Anti-Semitism in Europe

The Murder of Ilan Halimi
A Jewish man is kidnapped in Paris, tortured for 24 days and then dies.

BY NIDRA POLLER
Sunday, February 26, 2006 12:01 a.m. EST

PARIS--Two weeks ago a 23-year-old man initially identified as "Ilan" was found by a passerby stumbling in a field near the railroad tracks in the Essonne region south of Paris. Handcuffed, naked, with four-fifths of his body covered with bruises, stab wounds and serious burns, Ilan died in the ambulance on the way to the hospital.

Soon after, police provided more details. The victim had been kidnapped Jan. 20 and held for 24 days by a gang from the banlieues, the poor suburban projects that ring the French capital, who eluded capture while repeatedly contacting Ilan's family with ransom demands. The police suspect the group was involved in other kidnapping attempts in the past two months that used young women as bait. Several of the targeted men worked, as Ilan did, in the small cell phone shops along Boulevard Voltaire in the mixed 11th arrondissement of Paris. In another case, a suspicious father replaced his son for a meeting with a girl who claimed to be a singer, and fell into the hands of masked men who tried to capture him but ran away when someone called the police.

Throughout Ilan's disappearance, the police handled his case as a straightforward kidnap for ransom. The discovery of his body, bearing signs of barbaric torture over an extended period of time, raised serious doubts about this hypothesis. Later, a policeman admitted to the press that he and his colleagues were baffled by the gang's erratic behavior. Ransom demands went up to 400,000 euros, dropped to 100,000 euros one day, 5,000 euros another. The kidnappers called off several pickup arrangements, acting like amateurs, but were highly sophisticated in using untraceable emails and cell phones.

Yet one detail was consistently played down by the investigators and missing from the early media reporting on the killing. The victim, whose full name is Ilan Halimi, was Jewish. Most of the men targeted in other kidnapping attempts were Jewish. Most members of the gang who allegedly carried out the crime are Muslims, whose families come from the Maghreb or sub-Saharan Africa and live in the very sort of neighborhoods that went up in flames during three weeks of nationwide rioting last fall.

Jewish community leaders like Roger Cukierman, president of the Conseil Representatif des Institutions Juives de France, an umbrella group for the country's 600,000 Jews, cautioned against hasty conclusions and unreasonable panic. But French Jews have become sensitive to a well-documented rise in violent Muslim anti-Semitism over the past five years and saw anti-Semitism as the missing link in this senseless crime. After all, Ilan's family is simple and modest. Ruth Halimi, who is divorced from Ilan's father, works as a receptionist. Why else, people are asking, would Ilan be tortured so cruelly for so long? No other motive, aside from sheer hatred, is apparent.

After Ilan was found on Feb. 13, the pieces started to fall into place quickly. When the police put out a sketch of a blond woman who had tried to bait other young men in similar circumstances as Ilan Halimi's, Audrey Lorleach turned herself in. She led police to a housing project in Bagneux, a suburb in Hauts-de-Seine. Fifteen suspects in the Halimi murder, who call their gang the "Barbarians," were brought into custody. Youssouf Fofana, who refers to himself (in English) as the "Brain of the Barbarians," is the apparent ringleader. He is on the run and, investigators suspect, hiding in northern Ivory Coast, the birthplace of his parents. The girl who entrapped Ilan Halimi, who was also on the run, may be among the three people arrested in Aix-en-Provence this past week.

Ilan was held prisoner and abused in an apartment and later a utility room in the cellar in one of the project buildings. Both were lent to the gang by the concierge, who is also now in custody. Some in the gang were known delinquents. Mr. Fofana, who is 26, had served time for armed robbery. But another member was in on-the-job training in the IT service of a French TV station.

In initial statements to the press, Public Prosecutor Jean-Claude Marin and various police officials stuck to their hypothesis that money was the motive for the crime, not anti-Semitism. They noted that Ilan Halimi had been tortured as if the gang were following "a known scenario." Photos of Ilan, naked, with a sack on his head and a gun pointed at his temple were emailed to family members suggesting, according to the police, "scenes of torture at Abu Ghraib." As it turns out, the beheading of Daniel Pearl or Iraqi snuff films are the better comparison. An anonymous police detective quoted in this past Monday's edition of Liberation said: "It's simply that, for those criminals, Jew equals money."

Later that same day, investigating magistrate Corinne Goetzmann detained seven of the suspects on charges of kidnapping, sequestration, torture, acts of barbarism and premeditated murder in an organized gang. They will also be charged with targeting the victim on the basis of his religion, French for hate crime, which carries a stiffer penalty. Justice Minister Pascal Clement explained that the charge of anti-Semitism was based on the fact that one of the suspects had declared to the judge that they picked a Jew because Jews are supposed to be rich. But, according to reports in the French press, some of the suspects in police custody said that they tortured Ilan with particular cruelty simply because he was Jewish.

No longer able to deny or play down the racial motive, the investigation is entering a new phase. One of the most troubling aspects of this affair is the probable involvement of relatives and neighbors, beyond the immediate circle of the gang, who were told about the Jewish hostage and dropped in to participate in the torture.

Ilan's uncle Rafi Halimi told reporters that the gang phoned the family on several occasions and made them listen to the recitation of verses from the Koran, while Ilan's tortured screams could be heard in the background. The family has publicly criticized the police for deliberately ignoring the explicit anti-Semitic motives, which were repeatedly expressed and should have dictated an entirely different approach to the case from the start. Police searches have now revealed the presence of Islamist literature in the home of at least one of the gang members.

The highest echelons of the French government are now preoccupied with the murder of Ilan Halimi. Paris is well aware that the case threatens France's international reputation, but far more than that is at stake. Once again, as in the suburban riots of 2005, the country is forced to come face to face with the criminalized, alienated and racist Muslim youth and their adult enablers in its midst.

Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin declared, in a long speech delivered at the annual dinner of the CRIF, that this heinous crime was anti-Semitic, and that anti-Semitism is not acceptable in France. He promised that the perpetrators would be captured and punished. Two French policemen were sent to the Ivory Coast with an international warrant to arrest Mr. Fofana who flew there on a one-way ticket on Feb. 15, the day that his photo appeared in Le Figaro. A delegation of the CRIF and members of the Halimi family this past Tuesday met with Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy.

The murder of Ilan Halimi invites comparison with the November 2003 killing of a Jewish disc jockey, Sebastien Selam. His Muslim neighbor, Adel, slit his throat, nearly decapitating him, and gouged out his eyes with a carving fork in his building's underground parking garage. Adel came upstairs with bloodied hands and told his mother, "I killed my Jew, I will go to paradise." In the two years before his murder, the Selam family was repeatedly harassed for being Jewish. The Selam case has not been opened by the magistrate. The murderer, who admits his guilt, was placed in a psychiatric hospital, and may be released soon.

The initial response to the kidnapping of Ilan Halimi suggested a comparably selective ignorance. But many things have changed in French society in the past two years. Then, faced with the new tide of anti-Semitism, the Jewish community was left alone with its distress and at times even accused of being justifiably targeted because of its support for Israel. Today the government has apparently decided that the barbarous hatred unleashed against one Jewish man is a threat to all of France.

Ms. Poller is an American novelist living in Paris since 1972.

Like the Nazi romance of an exalted ancient Volk, the Islamists hearken back to a mythical purity, free of decadence brought on by Western liberalism.

Appeasement 101
By Victor Davis Hanson

It is easy to damn the 1930s appeasers of Hitler — such as Stanley Baldwin and Neville Chamberlain in England and Edouard Daladier in France — given what the Nazis ultimately did when unleashed. But history demands not merely recognizing the truth post facto, but also trying to reconstruct the rationale of something that now in hindsight seems inexplicable.

Appeasement in the 1930s was popular with the European public for a variety of reasons. All of them are instructive in our hesitation about stopping a nuclear Iran, or about defending the right of Western newspapers to print what they wish — or about fighting radical Islamism in general.

First, Europe had nearly been destroyed during the Great War, a mere 20 years prior. No responsible postwar leader wished to risk a second continental bloodbath.

Unfortunately, Hitler understood that all too well. In a game of diplomatic chicken, he figured many responsible democratic statesmen had more to lose than he did, as the weaker and once-beaten enemy.

British intellectuals, like European Union idealists today, wrote books and treatises on the obsolescence of war. Conflicts were supposedly caused only by rapacious arms merchants and profiteers at home, not by anti-democratic dictators who interpreted forbearance as weakness. Winston Churchill was a voice in the wilderness — and demonized as a warmonger and worse.

Today, the 50-year Cold War is over, and Europe is at last free of burdensome military expenditure and the threat of global annihilation. Like Osama Bin Laden, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad senses a certain weariness in much of the West as it counts on perpetual peace.

He assumes that most sober Westerners will do almost anything to avoid military confrontation to stop a potential threat — even though, unlike Hitler, Ahmadinejad not only promises to liquidate the Jews but reveals his method in advance by seeking nuclear weapons.

Some naive conservatives in prewar Europe thought the German and Italian fascists would prove a valuable bulwark against communism, and so could be politically finessed. So, too, it has been at times with Islamic fascism. Arming the mujahadeen in Afghanistan, Pakistan or Saudi Arabia was once seen as an inspired way of thwarting Soviet communist imperialism.

At the time of the Ayatollah Khomeini's homicidal fatwa against Salman Rushdie, religious conservative commentators from Patrick Buchanan to New York's Cardinal O'Connor attacked Rushdie, rather than defended the Western right of free expression. Apparently, they felt such Islamic threats to supposed blasphemers might have positive repercussions in discouraging left-wing anti-Christian attacks as well.

In the 1930s, the doctrine of appeasement fobbed off responsibility of confronting fascism onto the League of Nations. Both France and England were quiet about the 1936 Italian invasion of Ethiopia and the German militarization of the Rhineland. They counted on multilateral action of the League, which issued plenty of edicts but marshaled few troops.

Likewise, the moral high ground today supposedly was to refer both the Iraqi and Iranian problems to the United Nations. But considering the oil-for-food scandals and Saddam's constant violations of U.N. resolutions, it is unlikely that the Iranian theocracy has much fear that the Security Council will thwart its uranium enrichment.

