The Telegraph is the UK's more conservative newspaper.

In a sobering look at the "enemy at the gates" situation that the British find themselves in, Mark Steyn, in his July, 19th column, exposes the cultural vulnerability that lead to the London attacks. He opens with:

It has been sobering this past week watching some of my "woollier" colleagues (in Vicki Woods's self-designation) gradually awake to the realisation that the real suicide bomb is "multiculturalism". Its remorseless tick-tock, suddenly louder than the ethnic drumming at an anti-globalisation demo, drove poor old Boris Johnson into rampaging around this page last Thursday like some demented late-night karaoke one-man Fiddler on the Roof, stamping his feet and bellowing, "Tradition! Tradition!" Boris's plea for more Britishness was heartfelt and valiant, but I'm not sure I'd bet on it. The London bombers were, to the naked eye, assimilated - they ate fish 'n' chips, played cricket, sported appalling leisurewear. They'd adopted so many trees we couldn't see they lacked the big overarching forest - the essence of identity, of allegiance. As I've said before, you can't assimilate with a nullity - which is what multiculturalism is.

Hmmm, Mark Steyn thinks that allegiance is the essential measure. I'm glad to be in such company.

Then there's:

Consider the Bishop of Lichfield, who at Evensong, on the night of the bombings, was at pains to assure his congregants: "Just as the IRA has nothing to do with Christianity, so this kind of terror has nothing to do with any of the world faiths." It's not so much the explicit fatuousness of the assertion so much as the broader message it conveys: we're the defeatist wimps; bomb us and we'll apologise to you. That's why in Britain the Anglican Church is in a death-spiral and Islam is the fastest-growing religion. There's no market for a faith that has no faith in itself. And as the Church goes so goes the state: why introduce identity cards for a nation with no identity?

In a country that has an official state church this can be said. Steyn blames the spiritual bankruptcy of the Anglican church, coupled with its pervasive PC multicultural mentality for part of their woes.

Chillingly, Steyn provides a glimpse into the close connection between friend and foe:

One of the striking features of the post-9/11 world is the minimal degree of separation between the so-called "extremists" and the establishment: Princess Haifa, wife of the Saudi ambassador to Washington, gives $130,000 to accomplices of the 9/11 terrorists; the head of the group that certifies Muslim chaplains for the US military turns out to be a bagman for terrorists; one of the London bombers gets given a tour of the House of Commons by a Labour MP. The Guardian hires as a "trainee journalist" a member of Hizb ut Tahir, "Britain's most radical Islamic group" (as his own newspaper described them) and in his first column post-7/7 he mocks the idea that anyone could be "shocked" at a group of Yorkshiremen blowing up London: "Second- and third-generation Muslims are without the don't-rock-the-boat attitude that restricted our forefathers. We're much sassier with our opinions, not caring if the boat rocks" - or the bus blows, or the Tube vaporises. Fellow Guardian employee David Foulkes, who was killed in the Edgware Road blast, would no doubt be heartened to know he'd died for the cause of Muslim "sassiness".

This one is worth more than the trees it is printed on. Please read it twice.

Remember that the Guardian is the British liberal newspaper.

Columnist Jonathan Freedland invests the first part of his column: It's not only about Iraq, in elaborating on the fiction of the UK's participation in Iraq as the reason d'etre for the London attacks. I'll not waste any more bit space but will decry their inappropriate waste of dead trees on this subject.

It is, however, very significant that the Guardian, by way of Freedland, in a schizoid shift, introduces its base to the Caliphate:

...al-Qaida is not like Eta or the IRA - organisations with a clear, single goal. It is not simply a troops-out movement, demanding nothing more than a withdrawal from Afghanistan and Iraq and justice for the Palestinians. It is not the armed wing of the Stop the War Coalition.

Its aims are rather different. Central to its ideology is the reintroduction of the caliphate, an Islamic state governed by sharia law that would stretch across all formerly Muslim lands, taking in Spain, Morocco, north Africa, Albania, Turkey, Saudi Arabia and the Middle East, as well as Pakistan, Indonesia and the Philippines. Plenty on the left tend to skim over this stuff, dismissing it as weird, obscurantist nonsense - and imagining it as somehow secondary to al-Qaida's anti-imperialist mission.

