Saturday, February 17, 2007

 

Note: Watch will no longer be updated. Five years seems more than enough, really, and I haven't had any enthusiasm for it lately. It was just difficult to find a natural end for it, as history has a tendency to continue on a day to day basis. The frontpage will end on September 11, 2006, but you'll still find updates to December 2006 in the archive, which starts on September 11, 2001.

I hope that the very generous Winds of Change.NET will continue to host Watch as an archive. Many thanks to Joe Katzman for supporting the site for the last couple of years.

Thanks to all who have been visiting and a special thanks to those who have supported Watch by mailing tips and the like.

Take care,
Mårten Barck

Monday, September 11, 2006

News and commentary:

"Patricia Smith, held the hand of her father..."
(Spencer Platt, Getty Images, 2006/09/11)
From "A Day to Remember" (The New York Times, 2006/09/11):
"Patricia Smith, held the hand of her father, James Smith, as names of the victims were read aloud during the ceremony. Patricia's mother, police officer Moira Smith, was killed on Sept. 11, 2001."

"Five years on" (Melanie Phillips, melaniephillips.com, 2006/09/11)
"The real problem is that we are in a world war but few will acknowledge that fact. In the Times at the weekend, David Selbourne laid out the gross delusions currently undermining the defence of the west. An enormous fifth column of appeasers, quislings and defeatist whingers across the political spectrum has been willing the west to defeat ever since 9/11. And even the most apparently bullish in the US and UK adminstrations are still failing to follow the logic of their own rhetoric. If this really is a war, as President Bush has constantly told us, then why isn’t it being fought like one? How could the mayhem in Iraq ever have been prevented or controlled on the cheap with so few troops? How on earth can the conflagration in Afghanistan be contained with so few troops and equipment? How can order be brought to Iraq when no action is being taken against the principal causes of the disorder, Iran and Syria?
How can we act against the continuum of Islamic extremism which is providing the sea in which the jihad swims, when we are not even prepared to acknowledge that such a continuum exists, and demonise those who try to warn against it? How can we defend the free world when we are doing our damnedest to sacrifice Israel, the front-line nation in that defence, as a scapegoat instead of coming to its own defence? How can a war to defend a civilisation be fought apologetically, with two hands tied behind our backs and with the hostile camera lenses of CNN and the BBC trained against our own troops and primed to inflate every casualty into an atrocity, against an enemy that by contrast is prepared both to slaughter and to die in vast and bloody numbers for its beliefs? How can we defend our own beliefs if we can no longer even agree what they are?"

"9/11, Five Years Later: A View from Europe" (Bruce Bawer, De Volksrant, 2006/09/02)
"On 9/11, I would never have imagined that five years later, a man who refuses to condemn the stoning of female adulterers would be respected as the leading voice of “moderate” European Islam; that European governments would still be funding within their borders mosques and Muslim schools that teach contempt for democracy, Jews, gays, and sexual equality; that Amsterdam mayor Job Cohen would argue for accepting the oppression of Muslim women in the West; and that Britain would still be sheltering radical clerics, Queen Elizabeth knighting the likes of Iqbal Sacranie (who calls homosexuality “unacceptable”), and London mayor Ken Livingstone praising as “progressive” the above-mentioned al-Qaradawi (who has defended suicide bombers and the execution of gays). The delusion endures: in August, the AP reported that Germans were “stunned” by news of a planned train bombing in their country because they thought their “opposition to the Iraq war would insulate” them from terrorism; and Britain’s “Communities Secretary,” following the arrest of “English lads” who’d planned to blow up London-to-U.S. flights, promised to consider a proposal by Muslim leaders to pacify would-be domestic bombers by introducing sharia law in immigrant areas."

"Global media abhors US response to 9/11" (AFP/Yahoo! News, 2006/09/11)
Ah, yes, the huge pool of compassion and solidarity was a wondrous thing to behold:
"Newspapers strongly criticised the US response to September 11, accusing the Bush administration of bungling its "war on terror" and squandering global goodwill by invading Iraq. ...
Left-leaning French newspaper Liberation said Bush's leadership of the "war on terror" had been disastrous.
"The Bush administration has succeeded in destroying the huge pool of compassion and solidarity which gripped the world after September 11," said the paper. ...
Many Arab newspapers said the US campaign and the invasion of Iraq had pushed the world closer to a clash of civilisations between the West and the Muslim world.
"The administration of George W. Bush used a vengeful mentality in dealing with the 9/11 crime and has turned the entire world into a battleground," wrote the editor-in-chief of the independent Al-Ghad daily in Jordan, Ayman Safadi.
Saudi Arabia's Al-Jazira said US policy had turned Iraq into an incubator for terrorism. "US policy has failed and has turned the war on terror into a clash of civilisations," said the paper.
The United Arab Emirates daily Al-Khaleej added: 'Bush's policies have not brought security to Americans and have instead brought chaos to the entire world.'" (See also: "The Legend of the Squandered Sympathy" (John Rosenthal, Transatlantic Intelligencer, 2004/10/06))

"Al-Qaida lieutenant warns of new attacks" (Lee Keath, AP/Yahoo! News, 2006/09/11)
"CAIRO, Egypt - Al-Qaida's No. 2 condemned U.N. peacekeepers in Lebanon as enemies of Islam and warned the terror group will strike the Persian Gulf and Israel, suggesting new fronts in its war against the West in a video Monday marking the fifth anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks. ...
"We have repeatedly warned you and offered a truce with you. Now we have all the legal and rational justification to continue to fight you until your power is destroyed or you give in and surrender," he said. "The days are pregnant and giving birth to new events."
Addressing the United States, al-Zawahri said "you should not waste your time" reinforcing troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, "because they are doomed to defeat."
"Instead, you have to reinforce your troops in two regions. First is the Gulf, where you will be thrown out after you are defeated in Iraq, at which point your economic ruin will be achieved," he said. 'The second is Israel, because the jihad reinforcements are getting closer to it.'"

