Tsion In Somali ex-Muslim Ayaan Hirsi Ali's autobiographical book 'Infidel', she describes what it was like to be a little black African Somali - Muslim - girl in Saudi Arabia; and then she compares that, to what it was like when her family moved to Ethiopia. In Saudi Arabia she was called 'abeed' and beaten by her Arab Muslim teacher. Saudi Arabia was wealthy, but it was also fiendishly cruel, and very violent, and restrictive. In Saudi Arabia, as a little girl, she had no freedom whatsoever. And then...Ethiopia! Freedom! She loved it. And, she said, although the people were very poor, many of them were so kind to each other and to her. You may also like to know that it was a bunch of cheerful, sassy Ethiopian Christian girls, when she was living as an 'asylum seeker' in the Netherlands, who helped crack her free from her Islamic cult programming. (She was already questioning it, but what these girls did and said, the way they joshed and laughed and challenged the islamic cult talk, really accelerated the process). So, think of it: you, as an Ethiopian, can proudly claim that Ethiopia, and Ethiopian non-Muslims, had a hand in helping educate and liberate one of the world's best-known and most famous - and eloquent - apostates from Islam. Who is Somali! (She's now putting all of that notorious Somali toughness to a good cause: raising the alarm about Jihad and Sharia).

I would encourage anyone here who has not yet read G K Chesterton's novel 'The Flying Inn' (1915) to do so. It will make the hair stand up on the back of your neck. And if you are British, and fancy yourself as an indie film-maker, I'd suggest making a film of same: black and white, hand-held videocam, sort of in the gritty 'look' of 'the blair witch project'...and update the setting to today's heavily Islamised England. Because GKC's novel is about an England that has been stealth-Islamised...eerily prescient. Like I said, he wrote it in **1915**. A modern film version, done well, could become powerful samizdat. Second, I have a suggestion to all British readers. Look up the ancient English custom of 'Beating the Bounds'. And allow yourself to think how it could be used - at the appropriate ecclesiastical season, next year - to push back against Islamisation; all you need is a sympathetic parish priest or minister here and there (such *do* exist, you just have to look), and some very careful and creative forward planning. Some parishes do it already; if so...and you live near...join in, make it BIG. Third: there is a group, small but feisty, called 'The British Pakistani Christian Association'. They held a small but brave protest outside the Pakistani consulate in Manchester on 1st September - even while things were going pear-shaped in Walthamstow - and bearded the Pakistani consul in his den. They had a great protest song by the pope's favourite pop band, and they had some support from a Hindu group; they were protesting against the iniquitous Pakistani 'Blasphemy' laws, and on behalf of little Rimsha Masih, and Asia Bibi. I encourage all Brits here present to visit their website regularly; and, if you possibly can, attend *their* protests and back them up; they need a LOT more people. It's about raising awareness. Fourth: for those who look down on the EDL; join the Royal Society of St George, increase the membership mightily and ginger it up a bit. It's about preservation and affirmation of all that is good in English culture. Think 'flanking movement'. If the **Royal Society of St George* were to have a function or a march, the police could hardly suppress it without looking really silly, seeing as *that* Society is under the direct patronage of Her Majesty the Queen... For the same reason, I encourage Scots to join the Society of St Andrew of Scotland; and Welshmen to create a Society of St David, if one does not already exist. And if you have a local Catholic or Orthodox or 'High Anglican' church that holds public street processions on major church festivals and Saints' days...JOIN IN, even if it's just coming along to watch.

Me, I see Islam as being more 'decadent' than 'savage' in the sociological sense (just as Nazism was the fruit of a period of social and intellectual decadence, and attracted decadent urban intellectuals and aristocrats, not peasants ). Its nihilism and its infinite and frankly occultic/ Black Magic perversity make me think of the 'Hellfire Clubs' that were not frequented by yokels and peasants but by wealthy, bored, decadent Regency rakes, or of the Marquis de Sade, or the city-dwelling imperial Aztecs and the Moloch-worshipping ancient Canaanites and Carthaginians (super-sophisticated city-dwellers, all). Its anti-art mindset, its anti-music mindset, is not that of someone who does not know that these things exist, but closer to that of one who knows exactly what these things are: and chooses to smash them; of the occultist who consciously blasphemes the holy. It represents itself as having been born in the desert, but its actual historic origins are probably in the library of the caliph's palace rather than in the shepherd's tent. A nonliterate tribe of 'primitive' non-Muslim animists who love pet dogs, make fermented drinks, let their women walk around uncovered, sing and dance and create elaborate art (paintings and carvings) representing people, spirit beings, and animals, are more 'civilised' - that is, more in tune with the essence of what it is to be human - than any Tariq Ramadan,. I see this contest as not being about 'civilised' versus 'savage' but about Eros versus Thanatos; the human versus that which deliberately attacks the human. There is a consistent and thoroughgoing asceticism of antinature in Islam - seen in the fact that Muslim married couples, seemingly, are much more likely to engage in anal intercourse than hetero couples from any other cultural bloc, or in the whole gorge-by-night starve-by-day Ramadan faux-'fast' that has just been happening, and in the strict sharia ban on pet dogs, wine, music and representational art and sculpture, as well as the extreme covering/ masking of women, all of which things have no real parallel among any other human group - that has all the flavour of the bored sophisticate dabbling in the occult. And, too, there is a strong Gnostic flavour to Islam - I would even go so far as to call it a gnostic war cult - that manifests in things like its use of the terms 'ignorance' and 'light', its presentation of its ugly secrets as 'knowledge'; Muslims pose as superior beings, as lordly illuminati , they *Know* the special inner secret and we do not... Islam *reduces* people and societies to ignorance and poverty...but it does so in a very peculiar way, by a method that smells of the corrupted intellect that has declared 'evil, be thou my good'.