That's a big mistake. For it is this animating idea which helps to explain al-Qaida actions that otherwise make no sense. Why did the Madrid cell that staged last March's train bombings continue to plan attacks, even after Spain's new government had begun withdrawing from Iraq? Perhaps because al-Qaida wants to recapture at least part of Spain for Islamist rule. Why did it bomb a nightclub in Bali? Partly to attack western tourists, of course. (Taylor says the bombers thought the clubbers would be American, not Australian.) But its chief aim was to destabilise Indonesia, which it wants to place under Islamist rule as part of the yearned-for caliphate.

In other words, al-Qaida has a programme that predates and goes beyond Iraq. It seeks to end all western presence in those lands it deems Islamic. That's why it has, over the years, targeted France and Germany as well as the US and the UK. When Tony Blair asks "What was September 11 the reprisal for?" he should know the answer. It was for eight decades of US-led, western meddling in territory that al-Qaida believes should be Muslims' alone.

This is the ideology that defines al-Qaida and which explains why it was in business from 1993 and not just 2001 and after. Tellingly, those who monitor Islamism in Britain say the big surge in growth of extremist groups came not after 9/11 or Iraq but in the mid-1990s - with Bosnia serving as the recruiting sergeant. In the same period Chechnya, Kosovo and Israel-Palestine all came into play - again predating Iraq.

While he clearly takes a left hook swipe at the US and assumes that islamofascist expansion would actually stop at historically Islamic lands (So would that include Austria then Mr. Freedland?), he clearly lets the cat out of the bag: militant Islam wants to reintroduce the caliphate and institute sharia law.

Who knows, maybe in a few months, as Freedland contemplates this, and the UK collectively takes its lithium he'll declare that the cult of death does indeed have global aims.

We are just beginning to see the ramifications of the attack on London.

In the UK, the Guardian newspaper reports (on Wednesday, July 20th) that:

Special intelligence units are being planned across Britain to monitor Muslims so the authorities can collect "community by community" knowledge of where extremism is building up.

The Guardian has learned that the special squads, to be known as Muslim Contact Units and staffed by Special Branch officers, will be established in areas including Yorkshire, north-west England and parts of the Midlands.

After the London bombings police admit their intelligence of what goes on in Muslim communities is "low", and urgently needs to be boosted.

The police and Home Office say that a Muslim Contact Unit operating in London has already helped thwart extremist attempts to recruit young British Muslims to violent jihad, by working with Islamic communities.

Because it's the Guardian, there is an effort in the piece to downplay the significance of what would likely be completely shouted down by the LSM here in the US as "profiling".

What is truly significant is that doing this would have been totally inconceivable just a few weeks ago in the multicultural UK. This is implicit recognition that the cult of death is part of, and is masquerading inside of, the Muslim religion.

How they will develop intelligence on the ground remains to be seen.

We need to take action on this side of the pond as well. We have been mollified for several years by people saying "Well, we haven't been attacked again" as if we have taken the needed and appropriate steps to protect ourselves. The London attacks give lie to that.

The events in London remind me of a story last fall about MI-6 foiling a terrorist plot that I posted about.

Of course, at the time,the LSM bald facedly suggested that it was all a British government plot.

It's of interest to watch the videos on that post in the light of recent events. Short memory we have.

The New York Times (of all the LSM, who would have thunk it?), reported yesterday that last Friday, two men - a martial arts expert in the Bronx and a doctor in Florida were arrested  on conspiracy charges. They must be characterized as domestic terrorists:

The men, United States citizens who were identified by the authorities as Tarik ibn Osman Shah of the Bronx and Rafiq Sabir of Boca Raton, were captured in early morning raids in the Bronx and in Boca Raton on Friday, according to Paul J. Browne, a New York City police spokesman.

The arrests came as part of a two-year sting operation that ended with each man facing a single conspiracy charge. While the authorities said that they had no evidence that either man had actually provided support to terrorists, they said they had taped each man swearing his allegiance to Osama bin Laden, Mr. Browne said. (Ed. Emphasis added.)

This arrest follows fairly closely on the heels of another recent bust of an arms smuggling ring - primarily made up of non-citizens operating in the US - who were willing to sell arms to an FBI informant who told them he was an al Qaeda operative.

What can we draw from these events? Here's one thing: David N. Kelley, the US Attorney for the Southern District of NY is doing his job.

But there's really something more. New York is not the only place where these things are happening or where our justice department and FBI are active. Certainly there are investigations in progress and there are other examples of domestic terror that have been recently thwarted (here and in other western countries).

What we must realize that these things are really just the tip of the iceberg and that they are symptoms of a much wider and more insidious alliance of the progressive left and Islamic jihad.

