Robert Spencer's New Book and Conference Call

Ocean Guy was in on a Conference Call with Robert Spencer, who is coming out with a new book: The Truth About Muhammad. I'm still working on his Politically Correct Guide to Islam (and the Crusades)

I just checked Amaon, and the complete title of his new book is:
The Truth About Muhammad: Founder of the World's Most Intolerant Religion

Ocean Guy has links if you want to know what went on at the Conference Call.
I'm sure it wasn't boring.

Technorati Tag: Robert Spencer.

The Majority of Muslims Cannot Read The Qur'an

In The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam, Robert Spencer writes that not every Muslim is a terrorist. Why not? Because since

the Qur'an is in difficult, classical Arabic, and must be read and recited during Muslim prayers in that language only, a surprisingly large number of those who identify themselves as Muslims have scant acquaintance with what it actually says. (p. 43)

According to Spencer, for Muslims this applies not only to the classical Arabic of the Qur'an, but to modern Arabic as well--and the Qur'an is often memorized by rote without having any clear idea of what it actually says.

That last point is substantiated by the New York Times in an article about the Muslim Center of New York, where students from 7 to 14 years old spend the entire day from 8am to 5pm, including the summer, just memorizing the Qur'an. Ann Althouse points out this arrangement violates the laws of compulsory schooling. But the article also points out one of the things that makes the memorizing so challenging:

Making the work even more difficult, the students, for the most part, do not understand what they are reciting. Muslims believe the Koran was spoken to the prophet Muhammad by the angel Gabriel in Arabic. Because it is seen as the literal word of God, the use of translations is frowned upon. Students know how to pronounce the words but mostly do not know what they mean.

Going one step further, Raphael Patai, in The Arab Mind, writes that the difficulty in understanding the Qur'an extends not only to the non-Arab Muslims, but to Arabs themselves:

The unschooled, who form the majority in most Arab countries, speak a local, colloquial dialect which is so different from literary Arabic as to make it appear almost a foreign language...They have their own language, which is adequate for all their needs and which is the only tongue they know, apart from a few verses from the Koran which are in literary Arabic, and which make them aware of the existence of a literary language that is greatly different from their own idiom (p.196)

As far as the educated Arabs who can understand the classical Arabic of the Qur'an:

Even among the educated Arabs, the knowledge of the literary language is primarily a passive one. they know it well enough to understand it, enjoy it, come under its magnetic influence; but they do not know it well enough to speak it with any degree of fluency.

Keep in mind that according to Patai, the uneducated Arabs who do not understand the Qur'an make up 90% of the Arab population. (p. 198)

Michael Cook writes in The Koran: A Very Short Introduction, on the options on how to deal with the Arabic barrier:

There are only two clear-cut solutions to this problem: either the believers have to learn Arabic, or the Koran has to be translated...mass literacy in a foreign language is not a very realistic educational project...[and] the non-Arab Muslim world shows little sign of adopting the idea of a vernacular scripture in the manner of sixteenth-century Protestantism or twentieth-century Catholicism. (p. 26-7)

That is not to say that the Qur'an has not been translated.

In Why I Am Not a Muslim, Ibn Warraq writes in his introduction:

The majority of Muslims have to read the Koran in translation in order to understand it. Contrary to what one might think, there have been translations of the Koran into, for instance, Persian, since the tenth or eleventh century, and there are translations into Turkish and Urdu. The Koran has now been translated into over a hundred languages, many of them by Muslims themselves, despite some sort of disapproval from the religious authorities.

So, bottom line is--so what? What does it matter whether Muslims can read the Qur'an in the original Arabic or have to read it in translation?

For one thing, Ibn Warraq writes that some Muslims claim that outsiders are not qualified to critique what is written in the Qur'an until they are actually able to read it in the original. In light of the fact that a majority of Muslims themselves cannot read and understand the Qur'an in the original, such a counter-argument falls short.

More importantly, as alluded to by Robert Spencer, the difficulty of the language of the Qur'an to some degree has allowed for some level of moderation with Islam by keeping some of it's more extreme statements out of the limelight. So what happens now that the number of translations and their availability is on the rise?

According to Andrew Bostom, author of The Legacy of Jihad, in a response to an email:

The Koran is now available in translation to local languages on an unprecedented scale in history...This, in my humble opinion, fuels Islamic fundamentalism...

Crossposted at Israpundit

Technorati Tag: Islam and Koran and Quran and Arabic.

