DESPITE the popularity of successive Pirates of the Caribbean films, real pirates are not cuddly criminals. Nor are they members of an oppressed minority group suffering from low self-esteem. They are murderers and kidnappers who live by the gun and understand only one thing - force. Sunday’s successful rescue of American sea captain Richard Phillips, after US President Barack Obama authorised the use of force against the Somali pirates who held him captive, emphasises that reality. A team of US Navy SEALS aboard the USS Bainbridge freed Phillips after shooting his captors from their position about 30m away, a ridiculously easy shot for trained marksmen. This followed an earlier rescue of a French yacht crew by French commandos, during which a French yachtsman was killed, possibly by the French rescue team. A photograph of the French crew taken before their rescue shows an anguished woman held at gunpoint by a young pirate armed with an automatic weapon. Anyone who doubts the ruthlessness of the pirates should use that image as a reality check. The US effort marked Obama’s first authorisation of force against a group hostile to Americans, and it is reported that he received news of the successful rescue 11 minutes after it was completed, and spoke with Phillips shortly after. To date the Obama administration has attempted to fudge its commitment to fighting forces opposed to the US. While it has rebadged the “war on terrorism” as “overseas contingency operations” and terrorist attacks are now to be called “man-caused disasters”, piracy remains piracy. The US is revisiting a sea-borne scourge that has existed since the 14th Century. Somali pirates still hold about 300 captives and 17 ships but, as few are Westerners, there remains little international indignation about their plight. It was not always so. When Britain ruled the waves, pirates weren’t tolerated. If captured alive, their trials were short and their sentences terminal. Hanging was the norm. With American independence in 1776, the US navy’s first major achievement was cleansing the entrance of the Mediterranean of the Barbary pirates who operated out of north Africa. Using swift galleys rowed by slaves, these pirates enslaved their captives, sent any women captured to harems, and were known for their brutality. They were so successful that they were able to demand tribute from the nations which traded into the Mediterranean, until Thomas Jefferson became US president and deemed the annual ransom had to stop. In 1801, Jefferson launched a war against the Barbary pirates which eventually saw the US flag fly over Derna, Libya’s second-largest city, a feat which is remembered in the line in the Marine hymn: “From the halls of Montezuma, to the shores of Tripoli.” The war ran until 1812 when president James Madison sent Captain Stephen Decatur into action against Omar the Terrible, the ruler of Algiers. Within 16 days of entering the Med, Decatur triumphed with a treaty he said was “dictated at the mouths of our cannon”. Mediterranean piracy was dead. In the shallow waters around South East Asia however, piracy was in the ascendancy. The narrow straits which ran through the many archipelagoes proved ideal for opportunistic pirates. The British navy was sent in to deliver justice and accounts published at the time show how successful they were. In one dispatch published in The Hobart Courier of February 20, 1850, Captain Hay of the Columbine reported that in an action on October 2, 1849, 23 “piratical junks averaging 500 tons, mounting from 12 to l8 guns, three new ones on the stocks, and two small dock-yards, with a considerable supply of naval stores, have been totally destroyed by fire; and of 1800 men who manned them, about 400 have been killed, and the rest dispersed without resource”. In the same newspaper, there was an account of the destruction of Shap-ng-tsai’s pirate fleet by a Royal Navy squadron under the command of a Captain Hay. In all 1700 were killed. The West has forgotten some hard-learnt lessons on dealing with pirates. They are worth revisiting. Source: The Daily Telegraph
 HOPE springs eternal, and Dan Gillerman, former Israeli ambassador to the UN, is an optimist. He must be.
He believes that there is hope of some sort of settlement to the Palestinian problem in the aftermath of Operation Cast Lead, Israel’s retaliatory strike against the Hamas terrorists in Gaza who ordered the eight-year rocket bombardment against Israel.
But his optimism rests not so much upon Palestinians as upon moderate Muslims and moderate Arabs who he hopes may now see that the world is not witnessing the clash of civilisations Samuel Huntington predicted in his best seller over a decade ago, but within a civilisation, the Islamic civilisation.
