MOSQUES ON THE RHINE
Written by Dr. Jack Wheeler
Thursday, 28 June 2007

You disappear into the African bush for over two weeks, only to emerge back into the world to discover everything's the same.

Bush is still commiserating over the dead horse of the immigration, people with 2-digit IQs are still paying attention to Paris Hilton, Palestinians are still killing each other in Gaza, Moslems are rioting around the world over some perceived insult to their religion of intolerance (in this case, the knighting of Salmon Rushdie by Queen Elizabeth), and good news from Iraq is not being reported.

What really got my attention, though, was a news bulletin from Cologne, Germany.

On our way to Nairobi, my son Jackson and I had a long layover in Frankfurt. So I took him on a train ride to Cologne, which goes along the famous section of the Rhine from Mainz to Koblenz - the Valley of the Lorelei - with the great medieval castles perched on heights above the river.

The Castles on the Rhine is one of Europe's great sights. But even more than them, I wanted Jackson to see one of Christianity's greatest architectural accomplishments, the Cologne Cathedral.

One of the world's largest churches, the largest Gothic structure in Europe, a World Heritage site, this magnificent edifice of Western Civilization took 632 years to complete.

Started in 1248, work continued on it until 1560, when Catholic-hating Protestants halted construction. It wasn't until the 1840s that construction resumed, finished in 1880 as a symbol of the new-found pride of the German people and their contribution to Christendom.

It is such a thrilling experience to be in the presence of an awe-inspiring man-made wonder as the Cologne Cathedral. The giant twin spires soar over 500 feet high:

The nave soars with spirituality in stone:

At the center of the church lies the Shrine of the Three Kings, a golden sarcophagus traditionally containing the remains of Gaspar, Melchoir and Balthazar, the Three Magi or Wise Men who visited Jesus in the manger, brought to Cologne by Holy Roman Emperor Frederick Barbarossa in 1164. The great church was built to house the remains and serve as a pilgrimage site.

It is at such a sacred place that Christians can feel most deeply in touch with the ancient and deep roots of their religion's history.

So it should come as no surprise whatever that today, Moslems want to spoil and horn in on it, by demanding they be allowed to build an enormous mosque right next to the Cathedral.

Construction of a 2,000-capacity mosque with twin minarets 170 feet high virtually within the very shadow of the Cathedral is scheduled to start this September. "Moslems have been in Cologne for 40 years," argues Turkish Moslem Seyda Can [wow, four decades vs. 129 for Christians starting with St. Boniface in the early 700s]. "There are now 120,000 Moslems, 12% of the city's population. We deserve this."

Thankfully, a broad coalition of Cologne residents has come together to oppose the mosque, from local leaders of the CDU party of Chancellor Angela Merkel to prominent Jewish intellectuals.

One of the latter, Ralph Giordano, has received death threats from Moslems for opposing the mosque. "What kind of a state are we in that I can face a fatwa in Germany?" he asks.

What kind of a state indeed. Let's see if Cologne is the place where the encroaching Moslemification of Germany is halted or allowed to proceed apace. There are already more Moslems in Germany than in the US (3.2 vs. 2.7 million, 4% of Germany's 80 million).

As Joerg Uckerman, Cologne's deputy mayor, puts it: "I know about Londonistan and I don't want that here."

Or the Cologne Cathedral's Prelate Johannes Bastgen: "We live in a land of religious freedom. I would be very glad if the same principle existed in Moslem countries."

Let's wish upon the Germans who live near one of Christendom's greatest shrines courage and good fortune. Or else Germany is going to end up not with castles and cathedrals, but mosques on the Rhine.

Ps. Oh, that good news from Iraq?

First, the bad guys in Diyala province (and particularly in the capital of Baqouba) are being rolled up in a ball. This is right on the heels of the same thing happening in Anbar. The Sunnis are finally coming over to our side in droves and turning in the terrorists.

The same thing is happening in the Baghdad suburbs.

