Where Are the Muslim Mothers for Peace?

The commentary below raises a good point: Where are the Muslims protesting against the war being waged by Islamic fascists? We're told Islam is a religion of peace. So where are the Muslim peaceniks? We've seen plenty of Muslims protesting and threatening death and destruction. But where are the peacelovers?

Where are the Muslim mothers for peace? Times Online: " I read all the sympathetic coverage in the liberal press about the poor, puzzled Muslims who feel that they are being picked on in airports and flights. If the parents of the young men who are attracted to this murderous martyrdom have lost control of
their sons, then they must shoulder part of the blame. If the Muslims who choose to live in our society, with all its so-called tempting freedoms, do not protest against those who wish to destroy it, then how can they expect our tolerance? Why are the moderates not, in their hundreds and thousands, standing outside those mosques that are known to preach hatred, shouting "Not in our name" down their
megaphones or "One, two, three, four, no more terror anymore"?
And where are the voices of the ordinary mothers and daughters and aunts from the Muslim community saying, "Enough. No more violence. No more deaths", as did all those courageous women who helped to bring peace to Ireland? And if they, our Muslim sisters, are mute slaves to or, worse, themselves in thrall to the siren call of the
death-wish culture, is there any hope for the rest of us?

This dovetails with the thoughts of British top-cop Lord John Stevens who wrote recently that the problem of terrorism won't be solved until Muslims themselves stop the spread of the culture of hate and death which is being inculcated into the minds of young jihadis.

Muslims themselves must choose peace or war.

New GOP Straw Poll

I forget where I first saw this nifty straw poll. If it's your blog, remind me. You can vote FOR (acceptable) or AGAINST (unacceptable) any number of candidates as well as picking your first choice:

Already cast your vote and just want to check on the results? Click here.

GOP Bloggers also has some other interesting tidbits. I had missed the latest from the always great Victor Davis Hanson . Here are a couple of highlights:

-Our enemies call Jews "pigs" and "apes" and employ racist caricatures of the U.S.'s African-American secretary of state. Meanwhile, we worry about incurring charges of "Islamophobia"...

-Under the jihadists' code of vigilante justice, local informants suspected of supplying tips to Westerners are almost instantly and publicly executed. We, on the other hand, flay ourselves over targeted wiretaps.

Read the full article here.

2006 Election: Who is Serious About Security?

Have you noticed the number of Democrats lately insisting that they would do a "better" job fighting the war on terror? That's a sure sign they must be getting worried about the 2006 elections.

Ann Coulter sums it up well:

What part of the war on terrorism do they support?
By Ann Coulter
WorldNet Daily

This year's Democratic plan for the future is another inane sound bite designed to trick American voters into trusting them with national security.

To wit, they're claiming there is no connection between the war on terror and the war in Iraq, and while they're all for the war against terror – absolutely in favor of that war – they are adamantly opposed to the Iraq war. You know, the war where the U.S. military is killing thousands upon thousands of terrorists (described in the media as "Iraqi civilians," even if they are from Jordan, like the now-dead leader of al-Qaida in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi). That war.

As Howard Dean put it this week, "The occupation in Iraq is costing American lives and hampering our ability to fight the real global war on terror."

This would be like complaining that Roosevelt's war in Germany was hampering our ability to fight the real global war on fascism. Or anti-discrimination laws were hampering our ability to fight the real war on racism. Or dusting is hampering our ability to fight the real war on dust.

Maybe Dean is referring to a different globe, like Mars or Saturn, or one of those new planets they haven't named yet.

Assuming against all logic and reason that the Democrats have some serious objection to the war in Iraq, perhaps they could tell us which part of the war on terrorism they do support. That would be easier than rattling off the long list of counterterrorism measures they vehemently oppose.

They oppose the National Security Agency listening to people who are calling specific phone numbers found on al-Qaida cell phones and computers. Spying on al-Qaida terrorists is hampering our ability to fight the global war on terror!

Enraged that the Bush administration deferred to the safety of the American people rather than the obstructionist Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act court, one Clinton-appointed judge, James Robertson, resigned from the FISA court in protest over the NSA spying program.

