Land Transfer to Hindu Site Inflames Kashmir’s Muslims

THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

SRINAGAR, Kashmir (AP) — Tens of thousands of Muslim demonstrators filled the streets in Indian-controlled Kashmir on Friday, burning flags and effigies of Indian leaders on a fifth day of protests against the transfer of land to a Hindu shrine.

Protesters clashed with riot police officers in several parts of Srinagar, the main city in the region, which has a Muslim majority. The police responded with tear gas, said Prabhakar Tripathi, a spokesman for the Central Reserve Police Force.

Three people have died and dozens of others, including at least 22 police officers, have been wounded since Monday, as the police have struggled to control angry mobs protesting the transfer of 99 acres of land by the state government to the Shri Amarnath Shrine Board, a trust running the popular Hindu shrine.. Protesters accuse the Indian government of planning to build Hindu settlements in India’s only Muslim-majority state in an effort to change the demographic balance in the region.

Anti-Indian sentiment is strong in Kashmir, where nearly a dozen militant groups have been fighting since 1989 for independence or a merger with neighboring Pakistan. But Kashmiris had been enjoying a period of relative calm until this week’s protests, which rank among the angriest displays in two decades.

In an effort to ease tensions, the chief minister of the state of Jammu and Kashmir, Ghulam Nabi Azad, promised Wednesday that there would be no construction on the transferred land and pledged to meet with local political parties to address the protesters’ grievances.

The Amarnath shrine is a cave that houses a large ice stalagmite revered by Hindus as an incarnation of Siva, the god of destruction and reproduction. Hundreds of thousands of Hindus are descending on the area as part of an annual pilgrimage to the cave.

This year, as in the past, thousands of soldiers are guarding the pilgrims’ route. In previous years, the pilgrims made tempting targets for militant Islamist separatists, who claim that India, which has a Hindu majority, uses the event to bolster its claim over the Kashmir region.

Clearing up misconceptions about Islam

There are so very many stories like this -- most of them I don't post here. But as our new Jihad Watch contributor Raymond Ibrahim noted the other day, "Why are we not constantly exhorted, day after day, that Christianity, or Judaism, or Hinduism, or Buddhism, or Scientology are 'misunderstood'? Why only Islam?" Why indeed? Why is there a concerted effort all over the Western world to clear up "misconceptions" of Islam for well-meaning unbelievers, but no effort anywhere to clear up the "misconceptions" of Islam that jihad terrorists have -- the ones who, we're constantly told, are twisting and hijacking the religion? Where do the "misconceptions" that Westerners constantly seem to fall prey to come from? Could they possibly come from those jihad terrorists, committing acts of violence and justifying them by referring to Islamic texts and teachings? Will a pleasant evening (over chicken and pita, as Hugh would point out) assuring non-Muslims that those people aren't true Muslims clear up that problem?

Or are these evenings, carried on more or less daily all over the West, more likely to make their bemused audiences less likely to understand what is happening in the world, and to respond to it appropriately?

"Get the lowdown on Islam, Northern Territory style," by Daniel Bourchier for the Northern Territory News, June 29 (thanks to the Constantinopolitan Irredentist):

RELIGIOUS and cultural understanding and tolerance will be debated as part of Islamic Awareness Week today.

The celebration aims to explain what the religion is all about and its role in the Northern Territory.

As part of the week, the Darwin Islamic Centre was officially opened by Chief Minister Paul Henderson last night.

Organiser Ishfaq Haider said the idea of this third Islamic Awareness Week is getting to know each other.

"We invite all local people to come and see what we do,'' he said.

"With so many misconceptions about Islam, this is a good chance to ask questions.''

Highlights today include lectures about Muslim youth in Australia -- and the question of female oppression under Islam....

Thousands cheer as Pakistani jihadists decapitate, shoot Afghans accused of spying for U.S., "for the interest of the Islamic world"

"The crowd erupted in cheers of "God is great!" and gunmen fired in the air in jubilation."

"Thousands Cheer as Pakistani Militants Decapitate, Shoot Afghans Accused of Spying for U.S., " from the Associated Press, May 27: ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — A gang of Pakistani militants executed two alleged U.S. spies in front of thousands of cheering supporters Friday as a top U.N. official expressed fears that Pakistani government peace deals with the gunmen were sparking a wave of human rights abuses.

At least 5,000 people gathered by a stream in the Bajur region to watch the executions, which highlighted the power of local Taliban forces in the lawless tribal areas near the Afghan border.

Masked militants pulled the two blindfolded Afghans from a car and forced them to kneel on the ground.

Waliur Rehman, a local Taliban commander, told the crowd that the two men confessed to aiding in a suspected U.S. missile strike on a house in the border town of Damadola that killed 14 people last month. The men disclosed the names of others involved, and they would be killed as well, he said.

"Whoever, for the sake of money, for the sake of America, harms the interest of the Islamic world will meet the same fate," he said.

Gunmen with daggers then pounced on one of the men — identified as Jan Wali, 36 — decapitated him and waved his bloody head to the cheering crowd.

The militants then argued over how to kill the other man because he may have been a teenager, before one lost patience and shot him with an assault rifle.

The crowd erupted in cheers of "God is great!" and gunmen fired in the air in jubilation. The celebratory gunfire killed two bystanders and wounded six, local official Fazal Rabbi said.

The recently elected Pakistani government has supported negotiations that would give local tribes and militants broad authority over some tribal areas. The U.S. says those deals will only give Taliban and Al Qaeda forces in the border region more freedom to attack Afghanistan.

A deal has not yet been reached over Bajur, but the militants are clearly able to operate freely in the area.

U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Louise Arbour said Friday she was concerned that the peace deals undermined state authority and left residents vulnerable to a range of human rights abuses, including extrajudicial killings.
Thanks Jihad Watch

Somali Islamists snatch Danish, Swedish aid workers: UN

AFP

MOGADISHU (AFP) - Islamist militants kidnapped a Dane and a Swede working for the United Nations and a Somali aid worker when the fighters seized control of a town Saturday, several sources told AFP.

Local residents and aid workers said the insurgents attacked the town of Hodur, 370 kilometres (235 miles) west of the Somali capital Mogadishu, around 4:30 am (0130 GMT) but then withdrew. "The two UN mine action workers were taken from the IMC (International Medical Corps) compound. We don't know their whereabouts and they were taken after Islamists took control of the town," a UN official told AFP.

First reports said the two foreigners abducted were Swedes, but it later emerged that one was Danish and the other Swedish.

"According to our sources on the ground, they are a Dane and a Swede working for our organisation, carrying out a demining training assignment on behalf of the United Nations," said Aake Svensson, a spokesman for the Raddningsverket, the Swedish government's risk assessment and emergency management agency.

A UN security official in Nairobi said: "Local authorities in the zone are negotiating with the kidnappers and calling for their immediate and unconditional release. Local chiefs are also involved in the negotiations."

Local resident Hassan Mohamed told AFP the militants wounded a district commander during a a heavy exchange of gunfire in which a bodyguard was killed.

"They took control of the town and they also raided the IMC compound and took two foreign aid workers," he added.

According to another local resident and a humanitarian worker the Islamists also snatched a Somali.

"The attack took place in two locations: the governor's compound and the district commissioner's house. Now they have left the town but they took two foreign aid workers and a Somali national," resident Mohamed Abdullahi Yare told AFP.

"We don't know why and where" they have taken them, said another aid worker, who asked not to be named, confirming the kidnappings. The worker said forces that attacked the town "stormed the IMC compound where the aid workers were staying."

The latest abductions take the number of humanitarian workers kidnapped recently in this Horn of Africa country to nine: two Swedes, two Italians, one British national, one Kenyan and three Somalis.

An uninterrupted civil war has plagued Somalia since the 1991 overthrow of president Mohamed Siad Barre, defying numerous peace initiatives and truce deals.

Since their ouster early last year by joint Ethiopian and Somali forces, the Islamists have waged a guerrilla war, which according to international rights groups and aid agencies has left at least 6,000 civilians dead and displaced hundreds of thousands.

The African Union has deployed 2,600 peacekeepers in Somalia -- short of the pledged 8,000 troops -- but they have failed to stem violence.

Russia: Nine dead, four injured in clashes with Caucasus jihadists

Though not often reported on in the mainstream press, the jihad in and around Chechnya has not gone away. "Nine dead, four injured in North Caucasus clashes," from Deutsche Presse Agentur, June 28: MOSCOW - Nine people have been killed and four injured in several exchanges of gunfire in the disputed Russian North Caucasus region, Interfax news agency and regional authorities said Saturday.

Four police officers and two rebels were killed and four police officers injured in a gun battle near the village of Dargo in the semi-autonomous Russian republic of Chechnya, Interfax and the authorities reported.

In mid-June, Islamist rebels shot dead three villagers in Benoy- Vedeno and set several houses alight.

In the semi-autonomous republic of Dagestan, three members of a rebel gang were killed in the capital Makhachkala during a police raid.

The heavily armed members of a terrorist group, which included a woman, had holed up on the fourth [floor] of a high-rise building, a spokesman for the authorities said.

After they refused to respond to requests to give themselves up, a special unit stormed the flat and killed the three of them, the spokesman said.

The four police officers in Chechnya were killed Friday evening during a operation by the security forces, the spokesman added.

Grenade launchers were found with the two rebels who were shot dead during that operation.

The rebels managed to hit an armoured personnel carrier during the clashes.

The troubled North Caucasus region has remained restive even under new Russian President Dmitry Medvedev.

The situation in Chechnya has improved greatly since two wars were fought there in the 1990s, but there are still frequent skirmishes.

Islamist groups in neighbouring Dagestan and Ingushetia also clash frequently with the pro-Russian authorities.

On Islamic Antisemitism

Mark Durie

During the years that responding to Islam has been a significant concern for me in Christian ministry, I have been repeatedly struck by two seemingly contradictory facts: the reality of Islamic antisemitism on the one hand, and its denial on the other.

