Well, um, oops.

In other news from under over the Egyptian border, there is a move on to reduce female circumcision:

“I hear that girls suffer not just physically but psychologically,” the 31-year-old Mohammed said. “But I am afraid. I don’t want my daughters to have uncontrollable demands for sex.”

Such doubts are significant. With vigorous grass-roots campaigns and the passage of tough laws against circumcision, Egypt seems to be making a dent in this deeply ingrained practice, thousands of years old. The number of young girls circumcised is now steadily declining in a country where an estimated 96 percent of married Egyptian women have had their genitals cut.

I’m thrilled that it’s less common, and yet I’m repulsed and horrified that it still even exists.

That would be like reading a triumphant headline noting that fatal bear attacks dropped from five thousand to four thousand in Montana this year. That’s great, but dude: there’s still thousands of fatal bear attacks going on. You have a bear problem.

________________________
{Post by See-Dubya}

I can’t believe she couldn’t find private individuals to help her out. Will someone step up to the plate?

“Ex-Muslims” hoping to change the terms of debate about Islam in Europe will launch a British group in London on Thursday.

The Council of Ex-Muslims of Britain will be the latest addition to groupings that began in Germany in February and spread to Scandinavia in May. A Dutch group will hold its launch in September.

The activists, many of them Iranian exiles, support the freedom to criticize religion and the end to what they call “religious intimidation and threats”.

“Too many things in the media and government policies have been geared to pandering to the political Islamic movements and Islamic organizations,” Maryam Namazie, head of the British group, told Reuters by telephone from London on Wednesday.

“I hope we’ll get a lot more attention and begin to change the debate,” said Namazie, who left Iran in 1980 after the Islamic revolution there.

Leaving Islam is considered a crime punishable by death in some Muslim-majority countries. Muslims in Europe practice their faith less than their co-religionists in the Middle East but few openly proclaim themselves apostates or atheists.

Sugiero has more on Maryam Namazie, including a few video interviews. Here’s one:

Her website is here.

Fellow dissidents Walid Shoebat and Aayan Hirsi Ali speak out here.

Find a way to show your support. These are the people putting their necks on the line for Western civilization. Literally.

All well and good.

But when President Bush starts overgeneralizing and whitewashing reality, his shallow platitudes about Islam become a hindrance.

“Islam is a religion that brings hope and comfort to more than a billion people around the world. It has transcended racial and ethnic divisions. It has given birth to a rich culture of learning and literature and science…

…Ramadan is the holiest month in the Muslim calendar. For Muslims in America and around the world, Ramadan is a special time of prayer and fasting, contemplation of God’s greatness, and charity and service to those in need. And for people of all faiths, it is a good time to reflect on the values we hold in common, including love of family, gratitude to God, the importance of community, and a commitment to tolerance and religious freedom.”

Religious freedom? Ask an apostate. Ask Abdul Rahman. Ask Indonesian Christians. Ask Saudi Christians. Ask Egyptian Christians.

Tolerance? Ask gays in Iran. Ask Danish cartoonists. Ask Salman Rushdie. Ask Aayan Hirsi Ali. Ask brave moderate Muslims. Like the ones Robert Spencer pays tribute to today. Like Salah Uddin Shoaib Choudhury, whose trial on charges of sedition for advocating ties with Israel starts today in Bangladesh. Like Teguh Santosa, the newspaper editor who faced indictment in Indonesia for publishing the Mohammed Cartoons. Like Abdulkarim Sabra and Muhammad al-Asadi in Yemen, who were also prosecuted for publishing the cartoons.

And like Mohammed Taha, editor-in-chief of the Sudanese private daily Al-Wifaq, who dared to criticize Islamic extremists in his country. Oh, wait. You can’t ask him. They beheaded him.

Get real.

“A rich culture of learning and literature and science?”

Not for Muslim girls in the Arab world.

As for the special time of Ramadan, read Keith Roderick’s reality check at NRO:

Fasting from sunrise to sunset is a struggle for Muslims during this month of Ramadan. The month will present a more dangerous struggle for non-Muslims in Iraq, against whom Islamic terrorists promise to increase their violence.

