Estimates by the US State Department suggest up to 17,500 slaves are brought into the US every year, with 50,000 of those working as prostitutes, farm workers or domestic servants. What a whitewash. Arabs took 50% more slaves than the Trans-Atlantic trade. And the Arabs murdered most of their slaves. In stark contrast, negros thrive throughout the Americas. It was common for Arabs to rape household slaves, then kill them when they were no longer attractive. And slavery is still practised in Arab countries. Blacks are referred to as 'abds' or slaves. As for the crybaby website, muslim suffering is a self inflicted wound.
Umm, no, negroes did not 'thrive' throughout the Americas. Somewhere between 1/3 and 1/2 died in the 'Middle Passage'. Many, many more died in the sugar cane plantations in the Caribbean. The ones who got to the U.S. were -- in a sad way -- lucky in some respects, but they were beaten, whipped, starved, raped, sold, and auctioned. Repeatedly. They didn't 'thrive' so much as they survived. A little respect, please.
According to the CIA, more than 1,000,000 people are enslaved in the US today. Thousands of cases go undetected each year and many are difficult to take to court as it can be difficult to prove force or legal coercion.
Simon Jenkins
The British expedition to Afghanistan is on the brink of something worse than defeat: a long, low-intensity war from which no government will dare to extricate itself. With the death toll mounting, battle is reportedly joined with the Taliban at the very gates of the second city, Kandahar. There is no justification for ministerial bombast that we are winning the war, really.
I think what he's trying to say is that "All is lost!"
What is to be done? In 2001 the West waged a punitive retaliatory strike against the hosts of the perpetrators of 9/11. The strike has since followed every law of mission creep, now reduced in London to a great war of despair, in which the cabinet can do nothing but send even more men to their deaths.
In seven years in Afghanistan, America, Britain and their Nato allies have made every mistake in the intervention book. They sent too few troops to assert an emphatic presence. They failed to hit hard and get out, as advocated by Donald Rumsfeld, the American defence secretary. They tried to destroy the staple crop, poppies, and then let it go to warlords who now use it to finance suicide bombers, among others. They allowed a corrupt regime to establish itself in the capital, Kabul, while failing to promote honest administration in the provinces.
They pretended that an international coalition (Nato) would be better than a unitary command (America), which it is not. They killed civilians and alienated tribes with crude air power. Finally, they disobeyed the iron law of postimperial intervention: dont stay too long. The British ambassador threatens to stay for 30 years, rallying every nationalist to the insurgents cause. The catalogue of western folly in Afghanistan is breathtaking.
Britain went into Helmand two years ago on the basis of gung-ho, and gung-ho still censors public debate. Yet behind the scenes all is despair.
Britain went into Helmand two years ago on the basis of gung-ho, and gung-ho still censors public debate. Yet behind the scenes all is despair. A meeting of Afghan observers in London last week, at the launch of James Fergussons book on the errors of Helmand, A Million Bullets, was an echo chamber of gloom.
All hope was buried in a cascade of hypotheticals. Victory would be at hand if only the Afghan army were better, if the poppy crop were suppressed, the Pakistan border sealed, the Taliban leadership assassinated, corruption eradicated, hearts and minds won over. None of this is going to happen. The generals know it but the politicians dare not admit it.
Those who still support the good Afghan war reply to any criticism by attempting to foreclose debate. They assert that we cannot be seen to surrender to the Taliban and we have gone in so far and must finish the job.
This is policy in denial. Nothing will improve without the support of the Afghan government, yet that support is waning by the month. Nothing will improve without the commitment of Pakistan. Yet two weeks ago Nato bombed Pakistani troops inside their own country, losing what lingering sympathy there is for America in an enraged Islamabad. Whoever ordered the attack ought to be court-martialled, except it was probably a computer.
We forget that the objective of the Afghanistan incursion was not to build a new and democratic Afghanistan. It was to punish the Taliban for harbouring Osama Bin Laden and to prevent Afghanistan from becoming a haven for Al-Qaeda training camps. The former objective was achieved on day one; the latter would never be achieved by military occupation.