Time for the Islamosavvy - from NYC and beyond - to hold a big rally in NYC in support of the NYPD, telling them to go on exactly as they have begun. And praise and encourage the Mayor for his backing up the Police and supporting what they've been doing. the Muslims are whining and making noise. Well, the Non-Muslims need to make **more** noise.

I suggest a fund-raising - and consciousness-raising - concert. Benjamin Britten's 'St Nicholas' cantata. Three possibilities for venues. 1. Outdoors, as close as possible to the original site of the church as can be managed. Or 2. in St Paul's Chapel, which is the closest church now standing next to the WTC site. Or 3, St Peter's Catholic Church, the other church close by. Get a really good choir and orchestra and conductor together (you might be able to get top singers from round the world to volunteer as soloists and choristers); audience members pay to be there, knowing that their steep ticket price will go toward putting a beautiful new St Nicholas Church; get a good director to film the whole thing; sell the sound and audio-visual recordings. 'St Nicholas at Ground Zero'. The dvd music video, as well as showing the performance, could intercut historic images from the entire lifetime of the church (including those incredibly moving, heartbreaking photos that were taken just before it was destroyed). There are parts of the St Nicholas cantata that would absolutely send chills down people's backs if they were hearing it *in that particular place* - as when, for example, St Nicholas raises to life three boys who have been murdered, and they come walking in chanting "God be glorified!"

Sorry about the multiple posting. I thought it hadn't gone through.

With all due respect: neither Plato nor Ayn Rand nor Nietzsche seems to me to be the final word on the way in which one may understand the world. It makes a great deal of difference to the way one lives, whether one regards war, chaos, conflict, violence as original and as *the* fundamental truth of things, or whether one regards peace - the shalom of Creation - as both original and final, and evil - including violence and war - as historic and temporary; whether one regards Evil as coeternal with Good, the two being locked in ceaseless conflict; or whether one regards Evil as temporal, historic, and parasitic (that is, as having no independent or permanent reality). Does the Holy One, the creator of heaven and earth, create by war? He is called the Lord of Hosts, true; but that is not His only name, nor even the name by which He primarily chooses to be known. The name He speaks to Moses is pure existence: I will be where I will be/ I will be what I will be; the God Who Is; and he also chooses to be known in relationship, to Jews as 'God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob', while Christians in addition worship Him as 'God and Father of Jesus the Christ'. Rather than going with Plato or for that matter, Nietzsche the neo-pagan, I prefer the perspective that is presented by Eastern Orthodox theologian David Bentley Hart in his masterpiece "The Beauty of the Infinite: the Aesthetics of Christian Truth" (he could just as easily have said, 'the aesthetics of Biblical truth', for he has a solid grasp of the fact that Christianity is born from a Hebrew matrix), and in briefer compass in "The Doors of the Sea". In 'The Beauty of the Infinite' there are three sections that I encourage the curious to read, and think through carefully: 'the Will to Power' (which tackles Nietzsche, and his attempt to revive what might be called the classical Pagan view of the world), and then 'The Covenant of Light', and - toward the end of the book - 'The Consolations of Tragedy, the Terrors of Easter'. There, Hart sets out bluntly the contrast between a vision of the world in which war, violence, death are *the* final and defining realities, and an alternative vision, that which he sees articulated in the Bible - and nowhere else. I quote, from 'the consolations of tragedy, the terrors of Easter', this: "Tragedy might well represent the most pronounced instance in Greek religion of that mystification of violence that sustains the sacred order of pagan society, the consecration of social violence as a restraint of cosmic violence, natural and divine. That is why it cannot preserve moral thought against the lure of ideology, but can only preserve a particular ideology against critique: its salubrious disenchantment is meant to mesmerise us with necessity's dark majesty. "It is here, first and foremost, that the Christian narrative proves resistant to a tragic reading: theology must insist upon "historicising" evil, treating it as the superscribed text of a palimpsest, obscuring the aboriginal goodness of creation; Christian thought , which conceives of difference within being as primordially an ordination of peace...radically resituates all things (even, ultimately, pain, alienation and death) within its greater story of creation and redemption, and so can never reconcile itself to any wisdom whose premise is the ontological necessity of violence."... More: [the tragic] turns attention not toward the one who suffers, but to the sublime backdrop against which the drama is played out; it assures the spectator that this is how things are, this is the constitution of the universe, and that justice is strife; tragic wisdom is the wisdom of resignation and consent, a wisdom that is too prudent to rebel against what is fixed in the very fabric of being, and that refuses to suffer inordinately, enraged by death or resentful of civic order. "Tragedy legitimates a particular regime of law, violence, and war: it teaches that moira [fate/ destiny/ necessity] places and displaces us, and so leads us to a serene and chastened acceptance of where we are placed and how we are displaced; tragedy resists every motion outwarrd, beyond the sentineled frontier, and reinforces the stable foundations of the totality. "Christianity, however, feeds upon a different wisdom, a defiant, Jewish wisdom that insists upon an act of affirmation far removed from the resigned serenity of tragic consciousness: insanely, perhaps, it enjoins a love of creation that will not be reconciled to the loss of what is created, but enacts a double motion, an affirmation of the goodness of what is and an expectation of action by God to rescue this wholly good creation from the violences that enslave it. "A recognition of the true universality of suffering, of its endless particularity and of the infinite gravity of its every instance, is a Jewish, not an Attic, accomplishment, and it leads inevitably to a prophetic outcry, a call for reconciliation that is also redemption, a demand for divine justice; Israel is always - and always ever more - in rebellion against the wisdom of totality. The wisdom of Israel - expressed in the added ending to the book of Job, or in Ezekiel's vision of the valley of dry bones - lies in its growing awareness that God is the God of justice and election, and that his goodness and the goodness of creation can be affirmed only through faith in a future that overcomes all endings... "It is from Israel that Christianity learns the grammar of charity, its passionate commitment to creation and its revulsion before injustice, rather than resignation before the magnitude of evil. Christian love erupts from the empty tomb, and so must always be in rebellion against all tragic 'profundities'." There is much, much more, but I hope that gives some hint of what he is getting at. I will add that the first half of Hart's book, where he discusses modern and postmodern continental thinkers such as Deleuze and Foucault, seems to me to explain why so many French intellectuals rushed to convert to Islam - they already held a worldview not dissimilar from the Islamic, a worldview suffused with certain assumptions about the primacy of violence and the will to power. And it might be worth reading Franz Rosenzweig in tandem with Hart; and looking up Spengler's 'First Things' essay, entitled 'Christian, Muslim, Jew'. From which I will quote this sentence: "For Rosenzweig, holy war is the sine qua non of Islam, precisely because war is the most sacred act of pagan society in general." Let those among us who identify as Christian, or as Jewish, beware lest we fall into the trap of sacralising war. If we wage war, as it seems we must, in this present age (as our ancestors also had to do, to defeat Nazism for example, or as Israel has had to fight, to defeat the death cultists of Islam), we do so with a different mindset; we will fight well and bravely, but we would much rather be doing something other than fighting, we would rather create than destroy; war *does not* show us the deepest truth of God's Creation; it is a thing of the surface, not of the depths. There is an enormous difference between seeing war as the norm, or as institution (as Islam does) with peace a temporary respite or even an illusion; or seeing war, even all the wars of what the New Testament calls 'this present age', as an interruption, or interruptions, of peace. Our earthly peace however seemingly fragile mirrors a peace that is eternal, that antecedes all violence, that is neither determined by nor dependent upon violence, and will remain when violence ceases; the peace of the Sabbath day.

