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July 2007 Stats for The Big Picture.
Weekly, sometimes daily, new plots - and often, new successful attempts - by radical Islamists, to kill people, are reported. Just to take the ones from the past 5 days:
Germany: "BERLIN (AP) - Three suspected Islamic terrorists from an al-Qaida-influenced group nursing "profound hatred of U.S. citizens" were arrested on suspicious of plotting imminent, massive bomb attacks on U.S. facilities in Germany, prosecutors said Wednesday."
Norway: "Three Muslims have been indicted in Norway in connection with attacks on a synagogue and a plot to attack the US and Israeli embassies."
Pakistan: "Twenty-five dead and at least 70 wounded in mass murder attacks in Pakistan: Suicide bombers kill 25, wound 70, in Pakistan."
Denmark: "Danish authorities have arrested eight Al Qaeda-connected Muslims planning a bomb attack..."
Thailand: "Three more dead in the south Thailand jihad."
America: "Those two Egyptian students at the University of South Florida who were caught with pipe bombs near a South Carolina Navy base have been indicted, and one of them turns out to have a history of involvement in terrorism."
We're all mad as hell about it. All over the world, people feel paralyzed about how to deal with this, saying that it's impractical to expel all the members of a religion. But Daniel Pipes has identified a workable strategy so that we can start to say, as one of writer Paddy Chayefsky's characters did in the movie Network, "I'm mad as hell, and I'm not going to take this any more."
Before we get to Pipes' strategy, let's recall that radical Islam doesn't work, as the mafia did, by direct instruction to specific Islamists to commit specific attacks. The radical imams don't address their audiences and single out someone and say, "You, go out and blow up a bus next Tuesday." Instead, Islamist religious, government, and media leaders routinely address their audiences in a manner so as to fill them with rage and hatred toward everything in the non-Islamic world. The result is that their mosques constantly produce Islamists who independently come up with specific plans to go out and kill - thus providing their mosques with legal cover. For example:
Fox News: "American-Born Imam Spews Message of Hate in England"
From a NY Police Dept. Report:
The jihadist ideology combines the extreme and minority interpretation [jihadi- Salafi] of Islam with an activist-like commitment or responsibility to solve global political grievances through violence. Ultimately, the jihadist envisions a world in which jihadi-Salafi Islam is dominant and is the basis of government.
...Two key indicators within this self-identification stage that suggests progression along the radicalization continuum are:
• Progression or Gravitation Towards Salafi Islam
• Regular Attendance at a Salafi mosque [emphasis in original]
British TV exposed the hate-filled preachings of the Green Lane mosque in Birmingham, England.
The Society of Americans for National Existence exposed similar events at mosques in the U.S.
Egyptian Cleric Hazem Sallah Abu Isma'il on the Rewards of the Martyr
Sheik Yousuf Al-Qaradhawi Justifies the Killing of Israeli Women and Children in Suicide Operations
This is the precise mechanism that produces the Islamist killers that we must eradicate. To eradicate the killers, we must destroy the mechanism that produces them.
Now, let's review Pipes' strategy for doing just that. He writes:
I understand the security-based urge to exclude the Koran, Islam, and Muslims, but these efforts are too broad, sweeping up inspirational passages with objectionable ones, reformers with extremists, friends with foes. Also, they ignore the possibility of positive change.
More practical and focused would be to reduce the threats of jihad and Shariah by banning Islamist interpretations of the Koran, as well as Islamism and Islamists. Precedents exist. A Saudi-sponsored Koran was pulled from school libraries. Preachers have gone to jail for their interpretation of the Koran. Extreme versions of Islam are criminally prosecuted. Organizations are outlawed. Politicians have called for Islamists to leave their countries.
Islam is not the enemy, but Islamism is. Tolerate moderate Islam, but eradicate its radical variants.
Prosecute, expel, ban, arrest, and jail Islamist leaders who preach that the Koran says Muslims must kill non-Muslims, and who preach that the Koran says that our freedoms must be overthrown and that Shariah must replace the American Constitution.
As shown by Pipes' links, this strategy is already beginning to be implemented.