Democratic Sen. Russell Feingold called for a formal Senate censure of President Bush when he found out the president was rude enough to be listening in on al-Qaida phone calls. (Wait until Feingold finds out the White House has been visiting Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's MySpace page!)

Last week a federal judge appointed by Jimmy Carter ruled the NSA program to surveil phone calls to al-Qaida members in other counties unconstitutional.

Democrats oppose the detainment of Taliban and al-Qaida soldiers at our military base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Democrats such as Rep. Jane Harman, the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, have called for Guantanamo to be shut down.

The Guantanamo detainees are not innocent insurance salesmen imprisoned in some horrible mix-up like something out of a Perry Mason movie. The detainees were captured on the battlefield in Afghanistan. You remember – the war liberals pretended to support right up until approximately one nanosecond after John Kerry conceded the 2004 election to President Bush.

But apparently, imprisoning al-Qaida warriors we catch on the battlefield is hampering our ability to fight the global war on terror.

Democratic Sen. Dick Durbin has compared Guantanamo to Nazi concentration camps and Soviet gulags, based on a report that some detainees were held in temperatures so cold that they shivered and others were forced to listen to loud rap music – more or less approximating the conditions in the green room at "The Tyra Banks Show." Also, one of the detainees was given a badminton racket that was warped.

New York Times columnist Bob Herbert complained this week that detainees in Guantanamo have "no hope of being allowed to prove their innocence." (I guess that's excluding the hundreds who have been given administrative hearings or released already.)

Of course all the usual "human rights" groups are carping about how brutally our servicemen in Guantanamo are treating the little darlings who are throwing feces at them.

Democrats oppose the Patriot Act, the most important piece of legislation passed since 9/11, designed to make the United States less of a theme park for would-be terrorists.

The vast majority of Senate Democrats (43-2) voted against renewing the Patriot Act last December, whereupon their minority leader, Sen. Harry Reid, boasted: "We killed the Patriot Act" – a rather unusual sentiment for a party so testy about killing terrorists.

In 2004, Sen. John Kerry – the man they wanted to be president – called the Patriot Act "an assault on our basic rights." At least all "basic rights" other than the one about not dying a horrible death at the hand of Islamic fascists. Yes, it was as if Congress had deliberately flown two commercial airliners into the twin towers of our Constitution.

They oppose profiling Muslims at airports.

They oppose every bust of a terrorist cell, sneering that the cells in Lackawanna, New York City, Miami, Chicago and London weren't a real threat like, say, a nondenominational prayer before a high school football game. Now that's a threat.

Democrats Proud to Oppose Tools to Win War

In the final weeks of the 2006 Battle for Congress the airwaves will be flooded with campaign ads by Democrats who will once again try and fool voters into believing they take our security seriously.

To counter that big lie, it would require little more than to replay the few seconds from this clip of Democrats cheering as Senate Minority Leader announces "We killed the Patriot Act."

Time is running out:

Reality Check: Islam's Peace Offer

Chicken Hawk Express found the statement that the kidnappers of Fox News reporter Steve Centanni and cameraman Olaff Wigg made in a video which also showed the two captives. The kidnappers, calling themselves The Holy Jihad Brigades demand release of all Muslim's held in
American prisons.

More chilling is the invitation to convert to Islam, or else:

"Embrace Islam and you will be saved, or else, enjoy yourselves until your turn comes to be slaughtered."

Readers may recall that the crazy President of Iran invited President Bush to convert to Islam in a letter last May.

If anyone doubts the reality of the threat we face, the above statement should be a wake up call. We can either defeat this evil, or it will defeat us. I choose to defeat it.

Don't Believe Polls that Say GOP Can't Win in 2006!

You need only recall the surprise on election night 2004 when the exit polls showing Kerry beating Bush were proved wrong to know that opinion polls don't quite tell the real story.

