Americans are dying for these people ? -

  Hamid Karzai has said if the United States and Pakistan ever went to war, Afghanistan would back Islamabad

Wow! It's as if they deserve Taliban.

Holy cows- now exploding boobs!

These things are explosive, we all know-

 

Booby traps

But now they are explosives-

Terrorists Could Use Explosives in Breast Implants to Crash Planes, Experts Warn

 

Female homicide bombers are being fitted with exploding breast implants which are almost impossible to detect, British spies have reportedly discovered.

 

The shocking new Al Qaeda tactic involves radical doctors inserting the explosives in women's breasts during plastic surgery — making them "virtually impossible to detect by the usual airport scanning machines."

 

The misunderstanders of religion of peace do not believe in gender discrimination-

MI5 has also discovered that extremists are inserting the explosives into the buttocks of some male bombers.

 

 

Now we know why these are called bombs bums-

Obama is a menace to humanity

What if this guy(I mean the terrorist mentioned below,not Obama the pal of Bill Ayers the domestic terrorist) goes back to his terrorist ways-a likely scenario- and kills some people? Would anybody hold Obama responsible?

Andy McCarthy-

The Justice Department has announced the release from Gitmo of a terrorist who conspired to bomb Los Angeles International Airport in the 2000 Millennium plot.  Hassan Zumiri, who was part of an al-Qaeda affiliated terror cell in Montreal, has been repatriated to his native Algeria — a country so rife with terrorists that it was recently placed on the list of 14 countries whose travelers warrant enhanced screening at airports.  Worse, the Justice Department won't say whether the terrorist, Hassan Zumiri, and another Gitmo detainee who was also sent to Algeria will be in custody there.  They may be free and clear.
-----------------
Zemiri later plotted against the U.S. from Afghanistan, where he was captured after 9/11 by the Northern Alliance, near Tora Bora. He'd been held at Gitmo since 2003.
At the Standard's blog, Tom Joscelyn has more on Zumiri and on the other Gitmo detainee transferred to Algeria, Adil Hadi al Jazairi Bin Hamlili. As Tom shows, relying on disclosures at Hamili's detention proceedings at Gitmo,

Hamlili is a particularly nasty takfiri, which means he is a hardcore ideologue who believes that not only Christians and Jews, but also most Muslims, are infidels. 
---------
The Gitmo disclosures implicate Hamlili in a Qaeda cell plotting IED attacks against Americans in 2002. Drawing on the reports, Tom notes:

---------

-----------------
Good to see that, between Fort Hood and the Christmas day panty bomber, the Obama administration has really gotten serious about protecting our nation against further attacks by an enemy it won't name, motivated by an ideology it won't describe.

Update -cleared up some language

Readings for 9/11 – “Betraying the dead”

Ralph Peters-

We resolved that we, the People, would never forget. Then we forgot.

We've learned nothing.

Instead of cracking down on Islamist extremism, we've excused it.

Instead of killing terrorists, we free them.

Instead of relentlessly hunting Islamist madmen, we seek to appease them.

Instead of acknowledging that radical Islam is the problem, we elected a president who blames America, whose idea of freedom is the right for women to suffer in silence behind a veil -- and who counts among his mentors and friends those who damn our country or believe that our own government staged the tragedy of September 11, 2001.

Instead of insisting that freedom will not be infringed by terrorist threats, we censor works that might offend mass murderers. Radical Muslims around the world can indulge in viral lies about us, but we dare not even publish cartoons mocking them.

Instead of protecting law-abiding Americans, we reject profiling to avoid offending terrorists. So we confiscate granny's shampoo at the airport because the half-empty container could hold 3.5 ounces of liquid.

(Shahrukh, are you listening? –ed)

        ---------snip----snip-----------.

Instead of taking every effective measure to cull information from terrorists, the current administration threatens CIA agents with prosecution for keeping us safe.

          ---------snip----snip-----------

Instead of insisting that Islam must become a religion of responsibility, our leaders in both parties continue to bleat that "Islam's a religion of peace," ignoring the curious absence of Baptist suicide bombers.

       ---------snip----snip-----------

Instead of pursuing our enemies to the ends of the earth, we help them sue us.

We've dishonored our dead and whitewashed our enemies. A distinctly unholy alliance between fanatical Islamists abroad and a politically correct "elite" in the US has reduced 9/11 to the status of a non-event, a day for politicians to preen about how little they've done.

        ---------snip----snip-----------

We've forgotten what we owe our dead and what we owe our children. We've even forgotten who attacked us.

We have betrayed the memory of our dead. In doing so, we betrayed ourselves and our country. Our troops continue to fight -- when they're allowed to do so -- but our politicians have surrendered.

This sounds so right, doesn't it – in Obama there is a president who would rather fight the Republicans than the jihadis. Somewhere down the line, one expects him to surrender –as soon he can figure out how to come out looking holier and blessed from it.

Hate to be repetitive, but do read the whole thing.

Readings for 9/11 – Obama confuses 9/11 with the Earth Day

Jennifer Rubin-

Plant a Tree

As this report explains, 9/11, on its eighth anniversary, is being recast as “a day of national service”:

“Instead of us simply remembering the horrible events and more importantly the heroes who lost their lives on 9/11, we are all going to turn into local heroes,” said Ted Tenenbaum, a Los Angeles repair shop owner who offered free handyman services Thursday and planned to do so again Friday.

Similar donations of time and labor were planned across the country after President Barack Obama and Congress declared the day would be dedicated to service this year for the first time.

Some Americans are suspicious about the new commemoration, though, fearing it could overshadow a somber day of remembrance for nearly 3,000 people killed aboard four jetliners and at the World Trade Center in New York, the Pentagon, and a field in western Pennsylvania.

