By Andrew L. Jaffee

Benazir Bhutto almost gets incinerated, 136 of her supporters killed, scores wounded, and who does Pakistan’s government put on the case? The fox tending the chicken coop:

The detective leading the inquiry into Thursday’s suicide attack on Pakistani opposition leader Benazir Bhutto has been taken off the case, officials say.

Ms Bhutto’s supporters had complained that Manzur Mughal was present when her husband, Asif Zardari, was allegedly tortured by police eight years ago.

Sindh government officials say that Mr Mughal has now “disassociated himself” from the investigation. …

Uh, huh… Just like the BBC blamed Bhutto for antagonizing the poor terrorists…

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By Isaac Kfir*

This paper explores several key elements undermining the viability of the Pakistani state: Islamism, tribalism, ethno-nationalism, and quasi-secularism. The demands of each of these movements are difficult to reconcile with the needs of the others. At the same time, these movements exert pressure on a very weak government and state system. Hence, the author argues that unless the current regime undertakes substantial structural reforms, Pakistan may come apart at the seams, with dire consequences for regional and international stability.

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By Phyllis Chesler

“The radical Muslims on American campuses are getting more belligerent, far more militant,” author and lecturer Nonie Darwish tells me. “They have perfected their intimidation and disruption techniques.”

Darwish is a beautiful and passionate speaker. She is an expressive, emotional orator, dramatically thrilling (as so many Arabs can be), but Darwish is also soft, almost maternal when she speaks. She is also very clear, very firm, and totally uncompromising. She grew up in Cairo and in Gaza and now lives in America. She has founded Arabs for Israel. She is pro-American and also concerned with women’s rights. Her first book, Now They Call Me Infidel: Why I Renounced Jihad for America, Israel, and the War on Terror, is clear-sighted, well-written, and extremely brave.

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by Daniel Pipes*

The Bush administration’s plans to convene a new round of Israeli-Arab diplomacy on Nov. 26 will, I predict, do substantial damage to American and Israeli interests.

As a rule, successful negotiations require a common aim; in management-labor talks, for example, both sides want to get back to work. When a shared premise is lacking, not only do negotiations usually fail, but they usually do more harm than good. Such is the case in the forthcoming Annapolis, Maryland, talks. One side (Israel) seeks peaceful coexistence while the other (the Arabs) seeks to eliminate its negotiating partner, as evidenced by its violent actions, its voting patterns, replies to polls, political rhetoric, media messages, school textbooks, mosque sermons, wall graffiti, and much else.

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New Estimate Shows Another 1.4 Million Family Members Could Also Stay

By Mark Krikorian, CIS

The Senate is currently considering the DREAM Act (S.2205). Some have argued that only 60,000 illegal immigrants would be granted amnesty annually under the Act, but a new analysis by the Center for Immigration Studies of 2007 Census Bureau data shows millions of potential beneficiaries.

# An estimated 800,000 illegal immigrants under age 17 have been here long enough to qualify for legalization under the DREAM Act. There are a total of 1.7 million illegal aliens estimated to be under age 17.

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By Barry Rubin

The alternative Western view of Middle East strategy–so influential in academic, media, and to some extent diplomatic circles–has a six-point program that boils down as:

Make deals with Iran, Syria, Hamas, and Hizballah; ally with Muslim Brotherhoods; and split Iran and Syria.

Those more extreme who advocate this approach are sympathetic to these forces, seeing them as more misunderstood victim than aggressive oppressor; the more moderate among them merely think the radicals can be moderated through concessions and confidence-building measures. In other words, they are not really adversaries but either already good guys or can be converted into playing that role.

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by Robert Sklar*

We talked for 30 minutes but historian and political analyst Daniel Pipes’ core message came quickly: The civilized world is at war. And American Jews are engaged on two distinct fronts: against Islamists who hate the West and against Jew-haters who despise Zionism.

Pipes helped crystallize why there’s something to the belief that diplomacy doesn’t end wars - victory by one side over the other does. I’m not willing to scuttle hope that compromise won’t resolve America’s war against Iraqi insurgents or Israel’s conflict with Palestinian terrorists. But I understand that if you don’t win a war, you lose it by default.

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By The Investigative Project on Terrorism (IPT)*

DALLAS - The nation’s largest terror-support trial ended in a mistrial Monday after jurors were unable to reach unanimous decisions on most counts. In a bizarre twist, three jurors told U.S. District Judge A. Joe Fish that they disagreed with acquittals announced against at least two defendants, prompting the judge not to accept those outcomes.

A second trial appears likely for the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development (HLF). It and five former officials were accused of illegally funneling more than $12 million to Palestinian charity committees controlled by Hamas. Prosecutors relied on secretly recorded conversations and a mountain of bank and other financial records to show that flow of money.

It wasn’t enough.

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By Douglas Farah*

In an ending worthy of a thriller, a Dallas judge today declared a mistrial in the case of the Holy Land Foundation. The government said it would retry the case. One person, Mohammed El-Mezain, was found not guilty of most of the charges against him.

The outcome in the complicated and high-stakes trial, which for the first time publicly laid bare the clandestine inner workings of the Muslim Brotherhood in the United States, was not unexpected. The NEFA Foundation has a complete, annotated list of the exhibits for viewing.

