Al Qaeda in Iraq publicizes one of its failures.

VIDEO HERE.

In No god, but God: The Origins, Evolution, and Future of Islam, Reza Aslan argued that modern Islamic terrorism was a symptom of a struggle for the soul of Islam among believers in which the West is more of prop than a player.

Aslan’s book is a well-written introduction to Islam’s history and future — a very good and easy read. His point accords with a meaty article by Lawrence Wright in the New Yorker about Dr. Fadl, an Egyptian surgeon and contemporary of Ayman al-Zawahiri, Osama bin Laden’s #2 guy.

Dr. Fadl also wrote the book, literally, that paved the way for today’s jihad.

Twenty years ago, he wrote two of the most important books in modern Islamist discourse; Al Qaeda used them to indoctrinate recruits and justify killing.

But now Dr. Fadl, sitting in an Egyptian prison, has reconsidered his theological arguments that justified so much mayhem and has a new book that says true Muslims are prohibited from committing aggression.

Fadl’s ideas carry weight and his reversal has set off an ideological war.

The roots of this ideological war within Al Qaeda go back forty years, to 1968, when two precocious teen-agers met at Cairo University’s medical school. Zawahiri, a student there, was then seventeen, but he was already involved in clandestine Islamist activity. Although he was not a natural leader, he had an eye for ambitious, frustrated youths like him who believed that destiny was whispering in their ear.

1968 again. What a rotten year that’s turned out to be. The New Yorker piece is really too long to excerpt. It’s all online; print it out and have a read.

Nothing demonstrates the bias of Big Baloney like the treatment of two books by two former members of the Bush administration.

Former press secretary Scott McClellan’s dirt dishing book is treated to a front page review in today’s LA Times. Douglas Feith, who wielded greater influence on policy as Undersecretary of Defense, wrote a heavily-sourced book that every historian of this period will own.

Feith’s book, as we’ve noted, has not been reviewed by any of Big Baloney’s big names — not the NYT, WaPo or LAT. That they’re ignoring a book by a man they demonized as a warmongering neocon speaks volumes.

But back to McClellan, one of his beefs was:

“In the permanent campaign era, it was all about manipulating sources of public opinion to the president’s advantage,” McClellan writes.

Oh, do tell. Why would that be? And how well did that work out?

When the New York Times and Washington Post decide that you’re the enemy, you have a second flank to defend, 24/7. (And when you’re golden, like Obama, you can rest easy.)

One anecdote from Feith’s book should give everyone pause, liberals and conservatives alike, because it demonstrates the sick interface between government and media that disserves us all.

Shortly after 9/11, Rumsfeld and others inside the Pentagon decided that our war on Islamist fascism should be fought both militarily and ideologically. The latter should have been the province of the State Department, but, Feith writes, “neither [Colin] Powell or [Richard] Armitage saw the philosophical dimension of the war as particularly important.”

So with Rumsfeld’s blessing, Feith created the Office of Strategic Influence to fight jihadist ideology at the source. He assembled a staff and recruited Air Force General Simon Worden to run it. One of his original ideas was to create cheap, wireless-connected laptops and information kiosks that could be distributed in remote Pakistan where Madrassas were twisting young minds.

But OSI stepped on toes, both at State and inside the Pentagon, particularly with Victoria “Torie” Clark, Assistant Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs, who thought her department had authority over all “outreach” programs.

Just as OSI was getting going, on February 19, 2002, the New York Times ran a front page story citing unnamed “military officials” claiming that the…

“Pentagon is developing plans to provide news items, possibly even false ones, to foreign news media organizations as part of a new effort to influence public sentiment and policy makers in both friendly and unfriendly countries.”

The story said others “inside the Pentagon” were worried that this could undermine credibility of their efforts. The NYT went on to suggest…

“General Worden envisions a broad mission ranging from ‘black’ campaigns that use disinformation and other covert activities to ‘white’ public affairs that rely on truthful releases.”

The disinformation charge was untrue, but it spread quickly among a news media that distrusted and despised President Bush. Chris Matthews called OSI a plan “worthy of Joseph Goebbels.”

Such stories were readily retold and embellished by a hostile world media, always keen to promote anti-Americanism. Bush was traveling overseas and was badgered by questions about OSI.

OSI died in its cradle, on February 26, 2002. The State Department never picked up the initiative and it went undone, to the detriment of everyone in the western world. Feith writes of…

…the irony of an office formed to plan information operations had been blown away by a disinformation operation. Concentrating on foreign enemies, OSI hadn’t protected its back from other Pentagon officials. 

And from the New York Times.

New York Times: 

On the street, Malika El Aroud is anonymous in an Islamic black veil covering all but her eyes.

In her living room, Ms. El Aroud, a 48-year-old Belgian, wears the ordinary look of middle age: a plain black T-shirt and pants and curly brown hair. The only adornment is a pair of powder-blue slippers monogrammed in gold with the letters SEXY.

But it is on the Internet where Ms. El Aroud has distinguished herself. Writing in French under the name “Oum Obeyda,” she has transformed herself into one of the most prominent Internet jihadists in Europe.

