Archived news and commentary: July 8 - 14, 2002

2002/09/23 - 2002/09/29
2002/09/16 - 2002/09/22
2002/09/09 - 2002/09/15
2002/09/02 - 2002/09/08
2002/08/26 - 2002/09/01
2002/08/19 - 2002/08/25
2002/08/12 - 2002/08/18
2002/08/05 - 2002/08/11
2002/07/29 - 2002/08/04
2002/07/22 - 2002/07/28
2002/07/15 - 2002/07/21
2002/07/08 - 2002/07/14
2002/07/01 - 2002/07/07

Sunday, July 14, 2002

News and commentary:

"And a Thief, Too - Yasser Arafat takes what he likes" (Rachel Ehrenfeld, IMRA/National Review, 2002/07/14)
"Britain's National Criminal Intelligence Service (NCIS) published its own estimate of the PLO's loot in a 1993 briefing paper on organizations threatening the UK, calling it "the richest of all terrorist organizations." NCIS estimated the PLO's ill-gotten gains at $8-10 billion. In addition, the PLO enjoyed an annual income of about $1.5-2 billion from "do nations, extortion, payoffs, illegal arms dealing, drug trafficking, money laundering, fraud, etc." ... When $326 million disappeared from PA coffers in 1996, the Palestinian Legislative Council established a special commission to investigate corruption within the PA. The ensuing report found that nearly 40 percent of the PA's $800 million annual budget (coming mostly from foreign aid) had been lost through corruption and mismanagement. The PA's comptroller wrote: "The overall picture is one of a Mafia-style government, where the main point of being in public office is to get rich quick." Arafat suppressed the report but promised reform. ...
Soon after, the London Daily Telegraph revealed that computer hackers had broken the security code of the PLO's computer system, uncovering records of about $8 billion the PLO held in numbered bank accounts in New York, Geneva, and Zurich, and smaller secret accounts in North Africa, Europe, and Asia. The newspaper also unearthed further secret holdings of the PLO - including front companies, European real estate, and shares in Mercedes-Benz and the national airlines of the Maldives and Guinea-Bissau - totaling about $50 billion for the year 2000 (up from $32 billion recorded in 1998). Naturally, Arafat and his men denied the report."

"Hopes for Palestinians carried in unborn son" (Stephen Farrell, The Sunday Times, 2002/07/14)
"On a torn, painted canvas 20ft above Amal al-Dura's head, her son Muhammad crouches in foetal position behind his father, waiting to die. Inside her a new Muhammad al-Dura crouches in foetal position, waiting to be born. Amal, mother of the most famous victim of the intifada, is pregnant again, with a boy whose name and legacy were decided 18 months before he was conceived. It was at a blood-spattered wall at Gaza's Netzarim crossroads on September 30, 2000, that the 12-year-old brother he will never know was killed, apparently by Israeli soldiers, in full view of television cameras; the images were flashed round the world even before his mother knew. For a foetus weighing only a few ounces, the "new Muhammad", as his mother refers to him, has a heavy burden to bear. He was conceived almost exactly on Muhammad's birthday - February 18 - because that was when 35-year-old Amal took out the diaphragm she had worn for four years. He is a replacement. He is a message. And he is a weapon."

"F.B.I. and Military Unite in Pakistan to Hunt Al Qaeda" (Dexter Filkins et al., The New York Times, 2002/07/14)
"Pakistanis living in the tribal areas described a chaotic scene, with hundreds of Qaeda and Taliban members spilling across the border in search of refuge from their American pursuers. "A lot of people passed through here, hundreds of them," said Selab Mehsood, a Pakistani journalist in Wana, in the heart of Pakistan's tribal areas. "Most of the Al Qaeda did not stay here. They kept going, into the cities." The presence of Al Qaeda in the cities has been confirmed by intercepts of cellphone, Internet and e-mail traffic. Western diplomats and Pakistani officials say they believe that Al Qaeda already helped orchestrate as many as three recent attacks on Western targets: the grenade assault on a Christian church in Islamabad, which killed two Americans; the deadly bombing of the American Consulate in Karachi; and the suicide bombing that killed 11 French citizens in Karachi."

"Yemeni Fugitive Was Critical to Unfolding of Sept. 11 Plot" (Peter Finn, The Washington Post, 2002/07/14)
A profile of Ramzi Binalshibh, "the most wanted figure from the tight circle of operatives believed to have planned and carried out the attacks.": "With preparations for the attack complete after the Spanish summit and the final cash transfers to Moussaoui complete, Binalshibh fled Germany on Sept. 5, investigators said. Apparently taking a circuitous route through Spain en route to Pakistan, officials believe he disappeared into Taliban-controlled Afghanistan just before Sept. 11. In December 2001, Binalshibh resurfaced in an al Qaeda video that was seized by U.S. forces from the bombed-out home of Muhammad Atef, the al Qaeda military operations chief. Wide-eyed and wearing a red kaffiyeh, Binalshibh looked at the camera and promised holy war."

