29-Nov-10: Finally the neighbors are caught washing some of their dirty laundry

For years, we Israelis have been subjected to the terrorist threats and attacks of the jihadist regime of the Mullahs of Teheran and their agents in Hamas and Hizbullah. The Iranian ambitions always extended beyond this tiny country, and now - finally - its extent is front-page news throughout the world today.

Secret American intelligence assessments have concluded that Iran has obtained a cache of advanced missiles, based on a Russian design, that are much more powerful than anything Washington has publicly conceded that Tehran has in its arsenal, diplomatic cables show. Iran obtained 19 of the missiles from North Korea, according to a cable dated Feb. 24 of this year. The cable is a detailed, highly classified account of a meeting between top Russian officials and an American delegation led by Vann H. Van Diepen, an official with the State Department’s nonproliferation division who, as a national intelligence officer several years ago, played a crucial role in the 2007 assessment of Iran’s nuclear capacity. The missiles could for the first time give Iran the capacity to strike at capitals in Western Europe or easily reach Moscow, and American officials warned that their advanced propulsion could speed Iran’s development of intercontinental ballistic missiles. 

Source: The New York Times 

Iran's Moslem cousins have known this and more for a long time. They, more than almost anyone except perhaps the Israeli government, have been anxiously lobbying for the power of the jihadists in Teheran to be curtailed - one way or (ahem) another. The British newspaper The Guardian, known in our circles for its vitriolic and unceasing attacks on and demonization of Israel and Israelis, published some insights today into how Arab political leaders view the Iranians when the flashlights are off and the cameras are not rolling. It's a revelation. You can get a sense of what follows from the header: Arab states scorn 'evil' Iran: US embassy cables reveal Tehran's reputation as a meddling, lying troublemaker intent on building nuclear weapons

• King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia urged Iran's foreign minister to "spare us your evil" in a meeting that reflected profound Arab hostility to the Islamic Republic.
• The Saudis and smaller Gulf states, plus Egypt, Jordan and others, complained bitterly about Tehran's nuclear ambitions, its involvement in Iraq and its support for Hezbollah and Hamas.
• The Teheran regime has "no business meddling in Arab matters", the Saudi monarch is quoted telling Manouchehr Mottaki, Iran's foreign minister. 
• "Iran's goal is to cause problems," the Saudi king says. "There is no doubt something unstable about them... May God prevent us from falling victim to their evil... The bottom line is that they cannot be trusted." 
• The leadership of the United Arab Emirates feared being "46 seconds from Iran as measured by the flight time of a ballistic missile".
• Abu Dhabi's crown prince and deputy commander of the UAE armed forces, Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed al-Nahyan, called Iran an "existential threat" and feared "getting caught in the crossfire if Iran is provoked by the US or Israel". 
• Bin Zayed said the US should send in ground forces if air strikes were not enough to "take out" Iranian nuclear targets. 
• The UAE the foreign minister says Iran is "a huge problem that goes far beyond nuclear capabilities. Iranian support for terrorism is broader than just Hamas and Hezbollah. Iran has influence in Afghanistan, Yemen, Kuwait, Bahrain, the Eastern Province of Saudi Arabia and Africa."
• Bahrain's King Hamad bin Isa al-Khalifa says Iran is "the source of much of the trouble in both Iraq and Afghanistan" and argued forcefully for taking action to terminate their nuclear programme "by whatever means necessary. That programme must be stopped. The danger of letting it go on is greater than the danger of stopping it."
• Sultan Qaboos bin Said al-Said of Oman called Iran "a big country with muscles and we must deal with it." 
• A senior Omani minister singled out Kuwait, Bahrain and Qatar as the three Gulf countries that would probably want the US to attack Iran.
• Kuwait's military intelligence chief says the Iranian jihadists are supporting terrorist groups in the Gulf and extremists in Yemen. 
• Yemen and Saudi Arabia repeatedly accuse Iran of supplying weapons and money to the Houthi rebels in Yemen's Saada region.
• Qatar, the wealthiest country in the Gulf region, is an outspoken critic of Iran in private while maintaining cordial public relations with it - and with the US.
• The Qatari prime minister, Hamad bin Jassim bin Jaber al-Thani, says "Iran is clever and makes its opponents dizzy... Iran will make no deal. Iran wants nuclear weapons... They lie to us, and we lie to them".
• Jordan and Egypt are also deeply hostile to Iran. Egypt's intelligence head Omar Suleiman calls Iran "a significant threat to Egypt … supporting jihad and spoiling peace".
• Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak calls the Iranian president Ahmadinejad an extremist who "does not think rationally... Iran is always stirring trouble". 
• Mubarak has "a visceral hatred for the Islamic Republic [of Iran], referring repeatedly to Iranians as 'liars', and denouncing them for seeking to destabilise Egypt and the region. He sees the Syrians and Qataris as sycophants to Tehran and liars themselves."

