Atlas Shrugs has this from Andy Bostom:

Jew Hatred from the “Muslim Pope”

Andrew G. Bostom, MD, MS

Imagine the following (thankfully unimaginable) scenario: Some twenty years prior to being elected Pope Benedict, then Cardinal Ratzinger wrote a 700 page treatise detailing and rationalizing for present (and all) times the most virulent anti-Jewish motifs extant in Christian theology. Sadly, what is unimaginable in Christendom, has not only occurred, but passes virtually without recognition in the Islamic world of today.

Muhammad Sayyid Tantawi wrote these words in his 700 page dissertation rationalizing Muslim Jew hatred, Banu Isra’il fi al-Qur’an wa al-Sunna [Jews in the Koran and the Traditions], originally published in the 1970s, and then re-issued in 1986:

[The] Koran describes the Jews with their own particular degenerate characteristics, i.e. killing the prophets of Allah, corrupting His words by putting them in the wrong places, consuming the people’s wealth frivolously, refusal to distance themselves from the evil they do, and other ugly characteristics caused by their deep-rooted lasciviousness…only a minority of the Jews keep their word….[A]ll Jews are not the same. The good ones become Muslims, the bad ones do not.

Tantawi was apparently rewarded for this scholarly effort by being named Grand Imam of Al-Azhar University in 1996, a position he still holds. These are the expressed, “carefully researched” views on Jews held by the nearest Muslim equivalent to a Pope—the head of the most prestigious center of Muslim learning in Sunni Islam, which represents 90% of the world’s Muslims. And Sheikh Tantawi has not mollified such hatemongering beliefs since becoming the Grand Imam of Al-Azhar as his statements on the Jews as “enemies of Allah, descendants of apes and pigs”, the legitimacy of homicide bombings of Jews, or “dialogue” with Jews (excerpted just below), make clear.

…anyone who avoids meeting with the enemies in order to counter their dubious claims and stick fingers into their eyes, is a coward.  My stance stems from Allah’s book [the Koran], more than one-third of which deals with the Jews…[I] wrote a dissertation dealing with them [the Jews], all their false claims and their punishment by Allah. I still believe in everything written in that dissertation.

Unfortunately, the orthodox Islamic archetypes of Jew hatred promulgated by Hizbollah and Hamas, are also being disseminated by the most respected, mainstream Islamic institutions. Tantawi’s case illustrates the prevalence and depth of sacralized, “normative” Jew hatred in the contemporary Muslim world which can no longer be ignored.

Dr. Bostom, www.andrewbostom.org is the author of “The Legacy of Jihad”, from Prometheus Books

UPDATE: Andrew Bostom will be on History TV today:

History on Book TV
A look at non-fiction history books. On Sunday, July 30 at 1:30 pm EST.

Report: Kuwait’s Al Seyassah newspaper reported that Hassan Nasrollah, the capo of Lebanon's Hezbollah traveled to Damascus to meet with Syrian leader Bashar al-Asad and the secretary of the supreme national security council of the Islamic Republic of Iran, Ali Larijani. On Thursday, the Islamic regime’s news media announced Larijani’s trip to Syria. However, later they denied it.

Al Seyassah however wrote that Nasrollah was able to reach Syria with the assistance of Syrian security agents stationed in Lebanon. The topic of discussion between the 3 men will be about the ways Syria and the Islamic Republic of Iran can deliver weapons and ammunition to Hezbollah; Nasrollah intends to be consulting with his “big brothers”.

This newspaper reported that the Hezbollah capo appeared in plain clothes in Damascus without his usual clerical attire and rode in a bullet proof, Syrian Baathist security vehicle. Since the beginning of the war against Lebanese Hizbullah, this is the first time it is reported that Nasrolah has in fact traveled out of Lebanon.

The paper also reported that while Larijani has traveled to Damascus in order to deliver to Nasrollah his new set of orders from Tehran, the Islamic Republic of Iran’s radio and television had claimed that the true nature of his trip was "to achieve the humanitarian objectives".