David Horowitz, today, has an article at FrontPage magazine: Vindication: There Is An Unholy Alliance, which provides significant detail about his identification of those on the 'progressive' side who tacitly support our enemy. He links efforts to oppose the Patriot Act, assault our incarceration of terrorists at Guantanamo Bay, open our borders to terrorists - to the same people who are active in funding terrorists organizations and who support and admire convicted terrorists of their own ranks (like Lynne Stewart).

David references an interview excerpt that the Iraq News Network conducted in March with none other than 'Gorgeous' George Galloway who was just in Washington DC a couple of weeks ago disclaiming his financial relationship with Saddam Hussein in the OFF scandal.

Here's the excerpt:

Mohammad Basirul Haq Sinha: "You often call for uniting Muslim and progressive forces globally. How far is it possible under current situation?"

Galloway: "Not only do I think it's possible but I think it is vitally necessary and I think it is happening already. It is possible because the progressive movement around the world and the Muslims have the same enemies. Their enemies are the Zionist occupation, American occupation, British occupation of poor countries mainly Muslim countries. They have the same interest in opposing savage capitalist globalization which is intent upon homogenizing the entire world turning us basically into factory chickens which can be forced fed the American diet of everything from food to Coca-Cola to movies and TV culture. And whose only role in life is to consume the things produced endlessly by the multinational corporations. And the progressive organizations & movements agree on that with the Muslims."

So, here's a political 'servant' not unlike some of the political 'servants' in our country that is declaring an alliance between progressive liberals and Islamic jihad.

It is difficult to think that many of our own citizens, many with names that we know, want you and me to die and want our families to die - they want us to lose the War on Terror.

It is difficult, it is a challenge - but a headline like "British MPs, a US Senator, several US Congresspersons, and several leaders of leftist political organizations were indicted and arrested on conspiracy charges today in connection with domestic and international terrorism..." would be a good start. The First Amendment does NOT protect criminal actions and just as in the case of Galloway - there are money trails and phone calls, meetings and action plans that can be uncovered.

I suggest that David Kelley be put on the job. What about it Secretary Chertoff?

UPDATE: Ace has a link to the LGF post on Galloway and a good comment thread. Wizbang has a post that links to some great Galloway debunking at Seixon - here, here, and here (at least). Galloway up for perjury charges?

I have an amazing amount of first hand knowledge that I would love to share with the public. I've been to Bosnia twice, Kosovo in 1999, and now Iraq twice. I am just getting started as a junior author and I figure putting everything in segments would be the best way to spread the wealth.

On my second trip to Iraq I workied out of Camp Baharia, Fallujah. Before we destroyed the city my partner and I were tasked with training volunteer Iraqi Army Special Forces. At first I was mad we were tasked with teaching people our tactics, troop movements, immediate action drills, etc. Just so they could be like every other Iraqi we taught previously and disappear back into the city to use the knowledge against us. Or better yet we were going to be expected to intergrate the ISF soldiers into our ranks for the attack on Fallujah. "The enemy from within" - was the first thing to come to mind. One eye on the insurgents and one on the man who is expected to cover my back.

Through the time we trained the ISF soldiers I got to know five or six as friends. Hard working, insurgent hating, patriotic killers. After a few months of building each others trust I was sitting eating an outstanding dinner they had prepaired for us and struck up a conversation about culture. I was curious why the two thousand Iraqi national guardsman the Marine Corps had trained for over four months had just upped and walked out into the city to fight us. The response I got blew my mind. According to them it is considered dishonorable to be on the losing side, no matter what. What I mean is they can grow up all their live as loyal Iarqis and then the second it looks like the Insurgents are going to win they switch sides and go around killing their neghbors. This is the honorable thing to do. To stay loyal and be a patriot, or die for something you believe in is dishonorable. So at a drop of a dime the tides can turn.

This is only half the problem. The other half of the enemy believes that if they are martyrs under our blade they will go straight to heaven and are rewarded with handfulls of virgins. Fighting these guys is madness! They don't have escape routes, they don't use published tactics and they don't want to live. They hide and wait for us inside houses or walk up to us on city streets with white flags, then they blow up and kill or injure Americans. They don't care about the future. They don't care about cause and effect or how many people they kill, American or Arabic. They are brainwashed. With one goal: to die and take as many people with them as they possibly can.

As we ate dinner I wondered wich one of the ISF guys I would have to kill once we entered the city. What made these six men any different from the  thousands that walked back into the city? Which ones of the six were really insurgents?

April 19th was the 10th anniversary of the Oklahoma City bombing.

