IRIS Blog

Report: Bin Laden dead in Pakistan

Poll Brings Pain for Democrats
"Among Iowa voters, Hillary Clinton is viewed unfavorably by a whopping 49 percent"

No London Terror Raids without Muslim Approval
Perhaps they missed the scene in 'The Road to 9/11' where the pre-briefing of Pakistan enabled bin Laden to escape

Does AP stand for Al-Qaeda Propaganda?

Anti-War = Pro-Hezbollah

Here is an important piece by the leading scholar of the Middle East, Bernard Lewis (summarized by the Daily Alert):

What is the possibility of freedom in the Islamic world, in the Western sense of the word?

One view common in the U.S. and Europe holds that Islamic peoples are incapable of decent, civilized government. Whatever the West does, Muslims will be ruled by corrupt tyrants. Therefore the aim of our foreign policy should be to insure that they are our tyrants rather than someone else's - friendly rather than hostile tyrants.

The second common view is that Arab ways are different from our ways. They must be allowed to develop in accordance with their cultural principles, but it is possible for them - as for anyone else, anywhere in the world, with discreet help from outside and most specifically from the U.S. - to develop democratic institutions of a kind.

There is a view sometimes expressed that "democracy" means the system of government evolved by the English-speaking peoples. I beg to differ. Different societies develop different ways of conducting their affairs, and they do not need to resemble ours.

Democracy is not born like the Phoenix. It comes in stages, and the stages and processes of development will differ from country to country, from society to society. There are elements in Islamic society which could well be conducive to democracy.

Pro-American feeling is strongest in countries with anti-American governments. I've been told repeatedly by Iranians that there is no country in the world where pro-American feeling is stronger, deeper, and more widespread than Iran.

But the anti-American feeling is strongest in those countries that are ruled by what we are pleased to call "friendly governments." And it is those, of course, that are the most tyrannical and the most resented by their own people.

At the top of this list is the Palestinian Authority, where Clinton and his Peace Now radical Leftists imposed a regime of terrorists.

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Another Church Attacked in Gaza

Pakistani Islamist Leader: Crucify the Pope

Norway Muslim Synagogue Plotters Were Planning to Behead Israeli Ambassador

Nasrallah Boasts: Still Have 20,000 Rockets

Palestinians: The Pope is a Jew

Palestinian Pope Demonstrators: "Conquering Rome is the Answer"

IDF General Denies Nasrallah Assassination Planned at Hezbollah Victory March
Nasrallah's 'hiding' is about as authentic as a Jesse Jackson 'rolling' hunger strike, if Nasrallah is able to appear in public on the condition that he is surrounded by other terrorists. Israel's leaders have pushed the envelope on pusillanimity with the redefinition of 'civilians' to mean 'terrorists not currently engaged in attacks.'

Iraqi Terrorists Using Kidnap Victims as Unwitting Suicide Bombers
Muslim culture has contributed almost no constructive innovations, but the inventions of depravity are unceasing

Palestinian Rocket Hits Israeli College
Meanwhile Israeli leaders bring out the bizarre ritual of self-humiliation known as "declare that Palestinians must end terror attacks before negotiations, before dropping that demand and then negotiating."

Oslo Synagogue Detainees Planned to Blow Up U.S., Israel Embassies
They only wanted to get the Saturday people first; now they are coming for the Sunday people as well

UK Minister: Hezbollah's Hiding Weapons in Civilian Areas Had Gone to "New Depths"

Vandals Attack Synagogues in Russia

Honor Killing in Ottawa
The brother is the lead suspect. What is almost unheard of is that brothers are the chief perpetrators of honor killings because of incestuous jealousy when a sister chooses to marry outside the family. See this previous post for details.

Red Cross Admits Covering Up Fauxtography Evidence

Smoking May Increase Risk of HIV
Classic reversal of cause and effect. Those who are prone to a destructive habit like smoking are more likely to engage in other low 'time-horizon' behaviors. See this must-read article for more: Most Scientific Papers are Probably Wrong

Wal-Mart to Sell Generic Drugs for $4
Typically, they currently average $10-30. Health care costs have skyrocketed because the free market has been subverted. If more people paid directly for their care, costs would plummet with innovations such as these.

