Cruelty for Allah in Afghanistan & England

In a war like the present war, it is easy to forget the nature and evil of the enemy we are confronting. If you know of anyone who says that we should withdraw no only from Iraq, but even from Afghanistan, remind your friend of the safe haven that the Taliban gave to al-Qaeda. Then tell your friend about this. Tapscott's Copy Desk reports it from Jihad Watch which in turn gets it from the Telegraph in London. That's how I came by it.

The Taliban accused a 12 year old boy of spying for the British (telling them about roadside bombs--can you imagine the treachery in one so young?), hauled him off to a nearby garden and hanged him from a mulberry tree. No trial. Those are unnecessary when you're right.

Hamid Karzai, Afghanistan's president, is apparently horrified. Haji Mohammed Anwar Khan, the head of Helmand provincial council, considers this wholly repugnant to Islamic standards of behavior. "If someone is a child their mind is not considered sufficiently mature to be held responsible under Sharia law. This is just a crime and we condemn it."

It is nonetheless well within respectable standards of Islamic behavior murder your own daughter for converting to Christianity, as this Imam is attempting to do, the London Times Online reports. Notice that this is not those crazy Talibs. This is commonly accepted practice in Islamic countries. Oh...except this Muslim religious leader lives and "ministers" in the north of England.

But I take comfort in the diversity he brings to that land.

On a happy note...In the People's Republic of China, one Bible is being produced every second. And it's all above board. This also comes from the Times Online.

Good News From Iraq

Amir Taheri, in his column today, shares good news from Iraq that goes beyond merely the violence index.

* More than 70 percent of the cells created by al Qaeda in Iraq have been dismantled, with vast amounts of money and arms seized from terrorists and insurgents. The so-called Islamic State in Iraq, set up by al Qaeda in parts of four provinces, has collapsed.

* Iraqis who'd sought temporary refuge in neighboring countries are returning home in large numbers - 1,000 a day returning from Syria alone.

* Thanks to mediation by Abdul-Aziz al-Hakim, leader of the Shiite coalition, the three groups that had withdrawn from Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's coalition government are expected to return to the fold.

* The British forces' handover of Basra to Iraqi authorities was completed without a hitch; Iraq's second largest city is rapidly returning to normal.

* Iraq's national currency, the dinar, is trading at its highest level since 1990 against the Iranian rial, the Kuwaiti dinar and the US dollar.

* Iraqi oil production is at its highest since 2002. Oil Minister Hussein Shahrestani recently notified OPEC that Iraq intends to produce its full quota next year.

* There's a rush of applications to set up small and medium businesses. In Baghdad alone, the figure for October was 400, compared to 80 last August.

* The fourth American university in the Arab world, and the first in Iraq, has started work in Suleymanieh, close to the Iranian border.

He also has bad news to share, and he is not short on it. It should not surprise anyone that there is lots of bad news coming out of Iraq. (There is bad news coming out of America, after all.) But on balance, the news is good.

IRAQ today is a hundred times better than what it would have been under Saddam in any imaginable circumstances. Statistics of violence don't begin to measure the efforts of a whole nation to re-emerge from the darkest night in its history. And in that sense, the news from Iraq since April 2003 has always been more good than bad.

Follow-up on Saudi Terror Funding

This past Friday, I posted "Troubling Saudi Arms Deal" in which I made references to a few different articles in the New York Sun of the previous day. In today's NYS, Mark Steyn, bravely taking on "one of the richest men on the planet" who undoubtedly has ties to al Qaeda, follows up on these dots-for-connecting in "One Way Multiculturalism." He begins:

How will we lose the war against "radical Islam"? Well, it won't be in a tank battle. Or in the Sunni Triangle or the caves of Bora Bora. It won't be because terrorists fly three jets into the Oval Office, Buckingham Palace and the Basilica of St. Peter's on the same Tuesday morning. The war will be lost incrementally because we are unable to reverse the ongoing radicalization of Muslim populations in South Asia, Indonesia, the Balkans, Western Europe and, yes, North America.

