Michelle Malkin’s latest video reviews the unrecognized and surprisingly lengthy list of “lone gunman” acts of Islamic terrorism on US soil.

Fjordman argues that the left’s swooning capitulation to Islamic demands for suppression of free speech constitutes the greatest erosion of democratic practice in the world’s advanced democracies since WW2.

The less control the authorities have with Muslims, the more control they want to exercise over non-Muslims. As problems in Europe get worse, which they will, the EU will move in an increasingly repressive direction until it either becomes a true, totalitarian entity or falls apart. This strange mix of powerful censorship of public debate, yet little control over public law and order, has by some been labelled anarcho-tyranny.

While Islamic groups in Britain openly brag about how they are going to subdue the country by violent means or call for beheading those insulting Islam, Bryan Cork, 49, of Carlisle, Cumbria, in the Lake District, was sentenced to six months in jail for standing outside a mosque shouting, “Proud to be British,” and “Go back to where you came from.” One British court ruled that even use of the word “immigrant” as an insult could amount to proof of racial hostility.

In Belgium, a Turkish-born Catholic priest, Père Samuel, has been prosecuted for “incitement to racist hatred” by the Belgian Centre for Equal Opportunities and Opposition to Racism (CEOOR), because of a remark he made in a 2002 television interview…

Writer Oriana Fallaci has been indicted by a judge in her native Italy for “vilification” of Islam, because of a book she wrote called The Force of Reason.

Cartoon comment from Cox & Forkum.

Victor Davis Hansen thinks the patience of the Western democracies is wearing thin, and that -beyond a certain point- efforts to placate Islam are bound to end and be replaced by a very different approach: old-fashioned total war.

Yet for all their threats, what the Islamists — from Hezbollah in Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley to the Iranian government in Tehran to the jihadists in Iraq’s Sunni Triangle — don’t understand is that they are slowly pushing tired Westerners into a corner. If diplomacy, or aid, or support for democracy, or multiculturalism, or withdrawal from contested lands, does not satisfy radical Islamists, what would?

Perhaps nothing.

What then would be the new Western approach to terrorism? Hard and quick retaliation — but without our past concern for nation-building, or offering a democratic alternative to theocracy and autocracy, or even worrying about whether other Muslims are unfairly lumped in with Islamists who operate freely in their midst.

Any new policy of retaliation — in light both of Sept. 11 and the messy efforts to birth democracies in Afghanistan, Iraq, Lebanon and the West Bank — would be something of an exasperated return to the old cruise-missile payback. Yet in the new world of Iranian nukes and Hezbollah missiles, the West would hit back with something far greater than a cruise missile.

If they are not careful, a Syria or Iran really will earn a conventional war — not more futile diplomacy or limited responses to terrorism. And history shows that massive attacks from the air are something that the West does well.

So in the meantime, let us hope that democracy prevails in Iraq, that our massive aid is actually appreciated by the Middle East, that diplomacy ultimately works with Iran, that Syria quits supporting terrorists, and that Hamas and Hezbollah cease their rocket attacks against Israel — more for all their sakes than ours.

I think myself that the case of the immigration of Roman Catholic Latin Americans of primarily European descent to the United States is a very different thing from the Islamization of Europe, but Fjordman‘s pessimistic essay attacking Third World immigration Trans-Atlantically is, as usual, an insightful contribution to the debate.

Imagine you have two such houses next to each other. In House A, the inhabitants have over a period of generations created a tidy and functioning household. They have limited their number of children because they wanted to give all of them a proper education. In House B, the inhabitants live in a dysfunctional household with too many children who have received little higher education. One day they decide to move to their neighbors’. Many of the inhabitants of House A are protesting, but some of them think this might be a good idea. There is room for more people in House A, they say. In addition to this, Amnesty International, the United Nations and others claim that it is “racist” and “against international law” for the inhabitants of House A to expel the intruders. Pretty soon, House A has been turned into an overpopulated and dysfunctional household just like House B.

This is what is happening to the West today.

A celebration of the burkha at Time Magazine.

Baron Bodissey, this week, has a terrific essay identifying the crucial components of Islam’s attack on the West:

Covert funding based on successful long-tern extortion via the manipulation of petroleum prices.

