timeimmortal

Over in Pakistan, the friends and family of one of the London Tube bombers have gathered at his grave to celebrate his life and “martyrdom” (read: murder/suicide).

Remember what is happening here: people are gathering to cheer and celebrate the life of a man whose final act was to participate in a suicide-bombing attack that killed 52 people and wounded over 700. And they are gathering to celebrate that bodycount as well.

What’s perhaps even more shocking in all of this is that England sent the terrorist’s body home for a proper burial; whose bright idea was that?

Seriously.

If Muslim passengers can circumvent security protocols because sniffer dogs are “unclean” and body scanners are the theological equivalent of a strip search, then I think the transit authority in London, England should have every right to refuse service to Muslim passengers, and to any passengers that wish to be exempted from security checks.

It’s only reasonable, after all.

Of course, the better solution would be for someone at some level of the British government to summon up the courage to tell the people making complaints against the scanners and dogs that if they are not at home with the practices and means of Britain, they are of course welcome to leave, rather than attempting to force their minority view onto the national character.

But who in Britain has the guts to say that anymore?

Update: Welcome, Steynians!

So about those Muslim-only no-go areas we keep hearing about?

This Brit suggests a simple enough solution: go there.

Mr. Cunningham and Mr. Abraham have fired the first shots in the counter-jihad: they are demanding a full and unreserved written apology from West Midlands Police, and have given notice that they regard this incident as a breach of their convention rights under the 1998 Human Rights Act. They are supported by the Christian Institute pressure group, and by Christian Voice, which plans to leaflet the area this weekend.

Outside this immediate battle, how do we fight the territorial expansion of Islam? My answer is simply not to accept that there are “no-go areas”: just go there. Libby Purves, writing recently in the London Times on the dangers of walking around London late at night, makes points that apply to all “no-go areas,” Muslim or not:

I am not foolhardy; I stay away from alleys and don’t flash jewelery. But I know parts of London in particular to be increasingly dangerous, and with growing caution comes growing rage. I will not be kept cringing indoors, not by day or night; nor should any man or woman in a free country.

It was another woman, Eleanor Roosevelt, who said: “Nobody can make you feel inferior without your permission.” So we, men and women, should not grant that permission, and should not pander to the assumed superiority of those who would intimidate us, whether thugs or Muslims or both.

Turning to “Muslim no-go areas”, here is my advice: just go there. Look those niqab-clad women in the eye — it is all you can look them in — and raise a quizzical eyebrow at their alien garb.

Look with contempt at their “masters” swaggering along in jeans two steps in front of them.

Above all, just go there.

To this, I might add: while you’re at it, take your dog for a walk, and have a stopover at your favourite place to purchase liquor. And don’t forget to pick up that rasher of bacon on the way, too!

Satirical brilliance from London, Ontario musicians Unprotected Group — a commentary on the current human rights fracas in Canada:

Here comes the Rights Commission, second time today
Everybody logs off and hopes they go away
How many folks they’ve framed now, only God could say
But if I had a royal commission, I’d make somebody pay

I don’t believe in Section 13 or investigators leaving bait
Cause if there ain’t no haters out there, Lord, they’re easy to create
And when I read on FreeDominion of Human Rights folks spreading hate
If I had a royal commission then I would set things straight

In the right wing blogosphere, one hundred thousand wait
To be sued by Richard Warman, or some less humane fate
It’s just like Charlie Manson suing Sharon Tate
If I had a royal commission I would not hesitate

You can get them on the stand, but they’re just gonna lie
Or say they don’t remember who wrote those words or why
Stealing people’s wireless — echoes of the victims’ wails –
If I had a royal commission, somebody’d go to jail

I almost like it better than Bruce Cockburn’s original.

Update: Welcome, Steynians!

RightGirl puts in a comment on Islam that I admit gives me pause:

It used to be easy for me to say that if you want to live under 7th century Sharia, go back to Crapistan and do it there. After all, why come to the free West, right? But I now realize that the whole point of coming here was to take over. Our touchy-feely naiveté leads us to believe they are “escapees” and “refugees”, running from oppression. But in fact they have sought out free lands in order to spread that oppression in the name of the devil Allah.

