* A Superpower’s View of the World 251,000 State Department documents, many of them secret embassy reports from around the world, show how the US seeks to safeguard its influence around the world.

* Wikileaks cables leave Europe angry and irritated European countries have reacted with irritation to the release by whistle-blowing website Wikileaks of secret memos written by US diplomats.

* Iran Fortifies Its Arsenal With the Aid of North Korea Secret American intelligence assessments have concluded that Iran has obtained a cache of advanced missiles are much more powerful than anything Washington has publicly conceded that Tehran has in its arsenal.

* US planned Wikileaks to pressure Iran Iranian president Ahmadinejad alleges that documents showing Arab calls for Teheran strike were an “organized” effort to “stir up trouble.”

* PM on WikiLeaks: “Now World Knows what Arabs Say About Iran” WikiLeaks exposures are a dangerous precedent but have revealed to the world the Arabs’ private fears of the Iranian nuclear threat, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu.

* Israel Relying on Intelligence, Reduces Troop Deployment The IDF is relying more on intelligence and less on troops in Judea and Samaria, military sources say, hoping that Arabs won’t escalate the Intifada.

* Voting Irregularities Mar Egypt Vote Egypt’s main opposition group says the ruling party of President Hosni Mubarak has heavily defeated its candidates in a parliamentary election it says was rigged.

* Markets fall after Irish Republic 85bn euro bail-out The euro has fallen against the dollar and major European markets have dropped sharply, a day after ministers agreed a bail-out for the Irish Republic.

* Seoul warns: ‘dear price’ if North Korea attacks again South Korean President Lee Myung-bak warned that North Korea will face severe consequences if it launches another military attack across its southern border.

* We Can Fight and Beat Anti-Semitism, Says World Zionist Org The World Zionist Organization is holding a seminar in France to combat anti-Semitism.

The Muslims – not the Islamists – mean to take over every Jewish site in Jewish Israel. And the United Nations means to assist them.

The Palestinian Authority has recently issued a new and particularly brazen report in which it declares that the Kotel (Western Wall), the outer wall of the Jewish Temple complex which was first built by the Jewish King Solomon in 960 BCE, destroyed by the Babylonians in 586 BCE, rebuilt again by Jews in 515 BCE – more than a millennium before the rise of Islam – is not really a Jewish site.

It is now, purportedly, a Muslim holy site.

The report states: “Jews did not worship at the Wailing Wall at any time until the Balfour Declaration of 1917…nor can any Muslim, or Arab, or Palestinian give up a single stone or piece of dust from the Wailing Wall or other holy places because that would be a concession on the Temple Mount.” Not only is this claim part of crass Islamic revisionist history – the Muslims are fast destroying the archeological evidence as well.

Just a minute. There is a well-known photo of religious Jewish men and women seen praying at the Kotel in 1905 – before the Balfour Declaration. And, there are two thousand years of stories told by both Jewish and non-Jewish travelers who visited Jerusalem either to pray at the Kotel or to visit the site where they saw Jews at prayer in that exact spot.

However, afraid that propaganda and Big Lies might not be enough, beginning in 1999, the Waqf (the Islamic religious authority) took away 400 truckloads of precious archeological evidence from the Temple Mount – evidence which would further establish that there has been a long-time Jewish presence here.

But, in the land of the one-eyed, like 1967 Defense Minister Moshe Dayan who gave the Arab Waqf control over the Temple Mount (a step he would surely regret if he were alive today), a truly sighted person is King. To me, there is a pattern here, as clear to me as my own right hand, as clear as the stars above on a crisp, clean Jerusalem night.

The Muslims (not the Islamists, but the Muslims) mean to take over every Jewish site in Jewish Israel. And the United Nations means to assist them.

Long before a sovereign Jewish state ever existed, Muslims massacred the Jews of Hevron in 1929. Surviving Jews returned, but were then forced to flee again during the Arab Revolt of 1936-1939. This burial chamber of our Jewish ancestors is a cave whose purchase is carefully and exhaustively reported in the fifth parasha (portion) of the Torah. According to Jewish religious sources, this purchase took place in approximately 1677 BCE.