And since we're suddenly being exceptionally candid with each other, some further insights from the NY Times by way of those Wikileaks:

• The Saudis are the chief financier of terrorist groups including al-Qaeda.
• Qatar, described as "a generous host to the U.S. military" by the NY Times, was the "worst in the region" at counterterrorism efforts (says a State Department cable from December 2009). 
• Qatar's security service was "hesitant to act against known terrorists out of concern for appearing to be aligned with the United States and provoking reprisals."
• The US has tried, and failed, to prevent Syria from supplying arms to the Hizbollah terrorists in Lebanon. Hizbollah's weapons stockpile and particularly rockets and missiles has swelled hugely since the 2006 war with Israel. 
• Just one week after Syrian President al-Assad promised a senior State Department official that he would not send “new” arms to Hezbollah, the United States found that Syria was providing increasingly sophisticated weapons to the terrorists.
• And finally (at this stage) from The Guardian again: The Iranian Red Cross (technically its Red Crescent society) smuggled Iranian weapons and Iranian agents into Lebanon during the 2006 war with Israel. 

Welcome to the neighborhood. The double-talk and the deception about who is doing the terrorism, about the scale of their terrorist weaponry and about the size of the danger - well, how shall we put this? It's all far worse than the news channels and the politicians have been telling us for years. But not nearly as bad as it's going to get.

27-Nov-10: Quote of the day

Moslem Pakistani-born journalist Tarek Fatah immigrated to Canada from Saudi Arabia in 1987 and founded the Muslim Canadian Congress. Now he says if Muslims in the Middle East have anyone to blame for their plight it's their own political and religious leaders. In his newly published book, The Jew Is Not My Enemy, he argues that despite his solidarity with the Palestinian cause "I denounce anti-Semitism and refuse to hate either Israel or the Jewish people."

• The Palestinians, espousing an all-or-nothing doctrine, repeatedly have squandered opportunities to secure a state for themselves.
• The virulent anti-Semitism that has infiltrated Islam is a "medieval madness that is creating monsters within the Muslim community."
• Muslims are told early and often by clerics and in religious tracts that Jews are the descendants of pigs and apes and the brothers of monkeys, that they annually sacrifice people to drink their blood.
• This has been fuelled by the spread of Wahhabism, courtesy of a wealthy "Saudi hate machine" that geared up in earnest after oil prices soared in 1973. Saudi Arabia preaches hatred of Jews in its schoolbooks and that it exports Korans that feature interpretations promoting Judeophobia.
• Clerics regularly close Friday prayers with a call to arms to defeat the Jews. By contrast, Fatah notes, Jewish scriptures and teachings do not feature anti-Muslim preachings.
• "I have spent countless hours trying to locate explicit attacks on Islam by Jewish religious authorities, but have found little evidence of such literature."
• His book points out that Israeli Arabs regularly state a preference for living in Israel rather than under Hamas or Fatah rule or other Middle East regimes. Many hold favourable views about Jews, says Fatah. When he has randomly asked Israeli Arabs if they believe Israel is an "apartheid state," they laugh out loud.
• His fellow Muslims "have a choice. Either we allow ourselves to be consumed by hatred, or we approach Jews as fellow human beings, at worst as adversaries in a political dispute, not as monsters destined to be our enemy for all time."

26-Nov-10: Gifts and good relations

Her majesty the Queen, dressed in hijabic regalia on her visit to Abu Dhabi (see our earlier post) yesterday, makes a striking sight.