(Thanks to Jonah Goldberg at the Corner)

This Psychology Today report is the most horrible, horrible thing I have read for a long time. I sort of knew it all, of course, as we all do, piecemeal; but to see it spelled out in one place, at such length, induced something close to clinical shock. Our poor kids, our poor poor kids.

I've been aware for some time, and reading that made me freshly aware, of my own great good fortune in having been in the last (actually, I think, about last but one, or last but a half) generation of Western children to have a real childhood: roaming over fields and through woods, falling out of trees and into ponds, experienced with firecrackers, roller-skates, airguns, and slingshots, being bullied and occasionally beaten up by older boys, playing "British Bulldog" in the schoolyard**, sailing model boats and flying model planes, playing complicated street games handed down intact from ancient Rome—-and all with never an adult in sight! How lucky we were! How miserable our children must be!

And someone please tell me how we are going to preserve liberty, when we are raising generations who have never experienced it?

Now you've gone and done it. Now I'm in that mood again: I ***hate*** the modern world.

—

**Rules of British Bulldog: About a dozen boys stand in a line with their backs against a wall. Another dozen stand likewise, facing them, with their backs against an opposing wall 50 feet or so away. At a signal, both groups charge headlong for the opposite wall, the two groups meeting in the middle. First group to get all its men to the opposite wall wins. Contact rules: there aren't any.

Victor Davis Hanson has the right dislikes. His attacks on the American -- or at least the California -- university system are a pleasure to read. His hatred for those who are unfair to Israel, his general take on the universe endear him to all sensible people. But what is not endearing, what has been so disturbing and even maddening for the past 2 1/2 years, is his refusal, even though in his writing he has made much of the influence of "culture" in explaining the success of Western man as warrior (those free Greeks, those serried ranks of Persian myrmidons), to contemplate what the belief-system of Islam is all about, and how Islam so completely molds both its adherents, and the societies in which even those who are not full believers grow up, and drink in the atmospherics of Islam.

Had he done so, he would long ago have realized that in March or April, 2004, when I began setting out exactly what would happen and why it was inevitable (those sectarian and ethnic divisions that cannot be healed, that neither Sunni Arabs nor Shi'a Arabs will permit to be healed though both will play for Amercian protection, American military equipment and training, American fighting against their enemies under the guise of "protecting democracy") and furthermore, why it was in American and Infidel interests for these sectarian and ethnic divisions to be encouraged -- the first being a kind of Iran-Iraq War (which should have gone on forever), with repercussions in Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Kuwait, Pakistan, Lebanon, and the second with repercussions in Algeria and elsewhere in the Berber-haunted Maghreb, and everywhree that non-Arab Muslims have been persecuted, or treated with contumely, or resented the linguistic and cultural imperialism of the Arabs, of which Islam is the obvious vehicle.

His refusal to see this, his ignoring of what his associate Bruce Thornton was writing in those "Private Papers," and his failure to see that the war in Iraq had been won, as far as Infidel interests were concerned, just as soon as Saddam Hussein was captured, his sons killed, the game of Fifty-Two Pickup successfully completed, and -- this is the main point -- the country scoured for weapons of mass destruction and for projects intended to produce such weapons, in the first case an effort of search and destroy, in the second case an effort of search and disrupt for a very long time.

All that was accomplished within the first year, and everything was then set inevitably in motion. It was time then to leave.

This is still somethiing Hanson has trouble with. But he's much more intelligent than the smug Kristols and all those others who will keep prating about what "needs to be done" in Iraq, and has no need to obstinately defend the Administration for its folly, its lack of low or high cunning, its miscomprehension that this "war on terror" stuff will not do, and the "war of self-defense against the Jihad" (Jihad standing in, synecdochically, for "Islam").

Incidentally, I realize now that setting all this out, declaring victory, as has been done here repeatedly since late March or early April, 2004, should entitle the author of that victory-declaraation, trying to halt the squandering of taxpayers' money (and the lives of soldiers), should be worth something, some kind of whistle--blower's award. A third of the avoidable hundreds of billions would seem like a lot. A million would do just fine.