On Thursday, October 12, Syrian Orthodox Metropolitan of Mosul, Saliba Chamoun, buried one of his priests, the latest victim of violence targeting Christians and other minorities in Iraq during Ramadan. Father Boulos Iskander had been kidnapped the previous Monday by an unknown Islamic extremist group. Family and church authorities negotiated with the abductors, who demanded $350,000 in ransom, but later promised to reduce the amount to $40,000 if Pope Benedict XVI’s reference to historical Islamic violence was publicly condemned.

The ransom was raised and paid. St. Epharim’s parishioners dutifully posted 30 large signs on walls around the city repudiating the Pope’s statements. They awaited word of Fr. Iskander’s promised release. On Wednesday in the Tahir City District, a mile from the Mosul city center, the priest’s body was found. Fr. Iskander’s severed head lay atop his chest. His severed arms and legs were placed around his head.

The same day as Fr. Iskander’s kidnapping, the leader of the Mandaean religious community (followers of John the Baptist), Sheikh Raad Mutar Saleh, was assassinated in Suweira, 35 miles southeast of Baghdad.

…On October 4, an Assyrian Christian neighborhood in Camp Sara was devastated by a bomb that killed nine persons. The week before, two similar explosive devices were used in an attack on the Assyrian Cathedral of the Virgin Mary in Baghdad. Islamists also targeted a Dominican convent. Two days later, during the second week of Ramadan, the Church of the Holy Spirit in Mosul was attacked. In the past two years, over 27 churches have been attacked or bombed…who in the Muslim community will call to end the violence against the others, Assyrians, Chaldeans, Mandaeans, Turkomen, Yazidis, and Shabak, whose blood is also flowing freely in Iraq?

…Western media outlets have been conditioned to call the Muslim month of fasting “the holy month of Ramadan.” For many Iraqis, especially ethnic and religious minorities, Ramadan has been less than blessed this year. Murder, intimidation, rape, torture, and other forms of violence have increased during this “holy” month. Hope in Iraq’s future cannot be found in the destruction of minority faith and ethnic communities…

Want more? Just Google “Ramadan violence.”

Read: ” The U.S. military spokesman says there has been a 22 percent jump in attacks during Ramadan…”

It ain’t all peace, love charity, and understanding.

If we truly want moderate Muslims to prevail over the jihadists and their enablers, we must abandon double-talk and sugar-coating and delusionary pleasantries. Confronting hard truths is the most compassionate thing we can do. If we don’t do it, who will?

***

Related: Memeorandum has a good round-up of blogosphere reaction to the ABC News report on Bush’s Iraq-Vietnam remarks. I’ll weigh in sometime soon.

The sports hall doubles as a prayer room and dining hall for male teenagers, at other times for young women, but never the two together. In the kindergarten, female teachers, warned of an impending visit by a man, draw full facial veils before receiving their guest. When the guest arrives, the children offer a chorus in Arabic: “As salaam aleikum” — peace be upon you.

“Here we can keep ourselves on the path of religion,” said Nasir Nathalia, a 15-year-old student at the Leicester Islamic Academy. His friend Mohammed Seedat agrees. “There is less chance here of going off the track,” he said.

This is the piety that Britain’s expanding Islamic schools seek to project, casting themselves as typical of the thousands of faith schools, mainly Christian, that make up roughly one-third of all publicly financed British schools.

But the visible differences — the way female teenagers wear the full-length dress and head-covering and the boys wear black robes and skullcaps — play into a ferocious debate about the sense of separateness or readiness to integrate Britain’s estimated 1.8 million Muslims, about 3 percent of the population…

…“Muslim children in this country tend to live separate lives anyhow,” said Mark Halstead, a professor of education at the University of Huddersfield in northern England. “Whether they go to Muslim school does not make much difference to their segregation. They are concentrated in the inner cities. They could be attending a state school that is 90 percent Muslim anyway.”

