A Jew in Baghdad

Jonathan D. Zagdanski, 1st Lieutenant U.S. Army, JewishTimes, Sept. 11, 2003 

I recently returned from Baghdad, Iraq, where I served as an Infantry Platoon Leader of 26 men during nearly 6 months of combat operations. We were part of the 3rd Infantry Division, the unit that led the invasion into Iraq and subsequently captured Baghdad. Our political and military leaders told us before the invasion that we were key players in the War on Terrorism.  However, as a Jew and an American having fought the war, I came to realize that we are not just fighting terrorism. Rather, we are engaged in a war against something much more fundamental.

Also see: To be a Jew in Baghdad, By Orly Halperin: In 2004 Baghdad's last Jews struggle to survive.  Recall the gruesome video footage, March, 2004 when four bodyguards of the US-based Blackwater Security Consulting Company were attacked while driving through Fallujah -- two of the men who were mutilated, dragged through the streets, then hung from the town's bridge and burned while crowds cheered.

Rumors filtered back to Baghdad that the security guards had dual citizenship: American and Israeli. One source with contacts in Fallujah says that this was partially true. Israeli passports were found on two of the security professionals, he says, those whose bodies were mutilated and hung. The Israelis, he said, had their appendages cut off and their bodies cut up while they were still alive. Then fuel was poured over them and they were lit ablaze.

Whether the two men were Israeli or not, the underlying belief held by the average Iraqi is clear - there is no place for Jews or Israelis in Iraq.

Shortly after we breached the city limits of Baghdad on that fateful day of April 9th, it was obvious that the Iraqi Army was not going to fight us in the city. The U.S. Military was caught by surprise at the lack of opposition and was rather unprepared to transition to nation building so rapidly. Thus, Military commanders hastily assigned each Platoon Leader, including myself, a section of Baghdad to oversee. The neighborhood under my control was roughly 3 square miles in northwest Baghdad with approximately three thousand Iraqi citizens, most of who were Shia Muslims.

See also, The Ungovernable Shiites, By Steven Vincent, April 08, 2004, " . . . examining their teachings and iconography . . .  severed heads, amputated hands, Arabic letters dripping blood — and that's what found in mosques."

My initial  responsibilities was to find heavy  conventional weapons and  ammunitions, arrest looters, identify  destroyed power lines, and restore  order in the neighborhood by  conducting day and night street  patrols. This was a very difficult task but it gave me the opportunity to interact with many Iraqis during these unstable times.

While patrolling the streets of Baghdad, I often got involved in political conversations with secular, educated, and “moderate” Iraqis about the war against Iraq, Israel, the Jews and America. To my surprise, most of them held wildly irrational beliefs about the world.  For example, most of them would swear that Ariel Sharon pressured a reluctant President Bush to go to war against Iraq. Moreover, that the CIA put Saddam Hussein, a CIA agent, in power to allow U.S. forces to take Iraqi oil and impoverish Iraq.  Finally, they were convinced that the CIA is an organization controlled by the Mossad and that powerful Zionists dominate Washington D.C.!  In fact, most Arabs in the world believe these absurdities. These beliefs are the product of years of intense brainwashing by their education system, mass media, and political and religious leaders. These beliefs turn educated, intelligent Arab family men into hijackers that slam passenger planes into buildings and homicide bombers that murder as many Jews as possible on Israeli buses.

PAC Comment:  Unfortunately, these insane beliefs are also held right here among U.S. Moslems.  But it goes beyond just holding insane beliefs.  We are infiltrated by radical Islamist terrorists and terrorist sponsors who intend to melt into Western societies for the long fight ahead -- the jihad.

• CAIR, the "mainstream" Muslim organization, established by Hamas leader, supported financially by the UAE stands “on the wrong side in the war on terrorism.”  It's yet another player in the international terror network.

   

   

  • The executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), Nihad Awad, participated in a three-day summit of U.S.-based Hamas members and supporters in 1993, FBI Special Agent Laura Burns testified in a Dallas courtroom August 2, 2007.  CAIR and five of its officials are unindicted co-conspirators in the terror support trial of the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development.  (Investor's Business Daily weighs in.)  Holy Land Trial Ends in Mistrial.

   

  • CAIR throws its support behind Dr. Esam Omeish, a leader of Muslim Brotherhood front group, who resigned from the Virginia Commission on Immigration after being exposed.

   

  • Federal prosecutors: CAIR is part of a covert Muslim Brotherhood effort in the U.S while the  Muslim American Society (MAS) was "founded as the overt arm of the Muslim Brotherhood in the United States."

   

  • CAIR's uses $50 million in Saudi funding to promote the ideas advanced by those such as Dr. Ahmad Al-Akhras who is also Vice Chair of CAIR-National.

   

  • CAIR’s usual response any time authorities detain or question Muslims or Arab nationals in the US who are suspected of potential terrorism planning came about when two young Saudi nationals, Mana Saleh Almanajam, 23, and Shaker Mohsen Alsidran, 20, both of Tampa, boarded a Florida high school bus with local students one morning.

   

  • April 2004: A member of CAIR's national staff, Randall Todd "Ismail" Royer, pleads guilty for conspiring to train on American soil for a "violent jihad."  Another CAIR figure, Bassem Khafagi, arrested in 2003 while serving as the group's director of community relations.