Well, count me among the suspicious — and the outraged. This is quite obviously part of the grand exercise in amnesia, in recasting 9/11 as a feel-good celebration, as opposed to the act of war and Islamic-fundamentalist terror it was.

I’d be less suspicious had not the idea for de-horrifying 9/11 come from the crowd who has gone to war, not against those who would kill Americans, but against those who protected us and extracted life-saving information when we were most at risk. I’d be less suspicious had the president not set forth on a charm offensive with the “Muslim world,” in which through winks and nods and spitting back to them their own twisted version of history, the president assured them that America finally gets just how delinquent we’ve been and just how insensitive we’ve been to the Muslim world. I’d be less suspicious of the “plant a tree on 9/11″ crowd if a “truther” hadn’t made it to the White House and hadn’t received a rousing defense from many “respectable” liberals when he was finally shoved out the door — so as not to embarrass the president on 9/11, which isn’t really about 9/11 anymore.

            ---------snip—snip-----------

And now the appeal to 9/11 is muted and diffused because the Obama crowd would rather 9/11 not be about 9/11. It is shameful, but it is not surprising. This administration just isn’t into the war on terror. So go plant a tree.

Read it all.

Readings for 9/11 –False choice between the ‘good’ and the ‘bad’ war

I think on this day one can safely bypass MSM and their cliché soaked reports. Here is a small but essential reading list, starting with the excellent FOUAD AJAMI

This distinction between a war of choice (Iraq) and a war of necessity (Afghanistan) has become canonical to American liberalism. But we should dispense with that distinction, for it is both morally false and intellectually muddled. No philosophy of just and unjust wars will support it.

            ---------snip----snip-----------

Those were not Afghans who had struck American soil on 9/11. They were Arabs. Their terrorism came out of the pathologies of Arab political life. Their financiers were Arabs, and so were those crowds in Cairo and Nablus and Amman that had winked at the terror and had seen those attacks as America getting its comeuppance on that terrible day.

           ---------snip----snip-----------

Grant George W. Bush his due. He drew a line when the world of the Arabs was truly in the wind and played upon by powerful temptations. Mr. Obama and his advisers need not pay heroic tribute to the men and women who labored before them. But they have so maligned their predecessors and their motives that the appeal to 9/11 rings hollow and contrived. In those years behind us, American liberalism distanced itself from American patriotism, and the damage is there to see.

           ---------snip----snip-----------

Wars are great clarifiers. Barack Obama's trumpet is uncertain. His call to arms in Afghanistan does not stir. He fears failure in Afghanistan, and nothing more. Having disowned Iraq, kept its cause at a distance, he is forced to fight the war in Afghanistan. So he equivocates and plays for time. Forever the campaigner, he has his eye on the public mood, the steel that his predecessor showed in 2007 when all was in the balance in Iraq is not evident in Mr. Obama.

        ---------snip----snip-----------  

Eight years ago, we were visited by the furies of Arab lands.

---------snip----snip-----------

Our country answered that call, not always brilliantly, for we are fated to be strangers in that world and thus fated to improvise and make our way through unfamiliar alleyways. We met chameleons and hustlers of every shade and had to learn, in a hurry, incomprehensible atavisms and pathologies. We fared best when we trusted our sense of things. We certainly haven't been kept safe by the crowds in Paris and Berlin, or by those in Ankara and Cairo who feign desire for our friendship while they yearn for our undoing.

Read the whole thing, as they say.

Bin Laden Son Reported Killed In Pakistan

Who wants to share a latrine with a dozen half-witted goatherds?

Mark Steyn in top form -

The savvier Muslim potentates have no desire to be sitting in a smelly cave in the Hindu Kush, sharing a latrine with a dozen half-witted goatherds while plotting how to blow up the Empire State Building. Nevertheless, they share key goals with the cave dwellers – including the wish to expand the boundaries of "the Muslim world" and (as in the anti-blasphemy push at the U.N.) to place Islam, globally, beyond criticism. The nonterrorist advance of Islam is a significant challenge to Western notions of liberty and pluralism.

Read the whole bloody marvelous article.

Amaresh Mishra -a case of intellectual rottenness

(Update - audio of an interview with Amaresh Mishra by ABN.)

Till recently I did not know very much about Amaresh Mishra but that he had written a book that appeared to be of dubious merit and dodgy scholarship. I briefly touched on it in an earlier post- Amaresh Mishra opens my third eye and piques my sixth sense. I have not read the book(or his other books) -only about the book -so I reserved my more substantial judgment on Mr. Mishra's intellectual outpourings.

Now it seems that that dodginess runs deep indeed -deep into the dark recesses of conspiracy theories. He suffers from the same strain of kookiness that Union Minority Affairs Minister A R Antulay does. Here is Mr. Mishra's searchlight of an intellect throwing light on the Mumbai terrorist attacks-

Mumbai is under attack. People and forces who killed Mahatama Gandhi, who demolished the Babari Mosque have triumphed. More than 16 groups of terrorists have taken over Taj, Oberai and several hotels. Hundreds of people are dead. For the first time no one is blaming Muslim organizations. The Mumbai ATS chief Hemant Karkare and other officers of the ATS have been killed. These were the same people who were investigating the Malegaon Blasts - in which Praggya Singh, an army officer and several other noted personalities of the BJP-RSS-Bajrang Dal-VHP were arrested. Karkare was the man to arrest them. Karkare was receiving threats from several quarters. LK Advani, the BJP chief and several other prominent leaders of the so-called Hindu terrorism squad were gunning for his head. And the first casualty in the terrorist attack was Karkare! He is dead - gone - the firing by terrorists began from Nariman House - which is the only building in Mumbai inhabited by Jews. Some Hindu Gujaratis of the Nariman area spoke live on several TV channels - they openly said that the firing by terrorists began from Nariman house. And that for two years suspicious activities were going on in this house. But no one took notice.