Here's more on that subject:

FALSE PROPHETS OF THE '06 VOTE
By John Podhoretz
New York Post

THERE'S a growing sense among political insiders that Republicans will get blown out of the water in November. GOP politicians have met waves of hostility from voters in their home districts.
...
The drumbeat is constant: We haven't seen numbers like this since 1994, when the GOP swept into power. Or even: We haven't seen numbers like this since the slaughter of Republicans in 1974, in the wake of Watergate.

After all, everybody is certain that, after Election Day, Democrats will hold a majority of governorships for the first time in six years. Surely the Republican reckoning in Washington is at hand. Surely . . . surely . . .

Don't be so sure.

The chief evidence Washington wise men are using to adduce an upcoming earthquake derives from some very unfavorable polling. President Bush's approval rating is only 37 percent, according to the Real Clear Politics average of all major polls. That's about the same number recorded for the GOP in the "generic ballot" question - where pollsters ask whether people intend to vote for a Republican or a Democrat, without offering a candidate's name.

Plus, the "right track-wrong track" numbers - based on whether people say the country is on the right or wrong track - are running nearly 70 percent against the current direction.

But there are real questions about the validity of this kind of polling, not only as window on coming events, but also as a political indicator altogether. First, there's the question of who is being polled. Midterm elections feature very low turnout - nationally, somewhere around 30 percent. Those are very committed voters, what pollsters call "likely voters."

It's very expensive and very difficult to try and poll only "likely voters" during a non-presidential election, and most polling firms don't even bother. Most polls this year don't even screen for people who describe themselves as "registered voters."

So these polls may reflect real public anger, but they're highly questionable as a gauge for what voters will do.

Also, polling firms seem unable to correct a persistent bias in favor of Democrats. "There has been a long-term tendency for Democrats to do better on this generic ballot question than they in fact do at the polls, so considerable care is required in thinking about this number," notes Charles Franklin of the University of Wisconsin. "If a Democratic lead in the generic ballot were sufficient for control of the House, the Democrats would have won the House in five of the last six congressional elections, including 1994."

Franklin says unhesitatingly that the atmosphere is now very favorable to Democrats - and even that, if today's situation were analogous to elections before 1992, Republicans would surely lose control of the House. The size of the Democratic advantage in the generic ballot, even accounting for the bias, would once have been enough to flip lots of seats nationally - since it indicates that Democrats should get something like 6 percent more votes nationally in November than Republicans.

"From 1946-1992, a one-percentage point gain in the Democratic share of the national vote produced a gain of 8.2 [House] seats (and vice versa for Republicans)," Franklin writes. But: "Since 1994, a one-point gain in votes has produced a gain of only 1.9 seats."

There are indications as well that, as the elections approach, Republican politicians in contested Senate races are beginning to close the gap against their Democratic rivals and are receiving high personal approval scores.

No doubt races this year will be tighter than many of us would like. But don't let phony bad news from polls keep you from doing everything you can in the time remaining to get the turnout for Republican candidates that will make the difference.

Only one thing can top the pleasure of seeing Democrats defeated in 2004. And that is watching their unrelenting five year campaign of hate, defeat and negativity fail to win their objective of retaking Congress.

Work hard folks!

Iran Rejects UN Nuke Demands and Requests "Serious" Negotiations

August 22, Iran rejected the demands of the international community and the Useless Nations (UN) Security Council that they cease uranium enrichment. Instead, Iran is requesting "serious negotiations." Is it now perfectly clear that the previous years of negotiations were not serious? After years of talks which went nowhere, is there any reason to believe that Iran is now "serious" about resolving the issue? And what damage does continued stalling do to the collective security mechanism so prized by our European partners?

Still, the Iranians know that the cadre of the willfully deceived, or as we say: useful idiots, in the West will grasp at this straw and demand we give Iran more time to prove that we haven't already allowed them too much time to develop nuclear weapons.

Nearly six months ago, we posted the news that Iran's chief nuclear negotiator admitted using the process simply as a ruse while they continue their developing nuclear weapons:

In a speech to a closed meeting of leading Islamic clerics and academics, Hassan Rowhani, who headed talks with the so-called EU3 until last year, revealed how Tehran played for time and tried to dupe the West after its secret nuclear program was uncovered by the Iranian opposition in 2002.