Second, new technology is giving us the clear edge over the terrorists and their deadliest weapon, roadside bombs. It's called Buckeye (full name: the Buckeye Precision Geo-Referenced Digital Airborne Camera System), which takes high-res digital 3-D pictures of Baghdad (and other cities') streets.

Then before one of our convoys travels the road, it takes another, spotlighting any changes - down to the size of a penny. The system has cut roadside bomb attacks in many Iraqi cities 90%. Focusing on the main supply routes, it has virtually eliminated ammo trucks and fuel tankers getting blown up.

We are winning in Iraq, no matter how much the Democrats and their media poodles wish to deny and ignore it.

President Cites Hopeful Signs in Iraq
By Jim Garamone
American Forces Press Service
WASHINGTON, June 28, 2007 – The surge of coalition and Iraqi operations in Baghdad has produced hopeful signs, President Bush said today at the Naval War College in Newport, R.I.

Bush said the coalition and the Iraqi government are making progress in Anbar province, and this is spreading to Baghdad. He also spoke about the Iraqi government's need to pass legislation, and the need for Americans to display patience.
The Sunni-dominated Anbar province was the seat of al Qaeda in Iraq six months ago. Bush said critics cited the province as the example of American failure in Iraq.
"About the same time some folks were writing off Anbar, our people are methodically cleaning Anbar's capital city of Ramadi of terrorists and winning the trust of the local population," he said. "In parallel with these efforts, a group of tribal sheikhs launched a movement called 'The Awakening' and began cooperating with American and Iraqi forces." The confluence of coalition forces and Iraqi sheikhs worked against al Qaeda.
"To capitalize on the opportunity, I sent more Marines into Anbar, and gradually they've been helping the locals take back their province from al Qaeda," Bush said. "These operations are showing good results. Our forces are going into parts of Anbar where they couldn't operate before. With the help of Iraqi and coalition forces, local Sunni tribes have driven al Qaeda from most of Ramadi, and attacks there are now down to a two-year low."
Anbar is still a dangerous place, Bush said, but a province that had been written off as hopeless "now enjoys a level of peace and stability that was unimaginable only a few months ago."
The president said coalition leaders want to replicate the success in Anbar in Baghdad.
"In the months since I announced our new strategy, ... we've been moving reinforcements into key Baghdad neighborhoods and the areas around the capital to help secure the population," he said. Coalition and Iraqi forces are in the midst of Operation Phantom Thunder - which is focused on defeating al Qaeda terrorists, the insurgents and militias, and on denying extremists safe havens.
In January, about 80 percent of Iraq's sectarian violence was within 30 miles of Baghdad, Bush said. If coalition forces can clear the belt around the capital of al Qaeda and death squads, "we can improve life for the citizens of the areas and inhibit the enemy's ability to strike," the president said.
Bush said Americans must get used to hearing the names of places like Adhamiya, Rashid and Mansour.
"These areas are important because they represent so-called sectarian faultlines, locations where Shiia extremists and al Qaeda terrorists are attempting to reignite sectarian violence through murder and kidnappings and other violent activities," he said. "Until these areas and others like them are secured, the people of Baghdad can't be protected. They can't go about their lives."
The coalition and Iraqi forces are at the beginning of the offensive, the president emphasized.
"We finally got the troops there. Americans have got to understand, it takes a while to mobilize additional troops and move them from the United States to Iraq," he said. "And we got them there, and now we're beginning to move."
The plan in place is a good one, Bush said. The forces are the best in the world and are carrying out that plan. "We owe them the time and we owe them the support they need to succeed," the president said.
But the fight in Iraq involves more than just the military. "The Iraqis have got to be making tough decisions towards reconciliation, and that's why we'll keep the pressure on Iraqi leaders to meet political benchmarks they laid out for themselves," he said.
The United States will keep up pressure for the Iraqis to pass important legislation regarding sharing oil revenues, hold provincial elections and reconciliation.
"I speak to the prime minister and I speak to the Presidency Council quite often, and I remind them we expect the government to function and to pass law," Bush said.
He said that many Americans are frustrated by the slow pace of legislation. But Iraq is a democracy, and democracies are often slow, he said.
"The Iraqi parliament is composed of members representing many different religions and ethnicities - Sunnis, Shiia, Turkamen, Kurds and others," he said. "Even in a long-established democracy, it's not easy to pass important pieces of legislation in a short period of time. We're asking the Iraqis to accomplish all these things at a time when their country's being attacked.
"I make no excuses," he said. "We will continue to keep the pressure up. We expect there to be reconciliation; we expect them to pass law."
The United States is involved in a broader war against ideological killers, Bush said, calling success in Iraq and Afghanistan important to the people of the greater Middle East and Central Asia.
"The stakes are high in the beginning stages of this global war against ideologues that stand for the exact opposite of what America stands for," the president said. "What makes the war even more significant is that what happens overseas matters to the security in the United States of America, as we learned on September the 11th, when killers were able to use a failed state to plot the deadly attack.
"If we withdraw before the Iraqi government can defend itself," he continued, "we would yield the future of Iraq to terrorists like al Qaeda, and we would give a green light to extremists all throughout a troubled region."
The president said the consequences of such a withdrawal would be disastrous, as sectarian violence would overwhelm Iraq and fighting could spread well beyond Iraq and engulf the entire Persian Gulf region.
"We would soon face a Middle East dominated by Islamic extremists who would pursue nuclear weapons, who would use their control of oil for economic blackmail and who would be in a position to launch new attacks on the United States of America," Bush said.
The United States must stay involved in the region, the president said.
"The United States must stand with millions of moms and dads throughout the Middle East who want a future of dignity and peace, and we must help them defeat a common enemy," he said.