1. There can be non doubt that antisemitism is hard-wired into Islam's sacred history. The Qur'an and hadiths (traditions of Muhammad) have numerous passages which proclaim enmity towards the Jews. Jews are declared to be deceivers, malevolent, and killers of Muhammad (by poisoning him). Islam's foundational texts express hostility to four religious groupings: Jews, Christians, pagans, and Muslim renegades. Jihad is mandated against all four of these groups, and whereas the rules of war are the more merciless against the pagans and Muslim renegades - only Jews and Christians being allowed to keep their faith after conquest - of the two 'Peoples of the Book' it is the Jews who attract the most intense expressions of hatred. There is less anti-Christian sentiment in the Qur'an and hadiths than there is anti-Jewish sentiment, and in Muhammad's biography his dealings with the Jews of Arabia - leading to a genocide in Medina, and the bloody conquest of Khaibar - loom much larger and are much more negative than his dealings with Christians.

The Islamic daily prayers include repeated recitations of al-Fatihah, the first chapter of the Qur'an. In these few verses, every Muslim prays that they will be guided on the straight path, not like the Christians ('those who have gone astray') or the Jews ('those who incur Allah's wrath'). This simple contrast, that whereas Christians have lost their way, Jews have fallen under the anger of Allah, neatly summarizes Islam's attitude to the Jews. The celebrated commentator Ibn Kathir, whose translated tafsir is popular among English-speaking Muslims, explains the distinction in his discussion of al-Fatihah:
These two paths are the paths of the Christians and Jews, a fact that the believer should beware of so that he avoids them. … the Jews abandoned practicing the religion, while the Christians lost the true knowledge. This is why ‘anger’ descended upon the Jews, while being described as ‘led astray’ is more appropriate of the Christians. Those who know, but avoid implementing the truth, deserve the anger, unlike those who are ignorant. The Christians want to seek the true knowledge, but are unable to find it because they did not seek it from its proper resources.
This is why they were led astray. We should also mention that both the Christians and the Jews have earned the anger and are led astray, but the anger is one of the attributes more particular of the Jews. Allah said about the Jews, ‘Those (Jews) who incurred the curse of Allah and His wrath’ ([Sura] 5:60). The attribute that the Christians deserve most is that of being led astray, just as Allah said about them, ‘Who went astray before and who misled many, and strayed (themselves) from the right path’ ([Sura] 5:77).

Here Ibn Kathir is explaining that, wheras Christians are merely ignorant, Jews know the truth but deliberately reject it, thus thus making themselves objects of Allah's wrath.

That this libel is repeated in every observant Muslims' obligatory prayers, seventeen times a day, shows that Islam's rejection of the Jews is not peripheral in Islam. Many years ago I was personally surprised to discover hatred of Jews among the Muslims of Indonesia, a country which has had virtually nothing to do with Jews in its history. When Amrozi, the Balinese bomber, cried out threats against Jews at his sentencing in a Balinese courtroom, this was not because he had ever met a single Jew. His hatred was purely theological.

2. The other reality is that denial of Islam's antisemitic legacy is so persistent and tenacious, in spite of the overwhelming evidence to the contrary. Even some Jews who should know better deny it:

The historian Bernard Lewis confidently declared in his 1984 book The Jews of Islam, that, unlike Christian antisemitism, Islam's ill-treatment of Jews had no theological basis: it was merely the 'usual attitude of the dominant to the subordinate'.

Iranian Jewish philanthropist and art-collector David Khalili, when asked on Australian radio whether his remarkable achievements as a collector of Islamic art might change Muslims' attitudes to Jews, responded that the idea that Jews are inferior would never have 'crossed any Muslim's mind'.


In the light of these two considerations - Islamic antisemitism and its baseless denial - I strongly encourage readers to familiarize themselves with the work of Andrew Bostom, who has recently published The Legacy of Islamic Antisemitism. This brilliant and courageous book is a landmark study of the subject.

My friend Dr Daniel Shayesteh was one of the Iranian founders of Hizballah, became a Christian after he fled from the Ayatollah's murderous regime. He explains in his testimony of the hatred of Jews which he absorbed as part of his Muslim upbringing in Iran, and the intention of the Iranian revolutionaries to destroy Israel. The visceral hatred which shaped Hizballah's dreams of conquest and destruction has not died out, and continues to plague the world. The urgency of this threat leads me to append below one of Andrew Bostom's recent postings, on Hizballah's intentions.

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http://www.americanthinker.com/printpage/?url=http://www.americanthinker.com/2008/06/renewing_hezballahs_jihad_geno.html

June 22, 2008
Renewing Hezb'allah's Jihad Genocide Against Jews Everywhere

By Andrew G. Bostom

According to US and Canadian intelligence agencies the Shi'ite jihad terror organization Hezb'allah, supported by its patron Iran, is poised, once again, to launch a lethal attack against "Jewish targets" far removed from the battlegrounds of the Middle East. Although no substantive evidence has emerged identifying a specific target, both Canada and Latin America have been suggested as possiblities, the latter being where, in Buenos Aires, Hezb'allah struck twice during the 1990s, killing 29 at the Israeli embassy in 1992, and murdering at least 85 more in a 1994 bombing of a Jewish community center.

The ostensible reason given for this renewed jihad terror activity is "revenge" for the February (2008) assassination of Hezb'allah's murderous terror master Imad Mugniyah, killed by a car bomb in Damascus, Syria. Hezb'allah blames Israel for this assassination, an allegation rejected by Israeli officials. Ultimately, however, Hezb'allah's chronic, annihilationist jihad against Israel reflects a rigid adherence to both classical jihad theory, and the ugliest elements of Islamic theology regarding Jews.

The distinguished Shi'ite theologian al-Amili (d.1622) wrote the following (p.213) about jihad war in the Jami-i-Abbasi, his seminal Persian manual of Shi'a Law:

"Islamic Holy war [jihad] against followers of other religions, such as Jews, is required unless they convert to Islam or pay the poll tax."

And the Jews stubborn malevolence -- portrayed in the darkest colors by Islam's sacred texts -- is their defining worldly characteristic. Examples of this archetypal Jew hatred from the Koran, and hadith (traditions of the Muslim prophet Muhammad), amplified by the early Muslim biographies of Muhammad, include:

Koranic verses labeling Jews as malevolent enemies of Islam (5:82); disobedient slayers of their own prophets who suffered justifiable abasement (2:61), including, for some, transformation into apes and swine (5:60);
the canonical hadith (Sahih Muslim Book 026, Number 5431), and accounts provided by early Muslim biographers of Muhammad (such as Ibn Saad, below), that the Jews caused Muhammad's protracted, excruciating death from poisoning:

"The Jews discussed about poisons and became united in one poison. She [a Khaybar Jewess, Zaynab Bint al-Harith] poisoned the goat putting more poison in the forelegs.. Allah's Apostle took the foreleg, a piece of which he put into his mouth...Allah's Apostle sent for Zaynab [and]...handed her over to [those] who put her to death...Allah's Apostle lived after this three years, till in consequence of his pain he passed away. During his illness he used to say: I did not cease to find the effect of the poisoned morsel I took at Khaybar..."

Hezb'allah's name, "The Party of Allah", derives from Koran 5:56:


"And whoever takes Allah and His messenger and those who believe for a guardian, then surely the party of Allah are they that shall be triumphant."

In a public statement issued February 15/16, 1986, Hezb'allah stressed its indelible links to Iran and Ayatollah Khomeini ("We obey the orders of one leader wise and just...") and conceived of itself as a "nation" linked to Muslims worldwide by "...a strong ideological and political bond, namely Islam." Expressed in the political language of the Koran, Hezb'allah's ideology encompasses, (as per the slogan adorning the party emblem, "The Party of Allah is Sure to Triumph" ) at least three major objectives: transforming Lebanon into a Shari'a state; destroying Israel; establishing regional, followed by international Islamic hegemony, i.e., bringing the region, then the world under Shari'a law.

...we do not constitute an organized party in Lebanon. Nor are we a tight political cadre. We are an umma linked to the Muslims of the whole world by the solid doctrinal and religious connection of Islam, whose message God wanted to be fulfilled by the Seal of the Prophets, i.e., Muhammad. This is why whatever touches or strikes Muslims, in Afghanistan, Iraq, the Philippines and everywhere reverberates throughout the Muslim umma of which we are an integral part. Our behavior is dictated to us by legal principles laid down by the light of an overall political conception defined by the leading jurist (wilayat al-faqih)

As for our culture, it is based on the Holy Koran, the Sunna and the legal rulings of the faqih who is our source of imitation (marja' al-taqlid). Our culture is crystal clear. It is not complicated and is accessible to all.

No one can imagine the importance of our military potential as our military apparatus is not separate from our overall social fabric. Each of us is a fighting soldier. And when it becomes necessary to carry out the Holy war (Jihad), each of us takes up his assignment in the fight in accordance with the injunctions of the Law, and that in the framework of the mission carried out under the tutelage of the Commanding Jurist.

...our struggle [against Israel] will end only when this entity is obliterated. We recognize no treaty with it, no cease fire, and no peace agreements, whether separate or consolidated.

Demonizing Israel and Jews -- via motifs in the Koran and hadith -- Hezb'allah views the jihad against the "Zionist entity" as an annihilationist war intrinsic to broader conflicts: the struggle between the Islamic world and the non-Muslim world, and the historical struggle between Islam and Judaism.

The most senior clerical authority for Hezb'allah, Husayn Fadlalah has stated,

"We find in the Koran that the Jews are the most aggressive towards the Muslims...because of their aggressive resistance to the unity of the faith."


Fadlallah repeatedly refers to anti-Jewish archetypes in the Koran, hadith, and sira: the corrupt, treacherous and aggressive nature of the Jews; their reputation as killers of prophets, who spread corruption on earth; and the notion that the Jews engaged in conspiratorial efforts against the Muslim prophet. Fadlallah argues, ultimately, "Either we destroy Israel or Israel destroys us." Muhammad. Hassan Nasrallah, current Secretary General of Hezb'allah, and a protége of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, presently Iran's highest ranking political and religious authority (i.e., its "Guardian Jurisprudent"), has reiterated these antisemitic and annihilationist views with particular vehemence. Invoking motifs from Islam's foundational texts, Nasrallah has characterized Jews as the "grandsons of apes and pigs," and as "Allah's most cowardly and greedy creatures." He elaborates these themes into an annihilationist animus against all Jews, not merely Israelis.

Anyone who reads the Koran and the holy writings of the monotheistic religions sees what they did to the prophets, and what acts of madness and slaughter the Jews carried out throughout history...


