A court in Melbourne, Australia heard some chilling evidence yesterday regarding the activities of Abdul Nacer Benbrika, an Islamic cleric suspected of plotting a massive terrorist attack.  The evidence included surveillance tapes of Benbrika urging his followers to kill at least 1,000 Australians to “please Allah.”

Mr Benbrika encouraged his devotees to plan a large-scale terrorist attack, which police foiled during its "developmental stages", the court heard during the opening day of the committal hearing of 13 suspects yesterday.

"If you kill, we kill here 1000," Mr Benbrika allegedly said in a conversation covertly taped by police. "Because if you get large numbers here, the government will listen."

Benbrika is currently on trial along with 12 other people, including Shane Kent, a “blonde recruit” who allegedly traveled to Afghanistan in 2001, met Osama bin Laden, and received extensive weapons and explosives training.  The suspects were arrested in November 2005 during a series of raids that turned up large quantities of alleged precursor chemicals, laboratory equipment and instruction manuals on the production of the explosive triacetone triperoxide (TATP).  Police also found maps and photographs of potential targets, including the Australian Stock Exchange, Flinders Street Station (Melbourne’s landmark central train exchange), and the Melbourne headquarters of Australia’s Departments of Foreign Affairs and Trade and Immigration.

Benbrika, a native of Algeria, came to Australia in 1989 on a temporary visa.  He claimed that he faced persecution in Algeria and was eventually granted Australian citizenship.  During the following years he became increasingly radicalized and attracted a small group of like-minded fanatics, mostly the disaffected children of Muslim immigrants. 

As Mark Steyn has noted, “Pre-modern Islam beats postmodern Christianity--and, for young men in search of an identity, transnational jihad beats multicultural nullity.”  If that diagnosis is correct, the long term prospects for the West are not good.

In 2003 the United States invaded Iraq in part to end the threat posed by Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction.  Unfortunately, no significant WMDs have been found to date.  Nevertheless, the threat of such weapons falling into the hands of enemy states, religious fanatics and sub-national terror groups is growing by the day.  The latest development is Pakistan’s construction of a powerful new nuclear reactor at its Khushab nuclear site.

According to the Washington Post, the new reactor is a 1,000-megawatt behemoth capable of producing enough plutonium to build 40 to 50 nuclear weapons per year.  That’s about 20 times more than Pakistan is currently capable of producing.

Pakistan already has 30 to 50 nuclear warheads in its arsenal.  However, most of these are uranium-powered bombs that work by shooting two pieces of uranium together.  Uranium bombs tend to be large and heavy.  Plutonium warheads, in contrast, work by using shaped explosives to implode a small sphere of plutonium.  This is technically more difficult but the resulting warheads are smaller and lighter, ideal for mounting on missiles.

Aside from increasing the threat of a nuclear war with India, these smaller nukes will undoubtedly pose a grave terrorist threat.  Pakistan’s Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) has a long history of sponsoring Islamist fanatics, including the Taliban as well as terrorists in Kashmir.  In addition, the ISI has been deeply involved in Pakistan’s domestic politics for decades.  It is entirely possible that the ISI might someday get its hands on one or more of Pakistan’s plutonium warheads and transfer them to al-Qaeda or some other terrorist group.  The possibilities are no doubt giving intelligence analysts in the U.S. a lot of sleepless nights.

Although Pakistan’s current leader, Pervez Musharaff, allegedly purged the ISI of Islamist sympathizers following 9/11, others no doubt still exist.  Also, President Musharaff has been the target of several assassination attempts, in part due to his decision to support the U.S. attack on Afghanistan.  When he goes, what will happen to Pakistan?  More to the point, what will happen to all those nukes?

There is no shortage of liberal judges in the United States willing to interpret laws and the Constitution so as to advance a “progressive” social agenda.  The Supreme Court’s decision in Roe v. Wade, which abrogated state laws restricting abortion, is the classic example.  But our judges are amateurs compared to those in Holland, who recently decided that a political party that wants to legalize pedophilia has the right to participate in the next round of elections.