 

Saturday, July 13, 2002

News and commentary:

"Gunmen Disguised as Holy Men Kill 24 in Kashmir" (Ashok Pahalwan, Reuters/Yahoo! News, 2002/07/13)
"Gunmen disguised as Hindu holy men shot dead at least 24 civilians, including a child, in a mainly Hindu slum in Indian Kashmir Saturday, police said. The attack is likely to stoke tensions between neighboring nuclear powers India and Pakistan, locked in a military standoff for more than six months over the disputed Himalayan region that has raised fears of war. Five men opened fire near a makeshift Hindu temple in Jammu - Jammu and Kashmir state's winter capital - in the evening attack before fleeing. The army has launched a manhunt. At least 12 women were among the dead and 20 people were injured, police said, adding the toll was likely to rise. ...
No one has so far claimed responsibility for the killings and there was no independent confirmation it was carried out by Islamic militants fighting Indian rule in Jammu and Kashmir."

"If the shoe fits..." (James C. Bennett, UPI, 2002/07/13)
"At the same time, European academics have been promoting a Europe-wide boycott of Israeli Jewish academics and affiliations. Although claiming to be an anti-Israeli, not an anti-Semitic measure, there have been so far as I can determine no cases of non-Jewish Israeli citizens being targeted. For example, a British professor (of Egyptian origin) reportedly acting as part of this boycott action fired two members of publication boards who were Israeli Jews. Appallingly enough, Patrick Bateson, the provost of King's College, Cambridge, rejected criticism of the boycott, comparing the moral issue of working with Israeli Jews as comparable to the moral dilemma of collaborating with Nazi death camp torturer Josef Mengele, who performed bizarre and cruel procedures on Jewish children. ...
Thus British pro-European intellectuals find the whiff of Nazis around 'the single currency project' to be something Jews should find offensive, while at least some among them deem acceptable Nuremberg Law-style campaign against the livelihood of Israeli Jews living in Europe."

"All the Hate That's Fit to Print" (Stephen Schwartz, The Weekly Standard, from the 2002/07/22 issue)
"What's gone unremarked is that [Hadayet] could just as easily have been incited by the steady diet of violent rhetoric served up by the American Muslim community media - periodicals with names like The Minaret, Islamic Horizons, the Weekly Mirror International, and the Muslim Observer, which toe the anti-American, anti-Israel line of Saudi Arabia's Islamofascist Wahhabi sect. ...
These publications make no attempt to hide their attachments to international extremist groups. Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood - which preaches the classic neo-Wahhabi doctrine of the supremacy of Islam and condemnation of non-extremist Muslims as irreligious - receives support from at-Talib (The Student), published at UCLA by the Islamic Center of Southern California, and from Islamic Horizons, based in Plainfield, Indiana. ...
Meanwhile, in the March 27 issue of the Weekly Mirror International (www.readmirror.com), author Khalil Osman declaims, 'The Bush administration has demonstrated unprecedented zeal in instituting draconian measures aimed mainly at Arabs and Muslims. ...
As more details became known, a chilling picture of a full-blooded campaign against Muslims and Arabs began to emerge.'"

 

Friday, July 12, 2002

News and commentary:

"Osama Bin Laden, Meet Your Closest Kin: Karl Marx" (Jonathan Rauch, National Journal, 2002/07/12)
"To understand the sort of war that militant Islam is waging, look not to the Far Right but the Far Left. This new adversary resembles an enemy America knows well: Marxism. ...
Both Marxism and Islamism are utopian, promising a future in which harmony, equity, and altruism will replace conflict, unfairness, and corruption. Both embrace historicism, the doctrine that ineluctable historical laws - economic in one case, divine in the other - make eventual triumph inevitable. ...
Where they rule, Marxism and Islamism resemble fascism in their absolutist style. But they see state power not, in the fascistic way, as an end, but instead as a means: a stepping-stone toward a stateless future ruled directly by the masses or by God. Thus Marxism and militant Islam have little interest in joining coalitions and playing politics; where they cannot rule, they prefer to destabilize. Instability, in their view, can only help release the historical forces that operate in their favor. After all, capitalism (they believe) is fatally weak. Its strong exterior masks decadence and contradiction. All it needs is a hard push, and down it will go. ...
For ultimately, both have as their greatest asset - and perhaps their deepest similarity - a genius for disguising a brutal and self-serving political agenda as a quasi-religious mission of world salvation. Both claim not only to solve all political and social problems, but to answer all questions worth asking. Both thus inspire fanatical devotion worldwide."

