JIHAD ON THE AUSTRALIAN PLAINS?

On September 7, 2008, from Australia, it was reported that a web site posted by a group called the Al-Ikhlas Islamic Network, argues in Arabic that lighting fires is an effective form of terrorism justified in Islamic law. The article as follows:

AUSTRALIA HAS BEEN SINGLED OUT as a target for "forest jihad" by a group of Islamic extremists urging Muslims to deliberately light bushfires as a weapon of terror.

US intelligence channels earlier this year identified a website calling on Muslims in Australia, the US, Europe and Russia to "start forest fires", claiming "scholars have justified chopping down and burning the infidels' forests when they do the same to our lands".

The website, posted by a group called the Al-Ikhlas Islamic Network, argues in Arabic that lighting fires is an effective form of terrorism justified in Islamic law under the "eye for an eye" doctrine.

The posting—which instructs jihadis to remember "forest jihad" in summer months—says fires cause economic damage and pollution, tie up security agencies and can take months to extinguish so that "this terror will haunt them for an extended period of time".

"Imagine if, after all the losses caused by such an event, a jihadist organisation were to claim responsibility for the forest fires," the website says. "You can hardly begin to imagine the level of fear that would take hold of people in the United States, in Europe, in Russia and in Australia."

With the nation heading into another hot, dry summer, Australian intelligence agencies are treating the possibility that bushfires could be used as a weapon of terrorism as a serious concern.

Attorney-General Robert McClelland said the Federal Government remained "vigilant against such threats", warning that anyone caught lighting a fire as a weapon of terror would feel the wrath of anti-terror laws.

"Any information that suggests a threat to Australia's interests is investigated by relevant agencies as appropriate," Mr McClelland said.

Adam Dolnik, director of research at the University of Wollongong's Centre for Transnational Crime Prevention, said that bushfires (unlike suicide bombing) were generally not considered a glorious type of attack by jihadis, in keeping with a recent decline in the sophistication of terrorist operations.

"With attacks like bushfires, yes, it would be easy. It would be very damaging and we do see a decreasing sophistication as a part of terrorist attacks," Dr. Dolnik said.

"In recent years, there have been quite a few attacks averted and it has become more and more difficult for groups to do something effective."

Dr. Dolnik said he had observed an increase in traffic on jihadi websites calling for a simplification of terrorist attacks because the more complex operations had been failing. But starting bushfires was still often regarded as less effective than other operations because governments could easily deny terrorism as the cause.

The internet posting by the little-known group claimed the idea of forest fires had been attributed to imprisoned Al Qaeda leader Abu Musab Al-Suri. It said Al-Suri had urged terrorists to use sulphuric acid and petrol to start forest fires.

And today's headlines:

Victoria remains under a shroud of smoke and grief today with thousands homeless and at least 134 people dead after the worst bushfires in Australia's history.

We await an investigation as to the culprits of this mass murder (as just reported on FOX News), and surely hope the Australian authorities live up to earlier chutzpah by government officials who have gone on record telling the Muslim agitators to leave Australia and move to a place where the islamic medieval code of institutionalized barbarism is the law of the land.

MODERATION BY ANY OTHER NAME

MONDAY MARKED THE FIFTH anniversary of the imprisonment of Sami Al-Arian, the notorious Palestinian Islamic Jihad leader who operated for years out of the University of South Florida, where he taught computer science. The Leftist LinkTV (“Television Without Borders”) celebrated the day with the premiere of USA vs AL-ARIAN, a hagiographical documentary about the jailed jihadist, who is currently on a hunger strike after refusing to testify to a grand jury about the activities of Islamic charities and other organizations in Virginia.

LinkTV works hard to portray Al-Arian as a martyr, saying: “Al-Arian, who is diabetic, is on a hunger strike in protest of his continued imprisonment beyond his scheduled release date, despite being acquitted in a jury trial. His health is deteriorating rapidly, as his food and water strike nears the one-month mark.”