As Theodore Dalrymple writes in City Journal, the Brotherly Love, Freedom and Diversity Party has a platform that includes “lowering the age of consent to sexual intercourse from 16 to 12, the legalization of the possession of child pornography and of sexual intercourse with animals,” as well as the right to broadcast violent pornography.  This is too much even for the Dutch, 82 percent of whom want the party outlawed. 

No nation can function effectively with a judiciary so out of synch with traditional values.  The danger, according to Dalrymple, is that such decisions call into question the legitimacy of the law, which in turn can lead to political violence and a breakdown of law and order.

More ominously, the Dutch decision can only increase the contempt and loathing that Muslims in Holland already have for their adopted country.  Of course, most Islamists already view Holland as a land of debauched infidels.  Allowing pedophiles to run for public office will only add fuel to the fire.

Ynet News is reporting that Israeli warplanes have attacked four el-mal (money house) buildings in Lebanon where Hezbollah stores its cash.  The buildings are located in the Bint Jbeil, Nabatiyeh, Baalbek and the Tyre areas.  The Israelis also took out the “Shahid Fund” financial office and other financial operations in Beirut.

If true, this would be a serious setback for Hezbollah.  Like most terrorist organizations, Hezbollah probably keeps large sums of money in cash to avoid detection by the international financial system.  This is especially true given the recent revelations by the New York Times regarding the SWIFT system for tracking terrorist financial transactions.

We’re not talking about small change here.  By some estimates, Iran is funding Hezbollah to the tune of $20 million to $40 million per month.  This volume of money takes time to physically move, so there’s a good chance that a lot of it went up in smoke.  Way to go, IDF!  

The Washington Post has published its share of dumb columns in recent years, but today’s piece by Richard Cohen, Hunker Down With History, takes the cake.  With Israel fighting for its life on two fronts, Cohen advises Israelis not to forget that Israel is a mistake.

It is an honest mistake, a well-intentioned mistake, a mistake for which no one is culpable, but the idea of creating a nation of European Jews in an area of Arab Muslims (and some Christians) has produced a century of warfare and terrorism of the sort we are seeing now. Israel fights Hezbollah in the north and Hamas in the south, but its most formidable enemy is history itself. 

In Cohen’s view, Hamas, Hezbollah and most other Muslims in the Middle East are who they are: Jew-hating barbarians.  They can’t help it, so holding them accountable for their murderous anti-semitism is pointless.  The real culprits are the Jews, who have enraged Muslims by having effrontery to establish a thriving state in their ancestral homeland.

This argument displays a breathtaking ignorance of history.  The Jewish people lived in Palestine for thousands of years, long before Islam was even founded.  Their claim pre-dates those of the local Arabs who subsequently settled there.  Besides, Arabs showed little interest in Palestine before Jews started building a state there in the nineteenth century.  Indeed, most of Palestine was widely regarded as pesthole before the Jews arrived.  Mark Twain, who visited Palestine in 1867, famously painted a very unflattering portrait of the region in The Innocents Abroad:

Of all the lands there are for dismal scenery, I think Palestine must be the prince. The hills are barren, they are dull of color, they are un-picturesque in shape. The valleys are unsightly deserts fringed with a feeble vegetation that has an expression about it of being sorrowful and despondent. The Dead Sea and the Sea of Galilee sleep in the midst of a vast stretch of hill and plain wherein the eye rests upon no pleasant tint, no striking object, no soft picture dreaming in a purple haze… It is a hopeless, dreary, heart-broken land.

One wonders what Twain would say if he could see Israel today.

Cohen also urges Israel to exercise “restraint” in dealing with genocidal terrorists.  “Whatever happens, Israel must not use its military might to win back what it has already chosen to lose: the buffer zone in southern Lebanon and the Gaza Strip itself.”  That would turn Israel into an “occupier” again and give the Arabs yet another casus belli.  Instead, Israel should make the “smart choice” by abandoning the West bank, retreating to its pre-1967 borders and “waiting (and hoping) that history will get distracted and move on to something else.”

