The Telegraph reports Pakistani officials are urging NATO to admit defeat in Afghanistan and work towards bringing the Taliban into shared power with the current Afghani government.   The idea of defeat is pure nonsense, and other than Pakistan’s former connections to the Taliban I cannot account for why such a statement would be made.

But there’s a reason that even if NATO has been defeated you still don’t give up the fight.  The fight against the Taliban is not about land or money, but rather it’s a fight of civilization against barbarism.

The Taliban has routinely targeted schools in Afghanistan, seemingly prefering to target the present and future potential of children over NATO soldiers.  These strikes are how the Taliban thinks it can win the hearts of Afghanis.  That and through a buyout program aimed at the nation’s many tribal chiefs and warlords which is as old as Afghanistan itself.

The gunmen came at night to drag Mohammed Halim away from his home, in front of his crying children and his wife begging for mercy.

The 46-year-old schoolteacher tried to reassure his family that he would return safely. But his life was over, he was part-disembowelled and then torn apart with his arms and legs tied to motorbikes, the remains put on display as a warning to others against defying Taliban orders to stop educating girls. (source)

This heinous act is just a microcosm of the war against Islamism all civilized societies must face, either today or in the future.  Halim’s only ‘offense’ was to teach at a school where Afghani girls learned.

In the United States, two Texas men were plead guilty for aiding the Taliban.  One of the two men were living here on an expired visa.  Why Debbie is talking about fishing regarding this case is beyond me.

Former Speaker of the House and hopeful presidential candidate Newt Gingrich proposed a curb of First Amendment rights while fighting the GWOT, an issue I don’t entirely agree with depending on what exactly he means.

“We need to get ahead of the curve rather than wait until we actually literally lose a city, which I think could literally happen in the next decade if we’re unfortunate,” Mr. Gingrich said Monday night during a speech in New Hampshire. “We now should be impaneling people to look seriously at a level of supervision that we would never dream of if it weren’t for the scale of the threat.”

“This is a serious, long-term war,” the former speaker said, according an audio excerpt of his remarks made available yesterday by his office. “Either before we lose a city or, if we are truly stupid, after we lose a city, we will adopt rules of engagement that use every technology we can find to break up their capacity to use the Internet, to break up their capacity to use free speech, and to go after people who want to kill us to stop them from recruiting people.”

Unfortunately I haven’t seen Gingrich’s comments regarding the headline in the New York Sun calling for restrictions upon First Amendment rights so I don’t exaclty know what Gingrich is proposing. From what is published, I certainly feel he is dead-on in suggesting this nation is not seriously waging the GWOT and doing all we could to defeat the enemy.

I have written numerous times the jihadi use of the Internet to spread their propoganda, training manuals and communication that troubles me most. Al Qaida has seemingly gone from a non-traditional army to a network of dispersed cells throughout the world. The one common bond is how they all communicate and how “diseffected youths” find this material and decide to start their own cell. The Toronto 17 is the perfect example of this new method, learning over the Internet through jihadi sites how to construct bombs and where to strike in Canada.

Gingrich is also spot-on in his analysis of what rights should be afforded to terrorists.

“We should propose a Geneva Convention for fighting terrorism, which makes very clear that those who would fight outside the rules of law, those who would use weapons of mass destruction, and those who would target civilians are, in fact, subject to a totally different set of rules that allow us to protect civilization by defeating barbarism before it gains so much strength that it is truly horrendous,” he said.

We are facing a new reality here, different from the uniformed wars of the past. Gingrich understands that threat, which is why I’m hoping he runs for president regardless of what many see as a checkered past. My vote in 2008 will be based upon the candidate I feel will best fight the GWOT rather than anything else, be it a Republican or a Democrat.

But the press is already reporting Gingrich wants to curb freedom of speech laws, despite having seen any of his comments regarding that particular alleged statement. Gingrich didn’t say he advocated curbing the free speech of Americans, rather he said he wanted to curb the free speech of terrorists and their enablers. Doesn’t this tie into preventing Islamist propoganda from gaining traction?

Gingrich is on the Michael Medved Show right now, and I suspsect he’ll be asked to clarify his remarks. I’ll update this post if he does so.

UPDATE (2:30 p.m. CST): Thus far nothing on that subject matter.

Al Qaida in Iraq is a bit late to the parade, but timing has never been the terrorist group’s best attribute.  Waiting for the Pope to all but wrap up his visit within Turkey where the Pope called for all religions to advocate against violence, the radical Islamic group denounced the Pope’s visit as a “crusader campaign” against Islam.

“The pope’s visit, in fact, is to consolidate the crusader campaign against the lands of Islam after the failure of the crusader leaders … and an attempt to extinguish the burning ember of Islam inside our Turkish brothers,” it said.