Muhammad: A Prophet for Our Time

That's not a cynical thought; it's the title of Karen Armstrong's new book (and a cynical thought). Efraim Karsh reviews Armstrong's book for the New York Sun.

He explains that Armstrong is one of those that claims that 'Jihad' is the quest for self-improvement as opposed to Holy War--that Islamist terrorist attacks are extremist reactions to arrogant US policy. As a result, according to Karsh:

"Muslims have never nurtured dreams of world conquest," wrote Karen Armstrong, a prominent representative of this view, shortly after September 11. "They had no designs on Europe, for example, even though Europeans imagined that they did. Once Muslim rule had been established in Spain, it was recognized that the empire could not expand indefinitely."

But the Moslem occupation of Spain, 2,000 miles from Arabia, was not the end of their imperialism--from there they invaded France, where they were defeated in 732 at the battle of Poitiers.

Bernard Lewis goes into even more detail. In What Went Wrong, Lewis describes century by century of Moslem expansionism:

In the course of the seventh century, Muslim armies advancing from Arabia conquered Syria, Palestine, Egypt, and North Africa, all until then part of Christendom, and most of the new recruits to Islam, west of Iran and Arabia, were indeed converts from Christianity. (p.4, emphasis added)

That, of course, was just the beginning. During the eighth century, Lewis describes how, using North Africa as their base, the Arab forces were joined by Berber converts as they went into Spain and Portugal and invaded France.

In the ninth century they conquered Sicily and sacked Rome--resulting in the Christian counter-attack known as the Crusades, hardly the offensive unprovoked attack that the Arab world condemns.

In the thirteenth century, the Tartars conquered Russia and later converted to Islam--meaning that Russia and much of Eastern Europe was subjected to Moslem rule till they freed themselves in the late 15th century.

During a third wave of attacks, the Ottoman Turks conquered Anatolia, captured Constantinople, invaded the Balkan peninsula and reached as far as Vienna.

Armstrong also writes that Mohammed himself was really a man of peace:

"whose aim was peace and practical compassion" and who "literally sweated with the effort to bring peace to war-torn Arabia"; an altruistic social reformer of modest political ambitions, whose life was "a tireless campaign against greed, injustice, and arrogance" and who founded "a religion and cultural tradition that was not based on the sword but whose name — ‘Islam' — signified peace and reconciliation."

Karsh counters that such a description is a whitewash, because in fact:

the Qur'anic revelations during Muhammad's Medina years abound with verses extolling the virtues of fighting "in the path of Allah," as do the countless sayings and traditions (hadith) attributed to the prophet. As he told his followers in his farewell address: "I was ordered to fight all men until they say ‘There is no god but Allah.'" Had it not been for his sudden death, Muhammad probably would have expanded his control well beyond the peninsula.

But Armstrong goes even further in painting her picture of Mohammed and Islam:

Ms. Armstrong glibly claims that "Later in the Islamic empires, Jews would enjoy full religious liberty and anti-Semitism would not become a Muslim vice until the Arab/Israeli conflict became acute in the mid-twentieth century." For one thing, such ahistorical analysis ignores the deep anti-Jewish bigotry dating to Islam's earliest days, which made it highly receptive to the worst precepts of Christian anti-Semitism, such as the "blood libel." For another thing, Armstrong overlooks Islam's pervasive mistreatment of its non-Muslim subjects, or Dhimmis as they are commonly known, who have been allowed to practice their religions in return for a distinctly inferior legal and institutional status, rife with social indignities and at times open persecution. [emphasis added]

Jews had "full religious liberty"? Jews were dhimmis and by definition had second class citizen status, with limits on any form of public religious expression that would annoy their Moslem rulers.

Wikipedia has a documented, if disputed, section on the limitations on the religious practice of dhimmis:

Although dhimmis were allowed to perform their religious rituals, they were obliged to do so in a manner not conspicuous to Muslims. Display of non-Muslim religious symbols, such as crosses or icons, was prohibited on buildings and on clothing (unless mandated as part of distinctive clothing). Loud prayers were forbidden, as was the ringing of church bells or the trumpeting of shofars. According to one hadith, Muhammad said: "The bell is the musical instrument of the Satan." (Sahih Muslim 24:5279). This hadith actually refers to music in general, this is not aimed at Church bells.

Dhimmis had the right to choose their own religious leaders: patriarchs for Christians, exilarchs and geonim for Jews. However, the choice of the community was subject to the approval of the Muslim authorities, who sometimes blocked candidates or took the side of the party that offered the larger bribe.

