By Phyllis Chesler

Once upon a time, the King invited the infidels to Madrid–but he only invited a handful of Jews who are all, rightly or wrongly, perceived as more critical of Israel and of Judaism than of Islam. The King did not invite any influential, religious women. This did not stop any man of faith from attending.

I am talking about Saudi King Abdullah’s interfaith conference in Madrid which was attended by nearly 300 delegates representing Islam, Judaism, Christianity, Buddhism, Hinduism and other faiths from over 50 countries. King Abdullah opened the conference on July 16, 2008 in the presence of Spain’s King Juan Carlos… (Continue reading…)

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By Phyllis Chesler

Congratulations to My Pet Jawa for asking the right questions about the AP photographer, Basmatullah Naikzad, who just stood there and watched as the Taliban murdered two women. But Naikzad did not just stand there–he also photographed the murder and then made money and gained international credit when AP ran his photo. Perhaps he shared the loot with the Taliban in return for being allowed to take photographs.

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by Dmitry Shlapentokh*

Chechnya has been at war with Russia for generations. By 1999, when the second Chechen war broke out, two resistance groups had emerged: nationalists and jihadists. While long simmering below the surface, the schism between the two camps erupted publicly in 2006 on the Internet after Akhmed Khalidovich Zakaev, the moderate foreign minister of the shadow Chechen government, argued that the goal of the Chechen resistance should be an independent Chechen state modeled after Western democracies and integrated into the global community. Movladi Udugov, a jihadist and editor of Kavkaz Center, the best-known online resistance publication, vehemently disagreed and declared that for real Muslims, spiritual bonds should be more important than blood ties. He argued that he would rather embrace ethnic Russians who had converted to Islam than Chechens who had strayed from their religion. There was no point modeling society after Western states, he contended, because all non-Muslim states, or those that are Muslim only in name but not in essence, are corrupt. Instead, Chechens should fight for the establishment of a global caliphate.

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By Andrew L. Jaffee

… “We should prepare our children and men for jihad,” she said.

The crowd responded with shrill chants of “we are ready” and “al jihad”. …

Such was the atmosphere at a perverse Islamist rally held last week in Islamabad, Pakistan: Female protesters calling for their children and husbands to kill “infidels” by killing themselves. I hope the generation of Westerners who grew up listening to Crosby Stills Nash & Young’s Teach Your Children will take note. From the Mail Online:

About 2,000 Islamist women gathered at the radical Red Mosque in the Pakistani capital on Wednesday and vowed to raise their children for holy war, days after a suicide bomber killed 18 people after a similar rally.

Chanting slogans of “jihad is our way”, burqa-clad women, some with babies, listened to fiery speeches from the daughter of the mosque’s jailed cleric on the eve of the anniversary of a commando raid on the complex in which more than 100 people died.

“Our mujahideen (fighters) laid down their lives for the enforcement of the Islamic system in Pakistan. We are left behind to carry forward their mission,” the daughter of cleric Abdul Aziz told the tightly guarded rally in the mosque compound. …

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By E.D. Kain

Harry’s Place, a UK blog dedicated to promoting the ideals of freedom and democracy, is being sued by Mohammed Sawalha, the President of the British Muslim Initiative, which has been linked to Hamas and the Islamic Brotherhood, both terrorist organizations. The blog reports that Mr. Sawalha, according to the BBC…

“master minded much of Hamas’ political and military strategy” and in London “is alleged to have directed funds, both for Hamas’ armed wing, and for spreading its missionary dawah”.

In their revelation of the impending lawsuit against them leveled by Mohammed Sawalha, they write:

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by Daniel Pipes*

“Since 9/11, there have been over 2,300 arrests connected to Islamist terrorism in Europe in contrast to about 60 in the United States.” Thus writes Marc Sageman in his influential new book, Leaderless Jihad: Terror Networks in the Twenty-First Century (University of Pennsylvania Press).

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by Daniel Pipes*

If you cannot name your enemy, how can you defeat it? Just as a physician must identify a disease before curing a patient, so a strategist must identify the foe before winning a war. Yet Westerners have proven reluctant to identify the opponent in the conflict the U.S. government variously (and euphemistically) calls the “global war on terror,” the “long war,” the “global struggle against violent extremism,” or even the “global struggle for security and progress.”

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by Michael Rubin*

On April 29, answering a question on ABC’s “Good Morning America,” Sen. Hillary Clinton warned that if Iran attacked Israel with nuclear weapons, “we would be able to totally obliterate them.” On NBC’s “Meet the Press” Sunday, Sen. Barack Obama chided Clinton. “It’s language reflective of George Bush. …This kind of language is not helpful,” Obama told Tim Russert.

