There’s a new meme in town: namely, that things are improving in Iraq and in the GWOT.

WaPo:

While Washington’s attention has been fixed elsewhere, military analysts have watched with astonishment as the Iraqi government and army have gained control for the first time of the port city of Basra and the sprawling Baghdad neighborhood of Sadr City, routing the Shiite militias that have ruled them for years and sending key militants scurrying to Iran. At the same time, Iraqi and U.S. forces have pushed forward with a long-promised offensive in Mosul, the last urban refuge of al-Qaeda. So many of its leaders have now been captured or killed that U.S. Ambassador Ryan C. Crocker, renowned for his cautious assessments, said that the terrorists have “never been closer to defeat than they are now.”

Funny, but I just wrote about the fact that things seem to be looking up in Iraq! I guess others have noticed—but not the MSM, as Engram notes repeatedly in this post.

Of course Engram has been bird-dogging events in Iraq for a long time, creating graphs and explaining over and over in painstakingly that the reduction in casualties (both Iraqi and American) means that the tide is turning. Admirably and stubbornly, he has continued to make this unpopular case. How he ties it all together:

It seems that we may have already won this unwinnable war. In so doing, we have disconfirmed the world’s most dangerous theory. That theory, which was shared by Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein alike, was that America’s powerful military was not a force to be feared because the will of the American public could be easily broken with just a bit of bloodshed. That was the lesson these tyrants learned from Vietnam, and the actions of Barack Obama and Harry Reid seemed to confirm that 9/11 did not change anything. The lesson I have learned is that Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein were, to my great surprise, mostly correct. As they thought, most Americans do not have the will to sustain a bloody fight. But I’ve also learned that if the president alone does show that resolve, then that’s all that matters. Now that al Qaeda in Iraq has been crushed, I suspect that they have learned this new lesson as well (well, bin Laden has).

As it turns out, it was al Qaeda, not America, that launched a misbegotten adventure in Iraq. Their great mistake in an otherwise brilliant plan was to think that even George Bush’s will could be broken once the will of the American people began to flag. It was a monumental error on their part. Now, they have lost in Iraq, and they destroyed their reputation throughout the Muslim world because of the strategy they used in their unsuccessful effort to evict American forces. That strategy was to slaughter other Muslims (Shiites) to break the will of the American people instead of directly taking on the U.S. military. It almost worked, but the gamble appears to have failed.

There’s more: because of Al Qaeda’s abhorrent massacres of Muslims, jihadism is losing favor among the world’s Muslims. Newsweek is the latest to report:

Important Muslim thinkers, including some on whom bin Laden depended for support, have rejected his vision of jihad. Once sympathetic publics in the Middle East and South Asia are growing disillusioned. As CIA Director Michael Hayden said last week, “Fundamentally, no one really liked Al Qaeda’s vision of the future.” At the same time, and potentially much more important over the long run, a new vision of Islam, neither bin Laden’s nor that of the traditionalists who preceded him, is taking shape. Momentum is building within the Muslim world to re-examine what had seemed immutable tenets of the faith, to challenge what had been taken as literal truths and to open wide the doors of interpretation (ijtihad) that some schools of Islam tried to close centuries ago.

As Peter Wehner notes, this jihadism-is-on-the-wane meme has been building recently:

CIA Director Michael Hayden gave a noteworthy interview to the Washington Post this week.

Less than a year after his agency warned of new threats from a resurgent al-Qaeda, CIA Director Michael V. Hayden now portrays the terrorist movement as essentially defeated in Iraq and Saudi Arabia and on the defensive throughout much of the rest of the world, including in its presumed haven along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. In a strikingly upbeat assessment, the CIA chief cited major gains against al-Qaeda’s allies in the Middle East and an increasingly successful campaign to destabilize the group’s core leadership. …

…  Hayden’s assessment comes on the heels of important essays by Lawrence Wright in The New Yorker and Peter Bergen and Paul Cruickshank in The New Republic arguing that the tide within the Islamic world is turning strongly against al Qaeda and jihadism.

