Obsession - Radical Islam's War Against the West.

We have just become aware of a new documentary, Obsession - Radical Islam's War Against the West, that through graphic scenes and interviews, depicts the death and destruction wrought by Islamic terrorists as well as the angry imams spewing their complaints and hatred of the West.

If you visit the website http://www.obsessionthemovie.com/, there is a timeline that should be seen by all: it is a wake-up call. The documention, which is sourced, begins in 1977... here's a sample:

The Islamists have pursued their battle on a variety of fronts, from sectarian violence against Coptic Christians in Egypt , to subway bombings in Paris , to attacks in Russia . The ...timeline gives a limited idea of some of the events around the world, over the last few decades.

1977
March 9

A dozen Hanafi Muslim terrorists seize 134 hostages in three buildings only blocks from the White House. One man is killed and 12 are wounded in the takeover of the Islamic Center, the international headquarters of B'nai Brith, and the District building, Washington 's city hall. They surrender two days later after negotiations with ambassadors of Egypt , Iran , and Pakistan.

1979
February 14

The U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan dies in hail of gunfire from Afghan troops as others plot to rescue him from four kidnappers in a Kabul hotel room. Just as U.S. officials believed they had persuaded Afghan Interior Ministry officials not to storm the room, a gunshot was heard, spurring the spray of bullets.

November 4

Islamic students stormed the U.S. Embassy in Tehran , Iran , and took 66 American diplomats hostage.

November 20

The holy Kaabaa at Mecca’s Grand Mosque. In 1979, Sunni dissidents seized control of the Mosque, taking hundreds hostage. Saudi and French forces retook the shrine, after a battle in which 250 were killed and 600 wounded.

November 21

The US Embassy in Islamabad , Pakistan , is attacked by a mob and set afire, killing four.

[diplomacy] [Muslims][West][Islam][terrorism][Europe][Eurabia][obsession]

Muslim Vote Tips the Balance in Netherlands

Paul Belien writes in The Brussels Journal that the Left won yesterday’s municipal elections in the Netherlands.

... the center-left newspaper De Volkskrant writes that the immigrant vote has tipped the balance in favour of the Left. ...According to the Institute for Migration and Ethnic Studies of the University of Amsterdam 80% of the non-indigenous electorate voted for Labour. This explains why cities such as Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Breda and Arnhem succumbed to the Left. 84% of the Turks voted for the PvdA; 81% of the Antillians/Surinamese did likewise. Of the Moroccans 78% voted Labour and 12% voted Green Left.

The effects of the immigrant vote will soon be visible. The Amsterdam borough of De Baarsjes has already decided to remove a white cross which serves as a memorial to the Second World War. The cross is situated not far from the place where a mosque is being built. According to the authorities “Muslims and Jews” take offense at the cross as a war memorial. “We told them that it is a Dutch tradition to refer to the dead with a cross. However, the cross is seen as a reference to Christianity. I can understand this,” the local (Christian-Democrat) councillor, Jan Voetberg, said.

[Netherlands]
[Muslims]
[Eurabia]

Citizens need to wake up and realize that old "crimes" may have been early terrorist attacks.

We need to wake up and pay attention to past events that seemed random and unique, yet, in hindsight, they were harbingers of things to come.

Eric Fettmann of the New York Post brings to our attention the plight of Devorah Halberstam, whose 16-year old son, Ari, was murdered 12 years ago by a a Lebanese-born man who had just listened to a hate-filled anti-Jewish sermon at the Islamic Society of Bay Ridge. Mr. Fettmann explains that

Dr. Douglas Anderson - the psychiatrist of killer Rashid Baz - testified at trial that Baz had attended a prayer service at the Islamic Society mosque following the massacre of 29 Palestinians by a Jewish doctor, Baruch Goldstein, in the West Bank city of Hebron. ...After hearing that sermon, Baz took a Glock semiautomatic pistol, a Cobray machine gun and a 12-gauge Streetsweeper shotgun and put them in his car. The first two were the weapons he used in attacking the van carrying Ari Halberstam.

Devorah Halberstam has been trying to emphasize for the past 12 years that officials have steadfastly refused to accept the evidence that New York was being targeted by terrorists.

[The officials] tried to dismiss cases like her son's murder, making less of it than it was.

The end result of this "see no evil" approach was 9/11. That's why, she says, Ari Halberstam's murder can't be forgotten or ignored - not just because of the precious life that was lost, but because of the important warning that it sent.

[islam]
[mosque]
[imam]
[jews]
[terrorism]

Iran to the US: "the United States is also susceptible to harm and pain. So if that is the path that the U.S. wishes to choose, let the ball roll."

According to an AP article, Iran has threatened the United States with "harm and pain".

"The United States has the power to cause harm and pain," Iran said [in] a statement meant for delivery at the International Atomic Energy Agency's 35-nation board meeting in Vienna on Iran's refusal to freeze uranium enrichment.

"But the United States is also susceptible to harm and pain. So if that is the path that the U.S. wishes to choose, let the ball roll."

Surely we are not naive about the United States' ... intention to flex muscles," said the statement. But we also see the bone fractures underneath." The IAEA meeting is in effect the last step before the Security Council begins to consider Iran's nuclear plans, which could lead to possible sanctions. Iran's president said earlier Wednesday that his country will not back down from plans to enrich uranium domestically.

``Accommodating the military's message," [Justice]Roberts wrote, `` does not affect the Law schools' speech...."

March 8, 2006
Professors of Pretense
By George Will

WASHINGTON -- The institutional vanity and intellectual slovenliness of America's campus-based intelligentsia have made academia more peripheral to civic life than at any time since the 19th century. On Monday, its place at the periphery was underscored as the Supreme Court unanimously gave short shrift to some law professors who insisted that their First Amendment rights to free speech and association were violated by the law requiring that military recruiters be allowed to speak to the professors' students if the professors' schools receive federal money.

Many schools that disapprove of the congressionally mandated ``don't ask, don't tell" policy that prevents openly gay people from serving in the military have barred military recruiters from the same access to students that is granted to other employers. This provoked Congress to pass a law denying federal funds -- institutions of higher education receive about $35 billion annually -- to any school discriminating in that way against the military. The law exempts any institution with ``a longstanding policy of pacifism based on historical religious affiliation."

Thirty-six law schools and faculties challenged the constitutionality of the law on the ground that ``forced hosting" of military recruiters constitutes a ``crisis of conscience" over compelled speech. They said they are compelled to communicate the false message that they support the ``don't ask, don't tell" policy, and their hosting also subsidizes the military's expression of its view that openly gay persons are not suited for service.

(Do those professors object to public financing of political campaigns, which compels taxpayers to subsidize political speech they oppose? Don't ask.)

Monday's opinion was written by Chief Justice John Roberts who, during last December's oral argument, blandly said of the schools' desire to discriminate against the military, ``You are perfectly free to do that, if you don't take the money." On Monday, Roberts' shredding of the law schools' arguments included a tartness that betrayed impatience with law professors who cannot understand pertinent distinctions.

The court has held that ``judicial deference ... is at its apogee" when Congress legislates under its enumerated power to raise and support armies, so Congress could have directly mandated access for military recruiters rather than doing so ``indirectly" with incentives -- conditioning spending on recruiters' access. And the law at issue, Roberts said, ``regulates conduct, not speech. It affects what law schools must do -- afford equal access to military recruiters -- not what they may or may not say."

Suppose, Roberts wrote, an individual announced that he intended to express disapproval of the Internal Revenue Service by refusing to pay taxes. That would not mean that the tax code violates the First Amendment.

The court has held that freedom of speech prohibits government from telling people what they must say -- that schoolchildren must salute the flag or that New Hampshire motorists must display the state motto ``Live Free or Die" on their license plates. But those cases concerned government dictating the content of speech, which the law concerning recruiters' access to law school students does not.

The court has held that state law cannot compel a parade -- which is a form of expression, not mere motion -- to include a group whose message the parade's organizer does not want to express. Similarly, the court has held that compelling the Boy Scouts, an ``expressive association," to accept a homosexual scoutmaster would ``significantly affect" the Scouts' right of expression. But the law schools are in no way inhibited from -- or bashful about -- proclaiming their message of disapproval about ``don't ask, don't tell."

``Accommodating the military's message," Roberts wrote, ``does not affect the law schools' speech, because the schools are not speaking when they host interviews and recruiting receptions. Unlike a parade organizer's choice of parade contingents, a law school's decision to allow recruiters on campus is not inherently expressive."

Recruiters are obviously not components of law schools; they are outsiders on brief visits for a limited purpose. ``Nothing about recruiting," Roberts wrote, ``suggests that law schools agree with any speech by recruiters." Besides, ``We have held that high school students can appreciate the difference between speech a school sponsors and speech the school permits because legally required to do so, pursuant to an equal access policy." Then, Roberts' tartness: ``Surely students have not lost that ability by the time they get to law school."

The law schools and faculties earned that sip of the chief justice's vinegar by bringing this case to court. The professors deserved -- no, let us just say they needed -- better legal advice than they were able to give themselves.

© 2006, Washington Post Writers Group

Teachers' Unions: Defending Mediocrity in Schools

We had the opportunity of watching John Stossel's program on Abc, "Stupid in America" and we came to the conclusion that the title best describes the attitude of the Teacher's Union President than the performance of American children in schools. Mr. Stossel wrote an article,
The Inescapable Facts on Public Education , in which he enumerates many of the problems he discovered while filming his documentary. Needless to say, it demands the attention both of honest politicians and real educators. He writes,

"Teachers unions are mad at me. The New York State United Teachers demands I apologize for my "gutter level" journalism, "an irresponsible assault on public school students and teachers." This is because I hosted an ABC News TV special titled "Stupid in America," which pointed out:
-- American fourth graders do well on international tests, but by high school, Americans have fallen behind kids in most other countries.



