Sitting down with NY's most influential Muslim

Reuters religion editor and FaithWorld administrator, Tom Heneghan, recently interviewed Mohammad Shamsi Ali, New York's "most influential Islamic leader" and the Muslim emissary to local police and the mayor's. Here's what Ali had to say about being Muslim in America and dealing with radical Islamists:

“We feel at home here. To be honest with you, those people who are really sincere with their religion and understand the religion properly, they see many things Islamic in America, more Islamic than in many Muslim countries. First of all, freedom and Islam are like fish and water. Islam cannot live without freedom … Here in America we have freedom. You can express yourself freely. It is guaranteed by the Constitution. Then you have justice for all, equality. We have to say there are some interruptions because of the security. But it doesn’t at all change the real nature of America. For those Muslims who understand the teaching, this will make them feel that America really belongs to them and they belong to America.”

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“Some Muslims like the Islamic Thinkers Society are against Jews and against non-Muslims. I consider them ignorant and in need of an education. I feel a deep responsibility to bring them back to the right track. It makes me worry when I see what Imam Shamsi Ali, 23 April 2008/Tom Heneghanhappened in Britain, in London with Hizb ut Tahrir and Al Muhajiroun. They are very much fundamentalist radicals. I don’t think these will give any benefit to our community, nothing at all. Among the Jewish community there are also fairly radical people. It is the responsibility of us in the middle to strengthen our unity and come together and try to find solutions to problems that surround our communities. I say to non-Muslims: let us do the job but have confidence in us … In a meeting with the NYPD, I told them we acknowledge the presence of radicals in the Muslim community — but it doesn’t mean we support them. In fact, the radicals are marginalised in many ways right now … So I don’t feel we need aggressiveness. I feel we need to reach out … We need confidence in us (from non-Muslims) and we need support. Don’t put suspicions over us. We are not confident enough to do the job. All good Muslims must have good intentions for America because this is the country where we live and we consider this our own country. The opposite is true too — if you’re not good Muslims, you’re not good Americans.”

Lord Hameed: suicide bombings 'un-Islamic'

No kidding. Maybe someone should share Lord Hameed's recent speech with those young American Muslims who think Islam sometimes justifies suicide attacks ... on civilians:

Many now viewed and with scepticism Islam’s message of peace and compassion, for if this were true, why, they asked, is it associated with violence and intolerance towards non-Muslims and the poor treatment of women? The answer is that both Muslims and non-Muslims use the Quran selectively. The events of 9/11 in New York and 7/7 in London and in Spain, Bali, and other places, were despicable acts committed by misled youths wrongly in the name of Islam. My Lords, Islam prohibits not only the killing of the innocent but is also most severe on the act of suicide. There is a clear Quranic instruction against taking ones own life. I therefore have no problem, my Lords, in stating from the August floor of your lordships’ House for all to hear, specially my co-religionists from the Muslim world, that exploding bombs as an act of suicide to kill innocent people in buses, bazaars, aeroplanes, trains, schools, places of worship or anywhere else, is totally un-Islamic and against the teachings of the Quran. All Muslims, therefore, must do everything to stop this evil depravity.

What traveling to Mecca does to Muslims

Last December, more than 2 million Muslims from around the world converged on Saudi Arabia to participate in the Hajj, the annual pilgrimage to the holy site of Mecca. The Hajjis spent a month performing religious rituals, mingling with Muslims from all walks of life, and, in some cases, taking part in communal chants of "Death to America" led by Islamic extremists. This was understandably unnerving to the 10,000 or so Americans who made the pilgrimage, not to mention those who didn't. Such behavior raised concerns that the Hajj is a breeding ground for anti-Western sentiment—or worse.

Then again, the spirit of friendship and community that typically prevails during the Hajj has also been known to promote tolerance and understanding across peoples. Malcolm X famously softened his views on black-white relations during his pilgrimage to Mecca, where he witnessed a "spirit of unity and brotherhood that my experiences in America had led me to believe never could exist between the white and non-white."

So does the Hajj open minds, or does it expose Muslims to radical views that unite them against the non-Islamic world?

