And over the weeks that followed, friends and online acquaintances sent me pictures to post online, each doing their part to preserve another memory of what happened that day. You can find these pictures here.
31 March 2010 >>
Not too long ago, taking to the streets to protest your government was considered a patriotic act.
It’s true!
But it seems that publicly airing your grievances stopped being patriotic right around noon on January 20th, 2009.
Once President Obama was sworn in, protesting became incitement to violence.
If you’ve opened up a newspaper or watched a cable news program in the past week or so, you’ve probably seen members of the media painting Tea Party activists as dangerous bigots. That’s because disagreeing with President Obama on issues like government spending and high taxes makes you a racist, you see.
What’s interesting about the media’s latest freak-out is that there were radicals a-plenty under President Bush. They protested in the streets. They talked openly about revolution and killing. But oddly, the violent imagery used by people claiming to be advocates for peace never registered with the media. They were too busy fawning over Cindy Sheehan.
Why the difference in coverage? Did the media cheerlead protests against President Bush to hurt him politically? Are they trying to marginalize the increasingly powerful Tea Party movement because they favor President Obama’s agenda?
One thing’s for sure: If there is such a thing as dangerous rhetoric, then the media is at least one president too late in reporting the story.
Don’t believe me?
Well, then let’s take a trip down memory lane...
Video >>
Less than a month after major Nidal Hasan allegedly killed 13 people at Fort Hood, Texas, the Pentagon’s top intelligence officer sent the White House a report detailing an earlier failure to connect the dots. It reads like a dress rehearsal for the Detroit bomber case, reports CBS News chief national security correspondent David Martin.
According to that still-classified report, the terrorism task force responsible for determining whether Hasan posed a threat never saw all 18 e-mails he exchanged with that radical Yemeni cleric Awlaki whose communications were being monitored under a court ordered wiretap.
Guess which radical Yemeni cleric won’t be using the same communication channels anymore?
This is why we shouldn’t be trying to fight wars in a courtroom.
Mark down the date. Tuesday, April 21, 2009, is the moment that any chance of a new era of bipartisan respect in Washington ended. By inviting the prosecution of Bush officials for their antiterror legal advice, President Obama has injected a poison into our politics that he and the country will live to regret.
Policy disputes, often bitter, are the stuff of democratic politics. Elections settle those battles, at least for a time, and Mr. Obama’s victory in November has given him the right to change policies on interrogations, Guantanamo, or anything on which he can muster enough support. But at least until now, the U.S. political system has avoided the spectacle of a new Administration prosecuting its predecessor for policy disagreements. This is what happens in Argentina, Malaysia or Peru, countries where the law is treated merely as an extension of political power.
If this analogy seems excessive, consider how Mr. Obama has framed the issue. He has absolved CIA operatives of any legal jeopardy, no doubt because his intelligence advisers told him how damaging that would be to CIA morale when Mr. Obama needs the agency to protect the country. But he has pointedly invited investigations against Republican legal advisers who offered their best advice at the request of CIA officials.
Put yourself in the shoes of the people who were asked to interrogate al-Qaeda prisoners in 2002. One former officer told me he declined the job, not because he thought the program was wrong but because he knew it would blow up. “We all knew the political wind would change eventually,” he recalled. Other officers who didn’t make that cynical but correct calculation are now “broken and bewildered,” says the former operative.
[...]
One veteran counterterrorism operative says that agents in the field are already being more careful about using the legal findings that authorize covert action. An example is the so-called “risk of capture” interview that takes place in the first hour after a terrorism suspect is grabbed. This used to be the key window of opportunity, in which the subject was questioned aggressively and his cellphone contacts and “pocket litter” were exploited quickly.
Now, field officers are more careful. They want guidance from headquarters. They need legal advice. I’m told that in the case of an al-Qaeda suspect seized in Iraq several weeks ago, the CIA didn’t even try to interrogate him. The agency handed him over to the U.S. military.
So, this is where we are as a country these days? We’re really considering prosecuting people for authoring legal opinions?
