I’ve been asked to post about a couple of sites campaigning to draw attention to, and push for action on the Darfur crisis.

The Italian Blogs for Darfur team are campaigning Italian TV stations to give more airtime to the Darfur problem. According to Italian blogger Mauro Italian TV devoted only a single hour to Darfur in the whole of 2005. Italy will take up a seat on the UN Security Council for 2007 and 2008. You can read and sign an English or an Italian version of their appeal.

Yesterday I posted about a documentary in which David Aaronovitch noted there are no “mass demonstrations by thousands of slogan chanting protesters” about the Darfur genocide, which has, by some estimates, claimed 300,000 lives in three years, while there have been plenty of marches for other “trendier” causes. One man who’s been trying to redress the balance is Jay McGinley, who has been hunger striking and holding vigil outside the White House, until he along with 29 others were arrested there a month ago. Now he has started another fast and is working relentlessly to spread the word. If there is any cause in the world worth protesting about, surely this is it. Head over to Jay’s “Darfur Dying for Heroes” site.

You can get more info about whats happening in the Sudan at Sudan Watch and the Passion of the Present sites.

See also my previous posts on Darfur:

Charles Moore: This is why there is slaughter in Darfur (recommended)
Lest We Forget Darfur

A no-nonsense explanation of the situation in Darfur and why it occured, in the Telegraph:

[..]

The death in Darfur is the result of a policy.

The policy is that of the Sudan government, which is now, in effect, the government of northern Sudan. That government is Islamist and Arab. It used to harbour Osama bin Laden until bombed by Bill Clinton. Even before the Islamists came to power in 1989, the north imposed sharia everywhere.

In 1990, it declared jihad against the south. It seeks to dispossess Christians and to assert Arab dominance of the north over the black population of the whole country. In Darfur, it destroys black villages through the Janjaweed and other militias.

As with Slobodan Milosevic’s Greater Serbia, Khartoum’s power grab is presented in the guise of restoring national unity. In reality, Khartoum wants to kill or expel as many blacks as possible while the rest of the world wonders what to do.

[..]
Last week, I was in southern Sudan. Although desperately poor, with 95 per cent illiteracy, and some armed groups still roaming the bush, the place is more or less at peace.

This is because, at the start of last year, international pressure forced a Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) between north and south. The largely Christian south now has a great measure of self-rule, and will be allowed to vote, in 2011, as to whether it wants to secede from the Sudan. It is certain, if it ever gets its promised chance, that it will vote to break away.

A UN force of 7,000 is in the south, trying to see that the CPA becomes a reality. The north drags its feet on key provisions – most notably the settling of the borders.

It knows that if the borders are agreed, this will show clearly that most of the oilfields which earn the country large amounts of hard currency are in the south.

The north is supposed to give half of the revenue from the southern oilfields to the southern government, but there is no independent audit of what that revenue is, so the south is being short-changed. This suits China, which is in the country, helping itself to Sudanese oil at good rates.

The leaders of the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement who run the south, told me that half their budget is spent on the army, and that this is what people want. They think the way to avoid war is to be strong enough to fight it.

Southern Sudan is all but unique in the modern world in having recently overthrown sharia rule. After years of officially imposed Islam, in schools, the civil service and preferences for jobs, Christians no longer have to live in daily fear. I visited towns where mosques and churches now coexist peacefully.

Yet one Anglican prelate I met, who said that he survived 20 years of persecution because “it is not so easy to kill a bishop”, told me that “the Arab Muslim is not a giving-up sort of person”.

The blow to Arab pride if the south became independent would be tremendous. The threat to the south is, therefore, huge. “We are the wall to the penetration of the Islamic religion to the whole of Africa,” Bishop Micah said.

What occurs in Darfur concerns not only the fate of its refugee, raped, hungry, dispossessed people. The outcome will also tell the north whether it can get away with what it wants. If it discovers that it can, it will start again on the much bigger prize of the south.
[..]

Here’s a reminder of just how revoltingly brutal and inhumane the Arab Supremacism of the Sudanese Islamists is (The Guardian, July 20, 1004):

While African women in Darfur were being raped by the Janjaweed militiamen, Arab women stood nearby and sang for joy, according to an Amnesty International report published yesterday. The songs of the Hakama, or the “Janjaweed women” as the refugees call them, encouraged the atrocities committed by the militiamen.

The women singers stirred up racial hatred against black civilians during attacks on villages in Darfur and celebrated the humiliation of their enemies, the human rights group said.

[..]

During an attack on the village of Disa in June last year, Arab women accompanied the attackers and sang songs praising the government and scorning the black villagers.

According to an African chief quoted in the report, the singers said: “The blood of the blacks runs like water, we take their goods and we chase them from our area and our cattle will be in their land. The power of [Sudanese president Omer Hassan] al-Bashir belongs to the Arabs and we will kill you until the end, you blacks, we have killed your God.”

The chief said that the Arab women also racially insulted women from the village: “You are gorillas, you are black, and you are badly dressed.”

The Janjaweed have abducted women for use as sex slaves, in some cases breaking their limbs to prevent them escaping, as well as carrying out rapes in their home villages, the report said.

The militiamen “are happy when they rape. They sing when they rape and they tell that we are just slaves and that they can do with us how they wish”, a 37-year-old victim, identified as A, is quoted as saying in the report, which was based onmore than 100 testimonies from women in the refugee camps in neighbouring Chad.

What the report does not mention is that according to the Sunnah women taken captive during Jihad can be taken as slaves and the Koran permits the rape of female slaves.

Robert Spencer explains:

“Each of us was raped by between three and six men….One woman refused to have sex with them, so they split her head into pieces with an axe in front of us.”

