Recently in journalistic bias Category

UPDATE: Was the Orlando Sentinel embarrassed by this shoddy hit piece? They have just removed it from their site. Let's hear it for the last shreds of journalistic integrity. (Thanks to Morgan for the heads-up.)

-------------------------------

They call this journalism. "Miami-Dade Transit Drops Anti-Islam ads," by Jeff Kunerth in the Orlando Sentinel, April 19:

Miami-Dade Transit has decided to drop bus advertisements sponsored by an anti-Islam hate group after complaints by the South Florida chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations.

The South Florida CAIR asked that the ads, produced by the hate group Stop the Islamization of America, be dropped because they promote bigotry and may fuel discrimination against ordinary Florida Muslims.

"We believe Miami-Dade Transit did the right thing in dropping this campaign of hatred and intolerance," said CAIR-SFL Executive Director Muhammed Malik. "The advertisement's reference to apostasy is merely a smoke-screen for the promotion of anti-Islam bigotry and the attempted marginalization of American Muslims."

I added this comment:

Your characterization of Stop Islamization of America as a hate group is not only inaccurate, but libelous.

SIOA stands for the freedom of speech, the equality of rights of all people before the law, and the freedom of conscience (as exemplified by these bus ads, designed to protect those threatened with death for leaving Islam, in accord with Islam's traditional death penalty for apostasy, which comes from Muhammad the Islamic prophet's dictum, "If anyone changes his religion, kill him").

All of these are denied in Islamic law. Would you then defend their extinguishing and characterize their defense as "hate"?

Please note also that the Council on American-Islamic Relations is an unindicted co-conspirator in a Hamas terror funding case, has had several of its officials convicted of jihad terror activities, and has opposed every anti-terror measure introduced since 9/11.

Which one is the "hate group" again?

The Orlando Sentinel ought to be ashamed to publish this defamatory nonsense.

This Chicago Sun-Times story, after being more honest than AP by noting that Larry killed all these people because he believed he had some responsibility before Allah to do so, makes sure to include the standard disclaimer from a local Muslim group -- the kind of thing that is usually as a matter of course appended to any story about a Muslim committing violence in the name of Islam: Islam condemns, Islam forbids, Islam is peace, etc. etc. etc.

The sheer pro-forma aspect of such disclaimers, and their frequent employ, ought to give some people pause. But it doesn't. In any case, it is here once again disingenuous. James Larry murdered his family, according to this Chicago Tribune report, after complaining that his wife was not behaving according to Islamic standards, and saying that the Qur'an was telling him to kill (which it certainly does do -- see 2:191, 4:89, 9:5, 9:29, 47:4, etc.). Now, honor killing, which is also the subject of a blizzard of Islamic disclaimers whenever it appears in the news, is nonetheless relatively common in many Muslim countries, and is effectively encouraged by the fact that honor murderers often are given lighter sentences than other murderers.

Syria recently scrapped a law limiting the length of sentences for honor killings, but "the new law says a man can still benefit from extenuating circumstances in crimes of passion or honour 'provided he serves a prison term of no less than two years in the case of killing.'"

That's right: two years for murder!

In 2003 the Jordanian Parliament voted down on Islamic grounds a provision designed to stiffen penalties for honor killings. Al-Jazeera reported that "Islamists and conservatives said the laws violated religious traditions and would destroy families and values."

And a manual of Islamic law certified as a reliable guide to Sunni orthodoxy by Al-Azhar University, the most respected authority in Sunni Islam, says that "retaliation is obligatory against anyone who kills a human being purely intentionally and without right." However, "not subject to retaliation" is "a father or mother (or their fathers or mothers) for killing their offspring, or offspring's offspring." ('Umdat al-Salik o1.1-2).

In other words, someone who kills his child incurs no legal penalty under Islamic law.

That's why these honor killings keep happening -- because they are broadly tolerated, even encouraged, by Islamic teachings and attitudes. Yet no authorities are calling Islamic leaders to account for this. But in light of all this, James Larry ought not to be dismissed as a simple madman, and the Islamic community let off with the standard "Islam condemns, Islam forbids" disclaimer. Instead, there ought to be a serious public discussion about how the texts and teachings of Islam are used by Islamic jihadists to justify violence, and how they can be and are used even by violent creepy lunatics like James Larry to justify wanton slaughter. Only then can any effective steps be taken to try to prevent future murders like these.

But nothing like that is going to be done. Even to suggest that it should be done is "Islamophobic." And so instead, more people will be murdered in the future the way James Larry's family was murdered.

"Murder suspect 'suffering greatly,' his lawyer says: Bail denied Wisconsin man accused of killing 4 in his family," by Rummana Hussain for the Chicago Sun-Times, April 17:

The Wisconsin man charged with killing four family members and seriously injuring two other relatives in a hail of bullets as they slept at his sister's Marquette Park home suffers from a "multitude" of mental health illnesses, his attorney said Friday.

James Larry, a 32-year-old Muslim convert who allegedly told authorities he was ordered by "Allah" to carry out the carnage, has been under doctors' care since 2002 and recently received psychiatric treatment in Janesville, Wis., said Julie Koehler, an assistant Cook County public defender.

Koehler said Larry was crying, his head bowed, when prosecutors detailed how he allegedly killed his pregnant wife, Twanda Thompson, 19; son, Jihad, 7 months, pregnant niece Keyshai Fields, 16, and 3-year-old Keleasha Larry, another niece.

"He is suffering greatly," Koehler said, after Judge Peggy Chiampas ordered Larry held without bond.

Larry also shot his 57-year-old mother, Leona Larry, and a nephew Demond Larry, 13, before dawn Wednesday. Both remain in critical condition, Assistant State's Attorney Jamie Santini said.

The body count could have been worse, Santini added. He said Torino Hill, a 35-year-old man living in the home's basement, was spared when James Larry's gun jammed and another niece, 12, escaped injury when she ran down the street and called police....

James Larry, who has a lengthy criminal record, admitted his role in the shooting spree, told detectives he knew his wife and 16-year-old niece were pregnant and even led police to the 9mm handgun he allegedly used in the shooting, Santini said.

"That's not the lot, turn left. It's the first vacant lot off the alley on the left," Larry directed officers, according to a police report.

James Larry also allegedly told officers he wished he "had more bullets."

"I wish I had more bullets. Kill me. I threw the gun in a vacant lot by the police station. I'll show you," James Larry said, according to the report.

A relative said that when James Larry looked to the sky and didn't see the moon or the sun before dawn Wednesday, "that meant Allah told him to take his family."

On Friday, several local Muslim leaders and organizations denounced the murders and stressed that the Islamic faith should not be associated with the tragedy.

James Larry's sister Keshai -- the mother of three victims, including the two dead girls -- joined Inner-City Muslim Action Network members and Jewish and Christian leaders later in the afternoon to show solidarity with the religious groups, IMAN's executive director Rami Nashashibi said.

For years, the Marquette Park-based IMAN has been involved in many anti-violence efforts in the neighborhood and is taking an active role in assisting the victims, Nashashibi said.

"We find this type of horrific violence absolutely incompatible with any understanding or any expression of Islam," he said.

After Miami Herald reporter Jaweed Kaleem incorrectly identified me rather than Pamela Geller as the head of SIOA in the original version of this article, I corrected the record here. Kaleem was kind enough to send me this note this morning:

Robert: my mistake in incorrectly identifying you in the article. I'll get that fixed online. FYI the decision to remove the ads was a last-minute one; I did not know of it when I interviewed you via email.

I responded with this:

Thanks. I appreciate the correction. Why didn't you mention CAIR's unindicted co-conspirator status, links to Hamas, and terror convictions of its officials in your article? Why didn't you mention the many apostates from Islam who have been murdered or threatened with death around the world in recent years, or the fact that all the sects of Islam and schools of Islamic jurisprudence teach that apostates from Islam should be killed? I would be happy to supply you with data on these or other matters for a follow-up article. Let me know -- I'd be happy to help.

And Jaweed Kaleem answered:

The answer to most of your questions is that my articles usually have a local focus. I have written about the South Florida chapter of CAIR for a few years now and have never seen or heard them advocate terrorism. I don't write about the national CAIR organization. Re: the apostasy issue, I have heard of many of these incidents in abroad, but have heard of few in the U.S. and none in South Florida. Sure, I'll take a look at your data. If you can provide me with a former Muslim in South Florida who has been threatened for leaving the religion and who would have appreciated the help of the ad, I can look into a follow-up interview.

Well, unfortunately, in South Florida Muslims read the same Qur'an and follow the same Sharia that other Muslims read and follow in other parts of the world. They may not, for any number of reasons, live it out in the same way, but there is no South Florida Islam that is distinguished from Islam in other parts of the world by any significant doctrinal difference. Nor is there any coherent reason to believe that CAIR-South Florida differs in any substantial way from CAIR national. Accordingly, the information I provide here for Jaweed Kaleem is not restricted to South Florida -- but it holds true there as well. And I decided to do this publicly rather than in a further email, since the information here may be useful to others besides Jaweed Kaleem.

First, re CAIR: CAIR is an unindicted co-conspirator in a Hamas terror funding case -- so named by the Justice Department. CAIR operatives have repeatedly refused to denounce Hamas and Hizballah as terrorist groups. Several former CAIR officials have been convicted of various crimes related to jihad terror, and that CAIR's cofounder and longtime Board chairman (Omar Ahmad), as well as its chief spokesman (Honest Ibe Hooper), have made Islamic supremacist statements.

And regarding apostasy, Kaleem quotes CAIR's Muhammad Malik saying this: "Islam guarantees freedom to and freedom from religion....[We] reject as un-Islamic any extremist interpretation that sanctions the killing of any individual because she decided to 'leave Islam.'"

So evidently Muhammad Malik and CAIR reject as "un-Islamic" these words of Muhammad, the prophet of Islam and supreme example of conduct for the Muslim (cf. Qur'an 33:21): "Whoever changes his Islamic religion, then kill him." (Bukhari 9.84.57)

Evidently Muhammad Malik and CAIR reject as "un-Islamic" the Tafsir al-Qurtubi, a classic and thoroughly mainstream exegesis of the Qur'an. About Qur'an 2:217, Qurtubi says this: "Scholars disagree about whether or not apostates are asked to repent. One group say that they are asked to repent and, if they do not, they are killed. Some say they are given an hour and others a month. Others say that they are asked to repent three times, and that is the view of Malik. Al-Hasan said they are asked a hundred times. It is also said that they are killed without being asked to repent."

Evidently Muhammad Malik and CAIR reject as "un-Islamic" the teachings of all the schools of Islamic jurisprudence, since they all teach that a sane adult male who leaves Islam must be killed. They have some disagreements about what must he done with other types of people who leave Islam, but they have no disagreement on that.

Evidently Muhammad Malik and CAIR reject as "un-Islamic" the internationally renowned Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, who has been praised as a "reformist" by pseudo-academic John Esposito and who has said this about Islamic apostasy law: "That is why the Muslim jurists are unanimous that apostates must be punished, yet they differ as to determining the kind of punishment to be inflicted upon them. The majority of them, including the four main schools of jurisprudence (Hanafi, Maliki, Shafi`i, and Hanbali) as well as the other four schools of jurisprudence (the four Shiite schools of Az-Zaidiyyah, Al-Ithna-`ashriyyah, Al-Ja`fariyyah, and Az-Zaheriyyah) agree that apostates must be executed."

Meanwhile, although it's just dandy that "Islam guarantees freedom to and freedom from religion," Muslims all over the world seem to misunderstand Islam on this point. There are many killings of apostates and threats to their lives that take place frequently in the Islamic world.

Click on every word -- each one is a story about an apostate being murdered or threatened with death. Now, isn't that odd? Why did all these Muslims misunderstand Islam's protection of religious freedom? Why are so many Muslims misunderstanding Islam in just the same way?

But none of this was fit to print in the Miami Herald. I think it almost certain that Jaweed Kaleem didn't even ask Muhammad Malik any hard questions. Maybe he will get another chance as our lawsuit runs its course.

What's that? The "gunman" was a Muslim? He said something about the Qur'an? Surely not! None of that is in the AP story, which is an object lesson in journalistic bias and obfuscation: "Source: Chicago gunman heard voices to kill family," by Don Babwin for Associated Press, April 14 (thanks to Paul):

CHICAGO - A person close to the investigation of a shooting in Chicago that left a woman and three children dead says the gunman told police that he committed the crime after hearing voices telling him to kill his family.

Compare that to the Chicago Tribune story I discussed here. It says that "the man had converted to Islam several years ago while serving time in prison and had a dispute with his wife -- one of the victims -- because she would not adhere to his faith. He told police that he needed to take his family back to Allah and out of this world of sinners, a source said....The wife's sister, Shirina Thompson, said the suspect had been talking about "going to Allah." Both Thompson and a neighbor in Wisconsin said the man had fought with his wife in recent days because she refused to wear Muslim garb....Letisha Larry, one of the suspect's sisters, said her brother had been acting strange, carrying around the Quran and telling family members that something in the book told him to kill someone."

But AP has none of that. He was just "hearing voices."

This is one of the reasons why we always post at Jihad Watch the names of the reporters who write the stories. These whole process of news gathering and news reporting needs to be demystified, even in this Internet age, and news reports recognized not as objective, dispassionate accounts, but as the work of human beings with agendas. While it is possible that Kristen Schorsch, Annie Sweeney and Cynthia Dizikes of the Tribune are simply better, more thorough reporters than Don Babwin of AP, it is more likely that Babwin had access to exactly the same information that showed up in the Tribune report, but chose not to go with it.

He probably thought it would be "Islamophobic" to do so, or that to do so would fuel one of those fabled but nonexistent "backlashes" against innocent Muslims. So he probably decided it was better to cover up key facts about this incident. And the thing is, Don Babwin is no worse a journalist than thousands of others working today. He was just doing what they all do, in large and small ways, every day.

To expose them as they do this, and to inform you about what is really going on, is one of the main reasons why Jihad Watch exists.

MPAC unsavory? See here.