Wisely, Wehner cautions against excessive optimism [e.a.]:

Progress, like setbacks, can be reversed. Georgetown University terrorism expert Bruce Hoffman is surely right when he says “Al-Qaeda’s obituary has been written far too often in the past few years for anyone to declare victory. I agree that there has been progress. But we’re indisputably up against a very resilient and implacable enemy.” And Hayden’s right to warn us that progress in Iraq is being undermined by increasing interference by Iran, which he accused of supplying weapons, training, and financial assistance to anti-U.S. insurgents.

Indeed. This would be the “malign influence” that Iran casts over the entire region, according to Gen. David Petraeus’s testimony before Congress last week—a claim that was challenged by Sen Jim Webb, who apparently thinks we should go so easy on Iran that we should avoid using displeasing words like “malign. Petraeus disagreed [e.a.]:

WEBB: General Petraeus, there’s some language in response to questions that were submitted to you for the record that go to Iran that I would like to get some clarifcation or give you the opportunity to clarify. You use the word malign as an adjective, as someone who’s written nine books, I’m trying to struggle with how this fits in to what you’re saying here. You say ["]we will continue to expose you the extent of Iran’s malign activity in Iraq,” and then you say on the next page, “our efforts in regard to Iran must involve generating international cooperation and building consensus to counter malign Iranian influence,” and then you speak about its…”there are consequences for its illegitimate influence in the region.” Can you clarify for us…how are you using those words?
PETRAEUS: I can, Senator. What I’m talking about there I am characterizing that influence, it is malign and it is lethal and it is illegitimate. The arming, training, funding, and directing of militia extremists who have killed our soldiers…is very malign indeed it’s the same situation with what they’re doing…

But rather than get all caught up in Iran and other issues in the Middle East—Olmert’s extraordinary meltdown, anybody?—I’d like to reprint at length Peter Wehner’s conclusions about these extraordinary shifts in the geopolitics of the day, and the lesson we should all draw from them:

It’s worth recalling how widely the pendulum has swung in just the last two years. In 2005 and 2006, Iraq, it was said in many quarters, was lost; we either had to beat a hasty retreat or, as Joe Biden and Les Gelb counseled, we needed to separate Iraq into three largely autonomous regions (Shia, Sunni, and Kurd). For a time the Biden-Gelb plan was the “hot” one among commentators — the “third way” between leaving Iraq precipitously and foolishly attempting to repair a hopelessly broken and divided society. In fact, we are now seeing precisely the reconciliation and progress that many analysts believed was impossible to achieve.

It was also said by many analysts that as a result of the President’s misguided policies, al Qaeda was growing more popular, terrorist recruitment was up, al Qaeda had been handed great gifts by the Bush administration, and that America was less safe than prior to 9/11. The conventional wisdom was that the “Bush legacy” would be that al Qaeda was much stronger and America was much weaker than before the Iraq war.

Today the pendulum is swinging very much the other way. The reality is that things are much better now then they were at the mid-point of this decade. The cautionary tale in all this may be that we need to resist the temptation to take a snapshot in time and assuming that those things will stay as they are. Two years ago there were reasons for deep concern — but there were not reasons, it turns out, for despair or hopelessness. Events are fluid and can be shaped by human action and human will. While commentators were busy writing obituaries on Iraq, Bush, in the face of gale-force political winds, changed strategies –and Petraeus and company took on the hard task of redeeming Iraq.

Recent events are reminders, too, that equanimity and the capacity for some degree of detachment are important qualities to possess–qualities which are often lacking among those of us who inhabit the world of politics and government and comment on events on a daily or weekly basis.

Indeed.

But detachment and equanimity are, of course, the opposite of what sells on television—which is why cable “news” is 24/7 hysteria.

It’s not a bad idea, and Ross Douthat gets that part:

[N]early every pronouncement from Osama bin Laden or his imitators contains something that might be laughable, if it weren’t in deadly earnest.