Even up to very recently I believed that the women of Islam were oppressed and that they should be freed. This, I have come to learn, is utter hogwash. On more than one occasion we have seen the women take up arms, the women strap on explosives, the women preach jihad to their sons and husbands. Enough is enough. Our leaders - be they political or religious - are too wrapped up in politically-correct doublespeak to be able to defend us from this insidious evil. It saddens me that it’s up to a bunch of bloggers and cartoonists to save the world from the new Caliphate, but I have seen more guts come from Dutch filmmakers than I have from my own government, who no longer even believe in freedom of the press.

I cannot advocate open season on Muslims in the street. But I think for our own sakes we make ready for the coming onslaught, and brace ourselves to fight them. Not in Afghanistan and Iraq, but in London and Toronto and Detroit. And the first way we can fight them - a way that will not cause bloodshed by any act of our own hands - is to say NO. No to Sharia. No to Islamic banking and trade. No to muzzeins screeching at dawn. No to polygamy and incestuous marriages. No to welfare for those perfectly capable of working - like our Khadr family here in Toronto. No to visas and citizenships for terrorists. No, no, no.

I’m reminded of Lenin’s (at least, I think it was Lenin) observation that capitalism would sell the rope to hang itself with to the communists. In a perverse sort of way, I think the same may be true of the tendency toward multiculturalism in most Western nations — that is the rope that we may well end up hanging from. It’s really just a question, I suppose, of whether the hangmen will be Sunni or Shia.

Update: Welcome, Steynians!

…unknown to one U.K. mother, the kicking she felt from the twins growing inside her actually saved her life, according to a report from the Daily Mail.

Michelle Stepney, 35, said her twins Alice and Harriet, now age 13 months, were a lively pair in the womb. At the time, however, she had no idea that constant kicking she felt actually dislodged a tumor that had formed on her cervix and, according to doctors, saved her life.

Shortly after becoming pregnant, Stepney of Cheam in South-West London was taken to the hospital after suffering what was believed to be a miscarriage. Soon doctors realized she was still pregnant, but had developed life-threatening cervical cancer. Stepney declined to have an abortion and doctors at the Royal Marsden Hospital in London agreed to give her reduced chemotherapy in the hope of stopping the cancer spreading during the pregnancy.

But it wasn’t the chemo that ultimately saved Stepney.

“I couldn’t believe it when the doctors told me that the babies had dislodged the tumor,” she said. “I’d felt them kicking, but I didn’t realize just how important their kicking would turn out to be. I owe my life to my girls, and that’s why I could have never agreed with a termination.”

This woman made a brave choice, choosing not to have an abortion so as not to damage the young lives forming within her. There’s been a number of stories of mothers doing that, but this one has a bit of a twist: it was the decision not to have an abortion that saved this woman’s life. Had she terminated the pregnancy, who knows? Perhaps that tumor would have still been successfully treated…or perhaps, with nothing to knock it free, it would have spread the cancer further into her body.

How many times, I wonder, will the tired arguments of the pro-choicers be revealed as lies before it becomes obvious once again that abortion is nothing less than murder (really, a form of contract killing)?

One tends to find so many examples on a daily basis that it is becoming prudent to just lump them all together in one glorious catch-all posting. Or, at least, it saves me some time, which I like.

First, from Britain: “Asian youths” throw rocks at Holocaust Memorial participants. This is the British press, so we need to translate: “Asian youths” overwhelmingly means teenaged-to-twentysomething young men of Arabic or Indian sub-continental extract. Oh, I’ll grant that it could mean, you know, what we usually tend to think the term “Asian” means. But the anti-Jewish angle is significant: how many incidences of violence against Jews have been recorded where persons of Chinese, Japanese, or Korean extract are the perpetrators?

Here’s the money quote from the article, though:

The tour was organised by leading local historian Clive Bettington, who was later asked by police if he wanted officers to accompany him in future, but declined.

“That would be admitting there are ‘no go’ areas,” he said.

(…)

“I looked over the fence and saw four Asian youths throwing stones. They were laughing, then ran away.”

