Another Bad Day At The Jihad

Here's a jihadi getting his jihad on, mortaring the infidels. Unfortunately, Allah was not akbar this time around. Better luck with those 72 virgins in paradise, Mohammed!

Rapping With KSM

Jane Mayer provides a precious peek inside the treatment of high level terrorist captives in her New Yorker article, "The Black Sites: A rare look inside the C.I.A.’s secret interrogation program."

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Al Qaeda project manager for the Sep 11 attacks, was caught after the US paid $25 million to an informant who pointed the way to his hideout. That's his portrait above after being awakened by his captors, just before he was turned over to the CIA and beginning his worst nightmare. He didn't talk at first, just babbling Koran scripture, but he came around after that.

He supposedly boasted of slaughtering Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl,

"I decapitated with my blessed right hand the head of the American Jew Daniel Pearl in the city of Karachi, Pakistan. For those who would like to confirm, there are pictures of me on the Internet holding his head."

It looks like he was lying. There are no photos.

"Special Agent Randall Bennett, the head of security for the U.S. consulate in Karachi when Pearl was killed—and whose lead role investigating the murder was featured in the recent film "A Mighty Heart"—said that he has interviewed all the convicted accomplices who are now in custody in Pakistan, and that none of them named Mohammed as playing a role. "K.S.M.’s name never came up," he said. Robert Baer, a former C.I.A. officer, said, "My old colleagues say with one-hundred-per-cent certainty that it was not K.S.M. who killed Pearl.""

KSM liked to talk a big bloody game but he never got his hands dirty actually killing anyone himself. He did his killing by proxy, like Himmler. There is also the possibility that he was covering for the guilty parties. In Pakistan, any new evidence is grounds for appeal. KSM's phony confession could confuse the courts and spare the real killer.

KSM and other Al Qaeda dirtbags were held in secret CIA prisons in Afghanistan and Poland. That makes me think I'm getting my money's worth from my tax dollars and gives me another reason to like the Poles. KSM did not stand up well to waterboarding:

"The inquiry source said that most of the Poland detainees were waterboarded, including Mohammed. According to the sources familiar with the Red Cross report, Mohammed claimed to have been waterboarded five times. Two former C.I.A. officers who are friends with one of Mohammed’s interrogators called this bravado, insisting that he was waterboarded only once. According to one of the officers, Mohammed needed only to be shown the drowning equipment again before he “broke.”

"“Waterboarding works,” the former officer said. “Drowning is a baseline fear. So is falling. People dream about it. It’s human nature. Suffocation is a very scary thing. When you’re waterboarded, you’re inverted, so it exacerbates the fear. It’s not painful, but it scares the shit out of you.” (The former officer was waterboarded himself in a training course.) Mohammed, he claimed, “didn’t resist. He sang right away. He cracked real quick.” He said, “A lot of them want to talk. Their egos are unimaginable. K.S.M. was just a little doughboy. He couldn’t stand toe to toe and fight it out.”"

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the big terrorist mastermind, turned out to be a coward.

Jihad, The Musical

It probably was inevitable but it comes as a surprise anyway: the first musical about Islamic terrorism. "Jihad, The Musical" by the Silk Circle Production company has opened at the Edinburgh Festival in England, billed as "madcap gallop through the wacky world of international terrorism". It's the story of a simple, young Muslim named Sayid who comes to the West with a bomb and a dream of blowing up an "Unidentified, Very Prestigious Landmark". He lands in London, links up with a jihadi cell, and the comedy ensues. You can watch the leader of his terror cell sing "I Wanna Be Like Osama" here. There are also the show-stopping tunes "Building a bomb today, what does the manual say" and "I can only see your eyes."

Now, a reasonable person, watching Muslims bomb innocent people into bloody chunks from New York to Bali, might wonder what would lead a playwright to say, "Let's set that to music!" At first glance, jihad does not lend itself to musical comedy. The predictable protest has been made in the form of a petition on the British Prime Minister's webste: "We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to condemn the tasteless portrayal of terrorism and its victims in Jihad the Musical." This seems to be a reaction from the general British public. Curiously, no Muslim group has taken offense. Perhaps, that's because Islamic terrorism doesn't offend them. Just an opinion. In the humorless and dull-witted world of the radical Muslim, they may think this glorifies their jihad.

There are precedents for this seemingly tasteless production. They sang "Springtime For Hitler" in the play, "The Producers." Charlie Chaplin made "The Great Dictator" in 1938 lampooning Hitler as the Nazis were persecuting Jews in Germany. Hollywood was afraid of offending the Nazis for fear of losing ticket sales in German theaters, much like Hollywood is afraid of offending Muslims today. Chaplin wrote in his autobiography, "Half-way through making The Great Dictator I began receiving alarming messages from United Artists. They had been advised by the Hays Office that I would run into censorship trouble. Also the English office was very concerned about an anti-Hitler picture and doubted whether it could be shown in Britain. But I was determined to go ahead, for Hitler must be laughed at." Nowadays, Muslim terrorists can only be theatrically mocked in indie productions like "Jihad, The Musical." Hollywood producers don't want to end up like Theo van Gogh.

