Hat tip Alan, from The Guardian.
Three months after Dispatches: Undercover Mosque won a police apology and libel damages, Channel 4 has announced it is returning to the subject in Undercover Mosque: The Return.
It has now emerged that the same Hardcash production team have revisited the subject to "see whether extremist beliefs continue to be promoted in certain key British Muslim institutions".
In the new documentary, a female reporter attends prayer meetings at an important British mosque which claims to be dedicated to moderation and "dialogue with other faiths".
According to Channel 4, "she secretly films sermons given to the women-only congregation in which female preachers recite extremist and intolerant beliefs".
In one scene, as hundreds of women and some children come to pray, a preacher calls for adulterers, homosexuals, women who act like men and Muslim converts to other faiths to be killed, saying: "Kill him, kill him. You have to kill him, you understand. This is Islam."
Channel 4 also said that in the same mosque, "the reporter visits the bookshop and discovers books and DVDs still on sale, promoting extremist, anti-Semitic, misogynistic and intolerant messages".
The undercover reporter also "films inside a key Saudi-funded Muslim organisation, which claims to promote tolerance and integration yet distributes literature which promotes intolerance for non-Muslims, an extreme version of sharia law and teachings which support discrimination against women".
In addition, Undercover Mosque: The Return also "investigates the role of the Saudi Arabian religious establishment in spreading a hard-line, fundamentalist Islamic ideology in the UK - the very ideology the government claims to be tackling".
A former Foreign Office minister tells Dispatches he thinks the government should take a stronger line on the issue.

Empires of the Sea – The final battle for the Mediterranean 1521 – 1580 by Roger Crowley. I recommend this book highly.
Terry Pratchett – Thief of Time. Only one witch, Nanny Ogg, and her on the periphery, but very funny.
Mavis Cheek – Mrs Fyttons Country Life. Left behind by a previous holiday maker and it was raining. Again. What I think the magazines call “a holiday read”.
Unzipped - The autobiography of Suzi Quatro. Much more my style; if I am going to read chick lit, I much prefer it by a rock chick. Not that a musician of her calibre deserves to be called a “chick”.

From McClatchy (with thanks to Andrew Bostom):

BAGHDAD — A key pillar of the U.S. strategy to pacify Iraq is in danger of collapsing because the Iraqi government is failing to absorb tens of thousands of former Sunni Muslim insurgents who'd joined U.S.-allied militia groups into the country's security forces.

American officials have credited the militias, known as the Sons of Iraq or Awakening councils, with undercutting support for the group al Qaida in Iraq and bringing peace to large swaths of the country, including Anbar province and parts of Baghdad. Under the program, the United States pays each militia member a stipend of about $300 a month and promised that they'd get jobs with the Iraqi government.

But the Iraqi government, which is led by Shiite Muslims, has brought only a relative handful of the more than 100,000 militia members into the security forces. Now officials are making it clear that they don't intend to include most of the rest.

"We cannot stand them, and we detained many of them recently," said one senior Iraqi commander in Baghdad, who spoke only on the condition of anonymity because he wasn't authorized to discuss the issue. "Many of them were part of al Qaida despite the fact that many of them are helping us to fight al Qaida."

(...)

"All the Americans are doing is paying them just to be quiet," said Haider al Abadi, a leading member of Maliki's Dawa political party and the head of the economic and investment committee in the parliament. The Iraqi government, he said, can't "justify paying monthly salaries to people on the grounds that they are ex-insurgents."

The best that most of them could expect is to be placed in vocational training for trades such as bricklaying and plumbing, along with a slew of other unemployed people.

The government has allocated $150 million for such training. So far this year, the U.S. military has spent $303 million on Sons of Iraq salaries.

(...)

Colin Kahl, a senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security, a centrist policy institute in Washington, who recently visited Iraq, said the dispute over the militias could set the stage for a return of widespread bloodshed, particularly because the Maliki government seemed intent on thwarting the plan.

He noted that of the militia members slated to join the security forces, only 600 have completed the required training. Of those, most are Shiites.

Kahl, who spoke with senior U.S. officials during his visit to Iraq, said that the Iraqi government was providing jobs to the militia members in "humiliating ways." He said former Iraqi army officers were being absorbed as low-level beat cops, and men who saw themselves as the "slayers of al Qaida" were being asked to become plumbers and bricklayers.

