What is happening in the Ivory Coast, and why is it of interest to us?

Steven Plaut answers both questions in a Front Page article:

The most important aspects of the crisis in the Ivory Coast are being overlooked or deliberately disguised by the Western media. One can read media report after media report without discovering the basic fact that the Northern Ivory Coast “rebels” are Muslims. Indeed they are Muslims who by and large entered the Ivory Coast as infiltrators, through borders that are poorly patrolled, from neighboring countries. A better advertisement for stronger border control cannot be found. At least four million illegal immigrants, mostly Muslim, entered the Ivory Coast during the past two decades, tilting the demographic balance there.

And these Muslim infiltrators and interlopers, increasingly backed by African, French and Western powers, are challenging the control by Ivory Coast natives over their own country. The sufferings and violence in the Ivory Coast may well illustrate what awaits Europe if it continues its own demographic suicide and if it continues to flood itself with Muslim immigrants. …

The Ivory Coast of today, or Côte d’Ivoire, is essentially a bi-national state, although each “nation” is in fact a collection of tribes.

This is true of almost all African states, including those of the Arab north. Tribes remain the important units of African politics. Some of them share the bond of Islam with the Arabs, but in the Arab mind there is a sharp division between them and non-Arab peoples regardless of their religion. To the Arabs, the others are inferior, fit for domination, or extermination, or slavery.  In Dafur, for example, the people killed, raped, tortured and dispossessed by their Muslim Arab compatriots are themselves Muslims.

The native tribes of the Ivory Coast were not Muslim when the territory became a French colony. Plaut outlines the history:

Built upon a territory that had once been home to several tribal statelets before the era of colonization, it fell under French partial control in the 1840s, and became a formal French colony in 1893. French is still the official language spoken there, in addition to many local tribal tongues. The French hung around until 1960, when the Ivory Coast became independent. Once independent, the country was one of the most prosperous in Africa, thanks to its large cocoa crop. The country has been politically unstable since a coup in 1999 and a civil war that began in 2002.

The background to the civil war and the current constitutional crisis is the massive in-migration of Muslims from the countries neighboring the Ivory Coast, mainly from Burkina Faso.

Now there are two “nations” in the single state: “the northern ‘nation’ is Muslim; the southern ‘nation’ consists of Christians and other Non-Muslims.”

The infiltrators settled in the northern half of the country, and also in pockets in the south, including in some neighborhoods inside the country’s largest city, Abidjan. Today Muslims, including illegals, are almost 40% of the population of the country (although Muslim and other sources claim they are really considerably higher), the remainder being a mixture of Christians (mainly Roman Catholics) and animists. …

The current political standoff in the Ivory Coast is largely a Muslim-Christian confrontation. The “rebels” represent the Muslims of the country, especially of the north, and in particular the “aliens.” They are led by Hassan Ouattara, whose parents were evidently illegal immigrants into the Ivory Coast from Burkina Faso. Hence he personally illustrates and epitomizes the “alien” character of the “rebel” forces. An economist who once worked for the IMF, he calls his rebel militia the “New Force.” The “government” forces represent the indigenous and traditional non-Muslim Ivorians. Their leader is the current President (or, if you prefer, “president”) Laurent Gbagbo, a one-time university professor, who has been the official head of state since 2000. He claims to be a socialist and anti-imperialist. The government claims that neighboring Muslim states have intervened in the civil war on the side of the Muslims.

France, the erstwhile colonial power, other Western powers, and the poisonous UN*, have interfered on the side of the in-flooding Muslims.

Civil war broke out in the country in 2002.  The “rebels,” whose support base is the Muslim north, challenged the “government,” whose power base was the non-Muslim south.  Atrocities were committed on both sides. Each side accuses the other of using mercenaries.  French military forces in the country participated in some of the fighting, increasingly on the side of the “rebels.”

The elections that were to have taken place in 2005 were postponed repeatedly until 2010, in part at the initiative of the UN.  A power-sharing arrangement between the two main sides in the conflict went into effect in 2007 but did not hold for long.  None of the forces in the country seemed to want new elections to be held, since electoral forces were evenly matched between the two halves of the now “bi-national” state.  When they were eventually held in 2010, Gbagbo lost by a thin margin.  But he refused to accept those results as conclusive and compelling.  Aside from claims of widespread fraud, Gbagbo insisted that the victory of the party of Ouattaro was entirely thanks to the votes of the millions of illegal immigrants participating in the election!