A report by Simon Burgess, a professor of economics, discovered that, for instance, in the blue-collar Tower Hamlets district of East London, where ethnic minorities form 48 percent of the population, nearly half the schools were “exclusively nonwhite.”

The issue of Islamic separateness is magnified by a recent debate about a full-face veil that shows only the eyes and is known as the niqab. Some non-Muslims, most notably Foreign Secretary Jack Straw, have said the veil illustrates that Muslims are rejecting British norms; others say simply that Britons are discriminating against Muslims.

The debate cuts to the heart of Britain’s stated philosophy on multiculturalism, defined 40 years ago by the Labor politician Roy Jenkins when he was home secretary. In laying out a new immigration policy, he said immigration should not lead to a “flattening process of assimilation” but instead should provide “equal opportunity accompanied by cultural diversity.”

But now, as the country is struggling so publicly with Muslim assimilation, some analysts like Mr. Phillips of the Commission for Racial Equality fear that a premium on cultural separateness has Britain “sleepwalking into segregation.”

Robert Spencer of Jihad Watch and Aayan Hirsi Ali of AEI comment on BBC radio about Islamic separateness, the Muslim veil, and the backdoor adoption of sharia law.

Andrew Bostom reviews Spencer’s brave and invaluable new book, “The Truth about Muhammad:”

Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the former Dutch Parliamentarian and secular Muslim reformer, has courageously identified the taboo discussion which must take place to understand, and defuse, the scourge of modern jihad terrorism:
“In their thinking about radical Muslim terrorism most politicians, journalists, intellectuals, and other commentators have avoided the core issue of the debate, which is Muhammad’s example.”

…Disregarding murderous threats, and the prospect of social ostracism, the intrepid author Robert Spencer — a serious independent scholar of Islam for the past two decades — has taken up Hirsi Ali’s challenge in his compelling new book, “The Truth About Muhammad.”

Mr. Spencer’s stated purpose in writing the book was to elucidate, in particular, those aspects of Muhammad’s life used by Muslims today to rationalize violence, or other behaviors incompatible with Western constructs of human rights and dignity. And Mr. Spencer, whom I have come to know through my own independent research on Islamic doctrine and history, fulfills admirably his pledge not to “deride,” “lampoon” or “mock” Muhammad, but instead compose “a scrupulously accurate account of what he [Muhammad] said and did” regarding these critical matters.

A salient feature of “The Truth About Muhammad” is its exclusive reliance on pious Muslim sources: the earliest (and most respected) Muslim biographers of Muhammad, Ibn Ishaq (died 773), Ibn Sa’d (845), and the great historian al-Tabari (923); the “gold-standard” canonical hadith collections of Bukhari (870), and Muslim (875); and the Koran itself.

As Mr. Spencer notes, these are the same sources contemporary Muslim biographers have relied upon, both respected scholars (such as the late Martin Lings, aka Abu Bakr Siray Ad-Din), and popularizers (Javeed Akhter, Yahiya Emerick).

…He concludes with a series of logical, unflinching recommendations for non-Muslim governments, all of which hinge, ultimately, upon an honest recognition of Muhammad’s bellicose example: Stop insisting that Islam is a religion of peace; initiate a full-scale Manhattan Project to find new energy sources; make Western aid contingent upon renunciation of the jihad ideology; call upon American Muslim advocacy groups to work against the jihad ideology; revise immigration policies with the jihad ideology in view.

Must-reading for those who are not yet slumbering in dhimmitude.

So go ahead and click it and give Esmay more of the traffic he wants. I highly recommend you read his post as the classic blogospheric example of how not to argue about Islam.

Or anything else, for that matter.

Notice the absence of a single link or a specific quotation of anything I’ve ever written (at least as of this posting). Very Ralph Peters-esque. He “calls me out” by citing…something written by blogger Gary Metz. He relies on overwrought non sequiturs (Muslims are buried at Arlington National Cemetery!) and beats his chest:

I’m making an open appeal to your conscience, Michelle Malkin, and to the conscience of conservatives everywhere: shouldn’t you start making a distinction between Muslims who hate us and want to kill us, and Muslims who believe in freedom, democracy, and religious tolerance?