As fascism spread, France worked on fortifying its German border with the Maginot Line, Oxford undergraduates voted to refuse "in any circumstances to fight for King and Country," and British newspapers decried the Treaty of Versailles for unduly punishing Germany. This was all long before the "no blood for oil" slogan and Al Gore in Saudi Arabia apologizing to his Wahhabi hosts for the supposed American maltreatment of Arabs.

But deja vu pertains not just to us, but our enemies as well. Like the Nazi romance of a exalted ancient Volk, the Islamists hearken back to a mythical purity, free of decadence brought on by Western liberalism. Similarly, they feed off victimization — not just recent defeats, but centuries-old bitterness at the rise of the West. Their version of the stab-in-the-back Versailles Treaty is always the creation of Israel.

Just as Hitler concocted incidents such as the burning of the Reichstag to create outrage, Islamist leaders incite frenzy in their followers over a supposed flushed Koran at Guantanamo and several inflammatory cartoons, some of them never published by Danish newspapers at all.

Anti-Semitism, of course, is the mother's milk of fascism. It is always, they say, a small group of Jews — whether shadowy cabinet advisers and international bankers of the 1930s or the manipulative neoconservatives and Israeli leadership of the present — who alone stir up the trouble.

The point of the comparison is not to suggest that history simply repeats itself, but to learn why intelligent people delude themselves into embracing naive policies. After the removal of the Taliban and Saddam Hussein, the furious reply of the radical Islamist world was to censor Western newspapers, along with Iran's accelerated efforts to get the bomb.

In response, either the West will continue to stand up now to these reoccurring post-Sept. 11 threats, or it will see the bullies' demands only increase as its own resistance weakens. Like the appeasement of the 1930s, opting for the easier choice will only guarantee a more costly one later on. .

Every weekday JewishWorldReview.com publishes what many in in the media and Washington consider "must-reading". Sign up for the daily JWR update. It's free. Just click here.

Victor Davis Hanson is a classicist and military historian at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University.

Ever read anything positive about what's going on on the ground in Iraq? Here's a soldier's perspective:

IED ROLL-UP
A Soldiers Perspective
10 February 2006
CJ

Here we go again with the information you all love to hear about.

This week, Iraqi and Coalition forces found enough material to produce approximately 84 IEDs (improvised explosive devices/roadside bombs).

This is a VERY conservative figure as you’ll read in just ONE cache 73 mortar rounds were found. One could feasibly create 73 IEDs just off of that cache, but I took into account the rate by which they misfire and the fact that some of them would be combined into one IED with perhaps two mortar rounds.

My professional opinion is that at least 84 IEDs in total would have been created with all this ammunition. That translates into approximately 900 people who are still alive and unaffected by these explosive menaces. Innocent civilians and courageous soldiers were spared the devastating effects of an IED.
It is a direct reflection of the professionalism of your military and the Iraqi forces helping to counter these threats.

Are we having success against these things?

Absolutely!!

But, we’re not perfect. We can’t get every one. But that won’t prevent us from trying.

So, let’s get into it:

February 4 - Iraqi Police officers reported an improvised explosive device discovered along a business route to Coalition personnel. Bomb disposal personnel later arrived on scene and cleared the two surface laid artillery shells, which had been concealed with a timing device in a plastic bag.

February 4 - Iraqi soldiers identified and detained a would-be bomber and defused an explosive device after some quick coordination with Coalition personnel. Iraqi troops became suspicious of a man that was standing with a cell phone near a bridge on the east side of town. The soldiers also suspected a bomb was emplaced and contacted Coalition troops with the information. An Iraqi Army quick reaction force was dispatched and the suspect was arrested. The bomb was discovered on the side of the bridge and disarmed. No injuries or damages were reported. The detainee and roadside bomb were turned over to authorities for further disposition.

February 6 - Soldiers from the 1st Battalion, 2nd Brigade, 7th Iraqi Army Division and Coalition forces discovered five caches and captured two insurgents during counter-insurgency operations near Hit. The caches, found along the Euphrates River, consisted of five 120 mm rocket rounds, one 120 mm rocket warhead, 73 120 mm mortar rounds, 39 90 mm high-explosive anti-tank rounds, seven 100 mm anti-tank rounds, two 122 mm artillery rounds, two 155 artillery rounds, 153 .53-caliber anti-personnel rounds, nine rocket-propelled grenade warheads, six 60 mm mortar rounds, 26 25 mm anti-aircraft rounds, 250 7.62 mm rounds, seven 122 mm fuses and a pair of binoculars. Soldiers also detained two insurgents at a vehicle control point southwest of Hit after they tested positive for explosives residue and were found to have three AK-47s, several identification cards and two cell phones in their possession.

February 6 - Soldiers from the 2nd Battalion, 2nd Brigade, 7th Iraqi Army Division and Coalition personnel discovered three men trying to dig up a weapons cache while conducting counter-insurgency operations in Barwanah. Soldiers killed the insurgents as they attempted to unearth the cache. The cache contained a 12.7 mm machine gun, a 60 mm mortar tube and bipod and one 130 mm artillery round. In a separate action, the soldiers detained a man suspected of insurgent activity after he tested positive for gunpowder residue. Three men were also detained in nearby Haqlaniyah after they tested positive for explosive residue.

February 7 - Iraqi Police and Coalition Soldiers seized two weapons caches and detained two men suspected of stealing oil from a local pipeline in the Kirkuk area. Tarkalon police conducted a joint patrol with Soldiers from the 101st Airborne Division and discovered a cache which consisted of several mortar rounds and ammunition for various weapons. An explosive ordnance disposal team destroyed the cache on site. Two local children led Iraqi soldiers and their Military Transition Team partners to a second cache west of the city. An EOD team collected a dozen various-sized explosive shells from the site.

February 7 - Soldiers from the 2nd and 4th Battalions of the 1st Iraqi Army Division and Coalition personnel seized and cleared a weapons cache in west Fallujah. The cache consisted of eight rockets, four hand grenades, an RPG launcher, two rifles, eight assorted artillery rounds, two propane tanks, ski masks and various radios.

February 8 - Soldiers from the 1st Battalion, 3rd Brigade, 2nd Iraqi Army Division found and reported a roadside bomb during operations. Explosives disposal personnel and Coalition troops arrived on scene and found a 155 mm South African manufactured artillery round with a radio attached as a detonation device. The bomb was safely recovered to be destroyed later.

February 8 - Personnel from the Iraqi 5th Strategic Infrastructure Battalion found and seized a cache, northwest of Kirkuk. The cache consisted of 13 122 mm mortar rounds, three 40 mm anti-personnel rounds, four 155 mm artillery rounds and an assortment of fuses. The munitions were taken into custody for later disposal.

And lost in all of the hullabaloo of cartoons...

US Navy rescues ship attacked by pirates-captain
Reuters
14 Feb 2006
The U.S. Navy rescued a 3,000-tonne cargo ship attacked by pirates off the coast of lawless Somalia, the vessel's captain said late on Monday.

In a spate of attacks along the unpatrolled waters off Somalia, gunmen stormed the United Arab Emirates-owned Al Manara last month, captain Deaa Naseh said.

U.S. sailors arrested and left two suspected pirates locked up aboard the ship, Naseh said, adding that it was unclear what action would be taken against them.

After the rescue mission, the ship suffered engine failure and drifted for 15 days before being towed at Naseh's request by the Seychelles coastguard into the port of Victoria on Saturday.

"The attackers kept boarding and leaving the vessel at will going and coming back by smaller boats, but when the U.S. Navy personnel were about to board, the gunmen threw away their weapons into the sea," Naseh told Reuters.

Looking tired and weak, he said he used makeshift sails to reach the Indian Ocean island.

Last month the U.S. Navy captured a ship near the Somali capital Mogadishu with 10 pirates on board and 16 Indians believed to be hostages.

Under a $50 million deal signed with the Somali government in November, a U.S. marine security firm was tasked with ending piracy in the waters off Somalia, where dozens of hijackings and attempted seizures have been reported over the past year.

The wave of attacks has badly shaken merchant shipping which relies heavily on international trade routes that snake along Somalia's coastline -- the longest of any African country.

"Europe has no real defenses against a 9/11-like attack. They know it. So do the terrorists."

February 14, 2006
What Will Europe Really Do?
By Victor Davis Hanson

Nothing is quite as surreal as the Islamic world’s fury at the liberal and innocuous Danes. How could anyone wish to burn their embassies and kill their citizens, when they have always offered all the politically correct, multicultural platitudes and welcomed in any and all from the Middle East?

Now the furor over the cartoons, coming on the heels of the bombings in Madrid and London, the French rioting, the murders in Holland, and the failed European negotiations with the Iranian theocracy have shaken Europe to its foundations.

If the most liberal and tolerant states in Europe such as Holland and Denmark have the most problems with Islamic radicals, then what does that say about the continent as a whole? Why were not the calculating jihadists singling out a more unapologetic Catholic Poland that has larger contingents in Iraq and is far prouder of its Christian roots?

Do the Europeans sense that the more open, free-wheeling and non-judgmental the culture, the more it is hated by the jihadists? If Europe as a whole is more pro-Palestinian than the United States, disapproved of Iraq, and yet is still hated as much, is magnanimity at last exposed as appeasement—earning only contempt from an emboldened enemy?

Don’t look, however, for any overt expression of alarm. It is too much to ask of the European Union for now to go on the record supporting the right of Danish free expression or to demand an embargo of Iran as it approaches nuclear autonomy. Instead, expect the European reaction to be far more subtle: the same old public utopian rhetoric, but in the shadows a newfound desire to galvanize against the threat of Islamic fascism.

Here is what we can probably anticipate. First will come a radical departure from past immigration practices. Islam will be praised; the Middle East assured that Europe is tolerant—but very few newcomers from across the Mediterranean let in.