Dhimmis were prohibited from proselytizing on pain of death. Neither were they allowed to obstruct the spread of Islam in any manner. Other restrictions included a prohibition on publishing or sale of non-Muslim religious literature and a ban on teaching the Qur’an.

As required by the Pact of Umar, dhimmis had to bury their dead without loud lamentations and prayers. Incidents of harassment of dhimmi funeral processions by Muslims, involving pelting with stones, battery, spitting, or cursing, even by Muslim children, were common regardless of place and time. [go to their site for hyperlinks and footnotes]

But historically, Moslems resorted to more than just harrassment in their mistreatment of Jews. Mitchell Bard gives a summary:

At various times, Jews in Muslim lands were able to live in relative peace and thrive culturally and economically. The position of the Jews was never secure, however, and changes in the political or social climate would often lead to persecution, violence and death. Jews were generally viewed with contempt by their Muslim neighbors; peaceful coexistence between the two groups involved the subordination and degradation of the Jews.

When Jews were perceived as having achieved too comfortable a position in Islamic society, anti-Semitism would surface, often with devastating results: On December 30, 1066, Joseph HaNagid, the Jewish vizier of Granada, Spain, was crucified by an Arab mob that proceeded to raze the Jewish quarter of the city and slaughter its 5,000 inhabitants. The riot was incited by Muslim preachers who had angrily objected to what they saw as inordinate Jewish political power.

Similarly, in 1465, Arab mobs in Fez slaughtered thousands of Jews, leaving only 11 alive, after a Jewish deputy vizier treated a Muslim woman in "an offensive manner." The killings touched off a wave of similar massacres throughout Morocco.

Other mass murders of Jews in Arab lands occurred in Morocco in the 8th century, where whole communities were wiped out by Muslim ruler Idris I; North Africa in the 12th century, where the Almohads either forcibly converted or decimated several communities; Libya in 1785, where Ali Burzi Pasha murdered hundreds of Jews; Algiers, where Jews were massacred in 1805, 1815 and 1830 and Marrakesh, Morocco, where more than 300 hundred Jews were murdered between 1864 and 1880.⁾

Decrees ordering the destruction of synagogues were enacted in Egypt and Syria (1014, 1293-4, 1301-2), Iraq (854-859, 1344) and Yemen (1676). Despite the Koran's prohibition, Jews were forced to convert to Islam or face death in Yemen (1165 and 1678), Morocco (1275, 1465 and 1790-92) and Baghdad (1333 and 1344).

Karsh fittingly concludes his review of Armstrong's book:

"If we are to avoid catastrophe, the Muslim and Western worlds must learn not merely to tolerate but to appreciate one another," Ms. Armstrong emphatically concludes her book. I couldn't agree more. Provided of course this is done in good faith and without rewriting the historical truth, let alone violently suppressing critical minds and dissenting voices.

Armstrong's book will not bring us any closer to the goal which Armstrong claims to seek.

Crossposted at Israpundit

Technorati Tag: Efraim Karsh and Karen Armstrong and Mohammed and Dhimmis and Islam.

The Great Thing About the Pope Controversy...

is the ridiculous quotes:

The head of Cairo’s Al-Azhar university Sheikh Mohammed Sayyed Tantawi said Saturday the pontiff’s comments “betray a clear ignorance of Islam and attribute to the faith things which have nothing to do with it”.

You mean like Mohammed's "command to spread by the sword the faith he preached"? Who's kidding whom?

"The declarations from the pope are more dangerous than the cartoons, because they come from the most important Christian authority in the world — the cartoons just came from an artist," said Diaa Rashwan, an analyst in Cairo, Egypt, who studies Islamic militancy.

The cartoons 'just came from an artist'--now they realize that?

"He has a dark mentality that comes from the darkness of the Middle Ages. He is a poor thing that has not benefited from the spirit of reform in the Christian world," Kapusuz told Turkish state media. "It looks like an effort to revive the mentality of the Crusades."

...at a time when the Moslem world is reviving the mentality of the Jihad that brought about the original Crusades in the first place.

"One would expect a religious leader such as the pope to act and speak with responsibility and repudiate the Byzantine emperor's views in the interests of truth and harmonious relations between the followers of Islam and Catholicism," said Muhammad Abdul Bari, the council's secretary-general.

And just what have Moslems been up to "in the interests of truth and harmonious relations between the followers of Islam and Catholicism" in Bethlehem?