"European Morality?" (Victor Davis Hanson, National Review, 2002/07/12)
"We in the United States have this unpleasant suspicion that the record of European jurisprudence - more scrutiny and concern given to those caught on the battlefield and detained in Cuba than to the Sept. 11 terrorists who planned their murdering while roaming free in Europe - is both biased and opportunistic. Europe will go after a decrepit Pinochet when he flies thousands of miles from home in his dotage, but wait years to do much about a robust and dangerous Milosevic right next door who killed more in a month than Pinochet did in a lifetime. It will lecture the United States, which is a civilized and humane state, about everything from its death penalty to internment of prisoners of war, but say nothing about real murder that is a daily occurrence in China and much of the Arab world. ...
The Europeans have more important security worries than errant American soldiers - such as terrorism and rising anti-Semitism. But if they are worried about issues of morality and law, they should look to their own immediate past and round up all the present legions of ex-communist officials and fellow-travelers still safe in their midst who just a few years ago brought misery and death to millions."

"A Few Saudis Defy a Rigid Islam to Debate Their Own Intolerance" (Neil MacFarquhar, The New York Times, 2002/07/12)
"Saudis abhor the term Wahhabism, feeling it sets them apart and contradicts the notion that Islam is a monolithic faith. But Wahhabi-inspired xenophobia dominates religious discussion in a way not found elsewhere in the Islamic world. Bookshops in the holy cities of Mecca and Medina, for example, sell a 1,265-page souvenir tome that is a kind of "greatest hits" of fatwas on modern life. It is strewn with rulings on shunning non-Muslims: don't smile at them, don't wish them well on their holidays, don't address them as "friend." A fatwa from Sheik Muhammad bin Othaimeen, whose funeral last year attracted hundreds of thousands of mourners, tackles whether good Muslims can live in infidel lands. The faithful who must live abroad should "harbor enmity and hatred for the infidels and refrain from taking them as friends," it reads in part. Saudis in general, and senior princes in particular, reject the notion that this kind of teaching helps spawns terrorists. "Well, of course I hate you because you are Christian, but that doesn't mean I want to kill you," a professor of Islamic law in Riyadh explains to a visiting reporter."

"Rice: entire PA leadership must go" (Aluf Benn, Haaretz, 2002/07/17)
"In an interview with Israeli Channel 2 news, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice said Thursday that the administration of President George W. Bush had reached the conclusion that the entire Palestinian Authority leadership should be replaced, and not just chairman Yasser Arafat. "It's not just a question of one man," said Rice, "it's an entire politcal regime that needs to be changed, so that one man does not control the lives of the entire population.'"

"Tales of Canterbury's Future?" (Peter Mullen, The Wall Street Journal, 2002/07/12)
Mullen on archbishop Rowan Williams, who is likely to become the next archbishop of Canterbury: "As it happens, he was in New York on Sept. 11, 2001, at a conference on spirituality. He has given us his reflections on the atrocities in a booklet titled "Writing in the Sand," published late last year. ...
The archbishop wants us to "understand" the terrorists' motives. "We have something of the freedom to consider whether or not we turn to violence and so, in virtue of that very fact, are rather different from those who experience their world as leaving no other option." But this is cant. Of course the suicide bombers had "other options": Not every Muslim thinks that the only answer to his problems is to destroy New York. ...
Once we have admitted that the atrocity was not the terrorists' fault, what next? "We begin to find some sense of what they and we might together recognise as good." Really? But how to make common moral cause between democracy's rule of law and nihilistic killing? Do sit down Osama. Have another éclair while we discuss the terms of trade. ...
Dr. Williams is often described here as something of a saint. In fact, he is an old-fashioned class warrior, a typical bien-pensant despiser of Western capitalism and the way of life that goes with it."

"Perfidious Belgium" (Paul Belien, The Spectator, from the 2002/07/13 issue)
"According to a recent inquiry ordered by a Belgian parliamentary commission, Brussels has become a major recruiting base for al-Qa'eda and a launch-pad for terrorist attacks on neighbouring countries. The commission investigated the failure of the Sûreté de l'Etat, the Belgian secret service, to screen Islamic terrorists. ...
The inquiry of the Belgian parliamentary commission into the Sûreté de l'Etat revealed that it had allowed the Belgian Muslim community - numbering over 350,000 members, including more than 200,000 Moroccans, almost 100,000 Turks and 13,000 Algerians - to become heavily infiltrated by fundamentalist extremists. ...
The report warns that the fundamentalist Muslims are creating a religious state within the Belgian state. The biggest mosque in Belgium, the Great Mosque of Brussels, built in the Cinquantenaire Park with Saudi money on a piece of land donated by the late King Baudouin to Saudi King Faisal in 1967, operates its own 'Islamic police', supervising certain Brussels neighbourhoods with a large concentration of Muslims. It even organises paramilitary training. The report refers to sermons at the Great Mosque calling Brussels 'the capital of the infidels', rejoicing in the attacks of 11 September, openly supporting Osama bin Laden, and admonishing the faithful to prepare for the jihad."