Before one makes an ass of himself, with all due respect, he should do his research and homework . Perhaps one should worry less about other people’s consciences and more about one’s intellectual sloppiness.

Speaking of which, it looks like Esmay is becoming unhinged:

Good gracious.

Bryan Preston weighs in here.

There is a grown-up debate to be had about the incompatibility of fundamental tenets of Islam and liberal democracies, and about the prospects for reform in the Muslim world (Max Boot makes a histrionics-free go at it in the LA Times, which I will come back to soon). I will waste my time no further with trivial distractions. I make no apologies for highlighting the horrors of sharia law, criticizing creeping dhimmitude, and citing the work of outspoken and brave critics of Islam–Muslim and non-Muslim alike. (Speaking of which, don’t miss Jihad Watch at Hot Air TV today.)

I will not submit to hysterical boys who cry “Islamophobia!”

Neither will Brigitte Gabriel:

Our mediocre attitude of not confronting Islamic forces of bigotry and hatred wherever they raised their ugly head in the last 30 years, has empowered and strengthened our enemy to launch a full scale attack on the very freedoms we cherish in their effort to impose their values and way of life on our civilization.

If we don’t wake up and challenge our Muslim community to take action against the terrorists within it, if we don’t believe in ourselves as Americans and in the standards we should hold every patriotic American to, we are going to pay a price for our delusion. For the sake of our children and our country, we must wake up and take action. In the face of a torrent of hateful invective and terrorist murder, America’s learning curve since the Iran hostage crisis is so shallow that it is almost flat. The longer we lay supine, the more difficult it will be to stand erect.

I’ve just bought her new book. You should, too:

I’ll take Brigitte and Wafa Sultan and Aayan Hirsi Ali and Nonie Darwish over the Dhimmi Esmays of the world any day.

***

More blogosphere reaction:

Plus + Ultra
Pink Flamingo
Rosemary at QOAE
Donald Sensing

Related must-read: Andrew Bostom reports on a Pentagon briefing about suicide bombers that will have the “Islamophobia” crowd in hysterics. It’s in the Koran:

With suicide bombings spreading from Iraq to Afghanistan, the Pentagon has tasked intelligence analysts to pinpoint what’s driving Muslim after Muslim to do the unthinkable.

Their preliminary finding is politically explosive: it’s their “holy book” the Quran after all, according to intelligence briefings obtained by WND.

In public, the U.S. government has made an effort to avoid linking the terrorist threat to Islam and the Quran while dismissing suicide terrorists as crazed heretics who pervert Islamic teachings.

“The terrorists distort the idea of jihad into a call for violence and murder,” the White House maintains in its recently released “National Strategy for Combating Terrorism” report.

But internal Pentagon briefings show intelligence analysts have reached a wholly different conclusion after studying Islamic scripture and the backgrounds of suicide terrorists. They’ve found that most Muslim suicide bombers are in fact students of the Quran who are motivated by its violent commands – making them, as strange as it sounds to the West, “rational actors” on the Islamic stage.

In Islam, it is not how one lives one’s life that guarantees spiritual salvation, but how one dies, according to the briefings. There are great advantages to becoming a martyr. Dying while fighting the infidels in the cause of Allah reserves a special place and honor in Paradise. And it earns special favor with Allah.

“Suicide in defense of Islam is permitted, and the Islamic suicide bomber is, in the main, a rational actor,” concludes a recent Pentagon briefing paper titled, “Motivations of Muslim Suicide Bombers.”

Update:

LGF on When Chihuahas attack. LOL.

Oh, and let me help Dean out here. You must be looking for this and this. And?

***

More: Tom Maguire

The above phrase in Arabic is “lan astaslem.” It means “I will not surrender/I will not submit.” (Thanks to Rusty, Laura, and Daveed for translation help.) This is the last line of my 9/11 column and it’s my 9/11 anniversary message to the convert-or-die jihadists.