That is an important question asked in this Slate article. The Hajj is a Pillar of Islam, up there with daily prayer, giving to the poor and fasting during Ramadan. It is a pilgrimage to Mecca that every able-bodied Muslim is expected to participate in, and therefore its influences are profound. Three researchers recently set out to answer that question. In a yet published study, they found that the Hajj made its pilgrims more moderate on a range of issues, religious and nonreligious, "suggesting that the Hajj may be helpful in curbing the spread of extremism in the Islamic world."

Singleton confuses Osama and Obama

Yeah, the guy who is running into the ground the parent company of my old papers, media baron Dean Singleton, showed the error today of axing so many of his editors when he referred to Mr. Most Wanted as "Obama bin Laden." From the AP wire:

Sen. Barack Obama’s name has been mangled plenty of times, though not always in the presence of 1,200 news executives and TV cameras.

It happened Monday at The Associated Press’s Annual Luncheon, where the Democratic presidential candidate spoke and took questions. Dean Singleton, chairman of the AP’s board of directors and head of Denver-based MediaNews Group, slipped when asking the senator if he could envision sending many more U.S. troops to Afghanistan, where "Obama bin Laden is still at large.”

Obama gave a quizzical look and said, “I think that was Osama bin Laden.” Singleton quickly replied, “If I did that, I’m so sorry."

“No, no, no,” the senator said. He called it “part of the exercise that I’ve been going through over the last 15 months, which is why it’s pretty impressive I’m still standing here.”

The crowd laughed and gave him a sympathetic round of applause.

Here's more from Editor & Publisher.

That anti-Islam film getting all the attention

Geert Wilders' new film, "Fitna," has been getting a lot of attention. A former Malaysian diplomat said the film, which is highly critical of Islam, would make the rioting and violence sparked by the cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad look like a "picnic."

The film was originally posted at LiveLeak today but was taken down after 3 million views and a lot of threats.

In place of the video Friday afternoon, a brief and poignant message appears on-screen: "Following threats to our staff of a very serious nature.... LiveLeak has been left with no choice but to remove Fitna from our servers.

"This is a sad day for freedom of speech on the net.... We would like to thank the thousands of people from all backgrounds and religions who gave us their support."

GoogleVideo still has a 17-minute clip from "Fitna." Many images are very, very disturbing -- from the physical brutality of a beheading to the rhetorical venom of a 3-year-old girl who says Allah told her Jews are pigs and apes -- and some resemble segments of "The Path to the Final Solution." Fortunately, most Muslim Americans shy away from such extremist attitudes. Most.

(Hat tip: Bloggish)

Mourning the Mercaz Harav massacre

The killing of eight students at a Jerusalem yeshiva last week, the first terror attack in the Holy City in four years, broke the hearts of Jews around the world. Here in Los Angeles, their were vigils and peace rallies and very shaken Jewish teenagers like Aaron Begin.

"Rabbi, I have a question," he says to his principal, Rabbi Heshy Glass, who is standing with him. "Doesn't it say you can't die while you're learning Torah?"

Glass tells him the story of the Mishnaic sage Rabbi Akiva, who was taken by the Romans while he studied. Like these boys, he tells Begin, he was a Jewish hero, remembered for the ages.

Glass doesn't try to make sense of the tragedy, just to continue the conversation about what is so troubling to Begin and other boys at YULA, many of whom plan to study in Israeli yeshivas when they graduate.

"You hear about tragedies in Israel, but it hits so close to home because this is us next year. Next year we're going to yeshiva," said Chaim Gamzo, a 17-year-old senior. "These guys had their whole lives ahead of them -- like me. I hope to go to yeshiva, to go to college, to have a normal successful life, but they didn't have the opportunity to do that."

On Sunday, a peace rally packed Young Israel of Century City and L.A. Councilman Jack Weiss said the massacre at Mercaz Harav was not an attack on a seminary affiliated with the settler movement.

“Judaism is about Torah and the transmission of Torah. The essence of Judaism is Torah, and its transfar from one generation to the next, “Medor le'dor.” And that's what Mercaz HaRav does, all day and all night, year in and year out.