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By Phyllis Chesler

We have just been informed that President Amadinejad, who himself enjoyed no disruption when he spoke at Columbia University, has called upon American students and faculty to disrupt the handful of panels and lectures at Columbia University and at the more than one hundred other universities where Islamo-Fascist Awareness Week will take place from October 22nd to October 26th, 2007.

By the way, the term “Islamo-fascism” was coined by Algerian Muslims and ex-Muslims to characterize the Islamic fanatics who slaughtered 150,000 of their Algerian Muslim brethren in the 1990s—and all in the name of Allah.

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By Andrew L. Jaffee

“We are furious. If the Dalai Lama can receive such an award [the Congressional Gold Medal], there must be no justice or good people in the world.”

- Zhang Qingli, Chinese Communist Party secretary for Tibet

What a world the Chinese Communist Party lives in… Maura Moynihan explains why China is so afraid of the humble Dalai Lama:

…True, the Dalai Lama is no ordinary scholar and teacher; he is the living symbol of the Buddhist faith. It seems that Beijing’s cadres fear his moral authority and do not want the international community to examine their record in Tibet, because they have a lot to hide.

It has been 48 years since the Dalai Lama eluded capture by the People’s Liberation Army and escaped to India, whereupon Chairman Mao Zedong began to plunder Tibet’s wealth and murdered more than 1 million of its people.

In the mid-1990s, the Chinese politburo implemented the “Strike Hard Campaign” that declared Buddhism “a disease to be eradicated.” News of major protests in Tibet has not been widely disseminated in recent years, and now the survival of Tibetan civilization has reached a tipping point.

In 2000, China launched a vast infrastructure campaign called “Opening and Development of the Western Regions” and embarked on a new phase of subjugation and control. Construction of rail and road links to Tibet, such as the Qingzang railway that opened last year, has accelerated Beijing’s surveillance of Tibetans and has advanced the Sinofication of the Himalayan and Turkic peoples who inhabit China’s western territories.

Exploiting Tibet’s resources for the mainland’s industrial base is a strategic and economic priority for China’s government, which suppresses manifestations of Tibetan identity or nationalism with blunt force. …

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By Andrew L. Jaffee

Despite the fact that Dubya has incinerated his political capital through gross incompetence, I’m still only finding fresh political creativity on the Right — and this is coming from a recovered leftist.

I was at a “60s” party about a month ago, and inevitably, two guys were wearing Che Guevara t-shirts. They just don’t get it. I imagined the reaction if I were to have worn a Hitler t-shirt to their shindig. Heck, an American flag t-shirt would’ve turned heads there. I thought of John Lennon’s words from Revolution, he being the Left’s solely-claimed-for-their-own hero:

You say you want a revolution, well, you know
We all wanna change the world

You tell me that its evolution, well, you know
We all wanna change the world

But when you talk about destruction
Don’t you know that you can count me out…

You say you’ve got a real solution, well, you know

We’d all love to see the plan…

But if you goin’ carrying pictures of Chairman Mao
You ain’t gonna make it with anyone anyhow…

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By Heymi Bahar*

The July 2007 Turkish parliamentary elections were a major victory for the governing Justice and Development Party (AKP), entrenching it in power. By the same token, the historic center-right parties virtually disappeared, the left stagnated, and the number of nationalist MHP and independent Kurdish members increased. This article lays out the reasons both for the AKP’s success as well as the performance of other forces.

Following the Turkish Parliament’s failure to select a new president in an April 27, 2007 session, the decision was made that early elections be held on July 22, 2007 (rather than in October). The governing Justice and Development Party (AKP) had named Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul as its candidate, rejecting proposals by the opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP) to choose a non-partisan, mutually accepted figure. Following the decision of CHP and other parties to boycott the voting session, the issue was taken to the Turkish Constitutional Court. CHP leader Deniz Baykal argued that there had not been 367 members present to start the first round of voting. While the court agreed with Baykal, some charged that this was a political rather than judicial decision^[1].

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By Phyllis Chesler

I am not a Muslim nor am I a religious Muslim. I am certainly not a Qur’anic scholar. But I am a religious Jew. As such, I want to respect peoples of faith, including those who are secular fundamentalists. One does not have to agree with one’s neighbors in order to respect them and one does not have to disagree with others in a verbally uncivil or physically violent way. I applaud all efforts to “reform” or re-interpret ancient religions in accordance with our contemporary understanding of human and women’s rights.

I have also been drawn to the Islamic East for almost sixty years and count many Muslims and ex-Muslims as friends and political allies. I have lived in or traveled to Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, Iran, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Uzbekistan but now, I can no longer visit most of the countries that once called out to me (except in books).

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By Andrew L. Jaffee

The Beeb is at it again: Radical Islam is not the cause of terrorist acts; it is the meddling West and its allies whom drive the desperate Islamists to inflict horrendous, terrorist crimes against humanity. G#d forbid that Benazir Bhutto publicly marshal her democratic supporters in Pakistan and “antagonize” the terrorists:

… Questions and accusations …

The BBC’s Damian Grammaticas in Karachi says Ms Bhutto is clearly attempting to portray herself as a brave fighter for democracy.

But he adds that there are bound to be questions about why, if she had been warned of a suicide bomb attack, she authorised such a slow public procession from the airport attended by hundreds of thousands of supporters. …

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