The statement did not include any direct threat to the pope, saying only that the group is “confident in the defeat of Rome in all parts of the Islamic world.”

I do believe Rome will be defeated in all parts of the Islamic world, as it’s not in the Islamic world.  That is unless Al Qaida in Iraq considers any land where a Muslim lives part of the Islamic world, which it’s parent group certainly does.

A Vatican spokesman said the Vatican is not worried about the statement, nor should it be, adding  “this type of message shows once again the urgency and importance of a common commitment against violence” and that the Pope’s message is to “say No to violence in God’s name.”

Yet another classified document has been leaked to and printed by the New York Times that will compromise this nation’s national security.  U.S. National Security Advisor Steven Hadley traveled to Iraq and talked with Iraq Prime Minister Nuri al-Malaki on October 30, 2006.  Upon Hadley’s return visit, he wrote a classified memo on his assessment of Malaki and what the United States should do to help shift the momentum inside Iraq.

The report, filed on November 8, questions Malaki’s connections to Shia insurgent groups, mainly the Mahdi Army and its leader Muqtada al Sadr.

“His intentions seem good when he talks with Americans, and sensitive reporting suggests he is trying to stand up to the Shia hierarchy and force positive change,” the memo said of the Iraqi leader. “But the reality on the streets of Baghdad suggests Maliki is either ignorant of what is going on, misrepresenting his intentions, or that his capabilities are not yet sufficient to turn his good intentions into action.”

The timing of this leak is unquestionably aimed at altering the planned talks between Bush, Malaki and the Jordanian King Abdullah.  And just as one would imagine, contrary to what the NYT reports, the memo seems to have had an effect after Malaki canceled his meeting with Bush.  The meeting was set out to determine what course of action is best for Iraq and help pave a new path for the two nations to take in a shared goal.

Well, there’s the memo, but then there’s also the actions of Muqtada al Sadr ahead of the planned meeting.  Sadr, who essentially controls up to 30 members of the Iraq Parliament, called upon his parliamentarians to withdraw from the Iraqi government in protest of this meeting.  Five cabinet members also temporarily left the government.

In a statement released to the press regarding why the 35 men stepped down, the group said the meeting was a “provocation to the feelings of the Iraqi people and a violation of their constitutional rights.”  I had not realized talking to dignitaries of other nations was against the constitution of any nation, but I can’t help but wonder if pressure from Sadr is yet another reason Malaki decided not to meet with Bush.

Sadr not only controls one of the key insurgent groups in Iraq responsible for the death of numerous Iraqi civilians, he also controls a key voting block within Iraq and has seemingly gained more power than Ayatollah Sistani who previously was called the leader of Iraqi Shia.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again.  Muqtada al Sadr should have been taken out three years ago, but it’s not too late.  He is a stooge of the Iranian government and he has worrisome ties with Malaki as the Hadley document states.  But it didn’t take a classified document to note these connections nor that Malaki may be in over his head.  What can be done to strengthen Malaki’s hand and force him not to play politics is crucial.  Can he do it?

Unpartisan.com Political News and Blog Aggregator linked with Before diplomacy, more doubt...

I can’t wait for the mail today. Word has it Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has written a letter to me and every other American citizen. Fox News has an advanced copy of the letter, and I must say it’s really no different than the other letters Ahmadinejad has supposedly written before.

Missing is my invitation to Islam, something I was looking for based upon Ahmadinejad inviting both President Bush and Pope Benedict XVI to Islam. Since Ahmadinejad certainly feels Islam is the true path of Allah, does he not consider the American civilian to be worthy of Islam? Why then does he repeatedly call me, a Xstian dog, a “noble American?”

UPDATE: There’s certain times when you just want to knock yourself in the head and wonder how you missed something. This is one of those times for me.

Ahmadinejad did indeed invite me to Islam, and it’s in his opening and closing remarks.

O, Almighty God, bestow upon humanity the perfect human being promised to all by You, and make us among his followers.

[snip]

We should all heed the Divine Word of the Holy Qur’an:

“But those who repent, have faith and do good may receive Salvation. Your Lord, alone, creates and chooses as He will, and others have no part in His choice; Glorified is God and Exalted above any partners they ascribe to Him.” (28:67-68)

The “perfect human being” would be the 12th Imam or Mahdi. It continues to amaze me how little these dawahs are reported within the American press or how little the American press reports upon Ahmadinejad’s fascination with the return of the Mahdi, or the Islamic apocalypse.