Acquitted in a jury trial? Then why is he in prison? Because Al-Arian, LinkTV later reports, "pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy in aiding Palestinian Islamic Jihad associates in nonviolent ways in return for receiving the minimum prison sentence, including time served, and to be deported from the country upon his release.”

In reality, Al-Arian pleaded guilty to a charge of “conspiracy to make or receive contributions of funds to or for the benefit of Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ), a Specially Designated Terrorist” organization. If PIJ is a terrorist group, then “non-violent” aid to it is comparable to contributions to Nazi charitable organizations (and yes, they did have them). Al-Arian was aiding a jihad terrorist group, period. And his plea agreement leaves no room for doubt: “Defendant is pleading guilty because defendant is in fact guilty. The defendant certifies that the defendant does hereby admit that the facts set forth [in the plea agreement] are true, and were this case to go to trial, the United States would be able to prove those specific facts and others beyond a reasonable doubt.” What’s more, Al-Arian acknowledged that he was “pleading guilty freely and voluntarily…and without threats, force, intimidation, or coercion of any kind.”

As far as LinkTV is concerned, the hounding of this good man is all part of the persecution of Muslims in the post-9/11 Amerikkkan police state, you see: “USA vs AL-ARIAN is the personal story of the Al-Arian family, who like many Muslims in the U.S. today, are navigating the new laws and political climate of post-9/11 America.”

But it was Al-Arian who worked hard to create a climate of intimidation and violence. He stood by approvingly at one Islamic conference while former Cleveland Imam Fawaz Damra (himself now also deported) tried to raise money for Islamic Jihad by saying: “Donate to the Islamic Jihad. Nidal Zalooum from the Islamic Jihad held a dagger and stabbed four of the Jews in the courtyard of Al-Haram Al-Qudsi….One of them would leave his house with a knife to stab the Jews -- twelve Jews -- after the events of the Gulf War. Brothers, the Intifadah calls you. Five hundred dollars! Who would add to five hundred dollars?”

Al-Arian and Damra operated for years within the United States while enjoying reputations as moderates. Damra was one of the signers of the 2005 fatwa condemning terrorism issued by the Fiqh Council of North America under the auspices of the Council on American Islamic Relations and the Muslim Public Affairs Council. Damra’s name among the signatories lends credence to the view that this fatwa, despite the enthusiastic praise it has received from the mainstream media, is in fact another exercise in the deception that Damra and Al-Arian so skillfully practiced in America for so long, while continuing behind closed doors to support jihad terror.

Another video that was shown publicly for the first time at his trial depicts Al-Arian, the mild-mannered computer science professor, exhorting his Muslim audience to “adopt the choice of jihad.” And of course, most notoriously, Al-Arian has said: “Let us damn America, let us damn Israel, let us damn them and their allies until death.”

Al-Arian’s guilty plea and future deportation thus constitute a significant setback for the subversive, stealth jihad that the mujahedin have been waging in the West, largely (but not solely) by financing jihad activities elsewhere in the world under religious and academic cover.

That LinkTV would mark the fifth anniversary of his imprisonment by trying to portray him as a Muslim Gandhi, railroaded by a racist U.S. government avid for terror convictions, is unconscionable. LinkTV plays into the hands of those friends of Sami Al-Arian who would destroy LinkTV along with the rest of the embattled civilizational outposts of the confused and squabbling West.

CASABLANCA BOMBERS ESCAPE

NINE ISLAMIC JIHADISTS convicted over the Casablanca bombings that killed 45 people in 2003, including one facing the death sentence, tunnelled their way out of a Moroccan prison early Monday, officials said.

The Kenitra "prison administration noted the escape Monday morning and all measures have been taken to find the escaped prisoners and establish who was responsible," the justice ministry said in a statement quoted by the MAP state news agency. The Casablanca bombings were the deadliest ever in Morocco, killing 45 people including 12 suicide bombers, and injuring scores more.