I've got a better idea for Mary Sanchez and MPAC: if they really want to "unravel" Americans' "misperceptions" of Islam, here is an easy way they can do it without going to all the time, trouble and expense of finding and hiring a slick PR man:

1. Focus their indignation on Muslims committing violent acts in the name of Islam, not on non-Muslims reporting on those acts.
2. Renounce definitively not just "terrorism," but any intention to replace the U.S. Constitution (or the constitutions of any non-Muslim state) with Sharia even by peaceful means. In line with this, clarify what is meant by their condemnations of the killing of innocent people by stating unequivocally that American and Israeli civilians are innocent people.
3. Teach Muslims the imperative of coexisting peacefully as equals with non-Muslims on an indefinite basis.
4. Begin comprehensive international programs in mosques all over the world to teach against the ideas of violent jihad and Islamic supremacism.
5. Actively work with Western law enforcement officials to identify and apprehend jihadists within Western Muslim communities.

If Muslims do those five things, voila! "Misperceptions" of Islam will no longer hold sway among Americans. And "outright bigotry"? Forget it! It will be about as common as outright anti-Buddhist bigotry!

"Wanted: A calm, credible voice to soothe Americans' fear of Islam," by Mary Sanchez for the McClatchy Newspapers, April 9:

Here's a job posting worthy of only the most stellar applicants. In fact, only those rare individuals with near-superhuman powers to untangle the crossed circuitry in the American mindset need apply.

The Muslim Public Affairs Council is seeking "high-energy candidates" for a communications coordinator. I'd love to eavesdrop on those interviews.

"What do you believe would be the best approach for unraveling the misperceptions and outright bigotry toward Muslims that goes virtually unchallenged daily in the U.S.?"

Yes, the American Muslim community needs a Walter Cronkite, conceded Haris Tarin, a director in the council's Washington office. Muslims need a spokesperson with the credibility to soothe and educate their suspicious countrymen. Despite consistently condemning acts of terrorism, American Muslims find that the No. 1 charge against them is that they do not denounce terrorism.

As Tarin and others point out, Muslims in the United States do not control their own story telling. And far too often, they leave a vacuum only too readily filled by those who view Muslims as anti-Christian terror suspects first, foremost and sometimes completely.

Muslims need to imprint a more positive image in the public mind, and the best way to do that is by pointing out more effectively who they are, rather than taking a defensive posture....

The New York Times did not distinguish itself when the Nazis came to power. It kept stories of the persecution of the Jews to small items, on the inside pages, and failed to convey to its readers, many of whom must surely have been Jewish and had relatives they might have more vigorously attempted to help, the full story of what Hitler so clearly intended. And many readers of The New York Times, both Jewish and non-Jewish, might have done more throughout the 1930s to strengthen the power of those who wanted American intervention, and consequently a much earlier buildup of American military strength at a time when the American army was only the 18th largest in the world. The full story is told by Laurel Leff, and I would go further than she does, and charge that those such as the Sulzberger family who didn't want to have their paper appear to be "too concerned with Jewish matters" in fact have blood on their hands, the blood of those who were not rescued because all through the nineteen thirties, and even into the period of America's entry into the war, there was not nearly enough coverage of the persecution and mass murder of the Jews from the "newspaper of record."

The same was true of the coverage of the Communists, and especially of the forced starvation of the kulaks and others in the Ukraine. Walter Duranty was the Times' correspondent in the Soviet Union, and a sympathizer with the Communists, a man deeply impressed with Joseph Stalin. For his deeply misleading and in retrospect sickening reports, he won a Pulitzer Prize. He helped, by commission, to convey a false reality concerning the Soviet Union and its murderous policies, just as the owners of the Times helped, by deliberate omission and de-emphasizing, to convey a false reality concerning the Nazis and their murderous policies, and chief and earliest victims, the Jews of Germany and then of Eastern Europe.

Not content with that record, the New York Times over nearly the last decade has done nothing to enlighten its readers about the ideology of Islam. If you read the Times every day, faithfully, from 9/11/2001 on to today, you still would not know what the word "Hadith" means or what an "isnad-chain" is. You still would not be able to define the word "Sunnah." You still would not know that Muhammad is regarded as the Model of Conduct, uswa hasana, and the Perfect Man, al-insan al-kamil, or why it matters. You still would not know about little Aisha, and why Muhammad's "marriage" to her when she was nine years old had consequences in the Islamic Republic of Iran when Khomeini came to power, and still has permanent consequences for girls all over the Muslim-ruled lands.

No matter what Islamic jihadists and Islamic supremacists do, no matter how bloodthirsty they are, no matter how gratuitous and brutal their attacks, for the mainstream media Muslims are always and everywhere the victims. "Macheteculturalism," by Mark Steyn at The Corner, April 6 (thanks to Hugo):

[...] Sadly, in Landskrona the other day, an elderly couple parking their car made the mistake of attracting the attention of a young man of a certain, only vaguely hinted at, religion-of-peacey persuasion. He beat the 71-year old man brutally, and the 78-year old woman to death.

The killing has shocked the town. The leaders of four local Muslim associations held a press conference to deplore the "accident" and warn that it could "cause xenophobia". Indeed. That's the real news angle here:

Sweden: Muslim Community Fears Violence After Attack On Elderly Couple

Here's another for you, Mr. Steyn:

Islamophobia on the rise after Moscow Metro attacks

As Steyn says, this is beyond parody.

The killers showed no mercy: They didn't spare women and children, or even a 4-day-old baby, from their machetes. Nigerian women wailed in the streets as a dump truck carried dozens of bodies past burned-out homes toward a mass grave.

Rubber-gloved workers pulled ever-smaller bodies from the dump truck and tossed them into the mass grave on Monday. A crowd began singing a hymn with the refrain, "Jesus said I am the way to heaven." As the grave filled, the grieving crowd sang: "Jesus, show me the way." - from a news account of the mass-murdering by Muslims, of Christians sleeping in their beds, attacked in the middle of the night, on all sides, by Muslim Fulanis.

And you can read more here.

You've already forgotten just a bit, haven't you? That is, forgotten the details? You remember that about 600 people were killed in north-central Nigeria - was it a week ago? Or two weeks? Or three weeks? It's hard to remember -- when Muslims of the Fulani tribe surrounded Christian villages at night, where there were mostly women and children, and set fire to their houses, and then with machetes killed them, while the Muslim-officered army and police did nothing to prevent it. And you may remember, or not, how in January there was the same story, when Muslims attacked Christians, on a Sunday, burning them alive in a church. But on that occasion, since the Christians around included men, they did fight back, and so that January story's details have been forgotten, and the BBC, and NPR, and everyone else had a high old time, in describing the six hundred Christians murdered last week, in glibly (and wrongly) calling it a "revenge" for the attacks in January -- as if the attacks in January had not been instigated by the Muslims in the first place, and the Christians only inflicting casualties because they were defending themselves.

And this Reuters article, true to form, says that the Muslims are fighting to gain autonomy in what was up until a hundred years ago a Malay sultanate -- but it does not mention, of course, that the Malay Sultanate was making war against the Siamese during the war between Siam and Burma, and Thailand conquered it in that context. That makes it Thai land by a right of conquest that has been universally recognized throughout human history -- except, of course, when it comes to Israel and to any Muslim land that is conquered by non-Muslims.

Note also the tortured language in the last paragraph: "The violence has ranged from drive-by shootings to bombings and beheadings. It often targets Buddhists and Muslims associated with the Thai state." As if "the violence" were something that is conscious and acts of its own volition. Look out, Mabel, here comes The Violence again, and it's targeting us this time!

The mainstream media will do anything to avoid saying that Islamic jihadists, the most prolific and energetic mass murders of our time, are responsible for any of the evil they perpetrate.

And finally, the fifteen scholars of the Mardin conference need to make their way to southern Thailand and clue in the Thai jihadists that "the entire world" is now "a place of tolerance and peaceful co-existence between all religious, groups and factions." Or is their declaration designed to reassure jittery Infidels, and isn't intended to dissuade jihadists from their jihads at all?

"Six killed in Thailand's insurgency-plagued south," from Reuters, April 1 (thanks to Weasel Zippers):

NARATHIWAT, Thailand (Reuters) - Suspected Islamic insurgents shot dead six Buddhist villagers in Thailand's restive south Thursday, police said, the latest attack in the troubled region bordering Malaysia.

The villagers in Narathiwat province were believed to have been ambushed, said police Colonel Sanit Suwanno...

Ten policemen and soldiers were also wounded when a roadside bomb exploded as they were traveling to the scene of the shootings, police said.

More than 3,900 people have been killed in six years of unrest as ethnic Malay Muslims fight for autonomy from Thailand's Buddhist majority in the region just a few hours by car from some of Thailand's best-known tourist beaches.

Local Muslims largely oppose the presence of tens of thousands of police, soldiers and state-armed Buddhist guards in rubber-rich region, which was part of a Malay Muslim sultanate until annexed by Thailand a century ago.

About 80 percent of Thailand's three southern provinces of Pattani, Yala and Narathiwat are Muslim.

The violence has ranged from drive-by shootings to bombings and beheadings. It often targets Buddhists and Muslims associated with the Thai state, such as police, soldiers, government officials and teachers.

In Human Events this morning I discuss the mainstream media's favorite religious extremist group: the Hutaree:

A Christian militia group--called the "Hutaree"--preparing to battle the Antichrist and supposedly targeting Muslims, has been raided by the FBI and Joint Terrorism Task Force, and nine of its members have been arrested. These raids and the alleged Christian character of the militia, as well as its rumored targeting of Muslims, are a mainstream media dream come true--a few years back the BBC featured an improbable inversion-of-reality drama about Christians beheading Muslims, and now, lo and behold, it seems to have come to life.

For years now we have heard, in the indelible formulation of Rosie O'Donnell, that "radical Christianity is just as dangerous as radical Islam," and yet proponents of this exercise in wishful thinking and ignorance have had precious little evidence to adduce in support of it. But now it is certain that for years to come this Hutaree group will be thrown in the face of anyone who takes note of jihad activity in the United States and around the world, as if this group in itself balances and equals the innumerable Islamic groups that are waging armed jihad all around the world today.

The point will be the same as the one Tim McVeigh has had to shoulder alone all these years (even though he wasn't really a Christian at all and did not justify the Oklahoma City bombing by referring to Christian teaching): that every religion has its "extremists," and that therefore it would be bad form to subject Islam to greater critical scrutiny, and Muslims to greater law-enforcement scrutiny. Everyone does it, don't you see? Al-Qaeda, Hamas, Hizballah, Jemaah Islamiyah, al-Shabaab, and on and on and on--yes, but the Hutaree!

Meanwhile, in the Detroit News story on the raids, which as tendentious, superficial, and slanted as all the mainstream media coverage of the Hutaree's downfall, the Hutaree is matter-of-factly identified as Christian. Yet there are no quotations in the story from Christian leaders explaining how they condemn this "Christian militia," and saying that Christianity doesn't condone such violence, and that these militiamen have twisted and hijacked their peaceful faith. Why didn't the News take care to gather such quotes? After all, they always include such quotes from Muslim leaders in every story about Islamic jihad terror activity. Why is the practice different in this case?

Yet instead of the mainstream moderate Christians (now there's a phrase we don't ever see even from the moral-equivalence types) that we would have every reason to expect the Detroit News to feature in this story, the Hamas-linked Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) shows up toward the end of the article, playing the victim card with gusto. The arrests are announced during the tenth anniversary banquet of the group's Michigan chapter, to "audible gasps" from the assembled crowd. The claiming of victim status, complete with gasping prospective victims, is artful--and of course the Detroit News, true to mainstream media form, says nothing about CAIR's links to Hamas, the jihad-related arrests and convictions of several of its officials, and the rest of this group's unsavory record.

A responsible reporter might have asked Dawud Walid, executive director of CAIR-Michigan, if he thought this alleged Christian militia group was a "backlash" after the sharp increase in jihad terror activity in the U.S. in the last year, but why should the Detroit News have responsible reporters on staff when no other mainstream media outlet does?

And as for the FBI and the JTTF, are they investigating the Muslim camps around the country where firearms and paramilitary training are known to be going on? Are they doing so with the same energy and resources that they obviously have devoted to the investigation of this Christian militia? If not, why not? If the allegations against this group are true, they richly deserve to be raided and arrested and shut down. But there have been allegations made against Islamic compounds in the U.S. that are quite similar, and nothing has been done. Why is that?

The Islamic jihad is global, well-financed (courtesy our friend and ally Saudi Arabia) and relentless. One self-proclaimed Christian group should not divert us from the ongoing need to defend ourselves against that jihad. But for many, it will.

These raids and the alleged Christian character of the militia, as well as its targeting Muslims, is a mainstream media dream come true -- a few years back the BBC featured an inversion-of-reality drama about Christians beheading Muslims, and now, lo and behold, it seems to have come to life. For years to come this "Hutaree" will be thrown in the face of anyone who takes note of jihad activity in the United States and around the world, as if this group in itself balances and equals the innumerable Islamic groups that are waging armed jihad all around the world today.

The point will be the same as the one Tim McVeigh has had to shoulder alone all these years (even though he wasn't really a Christian at all, and did not justify the Oklahoma City bombing by reference to Christian teaching): that every religion has its "extremists," and that therefore it would be bad form to subject Islam to greater critical scrutiny, and Muslims to greater law enforcement scrutiny. Everyone does it, don't you see? Al-Qaeda, Hamas, Hizballah, Jemaah Islamiyah, al-Shabaab, and on and on and on -- yes, but the Hutaree!

Meanwhile, why doesn't the Detroit News include in this story quotations from Christian leaders explaining how they condemn this "Christian militia," and that Christianity doesn't condone such violence, and that these militiamen have twisted and hijacked their peaceful faith? After all, they always include such quotes from Muslim leaders in every story about Islamic jihad terror activity. Why is the practice different in this case?

