So says Hugh Fitzgerald at Jihad Watch. His words may be the beginning of a convergence of those with more voice who can be heard over the din of the apologists and the “why-can’t-we-all-just-get-along” crowd, and all the rest of the misguided and ignorant who refuse to read the texts which would give them the information they need to defend themselves:

Mr. Fitzgerald’s words are echoed in the statements of Geert Wilders, who has finally yelled “Stop!” from the confines of the hiding place in which he lives for protection from the Netherlands’ jihadists, who want to kill him. Interviewed by Andrew Stuttaford in this week’s National Review (subscription required for full article), Wilders is unapologetic in “proclaiming the superiority of Western values

Perhaps the chorus will swell. Mr. Fitzgerald at Jihad Watch delineates the five kinds of fellow travelers which keep the real melody of Islam from being heard for the dissonant, martial music it is, has been, and always will be:

1. Those born into Islam who see it for what it is but are too embarrassed to speak up.

2. Then there are the “converts” who know little of the real deal. Islam was just the last stop in their spiritual search and it’s too much trouble to get back on the bus. Their Islam is an “imaginary, willed construct” which has little to do with reality.

3. Those who have been bought off by Arab interests. These fellow travelers are not Muslims. Instead, their infidel derrieres are perched “on a well-endowed chair (or) the wherewithal has been supplied for (the) Center for Muslim-Christian this-and-that”…in other words, no biting the hand that feeds you.

4. The cynics who know it won’t work but refuse to say so, not finding fault with the extremists and the violent, but directing us instead to the more ‘moderate’ voices of Islam.

5. The last group is characterized by its narrow education at the feet of Bernard Lewis, who is knowledgeable, but internally and constantly self-contradictory. He claims that Islam is all right and then frets about the “inevitable… islamization of Europe… before the end of the century.”

So what is to be done? Mr. Fitzgerald suggests education for a start.

Then we close the purse.

There you have it. Two people who believe, as Gates of Vienna has been saying, that dhimmitude is not only possible but also very likely if we have eyes but will not see, ears but will not hear…

How can anyone see or hear when plagued with the devious and dissolute din produced by the MSM?

Jihad is forever, folks, or for as long as it takes to make the world safe for Allah. And once the world has “submitted” then the Sunni and Shi’ite and Wahhabi and Sufi, etc., can turn on one another, purifying doctrine right down to the last man standing.

 
In an April 5 UPI story posted on Science Daily, Anwar Iqbal writes about a Washington D.C. seminar which focused on the problem of extremist religious education in Pakistan:

The United States wants Pakistan to crack down on the madrassas and curb the jihadist indoctrination that takes place in them. It sees a modern secular education in the arts, mathematics, and science as the best antidote to Islamic extremism in the schools.

Not everybody at the seminar agreed with Mr. Kardar. Prof. Tahir Andrabi

Prof. Andrabi’s words are encouraging, but note what his alternative implies: poor children in Pakistan simply fail to attend school, thus remaining ignorant and illiterate. This is not a recipe for resisting Islamist indoctrination.

Prof. Anita Weiss spoke about the need for Pakistan and the United States to act jointly to address the problem of education:

Just because students are exposed to modern technology and educated in the use of computers, that does not mean they are any less inclined to become mujaheddin:

The web is a powerful weapon, but it is a double-edged sword. Those of us who oppose the Great Islamic Jihad in the blogosphere are harnessing the “distributed intelligence of the internet”, but we would do well to remember that the enemy can do the same thing.

Our advantage is a commitment to open discourse and the truth. A totalitarian ideology, whether Islamist or anything else, cannot thrive and spread without suppressing alternative points of view.

Keep the lights on.

 
At the Museum of Hoaxes site, commenter Arabian has translated the mysterious page from the Arabic. He says, “This hoax has been doing the rounds of Islamic forums for a month. I’ll try to translate the Arabic page you posted (I’m bored:- ))”:

This is quite a perplexing hoax: I googled eight different ways on the keywords involved and still can’t find any indications of an event used as the basis of the post. Apparently the hoaxer made it up out of whole cloth.

But where is Snopes on Gates-gate? When I search there, I still get: “Sorry, no matches were found containing bill gates islam.”

Not wanting to post any additional keywords to our blog and thus draw in even more searchers, I hereby abandon this topic. Unless, of course, any more interesting or amusing information turns up.

 
(Previous posts on this topic are here and here.)