“Most of the horror, most of the killing, is within the world of Islam, whether it is in Dubai or Sharm el-Sheikh, or Afghanistan or Morocco, Muslims are killing each other,” he said in Sydney yesterday.
“We are not seeing moderates saying, ‘Enough is enough’. The wars in Lebanon and Gaza may bring about some sign of awakening to the fact terrorism is being exported by a extremist regime in Iran.”
The former business leader, who had some notable diplomatic successes during his 2003-2008 posting to the UN, including being elected as a vice president of the UN General Assembly, said the Gaza operation initially brought about an unprecedented level of support and understanding for Israel’s action from much of Europe, the US, nations like Australia and even from some parts of the Arab world.
As it dragged on, some of that support eroded but many nations conceded they would have acted in a similar fashion if their people had been under rocket attack for eight consecutive years.
“Moderate Arabs and moderate Muslims are awakening to the reality that Hamas is a monster that brought suicide bombings to the region, sometimes as young as 11-years-old, who would don their bomb belts sometimes helped by their parents,” he said.
“They know that Hamas holds the Palestinian people hostage, that it is persecuting its own people.”
Gillerman said no other country in the world had instituted the protective measures taken by the Israelis in their attempts to reduce civilian casualties, citing 250,000 telephone calls made to Palestinians to warn them to leave homes containing Hamas arms caches.
Yet civilians were killed, though not in the same proportions that they lost their lives in Kosovo, Afghanistan or Iraq - and Gaza is one of the most densely populated areas in the world.
The difference between Israel and Hamas in their approach to civilian deaths was marked, he said, by the reality that Israelis sheltered their children and Hamas used them, and celebrated the death of every child. Former Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir said there would be no peace until the Arabs learned to love their children, he said.
Four messages could be drawn from the conflict: That the Israelis were not to be messed with; that Hamas had been weakened; that the strike was about current and future events, and that extremists in Iran and other rogue regimes should learn that the Israelis will stand on the side of moderates in their conflicts with extremists. There was another “missing link”, he said - the number of world leaders eager to see a settlement, from the US, the UK, across Europe and in other parts of the world.
The solution Gillerman envisages is not just a two-state answer, but a 23-state solution that would also embrace the whole Arab world.
Which makes it more remarkable that two Western Sydney Councils, Marrickville and neighbouring Canterbury, would waste their ratepayers’ time and money by passing resolutions which gave both overt and tacit support to Hamas.
Apart from exposing the ignorance of the councillors who supported the resolutions, backing proscribed terror organisations like Hamas is unlikely to foster the ideals of peace embraced by the inner-urban Green councils. Perverse contradiction is the new green mantra.
Real support for the Palestinian people, including those in Gaza is coming from an entirely different source - the UK-based Portland Trust chaired by Sir Ronald Cohen, which has offices in London, Ramallah and Tel Aviv.
It is committed to promoting peace and stability between Palestinians and Israelis through economic development and has had some success raising funds for a $1 billion development in Ramallah, which includes 15,000 homes.
Its global conferences dedicated to rebuilding a Palestinian economy, giving Palestinians real futures, would be alien to the terrorist-supporting councillors.
Well-meaning idiots perhaps, but the futile motions will bring joy to extremist generators of international terrorism in Iran as they bundle up weapons for Hezbollah and Hamas. Moderate Arabs and moderate Muslims will only despair at such a demonstration of stupidity. Source: Daily Telegraph
 January 03, 2009
ISRAEL’S continued demolition of the terrorist Hamas government of Gaza has highlighted the impotence of the United Nations.
In a small bonus, call it collateral damage, it has also flushed out some members of the Fifth Column in Australia’s Muslim community who are dedicated to the destruction of Western culture. The politics of war in the Middle East are often too muddied for all but the cognoscenti to follow, but the current situation is as clear as gin, which may be why there remain a few in the alcophobic Islamic world who attempt to deny the realities.
Since 2001, Hamas and its allies launched more than 6400 rockets, mortar bombs and other missiles at Israel. Not at specific military targets, not at strategic targets ... just at the nation.
