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he prophet Muhammed would be tickled piggy-pink with this, as will the millions of subhuman terrorist swine who proudly carry his name, although the rest of the world will recoil in horror:

A Pakistani Federal Minister Monday said that militants were using kidnapped children as suicide bombers across the country.

Federal Interior Minister Rehman Malik talking to newsmen here said that the militants were buying innocent children for few hundred thousand rupees and using them to carry out suicide attacks. (Kuwait News via ROP)

By way of contrast, the Son of God taught us:

Then he put a little child among them. Taking the child in his arms, he said to them, “Anyone who welcomes a little child like this on my behalf welcomes me, and anyone who welcomes me welcomes my Father who sent me.” (Mark 9:36-37)

I’ve read that scripture a whole bunch of times, and I just can’t find anything there about blowing the child up.

Hat-tip: Infidels Are Cool

A

s I understand it, here’s the Obama/Clinton State Dept’s take on how they will win what we used to call the war on terror:  The problem between the U.S. and the jihadists is that we just haven’t been likable enough. We’ will win over Islam if we spend less on the military and more on fish sticks for orphans.

That was the gist of Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs Judith A. McHale’s talk to the Center for a New American Security today.  (I thought the old Bush security was just fine, by the way, since no Americans were killed by jihadists on American soil during his watch, post 9/11.)  Here’s some excerpts:

Whether we are strengthening old alliances, forging new partnerships to meet complex global challenges, engaging with citizens and civil society, or charting new strategies in Afghanistan and Pakistan, our national interests depend on effective engagement and innovative public diplomacy. The stakes could not be higher. We must get this right…This is not a propaganda contest — it is a relationship race. And we have got to get back in the game.

Enhanced public diplomacy is a key component of the President’s new strategy in the region…To achieve the President’s aims, we are launching a multi-faceted strategy to provide platforms for local moderate voices, support democratic institutions and civil society, and position the United States as a long-term partner working to create opportunities and enable the people of the region to chart the futures of their own countries.

We are responding to requests from the governments of Afghanistan and Pakistan to help meet the needs of their people. Secretary Clinton recently announced more than $100 million in humanitarian support for the people of Pakistan. And Ambassador Holbrooke just announced another $200 million. Since 2002, the United States has provided a total of more than $3.4 billion to alleviate suffering and promote economic growth, education, health, security and good governance in Pakistan. [Oh, wait! You mean Bush tried this to the tun of $3.4 billion and they're still trying to kill us? No matter; just apply the Universal Obama Solution - throw lots of money at it.]

Yet we have a credibility gap with many in the region — some have called it a ‘trust deficit.’ So part of our task is reassuring the people that our aim in the region is to support their own aspirations. We need to do a better job of getting the word out about what we are doing to help Pakistan and Afghanistan become more stable and prosperous, both through the local media and by communicating directly with people.”

It is not about getting the word out, or the trust deficit, but it is most definitely about the aspirations of the people of the region.  A significant percentage of them have a deeply imbedded aspiration to bring pain, suffering and death to the Great Satan, and no amount of communication or prosperity is going to change that.  Only rewriting the Q’ran will change that.

Islam has nurtured radicals since the dawn of the religion, through times of great wealth and times of great poverty alike.  Radical Muslims abound in Lebanon, where Democracy still hangs on. And education? Cairo University, where Obama spoke to the Muslim world last week (except for Iran, of course, where the state didn’t broadcast it), has spawned its share of very well educated Islamo-savages.

McHale concluded her comments with a bizarre historical reference:

A few days after I started at the State Department, I moved into George Marshall’s old office. General Marshall saw a world beyond our shores devastated by war and reeling from economic crisis. He knew that our fates and our fortunes were intertwined and that America had to engage with the world to ensure our future. So he launched one of the most far-reaching engagement efforts in history. And today we are still reaping the rewards of that investment in mutual prosperity and security. From Cairo to Kabul, from quiet villages to crowded cities, America is once again reaching out a hand of friendship and seeking new relationships. We know it is the right thing to do and we know, like General Marshall did, that our future depends on it.

