All part of the African version of the Taliban, out to stir up more Islamist terror.

Eleven youths suspected of being trained with the hardline Islamist group of Al-Shabaab in the south-central Somalia were arrested. The youths reportedly arrived from Mogadishu to Hargeisaand had lived in the United States.

And

Somaliland security forces arrested five people after they raided a house in Hargeisa. The suspects consist of four men who are said to be from the United States and a woman from Mogadishu, all five suspects were taken into custody yesterday.

Local newspapers reported today that the woman who came from Mogadishu rented a villa in Hargeisa days before the four men arrived from the US. Members of the security forces had received a tip about the terrorist suspects and were ready to move in and arrest them.

Seems to me that we have a terrorist problem right here at home. What does the Obama Administration intend to do about it?

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One more example of how Islamists have managed to impose their values on the West, rather than assimilating.

A member of the Lords intended to invite her colleagues to a private meeting in a conference room in the House of Lords to meet the Dutch politician Geert Wilders, an elected member of the Dutch parliament, to watch his controversial movie Fitna and discuss the movie and Mr. WildersÂ’ opinions with him.

Barely had the invitation been sent to all the members of the House when Lord Ahmed raised hell. He threatened to mobilize 10,000 Muslims to prevent Mr. Wilders from entering the House and threatened to take the colleague who was organizing the event to court. The result is that the event, which should have taken place next Thursday was cancelled.

Seems to me that what you have here is that a Muslim has been allowed to impose his values on what other members of the House of Lords may discuss and who they may meet with. Seems to me that this is antithetical to the values that Great Britain used to stand for – but then again, maybe allowing so many Muslims into the UK has weakened the sterner stuff of which the British were once made, resulting in a Britain that is significantly less great than in former days.

On a related note, Geert Wilders and Robert Spencer have a great piece in National Review on the threat to freedom of speech from those who, like Lord Ahmed, would suppress free speech when it is critical of Islam.

If Geert Wilders is silenced, all those who oppose attempts to impose Islamic legal norms upon the West will be silenced also. European nations and the United States should stop appeasing Islam and start fighting together against the rapidly increasing Islamization of Europe. This is a struggle for human rights and human dignity, and for the great heritage of Western civilization that has given so many things to the world, yet whose children and heirs seem curiously embarrassed and reluctant to defend it.

Enough is enough. We must defend our freedom, or we will most certainly lose it.

I encourage you to read the whole thing.

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I’ll agree that not everyone who opposes some aspect of Israeli policy is an anti-Semite. However, those who oppose Israel’s right to defend itself from terrorism – and its right to exist at all – usually anti-Semitism lies at the heart of the issue.

Take, for example, this situation from Canada.

Re: Anti-Zionism Is Not Anti-Semitism, letters to the editor, Jan. 21.

Why don't your letter writers come and tell their analytical garbage to my son's 20-year-old friend, who last week ended up in hospital after being beaten up in Toronto? His "crime"? He was wearing a Magen David (the Jewish, not Zionist, Star of David). As he fell to numerous blows, his attackers shouted, "Jewish [not Zionist] scum. Let's see how strong you are without your army now!"

The police were most helpful: "We will lay charges only if we know who they are."

Now a couple of observations here.

1) This was a hate crime. The attack was upon a man wearing the symbol of his religious faith, and had epithets hurled at him based upon his religion. The scum who attacked him had no way of knowing what his position on Israel or the war in Gaza were – they simply picked out a convenient Jew to assault simply because he was a Jew. They make no distinction between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism – why should we in this instance?

2) The Canadian police and media seem quite unwilling to give this hate crime the treatment it deserves. Maybe that is because they don’t see the difference between Jews and Zionists either. Would the incident have been treated the same way if it were a Muslim attacked for wearing some symbol of his/her faith, and insulted with anti-Muslim slurs during the attack? Or would the incident have been a priority for both as an example of the “growing intolerance” against Muslims?

