Free Republic

It is increasingly hard to draw a line between the agendas of the violent and non-violent -- Who says that Islamists can't learn a trick or two from the West when they have to? Take a glance at the glossy brochure of Islam Expo - billed as Europe's “biggest Islamic cultural festival” - which ended at Olympia yesterday. You could be forgiven for thinking that you were looking at the catalogue for the forthcoming Boden sale that comes to the venerable London exhibition centre in a few weeks' time. Visitors to Islam Expo would have witnessed such innocent activities as...

My Contentions colleague Abe Greenwald takes a gloomy view of a new Gallup survey that shows 93 percent of the world’s Muslims are moderates. “We need to find out from one billion rational human beings why they largely refuse to stand up for humanity and dignity instead of cowering in the face of fascist thugs,” he wrote. First of all, I’d like to agree with Abe’s point that even this sunny survey suggests we still have a serious problem. If seven percent of the world’s Muslims are radical, we’re talking about 91 million people. That’s 65 times the population of...

Ever since his first post-9/11 speech summoning the nation to a war against terrorism, President Bush has stressed that “our war is against evil, not against Islam.” Indeed, his administration has branded the terrorists as “traitors to their own faith”—outlaws who are “trying, in effect, to hijack Islam itself.” There is no reason to doubt the sincerity of such pronouncements. But they also reflect a strategic imperative—namely, to prevent the jihadists from attracting wide support in the Muslim world. The goal of Bush’s policy is, rather, to call forth the Muslim majority against the acts and ideology of the terrorists....

After the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, Muslim immigrants were seen as a potential threat in the United States. They have since become model citizens -- and now they want a greater say in politics. Why shouldn't we wear head scarves? It is almost 1 p.m., time for noon prayers, and Abdul Malik Mujahid, 55, is in his office on the second floor of Chicago's Downtown Islamic Center, preparing for his sermon. On his desk are a Koran, a pad of paper and a Blackberry. A telephone rings in the next room as people hurry through the corridors. Soon Mujahid...

PBS Affiliates to air ABG Film's- "ISLAM V. ISLAMISTS: VOICES FROM THE MUSLIM CENTER with follow-up Panel Discussion" August 9, 2007 AIFD Press Release Phoenix, Arizona: 1. AIFD Calls your attention to the official release and national distribution by Oregon Public Broadcasting (OPB) of Islam v. Islamists: Voices from the Muslim Center with a follow-up discussion. This documentary was set to be part of the high-profile Corporation of Public Broadcasting (CPB) Crossroads Program released in April 2007 before CPB reviewers refused to allow its release. Now through an agreement reached between CPB and ABG Films, Inc. and OPB, the film...

A Bridge to 'Moderate' Islam Is In Fact a Road to Hell Amil Imani - 8/8/2007 Islam is a religion of peace and the great majority of Muslims are not party to any plans and actions of the radicals’- so claim academic pundits, leftist journalists, and hired Islamic apologists. The incantation of these “authorities” is the lullaby that puts the people into a sleep of complacency. Complacency and appeasement on the part of the free world and those well-meaning, non-practicing Muslims, can only serve Islam. There is no chance for co-existence with Islam. All one needs to know is to...

'Mullahgardi band karo': Peaceful rallies against violent mullahs Citizens of Islamabad and Rawalpindi on Thursday staged a peaceful protest against the violence of religious extremists who have been, trying to force their version of Islam on other people for sometime now. "Where's the writ of the state?" asked the biggest and the most prominent placard at the protest. The protest was a mix of women and extremists who had also launched the move to enforce sharia with seminary women in the lead. Strategic Analyst Shirin Mazari led the protestors who gathered barely a kilometre away from Constitution Avenue and walked...

Moderate Muslims Speak Out, But Not on PBS(CNSNews.com) - Islamists are working to build "parallel societies" with the aim of imposing strict Islamic law in parts of the West, according to a documentary the Public Broadcasting System has chosen not to air. "Islam vs. Islamists: Voices from the Muslim Center" highlights the work of moderate Muslims who oppose the Islamist agenda and are willing to speak out. PBS officials decided against airing the film, which PBS's Robert MacNeil told the Diane Rehm Show earlier this month was "one-sided" and "alarmist." Some of the key Muslim figures featured in the documentary...