-- The constant refrain that "public schools need more money" is nonsense. Many countries that spend significantly less on education do better than we do. School spending in America (adjusted for inflation) has more than tripled over the past 30 years, but national test scores are flat. The average per-pupil cost today is an astonishing $10,000 per student -- $200,000 per classroom! Think about how many teachers you could hire, and how much better you could do with that amount of money.

-- Most American parents give their kids' schools an A or B grade, but that's only because, without market competition, they don't know what they might have had. The educators who conduct the international tests say that most of the countries that do best are those that give school managers autonomy, and give parents and students the right to choose their schools. Competition forces private and public schools to improve.

-- There is little K-12 education competition in America because public schools are a government monopoly. Monopolies rarely innovate, and union-dominated monopolies, burdened with contracts filled with a hundred pages of suffocating rules, are worse. The head of New York City's schools told me that the union's rules "reward mediocrity."

All that angered the unions. But when they criticize my "bias and ignorance," I don't hear them refute the points listed above. They don't refute them because they can't. It's just a fact that rules that insist an energetic, hard-working teacher who makes learning fun must be paid exactly the same as a lazy, incompetent teacher are rules that promote mediocrity.

Ironically, before I did "Stupid in America," the New York teachers union wanted to give me an award. The United Federation of Teachers' Social Studies Conference wrote: "Our organization, ATSS/UFT, would be proud to present you with the Hubert H. Humphrey Humanitarian Award for the outstanding work which you have done for social causes. ... Your development and generous sponsorship of In the Classroom Media provide students with the opportunity to enhance their civics education. This is the highest award that we can give to an individual. Past honorees have included Mario Cuomo, Shirley Chisholm, Charles Schumer, Dolores Huerta, Major Owens, Charles Rangel ... "

Wow! Chuck Schumer, Charlie Rangel and me! Alas, after my education special aired, they decided not to give me the award. Apparently my work with In the Classroom Media -- which provides teachers with videos about the free market -- only helps kids as long as I stay away from the "social cause" most relevant to them: their education.

Instead, teachers' unions announced that Wednesday (3/8), they will hold demonstrations against me and ABC in New York City, Chicago, Atlanta, Detroit, and elsewhere. One police permit suggests the crowd outside my office will number 750-1,000 people. It should be interesting.

"We want to make sure that ABC hears the voices of incredibly hard-working teachers," says the union website, quoting New York City's UFT President Randi Weingarten. "The network needs to hear how unfair and biased those of you in the trenches believe their broadcast to have been."

I'm sorry that union teachers are mad at me. But when it comes to the union-dominated monopoly, the facts are inescapable. Many kids are miserable in bad schools. If they are not rich enough to move, or to pay for private school, they are trapped.
It doesn't have to be that way. We know what works: choice. That's what's brought Americans better computers, phones, movies, music, supermarkets -- most everything we have. Schoolchildren deserve the joyous benefits of market competition too.

Unions say, "education of the children is too important to be left to the vagaries of the market." The opposite is true. Education is too important to be left to the calcified union/government monopoly.

Out of curiosity we decided to look up the Teachers' Union website and were amazed to find out that they are indeed desperately seeking to call to arms fellow comrades to protest John Stossels' vile assertions, "half truths and distortions"

Dear Teachers and "Educators" in this Union : If there are half-truths (your words) in the findings by Mr. Stossel wouldn't it be much more honest and honourable to work towards correcting the errors in the system and think of the children's education in America and the future of a society rather than in defending the indefensible: the facts and numbers speak for themselves and half-truths can be just as damning as truths.

Media Won't Report Radical Islamic Events

It is frightening to realize that many of us in the West are in complete denial regarding the rise of radical Islam. Tony Blankley writes that

[m]ost of the world today not only is in denial concerning the truly appalling likely consequences of the rise of radical Islam, it often refuses to even accept unambiguous evidence of its existence.

As an example, he cites the incident at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, USA, where an Iranian Muslim student drove a jeep into a crowd of students. Fortunately, no one was seriously hurt. Yet, the perpetrator announced to the police and the media that he meant to kill students to "avenge the deaths of Muslims around the world."

Neither the university nor most of the media has been willing to characterize this event as a terrorist attempt by a radical Muslim. ...Similarly, the attack at the Los Angeles International Airport a few years ago was for nine months just called a violent attack, before it was finally characterized by police as a radical Muslim act of terrorism.

Mr. Blankley points out that the there is increasing radical Muslim street violence in Britain and continental Europe, that is not reported or characterized as such.

The greater danger is the ferment in Islam that is generating radical ideas in an unknown, but growing percentage of grass-roots Muslims around the world -- very much including in Europe and, to a currently lesser extent, in the United States.

...What are we dealing with? A few maladjusted "youth"? Or a larger and growing number of perfectly well-adjusted men and women -- who just happen to be adjusted to a different set of cultural, religious (or distorted religious) and political values. And does it matter that those values are inimical to western concepts of tolerance, democracy, equality and religious freedom?

The public has the right and vital need to have the events of our time fully and fairly described and reported. But a witch's brew of psychological denial and political correctness is suppressing the institutional voices of government, police, schools, universities and the media when it comes to radical Islam.

... Denying the existence of evil (or refusing to be judgmental about it) has never proved a reliable method for defeating it. Hell is presumably filled with souls who didn't understand that point.

Mark Steyn minces no words.

Mark Steyn presents a grim picture of Japan’s and Europe’s future in Hello Dolly, Sayonara, Japan. In his acerbic usual self, he is blunt in his assessment:

The most geriatric jurisdiction on the planet, Nippon’s rising sun has now passed into the next phase of its long sunset: net population loss. 2005 was the first year since records began with more deaths than births. The world’s other elderly societies have complicating factors: In Europe, the successor population is already in place – Islam – and the only question is how bloody the transfer of real estate will be. But Japan offers the chance to observe the demographic death spiral in its purest form. It’s a country with no immigration, no significant minorities and no desire for any: just Japs, aging and dwindling.

Unlike the Europeans, many of whom will flee their continent as Eutopia evolves into Eurabia, the Japanese are not facing ethnic strife and civil war. They could simply start breeding again. But will they? What’s easier for the governing class? Weaning a pampered population off the good life and re-teaching them the lost biological impulse or giving the Sony Corporation a license to become the Cloney Corporation?
Reporting the latest grim demographics, The Japan Times observed, almost en passant, “Japan joins Germany and Italy in the ranks of countries where a decline in population has already set in.”

Japan, Germany and Italy, eh? If the Versailles Treaty was too hard on our enemies, the World War Two settlement was kinder but lethal.

The Iranian bomb versus Western civilization.

In Soft Europe - Is the Continent willing to fight for anything, besides a welfare check? the author, Leon De Winter, reaches a damning conclusion about the course of events relating to the Iran debacle:k

Thanks to European illusions about soft power, the free world has two options left on Iran: disaster or catastrophe. America and Israel will bleed for Europe's lack of conviction.

Mr. De Winter points out that the no diplomatic initiative can stop Iran from getting the bomb.

Europe's posturing was empty from the start. The only weapon that the EU was willing to consider, as a last result, was an economic boycott that would harm Europe's commercial interests more than Iran's. The mullahs also knew that the Troika [UK, Germany and France] couldn't back up its threat of an economic boycott with the threat of military action. If the EU couldn't muster the will to fight in its own backyard in the Balkans without America leading the way, it surely wouldn't put any lives at risk beyond the frontiers of the Continent.

By contrast, Iran, ostensibly a democracy but in reality a religious tyranny, possesses a character trait that is almost nonexistent in modern Europe: Iranians, almost exclusively Shiite, are willing to suffer. This quality is deeply rooted in their religion. Ashura, one of the central Shiite rituals that marks the death of Imam Hussain at the Battle of Karbala in 680, celebrates flagellation, blood, pain. As Steven Vincent, the remarkable American journalist who tragically was murdered last August in Iraq, observed in his book "In the Red Zone": "Eight-foot long white silk flags depicting crossed sword, the blades oozing with blood . . . pictures of severed hands, severed heads, . . a fountain in front of Meshed Ali spraying geysers of blood-red liquid. . . . bloody swords flashing over the heads of milling crowds . . . men with blood-soaked bandages wrapped around their heads to stanch the bleeding from self-inflicted wounds . . . endless posters of the slaughtered innocents. This is an orgy of death imagery, I thought."


... As with Germany in the 1930s, anti-Semitism plays a key role in modern Iranian politics. If Iran succeeds, its nuclear weapons will be controlled by people who believe that they should bring the End of Days closer--a notion not dissimilar to Hitler's apocalyptic visions. An Iranian bomb threatens the very existence of Western civilization.

Old Europe versus New Europe and the Muslims.

Stephen Schwartz writes that

Visiting Old Europe, i.e. Western Europe today, it is difficult to deny that the long-dreaded "clash of civilizations" between Muslims and non-Muslims -- at least on the battlefield of mass psychology -- has begun.

...the mainstream media appear intent on conspiring with radical Islamists to portray the whole of the ummah or global Islamic community -- more than a billion people -- as empty-headed fools.