3) Of course, we don’t see incidents like the hypothetical I proposed above. Maybe that is because Jews, Zionists or otherwise, and those of us who are supportive of Israel are motivated by something other than the hatred that underlies the anti-Semitic ideology of all too many of Israel’s opponents. That’s why in every instance of violence surrounding rallies and demonstration the associated acts of violence were committed not by the supporters of Israel, but rather by the “peace-loving” supporters of the terrorists of Hamas. Similarly, Jews, not Muslims, are regularly the victims of these sorts of incidents – in which the targets of “anti-Zionist” hate are targets because they are Jews, not because they are Zionists..

Now are you sure that you really want to try to argue that antipathy towards Jews as Jews isn’t the underlying motivation behind a significant part of the “anti-Zionist” activity we are assured is not anti-Semitism?

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Apparently even true statements that are arguably true can result in criminal convictions in Europe if they insult Islam.

Austrian far-right parliamentarian Susanne Winter was convicted Thursday of incitement because of her anti-Muslim statements, including the claim that Islam's prophet Mohammed was a paedophile. A court in Winter's home town of Graz also found the 51-year-old politician guilty of humiliating a religion. She was sentenced to a fine of 24,000 euros (31,000 dollars) euros and a suspended prison term of three months, Austrian news agency APA reported.

The politician, who took a seat in parliament last fall for the Freedom Party (FPOe), made the anti-Islamic remarks in January 2008.

Now I have said in the past that I do not necessarily accept the validity of the claim that Muhammad was a pedophile. While Muslim sources do indicate that he did consummate a marriage with a 9-year-old, I’m not willing to go so far as to pass judgment on his psychological health – instead I prefer to simply condemn as evil a man who in his 50s foists himself sexually upon a pre-pubescent girl. If Islam is “humiliated” by such things, I’d argue that the source of that humiliation is the moral degeneracy of its false prophet, not commentary upon that deviancy by non-Muslims.

Following close on the heels of the decision of a Dutch court to order the prosecution of Geert Wilders for daring to speak out against some of the evils committed in the name of Islam based upon the precise language of the Quran, I think it is now safe to say that the spirit of the Enlightenment is being smothered by those who would impose Islamic censorship upon non-Muslims in the name of “tolerance” and “sensitivity”. Should they succeed (as they appear to be doing), how long will the light of freedom be permitted to burn here in America before some future majority of the Supreme Court decides to reinterpret the First Amendment’s guarantees in light of “contemporary world standards” using the judgments of foreign courts to radically alter our liberties forever?

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In other words, he isn't REALLY banning torture, despite his claims to the contrary.

[Obama's new executive orders] will also prohibit the C.I.A. from using coercive interrogation methods, requiring the agency to follow the same rules used by the military in interrogating terrorism suspects, government officials said.

But the orders leave unresolved complex questions surrounding the closing of the Guantánamo prison, including whether, where and how many of the detainees are to be prosecuted. They could also allow Mr. Obama to reinstate the C.I.A.’s detention and interrogation operations in the future, by presidential order, as some have argued would be appropriate if Osama bin Laden or another top-level leader of Al Qaeda were captured.

In other words, Obama just signed an order that said "I'm banning what I call torture until I decide that I want to un-ban it. It's not illegal or unethical or contrary to American values if I'm the president who orders it."

This does, however, make it pretty clear that there will be no criminal prosecutions of those who were authorized to use harsh techniques against jihadi swine during the Bush Administration. After all, Obama doesn't want a legal precedent that would bind his hands when and if he decides that those same methods were a good idea after all.

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Declaring the principles of the Enlightenment to be in violation of contemporary legal and social norms in Europe, a Dutch court has ordered that Geert Wilders stand trial for daring to speak in a contemptuous fashion regarding Islam and the Quran.

MP Geert Wilders, who leads the anti-immigration PVV party, should be prosecuted for discrimination and inciting racial hatred, Amsterdam's appeal court ruled on Wednesday.