The 2007 presidential elections in France have been characterized by the participation of a large number of French citizens of North African origin in the electoral process. Four applied for candidacy: the former mufti of Marseilles Soheib Bencheikh, [1] ambassador to France's Supreme Audio-Visual Council (CSA)Leila Bouachera, entrepreneur Rachid Nekkaz, and Zakaria Ben Mlouka, who holds both Tunisian and French citizenships. Only 12 of all applicants for candidacy managed to obtain the 500 mayors' signatures required to run - the most prominent of whom are Nicolas Sarkozy, Ségolène Royal, François Bayrou, and Jean-Marie Le Pen. None of the four prospective...

Identifying Key Partners and Audiences A critical part of U.S. network-building efforts, as well as in its broader public diplomacy and strategic communications policy, is identifying key partners and audiences. Difficulties in distinguishing potential allies from adversaries present a major problem to Western governments and organizations attempting to organize support for moderate Muslims. Work done by the RAND Corporation—in Cheryl Benard’s Civil Democratic Islam and Angel Rabasa et al., The Muslim World After 9/11—has begun to lay the framework for identifying ideological tendencies in the Muslim world,1 which is necessary in order to identify the sectors with which the United...

April 13, 2007, 1:37 a.m. PBS at a CrossroadsWhy is a film on moderate Islam being suppressed? By Frank J. Gaffney Jr. On March 21, the ranking Republican on the House Appropriations subcommittee that oversees the federal budgets of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) and Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) challenged the leaders of those two organizations concerning their handling of the film Islam vs. Islamists: Voices from the Muslim Center. The film was produced at a cost of some $675,000 in taxpayer funds for the PBS series “America at a Crossroads,� which will begin airing next week. As...

We can have hope for the future now that, for the first time, moderate Muslims collectively are speaking out against Jihad. FSM Contributing Editor Walid Phares explains why the recent Secular Islam Summit could be key to the success of this effort. ________________________________________________ A unusual conference, taking place on the West coast of Florida, drew the attention of many observers of the War of Ideas: The first Secular Islam Summit. Organized by the Center for Inquiry Transnational and various activists, the meeting included two dozen speakers and about two hundred participants from various backgrounds and nationalities. It took place at...

Abdullah says moderates must fight extremists Vir Sanghvi New Delhi, November 30, 2006 The time has come for moderate Muslims all over the world to stand up and fight the extremists within the community. In an exclusive interview to the Hindustan Times, King Abdullah of Jordan said, "Let the silent majority win the street back." King Abdullah said that Islam had been hijacked by a minority of extremists who had imposed their own agenda on the community. Further, he said, this agenda relied on miscommunication of Islam's tenets. All over Asia, Muslims who did not speak Arabic were often misled...

Is there a liberal Islam? Liberal International is betting that there is. In mid-November, several hundred representatives from some 90 liberal parties and institutions worldwide met in Marrakesh, Morocco, to talk about democracy and development. However, while not proclaimed out loud, there was another, delicate underlying purpose: to strengthen the weak liberal tendencies that exist in Muslim nations.Liberal InternationalTwenty-nine parties from the Islamic world were represented in the event, in addition to the Moroccan hosts. The delegates came from countries such as Egypt, Iraq, Turkey and Indonesia. There was even an invitee from the Palestinian Authority.It was the 54th Congress...

Shut up. When all is said and done -- when protestors junk their placards, when burning churches cool, when a murdered nun's grave grows grass -- "shut up" is the underlying message of Pope Rage, the latest fulmination to come from Islam, this time over Pope Benedict's recent lecture on faith and reason. When the pope argued, quoting a Byzantine source on Muhammad, that the practice of forced conversion -- key to Islamic expansion over the centuries -- is inimical to both faith and reason, the reaction of anger and violence was instantaneous. Just shut up, the umma exclaimed. Pakistani...

CAIRAccording to Dr. Daniel Pipes, Omar Ahmad, the long-serving chairman of CAIR, the Council on American-Islamic Relations, reportedly told a crowd of California Muslims in July 1998, “Islam isn’t in America to be equal to any other faith, but to become dominant. The Koran ... should be the highest authority in America, and Islam the only accepted religion on earth.” The arrest of Ghassan ElashiIn 2005, three Dallas-area brothers were convicted of supporting terrorism by funnelling money to a high-ranking official in the militant Palestinian group Hamas. Ghassan and Bayan Elashi and their company were found guilty of all 21...