Just some aspiring young jihadists out having a laugh and throwing some rocks at the Jooooooos. Another typical day in London(istan). Interestingly, the issue of “no-go areas” (i.e. areas where Muslims have effectively taken over and rendered it unsafe for non-Muslims to travel through or past) rears its head again, although in typical Brit PC fashion, the man who organized the tour to the Holocaust memorial is too afraid of being labeled a racist* to acknowledge the existence of a very real problem.

Which brings us to item #2.

Apparently, it is also becoming increasingly common in Britain for teachers, police, and others in positions of authority to refuse to report honour killings as crimes, for fear of being branded as racist by Muslim spokesmen or hauled in front of a human rights tribunal (yes, England has them too).

The authors said families withdraw teenage daughters from school because they fear men will be unwilling to marry them if they are educated.

Many men brought up here want “freshies” - women “uncontaminated” by ideas of independence.

Rahni Binjie of the Roshni Asian Women’s Aid, a refuge in Nottingham, said: “We’ve had women who have disappeared from the education system. We don’t know if they’ve been taken abroad or killed or anything.”

Activists say there are particular problems with taxi firms who return women fleeing from abuse.

It’s those damnable cab drivers again!

I wonder if there wouldn’t be a noticeable drop in the number of honour killings in Western nations if a comprehensive ban prohibiting persons of Middle Eastern, African, or Indian sub-continental extract from driving cabs?

More seriously, though, the above is illustrative of just why more and more people are making noise about the human rights commissions (HRCs). We are fighting for true freedom of expression in Canada, a right that we, as Canadian citizens, are supposedly ensured by the anyhow, but which increasingly seems to be under threat from our self-styled “betters”, Richard Warman in particular.

And a part of that freedom of expression is the freedom to call a spade a spade. If we let the HRCs’ powers take us to the point where police can be hauled before them for the “crime” of being “anti-Muslim” simply because they made the attempt to investigate a possible honour killing, and if we let the HRCs’ powers take us to the point where teachers can be hauled before them for the “crime” of being “anti-Muslim” simply because they made the attempt to intervene in a case of obvious abuse of a female Muslim child by her male relatives in accordance with Sharia law, then we — all of us: every Canadian citizen who values his or her rights and freedoms, and who kind of likes what Canada is — have lost. We will, at that point, have turned over the keys to the country to the barbarians and the savages.

Item #3 is yet another suicide bombing, this time in the Israeli town of Dimona. One person was killed, and another ten injured. One suicide bomber managed to self-detonate, while the other was shot dead by an Israeli policeman.

The terrorist organization Islamic Jihad is claiming responsibility, but Kateland wonders how this smaller group came up with the resources to carry out the attack. She wonders if perhaps Hamas is employing the use of fronts.

Item #4 is another page from our “if you can’t obey the rules, don’t work there” file: Muslim women workers in Britain’s health system are committing hygeine violations in order to conform with Sharia law’s unreasonable standards of modesty.

female workers are ignoring Britain’s Department of Health rules requiring medics to be “bare below the elbow” because they consider showing any skin — outside the hands and face — immodest.

The guidelines were put into place to stave off the spread of infectious killer bugs like MRSA and Clostridium difficile, which have been implicated in the deaths of hundreds of hospital patients, according to the paper.

Hygiene experts said the standard should hold for all workers — even if it goes against their Religion.

“I don’t think it would be right to make an exemption for people on any grounds. The policy of bare below the elbows has to be applied universally,” Dr. Mark Enright, professor of microbiology at Imperial College London told the Telegraph.

Some fear the enforcing the rules will open the door to lawsuits charging discrimination against female Muslims working within the medical professions.

The Islamic Medical Association, for one, has issued a statement that “no practicing Muslim woman — doctor, medical student, nurse or patient — should be forced to bare her arms below the elbow,” according to paper.

I’ve worked in kitchens before, and the hygeine standards at those restaurants were pretty strict. I wasn’t married at the time, but had I been, not even the fact that it was my wedding ring would have prevented my managed from objecting to the gold band on my left ring finger. Rings are actually very unsafe things to wear in a kitchen, because they trap all sorts of bacteria. And the danger isn’t just to the customers, but to the cook himself even after he goes home; nothing says “bad Tuesday” like accidentally contaminating one’s breakfast with bacteria from the five chicken pizzas one made during the course of Monday evening.