Yet instead of the mainstream moderate Christians (heh) that we would have every reason to expect the Detroit News to feature in this story, Hamas-linked CAIR shows up toward the end of this article, playing the victim card with gusto, so that as the arrests were announced, "audible gaps" (yikes!) sounded in their 10th anniversary banquet hall. The claiming of victim status, complete with gasping prospective victims, is artful -- and of course the Detroit News says nothing about CAIR's links to Hamas, the jihad-related arrests and convictions of several of its officials, and the rest of this group's unsavory record. A responsible reporter might have asked Dawud Walid if he thought this alleged Christian militia group was a "backlash" after the sharp increase in jihad terror activity in the U.S. in the last year, but why should the Detroit News have responsible reporters on staff when no other mainstream media outlet does?

And as for the FBI and the JTTF, are they investigating the Muslim camps around the country where firearms and paramilitary training are known to be going on? Are they doing so with the same energy and resources that they obviously have devoted to the investigation of this Christian militia? If not, why not? If the allegations against this group are true, they richly deserve to be raided and arrested and shut down. But there have been allegations made against Islamic compounds in the U.S. that are quite similar, and nothing has been done. Why is that?

"Seven arrested in FBI raids linked to Christian militia group," by Jennifer Chambers for The Detroit News, March 28 (thanks to all who sent this in):

At least seven people, including some from Michigan, have been arrested in raids by a FBI-led Joint Terrorism Task Force in Michigan, Ohio and Indiana as part of an investigation into an Adrian-based Christian militia group, a person familiar with the matter said. [...]

Lackomar said he heard from other militia members that the FBI targeted the Hutaree after its members made threats of violence against Islamic organizations. [...]

One of the Hutaree members called a Michigan militia leader for assistance Saturday after federal agents had already began their raid, Lackomar said, but the militia member -- who is of Islamic decent and had heard about the threats -- declined to offer help. That Michigan militia leader is now working with federal officials to provide information on the Hutaree member for the investigation, Lackomar said Sunday. [...]

Dawud Walid, executive director of the Council on Islamic-American [sic!] Relations of Michigan, made an announcement Sunday during the group's 10th anniversary banquet about receiving a call from a network journalist about the alleged threat against Muslims.

"Don't allow this news to scare you away from practicing your faith," said Walid.

Audible gaps [sic!] were heard throughout the banquet hall when the news was announced. Walid said he will call local authorities about more information on the allegations. He urged local Muslims to recommitt [sic] themselves to their faith in light of the accusations.

Yes, that will pacify everything.

We are now ready to continue with our discussion of The Michael Coren show, Part 2. Please take the time, once again, to watch both segments.

Part 1 is here. Part 2 is above. And my discussion of Part 1 is here.

Returning from the station break, this segment begins with Tarek Fatah in apparent medias res explaining that the West's perception of Islam is flawed because it sees everything through the prism of Arab Islam, while the Islam practiced in the subcontinent, Tarek Fatah's neck of the woods, is so very very different.

There's Bangladesh, for example, with 150 million people, and yet in Bangladesh, he says, "whenever they get a chance they vote out the extremists." And neither Michael Coren, nor anyone in the audience, is likely to know what this means, to know who are "extremists" and who the good guys, relatively speaking. I presume that Tarek Fatah means the first head of an independent Bangladesh, back in 1971, Mujibur Rahman, and also Mujibur Rahman's daughter, the head of the "secular" Awami League, where "secular" means, as almost always in such cases, less fanatically a follower of the Shari'a rules, less fervently a Muslim, than those who oppose them. In his passing allusion to Bangladesh, Tarek Fatah makes no mention -- why not? -- of the many current examples of popular Muslim intolerance. He is content to limit himself to the misleading statement that when given a chance, Bangladeshis "throw out the despots." Is that quite enough? He fails to mention, for example, that Taslima Nasrin, the celebrated apostate, had to flee from Bangladesh to India in fear of her life, because of threats by Muslims eager to kill her, and a government unwilling to protect her. Is it the position of Tarek Fatah that if the Awami League were running things, Taslima Nasrin could live safely in Bangladesh?

And he does not mention, either, that astonishingly brave editor and journalist, Mr. Salah Choudhury, who dared to write words of sympathy and support for Israel, and for Hindus and Christians too. Choudhury has been under almost constant pressure - death threats, physical attacks, charges of treason, and finally, arrest and formal charges laid, all because he is a true and brave version of what we in the West would dearly wish all "moderate Muslims" to be. Shouldn't Tarek Fatah have done more than pretend that Islam somehow changes its spots, and so do Muslims, when we move from the Arab countries to Pakistan and Bangladesh?

Naivete. "Moderate Muslims speak, but they are rarely heard," from the Houston Chronicle, March 18:

Recently two events have occurred that describe opposing views of how some Muslims see the world. The reactions of Muslims in the United States to these two events will affect how their non-Muslim fellow citizens view this new and growing minority.

One of the events occurred March 7 when Adam Gadahn, an American-born "spokesman" for al-Qaida, called for terrorist attacks on American targets, including "mass transportation systems." Many non-Muslims will hear about this through the widespread media coverage it got and will wonder, "Where are the moderate Muslims among us? Why don't they speak out?"

But they have been speaking out. For example, the Muslim Public Affairs Council issued the following statement March 7: "MPAC rejects this latest call for criminal acts by al-Qaida, considering it a failed attempt to deliver its bankrupt ideology to Western Muslims, who have continued to reject terrorism in all its forms."

The Islamic Society of North America has also emphatically rejected Gadahn's statement: "American Muslims ... reject al-Qaida's attempts to lure our young men and women to their revolutionary fantasies. ... Adam Gadahn and his masters have deviated from justice by calling for the indiscriminate murder of vast numbers of people on American soil."

The other event occurred March 2, when Pakistani-born Sheikh Tahir ul-Qadri, a prominent theologian, launched a seminal fatwa in London condemning terrorism in all its forms. "Terrorism is terrorism, violence is violence and it has no place in Islamic teaching and no justification can be provided for it, or any kind of excuses of ifs and buts. The world needs an absolute, unconditional, unqualified and total condemnation of terrorism."

This is only one of many such statements that have been issued by Islamic scholars since 9/11, but it is significant because it is one of the few that was issued in English and publicized in the United Kingdom, where most British-born extremists have family or cultural links within the Muslim community.

Regrettably, our news media will probably devote significant coverage to Gadahn's statements, and too few non-Muslims will hear of the condemnations of his statements issued by American Muslim groups, or of ul-Qadri's fatwa. [...]

We are part of a group of Jews and Muslims who have come together to understand each other's narratives under the auspices of Interfaith Ministries and the Institute for Sustainable Peace....

What could go wrong? Plenty.

MPAC was formed out of the Islamic Center of Southern California, whose leaders are known members of the Muslim Brotherhood. MPAC's Senior Advisor, Maher Hathout, has close ties to the Brotherhood.

ISNA, for its part, has admitted ties to the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas.

The Muslim Brotherhood "must understand that their work in America is a kind of grand Jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and 'sabotaging' its miserable house by their hands and the hands of the believers so that it is eliminated and Allah's religion is made victorious over all other religions." -- Mohamed Akram, "An Explanatory Memorandum on the General Strategic Goal for the Group in North America," May 22, 1991, Government Exhibit 003-0085, U.S. vs. HLF, et al. P. 7 (21).

And what more enjoyable way could they have found to sabotage our miserable house than to sucker the naive kuffar into buying that groups like MPAC and ISNA are really opposed to jihad?

Here we go again: more smooth lies, half-truths, detours and deceptions -- anything to keep us from looking squarely at the jihad doctrine as delineated by the Qur'an and Sunnah. It's interesting that Philip Jenkins gets a big feature on NPR for claiming that the Bible is more violent than the Qur'an -- when NPR offers the opposing view, featuring someone who says that the Qur'an is more violent than the Bible, we will know that the End Times have begun. "Is The Bible More Violent Than The Quran?," by Barbara Bradley Hagerty for NPR, March 18 (thanks to all who sent this in):

As the hijackers boarded the airplanes on Sept. 11, 2001, they had a lot on their minds. And if they were following instructions, one of those things was the Quran.

In preparation for the suicide attack, their handlers had told them to meditate on two chapters of the Quran in which God tells Muslims to "cast terror into the hearts of unbelievers."

"Slay the idolaters wherever ye find them, arrest them, besiege them, and lie in ambush everywhere for them," Allah instructs the Prophet Muhammad (Quran, 9:5). He continues: "Prophet! Make war on the unbelievers and the hypocrites! ... Hell shall be their home, an evil fate."

When Osama bin Laden declared war on the West in 1996, he cited the Quran's command to "strike off" the heads of unbelievers. More recently, U.S. Army Maj. Nidal Hasan lectured his colleagues about jihad, or "holy war," and the Quran's exhortation to fight unbelievers and bring them low. Hasan is accused of killing 13 people at Fort Hood, Texas, last year.

Given this violent legacy, religion historian Philip Jenkins decided to compare the brutality quotient of the Quran and the Bible.

Defense Vs. Total Annihilation

"Much to my surprise, the Islamic scriptures in the Quran were actually far less bloody and less violent than those in the Bible," Jenkins says.

Jenkins is a professor at Penn State University and author of two books dealing with the issue: the recently published Jesus Wars, and Dark Passages , which has not been published but is already drawing controversy.

Violence in the Quran, he and others say, is largely a defense against attack.

"By the standards of the time, which is the 7th century A.D., the laws of war that are laid down by the Quran are actually reasonably humane," he says. "Then we turn to the Bible, and we actually find something that is for many people a real surprise. There is a specific kind of warfare laid down in the Bible which we can only call genocide."

It is called herem, and it means total annihilation. Consider the Book of 1 Samuel, when God instructs King Saul to attack the Amalekites: "And utterly destroy all that they have, and do not spare them," God says through the prophet Samuel. "But kill both man and woman, infant and nursing child, ox and sheep, camel and donkey."

When Saul failed to do that, God took away his kingdom.

"In other words," Jenkins says, "Saul has committed a dreadful sin by failing to complete genocide. And that passage echoes through Christian history. It is often used, for example, in American stories of the confrontation with Indians -- not just is it legitimate to kill Indians, but you are violating God's law if you do not."

Jenkins notes that the history of Christianity is strewn with herem. During the Crusades in the Middle Ages, the Catholic popes declared the Muslims Amalekites. In the great religious wars in the 16th, 17th and 19th centuries, Protestants and Catholics each believed the other side were the Amalekites and should be utterly destroyed.

'Holy Amnesia'

But Jenkins says, even though the Bible is violent, Christianity and Judaism today are not for the most part.

"What happens in all religions as they grow and mature and expand, they go through a process of forgetting of the original violence, and I call this a process of holy amnesia," Jenkins says.

They make the violence symbolic: Wiping out the enemy becomes wiping out one's own sins. Jenkins says that until recently, Islam had the same sort of holy amnesia, and many Muslims interpreted jihad, for example, as an internal struggle, not physical warfare....

So is it just that simple? Religious texts teach violence, and so believers commit acts of violence that they believe will please God, until they just forget that the texts that teach violence are actually in their Scriptures? And what exactly makes them do this forgetting? Setting aside the fact that the Old Testament passages Jenkins cites are specific commands for a particular times and place, not universal commands for all believers for all time to make war against unbelievers, as we see in the Qur'an, it is also true that Jenkins completely ignores the fact that it was Jewish and Christian principles involving the dignity of the human person as made in the image of God that led to the spiritualizing of violent passages in the first place. He also neglects to mention that when these passages were used in history to justify violence, this was contrary to their mainstream interpretations both before and after the periods in which the violence was committed.

In Islam, by contrast, there is such a sharp dichotomy between the believer and the unbeliever (cf. Qur'an 48:29, which tells the Muslim to behave mercifully to fellow believers, but harshly to unbelievers), that the spiritualizing of violent Qur'anic passages has never taken place. Jenkins claims that "until recently, Islam had the same sort of holy amnesia, and many Muslims interpreted jihad, for example, as an internal struggle, not physical warfare." In reality, the two understandings have never been considered mutually exclusive by Islamic scholars. Hasan al-Banna, founder of the Muslim Brotherhood and great proponent of violent jihad, mandated Sufi spiritual exercises for the early Brothers, so that they would not neglect the aspect of jihad as internal struggle. The Chechen jihad was long led by Sufis -- the great proponents of that internal jihad.

And it simply isn't true that until recently, the prevailing understanding among Muslims was that jihad is an internal struggle, but now that is changing. Imran Ahsan Khan Nyazee, Assistant Professor on the Faculty of Shari'ah and Law of the International Islamic University in Islamabad, his 1994 book The Methodology of Ijtihad offers a quite different explanation of why jihad may appear to be a relatively recent phenomenon. He asserts: "The primary goal of the Muslim community, in the eyes of its jurists, is to spread the word of Allah through jihad, and the option of poll-tax [jizya] is to be exercised only after subjugation" of non-Muslims. But if this is so, why hasn't the worldwide Islamic community been waging jihad on a large scale up until relatively recently? Nyazee says it is only because they have not been able to do so: "the Muslim community may be considered to be passing through a period of truce. In its present state of weakness, there is nothing much it can do about it."

Perhaps Philip Jenkins would be so kind as to explain to Imran Ahsan Khan Nyazee how he misunderstands Islam. Or perhaps Waleed El-Ansary, who is cited later on in the NPR piece, would take on the job:

That may be the popular notion of jihad, says Waleed El-Ansary, but it's the wrong one. El-Ansary, who teaches Islamic studies at the University of South Carolina, says the Quran explicitly condemns religious aggression and the killing of civilians. And it makes the distinction between jihad -- legal warfare with the proper rules of engagement -- and irjaf, or terrorism.

"All of those types of incidences -- [Sept. 11], Maj. Nidal Hasan and so forth -- those are all examples of irjaf, not jihad," he says. According to the Quran, he says, those who practice irjaf "are going to hell."

The problem with El-Ansary's slick explanation, of course, is that the Qur'an actually never "condemns religious aggression and the killing of civilians" -- if those civilians are non-Muslims. The NPR article offers no supporting citations. I invite all Muslim readers of this site (and non-Muslim Islamic apologists) to offer verses to support this assertion in the comments field below, and I will check in from time to time and examine each one that is offered in light of the mainstream and authoritative tafasir, or Muslim commentaries on the Qur'an.

