CI Centre’s CI & CT News will be on hiatus the week of Thanksgiving.
General Thanksgiving
By the PRESIDENT
of the United States Of America
A PROCLAMATION
Whereas it is the duty of all nations to acknowledge the providence of Almighty God, to obey His will, to be grateful for His benefits, and humbly to implore His protection and favor; and Whereas both Houses of Congress have, by their joint committee, requested me to “recommend to the people of the United States a day of public thanksgiving and prayer, to be observed by acknowledging with grateful hearts the many and signal favors of Almighty God, especially by affording them an opportunity peaceably to establish a form of government for their safety and happiness:”
Now, therefore, I do recommend and assign Thursday, the 26th day of November next, to be devoted by the people of these States to the service of that great and glorious Being who is the beneficent author of all the good that was, that is, or that will be;
That we may then all unite in rendering unto Him our sincere and humble thanks for His kind care and protection of the people of this country previous to their becoming a nation;
For the signal and manifold mercies and the favorable interpositions of His providence in the course and conclusion of the late war;
For the great degree of tranquility, union, and plenty which we have since enjoyed;
For the peaceable and rational manner in which we have been enable to establish constitutions of government for our safety and happiness, and particularly the national one now lately instituted for the civil and religious liberty with which we are blessed, and the means we have of acquiring and diffusing useful knowledge; and, in general,
For all the great and various favors which He has been pleased to confer upon us.
And also that we may then unite in most humbly offering our prayers and supplications to the great Lord and Ruler of Nations and beseech Him to pardon our national and other transgressions;
To enable us all, whether in public or private stations, to perform our several and relative duties properly and punctually;
To render our National Government a blessing to all the people by constantly being a Government of wise, just, and constitutional laws, discreetly and faithfully executed and obeyed;
To protect and guide all sovereigns and nations (especially such as have shown kindness to us), and
To bless them with good governments, peace, and concord; to promote the knowledge and practice of true religion and virtue, and the increase of science among them and us; and, generally
To grant unto all mankind such a degree of temporal prosperity as He alone knows to be best.
Given under my hand, at the city of New York, the 3d day of October, A.D. 1789.
G. Washington
National, 21 Nov 09: . . . . . Now known in India as 26/11, this attack, orchestrated on the night of November 26, 2008, which claimed 166 lives, came to be a defining moment. In a country not unfamiliar with terrorist attacks, people were shocked at the brazenness and the high-profile targets of the attack, which exposed the country’s deficient security system.
A year later, the shrill sloganeering has subsided, but the country still confronts familiar unsettling questions: Is Mumbai safer after 26/11? Is the country now prepared to handle a terrorist assault of a similar scale? . . . .
By Amil Imani/American Thinker, 21 Nov 09: Western policymakers and elites in government, academia, and the media suffer from an extraordinary ignorance about the true nature of Islam. This ignorance was on display following the murder of thirteen American troops at Fort Hood, Texas by Nidal Hasan, a devout Muslim who held the rank of Major in the U.S. Army. Hasan is said to have shouted “God is Great” in Arabic as he gunned down his unarmed fellow troops. . . . .
. . . .The truth is that the Constitution’s treatment of religion is premised upon concepts originating from within Christianity that are irreconcilable with the Islamic worldview. The Constitution prevents the “establishment” of a state religion. But the very idea that the state cannot or should not establish a religion is unique to Christianity. There is no parallel for this idea in Islam. The Constitution also prevents Congress from impeding the “free exercise” of religion. But the “free exercise” clause also assumes compatibility with Christian styles of worship — for instance, one cannot engage in ritualistic human sacrifice to appease the gods and successfully claim immunity under the free-exercise clause.
Any honest evaluation of the history of Islam will indicate that it cannot be pigeonholed as if it were merely a different sect that utilizes a crescent rather than a cross as a symbol. Islam is fundamentally incompatible with Western attitudes toward religion and society. . . .
. . . . The Islamic worldview divides the world into two spheres: the non-Islamic world is the dar al-harb, or the “house of war,” and the Islamic world is the dar al-Islam, the “house of peace.” From the Muslim perspective, “peace” is achieved only once the enemy has been conquered and subordinated to Islam.