'This is a black day for me and for freedom of speech,' Wilders told the Telegraaf on Wednesday. 'I had not expected it [this ruling].'

The public prosecution department has received dozens of complaints about Wilders' anti-Islam film Fitna and his statements in the media over the past few years.

But at the end of June last year, the department said it did not have enough grounds to prosecute him and that a healthy legal system should allow plenty of leeway to people involved in political debate.

Newspaper letters

The appeal court said that while freedom of speech was important, there were limits to that freedom.

Several of the complaints relate to articles or letters by Wilders which were published in the Volkskrant newspaper. For example, in August 2007 he called for the Koran to be banned. 'I have had enough of Islam in the Netherlands: no more Muslim immigrants,' the MP wrote. He also compared the Koran to Adolf Hitler's book Mein Kampf.

Lawyer Haroon Raza, one of those who asked the court of appeal for its position, points to the 'massive social unrest' which Wilders has generated and says this is why he should be prosecuted.

Wilders' refusal to debate the issues with Muslims themselves means that those who feel insulted by his comments cannot counter the claims he makes, Raza told the Volkskrant.

In other words, the outrage of Muslims is grounds for suppressing the speech of non-Muslims -- and a refusal to engage in debate with those one views as evil renders one's speech criminal.

Here is Wilders' great offense -- Fitna. In the name of the inalienable right to speak freely, I post it here and challenge any person to try to force me to take it down.

I wonder -- will President Obama have the balls to stand up for human rights when they are being violated by an ally like the Netherlands? Will he stand up to members of the Religion of Terror whose own violence and intolerance leads the government of a nation that was once one of the major centers of Enlightenment thought to repudiate one of its fundamental principles by engaging in a prosecution of one who dares to speak out against what he views as the dangerous nature of the backwards teachings of a false religion? Or will he remain mute, in effect according to the religion of his father and step-father (and, according to Islamic law, his own religion by virtue of his parentage and his public recitation of the shahadah) a level of protection that he would reject if it were accorded to any other faith?

(NOTE TO ILLITERATE LIBERALS -- No, I did not say Obama is a Muslim. I accept his statement that he is a Christian, but do feel it necessary to note his status under sharia. For more info on my position, read these earlier posts.)

H/T Gateway Pundit, Malkin, STACLU, Hot Air

UPDATE: Ezra Levant, a crusader for free speech rights in Canada who has been repeatedly targeted by the Islamic Censorship Machine, fisks the ruling of the court.

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Confirming just what has always been known by those who are not shills for terrorists.

What really is behind the numbers reported on the number of civilian casualties in the Gaza Strip? Italian newspaper Corriere Della Sera reported Thursday that a doctor working in Gaza's Shifa Hospital claimed that Hamas has intentionally inflated the number of casualties resulting from Israel's Operation Cast Lead.

"The number of deceased stands at no more than 500 to 600. Most of them are youths between the ages of 17 to 23 who were recruited to the ranks of Hamas, who sent them to the slaughter," according to the newspaper article.

In other words, their tactics are not dissimilar to those practiced by the Nazis in the last days of WWII, when they armed members of the Hitler Youth (remember, membership was not voluntary) and placed them in harm's way in a last ditch effort to protect that malign regime from its well-deserved defeat. That is appropriate, given that the Hamas program of anti-Semitism and genocide bears much in common with that espoused by the Nazi Party -- which a number of Hamas' spiritual and political ancestors adhered to during that time.

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It isn’t just that we once again find members of the ersatz “Religion of Peace” ready to engage in acts of murder mayhem, and jihad against the United States. Rather it is a tiny detail overlooked by other commenters on the matter.

Two cousins from the Chicago area have pleaded guilty in Ohio to taking part in a plot to recruit and train terrorists to kill American soldiers.
Federal prosecutors say the men had been training and planning to go overseas so that they could kill U.S. soldiers in Iraq or Afghanistan.

