1. FORMER NAVY SAILOR CHARGED WITH PASSING SECRETS TO AL QAEDA

This should remind us of the huge security risks which arise from hiring non-native Britons in the Armed Forces.

http://abcnews.go.com/US/story?id=2933058&page=1

A former U.S. Navy sailor has been charged with allegedly passing military secrets about U.S. Navy movements through waters in the Middle East to al Qaeda-related Web sites during the spring of 2001, just months after the USS Cole was attacked in Yemen. Hassan Abujihaad, formerly known as Paul R. Hall, allegedly passed information about U.S. Navy warship movements in the Straits of Hormuz in April 2001 while he was a member of the Navy. The information passed along contained details about vulnerabilites of U.S. vessels - including susceptibility to small boat attacks by terrorists. Abujihaad was arrested today in Phoenix, according to a criminal complaint unsealed tonight that charged him with providing material support to terrorists who planned to kill U.S. nationals.

The complaint claims Abujihaad was an associate of Derrick Shareef, who allegedly tried to explode grenades at the Cherry Vale Mall outside Chicago during the height of the holiday shopping season last December. Shareef was arrested on Dec. 6, 2006, when he traded stereo speakers for dud grenades in an FBI sting operation. Abujihaad's arrest arises out of the investigation of Babar Ahmad, who is suspected of developing radical Islamic Web sites popular with members of al Qaeda and other mujahedeen. Ahmad was indicted in the United States in 2004 for allegedly providing material support to Chechen terrorist groups and the Taliban. Ahmad is currently battling his extradition to the United States in British courts. The British government has said that Ahmad can be extradited to the United States to face trial. Lawyers for Babar Ahmad have filed an appeal with Britain's High Court. The earlier charges mentioned that Ahmad had received critical information about ship movements from a U.S. Navy sailor, but the serviceman was not identified at the time.

From 1997 until his arrest in 2004, Ahmad allegedly ran Web sites for Azzam Publications, which used to carry propaganda for al Qaeda, including bin Laden's1996 Declaration of War against the United States. The Azzam Web site was a key recruitment and propaganda tool for al Qaeda and mujahedeen. According to an indictment in a related case unsealed last July, a defendant named Sayed Talha Ahsan, "In or about April 2001 the defendant [Ahsan] . possessed, accessed, modified and resaved a document containing then-classified United States Navy plans of a United States Naval Battle Group operating in the Straits of Hormuz and discussing the Naval Group's vulnerabilities to terrorist attack. "According to the indictment, Ahsan allegedly helped run the Web sites with Ahmad. The Abujihaad case is being investigated by the U.S.Attorney's Office in Connecticut, since some of theWeb servers they allegedly used were based inConnecticut.

2. 60% OF EUROPEANS THINK ISRAEL GREATEST THREAT TO WORLD PEACE

The idea of Israel, a country the size of Wales with a population less than London, as the greatest threat to world peace, is simply preposterous. Israel isn't even a major power, but a medium-sized regional one with no military interests other than not being attacked by her neighbors. So long as she doesn't expect us to fight her wars for her (something they can't make us do; only our own leaders' stupidity can) we have no rational complaint against her. Yes, she took her national territory at the point of a gun, but so did half the nations on earth, including the Arabs who whine about her doing it. The real greatest threat to world peace is the appetite of Islam to dominate the entire world.

The runners up would probably be the witless military blundering of certain American presidents, followed by the chance that China's autocratic rulers may get nasty one day about using their nation's vast military power, which is currently just sitting there doing nothing, followed by the sheer inability of the Moslem states of the Middle East to produce stable and reasonable governments for themselves. This story is an index of how far the European public has been brainwashed by its EU masters, who would like to serve up Israel's head on a plate to the Arabs in order to curry favour for their 'Eurabia' project to merge Europe with the Middle East. Incorporating Turkey into the EU is just the beginning; the Eurocrats want to merge with the whole Mideast, as part of their attempt to make the EU a world power rivaling the USA. If the price is the liquidation of Britain and the other historic nations of Europe, they do not care: power is their only God.