So much for democracy. But it surely should be obvious that democracy cannot possibly be instituted where the nominal “nation” is a loose collection of tribes.

Other African countries, led by predominantly-Muslim Nigeria, have been backing the “rebels.”  A number of African countries have called for armed intervention on the side of those “rebels.”  After a period of respite, violence began to escalate a few weeks ago.  New Forces, now renamed the Republican Forces of Côte d’Ivoire (RFCI) have been beating Gbagbo’s army in the field, took the country’s capital city, and are now holding parts of Abidjan.  Gbagbo is under siege in his headquarters and expected to fall any day now.

In fact, according to Reuters today, President Gbagbo has been captured by the French –  and handed over to the Muslims. Our guess is that he will not have an easy time of it now, whether he lives for a while or soon dies.

Hundreds of thousands of people have fled the battle zones, seeking refuge in neighboring countries, especially Liberia.

The conflict is too complex for a simplistic assignment of forces into categories of “good buys” and “bad guys.”   There are solid bases for skepticism about the true commitment to democratic rule by either side.

Indeed. Should it be a surprise?

Nevertheless, the conflict in the Ivory Coast shows what happens when massive illegal immigration leads to the demographic eclipse of a native population.  The same Western powers so ready to strip the Serbs of their heartland to create a second Albanian nation-state in Kosovo have been unwilling to sustain any nation-state for indigenous Ivorians, and indeed have backed the aliens. …

But the even more obvious lesson from all this is the instability of “bi-national” states and the impossibility of preventing them from morphing into killing grounds.  This should have been obvious from the experiences in Rwanda. …

Can even well-established democracy survive where Islam comes to stay and proliferate?

Massive Muslim immigration is also transforming Europe demographically, in ways strikingly similar to the influx of immigrants into the Ivory Coast.  France, Belgium, and other parts of Western Europe may soon find themselves the European Ivorians, the “Other,” the stranger and disenfranchised inside their own home countries.

Right. We are watching the decline of the nation-state, a return to tribalism (even in Europe), and the slow but steady growth of Islamic domination over all the continents.

* About 1,000 people in Duekoue, Ivory Coast, were killed between March 27–29, when the area was controlled by Muslim forces, while there were 1,000 U.N. “peacekeepers” based there to protect the local – mostly Catholic – population.

We present a short real life action-packed “whodunnit” mystery involving several states’ governments, secret services, terrorist organizations, insurrectionists, arms smugglers, ghostly intelligence gatherers, and shadowy assassins who descend and strike and rise again and disappear.

Atbara is a town in north eastern Sudan, where the Blue Nile and the White Nile meet each other. For the last 20 or 30 years it has been the center of Sudan’s biggest arms smuggling network.

One of the regular buyers is al-Qaeda. Leading operatives of the network joined Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan in 1996. (One of them, Ibrahim al Qosi, was captured and is at present enjoying luxurious confinement at Guantanamo Bay.)

Iran was a chief source of the arms, and over time Iranians acquired a foothold in the network. One of their chief customers was the terrorist organization that has engaged the hearts of European governments, the United Nations secretariat and General Assembly, the US State Department, all Islam, and lefties everywhere: Hamas. In time, they too acquired a foothold in the network.

Al-Qaeda, Iran, Hamas, all working together to provide arms for insurrection, terrorism, and war. Quantities found their way into Gaza through the tunnels that run between Egyptian Sinai and the strip.

Recently, Iran withdrew its personnel, or most of them, from direct involvement, but continued using the network to keep up the flow of arms to Hamas and Iran’s own terrorist army, Hizbullah.

A short time ago, through Atbara, the Iranians bought WMD, namely mustard gas and nerve gas, from rebels in the Libyan town of Benghazi, and ordered the consignment to be delivered to Gaza and Lebanon. It was driven in convoys from Libya to Sudan, under Hamas and Hizbullah guard.