Well, when *I* read about this thing I thought at once- 'Concealed Military Base'. I'd *love* to know what they've got dug in underneath.

I had read part of this before, in Andrew Bostom's encyclopaedic anthology, 'The Legacy of Jihad'. But to read it all, again, is to realize this: that at bottom Islam is nothing other than a death cult, a cult whose ultimate raison d'etre is ritualised mass human sacrifice. Every field of jihad butchery and of jihadist gang-rape-unto-death (and, for that matter, every 'pride murder' of a Muslim female by her 'family' and every obscene beheading video) involves the ritual pouring of human blood in to the bottomless maw of allah the arab demon of blood and war. Every dead non-Muslim whom a Muslim murders is for that Muslim a sacrificial animal, whose terror and pain and death is the Muslim murderer's ticket to 'paradise'. The peculiarly horrible touch, here, in this report by McGahan, is the bit about Muslims ripping open pregnant women and butchering the unborn infant separately from its mother, in order to increase the number of notches on their scimitar and thus, in their depraved minds, ensure their own entry into 'paradise'. *Now* we know why the Muslims did what they did to Rivka Holzberger. The scenes McGahan describes - and scenes just like them, only worse, even by factors of ten or a hundred - have been repeated, over and over, on three continents, in every place where the Religion of Slavery and Murder has gone: in Africa past and present (Sudan, Nigeria), in Asia (the scores of millions of Hindus and Buddhists butchered by the Muslims), in the East Indies (Moluccas and Timor Lorosae, 1990s) and in Europe, especially in Spain and the Balkans, in every year that Islam has been in existence. September 11 was just such a scene of ritual mass murder by Muslims. Muslims were in ecstasy at the sight of so many non-Muslims being sacrificed at once; allah gorging himself on all that terror and pain and grief. Islam was, I think, created by a psychopathic serial killer or killers, in order to normalise and sacralise and validate, and indeed, in order to teach and perpetuate, and indeed to forcibly program even into the brains of those who might otherwise have been neurologically normal, the depravity of the worst kind of serial killer. And like such serial killers, it operates in two modes - it adopts smiling superficial 'charm mode' if those around it, whom it desires to murder, are for the moment too strong for it, or require to be lured into a place of vulnerability...but then, when it is able to seize the throat, it morphs into monster mode. I have an awful suspicion that many Muslims look at world population today, see 1.2 billion Muslims and five billion non-Muslims, and make the mental calculation that this means each individual Muslim only has to ritually murder five non-Muslims, in order to possess the world...That the world would, absent the non-Muslims, with only Muslims left alive, descend in short order into a pretty fair imitation of Hell made manifest on earth, does not bother them. Into that bottomless pit they are willing to go; killing, killing, killing. One does not understand the full force of the Biblical concept of 'fire from heaven' - the fire of YHWH - until one reads reports like this. Only then can one understand why one would want to call down an annihilating and judging fire from heaven upon the unrepentant, indeed, the arrogant and strutting, perpetrators of such horrible mass murder. Islamia delenda est. How does one keep one's soul from being utterly overwhelmed? I guess, first by remembering that the Bulgarians who survived horrors like this, throughout the entire period of their subjection by Muslims, did in the end achieve their freedom from the Empire of Islam, and drove nearly all of the Muslims out of their lovely country. God bless the Bulgarians and heal them and restore to them the years that first the Muslims, then the Nazis, then the Soviets ate. Secondly: I can think only of reading, and rereading, first Psalm 88, the series of agonised questions that are hurled at God in verses ten to twelve; and then the vision that Ezekiel is given in the Valley of Dry Bones (the 37th chapter of the Book of Ezekiel in the English translation of the Bible).