Anyone who reads these texts cannot think of co-existence with them, of peace with them, or about accepting their presence, not only in Palestine of 1948 but even in a small village in Palestine, because they are a cancer which is liable to spread again at any moment...There is no solution to the conflict in this region except with the disappearance of Israel.


If we searched the entire world for a person more cowardly, despicable, weak and feeble in psyche, mind, ideology and religion, we would not find anyone like the Jew. Notice, I do not say the Israeli...[I]f they [the Jews] all gather in Israel, it will save us the trouble of going after them worldwide.

The Shi'ite jihadist organization Hezb'allah thus proclaims with triumphant exuberance its visceral opposition to Judaism and the existence of Israel, stressing the eternal conflict between the Jews and Islam. Eradicating Israel, and terrorizing, perhaps even destroying Jewish communities worldwide, represents an early stage of Hezballah's Pan-Islamic ambitions, and its jihad against the rest of the non-Muslim world. Blithely ignoring this reality, and allowing places such as Toronto, Canada, or Dearborn, Michigan to become hubs for Hezb'allah fund-raising and organizing is both morally repugnant, and destructive to our must fundamental Western values expressed with such eloquence in George Washington's 1790 letter to the Jewish community of Newport, Rhode Island.

The Citizens of the United States of America have a right to applaud themselves for having given to mankind examples of an enlarged and liberal policy: a policy worthy of imitation. All possess alike liberty of conscience and immunities of citizenship. It is now no more that toleration is spoken of, as if it was by the indulgence of one class of people, that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent national gifts. For happily the Government of the United States, which gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance requires only that they who live under its protection should demean themselves as good citizens, in giving it on all occasions their effectual support.

May the children of the Stock of Abraham, who dwell in this land, continue to...enjoy the good will of the other Inhabitants; while every one shall sit in safety under his own vine and figtree, and there shall be none to make him afraid.

Andrew G. Bostom is the author of The Legacy of Jihad (Prometheus, 2005) and The Legacy of Islamic Antisemitism.

Fitzgerald: The Saudis: Nobody's perfect

The Saudis recently arrested 700 people they said held to a “deviant ideology.” Actually the "deviant ideology" is to mistake the princes, princelings, princelettes of the Al-Saud family, and their spaniel-courtiers, for bad people, greedy people, decadent people who, some claim, have been robbing the country blind. How could anyone think that? Surely they must have embraced a "deviant" ideology to mistake for criminals the members of the benevolent and wonderful family whose ancestor, having defeated the Shammar tribe in Nejd back in 1920, proceeded to take Arabia. The Al-Saud had already driven the Hashemites out of their position as the Guardians of the Two Holy Places and into exile, with one Hashemite son, Faisal, plumped on the newly-created throne of newly-created Iraq, and another, Abdullah, being given as his consolation prize by the British all of Eastern Palestine.

Al-Saud and his clan renamed Arabia after themselves as "Saudi" Arabia. In order to stay in power, they handed over the intellectual and moral development of the country and its people to the most fanatical Wahhabis, which was not hard to do because the Al-Saud themselves, in the old days, were the most fanatical Wahhabis. Now they are attempting to crush the opposition that they fear the most, that from Muslims who don't like their Grand Theft (hold the "Auto"), don't like their decadence (oh, if only the C.I.A. had its cameras in southern Spain, and at the Trump Tower, and in Belgravia, and along Avenue Foch, and perhaps distributed a few to well-placed bellhops in the Western world's most luxurious hotels and resorts, what a video file -- On YouTube Now, unless the Saudis collaborate -- could be collected), don't like a thing about them, and are prepared to treat them as....Infidels!

The daggers-and-dishdasha Al-Saud, doing their little tribal dance, don't like that sort of thing. They don't mind it when Western critics say, accurately, after a week or a month or a few years in Saudi Arabia, summing up the place, that "money can buy everything -- except civilization." They don't mind the forlorn attacks on the Saudis for continuing to countenance slavery -- see those ads in Saudi papers, where someone offers to trade a girl from the subcontinent for "a late-model American automobile." They don't mind the memoirs of American military men denouncing the way in which the Saudis treated them with such arrogance, as mere hired hands, brought in as mercenaries to defend the Al-Saud. None of that worries them. They don't even worry about the world rising up and seizing, if not the oil directly, then the assets the Saudis have abroad. This could be done by way of compensating ourselves for the oligopolistic rents the Saudis have managed to charge for oil. That amount may well surpass the trillion or so in assets the Saudis may own in the West, and that with perfect justice oil-consuming Western states could seize. The Saudis could do nothing about this. They'd still have to sell oil, and at this point, they have no real control over the market, although they pretend they do. So they would have to continue to charge, as they do now, what the market allows, and not practice the market manipulation that was availed of by them in the past.

No, what worries the Saudis, those fabulously rich and decadent Saudis who rule that country, is the opposition that comes out of Islam. It was the same, of course, with Saddam Hussein. In Saddam Hussein's Iraq, the Christians had a kind of protection because they were, for Saddam Hussein, no threat. The potential threat, for him, were the more fanatical Shi'a, and political opposition was located in the mosques.

Similarly, the Saudis worry not about what the Infidels think, as long as those Infidels continue to give every sign of being frightened of the Saudis and their reaction to things -- see the "66 suitcases of cocaine" scandal. See the BEA bribery scandal (where the Law Lords have spoken, but the government of Great Britain will not enforce the rule of law when it comes to that scandal, for the Saudis have threatened to take their bribe-prompted business elsewhere). See the failure of the State Department to support the right enforcement of our own laws, when it comes to shutting down the Saudi Academy in Virginia. No, they are afraid only of the Islam-based opposition, because, let's face it, they know perfectly well how dangerously murderous fellow Muslims can be. They may also suspect, at this point, that there are all kinds of secret supporters, because there is all kinds of disgust in Saudi Arabia at the ruling family and the regime that endures.

And all that brave talk about the building of "economic cities" is simply blague. It is designed to make everyone think the Saudi rulers do have some kind of plausible plan for the nation's economy beyond oil. But of course they don't, and those "economic cities" will be as much of a waste as was the colossal investment in agriculture made over the past few decades, that all ended in failure, total failure. There is no real economy in inshallah-fatalist Saudi Arabia, though there is gold and greed aplenty.

What they cannot stand is the notion that the war on the Infidels may also come to include them. So their famous "de-programming" sessions of imprisoned Al-Qaeda members consists of having Muslim clerics come in and explain just how wonderfully Muslim the Al-Saud have been, how they are building mosques and madrasas everywhere in the Western world, are funding campaigns of Da'wa everywhere in the Western world -- look, here's the list, look what we are doing, look what we have done, and never fear, the Saudis are doing more, and more effectively, than Bin Laden and his merry men could ever achieve.

And, of course, everything those tame Saudi clerics argue is true. The Saudi regime is the most effective bankroller, the most effective deployer, of the Money Weapon that makes the March of Islam, and so many local Jihads, possible.

So they are right to pick up those men for their "deviant" behavior. In this case, it is the "deviant" notion that the dishdasha-and-dagger boys, with their sneers of cold command, would forget, in all their decadence, to pay their colossal dues to Islam. They might somehow overlook their duty to take part in the "struggle" or Jihad to ensure that all obstacles to the spread and dominance of Islam are removed. Why, the Saudis have spent close to 100 billion dollars of that Money Weapon to further the advance of Islam in the Infidel lands.

What more can good Muslims, devout but alas "deviant" Muslims, expect of them? They're doing their best for the very same goal.

Leave those princelings and princelettes alone. They're with you on the Jihad. Even if they choose, now and again, to phone in a money transfer from a 340-foot yacht off the coast of Marbella. For god's sake, be a little patient with the benign thoroughly Muslim Al-Saud.

We all have our faults.

Nobody's perfect.

Taliban enforcing Sharia at gunpoint in Pakistani province

“This speaks of a complete lack of control by the government over the situation.” "Taliban bring vigilante law to Peshawar," from Reuters, June 28 (thanks to Jeffrey Imm):

PESHAWAR: The Taliban are no longer at the gates of Peshawar, they’re inside, making their presence felt in the largest city in the NWFP. Their brazen movement is a chilling demonstration of the political and military failure to resist a militant Islamist tide rolling in from the Pashtun tribal belt on the Afghan border.

“This speaks of a complete lack of control by the government over the situation,” said Mehmood Shah, a former tribal region security chief.

President Pervez Musharraf warned more than two years ago that Talibanisation, the spread of the militants’ puritanical culture, was the greatest threat that Pakistan faced.

These days Taliban fighters do not sneak in to Peshawar. They arrive in broad daylight on the back of pick-up trucks, brandishing automatic weapons, and threatening owners of music stores to close down. “They had long hair and flowing beards, and were carrying Kalashnikovs. They told me to close down the shop or face the consequences,” said Abdul Latif, a clean-shaven 20-year-old, whose video store received a visit from the vigilantes last week. “I asked police for help but they said they are helpless,” he said.

Even Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam chief Fazlur Rehman, a member of the ruling coalition known for his past support for the Taliban and opposition to Pakistan’s alliance with the US, has rung alarm bells.

“It’s just a matter of months before news comes that the entire NWFP has slipped out of control,” Fazl warned parliament. Officials said they (law enforcement agencies) were getting ready to go on the offensive within weeks to free Peshawar from the creeping insurgency, and an anti-terrorist force of 7,000 men had been raised.

“If we don’t take timely action, we will be facing a much bigger problem,” said Malik Naveed Khan, provincial police chief, whose cousin was killed by a suicide bomber two years ago.

“If we don’t take timely action, we will be facing a much bigger problem.” Ain't that always the way?

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The enemy within

Details emerging from the Khawaja trial suggest it's time to take seriously the oft-stated terrorist goal of infiltrating western institutions
David Harris
Citizen Special

Thursday, June 26, 2008

If terrorism suspect Momin Khawaja, now on trial in Ottawa, is as guilty as Crown prosecutors say, it'll be time to settle an important question: Was Mr. Khawaja a "Naji man"?