“The attack on the students of Yeshiva Mercaz Harav had absolutely nothing to do with politics. The terrorist was not acting because of national grievances, it was not a dispute about territory—as if that would excuse such an atrocity—for it wouldn't.

“No, the terrorist was attacking Judaism.

“By murdering these eight pure students the terrorist was trying to eradicate the core of Judaism: Torah and the transmission of Torah.

“In addition, the rockets that fly from Gaza into S'derot may appear as if they are connected to a dispute about land, but that's a lie.

“The rockets are also an attack on Judaism. The rockets are an attack on Jews in Israel and on Jews in every corner of the world.

“The battle that Israel wages against the Muslim jihadists is not a local conflict, but just one front in a world-wide jihad.

“Make no doubt about it, this war is a genocidal attack against all Jews.

“The goal of the Islamic jihadists is to eradicate Judaism from the face of the earth.

“And that's why the eight Torah students were chosen for slaughter.

“If you don't understand this simple calculus, then you have no understanding of the true nature of the enemy.”

Tied to the Mercaz Harav attack, I have a short piece in tomorrow's Jewish Journal, online now, about a protest against the Jewish state that was held outside the Israeli consulate in L.A. while officials inside mourned the deaths that occurred only the day before. The protest was organized by the Muslim Student Union at UC Irvine in response to the IDF's entry into Gaza the weekend before, which left 100 Palestinians dead, and among the speakers was Amir Abdel Malik Ali, who referred to Zionists as "the new Nazis."

The tale of three former terrorists

InFocus is a relatively new monthly newspaper for the Muslim community in Southern California that circulates 25,000 copies to Muslim businesses and mosques. In the same way that one would expect Jewish publications to be pro-Israel, it is clearly pro-Palestinian and uses the dateline "Occupied Jerusalem."

In the current issue, InFocus' senior writer -- like a Muslim me, though I don't think he's Christian -- has a story that questions the authenticity of three speakers on the ex-terrorist circuit. Well, it doesn't so much question their story as it does indict them for being fallacious Islamophobes.

For self-proclaimed "former terrorists" Walid Shoebat, Kamal Saleem and Zachariah Anani, all with a history of alleged blood and murder, nothing even close to legal action has ever been taken against them. On the contrary, the trio has, for the past few years, actively been appearing on TV shows across the nation, speaking at conferences and fund-raisers in churches and synagogues and openly proclaiming their so-called bloody past to anyone who is willing to listen.

As recently as last month, the three, whose stories are riddled with lies and inconsistencies according to critics, were invited by the prestigious United States Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs, which held its annual conference on terrorism, to speak about the dangers of "Islamic terrorism." The appearance of these individuals drew the ire of Muslims and religious freedom organizations alike. The former were incensed by the fact that the speakers were notorious Islamophobes cashing in on the post-9/11 Islam-bashing industry, and the latter worried by the increasing presence of evangelicals in the armed forces.

"It’s a puzzle as to why the Air Force would invite these three Muslim bashers," said Ibrahim Hooper, communications director for the Council on American-Islamic Relations. "We see a history, unfortunately, of proselytizing for particular faith groups and this seems to have been part of that whole effort."

Maj. Brett Ashworth, a spokesman for the academy, told the New York Times that the three would be paid a total of $13,000 for their appearance, some of it from private donors. Ashworth justified the invitation saying "they offered a unique perspective from inside terrorism." The findings of the conference will be compiled into a report on methods to combat terrorism that will be sent to the Pentagon, members of Congress and other influential officials, he added.

A group that calls itself the Military Religious Freedom Foundation is suing the federal government for what it calls "creeping evangelism in the armed forces." The group accused the Air Force Academy of constantly inviting born-again Christians, rather than experts, to address cadets on terrorism.

"This stuff going on at the academy today is part of the endemic evangelical infiltration that continues," David Antoon, a 1970 academy graduate and a foundation member, told the Times.

On his own web site, (www.shoebat.com) Shoebat claims to have belonged to the Palestinian Liberation Organization early in his life and to have committed "acts of violence and terrorism against Israel." In his bio, Anani, who now resides in Canada, claimed to have joined a militant group in Beirut, Lebanon, when he was a teenager and boasted to have killed 223 people at a tender age, most of them with a dagger. Saleem claims to have been recruited by the Muslim Brotherhood when he was just 7 years old, and then later as a teenager to have joined the PLO.

