Recently in Islamic Imperialism Category

Bernard Lewis, the premier Western authority on Islam for many decades, see the era of tyrannies in the Middle East coming to an end. Western-style freedon, tolerance and free speech as a result? Islam westernized? Not likely.

More likely is a return to the consultative process of the Ottoman Empire in which the sultan had to work things out with the various power brokers to get things done.

islam will remain dominant.

He notes the distressing regression taking place in Turkey. In a way, it's a non-violent repeat of the transition in Iran from the secular. The mullah tyranny will be replaced by an Ottoman-style system of governance. Turkey and Iran will be running parallel courses. It's anyone's guess how Islamic fundamentalist fervor will act out. The odds are continuing trouble for the West from an expansionist, fundamentalist Islam.

He has no answer for a nuclear-armed Iran. He thinks a military move would incite patriotism among the opponents, so should not be tried. At the same time, he fears the "fanatic mullahs" who have an apocalypitc end-time vision.

Lewis sees things this way, nuclear holocaust skipped over:

{E}ven as... young Middle Eastern activists rise up against the tyrannies that have oppressed them, he keeps a wary eye on the spread of Islamic fundamentalism. It is particularly challenging because it has "no political center, no ethnic identity. . . . It's both Arab and Persian and Turkish and everything else. It is religiously defined. And it can command support among people of every nationality once they are convinced. That marks the important difference," he says.

"I think the struggle will continue until they either obtain their objective or renounce it," Mr. Lewis says. "At the moment, both seem equally improbable."

That's pretty depressing. Lewis does not see Islam succceding in achieving world domination as decreed in the Koran, but he does not see any wholesale defection of the billion plus Muslims from the creed of Mohammad and the effort to impose Islam on the world.

In other words, Islam will continue sreading through violent and non-violent means as at present with intermittent successes and setbacks. It will keep progressing in its war of expansion as long as the non-Muslims of the world do not resist and mount an effective counterattack to preserve their values. Europe is being swallowed thus far with no resistance by Muslim immigration, procreation and separatism, with not much need of terror. Stealth Jihad in the U.S. is well underway with the government in total denial.

The 1400-year war continues.

'The Tyrannies Are Doomed'

The West's leading scholar of the Middle East, Bernard Lewis, sees cause for optimism in the limited-government traditions of Arab and Muslim culture. But he says the U.S. should not push for quick, Western-style elections.
By BARI WEISS in the Wall Street Journal, April 2, 2011
THE WEEKEND INTERVIEW
Princeton, N.J.

'What Went Wrong?" That was the explosive title of a December 2001 book by historian Bernard Lewis about the decline of the Muslim world. Already at the printer when 9/11 struck, the book rocketed the professor to widespread public attention, and its central question gripped Americans for a decade.

Now, all of a sudden, there's a new question on American minds: What Might Go Right?
To find out, I made a pilgrimage to the professor's bungalow in Princeton, N.J., where he's lived since 1974 when he joined Princeton's faculty from London's School of Oriental and African Studies.

Geert Wilders is the leader of the Dutch Freedom Party and the foremost European fighting against the Islamization of Europe. Wilders gave an important speech in Rome this past week on what must be done in the Western world to defeat the spread of Islam, which is incompatible with Western civilization and democracy.

Islam's goal is the destruction of Western civilization to be replaced with Islam and Islamic law. Wilders speaks most urgently about Europe, which is already imperiled, but his words of warning and recommendations for actdion apply equally to the United States. The agents of Islam are already at work undermining our culture.

The Muslim Brotherhood's "work in America is a kind of grand jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and 'sabotaging' its miserable house by their hands and the hands of the believers so that it is eliminated and God's religion is made victorious over all other religions. This goal was approved by the Muslim Brotherhood's top council in 1987.

Multiculuturalism must be defeated. Western civilization is far superior to that of Islam. Islam's evil must be widely made known. Free speech must be free and political correctness must end. As John Adams, John Quincy Adams and Winston Churchill have warned, Islam is a retrograde expansionist force that must be opposed and defeated. Geert Wilders is echoing a centuries-old message that is still falling on too many deaf ears. The late Harvard historian Samuel Huntington wrote of a coming clash of civilizations. One ex-Mulsim Wafa Sultain more correctly says it is a clash between barbarity and civilization.

Wilders' speech in full follows.

"The Failure of Multiculturalism and How to Turn the Tide"
Geert Wilders, March 25, 2011
Rome

Signore e signori, ladies and gentlemen, dear friends of the Magna Carta Foundation, molte grazie. Thank you for inviting me to Rome. It is great to be here in this beautiful city which for many centuries was the capital and the centre of Europe's Judeo-Christian culture.

Together with Jerusalem and Athens, Rome is the cradle of our Western civilization - the most advanced and superior civilization the world has ever known.

As Westerners, we share the same Judeo-Christian culture. I am from the Netherlands and you are from Italy. Our national cultures are branches of the same tree. We do not belong to multiple cultures, but to different branches of one single culture. This is why when we come to Rome, we all come home in a sense. We belong here, as we also belong in Athens and in Jerusalem.

It is important that we know where our roots are. If we lose them we become deracinated. We become men and women without a culture.

I am here today to talk about multiculturalism. This term has a number of different meanings. I use the term to refer to a specific political ideology. It advocates that all cultures are equal. If they are equal it follows that the state is not allowed to promote any specific cultural values as central and dominant. In other words: multiculturalism holds that the state should not promote a leitkultur, which immigrants have to accept if they want to live in our midst.

Muslim persecution has driven most Jews and Christians out of Muslim lands. The latest outrages in Nigeria, Egypt and Pakistan reflect the pressure of Islam to convert, kill or drive out "the other." Now the number of ever-expanding Muslim clusters in the big cities of Europe are driving Jews out of not-yet Islamic countries.

Is this reversible?

The French are finally getting concerned about how the Islamic demographic invasion of their country is transforming it into something else. A French video team went to London to see if things were any better there. They weren't.

What do Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Obama have in common?

An indifference to the life and death of American Jew Daniel Pearl.

Mark Steyn explains.

Now here is a straight-talking American on the war being waged against America by Islam.

You've heard the Attorney General of the United States, who can't seem to comprehend what motivated the Times Square bomber, the Fort Hood killer and the would-be Christmas Day suicide murderer.

It's well worth the three minutes to listen to someone who knows who our enemy is and is not afraid to speak clearly about the threat we face.

Colonel Allen West is a candidate for Congress this November in Florida's 22nd Congressional District which is mostly coastal Palm Beach County and some of Broward County, running along the coast from Jupiter to Fort Lauderdale. He will be an outstanding addition to the House of Representatives. Check out his website and make a contribution.

Two articles this weekend make the same point: It is essential that we understand Muslims and the Islam that is the driving force behind their actions. With a western mindset and political correctness we constantly delude ourselves and fail to recognize the real challenge of Islam and how huge a problem it is.

A new book "Son of Hamas" is by the son of a founder of Hamas who defected and now lives in the United States. He strikes to the heart of the matter in this interview posted by the Wall Streeet Journal:

As the son of a Muslim cleric, he says he had reached the conclusion that terrorism can't be defeated without a new understanding of Islam. Here he echoes other defectors from Islam such as the former Dutch parliamentarian and writer Ayaan Hirsi Ali.

Do you consider your father a fanatic? "He's not a fanatic," says Mr. Yousef. "He's a very moderate, logical person. What matters is not whether my father is a fanatic or not, he's doing the will of a fanatic God. It doesn't matter if he's a terrorist or a traditional Muslim. At the end of the day a traditional Muslim is doing the will of a fanatic, fundamentalist, terrorist God. I know this is harsh to say. Most governments avoid this subject. They don't want to admit this is an ideological war.

"The problem is not in Muslims," he continues. "The problem is with their God. They need to be liberated from their God. He is their biggest enemy. It has been 1,400 years they have been lied to."

Former Army intelligence officer Ralph Peters writing in the New York Post makes somewhat the same point less dramatically:

Our reluctance to understand the Taliban on its own terms is strikingly evident in our insistence that Islam isn't a factor. A confederation of franchises, the Taliban has multiple interests, from a regional power-struggle to local issues that vary between valleys. But the common identity of Taliban fighters is that they're 100% Muslim and overwhelmingly Pashtun, members of a stateless ethnic group of 40 million straddling the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Why is Obama so reluctant to acknowledge what he must know? Islam is at war with America and will continue to be so until it has conquered America.

Was Obama, like many, if not most or all, Muslim-born babies, inculcated with the poison of Islam at birth? Does the poison still run through his veins?

Not the Manchurian candidate, but the Meccan candidate?

Hollow Words on Terrorism

By Charles Krauthammer

WASHINGTON -- Janet Napolitano -- former Arizona governor, now overmatched secretary of homeland security -- will forever be remembered for having said of the attempt to bring down an airliner over Detroit: "The system worked." The attacker's concerned father had warned U.S. authorities about his son's jihadist tendencies. The would-be bomber paid cash and checked no luggage on a transoceanic flight. He was nonetheless allowed to fly, and would have killed 288 people in the air alone, save for a faulty detonator and quick actions by a few passengers.

Heck of a job, Brownie.

The reason the country is uneasy about the Obama administration's response to this attack is a distinct sense of not just incompetence but incomprehension. From the very beginning, President Obama has relentlessly tried to downplay and deny the nature of the terrorist threat we continue to face. Napolitano renames terrorism "man-caused disasters." Obama goes abroad and pledges to cleanse America of its post-9/11 counterterrorist sins. Hence, Guantanamo will close, CIA interrogators will face a special prosecutor, and Khalid Sheik Mohammed will bask in a civilian trial in New York -- a trifecta of political correctness and image management.

And just to make sure even the dimmest understand, Obama banishes the term "war on terror." It's over -- that is, if it ever existed.

Obama may have declared the war over. Unfortunately al-Qaeda has not. Which gives new meaning to the term "asymmetric warfare."

And produces linguistic -- and logical -- oddities that littered Obama's public pronouncements following the Christmas Day attack. In his first statement, Obama referred to Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab as "an isolated extremist." This is the same president who, after the Ford Hood shooting, warned us "against jumping to conclusions" -- code for daring to associate Nidal Hasan's mass murder with his Islamist ideology. Yet, with Abdulmutallab, Obama jumped immediately to the conclusion, against all existing evidence, that the bomber acted alone.

More jarring still were Obama's references to the terrorist as a "suspect" who "allegedly tried to ignite an explosive device." You can hear the echo of FDR: "Yesterday, December 7, 1941 -- a date which will live in infamy -- Japanese naval and air force suspects allegedly bombed Pearl Harbor."

Obama reassured the nation that this "suspect" had been charged. Reassurance? The president should be saying: We have captured an enemy combatant -- an illegal combatant under the laws of war: no uniform, direct attack on civilians -- and now to prevent future attacks, he is being interrogated regarding information he may have about al-Qaeda in Yemen.