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4/14/05 Update: An entertaining variant on one of the searches came in this morning: “bill gates” jew islam. Did the searcher assume Bill Gates was Jewish because he is rich?
 

 
Strategy Page has an insightful essay into the current flux in Afghanistan’s regular Army. A mix of Soviet leftovers, former warlords, deserters, and anti-Taliban resistance fighters is being trained by NATO personnel to more closely resemble a traditional Western military.

They have their work cut out for them. The hit-and-run, capriciously revengeful tribal warfare these men were raised to rubs up against the ethos and rigorous standards of the Western warrior. Twenty-first century combat training seems “endless and exhausting.” All those glory, gory war movies failed to show the sheer boredom of endless repetition necessary to produce a skilled infantryman.

What the recruits admire, though, are the American Special Forces and it is this image that keeps them from dropping out. The Soviet soldiers these men fought against often fled when attacked; the Americans fought back fiercely and that example has served to change their thinking about ‘modern’ armies and the definition of courage.

The NATO/US personnel doing the training are hampered by the lack of NCOs (non-commissioned officers). Under the more familiar Soviet system, sergeants had little authority. Looking for mature specimens among those who have volunteered, trainers are attacking the problem piecemeal, rewarding initiative and assigning responsibility. Some men work out well, some don’t.

The officer problem is thornier. Mid-level and senior officers come from either the warlord population or Russian-trained veterans in the Afghan military. Both find the idea of treating their men as well-trained, intelligent and capable troops “exotic” at best. Those who have been willing to try the new ways are pleasantly surprised.

The author notes a shift in perspective in the civilian population. The latter are used to bandit-soldiers who operate in rape-and-pillage mode. As the army morphs into a professional cadre, their disciplined behavior has been welcomed by average citizens. He wonders, though, if these new professional soldiers will be high-jacked by ambitious officers in attempts of government takeovers.

Given the investment by NATO and the US, not to mention the sweat equity of the Afghan soldier, this may be less likely with each passing year. Old ways die hard, but the taste of life lived under the rule of law may be an irresistible force.

Who knows, perhaps the need for warlords will fade away, taking the life of banditry with it.

 
The CNN headline this morning reads:

Bombs target U.S. military vehicles

Click the link and start to read the story:

Notice the good news, not evident from the headline, was that the bombers were not successful.

But one has to scroll down through acres of the standard MSM litany to find a paragraph just before the end of the story:

I propose an alternate headline, based on the same raw data and drawn from the same news story:

US forces score successes against the terrorists in Iraq.
 

 
If one gives credence to the likes of CAIR, Muslims in this country are on the verge of persecution, as evidenced by a Fox television program which depicts — gasp! — Muslim terrorists. One presumes that a more realistic portrayal would have the typical terrorist be a neo-Nazi born-again Christian skinhead, or something similar.

In other parts of the world, however, millions of people suffer from more tangible forms of religious persecution, and those persecuted are most likely Christians. Consider the “stans”, the former Soviet Socialist Republics of Central Asia. Under Communism, religious persecution was egalitarian: all believers were discriminated against equally. But with the departure of the commissars, the Muslim majority is free to exert its strength in the authoritarian states left behind.

Persecution News reported in 2003 on events in Uzbekistan:

More recently, ASSIST News Service has reported:

Contemplate for a moment the ominous phrase: an illegal religious sect. CAIR has yet to face such conditions in this country, unless one counts the shutting down of the Islamist “charities” that funnel money to al-Qaeda and Hamas.

The ANS article goes on to say,

So publicizing the plight of Christians in Uzbekistan in the Western media makes stepped-up persecution more likely.

Human Rights Without Frontiers reported:

Note that in Uzbekistan, 100 signatures on a petition are required before the government will permit the establishment of a church.

No wonder people come to America.

In this country the established religion is, of course, Orthodox Secularism, but Christians face no persecution by the authorities. The Christian religion is vital and confident, exercising its ministry here and abroad.

However, there are discouraging signs that a “religious test” may soon be applied to those who would hold public office. Witness the ordeal of Bill Pryor at the hands of the Senate Judiciary Committee. His Catholic faith was held by some of the Democrats on the committee to put him outside the mainstream and make him unfit for public office. We are approaching the point where sincere religious faith is enough to have a public officeholder branded a “theocrat” by the mainstream media.

The Orthodox Secularists who create this new atmosphere do not intend to do the journeywork of the Islamists; in fact, just the opposite is true: they are as adamant in their opposition to Islamic intolerance as anybody else.

