Small correction to the above. Albert Elmarry's child, born seven months after its father's death in the Twin Towers, will be turning ten in March this year, not eleven.

Mr Bell - good article. Thank you in particular for heeding - and taking seriously - your Coptic Christian taxi driver, and for following up on what he told you. I think you owe him. You might even like to consider talking to others like him - and perhaps to non-Muslims (Hindu, Buddhist, Christian) who have fled from places like Pakistan and Bangladesh, and who are also fleeing from places like Malaysia and Indonesia as those places become more strongly Islamified and more and more people push for sharia-in-full. Bear in mind, however, that some who have experienced life inside the lands of Islam as de facto dhimmis can be as deeply in denial about the real extent and agent/s of the abuse they suffered, as any severely-battered spouse or abused child.

Further thought. Here's a poignant story that might be worth pursuing, and documenting: Albert Elmarry, one of the Canadian citizens killed in NYC on 9/11 was a Coptic Christian who had escaped Egypt to settle in Canada, and then got a job in the USA, in NYC, in the Twin Towers no less. On the strength of that job, enormously pleased with himself, he visited back home and scooped up a beautiful wife (also a Coptic Christian) whom he brought back to live in peace and safety - as he thought - in the USA. They bought the house, they started the baby; and then, when his wife was only two months pregnant, he was killed in the attack on the Twin Towers in 2001. He had fled all the way to the Americas to escape Muslim persecution of his people in his ancestral homeland; and yet he died as a victim of Jihad, in the very heart of what he thought was a place of refuge, where he had begun a new life. Perhaps you could find his wife and child - the child (born March 2002) would be eleven years old - and the two families concerned, and the people he worked for and the church where he worshipped in Egypt and then in Canada and NYC, and use his story as a way of introducing English-speaking westerners to the long tragedy of the Copts, the indigenous non-Muslim people of Egypt, reduced (by 1200 years of Muslim invasion, occupation and oppression) to a minority in their own country - who right now, I fear, are facing nothing less than genocide, to exceed what was done to the Armenians.
There are so many stories that cry out for a gutsy film-maker to tell them. For that matter, you mentioned Theo Van Gogh - who's doing a doco about him, and about all the others who've been targeted - e.g. Kurt Westergaard, Lars Vilks, Taslima Nasreen, Molly Norris? Do a doco on Islam's denial of free speech - its threats against and murder of critics and 'blasphemers' - and call it 'The Heirs of Asma Bint Marwan'.

I'm an Aussie, so I just have to chew my fingernails, cross my fingers and toes, and pray like blazes that our great friend and ally across the Pacific Ocean wakes up and gets a clue and finds a guy for the top job who 'gets' the Meaning and Menace of Islam and won't be afraid to do what's necessary to defend his own country against the Jihad...and others, too. And I will say that from what I've seen and heard of Allen West, if he *were* to run, and per miraculum get into the White House, I would sleep a lot more peacefully o' nights than I do now...All you folks here that say you like him, I hope you're putting money in his campaign chest. And advertising him by word of mouth and in cyberspace every chance you get.

I'm an Aussie, so I just have to chew my fingernails, cross my fingers and toes, and pray like blazes that our great friend and ally across the Pacific Ocean wakes up and gets a clue and finds a guy for the top job who 'gets' the Meaning and Menace of Islam and won't be afraid to do what's necessary to defend his own country against the Jihad...and others, too. And I will say that from what I've seen and heard of Allen West, if he *were* to run, and per miraculum get into the White House, I would sleep a lot more peacefully o' nights than I do now...All you folks here that say you like him, I hope you're putting money in his campaign chest. And advertising him by word of mouth and in cyberspace every chance you get.

I have written to the Canadian High Commissioner in Australia, expressing my admiration for his Prime Minister's principled stand in this matter. It is very inspiring. I hope Mr Harper can manage to go on as he has begun.

Not quite the only one. Stephen Harper of Canada looks possible. Long may he govern. And if Dutch MP Geert Wilders in Holland can avoid being sent to jail for blasphemy against Islam (he merely dared to tell things like they are), and his party continues to gain ground, then one day it might be Geert Wilders PM of the Netherlands. And then wouldn't it be fun at the UN if there were one of those horrible 'let's lynch Israel' resolutions pushed by the Islamintern, and the Dutch rep and the Canadian rep stood up and voted a resounding NO to it and then invited the Israeli rep out to dinner afterwards...?

Ever heard about Orde Wingate? If you haven't look him up. Maybe Israel needs to create something analogous to the French Foreign Legion; and name it after Orde Wingate. I think they'd find themselves with quite a lot of folks eager to sign on.

One of the best ways to sum up the nature of 'dhimmitude' - the condition of segregation, degradation, humiliation and exploitation - imposed upon non-Muslims by Muslims in Muslim-majority lands historically (and de facto, in many Muslim lands, today) - is to describe it as being like the 'Jim Crow' system...only worse. Much worse. To understand dhimmitude, the best intro is Dr Mark Durie's "the Third Choice: Islam, Dhimmitude and Freedom". He has reflected upon and absorbed Bat Yeor's pioneering work and extended it with his own research and reflection, and then distilled all of that into a lucid - and devastating, and profoundly disturbing - book.