Meanwhile, let's hope that Hanson, given his many admirers, begins to see the plans for Iraq as the hopeless -- and self-defeating from the Infidel point of view -- nonsense it is. It would help push the Pentagon and Bush and Rice into recognizing reality.

... at least if you find yourself in Iran or Russia.

AP reports (h/t Iran Focus) that "Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has ordered government and cultural bodies to use modified Persian words to replace foreign words that have crept into the language, such as 'pizzas' which will now be known as 'elastic loaves,' state media reported Saturday."  The story continues: 

The presidential decree, issued earlier this week, orders all governmental agencies, newspapers and publications to use words deemed more appropriate by the official language watchdog, the Farhangestan Zaban e Farsi, or Persian Academy, the Irna official news agency reported.

The academy has introduced more than 2,000 words as alternatives for some of the foreign words that have become commonly used in Iran, mostly from Western languages. The government is less sensitive about Arabic words, because the Quran is written in Arabic.

Among other changes, a "chat" will become a "short talk" and a "cabin" will be renamed a "small room," according to official Web site of the academy.

Meanwhile, in Putin's fourishing democracy — where the Wall Street Journal reports that a law has just been enacted making criticism of government officials a crime punishable by imprisonment for three years and closure of a media outlet — "Russia's Parliament is in the process of adopting a law that will fine ministers for saying 'dollar' when they could have used 'ruble.'" 

From the BBC.

Muslims in Malaysia are going to have to learn to live with their wrinkles, after the country's top Islamic body ruled against Botox injections.

The council decided that the serum contained prohibited substances, including those derived from pigs. At the last meeting of the National Fatwa Council, Malaysia's top Muslim clerics decided to ban black metal music - a kind of heavy metal. (I'm not keen myself;  I much prefer a nice classic rock)  They also ruled that it was alright for Muslims to eat cheese. (More cheese Gromit?)

But they could not make up their minds about Botox. Now they have come down against it, amidst fears that it contains pig products.

Never mind, they can always follow the advice here, and use this.

If you are a kind, goodhearted soul, if you think the ACLU today has anything in common with the ACLU in, say, 1954, you are dead wrong. It has as little to do with the ACLU in 1954, as the U.N. today has to do with the U.N. as originally conceived, and as it seemed to be, for the first few years, with some exceptions, even in the year 1954.

The names of some organizations may remain the same. Outwardly, they may seem to stand for the same ideals. But they do not. Just as, say, the English or History Department at a famous university may bear no relation, in the kinds of people who now dominate it, and the kinds of courses they now offer, to what that History or English Department was some 40 years ago, and we all know -- do we not? -- why. It is the same with the ACLU. Do not be fooled. Do not support it. Do not contribute to it. All of its works and days, for the past five years and more, have contributed to making our ability to defend ourselves against the instruments of Jihad more unsure, more fiendishly difficult. We are not on the verge of a "police state." We are trying to deal with a new situation, including a fifth column that apparently cannot be identified as such. There are all kinds of new situations. Israel right now is trying to fight a terrorist group that has spread out all over civilian areas, and deliberately hidden its missiles and other weaponry right in the middle of civilian populations, and deliberately fires missiles, or whatever else it has, from civilian buildings, from the roofs of schools, hospitals, and apartment buildings and from right beside U.N. buildings. And Israel has to deal with this as a sensational world press, looking only to depict scenes of gore in Lebanon, and to relay the tales of woe, the more exaggerated the better, from Lebanese "civilians" (many of those "civilians" being heart-and-soul supporters of the black-balaclaved Kalashnikov-clutching bezonians of Hezbollah, for whom "with our blood, with our soul" they would, those supposedly innocent "civilians," give everything.

