted one of the original cartoons as a free-speech gesture after the arrest of three people accused of plotting to kill the artist.)

Last year brought another cartoon crisis—this time over Swedish artist Lars Vilks’s drawings of Mohammed as a dog, which ambassadors from Muslim countries used as an excuse to demand speech limits in Sweden. CNN reporter Paula Newton suggested that perhaps “Vilks should have known better” because of the Jyllands-Posten incident—as if people who make art should naturally take their marching orders from people who make death threats. Meanwhile, The Economist depicted Vilks as an eccentric who shouldn’t be taken “too seriously” and noted approvingly that Sweden’s prime minister, unlike Denmark’s, invited the ambassadors “in for a chat.”

The elite media regularly underreport fundamentalist Muslim misbehavior or obfuscate its true nature. After the knighting of Rushdie in 2007 unleashed yet another wave of international Islamist mayhem, Tim Rutten wrote in the Los Angeles Times: “If you’re wondering why you haven’t been able to follow all the columns and editorials in the American press denouncing all this homicidal nonsense, it’s because there haven’t been any.” Or consider the riots that gripped immigrant suburbs in France in the autumn of 2005. These uprisings were largely assertions of Muslim authority over Muslim neighborhoods, and thus clearly jihadist in character. Yet weeks passed before many American press outlets mentioned them—and when they did, they de-emphasized the rioters’ Muslim identity (few cited the cries of “Allahu akbar,” for instance). Instead, they described the violence as an outburst of frustration over economic injustice.

When polls and studies of Muslims appear, the media often spin the results absurdly or drop them down the memory hole after a single news cycle. Journalists celebrated the results of a 2007 Pew poll showing that 80 percent of American Muslims aged 18 to 29 said that they opposed suicide bombing—even though the flip side, and the real story, was that a double-digit percentage of young American Muslims admitted that they supported it. US muslims assimilated, opposed to extremism, the Washington Post rejoiced, echoing USA Today’s American Muslims reject extremes. A 2006 Daily Telegraph survey showed that 40 percent of British Muslims wanted sharia in Britain—yet British reporters often write as though only a minuscule minority embraced such views.

After each major terrorist act since 9/11, the press has dutifully published stories about Western Muslims fearing an “anti-Muslim backlash”—thus neatly shifting the focus from Islamists’ real acts of violence to non-Muslims’ imaginary ones. (These backlashes, of course, never materialize.) While books by Islam experts like Bat Ye’or and Robert Spencer, who tell difficult truths about jihad and sharia, go unreviewed in newspapers like the New York Times, the elite press legitimizes thinkers like Karen Armstrong and John Esposito, whose sugarcoated representations of Islam should have been discredited for all time by 9/11.

Mainstream outlets have also served up anodyne portraits of fundamentalist Muslim life. Witness Andrea Elliott’s affectionate three-part profile of a Brooklyn imam, which appeared in the New York Times in March 2006. Elliott and the Times sought to portray Reda Shata as a heroic bridge builder between two cultures, leaving readers with the comforting belief that the growth of Islam in America was not only harmless but positive, even beautiful.

Though it emerged in passing that Shata didn’t speak English, refused to shake women’s hands, wanted to forbid music, and supported Hamas and suicide bombing, Elliott did her best to downplay such unpleasant details; instead, she focused on sympathetic personal particulars. “Islam came to him softly, in the rhythms of his grandmother’s voice”; “Mr. Shata discovered love 15 years ago. . . . ‘She entered my heart,‘ said the imam.” Elliott’s saccharine piece won a Pulitzer Prize. When Middle East scholar Daniel Pipes pointed out that Shata was obviously an Islamist, a writer for the Columbia Journalism Review dismissed Pipes as “right-wing” and insisted that Shata was “very moderate.”