  • Radical Islamic front group CAIR is doing a full court press to push through the construction of a huge mosque in the Orland Park suburb of Chicago—and anyone who protests is being labeled a “racist” and a “bigot, even though,  the nearby Bridgeview mosque openly supports and raises money for Hamas and Islamic Jihad.

  • February 2006: Nihad Awad, the Executive Director of the national CAIR headquarters goes to bat for the release of convicted terrorist Sami Al-Arian .  Also speaking: Eric Erfan Vickers, the former Executive Director of the American Muslim Council (AMC). Vickers resigned from his position at AMC, after he was exposed for calling the Space Shuttle Columbia disaster “an act of divine retribution against Israel.”

  • CAIR's strategy of falsely claiming "persecution" (2005 Report,  2004 Report) and silencing the press.  When disingenuous CAIR officials like Ibrahim Hooper are quoted directly, their own defensive, evasive words make them look worse than any “basher” ever could.  Unfortunate truth: in 2005, of the 1,314 verified offenses motivated by religious bias, 69% were anti-Jewish, while 11% were anti-Islamic

  • Lead the witch-hunt against  Daniel Pipes nomination to The U.S. Institute of Peace

  • Web of connections among the leadership of CAIR, the Islamic Association of Palestine, and Hamas

• The Arab Lobby Network

• Legal jihad - manipulating democratic court systems to abolish public discourse critical of Islam, and establish principles of Sharia, Islamic law. A long list of targets include Mark Steyn, Dr. Rachel Ehrenfeld, Orianna Fallaci.  Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams: sharia should become a part of "plural jurisdiction" in Britain!!

• September 2007, Chicago: The annual meeting of  the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA).  One seminar: How to properly beat a woman.  How its membership thinks.  ISNA (along with CAIR - see above)  named as an unindicted co-conspirator in the terror support trial of the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development.

• Muslim community closes ranks against their own moderates -- right here in the U.S. though?

• Sheik al Sahlani, leader of a large New York mosque, joins the new Iranian president (and a US-based Saudi political science prof.) in disputing the Holocaust, saying it “has been exaggerated.”  “The numbers, the reasons, we have to study more.”

• The 6 imams complaints on being removed from U.S. Airways flt 300 are out of line.  Here's hoping that the those Muslim groups disingenuously expressing outrage will be ignored. The imams legal representation is CAIR.   Keith Ellison, D-Minn., the first Muslim member of Congress immediately steps in to pressure US Airways and the local airport to change security policies.  Ellison's links to a radical Islamic school of thought that requires loyalty to the Quran over the U.S. Constitution.

• Bridges TV, American-Islamic TV channel -- October, 2006 -- religious programming that praises martyrdom, tells Muslims they have a duty increase their numbers to 50% of the population from 2%,  that Islamic law be implemented in American courts.

• July 28, 2005: Steven Emerson -- This morning a group of American Islamic leaders held a press conference to announce a fatwa, or Islamic religious ruling, against “terrorism and extremism.” An organization called the Fiqh Council of North America (FCNA) issued the fatwa, and the Council on American - Islamic Relations (CAIR) organized the press conference, stating that several major U.S. Muslim groups endorsed the fatwa. In fact, the fatwa is bogus.  Two of the signers: Fawaz Damra (Imam of Ohio’s largest mosque deported Jan '07), Muzammil Siddiqi.  Judea Pearl: AN AMERICAN FATWA AGAINST TERRORISM FALLS SHORT. CAIR smears Emerson.

• Experts have been surprised to discover that the typical recruit to Al Qaeda is Western educated and has a wealthy, professional background.  Dr Marc Sageman, a forensic psychiatrist who conducted the study: “The common stereotype is that terrorism is a product of poor, desperate, naive, single young men from Third World countries, vulnerable to brainwashing and recruitment into terror.  However, his study showed that three-quarters of the Al Qaeda members were from upper middle-class homes and many were married with children; 60 were college educated, often in Europe or the United States.

• Though the Saudi-funded Muslim Students’ Association promotes itself as a benevolent, non-political entity devoted to the simple virtue of celebrating Islam and providing college students a healthy venue to develop their faith and engage in philanthropy,  there is overwhelming evidence that it is an overtly political organization seeking to create a single Muslim voice on U.S. campuses— espousing Wahhabism, anti-Americanism, and anti-Semitism,  expressing solidarity with militant Islamist ideologies, sometimes with criminal results.  The MSA is is a Pro-Terror Organization.

  • MSA sponsors the Islamic supremacist group Al-Muhajiroun at Queensborough Community College: “We reject the U.N., reject America, reject all law and order. Don’t lobby Congress or protest because we don’t recognize Congress! The only relationship you should have with America is to topple it!” Its convention to celebrate the third anniversary of the September 11 attacks titled: “The Choice is in Your Hands: Either You’re with the Muslims or with the Infidels.”  A strident NY based offshoot calls itself The Islamic Thinkers Society.

  • Following the deaths of more than 350 people - at least half of them children - who are so far known to have died in Beslan, Russia,  Omar Bakri Mohammed, al-Muhajiroun's spiritual leader says that holding women and children hostage would be a reasonable course of action for a Muslim who has suffered under British rule.