The picture at right was taken when she and Prince Phillip this week visited a monumental marble shrine erected to the memory of Abu Dhabi's late leader (for more than 33 years) Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan al-Nahyan, and containing the great man's tomb. A special individual, when the sheikh spent some time in hospital during 1999 undergoing tests, he received "a personal thank-you letter with 1.5 million signatures" from the people of the UAE. Now that's political power.

In 2004, Harvard returned a $2.5 million gift it had received from Zayed for the Harvard Divinity School after it "emerged" that his Zayed International Centre for Co-ordination had sponsored lectures and publications claiming that Zionists were responsible for the Holocaust and that the US military had carried out the September 11 attacks in 2001. The stated purpose of the gift, by the way, was "to promote a better understanding of Islam among the non-Muslim peoples of the world and to foster dialogue among the world's great religions."

Undeterred, the United Kingdom's London School of Economics accepted a £2.5 million donation in 2008 which entailed naming a new lecture theatre ("holds 400 students, recently played host to BBC Radio 4's Any Questions") after Zayed - notwithstanding the opposition of the LSE Students Union.

25-Nov-10: Royal visits and royal non-visits

On a visit to Canada, the Queen did NOT find it necessary to adopt the
hosts' style of clothing. In Abu Dhabi, it's evidently another story.

Since acceeding to the British throne in 1952, Queen Elizabeth II has undertaken (as Wikipedia points out) a huge number of state and official visits as well as trips throughout the Commonwealth. Numbering about 250, they make her probably the most widely travelled monarch in history.

Yesterday, Wednesday, she and her husband, the Duke of Edinburgh, arrived in Abu Dhabi for a five-day state visit to the Gulf including two-days in sunny Oman ("to join the celebrations for the 40th anniversary of Sultan Qaboos's ascension to the throne").

This report, a small and - without wishing to be unkind - not terribly weighty bit of news, got us thinking about which countries the Queen has visited, and which not. Also: what those visits are intended to say to the people of the United Kingdom as well as to the people of the countries she visits.

Travel very likely has lost whatever appeal it may have had in Her Majesty's earlier years. Even if she were not 84 years old (and she is, born in 1926), these are undoubtedly tiring, boring chores. Yet the visits keep coming. And the list gets longer.

It's a long list by anyone's standards. Digging around on the web, we have found 118 countries and country-like entities. (One source we saw says 129 countries, but having researched it we think they're wrong.) Here they are in alphabetical order.

Aden, Algeria, Anguilla, Antigua, Barbuda , Australia , Austria, Bahamas, Bahrain, Bangladesh, Barbados, Belgium, Belize, Bermuda, Botswana, Brazil, British Guiana, British Virgin Islands, Brunei, Canada, Cayman Islands, Chile, China, Cocos Islands, Cook Islands, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, Dominica, Estonia, Ethiopia, Fiji, Finland, France, Gambia, Germany, Ghana, Gibraltar, Grenada, Grenadines , Guyana, Hong Kong, Hungary, Iceland, India, Indonesia, Iran, Italy, Jamaica , Japan, Jordan, Kenya, Kiribati, Kuwait, Latvia, Liberia, Libya, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malawi, Malaysia, Maldives, Malta , Mauritius, Mexico, Montserrat, Morocco, Mozambique, Mustique , Namibia, Nauru, Nepal, Netherlands, New Hebrides, New Zealand , Nigeria , Norfolk Island, Norway, Oman, Pakistan, Panama, Papua New Guinea, Poland, Portugal, Qatar, Russia, Saint Christopher-Nevis-Anguilla, Saint Lucia, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Samoa, Saudi Arabia, Seychelles, Sierra Leone, Singapore, Slovakia, Slovenia, Solomon Islands, South Africa, Spain, Sri Lanka, Sudan, Sweden, Switzerland, Tanzania, Thailand, Trinidad and Tobago, Tunisia, Turkey, Turks and Caicos Islands, Tuvalu, Uganda , United Arab Emirates, United States of America, Vatican City, Western Samoa, Yugoslavia, Zambia and Zimbabwe

Notice which country is missing?