While the best direct defense against the jihad is to return it to its senders in their own homes sped along with fearful firepower, the best indirect defense at home against Muslim terrorism is to simply refuse to be terrorized. The main aim of Muslim terrorists is not simply to kill people for Islam but to deliver a psychological bomb in the collective mind of the populace which paralyzes them with fear or prompts wildly exaggerated reaction to the benefit of the attackers. The best way to defuse that fear is through mockery as delivered through theater pieces such as "Jihad, the Musical."

Jeff at Beautiful Atrocities improves upon the Edinburgh production with an alternate script for the musical: Mohammed, the protagonist, opens with "I'm gonna wash that Jew right outa my hair!" Robert Fisk, masochistic lefty journalist, is beaten up by madrassa boys, to his delight, singing how much he and the West deserve it in "I've Been a Bad, Bad Boy." Mohammed sings "What I Did For Jihad." John Walker Lindh belts out "A Long Way From Whole Foods!" Osama bin Laden gloats to his Al Qaeda lieutenants about the World Trade Center attacks in "My Bad" while the Taliban chorus sings "Pushing Up Daisy Cutters." Mohammed is released from Gitmo into a changed world he scarcely recognizes where democracy reigns in Iraq and Afghanistan and the Arab world is aflame with pro-democracy protests. Mohammed laments his lost dream of a world submitting to Sharia law in "Who Let the Genie Out?"

Now, I'd pay to see that.

Another Bad Day In The Jihad

While I hestitate to offer tips to the jihadis attempting to ambush our fabulous troops in Iraq, I don't think I'm giving away the game when I say it's a bad idea, a very bad idea indeed, to be planting your IEDs when our troops are lurking nearby with night vision and a big ass gun, unless you're very intent on hooking up with them there seventy-two virgins. Watch it here.

Strategy Page places incidents like this ambush of ambushers in perspective:

"In a very good month, Iraqis make a hundred or more attacks a day on American troops, and kill, on average, about four of them. While the terrorists make a big deal out of every American killed, they know that most of their attacks were not only failures, but got a lot of their buddies killed. On average, 10-20 terrorists die for every American killed. This has been going on for years, and an increasing number of Iraqi fighters are demoralized and quitting. Many either become informers, or surrender and speak freely. This is resulting in fresher intelligence, and raids that are catching terrorist cells preparing for operations, and in possession of weapons, bombs and incriminating documents."

Let's do the math, shall we? If a band of insurgents makes a hundred attacks and loses forty to eighty guys to kill four Americans, that means they will suffer one dead insurgent every one to three attacks. Traditionally, combatants suffer three to four wounded for every one killed. The insurgents are generally neighborhood gangs. That means that a band of a dozen insurgents would be killed and wounded after a dozen attacks, at best. More likely, after a fight or two where one of their buddies got killed and a couple others got badly wounded, they'd get out of the insurgency business.

That sounds like defeat to me, though not the kind that's being marketed to us in the media.

Saddam Still Dead

When Saddam Hussein was hanged on December 30, 2006 the Iraqi government planned to bury him in a secret and unmarked grave. A delegation of men from Saddam's hometown of Awja argued against it and somehow won their point, receiving his body and spiriting it back home the next morning to bury it in the courtyard of a mosque. A few hours later they dug it up and buried it under the rotunda of a two-story reception hall given to the village as a gift from Saddam, now named "Martyr's Hall." There he is visited by only a handful of mourners each day, most of them his loyalists.

Even one of the delegation who brought him home doesn't admire him much. Abdullah Hussein Ejbarah was an official of the Baath party and an officer in Saddam's elite Special Republican Guard until members of his tribe tried to assassinate Saddam in 1993. Abdullah survived by the skin of his teeth. Now he's the 50-year-old deputy governor of Salahuddin Province, which has its capital at Tikrit, not far from Awja. Says Ejbarah, "Saddam Hussein led the country into destruction, and in doing so destroyed himself and his family, and led us into the present chaos."

The Hussein family has buried six others outside Martyr's Hall, including Saddam's thoroughly contemptible sons Uday and Qusay, and three of his henchman who were hanged shortly after Saddam.

Iranians Are Begging To Be Invaded

From Strategy Page:

"July 21, 2007: A recent opinion survey showed that 58 percent of Iranians would support a foreign invasion to overthrow the current religious dictatorship. However, nearly 70 percent would prefer a popular, but non-violent, revolution, like the one that tossed out European communist dictatorships in 1989-90. Worse, 92 percent do not approve of how their government operates.

"Only eleven percent oppose democracy, and 72 percent did not support the "Islamic Revolution" that has dominated the country for 28 years. Still, most Iranians are not willing to fight, knowing that the minority of Iranians who do support the government are armed and willing to kill Iranians that oppose them.

"The survey also showed that 78 percent of Iranians believe the country should have nuclear power, but only 46 percent believed they should have nuclear weapons. Interestingly, 52 percent believed that Western Europe would accept Iran having nuclear power. People are not happy with the government foreign policy, with 60 percent opposing support of Hizbollah, 56 percent oppose support for Hamas, and 70 percent oppose the destruction of Israel. However, a third of the population agreed with president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's contention that the World War II German death camp program, that killed six million Jews, never happened".