Instead, Abdulmutallab is dispatched to some Detroit-area jail and immediately lawyered up. At which point -- surprise! -- he stops talking.

This absurdity renders hollow Obama's declaration that "we will not rest until we find all who were involved." Once we've given Abdulmutallab the right to remain silent, we have gratuitously forfeited our right to find out from him precisely who else was involved, namely those who trained, instructed, armed and sent him.

This is all quite mad even in Obama's terms. He sends 30,000 troops to fight terror overseas, yet if any terrorists come to attack us here, they are magically transformed from enemy into defendant.

The logic is perverse. If we find Abdulmutallab in an al-Qaeda training camp in Yemen, where he is merely preparing for a terror attack, we snuff him out with a Predator -- no judge, no jury, no qualms. But if we catch him in the United States in the very act of mass murder, he instantly acquires protection not just from execution by drone but even from interrogation.

The president said that this incident highlights "the nature of those who threaten our homeland." But the president is constantly denying the nature of those who threaten our homeland. On Tuesday, he referred five times to Abdulmutallab (and his terrorist ilk) as "extremist(s)."

A man who shoots abortion doctors is an extremist. An eco-fanatic who torches logging sites is an extremist. Abdulmutallab is not one of these. He is a jihadist. And unlike the guys who shoot abortion doctors, jihadists have cells all over the world; they blow up trains in London, nightclubs in Bali and airplanes over Detroit (if they can); and are openly pledged to war on America.

Any government can through laxity let someone slip through the cracks. But a government that refuses to admit that we are at war, indeed, refuses even to name the enemy -- jihadist is a word banished from the Obama lexicon -- turns laxity into a governing philosophy.

Even the New York Times editorial page may be waking up to the internal threat posed by immigrants from barbarian Muslim societies with values far removed from those of the West.

What's happening in Europe is an advanced stage of what can happen and is happening already in America.

Politicians ignore the danger that citIzens increasingly face from unassimilated -- and unassimilable -- Muslims.

Islam is an all-encompassing ideology demanding submission to its command to wage war until Islam rules the world. Its hold on its adherents inculcated from the moment of birth is difficult to break for most and impossible for many.

European politicians turned a blind eye for decades to this fact as they waved Muslim immigrants in. The result is chaos sweeping through Europe with fear, resentment and anger building among the natives. Many are pessimistic about the chances of European civilization surviving the belligerent Islamic onslaught. Political correctness and multiculturalism stand in the way of an aggressive defense.

Oddmakers are betting on Islam.

Op-Ed Columnist

Europe's Minaret Moment

By ROSS DOUTHAT

They toasted to progress in Europe's capitals last week. On Tuesday, the Treaty of Lisbon went into effect, bringing the nations of the European Union one step closer to the unity the Continent's elite has been working toward for over 50 years.

But the treaty's implementation fell just days after a milestone of a different sort: a referendum in Switzerland, long famous for religious tolerance, in which 57.5 percent of voters chose to ban the nation's Muslims from building minarets.

Switzerland isn't an E.U. member state, but the minaret moment could have happened almost anywhere in Europe nowadays -- in France, where officials have floated the possibility of banning the burka; in Britain, which elected two representatives of the fascistic, anti-Islamic British National Party to the European Parliament last spring; in Italy, where a bill introduced this year would ban mosque construction and restrict the Islamic call to prayer.

If the more perfect union promised by the Lisbon Treaty is the European elite's greatest triumph, the failure to successfully integrate millions of Muslim immigrants represents its greatest failure. And the two are intertwined: they're both the fruits of the high-handed, often undemocratic approach to politics that Europe's leaders have cultivated in their quest for unity.

The European Union probably wouldn't exist in its current form if the Continent's elites hadn't been willing to ignore popular sentiment. (The Lisbon Treaty, for instance, was deliberately designed to bypass most European voters, after a proposed E.U. Constitution was torpedoed by referendums in France and the Netherlands in 2005.) But this political style -- forge a consensus among the establishment, and assume you can contain any backlash that develops -- is also how the Continent came to accept millions of Muslim immigrants, despite the absence of a popular consensus on the issue, or a plan for how to integrate them.

The immigrants came first as guest workers, recruited after World War II to relieve labor shortages, and then as beneficiaries of generous asylum and family reunification laws, designed to salve Europe's post-colonial conscience. The European elites assumed that the divide between Islam and the West was as antiquated as scimitars and broadswords, and that a liberal, multicultural, post-Christian federation would have no difficulty absorbing new arrivals from more traditional societies. And they decided, too -- as Christopher Caldwell writes in "Reflections on the Revolution in Europe," his wonderfully mordant chronicle of Europe's Islamic dilemma -- that liberal immigration policies "involve the sort of nonnegotiable moral duties that you don't vote on."

Better if they had let their voters choose. The rate of immigration might have been slower, and the efforts to integrate the new arrivals more strenuous. Instead, Europe's leaders ended up creating a clash of civilizations inside their own frontiers.

Millions of Muslims have accepted European norms. But millions have not. This means polygamy in Sweden; radical mosques in Britain's fading industrial cities; riots over affronts to the Prophet Muhammad in Denmark; and religiously inspired murder in the Netherlands. It means terrorism, and the threat of terrorism, from London to Madrid.

And it means a rising backlash, in which European voters support extreme measures and extremist parties because their politicians don't seem to have anything to say about the problem.

In fairness, it isn't clear exactly what those leaders could offer at this point. They can't undo decades of migration. A large Muslim minority is in Europe to stay. Persisting with the establishment's approach makes a certain sense: keep a lid on prejudice, tamp down extremism, and hope that time will transform the zealous Islam of recent immigrants into a more liberal form of faith, and make the conflict go away.

Or least keep it manageable. Caldwell's book, the best on the subject to date, has a deeply pessimistic tone, but it shies away from specific predictions about the European future. Other writers are less circumspect, envisioning a Muslim-majority "Eurabia" in which Shariah has as much clout as liberalism.

But even a decadent West is probably stronger than this. The most likely scenario for Europe isn't dhimmitude; it's a long period of tension, punctuated by spasms of violence, that makes the Continent a more unpleasant place without fundamentally transforming it.

This is cold comfort, though, if you have to live under the shadow of violence. Just ask the Swiss, who spent last week worrying about the possibility that the minaret vote might make them a target for Islamist terrorism.

They're right to worry. And all of Europe has to worry as well, thanks to the folly of its leaders -- now, and for many years to come.

Just another reminder of reality.

Muslim threats to Christians rise in Pakistan

October 4, 2009

Anjum Herald Gill THE WASHINGTON TIMES

LAHORE, Pakistan | Christians in Pakistan are feeling increasingly insecure after several violent attacks by Muslim extremists in the past two months.

In one case, eight Christians were burned to death by a Muslim mob after reports that the Muslim holy book, the Koran, had been desecrated.

Growing Talibanization of the country and a blasphemy law in place for two decades make non-Muslims, especially Christians, easy targets for discrimination and attacks, Christian and human rights activists say.

"The attacks on Christians seem to be symptomatic of a well-organized campaign launched by extremist elements against the Christian community all over central Punjab since early this year," Human Rights Commission of Pakistan Chairwoman Asma Jehangir said at a press conference last month.

The situation has become so serious that Pope Benedict XVI and Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari discussed it during a meeting Thursday at the papal summer retreat in Castel Gandolfo, near Rome, the Associated Press reported.

The Vatican said the two stressed "the need to overcome all forms of discrimination based on religious affiliation, with the aim of promoting respect for the rights of all."

Most of the attacks on Christians' houses and churches followed claims of desecration of the Koran. Subsequent investigations generally proved the claims to be false.

Pakistani Minority Affairs Minister Shahbaz Bhatti, a Christian himself, said that no Christian would even think of desecrating the Koran. Some elements wanted to create an atmosphere of disharmony, but the government would not allow anybody to play with the lives and properties of the Christians, he said.

On June 30, a mob attacked Christians' houses in the village of Bahmani Wala in Kasur district of Punjab province, destroying more than 50 houses after looting.

On July 30, eight people were burned alive in the village of Gojra, also in Punjab, after a purported incident of desecration of the Koran in the nearby village of Korian Wala. Churches were attacked and copies of the Bible and hymn books were burned in both villages. In Korian Wala alone, more than 50 houses of Christians were ransacked.

On Sept. 11, a church in a village in Punjab's Sialkot district was burned after claims that a 20-year-old Christian youth had desecrated the Koran. On Sept. 15, a day after his arrest, Robert Masih was found dead in his jail cell. Police reported it as a suicide, but Mr. Masih's family claims he was killed. Joseph Francis, who runs an organization providing legal assistance to Christians, said he saw marks of torture on Mr. Masih's body.

Christians account for about 4 percent of the 170 million population of Pakistan, which was carved out of India as a state for Muslims at the time of independence from Britain in 1947.

Since then, successive civilian and military rulers have progressively strengthened the Islamic character of the country by introducing Shariah law. A controversial blasphemy law introduced in 1986 also has widened the gap between the minority Christians and majority Muslims.

The U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom listed Pakistan as a "country of particular concern" in 2006, citing forced conversions of Christians to Islam and a rise in hate crimes against religious minorities.

All the recent attacks targeting Christians, activist groups claimed, were provoked by hate speeches made by Muslim clerics on loudspeakers from mosques.

"The rising intolerance and violence against Christians is a result of the Talibanization and promulgation of Shariah law in the country," said Kanwal Feroze, a well-known journalist. "It is not a matter of blasphemy law, but shows a mind-set of the common man."

When the blasphemy law was introduced during the rule of Gen. Muhammad Zia ul-Haq, the punishment was life imprisonment. It was changed to the death penalty by the Federal Shariah Court in 1992 when Nawaz Sharif was prime minister.

Since the inception of the blasphemy law, as many as 976 cases have been registered under it, of which 180 were against Christians. When a Christian is accused of blasphemy, he or she can be granted bail only by the top court in the province.

The step-by-step Islamization of Pakistan began in 1956, when the country's name was changed from the Democratic Republic of Pakistan to the Islamic Republic of Pakistan. In 1973, Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto changed the country's constitution to declare Islam the religion of the state. Non-Muslims were barred from becoming president or the prime minister, and denied seats in the Senate.

Mr. Bhutto - father-in law of current President Asif Ali Zardari - also nationalized church-run schools and institutions. Some of them were denationalized later by Gen. Pervez Musharraf, who led Pakistan from 1999 until 2008.

In 1979, Gen. Zia introduced several Islamic laws that discriminated against non-Muslims - strengthening fundamentalist organizations and sowing the early seeds for Talibanization.

Under the Evidence Act of the Islamic law, a Christian man's witness is worth half that of a Muslim. Christian women would not be deemed as witnesses at all.