  • Novermber 2004: Northeastern Illinois University branch of MSA hosts an event  paying tribute to the “spiritual leader” of Hamas, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin—personally responsible for the murders of hundreds of innocent men, women, and children who was killed by Israel in March. CANCELLED.

  • Former president of the Muslim Students' Association at Montgomery College and elementary school teacher, Ali Asad Chandia is accused of providing material support to Lashkar-e-Taiba, a U.S.-designated terrorist group, and serving as the personal assistant to Ali al-Timimi, the convicted spiritual leader of another terrorist group dubbed the “Virginia Jihad network” by federal prosecutors.

• Dr. Ahmad Dewidar, imam of the Islamic Society of Mid-Manhattan and lecturer at Manhattan University: “The Zionist community numbers only 3 million, but they control the government, the politics, the economy, and the media in the U.S.”

• A Fifth Column in the Prisons?: Imam Umar Abdul-Jalil, head of Islamic chaplains in the New York City Department of Correction, one of NYC's most prominent Islamic leaders:  the “greatest terrorists in the world occupy the White House,” Jews control the media, and Muslims are being tortured in Manhattan jails.  Report: Islamists in U.S. Prisons Pose Threat - Jerry Seper (Washington Times) Islamic extremists in U.S. prisons have taken advantage of a lack of religious monitoring to embrace violent interpretations of the Koran, posing a threat to national security, a study conducted for the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee said Tuesday.

• Saudis control most of the Muslim organizations in the U.S -- 80% of the mortgages on mosques in the U.S. are paid for by the Wahhabist Saudis.    Saudi Hate Ideology Fills US Mosques.  A network of Saudi front groups -- embedded deep within our system of higher education, including many of our most prestigious universities -- is using vast infusions of money to turn the American educational system against US support for Israel and in favor of the Saudi vision of a global Muslim state in which not only Jews, but Christians and all infidels will have subordinate status to the followers of the “true faith.” [See this JTA investigation.]  At the same time they look to affect American policy in the Middle East and public opinion in the US in a way to aid their Wahhabist goals and undermine America’s efforts to prosecute the War On Terror.   Lee Kaplan, FrontPageMagazine.com, April 5, 2004.  The U.S. government should stop giving "religious visas" to foreign Muslim preachers from radical Muslim countries.  Rachel Ehrenfeld on the widespread Saudi investments in the United States.

• October 18, 2007: U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom recommends shutting down the Saudi funded Islamic Saudi Academy, a private school serving nearly 1,000 students in grades K-12 at two campuses in northern Virginia’s Fairfax County concerned that the school is fostering radical Islam.

• August 5, 2004: Two leaders of Albany, New York mosque arrested in a sting operation (conducted after finding information in a vacated terrorist training camp in Iraq) for helping a government agent they believed was a terrorist interested in purchasing a shoulder-launched missile

• June 2, 2004 - federal agents raid the Northern Virginia offices of WAMY - the World Assembly of Muslim Youth: see this excerpt from a songbook from WAMY’s US summer camp for Muslim kids, a cheery little campfire tune for budding jihadis.

• Time Magazine profiles a major Chicago Mosque, the Mosque Foundation which is under a large-scale terror Investigation.  See "Hard-liners Won Battle For Bridgeview Mosque" the Chicago Tribune Story that lays out the connections between: Sheik Jamal, Sami Al-Arian, Saudi Arabia (North American Islamic Trust), the Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas, suicide bombing and money.  The U.S. branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, the Muslim American Society, behind Minnesota airport taxi controversy.

• August 11, 2004: Tariq Isa, 55, a Palestinian-American, the third leader of the Mosque of the Martyr Izzedine Al-Qassam on West 63rd Street on Chicago’s South Side arrested on drug peddling charges -- with distributing almost 1.73 million tablets of pseudoephedrine, a chemical essential to manufacturing the illegal stimulant methamphetamine -- likely in order to fund terrorism.  See Chicago Tribune story too.  September 4, 2005 Update: Tariq Isa pleads guilty

• Asra Q. Nomani, a Muslim in West Virginia, describes the takeover of her mosque by radical Islamists—and the total lack of concern from “mainstream” Islamic groups like ISNA and CAIR.

• Islamic Society of Boston and their connections to extremists. January 2007 Update. May 2007 Update.

• July 29, 2005: The new imam of the Dar al-Hijrah mosque in Falls Church Virginia rejects any call to reform Islam. And he’s a fan of Hamas.

• Gilbert T. Sewell of the American Textbook Council, a non-profit that reviews history textbooks, recently submitted a report that reviewed the teaching of Islam in most of our children’s history textbooks. He discovered that sections concerning Islam in books distributed by the main U.S. publishers/providers have been sanitized. In general, current or past events about Islam are not reported accurately for the sake of “political correctness.”

• UC Berkeley Lecturer Hatem Bazian calls for an intifada in the United States.  [More on the scary transformation of Berkeley Ca., from the birthplace of the Free Speech movement to an epicenter of hatred, anti-Semitism, and jihad ideology.

• February 2006: Ilan Halimi,  23-year-old French Jew, kidnapped, tortured by a Muslim gang for 24 days found by a passerby stumbling in a field south of Paris. Handcuffed, naked, with four-fifths of his body covered with bruises, stab wounds and serious burns, Ilan died in the ambulance on the way to the hospital.  January 2004, a Saudi national, Muhammad Ali Al-Ayed, pleaded guilty to killing, and nearly decapitating, his Jewish friend.  They met while studying at Houston Community College.

