Iran has suffered a series of attacks against its petroleum industry. As Iranian media reported (detailed in the London Telegraph), a pipeline to Turkey was blown up last month, most likely by Kurdish oppositionists. Soon afterwards there was an explosion in a natural gas pipeline near Tabriz.

That was followed by a spectacular blast at the Pardis petrochemical plant in Assalouye, …

The same plant was similarly sabotaged six months ago. No one has taken responsibility for that attack, but it suggests an activist opposition with considerable “inside” assistance.

That opposition is fed by enduring social and economic crises. Unemployment last month reached 15% and is as high as 45% in some regions. In Tehran, health officials warned pregnant women and mothers of young children not to drink the water. Electrical failures are widespread. Taxi drivers have been striking around the country this summer, some because of the long lines at gas stations and others because of a shortage of compressed natural gas. The sanctions seem to be having an effect. …

Very little of this news reaches a mass Western audience, and one wonders to what extent Western governments understand what’s going on. If they do, their failure to support the democratic revolutionaries is all the more lamentable.

According to Reuters calculations based on trade sources, Iran’s gasoline imports for August look set to be around half those of the previous month and down by almost 90 percent from a year ago.

The State Department could send a crystal clear message to Russia by shutting down Gazprom’s operations in the U.S., and the EU could give serious thought to disentangling itself from its Russia energy addiction; it could also apply its new sanctions against the development of Iran’s energy sector to Russian energy companies.

Whatever we may think about Imam Rauf and his Manhattan project, sooner or later we are going to have to face a serious problem: what to do about the hundreds of radical mosques in this country. It’s a serious problem because, as Bernard-Henri Lévi wrote some years ago, every terrorist has a mosque. Indeed, some became terrorists because of what they were told in mosques. Many young, alienated Muslims found the meaning of life by joining jihad, and they were encouraged to become terrorists by radical imams and ayatollahs. …

We’re not talking about a handful of mosques, and the schools associated with them. As of 9/11, there were at least 1,200. Most are radical. The American Sufi leader Sheik Hisham Kabbani, who founded the Islamic Supreme Council of America to combat the influence of radical (Saudi) Wahhabis in the United States, testified at a State Department hearing that 80 percent of the nation’s mosques were under radical influence or outright control.

The intelligentsia is near unanimous that the only possible ground for opposition is bigotry toward Muslims. This smug attribution of bigotry to two-thirds of the population hinges on the insistence of a complete lack of connection between Islam and radical Islam, a proposition that dovetails perfectly with the Obama administration’s pretense that we are at war with nothing more than “violent extremists” of inscrutable motive and indiscernible belief. Those who reject this as both ridiculous and politically correct (an admitted redundancy) are declared Islamophobes, the ad hominem du jour.

Islamic radicalism isn’t a new phenomenon, although the militancy that we’ve seen grow in the Muslim world since World War II has a different cause -- modernity’s relentless and merciless advance -- than the irruptions in the past. But the galvanizing sentiments of militants today probably aren’t that different from what drove their predecessors to rebellion. …

[W]e can probably safely say that the moral suasion of “moderate Muslims,” whatever they were at any given time, did not turn back Islam’s many radical movements. The armies of establishment-loving Sunni caliphs and sultans, the bloody excesses and spiritual intensity of militant causes, and occasionally the military might of foreigners have been the critical factors in thwarting the triumph of those who felt, profoundly, the pulse of an angry God. …

Having the Saudis, whose “pristine” Wahhabi doctrine is at war with the beauty and complexity of historic Islamic culture, as the rulers of Mecca and Medina also has not helped.

If the Israelis do nothing, they know that they would eventually be staring at an internally unstable, virulently anti-Semitic, terrorist-fond regime with nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles. Simply imagining the probable hair-trigger scenarios in which Israel will have to play atomic-bluff with Iran’s supreme leader Ali Khamenei and the Revolutionary Guard Corps -- the organization that oversees Iran’s nuclear program -- ought to be enough to make any rational nuclear planner shudder. For the first time ever, the same organization that has been responsible for all of the Islamic Republic’s terrorist liaison relationships -- including an operationally supportive relationship with al-Qaeda after the 1998 Africa embassy bombings, according to the 9/11 Commission Report -- would control nuclear weapons. Then imagine other Middle Eastern regimes, especially the Saudi state, built upon Wahhabism, also acquiring the bomb in order to counter Iranian Shiite power -- and you can see why the nerves of any Israeli nuclear planner have to be fried. …

What the Israelis need to do is change this dynamic.