This is a prescription for Israel’s destruction, and Cohen knows it.  Hunkering down and hoping that your enemies will lose interest in killing you is not a strategy.  That’s especially true in this case, where Israel’s enemies have a long history of apocalyptic Jew hatred.  The only solution is the one that Israel is implementing: beating on its enemies until they are either dead or too weak to pose a threat.

A lot, as it turns out. Writing in the July issue of Scientific American (subscription required), Timothy Goldsmith notes that “We humans customarily assume that our visual system sits atop a pinnacle of evolutionary success.” In fact, what we see is only a tiny subset of a much larger reality. The most startling example of this is the recent discovery that birds can see into the ultraviolet part of the electromagnetic spectrum.

Color vision depends on cone cells in the retina. Humans have three different kinds of cone cells, each of which is sensitive to a different range of wavelengths of light. Our brains compare the signals sent by these cells to produce the sensation of color. Birds, however, have four types of cone cells, allowing them to perceive a much broader range of electromagnetic radiation. As a result, they inhabit a perceptual world beyond human experience.

“[I]t is difficult – impossible, in fact – for humans to know what [birds’] perception of colors is actually like,” writes Goldsmith. “They not only see in the near ultraviolet, but they also see colors that we cannot even envision.”

The New York Times has a long article on the “dark odyssey” of an Algerian, Laid Saidi, who was seized by authorities in Tanzania in 2003 and subsequently spent 16 months in prison in Afghanistan.  The article is yet another attempt by the Times to portray the Bush Administration as a rogue government that violates human rights.

Saidi clearly raised some red flags.  During his time in Tanzania, he ran a branch of a Saudi Arabian “charity” suspected of funneling money to terrorist groups.  In addition, he was carrying a false passport at the time he was detained.  That was enough for Tanzania, which suffered from the 1998 terrorist bombing of the U.S. embassy in Dar es Salaam.  Saidi was taken to Afghanistan, imprisoned in a windowless cell and interrogated relentlessly by people who spoke English and presumably worked for the Central Intelligence Agency.

Saidi’s stay in Afghanistan was not pleasant.  He claims that his interrogators “beat me and threw cold water on me, spat at me and sometimes gave me dirty water to drink.”  The interrogators also allegedly hand-cuffed Saidi to a wall for several days and told him that he would die in prison.  Eventually, they released Saidi “without charge” and flew him back to the Middle East.

According to the Times, the rendition of suspected terrorists like Saidi “represent not only a mounting political problem, but a potential legal problem for the United States and its allies that have participated in the extrajudicial abductions.”  The Times’ concern is touching, but naive.  Saidi was not a hapless traveler but a suspected terrorist.  As such it was morally and strategically appropriate to learn what he knew as quickly as possible.

The Times’ inference that Saidi should have been charged with a crime or released reflects a September 10^th mindset.  To put it bluntly, the Times and its fellow travelers simply don’t believe, or don’t want to believe, that we are at war with Islamic terrorists.  Thus, the U.S. has no right to treat people like Saidi as prisoners of war.

The Times is free to believe whatever it wants about the current conflict.  However, reality has a habit of shattering wishful thinking.  The Times may not believe we are at war, but the terrorists certainly do.  Today, for example, the FBI revealed that it had foiled plans by terrorists based in Beirut to bomb the Holland Tunnel.

The plotters wanted to detonate a massive amount of explosives inside the Holland Tunnel to blast a hole that would destroy the tunnel, everyone in it, and send a devastating flood shooting through the streets of lower Manhattan.

It is assumed by officials the thugs would try to use vehicles packed with explosives.

Sources said that New York City officials believed the plan could conceivably work with enough explosives placed in the middle of the tunnel, which runs underneath the river bed, a source said.

How many more plots like this are being hatched?  No one knows.  What is certain, however, is that the Times is either too stupid to see the looming threat or too blinded by partisan political zeal.