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WASHINGTON, Sept. 25, 2009 – The British army’s 1st Battalion Scots Guards Pipes and Drums played in the Pentagon courtyard during lunchtime today in a show of solidarity with U.S. armed forces. The British army’s 1st Battalion Scots Guards Pipes and Drums Band performs for employees, servicemembers and families at the Pentagon, Sept. 25, 2009. The band, which consists of infantry soldiers who will soon prepare to deploy to Afghanistan, performed to express admiration for its closest allies. U.S. Air Force photo by Master Sgt. Stan Parker  (Click photo for screen-resolution image);high-resolution image available. The unit’s performance is “an expression of...

SNIPPET: "Today, I received two emails from an Elly Kilroy on behalf of WLUML, asking me to “please immediately remove the link to Women Living Under Muslim Laws from your list of recommended websites; we do not want to be associated with you in any way.” The email reads as follows: “Dear Phyllis, Please could you remove the link to Women Living under Muslim Laws from your list of Recommended Websites; we are more than uncomfortable about being in the same list as names such as Daniel Pipes, Melanie Phillips and Internet Haganah to name just a few. We are...

The Council on American-Islamic Relations, or CAIR, North America's foremost Islamist group, bills itself as a "civil rights organization," suggesting it maintains high standards of decency and morality. But, as I personally can attest, it fails abysmally to do so. Its seven-year-long campaign against me has included misappropriation, misrepresentation, misquotation, defamation, and inaccuracy, prompting one one writer recently to compare its propaganda with that of Nazi Germany. Consider several dirty-trick episodes: DanielPipes.com: On December 15, 2000, simultaneous with the debut of my website, www.DanielPipes.org, John Michael Janney registered the domain www.DanielPipes.com. Janney was both a member of CAIR and an...

We're all familiar with the concept of modern technology having ancient Chinese analogues. But a 2002 discovery in remote Qinghai province is anachronistic enough to constitute an OOPart. Out-of-place-artifacts are so unusual, or found in such improbable contexts, that mainstream science has no plausible explanation for them. The crystal skulls of Mexico referenced in the latest Indiana Jones movie, the iron pillar of Delhi, and the ancient Greek Antikythera mechanism are examples of OOPart yet to be explained. Like these, the pipes of Qinghai's Mount Baigong suggest a level of technology simply inconceivable for the apparent era of their manufacture. Those...

Two events earlier this month summed up differing views of George W. Bush's Middle East record. In one, Bush himself offered a valedictory speech, declaring that "the Middle East in 2008 is a freer, more hopeful, and more promising place than it was in 2001." In the other, an Iraqi journalist, Muntadar al-Zaidi, expressed disrespect and rejection by hurling shoes at Bush as the U.S. president spoke in Baghdad, yelling at him, "This is a farewell kiss! Dog! Dog!" Ironically, Zaidi's very impudence confirmed Bush's point about greater freedom; would he have dared to throw shoes at Saddam Hussein?While I...

Obama Wins, Muslims Divided   By Daniel PipesFrontPageMagazine.com | Tuesday, November 11, 2008 Ali ibn Abi-Talib, the seventh-century figure central to Shiite Islam, is said to have predicted when the world will end, columnist Amir Taheri points out. A "tall black man" commanding "the strongest army on earth" will take power "in the west." He will carry "a clear sign" from the third imam, Hussein. Ali says of the tall black man: "Shiites should have no doubt that he is with us." An Iranian in Tehran sports a badge of Barack Obama. (AP: Hasan Sarbakhshian) Barack Hussein in Arabic...

One watches with dismay as Democratic candidate Barack Obama manages to hide the truth on his longstanding, if indirect ties to two institutions: the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), listed by the US government in 2007 as an unindicted co-conspirator in a Hamas-funding trial; and the Nation of Islam (NoI), condemned by the Anti-Defamation League for its "consistent record of racism and anti-Semitism." First, Obama's ties to Islamists: • The Khalid al-Mansour connection: According to former Manhattan Borough president Percy Sutton, Mansour "was raising money for" Obama's expenses at Harvard Law School. Mansour, a black American (né Don Warden), became...