There will be continued public furor over the American efforts in Iraq, but far greater secret efforts to coordinate with the United States—in everything from isolating the Assad regime in Syria to rethinking missile defense. For the past three years the post-colonial Europeans have wished the Americans to learn their imperial lessons by failing in Iraq. Yet it may well be that many in private will now wish us to succeed, if only in the hopes that such Middle East democracies will be less likely in the future to turn loose their mobs to burn European embassies and threaten their citizens.

We won’t see much public condemnation of Hamas, but more likely quiet efforts to pull the plug slowly on subsidies for such terrorists. The Europeans praised Arafat, then learned that he was singularly corrupt. Nothing disturbs a European more than to be swindled and damned as immoral in the process. Subsidies to Jew-hating Hamas terrorists only ensure both.

Europe will still talk about bringing Turkey into the fold of the West, but de facto is horrified at the thought that millions of a religion that empowers so many to go berserk over a few cartoons might soon comprise the most populous nation of Europe. I doubt any European diplomat will invest any political capital at all in restarting in earnest Turkish/European Union talks.

We can also look forward to more bizarre pronouncements such as Jacques Chirac’s warning about the French nuclear deterrent. In point of fact, Europe has no real defenses against a 9/11-like attack. They know it. So do the terrorists.

Crash an airliner into the dome of St. Peter’s or knock down the Eiffel Tower tomorrow: Europe has no mechanism to hunt down the perpetrators in the Hindu Kush, the Bekka Valley, or the wilds of Iran—much less, like the United States, to hold a rogue regime responsible.

Frustrated by its lack of military resources, but cognizant of the classical need to warn an enemy that more is to be lost than won from starting a war, France is reduced to bluster about nuclear weapons—threats that probably are either not believed or welcomed by the jihadists. In lieu of a credible military, Europe will send more tiny contingents to Afghanistan, remind the world that Britain and France are nuclear, and somehow hurry up to construct a conventional deterrent where there is now none at all.

Finally, the Europeans who despised the unilateral and preemptory George Bush will start to grate at his new multilateral side even more. Be careful what you wish for, especially when an American leader may now not necessarily be such an easy target of caricature—or may not always do the dirty work of fighting jihadists from Pakistan to the Sunni Triangle.

Instead, by letting the Europeans take the lead with the Iranian negotiations, and keeping nearly silent about the cartoon hysteria, the United States essentially has told the Europeans, “Here is the sort of restrained sober and judicious global diplomacy that you so welcome.”

Because of slated troop withdrawals from European bases, and a new American weariness with the old anti-Americanism, some Europeans are beginning to recoil at the idea that they might well be on their own—and in a war against fanatical enemies that they have appeased and without rational friends that they have estranged.

In response, we may see less of the anti-American rhetoric and a return to the Cold War slogans of a “strong Atlantic Alliance” and “an essential Nato,” as nuclear jihadists replace the fear of 300 Soviet divisions.

So now Europe is being thrust right into the middle of the so-called war against Islamic fascism. Once threatened, it will either react with a newly acquired Churchillian maturity to protect its civilization, or cave, in hopes that even more Chamberlain-type appeasement will satisfy the Islamists.

It should be a fascinating spring ahead.

Victor Davis Hanson is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and author of A War Like No Other: How the Athenians and Spartans Fought the Peloponnesian War.

The Left and the mujahedin see a totalitarian state that cleanses the world of evil by force...

Fallaci Decapitated: Emblem of the New Europe
Robert Spencer
HUMAN EVENTS
Feb 14, 2006

An art show in Milan has illustrated once again the deep affinity between the Left and the forces of the global jihad. As Muslims the world over call for the deaths of those who have "insulted Islam," anyone who wants to see the author of the seminal post-9/11 books The Rage and the Pride and The Force of Reason beheaded can go to the Galleria Luciano Inga-Pin in Milan, which is exhibiting Giuseppe Veneziano's "American Beauty" from January 19 through March 18. This is a series of paintings designed to highlight the "weakness and perversity of the 'American way of life'" -- including Oriana Fallaci's decapitated head.

Although I find the picture of Fallaci decapitated offensive, I have no plans to attack the Italian embassy, boycott Italian wine, phone in a bomb threat to the gallery, kill innocent people who had nothing to with the painting, or threaten to kill those who are actually responsible for it. Veneziano's painting is the sort of obnoxiousness that has become commonplace on the Left, and is one of the prices of freedom of speech.

Veneziano’s painting is doubly offensive, however, in light of the fact that Fallaci herself has been driven out of Italy by frivolous charges that she has "defamed Islam." Veneziano is not on trial for depicting Fallaci decapitated, but Fallaci faces trial for making a series of heated but largely true statements about Islam and Muslims. Veneziano’s painting is triply offensive in that it depicts exactly what the Muslim exponents of cartoon rage around the world would like to see done to Fallaci -- and thus manifests the ever-closer empathy between the Western Left and Islamic jihad.

Both the Left and the mujahedin envision a totalitarian state that cleanses the world of evil by force, establishing a just society at the price of an unspecified number of dead. Both advocate a supremacist ideology unable to tolerate criticism from others. And now as the European Union contemplates new laws that will, in the words of Franco Frattini, EU Commissioner for Justice, Freedom, and Security, "give the Muslim world the message: We are aware of the consequences of exercising the right of free expression," the marriage of the European Left and Islamic jihad can proceed all the more speedily. Frattini has since denied that the EU has any such plans, but there can be no denying that voices all over the West have called for the media to exercise "responsible self-regulation" so as to avoid trampling upon Muslim sensibilities. But Muslim sensibilities only: those who depict Fallaci beheaded, or Jesus Christ with the face of Osama bin Laden, will continue to be subject to the same protections enunciated by Josh Wainwright, the producer of the art show that featured the Christ/Osama painting: "I don't think it's anyone's job or vocation to limit the expression of artists." Right. Except cartoon artists, of course. Or at least those who have the temerity to suggest that there might be some connection between violent actions done by Islamic jihadists and the Prophet who said that "Paradise is under the shades of swords."

Fallaci decapitata is a fitting emblem for the new Europe, in which the Swedish government closed down a political party's website for displaying the cartoons of Muhammad, the Norwegian editor who ran the cartoons abjectly apologized, and European companies doing business in the Middle East can't dissociate themselves quickly enough from Denmark. This is the New Dhimmi Europe, eager to "give the Muslim world the message: We are aware of the consequences of exercising the right of free expression."

Europe is already well aware of those consequences. They are clear in Veneziano’s painting. Not enough of those in Europe who still have their heads seem willing to stand up to Islamic violence and intimidation long enough to allow the heroic lady to keep hers. All around the Continent the parliamentary heads of government are losing their heads trying to avoid offending Islam; all too soon they will realize that Fallaci's head alone was not enough to appease their sworn enemies. Not nearly enough.

Tectonic plates unhinged?

We are finally paying attention to the explosions unleashed by the hitting of two tectonic plates, which have been hitting each other for centuries: mainly, "the confrontation of a society with a pre-Enlightenment way of thinking with a society with a post-Enlightenment way of thinking." What will be the new landscape once the earthquake and its aftershocks have waned? As Mr. Darlymple suggests,

however much we may criticize the Enlightenment, as being in some respects shallow, or as leading to the destruction of any transcendent meaning to human life, the irreducible fact is that we are all children of the Enlightenment, and when — as now — we see the freedom that the Enlightenment wrought challenged in so intellectually primitive and thuggish a way, we realize for once how very much we owe to the Enlightenment. You don’t really appreciate something until you have lost it, or at least are in danger of losing it; and no philosophical critic of the Enlightenment has ever really wanted to live in a pre-Enlightenment society.

Please read:

Theodore Dalrymple: Unenlightened -
National Review
February 27, 2005

As extremist Muslims react to the Danish cartoons, the Enlightenment doesn’t look so bad, huh?

Where do you get a Danish flag to burn when you live in Damascus or Karachi? I am not sure that I would find it easy to come by one, and I live in France, a fellow member of the European Union. In fact, I don’t think I could even find a French flag to burn in the streets of my nearest town (though I confess that I am not an experienced flag-burner).

Moreover, Damascus is not the kind of place where spontaneous demonstrations happen: A genuine expression of mass popular sentiment there would be a revolution, not a demonstration. Let us also not forget that the Syrian regime is itself secularist and therefore anti-Islamic, at least in theory. Islam is to Assad what Russian Orthodoxy was to Stalin during the Second World War.

Nevertheless, the fury belatedly expressed by the public in the Muslim world after its attention had been maliciously brought to the cartoons first published four months ago in Denmark is as genuine as any ersatz or kitsch emotion ever is. There is a great deal of pleasure, after all, to be had from indignant outrage, especially when there isn’t much else in your life. The polities of Islamic countries tend to ensure that this is true of a large proportion of the population.

The psychology of the Muslim extremists in Europe and the Middle East strongly reminded me of something, though at first I couldn’t quite put my finger on what it was. Eventually I realized: They are like the inhabitants of our ghettoes who demand something that they call “respect,” and which they extort by fear for lack of any other means by which to earn it.

The Muslims are not deceived by the pusillanimous apologies of the Danes, or the odious, unctuous, and fatuous expressions of sympathy and understanding for their feelings that have emerged from official circles in Britain and America, in a vain and cowardly attempt to defuse the situation by a precipitate though insincere abandonment of the best values of the Enlightenment. Would Voltaire have caved in so cravenly?

Amman, Jordan, February 2006 Ali Jarekji/Reuters

The Muslim extremists know perfectly well that the West does not respect them, and that the only way they can cut a figure in the world is by terror. Technologically, scientifically, artistically, philosophically, economically they are nullities: but they know how to be vicious, and that makes up for every other defect. If the world will not listen to their tedious religiose lucubrations, it will at least pay heed to their bloodcurdling threats. Each expression of pseudo-understanding is music to their ears: They know that threats of mass decapitation and killing in the streets à la Theo van Gogh have worked. It is an open invitation for more of the same.

The problem is not only for Western democracies, of course, which so far have demonstrated a lack of resolve comparable only to that of Chamberlain and Daladier in the face of Hitler, though without the extenuating circumstances (Chamberlain, at least, had a genuine and humane horror of war). The problem for Muslim countries is even worse.