At a gala dinner in London a year ago, a prominent British historian said the omission of Israel from the list of royal destinations is no accident. The British Foreign Office placed a ban on royal visits to Israel "...which is even more powerful for its being unwritten and unacknowledged."

In one of the UK's leading papers today, the unwritten and unacknowledged became slightly less so. In an article entitled "British foreign policy to change reflecting Arab concerns on Middle East",  the Telegraph writes that the royal visit may be an indicator of:

"yet further withdrawal of traditional British support for Israel, with criticism of its government already more marked under Mr Hague than it was under New Labour government. In another indication of the Foreign Office's new sensitivity to Arab opinion, officials admitted to The Daily Telegraph that policies on the Israel-Lebanon war of 2006, Israel's invasion of Gaza in 2008-9, and its occupation of the West Bank and settlements policy were "motivators" for the Islamic radicalism that they confronted daily in the Gulf."

A good thing we have Her Majesty the Queen around. Makes it a little easier to understand the direction in which the British winds are blowing.

25-Nov-10: Quote of the day

"Over the past three years, women in the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip have been facing a campaign of intimidation and terror that has forced many of them to sit at home and do nothing... But what is even more disturbing is the silence over abuse of women's rights in the Gaza Strip. Has anyone heard prominent Palestinian spokeswoman Hanan Ashrawi come out in public against Hamas's repressive measures against Palestinian women? Where are local and international human rights organizations..? Has any major media outlet in the West thought of making a documentary about the suffering of women under Hamas? Or are they so obsessed with everything that Israel does [or does not do] that they prefer to turn a blind eye to what is happening in the Gaza Strip? Has anyone dared to ask Hamas why sending women to carry out suicide bombings is all right, while it is not ok for them to walk alone on the beach or be seen in public with a man?"

 Gaza's Women: Who Is Defending Their Rights?

Khaled Abu Toameh, Palestinian Arab journalist

24-Nov-10: Quote of the day

"The Palestinians are one of the world's largest beneficiaries of foreign aid, receiving over $3 billion annually (not including the budget of UNRWA itself).

• In 2009, over 60% of Palestine's gross national income, and almost 100% of government expenditure, came from aid. 
• PA budgets allocate ten times more money to security than to agriculture.
• The Palestinians' NGO sector has become a byword for corruption, incompetence and meaningless job creation. 
• Thousands of NGOs have sprung up, bloating the aid industry without delivering long-term benefits.
• Naseef Mu'allem, director-general of the Palestinian Center for Peace and Democracy, revealed that "JICA - the Japanese government aid mission - invested $5 million last year, but practically what they spent is $600,000. The rest is given as salaries, accommodation, hotels...and transportation for the foreign employees here but not for the Palestinians.
• Without donors thoroughly checking on their investments, this kind of private profiteering has become normal."

Palestine aid models must change: Far from offering
sustainable development, the UNRWA's Peace Starts Here aid campaign
is simply life-support for Palestine 

Kieron Monks [ guardian.co.uk ]
Friday 19 November 2010

23-Nov-10: Quote of the day

The consistent willingness of Western news organizations to downplay stories about Palestinian illiberalism and thuggery goes far to explain why so much of the world misdiagnoses the nature of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Settlements are a convenient alibi: They foster the illusion that the conflict can be resolved by Israeli territorial concessions alone. But if that were true, Gaza would have turned peaceful the moment settlements were withdrawn five years ago. The opposite happened.

Bret Stephens,

"Free Palestine! Can Palestinians abide a single free-thinking blogger in their midst?",

Wall Street Journal 23rd November 2010

23-Nov-10: Belgian tentacles

This just in, via the BBC that says arrests of several "Islamists" - the BBC's word - were made today in connection with a terrorist plot in Antwerp, Belgium. (For background, we can suggest one of our previous blogs "15-Oct-10: Is Europe facing a terror attack?") Ten people were picked up in Belgium, the Netherlands and Germany, according to AFP. Stay tuned.

23-Nov-10: Korea and us

Today's live-fire clashes in South Korea are alarming for many reasons. Not least, because the North Koreans have been working on a nuclear weapons program for years and have the results to show for it. And Iran and North Korea - each having shown signs of sociopathic behavior - are growing closer in strategic terms.

What our neighbourhood does not need is more lunatics. Lunatics with nukes.