A moments thought would show that any invasion that replaced the Taliban with a western puppet in Kabul would merely restore the Taliban as champions of Afghan sovereignty. The Americans sponsored them to be just such a puppet in the 1980s, funding some 60,000 foreign mercenaries to join them against the Russians. Intervention reaps what it sows.
Posted by: Fred ||
06/22/2008 00:00 ||
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#1
The Vietnam experience proved: Americans will not sustain a war that they are not allowed to win. The conflict escalated because: North Vietnam could not be occupied. However, Taliban cannot be allowed to resume power in Afghanistan. The only difference between them and al-Qaeda is the fact that they were locals; al-Qaeda is mostly foreign arabs. Unless we take some extremely harsh measures in order to take away Taliban's ability to recruit endlessly, and fight a war of attrition, all we can possibly achieve in Afghanistan is an Orwellian perma-war. At present, I would project an Obama election victory and surrender to the Taliban. Then, 4 years later Americans will elect the harshest kick ass President ever to take office. That is a long time to wait, but the Bush administration chose to stifle Northern Alliance moves against the Pashtos, and decide the 2001 contest by armistices with Taliban-lite. You reap what you sow.
#2
Don't Panic McZoid. From Strategy Page - "June 19, 2008: Afghan and NATO forces killed or wounded several hundred Taliban who had come together south of Kandahar, and tried to take over seven villages. As usual, an examination of the dead, and interrogation of prisoners, showed that most of the gunmen were from Pakistan, recruited from Pushtun tribes, and religious schools for boys. Not exactly a great source of skilled warriors. Give them an AK-47, a few days training, a pep talk by a preacher and send them across the border. If they don't come back, and many don't, declare them martyrs for the cause."
In military parlance - they're sending out the old men and boys to fight. Things aren't going their way on the other side either. And by standard measures, they're scraping the bottom of the barrow. I suspect that a well executed incursion into the Northwest Tribal areas by an major Afghan force would bring the place crashing down. It's one thing to wait out the Yanks and other foreigners, its another to know that you've royally pissed off your blood feud neighbors who won't give a damn about some imaginary border either and can visit any time in the next couple generations when they want and basically destroy your way of life. Imagine the tribal leaders running down to Karachi asking for protection. That would be a show after their behavior for the last four years and they know it.
#3
To what degree are we helping Afghanistan build forces to make effective incursions into Paki territory? That seems the key to a more stable existence in that area. Maybe we could hire a few Iraqi's to help pave the way with the Afghani's.
Posted by: Richard of Oregon ||
06/22/2008 12:31 Comments ||
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#4
Well, since you asked Richard, you shall receive.
#5
One comparison with Vietnam is actually correct. That is, Pakistan is to Afghanistan what North Vietnam was to South Vietnam.
And this means that until that border is sealed, or the Pakistan military puts a stop to the trouble on their side, there will be a continuing flow of gunman in one direction.
We had the opportunity for some of this while Perv was fully in charge, but it would have involved a large scale slaughter of the tribes on the Pakistani side.
#6
What is important here is to raise Afghanistan from a failed state to a normally dysfunctional central Asian country. The notion that Afghani national power could invade and capture anyone they like in the Pakistani tribal regions would completely eliminate the appeal of the region to anti-western cultists. Which would be marvelous, even if they all moved to Iran.
#7
To what degree are we helping Afghanistan build forces to make effective incursions into Paki territory?
Richard, some members of the first class at Afghanistan's new 'East Point' literally walked barefoot through the snow to get there. The school was deliberately based on West Point, and has gotten a great deal of assistance from the West Point professorate. I'm not sure, but I think that first class graduated last year. For more see here, here, and here.
#8
Also, the very first Reception Day was photoblogged at Winds of Change. In the comments thread one of the gentlemen involved in the enterprise wrote on May 15, 2007
The acadamy now has over 700 cadets, 400 staff and faculty, six academic majors, dozens of new buildings and a diverse student, staff and professor population of Pashtoons, Tajiks, Hazaras, Uzbeks and other ethnicities that reflect the population of all Afghanistan.
In its storied history the U.S. Navy has defeated German U-boats and the British and Japanese Imperial navies, but we are about to find out if it can be whipped by whales and activist judges. Welcome to the new world of lawsuits as antiwar weapons.