• Andrew C. McCarthy, May 13, 2004, NRO: As an assistant U.S. attorney, time and time again I heard it over the last decade, from ordinary Muslims we reached out to for help.  "I'd like to help the government," they would say, "but I can't." Repeatedly they'd tell us that the militant factions dominated their communities.  This is no small matter.   [T]he more insular and dominated communities become, the more they are likely to breed the attitudes and pathologies that lead to terrorist plots and suicide bombings.

• The Muslim Student Union (MSU) of University of California-Irvine asks graduating Muslim students to to show their support for terrorism, murder and Islamist tyranny by wearing green sashes bearing the word “shahada,” the Arabic word for "martyrdom.” The Muslim world refers to a suicide bomber who kills innocent civilians in Israel as a “shahid.” Pilots and their cohorts who fly airplanes into skyscrapers are also celebrated for their “martyrdom.”  Hate Fest May 15-18, 2006.

• A group preparing to build the largest mosque in the Northeast, has long-standing ties to a suicide-bomber-advocate Egyptian cleric and to American Muslim Council leader Abdurahman Alamoudi sentenced to 23 years in prison for terrorist financing.  Alamoudi, a pillar of the U.S. Muslim community, whose influence once reached the highest levels of the U.S. government, pleaded guilty to illegally moving cash from Libya and admitted that he was involved in an elaborate Libyan plot to assassinate Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah.  Arnaud de Borchgrave: Alamoudi, a U.S. citizen, the most respected member of the Muslim community in Washington, D.C., with easy access to the White House and Congress in the 1990s, is but the tip of the proverbial iceberg.

• Salam Al-Marayati, executive director of the Muslim Public Affairs Council tells radio station KCRW, within hours of the September 11 mass murder: “If we’re going to look at suspects we should look to the groups that benefit the most from these kinds of incidents, and I think we should put the state of Israel on the suspect list because I think this diverts attention from what’s happening in the Palestinian territories so that they can go on with their aggression and occupation and apartheid policies.”  Former head of the Islamic Center in Washington DC, Muhammad Al-Asi, accuses the US government of carrying out the September 11 attacks.

• July 2004: The largest U.S. Muslim charity, The Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development, and seven of its officers (including Ghassan Elashi, founder of Texas CAIR chapter -- convicted April 2005, sentenced October 2006) named in a 42-count federal indictment charging conspiracy, tax evasion, money laundering, and providing help to a terrorist organization. The foundation provided more than $12.4 million to individuals and organizations linked to Hamas.  The Saudi government, our supposed ally, has in reality been the Holy Land Foundation's partner in crime.

  • Beyond "just" financing terrorism under the guise of charity,  Hamas supporters in Louisiana, Illinois, and Virginia involved in a fifteen-year conspiracy in an OPERATIONAL ROLE for preparation for actual terrorist attacks.

  • December 2004:  The Quranic Literacy Institute of suburban Oak Lawn, IL, Texas-based Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development, the Islamic Association for Palestine and alleged Hamas fund-raiser Mohammed Salah ordered to pay $156 million to the parents of an American teenager, David Boim, killed by terrorists outside Jerusalem.

• Fourteen miles from the U.S. Capitol in  Springfield, Virginia, a basement-run Muslim "think-tank" -- UASR -- with alleged ties to Hamas and al Qaeda is a crucial link in the planning of any future terrorist attacks against the United States.

• Fall 2004:  Dearborn, Michigan and North Texas Muslims honor Iranian leader Ayatollah Khomeini as a great Islamic visionary."  Khomeini: “Those who know nothing of Islam pretend that Islam counsels against war. Those [who say this] are witless. Islam says: Kill all the unbelievers just as they would kill you all! Does this mean that Muslims should sit back until they are devoured by [the unbelievers]? Islam says: Kill them, put them to the sword and scatter [their armies]...."  The list of speakers at the Irving event included some of North Texas’ best-known mainstream Islamic figures. Dearborn Muslims support for Hizballah.

• The American Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC) of Michigan, headed by “former” Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) terrorist, Imad Hamad.  ADC is one of the most anti-Israel, anti-Semitic organizations in America, today. And one of the most anti-American. While we are fighting terrorists within and abroad, the Saudi-funded ADC is the modern-day equivalent of the German-American Bund.

• The American, Adam Yahiye Gadahn, who was named as one of seven Al Qaeda monsters sought by the FBI was recruited to radical Islam and attended the Islamic Society of Orange County— was taught Islam by Muzammil Siddiqi, a radical Wahhabist, who is on record threatening the United States and supporting terrorist groups.  A California woman, Saraah Olson, reveals to ABC News that she unknowingly married Muslim extremist, Hisham Diab, who helped set up one of the first al Qaeda sleeper cells out of their Orange County apartment complex.  She watched as her then-husband and his group transformed local teen Adam Gadahn into an America-hating fanatic.