I love what my ring stands for, and wear it to signify the highest devotion possible to my wife. If I felt that it would be improper of me to take the ring off in order to work in a kitchen, I would turn in my apron and find a different job. Either that, or I would put the ring on a chain and keep it safely tucked inside my shirt while I worked.

The point is, I’d either meet the requirements of my employer, or I’d leave the job behind.

This is not me being hard on modesty; I’m a huge fan of modesty. But this is me being hard on unreasonable standards of modesty that know no flexibility even when the lives of others are potentially at stake. Showing the forearms is not unreasonable by any measure — they’re just forearms, after all — and if the choice has to be made between rolling up one’s sleeves and potentially giving a patient a septic infection, then the choice should be obvious: roll up your damn sleeves. If for some reason you feel you are unable to do this, you are welcome to seek employment in a career that does not require your sleeves to be rolled up.

Just don’t expect that the entire British medical system should roll over for you, and don’t expect that you’ll be given the “right” to potentially endanger the health and lives of patients by becoming a transmission vector for superbugs simply because it is more important, in your mind, that Britain adapt to your barbaric code of law.

Item #5: Husbands in the U.K. with multiple wives will be allowed to claim additional welfare benefits for said additional brides. Even though bigamy is illegal in Britain, as long as the wedding took place in a nation that treats polygamy as legal the additional benefits can and will be granted.

Item #6: speaking of suicide bombers, did you hear the one about the Islamic terrorists who strapped bombs to women with and then remote-detonated them when people stopped to render aid?

Yes, O Reader, that is the sort of vermin that the West is up against. Just in case there wasn’t enough evidence already pointing out what flavour of evil these people are.

And proving that both stupidity and slavish devotion to Darwinism are alive and well among the progressive left:

For the record, assuming it’s true, I think it’s just horrible that whoever was behind this latest disaster used Down’s women to perpetrate the bombings but I don’t see it as a sign of desperation. I see it as a sign of adaptation and a brilliant one at that.

The above sort of thinking is another example of why I continue to hammer on atheism as being the gravest threat to human liberty that humanity has ever concocted for itself. Not only is it just disgustingly wrong, but it actually serves to justify, in a weird sort of way, the actions of the jihadists. Oh, I know that he “think[s] it’s just horrible” that these women were used in this way, but all that pretending at disgust fades by the last sentence, which openly praises the ingenuity and adaptation that the terrorists displayed in employing this latest murder tactic. How brilliant of them!

Item #7: that British bishop who warned about “no-go areas” (see link, above) is now under police protection, in fear of his life. How did Britain’s Muslims respond to the claim that Muslim immigrants had created several communities into which it was unsafe for non-Muslims to wander?

Death threats.

Gee, thanks, guys…don’t try and do anything now to dispel the public’s already negative image of you!

As I’ve said before, and will say again now, I really want to have a higher opinion of Islam and of the people who practice that religion. The problem, for me at any rate, is that there are too many examples — from too many different places around the world! — that make it so very difficult to look at Islam, and at the Islamic world, with anything but disgust.

* are we still caught up in this idiocy? It is not, by definition, racist to criticize Islam, because Islam is not a race!

(In Soviet Russia, hat tips you: Kathy Shaidle)

Update: Welcome, Steynians!

I’ve been to London. Traffic was bad. It wasn’t bad enough to justify this kind of measure, though.

“Twenty miles per hour speed limits save lives and make our neighbourhoods better. These measures will build on what we have already done so that the quality of life in our local neighbourhoods is improved for everyone. I think if you can say 20mph zones without the road humps there won’t be any opposition.”

According to City Hall, nine out of 10 pedestrians will be killed if hit by a car travelling at 40mph, two out of 10 will die if struck at 30mph but his drops to one in 40 at 20mph.

I’m not advocating for traffic-related mania, nor am I advocating for a relaxation in extant speeding laws in London (or anywhere else). But when I hear stuff like the above, it makes me worry, because it’s basically nanny-state thinking. As Ace quips:

Of course, it drops to zero out of infinity if driving is banned completely. If it saves only one life, you gotta do it for the kids.

