Andrew Bostom examines its uncontestable evidence in Europe:

A . . . (9/5/06) report on the Parliamentary Enquiry in the Jerusalem Post was more forthcoming, and stated explicitly that “Islamic extremists” were responsible for “inciting hatred towards Jews”. As the Jerusalem Post also noted, the Parliamentary Enquiry’s results are consistent with data recently published in The Journal of Conflict Resolution by Yale University biostatistician Dr. Edward H. Kaplan, and Dr. Charles A. Small of the Yale Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism.

Drs. Kaplan and Small examined the views of 5004 Europeans, roughly 500 individuals sampled from each of 10 European Union countries (Austria, Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, The Netherlands, Spain, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom). The authors’ main publicized results confirmed their (rather commonsensical) a priori hypothesis: anti-Israel sentiments strongly and independently predicted the likelihood that an individual was anti-Semitic in a graded manner, i.e., the more anti-Israel (on a scale of zero to 4), the more a person was likely to be anti-Semitic.

But perhaps an even more striking finding in light of the burgeoning Jew hatred now evident in Europe’s Muslim communities, has until now received much less attention. In a controlled comparison to European Christians (as the “referent” group), European Muslims were nearly eightfold (i.e., 800%) more likely to be overtly anti-Semitic. Furthermore, in light of the Pew Global Attitudes Project data on Muslim attitudes toward Jews in Islamic countries, the Yale study likely underestimated the extent of anti-Semitism amongst Europe’s Muslim communities.

Matters are even worse within the Muslim world:

In the Muslim world, attitudes toward Jews remain starkly negative, including virtually unanimous unfavorable ratings of 98% in Jordan and 97% in Egypt. Muslims living in Western countries have a more moderate view of Jews – still more negative than positive, but not nearly by the lopsided margins that prevail in Muslim countries.

Then there is Indonesia, the largest Muslim country in the world. It has just let out of jail the mastermind of the Bali bombing, Abu Bakar Bashir. This is what he has to say about Jews:

"The Jews are cunning and cannot be trusted, as it states in the Qur'an. At the moment the United States is just being the donkey for Israel, who is riding the USA.

"How can we dialogue for peace in the Arab world as long as Israel exists? Israel cannot dream of having peaceful borders because Israel has no right to exist, no right to be there. That is the land of Palestine, for the Palestinians. How can any Muslim leader say that Israel has the right to safe borders? It should not be there in the first place!...

Those who wish to appease the Islamists by feeding them with Jews, should consider that they and their life styles are sure to be next:

"If the Prophet Carried a Spear Then... We Can Carry an M-16!" . . .

"There is no democracy in Islam, so do not try to interpret the Quran and turn Islam into a democracy to suit your needs. God's law comes first. It is not up to the will of the people to decide what is right and how to live. Rather the will of the people have to be bent to suit the will of God. It is not democracy that we want, but Allah-cracy!

"The struggle for Islam can only come through crisis and confrontation. Islam is here to change the world, not to be changed by the world. So there is bound to be resistance, that is why the West fears us.

"If we accept Western norms like democracy then we can never reach the Allah-cracy I mentioned earlier. Democracy must be replaced by Allah-cracy and this cannot come from elections. Those who oppose us must be educated, that is why dawah is important, to show them that Islam is the only way. But if they still resist, and are willfully stubborn, or if they create obstacles for us, then they must be opposed.

Obstacles to what?

We demand an Islamic state, and not some form of Islamisation of society. We want the state to be Islamic, with Islamic leaders who have the courage and will to implement the shari'a in total. There is no other way..."We want an Islamic state where Islamic law is not just in the books but enforced, and enforced with determination. There is no space and no room for democratic consultation. The shari'a is set and fixed, so why do we need to discuss it anymore? Just implement it!

No, Ahmadinejad in not alone. This is a fight the rest of the world cannot avoid. These power hungry theocrats will not let us and they have a large cohorts of young men at their disposal.