The final lap of the transport had then to be organized.

On April 5, two men set out in a Hyundai car from Atbara for Port Sudan. They were driving through the Kalaneeb region and approaching their destination when something hit and blew up their car. The bodies of the men, one found inside the wreck of the Hyundai and one outside, were too burnt to be identified. The incident warranted investigation by the Sudanese intelligence service and the military. The Foreign Minister of Sudan made a public announcement that the car had been hit by a missile from an aerial drone – or maybe fired from a foreign ship on the Red Sea.

The government of Sudan asked the sort-of-interim-government of Egypt  to send counter-terrorist and missile experts to help the investigation. After forensic examination they declared that a remnant of paper identified one of the dead men as Iranian. And the blackened remains of the other gave them, or some among them, the impression that he was a Palestinian. They were sure, anyway, that they were not Sudanese.

But they didn’t agree with the Foreign Minister that the car had been hit from the air or the sea. They concluded that a person or persons unknown had blown it up from somewhere near by on the ground; they must have been foreigners; and they must have arrived and departed by helicopter. Having done the deed, they took off again to a waiting ship that had brought them to the coast.

Who were the dead men? What was their business? And who had assassinated them?

The report from which we have the information ends with this:

The method of attack and clean getaway pointed to a sophisticated military organization capable of unconventional operations across great distances spanning thousands of kilometers. It would have required competent military intelligence support in places as far apart as Atbara, Kalaneeb, Port Sudan and the Red Sea.

Who could it have been? CIA? Unlikely. MI6? Extremely unlikely. Who else is there who could have done it? And why?

It remains a baffling mystery, probably never to be solved.

Ann Barnhardt speaks here as a Christian, and of course we don’t go along with her “divinely ordained”, “Christ commands” statements, but otherwise we applaud what she says – eg. “Allah’s a son of a bitch” – and what she does: marking especially evil passages in the Koran with bacon, and then burning the pages. Generally, we’d rather people read the Koran than burnt it  as it is likely to appall them, but we appreciate that burning it now after the killing of 20 people in Afghanistan by Muslims because a Koran was burnt by Terry Jones in Florida (see our post, Muslim animals, April 4, 2011), is a strong and necessary political action.

We found this happy snap of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton shaking hands in 2009 with one of Colonel Gadhafi’s sons, Mutassim, at Creeping Sharia. Also through them we found the following story about another of the Libyan dictator’s sons, Khamis, coming recently to the US as an intern with AECOM:

From the Daily Caller:

A son of Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi toured U.S. ports and military facilities just weeks before he helped lead deadly attacks on rebels protesting his father’s authoritarian regime.

Khamis Gadhafi, 27, spent four weeks in the U.S. as part of an internship with AECOM, a global infrastructure company with deep business interests in Libya, according to Paul Gennaro, AECOM’s Senior Vice President for Global Communications. The trip was to include visits to the Port of Houston, Air Force Academy, National War College and West Point, Gennaro said. The West Point visit was canceled on Feb. 17, when the trip was cut short and Gadhafi returned to Libya … The uprising there began with a series of protests on Feb. 15….

Gennaro said the U.S. State Department approved of the trip, and considered Gadhafi a reformer. He said the government signed off on the itinerary, at times offering advice that affected the company’s plans for Gadhafi.

State department officials denied any role in planning, advising or paying for the trip. “We did greet him at the airport. That is standard courtesy for the son of the leader of a country,” said State Department spokesman Mark Toner. Toner said the government was aware of Gadhafi’s itinerary, but “did not sign off on it.” …

One or the other is lying. Our guess, it’s the State Department.

So the State Department regularly greets the children of all national leaders when they arrive at a US airport? Even if the national leader is a dictator responsible for the deaths of American servicemen in a Berlin discotheque and hundreds of civilians in the Pan Am plane he had blown up in the air?

Gennaro was one of the AECOM executives who met with Gadhafi during the trip, to educate him on U.S. corporate practices. He said Gadhafi was “very, very interested in the planning, design, how do you advance large infrastructure projects. That was the nature and the tenor of this internship” …

Khamis Gadhafi was [reported] killed earlier this week after a disaffected Libyan air force pilot crash-landed his jet in the ruling family’s headquarters … [He had] led the Khamis Brigade, one of several professional military units that are loyal to leader Moammar Gadhafi. …

U.S. diplomats in leaked memos have called it “the most well-trained and well-equipped force in the Libyan military.”

