Ground forces move in for Pakistan offensive

Pakistani ground troops moved into Taliban-controlled areas Friday and engaged in the first gunbattle of a new offensive in the volatile northwest, as an aerial and artillery bombardment pounded other targets.

Officials said Friday's action did not represent the start of a full-scale operation in the tribal belt along the border with Afghanistan, but that most troops were now in place for when the orders came.

The coming operation in South Waziristan, along with one winding down in the Swat Valley further north, could be a turning point in Pakistan's yearslong and sometimes halfhearted fight against militancy.

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Are Hamas and Hezbollah Uniting to Crush Iranian Dissidents?

Encountering Hamas in Teheran is tantamount to meeting an African American at a KKK gathering.

 

And yet, the Sunni terrorist group from the Palestinian Authority is now joining hands with the Shi’ite mullahs of Iran to crush street protests in favor of opposition candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi and to solidify the re-election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

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n conspiracy trial, dark tale emerges of jihad training

Speaking publicly for the first time, former Seattle resident James Ujaama testified Tuesday about his efforts in 1999 to create a terrorist training camp in rural Oregon for would-be jihad warriors wishing to take up the fight against the U.S.-backed Northern Alliance in Afghanistan.

Among the instructors would be Oussama Kassir, a Swedish jihadist who once bragged he had been a bodyguard for Osama bin Laden.

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Islam, Virgins and Grapes

Muslim fundamentalists damage Islam far more than any number of Danish cartoonists ever could, for it’s inevitably the extremists who capture the world’s attention. But there is the beginning of an intellectual reform movement in the Islamic world, and one window into this awakening was an international conference this week at the University of Notre Dame on the latest scholarship about the Koran.

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The Pakistani dilemma

In the current era of ideological polarization, throughout the West, the Right and the Left diverge on almost every issue. One of the few convictions that still unifies national security strategists across the ideological spectrum is that it would be a global calamity of the first order if al-Qaida gets its hands on nuclear weapons.

Unfortunately, due to the rapid demise of nuclear-armed Pakistan as a coherent political unit, this nightmare scenario is looking more possible than ever. Indeed, if events continue to move in their current direction, it is more likely than not that in the near future, the Taliban and al-Qaida will take possession of all or parts of Pakistan's nuclear arsenal.

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U.S. Intelligence Official about Israel: “This is just the beginning”

 Northeast Intelligence Network director Doug Hagmann interviewed a highly-placed U.S. intelligence official late yesterday who not only confirmed rumors about escalated and more intensive Israeli military operations against the Muslim terrorists in Gaza, warned of the increasing probability of abandonment of Israel by the U.S. and other Western countries based on what he termed “malicious intelligence.”

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CAIR’s Well-Deserved Expulsion

That threat is not, essentially, about terrorism. Given the life-and-death stakes involved, it is understandable that government is preoccupied by terrorism (or what Obama’s homeland-security secretary, Janet Napolitano, absurdly calls “man-caused disasters”). But jihadist terror is merely the means to a specific end: the installation of sharia, the Islamic legal code, which Muslim fundamentalists regard as the necessary precondition for the achievement of Islam’s universalist ambitions.

Sharia should be of grave concern to us because it is antithetical to the U.S. Constitution and to our way of life. It rejects several core American propositions: that liberty cannot co-exist with an established state religion, that free people have a right to govern themselves irrespective of any religious code’s dictates, that there should be freedom of conscience (sharia holds that apostasy from Islam is not merely a crime but a capital offense), sexual liberty (homosexuality is also a death-penalty offense), and equal protection under the law (sharia privileges Muslims over non-Muslims and men over women). Sharia, furthermore, is the rationale commonly trotted out by militants to justify the use of force (whether we call it “terrorism” or employ such sophistries as “resistance” or “man-caused disasters”) for resolving policy disputes — under the rationale that policies that do not privilege Islam constitute an attack on Islam and therefore justify jihadist violence.

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