There’s the incessant nostalgia for the Crusades, heavy-handed enough to embarrass Sir Walter Scott, and the Risk-board view of geopolitics, epitomized by the oft-cited aspiration to reconquer “Al-Andalus” (known to most of us as “Spain”) for Islam. There’s the blinkered understanding of American politics, as when Bin Laden criticized George H.W. Bush for “installing” his sons as governors of Texas and Florida, and seemed to suggest (depending on the translation) that he might make a separate peace with any American state that didn’t vote for George W. Bush. And of course, there’s the consistency with which Al Qaeda and its fellow travelers greet perceived insults to Islam with threats and actions that seem designed to, well, vindicate the offending parties.

When a Danish newspaper published cartoons portraying Muhammad as an assassin and a terrorist, Islamists responded to these outrageous insinuations by inciting their co-believers to … assassination and terrorism. When the Pope stirred up controversy by suggesting that Islam might be less compatible with reason and philosophy than Christianity, he was answered with a burst of (no doubt rigorously reasoned) acts of violence committed on behalf of the faith he had insulted. Now, just in time with Easter, he’s been answered with al Qaeda’s idea of inter-religious dialogue as well.

But ridiculing this by ridiculing in-earnest and exquisitely effective Nazi propaganda, as Douthat does, seriously misses the mark:

If Hitler’s Germany hadn’t turned Europe into a charnel house, many of the elements of National Socialism — the clumsy anti-Semitic propaganda, the philosophical pretensions, the ranting speeches, even the uniforms — would seem almost deliberately comic, like bits and pieces from a Monty Python sketch.

This could only be written by someone who absorbed the evils of Nazism via pop culture, and who therefore has a limp response to it. He suggests that OBL should go ahead an make Pope Benedict’s day:

Here’s hoping that His Holiness enjoys a quiet chuckle while he puts the Swiss Guards on high alert. There’s nothing wrong with laughing at evil, so long as your bodyguards are packing heat.

Something tells me that the West will need to do a little more than “pack heat” against OBL and those he continues to inspire. But I do salute the effort to look for a handle on OBL that makes the threat he poses accessible to those he is intimidating through his demagoguery.

In other counterterrorism news, today the New York Times writes about the Dutch anti-Islamist provocateur Geert Wilders [e.a.]:

Of the Netherlands’ 16.5 million residents, a million are either Muslim or of Muslim descent. Many of them are so-called guest workers from Morocco, Turkey and other Islamic countries who came here decades ago to work in factories and stayed to raise families of their own.

Occasionally, conflicts arise between mainstream Dutch society — which supports gay marriage and legalized prostitution, for instance — and the often more conservative Muslim minority, and Mr. Wilders has successfully mined the unease between them.

This somehow leaves the impression that Wilders is someone acting for his own (political) benefit. And later on, the Times writer spells out [e.a.]:

Since no one has actually seen Mr. Wilders’s film, some here have started wondering if it is as fake as his hair color, a clever publicity stunt devised to prove his point that Islam and freedom of speech cannot coexist.

Mr. Wilders disabuses him of the notion:

“I get in so much trouble, both privately and politically, that if I would do it for publicity reasons, I would be a fool,” he said.

It’s pretty obvious to me that Wilders is doing it for publicity reasons—that is, to publicize the dangers of Islamist extremism to Western societies.

If that makes him a fool, let there be more such brave “fools.”

If you read closely, you’ll find buried in today’s New York Times the suggestion that things are indeed better in Iraq:

When sectarian violence soared in 2006, hundreds of thousands of Iraqis fled to Syria and Jordan, or moved to safer areas in Iraq. But now that the American troop reinforcement plan and a new counterinsurgency strategy have helped reverse a rising tide of car bombings and sectarian killings, there are signs that Iraqis are starting to return.

Perhaps you missed the significance of this sentence because the word “surge” was missing?

Well, never mind, because “the surge is working,” says Congressman Jack “Let’s Cut and Run” Murtha. And, The Politico reports with glee, this could cause problems for the Dems.

Are you surprised that the absence of bad news coming out of Iraq is being read as good news by the public? You shouldn’t be, if you read my post just the other day. And you definitely wouldn’t be surprised about the better news coming out if Iraq if you’d been reading Engram’s blog for the past couple of months.

