"Racist!" "Islamophobe!" These are among the word-weapons with which critical discourse about growing Islamic extremism is stifled. But this is no time to retreat to an ostrich colony of Islamophobiaphobia. There's really not a helluva lot of negotiation to be done with these fellahs.

It is Ramadan, the month of jihad and martyrdom, claims al-Qaeda In Iraq leader Abu Hamza al-Muhajeer in a newly released video. He urges al-Qaeda followers in Iraq to kidnap Westerners in an attempt to force release of Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman, imprisoned for masterminding the 1993 bombing intended to topple the World Trade Center's twin towers in New York City eight years before bin Laden's jhadists pulled it off with hijacked U.S. commercial jets in an act of war which left 3,000 dead. But al Qaeda's new Iraq ops chief is winning scant mindshare, especially with the majority of the Sunni Muslim swing constituency. He urges their rerturn to what he calls their true religion, al-Qaeda's convert-or-die brand of Islam known as Wahhabism. Among Sunnis already so aligned are Jaish al-Mujahideen, which recently posted a celebratory video at YouTube showing U.S. soliders being killed by explosives, and a sniper.

An AP report on the al-Muhajeer video notes he also issues a call to Islamist scientists to develop chemical, biological and nuclear weapons for deployment against the Western menace in Iraq and elsewhere. Killing infidels with enriched uranium is a smart career move for ambitious scientists, he says.

The fugitive terror chief said experts in the fields of "chemistry, physics, electronics, media and all other sciences - especially nuclear scientists and explosives experts" should join his group's jihad, or holy war, against the West. "We are in dire need of you," said the speaker, who identified himself as Abu Hamza al-Muhajir - also known as Abu Ayyub al-Masri. "The field of jihad can satisfy your scientific ambitions, and the large American bases (in Iraq) are good places to test your unconventional weapons, whether biological or dirty, as they call them."

So the IEDs and suicide bombers just aren't doing it. Because neither we nor the Iraqis will turn tail. Plus he's losing the Sunnis to the hard-road Democratic process. Worse, it turns out jihadists are no more than 10 percent of an Iraq "insurgency" which the Brookings Instiution estimates at 20,000 or less, a tiny fraction of the country's population. Thus the continuing desperation of the freelance holy warriors, and the minority Sunni and Baathist rebels. Yet still emboldened by quavering public opinion in the U.S., they hope their continuing and cowardly terrorist attacks on police recruits, nurses or schoolteachers, or the next counterattack by Iraqi Shi'ites against them will return the U.S. Congress to Democratic control and all U.S. troops home. The war in Iraq WILL fuel global jihadism precisely IF we leave on their schedule, rather than ours.

Says Walid Phares, senior fellow at the Foundation For The Defense Of Democracies, and author of "Future Jihad: Terrorist Strategies Against The West," in a New York Post interview:

The debate in the U.S. today is about whether the terrorists are getting stronger because of U.S intervention in Iraq. But...the jihadists have been in the Middle East for decades, and have been spreading their Wahhabi ideology for years. They will move to any country that moves toward democracy. That is the real battle in Iraq: future democracy. Americans need to understand that the jihadists are international; they travel from spot to spot to conduct their war. In the past it was Afghanistan and Iraq. Soon it will be Somalia and Sudan. The only serious threat to Iraq is the sectarian incidents. But when terror is reduced, mainstream politicians will understand that further destruction and killings don't serve the interests of a stable Iraq.

In the meantime: Ansar Al Suna (Kurdish allies of al-Qaeda) threaten to bring down the wall of Rome; and The FBI eyes with concern emergent alliances ties between U.S. organized crime and jihadists.

What's it all about Alfie? World domination, that's all. In case you missed this, from Paul Sperry in Front Page;

"Islam isn't in America to be equal to any other faith, but to become dominant," CAIR (Council on American-Islamic Relations) co-founder Omar Ahmad once told a Muslim audience in Fremont, Ca. "The Quran should be the highest authority in America." Lest anyone think he was misquoted, CAIR's own spokesman, Dougie "Ibrahim" Hooper, let it slip to the Minneapolis Star Tribune that he essentially wants the same thing: "I wouldn't want to create the impression that I wouldn't like the government of the United States to be Islamic sometime in the future."

They aren't alone: The former head of the American Muslim Council -- supposedly the "most mainstream Muslim organization in America" -- exhorted Muslims to turn the U.S. into an Islamic nation ruled by Quranic law even if it takes "a hundred years," according to federal court records. Popular New York imam Siraj Wahhaj told his flock in a taped sermon available at his mosque: "In time, this so-called democracy will crumble, and there will be nothing. And the only thing that will remain will be Islam." Another so-called moderate cleric, Zaid Shakir, admitted in a recent interview with the New York Times: "I would like to see America become a Muslim country."

These quislings aren't part of the fringe. They represent the Muslim establishment in America. And they are on record wishing America would be ruled by Islamic law and not the Constitution.

The shrilly illiberal isolationists and musty paleocons who insist the U.S. should just back off on Islamic extremism are palpably delusional. Truth is getting at least as strange as fiction. Ferrigno is on to something.

TECHNORATI TAGS: ISLAM, MUSLIMS, ISLAMISM, ISLAMOPHOBIAPHOBIA, AL QAEDA IN IRAQ, IRAQ, ROME, NEW YORK, INSURGENCY, KIDNAPPINGS, CHEMICAL WEAPONS, BIOLOGICAL WEAPONS, WALID PHARES, FUTURE JIHAD, ANSAR AL-SUNA, ROME, FBI, ORGANIZED CRIME, SHARIA, UNITED STATES, ROBERT FERRIGNO, PRAYERS FOR THE ASSASSIN

Posted by Matt Rosenberg at October 3, 2006 01:23 PM

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