McGreevy: A Disgraced, Corrupt Ex-Governor
Classic Leftist thinking: "I'd taken a million ethical shortcuts to climb the ladder, all the time thinking that that was the only way to amass enough power to serve the collective good."

U.S. Supports Abbas in Bid to Assemble Unity Cabinet
Get ready for a big Bush sell-out of Israel.

Columbia Invites Ahmadinejad to Speak

IRIS Blog carried this opinion piece in full in May. Now the author, Salah Uddin Shoaib Choudhury, faces the death penalty in Bangladesh for his positive opinions about Israel. It is interesting that although Muslim extremism is attributed to a "tiny minority" of Muslims, I have cited examples of extremism by officials of most Muslim countries (see here, for shocking examples from countries frequently cited as moderate: Oman, Jordan, Pakistan, Indonesia).

A Bangladeshi Muslim journalist arrested in the past for advocating ties with Israel now faces charges of sedition, a crime punishable by death in Bangladesh, and will likely be put on trial by the end of the month....

As editor of The Weekly Blitz, an English-language newspaper published in Dhaka, Choudhury aroused the ire of Bangladeshi authorities after he printed articles favorable to Israel and critical of Muslim extremism.

Bangladesh does not recognize Israel's existence and refuses to establish diplomatic relations with the Jewish state.

In November 2003, Choudhury was arrested at Dhaka's international airport just prior to boarding a flight on his way to Israel, where he was scheduled to deliver an address on promoting understanding between Muslims and Jews. His visit to Israel would have been the first by a Bangladeshi journalist.

Choudhury was charged with sedition, held in prison for 17 months and was reportedly tortured before being freed in April 2005. But the authorities in Bangladesh, which is ruled by a coalition government that includes Islamic extremists, decided to continue pursuing charges against him....

After his release from prison last year, Choudhury proceeded to reopen his weekly newspaper, continuing to publish articles calling for greater interfaith understanding and warning of the dangers posed by fundamentalist Islamic terror.

Last month, unknown assailants set off explosives outside the newspaper's offices and planted a bomb in the press room that failed to detonate.

According to Benkin, Choudhury's family has been subjected to various forms of what appear to be orchestrated harassment. These have included pressure from the Bangladeshi authorities to denounce Choudhury, angry crowds gathering outside their home and even physical attacks....

Describing the moments immediately before his 2003 arrest, he wrote: "Though physically still in Dhaka, my heart ached to kiss Israel's holy soil."

That last quote is all the court will need for a conviction.

The surveys don't state it explicitly, but it is hard to believe that any Israeli Prime Minister was ever less popular.

Only 7% of respondents said that the prime minister was the most worthy figure to head the government.

Probably the two best candidates (among the realistic options), Netanyahu and Lieberman, were rated highest as alternatives.

68 percent of those interviewed were unhappy with Olmert's performance.

As I have pointed out previously, however, don't count on his imminent demise:

Unfortunately, this coalition is much more stable than anyone realizes because it is composed of political opportunism. Legally only the government can dissolve itself and they are not about to cut off their own well-earned perks.

Meanwhile, his hallucinations continue. Today, he claimed that "there is no more threat of Hezbollah on northern settlements" in an interview in which he admitted "I always make mistakes."

Here is an important article by George Weigel on the meaning of the Pope's speech, which he believes was lost in the drama of the reaction. The Pope had actually proposed a dialog with Islam on the acceptibility of violence to God. Unfortunately in his naivete, Weigel missed the Muslim World's response--"we don't talk to infidels; we kill them."

IN A BRILLIANT lecture at the University of Regensburg last week, Pope Benedict XVI made three crucial points that are now in danger of being lost in the polemics about his supposedly offensive comments about Islam.

The pope's first point was that all the great questions of life, including social and political questions, are ultimately theological. How we think (or don't think) about God has much to do with how we judge what is good and what is wicked, and with how we think about the appropriate methods for advancing the truth in a world in which there are profound disagreements about the truth of things.