The public, as usual, is way ahead of our distinguished elected representatives.

So now the Dems are scrambling to position themselves as they realize that once again they’ve been caught by surprise.

The apparent shift in voter intensity about Iraq, also captured in some polls, shows how dramatically the political context of the war debate has changed from last summer.

Democrats believed then that mounting public pressure would soon force Republicans to take flight from President Bush, allowing Congress to impose a more rapid end to the war on an unwilling administration. It has not happened yet, and if anything it shows Democrats are facing a stiffer challenge at year’s end than they had at the beginning to frame the public debate on their terms. 

One Republican put it a little bit differently:

“Democrats made a strategic calculation last January that has proven to be dead wrong,” said Kevin Smith, a spokesman for Minority Leader John A. Boehner (R-Ohio). “Their message of failure and retreat makes little sense in light of our troops’ remarkable progress, and the American people are responding to their successes.”

Well, yeah. Sorta.

What’s actually happening is that the changes for the better on the ground in Iraq are making way for a narrative of success. Which is of course something different from success.

But in the war against Islamist fanaticism, where the most important battles are fought in the media, a narrative of success for America matters. A lot.

“I can’t believe my son is a fanatic,” says the father of Dr. Mohammed Asha, one of the rage-filled terrorists who tried to disrupt daily life in Britain last week.

“My son is incapable of such acts,” said Dr Asha’s father Jamil Abdelkader Asha from his modest home in Amman, Jordan.

“My son was happy in Britain, he was always telling us. He didn’t feel he was the brunt of any negative sentiment as an Arab or a Muslim, on the contrary.

“And he is not the type to get involved in political issues – at university he wasn’t even a member of any student unions. He is a devout Muslim like the rest of us, but he is not extremely religious. He didn’t have time for religion because he was always studying.”

Obviously, the senior Mr. Asha didn’t see the 1999 movie My Son the Fanatic:

Synopsis: A Pakistani cab driver and a prostitute find their lives complicated when his Islamic Fundamentalist son decides to “clean up” their town [in Britain].

The movie, which does not have a happy ending, or even a resolution, came out in 1999—well before 9/11 and well before Iraq, which Andrew Sullivan tries to label as a “proximate cause” of the latest incidents involving Rage Boys in Britain.

Abdulla is clearly a Sunni, angered at US and UK support of Shia in Iraq. This paradigm reveals the real danger of our further enmeshment in a Muslim civil war: we can turn one or both sides against us. The imperative to get out before this compounds itself as a problem is urgent.

Sure, sure—let’s get out of Iraq. And let the Israelis get out of Israel. And then let’s us get out of Britain, too, while we’re at it, because they don’t like having us there, either.

While everyone in Israel is angling for position now that Olmert has gotten a 0% popularity rating and Nasrallah is singing nyeh nyeh nyeh boo boo, I’m watching Gaza to see what’s going on among Israel’s putative partners for peace.

Here’s what’s going on: al Qaeda (or someone affliated with it, or involved in al Qaeda-type thinking) is pressuring Hamas, as evidenced by a Guardian story about abducted BBC journalist Alan Johnston. Apparently Haniyeh is in negotiations with Johnston’s kidnappers [e.a.]:

 The letters from Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh have sought to “clarify to these people [the kidnappers] that this issue doesn’t serve the interest of our people, and the Muslims,” said the aide, Ahmed Youssef. …

Youssef said the kidnappers had not demanded any ransom and suggested they were a militant Muslim group.

“Money is not the issue. The issue is an incorrect understanding of Islam, how to deal with foreigners in general, an incorrect understanding of Islam among some,” he said.

Youssef declined to discuss the kidnappers’ identities or ideology. “Any discussions about it will harm this issue,” he said.

 For what it’s worth, Abbas also released a quote:

“We know where the journalist is, and we want to preserve his life and we want to save him, and this needs time,” Abbas was quoted as saying by the official Wafa news agency.

They seem to be afraid to say anything more for fear that Johnston will be killed by his kidnappers.