But make no mistake about it: the deliberate and systematic undermining of public Christianity creates a spiritual void in our civic life, and works in a kind of synergy with the Islamist goals. One only has to look at “Eurabia” to see what happens when Christianity is debilitated and the post-Christian polities emerge.

When religious belief is routinely trashed and denigrated and mocked and belittled, a kind of spiritual enervation takes hold of the body politic, leaving it empty at the center and ripe for appropriation by those whose zeal is strong and pure and unyielding.

Watch for it in Europe, and fear for it here.

Prince Abdullah addressed the board meeting of the King Abdul Aziz Public Library in Riyadh yesterday. He used the opportunity as a platform to establish the important role of the library in broadening knowledge and “obliterating ignorance” throughout the Kingdom.

The library’s supervisor, Faisal Muammar, estimated the number of volumes at more than 1.2 million books. He also described the library’s latest and most ambitious project: publication of a Saudi Arabian Encyclopedia. The first volume, about Region Seven — Riyadh territory — will be ready this year. There was no mention of how many volumes will comprise the series, though Prince Abdullah did say

Depends on what you mean by “authentic” perhaps. The Cambridge Dictionary of American English has this definition: “being what it is claimed to be;” and suggests ‘genuine’ as a synonym. Somehow it doesn’t seem likely that anyone outside the Kingdom will be ready to apply this adjective to the Saudi encyclopedia. Though perhaps outsiders might discuss slavery (abolished in 1961), or the fact that the number of imported foreign workers is about twenty five percent of the total population. Many of them come from the poorest of the poor countries and work as indentured servants. Sometimes they get paid, sometimes they don’t. The latter is called slavery. Read the whole report.

Meanwhile, Prince Abdullah has a new idea — new to him, at any rate, though ageless in its essentials. Every other attempt in history to control thinking has failed utterly. Then again, history is not a strong point in this benighted land. What doesn’t fit is obliterated.

???”explaining the true teachings of Islam and driving home the merits of moderation and tolerance”??? Excuse me? The oxymoron of the day perhaps? By all means let us drive home the merits of moderation and tolerance. There’s no point in hanging around where you don’t speak the language. Someone get the chauffeur and give these ladies a ride back.

In one place the Prince is absolutely correct. A little “aberration” and the whole cardboard House of Saud will collapse. The clan will have to grab their already-packed-and-waiting luggage and head for France…imagine the scramble for seats on the airplane.

Can you see it now? Nervous Princes asking themselves “what would Mohammed do?” Yes, that’s correct: he’d take the money and run.

 
I found this at The Museum of Hoaxes:

The image link is here.

Oh, and by the way: our traffic is through the roof due to this hoax, but this fact gives us no pleasure.

 
Why is this soldier downcast? Time magazine would like you to believe that he has been demoralized by his experience in a senseless war.

But perhaps he has just learned that when he returns from active duty, his service and sacrifices for his country will be mocked by the mainstream media, who will report virtually nothing of the good he has done and the successes he has achieved, but instead will focus on the violence of terrorists and give prominence to statements issued by the mouthpieces of terrorists. He knows that he will be honored and respected at Instapundit, Powerline, Blackfive, Mudville Gazette, Belmont Club, here at Gates of Vienna, and on many other blogs. The blogosphere recognizes the phenomenal success our military has had in the war against the Great Jihad, but the newspaper that plops onto his front porch in the pre-dawn dimness will open to reveal stories that are selected and spun to make him and his country look bad, so long as he and his comrades are waging a successful war on behalf of a Republican president.

There’s no need to analyze why this happens; it’s all so depressingly familiar: the overwhelmingly liberal opinions and Democrat voting habits of those who manage, select, and write the news; the great and growing cultural chasm between those who fight our wars and those who write copy about them; the sophisticated condescension of the elite literati towards those who practice a rough and dangerous skill like soldiering.

But the story discussed here and at Belmont Club yesterday has exposed a new level of corruption and deceit. A captured cameraman named Abdel Amir Younes Hussein, acting as a paid CBS stringer, appears to have been at the site of an IED incident in Mosul, having been given prior notice which allowed him to get the most advantageous shots, all in order that CBS should have the most valuable and graphic propaganda to display on national television screens to the disadvantage of our military and our President. This was not Mr. Hussein’s first rendezvous with terrorist destiny; images found in his camera reveal a number of previous terrorist incidents. The placing and timing of his shots indicate that he could not possibly have been able to take them without the close co-operation of the terrorists.

For all intents and purposes, the man is a terrorist himself, a terrorist paid by and acting on behalf of CBS. As I asked yesterday, Where is the outrage?