• Tariq Ramadan, the charismatic Islamist has achieved star status in French-speaking Europe.  He sees the West in decline and advocates that Islam enter and overcome the spiritual void left by Judaism and Christianity, no longer enduring modernity, but Islamicizing it.  He is adept at the taqiyya, or the art of dissimulation, a typical Islamic practice on enemy soil.   Until his visa was revoked -- despite the efforts of the coalition to defend Ramadan -- Ramadan was planning to teach at University of Notre Dame in Indiana.  (Daniel Pipes has more on Ramadan.)  Another such character: Arab European League leader Abou Jahjah, a raving Jew-hater and Islamic supremacist, eloquent, charismatic and Hollywood handsome.

• The Mayor of London, Ken Livingstone, welcomed to City Hall the Qatari divine Dr Yusuf al-Qaradawi, according to the MCB “an Islamic scholar held in great respect throughout the Islamic world”.  Basing his teaching on Islam’s holiest texts, Dr al-Qaradawi has urged his fellow Muslims to beat their wives; to use child suicide bombers to kill female and infant civilians; to destroy Israel and to murder Jews, homosexuals and British servicemen; and to colonise, desecrate and usurp Christian Rome.  Al-Qaradawi's role helping incite  the "Cartoon Intifada" -- how did the Jews get dragged into that one?  For more on Qaradawi see: The Triumph of the East.  And his links to Caribou Coffee.  Livingston on al-Qaradawi  following the 7/7/05 London bombings. Hear Yusuf al-Qaradawi for yourself.

• The Mufti of Australia Calls for Jihad -- "Don't be surprised if one day you hear the Muezzin calling for prayer and saying 'Allahu Akbar' (God is great) from the top of the White House. Sept. 11 is God's work against oppressors."

• Saudi-funded, al-Qaeda-linked  -- the Budapest Islamic community's Dar-Assalam mosque "spiritual leader" arrested planning to bomb the city's Jewish museum.

• Broadcaster Aminul Hoque spent three months gauging the mood of young Muslims on the streets of Britain: "Most worryingly, my research opened up my eyes to the fact that people whom I know very well - friends, family, colleagues - possess opinions that are enough to send shivers down the spines of most people. These are ordinary people who have well-paid jobs, are educated and seem very pleasant in conversation."  London Times, July 12, 2004: Hundreds of young Britons are believed to have attended Afghan training camps, MI5, the British Security Service, will deploy agents around Britain in cities where it is feared that extremists are radicalizing Muslim youth fearing that the main terrorist danger comes not from abroad but from within the UK. [See An American in London by Carol Gould -- a grim assessment of anti Americanism and anti Semitism -- not from Britain's Muslims either.]

• Former imam of the Finsbury Park Mosque in north London, Abu Hamza al-Masri arrested May, 2004 after US authorities charged him with trying to establish a terrorist training camp in the western state of Oregon, involvement in hostage-taking in Yemen and funding terrorism training in Afghanistan -- October, 2004 charged by British police  with encouraging followers to murder Jews and other non-Muslims. The trial of this "Hate Filled Bigot".

• The Netherlands, November 2, 2004, Theo van Gogh brutally murdered: he angered Muslims with a film -- the movie "Submission," made with Somali-born Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a member of the Dutch parliament -- that said Islam encouraged violence against women. A man with Dutch and Moroccan nationality was arrested for the killing, and suspected of Islamic extremist motives.  De Telegraaf newspaper:  lenient immigration policies had turned an open society into a “resentful and intolerant” one.  Afraid of being called racist, we have been so tolerant with regard to these religious fascists that they have been allowed to merrily undermine the roots of our freedom.”   Muslims are a majority among children under 14 in the Netherlands' four largest cities.

• The elephant in the room that politicians would like to ignore: Islamist extremists in democratic countries who become citizens of European countries, hold EU passports, and are protected by laws that guarantee freedom of speech and assembly.  A growing group of Europeans who found a home in Islam and then veered into extremism is raising concerns among antiterrorism officials that the new recruits could provide foreign-born Islamic militants with invisibility and cover, by escaping the scrutiny often reserved for young men of Arab descent. Islam is Europe's fastest-growing religion, and many experts believe that the number of converts has grown since Sept. 11, 2001. A report by France's domestic intelligence agency, published by Le Figaro, estimated last year that there were 30,000 to 50,000 converts in France. French scholar Antoine Sfeir said some converts saw the current wave of Islamic terrorism as "a kind of combat against the rich, powerful, by the poor men of the planet."  [Courtesy -- Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations by the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, Daily Alert, July 20, 2004]

• Europe's Threat to the West, Daniel Pipes, New York Sun, May 18, 2004:  Islamist terrorists are not dumb; they note this special attention and now recruit intensively from citizens of the 27 countries – mostly European – who, thanks to the Visa Waiver Program, can enter America for 90 days without a visa.

• Not reassuring: the government may have let him go, but there's good reason that Brandon Mayfield of Beaverton, Ore. was arrested in connection with the Madrid March 1, 2004 bombings.

• Remember "unfairly-persecuted" software engineer Maher “Mike” Hawash of the Portland 7?  Well, he's sentenced to seven years in prison.

• Relatives of marine, Cpl. Wassef Ali Hassoun charged with desertion attempting to counter fundamentalist Sunni Muslim criticism accusing Hassoun’s family of being “American agents and collaborators.” issued a statement saying he was forced to go to the United States and join the Marines.

And the worst of it is that  multiculturalists are abetting the problem by intimidating and squashing those who speak up.