So what's going on here? After all, we all have images of Muslim radicals flying planes into buildings, shooting up soldiers at Fort Hood, trying to detonate a bomb on an airplane on Christmas Day. How to reconcile a peaceful Quran with these violent acts?

El-Ansary says that in the past 30 years, there's been a perfect storm that has created a violent strain of Islam. The first is political: frustration at Western intervention in the Muslim world. The second is intellectual: the rise of Wahhabi Islam, a more fundamentalist interpretation of Islam subscribed to by Osama bin Laden. El-Ansary says fundamentalists have distorted Islam for political purposes.

"Basically what they do is they take verses out of context and then use that to justify these egregious actions," he says.

Contradiction: the word "fundamentalist," which is misapplied to Islam in the first place, usually means someone who takes the text literally. But here El-Ansary would have us understand that the "fundamentalists" in Islam are misusing the texts. So then how are they fundamentalists at all?

El-Ansary says we are seeing more religious violence from Muslims now because the Islamic world is far more religious than is the West.

Wait a minute. The Islamic world is more religious, and yet so few people seem to notice that the Islamic jihadists are taking all these Qur'anic verses out of context?

Still, Jenkins says Judeo-Christian cultures shouldn't be smug. The Bible has plenty of violence.

"The scriptures are still there, dormant, but not dead," he says, "and they can be resurrected at any time. Witness the white supremacists who cite the murderous Phineas when calling for racial purity, or an anti-abortion activist when shooting a doctor who performs abortions....

15,000 Islamic jihad attacks, about half a dozen murders of abortionists in the last thirty years, and they're equivalent. Right.

In this article, David Pugliese does his best to portray Ghulam Rasol as an illiterate, manipulated naif, operating (no doubt) according to a twisted, hijacked version of Islam -- a classic Misunderstander of the Religion of Peace™. In reality, however, what Ghulam Rasol did was entirely in accord with Islamic law. His going to Afghanistan to fight the Infidels was in line with the Islamic doctrine that jihad becomes obligatory upon all Muslims whenever a Muslim land is attacked. (Provocations by Muslims from that Muslim land don't factor into this equation -- if the non-Muslim enemy strikes back, that constitutes an invasion of Muslim land.) All the schools of Islamic jurisprudence agree that when a non-Muslim force enters a Muslim land, jihad becomes the individual obligation of every Muslim (fard 'ayn) rather than a collective obligation of the entire umma, from which one is released if others are taking it up (fard kifaya). Bulghah al-Salik li-Aqrab al-Masalik fi madhhab al-Imam Malik ("The Sufficiency of the Traveller on the Best Path in the School of Imam Malik,") says this:

Jihad in the Path of Allah, to raise the word of Allah, is fard kifayah [obligatory on the community] once a year, so that if some perform it, the obligation falls from the rest. It becomes fard `ayn [obligatory on every Muslim individually], like salah and fasting, if the legitimate Muslim Imam declares it so, or if there is an attack by the enemy on an area of people.

The Hanafi, Maliki, and Shafi'i schools of Sunni jurisprudence further declare that jihad, once it is fard 'ayn, is no different from prayer and fasting -- in other words, to engage in warfare with non-Muslims in that case is a religious devotion that cannot lawfully be evaded. Hashiyah Ibn `Abidin, an authoritative text of the Hanafi school, says that jihad is "fard 'ayn if the enemy has attacked part of the Islamic homeland. It thus becomes an obligation like salah [prayer] and fasting which cannot be abandoned."

"Would-be suicide bomber explains himself," by David Pugliese for Canwest News Service, March 20:

KABUL, Afghanistan -- Several months ago, Ghulam Rasol packed his bag and quietly slipped out of his village in northwest Pakistan.

He did not tell his parents, his brother or sister what he was doing or where he was going. They still don't know what happened to him.

Rasol decided to leave after being told by mullahs, who had come to his village outside Peshawar, that Afghanistan had been occupied by foreign troops. It was his duty as a good Muslim to kill those infidels, he was told.

The 20-year-old had never been out of Pakistan. He knows little about Afghanistan. Yet he decided it was his responsibility to his religion that he should wage jihad by becoming a suicide bomber.

Rasol acknowledges he has never met a foreigner. He can't tell the difference between a Canadian, U.S. or British soldier. Nor does it matter to him.

"I cannot distinguish between foreigners and we don't care from which country they are from," he explained through an interpreter. "Whoever is not Muslim are infidels for us." [...]

He decided to devote his life to jihad because the mullahs had told him it was his responsibility to do so. After that Rasol was taken to a nearby madrassa, or religious school, where he received his "education."

"They told us that in Afghanistan jihad is allowed, it is legal and they said: 'Go to Afghanistan and start jihad,' " he said. "They told us that we are Muslim and that in Afghanistan there are infidels, so it's our responsibility to go to Afghanistan and do jihad." [...]

He informed the mullahs at the madrassa he didn't want to kill fellow Muslims but he was willing to fight international troops. "I was ready to blow up myself among Westerns," he said. [...]

"It is not for a believer to kill a believer unless (it be) by mistake" -- Qur'an 4:92

In "Glenn Beck, Think Before You Preach" in Human Events today, Pamela Geller calls out Glenn Beck for smearing Geert Wilders:

Something very disturbing happened last Monday on FOX. Glenn Beck, who has, for the most part, steered clear of jihad, sharia and Islamic supremacism, put his toe in the water, and for the first time since I started fighting the long war, I got nervous.

Beck called the Dutch politician Geert Wilders, who produced the film Fitna about Islamic Koran-based violence, a fascist, and far-right.

What is Beck doing?

Why would he stigmatize Wilders this way? Wilders is the embodiment of what our founding fathers extolled. Individual rights. Freedom of speech. Not sharia law.

In the House of Lords on March 5, Wilders said:

I believe that Islam is not compatible with our Western way of life. Islam is a threat to Western values. The equality of men and women, the equality of homosexuals and heterosexuals, the separation of church and state, freedom of speech, they are all under pressure because of islamization. Ladies and gentlemen: Islam and freedom, Islam and democracy are not compatible. They are opposite values.

Was Beck saying that standing up to defend the "equality of men and women, the equality of homosexuals and heterosexuals, the separation of church and state" and "freedom of speech" is fascist?

Good question. Read it all.

"For quite some time we have alerted the government to training grounds in some parts of the northern state where people are being trained to cause problems in the country... Nobody did anything about it." More on this story. "Nigeria: Christian Muslim violence perpetrated by mercenaries?," by Konye Obaji Ori for Afrik, March 10 (thanks to Twostellas):

The return to sectarian violence in the Plateau State city of Jos has been largely described as a revenge from the deadly attacks in January. It has also been reported that some of the perpetrators were mercenaries from neighboring Chad and Niger.

Following the sacking of the country's national security adviser, Sarki Mukhtar, in an apparent response to the sectarian killings by Nigeria's acting president Mr. Goodluck Jonathan, reports have revealed that Mercenaries from Niger and Chad may have participated in the attacks on Christian villages that claimed hundreds of lives. Those who died were reported to be mainly women and children.

"Many people come into Nigeria under the pretext of being pastoralists, they are mercenaries [from Chad, Niger]. They follow pastoralist routes to gain entrance, carry out their activities and then leave," the head of the northern area of Nigeria's Christian Association Mr. Saidu Dogo was quoted as saying.

Mr. Dogo urged the international community to become more actively involved as, he said, the government was unable to protect its own people. "We feel that the world just has to do something. If the Nigerian government cannot do something then the world has to do something to stop this killing," Mr. Dogo added.

Analysts have described the attack on the three villages near the Plateau state capital, Jos, as an act of revenge carried out by members of the mainly Muslim Fulani community who had fallen prey to violent attacks in January. Human Rights Watch had reported that the sectarian violence in January may have claimed the lives of at least "364 Muslims".

Above is an extremely deceptive description of the situation in Jos, implying that Christians fired the first proverbial shot, and that the conflict is new. A prior report on the situation in January said "Two pastors and 46 other Christians were killed in the outbreak of violence in Jos on Jan. 17, triggered when Muslim youths attacked a Catholic church; 10 church buildings were burned, and police estimated more than 300 lives were lost in the clash."

Another report elaborated:

Angry Muslim youths set fire to a church filled with worshipers, starting a riot that killed at least 27 people and wounded more than 300 in Jos, in northern Nigeria, officials said Monday. Sani Mudi, a spokesman for the local imam, said 22 people died in fighting between Christians and Muslims after rioters set fire to a Catholic church on Sunday.

Further background on Jos can be found here and here. The Afrik article continues below:

According to reports, Nigerian troops are patrolling the villages which were targeted on Sunday in a bid to prevent further violence and police say they have arrested more than 90 people suspected of inciting violence. Nonetheless villagers from the nearby communities have began to flee the area for fear of fresh bouts of violence.

"We are fleeing our village because we are afraid we might be the next target of attack by these Fulani. They have been making phone calls warning they are going to attack. We take these threats seriously. We don't want to be caught off-guard," AFP quoted a local resident as saying.

The Plateau State Christian Elders Consultative Forum complained that it had taken the army two hours to react after receiving a distress call: "For quite some time we have alerted the government to training grounds in some parts of the northern state where people are being trained to cause problems in the country... Nobody did anything about it."

Governor of Plateau state Mr. Jonah Jang said he had warned the army about reports of suspicious people with weapons hours before they attacked, but they failed to take action. "Three hours or so later, I was woken by a call that they have started burning the village and people were been hacked to death. I tried to locate the commanders. I couldn't get any of them on the telephone," Mr. Jang was quoted as saying....

So now standing up for the rights of women and non-Muslims, the freedom of speech (yes -- here is a post on those who claim that he opposes it), and the freedom of conscience is fascist.

But Jacqui Smith and the other British dhimmi officials who barred Wilders from the U.K. last year (a ban that was later reversed after it had been showered with derision) -- thugs who would silence and crush dissent -- they're apparently the leading lights of free thought and free action.

What on earth has gotten into Beck? Is he getting his talking points from Ibrahim Hooper? As Pamela Geller says, "Why would he stigmatize Wilders this way? Wilders is the embodiment of what our founding fathers extolled. Individual rights. Freedom of speech. Not sharia law." There is much more over at Atlas Shrugs -- read it all.

Beck should have more sense.

CNN ran a story about the Department of Justice officials who had previously defended jihad terror suspects. A graphic referred to the story as "Department of Jihad?"

But now Blitzer says: "CNN had no intention of suggesting that the Justice Department supports terrorism. Lawyers at the Justice Department are patriotic Americans and we certainly regret any confusion that may have been caused by our graphic."

Of course, the possibility that anyone employed by the Justice Department might not be patriotic is never considered; it wasn't intended by the graphic, and Blitzer apologizes because it is an article of faith, an unquestionable dogma, that everyone in the government is patriotic, especially Leftists, for whom it is "right-wing" to question their patriotism.

Wolf Blitzer would have served his audience much better if he has launched an investigation of Muslim Brotherhood influence in the Justice Department and in the government in general. But we are still a very, very long way from that.

You mean, as opposed to the one they're already waging?

"Iran Spy Chief Urges Media Intifada Against Israel," from Eurasia Review, February 28:

Iran's Minister of Intelligence, Heidar Moslehi on Sunday urged Muslim nations to set up a 'Media Intifada' against Israel, the state news agency ILNA reported.

Addressing the 'National-Islamic solidarity for the future of Palestine' in Tehran, the minister said forming a social Internet network would help begin a media campaign against "the Zionist regime and America," according to ILNA.

"Forming an Internet network would help disclose plots of America and the Zionist regime at the cyber space and begin a media campaign against them," Moslehi was quoted as saying.

Moslehi said "the third intifada must be the cyber intifada," reported the semi-official news agency ISNA.

"Considering our great experience in this field and in creating social networks, we could reveal the Zionist regime's crimes and its supports, we could create a full media war," Moslehi was quoted by ISNA as saying, adding that the cyber intifada against the international Zionism could be very successful....

How interesting that the same "reporter," Kelley Beaucar Vlahos, who filed this biased and shoddy FoxNews report about my FDI event last Friday at CPAC has now written two broadsides against the event, both at antisemitic paleocon sites: Antiwar.com and The American Conservative. The three pieces are similar -- Kelley Beaucar Vlahos knows how to double-dip and triple-dip -- but since she is plastering the Internet with this nonsense, responses are in order.

First, from Fox:

"Everyone knows Islam is a religion of peace that has been hijacked by a tiny minority," said Robert Spencer, sarcastically and to a great amount of applause and guffaws. Spencer, executive director of Jihad Watch and associate director of the Freedom Defense Initiative, which he recently founded with Atlas Shrugged blogger Pamela Geller, told his audience everyone believes that "like they believe in Santa Claus though no one has ever seen it."

Sloppiness Alert: Pamela Geller's blog is Atlas Shrugs, not Atlas Shrugged.

He declared that "conservative media leaders even parrot this line" that Islam is a peaceful religion at its core.

While holding up my statements as examples of some egregious falsehood -- something she does only implicitly in the Fox article but explicitly in her other iterations of it -- Kelley Beaucar Vlahos cannot and does not produce any mainstream sect of Islam or school of Islamic jurisprudence that does not teach the necessity to wage war against and subjugate unbelievers. But she probably isn't even aware that that's the case.

So defined the event, which repeated the group's message, that political correctness was preventing the American people -- elected officials and the government included -- from acknowledging -- in Geller's words -- that Islamists "have infiltrated at every level of society and all levels of government."

Re that infiltration, see here for information from two former government officials.

Spencer called recent complaints that full body scanners at airports violate the privacy and modesty of Muslim women according to Islamic law and attempts to accommodate them a "perversity," since Muslims "themselves made (scanners) necessary."...

