Reports the Telegraph. Some are actually also apparently fighting with the Taliban in the field.

British Muslims are providing the Taliban with electronic devices to make roadside bombs for use in attacks against British forces serving in southern Afghanistan. …

Details of how British electronic components have been found in roadside bombs were given to David Miliband, the Foreign Secretary, when he visited British troops at their military compound at Lashkagar, in Helmand province, earlier this week.

In a briefing on British operations in southern Afghanistan by Brigadier Gordon Messenger, the Royal Marine commander of the British battlegroup, Mr Miliband was shown examples of the crude, home-made devices that are being used in attacks against British patrols.

They included mobile phones filled with explosives, which could kill or seriously injure British soldiers patrolling on foot, and more sophisticated devices that can be used against military vehicles.

Explosives experts who have examined the devices say they have found British-made electronic components that enable Taliban insurgents to detonate their home-made, road-side bombs by remote control.

The electronic devices smuggled into Afghanistan from Britain range from basic remote control units that are normally used to fly model airplanes to more advanced components that enable insurgents to conduct attacks from up to a mile away from British patrols.

“We have found electronic components in devices used to target British troops that originally come from Britain,” a British explosives officer told Mr Miliband during a detailed briefing on the type of improvised explosive device (IED) used against British forces.

When asked how the components had reached Afghanistan, the officer explained that they had either been sent from Britain, or physically brought to Afghanistan by British Muslims who had flown over. …

In August, Brigadier Ed Butler, the former commander of UK forces in Afghanistan, told the Telegraph that there are “British passport holders” in the Taliban ranks. Other officers believe their soldiers have killed British Muslims fighting alongside the Taliban.

And last year, it was revealed that RAF Nimrod surveillance planes monitoring Taliban radio signals in Afghanistan had heard militants speaking with Yorkshire and Midlands accents.

Iowahawk‘s latest hilarious satire.

1 Whan in Februar, withe hise global warmynge

26 “Father, we do not like howe thynges are goin’

Read the whole thing.

Hat tip to Karen L. Myers.

In another gesture of grovelling to superstitious natives, Britain’s Museums, Libraries and Archives Council (MLA) is advising libraries to treat the Mussulman’s Al-koran as a sacred object entitled to physical deference. The Koran must be placed above other books on the topmost shelf.

Doubtless anticipating some negative comment, the MLA’s wise men took care to advocate equality of treatment for the holy books of other religions, too. So the Christian Bible is to be placed on an out-of-reach top shelf, too, right beside the dictates of Mahound. “Blessed too is Diana of the Ephesians.”

Telegraph:

Muslims have complained that the Koran is often displayed on the lower shelves, which is deemed offensive as many believe the holy book should be placed above “commonplace things”.

Now officials at one library have recommended keeping all holy books, including the Bible, on the top shelves.

The move has come despite concern from Christian charities that this will put the Bible out of the reach and sight of many people.

Guidance published by the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council, a quango answering to Culture Secretary Andy Burnham, brought the situation to light.

It said Muslims in Leicester had moved copies of the Koran to the top shelves of libraries, because they believe it is an insult to display it in a low position.

A report into the issue said the city’s librarians consulted the Federation of Muslim Organisations and were advised that all religious texts should be kept on the top shelf to ensure equality.

The right European approach to the Koran may be seen in the Flemish Baroque church pulpit below.

Mattheus van Beveren, Mohammed, leaning on his Koran, Trodden upon by Angels Bearing the Pulpit, Liebefraukirke, Dendermonde, Flanders, late 17th century

Roger Scruton argues for the superiority of Western Civilization on the basis of its possession of the faculties of irony and forgiveness, but warns that the arid landscape of multicultural liberalism can never fulfill the spirtual and emotional needs of humanity.

This culture of repudiation has transmitted itself, through the media and the schools, across the spiritual terrain of Western civilization, leaving behind it a sense of emptiness and defeat, a sense that nothing is left to believe in or endorse, save only the freedom to believe. And a belief in the freedom to believe is neither a belief nor a freedom. It encourages hesitation in the place of conviction and timidity in the place of choice. It is hardly surprising that so many Muslims in our cities today regard the civilization surrounding them as doomed, even if it is a civilization that has granted them something that they may be unable to find where their own religion triumphs, which is a free, tolerant, and secular rule of law. For they were brought up in a world of certainties; around them, they encounter only doubts.

If repudiation of its past and its identity is all that Western civilization can offer, it cannot survive.

Liberalism additionally fundamentally misunderstands our current Islamic adversaries, Scrutin argues, erroneously trying to fit their motivations into a simplistic Marxist schema of economic motivation and animosity.