Our worst fears have come true. It is clear that Mossad is involved in the whole affair. An entire city has been attacked by Mossad and probably units of mercenaries.
----------------------------------------------
RSS type forces and Israel are all involved in not only destabilizing but finishing India. India should immediately snap all relations with Israel. We owe this much to Karkare and the brave ATS men who had shown the courage to arrest Praggya Singh, Raj Kumar Purohit, the army officer and several others.

-----------------------------------------------

This is a moment of reckoning especially for Hindus of India. The killers of Gandhi have struck again. If we are true Sanatanis and true Hindus and true nationalists and true patriots we have to see this act as a clear attack by anti-national deshdrohi forces. Praggya Singh, Advani and the entire brand is anti-national. They ought to be shot. Any Hindu siding with them is hereafter warned of serious consequences.

This is a question of nationalism. If no one else, the Indian army will not take this lying down. Communal, anti-national forces have attacked the very foundation of the Indian constitution and the nation. We will fight a civil war if need be against the pro-Hindutva, communal forces and their Israeli backers.

He belongs to that overflowing breed of intellectual/media/pundit/academic class that sees Mossad and CIA (or America and Israel) as the fountainhead of most evil in the world.Kookiness is not an aberration in this circle but a feature.This class will loathe Bush for 'torture' and then go smooch a murderous leftist and/or anti-American dictator(Castro, Chavez, Saddam, Ahmedinajad).

It appears that Amaresh Misra is a gentleman too-

The Citizens for Justice and Peace had hosted a meeting at the St. Xaviers College Hall to condemn the horrific terror attacks and to outline an action plan for youth and citizens. All of us were gathered there, scattered in the quadrangle and the hall. Swami Agnivesh and Mufti Fuzail Ul Rahman Hilal Usmani, our special guests, were also present having been escorted by my husband and colleague, Javed Anand. Suddenly Mr Amaresh Mishra arrived on the scene and first started using abusive language against M Rajdeep Sardesai, editor in chief of CNN-IBN at which point his mother Smt Nandini Sardesai also intervened. He then started haranguing Swami Agnivesh our guest, "warning" him on how he should speak related to the recent terror attacks in Mumbai! He soon turned to abusing both Mr Javed Anand and journalist Sajjid Rashid in offensive and unprintable language. In fact our daughter hurried to me at this point thinking that her father, Javed Anand was about to be assaulted. One of the over dozen witnesses, Shahbaz Khan intervened at this point and escorted Mr Amaresh Mishra out of the college.

Sir, there were many witnesses present that day, December 4, 2008 when Mr. Mishra in fact did his best to disrupt our meeting and abuse Mr.Rajdeep Sardesai, Mr. Javed Anand and others. I believe he did this because he is threatened by the scope and reach of our activities and
especially the role of MSD in drawing the Muslim community into Civic, Secular Democratic issues breaking the manipulative stereotypes perpetrated by the Hindu right wing -- the RSS, the Bajrang Dal and the VHP among many other organizations -- against the entire community. Specifically, I believe that Mr Amaresh Mishra was out to discredit the courage and initiative shown by both Mr Javed Anand and myself in suggesting to Indian Muslims all over the country to demonstrate in one voice against the enemies of India and the forces of terror following the recent attacks on Mumbai on November 26, 2008.
---------------------------------

There are more falsehoods, Sir, in Mr Mishra's claims. He mentions three respected members of the Muslim clergy who he says also condemned M Javed Anand for "ostensibly attacking Mr Mishra (sic)". One of the three respected persons Maulana Mustaqeen Azmi specifically spoke to me, categorically refuting Mr Mishra's claim that he had issued any such statement of condemnation. Finally, Mr Mishra ends his diatribe stating that he spoke to some persons that include Mr Javed Akhtar, Ms Shabana Azmi and me, Ms Teesta Setalvad about the incident. This is an absolute lie. He did not speak to either of us and has not for some time.

The above was written by Teesta Setalvad as a response to an article in the Rashtriya Sahara Urdu, Mumbai edition, in which Mr.Mishra's scholarship on the Mumbai attacks scorches the newsprint. In fact Mr. Mishra is on a scorching spree-

A group of Muslim leaders on Wednesday decided to float a political party in Maharashtra, just in time to contest the Lok Sabha and
assembly elections.

Senior cleric Maulana Badruddin Ajmal will lead the front, which will be launched in 40 days. The name proposed for the new party is Maharashtra United Democratic Front.
-----------------------------------------------
The cleric-led front has appointed journalist-historian Amresh Mishra, a known Sangh Parivar-baiter, as its spokesperson. Explaining the reasons why a Muslim-based party was the hour's need, Misra said that the Congress "lost the confidence'' of the community years ago.

Here is Mr. Mishra's new boss fighting for freedom of speech, dissent and freedom-

Maulana Ajmal demands extradition of Taslima Nasrin

President of Assam United Democratic Front, Maulana Badruddin Ajmal demanded extradition of Taslima Nasrin in a letter written to the Prime Minster Mr. Manmohan Singh.

Blaming both left and right wing of Indian political scene of using Nasrin as political gimmick, he requested the prime minster to extradite her from India. ---------------------------------------------------------------
“It will undoubtedly be a wise decision on behalf of seventeen crore Muslims in India,” said Maulana in the letter. He added that “no mainstream Muslim or Muslim organization favours her stay in our country” blaming her for her insults on Prophet of Islam and Islamic doctrines.