This happened in Darfur, from which Sudanese military personnel actually airlifted women to Khartoum to serve as sex slaves.

Meanwhile, Indira Dzetskelova, the mother of one of the child hostages in Beslan, Russia, reports that “several 15-year-old girls were raped by terrorists.” Her daughter “heard their terrible cries and screams when those monsters took them away.”
[..]

What does rape, then, have to do with these religious conflicts? Unfortunately, everything. The Islamic legal manual ‘Umdat al-Salik, which carries the endorsement of Al-Azhar University, the most respected authority in Sunni Islam, stipulates: “When a child or a woman is taken captive, they become slaves by the fact of capture, and the woman’s previous marriage is immediately annulled.” Why? So that they are free to become the concubines of their captors. The Qur’an permits Muslim men to have intercourse with their wives and their slave girls: “Forbidden to you are … married women, except those whom you own as slaves” (Sura 4:23-24).

After one successful battle, Muhammad tells his men, “Go and take any slave girl.” He took one for himself also. After the notorious massacre of the Jewish Qurayzah tribe, he did it again. According to his earliest biographer, Ibn Ishaq, Muhammad “went out to the market of Medina (which is still its market today) and dug trenches in it. Then he sent for [the men of Banu Qurayza] and struck off their heads in those trenches as they were brought out to him in batches.” After killing “600 or 700 in all, though some put the figure as high as 800 or 900,” the Prophet of Islam took one of the widows he had just made, Rayhana bint Amr, as another concubine.

(I ran out of time yesterday, so posting part 3 today)

Ever so lightly.

Firstly a look at developments in some “moderate” Muslim nations.

Nibras Kazimi looks at Turkey in the NY Sun: “Return of the Gazi”

Psychoanalyzing the Turkish nation is a favorite pastime for many analysts since Turkey’s recurring identity crisis gives ample material for all sorts of conjecture: Is it trying to be Western? Is Turkey trying to rediscover its eastern roots? Is it getting more comfortable with its Ottoman inheritance?

This has been going on for decades, with some haughty Westerners finding it bemusing that a Muslim nation is trying so hard to put on sophisticated – read European – airs. Well, now Turkey’s existentialism is no longer eccentrically cutesy. Whichever way Turkey lands could potentially determine the outcome of a war between two civilizations – the West and Islam.

The acquittal of writer Elif Shafak is a small but positive sign. (Washington Post editorial).

But the overall trend is looking bleaker. Leon de Winter has more Turkey questions at his Free West blog (a recent discovery for me and highly recommended):

This is a decisive moment for Turkey. Either it recognises Greek aspirations and reneges on its promise to protect the Turks of northern Cyprus in order to be able to join the European Union, and at the same time pursues a peaceful solution for the Kurdish problem in its eastern provinces. Or it stands firm on Cyprus, bringing its candidacy for European Union membership crashing to a halt, and at the same time focuses on expansion into Iraqi Kurdistan in a kind of Molotov-Ribbentrop deal with Iran.

Which is to be? Can Turkey survive as a nation if it gives up on its fear of the irridentist Greeks? Can it continue in its present form if it accedes to Kurdish demands for autonomy? Could Turkey ever turn itself into a docile federal democracy without risking a further loss of territory? Spain, Portugal and even Greece were transformed under the protective mantle of the European Union. Could it happen in Turkey, or will the Turks turn their backs on the West and allow themselves to become drawn into the approaching Middle East conflagration?

Maznah Mohamad in Lebanon’s Daily Star on the Malaysian crossroads: “Malaysia’s unsettling turn toward Islam”

Malaysian society is now gripped by a fundamental question: Is the country, which is more than half Muslim, an Islamic state? In practice, various religious and ethnic groups give Malaysia a distinctly multi-cultural character. But the Malaysian Constitution provides room for arguments on both sides of the question, and the relatively secular status quo is facing a serious challenge.

Olivier Guitta in the Weekly Standard on developments in Morocco: “The Islamization of Morocco” Extremism is displacing moderation in the North African kingdom.

A LITTLE MORE THAN three years ago, Morocco experienced Islamic terrorism firsthand. On May 16, 2003, Casablanca was hit with four simultaneous attacks that left 45 people dead and hundreds injured. The attacks were perpetrated by Moroccan citizens who were members of the al Qaeda-affiliated Moroccan Islamic Combatant Group (known by its French acronym, GICM).

Needless to say, the kingdom was stunned that its sons had turned violently against it. Now, the dismantling of another extensive Islamist cell in Morocco confirms that extremism is spreading inside what has long been viewed as one of the most moderate countries in the Arab world.

In a series of arrests over the past month, Moroccan authorities have seized 59 people and over 30 kilograms of TNT, more than was used in the 2003 attacks but of the same type. The alleged targets were political and military leaders, along with locations in Marrakesh, Morocco’s premier tourist destination, the air force base of Salé, and the U.S. embassy in Rabat.

But the most troubling aspect of this cell by far is its membership. While the suicide bombers of 2003 came from the slums around Casa blanca, the newly arrested suspects are from all walks of life. They include five members of the military, three policemen, a Domestic Security officer, two imams, and four society women. Two of these women, the wives of Royal Air Morocco pilots, had volunteered for suicide missions in Iraq and Israel.

Now a brief look at Thailand.

David Warren’s analysis on the coup, on RealClearPolitics.com: “Thai Democracy”

There have been at least a dozen military coups, since Thailand first embarked on the “path to democracy” before the Second World War. After each comes the ritual of a gleaming new constitution. The good news is the coups get farther and farther apart. The bad is that the most recent coup — bloodless and fairly happy — happened this week.