Yeah, but back then Europe was a Christian continent. And the enemy was broken, broke and starving - a point we’ll never get to if the administration can’t even admit that we’re fighting terrorists.  There is a role for public diplomacy - what we used to call foreign aid - but alone, it will have no measurable effect on the level of jihadist violence against us.

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mong the unbounded wealth of things President Bush caught a lot of flak for was his insistence that there is an axis of evil up to nefarious stuff in our world. We haven’t heard the expression much lately, but now it’s back, in a new incarnation … and not out of the mouth of Republicans.

Memri provides this translation of an article by Khaled Imam, the editor of the Egyptian government daily Al-Masaa, in which the “axis” word is invoked again. Imam wrote the piece after Egyptian security forces announced the arrest of seven members of a terror cell that allegedly had carried out a February 22, 2009 terror attack in Egypt.

The capture of the terrorist cell associated with the explosions in a square near the Al-Hussein mosque [in Cairo] last February brought to light two new matters of utmost importance. The first is that this cell was discovered through the Internet; the second is that Al-Qaeda had for the first time carried out an operation inside Egypt. …

The fact that Al-Qaeda has entered the fray indisputably confirms the strong connections between this terrorist organization and Iran, Hizbullah, and extremists within the Palestinian resistance. This is a quadruple axis of evil, whose four components were melded together in a single crucible. It’s impossible now to tell which of them is hoisting the banner of international terrorism, which is bandying the slogans of Islam and instigating hate towards Israel, and which is extolling resistance in Lebanon or Gaza. The four have become one.

The target, too, has become one - namely Egypt, its land, its people, its history, its civilization, its economy, [and] its past, present, and future. Egypt - this gate of steadfastness, this bulwark against Iranian ambitions - is unfortunately the main, if not the only, target, and not Israel, as they claim.

This filthy, stinking, motley crew harbors evil intentions against Egypt, which is protected by the Lord, as well as by our outstanding armed and police forces… whose members are willing to sacrifice their lives for the sake of Egypt’s security. We have the right to be proud of them and of our Egyptian identity, and to defend our national security in every way, both traditional and modern.

Two points. First, I’m very glad, after reading that prose, that we don’t have state-owned media in America. And leaving the more important for last, Imam’s piece shows again that there is indeed a global war on terror that must be fought, whether the current administration realizes it or not.

A

h, the Religion of Peace is at it again, this time flogging a teenage girl, who screams and cries as a circle of men watch intently. Does anyone else feel that this appears to be more like a sick sexual perversion, and not a religious event.

The girl was accused of “illicit relations” with a man, which the WSJ tells us was nothing more than appearing in public chaperoned by her father-in-law.  Of course, you will find no video of the father-in-law being flogged; it doesn’t exist because he wasn’t - the sin is just not his problem.  And as more evidence of the low regard Islam has for women, near the end of the clip, the girl stands up and a man can be heard shouting in the background.  According to BBC, he was angry that a mere female should be allowed to stand in the presence of men.

The clip was shot in Afghanistan, where we’re fighting the “good” war.

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errorists … no wait, let me look up the right word … uh, man-caused disaster causers … may soon be released by our Atty Gen onto our shores, in a move that’s just sure to increase our safety.  (Why didn’t Bush think of that?  He was sooo concerned about terror … uh, man-caused disasters.)  Here’s the report:

Some of the Guantanamo Bay prisoners could be released into the United States while others could be put on trial in the American court system, Attorney General Eric Holder said on Wednesday. …

Holder told reporters at the Justice Department that the administration’s review, made on a case-by-case basis, would determine whether the prisoners need to be put on trial or whether they can be released.