However, to most, the trio’s stories seem more fiction than fact.

"You have three people who are openly claiming to be former terrorists," said Hooper. "I don’t think that in any other case, law enforcement officials would look at the word ‘former’ and excuse people. If these three people are indeed former terrorists, why aren’t they in jail or at the very least deported?"

Not to dismiss the possibility that some opportunists are using the religious speaking circuit to make a buck -- it has happened, oh, a few times before -- but the speculative "evidence" here feels pretty weak.

'Terrorism is the lousiest shortcut to failure'

An old colleague of mine, Alex Dobuzinskis, recently interviewed Maher Hathout, whom you might remember from that ugly battle over a humanitarian award and those even uglier comments about Israel.

In the interview, Hathout promotes himself as a "progressive" and an admirer of Malcolm X, calls terrorism as "the lousiest shortcut to failure" and stands by his criticisms of the Jewish state.

Q: You follow a more progressive Islam, one that respects a woman's independence and a right to an education. Is this version winning out in the United States among younger Muslims or are they becoming more radicalized like their peers in Europe, the Middle East and Asia?

A: I underscore a version of Islam that I think is the real Islam ... from the higher sources, from the Koran and the model of prophet Muhammad. And we believe that our fair and neutral reading will lead to emancipation of women, equality of genders and to mercy and justice. ... I am afraid that this is sometimes overtaken by overwhelming anger and feelings of injustice.

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Q: In 2000, during the height of the second Palestinian Intifada against Israel, you gave a speech using the word "butchers" to describe the state of Israel. Would you refer to a Palestinian suicide bomber in Tel Aviv as a butcher?

A: I refer to them as suicidal (people) who are committing crimes against civilians, and that's absolutely wrong.

Remember, at that time, the Intifada was called the stone Intifada because they didn't use weapons, they threw rocks. And I was very angry about (Israel's harsh reaction), and I expressed that anger in the tone of my speech.

There was great brutality committed against the Palestinians ... which led me to say what I said. I clarified and, as a matter of fact. I apologized for the tone, not for the principle.

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Q: What is terrorism's appeal? Doesn't it really just come down to the fact that it's easier to hide in a crowd and lob bricks than to get involved in civil society, which always involves compromise and concessions?

A: Yes. Terrorism is the lousiest shortcut to failure. Terrorism does not achieve results. And I'm not talking only about this wave, I'm talking about history, whether in Russia ... or in Germany or in Europe or Ireland. Terrorism does not achieve things. What achieves things is the ability to deal with the opposite side ... to reach a compromise that does not violate human rights and justice.

Islamic Jihad: Let's have a bake sale

I wasn't able to see Jeffrey Goldberg -- the author of "Prisoners: A Muslim and a Jew Across the Middle East Divide" who had a great Atlantic cover story this month on the future nations of the Middle East -- when he spoke at UCLA Hillel and Sinai Temple this month. But Jewish Current Issues has an interesting quote about the presidential election from his talk at the latter location.

There is almost this childish belief that on January 20, 2009 we will elect another president and that it will be Obama, or at least a woman, and the world will say “Oh great! Now we can like you again!”

There is this level of childish certainty in that -- that I find unfathomable. Because the next American president will have to advance America’s interests around the world. Some of those interests will have to be advanced in hard ways.

I predict that if Barack Obama becomes president, by late 2009 the stories in newspapers in Europe and on TV across the Arab world will be “Oh my God, this Obama is like Bush Lite!”

Why? Because he’s had to take hard steps in Afghanistan. Because he’s had to take hard steps in Pakistan. Because he hasn’t actually pulled out of Iraq, because pulling out of Iraq is not as easy as it sounds when you are debating Hillary Clinton on a stage somewhere. . . .

Because the next president -- whoever it is -- is going to face the same set of enormous problems, and like any president is going to have limited maneuverability to deal with those problems. And those problems are not going to go away. The Islamic Jihad is not going to say “Well! They elected Barack Obama! I guess we should just have a bake sale or something.”

What's the cure for 'sudden-jihad syndrome?'