Whatever the doctrines of Islam, it is a fact that there are countless Muslims who are content to live and let live, and who are by no means religious fanatics. I have traveled fairly widely in the Islamic world, and have met almost everywhere with kindness and hospitality. In some respects, Islamic societies are notably superior to our own: It is — or used to be — safer to walk in a Cairo slum than it now is in the best parts of the West End of London. People behave in a more dignified manner than among us: There is very great poverty in Cairo, for example, but not the willful degradation, at least in public, that you see almost everywhere in the West.

The problem is that Islam seems to allow no way of institutionalizing moderation, beyond Mubarak-style repression. Just as left-wingers used to say that there are no enemies to the left, for fear of losing caste and being branded right-wing, so Muslims, especially those in power, find it difficult to admit to enemies claiming religious purity, for fear of being branded anti-Islamic.

Hence a newspaper editor in Jordan was not only dismissed but imprisoned for daring to write that the Muslim reaction to the cartoons was excessive, and to call on Muslims to be sensible. It seems to me likely that the Jordanian ruling class agreed with this, but dared not do so in public, or even allow it to be thought that it didn’t object very strongly to it. Otherwise it could be presented as being lukewarm in the defense of Islam.

And this in turn is because no Islamic country of which I am aware will allow even closely argued intellectual public criticism of Islam of the kind that Christianity has now had to withstand for hundreds of years. If you can’t criticize Islam publicly, there can be no moderation founded upon anything except force, which is not only susceptible to counterforce, but intellectually and emotionally incoherent. It is surely emblematic of the extremely fragile existential position of Islam that a scholarly book such as Ibn Warraq’s Why I Am Not a Muslim is not widely available in Muslim countries, to put it mildly (unlike The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, for respect is a strictly one-way street in the opinion of many Muslims).

In other words, what we are seeing is the confrontation of a society with a pre-Enlightenment way of thinking with a society with a post-Enlightenment way of thinking. And however much we may criticize the Enlightenment, as being in some respects shallow, or as leading to the destruction of any transcendent meaning to human life, the irreducible fact is that we are all children of the Enlightenment, and when — as now — we see the freedom that the Enlightenment wrought challenged in so intellectually primitive and thuggish a way, we realize for once how very much we owe to the Enlightenment. You don’t really appreciate something until you have lost it, or at least are in danger of losing it; and no philosophical critic of the Enlightenment has ever really wanted to live in a pre-Enlightenment society.

If in Islamic countries free criticism of the religion were allowed without endangering the lives of the people who criticized it, then the Danish cartoons would have been gratuitously offensive and reprehensible, because quite unnecessary, as are all the gimcrack works of art such as Piss Christ that so offend the Christian sensibility. But the fundamental objection to the cartoons was not that they were offensive, but that they were pointed, albeit rather crude, criticism.

The fundamental problem of the Muslim world is that it wants the material fruits or benefits of the Enlightenment without the Enlightenment itself. A considerable proportion of the large migrant population from Islamic countries to Europe has wanted this too, which is why many such migrants are notably less successful in their adopted countries than their Hindu, Sikh, and Chinese counterparts.

Muslims have been trying to square this circle for well over a century, since they first became aware of just how retarded they were by comparison with a civilization that theirs once more than equaled. Like the inhabitants of the ghetto, they want the respect of the rest of the world without wishing to do the things necessary to obtain it. Is it not a deeply humiliating reproach to Muslims that many in the nations where the Danish legations were burned down would love to live in Denmark, if only they were allowed to do so, cartoons of Muhammad or no cartoons of Muhammad?

Mr. Dalrymple is a contributing editor of City Journal, and the author most recently of Our Culture, What’s Left of It: The Mandarins and the Masses.

An understanding of the Moslem world and of the stresses and forces operative within it is an essential part of the basic intelligence framework.

“Moslem States Represent a Potential Threat to World Peace”
By Daniel Pipes
FrontPageMagazine.com
February 13, 2006

How did the U.S. government perceive Islam as a political force in the old days? For an answer, I propose a look at a “confidential” 76-page study (declassified in 1979) published sixty years ago tomorrow by the Military Intelligence Service of the U.S. War Department.

The 1946 report, which I have posted online in pdf format (warning: it is a large document that may be slow to load), is the inaugural issue of a series of weekly reports titled simply Intelligence Review. This series presents “current intelligence reflecting the outstanding developments of military interest in the fields of politics, economics, sociology, the technical sciences, and, of course, military affairs.” Chapter headings in this first issue include: “Transition of Major Powers to Peacetime Military Systems,” “Manchuria: Soviet or Chinese Sphere?” and “Wheat: Key to the World’s Food Supply.”

Of particular interest is an 11-page chapter that deals with “Islam: A Threat to World Stability.” It opens with some bleak observations:

With few exceptions, the states [in the Muslim world] are marked by poverty, ignorance, and stagnation. It is full of discontent and frustration, yet alive
with consciousness of its inferiority and with determination to achieve some
kind of betterment.

Two basic urges meet head-on in this area, and conflict is inherent in this collision of
interests. These urges reveal themselves in the daily news accounts of killings
and terrorism, of pressure groups in opposition, and of raw nationalism and
naked expansionism masquerading as diplomatic maneuvers.

The report then explains these two urges and rightly begins by focusing on the long shadow of the premodern period.

The first of these urges originates within the Moslems’ own sphere. The Moslems
remember the power with which once they not only ruled their own domains but
also overpowered half of Europe, yet they are painfully aware of their present
economic, cultural and military impoverishment. Thus a terrific internal
pressure is building up in their collective thinking. The Moslems intend, by any means possible, to regain political independence and to reap the profits of
their own resources. … The area, in short, has an inferiority complex, and its
activities are thus as unpredictable as those of any individual so motivated.

Looking at Muslims in psychological terms is characteristic of that era, when social scientists frequently viewed politics through the prism of individual behavior. (For a famous example of such an analysis, see Ruth Benedict’s 1946 study, The Chrysanthemum and the Sword: Patterns of Japanese Culture, which argued that the Japanese national character is formed in part by stringent toilet training techniques.)

The other fundamental urge originates externally. The world’s great and near-great Powers cover the economic riches of the Moslem area and are also mindful of the strategic locations of some of the domains. Their actions are also difficult to predict, because each of these powers sees itself in the position of the customer who wants to do his shopping in a hurry because he happens to know the store is going to be robbed.

In an atmosphere so sated with the inflammable gases of distrust and ambition, the slightest spark could lead to an explosion which might implicate every country committed to the maintenance of world peace.

The introduction concludes with a justification for the present analysis: “An understanding of the Moslem world and of the stresses and forces operative within it is thus an essential part of the basic intelligence framework.”

The chapter proceeds with a one-page sketch of Muslim history that includes this observation: “At the present time there are no strong Moslem states. The leadership of the Moslem world remains in the Middle East, particularly in Arabia.” Given the backwardness of Arabia in 1946, this statement was either very ill-informed or very prescient.

The bulk of the chapter looks at forces that weaken or strengthen Muslim unity. The former include a lack of a common language, religious schisms, geographical separation, economic disparities, political rivalries, and what the report indelicately calls a “prostitution of leadership.” This last is not so much an excoriation of Muslim kings, presidents, and emirs, but a review of how several non-Muslim powers, ending with the Soviet Union, have claimed to be the Protectors of Islam. The analysis includes the notable observation that “Moslems are properly suspicious of their leaders.”

Forces that strengthen Muslim unity make up a second, shorter list: the pilgrimage to Mecca, classical Arabic, modern communications, and the Arab League. A mention of the hajj leads to one dramatically wrong prediction: “The scarcity of shipping during the war reduced the usual horde to about 20,000-30,000 per year. While the numbers will probably increase now, they are not likely to reach their former proportions.” (In fact, the pilgrimage breaks new attendance records practically every year and now numbers three million pilgrims, many times more than ever was the case before 1946.)

The chapter on Islam concludes with an eye to the U.S. rivalry with the Soviet Union. Far from viewing Islam as a “bulwark against Communism,” as later was the case, the Military Intelligence Service sees Muslims as easy prey for Moscow. It finds Muslim states “weak and torn by internal stresses” and deems their peoples “insufficiently educated to appraise propaganda or to understand the motives of those who promise a new Heaven and a new Earth.” The analysis ends on a sober note:

Because of the strategic position of the Moslem world and the restlessness of
its peoples, the Moslem states represent a potential threat to world peace.
There cannot be permanent world stability, when one-seventh of the earth’s
population exists under the economic and social conditions that are imposed upon
the Moslems.

This voice from the past prompts three observations. First, its blunt expression is remote from today’s carefully worded government analyses (even classified ones) intended to offend no one. Second, the perception that the Muslim world (then making up one-seventh of the world’s population, now about one-sixth) could impede world stability is deep and remarkable. Third, many of the themes wracking today’s world could be discerned two generations ago – the frustration of Muslims, the sense of longing for an earlier era, the political volatility, the susceptibility to extremist ideologies, and the threat to world peace. This confirms, again, that 9/11 and attendant aggressions should not have been the shock they were.

"The UN undermines its potential to live up to its charter by its failure to change the repellent composition of its Human Rights Commission."

U.N. Hipocrisy on Human Rights
by Nat Hentoff
The Washington Times
February 13, 2006

Pakistan's Mukhtar Mai became an inspiration to human rights defenders throughout the world when -- after being publicly gang-raped by order of a village council for an alleged act by her brother, which she was not involved -- she bravely defied the council and got a higher court to overturn the verdict. On Jan. 20, she was scheduled to be interviewed at the United Nations, but, as the New York Times reported, the United Nations canceled her appearance.

At the U.N. television studios, she was to appear in "An Interview with Mukhtar Mai, The Bravest Woman on Earth." But Pakistan protested because Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz would be at the United Nations that very day, and accordingly, the U.N. officials didn't want to embarrass this dignitary. Said U.N. undersecretary-general for communications, Shashi Tharoor: "We are obliged to take into account the views formally expressed by member states." But it was only after news accounts of what happened that Secretary-GeneralKofi Annan, very embarrassed, offered to reschedule Mai, to be cosponsored by Pakistan.