She calls herself a female holy warrior for Al Qaeda. She insists that she does not disseminate instructions on bomb-making and has no intention of taking up arms herself. Rather, she bullies Muslim men to go and fight and rallies women to join the cause.

“It’s not my role to set off bombs — that’s ridiculous,” she said in a rare interview. “I have a weapon. It’s to write. It’s to speak out. That’s my jihad. You can do many things with words. Writing is also a bomb.”

Getting others to set off bombs? Not ridiculous, it seems.

Ms. El Aroud has not only made a name for herself among devotees of radical forums where she broadcasts her message of hatred toward the West. She also is well known to intelligence officials throughout Europe as simply “Malika” — an Islamist who is at the forefront of the movement by women to take a larger role in the male-dominated global jihad.

The authorities have noted an increase in suicide bombings carried out by women — the American military reports that 18 women have conducted suicide missions in Iraq so far this year, compared with 8 all of last year — but they say there is also a less violent yet potentially more insidious army of women organizers, proselytizers, teachers, translators and fund-raisers, who either join their husbands in the fight or step into the breach as men are jailed or killed.

“Women are coming of age in jihad and are entering a world once reserved for men,” said Claude Moniquet, president of the Brussels-based European Strategic Intelligence and Security Center. “Malika is a role model, an icon who is bold enough to identify herself. She plays a very important strategic role as a source of inspiration. She’s very clever — and extremely dangerous.”

Ms. El Aroud began her rise to prominence because of a man in her life. Two days before the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, her husband carried out a bombing in Afghanistan that killed the anti-Taliban resistance leader Ahmed Shah Massoud at the behest of Osama bin Laden. Her husband was killed, and she took to the Internet as the widow of a martyr.

Oh, how proud she must be. Read on.

This, by Kathy Shaidle, is depressing.

Mark Steyn is in the business of making predictions. The possible consequences of some of those predictions recently led him to make another one: “My career in Canada will be formally ended next month.”

How has it come to this?

On June 2, Steyn and Maclean’s magazine — the nation’s oldest newsweekly — are obliged to defend themselves against charges of “flagrant Islamophobia” at a British Columbia Human Rights Tribunal.

The saga began two years ago, when Maclean’s published an excerpt of Steyn’s bestselling book, America Alone, which asks how the West’s changing demographic profile — specifically, the difference between Muslim and non-Muslim birthrates — will affect its future.

In December 2007, the Canadian Islamic Congress (CIC) filed Human Rights Commission complaints against Steyn and the magazine in three different jurisdictions, charging them with “exposing Muslims to hatred and contempt” for, among other things, accurately quoting a Norwegian imam who boasted that Muslims were breeding “like mosquitoes.”

The CIC demanded that Maclean’s print five pages of unedited Islamist propaganda in the interest of “fairness” and “balance.” Maclean’s refused. In fact, publisher Ken Whyte’s response to the group — that he would rather see the magazine go bankrupt than bow to their blackmail — outraged the CIC as much as Steyn’s original article.

The story soon became an international cause célèbre. Unlike many other Canadians who’ve been caught in the HRC’s clutches over the last ten years (and subsequently ruined), Steyn and his co-defendants are well-connected and eloquent, with relatively deep pockets and high profiles. Their case has helped expose a bizarre quasi-judicial set-up that’s part extortion scheme, part secret police.

Now the petitions have been signed and the op-eds written, and members of Parliament faxed and emailed. There seemed to be little more to do than wait anxiously for that first tribunal to start.

Read it all.  On a cheerier note, here’s video of publisher Ezra Levant telling off the Alberta Human Rights Commissioner in January.

William Blackstone wrote, “It is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer.” Is it? Suppose Hitler had been one of those ten released to spare a single innocent?

Which brings us to Guantanamo Bay, where jihadis captured on battlefields in Afghanistan remain in US custody indefinitely. Should they be allowed to go? Consider this:

It’s a fair bet that no high-powered American law firm will lend a caring hand to the relatives of the seven Iraqis murdered last month by a suicide bomber named Abdullah Salih Al Ajmi and two accomplices. That’s too bad, seeing as how Ajmi was himself a beneficiary of some of that high-powered legal help.

Ajmi is a Kuwaiti who was 29 when he blew himself up in the northern city of Mosul in April. But before that he had spent more than three years as an enemy combatant at Guantanamo, where he was known as “Captive 220.” He was taken prisoner at Tora Bora, Afghanistan, after the fall of the Taliban, in whose service he had reportedly spent eight months. While in detention, he told interrogators that his intention was “to kill as many Americans” as he possibly could.

In April 2002, a group of Kuwaiti families retained the law firm of Shearman & Sterling to represent the Kuwaitis held at Guantanamo, including Ajmi. (An attorney at Shearman tells us the firm donated its fees to charity.) Ajmi was one of 12 Kuwaiti petitioners in whose favor the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 2004 in Rasul v. Bush, which held that the detainees were entitled to a habeas corpus hearing.

At the time, we wrote that Rasul had “opened the door to a flood of litigation. . . . This pretty much guarantees that the 600 or so Guantanamo detainees will bring 600 or so habeas corpus cases – perhaps in 600 or so different courtrooms, with 600 or so different judges demanding 600 or so different standards of what evidence constitutes a threat to the United States.”