Please remember: In 1929, when the Muslims massacred the Jews of Hevron, there were no Jewish “settlements” in “occupied Palestinian land.” There was no Muslim “Palestine” and no sovereign Jewish state. In 1996, under the Wye Accords, Jewish Israel surrendered most Jewish access to this Cave to the Waqf.

Today, Jews can pray there in an outer, small chamber only under heavy guard and only a few times a year in the main prayer chamber. Muslims took the lion’s share of the main prayer hall because, as they claim, Abraham is also their forefather.

As half-siblings however, Muslims have not been as close to Jews as Yishmael once was to his half-brother Yitzchak. Yishmael was the son of a pagan Egyptian mother, Hagar, and an Iraqi-born father, Abraham); Yitzchak, was the son of the same father but of another mother, Sarah.  If Abraham is truly the father of Muslims, too – then his Muslim descendants have surely shamed him.

On October 8, 2000, Muslims destroyed Joseph’s Tomb and martyred Rabbi Hillel Lieberman as he tried to rescue a Torah scroll from the burning building. Please understand that the Biblical Joseph was a highly assimilated Jew and beloved Grand Vizier to the Egyptian Pharaoh.

However, Joseph saved the Jews as well as the Egyptians from a famine, and his sons comprise two of the twelve Jewish tribes. Nevertheless, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas declared the Tomb a Muslim holy site only. He explicitly said that Joseph himself was a Muslim.

If Joseph is a Muslim, so are my blessed Jewish grandparents and parents.

Muslims did not stop here. This year, on October 21, 2010, Muslims persuaded UNESCO to declare that Rachel’s Tomb is really a mosque. Before then, it was widely assumed that Rachel’s Tomb was most definitely a Jewish holy site. This revisionist counter-claim originated only in 1996.

This Muslim take-over of the holy sites of other religions is all part of a pattern; it is one that precedes the establishment of the Jewish state of Israel in 1948 and the post-1967 war of self defense which Israel was forced to fight and which it won in six days. The first alleged West Bank “settlements” in “Palestinian” territory” dated back to 1975.

In the seventh century, Muslims began destroying both pagan and Christian holy sites as well as living pagan and Christian human beings across the Arab Middle East, and into North Africa and central Asia. They have never stopped this bloody reign of terror, this carnage and pillage, which continues today. Muslims began their destruction of Hindu and Buddhist holy sites as well as of living Hindu and Buddhist human beings a century later. Forced conversion was often the only way to survive.

As for my people, the Jews, Mohammed himself presided over the genocide of an entire Jewish tribe in Arabia. His soldiers beheaded every last Jewish man, then took the women captive; Mohammed brazenly force-converted and married one Jewish female survivor, Safiya bint Huyay, right after she had witnessed the murder of her husband, family, and entire tribe.

In addition, down the centuries, Muslims continued to torture, murder, and exile living Jewish beings. They also systematically destroyed or despoiled Jewish holy sites all over the Middle East, North Africa, and Central Asia. As with churches, (The Church of St. John in Damascus, Hagia Sofia in Istanbul, The Great Church of Cordoba), Muslims also converted ancient synagogues into mosques in what is now Israel (Katzrin) and in Algeria, where the Great Synagogue of Oran, which had been built in 1880, was confiscated and converted into a mosque after Algerian independence.

Please realize that the Jewish state of Israel has safeguarded the holy sites of all religions, both Christian and Muslim, and has given asylum to the Baha’i who were forced to flee Iran. Also realize that Arafat’s Palestinian terrorists actually took the church of the Nativity in Bethlehem hostage in 2002; they kept priests as hostages there as well. They vandalized the church which thereafter reeked of urine, was strewn with dirty pots and pans, cigarette butts, lighters, etc. Some priests subsequently denied they were held hostage, but what else could they say if they wished to keep the Church which is located in hostile Muslim territory?      