Then, recently, for only the second time in U.N. history, a movie, "Che," glorifying the ruthless presiding executioner in Castro's Cabana prison from 1957 to 1959 was permitted to be filmed in the U.N.'s General Assembly, with Mr. Annan's authorization.

While he was commander of that notorious Havana prison, Che Guevara ordered and often personally executed (according to the Free Society Project's Truth Recovery Archive) more than 200 Cubans. As the archival project's director, Maria Werlau, said to the Jan. 30 New York Sun, "Che stood for the opposite of what the U.N. charter upholds." The glowing promises of the U.N. charter, however, have often been betrayed. Steadily increasing numbers of black Africans in Darfur, for example, have been murdered, gang-raped and torn from their villages by the government of Sudan, while the veto power of China on the SecurityCouncil, where this celebration of Guevara was filmed, precludes any meaningful intervention by the United Nations.

Not only the United Nations honored the murderous Che Guevara. In the Dec. 25 New York Sun, William Meyers reported on the continuing exhibition at the International Center of Photography in New York of "Che! Revolution and Commerce."The wall text speaks reverently of the "classical, even Christ-likedemeanor"ofthis"youngand charismatic idealist who gave up the security of his middle-class world for his convictions."

The one time I met Guevara,atthe Cuban mission to the United Nations, he expressed one of his convictions. Guevara professed not to understand English. So, looking at him and his interpreter, I asked this idealist: "Can you conceive however far into the future a time when there will be free elections in Cuba?" Not waiting for his interpreter, Guevara broke into laughter at my naively ignorant question. He made it clear that I had no understanding of a true people's revolution, firmly guided by Maximum Leader Castro.

While being hospitable to the further mythicizing of Guevara in a movie though initially turning away Mai, "The Bravest Woman on Earth," the United Nations continues to undermine its potential to live up to its charter by its failure so far to change the repellent composition of its ludicrously named Human Rights Commission.

To his credit, Mr. Annan is trying to get the support of enough U.N. members to create a smaller human rights commission,whichthe world'smostbarbarous human-rights abusers would not to be qualified to join. But, as a Jan. 20 Washington Post editorial, "Impasse on Human Rights," points out, among the so-far effective resisters to this vital change are Egypt and Pakistan, along with "several Caribbean countries." Unless Mr. Annan's changes go through, when this grotesque parody of a human rights commission meets again in Geneva next month, its decisions will still be made by such chronic crushers of human rights as Sudan, Cuba, China, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Russia and Robert Mugabe's Zimbabwe.

In its newly published World Report 2006, Human Rights Watch ends its grim report on Zimbabwe with this telling paragraph: "Western governments, in particular the United Kingdom and United States, have failed to convince other (African) influential governments (especially those in the South) to take a stronger stand on Zimbabwe...China, Russia and other African countries state that Zimbabwe does not warrant discussions at the Security Council because they claim it is not a threat to international peace or security."

Zimbabwe is only a monstrous daily threat to its own people, but the United Nations is indifferent to the brutally repressed people of Zimbabwe.

..."people who didn't know the first thing about us trumpeted the misdeeds of a handful of young men who scoffed at the concepts of honor and duty..."

SOLDIERS' STORIES
The war you didn't see
A controversial National Guard unit's heroics got lost in the hype and scandal.

By Robert C.J. Parry, February 12, 2006
Los Angeles Times

LAST MONTH I returned from Iraq, swapping my desert camouflage for a suit and tie to resume my desk job at a Century City firm. For the first time in 18 months I was separated from my battalion, the 1st of the 184th Infantry Regiment, which was among the first California Army National Guard units to be sent into combat since the Korean War.

From the first weeks of our mobilization in August 2004, we were in the spotlight. We were the battalion "mired in scandal." We were, according to the disgruntled, poor in training and morale. Once in Iraq, we were the battalion that suffered casualties seemingly faster than anyone could count: 17 killed in action and nearly 100 wounded in 12 months. We were the battalion whose commander, Col. William W. Wood, became the highest-ranking soldier to die in action. Our previous commander was relieved of duty after a scandal involving the abuse of Iraqi prisoners. Even as we rolled out each day to confront terrorists, we were known at home primarily for things that had nothing to do with the job we did or how we did it.

Over the course of 18 months, the 600 soldiers of the 184th experienced almost every high and low a band of brothers could, from great distinction to shocking heartbreak. But what never made it into print were the things that will mark our hearts until well after we become the old-timers down at the VFW.

We served with honor. We served with valor. We earned distinction.

Google us to find the litany of supposed woe. But if you want to know the real story of our battalion, go find Sgt. Thomas Kruger and ask him about April 5, 2005.

On that bright spring morning, with his legs shattered, Kruger dragged himself across 100 feet of debris and shrapnel to reach Cpl. Glenn Watkins, who had been mortally wounded moments earlier by the same ghastly roadside bomb.

You might also ask anyone from our ranks about Staff Sgt. Steve Nunez. Broken and bloodied by an IED, he was ordered home to recuperate after refusing to go voluntarily. He rejoined us to carry the fight forward, refusing the chance to stay home.

There were no front-page headlines for Kruger, Nunez or even Sgt. 1st Class Tom Stone, who covered a wounded subordinate's body with his own to protect that soldier from a secondary attack that could have come at any moment.

Stone, a Los Angeles Police Department officer, and Kruger, a paramedic on movie sets, were awarded Bronze Stars for their valor. Nunez, a Riverside metalworker, received our awe and admiration, and I hope yours too.

Equally deserving of recognition were Sgt. 1st Class Chris Chebatah and 1st Lt. Ky Cheng. One terrible September night, an armored personnel carrier in their patrol was destroyed by a tremendous blast and flipped, pinning a soldier. Even while taking enemy fire and directing the care for casualties around them, they rigged a chain to pull the 10-ton vehicle off him. The effort was successful but ultimately futile.

So far, 14 of our soldiers have been decorated for valor and another 48 have earned the Bronze Star for service. But that cannot be found in print.

Our unit — supposedly just a band of weekend warriors from the National Guard — was selected by the Army's renowned 3rd Infantry Division to take on its primary challenge: taking control of a sector of south Baghdad that was home to leading Baathists and Al Qaeda fanatics. In that capacity, we conducted more than 7,000 combat patrols totaling nearly half a million man-hours. We captured more insurgents in one month than did whole brigades. We stand nominated (with the rest of our brigade) for a Valorous Unit Award.

But instead, people who didn't know the first thing about us trumpeted the misdeeds of a handful of young men who scoffed at the concepts of honor and duty that our commander invoked.

At dawn on the June day that that story broke, we awakened to the deep reverberation of a complex attack — five car bombs and at least three subsequent ambushes designed to hit those who responded — in an adjacent sector. The 3rd Battalion, 7th Infantry Regiment was in a hot fight. Our Alpha Company — a part of our battalion, based in Fullerton — rallied to 3-7's aid. The company fought through ambushes to find, kill and capture terrorists. For a few hours, the men of Killer Company, as we call Alpha, were heroes.

But that night, amid rumor and whisper, the Alpha soldiers were taken off patrol and isolated. Within days we knew the ugly story. Months earlier, it seems, shortly after we arrived in Iraq, a few of Alpha's young NCOs had abused a group of Iraqi detainees.

It was immature, nasty, stupid stuff — using stun guns on the genitals of men allegedly caught trying to attack a power plant. The men they tortured were later released, as are so many of the suspected terrorists caught in country. In the investigation that followed, nine others were accused of lesser misdeeds — taking photographs of themselves with detainees and the like — in which no physical harm came to anyone.

The Army PR machine touted the news, almost proudly, much like "Access Hollywood" touts B-list celebrity gossip: "Baghdad Troops to Face Court-Martial for Detainee Abuse." Before long, word leaked out that they were ours. What was not said was that it was one of the soldiers in our own battalion who had found the video of the abuse and turned it in to our commander.

Lots of folks had lots of theories about why the Army made such a big deal of it. Mine is that the Army wanted to get out in front of "another Abu Ghraib," and a group of "nasty Guard" soldiers made good poster children. It was sound PR, but lousy teamwork.

Whatever the case, in the end, only three went to prison for their role in the abuse, all for short terms. The others received minor administrative punishments, and our commander — a schoolteacher, poet and a man of noble values — was sent elsewhere. The facts did not live up to the hype, but the hype was what we, and you, were left with.

While our Delta Company patrolled a stretch of Baghdad road where five of our soldiers were eventually killed, people who had never set foot in Iraq were quoted about our performance. People who rarely left the safety of an operations base damaged our reputations. We never flinched in a fight, but we were smeared nonetheless.

What none of us could explain was why no reporter actually met a single 184th soldier in Iraq until November. Even that only came after the tragic death of our new commander, Col. Wood, an amazing active-duty officer who held us together and made us strong again. Whether it was some form of politics or simply the realities of journalism in war, I do not know. The hype was all that mattered.

During my tour, I was blessed — or perhaps cursed — with a "utility infielder" role, serving in a variety of positions that gave me a diverse look at the lives of soldiers and Iraqis alike.

I patrolled the streets of Baghdad's elite Karrada neighborhood and its insurgent-rich Doura sector, shaking people's hands and learning their problems. I lived and worked alongside American contractors upgrading a key power plant. I trained Iraqi police, saw their enthusiasm and came to understand their different approach to things. I worked as a junior officer on our battalion staff, witnessing how the decisions governing the street fight were shaped. I was shot at and attacked with IEDs.

I saw the successes. I struggled with the failures. But most important, I saw people who once had nothing now bursting with hope and thanks.

While I was in Iraq, I read Walter Isaacson's remarkable biography, "Benjamin Franklin: An American Life." I was reminded of the passion and determination of our founding fathers, and of the long years they experienced between independence and the founding of the government we enjoy today. Franklin and company recognized the importance of having a fully informed American constituency involved in making the decisions of government.

When it comes to Iraq, in my experience, that constituency is poorly served.

