Islamic Dress Code Imposed in Gaza Schools

With the school year beginning in Gaza, the Hamas regime appears to be moving to impose Islamic dress codes on female students. Hamas has ordered schoolgirls to wear long-sleeved dresses called jilbabs as well as head scarves. Failure to do so could lead to expulsion from school.

Until two years ago, girls could wear jeans or trousers in Gaza public schools. But since Hamas seized control of Gaza in 2007, it has pressured schools to force female students to dress in accordance with Islamic rules. The order follows a decree issued last month by a local judge requiring all female lawyers who appear in Gaza courts to wear the hijab (Muslim head scarf).

A source in the Hamas-controlled Education Ministry told Jerusalem Post reporter Khaled Abu Toameh that school administrators had been given approval to decide on what type of clothing students should wear. "In many schools, the administrations, in coordination with the families, decided to impose hijabs and jilbabs on girls," the source said.

A veteran journalist in Gaza said that most girls who returned to schools that reopened on Sunday were seen dressed in traditional Islamic clothes. At one school in central Gaza, 95 percent of the girls were wearing jilbabs. "The few who came to school wearing jeans were warned that they would be expelled if they did not wear jilbabs," the journalist said.

The Gaza government has also reportedly banned men from teaching at girls' schools. Read more about it here.

Ahmadinejad Nominates Wanted Terrorist as Iran's Defense Minister

Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad submitted a list of cabinet nominees to the Iranian Majlis Wednesday. The proposed Minister of Defense is Ahmad Vahidi, a former Revolutionary Guard commander wanted by Interpol for his role in the 1994 bombing of a Jewish cultural center in Buenos Aires in which 85 people died and another 200 were injured

At that time Vahidi was commander of the Guards' Quds (Jerusalem) Force. The Force has been active outside Iran, supporting Hizballah through extensive training and funding. The Director of National Intelligence has testified before Congress that weapons the Quds Force smuggled into Iraq were responsible for the deaths of at least 170 Americans.

Most recently, Vahidi was deputy head of Iran's Ministry of Defense Armed Forces Logistics. In 2008 The European Union named him as someone involved in Iran's development of nuclear weapon delivery systems. EU member states are mandated to freeze any funds Vahidi holds in them and to prevent his entry or transit through their territories.

The Majlis, Iran's parliament, will vote on the cabinet list on August 30. The body's Vice-Speaker has stated that several on the list would be rejected. They are being criticized for lack of experience (The Speaker of the Majlis said, "A ministry is not a place for apprentices.") rather than any ties to terrorism. In this regard Vahidi seems well experienced.

Iranian Ties Cost Tariq Ramadan his Public Jobs

The well-known Islamist Tariq Ramadan has been fired from his faculty job at the Erasmus University in Holland, just days after the City of Rotterdam dismissed him from his post as advisor for integration.

University and Rotterdam city officials issued a joint statement stating that Ramadan's hosting a weekly talk show "Islam and Life" on the Iranian government-funded TV channel, Press TV is "irreconcilable" with his posts. Press TV toes the Iranian regime's line. In June, it issued a report disputing eyewitness stories that militiamen had shot Neda Agha-Soltan during the election protests in Tehran. At about the same time a prominent British presenter quit the channel citing its biased election coverage.

Ramadan said he plans to sue the Rotterdam City Council and the university.

Ramadan has also been involved with litigation with the United States government, appealing the 2004 revocation of a visa to teach at the University of Notre Dame. In July 2009, an appellate court ordered Ramadan be granted a chance to prove he didn't know that a charity to which he donated was tied to Hamas, a designated terrorist organization.

U.S. officials cited that donation as a reason to reject Ramadan's visa.

Controversy emerged in the Netherlands over Ramadan's statements over homosexuals ("God has established norms and the norm is that a man is meant for a woman and a woman is meant for a man.") and women ("When walking in the streets austerity requires that you always cast you eyes down to the pavement.").

Although touted as a moderate, Ramadan has made a long series of disturbing statements. At a 2002 conference in Washington, when he was still allowed in the United States, Ramadan said of terrorism in Palestine, "I am not going to justify killing innocent people, but what is going on now in Palestine is explainable… we are leaving one population be oppressed, be killed and we are all spectators… we have to understand is that there are causes that should be removed" More recently, a 2006 YouTube video shows Ramadan praying for Palestine:

"God, strengthen their belief, those who are in Palestine, and let them celebrate their victory over their enemy, your enemy, enemy of the faith."

The Wall Street Journal editorialized on the firings, noting that Ramadan "likes to talk about democracy and following the rule of law—but only as long as the law doesn't contradict an Islamic principle. He rejects terrorism and violence but thinks that blowing up eight-year-old Israeli children is "contextually explicable."