Sloppiness Alert: I said "absurdity," not "perversity." But in any case, Kelley Beaucar Vlahos might be hard-pressed to explain why the full-body scanners are deemed necessary if it is not because of Islamic jihad terrorists like Umar Farouk Abdulmuttalab, the Christmas day underwear bomber on Flight 253, whose attempted attack is precisely the reason why the full body scanners are being contemplated.

Others speakers included Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff, who is being investigated for hate speech in Austria for her critical seminars on Islam; Simon Weng, a former slave in Sudan; Anders Gravers, a Dane who wrote Stop the Islamization of Europe; and Lt. Col Allen West (Ret.), a candidate for congress in Florida.

Sloppiness Alert: Simon's surname is Deng, not Weng. And Stop the Islamization of Europe is a group, not a book. Gravers did not "write" it, he is one of its leaders.

On to Antiwar.com:

[...] Even worse were the CPAC events this year in which the very loyalty of Americans was questioned and entire religions were deemed a threat to global security.

There is a worldwide movement waging war against the United States in the name of a religion, and with no significant opposition from those members of that religion who are not participating in that war. Yet if I point this out, I am "Orwellian":

If there was ever a manifestation of the radical impulses of these political events, it was the simply Orwellian experience of "Jihad: the Political Third Rail," presented by the Freedom Defense Initiative, the latest venture of jihad-hunters Pamela Geller (Atlas Shrugs) and Robert Spencer (Jihad Watch).

Attendees at this "unofficial" CPAC panel (yes, even among this crowd, Geller and friends are pretty radioactive) were forced to show picture identification at the door. Bodyguards roamed the capacity crowd, some of which donned lapel pins featuring crossed American and Israeli flags (meanwhile, new Muslim-American envoy Rashad Hussain should be put to a loyalty test to see if he is Muslim or American first, suggested one panelist)....

Radioactive? Sure. But because of moral and intellectual cowardice, and worse, among those doing the radiation tests.

Rashad Hussain defended a jihad terrorist, as he himself now admits having done. And Kelley Beaucar Vlahos actually likens this to supporting an American ally.

And does Kelley Beaucar Vlahos actually think that bodyguards and ID checks weren't necessary? Of course, her jihad-enabling and antisemitism are fashionable on campuses today, but if she really were an "American conservative" and ventured on to an American university campus without bodyguards today, she might suddenly be awakened to the need for them, emanating from the peace-loving Left and the jihadis whose peaceful religion she insists I was maligning.

Antiwar.com and its panel of apostates were duly dismissed from the outset of the "Third Rail" forum as an "outrageous" affront to the conservative ideas held at CPAC, just before Geller and Spencer went on to blame Islam for 9/11 and charged that Islamists "have infiltrated at every level of society and every level of government" in the United States. The Koran (which Rashad Hussain has supposedly memorized - the horror!) is to blame for global terrorism. If we do not act now, went the message, Shariah law will soon prevail in the U.S.

Yes, we're imagining all that. We're imagining all this also:

The Muslim Brotherhood "must understand that their work in America is a kind of grand Jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and 'sabotaging' its miserable house by their hands and the hands of the believers so that it is eliminated and Allah's religion is made victorious over all other religions." -- Mohamed Akram, "An Explanatory Memorandum on the General Strategic Goal for the Group in North America," May 22, 1991, Government Exhibit 003-0085, U.S. vs. HLF, et al. P. 7 (21).

"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. . . . Eventually there will be a Muslim in the White House dictating the laws of Shariah." -- Muhammad Faheed, Muslim Students Association meeting, Queensborough Community College, 2003

"Let us damn America, let us damn Israel, let us damn them and their allies until death." -- former University of South Florida professor and Palestinian Islamic Jihad leader Sami al-Arian

"Very soon, Allah willing, Rome will be conquered, just like Constantinople was, as was prophesized by our Prophet Muhammad. Today, Rome is the capital of the Catholics, or the Crusader capital. . . . This capital of theirs will be an advanced post for the Islamic conquests, which will spread through Europe in its entirety, and then will turn to the two Americas." -- Hamas MP and Islamic cleric Yunus al-Astal, 2008

"I have complete faith that Islam will invade Europe and America, because Islam has logic and a mission." -- Muslim Brotherhood leader Muhammad Akef, 2004

"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." -- CAIR cofounder and longtime Board chairman Omar Ahmad, 1998 (denial noted and full story explained at link)

"I wouldn't want to create the impression that I wouldn't like the government of the United States to be Islamic sometime in the future." -- CAIR spokesman Ibrahim Hooper, 1993

"If only Muslims were clever politically, they could take over the United States and replace its constitutional government with a caliphate." -- prominent American Muslim leader Siraj Wahhaj, 2002

Back to Kelley Beaucar Vlahos, who prefers to pretend that we are making all that up:

Fortunately, many of us still consider standing up to the government for doing things like detaining people indefinitely without charge, or presuming suspects guilty until proven innocent, or trying to prevent the persecution of an entire population based on religious beliefs, to be "constitutional correctness," plain and simple.

Of course, no one is advocating the "persecution of an entire population based on religious beliefs," but by means of that dishonest little reductio Kelly Beaucar Vlahos hopes to bamboozle people into thinking that there is no violent or supremacist imperative in Islam, and that those who think there is a jihad against the U.S. are just imagining it. Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, Nidal Hasan, and so many others would beg to differ.

And finally, Kelley Beaucar Vlahos at The American Conservative, where her crying need for an attentive editor is especially in evidence:

[...] The Newsmax alert included a headline, "Pope Warns about Full Body Scanners." Indeed, Pope Benedict XVI told an audience of aerospace industry types this week that while he is aware of the terrorist threat that has prompted enhanced screening at airports, "the primary asset to be safeguarded and treasured is the person, in his or her integrity," and that plans to implement devices that present screeners with "virtually naked" images of individual travelers compromises that integrity. [...]

But at CPAC friday [sic!], at an "unofficial" panel sponsored by jihad-hunters Pamela Geller (Atlas Shrugs) and Robert Spencer (Jihad Watch), called "Jihad: the Political Third Rail," participants balked at these religious arguments against full body scanners -- particularly because those concerns had been raised earlier, not by Catholics, but by Muslims. According to a group of Islamic scholars who posted a statement online, the intrusive images taken by full body scanners fly in the face of Koranic teachings on modesty. The group, the Figh [sic! It's Fiqh] Council of North America (FCNA), issued a fatwah, or religious edict, preventing Muslims from going through such scanners at airports.

Of course, as it stands now, anyone can opt out of a full body scan by agreeing to a "pat down." But Spencer roundly mocked these Muslims, because as far as he was concerned, Islam was responsible for 9/11 and Muslims themselves "made (full body scanners) necessary." In fact, the entire thrust of the panel was that Islam is a violent religion, a plague in fact, that needed to be cured. So any idea that Muslims would consider their faith a reason to deny airport screening was rich. "Former Muslim" and speaker Wafa Sultan, cheered the full body scan, suggesting that it would be so repulsive to Muslims -- and thanks to the fatawa [sic! This is plural of "fatwa," but there was only one], inconvenient -- that they might stop trying to bombing [sic!] airplanes....

Interestingly enough, you can add Jewish law to the fatwahs and papal declarations on full body scans...

There are two things I am taking away from this issue: one, the full body scans are creepy and intrusive and violate basic civil liberties of all individuals -- on a global scale. Secondly, the sneering tenor of Robert Spencer about Muslim women and their "modesty" cannot hide the fact that the three major religions of the world -- Christianity, Judaism and Islam -- all regard modesty a prevailing virtue and, especially in the conservative observances of all three, it cannot be compromised by either the individual or the state.

Politics and the people who practice them can be so crude and reactionary- but all three religions, and the people who practice them, have much more in common outside of those political prejudices than they would care to admit. All three could create a united front on the issue of full body scans, but because one side blames the other for the use of the screening in the first place, they will remain divided....

One wonders if Kelley Beaucar Vlahos is willfully missing the point. She did not bother to speak to me, of course, before compiling this triplicate report; if she had, she might have discovered that on February 11, a week before the FDI event, I wrote that "there may be plenty of reasons to oppose body scanners." I was not expressing scorn for the modesty of Muslim women, as Kelley Beaucar Vlahos suggests, but for the idea that Muslims should be exempt from these scanners when it was the actions of jihadis that made them necessary.

But if Kelley Beaucar Vlahos is as inattentive a listener as she is a speller and writer, it is perhaps understandable that this point escaped her.

Journalistic irresponsibility and bias example #281,328,616, from "Know Your Conspiracies" in Newsweek, February 12 (thanks to Daniel). Number Nine on this list of crackpot conspiracy theories comes this gem:

9. The Council on American-Islamic Relations is trying to infiltrate Capitol Hill and spread jihad.

Author Dave Gaubatz alleges that the mainstream group is both connected to Islamist terrorists and international jihad and is working to infiltrate the American government by placing interns on Capitol Hill.
Proponents: Dave Gaubatz, Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.), Rep. Sue Myrick (R-N.C.), Joseph Farah.
Kernel of Truth? CAIR has tried to place interns on Capitol Hill, but as it points out, that's standard practice for advocacy groups of all types and allegiances. There's no proof of sinister motives or an effort to encourage international jihad.

Kernel of Truth? Kernel of Half-Truth is more like it. Newsweek does not see fit to mention that CAIR is an unindicted co-conspirator in a Hamas terror funding case -- so named by the Justice Department. It says nothing about how CAIR operatives have repeatedly refused to denounce Hamas and Hizballah as terrorist groups. Also mentioned is the fact that several former CAIR officials have been convicted of various crimes related to jihad terror, and that CAIR's cofounder and longtime Board chairman (Omar Ahmad), as well as its chief spokesman (Honest Ibe Hooper), have made Islamic supremacist statements.

It's all just a conspiracy theory, you see, you greasy Islamophobes. So I guess CAIR is not an unindicted co-conspirator in a Hamas funding case. And that it has condemned Hamas and Hizballah as terror groups. And that none of its formal officials have been convicted of terror activities. We can relax and go back to sleep, because Newsweek says that everything is A-OK.

At Big Government, Pamela Geller responds to the FoxNews article to which I responded here:

At the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) 2010, Robert Spencer and I are launching a new organization, the Freedom Defense Initiative (FDI), by presenting a conference entitled "Jihad: The Political Third Rail -- What They Are Not Telling You." The conference is designed to speak the truths that others will not speak - and the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) is enraged.

The conference is designed to educate Americans about the Muslim Brotherhood's infiltration at the highest levels of the U.S. government, as well as its war on free speech: its attempt to silence and discredit those who speak up against the jihad and Sharia encroachment in the West. Emphasis will be on the international character of the jihad against the West and on how the Islamic war on free speech (and the media's self-imposed blackout on this issue, as in the Fort Hood massacre) is part and parcel of the same jihad against the West that terrorists are pursuing by violent means.

And that's too much for CAIR. Ibrahim Hooper, the spokesman for the unindicted co-conspirator and front for the Muslim Brotherhood CAIR (the Council on American-Islamic Relations), said, "They're free to be anti-Muslim bigots if they like, but it's really up to the organizers of CPAC to determine if they're going to allow their conference to be associated with the hate-filled views of those who will be speaking."

Why doesn't FOX explain what CAIR is? As Robert Spencer explained at Jihad Watch:

"CAIR is an unindicted co-conspirator in a Hamas terror funding case -- so named by the Justice Department. CAIR operatives have repeatedly refused to denounce Hamas and Hizballah as terrorist groups. Several former CAIR officials have been convicted of various crimes related to jihad terror. CAIR's cofounder and longtime Board chairman (Omar Ahmad), as well as its chief spokesman (Honest Ibe Hooper), have made Islamic supremacist statements. CAIR has warred against free speech in the past."

Why doesn't FOX read the documents from the Holy Land trial, which exposed the Muslim Brotherhood's agenda of "eliminating and destroying Western civilization from within," and made plain CAIR's connection to the Brotherhood? Why does FOX cover for this subversive organization? And why do they run everything they say unchallenged while smearing me in every other paragraph?

Why am I called a bigot by a vocal anti-Semite, unchallenged?...

Good question. Read it all.

Aaqil Ahmed says that to give preference to Christian programming would be "living in the past." Clearly he sees an Islamic future for Britain.

"Church of England is 'living in the past', says BBC's head of religion," by Jonathan Wynne-Jones in the Telegraph, February 6 (thanks to Anthony):

The BBC's head of religion has accused the Church of England of "living in the past" and said that the corporation should not give Christianity preferential treatment.

Aaqil Ahmed, a controversial executive whose appointment last year prompted more than 100 complaints, said: "I think all the faiths should be treated in the same way. I don't believe in treating any faith differently."

He dismissed claims that the BBC was marginalising religion as overly simplistic and argued that Christianity, in particular, was already covered well on television....

There has been growing concern at top levels of the Church over the corporation's approach to religion, with warnings that it must not ignore its Christian audience....

Bishops, clergy and lay members of the General Synod will vote this week on a motion calling on the state broadcaster to explain why its television coverage of Christianity has declined so steeply in recent years.

Output has fallen from 177 hours of religious programming on BBC television in 1987/88 to 155 hours in 2007/08 - a period during which the overall volume of programming has doubled.

However, in an interview with The Sunday Telegraph, Mr Ahmed, an award-winning programme-maker, said that the Church's criticisms were too simplistic.

"I don't believe that we should be basing the debate on 20-year-old figures, the conversation is far more complicated than that," he said.

"It's very easy to live in the past, but we live in the present. In a few years' time the way we're going to view television will change radically, so the conversation will become even more redundant.

"We'll listen to what they say, but we're clear that we know what we're doing and we'll stick to that."...

Mr Ahmed - the first Muslim to hold his post - revealed that BBC One will air two explicitly Christian documentaries during Holy Week....

Mr Ahmed's comment that Christianity should not receive preferential treatment comes despite nearly three-quarters of the population describing themselves as Christian in the last census....

Sabrina Tavernise reports in today's New York Times -- a story that begins on the front-page, and continues at great length inside -- about the rape and beating to death of a 12-year-old Pakistani girl by her employer, a rich and prominent member of the Lahore bar. The story is very long, and I read it, eager at long last to see the Times begin to cover the hideous treatment of Christians in Pakistan. The girl was Christian, and Christian girls frequently find that the only employment they can get are as domestic slaves to Muslim masters.