Pedestrians in London do not have right of way — cars do. It is ultimately only their own fault if any pedestrian gets hit by a car. London is pretty advanced in terms of the little city-planning tricks they employ to maximize pedestrian safety, though — painted crosswalks include lettering telling you which direction the traffic is coming from, and busier roadways have safety-fenced islands in the middle of them that pedestrians can cross to and take shelter from the traffic in while they wait for a sufficient gap in traffic so as to complete their road crossing.

Let’s face it — most people who get injured/killed in pedestrian accidents have nobody to blame but themselves (this is true enough in Edmonton, where pedestrians do have right of way over cars; it is at least doubly true in places where that is not the case). Getting hit by a car is a part of the risk that anybody who jay-walks, who runs out into the street without looking, or who crosses the road on the red hand instead of the green/white walk sign takes. Yes, there are occasions where the fault is truly the driver’s and the driver’s alone, but in most of those cases the speed limit wouldn’t have mattered much anyhow; anybody who is going to stick to the posted limit is probably not going to be the one who runs a red light or misses a stop sign.

Who can doubt it? Jihadists promise to “Behead The Enemies Of Islam” and demand the Pope be executed and threaten to rain down a second 9/11 on Europe and call Britain’s Tube bombers “the Fantastic Four” - and no-one ever suggests restraining their free speech. On the contrary, in London the guys calling for the beheading of infidels are flanked by constables of the Metropolitan Police so zealous in their defence of jihadist free-speech rights they threaten to arrest any members of the public who get too near.

What’s at issue here is the non-jihadists’ right to free speech.

Mark Steyn is in fine form today.

The venerable Mark Steyn has not been overly kind to Tony Blair or the government of the United Kingdom in recent weeks, since the bombings early in July. And it’s not a stretch to say that there’s good reason for that — how serious can a nation be in its denunciations of terrorism when that same nation does not come down like God’s Holy Wrath on the mayor of a certain large English city (which we will call “London“) who entertains and allows to speak in a public forum a radical Muslim imam who openly supports the terrorists and their agenda?

Not serious at all, right?

Steyn, and others, have also observed (again rightly) that many Western governments seem in many respects paralyzed by, or wilfully blind to, the terrorist threat. Consider:

It’s not black (the bomber) and white (the rest of us); there’s a lot of murky shades of grey in between: the terrorist bent on devastation and destruction prowls the streets, while around him are a significant number of people urging him on, and around them a larger group of cocksure young men gleefully celebrating mass murder, and around them a much larger group of people who stand silent at the acts committed in their name, and around them a mesh of religious and community leaders openly inciting mayhem, and around them a savvy network of professional identity-group grievance-mongers adamant that they’re the real victims, and around them a vast mass of progressive elites too squeamish about ethno-cultural matters to confront reality, and around them a political establishment desperate to pretend this is just a managerial problem that can be finessed away with a new bureaucracy and a bit of community outreach.

Taken from: The Daily Telegraph, August 02, 2005

There’s something to this order of things, really. When you consider that in Leedsyou can buy jihadist video games in which you too can slaughter the infidel and become a holy martyr, or when you consider the blatantly foolish edicts coming out of English police adminstration — remove your shoes when storming the house of a suspected Islamist terrorist, out of respect, are you at all surprised that (much!) less than a week after the initial bombings in which over 50 people died, there were more attempts that the police didn’t catch?

Yet the bombers are, so to speak, able to hide in plain sight - pests in a street full of pests, in a Britain where clerics freely incite violence; and where the Guardian hires a trainee reporter knowing he’s a member of a radical Islamist group banned in other European countries; and where the BBC cannot bring itself to drop its preferred euphemism of “militants”, even as suicide bombers advance from the Zionist Entity to the corporation’s own Tube station at .

Taken from: The Daily Telegraph, August 02, 2005

And as various quarters sound in with talk of a backlash against Muslims in Britain, which to my knowledge is still pending, radical imams continue to denounce Western governments, including the British government under which they live and which they ostensibly claim legal protection (and, in the case of some of the bombers, publically funded fiscal support) from, and you can still buy those damn games in Leeds. But everywhere, the spirit of appeasement seems alive and well.

