Pommygranate has posted a fantastic report on Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s presentation at the Sydney Recital Hall last Sunday night. Inspirational stuff.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali is in town and we have seen the predictable reaction from various representatives of the Muslim community. Yawn.

Whats more disconcerting is the criticism Hirsi Ali has received, particularly in Europe, from various intellectuals and philosophers, cultural relativists in-denial and morally obtuse apostles of the coming great Multiculturalist Utopia, some of whom had the gall to call her an “Enlightenment fundamentalist”. This attack on Hirsi Ali, and the accompanying championing of “moderate Islamist” Tariq Ramadan was the subject of a momentous debate I posted about earlier, which serves as the background for this post.

The cover story of the current issue of The New Statesman is called “Who’s afraid of Tariq Ramadan?” (and doesn’t Ramadan ever look the part of a modern philosopher?), by Paul Berman, and contains the most erudite, complete and clear defense of Ayaan Hirsi Ali against the lot above, yet. The whole essay is very long, broken up over 12 pages, so I recommend heading straight for the “print” version, which allows you to view it in one page. Feel free to search the page for “Ayaan” to get the relevant part (not that the whole thing is not worth reading, it is).

Here’s Berman’s explanation of why these people attack Hirsi Ali:

If you open either of her books and read a few lines at random, you will discover one reality that you would hardly guess from reading those attacks. Buruma–and he is not the only one to do this–presents Hirsi Ali as a diehard enemy of Islam, dedicated to hurling insults, which, to be sure, she does do, and with gusto. But this is not her major theme. In her books, and in the little film that she made with van Gogh, she dedicates herself mostly to something else, and that is to describe and to decry the miseries of women in the portion of the Muslim world that she knows best–in East Africa and Saudi Arabia, together with the immigrant zones of Europe. Her account of her own genital mutilation as a little girl, and of the botched genital mutilation of her sister, and the sister’s tragic life and suicide; her portrait of girlhood and marriage in Somalia, Kenya, and Ethiopia, not to mention her own forced marriage, which she fled; the portrait of her grandmother, the Somali nomad, and the patriarchal customs of the past, which do seem to have lingered on; her sense of horror, as a girl, at seeing the women of Saudi Arabia for the first time, these women who have no faces because of their veils and whose black garments hang so shapelessly upon their bodies that, in order to know which way the women are facing, you have to look to see which way their shoes are pointing; her account of the shelters for abused Muslim women in Holland; her account of the terrors of refugee existence, and the double terrors of refugee existence for women–all these passages express something that can never be detected in a certain kind of high-minded cerebral journalism today. It is a visceral anger at oppression. A moral indignation, and not just a wistful pragmatism.

But mostly these passages in Hirsi Ali’s books raise the issue of women’s rights, and not from an outsider’s point of view, regardless of how many times she has been denounced for making herself an outsider to Muslim life. Hers is a story marked by knives–the knife at her own genital mutilation, and at her sister’s; the knife at the murder of her friend and colleague, pinning to his chest the sheet of paper threatening her own life. This is not a Swiss professor! Here is the actual insider; the real thing. I suppose that all this unironic indignation can only be annoying in the extreme to a certain kind of refined sensibility. Something about those knives takes away the quality of abstraction that allows a social issue to be shrugged off. It is always good to be subtle and nuanced, but Hirsi Ali’s writings have the effect of making a large number of nuanced subtleties look ridiculous.

About Hirsi Ali we do not have to wonder: where does she stand on the question of stoning women to death? Or on the obligation for husbands to beat their wives? Read one page by her and you will know the answer; and if you read two pages, you might begin to suspect that, on the television screens of France, the man who defended the oppressed of the oppressed in the poorest neighborhoods of Europe was Nicolas Sarkozy. But that has got to be the problem from a perspective like Buruma’s. This talk of women’s rights–doesn’t it point ultimately in directions that ought to be regarded as (here is the mystery of our present moment) conservative? Better the seventh century than Nicolas Sarkozy.

If there is an intellectual establishment, and I suppose there is, the attacks on Hirsi Ali radiate from its center. And this, the campaign against Hirsi Ali–this, like the anti-Semitic mob assault during the Paris peace march of 2003, or like the spectacle of millions of Britons marching under the leadership of an Islamist organization, or like the calm discussions in The New York Times of why it would be wrong to condemn with any vigor the stoning of women to death–this does represent something new. Here is the new development among journalists and intellectuals, the development that Ramadan’s career has served to illuminate. Something like a campaign against Hirsi Ali could never have taken place a few years ago. A sustained attack on an authentic liberal dissident crying out against injustices in remote parts of the world and even in the back streets of Western Europe, a sustained attack that appears nearly to have erased the very mention of women’s oppression and the struggle for women’s rights from discussion–no, this could not have happened yesterday, except on the extreme right. This is a new event. This is a reactionary turn in the intellectual world.

And delving deeper, past “the reactionary turn”, we happen upon a nose-dive:

[the French writer Pascal Bruckner] wrote a criticism of the leftist doctrine that in [the seventies] was still known as “Third Worldism”–meaning the hope and the expectation that, around the world, the impoverished countries, the former colonies and semi-colonies, would generate, as an aspect of their struggle against Western imperialism, a worldwide revolutionary alternative, a soulful new kind of socialism, a new and revolutionary culture. This was the doctrine that venerated revolutionary leaders such as Mao, Ho Chi Minh, and Fidel Castro not because they were communists but because they were the leaders of the Third World revolution.