The Pentagon seems to have understood this point only too well, because in November 2005 it released Ajmi into Kuwaiti custody before he could have his hearing. A Kuwaiti court later acquitted Ajmi of terrorism charges, and last month the Kuwaiti government issued Ajmi and his accomplices with passports, which they used to travel to Mosul via Syria.

Ajmi’s story is hardly unique. Some 500 detainees have been released from Guantanamo over the years, mostly into foreign custody. Another 65 of the remaining 270 detainees are also slated to go. Yet of all the prisoners released, the Pentagon is confident that only 38 pose no security threat. So much for the notion that the Gitmo detainees consist mostly of wrong-time, wrong-place innocents caught up in an American maw.

DUBAI (Reuters) - A Kuwaiti man released from the U.S. prison in Guantanamo Bay in 2005 has carried out a suicide bombing in Iraq, his cousin told

A friend of Abdullah Saleh al-Ajmi in Iraq informed his family that Abdullah carried out the attack in Mosul, his cousin Salem told the Dubai-based television channel.

“We were shocked by the painful news we received this afternoon … through a call from one of the friend’s of martyr Abdullah in Iraq,” said Salem al-Ajmi in a telephone interview aired by Arabiya.

He did not say when the suicide bombing happened.

Abdullah had been missing for two weeks and his family learned he left Kuwait illegally for Syria, he said. Abdullah had sent messages to his wife from Iraq.

Bruce Thornton reviews Lee Harris’s, The Suicide of Reason.

Sun Tzu wrote in The Art of War, “If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.” This dictum threatens to be prophetic of the West’s war against Islamic jihad. Our failure to understand the true origins and nature of jihad is as dangerous as our blindness to our own peculiar cultural weaknesses. As Lee Harris argues in his new book, both failures of knowledge are contributing to the “crash of Western civilization.”

Harris is an independent writer whose first book, Civilization and its Enemies, unabashedly called on America to accept its role as a superior civilization threatened by barbaric fanaticism from without and self-loathing cultural relativism from within. His new book explores in more depth the peculiar weakness of the liberal West: its “exaggerated confidence in the power of reason . . . [and] profound underestimation of the forces of fanaticism.”

The persistence of fanaticism, these days in the form of Islamic jihad, challenges the West’s cherished myth of inevitable progress fueled by the increase of knowledge and the improvement of human life. Yet such progress is not guaranteed, for “the law of the jungle can never be abolished.” The utilitarian and materialist goods by which the West judges progress — the “carpe diem” principle of “maximizing the happiness and pleasures of each individual” at the expense of one’s community, the world, or the future — are not typical historically of most peoples. Indeed, the existence of “rational actors,” as Harris calls them, people who in the pursuit of “enlightened self-interest” adjudicate conflict through “rational procedures,” is an anomaly, the “historical offspring of the specific cultures that produced the first generation of rational actors.”

Contrary to the assumptions of liberal West, then, such “rational actors” are not the “natural” man towards whom all humanity is evolving. Rather, “tribal actors” are more typical of humanity, those peoples who put the survival and flourishing of tribe ahead of the individual’s happiness, who unthinkingly accept and never question the superiority of their tribe and its values, and who work for the tribe’s success at any cost, particularly at the expense of other peoples deemed inferior simply because they are not members of the same tribe. Such people are “fanatics,” willing to die and kill for the group and its values, and unwilling to trade away those values for the material goods we in the West prize.

Bret Stephens:

Last year, imprisoned Egyptian radical Sayyed Imam Al-Sharif, a.k.a. “Dr. Fadl,” published “The Document of Right Guidance for Jihad Activity in Egypt and the World.” It is a systematic refutation of al Qaeda’s theology and methods, which is all the more extraordinary considering the source. Sayyed Imam, 57, was the first “emir” of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, many of whose members (including his longtime associate Ayman al-Zawahiri) later merged with Osama bin Laden and his minions to become al Qaeda. His 1988 book, “Foundations of Preparation for Holy War,” is widely considered the bible of Salafist jihadis.

Now he has recanted his former views. “The alternative” to violent jihadism, he says in an interview with the pan-Arab daily Al-Hayat (translated by Memri), “is not to kill civilians, foreigners and tourists, destroy property and commit aggression against the lives and property of those who are inviolable under the pretext of jihad. All of this is forbidden.”

Sayyed Imam is emphatic on the subject of the moral obligations of the would-be jihadist. “One who lacks the resources [to fight jihad] is forbidden to acquire money through forbidden means, like [burglary],” he says, adding that “Allah does not accept martyrdom as atonement for a mujahid’s debts.” As for a child’s obligations toward his parents, he adds that “it is not permitted to go out to fight jihad without the permission of both parents . . . because acting rightly with one’s parents is an individual obligation, and they have rights over their sons.”

“This has become pandemic in our times,” he adds in a pointedly non-theological aside. “We find parents who only learn that their son has gone to fight jihad after his picture is published in the newspapers as a fatality or a prisoner.”