Authorities say the men were recruited by three Toledo men organizing the plot. All three were convicted last summer and are awaiting sentencing.

Khaleel Ahmed of Chicago and Zubair Ahmed of suburban North Chicago both pleaded guilty Thursday in U.S. District Court to conspiracy to provide material support to terrorists.

Each faces a maximum of 15 years in prison.

Prosecutors say the two men received training in firearms and counter-surveillance so they could join the insurgency against U.S. troops.

They were alleged to be planning to go abroad – but that little bit that I bolded makes me wonder about a potential problem closer to home.

IÂ’ve been to North Chicago. Indeed, I went to school there and worked there when I was from the time I was 13 until I was 21.

North Chicago, you see, is the community that abuts Naval Station, Great Lakes, where my father was stationed for many years. It is home to the US NavyÂ’s only boot camp, as well as a great many advanced training programs for enlisted personnel in critical specialties. Here's hoping that federal authorities are looking closely at this connection -- and making sure that there is not a cell of terrorists preparing to strike at the heart of our national defense.

H/T Founding Bloggers

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Whatever will the liberals do now that their criticism of the wiretapping of foreign calls has been upheld by the courts as constitutional.

A federal intelligence court, in a rare public opinion, is expected to issue a major ruling validating the power of the president and Congress to wiretap international phone calls and intercept e-mail messages without a court order, even when AmericansÂ’ private communications may be involved.

The court decision is expected to be disclosed as early as Thursday in an unclassified, redacted form. It was made in December by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court of Review, which has issued only two prior rulings in its 30-year history.

The decision marks the first time since the disclosure of the National Security AgencyÂ’s warrantless eavesdropping program three years ago that an appellate court has addressed the constitutionality of the federal governmentÂ’s wiretapping powers. In validating the governmentÂ’s wide authority to collect foreign intelligence, it may offer legal credence to the Bush administrationÂ’s repeated assertions that the president has constitutional authority to act without specific court approval in ordering national security eavesdropping.

What this means, of course, is that the Bush Administration was right when it implemented a program of listening in on suspected terrorist phone calls. What’s more, it also bodes well for any challenge to the constitutionality of other warrantless surveillance programs related to national security, including those treasonously disclosed by the New York Times – programs that did nothing more or less than was done by the Roosevelt Administration during WWII.

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Hey, liberals – in an effort to guarantee those who would destroy your liberties and murder you in your beds get rights accorded to no enemy captured in time of war anywhere in history, are you willing to volunteer YOUR town as a new home for the most dangerous of the illegal combatants capture during the Islamofascist jihad against the modern world and its freedoms? After all, Barry Hussein is going to order the prison at Guantanamo Bay closed even though he has no idea where to put these terrorists.

Advisers to President-elect Barack Obama say one of his first duties in office will be to order the closing of the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay.

That executive order is expected during Obama's first week on the job — and possibly on his first day, according to two transition team advisers. Both spoke Monday on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly.

Obama's order will direct his administration to figure out what to do with the estimated 250 al-Qaida and Taliban suspects and potential witnesses who are being held at Guantanamo.

So come on, liberals, become a national hero by helping the Obamateur make his first major policy decision related to terrorism – importing terrorists into the territory of the United States.

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Not only calling for genocide, but the national organization that is sponsoring the pro-terrorist demonstration refuse to condemn the call for genocide.

Like many other protests of Israel's campaign in Gaza, this one ended badly — police had to cool an ugly fight between supporters of Israel and Gaza, breaking up the warring sides as their screaming and chanting threatened to turn into something worse.

But some protesters at this rally in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., took their rhetoric a step further, calling for the extermination of Israel — and of Jews.

* * *

But as the protest continued and crowds grew, one woman in a hijab began to shout curses and slurs that shocked Jewish activists in the city, which has a sizable Jewish population.

"Go back to the oven," she shouted, calling for the counter-protesters to die in the manner that the Nazis used to exterminate Jews during the Holocaust.
"You need a big oven, that's what you need," she yelled.

