Here’s part of a report, with questions, conjectures, and comments, about the Libyan rebels’ capture of Tripoli.

It comes from DebkaFile, an Israeli source.

We can’t know how reliable it is, but the questions it asks are interesting:

Muammar Qaddafi’s regime fell in Tripoli just before midnight Sunday, Aug. 22. The rebels advanced in three columns into the heart of the capital after being dropped by NATO ships and helicopters on the Tripoli coast. Except for pockets, government forces did not resist the rebel advance, which stopped short of the Qaddafi compound of Bab al-Aziziyah.

After one of his sons Saif al Islam was reported to be in rebel hands and another, Mohammad, said to have surrendered, Qaddafi’s voice was heard over state television calling on Libyans to rise up and save Tripoli from “the traitors.” Tripoli is now like Baghdad, he said. For now, his whereabouts are unknown.

Government spokesman Moussa Ibrahim said 1,200 people had been killed in the 12 hours of the rebel push towards the capital. As he spoke, Libyan rebels, backed by NATO, seized control of the capital. After holding out for six months, the Qaddafi regime was to all intents and purposes at an end.

Still to be answered are seven questions raised here by DEBKAfile’s analysts:

1. Where are the six government special divisions whose loyalty to the Libyan ruler and his sons was never in question? None of the 15,000 trained government troops were to be seen in the way of the rebel advance into the capital. The mystery might be accounted for by several scenarios: Either these units broke up and scattered or Qaddafi pulled them back into southern Libya to secure the main oil fields. Or, perhaps, government units are staying out of sight and biding their time in order to turn the tables on the triumphant rebels and trap them in a siege. The Libyan army has used this stratagem before.

2. How did the ragtag, squabbling Libyan rebels who were unable to build a coherent army in six months suddenly turn up in Tripoli Sunday looking like an organized military force and using weapons for which they were not known to have received proper training? Did they secretly harbor a non-Libyan hard core of professional soldiers?

3. What happened to the tribes loyal to Qaddafi? Up until last week, they numbered the three largest tribal grouping in the country. Did they suddenly melt away without warning?

4. Does Qaddafi’s fall in Tripoli mean he has lost control of all other parts of Libya, including his strongholds in the center and south?

5. Can the rebels and NATO claim an undisputed victory? Or might not the Libyan ruler, forewarned of NATO’s plan to topple him by Sept. 1, have decided to dodge a crushing blow, cede Tripoli and retire to the Libyan Desert from which to wage war on the new rulers?

6. Can the heavily divided rebels, consisting of at least three militias, put their differences aside and establish a reasonable administration for governing a city of many millions? Their performance in running the rebel stronghold of Benghazi is not reassuring.

7. DEBKAfile’s military and counter-terror sources suggest a hidden meaning in Qaddafi’s comment that Tripoli is now like Baghdad. Is he preparing to collect his family, escape Tripoli and launch a long and bloody guerrilla war like the one Saddam Hussein’s followers waged after the US invasion of 2003 which opened the door of Iraq to al Qaeda?

If that is Qaddafi’s plan, the rebels and their NATO backers, especially Britain and France, will soon find their victory wiped out by violence similar to – or worse than – the troubles the US-led forces have suffered in Iraq and Afghanistan.

We have often wondered why it is that the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR), regularly named as an “unindicted co-conspirator in the Holy Land Foundation case”, remains unindicted.

In April this year, Rep. Peter King (R-NY), who is holding hearings on the radicalization of Muslims in the US, wrote  to Attorney General Eric Holder to ask him why.

Here’s Peter King’s letter, from the website of the Committee on Homeland Security (of which he is chairman):

Dear Attorney General Holder:

I write to inquire about your decision not to prosecute the 246 individuals and organizations, named as unindicted co-conspirators in a Hamas terror finance case, United States v. Holy Land Foundation.

I have been reliably informed that the decision not to seek indictments of the Council on American Islamic Relations (“CAIR”) and its co-founder Omar Ahmad, the Islamic Society of North America (“ISNA”), and the North American Islamic Trust (“NAIT”), was usurped by high-ranking officials at Department of Justice headquarters over the vehement and stated objections of special agents and supervisors of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, as well as the prosecutors at the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Dallas, who had investigated and successfully prosecuted the Holy Land Foundation case. Their opposition to this decision raises serious doubt that the decision not to prosecute was a valid exercise of prosecutorial discretion.

I request that you provide answers to the following questions:

What are the reasons for the Department’s decisions not to prosecute CAIR, ISNA, NAIT and Mr. Ahmad, who is a CAIR co-founder and former head of the Palestine Committee of the Muslim Brotherhood in the United States?