The vague or utopian character of the cause is therefore an important part of terrorism’s appeal, for it means that the cause does not define or limit the action. It is waiting to be filled with meaning by the terrorist, who is searching to change not the world but himself. To kill someone who has neither offended you nor given just cause for punishment, you have to believe yourself wrapped in some kind of angelic cloak of justification. You then come to see the killing as showing that you are indeed an angel. Your existence receives its final ontological proof.

Terrorists pursue a moral exultation, a sense of being beyond the reach of ordinary human judgment, radiated by a self-assumed permission of the kind enjoyed by God. Terrorism of this kind, in other words, is a search for meaning—the very meaning that citizenship, conceived in abstract terms, cannot provide. Even in its most secularized form, terrorism involves a kind of religious hunger. …

Islamist terrorists are animated, at some level, by the same troubled search for meaning and the same need to stand above their victims in a posture of transcendental exculpation. Ideas of liberty, equality, or historical right have no influence on their thinking, and they are not interested in possessing the powers and privileges that their targets enjoy. The things of this world have no real value for them, and if they sometimes seem to aim at power, it is only because power would enable them to establish the kingdom of God—an aim that they, like the rest of us, know to be impossible and therefore endlessly renewable in the wake of failure. Their carelessness about others’ lives is matched by their carelessness about their own. Life has no particular value for them; death beckons constantly from the near horizon of their vision. And in death, they perceive the only meaning that matters: the final transcendence of this world and of the accountability to others that this world demands of us.

Hat tip to Karen L. Myers.

The London Times:

The day had started with the Dutch MP determined to test the Government’s entry ban after it was decided that he should not be allowed to attend a screening of Fitna at the House of Lords last night.

Mr Wilders, 45, caught a British Midland flight from Amsterdam brandishing his passport. He said that he would have to be physically restrained from entering the country. “I’ll see what happens at the border. Let them put me in handcuffs,” he said.

Once in the air he called the British Government Europe’s biggest cowards and told The Times: “It is easy to invite people you agree with. It is more difficult to invite people you disagree with.

“I am going to Great Britain because I was invited by another politician [the UKIP peer Lord Pearson of Rannoch]. I am a democrat. I am serving freedom of speech. They are not only being nasty to me, they are being nasty to freedom of speech. They are more Chamberlain than Churchill.”

The aircraft landed at 2pm but before they could disembark, Mr Wilders and his entourage were confronted by two plain-clothes UK Border Agency guards. Towering over them, the Dutch MP and his two minders offered no resistance and were escorted through passport control into a holding room.

During the long walk along the airport’s corridors, one of his bodyguards asked the officers to relax their grip on the MP. But they kept a tight hold on him as they walked, surrounded by a gaggle of journalists and cameramen. …

The MP had been invited to attend a showing of his 17-minute film at the House of Lords by Lord Pearson. The film features verses from the Koran with images of terrorist attacks in New York, London and Madrid, and calls on Muslims to remove “hate-preaching” verses from the text. Lord Pearson said that the screening would go ahead regardless.

The decision to refuse Mr Wilders entry provoked Maxime Verhagen, the Dutch Foreign Minister, to call David Miliband, the Foreign Secretary, to protest against the decision. “The fact that a Dutch parliamentarian is refused entry to another EU country is highly regrettable,” Mr Verhagen said.

The Home Office said: “The Government opposes extremism in all its forms. It will stop those who want to spread extremism, hatred and violent messages in our communities from coming to our country.”

————————————–

Earlier posting.

Reviving the inglorious tradition of King Aethelred the Unready, Britain’s Labour Government has made a spectacular public surrender to Islamic intimidation, banning Dutch Parliament member Geert Wilders from entering the country for a private meeting with the House of Lords.

Brussels Journal:

This morning Lord Malcolm Pearson, a member of the British House of Lords, announced that he has invited Geert Wilders, a member of the Dutch Parliament, to show the movie Fitna (see it here) in a committee room of the House of Lords next Thursday (12 February). Mr. Wilders has been asked to address a private meeting with members of the British Parliament, explaining to the Peers and MPs why he made Fitna and to engage in an open and frank discussion with them.

This afternoon Mr. Wilders received a letter from the British Embassy in The Hague [see below] saying that he is a “persona non grata” in the United Kingdom. The ambassador told Mr. Wilders that he is a threat to public security and public harmony because of the controversy created by Fitna. Mr. Wilders intends to go to London anyway. “Let them arrest me in Heathrow,” he says.

If Mr. Wilders is denied entry to the United Kingdom, it will be the first time that Britain refuses entry to an elected politician from another member state of the European Union. The Dutch government has protested to the British government over the unprecedented barring of an EU parliamentarian by another EU country.

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The Spectator was deservedly outraged.