[W]e’ve got at least a 51 percent chance that the Israelis will strike by next summer. If they do, Israeli pilots will unlikely be flying with the conviction that they can end the Iranian nuclear menace forever. But they will, no-doubt, be hoping that, with some luck, they can change a nuclear equation that will otherwise put atomic weapons in the hands of a regime that holds international conferences denying the Holocaust’s existence, while arming and funding those who strive for Israel’s annihilation.

Speaking from Finland, Kenneth Sikorski, who runs the Web site and picked up Johansson’s remarks, told The Jerusalem Post that Johansson’s comments are “absolutely atrocious and indicative of a problem of systematic anti-Semitism.”

Human-rights organizations such as the London-based Amnesty International and the U.S. Human Rights Watch have long developed a cottage industry of playing down repression of human rights in the Islamic world while devoting the bulk of their resources, energies, and personnel to soft targets such as Israel’s democracy. All of this helps to explain why Gita Sahgal, the former head of Amnesty International’s gender unit, deemed Amnesty’s leadership to be plagued by “ideological bankruptcy” and “misogyny.” Sahgal criticized Amnesty for giving a platform to Moazzam Begg, a leading advocate of the Taliban in the United Kingdom and former Guantánamo Bay prisoner. Sahgal was dismissed this past year for blowing the whistle on Amnesty’s alliance with radical Islam and haters of women.

It is a world beyond madness: Human rights animated by anti-Semitism and Taliban slaughterers of women.

have broken up a terrorist cell that had more than 50 electronic circuit boards that could be used in improvised explosive devices (IEDs). The details of the plot are still a bit cloudy, but Canadian authorities were quick to point out that the plotters had ties to other actors in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iran, and Dubai. One of the cell members taken into custody had reportedly received terrorist training in Afghanistan/Pakistan. And this raises a basic point.

The Canadian plotters are being referred to as a “homegrown” cell, which is true from a certain point of view. They all lived in the West, and it is likely that some if not all of them were radicalized while living in Canada. But when analysts and commentators say “homegrown” they often act as if this is something new -- as if we now have to worry about terrorists being indoctrinated in the West, whereas previously we did not. In that sense, the terminology is misleading.

We need to recognize the extent to which the advance of radical Islam is the result of an active propaganda campaign. According to a CIA report written in 2003, the Saudis invested at least $2 billion a year over a 30-year period to spread their brand of fundamentalist Islam. The Western response in promoting our own civilization was negligible.

Our civilization is not indestructible: It needs to be actively defended.

certain minorities within Islam have developed a non-literalist, even allegorical, approach to reading the Qur’an. Foremost among these moderates are the Isma`ilis, the Sevener Shi`is, whose global head is the philanthropical Aga Khan. Isma’ilis may number only in the tens of millions (out of the total Muslim community of some 1.3 billion, second only to Christianity’s 2+ billion), but they do exist and they define, for example, jihad not as killing or conquering unbelievers, but as economic development and charity work.

In general, all branches of Shi`ism (which makes up perhaps 15% of the world’s Muslims), including the Twelvers of Iran, Iraq and Lebanon, allow the practice of ijtihad, “independent theological-legal judgment” -- which is decidedly not the case for Sunnism. And while this has allowed for the ayatollahs to come up with negative novelties such as vilayet-i faqih (Khomeini’s “rule of the jurisconsult”), it also leaves the door open to non-literal exegesis of the anachronistic passages of the Qur’an.

Even within Sunnism, many of the Sufi (Islamic mystic) orders are more akin to the Shi`i than the woodenly literalist Sunnis in their exegesis. …

Today, many Sufis are non-literalists and focus on the batini, “inner” or “esoteric” meaning of the Qur’anic verses rather than on the zahiri, “outward” or “exoteric”-- i.e., literal–meaning as Bin Ladin and his ilk do.

includes a concept of war that attacks the host civilization at every aspect of its being. In modern times, the military power of Islam is weak, but this is more than compensated by its ability to attack along legal and cultural lines under the guise of being a religion.

As Sharia is applied to a society, the host civilization is annihilated in each and every manifestation of culture. This annihilation is demonstrated by a peculiar fact about the history of Islamic countries -- part of it is missing. Afghanistan used to be a Buddhist civilization. We see its remnants in ruins and fragments such as the Bamiyan Buddhas, which were destroyed by the Taliban. Who knows the Buddhist history of Afghanistan? Practically speaking, it does not exist. Who knows the history of how Turkey, North Africa, Egypt, Lebanon, Syria, and Iraq went from being Christian to Islamic?