Muslim men can marry non-Muslim women but a Christian man cannot marry a Muslim woman. The constitutional provisions also welcome a Christian to embrace Islam, but when a Muslim converts to Christianity, the penalty is death.

Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani has promised to review laws that could fuel hate for non-Muslim citizens after the recent attacks. A committee has been formed to look into the laws and make recommendations.

However, hard-line parties such as Jamaat-e-Islami and the banned militant organization Dawat-ul-Irshad already have warned of protests if the blasphemy law is rescinded. Even the mainstream Pakistan Muslim League-Q party of Mr. Musharraf has threatened to resist any change in the law.

One commentator on this report said this:

Wake up world. Muslims have been raping, terrorising and pillaging for 1500 years. The Koran teaches to kill all infidels, unless they convert to Islam. It won't stop on its own. Islam is like a cancer, unless you kill it, it will kill you.

Another:

FINALLY, THE TRUE TARGET OF ISLAMISTS IS BEING REVEALED. IT IS NOT ISRAEL AS MANY LIKE TO BELIEVE. NOR IS IT UNITED STATES, AS SUCH. THE TARGET OF THE WAR ISLAM IS WAGING SINCE MUHAMMAD WENT TO MEET ALLAH, AND EVEN BEFORE THAT, WAS AND CONTINUES TO BE CHRISTIANITY.

While top Obama officials are erasing from their vocabularies such terms as Islamic terrorism, jihad, jihadism, radical Islam, war on terror and Islamic war of world conquest, the Islamic war of world conquest goes on.

It's going on in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Indonesia, the Philippines, Russia, the United Kingdom, Somalia, Nigeria, Somalia, Kenya, the United States, Canada, Australia and India, to name just a few places. It's also fanning out from the Islamic terrorist strongholds in Algeria down into the almost ungovernable states of Niger, Mali and Mauritania.

What's unusual about this report in the Wall Street Journal is that, unlike reports carried in the New York Times, other mainstream media and Associated Press and Reuters newswires the reporter actually uses correct descriptives in telling what's happening.

The Koran commands all Muslims to engage in worldwide jihad until Islam is universal and all infidels are killed or enslaved. Almost all Muslims learn this from birth and many decide the way to glory and Paradise is to take up arms, kidnap, rape, kill and seize the property of others (booty, as Mohammad called it). You can get rich and have fun in the process once you get used to the blood.

Islamic Rebels Gain Strength in the Sahara

Moving South From Algeria, al Qaeda-Affiliated Insurgents Find Support Among Locals in Mauritania, Mali and Niger

By YAROSLAV TROFIMOV

NOUAKCHOTT, Mauritania -- Al Qaeda-affiliated rebels are spreading far beyond their original battleground in Algeria and increasingly threatening Africa's Sahara belt, scaring away investors and tourists as they undercut the region's fragile economies.

Click to enlarge.

Dozens of security personnel, as well as an American aid worker and a British tourist, were killed by militants in several attacks in the region this summer alone. The attacks -- which prompted this year's lucrative Paris-Dakar car race to relocate to South America -- have become more frequent and brazen. Recent hits occurred not just in the remote desert but also in Mali's tourist magnet Timbuktu and in the Mauritanian capital Nouakchott, where a suicide bomber attacked the French Embassy last weekend.

Though still dominated by the veterans of Algeria's civil war, this Saharan insurgency has grown deep local roots. Armed bands roaming the desert include hundreds of recruits from Mauritania, Mali and Niger -- vast and impoverished countries that straddle the Arab world and black West Africa, and that relied on the now-collapsed tourism industry as the key source of foreign exchange.

"What had started out as an Algerian problem is now engulfing Mali and Mauritania. They are the weak link," says Zakaria Ould Ahmed Salem, a specialist on political Islam at the University of Nouakchott.

An Islamist insurgency that cost 200,000 lives erupted in Algeria 18 years ago, after that country's secular regime annulled the second round of elections that the Islamists were poised to win. But it is only in the past few years, as Algerian security forces contained the violence at home, that the rebels -- who seek to create an Islamic state encompassing North Africa -- began mounting operations in neighboring Saharan countries that had been unscathed by international terrorism.

Underlining its wider ambitions, the main Algerian insurgent movement, the Salafist Group for Call and Combat, re-branded itself in 2007 as al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, or AQIM. Actual operational links between AQIM militants in the Sahara and traditional al Qaeda leadership in Pakistan or Afghanistan are tenuous, if they exist at all, Western officials say.

But the group's new name has made it easier to find money and recruits for the cause outside Algeria. "Someone like Bin Laden is considered a hero here," explains Mohamed Fall Ould Oumere, publisher of La Tribune newsweekly in Nouakchott.

Mauritania, where most people speak Arabic and watch satellite TV chains like Al-Jazeera, is a particularly fertile ground for AQIM's growth, and accounts for a growing share of the movement's cadres, Western diplomats say. In Mali, Niger and Chad, the bulk of AQIM recruits also come from Arab-speaking communities, which in these countries are outnumbered by black African majorities.

AQIM is trying to spread south, "aiming to attract the young Muslims of the region -- white ones and black ones," says Isselmou Ould Moustafa, a specialist on AQIM who interviewed many of the group's members for his Mauritanian publication, Tahalil Hebdo.

Security officials in Nigeria recently claimed that AQIM trained in Algeria some members of Boko Haram, the Islamist sect whose armed uprising cost several hundred lives in northern Nigeria last month. According to some experts on AQIM, there is also evidence of contacts between the Saharan insurgents and the Shabaab, the radical Islamist militia controlling a chunk of Somalia. "It's an arc of fire," says Mr. Oumere.

All the governments in the region say they are fighting back. But the area's political instability and frequent bickering between neighboring countries have long made it easy for Islamist rebels to roam the Sahara, obtaining sanctuary and help from local tribes. Mali and Mauritania both have strained relations with Algeria. Planned regional summits to tackle the cross-border terrorism problem have been repeatedly postponed.

A military coup in Mauritania last year complicated the situation: The U.S. reacted to the overthrowing of Mauritania's democratically elected president by reducing military cooperation with the country and pulling out a reconnaissance plane that flew regular sorties over the Sahara to search for insurgents. Cooperation is likely to be restored now that Mauritania has held a democratic election last month.

Government officials here say that, without outside help, Saharan countries have little chance of defeating AQIM. "This is a zone that can't be controlled. We don't know who's out there in the vast desert and what are they doing," says Mohamed Ould Rzeizim, who served until this week as Mauritania's minister of interior.

To finance its campaign, AQIM is smuggling Europe-bound cigarettes, drugs and illegal immigrants through the desert, Mauritanian and Western officials say. Depots of untaxed cigarettes, often brought in by ship from South America, dot the desert along Mauritania's porous northern borders.

An equally important source of revenue for AQIM is ransom money -- estimated at tens of millions of dollars -- paid by European governments for the freedom of European tourists kidnapped in separate attacks in Algeria, Tunisia, Mali and Niger. The hostages were usually transported across the Sahara to AQIM's bases in lawless northern Mali, where local officials helped negotiate the ransom collection and the tourists' release.

Mali's role as a sanctuary for AQIM has long infuriated Algeria and the U.S. The country appears to be taking a harder line after the Islamist rebels -- who refrained from killing their hostages in the past -- announced in June that they executed their British captive, Edwin Dyer.

A few days after the killing of Mr. Dyer, suspected militants also gunned down in Timbuktu the regional chief of Malian intelligence, Lt. Col. Lamina Ould Bou. The colonel, an ethnic Arab and former Islamist rebel, had played a crucial role in Mali's efforts against AQIM. According to Malian government accounts and al Qaeda Internet postings, armed clashes in the region in following weeks killed dozens of Malian troops and Islamist guerrillas.

"We are now engaged in a total struggle against al Qaeda," Mali's President Amadou Toumani Touré declared last month.

The Saharan rebels have so far targeted only foreigners and security forces, sparing civilian targets like restaurants and hotels. In Algeria, Pakistan and Iraq, by contrast, al Qaeda-affiliated militants showed no concern about killing large numbers of Muslim civilians.

"These youngsters are not yet ready to carry out blind attacks and to explode car bombs, Algerian-style. They have not yet completely broken with the Mauritanian society," says Mr. Moustafa, the AQIM expert. But, he cautions, bloodier attacks are likely to happen soon: "They have bad teachers. Their future targets will be Mauritanian."

The war to impose Islamic law in Nigeria through violence has claimed at least 700 more dead in new rioting. The war has been ongoing for years, pushing south from largely Muslim northern Nigeria, but also attacking non-Muslims living in lands already under Sharia. The most recent major explosion of Islamic violence four years ago in the north resulted in many Christian deaths and churches burnt. Associated Press reports on this current blood shedding:

In a wave of violence that began Sunday, July 26, in Bauchi and quickly spread to three other northern states, including Borno, the sect, Boko Haram -- the name means "Western education is sacrilege" -- attacked police stations, churches and government buildings. The group is seeking the imposition of strict Islamic Shariah law in Nigeria, a country of several religions.

Roughly half of Nigerians are Christians, living mostly in the south. Several northern states are officially under Islamic law.

35-year-old Ibrahim Mohammed, told the AP that he and his family cowered in their house for days, terrorized by knife and sword-wielding sect members -- then later by soldiers, who, he said, would shoot anything that moved.

"It was terrible," Mr. Mohammed said as he drew an imaginary knife across his throat. "At first if you run, (the sect) will knife you, and then after you run, (soldiers) will shoot you."

He said he hid 17 Christian neighbors, including a pregnant woman, in his house during the fighting.

The term Harvard Professor Samuel Huntington coined in his famous Foreign Affairs essay in 1993 continues to be apt: "Islam has bloody borders." So it has been for 1400 years as Mohammad's imperative for Islamic world conquest plays on.

More. . .

Oh, and in Pakistan rampaging Muslims torched Christian homes and killed six, including four women and an infant.

The mainstream media, left wing that it is, acts as the left wing in Europe does, siding with Muslims as wonderful new neighbors in Europe. The reality is very different, as this article from Brussels Journal discloses. The Muslim invasion is gaining strength and only courageous people like Geert Wilders of the Netherlands is standing up to say, "STOP." But their numbers are expanding. The message is simple: "Become one of us or leave. We will not abandon our civilization for yours."

American columnist Diana West makes an excellent point: We are playing into Islam's hands in its war of world conquest by refusing, because of fear of offending Muslims or the corrosive habit of political correctness (and perhaps fear of violence), to speak of "the gross incompatibility of Islamic ideology with Western liberty."