"Bush pulls it off again" (Mark Steyn, The Spectator, from the 2002/07/13 issue)
"In Whitehall, meanwhile, 'senior civil servants' brief John Simpson that Bush is 'a bear of very little brain' and that his Middle East speech was 'puerile', 'absurdly ignorant' and 'ludicrous'... ...
For Bush, it's a win–win situation. If the Palestinians elect the Hamas crowd, he can say, 'Fine, I respect your choice. Call me back when you decide to put self-government before self-detonation.' If they opt for plausible state and municipal legislators, Bush will have re-established an important principle: that when the Americans sign on to nation-building they do so only to bring into being functioning democratic, civilised states - as they did with postwar Germany and Japan. ...
The question Matthew Parris might like to ask as he weeds his borders is why could no European leader make a speech like that? How did it come about that the entire EU reflexively stuck with an aging terrorist who cancelled the last scheduled elections? Which bear is really the one with the little brain? The one who in under three weeks has changed the dynamic of the Palestinian question? Or the one whose gags are as stale as his world view?"

 

Thursday, July 11, 2002

News and commentary:

"Al-Qa'eda 'aimed to massacre Vatican pilgrims'" (Bruce Johnston, The Daily Telegraph, 2002/07/11)
"Terrorists with links to al-Qa'eda planned to blow up pilgrims in St Peter's Square, at the heart of the Vatican, it was disclosed yesterday. But the plan was frozen two months before the September 11 attacks. Details of the plan, which appeared in the newspaper Corriere della Sera, were contained in a report given to magistrates by Italy's Digos anti-terrorist police. They included intelligence provided by Britain. The document named the terrorists involved and described visits they had made to likely targets. "The Salafist cell in Italy is thought to be organising plans, now in an embryonic stage, to carry out a sensational terror attack, either against an American target in Europe or against the Vatican," it said. Among the reconnaissance visits by suspected terrorist scouts was one to an unnamed Venetian church, "well known for being frequented by Americans", and to St Peter's Square. Another likely target was the US embassy in Rome."

"Iraq building up deadly arsenal, say defectors" (Michael Evans and Roland Watson, The Times, 2002/07/11)
"Saddam Hussein has made important progress in developing weapons of mass destruction capable of killing millions of people, senior Iraqi defectors say. That suggests that the Iraqi leader is pressing ahead with all three elements of his secret weapons project: nuclear, chemical and biological. The analysis is based on material gained from officials who worked on the programme and Intelligence on Iraqi agents trying to buy dual-use components. ...
The production of biological agents such as anthrax, botulinum toxin and ricin, can be carried out under cover of legitimate pharmaceutical plants and small laboratories which remained intact after the Gulf War. Terence Taylor, a UN weapons inspector in Iraq for four years up to 1997, said he believed Saddams biological arsenal posed the greatest immediate threat. Since 1998, when the UN inspectors withdrew, Iraq has failed to account for 17 tons of growth media used for culturing anthrax and other biological agents."

"Amnesty condemns Palestinian attacks" (BBC News, 2002/07/11)
"Israel has welcomed a report by a human rights watchdog that condemns Palestinian attacks on Israeli civilians. Amnesty International describes the attacks as crimes against humanity which should end immediately. "The attacks against civilians by Palestinian armed groups are widespread, systematic and in pursuit of an explicit policy to attack civilians," the Amnesty report said. "They constitute crimes against humanity... They may also constitute war crimes." ...
Over the years the bulk of Amnesty's work in the region has highlighted abuses by Israel, making Thursday's report an unusual departure."

"Palestinian Media Glorify Homicide Bombers to Children" (Fox News, 2002/07/11)
"Roa Salameh is a 12-year-old girl living in Bethlehem, and she wants to become a homicide bomber. Her father, who thinks she's motivated by feelings of hopelessness and despair, is trying to talk her out of it. He spent 15 years in prison for political activities and was once a member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, which the U.S. has labeled a terrorist organization and which is part of Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat’s Fatah party. But as he grew older he started to soften his views and became a peace activist. ... She came home and told her father that since the Jews don't like them, she wants to be a homicide bomber. "I want to kill them," Roa told a reporter. "I want to kill them but I can't." ...
An anchor on Palestinian TV once asked a child, "You said martyrdom is a beautiful thing? Is it a beautiful thing?" "I think people like to be martyrs. They will go to heaven," the girl answered. "What could be better than going to paradise?'"

"German newspaper: Mossad following Palestinians planning to attack Baltic ships" (Al Bawaba, 2002/07/11)
"Israeli and German intelligence services are tracking two Palestinians who they believe are planning attacks on cruise ships in the Baltic Sea, a German daily said in a report published Thursday. Israel's intelligence service, the Mossad, alerted its German counterpart after intercepting a phone conversation between the two, Die Welt said, without indicating its source. Authorities in the German port city of Hamburg followed the suspects after they went to Frankfurt. The two men later met with two other Palestinians in Hamburg, before travelling by sea to Denmark, where they are currently staying, the paper said. German intelligence services and Israel's Mossad plan to continue to track the suspects. It should be mentioned that a few weeks ago, German Interior Minister Otto Schily and federal police issued a warning of possible attacks in the Baltic Sea, probably based on information supplied by the Mossad, Die Welt reported."