And yes, I’ve got t-shirts in the works as a response to Cindy Sheehan’s own Arabic moonbat version, which protests national security profiling.

Hers reads: “We will not be silent.” Yeah, well neither will I.

My morning has been devoted to paying tribute to the victims of the terrorist attacks five years ago. They will never be forgotten. But as I wrote last night in noting the new Zawahiri video:

“Remembrance is worthless without resolve. And resolve is useless without recognition. You can’t know our enemies, let alone defeat them, with your head buried in the sand hiding from the ‘Islamophobia’ brigade.”

Remembrance. Resolve. Recognition. Those have been major themes of this blog over the past several years in covering everything from the battle over the Ground Zero memorial to the fight over the Flight 93 memorial to the terror-coddling by CAIR to our persistently stupid open-door policies to jihadis to the Mohammed Cartoon rage to the plight of Abdul Rahman to the blogger whistle-blowing on “Fauxtography.”

In keeping with those three tenets, I have chosen to welcome best-selling author Robert Spencer over at Hot Air today to provide much deeper historical context for the 9/11 attacks–context the appeasers and the Islamophobia-phobes prefer to ignore, misremember, or whitewash. We’ll be running another program later this week hosted by Robert, who will have a rejoinder to American al Qaeda Adam Gadahn. Gadahn named Robert and several other outspoken American analysts and authors, including Daniel Pipes and Steve Emerson, who write critically on Islam and jihad.

We owe these and many other outspoken dissidents our thanks. I personally owe Robert, Daniel, Steve, Diana West, and Andy Bostom deepest gratitude for helping educate me about a threat I shrugged my shoulders at before 9/11. More: Bat Ye’or. Oriana Fallaci. Wafa Sultan. Aayan Hirsi Ali. Irshad Manji. Ibn Warraq. Bruce Bawer. MEMRI. Bloggers: Charles Johnson, The Jawa Report, Laura Mansfield, Gates of Vienna, The Counterterrorism Blog, Zombie, Honest Reporting, Paul Belien and The Brussels Journal. So many more.

Not all of them agree on every aspect of the Islamic terrorist threat to the West or how best to defend ourselves against it. And I don’t agree with everything they’ve written. But all of these men and women are inspirations who share a common intellectual defiance against submission to jihad.

For their refusal to submit, they have earned death threats, scorn, and endless accusations of “Islamophobia.” And not just from the unhinged Left. Ralph Peters of the New York Post, a venerable writer and author whose work I’ve admired and respected, lost it completely last week pointing fingers at unnamed “right-wing extremists” as “Islam Haters: The Enemy Within.” He refuses to name any names. He rages that his anonymous targets are the “Ku Klux Klan with higher-thread-count sheets.” And he plays the chickenhawk card to the hilt, as if civilians have no ammunition to offer in the battle against jihadists.

Sputters Peters:

“The most repugnant trend in the American shouting match that passes for a debate on the struggle with Islamist terrorism isn’t the irresponsible nonsense on the left – destructive though that is. The really ugly “domestic insurgency” is among right-wing extremists bent on discrediting honorable conservatism.”

Um, who’s shouting? And if “right-wing extremists” are more destructive than the jihadi-coddling Left, why can’t Peters muster up the cojones to name a single one of these destructive forces?

Andy Bostom has a scathing response. So does Spencer, who writes:

As I have said many times, I am all for encouraging and working with moderate Muslims. But for their moderation to be effective, they have to confront, repudiate, and help other Muslims to repudiate the elements of Islam that are giving rise to violent fanaticism. Most self-proclaimed moderates instead simply deny those elements exist, while the mujahedin continue to use those same elements to recruit new members. And now Ralph Peters, in his fog of confusion, has just contributed to that destructive denial.

It’s a measure of how triumphant the forces of political correctness have been over the past five years that attempts to discuss what Islam is actually about immediately invite cries of bigotry and “Islamophobia”–not only from the unhinged Left, but also from the obsequious Right.