An official representing a group looking after the welfare of jailed Islamic militants said the fugitives had escaped from the Kenitra prison north of Rabat after dawn prayers at 5:30 AM local time.

Abderrahim Mahtade of the Annasir association said one of the nine had been sentenced to death, six others to life imprisonment and two were given 20 years in jail, and all came from Casablanca.

Read it all.

DETERRANCE BY ANY OTHER NAME

Okay, all that other stuff failed. Carrots and honey only brought us more vicious rabbit holes and nasty bee stings. Why not let bygones be bygones, shift gears, and come back running with something else, say like, the Big Stick Theory? The continuing saga of a nation without clarity, a people without leadership, the damage that surely must be done, and emphatically shall be done, one way or the other, in this campaign to set the record straight about man, and god, and law, is once again nailed to the door of our awakening in an article written by the impetuously comprehensive Hugh Fitzgerald of Jihad Watch.

Read it, comprehend it, pass it along:

And what is the deterrence going to be, and how will that deterrence be made known? Surely any further attack on Americans has to be answered not by means of what is essentially a glorified police action, attempting to round up only those immediately involved, those who trained and supported them. Retaliation must he very large, and must do equal damage to the Camp of Islam. The Al-Saud, the Al-Thani, the Al-Sabah, the Al-Maktoum, and all the others must be made aware that their economic and other interests will be damaged, damaged far more severely than we have so far been damaged, and that such damage will be inflicted in all kinds of ways, including a halt to the availability of goods and services, the seizure of enemy-owned assets (just as such assets were seized during World War II), and that will include the privately-owned real estate of various Saudi princelings (could that be why Prince Bandar is selling off his Aspen estate for $135 million, the estate for which he had blown to bits the top of a mountain to improve his view") and whatever can be reached by American and other NATO allies. The days of visiting the West for medical care and education should come to an end—wouldn't you, if you were told you could no longer go to any Western doctors, begin to worry, begin to think about modifying your behavior so that you could see the best oncologists and cardiologists and bring your children to Western doctors instead of Arab ones? You would.

And that's a start. Other measures could include seizing the very large, and very conveniently placed, oilfields of Saudi Arabia, holding whatever oil revenues are obtained piously "in trust," after first deducting the amount of economic damage that Saudi support, over the past 30 years—support for mosques and madrasas where the most fanatical Wahhabi propaganda has been available and been distributed, support for campaigns of Da'wa targetted at the psychically and economically marginal, campaigns to buy up Western hirelings in all the capitals of the West, and much more—amounting to nearly $100 billion in the past 30 years—has caused, for there is a direct relationship between the Saudis and the spread of the most virulent form of Islam.

Deterrence, to be effective, must be understood on all sides. The Western world has not made clear to the rulers and peoples of Muslim states, nor to Muslims now living in the Bilad al-kufr and working night and day at their Taqiyya-and-Tu-Quoque in order to prevent Infidels from learning just a bit too much about Islam, and about the history of Islamic conquest over 1350 years, that all kinds of measures can be, and will be, taken. The Western publics are far far ahead of their governments, and the deep unhappiness with both parties in this country, with the hallucinating Bush bringing "freedom" to "ordinary moms and dads" and the Democrats who oppose the war but apparently not for the right reasons—that is, in order to more intelligently constrain Islam that can be achieved best by leaving, not staying in, Iraq.

Western governments, led by the Americans, should start consulting with one another on this collective threat (surely the recent elections should mean that NATO will have to meet without Turkey, no longer a fit member of an organization that will have to direct its main efforts at constraining Islam) of the world-wide Jihad, and on the Money Weapon, campaigns of Da'wa, and demographic conquest within the Bilad al-kufr, especially in the hitherto negiligently compliant states of Western Europe. One wants the Muslim would-be terrorists, and those who support them, to be made aware of what, beyond physical destruction to certain Muslim lands, will take place, what damage will be done to the interests of Muslims in Paris and London, in Dearborn and Falls Church, what will be done with some—not all—of the oilfields, what will be done with reachable Arab and Muslim assets in the West, what will be done to close down Muslim insetitutions all over the West that inevitably offer support and encouragement for the Jihad.