Related Sites:
Transcript: President Bush's Remarks at the Naval War College

June 28, 2007
In West Bank, Hamas Is Silent but Never Ignored

By IAN FISHER
HAWARA, West Bank, June 26 — A new code was born here overnight. No one, it seems, belongs to Hamas in the West Bank anymore. Everyone now is an “Islamist,” a word that neatly, and maybe more safely, shears the religious from party affiliation amid the uncertainty of a Palestinian people newly divided.

“I don’t want to spend my life in jail!” a 35-year-old restaurant owner said, refusing to give his name after expressing pro-Hamas sentiments in an interview here.

Hamas, shrewd as it is deadly, has gone to ground in the West Bank, which is controlled now by its secular rival Fatah and supported by the United States, Europe and Israel as the territory with the only workable Palestinian government.

Dozens of Hamas members have been arrested in the last week, since the militant Islamic group drove Fatah out of Gaza, the West Bank’s smaller and more radical sibling. Men with beards — the symbol of religious devotion and, often, of Hamas — say they are sticking close to home. Hamas’s charities, a bedrock of the group’s support, have been attacked, and their workers are lying low.

But in scores of interviews in the West Bank with people of all political shades, one thing seems clear: Hamas remains a powerful presence in the West Bank, even if kept somewhat in check by both Fatah and the Israeli Army. This may be the most crucial fact that Israel, the United States and others will have to absorb as they bolster the West Bank as a sort of trial Palestinian state.

“If Hamas doesn’t like it, Hamas can destroy it,” said Fais Hamdan, 34, a stone cutter with an “Islamist” beard in this village of 6,000 near Nablus, as he sat in the restaurant with the owner who would not give his name. “If they want to kill any political deal, they only have to attack a settlement or another Israeli target. Don’t think that Hamas is very weak in the West Bank.”

The central issue, as it has been for years, remains credibility.

Hamas crushed Fatah politically last year, sweeping legislative elections in January 2006, partly because Fatah was perceived as corrupt and aloof. That reality, even many Fatah members complain, has changed little.