So it goes in this upside-down, not-so-brave new media world: those who, if given the power, would subjugate infidels, oppress women, and execute apostates and homosexuals are “moderate” (a moderate, these days, apparently being anybody who doesn’t have explosives strapped to his body), while those who dare to call a spade a spade are “Islamophobes.”

The entertainment industry has been nearly as appalling. During World War II, Hollywood churned out scores of films that served the war effort, but today’s movies and TV shows, with very few exceptions, either tiptoe around Islam or whitewash it. In the whitewash category were two sitcoms that debuted in 2007, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s "Little Mosque on the Prairie" and CW’s "Aliens in America." Both shows are about Muslims confronting anti-Muslim bigotry; both take it for granted that there’s no fundamentalist Islam problem in the West, but only an anti-Islam problem.

Muslim pressure groups have actively tried to keep movies and TV shows from portraying Islam as anything but a Religion of Peace. For example, the Council for American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) successfully lobbied Paramount Pictures to change the bad guys in The Sum of All Fears (2002) from Islamist terrorists to neo-Nazis, while Fox’s popular series 24, after Muslims complained about a story line depicting Islamic terrorists, ran cringe-worthy public-service announcements emphasizing how nonviolent Islam was. Earlier this year, Iranian-Danish actor Farshad Kholghi noted that, despite the cartoon controversy’s overwhelming impact on Denmark, “not a single movie has been made about the crisis, not a single play, not a single stand-up monologue.” Which, of course, is exactly what the cartoon jihadists wanted.

In April 2006, an episode of the animated series South Park admirably mocked the wave of self-censorship that followed the Jyllands-Posten crisis but Comedy Central censored it, replacing an image of Mohammed with a black screen and an explanatory notice. According to series producer Anne Garefino, network executives frankly admitted that they were acting out of fear. “We were happy,” she told an interviewer, “that they didn’t try to claim that it was because of religious tolerance.”

Then there’s the art world. Postmodern artists who have always striven to shock and offend now maintain piously that Islam deserves “respect.” Museums and galleries have quietly taken down paintings that might upset Muslims and have put into storage manuscripts featuring images of Mohammed. London’s Whitechapel Art Gallery removed life-size nude dolls by surrealist artist Hans Bellmer from a 2006 exhibit just before its opening; the official excuse was “space constraints,” but the curator admitted that the real reason was fear that the nudity might offend the gallery’s Muslim neighbors.

Last November, after the cancellation of a show in The Hague of artworks depicting gay men in Mohammed masks, the artist, Sooreh Hera, charged the museum with giving in to Muslim threats. Tim Marlow of London’s White Cube Gallery notes that such self-censorship by artists and museums is now common, though “very few people have explicitly admitted” it. British artist Grayson Perry, whose work has mercilessly mocked Christianity, is one who has—and his reluctance isn’t about multicultural sensitivity. “The reason I haven’t gone all out attacking Islamism in my art,” he told the Times of London, “is because I feel real fear that someone will slit my throat.”

Leading liberal intellectuals and academics have shown a striking willingness to betray liberal values when it comes to pacifying Muslims. Back in 2001, Unni Wikan, a distinguished Norwegian cultural anthropologist and Islam expert, responded to the high rate of Muslim-on-infidel rape in Oslo by exhorting women to “realize that we live in a multicultural society and adapt themselves to it.”

The Times described Armstrong’s hagiography of Mohammed as “a good place to start” learning about Islam; in July 2007, the Washington Post headlined a piece by Esposito "Want to understand Islam? Start here."

There's lots more to this essay. We encourage you to read it all.

THE COMING CONQUEST OF ROME

Religion of peaceniks armed with tools to proselytize Infidels

Spain will host OSCE conference on Muslim discrimination.

A juicy headline. Wonderful news. Finally, a serious breakthrough, a fierce blow against the anemic dhimmitude of Europe's socialist leadership. Wait a minute! Oops, reality reveals another wishful misreading of the text. At first glance, the headline seemed to suggest that indeed a miracle had occurred, that some fact-finding authority was finally set to investigate why Muslims seemed to discriminate against everyone under the sun, including those of opposition sects within their own ranks. And Spain was leading the way. Wrong!