"Anyone who describes Islam as a religion as intolerant encourages violence," Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Tasnim Aslam said.

If you say Islam is intolerant...you'll force them to be intolerant?

Even the good folks at Reuters are getting into the act. On the Muslim Brotherhood, which demanded a personal apology:

The Muslim Brotherhood is a political Islamist group founded in Egypt which has inspired movements across the Arab world.

And what kind of movements have the Moslem Brotherhood inspired?

As stated on its charter and its website, the Muslim Brotherhood seeks to install an Islamic totalitarian empire and a worldwide Caliphate, through stages designed to Islamize targeted nations by whatever means available. Although the Brotherhood itself renounced violence in the 1970s, many of its branches continue to practice violence through terrorism and assassination.

Oh, those kinds of movements.

Technorati Tag: Israel.

The Koran and Reading Incomprehension

From Ann Althouse:

The NYT has what seems meant to read as a charming human interest piece about "children" -- really, boys -- who are sent to school in New York City for 9 hours a day to work exclusively on the task of memorizing the Koran.

But this level of devotion to Islam has a way of causing suspicion these days. While parents whose children are in the schools said they were proud of them, they also worry about how they will be perceived.

How they will be perceived? This isn't a matter of stimulating the supposed ethnic prejudice of Americans, it's blatantly violating the laws of compulsory schooling!

The young boys are taught that if they memorize the entire Koran, they will gain admittance to heaven and the right to choose 10 persons to bring along with them. If believed, this is a powerful incentive. There is a sense that the entire family is relying on him. Meanwhile, these boys -- who must be quite smart to have a shot at memorizing the 6,200 verses -- are deprived of all other education, including instruction in Arabic, the language of the text they are memorizing phonetically. (Nor are they provided with a translation: they are learning only to pronounce sounds.)

I'm out of town right now, but at home I have a copy of Robert Spencer's The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (and the Crusades), where he writes about the significant number of Muslims who do not know what the Koran actually says.

I don't recall if he had more than annecdotal evidence for this claim, but this would seem to add credence to what he wrote.

Certainly knowing--and discussing--the text is part of learning, and memorizing Shas. The Baal Koreh's I know do more than just blindly memorize the Torah.

Then again, I suppose that blindly memorizing the Koran without having a clue as to what they are reading would be an essential tool to creating equally blind followers.

Except that this should not be happening on US soil.

Technorati Tag: Israel and Koran and Quran.

Historically, Arab Conquests Have Been An Occupational Hazard

With Arab talk of "Israeli Occupation," you might forget that what are today Arab countries today were not always that way. In The Arab Mind, Raphael Patai gives a short rundown:

Within eighty years after the death of Muhammad (632), the Arabs held sway over Spain, North Africa, Egypt, the Fertile Crescent and several contiguous areas, most of which have remained both Arab and Muslim to the present day. Successive generations carried the banner of Islam into more remote parts of the world, including, in the east, Central Asia as far as Mongolia, the Indian Peninusla, and Southeast Asia; in the west, the Balkans and Hungary; and in the south the wide Sudan belt of Africa. (p. 48)

Bernard Lewis makes the point even more clearly. In What Went Wrong, Lewis notes

In the course of the seventh century, Muslim armies advancing from Arabia conquered Syria, Palestine, Egypt, and North Africa, all until then part of Christendom, and most of the new recruits to Islam, west of Iran and Arabia, were indeed converts from Christianity. (p.4, emphasis added)

Lewis describes how the Moslem invasions did not stop there.

During the eighth century, using North Africa as their base, the Arab forces were joined by Berber converts as they went into Spain and Portugal and invaded France.

In the ninth century they conquered Sicily and sacked Rome--resulting in the Christian counter-attack known as the Crusades, hardly the offensive unprovoked attack that the Arab world condemns.

In the thirteenth century, the Tartars conquered Russia and later converted to Islam--meaning that Russia and much of Eastern Europe was subjected to Moslem rule till they freed themselves in the late 15th century.

During a third wave of attacks, the Ottoman Turks conquered Anatolia, captured Constantinople, invaded the Balkan peninsula and reached as far as Vienna.

Bernard Lewis writes:

At the peak of Islamic power, there was only one civilization that was comparable in the level quality and variety of achievement; that of course was China. (p. 6)

The difference being that China was limited to one area.

So historically, the Arabs have the distinction of being The World's Greatest Occupational Power.