He boasted that while talks were taking place in Tehran, Iran was able to complete the installation of equipment for conversion of yellowcake - a key stage in the nuclear fuel process - at its Isfahan plant while convincing European diplomats that nothing was afoot.

'From the outset, the Americans kept telling the Europeans, 'The Iranians are lying and deceiving you and they have not told you everything'. The Europeans used to respond, 'We trust them',' he said."

Now that the matter will be returned to the Useless Nations for consideration of sanctions against Iran's failure to comply with the previous resolution, one question should be uppermost: Do the Russians and Chinese, not to mention the French and the Germans, really want to participate in the self-neutering of the collective security process?

And, can those who claim to advocate peace stand by and watch the primary mechanism for promoting that value be undermined in such an overt and obvious fashion?

Useful Idiots and the Hidden Enemy Within

Flopping Aces linked to the following piece by Michael Barone yesterday and it fits in so well with our continuing discussion on the useful idiots and enablers of those who would snuff out not only our freedom, but our lives as well:

Our covert enemies
By Michael Barone
Townhall.com

In our war against Islamo-fascist terrorism, we face enemies both overt and covert. The overt enemies are, of course, the terrorists themselves. Their motives are clear: They hate our society because of its freedoms and liberties, and want to make us all submit to their totalitarian form of Islam. They are busy trying to wreak harm on us in any way they can. Against them we can fight back, as we did when British authorities arrested the men and women who were plotting to blow up a dozen airliners over the Atlantic.

Our covert enemies are harder to identify, for they live in large numbers within our midst. And in terms of intentions, they are not enemies in the sense that they consciously wish to destroy our society. On the contrary, they enjoy our freedoms and often call for their expansion. But they have also been working, over many years, to undermine faith in our society and confidence in its goodness. These covert enemies are those among our elites who have promoted the ideas labeled as multiculturalism, moral relativism and (the term is Professor Samuel Huntington's) transnationalism.

At the center of their thinking is a notion of moral relativism. No idea is morally superior to another. Hitler had his way, we have ours -- who's to say who is right? No ideas should be "privileged," especially those that have been the guiding forces in the development and improvement of Western civilization. Rich white men have imposed their ideas because of their wealth and through the use of force. Rich white nations imposed their rule on benighted people of color around the world. For this sin of imperialism they must forever be regarded as morally stained and presumptively wrong. Our covert enemies go quickly from the notion that all societies are morally equal to the notion that all societies are morally equal except ours, which is worse.

These are the ideas that have been transmitted over a long generation by the elites who run our universities and our schools, and who dominate our mainstream media. They teach an American history with the good parts left out and the bad parts emphasized. We are taught that some of the Founding Fathers were slaveholders -- and are left ignorant of their proclamations of universal liberties and human rights. We are taught that Japanese-Americans were interned in World War II -- and not that American military forces liberated millions from tyranny. To be sure, the great mass of Americans tend to resist these teachings. By the millions they buy and read serious biographies of the Founders and accounts of the Greatest Generation. But the teachings of our covert enemies have their effect.
...
Nevertheless, the default assumption of our covert enemies is that in any conflict between the West and the Rest, the West is wrong. That assumption can be rebutted by overwhelming fact: Few argued for the Taliban after Sept. 11. But in our continuing struggles, our covert enemies portray our work in Iraq through the lens of Abu Ghraib and consider Israel's self-defense against Hezbollah as the oppression of virtuous victims by evil men. In World War II, our elites understood that we were the forces of good and that victory was essential. Today, many of our elites subject our military and intelligence actions to fine-tooth-comb analysis and find that they are morally repugnant.

Useful Idiots Defend Iran

Need an example of just how dangerous these useful idiots are?

Today, Iran answered the UN demand that it cease it’s nuclear development by calling for yet more negotiations on top of the years that our European partners and the Useless Nations (UN) have invested.

You can count on the useful idiots to trot out all the shopworn shibboleths and demand we “give peace a chance” by more talking. Some hidden enemies even go so far to insist that it is only fair that Iran be allowed to develop nuclear weapons. Coming from the very same people who marched in the streets to demand unilateral Western nuclear disarmament, this current flip-flop would be laughable if it weren’t dangerous.