Analyzing the nightmare scenario unfolding in North Korea and its impact on this region right here, the Wall Street Journal's Jay Solomon (North Korea Nuclear Find Raises Fear on Tehran) pulls together some disturbing pieces in yesterday's edition. It makes for ulcer-inducing reading... and that was before today's hostilities.

The WSJ puts flesh on what is more or less known: that the bizarre ruling clique in Pyongyang are engaged in playing a potentially catastrophic role, supplying Iran (and probably others) with ultra-sophisticated war supplies. Some highlights:

• Tehran and Pyongyang have developed expansive military ties over the past three decades, and are jointly developing missile systems, submarines and small arms.
• Several Iran-bound North Korean arms shipments, by sea and by air, have been intercepted in recent months and years through the work of U.S. and allied intelligence services.
• North Korea, desperate for hard currency, seems intent on expanding military ties with Iran's nuclear efforts. The Tehran regime, facing technical challenges, is just as interested.
• In a well-publicized report on Saturday, Stanford physicist Siegfried Hecker says he saw some 2,000 centrifuges organized in cascades at an "astonishingly modern" North Korean nuclear facility. He called the plant "stunning". Experts say it is a full generation beyond what Iran has. The North Korean plant's design was probably procured from Pakistan.
• We can assume Iran either has this new generation equipment or is going to get it very soon.
• We already knew Pyongyang was behind the building of the nuclear reactor in Syria - under the noses of international monitors - that was eliminated by Israeli air force intervention in 2007.
• There is plenty of evidence that the Iran regime is rapidly expanding its nuclear-fuel production at Natanz, central Iran.
• International sanctions against Iran are tightening. But they are having no evident effect.

So 200 artillery shells fired into Yeonpyeong, a South Korean island, in a burst of a carefully-orchestrated North Korean tantrum-throwing this afternoon might seem a footnote to more weighty global events. But it's almost certainly not. There are plenty of people around here urgently brushing up on their knowledge of Korean current affairs.

21-Nov-10: More rockets, more mortars and now phosphorous

A total of seven mortar shells and two highly-destructive Grad rockets (according to this VOA report) have been fired by the jihadist terrorists in Hamas-ruled Gaza into Israel's western Negev and Gaza-bordering communities since Thursday. (CNN puts the number of mortars at 10.) So far, fortunately, there have been no injuries or damage to Israelis. As we have pointed out dozens of times in the past, this was never the intention of the jihadists. The IDF reports that some of the jihadist mortar shells contained white phosphorous which is capable of causing severe burns. The use of phosphorous against civilians is banned under international law.

According to BBC News, one of Friday's long-range rockets struck as far as the town of Ofakim in the Negev. The BBC says Grad-type rockets, from a Soviet design, have a range of up to 40km (25 miles), about twice the distance of the Qassam rockets made in Gaza and fired from there by the terrorists.

9-Nov-10: Gaza's jihadists admit to telling very large lies. World yawns.

Screen shot (above) is from the undhimmi.com website

There are solid reports the past week that the number of terrorist combatants permanently eliminated by Israeli forces during the anti-jihadist operation known as a Operation Cast Lead, in  December 2008 and January 2009, was orders of magnitude larger than Hamas admitted at the time.

One account points out that Hamas has been saying all along fewer than 50 of its men were killed during the IDF operation from more than 1,300 Gazan casualties and that all the rest were civilians. Israel at the time said the correct figure was 709 dead terrorists and published actual names to substantiate the quality and authority of its assessment. Being Israeli, the IDF report was universally ignored and denied by virtually all parties.

Subsequently the Goldstone Report, commissioned by the highly problematic UN Human Rights Council, slandered and demonized the IDF and Israel's political leadership for what was done during Cast Lead while strikingly averting their gaze from the appalling terrorist actions of Hamas. Dr Richard Landes penned a factual, detailed, substantive, uncompromising and damning critique of the Goldstone clique's performance - see the well-named "Goldstone's Gaza Report: Part One: A Failure of Intelligence". He notes:

"If Hamas fired from their midst, if they tried to draw Israeli fire to kill their own civilians in order to accuse them of war crimes, then the mission is in a double bind: 1) How can they judge Israeli actions without knowing what IDF soldiers were aiming at when they fired their weapons, and 2) how can they avoid becoming the dupes of this strategy of waging war intended to maximize one’s civilian casualties for the public relations victory?"