And you know what that means. Like any other occupational force, the occupying forces of the Moslem army had to deal with the occupied population--though not in terms of terrorist militant counter-attacks.

In The Crisis of Islam, Lewis writes

By this time the jihad had become almost entirely defensive--resisting the Reconquest in Spain and Russia, resisting the movements for national self-liberation by the Christian subjects of the Ottoman Empire, and finally, as Muslims see it, defending the very heartlands of Islam against infidel attack. (p. 34 emphasis added)

By contrast, pre-1948 Palestine was a bargain--where Jews were willing to share a land that never lacked for some Jewish presence, in spite of its desolation at the hands of the Arab occupation, as recorded by Mark Twain in Innocents Abroad:

Palestine sits in sackcloth and ashes. Over it broods the spell of a curse that has withered its fields and fettered its energies...Renowned Jerusalem itself, the stateliest name in history, has lost all its ancient grandeur, and is becorme a pauper village...

...Palestine is desolate and unlovely. And why should it be otherwise? Can the curse of the Deity beautify a land? (online here)

But the Arab occupier-as-occupied claim goes along with similar claims made regarding the Taj Mahal and their continued claim to Spain. As Ephraim Karsh writes:

the fact is that the fuel of Islamic imperialism remains as volatile as ever, and is very far from having burned itself out. To deny its force is the height of folly, and to imagine that it can be appeased or deflected is to play into its hands. Only when it is defeated, and when the faith of Islam is no longer a tool of Islamic political ambition, will the inhabitants of Muslim lands, and the rest of the world, be able to look forward to a future less burdened by Saladins and their gory dreams.

But the first step is to recognize the threat, and we are not even up to that point yet.

Technorati Tag: Israel and Islamism and Middle East and Occupation and Arab.

These Pirates Didn't Sing Opera

I pray you, pardon me, ex-Pirate King!
Peers will be peers, and youth will have its fling.
The Pirates of Penzance

In an article appearing on National Review Online, Joshua E. London writes about the first case of an unprovoked attack on Americans by Muslim terrorists under the protection of Arab dictators--when Thomas Jefferson dealt with the Barbary pirates:

The Barbary states, modern-day Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, and Libya, are collectively known to the Arab world as the Maghrib (“Land of Sunset”), denoting Islam’s territorial holdings west of Egypt. With the advance of Mohammed’s armies into the Christian Levant in the seventh century, the Mediterranean was slowly transformed into the backwater frontier of the battles between crescent and cross. Battles raged on both land and sea, and religious piracy flourished.

The Maghrib served as a staging ground for Muslim piracy throughout the Mediterranean, and even parts of the Atlantic. America’s struggle with the terror of Muslim piracy from the Barbary states began soon after the 13 colonies declared their independence from Britain in 1776, and continued for roughly four decades, finally ending in 1815.

One of the key points London makes is to focus on the reason behind the ongoing conflict between these Moslems on the one hand and the US--which did not understand the reason for the attacks in the first place. The answer to that question was later explained at a meeting:

the 1786 meeting in London of Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, and Sidi Haji Abdul Rahman Adja, the Tripolitan ambassador to Britain. As American ambassadors to France and Britain respectively, Jefferson and Adams met with Ambassador Adja to negotiate a peace treaty and protect the United States from the threat of Barbary piracy.

These future United States presidents questioned the ambassador as to why his government was so hostile to the new American republic even though America had done nothing to provoke any such animosity. Ambassador Adja answered them, as they reported to the Continental Congress, “that it was founded on the Laws of their Prophet, that it was written in their Koran, that all nations who should not have acknowledged their authority were sinners, that it was their right and duty to make war upon them wherever they could be found, and to make slaves of all they could take as Prisoners, and that every Musselman who should be slain in Battle was sure to go to Paradise.” [emphasis added]

Based on this, Mr. London makes what should be a point well taken but one that will undoubtedly ignored anyway:

Note that America’s Barbary experience took place well before colonialism entered the lands of Islam, before there were any oil interests dragging the U.S. into the fray, and long before the founding of the state of Israel. [emphasis added]

True, Israel holds a special place in the hearts of Moslems, in part as the dhimmis that got away and are now the equals--and more--of the one-time Moslem empire.

After all, while Moslems are fond of pointing to "Palestine" as occupied territory, they tend to gloss over the history of the Moslem attempted expansion which started from the originally Christian areas of Syria, Palestine, Egypt, and North Africa, and invadedRussia, Belgrade, Spain, Budapest, and Vienna, France and Iceland--before the Moslem invaders were repulsed. (see Israeli Occupation? Moslems Are Just Being Modest) The Crusades were a reaction to Moslem imperialism, a piece of history that seems to get forgotten.