And it may be the answer to the question of how to eradicate the cancer of radical Islamism, from Western nations.
#1
#2Sean, you know perfectly well that Israel has given away land in Gaza to the Palestinians as a good-will gesture, and that the Palestinians have only used it to launch more rocket attacks at Israel. Israel has proven it wants peace, and the Palestinians have proven that they have no interest in peace, and want only to destroy Israel.
There are people committing murders in the name of Islam in countries all over the world on a weekly basis. Your notion that Israel “produces more terrorism” than Islamofascism, is absurd.
#3Thanks for responding Vik. Israel wants peace but also expanded its size at the cost of neighbours Syria, Jordan, Egypt, Lebanon and Palestine. I’m afraid the world has finally opened its eyes to the school yard bully Israel. The only hope of peace in the Middle East is a fair and just solution. Is Israel right and ALL its neighbours wrong? What about UN resolution 242? or the right of return for the thousands of people stampeded from their homes? The injustice of the Israeli Palestinian conflict is a major cause of the anger and sense of outrage felt by all people who sympathise with the downtrodden Palestinians. Just as Jews used murder and terror to fight the power of England and help create a state of Israel so too do the Lebanese and Palestinians defend against the might of a U.S. backed Israel with similar methods. Israel has given away land in Gaza to the Palestinians as a good-will gesture?? Israel can’t GIVE AWAY land it seized Vik, perhaps returned stolen property would be a better phrase?
#4Sean, the statements of fact you are basing your opinions on, are inaccurate. You mention “the right of return for the thousands of [Arab] people stampeded from their homes”. That is not what happened.
The State of Israel was created in a peaceful and legal process by the United Nations. It was not created out of Palestinian lands. It was created out of the Ottoman Empire, ruled for four hundred years by the Turks who lost it when they were defeated in World War I. There were no “Palestinian” lands at the time because there were no people claiming to be Palestinians.
...In 1947, the UN partition plan mandated the creation of two states on the remaining 20 percent of the Palestine Mandate: the State of Israel for the Jews, and another state for the Arabs. The Arabs rejected their state, and launched a war against Israel. This is the primal cause of the Arab refugee problem.
The Arab refugees were roughly 725,000 people who fled because of the war that the Arab states - not the Palestinian Arabs-started. The Arab states - dictatorships all - did not want a non-Arab state in the Middle East. The rulers of eight Arab countries whose populations vastly outnumbered the Jewish settlers in the Turkish Empire, initiated the war with simultaneous invasions of the newly created state of Israel on three fronts. Nascent Israel begged for peace and offered friendship and cooperation to its neighbors. The Arab dictators rejected this offer and answered it with a war of annihilation against the Jews. The war failed. But the state of war has continued uninterruptedly because of the failure of the Arab states -Saudi Arabia and Iraq in particular - to sign a peace treaty with Israel. To this day, the Arab states and the Palestinians refer to the failure of their aggression and the survival of Israel as an-Nakba - the catastrophe.
Had there been no Arab aggression, no war, and no invasion by Arab armies whose intent was overtly genocidal, not only would there have been no Arab refugees, but there would have been a state of Palestine in the West Bank and Gaza since 1948.
...It is indisputable that there was no theft, because no one complained of any. No Arabs were driven from their homes. In fact, as a demographic study published by Columbia University demonstrates the Arab population of the area grew tremendously during this period in part because of the economic development that the Jews helped to generate. Between 1514 AD and circa 1850, the Arab population of this region of the Turkish Empire was more or less static at about 340,000. It suddenly began to increase around 1855, and by 1947 the Arab population stood at about 1,300,000-almost quadrupling in less than 100 years. The exact causes of this population rise are beyond the scope of this essay, but the causal correlation between this independently documented phenomenon and the Zionist enterprise is beyond rational argument.
(Continued in next comment)
#5(Continued from previous comment)
Far from driving out any Arabs, stealing their land or ruining their economy, the work of the Jewish pioneers in the 19th and early 20th centuries actually enabled the Arab population to quadruple, the economy to enter the modern era, and the society to slough off the shackles of serfdom that typified the effendi-fellah (land-owner/serf) relationship of the Ottoman era. An Arab working in a Jewish factory or farming community could earn in a month what his father earned in a year eking out a living as a subsistence-level farmer using medieval technology. Arab infant mortality plummeted and longevity increased as the Jews shared their modern medical technology with their Arab neighbors.