Over the holidays, one of my uncles brought up Iran to me. I said something about Ahmadinejad’s desire to bring about the end of the world, to which he had never heard about. He follows the news yet he’s never heard about Ahmadinejad and the 12th Imam. Are we merely sitting on news that the rest of the public doesn’t know about, assuming they do?

The Telegraph reports pockets of Sharia Law are springing up in England, offering an alternative to British law in deciding the smaller cases.  Normally people would think such alternative rules of law within a sovereign nation would be a bad thing, but not those who support Sharia in Britain.

Among the cases on the Sharia docket include a stabbing case and divorce.  Scotland Yard had never heard of the stabbing case in which a Sharia council decided to verbally reprimad the offender . . . for stabbing a victim.

How could a parallel legal system that subverts a nation’s legal system spring up?  That’s simple.  Those who participate in the parallel system don’t recognize the nation’s laws that they live in.

Mr Yusuf told the programme [ed. BBC Radio 4 program Law in Action] he felt more bound by the traditional law of his birth than by the laws of his adopted country. “Us Somalis, wherever we are in the world, we have our own law,” he said. “It’s not sharia, it’s not religious — it’s just a cultural thing.”

Isn’t that just grand.  In light of this rather stunning revelation, since I have Irish blood flowing through my veins, the supposed legal intoxication limit no longer applies to me.  You know, it’s a cultural thing.

Simple domestic issues not causing bodily harm would be one thing, but these Sharia courts are deciding far more severe cases.  And where does it stop?

Faizul Aqtab Siddiqi, a barrister and principal of Hijaz College Islamic University, near Nuneaton, Warwicks, said this type of court had advantages for Muslims. “It operates on a low budget, it operates on very small timescales and the process and the laws of evidence are far more lenient and it’s less awesome an environment than the English courts,” he said.

Mr Siddiqi predicted that there would be a formal network of Muslim courts within a decade.

Speaking of the “laws of evidence,” in these Sharia courts in England, does a woman have to produce four male witnesses to her rape?  And who pays for these courts while they are informal?  If it’s the British government, to which those who would attend such trials and subjugate themselves outside of British law would attend, the same state one doesn’t recognize as a rule of law would be paying for outside rule.

Mensa Barbie Welcomes You linked with Dropping Sanctions: Keeping the Threat...
Hyscience linked with Sharia Courts Spring Up In Britain...
Hyscience linked with Sharia Courts Spring Up In Britain...

The analysis comes from an educated view, but I am still skeptical.  Just like Zarqawi and the many near-misses and reports of his capture or death, I’ll believe Zawahiri is dead when years go by and we don’t see such a hateful man release a video.  Well, that or we’ll see his lifeless body and mass protests in support of a mass murderer that will ensue without question in some parts of the world.

The lack of a communiqué from al-Zawahiri is much more likely the result of a conscious decision to maintain radio silence because of a breach in al Qaeda’s operational security net. In other words, al-Zawahiri has likely survived, and is trying to stay beneath the radar. The strike in Chingai, while it did not eliminate al-Zawahiri, must have come very close to doing so…

Al Qaeda’s move deeper underground shows that U.S. intelligence has come very close to triangulating the likely location of al Qaeda’s global headquarters…

The two airstrikes have provided U.S. intelligence with a wealth of information, which the United States can use to pinpoint not just the places frequented by al-Zawahiri and his associates but also his actual hideout, as well as other key al Qaeda facilities that probably lie much deeper in the NWFP [Northwest Frontier Province of Pakistan]. This poses a dilemma for al Qaeda, which does not have the luxury to simply shift from one location to another, and this would again explain the decision to go offline…

Al Qaeda’s leaders are likely hiding very close to if not in a heavily populated area that is quite far from the Afghan-Pakistani border. This is actually the best defense the jihadists have in their arsenal; they believe it is unlikely that U.S. forces would conduct a strike so deep inside Pakistan and in an area so densely populated.

The strike in Damadola almost one year ago nearly took out Zawahiri.  While it missed the intended target after he decided not to dine at the location, the strike did hit other high-ranking Al Qaida members.  Couple that strike with the strike on the madrassa/training camp and there’s at least a good chance Zawahiri is hiding within that area.  It changes my view he was withing a large Pakistani city, though I would hardly be surprised if he escaped Waziristan or Buchistan to Lahore wearing a burqa in the middle of the night.

Zawahiri’s death would be an enormous blow to Al Qaida, far larger of a blow than the death of Osama bin Laden in my view.  Of course it’s my view Zawahiri is the leader of Al Qaida rather than OBL anyways.

HT Hot Air

Venezuela President Hugo Chavez has constructed an army of armed citizens to maintain his stay as the nation’s leader despite whatever electoral results may be issued, The Telegraph reports.  Chavez, who led a failed coup in 1982, has purged opposition figures from the Venezeulan military and appointed key military figures to top political posts.  The last part sounds a bit like Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and the two are strange bedfellows.