And the same is true with the entirely new situation created by the foolish pretense that Islam is merely a religion and not a complete system, totalitarian in its aspirations to be a Total Regulation of Life, that beyond the ritualistic (shehada, zakat, salat, Ramadan, hajj) is entirely a system for political or geopolitical conquest and domination of all non-Muslims. All over the Western world millions of Muslims have been permitted, in the last few decades, to enter. It was in fact salutary that Osama bin Laden, and so many others, have quickly revealed their intentions through sensational acts. Suppose they had waited another decade, or two, and the Muslim immigration had been allowed to continue?

Wait. Perhaps it is still being allowed to continue? No, that cannot be. Or can it?

Tens of thousands might be removed from Australia where they are a cause, rightly, for alarm. Their large-scale presence has created a situation for the indigenous Infidels (and their institutions and laws, customs, understandings), that is far more unpleasant, expensive, and physically dangerous -- just look at these people attacking the car of the Prime Minister, throwing things, "demonstrating" in the Muslim manner with which, by now, we Infidels are so very familiar.

Start this. And start discussing the need for this all over the Western world -- intelligently, calmly, soberly. With none of the ranting or crudity or intolerable racism of some. Islam is a complete belief-system. It is not a race. It should not be allowed to hide behind charges of "racism."

Islam does, of course, contain within itself an Arab supremacist ideology, as one can easily begin to comprehend, and the Arab treatment of non-Arab Muslims (Berbers, Kurds, black Africans in Darfur) is on display right now, for all the world's non-Arab Muslims, and its Infidels, to view and come to understand. If there is any "racism" charge to be flung, it must be flung at Islam, as a vehicle for that Arab imperialism that has been the most successful imperialism in history, causing those non-Arabs conquered to desperately wish to become, in some way, just like the Arabs who conquered them through islamization -- to become "Arabs." But that is a separate matter, offered here only by way of reply to those Muslims who would dare to raise the specter of "racism."

One more of my previous postings on the same theme, this one prompted by the argument of Moussaoui's court-appointed defense lawyer, that Moussaoui must be "crazy" (bonkers, nuts, cingle), put here because the list of what melancholic or thwarted Infidels may blame is included, as a contrast to the limited list ("Infidels") readily available to Muslims as a result of their having the prefabricated mental grid of Islam:

The list of mitigating circumstances that apparently resulted in Moussaoui receiving a life sentence instead of the death penalty reads like a parody of everything that is most sentimental and silly in modern psychiatry (Karl Kraus: "Psychoanalysis is the disease for which it is supposed to be the cure").

What the prosecution should have done, but apparently felt it could not do, or possibly simply did not ever even think of doing, was to preempt both the "insanity" and the "on account of he's deprived" excuses, and set out clearly why Moussaoui did what he did with clear and uninhibited discussion of that book he was clutching -- the Qur'an -- and with the Qur'an, the Hadith. And with the Hadith, the figure of Muhammad, uswa hasana and al-insan al-kamil.

Did the psychiatrist Dr. Vogelsang (one more Upper-West-Side name out of Lillian Ross's comical period-piece "Vertical and Horizontal") give any sign of having studied the belief-system of Islam, without which no conceivable judgment can be made about the sanity, or lack of it, of a devout Muslim such as Moussaoui?

Why didn’t the Prosecution rebut the argument of the defense lawyer that Moussaoui is "crazy" because of his wretched childhood, etc. by pointing out that a large number of other people -- such as Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawihiri and Mohammed Atta -- were children of great privilege in the case of the first two, and middle-class in the case of the third, and that furthermore studies of terrorists had found them to be far above average, in their societies, in the amount of education they had received, and in the degree of their economic wellbeing?

Lay it all out. Explain that yes, Moussaoui, like a few billion other people, may have had a "deprived" childhood. Yes, he was quick to sense any slight, and yes, he was quick to resent his treatment at the hands of Infidels, because, as a Muslim (one who grew to be more and more faithful and observant) he knew that Muslims should be on top -- not equal, but on top. Infidels lording it over him, or other Muslims, in France, were contra naturam, against the natural and just and right order of things, islamically speaking. The prosecutors should have explained that Moussaoui viewed the world through the prism of Islam, and the texts he read, the society he inhabited (both real, and virtual), taught him to blame, always and everywhere, Infidels.