The coups are justified because each elected government proves corrupt and incompetent. (So why don’t we have coups in Canada?) The Thai military goes in with a new broom, or at least a new set of officers from the last time, and usually enjoys, as now, great initial popularity. This wears thin fairly quickly, setting the stage for a new round of public celebration when democracy is restored. That sours, in turn, when the party that wins the election errs on the side of demagoguery, featherbeds to an unconscionable degree, and creates the conditions for another coup.

This pattern is not always strictly followed. When a mistake is made, in the established etiquette, a lot of people get killed. In one case, two generations ago, the army and navy found themselves on opposite sides of both the political spectrum, and Wireless Road. The resulting shoot-out made it perhaps Thailand’s least happy coup.

[..]

The situation is now complicated because in the far south of Thailand, adjoining Malaysia, where the Muslims are concentrated in an overwhelmingly Buddhist country, another wave of revolution has come. Southern Thailand is now one of the many bloody fronts in the international “terror war”, where thousands have been killed, both by Islamofascist jihadis, and in police operations. The Western media wrongly describe this as a “separatist movement”, whenas the revolutionists are demanding the same imposition of the Shariah as they do in Afghanistan, Iraq, Chechnya, Israel, France, and England.

[..]

The outgoing government was elected by “conservative” rural Thailand over the visible sneering of “liberal” Bangkok. The ex-prime minister was using brutal and insensitive methods to discourage the spread of “Islamism” in the south. Bangkok disapproved that sort of thing. The urbane people of that once-fair city, like the urbane people over here, have no alternative in mind, nor any willingness to confront the question. But neither will it go away.

Democracy is a beautiful flower in any garden. But in Thailand as elsewhere it does not survive, unless the beneficiaries have the guts to do the necessarily unpleasant weeding.

For insightful background info on the events in Thailand, have a read of Zachary Abuza’s piece in The National Interest: “A Coup in the Making? Expert in Bangkok says Autumn had been Dawning on the Thai Patriarch”

Now some famous last words. Last Monday, the day before the coup, Thaksin Shinawatra, (then) prime minister of Thailand, was answering some questions at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York (via Carolyn O’Hara of Foreign Policy):

Q: In your vision of a Thai democracy, who provides the check and balances on the military and security class?

THAKSIN: The role of military is [decreasing] in terms of involving in politics. So we don’t need a check and balance system on that part anymore because…this is [the] 21st century…[t]he memory is still about the 20th century. This is 21st. I think things [are] changing a lot. Thank you.

Obviously!

Guess this country.

It’s army, under the command of the ruling regime, is engaging in a campaign of genocide against racial and religious minorities, often beheading, raping and torturing its victims, but it is not the Sudan.

Children as young as 12 are being forcefully recruited into this army, but this is not the Taliban in Afghanistan or “Saddam’s Lion Cubs” in Hussein’s Iraq.

The military regime is busily building bunkers in a strongpoint defence matrix, allegedly in anticipation of a US attack, but it is not Iran.

This country is removing any crosses or other Christian symbols from public spaces, bit it is not Algeria.

This country has the world’s largest narcotics-trafficking militia operating on its territory, but it is not Columbia.

This country has a health crisis worse than the poorest areas of Africa, with more children dying before age 5 in some areas, than the Congo, but it is not Afghanistan.

This country has recently agreed to allow Russia to share in exploitation of its oil fields, in exchange for weapons shipments, but it is not Venezuela.

This country, while shunned by the West, counts China as its main political and economic ally, but it is not North Korea.

While the world’s attention is focused on several noisy ideologically and religiously driven nutjob regimes, one old backyard hussler is slowly but surely losing touch with reality, seemingly by way of good old fashioned drug-induced psychosis. That twitchy little battler is Burma.

“The side road the soldiers have blocked off is 15 kilometers (9 miles) north of the city of Pyinmana in the central Burmese plains. The jungle stretches for more than 400 kilometers (249 miles), like some vast, green carpet, toward a line of jagged peaks on the distant horizon marking the Golden Triangle bordering Laos and Thailand. The only destination worth seeing in this rural stretch of Burma is its tropical rainforest research institute.

But Burma’s ruling generals recently declared the region a restricted military zone, making the trip to the institute off-limits to outsiders. The Junta is having its new capital built somewhere at the end of this 20-foot-wide highway. The central government’s officials were already required to move there last November.

..

Burma’s leadership apparently plans to barricade itself into its remote new capital, from which it expects to control the country in the future. The nearest major city, Mandalay, is a 250-kilometer (155-mile) journey away on a deeply potholed road, and the trip to Rangoon takes about eight hours. Naypyidaw, or “Royal Country,” is the name Than Shwe, the junta’s 73-year-old leader, has personally selected for his government’s secretive new headquarters. According to official instructions to be followed in the event of a foreign attack, “Naypyidaw is our war bunker, where we will wait, during an American attack, until the Chinese hurry to our aid.”

Sounds like a brilliant plan. Although, considering the pace of events in Iraq and throwing in some generous estimates for the actions against Iran, Syria, North Korea, Venezuela, Cuba, Bolivia and Trans-dnestr my estimated date of invasion is somewhere around hmmm.. how does 2090 sound? By which date you won’t need to wait long for China to help, because you’ll be a part of it.

So what the hell is going here? Well, I did mention drug-induced psychosis, didn’t I?

“Beheadings by troops are common. So too are beatings, the use of forced labour and rape. Growing use of amphetamines among Burma’s 400,000-strong army is fuelling this violence.