Fudging with words and terms such as "Islamist" and "Islamofascism" and "radical Islam" is to confuse Americans who need to know the truth about Islam's true nature and why it must be tamed or turned back. The problem with Islam is its core ideology as contained in the Koran and proclaimed and acted out by Mohammad. Our problem is not with fringe groups who have hijacked Islam. Mohammad's Islam is a religion of war, not of peace, and it has been so for 1400 years. Jihad until Islam rules the world is the duty of every true believer Muslim.

But we must not say that.

Muslim organizations are working on "hate-crime" legislation in the UN and in various countries, including the United States, to make it a punishable offense to criticize Islam. The Attorney General of the United States under the leadership of President Obama is currently advocating expanded coverage of hate-crime legislation. (Dutch pro-freedom parliamentarian Geert Wilders and American Islam expert Robert Spencer both support all hate-crime laws.)

We may have the First Amendment and free speech in the United States, but, it we stifle ourselves from telling the truth about Islam, it is as if free speech doesn't exist.

There is an Islamic network of organizations active in the United States today working on their program of subverting the country from within with the goal that one day Sharia, Islamic law, will replace the U.S. Constitution.

Fanciful, you say? Islam has been engaged in this war of conquest against the rest of the world since it was begun by Mohammad. Today, with trillions in oil wealth and more than a billion followers, Islam may be in the best position at any time in its history to press forward with its war.

Strategies of conquest are tailored to the situation in each country. War in Afghanistan, terrror in Nigeria, aggressive immigration, high birth rates and intimidation in Europe, quiet subversion and random terrorism in the United States and building allies for control over human rights and other policies at the UN.

Ms. West delivered her timely warning against pre-emptive surrender to Islam at the free speech conference of the International Free Press Society held in Denmark's parliament on June 17th.

The Impact of Islam on Free Speech in America

Americans are proud, and rightly so, of the First Amendment in the Bill of Rights, which, among other things, protects speech from government control. The Amendment says in part: "Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press."

Increasingly, however, Americans seem content to regard the First Amendment not as the fundamental working tool of democracy, but as a national heirloom, a kind of antique to admire rather than put to use. I don't think many of my countrymen perceive how profoundly their attitude toward free speech has changed. But there is a difference between having freedom of speech and exercising freedom of speech, one that has become glaringly and distressingly obvious to me since September 11, 2001. So, while it is true that the US government is not Constitutionally empowered to make laws that censor Americans, it is also true, I believe, that Americans have come to censor themselves. But why?

The reaction to the falsities and half-truths in President Obama's Cairo speech to Muslims of the world continues. Brigitte Gabriel, who was terrorized by Muslim violence as a young Christian girl in Lebanon and ultimately settled in the United States, has written a letter to the President that bears careful reading.

An Open Letter to President Obama
June 8, 2009

Dear Mr. President,

You face difficult challenges in matters such as achieving peace in the Middle East and protecting America from the threat of radical Islam and terrorism. These are challenges that have vexed past presidents, going as far back as our second president, John Adams. I have no doubt you appreciate both the gravity of these challenges and the enormous obstacles that exist to solving them.

I also have no doubt that you and your staff understood that, no matter what you said in your speech last Thursday in Cairo, there would be those who would take issue with you. That is always the case when attempting to solve problems that are as deep and emotionally-laden as these challenges are.

I am assuming it is your sincere hope that the approach you have chosen to take, as evidenced by what I'm sure was a carefully crafted speech, will ultimately prove successful. However, it pains me to say this sir, but, while you said in your speech that you are a "student of history," it is abundantly clear that, in these matters, you do not know history and thus, as Santayana noted, you are doomed to repeat it. In doing so your efforts, however well-intentioned they may be, will not produce what you profess to hope they will produce.

A wise man once said that if you start with the wrong assumptions, no matter how logical your reasoning is, you will end up with the wrong conclusion.

With all due respect Mr. President, you are starting with certain assumptions that are unsupported by history and an objective study of the ideology of political Islam.

You began in your speech by asserting that "tensions" exist between the United States and Muslims around the world, which, of course, is correct.

Unfortunately, you then proceeded, incorrectly, to lay virtually all the blame for these tensions at the feet of America and the West. You blamed western colonialism, the Cold War, and even modernity and globalism.

A student of American history, who is not trying to reconstruct it to fit a modern politically correct narrative, would state that tensions between America and Muslims began with the unprovoked, four-decades long assault by the Muslim Barbary pirates against American shipping in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. I find it telling that you mentioned the Treaty of Tripoli in your speech but ignored the circumstances that led to it. That treaty was but one of numerous attempts by the United States to achieve peace with the jihadists of the Barbary Coast who were attacking our shipping and killing and enslaving our citizens and our soldiers and who by their own admission were doing so to fulfill the call to jihad.

These jihadists were not acting to protest American foreign policy, which was decidedly isolationist, and there was no state of Israel to scapegoat.

They were doing what countless Islamic jihadists have done throughout history, acting upon the hundreds of passages in the Qur'an and the Hadith that call upon faithful Muslims to kill, conquer or subjugate the infidel.

A student of world history would know that, for all the acknowledged evils of Western colonialism, these evils pale in comparison to the nearly 14 centuries of Islamic colonialism that began in Arabia under the leadership of Mohammed. The student of history would know that Islamic forces eradicated all Jewish and Christian presence from Arabia after Mohammed's death, and then succeeded in conquering all of North Africa, most of the Middle East, much of Asia Minor, and significant portions of Europe and India, eventually creating an empire larger than Rome's was at its peak.

The number of dead and enslaved during these many centuries of Islamic imperial conquest and colonialism have been estimated to total more than 300 million. What's more, the wealth of many of the conquered nations and cultures was plundered by the Islamic conquerors, and millions of non-Muslims who did survive were forced to pay onerous taxes, such as the "jizya," a humiliation tax to the Islamic caliphs. Indeed, in some areas Christians and Jews were made to wear a receipt for the jizya around their neck as a mark of their dishonor.

These facts have not been invented by Christian or Jewish historical revisionists, but were chronicled by Muslim eyewitnesses throughout the past 14 centuries and are available to be researched by any person seeking an objective understanding of how Islam spread throughout the world.

You say in your speech that we must squarely face the tensions that exist between America and the Muslim world. That is a laudable notion with which I agree, but by casting Islam as the historical victim and the West (and by implication, America) as the aggressor, you do not face these tensions squarely, but alleviate the Muslim world from coming to grips with the jihadist ideology embedded in its holy books and acted upon for 1,400 years.

Even worse, you empower and embolden militant Islamists who regard your gestures as signs of weakness and capitulation.

The issue is not that all Muslims are terrorists or radicals or extremists.

We all know that the majority of Muslims are not. We also know that many peace-loving Muslims are victims of Islamist violence.

The issue is this: what drives hundreds of millions of Muslims worldwide to call for the death of Jews?

What drives millions of Muslims to riot, destroy property, and take innocent lives in reaction to the Danish cartoons?

What drives tens of thousands of Muslims to demand the execution of a British teacher whose only "crime" was allowing her students to name their teddy bears "Mohammed"?

What drives countless Muslims worldwide to actively participate in, or fund, or provide nurture to terrorist organizations?

What drives Muslims in mosques in America to proclaim and distribute materials that call for hatred of and the destruction of infidels?

What drives entire Islamic countries to prohibit the building of a church or synagogue?

To assume, as you apparently do, that what drives these actions is not an ideology embedded in the holy books of Islam, but rather other "root causes," most of which you lay at the feet of America and the West, is at best naïve and at worst dangerous.

Lastly, I must address your statement that "Islam has a proud tradition of tolerance." Unfortunately, the examples you gave are the exception rather than the rule.

Historically speaking, I seriously doubt the Egyptian Copts, the Lebanese Maronites, the Christians in Bethlehem, the Assyrians, the Hindus, the Jews, and many others who have been persecuted by Islamic violence and supremacism, would agree with your assertion.

For instance, Christians and Jews became "Dhimmis," a second class group under Islam. Dhimmis were forced to wear distinctive clothing; it was Baghdad's Caliph Al-Mutawakkil, in the ninth century, who designated a yellow badge for Jews under Islam, which Hitler copied and duplicated in Nazi Germany nearly a thousand years later.

I witnessed first-hand the "tolerance" of Islam when Islamists ravaged my country of birth, Lebanon, in the 1970's, leaving widespread death and destruction in their wake. I saw how they re-paid the tolerance that Lebanese Christians extended toward them. My experience is not an isolated one. When you make an unfounded assertion about the "proud tradition" of tolerance in Islam, you do a great disservice to the hundreds of millions of non-Muslims who have been killed, maimed, enslaved, conquered, subjugated or displaced in the cause of Islamic jihad.

Mr. President, those of us like me who are ringing the alarm in America about the threat of radical Islam would like nothing better than to peacefully co-exist with the Muslim world.

Most Americans would like nothing better than to peacefully co-exist with the Muslim world. The obstacle to achieving this does not lie with us in America and the West. It lies with the hundreds of millions of Muslims worldwide, including many of their spiritual leaders, who take seriously the repeated calls to jihad in the Qur'an and the Hadith. Who regard "infidels" as inferior and worthy of conquering, subjugating and forcibly converting. Who support "cultural jihad" as a means to subvert non-Muslim societies from within. Who take seriously the admonitions throughout the Qur'an and the Hadith to convert the world to Islam by force if necessary and bring it under the rule of Allah.

Unless you are willing to courageously and honestly accept this, your aspirations for worldwide comity and peace in the Middle East are doomed to fail.

Sincerely,

Brigitte Gabriel

President Obama has become the self-proclaimed apologist for Islam and is "either unable or unwilling to come to terms with the nature of the radical Islamic threat to America and the West." HIs Cairo speech was a collection of missstatements and half-truths that exaggerated if not falsified Islamic claims for academic progress and tolerance.

His actions with respect to Islamic terrorists are even more alarming: Bringing terrorists captured on the battlefield to New York for a court trial? Reading Miranda rights to Taliban mauraders rounded up in the Afghan mountains? Expressing a willingness to release Guantanomo detainees in the United States? Stacking his administration with Arabists and selling out Israel?

What is the extent of the danger in all this for Americans?

The Bush administration was justifiably taken to task for refusing to recognize or do anything about the nefarious role played by state sponsors of extremism such as Saudi Arabia and Pakistan in the spread of radical Islam. President Obama has already gone beyond that, with a policy of pandering and appeasement. History teaches us that tolerating the intolerant and appeasing the unappeasable results in more conflict and bloodshed.

Read all of what Alex Alexiev has to say.

June 11, 2009, 4:00 a.m.

Obama's Fantasy Islam
Obama has seemingly chosen to act as an apologist for Islamism.

By Alex Alexiev of the Hudson Institute

With the media's rhapsodic paeans to President Obama's "historic" Cairo speech now receding into the background, this may be an opportune moment to take a sober look at America's policies vis-à-vis the Muslim world and, no less important, at where Islam itself may be heading.