Hamas also still remains, on paper at least, a strong political force, with the majority of legislative seats in parliament and in control of dozens of city and town councils around the West Bank. Israel has curtailed that as best it can. Of the 74 Hamas legislators, 40 are in Israeli prisons — and many of its other leaders have been arrested since the fighting erupted in Gaza.

But that could end up helping Hamas because Israeli prison is where Palestinian leaders often gain their contacts and organizational skill.

More broadly, many Palestinians seem to hold little hope that anyone — America, Israel or even Arab states fearful that Hamas’s Islamism could spread — will actually make good on promises of aid to the West Bank.

That perception seemed reinforced on Monday, after the Israeli prime minister, Ehud Olmert, met with President Mahmoud Abbas, known as Abu Mazen, and made what Palestinians considered a paltry opening gesture: the release of only a portion of the $600 million of withheld Palestinian tax money and an offer to free just 250 prisoners held in Israeli jails, among some 11,000.

“Look at the irony here,” the restaurant owner said. “Abu Mazen says he rejects talks with Hamas but he sits down with Olmert. And Olmert isn’t going to give him anything! Then Hamas leaders appear on TV and say, ‘Fatah negotiated for 15 years with Israel and nothing happened. Israel didn’t give us anything for 15 years. Why now?’

“And people are listening,” he added.

For the moment, political leaders and security officials say, the danger of the Gaza violence spilling into the West Bank seems remote. Fatah is stronger here and, unlike in Gaza, Israeli soldiers still occupy the West Bank.

At any rate, Hamas seems for now to have taken itself out of any fight in the West Bank — though its critics say that is not only because its members fear arrest.

“If they are hiding, then they are hiding for shame at the crimes that were committed in Gaza,” said Ahmad Hazaa Shreim, a legislator and leader of Fatah in Qalqilya, a Palestinian city of 40,000 close to the Israeli line.

Qalqilya, walled off almost completely by the Israeli barrier, presents a telling test case for the future of Hamas in the West Bank. Flags of both Fatah and Hamas still fly here, and in 2005, its residents voted in a 15-member city council composed entirely of Hamas members (including the mayor, who was in an Israeli jail at the time and was arrested again last month).

But then last year, the city bucked the trend, voting in a majority of Fatah legislators at a time when Hamas won elections around the Palestinian territories.

Now the two forces are locked in another standoff. Hamas is coming under verbal fire for pushing Fatah from Gaza.

“Hamas people always wore the clothes of religion,” complained the 65-year-old owner of a shoe shop in Qalqilya, who like many people refused to give his name out of fear. “Now after what happened in Gaza, the mask has been removed from these people.”

But Hamas supporters say Fatah’s mask is off, too. Amid arrests and violent overtaking of government and Hamas buildings around the West Bank, at least 23 people, most of them Hamas members, have been detained in Qalqilya alone by the Palestinian security forces controlled by Fatah in the last week. Fatah says that only armed men are being sought.

While a Fatah building was firebombed and a security patrol fired on, several shops owned by Hamas supporters have been shot at. At the edge of town, a small charitable factory that makes artificial limbs — and is said to be controlled by Hamas — was systematically demolished; all the windows were broken, wheelchairs were overturned, plaster casts were shattered.

It was carried out, the factory’s operators say, by 16 well-organized men in ski masks.

“Sixteen people?” said Tawfik Daoud, the charity’s treasurer, who denied any link to Hamas. “Masked? They were not thieves. It’s obvious who did it.”

Fatah has come under much criticism here for the raid, though Mr. Shreim, the Fatah chief, who had been respected by Hamas because he spent 22 years in Israeli jails, strongly denies that Fatah had anything to do with it.

Still, there is a rising concern among the West Bank’s many religious people, even those who claim not to belong to Hamas, that life may become more difficult all around for the religious. For whatever anger there may be at Hamas, the fear seems to be preserving its support.

“They are chasing Hamas people,” said a bearded 27-year-old man who gave his name as Abu Khaled. “The situation in town makes people sympathize with them.”