If, for example, we imagine that God is pure will, a remote majesty with whom our only possible relationship is one of unthinking submission, then we have imagined a God who can even command what seems to be irrational ? like the murder of innocents. Pope Benedict reminds us, however, that mainstream Christian tradition, following its Jewish parent, has a different concept of God. The God of Abraham, Moses and Jesus is a God of reason, compassion and love, a God who comes searching for man in history, appeals to the human mind as well as the human heart and invites human beings into a dialogue of salvation.

This God cannot demand the unreasonable or the irrational. This God's revelation of himself, in the Hebrew Bible and the Christian New Testament, does not cancel out or abrogate human reason. That is why mainstream Christianity has always taught that human beings can build decent societies by attending to reason.

Classical Judaism agrees, as evidenced by the many times in the Talmud that s'vara (logic) is cited as a more authoritative justification than a religious text.

The pope's second point, which flows from the first, was that irrational violence aimed at innocent men, women and children "is incompatible with the nature of God and the nature of the [human] soul." If adherents of certain currents of thought in contemporary Islam insist that the suicide bombing of innocents is an act pleasing to God, then they must be told that they are mistaken: about God, about God's purposes and about the nature of moral obligation.

Responsibility for challenging these distorted views of God and the distorted understanding of moral duty that flows from them rests, first, with Islamic leaders. But too few Islamic leaders, the pope seemed to suggest, have been willing to undertake a cleansing of Islam's conscience ? as Pope John Paul II taught the Catholic Church to cleanse its historical conscience.

The Muslim response was quite clear. They don't want to explore Islam's faults with a non-Muslim; infidels with such chutzpa deserve death.

Apparently Oman's government is ignorant of "true Islam":

After God empowered Muslims to enter Mecca, Islam became the prevailing power and was spread by use of fear. This was particularly evident in the tribe of Quraysh, who had responded to the Prophet Muhammad?s new message of Islam with unrelenting persecution, eventually putting its resources in the service of the ever growing new religion. The Prophet then saw it preferable to contact neighbouring kings and rulers, including the two kings of Oman, Jaiffar and Abd, sons of Al Julanda, through peaceful means. History books tell us that the prophet had sent messages to the people of Oman, including a letter carried by military escort from Amr Inn Al Aas to Jaiffar and Abd, sons of Al Julanda, in which he wrote: ?In the name of God the Merciful and the Compassionate, from Muhammad bin Abdullah to Jaiffar and Abd, sons of Al Julanda, peace be on those who choose the right path. Embrace Islam, and you shall be safe. I am God?s messenger to all humanity, here to alert all those alive that non believers are condemned. If you submit to Islam, you will remain kings, but if you abstain, your rule will be removed and my horses will enter your arena to prove my prophecy?.

Via: Little Green Footballs

Israel Charges Three Captured Hezbollah Fighters with Murder
They will continue their careers in prison, training jihadis and planning attacks for those who are about to be released by Israel to carry out.

Israeli Youth Wounded in Palestinian Rocket Attack
Olmert's response to unceasing Palestinian missiles? More 'land for peace negotiations.'

Pope Expresses "Deep Respect" for Islam
Westerners understand this as PR, Muslims generally read this as submission in response to aggression against the most venerated man in Christendom.

Federal Agents Raid Muslim Charity in Michigan
Although the last frame of 'The Road to 9/11' noted that the administration received an 'A' for anti-terror financing, it is important to note that most of this activity is only symbolic given the fungibility of money and the persistence of the jihad.

The "youth" (the traditional euphemism for Muslim immigrants) have apparently been inspired by the brazen effrontery against the most venerated man in Christendom. First a gang of 30 stoned an unmarked police car. When the officers got out of the car, they were surrounded and attacked with iron bars.

One officer was hospitalized with a double fracture of the skull during Tuesday night's incident in Corbeil-Essonnes, a police source said. His colleague reportedly sustained facial and body injuries.