Merely by raising the issue in this fashion, Obama has already undermined the future security of the country. In the environment created by President Obama and Congressional Democrats, who in their right mind would ever begin a career in intelligence or anti-terrorism? Who would stay in the intelligence services, knowing that their work could land them in court any time the presidency changes hands?
The only question is whether Obama administration officials will be prosecuted in the future for what they’re doing today. Because once politicians take the frightening step of criminalizing policy differences, they’d better plan on staying in power forever, or they may one day find themselves in the defendant’s chair. And if being too vigilant about protecting the country is a potential criminal offense, so is not doing enough.
26 February 2009 @ 8:59AM >>
For the last few years, and especially during the presidential campaign, the Guantanamo Bay detention center was held up as evidence that America had become a modern-day Nazi Germany.
Attorney General Eric Holder said Wednesday the Guantanamo detention center is a well-run, professional facility that will be difficult to close - but he is still going to do it.
[...]
Closing Guantanamo, he said, “will not be an easy process. It’s one we will do in a way that ensures that people are treated fairly and that the American people are kept safe.”
Exit question: if Guanatano is a professional, well-run facility whose occupants are just going to be moved to other facilities anyway, what is the purpose—other than pure symbolism—of closing Guantanamo?
25 August 2008 @ 9:10AM >>
Barack Obama launched his political career with a fundraiser in the house of Bill Ayers, an unrepentant terrorist who—along with his wife Bernardine Dohrn—founded a radical Marxist group in the 1960s called the Weather Underground.
The Weather Underground was responsible for a number of bombings around the United States, including the U.S. Capitol building and the Pentagon.
On the morning that the World Trade Center was collapsing, the New York Timesran an article on Ayers in which he was quoted as saying, “I don’t regret setting bombs. I feel we didn’t do enough.” You have to wonder whether Ayers felt some level of glee watching the news that day.
The relationship between Ayers and Obama is extensive: for years, they worked together on a project called the Annenberg Challenge.
You’d think the media would delve into this relationship a little. If John McCain kicked off his political career at the house of, say, a bomber of abortion clinics, you probably would have heard about it by now. But the media, so clearly in love with Barack Obama, isn’t doing its job.
In election cycles a decade or more ago, that would have mattered more. But with the establishment media’s weakening grip on controlling coverage—ask John Edwards about that—the old gatekeepers can’t prevent this news from being discussed.
If anything, the media’s reluctance to discuss Obama’s shady connections may end up torpedoing the Democrats’ chances of taking back the White House. Ironic that the media’s desire to see Obama elected ended up causing the Democrats to nominate someone who might be the least electable candidate.
Because the media hasn’t been doing its job covering Obama’s connection to Bill Ayers, ads like this one are going to resonate this fall:
22 April 2008 >>
Al Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri seems upset that conspiracy theorists are robbing his terrorist network of the recognition it deserves.
Al-Zawahiri also denied a conspiracy theory that Israel carried out the September 11, 2001, attacks on the U.S., and he blamed Iran and Shiite Hezbollah for spreading the idea to discredit the Sunni al Qaeda’s achievement.
Hey, Ayman! Don’t forget that the Western left has a stake in promoting the al-Qaeda-didn’t-do-it theory. After all, if they’re forced to acknowledge that the attack was perpetrated by al Qaeda, then they can’t also claim it was an “inside job” orchestrated by the U.S. government.
Al-Zawahiri accused Hezbollah’s al-Manar television of starting the rumor.
“The purpose of this lie is clear — (to suggest) that there are no heroes among the Sunnis who can hurt America as no else did in history. Iranian media snapped up this lie and repeated it,” he said.
And plenty of Westerners have bought into it, too.
11 December 2007 @ 6:56PM >>
The headline above can be parsed in two different ways. A court in Iraq will soon try to determine which is more accurate.
AP photographer Bilal Hussein was on the radar screen of US forces prior to his being detained in a chance encounter April 12, 2006. He was a stringer working in Fallujah who filed numerous reports and photos that seemed to need a high degree of cooperation from the terrorists. He has been in custody for 19 months and will soon face trial by the Iraqi government on charges related to his activities with Sunni insurgents in Fallujah and Ramadi. Evidence against him is expected to be given to the Iraqi government this week.