Amid trial allegations, court details and defence objections, significant questions arise about Mr. Khawaja's status as a consultant to the Department of Foreign Affairs at about the time of his arrest. Prosecutors claim the software contractor used his perch inside the department to send streams of E-mails to confederates abroad - that federal resources were, in other words, used to advance terror plots. Authorities also say Mr. Khawaja might have used privileged Foreign Affairs department travel documents to travel on his "missions." And that he allegedly suggested using special departmental courier services to send bomb-related equipment to foreign associates, in the apparent belief that a government imprimatur on shipments confers immunity from customs searches. Insiders can do a lot of damage in sensitive government and private-sector establishments. From intelligence organizations to banks, history is replete with examples of infiltrators and penetrators undermining computer systems, removing money, spilling secrets. Remember Barings Bank? Kim Philby?

So questions must be asked. If, for the sake of argument, Mr. Khawaja was working against Canadians and their allies, what access did he have to departmental personnel, to electronic records, communications and associated encryption systems? Who recommended and hired him in the first place? A friend? If the government's version is correct, why would a software consultant be so confident about his access to special courier services? Did he have a network of friends at the department? It is early days, and no decisive answers are on offer.

But these things must be asked whenever a possible radical or extremist Islamist breach of security is hinted at, and here's why: Islamic extremists and subversives place great emphasis on infiltrating social, political, economic and security apparatuses of target nations, like Canada, with a view to manipulating and undoing their infrastructure.

Last year's dramatic Holy Land Foundation trial in Texas made the point. There, U.S. prosecutors put klieg lights on previously secret strategic documents seized from extremist Muslim Brotherhood (MB) sources. This subversive worldwide organization is the font from which spring a number of hardline "mainstream" North American Islamic front groups and "representative organizations," including many recently defined as unindicted co-conspirators by the U.S. Justice Department - and some, amazingly, periodically engaged in "outreach" by unsuspecting interfaith and even government officials.

The prize U.S. document was the Brotherhood's 1991 long-term plan to subvert and collapse the United States and its political, economic and other infrastructure, preparatory to achieving a forced radical Islamicization of that country, and others. Through a malign combination of immigration, intimidation, psychological warfare and subterfuge, the MB proposed "settling" - colonizing - the U.S., infesting its infrastructure, and relying on societal openness, constitutional freedoms and influence operations to proceed from there: "The process of settlement is a 'Civilization-Jihadist Process'," said the memorandum, adding ominously, "with all the word means."

The Brothers, it continued, "must understand that their work in American [sic] is kind of a 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."

More recently, Abu Bakr Naji, al-Qaeda's senior operational strategic thinker, explained the priority. Radical Islamists are to be "infiltrating the adversaries and their fellow travelers and establishing a strong security apparatus" to support the underground movement, now, and the resulting theocratic Islamic state, later. "[We] should infiltrate the police forces, the armies, the different political parties, the newspapers, the Islamic groups, the petroleum companies ... private security companies, sensitive civil institutions, etc."

"That," concludes Mr. Naji chillingly, "actually began several decades ago, but we need to increase it in light of recent developments."

Indeed, Muslim Brotherhood-inspired organizations were being set up on this continent as far back as the 1960s, and considerably earlier elsewhere. By now, there is little doubt that many "Naji men" -- and women -- are ensconced in the West, and recent developments cause concern:

- a police officer in the northeastern U.S., helping a terror suspect at his mosque to identify federal surveillance vehicles;

- an American 911 operator conducting illegal watch-list and other database searches, and communicating the results, illicitly;

- and questions about jihadist sympathies among certain figures in the FBI and CIA, the State Department and U.S. Muslim military chaplain corps, the White House, Homeland Security, the U.S. Air Force, Guantanamo, and the Federal Bureau of Prisons. (For details see this Investor's Business Daily editorial on the subject: http://www.ibdeditorials.com/IBDArticles.aspx?id=280367130714172.)

Canadians must guard against infiltration of government, business and associated infrastructure. Mr. Naji's operational aims bring home the need to make realistic determinations about the reliability of those employed in military and security offices, in nuclear-energy and power-grid control rooms, and in virus and biochemical research labs - even about those influencing politicians and decision-makers.

We cannot guess the outcome of the Khawaja trial, but perhaps evidence of Mr. Khawaja's work in government will encourage an overdue debate about Canada's counterpenetration strategy. We should begin now, while relative peace allows us to do so in an ordered, balanced and effective way.

David Harris is president of Democracy House, and a lawyer involved in national security matters. He is counsel to the Canadian Coalition for Democracies and a former senior CSIS official.

© The Ottawa Citizen 2008

Another Israel-Hezbollah Prisoner Swap?

P. David Hornik
FrontPageMagazine.com
6/27/2008

A lot happened in Israel this week: the Olmert government again scraping through, at least till September, with an eleventh-hour deal between Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Defense Minister Ehud Barak; the government’s ceasefire with Hamas already blasted by mortar and rocket firings from Gaza. At the center of public attention, though, were three hostages of terrorist organizations and their fate.

It was two years ago on Wednesday—June 25, 2006—that Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit was abducted into Gaza by Hamas. On Thursday Israeli negotiator Ofer Dekel was again in Cairo for talks on a deal for Shalit that still appears elusive. And it was on July 12, 2006, that Israeli reserve soldiers Eldad Regev and Ehud Goldwasser were abducted into Lebanon by Hezbollah. In this case a deal is said to be within reach and the Israeli cabinet is supposed to vote Sunday on a framework agreement for a prisoner exchange with Hezbollah.

Reports vary as to the terms of the agreement. But according to what could be called the dominant version, Israel is supposed to hand over the notorious Lebanese terrorist Samir Kuntar, four terrorists captured during the 2006 war, and the remains of eight others who were buried in Israel. Hezbollah is supposed to hand over Regev and Goldwasser, whose kidnapping prompted Israel to go to war in a failed attempt to retrieve them.

Hezbollah is also supposed to provide information on Ron Arad, the Israeli air force navigator who was shot down in Lebanon in 1986 and whose fate has been unknown since 1988, though it’s believed he was transferred to Iran and is most likely dead.

If it sounds surprisingly close to a fair exchange after Israel’s past lopsided deals with Hezbollah and other terrorist organizations, the hitch is that Regev and Goldwasser, according to Israeli intelligence, are definitely dead. Reportedly all three branches—the Mossad, the Shin Bet, and Military Intelligence—reached that conclusion in separate investigations and conveyed it to Prime Minister Ehud Olmert last June 3.

So the imbalance is there after all—especially considering that Samir Kuntar is supposed to be part of the deal.

In 1979, in the course of a terrorist attack in the Israeli coastal town of Nahariya, Kuntar and others took 28-year-old Israeli civilian Danny Haran and his four-year-old daughter Einat down to the beach as hostages. There Kuntar shot Danny Haran dead and killed Einat Haran by smashing her head on rocks and with the butt of his rifle.

Since then Kuntar has been jailed in Israel with a life sentence. Last February the assassination of terrorist leader Imad Mughniyeh in Damascus prompted him to send a letter—reprinted in the Palestinian Authority daily Al-Hayat Al-Jadida—to Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah in which he wrote: “Peace be unto…Imad Mughniyeh…. My oath and pledge is that my place will be at the battlefront…and that I shall continue down the path, until complete victory.”

For Nasrallah, eager to shore up his newly enhanced standing in the Lebanese political scene, freeing the child-killer is high-priority. Kuntar’s inclusion in the prospective deal, though, has led Mossad chief Meir Dagan and Shin Bet chief Yuval Diskin to raise objections to it. Dagan and Diskin are particularly concerned that, after paying such a price, Hezbollah could “reciprocate” with information on Ron Arad that’s of little worth and sheds little light.

Dagan and Diskin’s objections are reportedly what has caused Olmert to have second thoughts and order the army’s chaplaincy corps to declare Regev and Goldwasser KIA—killed in action—which some have interpreted as Olmert's attempt to dampen support for the deal.

Some observations:

1. Israel has itself to blame for making the kidnapping of Israelis a key objective of terrorist organizations. Israel’s previous severely asymmetrical deals are infamous, not least in Israel itself; the most egregious case is the 1985 Jibril Deal in which—sparking public outrage—Israel traded 1150 terrorists for three soldiers held by Ahmed Jibril’s PFLP. Now, reportedly, teams have been formed to draft a new policy for such situations. Earlier the Winograd Committee, set up to investigate the failures in the 2006 war in Lebanon, called for an end to what it called “crazy deals.” Clearly, continuing to make such exchanges means inviting further kidnapping attempts since Israel’s enemies have so much to gain from them.

2. The value of retrieving the bodies of dead soldiers is very real; Israel is dealing with ghoulish enemies who won’t hesitate to exploit families’ natural desire for the closure afforded by a funeral and a gravesite. Trading live terrorist prisoners for corpses, however, gives terrorists a message that they have nothing to lose: they can kidnap the Israelis and, even if they kill them, still reap a high price for them. Israel’s January 2004 deal with Hezbollah, when it freed 435 terrorists in return for the shady businessman Elhanan Tanenbaum and three corpses of soldiers, may possibly have been a death warrant for Eldad and Goldwasser since Hezbollah had little incentive to keep them alive.

3. The terrorist organizations’ behavior in these situations is a display of human evil at its coldest and most sadistic. Hezbollah has kept conveying shifting versions of the terms it will accept while refusing to disclose if Eldad and Goldwasser are dead or alive. The terrorists use the pain of the soldiers’ families, and the pressure they inevitably exert on the Israeli government, as part of their arsenal. Although Shalit has been allowed to send his parents three letters, neither he nor Eldad and Goldwasser have been seen by a third party, visited by the Red Cross, let alone visited by a relative. Both Hezbollah and Hamas have exploited the case of Ron Arad—vanished for twenty years—by threatening that the current hostages’ fate will be similar if Israel doesn’t pay the demanded prices.

For Israel it’s a disconcerting experience of staring evil in the face, but an experience from which Israel has to learn. If it ends up paying an exorbitant price for Shalit, or for the remains of Goldwasser and Regev plus inadequate information on Arad, it has to make clear that this is the last time. Expecting such clarity and resolve from Israel’s current government, however, is excessively optimistic.
P. David Hornik is a freelance writer and translator living in Tel Aviv. He blogs at http://pdavidhornik.typepad.com/. He can be reached at pdavidh2001@yahoo.com.