Eventually this is going to have to be done. Eventually this is going to be unavoidable, if the United States and other Infidel countries are going to continue to use the criminal justice system as it is, and to continue to rely on untrained and inexpert juries who are the products of their age -- with all its sentimentality about mitigating circumstances because, you see, the blame for your behavior can always, always, be found in some part of your background, so that blame can be passed onto one's upbringing, say.

But this misses the point. There are always people who have had unhappy childhoods, unhappy adolescences, unhappy adulthoods. As noted many times before, we who are Infidels may lose status, a job, a spouse, a girlfriend or boyfriend, or suffer setbacks or perceived slights. Did not Moussaoui think he was entitled to more than he received? Yet his inshallah-fatalism prevented him from simply working hard and doing what he could to overcome, as his brother did, that same background. Why? The answer is that he took Islam far more seriously, was far more of a deep believer, than his brother.

Infidels have a thousand things to blame. They can blame their parents -- just as many on that Infidel jury wanted to blame, for Moussaoui, his treatment by his parents. They can blame their aggressive or unpleasant siblings, their ungrateful children, the System, Racism, The Man, Amerikkka, Kapitalism, Fate, the stars, their cholesterol level, their serotonin level, anything and everything at all -- even, just perhaps, themselves. But Muslim Believers have one thing to blame always at the ready. And to the extent that one takes that belief-system seriously, it is likely that one will, viewing the universe through the grid, the prism, of Islam, blame the Infidel. And that is exactly what Moussaoui did.

Unless this is going to be understood by the usual "experts" -- including those complacent psychiatrists who appear not to have thought it necessary for them to study the doctrines of Islam and what might follow and has naturally followed from them (starting with the perceived behavior of Muslims conducting Jihad over 1350 years, wherever they were able to conduct it because of local conditions or circumstances) -- then there will be more miscarriages, with justice stillborn, the result of those thanatotropic bromides and thalidomides, sentimentality and ignorance.

And what do we conclude? We have two possible conclusions:

1) Moussaoui was and is simply following the tenets of Islam faithfully, and putting into practice the requirement that at least some Muslims must engage in Jihad (in order that others may, temporarily, be relieved of the duty).

OR

2) Moussaoui became depressed, as so many of us do, all over the Infidel world as well, but in the case of Muslims, the problem is that that depression, or any kind of emotional setback, can lead to blaming the Infidel. Viewing the universe through the prism of Islam makes one almost automatically ready to blame that Infidel, and to seek revenge.

Those are the two possible explanations.

And either one has immense implications for the Muslim presence all over Europe and North America. For the sake of the legal and social order and the physical wellbeing of the resident Infidels who created those societies and have no desire to see them islamized, these implications need to be faced.

The entire Muslim world consists largely of people who are raised in a politico-theological belief-system that offers a Total Regulation of Life and a Complete Explanation of the Universe. The idea that the Qur'an contains all of wisdom and includes all the scientific discoveries that have been made since its appearance, or that ever will be made (in this respect the Qur'an is like the famous Master of Balliol, Benjamin Jowett: "I am the master of this college/And what I don't know isn't knowledge) is or must be rejected by the more intelligent, but the more intelligent have to be wary of expressing their doubts, for this totalitarian belief-system has its enforcers, or rather the Qur'an and Sunnah prescribe what should be done to those who fall away from Belief into Unbelief. Thus does the open expression of any kind of skepticism, or the open encouragement, of any kind of free inquiry, become discouraged -- on pain, often, of death, or at least complete social ostracism (loss of family and friends) and economic marginalization (loss of job).