Were Goldstone and his fellows in fact dupes of the terrorists? The answer is connected to the concept of 'public relations victory' that Dr Landes mentions. For whatever we know about terrorism and terrorists, it's clearly not ever about achieving strategic progress on some military battlefield (there almost never is a military battlefield) but all about PR. About terrorizing ordinary people and the society in which they live their lives. About terrorizing ordinary people even when those ordinary people are literally the sisters and cousins of the jihadists themselves, as is the case in Hamas-controlled Gaza.

It turns out that Hamas did not lose 49 of its fighters to the Israelis in Operation Cast Lead but rather 600 to 700, and the source for the number is Hamas. (Remember Israel said two years ago that the right number was 709.)

From today's Haaretz:

In an interview with the London-based Al-Hayat daily last Monday, however, Hamas Interior Minister Fathi Hamad detailed the heavy price his group had paid during the war... "On the first day of the war, Israel attacked the police command and killed 250 martyrs, from Hamas and other factions. This was in addition to the 200-300 members of the Al-Qassam Brigade [Hamas' military wing] and 150 security personnel... The rest of the fatalities were from among the civilian population."

In plain terms, the Hamas version was wildly and deliberately wrong, and the Israeli account was spot on. The UN report authored by the highly problematic Goldstone swallowed the first, and ignored and contradicted the second.

Richard Landes points out that there is a repeating theme here:

Both in terms of what it permits and what it considers believable, the official culture in the Palestinian territories (and beyond, in the Arab and Muslim world) affirms any vicious narrative about Israel as true. This is an old and long, repeatedly documentable, story and should have raised concerns among the “fact-finders” about the credibility of Palestinian witnesses. In cases where these witnesses described particularly heinous and gratuitous Israeli assaults on Palestinian civilians... these concerns should be paramount: Did Hamas use the family farm to fire rockets at Israel? Were the children killed in an air strike as originally reported, or in cold blood, as later claimed? In other words, were these children victims of Hamas deliberately drawing fire against its own people or victims of Israeli malevolence? These are legitimate questions, and considerable evidence supports the former narrative.

But the considerable evidence was consigned to the garbage. And the new admission by Hamas of the lies they told will have no impact either because the power of the narrative in which Palestinian Arabs are eternal, powerless victims, no matter the degree of their complicity in the situation in which they live, is so compelling in the current realpolitik.

Until we get to a better understanding of who the terrorists (everywhere) are, what they and their co-conspirators in the world of the media and of public life are doing to advance their terrorist agenda, and how important it is to make the effort to identify and reject jihadist propaganda when it confronts us, we are doomed to relive this script again and again. In th war against the terrorists, it is a mistake to think we are winning.

7-Nov-10: Rockets and responses

A beautiful autumnal Saturday has just ended - mild weather, a light breeze, clear skies. And more rockets fired into Israel by the jihadists of the Gaza Strip. This morning's attack exploded in a field in the Sdot Negev area, near the border with the Hamas-controlled territory, according to Ynet. No one was injured, but the jihadists intend to spread terror and fear and see injuries and damage as a highly desirable but non-essential side-benefit. Around 180 rockets and mortar shells have been fired into Israel from the Gaza Strip so far since the start of 2010, an IDF spokesperson said in a briefing today.

Israeli air force planes carried out two strikes tonight (Saturday night) on targets in southern Gaza. Strike number one was near Khan Younis; the second was aimed at smuggling tunnels in Rafah, near the Gazan/Egyptian border. AFP, quoting Hamas, says a Palestinian who was in his house during the second attack was injured by shattering glass.

2-Nov-10: Know the enemy (with sincere thanks to Mr Choudary of Ilford)

We believe many, perhaps most, people are confused about how the jihadist terrorists work, about their goals, about what civil society ought to do in the face of their racism, their hatred and their physical violence. The confusion we cite is to a considerable extent due to the fuzzy thinking and double-talk - in particular from politicians and from the news reporting industry - that comes with much of the public discussion about terrorism, Islamicism and jihad.