In one brutal attack, his forces surrounded Zawiya while rebels in the city celebrated their victory and cared for the injured. The Khamis Brigade then unleashed an all-out assault from three sides, unloading their weapons and artillery as they stormed the city.

Maybe some of those rebels are among the “thousands of lives” that Hillary Clinton “knows” were saved by US intervention.

If Gadhafi ends up deposed or dead, he’ll possibly be replaced by one of the rebel leaders who fought against Americans in Iraq or was trained by al-Qaeda in Afghanistan. He too, and his close relations, would of course be welcome in America and treated with the State Department’s standard courtesy.

Obama does not make war. Definitely not. So what’s the US doing firing Tomahawk subsonic cruise missiles at Libyan targets?

According to official spokesmen, it is taking “kinetic military action”. And that only to protect civilians.

Let us, in this stifling atmosphere of pacifism and sentimentality, consider some information (from Wikipedia) that raises questions in an enquiring mind:

The numbers of US military personnel in foreign lands “as of March 31, 2008”, though it must be remembered that  numbers change due to the recall and deployment of units, show that there are more US military personnel in Germany, 52,440, than in Iraq, 50,000.

Why are they in Germany?

9,660 in Italy and 9,015 in Britain.

What for?

28,500 in South Korea (good);  71,000 in Afghanistan (we know what for) and about half as many, 35,688, in Japan.

Why are they in Japan?

Altogether, 77,917 military personnel are located in Europe [more than in Afghanistan], 141 in the former Soviet Union …

What are the 141 doing in “the former Soviet union”?

47,236 in East Asia and the Pacific,  3,362 in North Africa, the Near East, and South Asia, 1,355 are in sub-Saharan Africa with 1,941 in the Western Hemisphere excepting the United States itself …

Within the United States, including U.S. territories and ships afloat within territorial waters –

As of 31 December 2009, a total of 1,137,568 personnel are on active duty within the United States and its territories (including 84,461 afloat). The vast majority, 941,629 of them, were stationed at various bases within the Contiguous United States [the 48 U.S. states on the continent of North America that are south of Canada, plus the District of Columbia, not the states of Alaska and Hawaii, or off-shore U.S. territories and possessions, such as Puerto Rico]. There were an additional 37,245 in Hawaii and 20,450 in Alaska. 84,461 were at sea, 2,972 in Guam, and 179 in Puerto Rico.

What of the US navy?

The United States Navy is the largest in the world; its battle fleet tonnage is greater than that of the next 13 largest navies combined. The U.S. Navy also has the world’s largest carrier fleet, with 11 in service, three under construction, and one in reserve. The service had 328,516 personnel on active duty and 101,689 in the Navy Reserve in January 2011. It operates 286 ships in active service and more than 3,700 aircraft.

The 21st century United States Navy maintains a sizable global presence, deploying in such areas as East Asia, the Mediterranean, and the Middle East. It is a blue-water navy with the ability to project force onto the littoral regions of the world, engage in forward areas during peacetime, and rapidly respond to regional crises, making it an active player in U.S. foreign and defense policy.

See a list of US Navy ships here.

The air force?

As of 2009 the USAF operates 5,573 manned aircraft in service (3,990 USAF; 1,213 Air National Guard; and 370 Air Force Reserve); approximately 180 unmanned combat air vehicles, 2,130 air-launched cruise missiles, and 450 intercontinental ballistic missiles. The USAF has 330,159 personnel on active duty, 68,872 in the Selected and Individual Ready Reserves, and 94,753 in the Air National Guard as of September 2008. In addition, the USAF employs 151,360 civilian personnel, and has over 60,000 auxiliary members in the Civil Air Patrol,making it the largest air force in the world.

See the list and the pictures of the military aircraft here.

Weaponry – here. And a quotation:

We have achieved a level of technology in military weapons and equipment that no other nation on earth comes close to.

