Sunday, December 02, 2007

Klink

Everyone who's watched Hogan's Heroes knows that the prison is often another battlefield, where combat can be continued by other means. Here's how it is being waged by al-Qaeda in Australia's maximum security prisons.



Islamic extremists are using an al-Qaeda training manual to give them instructions for taking over the state's toughest jails, prison authorities have alleged. ...

The prisoners had set up leadership groups in several maximum-security jails, with their activities governed by the code outlined in the al-Qaeda manual for incarcerated followers.

A number of Corrective Services staff have been targeted, some with violent threats by inmate groups. Other staff have been singled out for conversion to Islam.

The al-Qaeda style activity was detected after a 24-hour surveillance system was instituted.

Mr Hatzistergos said he was extremely concerned about the broader attempts to infiltrate the jail system, which were uncovered after sweeping changes to prison regulations allowed 24-hour monitoring of Muslim inmates.

The latest crackdown followed the disclosure this year that a third of the state's most dangerous criminals held in the highest-security jail in Australia, the Super Max facility inside Goulburn jail, were Muslim fundamentalists or converts to Islam.

The al-Qaeda prison organizing manual understands the need to enclose resistance activities in the wrapper of privacy. The al-Qaeda instructions are to engage in "hunger strikes, group protests and claims of mistreatment". One of those future demands might be to object to 24-hour monitoring on grounds of the invasion of privacy. The story continues:

"There were hunger strikes and organized complaints about their treatment," he said. "We have detected the leadership in groups across our maximum security jails [and] have moved in to segregate them and split them up.

"There is nothing wrong with conversion to Islam for the right reasons, but we believe there has been conversion taking place for the wrong reasons."

From the outset two schools of thought have contended to explain events since September 11. One regards radical Islamists as individual aberrants from an otherwise pacific religion. Radical Islamists are therefore criminals, deviant individuals best dealt with through the criminal justice system. The other school of thought regards radical Islamists as enemy combatants -- non-uniformed soldiers of an organized hostile force. And in fact, this is how radical Islamists understand themselves when they are not otherwise making hypocritical arguments to dopey human rights activists. They see themselves as soldiers of Islam, with a duty to continue the fight within the prison and to escape if possible to fight again.

For comparison, The Code of Conduct of U.S. Fighting Forces similarly imposes upon its members the duty to "evade capture, resist while a prisoner or escape from the enemy", the difference being that U.S. Forces are members of a uniformed military under regular command while the al-Qaeda are fighters in mufti often answerable only to their own murderous instincts.

However that may be, there will be no shortage of advocates who will continue to regard hard-core Islamists as simply another type of juvenile delinquent; the product of a bad home and lack of job opportunities. From that social-worker point of view Mr. Hatzistergos's 24-hour surveillance and breakup tactics will be regarded as an abomination left over from the dark John Howard years. They will take their cue from that immortal character from Hogan's Heroes, Sergeant Schultz, who memorably said whenever he observed something inconvenient, "I see nothing, nothing. I did not even get up this morning."

Too true.

15 Comments:

Blogger Panday said...

These kinds of things are happening, yet people wonder why we have Guantanamo Bay.

12/02/2007 04:15:00 PM  
Blogger Zenster said...

"There is nothing wrong with conversion to Islam for the right reasons, but we believe there has been conversion taking place for the wrong reasons."

I can only suppose that it will take a while for those in the West to finally reach the conclusion that there are no "right" reasons for converting to Islam.

Islam's central goal of violently establishing a universal claiphate makes it the enemy of all non-Muslim people. Under global shari'a law the West's entire patrimony of great art, literature and architectural works would all become fuel for one monstrous bonfire.

Soon enough it will become apparent that convicted terrorists must be kept in solitary confinement in order to prevent them from infecting other inmates. Islam's infiltration of Western prison systems means that they are able to recruit people already predisposed to violence and illegal activities. Both of these proclivities are requisites for successful terrorist operations. Such fertile recruiting grounds must be denied our enemies.

Not much will change until Western nations begin banning Islam as a seditious political ideology and prohibiting shari'a law as a massive violation of human rights.

12/02/2007 04:17:00 PM  
Blogger wretchardthecat said...

We have Guantanamo Bay because we are conflicted. Society hasn't made up its made as to whether it is facing a law enforcement problem or whether it is at war. And Guantanamo reflects the state of that ambiguity. It's prisoners are half-regarded as criminals and half-regarded as enemy combatants.

The limbo that is Gitmo is a mirror of the limbo public policy has wandered into.

12/02/2007 04:18:00 PM  
Blogger wretchardthecat said...

I don't think Islam is the problem. Islam is as it has ever been. Nothing about it has changed. Yet in the recent past it posed no difficulties to the West. Why the danger now? What's changed is us.

That global sharia law should want all of Western patrimony atop one monstrous bonfire is to be expected. That's after all its nature. But what is surprising is the endless number of Western "intellectuals" who are stumbling all over themselves to cast the first books into the flame.