(Note -it seems that either the reporter who wrote the above or Maulana Badruddin Ajmal or both are confused about the meaning of 'extradition'. I suppose they mean 'expulsion'.)

But hey who are we plebeians to quibble?
Aren't we told that Amaresh Mishra is a renowned historian? I am glad we were enlightened or we might have come to the conclusion that he is a conspiracy mongering lout.

(emphasis mine)

Victory in Iraq -Arundhati Roy loses

Freedom wins. Arundhati Roy, you and the medieval horde of Islamofascist terrorists that you have supported have lost.

Bastards!

The cowards who call themselves Indian Mujahideen go about killing innocents again-

20 killed, 90 injured in 5 blasts across Delhi

source

They targeted one of my favorite spots in Delhi -Connaught Place and especially the Central Park which is a refuge to many a couple in love. I saw one such couple badly injured on TV.

Bastards!

A case for cultural imperialism

Some ancient(2001) wisdom from the fair-haired one that still rings the bell -

"It is time for concerted cultural imperialism. They(Muslim fanatics) are wrong about women. We are right."

"I never knew she cared"

Robert Spencer finds errors in Benazir Bhutto's book Reconciliation: Islam, Democracy, and the West.

Finally, some courage from the artist community

Looking forward to getting my hands on this-"Matamoros - the first comic book focusing on the U.S. military’s fight against radical Islamists."

As long as the moral dunces who rule us don't decide to ban it in order to again appease the eternal lovers of peace and harmony.

Coining a new expression -"to Ahmenijad homos."

"Steve", a commentator at this debate is perhaps the first to coin this verb and expression-

.....trying to Ahmenijad homos out of existence.

Could this make it big like 'fisking'? It sure deserves to, especially after Ahmadinejad declared that there are no homosexuals in Iran-

In Iran we don’t have homosexuals like in your country. We don’t have that like in your country. … In Iran we do not have this phenomenon. I don’t know who’s told you that we have this.

Where have they all gone? Could this be the answer-

When Ahmadinejad told Columbia today that Iran doesn’t have homosexuals, he meant that the theocracy has done its level best to cleanse Iran of gays and lesbians. He also means that they’ll get rid of any more they find.

Or this-

Two gay Iranian teenagers -- one 18, the other believed
to be 16 or 17, were executed the "crime" of homosexuality

Or this-

The Iranian government is executing gay and bisexual men under the cover of rape and kidnapping charges, according to a major new investigation by Simon Forbes of the UK-based gay and lesbian human rights group OutRage!

Mr Forbes’s nine-month investigation, published today by OutRage!, is based on information gathered from sources inside Iran. His research reveals:

- Lynchings by Iran’s security forces, and ‘honour killings’ by families in the south western province of Khuzestan

-Secret hangings in prison

- The method of hanging is designed to cause slow, agonising strangulation

- Internet entrapment of gay Iranians using foreign-based online gay dating agencies

- A pattern of framing gay people on charges of kidnap, rape and paedophilia, as the following five sample cases suggest:
- The Gorgan case where two men were publicly hanged for Lavaat (sodomy) in November 2005

- Details of the Kermanshah case where three men were hanged in prison in November 2005 for sodomy that was alleged to have taken the form of the kidnap and rape of a younger male

- The Arak case of two men sentenced to death for sodomy in August 2005, which also involved the alleged kidnap and rape of a younger male, the son of an officer

- Two cases of public execution for sodomy in Mashhad in December 2004 and July 2005 that involved suspiciously similar charges

- Claims of rape are sometimes made to save the family’s honour or to save the passive partner from execution, and are part of an Iranian government propaganda offensive to scapegoat and demonise gay people

- Comparisons with Saudi Arabia, where it is also suggested that bogus rape charges are levelled against gay men

- Hypocrisy of the mullah’s attitudes towards the abuse of young girls, the rape of both males and females in custody, and widespread sodomy in religious colleges

Now, a few good questions-
1) If Uncle Ahmenida--dina--ja--dad--whatever can lie about this, then can we trust him about his nuclear intentions?
2) He is a religious fundamentalist, a theocrat, head of a regime that imprisons and hang gays, oppresses women -so why do the leftists support him?

Let a non-leftist gay answer-

I must say it is still shocking to me that the American Gay Left views President Bush of more of an enemy to gays than Islamic fundamentalists who want to destroy Western Civilization with gays as the first in their crosshairs. Maybe American gay activists are so upset that Christianity is the foundation of America that they are willing to take their chances with Islamic rule? How tolerant, no? What it really makes me think is this: Choosing Islam over America in the War on Terror is the ultimate in being a gay who is self-loathing.

hat tip-Stop the ACLU

Note -that debate I referred is an extremely interesting one. The first salvo is here.

(emphasis mine)

Update -a very disturbing picture and account here.

Khatami touches women, sky falls down upon him.

Is this a fake?



or is he?


Is it possible, just possible that Iran's former president Mohammad Khatami might have touched -what horror!- a woman?!!!! And that too more than one! And that too one after the another -a serial woman-toucher!


From the Iran Press Service-
A Handshake that Might Become A Religious Revolution Or A Political Suicide

A videotape, taken with a digital camera by Mr. Marco Orioles, a university sociology lecturer, shows the former Iranian president exchanging handshakes with Gianola and Cristina Nonnino, well-known producers of grappa, the famous Italian brandy, in the region around Udine.

from the Guardian-

Iran's reformist former president, Mohammad Khatami, has suffered a blow to his political standing by being pictured apparently shaking hands with women in breach of Islamic convention.

