PARALLEL UNIVERSE: Terror Comes to (My) Heartland

By David M. Kinchen
Editor, Huntington News Network

Hinton, WV – “O, by gosh, by golly, it’s time for Santa….” HOLD it right there, Pilgrim. The war on terror is getting mighty close to where I grew up, in small-town Northern Illinois, south of Rockford, the second biggest city in Illinois.

According to the Chicago Tribune on Dec. 9, 2006 (see this link)

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/nearwest/chi-0612090019dec09,1,5379670.story?coll=chi-newslocalnearwest-hed

A 22-year-old convert to Islam named Derrick Shareef, from Rockford, is charged with plotting to use hand grenades and a pistol to terrorize shoppers at the CherryVale Shopping Center outside of Rockford, IL, according to federal authorities.

“It’s time for Santa and Kris Kringle” indeed! The plot by this “convert” shows that we have to be on guard for fanatics of all faiths, regardless of race, creed or color. There was no identification of Shareef’s race in the Trib story, but the other Chicago daily, The Sun-Times, said his father was a member of the Nation of Islam, while the rest of the family was Christian.

Yeah, I know seeking for logic in human beings is like looking for signs of intelligent life on earth, but the final comment in the story is another exercise in political correctness: “Muslim leaders in Rockford urged the public not to associate the alleged incident with the Islam faith.

’We know of no one who pursues this type of violence,’ said Imam Shpendim Nadzaku. ‘This is not what we believe.’ “

This is the kind of boilerplate quote reporters for mainstream media outlets put in, to assure potentially terrified Christmas (and Hanukkah) shoppers that most Muslims are peaceful people. Yeah, like the 19 men responsible for the 9/11 attacks. We keep hearing what a religion of peace Islam is and we also hear of stories like this out of America’s heartland. If you’re not safe in Winnebago County (Rockford) or Ogle County (Rochelle, where I grew up) or DeKalb County (where I attended Northern Illinois University) where are you safe?

Federal agents and an undercover informant followed Shareef from the plot’s onset, U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald said on Dec. 8, 2006. According to the Trib: “Authorities didn’t specify how they originally learned of Shareef. Many elements of Shareef’s alleged plot, including the idea to attack the mall, came from the informant, the charges said. Shareef acted alone, and the public was never in any danger, authorities said.”

This really reassures me!

How about this: “In a recorded conversation with the informant on Nov. 29, Shareef discussed attacking a courthouse in DeKalb County, according to the complaint. ‘I just want to smoke a judge,’ he allegedly said. The next day, the informant suggested the mall become the target. ‘I mean, all right, we gotta look at it this way, we want to disrupt Christmas,’ the informant is quoted as saying in the criminal complaint. Shareef allegedly responded: ‘Oh hell yeah, the mall is where it’s at.’”

Possibly associating the retailing industry with members of a specific group, “Shareef was recorded spewing hatred for Jewish people and the American justice system, authorities allege.”

According to the Tribune story, Shareef was arrested without incident after the exchange and appeared in federal court in Chicago on Friday, Dec. 8, 2006.

“His attorney did not issue a statement but said Shareef was aware of his rights and understood the proceedings,” the story said. “He was held without bail on charges of attempting to use a weapon of mass destruction and damage or destroy a building. Under the law, grenades are considered weapons of mass destruction. If convicted, he faces up to life in prison.”

OK, let’s have another chorus of “Silver Bells” (from the “Lemon Drop Kid, a 1951 flick starring Bob Hope).

For another take on the foiled terror plot to take everybody out of Christmas, with more of Shareef’s background, read this story:

http://www.suntimes.com/news/metro/166248,CST-NWS-terror09.article

For a column in the Rockford Register-Star (I delivered the Register-Republic, a predecessor newspaper of the Register-Star as a grade school kid) on the incident:

http://www.rrstar.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20061209/OPINION0102/112090

BOOK REVIEW: ‘Betrayal’ Shows How French Foreign Office Played Off Arabs Against Jews and Gained Hatred of Both

Reviewed By David M. Kinchen
Huntington News Network Book Critic

Hinton, WV  – The late French President Charles de Gaulle had his Mel Gibson moment, relates author David Pryce-Jones in “Betrayal” (Encounter Books, $23.95, 185 pages) when in November 1967 in his anger at Israel for winning the Six-Day War the previous June, blurted out at a press conference that the Jews were an “elite people, self-assured and domineering” with a “burning ambition for conquest.”

That’s not far from Gibson’s drunken rant earlier this year to the effect that the Jews are responsible for all the wars in the world and reveals a powerful Jew-hatred on the part of both men. DeGaulle tried to wiggle out of his comments by saying they were compliments! He had more chutzpah than Gibson.

The subtitle of Pryce-Jones’s slim volume is “France, the Arabs, and the Jews” and uses documents from the Quai d’Orsay – the French equivalent of our State Department – to show how the French themselves have acted exactly as DeGaulle accused the Israelis – and Jews – in their attempt to establish hegemony over the Muslim world.

All this enmity toward Israel – and it was a French diplomat named Daniel Bernard who called the nation a “shitty little country” at a party celebrating his promotion to French Ambassador to London – is detailed by Pryce-Jones, an authority on the Middle East who covered both the 1967 war and the 1973 Yom Kippur war.

Not all of the French are anti-Israel, Pryce-Jones relates: Most of the ordinary populace favors the Israelis, on the front line of a war against radical Islam that has its goal the conquest of Europe. Muslims – mostly North Africans from Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia – outnumber Jews in France by a factor of at least six to one, Pryce-Jones writes and the culture of many of the Muslims of France is violently anti-West. Jews, on the other hand, tend to assimilate into the greater French culture. Still the authorities, including leaders of the 600,000 French Jewish community — in their timidity – suggest that observant Jews don’t call attention to themselves by wearing distinctive skullcaps and similar signs of Orthodox Judaism.

Critics of Israel and its power in the U.S. through lobbying groups should read the passages in Pryce-Jones’ book that describe – under the administration of Francois Mitterrand – an anti-Israel and pro-Arab lobby in the very heart of the Quai d’Orsay. Mitterrand was a 1930s fascist, Pryce-Jones says and was an official in the Nazi puppet Vichy regime, which enacted anti-Jewish laws beyond those which their German overlords demanded.

For the first three years of Mitterrand’s regime as president (he ruled from 1981 to 1995), his foreign minister – the boss of the Quai d’Orsay – was Claude Cheysson, who displayed unalloyed hatred toward the Jewish state. After he left office, he said: “My condemnation of Zionism is absolute…The State of Israel created itself against the will of the rest of the world” ignoring the fact that Israel was accepted as a member in good standing of the United Nations in 1949, before Jordan (1955), Indonesia (1950), Kuwait (1963), Algeria (1962) and Tunisia (1956), to name just a few of the countries listed in the 2007 “World Almanac and Book of Facts.”

In his conclusion, Pryce-Jones catalogues the anti-Israel – and by extension anti-Jewish – actions of the French government. He concludes that the damage has been done, that “The French state’s hostility to Jewish self-determination coincides with Arab and Muslim resentment and fuels corresponding violence….France is acquiring an internal reality as “une puissance musulmane” [a Muslim Power] on lines quite different from anything envisaged by those who have fostered this intellectual illusion…”

“Betrayal” is an important, well-documented book by an authority on the Middle East. It should be read by all, especially those who persist in believing that the French government is an ally in the war on terror and the concomitant war to preserve Western Civilization.

Publisher’s web site: www.encounterbooks.com