What of US nuclear armament? The US maintains an arsenal of 5,113 warheads.

Space dominance? The question of weapons in space has been much discussed and is not settled. Not wanted by Obama.

What conclusions can be drawn from these facts and figures?

The Cold War is not over?

China is a menace?

The US is still the Watch of the World? Patrolling, protecting, ready to defend? Defend what, specifically?

One thing is certain. The United States of America is a military colossus.

Its military might is a hard – and surely very comforting – fact.

The fact alone should be enough to deter impudent adventurer states, like Russia and Iran, and make tyrannical chieftains who think of plotting massacre, like Gaddafi, think again – unless a silly leader like Obama announces that America will not go to war.

America must not be humble. Far better that it be feared than loved.

America must remain strong. Its ineluctable duty is to awe the world.

Muslim men can divorce their wives by repeating a few words three times. For women to divorce their husbands, the process is forbiddingly hard, long, and often doomed to failure.

But now al-Qaeda has come up with an idea that will save Muslim women from being locked in miserable marriages.

They should seek their ideal partners among dedicated suicide-bombers.

If there is time for them to bear any male children, they can soon have them off their hands too by raising them with the ambition to self-detonate.

It is also the path to honor in the community – being the spouse and mother of martyrs.

From the Daily Caller:

The wait is over. Finally, a magazine just for women with a predilection for religiously motivated self-detonation!

This month the al Qaeda-affiliated Al-Fajr Media Center released its first issue of “Al-Shamikha” (“Majestic Woman”), a magazine for women featuring tips on beauty, health and, naturally, violent jihad. Think Elle magazine for the Islamofascist. …

The magazine cover is fitting, with a covered woman bearing a gun.

The articles in the publication are geared toward ensuring their women are good models of jihadi-inspired motherhood. …

The centerpiece of the magazine is an interview with the wife of a suicide bomber. The widow, Um Muhannad, explains to the interviewer how she longed her whole life to marry a mujahid (or religious fighter) and how women play a crucial role in the movement. …

“A woman has a pivotal role in spurring [her husband to jihad] and supporting [the mujahideen] … ” said Um Muhannad. “[In the case of jihad], she teaches her son to become a mujahid from childhood, and encourages him until he achieves his goal [i.e., martyrdom]. …”

Not to be outdone by Cosmo, the publication also features clothing and health advice as well as guidance on how to snag a man.

With that gun, perhaps. He’s going to need it. And put explosive on the wedding-gift list.

Believers in God speak of earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, tsunamis, hurricanes and other such natural events as “acts of God”. Funny thing is, they still maintain that their God is good, the very essence of Goodness. Plainly enough to us, if there were a God killing people, ruining their lives, wrecking their homes, dooming them to hunger, cold, loss, and sickness in Japan right now by earthquake and tsunami, he would be an evil power.

For us who do not believe in divine control of the universe, what is happening in Japan is not a moral evil but a natural disaster. Nature is not a thinking thing. It has no moral responsibility. There is no point in criticizing it. Being  good and bad has to do with moral decisions, which are human and only human. What human beings do must be judged, not what nature does.

It is for this reason that we say the cold-blooded murder of five people in Samaria, the victims of human viciousness, needs our thought more than does the plight of tens of thousands of earthquake and tsunami victims in Japan, regardless of how much our emotions may be moved by one or the other.

Udi Fogel, 36, his wife Ruth, 35, and their children Yoav, 11, Elad, 4 and Hadas, 3 months were all stabbed to death in the early hours of Saturday March 12.

Can there be any reasonable doubt that the killings were carried out by a Palestinian or more than one Palestinian?

The Palestinian Authority (PA) is ostensibly the keeper of law and order on the “West Bank” which includes Samaria. The PA, which is Fatah in a suit, has received billions of US tax-payers’ money – at least $500 million per annum. Its  law enforcers are equipped and trained by the US. And where else does the money go? To raise generations hating Israelis and all Jews, teaching that the killing of Jews is a high moral duty, and to attain the “martyrdom” of suicide while doing so is the highest of moral achievements. That is what the US tax-payer is subsidizing.