Barack Obama is lying when he insists that he has never prayed in a mosque and was never a Muslim, a prominent Middle East expert and journalist says. Daniel Pipes, founder of the Middle East Forum think tank, says he fully accepts that Obama is a Christian now. But there is strong evidence that Obama received a Muslim upbringing during his years in Indonesia, Pipes said. It's fine with me that he was a Muslim and a convert to Christianity, Pipes told Newsmax. Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal is a convert from Hinduism. I have no problem with his conversion. What...

How do Muslims see Barack Hussein Obama? They have three choices: either as he presents himself – someone who has "never been a Muslim" and has "always been a Christian"; or as a fellow Muslim; or as an apostate from Islam. Reports suggests that while Americans generally view the Democratic candidate having had no religion before converting at Reverend Jeremiah Wrights's hands at age 27, Muslims the world over rarely see him as Christian but usually as either Muslim or ex-Muslim. Lee Smith of the Hudson Institute explains why: "Barack Obama's father was Muslim and therefore, according to Islamic law,...

Hugo Chavez visiting Tehran celebrated his alliance with Akmadinejad. Che Guevara's son Camillo visited Tehran last year. Fidel Castro was there and told his hosts that "Iran and Cuba, in cooperation with each other, can bring America to its knees." It's not just Latin American leftists who see potential in Islamism. There is Ken Livingstone, the Trotskyist mayor of London. Dennis Kucinich, during his first presidential campaign in 2004, quoted the Koran and roused a Muslim audience to chant Allahu akbar ("God is great") and he even announced, "I keep a copy of the Koran in my office." And there...

Pipes and Drums of FreeRepublic Tartan Day 2009?

A ship bound for Syria from North Korea and detained in Cyprus on an Interpol alert for suspected arms smuggling was carrying an air defense system, Cypriot authorities said. The shipment was billed as weather-observation equipment on the freight manifest of the Panamanian-flagged Grigorio 1. The ship was carrying 18 truck-mounted mobile radar systems and three command vehicles. "The radars on the 18 trucks appear to be part of an air defense system," a police spokeswoman said.

There's an impression that Muslims suffer disproportionately from the rule of dictators, tyrants, unelected presidents, kings, emirs, and various other strongmen - and it's accurate. A careful analysis by Frederic L. Pryor of Swarthmore College in the Middle East Quarterly ("Are Muslim Countries Less Democratic?") concludes that "In all but the poorest countries, Islam is associated with fewer political rights." The fact that majority-Muslim countries are less democratic makes it tempting to conclude that the religion of Islam, their common factor, is itself incompatible with democracy. I disagree with that conclusion. Today's Muslim predicament, rather, reflects historical circumstances more than...

The effort is the first time since World War II – when the Germans bombed London, and London children were sent off to families in the countryside to be cared for until the German assault ended – that a "people-to-people" campaign has been organized to remove children from a war zone. Sadly, indeed embarrassingly, the children are those of S'derot, an Israeli town of 19,000 near the border with Gaza that has been under a missile barrage since the Israeli retreat from Gaza in September 2005, with thousands of missiles to date. These have causing damage to property and injuries...

Metal pipes worth more than some US homes By Catherine Elsworth in Los Angeles Last Updated: 2:19am BST 02/04/2008 Copper pipes and wiring found in many of America's repossessed homes are now more valuable than the properties themselves. Across the country thieves are stripping empty houses of the copper, aluminium, and brass in their plumbing and heating systems to take advantage of the crashing property market and the soaring price of scrap metal, much of which is sold to China and India. The trend has accelerated as the glut of unwanted properties clog the market, dragging down house prices. "Houses...

How did Lenin come to be a socialist? I think the first thing you want to take into consideration is this sort of passion which drove him. It was not idealism. Not so much hope for a better future for humanity, the creation of a new human being, it was above all a passionate hatred for the established regime. And that has a lot to do with personal biography. When he was a teenager, his brother was executed for plotting an assassination attempt on the life of the Czar. That did not, I think, affect him so much because he...

  NIE Makes War Against Iran More Likely   By Daniel PipesFrontPageMagazine.com | Tuesday, December 11, 2007 With the Dec. 3 publication of a completely unexpected declassified National Intelligence Estimate (NIE), "Iran: Nuclear Intentions and Capabilities," a consensus has emerged that war with Iran "now appears to be off the agenda." Indeed, Iran's president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, claimed the report dealt a "fatal blow" to the country's enemies, while his foreign ministry spokesman called it a "great victory."I disagree with that consensus, believing that military action against Iran is now more likely than before the NIE came out. The NIE's...