However, the people you are defending, are guilty of the actions you condemn. Arabs were never driven from Israel, but Jewish people were driven forcibly out of their homes in Arab nations. From Wikipedia:
Mass murders of Jews and deaths due to political instability did however occur in North Africa throughout the centuries and especially in Morocco, Libya and Algeria where eventually Jews were forced to live in ghettos. Decrees ordering the destruction of synagogues were enacted in the Middle Ages in Egypt, Syria, Iraq and Yemen. Jews were also forced to convert to Islam or face death in Yemen, Morocco and Baghdad at certain times.
...In 1945, there were between 758,000 and 866,000 Jews (see table below) living in communities throughout the Arab world. Today, there are fewer than 7,000. In some Arab states, such as Libya (which was once around 3% Jewish), the Jewish community no longer exists; in other Arab countries, only a few hundred Jews remain.
Please read that last paragraph carefully: 800,000 Jewish people, driven from their homes, so that less than 7,000 remain in the Arab world today - per Wikipedia. You cannot overlook this without having your arguments appear to be absurd.
Apply your own logic to the accurate historical facts, and you will find that you agree with me.
#6Vik, you can alter the facts however you want but numbers tell the story of this argument.
From Wikipedia…
From 1967 to 1989 the UN Security Council passed 131 resolutions directly dealing with the Arab-Israeli conflict. Of the 131 resolutions passed, 43 could be considered neutral while the remaining 88 either criticized and opposed the actions of Israel or judged against its interests. Nearly half of the 88 resolutions against Israel “condemned,” “censured,” or “deplored” the member state or its actions.[3] During this time, in the UN General Assembly, 429 resolutions against Israel were passed, and Israel was condemned 321 times.
The United States, a strong ally of Israel, has used its veto power to prevent resolutions from passing through the Security Council.
Of coarse the UN is then accused of being anti Israeli as is anyone who critizises Israels distorting history… so I will quote Israeli sources who are prepared to be unbiased sometimes...The Association for Civil Rights in Israel (ACRI) and B’Tselem - the Israeli Information Center for Civil Rights in the Occupied Territories, claim that a “policy of separation on a national basis” is being imposed in Hebron. In areas of the city close to the settlers’ neighborhoods, at least 1,014 residential units (41.9 percent of the total number of homes in the area) were abandoned by their residents. Of these, 659 (65 percent) were abandonned during the second intifada. In addition, 76.6 percent of the businesses were abandonned, 1,141 (62.4 percent) of them during the same period; at least 440 were closed by IDF order.
Israeli historian…
Benny Morris was among the first of the younger Israeli scholars to receive widespread notice when he refuted Ben-Gurion’s long-accepted assertion that the Palestinian refugees of 1947-48 left Palestine at the instruction of Arab leaders. According to Ben-Gurion, “they did so under the assumption that the invasion of Arab armies at the expiration of the mandate will destroy the Jewish state and push all the Jews into the sea, dead or alive.” In The Birth of the Palestine Refugee Problem, published in 1988, Morris concluded that Arab leaders had not urged the local population to leave but that the exodus was mainly the result of attacks by the official Jewish army, the Haganah, and the Irgun, a militia headed by Menachem Begin that had carried out assassinations and bombings against both the British and the Palestinians during the British mandate.
Israel’s military raids were the main cause of continued violence and hostility.
Morris also discounted the claim that the 1950s were years of Arab terrorism against Israel. In many cases, he found, the “terrorists” were simply dispossessed Palestinian farmers who had sneaked back across the border in an attempt to harvest some of their crops. Morris and other Israeli historians believe that Israel’s military raids during those years were the main cause of continued violence and hostility.