http://www.thestar.co.za/index.php?fSectionId=132&fArticleId=275436 Israelis have reacted angrily to a European Union poll in which most of those surveyed reportedly believe that Israel poses the greatest threat to world peace. Almost 60% of the Europeans surveyed believe Israel is more dangerous than North Korea, Iran, Iraq and Afghanistan, according to the survey. Partial results were published in Spain's leading newspaper, El Pais, on Thursday. The United States is ranked as sixth most dangerous on the list. The full findings of the poll were due to be released today. Many Israelis consider Europe to be anti-Israel, largely due to EU support for the Palestinian cause in the United Nations and other world forums during the past three years of Israeli-Palestinian fighting. "Who is the most dangerous in the world? We are," read a large headline in the mass-circulation daily Ma'ariv. Diaspora Affairs Minister Natan Sharansky accused Europeans of being antisemitic for placing Israel on the list above countries that serve as bases of terrorism, like Iraq and Iran. Israel accuses Iran of sponsoring the Hezbollah militia, which has carried out attacks against Israel from Lebanon.

The Los Angeles-based Simon Wiesenthal Centre, which fights antisemitism, said the survey's results meant that the EU should not have any role in any future peace talks between Israel and its Arab neighbours. Political analyst Seffi Hendler wrote in Ma'ariv that "a bad odour" arises from the poll. "Although the Israeli-Palestinian fighting endangers world peace, Europeans should not go so far as to jump to the conclusion that Israel is a threat to other countries," Hendler said. The survey, conducted in mid-October, questioned 7,515 citizens of the 15-nation bloc, El Pais said. No other details about the poll's methodology were available.

3. WHY EUROPEANS SHOULD SUPPORT ISRAEL

http://www.brusselsjournal.com/node/1965

One of the most frustrating things to watch is the powerful anti-Israeli and sometimes outright anti-Semitic current that is prevalent in too much of Europe's media. Bat Ye'or's predictions about Arab anti-Semitism spreading in Europe as the continent's Islamization and descent into Eurabia continues have so far proved depressingly accurate. This trend needs to be fought, vigorously, by all serious European anti-Jihadists. Not only because it is immoral and unfair to Israelis, which it is, but also because those who assist it are depriving Europeans of the opportunity to fully grasp the threat and understand the nature of the Jihad that is now targeting much of Europe as well. In 2005 the Norwegian police issued a mobile security alarm to Carl I. Hagen, leader of the right-wing Progress Party. Mr. Hagen had criticized Islam and could see no similarity with the concept of morality and justice found in Christianity. During the 1990s, Mr. Hagen was one of the few politicians who protested against giving money to Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat as a part of the Norwegian-brokered Oslo Peace Process.

Hagen said that if Israel loses in the Middle East, Europe will succumb to Islam next. He felt that Christians should support Israel and oppose Islamic inroads into Europe. In an unprecedented step, a group of Muslim ambassadors to Norway blasted Carl I. Hagen in a letter to the newspaper Aftenposten, claiming that he had offended 1.3 billion Muslims around the world. Other Norwegian politicians quickly caved in and condemned Hagen. Maybe Norway, "the country of peace" and home to the Nobel Peace Prize, will get along just fine with Islam, "the religion of peace." Although some political leaders such as Mr. Carl I. Hagen have a clear understanding of what's going on, they are unfortunately few and far between. Most European media commentators are hostile to the Jewish state of Israel, partly because they get angry with anybody defending themselves against Islamic Jihad instead of surrendering, and partly because they want to project their own feelings of guilt from the Holocaust onto Israel by recasting the Jews as villains and the Palestinians as victims. French filmmaker Pierre Rehov made the film Suicide Killers where he interviewed the families of Palestinian suicide bombers.