"A battle in which the pen has become the sword" (Magnus Linklater, The Times, 2002/07/11)
"Martin Walser, a once powerful literary voice in post-war Europe, has written a novel, called Death of a Critic, which turns [Germany's leading literary critic] Reich-Ranicki, thinly disguised, into a figure of ridicule and contempt. The book has yet to be published, but already it has become a national scandal. I counted more than 120 articles in the German press, then gave up less than halfway through. This being Germany, there is one other element in the book which has sent shock waves through the literary world. It is anti-Semitism. The principal character in Death of a Critic is a Jew - and not just any Jew. He is, in the words of Die Welt, "not a man, but a monster of corruption, of vulgarity, vanity and lubricity. He personifies the Jew as an object of hate." So this is more than just an attack on Reich-Ranicki, it constitutes an assault on his race as well. It is the first anti-Semitic novel to be published in Germany since the war. Realising this, the publisher of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung has hurriedly cancelled his plans to serialise it, describing the book as riddled with "anti-Semitic clichés". ...
So Walser's attack is more than just an injured writer hitting back; it is, as the current literary editor of Die Welt, puts it, "an execution, a settling of scores, a document of hate". The editor was particularly repelled by a sentence towards the end of the book where the critic’s wife observes that "getting himself killed would be out of character". As a comment aimed at the sole survivor from a family destroyed by the Nazis it was, he noted, 'nothing short of horrifying'."

"5,000 in U.S. suspected of ties to al Qaeda" (Bill Gertz, The Washington Times, 2002/07/11)
"U.S. intelligence agencies are watching several groups of Middle Eastern men thought to be part of an infrastructure of as many as 5,000 al Qaeda terrorists and their supporters in the United States, The Washington Times has learned. Small groups of about a half-dozen men in Seattle, Chicago, Detroit and Atlanta are under surveillance by FBI and other intelligence agencies and are thought to be part of Osama bin Laden's terrorist network, said intelligence officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity. In one case, five men of Middle Eastern origin rented rooms in Seattle and conducted activities that officials would not specify but called unusual. "One [intelligence] estimate is that there are up to 5,000 people in the United States connected to al Qaeda," one U.S. intelligence official said."

"The West must stop kidding itself about Saudi Arabia" (Simon Henderson, The Daily Telegraph, 2002/07/11)
"According to a leaked British intelligence dossier, al-Qa'eda has been receiving large sums from bin Laden's Saudi supporters since last year to fund future terrorist attacks. A British official said last month that he hoped funds from Islamic foundations had been cut off, but he doubted whether the kingdom had the political and legal will. More worryingly, there is evidence that senior Saudi princes paid off bin Laden after his followers carried out a bombing in Riyadh in 1995. Officials estimate that "hundreds of millions of dollars" were transferred to al-Qa'eda to encourage it to place its bombs elsewhere. ...
Would more democracy help? The Saudi business and technocratic middle class has always been disfranchised, but is not necessarily enlightened. In April, 126 Saudi academics and writers published an open letter saying: 'We consider the United States and its current administration a first-class sponsor of international terrorism, and it along with Israel form an axis of terrorism and evil in the world.'"

"The Death of bin Ladenism" (Amer Taheri, The New York Times, 2002/07/11)
According to Taheri the threat of "bin Ladenism" is gone, except as a "useful" specter for Bush and Musharraf: "With an ego the size of Mount Everest, Osama bin Laden would not have, could not have, remained silent for so long if he were still alive. He always liked to take credit even for things he had nothing to do with. Would he remain silent for nine months and not trumpet his own survival? Even if he is still in the world, bin Ladenism has left for good. Mr. bin Laden was the public face of a brand of politics that committed suicide in New York and Washington on Sept. 11, 2001, killing thousands of innocent people in the process. ...
Mr. bin Laden's ghost may linger on - perhaps because Washington and Islamabad will find it useful. President Bush's party has a crucial election to win and Pervez Musharraf is keen to keep Pakistan in the limelight as long as possible. But the truth is that Osama bin Laden is dead."

 

Wednesday, July 10, 2002

News and commentary:

"LAX Attack: The View from Israel" (Tom Gross, National Review, 2002/07/10)
"Almost one week on from the Los Angeles airport shootings American law-enforcement authorities, as well as virtually the entire world media, are continuing to refuse to countenance the idea that the attack was a terror attack - though that is what it undoubtedly was. ...
Had Hadayet attacked another airline rather than El Al, which alone at L.A. airport had armed security officers, the final death toll may well have proven far worse. Hadayet was only seconds into his assault - he had come heavily armed with the two fully loaded guns, spare magazines and ammunition, and a six-inch-long hunting knife - and managed to fire just ten of his bullets, killing two civilians and wounding seven others, before he was shot dead by the alert El Al security officer. ...
The idea that Hadayet needed a direct personal order from someone such as Yasser Arafat or Osama bin Laden to carry out his attack on Israelis for it to be characterized as a "terror attack" rather than "isolated incident," "hate crime," or "despondent act" shows how little Western officials still seem to understand about the methods and mentality of Islamic and Arab terror groups."