Who made the final decision not to prosecute? Who, if anyone, from the Executive Office of the President, consulted with, advised, or otherwise communicated with the Department of Justice, in electronic, oral or written form, regarding the Department’s decision to not seek indictments of CAIR, ISNA, NAIT and Mr. Ahmad?

How does and will the Department and the Federal Bureau of Investigation address the potential for CAIR, ISNA, or NAIT to engage in terrorism financing? What policies with regard to those organizations have you implemented to address that threat?

The answers to these questions should provide some explanation for declining a prosecution that is strongly supported by the record from the Holy Land Foundation trial. As you are aware, in a previously sealed Memorandum Opinion Order of July 1, 2009, United States District Judge Jorge A. Solis declined CAIR, ISNA and NAIT’s August 14, 2007 and June 18, 2008 requests to strike their names from the United States Attorney’s list of unindicted co-conspirators in the Holy Land Foundation case. Judge Solis found that the “Government has produced ample evidence to establish the associations of CAIR, ISNA and NAIT with [the Holy Land Foundation, “HLF”], the Islamic Association for Palestine (“IAP”), and with Hamas.” The Court found that the evidence was “sufficient to show the association of these entities with HLF, IAP, and Hamas. Thus, maintaining the names of the entities on the List is appropriate in light of the evidence proffered by the Government” ..  At minimum, FBI testimony established that Mr. Ahmad attended a meeting in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in which participants discussed how they could support Hamas, including by raising funds for this terrorist group. NAIT was similarly unsuccessful in its subsequent request to the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit to have its name removed from the list of co-conspirators.

Hamas has been designated as a terrorist organization by the Department of State since October 9, 1997, and its status was reconfirmed by the most recent annual report of the National Counterterrorism Center, issued April 30, 2010. Hamas shamefully conducts cowardly suicide bombings against civilian targets inside Israel. Hamas also, between 2008 and 2009, conducted 2,614 indiscriminate rocket and mortar attacks upon residential areas in that country, an ally of the United States. According to the State Department, Hamas finances its terrorist activities “through state sponsors of terrorism Iran and Syria, and fundraising networks in the Arabian Peninsula, Europe, the Middle East, [and] the United States”.. It raises the most serious question for the Justice Department to decline to even attempt to prosecute individuals and organizations, accused by a US Attorney and found by a federal judge, to have a nexus with fundraising for an organization which conducts terror attacks upon civilians.

I believe that in order to maintain the credibility of the Department, there should be full transparency into the Department’s decision. Please respond to this letter by April 25, 2011..

Sincerely,

PETER T. KING

Chairman

We don’t know if Eric Holder replied, and if he did what he said. But we do know there have been no prosecutions of the terrorist-supporters named  in Peter King’s letter. And we don’t think there will be any as long as the infamous Eric Holder heads the Department of Justice.

From The Religion of Peace:

From an Arab website, the estimated numbers of those killed to date in the Arab uprisings:

Long ago, in the land of Canaan, it was the custom to sacrifice little children to the  god Moloch. The Canaanites literally fed children into the mouth of a huge bronze idol of the god. It had a human body with a bull’s head. The Canaanites made a fire inside it and heated the metal until it glowed red-hot. Then they threw babies into the furnace through the gaping mouth. Moloch had to be propitiated, they believed, with human flesh and blood so that he’d allow the tribe to survive and prosper.

In our time, Allah, the god of Islam, also requires the sacrifice of children, so that the Ummah – the community of the religion – may survive and prosper.

Here are two tales of child sacrifice by devout Muslims: The Palestinian Authority and Hamas in the erstwhile land of Canaan, and al-Shabaab in the Horn of Africa.

First, here and here are reports on Palestinians sacrificing their children:

A Palestinian Authority kindergarten showed off what its young students had learned over the past year by having the five-year-olds act out scenes of terror and death for their families. The parents were moved to tears upon seeing their children pretend to die as “martyrs” …

During the graduation ceremony two plays were performed – one based on “Little Red Riding Hood,” the second, “The Martyr’s Wedding,” a story glorifying death in battle with Israel for the sake of Islam.

“Another performance named ‘The Martyr’s Wedding’ delighted the audience due to the role-play of the children, whose acting depicted the reality of roadblocks, children, occupation, soldiers, and the children’s death as Martyrs,” wrote the PA daily Al-Hayat Al-Jadida …

The performance was accompanied by “nationalistic” songs, Al-Hayat Al-Jadida reported. Many such songs encourage “martyrdom” and bloodshed for the sake of “freeing the land of Palestine” – a land which, according to the PA, includes all of Israel.

