Category Archives: Islam

‘Remembering the World Trade Center’

Islam, Terrorism, The West

Every year since September 11, 2001, New Yorker Chris Matthew Sciabarra (who was gracious enough to endorse my book) has written a tribute to the World Trade Center. In 2003 he penned this:

“We all knew that these buildings had come to symbolize so much of what made New York great. That’s one of the reasons they were targeted. It’s the kind of thing that led the novelist and philosopher Ayn Rand to write in The Fountainhead, fifty years earlier, that New York’s skyline was ‘the will of man made visible. She wrote'”:

Is it beauty and genius people want to see? Do they seek a sense of the sublime? Let them come to New York, stand on the shore of the Hudson, look and kneel. When I see this city from my window—no, I don’t feel how small I am—but I feel that if a war came to threaten this, I would like to throw myself into space, over the city, and protect these buildings with my body.

Read Chris’ poignant yearly tributes here.

‘Remembering the World Trade Center’

Islam, Terrorism, The West

Every year since September 11, 2001, New Yorker Chris Matthew Sciabarra (who was gracious enough to endorse my book) has written a tribute to the World Trade Center. In 2003 he penned this:

“We all knew that these buildings had come to symbolize so much of what made New York great. That’s one of the reasons they were targeted. It’s the kind of thing that led the novelist and philosopher Ayn Rand to write in The Fountainhead, fifty years earlier, that New York’s skyline was ‘the will of man made visible. She wrote'”:

Is it beauty and genius people want to see? Do they seek a sense of the sublime? Let them come to New York, stand on the shore of the Hudson, look and kneel. When I see this city from my window—no, I don’t feel how small I am—but I feel that if a war came to threaten this, I would like to throw myself into space, over the city, and protect these buildings with my body.

Read Chris’ poignant yearly tributes here.

Adam Yahiye Gadahn Pearlman?

Government, Islam, Terrorism

The individual I mentioned in “Lunatic Government Occupies Airports” has surfaced again. Adam Yahiye Gadahn, now a propagandist for Al-Qaida in Pakistan, is originally a Pearlman from California.

Gadahn has called on Americans and other unbelievers to convert to Islam. You can read more about it here. I mentioned him in that column in the context of rational profiling at airports. I said that,

“If young Jews were as well-represented among suicide bombers and airline hijackers as Muslims are, I’d want the TSA’s canine teams to sniff them out instead of being sicced on Joe Scarborough’s baby girl. Remember Adam Yahiye Gadahn of Al-Qaida, Pakistan? He turned out to be a Pearlman from California. Had Gadahn, aka Pearlman, represented the tip of a Jewish Jihadist iceberg, I’d recommend that young Jews be frisked. So far, this (partly) Jewish John Walker Lindh has proven to be an extreme exception to the rule, like the Tamils.â€?

A few readers wrote to correct me. For the purpose of the column, I had treated Gadahn as a Jew. But, they said, only his grandfather (and father too, until conversion, it would appear) were Jewish. That’s perfectly true: By rabbinical law, Gadahn was not Jewish. By Hitlerian law, he was and still is Jewish.

Although his Jewish lineage is indeed weak, had I not introduced him in the context of profiling, I’d have been accused of conveniently ignoring the possibility that young Jews, especially members of the left-liberal faith, could join a terrorist group and might need to be profiled. As I suggested to a law professor from the “Volokh Conspiracy,” I needed to rule out that eventuality.

From Bondage to Freedom

Islam, Israel, Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, Media, Middle East

Fox Correspondent Steve Centanni and cameraman Olaf Wiig were freed, after being held in Palestinian captivity for two weeks. Hostage taking is a developing industry in the PA, an import from “liberated” Iraq, it would seem. Better that than, say, working for a living.

I don’t mean to criticize the two men. They had to placate their captors. I fully understand and sympathize with that. I’m just not quite clear on the conclusions Centanni and Wiig drew from their harrowing ordeal:

Said Centanni: “the Palestinian people are very beautiful and kind-hearted,” a sentiment Wiig reiterated by expressing his fear that the plight of the Beauteous Ones would be left untold if such unlovely acts proliferated. (No such luck: the most rehashed story ever will continue to be rehashed, and the resolution of the so-called Palestinian problem tied to every treaty or agreement imaginable. I hear Pigmy tribes won’t parcel out a piece of rain forest without a promise that the plight of the Palestinian people be solved.)

Centanni related that they “were forced to convert to Islam at gunpoint.” But incase viewers took issue with Centanni’s use of the word “forced,” or if they understood him to mean he would not have converted voluntarily, Centanni quickly qualified: “Don’t get me wrong here,” he told Fox. “I have the highest respect for Islam, and I learned a lot of good things about it, but it was something we felt we had to do because they had the guns…”

Despite the oddly inverse conclusions the two freed media men drew from the experience, they hastily departed for Israel through the northern Erez border crossing. As the old adage goes, actions speak louder than words.