Here is that story.

By now, like you, I am used to a lot. I have long become inured to all the ingenious or clumsy ways the New York Times, The Washington Post, the Boston Globe, the L.A. Times, and hundreds of other papers, and of course NPR, and the Nightly News as brought to Americans by CNN, NBC, ABC, CBS, and Fox (the ranters who, when it comes to Islam, always fall noticeably silent, perhaps that silence being silent testimony to the share of Murdoch's News Corporation owned by that Saudi prince with the facial tic), avoid discussing forthrightly what Islam inculcates, or how non-Muslims are treated in countries where Muslims dominate.

But even I was surprised at how Sabrina Tavernise, and her paper, The New York Times, managed to carry this story and not once mention the fact that the girl who was beaten to death was a Christian, that her employer is Muslim, and that the Muslim lawyers of Lahore have refused to take up her case or cause, and have even terrified the handful of Christian lawyers, too, from making her case a cause célèbre.

For this is merely one case among many, of repeated miseries and murders inflicted by Muslim Pakistanis on Christians in Pakistan. If you seek examples in the modern world of the Christian heroes and martyrs to rival those of the ancient world, then surely they are to be found among the Christians in Muslim-ruled lands, and perhaps above all today in Pakistan.

Just so that the Sabrina-tavernises of this world get this straight, let's simply remind her, and her employer, The New York Times, of what it is that Pakistan's Christians must endure. A little - just a minute's worth, from recent stories put up at Jihad Watch:

"Pakistani scientist found guilty of attempted murder" by Amy Sahba for CNN, February 3, is a typical example of the mainstream media's deliberate obfuscation of the global jihad.

In it, Islamic jihadist Aafia Siddiqui is identified as a "Pakistani neuroscientist" and "an American-educated neuroscientist."

We learn that "Siddiqui shot at two FBI special agents, a U.S. Army warrant officer, an Army captain and military interpreters while she was being held unsecured at an Afghan facility on July 18, 2008." We learn that "Afghan police had arrested her a day earlier outside the Ghazni governor's compound in central Afghanistan after finding her with bomb-making instructions, excerpts from the "Anarchist's Arsenal," papers with descriptions of U.S. landmarks, and substances sealed in bottles and glass jars." We learn that "Siddiqui had 'handwritten notes that referred to a "mass casualty attack"' listing several locations in the United States and 'construction of "dirty bombs."'"

Sixteen paragraphs into the article, we learn that the FBI suspected Siddiqui of "ties to al Qaeda."

But what is Al-Qaeda? Why are they fighting? Can't we get even a line on that? Can't we get even half a line about why an "American-educated neuroscientist" would want to make war on America? Is there some scientists' war on the United States?

There is nothing special about this CNN story. It is just like thousands of other news stories since 9/11. And this is why the level of public awareness of what exactly we are facing in this war is so abysmally low. During World War II, "Why We Fight" material was common. Now it is unheard of -- at least in any honest form -- because to talk about it honestly would lead directly back to the Islamic jihad, and honest talk about that is forbidden.

In "Take care when CAIR is quoted as a 'reliable' source" in JWeekly.com, February 4, Eric Rozenman of CAMERA offers the common sense on this unsavory and charmless group of thugs (Hi, Honest Ibe! Good morning, Brave Ahmed!) that we have noted many times at Jihad Watch, and that still eludes (on purpose) the great investigators in the mainstream media:

After the Fort Hood shooting massacre in November, allegedly carried out by Maj. Nidal Hasan, USA Today used a quote from Ibrahim Hooper of the Council on American-Islamic Relations -- but identified CAIR only as "a Muslim advocacy group."

When five American Muslims from the Alexandria, Va., area were arrested in Pakistan on suspicion of intent to wage jihad, the Washington Post in December reported without context that "two major groups -- the Muslim Public Affairs Council and CAIR -- said this week that they would launch counter-radicalization programs aimed at young people."

News media often treat CAIR uncritically as a civil rights organization.

But CAIR was an unindicted co-conspirator in a major terrorism funding case. And at least five people associated with CAIR, including some who were staff members at the time of their charges, have been jailed or deported on terrorism-related charges.

In December, NPR introduced a segment with Hooper about the Americans arrested in Pakistan by alluding to something more: " ... It's important to note that there's been a contentious relationship between CAIR and the FBI in recent years."

But details such as the following were absent:

• In 2009, Ghassan Elashi and Shukri Abu Baker, founding members of the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development, once America's largest Muslim charity, were each sentenced to 65 years in prison in a federal case charging HLF with funneling more than $12 million to Hamas.

Hamas is responsible for the murders of hundreds of Israelis. Elashi also was a founder of CAIR's Texas chapter and had been convicted in a 2004 Hamas-related case.

• Mousa Abu Marzook, a one-time CAIR official, was designated by the U.S. government in 1995 as a "terrorist and Hamas leader." He now helps direct Hamas from Syria.

• Randall Royer, CAIR's former civil rights coordinator, began serving a 20-year federal sentence in 2004 for, among other things, helping al Qaida and the Taliban fight U.S. troops in Afghanistan and recruiting for Lashkar e-Taiba, the jihadi network blamed for the 2008 Mumbai massacres.

• Bassem Khafagi, CAIR's former community relations director, was arrested for involvement with the Islamic Assembly of North America. IANA was suspected of aiding sheiks opposed to the Saudi Arabian government and linked to al Qaida leader Osama bin Laden. Khafagi pleaded guilty to visa and bank fraud charges and was deported.

• Rabih Haddad, once a CAIR fundraiser, was arrested on terrorism-related charges. In 2002, the U.S. Treasury designated the Global Relief Foundation, which Haddad had co-founded, as a terrorist-financing organization. He was deported.

• In 2009, members of the Somali immigrant community in Minneapolis protested at a CAIR ice cream social, alleging that the group had discouraged local Somalis from cooperating with the FBI. The bureau was investigating the disappearance of at least 20 young Somali American men, who reportedly traveled to Somalia to wage jihad against the U.N.-supported transitional government....

Read it all.

Just so that you don't get the idea that the Post is "Islamophobic" for reporting on this story, Reuven Blau and Dan Mangan include a completely gratuitous reference to an illegal bar mitzvah party organized by a Jewish chaplain for an inmate's son. Box cutters = bar mitzvah. Check.

"Muslim chaplain 'smuggled' box cutters into jail," by Reuven Blau and Dan Mangan in the New York Post, February 3 (thanks to herr Oyal):

A Muslim chaplain for the city Department of Correction was arrested this morning for allegedly trying to smuggle in three box-cutters to a lower Manhattan jail.

The imam, Imam Zul-Qarnain Shahid, has worked as a DOC jail chaplain for three years, according to department sources.

Several sources said Shahid was caught this morning attempting to bring three box-cutters into the jail known as the Tombs during a visit there. It was not known why he was visiting the jail....

A DOC chaplain assigned to the Tombs - politically connected rabbi Leib Glanz - resigned last year after The Post exclusively revealed that he had organized a bar mitzvah party within the jail's walls for the son of an inmate. The bar mitzvah featured catered food and a live band, as well as dozens of non-inmate guests....

The family that prays together, slays together.

Note that this AP report makes no mention of Islam or jihad. The motive for this plot is completely out of the picture. Imagine a news story about the Duquesne Spy Ring in World War II -- a network of German spies in the U.S. -- that never mentioned Nazis, Germans, or the war, but pretended that these men were isolated individuals who had taken up spying as a hobby. That's what this article is, and what most mainstream media articles about jihadist activity are like.

"NY grand jury indicts father of man in terror plot," by Tom Hays for the Associated Press, February 1 (thanks to Creeping Sharia):

NEW YORK -- The father of an airport driver accused of trying to cook up homemade bombs in a Colorado motel for an attack on New York City was charged Monday with trying to get rid of chemicals and other evidence.

FBI agents arrested Mohammed Wali Zazi on Monday at his home in a Denver suburb after a previous charge, lying to the government, was dropped. He had been out on bail.

A new indictment unsealed in federal court in Brooklyn accused Zazi of conspiring with others to destroy or hide "glasses, masks, liquid chemicals and containers" that were evidence in a foiled terrorism plot.

Zazi, the father of suspect Najibullah Zazi, was scheduled to appear in a Denver court Monday. There was no immediate response to a phone message left with his attorney, and the U.S. attorney's office in Brooklyn, which is leading the investigation, declined to comment.

Prosecutors allege that Najibullah Zazi and others bought beauty supplies in Colorado to make peroxide-based bombs and that he tried to mix the explosives in a hotel room there. In early September he drove to New York, where investigators say they lifted notes on bomb-making from his computer.

Authorities have said they believe Zazi, who was arrested in September, wanted to attack New York's transit system - something Attorney General Eric Holder called one of the most serious terrorism cases since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001....

In "Nothing To Fear: Misreading Muslim immigration in Europe" by John R. Bowen in the Boston Review's January/February 2010 edition (thanks to Quasimodo), there appears this paragraph:

Europe's anti-Islam sentiment may be expressed most visibly in memoirs because Europeans have been reticent to condemn Islam--or religion more generally--outright. Americans, however, seem to prefer a less subtle approach. In the United States, alongside the autobiographies, we find two kinds of direct attack on Islam: as a "gutter religion" (Robert Spencer's The Complete Infidel's Guide to the Koran) and as a threat to our fundamental values--a threat that has already overrun Europe and is now heading this way.

Yikes! That's some bad craziness, eh? A "gutter religion"! Imagine someone using that kind of hateful and incendiary rhetoric! Why, it's unconscionable! It's paranoid! It's...evil!

There's just one catch: the words "gutter religion," despite the quotes around them in Bowen's piece, never actually appear in The Complete Infidel's Guide to the Koran. In fact, nowhere in any of my nine books, over a thousand articles, and over twenty thousand blog posts have I ever referred to Islam as a "gutter religion." Bowen is falsely attributing the words to me.

There is, however, someone who has used those words. Louis Farrakhan some years back referred to Judaism as a "gutter religion."

This is a common practice of the Left and of jihadists as well: they project what they themselves do onto their enemies. They do this so reliably that if you want to know what the Leftists and their jihadist allies are doing, look at what they're accusing others of doing -- that is always a reliable indicator. And the antisemitism that has become so fashionable on the Left these days points back to Farrakhan's quote, and to the true purveyors of hate paranoia in this scenario.

Their professional guidelines tell them not to do so.

"The Society of Professional Journalists: Why We Never Get the Straight Story on Islamic Jihad," by Pamela Geller in Big Journalism, January 18:

In case you've ever wondered why you never got the straight story on Islam directly after Sept. 11, and still haven't, and why the media seems in the tank for jihad, here's a clue.

The Society of Professional Journalists (SPJ) issued this directive a couple of weeks after 9/11; for sheer propaganda, their "Diversity Guidelines" are hard to beat. In fact, the enemy who attacked our country in an attempt to bring it down may just as well have been writing the narrative.

The "guidelines," adopted at the Society's national convention on October 6, 2001, urge journalists to "take steps against racial profiling in their coverage of the war on terrorism and to reaffirm their commitment to use language that is informative and not inflammatory."

How? Among other things:

Seek out people from a variety of ethnic and religious backgrounds when photographing Americans mourning those lost in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania.

Seek truth through a variety of voices and perspectives that help audiences understand the complexities of the events in Pennsylvania, New York City and Washington, D.C.

Seek out experts on military strategies, public safety, diplomacy, economics and other pertinent topics who run the spectrum of race, class, gender and geography.

Regularly seek out a variety of perspectives for your opinion pieces. Check your coverage against the five Maynard Institute for Journalism Education fault lines of race and ethnicity, class, geography, gender and generation.

Translation: even if the horror, murder and bloodshed of jihad are inflammatory, don't tell the people.

To deflect attention away from the Islamic character of jihad, reporters should "portray Muslims, Arabs and Middle Eastern and South Asian Americans in the richness of their diverse experiences."

Portray the beheaders, the homicide bombers, and the infiltrators in the "richness of their diverse experience"? You mean the stonings, amputations, sharia law, clitorectomies, Jew-hatred, Hindu-hatred, the brutal conquests of India and Persia, the caliphate? Of course not!

Journalists should "make an extra effort to include olive-complexioned and darker men and women, Sikhs, Muslims and devout religious people of all types in arts, business, society columns and all other news and feature coverage, not just stories about the crisis." In other words, make an extra effort to depict Muslims not engaged in jihad.

Read it all.

Although the meeting centered on Arab media, this bodes ill for honest discourse about Islamic jihad in Murdoch-owned media outlets. After all, we have already seen the effects of Prince Alwaleed's money upon Murdoch.

"Prince Alwaleed bin Talal's media meetings," from Monsters and Critics, January 18:

Saudi's Prince Alwaleed bin Talal has met Rupert Murdoch to discuss "future potential" alliances.

The prince - who is one of Saudi Arabia's richest businessman - held talks last week with the chief executive officer of News Corporation, in New York, about projects they may work on together in the future.

The meetings, which mainly focused on "economic and investment issues, especially in the media sector", specifically touched on Rotana Media, which provides Arabic and English television content in the Middle East and is owned by the prince....

If the deal goes ahead it would significantly strengthen the ties between two of the world's leading media moguls.

The prince has helped build Rotana into one of the largest media conglomerates in the Arab world, with holdings in print, television, radio, film, digital and music.

Churches are being firebombed in Malaysia, and for AP that is "similar" to a rum bottle being thrown at a mosque. "Rum bottle thrown at Malaysia mosque amid tension," from The Associated Press, January 16 (thanks to Pamela):

KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia -- Vandals threw a rum bottle at a mosque in the first attack on a Muslim house of worship after almost a dozen similar assaults on churches in Malaysia the past week, police said Saturday.

Police have dismissed the attacks as vandalism, but they have caused disquiet in multiracial Malaysia and raised fears of more widespread religious tensions.