He warns that we are facing "a neurosis at the level of an entire civilization," a "culture of hatred in which the uneducated are brainwashed to a level where their only solution in life becomes to kill themselves and kill others in the name of a God. I hear a mother saying 'Thank God, my son is dead.' Her son had became a shaheed, a martyr, which for her was a greater source of pride than if he had became an engineer, a doctor or a winner of the Nobel Prize. [...] They don't see the innocent being killed, they only see the impure that they have to destroy." Rehov believes that we are dealing with "a new form of Nazism" that it is going to spread to Europe and the United States, too. Spanish journalist Sebastian Villar Rodriguez claims that Europe died in Auschwitz: "We assassinated 6 million Jews in order to end up bringing in 20 million Muslims!" Yet in 2007, Ciempozuelos, a small Madrid suburb, refused to commemorate Holocaust Day and opted instead to commemorate the 'Day of Palestinian Genocide.' In Britain following Muslim pressure, the Bolton Council scrapped its Holocaust Memorial Day event. The Muslim Council of Britain asked for a Genocide Day to protest the Israeli "genocide" against the Palestinians. The secretary-general of the MCB, Dr Muhammad Abdul Bari, has earlier compared the situation of Muslims in Britain to Jews under Hitler. We thus have the absurd situation where the Nazis of today are presented as Jews while the Jews are presented as Nazis. French philosopher Alain Finkielkraut thinks that Auschwitz has become part of the foundation of the European Union, a culture based on guilt. "I can understand the feeling of remorse that is leading Europe to this, but this remorse goes too far." It is too great a gift to present Hitler to reject every single aspect of European culture. This is said by the Jewish son of an Auschwitz prisoner.

The Holocaust was an unspeakable crime. It also did massive damage to Europe's own identity and cultural confidence, and is one of the major causes of Europe's seeming inability to withstand the ongoing Islamic Jihad. As Hugh Fitzgerald notes, "Fortunately for so many, and for the Arabs, the victory of Israel in the Six-Day War promptly provided a reason to depict Jews as villains, not victims. This found an eager audience of Europeans, who were already eager for psychological reasons to find fault with Jews so as to avoid thinking unduly about the behavior of many European peoples and states during the war. [...] The damage done to the morale of Europe because of the destruction of European Jewry has been great. If Western Europe, or the West generally, were after all that has happened to permit Israel to go under, Europe would not recover." He warns that those who believe sacrificing Israel would in any way stop the global Jihad are very wrong. On the contrary, "The loss of Israel would fill the Arabs and Muslims with such triumphalism that their Jihad in Western Europe and elsewhere (including the Americas) would receive a gigantic boost.

The duty is to make sure that Islam covers the globe; that Islam dominates, and Muslims rule." Europeans need to understand how closely intertwined are the fates of Israel and of Europe itself. The term "Judeo-Christian" is not a cliche. We cannot defend Western civilization without defending its Jewish component, without which modern Western culture would have been unthinkable. The religious identity of the West has two legs: The Christian and the Jewish ones. It needs both to stand upright. Sacrificing one to save the other is like fighting a battle by chopping off one of your legs, throwing it at the feet of your enemies and shouting: "You won't get the other one! We will never surrender!" We could always hope that our enemies will laugh themselves to death faster than we bleed to death, the Monty Python way of fighting. Maybe that works, but most likely it will leave us crippled and pathetic, if not dead. I agree with Mr. Finkielkraut: To reduce absolutely everything about Europe to gas chambers, thereby allowing the Nazis the opportunity to expropriate everything that has been created during thousands of years, is to grant Adolf Hitler victory posthumously. We should not award him that pleasure, especially since what would replace Western civilization would be Islamic culture, the most warlike and anti-Semitic on earth, and greatly admired by Mr. Hitler for it. We cannot change what has happened in the past. We should, however, consider it our duty to combat anti-Semitism in the here and now and make sure that the remaining Jews both in Europe and in Israel are safe. This is not just because it is our moral and historical obligation, which it is, but also because we only gain the right to defend ourselves against Islamization of we grant the same right to Israel. Likewise, we can only begin to heal our self-inflicted civilizational wounds if we embrace the Jewish component of our cultural identity.