With Mr Chavez hoping to win another six years in power, the opposition fears that even if it wins at the ballot box it will never be able to take power.

He has acquired 100,000 Russian Kalashnikov rifles, SU30 fighter jets and more than 50 helicopters.

But it is more about political control than national defence.

For Alberto Garrido, a leading political analyst in Caracas, the president is building up and arming his support base, should he lose elections or be removed from power by other means.

“He believes in the revolutionary principle of a people in arms, and he believes that he can never be beaten should his people be armed,” said Mr Garrido.

As popular as Chavez always likes to consider himself, his private army tells a far different story.  He is though modeling his rule from the utterly failed rule of Fidel Castro, therefore expect a continued exodus of educated Venezuelans from the nation leaving Venezuela to ruin.

Former Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards is against Wal-MART, or if I had to guess, he’s for the American Left’s support of his future candidacy and he knows he has a winning ticket for assailing Wal-MART within the socialist confines of the far-left. It’s quite a spectacle too, knowing how Edwards told the national press his staff member who tried to push his way through a Playstation 3 line (another issue of entitlement there too) to buy Edwards’ children a system simply didn’t know the evils of Wal-MART. I don’t either.

As a bit of a background, let me state I don’t like Wal-MART and I own a paltry amount of stock in Target so I’ve always prefered Target. Wal-MART is crowded and the stores are often too big. Nothing is appealing for me at Wal-MART. However, since the fringes of the Liberal establishment hate Wal-MART so much, I figure there has to be a reason for me to shop there this Christmas, and shop there for at least a couple of gifts I will.

Edwards will detest me, or at least he’ll say he detests people that shop at the store, but the argument he and other Wal-MART haters cites is the supposed low wages of employees and no health care. There’s an easy solution for all of this. If you don’t like the wages Wal-MART pays its employees and you don’t like how they don’t have health insurance for all full-time members, then don’t work at Wal-MART. We’re told that’s it, but we all really know it’s because Wal-MART employees are not represented by a union. Yay capitalism!

Edwards plans to have a book signing (hey, who knew he could write?) where he will most likely tear into Wal-MART for low wages, health care, ad nauseam. Since he’s promoting a book and playing his Wal-MART schtick, there’s no better place to do so than at a Barnes & Noble store right next to a Wal-MART. There’s just one problem, according to the Union Leader.

So naturally Edwards is holding his book signing at Barnes & Noble instead of Wal-Mart. Which is too bad for his anti-low-wages campaign, because in Manchester Wal-Mart pays hourly employees more than Barnes & Noble does.

The Barnes & Noble where Edwards will hawk his book pays $7 an hour to start. The Wal-Mart that sits just yards away pays $7.50 an hour.

Doh! John Edwards really is a homer.

A children’s book depicting a Muslim as a terrorist, or as a “baddie” as the book’s publisher Scholastic Australia claimed librarians described the role of a Muslim within the book, has been shelved because it paints this one Muslim in a poor light.

A prominent literary agent has slammed the move as “gutless”, while the book’s author, award-winning novelist John Dale, said the decision was “disturbing because it’s the book’s content they are censoring”.

“There are no guns, no bad language, no sex, no drugs, no violence that is seen or on the page,” Dale said, but because two characters are Arabic-speaking and the plot involves a mujaheddin extremist group, Scholastic’s decision is based “100 per cent (on) the Muslim issue”.

This decision is at odds with the recent publication of Richard Flanagan’s bestselling The Unknown Terrorist and Andrew McGahan’s Underground in which terrorists are portrayed as victims driven to extreme acts by the failings of the West.

The Unknown Terrorist is dedicated to David Hicks and describes Jesus Christ as “history’s first … suicide bomber”.

In McGahan’s Underground, Muslims are executed en masse or herded into ghettos in an Australia rendered unrecognisable by the war on terror.

Scholastic Australia can print a book that describes Jesus as a suicide bomber, thus confirming the publisher will touch on such issues both religious and violent, but because the villain in this book is a Muslim they nix it.  The publisher will though print a book which makes Muslims the victim of a horrendous act.  Always the victim, never the aggressor?

Elsewhere in Australia, a children’s play has recieved the axe treatment after parents complained it painted radical Islamic terrorist groups, including Hamas’s Qassam Brigades and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, in a positive light.  The play, The Australian reports, “accurately said that [Hezbollah’s] long-term aims were to rid Palestine of the Jewish population and create an Arab state but no mention was made of its terrorist activities, only philanthropic ones.”

(more…)