From RedState:

For years, the left wing foreign policy establishment has rapturously promoted the ‘Palestinians’ as the cause célèbre of our national security interests. Despite their unyielding commitment to terror, these supercilious ‘wizards of smart’ have credulously identified the creation of a ‘Palestinian’ state as the consummate solution to all geo-political problems. They posit that upon creation of a 22nd Arab state and 2nd Palestinian state (the first being Jordon), the culture of terror would cease and we would all experience peace in our time. …

To that end, congress has been cajoled into authorizing billions of dollars in foreign aid to the Palestinian Authority (PA). In addition, we have equipped and trained their armed forces with the best our military has to offer. This travesty is justified as integral to strengthening the “Palestinian people” and the “moderate PA leadership” in their alleged battle against the “extremist” Hamas. Those of us with more than a superficial understanding of the Middle East and Islamo-fascism, have always known the PA to be indistinguishable from Hamas. After all, the PA, otherwise known as the Fatah, was the catalyst in terror under the leadership of Yasser Arafat long before Hamas arrived on the scene.

The barbaric massacre of a family of five … should dispel the fallacy of the moderate Palestinian even in the eyes of their fatuous promoters. Here are the sickening details of the massacre:

Between 22:20 and 22:30 the terrorists entered the house through the living room picture window, did not notice the 6-year-old boy sleeping on the couch and continued on to the bedroom where they slashed the throats of the father and newborn [three months old] baby who were sleeping there. The mother came out of the bathroom and was stabbed on its threshold. The evidence shows that she tried to fight the terrorists.

They then slashed the throat of the 11-year old-son who was reading in bed. They did not notice the 2-year old asleep in his bed, but murdered the 3-year old with two stabs to his heart. After that, they locked the door, exited through the window and escaped.

So who committed this atrocity, Hamas? Nope. They always blithely claim responsibility for such attacks, yet have been silent in this instance. …

After the “Imad Mughniyeh” cell [of Fatah’s al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigade] assumed responsibility for the attack on Saturday, the organization released a statement saying that killing children is not part of their ideological views.

And there are those who will believe that lie, so the subventions from the US will continue without President Obama or Secretary of State Hillary Clinton having a moment’s uneasiness of conscience – if either of them even possesses such a moral faculty, which we seriously doubt.

In our post below, An unanswered (and unanswerable?) question, we ask what the Western world can do to win the war Islam is waging against it.

The very tolerance and freedom that characterize the West provide advantage to the enemy, but if the only way to defeat the aggressor is to become intolerant and unfree, there would be nothing worth defending.

We don’t think the question is unanswerable, and we don’t think tolerance and freedom have to be lost. On the contrary, they have to be insisted upon.

If Muslims take advantage, as they do, of our freedom of speech to advocate their system which prohibits it, we must argue them down, loudly, publicly, and persistently.

That is what the West is not doing. European governments are doing the opposite, prosecuting critics of Islam.

In America, government policy since 9/11 has been to appease Muslims rather than hold them to account. Great effort is put into propitiating those who claim to be aggrieved, with the result that the jihadists in our midst have become ever more powerful.

In a PajamasMedia column, N.M. Guariglia discusses the policy and suggests how better to deal with the internal and international threat:

There is one silver lining to the rise of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt: it will eventually force the United States to adopt an international policy on Islam itself. Given his Cairo speech in 2009, littered with historical inaccuracies and undue politically correct praise of Islam, we shouldn’t expect President Obama to take upon himself this task. Perhaps another statesman will. But that it must be done …  is no longer a matter of debate.

The national discourse is petty. Policymakers talk as though the problem were merely 500 terrorists cave-hopping around Waziristan. This is not so. The issue is societal. Europe is on the precipice of cultural implosion. The issue is also imminent. The entire Persian Gulf and Arab Levant is up for grabs. Atomic bombs are in question. Radical Islamists have entrenched themselves in the West’s political mainstream — even into the U.S. government. For decades, the Muslim Brotherhood has had more power within the United States than in Egypt.