An old colleague of mine writes about terrorism for the Washington Times, and the other night I can across a month-old story referring to sudden-jihad syndrome, which sounds like the evil spawn of SIDS and a small-man complex

Sympathy for al Qaeda has produced "sudden jihad syndrome" in domestic terror cells unaffiliated with foreign terrorists and people seeking to carry out attacks in the U.S., a law-enforcement intelligence analysis says.

The Dec. 6 report by the Texas Public Safety Department's Bureau of Information Analysis warns officials not to dismiss individual or homegrown terror cells as "wannabes," saying they pose a credible threat to homeland security.

"Oftentimes, these attackers are dismissed as suffering from mental health issues, but their own words and writings reveal an affiliation with Islamic supremacy or an affinity for Islamic extremism," said the report, which was distributed to federal, state and local law enforcement in Texas. "As a result, law enforcement should not be too quick to judge their attacks as having no nexus to terrorism."

Gunmen bomb Gaza YMCA library

Stories like this reminds me that militant Islamist groups -- not to be confused with righteous Muslims -- don't just hate Jews and Israel, but all who disagree with their vision for world supremacy. (Remember what Hamas did to its Fatah brothers in June?)

A band of 14 masked gunmen forced its way into YMCA offices in the Gaza Strip and exploded a library there, Israel Radio reported Friday.

Thousands of books were reportedly burnt in the ensuing fire. The YMCA in Gaza also operates a gym and a wedding hall.

The gunmen laid a second explosive device near a computer in the library but it failed to detonate. Two security guards on the scene were not able to block the intruders; they were taken by them from the YMCA and later released in the northern Gaza Strip.

The latest incident is another link in an ongoing chain of attacks against Palestinian Christians which has worsened since Hamas took power of the Gaza Strip last June.

What Daniel Pearl stood for

Judea Pearl reflected in the Wall Street Journal last week on how the murder six years ago of his son, journalist Daniel Pearl, changed the world.

The shocking element in Danny's murder was that he was killed, not for what he wrote or planned to write, but for what he represented -- America, modernity, openness, pluralism, curiosity, dialogue, fairness, objectivity, freedom of inquiry, truth and respect for all people. In short, each and every one of us was targeted in Karachi in January of 2002.

This new twist of killing journalists for what they represent has changed the course of journalism as well as the rest of society.

It was through Danny's face that people came to grasp the depth of cruelty and inhumanity into which this planet of ours has been allowed to sink in the past two decades. His murder proved that 9/11 was not an isolated event, and helped resurrect the age-old ideas of right and wrong, good and evil. Moral relativism died with Daniel Pearl in January 2002.

LA drug ring fronting for Hezbollah

A seemingly small-time drug ring busted this week in Los Angeles was actually targeted for funding the Lebanese terror group Hezbollah, the Daily News has learned.

Prosecutors left out the terror tie when they announced Tuesday that federal agents and local cops had arrested a dozen people for allegedly peddling cocaine and counterfeit clothing in Bell, Calif.

But several sources familiar with the investigation said the predominantly Arab-American gang was believed to have smuggled its crime cash to the Iranian-backed terror group.

"This was a classic case of terrorism financing, and it was pretty sophisticated how they did it," a source close to Operation Bell Bottoms told The News.

There's not much more to the story, but you can read the rest here.

Militants use Google Earth to attack Israel

From the Guardian, via Seraphic Secret:

Palestinian militants are using Google Earth to help plan their attacks on the Israeli military and other targets, the Guardian has learned.

Members of the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, a group aligned with the Fatah political party, say they use the popular internet mapping tool to help determine their targets for rocket strikes.

"We obtain the details from Google Earth and check them against our maps of the city centre and sensitive areas," Khaled Jaabari, the group's commander in Gaza who is known as Abu Walid, told the Guardian.

Abu Walid showed the Guardian an aerial image of the Israeli town of Sderot on his computer to demonstrate how his group searches for targets.

The Guardian filmed an al-Aqsa test rocket launch, fired into an uninhabited area of the Negev desert, last month. Despite the crudeness of the weapons, many have landed in Sderot, killing around a dozen people in the last three years and wounding scores more.