It is tense, too, in Hebron, another religious city to the south. Local security officers say they are not expecting a fight with Hamas, but just in case they have piled sandbags in front of their headquarters and built up gun positions around them.

Akram al-Himouni, a local Fatah leader, said he saw some hope if Hamas apologized for Gaza and allowed Fatah back there. If Hamas does not “say sorry,” he said, “then the story will become worse, and there could be a military resolution.”

He added grimly: “I know Hamas. I believe there may not be a dialogue; the resolution may be unfortunately by force.”

But many others predicted some sort of reunion, if not from love than from an inescapable logic tied, as always here, to what the outside world decides to do.

If the outside world manages to create stability in the West Bank, and thus hunger for real peace, many argue a final settlement cannot happen without Hamas, which represents a sizable, if unknowable, percentage of the population. [On Wednesday, Saudi and Jordanian officials called for Palestinian unity.]

If it fails, the choice is either more, possibly worse, fighting — or some self-protective accord that preserves the value of unity that Palestinians say is part of their heritage. The choice seems starker in the West Bank, where neither side can clearly dominate the way Hamas does in Gaza.

“Now the blood is very hot,” said Khaled Osaily, the politically independent mayor of Hebron. “Later things will calm down and people will find a solution. They will come back together. They don’t have another option.”

June 28, 2007
2 Iranian Gas Stations Burned Over Rationing

By NAZILA FATHI
TEHRAN, June 27 — Angry drivers set fire to at least two gas stations overnight in Tehran after the government announced that gasoline rationing would begin Wednesday just after midnight.

The state television news said Wednesday that “several gas stations and public places had been attacked by vandals.” While there were some reports that a large number of gas stations had been set on fire, only two fires were confirmed.

The government had been planning for a year to put rationing into effect but held off because of concerns that it could cause unrest. Some officials indicated it might have been started now because of the threat of stronger economic sanctions by the United Nations over Iran’s nuclear program.

Iran contends that its nuclear enrichment program is for civilian energy purposes, while the United States and some other Western nations contend that Iran is trying to develop nuclear weapons.

Under the new regulations announced by the Oil Ministry on Tuesday evening, private cars will be able to buy a maximum of 26 gallons of gasoline a month at the subsidized price of 34 cents per gallon. Taxis will be allowed 211 gallons a month. Parliament would have to determine whether individuals would be allowed to buy more at market rates.

There were long lines at gas stations in Tehran on Wednesday, causing traffic jams, and the police moved in to control the lines.

Iran is OPEC’s second-largest exporter of oil. But it needs to import half of its gasoline — at a cost of $5 billion a year — because of high consumption and low refining capabilities.

Inflation in Iran had already been high, as a result of a combination of economic factors and government decisions. The price of dairy products like milk, butter and yogurt increased this week by at least 20 percent.

Analysts had warned that the decision could have a direct impact on inflation.

It was unclear what would happen to many unemployed people who use their private cars as taxis.

The daily Ham-Mihan, a reformist newspaper, wrote on Wednesday that because of the many ambiguities in the new regulations, the decision could have a major effect on the economy and on people’s lives.

Parliament met behind closed doors with the ministers of oil and intelligence on Wednesday to examine the consequences of the decision.

The speaker of Parliament, Gholamali Hadad Adel, told reporters after the meeting that Parliament was determined to back the government.

“The rationing can help reduce consumption,” he said, according to Parliament’s Web site. “It can also make us more independent and become less vulnerable in the international community against world powers.”

May 23: 2954

June 12 3195 11:45 p
June 13 3210 10:30p
June 14 3228 7:30p
June 15 3238
June 16 3249 11:45p
June 18 3274 8 a.m.
June 18 3288 10p.m
June 20 3350 11p.m
June 22 3371 8 a.m.
June 23 3381 10 a.m.
June 24 3408 10 p.m
June 26 3435 8 a,m.

June 27 3455 4p.m.