But Bruckner, in writing about the “Third Worldist” idea, noticed that among the good-hearted leftists of the Western countries, sympathy for oppressed people in the former colonies had turned into a kind of dehumanizing contempt for the oppressed people in the former colonies, without anyone having noticed. He called his book The Tears of the White Man, and in its pages he served up a spectacular exposé of left-wing European clichés about the poor and the oppressed in faraway places–an enormous catalogue of Noble Savage imagery and other fantastical pictures of the superior qualities of downtrodden people in poor countries, compared with their former oppressors in Europe. The book was a demonstration of how, through a combination of guilty consciences and patronizing ignorance, the European intellectuals had ended up re-creating the worst sorts of racist and colonialist imaginings of what people in other places and with other skin tones must be like: their wisdom, virtue, selflessness, brilliance, and, above all, their profound quality of being different.

Bruckner has returned to this topic from time to time over the years, and just last year he came out with a sequel called La Tyrannie de la Pénitence, or The Tyranny of Penitence, updated to our own age, in which the “Third World” of yore has been renamed the “south,” and the imperialists have been renamed the forces of globalization. And the sequel has led Bruckner to take a new glance at how, in our own time, the progressive intellectuals of the Western countries, out of a continuing self-contempt and feeling of guilt for the Western crimes of the past, have likewise updated their fantasies about the wronged and inscrutable people of other regions without really changing them. Ian Buruma, because of his sundry books, was the ideal person for The New York Times Magazine to assign a profile on Tariq Ramadan; and Pascal Bruckner, because of his own books, has turned out to be the ideal person to write about Ian Buruma. Bruckner noted the peculiarities of Buruma’s campaign against Hirsi Ali. He took note of Timothy Garton Ash’s contribution to this campaign in The New York Review of Books. And Bruckner offered a philosophical analysis.

Buruma and Garton Ash, Bruckner concluded, had fallen for the intellectual miasmas of the postmodern sensibility, and the miasmas had led, via the errors of relativism and an indiscriminate multiculturalism, to the simplest of philosophical mistakes. This was the inability to draw even the most elementary of distinctions. In the postmodern idea, the Enlightenment has come to be looked upon as merely one more set of cultural prejudices, no better and very likely rather worse than other sets of cultural prejudices–a zealotry that is unable to control its own excesses. From this point of view, someone like Hirsi Ali, who grew up in an atmosphere of Islamist radicalism and the Muslim Brotherhood in Africa and has taken up a new outlook committed to rationalism and individual freedom, has merely gone from one fundamentalism to another–not much different, seen in this light, from van Gogh’s murderer.

Just wanted to extend a belated welcome back to the sun burnt country to our wayward adventurer Davie! I am sure he is rather keen to realise his plans for the future, that he had so long to think about over at Club Gitmo, so I thought I’d help. I wouldn’t want to be misrepresentin’, so here are his requests for assistance in his most urgently desired endeavours, word for word, just as he wrote them to his old flattie Louise:

LISTEN, have you got any friends I can f– when I get home? They have to be good-looking and I prefer big tits as well. Well, send their photos with the letters so I can check them out.

(Responding to Fletcher’s suggestion that she might write a book about him): Don’t try to write about my adventures because you don’t know that information.

Nobody does, so it would be inaccurate. I would prefer if you wrote nothing about anybody, for that matter. Shit, I would have no chance to make any money when I got home, otherwise.

So best of luck with the chicks and the… moolah. Just go easy on the Jew-hating now, fattie (bastards)!

UPDATE: Looks like I am not alone in wanting to help. Down Under we call this mateship.

Andrew Bolt has a selection of insanity from a thread on the Australian Muslim Village Forum, discussing Hamas’ warmongering Mickey Mouse. Some of the gems included are “Why cant Muslim kids be taught to arm themselves up with AK-47’s and strive for world domination under Islamic leadership” and “Islam is based on TOTAL SUBMISSION, not on logic and destructive reasoning”, along with numerous permutations thereof.

Muslim Village is a fascinating microcosm of “soft” Islamo-Fascism that I recommend visiting to get a bit of insight into Islamic views on all and sundry. Beware though, about 90% of non-Muslims that join end up getting banned (no difference of opinion, uncomfortable questions or criticism will be tolerated), as well as probably about 20% of Muslims. The latter because they are keen to present a nice image and do their bit of Dawah, so anyone (and particularly the more rabid Salafists) showing too much psychosis, “secularization” or keenness for violence is removed. Plenty of Caliphate-striving, Hizb ut-Tahrir and Victims-R-Us types though. Just keep in mind you’re getting a highly filtered and severely moderated cross section of views. You don’t need to join to view. I wonder what form “banning” would take if these people actually had political power over a population.

LGF has this astounding video of some “expert” maggot in a suit, on Iranian television saying that “Hitler was falsely accused of committing genocide against the Jews.” Unbelievable. He continues: “This is a lie, and we know full well that Hitler never did such a thing. It was a premeditated lie by the Zionist regime.”