4. ISLAMIC EXTREMIST 'INFILTRATE OXBRIDGE'

We have always been concerned about the security risks brought by Muslim immigration and this fact proves, again, that we are right.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2007/03/11/noxford11.xml

Leading universities including Oxford and Cambridge have been targeted by Islamic extremists who remain widely active on campuses, a prominent academic is warning. Up to 48 British universities have been infiltrated by fundamentalists and the threat posed by radical groups must be "urgently addressed", according to Prof Anthony Glees. The claim calls into question the Government's attempted crackdown on Islamic extremism in universities and casts doubt on claims by Bill Rammell, the Higher Education Minister, that the problem is not widespread. Prof Glees will warn the Association of University Chief Security Officers (Aucso) next month that the disbanded extremist group, al-Muhajiroun, claims to have infiltrated "the main campuses such as Cambridge, Oxford, the London School of Economics and Imperial College".

His speech on "radicalism in universities" also states that at its peak before the July 7 bombings in 2005, al-Muhajiroun had a presence at "more than 48 universities and faculties", and that Omar Bakri Mohammed, the group's founder, claims it is "still operational" in several campuses. Prof Glees, the director of Brunel University's Centre for Intelligence and Security Studies, said: "We must accept this problem is widespread and underestimated. Unless clear and decisive action against campus extremism is taken, the security situation in the UK can only deteriorate." Following a report from Prof Glees showing that 31 universities and colleges had hard-line Islamic groups within their campuses, the Department for Education and Skills last year issued guidelines on dealing with any extremism. Student Islamic societies have faced growing scrutiny after it emerged that one of 12 men charged in connection with the alleged plot to blow up transatlantic airliners was president of the Islamic Society at London Metropolitan University. Last year, Aucso launched a "counter-terrorism" group to tackle the spread of Islamic fundamentalism on campuses.

Prof Glees called on the Government to provide extra investment in campus security and urged university officials to interview undergraduates to ensure that they were bona fide students. A spokesman for Oxford University said: "We always take any extremism seriously and work closely with the police on any form of extremism that might affect our students or staff." A Cambridge University spokesman said he was not aware of any current extremist activity but that the university "remained vigilant". The Government's controversial guidance asked university staff to "monitor" student Islamic societies and report any "Asian-looking" students they suspected of extremism to the security services. Student groups attacked the move as "bearing on the side of McCarthyism". Other critics suggest that the guidelines are widely ignored. Chris Pope, an associate fellow of the Royal United Services Institute for Defence and Security Studies, said: "My understanding is that this problem is ongoing and expanding in some campuses."

A spokesman for Universities UK, the umbrella group for British vice-chancellors, said: "In the rare event of such problems, universities work very closely with the police and other authorities." In a recent report from a London-based Arabic newspaper, Anjem Choudary, the former head of al-Muhajiroun in Britain, who joined the group as a student at the University of Surrey, confirmed that while the movement officially disbanded in 2005, "the students of Omar Bakri continue to preach on campuses". Last year, Dhiren Barot, said to be al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden's "UK general", was jailed for 40 years for planning terrorist attacks. Barot, 34, faked his identity in order to study at Brunel University. The London School of Ecomonics and Imperial College were unable to comment. Mr Rammell said: "Our assessment has not changed. Violent extremism in the name of Islam is a real, credible and sustained threat to the UK and there is evidence of a serious, but not widespread risk of violent extremism in the name of Islam on our university campuses."

5. 13-YEAR-OLDS MARRY IN MASS CEREMONY

Let's not forget Nick Griffin and Mark Collett have been on trial twice because, among many other things, they warned about the problem of many adult Muslims grooming under-age British girls for sex .This fact not only vindicates our position on Islam but also underlines the risk of granting special right to ethnic minorities.

http://www.news.com.au/story/0,23599,21354139-401,00.html

TWO 13-year old Malaysians were the youngest among 10 couples who were married in a joint wedding ceremony in eastern Terengganu state, a report said today. Sukhri Ali and Mariam Din, who were neighbours in an indigenous people settlement, were married yesterday according to Muslim rites after courting for a month, The Star daily said in a report. They were advised to tie the knot by the head of the village which is located on the fringes of the peninsula's largest national park, Taman Negara, the newspaper said. The families of the two teenagers did not object to the wedding, the report said. It was the custom of their community that a boy and girl who had reached puberty could get married. The lovebirds had met while on a hunting trip, when "their eyes met" and "hearts fluttered," before they started dating, the Star said. The minimum legal age for marriage in Malaysia is 21 but those under 18 years who want to marry can do so with parental consent. Wedding ceremonies are also typically held according to traditional or religious customs.