A Clean Slate for North Korea

Jacob Laksin
FrontPageMagazine.com

YOU KNOW THE BUSH administration’s North Korea policy is fatally flawed when even Barack Obama, last heard pledging to meet with the world’s dictators “without preconditions,” judges it naïve.

And yet, the presumptive Democratic nominee sounded all too sensible yesterday when he suggested that the Bush administration’s baffling decision to strike Pyongyang from the U.S. list of terrorism-sponsoring states and to lift trade sanctions against the tyrannical regime – in exchange for an alarmingly incomplete “declaration” of its nuclear plants and materials – may have been premature. Concessions to Kim Jong Ill, Obama stressed, should be “based on North Korean performance.” The Bush administration favors a different metric: wishful thinking. How else to explain that it has generously rewarded North Korea for repeatedly flouting nuclear agreements – not least agreements it has signed with the administration as recently as last fall? Under the terms of an October 2007 agreement, after all, North Korea by the end of last year was supposed to provide a “complete” inventory of its nuclear programs and weaponry while demonstrating that it had shut down its nuclear plants. By the time the deadline arrived on December 31, however, Pyongyang was nowhere near satisfying its obligations under the pact. For that intransigence, it has now been given two gifts by the administration.

This is not the course negotiations were supposed to take. Back in December, State Department officials were warning that North Korea’s failure to come clean would prompt the U.S. “reevaluate and look to other options.” At the time, that sounded like a threat – and a warranted one. In the years before the pact, North Korea had made a menace of itself on the international stage, beginning with its expulsion of U.N. nuclear monitors in late 2002. The following year, North Korea declared itself free from the obligations of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty and restarted the nuclear weapons program it was supposed to have suspended under a 1994 agreement with the Clinton administration.

Escalating tensions further in 2005, North Korea bragged that it had finally gotten “nukes” and had no more use for silly disarmament talks. So that there would be no doubt about its seriousness, in October of 2006 North Korea conducted its first nuclear test, immediately hailed by the country’s government-run news agency for bringing “our people huge joy.” (By “our people,” it presumably did not mean the thousands of Koreans rotting in Soviet-style prison camps for “anti-communist” crimes.) If additional proof of Pyongyang’s intentions were needed, it was supplied by revelations that the Syrian nuclear reactor destroyed by Israel last September had been constructed with North Korean assistance. “Other options” were indeed in order.

It now turns out that the options the U.S. had been contemplating were designed not to punish North Korean duplicity but to encourage it. So it is that, despite its recent collaboration with Hezbollah-sponsor Syria – to say nothing of its intent, in the run-up the Iraq war, to sell $10 million worth of medium-range missiles to Saddam Hussein for use against coalition troops – North Korea no longer will be designated a terrorist state. Never mind that the country has yet to come clean about its nuclear program. In the eyes of the Bush administration, North Korea has been given a clean slate.

And legitimacy. Notwithstanding its defiance of every nuclear treaty it has ever signed – a habit of violation that continues in its latest declaration, which reportedly discusses only plutonium processing activities and not the uranium enrichment and nuclear capabilities that were supposed to have been declared – North Korea is being treated as a credible partner in negotiations instead of the extortionist state that it clearly is. Fool the Bush administration once, the lesson appears to be, and you wind up in the “axis-of-evil.” Fool it repeatedly, and all is forgiven.

As always with North Korea, there are token concessions. To demonstrate its sincerity, Pyongyang has invited foreign TV crews to broadcast its demolition of the cooling tower at the notorious Yongbyon nuclear plant. It promises to be quite the affair, though one would have to be really taken in by spectacle to forget that the plant was already supposed to be completely disabled in the 1990s and, more recently, by the end of 2007. Nor will the made-for-the-cameras moment prove that North Korea has nothing to hide. The facility at Yongbyon is believed to have been shuttered last year, having already produced enough weapons-grade plutonium to build, by some estimates, at least nine nuclear bombs. To see the destruction of this Potemkin reactor as a sign of genuine progress is to yield to illusion.

So much the stranger, then, that this week’s deal has been touted as a triumph by the formerly clear-eyed Bush administration. Since 2002, when the administration first moved, in the face of substantial criticism, to ostracize Kim Jong Ill’s regime, North Korea has confirmed its worst suspicions. Now the administration has repented for its prescience by granting the regime an undeserved reprieve. Former U.N. ambassador John Bolton may be overstating the case when he calls the new agreement the “final collapse of Bush’s foreign policy.” But it is certainly true to say that it marks a rejection of the principle of accountability in international affairs that the administration once championed.

President Bush stressed several times this week that he is “under no illusions” about the dangers of nuclear North Korea. That is heartening to hear. Would that it were reflected in his foreign policy.
Jacob Laksin is a senior editor for FrontPage Magazine. He is a 2007 Phillips Foundation Journalism Fellow. His e-mail is jlaksin@gmail.com

Gender equality and polygamy not compatible

The Age

MULTICULTURALISM has been a contentious doctrine in Australia, while also being a celebrated and mostly uncontentious fact. Those who complain most loudly about the use of the term typically live peaceably, and sometimes even amicably, alongside those whose religious beliefs and cultural backgrounds differ considerably from their own.

To that extent, the cultural diversity created in Australia by post-World War II migration and the dismantling of the White Australia Policy in the 1960s and '70s has created one of the world's most tolerant societies. But that diversity has in turn been dependent on a shared acceptance of the rule of law, and of fundamental values on which Australian law is based. Sometimes, however, an issue arises that draws attention to the fact that without at least that measure of agreement even the cultural diversity of which contemporary Australians are rightly proud would not be possible. That happened this week when several Muslim community leaders called for a change in Australia's family law, which has always forbidden polygamy.

Very few Australian Muslims practise polygamy, and few advocate a change in the law. But, as Joumanah El Matrah, manager of the Islamic Women's Welfare Council of Victoria and an opponent of polygamy, acknowledged this week, it can be surmised that the practice is probably increasing. If it wasn't, the question of its legal status wouldn't have been raised openly.

The mere fact that it has been raised will goad racist and sectarian bigots — though they will not identify themselves as such, preferring to proclaim instead that they are the defenders of central Australian values. And the instinctive racist response will probably be further inflamed by the fact, that, in so far as polygamy is becoming more evident in Australia, it seems to be so mainly in certain ethnic communities. In Melbourne, the estimated 20 polygamous families are mostly Somali refugees.

The declared advocates of a change in the law base their case on the anomalous situation of people who have arrived in Australia from societies in which plural marriage is accepted. In Muslim countries that allow polygamy, second and subsequent wives receive legal protection as spouses, and their children are recognised as children of the marriage. In Australia they have no spousal rights, although their children will be entitled to legal recognition of their paternity — "illegitimacy" is a concept long discarded.

The difficulty these families face cannot be denied, and no doubt adds to the trauma of trying to adjust to life as a refugee in a society very different from the one they were forced to flee. But acknowledging the plight of these families does not justify a change in the law.

As The Age has argued before, there are fundamental values that must be accepted by all who live in this society if the broader diversity is to be sustained. Among those core values is an acceptance of the civil equality of men and women, and that equality would not be possible if men were allowed to take more than one wife. (The same consideration would preclude a change in the law allowing women to take more than one husband, although no one has publicly argued for polyandry.)

As Ms El Matrah noted, women in polygamous marriages suffer emotionally and psychologically, and in practice their property rights and capacity to earn a livelihood are compromised. It might be argued that in some other societies legal polygamy serves to protect these things, but that is not the way it could be expected to function in Australia in 2008. If the law were amended to regularise the status of the very few refugee families affected, how might it be exploited by others who do not come into this category? As Sherene Hassan, a spokeswoman for the Islamic Council of Victoria, has said: "Fourteen hundred years ago it was altruism. These days the motivation behind polygamy is probably less honourable."

It is not only Western societies such as Australia that have taken this view of polygamy. Not all Muslim-majority states allow the practice, nor is there any widespread demand for it within Australia's diverse Muslim community. The advocates of polygamy are few, and have spoken on their own behalf, not with the authority of representative community organisations or the Australian National Council of Imams. They are entitled to their view, but not to the expectation that Australia's law on this matter should change.

“All Iraqi Christians paid”

Dhimmi Watch

This surprisingly honest account from the New York Times shows the jizya -- the tax on the People of the Book (primarily Jews and Christians) by Qur'an 9:29 -- for what it is: protection money. Pay up, or get killed. In a hadith, Muhammad says: Fight in the name of Allah and in the way of Allah. Fight against those who disbelieve in Allah. [...] When you meet your enemies who are polytheists, invite them to three courses of action. If they respond to any one of these, you also accept it and withold yourself from doing them any harm. Invite them to (accept) Islam; if they respond to you, accept it from them and desist from fighting against them. [...] If they refuse to pay the tax, seek Allah's help and fight them.... (Sahih Muslim 4294)

In other words, bid them to convert to Islam, pay the tax and submit, or die.

This mandate comes from Qur'an 9:29. Ibn Juzayy says that this verse is “a command to fight the People of the Book” and, in a reference to v. 30, “denying their belief in Allah because of the words of the Jews, ‘Uzayr [Ezra] is the son of Allah’ and the words of the Christians, ‘The Messiah is the son of Allah.’” Muslims must also fight them because “they do not enter Islam.” He says that “scholars agree about accepting jizya [a religious-based poll tax] from the Jews and Christians,” and that it signifies “submission and obedience.”

According to the pioneering historian of dhimmitude, Bat Ye’or:

The poll tax was extorted by torture. The tax inspectors demanded gifts for themselves; widows and orphans were pillaged and despoiled. In theory, women, paupers, the sick, and the infirm were exempt from the poll tax; nevertheless, Armenian, Syriac, and Jewish sources provide abundant proof that the jizya was exacted from children, widows, orphans, and even the dead. A considerable number of extant documents, preserved over the centuries, testify to the persistence and endurance of these measures. In Aleppo in 1683, French Consul Chevalier Laurent d’Arvieux noted that ten-year-old Christian children paid the jizya. Here again, one finds the disparity and contradiction between the ideal in the theory and the reality of the facts. (The Decline of Eastern Christianity Under Islam, pp. 78-9).