Hussein was in his house with Hamid Hamad Motib, a known al-Qaeda leader, last year when Marines wanted to use the house as an observation point. They determined Motib’s identity and status as a wanted terrorist and took both him and Hussein into custody. They also recovered a number of items that led them to believe that Hussein was involved in insurgent activities. The US will now provide the evidence it has to the Iraqi government.
[...]
Bilal Hussein had free reign [sic] to be anywhere and was often taking pictures in the company of insurgents and terrorists. He and the other stringers who made up AP’s Pulitzer Prize winning photo team managed to capture assassinations as they happened. They were on site at bombings within seconds to capture the carnage almost as it happened.
This access and the number of false reports of civilian deaths led the information operations staff to take note. They began monitoring Hussein more closely for two reasons: one they were tasked with countering or debunking false claims of civilian casualties and atrocities, second because Hussein’s very tight relations with the insurgents could be used against the Marines themselves.
The photo to the right was taken by Balil Hussein. It appears to show Italian hostage Salvatore Santoro shortly before he was executed. The Associated Press tries to defend Hussein by copping to a different journalistic no-no: that the photo was staged after Santoro’s execution.
Either way, Hussein had remarkable access to terrorists, and he routinely supplied photographs to AP that were useful propaganda for insurgents. By AP’s own admission, he dutifully waited while insurgents staged an execution scene, proving that he was an active participant in generating their propaganda.
So even if you give the Associated Press the benefit of the doubt, the best you can say is that their own evidence shows that Hussein was a willing tool of the insurgents.
Was he more than that?
Iraqi authorities will be seeking a verdict on that question soon enough.
26 November 2007 >>
“The dogma of multiculturalism holds that all cultures are equal, except Western culture, which (unlike every other society on the planet) has a history of oppression and war is therefore worse. All religions are equal, except Christianity, which informed the beliefs of the capitalist bloodsuckers who founded America and is therefore worse. All races are equal, except Caucasians, who long ago went into business with black slave traders in Africa, and therefore they are worse. The genders, too, are equal, except for those paternalistic males, who with their testosterone and aggression have made this planet a polluted living hell, and therefore they are worse.”
More >>
18 November 2007 @ 12:26PM >>
Jared Lapidus, who got his start in professional filmmaking shooting footage for Indoctrinate U, has just released a short film he directed called The Libel Tourist.
The film covers the abuses of exceedingly loose, plantiff-friendly libel laws in Britain, where American authors can now be sued for books never published there.
As long as a single after-market copy of a book is sold in Britain—such as on eBay or Amazon’s used books section—British courts can claim jurisdiction and rule against authors for things that would be protected First Amendment speech here in the U.S.
The Libel Tourist covers an issue that’s going to become increasingly important in a world where it’s next to impossible to contain the written word within a single country’s borders.
11 September 2007 >>
Last year, for the fifth anniversary of the September 11th attacks, I posted a video entitled Crystal Morning. The video consisted of footage shot on the morning of the attacks and the day after. The audio track was taken from emergency response calls and radio dispatch transmissions.
Yesterday, I received this e-mail from a woman who watched the video shortly after it was released. I thought it was a fitting memorial for today:
Last year, shortly before the fifth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, I was looking for online video to show my then nine-year-old daughter, who has little memory of the event and had been asking me some questions about it. Within the first minute of the film, something made me stop and reverse the video. There, standing behind a guy with a bike and to one side of a guy in a green uniform was the familiar figure of another witness to the events of that day, my husband, Larry.
Larry had spent the 10th in a training seminar on the 17th floor of one of the towers - he was an internet architect in charge of the Technology Lab for AIG on John Street at that time - and was supposed to be there that morning to meet up with co-workers and attend an exposition at Windows on the World. Having just been diagnosed with diabetes a few weeks before, he and some of his co-workers decided to get bagels for breakfast before going upstairs. Doing that probably saved their lives. He was standing in the street when the first plane hit, still standing there, trying to get his boss on the phone for instructions when the second plane hit. That is roughly the point he appears in the video in his blue shirt, with cellphone to his ear, like everyone else that day, unable to get a connection as he watched the buildings burning a few blocks away.