Police were called in to disperse the gang of up to 30 youths who stoned the unmarked police car as it patrolled the area, police officials said.

The police got out of their car, were encircled and attacked. Some of the youths were armed with iron bars, according to reports.

No arrests were made following the incident, police said.

"These youths fear nothing," a police union official said on LCI television.

Why should they fear when there are no arrests after breaking the skulls of police? Why should they fear when they have been given areas where they can engage in gang rape unmolested and where adult Muslims spit on victims who complain? Why should they fear when, at the beginning of the French Intifada, police made an official decision to retreat? Why should they fear when dozens of neighbors can drop in as accomplices to the most horrific anti-Semitic torture on record without a single tip to the police? Why should they fear when women are not defended from assault within large groups in daylight? Why should they fear when demonstrators can brazenly call for the murder of the Pope outside Westminster Cathedral and openly state their intention that "Islam Will Conquer Rome" without even a single Londoner complaining to the police?

They know that if an infidel were to voice a minor complaint about a minor imam outside a minor mosque in a minor Muslim country, he would instantly be lynched. The same as Jews who mistakenly enter an Arab neighborhood around Israel.

The conventional wisdom about the Papal Intifada is clever ("we'll protest your charge that we're violent with violence") but facile. Islam is not the slightest bit interested in fairness toward infidels. The entire point of the laws regarding insulting Islam and dhimmitude in sharia in general is to inflict humiliation on non-Muslims to pressure them into converting or accepting subjugation. "Submission," after all, not "peace," is the definition of "Islam."

Gunmen Attack Palestinian News Agency
The control of the press through violent intimidation is rarely reported. This is an absolute must-read on the topic.

Thailand Coup Installs Muslim Prime Minister

Terror Group Threatens Gaza Christians

Professor Disputes Global Warming is Human-Caused

Sudan Blames Israel and Jews for Many of its Woes
President Bashir is actually not that far off in his claim that Sunday's nationwide peace rallies for Darfur were "invariably organized by Zionist Jewish organizations."

An Appalling Distortion of Israel's Image
A glimpse of the sloppy anti-Semitism (e.g. "Abraham killed Isaac on the Temple Mount") that is typical of European broadcasting. (Hat tip: Chaya Eitan)

Iran's Supreme Leader Calls for Attacks on US Over Pope's Remarks

An important piece by Thomas Sowell:

When you enter a boxing ring, you agree to abide by the rules of boxing. But when you are attacked from behind in a dark alley, you would be a fool to abide by the Marquis of Queensbury rules. If you do, you can end up being a dead fool.

Even with a nuclear Iran looming on the horizon and the prospect that its nuclear weapons will end up in the hands of international terrorists that it has been sponsoring for years, many in the media and in the government that is supposed to protect us have been preoccupied with whether we are being nice enough to the terrorists in our custody.

The issue has been brought to a head by the efforts of Senators John McCain, John Warner, and Lindsey Graham to get us to apply the rules of the Geneva convention to cutthroats who respect no Geneva convention and are not covered by the Geneva convention.

Al-Qaeda Threatens Jihad over Pope's Remarks

An Iraqi militant group led by al-Qaeda has threatened to massacre Christians in response to remarks about Islam by Pope Benedict XVI. An Internet statement by the Mujahideen Shura Council, an umbrella group led by Iraq's branch of al-Qaeda, threatened reprisals against "worshippers of the cross" for the pope's remarks. "We shall break the cross and spill the wine....(You will have no choice but) Islam or death," said the statement, citing a saying of the Prophet Mohammed promising Muslims that they would "conquer Rome...as they conquered Constantinople. We tell the worshipper of the cross that you and the West will be defeated, as is the case in Iraq, Afghanistan, Chechnya. God enable us to slit their throats, and make their money and descendants the bounty of the mujahideen."

What exactly does it mean to make one's descendants someone else's bounty? In normative Islam, slavery has always been encouraged. For females this means a life of continual rape and torture. This is why the Muslim jihad in Darfur is marked by mass gang rape and slavery. The "bizarre" phenomenon of choirs of Muslim women performing at gang rapes singing songs of encouragement to the rapists is thus explained. Jihad has always been associated with rape.