The right to free speech protects those views, the newspaper said, but the Netherlands "has no obligation to bankroll" them.

The Sounds of Silence

A Palestinian writer is calling out what he sees as a double standard among Arabs and Muslims. Little, if any, outrage or condemnation is expressed when Palestinians kill other Palestinians in political fighting, as has happened at least 700 times since Hamas took over Gaza in 2007.

But if Palestinians die from Israeli actions, even in response to a terrorist attack, the outrage can last years, writes Ahmad Abu Matar, who lives in Sweden. The Middle East Media Research Institute has posted a translation of most of Abu Matar's essay here.

The murder of a Muslim woman in Germany provides a contemporary example.

"What about the hundreds of murders perpetrated every month in the Arab countries under the false pretext of 'preserving [family] honor?' In most of these cases, a young woman is murdered by her brother or some other [male] relative. He declares it openly, and the women of the neighborhood, as well as the victim's family, greet him with sweets and cries of joy. Who writes or demonstrates against this [phenomenon]? Autopsies have revealed that over 95% of the girls murdered this way are virgins, which means that there was no 'violated honor' to cry over [in the first place]."

The identity of the murderer shouldn't matter, Abu Matar argues. Someone was killed.

He also cites a series of examples of Arab and Muslim states seizing and occupying the land of other countries, in some cases that continue today. Yet there's no outcry against those occupations. Many Arabs, including Palestinians, supported Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein when his army took over Kuwait in 1991. Even the Persian Gulf saw Iran occupy three islands of the United Arab Emirates in 1971, but "Nobody ever mentions them." In fact, some Arabs defend Iran as more cultured and advanced.

"Using the same skewed logic, someone could make the unpatriotic claim that Israel – advanced, cultured and democratic – has a greater claim to Palestine than the struggling Palestinian people, who cause themselves more casualties than the [Israeli] occupation causes them. This, despite the fact that, according to common sense and international law, occupation is occupation, regardless of the identity and [cultural] level of the people whose land has been occupied."

It's a provocative and bold article that should generate discussion.

The War of the Words

A speech earlier this month by President Obama's assistant for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism is prompting a debate over semantics and its place in the war on terrorism.

For starters, John Brennan said in his August 6 speech that we're not really at war with terror, but with "al Qaeda and its allies." Moreover, the administration rejects the language of "jihad," instead recognizing the threat of "violent extremists."

This picks up on a theme set during the last year or so of the Bush Administration, when the Department of Homeland Security and the State Department's Counterterrorism Communications Center each issued memos saying softer language was good for America's fight.

"Use the terms 'violent extremist' or 'terrorist.' Both are widely understood terms that define our enemies appropriately and simultaneously deny them any level of legitimacy," the State Department memo said.

Sounds familiar. But in Homeland Security Today, Anthony Kimery cites several experts who say the lack of specificity and clarity does more harm than good.

Kimery notes that the 9/11 Commission Report defines jihad as a holy war and invokes the word jihad 79 times. He cites several experts who oppose the new rhetoric. Walid Phares, director of the Future of Terrorism Project at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, dismissed the language changes as wishful thinking, "As if one party in a conflict can decide on the ideology and the strategies of the foe."

The U.S. is a secular nation and has "no business" offering definitions in theological terms, Phares said. He added:

"By being precise that it is in conflict with the jihadists not with Muslims, the US will show that it is countering the actions of a radical terror network. There are Muslims fighting the jihadists in several countries: Iran, Algeria, Iraq, Sudan, and Lebanon, let alone in other places such as Nigeria. If the US will call off the confrontation with the jihadists, the Muslim moderates will loose the confrontation with extremism. The Obama administration is using a lexicon that goes against the national interest of the United States."

Other counterterrorism experts, including retired CIA career-man Charles Faddis, are less concerned with the rhetoric and more concerned with a policy shift that might follow. Faddis explained that "we can debate the characterization of the threat and exactly what tools we should be using, but at the end of the day we are still at war."

Check out Kimery's article here.

Smart People, Dumb Decision

Yale University Press is drawing flack from virtually all corners for its decision to purge cartoons and other artwork depicting the Prophet Muhammad from an academic book about the controversy resulting from their 2006 publication by the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten.

Yale said the decision follows the advice of "diplomats and experts on Islam and counterterrorism" who feared the publication in Brandeis University Professor Jytte Klausen's forthcoming The Cartoons That Shook the World "ran a serious risk of instigating violence."

American Association of University Professors President Cary Nelson slammed the Yale Press approach as an affront to academic freedom:

"In an action that parallels prior restraint on speech, Yale also refused to give the author access to consultants' reports unless she agreed in writing not to discuss their contents. Such reports typically have their authors' names removed, but a prohibition against discussing their content is, to say the least, both unusual and objectionable."