You’ll note that just a couple of days ago, al Qaeda was publicly provoking and goading Hamas. From a story published in the L.A. Times:

An Al Qaeda leader called on the Palestinian group Hamas to fight Israel with “bombs and fire.”

“Where is revenge, where are the bombs, where is the fire?” Abu Yahya al-Libi asked members of the military wing of Hamas in a video posted on a website used by Islamist militant groups.

Al Qaeda views Hamas as a moderate group that has compromised the rights of Palestinians for political gains.

A war of words between Hamas and al Qaeda has been going on for a while. Here’s one story from mid-March:

Hamas to al-Qaeda: Stop baseless accusations

 

Fury in Hamas after al-Qaeda deputy leader Ayman al-Zawahri ‘eulogizes’ the movement, saying it has surrendered and betrayed its principles. Hamas: ‘We will not forsake a single grain of the sand of Palestine’

Here’s another story from mid-April:

‘Al-Qaeda operating in Gaza’

 

PA security officials say global jihad group targeting Palestinian leaders, secular Muslims

Al-Qaeda is operating in the Gaza Strip and previously attempted to assassinate Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas and other top leaders from Abbas’ Fatah party, according to Palestinian security officials.

Can it be any more obvious that al Qaeda is operating with total impunity in Gaza, where there are currently no Western reporters?

Can it be any more obvious that al Qaeda took Johnston hostage as leverage against Hamas, which has been deemed to be not sufficiently Islamic to suit al Qaeda? that al Qaeda is now trying to hijack the Palestinian cause, for its own ends?

I last wrote about “al Qaeda-type thinking” in Gaza a few weeks ago. That phrase ran in both the New York Times and the International Herald Tribune on April 16.

No one has picked up on it since. Because they’re afraid that Johnston will be killed by his kidnappers. That’s how terrorism works: it’s extortion.

I’m sorry to be back to blogging. It was so much nicer to lose myself in the sights of downtown Manhattan for my impromptu photo project.

But no one else is writing about this—there’s a virtual news blackout—so it falls to me to document what I’ve been able to put together.

Via Power Line, one Marine tells us his reasons.

I’ll leave it up to you to decide if Sgt. Baker Brooks is ”reciting Republican talking points” or if he’s a ”warmonger” or if he’s hopelessly deluded or if he needs the Democrats in Congress to take him out of harm’s way, because they are so concerned about his welfare. Or if he’s just one of the many Americans who believe we are in a fight for our way of life and who are putting their lives on the line to defend it:

I say that it is the “Right war to Fight” and I mean it with every fiber of my being. America is in this fight now. Much like Israel is locked in war, we are now locked in war. It may be slow and protracted but it will remain.

You may be thinking that this is not the case and that the attacks on American soil were a fluke. I say to you that you are lying to yourself and are in for a rude awakening. Not only are you in for a rude awakening but your self deception will cost our nation dearly in mindset and readiness. You have become tired of fighting. But how can anyone become tired of fighting the right fight? Much like in a foot race you will begin to tire and hurt. You will begin to focus on what is happening to you now. You have lost sight of the goal as you focus on yourself. And the pain that consumes you now has killed your aspirations of winning. You will only be able to win when you keep your eyes on the end goal and you see past the now. But unfortunately our eyes, via the news, have been focused on the now far too long.

Read the whole thing.

I started this series of posts in order to follow the fate of BBC correspondent Alan Johnston, who was kidnapped in Gaza two weeks ago today. There  is nothing new to report. Google News offers this bloc of headlines today:

Two weeks since BBC man missing
BBC News, UK - 2 hours ago
Events are planned in London and Gaza to mark two weeks since BBC reporter Alan Johnston went missing in Gaza. The BBC is planning a satellite linkup …
Gaza rally for BBC reporter News24
Palestinian Journalists Protest as BBC Reporter Remains Hostage in … International Middle East Media Center
Gaza journalists on strike for BBC reporter PRESS TV
Guardian Unlimited - BBC News
all 16 news articles »

There is nothing new to report on this story. Johnston’s kidnapping has been completely overshadowed by a much bigger hostage-taking that affects Britain: Iran’s kidnapping of 15 of its sailors and marines.