Many of us are only concerned with reputation and image, our image in the media, and the reputation of the Muslims in the world, but they do not care about reforming the original source, their children. When US President George W. Bush described those who plotted to kill thousands of passengers in ten airliners as Muslim fascists, protests from a number of Islamic societies in the west and the east were voiced against this description. What is wrong with using a bad adjective to describe a terrorist as long as he is willing to personally call himself an Islamist; declares...

Many liberal Muslims in South-East Asia are trying to find a non-violent, middle way for their religion, writes Marian Wilkinson. SITTING in his prison cell in Malaysia on September 11, the former deputy prime minister, Anwar Ibrahim, knew almost immediately the 2001 al-Qaeda attacks in New York and Washington would irrevocably change his country, his religion and the whole Islamic world. "Never in Islam's history have the actions of so few of its followers caused the religion and its community of believers to be such an abomination in the eyes of others," Anwar wrote passionately in Who Hijacked Islam?, a...

Why expect "moderate Muslims" to stand up to the Islamist radicals when our own newspaper editors won't? As Pericles told the war-battered Athenians, "To a man of spirit, cowardice and disaster coming together are far more bitter than death striking him unperceived at a time when he is full of courage and animated by the general hope." Yes, I know. Bit of a downer for an opening number, but that's the way I feel. I am by nature a happy warrior, but in this last month I've seen way too much cowardice and disaster coming together. The Danish cartoons story...

Where are the moderate Muslims? Sunday, March 12, 2006 Once I read that the number of Germans directly involved in the Holocaust — giving orders in Berlin, building the infrastructure of the death camps, rounding up victims, piloting trains, releasing the gas, hunting down escapees and so forth — was 100,000. In 1939 the population of the Reich was 80 million, so slightly more than one-tenth of 1 percent of the Germans were actually involved in murdering Jews. Yet, somehow, I never see anyone trying to clear the German volk of the guilt of the crimes of Hitler's "tiny extremist...

Once I read that the number of Germans directly involved in the Holocaust — giving orders in Berlin, building the infrastructure of the death camps, rounding up victims, piloting trains, releasing the gas, hunting down escapees and so forth — was 100,000. In 1939 the population of the Reich was 80 million, so slightly more than one-tenth of 1 percent of the Germans were actually involved in murdering Jews. Yet, somehow, I never see anyone trying to clear the German volk of the guilt of the crimes of Hitler's "tiny extremist minority." No, the verdict of history is that all...

FLORIDA -- It's true. Many Muslims do condemn terrorism - we just don't hear about it in the American news media. Yet Americans continue to ask: "Why don't Muslims condemn terrorism? We keep waiting for the so-called moderates to speak out against violence and yet no one comes forward." A man in the audience asked me this question recently when I was invited to speak at a Unitarian Fellowship about what Arabs think about the US and Americans. I had just finished saying that many of the Arab people I interviewed for my book a year ago in Egypt, Jordan...

http://www.ctv.ca/servlet/ArticleNews/story/CTVNews/20051204/hostages_momspleas_051204/20051204?hub=TopStories The Iraqi Islamic party said such kidnappings tarnish the image of Islam and will have a "grave negative effect among those who call for ending ...

Shukhrat Masirokhunov met with Osama bin Laden, was trained by Khattab, recruited mujaheddin and fought Americans in Afghanistan. He also has firsthand knowledge about the situation in Chechnya A Tashkent city court delivered a guilty verdict against members of the Akromiylar movement who took part in the Andizhan events (May, 12-13, 2005). The authorities allege that militants from the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU) were also involved. Shukhrat Masirokhunov, 34, a former chief of the IMU counterintelligence service who was extradited from Pakistan several months ago, is now awaiting trial in Tashkent. He faces 20 years in prison. It is...

It must be a sign of the times that while the latest diatribe from the fugitive terrorist Ayman al-Zawahiri gets top media billing, the passing away of one of contemporary Islam’s most enlightened scholars receives virtually no mention. And, yet, Nurcholis Madjid, is certain to have a more lasting impact on the development of Islamic thought than either al-Zawahiri or his fellow fugitive Osama bin Laden. Madjid, who died last Monday aged 66, was one of Indonesia’s most daring Islamic thinkers and in large part responsible for the defeat of extremist and obscurantist currents that have emerged there in the...