Over in the comments here a visitor with a Dutch IP, calling him/herself “Domination” had the following to say:

Fuck serbs. fuck HellASS
Long live 2 USAlbania

USAlbania? Sounds like a fun place. Don’t leave the Macedonians out now.

Tomorrow, 19th of May, is Pontian Greek Genocide Remembrance Day.

I highly recommend you read this exceptional post by Stavros at My Greek Odyssey. Here are some extracts, but do read the whole thing:

May 19 has been recognized by the Greek parliament as the day of remembrance of the Pontian Greek Genocide by the Turks. There are various estimates of the toll. Records kept mainly by priests show a minimum 350,000 Pontian Greeks exterminated through systematic slaughter by Turkish troops and Kurdish irregulars. Other estimates, including those of foreign missionaries, spoke of 500,000 deaths, most through deportation and forced marches into the Anatolian desert interior. Thriving Greek cities like Bafra, Samsous, Kerasous, and Trapezous, at the heart of Pontian Hellenism on the coast of the Black Sea, endured recurring massacres and deportations that eventually destroyed their Greek population. The genocide started with the order in 1914 for all Pontian men between the ages of 18 and 50 to report for military duty. Those who “refused” or “failed” to appear, the order provided, were to be summarily shot. The immediate result of this decree was the murder of thousands of the more prominent Pontians, whose names appeared on lists of “undesirables” already prepared by the Young Turk regime.

[..]

U.S. Ambassador Henry Morgenthau accused the “Turkish government” of a campaign of “outrageous terrorizing, cruel torturing, driving of women into harems, debauchery of innocent girls, the sale of many of them at 80 cents each, the murdering of hundreds of thousands and the deportation to and starvation in the desert of other hundreds of thousands, and the destruction of hundreds of villages and many cities,” all part of “the willful execution” of a “scheme to annihilate the Armenian, Greek and Syrian Christians of Turkey.” US Consul-General George Horton reported that “one of the cleverest statements circulated by the Turkish propagandists is to the effect that the massacred Christians were as bad as their executioners, that it was “50-50.”” On this issue he clarifies that “had the Greeks, after the massacres in the Pon­tus and at Smyrna, massacred all the Turks in Greece, the record would have been 50-50—almost.” As an eye-witness, he also praises Greeks for their “conduct toward the thousands of Turks residing in Greece, while the ferocious massacres were going on.”, which, according to his opinion, was “one of the most inspiring and beautiful chapters in all that country’s history.”

Stavros also includes in his post a graphic eyewitness account of the destruction of a Greek village, one of hundreds that met the same horrific fate:

The mothers, stood pale and disheveled in the bitter cold, trembling with fear while holding their clinging infants in close embrace. The young girls, some with their old parents and others with old women or holding up the sick, were herded like sheep, ready for slaughter, into the middle of a pandemonium punctuated by heart-breaking cries and lamentations. Then they ordered their victims to enter two pre-selected houses in the vicinity of the square where they could complete their crime. They herded this unwilling flock into the houses with kicks and shouts. There was no doubt now about the fate that awaited them. The Tsets crammed over three hundred into those houses, anxious to finish their macabre enterprise. When they were sure that no one remained outside, they locked the doors oblivious to the cacophony of cries and supplications for mercy that reverberated in the surrounding mountains and forests.

The final phase of this tragic event needed only a few handfuls of dry grass set alight to create a firestorm that engulfed the two houses in bloodcurdling screams through the pungent black smoke. What followed during the next hour cannot be adequately described…

Crazed mothers clutched tightly, with the all the force of their souls, their crying babies to their bosom. Children cried for their mothers. The girls and the other women with the elderly, the children and the sick, screamed and seized each other as if they wanted to take and give the other courage and help until their hair, clothes and bodies were engulfed by the flames. Piercing cries, maniacal screams and thunderous, wild howls of people, overcome by terror and pain. They beat and flayed the air and the walls to no avail. Hell on earth!

Some women and girls, in their despair and pain, threw themselves out of windows, preferring death from the bullets to the blazing inferno. Osman’s men who looked on smiling, enjoying the spectacle before them, were more than happy to accommodate these poor women by shooting them dead. The screaming began to dwindle, replaced by the noise of the crackling timbers and the crumbling walls falling on the smoldering bodies. Nothing remained but the ash and ruins of what used to be two homes in the town of Beyialan.

I’ve quoted quite a lot there, but please go and read the whole post, “Bitter Homage”.

You can also read another excellent article/post on the subject here, written by a young Pontian Greek girl called Olga, born in Russia and now living in South Africa. She also has a version of it in Russian.

Ted Laskaris comments on the current situation between Greece and Turkey on his blog Augean Central.

The Remembrance Day is currently recognised only by Greece and Cyprus and a half a dozen US states. Armenia also recognizes that the genocide occurred. Last year Jenny Mikakos raised the issue in the Victorian Parliament, seeking acknowledgement from the Turkish Government that the genocide took place. A minor scandal followed, with Jenny Mikakos being called racist and being accused of “inter-ethnic hate speech”. Here are extracts from her speech, from an article in The Age:

[..] On May 19 the Pontian community in Victoria and around the world will commemorate the 87th anniversary of the Pontian genocide that occurred in present-day Turkey.

