Lawrence Person's BattleSwarm Blog

Time for another installment of This Week in Jihad.

Please note that these weekly installments are only a sampler of Jihad-related news from around the world, and that I skim a lot more stories than I post here. One reason is that, from Africa to Indonesia, regular Jihad-related violence is depressingly frequent. So I don’t report every suicide bombing or honor killing that goes on. There’s just too much to keep up with.

However, given Jared Lee Loughner’s shooting spree in Tucson, I thought I would change that for this week’s roundup, to provide glimpses of places in which political and religious violence are the rule rather than the exception. So here’s a list of all the deadly incidents related to Islam I could find mention of from this past week:

1. Suicide bomb kills 18 at a police station in Pakistan.
2. Suicide bomber kills two on bus in Afghanistan.
3. Two killed, six wounded in Taliban attack.
4. Off-duty policeman shoots a 71-year old Christian man dead on a bus in Egypt.
5. Jihadis open fire in a bar, killing seven in Nigeria.
6. That follows hot on the heels of 11 people being killed in Jos, Nigeria.
7. Jihadist suicide bomber kills 17 at bathhouse in Afghanistan.
8. Couple axed to death in Punjab, India.
9. Man killed and mutilated in honor killing in Multan, Iran. “Murtaza’s ears, lips, tongue, nose were sliced his eyes were gouged out with a knife before his head was severed.”
10. Ireland suffers its first honor killing.
11. Iraqi police chief killed by a roadside bomb.
12. Six NATO soldiers killed Wednesday in Afghanistan.
13. The figure above presumably includes U.S. Private Benjamin Moore, killed by an IED.
14. The figure presumably does not include Marine Lance Cpl. Ryan Giese, killed on Friday.
15. Nor that of Private First Class Robert Near, also killed in Afghanistan on Friday.
16. Finally, I count two more names on this list of the fallen, for the time period specified, not including those killed 1/12: SPC Ethan C. Hardin and PFC Ira B. Laningham IV (the latter of Zapata, Texas).

If I’m counting correctly, that brings the total, just for this week, up to 73. There could be twice that many I didn’t have time to search out yet, either from the Foreign Policy/Jihad sources listed to the right (JihadWatch was, as always, invaluable) or just doing a Google search. And there could be twice (or ten, or even a hundred) times as many Jihad-related killings that didn’t make news reports. I did not include Iran’s execution of five accused drug-smugglers in the total. Nor any of the other 46 executions the Islamic Republic of Iran has carried out in the last 20 days.

Other Jihad-related tidbits:

• Christopher Hitchens on the assassin of Salman Taseer
• Speaking of Taseer, Pakistani’s clerics have weighed in overwhelmingly. Overwhelmingly in favor of his assassination, that is.
• Want to know what soft Jihadis actually think? This piece by M. Shahid Alam, a mixture of truths (Pakistan’s elites are corrupt), half-truths (America is their pupper master), half-digested second-hand Marxism (“the Pakistani state fell into the lap of lumpen elites”), conspiracy theories (“The military dictator who preceded him had boasted in his autobiography that his government had garnered US$50 million by capturing and selling Pakistanis to secret US agencies.”), and Islamist rhetoric (“Pakistanis worried that this was only the start of a campaign to repeal the [blasphemy] law – and open the floodgates for Salman Rushdi-style smearing of the blessed Prophet.”). Oh, and this guy is an economics professor at Northeastern University in Boston.
• American Center for Law and Justice sues to halt construction of the Ground Zero Mosque.
• If you didn’t already have enough to worry about, the coalition government in Lebanon has collapsed.
• Not News: Jihadist death threats against synagogues. News: In Fargo, North Dakota.
• First they came for the beer…
• Hamas linked CAIR is singing from the same hymnal as The New York Times in blaming the Tucson shooting on “inflammatory political rhetoric”.
• In Saudi Arabia, accused in rape case sentenced to one year in prison, 100 lashes. The accused rape victim, that is.