Vice-President Cheney and President Clinton were on hand to speak to and support those who gathered there to commemorate the loss of life and the courage of fellow citizens in the face of terror.

What they nor the media discussed was that there is a very clear link to Iraqi terrorists that participated in this barbaric act in our heartland ten years ago.

Reporter Jayna Davis (she was a local TV reporter at the time of the attack) has published The Third Terrorist, an investigative expose with evidence of Iraqi terrorists involved in the Oklahoma City bombing.

This is no drummed up conspiracy theory - brave Ms. Davis has 22 eyewitnesses, classified documents, and stories of FBI involvement. The most compelling part to me are the eyewitness descriptions from multiple employees at a hotel of - what in hindsight - are dry runs and preparations for the bombing - and their accounts demonstrate the use of 'lily whites' McVeigh and Nichols in the process. There's much more that needs to be discovered and our government should certainly look into this much more significantly than they have thus far. It is insidious that prosecutions have been conducted with the Americans that were involved and that those prosecutions were apparently tailored to keep out any evidence of international treachery.

Now that the Justice Department has issued a complaint that names a group of conspirators - including Saddam regime Iraqis - in a scheme to create the outrageous Oil For Food program more than ten years ago - a scheme that exceeded the expectations of those evil men that conspired to create it - Iraqis, UN Officials, a bagman, and one or more US government officials - it doesn't seem so far fetched that Saddam's regime was involved in this bombing, does it?

On planet earth, I asked in a post yesterday what our MSM and the BBC would do with the incredible announcement from ITV that MI-6 and other British intelligence and security services had foiled a "911" style plot - hijackers planning to take control of multiple aircraft and crash them into Canary Wharf and the Heathrow Airport. That's what they said - they stopped something that might have been as devastating.

On planet earth, there were many stories that reflected on the horror of Ground Zero and the other events of that fateful day and focused on the incredible success that the brave men and women in the British services have achieved.

Pictures of captured terrorists - past and present were shown on all the mainstream media broadcasts. The BBC wire submitted several stories on some of the personal heroics of the enforcement personnel and interviewed dozens of citizens that expressed their thanks for the avoidance of the nightmare and the fact that they would sleep easier knowing they were being looked after so well.

A number of government officials were interviewed and anonymously released a few more bits of information about the operation and congratulated their colleagues on a superb job well done.

Meanwhile, since last night, a universal bifurcation occurred and a Philip K. Dick'sian parallel universe was born - if you are reading this blog entry, you are now on the planet Arxeniodysfun (pronounced like the ex-talk show host - but not related in any way - and the first part of the word dysfunctional - related in every way).

In this parallel world that we find ourselves in, the BBC did not post a single news wire story on the incredible events even though they seem to be happy to so report when Iran (yes Vern, that's Iran) is able to avoid terror attacks. Late in the day they posted an oblique story about Prime Minister Blair denying that the government was scaremongering.

In the parallel United States, MSNBC jumped quickly to communicate to the world that the story was actually a British government plot to take further civil liberties from the British people and generally expand its power. Even the Queen is a participant in this plot! MSNBC quoted multiple sources (all Muslim clerics apparently) that found this plot quite controversial.

Don't believe me?

Here's the video (click on the picture to the left: requires Ms Media Player) - just in case you haven't realized that you woke up in a new universe this morning.

It's the only explanation that we can come up with. Otherwise - I mean if we are still on planet earth - we have just seen another example of egregious journalistic fraud on par with the Ra^thergate scandal. What reputable news organization would take a story of success against terror and, without any evidence of any kind, make it into an accusation of government conspiracy against its population?

There's just no other explanation. See, MSNBC isn't the only one - CNN (click on the picture to the left for video: requires Ms Media Player) put on nearly the same story, except this time it was "some quwahhrters" that knew of the sinister plot by the British government. Those quarters were apparently several mosques in London along with the leftist Democrats (they have them there too). Note that the entire video is captioned with "British Terror Plot?" so we are certain to understand that it is in question. Most of the time in this clip is spent hand-wringing over new security measures that just might catch more terrorists, but they don't fail to quash the story that the British might have actually foiled the bad guys.

Friends In The Bullpen do get some more information behind the success here. Comments to this Captain's Quarters post are interesting. This Australian article perhaps provides some underlying detail on one real suspect (along with token hand-wringing) - wonder how the British arranged that? Think the British were able to obtain any information from these guys?

See my summary of posts on the MSM and domestic terrorism here.