These “Revisions,” as Sayyed Imam’s book is widely known in Arab intellectual circles, elicited a harsh and immediate response from unreconstructed jihadists. “What kind of guidance does the ‘Document’ offer?” asked al Qaeda commander Abu Yahyha Al-Libi in a March 9 Internet posting. “Is it guidance that tells the mujahadeen and the Muslims: ‘Restrain yourselves and [allow] us [Arab regimes] to shed your blood’?”

…

But whatever Sayyed Imam’s motives, it is the neuralgic response by his erstwhile fellow travelers that matters most. There really is a broad rethink sweeping the Muslim world about the practical utility — and moral defensibility — of terrorism, particularly since al Qaeda began targeting fellow Sunni Muslims, as it did with the 2005 suicide bombings of three hotels in Amman, Jordan. Al Qaeda knows this. Osama bin Laden is no longer quite the folk hero he was in 2001. Reports of al Qaeda’s torture chambers in Iraq have also percolated through Arab consciousness, replacing, to some extent, the images of Abu Ghraib. Even among Saudis, a recent survey by Terror Free Tomorrow finds that “less than one in ten Saudis have a favorable opinion of Al Qaeda, and 88 percent approve the Saudi military and police pursuing Al Qaeda fighters.”

No less significant is that the rejection of al Qaeda is not a liberal phenomenon, in the sense that it represents a more tolerant mindset or a better opinion of the U.S. On the contrary, this is a revolt of the elders, whether among the tribal chiefs of Anbar province or Islamist godfathers like Sayyed Imam. They have seen through (or punctured) the al Qaeda mythology of standing for an older, supposedly truer form of Islam. Rather, they have come to know al Qaeda as fundamentally a radical movement — the antithesis of the traditional social order represented by the local sovereign, the religious establishment, the head of the clan and, not least, the father who expects to know the whereabouts of his children.

Al Qaeda recruiters, that is. It just keeps getting tougher to find saps willing to go to Iraq and blow themselves up for Allah.

Bill Roggio: 

As US and Pakistani intelligence attempted to determine who else might have been killed in the Jan. 29 US airstrike in North Waziristan that took the life of al Qaeda commander Abu Laith al Libi, a new, unconfirmed report claimed Adam Gadahn, Laith’s American deputy, died in the strike, as did two Kuwaitis and four other terrorists.

Sources inside Pakistan told the Nine/Eleven Finding Answers Foundation that US traitor Adam Gadahn was killed, along with Abu Suhail, Laith’s former deputy; Hamza al Somali, who is presumably of Australian or US nationality; Abu Ubayda Tawari Rakhis al Mutairi, a Kuwaiti national; Abu Adil al Kuwaiti, another Kuwaiti; and at least three Uzbek nationals. “It should be noted that the death of the American Gadahn has not yet been officially confirmed,” the Nine/Eleven Finding Answers Foundation reported.

As I posted last year:

You may wonder, who is this chowderhead and where did he come from? The New Yorker ran a long profile on our homegrown jihadi last January, tracing his path from death metal (music) to death to infidel.

Adam Gadahn’s nom de guerre is Azzam al-Amriki (Azzam the American). He can fluently recite the Koran in classical Arabic, and, since the late nineteen-nineties, when he joined the jihad, his English has acquired a vaguely Middle Eastern accent.

At times, he speaks in what might be called Jihadlish—a peculiar fusion of American vernacular and militant Islamist theory. Gadahn may be the first Al Qaeda operative to lace a religious threat with a reference to Monopoly. (“If you die as an unbeliever in battle against the Muslims, you’re going straight to hell, without passing Go.”) Or to adopt the bluster of a barroom pundit. (“Whoever takes over for Bush probably won’t have the guts to bring the troops home.”)

Once, referring to Abu Jahal, an early enemy of Islam known as the Father of Ignorance, Gadahn said, “I can’t forget the day, when, as I was praying a prescribed prayer with one of the brothers in a shopping-center parking lot in suburban America, a man sped by in his sports-utility vehicle shouting from his open window, ‘Worship Jesus, your Lord.’ The gas guzzler, cell phone, and college diploma notwithstanding, one couldn’t help but be reminded of Abu Jahal in the seventh century, abusing the Prophet while he prayed.”

From a comment at Megan McArdles blog:

The WoT was an existential war, for about two weeks after 9/11. My most shocking post-9/11 moment was hearing a generally anti-war and anti-American German acquaintance rage about how the world needed to band together and nuke Afghanistan into glass, “put an end to these guys once and for all.”

Problem was, when the shock war off, the memories wore off with them, because there wasn’t a series of consecutive events to remind people that this wasn’t an isolated incident, it was merely the first time the self-proclaimed enemy had managed to work out all the details into the butter zone. And would happily do it again, and did…Bali, Madrid, 3/11. (Unsurprisingly, das German was complaining bitterly about the Afghan war as little as three months later.)

So rather than finding a united willingness to work out a measured and effective response to the threats of global terror, even though it would mean difficult and tragic decisions, we get wild and vascillating policy preferences ranging from “stupid and ruinous war set up by lying Bush…” to “invade Iran”.

