Al Qaeda experts report that the fundamentalist ideologues of terror, after conducting a cold-blooded doctrinal debate on the integration of decapitation in their “jihad” produced their judgment Thursday, October 10: Americans in Iraq, all foreigners, and their Iraqi collaborators fit “every Muslim religious and traditional criterion that permits their slaughter.” i.e. decapitation. The decree is divided into two long sections, each signed by a different group.

According to our experts, the first section addresses the questions and uncertainties stirred up in many parts of the Muslim world by the barbarous depictions of masked Muslim men snatching living human beings by the hair and slashing their throats with large knives. So monstrous are these images that even Arab TV stations are loath to air them.

The reluctant broadcasters are taken to task in this first section, accused of spurning “deeds sanctioned by Islam.”

Section two lays down the law: “The slaughter of infidels is compelled by religious precept and must be implemented in letter and spirit as determined by the Prophet Mohammed, who declared that decapitation is the most effective means of intimidation and deterrent against the enemy.”

Saturday, October 16, two days after publication of the two-part decree, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi’s Tawhid Wal Jihad (Unity and Holy War) announced the execution by beheading of 11 members of the Iraqi police and national guard. It was a form of Islamic salute to al Qaeda for coming around to Zarqawi’s norms of operation.

A few hours later, he took the critical step of vowing allegiance to Osama bin Laden as “the teacher of the generation.”

Zarqawi’s following in Iraq is under severe pressure from relentless US pummeling in Fallujah and in retreat from most of its Iraq bases. Yet inside bin Laden’s network, his path has triumphed. Al ! Qaeda’s parent body has bought his mode of operation as a tenet of its fundamentalist jihad doctrine, adopting his argument that to prevail in their holy war, adherents must abduct heretics and are bound to behead them.

The new al Qaeda decree represents a fresh policy twist for the entire network that portends stepped up brutality in its terrorist methods in Iraq and in countries where the group maintains active cells. Once the message is communicated to al Qaeda’s operatives everywhere, counter-terror experts foresee an upsurge in hostage-taking and decapitations spreading out of Iraq and Saudi Arabia and targeting Western civilians and anyone doing business, or maintaining military, personal or cultural relations with the West.

The first American victim to be slaughtered by al Qaeda was the Wall Street journalist Daniel Pearl, who was murdered in February 2002 in Karachi, Pakistan.

From April 2004, 22 have suffered his horrendous fate in Iraq.

Foreigners beheaded in Saudi Arabia: On May 29, Al Qaeda attacked foreign oil offices and installations in Khobar City and took hostages. An official news blackout was imposed and the number and names of the hostages taken and! murdered was never released. Sources estimate that 9 foreign employees were murdered by beheading after being identified as non-Muslims and separated from Muslim hostages. This group is believed to include one American, as well as Italian and Indian nationals.

Paul Johnson, American electronics engineer, was murdered June 2004 in Riyadh.

18 October: Al Qaeda experts report that the fundamentalist ideologues of terror, after conducting a cold-blooded doctrinal debate on the integration of decapitation in their “jihad” produced their judgment Thursday, October 10: Americans in Iraq, all foreigners, and their Iraqi collaborators fit “every Muslim religious and traditional criterion that permits their slaughter.” i.e. decapitation.

The decree is divided into two long sections, each signed by a different group.

According to our experts, the first section addresses the questions and uncertainties stirred up in many parts of the Muslim world by the barbarous depictions of masked Muslim men snatching living human beings by the hair and slashing their throats with large knives. So monstrous are these images that even Arab TV stations are loath to air them.

The reluctant broadcasters are taken to task in this first section, accused of spurning “deeds sanctioned by Islam.”

Section two lays down the law: “The slaughter of infidels is compelled by religious precept and must be implemented in letter and spirit as determined by the Prophet Mohammed, who declared that decapitation is the most effective means of intimidation and deterrent against the enemy.”

Saturday, October 16, two days after publication of the two-part decree, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi’s Tawhid Wal Jihad (Unity and Holy War) announced the execution by beheading of 11 members of the Iraqi police and national guard. It was a form of Islamic salute to al Qaeda for coming around to Zarqawi’s norms of operation.