The Scotsman reports the response of Britain’s prime minister to this latest outrage: Iran’s actions are “unjustified and wrong.”

The Prime Minister’s forthright comments - his first public statement on the incident - were in stark contrast to the earlier moderate tone coming from British diplomats, anxious not to antagonise the volatile protagonists in Tehran.

If this is the extent of Blair’s “forthright comments,” I think it is only logical to conclude that the West has been enmeshed in the monkeys’ chess game. (No, I am not saying that Iranians are  monkeys or that Muslims are monkeys. I am alluding to this quote from the New York Times, which I also posted in December: [e.a.]

Azar Nafisi, the author of ”Reading Lolita in Tehran,” quoted a former colleague in Tehran who compared dealing with the Islamic Republic to playing chess with a monkey. ”In the middle of the game, the monkey picks up your queen and swallows it,” she said. ”Then what are you going to do? You are dealing with a country that is not going to follow your rules.”

In today’s New York Sun, Benny Avni details Iran’s history of using terror as a tool of diplomacy:

In 2004, Iran similarly kidnapped eight British seamen, only to release them quietly after three days. The equipment seized was proudly displayed by Iran and used for bragging rights. A documentary film on the 2004 kidnapping is frequently screened to Revolutionary Guards as an educational and motivational tool.

Mr. Mottaki yesterday described at length the perceived injustice dealt to Iran by the Security Council during the eight-year 1980s Iran-Iraq War. In Lebanon at that time, Iranian proxies kidnapped anyone Western enough to negotiate over. Deals were then made for the release of hostages in return for Western supplies of weapons to Iran.

That pattern is still in use today. The Iranian-backed Hezbollah famously kidnapped Ehud Goldwasser and Eldad Regev last summer, launching a war with Israel. Rather than negotiating, Hezbollah so far has demanded a huge price in return for any sign that the two soldiers are alive. While Gilad Shalit, who was kidnapped by Syrian-backed terrorists in Gaza, is known to be alive, his fate too is being used as a cruel bargaining chip in Palestinian Arab “peace process” diplomacy.

The resolution passed by the Security Council on Saturday may lead to further internal questioning in Iran of the wisdom of the path taken by Mr. Mottaki’s regime – which may explain why he resorted to the language of veiled threats against London. For Iran, terrorism has always served as a diplomatic tool.

To sharpen that tool, Hezbollah was created in the 1980s by Revolutionary Guards and the Lebanese-born Mr. Mugniyah. Now Mr. Mugniyah and his handlers in Iran are wanted by Interpol and Argentina.

Will Tehran turn them over?

Evidently not. What the West will do about this remains to be seen.

Of course, everything happening in the Middle East (as seen through photo ops and statements released to the press) is a mirage, as Youssef Ibrahim notes (also in the Sun, which is a must-read for those who follow international events).

There is a new American plan and great hope for peace among Arabs and Jews. I have read all about it and heard it on TV all day yesterday. …

The platitudes of this new search are so many, so old, and so repetitive. Go back and check the late 1970s or the heyday of the Oslo accord fever of 1993, and you will encounter the same stuff: last chance, critical moment, now or never, the area is ready, etc.

Here is what is not new. The Arab Quartet is about as useless and toothless as the Arab League itself, none of whose members are prepared to recognize Israel’s right to exist unconditionally. The Israelis are not about to pull out of the West Bank or the Golan Heights of Syria unconditionally, if at all.

Hamas and the other Islamic Palestinian Arab fanatics will continue to lob rockets into Israel. Hezbollah is preparing for the next round in Lebanon of fighting Israelis and Lebanese. The Palestinians will remain at each other throats in Gaza and the West Bank, regardless. Saudi Arabia is scared silly about Iran and the sectarian wars between Shiites and Sunnis on its borders, which is just about the only thing that matters in Riyadh. Egypt is steadily descending into a failed state where the succession to the post of 78-year-old dictator Hosni Mubarak promises to be messy. Jordan has virtually no role to play anywhere and no weight to speak of ever since it lost its West Bank to Israel. And the United Arab Emirates has never had any weight to begin with.