Something very similar to this posted at the Wide Awakes!

Send in the Useful Idiots, Send in the Clowns

We talk a lot about moonbats, those masters of delusion, denial and self deception that seem to populate the left. For an example, pick any of the lefty commenters on these pages. But there's another term for these folks that arose earlier in world history. And that story is here:

Useful Idiots: Islam’s Best Soldiers
By Amil Imani
FrontPageMagazine.com

Islam enjoys a large and influential ally among the non-Muslims: A new generation of “Useful Idiots,” that Lenin identified as those who lived in liberal democracies and furthered the work of communism. This new generation of Useful Idiots also lives in liberal democracies but serves the cause of Islamofascism—another virulent form of totalitarian ideology.

Useful Idiots are naïve, foolish, ignorant of facts, unrealistically idealistic, dreamers, willfully in denial or deceptive. They hail from the ranks of the chronically unhappy, the anarchists, the aspiring revolutionaries, the neurotics who are at war with life, the disaffected alienated from government, corporations, and just about any and all institutions of society. The Useful Idiot can be a billionaire, a movie star, an academe of renown, a politician, or from any other segment of the population.

Arguably, the most dangerous Useful Idiot is the “Politically Correct.” He is the master practitioner of euphemism, hedging, doubletalk, and outright deception.

The Useful Idiot derives satisfaction from being anti-establishment. He finds perverse gratification in aiding the forces that aim to dismantle an existing order, whatever it may be: an order he neither approves of nor he feels he belongs to.
...
The lesson is clear. Beware of the Useful Idiots who live in liberal democracies. Knowingly or unknowingly, they serve as the greatest volunteer and effective soldiers of Islam. They pave the way for the advancement of Islam and they will assuredly be among the very first victims of Islam as soon as it assumes power.

You'll want to read the entire article here. The author has some very frank and non-politically correct observations about the nature of Islam that many of today's useful idiots willfully overlook.

The more I think about today's useful idiots and the moonbats which populate the comment streams of the blog world, that old song, Send in the Clowns comes to mind:

Send In The Clowns

Isn't it rich?
Are we a pair?
Me here at last on the ground,
You in mid-air.
Send in the clowns.

Isn't it bliss?
Don't you approve?
One who keeps tearing around,
One who can't move.
Where are the clowns?
Send in the clowns.
...
Don't you love farce?
My fault I fear.
I thought that you'd want what I want.
Sorry, my dear.
But where are the clowns?
Quick, send in the clowns.
Don't bother, they're here.

Yes my friends the clowns are here. But it's no circus!

French Fonies Promise Peace Troops, Deliver Escargo

Quelle surprise! The French surrender in Lebanon even before they arrive. By now readers are aware that the U.S. and the French went to great lengths to hammer out a meaningful Useless Nations (UN) resolution for a ceasefire between Israel and Hezbollah. France promised to lead the way in providing troops to police the deal.

Didn't turn out that way did it?

"With doublespeaking France, honor gets lost in translation"

By Jules Crittenden, Boston Herald City Editor:

...In recent weeks, France stepped forward to act as a broker of peace in Lebanon. “Act” is the key verb in that last sentence, as it now would seem that the only other verifiable part of the sentence is “in recent weeks.”

To correctly parse that sentence, one must understand that when France suggested it wanted to broker peace in Lebanon, it did not necessarily mean “broker” or “peace” or “Lebanon” in the way we might understand those words. The same is true when France further suggested it wanted to “lead” a “strong” “multinational” “force” there.

I don’t speak French, so I have no idea what the actual French words are for those concepts or what possible nuances there may be. I’ve been relying on news reports in English, which now inform me that the French do not intend to send any significant number of troops to what is supposed to be a force of 15,000 in Lebanon, like everyone thought they said they would.

The heady moment of peace brokering having passed, uponsober reflection, the French now say they already have a general and some staff in south Lebanon ordering about UNIFIL, the U.N. monitoring entity there. That’s plenty of leadership, the French suggested: All France needs to contribute now is another 200 combat engineers.