"The last time we humiliated thousands of these guys is back in 2003, and we got the insurgency," Kahl said.

In the Infidel world, soldiers, heroes or not, come back from war and work for a living. Unfortunately, in the Islamic world, that prospect is too "humiliating."  They want to be perpetually rewarded like children.

The collapse of the Awakening Councils was inevitable. The Shi'a have won. They have strung the Americans along for as long as possible. Now the Americans are on the way out. And the Shi'a have no intention of welcoming the Sunnis into the government in any serious fashion, and no intention of allowing them to possess independent military forces capable of promoting Sunni interests.

And the Sunnis, of course, never intended those Awakening Councils to be merely the instruments of anti-Al Qaeda activities. They were, and remain, intent on extracting as much money and as many weapons from the Americans as possible.

And the Americans are always happy to oblige. Money here, weaonry there, and always the soothing fiction is maintained -- does General Petraeus still believe it? -- that somehow the Sunnis and Shi'a can be reconciled.

But they can't. The Sunnis will never acquiesce in their new and subservient position. And the Shi'a, whatever their internecine wars, will never give the Sunnis what they demand, or anything close.

Why Can't They All Get Along? 

Islam. Islam that teaches aggression and violence, Islam that teaches that one does not ever give into one's enemies, but may perhaps pretend to, now and then, in order to wait for a more opportune moment to strike. Islam, that  offers as a model of treaty-making that made, at Hudaibiyya, by Muhammad with the Meccans in 628 A.D., and promptly broke as soon as he could. Islam, that teaches that when the battle's lost and won, when the hurlyburly's done, there can remain only two possibilities: either one is among the Victors, or one is among the Vanquished. Nothing else to be -- anywhere!

Jerusalem Post: A former Italian president says his country had allowed Palestinian terror groups to roam free in exchange for not attacking Italian targets.

Francesco Cossiga's admission confirmed claims of such a deal revealed last week in an interview in the Corriere della Sera newspaper with Bassam Abu Sharif, the former chief of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.

In a letter published Aug. 15 in Corriere della Sera, Cossiga described a "secret 'non-belligerence pact' between the Italian state and Palestinian resistance organizations, including terrorist groups" such as the PFLP. The deal, he said, had been devised by Prime Minister Aldo Moro, who in 1978 was kidnapped and assassinated by the Italian terror group the Red Brigades.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=247yF3jTD9M

From a speech delivered by Biden at Al Sharpton's National Action Coalition, in April 2007:

"I would argue, since 1994 with the Gingrich revolution, just take a look at Iraq, Venezuela, Katrina, what's gone down at Virginia Tech, Darfur, Imus. Take a look. This didn't happen accidentally, all these things."
 

In his defense Biden might  claim that he was merely plagiarizing and had not been paying attention to what he was saying. Could be, but it has the authentic bidenesque ring.

Why should not Obama go the whole stream-of-consciousness hog, and select Molly Bloom as his running-mate instead? 

From The Telegraph (with thanks to Alan):

Two men were arrested at Manchester airport last week as they prepared to leave the country and a third, the brother of one of the other men, was detained in Accrington, Lancashire where he worked as a security guard.

Counter-terrorism sources said the arrests related to a statement which appeared on an Arabic language website called al-ekhlaas.net, which often carries messages from senior members of al-Qaeda.

Counter-terrorism sources said the arrests related to a statement which appeared on an Arabic language website called al-ekhlaas.net, which often carries messages from senior members of al-Qaeda.

The message, written in English, appeared only briefly on January 24, and claimed to be from Shaykh Umar Rabie al-Khalaila, "The leader of al-Qaeda in Britain."

In it, he demanded the withdrawal of troops from Iraq and Afghanistan and the release of prisoners from Belmarsh high security jail in south east London including the radical clerics Abu Hamza al-Masri and Abu Qatada.

Qatada was later released after an Appeal Court ruling and put under house arrest.

It is understood the men had been under surveillance by police and two were arrested as they prepared to leave the country for Finland.

The message demanded: "We, the organization of Al-Qaeda in Britain, offer a truce to the British government.