The Supreme Court is currently deciding whether to take the case, National Resources Defense Council v. Donald Winter. For the sake of the U.S. military and the Constitution's separation of powers, this one deserves its day before the High Court.
Mr. Winter is Secretary of the Navy. The NRDC, a nasty left-wing activist group that specializes in lawsuits, has sued him for conducting training exercises off the coast of California, as the Navy has done for 40 years. The NRDC claims the use of medium-frequency active sonar a type of sonar especially useful for antisubmarine warfare might harm whales, or at least confuse them.
When the issue was first raised eight years ago, the Bush Administration went out of its way to allay the concerns though the Navy says that it has never harmed a whale with sonar, as far as it knows. It asked the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) to study the issue under the Endangered Species Act. NOAA gave the Navy a permit to continue to train. Just to be sure, the Navy asked for another study, under the Marine Mammals Protection Act. NOAA replied that this would take time but granted the Navy permission to continue the exercises, noting that the Navy had adopted 29 separate measures to minimize any impact on marine mammals.
None of this was good enough for the litigious greens, who sued again in March 2007 to stop the training in the middle of a war. Enter federal judge Florence Cooper, who ordered the Navy to halt the exercises while the suit is pending. The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, in a rare moment of sanity, stayed the injunction "on the grounds that the district court had failed to consider the 'public interest' in having a trained and effective Navy." Talk about understatement.
This bout of clarity didn't last long. In January, Judge Cooper issued another partial injunction, allowing the exercises to proceed as long as no whales came swimming through. This time, the Ninth Circuit concurred. In response, President Bush, citing "emergency circumstances" and the "paramount interests of the United States," and implementing alternative safeguards, asked the judge to reconsider. Judge Cooper declined, saying there was no emergency. The appeals court affirmed.
The last time we checked, the executive branch was responsible for national security and the President is Commander in Chief. Having unelected judges order our troops to stand down in response to a phantom threat to whales is bad enough. But the laws at issue in this case are mere "paperwork" statutes. The Navy and Bush Administration are accused of having failed merely to complete an environmental impact statement on the possible threat to whales. Under the substantive laws intended to protect the whales, NOAA has already given the Navy the approval it needs.
Judge Cooper is a major culprit here, arbitrarily preventing the Navy from maintaining its military readiness training for the sake of compliance with a purely procedural law. But the larger problem is the culture of environmental law and litigation, which puts the speculative threat to whales above U.S. national security. The Supreme Court should leap at the chance to slap these activist litigants and judges down.
Posted by: Steve White ||
06/22/2008 00:00 ||
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#1
Do an end run. Get a congressman (Duncan Hunter?) to sponsor legislation to legalize whale hunts (canned whale, now dolphin safe) and force the Greenies to waste all their resources on that.
Posted by: ed ||
06/22/2008 9:48 Comments ||
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#2
Why not fight fire with fire. Are there no filthy rich conservative groups out there that can sue the shit out of NRDC and their like?
The Central Intelligence Agency asked The New York Times not to publish the name of Deuce Martinez, an interrogator who questioned Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and other high-level Al Qaeda prisoners, saying that to identify Mr. Martinez would invade his privacy and put him at risk of retaliation from terrorists or harassment from critics of the agency.
After discussion with agency officials and a lawyer for Mr. Martinez, the newspaper declined the request, noting that Mr. Martinez had never worked under cover and that others involved in the campaign against Al Qaeda have been named in news stories and books. The editors judged that the name was necessary for the credibility and completeness of the article.
The Timess policy is to withhold the name of a news subject only very rarely, most often in the case of victims of sexual assault or intelligence officers operating under cover.
Mr. Martinez, a career analyst at the agency until his retirement a few years ago, did not directly participate in waterboarding or other harsh interrogation methods that critics describe as torture and, in fact, turned down an offer to be trained in such tactics.
The newspaper seriously considered the requests from Mr. Martinez and the agency. But in view of the experience of other government employees who have been named publicly in books and published articles or who have themselves chosen to go public, the newspaper made the decision to print the name.
Too bad his name wasn't Valerie Plame.
Posted by: Steve White ||
06/22/2008 00:00 ||
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#1
The Timess policy is to withhold the name of a news subject only very rarely, most often in the case of victims of sexual assault or intelligence officers operating under cover.