Our daughters have heard him talk about all the things that happened to him that day, but seeing this video finally made it real to them. Later that day, his life was saved again when workers in a condo office in Battery Park City pulled him and his secretary off the street as the first tower fell and they were running for their lives - he had fallen while trying to climb a fence, and been pulled to his feet by another stranger seconds before the collapse, and she was running barefoot, having lost her shoes as they went over the fence.
He and I both knew people that were not as fortunate that day, and it remains important to us to have our children understand the magnitude of what happened, not as an abstract bit of history, but as something that forever altered all our lives. I just wanted to thank you for being a part of that.
Sincerely,
[Name Withheld]
Thank you for taking the time to write and for letting me share this story with the rest of the world.
26 July 2007 >>
The so-called John Doe amendment, which would prevent citizens from being sued for reporting suspicious activity to law enforcement officers and transit personnel, is apparently not dead yet.
After coming under heavy criticism when they first killed the provision, Congressional Democrats have wisely re-evaluated their position and will now allow the measure to come up for a vote. Let’s hope it passes, because if it doesn’t, you could wind up in court simply for voicing concerns about potential terrorist activity.
The John Doe amendment would effectively end that court case and protect people who abide by the recommendation, “if you see something, say something.”
20 July 2007 @ 8:58AM >>
The Metropolitan Transportation Authority here in New York City runs commercials saying, “If you see something, say something,” asking the citizenry to report suspicious behavior that might indicate terrorist activity. But apparently, the Democrats in Congress would rather have you keep your mouth shut. Because of their actions, saying something could end up dragging you into court.
As the plane boarded, she said, no one refused to fly. The public prayers and an Arabic phone call triggered no alarms.
But then a note from a passenger about suspicious movements of the imams got the crew’s attention.
To Pauline, everything seemed normal. Then the captain - in classic laconic pilot-style - announced there had been a “mix-up in our paperwork” and that the flight would be delayed.
In reality, the crew was waiting for the FBI and local police to arrive.
Contrary to press accounts that a single note from a passenger triggered the imams’ removal, Captain John Howard Wood was weighing multiple factors.
* An Arabic speaker was seated near two of the imams in the plane’s tail. That passenger pulled a flight attendant aside and, in a whisper, translated what the men were saying: invoking “bin Laden” and condemning America for “killing Saddam,” according to police reports.
* An imam seated in first class asked for a seat-belt extender - the extra strap that obese people use because the standard belt is too short. According to both an on-duty and a deadheading flight attendant, he looked too thin to need one.
A seat-belt extender can easily be used as a weapon - just wrap one end around your fist, and swing the heavy metal buckle.
* All six imams had boarded together, with the first-class passengers - even though only one of them had a first-class ticket. Three had one-way tickets. Between the six men, only one had checked a bag.
And, Pauline said, they spread out - just like the 9/11 hijackers. Two sat in first class, two in the middle and two back in the economy section, police reports show. Some, according to Rader, took seats not assigned to them.
* Finally, a gate attendant told the captain she was suspicious of the imams, according to police reports.
So the captain made his decision to delay the flight based on many complaints, not one. He also consulted a federal air marshal, a U.S. Airways ground-security coordinator and the airline’s security office in Phoenix. All thought the imams were acting suspiciously, Rader told me.
One more odd thing went unnoticed at the time: The men prayed both at the gate and on the plane. Yet observant Muslims pray only once at sundown, not twice.
“It was almost as if they were intentionally trying to get kicked off the flight,” Pauline said.
And now, the people who reported the suspicious behavior are being sued by the “flying imams” who were removed from the plane.
[W]hat drove me and many others to plot acts of extreme terror within Britain and abroad was a sense that we were fighting for the creation of a revolutionary worldwide Islamic state that would dispense Islamic justice.