Anthony Cordesman, a strategist at the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies, has estimated the consequences if Tehran gets the bomb and a nuclear exchange with Israel ensues. He expects, writes Martin Walker of United Press International, some 16 million to 28 million Iranians dead within 21 days, and between 200,000 and 800,000 Israelis dead within the same time frame. The total of deaths beyond 21 days could rise very much higher, depending on civil defense and public health facilities, where Israel has a major advantage.It is theoretically possible that the Israeli state, economy and organized society might just...

Non-Muslims occasionally raise the idea of banning the Koran, Islam, and Muslims. Examples this month include calls by a political leader in the Netherlands, Geert Wilders, to ban the Koran — which he compares to Hitler's Mein Kampf — and two Australian politicians, Pauline Hanson and Paul Green, demanding a moratorium on Muslim immigration.What is one to make of these initiatives? First, some history. Precedents exist from an earlier era, when intolerant Christian governments forced Muslims to convert, notably in 16th-century Spain, and others strongly encouraged conversions, especially of the elite, as in 16th- and 17th-century Russia. In modern times,...

Once-exotic forms of Muslim women's head and body garments have now become both familiar in the West and the source of fractious political and legal disputes.

Two positions dominate and polarize the American body politic today. Some say the war is lost, so leave Iraq. Others say the war can be won, so keep the troops in place. I split the difference and offer a third route. The occupation is lost, but the war can be won. Keep American troops in Iraq but remove them from the cities.

When Dwight D. Eisenhower dedicated the Islamic Center in Washington, D.C., in June 1957, his 500-word talk effused good will ("Civilization owes to the Islamic world some of its most important tools and achievements") even as the American president embarrassingly bumbled (Muslims in the United States, he declared, have the right to their "own church"). Conspicuously, he included nary a word about policy. Exactly 50 years later, standing shoeless, George W. Bush rededicated the center last week. His 1,600-word speech also praised medieval Islamic culture ("We come to express our appreciation for a faith that has enriched civilization for centuries"), but...

<p>Recently, neo-conservative analyst Daniel Pipes wrote an article ("Can the IAF take out Iran's nukes?", June 13) that, in essence, advocates for the Jewish state to carry out pre-emptive military strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities.</p> <p>Although Pipes has many justifications for his reasoning, this time he specifically alludes to the recently published article in International Security entitled “Osirak Redux” by security scholars Whitney Raas and Austin Long. Now Pipes makes it clear that Raas and Long do not take into account the diplomatic, strategic, and political fallout of such an action, but only focus on the question of “Can it be done”? To Pipes, the answer is a resounding “yes”, however, for those who too often take the Middle Eastern analysis of western academics as gospel, I would urge you to carefully read Raas and Long before forming any definitive conclusions. In rehashing “Osirak Redux”, Pipes clearly cherry picks certain points that the article makes that support his assertion that bombing Iranian nuclear facilities is the only method of keeping the Islamic Republic from attaining nuclear weapons. Yet he also manages to maneuver around critical points that the authors make that undermine the neo-conservative mantra that Pipes so eagerly defends.</p>

A tribute to our fighting men & women

Yes, there is a moderate Islam - let's support it Daniel Pipes THE JERUSALEM POST Apr. 17, 2007 'What moderate Muslims?" is the near-inevitable retort to my stating that radical Islam is the problem and moderate Islam the solution. Where are the anti-Islamists' demonstrations against terror, their combating of Islamists, their reassessments of Islamic law? I am asked. Moderate Muslims do exist, I reply. Admittedly, they do not constitute a movement but represent mere wisps in the face of the Islamist onslaught. This means, I argue, that the US government and other powerful institutions should give priority to locating, meeting...