This is no different from how Muslims (not Islamists, not jihadists) have, in the past, treated Jewish holy sites in the Middle East as well. It is a well known fact that Jordanian Muslims used the narrow alley before the Kotel (Western Wall) as a stable and garbage dump. Yes, this is the same Kotel/Western Wall area which the Waqf is now declaring sacred to Muslims.

I am not ascribing this aggression to Islamists. I am not talking about “wronged” Palestinians. I am writing about what Muslims, in the name of Islam, have done, and are still doing to the holy sites of other religions. And yet, simultaneously, Muslims demand more and more Muslim religious rights in the West: more mega-mosques, more minarets, more time off for prayers, more segregated public facilities, more veiled women, more respect for “Muslim” ways, even if that includes respect for Muslim religious hatred and a Muslim sense of superiority towards all non-Muslims.

The handwriting is on the sky for all who can see. Where once the Jewish Temples proudly stood, we now have the al-Aqsa Mosque. Are the Muslim supremacists soon going to call the Kotel below “Al Kotel Al-Ma’aravi?”

In five years Lagos in Nigeria is set to overtake the Egyptian capital Cairo as Africa’s biggest city.

UN-Habitat’s Joan Clos said Africa needed to invest urgently in housing.

He told the BBC that sub-Saharan Africa could learn from North Africa as Egypt, Libya, Morocco and Tunisia had almost halved slum areas in the past 20 years.

Some 199.5 million people in sub-Saharan Africa live in slums, the highest number in the world, the UN said earlier this year.

According to UN-Habitat’s State of African Cities 2010 report, urbanisation is happening faster in Africa than anywhere else in the world.

By 2030 the continent will no longer be predominately rural, it says.

Mr Clos, UN-Habitat’s executive director, said that cities were attractive places for those wanting to relocate.

“People are looking for a better future and they think the city can offer that,” he told the BBC’s Focus on Africa programme.

Agricultural reform and poverty in rural areas were another reason for the trend, he said.

Coastal flooding

Many African cities already face major problems of overcrowding, irregular supplies of water and power and poor transport infrastructure.

But urbanisation often led to improved living standards, if action was taken to provide adequate housing, infrastructure and services, Mr Clos said.

In 2015 it is estimated Lagos will have 12.4 million inhabitants.

The UN also forecasts that the population of Kinshasa, the capital of the Democratic Republic of Congo, will increase by 46% over the next 10 years to become the fast-growing city.

By 2050, Africa’s urban population is expected to reach 1.23 billion.

The report warns that climate change is causing a serious problem for some cities.

With many of Africa’s cities built by the sea, millions of people risk losing their homes in the coming decades because of coastal flooding.

It says the West African coastline is retreating by between 20m and 30m every year.

Turkey is not thought of as the Muslim country par excellence, but it is perhaps the most Muslim nation in the world. Due to its unique birth during the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, as a state forged exclusively by and for Muslims through blood and war, Turkey is a Muslim nation by origin – a feature shared perhaps only with partitioncreated Pakistan.

Mustafa Kemal Ataturk’s secularization in the 1920s veneered the country’s core identity with a Kemalist, nationalistic overlay. However, a recent perfect storm has undone Ataturk’s legacy: Whereas the events of September 11 have, unfortunately, oriented Muslim-Western relations toward perpetual conflict, the Islamist-rooted Justice and Development Party (AKP) in Ankara has helped reexpose the country’s core identity. When the AKP came to power in 2002, many expected that the party’s promise to de-Kemalize Turkey by blending Islam and politics would not only create a stronger Turkey, but would prove Islam’s compatibility with the West. The result, however, has been the reverse.

The AKP has eschewed Ataturk’s vision of Turkey as part of the West, preferring a Manichean “us [Muslims] vs them” worldview. Hence, in the post- September 11 world, stripped of its Kemalist identity, Turkey’s self-appointed role is that of “leader of the Muslim world.” The country is, in fact, well-suited for this position: It has the largest economy and most powerful military of any Muslim nation. After years of successful de-Kemalization, the only obstacle that remains is convincing its Muslim brethren to anoint it as their sultan.