In this world, what rational non-Muslims regard as "crazed" behavior is not crazed at all. Look at those all-male mobs, one after the other, screaming their hate all over the Muslim world. Look at those dull-eyed hijabbed prematurely aged women, mere breeders kept in permanent thrall, look at the level of what passes for schooling, what pass for universities, what passes for coverage of the world in the Arab press and television. Look at the effect on a billion believers of being taught, being inculcated with the idea, that Muhammad was the Perfect Man, uswa hasana, al-insan al-kamil, and then simultaneously having to reconcile this article of Faith with what Muhammad was really like, in his wars and his loot-grabbing and booty-distribution, in his laughingly regarding the massacres of helpless prisoners, or encouraging, and welcoming the news of, the assassination of anyone who dared to mock him (Asma bint Marwan), and then there were his attacks on the innocent farmers of Khaybar (this unprovoked attack on helpless farmers is described in an AP dispatch yesterday on the new Iranian-supplied rocket used by Hezbollah, a dispatch written by one Kathy Gannon, as being named after the "battle of Khaybar" -- some battle.

All of this makes an entire society "crazy." It makes it far more prone to crazed views of the world, crazed hatred of Infidels (for they are to be hated, and if they are to be hated, no matter what, it is important to tell oneself, to convince oneself and all other Infidels, that the Infidels are terrible, that the Infidels are monsters, that the Infidels even when they try to do seeming good to Muslims are in fact always scheming against them). And all of this makes people deny so many parts of reality, so many obvious definitions of "good" and "evil" that their heads spin, and they live in a constant miasma -- what I have been calling, the "atmospherics" of Islam. And those "atmospherics" are reproduced even in the Lands of the Infidels, wherever Muslims live with other Muslims, or even by themselves, when they live in a universe mentally formed by, and limited mostly to, Islam.

Muslim apologists tell us that this or that individual Muslim was crazy. Taheri-Reza was "crazy." And the Jordanian who killed those seven little girls visiting the Peace Garden in 1997 was "crazy." The Egyptian soldier who killed Israeli children and their parents visiting in Egypt was declared "crazy." The copilot of that Egypt Air plane was "crazy." The terrorist here, the terrorist there -- all "crazy."

Well, are all the members of Hamas and Hezbollah and Al-Qaeda and Lashkar-e-Taiba and the thousand other groups all "crazy"? The views of all of them, the support they all give to the acts of that Jordanian soldier, that Egyptian soldier, that Iranian tarheel, that shooter at LAX, that smiling yearbook boy above who was mad at Israel and who did not what was "crazy" but what all Muslims will understand, just as they will understand the need to call him "crazy" (and some in the American police and FBI will want eagerly to go along with this fiction).

But let's take for now a different tack. Let's agree that a certain number of people in every society get depressed. Let's agree that they get mad at someone and something. The problem is that Muslims take as the Perfect Man someone who led a life not akin to that of Jesus, but a life full of warfare, full of violence. And he is their Model for All Time. He is the best. The violence of Islamic societies, the high premium placed on warfare, the readiness to fight, the willingness to die, possibly has, over 1350 years helped to breed out the less violent, those inclined to a certain meek-and-mildness, and has encouraged the predominance of the more violent in the Muslim gene-pool.

I will simply repost here what was put up about Taheri-reza, the North Carolina student, born of Muslim parents who did not take Islam seriously, but he, in his mental disarray, did:

"Please let us echo in your ears that my brother was and always has been a kind, gentle and pure soul,” she read from a statement. “His current actions and words are as much a source of shock and distress to us as they are to you.”
-- an AP article, from the sister of the kind and gentle soul who plowed an SUV into a crowd of college students.

No doubt, for a Muslim, much of it true -- he is a "kind, gentle and pure soul" in many ways. But not toward Infidels. There the adjectives begin to jostle one another. The purer his Islam, the less kind and gentle he would be toward Infidels -- as the Qur'an tells him (48:29), as the Hadith makes clear in its most authoritative recensions, as the example of Muhammad instructs.

And when an Infidel experiences mental desarroi or depression, he can blame his parents, his children, his siblings, his karma, The System, Amerika, the stars, fate, his cholesterol level, his serotonin level, or even --- himself. When a Muslim falls into any kind of distress, with that mental vademecum and pocket prism through which to view the universe, Islam, he can blame the Infidel. (And this assumes, which may not be true, that Taheri-azar did not quite take the tenets and attitudes of Islam as much to heart before, when he was merely that "kind, gentle and pure soul.")