“Between 1916 and 1923, over 353,000 Pontic Greeks living in Asia Minor and in Pontus, which is near the Black Sea, died as a result of the 20th century’s first but less-known genocide. Over a million Pontic Greeks were forced into exile. In the preceding years, 1.5 million Armenians and 750,000 Assyrians in various parts of Turkey also perished.

[..] The Turkish Government must begin the reconciliation process by acknowledging these crimes against humanity. The suffering of the victims of the Pontian genocide cannot and will not be forgotten.

[..] The Pontic people lived in Asia Minor and in Pontus from ancient times. When the Turkish nationalists took power after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, a deliberate policy of creating ‘Turkey for the Turks’ was adopted, essentially to rid Turkey of its Pontian, Armenian and Assyrian Christians.

The process began with Christian businesses being boycotted, leading to bankruptcies and property being confiscated. Eventually, intellectuals and community leaders were rounded up and executed; women were raped and enslaved. Most victims died from exhaustion or dehydration on forced marches or work in the so-called labour battalions.

[..] Unlike Germany, which has taken responsibility for the Jewish holocaust, Turkey has never apologised to its victims.

Turkey of course won’t be apologizing anytime soon, but I wonder if a way forward may be to ask the Government of Kurdistan to apologize for the involvement of the Kurds. That would certainly put pressure on Turkey, to put it mildly. Although realistically it is unlikely, the Kurds may find reason to agree, given the recent war of words between them and Turkey over the PKK and the upcoming Kirkuk referendum.

I won’t be around a computer much for the rest of this week, so probably won’t have time to post.

Back next week.

Happy ANZAC day to everyone in Australia and New Zealand. Lest we forget.

Here’s a short ANZAC day roundup:

Not PC: “War. What is it good for?” A post about something worse than war.

Des Walsh: “A Special Day for Australians: Lest We Forget” A day to be proud of our country and confident about future.

Duncan Riley: “Lest We Forget, Anzac Day 2007″ A bit of Banjo Patterson to get you in the mood.

Iain Hall: “Dawn Service” The history of the dawn service.

Kev Gillett: “ANZAC Day” An Aussie Digger with a video you should watch.

Voice of the Pacific: “ANZAC Day 2007″ A fe w wise words from Rudyard Kipling which he apparently got into a bit of trouble over.

Bron Marshall: “Red Remembrance Poppies for ANZAC Day” Have your remembrance and eat it too.

UPDATE: Jules Crittenden has some firsthand accounts of Gallipoli. Recommended.

Taqiyya: easy as ABC.

Yvonne Ridley ducks, weaves, splutters, lies, goes berzerk on the ABC’s AM radio program last Saturday:

JANE COWAN: Can you categorically condemn suicide bombing?

YVONNE RIDLEY: You know, the greatest purveyors of suicide bombing are the Tamil Tigers, a Marxist-Leninist organization, largely of the Hindu faith; I’m not really quite sure why it is being attached specifically towards Muslims.

JANE COWAN: But if you’ve been reported as saying you support suicide bombing, would you now here condemn it, no matter who perpetrates it?

YVONNE RIDLEY: I condemn shoddy journalism and poor research, and people like you should know better than to try and tackle people like me over things that have allegedly been said or not said.

ANE COWAN: But this is an opportunity for you to clarify your views, and …

YVONNE RIDLEY: I’ve clarified them. What don’t you understand?

Listen, I have told you exactly what I have said, now you tell me why you need me to condemn something that is as plain as, you know, as the language that I’ve just said. What didn’t you understand about what I have just said?

JANE COWAN: My question is, do you or do you not support suicide bombing?

YVONNE RIDLEY: Of course I don’t.

Feel free to read the whole thing, just to make sure she is not being taken out of context and that it still makes no sense what-so-ver. There is not much more to it.

Anyhow, of course she doesn’t support suicide bombing. The term that is. She much prefers the more glorifying description of martyrdom operations:

A: Yvonne Ridley – “Muslims have lost confidence since September 11th. Something as simple as suicide bombers being martyrs is being denied by prominent sheikhs. The dictionary definition of a martyr is a person who gives up their life for a cause – suicide bombers are martyrs.”

Now, about that bit on the Tamil Tigers and why oh why, as Yvonne wonders indignantly above, is suicide bombing associated with Islam.

Suicide bombing: 1980 – 2001

Lets start with the following numbers on Wikipedia and go from there:

“Lebanon saw the first bombing, but it was the LTTE Tamil Tigers who perfected the tactic and inspired its use elsewhere [2]. Their Black Tiger unit has committed between 76 and 168 (estimates vary) suicide bombings since 1987.

That first statement is a strange one to make, considering the Black Tigers carried out their first suicide bombing in 1987, by which time they were already common place in Lebanon, for example the suicide car bombing of the Iraqi embassy by Islamists in 1981, the bombing of the U.S. embassy by Hezbollah in 1983 and the bombing of the American and French barracks, also in 1983 and also by Hezbollah and Iran. In the least the word “bombing” above should be plural. Further, for a decade after 1987, most of the suicide bombings perpetrated by groups other than the Tamil Tigers were carried out by groups originating either in Lebanon or Israel, ie Hezbollah, Hamas, Islamic Jihad and Al-Aqsa Brigades. Did Hamas need inspiration from Sri Lanka, when they already had plenty from next door in Lebanon, where they were also involved in the Lebanese uncivil free-for-all?