Turkey was created as an exclusive Muslim homeland through war, blood and tears. Unbeknownst to many outsiders, modern Turkey emerged not as a state of ethnic Turks, but of Ottoman Muslims who faced expulsion and extermination in Russia and the Balkan states. Almost half of Turkey’s 73 million citizens descend from such survivors of religious persecution. During the Ottoman Empire’s long territorial decline, millions of Turkish and non-Turkish Muslims living in Europe, Russia and the Caucasus fled persecution and sought refuge in modern-day Turkey.

With the empire’s collapse at the end of World War I, Ottoman Muslims joined ethnic Turks to defend their home against Allied, Armenian and Greek occupations. They succeeded, making Turkey a purely Muslim nation that had been born out of conflict with Christians. Religion’s saliency as ethnicity lasted into the post- Ottoman period: When modern Greece and Turkey exchanged their minority populations in 1924, Turkish- speaking Orthodox Christians from Anatolia were exchanged with Greek-speaking Muslims from Crete.

All Muslims became Turks.

Although Ataturk emphasized the unifying power of Turkish nationalism over religious identity, Turkishness never replaced Islam; rather, both identities overlapped. Ataturk managed to overlay the country’s deep Muslim identity with secular nationalism, but Turkey retained its Muslim core.

Turning to the post-September 11 world, states created on exclusively national-religious grounds are vulnerable to a Huntingtonian, bifurcated “us [Muslims] versus them” worldview.

Until the AKP, Turkey was successfully driven by large pro-Western and secular elites, and there was not much to worry about in this regard.

However, the AKP has replaced these elites with those sympathetic to the us versus them eschatology.

AKP leader and Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, along with his government, believe in Huntington’s clash of civilizations – only they choose to oppose the West. The AKP’s vision is shaped by Turkey’s philosopher- king, Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu, who summarizes this position in his opus Strategic Depth, in which he writes that “Turkey’s traditionally good ties with the West… are a form of alienation” and that the AKP will correct the course of history, which has disenfranchised Muslims since the collapse of the Ottoman Empire.

Undoubtedly, the AKP’s us versus them vision would not have had the same powerful resonance had the group come to power before September 11. Because those attacks defined a politically-charged “Muslim world,” the AKP’s worldview has found fertile ground and has changed not only Turkey itself, but also the nation’s role in foreign policy.

To this end, the AKP took advantage of Turkish anger with the US war in Iraq, casting it as an attack on all Muslims, Turks included. This reinforced its bipolar vision. Recently, while visiting Pakistan (of all places), Erdogan claimed that “the United States backs common enemies of Turkey and Pakistan, and that the time has come to unmask them and act together.” He later denied making these comments, which were reported in Pakistan’s prominent English-language dailies.

The AKP’s foreign-policy vision is not simply dualistic, but rather premised on Islam’s à la carte morals and selective outrage, and therein lies the real danger. One case in point is to compare the AKP’s differing stances toward Emir Kusturica and Omar al- Bashir. The former, a Bosnian film director who stood with the Yugoslav National Army as it slaughtered Bosnians in the 1990s, was recently driven out of Turkey by AKP-led protests, resulting in threats against his life – a victory for the victims of genocide in Bosnia. The latter, the Sudanese president indicted for genocide in the International Court of Justice, was gracefully hosted by the AKP in Turkey. Erdogan has said, “I know Bashir; he cannot commit genocide because Muslims do not commit genocide.”

This is the gist of the AKP’s à la carte foreign-policy vision: that Muslims are superior to others, their crimes can be ignored and anyone who stands against Muslim causes deserves to be punished.

The reason this vision will transform Turkey is because the country changes in tandem with its elites. Ever since the modernizing days of the Ottoman sultans, political makeover has been induced from above, and today the AKP is poised to continue this trend, as it is replete with pro-AKP and Islamist billionaires, media, think tanks, universities, TV networks, pundits and scholars – a full-fledged Islamist elite. Furthermore, individuals financially and ideologically associated with the AKP now hold prominent posts in the high courts since the September 12 referendum, which empowered the party to appoint a majority of the top judges without a confirmation process. In other words, the AKP now not only governs, but also controls Turkey.