Under self-rule on the West Bank and Gaza, child sacrifice has turned into a normative part of the socialization process as the phenomenon of suicide bombers has escalated to epidemic proportions.

From an early age, children are fed anti-Zionist, anti-Jewish and anti-Western hate propaganda. Mosques, schools, summer camps, and even children’s television programs are exploited to encourage children to become martyrs in an act that will bring them respect and parental pride:

In Hamas-run kindergartens, signs on the walls read: “The children of the kindergarten are the shahids (holy martyrs) of tomorrow.”

A television show called “The Children’s Club” shows a young Palestinian, age 9 or 10 proclaiming, “When I wander into Jerusalem, I will become a suicide bomber.” …

A 6th grade Palestinian textbook, Our Beautiful Language, includes the “Shahid Song” that encourages death in war as a shahid or martyr. Other textbooks carry similar messages. …

An Islamic Jihad summer school massages the libidos of teenage boys by telling them they will “liberate Palestine from the Jews” by becoming martyrs, and promise the boys that they will be greeted [in heaven] by 72 virgins.

Kindergartens, schools, summer camps, and school sports tournaments (and other institutions) are named after terrorists and young suicide bombers, who are used as pedagogic role models. …

Throughout the Palestinian territories, walls are plastered with posters of young martyrs who are idolized by Palestinian youth the way other teens worship rock stars.

Parents in Gaza dress up their infants in mock suicide vests, and when one of their children dies a “martyr” death by exploding a real one, they celebrate with cakes and candy.

The PA loads buses with children to carry them to points where they throw rocks at the Israeli security forces.

In fire-fights, the Palestinians use children as human shields. They set up their guns on the roofs of schools. And in battle on the ground, men with guns stand behind rows of children.

Next the story of al-Shabaab in Somalia:

The drought in the Horn of Africa that began in 2009 is the worst in 60 years. … In Somalia that drought soon turned into a famine of unprecedented proportions. To date almost 30,000 children under the age of 5 have died of starvation … More than one million Somalis have fled to Ethiopia and Kenya, where makeshift refugee camps house hundreds of thousands.

One might expect that all Somali leaders and political parties would join forces to help their people survive this enormous tragedy; but one would be wrong. The Somali Muslim terrorists known as al-Shabaab have worked for the past two years to prevent any foreign aid from reaching their Muslim Somali co-religionists …

Harakat ash-Shabaab al-Mujahideen (the “Organization of the Youth Jihad Fighters”), or al-Shabaab (“the lads” or “the youths” in Arabic) for short, is a group of Islamist terrorist jihadis fighting to overthrow the Muslim government of Somalia in order to replace it with a government committed to a more extreme form of Islam and to Shari’a law. The group now controls large swathes of southern Somalia. Its leaders claim that they are waging war against the “enemies of Islam” which includes the present Somali government.

Al-Shabaab leaders formerly denied any connection with el-Qaeda, but early in 2010 they acknowledged that they worked with el-Qaeda forces in Pakistan and Yemen for training and deployment. … Its terrorist forces, under el-Qaeda influence, have created the single greatest obstacle to humanitarian assistance in Somalia. Thanks to al-Shabaab, the rate of malnutrition in southern Somalia is the highest in the world, approaching half the population …

In addition to denying aid workers access to the regions where the drought and famine rage, al-Shabaab terrorists force local Somali Muslim humanitarian organizations to pay “taxes” (aka bribes) in order to be able to funnel food and other supplies to the devastated areas… In some cases, al-Shabaab terrorists have burned food stocks and medicine, and have kidnapped or killed charity workers, when bribes were not paid. These “taxes” can be as high as $10,000 for access to the areas al-Shabaab controls. Then there are the “registration fees” of another $10,000, and payments of $6,000 every six months, as well as 20 percent of the value of all food and other supplies and 10 percent on all vehicles, as a form of “import duties.” Their terrorism pays well; but their extorted wealth and their Islamic jihad agenda come at the expense of the lives of hundreds of thousands, and perhaps millions, of their own people. …

Why does al-Shabaab wreck this horrific inhuman brutality against their own Muslim Somali people?

As al-Shabaab spokespersons explain it, alien non-Muslim groups cannot be permitted to enter Somalia because they might host spies, or worse, promote an un-Islamic way of life among the Somali Muslims…  Attacks on humanitarian workers … bringing food to starving Somalis are merely self-defense against foreign non-Muslim influences that might corrupt the pure Islamic way of life for Somali Muslims.

Are these devout Muslims incapable  of feeling pity?

Now comes a surprise. A strange, ironic twist in the story.

Gazans, whose walls are plastered with pictures of their sacrificed children, are so moved by the plight of the dying children of Somalia, that they are sending aid to them.