A quick look at those numbers on Black Tiger bombings – “between 76 and 168″.

The lower number, 76, is taken from Robert Pape’s book, “Dying to Win”:

Pape says that the group [the Tamil Tigers] accounted for 76 of 315 suicide attacks carried out around the world from 1980 through 2003, compared with 54 for the Islamic Resistance Movement, or Hamas, and 27 for Islamic Jihad.

The higher number, 168, is taken from this report by Jane’s Intelligence Review (note these numbers stop just before the start of the intifada in Israel in 2000, see more recent figures from that region further down):

NUMBER OF SUICIDE ATTACKS BETWEEN 1980 – 2000

The Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) in Sri Lanka and in India 168
Hizbullah and pro-Syrian groups in Lebanon, Kuwait and Argentina 52
Hamas in Israel 22
The Kurdistan Worker’s Party (PKK) in Turkey 15
The Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) in Israel 8
Al Quaida in East Africa 2
The Egyptian Islamic Jihad (EIJ) in Croatia 1
The Islamic Group (IG) in Pakistan 1
Barbar Khalsa International (BKI) in India 1
The Armed Islamic Group (GIA) in Algeria 1

What we have above is 10 groups out of which 7 are Islamic, 2 are Marxists-Leninist nationalists (the LTTE and the PKK, although the latter began reclaiming their Islamic identity from the late 1980s on) and one Sikh separatist group, BKI. What we also have, by the way, is numbers pretty damn different to Robert Pape, whom everyone (and especially Islamist apologists) seems to quote, usually out of context, as an expert on suicide bombing.

The list from Jane’s seem far from exhaustive, for example the suicide bombing of the Iraqi embassy in 1981 in Beirut was carried out by the Islamic Dawa Party, which is a militant Shiite party, to which the current Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki belongs. Others were also carried out in Lebanon by groups like Amal and even the schitzophrenically fascist Syrian Social Nationalist Party, who are credited with the first suicide bombing by a woman. Overall however, terrorism expert Bruce Hoffman calculates that 31 out of the 35 groups that have carried out suicide bombings since 1980 are Islamic (2005 figure).

Suicide bombing since 2001.

Looking at the numbers above, Yvonne would have had a point had she made her statement, often repeated by Islamist apologists, 5 or more years ago. Since then however the picture has changed completely, no matter how you look at it. As the number below will show, 95% – 97% of the suicide attacks in the last 5-6 years have been carried out by Islamists, with a large number against civilian targets.

In 2002 a ceasefire was signed in Sri Lanka and the suicide bombings ceased, until renewed hostilities in 2004. In the three years since 16 suicide bombings have been carried out by the Tamil Tigers. Taking the 168 from the Jane’s article, and adding the 16 recent one, plus 7 that occured between October 2000 (when the Jane’s article was published) and the ceasefire and we get a total of 191 in 20 years. Note however that most although certainly not all, of these were against military targets.

In the meantime the Second intifada started in Israel in September 2000. In 2002, as a ceasefire was signed in Sri Lanka, the intifada was at its peak – 42 suicide bombings were carried out by Palestinian Islamists that year, killing 228 people. Dozens more followed since. About 130 suicide bombings have been carried out in Israel in the last 15 years, about 75 of those by Hamas, 22 by Al-Aqsa Martyrs brigades and 32 by Islamic Jihad. The number would be much higher had it not been for the excellent work of the Israeli security services and the security wall. And then came Iraq. There were about 30 suicide bombings in Iraq in 2003. Then two to three times that in 2004. In 2005 the numbers went off the chart, as this Washington Post article from July 2005 that I’ve already quoted above documents:

The numbers in Iraq alone are breathtaking: About 400 suicide bombings have shaken Iraq since the U.S. invasion in 2003, and suicide now plays a role in two out of every three insurgent bombings. In May, an estimated 90 suicide bombings were carried out in the war-torn country — nearly as many as the Israeli government has documented in the conflict with Palestinians since 1993.

Hundreds more have followed in Iraq since. A November 2006 estimate by David Cook put the number at 540, with a death toll between 16,000 and 18,000. Stratfor put the number above 500 for 2005 alone (subscription only). Dozens more have followed in other countries. In the 1980x only three countries experienced suicide attacks – Labanon, Kuwait and Sri Lanka. By 2002 this had risen to 15, including countries as far and wide as Croatia and Argentina, Russia (23 suicide attacks since 2000, 6 against civilian targets) and Algeria. The number is now above 30 (hint: the Tamil Tigers have not expanded their area of operation). The Tamil Tigers have long been superseded by the various Islamist groups in terms of number bombings and even more so in number of casualties, especially civilian casualties. Islamist terrorist groups are responsible for the most deadly suicide attacks – at least the top 10, the suicide attacks that killed the most civilians – again easily the top 10, and the attacks that used the most bombers at one time. The genocidal Islamist terrorist organization Lashkar e-Toiba pioneered the use of suicide squads (fedayeen) in their operations. Just in 2005 Islamist groups in Iraq alone carried out more attacks than all non-Islamist groups in the last 30 years combined, the civilian death toll has also been proportionally larger. Islamists have flown planes into building killing thousands of civilians, blown themselves up to kill hundreds on trains, in mosques, and in crowded markets, walked into weddings, cafes, nightclubs and onto buses killing dozens or more. All the while they were screaming “Allahu Akbar!”, fantasizing of virgin flesh and yearning to please Allah. In the background of the carnage Islamic clerics have been issuing fatwas that support these suicide attacks, not only against military targets, but also against civilians. Is it clear yet why the question is being asked specifically in relation to Muslims yet, Yvonne?