#6
If the staff of the NYT felt personally threatened this would never have been an issue. Witness their reaction to the cartoon wars.
Posted by: Big Speaper6463 ||
06/22/2008 18:15 Comments ||
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#7
I have a question that is sort of related: Has anybody seen an article or news report that examines Scotty "Madman" McStabbers' testimony? I have seen only snippets of the testimony and I can't understand what the hubub was all about? "He wasn't in meetings and guesses that there were crimes committed in those meeting because he was not privy to them." Hell I could write taht book too.
The New York Times has made a startling discovery: things are much improved in Iraq. Yes, the Times reporters hedge and predict reversal and doom behind every success, but they also reveal a kernel of the larger truth: Iraq is much better.
For weeks and months other outlets including some of the Times' major competitors, the Times'owneditorial writers, government officials, and independent observers have been saying much the same thing, indeed saying it without much of the self-conscious double-talk we read in the Times. Yet the Times neither reported itself on the developments which other outlets did or acknowledged other's reports. What to make of this?
Like Barack Obama, the Times has largely been frozen in a narrative of defeat and disaster and generally ignored significant political and military developments which would possibly help Americans reach a different conclusion about the prospects for a successful outcome. Obama has an excuse -- he has a major political problem if he reverses course and admits error now. But what is the Times excuse? And what end did they serve by ignoring news?
I eagerly await Clark Hoyt's next explanation of the most egregious example yet of the Times' journalistic malpractice. (Well, the most recent egregious example, that is.)
Posted by: Mike ||
06/22/2008 09:15 ||
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#1
NYT two years behind Rantburg. Nothing like being on the cutting edge of information is there? I don't think Rantburg relies upon a demographic that is literally dying off [although I'm sure some Kos Kiddies would like to make that happen, but only if big burley men were available are doing the dirty work for them.]
In April, I had to make an emergency trip to Pakistan due to declining health of my father. Since my last couple of trips had been very short, this was after more than two years that I was visiting Pakistan for four weeks, most of them to be spent in my hometown of Bahawalpur.
When I had visited back in 2005, it was a visit after 4 years, so new roads and cell phones in every hand looked quite fresh. This time, at least on the surface, little seemed to have changed since my last trip. On my way home from the airport, it looked like the same old desert town of Bahawalpur. The date palms, the early summer heat, the dust and the desert wind were all too familiar.
As the car stopped at the main gate of my parents house, a poster pasted on the gate caught my attention. The title of the poster was Azmat-e-Quran Conference. And the key speaker was going to be someone named Masood Azhar. Why did the name sound familiar? I thought about it for a moment, but then as the car moved in, the happy feeling of meeting my parents again overwhelmed me and I quite forgot about it all. The next few days were spent making courtesy calls and getting over the jet lag.
Then came the day when I was fresh again to go out and meet relatives and family friends in the city. As I went out, I saw the same poster pasted all over the city with a lot of white flags hoisted on all major intersections. I wondered what was going on, and the name Masood Azhar clicked with some old memories of watching this man on the news a long time ago. Yes, he was the same Masood Azhar who founded the Jaish-e-Muhammad organization and served time in Indian jails before getting freed through hijacking of an Indian Airlines jet.
To Westerners and moderate Muslims shocked by the radical form of Islam now topping nightly newscasts, the efforts of liberal-minded Muslims like Tawfik Hamid, Italian Sheikh Abdul Hadi Palazzi and a handful of others may seem like the perfect solution. Not so for Ali Sina, who has a different suggestion: destroy Islam.
Sina, who runs Faith Freedom International - an Internet forum dedicated to debunking Islam - calls himself "probably the biggest anti-Islam person alive." The publication of his latest book, Understanding Muhammad: A Psychobiography of Allah's Prophet, will likely cement that position. In it, Sina suggests that Islam's central figure suffered from a series of mental disorders, including narcissistic personality disorder, temporal lobe epilepsy and obsessive compulsive disorder.
"These disorders," he says via telephone, "can explain the phenomenon known as Islam... which is nothing but one man's insanity."