To be sure, Mr. Bush understands that we cannot ignore our enemies; they are real. He knows that an enemy who believes in religiously sanctioned suicide-bombing is an enemy who, with a nuclear or biological weapon, is a mortal threat to our survival as a free country. The analysis Mr. Bush offers the nation--before the Joint Session on Sept. 20, 2001, in his 2002 State of the Union, in his 2005 Second Inaugural--is consistently correct. On each occasion, he outlines the threat, the moral nature of the conflict and the absolute requirement for victory.

Unfortunately, the great bureaucracies Mr. Bush presides over (but does not run) have either not read his speeches or do not believe in his analysis. The result has been a national security performance gap that we must confront if we are to succeed in winning this rising World War III.

Do read the whole thing.

9/11 and its aftermath demonstrated that we are better, stronger, and more resilient than we thought but that we were intentionally been kept ignorant and complacent about the dangers and evils of the gathering jihadist storm making its way towards our shores. Osama bin Laden was not the only one who believed that these United States were easy pickings. Robert Bork had warned that we were Slouching towards Gomorrah, while Benjamin Barber had blamed us for championing the creation of a soulless McWorld. They were all proven wrong.

The generous loving messages of the victims; the simple heroism of police and firemen; the calm determination of the survivors; the amazing generosity and initiative shown by individuals and organizations revealed yet again just how indomitably soulful free people are. They also produce resilient interdependent growth-oriented economies capable (as the recent surprising 2007 World Bank report demonstrates) of using even security measures to increase international trade flow and decrease corruption. Most gratifyingly, we discovered what an amazingly valiant young generation we have spawned as many of its best and brightest rushed to join the arm forces quickly proving that contrary to recalcitrant elite opinion, productive, life affirming democracies produce very capable, if reluctant warriors.

But war is hell and the kind of semi-war in which we engaged in the past five years feels like slow water torture. Not surprisingly, we are in a foul mood desperately searching for a silver bullet or at the very least a sacrificial lamb to end it all. It is in such trying times that we must trust our innate pragmatism and ingenious political system to insure that we retain our moral balance, act moderately, and continue to tinker and adjust our strategies and tactics until we make sure that the government of the people by the people for the people shall not perish from this earth.

Do read the rest.

Five years after the tragedy of 9/11, airport and rail security personnel are rapidly adopting an Israeli method for spotting terrorists by their body language.

Labeled SPOT - Screening Passengers by Observation Technique - the program, which has been introduced by the Transportation Safety Authority (TSA) in the US and the British Aircrafts Authority (BAA) in England, was devised by Rafi Ron, former chief security officer of the Israeli Airport Authority.

Here is some good news:

Sen. Sam Brownback, R-Kan., introduced legislation Thursday that would refocus U.S. government-funded broadcasting into Iran to"stand with the people of Iran."

The Iranian regime's record of"repression, oppression, beatings and abuse ... was"a story that has been told too little," Brownback told reporters and Iranian-American activists. His"Iran Human Rights Act" would also appoint a"special envoy" to pro-democracy groups in Iran and in exile.

"While we are focusing on [Iran's] nuclear weapons development, as we should, we cannot deny the human suffering of the Iranian people," Brownback said."This story needs to be told."

As a backdrop to the new Brownback bill, former Iranian political prisoners and their relatives gave grisly testimony Thursday of torture under the regime of former president Mohammad Khatami, who is currently visiting the United States.

You will find some harrowing stories here.

St. Paul's Chapel, next to Ground Zero, serves for many as an interim memorial.

Though it was carpeted in dust and debris, it escaped serious damage and became a center for rescue workers as well as a shrine where desperate relatives would leave flyers with photos of the missing, flowers, candles, poems and other gifts.

Many are still on display, along with computer terminals that allow a visitor to watch video clips of key moments in the aftermath. The church holds daily prayers for the victims and will hold an interfaith service on Monday.

Church worker Omayra Rivera, 33, said around a million visitors a year come to St. Paul's."They (church officials) don't use the word 'tourists,' they say 'pilgrims."'