I think this is a great idea. Ayaan Hirsi Ali as the author of two major books - Infidel and Nomad - as well as the essay collection 'The Caged Virgin' and the screenplay of the brief yet powerful film 'Submission', and as a graduate of the great University of Leiden in the Netherlands, would be a very worthy recipient of an Honorary Doctorate. Ibn Warraq's book 'Defending the West' could surely be deemed equivalent to a doctoral thesis. And so could Nonie Darwish's "Cruel and Usual Punishment", her examination of the theory and practice of Sharia. These people should surely be considered as having earned an honorary degree.

There are a couple more things to read, to add to Stosh's suggested reading list. 1. Martin Gilbert's new book, 'In Ishmael's House' - 'the tale of Gilbert's book is that of the humiliation heaped on Jews by Muslim rulers over 1, 400 years, largely through the subjugation known as 'dhimmitude'. Under Sharia law, non-Muslims are referred to as 'dhimmis', regarded as a lower category of people, and therefore subject to institutionalised discrimination (which, btw, includes the fact that dhimmis are forbidden to keep and bear arms, and are not permitted to strike a Muslim under any circumstances - i.e. they have NO right of self-defence - and in court the word of a Muslim always trumps that of a dhimmi, which means that Muslims were essentially free to prey upon dhimmis with absolute impunity - my note, dda). In many cases the rigorous codes set up to enforce this were more humiliating even than the segregationist rules imposed on black South Africans by the apartheid system". [From the review of 'In Ishmael's House' which appeared in The Times]. And here is the testimony of Maimonides in his letter to the - cruelly persecuted - Jews of Yemen, who were being threatened with forced conversion to Islam, ca. 1200 AD: "God has hurled us in the midst of this people, the Arabs, who have persecuted us severely, and passed baneful and discriminatory legislation against us...Never did a nation molest, degrade, debase and hate us as much as they...we were dishonoured by them beyond human endurance and had to put up with their fabrications..our sages instructed us to bear the prevarications and preposterousness of Ishmael in silence...We have acquiesced, both old and young, to inure ourselves to humiliation...All this notwithstanding, we do not escape this continual maltreatment [that is, maltreatment inflicted on the Jews **by the Arab Muslims** - dda] which well nigh crushes us. NO matter how we suffer and elect to remain at peace with them, they stir up strife and sedition..." - Iggertet Taiman, Epistle to Yemen, ed A S Halkin, trans. B Cohen, New York, 1952, p. 18.
Oh yes, and the massacre (including gang rapes of minor girls, and gross mutilations of the living and dead victims) of the Jews of Hebron by the Arabs in 1929 was not the first such pogrom by Muslims against Jews in eretz Israel, by a long chalk. At the end of the 18th century the local Arabs violently persecuted the dhimmi Jews in the Land, causing many to flee. In 1833-34, Arab Muslim mobs carried out murderous pogroms against the unarmed, peaceful, scholarly dhimmi Jews of Safed in the Galilee. That was under Turkish rule; yet bad as it was, it was preferable to life in Muslim Persia - in that same year, 1834, Jews from Persia fled to eretz Israel after others had been forced to convert to Islam in Persia. Note - in the yeas before 1840 there were systematic attacks upon Jews in eretz Israel, carried out both by Muslim authorities and also by the local Arab Muslim mobs. All of this, of course, happening when the Jewish community in the land was essentially defenceless, unarmed, deeply dhimmified, and BEFORE any significant migration of Jews from Eastern or Western Europe into the Land. We can go back to 1625-1627 and discover that under the Ibn Farouk Muslim family's rule of Jerusalem, the Jewish community was persecuted unmercifully - Muhammad ibn Farukh persecuted the entire Jewish community in the land of Israel, extorting huge sums of money, and jailing and torturing anyone who could not pay what he demanded. There were 2500-3000 Jews in Jerusalem in 1625 - by 1627 the Farukh persecution had reduced this to a few hundred. So much for SND's claim that the Arabs/ Muslims loved the Jews as their 'brothers' and 'protected' them, prior to the formation of the modern Jewish state of Israel.

SND is nothing more than a typically brazen, stony-hearted Muslim Big Liar: lying till he's black in the face, using Turnspeak and projection from start to finish. I bet he knows damn well that Muslims - Arab Muslims, Persian Muslims, any kind of Muslims - suck in Jew-hatred with their mothers' milk and that Jews in Muslim lands were hated and humiliated, ruthlessly exploited and periodically mass-murdered - and sometimes force-'converted' - and that Jewish girls were constantly kidnapped, raped, and forcibly 'married' to Muslims, all the way through Islamic history, starting with what Mohammed did to the peaceful Jewish farmers of the Khaybar Oasis.