In WWII, they didn’t have that, especially in Europe. In the offchance the average Londonite was prone to make a “if you think about it, less people have died in incident X than have died in car accidents” argument, the whine of a V2 would quickly refocus the thought processes.

You may have noticed that Youtube was not functioning for a while last week. Things happen.

But this was no glitch, it was cyber terrorists in Pakistan angry over some perceived slight to their prophet.

In yet another verbal attack against Israel, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad called the Jewish state a “filthy bacteria” whose sole purpose was to oppress the other nations of the region.

“The world powers established this filthy bacteria, the Zionist regime, which is lashing out at the nations in the region like a wild beast,” the Iranian president told supporters at a rally in southern Iran.

All that man needs is a good talking-to from Obama.

Maybe Bush didn’t “take our eye off the ball” after all. Maybe Iraq was indeed the central battlefield in the war on Islamic terror.

Iraqpundit:

Former CIA case Officer Reuel Marc Gerecht argues today that, barring a precipitous U.S. abandonment of the country, “Iraq could well become America’s decisive victory over Osama bin Laden, al-Qaeda and all those Muslims who believe that God has sanctified violence against the United States.”

Gerecht bases his argument on two observations. The first is the apparently tiny number of jihadist radicals now entering Iraq from neighboring countries, especially when compared to the large number of fighters who traveled to Afghanistan in the 1980s to fight the Soviets.

“In the 1980s,” he writes, “the Muslim Brotherhood, the largest and most well-organized Islamist movement, was at the center of the anti-Soviet jihadist recruitment effort. But in the case of Iraq, the Brotherhood has largely sat out the war. Even in Saudi Arabia, the mother ship of virulently anti-American, anti-Shiite, anti-moderate Muslim Wahhabism, the lack of commitment has been striking. We should have seen thousands, not hundreds, of Saudi true believers descending on Iraq.”

It’s important to note that, whatever the raw numbers of jihadis in Iraq, they have been by far the most lethal aspect of the so-called “insurgency”; their aim all along was to foment a sectarian civil war among Iraqis, especially by slaughtering as many innocent Shiite men, women, and children as possible.

Gerecht’s second point is that the jihadis who have entered the country have not been embraced by the Iraqis. As he puts it, “the arrival of foreign holy warriors is deradicalizing the local population — the exact opposite of what happened in Afghanistan.”

According to Gerecht, the result is that “Sunni extremism is now in retreat. More important, the gruesome anti-Shiite tactics of extremist groups, combined with the much-quoted statements made by former Sunni insurgents about the positive actions of the United States in Iraq, have caused a great deal of intellectual turbulence in the Arab world.”

Gerecht’s argument about the state of Sunni extremism is consistent with polls released last year by Pew, which found that “large and growing numbers of Muslims in the Middle East and elsewhere rejecting Islamic extremism.”

According to Pew, “The percentage of Muslims saying that suicide bombing is justified in the defense of Islam has declined dramatically over the past five years in five of eight countries where trends are available. In Lebanon, for example, just 34% of Muslims say suicide bombings in the defense of Islam are often or sometimes justified; in 2002, 74% expressed this view.” In that survey, Al Qaeda’s reputation in the Muslim world had plummeted. To use Bin Laden’s own imagery, he had become the “weak horse” in his battle with the U.S.

“It’s way too soon to call Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda spiritual outcasts among Arab Muslims, but they have in fact sustained enormous damage throughout the region because of Iraq,” writes Gerecht. “If bin Ladenism is now on the decline — and it may well be among Arabs — then Iraq has played an essential part in battering the movement’s spiritual appeal.”

by J.C. Phillips 

One of my frustrations in listening to the campaign rhetoric of the various candidates vying for our nation’s highest office is their repeated use of the phrase “global war on terror.” The description is grating, rather like fingernails on a chalk board. Moreover, the use of this tired and inaccurate expression indicates an inexplicable lack of will in political circles to call our enemy by its proper name. We are not at war with terrorism; we are at war with Islamic fascism or what has come to be known as Jihadism. Our enemy is the idea among certain of the Muslim faith that they must bring the world to kneel before the prophet Mohammed. We don’t need to guess at their intentions. Our foe says without hesitation that it is his intent to raise the flag of Islam first over Jerusalem then over the world. They have similarly demonstrated through their actions that they are willing to use any means necessary to accomplish that goal.

We seem more than willing to engage in myriad conversations about America’s failure to live up to her own moral standards. Indeed for certain segments, it is all the rage to talk of American evil and to compare Republican administrations to the worst tyrants in history. As a nation, however, we remain rather reticent to move past the sophisms and face head-on the real threat to world peace and prosperity.

At bottom this is a war of ideas. Americans, therefore, must be zealots of a different kind. If we are going to be victorious, we must resist the temptation to embrace the multicultural relativism that teaches that all cultures are equally valuable and that all ideas are equally constructive. Victory demands that we make the objective and decidedly non-politically correct judgment that our culture is best – that our ideas of limited government, of individual and property rights, and most importantly, a secular government that supports and protects the expression of all religious ideas, is the best way or at least the best way we have found. Our ability to unflinchingly make this judgment will determine our eventual success or failure.