You know what gets me about this? The person who was killed was a Thai. Probably Buddhist. And guess what the Malay Muslims do in the southern provinces of Thailand (which originally came under Thai rule the same way Gaza and Judea and Samaria came under Israeli control, that is, in the course of defensive warfare against a Jihadist assault)? - they're waging Jihad against the Buddhist Thais, just like the Arab Muslims in and around Israel wage war on the Jews and the Arabised Christians. So this man, had he been in southern Thailand, and even while living in the rest of Thailand, would *still* have been a target for Muslim Jihadis. He goes all the way to the other end of Eurasia, to Israel: and there he gets killed by - Muslim Jihadis. Maybe the Israeli government and the Thai government need to get together and swap ideas about how to deal with a hostile, treacherous and sullen Muslim population out of which jihadis perpetually emerge. Either the Thais abandon those provinces and let them merge with Malaysia (which means dar al Islam just got bigger) or they bite the bullet, boot all the permanently-rebellious and beheading-and-ambushing Muslims out into rapidly sharia-izing Malaysia next door, and keep the provinces and populate them with non-Muslim Thais, and seal the border with Malaysia (which means dar al Harb, territory of the non-Muslims, gets bigger, and the Ummah, or Mohammedan Mob, is served notice that if it keeps attacking its non-Muslim neighbours, it will *lose* big-time). I can't see any way out for Israel, in the short and mid term, than a similar move: evict all the Muslims from Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria and Israel proper (the Christians could stay, provided they took an oath of loyalty - they'd be *far* better off under Jewish rule than as terrified, exploited dhimmis in any 'islamic state of "palestine"'); keep the military high ground, that is, the Golan with all of Judea and Samaria; and fortify the borders. Oh, and remove the Al Aqsa mosque from the Temple Mount. It can be pulled apart, taken away and reassembled in Jordan or Saudi Arabia if the archaeologists and historians don't want it dynamited. Anyway, to repeat: the jihadists' murder-by-rocket of this Thai Buddhist worker, in Israel, is an opportunity to point out that the Jihad assails everyone who is not a Muslim; and to work on establishing or deepening an understanding between Thailand and Israel. A lot more could be done with the Philippines, too (who *also* send a LOT of workers to Israel); for they too, like Israel and Thailand, are afflicted by a large and aggressive Mohammedan 'minority' who have been using a fake 'peace process', punctuated by terror raids, to chip away at Filipino territory, slice by slice. I suggest to Israelis reading here, that you follow the news of the Jihad in the Philippines and Thailand; and whenever there is a Muslim attack, write intelligent letters of condolence to the Filipino and Thai ambassadors in Israel, bringing up this fact, that they - like you - are on the front lines of the Global Jihad.

A poster above describes Geert Wilders as 'gay'. I'm not so sure he is. These days gay men don't usually get married to women; and Wilders has a Hungarian wife tucked away somewhere safe...poor people, because of the security arrangements they get to see each other about once a week in a closely-guarded location. Frankly, I think his wife is a serious contender for the title of Smartest Woman in Europe...for picking out and snaffling up, well ahead of time, a man who would be intelligent enough to recognise the threat from the Jihad-makers and the Sharia-pushers, and brave enough to try to lead a Resistance against that threat. Whether he's gay, bi or straight, he's a Man and his wife must have seen that, way back when.

Seconding PersonoftheBook - if these Muslims are carrying out their razzias, their cowardly swarming attacks, repeatedly in certain locations - e.g. Kennedy Park - and against certain types of targets, say, a schoolgirl, a drunk guy, a lone elderly woman walking a dog - then it seems to me that a few 'stakeouts'/ booby traps could be arranged. The gang attacks and then discovers, for example, that the lone little old lady isn't as old as she was made up to look, nor the schoolgirl as defenceless, and that she's a wing chun kung fu champ (they find this out when they're balled up on the ground clutching their groins after being swift-and-deadly kicked), and her dog is a bull terrier that's prepared to BITE and HOLD ON and that she has a whole lotta friends just as unfriendly as her, with dogs too, suddenly popping out of their hiding places, and that they - the nasty, slimy, cowardly little Muslim bullies - are surrounded, with nowhere to run. Or they discover that that bloke who looked drunk...isn't, and that he too has a LOT of friends, big burly friends with guns, or great BIG sticks. And then they get humiliatingly caned, with everything recorded on video from start to finish. HOnestly, too, tarring and feathering and riding out of town on a rail was *made* as a taking-down-a-peg treatment for supremacist Muslim thugs. Maybe, if the Muslim jihad gangsters had a few nasty surprises of this kind, they'd think twice about attacking random kafir... Of course, if such action was taken, you'd have to have a few lawyers on side beforehand, ready to deal with the howls of 'racism!' that would be raised; which is why the initial *Muslim* gang attacks on what the Muslims supposed to be lone, defenceless, easy target Infidels, would have to be filmed.