And when the spokesman for the organizing group was contacted about such shouts, he couldn’t bring himself to condemn anti-Semitism or the genocidal rantings of some of the protesters – but he could certainly condemn Israel.

The protest organizers, asked to comment on the woman's overt call for Jewish extermination, said she was "insensitive" but refused to condemn her statement.

"She does not represent the opinions of the vast majority of people who were there," said Emmanuel Lopez, who helped plan the event, one of many sponsored nationwide on Dec. 30 by the ANSWER (Act Now to Stop War and End Racism ) Coalition.

Lopez, a state coordinator for ANSWER, admitted there is a problem with anti-Semitism within his organization's ranks. But then he went on to call the supporters of Israel across the street "barbaric, racist" Zionist terrorists.
"Zionism in general is a barbaric, racist movement that really is the cause of the situation in the entire Middle East," Lopez said.

Let’s see – 2000 rockets were launched from Gaza by Hamas during 2008, but it is Israel that is condemned by these folks as “barbaric” and “terrorists”? Seems to me that Lopez is implicitly supporting the calls for genocide with his non-condemnation. But why should that surprise us – Hamas itself has called for the murder of Jews.

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Israel is acting to stop a continuous stream of war crimes by Hamas. The Hamas official, on the other hand, has made it very clear that he wants to see war crimes stepped up to include genocide and the intentional murder of children.

[Hamas spokesman Mahmoud Az-Zahar] called to murder Israelis and Jews worldwide, including children. “The Israelis have sentenced their children to death... They have legitimized the killing of their people all over the world,” he said. Hamas' platform calls for all Jews to convert to Islam or be killed, based on an Islamic saying (Hadith), and the group has not refrained from targeting children in the past.

Now letÂ’s see how long the anti-Semitic advocates of moral equivalence take to agree with him.

But on the other hand, Zahar has indicated that Hamas will consider a ceasefire provided that Israel refrain from defending its people from terrorism and Hamas is allowed to openly import the weapons used to commit its war crimes against Israeli civilians by sea and freely send terrorists into Israel by land without fear of discovery by IDF checkpoints.

And lest you think that the Zahar is alone in his views, consider the views of one Hamas leader recently dispatched to Hell by the IDF.

There is no chance that true Islam would ever allow a Jewish state to survive in the Muslim Middle East. Israel is an impossibility. It is an offense against God.“ (H/T Founding Bloggers)

So if you think that this is a case of Israel crating terrorists with its policies, think again – these jihadi swine seek the destruction of Israel and the murder of its people based upon their sense of religious duty growing out of Islam.

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Let's put this into perspective -- these are the areas of Israel that the Terrorstinians can now attack from Gaza. That range, 40 km, is the equivalent about 25 miles -- and some 1/8 of Israel's population lives within the attack zone, which is within the internationally-recognized pre-1967 borders of Israel.

And the word is that Hamas may have bought missiles from Iran that give the Terrorstinians the possibility of targeting even more civilians in the rest of Israel.

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R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr. offers this observation.

It is dreadful that Gaza, one of the most densely populated places on earth, is under heavy aerial bombardment from Israel. Yet Hamas, the governing entity in Gaza, has been lobbing shrapnel-filled missiles into Israel on a regular basis for months. Two weeks ago, Hamas arbitrarily broke its six-month ceasefire with Israel, and the danger to Israeli life and property has gotten worse. How many missiles is Israel to suffer before it is warranted to defend its territory and its people?

Now that word "disproportional" is being raised among foreign policy elites. Israeli air strikes since Saturday have killed several hundred Palestinians and injured several thousand. So we are hearing that the Israeli actions are "disproportional."

* * *

I have no idea how many Hamas strikes against civilians warrant how many Israeli acts of retribution. Frankly, such calculations seem to me as beside the point. The real question is how many Israeli strikes are needed to close down Hamas? That is what is necessary. The Israelis have at their border a violent, unprincipled enemy that has vowed to destroy Israel. Hamas not only vows to destroy Israel, it bombards Israel and expects the world to object when Israel counterattacks.