Like their close neighbors, the Russians, Turks have moved in lockstep with the powerful political, social and foreign-policy choices that their dominant elites have ushered in. Beginning with the sultans’ efforts to westernize the Ottoman Empire in the 1770s, and continuing with Ataturk’s reforms and the multiparty democracy experiment that started in 1946, Turkish elites have cast their lot with the West. Unsurprisingly, the Turks adopted a pro-Western foreign policy, embraced secular democracy at home and marched steadily toward European Union membership.

Now, with the AKP introducing new currents throughout Turkish society, this is changing. In foreign policy, the dominant wind is solidarity with Islamist and anti-Western countries and movements. After eight years of AKP rule – an unusually long period in Turkish terms: if the AKP wins the June 2011 elections, it will have become the longest-ruling party in Turkey’s multiparty democratic history – the Turks are acquiescing to the AKP and its us versus them mind-set.

According to a recent poll by TESEV, an Istanbul-based NGO, the number of people identifying themselves as Muslim increased by 10 percent between 2002 and 2007, and almost half of them described themselves as Islamist. In effect, the AKP’s steady mobilization of Turkish Muslim identity along with its close financial and ideological affinity with the nation’s new Islamist elites is setting the stage for a total recalibration of Turkey’s international compass.

Muslims have been conducting a prolonged campaign against Christian values which has now entered its third phase.

The first phase began when Islam itself was born in the Arabian Peninsula, from where it spread into the Middle East and beyond. By conquering Syria, Palestine, Egypt, and North Africa, all of which had been part of the Christian world. Muslim armies were able to initiate a process of Islamization and Arabization. They continued their expansion into Europe, where areas of Spain, Portugal, Sicily, mainland Italy and part of France all fell under the dominance of Islam. Despite a mighty and bitter struggle Christianity only managed to regain a portion of the territories they had lost. Having retaken most of what became known as Europe, they had to give up on their former territory in North Africa and the Middle East.
However, despite the failure of the Arabs and Moors to gain a foothold in Europe, the Turks and Tatars conducted a second wave of attacks. In the Mid-thirteenth century the Mongol conquerors of Russia were converted to Islam. Having previously conquered Asia Minor, the Turks advanced into Europe in 1453 by assuring control over the ancient city of Constantinople. Then they captured the Balkans. Temporarily they ruled half of Hungary and twice got as far as Vienna, which they laid siege in 1529 and 1683. This time Europe decisively fought back to recover Russia and the Balkan Peninsula. This time too they managed to pursue their Islamic conquerors beyond the borders of Europe well into Islamic territory. Indeed so successful was the second Europe counterattack, that Europe was able to exert rule over the heart of the Middle East between the two world wars in the twentieth century.

Since the 1979 Islamic Revolution of Iran by Shiite Muslims a third wave of the struggle against Europe has been apparent. As evident in numerous events, in particular the 9/11/2001 attacks by the Wahabi Al-Qaeda Terrorist Network , their new phase has been marked by two distinct characteristics: Terrorism and Immigration.
The catalyst was in Iran.

“After the Iranian revolution and the establishment of the Shia system of Velayat-e-Faqih, the Wahabi/Salafi religious leaders in order not to be left behind introduced a Sunni version of radical Islam,” Dr. Assad Homayoun a former Iranian diplomat and President of Azadegan Foundation said. “This competition led to the rise of the Al Qaida which attacked two centers of economic and military power of the United States on September 11, 2001 and created the present incarnation of International terrorism.”

Although there is competition between the Salafists and the Shias there has also at times been cooperation among them.