The most startling non-news is that new magical American solution. One newspaper writer asserted Sunday that Secretary Rice ‘’has opened the door to the possibility” she might offer her “own proposals to bridge the divide.” Wow. We can hardly wait.

Indeed.

Also: I will no longer be “following the abduction story.” Sadly, there is no story. There is only the abyss.

If you’re a 21st-century holy warrior, the world is your oyster, courtesy of the Internets. Should you decide to embark upon this path, here’s a primer on how to wage “media jihad”:

“Raiding American Forums is Among the Most Important Means of Obtaining Victory in the Fierce Media War… and of Influencing the Views of the Weak-Minded American”

Indicate You Are an American

“Invent Stories About American Soldiers You Have [Allegedly] Personally Known”

And my personal fave:

How to Make Americans Feel Frustrated With Their Government

“You should enter into debate or respond only if it is extremely necessary… Your concern should [only] be introducing topics which… will cause [them to feel] frustration and anger towards their government…, which will… render them hostile to Bush… and his Republican Party and make them feel they must vote to bring the troops back from Iraq as soon as possible.”

Hey! I think it’s working!

Andrew Sullivan posted one of Thomas Mallon’s provocative questions the other day:

“Are American writers, artists, and thinkers truly prepared to admit that Islamofascism is a real, and even imminent, threat to everything they are accustomed to thinking, saying, and creating?”

I would say the answer is no, judging by the “response” Sullivan received and posted, which referred exclusively to the threat from Islamist-fueled terrorist-generated random violence.

Our societies, cultures and economies are just too strong to be even mildly shaken by this lame bullshit. Just because some gaggle of religious lunatics manages to kill a bunch of westerners once every 6 months, does anyone really believe that “everything we are accustomed to thinking, saying and creating” is under threat? I call bullshit.

The threat of Islamofascism is not the same thing as the threat from Islamist terrorism and nukes. This is Islamofascism, and it’s taking place in Britain, while everyone is sleeping or drugged on our wonderful, pleasurable escapist way of life:

Freedom of speech row as talk on Islamic extremists is banned

A leading university has been accused of “selling out” academic freedom of speech by scrapping a talk on links between the Nazis and Islamic anti-semitism after allegedly receiving emails from Muslims protesting about the event.

Matthias Küntzel, a German author and political scientist who specialises in the threat of Islamic fundamentalism, was told yesterday by the University of Leeds that a talk scheduled for yesterday evening, and a two-day workshop, on Hitler’s Legacy: Islamic Anti-semitism in the Middle East, had been cancelled because of security fears.

Let me repeat myself in case I wasn’t clear—and in case Sullivan and his lazy reader didn’t get what Mallon meant when he said [e.a.] that Islamofascism is “a real, and even imminent, threat to everything they are accustomed to thinking, saying, and creating.”

Islamofascism doesn’t manifest itself primarily as the desire to nuke us, though that would be good for them, too, I suppose. It manifests itself as the threat to shut down our way of life, preferably by persuading us that we are “insulting Islam” when we exercise our hard-won freedom of speech.

I don’t know about you, but that makes me feel like doing nothing but insulting Islam from morning to night, every day, seven days a week.

(edited for clarity)

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, in a confession in which he also likened himself to George Washington, says that in addition to planning 9/11 and Bali and a long string of other atrocities that shocked the conscience of civilized people everywhere, he butchered Daniel Pearl.

“I decapitated with my blessed right hand the head of the American Jew, Daniel Pearl, in the city of Karachi, Pakistan,” Mohammed is quoted as saying in a transcript of a military hearing at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, released by the Pentagon.

“For those who would like to confirm, there are pictures of me on the Internet holding his head,” he added.

Before Mohammed did it, Daniel Pearl gave him the finger:

Judea Pearl: ‘We have to defeat the hatred that took Danny’s life’

Rest in peace, Daniel Pearl.