It is not xenophobia to confidently suggest that democratic expression is preferable to religious coercion; indeed, that liberty is preferable to slavery. We gain nothing by discarding our ideas in favor of the soft socialism of Europe (much to the chagrin of many here in Hollywood) and we stand to lose everything by ignoring Winston Churchill’s maxim that “Compromise with tyrannical evil is not possible.” Nor do we display leadership through capitulation to the will of a world government body. It is not the sanction of the United Nations that is the source and foundation of our leadership, but the embrace of our American ideals.

These ideas — that all men have a right to their private property, their liberty and the right to worship God (or not) as they see fit, and that the government has a duty to protect those rights — are the ideas that have provided America with vast reservoirs of talent and innovation and continue to draw the best talent from around the world to our shores. If we are not able to make the moral case for why our American ideals are better than those of Jihadis, even with a force of marines a million strong, we are doomed to lose this war.

As this election takes shape, I am excited about the cultural changes America is poised to undergo. I am, however, much less concerned about the race or gender of any candidate than I am with their ability to properly identify the enemy and wage an aggressive war on many fronts – a war that will ultimately determine not only the survival of America but also the survival of American ideals. 

Two mentally disabled women were strapped with explosives Friday and sent into busy Baghdad markets, where they were blown up by remote control, a top Iraqi government official said.The bombs killed at least 98 people and wounded more than 200 at two popular pet markets on the holiest day of the week for Muslims, authorities said.

In both bombings, the attackers were mentally disabled women whose explosive belts were remotely detonated, Gen. Qasim Atta, spokesman for Baghdad’s security plan, told state television.

Disabled, as in having Down syndrome. Used a remote bomb delivery systems. Is that not evil?

As Confederate Yankee points out, this news was met with satisfaction with the lose-at-all-costs Left.

UPDATE: Today’s LA Times covers the story, but buries the fact about the women being retarded until after the jump.

The Taliban leadership are struggling to contain the fallout from an embarrassing public argument after a senior commander was sacked for disobeying orders but then refused to stand down.

Taliban spokesmen traded accusations in phone calls to news organisations after Mullah Omar, the spiritual leader of the Islamist organisation, publicly sacked Mansoor Dadullah, the new overall ground commander fighting British forces in southern Afghanistan.

Zabiullah Mujahid, a spokesman, said Dadullah was sacked for disobeying orders and conducting activities against the Taliban’s rules and regulations.

The teddy bear was named after Teddy Roosevelt. Then one got named Mohammed and a school teacher nearly got 40 lashes, and angry Sudanese crowds called for death, chanting:

If you go out in Sudan today
You’re sure of a big surprise.
If you go out in Sudan today
You’d better go in disguise.

For every bear that ever there was
Will gather there for certain, because
Today’s the day the teddy bears have their jihad.

Okay, just kidding. And, as ugly as those crowds were, they do not necessarily represent the mood of the nation, as this Sudanese blogger notes:

I’ve been deeply upset ever since this teddy bear circus erupted. A few days ago, I was out with a bunch of friends trying my best to get my face unglued from my computer screen. As we were walking in laughter, we passed by a shop displaying a set of teddy bears, and for the first time the triggered emotion was a starkly different one.

If anything, the whole spectacle further proves something to me as a Sudanese Muslim: our false pride and misplaced sense of honor.

Those we watched angrily protesting love to highlight the supposed immorality of the West – the bars, bare women and “corrupting” freedoms. We pride ourselves on living in a country that is supposedly more moral and therefore automatically better. It’s a false pride, one propagated and encouraged by the propaganda of Sudanese Islamists.

Certainly we have a lot to be proud of as a people with a rich history and culture. The Nubian Civilization, hailed by many experts as one of the greatest that ever existed, is but only one aspect of that. True Sudanese values of generosity and hospitality – ones slowly but surely withering away as oppression tears us – are trademarks we’re well known for. There is, however, nothing for us to be proud of as citizens of a country ruled by a gang of morally bankrupt butchers.

We are a country earning billions of dollars in oil exports, yet we rely on Western aid so millions of our own can survive when we can clearly afford to support them! Where’s the pride in that?

The day when basic human rights start to be respected is a day I might actually have some pride in being a Sudanese citizen. I guess it isn’t enough of an accomplishment for some in my country that we hosted one of the most beloved people in recent times – Osama Bin Laden. You may praise and thank the Sudanese Islamist leader Hassan al-Turabi for that.

It’s al-Turabi, after his rise to power, who is mainly responsible for the spread and exponential growth of radicalism in Sudan. Thanks to him, it also looks like our sense of honor has been greatly misplaced.

It amazes me how some of us can get so upset over a teddy bear whose name was democratically chosen by a bunch of seven-year-olds but feel no anger at the mass atrocities which took place in Darfur over the last four years. Honoring the countless Darfurian lives lost apparently isn’t important.