He doubts that the

necessary voices of calm and restraint will proliferate on either side in Old Europe. ...all hopes for conciliation between European Muslims and non-Muslims must come from New Europe [because] Western Europeans are spiritually exhausted...The peoples of New Europe -- Poles, Hungarians, Slovenes, Romanians, and even some other citizens of former Yugoslavia --survived Communism thanks to their spiritual commitments, often to traditional Catholicism. They are stronger in their Christian belief and are in a better position to view Islam without fear.

Read his article called New Visions for European Islam.

Self-congratulation, self-promotion, and self-protection vs. greatness and real courage.

Ben Stein eloquently shows us the difference between foolish behavior and real courage in the article below that appeared in The American Spectator:

Another Perspective
Missed Tributes
By Ben Stein
Published 3/6/2006 2:08:21 AM

Now for a few humble thoughts about the Oscars.

I did not see every second of it, but my wife did, and she joins me in noting that there was not one word of tribute, not one breath, to our fighting men and women in Iraq and Afghanistan or to their families or their widows or orphans. There were pitifully dishonest calls for peace -- as if the people we are fighting were interested in any peace for us but the peace of the grave. But not one word for the hundreds of thousands who have served and are serving, not one prayer or moment of silence for the dead and maimed.

Basically, the sad truth is that Hollywood does not think of itself as part of America, and so, to Hollywood, the war to save freedom from Islamic terrorists is happening to someone else. It does not concern them except insofar as it offers occasion to mock or criticize George Bush. They live in dreamland and cannot be gracious enough to thank the men and women who pay with their lives for the stars' ability to live in dreamland. This is shameful.

The idea that it is brave to stand up for gays in Hollywood, to stand up against Joe McCarthy in Hollywood (fifty years after his death), to say that rich white people are bad, that oil companies are evil -- this is nonsense. All of these are mainstream ideas in Hollywood, always have been, always will be. For the people who made movies denouncing Big Oil, worshiping gays, mocking the rich to think of themselves as brave -- this is pathetic, childish narcissism.

The brave guy in Hollywood will be the one who says that this is a fabulously great country where we treat gays, blacks, and everyone else as equal. The courageous writer in Hollywood will be the one who says the oil companies do their best in a very hostile world to bring us energy cheaply and efficiently and with a minimum of corruption. The producer who really has guts will be the one who says that Wall Street, despite its flaws, has done the best job of democratizing wealth ever in the history of mankind.

No doubt the men and women who came to the Oscars in gowns that cost more than an Army Sergeant makes in a year, in limousines with champagne in the back seat, think they are working class heroes to attack America -- which has made it all possible for them. They are not. They would be heroes if they said that Moslem extremists are the worst threat to human decency since Hitler and Stalin. But someone might yell at them or even attack them with a knife if they sad that, so they never will.

Hollywood is above all about self: self-congratulation, self-promotion, and above all, self-protection. This is human and basic, but let's not kid ourselves. There is no greatness there in the Kodak theater. The greatness is on patrol in Kirkuk. The greatness lies unable to sleep worrying about her man in Mosul. The greatness sleeps at Arlington National Cemetery and lies waiting for death in VA Hospitals. God help us that we have sunk so low as to confuse foolish and petty boasting with the real courage that keeps this nation and the many fools in it alive and flourishing on national TV.

Blasphemy and religious censors.

Marci A. Hamilton writes that The Organization of the Islamic Conference, an intergovernmental group of 57 states dedicated to protecting Muslim interests, and the Arab League

have approached the United Nations to obtain a resolution that would protectreligious entities from materials offensive to them by threatening sanctions on publishers. Although most newspaper editors in the US did not publish the cartoons, she points out that…[t]he cartoons… are an integral part of a story of extreme violence that targets American values. Readers cannot begin to make sense of the riots with their senseless destruction and deaths without seeing the cartoons.

This is paternalism based on an entrenched Pollyanna attitude. …Failing to hold religious entities accountable for their actions is, in a word, indefensible.

This failure of the free world to hold the Islamists accountable for their actions

…is the road to anarchy, and it is dumbfounding in the context of a war that is being instigated by a sect of Islamists. This latter statement is a fact, by the way, not a slander.

It all boils down to a choice the free world must make:

It can hold groups — including religious ones — accountable for their actions regardless of cause. Or it can protect them from discomfort caused by a lively and sometimes unruly public debate, and thereby excuse their crimes. With all due respect, the answer is obvious.

The US military and the Blogosphere.

We at Citizens in Defense of Defense already knew that the US military, through CENTCOM (linked here as well) was engaging in the world of Blogs. The military is now involved in electronic media engagement. Army Reserve Spc. Claude Flowers of the 304th Mobile Public Affairs Detachment from Kent, Wash., says that

The idea was put forth that so many people are getting their news from online sources that we would be remiss if we neglected that audience.

According to Flowers, the bloggers he and his team deal with consistently offer the same comment:

Repeatedly we hear from people, 'I never would have heard this story in the mainstream media,' Flowers said. People really are interested in what soldiers are doing. Blogs are individual statements. They're the voice of individuals. They're a way of understanding this war on a very human level."

Read the full story below.

CENTCOM Team Engages 'Bloggers'
American Forces Press Service
Capt. Steve Alvarez, USA

MACDILL AIR FORCE BASE, Fla., March 2, 2006 – The widespread use of Web logs, or "blogs," by online writers has proliferated information on topics as varied as the authors. Blogs, in essence, are online journals or forums for their authors, known as "bloggers."

Public affairs officials here said thousands of blogs are created each day, and they estimate that more than 21 million blogs are posted on the World Wide Web today.

Blogs sometimes include information -- accurate and otherwise -- about the U.S. military's global war on terror. U.S. Central Command officials here took notice and created a team to engage these writers and their electronic information forums.

"The main interest is to drive their readers to our site," Army Reserve Maj. Richard J. McNorton said. McNorton is CENTCOM's chief of engagement operations.

Anyone who wants a virtual voice can create a blog and share information with the online world. The ease with which bloggers spread information is what public affairs officials at CENTCOM saw when they created the blog team.

McNorton said the team contacts bloggers to inform the writers about any given topic that may have been posted on their site. This outreach effort enables the team to offer complete information to bloggers by inviting them to visit CENTCOM's Web site for news releases, data or imagery.

The team engages bloggers who are posting inaccurate or untrue information, as well as bloggers who are posting incomplete information. They extend a friendly invitation to all bloggers to visit the command's Web site.

Many bloggers appreciate the team's contact, blog team officials said, and most post CENTCOM's Web site as a link on their blog sites. This, McNorton said, has a "viral effect" that drives Internet news consumers to CENTCOM's Web site.

"Now (online readers) have the opportunity to read positive stories. At least the public can go there and see the whole story. The public wants to hear these good stories," he said, adding that the news stories the military generates are "very factual."

From his desk at CENTCOM headquarters here, Army Reserve Spc. Claude Flowers of the 304th Mobile Public Affairs Detachment from Kent, Wash., fights in the global war on terrorism daily in his own way. It is an effort, officials here said, that is making a big difference in the communications arena in the online world.

The team's motto is "Engage," and Flowers and others work with more than 250 bloggers to try to disseminate news about the good work being done by U.S. forces in the global war on terror. The effort, officials here said, has reached more than 17 million online readers.

"We were given the mission to do electronic media engagement," Flowers said. "The idea was put forth that so many people are getting their news from online sources that we would be remiss if we neglected that audience."

Flowers is one of three people who read blogs and try to drive Internet readers to the CENTCOM Web site, where readers can learn more about operations Iraqi Freedom and Enduring Freedom.

"We needed to do something to make people aware of the fact that we had this clearinghouse of photos and information," Flowers said. "We can get the whole story out there. We let them know we have a Web site."

Flowers said the Web site is filled with informative facts, figures, imagery, data and information that readers can digest before a third party processes and presents the information for them through other media.

"Certainly anyone is welcome to use the material on the Web site," Flowers said. "So far, the reception has been tremendous."

Team members said they have contacted a full spectrum of bloggers. In one instance, a blogger was writing about the opening of a water treatment plant in Iraq. The writer was presenting the information as a positive milestone for the U.S. military in Iraq, but the information was not complete. The team contacted the writer and offered information via the CENTCOM Web site, and more information was added to the blog to make the article more accurate.

In another blog contact, the team wrote a blogger who had written untrue information about U.S. military tactics. The blogger stated that the U.S. military routinely used children in Iraq and Afghanistan as human shields during their operations by using candy to entice and lure kids near them. The team posted a comment on the writer's blog stating that the U.S. military did not use human shield tactics and explained the full circumstances of the incident where Iraqi children died in 2004 when insurgents attacked U.S. forces in Baghdad.

Most blogs ordinarily have a feature that enables readers to contact the writer or allows readers to post comments. When the team "reaches out" to a blogger, the team members do not conceal their identity. They fully disclose that they are public affairs personnel and identify themselves accordingly. And, McNorton said, they are there to correct information, no more.

"We don't go in there and get into a debate," he said. And officials here are quick to point out that they are not policing Web sites. They are simply offering bloggers the opportunity to get raw information directly from the source.

Flowers said that many military personnel have also become bloggers during their deployments as a way to keep friends and family informed on their activities in the war. Here too, the team members don't police content, but if they do discover an operational security violation, they contact the blogger's command to point out the security violation.

"(Operational security) for a Web site is no different than OPSEC for a letter," Flowers said. "You shouldn't publish anything you don't want everyone to read," he said, adding that the enemy uses open sources of information to wage war on coalition forces.

But, he said, "The power of military blogs is that they're a letter home from servicemen and women that the entire world can read," Flowers said.