6. FREE RADICAL: AYAAN HIRSI ALI INFURIATES MUSLIMS AND DISCOMFORTS LIBERALS.

http://www.opinionjournal.com/editorial/feature.html?id=110009771

Ayaan Hirsi Ali is untrammeled and unrepentant: "I am supposed to apologize for saying the prophet is a pervert and a tyrant," she declares. "But that is apologizing for the truth." Statements such as these have brought Ms. Hirsi Ali to world-wide attention. Though she recently left her adopted country, Holland--where her friend and intellectual collaborator Theo van Gogh was murdered by a Muslim extremist in 2004--she is still accompanied by armed guards wherever she travels. Ms. Hirsi Ali was born in 1969 in Mogadishu--into, as she puts it, "the Islamic civilization, as far as you can call it a civilization." In 1992, at age 22, her family gave her hand to a distant relative; had the marriage ensued, she says, it would have been "an arranged rape." But as she was shipped to the appointment via Europe, she fled, obtaining asylum in Holland.

There, "through observation, through experience, through reading," she acquainted herself with a different world. "The culture that I came to and I live in now is not perfect," Ms. Hirsi Ali says. "But this culture, the West, the product of the Enlightenment, is the best humanity has ever achieved." Unease over Muslim immigration had been rising in the Low Countries for some time. For instance, when the gay right-wing politician Pim Fortuyn--"I am in favor of a cold war with Islam," he said, and believed the borders should be closed to Muslims--was gunned down in 2002, it was widely assumed his killer was an Islamist. There was a strange sense of relief when he turned out to be a mere animal-rights activist. Ms. Hirsi Ali brought integration issues to further attention, exposing domestic abuse and even honor killings in the Dutch-Muslim "dish cities." In 2003, she won a seat in the parliament as a member of the center-right VVD Party, for People's Party for Freedom and Democracy.

The next year, she wrote the script for a short film called "Submission." It investigated passages from the Quran that Ms. Hirsi Ali contends authorize violence against women, and did so by projecting those passages onto naked female bodies. In retrospect, she deeply regrets the outcome: "I don't think the film was worth the human life." The life in question was that of Van Gogh, a prominent controversialist and the film's director. At the end of 2004, an Islamist named Mohammed Buyeri shot him as he was bicycling to work in downtown Amsterdam, then almost decapitated him with a curved sword. He left a manifesto impaled to the body: "I know for sure that you, Oh Hirsi Ali, will go down," was its incantation. "I know for sure that you, Oh unbelieving fundamentalist, will go down." The shock was palpable. Holland--which has the second largest per capita population of Muslims in the EU, after France--had always prided itself on its pluralism, in which all groups would be tolerated but not integrated. The killing made clear just how apart its groups were. "Immediately after the murder," Ms. Hirsi Ali says, "we learned Theo's killer had access to education, he had learned the language, he had taken welfare.

He made it very clear he knew what democracy meant, he knew what liberalism was, and he consciously rejected it. . . . He said, 'I have an alternative framework. It's Islam. It's the Quran.' " At his sentencing, Mohammed Buyeri said he would have killed his own brother, had he made "Submission" or otherwise insulted the One True Faith. "And why?" Ms. Hirsi Ali asks. "Because he said his god ordered him to do it. . . . We need to see," she continues, "that this isn't something that's caused by special offense, the right, Jews, poverty. It's religion." Ms. Hirsi Ali was forced into living underground; a hard-line VVD minister named Rita Verdonk, cracking down on immigration, canceled her citizenship for misstatements made on her asylum application--which Ms. Hirsi Ali had admitted years before and justified as a means to win quicker admission at a time of great personal vulnerability. The resulting controversy led to the collapse of Holland's coalition government. Ms. Hirsi Ali has since decamped for America--in effect a political refugee from Western Europe--to take up a position with the American Enterprise Institute. But the crisis, she says, is "still simmering underneath and it might erupt--somewhere, anywhere." That partly explains why Ms. Hirsi Ali's new autobiography, "Infidel," is already a best seller. It may also have something to do with the way she scrambles our expectations. In person, she is modest, graceful, enthralling. Intellectually, she is fierce, even predatory: "We know exactly what it is about but we don't have the guts to say it out loud," she says. "We are too weak to take up our role. The West is falling apart.