One Sikh temple and 11 churches have been hit - most of them with molotov cocktails - since Jan. 8....

Maybe the molotov cocktails were made from rum.

"If some guy's got a lot of extra money in Jeddah, I don't mind taking it"

Ibrahim Hooper, or "Honest Ibe" as we affectionately call him here, is caught redhanded in the above surreptitiously filmed video boasting about getting money for CAIR from the Saudis -- although he has publicly denied that CAIR gets any Saudi money at all.

And as for Fox, I have long wondered the same thing.

"Why does Fox News promote terror-tied, FBI-shunned group?," from WND, January 11 (thanks to Doug):

Long a reliably patriotic media source in the war on terror, Fox News may now be among news outlets who have fallen under the spell of the Council on American-Islamic Relations' propaganda machine.

"We own the media," CAIR National Communications Director Ibrahim Hooper privately brags, according to a source currently working inside the aggressive Islamist lobby group.

Fox News host Bill O'Reilly last week invited the TV-savvy Hooper on his show to debate passenger profiling, the second guest appearance by the CAIR spokesman in a month. At the end of the segment, O'Reilly thanked Hooper and called him a "stand-up guy," sending shockwaves through the conservative blogosphere.

CAIR is no ordinary guest. The government has blacklisted it as an unindicted terrorist co-conspirator, and the group remains under criminal suspicion by the FBI, which has cut off outreach ties to it.

Congress and the IRS also are investigating CAIR, which has had no fewer than 15 executives and board members convicted or implicated in terror probes, including its founding chairman.

In addition, CAIR's very existence as a legitimate corporation has been challenged in a lawsuit in federal court.

Given CAIR's proven ties to terrorism - which O'Reilly failed to mention - why would Fox offer the group's top executives a virtually uncritical forum on prime-time cable TV? Saudi Arabian money may be a factor.

It turns out that the same billionaire Saudi prince who owns a major stake in Fox's parent company also bankrolls Washington-based CAIR. And sensitive State Department records reveal Hooper - despite his repeated public denials - has personally solicited cash from the prince and other members of the ruling Saudi royal family during recent trips to the kingdom.

The common financial bond between Prince Al-Waleed bin Talal and Fox, and between bin Talal and CAIR, raises questions not only about Fox News's independence, but about the truthfulness of CAIR's top spokesman.

Hooper repeatedly has denied that CAIR receives foreign support, insisting it's a "grass-roots" nonprofit organization. In CAIR press releases, Hooper has stated unequivocally: "We do not support directly or indirectly or receive support from any overseas group or government."

However, smoking-gun video footage obtained during a recent six-month covert investigation of CAIR puts the lie to Hooper's claims.

In a private conversation with undercover researcher Chris Gaubatz, who was posing at the time as a CAIR intern, Hooper boasted that he personally can "bring (in) a half million of overseas money" a year, adding: "If some guy's got a lot of extra money in Jeddah (Saudi Arabia), I don't mind taking it." Hooper made the remarks Aug. 30, 2008, during the Islamic Society of North America's 2008 annual convention in Columbus, Ohio.

A State Department cable citing Hooper by name, moreover, directly contradicts Hooper's denials about foreign support, according to the blockbuster book "Muslim Mafia: Inside the Secret Underworld That's Conspiring to Islamize America," which exposes the secret inner workings of CAIR, among other radical Muslim Brotherhood front groups in America. (The book is based, in part, on voluminous documentary and videotaped evidence gathered by Gaubatz during his internship.)...

Read it all.

"Outside court, about a dozen people held up signs reading 'Islam is against terrorism' and 'Not in the name of Islam.'" -- Reuters, January 8

"About 20 Muslims from nearby Dearborn appeared outside the courthouse to denounce Mr. Abdulmutallab. They carried large American flags and colorful signs that read 'NOT in the name of Islam' and 'Islam is against terrorism.'" -- New York Times, January 8, first version

"Dozens of Muslims from nearby Dearborn gathered outside the courthouse carrying large American flags and colorful signs that read 'NOT in the name of Islam' and 'Islam is against terrorism.'" -- New York Times, January 8, second version

"About 50 Detroit-area Muslims chanted 'We are Americans' as they marched behind metal barricades outside the courthouse. Many carried U.S. flags or signs with messages such as 'Not in the name of Islam.'" -- Associated Press, January 8

"An estimated 150 people attended a peaceful demonstration, carrying large American flags and signs that read, 'Not in the Name of Islam' and 'Not in Our Name.'" -- Detroit News, January 9

Many people over the last few years have asked why Muslims have demonstrated against Muhammad cartoons, and against the Pope's remarks in Regensberg in 2006, and against a teddy bear in Sudan, but have not demonstrated against jihad violence even as they profess to condemn it. In response to this, one of the chief talking points of disingenuous Islamic spokesmen in the U.S. has been that Muslims have been speaking out against terrorism, but that the "Islamophobic" media ignore them.

In reality, however, the mainstream media is avid to find and highlight moderate Muslims who speak out against terrorism, and as you can see from above, will even inflate the numbers of those who do so if reality is too embarrassing. And it's also interesting to note that Pamela Geller and I had 200 people at the Rally for Rifqa in November, and got virtually no press coverage -- while the media wants to spotlight Muslim moderates, it has little or no interest in giving any coverage to those oppressed by Islamic supremacism.

In any case, are these demonstrators sincerely going to challenge the mainstream understanding of the Islamic texts and teachings that jihadists use to justify violence and supremacism? We shall see. But I won't be holding my breath.

Most of the stories that have gone out about Abdulmutallab's Internet postings focused on what a lonely fellow he was. This little tidbit about the great Islamic empire has not been as widely reported. "My jihad fantasy.. Muslims will win and rule the world - UMAR ABDULMUTALLAB," by Andrew Gregory for the Mirror, December 30 (thanks to James):

Failed suicide bomber Umar Abdulmutallab spelt out his nightmare vision of a world ruled by fanatical Islamic hardliners in a series of rambling internet rants.

In one, he said: "I won't go into too much details about my fantasy, but basically they are jihad fantasies.

"I imagine how the great jihad will take place, how the muslims will win (Allah willing) and rule the whole world and establish the greatest empire once again."...

In the days after the Fort Hood jihad attack, we noted here just a few of the blizzard of backlash stories that ran in the mainstream media, and I wrote that there would be no backlash. And there has not been. Americans are decent people who do not victimize random innocents. But the Islamic advocacy groups in the U.S. need to maintain their victim status for political reasons -- it is they who want and need a backlash, and they who are responsible for all the mainstream media handwringing over something that never happened or was even likely to happen.

"The Myth of the Anti-Muslim Backlash: Hysteria hasn't swept the country since the Ft. Hood terrorist attack," by Gary Bauer in The Weekly Standard, December 22 (thanks to Maxwell):

Backlash: a strong or violent reaction, as to some social or political change.

It has been more than a month since U.S. Army Major Nidal Malik Hasan allegedly murdered 14 people and wounded 30 others at Fort Hood military base in Texas. And while we were led to believe that the rampage by Hasan, who is Muslim, would provoke a strong and violent reaction against Arab and Muslim Americans, a backlash has been conspicuous only by its absence.

In fact, in the immediate aftermath of each of the dozen attacks by Muslim Americans since 9-11, the conversation has been dominated by predictions of inevitable violence toward Muslims by bigoted Americans unable to control their rage. And each time a backlash has been virtually nonexistent. Our journalistic and political elites have become terrorism's unwitting domestic enablers, perceiving religion-based violence where there is none, while ignoring it where it is widespread and intensifying.

After Hasan's terrorist attack, an Associated Press headline read, "Another attack leaves U.S. Muslims fearing backlash." A Christian Science Monitor story was titled, "Fort Hood Shootings: US Muslims feel new heat."

Department of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano declared: "We object to, and do not believe, that anti-Muslim sentiment should emanate from this." And U.S. Army Chief of Staff George Casey said, "I'm concerned that this increased speculation [about Hasan's motives] could cause a backlash against some of our Muslim soldiers. And I've asked our Army leaders to be on the lookout for that. ... as horrific as this tragedy was, if our diversity becomes a casualty, I think that's worse."

But the data show that America's more than two million Muslims have little to fear from their fellow citizens. According to crime statistics compiled by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the number of hate crimes against Muslim Americans increased in the immediate aftermath of 9-11. But it declined precipitously after that, and has remained low ever since.

Of 6,832 religion-based hate crimes reported between 2002 and 2006, 4,627, or 68 percent, were committed not against Muslims but against Jews, while 744, or 11 percent, were committed against Muslims. In 2007 there were 1,477 reported offenses motivated by religious bias. Again, 68 percent were committed against Jews, and only 9 percent against Muslims. Reported hate crimes against Catholics and Protestants accounted for 8.4 percent.

And recently-released FBI statistics for 2008 show that 65.7 percent of religion-motivated hate crimes were anti-Jewish, 8.4 percent anti-Christian and 7.7 percent anti-Islamic. That means there were 1,013 cases of hate crimes motivated by anti-Semitism in 2008, the highest number of hate crimes against Jews reported since 2001. There were just 105 reported cases of anti-Islamic hate crimes.

Don't believe the FBI's statistics? Data compiled by Muslim lobby groups paint a similar picture. The American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee Research Institute's 2003-2007 Report on Hate Crimes and Discrimination Against Arab Americans found "The rate of violent hate crimes against Arab Americans continued to decline from the immediate post 9-11 surge, to a level somewhat but not dramatically increased over that seen in the five years leading up to the 2001 attacks." A 2008 survey by Human Rights First called Violence Against Muslims found only two assaults based on anti-Muslim sentiment in 2007 and 2008, no incidents under "violent backlash to terrorist and other attacks" and just one incident under "attacks on places of worship and cemeteries."

Almost all of the "backlash" against Muslims following acts of Islamic domestic terrorism has consisted of acerbic blog posts, tightened restrictions at mosques and enhanced airport security....

Read it all.

AP says he is a "Chicago businessman," leaving -- as always -- unanswered the question of why a prosperous Daleyesque Chicago burgher like Tahawwur Hussain Rana would be delighted by the brutal massacres of innocent people, and be plotting more of them.

"Feds: Chicago suspect knew of Mumbai attack," from AP, December 14 (thanks to all who sent this in):

WASHINGTON -- A Chicago terrorism suspect knew in advance about the deadly Mumbai terror attacks -- and offered congratulations to the killers, federal prosecutors charged Monday.

Papers filed in federal court in Chicago say Tahawwur Hussain Rana learned an attack was about to happen while traveling days before the Nov. 26, 2008 start of the carnage that left 166 people dead.

Rana, a Chicago businessman, is charged with providing material support to terrorists. Prosecutors say after the Mumbai attacks, he told an alleged co-conspirator, David Coleman Headley, to pass along his congratulations to the terror group for its excellent planning and preparation.

"Rana was told of the attacks before they happened and offered compliments and congratulations to those who carried them out afterwards," Assistant U.S. Attorney Daniel Collins wrote in the court filing.

The filing also charges that in a secretly recorded conversation in September 2009, Rana and Headley discussed possible attacks on a number of other sites in India: Somnath, a temple; Denmark, Bollywood, a reference to the Indian film industry, and Shiv Sena, a political party with strains of Hindu nationalism....

They were just increasing the peace!

Here is that rare thing, an attempt to show with specific Qur'anic citations how an Islamic jihadist is misusing the Qur'an and misunderstanding the true, peaceful teachings of Islam. Usually those who assert such things are extremely vague about just how Islam and the Qur'an are being misused.

Unfortunately, however, this is written by Salam al-Marayati of the Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC) -- a fact that immediately arouses suspicion. MPAC, for example, has trafficked in moral equivalence between jihadists and anti-jihadists regarding Israel. It was no surprise when the organization joined CAIR and other groups in 2004 in signing a "Joint Muslims/Arab-American Statement on Israel Violence in Gaza." The organizations echoed some of the most virulent rhetoric that jihadists employ in their offensives against the Jewish state, condemning "Israel's recent indiscriminate killings of innocent Palestinians, including many children," without even mentioning the targeting by Palestinian suicide bombers of Israeli citizens on buses and in restaurants, or the Israeli government's diametrically opposed policy of never targeting civilians.

Such extreme rhetoric was nothing new for MPAC. On the afternoon of September 11, 2001, on a Los Angeles radio show, al-Maryati added fuel to the wildest, most paranoid conspiracy theories about the attacks that had just unfolded: "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."

This was not al-Maryati's only outburst of anti-Israeli malevolence. Daniel Pipes recounts a "February 1996 incident when a Palestinian named Muhammad Hamida shouted the fundamentalist war cry, Allahu Akbar (Allah is Great), as he drove his car intentionally into a crowded bus stop in Jerusalem, killing one Israeli and injuring 23 others. Before he could escape or hurt anyone else, Hamida was shot dead. Commenting on the affair, Mr. Al-Marayati said not a word about Hamida's murderous rampage but instead focused on Hamida's death, which he called 'a provocative act,' and demanded the extradition of his executors to America 'to be tried in a U.S. court' on terrorism charges."

Al-Maryati in 1996 equated violent jihadists with the Founding Fathers: "Most Islamic movements have been branded as terrorists as a result of the rising extremism from a handful of militants. American freedom fighters hundreds of years ago were also regarded as terrorists by the British."

"Repentance is the only option for the Fort Hood killer," by Salam al-Marayati in the Wall Street Journal, December 9 (thanks to all who sent this in):

[...] Maj. Hasan took an oath as a member of the U.S. military to defend our country. He also took a Hippocratic oath to protect his patients. The violation of these oaths is a violation of the Quranic principle which states that making a pledge to anyone is tantamount to making a pledge to God. The Quran states: "(Be not like those) who use their oaths as a means of deceiving one another" (16:92).

QED, eh? Salam al-Marayati would have us believe that it's very simple: the Qur'an says don't break your oaths, Hasan broke his oath, and so Hasan, despite appearances to the contrary, is a Muslim heretic, a Misunderstander of Islam.