If anyone had doubted the extent to which Britain has capitulated to Islamic terror, the banning of Geert Wilders a few hours ago should surely open their eyes. Wilders, the Dutch member of parliament who had made an uncompromising stand against the Koranic sources of Islamist extremism and violence, was due to give a screening of Fitna, his film on this subject, at the House of Lords on Thursday. This meeting had been postponed after Lord Ahmed had previously threatened the House of Lords authorities that he would bring a force of 10,000 Muslims to lay siege to the Lords if Wilders was allowed to speak. To their credit, the Lords authorities had stood firm and said extra police would be drafted in to meet this threat and the Wilders meeting should go ahead. …

So let’s get this straight. The British government allows people to march through British streets screaming support for Hamas, it allows Hizb ut Tahrir to recruit on campus for the jihad against Britain and the west, it takes no action against a Muslim peer who threatens mass intimidation of Parliament, but it bans from the country a member of parliament of a European democracy who wishes to address the British Parliament on the threat to life and liberty in the west from religious fascism.

It is he, not them, who is considered a ‘serious threat to one of the fundamental interests of society’. Why? Because the result of this stand for life and liberty against those who would destroy them might be an attack by violent thugs. The response is not to face down such a threat of violence but to capitulate to it instead.

It was the same reasoning that led the police on those pro-Hamas marches to confiscate the Israeli flag, on the grounds that it would provoke violence, while those screaming support for genocide and incitement against the Jews were allowed to do so. The reasoning was that the Israeli flag might provoke thuggery while the genocidal incitement would not. So those actually promoting aggression were allowed to do so while those who threatened no-one at all were repressed. …

[T]his is another fateful and defining issue for Britain’s governing class as it continues to sleepwalk into cultural suicide. If British MPs do not raise hell about this banning order, if they go along with this spinelessness, if they fail to stand up for the principle that the British Parliament of all places must be free to hear what a fellow democratically elected politician has to say about one of the most difficult and urgent issues of our time, if they fail to hold the line against the threat of violence but capitulate to it instead, they will be signalling that Britain is no longer the cradle of freedom and democracy but its graveyard.

Ralph Peters takes the Heinleinian view of our Taliban adversaries.

A fundamental reason why our intelligence agencies, military leaders and (above all) Washington pols can’t understand Afghanistan is that they don’t recognize that we’re dealing with alien life-forms.

Oh, the strange-minded aliens in question resemble us physically. We share a few common needs: We and the aliens are oxygen breathers who require food and water at frequent intervals. Our body casings feel heat or cold. We’re divided into two sexes (more or less). And we’re mortal.

But that’s about where the similarities end, analytically speaking. …

Regarding Planet Afghanistan, we still hear the deadly cliché that “all human beings want the same basic things, such as better lives and greater opportunities for their children.” How does that apply to Afghan aliens who prefer their crude way of life and its merciless cults?

When girls and women are denied education or even health care and are executed by their own kin for minor infractions against the cult, how does that square with our insistence that all men want greater opportunities for the kids?

What about those Afghan parents who approve of or even encourage suicidal attacks by their sons? This not only confounds our value system, but defies biological reason.

So: These humanoid forms with which we must deal don’t all want or value the same things we do. They form different social aggregates and exchange goods and services within wildly different parameters (and exhibit hypocritical sexual tastes that diverge from procreative mandates – ask our troops about that).

These alien tribes seek to destroy physical objects and systems valued on Planet America. They perceive time differently. They treat other life forms more harshly than we do. Their own lives are shorter, with different arcs. They quite like our weapons, though .

This is a “war of the worlds” in the cultural sense, a head-on collision between civilizations from different galaxies.

And the aliens don’t come in peace.

Read the whole thing.

Some ordinary Muslims

The curmudgeonly traditionalist editorialist for Asia Times who signs himself Spengler demands to know.

‘My job is to communicate to the American people that the Muslim world is filled with extraordinary people who simply want to live their lives and see their children live better lives,’ United States President Barack Obama told an Arabic television channel on January 26. Really? What are their names? Word has come to the West of no extraordinary Muslim thinker since the 12th century.

Read the whole thing (and, if you’re liberal, be sure to take your apoplexy pill first).

Melanie Phillips describes how the British left and the Labour Government has shamefully surrendered to the Saracens.

In Britain, the war in Gaza has revealed the extent to which the media, intelligentsia and political class have simply crumbled in the face of the global jihad.

The U.K. is a major player in European and world politics and is America’s most significant strategic ally. Until now, it has been considered one of Israel’s firm supporters and a linchpin of the Western defense against the world-wide Islamist onslaught. With the reaction to Gaza, however, that reputation is no longer sustainable.

Years of demonizing Israel and appeasing Islamist extremism within Britain have now coalesced, as a result of the media misrepresentation of the Gaza war as an atrocity against civilians, in an unprecedented wave of hatred against Israel and a sharp rise in attacks on British Jews.