Here is the report:

In another sign that the humanitarian crisis in Gaza isn’t all it is said to be, Gazans are sending aid to Somalia.

Imams in mosques in the Gaza strip mentioned Somalia during Friday prayers last week and asked Gazans to donate to their brothers there.

Moreover, the Arab Doctors Union Gaza branch ran a campaign asking the people of Gaza to donate to people of Somalia.

The campaign, called “From Gaza hand in hand to save the children of Somalia“, will last throughout Ramadan.

The Union took out advertisements supporting the campaign in local radios and websites to encourage people to contribute to the campaign. It is planning advertisements on local television also.

Various people responded to the campaign, but most donations came from the local non-governmental organisations and some wealthy businessmen, according to the organizers of the campaign.

One of the donors, Mohammed Abd Al Latif said, “I saw the pictures of our brothers in Somalia and felt so sorry for them; I wanted to do anything to help.”

“The campaign aimed at demonstrating the extent of physical cohesion between the besieged Gaza and Somalia, showing that the Palestinian people are capable of supporting and standing by the Somali people,” said Ahmad Hathat, the public relations officer of the Union.

The charity campaign underscores the fact that Gaza is swimming in surplus aid from an international community willing to underwrite the national aspirations of Fatah and Hamas to the extent that their enclaves have become transit points, rather than a destination, for aid.

So the money comes out of aid from the West, including the US, by which the Gazans’ own existence is chiefly sustained.

But whether the aid-out-of-aid they are sending will actually reach the dying children of Somalia is uncertain. Will al-Shabaab consider Gazans – ruled by Hamas, an off-shoot of the Muslim Brotherhood – pure enough to be allowed to help the dying children without religiously corrupting them? Or will al-Shabaab pocket the bounty?

We have written often and at length about the futility of continuing the US engagement in Afghanistan. (Put “Afghanistan” or “Taliban” into our search slot to find our numerous posts on the subject.)

AP now reports that hundreds of millions of US dollars have found their way into the hands of the Taliban.

After examining hundreds of combat support and reconstruction contracts in Afghanistan, the U.S military estimates $360 million in U.S. tax dollars has ended up in the hands of people the American-led coalition has spent nearly a decade battling: the Taliban, criminals and power brokers with ties to both.

The losses underscore the challenges the U.S. and its international partners face in overcoming corruption in Afghanistan. A central part of the Obama administration’s strategy has been to award U.S.-financed contracts to Afghan businesses to help improve quality of life and stoke the country’s economy.

A nice clear demonstration of its political naivety.

But until a special task force assembled by Gen. David Petraeus began its investigation last year, the coalition had little insight into the connections many Afghan companies and their vast network of subcontractors had with insurgents and criminals – groups military officials call “malign actors.”

In a murky process known as “reverse money laundering,” payments from the U.S. pass through companies hired by the military for transportation, construction, power projects, fuel and other services to businesses and individuals with ties to the insurgency or criminal networks …

“Funds begin as clean monies,” according to one document, then “either through direct payments or through the flow of funds in the subcontractor network, the monies become tainted.”

The conclusions by Task Force 2010 represent the most definitive assessment of how U.S. military spending and aid to Afghanistan has been diverted to the enemy or stolen. …

Has it learnt its lesson from the discovery and grown wiser? No.

The Defense Department announced Monday that it had selected 20 separate contractors for a new transportation contract potentially worth $983.5 million … Officials said the new arrangement will reduce the reliance on subcontractors and diminish the risk of money being lost. Under the new National Afghan Trucking Services contract, the military will be able to choose from a deeper pool of companies competing against one another to offer the best price to move supplies. The new arrangement also gives the U.S. more flexibility in determining –

To determine something it is not flexibility that is required, just determination –

whether security is needed for supply convoys and who should provide it …

Security? How about American armed guards keeping cold eyes fixed on every one of the bastards?

And the Pentagon’s wondering who – if they decide for it – should provide it?  Does that mean they’re considering getting Afghans to do it? Oh yes!

The Pentagon did not provide the names of the 20 companies picked due to worries that larger contractors who weren’t selected might try to coerce them into a takeover, the senior defense official said.

Ah, canny, canny!