Instead, on October 9-10 a conference will be held in the Spanish city of Cordoba under the aegis of the Organisation for Security and Co-operation (OSCE) in Europe to ponder why indigenous peoples are resisting the aggressive Islamization and set asides for the Islamization of their towns, cities, and nations.

"The meeting will investigate the "roots of intolerance towards Muslims..."

Let's see. Here's the voice of Robert Spencer.

"Will the continuing violence committed by Muslims in the name of Islam be on the agenda as one of the contributing factors, and possibly the most important contributing factor, of this intolerance? Will the imperialistic boasts by Muslim leaders about the impending Islamic conquest of Europe be on the agenda?"

Like Spencer, I doubt that either one will be discussed. But why not?

In many articles written by Islamic clerics, the clerics herald the imminent conquest of Rome by Islam, in accordance with the prophecy of Muhammad. The issue is also discussed in Friday sermons. Sheikh Yousef Al-Qaradhawi, one of the most influential clerics in Sunni Islam, often makes this claim in his religious rulings and on his television programs. The following are remarks made by Al-Qaradhawi and other Muslim clerics:

Al-Qaradhawi: "Islam will Return to Europe as a Conqueror"
In a fatwa posted on thewebsite in response to a reader's question, Sheikh Al-Qaradhawi wrote of the "signs of the victory of Islam," citing a well-known Hadith: "… The Prophet Muhammad was asked: 'What city will be conquered first, Constantinople or Romiyya?' He answered: 'The city of Hirqil [i.e. the Byzantine emperor Heraclius] will be conquered first'—that is, Constantinople… Romiyya is the city called today 'Rome,' the capital of Italy. The city of Hirqil [that is, Constantinople] was conquered by the young 23-year-old Ottoman Muhammad bin Morad, known in history as Muhammad the Conqueror, in 1453. The other city, Romiyya, remains, and we hope and believe [that it too will be conquered]."

"This means that Islam will return to Europe as a conqueror and victor, after being expelled from it twice - once from the South, from Andalusia, and a second time from the East, when it knocked several times on the door of Athens."

Sheikh Al-Qaradhawi qualified his statement: "I maintain that the conquest this time will not be by the sword but by preaching and ideology…"

Al-Qaradhawi made similar statements on other occasions, on his weekly religious program on Al-Jazeera. He declared: "This means that the friends of the Prophet heard that two cities would be conquered by Islam, Romiyya and Constantinople, and the Prophet said that 'Hirqil [i.e. Constantinople] would be conquered first.' Romiyya is Rome, the capital of Italy, and Constantinople was the capital of the state of Byzantine Rome, which today is Istanbul. He said that Hirqil which is Constantinople, would be conquered first and this is what happened…"

"All right, Constantinople was conquered, and the second part of the prophecy remains, that is, the conquest of Romiyya. This means that Islam will return to Europe. Islam entered Europe twice and left it… Perhaps the next conquest, Allah willing, will be by means of preaching and ideology. The conquest need not necessarily be by the sword… [The conquest of Mecca] was not by the sword or by war, but by a [Hudabiyya] treaty, and by peace… Perhaps we will conquer these lands without armies. We want an army of preachers and teachers who will present Islam in all languages and in all dialects…"

Another time, Sheikh Al-Qaradhawi said, "The Hadith says that the city of Constantinople, the city of Heracles, will be conquered first. We conquered Constantinople and the second part of the prophecy remains—the conquest of Romiyya. The conquest of Romiyya means that Islam will return to Europe. In one of my previous programs, I said that I think that this conquest would not be by the sword or armies, but by preaching and ideology. Europe will see that it suffers from materialistic culture, and will seek an alternative, it will seek a way out, it will seek a lifeboat. It will find no lifesaver but the message of Islam the message of the muezzin who gives it religion but does not deny it this world, brings it to Heaven, but does not uproot it from Earth. Allah willing, Islam will return to Europe and the Europeans will convert to Islam. Then they themselves will be able to be the ones to disseminate Islam in the world, more than we ancient Muslims. This is within Allah's capabilities."