OK. So *only* fifteen people - fifteen heroes - turned up for the SIOE rally against the Harrow mosque. It's a start. Fifteen. Better than one, or two, or three, or ten. A whole lot better than none. The SIOE should simply set another date, for another rally (I suggest during the runup to Passover and Easter), and get cracking on some networking. Each of those fifteen people who did come, should try to find a few other people to join him or her, next time. And see what happens. If at first you don't succeed, then try, try, try again.

The thing that really gets me about this is the way Reuters casually ignores the psychological and economic damage wreaked by these strutting, sneering, predatory b*st*rds. Many of those who are held to ransom - most of the sailors on board the seized ships, for example, or the British couple who were snatched with their ocean-going yacht only 60 miles or so from the capital city of the Seychelles islands, or the kidnapped journalists Canadian Amanda Lindhout and Aussie Nigel Brennan - are NOT rich people; and so cannot afford to pay the exorbitant ransoms demanded. Seamen from the Ukraine, Russia, Philippines, Tuvalu and Kiribati, are poor as dirt; their families and friends can't meet the price. Countries like the Philippines, Tuvalu, Kiribati and Ukraine, are too damn poor to be able to ransom their citizens. So their captured people rot in hell with the jihadis quite prepared, in the end, to either enslave them or casually kill them, once it becomes clear that the money really ain't forthcoming. Lindhout and Brennan, and the British couple, come from middle-class backgrounds, not filthy rich at all; the kidnapped British couple had retired and sunk EVERYTHING into their boat which had become their sole asset; to ransom them, their children and friends would have to strip themselves of whatever assets *they* have. I know that Brennan's family members, to raise the $1.5 million demanded (and he was being kept in solitary confinement, and viciously beaten), sold houses and cars; the sale of a house and land with all or most of the resulting cash vanishing into the bottomless maw of Somalia, means that the seller is henceforward 'handicapped', permanently losing their main asset built up by years of work. And thus, bit by bit, kidnapping by kidnapping, ship by hijacked ship, the resources of the lands of the non-Muslims, are liquidated and siphoned off into dar al Islam, to feed the vampire extortioners; to be spent on ...more jihad, to conduct more ghazwa raids, more kidnappings, more hijackings. Furthermore, through the seizure of ships and cargoes there is the cost to the insurance companies and the disruption of trade and commerce. It's the imposition of jizya or tribute by any other means. Muslims used this sort of 'raiding', year after year, decade after decade, to 'soften up' targets like Spain and Byzantium, destroying assets and also stealing resources, to weaken them so they could be invaded outright. Sure, Lindhout and Brennan should have had more sense than to go into Somalia; but the British couple in their yacht had no reason to suppose pirates would be so close to the coast of the Seychelles; and a Tuvalu or Kiribati or Filipino ordinary seaman has no choice what ships he works. In the old days, newspaper articles about pirates, hijackers and kidnappers-for-ransom - whether said pirates were Muslim or non-Muslim - would have been filled with righteous fury and calls for enforcement of the law. But Reuters seems almost admiring of all this 'enterprise'. The proper treatment of these evil people should be the obliteration of their coastal lairs, their harbours, anchored boats and palaces, by withering bombardment from Infidel naval ships just offshore; at sea decoy ships (like the Q-ships of WWII) might be used to draw the pirate boats out of hiding, upon which, they should be sent to Davey Jones's locker.

NoGuile - true. There is an excellent organisation called 'Anglican Friends of Israel'. Look them up. Don't forget that one of the best Gentile friends that Israel ever had was the devout and erudite Anglican clergyman, James Parkes. His books 'The Story of Jerusalem' and 'Whose Land?' are well worth reading. The other great English lover of Israel was the extraordinary Orde Wingate who, had he not been killed in Burma during World War II, would surely have ended up with a job in the IDF, either in active service or as an instructor of soldiers. James the Fin: there are antisemites but I think there are also many earnest and well-meaning Christians who (knowing nothing about the enormous Arab/ Muslim capacity for voluble, tearful, convincing and elaborate lies) have been completely sucked in by Arab/Muslim taqiyya, much of it channelled through 'Palestinian' Islamochristians such as Naim Ateek and Hanan Ashrawi. At the very end of John Roy Carlson's 'Cairo to Damascus' (1951) you can see him putting his finger on that whole agitprop campaign aimed at Christians, right at its beginnings before it had much in the way of oil money behind it. I could have gone down that path but for the grace of God. I grew up in a totally pro-Israel household but by the time I did my second degree at university I was beginning to be swayed by all the Poor Palestinian sob stories that were deluging the church. Then, fortunately, I discovered Jacques Ellul and then, having read most of his other books and learned a good deal of respect for his judgement, worked my way through his brilliant book on Israel, 'Un Chretien Pour Israel' (1983), which contains a lucid and devastating deconstruction of the whole anti-Israel propaganda. Luckily by that stage I had learnt enough French to be able to read it in French...since it alone of all his books written around that time, has NOT been translated into English (funny, that). That cleared my head and rendered me thenceforward wholly immune to all versions of the 'Arab Narrative'. And then one day, googling for Jacques Ellul because I wanted to find out if Un Chretien Pour Israel was still in print (there is *exactly one* copy in Australia, in *one* library), I came across Bat Yeor's dhimmitude site, because of Ellul's forewords that he wrote for her. And Bat Yeor linked to Mr Spencer's jihadwatch...