Daniel Johnson, a senior editor and columnist for the London Times and Daily Telegraph, and currently a columnist for the New York Sun writes in How To Think About The Crusades:

In that larger perspective, they take their place as a short-lived counteroffensive against another, much lengthier, and much more relentless holy war — namely, the Muslim jihad against Christendom. For the fact is that whereas the Crusades were a temporary phenomenon that flourished for some two centuries and had quite limited purposes, jihad is and has been a permanent and ubiquitous fact of Islamic life.

Jihad evolved into a doctrine of Islamic jurisprudence as a byproduct of the great Arab expansion after the death of the Prophet Muhammad, thus predating the First Crusade by more than four centuries. Muslim scholars were well aware of the uniqueness of this institution. Ibn Khaldun, the greatest of all Islamic historians and a key witness from the period just after the Crusades, compares Islam with Christianity and Judaism in this respect:

In the Muslim community, the holy war is a religious duty, because of the universalism of the Muslim mission and the obligation to convert everybody to Islam either by persuasion or force… . The other religious groups did not have a universal mission, and the holy war was not a religious duty to them, save only for purposes of defense.

But today, past history amounts to little. Quoting Santayana is droll. The Crusades were evil. The Moslems were victims--and don't even mention the 'C' word, lest you offend. Meanwhile, the Barbary pirates are forgotten. Moslems are not all evil, but without the viewpoint of history we are being led to the belief that the West, and Israel, is.

As long as millions of dollars are being offered to universities to offer even more courses on Islam, isn't it about time to finally have an honest presentation of Islam and Islamic history--warts and all--instead of babying those who claim that Islam and Moslems are just being misunderstood. It's time for Islamic studies not only to grow but also grow up.

Crossposted at Israpundit

Technorati Tags: Israel and Islam and Crusades.

Bush's War

President Bush spoke today about the "War on Terror" at the National Endowment for Democracy.

Apparently the speech got a number of favorable reviews in the blogosphere. Instapundit, for one writes about

Bush giving a really first-rate speech on foreign policy and the war to the National Endowment for Democracy. Notable features -- besides its overall clarity -- are the naming of Iran and Syria, and his willingness to talk about a war against Islamic terror, not just generic "terror."

In his speech, Bush mentioned Israel twice in passing. Here is the second reference:

Over the years these extremists have used a litany of excuses for violence -- the Israeli presence on the West Bank, or the U.S. military presence in Saudi Arabia, or the defeat of the Taliban, or the Crusades of a thousand years ago. In fact, we're not facing a set of grievances that can be soothed and addressed. We're facing a radical ideology with inalterable objectives: to enslave whole nations and intimidate the world. No act of ours invited the rage of the killers -- and no concession, bribe, or act of appeasement would change or limit their plans for murder.

So according to Bush, the West Bank is an "excuse for violence" and "no concession, bribe, or act of appeasement would change or limit their plans for murder."

That's all well and good as far as it goes, but Bush is not talking about Palestinian terrorism--he's talking about Islamist terrorism--and since Bush does not connect Palestinian terrorism with Islamist terrorism, he will still be putting pressure on Israel.

Actually, Bush is taking the claim of the Palestinian terrorists ('return the West Bank') and applying it to the Islamist terrorists who in fact proclaim outright that their goal is to destroy Israel. Bush does not mention Palestinian terrorism in his speech.

At the White House web site, if you do a search for "palestinian terrorism" you get 3 hits, none of which include Bush, Cheney, or any White House representative using the term--just the term being used by the the questioner. That's not a scientific survey and may not indicate anything, but I think it may be part of the distinction being made between Palestinian terrorism versus Islamist terrorism as opposed to the equating of Abbas & Company with Iraq's democractic government (which I've mentioned before)--an equation that is patently absurd.

Bottom line, Bush is still buying into the politically correct version of terrorism shared by the world--he may refer to Iran and Syria by name and talk about Islamic terror instead of just terror, but he uses the world "militant" 11 times while using the world "terrorist" 7 times.

In a prepared speech that is supposed to clarify who the enemies of the US are, I think that is odd.

And there is nothing to indicate that Bush is recognizing the mess that is the PA.

Bush is not clarifying, just repackaging.
And putting the same old wine into new bottles isn't making it taste any better.

Technorati Tag: Israel.