ROBERT C.J. PARRY, a first lieutenant in the California Army National Guard's 1-184 Infantry, is a senior account manager for a Century City public relations firm. Contact him at rparry@ppmgcorp.com.

"40 percent of Swedish households would rank as low-income households in the U.S." In many European countries, the percentage would be even greater."

The Decline and Fall of Europe
Talk to top-level scientists and educators about the future of scientific research and they will rarely even mention Europe.
FAREED ZAKARIA
NEWSWEEK

Feb. 20, 2006 issue - Cartoons and riots made the headlines in Europe last week, but a far less fiery event, the publication of an academic study, might shed greater light on the future of the Continent. The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, headquartered in Paris, released a report, Going for Growth, that details economic prospects in the industrial world. It is 160 pages long and written in bland, cautious, scholarly prose. But the conclusion is clear—Europe is in deep trouble. These days we all talk about the rise of Asia and the challenge to America, but it might well turn out that the most consequential trend of the next decade will be the economic decline of Europe.

It's often noted that the European Union has a combined gross domestic product that is approximately the same as that of the United States. But the EU has 170 million more people. Its per capita GDP is 25 percent lower than that of the U.S. and, most important, that gap has been widening for 15 years. If present trends continue, the chief economist at the OECD argues, in 20 years the average U.S. citizen will be twice as rich as the average Frenchman or German. (Britain is an exception on most of these measures, lying somewhere between Continental Europe and the U.S.)

People have argued that Europeans simply value leisure more and, as a result, are poorer but have a better quality of life. That's fine if you're taking a 10 percent pay cut and choosing to have longer lunches and vacations. But if you're only half as well off as the U.S., that will translate into poorer health care and education, diminished access to all kinds of goods and services, and a lower quality of life. Two Swedish researchers, Frederik Bergstrom and Robert Gidehag, note in a monograph published last year that "40 percent of Swedish households would rank as low-income households in the U.S." In many European countries, the percentage would be even greater.

In March 2000, the EU's heads of state agreed to make the EU "the most competitive and dynamic knowledge-driven economy by 2010." Today this looks like a joke. The OECD report goes through the status of reforms country by country, and all the major continental economies get a B-minus. Whenever some politician makes tiny, halting efforts at reform, strikes and protests paralyze the country. In recent months, reformers like Nicolas Sarkozy in France, Jose Manuel Barroso in Brussels and Angela Merkel in Germany have been backtracking on their proposals and instead mouthing pious rhetoric about the need to "manage" globalization. EU Trade Commissioner Peter Mandelson's efforts to liberalize trade have been consistently undercut. As a result of the EU's unwillingness to reduce its massive farm subsidies, the Doha trade-expansion round is dead.

Talk to top-level scientists and educators about the future of scientific research, and they will rarely even mention Europe. There are areas in which it is world-class, but they are fewer than they once were. In the biomedical sciences, for example, Europe is not on the map, and it might well be surpassed by much poorer Asian countries. The CEO of a large pharmaceutical company told me that in 10 years, the three most important countries for his industry would be the United States, China and India.

And I haven't even gotten to the demographics. In 25 years, the number of working-age Europeans will decline by 7 percent, while those over 65 will increase by 50 percent. One solution: let older people work. But Europe's employment rate for people over 60 is low: 7 percent in France and 12 percent in Germany (compared with 27 percent in the U.S.). Modest efforts to allow people to retire later have been met with the usual avalanche of protests. And while economists and the European Commission keep proposing that Europe take in more immigrants to expand its labor force, it won't. The cartoon controversy has powerfully highlighted the difficulties Europe is having with its existing immigrants.

What does all this add up to? Less European influence in the world. Europe's position in institutions like the World Bank and the IMF relates to its share of world GDP. Its dwindling defense spending weakens its ability to be a military partner of the U.S., or to project military power abroad even for peacekeeping purposes. Its cramped, increasingly protectionist outlook will further sap its vitality.

The decline of Europe means a world with a greater diffusion of power and a lessened ability to create international norms and rules of the road. It also means that America's superpower status will linger. Think of the dollar. For years people have argued that it is due for a massive drop as countries around the world diversify their savings. But as people looked at the alternatives, they decided that the chief rivals, the euro and the yen, represented economies that were structurally weak. So they have reluctantly stuck with the dollar. It's a similar dynamic in other arenas. You can't beat something with nothing.

Mr. Solana, why not lobby for freedom of religion, including freedom to proselytize, to possess Bibles, and to build churches or synagogues there?

EU's Solana tries to calm cartoon row in Saudi Arabia
By Souhail Karam
Reuters
Mon Feb 13, 2006 2:23 PM GMT

JEDDAH, Saudi Arabia (Reuters) - The European Union and a major grouping of Islamic countries would back United Nations action to stop "defamation of religion" after cartoons of the Prophet Mohammad provoked violent protests worldwide.

The Organisation of the Islamic Conference (OIC) is lobbying for the United Nations to include language against blasphemy in the tenets of a new human rights body and EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana said he supported the idea.

"We agreed to take different measures including at the level of the United Nations to guarantee these acts will not be repeated," OIC Ekmelettin Ihsanoglu Secretary General said in Jeddah.

The head of the 57-nation body was speaking at a press conference with Solana, who arrived overnight in the birthplace of Islam at the start of a Middle East tour to try and calm the furore over caricatures.

"We have been talking today on how we can send a message to the people in both communities, the Islamic and European, that we need this not to happen again ... We strongly hope that people will be now sensible to understand that," Solana said.

"Be sure we are going to do our utmost for this not to happen again, because we need each other... I don't think honestly it will happen again," he added.

Ihsanoglu said he also wanted the EU to pass blasphemy laws.

"I have proposed many ideas, legislative measures to be taken by the European Union," he said.

But Solana made no comment on the idea of EU measures.

Solana has said he hopes to turn the tide in the cartoon furore during his Middle East visit. He was due to meet King Abdullah in the capital Riyadh later on Monday, before heading to Egypt, Jordan, the Palestinian territories and Israel.

Angry protesters have attacked the Danish and Norwegian missions in Damascus, Beirut and Tehran over the cartoons which first appeared in a Danish newspaper last September. They have been republished in many papers around the world.

Muslims consider any portrayal of the Prophet blasphemous, but many in Europe have supported the freedom of the press to publish the cartoons.

Saudi Arabia recalled its ambassador from Denmark last month after pressure from clerics and a popular campaign against Danish products in the kingdom, site of Islam's holiest shrines.

"In Denmark and France and the Netherlands and Britain, Islam senses the camel is falling and this is no time to stop knifing him."

Toon-deaf Europe is taking the wrong stand
By Mark Steyn February 13, 2006
JewishWorldReview
From Europe's biggest-selling newspaper, the Sun: ''Furious Muslims have blasted adult shop [i.e., sex shop] Ann Summers for selling a blowup male doll called Mustafa Shag."

Not literally "blasted" in the Danish Embassy sense, or at least not yet. Quite how Britain's Muslim Association found out about Mustafa Shag in order to be offended by him is not clear. It may be that there was some confusion: given that "blowup males" are one of Islam's leading exports, perhaps some believers went along expecting to find Ahmed and Walid modeling the new line of Semtex belts. Instead, they were confronted by just another filthy infidel sex gag. The Muslim Association's complaint, needless to say, is that the sex toy "insults the Prophet Muhammad — who also has the title al-Mustapha.''

In a world in which Danish cartoons insult the prophet and Disney Piglet mugs insult the prophet and Burger King chocolate ice-cream swirl designs insult the prophet, maybe it would just be easier to make a list of things that don't insult him. Nonetheless, the Muslim Association wrote to the Ann Summers sex-shop chain, "We are asking you to have our Most Revered Prophet's name 'Mustafa' and the afflicted word 'shag' removed."

If I were a Muslim, I'd be "hurt" and "humiliated" that the revered prophet's name is given not to latex blowup males but to so many real blowup males: The leader of the 9/11 plotters? Mohammed Atta. The British Muslim who self-detonated in a Tel Aviv bar? Asif Mohammed Hanif. The gunman who shot up the El Al counter at LAX? Heshamed Mohamed Hedayet. The former U.S. Army sergeant who masterminded the slaughter at the embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania? Ali Mohamed. The murderer of Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh? Mohammed Bouyeri. The notorious Sydney gang rapist? Mohammed Skaf. The Washington sniper? John Allen Muhammed. If I were a Muslim, I would be deeply offended that the prophet's name is the preferred appellation of so many killers and suicide bombers on every corner of the earth.

But apparently that's not as big a deal as Mustafa Shag. When Samuel Huntington formulated his famous "clash of civilizations" thesis, I'm sure he hoped it would play out as something nobler than shaggers vs. nutters. But in a sense that's the core British value these days. If it's inherent in Muslim culture to take umbrage at everything, it's inherent in English culture to turn everything into a lame sex gag. The "Mustafa" template is one of the most revered in the English music-hall tradition: "I've been reading the latest scholarly monograph — 'Sexual Practices of the Middle East by Mustapha Camel.'" If they wanted to appease the surging Muslim demographic, the British could conceivably withdraw from Iraq and Afghanistan but it's hard to imagine they could withdraw from vulgar sex jokes and still be recognizably British. They are, in the Muslim Association's choice of words, "afflicted" with shag fever.

In theory, this should have been the perfect moment for Albert Brooks to release his new film ''Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World.'' Instead, life is effortlessly outpacing art. Brooks had an excellent premise and, somewhere between studio equivocation and his sense of self-preservation, it all got watered down, beginning with the decision to focus the plot on a trip to India. Which is a, er, mostly Hindu country. But the Arab world refused to let Brooks film there, and, even if they had, he'd have been lucky to get out alive. Needless to say, the movie doesn't mention that. So a film whose title flaunts a bold disdain for political correctness is, in the end, merely another concession to it.