All bloggers have their niche audience, Flowers said. Some are faith-based, others are military community members, and yet others are involved in mustering humanitarian aid for people in Iraq or Afghanistan. But while the reasons for their blogs differ, most bloggers consistently offer the same comment to Flowers and his team.

"Repeatedly we hear from people, 'I never would have heard this story in the mainstream media,'" Flowers said. "People really are interested in what soldiers are doing. Blogs are individual statements. They're the voice of individuals. They're a way of understanding this war on a very human level."

(EDITOR'S NOTE: The author wrote a daily blog for hometown online newspaper Orlando Sentinel as part of his official duties during his yearlong deployment to Iraq in 2004-2005. CENTCOM officials said his blog, the first official U.S. military war blog published by a daily newspaper, helped in conceptualizing the blog team.)

In Arabic, 'Internet' means 'Freedom'.

Jonathan Rauch writes in the National Journal that somewhere in Baghdad there is a man who is editing Arabic versions of liberal classics, who I doing so at the risk of kidnap, beating, and death, because he hopes that a new Arabic-language Web site, called LampofLiberty.org (MisbahAlHurriyya.org in Arabic), which was launched in January, can change the world.

Interviewed by e-mail, he asks to be known by a pseudonym, H. Ali Kamil. A Shiite from Iraq's south, he is an accomplished scholar, but he asks that no other personal details be revealed. Two of his friends have been killed in the postwar insurgency and chaos, one shot and the other "slaughtered." Others of his acquaintance are in hiding, visiting their families in secret. He has been threatened for working with an international agency.

It was an American (Tom G. Palmer, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute in Washington) who was lecturing in Baghdad on principles of constitutional government that gave Mr. Kamil the impetus to begin his work.

Intellectual isolation is a widespread Arab phenomenon, not just an Iraqi one. …[F]ive times more books are translated annually into Greek, a language spoken by just 11 million people, than into Arabic. No more than 10,000 books were translated into Arabic over the entire past millennium…Authors and publishers must cope with the whims of 22 Arab censors.

No wonder the Arab world and Western-style modernity have collided with a shock. … in recent decades the Arab world has been singularly cursed with bad ideas. First came Marxism and its offshoots; then the fascistic nationalism of Nasserism and Baathism; now, radical Islamism.

Firmly establishing liberal ideas took centuries in the West…and [t]he liberal world's intellectual underpinnings are as difficult to grasp as its cultural reach is difficult to escape.

Yet few who are genuinely intellectually curious can read J.S. Mill or Adam Smith and come away entirely unchanged. The suffocating Arab duopoly of state-controlled media and Islamist pulpits is cracking -- only a little bit so far, but keep watching. In the Arab world, the Enlightenment is going online.

Is Europe sick?

In a review of the short book of Without Roots: The West, Relativism, Christianity, Islam, a short book, Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger (Pope Benedict XVI) and Marcello Pera (president of the Italian senate), Maximilian Pakaluk of National Review Online statest that

...There’s obviously something the matter with Europe...Europe cannot bring itself even to admit, never mind do anything about, the fact that its own culture has been rejected by, and is incompatible with, that of radical Islamism.

Because European society stands for acceptance and tolerance, and the enemy seeks to destroy it for that same reason, it is

...wise to look to the foundations of this tolerance. Ratzinger and Pera agree that Europe is crippled by relativism...and...[i]f relativism is the justification for tolerance, then Europe is in quite a predicament — for cultural relativism, posing as multiculturalism, does not permit criticism of a militant Islamic culture, which is a culture that Europe simply cannot uncritically accept...“[The West] is paralyzed because it does not believe that there are good reasons to say it is better than Islam. And it is paralyzed because it believes that, if such reasons do indeed exist, then the West would have to fight Islam.” While Pera points out the fallacies of this complex of attitudes, Ratzinger argues that Europe can rid itself of these misconceptions only through an acknowledgment of its Christian roots.

Because the state is just one element of society, its work depends on

... the belief of its citizens in the dignity of the human person, a belief that finds its roots in faith and religion. The destructive tendency of the last century has been for the state to establish itself as society’s highest authority, and to reject this prior belief. The result has...been...what Pope Benedict calls the dictatorship of relativism.

Europe would recover from this sickness by establishing a civil religion:

Over the centuries, the West has grown in its understanding that the state must respect and protect the freedom of conscience of its citizens. It now seems to believe that this freedom can be guaranteed only if Christianity is renounced, and relativism embraced. But there is no reason why this must be so — on the contrary, few institutions are as forthright in defense of the freedom of conscience as the Catholic Church. For Europe, there need be no contradiction between acknowledging a dependence on Christianity and recognizing the freedom and tolerance the state must show in questions of religion. The roots of Western belief are Christian: It is this specific faith that has informed Western society’s belief in the transcendent value of the human person. Cut off from these roots, the West will find it hard to avoid sinking deeper into a nihilistic, and deadly, relativism.

A lone-wolf jihadist?

According to ABC11TV , the Iranian-born driver of an SUV that plowed into a group of university students and other pedestrians at University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill on Friday told police it was retribution for the treatment of Muslims around the world.

... Paramedics took six people - - five students and a visiting scholar - - were treated for minor injuries and released from UNC Hospitals. ..

...Police say they arrested the suspect, Mohammed Reza Taheri-azar, 22, of Chapel Hill, shortly after the incident. He reportedly called police shortly after the incident and surrendered a few miles from campus. Police said they would charge Taheri-azar with nine counts of attempted murder.

What a twisted and sick take on using religion to damn us! Please read what extremists are saying about the US:

Please read What Extremists are Saying, which provides translations of statements made by The Mujahidin Shura Council in Iraq [Majlis Shura al-Mujahidin fi al-Iraq], which is the group that claims responsibility for destroying a US armored vehicle in Mosul and another in Al-Fallujah and clashes with police and Badr Corps forces in Baghdad.

What Extremists are Saying,
Mujahidin Shura Council Claims Operations in Mosul, Al-Fallujah, Baghdad

On 1 March, 2006, "eXtreme" posted to Hanin Net three statements issued by The Mujahidin Shura Council in Iraq [Majlis Shura al-Mujahidin fi al-Iraq] in which the group claimed responsibility for destroying a US armored vehicle in Mosul and another in Al-Fallujah and clashing with police and Badr Corps forces in Baghdad. "eXtreme" attributed the messages to the "Media Commission" of the Mujahidin Shura Council in Iraq. The "Issues of Iraq and the Nation" forum in Hanin Net is dedicated to news on jihad and Iraqi insurgent groups.

A translation of parts of the statements follows:

--"On Monday, 28 Muharram 1427, corresponding to 27 February 2006, your brothers of the military wing of The Mujahidin Shura Council detonated an explosive on a Crusader's armored vehicle on Al-Muthana Street on the left side [as published] of Mosul. The attack resulted in completely destroying the armor and the annihilation of every one of the cross worshippers on board, and the fire continued to flare for one hour with the worshippers of the cross inside the vehicle without anyone approaching the vehicle. All praise and gratitude be to God."

--"On Saturday, 26 Muharram 1427, corresponding to 25 February 2006, your brothers of the military wing of The Mujahidin Shura Council detonated an explosive on a Crusaders' convoy in the Al-Fallujah region. The operation resulted in destroying a vehicle and the killing of everyone inside was either killed or wounded. All praise and gratitude be to God."

--"On Saturday and Sunday, 26 and 27 Muharram 1427, corresponding to 25 and 26 February 2006, your brothers of the military wing of The Mujahidin Shura Council confronted the patrols of the apostate police and their supporters of the scum of the Corps of treachery [Badr] as they attacked the Sunni people in Al-Fadl region in Baghdad. The mujahidin brothers used light and mid-range automatic weapons. The confrontations resulted in killing no less than five apostates and burning two vehicles. All praise and gratitude be to God."

On 24 February, 2006, "Abd-al-Muhyi" posted a statement to the Ana al-Muslim Forum from "al-Qa'ida Organization in the Arabian Peninsula" (the name refers to Saudi Arabia) saying that organization claims credit for that day's attack on an oil installation in Buqayq, in Saudi Arabia's Eastern Region. "Abd-al-Muhyi" claims to have copied the statement from the password-protected Al-Hisbah website.

The "News" forum of the Ana al-Muslim website is a popular spot for statements issued by Iraqi insurgency groups.

Following is a translation of the statement.

"Thanks be to God, lord of the faithful; No aggression but on unjust people; God's prayers and peace be upon the one sent with the sword as a mercy for the two worlds, our Prophet Muhammad, his family, and companions.

"With God's support, our heroic mujahidin from the Unit of Shaykh Usama Bin Ladin, may God preserve him, at noon today, Friday, 26 Muharram 1427 hegira [24 February], infiltrated a facility for oil and gas processing in the city of Buqayq in the Eastern Region of the Arabian Peninsula, clearing the road for two booby-trapped cars, driven by two martyrdom-seekers. These plants help in stealing the Muslims' oil wealth. We will give further details on the operation and those who carried it out at a later stage, God willing.

"This operation falls within the framework of the operations carried out by al-Qa'ida Organization in its war against crusaders and Jews to prevent them from stealing the Muslims' wealth and to force the infidels out of the Arabian Peninsula.

"These heroes are an honorable example of the youth of Islam in the Arabian Peninsula, and their likes are many by the grace of Allah. They all compete for martyrdom and are eager to fight God's enemies, be they Jews, Crusaders, or the lackey apostate leaders. Their hearts cry out in pain over what has happened to their Muslim brothers in Palestine, Afghanistan, Iraq, and everywhere else. You will see from them what soothes your hearts, God willing.