Saudi Sheikh: "We Will Control the Land of the Vatican"
The Saudi Sheikh Muhammad bin Abd Al-Rahman Al-'Arifi, imam of the mosque of King Fahd Defense Academy,[5] discussed this Hadith in an article posted on the Kalemat website. Under the headline "Don't be sad, Allah is with us," the article read: "… We will control the land of the Vatican; we will control Rome and introduce Islam in it. Yes, the Christians, who carve crosses on the breasts of the Muslims in Kosovo - and before then in Bosnia, and before then in many places in the world - will yet pay us the Jiziya [poll tax paid by non-Muslims under Muslim rule], in humiliation, or they will convert to Islam…"

In a sermon at the Al-Nour Mosque in Khobar, Sheikh Naser Muhammad Al-Naser quoted the sage Al-Albani, who said: "The first conquest was carried out, as is known, by Muhammad the Ottoman conqueror, 800 years after the Prophet told of it, and the second conquest [that of Rome] will be carried out, Allah willing, and it is inevitable…"

In another sermon, Sheikh Al-Naser said: "This Hadith predicts that the two cities will be conquered. The first was already conquered, remained under the control of the Muslims for a time, and then was again stolen [by Ataturk]. There are signs that it will again be conquered and will return to the hands of the Islamic state. Rome also will be conquered…"

PA Deputy Minister: When Islam Reaches Its End, the Sun and Stars will Extinguish

In a sermon at the Al-Aqsa Mosque, the Palestinian Authority's Deputy Minister of Awqaf, Sheikh Yousef Juma'a Salameh said: "Romiyya is Rome, the capital of Italy, and Constantinople is today Istanbul, known in Islamic history by the name of Islam-Boul… The great conquest [of Constantinople] was carried out two centuries after the Tatars entered Baghdad and after the fall of the Caliphate. The people thought that Islam had reached its lowest point… and forgot that Islam had not reached its end in the world, because on the day it reaches its end, there will be no world: the sun will be extinguished, the stars will go out…"

Sudanese Sheikh: "Rome Will be Conquered"
In a sermon at a mosque in Khartoum, Sudan, Sheikh Muhammad Abd Al-Karim said: "…The Prophet said that the Muslims would take India, saying: 'Allah saved two groups of my nation from the fire of Hell: one group that would attack India and a second group that would be with Jesus the son of Mary [in the battle of Judgment Day].' The Prophet Muhammad told us of the conquest of Constantinople, the capital of the Byzantine state, and of the conquest of Rome, where the Vatican is situated… Some of what the Prophet said has already come to pass. The Muslims conquered Persia, the Muslims conquered Byzantium… the Muslims attacked India and Allah conquered it for us, until they reached the borders of China. The Muslims conquered Constantinople, where Eastern Christianity is situated, and in the future, a mighty king will arise for the Muslims; through him, Islam will spread and Rome will be conquered…"

I realize most of America is too busy watching Paris, Britney, Rosie, or rushing off to golf, tennis, or car racing events in a frenzy of constitutionally bestowed pursuit of happiness to even notice what the mainstream media is not telling us about the Islamic forces around the world today, while puffing up the smokescreen with a few radicals hijacking the religion of peace, but let's get pell back the onion here.

Nothing any priest has done in secret against the wishes of religion and civilization compares with what the Ayatollah Khomeini (following Mohammed's lead, of course) confirmed as acceptable practice for everyday Muslims, not just the mullahs or muftis with long gray beards. Read this from one of the Grand Ayatollah's books written after the Iranian Revolution in 1979:

"A man can have sex with animals such as sheep, cows, camels and so on. However he should kill the animal after he has his orgasm. He should not sell the meat to the people in his own village, however selling the meat to the next door village should be fine."

