I've become a bit of a fan of the Greg Sheridan Blog on the Australian. While I don't always agree with everything he writes he is well informed and unbiased. Here are a couple of his latest blogs...
Bombs as levellers
THE future of warfare, like its past, will be very ugly. I saw that future inside the Defence Intelligence Organisation headquarters in Canberra this week, the building behind the high wire fence at Russell North.There I met Brigadier Phil Winter and his team. Winter heads the counter improvised explosive device taskforce located in DIO. You've heard of IEDs, the explosives rigged as booby traps by the side of the road, or ready to go off under coalition vehicles, or stuffed inside dead dogs, or strapped in vests to suicide bombers. They have caused 70 per cent of allied casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan. This year, according to the US Defence Department, of 377 US service members killed in Iraq, about 265 were killed by IEDs. You are right to be concerned about IEDs, and not just on behalf of our troops. They have become the terrorist weapon of choice. They are used now by terrorists all over the world, in Thailand, India and the southern Philippines as well as in Iraq and Afghanistan. It was a landmine, a kind of commercial first cousin of the IED, that caused the one combat death so far of an Australian soldier, Sergeant Andrew Russell, in Afghanistan. Link |
Extremists winning war of words, too
SIX years after the 9/11 terror attacks that destroyed the World Trade Centre in New York and killed almost 3000 people, a majority of American Muslims do not believe the attacks were carried out by Arabs. And more than one-quarter of young US Muslims believe suicide bombings can be justified in some circumstances.These shocking and tragic findings, which come from the Pew Research Centre, tell us much about why the war against Islamist terror is going to last for generations. The West is losing the information and propaganda war against Islamist extremism. It is not losing because it is being insufficiently kind to Muslims at home or in the Middle East. As Britain's Tony Blair wrote in The Sunday Times: "Extremism will be defeated only by recognising that we have not created it ... pandering to its sense of grievance will only encourage it." Blair confronted the argument that Muslims hate the West because it has taken military action in Afghanistan and Iraq: "Tell me what exactly they feel angry about? We remove two utterly brutal and dictatorial regimes; we replace them with a UN-supervised democratic process. And the only reason it is difficult still is because other Muslims are using terrorism to try to destroy the fledgling democracy and, in doing so, are killing fellow Muslims. Why aren't they angry about the people doing the killing?" |
Muslim students seek clerics' jihad advice
AUSTRALIAN Muslim university students eager to become jihadis are regularly seeking advice from Islamic spiritual leaders in the hope of winning religious approval to travel overseas and fight.Leaders have warned that the obsession among some young Muslims to become holy warriors was also driving them to "shop around" for fatwas - religious rulings - should their initial request be turned down. Moderate Sydney-based Islamic cleric Khalil Shami said young Muslims, "predominantly university students", frequently asked his advice on travelling to war-torn countries to fight in the name of Islam. This comes two years after hardline Islamic university students were involved in the London bombings that killed 52 people and injured 700 others. It also follows The Australian's revelations in January that a 25-year-old Somali Australian, Ahmed Ali, died fighting alongside Islamists in his country of birth in December last year. Sheik Shami said he always warned aspiring Islamists against fighting because he believed Muslim countries were being run by corrupt leaders who were more interested in making money and advancing their political profiles than liberating their people. |
AC
1 comment:
nice blog
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