In tactical terms, when it comes to securing a Middle East conflict zone, that can be referred to as “squat.”

The United Nations, which is trying to salvage what is left of its own self-respect after the utter failure of UNIFIL in Lebanon, is now publicly begging European nations to contribute troops.

To find the last plain-speaking French leader, it is necessary to go back to Napoleon Bonaparte. He said he was going to take over Europe, and proceeded to do so. No, scratch that. He said he was going to bring French liberty and equality to Europe, then crowned himself emperor. Subsequent French history offers us a sordid string of third world colonizations followed by bloody wars to hang on long after the time to relinquish colonies had passed, setting the stage for corrupt government and prolonged conflict in places like Vietnam.

More recently, we’ve seen the naked hypocrisy of Dominic de Villepin in the United Nations, braying about his humanitarian concerns for the Iraqi people, while trying to ensure mass murderer Saddam Hussein remained in power to honor his French contracts.

The shamelessness of France knows no bounds. They have a domestic Arabic population and business interests in the Mideast to satisfy. They desperately want to be taken seriously as a major power. So they sat down with the United States and hammered out a peace plan. Then, before the ink was dry, they shrugged a Gallic shrug.

I wish I could be charitable here and find some good excuses for the French. Ernest Hemingway, who had a soft spot for them, used to like to say, “Always do sober what you said you’d do drunk.” But Hemingway, unlike the French, had a sense of honor. [continue]

We're all well aware that the French aren't known for putting up much of a fight, but this latest episode of surrender before honor would even shame most Democrats (oh, well, maybe just some).

Useless Nation's Kofi Annan Blames Israel for Breaking Cease Fire

Both Security Watchtower and Vital Perspectives are reporting on the Israeli commando raid into the Bekka Valley of Lebanon where Hezbollah is smuggling in rearmaments from Syria and Iran. Not much detail from Israel on the raid; apparently the IDF is doing the usual poor job of public relations.

Meanwhile, Secretary General of the Useless Nations, Kofi Annan has condemned Israel for this action which he claims is a violation of the ceasefire.

If you visit the UN page which lists all of Kofi's mutterings regarding the Middle East and the current conflict, you'll find statement after statement condemning Israel and only one teensie-weensie little note about Hezbollah's aggression in starting the conflict.

Readers will also be hard pressed to find ANY statement by Kofi regarding the weapons that Iran and Syria have been supplying Hezbollah and which enabled them to begin their month long rocket and missile assault on Israel.

Surely Kofi must have seen this report on missiles being loaded aboard a plane in Iran bound for Damascus then on to Hezbollah? Fortunately, that shipment was blocked after U.S. surveillance spotted it on the runway.

Kofi's off to the region this week with visits planned for both Iran and Syria. Perhaps he will even manage to be in Iran on August 22 when the mad mullahs celebrate the night flight of the prophet Muhammad on the winged horse Buraq. A date that has some worried about an Iranian desire to unleash the apocalypse.

I wonder if Kofi will get around to asking the crazies who run Iran and Syria to behave themselves and not send such nasty weapons over to Hezbollah? I'm not holding my breath.

But at least Kofi's term expires in 133 more days. Now that should be a date to celebrate.

Why Iran Does Not Fear the U.S.

Weakness, vacillation and appeasement only invites more terrorism. Here's proof:

From: "American Can't Do a Thing"

...The Carter administration went out of its way to support the new regime in Tehran. A ban imposed on the sale of arms and materiel to Iran, imposed in 1978, was lifted, and a 1954 presidential "finding" by Dwight Eisenhower was dusted off to reaffirm Washington's commitment to defending Iran against Soviet or other threats.

Also to symbolize support for the mullahs, President Carter initially rejected a visa application for the exiled shah to travel to New York for medical treatment.

Just weeks after the mullahs' regime was formed, Brzezinski traveled to Morocco to meet Mehdi Bazargan, Ayatollah Khomeini's first prime minister. At the meeting, Brzezinski invited the new Iranian regime to enter into a strategic partnership with the United States. Bazargan, concerned that the Iranian left might bid for power against the still wobbly regime of the mullahs, was "ecstatic" about the American offer.