PLAINFIELD, Ind. - A leading U.S. Muslim group called on President Bush Wednesday to show his support for mainstream Islam in this country and worldwide by meeting with the group next week in Chicago. Bush could make a powerful statement to the world's 1.2 billion Muslims by appearing at the annual meeting of the Islamic Society of North America, just as he showed his support for adherents of the religion when he visited a Washington mosque a few days after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, said Sayyid Syeed, the group's secretary general. ISNA, an umbrella organization of largely immigrant...

One of the nation's leading experts on Islam says that "moderate" Muslims are actually a tiny minority of the entire Islamic movement, with most Muslims either being jihadists or supportive of jihadists. Robert Spencer is the director of Jihad Watch and author of the book 'The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam and the Crusades'. He says there is a gross misunderstanding about moderate Muslims. "People talk about a tiny minority of extremists, [but] actually in terms of the truth about the Islamic world, it's the moderates who are the tiny minority -- not the jihadists," he says. Spencer says while...

Friendly advice to peaceful Muslims Posted: July 21, 2005 1:00 a.m. Eastern © 2005 WorldNetDaily.com There is a fast closing window of opportunity for the large majority of "peaceful Muslims" living in the United States and the United Kingdom. It is long past time for those Muslims who are not complicit with these radical Islamic clerics and their disciples who are preaching violence and hatred toward your host countries to actively get involved in exposing them. You are in the best position to know who these fanatics are. They live among you. They use your mosques to preach, teach and...

Since at least Sept. 11, 2001, the non-Muslim world at large has been waiting for that segment of the Muslim population designated as "moderate" to resolutely denounce terrorists who, in defiling its faith-tradition, have subverted Islam into a cult of death. The expectation there is a large, identifiable segment of "moderate" Muslims is a transposition to the Muslim world of the idea of "moderation" in politics and religion that sustains democracies. It is also a natural expectation that the sort of extremism associated with "jihadi" (war-mongering) politics of Muslim terrorism and suicide bombings would generate a counter-offensive by "moderate" Muslims,...

From media guru Kurtz, hardly a conservative or anti-Islamofascist radical. The veil of comfort in "moderate" Muslims is being pulled from everyone's eyes... A Real Bombshell By Howard Kurtz Washington Post Staff Writer Tuesday, July 19, 2005; 8:12 AM I'm going to take a brief break from the Rove wars to talk about the real war. Maybe I'm just a glass-half-empty kinda guy, but I found some recent poll numbers on attitudes toward terrorism pretty depressing. Others are spinning the study from Pew as good news because it shows a drop in support among Muslims for Osama and suicide bombers....

From media guru Kurtz, hardly a conservative or anti-Islamofascist radical. The veil of comfort in "moderate" Muslims is being pulled from everyone's eyes... A Real Bombshell By Howard Kurtz Washington Post Staff Writer Tuesday, July 19, 2005; 8:12 AM I'm going to take a brief break from the Rove wars to talk about the real war. Maybe I'm just a glass-half-empty kinda guy, but I found some recent poll numbers on attitudes toward terrorism pretty depressing. Others are spinning the study from Pew as good news because it shows a drop in support among Muslims for Osama and suicide bombers....

Dear Moderate Muslims, What’s up? I see that you guys have been in the news a lot lately. I thought I’d write you a letter and ask you some questions because it seems as if some Muslims are involved in some very bad stuff around the globe, i.e. targeting and killing innocent people and all in the name of your god. After the damnable 911 terror attacks, President Bush stated that, “Islam is a religion of peace” and the people who carried out these atrocious acts of war are the evil fringe adherents of a good religion. We’d all like...

Concerning the "paralysis of modern Muslims" in the face of Muslim extremist terror, which fellow TCSer Arnold Kling wrote on recently, I would suggest that a big reason for Muslim silence is, simply, terror. Steven Schwartz in a recent TCS article points to a type of spiritual renewal and reinforcement of traditional Muslim principles sans the "bloody stain" cast upon them by the Islamic terrorists. But the state of fear in which many Muslims find themselves is a formidable barrier to such a transformation. Americans and Britons have mainly shown anger and contempt for the Islamofascist terrorists. The Spanish? Well,...