Take Abdul Rahman al-Amoudi, a former advisor to President Clinton and the State Department. Amoudi also ingratiated himself to then-Governor George W. Bush. In the months after the 9/11 attacks, Amoudi was one of the Muslim “moderates” championed by the administration. He spoke at the Washington National Cathedral honoring the victims. Three years later, Amoudi was arrested for conspiring to work with al-Qaeda and Moammar Gaddafi of Libya in an assassination attempt on the Saudi king.

There’s Omar Ahmad, founder of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), the largest Muslim organization in the United States. CAIR was involved with the Holy Land Foundation, an operation that guised charity funds as subsidies to terrorist groups. And then there’s Nihad Awad, the co-founder of CAIR. Awad is an operative of Hamas and yet served on Vice President Gore’s commission for aviation safety and security — the irony! — and was invited to stand alongside President Bush after 9/11. Ismail Elbarasse worked with Amoudi and was involved with the Holy Land Foundation. He also conspired with Hamas leader Mousa Marzook and the “Virginia Network,” a cell of Pakistani terrorists.

In 2004, Elbarasse was arrested. Documents seized in his basement revealed the Muslim Brotherhood’s archives for the United States. CAIR is a front for the Muslim Brotherhood. The Islamic Society of North America (ISNA) is a front for the Muslim Brotherhood. The North American Islamic Trust (NAIT) is a front for the Muslim Brotherhood. The Muslim Students Association (MSA) is a front for the Muslim Brotherhood. Hamas is the Muslim Brotherhood. And the Muslim Brotherhood spawned Egyptian Islamic Jihad and subsequently al-Qaeda.

These are just a few of the men running the Islamic mosques, schools, campus organizations, and charities in the United States. They are all avowed jihadists and see no distinction between Palestinian “resistance” and al-Qaeda terrorism. The entire apparatus of U.S.-Muslim dialogue is controlled by our enemies. And we have accepted this — so much so that to acknowledge this reality is political suicide.

It’s time to address this. Embassies have been burned, diplomats and newspaper editors have cowered, cartoonists have been hunted down, film directors have been hacked, operas have been canceled, and books have been taken off the shelf. We are losing the Enlightenment out of fear of offending others. …

In the United States, there were terrorist attempts on Penn Station, at a military recruitment center in Arkansas, on a federal building in Illinois, against other landmarks in Manhattan, and on a Dallas skyscraper. Then there was the Christmas Day plot against Northwest Airlines Flight 253, which would have killed more than 300 people had the al-Qaeda operative been more competent; the Times Square plot, which would have been worse than the Oklahoma City bombing had the operative been more competent; and the Fort Hood massacre, which could have been avoided had we been less afraid to appear intolerant of intolerance. And all this happened in just the past year and a half. They’re here.

There is the prevalent argument that this is not representative of real Islam. Fine. Then let’s at least have a discussion as to what “real Islam” actually is. Surely it makes little sense to define all the good things as real Islam and all the bad things as a perversion of real Islam, no? Can we no longer think objectively? Have we become that terrified into silence?

The truth is this: Islam is not merely a religion. Islam is a complete way of life: theological, political, social, and legal. Islamic law is the literal word of the Koran, which is supposed to be the direct word of God. It claims to be unalterable. …

Even amongst the disparate schools of Islam, there are no distinctions of Islamic law. All of these interpretative matters have been addressed long ago. It is what it is and it cannot be anything else. …

“Jihad” is not a yoga-like exercise for internal spiritual discovery. It is the killing of non-Muslims and the enforcement of Islamic rule throughout the world. “Peace” is not coexistence. It is Islamic dominion over the planet. “Freedom” is not individual liberty. It is submission to the supernatural.

Where is the United States to go from here? We ought to shut down the internal jihadist infrastructure controlling the American-Muslim community. We ought to challenge the ten-year plan of the 57-nation Organization of the Islamic Conference to stifle freedom of speech, thought, and expression in the West. We ought to more passionately defend the superiority of democratic and liberal values — in ethics, in philosophy, and in practice. We ought to call for explanations on behalf of the Islamic world. What is it they actually believe? What actions are they willing to take on behalf of these beliefs? Rather than tell them what they want to hear, we ought to begin insisting they tell us what we want to hear.

And finally, we ought to devise a foreign policy whereby we officially oppose the inclusion of fascist theocratic movements in new democratic governments — whether Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas in Gaza, the Taliban in Afghanistan, or the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt [or the elected government in Iraq – JB]— and proclaim our support for true freedom.

