Copyright 2001-2008 Daniel Pipes Sun, 20 Apr 2008 04:24:02 -0400 Sun, 20 Apr 2008 04:24:02 -0400 http://my.netscape.com/publish/formats/rss-spec-0.91.html Weblog of daily Analysis and commentary by Dr. Daniel Pipes on Militant Islam, the Middle East, and U.S. foreign policy. http://www.danielpipes.org MeqMef@aol.com (Daniel Pipes) webmaster@danielpipes.org (Grayson Levy) en-us http://www.danielpipes.org/blog/839 In addition to Fatah clearly and explicitly wanting to eliminate Israel; for a fresh example see the statement on April 9 by the Palestinian Authority representative in Lebanon, Abbas Zaki, about the Israelis: the PLO, he says, intends to "drive them out of all of Palestine." But in addition to this – which should be enough to render it unfit for negotiations with Israel or benefits from Western states – it is also a horrific organization in its own right. For one instance of its brutality, http://www.danielpipes.org/blog/838 The deepest differences between Muslims and Westerners concern not politics but sexuality. Each side has a long history of looking at the other's sexual mores with a mixture of astonishment and disgust. Here are some examples from the Muslim side of the divide (in reverse chronological order) that have me, for one, shaking my head: -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Saudi imam details heavenly sexual delights: Omar Al-Sweilem, a Saudi imam, extols http://www.danielpipes.org/blog/836 The effort is the first time since World War II – when the Germans bombed London, and London children were sent off to families in the countryside to be cared for until the German assault ended – that a "people-to-people" campaign has been organized to remove children from a war zone. Sadly, indeed embarrassingly, the children are those of S'derot, an Israeli town of 19,000 near the border with Gaza that has been under a missile barrage since the Israeli retreat from Gaza in September 2005, http://www.danielpipes.org/blog/837 Prince Hassan bin Talal, younger brother of the late King Hussein of Jordan and uncle to the current King Abdallah II, has long spoken his mind. He continued and extended this tradition today in an interview with Stephen Sackur on the BBC program HardTalk when he stated that Arab regimes friendly to Washington (e.g., those in Jordan, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia) are lying when they claim that Tehran is working through Hamas. These Arab governments, he argued, are pushing this story to advance their http://www.danielpipes.org/blog/834 Pakistan's Post compares numbers of incidents and numbers of deaths from suicide bombings in three Muslim countries and comes up with surprising results. In these first months of 2008, Pakistan had the most attacks (18 to Iraq's 13), while Iraq had the most deaths (274 to Pakistan's 250). Afghanistan came in way behind with 3 attacks and 15 dead. Comments: (1) Coalition troops are not fighting in Pakistan. (2) Israel's totals trail these two countries by an order of magnitude. (March 24, 2008) http://www.danielpipes.org/blog/832 There's a contradiction brewing among Muslim political leaders on the question of creating a global law to respect religion. On the one hand, the Muhammad cartoons and other episodes leave them intent to find a mechanism to suppress public anti-Islamic sentiments. As such laws cannot single out Islam exclusively for protection, they must include respect for religion in general. Here is one example of this wish, as expressed by Yemen's Prime Minister Ali Mohammed Mujawr in late February who, as http://www.danielpipes.org/blog/833 For fun, how about collecting those instances when female political leaders, especially leftist ones, don the hijab (Islamic headscarf)? Oriana Fallaci, interviewing Ayatollah Khomeini in September 1979 in Qum, Iran. The interview lasted six hours and at one point, an indignant Fallaci removed her chador in and threw it at Khomeini. Oriana Fallaci interviewing Ayatollah Khomeini, before she threw her chador at him. Princess Diana during a 1996 visit to a cancer hospital in Pakistan. . http://www.danielpipes.org/blog/831 For some years now, the Vatican has made reciprocity the key to its relations with Muslim-majority states. For example, Cardinal Jean-Louis Tauran, the Vatican equivalent of foreign minister, commented in 2003 that "There are too many majority Muslim countries where non-Muslims are second-class citizens" and pushed for reciprocity: "Just as Muslims can build their houses of prayer anywhere in the world, the faithful of other religions should be able to do so as well." That sounded good, but http://www.danielpipes.org/blog/830 Founded by the Saudis on the basis of a conspiracy theory (concerning the Aqsa Mosque fire of August 1969), the 57-member Organization of the Islamic Conference has always had a disreputable quality to it, a quality hardly purified by the recent decision that the U.S. government to send to it a "special envoy." This year's meeting in Senegal has found the OIC particularly bellicose on the question of the Shari‘a (Islamic law), perhaps as a result of the surging price of oil. In particular, it http://www.danielpipes.org/blog/829 Barack Obama and the Rev. Jeremiah Wright. The Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Jr. of Chicago's Trinity United Church of Christ, and Barack Obama's pastor since 1988, told his congregation in a sermon on Sept. 16, 2001 that U.S. terrorism had precipitated Al-Qaeda's attack. "We bombed Hiroshima, we bombed Nagasaki, and we nuked far more than the thousands in New York and the Pentagon, and we never batted an eye. We have supported state terrorism against the Palestinians and black South Africans, and