The leaders of the Soviet Union knew what would happen if they did thus and so. The Muslims have been led to believe that very little will happen—oh, hundreds of billions may be spent, in vain attempts to cure Muslim "poverty" (see Afghanistan) and to "reconstruct" an entire country (see Iraq), and to bring Western ways, and the pollyannish panacea of "free elections" which are the main way that "freedom" can be brought, in Bush's view, to "ordinary moms and dads" in the Middle East. But the Iraqi body politic has already clearly rejected the attempt to successfully transplant the organ of Western freedom. Time to try something that makes sense.

The reason the Arab states do not attack Israel at the moment is because of the deterrent effect of the IDF, and what the IDF can do. That's it. It has nothing to do with the Camp David Accords, nothing to do with a change of heart—how could Muslims, if they were true believers, ever accept an Infidel state such as Israel, on land once part of Dar al-Islam, a state that furthermore is in the middle of that so-called "Arab world"? It is simply impossible, not thinkable. Deterrence, however, is not unthinkable—it exists, and it works.

The same can and should be done by the American and other Western governments. They have to start dropping all kinds of hints, as to the damage that can be inflicted on Muslim interests, everywhere. And they might do best to talk about reducing the Money Weapon (or inflicting economic damage in turn on the Muslim states), closing down campaigns of Da'wa and countering the effect of past campaigns, and recognizing demographic conquest as a key instrument of Jihad, historically and at present, and not only calling a complete halt to Muslim immigration into the West, but reversing it, by means that are not only perfectly justifiable when one is fighting such a comlicated war of self-defense in which, in a move without precedent in history, large numbers of people who are by unshakeable faith unalterably opposed to the continued dominance, in our own, Infidel lands of our own legal and political institutions, our own solicitousness for the individual rather than the collective, and for freedoms that are the product of centuries of thought and statecraft, have been allowed by the millions to settle within our lands, in a collective fit of ignorance and historical amnesia. In such circumstances, those who sense their own responsibiity, even in the midst of such present decadence, to preserve a civilizational heritage that can be undone by mere numbers, will take what measures are necessary, and will do well to learn of how often, in the past, even the most tolerant and advanced regimes—such as that in Czechoslovakia in 1946—undertook measures (the Benes Decree) that no one at the time, and no one respectable since, has criticized, much less deplored.

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.

MORE TAQIYYA, OR A TURNING TIDE?

The following article is by Yousef Ibrahim writing today for the New York Sun:

The latest batch of attacks by Islamic terrorists raised fresh concerns among Muslims over what they fear may be "heinous attempts" to link terror with Islam. British Muslims, who number 1.6 million, are reportedly funding advertising campaigns across Britain that proclaim Islam is "the religion of peace"—in the process also implicitly warning fellow Britons against criticizing their faith.

Yet a year ago, a weighty Muslim writer and pundit, Abdel Rahman Al Rashed, manager of the pan-Arab TV network Al-Arabiya Television, famously launched a stormy debate when he opined, "While all Muslims are not terrorists, all terrorists are now Muslims."

Ever since, the question among Muslim scholars and activists is precisely how much of the terror inspired by Islam is due to the faith itself—and how much is due to the way it is being preached. Clearly, the issue is enormously delicate, fraught with the pitfalls of prejudice and all sorts of other sensitivities. But as hundreds of thousands of people from New York to Baghdad are butchered under Islam's banners, failing to tackle it head-on is unacceptable.