Perhaps it isn’t, after all, this is Yvonne Ridley we’re talking about, so lets continue.

So how about your pals, the Taliban then, who claim to have 2000 suicide bombers (and 10,000 fighters) ready for the imminent spring offensive? OK, we all know thats bullshit, but even if we go with the much lesser estimate given by the commander of US forces in Afghanistan Major General David Rodriguez, who says they have more like 500 suicide bombers and 3,000 fighters, thats still a substantial number. Potentially record breaking even. Speaking of breaking records, lets see – Afghanistan had 25 bombings in 2004, 139 in 2005 and about 30 so far this year, targeting not only military targets but also civilian buses and markets, with 84% of the victims of these attacks being civilians (Feb 2007 figure). Add to that their 8 suicide attacks in Pakistan this year so far (ie not even looking at previous years) we get a total of 201, thus making the Taliban greater “purveyors of suicide bombing” than the Tamil Tigers (in 3 years versus 20). And all they are trying to do is catch up with their friends in Iraq.

Speaking of Pakistan, last week the chief cleric of the Red Mosque [Lal Masjid] in Islamabad had this to say:

“Our youth will commit suicide attacks, if the government impedes the enforcement of the Sharia and attacks Lal Masjid and its sister seminaries,” Maulana Abdul Aziz, the in-charge of the mosque said in his Friday sermon. The fresh suicide bombing threat is stated to be the strongest given so far by the hard-line clerics of the Lal Masjid, intensifying fear among Islamabad residents.

How about Morocco, where 4 bombers were killed or killed themselves yesterday and another detonated himself last month, his exposition leading the the uncovering of a plot involving at least 12 bombers? These bombers were working in Casablanca, by the way, where 45 people died in the Islamist suicide bombings in 2003 carried out by 14 bombers from the Al-Qaeda linked group Salafia Jihadia. The list goes on and on – London, Bali, Moscow, Riyadh. Islamists, Islamists, Islamists, Islamists. And the latest news – a twin suicide car bombing in Algeria, that killed 30 people. What kind of group may the Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat (GSPC) be? Oh sorry, I see they’ve recently changed their name to the Al-Qa’ida Organisation in the Islamic Maghreb.

The “martyrdom-seeking nation of Iran”.

No martyrdom-seeking roll call can be complete without the “martyrdom-seeking nation of Iran”:

In an earlier interview with Parto-Sokhan, Jaafari [commander of the “Lovers of Martyrdom Garrison”] announced that more than 50,000 individuals had been enlisted in the Iranian military garrison opened to recruit and train volunteers for “martyrdom-seeking operations”.

He added that several military divisions of the “Lovers of Martyrdom Garrison” had already been established in several of Iran’s provinces and others were presently being formed to “confront threats by America and Israel”.

The leader of the glorious Iranian bullshit-spinning entity praised his death-seeking fanatical compatriots a couple of weeks ago: “Suicide bombers in this land showed us the way, and they enlighten our future”, brimming with pride that Iran is capable of recruiting “hundreds of suicide bombers a day”.

In the name of Islam.

Perhaps its time to hear from a Muslim, here’s Yasmin Al-Mas in “Something has gone wrong” where she looks at challenging the Islamic justification for suicide terror, used by the Salafi-Jihadists, Q-News Magazine, November 2005:

Worldwide, in merely three years after 9/11, the number of suicide bombings in the name of Islam had increased three-fold than it had over two decades whilst the number of people killed had doubled. Suicide bombing in the name of Islam had now occurred in 26 countries: Lebanon [1981], Kuwait [1983], Argentina [1992], Panama, Israel and Occupied Palestinian Territories [1994], Pakistan, Croatia [1995], Saudi Arabia [1996], Tanzania, Kenya [1998], Yemen, Chechnya [2000], USA, Kashmir, Afghanistan [2001], Tunisia, Indonesia, Algeria [2002], Morocco, Russia, India, Iraq, Turkey [2003], Uzbekistan and Spain [2004] and the United Kingdom [2005].

The bigger picture.

Here’s Walid Phares, with some more numbers (Feb 2007):

Asked to estimate the number of jihadist insurgents worldwide, Phares had some unsettling news.

“It depends on what the duty of such people [insurgents] would be,” he told NewsMax. “Suicide bombers would be lower in number than of those who will fight, those who will spy, those who will provide funds. There are about from 5% to 6% to 8% jihadist sympathizers in the Muslim world, which is 1.1 billion, so we are talking about 50 to 60 million who sympathize with these ideas.

