A half-dozen snapshots from the global jihad:
Australia: Australia's foremost Muslim cleric triggers an uproar when he likens
women who don't wear an Islamic headscarf to "uncovered meat" and blames them for
attracting sexual predators. "If you take out uncovered meat and place it outside on
the street, or in the garden or the park . . . and the cats come and eat it," says
Sheik Taj al-Din Hilali, "whose fault is it, the cats' or the uncovered meat? If
[the woman] was in her room, in her home, in her headscarf, no problem would have
occurred."
Afghanistan: The kidnappers of Italian photojournalist Gabriele Torsello threaten to
murder him unless Abdul Rahman, an Afghan Christian convert, is returned to
Afghanistan and handed over to an Islamic court. Rahman lives in Italy, which
granted him asylum earlier this year, when he faced the death penalty under
Afghanistan's sharia law for converting from Islam to Christianity.
Iran: The president of Iran calls Israel "a group of terrorists" and threatens to
harm any country that supports the Jewish state. "This is an ultimatum," warns
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who has called for the elmination of Israel and the United
States. "Don't complain tomorrow." Days later, the deputy director of Iran's Atomic
Energy Organization confirms another stride forward for the country's illicit
nuclear program: With the injection of gas into a second cascade of centrifuges,
Iran has doubled its uranium-enrichment capacity.
Thailand: Islamist terrorists bomb a column of Buddhist monks as they collect
offerings of food in Narathiwat, a city in southern Thailand. One person is killed;
12 are injured. The attack is the latest in a bloody week that has included multiple
shootings and another fatal bombing.
France: Another Muslim intifadah rages in France. Hundreds of cars are torched
nightly and passenger buses set ablaze with Molotov cocktails. One such fire in
Marseille leaves a 26-year-old woman in a coma with burns covering 70 percent of her
body. "We are in a state of civil war, orchestrated by radical Islamists," says
police union leader Michel Thoomis. "This is not a question of urban violence any
more. It is an intifadah, with stones and firebombs." So far this year, more than
2,500 police have been wounded in clashes with rioters.
Britain: In a "true Islamic state," sexually active homosexuals would be executed,
says Arshad Misbahi, an imam in Manchester's Central Mosque. According to
interviewer John Casson, the imam explains that while executions "might result in
the deaths of thousands," they would be worthwhile "if this deterred millions from
having sex and spreading disease."
Not all the news is bad. NATO forces have recently killed scores of Taliban fighters
in Afghanistan . Czech intelligence agents thwarted an Islamist plan to seize the
Central Synagogue in Prague on Rosh Hashanah, hold the Jewish worshipers hostage,
and then blow up the building with its occupants. A proposal to let Muslim taxi
drivers at the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport refuse service to
passengers carrying alcohol was scrapped in the wake of vehement public opposition.
And the world's mightiest fighting force continues to kill Islamofascists in Iraq,
currently the key battleground in the global jihad.
But there can't be much question that at this point in the war against radical
Islam, the radicals are on the march. From Ahmadinejad's swagger to Hezbollah's war
on Israel to the plot to blow up jetliners leaving London, our enemies are
aggressive, relentless, and unequivocal in their determination to defeat us.
Meanwhile, Western Europe is turning into Eurabia before our eyes, as a fading
native population with its effete secular culture of pacifism and relativism is
superseded by a surging Muslim cohort. Most Muslims are not Islamists or terrorists,
of course. However, most of them keep quiet in the face of the radical offensive.
That is all the radicals need to keep driving the jihad forward.
"If this country lets down its guard, it will be a fatal mistake," President
Bush said last week. Yet too many Americans seem unable to recognize the
threat, or to believe that they, their liberties, and the lives of innumerable
human beings are truly at stake in a deadly global war.
But radical Islam is not going away. Like Nazism and communism, it is (in Senator
Rick Santorum's words) "an ideology that produces the systemic murder of innocents."
Like those earlier totalitarianisms, it will go on murdering until it is crushed.
Like them, it is impervious to appeasement and contemptuous of weakness. The longer
Americans sleep, the farther the jihad advances.