We don’t know the history because of the total annihilation of the past cultures by Sharia law. As time goes on, the customs, law, art, literature, and ethics of the host culture are replaced by Islamic values under the application of Sharia. The result is that there is nothing left of the history before the implementation of Sharia law.

There is a second aspect of this annihilation: the dhimmitude of the Kafirs (non-Muslims) remaining inside Islamic society. If you talk to Christians who are left in Islamic countries, they are an abused people who are unable to fight back after centuries of suffering and degradation under Sharia law. They are not supported by other Kafirs and are left to suffer under the oppression that will eliminate their few numbers. Whatever memory they have of the past is ignored by those who should be defending them.

If we are to go down the Sharia road, history teaches that it has always led to an Islamic mono-culture. In the end, there is no such thing as a little Sharia.

most Americans can imagine, even if their tone-deaf leaders cannot, how grating it is when those leaders lecture Israel on the need to take “risks for peace.” …

Palestine has a seemingly limitless capacity for eliciting nonsense from afar, as it did recently when British Prime Minister David Cameron referred to Gaza as a “prison camp.” In a sense it is, but not in the sense Cameron intended. His implication was that Israel is the cruel imprisoner. Gaza’s actual misfortune is to be under the iron fist of Hamas, a terrorist organization.

In May, a flotilla launched from Turkey approached Gaza in order to provoke a confrontation with Israel, which, like Egypt, administers a blockade to prevent arms from reaching Hamas. The flotilla’s pretense was humanitarian relief for Gaza -- where the infant mortality rate is lower and life expectancy is higher than in Turkey. …

The creation of Israel did not involve the destruction of a Palestinian state, there having been no such state since the Romans arrived. And if the Jewish percentage of the world’s population were today what it was when the Romans ruled Palestine, there would be 200 million Jews. After a uniquely hazardous passage through two millennia without a homeland, there are 13 million Jews.

In the 62 years since this homeland was founded on one-sixth of 1 percent of the land of what is carelessly and inaccurately called “the Arab world,” Israelis have never known an hour of real peace. Patronizing American lectures on the reality of risks and the desirableness of peace, which once were merely fatuous, are now obscene.

After a deeply flawed 2006 election encouraged by the United States, there was in 2007 essentially a coup in Gaza by the terrorist organization Hamas. So now Israel has on its western border, 44 miles from Tel Aviv, an entity dedicated to Israel’s destruction, collaborative with Iran and possessing a huge arsenal of rockets.

Rocket attacks from Gaza increased dramatically after Israel withdrew. The number of U.N. resolutions deploring this? Zero.

The closest precedent for that bombardment was the Nazi rocket attacks on London, which were answered by the destruction of Hamburg, Dresden and other German cities. When Israel struck back at Hamas, the “international community” was theatrically appalled. A senior cabinet member -- Moshe Yaalon, strategic affairs minister and possible future prime minister -- says “our withdrawals strengthened jihadist Islam,” adding, “We have the second Islamic republic in the Middle East -- the first in Iran, the second in Gaza: Hamastan.”

Israel’s withdrawals include the one that strengthened the Iranian client on Israel’s northern border, in southern Lebanon. Since the 2006 war provoked by Hezbollah’s incessant rocketing of northern Israel, Hezbollah has rearmed and possesses as many as 60,000 rockets. Today, Netanyahu says, Israel’s problem is less the Israel-Lebanon border than it is the Lebanon-Syria border: Hezbollah has received from Syria -- which gets them from Iran -- Scud missiles capable of striking Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. A leader of Hezbollah says, “If all the Jews gather in Israel, it will save us the trouble of going after them worldwide.”

Cigarette lighters sold on the West Bank show, when lit, the World Trade Center burning. … The biggest threat to peace might be the peace process -- or, more precisely, the illusion that there is one. The mirage becomes the reason for maintaining its imaginary “momentum” by extorting concessions from Israel, the only party susceptible to U.S. pressure. Israel is, however, decreasingly susceptible. In one month, history will recycle when the partial 10-month moratorium on Israeli construction on the West Bank expires. Resumption of construction -- even here, in the capital, which was not included in the moratorium -- will be denounced by a fiction, “the international community,” as a threat to another fiction, “the peace process.”

IN THEIR OWN WORDS

IN THE MEDIA