Unfortunately, however, there are indications in the Hadith that oaths taken to Infidels don't have that unbreakable character. Muhammad, of course, said, "War is deceit." He also said, "By Allah, and Allah willing, if I take an oath and later find something else better than that, then I do what is better and expiate my oath."

Muhammad said this in the context of being able to do something better for his men than what he had promised to do, and so al-Marayati may argue that shooting up Fort Hood was in no way better than remaining loyal to the U.S. military, but from the jihadist point of view a jihad against Infidels is certainly better than submitting to those Infidels. After all, Muhammad also said, when asked what was the best deed, that jihad was best after professing faith in Islam. He also recommended to his followers that they break their oaths if they found a better course of action.

Those who would say that Qur'an trumps Hadith whenever there is a contradiction, and that therefore oaths are always and everywhere binding upon Muslims, must then explain why that has never been understood as such in the Islamic world. History is full of examples of Muslims breaking oaths and treaties with Infidels. Were they all misunderstanding Islam?

In any case, al-Marayati mentions none of this. And why not? He could have given a much more convincing and honest presentation if he had acknowledged the existence within Islamic tradition of justifications for oath-breaking, and explained -- if he could -- why they did not excuse Hasan's behavior. But he didn't.

His now infamous PowerPoint presentation is rife with distortions of the Quran. Entitled "The Koranic Worldview As It Relates to Muslims in the U.S. Military," it provides anything but a Quranic perspective. Maj. Hasan's critical fault in understanding the Quran was his failure to distinguish between two very important categories of verses: those tied to the specific context of seventh-century Arabia, and those that are absolute and permanent.

Here al-Marayati implies, without offering specifics, that the martial verses of the Qur'an that Hasan quoted are understood by mainstream Islamic theology to apply only to seventh-century Arabia. Unfortunately, the opposite is true. Very early in the history of Islam, Muslims noticed and began to grapple with how Muhammad's messages changed in character over the course of his prophetic career. Muhammad's earliest biographer, a pious Muslim named Ibn Ishaq, explains the progression of Qur'anic revelation about warfare. First, he explains, Allah allowed Muslims to wage defensive warfare. But that was not Allah's last word on the circumstances in which Muslims should fight. Ibn Ishaq explains offensive jihad by invoking a Qur'anic verse: "Then God sent down to him: 'Fight them so that there be no more seduction,' i.e. until no believer is seduced from his religion. 'And the religion is God's', i.e. Until God alone is worshipped."

The Qur'an verse Ibn Ishaq quotes here (2:193) commands much more than defensive warfare: Muslims must fight until "the religion is God's" - that is, until Allah alone is worshipped. Ibn Ishaq gives no hint that that command died with the seventh century.

Nor do all contemporary Islamic thinkers believe that that command is a relic of history. According to a 20th century Chief Justice of Saudi Arabia, Sheikh 'Abdullah bin Muhammad bin Humaid, "at first 'the fighting' was forbidden, then it was permitted and after that it was made obligatory." He also distinguishes two groups Muslims must fight: "(1) against them who start 'the fighting' against you (Muslims) . . . (2) and against all those who worship others along with Allah . . . as mentioned in Surat Al-Baqarah (II), Al-Imran (III) and At-Taubah (IX) . . . and other Surahs (Chapters of the Qur'an)." (The Roman numerals after the names of the chapters of the Qur'an are the numbers of the suras: Sheikh 'Abdullah is referring to Qur'anic verses such as 2:216, 3:157-158, 9:5, and 9:29.)

This understanding of the Qur'an isn't limited to the Wahhabi sect of Saudi Arabia, to which Sheikh 'Abdullah belongs, and which many Western analysts imagine to have originated Islamic doctrines of warfare against unbelievers. Jihad theorist Sayyid Qutb, who was not a Wahhabi, subscribes to the same view of the Qur'an. In his jihad manifesto Milestones, he quotes at length from the great medieval scholar Ibn Qayyim (1292-1350), who, says Qutb, "has summed up the nature of Islamic Jihaad." Ibn Qayyim outlines the stages of the Muhammad's prophetic career: "For thirteen years after the beginning of his Messengership, he called people to God through preaching, without fighting or Jizyah, and was commanded to restrain himself and to practice patience and forbearance. Then he was commanded to migrate, and later permission was given to fight. Then he was commanded to fight those who fought him, and to restrain himself from those who did not make war with him. Later he was commanded to fight the polytheists until God's religion was fully established."

Qutb summarizes the stages: "Thus, according to the explanation by Imam Ibn Qayyim, the Muslims were first restrained from fighting; then they were permitted to fight; then they were commanded to fight against the aggressors; and finally they were commanded to fight against all the polytheists." He further quotes Ibn Qayyim as emphasizing the need to wage war against and subjugate non-Muslims, particularly the Jewish and Christian "People of the Book": "After the command for Jihaad came, the non-believers were divided into three categories: one, those with whom there was peace; two, the people with whom the Muslims were at war; and three, the Dhimmies....It was also explained that war should be declared against those from among the 'People of the Book' who declare open enmity, until they agree to pay Jizyah or accept Islam. Concerning the polytheists and the hypocrites, it was commanded in this chapter that Jihaad be declared against them and that they be treated harshly." Qutb says that if someone rejects Islam, "then it is the duty of Islam to fight him until either he is killed or until he declares his submission."

In fact, some classical Islamic theologians are as far from thinking that the verses commanding jihad against Infidels no longer apply in our own age as you can get. Some assert that the Verse of the Sword (Qur'an 9:5, "Slay the idolaters wherever you find them") abrogates no less than 124 more peaceful and tolerant verses of the Qur'an. Tafsir al-Jalalayn, a commentary on the Qur'an by the respected imams Jalal al-Din Muhammad ibn Ahmad al-Mahalli (1389-1459) and Jalal al-Din 'Abd al-Rahman ibn Abi Bakr al-Suyuti (1445-1505), asserts that the Qur'an's ninth sura "was sent down when security was removed by the sword." Another mainstream and respected Qur'an commentator, Ibn Kathir (1301-1372), declares that Qur'an 9:5 "abrogated every agreement of peace between the Prophet and any idolater, every treaty, and every term....No idolater had any more treaty or promise of safety ever since Surah Bara'ah [the ninth sura] was revealed." Ibn Juzayy (d. 1340), yet another Qur'an commentator whose works are still read in the Islamic world, agrees: the Verse of the Sword's purpose is "abrogating every peace treaty in the Qur'an."

None of them say that the Verse of the Sword applies only to the seventh century.

Ibn Kathir makes this clear in his commentary on another "tolerance verse": "And he [Muhammad] saith: O my Lord! Lo! these are a folk who believe not. Then bear with them, O Muhammad, and say: Peace. But they will come to know" (43:88-89). Ibn Kathir explains: "Say Salam (peace!) means, 'do not respond to them in the same evil manner in which they address you; but try to soften their hearts and forgive them in word and deed.'" However, that is not the end of the passage. Ibn Kathir then takes up the last part: "But they will come to know. This is a warning from Allah for them. His punishment, which cannot be warded off, struck them, and His religion and His word was supreme. Subsequently Jihad and striving were prescribed until the people entered the religion of Allah in crowds, and Islam spread throughout the east and the west."

And so today. The Saudi Sheikh Muhammad Saalih al-Munajid (1962-), whose lectures and Islamic rulings (fatawa) circulate widely throughout the Islamic world, demonstrates this in a discussion of whether Muslims should force others to accept Islam. In considering Qur'an 2:256 ("There is no compulsion in religion,") the Sheikh quotes Qur'an 9:29, as well as 8:39 ("And fight them until there is no more Fitnah (disbelief and polytheism, i.e. worshipping others besides Allaah), and the religion (worship) will all be for Allaah Alone [in the whole of the world]"), and the Verse of the Sword. Of the latter, Sheikh Muhammad says simply: "This verse is known as Ayat al-Sayf (the verse of the sword). These and similar verses abrogate the verses which say that there is no compulsion to become Muslim."

Underscoring the fact that none of this is merely of historical interest is another Shafi'i manual of Islamic law that in 1991 was certified by the highest authority in Sunni Islam, Cairo's Al-Azhar University, as conforming "to the practice and faith of the orthodox Sunni community." This manual, 'Umdat al-Salik (available in English as Reliance of the Traveller), spends a considerable amount of time explaining jihad as "war against non-Muslims." It spells out the nature of this warfare in quite specific terms: "the caliph makes war upon Jews, Christians, and Zoroastrians . . . until they become Muslim or pay the non-Muslim poll tax." It adds a comment by a Jordanian jurist that corresponds to Muhammad's instructions to call the unbelievers to Islam before fighting them: the caliph wages this war only "provided that he has first invited [Jews, Christians, and Zoroastrians] to enter Islam in faith and practice, and if they will not, then invited them to enter the social order of Islam by paying the non-Muslim poll tax (jizya) . . . while remaining in their ancestral religions."

Also, if there is no caliph, Muslims must still wage jihad. In any case, the desire to restore the caliphate ultimately highlights the expansionist, imperialist, totalitarian, globalist aims of the jihad movement, even as today it presents itself as a defensive action against Western evils. That expansionism is based on Qur'anic passages such as 9:29 and the life and teachings of Muhammad. The Pakistani Brigadier S. K. Malik's 1979 book The Qur'anic Concept of War (a book that carried a glowing endorsement from Pakistan's then-future President Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq, who said that it explained "the ONLY pattern of war" that a Muslim country could legitimately wage) delineates the same stages in the Qur'anic teaching about jihad: "The Muslim migration to Medina brought in its wake events and decisions of far-reaching significance and consequence for them. While in Mecca, they had neither been proclaimed an Ummah [community] nor were they granted the permission to take up arms against their oppressors. In Medina, a divine revelation proclaimed them an 'Ummah' and granted them the permission to take up arms against their oppressors. The permission was soon afterwards converted into a divine command making war a religious obligation for the faithful."

Imran Ahsan Khan Nyazee, Assistant Professor on the Faculty of Shari'ah and Law of the International Islamic University in Islamabad, in a 1994 book on Islamic law quotes the twelfth century Maliki jurist Abu al-Walid Muhammad ibn Ahmad Ibn Rushd. Ibn Rushd reports on a consensus (ijma) among Muslim scholars on jihad warfare - and in traditional Islamic legal terms a consensus among scholars, once reached, cannot be modified. "Why wage war?" asks Ibn Rushd, and then he answers his own question: "Muslim jurists agreed that the purpose of fighting with the People of the Book...is one of two things: it is either their conversion to Islam or the payment of jizyah." Nyazee concludes: "This leaves no doubt that the primary goal of the Muslim community, in the eyes of its jurists, is to spread the word of Allah through jihad, and the option of poll-tax [jizya] is to be exercised only after subjugation" of non-Muslims.

But if this is so, why hasn't the worldwide Islamic community been waging jihad on a large scale up until relatively recently? Nyazee says it is only because they have not been able to do so: "the Muslim community may be considered to be passing through a period of truce. In its present state of weakness, there is nothing much it can do about it."

Al-Marayati could, here again, have assuaged doubts by discussing Islam's martial teachings and explained -- if he could -- why Hasan was not appropriating them properly. But he didn't.

He ignores the Quranic mandates, for example, to stand for justice even if it is against your own interest, and to avoid transgression in the pursuit of justice. Yet the most troubling part of his presentation are his conclusions. One of them is: "Muslims are moderate (compromising) but God is not." There are two critical flaws in this one sentence.

First, to make any kind of declaration about God being unforgiving violates Islam's central teachings of mercy and compassion. The Quran makes it clear that human beings are meant to embody God's generous spirit. To argue otherwise is to violate God's will and Islam's goal of peacemaking.

Second, being moderate is about upholding religious values while working with other members of society for the greater good. Extremists believe they are compromising their Islamic values when living in the West. This is not true. And Muslim-haters oblige them with the converse, when they argue that the West should not tolerate Muslims. This is not just.

Maj. Hasan's hodgepodge of verses from the Quran and quotes from extremists left out the most important Quranic verse in his section on enjoining peace and forgiveness: "God invites you into the abode of peace" (10:25). Nor did he include the admonition by the Prophet Muhammad never to harm the innocent and never to target noncombatants....

Here again, it all depends on how one defines "innocent."

Pamela Geller reports in The American Thinker about how Rifqa Bary, America's most visible and threatened apostate from Islam, continues to be railroaded by Ohio authorities and victimized by the mainstream media:

A new government case plan directs Rifqa Bary, the girl who fled from her family in fear for her life after converting to Christianity from Islam, to talk about religion with her Muslim parents, and work toward Rifqa returning home.

According to reporter Meredith Heagney of the Columbus Dispatch, who wore a hijab when she visited a Columbus mosque and has consistently filed slanted, anti-Rifqa stories on this case, the goal of this case plan is reunification of the Bary family. [...]

Hussein Wario, a native of Kenya and, like Rifqa, an apostate from Islam, tells the truth that Heagney ignores: "I am very concerned for Rifqa. If the judge reunites her with her family, you know that she will either be severely persecuted or killed here in the United States or elsewhere. An ardent Muslim father would rather kill his child in order to preserve his family from ridicule (from fellow Muslims) than see him or her alive. Mr. Mohamed Bary would be hailed as a hero to Muslims if he were to carryout-God forbid-Islamic judgment on Rifqa because she refuses to revert to Islam."

Rifqa's close friend and another convert from Islam to Christianity, Jamal Jivanjee, adds: "As Meredith Heagney is the main reporter assigned to the Rifqa Bary story, I have read several articles that Ms. Heagney has written about the case previously. Each time I read her account of Rifqa's situation, I come away amazed at her 'selective' use of pertinent information that she includes in her articles. I am beginning to wonder if this is more than just simple oversight. I am convinced that Meredith's oversight reveals at best, a hidden bias against Rifqa Bary, and at worst, a deliberate attempt to deceive the public in Central Ohio. This latest article was unfortunately no exception."

The media is against her. Child Services is against her. Her own family is against her - and eagerly awaiting her return to their clutches.

Who will stand for Rifqa Bary?

We will, on December 22. Be there. Oh, and be sure to read it all.