Sina grew up a non-practicing Muslim. Raised in Iran, educated in Pakistan and Italy and now living in Canada, he began jousting with believers in the 1990s. What bothered him, he tells The Jerusalem Post, was not the penchant for jihad and intolerance that certain fanatical Muslims displayed, but the foundation for such ills in the Koran and core Islamic texts.
(Through the Faith Freedom Web site, Sina lists canonical references to Muhammad's actions and offers $50,000 to anyone who can disprove Sina's charge that Islam's prophet was "a narcissist, a misogynist, a rapist, a pedophile, a lecher, a torturer, a mass murderer, a cult leader, an assassin, a terrorist, a mad man and a looter." Respondents relentlessly attack Sina's motives, but none has won the prize.)
With violent conquest and contempt for non-believers central to the tenets of the faith, Sina argues, attempts to forge a moderate form of Islam are doomed.
#1
Hmmm... OCD could explain all the washing, and epilepsy might be a cause of banging one's head against the ground several times a day.
Posted by: M. Murcek ||
06/22/2008 9:54 Comments ||
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#2
Ten million readers on his site means a lot of people are pondering issues with their upbringing. Add to that the quiet apostates, whether they've lost their belief or converted, and something real is going on in the hearts and minds of the Ummah. It seems the actions of Al Qaeda in Iraq and SCIRI and the Sadr Army have been taken to heart throughout the Muslim world. It is, after all, one thing to want Sharia law in abstract, quite another to be beaten because your beard isn't long enough or your little son sang a nursery rhyme as he played.
Long, but worth going to the link to read. It seems Al Qaeda is no longer popular with many of their former jihadis. They've murdered too many Muslims they labelled takfiri, and the jihadis are getting older and more sensible than they were back in the go-go '90s, before 9/11 and 7/7. The article is based on interviews with a number of former jihadis who are now speaking out against the whole thing. This article gives depth and background to discussions here and elsewhere about the anti-Al Qaeda book released by the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood theorist Sayyid Imam al-Sharif, aka Dr. Fadl.
Within a few minutes of Noman Benotman's arrival at the Kandahar guest house, Osama bin Laden came to welcome him. The journey from Kabul had been hard 17 hours in a Toyota pick-up truck, bumping along what passed as the main highway to southern Afghanistan. It was the summer of 2000, and Benotman, then a leader of a group trying to overthrow the Libyan dictator Muammar Qaddafi, had been invited by Bin Laden to a conference of jihadists from around the Arab world, the first of its kind since al-Qa'ida had moved to Afghanistan in 1996. Benotman, the scion of an aristocratic family marginalised by Qaddafi, had known Bin Laden from their days fighting the communist Afghan government in the early 1990s, a period when Benotman established himself as a leader of the militant Libyan Islamic Fighting Group.
Bin Laden was trying to win over other militant groups to the global jihad he had announced against the West in 1998. Over the next five days, Bin Laden and his top aides, including Ayman al-Zawahiri, met with a dozen or so jihadist leaders. "This was a big strategy meeting," Benotman told one of us late last year, in his first account of the meeting to a reporter. "We talked about everything, where are we going, what are the lessons of the past 20 years."
Despite the warm welcome, Benotman surprised his hosts with a bleak assessment of their prospects. "I told them that the jihadist movement had failed. That we had gone from one disaster to another, like in Algeria, because we had not mobilised the people," recalls Benotman, referring to the Algerian civil war launched by jihadists in the 1990s that left more than 100,000 dead and destroyed whatever local support the militants had once enjoyed. Benotman also told Bin Laden that the al-Qa'ida leader's decision to target the West would only sabotage attempts by groups such as Benotman's to overthrow the secular dictatorships in the Arab world. "We made a clear-cut request for him to stop his campaign against the United States because it was going to lead to nowhere," Benotman recalls, "but they laughed when I told them that America would attack the whole region if they launched another attack against it."
After the [9/11] attacks, Benotman, now living in London, resigned from the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, realising that the United States, in its war on terrorism, would differentiate little between al-Qa'ida and his organisation.