“They are all not committed, but out of those you have probably 1% of people who would fight. That’s an army of 1 million. Among those, if you want to go to the most narrow dimension, there are about 100,000 suicide bombers around the world. For example, in Iraq there are probably 5,000, in Iran another 8,000 to 10,000, and within Hezbollah, 2,000.

“There is a pool of 100,000 people who have received this jihadist ideology and could be recruited for suicide bombing. Internationally, from an operational standpoint, there are somewhere around 5,000, and that’s a huge number of suicide bombers. Look at England, for example the operation of [July 7, 2005 -- the subway bombings] involved eight terrorists The next year, in the operation that wanted to bring down the airliners, there were about 50. So it grows geometrically.”

Why you should verify what you read on Wikipedia.

While we’re on the subject of “shoddy” reporting, take a look at this Wikipedia article on the Tamil Tigers:

LTTE had carried out more suicide bombings than any other organization on the face of the earth. According to the experts at Janes securities, between 1980 to 2000, LTTE had carried out a total number of 1,680 suicide attacks on civilians, political, and military targets. The number of suicide attacks easily exceeded the combine total of Hizbullah and Hamas suicide attacks carried out during the same period.[48]

Reference 48 is the Jane’s article which I quoted above. As you can see the original Jane’s article seems to be missing that extra 0.

UPDATE: I compiled the data above into the table below.

Top perpetrators of suicide attacks since 1980.

Al Qaeda in Iraq/Islamic State of Iraq (ISI) 500-800
Taliban in Afghanistan and Pakistan 200+
The Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) in Sri Lanka and in India 190+
Hamas in Israel 75
Hizbullah and pro-Syrian groups in Lebanon, Kuwait and Argentina 52
Al-Aqsa Martyr Brigades 32
Chechen groups in Russia 23
The Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) in Israel 22
Al Qaeda outside of Iraq 20+
The Kurdistan Worker’s Party (PKK) in Turkey 15

Note: Where I am not quoting other sources, for attacks where multiple attackers were involved I am adding up the number og targets attacked, not the number of attackers. Thus for the Casablanca 2003 bombings, there were 5 targets attacked, with 14 bombers, 12 of which detonated successfully, so I am counting that as 5. I wanted to avoid skewing the numbers by counting it as either 1 or 14.

Regarding the Al Qaeda in Iraq estimate, in 2006 Ayman Al Zawahiri, claimed Al Qaeda carried out 800 suicide bombings in Iraq. Al Zawahiri is of course exaggerating, but the total number of attacks over the last 4 years would be approaching that number. Also according to a report from the Gulf Research Center (see last link), there is four groups other than Al Qaeda that have carried out suicide attacks in Iraq. The same report also states that suicide attacks in Afghanistan increased 750% between 2001 and 2006, jumping from 21 to 180, suggesting a total far higher than what I’ve stated above, so as you can see I am playing it safe with the numbers.

Trackposted to Right Pundits, Outside the Beltway, Blog @ MoreWhat.com, Perri Nelson’s Website, Maggie’s Notebook, basil’s blog, Stuck On Stupid, The Bullwinkle Blog, The Amboy Times, Cao’s Blog, The Pet Haven, Conservative Cat, Conservative Thoughts, , Bumpshack, third world county, The Crazy Rants of Samantha Burns, The World According to Carl, The Pink Flamingo, Planck’s Constant, CORSARI D’ITALIA, Dumb Ox Daily News, Right Voices, and The Yankee Sailor, thanks to Linkfest Haven Deluxe.

Sincere thanks to Velvet Hammer for listing Tao of Defiance as one of the 5 nominations for her contributing node to the “Thinking Blogger Award” meme (well, beme, actually).

Here are the rules for those who want to come join the party:

1. If, and only if, you get tagged, write a post with links to 5 blogs that make you think,

2. Link to this post so that people can easily find the exact origin of the meme,

3. Optional: Proudly display the ‘Thinking Blogger Award’ with a link to the post that you wrote. (here is an alternative silver version if gold doesn’t fit your blog).

I am going to make an all Aussie list. Here are 5 Blogs That Make Me Think:

1. Saint’s Dogfight in Bankstown. Possibly the most under-rated blog in Australia.
2. Sheik Yer’mami’s Winds of Jihad. Single-handedly holding the fort in Cairns, the Sheik is renowned for thought-provoking hits such as “Harry the Taliban” and “Muslim Woman”. The Sheik makes me think particularly hard about protecting my online anonimity.
3. Pommygranate. Because he is so well integrated.
4. A Western Heart makes me think terribly un-PC things. John Ray also makes me think that too many blogs is never enough -an even dozen and counting! How does he do it?!
5. My last nominee has already gained global infamy as the premier exponent of the Evil Minimalist (Min-evilist) school of blogging. Title, quote, linepunch! Like a hammer hits a cantaloupe. Repeat until the demons of stupid are out. Lefthandalist suckers beware, its the “Evil” Tim Blair!

Don’t forget to check out Velvet Hammer’s great blog, Ironic Surrealism, too.