Islam is waging war on the rest of the world. Its war is called jihad.

It will not stop until it is victorious. It will count itself victorious when it has brought the whole world under its rule. Its supreme ruler will be a caliph. The totalitarian system to which all will submit is called sharia.

What is the enlightened West doing to preserve itself from conquest by Islam?

What can it do?

Raymond Ibrahim of the Middle East Forum considers this question at Right Side News, and answers it pessimistically:

Today …  onetime arcane words — caliphate, jihad, sharia — become commonplace in the media …

Ever since Egypt became a hot topic in the media, there has been no shortage of pundits warning against the Muslim Brotherhood; warning that an Islamist takeover in Egypt may have a domino effect in the region; warning that the ultimate goal of Islamists around the world is the resurrection of an imperialistic and expansionist caliphate … Similarly, the controversy caused by the Ground Zero mosque brought Arabic-Islamic concepts that were formerly the domain of academics, such as sharia, into the fore.

Yet, as the West begins to understand the unique nature of its enemy — caliphate, jihad, and sharia all pose a perpetual, transcendent threat — it must also understand that a unique response is required. …

Consider the caliphate: its very existence would usher in a state of constant hostility. Both historically and doctrinally, the caliphate’s function is to wage jihad, whenever and wherever possible, to bring the infidel world under Islamic dominion and enforce sharia. …

A jihad-waging, sharia-enforcing caliphate represents a permanent, ideological enemy — not a temporal foe that can be bought or pacified through diplomacy or concessions. Such a caliphate is precisely what Islamists around the world are feverishly seeking to establish. Without active, preemptive measures, it is only a matter of time before they succeed.

In this context, what, exactly, is the Western world prepared to do about it — now, before the caliphate becomes a reality? Would it be willing to launch a preemptive offensive — politically, legally, educationally, and, if necessary, militarily — to prevent its resurrection? Could the West ever go on the offensive, openly and confidently — now, when it has the upper-hand — to incapacitate its enemies?

One may argue in the affirmative, pointing to the preemptive Iraq war. Yet there are subtle and important differences. The rationale behind the Iraq war was physical and practical: it was limited to the elimination of suspected WMDs and against a specific government, Iraq’s Saddam regime. War to prevent the creation of a caliphate, on the other hand, is metaphysical and impractical: it is not limited to eliminating material weapons, nor confined to one government or person.

The fact is, the West does not have the political paradigms or language to justify an offensive against an ideological foe in religious garb. …

What if an important nation like Egypt does go Islamist, a big domino in the quest of a caliphate? It is a distinct possibility. Can we also say that it is distinct possibility that the West would do everything in its power to prevent this from happening? Of course not …

Indeed, the Obama administration has already made it clear that it is willing to engage the [Muslim] Brotherhood, differentiating them from “radicals” like al-Qaeda — even as the Brotherhood’s motto is “Allah is our objective, the prophet is our leader, the Koran is our law, jihad is our way, dying in the way of Allah our highest hope.” Likewise, a theocratic, eschatologically-driven Iran is on its way to possessing nuclear weapons — all while the international community stands by.

In short, as it becomes clear that violence and intolerance are inextricably linked to concepts like caliphate, jihad, and sharia, so too should it become clear that the threat is here to stay …

Ibrahim quotes Hamid Dabashi, Professor of Iranian Studies at Columbia University asking the question that needs to be asked, and which so far has no answer; a question which no leader in the West has dared to think about.

“You can sit here and talk about jihad from here to doomsday, what will it do? Suppose you prove beyond any shadow of doubt that Islam is constitutionally violent, where do you go from there?”

Ibrahim gives no answer of his own.

Has the West rendered itself finally impotent against this enemy by its choice of the very values that first made it strong: freedom, tolerance, openness, benevolence, irenicism, skepticism, rationality?

If it can only win this war by changing itself into its own opposite, becoming collectivist, intolerant, oppressive, malevolent, violent and dogmatic, it will destroy itself, becoming so much like Islam that Islam it may as well be.

… in Afghanistan.