A few hours later, he took the critical step of vowing allegiance to Osama bin Laden as “the teacher of the generation.”

Zarqawi’s following in Iraq is under severe pressure from relentless US pummeling in Fallujah and in retreat from most of its Iraq bases. Yet inside bin Laden’s network, his path has triumphed. Al ! Qaeda’s parent body has bought his mode of operation as a tenet of its fundamentalist jihad doctrine, adopting his argument that to prevail in their holy war, adherents must abduct heretics and are bound to behead them.

The new al Qaeda decree represents a fresh policy twist for the entire network that portends stepped up brutality in its terrorist methods in Iraq and in countries where the group maintains active cells. Once the message is communicated to al Qaeda’s operatives everywhere, counter-terror experts foresee an upsurge in hostage-taking and decapitations spreading out of Iraq and Saudi Arabia and targeting Western civilians and anyone doing business, or maintaining military, personal or cultural relations with the West.

The first American victim to be slaughtered by al Qaeda was the Wall Street journalist Daniel Pearl, who was murdered in February 2002 in Karachi, Pakistan.

From April 2004, 22 have suffered his horrendous fate in Iraq.

Foreigners beheaded in Saudi Arabia: On May 29, Al Qaeda attacked foreign oil offices and installations in Khobar City and took hostages. An official news blackout was imposed and the number and names of the hostages taken and! murdered was never released. Sources estimate that 9 foreign employees were murdered by beheading after being identified as non-Muslims and separated from Muslim hostages. This group is believed to include one American, as well as Italian and Indian nationals.

Paul Johnson, American electronics engineer, was murdered June 2004 in Riyadh.

Russian president Vladimir Putin never fully bought into the assumption that Osama bin Laden’s al Qaeda carried out, alone and unaided, the September 11, 2001 attacks in the United States. In the two telephone conversations he held with President George W. Bush soon after, on September 13 and September 23, 2001, he put forward his conviction! that foreign intelligence services had taken a hand in the assaults. He also offered Russian military and intelligence assistance in the coming US invasion of Afghanistan.

Putin’s conviction rested partly on the Russian intelligence evaluation that doubted whether the hijackers who slammed the planes into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon possessed the insider knowledge and expertise necessary for bypassing the US air defense codes protecting the airspace above the White House and the sprawling defense department complex.

This alone betrayed a helping hand by”International Terrorism”, said Putin.

The Russian leader revisited the theme in remarks he made Monday, October 18 in Dushanbe, the capital of Tajikistan.

”I consider the activities of terrorists in Iraq are not aimed so much at coalition forces but more personally against President Bush,” Putin said. “International terrorism has set itself the goal of derailing President Bush’s election for a second term.”

Commentators swiftly seized upon the comment as a vote of support by Putin for Bush’s re-election bid. But seen in the context of his remarks three years ago, it is probable that the Russian president’s suggestion emanated from his longstanding belief in an international terror network which toppled New York’s twin towers and is now striving to abbreviate the Bush presidency.

Putin is consistent in viewing this force as a common and acutely dangerous enemy gunning for America and Russia alike. But since his post-9/11 telephone conversations with Bush, he rarely returns publicly to the theme. In late 2002, when he discussed terrorist threats with senior Russian military and intelligence officers in Moscow, it was noted that al Qaeda never again made use of the top-secret information on US air defense codes. Putin concluded from this omission that the fundamentalist group’s access to such top-secret data had been blocked by its provider.

On September 24, under the strain of the Beslan school hostage crisis, he stated: “International terrorism has indeed declared war on Russia. And I have already said that the aim was not just the destabilization, but the destruction of the Russian Federation.”

The plot as seen in the Kremlin hinges on a recurrent partnership of convenience between al Qaeda and certain intelligence entities. As a rule, al Qaeda and likeminded Muslim terrorist groups do not perceive themselves as part of any international terrorist movement. Their leaders also draw clear distinctions between their jihad and the causes of other terrorist groups.

"Israel Builds for Nobel Prizes, Arabs Build for Suicide Bombers" notes Farid Ghadry, the President of the Reform Party of Syria.