"Moderate Unicorns," huffed a reader, responding to my recent plea that Western states bolster moderate Muslims. Dismissing their existence as a myth, he notes that non-Muslims "are still waiting for moderates to stand and deliver, identifying and removing extremist thugs from their mosques and their communities."It's a valid skepticism and a reasonable demand. Recent events in Pakistan and Turkey, however, prove that moderate Muslims are no myth.In Pakistan, an estimated 100,000 people demonstrated on April 15 in Karachi, the country's largest city, to protest the plans of a powerful mosque in Islamabad, the Lal Masjid, to establish a parallel court...

Dr. Pipes Comes to Brandeis By Linda Keay April 24, 2007 A metal detector and police outside the lecture hall doors aroused curiosity by students at Brandeis University. A young woman walking by the apparatus frowned and shook her head in disapproval. Two young men stopped and watched as people cued up at the hall door. “What’s going on?” asked one. “Pipes,” said the other. “Oh,” said the first. The two got in line. One said he thinks Pipes is a racist. The other said, “But he’s right about a lot of things,” adding, “but maybe he is a racist.”...

I am mirroring this from LittleGreenFootballs.com. Daniel Pipes sent it out on his list. I just can't be there, but if anybody is in the Los Angeles area, make it a point to be there. Remember, the video from US Irvine went global. Help support point-man Daniel Pipes in the ARENA OF THE WAR OF IDEAS! Leftists/Islamists Preparing to Disrupt Daniel Pipes at UCLA As we noted yesterday, there’s a panel discussion at UCLA tomorrow night featuring Daniel Pipes, Wafa Sultan, and Yaron Brook, on the subject: “Totalitarian Islam’s Threat to the West.� Today the moonbats and Islamic student groups...

As a silver member of "Hilton HHonors," I receive the odd discount from the hotel chain but today's offer really caught my eye. It was not to swing in Las Vegas or spend April in Paris, but to go on pilgrimage to Mecca. I've posted the webpage here. Some salient excerpts: Between February 1 and March 31, 2007, GCC nationals who stay a minimum of two consecutive nights at the Makkah Hilton & Towers earn double Hilton HHonors® Base points. Please note: During this period, Makkah is accessible only to Muslims and visas are issued to nationals of Bahrain, Oman,...

Finally being able to meet Daniel Pipes in person was a great opportunity, with his visit to University of California, Irvine (UCI). He was hosted by Hillel at UCI and the Hillel Foundation of Orange County. A forty-five minute trip through rare light traffic brought me early for the event to UCI and the Physical Sciences Lecture Hall on the sprawling campus. I was anticipating some sort of protest by Islamist interests, which always appear when Professor Daniel Pipes speaks at a California University campus. The exterior of the lecture hall was peaceful as a few elderly Jewish men and...

Last night at the University of California Irvine, the Muslim Students Union staged a threatening, thuggish disruption of a talk by Daniel Pipes. UC Irvine is a hotbed of Muslim radicalism, as we’ve documented many times at LGF, but you may not have understood how bad it is until you see this. (Watch out for a burst of white noise near the middle.)

An effective counterterrorism strategy must focus on the fact that terrorism by Muslims in the name of Islam presents the strategic threat today to civilized peoples, whether Muslim or non-Muslim. On the low end, this threat involves lone individuals seized by the Sudden Jihad Syndrome who unpredictably set off on a murder spree. At the high end, it involves an outlaw organization like Hamas running the quasi-governmental Palestinian Authority, or even Al Qaeda's efforts to acquire weapons of mass destruction. In all, were terrorism by Muslims halted, this would be a major advance toward winning what some call World War...

The political columnist and cultural critic Mark Steyn has written a remarkable book, "America Alone: The End of the World as We Know It" (Regnery). He combines several virtues not commonly found together — humor, accurate reportage, and deep thinking — and then applies them to what is arguably the most consequential issue of our time: the Islamist threat to the West. Mr. Steyn offers a devastating thesis but presents it in bits and pieces, so I shall pull it together here. He begins with the legacy of two totalitarianisms. Traumatized by the electoral appeal of fascism, post-World War II...

Soldiers, sailors, and airmen once determined the outcome of warfare, but no longer. Today, television producers, columnists, preachers, and politicians have the pivotal role in deciding how well the West fights. This shift has deep implications. In a conventional conflict like World War II, fighting had two premises so basic, they went nearly unnoticed. The first: Conventional armed forces engage in an all-out fight for victory. The opposing sides deploy serried ranks of soldiers, lines of tanks, fleets of ships, and squadrons of aircraft. Millions of youth go to war as civilians endure privations. Strategy and intelligence matter, but the...