Shrinkwrapped writes about a particular patient and her treatment, which leads to this:

Whenever I read someone who soft-pedals the risk from Islamic terrorists, or from radical Islam, whenever I contemplate such exercises in appeasement as the Annapolis conference, or the muted reaction of Western officialdom to such outrages as an English woman/teacher being threatened with jail and 40 lashes for naming a teddy bear “Mohamed”, or a 19 year old Saudi rape victim receiving 200 lashes for being responsible for her own rape, I consider the likely outcome of avoiding the paranoid rage that is always lurking just below the surface of public Islam. 

This is not to re-engage the question of Moderate Islam; in point of fact if the public face of Islam is rage and it is constantly amplified by the MSM and official government actions (both in the Muslim world and in the West), the existence of a significant Moderate Muslim cohort becomes mooted.  The important point from my work is that rage avoided is rage that can only grow; rage that is confronted and dealt with can be understood, channeled, and contained.

We do neither the Muslim world nor the West any favors by behaving as if their rage is so terrifying that we must avoid it at all costs.  If we do not vocally address and confront the rage and its derivatives, we will  one day, once again be forced to confront its violent fruition.

IBD:

A leading figure in the war on terror lectures his troops on avoiding the mistakes and brutality that alienate the Iraqi people. No, it’s not Murtha lecturing Petraeus. It’s Osama bin Laden admitting he’s losing.

No one has ever accused bin Laden of being stupid. The architect of 9/11 has seen better days and has admitted as much in a tape advising al-Qaida in Iraq to avoid the “mistakes” that have united the people of Iraq, Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds, against him.

“Some of you have been lax in one duty, which is to unite your ranks,” Osama advises followers in a tape aired Monday on Al-Jazeera television. “I advise myself, Muslims in general and brothers in al-Qaida everywhere to avoid extremism among men and groups.” Bin Laden, the voice of moderation? Who’da thunk it?

He sees, as we have seen, the uniting of Sunnis and Shiites against the mindless barbarism of al-Qaida in Iraq in the days when Anbar province was considered lost. That nihilistic violence, coupled with an American surge where U.S. and Iraqi troops came and this time stayed, have turned the tide in our favor.

Walid Phares:

The oddest of all factional relationships is the open alliance between the Jihadists and the so-called “antiwar” neo-Left movement in the West. The jumble of causes thrown together is mind-bending:  globalization hobnobs with the caliphate, class struggle with Wahabism, proletariat with infidels, and North Korea with Palestine.

While still shedding each others’ blood, the Reds (neo-Left) and the Dark Greens (Islamists) are conducting a joint offensive against both democracy-pushing America and the democracy-craving Middle East. They are not letting old or new grudges get in their way.

…Despite all the mutual mayhem across the Mediterranean and throughout the Middle East, an unnatural alliance was established by elites of the two camps, even while blood was being shed in the 1990’s. Setting ideologies and history aside, the Islamist tacticians and neo-Left pragmatists gradually converged on a two-lane path against liberal democracies and the specter of a free market and pluralist Middle East.

The Jihadi concern with Western involvement in the region is logical: free societies in the Arab and Muslim world, joined finally to the international community, would shatter fundamentalism’s control of the region’s political cultures. To have Arab and Iranian youths, in addition to minorities, hooking up directly with the peaceful and prosperous societies of the West would leave the Islamists without a base to recruit from.

Jihadism is joined with the antiwar movement even while promoting “holy war,” which is the essence of their rissala (mission). The ideology of the Salafists and Khumeinists is to prepare for, mobilize for, incite, and engage in a constant war of jihad against the infidels, who are supposed to be all those who aren’t Islamists, including moderate Muslims.

New York Times: 

In this isolated Taliban stronghold in eastern Afghanistan, American paratroopers are fielding what they consider a crucial new weapon in counterinsurgency operations here: a soft-spoken civilian anthropologist named Tracy.

Tracy, who asked that her surname not be used for security reasons, is a member of the first Human Terrain Team, an experimental Pentagon program that assigns anthropologists and other social scientists to American combat units in Afghanistan and Iraq. Her team’s ability to understand subtle points of tribal relations — in one case spotting a land dispute that allowed the Taliban to bully parts of a major tribe — has won the praise of officers who say they are seeing concrete results.

Col. Martin Schweitzer, commander of the 82nd Airborne Division unit working with the anthropologists here, said that the unit’s combat operations had been reduced by 60 percent since the scientists arrived in February, and that the soldiers were now able to focus more on improving security, health care and education for the population.

“We’re looking at this from a human perspective, from a social scientist’s perspective,” he said. “We’re not focused on the enemy. We’re focused on bringing governance down to the people.”

In September, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates authorized a $40 million expansion of the program, which will assign teams of anthropologists and social scientists to each of the 26 American combat brigades in Iraq and Afghanistan. Since early September, five new teams have been deployed in the Baghdad area, bringing the total to six.

But some academics hate the idea, natch.

BAGHDAD (AFP) - The US military said on Wednesday it had seized a list of some 500 Al-Qaeda members recruited to fight in Iraq from the Middle East and Europe during a raid in northwest Iraq that killed eight militants.

Major General Kevin Bergner said the September 11 raid near Sinjar targetted a senior Al-Qaeda in Iraq leader, known as Muthanna, who was killed along with seven colleagues.

