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From the DEBKAfile, which I understand is not always reliable:

More than 35 missiles have been fired against all the Israeli towns and villages within range of Gaza since early Wednesday, Nov. 5. Two upgraded Qassam missiles hit Ashkelon’s main street and industrial zone. Three shock victims were hospitalized. Israel’s emergency services in Ashkelon, Sderot, Netivot and the villages around Gaza are on the ready for further attacks but not all the schools within range of Gaza have shelters or fortified classrooms.

The Palestinian barrage, which coincided with Barack Obama’s victory rally in Chicago, followed a battle that erupted Tuesday night when an Israeli armored force crossed 250 meters deep into the Gaza Strip to demolish a Hamas tunnel dug from Al Bureij the Israel military position at the Kissufim border.

Via SondraK.

Via Grouchy Old Cripple:

Followed by this:

Just think. If the ecotards and the Dimocrat Party had not kept us from drilling in ANWR, off our coasts, and on federal lands and if they hadn’t blocked the building of new refineries and nuclear power plants, we would be energy independent and this would be the peace we would be raining on Iran and Saudi Arabia. These are the two countries who are our worst enemies on this planet and the countries we will eventually be at war with. They sponsor most of the Islamic terrorism in the world. The sooner we realize this and take steps to destroy them, by first becoming energy independent, the better off we’ll be.

I’ve been watching this happen for several years now. It’s scary as hell, and perhaps the scariest thing about it is, it forbids you to talk about it.

It’s the Jihad on Free Speech.

If you read that, grimaced, and moved to click the Back button to get away from this racist screed, congratulations! You’ve taken the first step to Submission!

If you want to find out how your right to free speech is being eroded by religious fanatics who happen not to be Christians, read Bruce Bawer’s Anatomy of Surrender over at City Journal.

Islam divides the world into two parts. The part governed by sharia, or Islamic law, is called the Dar al-Islam, or House of Submission. Everything else is the Dar al-Harb, or House of War, so called because it will take war—holy war, jihad—to bring it into the House of Submission. Over the centuries, this jihad has taken a variety of forms. Two centuries ago, for instance, Muslim pirates from North Africa captured ships and enslaved their crews, leading the U.S. to fight the Barbary Wars of 1801–05 and 1815. In recent decades, the jihadists’ weapon of choice has usually been the terrorist’s bomb; the use of planes as missiles on 9/11 was a variant of this method.

What has not been widely recognized is that the Ayatollah Khomeini’s 1989 fatwa against Satanic Verses author Salman Rushdie introduced a new kind of jihad. Instead of assaulting Western ships or buildings, Kho­meini took aim at a fundamental Western freedom: freedom of speech. In recent years, other Islamists have joined this crusade, seeking to undermine Western societies’ basic liberties and extend sharia within those societies.

The cultural jihadists have enjoyed disturbing success. Two events in particular—the 2004 assassination in Amsterdam of Theo van Gogh in retaliation for his film about Islam’s oppression of women, and the global wave of riots, murders, and vandalism that followed a Danish newspaper’s 2005 publication of cartoons satirizing Mohammed—have had a massive ripple effect throughout the West. Motivated variously, and doubtless sometimes simultaneously, by fear, misguided sympathy, and multicultural ideology—which teaches us to belittle our freedoms and to genuflect to non-Western cultures, however repressive—people at every level of Western society, but especially elites, have allowed concerns about what fundamentalist Muslims will feel, think, or do to influence their actions and expressions. These Westerners have begun, in other words, to internalize the strictures of sharia, and thus implicitly to accept the deferential status of dhimmis—infidels living in Muslim societies.

Call it a cultural surrender. The House of War is slowly—or not so slowly, in Europe’s case—being absorbed into the House of Submission.

The Western media are in the driver’s seat on this road to sharia. Often their approach is to argue that we’re the bad guys.

Oh, yes. Read the whole, ugly, sordid, thing. You need to know.

It’s long and detailed, but here’s the nut:

Britain’s Foreign Office has since deemed even [the phrase "War on Terror"] offensive and banned its use by cabinet members (along with “Islamic extremism”). In January, the Home Office decided that Islamic terrorism would henceforth be described as “anti-Islamic activity.”

Oh, that’s lovely. Brilliant. Note how that makes it impossible to fix responsibility for jihadist terrorism where it belongs. Anyone committing such an act is automatically considered separate from Islam–which therefor cannot be blamed for incitement.

In Britain, “Asian” is the accepted codeword for “Muslim”. In Europe, Muslim rioters are “disaffected youths”. Thus is the language debased, and made to hide the truth rather than reveal it.