Reasonable Muslims now agree that when a religion veers so far off course, it loses immunity to inquisition. "We ought to go through very serious questioning and soul-searching," a founder of the Muslim Public Affairs Council, Dr. Maher Hathout, wrote on "The American Muslim" Web site Thursday. "How did we, as a group, fail to nip this ugly phenomenon in the bud?" he asks. "How did we indulge in the luxury of theoretical debates, and craft all kinds of euphemisms to let this go on, spill out, and grow?"

The bare facts are there for all to see: Over the past 40 years or so, Islam's millions of fanatical preachers and political operatives have represented the religion as one of an "oppressed" people, victimized for centuries by the multiple ogres of Christianity, Judaism, and secularism. Listen to many preachers, read several interpretations of the Muslim holy book, or go to a variety of madrassas from Pakistan to Saudi Arabia, and you will quickly learn that Islam's central value, bar none, is jihad.

Far from a religion of peace, these clerics have "weaponized" Islam's text and the Koran into a war manifesto against even fellow Muslims—as between Shiites and Sunnis.

Raising the bar further, most Muslim scholarship of today maintains the refrain that Islam is not meant to be another religion, but the most definitive of God's revelations to man. As Muslim children are told daily, the Prophet Muhammad is not only the last of God's prophets, but the most authoritative. Thus, it follows that Muslims merit greater privilege. A Muslim, for example, may take any number of non-Muslim wives, but the reverse is illegal. Abandoning Islam is punishable by jail or death. No other religion is acceptable.

The next step in such a logical progression is clearly the necessity to force others to submit. Islam has become imbued with a kind of droit du seigneur—the extrajudicial, absolute rights of a lord of the manor—which cannot be argued with.
Saudis, for example—and this includes their most moderate and modernized leaders—feel it is perfectly natural to fund the building of hundreds of mosques in Europe, from London to Cologne, but cannot find a shred of logic in allowing the construction of a single church or Buddhist temple in Saudi Arabia, even though millions of Christian and Asian expatriates work there.

The scholarly journeys down such roads have served to legitimize the excessive aggression in hundreds of the religious edicts issued weekly by both legitimate and rogue Muslim scholars—including the charlatans of Al Qaeda, who decree that killing infidels is a Muslim duty.

A Saudi expert on Islamic movements, Mshari Al Zaydi, who is the opinion page editor of the Saudi daily Asharq Al-Awsat, went to the heart of the matter in a remarkable essay a few days ago, in which he pointedly noted that Saudi religious leaders have never issued an outright renunciation of the religious thinking of Osama bin Laden.

The most the Saudi religious establishment has done, Mr. Zaydi wrote, is to "mildly state that Mr. bin Laden was simply an ‘erroneous mujtahid,'"—a term referring to those qualified to issue juridical opinions and edicts such as fatwas—"as though this man was not responsible for setting the Muslim world ablaze, taking it back centuries and much farther than its original backwardness." In Egypt, Jordan, and Morocco, the Muslim Brotherhood contests for power based on a single slogan: "Islam is the solution."

Could it be that their version of Islam is also the problem?

___________

And precisely what version is that? A version modified to simply update the list of "given names" the infidel now goes by so as to include the United Staes, throwing in for good measure, that the US is the Great Satan (an idea shared by the hard Left in the West, if only they dared to use the "religious" language which they detest in their own backyard but rush to protect in their adopted allies in the Middle East as they move westward and upward towards demographic impulse to bring Sharia law into town). Ibrahim writes as if Islamic terror has just become manifest in the last 40 years.

As another commenter has put it, "He is like Daniel Pipes in that he (seems) to think that there is some benign, even good, Islam that exists. It is just the preaching that is the problem! Islam has veered off course! These preachers have 'weaponized' the text! Al Qaeda are charlatans!"

But the cat is out of the bag now. The voices are plain and clear that this is just not the case. Robert Spencer, Ali Sina, Ibn Warraq, Andrew Bostom, Bat Ye'or, Serge Trifkovic, Brigitte Gabriel, and Hugh Fitzgerald among others, have outlined the stress and strain of falsehood betraying that interpretation, pointing out in excrutiating detail that Islam has ALWAYS been murderous, following the example of Muhammad himself.