Bikini with rifle? Why not? I bet her husband would be first in line to get one of the posters and pin it up: every man with brains wants a Woman of Valour as a wife, after all if she knows how to stop the grizzlies and the mountain lions it means the kids get a better chance at surviving. (Isn't he Native American/ First Nations, by the way? And doesn't that make nonsense of any attempt to represent her as a Racist?) Get her head straight about Islam, put her in charge of the US combined forces and the jihadis would run screaming for cover. The jihadis' worst nightmare is this: that the Soccer Moms of the USA wake up, realize what the sharia-pushers intend for said Soccer Moms and their precious daughters...and Do Something. Tolkien's Ents annihilating Saruman's Orthanc will be nothing on it if Palin wakes up to the Muslim agenda and leads the Soccer Moms into battle. The whole non-Muslim world could do with a Deborah to lead it. But our potential Deborah still needs a bit more educating. Is there any way to get Palin into the same room as Nonie Darwish, Bat Yeor, Brigitte Gabriel, Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Wafa Sultan? Or to find a way of persuading her to read 1. Darwish's "Cruel and Usual Punishment", the lay infidel's guide to Sharia in all its hideousness 2. Spencer's 'Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam and the Crusades', 3. Jacques Ellul's brief foreword to Bat Yeor's 'The Decline of Eastern Christianity About Islam', which foreword comprises just five pages beautifully summing up *everything* that the practical non-Muslim politician needs to know about Jihad; and 4. Raymond Ibrahim, 'Islam's Doctrines of Deception', a little article that he wrote for 'Jane's Islamic Affairs Analyst' in September 2008? Maybe throw in 'Submission', 'Fitna', and 'Islam: What the West Needs to Know'.

Heagney went to Dr Alan Godlas at the University of Georgia. Godlas is most definitely not to be trusted. First up: he is listed among the 138 Islamic 'scholars' who signed off on the sweetly-sinister daw'a exercise, 'A Common Word', which the Muslims sent to the leaders of all major Christian groupings, in October 2007. Among those 138 are some truly nasty Islamic antisemites and peddlers of eye-stretching nonsense and lies (and that's only the main ones I've had a chance to research - I suspect most of the 138 are actually not very nice people, if one ferreted about a bit). Not good company to be keeping. Secondly: at Jihadwatch on 6 January 2006, in the comments thread to an article entitled 'dimwitted moral equivalence', Godlas' name was casually raised by a poster who had come across an article about jihad, that Godlas had written. Well: what then transpired on the comments floor makes for fascinating reading, as Mr Spencer's friend Hugh Fitzgerald did a bit of on-the-spot online investigation, assessing, in particular, the reading list of Godlas's course as presented at Georgia U. Mr Fitzgerald only very, very rarely indulges in vulgar language, but his instant response to Godlas's article as flagged, was..."cr*p". Then he got out the scalpel... I will reproduce part of what Mr Fitzgerald said, about Godlas's course, just to give you an idea of why Meredith Heagney's treatment of him [Godlas] as an 'authority is such an unmitigated disaster. "If one were to dream up a propaganda course for Islam, it would come out looking exactly like this one by Alan Godlas. Exactly. This should be used for a made-for-television movie. Enemy Within, that sort of thing. "I will, in the near future, provide a little analysis of the reading list and syllabus for this Guide to Nothing and Nowhere, so carefully and sinisterly crafted (why perhaps Godlas took his cue from the helpful list of Books Not to Read that Khaled Abou el Fadl offers at his self-glorifying website -- in which he attempts to make sure that students never ever find out the truth about Islam, but stick with the apologists). "I've never seen anything like it. "A carefully worked-out, systematic attempt, nothing innocent about it, to prevent this man's students from finding out anything real, anything of value, about what Jihad means -- 'what it means in the Qur'an, in the Hadith, in the Sira, 'what it meant to the major figures in the history of Islam, including Al-Ghazali and Ibn Khaldun and Ibn Taymiyya 'and all other Qur'anic commentators, and rulers, and jurisconsults, 'and what every single major Western figure in the history of the study of Islam, 'until the last few decades when it became impossible to tell the truth, 'and hirelings of the Muslims ruled the roost, and Muslims themselves came to dominate the academic departments and MESA Nostra."... And so on. Check it out in the archives at jihadwatch.org. Godlas in 2006 was deliberately and comprehensively and very cleverly misinforming his students about jihad. One must assume therefore that he is most definitely going to misinform the likes of stupid Ms Heagney, about what sharia law prescribes for those who - like Rifqa - publicly, noisily apostasise.