This kind of thing, this Muslim version of the old immigrant mother in the Jimmy-Cagney movie assuring the police that "my boy's a good boy," is particularly telling. For it happens all the time, with suspect after suspect -- the terrorists in London or Madrid or elsewhere are always being described, by a brother, an uncle, a father, someone, as "kind" and "gentle" and "pure." The message always is: How Could It Possibly Have Happened?

Now, two things are possible. Both should not relieve, but increase, the alarm and suspicion felt by intelligent Infidels. One possibility is that this sister is flatly lying, that she knows perfectly well her brother was consumed with the anti-Infidel teachings of Islam, and had given many signs of it. The possibility is that all these family members (that uncle of one of the London bombers, who first expressed his "amazement" at his nephew's action, and later expressed not amazement at all, but pride in the actions) understand perfectly why their son, brother, nephew, did what he did, and the obvious sources for his attitudes and actions.

The second possibility, far less likely, but still conceivable in a few cases, is that some of these people really are not quite aware of the natural effect of Islam on those who take Islam seriously. Again and again "moderate" Muslims, or those who are not even really Muslims but rather "Muslim-for-identification-purposes-only" Muslims, have themselves been amazed, when they return to a Muslim environment, to see the effect of Islam. How many of those the American government listened to in fashioning its Iraq policies were of the latter kind, the Allawi-Chalabi-Makiya kind -- the essentially secular Shi'a who had spent decades in the West and became westernized, and forgot or allowed themselves to forget just how crazy, how aggressive, how conspiratorial, how antipathetic to the ideas of compromise and power-sharing and common sense, is the world of Islam, a world that combines a dreamy blend of inshallah-fatalism with the duty of Jihad, which requires action, action, action (not the action of Western man, going to work every day, piling one stone on another to build the edifice of an economy or a civilization). That action is not to build but to either destroy (what the Infidel has) or to appropriate it (through Jizyah in all of its disguised and undisguised forms) or to seize it, as Muhammad seized the booty of those he would declare, in order to seize that booty, his enemies, such as the inoffensive Jewish farmers of the Khaybar Oasis.

So which is it? Is it the deliberate attempts by all these family members of all these terrorists to deceive us, which means they are exhibiting the problem with so-called "moderate Muslims" whose behavior simply deceives us and keeps us fooled a bit longer?

Or are those family members themselves fooled? And if they are, then how is that Infidels should be expected to detect the Muslim immigrant who is like, or will turn out to be, just like Taheri-azar, and the one who is like, or will turn out to be, just like his presumably inoffensive sister? If "only" 10% of Muslims in the West support "suicide bombing" (the figure is much higher in the opinion polls) or "only" 40% of Muslims in England support the imposition of Sharia' law in England -- which would mean the end of England as it has slowly been fashioned since the days of the Standing Stones of Callanish, and Stonehenge, and woad-painted tribesman -- what does this mean?

Why should Infidels take a chance, if the likelihood of their being able to distinguish the "moderate" from the "immoderate" Muslim is even slimmer than that of the closest relatives of those Muslims found to have engaged in would-be, or successful, acts of terrorism -- and given that the problem is complicated by the "My Son the Fanatic" problem where the children or grandchildren of "moderates" who may be classified mainly as economic migrants "return" to Islam, with dangerous consequences for Infidels?

The sister of Taheri-azar, like all the other relatives "amazed" at the "inexplicable" behavior of their relatives, are apparently unable cannot figure out what it is, what doctrines and attitudes, what passages in what set of texts, taken seriously, might have caused her kind, her gentle, her pure-souled brother to do what he did.

She can't figure it out. But we can.

The Post-Intelligencer story is so typical of what happens in a society and a government which default from the ideology part of an ideological war. 