Presumably there are many others like him, paid by Western news services and helping to organize incidents which maim and kill American and Iraqi military personnel and untold numbers of civilians. The executives of major news organizations, acting from ideology and in order to make a profit, organize a process which helps maintain the fiction of a successful insurgency in Iraq.

The evolution of this meme is unprecedented: a story created and maintained by major news media and passed off as a grassroots resistance, all in order to serve a left-wing ideological agenda and do damage to a war president and his political party.

When there was still honor in the world, this behavior would have been labeled treason and sedition, and the perpetrators would have had to answer for it, sometimes with their lives. But we live in a degraded time.

CBS, I say to you: There is blood on your hands, and you have much to answer for.

 
The Arab News reports that a German news agency believes that the Philippine government is investigating reports of forcible conversions to Islam of Filipino workers in Saudi Arabia.

The allegations were met with an immediate denial by Badr A-Olayan, director of the Islamic Education Foundation. Several Filipino workers were brought forth to deny the story.

It remains to be seen whether or not the report is true. If it turns out that Filipino workers start showing up as jihad terrorists, the old Islamic mamluk tradition of slave soldiers may be operative again.

Is history repeating itself? Let’s wait and see what shows up.

Why is this an important question?

For the last week or so, due to a quirky coincidence of keywords, about 15% of the traffic on this blog has been due to web searches (primarily Google) on “Bill Gates convert Islam” and similar combinations. In the last two days the frequency has been increasing.

What is going on here? A search on Snopes turns up nothing for “Bill Gates Islam”. My Google searches have been as fruitless as (I presume) those of all the new visitors to “Gates of Vienna”. All I can locate are stories about Mr. Gates’ Foundation granting money for relief efforts in Afghanistan.

Is this an urban legend? A “forward this email to everyone you know” hoax? A rumor spreading by word of mouth?

We’re dying to know. Anyone with any information is welcome to email us.

“It’s a total hoax and yes I found this blog from doing a google search.

“It was posted on an Islamic Arab site knowing it was a lie. They won’t get many good deeds from Allah like this.”

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Final Update (4/22/05): If you found this page directly via a search, please be aware that I know this thing is a hoax, with all the details. My later posts on the topic are here and here.

 
It seems that a cameraman with an inside track to the terrorists has been captured by US forces in Iraq. CNN reports:

As Belmont Club reported last December, the miraculous appearance of cameramen at precisely the right moment during terrorist attacks appears impossible without prior notification by and co-ordination with the terrorists themselves. Now one of these “journalists” seems to have been caught in the act. At Haifa Street it was an AP stringer; this time he was working for CNN:

The US military wants the evidence in the photographer’s camera:

We are accustomed to the idea that the major news media in America are fellow travellers with our enemies. From Walter Duranty and his cozy relationship with Stalin, through the television newscasts during the Tet Offensive, to Peter Arnett in Baghdad, the activities of our journalists have often given aid and comfort to those who are implacably opposed to us.

But first at Haifa Street, and now in Mosul, we have something different. How many more are there? The actions of CBS border on active collaboration with the enemy.

Where is the outrage?

 
In military strategy this might be seen as a flank attack. Academe probably has another term, and Islam yet a third. However it’s decoded, though, Tariq Ramadan’s latest move is brilliant.

Ramadan’s claim to fame in the US lies in Homeland Security’s revocation of his work visa last year. He’d taken on a prestigious tenured position at Notre Dame and had done all the preliminary work — found a house, schools for the children, etc. — and was within nine days of leaving Switzerland for South Bend when the news came.

Despite all his connections, which included Bill Clinton, William Cohen and a designation by Time magazine as one of the top 100 spiritual innovators, Mr. Ramadan was considered a risk.

It could be his family: Grandpa was the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt; Dad helped establish the Saudis’ proselytizing World Islamic League. That was before moving on to Switzerland in 1961 to start the Islamic Center of Geneva — where Osama bin Laden studied. Then there’s his brother, Hani, the director of Geneva’s Islamic Center. Swiss intelligence thinks he’s involved with Middle Eastern terrorists. And Tariq is on the Board of Directors.

Lee Smith, weighing in on the debate last year, dubbed Ramadan “gentle Jihadist” for his views:

So there Tariq Ramadan sits in Geneva, his chance for tenure as a US academic gone…for the moment. What’s a fellow going to do to get back in the swim?

Here’s one way: issue a ‘world-wide’ call to Muslims for a moratorium on hudud.