If we were interested in justice, you may ask, how did this continuing violence come to be the means of promoting such a (flawed) Utopian goal?
How do Islamic radicals justify such terror in the name of their religion?
There isn’t enough room to outline everything here, but the foundation of extremist reasoning rests upon a model of the world in which you are either a believer or an infidel.
Formal Islamic theology, unlike Christian theology, does not allow for the separation of state and religion: they are considered to be one and the same.
For centuries, the reasoning of Islamic jurists has set down rules of interaction between Dar ul-Islam (the Land of Islam) and Dar ul-Kufr (the Land of Unbelief) to cover almost every matter of trade, peace and war.
But what radicals and extremists do is to take this two steps further. Their first step has been to argue that, since there is no pure Islamic state, the whole world must be Dar ul-Kufr (The Land of Unbelief).
Step two: since Islam must declare war on unbelief, they have declared war upon the whole world.
[...]
For decades, radicals have been exploiting the tensions between Islamic theology and the modern secular state - typically by starting debate with the question: “Are you British or Muslim?”
But the main reason why radicals have managed to increase their following is because most Muslim institutions in Britain just don’t want to talk about theology.
They refuse to broach the difficult and often complex truth that Islam can be interpreted as condoning violence against the unbeliever - and instead repeat the mantra that Islam is peace and hope that all of this debate will go away.
[...]
Because so many in the Muslim community refuse to challenge centuries-old theological arguments, the tensions between Islamic theology and the modern world grow larger every day.
I believe that the issue of terrorism can be easily demystified if Muslims and non-Muslims start openly to discuss the ideas that fuel terrorism.
Crucially, the Muslim community in Britain must slap itself awake from its state of denial and realise there is no shame in admitting the extremism within our families, communities and worldwide co-religionists.
19 June 2007 @ 8:55AM >>
The Washington Timesreports that Pakistan is condemning Britain’s decision to grant knighthood to author Salman Rushdie. You may recall that Rushdie’s 1988 novel The Satanic Verses led to an Iranian fatwa being issued against him that ordered his death.
This leads to the Quote of the Day, courtesy of Mohammed Ijaz ul-Haq, Pakistan’s Religious Affairs Minister:
The West is accusing Muslims of extremism and terrorism. If someone exploded a bomb on his body, he would be right to do so unless the British government apologizes and withdraws the ’sir’ title.
In other words, do what we say—and don’t accuse us of being terrorists!—or we’ll blow you up.
As the Washington Times report indicates, this sentiment has some support:
In the eastern city of Multan, hard-line Muslim students burned effigies of Queen Elizabeth II and Mr. Rushdie. About 100 students carrying banners condemning the author also chanted, “Kill him. Kill him.”
Remember this next time someone tries to tell you that it is our foreign policy that creates terrorism. In reality, the Jihadists want the rest of the world to bow down before their demands.
This war will end in one of two ways: the Jihadists will be defeated, or the world will be ruled by Sharia law. Odds are, we’ll be gone long before this battle for civilization is over.
An Al-Qaeda front group in Europe threatened on Tuesday to launch bloody attacks in France in response to the election of “crusader and Zionist” Nicolas Sarkozy as president.
“As you have chosen the crusader and Zionist Sarkozy as a leader ... we in the Abu Hafs al-Masri Brigades warn you that the coming days will see a bloody jihadist campaign ... in the capital of Sarkozy,” the group’s “Europe division” said in an Internet statement addressed to the French people.
[...]
The group previously claimed responsibility for the July 2005 terror attacks in London, as well those in Madrid in March 2004 and in Istanbul in November 2003.
The only way for Western nations to be safe from this type of terrorism is to let al Qaeda choose our future heads of state.
When Elvis and Dritan Duka, two of the three brothers arrested on terrorism charges in Fort Dix, were kids, they were neighborhood bullies. When they got a little older, they became drug dealers.
How do I know? They grew up in my neighborhood, my brother and his friends used to brawl with them on a fairly regular basis. My brother’s best friend’s mom was friends with their mom. Then they moved to New Jersey and became Jihadis. Of all possible paths for the Duka kids, that one didn’t seem the most likely.