Fortunately, there were few casualties because the Israeli Government was able to give its citizens a warning system that gave the 250,000 people in the most exposed areas exactly 15 seconds to take shelter.
Since mid-2008 a truce was nominally in effect, but Hamas chose to stockpile smuggled weapons through a series of tunnels from Egypt into Gaza. Israel sought to extend the truce when it expired last month but Hamas rejected the offer, firing some 80 rockets a day into Israel between December 24 and December 27.
Obviously Hamas’s leaders were unfamiliar with Stanley Holloway’s cautionary tale about Albert and the lion, in which young Albert Ramsbotham pokes his ``stick with an ‘orse’s ‘ead ‘andle’’ into the ear of Wallace the lion in the Blackpool Zoo, and is eaten for his troubles.
Perhaps Sheik Dr Nizar Rayan, one of the most prominent leaders of Hamas in Gaza who was killed in the first air strike in the Gaza Strip _ should have been reading Holloway’s instructional rhymes to the son he encouraged to become a suicide bomber, rather than applauding his decision to obliterate himself and two Israeli citizens.
The missiles that killed Rayan also killed nine other people, including one or two of his wives (the reports are conflicting) and three children.
Hamas said that a further 25 people were wounded when it issued a call for ``mass rallies of wrath’’.
Its call coincided with a rally in Lakemba, the centre of Sydney’s Muslim ghetto, by the familiar figure of the Islamic Friendship Association of Australia’s Keysar Trad, the faithful apologist for that old beneficiary of Labor politics, Sheik Taj al-Din al-Hilali, to protest the retaliatory attacks against the Hamas leadership.
No record can be found of any rallies conducted by these prayerful representatives of Australia’s Islamic friends in protest at Hamas’s prolonged rocket campaign against Israeli civilians. It should also be noted that the Israelis took the trouble to phone Rayan, who was an advocate of the strict Wahhabist line of Islamist extremism, and warn his family to evacuate their home because it was to be attacked.
Trusting in their underground shelter to protect them, they remained. Secondary explosions indicated that their shelter was used to store arms and ammunition. One need not feel distressed by Rayan’s demise. He repeatedly urged young people generally and young women in particular to enlist as suicide bombers.
Two days before he was killed, he delivered a sermon at a Gaza mosque calling on Muslims everywhere to pray for Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, saying: ``We do not need money or weapons, we only need your prayers. We can handle the enemy ourselves.’’
Rayan was fiercely opposed to the moderate Palestinian Authority and to the notion of a secular Gaza. Last year, in an interview with the Palestinian al-Ayyam newspaper, he promised to turn the headquarters ofthe National Security Forcein Gaza into a huge mosque and to deliver sermons from the presidential headquarters.
As the moderates were defeated by the Hamas terrorists, he boasted: ``In a few hours, the secular era in Gaza will end without leaving a trace ... today heresy ends. Today the struggle is between Islam and the infidels, and it will end with the victory of the faith. [Once victorious], Hamas will open its arms to the members of the security forces, so that they will return to the faith, [for] Islam is generous with infidels [who repent]. We hold the truth and they [represent] falsehood ... how can we not fight against those who desecrate the sanctity of Allah, execute clerics and sell out the Palestinian cause _ those who blasphemed in houses of worship, burned mosques, Korans and [Islamic] education facilities and executed jihad fighters? We will hold dialogue with these [people] only through the barrels of our guns.’’
Today, even most of the so-called Arab street is tired of Rayan’s chosen form of dialogue.
And as Iran’s income from oil declines and it cuts back its sponsorship of Hamas and other terror groups, militants like the late Rayan will now find themselves further isolated.
In the clash of cultures, those who offer little more than death (and a promise of martyrdom) to followers, will find their currency doesn’t hold its value against the hope of prosperous, fruitful lives.
Little wonder that free, democratic and genuinely progressive Israel’s mere existence poses such a threat to its regressive, repressive Islamic neighbours. Source: The Daily Telegraph
 Saturday, November 29, 2008 at 08:18pm
The involvement of Britons among the terrorists responsible for the murders of more than 150 people in Mumbai last week signals another milestone in the march of multiculturalism and the failure of Western and democratised nations to deal with Islamists.