I am just so glad that some of them are out of that hell-hole, that Predator Pit. I started praying for them years ago and I'll keep on praying till I know that they're *all* safely out. I pray for the remnant Jews trapped inside Islamic Iran, too. May the Holy One dispose of the Islamic 'pharaoh', that 'amalek', who rules in Persia, and open a doorway of escape not just for Persian Jews but for the Christians and Zoroastrians and Bahaii. Oh, btw I'm a Christian. And in case anyone thinks I'm only praying for Yemeni Jews and Persian Jews to be able to escape, because of some beliefs about end times or whatever...WRONG. I pray for them because being a dhimmi is to be in the bottom of a Predator Pit and no human being should be subjected to such vile treatment. For *exactly* the same reasons I pray for the Christians trapped inside Islamic lands - especially, at the moment, the Christians of Iraq and Egypt and Pakistan, northern Nigeria and southern Sudan; but also those of Persia, Lebanon, and Syria. That's not the complete list... *And* I pray for the Hindus and Buddhists in Bangladesh, the Hindus and Sikhs of Pakistan, the Hindus and Buddhists and Confucians and Christians of Malaysia and Indonesia...I pray for them all to be able to escape (from places where they are small minorities, as in Pakistan) or (where they are regional majorities, as in S Sudan, S Nigeria, West Papua) to be able to free themselves from Muslim dominion as independent states, or, if they inhabit a region such as Kashmir or S Philippines or S Thailand, which is part of a kafir-majority state, then I pray for a resolute offensive against jihad subversion to be carried out by that state, resulting in the annihilation of the leading jihad inciters and the *eviction* of the entire lawless and violent Mohammedan population to whatever part of dar al Islam happens to be over the border.

Okay. You've got four people there who look like they're on the ball: Reps. Sue Myrick (R-N.C.), John Shadegg (R-Ariz.), Paul Broun (R-Ga.) and Trent Franks (R-Ariz.). It's a start. (How many members does Congress have?).

To those people who spoke of the need to get people out into the streets protesting on Rifqa's behalf, even in Ohio, but also spoke with alarm of the cold and the approaching winter: I'm afraid that to save Rifqa it may be necessary to ignore the weather. Just rug up like Eskimos or Russian bears, huddle like Emperor penguins, and bring hurricane lanterns and portable heaters if you have to. If it blows up a blizzard and even so, 1000 or 5000 or 10 000 freedom-loving Americans turn up with portable heaters and torches and banners and are prepared to make igloos on the sidewalk, if necessary, and sit in them for Rifqa's sake, *surely* the media would have to wake up and realize this thing is serious...that NOBODY would come out in the snow and the cold and the wind, unless they were convinced that a human being's life was at stake. (Look, I know it's easy for me to say this, since I'm an Australian; but I do know what your winters can be like, I've read Laura Ingalls Wilders' "The Long Winter"; still - this case is so desperately important for everything America stands for, everything you guys believe in - freedom of religion, freedom of conscience, vs. the totalitarian hell that is sharia law).

Quote: "They want us to give up our cars for buses. They want us to wash our dishes by hand and dry our clothes in the wind." And that = being an inhabitant of the Third World? Really? I lived in inner city Sydney for 17 years: we had four children and never owned a car, and used buses and trains all the time, taxis if it was late at night; we didn't feel deprived in the least. The public transport where we were, was quite efficient, frequent, and pleasant to use; the streets were too narrow and congested for car-driving - and fuggedabout parking. Well, now we live in a suburb that's a bit more spread out, where we *have* to use a car...though my husband still cycles to work because he likes the exercise (he takes the bus if it rains) and my son takes the bus to university. And in both my inner city house and my current house I never felt the need for a dishwasher, having washed dishes by hand all my life and thought nothing in particular about it. Big deal. As for drying clothes...well, I'm in Australia and in most parts of Australia, for nearly all of the year, you can hang out three loads of washing in the morning and they'll be bone-dry by midday. That worked for me even in the inner city house with its tiny backyard. Hanging out washing on the Hills Hoist doesn't make me feel like a Third World peasant (any more than does the fact that I have a banana plant in the back yard). I *like* being outside for what, five or ten minutes, checking on the garden and the pets and the weather. I feel absolutely no *need* for a drier, for 11 months of the year. Why would I use one when I don't need it and don't actually suffer any perceptible hardship from not using it? Why deliberately burn up more energy than you actually have to...unless, perhaps, to show off? I can fully understand why in the USA or Canada in winter you'd need a clothes-drier; and why people living in confined inner-city apartments with no open air access, would have to have one. But why would any person with access to a sunny balcony or a sunny breezy backyard would feel themselves put upon at the mere suggestion that they might hang their clothes out to dry in summer (and I know at least some of you guys get a pretty good summer, especially in parts west and south) rather than stuffing them into an electric drier- beats me.

Concerned Women For America (or a similar organisation) should set up a conference or hold a star-studded dinner. Invite Ms Mogahed {whose surname, btw, simply means 'MuJaHid', i.e, Jihadist, if I am not mistaken} to address the gathering. But DO NOT TELL HER that there will be *others* addressing the gathering, as a special surprise... Wafa Sultan, Nonie Darwish, Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Taslima Nasreen (and there are doubtless quite a few more whom Nonie or Ayaan or Wafa might know of, no-nonsense female apostates from Islam and whistle-blowers about the hideousness of sharia-as-it-is-lived, who might be called upon to be honored guests). See how long it takes for that sweetly-smiling mask to rip off, and the hysterical rage to come spitting and snarling forth, if she is put on the spot by Mesdames Darwish and Sultan.