Islam is perfectly well equipped to deal with people like al-Qaeda. They have their knives, swords, stones, anthills and whips. It is we who are helpless against them. One fellow asked me how I proposed to solve the Muslim insurgency in Mindanao. I answered, "give it to Malaysia."

The real problem is internal to Western society. It is implicit in its political contradictions, for which Political Correctness has become a shorthand. The War on Terror will never be won by bombing Muslims. It can only be won by changing ourselves. Islam hasn't changed from its inception. We are the deviants; we are the ones who have been untrue to our roots.

12/02/2007 04:49:00 PM  
Blogger torabora said...

Given that Islam is an enemy of western civilization, making a field of glass out of Mecca on 9/12/01 would have gone a long ways to making 9/12/07 a safer world. It is true that the West just "doesn't get it".Evidence the Teddy Bear outrage, the Danish Cartoons, and the murder of Van Gogh. The West is going to continue to "get it" from these murderous savages until their "religion" is crushed like Nazism and "The Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere".

12/02/2007 05:44:00 PM  
Blogger Peter Grynch said...

Mark Seyn sums it up beautifully:

Radical Islam is an opportunistic infection, like AIDS: It's not the HIV that kills you, it's the pneumonia you get when your body's too weak to fight it off. When the jihadists engage with the U.S. military, they lose--as they did in Afghanistan and Iraq. If this were like World War I with those fellows in one trench and us in ours facing them over some boggy piece of terrain, it would be over very quickly. Which the smarter Islamists have figured out. They know they can never win on the battlefield, but they figure there's an excellent chance they can drag things out until Western civilization collapses in on itself and Islam inherits by default.

That's what the war's about: our lack of civilizational confidence. As a famous Arnold Toynbee quote puts it: "Civilizations die from suicide, not murder"

12/02/2007 05:48:00 PM  
Blogger geoffb said...

We have changed somewhat but I believe what changed that has put us in this world filled with terrorists is the deal the Saudi's made to get control back of the Grand Mosque in 1979. The funding of radical Islam by the vast oil revenues of Saudi Arabia put us on the path to today. Without that money radical Islam would still be where it was in the 40's or 50's and not the worldwide threat it is today

12/02/2007 06:17:00 PM  
Blogger Zenster said...

I don't think Islam is the problem. Islam is as it has ever been. Nothing about it has changed.

No so. Islam now has access to high technology in the form of nuclear weapons and the internet. Both of these represent tremendous paradigm shifts that affect the dimension of threat it poses. Couple that with the vast flood of petro-dollars into the MME (Muslim Middle East) and there has been a total sea change in the challenges posed to us by radical Islam.

Yet in the recent past it posed no difficulties to the West. Why the danger now?

Fifty years ago, Islam neither had the weaponry, finances nor ideological consolidation that it has since undergone. It remained in what was basically a state of prolonged hudna. All of that has changed in ways that are wholly inimical to the West.

What's changed is us.

Yes, that too is the case.

Peter Grynch: Radical Islam is an opportunistic infection, like AIDS: It's not the HIV that kills you, it's the pneumonia you get when your body's too weak to fight it off.

I would differ with Steyn in that Political Correctness is more analagous to AIDS in the way it cripples a body's natural immune system so that a much simpler viral threat like Islam can penetrate its defenses and cause the final cessation of functions.

Your observations about equivocal attitudes over Guantanamo Bay are a pluperfect example of this strange and crippling ambivalence. It is paralyzing our nation's ability to properly treat with a hostile enemy that is making war upon us.

The War on Terror will never be won by bombing Muslims. It can only be won by changing ourselves.

Other than adopting what Barry Goldwater would call an intolerance for the intolerable, what changes would you suggest?

Islam hasn't changed from its inception. We are the deviants; we are the ones who have been untrue to our roots.

Aside from some truly warlike roots, what other fundamentals would you recommend that we return to? It is difficult in the extreme to see anything other than the catastrophic dismantling of Islam as restoring some degree of global security. Whatever portion of the planet's Muslim population perishes in the accomplishment of that task represents a butcher's bill that is steadily mounting with each day that we postpone this onerous duty.

12/02/2007 06:21:00 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

There have been people who knew how to deal successfully with this kind of thing-

"As many people will die in Argentina as is necessary to restore order." — Army Commander-in-Chief Jorge Rafael Videla, 10/75

"First we will kill all the subversives; then we will kill their collaborators; then … their sympathizers; then … those who remain indifferent; and finally we will kill the timid." -- General Iberico Saint Jean, military governor of Buenos Aires, 5/76

12/02/2007 06:43:00 PM  
Blogger wretchardthecat said...

Returning to our roots doesn't mean a return to fascism. That's what America fought World War 2 to defeat. Let's return to this simple place:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

That means that any system of laws like Sharia which classifies persons as dhimmis we should reject. That means that any system which declares the worth of a woman to be that of half a man, as the Iranians officially do, we should reject. That means that any system which denies the inalienable righ to pursue Life, Liberty and Happiness we should reject.