"Our demands are as follows:

"I. A complete withdrawal of the British troops from Afghanistan and Iraq.

"II. To free all Muslim captives from Belmarsh prison, and the foremost of them Shaykh Abu Qatada al-Filistini and Shaykh Abu Hamza al-Misri [sic]."

Referring to the leader of al-Qaeda and a man said to be the leader of the "Islamic state of Iraq" the statement went on: "If the British government fails to respond to our demands by the last day of March 2008 as they fail to answer to the truce of our Shaykh Usama bin Laden and to the truce of the Emir of Believers Abu Omar al-Baghdadi, then the Martyrdom seekers of the organisation of al-Qaeda in Britain will target all the political leaders especially Tony Blair and Gordan Brown [sic], and we will also target all Embassies, Crusaders Centers and their Interests through out the country, with the help of Allah."

It signed off: "Finally, all praise is to Allah. " ...

Jammie Wearing Fool has all the details.

On this date, August 22nd, in 2006, the Iranian government did not trigger a global cataclysm.  Famed Middle East scholar Bernard Lewis had predicted that the Iranians might try to commemorate the "night flight of the prophet Muhammad on the winged horse Buraq"  to the "farthest mosque" (which Muslims claim without evidence is Jerusalem) and back, by detonating nuclear weapons.

In the months and weeks leading up to August 22, Iran's president Ahmadinejad had made several references to the date and its importance to Shi'a Muslims.  Shi'a believe that the end of the world will be preceded by the return of the Hidden Imam, and that the Hidden Imam could only conjured back by global chaos and destruction.  Bernard Lewis, whose writings have usually been quite fawning and sympathetic when it comes to Islam, believed it entirely possible that the Iranians would try to hasten the coming of Judgement Day by using nuclear weapons.

Lewis believed that Iran's leadership knew full well that the West, whether Israel, the U.S., or others, would be sure to respond with full fury against Iran.  Lewis also understood that the threat of a nuclear retaliatory strike was no deterrent to the Shi'a in Iran.  In fact, they would welcome it, since it would guarantee them eternity in Islamic Paradise.

The concept of MAD, Mutually Assured Destruction, is what guided the U.S. and Soviets through the Cold War:  the knowledge that if either side used nuclear weapons, the other would surely respond, and both sides would lose.  Lewis understood that this concept is useless when dealing with religious fanatics who welcome the end of the physical world.

Of course, as it turns out, the Iranians did not use nuclear weapons on August 22, 2006.

So, did this mean that Lewis and others, including the esteemed and inestimable Robert Spencer, had misunderstood Shi'a beliefs?  Or, was there a technical glitch on the Iranians' side?  Was the deadline set, and then missed for whatever reason?  Or, was Ahmadinejad just "rattling sabres?"  The story of the Iranian nuclear weapon program is not over yet, and we will have to wait and see what the final resolution will be.

But this event was important, in that it marked one of the first times in modern history when non-Muslims attempted to see the world through the prism of true Islamic beliefs, not through the distorted George-Bush-"All religions are the same" funhouse mirror.  Lewis and Spencer used references to core Islamic texts to formulate their positions.  The scholars who studied mainstream Islamic documents found that they encourage True Believers to bring about Armegeddon through massive death and destruction.  That is what we should take away from this incident.

That fact that one group of Muslims, the Iranians, did not usher in the end of the world on one particular day is of trivial importance.  When the Iranians or some other group have their weapons of mass destruction ready, there will always be a date to commemorate:  the birth of Mohammad; the death of Mohammad; the first Hajj; the military victory by the Muslims over some or another early tribe; the disappearance of the Hiddan Imam; the end of the Caliphate; the beginning of Ramadan; the end of Ramadan; the beginning of Ashoura.  Pick almost any day of the year, and Muslims could find some reason to celebrate it by causing the end of the world.  We cannot predict which day it will happen, only that they will one day try to make it happen.

Previous Days in the "Religion of Peace™":

Aug 21: PLO Leave Lebanon
Aug 20: Barbarossa Attacks Tunis
Aug 19: Stoning Sentence in Nigeria
Aug 18: Iranian Jihad Against Kurds
Aug 17: Mass Murder in Lahore