A couple of stories from The Australian:

“Extremist students take over Newcastle mosque”:

Up to 150 university students from Saudi Arabia, Algeria and Egypt who follow the fundamentalist Wahabbism ideology were central to the overthrow at the weekend of the executive board of the Newcastle Muslim Association.

Deposed association president Yunus Kara yesterday accused the students of pushing for new leadership of the port city’s mosque in order to advance their own extremist agenda and continue “brainwashing” local Muslims.

“The international students have used their puppets to come forward and dictate,” Mr Kara told The Australian.

“They’re driving them to whatever ideology that (suits them). Their ideology is extremism … but they teach under the banner of Islam.”

“Taxation office to probe Muslim cleric on Saudi cash”:

An ACT Islamic organisation has also accused the Palestinian-born imam Mohammad Swaiti of being “radical”, anti-Western in his religious teachings, and failing to declare payments he received from officiating at wedding ceremonies.

Documents obtained by The Australian reveal an Australian Tax Office investigation into Sheik Swaiti over allegations by senior Muslim community leaders that he failed to declare his clerical allowances of up to $US30,000 ($37,700) a year, which were paid to him by the Saudi Government.

The tax office sent Islamic Society of ACT president Sabrija Poskovic a letter in reply to written allegations made by him and his community regarding Sheik Swaiti.

“I refer to your letter relating to the imam of your mosque, Mohammad Swaiti, who also happens to be a tax office employee,” the ATO’s letter to Mr Poskovic says.

[..]

Mr Poskovic accused the Saudi Embassy of bankrolling the annual salaries of up to 20 imams around Australia, including Sheik Swaiti, through its Islamic donations (Daawa) office.

A letter understood to be sent on behalf of Mr Poskovic claims the Saudis pay the imams “mukafa”, which is regarded a “reward compensation payment”. It also alleges that Sheik Swaiti had been on the Saudi payroll for 12 years.

Are parts of Australia heading the way of some cities in Europe, like Antwerp, where the Saudi-sponsored radical Salafists/Wahhabists have taken over all 25 mosques? On a bigger scale, just watch what is happening in Kosovo, where the Wahhabis have sponsored about 200 mosques and religious schools since 1999:

Wahhabis open internet cafes associated with their mosques, “in a bid to attract children to listen to ‘naslihates’ against Skenderbeg and the Albanian national renewal movement, the Western civilization and even Kosovo’s traditional brand of Islam,” the media report.

The newspapers in Priština also say that “Kosovo and international mujahedins may be preparing for a rebellion on the brink of the status solution,”

Or look at the growing influence of the Wahhabis in Bosnia, . Rather predictably, in both places a growing section of the Muslim population is growing increasingly radicalised. Lets not be going in that direction.

A new paper from the Australian Strategic Policy Institute: “Responding to radical Islamist ideology: The case of Hizb ut-Tahrir in Australia”

Extract:

[..]

Background

Sheikh Taqiuddin al-Nabhani al-Falastani founded HT in 1953 in a suburb of East Jerusalem, then part of Jordan. Al-Nabhani had been a judge in Lebanon and Mandatory Palestine and a university lecturer in Jordan. He was a judge in the court of appeal in East Jerusalem and a senior religious figure, who splintered from the Muslim Brotherhood movement.

His prior membership of the Muslim Brotherhood played a key role in conditioning al-Nabhani’s perspective on political Islam. HT’s strategic objective is nothing short of uniting the worldwide community of Muslims (umma) into a single polity, where spiritual and political leadership are held by a Caliph.

Organisationally, al-Nabhani drew heavily on Marxist-Leninist thinking on structuring a revolutionary movement. HT consists of a hierarchy of cells, generally up to five people each, with only one member of each cell aware of the identities in a higher cell. The benefits are its resistance to penetration. It reduces damage caused by defections or rebellion in individual cells.

[..]

Goals and strategies

Tactically, HT’s inspiration is a debatable interpretation of the Prophet Mohammed’s story. HT pursues and predicts a repetition of Mohammed’s success in establishing a Caliphate. The first step is quiet recruitment and avoidance of confrontation in order to build a vanguard. The second is public proselytising in order to introduce an ideological wedge between the umma and their governments. The aim is to convince both a critical mass and key power-holders to support HT. The final step is the revolution itself, when infiltrated governments and widespread agitation for change bring down borders and unite the umma under a single ruler, the Caliph.

HT advocates a complete Islamisation of society. In Australia, HT has not been a very successful recruiter. It’s at best in the very early part of the second phase of its program. However, three caveats to this broad analysis complicate the response to HT: its intolerance and racism; its links to broader radicalisation; and the appearance of violence in its ideology.

[..] in its birth throes the Caliph will use force to implement sharia law. HT says they’ll engage in military jihad as soon as there is a caliphate. A speaker at the Sydney HT conference this year referred to this as a duty.

HT’s literature and speeches avoid direct support for violence, although there are approving references to fighting against Americans in Afghanistan and Iraq. HT remains quick to disassociate itself from individual terrorist acts. This is a clever communications strategy: HT tailors its messages to different audiences. HT’s Da‘wa (propaganda) is a means to achieve the establishment of the Caliphate, including in Australia. HT has made Australia one of its many arenas for proselytizing around the world. It has plenty of time to achieve its goal. Its vision is long-term.

[..]