Throughout Islam’s imperial reign, no difference has existed between civil law and religious law, or sharia. The distinction between civil and religious law is a Christian, not an Islamic, idea. “Secular society” simply does not exist with Islam properly understood. Apostasy is punishable by death within the Islamic code. Secular rulers in Muslim countries during the twentieth century were a historic aberration, a result of British colonialism. Many, like the Shah of Iran and Egyptian president Anwar Sadat, met unhappy ends at the hands of the devout. . . . .
. . . . .Today’s Western elites who think that Islamic militants do not represent “true Islam” are dangerously wrong. From the very beginning of the Islamic faith, the good Muslim, following the example of Mohammed, has been called to do battle against unbelievers, reject secularism, and reject any notion of the equality of faiths.
In his 1998 manifesto “Jihad against Jews and Crusaders,” Osama bin Laden quoted the Qur’anic injunction to “fight and slay the pagans wherever ye find them” and also cited Mohammed’s belief that “I have been sent with the sword between my hands to ensure that no one but Allah is worshiped.” Osama then concluded that “The ruling to kill the Americans and their allies — civilians and military — is an individual duty for every Muslim who can do it in any country in which it is possible to do it.” (Even if only 10% of the world’s 1.4 billion Muslims heed this call, enemy strength still amounts to 140 million).
The idea that individuals like Maj. Hasan can serve the United States and Islam simultaneously is analogous to believing that one could have been a good communist and still loyally serve the United States during the Cold War — or patently untrue. In fact, Hasan’s business card did not reveal his rank in the U.S. Army, but did bear the inscription SoA — “Soldier of Allah.”
Like Maj. Hasan, an uncomfortably large number of Islamic terrorist suspects in the West are citizens of the very Western nations they seek to subvert. . . . . .
Independent, 21 Nov 09: Twenty years after the Velvet Revolution, Victor Sebestyen recalls how the Czech regime fell to a hapless secret plot.
For the past two decades, 17 November has been a national holiday in the Czech Republic. It is the day that marks the beginning of the Velvet Revolution of 1989 that brought down the Communist dictatorship which for 40 years had run Czechoslovakia, the country that then comprised today’s Czech and Slovak republics . . . . .
. . . . . One figure who played a central role in the Velvet Revolution was not mentioned. Ludvik Zifcak was at that time a junior officer in Czechoslovakia’s state security service. It is a subject Czechs do not like to discuss, but without Zifcak, and a hopelessly bungled secret police operation, history might have taken an altogether different course. . . . .
New York Times, 21 Nov 09: The trip from a strict Pakistani boarding school to a bohemian bar in Philadelphia has defined David Headley’s life, according to those who know the middle-age man at the center of a global terrorism investigation.
Raised by his father in Pakistan as a devout Muslim, Mr. Headley arrived back here at 17 to live with his American mother, a former socialite who ran a bar called the Khyber Pass.
Today, Mr. Headley is an Islamic fundamentalist who once liked to get high. He has a traditional Pakistani wife, who lives with their children in Chicago, but also an American girlfriend — a makeup artist in New York — according to a relative and friends. Depending on the setting, he alternates between the name he adopted in the United States, David Headley, and the Urdu one he was given at birth, Daood Gilani. Even his eyes — one brown, the other green — hint at roots in two places.
Mr. Headley, an American citizen, is accused of being the lead operative in a loose-knit group of militants plotting revenge against a Danish newspaper that published cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad. The indictment against him portrays a man who moved easily between different worlds. The profile that has emerged of him since his arrest, however, suggests that Mr. Headley felt pulled between two cultures and ultimately gravitated toward an extremist Islamic one.
“Some of us are saying that ‘Terrorism’ is the weapon of the cowardly,” Mr. Headley wrote in an e-mail message to his high school classmates last February. “I will say that you may call it barbaric or immoral or cruel, but never cowardly.”
He added, “Courage is, by and large, exclusive to the Muslim nation.”
Mr. Headley’s e-mail messages, including many that defended beheadings and suicide bombings as heroic, are among the evidence in the government’s case against him and his accused co-conspirator, Tahawwur Hussain Rana, who was born in Pakistan, is a citizen of Canada and runs businesses in Chicago. . . . . .