But about those security providers. Among a bunch of them named in the report, here’s one who is so surprisingly discovered to have been cheating:

In 2009 and 2010, [a] subcontractor identified in the document only as “Rohullah” received $1.7 million in payments. A congressional report issued last year said Rohullah is a warlord who controlled the convoy security business along the highway between Kabul and Kandahar, the two largest cities in Afghanistan. …

Rohullah’s hundreds of heavily armed guards operated a protection racket, charging contractors moving U.S. military supplies along the highway as much as $1,500 a vehicle. Failure to pay virtually guaranteed a convoy would be attacked by Rohullah’s forces … Rohullah’s guards regularly fought with the Taliban, but investigators believe Rohullah moved money to the Taliban when it was in his interest to do so. …

U.S. authorities in Afghanistan are screening contractors more carefully to be sure they can handle the work and also are trustworthy, the senior military official said. Authorities also are being more aggressive in barring companies if they violate contract terms or are found to be involved in illicit activities. Since the task force was created last year, the number of debarred Afghan, U.S. and international companies and individuals associated with contracting in Afghanistan has more than doubled – from 31 to 78, the official said.

And those not on the list may be presumed trustworthy?

Just how dumbly trusting and incurably naive the Western directors of the Afghan campaign are, here’s a reminder of how easily they were deceived by the Taliban last year. We quote from our post The Sting of Nov. 23 , 2010, concerning “a perfectly performed con-trick by which an imposter extracted a mountain of moola from craven double-dealing presidents, diplomats, and generals involved in The Endless War of Waste and Futility.”

The conman claimed to be Mullah Akhta Muhammad Mansour, “the second highest official in the Taliban movement” after the founder, Mullah Mohammed Omar.

He and “two other Taliban leaders” were flown to Kabul from Pakistan in a NATO plane, wearing serious beards, and were ceremoniously ushered into the presidential palace, where they proceeded to beard President Karzai in his den, so to speak. Then they were conducted to the city of Kandahar where “Mullah Mansour” and his two merry men hoodwinked government officials, NATO commanders, American diplomats and top-brass.

For months, the secret talks unfolding between Taliban and Afghan leaders to end the war appeared to be showing promise, if only because of the appearance of a certain insurgent leader at one end of the table: Mullah Akhtar Muhammad Mansour, one of the most senior commanders in the Taliban movement.

But now, it turns out, Mr. Mansour was apparently not Mr. Mansour at all. In an episode that could have been lifted from a spy novel, United States and Afghan officials now say the Afghan man was an impostor, and high-level discussions conducted with the assistance of NATO appear to have achieved little.

For “little” read “nothing”.

“It’s not him,” said a Western diplomat in Kabul intimately involved in the discussions. “And we gave him a lot of money.”

American officials confirmed Monday that they had given up hope that the Afghan was Mr. Mansour, or even a member of the Taliban leadership.

Doubts about the man’s identity arose after the third session of negotiations. Only then –

A man who had known [the real] Mr. Mansour years ago told Afghan officials that the man at the table did not resemble him.

Even so, they wistfully hoped that whoever he was would come again. They’d paid him to keep the fake peace talks going, and any old talks, with anyone at all, are better than none.

So who was the guy they were negotiating with?

The theory we like best is that he was “a humble shopkeeper from the Pakistani city of Quetta”, who simply enlisted the help of two cronies and carried out the sting operation for the most understandable of motives – to get a lot of money. Which they did.

When will they ever learn?

Sam Harris, fellow atheist, talks about Islam.

Iran urged the British government to show restraint in dealing with the rioters in English cities this week. At the time the English police were so restrained that they were not even permitted to use water-cannon to disperse the rioters.

Here’s a video showing how Iranian law deals with some offenders. This method of hanging is slow and agonizing. Notice the woman struggling, her death probably prolonged by her burqa.

Also note this, from an article by Michael Ledeen:

Thousands of [Iranian] Revolutionary Guards and Hezbollah killers and commanders have virtually taken charge of the Assad regime’s slaughter of Syrian protesters.

Last weekend, on August 6 – as reported  here –

U.S. Special Operations troops were closing in on a secret Taliban summit thought to include a high-value commander in Afghanistan’s rugged Tangi Valley when they ran into an insurgent patrol that pinned them down.

They asked for reinforcements, so-

Before dawn …  members of the elite U.S. Navy SEAL Team Six packed into a twin-rotor Chinook transport helicopter and rushed to the rescue …

As their Chinook was about to land … an insurgent shot it out of the sky with a rocket-propelled grenade, or RPG, in the deadliest attack endured by the American military in a decade of war in Afghanistan. Thirty U.S. special forces members were killed including members of SEAL Team 6 [the team that killed Osama bin Laden].

Immediate questions arise:

How did the Taliban pull it off? Why were the SEALs packed into an aging, slow-moving Chinook helicopter flying at low altitude? Were they on a mission only they could pull off or were they being overused to save a failed Afghan strategy? …

A strategy to achieve what? To change Afghanistan?