Prevailing wisdom in the western media and intelligence circles had been that international cooperation among terrorist groups was improbable, particularly between those following Shia Muslim ideology and those following salafist Sunni ideology. The Balkan wars of the 1990’s dispelled both beliefs. Officers of Iranian Al-Quds operational wing of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps of Iran are known to be located in Zagreb, the Croatian capital. Particularly interesting is the fact that several officials in the Embassy of Iran in Zagreb, are on the list of the intelligence arms of al-Quds. Several Western intelligence agencies consider that the Iranian Embassy in Zagreb is one of the communication centers of al-Quds with Al-Qaeda and other radical and extremist Islamic organizations across Europe In order to satisfy the need for labor in the 1950s and 1960s Europe sought workers in Africa and Asia. Thus Muslim Arabs and Turks initially settled in western Europe as guest labor. The first generation was followed by Muslim refugees seeking political asylum and a better way of life.

UN statistics show that the Islamic population of Europe grew twofold between 1989 and 1998. By 2005 the figures again had more than doubled, so that 5 percent of Europeans could be said to be Muslim. That amounts to 23 million Muslims. 5.5 million of those reside in France, where the number has doubled since 1980, in Germany there are 3.6 million, up from 6,800 in 1961, while Britain has 1.6 million Muslims. The other 12.3 million are spread across other nations in Western Europe. In addition 15 to 18 Million Muslims can be found in the Russian Federation, and if we were to include Bosnia, Albania and Turkey, the overall figure would rise to 90 million Muslims in Europe, representing 15 percent of the overall population.

The future development looks set to continue the trend. While the Muslim population in Europe is expected to double by 2015, the non-Muslim population may well fall by 3.5 percent. Indeed by 2050 in all likelihood at least 20 percent of the people living in Europe will be Muslim. In the most extreme prognosis Muslims could well out number non-Muslims by the year 2050. Homayoun also believes that if nothing dramatic happens political Islam will advance and in the mid 21st century Islam could be in control of Europe.

Europe holds huge appeal to many Muslims. They are attracted by the relative wealth of the West. Secondly, they often flee the tyranny that is suppressing much of the Muslim world. Even extremist Islamic groups find that they are better able to exploit the greater freedom offered in Europe to pursue their religious and political interests.

Three quarters of the Muslims living in Germany today are of Turkish origin. Two thirds of them live almost equally divided in North-Rhine Westphalia and Berlin. They are generally younger than the German population and have a higher birth rate. Many came as guest workers in the 1970s but chose to stay. They exploited lax immigration laws to bring their wives and family long after the need for additional labor had been satisfied. Today, however, many remain unassimilated, dwelling in ghettos, unemployed, poorly educated and with little prospect of integration or good jobs. So far few of the immigrants have been able to rise above their poor origins in Eastern Anatolia, where many were illiterate and politically and religiously conservative. In France and Britain similar parallel communities also exist.

Since 2 percent of the continent’s Muslims are thought by Europe’s counter-terrorism officials to be active in extremist circles. That makes for 500,000 persons. The right-wing fundamentalist forces in Turkey led by Necmatin Erbakan sought support among the social, cultural and religious reactionaries with the Turkish community in Germany. Emissaries and imams were dispatched by his extremist party to Germany. Two organizations were set up: Cemaleddin Kaplan’s Khalifat group in Cologne in 1984, which has 800 radical Turkish Muslim members and Milli Goerues established in 1985, which has 26,500 members in Germany and 210,000 members overall, making it the largest radical Turkish organization. Milli Goerues is active in 514 mosques, 323 of which are in Germany. Its ideological teachings are anti-Semitic and anti-Christian. The Khalifat Group, though relatively small, has been vociferous in its rejection of democracy and criticism of secular Turkey. It is a radical group whose funds come from various sources, including the intelligence services of the Islamic Republic of Iran. Although Kaplan died in 1995 to be replaced by his son Metin Kaplan, the group’s very radicalism has ensured that it is isolated from the general Turkish community in Germany. Apart from these groups, there are several radical Islamic groups in Germany emanating from the Arab community, such as Hizbullah with 900 members, Hizb al Tahrir, which has 300 followers, Hamas with 300 members and the 1300 members of the Muslim Brotherhood.