Can’t be said often enough:

There is no God, especially not Allah; and Mohammed, may piss be upon him, was no prophet, but a child-molesting mass murderer. Islam is no “Religion of Peace”, but a violent warrior cult specially designed to enforce ignorance and hatred of everything other than itself.

Today is St. George’s Day.

This flag has long been a symbol of England. It’s also associated with the Crusades, and is therefore reviled by jihadists. Today, the dhimmi forces of appeasement are working to ban its public display. In the latest outrage, a St. George’s Day parade has been canceled, because the planned participation of 1,500 children made it too attractive a target for the Religion of Peace.

Can’t be said enough:
There is no God, certainly not Allah; and Mohamed, may piss be upon him, was no prophet, but a child-raper and mass-murderer who invented a sociopathic warrior cult that advocates more of the same.

I’ve said some pretty harsh things about Islam here, believing as I do that among religions, particularly the Abrahamic religions, that it is especially toxic, the creed of a violent warrior’s cult. (Unlike the others, such as Christianity, which can be twisted into advocating violent proselytization, Islam must be twisted into a “religion of peace”.)

But are such ideological attacks wise? Brian Micklethwaite over at Samizdata argues that it is a wise, perhaps even necessary, strategy in the Long War, and that it is beginning to result in massive apostasy.

In this spirit, I at first thought that whereas Soviet communism was ideologically breakable, Islam is not breakable. More than a billion souls believe in it, and however true it might be that it is evil and repulsive nonsense, saying this would accomplish very little. It would merely poke the hornet’s nest with a stick. But slowly, I have been coming round to thinking almost the complete opposite. Not only does denouncing Islam as evil nonsense establish the mere right, of us civilisationers, to denounce Islam - along with our right to say anything else we might want to say - true or false, nice or nasty, sensible or daft. Such talk also, I am starting to believe, strikes a dagger into the heart of the enemy camp, by spreading doubt in it about basic beliefs and hence sewing discord and confusion. I used to think that Islamists were indifferent to such ideological attacks. Now, I am starting to believe that they fear them very much. Hence all the murder threats. They sense that this is one of their weakest and potentially biggest fronts in the struggle. The biggest front of all, in fact.

Yes, yes, read the whole thing.

And follow his pointer to this widely-linked article arguing that apostasy is widespread and on the rise.

Frederick W. Kaga provides this handy summary of why the war against Jihad is necessary, despite its financial and human costs:

“Why Iraq Matters: Talking back to antiwar-party talking points.”

Major points:

• The War Costs Too Much
• Recent Progress Really Has Little To Do with the Surge Anyway
• Now that the Surge Is Ending, We’ll Be Right Back Where We Started
• We Should Never Have Fought this War in the First Place
• Iraq Is a Distraction from the Real War on Terror

Some of these have several subheads; it’s a fairly detailed response.

I’m still digesting this, but it feels right to me.

One entry in particular stands out for me, under “We should never had fought this war in the first place”:

• Iraqis are not ready for democracy; it was an error for Bush ever to imagine that the U.S. could impose Western values on an Arab (or Muslim) state.

  As for the notion that democracy is incompatible with Islam, tell it to the hundreds of millions of Muslims in Turkey, India, Indonesia, and Europe who have embraced it. As for the notion that democracy is inappropriate for Arabs, the enthusiasm with which the liberal elite that insists on the universality of its own moral relativism engages in such overtly racist argumentation is astounding. More concretely, the millions of Iraqis who risked their lives to vote in previous elections and the polls showing that upwards of 90 percent of Iraq’s Sunni Arabs intend to vote in upcoming provincial elections suggest that Iraqis don’t agree. Many of the other counts of the inevitability argument spring from some version of this hyper-sophisticated racist viewpoint — Iraqis are too corrupt for legitimate government; they won’t fight because they’re weak, lazy, or just would rather have us do it; they won’t take responsibility for their state or security; and so on. To each argument there is an on-the-ground rebuttal (like the tens of thousands of Iraqis who have died fighting al-Qaeda and Iranian-backed militias, for instance), but this talking point isn’t really about on-the-ground realities; it’s about preconceptions that can be very hard to sway.

[Emphasis mine.]

Also via the Anchoress, an excellent article explaining why the majority of American soldiers believe that what they are doing is right and necessary.

“The foundation of all mental illness is the unwillingness to experience legitimate suffering.”
- Carl Jung

Last weekend, I was profoundly privileged to be in the VFW Post in Nashville, Tennessee with a roomful of the some of the most intelligent, reasonable and sane human beings I have ever encountered. These men seemed to shun the term “hero.”

Yet, what other word could possibly suffice?