Today, we can dip our lids out of gratitude to a native of the United Kingdom, a former medical student (failed first year and promptly changed faculties) and lawyer (chairman of the UK Society of Muslim Lawyers for a time, but then removed from the official register of legal practitioners in 2002) of Pakistani ethnicity, who went on to become a community leader and minor media personality in the UK and now the world. Additional aspects of his otherwise-undistinguished life are here.

Mr Anjem Choudary, who regales in the quasi-religious title 'imam', appeared a week ago in an interview on CNN. The man's cold-blooded message of hatred is despicable, but the interview demonstrates that he is clear and relatively articulate on matters that civil society needs to hear expressed clearly and with articulation.

Choudary was a founder of Islam4UK and al-Muhajiroun, both of them eventually declared illegal under the UK's counter-terrorism laws on 14 January 2010. Yet he remains free, unconvicted and able to express his jihadist views [see this BBC transcript] pretty largely at will. Such views as this one, expressed on one of the BBC's most prominent television programs five years ago:

"Look, at the end of the day innocent people - when we say 'innocent people' we mean Muslims - as far as non-Muslims are concerned they have not accepted Islam and as far as we are concerned that is a crime against God." [BBC HardTalk, 8 August 2005]

Speak clearly and articulately is what he does in the CNN clip below. The question is: is anyone listening? They should. We all should.



Given what we know about the devastation that the jihadists seek to bring upon the heads of most of us, it remains a source of painful astonishment that such men continue to thrive unhampered in the free and open societies that have extended welcoming arms to them. This speech, among many others like it, is a wake-up call.

No one should think, or say, that men like this vile practitioner of racism and of world-scale religious intolerance is a mainstream spokesman for Islam. Equally, no one should think that creatures like Choudary are entirely marginal to Islamic society, or that the vast differences between him and us are religious or doctrinal. Like Choudary, they are neither dreamers nor visionaries. Jihadist terrorists have action on their minds. If you look carefully you can see the evidence of their handiwork in the news every single day, with the certainty of much more (and worse) to come.

1-Nov-10: Firing terrorist rockets at Israelis: has Hamas changed its jihadist policy? You decide

Want to know how the terrorist organization Hamas views the firing of missiles into Israel?

Take your pick. Is this their policy?

Hamas strongman Mahmoud Zahar says Gaza militants who fire rockets at Israel violate an agreement among Palestinian factions not to do so and face possible arrest. Zahar's remarks published Saturday by the London-based newspaper Al-Hayat are among the clearest yet on the policy of Gaza's Hamas rulers toward rocket squads. Source: Associated Press Sunday 31-Oct-10

Or this?

"Senior Hamas official Mahmoud Zahar said that anyone who fires rockets from Gaza into Israel is a "rebel." In an interview with the Arabic language daily Al Hayat, quoted by Israel's Channel 10 Saturday, Zahar explained that Hamas vowed to adhere to a cease-fire agreement reached with Israel following Israel's assault on the Strip in late 2008."Did we agree to the truce in order to stick to it, or to violate it?," Zahar said. "Do they expect us to give a round of applause to people who rebel against their organization?" he asked, referring to so-called rebels firing rockets in violation of the truce." Source: Haaretz, Friday 30-Oct-10

Or this?

"Senior Hamas official Mahmoud Zahar has dismissed indication by media reports of a change in the Islamic movement's stance toward anti-Israeli resistance. The London-based al-Hayat daily newspaper published an article, citing the Hamas leader as describing those launching rocket attacks against Israel as “mutineers against their own factions.” "First of all, I have not spoken at all to many newspapers recently. Secondly, during meetings over security arrangements, there has been reference to single cases within some factions," Ma'an news agency quoted Zahar as saying on Sunday. Our official stance is that any Israel incursion in any area will be dealt with as an incursion whether it is in the north, the south or the center," the Hamas official stated." Source: Iranian PressTV news service today

We'll stick with the Iranians. They have a proven, deeply intimate familiarity with the terrorist policies of the Hamas jihadists. We're concerned that people don't take the Iranian regime's threats and rantings seriously enough. Experience shows they should be very, very carefully heard.