"Oh Allah, revealer of the book, mover of the cloud, crusher of the parties, crush America and its allies, crush and quake them and grant us victory over them, O All-Powerful, O Noble.

[Signed] "Al-Qa'ida Organization in the Arabian Peninsula"

On 20 February, 2006, the weblog Mujahidin News posted links to the "full" version of the 30 January Ayman Al-Zawahiri video message broadcast on Aljazeera Television. The video contained several portions that were not aired by Aljazeera, including a response to theUS missile strike in Pakistan and a threat to Pakistani President General Pervez Musharraf. The 11-minute, 18-second video was produced by Al-Qaida’s video production and distribution arm the Al-Sahab Institute, and has subtitles in English. The Mujahidin News is a new blog that provides statements by several Iraqi insurgency groups.

"In the name of God, and praise be to God, and prayers and peace be upon the messenger of God and upon his family, companions and allies.

Muslim brothers everywhere, peace be upon you and the mercy of God and His blessings. The US aircraft, with the collusion of traitor Musharraf and his security services, the slaves of the Crusaders and Jews, launched an attack on the village of Damadola in the Bajawar District shortly after the Id al-Adha, killing eighteen Muslims -- men, women, and children -- in their fight against the jihad, which they call terrorism, and on the pretext of seeking to kill my weak person and four of my brothers. The whole world has discovered the extent of US lying and disappointment and how barbaric it is in its fight against Islam and Muslims. Commenting on this incident, I would like to send several messages. I address the first message to the butcher of Washington, Bush. I tell him: Bush, you are not only a liar and defeated, but with God's help and might, you are a failing and disappointed person. You are a bad omen to your nation. You have brought and will bring to it catastrophes and disasters.

“Oh Bush, you failed Crusader, may you know that we, unlike you, are members of a nation of monotheism who believe in the 'One God who begetteth not, nor is He begotten; And there is none like unto Him' [Koranic verse, adapted from Sura 112:2 -- 4]. He sent to us His prophet, may God's peace and blessings be upon him, with a preserved book [the Holy Koran] that has not been changed nor altered, as was the fate of the books that preceded it, an inimitable book that challenges mankind to bring one like it. In His immortal and inimitable book, God Almighty tells us that ‘every soul shall have a taste of death’ [Koranic verse, excerpted from Sura 29:57] and that one's time on earth is predetermined and prejudged. This is not the first time that you tried to kill my weak person. You attacked four families -- and among them was my family in Cardiz -- and killed 18 Muslim men, women, and children, but you failed to kill me, with God's will and might. You dropped on us all kinds of bombs including the seven ton bombs in Tora Bora, but with God's power and might, you could not kill me. By an order from you, the dogs of the Crusaders surrounded [place name indistinct] in Waziristan and claimed that they had me under siege. Instead, they fell in an ambush for the mujahidin, who killed and burned them. Before you, the reckless [US President William J.] Clinton tried to kill me and the lion of Islam, the mujahid, Shaykh Usama bin Ladin, may God protect him, with cruise missiles, but with God's will, he could not. [A quote from Sixth Century Islamic leader Ali Ibn-abi-Talib was inserted here.]

“I will meet my fate, which is preordained by God Almighty as He wishes, but if my hour does not come, neither you nor all world forces nor all human beings can bring forward my death. Bush, do you know where I am? I am in the midst of Muslim masses, enjoying their support, care, generosity, and protection, which are manifestations of God's grace extended to me, not to mention their participation in the jihad against you until we defeat you, with God's help and might.

“Oh Bush, you failed individual, know that our brothers are racing toward death to please God, while your soldiers are running away from the battles fearing for the crumbs of this life. Our brothers go toward death with smiles on their faces, while your soldiers are having breakdowns and are committing suicide out of despair.

“Oh Bush, in spite of your crimes, your stupidity, and your dark history, I offer you Islam to transport you from darkness into light. If you accept the offer, you become our brother in faith, and we will forget all the harm and crimes you had committed against us and against our brothers and our people. [Verses from the Koran were cited here]

“My second message is to the American people, who are drowning in illusions. I tell them that Bush and his gang are shedding your blood and squandering your money in futile adventures that aim at pushing you into a confrontation which you cannot endure with the Muslims to boost their wealth. They are drawing for you a future that is painted in the color of blood, the smoke of explosions, and the darkness of horror. The mujahid lion of Islam, Shaykh Usama Bin Ladin, may God protect him, has offered you a noble solution to your crisis, but your leaders, who are keen to amass more wealth, insist on sending you to your death and on having you killed in Iraq and Afghanistan, and even in your own home, God willing.

“Your leaders have responded to the initiative of Shaykh Usama, may God protect him, by saying that they do not negotiate with terrorists and that they are winning the war against terrorism. I ask them: you liars, greedy people, and warmongers, who is withdrawing from Iraq and Afghanistan, you or we? Whose soldiers are committing suicide because of despair? Yours or ours?

“Oh American mother: If the Department of Defense calls you to tell you that your son will reach you in a coffin, remember George Bush. Oh British wife: If the Department of Defense contacts you to tell you that your husband will reach you handicapped, with limbs amputated and torched, then remember Tony Blair.

“My third message is to the traitor and the corrupt Musharraf. I say to him that your masters the Americans are running away from Iraq and Afghanistan, so wait for your Judgment Day to pay for the Muslim blood that you have spilled.

“My fourth message is to the Pakistani Army. I say to it, Musharraf has turned you into hunting dogs working for the Crusaders and has turned against your own people. What dignity or pride is left for you? You are humiliated and insulted. This humiliation can be lifted only by confronting your failed leadership and putting obedience to God and His messenger above obedience to America and Israel.

“My fifth message is to the Muslim nation in Pakistan. First, I offer my Muslim brothers my condolences for their martyrs who died as a result of the brutal shelling by the Crusaders. I pray that God will accept their martyrs, heal their wounded, and take care of their orphans and families.

“Second, I advise them to walk in God's path and to stand as one army in the face of the crusade against Afghanistan and Pakistan. I urge them to join their brothers the mujahidin with their lives, their money, and their weapons. I also ask them to extend to them a place to stay, support them, and pray for them.

“Third, I bring the good tidings that the signs of America's defeat are now apparent and, God willing, she will meet a fate similar to that of the defunct Soviet Union.

“Fourth, I call on them to cling to the rope of God and to struggle in order to establish Islamic law and unite under its banner in opposition to Musharraf, the traitor and corrupt, who sold Pakistan to America and Israel and spilled the blood of Muslims of Afghanistan, Peshawar, Waziristan, and Balushistan.

“Fifth, I call on all Muslims in Pakistan and Afghanistan, and particularly their scholars, students, and mujahidin, to come together around the amir [commander] of jihad, Mulla Muhammad Umar, the persevering mujahid in the face of the criminal Crusaders campaign.

“Sixth, I warn them against believing the lies of Musharraf and his corrupt gang of traitors who were exposed by Condoleezza Rice when she refused to apologize for spilling the blood of Muslims and she instead announced that they would deal harshly with the terrorists and that they would repeat their crimes again and again, fighting Islam and jihad in the name of the war on terrorism. Musharraf and his gang are contributing in shedding your blood. They have received bribes from the US. They have sold their faith, your blood, and honor. Here the traitor Shawkat Aziz pretends to protest US attacks and then hurries the following day to Washington to coordinate with the US the new plans to kill you and violate your honor. Is not that the treacherous government that recognized Israel and conceded all principles and positions of former governments with regard to Kashmir, while India did not concede one inch from its position on Kashmir? This is the government that is carrying out a US plan to divide Pakistan and turn it into a humiliated state subservient to India.

“My sixth message is to the Islamic nation everywhere to hold firm to the commands of God, to confront the Crusaders' campaigns, whose defeat in Iraq and Afghanistan are sending signals. Let all know that the welfare of this faith is more important than the life of this or that person and that all individuals are mortal and the religion of God is and will remain protected and honored with the help and might of God. I am calling on everyone to rise up to support their brothers in Palestine, Afghanistan, and Iraq with their souls, money, prayers, experience, and knowledge. This is the time. Rise up.

“Praise be to God, Lord of all creation."

"Yale's actions show that they consider the US military more evil than the Taliban."

Yale University: Taliban Yes; US Military No
by Jim Kouri, CCP
New Media Alliance, Inc
March 3, 2006

While most American parents can only dream of sending their kids to a first-tier university such as Harvard and Yale, a former ambassador for the oppressive and brutal Afghan Taliban is enrolled at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, even though he possesses none of the qualifications to attend such an institution for higher education.

"Yale University enrolls the Taliban's former spokesman as a student, but continues to prohibit other students from organizing a Reserve Officer Training Corps chapter on campus and also seeks to deny students the right to hear from military recruiters about employment opportunities," say members of the student group Young America's Foundation.

Under the guise of alleged sex discrimination as a result of the military's so-called "don't ask, don't tell" policy towards homosexuals, Yale and other universities have blocked their students from partaking of ROTC training on campus.

"Yet Yale University is allowing a member or former member of a group that not only discriminated against gays, but actually stoned them to death," says one outraged Yale student.

On February 26, the New York Times Magazine reported that Yale admitted Sayed Rahmatullah Hashemi, the Deputy Foreign Secretary of the Taliban, into a non-degree program, with a chance to gain full degree status by 2006.

"In some ways I'm the luckiest person in the world," Hashemi told the Times. "I could have ended up in Guantanamo Bay. Instead I ended up at Yale."

