Author: Jeff Jacoby
Publication: Jewish World Review
Date: November 2, 2006
URL: http://jewishworldreview.com/jeff/jacoby110206.php3
A half-dozen snapshots from the global jihad:
Australia's foremost Muslim cleric triggers
an uproar when he likens women who don't wear an Islamic headscarf to "uncovered
meat" and blames them for attracting sexual predators. "If you take
out uncovered meat and place it outside on the street, or in the garden or
the park . . . and the cats come and eat it," says Sheik Taj al-Din Hilali,
"whose fault is it, the cats' or the uncovered meat? If [the woman] was
in her room, in her home, in her headscarf, no problem would have occurred."
Afghanistan: The kidnappers of Italian photojournalist
Gabriele Torsello threaten to murder him unless Abdul Rahman, an Afghan Christian
convert, is returned to Afghanistan and handed over to an Islamic court. Rahman
lives in Italy, which granted him asylum earlier this year, when he faced
the death penalty under Afghanistan's sharia law for converting from Islam
to Christianity.
Iran: The president of Iran calls Israel "a
group of terrorists" and threatens to harm any country that supports
the Jewish state. "This is an ultimatum," warns Mahmoud Ahmadinejad,
who has called for the elmination of Israel and the United States. "Don't
complain tomorrow." Days later, the deputy director of Iran's Atomic
Energy Organization confirms another stride forward for the country's illicit
nuclear program: With the injection of gas into a second cascade of centrifuges,
Iran has doubled its uranium-enrichment capacity.
Thailand: Islamist terrorists bomb a column
of Buddhist monks as they collect offerings of food in Narathiwat, a city
in southern Thailand. One person is killed; 12 are injured. The attack is
the latest in a bloody week that has included multiple shootings and another
fatal bombing.
France: Another Muslim intifadah rages in
France. Hundreds of cars are torched nightly and passenger buses set ablaze
with Molotov cocktails. One such fire in Marseille leaves a 26-year-old woman
in a coma with burns covering 70 percent of her body. "We are in a state
of civil war, orchestrated by radical Islamists," says police union leader
Michel Thoomis. "This is not a question of urban violence any more. It
is an intifadah, with stones and firebombs." So far this year, more than
2,500 police have been wounded in clashes with rioters.
Britain: In a "true Islamic state,"
sexually active homosexuals would be executed, says Arshad Misbahi, an imam
in Manchester's Central Mosque. According to interviewer John Casson, the
imam explains that while executions "might result in the deaths of thousands,"
they would be worthwhile "if this deterred millions from having sex and
spreading disease."
Not all the news is bad. NATO forces have
recently killed scores of Taliban fighters in Afghanistan . Czech intelligence
agents thwarted an Islamist plan to seize the Central Synagogue in Prague
on Rosh Hashanah, hold the Jewish worshipers hostage, and then blow up the
building with its occupants. A proposal to let Muslim taxi drivers at the
Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport refuse service to passengers carrying
alcohol was scrapped in the wake of vehement public opposition. And the world's
mightiest fighting force continues to kill Islamofascists in Iraq, currently
the key battleground in the global jihad.
But there can't be much question that at this
point in the war against radical Islam, the radicals are on the march. From
Ahmadinejad's swagger to Hezbollah's war on Israel to the plot to blow up
jetliners leaving London, our enemies are aggressive, relentless, and unequivocal
in their determination to defeat us. Meanwhile, Western Europe is turning
into Eurabia before our eyes, as a fading native population with its effete
secular culture of pacifism and relativism is superseded by a surging Muslim
cohort. Most Muslims are not Islamists or terrorists, of course. However,
most of them keep quiet in the face of the radical offensive. That is all
the radicals need to keep driving the jihad forward.
"If this country lets down its guard,
it will be a fatal mistake," President Bush said last week. Yet too many
Americans seem unable to recognize the threat, or to believe that they, their
liberties, and the lives of innumerable human beings are truly at stake in
a deadly global war.
But radical Islam is not going away. Like
Nazism and communism, it is (in Senator Rick Santorum's words) "an ideology
that produces the systemic murder of innocents." Like those earlier totalitarianisms,
it will go on murdering until it is crushed. Like them, it is impervious to
appeasement and contemptuous of weakness. The longer Americans sleep, the
farther the jihad advances.