In the mosques of London, leaders like Anjem Choudary, right-hand man to the hate-filled cleric Omar Bakri, were praising the killers, saying any Britons or Americans among the dead were targeted legitimately because they should not have gone to India.
“Muslims are being killed in Pakistan, Iraq and Afghanistan every day through acts of atrocity against them.
But the media only report events like Mumbai,’’ he told The Daily Mail as Indian police revealed that at least two terrorists they had captured were British-born Pakistanis.
In the UK, as in many European nations and in Australia, governments have permitted Muslim migrants to create their own enclaves and ghettos and preach their own interpretations of their religion, unhindered by the cultures of their host nations and often in contempt of the laws of the society of their host country.
Aided by the powerful civil rights lobbies and squadrons of lawyers, Islamists are waging a successful war to prevent further assimilation of Muslims into Western society, forcing women to wear traditional Islamic garb to emphasise their separateness, urging the introduction of Islamic sharia law into local courts.
From the shores of Somalia to the cells of Guantanamo, the West is in confused retreat, its politicians too concerned about appearing to be in breach of international civil rights covenants than they are about the safety of their citizens.
India, with its 150-million strong Muslim population - the largest outside Indonesia - is no different.
Though the vast majority of its Muslims are peaceable and law abiding, it has not been able to develop a coherent policy to deal with the terrorists, despite continuing attacks in which more than 4000 people have been murdered in the past four years.
Lying between two backward, Islamic-loving nations, Pakistan and Bangladesh, India is a forward-looking country with a vibrant economy that is seeking to take advantage of its assets, its large English-speaking population, its legacy of British laws.
The Indian Islamic community is isolated within the greater population, its members attuned to the cults of victimhood and hate which spew from Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, across the Gulf from Mumbai.
Fearful, perhaps, of an Islamic uprising supported by the jihadist groups allowed shelter by Pakistan and Bangladesh, the Indian government has moved to appease, rather than challenge, Islamist supporters.
It was the first nation to ban Salman Rushdie’s novel, The Satanic Verses, in 1988, though the Nobel prize-winning author was born in Mumbai; and, 11 years later, it released three terrorists, in exchange for an aircraft hijacked by Taliban supporters and taken to Afghanistan.
One of those freed was Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh, a former London School of Economics student who later murdered The Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, recording the crime on a video which has been seen worldwide. Another case of failed appeasement, like Israel’s regular releases of Palestinian terrorists.
With Indian commandos still freeing hostages, the usual voices in the West are busily disseminating their preferred version of events.
Typically, your ABC’s Sydney morning presenter Deborah Cameron spent much of Friday attempting to find guests who would agree with her theory that disparity of wealth was the motivating force behind the massacre.
This peculiar view is regularly trotted out by the soft-headed adherents of the suburban Left, who instinctively believe that a caring, sharing approach will persuade terrorists to leave their AK47s at home.
Nowhere has it worked.
Everywhere the terrorists have taken the money, or their freedom, and gone on to commit more and greater atrocities, having benefited from the West’s lack of intellectual resolve.
It is the same muddling nonsense that has prevented the West from blockading the Somali ports used by growing numbers of pirates, secure in the knowledge that they can exploit a torrent of sympathy by claiming that the vessels they hijack are owned by nations which support fishing fleets netting in their waters.
There is one Australian, of course, who knows well what lies in the minds of those who conducted the murderous raid on Mumbai - David Hicks.
He embraced radical Islam, trained in Pakistan with young men no different from those responsible for this atrocity and expressed his desire to kill Indians at the first opportunity.
He was a good hater, as his own letters to his family revealed. He wanted to overthrow what he termed “Western Jewish domination’’, he wanted to kill non-Muslims and he joined the Taliban after the World Trade Centre tower attacks.
Now, of course, he is the darling of a subset of the suburban Left, those who either have no memory, or no love of democracy nor grasp of morality.
The ABC should hire him as its terrorism commentator, when his control order lapses in three weeks. Source: Daily Telegraph
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Copyright Muslims Against Sharia 2008. All rights reserved.
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