A Muslim man walks into not just any building in Seattle — not even just any identifiably Jewish location in Seattle — but into the Jewish Federation of Greater Seattle, whose mission since 1926, according to the website it maintains, is to "ensure Jewish survival and to enhance the quality of Jewish life locally, in Israel and worldwide." 

The Muslim man has obviously not only carefully chosen the target but cased the place.  There's a security system, so he waits until someone attached to the Federation enters using her access code, then he pounces, forcing his way through the open door.  He brandishes a large caliber, semi-automatic handgun.  He announces that he's a Muslim angry at Israel.  Then he randomly, wantonly opens fire — shooting six women, one of whom is pregnant, one of whom is killed.

So what happens?  The police don't even want to admit that he's Muslim ("You could infer that," the police chief tells the reporters who press this patently relevant question).  And the FBI insists it's not terrorism. 

Now, it could not conceivably be more clear that it is terrorism.  If the FBI is saying they can't link him to any known terrorist group, that doesn't mean it's not terrorism.  It's too early in the investigation to have run down whether the guy has ties to known groups; even if he doesn't, not all terrorism is committed by known groups (sometimes the acts of terror are how we get to know them); and even if he is acting alone, federal law recognizes the concept of lone-wolf terrorism. 

It is terrorism because it is a sneak attack — in this case against civilians — which is motivated by a purpose to affect government policy and/or further a political/social/religious cause.  The shooter was not there to rob the register or kill someone he knew over some private dispute.

This is militant Islam in action, but we don't want to think or talk about Islam, so we'll pretend that the fact he's a Muslim is irrelevant ("terrorists come in all shapes and sizes" is the official PC postion of government), and if we can't attach a known group to the shooter we'll close our eyes to the fact that he might have reason the understand that his religion impelled him to act.

On November 5, 1990, at a hotel in Manhattan, Sayyid Nosair murdered JDL founder, Rabbi Meir Kahane, as the latter finished a speech.  The chief of detectives for the NYPD immediately pronounced that the homicide was the work of a lone gunman.  No meaningful investigation had yet been done into Nosair's background, and the police could not quickly connect him to any known terrorist organization.  It turned out that he had been a member of a nascent jihadist militia with connections the Egypt's Islamic Group (Gama'at al Islamia) for several years.  Two years later, from his prison cell — which militants flocked to because the Kahane murder turned him into a hero in what they saw as an ongoing jihad — he helped plot the bombing of the World Trade Center.

As I tried to argue the other day, those who don't — or won't — learn from history are condemned to repeat it.

Let's see. There was the Egyptian man who shot dead two people at the El Al counter at Los Angeles airport. Before that, there was the Muslim who fired at a van of yeshiva boys in Brooklyn, killing 14-year-old Aaron Halberstam. There was the man who killed Rabbi Kahane after one of his speeches at a New York City hotel. There have been the mobs that prevented speeches (by Benjamin Netanyahu and other pro-Israel speakers at Concordia University in Montreal), and have intimidated others or tried to (see Brigitte Gabriel's website). There was the Egyptian co-pilot, who had a Muslim fit, grabbed the controls, and turned the plane into a nose dive, shouting "Allahu Akbar, Allahu Akbar" as the whole plane, and all of its passengers, including Americans, went down. There was the man, a Muslim named Ford, who tried to kill co-workers at a Safeway because they supposedly "made fun of him" for being a Muslim. There was the recent Muslim graduate of UNC/Chapel Hill who carefully planned to run down fellow students in "The Pit," a place for pedestrian traffic only, where students could sit around and relax. There was the Muslim man who shot several people on the Observation Deck of the Empire State Building, back in the early 1990s, found with a note in his pocket denouncing Jews...There was...there was....there was...

But CAIR is keeping careful track of all the hate crimes against Muslims. Keeping careful track of those storekeepers setting fire to their own grocery stores, and of all the others who have been non-existent victims of non-existent hate crimes.

Oh, there have been hate crimes connected to Islam in America all right. But not because Muslims were the victims.