A narcotics expert from the Australian National University who is based in Thailand, David Matheson, said researchers had concluded that many troops went into battle high on amphetamines. “When they come across dead Burmese soldiers, they find methamphetamine tablets on most of them if not all of them, particularly in the Shan state.”

The brutality of the attacks is evident in video footage, taken by members of the evangelical Christian missionary group the Free Burma Rangers, of the burning of villages. The video shows young men, armed with AK-47 rifles, setting fire to bamboo homes as residents flee in terror.”

Lets put two and 400,000 together here. “Most if not all” of the military is marching to the rhythm of an ICE binge, and its leadership is barricading itself away from the world in the middle of the jungle, declaring their new place of residence “Royal County”. Add the delusion and paranoia up with the erratic acts of violence, and this is obviously one hell of a tweak out. And it is sure to be followed by one hell of a come down, yet oddly enough “Royal County” just doesn’t sound like a rehab centre to me.

But I propose a solution. Send in the bicycles. That should keep them busy for at least a couple of decades. Heck, maybe after that we can arrange for them to sort through the world’s garbage for recycling, and get on top of that global warming biznit too. Hey, its far more likely to have an effect than another UN Resolution.

The August issue of Harper’s magazine had some extracts from interviews with Darfuri refugees, conducted by Amnesty International, for its 2004 report “Darfur: Rape as a Weapon of War.” The extracts appeared in the magazine under the title “We have killed your God” and the short collection was posted on their website today.

Here’s one of the accounts.

The janjaweed said during the attack, “You are complicit with the opponents, you are blacks, no black can stay here, and no black can stay in Sudan.” Arab women were accompanying the attackers singing songs in praise of the government and encouraging the attackers. The women said, “The blood of the blacks runs like water. We take their goods and we chase them from our area and our cattle will be in their land. The power belongs to the Arabs, and we will kill you until the end, you blacks. We have killed your God.” They also insulted the women from the village, saying, “You are gorillas, you are black, and you are badly dressed.”

—M., a male village chief from Disa

Read the rest here.

I posted recently about the rapid growth of Pentecostal Churches in Developing countries. In fact sociologist of religion Philip Jenkins wrote in his book “The Next Christendom”, that Christianity will be the dominant idea of the 21st Century. He believes in the next 25 years the world population of Christians will grow to 2.6 billion, with half of these in Africa and Latin America.

But that is not the only way evangelicalism is set to shape the world – its influence in the First World is set to be no less profound. Walter Russell Mead, the Henry A. Kissinger Senior Fellow for U.S. Foreign Policy at the Council on Foreign Relations, has written in the September/October issue of Foreign Policy on how the rise of the Evengelicans in the US is set to influence American foreign policy in the years to come.

You can also read his article on a single page, (rather than over 7 in FR), over at Real Clear Politics.

(their) summary:

Religion has always been a major force in U.S. politics, but the recent surge in the number and the power of evangelicals is recasting the country’s political scene — with dramatic implications for foreign policy. This should not be cause for panic: evangelicals are passionately devoted to justice and improving the world, and eager to reach out across sectarian lines.

Extract:

The growing influence of evangelicals has affected U.S. foreign policy in several ways; two issues in particular illustrate the resultant changes. On the question of humanitarian and human rights policies, evangelical leadership is altering priorities and methods while increasing overall support for both foreign aid and the defense of human rights. And on the question of Israel, rising evangelical power has deepened U.S. support for the Jewish state, even as the liberal Christian establishment has distanced itself from Jerusalem.

In these cases as in others, evangelical political power today is not leading the United States in a completely new direction. We have seen at least parts of this film before: evangelicals were the dominant force in U.S. culture during much of the nineteenth century and the early years of the twentieth. But the country’s change in orientation in recent years has nonetheless been pronounced.

Evangelicals in the Anglo-American world have long supported humanitarian and human rights policies on a global basis. The British antislavery movement, for example, was led by an evangelical, William Wilberforce. Evangelicals were consistent supporters of nineteenth-century national liberation movements — often Christian minorities seeking to break from Ottoman rule. And evangelicals led a number of reform campaigns, often with feminist overtones: against suttee (the immolation of widows) in India, against foot binding in China, in support of female education throughout the developing world, and against human sexual trafficking (the “white slave trade”) everywhere. Evangelicals have also long been concerned with issues relating to Africa.

This certainly put a new light for me on the recent visit to several African countries by Illinois Senator Barrack Obama, who is seen by many to be drumming up evengelical support for the Democrats:

“And one of the reasons I am here today, I don’t come today, as was said, as a grandson of this community. I come here as a United States senator and a representative of the United States government,”

And his earlier statements from The Chicago Tribune:

“Unfortunately, our foreign policy seems to be focused on yesterday’s crises rather than anticipating the crises of the future,” Obama said. “Africa is not perceived as a direct threat to U.S. security at the moment, so the foreign policy apparatus tends to believe that it can be safely neglected. I think that’s a mistake.”…”It’s critically important to capture a sense of hopefulness,” Obama said, “to give people in Africa and people outside Africa a sense that for all the strife and hardship that the continent has been through, the spirit of the people remains resilient.”

An interesting side note: Obama converted from Islam to Christianity in his early twenties. He was brought up a Muslim by his Indonesian stepfather.

The Jihadist Mogadisushi Train is now operational. Would you like to wage Jihad here or take away?

MOGADISHU (Reuters) – Somalia’s powerful Islamist movement opened a militia training camp on Wednesday with trainers from Eritrea, Afghanistan and Pakistan, witnesses said.

The presence of foreign trainers points to what many fear is a growing internationalization of a crisis that has split the Horn of Africa nation and threatened the slim authority of its interim government.