The embassy raid came just days after the Brzezinski-Bazargan meeting in Morocco and, by all accounts, took Khomeini by surprise. It is now clear that leftist groups opposed to rapprochement with the United States had inspired the raid.

Khomeini saw it as a leftist ploy to undermine his authority. He was also concerned about the possibility of the United States taking strong military and political action against his still fragile regime.

Deciding to hedge his bets, the ayatollah played a double game for several days, waiting to gauge the American reaction.

According to his late son Ahmad, who had been asked to coordinate with the embassy-raiders, the ayatollah feared "thunder and lightning" from Washington. But what came, instead, was a series of bland statements by Carter and his aides pleading for the release of the hostages on humanitarian grounds.

Carter's envoy to the United Nations, a certain Andrew Young, described Khomeini as "a 20th-century saint," and begged the ayatollah to show "magnanimity and compassion."

Carter went further by sending a letter to Khomeini.

Written in longhand, it was an appeal from "one believer to a man of God."

Carter's syrupy prose must have amused Khomeini, who preferred a minimalist style with such phrases as "we shall cut off America's hands."

As days passed, with the U.S. diplomats paraded in front of TV cameras blindfolded and threatened with execution, it became increasingly clear that there would be no "thunder and lightning" from Washington. By the end of the first week of the drama (which was to last for 444 days, ending as Ronald Reagan entered the White House), Khomeini's view of America had changed.

Ahmad Khomeini's memoirs echo the surprise that his father, the ayatollah, showed, as the Carter administration behaved "like a headless chicken."

What especially surprised Khomeini was that Cater and his aides, notably Secretary of State Cyrus Vance, rather than condemning the seizure and the treatment of the hostages as a barbarous act, appeared apologetic for unspecified mistakes supposedly committed by the United States and asked for forgiveness and magnanimity.

Once he had concluded that America would not take any meaningful action against his regime, Khomeini took over control of the hostage enterprise and used it to prop up his "anti-imperialist" credentials while outflanking the left.

The surprising show of weakness from Washington also encouraged the mullahs and the hostage-holders to come up with a fresh demand each day. Started as a revolutionary gesture, the episode soon led to a demand for the United States to capture and hand over the shah for trial. When signals came that Washington might actually consider doing so, other demands were advanced. The United States was asked to apologize to Muslim peoples everywhere and, in effect, change its foreign policy to please the ayatollah.

Matters worsened when a military mission to rescue the hostages ended in tragedy in the Iranian desert. The force dispatched by Carter fled under the cover of night, leaving behind the charred bodies of eight of their comrades.

In his memoirs, Ahmad nicely captures the mood of his father, who had expected the Americans to do "something serious," such as threatening to block Iran's oil exports or even firing a few missiles at the ayatollah's neighborhood.

But not only did none of that happen, the Carter administration was plunged into internal feuds as Vance resigned in protest of the rescue attempt.

It was then that Khomeini coined his notorious phrase, "America cannot do a damn thing."

He also ordered that the slogan "Death to America" be inscribed in all official buildings and vehicles. The U.S. flag was to be painted at the entrance of airports, railway stations, ministries, factories, schools, hotels and bazaars so that the faithful could trample it under their feet every day.

The slogan "America cannot do a damn thing" became the basis of all strategies worked out by Islamist militant groups, including those opposed to Khomeini.

That slogan was tested and proved right for almost a quarter of a century. Between Nov. 4, 1979, and 9/11, a total of 671 Americans were held hostage for varying lengths of time in several Muslim countries. Nearly 1,000 Americans were killed, including 241 Marines blown up while sleeping in Beirut in 1983.

For 22 years the United States, under presidents from both parties, behaved in exactly the way that Khomeini predicted. It took countless successive blows, including the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center in New York, without decisive retaliation. That attitude invited, indeed encouraged, more attacks.

The 9/11 tragedy was the denouement of the Nov. 4 attack on the U.S. embassy in Tehran.