"So this is what they mean by moderate voices" (Richard Littlejohn, The Daily Mail, 2006/09/11)
Abdul Bari II: "Far from being a bigot, I judge the MCB on exactly the same terms as any other bunch of spivs and opportunists. They are the ones hiding behind religion for political ends. I certainly don’t need any lessons in bigotry from someone like Bari, who invites as an honoured guest to his East London mosque a ‘radical’ cleric who describes Jews as ‘monkeys and pigs’.
Perhaps while the Muslim Council is accusing others of bigotry it would like to share with us its enlightened views on homosexuality and arranged marriages.
‘Islamophobia’ is just another of those catch-all, smear-the-messenger fantasies dreamed up to close down debate and stifle free speech.
When you examine closely Bari’s latest outburst, it is nothing short of monstrous. What he is saying is that every Muslim in this country is a potential terrorist.
If anything is guaranteed to increase suspicion of Muslims it is incendiary statements like that."

"Threat of up to two million Muslim terrorists, warns community leader" (Steve Doughty, The Daily Mail, 2006/09/11)
Abdul Bari I: "Britain will face have to deal with up to two million Islamic terrorists unless there is an end to 'demonising' of Muslims, the leader of the most influential Muslim organisation has said.
Treating all Muslims as if they were terrorists will encourage large numbers to become terrorists, Dr Muhammad Abdul Bari said.
The warning from the chief of the Muslim Council of Britain - the grouping that Tony Blair's Government has considered the leading voice for Muslims - came amid rising tensions over the increasingly suspicious attitude to Muslims in the rest of society.
Dr Bari declared: "Some police officers and sections of the media are demonising Muslims, treating them as if they are all terrorists, and that encourages other people to do the same.
"If that demonisation continues, then Britain will have to deal with two million Muslim terrorists, 700,000 of them in London. "If you attack a whole community, it becomes despondent and aggressive," he added."

"Militant site shows more al-Qaida videos" (Omar Sinan and Bassem Mroue, AP/Yahoo! News, 2006/09/11)
"CAIRO, Egypt - A videotape posted on the Internet late Sunday, purportedly by al-Qaida, showed previously unseen footage of a smiling Osama bin Laden and other commanders in a mountain camp apparently planning the Sept. 11 attacks on New York and Washington.
The documentary-like retrospective of the five years since the attacks was unusually long — 91 minutes, split into two segments — and sophisticated in its production quality compared to previous al-Qaida videos. The footage — with English subtitles — surfaced Sunday night, on the eve of the fifth anniversary of the attacks, on a Web site that frequently airs messages from bin Laden's terror network.
"Planning for Sept. 11 did not take place behind computer monitors or radar screens, nor inside military command and control centers, but was surrounded with divine protection in an atmosphere brimming with brotherliness ... and love for sacrificing life," an unidentified narrator said."

 

See the archive for earlier news and commentary.

 

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

"When people accept futility and the absurd as normal, the culture is decadent. The term is not a slur; it is a technical label."

Jacques Barzun

Articles of the week

"Losing the Enlightenment" (Victor Davis Hanson, OpinionJournal, 2006/11/29)

"Allah’s England?" (Daniel Johnson, Commentary. November 2006)

"'Sex in the Park': The latest doings of the Danish imams" (Henrik Bering, The Weekly Standard, 2006/11/18)

"Narcissism on Stilts" (Harold Evans, New York Sun, 2006/11/16)

"Terrorists are recruiting in our schools, says MI5 boss" (Philip Johnston, The Daily Telegraph, 2006/11/10)

› AOTW Archive



From the archives

Oriana Fallaci, R.I.P.

"The Rage, the Pride and the Doubt" (Oriana Fallaci, The Wall Street Journal, 2003/03/13)

"How the West Was Won and How It Will Be Lost" (Oriana Fallaci, The American Enterprise, from the January/February 2003 issue)

"On Jew-hatred in Europe" (Oriana Fallaci, dennisprager.com, 2002/04/13)

"Anger and Pride" (Oriana Fallaci, dennisprager.com, 2001/12/19)

Weekly archive

2006/12/04 - 2006/12/10
2006/11/27 - 2006/12/03
2006/11/20 - 2006/11/26
2006/11/13 - 2006/11/19
2006/11/06 - 2006/11/12
2006/10/30 - 2006/11/05

› From 2001/09/11 -



Monthly index

December 2006
November 2006
October 2006
September 2006
August 2006
July 2006

› From September 2001 -



Author index

› Ajami, Fouad - Johnson, Paul
› Kagan, Robert - Ye'or, Bat



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