The Islamists’ hardline leader, Shiekh Hassan Dahir Aweys, attended the opening of the camp for more than 600 Islamist militiamen at Hiilweyne, north of Mogadishu.

“You will study military tactics, because you will defend your country with Islamic morality,” Aweys told the recruits.

Witnesses identified foreign trainers from and Afghanistan at the camp.

Diplomats fear Somalia could become a proxy battleground for Ethiopia and Eritrea, and have said that more players like Libya, Iran and Egypt have quietly entered the fray.

One piece of the demographic puzzle for the 21st century that Mark Steyn did not address in his lecture was that while “post-modern Christianity” may be sinking in Europe, hand in hand with its demographic decline, in other parts of the world Christianity is set to neither sink nor to lose itself in post-modernism.

MercatorNet is currently running a series of articled on “Developing World Christianity”, particularly focusing on the rise of the Pentacostal Churches in Latin America and Africa.

Here are some projections :

Sociologist of religion Philip Jenkins, a lecturer in history and religious studies at Pennsylvania State University, believes that Christianity will, in fact, be the dominant idea of the 21st Century. This is the theme of his 2002 book The Next Christendom: The Rise of Global Christianity.

[..]

Jenkins doesn’t seek to assess the truth of Christianity, although as a Protestant, he is sympathetic. He is simply analysing obvious trends which few people in this part of the world have heeded.

The first, and possibly, the most decisive, is demographic. Birth rates have plummeted in Europe, the historic home of Christianity. Other English-speaking countries, with the exception of the United States, are having trouble replacing themselves without immigration. In the US, the birth rate has risen to about replacement level — thanks in great measure to immigration and higher fertility amongst Latinos, who have strong religious traditions.

“Within the next 25 years the population of the world’s Christians is expected to grow to 2.6 billion (making Christianity by far the world’s largest faith). By 2025, 50 per cent of the Christian population will be in Africa and Latin America, and another 17 per cent will be in Asia. Those proportions will grow steadily. By about 2050 the United States will still have the largest single contingent of Christians, but all the other leading nations will be [in the] Southern [hemisphere]: Mexico, Brazil, Nigeria, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ethiopia, and the Philippines. By then the proportion of non-Latino whites among the world’s Christians will have fallen to perhaps one in five.”

Amongst Catholics, Jenkins says, the trend toward “Southern” Christianity is particularly marked. In the early 1950s, Africa had about 16 million Catholics; now there are 120 million and by the year 2025 there will probably be 228 million. According to the World Christian Encyclopedia, almost three-quarters of all Catholics by the year 2025 will be found in Africa, Asia and Latin America.

..

Much has been written about the possible reasons for the radicalization of the British Muslim population in the last week. See my opinion round up from yesterday for a few examples.

Douglas Farah (author of “Blood from Stones: The secret financial network of terror”) wrote one of the more simple and to the point explanations:

As the Western world again debates the roots of Islamist attacks on Britain and the United States, the question often posed is “Why do they hate us?” The conventional wisdom is that alienated youth, suffering prejudice and unemployment, migrate to suicide bombings to help redress the grievious injuries suffered by uncaring European societies that offer them no way out. Also mentioned are the broader political issues of Palestine, Iraq and recently, Hezbollah.

But the real answer is not so simple or so trite. There are certainly push factors: undoubtedly Northern Africans, Pakistanis and others suffer prejudice and social isolation. Many are angry at geopolitical issues.

The quetions is why the isolation, and that leads to the pull factors, which are just as strong and perhaps more important. The primary pull factor resides in a small number of easily identifiable and identified mosques. Most of the religious institutions are part of the Muslim Brotherhood network. For a more formal look at this, see my paper for the International Strategy and Assessment Center.

What is taught in these mosques, to young people already feeling aggrieved, is not new. They are told that assimilation is wrong and that the more alienated one feels, the closer one is to Allah. Western civilization is degenerate, filthy and full of sin. Rejection of the non-Muslim society in which one lives is a duty, and alienation and hatred a sign of favor from Allah.

..

This teaching is part of a strategy, outlined by the Brotherhood in its own writings, with the aim of establishing the Muslim caliphate across Europe and the rest of the world. This ideology and theology of hatred and alienation is not taught by a few isolated and repudiated imams. It is the core teaching of a major component of political Islam, and shared by wahhabi Islamists and Salafists.

Listening to commentators on cable television since the UK plot was uncovered, it is striking how little the pull factors are discussed, rather than solely the easy to identify push factors that make the killers appear to be victims. The enemy has a pretty clear plan and a solid message. We cannot even define who the enemy is.

One of those “easily identifiable and identified mosques” was and is the Finsbury Park Mosque in London, where the verminous Abu Hamza al-Masri used to preach, before being jailed for racial hatred and incitement to murder. BBC Home Editor Mark Easton said police believed that one mosque, was “linked to literally dozens of terrorist plots around Europe and beyond”.

Here’s a bit of a reminder of what that cleric often referred to as The Hook, because of his disfigurement by a landmine in Afghanistan, used to preach. Have a listen, have a read, and ask yourself, how many other clerics out there are teaching the same thing? Where is it originating from? None of it is new to me or should be new to you. And finally ask what may have played a bigger factor in driving people to terror – British foreign policy (as a galling letter from various Muslim Organisations to the government dared to suggest) and the wanton excesses of British society or the venomous ranting of religious fanatics claiming to represent God’s word on Earth?

