AP | Feb. 1, 2008
Two women suicide bombers who have killed nearly 80 people in Baghdad were Down’s Syndrome victims exploited by al Qaida. The explosives were detonated by remote control in a co-ordinated attack after the women walked into separate crowded markets, said the chief Iraqi military spokesman in Baghdad General Qassim al-Moussawi. [Read more…]
Wall Street Journal | Bernard Lewis | May 16, 200
Islamists always believed the U.S. was weak. Recent political trends won’t change their view.
During the Cold War, two things came to be known and generally recognized in the Middle East concerning the two rival superpowers. If you did anything to annoy the Russians, punishment would be swift and dire. If you said or did anything against the Americans, not only would there be no punishment; there might even be some possibility of reward, as the usual anxious procession of diplomats and politicians, journalists and scholars and miscellaneous others came with their usual pleading inquiries: “What have we done to offend you? What can we do to put it right?”
FrontPageMagazine.com Walid Phares March 7, 2007
Where are the Muslim moderates?
That is a question that many in the West have been asking in recent years. Now it’s possible to provide an answer: They’re in St. Petersburg, Florida.
Matthias Dapfner, Chief Executive of the huge German publisher Axel Springer AG, has written a blistering attack in DIE WELT, Germany ‘s largest daily paper, against the timid reaction of Europe in the face of the Islamic Threat. This is a must read by all Americans.
(Commentary by Mathias Dapfner CEO, Axel Springer, AG)
A few days ago Henry Broder wrote in Welt am Sonntag, ” Europe — your family name is appeasement.” It’s a phrase you can’t get out of your head because it’s so terribly true.
National Review Online Melanie Phillips August 18, 2006
When America was attacked on 9/11 by Islamic jihadis, it was said that this was a doomsday wake-up call for the West. Within a short while, however, much of Britain decided that 9/11 was actually America’s fault and that Israel was at the core of the problem.
When Britain was attacked last year on 7/7 by Islamic jihadis, it was said that this was a doomsday wake-up call for the U.K. Within a short time, however, much of the country decided that it was Britain’s own fault on account of “Islamophobia” and the war in Iraq.
Now 25 British Muslims have been arrested for an alleged plot to blast up to ten trans-Atlantic airliners out of the sky. This vast alleged conspiracy, thought to encompass many dozens more plotters from Germany to Pakistan, bears all the monstrous hallmarks of a classic al Qaeda operation. In addition, security sources say that dozens more al Qaeda-linked terrorist cells are at large in the U.K.
From the evidence of one opinion poll this week, the British public has at least woken up to the fact that we are in the throes of a world war. Not so, however, the British establishment and chattering classes. Denial is no longer a river in Egypt but a British pathology.
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What the documents captured from the former Iraqi regime reveal–and why they should all be made public.
by Stephen F. Hayes
01/16/2006, Volume 011, Issue 17
THE FORMER IRAQI REGIME OF Saddam Hussein trained thousands of radical Islamic terrorists from the region at camps in Iraq over the four years immediately preceding the U.S. invasion, according to documents and photographs recovered by the U.S. military in postwar Iraq. The existence and character of these documents has been confirmed to THE WEEKLY STANDARD by eleven U.S. government officials.
The secret training took place primarily at three camps–in Samarra, Ramadi, and Salman Pak–and was directed by elite Iraqi military units. Interviews by U.S. government interrogators with Iraqi regime officials and military leaders corroborate the documentary evidence. Many of the fighters were drawn from terrorist groups in northern Africa with close ties to al Qaeda, chief among them Algeria’s GSPC and the Sudanese Islamic Army. Some 2,000 terrorists were trained at these Iraqi camps each year from 1999 to 2002, putting the total number at or above 8,000. Intelligence officials believe that some of these terrorists returned to Iraq and are responsible for attacks against Americans and Iraqis. According to three officials with knowledge of the intelligence on Iraqi training camps, White House and National Security Council officials were briefed on these findings in May 2005; senior Defense Department officials subsequently received the same briefing.
The photographs and documents on Iraqi training camps come from a collection of some 2 million “exploitable items” captured in postwar Iraq and Afghanistan. They include handwritten notes, typed documents, audiotapes, videotapes, compact discs, floppy discs, and computer hard drives. Taken together, this collection could give U.S. intelligence officials and policymakers an inside look at the activities of the former Iraqi regime in the months and years before the Iraq war.
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