I share my friend and Hot Air colleague Bryan Preston’s related thoughts on this:

Five years on, a psychosis has gripped millions who can’t and won’t fathom the true nature of the war we are in. For many of them, having been born and raised in an essentially post-Christian West, they can’t imagine that anyone might be motivated to kill and die because of something a warlord wrote down centuries ago. They cannot imagine any religion other than the one they believe they have outgrown being violent or causing violence. They cannot imagine anyone fighting for a cause that offers no material gains and therefore cannot be negotiated away. In our essentially materialist West, millions lack the imagination to believe that bin Laden’s pining for the return of Andalusia to Muslim rule is in his mind a legitimate reason to wage war on America now. They can imagine their own countrymen being so motivated, though, and I think that’s key to understanding their state of mind. They can imagine the Rotary Club member down the street plotting mayhem because he goes to church and votes Republican, but they can’t imagine that the Muslim in Karachi is a real, live enemy who is actually plotting an attack.

This lack of imagination has bred the anti-war madness we have now. Rather than accept the reality of an enemy that cannot and therefore will not negotiate away what he believes to be the will of God, and rather than accept that this enemy will understand nothing outside total victory or total defeat, and rather than understand that this enemy’s goals include enslaving the entire world in a global caliphate, and rather than accept that this reality necessitates the use of all tools including military might to defend ourselves, millions have embraced an alternate reality. The reality of the enemy outside the West and its motivations being too terrifying and too far beyond their own control, millions now imagine that the enemy in this war is within. The enemy, to them, isn’t the turbaned man behind the plot to hijack multiple airplanes and crash them into multiple buildings in America. The real enemy, to these millions, is the man in the Oval Office, and the man or men behind him.

Imagining the enemy as a Westerner who has a Western worldview and essentially Western motivations gives these millions the comfort of thinking that they can understand and defeat the enemy easily. They can expose him in the press or on their blog. They can spread the word through a bumper sticker or a sign in their yard. They can vote against him and encourage others to help vote him out. They can impeach him. They can shout and rail at anyone who supports him. They can destroy his political party and ruin his name. They can, in their own minds, win the war on their own terms without exposing themselves to danger. Because they have imagined their own enemy from before that day to be the enemy of civilization. And because it’s not really a war at all, just a made-up threat some evil neocons conjured up to scare everyone into giving them power. And that being the case, the deniers imagine that they can save civilizaton at the ballot box. They don’t have to find out what makes the enemy tick, they don’t have to fight him, and they don’t have to change their fundamental and now obviously flawed assumptions about humanity and the world.

If only it were that easy.

Five years on, the illness of replacing an implacable, indeed alien enemy with one from our own civilizational family has spread and metastasized through the majority of one of our two political parties, and may yet claim a majority of the country itself. History has a way of fading out as the day’s current noise rises in volume, and to them 9-11 is either history or a historic lie. The loudest voice, though not always or even often right, is often the one that gets the last word. And the 9-11 deniers and their allies across the left are nothing if not loud.

Five years on, it’s hard to take a positive look at the war because we are failing to comprehend it. The mass denial of reality is taking half our arsenal of unity and morale away from us. Those of us who see the threat for what it is still say that we will prevail because we are right and because we are America, but that’s just letting the others off the hook. If we’re going to prevail anyway, why should they snap out of their fog? And why should we demand that they do? The truth is, we need the denial to end and we need our countrymen to understand and help, but since we’re powerless to cure it with reason we shrug or laugh at it. But it’s eating away at our ability to defend ourselves.

And so I commemorate the fifth anniversary of the jihadi attacks on America with a small gesture.

“Lan astaslem.”

I will not submit. I will not surrender.

None of us can know exactly how we would act in Todd Beamer’s or Barbara Olson’s or Robert Stethem’s or Fabrizio Quattrocchi’s shoes. But we can gain strength in their memory, in the reinforcing presence of each other’s company, in making our refusal to submit public, and in working to honor this anniversary vow in small ways and large–long after the memorial candles have been blown out.