U.S. Copts Association

“Exactly what do you wish to achieve with your articles?” a reader asked. “Do you want a war against Islam?”

Such questions are particularly piquant this week, as I write near a massive deployment of military force that includes anti-aircraft missile batteries on the ground and round-the-clock combat jet patrols in the sky. Also aloft are E-3 warning and control aircraft, in place to guide interceptor jets to a target. No, I’m not in Fallujah. This is Washington, D.C.

Which makes me think we are already in a war against something. Terror? I’m not afraid; I’m mad; livid that our alabaster capital bristles with armaments so we might solemnize the outcome of our peaceful election. So the president might give an inaugural address and make his way safely from the steps of the Capitol (unchained for the occasion) to the reviewing stand in front of the White House. So we might begin Bush II without a deadly, explosive, bloody hitch.

We are at war in Iraq, not on Iraq, which we have liberated. We fight on to endow Iraqi Muslims, some Iraqi Christians and even a couple of Iraqi Jews with a little liberty and running water. Are we fighting terror? There’s no war on “terror” any more than there’s a war on car bombs. Neither moniker describes what animates the terrorists - drivers of car bombs, wearers of explosive vests or wielders of butcher-blades. Invariably, it is Islam and the murderous, expansionist ideology of jihad that drives that extreme fringe you read about to the point of unspeakable violence. And by the way, that’s some fringe; according to the famous estimate of Middle East Forum director Daniel Pipes, it includes 10 percent of the Muslim world - 100 million-plus people.
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By DOUGLAS MONTERO and STEFAN C. FRIEDMAN

The father of a murdered New Jersey family was threatened for making anti-Muslim remarks online - and the gruesome quadruple slaying may have been the hateful retaliation, sources told The Post yesterday.

Hossam Armanious, 47, who along with his wife and two daughters was found stabbed to death in his Jersey City home early Friday, would regularly debate religion in a Middle Eastern chat room, one source said. Armanious, an Egyptian Christian, was well known for expressing his Coptic beliefs and engaging in fiery back-and-forth with Muslims on the Web site paltalk.com.
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Daniel Pipes’ Weblog

 have held off commenting on the chilling murder of the four Armanious family members on Jan. 14, 2005, in Jersey City, New Jersey, not being sure of its motive. I held off despite the New York Post on Jan. 16 drawing a connection between the massacre and the father’s anti-Islamic Internet comments; and, one day later, WABC noting that a cousin of the slain family had worked as a translator for the prosecution in the trial of Lynne Stewart (the leftist radical lawyer accused of helping Omar Abdel Rahman, the Egyptian Islamist leader, to get his messages out to his terrorist acolytes).

But today comes news from Robert Spencer at Jihad Watch explaining what happened, and I can stay silent no longer.
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