The religion of peace under Islam, if there was ever any truth to it, rests only in the historical account of Muhammed taming the competing tribes of the Wild Deserts of his own time and geography. Things drastically changed. Now Islam has a long history of attack, pillage, subjugation, and tyranny. Peace by the sword always proceeds in the fashion.

Just ask the tens of millions of Hindus slaughtered by Muslims following the example of Muhammad starting in the 11th century.

BOXER STAYS THE COURSE

In the last gasp of the recent Boxer-CAIR affair, Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-CA) and officials from a Muslim advocacy group said Wednesday they have resolved to move forward on improving interfaith relations after smoothing over a skirmish over an honor rescinded by her office.

“I’m putting it all behind me, and we’re moving ahead to work with the civil rights community to better relations among people of all faiths,” Boxer said in an interview. But a spokeswoman for the California Democrat said she does not intend to give back the certificate honoring Basim Elkarra, executive director of the Sacramento chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations.

The senator also said the concerns prompting her to rescind his service award this month haven’t changed. At the time, Boxer and her staff cited concerns about CAIR’s positions on terrorist groups, contending that CAIR had refused to label Hamas and Hezbollah as terrorist organizations. Boxer had been criticized on conservative Web sites for giving the award to Elkarra; she said she did not know her office had done so.

CAIR officials met with Boxer and her staff Tuesday. “We have addressed the issues related to this unfortunate and unnecessary incident, and have agreed with Senator Boxer that we should all move forward to build a nation in which people of all faiths work together to promote respect and tolerance,” CAIR said in a statement.

Oh sure. But since when has Islam ever worked together with other faiths to promote respect and tolerance? A Muslim is forbidden to even be friends with the kafir, or infidels, except to deceive them until the day they've grown strong enough to subjugate them to the Islamic ideology. Working together with other faiths to promote respect and tolerance is anathema to Muslims.

Such niceties as respect and tolerance for others outside the cult are not part of Allah's program for his brave new world. The kafir's very existence is an affront to Muslim reflexive airs of superiority. Note Osama bin Laden's rage against the presence of the US base in Saudi Arabia during our defense of Kuwait. Segregation is a primary in the Muslim belief system—EXCEPT WHEN—Muslims are invading foreign lands wearing the mask of victimhood.

CAIR-Los Angeles Executive Director Hussam Ayloush said the group condemns all acts of terrorism. But as usual, the facts portray a different picture, one in which apparently CAIR does not condemn certain terrorists—more accurately, jihadist—groups like Hezbollah and Hamas, which is precisely why the award was rescinded.

It is certain that CAIR applied pressure to Senator Boxer with their "action alerts" and "calls for more understanding." Yet, to her credit, she did not capitulate and will not issue this member of CAIR an undeserved award. Kudos to Senator Boxer. CAIR's refusal to condemn Hezbollah and Hamas while recently in the news for condemning the fictional terrorists on the television show "24" shows the true profile of their boisterous hypocrisy.

Armed and dangerous bonafide terrorists are killing Muslims and non-Muslims alike in the real world while a whipped up CAIR concerns itself with fictional television terrorists.

SANE SYLLABLES

My friend Bill from Bunratty says the term "War on Terror" has always frustrated him. He asks with due diligence—are we at war with the Tamil Tigers, the IRA, the Baader-Meinhof Gang, the Red Brigades, the Symbionese Liberation Army, the Weathermen, Earth First, et cetera? He answers his own question:

No—none of the above—we are at war with Muslim terrorists who are acting in a straightforward manner on the tenets of their ideology. If the term "War with Islam" is too unpalatable for politicians and public figures to utter, perhaps "War with Islam's War on us" would work for them. It's a little wordy, but at least it is not disengenuous like the ridiculous "War on Terror."

Well done, Bill. I couldn't have said it better.