Don't stop there. He also penned the words in his Little Green Book:

"A man can marry a girl younger than nine years of age, even if the girl is still a baby being breastfed. A man, however is prohibited from having intercourse with a girl younger than nine, other sexual acts such as foreplay, rubbing, kissing and sodomy is allowed. A man having intercourse with a girl younger than nine years of age has not committed a crime, but only an infraction, if the girl is not permanently damaged. If the girl, however, is permanently damaged, the man must provide for her all her life. But this girl will not count as one of the man's four permanent wives. He also is not permitted to marry the girl's sister."

It only gets worse: This Muslim cleric goes on to suggest that if this man does force his penis into her tiny vagina he is obligated to pay for any surgical repairs that may be required. If those repairs are deemed insufficient you may work out a financial settlement to compensate you for his trivial infraction. No big deal. Muslim boys will be Muslim boys. And, after all, she is only a girl. Yes, this is all part of the sharia law these crackpots so stealthly wish to install across the West.

Another technique used by Muslim men is called "thighing". The child's legs are pressed together and the abuser inserts his penis between the thighs of the little boy or girl. As this was how Mohammed had sex with his wife, Aisha, from the time she was six years old the practice, of course, was approved of by Ayatollah Khomeini who in his Little Green Book asserted “It is not illegal for an adult male to 'thigh' or enjoy a young girl who is still in the age of weaning; meaning to place his penis between her thighs, and to kiss her.”

This is not inneuendo. Sources all over the web can be found. Muslims do not deny these rules for daily life. They excuse them by pointing out how stable their marriages are as a result of these "holy" admonitions.

But one particular Arab woman vigorously denounces this vile practice in the following video clip from Bahrain TV. Her denunciation of the "thighing" of infants and young girls comes towards the end of the interview. The subtitles are both in a strange English and a language I presume to be classic or contemporary Arabic, while the actual speech of both participants more probably is of some local dialect.


Arab woman fearlessly confronts ruthless misogynistic lies of Arab men

This practice flourishes in Muslim countries where women are ruthlessly oppressed and normal sexual development systematically suppressed. That would include the Arab world, Iran, Pakistan and Afghanistan. Deny men wholesome and natural sexual outlets and they will find unwholesome and unnatural alternatives.

The Grand Ayatollah's full ruling on marriage can be found here. The institution of "temporary marriage" appears to be designed to facilitate prostitution. Yes, Islam is a full service religion.

MUTUALLY ASSURED DECEPTION

Sheikyermami says, "When the Ayatollah Khomeini came to power in Iran he immediately set upon the useful idiots who were assisting him in what they believed would be some kind of socialist revolution. When the Russians pulled out of Afghanistan they left an operator named Najibullah behind. Google 'Najibullah' and check what happened to him, which is likely what would happen to Karzai, the darling of the West."

Word to that. V S Naipaul—in Among the Believers—spent time with the earnest Persian socialists—the people who read the leftist and Soviet literature and truly believed in people's revolution and all that. Khomeini took them—and their Russian sponsors—for a ride.

The Jihad mobsters used left-speak, communist speak, anything available to persuade the Ruskies to hand over weapons, money, et cetera. In other places, other times, they used different, Western-style jargon to persuade the West to hand over weapons, money, et cetera. The 'Palestinians' were particularly clever at this maneuver—until Hamas ripped the mask off.

Frankly, the driving force has been Islam, Islam, Islam all along.

I would BET my bottom dollar that just as America and the EU are being fed a truckload of taqiyya and kitman, so too are the Chinese and the Russians. Just because the Russians and Chinese are users of propaganda, doesn't mean they are any more immune to an ancient and lethal system that is 1200 years older than theirs is. Living in an fog of lies makes you more, not less prone to be deceived.