3 April 2007 >>
A Reuters article entitled “Bush success vs. al Qaeda breeds long-term worries” starts out by saying:
Even as al Qaeda tries to rebuild operations in Pakistan, experts including current and former intelligence officials believe the group would have a hard time staging another September 11 because of U.S. success at killing or capturing senior members whose skills and experience have not been replaced.
And to illustrate this seemingly positive news, columnist David Morgan quotes a few experts, such as a guy who claims that al Qaeda is delighted to be on the receiving end of this “success”:
“If you’re looking at it from the cave, or wherever al Qaeda is hiding at the moment, you have to be pretty happy with the way the world is moving,” [former CIA agent Michael Scheuer] said.
Yes, the world rarely looks more sunny than from deep within a cave.
Morgan notes that although “Islamist groups have killed about 1,600 people in 53 attacks overseas since 2001,” the current trend is encouraging: “The number and lethality of the attacks have fallen off since 2004.”
So naturally, Morgan concludes the article on a positive note:
But IntelCenter chief executive Ben Venzke said the chance of an al Qaeda attack on U.S. soil has grown based on the militant network’s increasing references to the American homeland in public messages.
“Our leading thinking is that we are closer now to an attempt at a major attack in the United States than at any point since 9/11,” Venzke said.
There is no denying Venzke is right. If an al Qaeda attack is in the future, then it is closer now than at any point since 9/11. Venzke has stumbled onto something profound: the linear and sequential nature of time.
There are other disturbing implications as well. If you survived 9/11—and this is true no matter who you are—you are more than five years closer to death now than you were then.
24 February 2007 @ 5:50PM >>
Contrary to the widely-held Western belief that terrorism arises when impressionable, impoverished teens look towards a future without hope, Islamic terrorists tend to come from the better-educated, wealthier segments of society. Investor’s Business Dailyreports on a Gallup poll of some 10,000 members of the Muslim world, saying that “[t]he most radical among Muslims — those who support jihad — earn more and stay in school longer.”
IBD cites anecdotal evidence that bears this out:
Bin Laden, the son of a Saudi billionaire, studied engineering.
His deputy Ayman al-Zawahri is an eye surgeon.
Mohamed Atta, the son of a lawyer, earned a master’s degree in urban planning.
9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed graduated from an American college with an engineering degree.
Flight 93 pilot Ziad Jarrah’s father is a Beirut bureaucrat who drove a Mercedes and put his son through prep school.
Some of the London bombers had college degrees. One was a schoolteacher. Another’s father owned a store.
Many of the Saudi hijackers were the best and brightest in their towns. Hani Hanjour, who crashed the plane into the Pentagon, studied English at the University of Arizona. Family members were wealthy merchants from Taif, a resort city in Saudi Arabia.
Marxism made popular the idea that all political turmoil was the result of clashes between socioeconomic classes. Although Marxism ultimately failed, that core tenet became the default thinking of many Westerners.
We perceive the motivations of the Jihadists through a distinctly Western lens. We’re projecting our beliefs onto them, and assuming that their behavior must be motivated by what our teachers taught us was the source of all conflict. Marxism may not have destroyed the West economically, but it could destroy the West psychologically, by preventing us from seeing the threat as it is.
Just because we learned in school that all conflict results from friction between the classes doesn’t make it so. This conflict stems from a profound cultural difference, one that can’t be papered over by feel-good policies like increased foreign aid.
As the court hearing ended, the media moved to the street in front of the courthouse and started interviewing people about what they thought of the trial. With the exception of human rights activists and bloggers, the Egyptian public seemed satisfied with the verdict, if not disappointed it wasn’t longer.
Many people expressed the view that Abdel Kareem should be killed for what he wrote, and each of them shared their preferred way to kill him: stabbing, hanging, and of course, the classic beheading. One actually asked a lawyer if it was legal to now kill him, since this verdict clearly brands him as an apostate, and the Sharia punishment for an apostasy is death. People were talking about killing him in the most casual manner, as if he was no longer a human being to them.