It is now clear that the president is either unable or unwilling to come to terms with the nature of the radical Islamic threat to America and the West. To him, the problem is a few violent extremists, a "small but potent minority of Muslims," which leaves one wondering how a small minority got to be quite so potent. In any case, the West is dealing not with a few militants, or even with terrorism as such, but with a murderous, totalitarian doctrine couched in Islamic terms that has already become the dominant idiom in much of the Muslim world and its diaspora communities. Whether it is called "radical Islam," "Islamism," "Salafism," or "Islamofascism," it aims at nothing short of the conquest of the world for Islam, by violent means if need be. And not just any kind of Islam, but the most reactionary and intolerant interpretation of the Muslim faith.

It is an ideology that elevates violent jihad as a religious obligation for all Muslims, openly discriminates against non-Muslims and women, banishes democracy and secularism, and ordains the murder of apostates and homosexuals. This doctrine is preached today in tens of thousands of Salafi, Wahhabi, and Deobandi mosques and madrassas, and promoted by countless Islamist organizations, from the Muslim Brotherhood networks in America to the Taliban and its fellow jihadists in Pakistan. Extremism and terrorism are the results of this malignant phenomenon. The Taliban and al-Qaeda did not bring Pakistan to the edge of the precipice on their own; rather, 30 years of state-sponsored Islamization of Pakistani society made Islamism the threat it is.

While President Bush was also remiss in explaining to Americans that we're in a deadly conflict with a violent Islamist doctrine that has deep and spreading roots among a quarter of the human population -- rather than with terrorism, which is simply its symptom -- Obama has seemingly chosen to act as an apologist for this ideology. There is no other credible reason for a man with an army of experts, researchers, and fact-checkers at his disposal to utter so many half-truths and outright falsehoods about what Islam is and what it is not. These include his touting ostensible Islamic contributions to music (an art form prohibited among the devout) and printing (regarded by the mullahs as the devil's invention, and not available to Muslims until three centuries after Gutenberg), and his preposterous promotion of Saudi King Abdullah, ruler of the most religiously intolerant country on earth, as a champion of "interfaith dialogue."

More telling still are Obama's historically inaccurate portrayals of Muslims as being at "the forefront of innovation and education," and his blaming colonialism and the Cold War for their falling behind. In fact, Muslims have not been at the forefront of anything since ijtihad (reason) was declared un-Islamic ten centuries ago and replaced by blind obedience to reactionary sharia dogma, which, in turn, ushered in a cultural and intellectual stagnation that is yet to be overcome. Indeed, the greatest Muslim minds over the centuries, from Averoes and Avicenna to Noble Prize physicist Abdus Salam, have invariably been persecuted and declared apostates by the guardians of Islamic orthodoxy. While colonialism is a favorite Islamist whipping boy for all real or imagined ills visited upon the Muslims, it was the result, not the cause, of the inexorable decline of Islam as a world power and civilization that culminated in the collapse of the Ottoman Empire in the early 20th century. Nor should it be forgotten that throughout most of its history, Islam has been a premier imperialist and colonialist power itself.

Perhaps the greatest failure of the president's vaunted new approach to Islam is his reluctance to examine the profoundly oppressive and despotic nature of governance in most Arab and Muslim countries as one of the root causes of radical Islam. Worn-out clichés that Islam is "an important part of promoting peace" do little to explain to either Westerners or Muslims the nature of the conflict and how it affects their well-being. It is, of course, a well-known fact that radical Islam would have never reached critical mass without massive financial support and political sponsorship from states such as Saudi Arabia, Iran, Pakistan, and Sudan. What's less well-known is that many Muslim regimes that are considered moderate, or even American allies, have also aided and abetted Islamic extremism.

Egypt, the recipient of billions of U.S. aid dollars, is a case in point. Faced with a virulent Islamist threat from the Muslim Brotherhood, Cairo's dictatorial rulers, from Sadat to Mubarak, sought to appease the Islamists by allowing them to play an ever-greater role in society. First Sadat promoted sharia as one of the sources of law and later proclaimed it the sole source of Egyptian legislation, providing the Islamists with a powerful weapon against their secular opponents. Mubarak then appointed the mullahs of Al-Azhar as the sole arbiters of what books should be published in or imported into Egypt. Predictably, anything that does not meet their medieval criteria is being censored, while books that discuss how many angels could be recruited for a war against Israel (120 million) are encouraged.

This is the same organization that, in President Obama's words, "paved the way for Europe's Renaissance and Enlightenment." The inevitable result of such policies is evident in the mufti of Egypt's open support for Hezbollah and Hamas, and in his Taliban-like fatwa that sculpture and sculptors are against Islam.

The inescapable reality is that the policies that have served the venal and corrupt Arab regimes well (by keeping their oppressed populations poor, uneducated, and ignorant) have served the violent religious obscurantism of the Islamists even better. Consider that not a single Western government had the courage to criticize the Organization of the Islamic Conference in 1990 when all 45 of its members voted for the "Cairo Declaration of Human Rights in Islam," which, de facto and de jure, denied most internationally recognized human rights to Muslims by making all rights and freedoms in Muslim countries subject to sharia as their "sole source." To discuss our relations with the Muslim world in the abstract, as the Obama administration is now doing, without even mentioning the vast gulf separating most Muslim regimes from the rest of the world when it comes to the most basic aspects of modern civilization is disingenuous as well as futile.

The Bush administration was justifiably taken to task for refusing to recognize or do anything about the nefarious role played by state sponsors of extremism such as Saudi Arabia and Pakistan in the spread of radical Islam. President Obama has already gone beyond that, with a policy of pandering and appeasement. History teaches us that tolerating the intolerant and appeasing the unappeasable results in more conflict and bloodshed.

-- Alex Alexiev is an adjunct fellow at the Hudson Institute in Washington, D.C.

Jeff Jacoby contrasts what Ronald Reagan did with his opportunity in Berlin and what Obama didn't do in Cairo.

What the Brandenburg Gate was for Ronald Reagan in 1987, Cairo University could have been for Obama. Reagan seized the moment, spoke the truth, and helped liberate half a continent. All Obama did was give a speech.

Oh, well. Maybe there'll be a next time.

In Cairo, the president pandered

by Jeff Jacoby
The Boston Globe
June 7, 2009

PRESIDENT OBAMA went to the Middle East, he said, to speak frankly and forthrightly about the issues that bedevil America's relations with the Muslim world. "Part of being a good friend is being honest," he had said in an interview just before his trip. He warned his Cairo audience that he intended to be blunt. "We must say openly the things we hold in our hearts and that too often are said only behind closed doors," he declared; so he was going to "speak as clearly and plainly as I can."

About some things, the president was indeed direct. He conveyed his impatience with those -- there are many in the Middle East -- who blame the 9/11 terrorist attacks on a Jewish or American conspiracy. "Let us be clear: Al-Qaeda killed nearly 3,000 people on that day" and "the victims were innocent men, women and children. . . . These are not opinions to be debated; these are facts to be dealt with."

He was even more scornful about Holocaust denial, which is also rife in the Arab world. "Six million Jews were killed" by Nazi Germany, Obama said -- "more than the entire Jewish population of Israel today. Denying that fact is baseless, ignorant, and hateful."

Would that the rest of his remarks had been equally plain-spoken. As the first American president with Muslim roots, Obama benefits from much acclaim and goodwill in the Middle East. Rarely has a president had a better opportunity to openly address the pathologies and prejudices that drag Islamic societies backward, trapping so many of the world's Muslims in cultures that are unfree and unenlightened. As a candidate for president, Obama had argued that his experience of Muslim life gave him the moral authority to speak truth to Islamic power. "I can speak forcefully," he told The New York Times, "about the need for Muslim countries to reconcile themselves to modernity in ways they have failed to do."
Alas, that is just what he didn't do. Instead Obama pandered to his audience. He repeatedly praised Islamic history and teachings, repeatedly drew attention to American or Western shortcomings -- and repeatedly avoided speaking frankly about the dysfunctions in contemporary Islam.

He spoke of democracy, for example, but only in gauzy platitudes about "the freedom to live as you choose" and the need for "government of the people and by the people." Obama could have mentioned that democracy is almost entirely absent from the Arab world, or called for the release of imprisoned dissidents. He could have used his bully pulpit to urge an end to Egypt's repressive "state of emergency," which has lasted 28 years. He could have contrasted Iraq's hard-won constitutional democracy with the Middle East's ugly autocracies and dictatorships. He could have offered hope and encouragement to persecuted reformers and pro-democracy activists. Why didn't he?

"I want to address . . . women's rights," the president said, as well he might, given the appalling subjugation of women in so many Muslim countries. But about that subjugation -- the gender apartheid in Saudi Arabia, the fanatic misogyny of the Taliban, the widespread female genital mutilation, the "honor" killings of women who get pregnant out of wedlock -- he spoke not a word. The closest he came to denouncing the thugs who blow up girls' schools and murder their teachers was to observe tepidly that "a woman who is denied an education is denied equality." He disagreed, he said, with those who think "that a woman who chooses to cover her hair is somehow less equal." But what about women who are forced to wear a hijab? About them, Obama was silent.

Most astonishing of all, Obama never spoke the words "Islamist" or "Islamism." In a speech directed to Muslims worldwide, he made no effort to refute radical Islam's endorsement of global jihad. He spoke only of "extremists" -- as in "violent extremists who pose a grave threat to our security" -- but said nothing about the totalitarian religious ideology that drives them. For Obama, speaking in the heart of the Arab world at a seat of Muslim learning, it was the perfect moment to strike an intellectual blow against radical Islam. It was the ideal venue to implore Muslims to rise up, vocally and en masse, against the jihadists who preach and commit violence in the name of Islam.

What the Brandenburg Gate was for Ronald Reagan in 1987, Cairo University could have been for Obama. Reagan seized the moment, spoke the truth, and helped liberate half a continent. All Obama did was give a speech.

Slavery is still practiced in the Muslim world as it was in the time of Mohammad.

232 Christian and animist natives of the south of Sudan were freed from slavery in Darfur, in western Sudan.

Interviews with all 232 slaves conducted by CSI representatives reveal a clear pattern of physical and psychological abuse. The liberated slaves reported having been subjected to beatings, death threats, rape, female genital mutilation, forced conversion to Islam, racial and religious insults and work without pay. Some slaves reported witnessing the execution of fellow captives.

The long war of the Arab north to subdue the Christians and animists of the south (where most of the Sudanese oil is) resulted in an estimated 2 million deaths before a truce negotiated by President Bush's envoy former U.S. Senator John Danforth. Supposedly, there will be a referendum shortly to determine in the people of the south want full autonomy from Khartoum. The people of the south will surely say "Yes" in great numbers; the question is whether the central government will honor its pledge.