RUNNING THE TABLE WITH SINCERITY

When ignorance is bliss, tis folly to be wise. Our leaders would rather pretend that Islam is nothing but a misunderstood faith because to do otherwise would require facing up to the danger it represents to Western societies.

“Islam says: Whatever good there is exists thanks to the sword and in the shadow of the sword! People cannot be made obedient except with the sword! The sword is the key to paradise, which can be opened only for holy warriors!

There are hundreds of other [Koranic] psalms and hadiths urging Muslims to value war and to fight. Does all that mean that Islam is a religion that prevents men from waging war? I spit upon those foolish souls who make such a claim.”

“Islam grew with blood...The great prophet of Islam in one hand carried the Koran and in the other a sword—Islam is a religion of blood for the infidels but a religion of guidance for other people.”

—Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini

“Islam is a revolutionary faith that comes to destroy any government made by man. Islam doesn’t look for a nation to be in a better condition than another nation. Islam doesn’t care about the land or who owns the land. The goal of Islam is to rule the entire world and submit all of mankind to the faith of Islam. Any nation or power that gets in the way of that goal, Islam will fight and destroy. In order to fulfill that goal, Islam can use every power available every way it can be used to bring worldwide revolution. This is Jihad.”

—Sayeed Abdul A'la Maududi, ‘Jihad in Islam’

“Soon we will take power in this country. Those who criticize us now, will regret it. They will have to serve us. Prepare, for the hour is near.”

—Belgium-based imam in 1994. “De Morgen”, Oct. 5, 1994. Cited in Koenraad Elst, "The Rushdie Rules", Middle East Quarterly, June 1998.

“The Quran should be America's highest authority”. “Islam is not in America to be equal to any other religion but to be dominant.”

—Omar Ahmad, CAIR's (Council on American-Islamic Relations) chairman of the board.

"Jihad and the rifle alone. NO negotiations, NO conferences and NO dialogue."

—Sheikh Abdullah Azzam (Osama bin Laden’s late mentor.)

THE ADVANTAGE OF COMMON SENSE

A lesson on the advantage of common sense when waging a war built on propaganda. Propaganda is the deliberate, systematic attempt to shape perceptions, manipulate cognitions, and direct behavior to achieve a response that furthers the desired intent of the propagandist. Many are accused of this form of warfare, few are those who actually succeed from it. From Bruce Thorton in his book—Greek Ways:

Common sense tells us that Khomeini and the other modern jihadists know their own faith and its doctrines, and are speaking squarely in that tradition, as can be documented from the Koran, Hadiths, and subsequent Muslim theologians, jurists, and other commentators (see Andrew Bostom’s invaluable anthology, The Legacy of Jihad). All these sources tell us that jihad indeed is the imperative to follow the example of the prophet Mohammed, who said in his farewell address: “I was ordered to fight all men until they say, ‘There is no god but Allah.’”

Modern jihadists, then, aren’t “heretics” or “fanatics” who have “highjacked” the “religion of peace” in order to compensate for their neurotic “humiliation” at Muslim backwardness. Bin Laden and his lieutenant Aymin Al Zawahiri have issued many writings that define their terrorist war as a traditional jihad, backing up their argument with numerous references to Islamic theology and jurisprudence. In a few weeks The Al Qaeda Reader will be published, Library of Congress researcher Raymond Ibrahim’s translation of the most significant Al Qaeda treatises, many of which have not appeared before in English.

This promises to be one of the most important books since 9/11, a critical resource for accurately understanding the motives of Al Qaeda. These writings, especially those intended for Muslims, ground the war against the West squarely in the Islamic tradition of jihad: “Zawahiri’s writings,” Ibrahim notes, “especially are grounded in Islam’s roots of jurisprudence; in fact, of the many thousands of words translated here from his three treatises, well more than half are direct quotations from the Koran, the Sunna of Muhammad, and the consensus and conclusions of the Ulema [past and present commentators and interpreters of Islamic belief and practice].”