After a great deal of interesting argument, he ends this way:

Because English libel law overwhelmingly favors the plaintiff. And like many other bigshot Saudis Sheikh Mahfouz has become very adept at using foreign courts to silence American authors — in effect, using distant jurisdictions to nullify the First Amendment. He may be a wronged man, but his use of what the British call "libel chill" is designed not to vindicate his good name but to shut down the discussion, which is why Cambridge University Press made no serious attempt to mount a defense. He's one of the richest men on the planet, and they're an academic publisher with very small profit margins. But, even if you've got a bestseller, your pockets are unlikely to be deep enough: House Of Saud, House Of Bush did boffo biz with the anti-Bush crowd in America, but there's no British edition — because Sheikh Mahfouz had indicated he was prepared to spend what it takes to challenge it in court and Random House decided it wasn't worth it.

We've gotten used to one-way multiculturalism: the world accepts that you can't open an Episcopal or Congregational church in Jeddah or Riyadh but every week the Saudis can open radical mosques and madrassahs and pro-Saudi think-tanks in London and Toronto and Dearborn, Michigan and Falls Church, Virginia. And their global reach extends a little further day by day, inch by inch, in the lengthening shadows, as the lights go out one by one around the world.

Click the link and read the whole essay for yourself.

Troubling Saudi Arms Deal

The proposed $20 billion arms sale to Saudi Arabia raises troubling questions.

First of all, let us all understand that the Middle East is extremely complicated, and so, as I am not a scholar in this area and have not seriously researched this matter, I shy away from bold, bloggish pronouncements. But I have noticed several "dots" which I will pass along for anyone to add whatever other dots needs connecting.

Fifteen of the nineteen 9/11 hijackers were from Saudi Arabia. On its own, perhaps this is not a cause for concern.

The Saudis fund radical, Wahhabist (click here or here) schools worldwide. These are ideological feeder schools for al Qaeda.

Though peace in the middle east is essential to stabilizing the region and winning the war on terror, the Saudi's are doing nothing substantive to advance this. Only now do they "say," according to the Washington Post, that they are "prepared to seriously consider participating in [President Bush's recently announced] push for Arab-Israeli peace" (New York Sun, Aug. 2, 2007).

The Saudis are hindering our efforts to stabilize the new government in Iraq. They have refused to recognize the Iraqi government, and are only now talking about opening an embassy (NYS, 8/2/07). Robin Wright and Josh White report that, "The Sunni-led kingdom has long resisted such a formal step, which would bolster the Shiite-dominated government in Baghdad and signal to Iraq's minority Sunnis that their prospects of returning to power are over." Despite this fact, "the Saudi foreign minister expressed anger" at the suggestion by Zalmay Khalilzad, our UN ambassador, that Saudi Arabia is "not doing enough to help with reconciliation in Iraq," according to Wright and White.

Gary Shapiro of the New York Sun reports that the Saudis are using British courts "to quash discussion of their alleged role in aiding terrorism." The agent in this operation is Sheikh Khalid Bin Mahfouz, a wealthy Saudi businessman. Deborah Lipstadt, a professor at Emory University, herself unsuccessfully sued by Mahfouz, says that the Saudis are "'systematically, case by case, book by book' challenging anything critical of them or anything that links them to terrorism." Of course they are free to sue if they think they are being libeled, but the British libel laws are more generous toward plaintiffs than ours and the aggressive and well funded threat of lawsuits effectively shuts down publisher interest in this topic.

Presumably, we are concerned about the rising power of Iran as a regional hegemon. Arming the Saudis who are mortally hostile to Israel and no help to us in Iraq does not seem to be the best way to deal with that situation, and certainly not without securing concessions on matters of serious foreign policy interest to us. John Edwards is right in saying that, "Saudi Arabia has not done the things that it needs to do in Iraq in controlling terrorism." He should not be the only one saying it.