Although Morris does not believe it was official Jewish policy to carry out massacres and other atrocities against Palestinians in the process of achieving statehood, other scholars cite the leadership’s Plan Dalet, or Plan D, as evidence that the Jews were determined to expel the Palestinians from as much territory as possible and by whatever means necessary. A recent book by Ilan Pappé, associate professor of Middle East history at the University of Haifa, emphasizes the importance of Plan D in the creation of Israel. In The Making of the Arab-Israeli Conflict, 1947-51 (available through the AET Book Club), Pappé writes that the Jewish army formally adopted the plan in early 1948 after Arabs protested a U.N. partition proposal that allocated to the Palestinians only 38 percent of mandatory Palestine although they made up more than 65 percent of the population.
Under Plan D, once the British authorities were out of the way, Jewish fighters would treat all of Palestine as a no-man’s land and seize any Arab village or town from which an attack on Jews was launched. But officials of the Jewish Agency’s Land Department, which was headed by a close ally of Ben-Gurion, chose to ignore the difference between friendly and hostile villages and encouraged local commanders to evacuate Arabs wherever there was fertile land. Jewish forces also attacked villages that lay along strategic routes, such as Deir Yassin, where on April 9, 1948, the Irgun slaughtered more than 250 men, women, and children. After Deir Yassin, frightened Palestinians fled in even greater numbers. From April 1, 1948 to the end of the war, Pappé writes, “Jewish operations were guided by the desire to occupy the greatest possible portion of Palestine.”
#7Vik, you can alter the facts however you want but numbers tell the story of this argument.
Again, your logic is good, but your facts are incorrect. Let’s use your logic, that numbers tell the story. The numbers are:
The population of Israel is currently 19.8% Arabic, and 16.2% Muslim.
The population of the Palestinian territory in Gaza is currently 0% Jewish.
And as noted in my previous post, the Jewish population of Arab countries is currently slightly above 0%, after those nations drove about 800,000 Jewish people from their homes by force.
These numbers prove that there is tolerance towards Arabs in Israel, but there is state-sanctioned genocidal behavior towards Jewish people in Arabic nations.
Come up with an answer to that.
#8Vic. I am not defending any Arab or European nations anti Semitic behaviour. I am condemning Israel’s history of terror tactics on civilians. Here is an excerpt of Yitzhak Rabin’s memoirs, published in the New York Times, on the 23rd of October 1979, he is quoted in recalling the conquest of Lydda, after the completion of Plan Dalet, “We walked outside, Ben-Gurion accompanying us. Allon repeated his question, ‘What is to be done with the Palestinian population?’ Ben-Gurion waved his hand in a gesture which said ‘Drive them out!’”
Again from Wiki. From 1967 to 1989 the UN Security Council passed 131 resolutions directly dealing with the Arab-Israeli conflict. Of the 131 resolutions passed, 43 could be considered neutral while the remaining 88 either criticized and opposed the actions of Israel or judged against its interests. Nearly half of the 88 resolutions against Israel “condemned,” “censured,” or “deplored” the member state or its actions. During this time, in the UN General Assembly, 429 resolutions against Israel were passed, and Israel was condemned 321 times.
#9Vic. I am not defending any Arab or European nations anti Semitic behaviour
You claim to be against nations who drive citizens from their homes, but you do not condemn Arab nations who have done so.
Why do you not condemn the behavior of Arab nations who drove 800,000 Jewish people out of their homes? Why do you not condemn Arab nations who have behaved so brutally to their Jewish citizens, that, as per my previous comment, just barely over 0% of their population is Jewish?
#10The system that Produces Extremists in Islam is
1.US, UK and EU support of Tyranical Goverments in M.E. and Asia ...
the People who are brutalized and whose fathers and sons and daughters get killed donot blame their regiem but Blame US for supporting them since all the aid military and financial comes from US, UK and EU ... so they are radicalized
2. Racism Towards Muslims in general
The racists REmarks by Leaders such as in Holland where the Muslims are called Pigs and they talk about banning the Quran and bombing Mecca and Madina and Saudia ... are turning even . normal everyday muslims into Radicals
3. US , UK and Eu’s Support of Isreal without a Proper ressolution to the Palestinian Problem
Isreal Keeps defying the UN Laws that prent her from puting up new seatlements in the westbank and gaza strip . but on the other hand when some country in africa defies certain UN laws they are attacked upon through media and by Sanctions such as Iran , or Kenya, or Libya or Uganda
this Favourism and Partiality towards certain countries is the main cause of radicalization ..