"Al-Qaida Spokesmen Makes New Threats" (Salah Nasrawi, AP/Yahoo! News, 2002/07/10)
"A key al-Qaida spokesman has made a new threat to attack American targets and urged Muslims the world over to "kill enemies of God everywhere." "Al-Qaida will organize more attacks inside American territory and outside, at the moment we choose, at the place we choose and with the objectives that we want," al-Qaida's chief spokesman, Kuwaiti-born Sulaiman Abu Ghaith, said in an audio recording aired by an Islamic website believed to be close to the terror network blamed for the Sept. 11 attacks. "We are coming back, God willing, from where you cannot expect us," said Abu Ghaith in the interview broadcast on www.jehad.net. The new targets, he said, will be 'American and Jewish ... our arrogant enemies.'"

"Put a war with Iraq in the diary for January" (Tim Hames, The Times, 2002/07/10)
"And when that Iraqi operation starts, the repercussions will be considerable, but paradoxical. The reaction in Western Europe will be more genuinely hostile than that of those in charge of many Middle Eastern nations. In a further twist, the prospect of a swift American military triumph will again trigger far more concern in Berlin and Paris than Amman or Cairo. ...
In Western Europe, though, an awesome demonstration of raw American power would be taken rather differently. The crowds would not take to the streets to hail the termination of the world's most dangerous weapons of mass destruction project. The complaints would be of American "unilateralism" and "hegemony". They would be amplified by the fact that in most EU countries the Left is in opposition and unencumbered by any sense of diplomatic responsibility. That a US invasion of Iraq might be popular with that country's citizens would not stop it being condemned as 'imperialism'."

"Villagers honour al-Qaeda 'martyrs'" (Zahid Hussain, The Times, 2002/07/10)
A report from Pakistan: "On the edge of a busy highway near the northern city of Kohat, hundreds of people gather every day at a makeshift shrine to pay homage and pray for four al-Qaeda fighters killed in a gunfight with the Pakistani security forces last week. ... "It is a sacred place where the blood of the soldiers of God was spilt," Noor Mohammed said as he knelt to kiss a stone, still stained with blood. ...
Over the past week the shrine has become the focus of anti-government agitation. On Monday thousands of protesters shouting slogans in support of Osama bin Laden and against the United States blocked the highway for several hours. Police arrested more than a dozen of their leaders and used teargas to disperse the crowd. According to reports, hundreds of villagers took part in funeral prayers for the militants, whom they described as "holy warriors". Many policemen on duty were also said to have joined the faithful. Villagers have erected a sign naming the site "martyr of Islam square" and have lit candles in memory of the dead. Witnesses said that the villagers thronged the spot after the fighting, many of them embracing the dead and others even taking away body parts to bury them inside the compound of their houses."

 

Tuesday, July 9, 2002

News and commentary:

"Saudi envoy: Israel occupation worse than Nazis" (Reuters/Haaretz, 2002/07/09)
"Saudi Arabia's ambassador to Britain said on Tuesday that Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza was worse than anything Europe experienced under Nazi Germany. He also defended Palestinian suicide bombers. Ghazi Algosaibi, who drew fire last April for writing a poem in praise of an 18-year-old female suicide bomber, said Israel was using its military might against civilians who were defending themselves with the only weapons available to them. "This is a war of occupation, far more severe than anything the Germans did when they occupied Europe in World War Two," he told academics and reporters after giving a speech at the University of Westminster in London. The Nazis systematically exterminated six million Jews during World War Two when Germany occupied much of continental Europe."

"Whatever you do, don't call it a hate crime" (Mark Steyn, National Post, 2002/07/09)
"On the Fourth of July (hint) a guy went to the airport in Los Angeles, sauntered up to the ticket counter of El Al (hint) and fatally shot two people and wounded three. ... And whaddaya know? He wasn't an elderly nun but a 41-year-old Egyptian male! His name wasn't Kellie-Sue, it was Hesham Mohamed Hadayet! This stunning development seems to have completely disoriented the FBI. I quote from The New York Times headline: "Officials Puzzled About Motive Of Airport Gunman." Hmm. Egyptian Muslim kills Jews on American national holiday. ...
That left the police with no leads. Nothing to go on. The trail's stone cold. All the FBI has is an Egyptian male, who'd complained to his apartment managers after his neighbours post-9/11 began displaying the American flag; who'd posted a banner saying "READ KORAN" on his own front door; who told his employees that he hated Israel, that the two biggest drug dealers in New York were Israelis, and that Israel was trying to wipe out the Egyptian population by flooding the country with AIDS-infected Jewess prostitutes. Could even the most expert psychological profiler make sense of such confusing and contradictory signs? Beats me, Sherlock. But, as Agent Garcia says, there's no indication of 'anti-Israel views or any other type of racial views.'"