As-Sawi specifies that the payment of the jizya signifies that the non-Muslims are “humble and obedient to the judgements of Islam.” As-Suyuti notes that the jizya is “not taken from someone in a state of hardship,” although that was a stipulation at times honored in the breach. For example, a contemporary account of the Muslims’ conquest of Nikiou, an Egyptian town, in the 640’s, says that “it is impossible to describe the lamentable position of the inhabitants of this town, who came to the point of offering their children in exchange for the enormous sums that they had to pay each month…”

This was a manifestation of the “state of abasement” specified by this verse and spelled out by the Bedouin commander al-Mughira bin Sa’d when he met the Persian Rustam. Said al-Mughira: “I call you to Islam or else you must pay the jizya while you are in a state of abasement.”

Rustam replied, “I know what jizya means, but what does ‘a state of abasement’ mean?”

Al-Mughira explained: “You pay it while you are standing and I am sitting and the whip hanging is over your head.”

Similarly, Ibn Kathir says that the dhimmis must be “disgraced, humiliated and belittled. Therefore, Muslims are not allowed to honor the people of Dhimmah or elevate them above Muslims, for they are miserable, disgraced and humiliated.” The seventh-century jurist Sa’id ibn al-Musayyab stated: “I prefer that the people of the dhimma become tired by paying the jizya since He says, ‘until they pay the jizya with their own hands in a state of complete abasement.’” As-Suyuti elaborates that this verse “is used as a proof by those who say that it is taken in a humiliating way, and so the taker sits and the dhimmi stands with his head bowed and his back bent. The jizya is placed in the balance and the taker seizes his beard and hits his chin.” He adds, however, that “this is rejected according to an-Nawawi who said, ‘This manner is invalid.’” Zamakhshari, however, agreed that the jizya should be collected “with belittlement and humiliation.”

Asad, Daryabadi and other Western-oriented commentators maintain that the jizya was merely a tax for exemption for military service. Asad explains: “every able-bodied Muslim is obliged to take up arms in jihad (i.e., in a just war in God’s cause) whenever the freedom of his faith or the political safety of his community is imperiled…Since this is, primarily, a religious obligation, non-Muslim citizens, who do not subscribe to the ideology of Islam, cannot in fairness be expected to assume a similar burden.” But they pass in silence over the latter part of v. 29, which mandates the humiliation of non-Muslims.

In explaining how the Jews and Christians must “feel themselves subdued,” Ibn Kathir quotes a saying of Muhammad: “Do not initiate the Salam [greeting of peace] to the Jews and Christians, and if you meet any of them in a road, force them to its narrowest alley.” He then goes on to outline the notorious Pact of Umar, an agreement made, according to Islamic tradition, between the caliph Umar, who ruled the Muslims from 634 to 644, and a Christian community.

This Pact is worth close examination, because it became the foundation for Islamic law regarding the treatment of the dhimmis. With remarkably little variation, throughout Islamic history whenever Islamic law was strictly enforced, this is generally how non-Muslims were treated. Working from the full text as Ibn Kathir has it, these are the conditions the Christians accept in return for “safety for ourselves, children, property and followers of our religion” – conditions that, according to Ibn Kathir, “ensured their continued humiliation, degradation and disgrace.” The Christians will not:

1. Build “a monastery, church, or a sanctuary for a monk”;
2. “Restore any place of worship that needs restoration”;
3. Use such places “for the purpose of enmity against Muslims”;
4. “Allow a spy against Muslims into our churches and homes or hide deceit [or betrayal] against Muslims”;
5. Imitate the Muslims’ “clothing, caps, turbans, sandals, hairstyles, speech, nicknames and title names”;
6. “Ride on saddles, hang swords on the shoulders, collect weapons of any kind or carry these weapons”;
7. “Encrypt our stamps in Arabic”
8. “Sell liquor” – Christians in Iraq in the last few years ran afoul of Muslims reasserting this rule;
9. “Teach our children the Qur’an”;
10. “Publicize practices of Shirk” – that is, associating partners with Allah, such as regarding Jesus as Son of God. In other words, Christian and other non-Muslim religious practice will be private, if not downright furtive;
11. Build “crosses on the outside of our churches and demonstrating them and our books in public in Muslim fairways and markets” – again, Christian worship must not be public, where Muslims can see it and become annoyed;
12. “Sound the bells in our churches, except discreetly, or raise our voices while reciting our holy books inside our churches in the presence of Muslims, nor raise our voices [with prayer] at our funerals, or light torches in funeral processions in the fairways of Muslims, or their markets”;
13. “Bury our dead next to Muslim dead”;
14. “Buy servants who were captured by Muslims”;
15. “Invite anyone to Shirk” – that is, proselytize, although the Christians also agree not to:
16. “Prevent any of our fellows from embracing Islam, if they choose to do so.” Thus the Christians can be the objects of proselytizing, but must not engage in it themselves;
17. “Beat any Muslim.”

Meanwhile, the Christians will:

1. Allow Muslims to rest “in our churches whether they come by day or night”;
2. “Open the doors [of our houses of worship] for the wayfarer and passerby”;
3. Provide board and food for “those Muslims who come as guests” for three days;
4. “Respect Muslims, move from the places we sit in if they choose to sit in them” – shades of Jim Crow;
5. “Have the front of our hair cut, wear our customary clothes wherever we are, wear belts around our waist” – these are so that a Muslim recognizes a non-Muslim as such and doesn’t make the mistake of greeting him with As-salaamu aleikum, “Peace be upon you,” which is the Muslim greeting for a fellow Muslim;
6. “Be guides for Muslims and refrain from breaching their privacy in their homes.”

The Christians swore: “If we break any of these promises that we set for your benefit against ourselves, then our Dhimmah (promise of protection) is broken and you are allowed to do with us what you are allowed of people of defiance and rebellion.”

Of course, the Pact of Umar, if authentic at all, was a seventh-century document. But the imperative to subjugate non-Muslims as mandated by Qur’an 9:29 and elaborated by this Pact became and remained part of Islamic law. In the nineteenth century the Western powers began to pressure the last Islamic empire, the Ottoman Empire, to abolish the dhimma. In Baghdad in the early nineteenth century, Sheikh Syed Mahmud Allusi (1802-1853), author of the noted commentary on the Qur’an Ruhul Ma’ani, complains that the Muslims have grown so weak that the dhimmis pay the jizya through agents, rather than delivering it themselves on foot. In his Tafsir Anwar al-Bayan, the twentieth-century Indian Mufti Muhammad Aashiq Ilahi Bulandshahri laments that “in today’s times, the system of Atonement (Jizya) is not practised at all by the Muslims. It is indeed unfortunate that not only are the Muslim States afraid to impose Atonement (Jizya) on the disbelievers (kuffar) living in their countries, but they grant them more rights than they grant the Muslims and respect them more. They fail to understand that Allah desires that the Muslims show no respect to any disbeliever (kafir) and that they should not accord any special rights to them.”

The influential twentieth century jihadist theorist Sayyid Qutb (1906-1966) emphasizes that these rules should be revived, for “these verses are given as a general statement, and the order to fight the people of the earlier revelations until they pay the submission tax with a willing hand and are subdued is also of general import” (In the Shade of the Qur’an, Vol. VIII, p. 126).

Likewise the Pakistani jihadist writer and activist Syed Abul A’la Maududi (1903-1979) states that “the simple fact is that according to Islam, non-Muslims have been granted the freedom to stay outside the Islamic fold and to cling to their false, man-made, ways if they so wish.” That heads off any potential contradiction between his understanding of v. 29 and 2:256, “There is no compulsion in religion.” Maududi continues by declaring that the unbelievers “have, however, absolutely no right to seize the reins of power in any part of God’s earth nor to direct the collective affairs of human beings according to their own misconceived doctrines. For if they are given such an opportunity, corruption and mischief will ensue. In such a situation the believers would be under an obligation to do their utmost to dislodge them from political power and to make them live in subservience to the Islamic way of life” (Towards Understanding the Qur’an, vol. III, p. 202).

"For Iraqi Christians, Money Bought Survival," by Andrew E. Kramer in the New York Times, June 26 (thanks to all who sent this in):

MOSUL, Iraq — As priests do everywhere, Archbishop Paulos Faraj Rahho, the leader of the Chaldean Catholics in this ancient city, gathered alms at Sunday Mass. But for years the money, a crumpled pile of multicolored Iraqi dinars, went into an envelope and then into the hand of a man who had threatened to kill him and his entire congregation.

“What else could he do?” asked Ghazi Rahho, a cousin of the archbishop. “He tried to protect the Christian people.”

But American military officials now say that as security began to improve around Iraq last year, Archbishop Rahho, 65, stopped paying the protection money, one sliver of the frightening larger shadow of violence and persecution that has forced hundreds of thousands of Christians from Iraq. That decision, the officials say, may be why he was kidnapped in February.

Two weeks later, his body was found in a shallow grave outside Mosul, the biblical city of Nineveh.

Archbishop Rahho was among the highest-profile Iraqi Christians to die in the war. He was mourned by President Bush and Pope Benedict XVI before his role as a conduit for protection money paid by the Chaldean Christians to insurgents became known outside Iraq.

These payments, American military officials and Iraqi Christians say, peaked from 2005 to 2007 and grew into a source of financing for the insurgency. They thus became a secret, shameful and extraordinary complication in the lives of Iraq’s Christians and their leaders — one that Christians are only now talking about more openly, with violence much lower than in the first years of the war.

“People deny it, people say it’s too complex, and nobody in the international community does anything about it,” said Canon Andrew White, the Anglican vicar of Baghdad. Complicating the issue further, he said, some of the protection money came from funds donated by Christians abroad to help their fellow Christians in Iraq.

Yonadam Kanna, a Christian lawmaker in Iraq’s Parliament, said, “All Iraqi Christians paid.” [...]

Since the time of the Prophet Muhammad, the founder of Islam, Muslims in the Middle East permitted that diversity in part through a special tax on Jews and Christians. The tax was called a jizya — and that is the name with which the insurgents chose to cloak extortion, Mafia-style, from Christians.

Officials say the demands could be hundreds of dollars a month per male member of a household. In many cases, Christian families drained their life savings and went into debt to make the payments. Insurgents also raised money by kidnapping priests. The ransoms, often paid by the congregations, typically ran as high as $150,000, several priests and lay Christians said. [...]