Martin Kramer highlights the role played by Marcia Inhorn, chairwoman of Yale's Council on Middle East Studies. Inhorn previously mocked concerns she encountered about a trip to lecture in Iran as ignorant and counterproductive:

"Wait a minute.... The last time we encountered Professor Inhorn, she was telling us to ignore the fear-mongering, not to let the media dupe us into expecting the worst. Now, behind the scenes, she's telling an expert author, who knows a lot more about the topic than she does, that Yale's press absolutely must expect the worst. The author's book must be censored."

Christopher Hitchens offers the Ivy League school lessons in history and language, first noting that the notion of limiting images of the Prophet "was the rather admirable one of preventing idolatry. It was feared that people might start to worship the man and not the god of whom he was believed to be the messenger." He then issues a scathing rebuke of Yale's conclusion that publishing the Danish images of Muhammad, along with classical art works from Iran, would instigate violence:

"If you instigate something, it means that you wish and intend it to happen. If it's a riot, then by instigating it, you have yourself fomented it. If it's a murder, then by instigating it, you have yourself colluded in it. There is no other usage given for the word in any dictionary, with the possible exception of the word provoke, which does have a passive connotation. After all, there are people who argue that women who won't wear the veil have 'provoked' those who rape or disfigure them … and now Yale has adopted that 'logic' as its own.

It was bad enough during the original controversy, when most of the news media—and in the age of 'the image' at that—refused to show the cartoons out of simple fear. But now the rot has gone a serious degree further into the fabric. Now we have to say that the mayhem we fear is also our fault, if not indeed our direct responsibility. This is the worst sort of masochism, and it involves inverting the honest meaning of our language as well as what might hitherto have been thought of as our concept of moral responsibility."

Finally, a fed-up Hugh Fitzgerald calls for a boycott on donations to Yale in protest of the publishing decision and Inhorn's role in it:

"Her behavior, in a well-ordered universe, would so arouse the faculty and students that they would demand her removal, and they would boycott her classes, and those of her now-absurd department, and she would feel compelled to leave. But that's not likely to happen, is it?"

Universities used to pride themselves for being the one refuge for truly open debate, where no idea, no matter how offensive it may appear, can be heard. What all the articles cited here share is an outrage at seeing self-imposed prior restraint on speech.

It's not the first time this has happened in the U.S. But it's especially disconcerting at Yale, which as Hitchens notes is "the campus of Nathan Hale."

Book on Muhammad Cartoons Won't Show Them

Yale University Press won't reprint cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad in a forthcoming book about the 2006 controversy over their publication by the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten.

The book in question is The Cartoons That Shook the World, written by Jytte Klausen, a Danish-born professor of politics at Brandeis University. When Klausen sought to include the cartoons in her book, which is due out in November, Yale University Press Director John Donatich moved quickly to consult several dozen outside "authorities."

The unanimous conclusion of these experts, Donatich told the New York Times, was that the cartoons would have to go. They also suggested that other illustrations of the prophet that were to have been included in the book should be removed: an Ottoman print, a drawing for a children's book, and a sketch by 19^th century artist Gustave Dore of Muhammad being tortured in Hell.

Donatich rationalized the capitulation by stating that the cartoons are widely available on the Internet and can be described in words, which would make reprinting them gratuitous. Donatich said he has published other controversial books, and "I have never blinked."

Until now.

The Cartoons That Shook the World was a different story because "when it came between that and blood on my hands, there was no question" that the cartoons would have to go, Donatich said. He added that the cartoons continued to provoke unrest as recently as last year when Danish police arrested three men suspected of trying to kill the artist who drew the cartoon depicting Muhammad's turban as a bomb.

Donatich quoted one of the experts consulted by Yale - Ibrahim Gambari, special adviser to the secretary-general of the United Nations and the former foreign minister of Nigeria – as concluding: "You can count on violence if any illustration of the prophet is published. It will cause riots, I predict, from Indonesia to Nigeria."

Donatich's action was too much for Reza Aslan, who called removal of the cartoons "academic cowardice" and "idiotic." Aslan, who previously wrote that the cartoons offended him as needlessly provocative, asked that a blurb of him praising the book be removed from its jacket.

The most eloquent criticism of Yale's decision came from Jonathan Tobin, executive editor of Commentary magazine:

"For a major university and a prestigious publishing house to bow to the dictates of Islamist murderers and those 'diplomats' and 'scholars' who believe in appeasing Islamism sets a new standard for political correctness. But the rot goes deeper than that. A Western culture that is willing to censor scholarly work so as to avoid upsetting irrational extremists in the Arab and Muslim world is in serious danger of losing the will to defend itself."