UPDATE: Friend ACE points out that it doesn't much matter what despicable terror evidence there is anywhere the "World Press Yawns."

Powerline offers us insight into the despicable hell in Fallujah where, at least, small stockpiles of chemical weapons were in production.

It's also noteworthy that in the Seattle terror arrests last week, one of the items seized in the raid on a felonious Islamic extremist's home included one or more "manuals on ... how to kill with poisons." No word yet on whether the Seattle denizen was actually cooking anything up.

It's also been reported just today that Britain has foiled a '911' style attack. This is great news which should be celebrated. Will it be?

The MSM is paying little attention to the nasty details in Fallujah - but is also playing down domestic events (what will the BBC and our MSM do with the news from Britain)?

See my series of posts on Seattle terror arrests last week here and tell me how you think we can get more attention on both the evil in our midst and the brave men and women that are taking it out around the world.

Throughout the day, I have had several friends, family members and favored 'net denizens ask me a variant of: "Why have you been approaching the point of being *shrill* about this terror issue in Seattle? I mean, hurray, they caught the bad guys! Besides, we're getting good coverage here in the Northwest and I just don't understand why you think that the limited emphasis the old MSM has on this is really meaningful. What's so upsetting?"

Here's my answer:

1. The events in Seattle are an ideological problem for the left and their cover band - the MSM. See, if terror isn't just 'over there' somewhere (i.e. the terrorists must be 'foreign' terrorists in 'foreign' lands), then some of the enforcement enabling in the Patriot Act is important and necessary for us domestically. The MSM decries potential civil liberty issues - even though there haven't been any - of having such legislation in place. These events tell us that we might actually be forced to confront the fact that our neighbors might have chosen to join the enemy.

2. A further ideological problem: For the MSM, Islamic terrorism is the perversion of the Religion of Peace in Arab Muslim countries. We cannot have instances of the Religion of Death in America, because that is a direct affront to the meme of multiculturalism. If we allowed that such practice were taking place within our own culture - there might be some pressure on the Muslim community in America to condemn what Islamic terrorists do anywhere that they do it. Ever heard of a condemnation of the beheadings in Iraq by American Muslim clerics? How would the bastions of moral relativism manage to trade with a 'poor choice of religious practice'? These events in Seattle are colored with this hue.

3. Incredible foresight is evident in the anti-terror task force's takedown of these cells. What they did was at least analogous to what an early discovery and a raid on the inner sanctums of Harris and Klebold would have been. Hindsight is always perfect. What they did at most is incalculable at this time. We can only speculate about the true intent underneath the kinds of conspiracy charges that are the only things that can stick before things blow up. And, instead of lauding the dedication and true heroism of these champions of Homeland Security and the administration's vigilance - on this particular set of events from any public report - we are treated to complete silence.

4. This combination of the reluctance to recognize the possibility of domestic terror, the refusal to face the reality of moral evil, and the outright disdain for those who are fervently working to protect us is a combination that endangers you and me and our families. To paraphrase Hugh Hewitt: "I don't like those ideas because they might kill me."

As in the case of our local news stations, the close proximity to these events have given many of us a clear sense of the evil that is near us - for me, not unlike when I first looked into the crater of Ground Zero in January of 2002.

Let us issue once again the clarion call to continue to vigilantly work toward replacing the failed radical left - MSM world view that has held us in sway for so long with a world view that confronts the real world with the difficult truths we must hold to survive.

In 1972, Francis Schaeffer wrote in the book "How Should We Then Live?":

There is a flow to history and culture. This flow is rooted and has its wellspring in the thoughts of people. People are unique in the inner life of the mind -- what they are in their thought-world determines how they act. This is true of their value systems and it is true of their creativity. It is true of their corporate actions, such as political decisions, and it is true of their personal lives. The results of their thought-world flow through their fingers or from their tongues into the external world. This is true of Michelangelo's chisel, and it is true of a dictator's sword.

I pray that we - we the people - will create - with these tools that provide us with almost instant results from our thought-world through our fingers - a flowing ground swell of vigilance that leads to action (when necessary) that leads to victory - all of which will enable us to leave a legacy of freedom to all who come after us.

Unlike our brave men and women who fight for America's best ideals in Afghanistan and Iraq, for most of us, there is no one to order us into this battle for truth. Let's volunteer.

UPDATE: More terror disruption success in Britain - reported 11/22 by LGF (via Yahoo news). Let's hope this one gets some legs.

UPDATE: Diggers Realm also had a post on this. Command Post as well.