“For those who are in that second category, who can be released, there are a variety of options that we have. Among them is the possibility that we could release them into this country,” he said. (Reuters)

That’s such a swell idea!  We can show them our way of life and how open and tolerant we are, and it’s just sure as fleas on dogs to win them over to our side, where they’ll be nice, complacent citizens contributing to the national well-being.

Or they just might blow a bunch of us up.

Tough call - but apparently an easier call for Holder to make than the call to keep open the one place on the planet that’s perfect for these thugs, Guantanamo.  And if the Islamists every stop their war against us and agree to live in peace, we can let them go, just like we let go of our German, Italian and Japanese prisoners when WWII ended.

hat-tip: Infidels are Cool

I

n a rare fit of clarity, Britain banned Omar Bakri from returning to Britain in 2005, after he fled the country following the 7/7 subway attacks that ended the lives of 52 British citizens. It seemed OK with the Brits that Bakri praised Osama bin Laden after the 9/11 attacks, but when he blamed the the British government and the British people for 7/7, the bugger’s welcome mat was pulled.

Now befouling Lebanon with his hateful existence, Bakri hasn’t given up on Britain.  From the Telegraph:

Omar Bakri, the radical cleric banned from Britain, has addressed a conference at a primary school in London in which he called for the country to become an Islamic state.

Dozens of Muslims attended the rally at Sudbury Primary School in Harrow, north London, to hear Bakri preach for 40 minutes over the telephone from his exiled home in Lebanon. …

Bakri told his followers: “The existence of the Islamic state is a necessity for justice to be established, a necessity for the people in order to keep away from personal desire and greed.

“I believe the way forward is Islam. It is time to go back to basics. I believe Islam is the future.”

Now perhaps its time for Britain to boot the organizer of this little fete out as well.  that would be Anjem Choudary, Bakri’s Britain-resident aide, who was identified by the Telegraph as the “former” head of the extremist group Al Muhajiroun.  IslamWatch tells us to watch out for words like “former” …

Al-Muhajiroun was officially disbanded in October 2004, but it has continued under other names. Right from its start, the group had intentions to be “international”. In this, it has succeeded. It established a foothold in the United States, and had a base in Pakistan. Even though the parent group has been abolished, its members continue to promote its message of jihad both in Britain and North America.

… and goes on to describe the groups’ activities including one member who trained to be a 9/11 hijacker, another who worked to set up a “terror training camp” in Washington, another admitted providing night-vision goggles, waterproof clothing and money to a senior Al Qaeda official who was based in South Waziristan, another was arrested following the finding of more than 1,300 pounds of ammonium nitrate fertilizer in London, and on, and on.

It’s not enough to kick them out of your country.  It’s certainly a bad idea to set them free from Guantanamo.  Their hatred is deep and unabated.  Only death silences them.

Hat-tip:  Weasel Zippers

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s the wildfire death toll in Australia nears 200, a frightening new question must be asked:  Are the fires an act of jihad?  If no, then an even more frightening question must follow: Why not?

Earlier this year, US intelligence channels identified postings by a group called the Al-Ikhlas Islamic Network that was urging members of the Religion of Peace in Australia, the US, Europe and Russia to start forest fires.  The life-threatening arson was fine with Allah, they said, because “scholars have justified chopping down and burning the infidels’ forests when they do the same to our lands.”  From Australia’s The Age:

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 all the usual disclaimers, what a sick excuse for a religion! Who, other than those that haven’t advanced beyond the 7th Century, still believes that fear is an effective motivator for spiritual matters?  Do they think Australians - or Californians - would fall on our knees and submit to a god who glorifies such reprehensible, sub-human behavior?

The paper quotes Adam Dolnik, director of research at the University of Wollongong’s Centre for Transnational Crime Prevention, saying “forest fire jihad” is evidence of desperation by jihadists, since it is an inglorious form of indirect jihad, resorted to only because efforts for grander actions are difficult to pull off in our post-9/11, post-Bali, post-Madrid, post-London world.