Thousands of tourists congregate from morning to night every day on the west side of Ground Zero, peering through the fence, taking pictures, silently reading a timeline of the events of 9/11, and fending off the occasional peddler hawking collections of photographs of the attacks.

Souvenir sellers have been ordered out of the immediate area, though fire and police department T-shirts and caps as well as key-rings and bottle openers in the shape of the Twin Towers can still be purchased a few blocks away.

Some visitors choose to leave something behind.

One message scrawled on one of wooden walkways around the site reads:"Yo, New York. I hope you are feeling better. I see that nasty scar is starting to heal ... a ... little."

"The crisis of Dutch socialism can be sized up in their attitudes to both Islam and Israel. They hold Israel to exceptionally high moral standards. The standards by which the Palestinians are judged are very low." - Hirsi Ali.

In a well argued letter To all the great Iranian mothers in diaspora Ganji calls on Iranian women to follow the example of the Iranian poet Ms. Simin Behbahani who not only writes but acts in a manner taught by Gandi and Martin Luther King:

Ms. Simin Behbahani is one of Iranian heroines, who, in the past years, has been in the front line of Iran's liberal movement. In this path, she has been insulted and beaten. She was treated unjustly and tolerated magnanimously. Behbahani could move a generation with her poems, but her work is not limited to poetry and literature. She actively and bravely defends the victims whenever the civil rights ware trampled upon.

One day she shows up in front of a hospital to defend the disregarded rights of an imprisoned dissident. On another day she is in a park to protest the extreme, unbelievable, and painful inequality of women compared to men and to say we are human too and human, on being human alone, is entitled to rights and dignity, and no regime, ideology, belief or culture could not and should not discriminate between human beings based on imaginary and ancient divisions and ignore their need to dignity. Still on another day, in another setting, she protests the murder of dissidents and with her poems keeps their memory alive. She has the courage to think.

She thinks because she understands what many Iranian apologists like their Communist predecessor refuse to acknowledge. She understands that just as yesterday's USSR was not a perversion of Communism, today's Iran is not a perversion of Islamism.

The problem of the avant-garde intellectual before the revolution [in Iran] was the poverty of philosophy and not attending to theoretical studies. Theorizing was completely rejected as"bourgeois philosophy" and" capitalist abstraction." Everything was reduced to"pratique" and"struggle." Resistance and courage, if not based on a democratic-humanist theory, replaces one dictatorship with another.

The 1979 revolution [of Iran] was the result of a 1970's discourse that was the anti-West (anti-imperialist), anti-liberal, anti-democratic, based on a return to our selves (alternatively our Islamic, Asian, or communist class-free proletariat self), ideologic, utopian, and revolutionary. We should not think of that revolution as a detour.

Trotsky wrote"Betrayed Revolution" thinking Stalin had betrayed the ideals of the Bolshevik revolution. But no one betrayed the Russian revolution and what took place was the exact realization of the Marxist-Leninist revolutionary ideology.

The classical all-encompassing ideological revolution is an irrevocably big mistake. [Such] Revolution does not lead to democracy and does not create freedoms. Therefore, the 1979 revolution was not betrayed. It was the objective realization of the 1970's discourse. The experience of the 1979 revolution guided us all to the fact that without reason and thinking we cannot go past our childhood and become democrat adults.

Behbahani acts because she has courage and Iran needs Diaspora women to follow in her footsteps.

And an idea is not God. No one can think for us, suffer for us, fight for us. Intellectual courage, which is refusing to submit to fear in our thinking and refusing to accept anything but the truth, is now highly needed in our circles. Democracy and human rights need bold and courageous agents. People who believe in democratic values and show their belief by struggling against oppression and injustice. It is obvious that courage in practice, without wisdom in thoughts, will not do.