Throughout the war, London’s streets have witnessed a hallucinatory level of violent and explicit support for Hamas from Muslims, members of the far left and supposedly progressive individuals.

Certainly, there have been anti-Israel protests around the world. But in Britain, not only have these been particularly violent but the authorities have done nothing to stop such incitement of hatred.

The police told pro-Israel demonstrators on at least one occasion to put away their Israel flags because they were ‘inflammatory.’ Yet officers allowed some anti-Israel demonstrators to scream support for Hamas — and even to dress up as hook-nosed Jews pretending to drink the blood of Palestinian babies.

In general, the police have reacted passively to the violence. One recent video clip captured the astonishing spectacle of Muslims stampeding through London’s West End hurling traffic cones and other missiles at the police, all the time shrieking ‘Allahu akbar’ and ‘cowards.’ The police ran and stumbled backward rather than standing their ground and stopping the rampage.

But, why be surprised? This is the same Britain that convicted Norfolk farmer Tony Martin of murder and sentenced him to life in prison (later reduced on appeal) for defending himself against two burglars.

From the modern leftist perspective, criminals are always at least partially justified by their grievances, and the crime which cannot be forgiven is self defence.

Leon de Winter explicates the Palestinian mentality.

All we think about is him. Our own home is in ruins because all our efforts, all our money and ideas and energy are devoted solely to destroying our neighbor’s house. We’re utterly convinced that we will be perfectly happy just as soon as we’ve killed him and his house is a heap of smoking rubble. We live for one thing only: our neighbor’s demise. It’s a noble ambition for which we’re all willing to die.

Israeli Intelligence mouthpiece DEBKAfile succeeded in restoring service today after a period of outage.

DEBKAfile’s two sites in English and Hebrew came under a massive cyber attack on our servers at the moment Israeli ground forces crossed into the Gaza Strip Saturday night, Jan. 3. The attackers tried and failed to block and replace our content. We did our utmost to restore service as quickly as possible and return to full operation.

DEBKAfile wasn’t the first site hit.

Computerworld reports earlier activity aimed at Israeli business and web domains:

The conflict raging in Gaza between Israel and Palestine has spilled over to the Internet.

Since Saturday (12/27), thousands of Web pages have been defaced by hacking groups operating out of Morocco, Lebanon, Turkey and Iran, said Gary Warner, director of research in computer forensics at the University of Alabama at Birmingham.

The defacements have primarily affected small businesses and vanity Web pages hosted on Israel’s .il Internet domain space. One such site was that of Israel’s Galoz Electronics Ltd. On Wednesday, the hacked Web site read “RitualistaS GrouP Hacked your System! ! ! The world isn’t insurance! ! ! For a better world.”

Other attackers have placed more incendiary messages condemning the U.S. and Israel and adding graphic photographs of the violence. Warner said he has seen no evidence that any Israeli government site has been hit by these attacks, although they have been targeted.

In a New Year’s tour d’horizon of warfare and violence across the globe, Jim Dunnigan’s Strategy Page concludes that, apart from the quality of media reporting, things have been getting better.

Worldwide, violence continues to decline, as it has for the last few years. …

All this continues a trend that began when the Cold War ended, and the Soviet Union no longer subsidized terrorist and rebel groups everywhere. The current wars are basically uprisings against police states or feudal societies, which are seen as out-of-step with the modern world. Many are led by radicals preaching failed dogmas (Islamic conservatism, Maoism), that still resonate among people who don’t know about the dismal track records. Iran has not picked much of the lost Soviet terrorist support effort. Hezbollah and Hamas, the Madhi Army and a few smaller groups, and that’s it. Terrorists in general miss the Soviets, who really knew how to treat bad boys right.

The War on Terror has morphed into the War Against Islamic Radicalism. This religious radicalism has always been around, for Islam was born as an aggressive movement, that used violence and terror to expand. Past periods of conquest are regarded fondly by Moslems. The current enthusiasm for violence in the name of God has been building for over half a century. Historically, periods of Islamic radicalism have flared up periodically in response to corrupt governments, as a vain attempt to impose a religious solution on some social or political problem. The current violence is international because of the availability of planet wide mass media (which needs a constant supply of headlines), and the fact that the Islamic world is awash in tyranny and economic backwardness. Islamic radicalism itself is incapable of mustering much military power, and the movement largely relies on terrorism to gain attention. Most of the victims are fellow Moslems, which is why the radicals eventually become so unpopular among their own people that they run out of new recruits and fade away. This is what is happening now. The American invasion of Iraq was a clever exploitation of this, forcing the Islamic radicals to fight in Iraq, where they killed many Moslems, especially women and children, thus causing the Islamic radicals to lose their popularity among Moslems.