"The Fortunes of Permanence" (Roger Kimball, The New Criterion, from the Summer 2002 issue)
"What we see in contemporary culture is relativism with a vengeance. It is a directed, activist relativism, forgiving and nonjudgmental about anything hostile to the perpetuation of traditional Western culture, full of self-righteous retribution when it comes to individuals and institutions friendly to the West. It incubates what Mark Steyn described above as "the slyer virus": "the vague sense that the West's success must somehow be responsible for the rest's failure." ...
The attack on permanence is a failure of principle that results in moral paralysis. Chesterton once defined madness as "using mental activity so as to reach mental helplessness." That is an apt description of a process we see at work in many segments of our social and intellectual life. It is not so much a version of Hamlet's disease - being sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought - as an example of what happens when conscience is no longer animated by principle and belief. ...
September 11 precipitated a crisis the end of which we cannot see. Part of the task that faces us now is to acknowledge the depth of barbarism that challenges the survival of culture. And part of that acknowledgment lies in reaffirming the core values that are under attack. Ultimately, victory in the conflict that besieges us will be determined not by smart weapons but by smart heads. That is to say, the conflict is not so much - not only - military conflict as a conflict of world views."

"Students attack boycott of Israelis" (BBC News, 2002/07/09)
"The sacking of Israeli academics from two scholarly journals is "nothing short of racist", says the National Union of Students. Dr Miriam Schlesinger and Professor Gideon Toury were removed as contributors to linguistics journals - the Translator and Translation Studies Abstract - in a boycott on academic contacts with Israel. ...
But the move against Israeli academics has been condemned by the head of the student union's anti-racism campaign. "To exclude people based on their nationality is abhorrent and nothing short of racism and should be universally condemned," said Daniel Rose. The union said the action had "shocked and horrified" the student movement - and it said that individual academics could not be held accountable for the actions of their countries." (See also: "Fury as academics are sacked for being Israeli" (Charlotte Edwardes, The Daily Telegraph, 2002/07/07))

"Wife of L.A. Airport Gunman Says He Is Innocent" (AP/The New York Times, 2002/07/09)
"The wife of an Egyptian who gunned down two people at the Los Angeles airport said Monday that her husband is innocent and that he gave no hint of violence in a phone call hours before the shooting. ...
El-Awadly said she did not believe her husband was responsible for the July 4 shooting. She offered no explanation for how he could be innocent when so many people saw him open fire, but said he was being blamed because he was Arab and Muslim. "He is a victim of injustice,'' she said three times. 'In America, they hate Islam and Arabs after Sept. 11.'''

"Terror & Denial" (Daniel Pipes, New York Post/danielpipes.org, 2002/07/09)
"It is obvious why Hesham Mohamed Ali Hadayet targeted Jews in a highly visible place on so prominent a date: to engage in terrorism against Israel. But one important institution - the U.S. government - claims not to know Hadayet's goals. An FBI spokesman has said that "there's nothing to indicate terrorism." ...
Sure, law enforcement should not jump to conclusions, but this head-in-the-clouds approach is ridiculous. It also fits a well-established pattern. ...
Hassan Jandoubi, an Islamist with possible connections to al Qaeda, had started working at the AZF fertilizer factory in suburban Toulouse, France, just days before a massive explosion took place there last Sept. 21. This, the worst catastrophe ever in a French chemical plant, killed Jandoubi and 29 others, injured 2,000, destroyed 600 dwellings, and damaged 10,000 buildings. The autopsy revealed that Jandoubi was wearing two pairs of trousers and four pairs of underpants, which the coroner compared to what is worn by "Islamic militants going into battle or on suicide missions." ...
Ignoring these signs, the French authorities declared there was "no shred of evidence" of the explosion being a terrorist act and ruled it an accident. They even prosecuted two publications merely for calling Jandoubi a "radical Islamist," making them pay tens of thousands of dollars in fines to Jandoubi's heirs, a mosque and a Muslim organization for their "defamation" of Jandoubi."

"Bigotry in Islam - And Here" (Nicholas D. Kristof, The New York Times, 2002/07/09)
"Since 9/11, appalling hate speech about Islam has circulated in the U.S. on talk radio, on the Internet and in particular among conservative Christian pastors - the modern echoes of Charles Coughlin, the "radio priest" who had a peak listening audience in the 1930's of one-third of America for his anti-Semitic diatribes. "Islam is, quite simply, a religion of war," Paul Weyrich and William Lind, two leading American conservatives, write in a new booklet titled "Why Islam Is a Threat to America and the West." Mr. Lind said of American Muslims: "They should be encouraged to leave. They are a fifth column in this country." ...
The Rev. Franklin Graham, son of the Rev. Billy Graham and a prominent evangelist in his own right, said of Islam: "I believe it's a very evil and wicked religion." The Rev. Jerry Vines, past president of the Southern Baptist Convention, declared that the Prophet Muhammad was 'a demon-obsessed pedophile.'" (See also: "Moral equivalence watch" (Andrew Sullivan, The Daily Dish, 2002/07/09): "'Our bigotry is as bad as theirs', he opines. Excuse me? When conservative Christians start murdering thousands of Muslim and Jewish civilians in the Middle East, it will be. Until then, there is simply no equivalence between anti-Muslim bigotry in the U.S. and anti-Western and anti-Semitic terrorism in the Arab world. One bigotry mouths off (often appallingly). The other murders thousands of civilians because of their religion and culture and glories in it. If Kristof cannot see that distinction, he should take a trip downtown and see the mass grave these evil fanatics created. They weren't killed by the religious right.")