What was called the jizya was collected and paid by Jewish and Christian leaders to the insurgents operating on the west bank of the Tigris River. Archbishop Rahho, according to Mr. Kanna, the Christian lawmaker, made the payments on behalf of the Christians living in eastern neighborhoods of Mosul. He would have been an obvious choice: he had spent nearly his entire life in Mosul and was well known.

“He was the link,” Mr. Kanna said.

The archbishop’s cousin, Mr. Rahho, characterized the role as less central and emphasized the life-and-death nature of the choice to pay to save the lives of the parishioners. And the archbishop was certainly not the only person paying.

“We all paid,” said one Assyrian Orthodox Christian priest here who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retribution from insurgents. “We were afraid.”

By several accounts by Christians who paid, the money changed hands quietly, according to a simple mechanism.

A man who introduced himself as Abu Huraitha, and who sometimes said he represented Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, made the menacing phone calls, the Assyrian priest said.

“He said: ‘I need money, I need money. If you do not give us money, I will kill you,’ ” the priest said. The bagman, however, was a fellow Christian, an elderly blue-eyed man who made the rounds of churches for the insurgents, the priest said. “If you do not give to him, they kill you.”

He said he paid 10 million Iraqi dinars, or about $8,000, over three years, until last winter, when the United States Army reinforced its garrison in Mosul with the Third Armored Cavalry Regiment. Military operations increased in the city. The American units built neighborhood forts and traffic control points that disrupted the insurgents’ movements. The racket started to fall apart.

During the fighting last winter, the Assyrian priest said, word trickled out that the Americans had killed Abu Huraitha. Many church leaders used the death of this contact to halt payments. Among them, perhaps most prominently, was Archbishop Rahho. He gave a speech on television in January denouncing the payments and saying that they should no longer be made.

A month later, on Feb. 29, he was kidnapped by gunmen after praying at the Holy Spirit Cathedral. They shot and killed his driver and two guards and bundled him into the trunk of a car. In the darkness, he managed to reach his cellphone and call his church. He implored them not to pay a ransom that would finance violence, church officials said. [...]

Virginia Islamic Academy had its corporate charter revoked and never filled out IRS forms

Surprise, surprise. But will their Saudi connection bail them out? I would guess that it probably will. "Virginia’s Islamic Academy on Shaky Legal Ground," by Patrick Poole for Pajamas Media, June 27:

An investigation by Pajamas Media has found that more trouble may be on the horizon for the Islamic Saudi Academy and the Saudi Embassy. . PJM first reported on the academy, a school sponsored by the Saudi Embassy, two weeks ago when law enforcement authorities raided it, looking for evidence that the school’s director, Abdullah Al-Shabnan, had covered up sex abuse allegations by a 5-year old student. The raid occurred just three days after the Fairfax County Board of Supervisors had renewed the school’s lease despite evidence that the school continued to use textbooks promoting violence and religious hatred.

Since then Abdullah Al-Shabnan has been charged with failing to report the child abuse allegations and obstruction of justice. A protest was held last week in front of the academy and it received considerable local media coverage, including from the Washington Post. That coverage no doubt played a role earlier this week when in a stunning about-face the Fairfax Board of Supervisors sent a letter to the State Department asking them to determine whether the lease should be renewed or not in light of the report earlier this month by the US Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) that reviewed the academy’s textbooks and found that incendiary and hateful passages had not been removed.

The school has issued a press release claiming that the passages have been “mistranslated and misinterpreted,” and saying that the “textbooks are no longer at use at the Academy.” That contradicts statements made last week by school officials to the media that textbooks will be rewritten and reissued before the beginning of school. Why would the textbooks need to be rewritten if those under scrutiny are no longer in use?

The textbooks are not the only elements of the school that don’t hold up under scrutiny.

Virtually all of the establishment media press reports have wrongly claimed that the school operates independently of the embassy as a private entity. Even Tom Casey, the State Department’s deputy spokesman, made this error during his June 24 daily press briefing:

QUESTION: I understand that you’ve received a letter from the — from Fairfax County asking you whether you could give an opinion on the lease of the Saudi school in Alexandria and whether the county should extend that lease, which I am told it’s worth $2.2 million a year. But — just, I mean, do you expect to pronounce yourselves on that? Is that something that you –

MR. CASEY: Well, I think it’s something we’ve just gotten. We’ll certainly take a look at it and see what kind of response would be appropriate, but I — you know, it’s not something we’ve had a chance to really look through. As you know, this is a school that is incorporated and overseen through the county there. It’s not an institution that we have any sort of formal role in accrediting or managing. But certainly, we’ll take a look at the letter and if there’s some thoughts or advice that we can offer, we’ll certainly do it.

And State Department spokesman Nichole Thompson has also said:

This is a private school. It is not a part of the Saudi embassy. It is not part of a diplomatic mission.

These claims by State Department officials make clear their position that the Islamic Saudi Academy has maintained a separate corporate identity from the Saudi Embassy. But a review of the corporate records on file with the Virginia State Corporation Commission finds that the Islamic Saudi Academy’s corporate charter was terminated by the state on December 27, 2004. There is no indication from state records that the incorporation has been revived or renewed, and the last corporate report the school has filed with the state of Virginia that we could find was 2004 — the same year its corporate charter was terminated. A check of corporations in neighboring District of Columbia and Maryland found nothing for the academy.

Shocked? Don't be. Why should they have to obey kaffir laws?

Jailed jihadist professor indicted for refusal to testify about Islamic charities

Jihad Watch

CAIR is in his corner, of course, and everyone is working hard to make him seem to be a martyr. But what does he have to hide? What would he be able to reveal about the IIIT, which was listed in a 1991 Muslim Brotherhood memorandum as one of the organizations involved in a "grand jihad" to destroy Western civilization?

Al-Arian Update: "Former Professor Indicted In Muslim Charities Case," by Jerry Markon for the Washington Post, June 27 (thanks to Writer Mom):A former Florida professor who had pleaded guilty to aiding a terror organization was indicted yesterday on criminal charges that he refused to testify before a grand jury investigating whether Islamic charities in Northern Virginia were financing terrorists.

The indictment of Sami al-Arian triggered outrage from his family and Muslim groups that have mounted a national campaign to secure his release from prison. Arian had already been jailed for a year on civil contempt charges. Legal experts said it is rare for the government to then add criminal counts.

"This is a really dirty game the government is playing," said Arian's daughter, Laila. "They've already put him through enough. Enough is enough. This will have repercussions in the American Muslim community and throughout the world."

Arian was accused in Tampa in 2003 of conspiracy to commit racketeering and murder and to aid the Palestinian Islamic Jihad group, but his trial ended two years later in an acquittal on some charges and a mistrial on others. He later pleaded guilty to a single count of conspiracy in one of the nation's highest-profile terrorism cases. He was sentenced to 57 months in prison, which he finished serving in April. He was expected to be deported, but prosecutors in Alexandria are seeking his testimony.

He was charged again yesterday in U.S. District Court in Alexandria with two counts of criminal contempt. He could face additional jail time if convicted, but there is no maximum or minimum penalty. [...]

Prosecutors in Alexandria want Arian to reveal what they think are his ties to the International Institute of Islamic Thought, or IIIT, a Herndon think tank that is one of the key organizations under investigation, according to Arian's lawyers and court documents. The six-year-old probe, which federal officials have called the nation's largest terrorism-financing investigation, is focused on a Herndon-based network of Muslim charities, businesses and think tanks. They have denied any terrorist ties.

The Northern Virginia investigation burst into public view in March 2002, when federal agents raided homes and businesses in Herndon and elsewhere in the region. Muslim groups have labeled the probe a fishing expedition, but law enforcement officials have defended it as highly complicated, involving a complex trail of international transactions among corporations and charitable entities.

Arian, who taught computer science at the University of South Florida, twice refused to testify before the grand jury in Alexandria, on Oct. 16, 2007, and on March 20, according to yesterday's two-page indictment. His daughter said that he views it "as a matter of conscience" and that "he has nothing to offer."

Arian's attorney, Jonathan Turley, said his client has given prosecutors two detailed affidavits saying that he knows of no criminal activity involving IIIT and that the government has acknowledged he is a "minor witness." Turley said the indictment "is a continuation of a long campaign of abuse that has drawn international criticism."

After Arian was found guilty of civil contempt by a federal judge in Alexandria in 2006, he drew the strong backing of Muslim organizations, which held a news conference at Justice Department headquarters in Washington and called for a worldwide fast in support. Arian has gone on at least two hunger strikes in prison.

Ahmed Rehab, a spokesman for the Council on American-Islamic Relations, called yesterday's indictment a "ludicrous decision" that is "growing evidence that the kangaroo prosecution of Professor Al-Arian in fact extends beyond the pursuit of justice and into the realm of vindictive political persecution."

Faking a killing

Standpoint, July 2008

On September 30 2003, two days after Ariel Sharon, then the leader of Israel’s opposition Likud Party, went for a walk on Temple Mount, Palestinians mounted a demonstration at Gaza’s Netzarim Junction. A 55-second piece of video footage of that demonstration, transmitted that day by the French TV station France 2, was to cause unprecedented violence in the Middle East and throughout the world.

The footage, with a voice-over by France 2’s Jerusalem correspondent, Charles Enderlin, showed what was said to be the killing of 12-year-old Mohammed al-Dura by Israeli marksmen. Viewers saw the child crouching in terror behind his father, Jamal, as they sheltered next to a barrel under what Enderlin said was Israeli gunfire, and then slumping to the ground as Enderlin pronounced that he was dead. That image of the boy screaming in terror before being killed was uniquely incendiary. It portrayed the Israelis as diabolically gunning down a child in cold blood, even as he cowered for his life. It ignited the Arab and Muslim world with apparent proof that the Israelis were deliberately killing their children, inciting a murderous frenzy.

Al-Dura became a poster boy for the Palestinian and Islamist war against Israel and the West. The day after the France 2 broadcast, the second intifada erupted in its full fury; according to the 2001 Mitchell report, the two events were directly connected. Twelve days later, a mob of Palestinians shouting, ‘Revenge for the blood of Mohammed al-Dura’ lynched two Israeli army reservists and dragged their mutilated bodies through the streets of Ramallah.