Chinese oil interests are entrenched in Sudan and are heavily involved in oil development in the south for which they are making handsome payments to the central government. But the Sudanese government and the Chinese will be loath to have the Chinese make additional payments to a provisional government of the south.

Sol, while these 232 have been freed, the fate of the south is uncertain, as is the fate of those caught up in the present civil war in Darfur.

Just another indication of how alien the Muslim culture is to western civilization.

232 Sudanese Slaves Liberated

CSI Urges President Obama to Help Stamp out Slavery in Sudan

WASHINGTON, May 29 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Today,
Christian Solidarity International (CSI) issued a report on the liberation of
232 Sudanese earlier this month. The slaves - Christian and traditionalist
members of the Dinka tribe - were liberated, with CSI's support, from Arab
masters in Darfur and neighboring Kordofan.

The released captives were then repatriated to their homeland in Southern Sudan by Arab retrievers working in association with local Arab-Dinka Peace Committees. The enslavement of these Black non-Muslim Sudanese took place during jihad raids undertaken by Arab militias backed by Sudan's Islamist government during the late North-South civil war (1983-2005).

Interviews with all 232 slaves conducted by CSI representatives reveal a clear pattern of physical and psychological abuse. The liberated slaves reported having been subjected to beatings, death threats, rape, female genital mutilation, forced conversion to Islam, racial and religious insults and work without pay. Some slaves reported witnessing the
execution of fellow captives.

Among the interviewed slaves were:

Achan Mawien Guat - pregnant 17 year-old: Enslaved, Raped,
Circumcised, and Islamized.

Peter Akot Dut Hol - 19 year-old Christian: Enslaved,
Islamized, Father Murdered, Mutilated and Terrorized

Majok Kon Maliith - 17 year-old: Enslaved, Islamized,
Terrorized, Beaten, and Blinded in one Eye.

Mary Atak Geng Baak - 18 year-old Christian: Enslaved,
Islamized, Sexually Abused, Terrorized, and Economically Exploited.

Writing today to President Barack Obama, Dr. John Eibner,
CEO of CSI-USA, recalled the crucial roles played by Ambassador Susan Rice,
while Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs, in initiating
government policy to eradicate Sudanese slavery during the Clinton
administration, and by President Bush's first Special Envoy for Sudan, Sen.
John Danforth in placing the issue of slavery at the heart of the Sudan peace
process.

Dr. Eibner furthermore urged President Obama to "revive America's commitment to act
energetically for the eradication of slavery in Sudan" by supporting the reintroduction of legislation sponsored by Reps. Chris Smith (R-NJ) and Diane Watson (D-CA) for the establishment of the United States Commission to Monitor Slavery and its Eradication in Sudan (Eradication of Slavery in Sudan Act of 2007. H.R.3844).

Slavery persists in Sudan, despite the signing in
January 2005 of the Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) between the Islamist
Government of Sudan (GOS) and the secular, Southern-based Sudan People's
Liberation Army (SPLM). The Agreement failed to include a mechanism for
overseeing the liberation of slaves and their safe repatriation.

An estimated 35,000 Black Africans from the Dinka tribe
remain enslaved today, according to a member of the Government of Sudan's
Committee for the Eradication of the Abduction of Women and Children (CEAWC),
James Aguir. (Skye Wheeler, Reuters, "Misseriya and Dinka Grapple with
History of Child Abduction", Aweil, November 14, 2008). Most of these
Dinka slaves are held by masters in Darfur and neighboring Kordofan. Reports from the UN Secretary General's International Commission of Inquiry on Darfur (January 2005) and from the Darfur Consortium (December 2008) also confirm the use of slavery as a weapon of war against Black Africans in Darfur. The enslavement and horrific abuse of Sudanese captives of the Lord's Resistance Army is yet another facet of Sudan's
slavery problem.

How far gone is Europe towards Islamization? A lot farther than many think.

This rather long but immensely informative report tells the story of how the invading Muslims aggressively assert their alien way of living and push the former prevailing culture into the background. The Islamic way of world conquest takes many forms and demographic expansion accompanied by just enough intimidation to frighten the natives is what is succeeding in Europe.

In this report, the Netherlands is ground zero. It is not a battleground, it is the scene of civilizational disintegration, hence the term "ground zero" is more appropriate to the reality of the situation. No one is fighting back.

As one ex-Muslim Ali Sina warns, this civilization cannot be allowed to vanish.

"If any culture needs to be preserved, it is the Western, Helleno-Christian culture. It is this culture that is facing extinction. It is to this culture alone that we owe the Enlightenment, Renaissance, and democracy. These are the foundations of our modern world. It would be a terrible mistake not to preserve this culture. If we do nothing, we face a future where democracy and tolerance will fade and Islam's more primitive instincts will subjugate humanity. All cultures are not made equal ... We owe our freedom and modern civilization to Western culture. It is this culture that is now under attack and needs protection."

Eurabia Has A Capital: Rotterdam

Here entire neighborhoods look like the Middle East, women walk around veiled, the mayor is a Muslim, sharia law is applied in the courts and the theaters. An extensive report from the most Islamized city in Europe.

by Sandro Magister

Muslim Women of Rotterdam

ROME, May 19, 2009 - One of the most indisputable results of Benedict XVI's trip to the Holy Land was the improvement in relations with Islam. The three days he spent in Jordan, and then, in Jerusalem, the visit to the Dome of the Mosque, spread an image among the Muslim general public - to an extent never before seen - of a pope as a friend, surrounded by Islamic leaders happy to welcome him and work together with him for the good of the human family.

But just as indisputable is the distance between this image and the harsh reality of the facts. Not only in countries under Muslim regimes, but also where the followers of Mohammed are in the minority, for example in Europe.

In 2002, the scholar Bat Ye'or, a British citizen born in Egypt and a specialist in the history of the Christian and Jewish minorities in Muslim countries - called the "dhimmi" - coined the term "Eurabia" to describe the fate toward which Europe is moving. It is a fate of submission to Islam, of "dhimmitude."

Oriana Fallaci used the word "Eurabia" in her writings, and gave it worldwide resonance. On August 1, 2005, Benedict XVI received Fallaci in a private audience at Castel Gandolfo. She rejected dialogue with Islam; he was in favor of it, and still is. But they agreed - as Fallaci later said - in identifying the "self-hatred" that Europe demonstrates, its spiritual vacuum, its loss of identity, precisely when the immigrants of Islamic faith are increasing within it.

Holland is an extraordinary test case. It is the country in which individual license is the most extensive - to the point of permitting euthanasia on children - in which the Christian identity is most faded, in which the Moslem presence is growing most boldly.

Here, multiculturalism is the rule. But the exceptions are dramatic: from the killing of the anti-Islamist political leader Pim Fortuyn to the persecution of the Somali dissident Ayaan Hirsi Ali to the murder of the director Theo Van Gogh, condemned to death for his film "Submission," a denunciation of the crimes of Muslim theocracy. Fortuyn's successor, Geert Wilders, has lived under 24-hour police protection for six years.

There is one city in Holland where this new reality can be seen with the naked eye, more than anywhere else. Here, entire neighborhoods look as if they have been lifted from the Middle East, here stand the largest mosques in Europe, here parts of sharia law are applied in the courts and theaters, here many of the women go around veiled, here the mayor is a Muslim, the son of an imam.

This city is Rotterdam, Holland's second largest city by population, and the largest port in Europe by cargo volume.

The following is a report on Rotterdam published in the Italian newspaper "il Foglio" on May 14, 2009, the second in a major seven-part survey on Holland.

The author, Giulio Meotti, also writes for the "Wall Street Journal." Next September, his book-length survey on Israel will be published.

The photo above is entitled "Muslim women in Rotterdam." It is from an exhibition in 2008 by the Dutch photographers Ari Versluis and Ellie Uyttenbroek.

In the casbah of Rotterdam

by Giulio Meotti

In Feyenoord, veiled women can be seen everywhere, darting like a flash through the streets of the neighborhood. They avoid any sort of contact, even eye contact, especially with men. Feyenoord is the size of a city, and there are seventy nationalities coexisting there. It is an area that lives on subsidies and residential construction, and it is here that it is most obvious that Holland - with all of its rules against discrimination and all of its moral indignation - is a completely segregated society. Rotterdam is new, having been bombed twice by the Luftwaffe during the second world war. Like Amsterdam, it is below sea level, but unlike the capital it does not enjoy an image of reckless abandon. In Rotterdam, it is the Arab shops selling halal food that dominate the cityscape, not the neon lights of the prostitutes. Everywhere are casbah-cafes, travel agencies offering flights to Rabat and Casablanca, posters expressing solidarity with Hamas, or offering affordable Dutch language lessons.

It is the second-largest city in the country, a poor city, but also the economic engine with its huge port, the most important in Europe. Most of the population are immigrants, and the city has the tallest and most imposing mosque in Europe. Sixty percent of the foreigners who arrive in Holland come here to live. The most striking thing when one arrives in the city by train are the enormous and fascinating mosques framed by the vibrant green, luxuriant, wooded, watery countryside, like an alien presence compared to the rest. They call it "Eurabia." The Turkish Mevlana mosque is imposing. It has the tallest minarets in Europe, even higher than the stadium of the Feyenoord soccer team.

Many of the neighborhoods in Rotterdam are captive to the darkest, most violent form of Islamism. Pim Fortuyn's house stands out like a pearl in a sea of chador and niqab. It is at number 11 Burgerplein, behind the train station. Every now and then someone comes to put flowers in front of the home of the professor who was murdered in Amsterdam on May 6, 2002. Someone else leaves a card: "In Holland everything is tolerated, except for the truth." A millionaire named Chris Tummesen bought Pim Fortuyn's house so that it would remain intact. The evening before his murder Pim was nervous, and had said on television that a climate of demonization had been created against him and his ideas. And his fears came true, when he was shot in the head five times by Volkert van der Graaf, a militant of the animal rights left, scrawny, head shaved, eyes dark, dressed like an environmental purist in a handmade shirt, sandals, and goat's wool socks, a strict vegetarian, "a guy impatient to change the world," his friends say.

Not long ago in downtown Rotterdam, funerary photos of Geert Wilders were placed under a tree, with a candle to commemorate his upcoming death. Today Wilders is the most popular politician in the city. He is the heir of Fortuyn, the homosexual, Catholic, ex-Markist professor who had formed his own party to save the country from Islamization. At his funeral, only the absence of Queen Beatrice kept the farewell to the "divine Pim" from becoming a funeral fit for a king. Before his death they made a monster of him (one Dutch minister called him an "untermensch," an inferior man in Nazi parlance), afterward they idolized him. The prostitutes of Amsterdam left a wreath of flowers in his honor beneath the National Monument in Dam Square, a memorial to the victims of World War II.