You can't blame Brooks, not in a world of surreal headlines like "Cartoon Death Toll Up to Nine" (the Sunday Times of Australia). Instead of ''Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World,'' the Muslim world's come looking for comedy in the West and doesn't like what it's found. If memory serves, it was NBC who back in the '70s used to have every sitcom joke about homosexuality vetted by a gay dentist in New Jersey. Apprised of this at a conference on censorship, the producer of "The Mary Tyler Moore Show" remarked, "You mean there really is a tooth fairy?" Alas, the Islamist Advisory Commission on Quran-Compatible Humor will be made of sterner stuff, and likely far more devastating to the sitcom biz.

And the good news is that that body's already on its way. The European Union's Justice and Security Commissioner, Franco Frattini, said on Thursday that the EU would set up a "media code" to encourage "prudence" in the way they cover, ah, certain sensitive subjects. As Signor Frattini explained it to the Daily Telegraph, "The press will give the Muslim world the message: We are aware of the consequences of exercising the right of free expression. . . . We can and we are ready to self-regulate that right."

"Prudence"? "Self-regulate our free expression"? No, I'm afraid that's just giving the Muslim world the message: You've won, I surrender, please stop kicking me.

But they never do. Because, to use the Arabic proverb with which Robert Ferrigno opens his new novel, Prayers for the Assassin, set in an Islamic Republic of America, "A falling camel attracts many knives." In Denmark and France and the Netherlands and Britain, Islam senses the camel is falling and this is no time to stop knifing him.

The issue is not "freedom of speech" or "the responsibilities of the press" or "sensitivity to certain cultures." The issue, as it has been in all these loony tune controversies going back to the Salman Rushdie fatwa, is the point at which a free society musters the will to stand up to thugs. British Muslims march through the streets waving placards reading "BEHEAD THE ENEMIES OF ISLAM." If they mean that, bring it on. As my columnar confrere John O'Sullivan argued, we might as well fight in the first ditch as the last.

But then it's patiently explained to us for the umpteenth time that they're not representative, that there are many many "moderate Muslims.''

I believe that. I've met plenty of "moderate Muslims" in Jordan and Iraq and the Gulf states. But, as a reader wrote to me a year or two back, in Europe and North America they aren't so much "moderate Muslims" as quiescent Muslims. The few who do speak out wind up living in hiding or under 24-hour armed guard, like Dutch MP Ayaab Hirsi Ali.

So when the EU and the BBC and the New York Times say that we too need to be more "sensitive" to those fellows with "Behead the enemies of Islam" banners, they should look in the mirror: They're turning into "moderate Muslims," and likely to wind up as cowed and silenced and invisible.

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld compared Chávez to the also democratically elected Adolf Hitler.

Chávez seen as U.S. threat
by PABLO BACHELET
The Miami Herald
February 11, 2006

A Pentagon planning report cited growing security concerns over Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez's populism.

WASHINGTON - A new Pentagon long-term planning document mentions Venezuela as a concern, reflecting a mounting sense that President Hugo Chávez's fiery populism poses a challenge to U.S. security.

The 2005 Quadrennial Defense Review says poor income distribution and weak democratic institutions have led to a ``resurgence of populist authoritarian political movements in some countries, such as Venezuela.'' ''These movements . . . are a source of political and economic instability,'' added the QDR, issued last week. It comes out every four years.

Venezuela's mention in the QDR was unusual because the document typically discusses broad trends and seldom mentions individual countries. Cuba, for example, was not mentioned. The 2001 QDR did not mention any Latin American country.

INCREASING VITRIOL

The QDR's reference to Venezuela was the latest in a steady drumbeat of U.S. statements criticizing the leftist Chávez as an increasingly authoritarian leader, a buyer of massive new weaponry and exporter of an aggressive brand of populism that could destabilize Latin America.
Earlier this week, the Director of National Intelligence John Negroponte said Venezuela posed the most serious threat to U.S. interests in Latin America and was seeking closer ties with North Korea and Iran -- both accused of having or seeking nuclear weapons. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld compared Chávez to the also democratically elected Adolf Hitler.

Ryan Henry, the Deputy Undersecretary of Defense for Policy, asked later by a reporter about the Venezuela reference in the QDR, said ``we do view with concern what's happened in Venezuela, we think that that's going in the wrong direction.''

In November, defense analyst William Arkin reported in his Washington Post blog that a Pentagon budget planning document, known as FY08-13 POM and dated in October, had listed Venezuela as a ''rogue nation'' along with Syria. Pentagon officials confirmed the document' existence to The Miami Herald, but denied it represented an official policy view of Caracas.

Venezuela's ambassador to Washington, Bernardo Alvarez, says his country is only promoting alternatives to the Bush agenda of development for Latin America. ''We are not a threat to the national interest of the United States,'' he told a group of journalists Thursday.

Chávez has repeatedly alleged that the Bush administration supported a 2002 coup attempt against him and is now plotting to either assassinate him or invade his oil-rich country. Late last month he alleged that Washington was considering declaring Venezuela a state sponsor of terrorism, but gave no details. Washington has just as repeatedly denied all the charges.

The Bush administration has been wary of the populist leader for some time. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has voiced her concern that governments elected democratically may then govern undemocratically.

POPULISM WILL GROW

''It is a greater threat than if you're dealing with an illegitimate authoritarian regime,'' said Steve C. Ropp, a Latin American and national security specialist at the University of Wyoming. As a visiting scholar at the U.S. Army War College, he wrote a paper circulating in the Bush administration, The Strategic Implications of the Rise of Populism in Europe and South America.
The paradox, he added, is that such populist challenges are likely to get worse as more countries become democracies and elect leaders that offer quick-fix solutions for income inequality and corruption, and blame Washington's policies for their troubles.

In the QDR, Venezuela is mentioned in a section titled ''shaping the choices of countries at strategic crossroads,'' which argues that major and emerging powers will affect the future strategic position of Washington and its friends.

''The United States will attempt to shape these choices in ways that foster cooperation and mutual security interests,'' the QDR says. ``At the same time, the United States, its allies and partners must also hedge against the possibility that a major or emerging power could choose a hostile path in the future.''

Rent-a-mob sackings of embassies in the name of Islam were an outburst of fascist energy.

BONFIRE OF THE PIETIES
by Amir Taheri
Wall Street Journal
February 8, 2006"The Muslim Fury," one newspaper headline screamed. "The rage of Islam sweeps Europe," said another. "The clash of civilizations is coming," warned one commentator. All this refers to the row provoked by the publication of cartoons of the prophet Muhammad in a Danish newspaper four months ago. Since then a number of demonstrations have been held, mostly -- though not exclusively -- in the West, and Scandinavian embassies and consulates have been besieged.

But how representative of Islam are all those demonstrators? The "rage machine" was set in motion when the Muslim Brotherhood -- a political, not a religious, organization -- called on sympathizers in the Middle East and Europe to take the field. A fatwa was issued by Yussuf al-Qaradawi, a Brotherhood sheikh with his own program on al-Jazeera. Not to be left behind, the Brotherhood's rivals, Hizb al-Tahrir al-Islami (Islamic Liberation Party) and the Movement of the Exiles (Ghuraba), joined the fray. Believing that there might be something in it for themselves, the Syrian Baathist leaders abandoned their party's 60-year-old secular pretensions and organized attacks on the Danish and Norwegian embassies in Damascus and Beirut.

The Muslim Brotherhood's position, put by one of its younger militants, Tariq Ramadan -- who is, strangely enough, also an adviser to the British home secretary -- can be summed up as follows: It is against Islamic principles to represent by imagery not only Muhammad but all the prophets of Islam; and the Muslim world is not used to laughing at religion. Both claims, however, are false.


The Prophet Muhammad riding Buraq.


There is no Quranic injunction against images, whether of Muhammad or anyone else. When it spread into the Levant, Islam came into contact with a version of Christianity that was militantly iconoclastic. As a result some Muslim theologians, at a time when Islam still had an organic theology, issued "fatwas" against any depiction of the Godhead. That position was further buttressed by the fact that Islam acknowledges the Jewish Ten Commandments -- which include a ban on depicting God -- as part of its heritage. The issue has never been decided one way or another, and the claim that a ban on images is "an absolute principle of Islam" is purely political. Islam has only one absolute principle: the Oneness of God. Trying to invent other absolutes is, from the point of view of Islamic theology, nothing but sherk, i.e., the bestowal on the Many of the attributes of the One.

The claim that the ban on depicting Muhammad and other prophets is an absolute principle of Islam is also refuted by history. Many portraits of Muhammad have been drawn by Muslim artists, often commissioned by Muslim rulers. There is no space here to provide an exhaustive list, but these are some of the most famous:

A miniature by Sultan Muhammad-Nur Bokharai, showing Muhammad riding Buraq, a horse with the face of a beautiful woman, on his way to Jerusalem for his M'eraj or nocturnal journey to Heavens (16th century); a painting showing Archangel Gabriel guiding Muhammad into Medina, the prophet's capital after he fled from Mecca (16th c.); a portrait of Muhammad, his face covered with a mask, on a pulpit in Medina (16th c.); an Isfahan miniature depicting the prophet with his favorite kitten, Hurairah (17th c.); Kamaleddin Behzad's miniature showing Muhammad contemplating a rose produced by a drop of sweat that fell from his face (19th c.); a painting, "Massacre of the Family of the Prophet," showing Muhammad watching as his grandson Hussain is put to death by the Umayyads in Karbala (19th c.); a painting showing Muhammad and seven of his first followers (18th c.); and Kamal ul-Mulk's portrait of Muhammad showing the prophet holding the Quran in one hand while with the index finger of the other hand he points to the Oneness of God (19th c.).

Some of these can be seen in museums within the Muslim world, including the Topkapi in Istanbul, and in Bokhara, Samarkand and Haroun-Walat (a suburb of Isfahan). Visitors to other museums, including some in Europe, would find miniatures and book illuminations depicting Muhammad, at times wearing his Meccan burqa (cover) or his Medinan niqab (mask). There have been few statues of Muhammad, although several Iranian and Arab contemporary sculptors have produced busts of the prophet. One statue of Muhammad can be seen at the building of the U.S. Supreme Court, where the prophet is honored as one of the great "lawgivers" of mankind.