This horrifying article presents as fact the assertion that Pakistan, a 97% Muslim country, currently has sharia law because of a single general's desire to "impress his backers." Note, also, the article's liberal use of the word "conservative":

Reports of yet another pack rape in Pakistan emerged over the weekend as plans to amend laws aimed at making it easier to punish rapists stalled in the Islamabad parliament because of opposition from ultra-conservative Islamic parties.

The News International said a mother and daughter in a rural area had been abducted and gang-raped for 12 days because the daughter continued her schooling in defiance of villagers in her home near Multan.

The newspaper said the daughter had recently attained a masters degree in education at the Bahauddin Zahariya University. Precise details of what happened are sketchy, but it appears that the girl's father was also attacked by the assailants and that police took 12 days to act and save the women.

Reports of the rape claimed involvement by "a minister of state" but did not name him.

The case recalls that of Mukhtaran Mai, a woman who was imprisoned after she was raped in June 2002. She was freed only after intervention by the Pakistan Supreme Court.

Her case caused a global outcry at the time and highlighted the injustice of Pakistan's Islamic Hudood Ordinances, which criminalise all sex outside marriage.

Under the ordinances, unless the complainant in a rape case produces four male witnesses to support her claims, she will herself face punishment.

As a result, it has been almost impossible to prosecute rape cases, and thousands of Pakistani victims of rape are languishing in jail.

According to Pakistan's Human Rights Commission, a woman is raped every two hours and there is a gang rape every eight hours in Pakistan.

How do they have any idea how many rapes there are? It strikes me that there would be serious underreporting if the victim is typically sent to prison.

The Hudood Ordinances were introduced 17 years ago when the then military dictator General Zia ul-Haq was installing sharia law in Pakistan as a way of impressing his conservative Islamic backers at home and abroad.

Successive governments - including civilian administrations headed by Benazir Bhutto and Nawz Sharif - failed to change the Hudood Ordinances, despite persistent pressure from human rights groups.

Previous: Pan-European Arab Muslim Gang Rape Epidemic

The Pope Must Die, Says UK Muslim

Sweden Swings Towards Right to End the Social Democratic Era
Moderates argue that the unemployment rate, officially at 5.7%, is actually higher than 20%

7 Churches Firebombed in Palestinian Areas

Iraq's al-Qaeda Threatens to 'Destroy the Cross'

The Pulitzer Prize for Felony Murder
Take a look at these pictures and see if it isn't obvious that there was no "extraordinary courage" here, only collusion

UNIFIL Head Restates: Group Won't Disarm Hezbollah
Like most items of significance reported in the Middle East, this too is a fraud. The UN won't lift a finger against Hezbollah and will actively support it when ready to attack again.

[95% Muslim] Tajikistan's Only Synagogue Attacked
It is unclear if the two attacks on the synagogue in the past month are connected with the controversy over the government's desire to demolish the building.

Gazans Warn Pope to Accept Islam

Palestinian PM: New Government Won't Recognize Agreements with Israel
This makes official what was apparent all along--Oslo was an utter fraud. Israel gave sovereignty to the PLO in exchange for a meaningless renunciation of terrorism. Rabin promised that the PLO would crush Hamas, but instead they nurtured Hamas and gave them open leadership. Rabin further promised that if the PA ever turned on Israel, Israel would restore the status quo ante. This was, of course, a lie.

Haniyeh's Bodyguards Fire on Protesters

Islamic Leader in Israel: Jerusalem Will Be Capital of Muslim Caliphate
This is not a "tiny minority of extremists." This is the goal of nearly every believing Muslim. The "moderates" have held that this is currently unrealistic and therefore is not mandated religiously. As soon as the West shows enough weakness, nearly every serious Muslim in the world will join an open war to conquer, kill or convert the infidels. All we need to do to stop it, however, is show a willingness to use our superior strength now.

Palestinian Rockets Wound Israelis in Sderot

Norway Muslims Back Imam's 9/11 Denial