Mr Khatami, a mid-ranking cleric, dismissed the photo as a fake and insisted he had not shaken hands with any of the women who had approached him after he made a speech.
--------------------------

Flyers condemning Mr Khatami have been circulated in the shrine city of Mashhad, while posters of him were defaced in Kashan before he spoke there.

Although Islam generally forbids handshakes between men and women who are not close family relatives, some Shia clerics say it is permitted in certain cases to avoid embarrassment. In Iran, handshakes between men and women have become more common in recent years despite the country's Islamic laws.

Faked? Judge for yourself-


(video of the controversial handshakes)

If it is not a fake then it must be a CIA operation. The imperialist Americans must have sent those devilish male-eating female agents to....to.. shake hands!

From the same Iran Press Service article-

The Iranian hardline daily “Kayhan”, run by Mr. Hoseyn Shari’atmadari, a high-ranking intelligence officer specializing in the interrogation of political and intellectual dissidents who is a senior advisor to Ayatollah Ali Khameneh’i, the leader of the Islamic Republic, suggested Khatami had allowed himself to fall prey of a US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) trap.

The article continues-

“If Mr. Khatami is assured that the video had been manipulated, he must with no hesitation take the case to the courts. This would be a good occasion case for him to make known those who are plotting to tarnish the good name and image of the former president and aims at stopping the reform process in Iran and put an end to the plot. If not, he must present his apology to all those who accuses him of having trespassed a well-known rule of Islam”, Ahmad Ra’fat, an Iranian journalist based in Rome, told Iran Press Service.

“Many of those who had voted for Mr. Khatami and supported the reforms never could imagine that simple and ordinary acts like shaking some hands in the streets of a town like Udine would undermine the future of reforms in Iran. Worse, this writer and many others could never imagine that a president who talks about the rule of law, civil society and dialogue among civilizations would fall so down to the point of not having the courage of accepting responsibility of his own acts and deeds and unashamedly revert to lying”, Mr. Ra’fat, who also covers for AKI, wrote in the Persian internet magazine “Rahbord”

Andy McCarthy sums it up-

It's the small things that tell us the most.

Iran's great "moderate" "reformer," Mohammed Khatami, shook hands with a woman in Italy while chatting genially with a group of women who were not covered from head to toe, or even wearing head-scarves.

This is a scandal in Iran.

So what is the Moderate Reformer's reaction? Did he tell his critics to stop being ridiculous?

Nope. He claims, preposterously, that the pictures and film footage of the incident are fakes ... while concurrently announcing he is withdrawing his from a 2009 presidential bid.

I'd like to be encouraged that there is a swelling democracy movement in Iran ready to revolt against the regime any time now. But what does it say about the state of things in mullah-land that the hero of what passes for liberal reform there feels he has to deny shaking hands with a woman?

And our comrades have no problem if these people get nuclear weapons.

(emphasis mine)

Will Obama vaporize Osama?

There has been much commotion in the Indian media about the US presidential candidate Barrack Obama's remarks about Pakistan. The impression we get is almost as if finally there could be an American president who would take on Pakistan, even invade it if necessary. Believe me there are many people who think invading Pakistan would be a good thing -the khaki-nicker*(BJP-RSS) crowd was hankering for it after the terrorist attack on the Indian parliament in December,2001. While I don't agree with their agenda, this sentiment (to go after Pakistan) is at least understandable, given that that land to our west has been the source of much pain and trouble. India's impression of Pakistan is that it is a land of a people who can't live with each other or with their neighbors peacefully. Na hum chain se jeeyenge na sale tumhe jeene deenge.*

Indians also have the impression that America is not doing enough about terrorism emanating from Pakistan, something many Indian security experts have been wailing about. So will Obama be the one to get to the mothership of the jihadis-the hiding and breeding grounds in the north-west of Pakistan- and blow it up? Will Obama vaporize Osama?

Let's hear some skeptics weighing in-


Paul Mirengoff:

Barack Obama on "the war we need to win."As is almost always the case with Democrats, it's a war other than the one we're fighting and (to the extent that Obama is really talking about war) it would involve taking military action in a country --Pakistan -- that has been our ally in the fight against terrorism, at least to some degree.

It's also a war that no one can reasonably believe Obama would initiate. Note that, while he has sponsored a resolution to give up in Iraq thus handing al Qaeda victory there, he has sponsored no resolution to send troops into Pakistan . In fact, even his speech is ambiguous on whether he would send a substantial force there. The deployment of significant troop levels is what folks ordinarily mean by "war," but perhaps Obama means war in the Bill Clinton sense -- lob a few missiles at a suspected hide-out.

In sum, this is your standard Democratic attempt to sound tough while effectively advocating defeat in Iraq and ignoring the mounting threat posed by Iran. Obama is smart enough to know that his speech is nonsense. But the fact that he would indulge in this sort of posturing should disqualify him from the presidency.

JOHN adds: Obama's statements remind me very much of John Kerry in the 2004 campaign, when he kept saying that Iraq was the "wrong war, in the wrong place at the wrong time." This implied, of course, that there was some other war--the right one--that Kerry would support fighting. But no one believed that; Kerry's willingness to fight any war anywhere, like Obama's, was entirely theoretical. At the time, I thought that if Kerry had been serious, and if he meant to say that we should be fighting Iran rather than Iraq, he may have had a point. But of course that wouldn't have been the "right" war either.