As I said, today’s conflict with the Jihadists arises from a profound cultural difference, not from America’s past foreign policy or failure to hand out even more money around the globe. But for some reason, many of us prefer to point the finger back at ourselves and ignore the real source of the problem. Simply put, finding fault with other cultures just isn’t politically correct.
But in war, refusing to understand the enemy is suicidal.
Terror suspects could be given taxpayer-funded counselling for being angry or having low self-esteem.
Under the proposal, the Federal Government would provide psychological counselling and anger management support to terror suspects and those subject to control orders.
But secrecy surrounds the initiative because the Australian Federal Police has refused to reveal the specifics of its proposal.
Scant details were released through a Federal Government question on notice.
“Some of the options considered include religious education, psychological support and assistance with issues such as anger management, low self-esteem, social identity and family separation,” the AFP said, responding to a question on voluntary education programs for terrorists.
27 January 2007 @ 5:46AM >>
Given the current state of the world, you’d think that this story would get far more attention than it has:
Last January, a Russian man with sunken cheeks and a wispy mustache crossed into Georgia and traveled to Tbilisi by car along a high mountain road. In two plastic bags in his leather jacket, Georgian authorities say, he carried 100 grams of uranium so refined that it could help fuel an atom bomb.
The Russian, Oleg Khinsagov, had come to meet a buyer who he believed would pay him $1 million and deliver the material to a Muslim man from “a serious organization,” the authorities say.
The uranium was a sample, just under four ounces, and the deal a test: If all went smoothly, he boasted, he would sell a far larger cache stored in his apartment back in Vladikavkaz, two to three kilograms of the rare material, four and a half to six and a half pounds, which in expert hands is enough to make a small bomb.
The buyer, it turned out, was a Georgian agent. Alerted to Mr. Khinsagov’s ambitions by spies in South Ossetia, Georgian officials arrested him and confiscated his merchandise. After a secret trial, the smuggler was sentenced to eight and a half years in prison.
The case has alarmed officials because they had thought that new security precautions had tamped down the nuclear black market that developed in the 1990s, after the Soviet Union collapsed.
[...]
What is most worrisome about the most recent case, nuclear experts say, is the material itself: in large enough quantities, it could provide a terrorist with an instant solution to the biggest challenge in making a nuclear weapon, obtaining the fuel.
16 January 2007 @ 11:19AM >>
As president in the late 1970s, Jimmy Carter was a leader of legendary impotence. For the last 444 days of his presidency, Islamic revolutionaries in Iran held Americans hostage in the U.S. Embassy in Tehran. According to the hostages, one of those terrorists was a man named Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
Today, Ahmadinejad is the president of Iran. And Jimmy Carter is an apologist for terrorists. In his new book, which compares the state of Israel to the segregationist apartheid regime that once ruled South Africa, Carter writes:
It is imperative that the general Arab community and all significant Palestinian groups make it clear that they will end the suicide bombings and other acts of terrorism when international laws and the ultimate goals of the Roadmap for Peace are accepted by Israel.
In other words, keep those attacks coming until Israel does what is demanded by “the general Arab community and all significant Palestinian groups.”
I can only imagine that by venturing into the territory of pure wingnuttery, Carter’s book is part of some elaborate scheme to make the foreign policy of his administration seem sensible by comparison.
11 January 2007 >>
There’s something about our psyche which seems to make self-criticism the new national pastime. Naturally, our political leaders know this. They know that when hundreds of newspapers and television stations align in a daily tearing-down of the war effort, the American people will eventually lose their nerve and want to give up. Others know this, too, which is why al Qaeda distributed copies of Black Hawk Down as a means to understand how the media can be used to amplify a relatively minor military failure and drive the United States from the field of battle. If terrorists provide enough negative footage to our media, they know we’ll turn and run. But if we fight too vigorously, that will be held up by our own media as evidence of our inherent evilness.