and is giving a chance to the radicals to indoctrinate more and more muslims into radical ones
#11anonymous,
> The system that Produces Extremists in Islam is…
By extremists, you refer to those who blow up planes, trains, cars and restaurants, in the name of Islam. You are presenting a defense of them. Do you believe that Muslims who blow up planes, trains, cars, and restaurants in the name of Islam, go to paradise as a reward for their actions?
#12i figure that you did not read the 3 points completely before posting
let me put it in easy words
lets say you own a house .. and i want your house real bad but you are not selling .. so i pay a coupple of gansters some money to get you out of your house.. ?
would you hate the gansters or would you hate me…
logically .. both .. 
and since you know that if you kill that ganster or have him arrested by the police .. i can always hire another one to steal your home ..
wouldnt it be easier to kill the problem at its root?
similarly .. when USA and UK and EU .. them most powerfull countries support the tyranical goverments in many of the worlds countries the people persicuted not only blame their goverments they also blame those who support and provide for their goverments that being USA or UK and EU ..
and no killing of innocents is forbiden and people who kill the innocent are bound for hell
then again these who have been persicuted have no other choice since they are indaviduals who want vengence but wake up and smell the cofee they cant fight a war against US or UK or EU right...?? ... so they do what they can to satisfy themselves..
now the people who were humilated in Abu-Gharaib Prision camp .. .or the innocent people caught up in the Guantanamo being tourtured ... when they will get out of their.. they will love the US .. or will they Hate the US?
even though many who never thoguht of being Terorists or hated terorists will now support them since USA proved the Extremists true that "USA is tyranical and they tourture and kil lmuslims"
and as far as your question goes… Blowing yourself up and killing the Innocent if wrong and is forbid and is a sin ..
but i fear that you have set up for me trap of words so, i would include the fact that. killing of a countries Army personal , and destruction of Countries authority landmarks is not killing but is an act of War, as was done by US during the Word war . when Tokyo city was attacked by using Napalm to burn a major area of the city .. or when the Japanese attacked the Ships in pearl harbour. and so forth
#13and as far as your question goes… Blowing yourself up and killing the Innocent if wrong and is forbid and is a sin .. but… [...] destruction of Countries authority landmarks is not killing but is an act of War…
In other words, you support the destruction of the World Trade Center by Islamists. This indicates that your talk about "killing of innocents is forbiden and people who kill the innocent are bound for hell" is just lip service.
#14wot proof av u ppl got dat muslims did wot u say, besides da media?
#15Islam has gotta be the bigest load of rubbish ever invented , congratulations mohamed for this insult to humanity .
#16Thank you, Vik Rubenfeld for hosting these pages and helping to educate the western world to this dangerous illogical religion called Islam.
I truly do not understand why we (in the west feel we must accept and apologize for our past). Certainty the Muslin world completely refuses to do the same.
The problem goes back to Ishmael and God curse that his descendants will always fight one another. The problem will never be resolve without God’s intervention.
#17Destroy the mechanism that produces them? Good idea. You can start with their headquarters in Langley, Virginia.
#18Emil, the mechanism described has been in existence for 1400 years - long before the U.S was created.
The ideals that caused an Israeli terrorist to enter a mosque in Jerusalem and shoot indiscriminately are just as bad as Islamofacism. The armed settlers expanding over Palestine with the idea that GOD promised this land to THEM has caused so much misery, frustration and a sense of hopelessness as young Palestinians fall under the spell of older militants who use them as bombs. The young human bomb delivered by Hamas to Israel is no worse than the hellfire missile fired from a helo into an ambulance in Lebanon by Israel. Menachem Begin killed Jews Britons and Arabs in bombings and terror hangings. Israel used murder and bombs in Europe to avenge terror. And so on it goes. Injustice breeds hatred with all people. The mechanism that produces more terrorism than any other is known to the world ...its name is ISRAEL!