“Muthanna was the emir of Iraq and Syrian border area and he was a key facilitator of the movement of foreign terrorists once they crossed into Iraq from Syria,” Bergner told a news conference in Baghdad.

“He worked closely with Syrian-based Al-Qaeda foreign terrorist facilitators,” he added.

“During the operation, we captured multiple documents and electronic files that gave an insight into Al-Qaeda’s foreign terrorist operations not only in Iraq but throughout the region,” he said.

The files revealed “a list of some 500 foreign terrorists being recruited by Al-Qaeda, biographies on 143 foreign terrorists en route to Iraq or who have already arrived, including personal data, photographs, recruiters’ names, route and date of entry into Iraq.”

The sissy side of the Taliban.

War photography tends to be a grim business, with the best pictures usually presenting the most tragic, horrific images. Therefore it was a pleasant surprise to discover Thomas Dworzak’s fantastic series of brightly colored, found photographs of Taliban fighters striking effeminate poses — some holding flowers and wearing enough black eyeliner to make a glam rocker proud.

The boys and men had Afghan passport photographers make the portraits clandestinely in the late Taliban era, flouting strictures against figurative representation, then abandoned them when they fled the 2001 U.S.-led invasion. Dworzak found the photographs in a studio near his hotel in Kandahar.

Watch the slideshow here.

Because evil must be defeated.

Taliban militants hanged a 15-year-old boy from a tree with 5 US $1-bills stuffed into his mouth, in the Helmand province of Afghanistan. It’s believed that the money was put into his mouth as a warning to villagers to not use US currency.” The Taliban warned villagers that they would face the same punishment if they were caught with dollars,” said police chief Wali Mohammad. US dollars is used as currency in Afghanistan in addition to the Afghani, the native currency.

Mohammad further reported that the Taliban shot and killed a farmer that had gone to an international aid program in search of seeds and farm assistance. The farmer was accused of being a spy by the Taliban.

James Lewis:

This will sound alarming. A literal reading of Ahmadi-Nejad’s UN address suggests that he is predicting a total war coming soon.

The key is in his invocation and his conclusion. Normal official communications by Muslims start with, “In the name of Allah, the Compassionate, the Merciful.” A’jad followed that formula immediately with:  

“Oh God, hasten the arrival of Imam Al-Mahdi and grant him good health and victory and make us his followers and those who attend to his rightfulness.” [italics in the official Iranian version]

Sounds like a pretty standard invocation, but it’s not.  It is a specific call for the Shiite Messiah, who will bring a final holy war, the final jihad, which in the Khomeini cult implies all-out war with the infidels to bring about the Millenarian Age of Paradise on Earth. (For Khomeini, the term “infidels” includes Sunni Muslims, who do not recognize the Mahdi). That is why Khomeini started the nuclear program twenty years ago, and why it has been pushed consistently by all the major cult leaders.

Iraqpundit:

Hey Osama!

Long time no see! Caught your latest video, man. You know, we really need to talk, one Muslim to another.

Let me tell you something, Osama. It’s really strange to hear you calling on people to convert to Islam, since al-Qaeda’s specialty is butchering Muslims. Look at Iraq, where your brave followers show up with car bombs at schools, markets, and funerals to murder entirely innocent Muslim men, women, and children. And it’s not like your point is to target Shiite “heretics,” since the avowed purpose of al-Qaeda’s slaughter is to goad Shiites into killing Sunnis. Maybe you want more converts to replace the tens of thousands of Iraqi Muslims you’ve murdered.

And what’s the result of this brilliant Iraqi strategy? Iraq’s Sunnis have turned against you. I see that every story in the Western press connects your video to the supposed reconstitution of al-Qaeda in Waziristan, but the connection that matters is that your nutty video appears as Iraq’s Sunni tribes have become Bush’s allies. Iraq’s Sunnis are gunning your guys down and informing on their hiding places. Maybe you should record a video just for them, urging them to embrace Noam Chomsky.

I guess I should say something about your tax comments, because they sound pretty crazy to my Muslim ears. Is that why you think people should convert to Islam, because it would lower their tax burden? What would the Prophet say about such a message? As for your tirade against capitalism, don’t you realize that after the early conquests, Islam spread by trade? The most populous Muslim country in the world, Indonesia, came to embrace Islam as a result of trade with Muslims. The fact is that Islamic culture was comparatively entrepreneurial, which is one of the reasons there was an Islamic Golden Age to haunt your dreams. If you want to know why that era of prosperity and learning is a receding memory, look in the mirror.

And speaking of mirrors, Osama, you look awful. Really, you should fire that colorist of yours. Because what he did to your hair, beard, and eyebrows is just criminal.

In Osama bin Laden’s latest hit video he sounded a lot like Cindy Sheehan. About the only talking point omitted was demanding that the National Guard end its “occupation” of New Orleans.

Osama’s video is getting oodles of coverage, so it’s not worth us spending much time on it here. However, if you wonder how Osama can be so historically ignorant — he thinks Donald Rumsfeld was Secretary of Defense during the Vietnam war — consider that this ghost writer is most likely a knucklehead from SoCal, one Adam Gadahn.

We had an extensive post on him, with links to a New Yorker article.