Even the killing of women and children is argued for on the basis of that same tradition, which provides traction for rationalizations based on Islamic military weakness, sophistic definitions of “innocence,” and the oft-repeated injunction to kill all infidels. This interpretation may be erroneous, but the mere fact that it can be argued for at all, and accepted by many Muslims, is itself significant. And such an interpretation is possible because there already exists the doctrine of jihad, which glorifies and justifies violence against non-believers. This helps to answer the obvious question why other ex-colonial peoples supposedly “humiliated” by their failure to keep up with the powerful West have not resorted to terrorist violence.

Again, it beggars belief that a Zawahiri or a Khomeini is distorting his faith’s traditions and dogmas, particularly when millions of Muslims world-wide agree with those traditional interpretations. Are we to think those millions don’t know their own religion? That they are dupes of manipulators and distorters? Or is it rather the case that they know very well their faith and see Bin Laden et al. as traditionalists attempting to restore to Islam the doctrinal purity that fueled Islam’s remarkable conquests? Perhaps this agreement with the so-called “Islamists” explains the dearth of protests against these presumed “distortions” on the part of all those “moderate” Muslims we keep hearing about.

No, it is we who are the dupes of distorters, all those apologists, propagandists, and Western useful idiots who obscure the truth of Islam and its history. And they are successful: Washington Times columnist Diana West, writing on July 6 about Robert Spencer’s important web-site jihadwatch.org, reports that “very ominously, Mr. Spencer's Web site is being blocked by assorted organizations which, according to his readers, continue to provide access to assorted pro-jihad sites. Mr. Spencer reports he's ‘never received word of so many organizations banning this site all at once.’ These include the City of Chicago, Bank of America, Fidelity Investments, GE IT, JPMorgan Chase, Defense Finance and Accounting Services and now, a federal employee in Dallas informs him, the federal government.” Why? “Some Internet providers deem the factually based, meticulous analysis on display at jihadwatch.org to be ‘hate speech.’”

This is the pass that we have come to: facts about the motives of an enemy sworn to our destruction are censored as “hate speech.” This betrayal of the truth demonstrates perfectly the West’s self-loathing failure of nerve that confirms the enemy’s belief in his spiritual superiority—and his ultimate victory.

WHY IRAN TAKES HOSTAGES

The following post was submitted to me by Brigitte Gabrielle of the American Congress For Truth and was written by Alan Caruba:
I often fear that the vast ignorance of Americans and others around the world concerning the history of Islam condemns them to be pawns in the hands of the Iranians and other Muslim leaders who reflect why Islam came to be and how it has conducted itself since the death of its founder.

The recent "incident" in which 15 British sailors were taken hostage by the Iranians (and you can substitute any radical Islamic group such as Hamas, Hezbollah, or al Qaeda committing other similar acts) and the subsequent "diplomatic" effort totally ignores the fact that these same Iranians took American diplomats hostage in 1979. Our subsequent failure to mete out a severe military retribution has brought us to the current prospect of a nuclear-armed Iran.

You may have noticed that, every time the United States leaves a war unfinished, we end up having to deal with the same bad people whether they are the North Koreans, the Iranians, or, in the case of Iraq, the return in 2003 after the botched victory in 1991. The only purpose of war is to leave one's enemies utterly without the will to repeat their bad behavior. By contrast, we have excellent relations with Japan and Germany.

It should be noted, too, that the Iranians have shown absolutely no regard for the Geneva Convention, having paraded their hostages on television and forced them to make false statements under threat of death. The loudest voices about the proper adherence to the Convention have, of course, been raised against the United States.

