Why Did Nidal Hasan Read the Middle East Forum?

A startling fact just emerged in the course of some routine maintenance work on the mailing lists for www.DanielPipes.org: One "Dr. Nidal Malik Hasan" has been subscribed as nidalhasan@aol.com since March 2009 to all the Middle East Forum mailing lists, including my own. He opened some but not many of the mailings.

In addition to the name, there are several reasons to think this is the butcher of Ft. Hood: He received the mailings for over half a year before his identity became notorious; he has not opened any e-mails in a while, presumably since he has been jailed; and a search for nidalhasan@aol.com on the internet finds this address associated with the Texas jihadi (for example, by the Northeast Intelligence Network)..

Comments: (1) I have never assumed that all the Middle East Forum's or my readers share our outlook. To the contrary, the lively debates carried on in the more than 100,000 published reader comments show that readers have all outlooks. Still, I never imagined that a future terrorist would subscribe himself to our writings.

(2) Why, I can't help but wonder, would Hasan have wanted to see the Middle East Forum's work? Opposition research? Or might he have been stalking us?

(3) This subscription gives new urgency to the concerns I addressed at "Am I Helping the Terrorist Enemy?" and I hereby rededicate myself to assuring that the Middle East Forum does not inadvertently provide guidance to the country's foes.

(4) On a sad note, this news brings to the mind that I learned just two months earlier, again while doing routine chores, that my articles were still being sent to the late Daniel Pearl's Wall Street Journal e-mail address, which had been initially subscribed before his murder nearly eight years ago. (December 30, 2009)

Daniel Pipes

David Horowitz: The Traitor Class

On Monday night Bill O’Reilly had a representative of the traitor class in his cross-hairs, an episode he re-visited Tuesday night.

The traitor class is easily defined as people who can’t identify a self-declared enemy of the United States even after he has killed 3,000 innocent people in an act of self-described holy war and is prepared to provide his talents and services gratis to help the enemy combatant attack this own country.

Scott Fenstermaker is an attorney for Covington Burling, a white shoe law firm which has provided millions of dollars in pro bono legal work to Gitmo terrorists.

A Covington partner is the brother of Weather terrorist Kathy Boudin, and the lawyer organizing the Gitmo pro bono defense team is family friend and political comrade Michael Ratner, head of the terrorist-supporting Center for Constitutional Rights, who has spent his life defending America’s enemies and serving anti-American causes.

If you can’t describe the 3000 innocent victims of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed as “murdered” and your first move is to describe your own government’s case as propaganda, and you are devising a case to “justify” the evil deed your client has committed and won’t say that you would be upset if your country were to lose the case, and also if you’re a Jew and don’t have any problem defending an Islamic Nazi who beheaded Daniel Pearl after forcing him to say “I’m a Jew, I’m a Jew” — there can be only one explanation.

You believe in the justification defense you are preparing, you think America and the Jews are guilty and deserve what they get, and you are a traitor.

And much worse — only words are inadequate to describe just how low on the human scale you have sunk.

FPM

America on Trial

by Jacob Laksin

In the annals of poor political judgment, the Obama administration’s decision to try 9/11 mastermind Khaled Sheikh Mohammed and four other Guantanamo Bay-based terrorist detainees in a New York City federal court may yet rank as a blunder without peer in American history.

The administration’s announced motive is to prove that civilian courts can be trusted to dispense justice to America’s deadliest enemies.

But in affording al-Qaeda alumnus Mohammed and his jihadist cohorts the constitutional privileges reserved for common criminals, the administration may have put America on trial and potentially endangered the country to score a political point against its predecessor.

Of Mohammed’s guilt there can be no doubt. By his own account, he had a hand in 31 terrorist plots, chief among them the attacks that killed nearly 3,000 Americans a short distance from Mohammed’s expected trial site in southern Manhattan.

In March 2007, the onetime al-Qaeda number three confessed that he helped Osama bin Laden organize, plan, and execute the 9/11 attacks. “I was responsible for the 9/11 operation, from A to Z,” Mohammed recounted.

Other highlights of Mohammed’s terrorist handiwork include planning the 1993 World Trade Center attack; the murder of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, whom Mohammed boasted of personally beheading; the 2002 Bali nightclub bombings; planning attacks in Thailand, the Philippines and Israel; and planning a series of “second wave” terrorist attacks to be carried out in the aftermath of 9/11 on the Library Tower in Los Angeles, the Sears Tower in Chicago, the Empire State Building in New York, as well as targets in Washington State.

As Mohammed once put the obvious in his broken English, “For sure, I’m American enemies.”

Read more at FPM

Daniel Pearl and the Normalization of Evil. When will our luminaries stop making excuses for terror?

By Judea Pearl

This week marks the seventh anniversary of the murder of our son, former Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl. My wife Ruth and I wonder: Would Danny have believed that today's world emerged after his tragedy?

The answer does not come easily. Danny was an optimist, a true believer in the goodness of mankind. Yet he was also a realist, and would not let idealism bend the harshness of facts.

Neither he, nor the millions who were shocked by his murder, could have possibly predicted that seven years later his abductor, Omar Saeed Sheikh, according to several South Asian reports, would be planning terror acts from the safety of a Pakistani jail. Or that his murderer, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, now in Guantanamo, would proudly boast of his murder in a military tribunal in March 2007 to the cheers of sympathetic jihadi supporters. Or that this ideology of barbarism would be celebrated in European and American universities, fueling rally after rally for Hamas, Hezbollah and other heroes of "the resistance." Or that another kidnapped young man, Israeli Gilad Shalit, would spend his 950th day of captivity with no Red Cross visitation while world leaders seriously debate whether his kidnappers deserve international recognition.

No. Those around the world who mourned for Danny in 2002 genuinely hoped that Danny's murder would be a turning point in the history of man's inhumanity to man, and that the targeting of innocents to transmit political messages would quickly become, like slavery and human sacrifice, an embarrassing relic of a bygone era. Read more ...

Source: The Wall Street Journal

Piers Akerman: The price of tolerating intolerance

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