I am not surprised that the men are downhearted. Anyone with commonsense can see that it is impossible to create a halfway decent civil society out of a population suffused with the suspicion and aggression that Islam inevitably fosters. The futile task should never even have been attempted. Now: just imagine what morale would be like if, instead of attempting the Sisyphean task that they have been set in 'Afghanistan', the men were in, say, Kashmir, or the southern Philippines, with a clearly defined and positive objective: to defend and protect, by plain old deadly force, all non-Muslims in said locales, from all forms of Muslim aggression from within and without (and, ideally, to gradually and relentlessly evict from those nonMuslim-ruled regions all of their Mohammedan fifth-column). An American or British or Aussie soldier helping guard the borders of India against Muslim infiltration from Pakistan or Bangladesh, would have no reason to fear treachery from the Gurkha or Sikh soldier at his elbow; an American or Aussie soldier going in with Filipino Catholic soldiers to rescue people kidnapped by Muslim jihad gangsters, or to liberate a Filipino Catholic town or farming village that had been attacked and occupied by Muslim jihadis, would have no reason to fear a knife or a shot in the back from his Filipino partner. They would be able to feel they were *achieving* something worthwhile, defending something worth defending - the very lives of basically-civilised non-Muslim societies, whether Hindu-majority India or deeply-Catholic Philippines; societies steeped in music, art, dance, and joie de vivre, societies where women don't cover themselves up in black bags, and thinking is not verboten, and people DON'T blow up primary schools. Sooner or later, dar al harb is going to have to realize that its borderlands - in Europe (Serbia, Croatia, Macedonia, Greece), Africa (especially Ethiopia, Kenya and Uganda, which could definitely do with a helping hand; indeed all the semichristianised countries of southern Africa need help to resist Islamisation), in south and southeast Asia (India, Philippines and Thailand are locked in battle with jihadis within their borders as well as [India] on their boundaries), and in the Middle East (Israel) need to be freed of their Mohammedan fifth-columnists, and defended vigorously against all attempted encroachments by the Empire of Islam.

Jokerman - you're on the right track. Everyone who hasn't already - read Auerbach, 'Mimesis'. He argues that the kind of literature that we call 'the novel' is rooted, ultimately, in the unique sensibility, a unique view of the human person, of deity and world and time, that derives from the TaNaKh and that was 'translated' into the Greco-Roman world by means of the Christian Gospels. The opening three chapters or so of Cahill's "The Gifts of the Jews" makes a very similar point. Instead of following a fated, predetermined path, instead of endlessly repeating an immutable cycle, each unique and irreplaceable person, each never-to-be-repeated individual bearing the Imago Dei, chooses toward life or toward death. The future is open; new things can come into being (and wrong choices are not always fatal; there remains the possibility, often, of repentance, of forgiveness, and even, astonishingly, the promise of resurrection). Remember: 'novel' also means 'new, without precedent'. The G-d of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob declares, in one Biblical passage, "Behold! I create all things new". Here is Cahill writing about the Ten Words: "The journey of Avraham and the liberation wrought by Moshe transformed human understanding of past and future: the past is all the steps of my forebears and myself that have brought me to this place and moment; the future is what is yet to be. But the past is irretrievable and the future is a blank. The one is fixed, the other unknown. For the past I can have only regret, for the future only anxiety. To live in real time, to live in history, can be a horrible experience - and no wonder that the ancients contrived to escape such torments by inventing cyclical time and the recurrent Wheel leading only to the peace of death. "But this gift of the Commandments allows us to live in the present, in the here and now. What I have done in the past is past mending; what I will do in the future is a worry not worth the candle, for there is no way I can know what will happen next. But in this moment - and only in this moment - I am in control. "This is the moment of choice, the moment when I decide whether I will plunge in the knife or not, take the treasure or not, begin to spin the liar's web or not. "This is the moment when the past can be transformed and the future lit with radiance. "And such a realization need bring neither regret nor anxiety, but, if I keep the Commandments, true peace. But not the peace of Death, not the peace of coming to terms with the Wheel. For in choosing what is right I am never more alive". Now let us contemplate Ayaan Hirsi Ali, standing in a German railway station, deciding what she will do; whether she will submit to the arranged marriage to a fellow Muslim, that her father has decreed; or whether she will flee, reach for freedom...choose Life. "But that first afternoon in Bonn, a new idea crept up on me. I didn't even have to go to Canada; I could disappear here. I could escape it all, hide, and somehow make my own way, *like someone in a book* {my emphasis - dda}'. [Infidel, p. 187. 'Like someone in a book'. *Like a character in a novel* - like the people in the Western children's books, Enid Blyton and Nancy Drew, Hans Andersen and Grimm's Fairy Tales with their questing heroes and heroines, the thrillers and adventure novels and romance novels,that she had devoured as a schoolgirl in Kenya. And perhaps we should see behind all those fictional characters their historic origin and model in a living man called Avraham, walking out of Ur, out of the World of the Wheel, at the behest of the mysterious Voice that told him 'Lech lecha! Come Out!' 'Come with me to a land that I will show you'.

Michael Finton alias Talib Islam. 'Talib', let us not forget, is Arabic for 'student'. Well, well, well, isn't that interesting? - this recruit to the Mohammedan Mob chose to call himself: "Student [of] Islam".