The impossibility of changing Afghanistan in the least degree, let alone turning it into a modern democratic state, could not be more clearly understood and vividly explained than it is by Daniel Greenfield in an article at Front Page:

Pedophilia, forced marriages, blasphemy trials and drug dealing. That is the real Afghanistan. The one that lingers on even when the Taliban are chased into the hills. That cannot be changed by American intervention because this is who its people are.

We might have been able to save Afghanistan from the Taliban, but we can’t save it from the Afghans. From the quarreling clans and warlords, the age old customs and the Islamic mores. Beyond a sliver of Western educated men and women in Kabul lies a land of a thousand cruelties and a million knives. With a vendetta around every corner and murder in every heart.

There is no Afghanistan, only a thousand divisions. The Islamic Republic of Afghanistan that replaced the Taliban’s Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, is an internationally funded mirage. A multi-billion dollar fund with its own flag and its own mercenaries. And because these mercenaries won’t fight, our soldiers go out to fight and die in their place.

Beneath that flag there is no unity. There are only divisions. Sunnis and Shiites. Pashtuns, Tajiks and Hazaras. Men and women. Groups with nothing in common except the Koran and the knife. …

Afghan jails are filled with women fleeing abusive marriages. Fleeing home carries with it a ten year jail sentence. The analogy to escaped slaves is as obvious and inescapable as a Muslim marriage. Adultery is the catch-all charge that can be leveled at a woman at any time, married or unmarried, a young girl or an elderly woman.

The Afghan man has three tools of power. Zan, Zar and Zamin. Women, gold and land. A man with many women will be able to breed many sons and expand his own clan. A man with a great deal of gold will be able to buy weapons and take his share of the drug and human trafficking networks. And a man with much land will have his own kingdom.

This elemental tribal power defines Afghanistan. Women are at the bottom of this pyramid. But so are minority ethnic groups. …

And on top of the bubbling kettle is Islam. No religion would be quite as fit for this backward tribalism as a religion that began as a warlord’s cult. Islam does not unify Afghanistan. For all that the Islamists imagine a Caliphate, Islam adds only another layer of division. Ethnic divisions in Afghanistan are also religious divisions. And Islam adds religious sanction to the oppression of women and the massacres of rivals.  …

Islam’s influence has only embedded the savagery deeper beneath its dusty skin. Everything that is bad in Afghanistan has its supporting verse in the Koran. The culture of the tribal raid, its emphasis on victory as proof of divine sanction and its contempt for women– finds its echo in the Koran. …

The tribal raider is unable to imagine any higher idea than the honor of his family. But Islam adds the idea of the meta-tribal identity. The Islamic Ummah as the ultimate tribe. It is an idea that allowed Mohammed and his successors to loot and pillage their way across much of the world. And the world is bleeding from a million wounds, stabbed, cut and pierced by the followers of that idea. …

20th century Islamists took the ugly tribal feud and globalized it. They took backward places like Afghanistan and turned them into platforms for a global war. We may be able to save ourselves from the puppet masters behind this shadow war, but we cannot save the Afghans from themselves.

The rioting in England that we wrote about yesterday (see our post Anarchy immediately below) is not being perpetrated by members of any one particular ethnic or religious group. The leftist anti-Semitic Guardian newspaper singled out just one “ethnicity” to put a name to, that of three or four Hasidic Jews who were watching the violence in Tottenham and, along with others, were “jeering at the police”.

The arsonists, vandals, and looters are said to be mostly young and male, and of mixed backgrounds. They are Children of the Welfare State, lacking none of the basic amenities of life except, in many cases, fathers. But they have daddy-the-state to support them. Daddy-the-state does not put every luxury their hearts desire within their reach, but a riot can.

There is nothing particularly British about their cushioned condition or their easy resort to violence. Their kind is to be found almost anywhere in Europe. At the drop of an entitlement they are likely to riot, as they do here and there from time to time, on one pretext or another or none at all.

In one European country, however, the violence is continual – and one religious group is responsible for it.      

It is the subject of an essay by Nidra Poller titled A French Intifada, published in the Winter 2011 issue of the Middle East Quarterly, a shocking account of the destructive and terrifying lawlessness that has become endemic in France.

Quoting from it doesn’t do it justice; it needs to be read in full. But here is part of what she writes:

A process described by some as the Islamization of Europe, by others as the failure of Europeans to integrate Muslim immigrants, has reached a breaking point in France. One of the most troubling manifestations of this discord is the development of a particular type of violence that is more than the sum of its parts. A sampling of this year’s news reports reads like a catalogue of stomping, stabbing, shooting, torching, and sacking; attacks on teachers, policemen, firemen, old ladies, and modest retirees; turf wars, tribal fights, murder over women, over attitude, over nothing; dead youths, murderous youths, bodies scattered across a national battlefield.