We are not at war against Terrorism; we are at war against an ideology. I consider this ideology to be the product of a dangerous mental disease. It is a disease that has infected millions of Arabs into believing that by destroying the enemy – the Jew, the State of Israel and the “Great Satan” America – past Arab pride and glory would be restored. This mental illness is  slowly but deliberately plunging the  world into World War III.

In the 30’s, a similar disease threw the world into World War II. It was a disease that infected millions of Germans into believing that by obliterating the Jews and conquering non-Arian nations, Germany would attain unsurpassed glory and freedom. Fortunately, America and its allies mustered all their efforts, resources and determination to crush and eradicate the German disease.

Unlike the Germans during WWII, the Arab world is fighting a multidimensional war against America and Israel. First, Arab nations are using the United Nations as a powerful tool to discredit Israel and the United States. Second, oil producing Arab nations use oil as a means to pressure the United States and Europe to adopt biased foreign policies against Israel. In addition, oil is used to deter many nations from trading with Israel. Third, Arab governments ensure that Arab children are fed anti-Semitic and anti-American material in their schools thereby assuring a constant supply of future terrorists. Fourth, Arab public relation spreads lies and twisted facts to Western media thereby fueling anti-Semitic and anti-Israeli sentiment in the West.  Finally, Either, Arab nations  promote, finance or condone  terrorist activity and organizations. 

Unfortunately, most of us in America and Israel believe that we are at war against terrorism. We therefore concentrate all our attention and effort against terrorism only. To do so is to wear blinders and not grasp the big picture. To worsen matters, we commit troops and equipment to fight the enemy precisely where he wants to fight - that is in his backyard using guerrilla tactics. We fail to understand that terrorism is only one of the many weapons used by our enemies. Every American and every Jew is under attack in some shape or form. It does not take a gun or a bomb to be under attack. A negative and biased article about Israel in the New York Times is a bomb directed against the Jewish community. We must fight back! Every one of us has the ability and the weaponry to contribute to the war effort. One does not need to join the U.S. Army and patrol downtown Baghdad in 120-degree weather. We can fight with our computers, our telephone, our money, our time, and our voice.  Inaction is not an alternative. Should we decide not to fight, our enemies will bring the battle to us, as they have done on September 11th and as they do daily in Israel. We have paid too often with our blood the price of passiveness and nonresistance. 

It is time to stand up, fight and shout “NEVER AGAIN!”  May God help us.

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Sudden Jihad Syndrome

INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY, February 16, 2007

Terror: It looks like the Muslim teen who opened fire on shoppers in a Salt Lake City mall is yet another case of "sudden jihad syndrome," a condition in which normal-appearing American Muslims abruptly turn violent.

Taken together, this and other cases add up to an invisible jihad inside America. But don't tell that to the FBI. The politically correct bureau does everything it can to avoid recognizing the obvious Islamic factor in these heinous crimes.

Sulejman Talovic, an 18-year-old Bosnian Muslim immigrant, was loaded with enough ammo to "inexplicably" kill dozens of victims — and he would have, if an alert off-duty cop hadn't returned fire and stopped him. Talovic still managed to methodically murder five and wound four others with a shotgun.

Witnesses say it was an act of coldblooded violence aimed at random victims — something otherwise known as terrorism. According to the Salt Lake Tribune, Talovic attended Friday prayers at a mosque about a block from the mall.

Yet the FBI saw no religious motive, and quickly ruled out terrorism. Nor could it find anything to indicate terrorism in several other Muslim-tied cases since 9/11, including:

• A 30-year-old Muslim man, Naveed Afzal Haq, who went on a shooting rampage at a Jewish community center in Seattle, announcing "I'm a Muslim-American; I'm angry at Israel."

• An Egyptian national, Hesham Mohamed Hadayet, who shot two and wounded three at an Israeli airline ticket counter at LAX.

• A bearded 21-year-old student, Joel Hinrichs, who blew himself up with a backpack filled with TATP (the explosive of choice in the Mideast) outside a packed Oklahoma University football stadium not long after he started attending the local mosque.

• A 23-year-old student, Mohammed Ali Alayed, who slashed the throat of his Jewish friend in Houston after apparently undergoing a religious awakening (he went to a local mosque afterward).

• The D.C. snipers — John Muhammad and Lee Malvo, both black Muslim converts — who picked off 13 people in the suburbs around the Beltway as part of what Muhammad described as a "prolonged terror campaign against America" around the first anniversary of 9/11, which he had praised.

• Omeed Aziz Popal of Fremont, Calif., who police said hit and killed a bicyclist there then took his SUV on a hit-and-run spree in San Francisco, mowing down pedestrians at crosswalks and on sidewalks before police caught up with him, whereupon the Muslim called himself a "terrorist."

• A 22-year-old Muslim, Ismail Yassin Mohamed, who stole a car in Minneapolis and rammed it into other cars before stealing a van and doing the same, injuring drivers and pedestrians, while repeatedly yelling, "Die, die, die, kill, kill, kill" — all, he said, on orders from "Allah."

• A 22-year-old Iranian honors student, Mohammed Reza Taheri-azar, who deliberately rammed his SUV into a crowd at the University of North Carolina to "punish the government of the United States" for invading Iraq and other Muslim nations.