Read the full article here.

Muslim Convert Confesses to Plotting Attacks on American Targets In Germany

In the wake of a recent discussion regarding Germany's lackluster approach to cracking down on terrorism, the AHN news service reports that a convicted suspect confessed to plotting the bombing of US sites and citizens in Germany.

The accused, Fritz Gelowicz, 29, admitted to a Dusseldorf court that he and three accomplices wanted to commit a terrorist attack in Germany. The three others, who together with Gelowicz were caught by a police raid while making 700kg of explosives in a warehouse in 2007, are also being charged with being members of the Islamic Jihadic Union, a Pakistan based terrorist group. Gelowicz has said that he trained "for three months in the group's camp somewhere between Pakistan and Afghanistan," according to the AHN article.

Gelowicz, a German-born citizen who converted to Islam as a teenager, is the suspected leader of a 2007 plot by the Islamic Jihadic Union to perform a massive terrorist attack using hydrogen-peroxide explosives aimed at U.S. citizens

On Monday, Gelowicz told a judge that the planned attacks in 2007 are intended to serve as a final warning to the public before "a referendum to pull out [...] troops in Afghanistan." If convicted, the members of the dubbed "Sauerland cell" each face 10-15 years in prison with Daniel Schneider, a participant charged with attempted murder for pulling an officer's gun out of its holster in an escape attempt during the 2007 raid, possibly receiving as much as a life sentence.

Yemeni Islamists Hail Release of Convicted Hamas Supporters

Convicted terrorists Sheik Mohammed Ali Hassan Al-Moayad and Mohammed Mohsen Zayed returned to Yemen on August 11, receiving "heroes' welcomes," according to the local press.

Yemen's Joint Meeting Parties (JMP), a coalition of the Islamist Islah party with several socialist parties, issued a statement welcoming the release of Al-Moayad and Zayed.

The Supreme Council of the JMP called the release a "good initiative by the new American Administration, " as opposed to "what the previous administration had done, behaving arbitrarily against a number of innocent men, at their head Sheikh Muhammad al-Moayad and Zayed, which deepened the hatred between the Arab and Muslim peoples and the American people." The Supreme Council called on the US Administration to "quickly release all prisoners in Guantanamo including Yemeni prisoners."

In March 2005 Al-Moayad and Zayed were convicted on charges of conspiring to support al Qaeda and Hamas. But the 2^nd Circuit Court of Appeals vacated those verdicts and ordered a new trial. Earlier this month, in separate plea agreements, the two men pleaded guilty only to conspiring to provide material support to Hamas. In exchange, a judge sentenced them to time served and ordered them to be released and deported to Yemen.

Prosecutors say they agreed to the terms because Al-Moayad is ill. Critics of the move say the Justice Department gave too much. In a letter to a federal judge describing the plea agreements, prosecutors said the investigation started when an informant told the FBI that "Al-Moayad, a prominent cleric in Yemen, had recruited Mujahidin for the Al Qaeda-led armed conflicts in Bosnia, Chechnya and Afghanistan. This information was later corroborated by, among other things, an Al Qaeda training camp form found in Afghanistan in late 2001 reflecting that Al-Moayad was the "sponsor" of one of the trainees, and pocket litter found in the possession of Mujahidin who had fought in Bosnia reflecting their association with Al-Moayad." [Emphasis added]

Read the Investigative Project on Terrorism's translation of a Yemeni press article on the JMP statement here.

Islamic Terrorists, Latin Style (Update)

Earlier this month, we noted a Homeland Security Today report which detailed the rise of radical Islamists in Latin America. Now comes a story in Israel's Ynetnews on a suspected Hizballah terrorist cell being put together in Venezuela, with the blessing of Venezuelan strongman Hugo Chavez. The Ynet report states the Hizballah operation collects intelligence in Latin America and is focused on identifying possible Israeli or Jewish targets for attack in retaliation for the assassination of Imad Mughniyeh.

It sounds similar to an operation Egyptian officials claim to have broken up last spring.

In Venezuela, the Chavez government reportedly is providing support to this Hizballah operation and coordinating such actions with Iran. The Ynet article states that Hizballah and the Iranian Revolutionary Guards have created special units to kidnap Jewish business people in Latin America and take them to Lebanon.

This latest report only highlights the danger posed by Hizballah and its state sponsor Iran in America's backyard.

The Homeland Security Today showed how Iamic terror organizations from the Middle East have been establishing significant operational footholds in various Latin American countries since the 1980s.

In the past four years, reports have surfaced showing how drug traffickers and their supply routes are being used to advance the terrorist infiltration. Examples are here, here and here.

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