The powerful hold that Islam has on the minds and hearts of Middle Eastern Muslims is deeply rooted in its very beginnings. This "religion" that Mohammed invented had as its purpose a justification for looting other towns and tribes in the name of Allah. Thievery, banditry, the sale of slaves, the imposition of taxes and tribute, were all set in place when in March 623 Muhammed said, "I was ordered to fight all men until they say 'There is no god but Allah.'"

Islam, which translates "submission", is all about war, the division of the booty that results, and the subjugation of those who are conquered. This explains why, alone among the three major monotheistic religions, Islam has produced absolutely nothing that one can call progress.

Centuries later, in November 2001, Osama bin Laden announced "I was ordered to fight the people until they say there is no god but Allah, and his prophet Muhammed." Not a single new idea has issued forth from Islam since its founding.

Islam divides the world between itself and what it calls "the world of war" by which it means all others who are not Muslims. The entire early history of Islam under Muhammed was one of looting and pillage as, one by one, those who responded to his banner, calling him a prophet, realized that there were profits to be had in conquering those around them.

On Mohammed's death, Islam almost immediately divided into warring parties over who would inherit his mantle as caliph. The Sunnis and the Shiites are still fighting one another over that. Islam is one long history of war, treachery and deceit.

In his book, "Islamic Imperialism: A History", Efraim Karsh relates a story of the struggle between the Abbasids and the declining Umayyads, two Muslim dynasties in 883 AD. The leader of the Abbasids, Abul Abbas, called himself "the bloodshedder." Karsh relates:

"In an attempt to prevent any backlash from supporters of the fallen dynasty, the Abbasids embarked on a murderous spree. In Mecca and Medina scores of Umayyads were rounded up and murdered in detention. In the Iraqi garrison town of Wasit the governor laid down his weapons in return for a personal guarantee of safe conduct by the caliph, only to be treacherously murdered. In Palestine, the newly appointed governor of Syria invited a group of eighty prominent Umayyads to a banquet, slaughtered them all, then sat calmly among the corpses to finish his meal."

In the aftermath of the 1991 defeat of the Iraqis who were driven from Kuwait by a coalition led by American forces, Saddam's generals met in Safwan to accept surrender terms. What they got was a promise of U.S. withdrawal and the right to use their helicopters for "transportation." What they did was use those helicopters as gun ships to slaughter thousands of Shiites and Kurds who showed any inclination to resist the further rule of Saddam Hussein. The result of that miscalculation were "no-fly zones" over two thirds of Iraq that were maintained for twelve years until the second invasion in March 2003.

Today, as the U.S. media puts the various battles between Shiites and Sunnis on the front pages, Americans wonder why are these two Muslim groups are blowing up each other's mosques? Why are they murdering each other? Why are Iraq's neighbors, Iran and Syria, maneuvering to secure whatever they can gain from the effort to (1) rid Iraq of the American-led coalition forces and (2) pick up the spoils of a divided and easily conquered Iraqi nation?

An easy reading of Islamic history and a common sense response to today's events tell us that the Iranians will continue to probe for weakness among its enemies, the Americans, the British, the other members of the European Union, and of course, those Gulf nations who will have to confront an nuclear armed Iran if they are permitted to continue. Any failure to respond to their outrages will earn their contempt and further rumblings of war.

"We will continue to export our revolution throughout the world.until the calls 'there is no god but Allah and Muhammad is the messenger of Allah' are echoed all over the world." Iran's Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini in 1979.

Want to hear the call to prayer in your neighborhood? All we have to do is leave Iraq.
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We need to do a lot more than not leave Iraq. We need to re-institute the draft, train our fighting forces to fight and not hand out candy and build schools, and then give the green light and assist Israel in defeating the entire Muslim region. Merely staying in Iraq as we empty our treasure into the corrupt Middle east is non-sense. Iraq is doomed. Let's share this fate among the remaining enemies of Irael and America, including Iran, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Pakistan, Egypt and whoever else wants to continue this chirade of false friendship, hot and cold.