In France, home to the largest Muslim community in Europe , most of the Muslims originate from Algeria and Morocco where France had colonies. The largest Muslim communities can be found in Paris, where about half of the total French Muslim population live, or between Marseille and Nice, where another 33 percent can be found and in the industrial north, in Lille-Roubaix-Tourcoing. For example over the last two decades the “Union des Organizations Islamiques de France”(UOIF), whose orientation is to that of the Muslim Brotherhood, has been the major Muslim organization in France. Its charter states that it works to help answer the religious, cultural, social and humanitarian needs of the Muslims in France. Officially the UOIF has no contact with the Muslim Brotherhood or extremism. In fact UOIF is indeed indirectly connected with the Muslim Brotherhood. In its political activities it maintains close contact to Sheikh Quardawi an important Al Jazeera TV network preacher who runs the European council for Fatwa and Research, a Muslim Brotherhood front organization based in Dublin. The UOIF is somewhat more radical than the Federation Nationale des Musulmans de France (FNMF), a moderate organization supported by the Moroccan government. Britain’s Muslim population of about 1.6 Million is to be found in London, Birmingham, the west Midlands, West Yorkshire and Lancashire. Most of the Muslim community stems from Pakistan and Bangladesh and constitutes about half of Britain’s post-war immigrant population.

The Bangladeshi form of Islam is largely influenced by moderate sufi elements and Hindi folk religion. This moderate population has to some extent been radicalized by fundamentalist preachers from Saudi Arabia and the Arab world. As a result individuals from these circles have turned to terrorism in Britain and elsewhere. The Muslim council of Britain (MCB), the Muslim Association of Britain (MAB) and the Islamic Society of Britain (ISB) are the three most influential political organizations among British Muslims. The MAB, cooperates with the Trotskyite Socialist Workers Party, the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas in the struggle against Israel. The MCB is a clear rival of the MAB for influence within the Muslim Community. In contrast to the Arab elements within the leadership of the MAB, the MCB has its roots in the Pakistani Islamist sects European terrorism of the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s as perpetrated by groups such as the IRA, Baader Meinhof and the RAF, have largely been replaced by radical Muslim cells. The threat of Islamist violence in Europe is becoming acute. It is easy for Islamic radical groups to find recruits in Europe, to move around and to organize.

Italy has been significant to other European countries as a terrorist nexus. Fighters have left Italy for Iraq, and Muslims from Albania and Bosnia have travelled through it. It has served as a logistic and financial support center. The government has attempted to counter radical Muslim activity by making dozens of arrests of militant helpers of the Egyptian al-Gama’ a al-Islamiyya, an Algerian Salafist group and the Iraqi Ansar al Islam that has close ties to Al-Quds. Much of the logistic and financial support of Islamic activities has been organized around Milan’s two Islamist Mosques Vialle Jenner and Via Quaranta. The Muslim networks developed in the 1990s. They were made up of veterans of the war in Afghanistan including Afghanis, Algerians, other North Africans and some Arabs. Many of the recruits were young unemployed men who were affiliated with mosques and who were promised tasks full of purpose, excitement and spiritual reward.

Nevertheless, a significant number of terrorists have been recruited from among the European university educated middle classes. So poverty alone is not an adequate explanation for the terrorist phenomenon. The Hamburg network, for example, that prepared the attacks on September 11 was made up of well-situated students. Social and economics are one factor explaining why certain people become terrorists. Another factor may be religion. Political and psychological factors have to be considered. Many of the middle class recruits were disillusioned lovers who joined university clubs based on ethnicity or religion. Some had only recently immigrated from North or East Africa, others were second or third generation inhabitants of their countries.

Perhaps, however, other non-terrorism issues are of primary importance in Europe. Profound demographic, social and cultural changes are taking place. Nevertheless, even some of those organizations that officially dissociate themselves from Al Qaida style activities accept the validity of Jihad and violence. In their belief in mass violence they are similar to the Fascist movements of the 1930s.