Responding to Islamist terrorism in Britain and elsewhere, Germany is considering introducing a Muslim public holiday. As Mathias Dopfner, chief executive of Axel Springer, put it: “A substantial fraction of Germany’s government - and, if polls are to be believed, the German people - believe that creating an official state Muslim holiday will somehow spare us from the wrath of fanatical Islamists.”

Taken from: The Daily Telegraph, August 09, 2005

It’s not unreasonable to expect Tony Blair, and indeed all Western governments, to take measures, however drastic, to protect their respective populations from harm. That’s one of the reasons the government is there, right?

Tony Blair talks a good talk, explaining the rationale for war far better than President Bush. But he now needs not just to talk but to act. In France, the interior minister, Nicolas Sarkozy, has just expelled another dozen Islamists. By contrast, Mr Blair seems paralysed. In the weeks after 9/11, Mr Bush rethought 40 years of US policy in the Middle East. The Prime Minister has a more difficult task: he has to rethink 40 years of British policy in Leicester and Bradford and Leeds and Birmingham.

Taken from: The Daily Telegraph, August 02, 2005

So it is encouraging to see things like this coming out:

British prosecutors said yesterday they would consider treason charges against any Islamic extremists who express support for Terrorism.

Taken from: The Vancouver Province, August 08, 2005

Islamic extremists who incite violence or praise suicide attacks in Britain could face charges of treason, it emerged Sunday.

Taken from: Victoria Times Colonist, August 08, 2005

And hopefully, there is less to this article than there seems to be:

Tony Blair’s anti-terrorist drive was in disarray Monday after rapidly retreating from threats to invoke treason laws against extremists.

Taken from: The Windsor Star, August 09, 2005

One of the key strengths of the American, and to an equal degree the Austrailian, counter-terrorism initiatives, and indeed their relief initiatives related to the Indian Ocean tsumani, was and is quick, decisive action that they committed to and stuck to. This same quick-minded and unflappable determination has been seen in a number of smaller applications as recently as a week ago, when in ninety seconds flat, 309 people were able to evacuate from a burning airplane that skidded off the runway at Pearson Airport in Toronto — from a plane crash that was rated as “low survivability”, not one fatality was suffered. Nations need to work on the same principle when dealing with the terrorist threat — act quickly, decisively, and take care of the problem. If that means detaining imams that advocate for and profess support and praise for bombings, so be it. If that means profiling, so be it. If that means “no fly” lists, so be it. If that means, Heaven forbid, stricter immigration laws, or even temporarily suspending immigration, so be it. How many more Londoners, Iraqis, Americans, and Spaniards need to get blown up before people get this through their skulls?

In the wake of the London bombings, the British police have done wonders to investigate the attacks, and have even made a few arrests in the process. Thus far, they have identified about 30 suspects with al-Qaeda links. A backlash is also underway, though not against Muslims, as was feared by some. It is instead a backlash against London mayor Ken Livingstone, for his continued support of the radical Muslim cleric Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, who has publically endorsed terrorist bombers. He also publishes the occasional fatwa, which you can sometimes find on the IslamOnline website.

Mark Steyn has recently been on about dirty nukes, truly horrific weapons of mass destruction which, in addition to causing low-range kiloton-range damage against a target, spew increased volumes of very radioactive material over a wider raduis. These bombs are brutal weapons of mayhem with one purpose…limit the damage to structures, and instead kill the inhabitants with astronomical levels of radiation.

In particular, you can find the discussion in his Mailbox, and in specific as a response to one letter, cited below:

SECURITY RESTRAINED THEIR FIREPOWER
The inestimable Mr Steyn: “In other words, the scale of the carnage was constrained only by the murderers’ ambition and their manpower.”

I hesitate to disagree with someone whose thought I so respect, and whose command of language so far exceeds my own, but the carnage was also constrained by the murderers’ firepower, which has been downgraded from commercial airliners to backpacks as a result of stepped-up security. This is not an insignificant improvement.

Meyer Shields

MARK REPLIES: That’s correct in a sense. But what happens when it’s a dirty nuke in the backpack?