Prior to his arrival as a student, Hashemi was imprisoned at Bagram Air Base. He had been a member of the Taliban government, serving both in Afghanistan and in the United States as Second Foreign Secretary and Ambassador-at-Large. Yale has not commented on why the university, which accepts only ten percent of all applicants, granted admission to this former Taliban officer. One Yale official claims it's part of creating diversity on campus, but opponents of having a Taliban officer attend a premier college say that excuse has been used by colleges and universities to invite everyone including cop-killers to their campuses.

Hashemi possesses a 4th grade formal education, never took the SATs and advocated violence against homosexuals. As the mouthpiece for the Taliban, Hashemi advocated the oppression of women, gays and non-Muslims. The Taliban are known associates and allies of Al-Qaeda. Not surprising, one intelligence report indicates Hashemi attended an Al-Qaeda terrorism training camp in Afghanistan.

Yale alumnus, and former Army Captain Flagg Youngblood said, "That my alma mater would embrace an ambassador from one of America's declared and defeated enemies and in the same breath keep ROTC and military recruiters off campus shows where Yale's allegiance falls. Yale's actions show that they consider the US military more evil than the Taliban."

While at Yale in the mid-nineties, Flagg worked with members of Congress and other Yale students and alumni to combat ROTC's second-class status on many campuses across the country. Flagg's frustration with the 70-mile drive to the University of Connecticut in order to participate in ROTC culminated in the passage of the Pombo and Solomon amendments which are currently before the US Supreme Court.

Hashemi's enrollment at Yale was aided by CBS news cameraman Mike Hoover, who developed a friendship with the Taliban government apologist during several trips to Afghanistan, dating back to 1991. According to Hoover, he contacted an attorney in his hometown of Jackson Hole, Wyoming. That attorney, Bob Schuster, who had earned his undergraduate degree at Yale, brought Hashemi to the attention of Richard Shaw, the Dean of Undergraduate Admissions.

According to the Times, Shaw said of his interview with Hashemi, “My perception was,’ It’s the enemy!’ But, the interview with him was one of the most interesting I've ever had. I walked away with a sense: Whoa! This is a person to be reckoned with and who could educate us about the world.”

Yale refuses to comment on how Hashemi's tuition -- almost $160,000 for four years -- is being paid.

John Fund, writing for the Opinion Journal does not view this admission as any great achievement, even though he quotes Richard Shaw as saying that...”another foreign student of Rahmatullah’s [Hashemi's] caliber had applied for special student status. We lost him to Harvard. I didn’t want that to happen again.”

Fund does not agree, saying “This is taking the obsession that US universities have been promoting diversity a bit too far."

However, Yale's response to criticism appeared in their campus newspaper:

"This is our burden to tend to, and there is no better way to develop a clearer understanding of our differences and similarities to the Afghani people than to invite Hashemi to learn in our system. Despite our anxieties, we must maintain the energy and tolerance to seek the origins of other ideologies. If Hashemi's voice were absent from University discourse, we would risk crippling our perception of today's world."

"I suspect they're already mentally crippled on that [Yale] campus and having an official from the Taliban isn't going to change that mental infirmity," says a former Marine combat officer.

Jim Kouri, CPP is currently fifth vice-president of the National Association of Chiefs of Police and he's a staff writer for the New Media Alliance (thenma.org). He's former chief at a New York City housing project in Washington Heights nicknamed "Crack City" by reporters covering the drug war in the 1980s. In addition, he served as director of public safety at a New Jersey university and director of security for several major organizations. He's also served on the National Drug Task Force and trained police and security officers throughout the country. Kouri writes for many police and security magazines including Chief of Police, Police Times, The Narc Officer and others. He's a news writer for TheConservativeVoice.Com. He's also a columnist for AmericanDaily.Com, MensNewsDaily.Com, MichNews.Com, and he's syndicated by AXcessNews.Com. He's appeared as on-air commentator for over 100 TV and radio news and talk shows including Oprah, McLaughlin Report, CNN Headline News, MTV, Fox News, etc. His book Assume The Position is available at Amazon.Com. Kouri's own website is located at http://jimkouri.us

Dispatch from the Eurabian Front: Sharia Law in the West?

For an interesting summary relating to the imposition of Sharia Law in the West, read the following piece by Hjörtur Gudmundsson in the Brussels Journal:

A poll published last week (Feb. 19) in Britain’s Sunday Telegraph, reveals that four out of every ten British Muslims want Sharia law introduced in areas of the country which are pre-dominantly Muslim, while 41 percent oppose it.

Sharia law is used in large parts of the Middle East, most notably in countries such as Iran and Saudi Arabia. The law is enforced by a religious police. Special courts can hand out harsh punishments; for sexual offences punishments include stoning, for theft amputation, and for apostasy death. The law also contains detailed rules for practically every aspect of life and is made up of elements from the Koran and the Hadith besides rulings by Muslim judges from the first centuries of Islam.

Sharia law also includes provisions that allow men to have several wives. Women are inferior to men and can easily be divorced. It suffices for the husband to recite „I divorce you“ three times. A woman’s testimony is worth less than that of a man, and women cannot marry non-Muslims though Muslim men are allowed to marry non-Muslim women. Sharia law also enforces a dress code on men and women, although the
dress code for men is much more relaxed than that for women. The latter are required to cover themselves entirely, including their hair and the shape of their bodies, except for their faces and hands. Such paragraphs obviously conflict with Western societies where individual freedom and the equal treatment of citizens are among the main principles. Radical Muslim imams, however, want to cordon Sharia provisions off from Western influence.

Canada

In September the head of Canada's Ontario province, Dalton McGuinty, rejected a proposal to allow Muslims to use Sharia law in family disputes such as divorce and child custody. Marion Boyd, a former attorney general, had recommended this in a report, but Mr McGuinty ruled against themove, saying there should be “one law for all Ontarians.”

Australia

In Australia Finance Minister Peter Costello, who is widely expected to become Australia’s next Prime Minister, demands that Muslim extremists with dual citizenship who scorn Australian values, be stripped of their citizenship. Such people should settle in countries where they feel more comfortable, said Mr Costello. He also denounced multiculturalism as “mushy and misguided” and wants new citizens to accept Australian laws rather than attempt to live by alternative codes from their home countries, such as Sharia law. He said it was a sign of respect for Australia in the same way that taking off one’s shoes before entering a mosque shows
deference towards Islam. “If you have strong objections to walking in your socks, don’t enter the mosque,” Mr Costello said in Sydney late Thursday. “If you have strong objections to [Australian] values, don’t come to Australia.”

Australian Muslim leaders have strongly criticized Mr Costello’s comments while complaining about alleged hostility towards Muslims from the Australian conservative government. Meanwhile Prime Minister John Howard has come out in Mr Costello’s support saying his comments were „fundamentally accurate“ and accusing Muslim leaders of being too sensitive to criticism. “He’s not trying to stir up hostilities with Islamic people,” Mr Howard told commercial radio. “For some to throw up their arms in horror and say that there’s something wrong in even talking about this issue is ridiculous,” he added.

Norway

The Norwegian human rights think tank Human Rights Service (HRS) recently warned against compromising with Islamists. “There is a gulf between secular democracy and Islamism as a totalitarian ideology which goes hand in hand with fascism, communism and nazism. Indications of the similarities between those ideologies is the Islamists’ derogative views on Jews, that they exalt themselves as superior people, and that they want to subvert secular democracy,” said Hege Storhaug from HRS to the Norwegian newspaper Klassekampen.

In Mrs Storhaug’s opinion the increasing debate on Islam has made the lines clearer, showing better which Muslims are Islamists and which ones are willing to become part of the Norwegian democratic society. She said it is terrible to see Muslim women in Norway wearing burqas in accordance with the Sharia law’s dress code. Mrs Storhaug also said she is very concerned about the attitude of Islamists towards homosexuals. The radical Mulims want homosexuality to be punished with death. “I would like to see an imam who says that Sharia law would not prevail in Norway if Muslims were in the majority,“ she said.

Belgium

Last December a poll in Antwerp among a representative group of Muslim youths between 15 and 25 years of age, revealed that 21% of the young Antwerp Muslims find it “problematic” that the majority of Antwerp’s citizens are non-Muslims.

Another story you won't find in the papers or magazines or TV reports.

Lieutenant Chandler with a sleeping baby.

Michael Yon writes a moving story about a campaign to bring mobility to the handicapped children of Iraq. The wheelchairs that have been made accessible are refurbished by inmates in the Colorado correctional system, and are designed for the dirt streets and uneven terrain of Iraq. Please read his story, Wheelchairs For Iraqi Children. Also, for those interested in reading more about Wheelchairs For Iraqi Kids you can log on to their website at:http://www.wheelchairsforiraqikids.com.

To donate online, log on to:https://www.marsew.net/RocWheels/donate.cfm.

A tender moment.

U.S. Army photo courtesy 860th Military Police Company

Here is a handsome soldier, U.S. Army 1st Lt. Jon Cope, of Phoenix, Ariz., holding a beautiful little girl he called "Gypsy" in the village of Al Risallah, located near the Abu Ghraib district of western Baghdad. Cope and his unit, the 860th Military Police Company from the Arizona Army National Guard, spent a year in Iraq working to train Iraqi police officers and to forge a bond of trust with local citizens. The Arizona Guard is heading home and these MPs reminisce about their year training Iraqi police officers and remember fallen comrades. Find out more about the good work the US soldiers are doing in the region by reading Arizona Guard MPs Reflect on Iraq Deployment.