Soldiers, sailors, and airmen once determined the outcome of warfare, but no longer. Today, television producers, columnists, preachers, and politicians have the pivotal role in deciding how well the West fights. This shift has deep implications. In a conventional conflict like World War II, fighting had two premises so basic, they went nearly unnoticed. The first: Conventional armed forces engage in an all-out fight for victory. The opposing sides deploy serried ranks of soldiers, lines of tanks, fleets of ships, and squadrons of aircraft. Millions of youth go to war as civilians endure privations. Strategy and intelligence matter, but the...

This is an expansion on debg's summary of Adam Gadahn's Al Qaeda videotape, available for download at http://www.lauramansfield.com/j/nnnnmn-1.rm. debg: He spent a long time saying we are ignorantGadahn did indeed spend a long time calling us "ignorant." After Zawahiri's introduction, he also accused us of "rapturously applause" when Israel wages war, of assenting to our governments' "atrocities in Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere in the Muslim world." He also accuses us of "voicing our approval" of the so-called desecration of the Koran at Gitmo, and of our "yellow press and tele-evangelists insulting the 'Prophet' Muhammad [piss be upon him - my...

RAMAT RACHEL, Israel (Reuters) - Archaeologists in Israel have unearthed an ancient water system which was modified by the conquering Persians to turn the desert into a paradise. The network of reservoirs, drain pipes and underground tunnels served one of the grandest palaces in the biblical kingdom of Judea. Archaeologists first discovered the palace in 1954, a structure built on a six-acre (2.4 hectare) site where the communal Ramat Rachel farm now stands. Recent excavations unearthed nearly 70 square metres (750 square feet) of a unique water system. "They had found a huge palace ... even nicer than the palaces...

Last night WRTI-FM's Bob Perkins announced the death of a Philly original. Rufus Harley is credited as the first jazz musician to pick the Scottish bagpipes as his instrument. You might have heard his distinctive drone on CDs by The Roots (Do You Want More?!!!??!) and Laurie Anderson (Big Science). If you ever saw a picture of him, it would stick. He cut a distinctive swath. So did his music. I talked to his son, Messiah Harley, the trumpeter, this morning. He said his father had prostate cancer, but never let on to anyone that he was hurting. "He...

All, as noted in the thread Prayer requested for Sionnsar's family, I have a new, quite significant, and high priority pull on my time that will continue for an indefinite period of time. I will do what I can, and newheart and Huber long ago volunteered to help out with posting and pinging the Traditional Anglican ping list during my times away (traveling). Unfortunately I think these two are even busier than your truly --- but we'll do what we can to keep the Traditional Anglican ping list going. For the Washington State ping list I have mostly been pinging...

Omnipresent expert in television studios and regular commentator of American mainstream newspapers, Daniel Pipes has become the world theorist of the Islamphobia. The son of Richard Pipes, the Sovietologist that resumed the arms race during the Ford Administration, and spiritual son of Robert Strausz-Hupé, the visionary of the new world order, Daniel Pipes, directs a lot of strategic institutes. He is the founder of currently common concepts such as «new anti-Semitism», «militants of Islam» and «conspiracy theories». An advocate of the annihilation of Palestinians, he has been appointed by George W. Bush director of the US Institute of Peace. Between...

I've spent the last three or four days drowning myself in websites filled with Celtic music midis and learning to play O'Carolan's Ramble to Cashel. My music library is a strange collection of 80s compilation albums, collections of Celtic music, works by Steel Eye Span, Moya Brennan, Pentangle, Clannad, Dougie McClean, and Bluegrass. I can sometimes tell you which Child Ballad a song is a variation of, and might know how to sing two or three different major variations. Tis a sickness. Wonder if anybody else had picked up this bug besides me....And I am logged in, my beeper is...

NOW that Hamas has apparently won the Palestinian elections, the West is hoist with its own petard. On the one hand, Hamas is a terrorist group that unabashedly targets Israeli civilians and calls for the elimination of the Jewish state. On the other hand, it just won what observers deem to have been a reasonably fair election, and so enjoys the legitimacy that comes from the ballot box. Every foreign ministry now confronts a dilemma: nudge Hamas to moderation or give up on it as irredeemably extremist? Meet Hamas members or avoid them? Continue to donate to the Palestinian Authority...