He’s also talked about portable nukes in one of his recent columns for the New York Sun. Again, the relevant passage is cited below:

Meanwhile, across the borders pour not primarily suicide bombers or suitcase nukes, though they will come in the end, but ideology — fierce, glamorous and implacable. That’s the final irony of the Israelification of Europe: distressing as it may be to Continental anti-Semites, in this scenario they’re the Jews.

At first, I was willing to put this down to Mr. Steyn’s usual talent for hyperbole and conjecture, but it appears that now it’s becoming something else. Say what you like about al-Qaeda, but they usually follow-through on the threats they make. One of the suspects in the London Bombings — Abu Musam al-Suri — recently was the subject of a Global Terror Alert, in which he asserts:

“I was honored to participate in the Afghani jihad against the Russians and the communists until we exterminated their forces and lowered their flanks and made an example out of them — as we will also do with America, with the help of Allah…I was honored to become acquainted with Shaykh Abdullah Azzam, and I worked with him during the days of the Afghani jihad in 1987. Then in 1988, I was honored by coming to know Shaykh Usama [bin Laden]…I was honored to become a member of Al-Qaida, and I worked with the group until 1992. During that time, I trained its first elite fighters and I was an instructor at its camps and other Arab-Afghan camps in various military and organizational methodologies, especially given my own high degree of specialized training in explosives production, special operations, and guerilla warfare that I received in Jordan, Iraq, and Egypt. All praise be to Allah for his blessing.“

A short while later in the article, he is again quoted:

“I emphasize my complete denial of what was reported in the American media and uttered by American official that I had any connection to or prior knowledge of the glorious and heroic September 2001 attacks. I only heard about it through the media, and I — along with many millions of other Muslims — enjoyed watching the beginning of the collapse of America. May Allah reward those who carried out [the attacks] with the best of rewards [martyrdom].“

The thing is, we can probably take him at his word about his non-involvement…and this is the tie-in between this report and Mark Steyn’s invocation of the spectre of dirty nukes. In an internet posting back in December 2004, al-Suri asserted that:

“…if I had been consulted about [the September 11] operation, I would have advised them to select aircraft on international flights and to have put weapons of mass destruction aboard them… now that the American administration has revealed the evil and wickedness of its forces… it is not a far cry from justice to adopt the slogan, ‘Dirty Bombs for a Dirty Nation’… Let the American people—those who voted for killing, destruction, the looting of other nations’ wealth, megalomania, and the desire to control others—be contaminated with radiation!“

As I said before, you can say what you like about the jihadi, but they usually make good on threats. It seems clearer and clearer now that in my lifetime, I will hear news of a backpack nuke going off in a major urban centre somewhere, probably in America. But really, it could be anywhere, because this is the ‘war’ that al-Qaeda is fighting. They are not waging a war of protest, or fighting so that America or any other Western nation will give them land or other concessions. They are fighting to kill the indifel.

We are all of us infidels to them.

My thoughts and prayers go out this day to the victims of the terrorist attacks in London — I pray that God’s merciful salvation will see the many dead received into His arms, and that the Holy Spirit will guide and aid the healing of the wounded.

In the aftermath of these terrorist attacks, there will probably be a lot of commentary (again and again, flogging the dead horse again…) about the “root causes” of Terrorism, and I think that most of this commentary will eventually devolve into scathing condemnations of three things:

a) George Bush
b) The “Zionist” entity and Israel
c) the “quagmire” in Iraq

And none of it will even come close to the truth.

The root cause of terror, this terror, isn’t a desire to promote a political cause, nor is it a method of protest against oppression. Not in the case of al-Qaeda. Their “root cause” is much simpler than economic disenfranchisement or neo-Marxist “liberation”. They seek to kill the infidel…which would be us. Mark Steyn weighs in with a timely quote from a couple years back, when some French ships were the target of terror attacks. It appears the terrorists were hoping to take out an American ship, but the French boats worked too…they were all infidels. Here’s the relevant excerpt, for people too lazy to click on the link:

…

On which subject, the Independent’s Robert Fisk thinks the Aussies were targeted for a more specific reason—blowback for being too cosy with the Great Satan: “The French have already paid a price for their initial support for Mr Bush. The killing of 11 French submarine technicians in Karachi has been followed by the suicide attack on the French oil tanker Limburg off the coast of Yemen. Now, it seems, it is the turn of Australia….” And don’t worry, there are plenty of others who’ll be getting theirs any day now. Just in case al-Qa’eda had missed one or two, Fisk helpfully provides a useful list of legitimate targets: “Belgium, which hosts Nato HQ; Canada, whose special forces have also been operating in Afghanistan; Ireland, which allows US military aircraft to refuel at Shannon…”. Blessings be upon you, Mister Robert, we had entirely forgot to add “Kill the Irish” to our “To Do” list.