"If you can't beat them, join them" Jacques has seen the light? or is he living proof of a "politico ad corruptio"?

America's New Ally, Jacques
Newsweek via MSNBC
How Chirac has helped Bush in India and the Middle East
by Denis MacShane

March 6, 2006 issue - As George W. Bush looks out on an unfriendly world, where can he find new allies to support America's tarnished foreign policy? Step forward Jacques Chirac, who in his final year in office acts as though he wants to be as good a friend to Washington as Tony Blair. After five years of trying to build an anti-U.S. front with Germany—splitting Europe down the middle—the French president is reaching into his diplomatic toolbox and coming up with initiatives that are increasingly in tune with America's global agenda.

So, as the U.S. president arrives in New Delhi with the aim of building up India as a 21st-century regional superpower capable of rivaling China, Bush will find that his path and message have been smoothed by Chirac. Just returned from India himself, the French president struck a blow for the U.S. administration's strategy by strongly supporting a rapid buildup of India's nuclear-energy ambitions. He signed an agreement to export French nuclear know-how, giving India the chance to obtain nonpolluting energy for its accelerating industrial and domestic needs and reduce its dependence on imported oil. The U.S. Congress has yet to lift its ban on nuke exports to India. But if Washington is as serious about assisting India's nuclear option as it seems, then France's willingness to partner in the effort looks like welcome news indeed.

But Chirac has gone further. In a little-noticed speech on French nuclear doctrine earlier this year, he announced that France's nuclear-weapons capability should be reckoned with by states tempted to sponsor terrorism on French soil. Although wrapped up in Gaullist tropes, this amounts to something akin to a pre-emptive-strike doctrine for Europe, not far removed from the U.S. policy that caused such a flap after 9/11. Belated or not, it echoes Washington's determination to tell terrorists and their state sponsors that there are lines not to be crossed.

In the Middle East, France and America are working intimately on Lebanon. They are pointing a collective finger at Syria and forcing U.N. resolutions demanding that it stop trying to control its neighbor. Chirac was a close friend of the murdered Lebanese prime minister, Rafik Hariri, who kept a good chunk of his $6 billion fortune in France. Furious Hizbullah leaders in Beirut, supported by Damascus, denounce the French president as a poodle of Washington. Even more significant is the new joint front on Iran. Chirac has led Europe's condemnations of Tehran's threats against Israel and has been instrumental in referring its nuclear challenge to the Security Council.

Little of this is reflected in the French press, which cleaves to its diet of America-bashing pur et dur. But Chirac understands that posturing over Iraq has not protected France from Islamofascism. Militant Islamist preachers are active among the nation's 5 million Muslim citizens, many of whom willingly believe that all their problems will get better if they follow Sharia and reject French secularism. Chirac also reacted swiftly when a French Jew was recently tortured to death after being kidnapped by a thuggish gang who believed that, because he was Jewish, his family by definition was rich enough to pay a massive ransom. This vestige of the very worst anti-Semitism shocked France and may serve to wake up intellectuals blinded to the excesses of radical Islamists by their own anti-Americanism.

And Chirac has his own Abu Ghraib. France's elite antiterrorist police face accusations of torturing Arab detainees suspected of terrorist links. A top general has been suspended after an enemy combatant held by his soldiers was murdered in the Ivory Coast, where young French troops, as frightened and far from home as American troops in Iraq, are all that is preventing a descent into anarchic bloodshed. Anti-U.S. politicians in Switzerland and Strasbourg may paint America as a nation of bloody torturers, but Chirac knows that in the fight against terrorism both soldiers and security agencies make mistakes. He is not joining in the U.S.-bashing on this front.

Thus, France in 2006 is a very different country in terms of foreign policy from the France that wanted to lead Europe, and much of the world, against America in 2003. Germany's new chancellor, Angela Merkel, does not share the keenness of her predecessor, Gerhard Schröder, for selling arms to China or turning a blind eye to the erosion of democracy in Russia—prompting France to follow suit. Meanwhile, other EU nations like Britain and Spain are economic success stories in part because they have embraced U.S.-style free markets. After investing so heavily in anti-Americanism, leading nowhere, Chirac finally appears to be cutting his losses. Perhaps it's time to put french fries back on the menu in Washington.

MacShane is a Labour M.P. and was Tony Blair's minister for Europe from 2001 to 2005.

"There are important reasons the Magna Carta and individual rights developed in the West—Great Britain, actually—and not the Islamic East."

Britain vs. UAE
By Diana WestFebruary 24, 2006

It's a no-brainer. President Bush has asked anyone opposed to the operational sale of a half-dozen American ports to a United Arab Emirates company "to step up and explain why all of a sudden a Middle Eastern company is held to a different standard than a Great British company."

Um, well, one overwhelming reason is that it was spawn of the Middle East, not Great Britain, that hijacked four American passenger planes on September 11, 2001. And it was United Arab Emirates, not Great Britain, that served as a financial and operational base for the September 11 hijackers (two of whom came from UAE), and a hub for Pakistan's rogue nuclear export business. As Great Britain is Islamized, the distinction narrows; for now, it's reason enough to hold a UAE company to that "different standard." But such evidence (and that there's more is obvious) is hardly the stuff of great debates. The fact that the president even begs the question is what requires deeper consideration.

Mr. Bush threatens to veto any legislation drafted against the port sale. Why? The only explanation I can think of — and it spells disaster — is that President Bush has decided that international feelings trump national concerns; that upsetting the UAE is worse than upsetting Americans: "I am trying to conduct a foreign policy now by saying to the people of the world, 'We'll treat you fairly,' " he said. Fairly? That's how you treat people after the war, not while the outcome remains undecided.

I didn't set out to write about the port story. Today's subject was meant to be Karen Hughes, Mr. Bush's diplomatic envoy extraordinary: the lady charged with making Them luv Us; the lady who is supposed to make the world — namely, the Muslim world — see that "we'll treat you fairly."

In international circles, this requires leveling the existential playing field. Where Mr. Bush labors to knock down our historic affinity with Great Britain to a par with the UAE, Mrs. Hughes, in her address to the U.S.-Islamic World Forum in Qatar, tries to belittle America's history of ever-expanding freedom into a We Are All Flawed narrative. As in: Once upon a time (that takes care of the first 300 years), there was a lady named Rosa Parks, who, as Mrs. Hughes put it, "was tired of a life of indignity and injustice in a country that was failing to live up to its founding conviction that all of us are created equal." We Are All Flawed.

Here Mrs. Hughes was, addressing some of the world's leading repressors—representatives of countries where there is little to no freedom of conscience, little to no religious freedom, and little to no sexual equality—running down the United States for "failing to live up to our founding convictions." Aiming low, she achieved a kind of immoral equivalence with the unfree.

What's notable about Mrs. Hughes' talk, which included vignettes about individuals who have tried to advance freedom in the Muslim world, is that she used their example to prove, as with Rosa Parks, that "one person of courage and conscience can make [a difference]." But they haven't. Where Rosa Parks succeeded symbolically because the nation institutionally was changing, these individuals spark and fail to ignite—as Rosa Parks would have surely failed in, say, Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, Tiananmen Square, downtown Tehran or Riyadh.

Mrs. Hughes' exemplars of courage — ranging from Mukhtar Mai, an outspoken gang rape ("honor crime") victim recently barred from appearing at the United Nations due to Pakistani government pressure, to Akbar Ganji, a dissident journalist who, after five years, still languishes near death in an Iranian jail — haven't changed nations or started mass movements. This is largely because of a doctrinal predisposition against freedom and equality that exists in Islamic societies, "democratic" or not. Even Roula al-Dashti, whom Mrs. Hughes applauds for shepherding women's suffrage through the Kuwaiti legislature, has seen her victory narrowed by legislation requiring women in politics to abide by Islamic law (sharia).

Such systemic obstacles highlight differences between the West and Islam—differences Mrs. Hughes seems unable to appreciate. It's really not enough to imagine a Rosa Parks boarding a bus for freedom in downtown Lahore or Cairo and getting anywhere but jail. There are important reasons the Magna Carta and individual rights developed in the West—Great Britain, actually—and not the Islamic East. Which goes back to why Mr. Bush's original question is so disturbing: Doesn't he know the difference?

The US has pushed its borders outwards. If they get a weapon into one of our terminals, it’s all over.

Homeland Transparency
By Kenneth R. Timmerman
FrontPageMagazine.com
March 2, 2006

The Bush administration played catch-up this week as it belatedly presented some of the facts behind its assessment that the Dubai Ports World takeover of six U.S. container terminals does not present a threat to U.S. national security.

It sent top officials to the airwaves and to Congress to explain exactly how security in American ports is handled – something the bright lights among our elected representatives should have known had they paid attention to the scores of hearings over the past four years where this has been discussed.

Senator James Inhofe (R, Ok), joked at the attention now showered on the Committee for Foreign Investment in the United States, the obscure inter-agency group that approved the deal, known by its acronym, CFIUS (pronounced Sif-ee-us). “Up until a month ago, if you’d mentioned CFIUS to any member of the U.S. Senate, they’d have thought you were talking about a communicable disease,” he told me.

There has been so much hyperventilation over Dubai Ports World that the first thing we all need to do is stand back and take a deep breath.

No, this deal is not going to allow bearded Islamist fanatics to swarm over our ports with AK-47s or to bring in a nuclear bomb. U.S. government agencies do and will continue to handle security checks of all port personnel. “We are not about to waver on something as fundamental as port security,” Chief Kevin McCabe, the top U.S. Customs and Border Protection office in charge of the Port of Newark told me.