Ramadan further said the political systems and the state of the majority Muslim societies do not guarantee just or equal treatment of individuals before the law.

The explosions began immediately.

The former President of the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA) chose a reductio ad absurdum to make his point: “When this call comes from a respectable scholar like Dr. Tariq Ramadan, it may encourage others also to disrespect the laws of Allah…some may start calling for moratorium on the family law of Islam also, and some others on the business and finance laws of Islam, and some may ask for moratorium on the whole Shari’ah“.

Another alarmist also invoked the slippery slope “for the sake of the Muslim Ummah… If we call today for an international moratorium on corporal punishment, stoning and the death penalty, then tomorrow I am so worried that they may ask Muslims to suspend their Friday Prayer.”

Yet another worthy, this one a member of the European Council for Fatwa and Research and the International Association of Muslim Scholars (IAMS) fretted that “such a call will only stir too much ado about an issue that is by no means a priority… “It will further beef up seculars and enemies of Islam, who will step up their war on Islam.”

There were predictions and imprecations and scoldings. Muslims would be pitted against one another. This was the fault of women: it occurred after the woman-led prayer in the United States and the opening of a women-only mosque in Holland. Now a call for a moratorium on hudud from Switzerland. Who would close Pandora’s box?

Ah, hudud. The justice and mercy of Islam, the peaceable kingdom. Allah forbid that an adulteress go unstoned, a lewd adolescent unhanged.

Meanwhile, where hudud has reached its fullest flower, they’re selling girl children in the streets of Tehran.

And Tariq Ramadan has proven again his skill at the practice of taqiyya. A virtuoso performance: he sounds so Western and compassionate and a rule-of-law kind of guy. Meanwhile, he never has to worry that this un-Islamic idea will ever be implemented.

Is this genius or what?

A Jewish Perspective

Last year the Presbyterian Church voted a resolution calling on churches to give up their investments in Israel, in protest of Israeli treatment of the Palestinians. The reactions presented here on both sides of this issue, interestingly enough, were all written by Jews.

Shamai Leibowitz, in the March 24th edition of The Electronic Intifada wrote,

Mr. Leibowitz, like many people on the left, offer no prescription for achieving the “right of the State of Israel to exist securely and peacefully”. Any attempt at self-defense on the part of the Jewish state is not permissible. We are required to put our faith in the eternal “peace process”, and somehow peace will come about. Any attempt on the part of Israel to fight back against the terrorists who would destroy it is condemned as contributing to the “cycle of violence”.

Aside from wishful thinking and moral preening, the World Council of Churches has nothing to offer as a practical means of attaining the elusive peace. Make nice with the thug who comes to kill you. Close your eyes and cross your fingers, and maybe he will go away.

Not everyone agrees, however. Some Jews are planning a counter-campaign. In the April 1st Jewish Week, James D. Besser reports:

A nice phrase, that: affirmative action. Maybe it will catch on.

On March 3rd, writing in Washington Jewish Week, Rabbi David J. Forman said,

Yes, the moral superiority of the Presbyterian Church is undeniable. They were on the front lines protesting the brutal Chinese occupation of Tibet, and the ongoing human rights abuses there, were they not? No?

Surely they were the first to protest the presence of Cuba on the U.N. Human Rights Commission… Well, maybe that communiqué will be issued next week.

And the Presbyterians were up in arms about the Syrian occupation of Lebanon, and the gassing of the Kurds by Saddam, and the abuse and disenfranchisement of women in much of the Muslim world… NOT.

No, for some peculiar reason it is the Jews of Israel who are singled out, the same Jews who run a successful democracy in an implacably hostile neighborhood and have survived for more than half a century against all the odds. The Jews, whose self-defense is waged under the most stringent human-rights standards in the world, more stringent than those of the United States. If the countries of the EU had any ability to defend themselves, they would not do so more ethically than Israel.

The UN has dedicated an entire agency to maintaining festering camps of Jew-hating refugees on Israel’s borders; it has not done so for any other country. Only Israel is forbidden by the edict of the UN to construct a wall defending its citizens from those who would destroy it. Only Israel is singled out for condemnation in resolution after resolution for the simple act of defending itself.

Perhaps the Presbyterian Church has forgotten another form of human-rights abuse. As Rabbi Forman has said: I must also protest the most basic human rights offense committed against my people, as demonstrated anew by the edicts of both the Presbyterian Church and now the World Council of Churches: The human rights abuse of anti-Semitism.