One of the saving graces for people living alongside the Gaza border has been the limited accuracy of Kassam rockets. But if Palestinian militants know what they're aiming at, I fear casualties might become more common.

Palestinian Christian murdered for selling Bibles

Can you imagine if the owners of Family Christian Stores had to worry about an Islamic radical barging into their shop and slitting their throats for publishing Bibles? Earlier this year, three Bible publishers were murdered in Turkey, and over the weekend the head of the Palestine Holy Bible Society turned up dead in Gaza.

The 32-year-old was abducted Saturday night, and found dead yesterday with gunshot and stab wounds, the Associated Press reports. AFP says his body, which showed signs of torture, was found by Hamas-affiliated police.

"We will pursue anyone who is found to be involved in this case," the regime said in a statement. "We will not be merciful with those who abuse the security and stability of our people."

Take that spin, from the people who recently threw members of the co-governing Fatah party off Gaza rooftops, for what it's worth. Gaza Christians have been on edge for a while now.

The greatest trick the devil ever pulled ...

There are a lot of "lies that won't die." The U.S. role in Israel's Six-Day War. The Jewish cabal that orchestrated 9/11. The devil convincing the world he doesn't exist.

But six years after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks -- and long after the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq and ouster of Saddam Hussein, whom investigations had found had nothing to do with the terrorist attacks -- millions of ignoramuses continue to believe otherwise. Heaven help us.

WASHINGTON — On the sixth anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks, one-third of the American people continue to believe that Saddam Hussein was "personally involved" in the terrorist assault, according to one recent poll.

Other surveys show that a larger number — 40 percent or more — believe that Iraq had some role in the attacks, or that Iraq gave substantial support to al-Qaida.

The 9/11 Commission and intelligence experts never found such a connection, but even after six years of reports and news accounts, the myth of a strong Iraq-Sept. 11 link persists.

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"The Bush administration has been extremely clever at suggesting connections without being explicit," [Ohio State political science professor John] Mueller said. "And if you support the war, you want to believe it. You hear soldiers in Iraq all the time say that they're there because of 9/11."

Qassam rocket hits Israeli military base

Remember when I wrote last month that the Qassams being fired into the Sderot region of Israel from Gaza were inefficient weapons that caused more emotional terror than physical? Well, early this morning one hit an IDF base, wounding 69 troops and critically injuring one soldier.

Hamas issued the expected response: "We consider this a victory from God for the resistence."

Whose God? Not mine, though my understanding of the Abrahamic faiths is that we all begin with the same singular God. If only we could have all stayed there.

My friend Robert J. Avrech at Seraphic Secret renews his call for Israel to respond by cutting the power to Gaza.

There is no reason for Israel to enable her blood enemies. The so-called Palestinians have received more foreign aid than any other country on the face of the earth. They could have used the money to build an infrastructure, to build an electrical power grid—instead of relying on Israel, their enemies, for electricity.

Instead, the so-called Palestinian leadership stole the money, or used it to buy weapons to kill Jews. But mostly the PA leadership just pissed away billions upon billions of dollars on the most corrupt thugogracy the world has ever seen.

Last week, Defense Minister Ehud Barak ordered his charges to look into the legal ramifications of cutting supplies to the Gaza Strip. I, however, anticipate nothing short of a major ground operation will alter the militants' actions, which have been ongoing for six years. And I don't expect that to happen any time soon.

L'Shana Tovah.

(Photo: From my visit to Sderot)

9/11 reflections

A couple of links for this anniversary morning.

GetReligion links to a reporter's notebook from the morning of the 9/11 attacks.

Then, seconds later, the crown of the south tower did a little twist, and there was that horrible, horrible roar, which I can hear inside my head as I type this, as the south tower collapsed. You can see on the image below the precise moment this happened, because I had my pen to my paper. At the top of the page were quotes from bystanders gathered just before the tower went down (“This is Tom Clancy. This is unbelievable.” “Plain and simple and act of war.” “This isn’t a pizzeria w/10 employees.”) But look under the line I drew — you’ll see a shaky line falling away toward the bottom of the page. That’s where my pen was on the paper as my knees went weak and I literally began to fall down. I reached out and grabbed Jessie to keep from going down.