The use of criminals, psychos, and malcontents as cannon fodder.

And so we have what might be called a Demonic Convergence, a confluence of destructive impulses that Islam gathers unto itself. In the terms of Chaos Theory, Islam is a “basin attractor”, an asymptotic solution to all the differential equations of nihilistic human behavior.

Any impulse that longs to destroy Western Civilization — which, for the modern world, means all civilization — will gravitate towards Islam. The criminal gets ideological justification for his behavior, the sadist gets to rape and murder to his heart’s content, and the hippie radical gets to stick it to the Man for all eternity.

This is what we’re up against: the Big Tent of ideological nihilism. The closer any given society gets to the behavioral sink, the more Islamic it tends to become.

And, finally, the habitual treason of the journalistic clerisy of the West, providing the essential Fifth Column.

A must-read article.

Hat-tip to Richard Fernandez.

Following news reports of several people being executed in Somalia for watching World Cup soccer matches on televsion, Mail&Guardian Online reports that the Islamic fundamentalists propose to enforce daily prayers by pain of death(!):

Somali Muslims who fail to perform daily prayers will be killed in accordance with Qur’anic law under a new edict issued by a leading cleric in the Islamic courts union that controls Mogadishu.

The requirement for Muslims to observe the five-times daily ritual under penalty of death was announced late on Wednesday and appears to confirm the hard-line nature of the increasingly powerful Sharia courts in the capital.

“He who does not perform prayers will be considered as infidel and Sharia law orders that that person be killed,” said Sheikh Abdalla Ali, a founder and high-ranking official in the Supreme Islamic Council of Somalia.

“Sharia law orders the killing of any Muslim person when he fails to perform prayers,” he said in an address at the opening of a new Islamic court in Mogadishu’s southern Gubta neighbourhood.

Ali added that it was the duty of every Somali to implement the provisions of Sharia law, which when fully accepted would allow “everybody to enjoy life based on peace and prosperity”.

And I used to think our nuns forcing us to attend mass on First Fridays during elementary school was tyrannical.

The tempest in a USMC canteen cup whipped up by MSM’s politically-correct thought police over Corporal Belile’s humorous little song is over. Possibly the Marine Corps still has enough good men simply to laugh the idea of charging a Marine corporal serving in a combat theatre in time of war with violations of the Uniform Code of Military Justice for writing and performing a song poking fun at the bloodthirsty fanaticism of the enemy.

Or perhaps Michelle Malkin and the rest of the right side of the Blogosphere directed enough effective ridicule at the uniformed, and un-uniformed, forces of compulsory piety to drive them back into their burrows on this one.

At any rate, congratulations and best wishes to Corporal Belile and his band “the Sweater Kittenz.” Let’s hope they get a better name, and go on to successful post-Marine Corps career of offending liberals and insulting CAIR.

Reuters:

The U.S. military will not punish a Marine who performed an obscenity-laced song to a laughing and cheering crowd of fellow troops in Iraq making light of killing Iraqis, the Marine Corps said on Tuesday.

The Marines two weeks ago launched a preliminary inquiry into whether Cpl. Joshua Belile, who returned home from Iraq in March, violated military law or rules in singing the song, a four-minute video of which was posted on the Internet…

“The preliminary inquiry has been concluded. No punitive action will be taken against Corporal Belile. And there will be no further investigation,” said Maj. Shawn Haney, a spokeswoman at Marine Corps Air Station Cherry Point in North Carolina.

Haney said the inquiry ruled out any violations of the Uniform Code of Military Justice.

Another Marine Corps official, who asked not to be named because details of the inquiry are private, said poor taste, poor judgment and poor timing, not to mention offensive lyrics, do not necessarily amount to criminal conduct.

Wikipedia entry

video link here

lyrics

Some National Defense University scholars believe we ought to be using Islamic terms more carefully in order to avoid inadvertently assisting the enemy by endorsing his own viewpoint and assumptions.

In dealing with Islamic extremists, the West may be giving them the advantage due to cultural ignorance, maintain Dr. Douglas E. Streusand and Army Lt. Col. Harry D. Tunnell IV. The men work at the National Defense University at Fort Lesley J. McNair in Washington, D.C.