Ganji urges Iranian intellectuals, indeed, all intellectuals not to succumb to passivity born of despair in the value of their own people:

He says: democracy, freedom and human rights, are not the issues of the people of Iran, but bread, water, clothing and shelter. He says: the knowledge and social prerequisites of democracy do not exist in Iran. He says: Iran will not be democratized in a hundred years. He says: the people are not ready to fight and pay the price for democracy, so why should the intellectual shoulder their burden and pay the price for them. He says: the modern era, is the era of separation of roles and division of social labour. The intellectual, is not a party or political activist, his job is to create thoughts and invent theories.

After all, intellectuals too made mistakes and they too need courage to accept those mistakes:

Courage, this philosopher's stone of the world of intellect and reformism, is not limited just to the Kantian courage, that is the courage to know. We also need the [Baruch] Spinozan courage, which is the courage to overcome any of our psychological and moral failures and shortcomings, let aside the [Paul] Tillichan courage that wants us to see and accept ourselves as we are and not deny ourselves. . . . .

And is there an intellectual who doesn't see in his past more or less dark spots, ignorance, mistakes, working with less than desired quality or quantity? And which intellectual is it who doesn't know that a considerable part of the misery and misfortune that has taken over his society is the consequence of his own ignorance, mistakes, and miscarriage? Why should the intellectual be so pessimistic and doubtful of people and optimistic and sure of himself?

I could not agree more. Unfortunately, such courageous intellectuals are not easy to come by and for every Chris Hitchens we have a plethora of Noam Chomskys, George Galloways and Tony Judts.

The Freedom Lover who translated this letter did all of us a great favor for it is well worth reading in its entirety. He, unlike John Murtha, is a true profile in courage. But that would have required a Kennedy Center in possession of some real imagination.

A Shia, Lebanese, school principal, also with the organization that I founded and this one, and who had his house destroyed in Lebanon, and his children and immediate family displaced, has started a cooperative educational program with us. He will invite someone to speak to his students from Solomon Shechter (conservative Jewish day school), and will go to them 10 times during a school year (once a month).

This program follows in the footsteps of a year long pilot program she helped initiate:

Half-education and half-dialogue, half-Jewish and half-Islamic, half in Manhattan and half in Queens, an innovative interfaith project that made its national debut at two New York City high schools during the first week of classes last year raised several questions.

Would the Unity Program founded by the Abraham’s Vision organization find support in the Jewish and Muslim communities? Would the teenage participants from the Abraham Joshua Heschel School on the Upper West Side and the Al-Iman School in Jamaica understand each other? Would the year-long series of classes and dialogue meetings make a statement about mutual tolerance?

So far, so good. Such program must be carefully constructed and their mutual respect vigilantly guarded. For the past few years, I have been participating in one such Sarah initiated interfaith (Christian, Jewish and Muslim)group in South Jersey. Acceptance of the legitimacy of Israel as a Jewish state is the basic requirement for joining. We,too, have conducted a successful, if less ambitious, educational program. It consisted of an evening course co-taught be a Muslim and a Jew. Familiarity bred friendships and improved understanding. Just as importantly it enabled our Muslim friends to express their rejection to Islamist attempt to represent all Muslims. Our yearly interfaith prayer services enjoy a particularly large Muslim attendance.

Of course, things can get off the rail as this article about recent developments in the Catholic- Jewish dialogue demonstrates. But that should not be a reason to stop trying, merely the reason to make sure that appeasers do not high jack the agenda. For ultimately, appeasement implies disrespect which is inherently humiliating to the appeased party and, hence, breeds resentment and even hatred.

I have recently participated in an interfaith trip to Turkey. The Lebanon war was raging and I made sure everyone knew that I grew up in Israel, that my family lives there and that I was very concerned about their welfare as they live in the Northern part of the country under the constant barrage of Katyusha rockets. I was met with sympathetic understanding especially when I noted the similarity between the Israeli-Palestinian and the Turkish-Kurdish terrorist predicament.

Their understanding gained a new dimension when I told them about Sarah and explained that her family also lived in Northern Israel and that she was just as worried about them as I was about my family. My hosts were often a mixture of Kurds and Turks. They explained that both groups were equally threatened by PKK terror.

As with all such efforts, one casts one's bread upon the waters in the