Three months ago, "The Economist," a weekly publication far from Wilders' anti-Islamic ideas, spoke of Rotterdam as a "Eurabian nightmare." For most of the Dutch who live there, Islamism is now a threat greater than the Delta Plan, the complicated system of dikes that prevents flooding from the sea, like the flood in 1953 that killed two thousand people. The picturesque town of Schiedam, part of the greater Rotterdam area, has always been a jewel in the Dutch imagination. Then the fairy tale glow faded, when in the newspapers three years ago it became the city of Farid A., the Islamist who made death threats against Wilders and Somali dissident Ayaan Hirsi Ali. For six years, Wilders has lived under 24-hour police protection.

Muslim lawyers in Rotterdam also want to change the rules of the courtroom, asking to be allowed to remain seated when the judge enters. They recognize Allah alone. The lawyer Mohammed Enait recently refused to stand when the magistrates enter the courtroom, saying that "Islam teaches that all men are equal." The court of Rotterdam has recognized Enait's right to remain seated: "There is no legal obligation requiring Muslim lawyers to stand in front of the court, insofar as this action is in contrast with the dictates of the Islamic faith." Enait, the head of the legal office Jairam Advocaten, has explained that "he considers all men equal, and does not acknowledge any form of deference toward anyone." All men, but not all women. Enait is well known for his refusal to shake hands with women, and has repeatedly said he would prefer them to wear the burqa. And there are many burqas on the streets of Rotterdam.

The fact that Eurabia has arrived in Rotterdam has been demonstrated by an episode in April at the Zuidplein Theatre, one of the most prestigious in the city, a modernist theater proud of "representing the cultural diversity of Rotterdam." It is located in the southern part of the city, and receives funding from the municipality, headed by a Muslim, the son of the imam Ahmed Aboutaleb. Three weeks ago, the Zuidplein Theatre allowed an entire balcony to be reserved for women only, in the name of sharia. This is not happening in Pakistan or in Saudi Arabia, but in the city from which the Founding Fathers set out for the United States. It was from here that the Puritans disembarked in the Speedwell, which they later exchanged for the Mayflower. This is where the American adventure began. Today, it has legalized sharia.

For a performance by the Muslim Salaheddine Benchikhi, the Zuidplein Theatre agreed to his request to have the first five rows set aside for women only. Salaheddine, an editorialist for the website Morokko.nl, is known for his opposition to the integration of Muslims. The city council has approved this: "According to our Western values, the freedom to live one's own life by virtue of one's convictions is a precious possession." A spokesman for the theater has also defended the director: "It is hard to get Muslims to come to the theater, so we are willing to adapt."

Another man who has been willing to adapt is the director Gerrit Timmers. His words are fairly symptomatic of what Wilders calls "self-Islamization." The first case of self-censorship took place in Rotterdam, in December of 2000. Timmers, the director of the theater group Onafhankelijk Toneel, wanted to stage a performance about the life of Mohammed's wife Aisha. The play was boycotted by the Muslim actors in the company when it became evident that it would be a target for the Islamists. "We are enthusiastic about the play, but fear reigns," the actors told him. The composer, Najib Cherradi, said that he would withdraw "for the good of my daughter." The newspaper "Handelsblad" gave the story the title "Tehran on the Meuse," the name of the gentle river that passes through Rotterdam. "I had already done three works about the Moroccans, so I wanted to have Muslim actors and singers," Timmers tells us. "Then they told me that it was a dangerous issue, and they could not participate, because they had received death threats. In Rabat, an article came out saying we would end up like Salman Rushdie. For me, it was more important to continue the dialogue with the Moroccans, rather than provoke them. For this reason, I see no problem if the Muslims want to separate the men from the women in a theater."

Let's meet the director who has brought sharia to the Dutch theaters, Salaheddine Benchikhi. He is young, modern, confident, and speaks perfect English. "I defend the decision to separate the men from the women, because here there is freedom of expression and organization. If people can't sit where they want to, that is discrimination. There are two million Muslims in Holland, and they want our tradition to become public, everything is evolving. Mayor Aboutaleb has supported me."

One year ago, the city was buzzing when the newspapers published a letter by Bouchra Ismaili, a Rotterdam city councilman: "Listen up, crazy freaks, we're here to stay. You're the foreigners here, with Allah on my side I'm not afraid of anything. Take my advice: convert to Islam, and you will find peace." Just a walk through the streets of the city, and you know right away that in many neighborhoods you are no longer in Holland. It is right out of the Middle East. In some schools, there is a "room of silence" where Muslim students, who are in the majority, can pray five times a day, with a poster of Mecca, the Qur'an, and a ritual washing before the prayers. Another Muslim city councilman, Brahim Bourzik, wants signs placed in various parts of the city showing the direction to Mecca.

Sylvain Ephimenco is a Franco-Dutch journalist who has been living in Rotterdam for twelve years. For twenty years, he was the "Libération" correspondent in Holland, and is proud of his leftist credentials. "Even though I don't believe in that anymore," he says, welcoming us to his home overlooking one of Rotterdam's little canals. Not far from here is the al Nasr mosque of the imam Khalil al Moumni, who when gay marriage was legalized described homosexuals as "sick people worse than pigs." From the outside, it can be seen that the mosque is more than twenty years old, having been built by the first Moroccan immigrants. Moumni has written a pamphlet that is circulating around the Dutch mosques, "The path of the Muslim," in which he explains that the heads of homosexuals should be cut off and "hung from the highest building in the city." Next to the al Nasr mosque, we sit down at a cafe for men only. In front of us is a halal Islamic slaughterhouse. Ephimenco is the author of three essays on Holland and Islam, and today is a famous columnist for the leftist Christian newspaper "Trouw." He has the best perspective for understanding a city that, perhaps even more than Amsterdam, embodies the tragedy of Holland.

"It is not at all true that Wilders gets his votes from the fringes, everyone knows that, even though they don't say it," he tells us. "Today educated people vote for Wilders, although at first it was the lower class Dutch, the tattoo crowd. Many academics and people on the left vote for him. The problem is all of these Islamic headscarves. There's a supermarket behind my house. When I arrived, there wasn't a single headscarf. Now it's all Muslim women with the chador at the register. Wilders is not Haider. His positions are on the right, but also on the left, he's a typical Dutchman. Here there are even hours at the swimming pool set aside for Muslim women. This is the origin of the vote for Wilders. Islamization, this foolishness with the theater, has to be stopped. In Utrecht, there is a mosque where they provide separate city services for men and women. The Dutch are afraid. Wilders is against the Frankenstein of multiculturalism. I, who used to be on the left but am no longer anything, I say we've reached the limit. I feel the ideals of the Enlightenment have been betrayed with this voluntary apartheid, in my heart I feel the death of the ideals of the equality of men and women, and freedom of expression. Here the left is conformist, and the right has the better answer to insane multiculturalism."

One of the professors at Erasmus University in Rotterdam is Tariq Ramadan, the famous Swiss Islamic scholar who is also a special adviser for the city. Some of Ramadan's statements against homosexuality were uncovered by Holland's most famous gay magazine, "Gay Krant," directed by a talkative journalist named Henk Krol. On a videocassette, Ramadan calls homosexuality "a disease, a disorder, an imbalance." On the tape, Ramadan also has comments on women, "they should keep their eyes on the ground when they're on the street." Wilders' party asked for the city council to be disbanded, and for the Islamic scholar from Geneva to be sent packing, but instead he was renewed in his post for two more years. This was happening while across the sea, the Obama administration was confirming the ban on Ramadan entering United States territory. The tapes in Krol's possession include one in which Ramadan tells women: "Allah has an important rule: if you try to attract attention through the use of perfume, or your appearance or gestures, you do not have the correct spiritual orientation."

"When Pim Fortuyn was killed, it was a shock for everyone, because a man was murdered for what he said," Krol tells us. "That was no longer my country. I'm still thinking about leaving Holland, but where can I go? Here we have been criticized by everyone, by the Catholic Church and by the Protestants. But when we criticized Islam, they answered us: you are creating new enemies!" According to Ephimenco, the street is the secret of Wilders' success: "In Rotterdam, there are three enormous mosques, one of them is the largest in Europe. There are more and more Islamic headscarves, and an Islamist impulse coming from the mosques. I know many people who have left the city center to go to the rich, white suburbs. My neighborhood is poor and black. It is a question of identity, on the streets Dutch is not spoken anymore, but Arabic and Turkish."

Let's meet the man who inherited Fortuyn's column in the newspaper "Elsevier." His name is Bart Jan Spruyt, a robust young Protestant intellectual, founder of the Edmund Burke Society, but above all the author of Wilders' "Declaration of independence," and his coworker from the beginning. "Here an immigrant no longer has to struggle, study, work, he can live at the expense of the state," Spruyt tells us. "We have ended up creating a parallel society. The Muslims are in the majority in many neighborhoods, and are asking for sharia. This isn't Holland anymore. Our use of freedom has turned back against us, it is a process of self-Islamization."

Spruyt was one of Fortuyn's close friends. "Pim said what the people had known for decades." He attacked the establishment and the journalists. It was a great relief for the people when he went into politics, they called him the 'white knight'. The last time I spoke with him, one week before he was killed, he told me he had a mission. His killing was not the act of a lone madman. In February of 2001, Pim announced that he wanted to change the first article of the Dutch constitution, on discrimination, because in his view it kills freedom of expression, and he was right. The following day in the Dutch churches, which are mostly empty and used for public meetings, the diary of Anne Frank was read as a warning against Fortuyn. Pim was truly Catholic, more than we think, in his books he spoke out against modern society without fathers, without values, empty, nihilist."

Chris Ripke is a well-known artist in the city. His studio is near a mosque in Insuindestraat. Shocked in 2004 by the murder of director Theo Van Gogh by an Dutch Islamist, Chris decided to paint an angel on wall of his studio and the biblical commandment "Gij zult niet doden," thou shalt not kill. His neighbors at the mosque found the words "offensive," and called the mayor of Rotterdam at the time, the liberal Ivo Opstelten. The mayor ordered the police to erase the painting, because it was "racist." Wim Nottroth, a television journalist, camped out on the spot in protest. The police arrested him, and his film was destroyed. Ephimenco did the same in his own window: "I put up a big white sheet with the biblical commandment. Photographers came, and the radio. If you can no longer write 'do not kill' in this country, then you are saying that we are all in prison. It is like apartheid, whites living with whites and blacks with blacks. There is a great chill. Islamism wants to change the structure of the country." For Ephimenco, part of the problem is the de-Christianization of society. "When I arrived here, during the 1960's, religion was dying, a unique event in Europe, a collective de-Christianization. Then the Muslims brought religion back to the center of social life. Aided by the anti-Christian elite."