From Hollywood’s anti-war movies to the New York Times’ pitiful anti-vet screeds, to the major networks’ portrayals of whacked-out homeless vets to the Winter Soldiers , the American public is bombarded on a daily basis with the notion that suffering for a just cause is not only a needless expenditure of treasure, but a disgraceful evil that should never be borne by good people.

But anyone with a decent upbringing and a grain of common sense, who listens to representatives from Vets for Freedom and Vets for Victory, as I did last weekend, clearly knows that Carl Jung had it right. These hero vets of VFF and V4V know intimately and soundly, the difference between legitimate and illegitimate suffering.

These men, these genuine heroes, are the personification of sanity walking tall.

And having listened to these heroes explain with poise, eloquence and clarity the cause of our war against the forces of terror, I have never been more proud to call myself an American.

Nor have I ever felt such shame for the mainstream media’s insane and childish portrayal of America to the rest of the world. Unfortunately, the mainstream media has the big megaphone and theirs is the voice the world hears.

The author, Kyle-Ann Shiver, then presents summaries of two of the speakers. Read the whole thing.

Yes, here’s an irrefutable mathematical proof that Invisible Superherovillain From Outerspace Allah means for me to submit to him.

Irrefutable, of course, for anyone who believes in numerology, or who believes that when you see a horsey in the clouds, it’s because Allah sculpted it as proof of his existence.

I like it that early on, they use “God” instead of “Allah”, and “submission” instead of “Islam”. At first glance, it could be a Christian site.

Via P.Z. Myers at Pharyngula.

Oh, and allow me to re-iterate:

There is no god, not even Allah, and Mohammad, may piss be upon him, was a child-molesting mass murderer.

Charles Johnson runs Little Green Footballs, a site once devoted to web programming, but now, after 9-11, perhaps the premier site attacking jihadists by exposing their own words and deeds.

Not surprisingly, Johnson’s regular commenters are passionate, and occasionally get a bit overheated. There are easily over five thousand comments a day; he cannot possibly read and approve each and every one.

Four comments to a recent article suggested bombing or vandalizing a Muslim prayer tower being built in St. Louis, MO.

The Council on Islamic American Relations, CAIR, which apparently monitors LGF very carefully, promptly reported LGF to the FBI as a possible hate site.

Pat Dollard, free lance reporter in Iraq, has a few choice words for CAIR. I concur. As Johnson says, “military grade language warning“.

This is from Dollard’s site:

UPDATE:
CAIR’s press release was uncritically published by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, once a major, reputable newspaper, now a shill for terrorists.

Make that an unapologetic shill for terrorists.

From the Gates of Vienna:

The Organization of the Islamic Conference denounced yesterday the reprinting of a blasphemous Danish cartoon, warning it could lead to confrontations between Muslims and Christians. “By reprinting these cartoons we are heading toward a bigger conflict and that shows that both sides will be hostages of their radicals,” OIC Secretary-General Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu told AFP in Istanbul.

“It is not a way of improving your rights and exercising your freedoms when you use these rights for insulting the most sacred values and symbols of others and inciting hatred,” he said. “This is a very wrong, provocative way — unacceptable.”

Several Danish newspapers on Wednesday republished one of 12 drawings, which had already caused bloody riots in the Muslim world in 2006, after police uncovered an alleged plot in the Scandinavian country to kill the cartoonist.

“The people who are doing this put themselves with the radicals, the fanatics and extremists who are using their beliefs as justification to hurt others,” Ihsanoglu said. “This is not the way to improve relations between East and West, between Islam and Christianity.” The drawing has triggered fresh uproar in Muslim countries.

GoV notes that what’s on offer here is your basic protection racket: “Nice little civilization you got here; It’d be a shame if anything happened to it.”

Bring it, assholes. Our civilization has pounded yours into the sand every time you pissed us off badly enough to bother to try.

Trite and obvious, yes, but this must be said, over and over, until it is heard:

It is not a way of proving the sanctity of your values and symbols when you riot, burn, kill, and, yes, incite hatred against those who mock you for rioting, burning, killing, and inciting hatred.

It’s the ones who do that who are in fact the radicals, fanatics and extremists who are using their beliefs as justification to hurt others.

I am a skeptic; I regard all religions as the groping attempts of pre-scientific societies to make sense of their world and their place in it.

Instead, I hold such constructs as the U.S. Constitution, particularly the Bill of Rights, as sacred. I most highly esteem the First and Second Amendments, which acknowledge (but does not grant) my right to express to my conscience, whoever it may offend, including my exercise of the power of life and death to defend myself and resist tyranny.

Again: there is no god, not even Allah, and Mohammed was a deranged mass-murderer.