I’m not resting easy.  If it was an Islamist terror action, two hundred dead is two hundred dead, whether they died by glorious or inglorious jihad.  And you know SoCal will be dry next summer.

Hat-tip: Jim

W

ith this headline, Salon launched its story about Obama’s executive orders yesterday directing that Guantanamo be closed within a year, ending the CIA’s use of secret overseas prisons, and banning “coercive” interrogation methods:

The Power of the Pen

When a nation is involved in fighting an enemy that has promised to destroy that nation, a pen can be powerful. It can sign acts of war and bigger military budgets, and can put into law new bills and executive orders that give the nation what it needs to execute its defense successfully.  It can even sign orders bestowing honors on its citizens who have given their lives in defense of the land they love.

But what power did Pres. Obama’s pen have yesterday as it took away some of the more extreme procedures we’ve  used in fighting the Islamists jihadists?  Perhaps Salon’s subhead can give us an idea:

On Day 2 of his administration, President Obama reverses key Bush “war on terror” policies, signing orders that end torture, close the CIA’s black sites and phase out Guantanamo

When did the war on terror get quotes around it? If they understand the subtleties of our language, jihadists around the globe must be firing off their Kalashnikovs with joy, especially when they realize that it’s not just Salon that’s used quotes to minimize our actions against their war. Here’s WaPo:

Bush’s ‘War’ On Terror Comes to a Sudden End

President Obama yesterday eliminated the most controversial tools employed by his predecessor against terrorism suspects. With the stroke of his pen, he effectively declared an end to the “war on terror,” as President George W. Bush had defined it, signaling to the world that the reach of the U.S. government in battling its enemies will not be limitless.

Apparently the WaPo editors can’t decide exactly where the quotes should go, as they’ve allowed different styles in the headline and the lead.  The headline, interestingly enough, makes the terror real, but the war against it somehow phony.

And how happy the bad guys of the world must be to learn that under Obama, all the powers of the American superpower will not be used to wipe them out.  But they’d better not let too much happiness seep into their dour, fatalistic selves because Scott Ott at Scrappleface has found some more quote marks:

‘War On Terror’ Ends, Obama Starts ‘Case Against Terror’

With the signing of executive orders to close the terrorist detention center at Guantanamo Bay, to prepare to grant full U.S. citizen legal rights to foreign enemy combatants, to end the threat to ‘high value targets’ of ‘enhanced interrogation’ techniques, and to shutter so-called ‘black sites’ operated by the CIA in foreign countries, President Barack Obama sent a clear signal yesterday that George Bush’s ‘War on Terror’ is over, and Barack Obama’s ‘Case Against Terror’ has begun.

“America’s enemies should not view these moves as surrender,” said an unnamed White House spokesman, “but rather as an effort to level the playing field and to make sure that our enemies get a fair shake.”

“The battle will now be joined in the Case Against Terror,” he said, “not with lethal weapons, but with subpoenas and motions and detailed arguments. The next time one of these criminals destroys one of our skyscrapers, detonates himself in a shopping mall, poisons our water supply or unleashes a dirty bomb in a crowded subway station, he does so with the knowledge that the full power of the U.S. legal system will be unleashed on him, with no limit to the cash damages that his victims’ families can collect.”

Meanwhile, unless Barry & Michelle take in the Guantanamo detainees as West Wing house guests, signs are Obama’s lefty pen might just lead to some really big problems:

BEIRUT, Lebanon — The emergence of a former Guantánamo Bay detainee as the deputy leader of Al Qaeda’s Yemeni branch has underscored the potential complications in carrying out the executive order President Obama signed Thursday that the detention center be shut down within a year.

The militant, Said Ali al-Shihri, is suspected of involvement in a deadly bombing of the United States Embassy in Yemen’s capital, Sana, in September. He was released to Saudi Arabia in 2007 and passed through a Saudi rehabilitation program for former jihadists before resurfacing with Al Qaeda in Yemen. (source)

Wow. This guy got the best we and the Saudis had to offer and he still went back to the dark side, like he really believed in it or something. And:

Terror suspects who have been held but released from Guantanamo Bay are increasingly returning to the fight against the United States and its allies, the Pentagon said Tuesday.