If DPW starts sending UAE or other Arab nationals into the United States to work in the ports, they will have to go through numerous security checks – just as any foreign nationals coming to the United States to work in a port would incur. “Just because you’re an Arab, doesn’t mean you’re a terrorist,” McCabe said.

And no, allowing a British company to sell their operator’s contract of container terminals to a Dubai-government owned company does not signify the end of national sovereignty as we think we know it. That ended a long time ago, whether we like it or not.

And no again, Treasury Secretary John Snow, who worked for CSX Terminals – another port operator that was bought out last year by Dubai Ports World – is not pursuing a secret plan to sell our ports to Arab sheikhs. He was not part of the CFIUS deliberations and only learned of them belatedly, as did other cabinet secretaries.

Nor is Neal Bush, the president’s brother, secretly running interference for the deal, despite the fact that he exercised monumental bad judgment (and that’s putting it politely) by accepting a speaking engagement at the grossly anti-Semitic Zayed Center in the United Arab Emirates.

Democrats who have raised such conspiracy theories – and much more - had no problem backing the Chinese communist takeover of the entire Port of Long Beach during the Clinton years. Nor did they object when another Chinese-government owned firm bought out Magnaquench in 1999, and so gained control of our entire national supply of rare earth materials, which are critical for manufacturing exotic defense technologies, as well as liquid-crystal displays and fiber optics cables .

At least 90 terminals at America’s largest ports are today operated by foreign companies, according to an excellent survey by the Washington Times that appeared on Feb. 22. The largest operators are China Ocean shipping Company, APM Terminals (Denmark), APL (Singapore), Hanjin Shipping (South Korea), and three Japanese companies, Kawasaki, Kisen, Kaisha Ltd, Mitsui O.S.K. Lines, and Ceres Terminals.

We may not like this foreign ownership of our container terminals. Indeed, Kevin Kearns, whose U.S. Business and Industrial Council represents thousands of small and mid-sized U.S. businesses, believes Congress needs to walk back the foreign terminal agreements so we can “take back control of our ports.” USBIC has been arguing for years that we need real national security controls on the sale of U.S. businesses unless we want our entire industrial base to be “hollowed out.”

Senator Jim Inhofe has sponsored legislation – S.1797 – that moves in this direction by extending the CFIUS review period and mandating greater transparency and Congressional oversight.

But the question of foreign ownership of container terminals is a long-term industrial base problem more than an immediate national security problem.

The U.S. Coast Guard, in tandem with U.S. Customs and Border Protection and the local ports authorities, handles security at U.S. ports. As one senior Department of Homeland Security official told me yesterday, “This deal presents no practical vulnerability. Why? I’ve got ships, and I’ve got guns. If I say that a terminal operator is not getting a cargo, he is not getting that cargo.”

His formula, while simple on the surface, expressed a complex reality that has been years in the making.

I spent three months last autumn touring U.S. ports and learning about port security for a cover story I was writing for Newsmax magazine. When I began my investigation, I believed as do many Americans today that we were at grave risk of terrorists bringing a nuclear weapon into a container port.

As I interviewed the men and women who are handling our goal-line defense, I learned the extraordinary efforts undertaken over the past four years by the Bush administration to push our borders outwards, so that security checks are done thousands of miles away from our shores.

This part of the Dubai Ports World debacle is a good news story that the White House and the rest of the administration has done a terrible job telling to the American people.

Are we 100% secure in our ports today? Of course not. But as former Customs commissioner Robert Bonner told me, Washington tends to specialize in the “anything is possible” scenario, and then dreams up new and more expensive ways of defending against it.

All infrastructure in the United States is potentially vulnerable to terrorist attack. But instead of looking at vulnerabilities alone, Bonner believes we need to look at the threat. “Our goal has been to prevent our enemy from getting terrorists or terrorist-weapons into the United States,” he said. “If you do that, you won’t have any attacks.”

DHS Secretary Michael Chertoff has testified that his department has spent $10 billion since 2004 on port security. That figure includes installation of Radiation Portal Monitors to screen containers entering and leaving U.S. ports, overseas deployments of U.S. Customs and Border Protection officers, the modernization of the U.S. Coast Guard, and much more.

By the end of this fiscal year, DHS expects that 65 percent of containers will be screened for radioactive or radiological materials at our seaports, while 80 percent will be screened at our land border points of entry. These are facts that rarely get mentioned in this debate.

Bonner spent four years implementing practical measures that have transformed the way port security is handled in the United States. “I am sick and tired of hearing that nothing has been done to improve cargo security since 9/11,” he said.

Like Mark Twain’s famous quip concerning reports of his own death, Bonner said the security concerns over Dubai Ports World “are greatly exaggerated.”

Critics complain that U.S. Customs and Border Protection physically inspect just 2 percent of containers. The actual percentage of containers actually unpacked in the United States is slightly higher, but it is simply irrelevant.

In fact, as Chief McCabe told me, “100 percent of containers coming into the United States from overseas go through our screening process. It begins 24 hours before they are ever loaded at a foreign port.”

Customs has built up an extensive data base of shipping companies, shippers, freight forwarders, importers, container terminal operators, and other actors involved in the movement of goods, as well as other criteria, that allow them to make a preliminary assessment of the potential terrorist risk from any given container. Every single container is run through this Automated Tracking System. At risk containers are then singled out for further passive or intrusive inspections.

Thanks to the Container Security Initiative (CSI), which Robert Bonner helped bring to life, forty-two ports around the world that account for 80 percent of the cargo coming into the United States now allow U.S. Customs and Border Protection officers to inspect cargo before it ever leaves for the United States.

Bonner signed a CSI agreement with Dubai in December 2004, making it the only port in the Middle East to allow such intrusive U.S. inspections.

All containers – no exceptions – that are identified as a potential security threat are inspected, most of them before they ever reach the United States. Customs and Border Protection uses radiation detectors, gamma ray inspection equipment, and X-ray systems to identify suspicious cargo without opening the containers and immobilizing global trade.

Container terminals “are the end of the line,” Bonner says. “We’ve pushed our borders outwards. If they get a weapon into one of our terminals, it’s all over.”

So in one sense, who owns a container terminal operating contract makes little difference to the security of our ports. The same longshoremen will be loading and unloading the ships, and the same security procedures will be in place that exist today.

But there are real concerns with the Dubai Ports deal that cannot be brushed away – and they do not stem from “Islamophobia,” the disease some have alleged has infected the deal’s critics.

A U.S. Coast Guard analysis, released in part by Senator Susan Collins on Monday, raises three areas where the Coast Guard Intelligence Coordination Center has assessed that “intelligence gaps” in our knowledge of Dubai Ports World are so serious that they “preclude an overall threat assessment” of the container terminal contract takeover.

“The breadth of the intelligence gaps also infer potential unknown threats against a large number of potential vulnerabilities,” an unclassified portion of the classified assessment reads. It identifies three major areas of concern:

“Operations: What is the security environment at all the DPW and P&O port or terminal operations; to include the methods of conveyance and the personnel management of related ports and terminal operations?

“Personnel: What are the backgrounds of all associated personnel working for or associated with DPW and P&O?

“Foreign Influence: Is there foreign influence on DPW or P&O operations that affect security and other major decisions? If so, what countries and to what degree?”

The Coast Guard contends that these passages were “taken out of context” from “a broader Coast Guard Intelligence analysis that was performed early on as part of the due diligence process,” and “do not reflect the full, classified analysis performed by the Guard. That analysis concludes ‘that DP world’s acquisition of P&O, in and of itself [emphasis mine], does not pose a significant threat to U.S. assets in [continental United States] ports.’”

Chief Kevin McCabe and senior DHS officials dismissed concerns over who will load and unload containers. They also dismissed fears that DP World officials will learn anything about port security procedures. “I can’t think of anything we’ve ever given the terminal operators that would give them a tip-off as to our security procedures,” McCabe said. “We tell them what containers we want to see, and we get them. They have nothing to do with what containers we screen or inspect.”

But the italicized weasel words in the Coast Guard analysis are not reassuring. Nor was the testimony on Tuesday by National Intelligence Director John Negroponte.

“On the basis of our inquiry we assess that the threat to U.S. national security posed by DP World to be low,” he told the Senate Armed Services committee. “We didn’t see any red flags come up during the course of our inquiry.”

Negroponte’s office wouldn’t comment on what might constitute a “red flag,” nor on the specific assurances DP World has given the U.S. government to mitigate the concerns raised by the U.S. Coast Guard.

Just who owns Dubai Ports World? We are told it is the government of Dubai, Chertoff and other U.S. officials say. But DP World is said to have raised most of the $6.8 billion it needed for the buyout on international capital markets, and has not publicly disclosed which investors bought into the deal.

How would the administration respond should it turn out, say, that the son of a senior Iranian government official was a significant investor in Dubai Ports World? Would that raise a “red flag?”

And then there’s the whole issue of the Arab League boycott on doing business in Israel, which the Dubai Ports Authority, part of the holding company that owns DP world, openly told Jerusalem Post reporter Michael Freund it was enforcing. U.S. companies that comply with the Arab League boycott are subject to stiff penalties under U.S. law.

Clearly, more transparency is required here if the administration holds out any hope of convincing Congress – let alone a jittery public – that this deal should stand.

Kenneth R. Timmerman is the author of Countdown to Crisis: the Coming Nuclear Showdown with Iran (Crown Forum, New York), and Executive Director of the Foundation for Democracy in Iran.