Is there a connection between the endless series of seemingly disparate criminal incidents and markers openly displayed in insurrectional riots and demonstrations — kaffiyeh face masks, Hezbollah flags, intifada slogans, Islamic chants? A general French tendency to withhold information and a deliberate decision to avoid ethnic and religious symbols leads to white noise coverage of criminality. Names, photos, and background information about perpetrators, suspects, and victims are usually suppressed, especially those that might create a negative image of Muslims.

Yet there is ample evidence that immigration has brought specifically Islamic antipathy to Jews, contempt for Western values, and other antisocial attitudes reinforced by religious zeal and aggravated by the clash between an authoritarian family structure and permissive French society. …

The French republic is in danger as the anti-Jewish thuggery has been extended to the general population, the “dirty Frenchies” and “filthy whities.”

The twisted logic and adulterated ethics devised to blame Israel for failing to bring peace on earth has come back to haunt the French. A compassionate discourse that excuses Palestinian atrocities against Israeli civilians as a reaction to “injustice” also excuses French domestic criminality as payback for colonization, discrimination, exclusion, unemployment, and police harassment. …   The “disproportionate reaction” accusation played like the ace of spades against Israel turns into a joker when riot police are portrayed as Robocops oppressing a “Palestinized” immigrant population. …

Palestinian terrorists are called “militants,” Gaza Flotilla jihadists are presented as “humanitarians,” and the young French criminals are “youths“. This deceivingly generic term used to mask the identity of local Maghrebi and African thugs is a paradoxical translation of the Arabic shabab. Indeed, it is not rare to read of a “36-year-old adult youth” involved in a rumble or suspected of murder. …

During the 2005 uprising, when rioting Muslim youths torched cars and public buildings in housing projects throughout the country and clashed with the security forces trying to restore law and order, Parisians believed they were safe inside invisible walls as fires burned on the other side of the ring road. “It’s just the banlieue [working class suburb],” they said. A second round of discourse about the urgent need to improve housing, infrastructure, transportation, and job opportunities circumscribed the problem. Before the year was out, flames were rising in the center of the city and the banlieue problems spread like wildfire.

Five years later … the discourse is similarly sterile. Newspapers string out a litany of violent incidents in a repetition of stock phrases and opaque vocabulary. Honey-voiced newscasters warble little tunes of tribal violence as if turf wars and fatal stabbings in retaliation for a look, an attitude, or a woman were all in a day’s work. Bucolic place names redolent with memories of Impressionist boating parties are now the sites of bloody murder. Fatal stabbings in schools named after resistance heroes are attributed to the influence of video games and a hunger for consumer products stimulated by capitalism. …

She lists examples of  “bloody murders”  as reported with insufficient information by the media.

What happened next? Were the circumstances elucidated? The perpetrators apprehended? Convicted? We may never know. Convinced that the identity of culprits is withheld for ideological reasons, readers do the detective work with telltale clues and exasperating similarities. Youths, knives, the banlieue? Twenty against one? Drug wars? Turf wars? Gang fights? The puzzled citizen situates each incident somewhere on a line traced from the intimidating rowdiness observed in public to mass revolts seen on television …

Delinquent immigrants are acquitted of responsibility for their antisocial behavior and self-destructive strategies. …  Housing projects are dilapidated by their own delinquent residents only to be displayed as proof of social injustice. …

No matter how much is done or given, it is never enough; no matter how wild the behavior, it is always explained away. Here, there, and everywhere, ethical boundaries are erased and logic surrenders to magical thinking. When mothers offer their children to die as shahids … the very horror of their vengeance is held as a measure of the degree of oppression they endure. In France, every form of brutality, including the murder of Ilan Halimi — a young French Jew kidnapped by a banlieue gang in January 2006 and tortured to death over a period of three weeks — is attributed to some form of “exclusion.”  … Lawyers for the defense organized press conferences and wrote op-eds to deny banlieue anti-Semitism and portray their clients as misguided underprivileged youths. …

No French outlet would touch the “Hamas on the Seine” report by photojournalist Jean-Paul Ney, published …  on May 31, 2010, describing enraged kaffiyeh-masked, pro-Palestinians chanting, “Zionist sellout media,” “Jews to the ovens,” “F–k France,” “Sarkozy the little Jew,” “Obama the Jew’s n —-r”,  repeatedly breaking police lines, determined to reach the Israeli embassy and vent their rage over the Gaza flotilla incident. Joined by anarchist “black-blocks,” the insurgents destroyed property, threw paving stones at the police, and wreaked havoc for several hours at the Champs Elysées Circle. Ney distinctly heard orders broadcast to the riot police: “Don’t try to stop them.” …

The 2005 riots were triggered by the death of two minors who sought refuge in an electrical substation, allegedly pursued by the police, allegedly for no good reason. In November 2007, several policemen were wounded by gunfire in a battle with some 200 youths in Villiers le Bel (Val d’Oise) after two youths without helmets sped down the street on a prohibited mini-cycle, crashed into a police car, and were killed. …  After a similar accident in Woippy, a banlieue of Metz, gendarmes were pelted with stones, fourteen vehicles including a bus were torched, telephone booths and a school were sacked. These are but a few of many incidents where youths in stolen cars or motorcycles, running away from the police, crash and kill themselves.