Sixty-one detainees released from the Navy base prison in Cuba are believed to have rejoined the fight, said Pentagon spokesman Geoff Morrell, citing data from December. That’s up from 37 as of March 2008, he said. (Navy Times)

You know, this isn’t all that shocking.  What do you think our soldiers and Marines would do in similar circumstances?  Freed from enemy prison camps (yeah, that would happen!), do we really think they would docilely say that the jihadists aren’t all that bad and they’ll just sit this one out from now on?  Hardly! So why do we expect something different from jihadist enemy combatants?

Liberals, though, always expect the best from everyone, and always refuse to base their expectations on what history and experience have taught us.

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here are some powerful punches and head-clearing uppercuts among this week’s champion sluggers of the blogosphere, as presented by the Don King of Blogs, The Watcher of Weasels.

In the Watcher’s Council corner, newcomer Right Truth scored a TKO with P.C./D.C., a rather long-ish but spot on piece on the difficulties we find ourselves in because we fight under PC rules, while our opponents from Islam don’t. (See how the boxing images all tie together?). Here’s the ring girl, strutting a particularly good paragraph from the piece:

Now, here’s where political correctness comes into play. We cannot fight the war on terrorism by singling out Arabs or other Muslims. We must consciously give “equal consideration” to that old lady in the wheelchair during airport screenings. We must conclude that openly hostile and questionably patriotic Dearborn, Michigan does not engage in terrorist recruitment or support. We must always address the “Palestinian Question” whenever we seek reasons why some people are quite prepared to blow themselves up in order to kill us. And, the grand finale, we cannot undertake diplomacy without somehow laying the blame for world destruction squarely upon the Israelis. Do you detect a trend here?

Runner-up Joshua Pundit also wrote on our war against the jihadists in Defeating the Death Cult, which got the most points on my score card for its analysis of how existing laws could be used to suppress eager jihadists at home:

As for legislating dangerous ideologies, our courts have been down this road before when faced with the communist conspiracy here in America in the 1940’s and 1950’s. Those laws exist and are quite plain and provide a firm and above all constitutional foundation when it comes dealing with most to the problems we have in the US with some practitioners of Islam and the people overseas who export jihad into America. And a few perfectly constitutional tweaks would cover the rest.

He cites, for example, how US code of justice, TITLE 18, PART I, CHAPTER 115, § 2385, § 2385. Advocating overthrow of Government is applicable and could be used to make the imams of the Saudi-funded Wahhabist mosques shut up.

My piece, Jihad’s Phony Hostages, on the Jew massacre in Mumbai the MSM continually called a hostage-taking, came in fourth.

And in the non-Council corner, we have a somewhat clear winner, and first on my non-Council score card, Elder of Ziyon’s Islamist strategy vs. Western tactics, an essay on a familiar theme that needs repeating:

The West is attuned to short-term thinking. Perhaps this is because of the need to elect new leaders every few years, but it sacrifices long-term strategy for vaporous short-term gains. It would be laughable to even consider that the West has a plan to defeat the Islamist world that spans more than a decade.

The Arab and Muslim psyche, on the other hand, is very much attuned to long-term trends. A hundred years is but a blip in Islamic history and, from their perspective, Israel has not yet lasted as long as the Crusades. The battle takes decades and centuries; it is not something that has to be mopped up by the next election cycle.

As a result, every Western concession to the Islamic world is tactical from the Western perspective and strategic from the Islamic perspective. Tactics without strategy is a loser’s game.