Benotman, however, did more than just retire. In January 2007, under a veil of secrecy, he flew to Tripoli in a private jet chartered by the Libyan government to try to persuade the imprisoned senior leadership of his former group to enter into peace negotiations with the regime. He was successful. This May, Benotman told us that the two parties could be as little as three months away from an agreement that would see the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group formally end its operations in Libya and denounce al-Qa'ida's global jihad. At that point, the group would also publicly refute recent claims by al-Qa'ida that the two organisations had joined forces.
This past November, Benotman went public with his own criticism of al-Qa'ida in an open letter to al-Zawahiri. In the letter, Benotman recalled his Kandahar warnings and called on al-Qa'ida to end all operations in Arab countries and in the West. The citizens of Western countries were blameless and should not be the target of terrorist attacks, argued Benotman.
Although Benotman's public rebuke of al-Qa'ida went unnoticed in the United States, it received wide attention in the Arabic press. In repudiating al-Qa'ida, Benotman was adding his voice to a rising tide of anger in the Islamic world toward al-Qa'ida and its affiliates, whose victims since 11 September have mostly been fellow Muslims. Significantly, he was also joining a larger group of religious scholars, former fighters, and militants who had once had great influence over al-Qa'ida's leaders, and who alarmed by the targeting of civilians in the West, senseless killings in Muslim countries, and barbaric tactics in Iraq have turned against the organisation, many just in the past year.
Why have clerics and militants once considered allies by al-Qa'ida's leaders turned against them? To a large extent, it is because al-Qa'ida and its affiliates have increasingly adopted the doctrine of takfir, by which they claim the right to decide who is a "true" Muslim. Al-Qa'ida's Muslim critics know what results from this takfiri view: first, the radicals deem some Muslims apostates; after that, the radicals start killing them. This fatal progression happened in both Algeria and Egypt in the 1990s. It is now taking place even more dramatically in Iraq, where al-Qa'ida's suicide bombers have killed more than 10,000 Iraqis, most of them targeted simply for being Shia. Recently, al-Qa'ida in Iraq has turned its fire on Sunnis who oppose its diktats, a fact not lost on the Islamic world's Sunni majority.
Additionally, al-Qa'ida and its affiliates have killed thousands of Muslim civilians elsewhere since 11 September: hundreds of Afghans killed every year by the Taliban, dozens of Saudis killed by terrorists since 2003, scores of Jordanians massacred at a wedding at a US hotel in Amman in November 2005. Even those sympathetic to al-Qa'ida have started to notice. "Excuse me Mr Zawahiri but who is it who is killing, with Your Excellency's blessing, the innocents in Baghdad, Morocco and Algeria?" one supporter asked in an online Q&A with al-Qa'ida's deputy leader in April that was posted widely on jihadist websites. All this has created a dawning recognition among Muslims that the ideological virus that unleashed 11 September and the terrorist attacks in London and Madrid is the same virus now wreaking havoc in the Muslim world.
Ultimately, the ideological battle against al-Qa'ida in the West may be won here in Britain. It is in this country that many leaders of the jihadist movement have settled as political refugees, and the capital has long been a key barometer of future Islamist trends. There are probably more supporters of al-Qa'ida in Britain than any other Western country. Over the last half-year, we have been interviewing London-based militants who have defected from al-Qa'ida, retired mujahideen, Muslim community leaders, and members of the security services. Most say that, when al-Qa'ida's bombs went off in London in 2005, sympathy for the terrorists evaporated.
In Leyton, the local mosque is on the main road, a street of terraced houses, halal food joints, and South Asian hairdressers. Around 1,000 people attend Friday prayers there each week. Usama Hassan, an imam at the mosque, has a PhD in artificial intelligence from Imperial College in London, read theoretical physics at Cambridge, and now teaches at Middlesex University. But he also trained in a jihadist camp in Afghanistan in the 1990s and, until a few years ago, was openly sympathetic to Bin Laden. And, in another unusual twist, he is now one of the most prominent critics of al-Qa'ida.
Raised in London by Pakistani parents, Hassan arrived in Cambridge in 1989 and, feeling culturally isolated, fell in with Jam'iat Ihyaa Minhaaj Al-Sunnah (Jimas), a student organisation then supportive of jihads in Palestine, Kashmir and Afghanistan. In December 1990, Hassan travelled to Afghanistan, where he briefly attended an Arab jihadist camp. Later, as a postgraduate student in London, Hassan played a lead role in the student Islamic Society, then a hotbed of radical activism. "At the time I was very anti-American... It was all black and white for us. I used to be impressed with Bin Laden. There was no other leadership in the Muslim world standing up for Muslims." When 11 September happened, Hassan says the view in his circle was that "al-Qa'ida had given one back to George Bush".