But we do not reject it. Rather, we find ways to torture the plain meaning of words into their opposite and gnarl our roots until they are a puzzle even to ourselves.

We don't have to go back to Hitler. Just to the spirit of when it seemed normal to say "millions for defense but not one cent for tribute."

12/02/2007 07:01:00 PM  
Blogger geoffb said...

To tie in with the posting on Zimbabwe, we should also reject the claims of thugs to sovereignty. Allowing thugs to be sovereign debases and cheapens all governments but especially the ones that believe in the Right to Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

12/02/2007 07:39:00 PM  
Blogger Words Twice said...

“The real problem is internal to Western society. It is implicit in its political contradictions, for which Political Correctness has become a shorthand. The War on Terror will never be won by bombing Muslims. It can only be won by changing ourselves. Islam hasn't changed from its inception. We are the deviants; we are the ones who have been untrue to our roots.”

Before I went on my last trip to the litterbox, I had a conversation with a gal who was upset that I was going over there, and wished there was some way she could meaningfully contribute to the war effort.

“I wish I could do something”, she lamented.

I told her, “Look, I could go over there and kill a million Muslims, and it won’t make one bit of difference. The real war is right here.”

Thanks, Wretchard, for making this point.

12/02/2007 10:20:00 PM  
Blogger Cannoneer No. 4 said...

America is a divided nation. We do not have the necessary unity to engage in a Long War with a militarily weaker but ideologically fanatical asymmetric enemy. They are more intensely devoted to our subjugation than we are to theirs. Things are looking up in Iraq, but that can only be acknowledged and accepted as true by those whose ideology does not blind them to favorable developments. There can be no praise from the blind for what is going right, either because we took too long to get it right, or because Iraq was a peace-loving sovereign nation-state with no WMD’s and no links to terrorists.

We're crow hopping while ideologically hobbled.

12/03/2007 08:46:00 AM  
Blogger Evanston2 said...

geoffb and Zenster are correct, the biggest change in Islam is money. Left alone it is dysfunctional, but since we foreigners give them oil (pumped by foreign workers since the natives can't handle the tech) we've essentially infused them with our vitality.

I have no love for trends in the West but our "roots" have always had corruption. The difference in cultures is the Bible, plain & simple. Just look at who is betraying the secular roots of western culture (the Greeks) -- the atheist elite in the media, universities, and political parties. Those we would presume to be the inheritors of Greek tradition are actually the most eager to abandon it and adopt multiculturalism, moral relativism, and postmodern "deconstruction" etc. Any "ism" other than Christ. Yes, I'm thumping the Bible but it is actually the only single influence that separates the West from the rest of the world. Logic is not ethnically-based. The rules of a society (that is, its "culture") either allow the spread of knowledge or its suppression. Christianity (when not tied to the State) has been unafraid of Truth and has been the linchpin to progress. Those who watch negative trends in the west and think that man can fix it himself are trying to fix the symptoms of the disease with the disease...yes, and no wonder muslims have many valid reasons to reject 21st Century western culture.

12/03/2007 09:12:00 AM  
Blogger Cedarford said...

geoffb and Zenster are correct, the biggest change in Islam is money. Left alone it is dysfunctional, but since we foreigners give them oil (pumped by foreign workers since the natives can't handle the tech) we've essentially infused them with our vitality.

Not really. Islam had more money than Europe for most of it's existence until industrialization and end-arounding the Muslim trade routes allowed the West to become more prosperous by the 1700s.

The oil is theirs, not the worlds. No less than US cropland and Florida phosphate deposits are ours.
Nor are most Muslim countries reliant on "Western brains" to do the skilled tasks of oil production anymore. They have trained quite competent petroleum and other engineers and technicians. For specialized niches, they can call on the US, or France, or Brazil, or India, or Russia, or China..as they please.

Claiming we "infused them with our vitality" is more a matter of them picking the aspects of our culture and technology they want to work better. The Meiji Restoration was Japan picking the best that they thought the UK, Prussia, the US had and making it work Japanese-style. We did not "infuse the Japanese with our vitality." They had oodles to start with.

Nor is oil money the reason why radical Islam succeeds. After 1979, KSA public and private donors, together with other Gulf States, sent 3 billion a year for Madrassahs. In the same period, we sent 5 billion a year to our 2 welfare queens, Egypt and Israel.

That the Saudi money was more effective than our funds blown on "weapons for peace" by the 2 welfare queens testifies to the Saudis being smarter than us.

Nor is Islamist assymetric warfare that expensive because it relies on volunteers with little desire for money over US military that requires vast sums of money just to get volunteers. 9/11 cost them 400 thousand dollars, cost us over 200 billion in real damages...plus perhaps the 3 trillion we borrowed from China, Japan, KSA to squander on dubious Homeland Security pork plus the bungled and costly Iraq War.
And we think the Sunni, Al Qaeda, and Shiite insurgent groups have spent around 800 million dollars trying to thwart and kill us, versus our 700 billion post-invasion costs to try and stop them.

12/03/2007 12:27:00 PM  

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