Christopher Hitchens, who is probably considerably more pro-Palestinian and skeptical of Israel than I am by a good measure, questions the motives of the “Gaza Flotilla,” noting the many ties of the organizers to Hamas, and of Hamas to Assad’s Syria and the Islamic Republic of Iran. “The intended beneficiary of the stunt is a ruling group with close ties to two of the most retrograde dictatorships in the Middle East, each of which has recently been up to its elbows in the blood of its own civilians.”
Ft. Hood shooter Nidal Hasan will face the death penalty. Good news, but why did it take a year and half to get to this point?
I stopped doing This Week in Jihad because it was eating up too much of my time. But this week there were enough big Jihad-related stories to justify putting one up:
Michael Totten has an interesting interview with Claire Berlinski on the situation in Turkey. If Turkey put up a status update, it would read “Mood: Delusional.” Also, is it just me, or does Berlinski look an awful lot like Dr. Lisa Cuddy on House?
You know that “unarmed peace flotilla”? Yeah, not so much.
Female Kuwaiti “activist” calls for the return of sexual slavery to keep rich Muslim men from committing adultery. Sisters are doing it to themselves. And somewhere, Dominique Strauss-Kahn is kicking himself.
Strafor analyzes the latest al Qaeda video and sees a message of defeat. “The very call to leaderless resistance is an admission of defeat and an indication that the jihadists might not be receiving the divine blessing they claim.” The also show how al Qaeda ignorance of American gun control laws (no, you can’t buy automatic weapons at a gun show, since you need to fill out a form, undergo a background check that can take up to 90 days, and have a local law enforcement “chief” authorize your form (among other requirements), and that assumes you live in a state they haven’t been outlawed in) has lead to the arrests of several Jihadests looking to purchase them.
Richard Cohen says the Bosnian no-fly zone was a sham to assuage the west’s guilt over genocide and asks: “Should President Barack Obama lead a coordinated, Arab League-backed Western military intervention in Libya to stop Qaddafi?”.
Alabama latest state to have law introduced banning Sharia.
Death penalty suggested for Ft. Hood shooter Nidal Hasan. Given that the shooting happened all the way back in 2009, isn’t this a little slow even for the usual wheels of American justice? Maybe if we’re lucky, the actual trial will occur in the home stretch of the 2012 election…
There’s one unqualified success story in the Middle East that Arab countries could use as a template to improve their societies. The problem? It’s Israel.
Geert Wilders: “All over Europe multicultural elites are waging total war against their populations. Their goal is to continue the strategy of mass-immigration, which will ultimately result in an Islamic Europe – a Europe without freedom: Eurabia.”
The current unrest in Egypt makes makes things look pretty grim for the Copts: “I’ve pored over every news report I can find, and have seen no sign that local Christians are involved in this uprising against Mubarak. This tells me all I need to know about the calls for ‘democracy’ and ‘reform’ in Egypt. They know that Mubarak’s fall would mean to them what Hussein’s fall meant to Iraqi Christians: the end.”
More from JihadWatch’s indefatigable Robert Spencer on the Muslim Brotherhood’s involvement in the unrest in Egypt. The amount of writing and analysis keeps up on the topic of jihad is positively dizzying. It’s hard to keep up just summarizing him…
Tell a Muslim their food smells bad and lose your house in Canada. This decision was overturned, but it proves Mark Steyn’s point that all Canadian “Human Rights Tribunals” need to be eliminated as threats to free speech…
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:
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.
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.