As al-Qa'ida continued to target civilians for attacks, Hassan began to rethink. His employment by an artificial intelligence consulting firm also integrated him back toward mainstream British life. "It was a slow process and involved a lot of soul-searching... Over time, I became convinced Bin Laden was dangerous and an extremist." The July 2005 bombings in London were the clincher. "I was devastated by the attack," he says. "My feeling was, how dare they attack my city."
Three days after the London bombings, the Leyton mosque held an emergency meeting; about 300 people attended. "We explained that these acts were evil, that they were haram [unlawful]," recalls Hassan. It was not the easiest of crowds; one youngster stormed out, shouting, 'As far as I'm concerned, 50 dead kuffar is not a problem.'"
In Friday sermons since then, Hassan has hammered home the difference between legitimate jihad and terrorism, despite a death threat from pro-al-Qa'ida militants: "I think I'm listened to by the young because I have street cred from having spent time in a [jihadist] training camp." This spring, Hassan helped launch the Quilliam Foundation, an organisation set up by former Islamist extremists to counter radicalism by making speeches to young British Muslims about how they had been duped into embracing hatred of the West.
In December, al-Qa'ida's campaign of violence reached new depths in the eyes of many Muslims, with a plot to launch attacks in Saudi Arabia while millions were gathered for the Hajj. Saudi security services arrested 28 al-Qa'ida militants in Mecca, Medina and Riyadh, whose targets allegedly included religious leaders critical of al-Qa'ida, among them the Saudi Grand Mufti Sheikh Abdul Aziz al-Sheikh, who responded to the plot by ruling that al-Qa'ida operatives should be punished by execution, crucifixion or exile.
Is al-Qa'ida going to dissipate as a result of the criticism from its former mentors and allies? Despite the recent internal criticism, probably not in the short term. Al-Qa'ida, on the verge of defeat in 2002, has regrouped and is now able to launch significant terrorist operations in Europe. And, last summer, US intelligence agencies judged that it had "regenerated its [US] Homeland attack capability" in Pakistan's tribal areas. Since then, al-Qa'ida and the Taliban have only entrenched their position further, launching a record number of suicide attacks in Pakistan in the past year. Afghanistan, Algeria and Iraq also saw record numbers of suicide attacks in 2007 (though the group's capabilities have deteriorated in Iraq of late). Meanwhile, al-Qa'ida is still able to find recruits in the West. In November, Jonathan Evans, the head of MI5, said that record numbers of UK residents are now supportive of the group, with around 2,000 posing a "direct threat to national security and public safety".
However, encoded in the DNA of apocalyptic jihadist groups such as al-Qa'ida are the seeds of their own long-term destruction: their victims are often Muslim civilians; they don't offer a positive vision of the future (but rather the prospect of Taliban-style regimes from Morocco to Indonesia); they keep expanding their list of enemies, including any Muslim who doesn't share their precise world view; and they seem incapable of becoming politically successful because their ideology prevents them from making the real-world compromises that would allow them to engage in genuine politics.
The scholars and fighters now criticising al-Qa'ida, in concert with mainstream Muslim leaders, have created a powerful coalition countering the organisation's ideology. According to Pew polls, support for al-Qa'ida has been dropping around the Muslim world in recent years. The numbers supporting suicide bombings in Indonesia, Lebanon and Bangladesh, for instance, have dropped by half or more in the past five years. In Saudi Arabia, only 10 per cent now have a favourable view of al-Qa'ida, according to a December poll by Terror Free Tomorrow, a Washington-based think tank. Following a wave of suicide attacks in Pakistan in the past year, support for suicide operations among Pakistanis has dropped to 9 per cent (it was 33 per cent five years ago), while favourable views of Bin Laden in the North-West Frontier Province of Pakistan, around where he is believed to be hiding, have plummeted to four per cent from 70 per cent in August 2007.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
3. Slavery still exists in the US. 