This is typical for example of Hizb al Tahrir which was founded in Jordanian Jerusalem in the early 1950s. Hizb al Tahrir, like many such organizations is a splinter group of the Muslim Brotherhood, an organization they considered to be too moderate. Hizb al Tahrir is a fundamentalist radical organization even if it has at times operated as a legal party. At other times it is said to have maintained a secret underground organization. What it openly aims to do is to restore the caliphate, which was abolished with the abdication of the last Turkish Sultan in the 1920s. Hizb al Tahrir is different to other groups in that it is elitist and seeks specifically to attract educated members. Having started up in Britain, it has grown to include branches in Germany, Egypt, Australia, Jordan, Kirgisistan, Kuwait, Sudan, Syria, Tajikistan, Turkey, Uzbekistan and even the United States. Members tend to have a technical or university background.

One last expression of Muslim frustration that should be mentioned here is the spontaneous violence that in November 2005 and November 2007 had affected in Paris, in particular. Most of the participants would seem to have been Muslims because of their conditions in which they are forced to live and at the despair of the younger generation in the ghettos. While they are also responding to agitation by preachers and political activists, there is no sign that any one organization is instigating a systematic campaign of violence. Similar violent protest in other parts of Europe would not be entirely unexpected.

Over the last couple of decades internal competition and rivalry has succeeded in accentuating religious political radicalization. It may be that this new fanaticism cannot last and should therefore not be overrated. A majority of Muslims, no differently from other groupings around the world are seeking to live a peaceful and prosperous life. Some sympathy born out of frustration does exist for the militants. Nevertheless, few Muslims want to die a martyr’s death. The key is to unlock the individual Muslim’s ability to think freely for themselves by raising their level of education. In that way, the power of the radical imams to suppress their communities will be weakened. In turn moderate Muslims and their Imam will be able to show that Islam is able to coexist peacefully in Europe.

Even if a moderate Islam prevails and the Muslims integrate with the European societies, Europe will not be the same. Over time the political salience of the Muslim factor in Europe will be most evident in the domestic realm. In large measure, the influence of Muslims in European societies will be a function of whether and when Muslims get involved in the electoral process on a significant scale, how political parties will include Muslims in day-to-day life, what economic role they will play, and what degree of social mobility they will achieve.

Unfortunately the West, instead of using the differences between Shiism and Sunnism, has lost its nerve and has totally been unable to devise a sound strategy to face political Islam.

Ousted congressman Bob Inglis (R-SC) has a theory about why he lost this year’s midterm primary: conservative voters did not much care for Inglis’s belief in global warming. This is because, according to the congressman, his environmentalism fell on “Satan’s side” of the climate-change debate. We were not aware that Satan had chosen sides, but, in fairness, it has been awhile since we last checked in with the Prince of Darkness. This afternoon, Satan stopped by the VF Daily Midtown Manhattan office to respond to Inglis’s comments.

VF Daily: Satan, thanks for joining us today. I heard you had a terrible time getting here this morning. The T.S.A. give you trouble?

Satan: No problem, glad to be here. Oh God, travel was just atrocious. I smell like brimstone, which confuses people because they think I’m hiding a fire-starting device.

Right.

It’s not a shoe-bomb, or whatever—my day job just requires me to put in long hours around the burning flesh of the damned.

I imagine you must have a hell of a dry-cleaning bill. Anyway, I’d like to ask you about comments made by outgoing Republican congressman Bob Inglis of South Carolina.

Sure.

Inglis blamed his belief in global warning for his loss in the 2010 midterm election Republican primary. “For many conservatives, it became the marker that you had crossed to Satan’s side—that you had left God and gone to Satan’s side on climate change because many evangelical Christians in our district would say that it’s up to God to determine the length of Earth, and therefore, you are invading the province of God,” he said. In the global warming debate, which side do you fall on?

I’m glad you asked. The flow of information is so mediated these days that to be able to influence your own public image is a rare privilege. Anyway, as you might have gathered from reading Revelation 20:10 or its sequel, the Drudge Report, I live in “a lake of fire.” I much prefer warm temperatures to cool ones.

That would mean you’re a global-warming-denier, right?

Well, no. Inglis is correct that I side with environmentalists, but it’s only because I know that whatever reforms are supported by the Democrats have a better chance of failing that those aligned with the Republican agenda.