Here’s most of what The Hook is saying in that video:

What makes Allah happy.. Allah is happy when a kaafir is killed! Allah is happy when a Muslim is relieved from agony. Now we are not tought this in the school. We are tought every soul is respected. Every soul?!.. Not every soul is respected. Every soul which Allah said is respected IS respected. The soul of a Muslim is more respected. The soul of a Jew or a Christian or a somebody under the leadership of an Islamic State is respected. Otherwise its like cattle!

Here’s another video where Abu Hamza is talking about getting “rid of everybody” who hinders the Jihad, even if that means killing fellow Muslims:

And here’s another one where Abu Hamza answers a question from the audience about the obligation of Jihad.

Some other quotes from Abu Hamza:

On 9/11:

“Everybody was happy when the planes hit the World Trade Center. Anybody who tells you that they are not happy, they are hypocrites on the Muslim nation. I am telling you, everybody.”

His explanation for all this joy and happiness?

“Well, the World Trade Center is doing globalization and making other countries poor, everybody will tell you that. It’s the centre of evil, political and financial for the whole world, and nobody listens.”

Back in 97/98 he told Muslims living in the UK that they “are living in a toilet and are living like animals”. He also called for martyrdom and Jihad against the West, describing the first stage of the Jihad as “bleeding the enemy”:

“We ask Muslims to do that, to be capable to do that, to be capable to bleed the enemies of Allah anywhere, by any means.

“You can’t do it by nuclear weapon, you do it by the kitchen knife, no other solution. You cannot do it by chemical weapons, you have to do it by mice poison. Like you imagine you have one small knife and you have a big animal in front of you.

“The size of the knife – you cannot slaughter him with this. You have to stab him here and there until he bleeds to death. Then you can cut up the meat as you like to, or leave it to the maggots. This is the first stage of Jihad.”

On people who sell alcohol:

Make sure that the person who gave him the licence for that wine shop doesn’t exist any more on the Earth. Finish him up. Give him Dawa (inviting non-Muslims to accept the truth of Islam). If he doesn’t respect Dawa, kill him.

“You have to understand that Dawa is good but it doesn’t survive alone. There is many prophets before Muhammad … they were killed because they did not have the sword with them.”

“Giving dawa” is exactly what the Iranian President was doing in his letter to President Bush, by the way. It was, in his own words, an invitation to “peace and appreciation of the truth.”, ie Islam.

On suicide bombing:

“It is not called suicide – this is called shahada, martyring, because if the only way to hurt the enemies of Islam except by taking your life for that, then it is allowed.”

and

“The person who hinders Allah’s rule, this man must be eliminated.”

More quotes here.

Most Muslims condemn Abu Hamza and say he does not represent their views or their religion. Yet he most certainly represents a lot of people’s religion (who strangely enough call their religion “Islam” too) and the view of many thousands of British Muslims. As he himself said: “I know thousands of people. This [Finsbury Park Mosque] is the largest mosque. It has four floors.” In fact the September 11 “20th hijacker,” Zacarias Moussaoui, was a frequent visitor there.

There are many other Abu Hamza’s in the West. And Omar Bakri Muhammads and Abu Qatadas.

And just how great is this tiny minority that agrees with Abu Hamza’s genocidal rantings? This POPULUS survey from December 2005, asked the question “How far would you agree with the general statements or teachings of the following Muslim leaders: Abu Hamza Al-Masri”. 13% overall said they “very much or somewhat agree” and 30% said they “very much or somewhat disagree” (note: 44% answered “dont know”, 13% put “neither”). However in the 18-24 year old category this rose to 27% for versus 14% against (39% entered “don’t know”, 20% “neither”). Declining to comment is often a deliberate strategy of deception (taqiya) by the way. It is common (because it is tought to them) for radical Islamists to disguise their true beliefs and intentions from the kafir.

More recent surveys reflect the same reality. James Forsyth summed up last week (note: links are JF’s):

A recent opinion poll of British Muslims, which Timothy Garton Ash wrote about this morning, makes for sobering reading. Only 31 percent support free speech if it offends religious groups. Seventy-eight percent want those who published the cartoons of Muhammad to be punished. A mere 29 percent believe the Holocaust happened as history teaches it. Forty-five percent are convinced that 9/11 was an American/Israeli conspiracy—and that number rises to 51 percent among Muslims aged 18-24. Thirty percent would rather live under sharia rather than British law and 28 percent would like Britain to become an Islamic state. Eleven percent have firmly decided that British foreign policy justified the July 7th bombings, and 31 percent of young Muslims agree with this idea. Sadly, this is no rogue poll. Other surveys have come up with very similar results.

These numbers demonstrate how imbecilic it is to argue that if only Tony Blair hadn’t allied himself with George W. Bush in the war on terror there would be no problem. So, if changing British foreign policy—or to be more frank, appeasement—won’t work, then what will? This is where pretty much everyone in Britain is stumped. A good place to start might be ceasing to tolerate people wandering around London boasting “We’re all Hezbollah now.”

Yep, thats a pretty good place to start. That and those “easily identifiable and identified mosques.”

I’ll leave you with one more video. This is the first 10 minutes of the the new documentary “Obsession: Radical Islam’s war against the West”. You can see more trailers on the official site.

Thats Hassan Nasrallah speaking at the end, by the way, preaching on Al-Manar TV that “The most honourable death is by killing. And the most honourable killing and the most glorious martyrdom is when a man is killed for the sake of Allah.” And what Allah hates most, I am guessing, is people “doing evil globalisation” and making Muslims poor (by giving them lots of money for all their oil, perhaps?).