The two believe the right words can help fight the global war on terror. “American leaders misuse language to such a degree that they unintentionally wind up promoting the ideology of the groups the United States is fighting,” the men wrote in an article titled “Choosing Words Carefully: Language to Help Fight Islamic Terrorism.”

A case in point is the term “jihadist.” Many leaders use the term jihadist or jihadi as a synonym for Islamic extremist. Jihad has been commonly adapted in English as meaning “holy war.” But to Muslims it means much more. In their article, Steusand and Tunnell said in Arabic – the language of the Koran – jihad “literally means striving and generally occurs as part of the expression ‘jihad fi sabil illah,’ striving in the path of God.”

This is a good thing for all Muslims. “Calling our enemies jihadis and their movement a global jihad thus indicates that we recognize their doctrines and actions as being in the path of God and, for Muslims, legitimate,” they wrote. By countering jihadis, the West and moderate Muslims are enemies of true Islam.

The men asked Muslim scholars what the correct term for Islamic extremists would be and they came up with “hirabah.” This word specifically refers to those engaged in sinful warfare, warfare contrary to Islamic law. “We should describe the Islamic totalitarian movement as the global hirabah, not the global jihad,” they wrote.

Another word constantly misused in the West is mujahdeen. Again, in American dictionaries this word refers to a holy warrior – again a good thing. So calling an al Qaeda terrorist a mujahid legitimizes him.

The correct term for these killers is “mufsidun,” Streusand and Tunnell say. This refers to an evil or corrupt person. “There is no moral ambiguity and the specific denotation of corruption carries enormous weight in most of the Islamic world,” they wrote.

People can apply other words instead. “Fitna/fattan: fitna literally means temptation or trial, but has come to refer to discord and strife among Muslims; a fattan is a tempter or subversive,” they wrote. “Applying these terms to our enemies and their works condemns their current activities as divisive and harmful.”

The men also want officials to stop using the term “caliphate” as the goal of al Qaeda and associated groups. The Caliphate came to refer to the successors of the Prophet Mohammed as the political leaders of the Muslim community. “Sunni Muslims traditionally regard the era of the first four caliphs (A.D. 632-661) as an era of just rule,” the men wrote. “Accepting our enemies’ description of their goal as the restoration of a historical caliphate again validates an aspect of their ideology.”

The men point out that an al Qaeda caliphate would not mean the establishment of just rule, but rather a global totalitarian state where women would be treated as chattel, music banned and any kind of difference severely punished. “Anyone who needs a preview of how such a state would act merely has to review the conduct of the Taliban in Afghanistan before Sept. 11, 2001,” they wrote.

The correct term for the al Qaeda goal is global totalitarian state – something no one in the world wants.

Finally, the men urge Westerners to translate Allah into God. Using Allah to refer to God would be like using Jehovah to refer to a Hebrew God. In fact, Muslims, Christians and Jews all worship the God of Abraham. Using different names exaggerates the divisions among the religions, the authors say.

Complete article

Israel wants to join the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies and Muslims are (as usual) making trouble.

An attempt to end Israel’s long isolation from the Red Cross humanitarian movement hit a snag Tuesday as Muslim opponents used procedural moves to block progress at a decisive international conference, delegates said.

The International Conference of the Red Cross and Red Crescent, which opened Tuesday and is expected to conclude Wednesday, is being asked to approve changes to meet Israeli demands of almost six decades that it be granted full membership without using the cross or crescent to identify itself.

I’m not sure that I see any overpowering need for all this ecumenicism in the first place.

The trial of Oriana Fallaci for the crime of defaming Islam by statements made in her 2004 book The Force of Reason began today in Bergamo, and was adjourned until June 26.

Adel Smith, head of the Italian Muslim Union, brought a lawsuit contending that Fallaci’s book included 18 blasphemous statements, including a reference to Islam as “a pool that never purifies”.

The lawsuit resulted in the 77 year old author being charged with violating a law that forbids defamatory statements concerning a religion recognized by the Italian state, an offence punishable by a fine of up to ₤6,000 (£4,100/$7560).

Smith previously unsuccessfully sued his hometown of Abruzzo to have crucifixes removed from classrooms in public schools.

Oriana Fallaci, who resides in New York and is suffering from cancer, did not attend.

Associated Press