Note that I said a “somewhat clear winner.” I didn’t vote for my own entry, Stratfor’s Strategic Motivations for the Mumbai Attack, because my free subscription had apparently timed out and I got a different page from the link. Assuming all Council members got this page, I voted first place to the Elder; had I realized others were seeing the Stratfor page, I would have voted it into first, giving it 2/3 more points and the Elder 1/3 less, and we would have had a different winner. The piece states early on:

More important than the question of the exact group that carried out the attack, however, is the attackers’ strategic end. There is a tendency to regard terror attacks as ends in themselves, carried out simply for the sake of spreading terror. In the highly politicized atmosphere of Pakistan’s radical Islamist factions, however, terror frequently has a more sophisticated and strategic purpose. Whoever invested the time and took the risk in organizing this attack had a reason to do so. Let’s work backward to that reason by examining the logical outcomes following this attack.

Then it looks at four different strategic/geo-political ramifications of the attack and leaves you pretty much gasping for breath by the time it’s all wrapped up.

Also in second place was American Thinker’s The Legacy of Jihad in India, a rather dry but very important historic analysis of Islam’s ongoing attacks on Hindus, stretching back nearly 1500 years.

The 570 year period between the initial Arab Muslim razzias (ordered by Caliph Umar) to pillage Thana (on the West Indian coast near Maharashtra) in 636—637 C.E., and the establishment of the Delhi Sultanate (under Qutub—ud—din Aibak, a Turkish slave soldier), can be divided into four major epochs: (I) the conflict between the Arab invaders and the (primarily) Hindu resisters on the Western coast of India from 636—713 C.E.; (II) the Arab and Turkish Muslim onslaughts against the kingdom of Hindu Afghanistan during 636—870 C.E.; (III) repeated Turkish efforts to subdue the Punjab from 870 C.E. to 1030 C.E. C.E. highlighted by the devastating campaigns of Mahmud of Ghazni (from 1000— 1030 C.E.); and finally (IV) Muhammad Ghauri’s conquest of northwestern India and the Gangetic valley between 1175 and 1206 C.E.

I hate the PC C.E. designation, BTW. Give me AD any day, and praise the Lord. But that (and the dryness of the piece) aside, you need to know the awful barbarism Islam has thrust on India for no reason other than India is peopled with Hindus. Only then can you really understand the Mumbai attack.

See all the winners at Watcher of Weasels. And Watcher, you need a bit more pomade.

H

ere’s Azam Amir Kasav, 21, as far as we know the sole surviving terrorist from the Mumbai terror attacks.

Does he look a bit dazed to you? It might be the painkillers he’s been given, or the interrogations he’s been through, or the awesome knowledge that he’s now a hero to millions of Muslims … or it might be this:

The Mumbai terrorists may have pumped themselves full of drugs to keep going during their murderous three-day rampage.

Indian police sources say tests on the bodies of dead Islamic fanatics revealed traces of stimulant drugs.

One said: “We found injections containing traces of cocaine and LSD left behind by the terrorists and later found drugs in their blood.

“There was also evidence of steroids, which isn’t uncommon in terrorists. These men were all toned, suggesting they had been doing some heavy training for the attacks. (Source)

Gosh, and here I thought all-powerful Allah gave his terrorist warriors all the special powers they need to carry out despicable, sinful, stomach-turning acts in his name. (Not really. It’s long been common knowledge that Islam’s suicide bombers and terror commandos are hopped up and stoned out when they go to their glorious martyrdom Hell. That is, if they’re not mentally retarded or unknowing children.)

And here’s one more thought about the photo: It’s a testament to the higher status of most civilizations, and the lower status of nearly all Islamic nations, that the photo exists at all. We see Kasav’s face wound treated, and his body hooked up to a medical device. If Kasav had been an American soldier captured in any of the fronts of Islamist terror’s war on us, we would see only a picture of him beheaded, or him mutilated, or his corpse dragged through the streets to the hysterical cheers of onlookers.

But it wasn’t the other way around, so we can look directly into the dazed eyes of horrific Islamist evil. And we can pray for his eternal soul.