"The news this week that two Israeli scientists, in addition to an American, won the Nobel Prize in chemistry, should be read with interest in the Arab world.

This win says a lot about the state of affairs of the Middle East .

The longer we persist, the more we are bound to hear these types of voices.

Will some Democrats ever learn?!

"The PFLP [People's Front for the Liberation of Palestine], whose history of terrorism dates back to the 'black September' hijackings of 1970, was personally vetted by Saddam to receive oil vouchers worth 40 million British pounds.

"The deal has been uncovered by U.S. investigators, trawling millions of pages of documents showing a network of diplomats bribed by Saddam's regimes, and political parties who qualified for backhanded payments from Baghdad."

The above is from the The Scotsman (Hat tips: Mike Reeder and Roger L. Simon)

The Egyptian media coverage of the Taba bombing is typical of all that is wrong with the Middle East - First, they try to ignore the event -

"I couldn't believe what I was seeing," said Hossam El- Garahi, a stock exchange analyst. Having learned of the incident from the satellite channel, Al-Arabiya, El-Garahi kept flipping back to Egyptian TV, determined to find out more about what was going on in Taba."All the channels had the regular stuff going on -- a play here, a video clip there -- it was like this thing wasn't happening in Egypt."

Millions of other people couldn't believe their eyes as they watched their TV screens late Thursday night. It wasn't just the horrific images emerging from Taba that astounded them, but the seeming oblivion to those events being demonstrated by their local channels.

Then, they blame everybody else -

The following are reports in the Egyptian media that blame the U.S. and Israel for the Taba attacks. In a response to a journalist's question during his recent visit to Italy, President Hosni Mubarak rejected the accusations against Israel and the U.S." until the investigations lead to results." Progressive columnist Mamoun Fandy attacked conspiracy theories and their proponents.

Columnist Adli Barsum wrote in the Egyptian government daily Al-Gumhuriya :"Who planned the bombings in Taba and who carried them out? Is it the Al-Qa'ida organization, which Israel hastened to hold responsible, even before the smoke of the fires had dissipated?

"Is it the Mossad? [After all,] there are those in Tel Aviv who are not happy about Egypt's efforts to resolve the disputes between the various Palestinian factions, and there are those who are working to spread civil war between the Palestinians and Egypt.

"Is it the CIA? [It] may perhaps be interested in preoccupying the Arabs with the events in Taba instead of dealing with the recent scandalous U.S. veto.

A friend sent me this analysis -

Just before last year’s US-led invasion of Iraq, the Russian leader returned to his former warning to Bush. In a telephone conversation that ended a long period of silence between the two leaders, he informed Bush of intelligence he had received of “international elements with ties to international terrorism” preparing a trap for US forces in Iraq that was aimed at tripping up Bush personally in a debacle. This would come in the form of a guerrilla war that would inflict heavy US casualties and force an American withdrawal.

The US president did not trust the warning, suspecting it was a ploy to avert the Iraq war, against which Moscow had lined up with Paris and Berlin.

But then Putin harked back to his warning to US national security adviser Condoleezza Rice, when she visited him at the Kremlin on April 6. At the time, Saddam Hussein’s forces and loyalists were still holding onto parts of Baghdad.

Rice was sharply reproving. Russian intelligence had better not interfere in Baghdad, she cautioned, or make any attempt to help Saddam and his sons hide in Iraq or flee the country. Putin shot back that his own intelligence services were out of it, but certain other European agencies were itching to put their oar in. He did not identify the agencies, but Washington inferred he meant French intelligence. The Russian leader then advised Washington to beware of the guerrilla war brewing in Iraq, using terms similar to those he employed this week: “International terrorism aims to hurt the United States and George Bush.”

Since his fruitless conversation with Rice, Putin frequently comments on what he sees as the Bush administration’s misreading of the forces activating the Iraq insurgency. He drops these comments into private conversations with top Russian political and security aides. Washington, he says, mistakenly sees three elements fighting US troops in Iraq: al Qaeda and its affiliates such as Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and Ansar al Islam, ex-Baath party activists and foreign fighters (Syrians, Saudis, Yemenis and others).