John Podhoretz:

Obama is full of it. This country is never — never — going to stage a major military action against Pakistan. Pakistan is a nation of 170 million people that has nuclear weapons and whose admittedly problematic and troublesome regime has, to some extent, cooperated with the United States in the war against Al Qaeda both in ways we know and ways we have no idea about. The concern that this strategically vital county might become an Islamic fundamentalist state is, should be, and will be paramount in every and all discussions about how to conduct the fight against Al Qaeda.

What's more, every serious person knows the United States won't invade Pakistan, even with Special Forces — since the reason we cancelled the proposed action against Al Qaeda in 2005 is that it was going to take many hundreds of American troops to do it. This isn't 15 people dropping like ninjas in the darkness. It's an invasion, with helicopters and supply lines and routes of ingress and escape. It would have had unforseen and unforeseeable consequences, but it would have been reasonable to assume the Pakistanis would have turned violently against the United States and hurtled toward Islamic fundamentalist control.

If the evil Bushitler Cheney Rumsfeld Monster wouldn't do it, nobody will do it. And you can bet there isn't a single person in line to run a Democratic State Department or Democratic Defense Department who would give the idea three seconds of thought. Obama is using Pakistan to talk tough, in the full knowledge that he will never actually pull the trigger.

ABC News:

In many ways, the speech is counterintuitive; Obama, one of the more liberal candidates in the race, is proposing a geopolitical posture that is more aggressive than that of President Bush. It comes at a time in Obama 's campaign when the freshman senator is drawing more financial support from more voters than any other candidate, though he has yet to vault from his second-place position in the polls. One of the reasons for that is that the Democratic front-runner, New York Sen. Hillary Clinton, is seen as more experienced and in some ways stronger, a perspective Obama wishes to change.

Victor Hanson David:

Obama has criticized Sen. Clinton for her approval of that Iraqi authorization, but the sort of action he is envisioning involves crossing into a nuclear Islamic country, one bullet away from an Islamic republic, and surely should be a question for Congressional approval.

Others have pointed out that his criticism of Musharref is contrasted by his willingness to parley with far worse in North Korea, Cuba, Venezuela, and Iran. And what were his reactions to our prior Predator strike on al Qaeda notables inside Pakistan-approval, criticism, or mere silence?

Ed Morissey:

One of the reasons that Democrats insist that the war in Iraq was a mistake was because it unnecessarily radicalized Iraqis into jihadists. What does Obama think an invasion of Pakistan will do to its population? And if the former was a mistake, consider that Pakistan has a population of over 160 million people. How does Obama think they will react to a military invasion by a putative ally?

For those who think that Obama's remarks do not imply an invasion but some other action, Ed points out-

To those insisting that this is nothing different than what Bush and Rumsfeld proposed -- using covert teams to infiltrate across the border -- let me quote directly from the news report that theObama campaign chose to highlight on its website:

The Illinois senator warned Pakistani President Gen. Pervez Musharraf that he must do more to shut down terrorist operations in his country and evict foreign fighters under anObama presidency, or Pakistan will risk a U.S. troop invasion and losing hundreds of millions of dollars in U.S. military aid.

That's definitely not the same as what Rumsfeld considered and rejected in 2005. It's a declaration of war, pure and simple.
(emphasis in the original)

*The colorful Indian language translator-

the khaki-nicker crowd- refers contemptuously to the followers of the RSS, who can been seen doing P.T. in the morning, training to save the country in their khaki nickers(shorts) and spindly legs. Pictures here and here .

Na hum chain se jeeyenge na sale tumhe jeene deenge -neither shall we live in peace nor bugger will we let you.

(emphasis mine unless stated otherwise)


Update- Colby Cash also weighs in: Obama goes to war

Update 2- nicker, of course, means knickers(half-pants). I haven't used the latter spelling because while in India knicker(almost always pronounced without a 's') means shorts, in many other places it most often means ladies panties or such! Can't have our nationalistic manhood marching in those!

Barkha Dutt confesses her prejudices in an almost sensible article.

Note -an important update to this post below the fold.

Barkha Dutt gets it -almost. It is too much to expect that she get it all.

We have hoped against hope that it is not true. We have tried to convince ourselves that this must be a grand conspiracy of racial profiling — you know, White Man hunts for Brown victim. Happily unmindful of how bigoted and quick to conclusion we are when terror hits the home turf, we have wondered whether the British police are shooting darts at soft targets.

I have always argued that the Indian media is quick to impute racism to people and authorities of Western nations without any evidence. Barkha is now admitting this prejudice in print. Good for her.

But what about looking inwards? Can we confront the fact that Political Islam may be growing roots in our own backyard? Are we brave enough to consider the possibility that the assimilation of the Indian Muslim has not been as successful as we like to believe?

And

This week, an emotional Prime Minister met some of us at his house and argued that terrorism had no nationality or religion. He warned against the labelling and stereotyping of communities and said that after he had heard the mother of the arrested doctors break down on national television, he lay awake all night.

The Prime Minister’s empathy and liberalism is laudable. But the fact is that if three Indian citizens are actually found guilty in this terror plot, we cannot afford to disown their nationality. For too long now, our instinctive need to protect India’s minorities from the onslaught of the Right has prevented us from looking at this issue honestly. We hesitate to use the word Islam and Terrorism in the same sentence. But we can no longer allow political correctness to obfuscate the debate. It may help to know that even the conservative clerics of the Jama Masjid in Delhi recently took the initiative to debate why radicalism had permeated their religion.

Another Barkha confession -that her instincts (and those of others like her in the media) have" ----- prevented us from looking at this issue honestly." This is a day for admitting prejudices. Good.