The interior ministers of two German states have recently advanced important measures for containing radical Islam. They bear close attention across the West. In Baden-Wurtenberg, Heribert Rech (of the ruling Christian Democratic Union party) has overseen the administering of a 30-topic loyalty test for applicants to become naturalized citizens. Following an intensive and sophisticated study by the Baden-Wurtenberg government of Muslim life, it developed a manual for the naturalization authorities explaining that applicants for citizenship must concur with the "free, democratic, constitutional structure" of Germany.

Shareholding prince claims change made after he called Rupert Murdoch

"Iran’s stance has always been clear on this ugly phenomenon [i.e., Israel]. We have repeatedly said that this cancerous tumor of a state should be removed from the region.” No, those are not the words of Iran’s president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, speaking last week. Rather, that was Ali Khamene’i, the Islamic Republic of Iran’s supreme leader, in December 2000. In other words, Ahmadinejad’s call for the destruction of Israel was nothing new but conforms to a well-established pattern of regime rhetoric and ambition. “Death to Israel!” has been a rallying cry for the past quarter-century. Ahmadinejad quoted Ayatollah Khomeini, its founder,...

GLASGOW, Scotland, Oct. 14 (UPI) -- One of Scotland's leading bagpipes manufacturers is marching to the oblivion of liquidation. Hardie and Weatherston was founded in 1950 by champion bagpipers Bob Hardie and John Weatherston. The company's pipes were awarded a royal warrant, featured in a hit Paul McCartney song, "Mull of Kintyre" and played by military pipe bands from Scotland to India. In fact, Hardie pipes are the equivalent of Steinway pianos, Robbie Wallace, principal of the Scottish Piping College, told the BBC. But the company, sold to a new owner last year, has fallen on hard times. Maureen Leslie,...

Amidst the vacuum of Judy Miller saying nothing and the misshapen vessel of Bob Novak's obfuscations, informed speculation swirls, on this site among many. At bottom, we wonder if Miller -- perhaps the private citizen singly most responsible for the current quagmire -- is admirably upholding a principle underlying one of the few brakes on an unbridled administration. Or has she realized, potential book deal and all, the salutary power of a four-month stint in reputation rehab? Or just maybe, as has been recently and deliciously floated, is she protecting her own Tinkers to Evans to Chance role as a...

Symposium: The Showdown By Jamie Glazov FrontPageMagazine.com | July 29, 2005 The rise to power of Islamic hard-liner Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in Iran has spelled precarious danger for the West. An Islamic fundamentalist who is determined to continue Iran’s nuclear ambitions, Ahmadinejad has brought the inevitable confrontation between Iran and the U.S. to a head. To discuss the coming showdown, Frontpage has assembled a distinguished panel. Our guests today are: Dr. Patrick Clawson, the Deputy Director at the The Washington Institute for Near East Policy; Kenneth Timmerman, a best-selling investigative reporter and the author of the new book Countdown to Crisis:...

CAIR cuts back on crucial libel claims in its infamous lawsuit against anti-CAIR. The Council on American-Islamic Relations, Inc., filed a defamation lawsuit against Andrew Whitehead, of Anti-CAIR (or ACAIR), a grass-roots project whose name explains its mission: to expose the largest, most vocal, and dangerous Islamist organization in North America. CAIR’s March 2004 lawsuit is part of what seems to be a policy of . In this case, CAIR claimed it had been harmed by six statements on ACAIR’s website, including CAIR’s being founded by Hamas supporters, being partially funded by terrorists, and intending to impose Islamic law on...

The Council on American Islamic Relations, better known as CAIR, fashions itself as a mainstream, moderate group. Well, read this article by noted scholar Daniel Pipes, and see if you agree with CAIR's claims. An excerpt: CAIR is particularly worrisome because it claims to be nothing but a mild public affairs organization promoting "interest and understanding among the general public with regards to Islam and Muslims in North America," and is widely seen as such. In fact, it is radical to the core; to quote its chairman, Omar M. Ahmad (as reported by the San Ramon Valley Herald in July...