Described by other students as "kind and gentle," Taheri-azar was a student council president and a member of the National Honor Society in high school. He told the judge he was "thankful you're here to learn more about the will of Allah."

He wrote a letter to a TV station citing Quranic verses justifying his attacks and told a detective that Muslims "all over the world are being killed, and now it is the people in the United States' turn to be killed."

This is not terrorism, the FBI said. Just some nutty kid. In all these cases, the feds' first reaction was to shrug. They said the perps were lone individuals who just went ballistic after having a bad day, as if anyone could have done such crimes.

But they weren't just anyone. They were all young Muslim men. Of course, the FBI can't treat all law-abiding young Muslim men as potential killers. But neither should the agency ignore this trend.

We're likely to see more of these seemingly random domestic attacks. They may seem isolated, but all have radical Islam at their nexus. They're not "senseless" or "utterly inexplicable" or "impossible to rationalize," as the media intone. They are purposeful. These men act as conscripts called up for a mission, sick as it is.

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Ohio Cleric Arrested; Terror Link Is Cited, New York Times, January 14, 2004, By ERIC LICHTBLAU

WASHINGTON, Jan. 13 — A leading Islamic cleric who runs Ohio's largest mosque was arrested Tuesday on charges that he concealed his ties to terrorist causes when applying for citizenship to the United States a decade ago.

The cleric, Fawaz Mohammed Damra, has been an outspoken figure who represented Muslims in Cleveland in interfaith gatherings after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, but was also forced to apologize for anti-Semitic and incendiary statements he made years earlier.

In an indictment unsealed Tuesday, Mr. Damrah, who officials said is a Palestinian by birth, is accused of lying to immigration officials about his association with terrorist groups when he applied for American citizenship in 1993. He also denied engaging in religious persecution "when in fact he had previously incited and/or assisted others, including terrorist organizations, that advocated the persecution of Jews and others by means of violent terrorist attacks," the indictment said.

Mr. Damrah pleaded not guilty in federal court in Cleveland and was released on bond. Officials declined to discuss the evidence in any detail. He faces up to five years in prison and possible deportation if convicted.

The F.B.I. questioned Mr. Damrah, 41, after the 1993 World Trade Center bombing about his association with a Brooklyn mosque where several of the plotters gathered, and he has also associated with prominent Islamic figures like Sami Al-Arian, the former Florida professor who was indicted last year [his brother-in-law was in on it too] on charges of supporting terrorism [that he used an Islamic charity and academic think tank at the University of South Florida as fund-raising covers for Palestinian Islamic Jihad.]

Update 9/16/04: Prelude to terror: How Damra misled FBI -- Speaking in English, he often preached interfaith brotherhood, befriending leaders of Cleveland's large and powerful Jewish community. He taught scores of college students about the beauty and peace of Islam, and he settled into a tidy suburban development in Strongsville where he and his wife are raising three daughters.

Speaking in Arabic, Damra once preached to those who meant harm to the United States and later, while in Cleveland, raised money for groups that recruited and paid for suicide bombers to kill Israelis.

Update 6/9/04: Federal judge has rules that a terrorist group’s manifesto and other items seized by the FBI in a search of an Islamic cleric’s home were taken in an illegal search and cannot be used at his trial.

Update 3/18/05: Federal prosecutors are clear to begin deportation proceedings against the leader of Ohio’s largest mosque after an appeals court upheld his conviction.

Update January 2007:  Damra deported

Update September 2007:  New imam of the Cleveland Islamic Center, Ahmed Alzaree -- Jew hater.

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Menaced by polysemites

MARK STEYN, Jerusalem Post, Nov. 26, 2003

The other day, a producer called me up and asked if I wanted to take part in a discussion about an American cartoon strip - to wit, B.C. by Johnny Hart, which has been running in a gazillion newspapers around the world for as long as I can remember.

I usually check in with it a couple of times a decade while waiting at the gate for a delayed flight, and am happy to find it refreshingly unchanged. It's set in a modified caveman era, which is to say that, like The Flintstones, its characters enjoy certain accoutrements not necessarily consistent with the time period.

On this particular day's strip, Johnny Hart shows us the caveman walking up a hill at night - there is a crescent moon in the sky - and heading for a wooden outhouse, with a crescent moon on the door, as outhouses traditionally have, at least in America. My own outhouse in New Hampshire certainly did, before it was dashed to smithereens in a hurricane.

Anyway, we next see a sound effect - "SLAM" - to indicate, presumably, the closing of the outhouse door. The final frame shows a speech bubble coming from within the outhouse with the words: "Is it just me, or does it stink in here?" The Council on American-Islamic Relations [CAIR] decided this was not an outhouse joke, but an Islamophobic slur disguised as an outhouse joke.

A reader in the Washington Post had noticed the six crescent moons in the strip, and suggested this indicated the real target of the gag. Cair drew attention to the fact that the sound effect of the alleged door slamming was stacked vertically, in a pillar-like shape, and thus could reasonably be read as "SLAM" contained within the overall shape of the letter "I" - or "ISLAM".

"Hmm," I said, thoughtfully, to the producer. "It's true that it's very hard to slam an outhouse door from the inside, what with the lack of space and so forth. Difficult to get back far enough to give it a loud enough slam to justify a sound effect. Unless there's a strong wind to whip it shut," I added, recalling my hurricane. "And even then, one would be more concerned to latch it carefully lest another gust blow it open again."