Then I wrote, in a crazy scrawl:

explosion, fell to ground people on bridge sobbing,
one woman
It’s not there anymore!
It collapsed!

A short, stout young black woman in front of me threw her head back and her arms open. She looked at the sky and bellowed an apocalyptic line from Scripture: “And every knew shall bow, and every tongue confess!” She added: “It ain’t over, people!”

For the six-years-later, what-has-it-done-to-us approach, The LA Times runs an editorial titled "What we've lost."

In the years since terrorists struck New York and Washington, we can point to one significant achievement: We have avoided another attack on American soil. Given the ferocity and cunning of Al Qaeda, that is no small feat. For this, we give thanks and credit to the diligence of U.S. and foreign intelligence services, homeland security and law enforcement officials, brave counter-terrorist fighters and wily strategists in every branch of the U.S. military, and alert citizens who have helped authorities foil attacks by would-be mass murderers.

By contrast, the decision to invade Iraq has proved, in our view, a distraction from the struggle against radical Islamist terrorism, and it has cost us dearly. More than 3,700 American soldiers have lost their lives on foreign sands. Another 27,000 have returned home with injuries, many of them life-altering. Tens of thousands of Iraqis have been killed or wounded and about 4 million forced to flee, half of them to uncertain foreign refuge. Their scars will mar the future as anger over the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq and its injustices at Guantanamo Bay breedsnew enemies.

Those are harrowing consequences of a war waged by an administration that has misunderstood its enemy and its place in history. But the price of thispresident'smilitary and domestic overreach has been highest in the loss of faith in America itself, in the values and institutions that have historically defined this nation.

This editorial reminds me of a less-than-stellar piece I wrote (overwrote, no doubt) at my first paper in 2004 about how the war on terror was whittling away American freedoms. Check out the guest appearance by presidential candidate Ron Paul.

'America to the Rescue'

This segment from "The Daily Show" two weeks ago starts a bit slow, but I found it's message about American arms sales worth a sad, tired laugh.

Summer reading -- Goldberg's 'Prisoners'

This week I finished Jeffrey Goldberg's wonderful book "Prisoners: A Muslim and Jew Across the Middle East Divide." In it, Goldberg, who recently left the New Yorker for the Atlantic Monthly, details his Zionist evolution for socialist camper to Israeli prison guard during the First Intifada to Middle East correspondent for The New York Times Magazine.

After serving at the Ketziot prison, Goldberg returned to Israel and the Palestinian territories to start talking with some of his former prisoners. One in particular, Rafiq Hijazi, now a professor in UAE, has captured Goldberg's imagination: He is convinced the two can become friends, an act with symbolic meaning for the solution to that seemingly eternal crisis in Israel.

The back of the book comes with praise from far greater journalists than me, so I'll just say it's worth your while to pick up a copy. For an Israel ignoramus like myself, the book really helps you understand the landscape and the latent ideologies manifesting themselves in suicide bombings and the difficulty of discussing peace when two people want such divergent things.

The book is, in parts, disturbing, such as when Goldberg interviews Abdel Aziz Rantisi, a founder of Hamas:

Hamas, more than any other force, transformed the dispute between Arabs and Israelis into one between Muslims and Jews. There was no category called "Israeli" in Rantisi's bifurcated understanding of the world. There is umma, which represents light, and then there are the Jews, who are darkness. "The Quran says that they will be behind violence and wars everywhere," he said. "This is true throughout history. They stole money from everyone. People always talk about what the Germans did to the Jews, but the true question is, What did the Jews do to the Germans?"

A resounding theme is the difficulty of working toward compromise when fundamentalism is at work. History is rarely right; the Quran always is, Goldberg learns.

Clearly, this fundamentalism, which UCLA law professor Khaled Abou El Fadl told me comes not from true Islamic scholars but politically motivated clerics, is becoming more prevalent in Muslim countries and Europe. It's the reason Bernard Lewis has said, "Bring them freedom or they destroy us."

But can Western ideals and Islamic fundamentalism live side-by-side? Or are American Muslims pushed to act in a way that is haram by living in a free society?