Yet, no matter how far-fetched the version of the “aggrieved” party, it always takes precedence over the official version in French media. Any police investigation is, by the media’s definition, suspect.  …

The media offered a brief tour when the police raided a housing project in the Parisian banlieue of Sevran (Seine Saint Denis) controlled by drug dealers. Graffiti arrows indicate “shops”; residents tell how they pass through checkpoints to access their buildings, and TV cameramen were lucky to escape with their footage. “Militants” responded to the raid with the now-familiar torching, sacking, and shooting at policemen. Government promises to enforce the law provoke an outcry from compassionate sociologists, left-wing magistrates and mayors, members of do-good associations who protest that “repression is not the solution.”Imposing undue restraint on the police has simply emboldened their adversaries. Over 5,000 were injured in the line of duty in 2009, and in January-February 2010, some 1,100. In recent incidents, police have been surrounded, pelted with paving stones, kicked, punched, hit on the head with hammers, humiliated, and treated like mugging victims, not agents of law enforcement. …

Contrary to expectations, the government did not slip away for the August vacation …  The president … announced a series of tough measures, and dared to link crime with immigration. Not all crime, not all immigrants. But he broke the taboo, simply by stating the obvious and followed with a promise of harsh measures for criminals who shoot at the police. Moreover, naturalized cop-killers will lose their citizenship. Tax officials will be sent into the projects to crack down on people living in luxury while on the dole. The drug market will be dismantled. Severe delinquency, polygamy, and female circumcision will also be grounds for withdrawal of nationality (this provision was subsequently withdrawn). …

The government’s straight talk has shaken France to the timbers. President Sarkozy was accused of cynically fishing for right-leaning-populist Front National voters, replaying the disgraceful Vichy past collaboration, separating the French-French from the foreign-French (akin to death-camp selections) …

Not a day goes by without a barrage of statements condemning the president. Former Socialist prime minister Michel Rocard — remembered for declaring in the early 1980s that “France cannot take in all the world’s misery” — stuck the Nazi label on President Sarkozy and accused him of fomenting civil war. Every opposition leader big or small took up the keyboard or microphone to vilify the president in the most emphatic terms. No Holocaust metaphor is left unturned. …  The rhetoric has come full circle: “immigrants” (meaning Arab-Muslim and sub-Saharan Africans) are today’s Jews when in fact the people who are now persecuting Jews belong to that lawless class loosely defined as “immigrants.”

The media are giving wall-to-wall coverage to the president’s most severe critics while limiting the defense of strict law enforcement to officials, giving the impression that the government stands alone — the 2 percent increase in approval ratings for the president and Prime Minister François Fillon notwithstanding. …

Hundreds of punk jihadists screaming “F–k France” can go amok but no one has the right to say they belong to a specific group or current. No one is even allowed to speculate on what they might have in common with other lawbreakers — unless one portrays them as hapless victims of injustice. …

Every law enforcement effort entails the danger of igniting a generalized insurrection on an overwhelming scale. It is easy to scold President Sarkozy as did The New York Times, parroting the French leftists, or on the other hand, to mock the president with a long list of unfulfilled law and order promises. But it would be wiser to ask why authorities in this western European nation with so much to lose keep mollifying antagonistic elements in the vain hope of avoiding a confrontation. 

How long can this go on? In France and all the Western European countries, anger is growing among the indigenous populations. Anywhere, everywhere, explosions of violence could become so sustained as to develop into civil wars. The continual conflict in France could already be described as “low intensity warfare”  – a sub-heading in Nidra Poller’s essay.

What might save the Europeans, paradoxically, is the economic collapse of their welfare states. If governments have no choice but to stop providing housing, health care, monetary hand-outs, their countries may no longer attract Muslim immigrants from the miserable Third World.

Post Script: This morning there are reports from England of residents turning out to protect their towns from advancing mobs of vandals, whole streets of shops being boarded up, and – particularly to be noted –  synagogues having to be protected by volunteers. The police continue to be defied with impunity.