The open society is coming undone." Many liberals loathe her for disrupting an imagined "diversity" consensus: It is absurd, she argues, to pretend that cultures are all equal, or all equally desirable. But conservatives, and others, might be reasonably unnerved by her dim view of religion. She does not believe that Islam has been "hijacked" by fanatics, but that fanaticism is intrinsic in Islam itself: "Islam, even Islam in its nonviolent form, is dangerous." The Muslim faith has many variations, but Ms. Hirsi Ali contends that the unities are of greater significance. "Islam has a very consistent doctrine," she says, "and I define Islam as I was taught to define it: submission to the will of Allah. His will is written in the Quran, and in the hadith and Sunna. What we are all taught is that when you want to make a distinction between right and wrong, you follow the prophet. Muhammad is the model guide for every Muslim through time, throughout history." This supposition justifies, in her view, a withering critique of Islam's most holy human messenger. "You start by scrutinizing the morality of the prophet," and then ask: "Are you prepared to follow the morality of the prophet in a society such as this one?" She draws a connection between Mohammed's taking of child brides and modern sexual oppressions--what she calls "this imprisonment of women." She decries the murder of adulteresses and rape victims, the wearing of the veil, arranged marriages, domestic violence, genital mutilation and other contraventions of "the most basic freedoms." These sufferings, she maintains, are traceable to theological imperatives. "People say it is a bad strategy,"

Ms. Hirsi Ali says forcefully. "I think it is the best strategy. . . . Muslims must choose to follow their rational capacities as humans and to follow reason instead of Quranic commands. At that point Islam will be reformed." This worldview has led certain critics to dismiss Ms. Hirsi Ali as a secular extremist. "I have my ideas and my views," she says, "and I want to argue them. It is our obligation to look at things critically." As to the charges that she is an "Enlightenment fundamentalist," she points out, rightly, that people who live in democratic societies are not supposed to settle their disagreements by killing one another. And yet contemporary democracies, she says, accommodate the incitement of such behavior: "The multiculturalism theology, like all theologies, is cruel, is wrongheaded, and is unarguable because it is an utter dogmatism. . . . Minorities are exempted from the obligations of the rest of society, so they don't improve. . . . With this theory you limit them, you freeze their culture, you keep them in place." The most grievous failing of the West is self-congratulatory passivity: We face "an external enemy that to a degree has become an internal enemy, that has infiltrated the system and wants to destroy it."

She believes a more drastic reaction is required: "It's easy," she says, "to weigh liberties against the damage that can be done to society and decide to deny liberties. As it should be. A free society should be prepared to recognize the patterns in front of it, and do something about them." She says the West must begin to think long term about its relationship with Islam--because the Islamists are. Ms. Hirsi Ali notes Muslim birth rates are vastly outstripping those elsewhere (particularly in Western Europe) and believes this is a conscious attempt to extend the faith. Muslims, she says, treat women as "these baby-machines, these son-factories. . . . We need to compete with this," she goes on. "It is a totalitarian method. The Nazis tried it using women as incubators, literally to give birth to soldiers. Islam is now doing it. . . . It is a very effective and very frightening way of dealing with human beings." All of this is profoundly politically incorrect. But for this remarkable woman, ideas are not abstractions. She forces us back to first principles, and she punctures complacencies. These ought to be seen as virtues, even by those who find some of Ms. Hirsi Ali's ideas disturbing or objectionable. Society, after all, sometimes needs to be roused from its slumbers by agitators who go too far so that others will go far enough. Mr. Rago is an editorial page writer for The Wall Street Journal. Recommended reading:

Recommended Books:
The Sword of the Prophet:
http://www.bnp.org.uk/shopping/excalibur/item.php?id=467

Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam and the Crusades:
http://www.bnp.org.uk/shopping/excalibur/item.php?id=689