UPDATE (16/9): Here’s one more video, entitled “Children of the Future Jihad”. Chad from the In the Bullpen compiled this “video composition on using children as tools in a war upon non-Islamic civilization”. (thanks for Debbie from Right Truth for this one)

UPDATE: (22/9/06): CNN has an interview with another British “cleric”, an associate of Abu Hanza who is unfortunately still free. In the interview he says the 9/11 attacks were justified (“every sincere Muslim was pleased because America deserved a punch in the nose”, yep, 3000 dead civilians is “a punch in the nose to him”), and he says there “should” be other attacks on the West, by Muslims, “in self-defence”. He calls Osama bin Laden “his honourable Sheikh”, whom he “loves more than himself” (note how he gets off on the shock value of those statements as he spits them out, sounding like a school yard bully). The man converted to Islam as an adult. Yet he says he “owes nothing to this country”. JihadWatch has a link to the video and further commentary on this imbecile. Watch his smirking face closely as he shown walking along the street. He looks more like a gangster thug, full of hate and violence, than a man of any spiritual persuasion. 27% of 18-24 year old British Muslims agreed with the views of Abu Hamza, who is even more outspoken in his calls to slaughter of infidels. Yet the presenter confidently states that the views expressed by this man would be repugnant to “the vast majority of Muslims”.

Mark Steyn was on the ABC’s Counterpoint program on Monday and they have put the transcript up on the Counterpoint site.

Michael Duffy barely had a chance to get started when Mark dropped a bombshell. Brazenly showing his true colours, yet concealing the revelation in an apparent joke (thus giving himself the ultimate escape clause should the ‘revolution’ not go according to plan), he announced his defection to the enemy camp:

Michael Duffy: Is this your first visit?

Mark Steyn: No, I was here a few years ago, not that many years ago but it was pre-9/11, so it seems like a lost age now, it could be something from two centuries ago for all the differences we’ve had since then.

Michael Duffy: You probably got through security a lot quicker then, did you?

Mark Steyn: Actually I get through security pretty quickly now because once you tell them you’re a columnist…they say, ‘What do you do?’ and I say, ‘I’m a newspaper communist. In my line of work, everything after five minutes is material.’ And they just whisk you through.

Safe in the Red stronghold of the ABC, the interviewer played along, covering brilliantly for the now unmasked Steyn by diverting the discussion to pinko ‘music’ talk for most of the interview.

The mask was back on and worn brilliantly as ever in the second half, most of which I reproduce below.

[#M_Expand transcript extract inpost|Hide transcript|

Michael Duffy: Let's talk a bit about the war in Iraq. What's it about? Why should America and Australia persist?

Mark Steyn: I think the reality of the situation in the Middle East is that you have a situation where we became over-invested in stability, and that stability proved to be terribly unhealthy for us. The Middle East dictators grew plump and prosperous and began exporting their problems, and that's true not just of our so-called enemies in the region like Saddam but also of our supposed allies, like the House of Saud and Mubarak. The object then was to find a point at which you could prick the Middle East stability, if you could prick this sort of puffed up balloon that it had become and somehow institute some change...no one knows where the change is going to wind up. It would be terrific if the whole Middle East was to be like Sweden or New Hampshire or Australia...it doesn't have to be that, if it becomes something else then that's good too.

Michael Duffy: You were just talking about export...you make a good point somewhere that if anyone wants to worry about globalisation, instead of Starbucks or Nike they should look at the export of Islamic fundamentalism from the desert basically to the heart of the West's biggest cities.

Mark Steyn: Exactly, and it's something that we didn't think about. Again, to go back to what the Archbishop [TOD: Pell] was saying, because we don’t think in terms of religion. Before September 11 when most people looked at the world they divided it into nations-there’s the Australians, there’s the Americans, there’s the Chinese, there’s the French-and we didn’t realise that there was this identity that’s beyond nations, that’s beyond the nominal citizenship that people hold, spreads across borders. You don’t even have to, as the Russians had…they had to insert deep sleepers into the United States and sort of maintain them covertly, being controlled directly from Moscow for decades until they could be activated. You don’t even need to do that if you’ve got a religion as a front in which your organisation nests, you can hang your shingle on Main Street and nobody will do a thing about it.

Michael Duffy: Let’s go to some of the things that Archbishop Pell was saying which I know you’ve written about at some length, demography and the rise of Islam. How will different birth rates change the world over the next 100 years?

Mark Steyn: Basically the most accurate guide to what the world is going to be like in 20 years time is who’s being born right now, and the reality is that if you go to the average maternity ward in France or Austria or Belgium or Netherlands, you will see that even though…at the moment as an overall proportion of the population, the Muslim population is relatively small, it’s officially about 10% in France, but if you go to a maternity ward in Leon you’ll see that about half the babies being born in that ward are in fact Muslim. Then you have to ask yourself is there a basic problem, is there a basic conflict between Islam and free societies? All of us know good, hard working, amusing, enjoyable, pleasurable, articulate, intelligent Muslims who are perfectly willing to live in a free society and want nothing more than to get on with their lives and build a future for their children. But, institutionally, Islam does not support that, and when you look at not just majority Muslim countries but countries where Islam is between about 20% and 50% of the population, very few of them are free societies. There’s Surinam and Serbio [??] and I think one in West Africa, and that suggests that the level of Muslim population that they’re about to reach in western Europe is going to call into question the stability of those societies.

Michael Duffy: And the figures are interesting internationally. I think you’ve written that in 1970 the developed world had twice as big a share of the global population as the Muslim world which was 30% to 15%, but by 2000 they were the same.