"Iraq says Farrakhan tells of U.S. Muslims' support" (Thanaa Imam, UPI/The Washington Times, 2002/07/09)
"Iraq's state-run media has quoted Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan as saying during a visit to Baghdad that American Muslims are praying for an Iraqi victory in a war with the United States. ...
Mr. Farrakhan held talks with Islamic Affairs Minister Abdul Munem Saleh on "ways to confront the American threats against Iraq," INA reported. The agency quoted the black Muslim leader as saying "the Muslim American people are praying to the almighty God to grant victory to Iraq." Mr. Saleh was quoted by INA as urging a common effort among the Muslims of the world to "expose the American and Zionist crimes toward the people of Iraq and Palestine." ...
Mr. Farrakhan, heading a Nation of Islam delegation, also met with Health Minister Omeed Mubarak, who briefed him on the "effects of the sanctions on Iraq and the health reality represented by the death of 1.6 million people a year because of food and medical shortages," INA said."

 

Monday, July 8, 2002

News and commentary:

"A Clash of Cultures and Religions" (Fox News, 2002/07/08)
A transcript of the July 5:th edition of Special Report With Brit Hume, featuring the Filipino evangelist and guest worker Dennis Moreno La Calle who "spent seven months in a Saudi prison for the crime of holding prayer sessions in his home.": "MORENO LA CALLE: And then they transferred me to the cell where we were separated as Christians from the others. And then this September 11 happened. They heard the news. And they were all shouting. ...
The following day, we had a feast. People were just happy because there was good food in the prison. And then after a week, I think about two weeks, somebody else came. And they were hugging each other as if they were crying, and they were telling stories. And I said, "Who is he?" The guy just said, "Oh, it means it's an officer." I said, "Of whom?" I thought the officer of a government, but he said of bin Laden.
SNOW: OK, very briefly then, the Saudi government in its own way threw a feast in the prison after September 11?
MORENO LA CALLE: It's the warden. And the sergeants allowed the foods to be brought in that so we may have a feast. I didn't know. I'm really sorry that I partook in it."

"Mr. Nowhere Man" (Joshua Hammer, Newsweek, from the 2002/07/08 issue)
"Abbas Zaki once considered himself a true believer in Yasir Arafat. As a charter member of Arafat's Fatah movement, Zaki, 60, carried out bloody raids inside Israel from guerrilla bases in Jordan after the Six Day War, then spent 27 years in exile before returning in triumph to the West Bank with Arafat in 1994. ...
"Wherever Arafat goes, lawlessness, corruption and instability follow," says Zaki, 60, sipping Turkish coffee in his Hebron apartment as Israeli machine guns pummel a nearby government compound. "There should be honor in the battlefield. When you lose, you quit." So you might think that Zaki supported George W. Bush's call last week to replace Arafat with a leader "not compromised by terror." Not so. ...
"The reaction on the street is, 'Let's support Arafat with all his ugliness and all his corruption, because the United States doesn't want him'," he says. ...
Even so, Hussam Khader, a member of the Palestinian Legislative Council and an influential leader of Fatah in the Balata refugee camp in Nablus, says that Arafat blew his credibility long ago. "I don't think that Arafat cares about anything other than being in power," he says. 'When Arafat disappears, they will write about him as they wrote about Mao - they will write about his criminality and his catastrophes.'"

"Communists and Islamic Extremists - Then and Now" (Stephen Schwartz, FrontPageMagazine, 2002/07/08)
"America's capacity to defend itself spiritually and intellectually had been deeply harmed by "anti-anti-Communism." The legacy of this deviation in American political life is audible whenever the claim is made that firm measures against terrorists - the use before September 11 of "secret evidence," or, after that date, denying terror troopers status as prisoners of war, investigating extremist activities that sheltered under the cover of religion, more efficient standards for wiretapping, detention of aliens, higher levels of transportation and communications security, or the failure to provide "American Taliban" John Walker Lindh with a "dream team" of lawyers in the Afghan hinterland - threatened to put America on the terrorists' level. America was told repeatedly it must fight for protection of the rights of its enemies if it was not to become indistinguishable from them. Similarly, apologists for Bin Laden and his accomplices insisted that evidence of his terrorist activities, satisfying absurdly high standards, must be produced before action could be taken against him."

See the archive for earlier news and commentary.

Copyright © Watch 2001-2006. Copyrights of quoted materials belong to their respective owners.

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