When al-Qaeda decapitated the journalist Daniel Pearl, the video of this atrocity was punctuated with references to al-Dura. After September 11 2001, Osama bin Laden said: ‘Bush must not forget the image of Mohammed al-Dura.’ Several Arab countries issued postage stamps with his picture. On Palestinian Authority TV and in its school books, al-Dura’s example is used to encourage other children to emulate his spirit of ’sacrifice’.

But we now know that this whole fiesta of violence and incitement was based on a lie. For whatever people think they saw in those 55 seconds, it was not the death of that boy. He was not killed by Israeli bullets; he was not killed at all. At the end of France 2’s famous footage, he was still alive and unharmed. The whole thing was staged, a fantastic piece of play-acting, an elaborate fabrication designed to blacken Israel’s name, and incite the Arab and Muslim mobs to mass murder.

It was, in short, a modern-day blood libel, an updated version of the medieval calumny that the Jews target gentile children for murder — which itself caused the murder of thousands of Jews over the centuries.

How do we know the footage was a lie? Because many of us have seen the evidence for ourselves in a French courtroom. Ironically, this blood libel was only exposed to public view because France 2 and its correspondent Enderlin brought a libel suit against a French media watchdog, Philippe Karsenty, for saying that the ‘killing’ was ‘pure fiction’ and that al-Dura wasn’t dead at all.

To begin with, a Paris court ruled in favour of the TV station. But in May this year, the appeal court ruled that Karsenty had every right to say what he said in the light of the evidence. This included the ‘inexplicable incoherence’ of footage, whose images did not correspond to Enderlin’s commentary; the ‘inexplicable inconsistencies and contradictions’ in Enderlin’s explanation; and the lack of credibility of France 2’s Palestinian cameraman Talal Abu Rahma, upon whose account of the events at Netzarim Enderlin — who was in Jerusalem at the time — had depended.

Denis Jeambar, the director of L’Express, and TV producer Daniel Leconte saw the untransmitted rushes and subsequently wrote in Le Figaro: ‘In the minutes that precede the gunfire, the Palestinians seem to have organised a staged scene. They “play” at war with the Israelis and simulate, in most of the cases, imaginary injuries.’ At the moment when Enderlin declared the boy to be dead: ‘Nothing permitted him to affirm that he was really dead and even less that he was killed by Israeli soldiers.’

The implications for France 2 are shattering. The state-funded TV station is now appealing to the highest court in France. Enderlin has blustered that Karsenty is backed by US and French ‘right-wing’, pro-Israel organisations. This is the desperate flailing of a journalist whose reputation now lies in shreds. For he never imagined that his attempt to silence Karsenty would lead the court to order France 2 to produce the evidence it had hitherto refused to make public — the untransmitted 27 minutes of footage that Abu Rahma claimed he had filmed.

I was in the Paris court on the day France 2 reluctantly complied and I saw the footage (minus a few minutes that Enderlin had excised and which are said to be even more explosive). This showed clearly that the whole thing was a set-up from start to finish.

The cameraman said the Israelis had fired continuously for 45 minutes. Yet the footage did not show people falling under fire. It showed instead Palestinians demonstrating, throwing rocks and so forth, in a positively carnival atmosphere. Youths strutted about, giving declamatory interviews and grinning at the camera; boys rode by on bicycles. And no one showed any sign of injury. There were no wounds; there was no blood. From time to time, demonstrators were pushed on to stretchers and into ambulances — but with no evidence of any disturbance to their anatomy.

Enderlin said he had cut out the scenes of al-Dura’s actual death agony because ‘it was unbearable’. But when the footage was shown, it became clear no such scenes existed. There was no agony and no death. Al-Dura and his father showed no sign of any wound or injury throughout. Supposedly riddled with bullets, their bodies remained totally unmarked. There was no blood anywhere. A red stain on the child turned out to be a piece of red cloth, which suddenly materialised.

You see the boy slumping to the ground. But before he does so, while he is still hanging on to his father and screaming, a voice shouts in Ara bic: ‘The boy is dead! The boy is dead!’ Asked to explain this astounding prescience, Enderlin’s team replied that the Arabic in fact meant: ‘The boy is in danger of dying.’ At this, the courtroom laughed out loud.

After Enderlin pronounces the boy to be dead, the corpse mysteriously assumes four different positions. You see the cameraman’s fingers making the ‘take two’ sign to signal the repeat of a scene. And then you see the lifeless martyr raise his arm and peep through his fingers — presumably to check whether his thespian services are still required or whether he can now get up and go home.

This extraordinary footage was first uncovered by Nahum Shahaf, a physicist in Israel’s defence establishment, who was at the centre of the Israeli army’s own investigation of the incident. Shahaf analysed frame by frame the untransmitted rushes from many TV crews.

He observed, from pictures of al-Dura’s autopsy, that the state of the body suggested he had been dead for at least a day; that this boy was older than 12; and that although there were bullet holes in his forehead, there had been no blood on the ground nor on the wall behind him. He also noted, from pictures of the boy’s funeral on the day of the shooting, that shadows indicated this took place around midday. He was told by two doctors at Gaza’s al-Shifa hospital that al-Dura’s lifeless body was brought to them before 1pm. But the incident at Netzarim had not started until 3pm.

Shahaf then discovered from al-Shifa’s records that a dead boy named Rami Jamal al-Dura had been brought into the hospital the day before. According to Palestinian TV and the earliest accounts of the incident, the full name of the boy who was killed at Netzarim was Mohammed Rami Jamal al-Dura.

Shahaf concludes: ‘It was just lie after lie after lie.’ He also found several short films shot in the Netzarim area on and around the day of the incident. ‘They used directors, cameramen and volunteer actors,’ he said. ‘You can see them shooting little horror scenes. Often the director scolds the volunteers for their bad acting. The wounded get up and go back for another take; Palestinian bystanders laugh and applaud.’

The implications of this scandal are enormous, going far beyond a disgraced journalist and his TV station. For France itself, it raises a century-old spectre. In 1894, a Jewish French army captain, Alfred Dreyfus, was convicted for treason on fabricated evidence that he was a spy, in an atmosphere of institutionalised state antisemitism. The al-Dura libel is being seen in some quarters as a second Dreyfus affair — but with Israel playing the role of the defamed army captain.

This perception of France’s revived shame was given fuel by the extraordinary behaviour of the lower court, which found Karsenty guilty of libel. For most of that trial, it had looked as if France 2 would lose, not least because it had failed to answer any of Karsenty’s allegations. But at the last minute, Enderlin’s team produced a letter to Enderlin from the then French President, Jacques Chirac, extolling him as a brilliant and authoritative journalist. As a result, the three judges promptly found for France 2.

This disgraceful piece of political nobbling and judicial grovelling has now been reversed by the higher court. But few in France would realise this — what scant coverage there has been of this judgment managed to suggest that the integrity of the al-Dura footage remained intact.

It’s not just the French media that is in the frame here. Over the years, Shahaf’s findings made their way into a handful of newspaper articles, TV documentaries and on to the internet; yet this evidence was studiously ignored by the rest of the media.

It is the most egregious example of the animosity towards Israel of much of the Western media, which routinely reports Palestinian or Hezbollah propaganda as fact and refuses to correct the record whenever these falsehoods are exposed. One thinks of the Jenin ‘massacre’ that never was, or the evidence revealing that alleged Israeli atrocities during the 2006 Lebanon war were either staged by Hezbollah or significantly embellished. Indeed, the presentation of theatrical fictions as Israeli atrocities has become so widespread that the practice has been dubbed ‘Pallywood’ — a grotesque new genre of terrortainment.

Why do Western journalists go along with such deadly fabrications? The answer lies in a combination of their dislike of Israel, professional self-preservation, and the fact that they depend on local stringers who are virtually all partisans of the Arab and Islamist cause.

According to Danny Seaman, director of the Israel government press office, almost every stringer now delivering local copy and images from Gaza to Western journalists answers to Hamas. Western journalists know that if they cross Hamas, their lives will be in danger — and British journalists, Seaman says, are the most compliant of all.

Palestinian stringers in general, he says — who all see their role as propagandists for the Palestinian cause — have virtually taken over foreign media offices. The result is that footage from Gaza has long been routinely fabricated or doctored, to which practices Western media organisations turn a blind eye. ‘These were good pictures, always getting on the front pages and eliciting an emotional response,’ says Seaman. ‘ “Bad Jews, poor Arabs” sold papers. Then it became so much the reality that no one ever challenged it.’

What Western dupes fail to realise is that Pallywood is a key weapon in the asymmetrical warfare being waged against Israel and the West. Realising they cannot achieve victory by conventional military means, the Palestinians and Islamists use psychological warfare — psy-ops — as a key strategy both to recruit their army of terrorists, and to demoralise, confuse and suborn their victims.

Israel fails to grasp that it is in a psy-ops war — hence its ineptitude in reacting to the al-Dura claims. Within hours, the Israeli army assumed it must be responsible for the boy’s ‘death’ — and said so without even questioning the commander on the ground. It then set up an investigation, which concluded that its soldiers could not have been responsible. But it left it at that for seven years, despite Shahaf’s discoveries.

Although Seaman said repeatedly during that time that the boy’s ‘killing’ was a fabrication, he was slapped down by Israel’s foreign ministry. It decided that the al-Dura image had taken on a life of its own, and so anything that reminded people of that image would be bad for Israel. It failed to grasp that if left unchallenged, that life of its own would cause the deaths of untold numbers of Israelis and other innocents.

Even after the startling developments in the French appeal court, Israel’s government has said nothing (although it has now quietly let it be known that it agrees with its own spokesman Seaman). Similarly in Britain, at time of writing, no daily newspaper has reported any of this; and around the world, only a handful of papers has done so. So the public is unaware that images that have convinced such a lamentable number of them of Israel’s iniquity are false, and that the iniquity belongs instead to the Arabs and the Western media.

In medieval times, the Christian blood libels led to the annihilation of Jews. Today, al-Dura and other similar libels are promoting the annihilation of the collective Jew in the form of the state of Israel. The Western media have shown themselves once again to be the Islamists’ most powerful weapon against the free world on what few realise is the real battleground of the mind.