But this is Barkha Dutt. There are some fundamental errors that she just has to make-

But can we afford to ignore these questions this time around as well? What was an Indian engineer from Bangalore doing partnering an Iraq-born doctor on a suicide mission? Why did he care enough to call a meeting of Muslims on World Chechnya Day in a city where most people don’t know what the dispute between Russia and the Chechens is about? If the doctors being investigated by British authorities are really part of a global terror module, have we underestimated the response of India’s Muslims to the war in Iraq and Afghanistan?

No, Barkha, this is not about Iraq and Afghanistan(see the previous post below - The Hindustan Times is clueless about jihad). Septemper 11, 2001 happened long before Iraq and Afghanistan. The plot to blow up 12 airliners happened before Iraq and Afghanistan.Bali was bombed before Iraq and Afghanistan.Indians were not involved in these and many more others, but the ideology behind them is the same. Iraq and Afghanistan vex many muslims but are only a recent addition to a long list of 'grievances' , 'grievances' that in fact go back centuries and are never ending.

It is only your own blinkers , that you have admitted to, that have prevented you from grasping this.



update - Samizdata points out this from an article in The Telegraph-

Mr Husain, whose book, The Islamist, exposed the workings of Hizb ut-Tahir, is contemptuous of the idea that the latest plots were inspired by the West's intervention in Iraq and Afghanistan. "This is just an excuse. They reject Western culture full stop, not just 'slags in night clubs'. They would have supported the bombing of Muslims attending the cinema in Cairo in the 1950s. They do not want Muslims to enjoy social freedoms. If it was not Iraq they would cite Chechnya. Or Palestine. These are angry men. Accommodation is not an option. It has to be containment or annihilation.

Also from the same article-

All the suspects under arrest are adherents of the Wahhabi doctrine which dates back to 18th-century Arabia. Bilal Abdulla, 27, is a devotee of the extreme form of the Wahhabi teaching, which advocates "hate and hostility to infidels and polytheists".

Some Middle East commentators have argued that the would-be bombers were motivated by the civilian killings in Afghanistan and Iraq. But one suspect is said to regard the Taliban, who routinely butchered their own people for the crime of adultery, homosexuality or for a woman showing too much flesh, as the leaders of the definitive moral society. And Mr Husain, whose book, The Islamist, exposed the workings of Hizb ut-Tahir, is contemptuous of the idea that the latest plots were inspired by the West's intervention in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The Samizdata post is titled - No, it really is not about Iraq or Palestine or Afghanistan...
Quite aptly, methinks.

(all emphasis mine)

The Hindustan Times is clueless about jihad.

Today at the Hindustan Times -a clueless editorial, mushy profile of a mass-murderer's admirer and a sensible article from Sagarika Ghose(of all people!)

Let's take them up one by one-


The editorial, Cause and deadly effect, peddles the same tired old myth that were it not for Bush, Blair and those Israelis, the jihadis would be sipping green tea and singing Kumbaya.

The archetypal image of the terrorist — and that includes extremists under the rubric of Naxalites, Kashmiri militants, etc — is the person who takes recourse to grievances of socio-economic deprivation and being marginalised. The case with the global ummah — or at least its perception — is that the worldwide Muslim community is under attack and needs to react, in the tactics of al-Qaeda and other versions of Muslim brotherhood — violently. This, of course, for better or worse, cuts across States and comfort levels. Thus, we have individuals who, discomfited by the fact that the real issues, such as Palestine or the question of occupied Iraq, have not been quickly corrected, find other minor issues, like Salman Rushdie’s knighthood, to project as bugbears.

Radicalisation is not only about being down and out, but also about lashing out. It is about feeling frustrated. And that is why we should not feel so surprised about some Indians — who happen to be part of the community of people unhappy with the US-British-led War on Terror — being turned into disgruntled members of society. One hopes that the Indian way of life eclipses some complaints. But if some anomalies slip through, the question to be asked of those waging a war is: how to remove the cause. We’ll see what happens next.

In other words, blame USA, UK and that little satan, Israel for the doctors going mad.And blame Salman Rushdie too!(though he gets the lesser blame, since it's Blair who knighted him).

Oliver Kamm has an interesting post on this-

Only on the letters page of The Guardian would you find an argument, expounded without irony, of the form "as Osama Bin Laden made clear..." (last letter on the page). Its author is maintaining that there are substantive causes in Western foreign policy for Muslim anger. The letter, like so much along the same lines that appears in that newspaper's comment pages, is inflammatory nonsense, but I was particularly taken with the notion that we ought to tailor our foreign policy to the demands of a man who asserts (in his 1998 statement "The Nuclear Bomb of Islam") that "it is the duty of Muslims to prepare as much force as possible to terrorise the enemies of God". It is, of course, strictly true that the jihadists hate us for, among many other reasons, our foreign policy. The only proper response is satisfaction that we have that effect on them.

---------------------------------

On the same subject, I called after the 7/7 bombings for the sacking of the editor of The New Statesman, John Kampfner, on account of his emblazoning the front page with the preposterous and indecent message "Blair's bombs". The author of that cover story, John Pilger, this week pronounces the failed bombing of a nightclub in London and of Glasgow airport "Brown's bombs". I modestly direct you to irrefutable evidence I have previously cited that by the same criteria (which is to say, entirely bogus ones) all of these terrorist acts are in fact "Pilger's bombs".

Diane West wants to call it as it is-

This is nothing new. From September 11 onward, the yeoman effort of elites has been to wrench "Islam" away from all acts of jihad. But now, particularly after the London and Glasgow attacks, their efforts have achieved a deeper level of denial, and, worse, broader consensus.