Let's go for a stroll through the Islamized neighborhoods. In Oude Westen there are only Arabs, women clothed from head to foot, ethnic foods shops, Islamic restaurants, and shopping centers with Arabic music. "Ten years ago, you didn't see all these headscarves," Ephimenco says. Behind his house, in a flourishing middle class area with two-story houses, there is an Islamized neighborhood. There are Muslim signs everywhere. "Look at all of those Turkish flags, over there is an important church, but it's empty, no one goes there anymore." In the middle of one square stands a mosque with Arabic writing outside. "That used to be a church." Not far from here is the most beautiful monument in Rotterdam. It is a small granite statue of Pim Fortuyn. Beneath the gleaming bronze head, the mouth saying his last words on behalf of freedom of speech, there is written in Latin: "Loquendi libertatem custodiamus," let us safeguard the right to speak. Every day, someone places flowers there.

__________

The newspaper that published the survey:

-- Il Foglio

Obama is thowing the only democracy in the Middle East to the Islamic wolves, betraying more than 60 years of mutual suport and cooperation between Israel and the United States begun by President Harry S. Truman.

Why? We can only guess. Obama has romanticized his early exposure to indionesian Islam and, because he has not studied history, even American oir European history, he is either naive about, ignorant of or indifferent to the explosiion of Jew-hating, jihadist Islamic political ideology that has occurred since he left Indoneisa in 1971. He also has this supreme belief that as the omnipotent and all-knowning American emperor he can do anything.

Caroline Glick and Anne Bayefsky detail why Israel should ignore the demands of the U.S. which gravely threaten Israel

Washington has abandoned its obligations

Caroline B. Glick
May 17, 2009
Philadelphia Inquirer

is the senior contributing editor and columnist for the Jerusalem Post and senior fellow for Middle Eastern affairs at the Center for Security Policy

Last Sunday, the head of Israel's military intelligence reported that Iran has mastered the nuclear fuel cycle and can rapidly move from low-grade uranium enrichment to weapons-grade uranium enrichment. He also said that the next 18 months will be "critical" for preventing Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons.

There is a national consensus in Israel that preventing Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons is the most important and urgent national-security challenge facing the country. Even if Iran refrains from using the weapons directly against Israel, a nuclear-armed Iran will accelerate its efforts to destabilize and destroy the Jewish state by using its proxies in the Palestinian Authority, Lebanon, Syria, and Iraq to wage constant, unrelenting terror, guerrilla and conventional warfare.

A nuclear arsenal will likewise help Iran to expand its sphere of influence by empowering it to escalate its efforts to overthrow the Jordanian and Egyptian regimes, and accelerate Hamas' takeover of the Palestinian Authority, scuttling peace negotiations and peace treaties with Israel. Other Arab states - including Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Morocco, and Kuwait - will also see their regimes threatened or overthrown by radical forces operating under Iran's nuclear umbrella.

And this is the best-case scenario.

It is no wonder, then, that Israelis of all political stripes are deeply disturbed by the Obama administration's Middle East policies. Since taking office, President Obama has made it clear that preventing Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons is not a major concern for him. Rather, he strives to open diplomatic relations with Iran in the inexplicable hope that Iran can be appeased out of a nuclear program that has already brought it to the cusp of regional hegemony.

Over the last several weeks, as part of the buildup to tomorrow's meeting between Obama and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the administration has ratcheted up its rhetoric against Israel. Vice President Biden, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, national security adviser James Jones, and White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel are among those who have stated that Israel cannot expect the United States to support its aim of preventing Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons unless Israel first makes concessions to the Palestinians. That is, if Iran acquires nuclear weapons, Israel will be to blame.

Israelis are mystified by this position. With Iran's proxy Hamas in charge of Gaza, and ascendant in the West Bank, it is clear that any Palestinian state that is established in the near future will be an Iranian-aligned terror state at war with Israel. That is, while administration officials claim "the only solution is a two-state solution," Israelis recognize that the rapid establishment of a Palestinian state will only cause more war, terror, and regional instability.

Moreover, statements by Biden and Defense Secretary Robert Gates expressing the administration's opposition to an Israeli military strike against Iran's nuclear installations, together with Assistant Secretary of State Rose Gottemoeller's recent call for Israel to join the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, have led many Israelis to perceive a strategic and moral blindness informing the administration's views about Israel and Iran. Apparently, for the administration, there is no difference between Israel, a stalwart U.S. ally and fellow democracy, and Iran - a terror-supporting, human-rights-violating, self-declared enemy of the United States that has been attacking U.S. citizens, interests, and allies since the 1979 Islamic revolution, and has repeatedly called for Israel to be eradicated.

A poll taken earlier this month by Bar Ilan University showed that only 38 percent of Israelis view Obama as friendly toward Israel. Moreover, 66 percent of Israelis support a military strike on Iran's nuclear installations, and only 15 percent say they believe Israel should cancel an attack on Iran if the United States opposes the operation.

These data are important for understanding how Israelis are responding to the Obama administration's apparent hostility toward Israel and its perceived preference for a nuclear-armed Iran over any concerted action by the United States or Israel to prevent Iran from becoming a nuclear power. What the administration is signaling Israelis - and their government - is that Washington is no longer Israel's trusted ally. Indeed, it is becoming clear to the Israeli public that, for the administration, it doesn't matter what Israel does or what its enemies do. As far as Obama and his advisers are concerned, Israel's refusal to make further concessions to the Palestinians will be the cause for whatever transpires.

In this state of affairs, on the eve of the Obama-Netanyahu meeting, more and more Israelis have come to the conclusion that there is little point in taking Washington's views into consideration. If Washington is going to blame Israel anyway, we are better off being blamed for preemptively removing the threat of a new Holocaust than for allowing that threat to become a fact of life.

Bayefsky focuses on how the Obama Administration is using the UN to undercut Israel.

America is now on a collision course with Israel.

Anne Bayefsky
National Review Online
May 15, 2009, 3:58 p.m.

In advance of Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu's visit to the United States on Monday, President Obama unveiled a new strategy for throwing Israel to the wolves. It takes the form of enthusiasm for the United Nations and international interlopers of all kinds. Instead of ensuring strong American control over the course of Israeli-Palestinian negotiations or the Arab-Israeli peace process, the Obama administration is busy inserting an international mob between the U.S. and Israel. The thinking goes: If Israel doesn't fall into an American line, Obama will step out of the way, claim his hands are tied, and let the U.N. and other international gangsters have at their prey.

It began this past Monday with the adoption of a so-called presidential statement by the U.N. Security Council. Such statements are not law, but they must be adopted unanimously -- meaning that U.S. approval was essential and at any time Obama could have stopped its adoption. Instead, he agreed to this: "The Security Council supports the proposal of the Russian Federation to convene, in consultation with the Quartet and the parties, an international conference on the Middle East peace process in Moscow in 2009."

This move is several steps beyond what the Bush administration did in approving Security Council resolutions in December and January -- which said only that "The Security Council welcomes the Quartet's consideration, in consultation with the parties, of an international meeting in Moscow in 2009." Apparently Obama prefers a playing field with 57 members of the Organization of the Islamic Conference, 22 members of the Arab League -- most of whom don't recognize the right of Israel to exist -- and one Jewish state. A great idea -- if the purpose is to ensure Israel comes begging for American protection.

The U.N. presidential statement also makes laudatory references to another third-party venture, the 2002 Arab "Peace" Initiative. That's a Saudi plan to force Israel to retreat to indefensible borders in advance of what most Arab states still believe will be a final putsch down the road. America's U.N. ambassador, Susan Rice, announced to the Security Council that "we intend to integrate the Arab Peace Initiative into our own approach."

Make no mistake: This U.N. move, made with U.S. approval, sets America on a well-calculated collision course with Israel. U.S. collusion on this presidential statement was directly at odds with Israel's wishes and well-founded concerns about the U.N.'s bona fides on anything related to Israel. Israeli U.N. ambassador Gabriella Shalev issued a statement of Israel's position: "Israel does not believe that the involvement of the Security Council contributes to the political process in the Middle East. This process should be bilateral and left to the parties themselves. Furthermore, the timing of this Security Council meeting is inappropriate as the Israeli government is in the midst of conducting a policy review, prior to next week's visit by Prime Minister Netanyahu to the United States. . . . Israel shared its position with members of the Security Council."

By contrast, Rice told reporters: "We had a very useful and constructive meeting thus far of the Council. We welcome Foreign Minister Lavrov's initiative to convene the Council, and we're very pleased with the constructive and comprehensive statement that will be issued by the president of the Council on the Council's behalf. This was a product of really collaborative, good-faith efforts by all members of the Council, and we're pleased with the outcome."

The Obama administration's total disregard of Israel's obvious interest in keeping the U.N. on the sidelines was striking. Instead of reiterating the obvious -- that peace will not come if bigots and autocrats are permitted to ram an international "solution" down the throat of the only democracy at the table -- Rice told the Council: "The United States cannot be left to do all the heavy lifting by itself, and other countries . . . must do all that they can to shore up our common efforts." In a break with decades of U.S. policy, the Obama strategy is to energize a U.N. bad cop so that the U.S. might assume the role of good cop -- for a price.

On Tuesday the Obama administration did it again: It ran for a seat on the U.N. Human Rights Council. As expected, the administration won election to represent the Council's Western European and Others Group -- it was a three-state contest for three spaces.

The Council is most famous, not for protecting human rights, but for its obsession with Israel. In its three-year history it has:

adopted more resolutions and decisions condemning Israel than condemning the 191 other U.N. members combined;

entrenched an agenda with only ten items, one permanently reserved for condemning Israel and another for condemning any other U.N. state that might "require the Council's attention";

held ten regular sessions on human rights, and five special sessions to condemn only Israel;

insisted on an investigator with an open-ended mandate to condemn Israel, while all other investigators must be regularly renewed;

spawned constant investigations on Israel, and abolished human-rights investigations (launched by its predecessor, the Commission on Human Rights) into Belarus, Cuba, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Liberia, Iran, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan.

Moreover, every morning before the Human Rights Council starts, all states -- and even observers like the Palestinians -- get together in their regional blocs for an hour to negotiate, share information, and determine positions. All, that is, except Israel. The Western European and Others Group refuses to give Israel full membership. Now the U.S. will be complicit in this injustice.

Joining the Council has one immediate effect on U.S.-Israel relations: It gives the Obama administration a new stick to use against Israel. Having legitimized the forum through its membership and participation, the U.S. can now attempt to extract concessions from Israel in return for American objections to the Council's constant anti-Israel barrage.

Obama administration officials may believe they can put the lid back on Pandora's box after having invited the U.N., Russia, the Arab League, and the Organization of the Islamic Conference to jump into the process of manufacturing a Palestinian state while Israel is literally under fire. They have badly miscalculated. By making his bed with countries that have no serious interest in democratic values, the president has made our world a much more dangerous place.

-- Anne Bayefsky is a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute and at Touro College