Mark Steyn: Yes, so basically they caught up between 1970 and now. What’s going to happen in 2020? The argument here is not that you have to be an ethnic Frenchman to understand the principles that animate the French state and French democracy. But at the same time, the idea that somehow France can still be France when there are no ethnic French people, there are no ethnic Spaniards, there are no ethnic Dutch people, and that somehow the inheritance of these countries can be transferred to a successor population…I think, at the very least, that’s a huge gamble, and it’s something, as the Archbishop says, we ought to at least be able to talk about honestly.

Michael Duffy: Apart from birth rates, there’s also the question of religion, although the two are intertwined. Can the West survive once the proportion of Christians drops below a certain level, do you think?

Mark Steyn: I don’t want to sound like an echo chamber but, again, I think that the Archbishop is right there too, that in fact what one might call radical secularism is insufficient as an organisational basis for society. There’s simply no precedent for sustained atheistic societies. So even if you’re not a believing Christian, you have a tremendous advantage in living in a society where there is a strong active Judeo-Christian tradition. You may not realise you benefit from that, you may frankly find it a bit of a pain in the neck that there are all these pious God-botherers living around you, but you will find that once they’re all gone that you don’t live in a secular paradise, that people turn to alternative faiths. The central reality of Islam is it’s not just winning in Europe by immigration, it’s also wining by conversion. It’s the fastest growing religion in the Western world though conversion as well as simply immigration.

Michael Duffy: They’re doing better than the Shakers.

Mark Steyn: Yes, in this formula, the Europeans…as you know, the Shakers believed you couldn’t reproduce, you could only win by conversion.

Michael Duffy: I think there are four of them left.

Mark Steyn: Yes, exactly, that’s the basic strategy of the European Union, that they’ve given up reproducing but they seem to think all their Euro ideas will survive simply because people will be converted to it. In the ghettos of the Netherlands and France that’s not happening.

Michael Duffy: Toynbee famously said civilizations die from suicide not murder, and you’ve made the important point that societies choose to fail or succeed by choosing what to worry about. If we look at the United States and Europe separately, is the West worrying about the right things at the moment?

Mark Steyn: Well, I don’t think so. I was listening to a couple of your listeners and your letters earlier, and it’s hardly my place to get off the plane and start immediately abusing your listeners…

Michael Duffy: Feel free, they’ll write in anyway.

Mark Steyn: …but I do think it’s very curious, this idea to choose to worry about climate change. Even if you look at the so-called problem of rising sea levels that threatens the Maldives, at the present rate that means the Maldives will be under water in the year 2500. Now, there are 350,000 people on the Maldives islands, and I like the Maldives, a very nice place. If it’s going to be under water by the year 2500 that’s fine, we can move those 350,000 people all the way to the south of France, and being Sunni Muslims they’ll fit right in by the year 2500 because everyone else in the south of France will be Sunni Muslims. And this idea that you demonstrate your virtue by worrying about entirely theoretical problems that will have no direct impact on you or your children or your grandchildren or your great-grandchildren, I think is a sign of decadence, to be honest.

Michael Duffy: Mark, there is a difference though between Western Europe…on the continent anyway, and America. America seems to take things a bit more seriously perhaps?

Mark Steyn: I do think the America is the great exceptional nation in the Western world. I should say that I think actually if I had to make a list of countries that are likely to survive the existential challenge posed by a resurgent Islam, I would put Australia number two on that list, simply because I think it’s less easy for Australians to live in the kind of happy-face, banal, sappy illusions that the European Union is living in. So I think it’s entirely possible to foresee a situation where Britain has in fact more or less collapsed but Australia lives on stronger than ever. I think Australia’s chances are better than most. But I do think America has an advantage in the sense that it hasn’t embraced to the same degree the kind of enervating principles of the social democratic state that now prevail in Europe. I mean, basically in Europe, once the state takes care of every issue of life, from childcare to healthcare to looking after your elderly parents to giving you six weeks paid vacation a year, 30-hour work weeks…what have you got to worry about? You are basically the world’s wrinkliest teenagers, you are left to go down to the record store and pick out your record collection, everything else is taken care of by the state. That’s not a healthy principle on which to build society.

Michael Duffy: Is that one of the reasons you’re a conservative or why you support smaller government?

Mark Steyn: Yes, I think big government is a national security issue. I live in the great state of New Hampshire in the United States which has…basically money is raised and spent at town level, so if you’ve got a budgetary overspend, it’s generally your neighbour that’s overspending, he’s listed in the phone book so you can call him up at home and shout at him. And I think there’s a lot to be said for small government precisely for that reason; it’s accountable. And the minute you get this big, bloated government…I mean, I love the way progressive people talk about ‘world government’ as if it would be a good thing, and if the UN were an embryo world government that would be a great thing. Well, is it more likely that you’re going to have New Hampshire or Swedish or Australian style government, or are you going to get Nigerian style government? The oil for food scandal tells you what the answer will be on that one.

Michael Duffy: Western Europe and America used to be closer together in terms of their values and so on, what happened to Western Europe, why did it move off?

Mark Steyn: I think that after WWII the United States took the position that the best thing it could do to prevent a resurgence of Nazism and Fascism and all the rest was to effectively guarantee Western Europe’s defence. I think defence welfare is even more dangerous than the other kinds of welfare. The Western Alliance is, in that sense, a joke because it’s basically one big sugar daddy, America, and then these whiney Western Europeans who are kind of like adolescents who never quite move out of the house but just want to moan and whine about the guy who effectively foots all the bills. I think it absolved those countries the core responsibilities of nationhood.

Michael Duffy: I guess Australia is a little different. We also want America to defend us but we feel we have to earn that.

Mark Steyn: Yes, and I think that’s the right way to do it. I think Australia is a grown up country in the sense that Germany no longer is.

_M#]