More >>
28 December 2006 @ 1:46PM >>
From Canada’s National Post:
Dr. Tawfik Hamid doesn’t tell people where he lives. Not the street, not the city, not even the country. It’s safer that way. It’s only the letters of testimony from some of the highest intelligence officers in the Western world that enable him to move freely. This medical doctor, author and activist once was a member of Egypt’s Al-Gama’a al-Islamiyya (Arabic for “the Islamic Group”), a banned terrorist organization. He was trained under Ayman al-Zawahiri, the bearded jihadi who appears in Bin Laden’s videos, telling the world that Islamic violence will stop only once we all become Muslims.
[...]
He is now 45 years old, and has had many years to reflect on why he was willing to die and kill for his religion. “The first thing you have to understand is that it has nothing, absolutely nothing, to do with poverty or lack of education,” he says. “I was from a middle-class family and my parents were not religious. Hardly anyone in the movement at university came from a background that was different from mine.
“I’ve heard this poverty nonsense time and time again from Western apologists for Islam, most of them not Muslim by the way. There are millions of passive supporters of terror who may be poor and needy but most of those who do the killing are wealthy, privileged, educated and free. If it were about poverty, ask yourself why it is middle-class Muslims — and never poor Christians — who become suicide bombers in Palestine.”
[...]
He leans back, takes a deep breath and moves to another area, one that he says is far too seldom discussed: “North Americans are too squeamish about discussing the obvious sexual dynamic behind suicide bombings. If they understood contemporary Islamic society, they would understand the sheer sexual tension of Sunni Muslim men. Look at the figures for suicide bombings and see how few are from the Shiite world. Terrorism and violence yes, but not suicide. The overwhelming majority are from Sunnis. Now within the Shiite world there are what is known as temporary marriages, lasting anywhere from an hour to 95 years. It enables men to release their sexual frustrations.
“Islam condemns extra-marital sex as well as masturbation, which is also taught in the Christian tradition. But Islam also tells of unlimited sexual ecstasy in paradise with beautiful virgins for the martyr who gives his life for the faith. Don’t for a moment underestimate this blinding passion or its influence on those who accept fundamentalism.”
A pause. “I know. I was one who accepted it.”
[...]
“The sexual aspect is, of course, just one part of this. But I can tell you what it is not about. Not about Israel, not about Iraq, not about Afghanistan. They are mere excuses. Algerian Muslim fundamentalists murdered 150,000 other Algerian Muslims, sometimes slitting the throats of children in front of their parents. Are you seriously telling me that this was because of Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians or American foreign policy?”
He’s exasperated now, visibly angry at what he sees as a willful Western foolishness. “Stop asking what you have done wrong. Stop it! They’re slaughtering you like sheep and you still look within. You criticize your history, your institutions, your churches. Why can’t you realize that it has nothing to do with what you have done but with what they want.”
Australia: Australia’s foremost Muslim cleric triggers an uproar when he likens women who don’t wear an Islamic headscarf to “uncovered meat” and blames them for attracting sexual predators.
Afghanistan: The kidnappers of Italian photojournalist Gabriele Torsello threaten to murder him unless Abdul Rahman, an Afghan Christian convert, is returned to Afghanistan and handed over to an Islamic court.
Iran: The president of Iran calls Israel “a group of terrorists” and threatens to harm any country that supports the Jewish state. “This is an ultimatum,” warns Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who has called for the elmination of Israel and the United States.
Thailand: Islamist terrorists bomb a column of Buddhist monks as they collect offerings of food in Narathiwat, a city in southern Thailand. One person is killed; 12 are injured.
France: “We are in a state of civil war, orchestrated by radical Islamists,” says police union leader Michel Thoomis. “This is not a question of urban violence any more. It is an intifadah, with stones and firebombs.”
Britain: In a “true Islamic state,” sexually active homosexuals would be executed, says Arshad Misbahi, an imam in Manchester’s Central Mosque.
There are no insurgents in Kurdistan. Nor are there any kidnappings. [...] Iraqi Kurdistan is optimistic, full of hope, infused top to bottom with a go-go, build-build attitude.
Who would have thought that a glimmer of hope for peaceful coexistence with our Muslim brothers could be found in—of all places—Iraq?