Now let me begin by noting that the very concept of proportionality in warfare is absurd. Following Pearl Harbor, the US was not limited to a "proportional response" against Japan and its Axis partners. Following 9/11, no one expected the US to stop fighting al-Qaeda and the Taliban after we inflicted three thousand enemy casualties (and no one tried to calculate the military equivalent of four hijacked jetliners so that we didn't exceed the force initially used against us).

Besides, Tyrrell is correct in noting that he (and, by implication, we) do not know what a proportional response is. Indeed, it would appear that the Terorstinian leadership of Hamas is the only group that does know what a proportional response is -- for when it is reached, Hamas will stop firing missiles into Israel, indiscriminately hitting homes, schools, and shops with no military significance. Given that Hamas continues to attack despite over 400 dead this week, it is clear that Israel has yet to inflict sufficient damage for the response to be proportional to the goal -- the end of Terrorstinian rocket attacks on civilians. It may be that the proper proportion is 100, or even 1000, dead Terrostinians for every dead Israeli -- but it is only Hamas that can set the figure, not Israel or the international community.

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If Islam is the "Religion of Peace", why was the mosque a munitions dump and a site for rocket launches?

On Wednesday, The IAF reported that it had hit 25 terror-related targets including the offices of Hamas Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh and a mosque in the city of Gaza where Hamas activists were hiding, and which had been used as a weapons storehouse.

Rockets had also been fired at Israel from the mosque.

Shin Bet security service officials said that over the last few days, Palestinian militants have been seen carrying Katyusha and Qassam rockets, as well as a large supply of other weapons, around the vicinity of the mosque. The Shin Bet said that these weapons were destroyed in the IAF strike.

We Christians do not use our churches as storehouses for weapons to be used in terrorist attacks. Jews do not use their synagogues that way. Indeed, most religions practiced in the world today treat their houses of worship as demilitarized zones, and international law tends to recognize them as such. But when such houses of worship are used for military purposes, they lose any legitimate claim of protection they might have. And when we see members of the same faith using their houses of worship for purposes of military and terrorist attacks time and again, it does lead one to question whether it is legitimate to call it a religion of peace.

Additional news coverage on this issue from AP, Guardian, Haaretz, Jerusalem Post

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How do we know?

The Terrorstinian scum lobbed one into an Israeli school in the middle of a civilian neighborhood -- that's how.

The army official said the rocket that struck the school in Beersheba was manufactured in China, is heavier than the Qassam and can "potentially cause much greater damage." He said the rocket contains metal pallets that can spread out across a radius of up to 100 meters (about 328 feet) from the point of impact.

Now for those of you who are confused, let me explain the purpose of those metal pellets. They are an anti-personnel feature designed to cause maximum human casualties in the area around the impact site, up to the length of a football field in all directions from the point of impact.

In other words, this weapon was sent into the middle of a civilian area -- a school where there would usually be children present -- with the goal of killing and wounding as many non-combatants as possible. Unlike the Israelis, who have made great efforts to avoid civilian casualties in the recent fighting, the Terrorstinians made an intentional effort to kill and maim as many children as possible.

Will the world hold China accountable for supplying weapons to terrorists who will use them in violation of international law? Or are only the US and Israel subject to condemnation by the international community when the Jewish state exercises its legitimate right to self-defense?

Debbie Schlussel has more on this matter -- including information and photos from relatives whose children attend the damaged school and who would likely have been among the victims of this war crime.

I teach in a school here in America -- and as I look through the gaping hole into that classroom, I see a sight that could be my own classroom. I praise God that I don't have to worry about things like this happening on a daily basis, and I pray that God will consign those who willfully and intentionally perpetrate such deeds to the deepest bowels of Hell (along with those who aid and abet them).

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