But he is firmly of the opinion that none of the three commands the resources for moving thousands of people around the world and then into Iraq via Syria or Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, fully furnished with travel documents, money and safe havens, and generous stipends dispensed to the families they left behind. The Russian ruler insists that neither al Qaeda nor the 4,000 Syria-based former Baath officials directing the guerrilla war is capable of organizing a logistical operation on this scale and across such distances.

A former KGB hand himself, he points to the resources the CIA had to collect to place mujahideen in Afghanistan to fight the Soviet Cold War occupation. It could not be done without calling on Saudi intelligence and setting up an extensive network of transit and training camps in several Muslim countries, primarily in Egypt.

Al Qaeda maintained cells in Spain, Morocco, France, Tangier, Gibraltar and perhaps other countries to initiate major terrorist attacks, such as the Madrid train bombings last March. But the Russian leader is certain that to bring this sophisticated, multi-faceted plan to the stage of execution, at least one professional intelligence agency must have been called in to tie together the ends scattered across several countries and place them in the tight operational framework necessary. He also found the political timing more than suggestive of experienced intelligence involvement. The Madrid blasts were precisely timed to take place just before a gener al election and induce the defeat of the pro-American government in Madrid. Al Qaeda alone, Putin reasoned, does not have this kind of fine-tuned strategic expertise.

Counter-terrorism experts report that the Russian leader will have found fuel for his conviction in this week’s kidnapping of Margaret Hassan, chief of operations in Iraq for the international aid agency CARE. She was described in the videotape aired by Al Jazeera as “a British aid worker” although she was born in Ireland and carries Iraqi dual nationality.

Hassan, who has lived in Iraq for thirty years and is married to an Iraqi, was abducted Tuesday, October 19 – the day the first British troops were moved from the southern city of Basra to the flashpoint towns of Iskandriya and in Latafiya south of Baghdad, as “backfill” for the US troops needed for the assault on the Sunni rebel stronghold of Fallujah.

None of the local guerrilla groups currently under US and Iraqi military siege in the Sunni Triangle has owned up to the kidnapping, strengthening the conviction in the Kremlin that the decision to abduct a prominent Briton in Baghdad was made by none other than the “international terrorists” who are orchestrating the guerrilla war against Bush and American troops.

For more on this subject, try Deroy Murdock's new website

Hanson is the Best. He will make you feel better without making you feel unrealistic

No, I do not enjoy paying more for oil than you do. BUT I am delighted with the implication of the Saudi loss of its ability to manipulate the price of oil. Why? Because that was the real source of its destructive power in the Middle East (since the 1968 Khartoum conference, the Saudi have been paying those who refused to make peace with Israel) and its influence in the US (based in part on paying off former American official connected with ME policy).

The Saudis are pumping and pumping and nothing. Already Senator Kerry is not afraid to run a 30 second campaign ad specifically directed at the Saudi royal family.

No one can hear the bell toll more clearly than that royal family. During the late nineties, I attended a lunch meeting with Hani Yamani where he argued that the Saudis should offer to sign a contract promising the US to supply it with all the oil it needs for fifty years at $10 a barrel. Why? In order to prevent the emergence of an economically viable alternative energy supply. Does anyone believe that with $50+ a barrel an alternative energy source is far away? Perhaps, that is the reason Putin signed Kyoto and the Bush administration agreed that their is danger of global warming. For it seems clear that the end of the era of fossil fuel is with us. The Chinese demand is not going to decline. In fact, the Indian one is bound to increase.

As I have always believed, G-d works in mysterious ways.

I want to thank Australians for standing up to terrorist intimidation and reelecting Howard. Had he lost, the Islamists would have scored a major victory.

This is a reason to celebrate - Joyous Afghans cast their vote "Rahgul, a 45-year-old matriarch came with 11 women from her family to cast her vote for Hamid Karzai.

"Our father said we should come early and vote. We are so happy. I can't belive today is the election," she said adding that the men in her family were also voting for Karzai.

She was not worried about attacks or explosions.

"The Taliban warned us but we are not scared. We are Afghans," she added.