Top Muslim leaders denounce some violence, aren't clear on West Days before the London bombings, many of the Muslim world's top religious leaders declared that much of the violence committed in Islam's name is not spiritually legitimate. More than 150 Muslim imams and scholars met in Jordan, called by King Abdullah II. The unprecedented statement they released could drain some of the faith-based power behind wars between Muslims in Iraq and elsewhere, some experts say. The impact on attacks like the ones against non-Muslim nations – the U.S., Spain and England, among others – are less obvious. It does not...

Driving back from the North Carolina mountains tonight, I heard an amazing commentary on NPR that fits into our discussion of the MSM’s heated search for a “moderate” version of Islam that it can hold up as some kind of majority viewpoint. This is part of the whole template that there are “fundamentalists” in all faiths who are equally dangerous in their often violent quest for the illusion of certainty and moral absolutes and then there are “moderates” who, if they all had their way, would all get along as they search for the Eternal Other.Here is the NPR link...

My father owns a business in the CBD area here in Auckland. We have a shop selling Persian rugs next to us and the owner is Iranian himself. He is a moderate Muslim (yep, the MSM definition of it no less) and seems to be very nice to us and other nearby shops' owners. Dad had this conversation with the owner yesterday regarding the London bombing: Dad: Did you read the papers this morning? Owner: Yes, a big news event. Dad: It's sad, isn't it? Owner: Well, the British got it upon themselves. You know that Americans and British have...

Tehran, 20 June (AKI) - Iran's former parliamentary speaker and reformist candidate in the presidential elections, Mehdi Karrubi has resigned from his official posts, including that of advisor for the Beit Rahbari, the secretariat to Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Seyyed Ali Khamenei. At the same time, the head of the Pasdaran or Revolutionary Guard, the elite hardline armed force that answers directly to Khamenei, has called on its commanders to "mobilise the troops" for the second ballot on Friday. In a letter published on Monday afternoon to confirm accusations of vote-rigging in the vote on Friday, Karrubi spoke of the...

While the world media has been consumed with speculation about the health and whereabouts of jihad leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, it has hardly noted at all a challenge he issued just before he was injured. Yet this challenge could in the long run prove to be more potent than the suicide bombings he continues to inspire in Iraq. It came in the form of an audiotape he released on May 20, in which he presents a detailed justification of his operations. His defense unfolds not on prudential, but on theological grounds: making copious reference to Islamic sources, Zarqawi does his...

 Zarqawi’s Islamic Challenge: Terror Leader Throws Down Gauntlet to Moderate Muslims by Robert Spencer Posted Jun 2, 2005 While the world media has been consumed with speculation about the health and whereabouts of jihad leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, it has hardly noted at all a challenge he issued just before he was injured. Yet this challenge could in the long run prove to be more potent than the suicide bombings he continues to inspire in Iraq. It came in the form of an audiotape he released on May 20, in which he presents a detailed justification of his operations. His...

Moderate Muslims are increasingly turning to Islam's sacred core - the Quran and the laws and traditions it inspires - to defend their views and discredit radicals as part of a ''counter-jihad'' for Islamic hearts and minds. Terrorist attacks by al-Qaida and other militant groups add urgency to the ideological debate, which challenges the dominance of Saudi Arabia's fundamentalist Wahhabist strain that has used its wealth and influence to mute moderate Islamic voices. ''The long and painful silence of moderate theologians and experts in Islam jurisprudence - who had been bought off or intimidated into silence - is finally starting...

A self-proclaimed 'moderate' Islamic website condones Palestinian suicide bombings against civilians. All decent human beings recoiled at the headline of January 5, 2003: Double-Suicide Bombing Kill 22, Wound 120 in Tel Aviv We all know how radical Islamists support these terrorist murderers. But what do the voices of "moderate" Islam have to say? Are we hearing an outcry from Islamic religious leaders in the Western world? The following Fatwa (Islamic legal religious opinion) is from the "Ask the Scholar" feature of www.Islam-Online.net. The question was asked and answered on January 5, 2003, the day of the double-suicide bombing in Tel...

Does it Exist? A leading intellectual figure and stalwart fighter in America's confrontation with radical Islam, Daniel Pipes is perhaps best known for his idea that "radical Islam is the problem, moderate Islam is the solution." As Pipes argues, radical Islam, though currently the dominant political force in the Muslim world, is supported by only 10 to 15 percent of Muslims worldwide, while moderate Islam represents the great, though so far mostly silent, majority of Muslims. He further points out that radical Islam, also known as militant Islam or Islamism, is a very recent phenomenon, having more in common with...