There has been other imagery: the Janissaries -- the elite of the Ottoman army -- carried a medallion stamped with the prophet's head (sabz qaba). Their Persian Qizilbash rivals had their own icon, depicting the head of Ali, the prophet's son-in-law and the first Imam of Shiism. As for images of other prophets, they run into millions. Perhaps the most popular is Joseph, who is presented by the Quran as the most beautiful human being created by God.

Now to the second claim, that the Muslim world is not used to laughing at religion. That is true if we restrict the Muslim world to the Brotherhood and its siblings in the Salafist movement, Hamas, Islamic Jihad and al Qaeda. But these are all political organizations masquerading as religious ones. They are not the sole representatives of Islam just as the Nazi party was not the sole representative of German culture. Their attempt at portraying Islam as a sullen culture that lacks a sense of humor is part of the same discourse that claims "suicide-martyrdom" as the highest goal for all true believers.

The truth is that Islam has always had a sense of humor and has never called for chopping heads as the answer to satirists. Muhammad himself pardoned a famous Meccan poet who had lampooned him for more than a decade. Both Arabic and Persian literature, the two great literatures of Islam, are full of examples of "laughing at religion," at times to the point of irreverence. Again, offering an exhaustive list is not possible. But those familiar with Islam's literature know of Ubaid Zakani's "Mush va Gorbeh" (Mouse and Cat), a match for Rabelais when it comes to mocking religion. Sa'adi's eloquent soliloquy on behalf of Satan mocks the "dry pious ones." And Attar portrays a hypocritical sheikh who, having fallen into the Tigris, is choked by his enormous beard. Islamic satire reaches its heights in Rumi, where a shepherd conspires with God to pull a stunt on Moses; all three end up having a good laugh.

Islamic ethics is based on "limits and proportions," which means that the answer to an offensive cartoon is a cartoon, not the burning of embassies or the kidnapping of people designated as the enemy. Islam rejects guilt by association. Just as Muslims should not blame all Westerners for the poor taste of a cartoonist who wanted to be offensive, those horrified by the spectacle of rent-a-mob sackings of embassies in the name of Islam should not blame all Muslims for what is an outburst of fascist energy.

Mr. Taheri is the author of "L'Irak: Le Dessous Des Cartes" (Editions Complexe, 2002).

"'The Project' is a roadmap for achieving the installation of Islamic regimes in the West via propaganda, preaching, and, if necessary, war."

The Cartoon Jihad
The Muslim Brotherhood's project for dominating the West.
by Olivier Guitta
The Weekly Standard
02/20/2006, Volume 011, Issue 22

IT IS NOW ABUNDANTLY CLEAR that the recent murderous protests over cartoons of the prophet Muhammad published in a Danish newspaper last September were anything but spontaneous. The actions of Islamist agitators and financiers have deliberately drummed up rage among far-flung extremists otherwise ignorant of the Danish press. The usual suspects--the regimes in Saudi Arabia, Syria, and Iran--have profited from the spread of the disorders, and even the likes of tiny Kuwait has reportedly offered funds to spur demonstrations throughout France. More important, however, and perhaps less widely understood, the cartoon jihad is tailor-made to advance the Muslim Brotherhood's long-term worldwide strategy for establishing Islamic supremacy in the West.

As first reported by the Italian terrorism expert Lorenzo Vidino on the Counterterrorism Blog, one of Denmark's leading Islamists, Imam Ahmed Abu-Laban, led a delegation late last year to visit influential figures in the Muslim world. He took with him a dossier of cartoons, both those that had been published and others, much more offensive, of dubious provenance. One place he took his road show was Qatar, where he briefed Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, a prominent leader of the Muslim Brotherhood and a star of Al Jazeera.

Even after the riots began, Abu-Laban continued his meddling. On February 4, he told Islamonline.net that Danish demonstrators were going to burn Korans in the streets of Copenhagen, a falsehood that nevertheless added fuel to the fire.

Abu-Laban's extremist connections are well established. A Palestinian who is close to the Muslim Brotherhood, he was expelled from the United Arab Emirates in 1984 for his fiery sermons and denunciations of local leaders. According to Vidino, he served as translator and assistant to Talaal Fouad Qassimy, top leader of the Egyptian terrorist group Gamaa Islamiya, in the mid-1990s. During the Iraq war, he called the Danish prime minister "an American puppet." In August, he told the Washington Post that the Danes "have made immigrants pay the price. Muslims have become the scapegoat. They think we will undermine their culture and their values."

Abu-Laban's labors were not in vain, and everywhere the loudest protests have come from the Muslim Brotherhood. On February 3 in Paris, Larbi Kechat, an imam linked to the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood, said, "The most abject terrorism is the symbolic kind, which spreads unlimited violence." Meanwhile, in Qatar, al-Qaradawi was calling for an "international day of anger for God and his prophet," describing the cartoonists as "blasphemers" and Europeans as "cowards." Acknowledging the latter's role, the pan-Arab daily Asharq Al-Awsat, in London, stated on February 8, "The issue disappeared from the radar until Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, the mufti of Al Jazeera TV, seized upon it and called for Muslims worldwide to protest."

Finally, according to the Moroccan daily Le Matin, the U.S. branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, the Muslim American Society (MAS), called on Muslims everywhere to use their economic power to punish European countries where the cartoons were published. After French and German newspapers reprinted the controversial cartoons, MAS executive director Mahdi Bray commented, "Denmark has already paid an economic price for disrespecting Islam. If France and Germany want to be next, then so be it."

THAT THE MUSLIM BROTHERHOOD would seek to inflame this controversy makes perfect sense, given the organization's Islamist philosophy and past links to al Qaeda. What may not be sufficiently appreciated, however, is the extent of the Brotherhood's deliberate planning for an Islamist takeover of the West--and how neatly the cartoon jihad conforms to its strategy.

A new book published by Le Seuil in Paris in October may further Western understanding of this reality. Written by the Swiss investigative reporter Sylvain Besson and not yet available in English, it publicizes the discovery and contents of a Muslim Brotherhood strategy document entitled "The Project," hitherto little known outside the highest counterterrorism circles.

Besson's book, La conquête de l'Occident: Le projet secret des Islamistes (The Conquest of the West: The Islamists' Secret Project), recounts how, in November 2001, Swiss authorities acting on a special request from the White House entered the villa of a man named Yusuf Nada in Campione, a small Italian enclave on the eastern shore of Lake Lugano in Switzerland. Nada was the treasurer of the Al Taqwa bank, which allegedly funneled money to al Qaeda. In the course of their search of Nada's house, investigators stumbled onto "The Project," an unsigned, 14-page document dated December 1, 1982.

One of the few Western officials to have studied the document before the publication of Besson's book is Juan Zarate, named White House counterterrorism czar in May 2005 and before that assistant secretary of the treasury for terrorist financing. Zarate calls "The Project" the Muslim Brotherhood's master plan for "spreading their political ideology," which in practice involves systematic support for radical Islam. Zarate told Besson, "The Muslim Brotherhood is a group that worries us not because it deals with philosophical or ideological ideas but because it defends the use of violence against civilians."

"The Project" is a roadmap for achieving the installation of Islamic regimes in the West via propaganda, preaching, and, if necessary, war. It's the same idea expressed by Sheikh Qaradawi in 1995 when he said, "We will conquer Europe, we will conquer America, not by the sword but by our Dawa [proselytizing]."

Thus, "The Project" calls for "putting in place a watchdog system for monitoring the [Western] media to warn all Muslims of the dangers and international plots fomented against them." Another long-term effort is to "put in place [among Muslims in the West] a parallel society where the group is above the individual, godly authority above human liberty, and the holy scripture above the laws."

A European secret service agent interviewed by Besson explains that "the project is going to be a real danger in ten years: We'll see the emergence of a parallel system, the creation of 'Muslim Parliaments.' Then the slow destruction of our institutions will begin."

One point emphasized in "The Project" is that Muslims must constantly work to support Islamic Dawa and all the groups around the globe engaged in jihad. Also vital is to "keep the Ummah [the Muslim community] in a jihad frame of mind" and--no surprise here--"to breed a feeling of resentment towards the Jews and refuse any form of coexistence with them." (On February 2, At-Tajdid, a Moroccan Islamist daily close to the Brotherhood, explained to its readers that the Danish cartoons were "a Zionist provocation aimed at reviving the conflict between the West and the Muslim nation.")

By inflaming a controversy such as the current one, the Muslim Brotherhood attempts to widen the rift between the West and Islam. It specifically targets Muslim communities living in the West, aiming to radicalize their moderate elements by continually pointing out the supposed "Islamophobia" all around them. Right on cue, the Saudi daily Al Watan reports that the Council of Islamic Countries decided in December to create a worldwide Islamophobia watchdog organization that will lobby for the adoption of "anti-Islamophobia" laws, as well as promoting a common position against states or organizations it sees as attacking Islam.

Under the scheme outlined in "The Project," the Muslim Brotherhood would seek to become the indispensable interlocutor of Western governments on issues relating not only to Islam but also to international issues touching the Islamic world, notably the Israeli-Arab conflict, the war in Iraq, and even the war on terror.

The same approach turns up in Qaradawi's 1990 book Priorities of the Islamic Movement in the Coming Phase. Qaradawi sees the presence of large Muslim populations in the West as a major opportunity. For him, "the Islamic presence" in the West is necessary "to defend the interests of the Muslim Nation and the land of Islam against the hostility and disinformation of anti-Islamic movements." He actually calls on Western Muslim communities to reform their host countries.

The cartoon jihad has been a godsend for Islamists throughout the world. For the past year, Muslim lobbies in Europe have been pushing for the adoption of blasphemy laws by the United Nations, the European Union, and the nations of Europe. Predictably, Qaradawi endorsed this cause in his sermon of February 3 (translated and posted on the web by the Middle East Media Research Institute): "The governments must be pressured to demand that the U.N. adopt a clear resolution or law that categorically prohibits affronts to prophets." Like the cartoon jihad, it is a ploy straight out of the Muslim Brotherhood playbook--and, most worryingly, a move likely to have strong appeal to Muslim moderates.

Olivier Guitta is a foreign affairs consultant based in Washington, D.C.