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By Bill West*

Lately, we hear much from supporters of detained ex-University of South Florida computer engineering professor Sami Al-Arian, who pleaded guilty to (was convicted of) the Federal felony violation of providing assistance and support to members of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) terrorist organization. Al-Arian was sentenced to 57 months prison time for his crime. He was also ordered to be deported from the United States at the completion of his criminal incarceration.

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By Andrew Whitehead

In an article carried by MyrtleBeachOnline.com, Rep. Sue Myrick says she wants America to “wake up” and do something about terrorism. To that end, Rep. Myrick has introduced a ten-point plan apparently designed to both alert Americans to the threat of terrorism and also lay out a blue-print for taking action now to hopefully prevent incidents in future.

Among Myrick’s points (”Wake Up America”) is a call for examining the tax exempt status of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) a Washington, D.C. based front group that supports Islamist terrorism and Islamist terrorists in North America.

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by Daniel Pipes*

There’s an impression that Muslims suffer disproportionately from the rule of dictators, tyrants, unelected presidents, kings, emirs, and various other strongmen — and it’s accurate. A careful analysis by Frederic L. Pryor of Swarthmore College in the Middle East Quarterly (”Are Muslim Countries Less Democratic?“) concludes that “In all but the poorest countries, Islam is associated with fewer political rights.”

The fact that majority-Muslim countries are less democratic makes it tempting to conclude that the religion of Islam, their common factor, is itself incompatible with democracy.

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By Barry Rubin

Many years after September 11, despite more than 10,000 terrorist attacks by radical Islamist groups alone, there is still an amazing amount of confusion and falsehood over what should be a very simple point: What is terrorism all about?

The answer is politics and, to be specific, revolutionary politics. Most obviously, terrorism is a tactic used by political groups but, most importantly, it is a strategy. Defining who and what is “terrorist” should be neither a moral judgment nor a propaganda exercise. It is a simple use of political analysis.

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by Daveed Gartenstein-Ross and Kyle Dabruzzi*

Government officials, scholars, and analysts continue to debate the extent to which Al-Qaeda’s central leadership remains relevant to today’s battle against terrorism. After U.S. forces eliminated the group’s safe haven in Afghanistan in late 2001, many argued that Al-Qaeda had transformed into a decentralized organization with little vertical hierarchy, that it had become “more of an ideology than an organization.”[1] In the words of one analyst, Al-Qaeda was seen as “a fragmented terrorist group living on the run in the caves of Afghanistan.”[2] This description may have been true in the months following the overthrow of the Taliban, but the notion of a scattered and ineffective Al-Qaeda central leadership has been overplayed over the past several years. Many analysts have exaggerated the capabilities that the terror group’s top leaders require to remain relevant and so have overlooked the fact that even during its nadir from 2002 through 2004, Al-Qaeda’s senior leadership was able to develop terrorist plots for regional nodes to execute. Now that Al-Qaeda’s senior leadership has gained a safe haven in the tribal regions of Pakistan, the organization’s power and relevance grow even greater. Today, the Al-Qaeda network—with a resilient central leadership—is the most dangerous terrorist adversary that the United States faces, possessing a lethal combination of capability and, unlike Hezbollah, a demonstrated desire to carry out mass-casualty attacks on U.S. soil.

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By Andrew L. Jaffee

LiveLeak has re-posted Geert Wilders’ film “Fitna,” after having pulled the video off its site due to death threats. LiveLeak is the British video/media sharing service which first released Wilders’ movie. Following suspension of “Fitna,” LiveLeak issued a statement alluding to several British newspapers’ complicity in the death threats. According to the Daily Kos, “various British newspapers actually printed the names and addresses of Liveleak staffers. Needless to say, lots of very pointed death threats followed.” Whatever the details, LiveLeak has refused to succumb to Islamist intimidation and has stated (with admirable attitude):

On the 28th of March LiveLeak.com was left with no other choice but to remove the film “fitna” from our servers following serious threats to our staff and their families. Since that time we have worked constantly on upgrading all security measures thus offering better protection for our staff and families. With these measures in place we have decided to once more make this video live on our site. We will not be pressured into censoring material which is legal and within our rules. We apologise for the removal and the delay in getting it back, but when you run a website you don’t consider that some people would be insecure enough to threaten our lives simply because they do not like the content of a video we neither produced nor endorsed but merely hosted.

You can watch “Fitna” at LiveLeak by clicking here. Note that “Fitna” has been continuously available on sites like Google and here at netwmd.com.

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By Phyllis Chesler

I am intimately surrounded by enemy propaganda and I’ve only myself to blame. For example, I have been reading Publishers Weekly (PW) for a very long time. I don’t have to but I won’t give it up. Yes, I have noted the leftward drift of their reviews but, like the New York Times, whose editors and book reviewers have drifted similarly left-ward, PW remains a “must” for all those who want to read reviews of upcoming book titles and who want to know what publishing deals are in the works.

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