If it doesn't exist, then what? When people speak of moderate Islam as the solution to radical Islam, they mean that there is a modernizing core within the Muslim community capable of transforming it into a civilized member of the world community. They foresee that the dar al-Islam, the Realm of Islam, will cease to be at war with the dar al-Harb, the Realm of War, and particularly with that part of the Realm of War known as the West. I describe these ideas as the "ecumenist" school of Western-Islamic relations, because to believe in the existence of moderate Islam...

Moderate Muslims? By Daniel Pipes There is good news to report: the idea that "militant Islam is the problem, moderate Islam is the solution" is finding greater acceptance over time. But there is also bad news, namely growing confusion over who really is a moderate Muslim. This means that the ideological side of the war on terror is making some, but only limited, progress.The good news: Anti-Islamist Muslims are finding their voice since 9/11. Their numbers include distinguished academics such as Azar Nafisi (Johns Hopkins), Ahmed al-Rahim (formerly of Harvard), Kemal Silay (Indiana), and Bassam Tibi (Göttingen). Important Islamic figures...

Imam Siraj Wahaj is in great demand. Last week he was a featured speaker at the Mosque for the Praising of Allah in Roxbury, Massachusetts. A few days before that, he addressed four hundred people at a Muslim Students Association gathering at Western Michigan University. His star has shone for years: in 1991, he even became the first Muslim to give an invocation to the U.S. Congress. And why not? Not long after 9/11, he said just what jittery Americans wanted to hear from Muslims: “I now feel responsible to preach, actually to go on a jihad against extremism.” But...

CAIRO, November 26 (IslamOnline.net) - A leading European cardinal claimed that Islam could not integrate into Europe unless it makes a clear break between religion and state as Roman Catholicism went through after the French revolution. Belgium's Cardinal Godfried Danneels is one of a few Catholic churchmen tipped as a possible successor to Pope John Paul II. Danneels said in an interview with Reuters that Muslims should be ready to show more flexibility to interpret the Noble Qur’an. "I think, I hope that it is possible to create a European Islam which has gone through its own French Revolution. It...

Jihad Watch Board Vice President Hugh Fitzgerald's brilliant and absolutely must-be-read exploration of the very concept of moderate Islam and the existence of moderate Muslims: 1. Not only Muslims, but "islamochristians" who objectively promote and push the propagandistic line that disguises the Jihad (evidence of which can be found worldwide), and who mislead as to both what prompts that Jihad (not "poverty" or "foreign policy" but the precepts of the belief-system of Islam) and what will sate it (not Kashmir, not Chechnya, not the absurd "two-state solution," not continued appeasement in France and Holland -- there is nothing that will...

Imam Siraj Wahaj is in great demand. Last week he was a featured speaker at the Mosque for the Praising of Allah in Roxbury, Massachusetts. A few days before that, he addressed four hundred people at a Muslim Students Association gathering at Western Michigan University. His star has shone for years: in 1991, he even became the first Muslim to give an invocation to the U.S. Congress. And why not? Not long after 9/11, he said just what jittery Americans wanted to hear from Muslims: "I now feel responsible to preach, actually to go on a jihad against extremism." But...

Editor's note: Readers may also be interested in Moderate Islam or Fata Morgana? and freemuslims.org Speaks Out.There is good news to report: The idea that "militant Islam is the problem, moderate Islam is the solution" is finding greater acceptance over time. But there is also bad news, namely growing confusion over who really is a moderate Muslim. This means that the ideological side of the war on terror is making some, but only limited, progress.The good news: Anti-Islamist Muslims have found their voice since September 11. Their numbers include distinguished academics such as Azar Nafisi (Johns Hopkins), Ahmed al-Rahim (formerly...

ATHENS, Greece - The same day Dutch mourners gathered outside a crematorium for a final goodbye to slain filmmaker Theo Van Gogh, police on the other side of the world made a horrific discovery in a hut: the decapitated body of a Thai laborer. The two events - in settings as different as tidy and prosperous Holland and a tropical rubber plantation in southern Thailand - bear similarities that suggest new flash points in the global struggle against radical Islam. A note impaled on Van Gogh's body by the alleged Muslim killer threatened further attacks against Dutch politicians in the...