I wonder if it was a cautious editor who added “initial” to that French “support for Mr Bush”. The French were supportive for about ten minutes after 11 September, but for most of the last year have been famously and publicly non-supportive: throughout the spring, their foreign minister, M. Vedrine, was deploring American “simplisme” on a daily basis. The French veto is still Saddam’s best shot at torpedoing any meaningful UN action on Iraq. If you were to pick only one Western nation not to blow up the oil tankers of, the French would be it.

But they got blown up anyway. And afterwards a spokesman for the Islamic Army of Aden said, “We would have preferred to hit a US frigate, but no problem because they are all infidels.”

No problem. They are all infidels.

…

(c) Copyright Mark Steyn, 2005, all rights reserved.

And even as I see that there are some people already weighing in with “root cause” commentary that pretty much follows the above predictions (see here, here, here, here, and here for starters…and then here for some laughable CIA paranoia), I’d just like to say that I hope the British government will show itself to be above such hypocrisy and address the real causes — the terrorists themselves, and the war they have declared against the infidel.

Because really, this “root cause” bleeding-heart talk is all pretty hypocritical, if you get right down to it.

Think about it…if al-Qaida or Hamas is justified in blowing up a bus in England or a restaurant in Tel Aviv because they perceive that the western Zionist oppressors are killing innocent Iraqis or Palestinians without cause and are driving the Islamic faith to ruin, then why isn’t some anti-abortion activist justified in blowing up an abortion clinic because s/he perceives that the pro-abortion oppressors are killing innocent unborn children without cause and are driving the moral fabric of society to ruin? Whether it’s a bus or an abortion clinic, it’s terrorism and it’s murder to blow it to pieces and kill people in doing so, so if you’re going to legitimize one and not the other then you’re committing a hypocrisy.

And if now you’re thinking “hah, now at least you’re admitting that Christians commit acts of terror too when they blow up clinics”, then I think you should read one of the recent articles at relapsedcatholic, and then the article that the author, Kathy Shaidle, links to from there. That’s not to say, of course, that there isn’t blood on the hands of some of those who claim to be Christian…but it IS to say that in many cases, the amount of blood is probably far less than many of my more liberal-minded acquaintances would prefer to see on the hands of members of a faith system they hate with almost irrational passion.

It’s both funny and tragic to me, and Mark Steyn has again commented on this (although sadly it appears that the relevant article is no longer linked from his page), that many of the same people who speak out against violence against women, oppression of women, violence against homosexuals, and discrimination against minority religions (i.e. “non-Christian” religions in the West), and who speak out in support of corruption-free elections and a vague concept of “freedom”, do so only in the West, in their own nations. On the global stage, many of these self-same people would be willing to plant themselves in the camp of fanatical theocrats and dictators who force women to wear burqas, who believe that the removal of the clitoris is the rite of passage into womanhood, who behead homosexuals — or toss them off rooftops, as the Taliban were fond of doing — and whose electoral process makes a mockery of concepts like democracy and “freedom”, all in the name of opposition to the even greater world threat: America. Saddam Hussein can execute and gas his own people, the Sudanese government can slaughter and rape Christians willy-nilly for the crime of not converting to Islam, and the “socially liberal” champions of individual rights here in the West are often the first to criticize America, Austrailia, and even Britain when they decide to go toe-to-toe against a dictator like that…or, come to think of it, when a Christian tries to peacefully convert them by handing them a pamphlet. If the Sudanese government stopped at pamphlets, there’d be a few thousand more Christian human beings alive today, and a few less trees. As sad as it is, for some people, the trees are the more important item.

And us conservatives are the scary ones, eh?

Well, so be it…consider yourself officially chilled to the bone.