"That's Marshall Blonsky's line," said the producer, a little impatiently. Blonsky is professor of semiotics at the New School in New York and had apparently got to my penetrating insight ahead of me: "You don't slam an outhouse door." Professor Blonsky argues that the cartoon is indisputably constructed "in a polysemic fashion."

"I hadn't thought of that," I said.

"How about this?" said the producer. "If it's really just a sound effect, how come there's no exclamation?"

In the end, I declined the invitation. Although I agreed of course that Islamophobic cartooning was the most pressing issue of the week, in my usual shallow way I'd become distracted by some of the day's more trivial stories - the 11 Hindus burnt alive by a Muslim gang in Bangladesh, the 13 Christian churches torched by Muslim rioters in the Nigerian town of Kazaure, and the 27 Turks and Britons murdered by Muslim terrorists in Istanbul.

No dead Jews in that particular day's headlines, but otherwise a good haul of Hindus, Christians and, of course, Muslims.

EVERY SOCIETY has its ugly side: in America, the problem is stone-age cartoons; in Nigeria, it's stone-age - or stoning age - reality.  [PAC Comment: The governor of Zamfara State in Nigeria has ordered the demolition of all churches in the state, in accordance with Islamic shari’a law. Foreign groups including Saudi, Sudanese, Syrian, and Palestinian representatives have been aiding the institutionalization of Islamic law.  But, it's spread beyond Nigeria; see,  Sharia on the Old Continent.]   But one can't help noticing that polysemic cartooning seems a notably ineffective way of stirring up anti-Muslim feeling, at least when one looks at preliminary statistics for Muslims murdered in America this Ramadan, compared with Muslims murdered in, say, Saudi Arabia and Turkey.

My advice would be to go for the direct approach, like Sheikh Anwar al-Badawi, the A-list imam who does the Thought For The Day slot on Qatar TV: "O God, destroy the usurper Jews and the vile Christians." Nothing very polysemic about that.

Nothing very polysemic about CAIR, either. America's most prominent mainstream Muslim lobby group, it has organized rallies that managed to climax with the singing of "No to the Jews, descendants of the apes." Its chairman, Omar Ahmad, has said that "Islam isn't in America to be equal to any other faith, but to become dominant."

The Koran "should be the highest authority in America, and Islam the only accepted religion on Earth." But its supply of White House invites and presidential photo-ops never seems to dry up, and its willingness to see offence everywhere is treated respectfully by the media.

Meanwhile, while Islamic lobby groups and the most distinguished semiotics professors in America are analyzing Johnny Hart's outhouse joke, the European Union's Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia has decided to shelve its report on the rise of anti-Semitism on the Continent. The problem is that the survey had found that "many anti-Semitic incidents were carried out by Muslim and pro-Palestinian groups," and so a "political decision" was taken not to publish it because of "fears that it would increase hostility towards Muslims."

Let's go back over that slowly and try not to get a headache: the EU's main concern about an actual epidemic of hate crimes against Jews is that it could provoke a hypothetical epidemic of hate crimes against Muslims.

You couldn't ask for a better illustration of the uselessness of these thought-police bodies: they're fine for chastising insufficiently guilt-ridden whites in an ongoing reverse-minstrel show of cultural self-abasement, but they don't have the stomach for confronting real racism. A tolerant society is so reluctant to appear intolerant, it would rather tolerate intolerance.

The writer is senior contributing editor for Hollinger Inc.

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Jews out of Palestine

Amnon Rubinstein, Haaretz, Wed., November 26, 2003 Kislev 1, 5764

According to Jewish philosopher Emil Fackenheim, Jew hatred has three stages. In the first stage, the message is you can't live among us as Jews; in the second, it's you can't live among us; and in the third, it's you can't live. The first stage is coerced conversion, the second is expulsion and the third is destruction.

The message of the fourth stage is you can't live in your own country. In the 1930s, the streets of Germany filled with two kinds of graffiti: "Jews Out" and "Jews to Palestine." The call of the new anti-Semitism of our age is "Jews out of Palestine." It characterized not only the traditional Israel haters but also - and mostly - circles dubbed the left nowadays, in Israel, Europe and among "liberal" Americans.

The absurd thing is that negating Israel's right to exist, which provides the intellectual backing for the threats of its destruction, is being done in the name of the most supreme doctrines of human rights and equality. In other words, all nations have the right to self-determination - except the Jews. There is no substantial difference between that and the first stage of traditional anti-Semitism according to Fackenheim: "You can't live among us as a member of the family of nations."

The fact that the extremist intellectual left is now carrying the banner once hefted by the fascist right in Europe is as traumatic for many contemporary Jews as it was in the late 19th century. True, there are no pogroms and no Dreyfus trial, but the chief rabbi of France, Joseph Sitruk, goes on radio to tell Jews to avoid wearing a skullcap in public - a call that should have shocked the most secular Jews to their core. The European Social Forum, meanwhile, invites anti-Semitic Muslim intellectual Tarek Ramadan to join its ranks, and the left in general inspires only deep disappointment when it does not demonstrate alongside Jews who are afraid to wear a skullcap and are killed at prayers in synagogues.

Those not tainted with fashionable academic ignorance who read