The new British prime minister, Gordon Brown, has directed ministers to omit "Muslim" when discussing (Muslim) terrorism. And forget the generic "war on terror"; even that pathetic phrase is off limits. (This has absolutely nothing to do with Mr. Brown's unctuously stated goal to make Britain "the gateway for Islamic finance.") The new Home Secretary, Jacqui Smith (love that "i" ending) refers to British Muslims as "communities" — maybe a prelude to not mentioning them at all. Both have done the "perversion of a great faith" dance to enlightened applause, taking cues from the unpublished "EU Lexicon," which reportedly nixes such "offensive" phrases as "Islamic terrorism."

British literary lions couldn't agree more. Philosopher John Gray and historian Eric Hobsbawm recently said on British television that even the word "Islamist" was "unfair" because "it implied a strong link to Islam." Never mind the link is doctrinally accurate. Better to accommodate mortal threat without identifying its Islamic roots. Instead of defending their nations — for starters, stopping Islamic immigration and, with it, the progression of Islamic law into Western societies — our elites have decided to pretend Islam isn't there at all.

In the media, the effort is misleading to the point of farce. Joel Mowbray, writing at the Powerline blog, noted that the New York Times has identified Britain's Muslim terrorists as "South Asian people" — which, considering Britain's largest South Asian population is Hindu, is beyond absurd. "Diverse group allegedly in British plot," the Associated Press reported, missing that unifying Islamic thread. "All 8 detainees have ties to health service," wrote the Toronto Star, "but genesis of terror scheme still eludes investigators."

The roots of jihad, as Charles Allen points out in his book, God's Terrorists: The Wahhabi Cult And the Hidden Roots of Modern Jihad, go back to the time of Sheikh Ibn Taymiyya (b.1263), when the Caliphs were still around.

One of reviews of the book says-

British author Allen (Soldier Sahibs) argues persuasively that violent Islamic extremism isn't as new as we might think,------------ Carefully drawing distinctions between mainstream Islam and the fanaticism that spawned al-Qaeda (which he calls "as much a threat to Islam as to the West"), Allen goes back to the 18th-century founding of Wahhabism, a strain of Islam fostered in the Arabian desert that now serves as the Saudi state religion. Fixated on removing any hint of deviation from their interpretation of Muhammad's teachings, violent Wahhabists have traditionally killed more Muslims than non-Muslims. A Central Asia expert, Allen focuses on the form of Wahhabism that developed against the backdrop of waning British imperialism in that area, gradually leading up to Osama bin Laden's arrival.

(from Publishers Weekly, at Amazon.com)

There must have been Bush and Blair in the 13th century. The root cause of jihad, you know.

The absolute cluelessness of the concerned HT editor is made even more stark by this confessional article by Hassan Butt-

When I was still a member of what is probably best termed the British Jihadi Network, a series of semi-autonomous British Muslim terrorist groups linked by a single ideology, I remember how we used to laugh in celebration whenever people on TV proclaimed that the sole cause for Islamic acts of terror like 9/11, the Madrid bombings and 7/7 was Western foreign policy.

By blaming the government for our actions, those who pushed the 'Blair's bombs' line did our propaganda work for us. More important, they also helped to draw away any critical examination from the real engine of our violence: Islamic theology.

(all emphasis mine)
Note -since this post has become longer than expected, I shall be taking up the other two opinion pieces published in HT in a later post.


update -maybe the root cause of jihad is global warming!

They are doctors, and they are here to kill you.

Some news and reactions to the jihadi doctor's plot in UK-


It was not about Iraq or Palestine or Afghanistan...
The attempted London bombings were, we will be told, a consequence of US/UK actions Iraq or Palestine or Afghanistan or something or other about George Dubya Bush or Halliburton or Global Capitalism or Social Injustice. You may be certain that all these bullshit excuses will be trotted out by the disingenuous left who crave the accusations or the deeply provincial Americocentric faction of libertarianism who pretend bad people will leave you alone if only you stay in your mountain bunker in the Ozarks, do not ever send soldiers abroad and refuse to trade or interact with the rest of the world.
(Samizdata)


‘Those who cure you will kill you’
An al-Qaeda leader in Iraq boasted before last week’s failed bombings in London and Glasgow that his group was planning to attack British targets and that “those who cure you will kill you”, The Times has learnt.


"that total indifference to pain and suffering"
I think it has something to do with what Mel Brooks once referred to as "that total indifference to pain and suffering" that is necessary to be a good doctor. You have to be "clinical" about all that, because you can't afford to have your judgment swayed by real sympathy with the sufferer.
(Micheal Leeden)
(via -James Taranto)


Why the Bombs Failed
The London bomb plot allegedly planned by a cell of doctors failed early last Friday morning because a medical syringe used as part of the firing mechanism caused a malfunction, ABC News has learned.


Who--- is going to be in a hurry to keep that appointment with Dr. Hamid?
(Thomas Lifson)
(via -James Taranto)



Common link found.
The BBC has been wondering for years what the common factor was in a wave of attemped or thwarted British terror attacks. At last they've found a link.
Terror suspects all linked to NHS
(ukcommentators)



The Islamists are not going anywhere
We have heard so often, and will continue to hear, that the Iraq war and Blair's alliance with George W Bush were a recruiting sergeant for al Qaeda and its affiliates in this country. That may be true, but only in the sense that everything is a recruiting sergeant for this cause: the removal of the Taliban, the existence of the state of Israel, the Balfour Declaration of 1917, the end of the Muslim caliphate in 1924, the way women dress in the West. One of the conversations bugged in Operation Crevice that led to life sentences for five terrorists in April included a chilling discussion about bombing a London nightclub. "Now no one can even turn around and say 'Oh they were innocent'," said Jawad Akbar, "those slags dancing around."
(Matthew D'Ancona)
(via -Oliver Kamm)